Singles
A quiet week for releases, chiefly two from members of our top ten albums of 2005 list. There doesn't seem any great reason for Brakes to bring All Night Disco Party out again, mind, as they're hardly more famous than they were when it came out last June and bar a short tour it's not tying in with anything we can see. They could have brought the cover of Jackson out to cash in on all things Cashular. Pleasing as it is to see it singled out, Mew aren't tying in The Zookeeper's Boy with anything either, Sony presumably having given up long ago on trying to pin them down to one way of selling them to the public at large. Plus the bass player's just left to become a dad. So much for curious single selections long after the album, what about first and obvious singles after the album? Two of those too - the Flaming Lips' The Yeah Yeah Yeah Song - and while we're about it, the album's been granted a clever TV advert - and Coldcut's True Skool, which with Roots Manuva in tow has been threatening to take on daytime Radio 1 without ever quite fully making the leap. Ah well. Falling somewhere in the middle are literate Aussies the Lucksmiths' A Hiccup In Your Happiness, inspired by and featuring liner notes from Daniel Kitson, who we hear is soon starting a radio show on Australia's Triple R.
Albums
While we were being set reeling from the news that the Parkinsons have a new album out - did we fall back four years overnight? - we take comfort in two of our favourite labels releasing samplers of their work. Now, we've gone on enough about Transgressive in recent months to the point where there must be some readers drawing up plans to burn Toby L and Tim Dellow's homes down for ever conceiving the thing, but their hitrate is so high that Transgressive Singles Collection Vol.1 is something we've been eagerly anticipating. It's a compilation of the tracks from their first five releases - Subways, Ladyfuzz, Burningpilot, Mystery Jets, Pipettes - plus Bloc Party and the Rakes from Dellow's time running Trash Aesthetic and an extra DVD featuring videos and live footage from the above plus the Young Knives, Larrikin Love, Jeremy Warmsley and Battle. If all you've got is a fiver, however, you could, well, put it aside and save up, or you could splash out on They'll Have To Catch Us First, Domino Recordings' first compilation since the seminal Worlds Of Possibility double set of 2003 and thus since the first of their two worldwide big hitters came to prominence. Franz Ferdinand are here with either L Wells or an acoustic version of The Fallen depending on which tracklisting you read, alongside Sons & Daughters, Adem, the Kills, Archie Bronson Outfit, Clearlake, Quasi, Tortoise & Bonnie Prince Billy, Four Tet, the Television Personalities, Juana Molina, Junior Boys and... oh, Test Icicles. Ah well. Boringly sticking to one band on an album, the Charlatans recover their mojo on Simpatico, the Dresden Dolls Brechtpunk their way into many a black bedroom with style on Yes Virginia, former voice of the Young Marble Giants Alison Statton and collaborator Spike see their acoustic 1994 album and EP Tidal Blues/Weekend in Wales stuck together, and just to ruin the artist album link To Elliott From Portland sees many of Elliott Smith's Oregonian contemporaries, chiefly the Decemberists, cover his back catalogue with care.
Sunday, April 16, 2006
Saturday, April 15, 2006
Streets of shame
We're not really fans of The Streets here, largely because we're automatically turned off by strong London accents in singing and that bit at the start of Has It Come To This?, which was after all the first we'd ever heard of Mike Skinner, put us right off. In fact so did the rest of that track, which made us appreciate all the more Neil Tennant's idea that he in fact was inventing English rap on West End Girls. It's fair to say, though, that The Hardest Way To Make An Easy Living is splitting opinion - is it pulling open the seedy underbelly of celebrity or reinforcing it? Who cares, really. We have been fascinated in many odd ways, however, by When You Wasn't Famous, not in the 'but who is it?' sense of everybody else, although the fact that nobody, not even the usual self-appointed committee of celebrity all-seers don't have a clue. Oddly, despite Skinner's appeals that it's based on truths, nobody seems to have made the connection between his statement that it's actually "all a bit of a piss-take" and the fact his last album was based on an extended fictional narrative. Hmm. But what is he actually trying to tell us beyond the fact that he's taken some drugs, possibly with famous girls? All lyrics copyright Mike Skinner and his publishers, probably. Oh, and we don't give a shit who it really is, so don't tell us.
See, the thing that’s got it all fucked up now is camera-phones. How the hell am I supposed to be able to do a line in front of complete strangers when I know they've all got cameras?
Diddums. Isn't this the reason why toilet seats came into Class A vogue? Are people popping their Nokias under the cubicle door? Of course this is the Skinner standard opening line scene-setter, here emblazoning in neon the words "YES, I AM THE FAMOUS THE STREETS, AND I HAVE TAKEN DRUGS. MMMMM."
When you're a famous boy it gets really easy to get girls
It's all so easy you get a bit spoilt
So when you try to pull a girl who is also famous too
It feels just like when you wasn't famous
So for those of you who've ever wondered why no celebrity goes out with anyone who isn't onscreen talent any more, it's because they desire the thrill of the chase, as evidently that's worked so well for Mike over his non-famous years. This is the whole thorny issue of groupies being brought out into the open possibly for the first time in a non-hair metal context. Hang on, is he telling us girls never tried to chat him up?
The celebrity pages in papers don't tell tales that are always to the line of the truth
Scansion is the enemy, evidently. 'Telling the truth' would have served equally well.
It’s 'til a line at which most likely you'll have the time or enough finance to sue
Which is why it's so frightening buying papers in the morning fearing the next Mike Skinner scoop
Cos I used to believe what I read, so now I know that others will believe that it's true
Mike Skinner Fearlessly Reveals The Truth About His Rise To Stardom II: not all celebrity gossip in the tabloids is true. Well, when Ian Hislop leaves Private Eye the job is surely his for the taking with insight like that. Also, what does that first line mean? Presumably the suggestion is nobody can be arsed to follow up each and every last word of a lie printed about them, which is fair enough, but half the message seems to have gone missing in the lyric editing process. Rhymers who namecheck themselves with their own real names - are there any beyond Skinner and Marshall Mathers?
But i realised with you the truth could be a whole lot worse than the flack
My whole life i never thought I'd see a pop star smoke crack
Score one for the 3am Girls! (not literally, that'd be a whole different celebrity drugs story) Skinner claims he hadn't anticipated that writing a single about a doomed celebrity fling which includes heavy drug references might have attracted any attention, which proves or disproves many things often thought about him. Does he mean this boastfully or regretfully? Was it actually him that planted that camera in Babyshambles' rehearsal studios? Well, that seems unlikely, but trust Skinner to write it into a song where most would go off-handed off the record in an interview.
And i must admit I was quite shocked with that thing you did with me on my back
With you on your back or onto your back? There's a distinction that needs making here.
But outside in the lobby I shouldn't have laughed when you slapped that man
What? Just randomly? Is this a man she knew or just some bloke? Hang on, is it Bjork? Yes, we know the reporter she attacked was a woman and it was in an airport, but run with the gag, would you.
When you're a famous boy...
You were so much fun I really got to like you more than you liked me, I really hoped that you'd stay
There's a clue in the first sentence as to why she didn't, we'd guess. Maybe there'll be an answer song in the style of Frankee, although that might just blow the gaff a little. Wait for Chris Moyles to have a brainwave.
Considering the amount of prang you'd done you looked amazing on CD:UK
The person who found STN in the week via a Google search for 'when you wasn't famous cat deeley' was clearly taking this line too laterally. Holly 'Goodbooks' Willoughby, who did present CD:UK for a bit before the revamp that saw it die its quiet death, cameos in the video at this point, but we'll assume she vaguely knows the director or something. What is prang in this context, by the way? The opening track on the album is called Pranging Out but 'prang' is an underused synonym for a crash, thus 'crashing out'. The drug allusions form themselves with that knowledge but it's probable he's merely trying to get a new colloquialism for some sort of hard drug usage going, like an illegality 'bouncebackability'.
You learn dances, do promo, cameras flashing, get in the van, zoom away
I wake up high, feel hung over and sorry for my doomed day
We'd guess most high class pop stars are ferried from class to TV studio by record company chartered people carriers, but no matter.
But I know I got a bit close to you and that you found it fucking boring
Whereas most potential candidates for the mystery girl are known for their outward going nature and ability to laugh at themselves. 'Boring' is perhaps another way of saying 'scary' here.
You taught me so much about how to deal with the fire I'd fallen in
Actually nobody seems entirely sure about how this line ends. We've gone with what a couple of sources agree on, but the way it's worded suggests more that she's tried to get him out of his depression/drug habit which as we know very much isn't the case. We initally heard it as '...with the far right fawning', which is an odd concept to throw into the middle of a leery love confessional (fair enough guess though, right? We can see polo shirted skinheads thinking they can emphasise with a crop-haired 'chav poet', and as the NF tried hard to align themselves with the Jamaican origined mixed race 2-Tone movement it's not impossible they could have pretended not to notice garage's origins in his case)
And what version of a rumour would be next day everyone's story of me
You taught me all the realities and to turn the page and ignore 'em
Suddenly we're being told that, despite having written a song boasting about their crack habit perhaps in subtle revenge for dumping him, Mike actually owes her one for dragging him into the realities of showbiz life. These two lines don't make a great deal of sense written down to us - we'd guess it's his coming to terms with not getting down about everything written about him (and yes, this is the same Streets who the Sun launched an active campaign about to get Dry Your Eyes to number one), but he seems more paranoid about this story getting out when it never did. Although the singer we shall call Primary Candidate A - you know who she is - has turned up in the margins of Skinner stories before, albeit not in a direct sense. But anyway.
When you're a famous boy...
Anyway, I had to rest my beer hat, delete my dealer's number and unroll my bank notes
Beer hat? Is that right? Is it a wide brimmed affair with a funnel attached to a straw?
And we were on borrowed time anyway what with the daily toilet papers not knowin’
Well, yeah, you're just taunting them now. Given the line before suggests Skinner was taking extreme actions to get off his various addictions, maybe the split should have been because she was, well, pranging in front of him.
And I knew that when the people who thought they knew you, when they found out I would've been mocked
Because it was Miss Clean and Mr Not Clean, yeah?
Which is ironic 'cos in reality standing next to you i look fucking soft
...ha ha, but that's what we all think of their relative status, eh? Eh? Eh? Booking home viit counsellers would be cheaper for her, Mike.
Whenever i see you on MTV I can’t stop my big wide smile
And past the 'children’s appeal' I see the darkness behind
Got it! It's Bonnie Prince Billy!
We both know the scratches on my back much better than the alludes and lies
That last bit doesn't sound right. It certainly doesn't figure with the idea that Mike knows the subject is listening and knowing as well as he does, as what are these 'alludes'?
I miss the bitchin' and shoutin' but I'm glad I got out in time
Aren't we all.
See, the thing that’s got it all fucked up now is camera-phones. How the hell am I supposed to be able to do a line in front of complete strangers when I know they've all got cameras?
Diddums. Isn't this the reason why toilet seats came into Class A vogue? Are people popping their Nokias under the cubicle door? Of course this is the Skinner standard opening line scene-setter, here emblazoning in neon the words "YES, I AM THE FAMOUS THE STREETS, AND I HAVE TAKEN DRUGS. MMMMM."
When you're a famous boy it gets really easy to get girls
It's all so easy you get a bit spoilt
So when you try to pull a girl who is also famous too
It feels just like when you wasn't famous
So for those of you who've ever wondered why no celebrity goes out with anyone who isn't onscreen talent any more, it's because they desire the thrill of the chase, as evidently that's worked so well for Mike over his non-famous years. This is the whole thorny issue of groupies being brought out into the open possibly for the first time in a non-hair metal context. Hang on, is he telling us girls never tried to chat him up?
The celebrity pages in papers don't tell tales that are always to the line of the truth
Scansion is the enemy, evidently. 'Telling the truth' would have served equally well.
It’s 'til a line at which most likely you'll have the time or enough finance to sue
Which is why it's so frightening buying papers in the morning fearing the next Mike Skinner scoop
Cos I used to believe what I read, so now I know that others will believe that it's true
Mike Skinner Fearlessly Reveals The Truth About His Rise To Stardom II: not all celebrity gossip in the tabloids is true. Well, when Ian Hislop leaves Private Eye the job is surely his for the taking with insight like that. Also, what does that first line mean? Presumably the suggestion is nobody can be arsed to follow up each and every last word of a lie printed about them, which is fair enough, but half the message seems to have gone missing in the lyric editing process. Rhymers who namecheck themselves with their own real names - are there any beyond Skinner and Marshall Mathers?
But i realised with you the truth could be a whole lot worse than the flack
My whole life i never thought I'd see a pop star smoke crack
Score one for the 3am Girls! (not literally, that'd be a whole different celebrity drugs story) Skinner claims he hadn't anticipated that writing a single about a doomed celebrity fling which includes heavy drug references might have attracted any attention, which proves or disproves many things often thought about him. Does he mean this boastfully or regretfully? Was it actually him that planted that camera in Babyshambles' rehearsal studios? Well, that seems unlikely, but trust Skinner to write it into a song where most would go off-handed off the record in an interview.
And i must admit I was quite shocked with that thing you did with me on my back
With you on your back or onto your back? There's a distinction that needs making here.
But outside in the lobby I shouldn't have laughed when you slapped that man
What? Just randomly? Is this a man she knew or just some bloke? Hang on, is it Bjork? Yes, we know the reporter she attacked was a woman and it was in an airport, but run with the gag, would you.
When you're a famous boy...
You were so much fun I really got to like you more than you liked me, I really hoped that you'd stay
There's a clue in the first sentence as to why she didn't, we'd guess. Maybe there'll be an answer song in the style of Frankee, although that might just blow the gaff a little. Wait for Chris Moyles to have a brainwave.
Considering the amount of prang you'd done you looked amazing on CD:UK
The person who found STN in the week via a Google search for 'when you wasn't famous cat deeley' was clearly taking this line too laterally. Holly 'Goodbooks' Willoughby, who did present CD:UK for a bit before the revamp that saw it die its quiet death, cameos in the video at this point, but we'll assume she vaguely knows the director or something. What is prang in this context, by the way? The opening track on the album is called Pranging Out but 'prang' is an underused synonym for a crash, thus 'crashing out'. The drug allusions form themselves with that knowledge but it's probable he's merely trying to get a new colloquialism for some sort of hard drug usage going, like an illegality 'bouncebackability'.
You learn dances, do promo, cameras flashing, get in the van, zoom away
I wake up high, feel hung over and sorry for my doomed day
We'd guess most high class pop stars are ferried from class to TV studio by record company chartered people carriers, but no matter.
But I know I got a bit close to you and that you found it fucking boring
Whereas most potential candidates for the mystery girl are known for their outward going nature and ability to laugh at themselves. 'Boring' is perhaps another way of saying 'scary' here.
You taught me so much about how to deal with the fire I'd fallen in
Actually nobody seems entirely sure about how this line ends. We've gone with what a couple of sources agree on, but the way it's worded suggests more that she's tried to get him out of his depression/drug habit which as we know very much isn't the case. We initally heard it as '...with the far right fawning', which is an odd concept to throw into the middle of a leery love confessional (fair enough guess though, right? We can see polo shirted skinheads thinking they can emphasise with a crop-haired 'chav poet', and as the NF tried hard to align themselves with the Jamaican origined mixed race 2-Tone movement it's not impossible they could have pretended not to notice garage's origins in his case)
And what version of a rumour would be next day everyone's story of me
You taught me all the realities and to turn the page and ignore 'em
Suddenly we're being told that, despite having written a song boasting about their crack habit perhaps in subtle revenge for dumping him, Mike actually owes her one for dragging him into the realities of showbiz life. These two lines don't make a great deal of sense written down to us - we'd guess it's his coming to terms with not getting down about everything written about him (and yes, this is the same Streets who the Sun launched an active campaign about to get Dry Your Eyes to number one), but he seems more paranoid about this story getting out when it never did. Although the singer we shall call Primary Candidate A - you know who she is - has turned up in the margins of Skinner stories before, albeit not in a direct sense. But anyway.
When you're a famous boy...
Anyway, I had to rest my beer hat, delete my dealer's number and unroll my bank notes
Beer hat? Is that right? Is it a wide brimmed affair with a funnel attached to a straw?
And we were on borrowed time anyway what with the daily toilet papers not knowin’
Well, yeah, you're just taunting them now. Given the line before suggests Skinner was taking extreme actions to get off his various addictions, maybe the split should have been because she was, well, pranging in front of him.
And I knew that when the people who thought they knew you, when they found out I would've been mocked
Because it was Miss Clean and Mr Not Clean, yeah?
Which is ironic 'cos in reality standing next to you i look fucking soft
...ha ha, but that's what we all think of their relative status, eh? Eh? Eh? Booking home viit counsellers would be cheaper for her, Mike.
Whenever i see you on MTV I can’t stop my big wide smile
And past the 'children’s appeal' I see the darkness behind
Got it! It's Bonnie Prince Billy!
We both know the scratches on my back much better than the alludes and lies
That last bit doesn't sound right. It certainly doesn't figure with the idea that Mike knows the subject is listening and knowing as well as he does, as what are these 'alludes'?
I miss the bitchin' and shoutin' but I'm glad I got out in time
Aren't we all.
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
Monday, April 10, 2006
Weekender: the way that we talk, the way that we walk
CHART OF DARKNESS: As if to spite our wondering last week, and indeed all the hype about downloads taking over, Gnarls Barkley's Crazy not only stays atop the singles chart but does so by selling 120,000 physical copies out of a remarkable 193,000, beating number two, the anaemic U2/Mary J collaboration that now beats the original One by five places, by well over 160,000. An oddly static week sees top ten climbers spurred on by Morrissey's usual second week sales collapse and a lot of records going back up at the lower end, the Zutons having the highest new entry at 9, their top ten debut. Franz Ferdinand latch onto the occasional album track/new song double A-side ploy and take The Fallen/L Wells to 14, the weather turned against Mish Mash at 16, Belle & Sebastian are at 25 - we were woken up on Saturday by Stuart Murdoch being given a jovial interview by Eamonn Holmes and his idiot sidekick, which surely must finally convince him to go back to the enigmatic days of old - the Charlatans make a re-emergence on a new label of some description at 28, D4L fail to go the MVP route with the stupidly titled Laffy Taffy - look, just learn that nobody likes a rap song title not in proper English - at 29, Keyshia Cole comprehensively fails to follow up the hype at 48, Sigur Ros' climb continues at 57 and Wigwam disappoint the cognescenti (hello!) at 60. There's some new ruling involving downloads in the album chart but we don't understand it and nothing would have stopped Ringleader Of The Tormentors becoming Morrissey's third number one. Pink is at 3 and the Flaming Lips do very well at 6 (a top ten debut, in fact), with the Stereophonics' overdue by common knowledge of their type live album at 13. Neil Sedaka's latest best of makes an odd climb into the top 20 - that'll be the iTunes types, then - while the Vines' winning days really have gone, Vision Valley entering at 71.
FREE MUSIC: One of a massive set of tracks from Sweden's Labrador Records brought to wider attention by a guest post over at Take Your Medicine, all suffused with the timely spirit of C86 and its adherents, we know nothing about this other than we admire its spirit, like a less easily irked Young Soul Rebels Dexys - Corduroy United - Daddy's Boy
HEY YOU GET OFFA MYSPACE: We thought Oxford instrumental behemoth The Rock Of Travolta, who supposed Radiohead at their massive South Park gig, had split up. There was a good reason for this. They had. They have now got back together with two new members, including an intriguing cellist, and still sound like Mogwai, Tortoise and Shellac in an industrial crusher.
VISUAL REPRESENTATION: Yesterday we pledged never to shoehorn in cheap references to the Kaiser Chiefs having once been a workaday New Rock Revolution outfit called Parva. Well, it's not shoehorning to directly mention them, so here's the video to 2002 single Hessles. Ricky does still have a nose piercing - study the Every Day I Love You Less And Less video carefully - and oddly it's drummer Nick that comes off worst 'I look slightly different!'-wise.
FALLING OFF A BLOG: We've never been tempted to follow everyone else into the world of podcasts - no mike, put off voice projection after listening to a guest radio spot we did a couple of years ago - but that doesn't mean we can't appreciate others. Indie Interviews, for instance, with a back catalogue of chats with the likes of the Decemberists, LCD Soundsystem, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah!, the Polyphonic Spree (Tim, luckily), Vashti Bunyan, Tapes 'N Tapes, Voxtrot and Explosions in the Sky.
EVERYBODY GET RANDOM: In the week that Pete Gofton turned up in the NME as A&R representative of Brille records (The Knife, Good Shoes, Envelopes, Whirlwind Heat), which is fair enough as a way of making a living but doesn't make the wait for the second J Xaverre album any more standable, Kenickie06 has been set up on Myspace as a campaign to get his former band to reunite. We can't see it happening, given Lauren's media interests, Emmy-Kate's magazine editing and Marie's...erm...is she still at Hall Or Nothing? Anyway, it's the thought that counts, and that Ainslie off the first series of Fame Academy has left a message makes it so much the stronger.
IN OTHER NEWS: Given their blog links to us, it's the least we can do to mention Vanity Project fanzine.
FREE MUSIC: One of a massive set of tracks from Sweden's Labrador Records brought to wider attention by a guest post over at Take Your Medicine, all suffused with the timely spirit of C86 and its adherents, we know nothing about this other than we admire its spirit, like a less easily irked Young Soul Rebels Dexys - Corduroy United - Daddy's Boy
HEY YOU GET OFFA MYSPACE: We thought Oxford instrumental behemoth The Rock Of Travolta, who supposed Radiohead at their massive South Park gig, had split up. There was a good reason for this. They had. They have now got back together with two new members, including an intriguing cellist, and still sound like Mogwai, Tortoise and Shellac in an industrial crusher.
VISUAL REPRESENTATION: Yesterday we pledged never to shoehorn in cheap references to the Kaiser Chiefs having once been a workaday New Rock Revolution outfit called Parva. Well, it's not shoehorning to directly mention them, so here's the video to 2002 single Hessles. Ricky does still have a nose piercing - study the Every Day I Love You Less And Less video carefully - and oddly it's drummer Nick that comes off worst 'I look slightly different!'-wise.
FALLING OFF A BLOG: We've never been tempted to follow everyone else into the world of podcasts - no mike, put off voice projection after listening to a guest radio spot we did a couple of years ago - but that doesn't mean we can't appreciate others. Indie Interviews, for instance, with a back catalogue of chats with the likes of the Decemberists, LCD Soundsystem, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah!, the Polyphonic Spree (Tim, luckily), Vashti Bunyan, Tapes 'N Tapes, Voxtrot and Explosions in the Sky.
EVERYBODY GET RANDOM: In the week that Pete Gofton turned up in the NME as A&R representative of Brille records (The Knife, Good Shoes, Envelopes, Whirlwind Heat), which is fair enough as a way of making a living but doesn't make the wait for the second J Xaverre album any more standable, Kenickie06 has been set up on Myspace as a campaign to get his former band to reunite. We can't see it happening, given Lauren's media interests, Emmy-Kate's magazine editing and Marie's...erm...is she still at Hall Or Nothing? Anyway, it's the thought that counts, and that Ainslie off the first series of Fame Academy has left a message makes it so much the stronger.
IN OTHER NEWS: Given their blog links to us, it's the least we can do to mention Vanity Project fanzine.
Sunday, April 09, 2006
Do our work for us
This probably won't lead anywhere but it's worth a shot as our readership expands - if you're off to a mid-ranking UK festival this summer and don't have a blog, online fanzine or anywhere else to tell people about it, why not let us inform the nation? Let us know if you're planning such and fancy writing about it in what could laughably be called our house style.
Frank'n'further
It's ironic that on the day news is revealed of a girl band whose sole role will be to advertise goods and services - seriously, major labels, if you're not interested in music as a whole any more than wind up and go and work in PR - the reason why we're inured to this kind of thing re-emerges, as despite nobody taking much interest in the first series T4's Totally Frank returns. This is the girl band created for a comedy drama, not that we've seen much element of either yet, and while, as with Girls Aloud *, the unsubtleties of the setup can in some ways be diluted by the work put into them by Xenomania for their summer musical launch, it's worth witnessing the very essence of spur of the moment that makes pop music what it is in action by looking at their PR company's official biography ("drawn from their individual influences" - right). Check the quote from Judy Finnegan, wonder whether Phil Redmond shouldn't have his house set alight for creating Hollyoaks and leading to this kind of 'emotional' teen-focused stuff, and drummer Hayley Angel Wardle - so when Frank go legit are they going to use their real or character names? This could all get very confusing - bigs up her acting craeer, love of Joy Division and contains the line "she's more akin to being one of hell's angels!" but misses out the most intriguing personal detail of all. She's Jah Wobble's daughter! Suddenly John Lydon's property development sideline (and by the way, he's been helping launch Nordoff-Robins in New York, a tale including a chance meeting with Steve Jones and a summit with, of all people, Keith Emerson) looks like a natural progression.
* Could someone not have a word with ver Aloud about how, whenever they want to prove they're non-media trained free spirits, they do so by slagging off Simon Amstell? Not only is it very unendearing of them, but it's hardly giving them a connection to much of their fanbase.
* Could someone not have a word with ver Aloud about how, whenever they want to prove they're non-media trained free spirits, they do so by slagging off Simon Amstell? Not only is it very unendearing of them, but it's hardly giving them a connection to much of their fanbase.
In shops tomorrow: 10/4
Singles
If you read this in time you'll be able to catch The Crimea on - and who'd have thought this when Davey McManus was culminating barely controlled gigs by swallow-diving into audiences in the Crocketts - Top Of The Pops. Although before now there's not been a lot of attention for White Russian Galaxy this was the second single first time round, Lottery Winners On Acid having been the first, that convinced us that there was something quietly special afoot. The inevitable major label reissue remix isn't as good, but we'll be glad to see him up there. Also veterans of their field are Peter and David Brewis, whose Field Music is the first of their many projects to gain national attention largely as a consequence of most of their ex-bandmates going off to form successful bands of their own. The corking You're Not Supposed To, from a forthcoming album that rounds up much of their life's work starts with some close harmony Gregorian, well, humming before launching into equal parts pop-psych Beatles and XTC about seven years on from everyone else's idea of XTC influence. Top handclaps too. Whirlwind Heat are a trio less likely to employ a string section, although they've developed from being Jack White's garage-Devo mates four years ago to the Reagan EP's not unwholly unwelcome diversion into Cake territory. Passing quickly over possibly the final Gorillaz single, the double A of Kids With Guns and El Manana, we come to this week's output from Transgressive Records. We have tended to go big on them a lot over recent months, but they will keep putting out excellent records, damn them. Get to their online shop and attempt to quickly snap up two new limited edition singles, our showbiz mate Jeremy Warmsley's second EP Other People's Secrets and the debut from ultrapromising Hot Chip-meets-The Rapture-meets-British Sea Power coves (and current STN Myspace soundtrack) Goodbooks, Walk With Me.
Albums
It's always difficult to second guess what any Fiery Furnaces album will sound like, but Matthew Freidburger's own description of Bitter Tea as "sissy psychedelic Satanism" will do for us. Not dissimilar, in fact, to how we'd describe the self-titled debut by Semifinalists, who took their time to grow on us but eventually open out their gorgeous, lo-fi Flaming Lips-esque soundscapes, mixing odd synth washes and direct riffage to winning effect. Solo singers all the way otherwise, whether BBC Radio 2 Folk Award winner Karine Polwart's powerful folk roots voice on Scribbled In Chalk, Ronnie Spector remaining in full voice with the aid of Patti Smith and Keith Richards amongst others on the wryly titled The Last Of The Rock Stars, her first album of new material in nineteen years, or Robyn Hitchcock's pecularily English oddball worldview in 1990s radio session form on This Is The BBC. Hitchcock and occasional backing band Minus 3 (Scott McCaughey, Bill Rieflin and Peter Buck) is playing a day of the Hyde Park version of the Wireless Festival in June, bottom of a bill that's headed by David Gray, KT Tunstall and the Fun Lovin' Criminals. The world is destined never to 'get' him, are they? Oh, reissue of the week - Lambchop have an out-takes compilation out which by all accounts is barely worth the effort but much of their back catalogue is coming back out to coincide, most notably How I Quit Smoking.
DVD
One each of these last two - despite the Morrissey ill business the first Madness Finsbury Park reunion Madstock in 1992 provided a party atmosphere all round, famously measuring 4.5 on the Richter scale. They kind of spoiled it by doing several more over the next few years, but never mind. Madness: At Madstock is out on mid-price DVD, and of course Lee Thompson gets flown on a wire during Baggy Trousers.
Book
You'd be surprised at how many bands, whatever their outward opinion to publicity, seem to have a photographer in quasi-residence - it seems any band worth its iconic salt has an exhibition ready to go whenever they're ready. The Kaiser Chiefs aren't up to that stage quite yet, but A Record Of Employment seems a good way of rounding off a year of madness, being a fully annotated scrapbook of photos and memorabilia compiled by the band, their associates and fans but not a straight biography. Were we Q, we'd pointlessly mention Parva at this stage. But we aren't.
If you read this in time you'll be able to catch The Crimea on - and who'd have thought this when Davey McManus was culminating barely controlled gigs by swallow-diving into audiences in the Crocketts - Top Of The Pops. Although before now there's not been a lot of attention for White Russian Galaxy this was the second single first time round, Lottery Winners On Acid having been the first, that convinced us that there was something quietly special afoot. The inevitable major label reissue remix isn't as good, but we'll be glad to see him up there. Also veterans of their field are Peter and David Brewis, whose Field Music is the first of their many projects to gain national attention largely as a consequence of most of their ex-bandmates going off to form successful bands of their own. The corking You're Not Supposed To, from a forthcoming album that rounds up much of their life's work starts with some close harmony Gregorian, well, humming before launching into equal parts pop-psych Beatles and XTC about seven years on from everyone else's idea of XTC influence. Top handclaps too. Whirlwind Heat are a trio less likely to employ a string section, although they've developed from being Jack White's garage-Devo mates four years ago to the Reagan EP's not unwholly unwelcome diversion into Cake territory. Passing quickly over possibly the final Gorillaz single, the double A of Kids With Guns and El Manana, we come to this week's output from Transgressive Records. We have tended to go big on them a lot over recent months, but they will keep putting out excellent records, damn them. Get to their online shop and attempt to quickly snap up two new limited edition singles, our showbiz mate Jeremy Warmsley's second EP Other People's Secrets and the debut from ultrapromising Hot Chip-meets-The Rapture-meets-British Sea Power coves (and current STN Myspace soundtrack) Goodbooks, Walk With Me.
Albums
It's always difficult to second guess what any Fiery Furnaces album will sound like, but Matthew Freidburger's own description of Bitter Tea as "sissy psychedelic Satanism" will do for us. Not dissimilar, in fact, to how we'd describe the self-titled debut by Semifinalists, who took their time to grow on us but eventually open out their gorgeous, lo-fi Flaming Lips-esque soundscapes, mixing odd synth washes and direct riffage to winning effect. Solo singers all the way otherwise, whether BBC Radio 2 Folk Award winner Karine Polwart's powerful folk roots voice on Scribbled In Chalk, Ronnie Spector remaining in full voice with the aid of Patti Smith and Keith Richards amongst others on the wryly titled The Last Of The Rock Stars, her first album of new material in nineteen years, or Robyn Hitchcock's pecularily English oddball worldview in 1990s radio session form on This Is The BBC. Hitchcock and occasional backing band Minus 3 (Scott McCaughey, Bill Rieflin and Peter Buck) is playing a day of the Hyde Park version of the Wireless Festival in June, bottom of a bill that's headed by David Gray, KT Tunstall and the Fun Lovin' Criminals. The world is destined never to 'get' him, are they? Oh, reissue of the week - Lambchop have an out-takes compilation out which by all accounts is barely worth the effort but much of their back catalogue is coming back out to coincide, most notably How I Quit Smoking.
DVD
One each of these last two - despite the Morrissey ill business the first Madness Finsbury Park reunion Madstock in 1992 provided a party atmosphere all round, famously measuring 4.5 on the Richter scale. They kind of spoiled it by doing several more over the next few years, but never mind. Madness: At Madstock is out on mid-price DVD, and of course Lee Thompson gets flown on a wire during Baggy Trousers.
Book
You'd be surprised at how many bands, whatever their outward opinion to publicity, seem to have a photographer in quasi-residence - it seems any band worth its iconic salt has an exhibition ready to go whenever they're ready. The Kaiser Chiefs aren't up to that stage quite yet, but A Record Of Employment seems a good way of rounding off a year of madness, being a fully annotated scrapbook of photos and memorabilia compiled by the band, their associates and fans but not a straight biography. Were we Q, we'd pointlessly mention Parva at this stage. But we aren't.
The Weekly Sweep
Gnarls Barkley - Crazy
Wire - Strange
Calexico - Letter To Bowie Knife
Futureheads - Skip To The End
Shooting At Unarmed Men - The Pink Ink
1990s - You Made Me Like It
Madvillain - Accordion
The Boy Least Likely To - Be Gentle With Me
Mew - The Zookeeper's Boy
Larrikin Love - Edwould
Wire - Strange
Calexico - Letter To Bowie Knife
Futureheads - Skip To The End
Shooting At Unarmed Men - The Pink Ink
1990s - You Made Me Like It
Madvillain - Accordion
The Boy Least Likely To - Be Gentle With Me
Mew - The Zookeeper's Boy
Larrikin Love - Edwould
Friday, April 07, 2006
An Illustrated Guide To...Wire
Starting another occasional series now, this one providing almost interactive guides to the backstory of some of our own musical heroes. Unofficial biographies that won't end up in The Works, if you will. As always, mp3s up for a week for evaluation purposes only, and that.
Wire came, unsurprisingly, from an art school background. Watford Art School, in fact, breeding ground of a number of leading photographers and graphic artists, where Brian Eno would give the occasional tutorial - his Oblique Strategies were formulated there - and where in 1976 illustration student and tape manipulation hobbyist Colin Newman and audiovisual technician and his occasional tutor abstract painter Bruce Gilbert (already thirty) initially formed Overload, before unschooled bassist/freelance designer Graham Lewis and non-art student drummer Robert Gotobed, who'd just split from a band that included members of future one hit wonders the Motors, joined before their first gig in October of that year. From Eno they took the idea of wondering what would happen if they ignored what everyone else was doing and went off on their own accord, guitars clean but jagged ("a deconstruction, a pisstake" according to Lewis), vocals sneery but subtly complex, look monochrome but knowingly so. EMI, apparently on the rebound from losing the Pistols to an upper management decision, snapped them up for their previously prog-friendly Harvest imprint, which must have confused those who bought the November 1977 single Mannequin/12XU and album Pink Flag, 21 tracks in 35 minutes, recorded as live wherever possible, songs stopping when they couldn't think of anything else to say, solos brutally excised, randomly contextualised wherever possible - 106 Beats That contains 106 syllables, while this much admired track was originally about a lion tamer before virtually all the lyric was changed.
Ex-Lion Tamer
Suitably confused, most reviewers considered it the work of Syd Barrett disciples rather than the snarling, experimental without losing the basic punk noise plot that left "a scale and feel of its own...not like anything you've heard and it'll leave its mark for a long time", as the Sounds review went, and would come to influence the approach of the likes of, to name but three, the Minutemen, Pixies and Futureheads in different but traceable ways. That comparison stood further ground, however, when the ever restless Newman and Lewis stumbled across a development into icier territory as displayed initially on demos recorded some months even before Pink Flag's release. Non-album singles I Am The Fly and Dot Dash passed muster as links between the two albums, the former laced with razorblade distorted guitar sounds - Colin Newman described it as his attempt at disco - while the latter worked to its own action painting made into sound rhythms, but Chairs Missing saw producer (and Harvest A&R man) Mike Thorne, who'd go on to produce Soft Cell, Bronski Beat and Blur, become their own Eno, taking to the keyboards but mixing them so they sounded as much like guitars as, well, the guitars did, and then working in numerous state of the art effects boxes and units to give the guitars distorted, unnatural sounds amid starker, more vitreous settings. Nobody knew what to make of it.
French Film (Blurred)
In the midst of all this, the still great Outdoor Miner, actually about the serpentine miner, an insect that lives in leaves. Set to be huge until caught up in a BPI chart-hyping scam after reaching number 51 with Top Of The Pops enquiring after them, it was the poppiest they ever got, at least deliberately, actually keeping to verse-chorus and featuring a piano solo in the single version. An album of 19 different cover versions, from electro to folk, was released under the title A Houseguest's Wish a few years back.
BREAK FOR YOUTUBE: Practice Makes Perfect for German TV's Rockpalast in 1979
154, named after the number of gigs they'd played up to release in September 1979 and again written and played live while supposedly promoting the previous album, is their highest UK charting album, making number 39. As well as a theme of sorting things into numbers and charts, the lyrics here often betrayed growing animosity between members, matched by the production values stepping up another gear. Often instruments would be subtly thrown out of sync while everything else would sound oppressive or just odd, cor anglais and electric viola making guest appearances, the whole atmosphere crackling with elegance through dissonance. They had another go at writing their version of consummate pop while they were about it, shearing guitar runs merged with vaulting keyboards and almost harmonies. All they really had to do to attract more attention was not give it a forbidding, slightly silly title.
Map Ref. 41°N 93°W
Ah.
The actual tensions between the members were by now getting insurmountable, Wire playing it out by performance art pieces instead of proper gigs. Four night theatre show People In A Room saw the four members take a solo turn each at performances ranging from canvas painting to Glenn Branca-style massed one chord playing before everyone convened to play a 15 minute track before half an hour of new songs. After leaving EMI, which had had changes at the top and was less open to exoticism, in February 1980 they put on a one-off show at the London Electric Ballroom that mixed more new songs with Dadaist 'happenings'. Semi-official bootleg Document And Eyewitness helpfully transcribes the gist of what's going on during every song, whether "vocalist attacks gas stove", "vocalist lit and accompanied by illuminated goose" or "vocalist wears black knee length veil, 12 percussionists with newspaper head dresses, MC attempts geographical explanation". Suddenly we feel we have a letter to write to Take That's management.
Not unreasonably, Wire drifted apart for a while, Gilbert and Lewis teaming up for a number of avant-garde collaborations and producing The The's debut single, Newman making two solo albums. Eventually they reunited in 1985, declaring themselves a no-nonsense "beat combo" and promptly bringing out 1986 EP Snakedrill, lead track The Drill a taut, one chord repetitive slab of rhythm that five years later would be the subject of an album entirely comprised of different versioned inspired by its ever shifting live versions. Proper comeback The Ideal Copy took a turn for the electronic, sequencers and drum machines making widespread appearances trying to reclaim Pink Flag's territory to an extent. The accompanying tour saw them supported by the Ex-Lion Tamers, a New Jersey-based Wire covers band who would play Pink Flag in order. REM probably made them a bit more PRS by covering Strange on their Document. The mightily titled A Bell Is A Cup Until It Is Struck followed in 1988, a less hurried affair that showcased a more sarcastically poetic approach, even in this track's attempt to make sense from cryptic lyricism:
Kidney Bingos
The odd It's Beginning To And Back Again followed in May 1989, a set of live recordings deconstructed and generally messed about with in the studio, new song Eardrum Buzz nearly giving them a hit. They responded in timelessly obscure fashion when invited onto Snub TV, by attempting to play this and Kidney Bingos simultaneously. 1990's Manscape is not among their most celebrated albums, heading straight for the dance firmament. Not unreasonably Gotobed wasn't particularly keen on being relegated to programmer and buggered off, at which the remaining three changed their name to Wir for 1991 album The First Letter, which leavened the electronics mildly and sampled their own Strange. Remaining dormant as they turned into an influence, Elastica famously swiping Three Girl Rhumba for Connection, the original foursome got back together in 1999 and the following year playing the Royal Festival Hall and the Mogwai-curated All Tomorrow's Parties. It took another two years for the first new recorded material to emerge, one of two mini-albums titled Read And Burn, collated a year later as Send. An extraordinary return to earlier teeth-baring form, it richochets from miniature, heavily stripped back near-hardcore to droning, machine-tooled guitar distortion.
In The Art Of Stopping
Wire are officially back on hiatus at the moment, Gilbert off pursuing other ventures while once again, most of what's around them is in their image. Never a band with a spectacular sense of timing, Wire.
Wire came, unsurprisingly, from an art school background. Watford Art School, in fact, breeding ground of a number of leading photographers and graphic artists, where Brian Eno would give the occasional tutorial - his Oblique Strategies were formulated there - and where in 1976 illustration student and tape manipulation hobbyist Colin Newman and audiovisual technician and his occasional tutor abstract painter Bruce Gilbert (already thirty) initially formed Overload, before unschooled bassist/freelance designer Graham Lewis and non-art student drummer Robert Gotobed, who'd just split from a band that included members of future one hit wonders the Motors, joined before their first gig in October of that year. From Eno they took the idea of wondering what would happen if they ignored what everyone else was doing and went off on their own accord, guitars clean but jagged ("a deconstruction, a pisstake" according to Lewis), vocals sneery but subtly complex, look monochrome but knowingly so. EMI, apparently on the rebound from losing the Pistols to an upper management decision, snapped them up for their previously prog-friendly Harvest imprint, which must have confused those who bought the November 1977 single Mannequin/12XU and album Pink Flag, 21 tracks in 35 minutes, recorded as live wherever possible, songs stopping when they couldn't think of anything else to say, solos brutally excised, randomly contextualised wherever possible - 106 Beats That contains 106 syllables, while this much admired track was originally about a lion tamer before virtually all the lyric was changed.
Suitably confused, most reviewers considered it the work of Syd Barrett disciples rather than the snarling, experimental without losing the basic punk noise plot that left "a scale and feel of its own...not like anything you've heard and it'll leave its mark for a long time", as the Sounds review went, and would come to influence the approach of the likes of, to name but three, the Minutemen, Pixies and Futureheads in different but traceable ways. That comparison stood further ground, however, when the ever restless Newman and Lewis stumbled across a development into icier territory as displayed initially on demos recorded some months even before Pink Flag's release. Non-album singles I Am The Fly and Dot Dash passed muster as links between the two albums, the former laced with razorblade distorted guitar sounds - Colin Newman described it as his attempt at disco - while the latter worked to its own action painting made into sound rhythms, but Chairs Missing saw producer (and Harvest A&R man) Mike Thorne, who'd go on to produce Soft Cell, Bronski Beat and Blur, become their own Eno, taking to the keyboards but mixing them so they sounded as much like guitars as, well, the guitars did, and then working in numerous state of the art effects boxes and units to give the guitars distorted, unnatural sounds amid starker, more vitreous settings. Nobody knew what to make of it.
In the midst of all this, the still great Outdoor Miner, actually about the serpentine miner, an insect that lives in leaves. Set to be huge until caught up in a BPI chart-hyping scam after reaching number 51 with Top Of The Pops enquiring after them, it was the poppiest they ever got, at least deliberately, actually keeping to verse-chorus and featuring a piano solo in the single version. An album of 19 different cover versions, from electro to folk, was released under the title A Houseguest's Wish a few years back.
BREAK FOR YOUTUBE: Practice Makes Perfect for German TV's Rockpalast in 1979
154, named after the number of gigs they'd played up to release in September 1979 and again written and played live while supposedly promoting the previous album, is their highest UK charting album, making number 39. As well as a theme of sorting things into numbers and charts, the lyrics here often betrayed growing animosity between members, matched by the production values stepping up another gear. Often instruments would be subtly thrown out of sync while everything else would sound oppressive or just odd, cor anglais and electric viola making guest appearances, the whole atmosphere crackling with elegance through dissonance. They had another go at writing their version of consummate pop while they were about it, shearing guitar runs merged with vaulting keyboards and almost harmonies. All they really had to do to attract more attention was not give it a forbidding, slightly silly title.
Ah.
The actual tensions between the members were by now getting insurmountable, Wire playing it out by performance art pieces instead of proper gigs. Four night theatre show People In A Room saw the four members take a solo turn each at performances ranging from canvas painting to Glenn Branca-style massed one chord playing before everyone convened to play a 15 minute track before half an hour of new songs. After leaving EMI, which had had changes at the top and was less open to exoticism, in February 1980 they put on a one-off show at the London Electric Ballroom that mixed more new songs with Dadaist 'happenings'. Semi-official bootleg Document And Eyewitness helpfully transcribes the gist of what's going on during every song, whether "vocalist attacks gas stove", "vocalist lit and accompanied by illuminated goose" or "vocalist wears black knee length veil, 12 percussionists with newspaper head dresses, MC attempts geographical explanation". Suddenly we feel we have a letter to write to Take That's management.
Not unreasonably, Wire drifted apart for a while, Gilbert and Lewis teaming up for a number of avant-garde collaborations and producing The The's debut single, Newman making two solo albums. Eventually they reunited in 1985, declaring themselves a no-nonsense "beat combo" and promptly bringing out 1986 EP Snakedrill, lead track The Drill a taut, one chord repetitive slab of rhythm that five years later would be the subject of an album entirely comprised of different versioned inspired by its ever shifting live versions. Proper comeback The Ideal Copy took a turn for the electronic, sequencers and drum machines making widespread appearances trying to reclaim Pink Flag's territory to an extent. The accompanying tour saw them supported by the Ex-Lion Tamers, a New Jersey-based Wire covers band who would play Pink Flag in order. REM probably made them a bit more PRS by covering Strange on their Document. The mightily titled A Bell Is A Cup Until It Is Struck followed in 1988, a less hurried affair that showcased a more sarcastically poetic approach, even in this track's attempt to make sense from cryptic lyricism:
The odd It's Beginning To And Back Again followed in May 1989, a set of live recordings deconstructed and generally messed about with in the studio, new song Eardrum Buzz nearly giving them a hit. They responded in timelessly obscure fashion when invited onto Snub TV, by attempting to play this and Kidney Bingos simultaneously. 1990's Manscape is not among their most celebrated albums, heading straight for the dance firmament. Not unreasonably Gotobed wasn't particularly keen on being relegated to programmer and buggered off, at which the remaining three changed their name to Wir for 1991 album The First Letter, which leavened the electronics mildly and sampled their own Strange. Remaining dormant as they turned into an influence, Elastica famously swiping Three Girl Rhumba for Connection, the original foursome got back together in 1999 and the following year playing the Royal Festival Hall and the Mogwai-curated All Tomorrow's Parties. It took another two years for the first new recorded material to emerge, one of two mini-albums titled Read And Burn, collated a year later as Send. An extraordinary return to earlier teeth-baring form, it richochets from miniature, heavily stripped back near-hardcore to droning, machine-tooled guitar distortion.
Wire are officially back on hiatus at the moment, Gilbert off pursuing other ventures while once again, most of what's around them is in their image. Never a band with a spectacular sense of timing, Wire.
Wednesday, April 05, 2006
The difference between me and you is that I'm not splitting up
Might as well stick something in here for today, this being the news that Jon Chapple's post-McLusky outfit Shooting At Unarmed Men are going on one of those 'hiatus' things that only means we'll probably never see them again, as he's moving to Australia. We think. Two gigs left in the UK next month, documented round at theirs', and an album on the 22nd May. No word of the aforementioned Andy/Jack/some of Jarcrew team-up as yet, but keep watching the skies.
Um... come and join our Myspace, why don't you? Look, just over there under 'contact details'.
Um... come and join our Myspace, why don't you? Look, just over there under 'contact details'.
Tuesday, April 04, 2006
Reading matter
Now that the Carling Weekend is virtually sold out, we can enquire about something we heard from more than one source about how a lot of independently run mid-summer festivals, most prominently Truck, aren't allowed to name their lineups until Reading and Leeds have sold out. Anyone know if this is true and if so why? It does seem very odd to us - what if Goldrush are asked to play Reading?
If you did miss the rush and now have £120 burning a hole in your back pocket, why not sponsor Mike Take Your Medicine's charity hike to Latvia?
If you did miss the rush and now have £120 burning a hole in your back pocket, why not sponsor Mike Take Your Medicine's charity hike to Latvia?
Monday, April 03, 2006
Weekender : almost frightening
CHART OF DARKNESS: Wasn't the relaxing of download chart rules supposed to mean more climbers to number one and less entering at the top straight away? For the second time a number one makes history through new technologies with a connection to the word 'crazy'. Gnarls Barkley, a reference that makes no sense to large swathes of the British population but there you go, is/are luckily more palatable than the frog of yore, topping the chart on 33,000+ downloads alone. Come to think of it, does this have a video yet? For such a high profile release we've not seen hide nor hair of one yet, and we're wondering what the last number one not to have such an accompaniment was. In this week when the Saturday morning 11.30 music slot has been abandoned after seventeen years we recall Stardust's Music Sounds Better With You topped the chart in the Chart Show's penultimate week and they had to sling a load of their old graphics together as a tribute/filler.
Elsewhere we find Morrissey equalling his all time best of number 3 and the Streets' number 8 looking worse than it might but better than it deserves. Depeche Mode, who must have been waiting all their career to make a record called Suffer Well, are at 12, that unnecessary Mary J Blige/U2 version of One lines up for bigger things as it hits 19 on downloads and Milburn ride the gritty Sheffield wave they've seemed all too keen to embark upon to 22. Two very odd entries near the bottom of the top 30 as the much feared UK Theme reworking greatly improves on the number of people who'd ever heard of it before it was dropped yet still only makes 29 - that'll be the Mike Flowers effect - one behind Tribute To Jinky, that being former Celtic great Jimmy Johnstone, the lead track a cover of Dirty Old Town with Simple Minds recorded two years ago for his battle against motor neurone disease. How JK & Joel tackled these two we really, really want to know. Despite being trailed as his best work in years, whatever small relief that is, Prince only manages 43, Andy Abraham fails to recaptue the album form at 63, David Gray now finds days pass by without him being necessary at 71 and Sigur Ros' Hoppipolla, off the Planet Earth trailers, re-enters the top 75 a month of its inevitable re-release. In the album chart Embrace pip Massive Attack to the top, three number one albums out of five now, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs better their previous best by six, Kooks climb 24 to 9 on the back of that Tom Baker-voiced advert showing on music channels with monotonus regularity and Be Your Own Pet find a berth at 46 in among a horde of sale-aided climbers, more of which tomorrow.
FREE MUSIC: Le Sport, inevitably, were called Eurosport until the TV channel had words. They're a duo from Stockholm and sound much like a lot of Scandinavia's recent output, being unafraid of calling itself techno-pop but knowing its Proper Indie moves, the result being akin to just pre-Ibiza New Order led by a less wordy Stephin Merritt on It's Not The End Of The World.
HEY YOU GET OFFA MYSPACE: Airstrip One are from Leeds, which means they're a year too late for New Yorkshire. The NME would have had them for those all-important genre crossover purposes, however, as they fit well in the almost-hardcore lineage of ¡Forward, Russia!, yourcodenameis:milo and maybe Youth Movie Soundtrack Strategies.
VISUAL REPRESENTATION: Darren Hayman may have been re-evaluated after the Hefner Best Of release last week as Britain's great lost forensic evaluatory songwriter, but clearly it's not got him anywhere financially as the setting for this performance of Caravan Song from his recent solo EP proves. Is that unneccesary beard growth we detect?
FALLING OFF A BLOG: The ever reliable for classic bootleg mp3 site rbally is shutting down soon, so get in quickly for Pavement live at the Paradiso, Amsterdam in 1997, including a cover of The Killing Moon.
EVERYBODY GET RANDOM: Someone had to do something with that BT text to landline Tom Baker thing eventually, but at least they're being clever about it - The Doctor Sings
IN OTHER NEWS: We got passed the address of video site BrainloveTV on in the week, possibly because it's just added footage of our new best mate Jeremy Warmsley performing his new single in his kitchen, but some rooting around finds a Final Fantasy video we'd never seen, live Kid Carpet, the celebrated Johnny Cash Hurt, Winona Ryder playing Jon Spencer and all manner of goodness and oddness in almost equal measure.
Elsewhere we find Morrissey equalling his all time best of number 3 and the Streets' number 8 looking worse than it might but better than it deserves. Depeche Mode, who must have been waiting all their career to make a record called Suffer Well, are at 12, that unnecessary Mary J Blige/U2 version of One lines up for bigger things as it hits 19 on downloads and Milburn ride the gritty Sheffield wave they've seemed all too keen to embark upon to 22. Two very odd entries near the bottom of the top 30 as the much feared UK Theme reworking greatly improves on the number of people who'd ever heard of it before it was dropped yet still only makes 29 - that'll be the Mike Flowers effect - one behind Tribute To Jinky, that being former Celtic great Jimmy Johnstone, the lead track a cover of Dirty Old Town with Simple Minds recorded two years ago for his battle against motor neurone disease. How JK & Joel tackled these two we really, really want to know. Despite being trailed as his best work in years, whatever small relief that is, Prince only manages 43, Andy Abraham fails to recaptue the album form at 63, David Gray now finds days pass by without him being necessary at 71 and Sigur Ros' Hoppipolla, off the Planet Earth trailers, re-enters the top 75 a month of its inevitable re-release. In the album chart Embrace pip Massive Attack to the top, three number one albums out of five now, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs better their previous best by six, Kooks climb 24 to 9 on the back of that Tom Baker-voiced advert showing on music channels with monotonus regularity and Be Your Own Pet find a berth at 46 in among a horde of sale-aided climbers, more of which tomorrow.
FREE MUSIC: Le Sport, inevitably, were called Eurosport until the TV channel had words. They're a duo from Stockholm and sound much like a lot of Scandinavia's recent output, being unafraid of calling itself techno-pop but knowing its Proper Indie moves, the result being akin to just pre-Ibiza New Order led by a less wordy Stephin Merritt on It's Not The End Of The World.
HEY YOU GET OFFA MYSPACE: Airstrip One are from Leeds, which means they're a year too late for New Yorkshire. The NME would have had them for those all-important genre crossover purposes, however, as they fit well in the almost-hardcore lineage of ¡Forward, Russia!, yourcodenameis:milo and maybe Youth Movie Soundtrack Strategies.
VISUAL REPRESENTATION: Darren Hayman may have been re-evaluated after the Hefner Best Of release last week as Britain's great lost forensic evaluatory songwriter, but clearly it's not got him anywhere financially as the setting for this performance of Caravan Song from his recent solo EP proves. Is that unneccesary beard growth we detect?
FALLING OFF A BLOG: The ever reliable for classic bootleg mp3 site rbally is shutting down soon, so get in quickly for Pavement live at the Paradiso, Amsterdam in 1997, including a cover of The Killing Moon.
EVERYBODY GET RANDOM: Someone had to do something with that BT text to landline Tom Baker thing eventually, but at least they're being clever about it - The Doctor Sings
IN OTHER NEWS: We got passed the address of video site BrainloveTV on in the week, possibly because it's just added footage of our new best mate Jeremy Warmsley performing his new single in his kitchen, but some rooting around finds a Final Fantasy video we'd never seen, live Kid Carpet, the celebrated Johnny Cash Hurt, Winona Ryder playing Jon Spencer and all manner of goodness and oddness in almost equal measure.
Sunday, April 02, 2006
Listing badly
To finish off this parade of all the stupidities, we might as well give 11-50 in the Q Worst Albums list the undeserved oxygen of publicity. Of course the list is only designed such so that people talk about it over the watercooler, but come on:
11. Limp Bizkit - Chocolate Starfish And The Hot Dog Flavored Water
Promoted by Q putting Fred Durst on the cover. Twice. If it's because nu-metal is now regarded as a silly style-driven passing fad, you might as well put Visage in the list.
12. Tom Jones - Mr Jones
13. Bruce Willis - The Return Of Bruno
14. Terence Trent D'Arby - Neither Fish Nor Flesh
15. Various - Sgt Pepper's Lonely Heart Club Band OST
16. Spice Girls - Forever
17. Bob Dylan & The Grateful Dead - Dylan And The Dead
18. Crazy Frog - Crazy Hits
Difficult targets, as you can tell.
19. Goldie - Saturnz Return
20. Mariah Carey - Glitter OST
Don't really recall this as being much different from the majority of her work but hey, she went all mad then, didn't she?
21. The Clash - Cut The Crap
22. Robson & Jerome - Robson & Jerome
23. Alanis Morissette - Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie
Again, different to Jagged Little Pill how? Oh yeah, several million less sales, and thus an easier target. Michael Bolton's big album sold ten million.
24. Lauryn Hill - MTV Unpugged 2.0
25. The Cranberries - To The Faithful Departed
26. Vanilla Ice - Hard To Swallow
27. Destiny's Child - Destiny Fulfilled
Um...
28. The Rolling Stones - Dirty Work
29. Various - Christmas In The Stars: Star Wars Christmas Album
30. Michael Jackson - Invincible
31. Stevie Wonder - Woman In Red
32. Ace Of Base - The Sign
Presumably the Culture Beat album never made it past import stage.
33. Billy Ray Cyrus - Some Gave All
34. Fischerspooner - #1
Yet no Sigue Sigue Sputnik's Flaunt It. How times move on.
35. Puff Daddy - Forever
36. Kula Shaker - Peasants, Pigs & Astronauts
37. Shania Twain - Come On Over
38. Chris Rea - The Road To Hell Pt 2
39. Big Country - Undercover
40. The Others - The Others
Ha ha!
41. Paul Simon - Songs From The Capeman
42. Babylon Zoo - The Boy With The X-Ray Eyes
43. The Travelling Wilburys - Vol 3
44. Kiss - Music From The Elder
45. William Shatner - The Transformed Man
Erm, if you want. It's not much different from that album of his everyone affected to like last year.
46. Oasis - Standing On The Shoulder Of Giants
Be Here Now's just too passe these days.
47. Ozzy Osbourne - Under Cover
48. Milli Vanilli - All Or Nothing
49. Neil Young And The Shocking Pinks - Everybody's Rocking
The album, lest we forget, that got him sued by his own label for unrepresentative work. We can't claim to be experts on early 80s Neil Young, or indeed entire back catalogue Neil Young, but we've heard a bit of his electronic album Trans and if this is considered worse it must be able to fell trees by its own musical force.
50. Beck - Midnite Vultures
And in what way is this bad? The album that features Sexx Laws and Mixed Bizness? We thought it was better than Odelay, which is why we'll never make this into a professional occupation.
By comparison, Classic Rock magazine has hit against the proliferation of Best UK Albums Ever lists by, well, compiling a Best UK Albums Ever list, although they forget to explain why U2 are in it. As expected, it makes no sense at all, forgetting its standpoint before the top ten is out. The White Album is more rocking than Sticky Fingers?
11. Limp Bizkit - Chocolate Starfish And The Hot Dog Flavored Water
Promoted by Q putting Fred Durst on the cover. Twice. If it's because nu-metal is now regarded as a silly style-driven passing fad, you might as well put Visage in the list.
12. Tom Jones - Mr Jones
13. Bruce Willis - The Return Of Bruno
14. Terence Trent D'Arby - Neither Fish Nor Flesh
15. Various - Sgt Pepper's Lonely Heart Club Band OST
16. Spice Girls - Forever
17. Bob Dylan & The Grateful Dead - Dylan And The Dead
18. Crazy Frog - Crazy Hits
Difficult targets, as you can tell.
19. Goldie - Saturnz Return
20. Mariah Carey - Glitter OST
Don't really recall this as being much different from the majority of her work but hey, she went all mad then, didn't she?
21. The Clash - Cut The Crap
22. Robson & Jerome - Robson & Jerome
23. Alanis Morissette - Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie
Again, different to Jagged Little Pill how? Oh yeah, several million less sales, and thus an easier target. Michael Bolton's big album sold ten million.
24. Lauryn Hill - MTV Unpugged 2.0
25. The Cranberries - To The Faithful Departed
26. Vanilla Ice - Hard To Swallow
27. Destiny's Child - Destiny Fulfilled
Um...
28. The Rolling Stones - Dirty Work
29. Various - Christmas In The Stars: Star Wars Christmas Album
30. Michael Jackson - Invincible
31. Stevie Wonder - Woman In Red
32. Ace Of Base - The Sign
Presumably the Culture Beat album never made it past import stage.
33. Billy Ray Cyrus - Some Gave All
34. Fischerspooner - #1
Yet no Sigue Sigue Sputnik's Flaunt It. How times move on.
35. Puff Daddy - Forever
36. Kula Shaker - Peasants, Pigs & Astronauts
37. Shania Twain - Come On Over
38. Chris Rea - The Road To Hell Pt 2
39. Big Country - Undercover
40. The Others - The Others
Ha ha!
41. Paul Simon - Songs From The Capeman
42. Babylon Zoo - The Boy With The X-Ray Eyes
43. The Travelling Wilburys - Vol 3
44. Kiss - Music From The Elder
45. William Shatner - The Transformed Man
Erm, if you want. It's not much different from that album of his everyone affected to like last year.
46. Oasis - Standing On The Shoulder Of Giants
Be Here Now's just too passe these days.
47. Ozzy Osbourne - Under Cover
48. Milli Vanilli - All Or Nothing
49. Neil Young And The Shocking Pinks - Everybody's Rocking
The album, lest we forget, that got him sued by his own label for unrepresentative work. We can't claim to be experts on early 80s Neil Young, or indeed entire back catalogue Neil Young, but we've heard a bit of his electronic album Trans and if this is considered worse it must be able to fell trees by its own musical force.
50. Beck - Midnite Vultures
And in what way is this bad? The album that features Sexx Laws and Mixed Bizness? We thought it was better than Odelay, which is why we'll never make this into a professional occupation.
By comparison, Classic Rock magazine has hit against the proliferation of Best UK Albums Ever lists by, well, compiling a Best UK Albums Ever list, although they forget to explain why U2 are in it. As expected, it makes no sense at all, forgetting its standpoint before the top ten is out. The White Album is more rocking than Sticky Fingers?
In shops tomorrow: 3/4
Singles
Mind if we start with some barely distinguised hyperbole? Cheers. So, The Victorian English Gentlemens Club, then. Adam, Louise and Emma by name, based in Cardiff via various West Midlands and northern outposts, who we promoted back in our preview of stuff to properly look forward to in 2006 not realising that, no matter how great debut The Tales Of Hermit Mark was, new double A-side Amateur Man/Ban The Gin would blow it into a cocked hat in a highly ungainly fashion, somewhere in the ballpark that fits in Pixies, Geffen era Sonic Youth, Wire, the Minutemen, McLusky and the Fall at their most up for it but certainly staking out its own territory. We've genuinely not been this excited about an opening one-two salvo of singles possibly since Franz Ferdinand (whose own double-A single release this week, The Fallen/L Wells, is none too shabby itself) and despite a slowness on the music press' part to date (damn them, eh?) they can only expand outwards - they're in capable hands on Fantastic Plastic, good things are noted about their live shows (they were on Marc Riley's Saturday afternoon 6 Music show yesterday) and they've landed four gigs as Wedding Present support in May. Watch them fly. What else? Well, Larrikin Love, a band who we're sure remind us of someone else that we can't quite put our finger on, release horribly titled first full scale single Edwould, the Fratellis debut with an enponymous EP that proves there is a good side to the whole shambolic electric skiffle thing, there's Alex James making the record you suspect he always wanted to make, namely teaming with Betty Boo on a strangely underpromoted excursion into stupid pop disco Wigwam by Wigwam, and physical stock is released of Gnarls Barkley's Crazy, although we're secretly hoping extreme irony will strike and it'll be knocked off number one as soon as you're able to buy it. No link, but Hope Of The States return with 2000 10"s of the Blood Meridian EP.
Albums
It's not every band, even one jammed into the outside edge of the mainstream as solidly as the Flaming Lips, who can pull off three top notch albums in a row, however much time and effort they put into each one. At War With The Mystics certainly isn't immediate and you could say it thematically treads old ground, although in the latter sense we'd like to hear all the bands who thematically tread through existential crises in hook-laden pop and doomy epics on the future of time and space. It's been called Wayne Coyne's political album, but it's as much personal and social politics as well-thumbed anti-Bush rhetoric that's covered here. He's too much in love with the ideas of humanity, you see. So, that list in full of bands who can record a song called My Cosmic Autumn Rebellion and get away with it in the slightest: the Flaming Lips. The Morrissey album's also out after what seems years of build-up, Ringleader Of The Tormentors categorised as his sex exploration opus. Needless to say, of course it isn't - the "explosive kegs" track, Dear God Please Help Me itself, is an oddly stately thing featuring Ennio Morricone striking up the string section and later features the lines "then he motions to me with his hand on my knee/Dear God, did this kind of this thing happen to you?" Easy to overlook where possible, isn't it. Again, it's not one for the listening post and perhaps will suffer by the fact that it comes two years after the last album rather than seven, but it will spread its wings over time and fills the allotted love, life and death themes excellently. Top Deutsche Grammophon-styled cover too. Everything else is understandly dwarfed by comparison this week, but there's just time for the all-out post-prog bashing of Secret Machines' Ten Silver Drops, the Domino Recordings low down and dirty blues-punk of Archie Bronson Outfit's onomatapaeically titled Derdang Derdang - none of them are called Archie Bronson, you'll recall - Calexico taking inspiration from their Sam Beam collaboration to become more hushed and thoughtful, in part, on Garden Ruin and female take on the Cure/Smiths/Interpol timeline The Organ's Grab That Gun, which import distibutors may like to note first came out in 2004 in North America. In the compilation stakes the only place to turn this week is Zero: A Martin Hannett Story 1979-1991, in which his most famous spooked production clients Joy Division are only represented by Transmission but there is room for the Buzzcocks, Happy Mondays, John Cooper Clarke, Magazine, New Order, OMD, the Durutti Column, U2, the Only Ones, the Psychedelic Furs and, well, Jilted John.
Things we missed
A couple of things we should really have mentioned had we spotted them at the time and have kept forgetting to since, not least that the band who recorded the song this bloody blog's named after, Spearmint. The Boy And The Girl That Got Away is a nine track album of songs written specifically for an acoustic tour of Germany. The glamour. It's only available via their website, in any case, ahead of the proper new album in the next few months. A band we've mentioned on here before but not followed so hard that we didn't miss their debut album release when it came out a fortnight ago are literate, angular Bristolians the Playwrights, whose English Self Storage sounds like an amalgam of all eras of XTC at once.
DVD
Some would say it's easy to forget how incendiary Public Enemy were in the face of Flavor Flav's lovelorn goofing around on VH1. We'd amend that slightly - they've made it easy for us, throwing in the album every three months or so. Timely, then that getting a re-release this week is It Takes A Nation - The First London Invasion Tour 1987, recorded at Hammersmith Odeon a few months after Yo! Bum Rush the Show's release while giving live debuts to Bring The Noise and Rebel Without A Pause. S1Ws present and correct, Bomb Squad beats to level monuments, crowd more than likely mostly there for headliner LL Cool J going appropriately nuts.
DVD with only tangential musical connection but we reckon is essential anyway
A Bit Of Fry And Laurie Series 1, featuring America
Book
As a rule we really should discourage managers from writing autobiographies, as we know what they'll be like before the spine has been even slightly cracked - more than slightly catty, presenting the elbowing for space nature of business as shock revelation, actual people in the acts somewhere in the background unless there's girls involved. Such is Simon Napier-Bell's schtick, but the paperbacked I'm Coming to Take You to Lunch survives through the storytelling skills Napier-Bell possesses in among the self-publicising. Subtitled A Fantastic Tale of Boys, Booze And How Wham Were Sold To China it's his opening up on how he made George and Andy the forces they briefly became and how they responded in kind up to and including that opening up of Eastern borders.
Mind if we start with some barely distinguised hyperbole? Cheers. So, The Victorian English Gentlemens Club, then. Adam, Louise and Emma by name, based in Cardiff via various West Midlands and northern outposts, who we promoted back in our preview of stuff to properly look forward to in 2006 not realising that, no matter how great debut The Tales Of Hermit Mark was, new double A-side Amateur Man/Ban The Gin would blow it into a cocked hat in a highly ungainly fashion, somewhere in the ballpark that fits in Pixies, Geffen era Sonic Youth, Wire, the Minutemen, McLusky and the Fall at their most up for it but certainly staking out its own territory. We've genuinely not been this excited about an opening one-two salvo of singles possibly since Franz Ferdinand (whose own double-A single release this week, The Fallen/L Wells, is none too shabby itself) and despite a slowness on the music press' part to date (damn them, eh?) they can only expand outwards - they're in capable hands on Fantastic Plastic, good things are noted about their live shows (they were on Marc Riley's Saturday afternoon 6 Music show yesterday) and they've landed four gigs as Wedding Present support in May. Watch them fly. What else? Well, Larrikin Love, a band who we're sure remind us of someone else that we can't quite put our finger on, release horribly titled first full scale single Edwould, the Fratellis debut with an enponymous EP that proves there is a good side to the whole shambolic electric skiffle thing, there's Alex James making the record you suspect he always wanted to make, namely teaming with Betty Boo on a strangely underpromoted excursion into stupid pop disco Wigwam by Wigwam, and physical stock is released of Gnarls Barkley's Crazy, although we're secretly hoping extreme irony will strike and it'll be knocked off number one as soon as you're able to buy it. No link, but Hope Of The States return with 2000 10"s of the Blood Meridian EP.
Albums
It's not every band, even one jammed into the outside edge of the mainstream as solidly as the Flaming Lips, who can pull off three top notch albums in a row, however much time and effort they put into each one. At War With The Mystics certainly isn't immediate and you could say it thematically treads old ground, although in the latter sense we'd like to hear all the bands who thematically tread through existential crises in hook-laden pop and doomy epics on the future of time and space. It's been called Wayne Coyne's political album, but it's as much personal and social politics as well-thumbed anti-Bush rhetoric that's covered here. He's too much in love with the ideas of humanity, you see. So, that list in full of bands who can record a song called My Cosmic Autumn Rebellion and get away with it in the slightest: the Flaming Lips. The Morrissey album's also out after what seems years of build-up, Ringleader Of The Tormentors categorised as his sex exploration opus. Needless to say, of course it isn't - the "explosive kegs" track, Dear God Please Help Me itself, is an oddly stately thing featuring Ennio Morricone striking up the string section and later features the lines "then he motions to me with his hand on my knee/Dear God, did this kind of this thing happen to you?" Easy to overlook where possible, isn't it. Again, it's not one for the listening post and perhaps will suffer by the fact that it comes two years after the last album rather than seven, but it will spread its wings over time and fills the allotted love, life and death themes excellently. Top Deutsche Grammophon-styled cover too. Everything else is understandly dwarfed by comparison this week, but there's just time for the all-out post-prog bashing of Secret Machines' Ten Silver Drops, the Domino Recordings low down and dirty blues-punk of Archie Bronson Outfit's onomatapaeically titled Derdang Derdang - none of them are called Archie Bronson, you'll recall - Calexico taking inspiration from their Sam Beam collaboration to become more hushed and thoughtful, in part, on Garden Ruin and female take on the Cure/Smiths/Interpol timeline The Organ's Grab That Gun, which import distibutors may like to note first came out in 2004 in North America. In the compilation stakes the only place to turn this week is Zero: A Martin Hannett Story 1979-1991, in which his most famous spooked production clients Joy Division are only represented by Transmission but there is room for the Buzzcocks, Happy Mondays, John Cooper Clarke, Magazine, New Order, OMD, the Durutti Column, U2, the Only Ones, the Psychedelic Furs and, well, Jilted John.
Things we missed
A couple of things we should really have mentioned had we spotted them at the time and have kept forgetting to since, not least that the band who recorded the song this bloody blog's named after, Spearmint. The Boy And The Girl That Got Away is a nine track album of songs written specifically for an acoustic tour of Germany. The glamour. It's only available via their website, in any case, ahead of the proper new album in the next few months. A band we've mentioned on here before but not followed so hard that we didn't miss their debut album release when it came out a fortnight ago are literate, angular Bristolians the Playwrights, whose English Self Storage sounds like an amalgam of all eras of XTC at once.
DVD
Some would say it's easy to forget how incendiary Public Enemy were in the face of Flavor Flav's lovelorn goofing around on VH1. We'd amend that slightly - they've made it easy for us, throwing in the album every three months or so. Timely, then that getting a re-release this week is It Takes A Nation - The First London Invasion Tour 1987, recorded at Hammersmith Odeon a few months after Yo! Bum Rush the Show's release while giving live debuts to Bring The Noise and Rebel Without A Pause. S1Ws present and correct, Bomb Squad beats to level monuments, crowd more than likely mostly there for headliner LL Cool J going appropriately nuts.
DVD with only tangential musical connection but we reckon is essential anyway
A Bit Of Fry And Laurie Series 1, featuring America
Book
As a rule we really should discourage managers from writing autobiographies, as we know what they'll be like before the spine has been even slightly cracked - more than slightly catty, presenting the elbowing for space nature of business as shock revelation, actual people in the acts somewhere in the background unless there's girls involved. Such is Simon Napier-Bell's schtick, but the paperbacked I'm Coming to Take You to Lunch survives through the storytelling skills Napier-Bell possesses in among the self-publicising. Subtitled A Fantastic Tale of Boys, Booze And How Wham Were Sold To China it's his opening up on how he made George and Andy the forces they briefly became and how they responded in kind up to and including that opening up of Eastern borders.
The Weekly Sweep
The Victorian English Gentlemens Club - Amateur Man
Field Music - You're Not Supposed To
My Latest Novel - The Reputation Of Ross Francis
Jeremy Warmsley - Dirty Blue Jeans
Klaxons - Gravity's Rainbow
Goodbooks - Walk With Me
Broken Social Scene - 7/4 (Shoreline)
Brakes - All Night Disco Party (Graham Sutton remix)
Tapes'N Tapes - Insistor
¡Forward, Russia! - Nine
Field Music - You're Not Supposed To
My Latest Novel - The Reputation Of Ross Francis
Jeremy Warmsley - Dirty Blue Jeans
Klaxons - Gravity's Rainbow
Goodbooks - Walk With Me
Broken Social Scene - 7/4 (Shoreline)
Brakes - All Night Disco Party (Graham Sutton remix)
Tapes'N Tapes - Insistor
¡Forward, Russia! - Nine
Saturday, April 01, 2006
An announcement
At last the purpose of Sweeping The Nation can be revealed. I am in fact Thom Yorke, and the reason why you've not had a Radiohead album for so long is because I've gone undercover as a wry music blogger as a secret means of fighting the tyrannies of...er...globalisation and, um, that. Oh, we're no good at April Fool-style comedy. Let's just stick up some comedically inclined songs instead.
Ivor Cutler - I'm Happy
The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band - Trouser Press
The Massed Carnaby St. John Cooper Clarkes - The Day My Pad Went Mad
Vic Reeves - Vienna
The Shirehorses - A Girl Like You (Hiya)
(The Cutler back catalogue is surely due a full reissuing soon, but some of it's still available on Amazon, including the George Martin-produced Ludo from which the above comes. You might as well start big with the Bonzos as the three CD box set of everything they ever did Cornology is only seventeen of your English. That version of the John Cooper Clarke standard was recorded for the NME's famous C81 and is included only because our copy of the superb best of Word Of Mouth is near the bottom of an enormous, unshiftable pile of CDs, as is Reeves' I Will Cure You, although again that, erm, cover there is from an NME jolly, Ruby Trax. Luckily, or not depending on how you see it, we've filed elsewhere Mark and Lard's fondly regarded The Worst Album In The World...Ever...EVER!)
Ivor Cutler - I'm Happy
The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band - Trouser Press
The Massed Carnaby St. John Cooper Clarkes - The Day My Pad Went Mad
Vic Reeves - Vienna
The Shirehorses - A Girl Like You (Hiya)
(The Cutler back catalogue is surely due a full reissuing soon, but some of it's still available on Amazon, including the George Martin-produced Ludo from which the above comes. You might as well start big with the Bonzos as the three CD box set of everything they ever did Cornology is only seventeen of your English. That version of the John Cooper Clarke standard was recorded for the NME's famous C81 and is included only because our copy of the superb best of Word Of Mouth is near the bottom of an enormous, unshiftable pile of CDs, as is Reeves' I Will Cure You, although again that, erm, cover there is from an NME jolly, Ruby Trax. Luckily, or not depending on how you see it, we've filed elsewhere Mark and Lard's fondly regarded The Worst Album In The World...Ever...EVER!)
Friday, March 31, 2006
A Friendly Chat With... Jeremy Warmsley
To launch A Friendly Chat With, our irregular (ie we may do more but don't hold your breath for one every week) interview feature, the wide-ranging, occasionally electronically enhanced Transgressive Records singer-songwriter rapidly building a richly deserved reputation, as you'll know from our highlighing him on this week's Weekender or from hearing Phill Jupitus play Dirty Blue Jeans, the lead track from his forthcoming EP Other People's Secrets, as his 6 Music Breakfast single of the week a couple of weeks ago.STN: How did the evolution into guitar plus electronics come about? Do you see a great deal of kinship with the recent wave of singer-songwriters wielding laptops (Patrick Wolf, Tunng, Get Cape Wear Cape Fly)?
JW: I've never used a laptop in my life, actually. I like Patrick Wolf, well the first album anyway. Not really heard anything by the other guys. I think my new record will surprise people - it's a lot less electronic and a lot more, erm, production-y, I think. The first record, I was very constrained by what I was able to do, and I think that lead to me expressing stuff in very particular ways; lots of electro beats and spiky guitars because that's all I had to hand. The new one, I had a lot more options, I used a lot of other musicians, there's loads more textures and sounds and stuff. (And better songs, too). There's still lots of synths and drum machine sounds and weird impossible noises but they're more integrated into the song, and there's other things going on.
STN: Is there a particular way you construct the songs? How important is the lyrical content in the great scheme of things?
JW: They come out different every time, really, but generally I'll have a lyrical idea and a musical idea and I'll put the two together and they'll develop together. Quite often both the original ideas will disappear in the evolution of the song. I'm very interested in lyrics, I like to tell stories or express things that I think are important, and obviously you have to have a certain level of literal meaning in your lyrics for that to be possible. And of course the sound of the words is very important musically.
STN: Name three albums that were crucial in your development and three recent ones that you've been listening to.
JW: Three important records: Radiohead - Kid A, Rain Dogs - Tom Waits, Kate Bush - Hounds Of Love.
Three recent records: 7 New Songs Of Mount Eerie - Mount Eerie, Everything Ecstatic - Four Tet and Campfire Songs - Animal Collective.
STN: What can we expect from the forthcoming tour, bearing in mind you've talked in the past about not wanting to sound like the records?
JW: It'll be me and a piano player, and I'll be switching between various instruments. Don't want to sound like the records, also can't, without resorting to backing tracks. (Backing tracks are rubbish). Anyone who saw me with Regina Spektor: it'll be a bit like that.
STN: What were the Mystery Jets' already fabled Eel Pie Island gigs like from the performer's perspective?
JW: A bit like a cross between an open mike night and the best club in London. They had some pretty dodgy bands on, and also some of the best bands around. And the atmosphere was incredible. Everyone knew the Jets were going places. Blaine & co are amongst the friendliest people I know; open to anything and possessed with a joy for life that infects everything they do. Also it was an enormous piss-up.
STN: There's been three very good videos so far - is that something you've had input with?
JW: Thank you. The first video was conceived jointly with my brother; the idea was to get four different directors to make four films that would segue perfectly into each other, and that was reflect the lyrical content of what was happening into the song at the time. It's a bit shambolic but quite endearing, I hope; I'm quite proud of it. The other videos were directed by Ben Rollason, who is an unbelievably talented man, and the ideas were all his, although we did talk them back and forth quite a lot.
STN: Is the talked about early EP compilation still on the way? What else have you got planned for the next few months?
JW: Yep, "The Art Of Fiction" should appear something in late summer, although it's not really an EP compilation any more - it has eight tracks off my first few releases and three new recordings. Everything's been remixed and edited a bit and played with, which will probably really fuck certain people off, but it was stuff I wanted to change so they'll just have to deal with it. Apart from that I'm on tour all of April which will be fun, I hope. Then I have my first proper single in June, a few festivals... I'm playing this weird arty festival in Denmark called Nova Forma that looks amazing. I'm also starting a label to put out some recordings by my piano player, Tom Rogerson, who is an inconceivably good piano player. So it's all looking good.
Many thanks to Jeremy, whose homepage is here and Myspace is here, both of which feature his April tour dates. Other People's Secrets is out in a run of 500 10"s on April 10th, available to pre-order through Transgressive. A couple more mp3s from his site while we're about it: After The Fact and I Keep The City Burning.
Thursday, March 30, 2006
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
Zane low
According to Broadcast, Simon Amstell's replacement on Popworld will be Alex Zane. Good news, then, we won't have to keep getting up early on a Saturday.
Sorry to return to an old topic, but these really are odd times for music on terrestrial television. Not just because there are three weeks left of imperial phase Popworld, but TOTP Reloaded finished last weekend not with a bang but with its now usual belief that comedic sketches are more important to a music show than music, while its father programme has just been shunted to another day entirely by coverage of Crufts. This Saturday meanwhile sees the end of CD:UK, axed despite rising audience figures - Blaze are trying to sell it to Sky, we hear, with which we wish them good luck because they'll need it - and adding yet another to the list of TV Lauren Laverne vehicles that crash and burn on impact. It's not her fault, we're sure. More people seem to be going to the Album Chart Show than watching it, unsurprisingly at that time, and it doesn't help that presenter Joe Mace is also series producer of that new BBC Saturday morning programme. Jools is back in May, but that's not the same. Yet within the next three months you'll hear of at least two seperate attempts to put on a prime-time pop programme, one of which will pride itself on being based on Hit 40 UK's chart even though the former Network Chart has been mined several times to miniscule levels of success. Given how most of Saturday evening telly seems to work off music at a base level, why can't anyone make a consistent go of broadcasting it as a standalone option any more?
Sorry to return to an old topic, but these really are odd times for music on terrestrial television. Not just because there are three weeks left of imperial phase Popworld, but TOTP Reloaded finished last weekend not with a bang but with its now usual belief that comedic sketches are more important to a music show than music, while its father programme has just been shunted to another day entirely by coverage of Crufts. This Saturday meanwhile sees the end of CD:UK, axed despite rising audience figures - Blaze are trying to sell it to Sky, we hear, with which we wish them good luck because they'll need it - and adding yet another to the list of TV Lauren Laverne vehicles that crash and burn on impact. It's not her fault, we're sure. More people seem to be going to the Album Chart Show than watching it, unsurprisingly at that time, and it doesn't help that presenter Joe Mace is also series producer of that new BBC Saturday morning programme. Jools is back in May, but that's not the same. Yet within the next three months you'll hear of at least two seperate attempts to put on a prime-time pop programme, one of which will pride itself on being based on Hit 40 UK's chart even though the former Network Chart has been mined several times to miniscule levels of success. Given how most of Saturday evening telly seems to work off music at a base level, why can't anyone make a consistent go of broadcasting it as a standalone option any more?
Tuesday, March 28, 2006
Update: William Shatner upgraded to 'ironically brilliant'
The problem we have with Worst Of All Time polls in the music press is how they're even more reductive than the canon that commands what appears at the top of Best Of polls. A couple of celebrity efforts, a couple of covers albums, something that can be dismissed with the phrase 'hasn't dated', something knowingly controversial, never mind the quality, feel the column inches. With that in mind, let's see what Q magazine has this week named as the ten worst albums ever:
1 Duran Duran - Thank You
These days any band with a keyboard and a jacket is instantly deemed to have been heavily influenced by Duran Duran, even if, like most of them, it's Duran Duran as heard through polystyrene with the treble turned off. This was their celebrated, if not in the positive sense, covers album, featuring versions of 911 Is A Joke - and exactly how did this influence prime Duran Duran? - and White Lines that became standing national jokes for about three months as well as a cover that you or I could knock up a better version of in Paint in five minutes. It also apparently includes a retitled cover of their own The Chauffeur. The whole of musical history to go at and that's where they end up? All the same, you can't knock the feeling that this is only at number one to see how many irate letters they get. Amazon: "Customers who bought music by Duran Duran also bought music by these artists: Arcadia, Power Station, Spandau Ballet, John Taylor, Human League." What wide ranging tastes those grown-up Durannies have.
2 Spice Girls - Any of their solo albums
Right. Stop right the fuck there. Apart from a set of well-meaning cover versions, the worst music ever collected into a 40 minute or so package, according to the opinion of trained musical experts, has been made by former Spice Girls. Mel B's Timbaland-produced I Want You Back, which made number one despite sounding like a loop of a zombie playing the Addams Family theme? Unworthy of the term 'music', it says here. Mel C's Ga Ga, off her first album, which is a better Garbage song than anything Garbage have recorded since 1998? Not worth the effort. That last Emma Bunton album of knowing 60s soundalikes that included an Astrud Gilberto track and generally sounded like it had actually had a budget put to good use? Paste pearls. Are Victoria Beckham records ("one of her many attempts at career resurrection" reckons the Independent report on this, because of course nobody would ever have heard of her otherwise) in any way bad? Well, no, they're guilty by association, but we could name plenty of more actively offensive records before we get to any of hers. Including Geri Halliwell's, but there's only so far they can go. Of course they've put this in with an eye on the forthcoming tenth anniversary and alleged reformation, which constantly seem to be reported as "the Spice Girls are reforming - oh no, they'll be shit again!", followed by "the Spice Girls aren't reforming any more - what idiots they are for not wanting to revive the Spice magic, eh?" without grasping the irony. Still, more fool those periodicals that put solo Spices on their covers, eh? You know, like Q did with Mel C in 1999.
3 Various Artists - Urban Renewal: the Songs of Phil Collins
Urban Renewal? No idea on that front. This is the R&B reappropriation compilation from 2001 that when this piece is written up will contain many smirking references to Fur-Q from The Day Today, a series never broadcast in America. Actually Collins, who's always been partial to the jazz, funk and sometimes both together backing, has always been well sampled in the urban community, and who doesn't want to hear Ol' Dirty Bastard doing Sussudio? There's many worse covers albums on record store shelves, usually released on Scandinavian labels, it's just none of them allow smug writers to go "baldy!"
4 Lou Reed - Metal Machine Music
Well, obviously it is. It's not exactly meant to be great pop by its nature. Strangely, there appears to be no sign of anything else from the burgeoning in its own field noise music scene or the experimental sound wave likes of Pan Sonic. Or, for that matter, Neil Young's Arc, which is pretty much the same thing as this.
5 Billy Idol - Cyberpunk
It's called Cyberpunk, which is a bad start, and it's by Billy Idol, which is worse. There were a fair share of people blending heavy riffing, technological buzzwords and basic synths and sequencers around for a good six to eight years up to this album's 1993 release, and it's a bit rich to start accusing Billy Idol of being a cariacature of a nouveau future punk. The ironic revival can only be months away.
6 Naomi Campbell - Babywoman
House! Again, you'd be able to write the blurb for this one without mentioning the music at all - you didn't buy the book or so much as see it on sale, so why do you care who wrote it so much? - and while we don't like to think what she did with Ride A White Swan, we recall single Love And Tears (co-produced by Tim Simenon) being a swooning Massive Attack-like thing with very much passable smoky vocals, remembering that this was in the days before Autotune was prevalent and thus surely no worse than the treated seriously pop careers of Lopez, Duff, Lohan etc. Bizarrely, a lot of the US Amazon reviews include variants on the line "buy Sade instead", as if some misguided street team was let loose around 2001.
7 Kevin Rowland - My Beauty
As Dexys officially become an influence, it's been interesting to watch critical opinion on his Creation Records sinker change. At the time, while nobody enjoyed the infamous dress-wearing cover - oh, but you've all got The Man Who Sold The World - and when the sales figures were released the laughter could be heard as far as the Reading Festival, the reviews were unanimously positive, Uncut's man calling it "one of the best albums I'll hear in my life". Again, you're calling out Kevin Rowland for overemoting his vocals?
8 Mick Jagger - Primitive Cool
We'd never heard of this before but it turns out to be the one with Let's Work on it, which surely has to place it higher in the critical spectrum if only for that Top Of The Pops of it performance where he utilised every stage in the studio, a load of kids following most of his moves.
9 Westlife - Allow Us To Be Frank
As Word once pointed out, one of the single worst album titles of all time, and they didn't even have the good grace to go with a recreation of the celebrated Rat Pack Sands Hotel shot on the cover. (In fact there were two covers, the other suggesting Christopher Dean had joined the band) The whole jazz-lite revival that spurred this on was one of the most hateful moments in modern music, surely only superceded by the current thought that the vast tenets and strictures of opera can be represented by Russell Watson and the fat lad out of G4, and given Robbie Williams, who probably had the cheek to think he could sound like Holmby Hills was his spiritual home after all, didn't manage it four balladeers in artfully unknotted bow ties were never going to. But who was the Joey Bishop of the group?
10 Tin Machine - Tin Machine II
"So which one of you is Dave?" It's possible from this distance to see what Bowie was up to here, just about, as this period bridged the pseudy, overreaching Glass Spider tour and the rediscovery of musical satisfaction and experimentation over his 80s commercialities. (This doesn't fit easily with ChangesBowie, the legend re-establishing hits compilation that was the second album we ever bought, and the accompanying hits tour, but never mind). Bowie apparently wasn't overly keen on the project by now and this was released independently, but it introduced him to drum'n'bass era cohort Reeves Gabrels and, you imagine, surely can't be all that bad. Never Let Me Down, on the other hand...
1 Duran Duran - Thank You
These days any band with a keyboard and a jacket is instantly deemed to have been heavily influenced by Duran Duran, even if, like most of them, it's Duran Duran as heard through polystyrene with the treble turned off. This was their celebrated, if not in the positive sense, covers album, featuring versions of 911 Is A Joke - and exactly how did this influence prime Duran Duran? - and White Lines that became standing national jokes for about three months as well as a cover that you or I could knock up a better version of in Paint in five minutes. It also apparently includes a retitled cover of their own The Chauffeur. The whole of musical history to go at and that's where they end up? All the same, you can't knock the feeling that this is only at number one to see how many irate letters they get. Amazon: "Customers who bought music by Duran Duran also bought music by these artists: Arcadia, Power Station, Spandau Ballet, John Taylor, Human League." What wide ranging tastes those grown-up Durannies have.
2 Spice Girls - Any of their solo albums
Right. Stop right the fuck there. Apart from a set of well-meaning cover versions, the worst music ever collected into a 40 minute or so package, according to the opinion of trained musical experts, has been made by former Spice Girls. Mel B's Timbaland-produced I Want You Back, which made number one despite sounding like a loop of a zombie playing the Addams Family theme? Unworthy of the term 'music', it says here. Mel C's Ga Ga, off her first album, which is a better Garbage song than anything Garbage have recorded since 1998? Not worth the effort. That last Emma Bunton album of knowing 60s soundalikes that included an Astrud Gilberto track and generally sounded like it had actually had a budget put to good use? Paste pearls. Are Victoria Beckham records ("one of her many attempts at career resurrection" reckons the Independent report on this, because of course nobody would ever have heard of her otherwise) in any way bad? Well, no, they're guilty by association, but we could name plenty of more actively offensive records before we get to any of hers. Including Geri Halliwell's, but there's only so far they can go. Of course they've put this in with an eye on the forthcoming tenth anniversary and alleged reformation, which constantly seem to be reported as "the Spice Girls are reforming - oh no, they'll be shit again!", followed by "the Spice Girls aren't reforming any more - what idiots they are for not wanting to revive the Spice magic, eh?" without grasping the irony. Still, more fool those periodicals that put solo Spices on their covers, eh? You know, like Q did with Mel C in 1999.
3 Various Artists - Urban Renewal: the Songs of Phil Collins
Urban Renewal? No idea on that front. This is the R&B reappropriation compilation from 2001 that when this piece is written up will contain many smirking references to Fur-Q from The Day Today, a series never broadcast in America. Actually Collins, who's always been partial to the jazz, funk and sometimes both together backing, has always been well sampled in the urban community, and who doesn't want to hear Ol' Dirty Bastard doing Sussudio? There's many worse covers albums on record store shelves, usually released on Scandinavian labels, it's just none of them allow smug writers to go "baldy!"
4 Lou Reed - Metal Machine Music
Well, obviously it is. It's not exactly meant to be great pop by its nature. Strangely, there appears to be no sign of anything else from the burgeoning in its own field noise music scene or the experimental sound wave likes of Pan Sonic. Or, for that matter, Neil Young's Arc, which is pretty much the same thing as this.
5 Billy Idol - Cyberpunk
It's called Cyberpunk, which is a bad start, and it's by Billy Idol, which is worse. There were a fair share of people blending heavy riffing, technological buzzwords and basic synths and sequencers around for a good six to eight years up to this album's 1993 release, and it's a bit rich to start accusing Billy Idol of being a cariacature of a nouveau future punk. The ironic revival can only be months away.
6 Naomi Campbell - Babywoman
House! Again, you'd be able to write the blurb for this one without mentioning the music at all - you didn't buy the book or so much as see it on sale, so why do you care who wrote it so much? - and while we don't like to think what she did with Ride A White Swan, we recall single Love And Tears (co-produced by Tim Simenon) being a swooning Massive Attack-like thing with very much passable smoky vocals, remembering that this was in the days before Autotune was prevalent and thus surely no worse than the treated seriously pop careers of Lopez, Duff, Lohan etc. Bizarrely, a lot of the US Amazon reviews include variants on the line "buy Sade instead", as if some misguided street team was let loose around 2001.
7 Kevin Rowland - My Beauty
As Dexys officially become an influence, it's been interesting to watch critical opinion on his Creation Records sinker change. At the time, while nobody enjoyed the infamous dress-wearing cover - oh, but you've all got The Man Who Sold The World - and when the sales figures were released the laughter could be heard as far as the Reading Festival, the reviews were unanimously positive, Uncut's man calling it "one of the best albums I'll hear in my life". Again, you're calling out Kevin Rowland for overemoting his vocals?
8 Mick Jagger - Primitive Cool
We'd never heard of this before but it turns out to be the one with Let's Work on it, which surely has to place it higher in the critical spectrum if only for that Top Of The Pops of it performance where he utilised every stage in the studio, a load of kids following most of his moves.
9 Westlife - Allow Us To Be Frank
As Word once pointed out, one of the single worst album titles of all time, and they didn't even have the good grace to go with a recreation of the celebrated Rat Pack Sands Hotel shot on the cover. (In fact there were two covers, the other suggesting Christopher Dean had joined the band) The whole jazz-lite revival that spurred this on was one of the most hateful moments in modern music, surely only superceded by the current thought that the vast tenets and strictures of opera can be represented by Russell Watson and the fat lad out of G4, and given Robbie Williams, who probably had the cheek to think he could sound like Holmby Hills was his spiritual home after all, didn't manage it four balladeers in artfully unknotted bow ties were never going to. But who was the Joey Bishop of the group?
10 Tin Machine - Tin Machine II
"So which one of you is Dave?" It's possible from this distance to see what Bowie was up to here, just about, as this period bridged the pseudy, overreaching Glass Spider tour and the rediscovery of musical satisfaction and experimentation over his 80s commercialities. (This doesn't fit easily with ChangesBowie, the legend re-establishing hits compilation that was the second album we ever bought, and the accompanying hits tour, but never mind). Bowie apparently wasn't overly keen on the project by now and this was released independently, but it introduced him to drum'n'bass era cohort Reeves Gabrels and, you imagine, surely can't be all that bad. Never Let Me Down, on the other hand...
Monday, March 27, 2006
Weekender : the hymn for the things we didn't do
CHART OF DARKNESS: Bit rushed this week, so you might have to make up some of your own barely hidden invective. The useless Ne-Yo is somehow number one, up 17, ahead of Embrace with what they used to call stadium power balladry. Maybe Danny and/or Richard should buff up their hair a bit. Pink's satire - it's better than anything Bremner's done for years - is at four. New York watchers will note the Yeah Yeah Yeahs at 18 and the Strokes at 25, and oddly Kooks, of all slightly whiney bands, are the only download-only top 40 entry. It's not worth bothering with the albums, not in this Mother's Day week.
FREE MUSIC: Jeremy Warmsley's laptop singer-songwriter thrown through a plate glass window style is winning him friends all the time, and a hookup with England's newest hitmakers Transgressive Records (where is that Good Books EP, by the way?) can't hinder. 5 Verses pitches its tent somewhere between the distinct fields of Jarvis Cocker, early solo Brian Eno and Four Tet's more accessible moments.
HEY YOU GET OFFA MYSPACE: 3hostwomexicansandatinofspanners. Mmm. Not a superb start, and anyone who describes themselves purely in terms of what they aren't is off to a bad start with us. Luckily, any band that sounds like McLusky, but more furious after a Dischord Records fashion, is alright by our dark side.
VISUAL REPRESENTATION: They never do visual promotion, you know. Half Man Half Biscuit live in Liverpool last year, doing The Light At The End Of The Tunnel Is The Light Of An Oncoming Train and Back In The DHSS family favourite Fuckin' 'Ell It's Fred Titmuss. If you don't understand this bit, get off this site at once.
EVERYBODY GET RANDOM: For a limited time only, Sound Of The Suburb reviews Davey Henderson's back catalogue
IN OTHER NEWS: We were going to do that new Q Worst Albums Of All Time list here, but that deserves a proper thorough rant later in the week. Instead, RIP Nikki Sudden of notoriously shambolic but hugely influential to the US underground Swell Maps.
FREE MUSIC: Jeremy Warmsley's laptop singer-songwriter thrown through a plate glass window style is winning him friends all the time, and a hookup with England's newest hitmakers Transgressive Records (where is that Good Books EP, by the way?) can't hinder. 5 Verses pitches its tent somewhere between the distinct fields of Jarvis Cocker, early solo Brian Eno and Four Tet's more accessible moments.
HEY YOU GET OFFA MYSPACE: 3hostwomexicansandatinofspanners. Mmm. Not a superb start, and anyone who describes themselves purely in terms of what they aren't is off to a bad start with us. Luckily, any band that sounds like McLusky, but more furious after a Dischord Records fashion, is alright by our dark side.
VISUAL REPRESENTATION: They never do visual promotion, you know. Half Man Half Biscuit live in Liverpool last year, doing The Light At The End Of The Tunnel Is The Light Of An Oncoming Train and Back In The DHSS family favourite Fuckin' 'Ell It's Fred Titmuss. If you don't understand this bit, get off this site at once.
EVERYBODY GET RANDOM: For a limited time only, Sound Of The Suburb reviews Davey Henderson's back catalogue
IN OTHER NEWS: We were going to do that new Q Worst Albums Of All Time list here, but that deserves a proper thorough rant later in the week. Instead, RIP Nikki Sudden of notoriously shambolic but hugely influential to the US underground Swell Maps.
Sunday, March 26, 2006
In shops tomorrow: 27/3
Singles
We know it's a show currently doing a decent impression of a cartoon fish suddenly deprived of a tank to swim in, but Top Of The Pops' guest booking continues to surprise us, especially last week when right out of the pack they picked out the Secret Machines' Lightning Blue Eyes, not as capable of swallowing cities whole as their first album singles but still propelling itself neatly. Morrissey's on tonight doing You Have Killed Me, the first single from an album that finds his stock caught between mid-90s post-Madstock public ennui and the critical hosannahs of his return two years ago. See, we've all moved on, to bands like Editors, who stop re-releasing all their old singles for a moment to bring out All Sparks. They're making an impact in America at the moment in the old fashioned touring their arse off way, perhaps not realising that there's a new approach to breaking into hipster collections, namely getting your name heard around mp3 blogs. Such is the route foisted upon Guillemots, whose early singles compilation From The Cliffs is out here on import only this week in the same week their scope grows ever wider on We're Here. There's a possible thesis, isn't there, in how UK hype targets are straight ahead four men with guitars outfits such as Arctic Monkeys, the Libertines adn their bubbles and indeed Editors, while those who decide what constitutes a buzz band in North America prefer their six string wielders to take it further out, hence the growing reputation of the Go! Team and, to an extent, Art Brut stateside alongside the likes of Wolf Parade, the Decemberists and, most notably, Broken Social Scene, whose 7/4 (Shoreline) should have had a lot more attention than it has given the controlled mess of an album nearly breached the top 75. It's one of our favourites of 2006, in any case, so it should be one of yours. Also to keep an eye out for if not to buy via an easy link, the 60s R&B-flavoured full frontal charge of Keep Dancing by Six Nation State.
Albums
It now sounds a bit like quite a lot else, just a superior version, but in 1981 David Byrne and Brian Eno's My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts, now remastered with the Koran-quoting track dropped just to annoy 'censorship! Everywhere is censored!' reactionary fools (we hope), sounded like nothing on earth. Conceived as a set of fake tribal field recordings, what emerged was a melange of found sounds and early sampling, the polyrhythmic post-punk-funk the recent Talking Heads album Fear Of Music (although it became delayed until after the pair's further adventures into effect-laden funk Remain In Light) had mined under Eno's guidance and the point in the musical Venn diagram where processed instruments, early hip hop beats and transcendental tribalism interlock. A small area, as you can imagine. We'd guess Massive Attack's 3D listened to it a bit in his musical apprenticeship, as his love of the dark side of post-punk has come to the fore at times during the band's lifespan, usually just before a major schism emerges. (Fact: during the Mezzanine sessions they intended to cover the Clash's Straight To Hell with Horace Andy singing, only to find Andy is so religious he refused to sing the word 'hell'.) It's the soul sides the kids go for, though, and everything is represented on stop-gap best of Collected. What did happen to Mushroom? There's no easy way of getting from this to the eponymous debut by be your own PET, so let's not try and make one. At least it's easier to play the ballsy frontwoman card when connecting their 14 tracks in 29 minutes rocket power to the less immediate but with fresh gold emerging over listens Show Your Bones by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Finally, the one we really have been waiting for, as The Best Of Hefner 1996-2002 showcases the Peel favoured Proper Indie standard bearers from their stripped back first two albums, forensically examining love under recording budgetary constraints, the full figured We Love The City and punter confusing electropop of Dead Media, all shot through with Darren Hayman's if not black then certainly grey humour and insight. Get the lot, or just this if it's easier. Hayman's spiritual father Elvis Costello's Very Best Of...And The Attractions is meanwhile being reissued, having originally come out in 1994. We have no idea why, but it's as good an intro to his finest work as you'll find.
DVDs
You wouldn't think much could come of a Gorillaz live show, but Albarn, Hewlett and co managed it by virtually sidelining the cartoons, and hence characters, themselves and just putting on a big show, recorded for posterity on Demon Days Live. Passing over the inevitably easy link into the week's, nay, year's, least likely live DVD release, The Higsons - I Don't Want To Live With Monkeys Live, we find the Skatalites, still nearly at full strength despite well advanced years and still capable of getting an audience moving. Live At The Lokerse Feesten 1997 And 2002 demonstrates their craft.
Books
What do you suppose The Eight Legged Atomic Dustbin Will Eat Itself by Martin Roach is about? Yes, it's a now fully updated reissue of the 1992 history of the Stourbridge scene, just as all three main players have reformed to a more selective audience.
We know it's a show currently doing a decent impression of a cartoon fish suddenly deprived of a tank to swim in, but Top Of The Pops' guest booking continues to surprise us, especially last week when right out of the pack they picked out the Secret Machines' Lightning Blue Eyes, not as capable of swallowing cities whole as their first album singles but still propelling itself neatly. Morrissey's on tonight doing You Have Killed Me, the first single from an album that finds his stock caught between mid-90s post-Madstock public ennui and the critical hosannahs of his return two years ago. See, we've all moved on, to bands like Editors, who stop re-releasing all their old singles for a moment to bring out All Sparks. They're making an impact in America at the moment in the old fashioned touring their arse off way, perhaps not realising that there's a new approach to breaking into hipster collections, namely getting your name heard around mp3 blogs. Such is the route foisted upon Guillemots, whose early singles compilation From The Cliffs is out here on import only this week in the same week their scope grows ever wider on We're Here. There's a possible thesis, isn't there, in how UK hype targets are straight ahead four men with guitars outfits such as Arctic Monkeys, the Libertines adn their bubbles and indeed Editors, while those who decide what constitutes a buzz band in North America prefer their six string wielders to take it further out, hence the growing reputation of the Go! Team and, to an extent, Art Brut stateside alongside the likes of Wolf Parade, the Decemberists and, most notably, Broken Social Scene, whose 7/4 (Shoreline) should have had a lot more attention than it has given the controlled mess of an album nearly breached the top 75. It's one of our favourites of 2006, in any case, so it should be one of yours. Also to keep an eye out for if not to buy via an easy link, the 60s R&B-flavoured full frontal charge of Keep Dancing by Six Nation State.
Albums
It now sounds a bit like quite a lot else, just a superior version, but in 1981 David Byrne and Brian Eno's My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts, now remastered with the Koran-quoting track dropped just to annoy 'censorship! Everywhere is censored!' reactionary fools (we hope), sounded like nothing on earth. Conceived as a set of fake tribal field recordings, what emerged was a melange of found sounds and early sampling, the polyrhythmic post-punk-funk the recent Talking Heads album Fear Of Music (although it became delayed until after the pair's further adventures into effect-laden funk Remain In Light) had mined under Eno's guidance and the point in the musical Venn diagram where processed instruments, early hip hop beats and transcendental tribalism interlock. A small area, as you can imagine. We'd guess Massive Attack's 3D listened to it a bit in his musical apprenticeship, as his love of the dark side of post-punk has come to the fore at times during the band's lifespan, usually just before a major schism emerges. (Fact: during the Mezzanine sessions they intended to cover the Clash's Straight To Hell with Horace Andy singing, only to find Andy is so religious he refused to sing the word 'hell'.) It's the soul sides the kids go for, though, and everything is represented on stop-gap best of Collected. What did happen to Mushroom? There's no easy way of getting from this to the eponymous debut by be your own PET, so let's not try and make one. At least it's easier to play the ballsy frontwoman card when connecting their 14 tracks in 29 minutes rocket power to the less immediate but with fresh gold emerging over listens Show Your Bones by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Finally, the one we really have been waiting for, as The Best Of Hefner 1996-2002 showcases the Peel favoured Proper Indie standard bearers from their stripped back first two albums, forensically examining love under recording budgetary constraints, the full figured We Love The City and punter confusing electropop of Dead Media, all shot through with Darren Hayman's if not black then certainly grey humour and insight. Get the lot, or just this if it's easier. Hayman's spiritual father Elvis Costello's Very Best Of...And The Attractions is meanwhile being reissued, having originally come out in 1994. We have no idea why, but it's as good an intro to his finest work as you'll find.
DVDs
You wouldn't think much could come of a Gorillaz live show, but Albarn, Hewlett and co managed it by virtually sidelining the cartoons, and hence characters, themselves and just putting on a big show, recorded for posterity on Demon Days Live. Passing over the inevitably easy link into the week's, nay, year's, least likely live DVD release, The Higsons - I Don't Want To Live With Monkeys Live, we find the Skatalites, still nearly at full strength despite well advanced years and still capable of getting an audience moving. Live At The Lokerse Feesten 1997 And 2002 demonstrates their craft.
Books
What do you suppose The Eight Legged Atomic Dustbin Will Eat Itself by Martin Roach is about? Yes, it's a now fully updated reissue of the 1992 history of the Stourbridge scene, just as all three main players have reformed to a more selective audience.
The Weekly Sweep
Futureheads - Skip To The End
Mew - The Zookeeper's Boy
Hope Of The States - Blood Meridian
Fratellis - Creepin' Up The Backstairs
Hefner - Love Will Destroy Us In The End
Sigur Ros - Hoppipolla
Larrikin Love - Edwould
Gnarls Barkley - Crazy
The Crimea - White Russian Galaxy
Voom Blooms - Politics And Cigarettes
Mew - The Zookeeper's Boy
Hope Of The States - Blood Meridian
Fratellis - Creepin' Up The Backstairs
Hefner - Love Will Destroy Us In The End
Sigur Ros - Hoppipolla
Larrikin Love - Edwould
Gnarls Barkley - Crazy
The Crimea - White Russian Galaxy
Voom Blooms - Politics And Cigarettes
Saturday, March 25, 2006
Field music
As we've been dropping in thoughts about summer events recently, we thought we'd go back to our festival preview post from the other week and update it with what's going on. As clearly there are too many events masquerading themselves as festivals these days we're only listing proper multi-day events, not those spread over a number of gigging venues or one day affairs in parks. Leave the latter to local commercial radio.
Wychwood, Cheltenham racecourse
Dates: 2nd-4th June
Tickets: £85, but you can take your car on site. Paperless ticketing, though, the bane of the site entrants' life.
Bands: We kick off with the second appearance of an Oxfam sponsored festival that seems to have one of those come one come all booking policies that includes Billy Bragg, Dreadzone, Seth Lakeman and Martha Wainwright on Friday, the Saw Doctors, Guillemots, The Feeling, Polar Bear, Chris Difford, Mr Scruff, the Handsome Family and Aberfeldy on Saturday, and on Sunday Eliza Carthy, Amadou & Mariam, The Bays, Field Music, Banco de Gaia and the Broken Family Band.
Download Festival, Donington Park
Dates: 9th-11th June
Tickets: £115
Bands: Tool, Metallica and Guns'n'Roses (Chinese Democracy might actually be out this year! Who's left to care?) headline, plus Alice In Chains - yes, they've got a new singer - the Prodigy, Korn, the Deftones, Funeral For A Friend, Cradle Of Filth, Avenged Sevenfold, Bullet For My Valentine, InMe, Soulfly, Stone Sour and Trivium, with plenty more to be confirmed, supposedly including Motley Crue, Bowling For Soup and Fightstar.
Isle Of Wight Festival, Seaclose Park, Newport
Dates: 9th-11th June
Tickets: sold out
Bands: Always strong bills for an underappreciated festival, the Friday features the Prodigy, Placebo, Goldfrapp, the Rakes and Morning Runner, Saturday has the Foo Fighters, Primal Scream, Editors, Dirty Pretty Things, the Kooks and the Proclaimers (!), while Sunday reunites Coldplay and Richard Ashcroft, kind of, ahead of Lou Reed, Maximo Park, Kubb and, um, Procul Harum. If it's any help, we could add that Justin Lee Collins is usually main stage compere and watch hordes of ticketholders head for the eBay sales page.
T In The Park, Balado, near Kinross
Dates: 8th-9th July
Tickets: sold out
Bands: This doesn't sound half completed yet, but we do know Saturday is headlined by the Chili Peppers and also features Franz Ferdinand, Kaiser Chiefs, Placebo, Paul Weller, Goldfrapp, Pharrell, the Feeling, the Charlatans, Damien Marley, the Ordinary Boys, Sigur Ros, the Kooks, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and the Orb, while Sunday is led by the Who ahead of the Strokes, Arctic Monkeys, Magic Numbers, Hard-Fi, the Proclaimers, Richard Ashcroft, Editors, Primal Scream, the Go! Team and Eels, with rumoured additions including Scissor Sisters, Snow Patrol, Starsailor, KT Tunstall, Maximo Park, Jamie Cullum, Feeder, We Are Scientists and Boy Kill Boy.
Oxegen, Punchestown Racecourse
Dates: 8th-9th July
Tickets: sold out
Bands: See above, pretty much, adding James Brown and the Streets.
Wakestock, Pwllheli Inner Marina and Abersoch Beach, Abersoch, Pwllheli, Gwynedd
Dates: 14th-15th July
Tickets: £45 from 3rd April plus £20 camping per person. You'll have to supply your own wetsuit.
Bands: The largest wakeboarding festival in Europe does have its own cachet, as proved by Delays, The Crimea, Freestylers, The Cuban Brothers, DJ Yoda and The Upper Room, with many more to come.
Guilfest, Stoke Park, Guildford
Dates: 14th-16th July
Tickets: Not even on sale yet, £75 last year
Bands: The first of the set of mid-season festivals that are usually coupled with the epithets 'laid-back' and 'friendly', no bands will be announced until tickets come out in April, but A-Ha have confirmed themselves. Bear in mind last year's main attractions were the Pogues, Paul Weller, Status Quo, Daniel Bedingfield, Lulu, Echo And The Bunnymen, Alabama 3, the Subways, the Others, the Proclaimers, Marillion, Chas & Dave, the Hothouse Flowers and Thunder, and then try and scratch some sort of connection between any of that lot.
Truck, Steventon, Oxfordshire
Dates: 22nd-23rd July
Tickets: sold out, remarkably
Bands: None officially announced yet for the most lo-fi of the main set, which means we're stuck with strong rumours including Young Knives, ¡Forward Russia!, Brakes, The Research, 65daysofstatic, Jetplane Landing and the usual phalanx of Truck Records alumni. More on this nearer the time.
Cambridge Folk Festival, Cherry Hinton Hall grounds
Dates: 27th-30th July
Tickets: on sale from 30th April for £86
Bands: Emmylou Harris, The Chieftains, Richard Thompson, Amadou & Mariam, Cerys Matthews, Eddi Reader, Nickel Creek, Chumbawamba, Cara Dillon, Seth Lakeman, Nizlopi, Rodrigo y Gabriel, The Broken Family Band...you get the picture.
WOMAD, Richfield Avenue, Rivermead, Reading
Dates: 28th-30th July
Tickets: £100 for the first 3,000, a tenner more afterwards.
Bands: Mung beans and lentils! Er...Anoushka Shankar, Bellowhead, Femi Kuti, Gotan Project, Los De Abajo, Nanci Griffith, Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings and Ska Cubano are among the first set declared.
Summer Sundae, De Montfort Hall and Gardens, Leicester
Dates: 11th-13th August
Tickets: £65 until Friday, £75 thereafter
Bands: Go back and have a look at the Weekender just gone for the first announcement. Yes, we will be there again.
Green Man, Glanusk Park, Usk Valley, Powys (new venue)
Dates: 18th-20th August
Tickets: £98
Bands: It's Jo And Danny, at a guess. Also, Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, King Creosote, Aiden Smith, James Yorkston, Gruff Rhys, Kieran 'Four Tet' Hebden with Steven Reid, the Television Personalities, Alasdair Roberts, Tunng, Adem, Archie Bronson Outfit, Circulus, Chris T-T, Euros Childs, the Aliens (two former Betas) and The Eighteenth Day of May.
Secret Garden Party, somewhere in Cambridgeshire (it's secret, you see?)
Dates: 18th-20th August
Tickets: announced around Easter, but roughly £65
Bands: Winner of Best Small Festival in the 2005 UK Festival Awards, the most nuts event on the circuit, which last year saw the Super Furries and Hard-Fi among others play in the middle of a landscaped garden on a private estate based on an Alice In Wonderland-style assault on the imagined senses, is pending.
V Festival, Chelmsford and Weston Park, Staffs
Dates: 19th-20th August
Tickets: sold out
Bands: Already famously, Radiohead have put aside their Naomi Klein set texts and are playing under the 'soulless' behemoth booze banner along with Sunday (at Chelmsford) headliner Morrissey, Beck, Keane, Bloc Party, the Magic Numbers, Faithless, Paul Weller, Hard-Fi, Razorlight, Kasabian, Fatboy Slim, Editors, the Ordinary Boys (by which time someone will have written a review of them which doesn't feature the line "but there was no sign of Chantelle", as if they go to Coldplay gigs expecting Gwyneth to appear in a cage), the Go! Team, Groove Armada, the Charlatans, Starsailor, Orson, James Dean Bradfield on his tod, the Sugababes, The Feeling, Daniel Powter, Delays and Rufus Wainwright with more to come.
Reading, Little Johns Farm, Richfield Avenue, and Leeds, Bramham Park
Dates: 25th-27th August
Tickets: from a week on Monday, £125 last year but that will go up
Bands: Taking over by proxy as 2006's big one, the official announcement comes on 3rd April at 7pm, but if the whispers are true expect Kaiser Chiefs, Franz Ferdinand, the Strokes, Arctic Monkeys, Muse, Feeder, Alice Cooper, Placebo, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Raconteurs, Rakes, Maximo Park, Audioslave, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and Dirty Pretty Things.
Electric Picnic, Stradbally Hall Estate, Stradbally, Co. Laois, Eire
Dates: 1st-3rd September
Tickets: 175 euros, just over £120 at current rates
Bands: Which isn't great value considering, but the bill's neat enough - Basement Jaxx, Massive Attack, New Order, Pet Shop Boys, Groove Armada, Antony and The Johnsons, DJ Shadow, Damien Rice, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The Frames, Devendra Banhart, Super Furry Animals, Belle & Sebastian, Rufus Wainwright, Bloc Party, Alabama 3, The Rapture, Saul Williams, Tom Vek, Gang of Four, David Kitt, The Boy Least Likely To, Elbow, Graham Coxon, dEUS, the Blue Nile and, even more unlikely, Gary Numan.
Bestival, Robin Hill Countryside Adventure Park, Downend, Nr Arreton, Isle of Wight
Dates: 8th-10th September
Tickets: £95. Funny how an event this late on's willing enough to get a move on, isn't it?
Bands: The Pet Shop Boys provide intriguing Saturday headliners, while also confirmed is the complete stylistic mish-mash of the unfunny Cuban Brothers, Devendra Banhart, The Stranglers, The Fall, King Creosote, Jamie T, Kid Creole and the Coconuts, Amadou & Mariam, Young Knives, Kanda Bongo Man, The Boy Least Likely To, The Fence Collective, The Aliens, Kitty Daisy & Lewis, Tunng, Jegsy Dodd, Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly and DJ sets from DJ Yoda, Annie Mac, Cosmic Fury (Tom Middleton and Lemon Jelly's Fred Deakin), Erol Alkan, Justin Robertson, Mary Anne Hobbs, Touche, Rob Da Bank, Chris Coco and the like. But not The Like.
Wychwood, Cheltenham racecourse
Dates: 2nd-4th June
Tickets: £85, but you can take your car on site. Paperless ticketing, though, the bane of the site entrants' life.
Bands: We kick off with the second appearance of an Oxfam sponsored festival that seems to have one of those come one come all booking policies that includes Billy Bragg, Dreadzone, Seth Lakeman and Martha Wainwright on Friday, the Saw Doctors, Guillemots, The Feeling, Polar Bear, Chris Difford, Mr Scruff, the Handsome Family and Aberfeldy on Saturday, and on Sunday Eliza Carthy, Amadou & Mariam, The Bays, Field Music, Banco de Gaia and the Broken Family Band.
Download Festival, Donington Park
Dates: 9th-11th June
Tickets: £115
Bands: Tool, Metallica and Guns'n'Roses (Chinese Democracy might actually be out this year! Who's left to care?) headline, plus Alice In Chains - yes, they've got a new singer - the Prodigy, Korn, the Deftones, Funeral For A Friend, Cradle Of Filth, Avenged Sevenfold, Bullet For My Valentine, InMe, Soulfly, Stone Sour and Trivium, with plenty more to be confirmed, supposedly including Motley Crue, Bowling For Soup and Fightstar.
Isle Of Wight Festival, Seaclose Park, Newport
Dates: 9th-11th June
Tickets: sold out
Bands: Always strong bills for an underappreciated festival, the Friday features the Prodigy, Placebo, Goldfrapp, the Rakes and Morning Runner, Saturday has the Foo Fighters, Primal Scream, Editors, Dirty Pretty Things, the Kooks and the Proclaimers (!), while Sunday reunites Coldplay and Richard Ashcroft, kind of, ahead of Lou Reed, Maximo Park, Kubb and, um, Procul Harum. If it's any help, we could add that Justin Lee Collins is usually main stage compere and watch hordes of ticketholders head for the eBay sales page.
T In The Park, Balado, near Kinross
Dates: 8th-9th July
Tickets: sold out
Bands: This doesn't sound half completed yet, but we do know Saturday is headlined by the Chili Peppers and also features Franz Ferdinand, Kaiser Chiefs, Placebo, Paul Weller, Goldfrapp, Pharrell, the Feeling, the Charlatans, Damien Marley, the Ordinary Boys, Sigur Ros, the Kooks, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and the Orb, while Sunday is led by the Who ahead of the Strokes, Arctic Monkeys, Magic Numbers, Hard-Fi, the Proclaimers, Richard Ashcroft, Editors, Primal Scream, the Go! Team and Eels, with rumoured additions including Scissor Sisters, Snow Patrol, Starsailor, KT Tunstall, Maximo Park, Jamie Cullum, Feeder, We Are Scientists and Boy Kill Boy.
Oxegen, Punchestown Racecourse
Dates: 8th-9th July
Tickets: sold out
Bands: See above, pretty much, adding James Brown and the Streets.
Wakestock, Pwllheli Inner Marina and Abersoch Beach, Abersoch, Pwllheli, Gwynedd
Dates: 14th-15th July
Tickets: £45 from 3rd April plus £20 camping per person. You'll have to supply your own wetsuit.
Bands: The largest wakeboarding festival in Europe does have its own cachet, as proved by Delays, The Crimea, Freestylers, The Cuban Brothers, DJ Yoda and The Upper Room, with many more to come.
Guilfest, Stoke Park, Guildford
Dates: 14th-16th July
Tickets: Not even on sale yet, £75 last year
Bands: The first of the set of mid-season festivals that are usually coupled with the epithets 'laid-back' and 'friendly', no bands will be announced until tickets come out in April, but A-Ha have confirmed themselves. Bear in mind last year's main attractions were the Pogues, Paul Weller, Status Quo, Daniel Bedingfield, Lulu, Echo And The Bunnymen, Alabama 3, the Subways, the Others, the Proclaimers, Marillion, Chas & Dave, the Hothouse Flowers and Thunder, and then try and scratch some sort of connection between any of that lot.
Truck, Steventon, Oxfordshire
Dates: 22nd-23rd July
Tickets: sold out, remarkably
Bands: None officially announced yet for the most lo-fi of the main set, which means we're stuck with strong rumours including Young Knives, ¡Forward Russia!, Brakes, The Research, 65daysofstatic, Jetplane Landing and the usual phalanx of Truck Records alumni. More on this nearer the time.
Cambridge Folk Festival, Cherry Hinton Hall grounds
Dates: 27th-30th July
Tickets: on sale from 30th April for £86
Bands: Emmylou Harris, The Chieftains, Richard Thompson, Amadou & Mariam, Cerys Matthews, Eddi Reader, Nickel Creek, Chumbawamba, Cara Dillon, Seth Lakeman, Nizlopi, Rodrigo y Gabriel, The Broken Family Band...you get the picture.
WOMAD, Richfield Avenue, Rivermead, Reading
Dates: 28th-30th July
Tickets: £100 for the first 3,000, a tenner more afterwards.
Bands: Mung beans and lentils! Er...Anoushka Shankar, Bellowhead, Femi Kuti, Gotan Project, Los De Abajo, Nanci Griffith, Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings and Ska Cubano are among the first set declared.
Summer Sundae, De Montfort Hall and Gardens, Leicester
Dates: 11th-13th August
Tickets: £65 until Friday, £75 thereafter
Bands: Go back and have a look at the Weekender just gone for the first announcement. Yes, we will be there again.
Green Man, Glanusk Park, Usk Valley, Powys (new venue)
Dates: 18th-20th August
Tickets: £98
Bands: It's Jo And Danny, at a guess. Also, Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, King Creosote, Aiden Smith, James Yorkston, Gruff Rhys, Kieran 'Four Tet' Hebden with Steven Reid, the Television Personalities, Alasdair Roberts, Tunng, Adem, Archie Bronson Outfit, Circulus, Chris T-T, Euros Childs, the Aliens (two former Betas) and The Eighteenth Day of May.
Secret Garden Party, somewhere in Cambridgeshire (it's secret, you see?)
Dates: 18th-20th August
Tickets: announced around Easter, but roughly £65
Bands: Winner of Best Small Festival in the 2005 UK Festival Awards, the most nuts event on the circuit, which last year saw the Super Furries and Hard-Fi among others play in the middle of a landscaped garden on a private estate based on an Alice In Wonderland-style assault on the imagined senses, is pending.
V Festival, Chelmsford and Weston Park, Staffs
Dates: 19th-20th August
Tickets: sold out
Bands: Already famously, Radiohead have put aside their Naomi Klein set texts and are playing under the 'soulless' behemoth booze banner along with Sunday (at Chelmsford) headliner Morrissey, Beck, Keane, Bloc Party, the Magic Numbers, Faithless, Paul Weller, Hard-Fi, Razorlight, Kasabian, Fatboy Slim, Editors, the Ordinary Boys (by which time someone will have written a review of them which doesn't feature the line "but there was no sign of Chantelle", as if they go to Coldplay gigs expecting Gwyneth to appear in a cage), the Go! Team, Groove Armada, the Charlatans, Starsailor, Orson, James Dean Bradfield on his tod, the Sugababes, The Feeling, Daniel Powter, Delays and Rufus Wainwright with more to come.
Reading, Little Johns Farm, Richfield Avenue, and Leeds, Bramham Park
Dates: 25th-27th August
Tickets: from a week on Monday, £125 last year but that will go up
Bands: Taking over by proxy as 2006's big one, the official announcement comes on 3rd April at 7pm, but if the whispers are true expect Kaiser Chiefs, Franz Ferdinand, the Strokes, Arctic Monkeys, Muse, Feeder, Alice Cooper, Placebo, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Raconteurs, Rakes, Maximo Park, Audioslave, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and Dirty Pretty Things.
Electric Picnic, Stradbally Hall Estate, Stradbally, Co. Laois, Eire
Dates: 1st-3rd September
Tickets: 175 euros, just over £120 at current rates
Bands: Which isn't great value considering, but the bill's neat enough - Basement Jaxx, Massive Attack, New Order, Pet Shop Boys, Groove Armada, Antony and The Johnsons, DJ Shadow, Damien Rice, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The Frames, Devendra Banhart, Super Furry Animals, Belle & Sebastian, Rufus Wainwright, Bloc Party, Alabama 3, The Rapture, Saul Williams, Tom Vek, Gang of Four, David Kitt, The Boy Least Likely To, Elbow, Graham Coxon, dEUS, the Blue Nile and, even more unlikely, Gary Numan.
Bestival, Robin Hill Countryside Adventure Park, Downend, Nr Arreton, Isle of Wight
Dates: 8th-10th September
Tickets: £95. Funny how an event this late on's willing enough to get a move on, isn't it?
Bands: The Pet Shop Boys provide intriguing Saturday headliners, while also confirmed is the complete stylistic mish-mash of the unfunny Cuban Brothers, Devendra Banhart, The Stranglers, The Fall, King Creosote, Jamie T, Kid Creole and the Coconuts, Amadou & Mariam, Young Knives, Kanda Bongo Man, The Boy Least Likely To, The Fence Collective, The Aliens, Kitty Daisy & Lewis, Tunng, Jegsy Dodd, Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly and DJ sets from DJ Yoda, Annie Mac, Cosmic Fury (Tom Middleton and Lemon Jelly's Fred Deakin), Erol Alkan, Justin Robertson, Mary Anne Hobbs, Touche, Rob Da Bank, Chris Coco and the like. But not The Like.
Friday, March 24, 2006
Classical ARIAs
Back to our occasional looks at singles charts from across the world, and in the week that the album by Zane Lowe's side project Breaks Co-Op comes out to a few meaningful glances and not much else, which is probably how he'd have wanted it if not Parlophone - the band were recently given a government funded grant as part of a New Zealand culture drive to aid their relocation to the UK, which given one of the three has worked here for eight years and another is actually British hardly makes it Arts Council material - we decided to have a look at what's selling down Wellington way. But it was a bit dull, so we shifted west instead and analysed the Australian top 20:
20 Eminem - When I'm Gone
He really has dropped off the music landscape very recently, hasn't he, just as was suggested? He'll be back, D12 have to eat somehow.
19 Nickelback - Far Away
Yes, there are still places where their success hasn't now been written off as a post-Limp Bizkit gut reaction to snap up anything that moved in a hard rock style.
18 Santana - Just Feel Better
Speaking of which, Carlos has gone back into semi-ignoration here since Supernatural, much like Rob Thomas in fact, but he'll still squealingly blues soloing away out there.
17 Notorious BIG - Nasty Girl
Surely before long there'll be a Biggie single that features nothing of Biggie himself?
16 Bow Wow - Like You
Again, since he stopped being so lil' he seems to have disappeared from the British radar. Even so, we think we can guess what this is like.
15 Daddy Yankee - Gasolina
Reggaeton - that disappeared quickly, didn't it?
14 Rihanna - If It's Lovin' That You Want
Her new single has New Crazy In Love potential, although surely Marc Almond is already fending off telephone query after telephone query with "I dunno, maybe they asked Gloria Jones' publishers..."
13 Kate Alexa - All I Hear
The daughter of Mushroom Records' founder, kind of a solo The Like, who rose to fame through singing on a trailer for Home And Away. One of her promotional photos features her in a parka, which given she looks like a prospective daughter of Carol Thatcher is probably wise.
12 Kate DeAraugo - Faded
Last year's Australian Idol winner, her second single peaking at number 8 after a McManus style.
11 Rogue Traders - Watching You
Izzy from Neighbours' band! Well, Natalie Bassingthwaighte's band to be exact, but let's not split hairs, especially when their other gimmick is re-recording (with credit) old new wave riffs, here My Sharona, as the basis of new songs, which makes them perfect All Around The World Records signings in waiting. And they're named after the Ewan McGregor Is Nick Leeson flop too. The role of Izzy is now apparently being played by a mutant crossbreed of Alison Goldfrapp and Avril Lavigne:
10 James Blunt - Goodbye My Lover
Apparently Guy Chambers is credited with 'guitar feedback' on one track on Back To Bedlam. Good to see hose years at the London Guildhall School of Music didn't go to waste.
9 Ashlee Simpson - L.O.V.E.
Ashlee Simpson records seem to us to be like terrorist scares - you're aware through osmosis that they should be happening, sometimes information leaks out, but when they do happen you barely notice.
8 Madonna - Sorry
We've just realised we've never heard this. We don't intend to start now.
7 Black Eyed Peas - Pump It
We've heard this, though, on many occasions over the last ten years. They might as well have made a dance track out of it.
6 Chris Brown - Run It
Keeping an eye on the caller display in case Usher finds his number.
5 Westlife - You Raise Me Up
It's Mother's Day across the world! Given we all know how pop longevity works, how come nobody predicts they're ever splitting up?
4 Pink - Stupid Girls
Of course, a still of the Paris car wash advert spoof bit from the video - a takeoff of an advert nobody in Britain has seen, of course - is on the cover of the single for irony reasons. And nothing more. Yes.
3 Bob Sinclar - Love Generation
Is he still running with the 70s international playboy style theme?
2 Youth Group - Forever Young
Ah, now we're getting somewhere. We think they had a single out in the UK last year after ex-Vine Patrick Matthews joined, but this was on the OC and is a cover of one of Alphaville's singles after Big in Japan. Presumably they've had the big push after that, as we see no Death Cab For Cutie here.
1 TV Rock - Flaunt It
Sounds like a Dutch music show, is a dance duo who look like they're auditioning to take over Brandon Block's position as most cliched man in international dance DJing. Pete Tong's a fan, apparently. Be scared.
20 Eminem - When I'm Gone
He really has dropped off the music landscape very recently, hasn't he, just as was suggested? He'll be back, D12 have to eat somehow.
19 Nickelback - Far Away
Yes, there are still places where their success hasn't now been written off as a post-Limp Bizkit gut reaction to snap up anything that moved in a hard rock style.
18 Santana - Just Feel Better
Speaking of which, Carlos has gone back into semi-ignoration here since Supernatural, much like Rob Thomas in fact, but he'll still squealingly blues soloing away out there.
17 Notorious BIG - Nasty Girl
Surely before long there'll be a Biggie single that features nothing of Biggie himself?
16 Bow Wow - Like You
Again, since he stopped being so lil' he seems to have disappeared from the British radar. Even so, we think we can guess what this is like.
15 Daddy Yankee - Gasolina
Reggaeton - that disappeared quickly, didn't it?
14 Rihanna - If It's Lovin' That You Want
Her new single has New Crazy In Love potential, although surely Marc Almond is already fending off telephone query after telephone query with "I dunno, maybe they asked Gloria Jones' publishers..."
13 Kate Alexa - All I Hear
The daughter of Mushroom Records' founder, kind of a solo The Like, who rose to fame through singing on a trailer for Home And Away. One of her promotional photos features her in a parka, which given she looks like a prospective daughter of Carol Thatcher is probably wise.
12 Kate DeAraugo - Faded
Last year's Australian Idol winner, her second single peaking at number 8 after a McManus style.
11 Rogue Traders - Watching You
Izzy from Neighbours' band! Well, Natalie Bassingthwaighte's band to be exact, but let's not split hairs, especially when their other gimmick is re-recording (with credit) old new wave riffs, here My Sharona, as the basis of new songs, which makes them perfect All Around The World Records signings in waiting. And they're named after the Ewan McGregor Is Nick Leeson flop too. The role of Izzy is now apparently being played by a mutant crossbreed of Alison Goldfrapp and Avril Lavigne:
10 James Blunt - Goodbye My Lover
Apparently Guy Chambers is credited with 'guitar feedback' on one track on Back To Bedlam. Good to see hose years at the London Guildhall School of Music didn't go to waste.
9 Ashlee Simpson - L.O.V.E.
Ashlee Simpson records seem to us to be like terrorist scares - you're aware through osmosis that they should be happening, sometimes information leaks out, but when they do happen you barely notice.
8 Madonna - Sorry
We've just realised we've never heard this. We don't intend to start now.
7 Black Eyed Peas - Pump It
We've heard this, though, on many occasions over the last ten years. They might as well have made a dance track out of it.
6 Chris Brown - Run It
Keeping an eye on the caller display in case Usher finds his number.
5 Westlife - You Raise Me Up
It's Mother's Day across the world! Given we all know how pop longevity works, how come nobody predicts they're ever splitting up?
4 Pink - Stupid Girls
Of course, a still of the Paris car wash advert spoof bit from the video - a takeoff of an advert nobody in Britain has seen, of course - is on the cover of the single for irony reasons. And nothing more. Yes.
3 Bob Sinclar - Love Generation
Is he still running with the 70s international playboy style theme?
2 Youth Group - Forever Young
Ah, now we're getting somewhere. We think they had a single out in the UK last year after ex-Vine Patrick Matthews joined, but this was on the OC and is a cover of one of Alphaville's singles after Big in Japan. Presumably they've had the big push after that, as we see no Death Cab For Cutie here.
1 TV Rock - Flaunt It
Sounds like a Dutch music show, is a dance duo who look like they're auditioning to take over Brandon Block's position as most cliched man in international dance DJing. Pete Tong's a fan, apparently. Be scared.
Wednesday, March 22, 2006
We don't tend to do a lot in midweek, do we?
Get on with these, then - Gang Of Four do Anthrax live at SXSW, something called Bopperenlarme radio rips the new Futureheads single. Anyone else thinking of the Pixies' U-Mass?
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