The reason we can never fully go along with the whole 'landfill indie' backlash no matter how genuine the rotten-ness of the bands corralled into it is its inherent smugness, the way it's always approached as if finally some great truth (that everyone else spotted at inception, maybe even Mark Beaumont) can be revealed, the approach of being told who to hate because it's easier than listing who to love. A lot of people crowed about the Independent article that crystallised all this, but essentially it was a journalist being given two pages of a major national newspaper to list bands they didn't like as if they were an eleven year old writing in their rough book.
(In fact, we get far more annoyed by those who present themselves as some sort of alternative despite having precisely the same number of ideas, because at least commercial guitar bands aren't trying to hide their Pete Doherty ambitions. If we must play this facile game between us, we'd honestly rather see Late Of The Pier split than The View.)
Eventually, this is what it leads to - the self-same newspaper getting someone to list bands they think should split up. Nyah nyah nyah-nyah nyah. It'd be uniquely cloying even if the springboard for it wasn't an incident nobody affected could really help, the Long Blondes split (you know, the Long Blondes who endless commentators reassured us were nothing like the commercial indie you hate) Indeed, the only levity from the piece comes when you read it and realise Cat Gordon clearly didn't know (/care?) about Dorian's stroke being the breakup catalyst, just saw a headline somewhere about it and decided to write a piece celebrating
before an editor took them aside to mention that it might seem a touch insensitive at the moment, hence that pasted in "actually they had some really good songs, I don't mean them harm really" second paragraph, which given they then forget to edit out the way they immediately declare medical incapacitation has "made my day" and spend the rest of the piece going 'look at me listing bands I don't like!' regardless, which even Gordon runs out of patience with before the end ("The Editors - we haven’t got time" - yes you have, it's a blog and you haven't explained yourself through choice because you've decided you can't be arsed) is astonishingly jarring.
Funnily enough, nobody on the Independent's sports desk has today listed rugby league players they'd like to see in car crashes.
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Monday, October 20, 2008
The Primer #3: Joe Meek
A certain sphere of music criticism enjoys celebrating the underdog, those that sold nothing in their day but went on to be surface influential to those who conquered the world. It's not the same for producers, for whom the most progressively minded producers (not as in those who produce themselves, let's make clear) are still seeing themselves as bringing their ideas to the pop sphere, so whether it be Sam Philips, Phil Spector, Norman Whitfield, Arif Mardin, George Martin, Trevor Horn, Tony Visconti, Timbaland or whoever, these are all producers whose clients are instantly recognisable throughout the ages.
Joe Meek was as much a pop producer at heart as any of those, albeit for a shorter period (three UK number ones), yet his pioneering DIY and independently rebellious auteur image has given him the kind of outsider status that cults thrive on. Following the close friends, associates and fans interviewing documentary released to art festival showings earlier this year A Life In The Death Of Joe Meek comes the premiere as part of the London Film Festival on 25th October and again on the 28th of Telstar, the film of the well regarded play co-written, adapted and directed by Nick Moran, starring acclaimed musical actor Con O'Neill as Meek and also featuring Kevin Spacey, Pam Ferris, Ralf Little, James Cordon, Rita Tushingham, Nigel Harman, erm, Carl Barat and Justin Hawkins. High time, then, to look into why he's so revered.
Robert George Meek, born 1929 in Newent, Forest Of Dean (home to the National Birds of Prey Centre and Europe's largest cul-de-sac) had an early interest in putting on a show, staging magic shows for children and being dressed as a girl by his mother. It was a fascination with electrics that was his real first love, though, building his own gadgets by taking the backs of old radios and record players, rigging up nascent PAs and setting up a mobile DJing kit. A National Service spell in the RAF as a radar technician helped his interest along. After demob, he bought an acetate disc cutter and in 1953 moved to London to become a sound engineer for a radio production company that made programming for Radio Luxembourg and then a studio recording engineer, and would surreptitously add effects and tricks onto recordings regardless of whether he'd been asked to. One such ploy saw him mess with the final mix of Humphrey Lyttleton's Bad Penny Blues, putting the piano part to the front and distorting the bass. It became trad jazz's first top 20 single. By day working in studios, he set up a small recording facility in his flat where he'd record tone deaf demos of songs he'd written, mostly inspired by his point of obsession hero Buddy Holly.
After being sacked from Lansdowne Recording Studios (where the Sex Pistols would later record Anarchy In The UK, following any number of 60s British Invaders) due to a clash of personalities with the owner, in 1960 Meek co-founded Triumph Records, possibly the first British independent label. One of its first releases was his own I Hear a New World - An Outer Space Music Fantasy. Playing on Meek's penchant for outer space and equipment manipulation and largely made flesh by The Blue Men, an adapted skiffle group, it was Meek's largely instrumental attempt "to create a picture in music of what could be up there in outer space", a blend of the band, found sounds, electronic pulses and special effects that was less late 50s kitsch the subject might suggest than presaging psychedelia and Eno ambient. Due to finance issues only the first side came out as an EP, the whole album not fully issued until 1991 (the 2002 reissue has a half hour interview with Meek about his processes added).
Joe Meek/The Blue Men - I Hear A New World
There were more conventional releases, most notably teenage fantasy Angela Jones by Michael Cox, heavily supported by Jack Good's television programmes and making number seven, arguably not going higher due to Triumph's inability to press enough copies through independent pressing plants. The label proved to be somewhat short of cost effective, but a rich toy emporter benefactor stepped in and enabled Meek to set up RGM Sound Ltd and upgrade both studio and flat to a premises above a leather goods shop on 304 Holloway Road, N7.
Photo adapted for size from Houseplant Picture Studio, which also reveals the leather goods shop is now a cycle store
Holloway Road wasn't the most comfortable of settings, being on the third floor, but Meek knew he now had the room and wherewithal to do what he pleased with the sounds he was trying to create. He knew he couldn't create them without a sideman, though, and through publisher auditions met Geoff Goddard, a Royal Academy of Music trained pianist whom Meek briefly attempted to launch as Anton Hollywood. It was as a writer he'd become more successful, not least when the first release from the new studios became a number one. John Leyton was a rising young actor (in fact he briefly appears in Telstar) who like many a successful with teenagers actor of the day was hastened towards the studio, and after a couple of flops Goddard offered the orchestral death disc Johnny Remember Me, which he would claim had been written with the aid of a seance. The recording session itself leant itself to many a Meek legend, with vocals recorded in the bathroom and a string section arranged on the stairs for the acoustics necessary to create the eerie, echoey sound Meek had made his own, plus the then in-house backing band The Outlaws, including future Dave cohort Chas Hodges. At the time Leyton was appearing in ITV department store drama Harpers West One as a character called Johnny St. Cyr and his manager arranged for the song to be mock-performed on the show, with the required chart results.
John Leyton - Johnny Remember Me
Nobody had heard a hit quite like this before, especially not one that clocked up five weeks atop the chart, and Meek's setup became an industry talking point, as much anti ("a recording studio is the place to record" one columnist railed) as pro, Meek claiming "I make records to entertain the public, not square connoisseurs who just don’t know”. A lot of his recordings weren't hits at all, but most were deeply fascinating. Overseen by a pair of men deeply fascinated by the occult and taken to visiting graveyards and haunting sites overnight, Screaming Lord Sutch, whose stage antics essentially invented Alice Cooper, recorded and plotted outlandish publicity stunts with Joe, and The Moontrekkers' Night Of The Vampire was banned by the BBC and has been credited with inventing goth about two decades too early (the band hadn't been instrumental until Meek worked with them, although the singer's sacking is something we doubt Rod Stewart has had much cause to bemoan lately). Some of these recordings were known to have been rejected by labels and mastertape cutting engineers as they would damage domestic speakers.
The Moontrekkers - Night Of The Vampire
For a good period of this time Meek had his next big success under his nose but hadn't realised it until his latest in-house band were asked to back Billy Fury on tour. The Tornados - Alan Caddy on lead guitar, Heinz Burt on bass, Matt Bellamy of Muse's father George on rhythm guitar, Roger Lavern on keyboards and drummer Clem Cattini (who went on to hold the record for most UK number ones played on, appearing on 44 chart toppers ranging from It's Not Unusual, The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore and You Don't Have to Say You Love Me to Grandad, Two Little Boys and Ernie The Fastest Milkman In The West) - were the guinea pigs for Meek's tribute to the AT&T communications satellite Telstar, which went into orbit in July 1962, five weeks before the single named after it was released. Making heavy use of Goddard's clavioline keyboard and inspired by I Hear A New World's advances, it not only topped the UK chart for five weeks but the Billboard Hot 100 for three, making the Tornados the first UK band to have a US number one, estimated worldwide sales standing at five million. Famously, it was also one of Margaret Thatcher's Desert Island Discs. The band did have other hits, Globetrotter reaching number five and Robot nineteen, but Meek was by this time high on the hog and buying ever more equipment for the studio, at least until French composer, Jean Ledrut accused Meek of plagiarism, claiming that the tune of Telstar had been copied from his own earlier work Le Marche d'Austerlitz. It is now thought very unlikely that Meek would have been aware of Ledrut, but the resultant lawsuit prevented him from receiving any further royalties until 1968, by which time it was too late.
The Tornados - Telstar
The Tornados' German bass player, Heinz Burt, wasn't allowed to merely drift away, however. Homosexual Meek - a lot of his depression and paranoia has been attributed to his feelings over his sexual proclivities, not legalised in the UK until 1967 - had taken an unconsummated shine to Burt, and when Goddard came up with Eddie Cochran tribute Just Like Eddie Meek, who had already split Burt from both band and professional surname, persuaded him to record it with yet another Meek band, The Saints, plus Outlaws guitarist Ritchie Blackmore (later of Deep Purple and Rainbow). A number five in August 1963, Meek was now in position where he could independently record a string of unknowns and sell the results to the major labels for big money, meaning the Meek rarities market is almost as crowded as the Northern Soul catalogue.
On November 11th 1963 Meek, who was as openly homosexual as the times would allow, was arrested for "importuning for immoral purposes" in a gents near the studio and fined £15, a possible set up and certainly one that would lead to incidents of blackmail which didn't help his mental state or legendary fits of temper. Additionally the beat group era who were more reliant on self-written songs and the pure pop of melody rather than svengali producers was on his tail with the rise of the Beatles and Merseybeat, although one such group, The Honeycombs, came under Meek's auspices. Famed at the time for having a female drummer, one Honey Lantree who supposedly inspired Karen Carpenter to take up the drums, they provided him with his last UK number one, the stomping Have I The Right featuring a bass drum sound achieved by the group stamping on the stairs of the studio, the underside of which had been attached four microphones.
However, the success came at a personal price - Geoff Goddard launched legal proceedings claiming that the prolific Ken Howard and Alan Blaikley had plagirised his own Give Me The Chance, and not only lost but saw Meek side against him. Goddard left Holloway Road employment and faded out of the business, taking a job in catering at Reading University where he ended up working in the kitchens (his later colleagues included two hard-up students who became Yan and Noble of British Sea Power, who would write The Lonely about him) and died in May 2000.
Meek's professional life was coming apart at the seams. Tom Jones, who he'd auditioned and turned down, was having hits. The Tornados and Heinz were fading away while the Honeycombs fell apart within two years. The deals Meek signed with major labels were full of loopholes and financing wasn't there. Meek was heavily into pills, including LSD, and seances, an unwise combination. Some of his music was as inventive as ever, moving on to psychedelia, Mod and freakbeat...
The Syndicats - Crawdaddy Simone
Glenda Collins - It's Hard To Believe It
...and after Merseybeat band The Cryin' Shames took a Meek produced cover of The Drifters' Please Stay to the top thirty in 1966 Brian Epstein supposedly offered his more famous charges to Meek with no dice, and when a London visiting Phil Spector called to express his love of the sound an increasingly paranoid Meek, who already believed Decca were bugging the premises, angrily accused Spector of stealing his ideas before hanging up. Meek ended up placing listening devices around the studio in case musicians were talking about him. At one point he was found beaten up and unconscious in his car, perhaps related to gangland threats against the Tornados as much as those around his sexuality.
When in January 1967 police found the body of Bernard Oliver, an alleged rent boy and past associate, mutilated and disposed of in a suitcase, Meek was alarmed when reports sugested police would be interviewing all known homosexuals in the city. On 3rd February 1967, the eighth anniversary of his hero Buddy Holly's death, heavily in debt and drug-paranoid, Meek was attempting to record his latest studio assistant when landlady Violet Shenton was called up, Meek believed to have been on the verge of being thrown out for non-payment of rent. Meek had a single barreled shotgun, registered to Heinz Burt and confiscated by Meek some time before when Burt left after a brief period living in the property. He now retrieved it and used it to blast Shenton in the back of the head, before turning it on himself. He was subsequently buried at Newent Cemetery.
Meek's legacy took some time to reassert itself, largely through the work of collectors and obscurists from the late 70s onwards. A 1991 BBC2 Arena documentary, The Strange Story Of Joe Meek (which we've found on torrent sites if you're interested) is credited with kickstarting the renaissance as well as a reissue and excavation program which continues. His influence is felt across music, from pop producers to leftfield beatmakers, both Orbital and Saint Etienne regarding him as a major inspiration. He pioneered effects in overdubbing, tape manipulation, miking, distortion, compression, reverb, instrument seperation, recording of rhythm sections, composite recording and sampling found sounds, always taking the sound spectrum first ahead of the tune, single-mindedly searching for a unique sonic signature for each record, these out of the way, supposedly unworkable advances now treated as standard. Unlike his contemporary Phil Spector, he wouldn't hire great numbers of musicians and backing singers to create the overwhelming effect but would record individually and mix together as he wanted. Meek turns up as a character in acclaimed gangland novel The Long Firm - writer Jake Arnott has a cameo role in the film - and songs have been written in his honour by the likes of Wreckless Eric, Graham Parker and, if you believe her story of the background to her single A Change Would Do You Good, Sheryl Crow. Meek may not be the most famous name outside certain circles, but his working methods were as groundbreaking as his life was fraught.
Further reading:
The Joe Meek Appreciation Society, formed in 1991, is "dedicated to keeping Joe Meek's name and his musical legacy alive" and runs a full membership scheme as well as keeping track on all current movements. This, oddly, is not to be confused with Joe Meek RGMAS. Meanwhile the dual language The Joe Meek Page attempts an entire discography. There's a few newspaper and magazine pieces we've trawled to write the above, but Jon Savage's essay for Observer Music Monthly on Meek's homosexuality, with reference to celebrated Tornados B-side Do You Come Here Often?, adds extra background for the times.
BUYER'S GUIDE: As stated somewhere in there, new discoveries are turning up all the time, the so-called "Tea Chest demos" as all his tapes were kept in 67 tea chests still being excavated - 1850 such tapes recently failed to sell at general auction despite including in the haul early recordings of Tom Jones, Gene Vincent and Billy Fury, plus David Bowie's first band The Konrads. Joe Meek: The RGM Legacy - Portrait of a Genius is a four disc box set that attempts a whole career overview, including rarities, demos, interview clips and alternate versions, plus liner notes by Bob Stanley. Telstar - The Hits Of Joe Meek reduces the 'hits' to two discs and 36 tracks on Sanctuary's budget promotion, while It's Hard To Believe It - The Amazing World Of Joe Meek is a more judiciously cherrypicked 21 track compilation. 56 track Joe Meek: The Alchemist of Pop fits somewhere in the middle. The EP Collection recreates twelve four-track EPs, including Telstar. I Hear A New World is reissued every so often. Let's Go - Joe Meek's Girls shows he could work really well with female singers, including the Sharades, the trio we singled out in the girl group Primer, while Joe Meek Freak Beat: You're Holding Me Down demonstrates that as the 60s wore on he didn't lose all his rampaging touch.
Joe Meek was as much a pop producer at heart as any of those, albeit for a shorter period (three UK number ones), yet his pioneering DIY and independently rebellious auteur image has given him the kind of outsider status that cults thrive on. Following the close friends, associates and fans interviewing documentary released to art festival showings earlier this year A Life In The Death Of Joe Meek comes the premiere as part of the London Film Festival on 25th October and again on the 28th of Telstar, the film of the well regarded play co-written, adapted and directed by Nick Moran, starring acclaimed musical actor Con O'Neill as Meek and also featuring Kevin Spacey, Pam Ferris, Ralf Little, James Cordon, Rita Tushingham, Nigel Harman, erm, Carl Barat and Justin Hawkins. High time, then, to look into why he's so revered.
Robert George Meek, born 1929 in Newent, Forest Of Dean (home to the National Birds of Prey Centre and Europe's largest cul-de-sac) had an early interest in putting on a show, staging magic shows for children and being dressed as a girl by his mother. It was a fascination with electrics that was his real first love, though, building his own gadgets by taking the backs of old radios and record players, rigging up nascent PAs and setting up a mobile DJing kit. A National Service spell in the RAF as a radar technician helped his interest along. After demob, he bought an acetate disc cutter and in 1953 moved to London to become a sound engineer for a radio production company that made programming for Radio Luxembourg and then a studio recording engineer, and would surreptitously add effects and tricks onto recordings regardless of whether he'd been asked to. One such ploy saw him mess with the final mix of Humphrey Lyttleton's Bad Penny Blues, putting the piano part to the front and distorting the bass. It became trad jazz's first top 20 single. By day working in studios, he set up a small recording facility in his flat where he'd record tone deaf demos of songs he'd written, mostly inspired by his point of obsession hero Buddy Holly.
After being sacked from Lansdowne Recording Studios (where the Sex Pistols would later record Anarchy In The UK, following any number of 60s British Invaders) due to a clash of personalities with the owner, in 1960 Meek co-founded Triumph Records, possibly the first British independent label. One of its first releases was his own I Hear a New World - An Outer Space Music Fantasy. Playing on Meek's penchant for outer space and equipment manipulation and largely made flesh by The Blue Men, an adapted skiffle group, it was Meek's largely instrumental attempt "to create a picture in music of what could be up there in outer space", a blend of the band, found sounds, electronic pulses and special effects that was less late 50s kitsch the subject might suggest than presaging psychedelia and Eno ambient. Due to finance issues only the first side came out as an EP, the whole album not fully issued until 1991 (the 2002 reissue has a half hour interview with Meek about his processes added).
Joe Meek/The Blue Men - I Hear A New World
There were more conventional releases, most notably teenage fantasy Angela Jones by Michael Cox, heavily supported by Jack Good's television programmes and making number seven, arguably not going higher due to Triumph's inability to press enough copies through independent pressing plants. The label proved to be somewhat short of cost effective, but a rich toy emporter benefactor stepped in and enabled Meek to set up RGM Sound Ltd and upgrade both studio and flat to a premises above a leather goods shop on 304 Holloway Road, N7.
Photo adapted for size from Houseplant Picture Studio, which also reveals the leather goods shop is now a cycle store
Holloway Road wasn't the most comfortable of settings, being on the third floor, but Meek knew he now had the room and wherewithal to do what he pleased with the sounds he was trying to create. He knew he couldn't create them without a sideman, though, and through publisher auditions met Geoff Goddard, a Royal Academy of Music trained pianist whom Meek briefly attempted to launch as Anton Hollywood. It was as a writer he'd become more successful, not least when the first release from the new studios became a number one. John Leyton was a rising young actor (in fact he briefly appears in Telstar) who like many a successful with teenagers actor of the day was hastened towards the studio, and after a couple of flops Goddard offered the orchestral death disc Johnny Remember Me, which he would claim had been written with the aid of a seance. The recording session itself leant itself to many a Meek legend, with vocals recorded in the bathroom and a string section arranged on the stairs for the acoustics necessary to create the eerie, echoey sound Meek had made his own, plus the then in-house backing band The Outlaws, including future Dave cohort Chas Hodges. At the time Leyton was appearing in ITV department store drama Harpers West One as a character called Johnny St. Cyr and his manager arranged for the song to be mock-performed on the show, with the required chart results.
John Leyton - Johnny Remember Me
Nobody had heard a hit quite like this before, especially not one that clocked up five weeks atop the chart, and Meek's setup became an industry talking point, as much anti ("a recording studio is the place to record" one columnist railed) as pro, Meek claiming "I make records to entertain the public, not square connoisseurs who just don’t know”. A lot of his recordings weren't hits at all, but most were deeply fascinating. Overseen by a pair of men deeply fascinated by the occult and taken to visiting graveyards and haunting sites overnight, Screaming Lord Sutch, whose stage antics essentially invented Alice Cooper, recorded and plotted outlandish publicity stunts with Joe, and The Moontrekkers' Night Of The Vampire was banned by the BBC and has been credited with inventing goth about two decades too early (the band hadn't been instrumental until Meek worked with them, although the singer's sacking is something we doubt Rod Stewart has had much cause to bemoan lately). Some of these recordings were known to have been rejected by labels and mastertape cutting engineers as they would damage domestic speakers.
The Moontrekkers - Night Of The Vampire
For a good period of this time Meek had his next big success under his nose but hadn't realised it until his latest in-house band were asked to back Billy Fury on tour. The Tornados - Alan Caddy on lead guitar, Heinz Burt on bass, Matt Bellamy of Muse's father George on rhythm guitar, Roger Lavern on keyboards and drummer Clem Cattini (who went on to hold the record for most UK number ones played on, appearing on 44 chart toppers ranging from It's Not Unusual, The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore and You Don't Have to Say You Love Me to Grandad, Two Little Boys and Ernie The Fastest Milkman In The West) - were the guinea pigs for Meek's tribute to the AT&T communications satellite Telstar, which went into orbit in July 1962, five weeks before the single named after it was released. Making heavy use of Goddard's clavioline keyboard and inspired by I Hear A New World's advances, it not only topped the UK chart for five weeks but the Billboard Hot 100 for three, making the Tornados the first UK band to have a US number one, estimated worldwide sales standing at five million. Famously, it was also one of Margaret Thatcher's Desert Island Discs. The band did have other hits, Globetrotter reaching number five and Robot nineteen, but Meek was by this time high on the hog and buying ever more equipment for the studio, at least until French composer, Jean Ledrut accused Meek of plagiarism, claiming that the tune of Telstar had been copied from his own earlier work Le Marche d'Austerlitz. It is now thought very unlikely that Meek would have been aware of Ledrut, but the resultant lawsuit prevented him from receiving any further royalties until 1968, by which time it was too late.
The Tornados - Telstar
The Tornados' German bass player, Heinz Burt, wasn't allowed to merely drift away, however. Homosexual Meek - a lot of his depression and paranoia has been attributed to his feelings over his sexual proclivities, not legalised in the UK until 1967 - had taken an unconsummated shine to Burt, and when Goddard came up with Eddie Cochran tribute Just Like Eddie Meek, who had already split Burt from both band and professional surname, persuaded him to record it with yet another Meek band, The Saints, plus Outlaws guitarist Ritchie Blackmore (later of Deep Purple and Rainbow). A number five in August 1963, Meek was now in position where he could independently record a string of unknowns and sell the results to the major labels for big money, meaning the Meek rarities market is almost as crowded as the Northern Soul catalogue.
On November 11th 1963 Meek, who was as openly homosexual as the times would allow, was arrested for "importuning for immoral purposes" in a gents near the studio and fined £15, a possible set up and certainly one that would lead to incidents of blackmail which didn't help his mental state or legendary fits of temper. Additionally the beat group era who were more reliant on self-written songs and the pure pop of melody rather than svengali producers was on his tail with the rise of the Beatles and Merseybeat, although one such group, The Honeycombs, came under Meek's auspices. Famed at the time for having a female drummer, one Honey Lantree who supposedly inspired Karen Carpenter to take up the drums, they provided him with his last UK number one, the stomping Have I The Right featuring a bass drum sound achieved by the group stamping on the stairs of the studio, the underside of which had been attached four microphones.
However, the success came at a personal price - Geoff Goddard launched legal proceedings claiming that the prolific Ken Howard and Alan Blaikley had plagirised his own Give Me The Chance, and not only lost but saw Meek side against him. Goddard left Holloway Road employment and faded out of the business, taking a job in catering at Reading University where he ended up working in the kitchens (his later colleagues included two hard-up students who became Yan and Noble of British Sea Power, who would write The Lonely about him) and died in May 2000.
Meek's professional life was coming apart at the seams. Tom Jones, who he'd auditioned and turned down, was having hits. The Tornados and Heinz were fading away while the Honeycombs fell apart within two years. The deals Meek signed with major labels were full of loopholes and financing wasn't there. Meek was heavily into pills, including LSD, and seances, an unwise combination. Some of his music was as inventive as ever, moving on to psychedelia, Mod and freakbeat...
The Syndicats - Crawdaddy Simone
Glenda Collins - It's Hard To Believe It
...and after Merseybeat band The Cryin' Shames took a Meek produced cover of The Drifters' Please Stay to the top thirty in 1966 Brian Epstein supposedly offered his more famous charges to Meek with no dice, and when a London visiting Phil Spector called to express his love of the sound an increasingly paranoid Meek, who already believed Decca were bugging the premises, angrily accused Spector of stealing his ideas before hanging up. Meek ended up placing listening devices around the studio in case musicians were talking about him. At one point he was found beaten up and unconscious in his car, perhaps related to gangland threats against the Tornados as much as those around his sexuality.
When in January 1967 police found the body of Bernard Oliver, an alleged rent boy and past associate, mutilated and disposed of in a suitcase, Meek was alarmed when reports sugested police would be interviewing all known homosexuals in the city. On 3rd February 1967, the eighth anniversary of his hero Buddy Holly's death, heavily in debt and drug-paranoid, Meek was attempting to record his latest studio assistant when landlady Violet Shenton was called up, Meek believed to have been on the verge of being thrown out for non-payment of rent. Meek had a single barreled shotgun, registered to Heinz Burt and confiscated by Meek some time before when Burt left after a brief period living in the property. He now retrieved it and used it to blast Shenton in the back of the head, before turning it on himself. He was subsequently buried at Newent Cemetery.
Meek's legacy took some time to reassert itself, largely through the work of collectors and obscurists from the late 70s onwards. A 1991 BBC2 Arena documentary, The Strange Story Of Joe Meek (which we've found on torrent sites if you're interested) is credited with kickstarting the renaissance as well as a reissue and excavation program which continues. His influence is felt across music, from pop producers to leftfield beatmakers, both Orbital and Saint Etienne regarding him as a major inspiration. He pioneered effects in overdubbing, tape manipulation, miking, distortion, compression, reverb, instrument seperation, recording of rhythm sections, composite recording and sampling found sounds, always taking the sound spectrum first ahead of the tune, single-mindedly searching for a unique sonic signature for each record, these out of the way, supposedly unworkable advances now treated as standard. Unlike his contemporary Phil Spector, he wouldn't hire great numbers of musicians and backing singers to create the overwhelming effect but would record individually and mix together as he wanted. Meek turns up as a character in acclaimed gangland novel The Long Firm - writer Jake Arnott has a cameo role in the film - and songs have been written in his honour by the likes of Wreckless Eric, Graham Parker and, if you believe her story of the background to her single A Change Would Do You Good, Sheryl Crow. Meek may not be the most famous name outside certain circles, but his working methods were as groundbreaking as his life was fraught.
Further reading:
The Joe Meek Appreciation Society, formed in 1991, is "dedicated to keeping Joe Meek's name and his musical legacy alive" and runs a full membership scheme as well as keeping track on all current movements. This, oddly, is not to be confused with Joe Meek RGMAS. Meanwhile the dual language The Joe Meek Page attempts an entire discography. There's a few newspaper and magazine pieces we've trawled to write the above, but Jon Savage's essay for Observer Music Monthly on Meek's homosexuality, with reference to celebrated Tornados B-side Do You Come Here Often?, adds extra background for the times.
BUYER'S GUIDE: As stated somewhere in there, new discoveries are turning up all the time, the so-called "Tea Chest demos" as all his tapes were kept in 67 tea chests still being excavated - 1850 such tapes recently failed to sell at general auction despite including in the haul early recordings of Tom Jones, Gene Vincent and Billy Fury, plus David Bowie's first band The Konrads. Joe Meek: The RGM Legacy - Portrait of a Genius is a four disc box set that attempts a whole career overview, including rarities, demos, interview clips and alternate versions, plus liner notes by Bob Stanley. Telstar - The Hits Of Joe Meek reduces the 'hits' to two discs and 36 tracks on Sanctuary's budget promotion, while It's Hard To Believe It - The Amazing World Of Joe Meek is a more judiciously cherrypicked 21 track compilation. 56 track Joe Meek: The Alchemist of Pop fits somewhere in the middle. The EP Collection recreates twelve four-track EPs, including Telstar. I Hear A New World is reissued every so often. Let's Go - Joe Meek's Girls shows he could work really well with female singers, including the Sharades, the trio we singled out in the girl group Primer, while Joe Meek Freak Beat: You're Holding Me Down demonstrates that as the 60s wore on he didn't lose all his rampaging touch.
Sunday, October 19, 2008
Weekender : now we can olly and we're not so shite
WHAT CD?
- Apart from Okkervil River's The Stand Ins, which we dealt with last week, not much leaps out this week, Peter, Bjorn & John's Seaside Rock curio worth little more than passing attention and the realisation that we didn't mention Fireworks Night's A Mirror A Ghost last week leavened by the equal reasoning that we've not actually heard any of it. So, one from deep in left field it is. Defunct, little heard and had their name swiped by a Norwegian group they may have been, but Alexandria Quartet have gone into STN folklore for being the first band to send us badges with their CD. To continue the largesse, their leader's current band Adam Donen and The Drought's As Our Parents Slowly Turn To Clay (not on Amazon, link to Myspace for preorder details) is being released inside a 32 page book of the album's lyrics set out as poetry, with iillustrations, acknowledgements and a seven page introduction written by Donen's friend and pianist which casually drops in towards the end the assertion that "history will come to judge them (the verse) as being at least as good as any poems produced by our generation". Well, even a journey of a million miles must begin with a single step and all that. As music it shapes up pretty well, mind. Donen clearly has a way with an elliptical allegories, equal parts cathartic howls and brooding mea culpas - mostly written, that preface says, in a trance-like state - and arranging it into a judiciously powered ragged folk-rock that variously recalls Nick Cave, Leonard Cohen, the Waterboys, Whipping Boy and latter day British Sea Power. Oh, and there's a track called Ganesh Whose Trunk Wipes Away Trubba (Plays Dice In The Abyss Of Infinity). For something created with such exacting standards for what seems to be being painted as some sort of Coleridge of lit-rock setting, it's well worth investigating.
- Of course 'Couples' had to be followed by 'Singles'! It's been largely overlooked in the last couple of years how long the Long Blondes were plugging away on Thee Sheffield Phonographic Corporation and Angular Records before Rough Trade took the plunge. While the band are out of action (Dorian is by all accounts slowly but surely on the mend), this is a timely compilation of their 7"s on those labels, which means the rough around the edges charm of the likes of Appropriation (By Any Other Name), Lust In The Movies, Autonomy Boy, New Idols and the original Giddy Stratospheres get their due.
- You complete and utter shower of bastards. Alright, you weren't to know that we didn't receive our pre-order of How We Became until a week after release, but you could have at least dropped a hint that we're thanked in the acknowledgements. It's like when the press team working for a band whose early singles we went on about at length sent us their album and mentioned in passing that the press release previous to that one had quoted us. (Much obliged, sir.) Jeremy Warmsley, of course, and the war tango Dancing With The Enemy is out as a single tomorrow. Quite a few other singles of note, not least more old friends in the shape of Sky Larkin, who've joined the generous geniuses of Wichita (who also put out Bloc Party's Talons tomorrow) and make their bow for that label with Fossil, I. They've been out recording their album with John Goodmanson and for a full and fun night out are playing dates both this Tuesday in London and across various bits of the country in a month's time with Those Dancing Days. Again, if you haven't got the Fleet Foxes album from which He Doesn’t Know Why comes from then you're nobody, while just because we can see why Universal are putting Noah & The Whale's Shape Of My Heart out again doesn't mean we fully approve. Herman Dune, Silvery and Robert Wyatt & Bertrand Burgalat complete the 'in the Sweep in the past' collection.
- It was often overlooked in both life and obituaries, although you could understand why, how great a writer John Peel was, from his sprawling, freeform 1970s festival reports for the Observer through to his weekly Radio Times column, all in the same style and lightness he brought to his radio links. This year's contribution to the increasing fading John Peel Day commemoration is The Olivetti Chronicles - most of them were bashed out on an old Olivetti typewriter - an anthology of his copy selected by Sheila, Thomas, Danda, William and Flossie covering everything from Oz to Bike, Gandalf's Garden to the Observer.
MYSPACE INVADERS: No, no meek post-post-punk revival or gloomy folkies this week. Three Trapped Tigers are free jazz electronica to some, a British Battles to others, not strictly the case but certainly having a better claim to it than previous press contenders for that title Foals. Led by Tom Rogerson, electric piano maestro recently transferred from Jeremy Warmsley's band to hunch over the keys in Emmy The Great's (has that bit blown the gaff on our attempt to seem newly experimentally inclined?), and also featuring Adam Betts, drummer with now defunct and much admired/feared Optimist Club, and guitarist/synthist Matt Calvert, they take the drawn out precision of math-rock and compress it into tense, elaborate slabs of build and release-driven intensity, shuttling between full throttle electronica-influenced passages and ambient segments that allow time for the next wave to hit, intricate cross-threading of movements and time signatures forefront. Lesser similarly inclined bands have been lauded far greater.
VISUAL AID: You'd expect us to follow our long held admiration for curious TV bookings by pointing up Seasick Steve on the Paul O'Grady Show, wouldn't you? And indeed we have, but that's not what we're specifically here for. In fact, such was the gold buried in last week's 1967 Christmas Top Of The Pops that we investigated further to this week bring you the 1983 festive show. Actually, festive show number two - the first had been on Christmas Day itself with the possibly overstaffed numbers of Simon Bates, Janice Long, Andy Peebles and Mike Smith introducing the big names, which just left...
One: Peter Powell, Tommy Vance, 80s glasses sporting Adrian John, Woo Gary Davies and life of any pop party Richard Skinner. Now, that's just dangerous overmanning, not to mention too much polyester sportswear for one fully neon lit and electrified television studio. It's the JoBoxers! Then dull old Mike Oldfield, then the Thompson Twins and Alannah Currie's improbable hair and extravagant percussive work.
Two: Is it time Tracey Ullman had a critical renaissance? Even among Stiff's waifs and strays she gets played down, but what a great reading of Kirsty Maccoll's They Don't Know this is. That's followed by a well before self-aware of image Robert Smith doing away with the niceties of a microphone while fronting up the Cure's The Love Cats. Then it's Jonathan King in New York, and we know King has a habit of turning up on message boards where he's mentioned in whatever context so we'll gloss over all the other connections except the spectacularly characterless reading of the top ten sellers in America that year and let you join the mental dots.
Three: The three Phil Collinses do You Can't Hurry Love, then "you've heard of Men Without Hats? These are women with hats", although only three of the seven Belle Stars representatives on stage are betitfered if you don't count the drummer's tinsel crown. There is nothing to say about Paul Young.
Four: Here's Cap'n Bob Smith again during his short period returning to Siouxsie and the Banshees, a marked contrast to Spandau Ballet in full accountant garb.
Five: "One of the big names to emerge in '84 is going to be Howard Jones". How can he emerge the year after he started having hits, Peter? Especially as hindsight tells us that his two 1983 hits, New Song and What Is Love?, are the two he's now remembered most for. It's the latter here, Howard constantly forgetting to mime either keyboard or singing into the mike and Jed's literal mental chains covered in tinsel. Of course they are! "Absolute football fanatic" Rod Stewart can't compete, not even doing Baby Jane.
Six: "When chilblains and turkey were just a thing of the future" the Style Council were having a hit with Long Hot Summer, Weller recreating synth burbles on a big white grand piano. We finish in the studio with "the year of Culture Club", George quite restrained in the circumstances, while Ofcom would have something to say nowadays about the size of the Puma logo on Mikey Craig's top.
LINKS EFFECT
* Give a band an inch and they'll take a mile, and while we're aware that we're not the only fonts of knowledge on the Internet... well, all we'll state is the fact that, three months after we harvested a playlist from Sky Larkin, they've put together their own stream of their favourite listens of the last month, including Boards Of Canada, TV On The Radio, Les Savy Fav, Why?, Kelis, BARR and the Shop Assistans for the P4K generation, Vivian Girls.
* ballboy's Gordon McIntyre has always been one of our favourite ideas men and wordsmiths, so we welcome the news that he's co-written a play. Midsummer is co-scribed by David Greig ("the most consistently interesting, prolific and artistically ambitious writer of his generation" - The Scotsman) and includes original songs and score written for the show. It opens at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh this Friday and runs through to 15th November.
* Yesterday we woke up to the news that our longtime compadre Phonogram's Kieron Gillen has written a comic about Sweeping The Nation. We mean, we're flattered, but... ah, but no - a-ha-ha-ha! - it's about the song Sweeping The Nation by Spearmint, as part of This Is A Souvenir, a 200+ page multi-authored comic book anthology of stories based on Spearmint songs published on January 28th.
* So a few weeks ago we went down to London, and within ten minutes of leaving the tube knew we were there when we saw a midday fight outside that Walkabout on the Embankment. Our afternoon was spent at Smalltown America's This Ain't No Picnic, and we'll forgive STA for spelling the link to this blog wrongly in their list of thanks in their mailout this week and instead guide the curious to a two part film of the event, featuring performances by the Young Playthings and Alan MX. We're not in it, but we know our programme is, which is fine by us.
* We get a lot of emails in the STN inbox, and once we've sorted the spam out we're left with a healthily productive number. A lot tell us about gigs we can't get to or include links for songs that we forget about (ha ha, not really, we listen to everything we get sent, even if we immediately delete it and hope nobody's looking at our last.fm account at that moment). Occasionally someone even asks nicely for a mention, and so it is with mel.opho.be, as it actually appears to be called, featuring North American gig reviews, interviews (The Acorn, Le Loup, Daedelus), fifty word album reviews and proper articles.
- Apart from Okkervil River's The Stand Ins, which we dealt with last week, not much leaps out this week, Peter, Bjorn & John's Seaside Rock curio worth little more than passing attention and the realisation that we didn't mention Fireworks Night's A Mirror A Ghost last week leavened by the equal reasoning that we've not actually heard any of it. So, one from deep in left field it is. Defunct, little heard and had their name swiped by a Norwegian group they may have been, but Alexandria Quartet have gone into STN folklore for being the first band to send us badges with their CD. To continue the largesse, their leader's current band Adam Donen and The Drought's As Our Parents Slowly Turn To Clay (not on Amazon, link to Myspace for preorder details) is being released inside a 32 page book of the album's lyrics set out as poetry, with iillustrations, acknowledgements and a seven page introduction written by Donen's friend and pianist which casually drops in towards the end the assertion that "history will come to judge them (the verse) as being at least as good as any poems produced by our generation". Well, even a journey of a million miles must begin with a single step and all that. As music it shapes up pretty well, mind. Donen clearly has a way with an elliptical allegories, equal parts cathartic howls and brooding mea culpas - mostly written, that preface says, in a trance-like state - and arranging it into a judiciously powered ragged folk-rock that variously recalls Nick Cave, Leonard Cohen, the Waterboys, Whipping Boy and latter day British Sea Power. Oh, and there's a track called Ganesh Whose Trunk Wipes Away Trubba (Plays Dice In The Abyss Of Infinity). For something created with such exacting standards for what seems to be being painted as some sort of Coleridge of lit-rock setting, it's well worth investigating.
- Of course 'Couples' had to be followed by 'Singles'! It's been largely overlooked in the last couple of years how long the Long Blondes were plugging away on Thee Sheffield Phonographic Corporation and Angular Records before Rough Trade took the plunge. While the band are out of action (Dorian is by all accounts slowly but surely on the mend), this is a timely compilation of their 7"s on those labels, which means the rough around the edges charm of the likes of Appropriation (By Any Other Name), Lust In The Movies, Autonomy Boy, New Idols and the original Giddy Stratospheres get their due.
- You complete and utter shower of bastards. Alright, you weren't to know that we didn't receive our pre-order of How We Became until a week after release, but you could have at least dropped a hint that we're thanked in the acknowledgements. It's like when the press team working for a band whose early singles we went on about at length sent us their album and mentioned in passing that the press release previous to that one had quoted us. (Much obliged, sir.) Jeremy Warmsley, of course, and the war tango Dancing With The Enemy is out as a single tomorrow. Quite a few other singles of note, not least more old friends in the shape of Sky Larkin, who've joined the generous geniuses of Wichita (who also put out Bloc Party's Talons tomorrow) and make their bow for that label with Fossil, I. They've been out recording their album with John Goodmanson and for a full and fun night out are playing dates both this Tuesday in London and across various bits of the country in a month's time with Those Dancing Days. Again, if you haven't got the Fleet Foxes album from which He Doesn’t Know Why comes from then you're nobody, while just because we can see why Universal are putting Noah & The Whale's Shape Of My Heart out again doesn't mean we fully approve. Herman Dune, Silvery and Robert Wyatt & Bertrand Burgalat complete the 'in the Sweep in the past' collection.
- It was often overlooked in both life and obituaries, although you could understand why, how great a writer John Peel was, from his sprawling, freeform 1970s festival reports for the Observer through to his weekly Radio Times column, all in the same style and lightness he brought to his radio links. This year's contribution to the increasing fading John Peel Day commemoration is The Olivetti Chronicles - most of them were bashed out on an old Olivetti typewriter - an anthology of his copy selected by Sheila, Thomas, Danda, William and Flossie covering everything from Oz to Bike, Gandalf's Garden to the Observer.
MYSPACE INVADERS: No, no meek post-post-punk revival or gloomy folkies this week. Three Trapped Tigers are free jazz electronica to some, a British Battles to others, not strictly the case but certainly having a better claim to it than previous press contenders for that title Foals. Led by Tom Rogerson, electric piano maestro recently transferred from Jeremy Warmsley's band to hunch over the keys in Emmy The Great's (has that bit blown the gaff on our attempt to seem newly experimentally inclined?), and also featuring Adam Betts, drummer with now defunct and much admired/feared Optimist Club, and guitarist/synthist Matt Calvert, they take the drawn out precision of math-rock and compress it into tense, elaborate slabs of build and release-driven intensity, shuttling between full throttle electronica-influenced passages and ambient segments that allow time for the next wave to hit, intricate cross-threading of movements and time signatures forefront. Lesser similarly inclined bands have been lauded far greater.
VISUAL AID: You'd expect us to follow our long held admiration for curious TV bookings by pointing up Seasick Steve on the Paul O'Grady Show, wouldn't you? And indeed we have, but that's not what we're specifically here for. In fact, such was the gold buried in last week's 1967 Christmas Top Of The Pops that we investigated further to this week bring you the 1983 festive show. Actually, festive show number two - the first had been on Christmas Day itself with the possibly overstaffed numbers of Simon Bates, Janice Long, Andy Peebles and Mike Smith introducing the big names, which just left...
One: Peter Powell, Tommy Vance, 80s glasses sporting Adrian John, Woo Gary Davies and life of any pop party Richard Skinner. Now, that's just dangerous overmanning, not to mention too much polyester sportswear for one fully neon lit and electrified television studio. It's the JoBoxers! Then dull old Mike Oldfield, then the Thompson Twins and Alannah Currie's improbable hair and extravagant percussive work.
Two: Is it time Tracey Ullman had a critical renaissance? Even among Stiff's waifs and strays she gets played down, but what a great reading of Kirsty Maccoll's They Don't Know this is. That's followed by a well before self-aware of image Robert Smith doing away with the niceties of a microphone while fronting up the Cure's The Love Cats. Then it's Jonathan King in New York, and we know King has a habit of turning up on message boards where he's mentioned in whatever context so we'll gloss over all the other connections except the spectacularly characterless reading of the top ten sellers in America that year and let you join the mental dots.
Three: The three Phil Collinses do You Can't Hurry Love, then "you've heard of Men Without Hats? These are women with hats", although only three of the seven Belle Stars representatives on stage are betitfered if you don't count the drummer's tinsel crown. There is nothing to say about Paul Young.
Four: Here's Cap'n Bob Smith again during his short period returning to Siouxsie and the Banshees, a marked contrast to Spandau Ballet in full accountant garb.
Five: "One of the big names to emerge in '84 is going to be Howard Jones". How can he emerge the year after he started having hits, Peter? Especially as hindsight tells us that his two 1983 hits, New Song and What Is Love?, are the two he's now remembered most for. It's the latter here, Howard constantly forgetting to mime either keyboard or singing into the mike and Jed's literal mental chains covered in tinsel. Of course they are! "Absolute football fanatic" Rod Stewart can't compete, not even doing Baby Jane.
Six: "When chilblains and turkey were just a thing of the future" the Style Council were having a hit with Long Hot Summer, Weller recreating synth burbles on a big white grand piano. We finish in the studio with "the year of Culture Club", George quite restrained in the circumstances, while Ofcom would have something to say nowadays about the size of the Puma logo on Mikey Craig's top.
LINKS EFFECT
* Give a band an inch and they'll take a mile, and while we're aware that we're not the only fonts of knowledge on the Internet... well, all we'll state is the fact that, three months after we harvested a playlist from Sky Larkin, they've put together their own stream of their favourite listens of the last month, including Boards Of Canada, TV On The Radio, Les Savy Fav, Why?, Kelis, BARR and the Shop Assistans for the P4K generation, Vivian Girls.
* ballboy's Gordon McIntyre has always been one of our favourite ideas men and wordsmiths, so we welcome the news that he's co-written a play. Midsummer is co-scribed by David Greig ("the most consistently interesting, prolific and artistically ambitious writer of his generation" - The Scotsman) and includes original songs and score written for the show. It opens at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh this Friday and runs through to 15th November.
* Yesterday we woke up to the news that our longtime compadre Phonogram's Kieron Gillen has written a comic about Sweeping The Nation. We mean, we're flattered, but... ah, but no - a-ha-ha-ha! - it's about the song Sweeping The Nation by Spearmint, as part of This Is A Souvenir, a 200+ page multi-authored comic book anthology of stories based on Spearmint songs published on January 28th.
* So a few weeks ago we went down to London, and within ten minutes of leaving the tube knew we were there when we saw a midday fight outside that Walkabout on the Embankment. Our afternoon was spent at Smalltown America's This Ain't No Picnic, and we'll forgive STA for spelling the link to this blog wrongly in their list of thanks in their mailout this week and instead guide the curious to a two part film of the event, featuring performances by the Young Playthings and Alan MX. We're not in it, but we know our programme is, which is fine by us.
* We get a lot of emails in the STN inbox, and once we've sorted the spam out we're left with a healthily productive number. A lot tell us about gigs we can't get to or include links for songs that we forget about (ha ha, not really, we listen to everything we get sent, even if we immediately delete it and hope nobody's looking at our last.fm account at that moment). Occasionally someone even asks nicely for a mention, and so it is with mel.opho.be, as it actually appears to be called, featuring North American gig reviews, interviews (The Acorn, Le Loup, Daedelus), fifty word album reviews and proper articles.
Saturday, October 18, 2008
The Weekly Sweep
Rich time for new tracks, this, which means thirty rather than twenty for one more week:
Abe Vigoda - Bear Face [Myspace]
Adam Donen and the Drought - Five Minute Zeitgeist [Myspace]
Broken Records - Lies [YouTube]
Chris T-T - We Are The King Of England [YouTube]
Dananananaykroyd - Pink Sabbath [YouTube]
The Decemberists - Valerie Plame [Myspace] (First in the Always The Bridesmaid 7" single series, and almost needless to say out last week)
Elbow - The Bones Of You [YouTube] (Saw them live this week; were amazing, especially Newborn and Weather To Fly)
Emmy The Great - We Almost Had A Baby [YouTube]
Eugene McGuinness - Moscow State Circus [YouTube]
Fleet Foxes – He Doesn’t Know Why [YouTube]
Gossamer Albatross - The Ground Will Take Us Down [Myspace]
Grammatics - New Franchise [Myspace]
Hello Saferide - Anna [YouTube]
i concur - Oblige [live YouTube]
Ipso Facto - Six And Three Quarters [YouTube]
Jeremy Warmsley - Craneflies [live Youtube]
The Kabeedies - Treasure Hunting [Myspace]
Laura Marling - Night Terror [YouTube]
Los Campesinos! - Death To Los Campesinos! (Napoleon IIIrd remix) [remix Myspace]
Noah & The Whale - Shape Of My Heart [YouTube]
Okkervil River - Pop Lie [Myspace]
Robert Wyatt & Bertrand Burgalat - This Summer Night [Making its Sweep debut, DailyMotion]
Rose Elinor Dougall - Another Version Of Pop Song [Myspace]
The Sexual Objects - Here Come The Rubber Cops [label Myspace] (New band of Davey Henderson, formerly of the Fire Engines, Win and Nectarine No. 9)
Silvery - Action Force [Myspace]
Sky Larkin - Fossil, I [YouTube]
Stars And Sons - In The Ocean [Myspace video]
Thomas Tantrum - Rage Against The Tantrum [Myspace] (Shake It Shake It is on a T-Mobile advert at the moment, surely entirely for the chorus line, but the reaction of the unknowing would really be something if only they found out)
Vampire Weekend - A-Punk [YouTube]
Wild Beasts - Brave Bulging Buoyant Clairvoyants [YouTube]
Friday, October 17, 2008
Games kit
Big drumkits. You don't see those any more, do you? OK, we're sure that bands doing one more round for the heavy rock fathers - Def Leppard, Iron Maiden, Kiss - have enormosets, but in this 80s revival going on we're surprised bands aren't taking to arena stages with ridiculous numbers of tom-toms and snares and a couple of gongs just in case. Even the Darkness' Ed Graham was behind a fairly standard set while all around was post-ironic excess.
And don't think it was just pyro-friendly sex'n'drugs'n'rock'n'roll types either. Look at the mother that turns up 2:08 into this!
And don't think it was just pyro-friendly sex'n'drugs'n'rock'n'roll types either. Look at the mother that turns up 2:08 into this!
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Trims, new braking
...and everything else needed on a tour bus required to carry three bands.
If, like us, you're missing out on the Los Viking Age touring feast they call Shred Yr Face, there's proper interactive elements to heighten the feeling of missing out
Chief of these is a comprehensive website, featuring blogs from both a reporter in situ and perhaps even sober musicians, plus a shedload of videos of performances and stuff, including the tantalising "Gareth LC! rates albums in Resident Records! One second reviews" Being the even more modern age, they've got a Twitter too.
With reference to the poster behind Gareth's head in the site's introductory video, Kenickie's last gig was ten years ago today. Whenever we see something like Lauren answering a question about biggest fashion mistakes "using an entire can of glitter spray before each gig when we went on stage" like it was something to be ashamed of, we still mourn. UPDATE: Kieron has his tribute up; Ben Hall of our vague acquaintance has put up a whole Reading Festival set.
If, like us, you're missing out on the Los Viking Age touring feast they call Shred Yr Face, there's proper interactive elements to heighten the feeling of missing out
Chief of these is a comprehensive website, featuring blogs from both a reporter in situ and perhaps even sober musicians, plus a shedload of videos of performances and stuff, including the tantalising "Gareth LC! rates albums in Resident Records! One second reviews" Being the even more modern age, they've got a Twitter too.
With reference to the poster behind Gareth's head in the site's introductory video, Kenickie's last gig was ten years ago today. Whenever we see something like Lauren answering a question about biggest fashion mistakes "using an entire can of glitter spray before each gig when we went on stage" like it was something to be ashamed of, we still mourn. UPDATE: Kieron has his tribute up; Ben Hall of our vague acquaintance has put up a whole Reading Festival set.
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Say goodbye to a few hours
Because we've just found out (OK, via Popjustice, but still) that Universal are slowly putting their whole video back catalogue on YouTube, 7809 of the blighters at the time of writing and no Ballroom or Let Loose left unturned.
Clearly we've taken note of a lot to put on our YouTube channel, but the overall scope is simply ridiculous. You're merrily gazing through the endless lists when you stumble across long forgotten pieces of our shared musical history, such as Double Barrel-sampling, Geoff Barrow of Portishead produced 2003 version of UK soul's future McKay, ABC's career levelling Fairlight-friendly How To Be A Millionaire, Apache Indian, Holly Johnson's solo career or these twats. Then you're diverted by Brix Smith's The Adult Net, one of Adam Ant's attempted comeback singles that we loved at the time and now can barely listen to and maybe even, spare us, Bob Geldof's The Great Song Of Indifference, an attempt at levity about which the only notable thing is the story Stuart Maconie tells of seeing him perform it on a European TV show and the host greeting him afterwards with "that was a very funny song", only to have "it's not meant to be funny" hissed back at him. Who's ever heard Tetris by Doctor Spin (Andrew Lloyd Webber was involved somewhere in it) in the fifteen years since release? Or seen the rare video for Elastica's Car Song, in which an Annieless band become glamorous PVC Ghostbusters and Donna accidentally flashes her knickers at camera at least twice? And then you realise the day has passed you by without your doing anything but having five YouTube enabled browsers open at once.
All of which leaves one question, if one that some of you may suffer deja vu on.
What the fuck is this?
Clearly we've taken note of a lot to put on our YouTube channel, but the overall scope is simply ridiculous. You're merrily gazing through the endless lists when you stumble across long forgotten pieces of our shared musical history, such as Double Barrel-sampling, Geoff Barrow of Portishead produced 2003 version of UK soul's future McKay, ABC's career levelling Fairlight-friendly How To Be A Millionaire, Apache Indian, Holly Johnson's solo career or these twats. Then you're diverted by Brix Smith's The Adult Net, one of Adam Ant's attempted comeback singles that we loved at the time and now can barely listen to and maybe even, spare us, Bob Geldof's The Great Song Of Indifference, an attempt at levity about which the only notable thing is the story Stuart Maconie tells of seeing him perform it on a European TV show and the host greeting him afterwards with "that was a very funny song", only to have "it's not meant to be funny" hissed back at him. Who's ever heard Tetris by Doctor Spin (Andrew Lloyd Webber was involved somewhere in it) in the fifteen years since release? Or seen the rare video for Elastica's Car Song, in which an Annieless band become glamorous PVC Ghostbusters and Donna accidentally flashes her knickers at camera at least twice? And then you realise the day has passed you by without your doing anything but having five YouTube enabled browsers open at once.
All of which leaves one question, if one that some of you may suffer deja vu on.
What the fuck is this?
Monday, October 13, 2008
Shop early for Christmas
Here's something interesting, albeit slightly touched on before. We don't quite understand why - after all, nobody has their Christmas lists sorted with more than eleven weeks to go - but October 2nd was the year's big day in publishing. That was the date of release for a lot of the big hitters publishers expect to do business among festive shoppers, from Michael Parkinson's autobiography to the Stephen Fry In America tie-in (a week and a half before the series). The idea is get the author to do heavy promotion now and it'll carry through to mid-December.
The record industry in Britain used to work differently. Common belief was that all major new releases had to get out of the way in September and October in preparation for the flood of cash in Best Ofs, repackages and restocking of albums from the newspaper best of the year lists, leaving no room for marketers to do their worst. As recently as two years ago many noted that Joanna Newsom's Ys was being pitched into the middle of a dead period for new albums, being as it was released on November 13th.
This year, however, things are different. Whether through the triumph of downloads or the precarious nature of major label finances forcing their hand to keep going all year, this November and even early December sees new albums released by Kanye West, the Killers, Dido, Razorlight, Britney Spears, Girls Aloud, 50 Cent, Lemar, Tom Jones, Nickelback, Outkast's Big Boi and now, who'd have thought, Guns 'n Roses. A time when all concerned's thoughts are usually headed Christmas number one-wards seem to have waved that white flag in the face of X Factor-dom and realised that they have all this new long form material that just can't wait, with the knock-on effect that January, traditionally the month huge new acts are launched, is looking fairly dead, Lily Allen's second album in mid-February at the moment kickstarting the major releases list for 2009. Either everyone suddenly got prolific three or four months ago, or someone's indulging in group panicking.
The record industry in Britain used to work differently. Common belief was that all major new releases had to get out of the way in September and October in preparation for the flood of cash in Best Ofs, repackages and restocking of albums from the newspaper best of the year lists, leaving no room for marketers to do their worst. As recently as two years ago many noted that Joanna Newsom's Ys was being pitched into the middle of a dead period for new albums, being as it was released on November 13th.
This year, however, things are different. Whether through the triumph of downloads or the precarious nature of major label finances forcing their hand to keep going all year, this November and even early December sees new albums released by Kanye West, the Killers, Dido, Razorlight, Britney Spears, Girls Aloud, 50 Cent, Lemar, Tom Jones, Nickelback, Outkast's Big Boi and now, who'd have thought, Guns 'n Roses. A time when all concerned's thoughts are usually headed Christmas number one-wards seem to have waved that white flag in the face of X Factor-dom and realised that they have all this new long form material that just can't wait, with the knock-on effect that January, traditionally the month huge new acts are launched, is looking fairly dead, Lily Allen's second album in mid-February at the moment kickstarting the major releases list for 2009. Either everyone suddenly got prolific three or four months ago, or someone's indulging in group panicking.
Sunday, October 12, 2008
Weekender : more alive than alert
WHAT CD?
- As we were saying last week, four live contenders for our end of year list, and actually probably the last contenders to be released in 2008 (assuming you count Intimacy as already out and follow that gumph about how We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed is a record rather than an album - we're not kidding, wondering what the hell to do with that come countdown time has been taking up a significant amount of our STN-related thoughts recently), listed here in the order that we've covered the band in the past on here. So, to start with, the small matter of the follow-up to the STN album of 2007. Actually it's not even that simple, as The Stand Ins was initially intended to be the second disc of The Stage Names and now emerges as a kind of souped up equivalent of their previous Black Sheep Boy Appendix, a 11 track 40 minute effort even if three of those tracks are sub-60 second instrumental connecting pieces. Musically it's largely a call back to the ballad directness and Motown heartrenches of The Stage Names, only with a couple of notably poppier tracks and a couple of more country tinged songs that hark back as far as their first album Down The River Of Golden Dreams. Lyrically, if The Stage Names was about entertainment as opposed to reality, this is how reality is brought low by the self same entertainment, or perhaps vice versa. It's a shit business, either way, and Sheff knows it better than most. And yes, although it's slightly hidden by context Blue Tulip is related to the Mike Read stalker of yore.
- Going through the record industry wringer can of course wait for some people, as there's fun to be had first. None of Those Dancing Days have yet hit their twenties, and the energy and pop bounce of In Our Space Hero Suits could only come from ones so unexhausted and inexhaustible. Yet, and this is why in another place we've compared it to the sainted At The Club, there's a melancholy and foreboding in a lot of the lyrics that neatly underscores the youthful enthusiasm. They play to their strengths too, Lisa Pyk Wirstrom's organ, Cissi Efraimsson's runaway drums and Linnea Jonsson's sultrily soulful croon lifting as they go. Bit of a shame they couldn't have got this ready for the summer, but that's that industry for you. Why the eponymous track is track eleven is a different query altogether.
- We were convinced, especially after their two stunning performances at End Of The Road and our resultant picking up a promo from amid a massive rush/crush after the second, that Ottawa's The Acorn would have the jewels of the UK music press laid out in front of them by the time Glory Hope Mountain came around, but no dice. Surprising, as alongside its Polaris Prize nomination and release on Bella Union it's got its own backstory - it's a concept album of sorts based on the memories and origins of frontman Rolf Klausener's Honduran mother Gloria Esperanza Montoya (the title is a rough translation). No Rehearsing My Choir this, though, as the story takes in domestic abuse, poverty, natural disasters and general destruction of normality. What this translates to is a wide range from cracked low-key beauty to Broken Social Scene-esque group indie anthem theatrics, plus a Honduran folk influence and a dollop of that extra percussive thing that's so now in north America, all conveyed with story sensitivity and intelligence. What we must hope for is exceptional word of mouth.
- Stylistically, Eugene McGuinness's self titled debut, following last year's acclaimed Early Learnings Of... mini-album, is all over the place, from ragged indie to swooning balladry. Do you remember when Badly Drawn Boy was on the way up and the way he'd rapidly pick up and discard ideas but held onto the melodic ideals? McGuinness's approach is something like that, and the stuff that sticks to the wall is mightily impressive.
- There's always been something studied about Saint Etienne, not that that's really a bad thing, but you're always aware that Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs have this huge frame of reference that coalesces with their love of allegedly disposable pop. We like to imagine that if we were musically gifted we'd end up like them. London Conversations is at least their third best of compilation, this one apparently capital thematically linked despite not including London Belongs To Me, which seems a bit of an oversight. Still, that just leaves a decade and a half of dance culture/retro kitsch inspired greatness, all the hits sounding as essential and as somehow unique to Saint Etienne as they ever did (except possibly He's On The Phone, but piano house never did age well), and we're assured by those who know better that the inclusion of rarity Lover Plays The Bass is as much of a carrot as you want.
- Plenty of singles too. Paper Planes is already in the charts, Fleet Foxes' He Doesn’t Know Why and Wild Beasts' Brave Bulging Buoyant Clairvoyants just hints to go out and get the very fine albums, so let's drag you towards two 7"s: Copy Haho's twisted Pavementish melodies have been getting the right people hot under the right collars and You Are My Coal Mine is to us their standout moment to date, while the ever cussed Comet Gain, who have a ten year retrospective out in a couple of weeks, chase their mod-Dexys-Godard-Forster dreams down a rabbit hole again on Love Without Lies.
COMING SOON: And so, eventually, inexorably, we turn to We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed. The reason why it was such a surprise was they'd never even hinted at any entirely new songs in their previous live sets. Obviously, now we know they have them they have to play them, so here's Documented Minor Emotional Breakdown #1 just about retaining its structure amid the murky mix of Berlin and being appended with My Year In Lists.
MYSPACE INVADERS: There's definitely something going on around Leeds at the moment as they're churning new bands at a decent rate. Following Sky Larkin, Grammatics, Dinosaur Pile-Up, from nearby Napoleon IIIrd and the recently relocated Her Name Is Calla as the latest to get people, by which we don't just mean us for once, excited are i concur (lower case obligatory). "We enjoy good music, especially the american indie stuff" it says on their Myspace, which pretty much does our job for us, but you'll need to know which bits, to which we suggest The National's sense of anxiousness/nervous tension, Interpol's brooding am-dram, Broken Social Scene's expansiveness and touches of Explosions In The Sky's glacial post-rock and Johnny Marr circling guitar lines. Never mind potential, they sound like they're almost there already.
VISUAL AID: Christmas starts earlier every year. Especially here, as this is a Top Of The Pops Christmas Special (part two, no less) from Boxing Day 1967, available in seven individually fascinating parts:
One: It's Jimmy Saville, Pete Murray and Alan Freeman, and we join them recording a trailer with none of the three really knowing what's going on except for Jim's odd palmistry riff. When we start properly there's some Bee Gees ("a song that's going to be a standard") and a beach-based clip we've never seen before for I'm A Believer, alongside some sort of Star Bar-presaging talking heads business with some people you'll recognise and some you won't (Spencer Davis, Dave Clark)
Two: Jimmy catches the light as one bloke completely misses a communal shout and someone else (we assume) boos the Rolling Stones' name. Let's Spend The Night Together, Mick in a game show jacket and Brian Jones on piano in a rakish hat, is their contribution, followed by Long John Baldry.
Three: Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich! See, they did really exist, and in their world percussion took a time signature floating role. If you've never heard Zabadak, have a check of this as it's a remarkable piece. As is the following, Lulu with the curlers fresh out and performing the really rather great Love Loves To Love Love (a strange choice, given it reached number 32 in Britain), not least for its scorching guitar intro by popular sessioneer Jimmy Page.
Four: Pete Murray is very formal, isn't he? There's a discussion of what happened to flower power before Scott Mackenzie, after which Freeman suggests we "think about the American groups" and stumbles right over Tamla-Motown before introducing dancers the Go-Jos and "all the Top Of The Poppers ready to do the whole bit" to the Supremes.
Five: "The Go-Jos couldn't have any Christmas dinner yesterday as they had to dance like that today!" Cliff has "learnt to live with success", apparently. Murray seems obsessed with the idea of a "standard", although you can't say he's lying when he refers to Whiter Shade Of Pale as an example. Right at the end is an astoundingly nervous girl to the left of Freeman, although maybe if she hadn't worn that sparkly dress and beehive she wouldn't have stood out so much. Or stood just there, obviously.
Six: All You Need Is Love. Nothing really needs adding there.
Seven: And especially not by Saville. Note to Jim - next T-shirt size up. Engelbert Humperdinck finishes the live performances off with whatever the technical opposite of a bang is. There's just time for Alan Freeman to piss himself laughing at Jim's hair getting in a mess before a baffling section of footage of people standing around and messing about in clothing stores and then a full minute or more of the audience self-consciously shuffling before the world's least convincing can-can line breaks out.
LINKS EFFECT
* We're fairly certain we've covered Eardrums Music before, but they really have come good in the last couple of weeks with the second in their series of free download albums, A Good Crop coming in one... two... three... FOUR! parts. Therein you'll find the likes of The Rosie Taylor Project, Darren Hanlon, Fanfarlo, The Kabeedies, Colin Clary, The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart, Sambassadeur, Je Suis Animal, Left With Pictures, Dark Captain Light Captain, The Lodger, Roses Kings Castles (the drummer from Babyshambles - oh, woo), Kotki Dwa and that.
* Say what you like about Foals, but they can choose a support act. Currently trailing them around the country are Wild Beasts, Dananananaykroyd - Calum and John in the crowd at an enormoroom? We'd like to see that - Maps & Atlases and Holy Fuck. The latter's label have pressed up some tour only 7"s of them and the headliners covering each other's songs, and then stuck them online for free, if in the format nobody understands, AIFF. Foals do a fine version of Super Inuit, Holy Fuck slow down Balloons with what seem to be sampled vocals from something else entirely.
* Because we feel the nature of the competition in what should be a sharing blogosphere, and not just because we did so badly last year and messed up the registration process this time around, we didn't enter the BT DMA Blog awards for 2008. It struggled by without our filling a space in the eighties, though, and the full top 100 has been published for us to comb when UK blogger album of the year polling time comes round again (and oh, it will) An Oasis news source won, Mike Skinner makes his traditional appearance at 3 (no David Gilmour this year, though) and Fish, as in Marillion, has his Myspace at 7. I don't think he's quite understood. Our other outlet The Line Of Best Fit comes in at 18, six short of Drowned In Sound, while old friends The Daily Growl, Keep Hope Inside, Fucking Dance and Music Like Dirt all appear among the misplaced Myspaces and blogs that probably aren't British anyway. How did a defunct YouTube account get in at 66?
* So what's the outcome of all this music blogging anyway? Canadian blogger Condemned to Rock 'N Roll wrote its MA paper on the subject, namely "Does NME even know what a music blog is?: The rhetoric and social meaning of MP3 blogs", including contributions from the likes of The Hype Machine, The Torture Garden, Song By Toad (and seeing a whole comments box reproduced takes us aback, not to mention to 'Ctrl+F' just in case - we're not), Chromewaves, Lost In Your Inbox, Culture Bully and Hits In The Car.
* Oh yeah, and if you get some spare minutes go and read Future Of The Left's US tour diary on their Myspace blog, because it's very much of the required Falkous high standard.
- As we were saying last week, four live contenders for our end of year list, and actually probably the last contenders to be released in 2008 (assuming you count Intimacy as already out and follow that gumph about how We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed is a record rather than an album - we're not kidding, wondering what the hell to do with that come countdown time has been taking up a significant amount of our STN-related thoughts recently), listed here in the order that we've covered the band in the past on here. So, to start with, the small matter of the follow-up to the STN album of 2007. Actually it's not even that simple, as The Stand Ins was initially intended to be the second disc of The Stage Names and now emerges as a kind of souped up equivalent of their previous Black Sheep Boy Appendix, a 11 track 40 minute effort even if three of those tracks are sub-60 second instrumental connecting pieces. Musically it's largely a call back to the ballad directness and Motown heartrenches of The Stage Names, only with a couple of notably poppier tracks and a couple of more country tinged songs that hark back as far as their first album Down The River Of Golden Dreams. Lyrically, if The Stage Names was about entertainment as opposed to reality, this is how reality is brought low by the self same entertainment, or perhaps vice versa. It's a shit business, either way, and Sheff knows it better than most. And yes, although it's slightly hidden by context Blue Tulip is related to the Mike Read stalker of yore.
- Going through the record industry wringer can of course wait for some people, as there's fun to be had first. None of Those Dancing Days have yet hit their twenties, and the energy and pop bounce of In Our Space Hero Suits could only come from ones so unexhausted and inexhaustible. Yet, and this is why in another place we've compared it to the sainted At The Club, there's a melancholy and foreboding in a lot of the lyrics that neatly underscores the youthful enthusiasm. They play to their strengths too, Lisa Pyk Wirstrom's organ, Cissi Efraimsson's runaway drums and Linnea Jonsson's sultrily soulful croon lifting as they go. Bit of a shame they couldn't have got this ready for the summer, but that's that industry for you. Why the eponymous track is track eleven is a different query altogether.
- We were convinced, especially after their two stunning performances at End Of The Road and our resultant picking up a promo from amid a massive rush/crush after the second, that Ottawa's The Acorn would have the jewels of the UK music press laid out in front of them by the time Glory Hope Mountain came around, but no dice. Surprising, as alongside its Polaris Prize nomination and release on Bella Union it's got its own backstory - it's a concept album of sorts based on the memories and origins of frontman Rolf Klausener's Honduran mother Gloria Esperanza Montoya (the title is a rough translation). No Rehearsing My Choir this, though, as the story takes in domestic abuse, poverty, natural disasters and general destruction of normality. What this translates to is a wide range from cracked low-key beauty to Broken Social Scene-esque group indie anthem theatrics, plus a Honduran folk influence and a dollop of that extra percussive thing that's so now in north America, all conveyed with story sensitivity and intelligence. What we must hope for is exceptional word of mouth.
- Stylistically, Eugene McGuinness's self titled debut, following last year's acclaimed Early Learnings Of... mini-album, is all over the place, from ragged indie to swooning balladry. Do you remember when Badly Drawn Boy was on the way up and the way he'd rapidly pick up and discard ideas but held onto the melodic ideals? McGuinness's approach is something like that, and the stuff that sticks to the wall is mightily impressive.
- There's always been something studied about Saint Etienne, not that that's really a bad thing, but you're always aware that Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs have this huge frame of reference that coalesces with their love of allegedly disposable pop. We like to imagine that if we were musically gifted we'd end up like them. London Conversations is at least their third best of compilation, this one apparently capital thematically linked despite not including London Belongs To Me, which seems a bit of an oversight. Still, that just leaves a decade and a half of dance culture/retro kitsch inspired greatness, all the hits sounding as essential and as somehow unique to Saint Etienne as they ever did (except possibly He's On The Phone, but piano house never did age well), and we're assured by those who know better that the inclusion of rarity Lover Plays The Bass is as much of a carrot as you want.
- Plenty of singles too. Paper Planes is already in the charts, Fleet Foxes' He Doesn’t Know Why and Wild Beasts' Brave Bulging Buoyant Clairvoyants just hints to go out and get the very fine albums, so let's drag you towards two 7"s: Copy Haho's twisted Pavementish melodies have been getting the right people hot under the right collars and You Are My Coal Mine is to us their standout moment to date, while the ever cussed Comet Gain, who have a ten year retrospective out in a couple of weeks, chase their mod-Dexys-Godard-Forster dreams down a rabbit hole again on Love Without Lies.
COMING SOON: And so, eventually, inexorably, we turn to We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed. The reason why it was such a surprise was they'd never even hinted at any entirely new songs in their previous live sets. Obviously, now we know they have them they have to play them, so here's Documented Minor Emotional Breakdown #1 just about retaining its structure amid the murky mix of Berlin and being appended with My Year In Lists.
MYSPACE INVADERS: There's definitely something going on around Leeds at the moment as they're churning new bands at a decent rate. Following Sky Larkin, Grammatics, Dinosaur Pile-Up, from nearby Napoleon IIIrd and the recently relocated Her Name Is Calla as the latest to get people, by which we don't just mean us for once, excited are i concur (lower case obligatory). "We enjoy good music, especially the american indie stuff" it says on their Myspace, which pretty much does our job for us, but you'll need to know which bits, to which we suggest The National's sense of anxiousness/nervous tension, Interpol's brooding am-dram, Broken Social Scene's expansiveness and touches of Explosions In The Sky's glacial post-rock and Johnny Marr circling guitar lines. Never mind potential, they sound like they're almost there already.
VISUAL AID: Christmas starts earlier every year. Especially here, as this is a Top Of The Pops Christmas Special (part two, no less) from Boxing Day 1967, available in seven individually fascinating parts:
One: It's Jimmy Saville, Pete Murray and Alan Freeman, and we join them recording a trailer with none of the three really knowing what's going on except for Jim's odd palmistry riff. When we start properly there's some Bee Gees ("a song that's going to be a standard") and a beach-based clip we've never seen before for I'm A Believer, alongside some sort of Star Bar-presaging talking heads business with some people you'll recognise and some you won't (Spencer Davis, Dave Clark)
Two: Jimmy catches the light as one bloke completely misses a communal shout and someone else (we assume) boos the Rolling Stones' name. Let's Spend The Night Together, Mick in a game show jacket and Brian Jones on piano in a rakish hat, is their contribution, followed by Long John Baldry.
Three: Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich! See, they did really exist, and in their world percussion took a time signature floating role. If you've never heard Zabadak, have a check of this as it's a remarkable piece. As is the following, Lulu with the curlers fresh out and performing the really rather great Love Loves To Love Love (a strange choice, given it reached number 32 in Britain), not least for its scorching guitar intro by popular sessioneer Jimmy Page.
Four: Pete Murray is very formal, isn't he? There's a discussion of what happened to flower power before Scott Mackenzie, after which Freeman suggests we "think about the American groups" and stumbles right over Tamla-Motown before introducing dancers the Go-Jos and "all the Top Of The Poppers ready to do the whole bit" to the Supremes.
Five: "The Go-Jos couldn't have any Christmas dinner yesterday as they had to dance like that today!" Cliff has "learnt to live with success", apparently. Murray seems obsessed with the idea of a "standard", although you can't say he's lying when he refers to Whiter Shade Of Pale as an example. Right at the end is an astoundingly nervous girl to the left of Freeman, although maybe if she hadn't worn that sparkly dress and beehive she wouldn't have stood out so much. Or stood just there, obviously.
Six: All You Need Is Love. Nothing really needs adding there.
Seven: And especially not by Saville. Note to Jim - next T-shirt size up. Engelbert Humperdinck finishes the live performances off with whatever the technical opposite of a bang is. There's just time for Alan Freeman to piss himself laughing at Jim's hair getting in a mess before a baffling section of footage of people standing around and messing about in clothing stores and then a full minute or more of the audience self-consciously shuffling before the world's least convincing can-can line breaks out.
LINKS EFFECT
* We're fairly certain we've covered Eardrums Music before, but they really have come good in the last couple of weeks with the second in their series of free download albums, A Good Crop coming in one... two... three... FOUR! parts. Therein you'll find the likes of The Rosie Taylor Project, Darren Hanlon, Fanfarlo, The Kabeedies, Colin Clary, The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart, Sambassadeur, Je Suis Animal, Left With Pictures, Dark Captain Light Captain, The Lodger, Roses Kings Castles (the drummer from Babyshambles - oh, woo), Kotki Dwa and that.
* Say what you like about Foals, but they can choose a support act. Currently trailing them around the country are Wild Beasts, Dananananaykroyd - Calum and John in the crowd at an enormoroom? We'd like to see that - Maps & Atlases and Holy Fuck. The latter's label have pressed up some tour only 7"s of them and the headliners covering each other's songs, and then stuck them online for free, if in the format nobody understands, AIFF. Foals do a fine version of Super Inuit, Holy Fuck slow down Balloons with what seem to be sampled vocals from something else entirely.
* Because we feel the nature of the competition in what should be a sharing blogosphere, and not just because we did so badly last year and messed up the registration process this time around, we didn't enter the BT DMA Blog awards for 2008. It struggled by without our filling a space in the eighties, though, and the full top 100 has been published for us to comb when UK blogger album of the year polling time comes round again (and oh, it will) An Oasis news source won, Mike Skinner makes his traditional appearance at 3 (no David Gilmour this year, though) and Fish, as in Marillion, has his Myspace at 7. I don't think he's quite understood. Our other outlet The Line Of Best Fit comes in at 18, six short of Drowned In Sound, while old friends The Daily Growl, Keep Hope Inside, Fucking Dance and Music Like Dirt all appear among the misplaced Myspaces and blogs that probably aren't British anyway. How did a defunct YouTube account get in at 66?
* So what's the outcome of all this music blogging anyway? Canadian blogger Condemned to Rock 'N Roll wrote its MA paper on the subject, namely "Does NME even know what a music blog is?: The rhetoric and social meaning of MP3 blogs", including contributions from the likes of The Hype Machine, The Torture Garden, Song By Toad (and seeing a whole comments box reproduced takes us aback, not to mention to 'Ctrl+F' just in case - we're not), Chromewaves, Lost In Your Inbox, Culture Bully and Hits In The Car.
* Oh yeah, and if you get some spare minutes go and read Future Of The Left's US tour diary on their Myspace blog, because it's very much of the required Falkous high standard.
Saturday, October 11, 2008
The Weekly Sweep
Wednesday, October 08, 2008
Absolute balance
Of course, nobody ever listens to Virgin Radio out of choice, it's merely 'on' in offices and factories that think their Chasing Cars-all-day-every-day ethos is universal enough for everyone to feast in without actually being the pestilence of local commercial radio, so for anyone new to their advertising account you've got a right job on.
Did we say Virgin? Oh, silly us. Since Branson's company was bought out of their stake in the station it's become Absolute Radio. The way they're advertising this is a) Christian O'Connell putting his name to a book about Being A Man as if it were still 1996 and b) some of the clumsiest, most hateful online advertising we've seen. Let's start, and frankly we could finish here, with the tagline - "DISCOVER REAL MUSIC". "Real music". The worst phrase and concept in the whole world. "Real music" is the phrase that spawned a million popists, the automatic assumption that X is greater than Y where X is Guitar Bands Who Really Mean It As Decreed By Paul Weller - Weller, it often escapes such people's notice, a huge conisseur of soul and rare groove, songs often written for purpose by third parties - and Y is But They Don't Even Write Their Own Songs! (oddly, a concept rarely applied to Sinatra or Presley) Interested in the new Oasis album? No doubt Absolute will have played the whole thing several times over by the end of this week.
Then there's the "cheeky", "irreverent" (you can imagine those phrases in yellow highlighter on the flipchart) set-up lines:
"LIKE GIRL BANDS? wHAT ARE YOU, A LIB DEM MP?"
Yes, Vincent Cable. Notice 'girl bands' rather than 'girl groups', the latter being the Sugababes, the former being Bikini Kill. Somewhere in there is a truth spoken in out, as the demographical assumption with such "real music" lovers is that anything with a girl singing will bring them out in hives. Way to tell large swathes of potential listeners they're unwanted round here, by the way.
"BOY BAND FANS... THERE'S A REGISTER FOR PEOPLE LIKE YOU"
Given the typical boy band fan is a fourteen year old girl we're guessing it's a school register, boy bands not noted for their instant attraction to paedophiles and sex offenders.
"HERPES OR THE CHEEKY GIRLS? IT'S A TOUGH CALL"
Do they only know one girl pop outfit? Still, at least they're differentiating themselves from all those other stations still playing the Cheeky Girls nearly six years later.
"NO WAY, BUBLE!"
Well, that's Michael Parkinson taken care of.
"THE LATE MICHAEL BOLTON. IF ONLY"
Now they're wishing death on innocent people, not least people who haven't had a top 40 single in eleven years. And we tell you what, those stations that endlessly play Richard Marx will get what's coming to them an' all. Incidentally, who'd like to see the TV advert? Suddenly Can I Touch You...There? looks like the soft option against heavy Hoosiers promotion. (The Hoosiers, of course, a so-called "real music" band whose facile marketing spend makes Blue look like Jandek)
And beyond all that, they're really sharpening up the gimmick factor. It's been reported that the station is inviting listeners to sit in on their weekly playlist meetings, because god knows focus grouping has been so successful at carving out an individual approach for commercially funded radio. There's a new tagline, "discover new music" - we look forward to those Rolo Tomassi and Italo-disco sessions. Despite this, according to the Guardian, the station will "put an emphasis on personality DJs". Yeah, that's just what we need. A check of that playlist reveals that, well, you could have written it, although under those strict guidelines surely Duffy and the Ting Tings are more than borderline.
The branding agency employed here previously worked on the faux-naivety and stupid target setting account of Innocent smoothies. It shows.
Did we say Virgin? Oh, silly us. Since Branson's company was bought out of their stake in the station it's become Absolute Radio. The way they're advertising this is a) Christian O'Connell putting his name to a book about Being A Man as if it were still 1996 and b) some of the clumsiest, most hateful online advertising we've seen. Let's start, and frankly we could finish here, with the tagline - "DISCOVER REAL MUSIC". "Real music". The worst phrase and concept in the whole world. "Real music" is the phrase that spawned a million popists, the automatic assumption that X is greater than Y where X is Guitar Bands Who Really Mean It As Decreed By Paul Weller - Weller, it often escapes such people's notice, a huge conisseur of soul and rare groove, songs often written for purpose by third parties - and Y is But They Don't Even Write Their Own Songs! (oddly, a concept rarely applied to Sinatra or Presley) Interested in the new Oasis album? No doubt Absolute will have played the whole thing several times over by the end of this week.
Then there's the "cheeky", "irreverent" (you can imagine those phrases in yellow highlighter on the flipchart) set-up lines:
"LIKE GIRL BANDS? wHAT ARE YOU, A LIB DEM MP?"
Yes, Vincent Cable. Notice 'girl bands' rather than 'girl groups', the latter being the Sugababes, the former being Bikini Kill. Somewhere in there is a truth spoken in out, as the demographical assumption with such "real music" lovers is that anything with a girl singing will bring them out in hives. Way to tell large swathes of potential listeners they're unwanted round here, by the way.
"BOY BAND FANS... THERE'S A REGISTER FOR PEOPLE LIKE YOU"
Given the typical boy band fan is a fourteen year old girl we're guessing it's a school register, boy bands not noted for their instant attraction to paedophiles and sex offenders.
"HERPES OR THE CHEEKY GIRLS? IT'S A TOUGH CALL"
Do they only know one girl pop outfit? Still, at least they're differentiating themselves from all those other stations still playing the Cheeky Girls nearly six years later.
"NO WAY, BUBLE!"
Well, that's Michael Parkinson taken care of.
"THE LATE MICHAEL BOLTON. IF ONLY"
Now they're wishing death on innocent people, not least people who haven't had a top 40 single in eleven years. And we tell you what, those stations that endlessly play Richard Marx will get what's coming to them an' all. Incidentally, who'd like to see the TV advert? Suddenly Can I Touch You...There? looks like the soft option against heavy Hoosiers promotion. (The Hoosiers, of course, a so-called "real music" band whose facile marketing spend makes Blue look like Jandek)
And beyond all that, they're really sharpening up the gimmick factor. It's been reported that the station is inviting listeners to sit in on their weekly playlist meetings, because god knows focus grouping has been so successful at carving out an individual approach for commercially funded radio. There's a new tagline, "discover new music" - we look forward to those Rolo Tomassi and Italo-disco sessions. Despite this, according to the Guardian, the station will "put an emphasis on personality DJs". Yeah, that's just what we need. A check of that playlist reveals that, well, you could have written it, although under those strict guidelines surely Duffy and the Ting Tings are more than borderline.
The branding agency employed here previously worked on the faux-naivety and stupid target setting account of Innocent smoothies. It shows.
Monday, October 06, 2008
Lesson learnt
Here's something of historical value to start the week with. Illegal Art, the property/theft traversing label that puts out Girl Talk and Negativland, are at the end of the month releasing What Does It All Mean? 1983-2006 Retrospective, a grab bag of the career of sampling groundbreaker Steinski, much of it appearing on legal(ish) CD for the first time.
Now, we could leave it there and entrust those reading who don't know of Steinski to head for Google or Wikipedia, but we've all got busy lives to lead, so... Steinski is Steve Stein, a former advertising copywriting hotshot who invented cut and paste sample turntablism. More precisely, in 1983 he entered a Tommy Boy Records remix competition along with his studio working friend Double Dee (Doug DiFranco, if you must know). Both experienced hip-hop heads with enviable collections, they pieced together Lesson 1 – The Payoff Mix, decorating the original song with samples from all over rock'n'roll, disco, funk, soul and early hip-hop, as well as film and spoken samples. Not only did it win, but once served to radio a lot of people suddenly paid attention. The pair followed it up over the next couple of years with Lesson 2 — The James Brown Mix and Lesson 3 — The History of Hip-Hop Mix, both of which were bootleg gold. Although Double Dee threw it in after that, bar a short reunion a decade later, Steinski continued in his own time with original works and remixes of carefully patched together collages and sampledelica, even ending up on a major label for a while, collaborating in recent years with Coldcut, DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist, who've all acknowledged him as a major influence. In fact, CD2 of this retrospective is an hour long mix made for Coldcut's Solid Steel radio show.
Steinski - Lesson 3 (History Of Hip Hop)
This isn't on the album as it was during his tenure on 4th And Broadway. Ovaltine later licensed it for advertising. Ah, sweet irony.
Steinski - We'll Be Right Back
Now, we could leave it there and entrust those reading who don't know of Steinski to head for Google or Wikipedia, but we've all got busy lives to lead, so... Steinski is Steve Stein, a former advertising copywriting hotshot who invented cut and paste sample turntablism. More precisely, in 1983 he entered a Tommy Boy Records remix competition along with his studio working friend Double Dee (Doug DiFranco, if you must know). Both experienced hip-hop heads with enviable collections, they pieced together Lesson 1 – The Payoff Mix, decorating the original song with samples from all over rock'n'roll, disco, funk, soul and early hip-hop, as well as film and spoken samples. Not only did it win, but once served to radio a lot of people suddenly paid attention. The pair followed it up over the next couple of years with Lesson 2 — The James Brown Mix and Lesson 3 — The History of Hip-Hop Mix, both of which were bootleg gold. Although Double Dee threw it in after that, bar a short reunion a decade later, Steinski continued in his own time with original works and remixes of carefully patched together collages and sampledelica, even ending up on a major label for a while, collaborating in recent years with Coldcut, DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist, who've all acknowledged him as a major influence. In fact, CD2 of this retrospective is an hour long mix made for Coldcut's Solid Steel radio show.
Steinski - Lesson 3 (History Of Hip Hop)
This isn't on the album as it was during his tenure on 4th And Broadway. Ovaltine later licensed it for advertising. Ah, sweet irony.
Steinski - We'll Be Right Back
Sunday, October 05, 2008
Weekender : now into its second glorious Wikipedia reference
WHAT CD?
- A really busy week all round, October 6th - not as huge as next week, when we think we have four live end of year album list contenders (and then, if you belive the Los Campesinos! party line, none after that), but churning over plenty of new material nonetheless. Most would start with Oasis, but who gives a shit, whatever people say now come the next one even Noel will admit it was sub-par. That's what he does. No, we're leading this week with a long time STN favourite, sometime contributor - if we're honest, someone we go to more than is decent for either party, if only because he always willingly does good stuff and knows what this thing is - and purveyor of off-centre singer-songwriter-turbo quality. That's right, the second Towers Of London album. Oh, no, hang on. (And yes. Yes, they have.) Jeremy Warmsley, of course, whose How We Became has proved something of a breakthrough already in that a handful of outlets are writing about him in the midst of the current low level chatter about bedroom electro-singer-songwriter stuff (James Yuill, Sam Isaac) with "apparently he's already had an album out, but..." caveats. We haven't heard this one yet, but the whisper is that it's more spacious and more immediately pop hook friendly, which we hope doesn't compromise the dirty electronics and off-kilter constructions that made The Art Of Fiction so excellent. Is he that much closer to the mainstream, especially after headlining Transgressive's Hot Summer tour? Probably not, no, but we wouldn't want him to compromise that much. Oh, and some bigger independent stores have a second CD consisting of both sides of the recent Boat Song/Temptation double A side plus four other new songs.
- On the other hand, offbeat melodic constructs are all very well and good, but sometimes only raw, wiry three piece abrasiveness will do. That's where Popular Workshop come in, a hard gigging London trio who, having taken one look at their inventory of raw, wiry abrasiveness and shouting, decided the only thing that could be done was to make for Electrical Audio Studios post haste. The Steve Albini fingerprints are all over We're Alive And We're Not Alone, but at its core their approach is theirs alone, careering between crashing riffs and urgent rhythms like Wire circa 1977 channelling the spirit of Ikara Colt and Bloc Party and not quite knowing what to do with it.
- What are we to do with Misty's Big Adventure? Now on their own label they're free to pursue their own erratic, eclectic, singular ends, which on Television's People turns out to be a concept. Grandmaster Gareth? "The story is about a man who is too upset to leave the house and too wrapped up in his problems to find anything that will take his mind off them. The only thing that can cut through is the television. We follow him though the course of a cooped-up Saturday, from the early morning advert-laden children's programmes up to lunchtime soaps to the weather and rolling news. He begins to become confused as to whether what he is seeing is actually on TV, or is in fact happening in his mind. Until the man in the Claims Direct advert starts asking him personal questions. Enraged he fights back but in doing so gets sucked into the television where he ends up in the Green Room of Television's Centre waiting to appear on an awful game show. We leave him, along with the game show host and other contestants, waving to the camera." It's inspired by library music compilations and Gruff Rhys is on it crunching vegetabes.
- It really looked for a little while that Land Of Talk were going to get a big push as part of Montreal's second wind, Liz Powell’s emotive voice combined with distorted guitars really putting them in pole position to follow where Throwing Muses left off. Inevitably, and despite hiring Justin 'Bon Iver' Vernon to produce (one track was recorded in the self same now infamous log cabin), Some Are Lakes is hovering on the precipice of attention. A shame if it dropped off, as this is a band who look constantly about to reach that little bit further into indefinable greatness. Also out this week - while Grizzly Bear make the album of 2009 (you've heard While You Wait For The Others, right?) Daniel Rossen activates his duo Department Of Eagles for In Ear Park, which we haven't got round to investigating yet but feel we probably should have done by this point; Maximo Park guitarist Duncan Lloyd bearing a marked resemblance to new wave one hit wonders The Jags, right down to the Costelloish vocal style, on Seeing Double; Kurt Wagner's quest to take Lambchop's country soul power back to the quiet heights last seen on Is A Woman continues, without total success, on Oh (Ohio); and Dawn Landes follows her fine Fireproof album with a first official release for 2005's Dawn's Music.
- Singles too, Foals' Olympic Airways setting the seal on perhaps Britain's most debated and counter-argued band of 2008, but sod them, there's a raucous future of fight-pop ahead. Perhaps Dananananaykroyd do work best live, but Pink Sabbath follows in the Sissy Hits EP's path of actually making that much lauded in your face (literally) post-hardcore energy come to life on vulnerable old record.
- The autumn of Clash promotion continues. Pause for catty comment re turning rebellion into money, continue. Live - Revolution Rock is a collection of rare live footage of that most theatrical of punk bands, battered into narrative shape by - you look surprised - Don Letts and featuring an explanatory voiceover from - bloody hell, was everyone else double booked? - Zane Lowe. White Riot Collectors Box Set - Amazon calls it Should I Stay for some indefinable reason - looks like the sort of thing that'll turn up in The Works within six months, while Live at Shea Stadium is a live album, converted from tapes Mick Jones found in an old lockup (did he really forget he'd put them there, or indeed ever had them?) of what's often described as punk's 1982 stadium apogee even though the band were only supporting the Who. This is probably a good point at which to work in a mention of DVD We Dreamed America, a documentary examining the Americana strain of new British artists. Alabama 3, Kitty Daisy & Lewis, the Broken Family Band, Hey Negrita, Matthew Ord and The Barker Band are the bands captured, Bob Harris, Guy Clark, Tom McRae, Laura Barton, BJ Cole and Sid Griffin among those passing comment.
- And for those days when you just want to wind down with a book full of themed and opinionated top tens, Hang the DJ: An Alternative Book of Music Lists, compiled by the people who did last year's film compendium Ten Bad Dates With De Niro, will do the trick. Simon Reynolds, Kathryn Williams, Tom McRae and David Peace (The Damned United) are among those contributing.
COMING SOON: We've been endlessly plugging the free mp3 of a new Future Of The Left song in the Sweep, but here's an idea of another one from the second album promised next year - recorded at This Ain't No Picnic, Drink Nike. Meanwhile Falco is writing a blog of their current US tour for the NME, which reads much as most of his blogs do.
MYSPACE INVADERS: So it's dubiously Googlable band names now, is it? Following Joy Of Sex the other week come Red Shoe Diaries. Despite featuring members of pre-nu-gaze pedalsmiths Amusement Parks On Fire you'd fear for this sound in a strong wind, but should you like Swedish indiepop and Felt without actually being Stuart Murdoch they're right up your street. Handclaps, the odd organ and trumpet, C86 referencing wistfulness... If you are Stuart Murdoch, don't think too badly of their sound appropriation, we're sure they mean well.
VISUAL AID: Bill Drummond's 17 is ekeing into Waterstones nationwide, and while we ultimately doubt it you do briefly wonder if his current theorising against recorded music is in any way influenced by the way that, having though his whole musical work was now consigned to history when he deleted the KLF's entire back catalogue in 1992, the advent of file sharing and video sites has meant it's all back up for open public sourcing. So, a beginner's guide to being an agent provocateur. Drummond started off with big ideas, working designing the set for and being heavily influenced by the great and recently sadly deceased Ken Campbell's The Illuminatus! Trilogy stage show (this is him discussing it at the Robert Anton Wilson tribute night in March 2007 in two parts - it's not the most conventional tribute you'll ever hear paid, natch), then formed Big In Japan, started Zoo Records, managed Echo & The Bunnymen and The Teardrop Explodes, then formed The Justified Ancients Of Mu Mu, chanced a number one with The Timelords and wrote The Manual to explain it, became the KLF and made the great ambient album Chill Out, then invented stadium house with the triptych of What Time Is Love?, 3am Eternal and Justified And Ancient, in the midst of which came a brief return to Mu Mu land, It's Grim Up North. Eventually the self-mythologising gave way to something more extreme, losing some money along the way and then hoping someone would explain it to them. In all honesty, we doubt The Late Late Show was the best place to try.
LINKS EFFECT
* With John Peel Day coming up Dandelion Radio have begun the nomination process for their third officially approved running of the Festive 50. Atlas won it last year, Tall Pony's I'm Your Boyfriend Now victorious in 2006, who follows them is up to you.
* Here's the sort of discussion topic tailor made for the subject - the current rustic pleasures of British Sea Power.
- A really busy week all round, October 6th - not as huge as next week, when we think we have four live end of year album list contenders (and then, if you belive the Los Campesinos! party line, none after that), but churning over plenty of new material nonetheless. Most would start with Oasis, but who gives a shit, whatever people say now come the next one even Noel will admit it was sub-par. That's what he does. No, we're leading this week with a long time STN favourite, sometime contributor - if we're honest, someone we go to more than is decent for either party, if only because he always willingly does good stuff and knows what this thing is - and purveyor of off-centre singer-songwriter-turbo quality. That's right, the second Towers Of London album. Oh, no, hang on. (And yes. Yes, they have.) Jeremy Warmsley, of course, whose How We Became has proved something of a breakthrough already in that a handful of outlets are writing about him in the midst of the current low level chatter about bedroom electro-singer-songwriter stuff (James Yuill, Sam Isaac) with "apparently he's already had an album out, but..." caveats. We haven't heard this one yet, but the whisper is that it's more spacious and more immediately pop hook friendly, which we hope doesn't compromise the dirty electronics and off-kilter constructions that made The Art Of Fiction so excellent. Is he that much closer to the mainstream, especially after headlining Transgressive's Hot Summer tour? Probably not, no, but we wouldn't want him to compromise that much. Oh, and some bigger independent stores have a second CD consisting of both sides of the recent Boat Song/Temptation double A side plus four other new songs.
- On the other hand, offbeat melodic constructs are all very well and good, but sometimes only raw, wiry three piece abrasiveness will do. That's where Popular Workshop come in, a hard gigging London trio who, having taken one look at their inventory of raw, wiry abrasiveness and shouting, decided the only thing that could be done was to make for Electrical Audio Studios post haste. The Steve Albini fingerprints are all over We're Alive And We're Not Alone, but at its core their approach is theirs alone, careering between crashing riffs and urgent rhythms like Wire circa 1977 channelling the spirit of Ikara Colt and Bloc Party and not quite knowing what to do with it.
- What are we to do with Misty's Big Adventure? Now on their own label they're free to pursue their own erratic, eclectic, singular ends, which on Television's People turns out to be a concept. Grandmaster Gareth? "The story is about a man who is too upset to leave the house and too wrapped up in his problems to find anything that will take his mind off them. The only thing that can cut through is the television. We follow him though the course of a cooped-up Saturday, from the early morning advert-laden children's programmes up to lunchtime soaps to the weather and rolling news. He begins to become confused as to whether what he is seeing is actually on TV, or is in fact happening in his mind. Until the man in the Claims Direct advert starts asking him personal questions. Enraged he fights back but in doing so gets sucked into the television where he ends up in the Green Room of Television's Centre waiting to appear on an awful game show. We leave him, along with the game show host and other contestants, waving to the camera." It's inspired by library music compilations and Gruff Rhys is on it crunching vegetabes.
- It really looked for a little while that Land Of Talk were going to get a big push as part of Montreal's second wind, Liz Powell’s emotive voice combined with distorted guitars really putting them in pole position to follow where Throwing Muses left off. Inevitably, and despite hiring Justin 'Bon Iver' Vernon to produce (one track was recorded in the self same now infamous log cabin), Some Are Lakes is hovering on the precipice of attention. A shame if it dropped off, as this is a band who look constantly about to reach that little bit further into indefinable greatness. Also out this week - while Grizzly Bear make the album of 2009 (you've heard While You Wait For The Others, right?) Daniel Rossen activates his duo Department Of Eagles for In Ear Park, which we haven't got round to investigating yet but feel we probably should have done by this point; Maximo Park guitarist Duncan Lloyd bearing a marked resemblance to new wave one hit wonders The Jags, right down to the Costelloish vocal style, on Seeing Double; Kurt Wagner's quest to take Lambchop's country soul power back to the quiet heights last seen on Is A Woman continues, without total success, on Oh (Ohio); and Dawn Landes follows her fine Fireproof album with a first official release for 2005's Dawn's Music.
- Singles too, Foals' Olympic Airways setting the seal on perhaps Britain's most debated and counter-argued band of 2008, but sod them, there's a raucous future of fight-pop ahead. Perhaps Dananananaykroyd do work best live, but Pink Sabbath follows in the Sissy Hits EP's path of actually making that much lauded in your face (literally) post-hardcore energy come to life on vulnerable old record.
- The autumn of Clash promotion continues. Pause for catty comment re turning rebellion into money, continue. Live - Revolution Rock is a collection of rare live footage of that most theatrical of punk bands, battered into narrative shape by - you look surprised - Don Letts and featuring an explanatory voiceover from - bloody hell, was everyone else double booked? - Zane Lowe. White Riot Collectors Box Set - Amazon calls it Should I Stay for some indefinable reason - looks like the sort of thing that'll turn up in The Works within six months, while Live at Shea Stadium is a live album, converted from tapes Mick Jones found in an old lockup (did he really forget he'd put them there, or indeed ever had them?) of what's often described as punk's 1982 stadium apogee even though the band were only supporting the Who. This is probably a good point at which to work in a mention of DVD We Dreamed America, a documentary examining the Americana strain of new British artists. Alabama 3, Kitty Daisy & Lewis, the Broken Family Band, Hey Negrita, Matthew Ord and The Barker Band are the bands captured, Bob Harris, Guy Clark, Tom McRae, Laura Barton, BJ Cole and Sid Griffin among those passing comment.
- And for those days when you just want to wind down with a book full of themed and opinionated top tens, Hang the DJ: An Alternative Book of Music Lists, compiled by the people who did last year's film compendium Ten Bad Dates With De Niro, will do the trick. Simon Reynolds, Kathryn Williams, Tom McRae and David Peace (The Damned United) are among those contributing.
COMING SOON: We've been endlessly plugging the free mp3 of a new Future Of The Left song in the Sweep, but here's an idea of another one from the second album promised next year - recorded at This Ain't No Picnic, Drink Nike. Meanwhile Falco is writing a blog of their current US tour for the NME, which reads much as most of his blogs do.
MYSPACE INVADERS: So it's dubiously Googlable band names now, is it? Following Joy Of Sex the other week come Red Shoe Diaries. Despite featuring members of pre-nu-gaze pedalsmiths Amusement Parks On Fire you'd fear for this sound in a strong wind, but should you like Swedish indiepop and Felt without actually being Stuart Murdoch they're right up your street. Handclaps, the odd organ and trumpet, C86 referencing wistfulness... If you are Stuart Murdoch, don't think too badly of their sound appropriation, we're sure they mean well.
VISUAL AID: Bill Drummond's 17 is ekeing into Waterstones nationwide, and while we ultimately doubt it you do briefly wonder if his current theorising against recorded music is in any way influenced by the way that, having though his whole musical work was now consigned to history when he deleted the KLF's entire back catalogue in 1992, the advent of file sharing and video sites has meant it's all back up for open public sourcing. So, a beginner's guide to being an agent provocateur. Drummond started off with big ideas, working designing the set for and being heavily influenced by the great and recently sadly deceased Ken Campbell's The Illuminatus! Trilogy stage show (this is him discussing it at the Robert Anton Wilson tribute night in March 2007 in two parts - it's not the most conventional tribute you'll ever hear paid, natch), then formed Big In Japan, started Zoo Records, managed Echo & The Bunnymen and The Teardrop Explodes, then formed The Justified Ancients Of Mu Mu, chanced a number one with The Timelords and wrote The Manual to explain it, became the KLF and made the great ambient album Chill Out, then invented stadium house with the triptych of What Time Is Love?, 3am Eternal and Justified And Ancient, in the midst of which came a brief return to Mu Mu land, It's Grim Up North. Eventually the self-mythologising gave way to something more extreme, losing some money along the way and then hoping someone would explain it to them. In all honesty, we doubt The Late Late Show was the best place to try.
LINKS EFFECT
* With John Peel Day coming up Dandelion Radio have begun the nomination process for their third officially approved running of the Festive 50. Atlas won it last year, Tall Pony's I'm Your Boyfriend Now victorious in 2006, who follows them is up to you.
* Here's the sort of discussion topic tailor made for the subject - the current rustic pleasures of British Sea Power.
Saturday, October 04, 2008
The Weekly Sweep
Friday, October 03, 2008
Punk rock will never die
Not for as long as John Lydon, a man we steadfastly refuse to refer to by his other name, is "shockingly" doing butter adverts.
Because that's exactly what he does now, isn't it? His entire career now is based on the hypothesis "what would people not expect me to say and do?", hence I'm A Celebrity, Judge Judy, the skateboarding videos he presented, the claim he wants to duet with Kylie, the innumerable identikit interviews in which he claims X were punk and Y wasn't in which X is a hoary old American trad rock outfit and Y is a sacred cow of 1977... basically, Lydon is Ozzy Osbourne with a different accent. You'll notice that while he's ever willing to play himself up as both an establishment threat and a national treasure he seems reticent these days to talk about the project closest to himself, Public Image Ltd, to the extent that the whole Kele Okerele fracas started when Kele suggested Lydon should have reformed PiL instead.
Doesn't this whole thing blow the long unsteady foundations of Punk Ethics up, though? You can't call Lydon a sellout because he was doing that in 1982 when he toured PiL with a scratch band, let alone the Pistols reformations. (Odd, isn't it, that after so much criticism of Malcolm McLaren's commodification of the Pistols he's gone to play ball) For a movement that was all about the youthful, DIY here and now we've ended up with Punk Weekenders, Jamie Reid exhibitions and the Clash back catalogue recycled as much as Dylan's or the Stones'. And yet it's still presented as the spirit of the Westway and the 100 Club still being alive, rather than never dying because it's been cryogenically frozen. Meanwhile, we wait to see which resort Lydon will be playing Bubbles at over next Christmas.
Can't wait to see the comments box.
Because that's exactly what he does now, isn't it? His entire career now is based on the hypothesis "what would people not expect me to say and do?", hence I'm A Celebrity, Judge Judy, the skateboarding videos he presented, the claim he wants to duet with Kylie, the innumerable identikit interviews in which he claims X were punk and Y wasn't in which X is a hoary old American trad rock outfit and Y is a sacred cow of 1977... basically, Lydon is Ozzy Osbourne with a different accent. You'll notice that while he's ever willing to play himself up as both an establishment threat and a national treasure he seems reticent these days to talk about the project closest to himself, Public Image Ltd, to the extent that the whole Kele Okerele fracas started when Kele suggested Lydon should have reformed PiL instead.
Doesn't this whole thing blow the long unsteady foundations of Punk Ethics up, though? You can't call Lydon a sellout because he was doing that in 1982 when he toured PiL with a scratch band, let alone the Pistols reformations. (Odd, isn't it, that after so much criticism of Malcolm McLaren's commodification of the Pistols he's gone to play ball) For a movement that was all about the youthful, DIY here and now we've ended up with Punk Weekenders, Jamie Reid exhibitions and the Clash back catalogue recycled as much as Dylan's or the Stones'. And yet it's still presented as the spirit of the Westway and the 100 Club still being alive, rather than never dying because it's been cryogenically frozen. Meanwhile, we wait to see which resort Lydon will be playing Bubbles at over next Christmas.
Can't wait to see the comments box.
Thursday, October 02, 2008
Your ideas are welcome
Following the success of the C97 and C98 Covermounts last year, picking out under the radar and lesser remembered tracks from those years, we're planning a C99 probably some time next month. We've got a bountiful list already, but we're willing to throw it open to the floor - any suggestions?
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Celebrity Playlist #5: Gossamer Albatross
And so, part one of two of our Playlist preview of This Ain't No Picnic, which due to response times and so forth comes in the week following Smalltown America's weekender, arrives in the shape of Gossamer Albatross, the Hereford largely teenage collective whose baroque folk has been much admired here for a while and will be so by more people when their debut 7" is out on October 27th. This is the music that made them:
(from Lewis)
This Ain't Vegas - Short Term Long Term
Absolutely one of my favourite songs ever. The drums, bass and guitar are so muscular but it’s counteracted by the singers vulnerable and uncertain lyrics. Every drum fill, bass note, guitar strum and vocal strain is needed. The chord sequence in the chorus is also insanely good. It gives me goosebumps.
Bright Eyes - Bowl Of Oranges
It’s perfect apart from the couple of minutes of noise at the end. His lyrics are the bomb and this song is one of the best examples of amazing lyrics coupled with a beautiful little melody. “And every time you feel like crying, I'm gonna try and make you laugh!” Yes Conor!
Death Cab For Cutie - A Movie Script Ending
Possibly my favourite Death Cab song. I’m a massive Death Cab nerd and love just about everything they’ve ever released. Ben Gibbard is a genius and along with Conor, John and Sufjan make up my favourite song writers.
R Kelly - Ignition
Me and Ben (our bass player) were singing this song in the pub last night to the utter dismay of all our friends. It was awesome. This song always puts me in a good mood. Sliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiick. It’s the freakin weekend baby I’m about to have me some fun!
50 Cent - Candy Shop
Really fucking dirty beats. They’re my favourite. This song is awesome.
(from Geena)
Coco Rosie - Werewolf
I absolutely adore this song, with its haunting father/lover parallels set against an achingly beautiful backdrop. Lyrics are a very important part of music for me, and without sounding like some arty prick I love this song even more for its parallels with Plath's 'Daddy', which is one of my favourite poems.
Tunng - Bullets
I find Bullets so bittersweet, and love the irony of searching for insight through religion, through pain just to forget and repeat old mistakes.
The Microphones - I Felt Your Heart
This song makes me tear up in the most fantastic way. Despite being only 1:56 long, Elvrum manages to squash, sit on and tie my heart into a figure-of-eight knot within the duration of this song.
Aphex Twin - Avril 14th
It's sounds so simple, and sends me into this dream-like state. I just think the piano sounds beautiful.
Final Fantasy - The CN Tower Belongs To The Dead
Best thing I've seen live to date, literally grinned ear to ear from start to finish. The string arrangement at 2:00 is just to die for.
Belle and Sebastian - A Summer Wasting
About two of the best things, summer holidays and spending it with friends. I think the mistake 'seven years of river walk ways' instead of seven weeks is deliberate because the song is about the wasted summer holiday that was seven weeks. Its like when The Beatles recorded the wrong name in their song Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da but left it as it was as recording can be so time consuming and expensive.
(And one from Reuben)
Yeasayer - 2080
Couldn't really say what I like about it exactly, the harmonies are perfect, I think I just like the way they use such a ridiculously diverse set of influences and still manage to make it sound amazing!
(from Lewis)
This Ain't Vegas - Short Term Long Term
Absolutely one of my favourite songs ever. The drums, bass and guitar are so muscular but it’s counteracted by the singers vulnerable and uncertain lyrics. Every drum fill, bass note, guitar strum and vocal strain is needed. The chord sequence in the chorus is also insanely good. It gives me goosebumps.
Bright Eyes - Bowl Of Oranges
It’s perfect apart from the couple of minutes of noise at the end. His lyrics are the bomb and this song is one of the best examples of amazing lyrics coupled with a beautiful little melody. “And every time you feel like crying, I'm gonna try and make you laugh!” Yes Conor!
Death Cab For Cutie - A Movie Script Ending
Possibly my favourite Death Cab song. I’m a massive Death Cab nerd and love just about everything they’ve ever released. Ben Gibbard is a genius and along with Conor, John and Sufjan make up my favourite song writers.
R Kelly - Ignition
Me and Ben (our bass player) were singing this song in the pub last night to the utter dismay of all our friends. It was awesome. This song always puts me in a good mood. Sliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiick. It’s the freakin weekend baby I’m about to have me some fun!
50 Cent - Candy Shop
Really fucking dirty beats. They’re my favourite. This song is awesome.
(from Geena)
Coco Rosie - Werewolf
I absolutely adore this song, with its haunting father/lover parallels set against an achingly beautiful backdrop. Lyrics are a very important part of music for me, and without sounding like some arty prick I love this song even more for its parallels with Plath's 'Daddy', which is one of my favourite poems.
Tunng - Bullets
I find Bullets so bittersweet, and love the irony of searching for insight through religion, through pain just to forget and repeat old mistakes.
The Microphones - I Felt Your Heart
This song makes me tear up in the most fantastic way. Despite being only 1:56 long, Elvrum manages to squash, sit on and tie my heart into a figure-of-eight knot within the duration of this song.
Aphex Twin - Avril 14th
It's sounds so simple, and sends me into this dream-like state. I just think the piano sounds beautiful.
Final Fantasy - The CN Tower Belongs To The Dead
Best thing I've seen live to date, literally grinned ear to ear from start to finish. The string arrangement at 2:00 is just to die for.
Belle and Sebastian - A Summer Wasting
About two of the best things, summer holidays and spending it with friends. I think the mistake 'seven years of river walk ways' instead of seven weeks is deliberate because the song is about the wasted summer holiday that was seven weeks. Its like when The Beatles recorded the wrong name in their song Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da but left it as it was as recording can be so time consuming and expensive.
(And one from Reuben)
Yeasayer - 2080
Couldn't really say what I like about it exactly, the harmonies are perfect, I think I just like the way they use such a ridiculously diverse set of influences and still manage to make it sound amazing!
Monday, September 29, 2008
Weekender : 'fresh' from This Ain't No Picnic, greatly enjoying the eccentric stapling of the programme
WHAT CD?
- After the still astounding war on post-Strokesism that was The Rat, and the highly impressive Bows + Arrows album it came encased in, The Walkmen seemed to lose their way a bit with 2006's A Hundred Miles Off, like they'd worn themselves out with all the energetic intensity they'd put into that earlier record. The track by track cover of Harry Nilsson's Pussycats album that followed did nobody any justice, except perhaps Mama Cass and Keith Moon (look it up). It's good, then, that whatever mojo went missing in that excursion into post-OC Latino influenced flatness they've picked themselves up, given themselves a shot of adrenaline and come back with You And Me. Don't think The Rat in terms of this album, more the fuzzed out widescreen of We've Been Had or New Years Eve; the early morning after the night before with just the memories and mistakes to go on. Hamilton Leithauser still sings like a man harbouring a personal grudge against the world and the music follows him introspectively down, again dropping in retro influences most of their contemporaries wouldn't touch but so subtly so as you almost don't notice. Finally they've found a side that does their post-Rat ethics justice.
- It seems like most of our life has passed since we first mentioned that the Hot Puppies had recorded an album called Blue Hands and had it ready for release whenever someone was ready to do the deed. The first single King Of England in fact came out last July, but this week that second album, or third, or first proper, it depends on which calculation you're using, lands and while hardly anything's worth that wait it's still as glamorously sophisticated as you'd expect from a band who tote their references. In terms of influences it screeches from early 80s electro to Kate Bush to New Pop to Bowie to the Cure while remaining as a whole, and while we can't claim they all come off with the same style at least they're giving it a go and coming up trumps more often than not, elevated even more than on Under The Crooked Moon by Becki Wood (nee Newman)'s dramatic soaring voice. Wood is eight months pregnant, by the way. What was that about release timing? (Also worth a glance this week: Mercury Rev got lost in a decade of over-emoting trying to follow up Deserter's Songs, so Snowflake Midnight stripping things back a bit comes as a welcome move)
- Good selection of singles this week, with Elbow on a download only unnecessary prop-up of the newly reinvigorated Seldom Seen Kid with The Bones Of You, while Those Dancing Days for some reason pick out one of their album's lesser lights, Home Sweet Home, and Kingston upon Thames trio Tubelord lay down further foundation evidence of their position as much touted "neo-emo math-punk-hardcore" (thank you, This Ain't No Picnic programme - god, we hope the bands followed our example and didn't get given a copy) contenders with I Am Azzerad. We'd like to guide you, moreover, towards Nat Johnson, formerly of Monkey Swallows The Universe, whose demos showed great wide ranging promise and chooses to start properly with the earworm-ridden jangling rockabilly of Dirty Rotten Soul. The B-side is a tearful folk rendition of a Cake song, if you can imagine such a thing.
- The Clash are about as anthologised as they were self-mythologising - Westway To The World and The Future Is Unwritten on screen, Last Gang In Town and Passion Is A Fashion in print. This month, however, the legacy is really being mimed with a CD and DVD next week helping ensure Don Letts need never go hungry again, and this week The Clash documenting the interviews Joe, Mick, Paul and Topper gave towards the making of Westway To The World, inevitably heralded as "in their own words for the first time". No, that was Westway To The World itself. Unseen photos and historical documents too? Well, obviously.
- On the other end of the scale, The Rough Guide To The Best Music You've Never Heard is a hand-sized documentation of the underachieving and cult artists and lost classics that haven't yet ascended to the status of genuine lost legends a la Drake or Buckley. The only artist mentioned by name in the blurb is David Ackles, which is fine by us. There's also tales of scrapped albums and side projects that never got off the ground, as well as "contributions from music industry insiders including Bat For Lashes". Hold up a bit, Natasha's not that influential a name yet.
MYSPACE INVADERS: Many moons ago it was Song, By Toad (see sidebar) that put us onto the great Broken Records, and they've recently repeated the trick with another set of emotionally charged Edinburgh types. Meursault, who've just released an album called Pissing on Bonfires/Kissing with Tongues, available pretty much only through the usual PayPal link on their Myspace. Theirs is a possibly unique when deployed in this way combination of lo-fi but defiant electronica, modern folky standbys of accordions and ukeleles, and Neil Pennycook’s cracked howl at the world, a fearsome and fearful lyrical content to match. It comes across like Band Of Horses taking on the Postal Service only to do it wrongly, on purpose. Where does it fit in? Well, apart from the odd wade into Jonquil territory, it doesn't, and that's all you really want.
VISUAL AID: We're always keen to find a US kids' show that blurs the boundaries between mainstream and just odd looking, and previously Pancake Mountain has more than fulfilled our needs with its Metric and its Subways and its Go! Team. However, that show is only on public access TV in Washington, whereas the manic felt world of Yo Gabba Gabba! is on Nickelodeon, and we believe it's on Nick Jr over here. Creator Christian Jacobs is also leader of oddball faux-superhero ska-punks The Aquabats and as such has his connections - Biz Markie and Devo's Mark Mothersbaugh appear in occasional slots while the odd band has been in the studio, including The Shins with a specially written song, Hot Hot Heat in some sort of Monkees-esque outdoor hootenanny, a far too chipper for their own good Jimmy Eat World and Cornelius launching Count Five Or Six at ver kids, with a bit of Biz at the end. Low didn't appear in the studio - that would have been just too bizarre - but they did lend Family Tree to an animation. We gather Scott Mills has done some sort of Yo Gabba Gabba/That's Not My Name comedy mashup, but frankly we can go one better than that with said band actually on a forthcoming show issuing a version, in the same way the seige of Stalingrad was a version of normal Russian city life, of Altered Images' Happy Birthday. Emote on those drums, White! (And yes, apparently that is John Reis from Hot Snakes and Drive Like Jehu, but we suspect you'd better know as Speedo from Rocket From The Crypt, introducing them)
LINKS EFFECT
* Pushed for time and short of stuff this week, but any time is the right time for a blog like Pyrolyse Bred, which is digitising all its vinyl and old cassettes, including, in the last few days, Kenickie's Catsuit City.
* Meanwhile, some people you may know have been to Japan.
- After the still astounding war on post-Strokesism that was The Rat, and the highly impressive Bows + Arrows album it came encased in, The Walkmen seemed to lose their way a bit with 2006's A Hundred Miles Off, like they'd worn themselves out with all the energetic intensity they'd put into that earlier record. The track by track cover of Harry Nilsson's Pussycats album that followed did nobody any justice, except perhaps Mama Cass and Keith Moon (look it up). It's good, then, that whatever mojo went missing in that excursion into post-OC Latino influenced flatness they've picked themselves up, given themselves a shot of adrenaline and come back with You And Me. Don't think The Rat in terms of this album, more the fuzzed out widescreen of We've Been Had or New Years Eve; the early morning after the night before with just the memories and mistakes to go on. Hamilton Leithauser still sings like a man harbouring a personal grudge against the world and the music follows him introspectively down, again dropping in retro influences most of their contemporaries wouldn't touch but so subtly so as you almost don't notice. Finally they've found a side that does their post-Rat ethics justice.
- It seems like most of our life has passed since we first mentioned that the Hot Puppies had recorded an album called Blue Hands and had it ready for release whenever someone was ready to do the deed. The first single King Of England in fact came out last July, but this week that second album, or third, or first proper, it depends on which calculation you're using, lands and while hardly anything's worth that wait it's still as glamorously sophisticated as you'd expect from a band who tote their references. In terms of influences it screeches from early 80s electro to Kate Bush to New Pop to Bowie to the Cure while remaining as a whole, and while we can't claim they all come off with the same style at least they're giving it a go and coming up trumps more often than not, elevated even more than on Under The Crooked Moon by Becki Wood (nee Newman)'s dramatic soaring voice. Wood is eight months pregnant, by the way. What was that about release timing? (Also worth a glance this week: Mercury Rev got lost in a decade of over-emoting trying to follow up Deserter's Songs, so Snowflake Midnight stripping things back a bit comes as a welcome move)
- Good selection of singles this week, with Elbow on a download only unnecessary prop-up of the newly reinvigorated Seldom Seen Kid with The Bones Of You, while Those Dancing Days for some reason pick out one of their album's lesser lights, Home Sweet Home, and Kingston upon Thames trio Tubelord lay down further foundation evidence of their position as much touted "neo-emo math-punk-hardcore" (thank you, This Ain't No Picnic programme - god, we hope the bands followed our example and didn't get given a copy) contenders with I Am Azzerad. We'd like to guide you, moreover, towards Nat Johnson, formerly of Monkey Swallows The Universe, whose demos showed great wide ranging promise and chooses to start properly with the earworm-ridden jangling rockabilly of Dirty Rotten Soul. The B-side is a tearful folk rendition of a Cake song, if you can imagine such a thing.
- The Clash are about as anthologised as they were self-mythologising - Westway To The World and The Future Is Unwritten on screen, Last Gang In Town and Passion Is A Fashion in print. This month, however, the legacy is really being mimed with a CD and DVD next week helping ensure Don Letts need never go hungry again, and this week The Clash documenting the interviews Joe, Mick, Paul and Topper gave towards the making of Westway To The World, inevitably heralded as "in their own words for the first time". No, that was Westway To The World itself. Unseen photos and historical documents too? Well, obviously.
- On the other end of the scale, The Rough Guide To The Best Music You've Never Heard is a hand-sized documentation of the underachieving and cult artists and lost classics that haven't yet ascended to the status of genuine lost legends a la Drake or Buckley. The only artist mentioned by name in the blurb is David Ackles, which is fine by us. There's also tales of scrapped albums and side projects that never got off the ground, as well as "contributions from music industry insiders including Bat For Lashes". Hold up a bit, Natasha's not that influential a name yet.
MYSPACE INVADERS: Many moons ago it was Song, By Toad (see sidebar) that put us onto the great Broken Records, and they've recently repeated the trick with another set of emotionally charged Edinburgh types. Meursault, who've just released an album called Pissing on Bonfires/Kissing with Tongues, available pretty much only through the usual PayPal link on their Myspace. Theirs is a possibly unique when deployed in this way combination of lo-fi but defiant electronica, modern folky standbys of accordions and ukeleles, and Neil Pennycook’s cracked howl at the world, a fearsome and fearful lyrical content to match. It comes across like Band Of Horses taking on the Postal Service only to do it wrongly, on purpose. Where does it fit in? Well, apart from the odd wade into Jonquil territory, it doesn't, and that's all you really want.
VISUAL AID: We're always keen to find a US kids' show that blurs the boundaries between mainstream and just odd looking, and previously Pancake Mountain has more than fulfilled our needs with its Metric and its Subways and its Go! Team. However, that show is only on public access TV in Washington, whereas the manic felt world of Yo Gabba Gabba! is on Nickelodeon, and we believe it's on Nick Jr over here. Creator Christian Jacobs is also leader of oddball faux-superhero ska-punks The Aquabats and as such has his connections - Biz Markie and Devo's Mark Mothersbaugh appear in occasional slots while the odd band has been in the studio, including The Shins with a specially written song, Hot Hot Heat in some sort of Monkees-esque outdoor hootenanny, a far too chipper for their own good Jimmy Eat World and Cornelius launching Count Five Or Six at ver kids, with a bit of Biz at the end. Low didn't appear in the studio - that would have been just too bizarre - but they did lend Family Tree to an animation. We gather Scott Mills has done some sort of Yo Gabba Gabba/That's Not My Name comedy mashup, but frankly we can go one better than that with said band actually on a forthcoming show issuing a version, in the same way the seige of Stalingrad was a version of normal Russian city life, of Altered Images' Happy Birthday. Emote on those drums, White! (And yes, apparently that is John Reis from Hot Snakes and Drive Like Jehu, but we suspect you'd better know as Speedo from Rocket From The Crypt, introducing them)
LINKS EFFECT
* Pushed for time and short of stuff this week, but any time is the right time for a blog like Pyrolyse Bred, which is digitising all its vinyl and old cassettes, including, in the last few days, Kenickie's Catsuit City.
* Meanwhile, some people you may know have been to Japan.
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