Not worth pointing out the ending is very slightly mistimed, is it?

Soul sister (and brothers)

Usually with post-album EPs you get to put on all the offcuts and ideas that wouldn't fit on the full-length. Lucky Soul, as is well established by now, don't do things like other bands, so their digital only Upon Hilly Fields EP, out for Valentine's Day, includes three tracks from last year's A Coming Of Age. The title track is one, and the country heartache swoon has a neat animated video. The band are already in their studio working on album three, a process due to be halted soon for the obviously pitifully thin excuse that Ali Howard will have to give birth.

Lucky Soul - Upon Hilly Fields from Ruffa Lane on Vimeo.

Sing! Autoharpy

Why does the male vocal harmony bit in this...



...turn in our head into this?



Not the same rhythm or anything. The latter is an old Toshiba advert in which Vivian Stanshall alters his own Terry Keeps His Clips on; the former is the especially great new PJ Harvey single The Words That Maketh Murder, from her Valentine's Day released album Let England Shake. We'd have this in Tracklist in a flash if it wasn't backed up for a full fortnight, and also our Polly deserves better in a way so here it is especially. Lest we forget this is what she chose to premiere last April in front of Gordon Brown, Andrew Marr and a current affairs inclined nation - an autoharp played in a different key to the Four Lads sample it overlays, although apparently that didn't make it to the album version.

You thought you saw a shooting script

And now we've officially run out of tortuous puns based on Johnny Foreigner titles.

So to new business from the aforementioned hyperBrums with gin for blood. Earlier on today they open source released a video for Harriet By Proxy off last year's You Thought You Saw A Shooting Star And That EP, directed by one J Matthew Nix around Chicago. Saam Faded Glamour chose to do the uploading honours, and here it is.



If we caught recent Facebook and Formspring posts correctly they're planning live business in April/May - we're waiting, especially after the Sub91 fiasco - and an album is being written and will be in the offing once Alexei has cased the requisite Securicor van so they can afford to record it/live (delete as appropriate). We could have asked him about their actual plans when we were offered an interview the other week, but that's what you would have expected us to do.

"It's cool, it's groovy, it's number one!"

We've posted this before, but that was three and a half years ago and it's so magnificent that when we discovered it was still on YouTube yesterday we had to give a hopefully wider audience a look. It's BBC current affairs magazine Nationwide in 1970, the days when no BBC bulletin would have run puff pieces about start of year pop predictions. Apparently of more importance to London viewers than a murder trial or two dead kids is the breaking news that some long haired midlanders are now more popular than the Beatles among Melody Maker readers. Therefore guilty parties Robert Plant and John Bonham of 'The' Led Zeppelin have to be hauled into the studio, their first time on telly and still hanging onto their protective cigs, to explain themselves to Bob Wellings, a man for whom the summer of love and hippie revolution clearly happened to other people, and who believes The Zep will see off the cult of personality for good. Pay particular attention to Maker editor Ray Coleman, contributing on his expert field of youth culture before dashing off to the All-England Eric Morecambe Lookalike Contest.

Nature boy

We were going to put this in Tracklist, but not only are new things moving too fast to find room for it but the video was released in July. We may have only found out about it over new year, but for a new music label it'd be taking the piss a bit. It's Otley's most idiosyncratic, David Thomas Broughton, who put his loop pedals into storage that same month and went travelling across Asia, unknown date of return, not only denying us his remarkable avant-live show but leaving behind an unreleased album titled Outbreeding. No word on whether that will ever find a home, but we do have a new song, Nature, and corresponding video. The presence of a rhythm section may necessarily dilute the seat of the pants ride of its live incarnation, but that richest of Yorkshire baritones and most end-of-the-bar self-flagellation remain.

This is what we meant to post at the foot of that Peel tribute (but forgot, evidently) - John's not entirely watertight impression of a colleague on the Goodies to start with, but then an anecdote from one of his Mark Radcliffe Graveyard Shift standins, where a star chamber of Lee, Herring and Maconie share in his anecdote about his mixed meetings with the Super Chaps Three.

Playlist additions is having a week off

Too busy to listen to loads of new music objectively at the moment, what with festivals and writing about festivals and warming up for festivals and all that. In the meantime, Brainlove Records is going on tour in September/October, and this is the player they've chosen to advertise it with, including an exclusive Napoleon IIIrd demo from the second album set for October:

Brainlove Tour 2010! by brainlove

Dates:
28th September London CAMP
29th September Norwich Knowhere Bar
30th September Leeds The Well
1st October Leicester Firebug *
2nd October Dublin The Twisted Pepper
5th October York Stereo
6th October Cardiff 10 Feet Tall
8th October Manchester Kings Arms

(* Yes, of course it's us. Who else would be stupid enough to think Brainlove artists could draw a crowd in Leicester?)

Dates are still being booked - contact John Brainlove direct for info.

Tin label

As alluded to yesterday, Wichita Recordings is ten years old today.

Why should you care?









(That's a new song, you're right)








Oh, no real reason.

Mark Bowen from Wichita contributed to Noughties By Nature

We shall remember him. You know we will. We really will.

RIP Chris Sievey.

Harvey's rare bit

If we have any hope for this week, it's that this clip goes viral.

Playing a couple of gigs over the last year or so, PJ Harvey has been debuting a new song called Let England Shake. Over a looped sample of The Four Lads' original of Istanbul Not Constantinople it involves Polly thrashing away at an autoharp not entirely in standard tuning with cryptic but fairly politicised lyrics atop.

Where, do you think, would Polly choose to give this fairly eccentric song by her recent standard its first wider airing?

This morning's The Andrew Marr Show. Obviously. (Interviewed her, too) Which would be bizarre enough, were it not that watching intently on with Marr was Gordon Brown.

Swing time

The Indelicates - a band completely impervious to proper STN-trade punning headlines.

Their new album Songs For Swinging Lovers has been released in the past few minutes through their own newly minted Corporate Records auspices under a post-In Rainbows (but with PayPal) pay what you like scheme. If you need to catch up on Simon and Julia (and the rest of them)'s evil genius, American Demo, our eleventh favourite album of 2008, can also be downloaded for a flat fiver. There's a whole other ethos to the Corporate Records idea laid out therein involving signing yourself up to the 'label', but you can go and take that in yourselves.

They're planning to make a video for every track on the album, starting with the demonic skiffle-Pogues of Sympathy For The Devil. Your monetary input could make back the expense on those CGI effects and specialist dance classes.

Catching up

Sorry about the break. We have a gig on Sunday night - you may have caught our moaning about its chances - and there'll be some halfway decent stuff up next week. In the meantime, here's a little light music.

The Sunday film

We Dreamed America, a 2008 documentary directed by Alex Walker about British Americana and the cultural exchange between British and American roots music, specifically featuring Alabama 3, Kitty Daisy and Lewis, Hey Negrita, Matt Ord, The Broken Family Band and The Barker Band.


We Dreamed America
Uploaded by bigbraintv. - See the latest featured music videos.

"Smash Hits wouldn't be entirely surprised if Ellen Foley turned out to be the first massive female star of The 80s. And that's not much of a gamble."

Time thoroughly wasted this week by Like Punk Never Happened, a slightly misleading title for an archive of scanned in editions of Smash Hits from 1979 and 1980, before the full Black Type/Uncle Disgusting/Ben Vol-au-vent-Parrot/Reg "Reg" Snipton onslaught but not much the worse for that. Not when singles are being reviewed by Chris Difford and Andy Partridge, the latter predicting Video Killed The Radio Star has no chance of being a hit. Excellent interviews under the editorial auspices of David Hepworth and Ian Cranna, plenty of songwords, great band photography and Secret Affair on the cover one week.

Also! Tweeted this last night on returning, but Adam Buxton was in our town on Bug duty and among his cache of inventive animated videos and personal flights of fancy (ah, Nutty Room on a large screen in surround sound) was this. It's had 2.2m views but we'd never heard of or seen it before. Sour, as far as we can tell, are a Japanese band who know a lot of fans with Macbook webcams and have hired a production team with particular ingenuity:

Fifty glorious years of guitar abuse

Recorded in 1960, Dutch-Indonesian rock'n'rollers the Tielman Brothers:



Pretty impressive, huh? All sorts of stuff you didn't think was invented for years, nay, decades later. We're particularly drawn to that drum solo-on-guitar bit at 0:40, because whenever you think of bands extracting wild new noises from their instruments you don't tend to see anything more exotic than drumsticks as sliders or Glenn Branca-style tuning calamities, whereas back in the primal days of noisy, fuzztoned R'n'R that sort of thing was happening and a few years later The Monks were soloing three at a time:



And you think rubbing the strings against the mike stand catches the eye and ear in exciting new ways? Ha!

The James Brown dancercise* plan

* The key to dancercise is the rather ingenious coupling of the word 'dance' to the word 'circumcise'.

Live music. That's a good thing.

Pre-prepared material girl

Madonna's first UK gig was at Roundhay Park, Leeds in August 1987. Seeing a perhaps inappropriate amount of news time given to a huge gig is of course commonplace now. Perhaps not so much the make-do nature of the reportage, with future NFL host and award winning writer Gary Imlach looking like the world's most 1980s suave man and a frankly quite miserable Annabel Croft-agram from Just Seventeen (now a freelance writer who does bits for the Guardian). And then, Jimmy Greaves gives his view. JIMMY GREAVES. ON MADONNA.

Guess what football-related joke he makes.



Channel 4's groundbreakingly graphic Network 7 had a go too:

Have you ever heard Suggs covering Suedehead with Mark Kermode on double bass?

You have now. And one for the washboard player, sir!

Here's both men in more natural musical environments. Curiously, Billy Lunn of the Subways is on the Dodge Brothers' new album (not this track):



And this is what Glastonbury last year looked like from the perspective of Chrissy Boy's headstock: