A Friendly Chat With... Fyfe Dangerfield

After an apprenticeship that encompassed jazz improv, modern classical and a place on a Fierce Panda compilation, Dangerfield formed Guillemots, who have taken off with a succession of brilliantly inventive, oddly attuned art-pop singles, a fifth place in the BBC's Sound Of 2006 industry poll and a major label contract. Luckily we've caught him just before it all skyrockets.

STN: Given nobody else has quite managed it yet, how would you describe the Guillemots' sound, or at least what it reaches towards?
Fyfe: Um, we're worse at describing ourselves than anyone, really. In a way the point of it is that we want to make something a bit indescribable but that of course sounds very pretentious if you go around saying it to everyone. Ruffled soul music maybe? I want to hi-jack the term "soul music" and make it a good thing again instead of it conjuring up images of coffee table bland R'n'B.

STN: How easy was it to find common ground with all the members coming from different musical backgrounds?
Fyfe: Surprisingly easy really - that's the strange thing. It shouldn't really work, the four of us playing together, but it did right from the first time we played together. We don't really know why! Just luck I think. There's pretty much no "style" of music that at least one of us doesn't like aspects of, so it just means that whenever we come to play or write things together there's a massive casserole pot waiting for us.

STN: How do you write songs - working to something pre-planned or organic development?
Fyfe: At the moment, most of the songs in our set and on our records are ones that I've already written; some of those I pretty much know how they're going to sound before we start recording them, some of them change completely. A song like Made-Up Lovesong changed completely when Greig and Arista added the whole drum'n'bass rhythm. But we also come up with loads and loads of things as a band, some of which we're going to - when we get a chance - release in their original rehearsal room minidisc form (but that's another story...), but some of them come out as songs right from the start. Sao Paulo and Go Away, which are both songs we've recorded and play live, were both improvised out by us in rehearsals and then just sort of edited and refined...

STN: Is there a place for Guillemots in the 2006 mainstream?
Fyfe: I hope so. In our heads we're a pop band.

STN: Do you see it as important to make the live approach distinct from the records?
Fyfe: Yes, very. There's nothing more boring than going to see a band live who replicate every aspect of their record with click tracks, backing tracks etc. It's lame really. If there's no risk of it falling apart live, how can it every be truly exciting? I think that's the way we look at it. We always try to slip little improvised bits into the gigs too, though its hard when you only have a 45 minute set or something.

STN: What's South By Southwest actually like?
Fyfe: Meat/music/madness.

STN: Out of pure curiosity, this one - what happened to We're Here's chart position? In the top 200 on downloads alone and then disappeared...
Fyfe: Yes, a bit of a weird one. It would have got in the charts, in the top 30s/late 20s i think, but we decided to run a competition with it, where we go and play at someone's house, and that made it non chart-eligible. Made-up Lovesong, in a slightly revamped way, is going to be our next single, and that will be the first one of ours that will hopefully chart.

STN: Name three albums crucial in your musical development.
Fyfe: I can't speak for the others, but for me I'd say everything by the Beatles, Homogenic by Bjork and Grace by Jeff Buckley.

STN: What's coming up in the near future?
Fyfe: Lots. Lots. Just lots. I can't remember any more than this...

Many thanks to Fyfe. Visit their official site and/or their Myspace. Made-Up Lovesong #43 is, as he says, currently scheduled for a re-release in late May, with album Through The Window Pane following on 12th June. If that's too far away, mini-album From The Cliffs is available on import. Guillemots tour in May and have confirmed so far for Wireless, Summer Sundae, The Great Escape and Wychwood festivals.

An Illustrated Guide To... Billy Bragg

The Bard Of Barking is on a UK tour from Sunday, accompanied by former Small Faces organist Ian McLagan. This being a Billy Bragg tour it's the Hope Not Hate Tour, supported by the Amicus, GMB, RMT and Unison unions as well as The Left Field, Love Music Hate Racism, Searchlight and Unite Against Fascism. Thus is the image of Billy Bragg shouting the left wing rights reinforced. Is it really justified, though? Well, yes, if he's gone to this much effort, but what about the stuff he made his living with?

There are two things everyone knows about the early life of Stephen William Bragg, DOB 20/12/57: he joined the Royal Irish Hussars of the Royal Armoured Corps in 1981 after his pub rock outfit Riff Raff split (his father had been in the Royal Tank Regiment and helped keep the peace in immediately post-WWII India) but left after three months having bought himself out with "the best £175 I ever spent", and he got his first Peel play after hearing him mention on air that he fancied a mushroom biriyani, bought one and handed it over at Radio 1 reception. The album also handed over was Life's A Riot With Spy Vs Spy - Bragg initially gigged under the Spy Vs Spy nom de plume, taken from a Mad magazine cartoon strip - one of the last releases on Charisma records, which had released prog prime Genesis, Van der Graaf Generator, Lindisfarne, Vivian Stanshall and most of the Monty Python records but had fallen on hard times, so much so that they couldn't afford a promotion budget for it (Bragg was its last signing before Virgin swallowed the label whole) Luckily Bragg was willing to travel with guitar and portable amp to hand, picking up many a music press writer almost stumbling across him and instantly becoming a fan. After a reissue on Go! Discs, a slot on The Tube and a third place in the NME writers' end of year poll the album made it as high as number 32 at the start of 1984. His back to basics approach (Back To Basics, coincidentally, being the title of the 1987 compilation that stuck his first two albums together) was different to the all-pervading robotic pop and plastic soul of the day, we'll say that for it.

The Milkman Of Human Kindness (the first song from the album Peel played, except here it's at the right speed. A story we've never quite believed, for what it's worth - we appreciate how he might have put on oddball prog/noise/techno at the wrong speed, but a solo singer-songwriter?)
A New England on The Tube

Being on the cover of the second NME of 1984 helped, mind. Support dates with Echo & The Bunnymen in America followed, and to fill the gaps in between he and manager (and Charisma A&R man) Peter Jenner developed the Portastack, a PA stack only slightly taller than Bragg himself that he would wear on his back while playing in the street during New York's New Music Seminar. Although his work had mostly been concerned with strip-mining affairs of the heart and soul, it was his occasional socio-political edge that was magnified after the 1983 election and when he started playing GLC-sponsored gigs and miners' benefits around London that year. September 1984's Brewing Up With Billy Bragg delved into this side more but still revolved on varied emotional states - The Saturday Boy, based on his actual schoolboy romance, was widely praised, and it wasn't alone.

The album entered at a barely credible number 16 - the Redskins never did that - while in the first month of 1985 Kirsty Maccoll was taking A New England to number seven in the singles chart. In the same month as the miner's strike officially ended Billy, spurred into action partly by the politicised folk revival, brought out the Between The Wars EP, featuring the titular live favourite, an adaptation of 1930s US miner anthem Which Side Are You On?, veteran political folkie Leon Rosselson's The World Turned Upside Down and Brewing Up's It Says Here. It reached number 15 and got Billy onto Top Of The Pops, joining Nik Kershaw and Loose Ends in the studio.

It Says Here

He and the Labour party were now inseperable in the public conscious, going as far as appearing in a party political broadcast, and it was he who came up with the name Red Wedge after a Russian constructivist painting, kicking off a tour at the start of 1986 that came to include the Smiths, Madness, Lloyd Cole, Prefab Sprout, the Style Council and the Communards among many others, and playing at the GLC's farewell free concert at the end of that March. In between there was an album to record, and what emerged was Talking With The Taxman About Poetry, its title taken from a poem by Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, featuring extra instruments for the first time properly as well as Johnny Marr and Kirsty Maccoll on Greetings To The New Brunette. There was politics, but not in a hammer-home style, Bragg still just as concerned with political manoevurings of the heart.

The Marriage
Greetings To The New Brunette video

Having warmed up for 1987 by getting arrested on a CND demonstration in Norfolk, Bragg found himself distracted for much of it, not by Red Wedge's fading, the concurrent election defeat, a trip to Honduras or a deputising stint for long time mate Andy Kershaw but by a deep love affair gone wrong. Much of this played into 1988's Worker's Playtime, produced by Joe Boyd (Pink Floyd, REM, Nick Drake, John Martyn, Fairport Convention, 10,000 Maniacs), preceded by a fluke number one when his cover of She's Leaving Home crept in on the Childline-aiding double-A undercard of Wet Wet Wet's With A Little Help From My Friends. One reviewer called it "broken heart surgery" and the idea of love lost and attempting to understand women generally runs right through the album, which was the first on which Bragg was backed by a full band and on closer Waiting For The Great Leap Forwards, a chorus of just about everyone he knew. Listen carefully as the slow fade kicks in for a particularly raucous effort from Go! Discs employee Phill Jupitus.

Waiting For The Great Leap Forwards

Bragg left Go! Discs upon their takeover by Polygram in 1989, briefly setting up Utility, UK home to Juliana Hatfield and Evan Dando's Blake Babies. 1990 saw him self-issue The Internationale, a stopgap mini-album reworking political protest anthems ranging from a return to solo work to a full brass band popping by, promoted in part with a gig at Barlinnie Prison in Glasgow. Drawn out negotiations saw him back at Go! for 1991's Don't Try This At Home, among his most consistent lyrical work and only top ten album, covering Gulf War paranoia, football hooliganism, capitalist ills, Wolves star turned Jehovah's Witness Peter Knowles and his own father's death on this.

Tank Park Salute

Former tour support friends Michael Stipe and Peter Buck turned up on You Woke Up My Neighbourhood while Marr and Maccoll returned for anthemic first single Sexuality, Jupitus directing the video and later helping Billy rework into occasional encore favourite, um, Bestiality. We thought we had a version of this on our hard drive but it seems not, but we've got this if it's any use...

Billy Bragg & Bill Bailey - Unisex Chip Shop (live at Glastonbury 2004)
Much the same, but more visual

An endless, unenjoyed tour with band The Red Stars ended abruptly when Billy's appendix burst, which gave him the opportunity to pay his advance back to Go! Discs, marry their boss' ex-wife, expand his writing portfolio and become a father, pretty much in that order. It was 1996 until the release of William Bloke, a grown up album in many ways, attempting to get a handle on the fact he wasn't the one man and a guitar ranter of yore. It sent him back into the album top 20, single Upfield somehow making Radio 1's playlist, and an 1997 election night gig in the heart of Red Wedge land was its own political rally without overtly being one.

Another side road opened up the following year, although it had actually begun when Bragg played at Central Park to celebrate what would have been Woody Guthrie's 80th birthday. There he met his daughter Nora, already a fan, and the idea was hatched shortly afterwards for him to put new interpretations to a stockpile of unused original lyrics, choosing Billy as "he didn't come with a lot of baggage" with regard to knowledge of the source. Bragg handpicked Wilco as support on Mermaid Avenue, getting on so well that they recorded a second album's worth of material that came out two years later, although they later fell out over mixing and a mooted tour fell victim to schedules. Bragg's arrangements aren't always immediately obvious, as indeed his voice isn't at times. Mermaid Avenue went on to sell as many records in America as the rest of his back catalogue put together. Here it ended a run of top thirty full studio albums dating back to Brewing Up With...

Way Over Yonder In The Minor Key

A hastily conceived backing band, The Blokes, was instead formed for touring duties, including McLagan. Back home with time to kill Bragg appeared on Question Time, Radio 2 drivetime and in Nicky Wire's ever growing hate list after he took a photo of their Glastonbury backstage private portaloos. Wire never got a road near Dagenham named after him, though. He moved to Dorset, had a near-shouting match with Boris Johnson on Radio 4 which ended with Bragg inviting Johnson to Glastonbury for a BBC documentary, wrote songs for a Royal Shakespeare Theatre production of Henry V and was given an honorary degree by the University of East London. In 2001 he campaigned for Lords reform and advocated tactical voting after realising his local MP was Oliver Letwin and the Lib Dems were closing in on him, leading to an only mildly dignified appearance on Letwin's hustings on Newsnight clad in Roman centurion gear. (Letwin's share of the vote actually increased, but Bragg's actual Tory tactical target next door lost his seat) Somewhere in the middle he made time to write England Half English, released on the twentieth anniversary of his first gig. This was his first proper band collaborative work, in which he attempted to make sense of the many sides of nationalism through a multitude of styles. It wasn't his most even work - The NPWA's attempt to make 'No Power Without Accountability' a rousing slogan curiously failed - but it's a grower and Take Down The Union Jack got him back onto TOTP the same month as he appeared on the Weakest Link and the week before the Golden Jubilee, standing on a box lamenting "Gilbert and George are taking the piss" to kids surely there for Atomic Kitten, Liberty X and Ms Dynamite, whose family it turned out Bragg knew well. In terms of studio work that was it, excepting last November's We Laughed, a benefit for the Rosetta Life charity written by terminally ill patient Maxine Edgington, until this month's free mp3 release The Lonesome Death Of Rachel Corrie, an opinion splitting (admittedly we're mostly going on the usual roundel of idiot blog commenters - not you lot here, you're lovely, we mean on the politicised blogs), Dylan-cribbing song about the peace activist killed by an Israeli bulldozer. But before you go any further, note wryly titled best of Must I Paint You A Picture?, which came out towards the end of 2003, reviews almost as one wondering why they hadn't noticed how he'd written love songs just as well if not better than political ones. Twas ever thus.

Open up

So U2 are deemed to have written the greatest single lyric of all time, even if the line chosen as representation by VH-1 isn't even the best lyric in the song. Beyond watercooler debate all this is highly subjective, of course - people are moved by different things within the words and there are as many ways to write as there are to skin a cat, whether the former poet using the rock fraternity to get their message across or the workaday hack aiming straight for square one. Similarly many would move it to the pub for worst lyrics bartering but that'd just boil down to the whole Des'Ree/ghost/toast business and it'd get us nowhere.

The great opening line, though, is another discipline entirely. It catapults the listener into the song's core just as well as a well placed riff can, if not better in most cases. A lot of people can write great lyrics, but those that can write a cracking opening line to set the scene, the mood or the worldview straight off are a whole other subsection. Here, in a list that spiralled rapidly out of control, are 40 magnificent opening shots, in no order but alphabetical, all of which set out to do a job and do that job with elan. We're guaranteed to have missed some, what with all the half-lines and unexplored pop crevices, so all comment suggestions are welcome.


Accidents Will Happen (Elvis Costello)
"Oh, I just don't know where to begin"
Not an un-bold way to begin a song, you'd have to say. The first line as double bluff, a tactic that actually applied to most of Elvis' lyrics around 1979.

Another Girl Another Planet (The Only Ones)
"I always flirt with death, I could kill, but I don't care about it"
Peter Perrett's various substances intake was legendary and this always turns up just after There She Goes in lists of Songs You Thought Were About Girls But Are Actually About Heroin Innit. It does pretty well in the stakes of expressing how little you care about the rest of the world whatever the intention.

Black Steel In The Hour Of Chaos (Public Enemy)
"I got a letter from the government the other day/I opened and read it, it said they were suckers"
What sort of form letter was that, then? They should have run that one past the team leader, or whatever the US government equivalent is, before sending out a letter with something like that included. We're certain there should be more rap in this list then there is, but here's everything you need to know about Public Enemy's single handed private army in one go.

Born To Run (Bruce Springsteen)
"In the day we sweat it out in the streets of a runaway American dream"
Almost stereotypical Boss, the working man toiling while the imagery of glamour disappears, but Springsteen's always been a great poet for the people who can't speak up coherently for themselves.

Cactus (Pixies)
"Sitting here wishing on a cement floor/Just wishing that I had just something you wore"
The intenations make you shiver, don't they? Black Francis usually at least waited until the second verse before dropping this kind of thing in.

Child Psychology (Black Box Recorder)
"I stopped talking when I was six years old/I didn't want anything more to do with the outside world"
There seems to be a pattern relating to childhood, and specifically childhood going wrong, in many of the words Luke Haines and John Moore wrote for Sarah Nixey. This is the one with the refrain "life is unfair, kill yourself or get over it", but it's all gone pitch black well before then.

Come Dancing (the Kinks)
"They put a parking lot on a piece of land/Where the supermarket used to stand"
Years after Ray Davies' Village Green Preservation Society was closed down he could still be found raising the rose-tinted glasses to progress overtaking old England.

Delia's Gone (Johnny Cash)
"Delia, oh Delia, Delia all my life/If I hadn't-a shot poor Delia, I'd have had her for my wife"
It wouldn't have worked in many people's mouths. The first Cash song worked on with Rick Rubin, it proved his spiritual alignment with the wrong side of the law was as strong as it had been at San Quentin.

Experiment IV (Kate Bush)
"We were working secretly for the military/Our experiment in sound was nearly ready to begin/We only know in theory what we are doing"
But you're intrigued and not a little scared, aren't you? In fact it turns out to be sonic devices that kill people, turning the joy of music back on itself. She doesn't half sweat the small stuff, does she?

First We Take Manhattan (Leonard Cohen)
"They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom/For trying to change the system from within"
Again, for best results apply to as deep a deadpan voice as you can find. He'll never be able to kick back at materialism, but he'll give it a damn good try. Pop fact: this song helped Shakira learn English. That explains a lot.

Gareth Brown Says (McLusky)
"All of your friends are cunts, your mother is a ballpoint pen thief"
What? What? Simultaneously making no sense and all sense, and it's hardly as if it's a one-off by their standards.

Gloria (Patti Smith)
"Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine"
The pause before the 'but' makes it completely. It's a hell of a way to mark out your territory and blasts the anti- attitude of most of her CBGB scene contemporaries right out of the water at the off.

God Only Knows (Beach Boys)
"I may not always love you/But as long as there are stars above you/You never need to doubt it"
An incredibly brave line to start what already sounds like a love song off with turns out to be the McGuffin in a sentiment giddy with its own possibilities.

History Lesson Part II (Minutemen)
"Our band could be your life"
Surely the statement that lies at the heart of everyone who ever formed a band.

I Am The Party (Million Dead)
"Well you can tell by the way I move my feet that I'm a genuine insurrectionary"
Great for three reasons: it set out the cult defunct Anglo-Aussie hardcore outfit's manifesto in one go, it can only be sung with complete conviction, and it partly goes towards showing how their often unwieldly lyrics looked horrible on paper but perfectly reasonable on vocal take (cf the same album's Charlie And The Propaganda Myth Machine. You heard.)

I Found That Essence Rare (Gang Of Four)
"Aim for the body rare, you'll see it on TV/The worst thing in 1954 was the bikini"
Finding middle ground where leftie ideology and fashion critique can go hand in hand. Actually, the worst thing in 1954 here were the nuclear tests on Bikini Atoll, which actually started in 1946 (as did the leisurewear) but presumably that didn't scan as well.

Into My Arms (Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds)
"I don't believe in an interventionist God"
Only Nick Cave could have written this line. It needs stating, though, that while everyone was recovering their breath from that one Cave slips in the rejoiner "but I know darling that you do/but if I did I would kneel down and ask Him/Not to intervene when it came to you".

Jumping Jack Flash (Rolling Stones)
"I was born in a crossfire hurricane"
There's a theory this is a reference to Keith Richards being born during a Doodlebug attack on Dartford. Whatever, you wouldn't want to get in the way of Jagger if he's in this kind of mood.

Kinky Afro (Happy Mondays)
"Son, I'm thirty/I only went with your mother cos she's dirty"
And so we welcome Shaun Ryder into the pantheon of lyricists people just don't get for reasons other than their songwriting.

Levi Stubbs' Tears (Billy Bragg)
"With the money from her accident she bought herself a mobile home"
It's either genius or careless that Bragg doesn't remember at any point to explain any of this in the rest of the song, but it sets it up beautifully.

No Thugs In Our House (XTC)
"The insect-headed worker-wife will hang her waspies on the line/The husband burns his paper, sucks his pipe while studying their cushion-floor"
You just know that something's about to go horribly wrong in this bit of suburbia. And, through a policeman turning up to question the son about a racial assault, so it does.

Packs Of Three (Arab Strap)
"It was the biggest cock you'd ever seen/But you've no idea where that cock has been"
Ladies and gentlemen, Mr Aidan Moffat.

Plaistow Patricia (Ian Dury and the Blockheads)
"Arseholes, bastards, fucking cunts and pricks"
And all ideas of an easy ride are cancelled. Even the punks who hung around Stiff Records' offices expressed shock when they first heard the tale of teenage heroin addiction's opening rail against everything.

Random Rules (Silver Jews)
"In 1984 I was hospitalised for approaching perfection"
Where do you go from there? David Berman's approach to Pavement-aided alt-country remains skewed, but he might well never get over this.

Razzmatazz (Pulp)
"The trouble with your brother, he's always sleeping with your mother"
Again, put the mental pause in before 'with' for best results. Jarvis Cocker is good at setting his wry stall out from the start - see also Dishes' "I am not Jesus though I have the same initials"

Rebel Rebel (David Bowie)
"Got your mother in a whirl/She's not sure if you're a boy or a girl"
You really couldn't tell the boys from the girls, as the cliched Top Of The Pops-watching father would have it, and having opened the door to the murky world of direct pop sexuality Bowie wasn't about to pretend it had nothing to do with him.

Reel Around The Fountain (the Smiths)
"It's time the tale were told/Of how you took a child and you made him old"
From these deeply unapologetic beginnings it actually becomes a love song inspired by feminist tracts, but really about 40% of the Smiths catalogue could have qualified. Because nobody else does, a word must be put in for I Want The One I Can't Have's far too tempting "On the day that your mentality/decides to try to catch up with your biology".

Reward (Teardrop Explodes)
"Bless my cotton socks, I'm in the news"
Some lyrics defy analysis at the end of the day. What on earth does this mean? Who cares, it sounds triumphant and that's all that matters.

Saturday's Kids (The Jam)
"Saturday's boys live life with insults/Drink lots of beer and wait for half time results"
Weller tightrope walks the line between condemning and emphathising with what he knows are his own type. 25 years later another provincial songwriter wise beyond his soundbite quality would muse about much the same people in "knackered Converse or tracky bottoms tucked in socks", proving that it takes one to know one.

Serve The Servants (Nirvana)
"Teenage angst has paid off well/Now I'm bored and old"
Plenty quoted this lyric when Kurt died as proof of his hatred of the 'jocks' Nevermind picked up, but really it works as the apotheosis of what to do when you get everything you didn't know you wanted nevertheless.

Sign O' The Times (Prince)
"In France a skinny man died of a big disease with a little name"
In among everything else Prince's lyrical abilities in his prime have often been overlooked, but for someone often portrayed as sex mad it proved that he wasn't going to treat his difficult subject with kid gloves.

Song From Under The Floorboards (Magazine)
"I am angry, I am ill and I'm as ugly as sin"
Howard Devoto's projected self-loathing expressed as self-mocking. When his lyrics, both here and with the Buzzcocks, weren't being dark they were actually amusing.

Strange Fruit (Billie Holiday)
"Southern trees bear strange fruit/Blood on the leaves and blood at the root"
A candidate for the single most haunting song of all time (we've got an excellent version on the Weekender Visual list) and still the greatest anti-racism tract ever. To quote Holiday, "The first time I sang it, I thought it was a mistake. There wasn't even a patter of applause when I finished. Then a lone person began to clap nervously. Then suddenly everyone was clapping."

The State I Am In (Belle and Sebastian)
"I was surprised, I was happy for a day in 1975"
This was the first time anyone outside their music college course had heard anything of Stuart Murdoch, and his intentions were nailed to the floor straight off - wry, quietly nostalgic, loudly forlorn. Murdoch is another who can pull off a first line - "he had a stroke at the age of 21/it could have been a brilliant career" for another example.

Time For Heroes (Libertines)
"Did you see the stylish kids in the riot?"
Yes, Pete, and now they all try to look like you. It turned round and gave him a healthy boot up the arse eventually, but while Albion has always been better in thought than execution this line alone captures the essence of poetry from the soul against the odds.

Tomorrow Never Knows (Beatles)
"Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream"
Yet earlier on the same album John had suggested relaxing (in bed, on I'm Only Sleeping) and floating upstream. What's going on? Well, everything, as even before he comes in it sounds remarkable and strange, only adding the obvious in relation to the soundscape. What it must have sounded like to the 1966 pop conisseur hardly bears thinking about.

Thousands Are Sailing (the Pogues)
"The island it is silent now/But the ghosts still haunt the waves"
Not that he's done himself much in the way of favours down the years, but Shane MacGowan's love of romantic Irish poetry shines through should it be given half a chance what with everything else going on in Pogues records. This is his tribute to the native Irish diaspora.

Up The Hill And Down The Slope (The Loft)
"Oh, my magpie eyes are hungry for the prize/Give me the money and I'll shoot it right between the eyes"
The second line in the selection to lend its title to an excellent history of a time and genre, we find a wide eyed Pete Astor standing just outside the big music world hoping for his chance to experience the glitz and glamour. He never got it, which probably turned out for the best.

War Pigs (Black Sabbath)
"Generals gathered in their masses/Just like witches at black masses"
For sale: rhyming dictionary, barely used. Does its job in spades, though, hinting at there being none more black as those in charge plot against their own people, desiring to destroy. It's an anti-Vietnam song, actually. Original second line: "Bodies burning in red ashes". That's just rubbish.

Werewolves Of London (Warren Zevon)
"I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand/Walking through the streets of Soho in the rain"
It doesn't actually mean anything, apparently, but what an image, not least because the apparent lack of side means you can mould it in whatever shape you want, should you be so inclined.

No heavy metal, rock'n'roll, music from the past, I'd rather jack then...

...play any Morrissey records, apparently.

So Radio 1 policy is, it says here, not to play anyone born before 1971. It must come as a great shock, therefore, when the station's head of music George Ergatoudis looks at the playlist he helped put together and finds there LL Cool J (born 1968), Red Hot Chili Peppers (John Frusciante 1970, the others 1961/62), Feeder (Grant Nicholas 1967), Goldfrapp (Alison 1970), the Flaming Lips (Wayne Coyne 1961) and Primal Scream (Bobby Gillespie 1964), plus Stevie Nicks and Tom Jones on dance records.

Penny royalty

The BPI (and Cliff Richard) demand a shakeup in the way royalties are paid. Louis Barfe, whose Where Have All The Good Times Gone? is an absorbing, ridiculously detailed journey through the minutiae of how the recording industry became this monolith and how it's trying not to be bought low by the little people, responds not in kind.

That seems inconsiderate

Insound are giving away the new Futureheads single for free.

Their mates Field Music, meanwhile, are part of Memphis Industries' free download sampler, also including the Pipettes, Absentee, J Xaverre and Blue States.

Weekender : potting the red and screwing back

CHART OF DARKNESS: Although starring with Woolworths' puppet dogs may yet give him his comeuppance - who buys new records at Woolies nowadays? - Shayne Ward can't stop the Gnarls Barkley juggernaut, and frankly it can only be downhill from here. An actual contender to take over next week is Rihanna's SOS, which we can't help feeling might have shocked the producer when they found out from where they had to clear the sample, which accidentally cashes in on a trend of the day just on downloads at 5. There's also new top 20 entries for Hard-Fi's barrel splinters, the clearly not as cared about as everyone thought it'd be Jamie Foxx, the inevitable Jacko and, from somewhere or other, Trina, but all of this pales against the curious news that, despite no extra promo effort this week that we can make out, It's Chico Time has climbed 13 to 13. Has it just dawned on people who he is? Fall Out Boy's distressing chart career looks set to continue as they have a download entry at 26, just ahead of Gorillaz, not even helped by news of their 'split', Studio B and Lorraine, another of those bands feted by all the pop media except the bits that actually matter to pop-buying kids. Another top 40 download entry comes at 34 from Infernal, a lame dance anthem attempt subject to post-ironic selling from Colin Fucking Murray. At least it keeps Mark Morrison down at 46, and while he still believes he's an Innocent Man nobody else is being quite so quick to trust him. Maybe he should get a lookalike to record his next single. The Crimea's Next Big Thing status has been well and truly made defunct as White Russian Galaxy enters at 51 and the Flaming Lips are at a pleasing 56 on downloads.
Another inevitable fan-driven number one sees The Hardest Way To Make An Easy Living debut at the top of the album chart - what will the next album be about, that's what we want to know. Learning to cope with the aftershock of fame? A horde of climbers, led by Kooks at an unlikely number three, colour the top end with Hayley Westenra being the latest off-radar popera high entry. We couldn't name anything on The Definitive Don Williams: His Greatest Hits but it's at 27 nevertheless. Sort it out, Official Charts Company.

FREE MUSIC: This has been going round the blogs in the last couple of weeks, but sod it, it's great, largely because Eiffel Tower come from the American off-kilter harmonic tradition that previously brought us Grandaddy, Pavement and Apples In Stereo, all of whom are reflected in the title track from their debut album, Smallish Things. They might just be about to take off, and those of us who felt slightly disappointed by a lot of the more recent hyped American indie albums (evening, Wolf Parade) have a lot to look forward to if they do.

HEY YOU GET OFFA MYSPACE: Again, this band show many signs of being about to colonise their given sector, so even though the name's been bandied about you can help us pretend we were really there first and everyone else is wrong. The 1990s are signed to Rough Trade, supported Franz Ferdinand on their last tour and comprise ex-members of the Yummy Fur and V-Twin. You can see why Franz would want to co-opt the local competition beyond Alex and Paul's associations with the former, being a less jerkified version of their artglampop stamp.

VISUAL REPRESENTATION: It's not just the English speaking world that stick everything they have on old VHS tapes of interest onto YouTube - from Holland's famed Pinkpop festival in 1987, Husker Du's heavily scuffed up cover of the Byrds' Eight Miles High

FALLING OFF A BLOG: More podcast interview business this week with Audiovant, who have already bagged CYHSY!, Tapes'N Tapes and Jens Lekman.

EVERYBODY GET RANDOM: We're fans, as you'll know, of the wonderful folly that is Yo La Tengo's annual WMFU improvised covers evening, and now they've stuck a "Best-of, or Best-of-the-Worst, or Worst-of-the-Best, or... oh, what's the use, it's dreadful" out called Yo La Tengo Is Murdering The Classics - syntax, gentlemen and lady, syntax! - seemingly on website mail order only.

IN OTHER NEWS: Let's share the joy of something we chanced across in the week - ages and ages ago we bemoaned the decline of Poptones, who in their fairly early days chanced their arm with Beachbuggy, occasionally dual-drummer matching boiler suited Doncaster surf-punks - a small section in your local record shop - who released a corking Steve Albini recorded album called Sport Fury in 2001 and a remarkably adept single called Kickin' Back from it. And here it is! For free!

The Weekly Sweep

Goodbooks - Walk With Me
Camera Obscura - Lloyd, I'm Ready To Be Heartbroken
Tapes'N Tapes - Insistor
Shooting At Unarmed Men - Girls Music
Field Music - You're Not Supposed To
1990s - You Made Me Like It
¡Forward, Russia! - Nine
The Victorian English Gentlemens Club - Ban The Gin
Mum & Dad - Kiss Of Death
Jeremy Warmsley - Dirty Blue Jeans

In shops tomorrow: 17/4 (unless it's closed for the Bank Holiday)

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.

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.

Polly Harvey's Thought For The Day

"Don't go near Rob Ellis!"

Satire

Emergence of British rap's latest big thing may undermine Good Friday Agreement

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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'.

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?

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.

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?

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.

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

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!)