Week 13

Damn this "being organised and structured about music" thing is hard. Too many diversions. But pressing on...

Tindersticks/The Something Rain (last12mths & new2me)
Bill Nelson/Model Village (last12mths & new2me)
Gil Evans Orchestra/Out Of The Cool
Bap Kennedy/The Sailor's Revenge (last12mths & new2me)
Wire/Red Barked Tree

Plenty of recent stuff, plenty of new stuff. And a cool jazz classic on Impulse! Yum.

Echo And The Bunnymen/Crocodiles

Oh man. Just that sleeve is enough really isn't it?! The coolest of the cool. I seem to recall that I built up the release of this album in a quite massive way. It could only disappoint. But it didn't. It was even better. I think that fade-in on the opener Going Up and the resulting crash into the first verse was probably what did it. They could have sung bloody nursery rhymes after that and I would have loved it.

I was lucky in that I was over in Liverpool a lot in the early 80's due to my pal going to University there. So all that Mac, Copey, Wylie - Crucial Three malarkey...I was well into it. It was mostly about out-cooling everyone else, but the fact that the records were so good, made you forgive the cliquey...chaps.

Going back to the beginning with the Bunnymen you need to hear the first Peel session. With the drum machine, Echo. They didn't really sound like anyone else back then. Like almost every band they became more and more rockist (remember that term? NME, I think) as they went on. Understandable I guess, but aspiring to become what U2 became is never a good thing is it?

Album of the week.

Johnny Cash/American V A Hundred Highways

Part of one of my favourite "series" of albums ever. The Man In Black produced by hip-hop legend Rick Rubin. What a combination.
I have always liked Johnny Cash, but along with a lot of musicians who emerged when he did, by the time I first became aware of them it was probably the 1970's and some of these guys were starting to get into a very MOR kinda style. Playing Vegas, national US TV specials etc. If they were English they would probably have been doing the musical spot on The Two Ronnies and gigging round the chicken-in-a-basket circuit. That kinda thing. And Johnny Cash is no Barbara Dixon.
So by whatever amazing set of circumstances, in the mid-90's JC and RR teamed up to make what became known as the American Recordings. A bunch of albums predominantly featuring covers of a very diverse and wide-ranging bunch of songs, recorded in a very un-Vegas way. Mostly acoustic guitars. Girls (the band, not the gender), take note.
By the time they got to A Hundred Highways in 2003 (released in 2006), our Johnny's health was deteriorating markedly. His voice is shaky, its power and verve as heard on the classics of the 50's & 60's and those wonderful prison albums, is reduced to that of a frail old man. But my God it is more affecting than any voice you will ever hear.
Some kind of a wonderful connection was made when I first heard his version on here of Rod Mckuen's Love's Been Good To Me. Just a few years earlier I had seen my musical hero Edwyn Collins sing the same song at a little pub gig in the Scottish Highlands. He mentioned that Roddy Frame had taught him it. It is difficult to put into words what connections like that do to you, but it involves backbones quivering that's for sure.

I have been a rover
I have walked alone
Hiked a hundred highways
Never found a home

A Hundred Highways

Nic Jones/Penguin Eggs

I am afraid this didn't work for me at all. For some reason I was expecting something along the lines of Nick Drake, but this is just way too "of it's genre" (what an awful turn of phrase - but it describes what I mean) for me. It is a straight English folk album. And the guy is clearly an excellent guitar player but the songs just didn't connect. After watching and thoroughly enjoying Pentangle at Glastonbury last year, one of Bert Jansch's last performances (he said, rapidly trying to get his folk credentials in some sorta shape), I think I do know a bit about English folk, but when I do like it, it is when it has taken the traditional elements and added something unique. This isn't that. I have probably insulted some serious folkies but I can't pretend I like it so...

Penguin Eggs

Bob Dylan/John Wesley Harding

Firstly Dylan is back on Spotify so that is cool. This is the 8th and final album in the utterly ace Original Mono Recordings box set. Albeit in some territories there is a 9th album, an in concert recording from Brandeis University in 1963. Annoyingly the mono box isn't available in the UK on Spotify, but the 9th disc is. Got it? Good. Oh and the box comes with a free download code for the essential Positively 4th Street A-side. Which is also available on Spotify in the UK. Moving on...

John Wesley Harding has never been a huge favourite of mine but listening to it this time round it does make perfect sense in the Dylan canon. Coming at a time when he, for various planned and unplanned reasons, put his foot on the brake of the runaway train that was his stunningly talented career, it is mostly an easy listen compared to what had come before. Country tinged from the title track opener through to the almost MOR ballad I'll Be Your Baby Tonight, it does occasionally touch on the more serious on I Dreamed I Saw St Augustine and I Pity The Poor Immigrant. And of course it features his own version of the song immortalised, and taken to levels way above this, by one Jimi Hendrix in All Along The Watchtower. Check XTC's version as well.

Girls/Father, Son, Holy Ghost

Ok so I have been playing Father, Son, Holy Ghost a good bit these last couple of weeks (yes I am aware I have been a bit lazy on the old blog updating front - had stuff to do - ok?!), and getting similarly annoyed at my lack of ability to "nail" where it was coming from, what it was all about etc, as when I listened to Kaputt by Destroyer  back in January.
Girls cover a wide range of musical styles from indie rock through prog to almost straight metal and various other things in between. And they are very adept at what they do. But I don't like it. And I had no idea how to explain why I didn't like it until I read part of Simon Reynolds' latest book Retromania. He talks about musicians nowadays suffering from "glutted/clotted" syndrome. In other words because they have such easy/cheap access to a huge history of 50+ years of "rock" music, their influences are so huge they feel they have to fit in as much of it as possible into their music and as such the music comes across as glutted with influences, unable to really make its own unique mark on the world and thus old Johnny Listener gets incredibly confused with what he is hearing. The end result being a dissatisfying listening experience, mainly because there is "too bloody much going on".
These guys are obviously very talented but I just want them to sit down with a snare drum, acoustic guitars and play some of these lovely songs all stripped down. Well specifically Saying I Love You, as it is the only song I really understood. It is a lovely indie ballad mind.

An Announcement

One is too pooped to pop. Tune in next weekend.

Week 11/52

Isn't time flying? Week 11 already blah, blah, blah, nearly Easter ner, ner, ner.

Girls/Father, Son, Holy Ghost (last12mths)
Bob Dylan/John Wesley Harding
Echo And The Bunnymen/Crocodiles
Nic Jones/Penguin Eggs (new2me)
Johnny Cash/American V A Hundred Highways

This week has a fairly "old" feel to it. Only the Girls album being anything like modern. The last of the Dylan mono box (hurrah! say the Bobby Z naysayers); the classic that is Crocodiles; a folk album and artist that I have never heard of till it/he were recommended recently; and the Man in Black reborn via a man called Rubin in his later years. Good stuff.

Bob Dylan/Blonde On Blonde

His masterpiece. I haven’t really had time to fully rediscover this for the umpteenth time but I know I will some day very soon. What I can tell you is that it is so good you really wonder why anybody bothered anymore after this came out.

Various Artists/ Decca Originals - The Freakbeat Scene

It is very rare that I play “various artist” compilation albums. I think it is only really necessary when the individual artists on the compilation don’t have much of a “body of work” to investigate in their own right. That theory can probably be challenged in a number of instances but I am sticking to it for now as it generally fits when discussing this particular “comp”.

“Freakbeat” is a term invented in the 1980’s, in a rather odd retrospective sorta way, to describe a type of 1960’s music that came after Merseybeat etc and before Psychedelia. Clearly no such “genre” or specific time period actually existed, and as such it is a completely manufactured name for any music that took the basics of  the British Invasion sound and added some off the wall sounds and ideas that take it off the beat group straight and narrow.

Two tracks on here fit that theory particularly well in that they are covers of Beatles songs i.e. Please Please Me by The Score and Taxman by Loose Ends (no I’d never heard of them either). The former is a soulful take on the moptops first number one that rather crassly adds a bit of the Rolling Stones Satisfaction guitar riff at the end. It is slightly mad, somewhat funny and overall just the right side of the genius/lunatic divide.

The cover of Taxman is really, really superb. It has shed loads of percussion going on and a bass line that severely kicks Macca’s ass. And gradually takes off with Hammond organ and guitar solos that major on the psych side of things.

The only bands on here I have heard of are The Small Faces, The Birds (with Ron Wood) and The Attack. Oh and some bloke called Marc Bolan. I have no idea what became of the rest of them but it is an immensely enjoyable album. It’s Freakbeat, baby.

It's Freakbeat, baby!

Simple Minds/Empires And Dance

I have to confess I have spent most of the week listening to early Simple Minds. Not just this one but most of the excellent “x5” reissue that pulls together the first 5 or 6 albums (depending on how you classify Sons And Fascination/Sister Feelings Call that was kind of a double and kind of 2 single albums when originally released). Primarily, Real To Real Cacophony, Empires And Dance and the aforementioned Sons/Sisters.

I really had forgotten just how great Simple Minds were in this period. That horrible thing that followed, that pure evil that was the “U2 with synthesizers” thing that came after the New Gold Dream album, had so left its ghastly fingerprints on my musical memory, I was genuinely shocked when I played these again, probably for the first time in over ten years.

Sticking just to the album on the list for the time being – like Harmonia and Eno it is awesome train music. I Travel, Constantinople Line, Thirty Frames A Second and This Fear Of Gods are easily as good as anything Bowie released when he was similarly as in awe of “Europe” and “European Music”. Yes, The Minds were pinching his ideas but my word what they formulated with the same ingredients was bloody great stuff.

Minds X5

The Wild Swans/The Coldest Winter For A Hundred Years

One of a bunch of very special early 80’s Liverpool bands, these guys have reformed and released this album in 2011. I was really looking forward to it as it came heavily recommended, and you find me a better Scouse-based single of that era than Revolutionary Spirit and, well you will struggle despite the plethora of aceness it had to compete with back then.

Unfortunately though, this album is just a tad average. In theory it does lots of things I like, and does them very well. But it lacks any surprises, and some of the lyrics are more than a bit cheesy, harking back to the England of the band’s glory days and, on the song When Time Stood Still, name-checking what I assume are some of the writers’ favourite songs and bands from “back in the day”. Yeah that’s what the problem is, it is just too damn retrospective and too respectful of that era.

Tell me I’m being too harsh on them if you like, but I just need a bit more from a new album these days.

The Coldest Winter For A Hundred Years

Harmonia & Eno/Tracks & Traces

Recorded in 1976 and unreleased for two decades, this wonderful album of electronic noises was apparently a huge influence on Berlin-era Bowie and Iggy. You can sort of hear that, but it is a lot more “ambient” than I was expecting and more in line with some of Eno’s late 70’s work. Ignoring the links for a moment and listening to it in isolation, literally, on a train journey down the English East Coast line on an icy foggy morning, this thing is capable of conjuring up some special moments. A soundtrack to life as affecting as any you will hear, once you tune in to its very individual sounds.

Tracks And Traces

Week 10/52.

So back to the 5 albums a week. Reminder of the rules. There must be 1 that has been released in the last 12 months; and 1 other that is new to me. So...

The Wild Swans/The Coldest Winter For A Hundred Years (last12mths)
Bob Dylan/Blonde On Blonde
Harmonia & Eno/Tracks & Traces (new2me)
Various Artists/Decca Originals - The Freakbeat Scene
Simple Minds/Empires And Dance

A Liverpool band from the 80's who released a classic single back in the day, reforms with a new album; the penultimate album from the Dylan mono box; some Krautrock; a delve into a freakbeat compilation; and a classic and much loved post-punk album.

The Currency Of Pop. Week 2. Ep 5.

Just to prove that great 7" singles are still being made now...

Bethany Heart Star/Bilkas Crib (Trensmat - TR002).

This is by a band called Mugstar. I pretty sure I came across these via a recommendation from Tony Lonorgan who runs the excellent Pink Fish Media forum - for those of a serious hi-fi persuasion. There is also a cracking little record shop there.

When I say this is a "now" record errr I mean from 2006. Don't time fly? I have no idea what you would call the racket that Mugstar make but imagine that the members of Hawkwind's kids formed a band. What am I saying? They probably have. Anyway, both sides build and build and build on solid and very loud guitar, bass, drums and some sorta synth riffs that make me want to jump around like a 16 year old pillock.

The Currency Of Pop. Week 2. Ep 4.

In 1988 I heard this band for the first time.

I bang on about them rather a lot here Martin Stephenson Biography

But just focussing on this record for a moment.

Crocodile Cryer/Louis (Kitchenware - SK25)

It is damn near perfect. The old photo of Martin's grandmother with his Mum as a baby sitting in a field and the line drawing of his grandmother on the front, giving little warning of the tale of relatives who would rather grasp than grieve at a funeral.

Flip it over and listen to Louis. Lightening up the subject matter somewhat as we hear about the cool characters that inhabit a Sunderland cafe in the late 70's and early 80's, and the desperate measures they take to ensure they can afford a cappucino.

Find me a better record. Go on.

The Currency Of Pop. Week 2. Ep 3.

In Hull in the late 70's/early 80's there was a very vibrant and creative music scene. I can't claim it was on a par with Liverpool, Manchester or Sheffield, but then maybe I am confusing national exposure to talent? Who knows.

This site covers the scene throughout the 80's very nicely. Hull bands

However it doesn't cover some of the earlier bands than emanated from the punk and post-punk movements. One of whom were Nyam Nyam. They were led by Paul Trynka who later went on to edit Mojo Magazine. Back then, initially I didn't really like them. Partly because they were way cooler than me, but mostly because they were far better than any of the bands I was in.

When We Can't Make Laughter Stay/Knowledge (Chapter II) (Vital - VTL004)

Around the time this single was released in 1981 I saw them play what remains to this day the best gig I have ever seen a local Hull band play. It was at the legendary Wellington Club on Beverley Road. And whether it was due to them being pissed or whatever they suddenly became very loose, very uncool and absolutely ripped the place apart. 

You won't get that feeling if you ever get round to finding this single. But it is still excellent. Well it is from Hull.

The Currency Of Pop. Week 2. Ep 2.

James were a very important group to us. Not quite sure how we discovered them exactly, it may well have been due to Morrissey's stated admiration of them. And I'm sure Peel would have been partially responsible as well. Early on they were a funny little band. All dischordant guitars and wonky drums with Tim Booth's vocals describing some highly odd behaviour.

James II - Hymn From A Village/If Things Were Perfect (Factory - FAC119).

This entry is a bit of a cheat actually. I never had this specific record back then. Instead I had the 12" single called Village Fire that combined this and the first James single Jimone (see what they did there?). James II gets in due it being a recent result of my mid-life crisis "must-track-down-all-original-vinyl-I-never-got-round-to-buying-back-then" thing.

Oh and it is fucking great.

I used to play the first album Stutter at work on a dusty little cassette player. At first it was met with a "what the hell is this rubbish you are playing now?" sort of response. I used to play a lot of "rubbish" at work then. But gradually a couple of people started to come round to its oddball charms as it did to them what it did to me, in, as if often the case with music I like, creating it's own logic out of seemingly illogically diverse noises.

Oh and if we had had a son it would have been called James. Fact.
(there maybe a bad joke about Factory catalogue numbers here somewhere).

The Currency Of Pop. Week 2. Ep 1.

TTID returns after a week off. We are blaming it on a Jonathan Richman gig.
So the 7" single once again...

The importance of The Smiths in the history of modern music and my personal enjoyment of music cannot be underestimated. They were way ahead of everyone else when they released their first singles like Hand In Glove and This Charming Man. Pushing forward "indie" guitar music by looking back at what happened before punk and developing something very new. And that man Morrissey's lyrics were to die for.

William, It Was Really Nothing/Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want (Rough Trade - RT166)

Tracy and I were in a pub one afternoon in 1984, The Royal Oak if memory serves me right, a "towny" pub full of people who weren't really into the same sort of music we were into. Think it might have been a "works do" thing. The music from the jukebox was terrible so we went to have a look to improve matters. Flicking through the records, there was very little that stood out. Until we found this. So we put it on much to the dislike of pretty much everyone else in the place. So we put it on again. And again. And again...spent a small fortune in beer money. Probably played it around 10 times. That's both a-side and b-side. Then we left, with the world we left behind a slightly better place.

PS Damn that sticker mark.