Stealth Buffet

British Sea Power Glee Club Birmingham 18th May

2010-05-31T21:43:00.003Z

The Glee Club has a policy of shutting the doors after 8.15 . Which means, you get to see the support band. And I’m glad I did. John and Jehn are a French boy girl duo who’ve bulked up for this tour with an additional boy and girl. They’ve got a Galaxie 500/New Order sound with a mixture of very clean, taut guitar lines, feedback and keyboards. They swap vocals and instruments. Jehn's vocals are a bit theatrical, John's are much more New York rock 'n' roller. Which is how we'd all sing if we were French and had relocated to London. The final song had some of that early White Stripes chemistry/tension with Jehn slowly moving towards John as if she was about to put her head on his shoulder. Like a Status Quo gig if Rick Parfitt and Francis Rossi were actually a couple.

I know a bloke who can’t bring himself to listen to the Who because “Girls don’t like them”. On the other hand, Jon Bon Jovi (who is not my Who dodging mate) has said that he takes no notice of critics that say The Bonj are too lightweight. After all, girls come to his gigs and lift up their tops. So who likes BSP? Well there’s a lot of them and it's a very mixed audience. I like them a lot, but I didn’t think they’re a band you’re going to fall in love with. I was proved wrong at the Glee though. There was measurable love and anticipation in the air. Not just pollen from the plant covered amps tended by gardeners rather than roadies. It felt like people had travelled to be there.

What BSP bring is cleverness, a broad, sweeping approach to lyrics. There’s nothing straight forward about them. They've got a whiff of moleskin and they look as if they’d be happier going to the Antarctic in dufflecoats and cable knit sweaters rather than following traditional rock n roll leisure activities. There’s a bit of Bowie, or Psychedelic Furs in the vocals, a thick sound, a grandeur and songs that take in ornithology and Dostoevsky. After 3 albums of arty guitar Pop they released an evocative and oddly ambient, soundtrack to a 1934 documentary Man Of Aran. No Lucifer has a terrace style “easy easy” backing vocal and references to Carlton Corsair and Raleigh 20 bikes, roe deer, the anti aircraft crew and the boys from the Hitler Youth. The stiff upper lip has got a potty mouth though. One of the new songs they play at the gig though has a chorus of “Over here, over there, over every fucking where.”

It’s a barnstorming opening 3 tracks. Apologies To Insect Life with it’s clicking bass, yelping vocals and a guitar that sounds like a quarrying operation. Guitarist Noble is dropping it from a very great height. In fact at one point it looks like he's brought his own stool to stand on. Remember Me and Atom just sound immense. Singer and guitarist Yan is wearing a white top, part space suit, part strait jacket. Guitarist Noble is wearing a vintage cycling top that probably doesn't provide much in the way of breathability and sweat wicking. Bassist and vocalist Hamilton shuffles as if he is peeping coyly from beneath an standard issue indie fringe- which is actually a leafy crown. He looks like he’s skipping band practice at Mount Olympus. Aby Fry plays violin and Phil Sumner adds keyboards, cornet and guitar as required. So for the new song (over here over there and over sweary there etc) there were actually 3 guitars powering away. Biff, Bang and Pow! BSP also like to swap instruments and take turns on vocals.

True Adventures sung by Hamilton has got an excellent bit where the rest of the band seem to slow down but the drums speed up. It sounds a bit like tape rewinding and is the sort of studio trick that Lee Perry would stick on the start of a track.

Please Stand Up finishes with that rare beast – a section that sounds like a cross between Boxer Beat by Jo Boxers and New Order.

The Great Skua is an instrumental where Phil Sumner's cornet really comes into it’s own. It’s a great piece of music in it’s own right and much more than a bog and bar prompter.

The band seemed relaxed and confident. There was banter about it being the second comedy club they’d played on the tour and the perennial problem of careful and insightful lyrics getting in the way of the gags.

Final song Spirit Of St Louis soon departed from a recognisable song structure was either largely improvised or they were just making it up as they went along. There was guitar dive bombing, crowd surfing from Noble, guitars being beaten with bushes and I think there may have been monocle wearing too.

Despite the fact that new album is on the way they only played a handful of new songs, with most of the material coming from the last album Do You Like Rock Music. BSP are actually more accessible than their eccentric image suggests and are a terrific live band. Full marks to the merchandising. Who wouldn’t want a mug with a British Tea Power logo?

Apologies To Insect Life
Remember Me
Atom
???? (Over here over there etc)
True Adventures
Down On The Ground
Please Stand Up
Waving Flags
Great Skua
No Lucifer
Canvey Island
Fear Of Drowning
??? (Into the night??)
Lights Out For Darker Skies
Trip Out
Spirit Of St Louis

The Fall Birmingham Academy 2 - 11th May 2010

2010-05-15T19:31:00.003Z

I didn't get the new album until after the gig, so it was just like the old days ...a Fall gig where I didn't know many of the songs. It's a healthy turnout and looks like a veteran Fall audience who've probably seen a fair few Fall gigs. Although surprisingly there's a sprinkling of younger recruits too.

After 33 years we probably know roughly what we're going to get. The line up may change, the wife in the band may change and the sound changes too. Some years it's a bit more Beefheart, sometimes more Rockabilly or electronic but there is still always a distinctive Fall sound, even before Mark E Smith starts to sing...or more as he put it on Dragnet’s Your Heart out "I don't sing I just shout-all on one note ahh".

There’s a backdrop with “Unseen Knowledge” scrawled across it (made more sense once I’d bought the album…but then I never really cracked “Undilutable Slang Truth”) and the line up is bass, drums guitar and Mrs Smith (Eleni Poulou) on keyboards. The current album Your Future Our Clutter is the second with this line up. In Fall terms this line up it's positively U2 in terms of stability and longevity. No drummers were punched onstage and no band members were sacked for dancing to Rock The Casbah.

There's still plenty of room for disruption though.

Smith, who seemed like he'd been catapulted out of the stage door, was wearing a blue shirt and what looked like leather blazer. He immediately grabbed 2 mics and a stand and got down to the business of shouting at traffic. Cue jutting out elbows, the dilemma of how to control 3 things with 2 hands and constant fiddling and feedback. Typical Smith. Ever the irritant and bugger the soundman.

Smith’s made a career out of using hand cupping, megaphones, Dictaphones and kazoos to make his horrible hectoring voice even more unpleasant. But that voice does draw you in. Knowing the songs isn't necessarily any help in knowing what he's singing about though. You get the impression he doesn't like anything much though - except for malt whisky and WW2.

The drums on the opening song Our Future Your Clutter are immense. This line-up is lean, efficient and relentless. A combine harvester scything down everything in it's path and spewing out Smithspeak There's nothing subtle about Eleni Poulou’s keyboards either. She's found the squelch button and turned on the Dr Who filter.

Hot cake has got EP's "ahh ahh ahh ooh" backing vocals and funnily enough they don't sound remotely Pop.

Smith's jacket was on and off all night (yes there are more complex stage shows, you know the one’s that are carried across Europe on huge trucks, rather than on a coat hanger) but he did wait until the Rockabilly twang of Cowboy George before having his first amp fiddle. Ah yes, Smith's favourite trick to try to unsettle the guitarist...he may call it Man Management to coax out a better performance.... he may just call it messing about.

Eleni Poulou sang I’ve Been Duped, from 2008's Imperial Wax Solvent but a very fidgety Smith, had been singing not just with his back to the audience but actually backing into the stage exit. On the opening night in Edinburgh, he had only lasted 6 songs leaving the band trying to carry on without him. Last song of the Birmingham’s better value set was Weather Report 2. In Fall terms it's actually quite a haunting if not downright beautiful song and the lyric "You gave me back my life,” echoes the 20 year old song Bill Is Dead which was his last attempt at crooning

The encores caught me completely by surprise. Psykick Dancehall with it's "Is there anybody there-yeah" intro, (I don’t think I was the only one who found there was a "yeah” reflex I didn't know I had) and Theme From Sparta FC. Peel Show favourite and car advert. For a band as contrary as the Fall, it was the greatest hits equivalent of doing a medley of Hi Ho Silver Lining, Come On Eileen and Beatles No 1's. Smith did actually sing most of Sparta FC from the dressing room though.

So there we go.... another Fall gig. I've seen dozens and there's usually something memorable about even the worst ones. But this was a good one.

The new album is definitely worth a punt. There'll be a different line-up next time round, but they'll still be The Fall.

Candi Staton Bilston The Robin 27th April

2010-05-04T21:38:00.004Z

Bilston’s Got Soul…and there was certainly a healthier turnout at The Robin than at Candi Staton’s Birmingham show last February. She had an excellent band behind her (bass, drums, sax, trumpet, 2 backing singers and Mick Talbot on keyboards.)

Wearing jeans and silver /grey housecoat affair, she looked genuinely pleased to be there. I don’t think the audience needed that much motivating, but, like the old soul trooper she is, she took no chances. When she wasn’t singing, she was clapping, and every song had a story behind it. So there was plenty to talk about, and she did like to talk. The stories and anecdotes served to remind both herself and us about her place in Soul history (a Grammy nomination here, and a sample there and a career that spanned Southern Soul, Disco and Gospel and 6 decades)

Opening song Nights On Broadway was buoyed by a tremendous horn sound and Prisoner Of Your Good Loving rattled along like the prime piece of Southern Soul tail shaking it is. As the band cut loose, Staton reminded us “This is how we do it in Alabama.”

A big surprise was hearing her first secular single Now You’ve Got The Upper Hand. She asked if there where any Northern Soul Lovers in the audience. The thing is when she recorded the song originally, there was no such thing…. Often labels where just putting out singles with a slow and fast song and pushing the side that found an audience. Now of course she’ll see it as another part of her career. And she seems happy to promote it all, even when it’s a song she wasn’t directly involved in. When she played He Called Me Baby she talked about the sample from it that One EskimO used on their song Kandi. The first she knew of it was when she heard it in a shopping mall in Atlanta Georgia. Even better was the aside that You’ve Got The Love was originally a vocal for a diet advert.

Stand By Your Man had everything you could need. A sparse intro building up to that magical chord change and then the band shifting through the gears and taking a detour through Stand By Me. It’s Vegas, but it’s good Elvis Vegas. To top it all there’s Staton’s observation about her Granddaughter who got to the part about “He’ll have good time’s you’ll have bad times” and retorted that he’d find himself standing on the kerb with his bags”.

She introduced You Bet Your Sweet Sweet Love with the story that she hadn’t felt like singing it for years, but could do it now because she had got married recently.

I’d Rather Be An Old Man’s Sweetheart (Than A Young Man’s Fool) has the archetypal Muscle Shoals sound and excellent use of brackets. Candi somewhat naively asked if there were any mature men in the audience. Indeed there were. Old Soul’s not a young mans game.

More Elvis, with In The Ghetto and a story about how she was sitting in the control room of a studio with the song’s writer Mac Davis and label owner Rick Hall. Clarence Carter (one of her ex husbands, but not at the time) was about to record it as a follow up to Patches. They talked about a having a female singer do it instead. “I stepped up to the mic and changed the key”. It’s a tremendous record and she still does a fine version.

She finished inevitably with Young Hearts Run Free. The horn section had looked like they’d been having a good time all night, with spots of Ready Steady Go swinging dance moves and grinning and nudging each other like distracted schoolboys. Sax player Richard Beesley pulled a really sweet solo out of the bag, and finished with a big smile on his face and immediately his trumpet playing mate leaned over to poke him again. Mick Talbot got some clown time in with his solo spot where he ran his fingers down and beyond the keyboard and twisted his body round as if he had run out of notes, like a piano driven soul plane slithering off the runway.

The band are Rare Groove stalwarts and have been playing under the name of Push for years. I’d seen the guitar, bass and drummer backing Marlena Shaw recently. They didn’t put a foot wrong then, but never seemed to really take off. I enjoyed them much more with Candi Staton and I was in no way influenced by the fact that the female backing singer was wearing hot pants and the bloke had been in Batman.

She encored with the funky gospel of Halleluiah Anyway and You’ve Got The Love. The set was very similar to last years show at the Town Hall and it was the same band. The anecdotes and patter were different though – which is an achievement in itself. Most importantly she’s still got that classic Soul voice, with it’s mixture of sweetness, tension and rasp. The gigs are a celebration of her back catalogue and I’m happy to celebrate that we can still see this stuff live. Even better though, she is still doing interesting new stuff. She’s featured on the Ashley Beedle celebration of Mavis Staples. Her contribution Revolution feels a bit like Freak Power’s Tune In Drop Out with a Staple Singers social commentary. Her voice sits intentionally back in the mix, but it’s still classic Candi

http://www.myspace.com/ashleybeedle

Last years Birmingham show is at http://stealthbuffet.blogspot.com/2009_02_01_archive.html

Nights On Broadway
I’m Just A Prisoner
Now You’ve Got The Upper Hand
Stand By Your Man/Stand By Me
You Bet Your Sweet Sweet Love
Suspicious Minds
He Called Me Baby
I’d Rather Be An Old Man’s Sweetheart (Than A Young Man’s Fool)
In The Ghetto
Young Hearts Run Free

Halleluiah Anyway
You’ve Got The Love

Peter Hook Glee Club Birmingham 11/04/2010

2010-04-21T16:48:00.005Z

It was billed as Peter Hook: An evening of Unknown Pleasures. Tales from Joy Division, New order and The Hacienda. But as the Compere was Howard Marks, they introduced themselves as The Hook and The Crook.

The Glee Club was the first stop on a 16-date jaunt. It was a bit of an odd night really partly down to Howard Marks compere role and the mix of pre-submitted questions and questions from the audience. However it did turn out to be an entertaining evening and Hooky looked relaxed and amenable on the sofa. So yes…the stage set up really was amp, guitars, sofas.

Early arrivals got to peer at Hooky's memorabilia, which was much more enjoyable than it sounds. I'd already got my moneys worth by seeing a receipt for a Transit van that Hooky had bought for £150, a Hacienda membership application form where Tony Wilson had answered the question “What do you want from the Hacienda” with a scrawled “My money back”. Never mind the signed footy shirts, New Order trainers and photos for the Hacienda looking gorgeous and empty. (which was exactly how it looked in 1984 when my band, the unlovable and unloved Awesome Precinct played there)

After a bit of archive film, a seated Hooky played along to two backing tracks, one of which was Elagia from Low Life. A great reminder of just how distinctive his reedy, metallic 6 string bass sound is. Instantly recognizable and distinctly genius. Even sitting down, he still plays the lowest slung bass in rock. Johnny Marr was only partly joking when he said the most important thing to master when you learn guitar is to sort out your strap length. The lower the better. Temperamental technology, and tardiness meant that New Order were rarely better than shit live. So those first 2 tracks at the Glee were a vast improvement on the times I’d seen New Order. Cheers Hooky…. Sorry Barney!

Still we were back to familiar territory with Howard Marks rambling and shambolic intro and opening questions. Eventually though (and probably to some relief on his part) Hooky just started talking about what he was probably going to say anyway. And yes he’s got a string of great stories to tell. He was in 2 pivotal bands (that would be the 2 before Monaco and Revenge) and it was New Orders money that bankrolled the Hacienda as it went from groundbreaking and empty to Madchester and gangsters.

The Hacienda was staggeringly badly run. Hooky’s book that ties in with this tour is subtitled How Not To Run A Club. It’s a great read. He passed on some of these lessons during the evening too. You may want to take notes! Lessons Hooky learnt included, just because your mates are great at getting pissed doesn’t automatically mean they’ll be good at running a club. Another problem was what he touchingly referred to as a short attention span and describes a meeting where they threw the accountant out rather than hear about how much money they were losing.

For all the business failings of the Hacienda Hooky was genuinely pleased to have owned the club and to have given something back to the city and people of Manchester. (Apart from large amounts of cash). He loved that fact that when eventually the Hacienda started to work as a club, and he was in the band who travelled all round the world (he really didn’t try to undersell his lifestyle) he still couldn’t wait to get home because he could have a better time at the Hacienda. He also loved having a club where he could lord it up over other bands and enjoyed people knowing who he was…even if it did amount to kids saying, “My dad loves you-he told me to come and say hello”

Sometimes it didn’t always go so well though. One night a young American came up and introduced himself, said how much he loved the band and how pleased he was to have finally got to the Hacienda. At which point Hooky’s minder kicked open the fire doors and bundled the unfortunate fan out. A giggling Hooky summed it up as “People travelled from all round the world to come to our club…and we welcomed them in.”

By the end the club had become unmanageable. People were running round the club with guns. One night the manager had a gun pushed in her face and the next thing she knew she was at the bottom of a stairwell. A bouncer had rescued her by throwing her over the balcony. But Hooky and the management were all accepting this as part of a normal night and just didn’t know how to stop it.

He talked about the sense of relief when they finally closed the club, and the lifting of the weight of responsibility for trying to keep people safe. There was also the sense of almost smugness when the gangs promptly moved onto another venue and closed that. He talked about how Tony Wilson had railed against the Police and the local authority who had seen it as an issue that was solely The Hacienda’s problem.

His favourite New Order was Technique because, even though the band were still arguing furiously, he thought the album captured the Balearic sound he had in his head. However at the time Tony Wilson said that the weeks they spent recording it were going to be the most expensive holiday they’d ever had.

Hooky said the band had come back with 17 drum tracks because Stephen Morris was the only one of the band who could stay out of the clubs and actually do any work. Even when it was finished there were still parts of the album that were news to Hooky. He described walking through Heaton Park and hearing an unfamiliar but fantastic track on a ghetto blaster. He actually had to ask what it was…turned out to be Run.

He acknowledged that there were large chunks of the past that he’d forgotten (or been incapable of remembering) but that fortunately people had kindly reminded him “But I left those bits out because I didn’t want to look like a twat…I just used the bits that made other people look like twats”

He talked about the seeing Sex Pistols in Manchester and their attitude was everything he felt and wanted at the time. ”They were shit. They were so shit, but they did it so well”. He made it sound quite profound.

He described Morrissey as still having his clothes bought by his mum, and that complaints about him went directly to her. “Ooh no, not our Stephen, you must be thinking of someone else”. Stephen Morris from New Order, also apparently wears mum sourced clothing. Amidst all the clothing slander, I think we need to remember the Stuart Maconie advice on how to recognise Peter Hook in the 80’s…. He’ll be the only person in the room dressed as a U boat captain.

He didn’t go along with the idea of Shaun Ryder as a poet, instead offering, “He’ll nick your wallet” and telling a story about how the Happy Mondays absolutely trashed a dressing room and argued that they were helping to make sure that the cleaners kept their jobs.

He told a good story about the release of Substance. Tony Wilson wanted to be able to play the New Order singles in his car. Obviously the best and easiest way to do this was to release an album. New Order and Factory were famously on a 50/50 split, however at the time of the deal Factory had been unaware that the label would also be paying the mechanical royalties (paid for each copy of a record sold). It was always a source of great amusement to New Order Manager Rob Gretton that the deal had ended up as effectively a 42/58 split. Because of Factory’s financial problems, the band agreed to a lower rate for Substance…which went on to sell shed loads

Of course the thing is that despite everything Hooky still owns a club and is also releasing compilations and DJing under the Hacienda banner. He recently opened FAC251 in the old Factory building with the idea that he’d already paid for it once and might as well buy it again. And he’s still making music.

Freebass is the surprisingly underused concept of having 3 bass players (Hooky, Mani from The Stone Roses, Andy Rourke from The Smiths) and a floating line up of mates on vocals. Which is where Howard Marks comes in. It’s also how the evening finished, with Hooky and Marks doing Dark Star. A Velvets style grind with a stream of consciousness rant over the top. It was grisly and words fail me. But they didn’t fail Howard Marks who has described it as being about "The light of Lucifer - the lightness of darkness, the archetypal permanence of the right bass line, the pain of a crowded Heaven, the seminal nature of spunk, and the elusive recipe for the concoction in the Holy Grail.”

Ouch!

Marlena Shaw Hare and Hounds Birmingham 19th March

2010-04-01T19:57:00.001Z

There was a great big Marlena Shaw sized musical gap in my musical knowledge and the first I knew of her was the advert featuring California Soul. It’s a phenomenal; record. Joyful, uplifting and loose. As a singer she’s swung from Swing, Jazz, Disco, and Millie Jackson style monologues, sung with The Count Basie Orchestra, released albums on Blue Note and played with Sammy Davies Jr.
The Hare and Hounds is a great place to be see bands and the booking policy means you are likely to see much bigger names than you would credit for a suburban pub. I saw her second set of the set of the evening.

The small band (bass, drums, guitar, keyboards, sax/flute and a variety of jazz hats) warmed up with something funky before easing into Wade In The Water. I could see Marlena Shaw leaning on her walking stick in the Victorian tiled hallway to the left of the stage but she’d shaken off her frailty when she got onto the stage to sing the last few lines of the of the song…and she can still sing!
She may be an old Soul trooper, still able to shrug off the years with a fairly relentless touring schedule but there is a slight whiff of cabaret about the proceedings. The Jazz leanings mean there is always the threat of an “ooh biddi boo boo ” and the MOR soul of Feel Like Makin' Love sounds like it could be a busy night as she sings the line Vegas Cabaret Style “Feel like making love, to you and you and you”
I can never resist between song chat and Soulful adlibs, even if they are as unnerving as “Your Daddy likes it. Your Mamma does too. And if they didn’t, there wouldn’t be no you”

One of the songs is about rhythm as a language and Slave Traders attempt to control it. Part history lesson, part drum lesson as the Nick Hornby lookalike drummer and Shaw play off each other. It sounded great, albeit a bit incongruous when she concludes “Talk to me Crispin”.

Fittingly she played Ain’t Doin’ Too Bad by Bobby Bland. The master of that Big Band orchestrated Soul sound. Her version had plenty of R&B swagger.
Inevitably the last song was California Soul. No encore but earlier on there had been a false start and she joked that she’d got mixed up with the set. So maybe she’d had enough and didn’t want to go through the ritual of keeping the hit back. I was a bit disappointed and slightly underwhelmed by the gig. The band had played impeccably but never really caught fire. Shaw’s voice is still intact and if the years have put a cabaret edge to her, she’s probably not that bothered. She’s still working!

Wade In The Water
Rhythm Of Love
Feel Like Makin’ Love
Talk To Me Crispin…..but it’s almost certainly not called that!
Ain’t Doin’ Too Bad
Hope In A Hopeless World
Woman Of The Ghetto
California Soul

I Put A Spell On You

2010-03-07T22:36:00.001Z

There’s no shortage of either charity records or versions of I Put a Spell On You.

The version released by Shane MacGowan and Friends is a fundraiser for Haiti and is a bit of belter. The friends include Nick Cave, Mick Jones, Glen Matlock, Chrissie Hynde, Bobby Gillespie, Paloma Faith, Eliza Doolittle , original Pogues bassist Cait O’Riordan and Johnny Depp.

Screamin’ Jay was the original Pop horror ham, with a joke shop full of gimmicks. Skulls on sticks, climbing out of coffins…you can draw the line from Hawkins to Crazy World Of Arthur Brown and Alice Cooper to Marilyn Manson.

The original Screamin’ Jay Hawkins version released in 1956 has clipped piano and sax and a really disconcerting and unexpected laugh that would have you changing seats on the bus. He’d originally recorded the song for Grand which had had flopped, but the version on Okeh had the full and maverick promotion of the Rock ‘n’ Roll era. The moans on the opening bars were supposedly deemed “Cannibalistic” by radio stations and so yet another version was recorded. This time Djs were told they would be compensated if they were fired for playing the record.

In Gerri Hirshey’s wonderful book Nowhere To Run The Story Of Soul Music, she watches him play to a bemused audience supporting the Stones in the early 80’s. (He’d re-recorded a version with Keef in 1979.) He goes straight home after his set to watch the wrestling on tv, but when she gets to his house to interview him he shows her a letter from Tom Fogerty with a return address of “Creedence”.

“My brother John and I had our minds blown the first time we heard I Put A Spell On You”

The Creedence Clearwater Revival cover from 1968 is my favourite version. Fogherty’s wonderful wind tunnel bellow is a threat to double glazing but it’s the guitar that really makes the song. Half of the song is given over to stinging guitar lines. The best bit comes when he seems to have run out of notes and is just left bending the ghostly feedback. It’s physical and it sounds like you should actually be able to see the feedback, like a shaft of light across the studio.

There a couple of other references that tie the Creedence version into it’s own era rather than the 50’s. It’s got a swirl to it like the Animals cover of House Of The Rising Sun but more tellingly it’s got the spindly drum and ratata guitar building up at the end of the verses which sound like Love.

The Shane MacGowan and friends version owes more to Nick Cave’s sound, a man who can make a record wheeze and clang like the meat store scene in the Long Good Friday.

Shane Macgowan sings the opening lines and in many ways it’s just good to hear he’s still alive. Paloma Faith leaves her usual kookie cabaret act at the stage door and really throws herself into her lines. She probably comes with a lot of baggage and definitely a lot of hat boxes. Nick Cave has played this song before as there’s a version on an NME cassette Department of Enjoyment from 1984. I think Nick Cave has borrowed from Screamin’ Jay Hawkins in his own vocal style, but strangely enough he’s not doing it in this song.

Chrissie Hynde sounds great and looks cool (and vice versa). Her voice is a source of wonder and is usually better than most of the records she’s made. You just know that she still totally and unironically believes in Rock ‘n’ Roll…which is quite touching really. As for Bobby Gillespie, I always think he talks a better record than he actually makes. I always seek out his interviews but rarely listen to his records. So he whoops a bit, bangs his knees together and is probably playing an imaginary tambourine.

Johnny Depp confounds all expectations by adding guitar wangery and making women interested in bearded men. Ok then, just the one bearded man.

You can see the song at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cf69vIQL_u8 and if you’re feeling ghoulish and are looking for a reason to stop drinking you can see Shane attempt to talk about the record at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSahS9k9zqw

Jimmy Webb & Webb Family Birmingham Town Hall 8th November

2009-11-09T20:38:00.002Z

There's a great Graham Nash (as in the Hollies and Crosby, Stills and the other one) quote about song writing. "We're all fishing in the same river, but Bob Dylan is further upstream and he's catching all the big ones." Well Jimmy Webb's knows a good spot too and has landed some whoppers.

Songs like the Glen Campbell versions of Wichita Lineman and By The Time I Get To Phoenix are like Elvis and Johnny Cash...we sneered at them as adolescents but eventually we realised our parents were probably right. Webb’s songs are grown up songs about grown up subjects. I mean, The Wichita Linesman even has a job. Mind you so does the Highwayman which is tonight's set opener

The tour was billed as The Webb Family and was a neat way round a few potential pitfalls facing an aging performer known as a songwriter rather than a singer and whose drinking buddies had been a thirsty Harry Neilson and a parched Richard Harris. His sons have put out albums as the Webb Brothers, including the excellent Maroon lp.

He'd also brought along Cal Campbell (Glen's son) on drums and Romeo from the Magic Numbers. Which means you get a great sounding band, the complementary style of the Webb Brothers own songs intermingled with Jimmy's own, and other vocalists to take the pressure off Jimmy for any parts he didn't fancy singing. And plenty of time for the stories and between song chat and what stories they were.

Around a third of the gig's running time was chat....and not a word too many. What there wasn't too much of though was an audience. It was a painfully empty Town Hall (or Parthenon as Jimmy referred to it as). but the gig itself was a bit of a treat. Webb Snr looking great in pinstripes, stayed at the piano. Son Jamie though had the last word in a cream jacket with a painted floral design. It looked good enough for Gram Parsons.

The band sounded really good, but restrained and unfussy considering how much was going on, bass, drums, 3 guitars, pedal steel, keyboards and Jimmy Webb’s piano. My favourite instrument of the night though was the Melodica type instrument with a flexible tube to blow through, that the Webb brothers passed around like prison porn. When James played it in his Nashville attire, he looked less like Augustus Pablo and more like an Ood in a Nudie suit. (That’s one for the Dr Who fans)

Jimmy introduced If These Walls Could Speak as a song he'd written specifically with Waylon Jennings in mind, and described at length and with great humour how it was perfect for Jennings’s voice, although the song ended up being sung by Amy Grant, Nanci Griffith and countless other female singers. He also, tellingly, described how he thought he'd written it about a house in New Jersey he'd lived, but had ended up realising that the song "Was actually about me"

Jimmy Webb introduced Galveston as a song written during the Vietnam War. Jamie sang it in a much higher key than Glen Campbell’s version, if anything a reminder of the easy confidence of Campbell’s vocal style. When the song finished everyone left the stage to be replaced by the voice of Jimmy’s own father singing Red Sails In The Sunset. After a bit of Webb reminiscence about his dad coming back from military service smelling of Old Spice (the 2 anecdotes may not necessarily be linked) Jimmy started talking about his own experiences as a father and the mistakes he had made. The song No Christian No was in recognition of the way he'd spoken to his own son as a child. Apparently it was one of Kurt Vonnegut’s favourite songs.

Aah yes the name dropping was extravagant. But there again why shouldn't it be? He's Jimmy Webb and he wrote those songs. One particular anecdote which must have spanned 10 minutes, veered from Richard Harris (the telegram read "Jimmy Webb come to London. Make record!") to The Girl he was trying (and failing) to impress (Miss Wales, later Miss World) to the song he wrote for her (she thought it was "silly") so he gave it to Art Garfunkel. He played that unaccompanied on the piano.

When the band bounced back on stage they inexplicably (apart from the fact that he wrote it) played Up Up And Away. It may be perfect slice of 60's silliness and the soundtrack of choice for all local news programmes about ballooning, but I wouldn't have played it and left out Do What You Gotta Do.

Wichita Linesman and By The Time I get To Phoenix were introduced by the line that "If it wasn't for Glen Campbell then we wouldn't all be on stage here tonight". Almost on cue Cal Campbell responded with "If it wasn't for Glen Campbell I wouldn't be here tonight". Rehearsed spontaneity. And still funny.

The set closer was the still baffling Macarthur Park. The Beatle savvy Webb Brothers turned the mid section into a slice of Abbey Road style languid loveliness, before the frantic Bond theme style final section. If that song is bonkers, then the Richard Harris album it came from (yes, Jimmy Webb did go to London) A Tramp Shining is very odd indeed. But then you would expect that given another of Webb’s anecdotes. During a Rolls Royce road trip round the Irish west coast Harris boomed "We'll stay at my sister’s house. You can sleep in the bed where I was conceived"

They encored with a stunning version of Without You which was sung really well by Jamie. Webb talked about how much he missed Nilsson (the boys used to call him as Uncle Harry) and that singing it was way of invoking Nilsson’s name so he can remain immortal, as the ancient Greeks would have done.(yes the Town Hall/Parthenon analogy had really got to Webb). Without You is one of those songs that I usually think I’d rather appreciate from a distance rather than listen to. It’s just too rich and there’s just too much of it. (And despite what my old neighbour thinks the human heart has never been broken badly enough to merit playing Without You followed by Lorraine Ellison’s Stay With Me Baby. Continuously. And on repeat!)

Overall then, a good gig. Jimmy Webb’s songs speak for themselves and if they couldn’t then he certainly can.

Highway man
Bad Things Happen To Good People
I Could Turn The Stars Around For Us
If These Walls Could Speak
Hollow Victory
Kick it like an old tin can
Galveston
Red Sails In The Sunset
Christian No
All I Know
Up Up And Away
PF Sloane,
Witchita Lineman
By The Time I get To Pheonix
The Worst That Could Happen
Macarthur Park

Without You
Adios

Generation Kill

2009-09-30T20:55:00.002Z

Generation Kill is the Iraq war mini series written by David Simon and Ed Burns based on the book by journalist Evan Wright

It’s only got 6 hours or so of telly to play with so it’s never going to be able to replicate The Wire’s range of characters and themes (there was more to the Baltimore drama than “Buy drugs, sell drugs”) but it does bring something new to the War Movie genre. And like The Wire, the dialogue is fantastic and the whole thing feels utterly authentic.

In a peaceable life I’ve worked my way through enough war films to get flashbacks. Each of those landmark films will have a scene or idea that brings something new or captures something different about war and the people caught up in it. And of course, other filmmakers, journalists and soldiers will pick up on it too. There’s an interesting podcast at http://www.wordmagazine.co.uk/content/they-tried-make-me-go-sangin-i-said-no-no-no-at-war-with-ipod-generation-afghanistan#comments with Patrick Hennessey a former Guards Officer who served in Iraq and Afghanistan who describes the moment when they were inadvertently and then deliberately recreating the swimming sequence in Hamburger Hill with Otis Redding as the soundtrack.

Generation Kill feels like it’s certainly seen it’s fair share of films

The first episode is hard work as the viewer can get disorientated by the amount of kit, characters and military slang. But stick with it. After all you had to with The Wire.

The dialogue shows up the social, and racial tensions amongst the United States Marine Corps and the (terrifying and inept) chain of command. As you’d expect from the writers of The Wire, the Military dialogue is baffling, funny, foul and poetically obscene. Whisky Tango (white trash) Marines (grunts) curse POG’ s (Person Other than Grunt). The owner of an untidy and non-regulation moustache (grown during the morale boosting, pre invasion moustache growing competition) is told to “Police that moustache”

There are a lot of characters to get used to but once it settles down, the series works because you get the claustrophobic view of the troops in the Humvee. This claustrophobia is one of the things that Generation Kill does differently. It’s a war film in a desert that feels like a submarine movie…and everyone likes a submarine film don’t they!

The commanding officers are as big a threat to their troops as the enemy and the unhinged Captain America is a war crimes investigation in waiting. Godfather is the Corleone voiced Lieutenant Colonel who lost his voice to throat cancer. A non-smoker. “I guess I just got lucky”, he’s actively trying to manoeuvre his men into risky and ill advised missions, like a zealous middle manager trying to commandeer the photocopier for the glory of his team

Inside the Humvee though it’s not much better. James Ransone (he played the excellent Ziggy Sobotka character in the second series of The Wire) is the Humvee driver speeding through Iraq on an over the counter stimulant called Ripped Fuel. He’s literally fighting a war on drugs. There’s the camel shooting farm boy who just wants to kill something, while Evan Wright is the Rolling Stone journalist who was only accepted by the troops when he told them he used to write for Hustler (“You wrote Beaver Hunt?”) The Iceman is the Sergeant, one of the elite Recon Marines and the only one of the bunch who actually knows what he’s doing…he just can’t believe he’s doing it with such a useless crew)

The night vision fire fights are tense, terrifying and wouldn’t have happened in earlier wars and the films made about them. It almost doesn’t happen in this one either as the troops don’t have enough batteries for their night vision goggles.

Vietnam was fought and lost on television and military chiefs have been trying not to let that happen again. However cheap technology means that troops themselves are filming it. Patrick Hennessey on the Word podcast describes how important these video diaries and home made films have become to troops. This runs right through Generation Kill too. Again this makes Generation Kill seem more relevant

The closing credits for each episode are genius. If you think of those classic TV sequences where the credits tell you about the programme itself, you’ could go from Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads, to The Sopranos to The Wire. In an inspired less is more leap, the credits for Generation Kill are just radio transmissions, voices amidst busts of static.

Generation Kill is a contemporary war film about a contemporary war, with plenty of scenes that not only add to the war film genre but also made me glad I wasn’t there…and wished they weren’t there either.

David Simon at the Hay Festival 30th May 2009

2009-07-29T18:50:00.002Z

If he’d have turned up at my front door I’d have given him money. As it was I had to go to the Hay Festival to see David Simon. To pay and pay homage. I would have travelled further as I don’t really think about much else now apart from The Wire.

Basically it was an hour or so of David Simon in conversation with Mark Lawson from the Late show and answering a few questions from the audience.

He was there to plug his book Homicide and the HBO mini-series The Corner.

Two sides of the same city and both sides would feed in to The Wire itself.

Homicide is the result of his years of crime reporting for the Baltimore Sun and captures the aggressive humour of Baltimore Police speak, while The Corner is filmed as a fly on the wall documentary and focuses on the daily grind of drug addiction in the Baltimore row houses where people are too busy being addicts to put the work into being funny.

So once you get to The Wire, you can get 60 hours of ambitious, gripping telly that expects the viewer to put the work in, pay attention and not to expect a neat plot resolution at the end of each episode.

It moves between the lives and work cultures of the Baltimore Police Department police and the drug gangs that they’re chasing. For both sides, it’s just business as usual and they’ve all got their own bureaucracies and work pressures. It then pans out to take in the roles of the schools, local politics and the press. You get a real feel of a city and society, disastrously going about it’s work.

The dialogue is fantastic. Foul mouthed and funny with properly inventive swearing. The potty mouthed work of people who spend too long doing observation in unmarked cars and standing on corners selling drugs. Both sides, dealing out the banter, just to pass the time. Both sides spending a lot of time just waiting. Both sides just doing their jobs.

The Wire has some fantastic characters, and even the minor characters seem to have had some care and effort put into them. My favourite character at the moment is Proposition Joe, who runs a drugs empire from his TV repair shop. He takes time out from fixing a toaster (he looks like he’s had a
few pieces himself) to remind one lucky individual that he was nearly a “cadaverous muthafucker"

The main thing that came out of the evening was David Simon’s ongoing love affair with journalism. He talked about starting out and just being in awe of the other reporters who were “Older than me, knew more than me, could drink more than me and were funnier than me…It was like a lost weekend that went on for years. Good job I took notes”

There was the pride in the fact that after his years in the job he knew exactly how to get the different sides of a crime story, through the fact that he had all the Police contacts, he knew where they drank and who would talk to him and about what. And who had an axe to grind or maybe just a different view.

One of the themes running through Series 5 of The Wire is the decline of the local paper. The problems of the Newspaper industry in Baltimore are echoed in local papers in the UK.

Although Simon acknowledged that a media based on dead trees may not be the most efficient way of delivering News he wondered what could replace it. Would an army of Citizen Bloggers have the skills, the time and the resources to find, follow and break a story? Because of course he was proud of his own skills and experience, but as he pointed out…he got them because he was paid and there was a newspaper industry that was willing and able to pay him.

His explanation of how The Wire came to be funded was really interesting. He talked about an executive at HBO who explained that it didn’t really matter how many people watched it (and by extension any of the other HBO shows). They just needed to have enough programmes that people would be interested in and would sign up for.

The company weren’t interested in whether you’d subscribed to the channel for The Sopranos, The Wire, boxing or indeed anything else…just so long as there was at least one programme in the schedule that would make you pay your subscription. Which of course turns the whole British TV ratings game on it’s head.

He claims to be surprised at how well The Wire was received in the UK (1200 people in a tent at Hay for starters) but put it down to “American dystopia plays better the further away you get from it”.

I was pleased to hear him talking about another Baltimore phrase that I loved from the series. Cops would describe themselves as being “A Police.” He said Martin Amis had been criticised for using it but Simon stood by it as a Baltimore phrase.

He talked about the importance of getting it right, the stories and the dialogue and about how the worlds of his characters were often only a few blocks away. But you are never going to go to Lafayette (where The Corner is set) as a tourist. He described The War On Drugs as a war against the underclass.

My next Box set is his Iraq drama Generation Kill and his next project is based Hurricane Katrina. Again you can see the parallels in his other work. Stories of failure by Government and Corporations and the effect on communities. Using drama to ask questions and show what is going on.

As he put it, after 40 years of talking about it, why are Baltimore schools still failing?

When he was asked about other writers he admired, he talked about Chekhov….because his characters don’t always do what they are supposed to do. By which I think he meant that the character isn’t just there as part of the plot. Which brings us back to The Wire and it’s huge and hugely entertaining cast.

Start working your way through the box sets. It may change the way you live. There’s a lot more swearing over breakfast after a night watching The Wire. Family punishments are harsher too.

That Petrol Emotion Birmingham Acadamy 1st July

2009-07-15T23:14:00.001Z

That Petrol Emotion split up in 1994 long after the world had lost interest.
Judging by the amount of elbow room at the Academy on the opening night of
their first tour since they split, the world may still not be interested.
Shame on the world. They were always an excellent band live and they've
still got all their powers.

I wouldn't trust them to set the video though. The first song Blue to
Black should have started with a sample...And indeed it did...Once singer
Steve Mack had found the play button.

Steve asked who remembered the name of the pub where they'd played their
first gig in Birmingham. That would be the Vine in Aston. I didn't go to
that but I do remember buying the first single Keen, downstairs in the old
Virgin Shop on Bull St where the assistant was enthusiastically promoting
the gig. Actually he probably was the promoter.

They were definitely amongst friends. Old friends. Over 30's friends,
many well acquainted with their 40's. Drummer Ciaran used to be an hairy man and used to look as if the red carpet had been rolled out along the back
of his neck. Well it's not quite gone to stripped floorboards yet but he’s
certainly put down a silver fox rug. Steve Mack still looks exactly the
same, all sinew and flailing limbs occasionally breaking into a kind of
hopping dance with a finger in the air. Guitarist and Undertone Damian's
sole concession to the ageing process seems to be a pair of glasses. He's
probably just wearing them as a show of solidarity with the rest of us

It looked like the gig was going well, for both band and audience. Steve said, "They say you should never go back to your old lover, but I'm beginning to change my mind".

It's A Good Thing would have me heading straight to Friends Reunited. It's a great example of how TPE built a joyous celebratory Pop out of awkwardness. One of the constant things about the band is they way they use discordant words. (Scum Surfin’, Chemicrazy...even T shirts that proclaim TPE to be renegades in Pop redux. I'm sure you are…but you probably told your mums you were astronauts, as it was easier to explain.) So in It's A Good Thing you get a line like "Our flesh feels fresh, That's the beauty" It's geekily awkward, and like unscientifically but enthusiastically
dissecting a frog. Just poking it to see what works. But you do get this
great high/ low sing song chorus from Steve and then just as the song
should be building, it breaks down as the guitars stumble into each other
before building up again. Calculated chaos. Obviously it doesn't finish
with a chorus (after all if you've got a great chorus...why would you want
to play it 3 times. That would be Pop insanity?) Instead what you get is a
blissful Ahhh ah vocal and Ciaran doing 4 bars of rolling drum thunder.
And that'll do instead of a chorus. And it does. Magnificently.

Looking out at the low numbers, Steve cheerfully announced, “next time we
do this, shall we just do it in somebody’s yard? We’ll have a barbecue,
bring a barrel of beer. It’ll be cheaper for all of us.” He gestured to
the rest of the band “…and if these fuckers won’t come, I’ll bring an
acoustic”

The band barrelled through the hits that got away, the likes of Big
Decision, Abandon, Hey Venus, Sensitize. It’s a toe in the water come back
tour, nothing to promote except their legacy. Great Pop tunes with
scratchy, scouring guitar lines to take the edge off the sweetness.
Another mishap with an intro sample to Catch A Fire brought anguished cries from the band. “This is what you’ve got look forward to…the doddering Petrols playing the same song 10 times”

Scum Surfin’ was an exhilarating hair pin drive, as the track built momentum
with the guitar powering out of the corners. Get it onto a video game,
boys. It can be your pension plan. Lifeblood comes from the first album
when their sound was closer to the Pere Ubu/Captain Beefheart template.
Closing tracks Last Of The True Believers and Detonate My Dreams sounded
fantastic as Damian's white Les Paul seemed to have turned into a white cat
which he was enthusiastically strangling. And the choker is that these
were the tracks that they had released after the world had lost interest.
And that, to my shame, included me.

These are the tracks I can remember...not necessarily in order

Blue To Black
Gnaw Mark
It's A Good Thing
Big Decision
Hey Venus
Tingle
Abandon
Head Staggered
Sooner Or Later
Sensitize
Life Blood
Catch A Fire
Scum Surfin'
Last Of The True Believers
Detonate My Dreams

There's TPE treasure trove at http://www.myspace.com/thatpetrolemotion and http://www.thatpetrolemotion.com/

That Petrol Emotion

2009-05-29T17:40:00.002Z

All bands reform. It’s inevitable, unavoidable and there are laws of physics that have less supporting evidence.

I’ve learned to live with gravity but my will to live has been tested by Spandau Ballet reforming. Actually that particular and unwelcome reformation has opened up the possibility of time travel for me. I really do feel exactly the same about them as I did when I was 16. Seething resentment and unlikely to be stopping off at the kilt shop.

Some bands rumble on for years after anyone has stopped caring and yet they can still catch you out when they reform. Like a fetish you didn’t know you had.

The Undertones split up after the world had stopped caring (one of the band described the final John Peel session as a “cover, a b side and the sound of 5 pairs of hands enthusiastically scraping the bottom of the barrel”). That Petrol Emotion were Sean O’Neil’s attempt to make more aggressive, politicised music. (Early singles had sleevenotes about strip searches and plastic bullets).

Late period Undertones had been shaped by the bands love of Soul and Psychedelia (and quite right too!) but That Petrol Emotion were more of the sound of the songs they loved to cover. Beefheart's Zig Zag Wanderer, Pere Ubu’s Non Alignment Pact, Television’s Friction, Neil Young’s Cinnamon Girl and In A Rut by The Ruts. Discordant and churning.

Initially the vocals were shared between bassist Damian (who’d joined after his post Undertones outfit Eleven had petered out) and guitarist Reamann O'Gormain. I saw this line up at the Mean Fiddler in 1985 but when I saw them a few months later at Thames Poly with The Nightingales they’d recruited gangly American singer Steve Mack. I saw them a lot over the following couple of years. Although at that point Mack wasn’t convincing as a singer (but he got a lot better over the years) they were a phenomenal band live. I saw them with The Long Ryders, The Woodentops in Deptford, Stump in Wolverhampton. The records weren’t as good as the gigs but songs like It’s A Good Thing proved that there was always joyous celebratory pop lurking under their swampy sound. They just couldn’t help it!

Now where it gets difficult is also where it got interesting…and actually where I lost interest. All the band wrote (great for quickly gathering up material…. and even better for arguments in the studio) and they were trying to bring in the Hip Hop and Dance records that they were listening to.

Actually, as band they were probably quicker off the mark than most in terms of the unloved and little lamented Indie dance crossover. So you’d get the “Agitate, educate organise” lyric from Brother D and The Collective Effort shoehorned into their own song Big Decision and a fair bit of sampling and remixing.

Sean O’Neil left after the 3rd album, End Of The Millennium Psychosis Blues and Damian moved back to guitar. Subsequent albums Chemicrazy and Fireproof were more focused than this sprawling sonic ragbag of styles but the law of diminishing returns is almost as fixed as the law about bands reforming. The band split in 94, still on ferocious live form.

The band played a couple of gigs in London and Ireland last summer and have just announced a full tour. If they’ve still got their live form then it should be a treat and I think it’s going to be the scene of much misty eyed reverie for those of us of a certain age. The baby sitters will be much in demand…but actually the baby sitters need to be watching live bands of this calibre for themselves.

http://www.myspace.com/thatpetrolemotion

Dag For Dag

2009-05-29T17:36:00.002Z

Dag for Dag are an American brother and sister duo now living in Stockholm. Sarah Parthemore Snavely and Jacob Donald Snavely have rediscovered the Joy Division sound of the spindly guitar, teetering on the edge of musical collapse and given it a bit of Gothic dressing up with the Woo hooOOOH (It’s all a bit scary isn’t it) vocals.

Shooting FromThe Shadows is a “full chunky ep” (that’s bass player Jacobs description) which is released on Conor Oberst’s label Saddle Creek. Main track Ring Me Elise has the kind of single line, distorted guitar snakery of Joy Divisions Transmission or Novelty. They also feel like an amped up Violent Femmes or the Cramps.

Barney’s guitar playing always sounded like he was playing beyond his actual ability and so part of the paranoia and gruff terror of Joy Division was that they were actually all going to be found out at any moment Of course Violent Femmes could all play like demons, they just liked sounding rough. And The Cramps? They need no justification.

With Dag For Dag there is a sense of glee to Sarah's playing and a pleasure in making it snort. You get the same feeling from the way the J Mascis sets about his guitar in Dinosaur Jr despite his apparent problem staying awake.

Silence Is The Verb sounds like a Country ballad version of Atmosphere. It’s a creepy boy girl duet with some heroic (and occasionally in tune) guitar twanging over a probing chiming bass line…The guitar sounds a bit like Frenz by The Fall and yes the bass line does sound like Atmosphere.

There is a version at http://www.dagfordag.com/

I have to approach Joy Division quite cautiously now. Whilst I can go back to New Order quite happily, I just can’t play a whole Joy Division album. I think about them quite a lot still but I just can’t face the hard work.

I did once hear an excellent story about the Joy Division tribute band who realised that the audience wasn’t quite sharing the intensity of the experience. The band ground relentlessly and terrifyingly through Day Of The Lords, with the singer giving it the full blown Ian Curtis gravitas.

The portentious lyrics “Where will it end, where will it end?” rang out and as the band seemed to be shaking before the fast approaching apocalypse, the audience was in fact doing a conga through the upstairs room of the Hare and Hounds.

Doves

2009-04-06T20:21:00.001Z

Doves are just so much better than they should be. The 4th album Kingdom Of Rust
looks like it's going to be more of the same big faced earnestness, chiming guitars and generic Northern glumness (do Elbow have a funny bone?) tempered with a dancefloor euphoria.
Here it comes, the swelling chorus, arms in the air, dancefloor drugs
rather than dance floor dancing. They keep the vocals mixed down low and
in interviews the singing bassist Jimi Goodwin has talked about deliberately
keeping the lyrics open ended and fuzzy to allow the listener to add their
own interpretation. (Actually that's often the defence of the
lyrically useless or the songwriter who is still scribbling while the
studio clock ticks and the keyboard player is practising their drumming

The feeling you get from Doves songs is that they are singing about the big
stuff. They sound like songs about leaving: hometowns and lovers,
travelling and movement....but the thing is I think they're going for a
feeling rather than a definite. If there is a Northern quality, then it’s
as much about place names in song titles (Northenden, Salford Quays, Winter
Hill) as much as the way they sit geographically and sonically with
Manchester bands like Elbow and The Chameleons with their middle distance
peering or Liverpool bands like Shack or The La’s with their more
traditional song structures. There is a terrace feel to them too.
Pounding was regularly played at Man City games and they’ve recorded a
version of Blue Moon. So there is more to them than earnestness.

What lifts them up as a band is their attention to detail, with a clever mix of guitar
sounds, little tricks and treatments. The first 2 albums sound compressed
and claustrophobic. The textures are really good but while you can hear the instruments you can’t hear the air move. You don’t hear the sound of speakers or drum skins pushing the
air around them, you don’t have the sound of fingers on guitar strings or
the clicks and pings of musicians making music. In fact I should hate the
sound of it…but I don’t

Catch The Sun from the first album Lost Souls has a warm fuzziness and an
elliptical bass line under the chorus of “Everyday it comes to this, catch
the things you might have missed, You say, go back to yesterday”. It’s a
line and a sound that pretty much captures what the band are about.
Wistful, regretful but oddly uplifting. It’s the kind of glumness you can
live with.

Second Album The Last Broadcast contains my favourite song of theirs (and probably yours) There Goes The Fear. With the drug references of the title and the line “Think of me when you’re
coming down” and a hefty 6 minute running time, it packs it all in.
There’s a U2 chukka chukka guitar sound and a really surprising moment as
the delicate “There goes the fear again” vocal line descends towards the
chorus. As the guitar line drops down it sounds like he’s fluffed the
line, and skipped a note, but then they repeat it through the rest of the
song. Which makes me warm to them as a band? Keep the mistakes.

The third album Some Cities has a drier sound and includes Black And White Town which sounds
like Heatwave by Martha and the Vandellas.

These soulful leanings shouldn’t be too much of a surprise. Before
reinventing themselves as Doves they were Sub Sub and released Ain’t No
Love Ain’t No Use in 1993. It’s a phenomenal record. It sounds like
hotpants and has earrings the size of mirror balls. It’s one of those
records that jumps out of the radio and whisks you straight out of the
kitchen/garage/hole in the road and drops you in the middle of the dance
floor of the best night of the best club. Still holding your washing up
brush/paintbrush.

The new album Kingdom Of Rust was recorded over a fraught three years on a Cheshire farm, within ear shot of the Manchester airport and the motorway. The title track has come out as the single and while it is still obviously Doves, there are some new twists. There’s a Mariachi feel and this time round they are actually using volume. Yes the guitar solo is louder than the part that
preceded it! Revolutionary and it sounds great. It also sounds like a
cross between Zager and Evans In The Year 2525 and Love. Psychedelic
Spaghetti Country and (North) Western. I’ll have some that!

Candi Staton Birmingham Town Hall 21st Feb

2009-02-27T15:08:00.002Z

Young Hearts Run Free is the song that defines her in England. It was the soundtrack to Candi Staton's 70's domestic turmoil and over the years it's also been the dance floor mood uplifter, the Hen Party Staple and karaoke hell. The Source used her vocal on You've Got The Love which has been a hit 3 times over the last 18 years. It's as seasonal as Slade! She's spent the last 20 years banging out a Gospel album a year and then there's her peerless and genre defining Southern Soul recordings from the late 60's. So who is exactly her audience? Actually where are her audience? The Town Hall is 2 thirds empty and one of the 2 backing singers has just introduced her as Candi STAYton and told us that he's heard that Birmingham is one of the loudest audiences anywhere. Ouch! This could be painful.

She opened with Nights on Broadway (well that's one hit out of the way) and it's immediately apparent that her voice is absolutely still intact and the band is sympathetic. Bass, drums, guitar, keyboards , 2 backing vocalists, sax and trumpet. It all sounds right, authentic and uncluttered. Whenever I watch old singers I always think of Paul McGrath's knees and wonder if the vocal veteran is using an old pros tricks and anticipation to keep themselves out of trouble (or in the right place) like the knackered knee knock 'em backer did at the end of his career. Well, not in Staton's case. Her voice still has the quality of those early recordings. There's a bruised, hurt quality which is incongruous coming from the smiling 65 year old woman walking round the stage with her arm outstretched as if carrying an invisible tray. And even better, she's going to talk. I always enjoy between song chat and Staton is talking her way though each song, explaining bits of musical history, who recorded the song and lots of talking to the ladies about men.

I Feel The Same is a Bonnie Rait song from Staton's new album and has the swampy Blues feel and the rising horns and backing vocals of her classic Muscle Shoals period. Towards the end Staton ad-libs that “You try and pick up the pieces, but there ain't no pieces left”.

I'm Just A Prisoner (Of Your Good Loving) is just such a Muscle Shoals classic. Staton finishes the song with the line “Sometimes it's worth being being a prisoner, if he loves you all night. Am I right ladies?” Considering that her interviews always go back to the failed and abusive marriages and Young Heats Run Free, it's the first of many often contradictory but usually entertaining statements.

I'll Sing A Love Song To You is mercifully brief but Elton John in cheesiness. She's singing it for those who have stayed with her since 1969

Later she talks about how in the 60's and 70's women singers could only sing songs about being hurt by love and begging men to stay and suggests that the record company must have spent a lot of money to make Jean Knights Mr Big Stuff a hit. Sexism and payola? What? In the Music Industry?

She lets slip that covers of In The Ghetto (she actually did perch on a stool to sing that one) and Stand By Your Man were both nominated for Grammys but my favourite line was when she talked about her first single I'd Rather Be An Old Man's Sweetheart (Than A Young Man's Fool) selling 750 000 copies “Before they realised it wasn't Aretha. But I got over it. Like a fat rat!”

The Town hall is a seated venue and she encouraged people to get their shoulders working but of course what the audience was really waiting for and what brought them to their feet was stretched out versions of Young Hearts Run Free and You've Got The Love. The band introductions brought the welcome revelation that the keyboard player was in fact former Style Councillor Mick Talbot, which of course shouldn't be that much of a surprise. His subtle keyboards had been a big part of why Staton's band sounded so good. On first listen Southern Soul seems to be just about the brass and a guitar that can either sting or twang. But the keyboard is crucial. Just think of the ghostly organ in Aretha Franklin's Do Right Woman Do Right Man and that piano. It's churchy and runs the rhythm, missing notes and paddling away like a syncopated seal. And of course Mick Talbot knows that stuff and indeed, his stuff.

She encored with the dancey and upbeat Hallelujah Anyway (so that covered the Gospel segment) and left with the announcement that Gods got a plan and that we should hang in there... and something about the President.

Shameful turnout aside, it was a really good gig and a treat to see a singer who's not only still got it but looked like she was still interested. You should have been there.

Nights On Broadway
I Feel The Same
I'm Just A Prisoner (Of Your Good Loving)
I'll Sing A Love Song To You
Breaking Down Slow
Suspicious Minds
Who's Hurting Now
I'd Rather Be An Old Man's Sweetheart (Than A Young Man's Fool)
Stand By Your Man
In The Ghetto
Young Hearts Run Free
You've Got The Love

Hallelujah Anyway

Candi Staton

2009-01-27T22:46:00.003Z

Of course not quite of all the best music came out on Stax and Motown….that would be a ridiculous notion. The rest came out on FAME and was recorded at Muscle Shoals. Sweeping generalisations aside, Candi Staton’s 6 year association with the label produced some of the definitive Southern soul recordings. That gospel and country influence, the multi racial band and the clarity and sweetness of the vocals playing (away) against the songs about cheatin’, lyin and slippin’ around. After all Country songs weren’t just about death, divorce and drinking.

Candi Staton's life story reads like a manual of how to be a definitive female soul singer. Born in Alabama, picking cotton, alcoholic dad, Gospel back ground, first solo in church at 5, touring with the Jewel Gospel Trio from the age of 12 until she was 17 when she started a relationship with Lou Rawls. When that ended she then married the first of her no good husbands, but after leaving him she tried to resestablish her career. She met and married Clarence Carter who was on FAME. Clarence Carter was never shy of a gimmick. Not only was he a blind blues singer but he also had a back up gimmick. A fruity filthy chuckle and a habit of breaking away from a song to stress the importance of “Making luuurve.” He introduced her to FAME owner Rick Hall and a similar deal to his own, whereby the FAME recordings were licensed to a major. In Staton's case Capitol

FAME drew from were incredibly talented pool of musicians and song writers. Original Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section bassist Tommy Cogbill played on Dusty in Memphis and on the Elvis Memphis sessions and his replacement David Hood (his son Patterson plays in the Drive By Truckers) knew a couple of good notes as well. Her early material included songs written by FAME house writer George Jackson and Clarence Carter. Just like County, Southern Soul likes to take a title, add some brackets and a bit of a twist. You’ve got to play with the words and add some humour to the heartbreak, so you get titles like I’d Rather Be An Old Man’s Sweetheart (Than A Young Mans Fool), Mr And Mrs Untrue, Another Man’s Woman Another Woman’s Man.

One of my favourite Candi Staton songs from that era is Evidence.

“Lipstick on your collar the smell of perfume that I never use,
Hotel matches in your pocket boy and a strange door key too”

The backing track is a miracle of hi fidelity infidelity. It’s got all my favourite sounds in. The contrast between the stinging guitar, the pad of the electric piano and the accusatory horns. The call and response vocals take their lead from the vocal interplay of Aretha Franklin and The Sweet Inspirations. And you don’t get better than that

Candi Staton also tackled C and W standards such as Stand By our Man and did a fine version of In The Ghetto. However, by 1974 the southern sound had fallen from favour, The Stax label was collapsing. Records sounded lusher. It was both the time and the sound of Philadelphia and the beginnings of disco

She moved to Warners. She’d been racking up the domestic misery, after splitting up from Clarence Carter and marrying husband number 3. Songwriter David Crawford wrote Young hearts Run Free based on the horror stories she’d told him, “I was in a very abusive relationship at that time He was a promoter, but I didn’t know he had a dark side. Before he met me, he was a big con artist. He threatened my life many times and did a lot of dirty things to me. I began to tell David about these things, and he wrote Young Hearts Run Free based on that. It was like my life-story in a song…”

After the disco era records like Young Hearts, Victim and Nights on Broadway she settled down to some serious drinking and husband number 4. “Your real role model is not an artist or an entertainer, it's your parents. And what you see them do, usually it comes down through the generations. I saw how my father would drink and abuse my mother and they would fight all the time. Somewhere in the back of my mind I knew it wasn't right, but you pick those same kind of men. I've married the same man over and over again. He just looked different and wore different clothes."

Eventually she quit both drinking and secular music, released a string of gospel records through the 80’s and 90’s and became a televangelist hosted the Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN) weekly series "Say Yes" from 1986 to 2004.

Her secular career received a bit of an unlikely kick in the 90’s after The Source sampled her Gospel track for “You’ve Got The Love”. She did put out a non gospel album in 1999 called Outside In

But if it was the church that took her out of secular music it also gave her a way back in. “ My pastor sat me down in the 90s. He said ‘I need to talk to you. Candi, those songs that you did in the 70s and in the 80s, they’re not bad songs. They’re good songs. Some of them you couldn’t sing because of the way you live now. Young Hearts Run Free wasn’t bad; Stand by Your Man – those songs are classics. Those songs were blessed. They raised your children, they bought you home. Rethink it. You could go out and bless people again with those songs’. It took me about five years to think about it. Eventually, when the compilation came out, that’s when I began to really think seriously about doing them again. Now I have a new gospel and new secular albums coming out.”

Honest Jon’s re issued her Fame recordings in 1994 and are also behind her secular albums His Hands from 1996 and the forthcoming album Who’s Hurting Now?

What has helped Staton this time round is that the people involved have tried to recapture the essence of what made those early records sound so good but also to allow Staton to feel comfortable with the material. She’s said that she wants to stay away from the cheatin’ songs but there’s still a wealth of heartbreak out there. "There will be some religious folk that will come against me, and even maybe some DJs. They'll be disappointed maybe that I'm singing love songs. But I call them life songs. Just because you go to church you're not alienated from life."

Mark Nevers from Lambchop produced and recorded her latest albums at his house in Nashville with a band including, Candi's son Marcus Williams on drums, daughter Cassandra Hightower on backing vocals and Barry Beckett from the original Muscle Shoals houseband on the Hammond organ.

There’s material from Dan Penn, Bonnie Rait and Mercy Now by Mary Gauthier (while we’re on the subject of Gauthier seek out I Drink. It’s not a tribute to Staton’s thirsty years but it is as harrowing a depiction of wet the bed/forget to collect the kids from school alcoholism as you are ever likely to need)

The title track His Hands is written by Will Oldham, known to his mother as Bonnie Prince Billy. A man who knows his Country and his Western and can do clever songwriting that can charm or scare. (Johnny Cash covered I See A Darkness. Strangely enough I’m not aware of anyone covering the song he did as Palace Music on the Arise Therefore album….You Have Cum In Your Hair And Your Dick Is Hanging Out)

Young Hearts Run Free hid it’s tale of domestic abuse under a soaring escapist tune and the chorus of of “Say I wanna leave a thousand times a day”, but Oldham’s song His Hands does it in a 3 act play over 6 harrowing minutes, as the hands change from The Lover, to the Wife beater to God. Musically it’s got a bit of nod to King Heroin by James Brown. On her website Staton describes it as “As a kind of a gospel song and it's kind of not. It ends up pointing you to the Redeemer, but it starts out telling you about a normal, natural man and what he would do to you in an abusive situation. I enjoyed singing that because it's so much like my life. I've lived through every line of that song."

His Hands is on Youtube and it’ll scare you to death

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7LdJGhf2XI

There are songs from the new album (released next month) at http://www.myspace.com/candistaton

She plays Birmingham Town Hall on 21st February. And I can't wait.

Hold Steady Wolves Civic 15 Dec 08

2008-12-24T20:52:00.009Z

It had been a long time coming but I did finally get to see The Hold
Steady. I'd fancied seeing them since their appearance on Jools Holland
last year and then the original Wolves gig was postponed after guitarist
Tad Kubler was hospitalised with pancreatitis. Now that could have been worse.
Gillian Taylforth ended up in a libel case after administering on the spot relief
for her hubby's pancreatitis on a motorway hard shoulder. Seems the Police
and the medically unqualified tabloid press couldn't tell the difference
between a Florence Nightingale act of mercy and a Hugh Grant lewd act.
Amazingly she lost the libel case when she tried to correct The Sun's
misconception.

There would have been room for a few more punters at Wolves Civic. Young
people and women had stayed away. The Hold Steady's audience reflect the
band themselves. Over 30, male, not too cool and gratefully glad to be
out. Still, I can talk....I was taking notes!

From the opening and barnstorming Constructive Summer, Craig Finn was a
whirl of geeky dervishness. Jumping , pointing, mouthing off mike and
looking like Sgt Bilko. At one point he swung an imaginary baseball bat.
After 5 songs he took his guitar off (he hadn't played it for the first 4)
but soon put it back on again. To give it some more of the silent
treatment

Keyboard player Franz Nicolay was also hugely entertaining. Sporting flat cap,
jacket and moustache combo and an arsenal of magicians gestures. At one
point he covered his eyes and then struck a pose as the keyboard swirls
rose. As if he couldn't quite believe the magical power in his
fingertips. Part snake charming, part twerpery.

The epic Lord, I'm Discouraged from the new album featured accordion and
the first appearance of the Tab Kubler's double neck guitar. Normally the
beast with two necks is best left in the hands of Led Zep or the Eagles
and is about as welcome as home brew. I mean it's nice that someone does
it, but you just don't want to be around when it comes out. The guitar
solo itself wasn't so much unleashed as unzipped. Full blown Rush style
rock pompery. And even more impressive from a man who's casual air made it
look as if he was just looking round for somewhere to put an awkward shaped
box he was carrying and would rejoin us in a minute. And I do like the
line "...Excuses and half truths and fortified wine"

I think this is the thing about the Hold Steady. Craig Finn is essentially
writing short stories. We don't actually need to believe they are
autobiographical, either for him or for us (if we are the sing along type).
He may look like he is someone's dad picking up the pieces afterwards rather than the actual housewrecking party dude....but then I suspect Nick Cave has also eased up on the murdering in recent years. Finn is too geeky to convince the under 20's. Young men won't want to be him
and their actual audience, of older and more beard capable blokes are
rather afraid that they already are him.

So with the Hold Steady what we've actually got is a cross over Rock band.
They're rawk enough for the Mid West but lyrically interesting enough for
Word magazine. On record, the keyboards can be a bit too flowery for
my tastes and the backing vocals sometimes have a bit too much wah and
wahoo. Fine for a stadium but not necessarily what I'd want at home . But
any doubts I have about the band are just barged aside by the quality of
the songs and performance. And they're still my favourite band of the
last couple of years.

Here's the set list....and an alternative review of the gig is at http://www.thestirrer.co.uk/the-hold-steady-1812081.html

Constructive Summer
Hot Soft Light
Sequestered In Memphis
Cattle And The Creeping Things
Massive Nights
Knuckles
Joke About Jamaica
Sapphire
Ask Her For Adderall
Lord, I'm Discouraged
You Can Make Him Like You
Chill Out Tent
Don't Let Me Explode
Stevie Nix
Chips Ahoy
Your Little Hoodrat Friend
How A Resurrection Really Feels

===========

Arms And Hearts
Stuck Between Stations
Stay Positive
Slapped Actress

Joe Strummer. The Future Is Unwritten

2008-11-29T10:49:00.004Z

Julian Temples Sex Pistols film The Filth And The Fury is one of the best Music films. It snatched the Pistols story back from his own highjacked Great Rock N Roll Swindle which Malcolm McClaren had turned into his own revisionist comedy.

Temple's film about Joe Strummer manages to be an affectionate and honest film about a contradictory, difficult man who was one of the best front men in one of the best bands. And like the Pistols, the myth of the Clash is as big as the music. And just as important. As a fan you buy the records. But for inspiration you buy into the myth.

The opening sequence is terrific. Strummer is in the studio singing an unaccompanied vocal to White Riot. The backing track drops in, powerful, ragged and naïve. But instead of the expected clips of The Clash careering round the stage or stock footage of urban chaos what you actually get is a young John Mellor kicking leaves in the garden with his diplomat dad.

The Future Is Unwritten is the story of the contradictions and the story of Strummer before and after The Clash. It is told through brilliantly edited archive footage and the recollections of those who knew him gathered up in camp fire interviews. During the 90's building campfires had became symbolic for Strummer allowing him to gather friends and new people around him. Temple carried out new interviews around campfires to allow contradictory reminiscences to sit side by side with the image of Strummer. And Strummer really did build his own image. Not only with the name changes (from John Mellor, to Woody to Strummer) but he also was naturally left handed but played guitar right handed because he thought it looked better.

Strummer described himself as being one of the boarding school bullies, but the school friends gathered round the camp fire remember him as a boy who stayed out of trouble because he knew how to handle people.

His ex girlfriend described him as a boys own adventurer who would "Sleep under the starts when it was totally unnecessary." Another ex, the more pragmatic Palmolive from The Slits describes looking out the window and wondering who the wino sleeping in the garden was….and then seeing the pointy shoes and realising it must be Joe.

He inspired great affection and loyalty among people, but he was ruthless about firing band members and distancing himself from his Pub Rock band the 101ers and his early 70's squat buddies. When he bumped into them they said it was like the shutters had come down. It was almost impossible for him to get out of character. The next chapter had started. .

An early Clash interview showed him projecting the image of a man of few words and fewer syllables. He answers a question about morality with "I'd never steal money from a friend…" There's a long pause, but you just know, that he's always known exactly what he was going to say…but just wants the camera to get that moment. "….But I'd steal his girlfriend".

There's no playfulness about it. This was strictly sullen era Clash. And away from the camera, Strummer was certainly partial to girlfriend poaching as Topper Headon testifies. But if Strummer was living the part of the Punk Rock mumbler, it was a 24 hour business. When he first joined the band Topper felt that they were trying to intimidate him with an early band meeting punctuated only by the sounds of Simonon spitting on the electric fire through the gap in his front teeth. He says Strummer didn't actually drop the act with him and talk honestly until Strummer and Headon were in an American jail cell together charged with stealing motel pillows.

But Strummer really could talk. His images and enthusiasm for the world came tumbling out in the clips, in quotes from the broadcasts he did for the BBC World Service and in his own description of Punk Rock history.

"The Pistols had to come in and blow everything away. They were the stun grenade into the room before the door kicked in. They came out of nowhere and they came to support us one night at the Nashville Rooms"

There's a great sequence of a recent Mick Jones interview (less hats, less hair) where he's looking out of his gran's Ladbrooke Grove tower block flat. You can see the lights of the city and the Westway snaking through it. Jones looks out and says "There's the roar of a city. It does sound like our music"

The end of the Clash is pure soap opera. As Topper's song Rock The Casbah becomes a hit, Topper is out of the band, replaced by original stand in drummer Terry Chimes for a tour of American enormodomes with the likes of The Who.

On one hand Strummer had got everything he could have hoped for as music fan who never really was Bored Of The USA but he also felt squeezed and compromised. A thoroughly unhappy looking Strummer and Jones sporting full Combat Rock regalia and wearing hats that span military campaigns from The American Civil War to Korea say the music industry is "No worse than any other prostitution business"

The film cuts between a full colour stadium version of Career Opportunities to a black and white early version. It's as if they won the caravan on Bullseye but would have been happier with the toaster.

As Should I Stay Or Should I Go plays (Oh the irony-Mick Jones's witless song about ex girlfriend and Meatloaf duetter Ellen Foley, where he ponders, quite literally, whether he should stay or indeed go) Strummer sums up the bands career.

"The success goes to your head pitfall. The ego trap pitfall. You think you're geniuses. You become drug addicts. You make indulgent records. You overdub the sound of ants biting through a wooden beam. All these things we've gone through, each and every one of them. And that's why we've come out a depleted force."

"We turned into the people we'd tried to destroy"

The film is still really interesting after the demise of the Clash, when Strummer was essentially lost. One afternoon he decided to cut down on his drinking but then that evening agreed to stand in for Shane MacGowan on a Pogues tour. I'm glad he did, if only for the version of Straight to Hell I saw them do at Aston Villa leisure Centre.

He made soundtracks and recruited musicians on a whim for his Latino Rockabilly War and Mescaleros projects.

The first time Strummer saw future Mescalero Antony Genn was when Genn was the Glastonbury streaker during Elastica's set in the mid 90's

He thought he'd found his ideal drummer. He hadn't heard him play but he liked his name. "He's got to be good. His name is Ramone Baharandra"

Anthony Kiedis thought that it was odd for Strummer to try to recruit ex Red Hot Chilli Peppers drummer Jack Irons who was in a mental institution at the time. "It'll be Ok. We'll get him a ride to and fro, he'll come into the studio, he'll have a job and we'll make this record"

After he'd made Earthquake Weather he really needed all the industry support he could muster. However on the day of the play back when the studio execs were due to come and listen to it, he didn't show up to the meeting. He'd left a note pinned to his front door. "I've gone to the desert"

Fittingly the last gig Strummer played was a benefit for striking firemen. Mick Jones got up and played too. The closest there was to a Clash reunion. Strummer died shortly afterwards at home after walking the dog. Cause of death was an undetected and congenital heart defect that could have killed him at any time in the preceding years.

The film does a fine job of telling Strummers story and allowing him to be both a very fallible human being but also Punk Rock hero. There are 2 good quotes from the extra interview footage that comes with the DVD. One is from Mickey Gallagher who felt that he and fellow Blockhead Norman Watt Roy should have had a credit for their work on the Magnificent 7. Strummer had made all the right noises but ultimately nothing had happened. (Before we all get too judgemental remember that The Clash actually took a royalty cut to subsidise the low price of Sandinista). Gallagher said "Joe Strummer was a hero but John Mellor was a coward"

The nicer quote though is a story about what happened when Strummer spotted Monica Lewinsky in a nightclub. It shows both his ability to both say the right thing but also the unexpected thing. As soon as Strummer saw her he told his friends he had to go and say something to her. They were worried about what he could possibly say. He bounded up to her; she looked nervous and didn't know who he was. "I'm Joe Strummer. But you're Punk Rock"

Ronnie Spector Last Of The Rock Stars

2008-10-28T19:41:00.003Z

Ronnie Spector's album Last Of The Rock Stars is a conscious effort to make art out of her life. Released 2 years ago, but a decade in the making, it uses songs and guest artists that reflect Ronnie Spector's life and it's influence.

Ronnie Spector is a proper icon with a look and a sound. Madonna has said she wanted to look how Ronnie Spector sounded. But Spector was also the sound of an era and the sound of New York. Stick a beehive on the Statue of Liberty and call it Ronnie Spector.

Veronica Bennett started singing with her sister and cousin and had huge hits with Baby I love You and Be My Baby. Their producer Phil Spector turned into a recluse in 66, hurt, astounded (and probably driven insane) by the idea that his production of Ike and Tina Turners River Deep Mountain High hadn't been a bigger hit. Unfortunately Ronnie married him and got the benefits of a controlling and abusive relationship to rival Ike and Tina's. A paranoid and jealous Phil Spector made Ronnie keep a life size model of himself in her car and tried to make sure that everything was delivered to the house so that she wouldn't need to go out. Deliveries also included their adopted children. She says he pointed out 2 children playing in the park and asked if she liked them. Next day he brought them round saying the adoption had gone through.

When she finally did escape after 5 years, she was barefoot. He'd taken all her shoes to stop her leaving.

But whilst Tina Turner escaped Ike and then went on to make a string of appalling records, Ronnie Spector spent her time in court battles over custody and royalties. Now Phil Spector is on trial for murder

Last of the Rock Stars opens with Never Gonna Be Your Baby. The titles a nod to her past, but the guitars are spikier. The lyrics have grown up from teen romance. "It smells of crime it smacks of sin I give a little more each I give in"…. and you just wait for the first trademark "Wo oagh oagh"

All I Want is a terrific song about a poisonous, desperate relationship. It manages to blend Girl Group lines like "I don't want flowers or fancy things, I gave up on a diamond ring" with the adult sexual complexities of "You turn to me at night, like you think everything's alright, and it is, til we turn on the lights and real life returns." It's a great line and her phrasing is fantastic. That song in particular (written by Amy Rigby who is married to Wreckless Eric…who wrote a song called Veronica) just feels like it was written with her voice and history in mind.

Keith Richards plays guitar on All I Want but also does a great knock about fun duet on Ike and Tina Turner's Everything's Gonna Work Out Fine. It's a battle of the sexes, song , very much of it's time.(like Otis Redding and Carla Thomas duets) She's making wedding plans and he's stalling. I particularly enjoy hearing her sing "Darling" and him sing talking in reply "Yes Ronnie" On the fade out she says "You're the best…Give it to me" and the wrinkly old man replies "You do the work Baby", amidst cackles of laughter

Here Today Gone Tomorrow is a Ramones song, and of course, under the leather jackets and the songs about glue the Ramones were really a Girl Group. Which is why they were so good.

She does a really good version of Johnny Thunders You Can't Put Your Arms Around A Memory, with Joey Ramone. Patti Smith also crops up on the album and Ode To LA features The Raveonettes, whose debt to Ronnie Spector is almost as great as their debt to The Jesus And Mary Chain.

Girl From The Ghetto is Spector's defiant vindication. Jenny may be from the block, but Ronnie reminds you exactly where she's from with the repeated line "Spanish Harlem". It's lyrics about triumph over adversity and Phil Spector include the lines "I hope your cell is full of magazines and everyone has a picture of me."

The Ronettes singles are Pop jewels. Instantly recognisable (Just think of that opening drum beat on Be My Baby…it's a Pop Quiz safe bet, you'll name it in seconds). The wall of sound and the discipline of having all your songs about boys and girls not only defined a view of American Teenage but made Pop Music that New York Punks could still love 20 years later.

Steve Van Zandt (bald under a bandana in the E Street band and bald under a quiff wig in the Sopranos) sums it up best. "Everybody loves Ronnie Spector…it's one of the byelaws of Rock 'n' Roll

Hot Club Of CowTown Glee Club Birmingham 23rd Sept

2008-10-28T19:37:00.004Z

The Hot Club Of Cowtown promise "Hot jazz and Western Swing". It's an offer I can't refuse.

The original trio of guitar, stand up bass and violin started in New York in 96 before moving to Austin. Classically trained violinist Elana James and classically shit hot guitarist Whit Smith were aiming for the feel of the songs of the 30's, as played by the likes of Bob Wills, Stephane Grappelli and Django Reinhardt and a dollop of Country. I didn't know whether to wear a hat or spats. After 5 albums the band split up for 2 years. Now they're back, refreshed and swinging with a drummer in tow.

The opening song Ida Redd is a traditional; song featuring a girl who'll take a shovel to your head and it pretty much encapsulates the Hot Club approach. The vocals of James and Smith bounce off each other and there's a whopping and a hollering from bassist Jake Erwin. Smith plays fluid and scuttling guitar lines on a coffee table sized semi acoustic, James violin swoops and skips through a range of different sounds and the bass rattles like a train.

They covers include Long Way Home by Tom Waites, Duke Ellington's I Got It Bad (And That Ain't Good) and Georgia On My Mind. The songs themselves are often a stepping off point for utterly joyful, utterly skilful musicianship. It's like a particularly well run orgy…Everyone gets a turn and everyone's part is appreciated.

I Can't Give You Anything But Love is the kind of breathy playful sultriness. Part Marilyn Munroe Happy Birthday Mr President, part Jessica Rabbit. What's The Matter With The Mill ploughs a filthy furrow. Apparently there's lots of corn but they can't get no grinding done.

Their own song Forget Me Nots with it's lines about going to the mountains "Forget me nots and mountain columbine… I'm leaving you behind" would have sat happily on a Gram Parsons album. Which makes sense really as both bands were trying to draw in the folkier, traditional roots of Country rather than the rhinestones.

The actual Hot Club name throws up some interesting references. There's the original Hot Club of France with Reinhardt and Grapelli, Emmylou Harris and The Hot Band and the Hot Teens who are currently sending me 200 e mails a day. The latter must have a keen manager and an enthusiastic plugger.

They play 2 sets with a half hour break spent lurking round the merchandising stall. I like the idea of bands being directly involved in selling. It keeps the money closer to them, but rather than just cds and posters I'd like to see bands branching out into car valeting, dry cleaning or crystal therapy between sets. Actually I'd have pretty much signed up for anything with fit as a fiddler Elana James and her spotty dress.

The personal problems behind the original split are referred to when James announces this series of 22 consecutive gigs is the longest they've ever done, but they're still all getting along. Smith just sighs and says "Aww don't say that."

What makes the band special though is the feeling of spontaneity. You really do get the feeling that they're reading each other musically and are ready to take a song into a different direction. They have a great trick of building up and snapping into each others solos. It's subtly done, an extra drum beat here or a fuller chord there, but it did feel that the band were stepping up to something rather than having a rest from singing!

Jake Erwin's upright bass playing was a joy to watch, moving between a rockabilly train slap and a jazz club chug. I waited all night to see him use the bow. It was there hanging off his bass, swinging like Iggy Pop's cock. And just like an Iggy gig, the audience knew, the bow was there and knew that it probably did come out at some gigs. But that night the bow stayed in. Wonder what it would have sounded like.

Last song of the night was Orange Blossom Special was astonishingly powerful. It's a song you've probably heard many times before but Hot Club really stoked it, building up the power for the first couple of minutes, before letting it go. Like a fiddle frenzied Metallica.

There's a best of album which draws together material from the previous 5 albums which is a good place to start and you can see a version of Orange Blossom Special from Jools Holland's Later at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jr8My5Uo0gE

Sam and Dave and Isaac Hayes

2008-09-02T21:47:00.003Z

When Isaac Hayes died recently there was a surprising (but deserved) amount of coverage. It may have been testament to his massive contribution to music but also to the fact that with his various roles as musician, songwriter, performer, iconic baldy, actor and voice of chef meant that there were simply more good stories about him. Death by treadmill didn't hurt the copywriters either!

Great things about Isaac Hayes.

The fact that he wrote 200 songs for Stax (and you do know a lot of them), the cover of Hot Buttered Soul with the bald head and chain and the fact that the lp only had 4 songs on it including By The Time I Get To Phoenix. With it's generous 18 minute running time, there was a fair chance you could actually get to Phoenix by the time Ike had finished the spoken intro. The slight pause as the monologue ends with the line "He said" and then the song slides into the opening line of the song. A classic soul moment, only bettered by the sweetness of the strings as it gets to the line "She'll laugh when she reaches the part that says I'm leaving"

Obviously Theme from Shaft was great. Even better was the fact that he was lifted onto the stage by a hydraulic ramp to play it at the 1971 Oscars. That's less Soulsvile USA. More like Kiss and Detroit Rock City. You've got to give credit for the fact that he had a tuxedo made of chains and also wrote a song called Pursuit Of The Pimpmobile. Oh yes. And the tooling up sequence in I'm Gonna Git You Sucka. The scene gets longer and the weapons get bigger. After being so involved in the whole Blaxploitation genre here was Hayes sending himself up.

But there's more to it than the stories and the songwriting. And more to it than great songwriter writes great song. I think what he did with Sam and Dave is even more interesting.

Hayes and song writing partner Dave Porter took an underachieving soul duo who had been signed by Atlantic's Jerry Wexler (who also died very recently) and forced them to go against their own instincts as singers. The resulting string of singles that Hayes and Porter wrote for them between 1965 and 69 are pretty much as good as it gets. Backed by a multi racial band on a white owned label that aimed at Black audiences (while in the North, Motown was the Black owned label aiming at White audiences) Sam and Dave had the Gospel fire, and the contrast of Sam Moore's pleading tenor contrasting with Dave Prater's gruff roar.

I Take what I Want
You Don't Know Like I Know
Hold On I'm Coming
You Got Me Humming
When Something Is Wrong With My baby
Soul Man
I Thank You
Everybody Got To Believe In Somebody
Soul Sister Brown Sugar

No duffers there! Hearing any of them would make anyone's world a better place. Sometimes you don't have to dig out the rare and obscure. Sometimes the best stuff was actually the hits!

Sam Moore started out singing Gospel and was all set to tour with the Soul Stirrers as a potential replacement for Sam Cooke. He changed his mind after seeing Jackie Wilson and wanted to do a broader range of material. In 1961 he was compering an amateur night in Miami he was joined onstage by Dave Prater still in his baker's whites from his day job. Prater was so nervous he dropped his mike and Sam caught it.

They'd signed to Roulette but the whole thing didn't really come together until they were signed by Jerry Wexler in 1964 and sent to Memphis....which is where Isaac Hayes came in. The hits that Hayes and Porter wrote for them forced them to sing outside their natural keys.

Sam Moore has said "The funny thing was I didn't like any of our hits when Hayes and Porter played them for us. I liked the ballads but I didn't understand their kind of music. I was looking for the straight Rock 'n' Roll and they'd come up with all these changes, horn lines doing this and we'd be doing that. Chords where you'd really have to grit your teeth to sing it"

But of course that straining gave an urgency to the sound. The horn lines, guitar and vocals were all going hell for leather. The band were doing call and response in the same way that Sam and Dave were. Hayes and Porter were writing songs for them that captured the fervour of Gospel but with celebrations of heartbreak and lust. Songs that built the Soul Man tradition. Testifying and testosterone. Sometimes he's a Broke Down Piece Of A Man (actually it's a Steve Cropper song rather than Isaac Hayes) but more likely it's Hold On I'm Coming.

Listen to the wail and flail of I Thank You, and it's opening plea for "Some more of that ooooold Soul clapping". Now go and play Black Grape's In The Name Of The Father. A record that could not have existed with Sam and Dave.

Thing is Hayes also had to convince the label owner. "Jim Stewart just did not like minor keys. Yeah yeah. The bread and butter of Gospel and Blues. He hated them in fact....Of course you couldn't be at all funky and innovative if you didn't use some of those options. So we were always at work sneaking them in"

As a live act they were legendary. They were Double Dynamite, with the non stop, athletic dance routines, the call and response vocals, feeding off each others lines and moves. I remember seeing a clip of Hold On I'm Coming where they make loosening a tie seem like a choreographed act of Soulful intensity, rather than just a way of breathing more easily.

In Gerri Hirshey's book Nowhere To Run (a terrific book on Soul that should be on the national curriculum) there is a lot of Sam and Dave...and sweat.
Prater saw it as proof that he'd worked for his pay and Moore said "Unless my body reaches a certain temperature, starts to liquify, I just don't feel right"

But despite their onstage chemistry the pair had a volatile relationship. Moore was a long term heroin addict. In 1968 Prater shot his wife during an argument. Prater's wife survived but he was never prosecuted. Moore wouldn't speak to him again. "I said I'll sing with you but I'll never talk to you again ever. So for 12 years our lives were completely separate"

In 1970 Moore recorded a solo album for Atlantic, backed by the cream of Atlantic and Stax musicians including Bernard Purdie on drums, Aretha Franklin on keyboards, Donny Hathaway and the Sweet Inspirations. Plenty Good Lovin' didn't get released until 2002.

Moore himself didn't remember making it but he did remember going to see the albums producer King Curtis in 1971. "Unfortunately when I got there he was ...ahh...getting murdered"
King Curtis Sax player (on everything from Yakety Yak to Memphis Soul Stew) and producer was carrying air conditioning equipment into his Harlem apartment when he was stabbed.

Moore remembers "Aretha was sitting across the street and I was walking towards the apartment. I could see King screaming at this guy to get off his steps....Aretha got out of the car and screamed but at the time I wasn't so clean. I was carrying stuff I didn't want any one to find. I ran before I saw him die

Sam and Dave continued to work with each other on and off through the 70's. There were various reunion tours and ill advised re recordings of their hits. The success of the Blues Brothers prompted another short lived reunion before Moore got a job serving Warrants and Prater worked for a Pontiac dealer.

Moore talks about those 70's gigs in a recent interview at http://www.zani.co.uk/Interviews.aspx?id=56 to plug his recent Overnight Sensational album (I'd go for the release of the 1970 album myself....it doesn't feature Sting or Jon Bon Jovi)

"Oh my god it was real bad. You've got to understand it wasn't a promoter that broke Sam and Dave, it was us. Sometimes Dave would show up, and I wouldn't. Sometimes I would show, and he wouldn't. We'd get up on stage, but it wasn't like the old days when we connected, and say to each other "Let's go and get them". We were getting high, I was pimping my girlfriends at the time. It wasn't such a good life then."

The Sam and Dave act had led to a myriad of male duo acts. Sam and Bill, Sam and Dan, Sam and Sam, Eddie and Ernie. At one point Dave Prater was touring as Sam and Dave with Sam from Sam and Dan.

There were legal shenanigans when Sam Moore stopped Atlantic from releasing a Sam and Dave album in 1985 that featured Sam Daniels. Moore himself felt the weight of legal process when he was ordered to stop performing Dole Man in support of Bob Dole. Sadly he was not stopped from recording Soul Man with Lou Reed. Prater had the misfortune to sell crack to an undercover policeman and then worse luck when he died following a car crash in 88.

The popularity and impact of their hits and their own personal problems meant that they were stuck with each other and their hits even when they weren't together. Although the sweat and intensity of their live shows was down to their own talent, it was the song writing of Isaac Hayes and Dave Porter
that gave them the hits that they could never escape from. Their story has some of the most thrilling moments in Pop, squandered talent, unseen chances and their own poisonous relationship.

It's like Rod Hull and Emu.

Bombay Bicycle Club

2008-09-02T21:46:00.002Z

When Lemmy and his wart were young and handsome, they decided that they should be part of the Rock n Roll world because, instead of all the people telling you what you couldn't do…"These guys told you what you could do. Which is a lot more fun. And there were all the cute chicks"

Bombay Bicycle Club on the other hand formed to play at their school assembly when they 15. "We weren't very good. The school assembly was a bit of a disaster, and afterwards we messed around for a year."

They're still only 18 though and have played at V and Reading festivals and supported the Young Knives. Between exams they've also put out 3 singles. And here's the thing. They're very good. It's 2 guitars, bass and drums sound, with tuneful Sonic Youth intertwining guitars, and Jack Steadman's reedy, quavery vocals sung into the middle distance. He sounds like Mr Magoo or Marc Bolan (The Glam Larry the lamb)

New single Evening/Morning is full of unexpected musical twists and turns. It starts quietly with a steadily building drums roll and a mix of ringing, guitar picking and some coarser strummage. As it reaches a crescendo it drops back to just a filthy bass. It squeezes a few more stop starts and a great false ending into a great 3 minutes. It sounds tense and it reminds me of Drink The Elixir by Salad. I doubt if they remember it though. When that record came out the band were still too young for the ball pool.

All their records have been produced by Arctic Monkeys producer Jim Abiss. How Are You, from last years How We Are ep released on the own Mmm label has more stop start trickery and has a bit more of a Dinosaur Jr feel especially the drums.

The chiming discordant guitars of Open House from their debut single Boy I Used To Be (also from last year) are more like The Strokes.

They're a band with loads of potential and I do like to hear band talk about their exams nearly as much as their records. I bet Lemmy does too.

http://www.myspace.com/bombaybicycleclub

The Hold Steady

2008-09-02T21:44:00.003Z

On the few occasions recently when I haven't been thinking about The Wire, I've mostly been thinking about how much I'm looking forward to the new Hold Steady album. I was really taken by them after seeing them on Jools Holland last year. Their last album Boys And Girls In America was their breakthrough album. Bruce Springsteen meets AC/DC as opposed to their first 2 albums which were Bruce Springsteen meets Husker Du. Stadium indie played by a bunch of Brooklyn blokes who comfortably manage to pull off the look of being a bunch of 30 something blokes who know their way around a bar, a bar band, a hotdog stand and quite possibly did see the Bears games on Saturday. They are the best new old band of recent years with just the right mix of classic rock moves, the Punk Rock sensibilities to keep all that Rock in check and the terrific lyrics of Craig Finn. Part Springsteen/Strummer declamatory roar and part pissed poetry.

Stuck Between Stations was the stand out track and single from their last album Boys And Girls In America and contains more good ideas than you generally need in a song. Kerouac quoting, AC/DC riffing and the lyric "Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together. Crushing one another with colossal expectations" Phew!

The ascending riff leading into the chorus is just monumental and straight out of the Angus Young's notebook. It is the cock of the school of rock. It was one of my favourite records of the year but some ear discretion is advised. Some of the keyboards are less E Street Band and more Bruce Hornsby and his bastard Range. So if you are Bruce averse (either Springsteen or Hornsby) then you need to concentrate more on the first 2 albums Almost Killed Me and Separation Sunday where the taut relentless guitars roll like tanks. There are crunching guitars and shouty bloke tales of suburban casualties where often the same characters run like a thread through his lyrics. War vets and party casualties and more painkillers than a celebrity "My Hollywood Hell" edition of Heat.

You wouldn't want him at your wedding...when the vicar asks if there is an any cause or just impediment, loose lips Finn would be bellowing out an eye watering story from the staggy!

The single from the forthcoming album is exactly what is required. Sequestered in Memphis seems to be a Police interview. (A parallel to Jenny Was A Friend Of Mine by The Killers) Something has gone badly wrong after picking up a woman in a bar. "We didn't go back to her place, we went to some place where she cat sits"

Finn leads into each chorus with a variation of "I'll tell the story, again…"

And as for the chorus itself, it's a 6 line distillation of what's great about the band. "Subpoenaed in Texas, sequestered in Memphis" A blend of legalese and geography. Craig Finn, the Replacements fan from Minneapolis is still so in love with Rock 'n' Roll that he thinks it's just enough for him to invoke the names Texas and Memphis and for that to be just enough to carry the song. In this case it is.

The American legal terms may be familiar to British ears through years of exposure to their legal system through films and telly (It's been like distance learning for me. I wouldn't exactly claim to be qualified, but I reckon I could pace around an American courtroom) but it really is not what you expect to hear in a chorus. Generally I look for a chorus that promotes cars, girls or shaking either booty, that thing or even the room.

Either way it's a great record and exactly what I want to hear from them. The new album Stay Positive is available on ITunes but I'm holding out until the 14th for the physical release, the digipack and the extra tracks.

There is more Hold Steady at http://www.thestirrer.co.uk/ps1405071.html

Stuck Between Stations is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Cem1ME-OvQ

Sequestered In Memphis is at http://www.myspace.com/theholdsteady

Zutons - You Can Do Anything

2008-09-02T21:41:00.003Z

The Zutons are back. Like the first cheeky bollock peeking out of the shorts of summer. Not quite want you want to see all the time, but the occasional view is always funny. I do like the band, although they may not appreciate being compared to cheeky bollocks. They started it though by calling their last album Tired Of Hanging Around.

This time round they've lost a guitarist, gained a producer (George Drakoulias who produced The Black Crows and Primal Scream) and singer Dave McCabe has had a new beard fitted.

The album cover has the band in the desert playing second fiddle to a giant silver Z. Now there is a proud tradition of monuments in Pop Culture from the monolith in 2001 A Space Odyssey, Spinal Tap's Stonehenge, and the monument on the Cover of Who's Next that seemed to be both public and convenient. The giant silver Z just feels more like a left over prop from a car advert though and I end up looking at Abi's legs rather than the fine corporate branding.

The albums is less odd ball than Who Killed The Zutons and doesn't have anything as good Valerie or Oh Stacey (Look What You've Done) from the last album, but there's still plenty to like. Starting with McCabe's hoarse yearning vocals and Sean Payne's excellent drumming.

My swaggering greasy Southern Rock A Boogie requirements have usually been satisfied by The Black Crows, rather than a bunch of Scouse Beefheart botherers. I'm not complaining though. Harder And Harder is a great opening track with slide guitar and gamely honking sax and really is only a few footsteps away (over the on stage Persian carpet) from The Black Crows. And if that's the Drak influence then I'm all for it.

What's Your Problem is a stomping brassy pop soul affair ushered in with jabbering sax and guitar riffs with plenty of" Huh" and "Yeahs" for backing vocals.

Always Right Behind You sticks it's thumbs in it's belt loops and rocks like a vintage Top Of The Pops. All slide guitar and platform shoes. It's extremely silly and you really shouldn't like it as much as you will

McCabe's lyrics on this album have come in for criticism as being clichéd and poisonous. Bumbag opens with the line "Raise a glass now to the person who invented the word called scum"

Family Of Leeches is a Shameless episode set to music. All asbos and hearts of gold. Maybe he's having problems with the neighbours of the house he bought with the proceeds of Valerie.

The first album definitely had odder lyrics though with it's images of zombies, Dirty Dancehalls and the self referential Zuton fever. McCabe claims he wants to write stories you can dance to and always writes about "trouble and mischief".

Valerie is "About our mate Valerie getting done for drink driving and about telling her to come and see me, give her a hug, kind of thing. 'Cos she's got ginger hair too. It's obviously her, it's very literal."

I quite like literal. One of the best tracks from the last album was The Little Things we do. Literally about hangovers, it's a wry look at the problems of sandwich making after hay making and it may not have been prize wining poetry but id did have a sax part that sounded like it was hurtling down the hallway to hurl.

There are plenty of songs of trouble and mischief on this album though.

Freak is a Gigolo song while Put A Little Side is a tale of funny money and bogus jobs.

"5 times a year I'll return with the fake pay packet that I didn't earn. I'm the one who works the oil rigs but clearly I'm not".

My favourite tracks are the up-tempo, rockier ones like Harder And Harder and Always Right Behind You. But I've made a little room in my life for Don't Get Caught. It is pickety country folk, that's part Everybody's Talkin' that sits comfortably on a cushion of perfectly judged keyboards. I also like Give Me A Reason with it's George Harrison guitar

There are sample tracks at http://www.columbia.co.uk/listen/the_zutons/you_can_do_anything___the_times_online

They've been playing a series of gigs at Forestry Commission sites (come on wouldn't you rather go to an arboretum than an auditorium) and play at Cannock Chase 28th June

Vic Goddard and Subway Sect

2008-05-24T07:57:00.003Z

Subway Sect were the Punk band that got away. Artier than their contemporaries, they were Post Punk before Punk had even happened. But whilst the similarly influenced and awkward Wire left a legacy of great records, the original Subway Sect just left the 2 singles: Nobody's Scared and Ambition. The debut album was scrapped and through a mixture of mismanagement and contrariness Vic Goddard's records and song writing style veered through big bands, swing and Northern Soul. Eventually he ran out of genres and became a postman.

However last year he re-recorded songs from the planned debut aiming for the sound and feel of that era. Released last year as 1978 Now, it's a really good record, and I dearly wish it had been around in 1978! An accompanying series of gigs included Leicester Firebug, which was a bit of a treat

www.thestirrer.co.uk/gom1911071.html

School friends Vic Goddard and guitarist Rob Symmons formed the band after seeing the Sex Pistols at the Marquee. Malcolm Mclaren paid for their early rehearsals to get them ready for the 2 day Punk festival at the 100 Club in September 76. In those early days, audiences may have been small but they were all forming bands, as Sex Pistols gigs became the focus for the curious and disaffected.

“I thought the Sex Pistols were the end of Rock n Roll but as it turned out they weren’t. Steve Jones had obviously learned to play from the New York Dolls but we wanted to sound like the Velvet Underground or The Seeds. Nothing remotely heavy. We never used ordinary guitars, a Gibson or a Strat. We used Fender Mustangs because they have a trebly sound. We became quite purist. Our guitarist refused to allow any macho Rock ‘n’ Roll attitudes on stage"

Subway Sect's instruments were on HP but even more onerously they were managed by Clash manager Bernie Rhodes. They were on The White Riot tour in 1977 with The Clash, Slits and Buzzcocks.

Nobody's Scared came out in 1978 on Braik records (Rhodes own label). It's a thrilling and god-awful racket, with the drums working overtime and the other instruments quite keen to put in the hours too!

The opening line "Everyone is a prostitute, singing the song in prison, Moral standards the wallpaper" fits in with Goddard’s aim to change the way that Rock songs were written. “To pare it down, take out all the Americanisms. I didn’t mind what went into the songs as long as the language was different. No “yeahs” and “baby”.

The call and response vocal lines and non Rock ‘n’ Roll language of that debut would also crop up in bands like Gang Of 4 or Au Pairs

Subway Sect’s influences were Johnny Thunders and Jonathan Richman, Erik Satie, Debussy and Dada. Slightly compromised by the fact that they still couldn't really play and the gigs were chaotic.

"The Sex Pistols represented what could be done but they had really been practising since 1974 so they really could play quite well while we literally not only couldn't play, we weren't even the sort of people who would be in a group in the first place and still aren't! I wouldn't look twice at an amplifier! We tended to try and do everything in a different way just because we couldn't do it in a proper way. We had a big thing with the Buzzcocks, we were totally on the same wavelength and the Prefects as well. We came out of the same mould. They were Birmingham, we were London and the Buzzcocks were Manchester but we were very similar, we'd all started from scratch”.

Rough Trade's Geoff Travis issued the second single Ambition later in 78. “Subway Sect were so literary. Vic is the great lost soul of the era. His nihilism is more extreme than anyone’s. He seemed to have seen through the circus, which he was being enticed into, from day one. He saw all the contradictions and didn’t want to be a pop star”

This makes what happened next all the more extraordinary. The band were recording what should have been the debut album at Gooseberry studios (Linda Lusardi's brother was the engineer), Bernie Rhodes basically sacked the rest of the band scrapped the album and then kept Goddard on as a songwriter (£100 per week for 10 songs…. regardless of quality) for a planned stable of acts.

Ambition was the only thing released from those sessions. It still ranks as one of the great Punk singles but at the time the band hated it. Not just the ones who'd been sacked. Goddard wasn't too keen either. Symmons thought that it sounded like "Just a great big Rock record". Well it didn't. But it certainly didn't sound quite like anything else that Punk had produced either, with it's guitar crashing opening chords, plinky keyboards and bubbling electronics (the latter was added by Rhodes and had the same grisly appeal as the horrible jug sound of the 13th Floor Elevators)

Still tied in with Rhodes, Vic Goddard released What's the Matter Boy in 1980 using many of the songs that would have been on the lost album. It's slick, a bit gimmicky and a long way from The Velvet Underground. Goddard has described his “reluctant cooperation” in making it and calls it a skiffle album. It features original Clash drummer Terry Chimes and his bass playing brother and also The Black Arabs (as featured on the great Rock n Roll Swindle Soundtrack…. oh yes Goddard’s world was still spinning on a McLaren/Rhodes axis)

Stop That Girl is a really good song though and I think long time fan Edwyn Collins definitely cocked an ear to the arrangement of Stop That Girl for his own songs on the first Orange Juice album. Orange Juice also covered Goddard’s song Holiday Hymn.

The line up of Subway Sect for the Songs For Sale album included the musicians that would later make up Joboxers. I saw them at Manchester Apollo in 1981 supporting Altered Images. A soon to be Joboxer asked the audience “Is Vic there?….cos he aint fucking here!” before launching into funny, clever and downright musical set of instrumentals. Without the elusive Goddard.

He recorded an album T.R.O.U.B.LE as a big band with the musicians who’d backed Joe Jackson on his Jumping Jive album but it didn’t get released until 86. Loss of impetus, loss of interest and so he was off to the Post office.

There have been projects since including an album The End Of The Surrey People produced by Edwyn Collins, a musical with Irvine Welsh and the albums Long Term Side Effect and Sansend.

Thing is I’m biased. I was much more interested in the prospect of original Subway Sect songs played as they were meant to be. He’s still an unlikely looking figure, as befits a man who sang We Oppose All Rock N Roll. At the Leicester gig drummer Mark Laff (one of the original Subway Sect drummers, who later joined Generation X) announced that there would be an encore but “Vic’s having a cup of tea” Rock ‘n’ Roll Phew! A chance to see a genuine Punk one off I’ll drink to that!

There are good interviews (well I’ve plundered them) with Goddard and Symmons at
www.punk77.co.uk/groups/subwaysectvicgoddardinterviewsep2001.htm

http://www.3ammagazine.com/musicarchives/2002_nov/interview_vic_godard.html

http://www.vicgodard.com/

There are streamed tracks of Nobody’s Scared, Ambition and Chain Smoking at

www.last.fm/music/Subway+Sect/_/Nobody%27s+Scared

He plays at Kings Heath Hare and Hounds on 30th May

Stars Of The Lid

2008-05-18T21:00:00.004Z

I don't spend very much time in the bubble chair suspended from the ceiling, stroking both my chin and a white cat. (I don't spend that much time on the sex swing either!) But if I did, then Stars Of The Lid would be my Ambient music of choice.

Adam Wiltzie and Brian McBride make instrumentals because "It just satisfied something we wanted to express. When you're trying to pay homage to the sounds of your refrigerator, there's no need for vocals."

Originally formed in Austin Texas in 1993 they now live in separate continents with Wiltzie living in Brussels. McBride used to have a day job as a Debating Coach. (Now there's a job that didn't feature in the Arctic Monkeys tradesman's line up.)

They use a mixture of heavily treated guitars, strings brass and "Found Sounds." It's not just the fridge, it's the sound of the kitchen it's in! Everything is squeezed, stretched or twisted into a completely different shape. Sounds build and ebb away. And sometimes they don't build very much!

It may be drones and echoes but the effect is often staggeringly beautiful, sometimes you're forced to concentrate on the tiniest sound and other times you can just let it wash over you. Fac 21 from 2001's album The Tired Sounds Of Stars Of The Lid is rich, orchestral, and uplifting but half way through it there is a creepy electrical crackle and rumble. Barely audible, but that's what makes it disconcerting. (Coincidentally Wiltzie and McBride have complained about the initial vinyl pressing of their second album Gravitational Pull vs The Desire For An Aquatic Life which suffered from surface noise. How can they tell? Sceptic slap down! It seems the undynamic duo actually are listening!)

The music is very cinematic and there is a real David Lynch feel. (They even call one of their tracks Music For Twin Peaks.) You could use their material for documentary soundtracks, (once Sigur Ros have been thoroughly mined) or Survival Horror games like Resident Evil.

4AD supremo Ivo Watts described them as making the most important music of the 21st century. (A view possibly shared by Cocteau Twin Liz Fraser who said " Sugar bee slip doh, sequin tree honey trollop")

Of course the whole thing with ambient music is you need to approach it in a different way. On one hand, using it as something nice to go to sleep to or playing it in your crystal shop and incense shack just seems a tad disrespectful. But then you've also got to ask yourself, what is it for and does it mean anything? What if it's just a bunch of random sounds thrown together and shipped out to the gullible?

As with many other things, the answer lies with Brian Eno and his ground-breaking series of albums like Discreet Music and Music for Airports.

In 1975 he was in hospital, in a body cast following a car crash. He was listening to 18th century harp music, with the volume too quiet, but unable to adjust it because he couldn't move. He noticed the way that the music blended in with the environment, working on "many different levels of listening attention without forcing one in particular". Eno made Ambient Music as a working, utilitarian music. To add to or change the environment you are in and the experience you are having. He described it as like a painter taking a figure out of a painting to create space. By taking out the vocals or by using software and loops to create a random element that would replace the musicians own intervention or personality, he could create a space that would filled by the listener's experience (presumably either consciously or unconsciously). So it's ok then. It's official. You can go to sleep to it or even buy a candle and some pot pourri. (That's the ambient equivalent of smashing up the seats!)

The volume thing is important though. Discreet Music was meant to be played at barely audible volumes. Similarly Harold Budd (who Eno collaborated with on Plateaux Of Mirror in 1980) aimed to play his piano as quietly as possible. It's a principle I wish my violin playing eight year old would adopt.

There is a good selection of Stars On The Lid material at www.myspace.com/starsofthelid and there are 8 albums and assorted solo projects to work through for the truly committed.

I'm just intrigued by the whole idea of seeing this stuff played live. Seating, a string section and projections are promised! Rocking out is not!

Nick Cave Birmingham Academy 05/05/08

2008-05-08T19:47:00.003Z

On the face of it a Nick Cave gig shouldn’t have been this much fun. What with all the Old Testament bellowing and all that murdering. And lest we forget he is a confirmed Kylie killer. One minute he was duetting with her on Where The Wild Roses Grow and then by the end of the song he’s killed her with a rock and stuck a rose between her teeth. What a rotter.

He’s 50 now and has been perfecting his pervy horror shtick and spilling blood in a literate and unique style over 15 solo albums. For years people have argued that there is a sense of humour at work, but after listening to all that bloodshed and bile could a sold out Academy just be full of serial killers in disguise? And while we’re at it, if Cave can’t think of anything nice to write about, then shouldn’t he go to a garden centre or visit a National Trust property instead.

Evidently not. The latest album Dig Lazarus Dig is amongst his more user friendly. And Nick cave himself was positively jovial.

They opened with the clanking call and response chain gang sound of Night Of The Lotus Eaters and Dig Lazarus Dig. The Bad Seeds specialise in that swampy, alcoholic sound. Rain hammering on a cabin roof and face at the window stuff.

For this tour they’ve brought the full drum shop. Loads of percussion and some songs had 2 drummers (the excellent Jim Sacluvas and his legendary pink drum kit) and any Bad Seed not otherwise gainfully employed could usually be spotted banging something or other.

Dig Lazarus Dig has Cave in full declamatory preacher mode, as he tells the story of a cult figure and his downfall. “The women all went back to their homes and their husbands with secret smiles in the corner of their mouths. He ended up as so many of them do, back on the streets in a soup queue.... Poor Larry” He sounds like he’s having fun by the way h squeezes out the “Poor Larry” line

The swirling Tupelo is as threatening as the storm it describes and Red Right Hand suits the clankier sound of the current Bad Seeds sound. Cave switches between guitar, keyboard and stage prowling and fist shaking depending on the song. His civil war ‘tache remains resolutely lady scaring though. He’s got some completion in the beardy stakes though. Guitarist Warren Ellis seems to have a hermit attached to his chin.

Cave responds good-humouredly to the constant audience requests, although sadly not to the hopeful “Play the one from Shrek”. At one point he announces “It’s Rock ‘n’ Roll. It’s incredible what you can get away with.”

He adopted one fan’s shout of “You’re the man” and enthusiastically took it up as the theme for the evening. After each song the patter would be a variant on “I’m the Man,” or “No you’re the Man”

After playing Your Funeral My Trial he said, “It was a happy day when I wrote that song” before almost giggling “The bitch never talked to me again”. Oh yes he’s in a good mood. Book him for your next children’s party!

Lie Down Here And Be My Girl from the new album sounds excellent, powering along like it’s close relative Third Uncle by Eno. The sparse and delicate Moonland has the arresting opening line “When I first came up out of the meat locker. The city was gone”

The set closer More News From Nowhere has Cave waving bye bye to the audience (oh yes) in contrast to the Birthday Party days when he’d be more likely to be sticking a winklepickered boot into the front row.

Oldies encores included Get Ready For Love where the “All around the world” part got played liked AC/DC’s Whole Lotta Rosie and the frankly beautiful Into My Arms. In a parallel universe couples may well be cuddling up to that one. And some were at the Academy! But just to prove that he’s not ready for the Simon Bates gig yet, his last song was Stagger Lee. As the song veered from taut and brooding to it’s full bloody climax, the stage lighting went as mental as the band in full explosive flight. ...And the language. Dear oh dear! What a lot of mother loving. Unfortunately what we’ve got in that song, is a very bad man who leaves a trail of death and destruction; starting with the murder of the bar man at the Bucket Of Blood and finishing with some sexual bad manners and the line “Billy dropped down and slobbered on his head and Stag filled him full of lead”

(Amazingly this isn't actually the most unsettling use of the word "head" in pop music....That would be the line from the Jacques Brel song Next. "And I swear on the wet head of my first case of gonorrhoea")

As a song and performance it summed up just why Nick Cave is still such a good thing. Funny, hokey, unsettling and thoroughly enjoying playing with the possibilities of a musical and literary history and also well aware of his own image and the fun he can have with it. Backed by a band who rock like bastards.

Night Of The Lotus Eaters
Dig Lazarus, Dig
Tupelo
Todays Lesson
Red Right Hand
Midnight Man
Your Funeral My Trial
Deanna
Lie Down Here And Be My Girl
Moonland
The Ship Song
We Call Upon The Author
Papa Won't Leave You Henry
More News From Nowhere

Get Ready For Love
Hard On For Love
Straight To You
Lyre Of Orpheus

Into My Arms
Stagger Lee

Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings. Birmingham Yardbird 13/04/08

2008-04-22T17:09:00.006Z

I had really fancied this gig.

From the records and the clips I’d seen I was expecting a full on, all out funky soul, sold out treat. And it was. There was no support but the dj’s delivered some furious funk and the Yardbird is just a good place to be anyway.

Eight Dap-Kings squeeze onto the small low stage. Suited and booted to various degrees of dapperness and exuding bar band nonchalance.

They’re all great players and look like they could probably play their instruments with one hand and use the other to skin you at poker. Except for the conga player who looks like he’s only a costume change away from a part in ‘Allo ‘Allo.

I felt I’d had my moneys worth even before Sharon Jones took to the stage.

MC and guitarist Binky Griptite led the band into a couple of warm up numbers and instrumentals. It was just so good to be standing so close to a band who had so completely captured the sound of classic soul. Northern and Southern, Country and Western. Sacred and profane and all points in-between. They had a handle on it and they were turning it. On!

Trumpet, 2 saxes, 2 guitars, congas and the effortless funky shuffle of the peerless Homer Funky Foot Steinweiss using the world’s smallest kit with no toms. (Or gongs. It didn’t levitate or explode into flames either!)

Bosco Bass Mann’s shades were straight from Starsky and Hutch and his bass lines were straight from all the best Rare Groove records. No complaints on either count then.

Binky Griptite’s stage patter is a delight. It’s 70’s dj/George Clinton meets Hendrix. In his world the merchandise stand isn’t a trestle table with some t shirts and cds. It’s a "Supersoul Superstore"

Sharon Jones is an Etta James style soul belter, with a sideline in the Tina Turner strut on unfeasible heels. (She probably didn’t wear them when she was a warder at Rikers Island. At least not on the days when she’d have to run after someone.)

Her act includes lots of chatting to the audience and she explains how she tackled the pitfalls of being a big woman dancing in a little dress. “I’ve got my shorts on!”

She does like to get people on stage though. One by one they’re dragged up to be danced at/with and sung to. The classic moment though was in a song called Be Easy.

She pulled a fresh faced fellow onto the stage and explained how this song was going to be an education to him and would help him in matters of love.

She asked if he was here with his girlfriend. She asked if he was here with a woman. “Are you here with a lady tonight?”

“Er I’m with my mum”....which was true. And his dad too. A family outing. Mum got dragged on stage as well. His dad plays drums in Ramones covers band Havana A Go Go. The Havana A Go Go hero was beaming “That’s my boy”.

The songs capture the sounds of all the best years of classic 60’s and 70’s Soul. Aint Nobody’s Baby opens out into a soaring Staple Singers type chorus and Mean Man positively shakes it’s tail feather.

Songs are stretched out or shortened with nods and glances between the band. So it feels as if the material is being moulded to the mood of the evening. They could have rehearsed being spontaneous though!

They finish with a covers of It’s a Mans World and There Was A Time. (Both Jones and her childhood hero Brown were born in Augusta Georgia).

A great gig then.

As on the records they’re not out do anything new or clever, just capture the sounds and feeling of classic era Soul. And they do it impeccably. It's more than just revivalism though. Jones herself has said “Maybe it’s coming back for others but I’ve lived through segregation and Stax and Otis dying. I’ve lived this part of history and now I’m singing it”.

Bettye Lavette

2008-04-10T21:39:00.002Z

Bettye LaVette's album The Scene Of The Crime is her 4th album since 2001.

The 62-year-old Soul veteran released her first single aged 16, but despite a string of singles, the debut album she recorded the following decade, (yes.... I do mean 10 years later!) got shelved and it took another another 10 years for an album came out on Motown. And then nothing, until now and her comparative commercial frenzy!

Her story is a classic case of bad luck and management that veered between criminal and pragmatic.

She didn't write her own material and saw herself as an interpreter of songs. Her best work is where she actually gets right inside the song and method acts the part.

Dave Godin, the influential Soul journalist understood that music isn't just something to dance to but there is life, meaning and a social context to how music is made and listened to and that the best singers could sing that life alive.

He saw it in Bettye LaVette and wrote that "Few can match the flawless totality of conveyed experience that Bettye LaVette never fails to achieve. She is the consummate artist who can relate on every level.

“Take Bettye LaVette away from Soul music's history and there is a gap which no other person I can think of could have filled."

Growing up in Detroit she went to school with many of the up and coming Motown acts. Her best friend knew Johnnie Mae Matthews who ran her own Northern label. She released her first single My Man He's A Loving Man in 1962 which was picked up by Atlantic.

LaVette remembers Matthews as "A big, mean woman with cuts on her face, who beat me up and cheated the Temptations and everybody else out of their money," The song was an R&B hit and she promoted it with a tour that included Clyde McPhatter, Ben E King, Barbara Lynn and Otis Redding. Not a bad start!

After a less successful second single You'll Never Change, Atlantic dropped her and Matthews passed her management contract on to Robert West (who had owned the studio where LaVette had first recorded). West released her 3rd single Witchcraft In The Air on his own Lupine label. He then got shot with his own gun while "negotiating" a deal for Mary Wells.

Let Me Down Easy is her defining song. Part Tango, part Dance Of The Sugar Plum fairy with its stop start rhythm and plucked strings. The vocal is hoarse and anguished, picking up from where despair leaves off. A desperate realisation that Love is walking out of the door.

She can see it and you can hear it!

A towering performance and an absolute Soul treasure. It was released in 1965 on Calla. LaVette certainly could pick 'em. Not only was she dropped after another couple of singles but the label was owned by Nate McCalla.... a gangland enforcer who would eventually disappear ...with his murdered body not turning up until years later.

LaVette has said wryly that "It was a great concern with record companies that I sounded more like Wilson Pickett than Diana Ross, It was only later that I realized that I sound different from other people, and I have to work with what I've got."

There were further releases on Big Wheel Records and Karen but still no hits and no money!

She did a version of the Kenny Rogers hit What Condition My Condition Is In. The young silver fox loved it and it led to a string of singles on his brother Lelan's Nashville based label Silver Fox. This is my favourite period of her career. It was gathered together on a Charly album Nearer To You that came out in the mid 80's.

Since then the compilation has come out on different labels, different track ordering and there is currently an import version called Piece Of My Heart. Essentially though, It's essential.

I think those Silver Fox singles are amongst the best things to come out of that whole Country Soul period. Where Black and White musicians were mixing and blending their respective styles and cooking up music that was both about the South and yet also nostalgic. Hard times, good lovin', home cooking.

The single He Made A Woman Out Of Me is a swampy country grind with a stinging guitar. It sounds as filthy as it's subject matter. I also like the way the story is set out, tying it together geographically and socially. "I was born on a levee. A little bit south of Montgomery. Mama worked at the big house and daddy worked for the county."

Outside of karaoke night it is actually quite hard to do a bad version of Piece Of My Heart. It's a song of universal experience that manages to push all the emotional buttons. Bettye LaVette's version released on SSS (yes another move!) sits between the supple, yet restrained version by Erma Franklin and the full flail and wail of Janis Joplin.

For my money, LaVette's version is the better.

She recorded a full album at Muscle Shoals, for Atlantic in 1972. It was shelved, although it was eventually released as Souvenirs in 2000 on the French label Art and Soul. There's a beefed up version around now with the obligatory extra tracks called Child Of The 70's.

It's often referred to as her great lost album. Although I don't think it deserves the full legendary status, there is some good stuff on it. It hasn't got the grit of the Silver Fox singles.There's a poppier feel to it, almost as if while Dusty Springfield and Petula Clarke et al were heading to Memphis, Betty was heading the other way.

It includes a cover of Neil Young's Heart Of Gold, It Aint Easy (the Ron Davies song that Bowie covered on Ziggy Stardust), The Stealer by Free and a terrific version of Joe Simon's Your Turn To Cry.

Turning her back on the music business she spent the next 7 years touring with the musical Bubbling Brown sugar.

There's a good interview at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djuQJDlGpbk.

She recalls her manager Jim Lewis telling her "You're really not that good. You're cute and your voice is powerful, but you gotta learn what to do with it. You can't just depend on the records. They may never sell. Learn how to do your show. Learn how to sing a song."

She says that if he hadn't said that then "I wouldn't have been able to hold on for these 45 years without a record unless I knew how to do a show."

A couple of singles came out during this period including the Soul Children style Thank You For Loving Me. It's sensuous and lush while it's follow up You're A Man Of Words I'm A Woman Of Action was thoroughly business like. In a good way.

Surprise disco anthem Doing the Best That I Can from 78 has the great lyric "Doin' the best that I can to get out of my head what got out of my hands" but I never warmed to it. A disco step too far. LaVette apparently hated it too.

Finally her debut album Tell Me A Lie came out on Motown in 1982. A mere 20 years after her first single. It's a bit slick for my tastes but the title track is really good and the album cover is worth a mention for it's picture of the slow dancing couple with the bloke slipping off his wedding ring behind the woman's back. Nice.

The resurgence started with a live album in 2001 and the album A Woman Like Me from 2004. It's a modern Blues record, with producer Dennis Walker supplying most of the songs. He previously worked with Robert Cray. And it shows.

I've Got My Own Hell To Raise from 2005 is a collection of songs all written by women, including Dolly Parton, Lucinda Williams, Sinead O'Connor, Roseanne Cash and Aimee Mann. It's a really good album. LaVette is on top form and while the songs styles are from outside the Soul genre, the album has got Soul by the bucket load.

Last years album The Scene Of The Crime is an intriguing concept and also the best album she's actually made. (Not including the Silver Fox/SSS singles compilation.... which I would count amongst the best albums that anyone has made!)

It was recorded at FAME studios by Patterson Hood and his band Drive By Truckers. Patterson Hood's father, David Hood, not only plays bass on the latest Bettye LaVette album (he also played on the 1972 sessions) but he played on pretty much every great record to come out of Muscle Shoals during the '60s and '70s. And the good ones he didn't play on probably had Spooner Oldham on keyboards instead. And look! He crops up on this album too.

So the album has already got more than it's fair share of Soul icons, but the twist is that the Drive By Truckers are a self-styled greasy Southern Rock n Roll band. It's a great sound.

No horns (in itself a break from the Southern Soul sound) instead it's got the pad of electric piano, a really good dry drum sound and guitar lines that hang distorted and crumpled like yesterdays socks. At the centre of it all though is Bettye LaVette's raw voice and the life she wrings out of the songs.

There's a great moment on Choices where she slides the lines into each other "At an early age I found. I like drinking. I never turned one down"

LaVette had never written a song before, but she gets a co-writers credit as Patterson Hood used the stories and phrases she used around the studio. (Much as Steve Cropper had done with In The Midnight Hour for Wilson Pickett).

Before The Money Came (The Battle Of Bettye LaVette) has lines like "I knew David Ruffin when he was sober sleeping on my floor before he crossed over" sitting on a spiky Stones riff that could have sat happily on the end of Exile On Main Street.

On the Eddie Hinton song I Still Want To Be Your Baby the 2 tone strident guitar blares like an R&B ambulance while LaVette delivers a lyric of unrepentant, if not downright celebratory stubbornness.

It's great to hear her singing again, and unlike many comeback albums this is much more than an album trading on past glories and the goodwill of fans.

The esteemed Martin Longley (The Stirrer's Jazz wibble correspondent) saw her last year. (see link here)

She's playing again at the Jazz cafe Camden 13 April. I think it'll be a corker.

Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings

2008-03-16T22:08:00.002Z

Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings don't do anything new. And they're all the better for it. They're a full on Soul Revue style band, all clattering drums and horn powered. A stage full of musicians and a singer with the vocal ticks and tricks of Mavis Staples or Irma Thomas. I like them a lot. And I do like a big band. A lean, mean, hungry power trio is all very well but I like to see a band who can kick start a local economy.

All their songs sound like they could have been recorded between 1966 and 1974. If there was such a thing as a Golden Age in Soul, then those are the years that count. (Actually that's not in doubt. It's scientifically proven and my stereo proves it on a nightly basis).

They're not so much a tribute act, more like a band who have been lifted straight from one era into another. Like an Austin Soul Powers. Or as if King Arthur and The Knights of the Round table were actually a Soul act who were waiting under the Harlem Apollo (rather than a Welsh Hillside) ready for when they were needed.

Well Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings are needed right now. Amy Winehouse certainly needed them. The Dap-Kings powered much of Amy Winehouse's Back To Black album and made it a very different (and much better album) than her debut. They also do important work on the (thankless) task of rehabilitating Coldplay on Mark Ronson's covers album Version.

Sharon Jones was born in 1956 Augusta Georgia (as was James Brown) but grew up in Brooklyn. She combined singing in Wedding bands and anonymous session work with stints as a security guard for Welles Fargo and at Rikers Island. It was all a long way from the Golden Age of Soul to which her voice and style belonged.

Old School style Soul did maintain a foothold through the Rare Groove scene of the 80's and the Northern Soul underground. Desco was a small Independent specialising in vinyl only releases catering for old Soul fans. Sharon Jones started recording vocal sessions for them in 1996 alongside the likes of Lee Fields.

When Desco folded, the house band The Soul Providers regrouped as The Dap-Kings featuring the former Desco label co- owner Bosco Bass Mann on bass and 17 year old Homer "Funkyfoot" Steinweiss on drums.

Dap Dipping with Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings was recorded on 8 track in a make shift basement studio in a Kung Fu dojo. It's a funky affair, much more influenced by the likes of James Brown than the Stax and Motown influenced albums that Sharon Jones released later.

MC and guitarist Binky Griptite (pay attention to the names) starts to describe an epidemic that's is (apparently) sweeping the nation. "It's called the Dap Dip and they say you get it in your pants." In true Soul revue style Sharon shouts back "Hell Binky, that's no epidemic. It's a brand new dance". It's a monstrous 4 note descending bass line. And there are foot by foot illustrations on the album sleeve for doing the dance to!

The band have thought out the packaging (the effort didn't just go on the names!), the sleeve notes, the graphics and the complete absences of dates mean you can almost believe this record was made 35 years ago.

All the required soul clichés are in place. Love is sweet. Men are mean. Often they are also no good. Make It Good To Me has the excellent line "It's half past making up time and a quarter to affection"

The second album Naturally was recorded on a 16 track in the studio below the Daptone offices in Brooklyn. It's actually a much better record, with a wider range of styles, but still sounding like it was recorded very much in the Golden Age of Soul.

From the bubbling Funk of How Do I Le t A Good Man Down to the Jean Knight/Betty Wright feel of Natural Born Lover where the guitars and horns do a call and response. And Soul cliché lovers and indeed lovers will be relieved to hear that the Natural Born Lover is dependable "He takes care of business".

Stranded In Your Love starts with a knock at the door as the disgraced ex lover pleads to be let back because he's had his car stolen and he can't sleep at his brothers house. It's great boy/girl soap opera duet, with both sides hamming it up as the sex with the ex saga unfolds.

And because the male voice is Lee Fields it means we get to hear Sharon say the immortal line "Now Lee I've told you. Is this romance or circumstance"? It's firmly in the tradition of the Otis Redding and Carla Thomas duets rather than Mills and Boon.

You're Gonna Get It is a Laura Lee/ Millie Jackson style, talking to the ladies about men. "Some love makes you do right. Some love makes you do wrong".

There's a clever Soul powered version of Woody Guthrie's This Land Is Your Land which treats it like It's A Mans World, while Your Thing Is A Drag is a mix of Marva Whitney's It's My Thing and Papa's Got A brand new Bag by James Brown. And I mean it's a mix both in the name checking title and the song itself!

100 days 100 Nights came out last year. It's another step up terms of quality and diversity. It's still all old Soul though! When The Other Foot Drops, Uncle starts off with the guitar arpeggios and horns of Try A Little Tenderness but as the song gathers momentum it becomes more like Mr Big Stuff by Jean Knight. Two great records in one. Result!

Sharon Jones vocal on Ain't Nobody's Baby qualifies as a great bit of soul wailing and the guitar gives a cheeky nod to What A Man by Linda Lyndell (and redone by Salt N Pepa and En Vogue).

Be Easy and Let Them Knock both have a New Orleans/Alan Toussaint feel to them. Let Them Knock is Soul filth. The rasping Sax is fruity and positively licentious. "Let them knock upon my door til their hands are black and blue. I'm not answering for no one until my man and I are through".

There's a good live version of Let Them Knock at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0iGhFwZx6c

Best of all though is Humble Me. Built on the chassis of Otis Redding's Pain In My Heart, complete with Steve Cropper style riffs, bar room piano, a lazy bass line that plays just behind the beat and a terrific vocal performance.

The key to Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings is to not treat them as revivalists, or like a Blues brothers act who think they are rejuvenating an era. It's better to treat them as if it's the audience who've gone back in time. After all, they do the kind of show that you'd have loved to see in 1970.

The whole thing just sounds right and completely authentic. You're not going to get a session guitarist with an inappropriate effects pedal or a drummer who's desperate to use his new gong. They just sound like a band who are at the height of their powers and are supremely confident that they are playing great gigs and writing great new songs. Which they are! They're the best new band of 1970. It's just the audience who've got this ridiculous notion that it's 2008.

We Are Scientists

2008-02-08T08:44:00.001Z

We Are Scientists dish out brash poppy punk tunes at the Maximo Park or Kaiser Chiefs end of the spectrum. After meeting at college in California in 2000, they relocated to New York. They had released a couple of independent singles and albums but it was British audiences who took to them first thanks to tours with Maximo Park and The Arctic Monkeys. America may want them back soon!

DJ Steve Lamacq was an early and enthusiastic evangelist for them. Their major label debut With Love And Squalor came out in 2005.

It’s a good album, going from the jerkiness of the likes of The Arctic Monkeys or Franz Ferdinand to the out and out Green Day cartoon Punkiness on a track like Callbacks. They remind me a lot of The Wannadies. The guitar sounds go from clipped riffage to that stratospheric echoing sound that bands like Bloc Party have been trying to reclaim from U2 or The Chameleons. Drummer Michael Tapper left the band at the end of last year. The drumming really motors along; it’s busy without being overly fussy. They haven’t announced a replacement yet.

One of the reason s people warm to the band is the humour around their interviews, website and videos. And if your girlfriend likes Owen Wilson then she’ll probably like singer Keith Murray. Oh Great!

The video for The Great Escape http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21-TCoFRgy0 has the trio getting out of bed (in a Morecambe and Wise and Young Friend style) and then carrying out their daily tasks like Siamese triplets. It’s been covered by Art Brut who are definitely travelling along the same road. Both bands have also embraced the ‘tache during their career

The video for This Scene Is dead is actually very short on action. It’s just the band standing pretty much stock still on an enclosed pedestrian bridge, while the occasional passer buy walks past. It’s actually quite disconcerting though as the accompanying song is going hell for leather. There is a flurry of activity when one of the band polishes his glasses.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wt3wHxxACDo&feature=related

My other favourite glasses related video, (although I haven’t really put a great deal of research into this, so it’s not much of a list) is the bit in The Happy Mondays video for Step On where Sean Ryder takes off his sunglasses, waves them around while he adjusts his parting (serious curtainage) and then puts them back on. I think Bez is involved with some goggles at one point as well. A video masterclass! O

Bassist Chris Cain answers a Jo Wiley question with a terse “I had my heart broken once, sure. It's a story as old as civilization: I loved her, was blind to her flaws, trusted her implicitly; she robbed my apartment and pawned my stuff to buy a car that she and some other guy drove off to God knows where, running over my father on the way out of town, taking with her my passport and credit cards and birth certificate which she sold to a criminal; I subsequently spent time in jail for what this criminal did under the guise of my identity. Hard time -- I lost a kidney. Eight years before my attorney got me out. Family all dead by then. Everybody I knew had moved away. No jobs to be had. Then the lean years: near-starvation, living on the streets, no human affection to speak of. And yes, I have forgiven her. I learned a ton.”

The new single Afterhours is less electric than previous material and is built round a winding circular riff. There’s a bit of a They Might Be Giants feel to it.

Chris Cain described it as “About that time of night when every instinct says you should not have one last drink, should not linger any longer at the pub, should not continue to talk to this clearly-troublesome yet troublingly-attractive stranger who keeps slurring as she holds eye contact for uninstinctively long periods of time -- what you should do instead is go home.”

Of course none of the of the other stuff, the humour, the videos, the facial hair, matters if the music isn’t any good. Well I like the music… and I really like their band name!

Nick Cave

2008-02-02T09:01:00.000Z

Nick Cave is instantly recognisable, but also easy to pastiche. He’s a scowley stickman with a Basil Fawlty walk, all hubba hubba heh he heugh vocals sung into his collars like a death obsessed Harry Hill. I think he’s just got better over the years though as he’s moved from the confrontational howl of the Birthday Party and embraced his inner Johnny Cash.

The Birthday Party are one of those bands that I really regret not seeing live, (although I did have a ticket for a gig in 82. I can’t remember the holiday I was on, but I bet I’d remember the gig I missed to go on it) The band’s gigs teetered on the edge of onstage and offstage violence and the band themselves were just such an odd looking spectacle. There was Cave, flailing and writhing, baiting the audience and kicking out at stray heads while Tracy Pew, the static Gay bar cowboy thug (big hat, bigger 'tache), knocked out bass lines that could knock down buildings.

The thing is though, I don’t listen to the Birthday Party very often now. And if I do it’s the songs like Release The Bats, which is funny, cod Goth rockabilly horror (“Bite sex vampire bite" and it’s Elvis impersonating "Baby’s a cool machine").... The band hated it and resented the fact that their joke song became their biggest song. Nick The Stripper has a predatory strut and it could have come straight from the Buffalo Bill scenes in Silence Of The Lambs). It's got the catchy refrain of “Hideous to the eye”. (Now doesn’t that make you want to sing along?)

While there was undeniably a fierce sense of humour about the band, there was also just fierceness, and the nasty undercurrents of misogyny. It’s probably 20 years since I listened to a Birthday Party album all the way through. It was hard work then. And I don’t feel like that anymore. Either the hard work or the hatred. The band split in 1984 but I did get to see him at the Powerhouse with Sonic Youth supporting around 1985. And he did kick up a thrilling and unholy racket.

The forthcoming album Dig Lazarus Dig will be his fourteenth and over time the scratchy swampy blues of the earlier albums have become a more streamlined kind of rocking and his ballads have become less hammy. He's operating outside the normal rock n roll influences though. His lyrics are ripe with biblical imagery and lyrics that sound like screenplays for unmade films, or Jim Thompson short stories. Sometimes they're just funny. There She Goes My Beautiful World has the great line "John Wilmot penned his poetry riddled with the pox and Nabakov wrote on index cards at a lectern in his socks"

The major influence on Cave though is Johnny Cash. As well he should be. After all most books could be usefully replaced with a copy of Cash's autobiography. It would certainly simplify library shelving.

On his second album The First Born is Dead he covered Wanted Man by Johnny Cash. (Well actually written by Dylan but made his own by Cash.) It’s a really good cover, repaid in kind when Cash covered the electric chair song The Mercy Seat, stripping it of the hysteria of Cave’s original and replacing it with tense resignation. Interestingly enough though the piano on Cash’s version plays the hysterical role instead. Cash and Cave dueted on I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry on Cash's American IV album.

Cave and Shane MacGowan released a single Wonderful World in 1992 and Cave does a masterful version of rainy Night in Soho by The Pogues. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoLRIXtAuxk

The spectacularly unflattering photos on his album sleeves over the years and his well-documented heroin use may have held him back from winning Handsome Man awards. But it could have been worse. While Dorian Gray had a picture in the attic, Nick Cave kept a guitarist on stage. Blixa Bargeld spent twenty years as a Bad Seed and still holds the distinction of the illest looking man in Pop

The duet with Kylie on Where The Wild Roses Grow was not only a hit in 1996 but it had a nation in up arms once they realised it’s murderous subject. You can’t kill Kylie! A Peoples Army of 40 year old blokes was raised to defend her. Some of them were straight!

The Boatman's Call from 1997 has the achingly beautiful Into My arms.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3-VZxkmmtI It's just piano and bass and has a hymn like stateliness but also a real delicacy. It also sets itself apart from most love songs by having the opening line "I don't believe in an interventionist God". Nick Cave sang it at the funeral of Michael Hutchence.

The album also has People Aint No Good, which crops up on Shrek 2. Another beautiful song. Sumptuous and perkily miserable. And just when you think, “Actually shouldn't Nick really be out there scaring the kids parents?” the closing track Green Eyes delivers the line

"Slip your frigid hands beneath my shirt. This useless old fucker with his twinkling cunt. Doesn't care if he gets hurt"
I'm not quite sure what he means.... but I'm fairly sure the song is not in Shrek The Third.
After establishing himself as the ultimate creepy crooner last years Grinderman project was an excuse for him to play filthy garage rock and play with a rocking pervy preacher persona. Grinderman features long time collaborators Warren Ellis and Jim Sclavunos and a fine array of lady scaring beards. No Pussy Blues from the Jools Holland show is tightly reined in chaos. Loud and layered, with wave after wave of guitar and feedback crashing in then holding back. It's what the Birthday Party used to do.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuDP7c3Zd8I

So even though I don't think I can listen to the Birthday party anymore I found that one of my favourite albums from last year was Grinderman with Nick Cave using some of his old tricks

Duffy

2008-01-24T19:59:00.002Z

I wouldn’t expect to go a bundle on the runner up of Welsh Pop Idol and I’m also a bit suspicious of singers who can only manage one name, Brazilian footballer style. (Mind you that would be quite a line up...Madonna, Kylie, Gabrielle, Adele ...Sonia).

I’m also a bit suspicious because the hype machine does seem to be gearing up behind Duffy. She came second (behind Adele...again) in a 6 Music “Singers most likely to” poll. (Possibly not the pervier “Most likely to...." poll that I’ve been running). I’m ready to suspend the scepticism though because she’s aiming to do exactly the kind of cinematic 60’s soul pop that I’m partial to. Dusty Springfield. Nancy Sinatra etc.

The video for debut single Rockferry made me think of my holidays and Julie Christie in Billy Liar. Sold!

Filmed around Porthmadog (Duffy grew up on the Llyn peninsular), it's a leaving town/leaving you kind of song, with lots of shots of railway lines, tea drinking, waiting on platforms, railings being aimlessly pinged and the whole thing is as 60's as the Prisoner style piping on her jacket.

It's also got a shot of Cob Records with Duffy walking past with a suitcase. Is the girl leaving town or going record shopping?

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=zlcRRnbqS8Y

New single Mercy uses all the stock soul phrases. And just how many songs have talked about begging for mercy, release me etc and have expressed bafflement at the power and quality of the good loving that is on offer? Loads, but there's always room for one more.

Duffy's version of it has the line "I don't know what you do but you do it well. You've got me under your spell." Bingo. Another soul cliche. It's all done with a lot of love though and the video features Dusty style hand waving and Northern Soul dancing. So yes it's retro! But yes I like it a lot.

The only concession to a more modern sound is the elastic band twang of the intro and the spoken words that you can just hear under both the intro and the middle 8 which is the kind of thing All Saints would have done.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=KE2orthS3TQ&feature=user

There's some footage of Warwick Avenue from Jools Holland last year, which has a bit more of a Gladys Knight style soulful sweep and the really good line "You think you're lovin' but you don’t love me".

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=MkkmQNA_aRs

The album is due out in March. I'm hoping that the fact that Duffy is managed by Jeanette Lee from Rough Trade (former “non musical member” of Public Image) and that Bernard Butler has been involved in some of the song writing is going to stop it from being (admittedly) top class karaoke.

Because she does sound great and looks the part but the songs are (to my ears) very close to their source material. After all what made Bernard Butler and David McAlmont’s Glam plastic soul records so interesting was that they shuffled their sources better.

The trick is to make a modern record that invokes the spirit of an older style. And you don’t need to be coy about it. You do need great big hits! There’s a quote from Stax songwriter Dave Porter along the lines of “Don’t talk to me about the records that didn’t sell. Talk to me about Soul Man.”

Although I'm naturally drawn to the obscure b-side, there have been some fantastic modern records that have used an obvious and infectious love of those old soul records. Songs like TLC’s Waterfalls (uses an Al Green /Teenie Hodges guitar style), Bouncy Beyonce’s Crazy In Love (partly Chi-lites but mostly big hair and hot pants) or Crazy by Gnarls Berkley.

On a similar old meets new there’s Candie Payne’s terrific single One More Chance. Image wise she’s giving it the full Audrey Hepburn, and there's a Mark Ronson remix too. It's Sandie Shaw, Beach Boys and bells and it's a modern re-creation of a sound rather than a copy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LE7RBl2YfOg&feature=related

One of the things that made Amy Winehouse interesting was the arrangements that Mark Ronson brought to her second album. The Motown feel to tracks like Tears Dry On Their Own or Addicted. Or the girl group doomed romanticism of tracks like Back to Black.

So while the strings gave it a Shangri-Las feel, there were also the Hip Hop shuffling drums and the fact that Winehouse wasn’t singing about the 60’s girl group staple of running away with a a bad boy on a motorbike who is also a bit of a rebel. (Apparently the parents don't understand). All powered by the brass section from Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings. A bona fide proper soul revue style band fronted by a 50 year old ex Rikers Island prison warder.

Thankfully 23 year old Duffy is more River Island than Rikers Island

John Cooper Clarke

2008-01-24T19:58:00.001Z

He's spent the last 30 years wearing the same clothes, often reading the same poems and his biggest supporting role has been to the Honey Monster in the 1990's Sugar Puffs adverts. John Cooper Clarke is still a one off though. He's been acknowledged as a major influence by Alex Turner from Arctic Monkeys. You can definitely hear the JCC influence in Turner's scabrous sneer and interest in society's crusty white underbelly.

The rapid fire delivery came from trying to grab an audience's attention when he did support gigs for the Punk acts. The poems themselves are funny, clever and musical, even without the music. You get the sense that he could probably quote Baudelaire by chapter and verse, but is more likely to write about the clap clinic.

He's argued that "Poetry has always been and always will be a very different way of writing, a minority interest. It's language with its best suit on." The live show has always been a mixture of poetry and the jokes that he uses to cover the gaps while he's trying to find the next poem. That helped keep the audience interested in the early days, but he could also handle a heckler.

"I can't hear you mate... your mouths full of shit".

Like Mark E Smith that other Salford bladdered balladeer it's partly the sound of his voice that drags you in, those extra syllables aah. Words that you can chew on. Delivered in a voice that could strip paint and would melt the ear wax of any unfortunate ear that found itself on the receiving end of his whispered sweet nothings.

First single the Psycle Sluts ep came out on Manchester label Rabid records and debut album Disguise In Love came out on CBS in 1978. His records were often criticised by people who'd seen him live who thought that the music got in the way of the words. The music was supplied by the Invisible Girls a rag bag assembly including Buzzcock Pete Shelley, producer Martin Hannett and Karl Burns from The Fall.

You can hear echoes of what Hannett was also working on at the time. Evidently Chickentown from 1980's album Snap Crackle and Bop has a snippet of reverbed drums that fade in and out of the mix but sound like they came from a Joy Division session.

There was a live album Walking Back To Happiness that came out in 1979. It covers the full range of the entertainment spectrum. From poems about Flashers "Gabardine Angus, open your coat" to the package holiday hell of Majorca "I got drunk with another fella who'd just brought up a previous paella" and "where the Double Diamond flowed like sick". This being 79, it got the full gimmicky vinyl treatment. Walking Back To Happiness was released as a 10 inch clear vinyl album.

It's accompanying single Twat. (I'd loved to have been in the CBS office when the plans for the new single were announced….'so what's it called then John?'), came out on a double grooved single.

Which meant you had a 50/50 chance of either playing the full frank and foul version "Like a nightclub in the morning you're the bitter end, like a recently disinfected shithouse, you're clean round the bend" or it's edited, more refined cousin Splat. On the Splat version the expletives are drowned out by comedy sound effects.

The other single Gimmix came in triangular orange vinyl version. It's a roll call of past gimmicks from "The balmy days of the hula hoop craze to the skateboard panic of today." You can hear the contempt in his voice on the line "Teasmades, cushions that fart. The Lord of the Rings." It's like the Punk version of Peter Kaye's "Garlic Bread" line.

Although you should really buy them all, Snap Crackle and Bop is the best of his studio albums. Evidently Chickentown feels like late 70's Manchester when the whole city centre seemed to collapse into it's failing Victorian sewers. Like Venice without the views. Or the Gondolas. But with the pigeons. "The bloody pubs are bloody dull, the bloody clubs are bloody dull, of bloody girls and bloody guys with bloody murder in their eyes" and where "The bloody weed is bloody turf; the bloody speed is bloody surf."

Beasley Street's account of where Thatcherism descends into Dickensian squalor should be taught in schools. And there aren't many lines more chilling than "Keith Joseph smiles and a baby dies in a box on Beasley Street." JCC's pronunciation of the words "Beasley Street" has more E's in it than Brian Harvey and takes about 6 months for him to say.

Everyone needs a prison song. 36 Hours is a jail guitar door clanging blues. Where if the regime of "Shit, shave shower and a shoe shine, That's it. Sack time" doesn't put you on the straight and narrow then the threat that "Everyone looks like Earnest Borgnine" surely will. There's a guitar line that that sounds like Pete Shelley reused it from ESP by Buzzcocks.

Zip Style Method came out in 1982. Musically it's the weakest of them, with the more polished synths and treatments actually making it sound more dated than the murky backing tracks used on the first 2 studio albums.

But you do know exactly what he's talking about on The Midnight Shift when he describes somebody's face being "Like a long abandoned baseball boot with the tongue hanging out"

So those are the records then. Due to his own self confessed disorganisation and possibly a result of living with Nico (wouldn't have thought their shopping list contributed much to their 5 daily portions of fruit and veg), the records dried up and promised books and novels didn't appear.

I saw him at Birmingham University at in 1985, ironically on the same bill as John Hegley's band The Popticians. John Hegley not only writes funny, clever poetry, but is also more likely to get the phone call when Radio 4 need a poet. On that night JCC just seemed dazed and disinterested. He rattled through the poems and then rattled home. No jokes, banter or interest. On a good night though he's unstoppable.

He was on stage for over 2 hours at a comedy night at Moseley Rugby Club in 1999. I saw the last 20 minutes when he supported the Only Ones in Wolverhampton earlier this year. A storming effort, with new material and quality jokes. He's pushing 60 but still got the shades and hedgecombed hairstyle and probably wears winklepicker slippers at home. And he's still following his key artistic principle. "I always try and talk in tune"

Eels

2007-12-14T19:50:00.001Z

For most bands whose first hit was their big hit (and that was 11 years ago) their PR and promotions options are restricted to punching a celebrity or marrying a stripper. However Mark Everett from Eels has been able to make a documentary, screened last week on BBC4 about his physicist dad who developed a theory of parallel universes in 1957.

Well it's definitely worked as PR, because I've gone straight to the Eels back catalogue. I haven't made it to the Quantum Mechanics section of the bookshelf yet.

I think there's always been an atmosphere of suspicion around Eels. A sense that they were corporate. When their debut album came out on DreamWorks, 2 years after Kurt Cobain died it all just seemed too calculated. The mix of grunge flavoured relentless chord sequences, Hip Hop's funky drummer beats, quiet loud, stop start song structures, samples and lyrics that dealt with the full emotional range. From unhappy to miserable.

In the same way that Morrissey was always (wrongly) written off as humourless and miserable, E (as the abbreviated Mark Oliver Everett likes to be known) presents an easy target. It's worth digging past those easy prejudices though as there is plenty to love in the Eels back catalogue.

Debut album Beautiful Freak came out in 1996 and it's first track Novocaine For The Soul was the first single and their biggest hit. With it's opening lines "Life is hard and so am I. You'd better give me something before I die", it's a mix of strings, music box plinkiness and a hoarse Cobain style vocal.

Susan's House is another stop start song structure with a sung chorus and spoken verse detailing a grim urban walk past a shooting, drug deals and teenage mothers. The hook is a piano part that used to really irritate me because I never liked Bruce Hornsby or his Range….and this sounds just like it should be them. It's actually a sample from Gladys Knights song from 1975 Love Will Find It's Own Way.

The title track with it's line "You're such a beautiful freak. I wish there were more like you. You're not like all of the others. That is why I love you"

Now to my jaded ears this sounds like the sort of thing that a sulky adolescent wants to hear when they want to feel special. With it's strings and piano it's a celebration of the eternal outsider and is part lullaby, part nursery rhyme. Disturbingly E was actually 33 when he wrote it. A man still in touch with his inner adolescent. And still in his teenage bedroom if the lyrics of Not Ready Yet are anything to go by. It has more quiet/loud and hoarse Cobainisms as he sings "So if I leave my room. Don't you tell me to lighten up."

My Beloved Monster crops up on Shrek (that would be the DreamWorks connection then) and it sounds like the ogre version of Elvis Costello's version of I Don't Know What To Do With Myself. The guitar collisions and squalls are splendid.

Guest List is another of his outsider songs while Mental has the "They say I'm mental but I'm just confused. They say I'm mental but I've been abused. They say I'm mental but I'm not amused by it all". It's a quiet/loud structure. Amazingly the closing track Manchild starts with a sample of a woman's voice saying "I'm not having any fun." Just in case you hadn't noticed!

1988's Electro Shock Blues is a far superior album. Michael Simpson from the Dust Brothers had collaborated on many of the tracks and there is a hefty Beck influence throughout

The subject matter is still unrelentingly grim and autobiographical, covering his sister's overdose and his mother's death from cancer. "My name is Elizabeth. My life is shit and piss." It's not pretty and neither is the image from Elizabeth On The Bathroom Floor, with the woman lying there unable to get up while the cat licks her face.

Going To Your Funeral (part 1) isn't much jollier either but it does sound fantastic. E does his full vocal range from B to C (Beck to Cobain), falsetto vocals over a boomy rasp of a bass line. The vocals sound dislocated, there are biscuit tin drums, Eels trademark music box keyboards and best of all a slide guitar line that sounds like it's probably made up from 2 tracks, one played forwards and one backwards.

Cancer For The Cure sounds like a Beck's Devils Haircut, with the drums from She's Lost Control by Joy Division and Sly Stone keyboards.

My Descent Into Madness has a string sample that sounds like The Stones She's A Rainbow, sixties soul keyboards and yet astonishingly manages to remind me of Going To Barbados by Typically Tropical.

3 Speed does manage to sound sweet and nostalgic though, with it's images of riding a 3 speed bike with a banana seat, leaning back on the sissy bar" Although, being Eels, the chorus is "You think I've got it all going my way then why am I such a fucking mess."

After trawling through the first 2 albums, the listener's got to ask themselves just how much can you take of someone else's grief, and introspection? Especially when you know there's 6 albums worth of this stuff. Amazingly the advance copies of Shootenany included a 5 page press release with a song by song breakdown of the albums themes. This was more succinctly dealt with by the slide projection on the tour that simply read "29 transient members. One deeply troubled permanent member".

By album number 4 the murderously sounding Soul Jacker he's hooked up with John Parish from PJ Harvey's band. The result is an evil Blues Glam stomp that goes from serial killer (Soul Jacker) to high school shootings to the pyscho at the bus stop. Dog Faced Boy has the great line "Mama won't shave me, Jesus won't save me"

Blinking Lights is his post 9/11 album where the E's personal family death toll extended to his cousin and her husband who were killed in the plane that hit the Pentagon. He's been quoted as saying" For me I've had to treat my family like an art project. It's really my only means of relating to it all"

He's determined to make you work at it though. Blinking Lights is a double album, 33 tracks, part orchestral, and part piano ballads with most of the better songs appearing on the second disc. There's touches of Tom Waits (well more than a touch...he actually appears on it) and the final track has one of those odd uplifting moments that are all the more surprising to be coming from E. It comes after you've worked through the line in Old Shit/New Shit about "The psychic pain of living in the world"

And the uplifting bit? Well it's on the closing track Things The Grandchildren Should Know where he sings "But if I had to do it all again, well it's something I'd like to do." And then the song fades out over an instrumental section. Now there's 2 ways of looking at this kind of fade. You could say that the band has run out of ideas and either don't know how to end it, or are incapable of ending it. (eg The first Stooges album where all the tracks fade out because the band just couldn't stop playing). There is a however a more positive view, and in the case of Things The Grandchildren Should Know that's the view I'm plumping for.

The fade out here sounds like he's made up his mind, dealt with what's happened and is now setting off down a new road. I get a similar feeling from the last minute of Cheap is How I Feel by The Cowboy Junkies, with it's extended pedal steel section. There's an air of resignation to it, tempered with a feeling of "Let's just get on with it" It's a great way to end the album

I do actually like Eels. Hard work though it may be. I really like the story around the film though. It was made after a tape was unearthed where his dad Hugh is discussing his theory on Quantum Mechanics while his son Everett Jr can be heard playing drums in the background.

Now I'm not a scientist (but I do know how to wear a white coat) but Quantum Mechanics tries to explain some of the odd ways that sub atomic particles behave. They can appear to be in 2 places at once. Conventional theory argued that they stopped doing that as soon as you tried to measure it (which itself is quite a thought...just imagine if that worked for crime, corruption and philandering.)

Everett Senior argued that at the instant where Quantum Theory puts a particle in 2 places at once then the universe splits into a parallel universe. Thus allowing the particle to also exist in the same place, but in that other universe. It's Sci fi. It's parallel worlds. And it raises the possibility that while in this world E is a grumpy Kurt Cobain with a major case of unhappy bunny syndrome, in another parallel universe he could be as upbeat as The Polyphonic Spree singing S Club.

Everett Sr's theory didn't gain support though so he concentrated on drinking and being a distant, aloof father figure to provide source material for his son's future career as a miserable autobiographical songwriter. I'm still impressed though because he'd come up with his theory at the age of 24. At that age I was researching crisps and savoury snack products.

Raveonettes

2007-11-20T22:04:00.001Z

Not many bands aren't improved by sticking a six foot blonde in front and The Jesus and Mary Chain would benefit more than most. They may have reformed (one of this years biggest Indie surprises).... but they're still the same messy haired, shade wearing squabbling Reid brothers.

On the other hand there are The Raveonettes.

Danish duo Sharin Foo and Sune Rose Wagner have taken the Jesus And Mary Chain template of fuzz guitar, feedback, mixed it with girl group melodies and added Suicide, Buddy Holly and surf guitar.

Usually all in the same song.

Add in a B move poster aesthetic (all good girls going bad and bad boys going worse) and a willingness to embrace the gimmick. A stand up drummer (not Bobby Gillespie). Add a dash more Mary Chain.

Ok the result may not be original and you can easily spot where they've got every one of their moves from (er would that be the Jesus and Mary Chain?), but it's still a bag of fun. And Sharin Foo doesn't look like either of the sulky Scottish Reid brothers. Result!

First album Whip It On is an 8 song dash through Garage Surf titles like Cops On Our Tail, Bowels Of The Beast and Beat City. The boast is that all the tracks are written in B flat minor and are no more than 3 minutes long. No more than 3 chords, no hi-hat and no cymbals. Whoever said Rock 'n' Roll was about no rules?

2003's follow up Chain Gang Of Love proudly screams from it's film poster style sleeve that this time it's written and recorded in B flat major. There is a difference. It's also produced by Richard Gottherer who produced the first Blondie records, co wrote My Boyfriend's Back by The Angels and co founded Sire. Put in those terms he pretty much built New York!

Chain Gang Of Love is an altogether shinier album. It plays with the idea of the innocence of 50's rock n roll and recognises that dumb lyrics are often the right lyrics. Sometimes a well placed "Yeah" can say more than 1000 other words.

In an interview on www.noripcord.com Foo describes their approach as "Both a homage and a little bit of satire. We're not totally romantically infatuated with American culture. On Chain Gang of Love in particular though, there's a real sentimental, nostalgic feeling in the lyrics and the music. There's a bunch of references to Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers, and the kind of melodies from back then; good old-fashioned song-writing"

Lets Rave On has an impossibly fast racing pulse of a drum machine. It's just bass drum, but if it was an episode of Casualty, then trolleys would be crashing through doors and they'd be a lot of shouting.

The lyrics not only echo Buddy Holly, but are for those moments when you think you watch films at the drive in rather than from Blockbusters: "Lets rave on cos I know that you want to. Lets make out cos I know that you want to. Lets go down where the hearts are broken. Fix them all in time"

The Love Gang has a lyric about "Two delinquents in love". As a phrase it's pure 50's imagery. West Side Story and James Dean. Nostalgia for when it was Grease rather than Grecian 2000 and it was all fields and juvenile delinquents round here.

The band's lyrics are one of the pleasures. How about this gem from The Love Gang? "Chains black leather and sex. Yeah it's not that complex." Sounds like a quiet night in to me, but as a lyric it made me giggle a like a loon.

Of course the band think they're doing more than just providing me with giggly entertainment.

Foo told Noripcord that ""We kinda like the contradictions in the music. It's interesting for us to have the opposites - the really sweet, subtle, mellow vocals; poppy and a bit naïve - and then a fuzzy background that's very guitar and bass-driven and pretty intense.

"And to have a melody that sounds innocent, but with lyrics that are really decadent. It creates an interesting tension we think."

Little Animal has the opening line "My girl is a little animal. She always wants to fuck. I can't find the reason why, I guess it's just my luck." I'd keep quiet about that…everyone will want one! The opening chords are standard Mary Chain issue and there's a great fuzz bass sound.
The lyrics to the title track break one of the oldest rules of pop in an interesting way. All bands need to have a prison song and the cast iron law is that you are always a prisoner of your baby's love. The singer is always powerless and can never stop loving his baby.

That's the language of Pop. Sentences are served and rules are obeyed.

However on Chain gang of Love amidst all the "Huh" and "Yeahs" that echo round the song and root it to the original chain gang of Sam Cooke etc there is this lyric. "I'm just a prisoner of love. I'm serving time for something I can't do. They call it a crime, cos I'm not in love with you."

Could be Sune Wagner be the only man in Pop prison who doesn't love his baby?

Best track on the album though is The Great Love Sound. I don't want to harp on about The Mary Chain but it starts like You Trip Me Up and the (excellent) line "So I walk right up to you and you walk all over me" couldn't be more like JAMC if it was wearing shades and punching it's brother.

Love Can Destroy You is a White Stripes style country song. Woozy and disorientating like wind up jewellery box. The guitars overlap from each speaker and there's a regular chime that helps to keep the beat, which actually sounds like a squeaky hamster wheel.

By their 2005 album and Pretty In Pink they were able to call in favours from Ronnie Spector who sings on Ode To LA and there are also appearances from Suicide's Martin Rev and Mo Tucker from the Velvet Underground.

New album Lust Lust Lust is released this week on Fierce Panda. There are 3 d glasses to go with it and more importantly a terrific single, Dead Sound.

http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=4263957

The guitars alternate between twangy and buzzy. Sune and Sharin's voices are wrapped around each other and combined in languid loveliness. Unusually the chorus is actually the quietest part of the song of the song (Yes you can change the laws of physics!) and it's got the tense pulse and impossibly pretty keyboards of Cheree by Suicide.

So once again The Raveonettes have used easily traceable sources, but it sounds so good that it would be churlish to complain. So I won't.

British Sea Power

2007-11-20T22:00:00.000Z

Being a Wash 'n' Go musician does have it's advantages. Angus Young only ever has to remember to bring his satchel and school uniform and Iggy Pop knows he's never going to have to remember to iron a shirt.

But there is always room for a band who've got a dressing up box in the dressing room. A band who have really thought through their image.

Brighton based four piece British Sea Power are 2 albums deep into their career of being one of Britain's, oddest, most intriguing and literate bands.

The band name sounds like it should be found in the darker recesses of the lower shelf, between Railway Modeller and Practical Caravanning. Admit it. When you are in the newsagents buying porn, don't you always have a sneaky look down to the bottom shelf and Trout Fisherman?

Their stage sets are festooned with foliage and stuffed animals, their haircuts look like they've been imposed on them and their lyrics are filled with references to military and wildlife themes.

Something Wicked from 2003's debut The Decline Of British Sea Power has the opening verse.....

"Where the ancient oak leaf clusters grew/The deaths head hawk moth flew/Something wicked this way comes/The swallow is depicted there along your fuselage/Something wicked this way comes."

Musically you can trace a line through Bowie, Psychedelic Furs and Granddaddy. The Psychedelic Furs link is really in the vocals which often have that Richard Butler atonal sneer. However on a song like Blackout there's a definite Morrissey feel. The Bowie link is more for the guitar lines. They're really good and thick enough to plaster a wall with.

Given the band's enthusiasm for uniforms and songs about Field Marshal Montgomery (Favours In The Beetroot Fields) I'm a bit disappointed to see only conventional instruments listed...I demand First World War Poetry.

The band line up reads like a Public School register. Last names only. Yan, Hamilton, Noble, Wood. Report for band practice after prep! They've also upped the mystery quotient by meeting journalists at grid references rather than pubs.

There's a great performance of Carrion on Jools Holland. Yes the keyboard player is wearing WW2 style helmet. And when was the last time you heard a lyric to equal "From Scapa Flow to Rotherhithe I felt the lapping of an ebbing tide"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JF5ivWRKBU

There's also a great moving statues video of Remember Me at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Peo0s75QDR0

Remember Me has a chorus of "Increment by increment." Again it's not the standard issue pop lyric but it does know it's pop history.

The downhill rush for the bus, of guitar bass and drums, sounds like the mighty riff from Victoria by The Kinks. And of course a band like British Sea Power who revel in the imagery of an imagined England will know all about The Kinks. And as the wilful awkward obscurists they are, they must surely also be Fall fans and so will know all about The Fall's faithful version of it.

Wilful and obscure...ok then. Lately is a brevity testing 14 minutes long while Apologies For Insect Life may well be about Dostoyevsky but it's hard to tell as the only intelligible lyrics are the repeated yelping of "Oh Fyodor, you are the most attractive man. Oh Fyodor, you are the most attractive man I know."

It's got a great step forward step back bass line and the drums and guitar alternately hold back then pile in. It's a thrilling ride.

The Lonely has the line "Just like Liberace I will return to haunt you with peculiar piano riffs." A line that actually scares me...it's camply threatening, like Liberace himself or the Sopranos Johnny Sack. The song itself could sit happily on Suede's second album and it's got some of the wooziness of Bowie's Aladdin Sane album.

The second album Open Season 2005 is a bit more straightforward, with less guitars and a bit more keyboards. But there again the band are never going to be too obvious. So long as they are releasing singles with titles like It Ended On An Oily Stage.

The word "ventricles" appears in Be Gone (and being British Sea Power it actually isn't the oddest choice of word in the song) and it may be the first time it's been used in a pop song since The Bozo Dog Doo Dah Band. Celine Dion's My Heart Will Go On might have been improved if only she'd been a bit more medically accurate.

New ep Krankenhaus is available as an (expensive) import but there is a free download through the bands website.

They gamely describe the lead track Atom as combining a pre school understanding of atomic theory with ancient wisdom in amplified rock music.

But they also do foliage and crowd surfing and those kind of post punk hard stares that are part Wilco Johnson part Paddington bear.

CSS

2007-11-20T21:58:00.001Z

Are CSS just a bunch of arty Brazilian women who play smutty, sweary punk rock electro pop? Do they have a catsuit wearing half Japanese singer called Lovefoxx and a gay bruiser with a moustache that you could use to paint fences? Thankfully yes. Debut album CSS came out last year on Sub pop where it nestles incongruously amongst the back catalogue of Nirvana and Mudhoney.

Their name Cansei de Ser Sexy comes from a Beyonce quote and translates as "tired of being sexy" in Portuguese.

"Lets Make Love And Listen To Death From Above" was one of the best singles (and titles) of last year. It sounded like the band themselves as it veered from disco pickety guitar, frisky bass and a swooping theramin type sound to a splurging Spirit In The Sky meets Dr Who theme tune pile up.

One minute it's a foxy, slinky dancer on a better class of dance floor. Then it morphs into beery uncle at a wedding, stomping and gurning in altogether stickier surroundings.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7agPOt1XZz8

"Patins" is a gleeful guitar rush, recalling the Riot Grrl acts or The Slits. The guitar and vocals follow each other closely. Now that's often a sign that a band have run out of ideas, or never had them in the first place. In this case though it just sounds absolutely right And Lovefoxx's vocal exuberance carries it off. "Whenever I look at you I don't know what to do. Whenever you talk to me I don't know what is true"

Adriano Cintra's male vocal line "Listen Baby I've got something to say" arrives in the song just like shouty bloke from the Sugarcubes used to. He's a bit more welcome, though, and I'm not going to argue with either him or his 'tache.

The song moves into Iggy Pop territory recalling the excellent duet with Debbie Harry ("Did You Ever") and Peaches ("Kick it"). It also sounds like they're packing for their holidays as Cintra and Lovefoxx sing alternate lines. "Your shirt, your shoes, your skirt your pants."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHFH2uc4Y9M

I really like Lovefoxx's vocals throughout the album. Although I've got to admit some of it is down to my own pervy preferences. I like the way she uses singing as a second language and there are definite parallels with Bjork.

On "Off The Hook" she sings "Why is it we stand so still, people gonna start thinking we're statues." Now there's no way that number of words should fit into the gaps into the song but she goes ahead and forces them to fit. It's a Bjorky moment.

I love Bjork's speaking voice with it's bizarre mix of Icelandic, American and Cockney inflexions. It's a voice I could listen to it all day without getting tired of. (Although I'd rather she talked about the bit where we both take our clothes off rather than the bit where she's telling me to go and unblock the sink. So that's my tip. Don't live with Pop Pixies unless you don't mind plumbing.)

About the sex and swearing. There's loads of it and it's really funny. (Obviously it's grown up and clever too!) One of their catchiest songs uses a synth chug, spiralling positively pretty pop keyboard lines and understated twangy guitar. It's called "Fuck Off Is Not The Only Thing You have to Show."

They've also used the whole celebrity culture and fashion scene. The excellently titled "Meeting Paris Hilton" has a chorus of "The bitch said yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah" while "Art Bitch" is about poo on a plate modern art where "Everything I do is featured on the pages of ID." Now I don't know much about art but I know what I like.....is opening nights with free drinks and nibbles.

"Art Bitch" has guitar lines that wriggle and squeal like The Dead Kennedys "Holiday in Cambodia" and the lines "lick lick lick my art tit suck suck suck my art hole"...Hmm. Did I mention the sex and swearing?

Guitarist Luiza Sa has said "We only realised how sexy some of our lyrics were when people started asking about them. We'd never sing that stuff in Portuguese, but it's very liberating to say those things in English." Actually they're fairly fluent in filth as liberated Luiza also Dj's with fellow band member Ana under the name Meuku.....which is Portuguese for "my arse."

"Alcohol" sounds like a Chas and Dave with it's crowd pleasing chorus of "Hey hey hey hey Do you wanna drink some alcohol." It's the most knockabout of their songs.

They did the rounds of all the festivals this summer and from my comfortable and mud free sofa they looked thoroughly entertaining. They've just supported Gwen Stefani on her tour of UK enormodomes.

Cynics might think that the elements that make up CSS are just too perfect. On paper they do sound like a cut and paste dream pop project, but on record and live the whole thing works well. So I think they're thoroughly Punk Rock (in a disco booty shaking way

Shack

2007-10-06T22:12:00.001Z

Their work rate and drug habits mean they’d have been more accurately named Slack or Smack. Over the last 20 years Shack have become synonymous with bad luck, bad timing and bad habits; but they still have the knack of turning out perfectly formed psychedelic acoustic (they still sound acoustic even when they’re electric!) pop songs using The Byrds and Love as their starting point.

Liverpool brothers Mick and John Head’s first band was the Pale Fountains who pretty much drowned in a surplus of record company cash and overproduction.

There was a feyness running through Indie Pop in the early 80’s with bands like Orange Juice, the Farmers Boys. Bands and fans wore Hawaiian shirts, shorts and hats. There were allusions to jazz and mutterings about Burt Bacharach. The early Pale Fountains sessions for John Peel included songs like The Norfolk Broads which was definitely a part of that era, nostalgic whimsical, trumpet noodling.

Their first single for Virgin, Thank You was blown up to Eurovision Song contest standard of pointless orchestral lushness. The album Pacific Street was a confused mix of Astrud Gilberto Latin pop and more straightforward, straight ahead acoustic stomps like Natural. I saw them twice at the Hacienda, once around 1982 as the fragile band of the early sessions, short of material and (very probably) in shorts. Second time around I disparagingly thought of them as an acoustic rockin’ Alarm. With hindsight I may have been wrong about that gig (although not about thinking of The Alarm as a bad thing).

Second album From Across the Kitchen Table worked better and contained the excellent Jeans Not Happening, a song, which I think, captures the strengths and source of Mick Head's songwriting.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6RFhVib1uw

It’s a song which combines the goofy gee whizz phrasing of someone imagining what the 60’s were like with, with a dash of 60’s TV theme tune and frazzled guitar line. You can almost hear the catsuits. (The Boo Radleys would do similar things in their poppier moments.) He takes the music he loves as a source and then writes his own tribute to it. You can usually hear who he’s thinking of but he’s a good enough songwriter for it not just to be a pastiche.

Ultimately though the Pale Fountains floundered. Their early orchestral stuff just didn’t work when the Human League were number 1. They headed back to Liverpool with an enthusiasm for heroin and a lack of interest in promoting the second album, eventually splitting in 1986 with bassist Chris McCaffrey dying from a brain haemorrhage shortly afterwards.

So that’s’ the Pale Fountains then...fondly remembered, but unfulfilled potential.

Shack’s debut Zilch came out in 88 and is fairly unloved, while the single I Know You Well from 1990 borrows from a vocal from the Byrds Triad (more of that later) and steals a McCartney bass line. It ends up sounding like Rain by The Beatles. This makes it fantastic

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gEWDm-5gbE&mode=related&search=

Meanwhile Shack were receiving regular visits from Messrs Bad Luck and Underachievement. They recorded their second album Waterpistol in 1991, but the studio burnt down, taking the master tapes with it. A dat copy survived but had been left in producer Chris Allison’s hire car...in the States. By the time it turned up the record company had gone bust. Fortunately though a German company Marina were able to release it…A tardy 4 years later. It’s a terrific album though. A cleverly stitched together tapestry of all the best moves of Love and The Byrds

Hey Mama owes a debt to David Crosby’s song Triad. It’s a tribute to the art of the threesome and was greeted less enthusiastically by the rest of The Byrds. It was booted off The Notorious Byrd Brothers lp in favour of Goffin and King’s song Goin’ Back. Crosby left the band soon after and the myth grew that Crosby was replaced by a horse on the albums sleeve.

And the thing is you know that Shack know the debt to Triad. They know all the stories and they know all their heroes tricks. In later years Shack backed Arthur Lee on live dates in the Uk. There’s probably no better band qualified and they would have known all the songs

The album Waterpistol has a warm, murky feel.to it. Mood Of The Morning is built on little circular, intertwining bass and guitar riffs like So You Wanna Be A Rock ‘n’ Roll Star, but with bongos. It has the line “My baby loves happy mondays, My Baby drinks leftovers in the morning, She’s always singing and yawning, She’s into the mood of the morning”

But of course the band didn’t really exist anymore. Mick and John Head recorded an album as The Strands, financed by a French fan. The Magical World Of The Strands.

By this point it was looking like Head was going to become one of those oft cited rarely sighted figures like Lee Mavers. In a last ditch burst of commercialism Shack regrouped and released HMS Fable on London in 1999. Big tunes big promotion and less dependent on the Byrds and Love.

Opening track Natalie’s Party crashes into the kitchen on a wave of Pete Townsend style scything guitar, pilfers the best bottles and then stumbles into the garden to see if there’s a swimming pool for Keith Moon to park his Rolls Royce in it...or at least somewhere to piss. It’s a great opener and the exuberance of the guitar and vocal is matched by the sweep of the string section. The whole lp is brasher in sound than their previous work.

The backing vocals throughout the album are interesting. What works best is John’s vocal following just behind Mick’s, sounding like it’s straining to keep up. Yes it may be a Beatles trick, but it’s still a good one.

There’s some silly stuff to contend with though. The key line on Lend Some Dough is “I’ve got to get out of the kitchen. Lend some dough, I’ve got a sore back and I’m itching” It’s actually a song about buying smack, but sung as a rousing Oliver style musical. All it needs is a kids chorus line to strike up as they go skipping down the street to meet an Artful Dodger in a sulky Scouse coat. I’m afraid they also use the line “Lend some dough, re me fa so la ti.” Ouch!

The anticipated commercial breakthrough didn’t happen, so Shack followed up the album with another single, Oscar. A song about a man in a wheelchair who wants to move to the Netherlands for state sponsored sex with prostitutes. That wasn’t a hit either.

At least the work rate was picking up though. Here’s Tom With The Weather hurtled into the shops a mere 4 years later. More Beatles Byrds, Love and some Nick Drake.

Byrds Turn To Stone is a wonderful song, wistful, and warmly nostalgic about the two brothers “Learning to play guitar, One for you and one for me. Who’ll be the first to learn. All the tricks of Mr Lee”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEman36xAIQ&mode=related&search=

And of course it does sound like the Byrds and Love. But as you may have gathered I don’t have a problem with that. I’ve bought many versions of Love’s staggering album Forever Changes over the years. The only way it could be improved for me would be if it could step out of a bath of custard, wearing a nurses uniform and announce it was ready for a little spanking. Apart from that it’s got everything I could want in an album.

The Shack release schedule was now unstoppable. The Corner of Miles and Gil was released on Noel Gallagher’s label Sour Mash. They describe the title as a tip of the hat to Miles Davis and his arranger Gil Evans. Now a mere year later there’s a greatest hits album Time Machine out complete with full on tour and in store appearances.

Pop music’s easy. You just need great songs, great singing and great playing. And a little bit of time. Which means Shack have got it all.

Alabama 3

2007-10-06T22:11:00.002Z

How much you like Alabama 3 depends on how much you like the idea of acid country house music, larger than life stage personas and people who think it would be more fun to sing as if they were from the American South than rather than the London South. So yes I like them a lot.

They deal in the traditional Country concerns of death, God, lust and drinking but spliced with clubby drug tales. On Saturday night live to excess, come Sunday morning you pray and confess. The sacred, profane and cocaine in a Mucky Chemical Romance.

They play sinuous looping stretched out grooves with the cod blues rasp of Rob Spragg AKA Larry Love and the holly roller testifying of Jake Black AKA The Very Reverend Dr. D. Wayne Love.(Is that cod meets God then?)

There's much fun to be had with the alter egos, the crumpled white suits of their stage wear carry the stains of hard living almost as much as their crumpled band faces. They're a band who look as if they've spent a long hard life in front of and behind bars.

On the face of it dressing up and pretending to be something that you're not should actually get in the way of the music. But is it where you walk or the way you walk that matters the most? Alabama 3 carry it off because underpinning, the subtle irony and the blatant piss taking is a deep knowledge of the music it's based on, and pop culture generally.

Trombonist Pascal Wyse who played a gig with them described a quick chat with a hungover Jake Black. "He may look all over the place, but talking to him leaves you feeling like you have never read a book, seen a film or listened to a CD in your life."

Debut album Exile On Coldharbour Lane came out in 97 with the band boasting that "We spent half of our advance from Geffen on various contraband items and with the rest we made an over-produced, brilliant situationist masterpiece called 'Exile on Coldharbour Lane'. Ever since then we've been preaching our Gospel all over the world. We've got into a whole bunch of trouble and met a whole bunch of nice people. We make friends where ever we go"

It's not only the Rolling Stones-saluting title and cover art that betray the band's ability to both dig and dig up the past. There's a cover of John Prine's Speed Of The Sound Of Loneliness that turns it into a twangy boing fest.

Ain't Goin' To Goa sticks the boot into the hippy rave trail and concludes "Cos the righteous truth is, there ain't nothing worse than some fool lying on some Third World beach wearing spandex, psychedelic trousers, smoking damn dope pretending he gettin' consciousness expansion. I want consciousness expansion, I go to my local tabernacle an' I sing with the brothers and sisters "

There's more pun slinging action with La Peste from 2000 with Sad Eyed Lady Of The Low Life which borrows from a Dylan for the title and an unlikely blend of Primal Scream's Loaded and Elton John's Saturday Night's Alright For Fighting for the tune.

In 2001 they did a month long residency at the Camden Underworld supporting themselves in various guises, as a country band with Eileen Rose and BJ Cole and as a gospel act with David McAlmont. Larry Love described it as "This is our chance to show that we know our country, we know our gospel, we know our techno and we know our blues… It's a chance for people to see us for the eclectic motherfuckers that we are.

"We can show the various elements of faith that make up our canon. I love being able to take a bluegrass loop or a rockabilly loop and turn it into a modern, computer-based concept…which is what Moby's had such success with on "Play"…we've been doing for years"

Outlaw came out in 2005 and tries to live up to it's title by having a song called Hello I'm Johnny Cash and another called Have You Seen Bruce Richard Reynolds. The Great Train Robber Reynolds wrote the sleeve notes for the album.

The new album MOR is just released and for the upcoming tour the band's website promise that "Maybe you've done some good things in your life, maybe you've done some bad things. We forgive you. Forgive yourself. Then dress up real sexy and come and party with us sometime. We'll look after you."

Maps

2007-10-06T22:10:00.002Z

Their debut album We Can Create was hotly fancied for the Mercury prize, but ultimately lost out to Klaxons. On a night out, the nu rave Klaxons songs would be all jabbing glow sticks in your ribs and telling you to wake up. The Maps sound is a much more comfortable, sonic duvet.

It doesn't just tickle your ear, it envelopes you in gorgeousness, gets you drunk and tells you it loves you.

Maps aren't really a band. It's Northampton bedroom electro fiddler James Chapman. Unusually for an electronic project the album was written on a 16 track machine at home rather than using a computer. He'd spent years tinkering with the songs and arrangements without playing them to friends let alone playing them live.

Once the world became interested though he was lured out of the bedroom and assembled a band to tour with.

As is often the case the record he thinks he's making in his head isn't the one that actually comes out. He describes himself as a massive fan of Boards Of Canada and the back catalogue of the Warp label, but by sidestepping the computer it sounds like he's used analogue methods to try and make an electronic album.

So what actually emerges recalls the electropop side of Spiritualised and the swooning breathlessness of Loveless era My Bloody Valentine. There's also the grandeur of Doves or New Order at their most ceremonial and the occasional whiff of Moby. The hazy, fragile vocals are mixed low, but the overall feeling is of stateliness. These are songs carried in slow dignified procession...by elves.

The songs do all follow the same format though. Similar mid paced tempos, and as each new instrumental layer is added, you're never surprised by the actual sound or where it sits. So it's not revolutionary but it does sound warm, welcoming and just absolutely "right". Each song is cut from the same cloth, but you do end up with a wardrobe of good suits....And so easy to wear!

There's been a frugal approach to the lyrics to. The complete lyrics to Back And Forth are "The Sounds. They separated. Back and forth to you." More of a cryptic crossword clue than a lyric.

When You Leave is also on the shorter side of brief. "When you leave. I ain't coming. What you have comes to nothing"

He's not only a man of few words. He's often a man of the same few words. The line "We can create I say" from opening track So High So Low reappears on Liquid Sugar as "Now we can create".

"Need help to cut on through" from To The Sky resurfaces as "You can try to cut it down" on Lost My Soul. In his defence I'm sure Chapman would be the first to argue that the lyrics are just another layer in themselves and that even the vocals are there to suggest a feeling rather than being a burning statement that just has to get out or the singer will combust.

A sentiment eloquently summed up by James Brown in Hot Pants Road.

The album was co-produced by Valgeir Sigurdsson and mixed by Ken Thomas who have also worked with Bjork and Sigur Ros respectively. So no strangers to the strange then.

So Low So High contains a sample from, Theme From A Teenage Opera by Mark Wirtz. This was the was the b side to Keith West's frankly bonkers 60's single Grocer Jack.

So Low So High follows the "quiet LOUD quiet" formula of the Pixies, but with treated brass fanfares, while You Don't Know Her Name has a Pixies type bass line.

The majestic Elouise approaches the "quiet LOUD quiet" trick from a different angle, using discordant throbbing synths for the LOUD part. When they stop the song itself just snaps into focus with the equivalent of the quiet part. It's the sound itself that's doing the trick rather than the volume. It's a really good effect and the song's great too!

The album does sound so overwhelmingly lovely that dwelling on any negative or critical feelings I have about it just make me feel a bit ungrateful. Like the swinish brute from a romantic tale who just doesn't appreciate the beauty and charms of the silky tressed heroine.

But here's the thing..

..I think it's going to end up as dinner party music, on adverts and voiceover music. I think we'll all feel worse about Maps because of it. Which is a shame, and a bit unfair.

Undertones

2007-09-01T13:25:00.000Z

Nostalgia just keeps getting better and better.

With the Punk Rock nostalgia circuit you can see bands that you may not have seen at the time and bands who've spent the intervening years learning how to play.

You can see bands who've realised that maybe that 3rd album that they insisted on playing in it's excruciating entirety the last time you saw them was in actual fact, a waste of studio time, gig time and your time. So this time round they'll just play the good stuff.

It does get complicated though because there are bands you don't want to see because they were ropey old toss 30 years ago and now they're just ageing ropey old toss. Then there are bands who you loved so much that you don't want to run the risk of seeing them again and having the memory spoilt. Decisions decisions.

The Undertones were my favourite band for years, so any reunion runs the risk of crushing disappointment. It could be like finding your first love has had a sex change and your place of birth is marked by a skip rather than a commemorative plaque.

So what about the Undertones? On the face of it doesn't sound promising, as they've reformed without their distinctive, original singer, Feargal Sharkey. They split in ‘83, but have been playing sporadically since 1999, with new singer Paul McLoone.

His vocals have a bit of the Sharkey quavery quality and the rest of the band are still belting out punchy pop punk as if their lives depended on it.... or at least because they're having so much fun that they don't want to stop. And that's the key to it really.

Many people go to a reunion gig as a celebration of the band, or of a period of their own lives. Inevitably it's the bands earliest songs that matter most to the audience and it's the bands attitude to the knowledge that in the public eye (even if not in their own heads) they've done their best work that makes the difference.

If a band still look like they've got a genuine excitement about playing live, then it's not just nostalgia. …It's a great gig with songs you like.

I saw them at the 3 years ago at the Academy. They were excellent and I probably enjoyed the gig more than any of the times I'd seen them first time round. (Review here)

Their debut single "Teenage Kicks" was such a pivotal pop moment and their first 2 albums delivered more unstoppable Pop thrills, Ramones and romance.

With "Positive Touch" and the final album "Sin Of Pride" they attempted to broaden their sound and musical influences...while actually leading to a narrower audience and increasing tensions between the rest of the band and Sharkey. They always delivered as a live band though. And still do.

"Get What You Need" was released in 2003 and is a zesty romp through a bunch of songs that have some of the same fizz and crackle of the first 2 albums. There are demos for material for the forthcoming album Dig Yourself Deep at http://www.myspace.com/theundertonesmyspace

The live show is based round all the songs you want to hear, ie the singles, the first 2 albums and a smattering of songs from the new one that sound like it could have been on the old one. Expect joyous enthusiasm from both band and audience.

Polyphonic Spree

2007-09-01T13:24:00.004Z

I've always liked big bands and I've never feared the gimmick. Polyphonic Spree score on all counts.

They've recently slimmed down to a compact 24 members (from a stage busting 28) including orchestra and choir. They had tap dancers on stage at their recent Lollaplooza appearance in Chicago.

They've got husband and wife bandleaders in Tim DeLaughter and Julie Doyle (although statistically speaking, with all those people involved, you're bound to find you are married to at least one of them).

More gimmicks? Oooh yes please. How about robes?

And then just in case the robes were overshadowing the band they've replaced them....with tunics. Is this a band or a cult? Would Sir care for another tiny piece of gimmick? Ok cut me a large slice.

How about 3 albums worth of bouncily scary "Happy". That's arm waving, stranger hugging, life affirming. A laughing Labrador of positivity and happiness. None of your bedsit Indie gloom in the Spree camp.

Tim DeLaughter formed the band in 2000 as a positive response to the breakup of his former band Tripping Daisy and death of his bandmate Wes Berggren.

There are other big bands around of course. I'm From Barcelona have the numbers, Arcade Fire have that same weird cult feel and Broken Social Scene have that collective arrangement, dipping in and out of a pool of musicians.

They call themselves a choral symphonic Pop band but in terms of the sound, it's a bonkers Flaming Lips or Mercury Rev, cooked up with ELO, musicals like Godspell or Hair and The Beatles brass fanfares from the songs like Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band (which funnily enough Spree have covered)....and then the whole rich pudding is over-egged some more.

Bring on the choirs, wheel on the harp and don't be frugal with the flugal horn.

The first album The Beginning Stages came out in 2002, while the lusher sounding Together We Are Heavy was released in 2004. They've even managed to add a gimmick to the song titles.

The first track on the first album is called Section 1 (Have a Day/Celebratory) continuing up to it's final track Section 10 (A Long day). While the first track on the second album is Section 11 (A long day Continues). The last track on the second album is Section 20 (Together We're Heavy) while the first track on the third album is polyphonic Section 21 (Together We're Heavy).

David Bowie was an early fan, and put them on at the Meltdown festival he compiled in 2002.

The Bowie connection becomes deeper with the appearance of Bowie's legendary pianist (careful how you read that!) on The Spree's new album The Fragile Army.

Mike Garson played the certifiable piano solo on the title track of Bowie's 70's classic Aladdin Sane, with it's a jaw dropping pop moment, where Glam Rock met Jazz. It's undoubtedly the strangest piano part on a Pop record....and it's the kind of thing that causes non Jazz fans to wonder. "Aren't they just making it up as they go along?"

On the video for current single Running Away the band are performing in front of a banner that reads "Hope" and the video itself is composed of thousands of still photos rather than moving video image.

It's classic Polyphonic Spree, joyous, with dippy lyrics. "I'm projecting and reflecting desire. For you to come into my life."

With it's pop rush and the emphasis of the opening syllable, it reminds me of Blondie's Dreamin' and it's "When I met you in the restaurant" line.

But obviously with extra choral swing, harps, cellos, a rousing gear change up for the final straight (this band only do up!) and a breakdown at the end where you could almost be getting ready to do The Timewarp.

Oh yes Musicals are never far away from The Spree.

The opening to Guaranteed Nightlife does sound like it should have come straight from a musical, you can almost hear the sound of hands being raised to the skies to set free the lyrics "Remember the night you said you had a vision of all of these wonderful feelings going by".

Then it takes an alarming turn as the song picks up and all I can think of is Patsy Gallant's 1977 hit New York to LA. I say it's alarming....but I do find myself strangely drawn back to Guaranteed Nightlife.

Get Up And Go has a catchy stop start drum pattern and I was especially pleased to see that they couldn't resist accompanying the line "We're marching to the left and right" with the sound of marching feet. The obvious can be good and the obvious can be fun!

One of the key things to the sound of both Arcade Fire and The Polyphonic Spree is the drums. The bands may approach the other instruments differently but for both, bands the drums are more important for driving the music forward than may at first appear.

And it is surprising given that the drums are just one instrument in many. Especially as both bands have so much going on in terms of sounds and layering...or just sheer numbers of people involved.

With the Arcade Fire the drums and vocals are shifting round the verses and choruses. While the other instruments are playing drones, the drums keep it moving. With the Polyphonic Spree, the vocals and other instruments are definitely providing melody but the drums are still really motoring.

The best track on the album though is The Championship. It's got bells and an opening "Wooh!" which as might as well say "C'mon kids lets do the show right here". Well if it was a Musical it would do.....but being the positively Polyphonic Spree, the key line is actually "If we try, somehow we will keep it alive".

Now this part of the song and it's swirling yet stately backing inhabits that strange and unexplored world somewhere between Prince and The Waterboys. I could always hear echoes of the pervy purple imp's When Doves Cry in the overblown Whole of the Moon.

The song really takes off with more piano hammering, a coronation's worth of trumpet fanfares and a low flying harp. And plenty of singing too!

To complete the Bowie links it actually sounds like Brian Eno circa Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy. Which is not just a good thing, it's one of the best things!

Just how many of the band are going to fit in the Glee Club though?

Wilco

2007-09-01T13:24:00.003Z

After an evening of fine dining, post cheeseboard but pre brandy and cigars the talk often turns to things Alt Country and Americana.The name of Wilco will come up. They formed from the ashes of Uncle Tupelo who pretty much invented the whole Alt Country genre by taking as much from the Minutemen as they did from Hank Williams.

Over the course of six very different albums frontman Jeff Tweedy has navigated a course through Country Rock and electronics, shed band members with the regularity (if not the sheer numbers) of The Fall and after a classic David and Goliath tussle with their record company become one of the first established bands to actively embrace the internet.

They've recorded 2 albums of Woody Guthrie songs with Billy Bragg released as Mermaid Avenue" Vols 1 and 2.

The current line up have come closer than anyone else I can think of to capturing that searing, unflashy virtuoso guitar style of Tom Verlaine and Television. It's mixed in with Beatles and Country moves though, and some really unflustered, confident playing.

The definitive Wilco album was always Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" from 2002.

The first few seconds of opening track I Am Trying To Break Your Heart" gives a clue to what they're trying to do.

It actually sounds like a roomful of electronics has just been switched on.The hums and bleeps circle round each other as the drums and keyboards shuffle in before snapping into focus with the opening line "I'm an American aquarium drinker. I assassin down the avenue."I'm still baffled after 7 minutes of it, but the ghost of Eels is definitely present.

It's in the half spoken /sung delivery and the dislocation in Tweedy's voice.

No confusion with next track Kamera" though.It's just a terrific, melodic pop song that could work in any style. You could speed it up and fuzzify it for Weezer/Blink 182 powerpop, play it Country style or like Simon and Garfunkel.How clever is that!

And the reason that's possible is that it started off as really good song.Which is also a clever thing to be able to do.

I like the lyric "Phone my family.Tell them I'm lost on the sidewalk. No it's not Ok."Now you can look for genius in different places (personally I find it easier to do my research in pop music than quantum physics) but I do really like the way Tweedy squeezes the line "No it's not Ok" into the melody and makes the phrase itself sound like pop genius.

What Wilco did with Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" was to really play with the sounds.One minute the drums sound natural and untreated, the next there's a fuzzy edge to them, guitar lines merge into keyboards.

It's tricksy but for the most part it's not getting in the way of the songs themselves.

Heavy Metal Drummer" has the great opening line "I sincerely miss those heavy metal bands we used to see on the landing in the sun....I miss the innocence I've known, playing Kiss covers beautiful and stoned."

It's another great mixture of carefully crafted pop, warm and woody, mixed with the artificial.Shuffling drums and the Georgio Moroder chug. The opening line "I sincerely wish" is either going to entrance or infuriate you. Like Morrissey or Marmite.

Radio Cure" has the desolate feel of the 3rd big Star album, while War On War" is ghostly synth pop.

Pot Kettle Black" is the Country Pop relative of The Cure's Inbetween Days", with electric piano, turning into acoustic guitar strummer time before the cheap cheese synthesiser ending that sounds a bit like Telstar. Which sells it to me!

The killer track though is I'm The Man Who Loves You".

They manage to squeeze so many different influences and changes into the song, without actually detracting from the song itself. From a sliding, guitar intro, it takes in Beatles/Scritti Politti melody, a fuzzy Mr Soul guitar mutates into brass, throws in a funk chord sequence, some "Whoo Whoo" backing vocals and then ends it with a Tom Verlaine guitar pile up.

And of course the song title itself sounds like Pop songs should.Broken hearted and braggadocios.There's a live version at

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHnEMdXN_FU&mode=related&search =

Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" may be revered now, but at the time their label Reprise had no confidence in it.As part of the shake out when Time and Warners merged, Wilco left the label and instead started streaming the album from their own website until they signed to Nonesuch.....which is ironically a Warners subsidiary.

The process of making the album was legendarily fraught and saw the departure of multi instrumentalist Jay Bennett. The albums follow up A Ghost Is Born" saw the departure of Leroy Bach and Tweedy going into rehab for painkiller addiction.

With Sky Blue Sky" released earlier this year (but streamed though the band's site before it's official release) the emphasis is squarely on the songs rather than the production values.

You Are My Face" has hints of Leonard Cohen or Paul Simon type phrasing.The vocals on Side With Seeds" have some of that Steely Dan smooth yelp quality, while What Light" is Dylanesque.

The key track though is "Impossible Germany".

Even though Tweedy has spoken in recent interviews about feeling that this time round he wanted to make the lyrics more direct, he has still managed to use the phrase "Impossible Germany Unlikely Japan".

It's a beautiful song though, full of longing and very long.The band stretch out quite literally, utilising lots of Television moves and then moving onto the Thin Lizzy trick of both guitars playing the same line.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97IT0-EDTtw

Wilco mix the usual musical influences with the experimental, abstract lyrics with the traditional Country concerns of drinking and gambling, but it's the incendiary guitar playing that's really got my interest at the moment. Live, I think it'll be a treat.

Broken Family Band

2007-08-06T21:23:00.001Z

Any one for "14 tracks of spite, bitterness and empty-hearted loathing"? That’s how The Broken Family band describe their new album "Hello Love."

Fortunately there’s a lot more to the band and their music than their tongue in cheek critique implies.

What you get is a band from Cambridge using Alt Country and Folk tricks mixed with American guitar bands and clever lyrics that understand the rules of Pop. They’re working in different fields but, like The Beta Band, you also get a sense that the unexpected is just around the corner.

They’ve also managed to do this while still holding down day jobs, working tours around annual leave. In a really entertaining piece in the Guardian recently singer Steven Adams made an excellent case for it.

He’d played in struggling bands for years, spending the days watching TV in his pants, before concluding "It's pretty easy to be in a band and have a job.

"You go to work in the daytime and you play shows in the evenings and on weekends. If we all agreed to take a pay cut (from our existing salaries) and to "do" the Broken Family Band full time for a year, we would require a one-off tax-free payment of £250,000. That's twenty-five grand each, per year, for two years (one year to "do" the band, one year to sit on our arses moaning about how we could have made it, and £50,000 for the pot). Anyone want to offer that? We have assumed not, so doing it this way makes sense to us. Two of our number have mortgages, one has a family to support, and one has an expensive trainer habit. So we've kept our jobs"

Giving up the day job or signing off is one of the foundations of the Rock n Roll world but think of the possibilities if you had to keep your old job, even after you’d cracked it as Rock ‘n’ Roll fabulous.

There’s the very real risk of being taught by Sting, being sold an ice cream by The Stranglers Jet Black or getting your hair cut by Kevin Rowland or Charlie Harper. Keanu Reeves would have to struggle on as a struggling actor.

And what about Bez? Forever cursed to wander the twilight between the worlds of work and Rock n Roll as one of the maraca shaking Undead.

Broken Family Band's current album "Hello Love" opens with "Leaps". It’s a saucy coupling of The Violent Femmes and Magic Numbers. It could be the most blatant celebration of afternoon delight since....Afternoon Delight.

"I love the way that it hides and it leaps out at you and it leaps out at me in the afternoon". The song fades out on a fuzz of discordant guitar, just before falling asleep with the afternoons intended tasks still undone.

The single "Love Your Man Love Your Woman" manages to get that deep ringing sound, like the bom bom bom rhythm of Mr Blue Sky, with the guitar, bass and drums hammering out the same note.

It’s a Grinderman type bastard blues howl and as Steve Adams sings "You need trees and flowers and someone to hold you when you want to be held" his vocals make the change, but the relentless (Nick) Caveman hammering behind him doesn’t follow the progression.

Eventually they do and use up those final 2 chords. Oooh, but they make you wait. It’s primitive and clever and there’s a scouring guitar solo that could contribute to coastal erosion.

Steven Adams vocals have a reedy Gram Parsons twang (obviously that’s a good thing) on "So Many Lovers" while on "Don’t Change Your Mind" he offers practical advice "You can’t always sleep naked knowing you have to run for the bathroom."

Well you’ve either got to wear PJ’s or else it’s cup and run. Might be one for the message boards.

My favourite track though is the wistful and jauntily sour "Give And Take" - "I’m sure she’s found a person/ to give her some attention/ and if I ever do meet him/there are things that I should mention/She will take your heart and crush it/and maybe you two should discuss it".

There’s an odd rhythm to the words but he fits the words round the melody so they sound absolutely right. With the female backing vocals from Jen Maro and the general guitar thrummery it feels like Leonard Cohen’s "The Partisan" meets Bill Callahan. It ends with a really effective reverbed trumpet part.

Closing track "Seven Sisters" goes from Will Oldham fragile hesitancy to a punkathon ending complete with that Johnny Greenwood (from Radiohead) style trick of squeezing needling, mosquito sounds from his guitar and Adams repeated distorted "Hello Love" bellowed refrain.

For a band whose original intention was to play a few gigs at their local and make an album they’re managed to squeeze out four full length albums and a 2 mini albums since 2002 including the impeccably titled "The King Will Build A Disco."

Their website is a treat www.brokenfamilyband.com because it actually captures something of the spirit of the band, sarky and funny and with an awareness of how they fit in (or don’t).

Triumphant gigs are described as "Smashed it" and I’m sorry to have missed two of their gigs in 2002.

"We were inappropriate but ultimately victorious at St. Luke's Primary School PTA Barbeque. It was great. Brian Penny's 59th birthday party was excellent, especially the hot pies, campsite, disco, bar area and eyebrows. Our happy future as a function band is secure"

Kaiser Chiefs

2007-08-03T19:20:00.001Z

You can go a long way with a great song title or a nifty lyric and even further if the quality of the musical goods backs it up. Kaiser Chiefs have surfed on waves of goodwill partly due to the worth of their words.

I would have liked "I Predict A Riot" for it's title alone and there are probably Academics already researching the magnificence of new album title "Yours Truly Angry Mob."

Even at the time, their rise to Indie Stadium status did seem rapid.

The phrase "I Predict A Riot" had started to crop up as e mail sign offs and in knowing conversations and then at a 5 year old's birthday party in 2005 Punk Rock Builder Dad leaned over to me to recommend the just released debut album "Employment" (A note to Record Company execs. Forget MTV…Children's birthday parties is the way to do it.)

And the rest of course is history; Brit Award scooping, Glastonbury triumphing, "Ruby" at number 1, being covered by Lilly Allen and Girls Aloud, scooting off to America with the usual mutterings of "Could this be the British band to crack America?"

They've also had the benefit of being called "A bad Blur" by Liam Gallagher.

Actually that's not unusual as poor Liam is like the dazed Japanese soldier who's just staggered out of the jungle unable to accept that the Blur/Oasis war is over. He sees Blur in anything from the postman to the toaster.

There is a thick seam of Brit Pop running through their music but it's as much XTC as Blur. Stephen Street produced both of the Kaiser's albums, and even if he wasn't the architect of Britpop, he was certainly the builders merchant, with his Blur and Morrissey production jobs.

The key to the Kaiser Chiefs current success though is their lack of success in their previous incarnation Parva. They've realised this is the last chance of a bite at the pop pie, so they're willing to put the work in, and elbow their way to the front of the queue.

When they reconvened as the Kaiser Chiefs in 2003, they ditched all the old material and purposefully went all out for entertainment and big catchy choruses.

And these choruses are clearly signposted with plenty of spaces for oooohh aaahhhhhhGGGH! (Or other appropriate vocal signage).

You know the chorus is on it's way and you know you'll probably get flattened.

Never mind the Kaiser Chiefs, some of these choruses charge over the hills like the combined forces of Chiefs Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, relentless and irresistible. Bad news for Custer. Good news for the customer.

There are some clever words and some of them may well feature in a song like Na Na Na Na Naa, but the simplicity of the chorus means you can save mental energy for dancing and singing along. Commercial genius!

The other trick they use on tracks like I Predict A Riot or current single Everything Is Average Nowadays is to have long single note guitar lines; picking out the melody lines like 6 string rumble strips...to make absolutely sure your attention doesn't wander.

Ricky Wilson described his stage moves as being like a “Lithe Indie Ninja”. His stage persona of big waves, pogoing and crowd surfing where he likes to “Get out in the audience and see what they smell like” is plenty entertaining.

Especially from an Eddie Izzard look-alike in pub lunch office worker short sleeve shirt and tie combo.

The rhythm section have also done a trolley dash round the charisma department....witness big haired bassist Simon Rix and drummer Nick Hodgson.

Hodgson sings “Boxing Champ” from the second album which is a deliberately slight, piano and vocal affair with the excellent line “You were a boxing champ and I was a weakling. You didn't give me a chance, you gave me a beating.”

It's all a bit camp...and even better for the fact that Hodgson looks like the singer from Showaddywaddy who (warning....the following information is pub based research!) would only ever allow himself to be photographed sideways on....to let everyone see the full profile of the pipe in his drainpipes.

First album “Employment” has quite a range of styles from the powerhouse pogo chorus of “Oh My God” and the line “I've seen more blood than a back street dentist” to “You Can Have It All” which is pastoral XTC meets Duran Duran synths.

“Saturday Night” has the choice line “We are birds of a feather and you can be the fat one.” Musically it's Pop Scene era Blur and the revving motorcycle is apparently Graham Coxon's.

The second album “Yours Truly Angry Mob” released earlier this year, is the better of the two.

The intro to “Ruby” is one of the best of the year. It's a statement of intent. You just know this song is going somewhere and you're going to like it.

“The Angry Mob” starts off as “Modern Life Is Rubbish” era Blur meeting the overhanging guitars of “The Queen Is Dead” by The Smiths and changes gear halfway through for the coda “We are the angry mob, we like who we like, we hate who we hate”

There's also a bit of a Julian Cope feel to tracks like “I Can Do It Without You (But It Wouldn't Be Very Good)” and “Love's Not A Competition (But I'm Winning)”. Nice bracket work Ricky! I do like his line in "My Kind Of Guy" - "You're My Kind Of Guy Cos I Like Your Style And You Sound As Horrible As Me"

The best line of all though crops up on the albums best song. “Highroyds” is another of Wilson's despatches from the frontline of the teenage sidelines. Drinking and not getting into either clubs or girls. “I got a text from my ex. She wants to know when we're in London next” is Bolanesque genius

At their Glastonbury appearance 2 years ago they had the air of a band who knew their time had come. This year, Wilson's Indie Stadium theatrics and gestures didn't need balancing with irony. Their time was coming again.

The band never wanted small indie cosiness or to be smug and skint. So it's the full on tour of the UK's enormo sheds. They're not new, but they have got big.....and they are quite clever

Badly Drawn Boy

2007-07-09T21:43:00.003Z

You could describe Damon Gough AKA Badly Drawn Boy as a woolly faced, woolly-hatted Manc guitar strummer. But you could also describe him as a singer who manages to walk that fine line between sentimentality and whimsical humour, between easy pop and wilful awkwardness.

Pop Music is a difficult and dangerous business, (although Test Pilots and North Sea Divers may disagree) and songs can go disastrously wrong. For the aspiring singer songwriter, James Blunt is always round the corner.

Badly Drawn Boy’s live shows were once famously chaotic, with well written, rehearsed songs often losing out to half written fragments that he’d knocked together in the soundcheck, acoustic strolls through the audience, extended monologues, story telling and impromptu knock about covers.

After a series of hard to find e.p.’s his first album The Hour Of Bewilderbeast won the Mercury music prize in 2000. It goes from the Nick Drake, acoustic pickings and orchestral flourishes of tracks like The Shining or Stone On The Water to the shambling Fall sound of Everybody’s Stalking. (Mark E Smith once mistook Gough’s car for a taxi and jumped in demanding to be taken home...and Gough obliged. Don’t know much he usually paid. However Gough later co wrote and appeared on Fall b side Calendar).

Another Pearl has an intro riff that sounds like Cornershop’s Brimful Of Asha while This Song includes the lyrics “This song will heal your soul/Rest by this song and the peace that it brings/This beautiful song has wings.” Perversely, though, the stereo effect switches from speaker to speaker so rapidly and is so disorientating that it is actually unlistenable. And there we go – that’s the Badly Drawn Boy conundrum. Just as he’s created something lovely, he’s scared of the result and decides to mess with our heads instead.

He wrote the soundtrack for About A Boy, which works really well, and it’s key song Silent Sigh manages to be both melancholic and uplifting at the same time. (You’d also want to describe it as haunting but there is a strict quota on combining the words”haunting” and “melancholic”. It’s a bit like the Hay diet.

What Silent Sigh does have though is a really good example of why Gough’s vocals work so well. He never over sings, his voice is warm and conversational, it strains a little as he steps up with the melody but he is definitely not Mariah Carey in a hat. Glad we’ve settled that!

While Bewilderbeast is still seen as his defining work, I actually prefer Have You Fed the Fish from 2002, for the simple reason that that the songs are better. It’s not as eclectic and there’s less deliberate awkwardness (still enough to keep an edge, mind), but like I said - the songs are better.

Gough is a self confessed Springsteen nut, and was playing Thunder Road at early gigs. The opening moments of Have You Fed The Fish’s title track is the closest he’d come so far to the boss Sound of The Boss. Except that Bruce would never sing “I need a new eiderdown, I want some binoculars”. Odds are he also wouldn’t sing “I’ve killed all the mockingbirds, I’ve wrestled the octopus, I came out with extra arms, to carry your baggage”.

The Further I slide has got the rhythm of Sexual Healing, whilst Using Our Feet has got the sinuous stretchiness of Got To Give It Up. It’s mind boggling to think of Badly Drawn Boy morphing into Marvin Gaye’s bedroom soul. Bet he keeps his hat on!

Best track though is You Were Right, it’s straight ahead pop. Nothing straightforward about the domestic nightmare of a dream he had though. “I was married to the Queen, And Madonna lived next door, I think she took a shine to me, And the kids were all grown up, But I had to turn her down, ‘cos I was still in love with you”.

The song is supremely catchy, but thankfully he still can’t shake that awkward spirit though. There is a clumsy rhythmic hiccup where the guitars and drums sound like they’re falling over each other. Well they may have done the first time, but he’s kept it in and kept playing it the same way for subsequent years.

All Possibilities has been used in an advert for Comet. Hopefully he made some money out of it because in the video for the single itself he spent 90 minutes busking outside Waterloo Station for the grand sum of £1.60.

2004’s album One Plus One Is One is a lower key return to folky Nick Drake guitar pickings. And flutes ahoy! The sleeve notes include refer to the death of his grandfather in WW2 and the sudden death of a close friend The latest album Born In The UK has had the promotional might of EMI behind it, including free chipforks given away with the single and a tour that included 3 gigs in chip shops.

The actual song Born In The UK is 30 years of recent British history. “You wanna be a rebel then turn your hose pipe on/With two years to wait for the sound of Jilted John.”

Born In The UK

If the title track is the punslinger's nod to Bruce Springsteen there is more of Bruce’s influence on Welcome To The Underground and also on Journey From A To B. The Way Things Used To Be is country tinged and Long Way Round has a keyboard and trumpet sounds that recalls The Pale Fountains.

It’s all good stuff though and well worth a look at the Mac next month. You might see him in a chippie afterwards, or some other scruffy bloke singing.

The Stills - Destroyer

2007-07-09T21:37:00.001Z

It starts with an electric piano, and Hammond riff, two of my favourite sounds in Pop, so I'm instantly doubly hooked.

The song itself is one those American Alt rock sound meets late period James (eg “Laid”). Big and warm sounding with a bit of a feel of “You're So Good To Me” by the Beach Boys and it's got great big parping slabs of burbling brass.

So that's pretty much everything I'd look for in a record.

You've got to worry about the keyboard players beard though...that kind of hairy chin shelf was last seen on a character living in Greendale and having letters delivered by Postman Pat.

Destroyer video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9Y448s3fus

I like the fact that the record is called “Destroyer” and doesn't actually have the word "destroyer" in the song.

You can't beat using album titles by Kiss...especially when you are a bunch of pullover rocking Montreal art students. And I would count Kiss as one of my favourite bands, despite and also because of the fact that I never listen to them and have no interest in their music.

I just like the idea of the whole ludicrous thing they created. Revolving drum kits, rocket launching guitars, the merchandising…Gene Simmons. And who wouldn't want to be buried in a Kiss coffin?

I really like the sound of the Stills single and the way that singer Dave Hamelim has a good drawling delivery that manages to be both clear and earnest. And it does remind me of Tim Booth. But dear, oh dear... the lyrics.

"I will destroy you, Your soul impedes on mine, let go my free will, I can't stand compromise.....And the arrows are pointed and the archers delighted, the thrill the smell, The shit I've been put through.....I'm coming to your town "

Now there's always room in pop for a good vengeance song but I don't think The Stills lyrics have delivered.

Not only are they competing against the entire works of Nick Cave (either his vengeance or someone else's) or Morrissey's grumblings but there is also the absolute daddy of all song titles which pretty much explains the situation in real time. Just in the title alone!

I give you Melvin Van Peebles epic from the soundtrack of Sweet Sweetbacks Baadasssss Song (generally reckoned to be the first Blaxploitation film, the film also has a running time shorter than the song title I'm talking about).

Get ready, deep breath.... and... “The Man Tries Running His Usual Game but Sweetback Jones Is So Strong He Wastes the Hounds (Yeah! Yeah! And Besides That He Will Be Comin' Back Takin' Names And Collecting Dues)”.

But back to The Stills...”Destroyer” is a terrific song but sadly it's streets ahead of anything else on their just released second album, “Without Feathers”. The rest of the album is a bit pedestrian, and never really goes anywhere.

I'm still intrigued by their story though.

They formed in 2000 in Montreal. The first album “Logic Will Break Your Heart” came out in 2003 and they toured with the likes of Interpol and The Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

They certainly had that Joy Division, Bunnymen sound that the likes of Interpol and The Editors have been reviving. But then founder member and singer Greg Parquet left the band to go back University to finish his degree.

In a full and frank interview bassist Olivier Corbeil has said "For us, we were heading in a different direction for the record, I think Greg kind of felt like leaving. Not that we wanted him to leave, but we kind of felt that it wasn't a bad idea either.

“It wasn't a big deal. We hung out, had some beers, and he said, 'Yeah, I think I'm going to go finish this.' And I was like, 'Ah, that's cool' ". Beans comprehensively spilt!

So that's the singer and songwriter leaving after releasing a well received debut. Hmm. That can present a problem. So drummer Dave Hamelim steps forward.

Now this should be about as welcome as Phil Collins telling the rest of Genesis "Go on, lads I'll have a go" or indeed the (possibly apocryphal) homemade by Elvis porn movie where Elvis gets tired of filming and steps out from behind the camera to join in. A shaky leg indeed.

With Hamelim upfront on vocals and guitar, the band's sound changed from an English Post Punk to American Rock sound, closer to bands like Soul Asylum.

Although the album “Without Feathers” was originally released in the States last year, it's only just been released over here on Drowned In Sound. (Their site http://www.drownedinsound.com is always worth a look for new bands, reviews and scabrous comment) and they supported Kings Of Leon on their UK tour earlier this year.

Whether the radical change in style will pay off for the band though is debateable because there does seem to be a bit of a scramble for bands trying to nail that Joy Division Post Punk sound.

I proved this scientifically by watching the Glastonbury coverage this weekend, (from my sofa, getting into the spirit of the event by wearing wellies, avoiding the toilets and undercooking and overcharging myself for a veggie burger).

The Editors were paying their debts to Joy Division, and Bloc Party were doing their Joy Divison/Cure cut and shunt job.

When The Killers did their adventurous cover of Shadowplay. I was tickled by the way that the guitarist was punching the air. You wouldn't see Peter Hook doing that... unless there was actually someone in that particular airspace.

Hayseed Dixie

2007-06-16T19:14:00.002Z

We're not scared of gimmicks and novelties are we? It's better if the music comes first but you've got to warm to a band who have at least made the effort to come up with a good story. I don't fear the gimmick. I embrace the novelty and cop a sly feel of the one hit wonder. So how about Hayseed Dixie?

A bunch of hillbillies playing speeded up Bluegrass covers of AC/DC songs? I'll have some of that. According to their own story (which I'm buying into completely) it all started when stranger's car crashed near their isolated Tennessee valley home of Deer Lick Holler. On the back seat they found some AC/DC records, but they could only play them on their old 78 record player. "The boys all agreed it was some mighty fine country music. So, in memory of the stranger who had perished the boys set about learning these songs." Now anyone who doesn't believe that story will also have doubts about the sibling nature of The Ramones and may wonder why one of The Corrs just seemed slightly less attractive than the other pouting poppets.

Hayseed Dixie followed up the AC/DC album with rollicking live shows and the albums Kiss My Grass (a Kiss tribute), A Hot Piece Of Grass, Let There Be Rockgrass and the new album Weapons of Grass Destruction. The later albums have a mixture of classic rock and Punk covers, with a couple of originals thrown in. eg their own sensitive song about dealing with loss…I'm Keeping Your Poop In A Jar.

They play "Songs that are fun to play while drinking beer and are hopefully fun to listen to while drinking beer." The playing is phenomenal though. Drummerless, but stonking honky tonkin' with frantic mandolin, fiddle and banjo, dungarees, scary mullets and ponytails. And vocals that go from a yodelling yelp to a thick lascivious gurgle.

There are some people who think that AC/DC is schoolboy smut played by trolls. Some people think that Big Balls (elaborate well attended social occasions, with dancing), Lets Get It Up (possibly not about raising the Titanic), Sink The Pink (snooker?) are double entendres. These people have taken it the wrong way.

Hayseed Dixie think that AC/DC songs are about drinking, cheating, killing and hell. Which does indeed make for mighty fine country music. Frontman Barley Scotch reckons that the Lost Highway that Hank Williams sang about and AC/DC's Highway To Hell "Were the same damn road…They were singing about the same stuff, from the perspective of a working class guy who's reserving his right to fight the man and raise some hell." He also said that "I'm not trying to advocate alcohol…but I love beer." But later on in an interview with The Guardian it turns out that Barley Scotch is actually John Wheeler who runs a recording studio in Nashville and has a PhD. I still want to believe that his bandmates Reverend Don Wayne Reno and Deacon Dale Reno are trading under their real names though

On the dixified Highway To Hell you can hear all the little country and bluegrass tricks that the Stones and Gram Parsons used, played at berserker speed but still obviously both AC/DC and Bluegrass. It's great to hear him sing, "Hey Satan paid my dues singin' in this bluegrass band."

It's hard to top the way that Brian Johnson wails the line "Yeah you" on the original version of You Shook Me All Night Long, but Barley Scotches delivers the line "Knockin' me out with them American thighs" with the ripe country fruitiness and overstuffed contentment of a good ol boy that finds he's not just at Tractor Pull but there's a Hog Roast too! It's a sound that Brian would find hard to match, but Brian also finds it difficult to stand with his legs any less than 3 feet apart.

The new album features covers of the Scissor Sisters I Don't Feel Like Dancing, a countrified Holidays In The Sun and Judas Priest's Breakin' The Law.

Hayseed Dixie are a great idea for a band and they play like demons. Just have a look at their version of Motorhead's Ace Of Spades http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYJUywl7CFw

They're not only ones to tackle AC/DC's back catalogue though. If Bluegrass AC/DC is unlikely, then how about Folky AC/DC? The first solo album from Mark Kozelek (from sensitive 4AD types Red House Painters) included 3 AC/DC songs recorded as folky acoustic interpretations. They worked so well he recorded an album full with it's follow up What's Next To The Moon. His version of Love At First Feel takes AC/DC's slashing strutting boogie, puts it's trousers back on and gives it a haunted, regretful quality. It's a contrast to when Bon Scott sings, "They told me it was disgusting, they told me it was a sin" because you know that Bon wouldn't want it any way but sinful and disgusting. There's a Kozelek sample at
http://www.badmanrecordingco.com/bands/default.aspx#11

In fact to square the whole folk/metal circle, Kozelek's version of Love At First Feel actually ends up sounding like That's The Way from Led Zep3, but obviously with less elves. AC/DC never wrote about elves. They were too busy writing about drinking, shagging and Rocking. And they did do a lot of Rocking

Richard Hawley

2007-06-11T20:44:00.000Z

When the Arctic Monkeys received their Mercury award with the words "Call the police, Richard Hawley's been robbed" it was a good natured nod to their Sheffield neighbour. It seemed that the world had almost caught up with Hawley's modern retro melancholia.

On that occasion he missed out on a cheque and something to prop behind the toilet door, but with his fourth album Coles Corner, he had delivered something new, in an old fashioned way....he'd also taken his time doing it.

I mean what is the likelihood of a 40 year old guitarist with greased back hair, specs and a hair lip making that move a few feet to the centre of the stage, from hired hand to star and then that big leap into our hearts?

"I could always hum along cleaning the pots. But after the Longpigs split I thought it was about time I stopped washing the pots and crack on with writing and recording".

He originally played guitar with Sheffield indie poppers Treebound Story and the more angsty LongPigs. When the latter disintegrated space was at a premium in Drink and Drugs hell.

Old friend Jarvis Cocker threw him a lifeline with his offer to play guitar for Pulp on their popularity squashing “This Is Hardcore” album. He spent the next six years working with Pulp and also Cocker's art/performance skeleton suit wearing side project, Relaxed Muscle.

He also played the guitar solo on All Saints version of “Under The Bridge”, wrote “Clean” for Robbie Williams but turned down further collaborations with him because he wouldn't have known what to do with the money. "I just didn't want to do it. It would have changed my life too much. Earning millions of pounds is not the reason I get up in the morning".

Hawley grew up in Pitsmoor, Sheffield where his dad was a steelworker who played in rock n roll bands. Hawley started playing guitar at 6 and was gigging with his dad and uncle as a teenager. Hawley's musical heroes are the likes of Link Wray and the original Sun artists, like Johnny Cash and Jerry Lee Lewis...probably just like his dad.

Now I think there's something quite poetic and fitting about growing up in a Rock 'n' Roll household, having a youthful dalliance with indie pop and then hitting your musical prime as you approach your forties with music that draws heavily from your dad’s influence.

It's all in the Sidies....The sideburns you have at 40 are different to the ones of your 20's. Bushy grey truck driving monsters....none of your razored clubland cool, designer beers and bars...it's all tea and greasy spoon.

Which is fairly Rock 'n' roll when you consider that that the modern British mecca for Rock 'n' Roll is the original Rock 'n' Roll Mecca. The Ace Cafe with a car park full of oil leaking British bikes that dropped their engines in the road on the journey. Tellingly Hawley's 3rd album Lowedges has a classic BSA on the cover.

What Hawley has done with his music is to take a retro grown up, adult music, strip out any elements that don't work anymore, (there have been some very odd ideas about backing vocals and orchestrations that although they were ground breaking and maybe even necessary at the time, when you're given the choice, you wouldn't use again.) Richard Hawley had the choice and hasn't used them again.

Take for example Ray Charles “Modern Sounds In Country And Western”. As a link in the development of soul music and as a shake up to the country music establishment it's crucially important. But 45 years on, it can sound a bit syrupy to my ears.

Well Hawley has taken the style and sound of Roy Orbison, Sinatra or Johnny Cash and turned it into a very late night music. But without the cheese, despite the fact that he does call it cheesy old bloke music. The self deprecation is part of his charm.

He's an unabashed crooner and a shameless romantic and as the cd slides into the drawer, the hour seems to get later, the whisky bottle gets emptier and (depending on the song) the lover is either longer gone or closer to home.

And because this music is from the past if your TV's on in the corner, you'll find it's got less channels and your central heating has turned into a hissing gas fire.

Because Hawley is very muchin the wistful crooner tradition, you're not going to get the full highs and lows of the feelings behind the songs just from his vocals. It's just not part of the style.

That whole easy tradition that Hawley has drawn from, that Frank Sinatra, rinky dink and Martinis, showed pain without the wrenching Soul style pain of what Sam Moore from Sam and Dave called "The ugly face." The key to depth in Hawley's music is the arrangements rather than his vocals.

Hawley's arrangements are built on sparse echoing guitars, gentle sweeps from the lap steel and plenty of reverb. It's Twin Peaks soundtrack territory. Lowedges from 2003 is very much built on this sound with the likes of “Darlin'” with its Roy Orbison vocal style.

There are lots of songs about going away and coming back...exactly what the heartbroken crooner needs. “You Don't Miss Your Water (Till Your River Runs Dry)” has the line "Like A Thief In The Night, You Stole the love from my world... You Don't Miss Your Water Till Your River Runs Dry. You don't miss your lover till they're waving goodbye." And let's face it if you're never going to hear Roy Orbison sing those lines then Richard Hawley will do just fine.

“I'm On Nights” is a wonderful song built on a guitar that twangs like broken heartstrings. It feels like “I'd Rather Go Blind” which has been covered by Etta James, Clarence Carter (who was blind) and Rod Stewart (who was blonde, apparently) amongst many others.

Just the phrase itself "I'm On Nights" gives it an English feel despite the fact that he's crooning an American style song. "I'm on nights, we need the money" but in classic style he'll be coming back "Now it's time to lose your sorrow, I'm on days and off tomorrow."

While “Lowedges” mines the a rich but underplayed echoing guitar sound, “Coles Corner”from 2005 spans a wider range of styles.

“Coles Corner” refers to the popular meeting spot for lovers outside the Cole Brothers department store in Sheffield. Even though it was demolished in 1969, local people still refer to it and still arrange to meet there. The title track starts with an impossibly lovely sweep of strings as Hawley hopes that "Maybe there's someone waiting for me with a smile and a flower in her hair."

Actually he gets stood up, but the whole thing of singing about a place that no longer really exists, but is still a part of the city's emotional and social landscape and part of the soundtrack that's in his head definitely seems a very Richard Hawley thing to do.

“Darlin' Wait For Me.” Oh yes it's another darlin' song, another song about going away and coming back and another song where you can hear hints of Elvis. Thing is you can bet, Hawley can always hear Elvis.

“Tonight” is another song that seems rooted in Sheffield and while there may be other cities that have hills, to my ears the only thing that could make this song more Sheffield would be a line about Richard Hawley's beloved Henderson's Relish and the less loved Human League.

......"Oh tonight I got it really bad, Maybe I'll go out walking, Don't feel like staying home, Might take the car up to the hills and watch the city lights below."

“Wading Through The Waters Of My Time” is Johnny Cash style Country whilst on Woody Guthrie's “Who's Gonna Shoe Your Pretty Feet” the echo is on the vocal rather than the instrumentation.

It's sparse and haunting with a thick, muted sound from the barely brushed guitar. Closing track “Last Orders” was written in a taxi on the way to the studio and is more Twin Peaky atmospherics. Maybe if the journey had been longer it wouldn't have ended up as an instrumental. Nonetheless it's a clever contrast with the lushness of the opening title track.

“Coles Corner” is the critic’s choice but my tip is buy both and spend more time with “Lowedges”.

Richard Hawley

2007-06-10T20:19:00.000Z

When the Arctic Monkeys received their Mercury award with the words "Call the police, Richard Hawley's been robbed" it was a good natured nod to their Sheffield neighbour. It seemed that the world had almost caught up with Hawley's modern retro melancholia. On that occasion he missed out on a cheque and something to prop behind the toilet door, but with his album 4 th Coles Corner, he had delivered something new, in an old fashioned way....he'd also taken his time doing it. I mean what is the likelihood of a 40 year old guitarist with greased back hair, specs and a hair lip making that move a few feet to the centre of the stage, from hired hand to star and then that big leap into our hearts?

"I could always hum along cleaning the pots. But after the Longpigs split I thought it was about time I stopped washing the pots and crack on with writing and recording"

He originally played guitar with Sheffield indie poppers Treebound Story and the more angsty LongPigs. When the latter disintegrated space was at a premium in Drink and Drugs hell. Old friend Jarvis Cocker threw him a lifeline with his offer to play guitar for Pulp on their popularity squashing This Is Hardcore album. He spent the next six years working with Pulp and also Cocker's art/performance skeleton suit wearing side project, Relaxed Muscle. He also played the guitar solo on All Saints version of Under The Bridge, wrote Clean for Robbie Williams but turned down further collaborations with him because he wouldn't have known what to do with the money. "I just didn't want to do it. It would have changed my life too much. Earning millions of pounds is not the reason I get up in the morning"

Hawley grew up in Pitsmoor Sheffield where his dad was a steelworker who played in rock n roll bands. Hawley started playing guitar at 6 and was gigging with his dad and uncle as a teenager. Hawley's musical heroes are the likes of Link Wray and the original Sun artists, like Johnny Cash and Jerry Lee Lewis...probably just like his dad.

Now I think there's something quite poetic and fitting about growing up in a Rock 'n' Roll household, having a youthful dalliance with indie pop and then hitting your musical prime as you approach your forties with music that draws heavily from your dads influence. It's all in the Sidies....The sideburns you have at 40 are different to the ones of your 20's. Bushy grey truck driving monsters....none of your razored clubland cool, designer beers and bars...it's all tea and greasy spoon. Which is fairly Rock 'n' roll when you consider that that the modern British mecca for Rock 'n' Roll is the original Rock 'n' Roll Mecca. The Ace Cafe with a car park full of oil leaking British bikes that dropped their engines in the road on the journey. Tellingly Hawley's 3rd album Lowedges has a classic BSA on the cover.

What Hawley has done with his music is to take a retro grown up, adult music, strip out any elements that don't work anymore, (there have been some very odd ideas about backing vocals and orchestrations that although they were ground breaking and maybe even necessary at the time, when you're given the choice, you wouldn't use again. Richard Hawley had the choice and hasn't used them again. Take for example Ray Charles Modern Sounds In Country And Western. As a link in the development of soul music and as a shake up to the country music establishment it's crucially important. But 45 years on, it can sound a bit syrupy to my ears. Well Hawley has taken the style and sound of Roy Orbison, Sinatra or Johnny Cash and turned it into a very late night music. But without the cheese, despite the fact that he does call it cheesy old bloke music. The self depreciation is part of his charm.

He's an unabashed crooner and a shameless romantic and as the cd slides into the drawer, the hour seems to get later, the whisky bottle gets emptier and (depending on the song) the lover is either longer gone or closer to home. And because this music is from the past if your TV's on in the corner, you'll find it's got less channels and your central heating has turned into a hissing gas fire.

Because Hawley is very much in the wistful crooner tradition, you're not going to get the full highs and lows of the feelings behind the songs, just from his vocals. It's just not part of the style. That whole easy tradition that Hawley has drawn from, that Frank Sinatra, rinky dink and Martinis, showed pain without the wrenching Soul style pain of what Sam Moore from Sam and Dave called "The ugly face." The key to depth in Hawley's music is the arrangements rather than his vocals.

Hawley's arrangements are built on sparse echoing guitars, gentle sweeps from the lap steel and plenty of reverb. It's Twin Peaks soundtrack territory. Lowedges from 2003 is very much built on this sound with the likes of Darlin' with its Roy Orbison vocal style. There are lots of songs about going away and coming back...exactly what the heartbroken crooner needs. You Don't Miss Your Water (Till Your River Runs Dry) has the line "Like A Thief In The Night, You Stole the love from my world... You Don't Miss Your Water Till Your River Runs Dry. You don't miss your lover till they're waving goodbye." And let's face it if you're never going to hear Roy Orbison sing those lines then Richard Hawley will do just fine.

I'm On Nights is a wonderful song built on a guitar that twangs like broken heartstrings. It feels like I'd Rather Go Blind which has been covered by Etta James, Clarence Carter (who was blind) and Rod Stewart (who was blonde, apparently) amongst many others. Just the phrase itself "I'm On Nights" gives it an English feel despite the fact that he's crooning an American style song. "I'm on nights, we need the money" but in classic style he'll be coming back "Now it's time to lose your sorrow, I'm on days and off tomorrow."

While Lowedges mines the a rich but underplayed echoing guitar sound, Coles Corner from 2005 spans a wider range of styles.

Coles Corner refers to the popular meeting spot for lovers outside the Cole Brothers department store in Sheffield. Even though it was demolished in 1969, local people still refer to it and still arrange to meet there. The title track starts with an impossibly lovely sweep of strings as Hawley hopes that "Maybe there's someone waiting for me with a smile and a flower in her hair." Actually he gets stood up but the whole thing of singing about a place that no longer really exists, but is still a part of the city's emotional and social landscape and part of the soundtrack that's in his head definitely seems a very Richard Hawley thing to do.

Darlin'Wait For Me. Oh yes it's another darlin' song, another song about going away and coming back and another song where you can hear hints of Elvis. Thing is you can bet, Hawley can always hear Elvis

Tonight is another song that seems rooted in Sheffield and while there may be other cities that have hills, to my ears the only thing that could make this song more Sheffield would be a line about Richard Hawley's beloved Henderson's Relish and the less loved Human League. ......"Oh tonight I got it really bad, Maybe I'll go out walking, Don't feel like staying home, Might take the car up to the hills and watch the city lights below."

Wading Through The Waters Of My Time is Johnny Cash style Country whilst on Woody Guthrie's Who's Gonna Shoe Your Pretty Feet the echo is on the vocal rather than the instrumentation. It's sparse and haunting with a thick, muted sound from the barely brushed guitar. Closing track Last Orders was written in a taxi on the way to the studio and is more Twin Peaky atmospherics. Maybe if the journey had been longer it wouldn't have ended up as an instrumental. Nonetheless it's a clever contrast with the lushness of the opening title track.

Coles Corner is the critics choice but my tip is buy both and spend more time with Lowedges

Devo

2007-06-02T19:20:00.001Z

Now here's the question. Were Devo a silly group? Apart from the Flowerpot hats, the jerky songs and jerkier dancing, the yellow chemical suits and half baked theories about unbaked potatoes and evolution going backwards? Well there's certainly a lot to love about the first album but they also encompass social history and change, from their arty beginnings and the Kent State university shootings through to Punk and the MTV generation. Phew! Pass me a flowerpot hat and let's get started.

Bassist Gerald Casales, Mark Mothersbaugh and original guitarist Bob Lewis were at Kent State University Ohio and had used the devolution concept or the idea of humans evolving into primitive forms as the basis for art exhibitions. The theory really took root with them with the killings at Kent State University in 1970 as 4 students were shot dead by The National Guard. Casales told The Vermont Review that "I was white hippie boy and then I saw exit wounds from M1 rifles out of the backs of two people I knew. Two of the four people who were killed, Jeffrey Miller and Allison Krause, were my friends… Until then I was a hippie. I thought that the world is essentially good. If people were evil, there was justice and that the law mattered. All of those silly naïve things. I saw the depths of the horrors and lies and the evil. In the paper that evening, the Akron Beacon Journal, said that students were running around armed and that officers had been hurt. So deputy sheriffs went out and deputized citizens. They drove around with shotguns and there was martial law for ten days. 7 PM curfew. It was open season for students. We lived in fear."

Like Malcolm Mclaren hanging Punk Rock up on the coat hooks of situationism and the Paris riots, Devo had a theory to back up their world view. In the same way that half the fun of Art is pulling the wings and legs off the theory behind it then great tunes can sound better with something to think about...even if that something boils down to the 5 Devo oaths

Be like your ancestors or be different. It doesn't matter.
Lay a million eggs or give birth to one.
Wear gaudy colours or avoid display. It's all the same.
The fittest shall survive, yet the unfit may live.
We Must Repeat.

Not forgetting Casales idea of the potato "It's the self. And it's the all-seeing potato, it's got eyes everywhere, even in the back of it's head"

Never could see how it all tied in with Kent State though. Neil Young wrote Ohio, Buffalo Springfield released For What It's Worth. Devo went to the green grocers.

Devo spent the next few years playing often confrontational gigs. Their film The Truth About Devolution won a prize at the 1975 Ann Arbor festival. They put out 2 singles Mongoloid and their deconstruction of The Stone's Satisfaction on their own Booji Boy label in 76 and 77.

By the time they hit Britain though it was on the back of the New Wave in 1978 with a Brain Eno produced album, released on a bewildering selection of coloured vinyls. Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo. Call and response vocals, theories, dressing up and a band who could career jerkily round the stage and yet all step up to the mic simultaneously just like the Clash. They looked brilliant and of course they didn't sound like anyone else.

The album stands up really well today. Uncontrollable urge has got a fabulous yelping "Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah” opening line. Well I think that says a lot and I also really like the call and response chorus, "He's got an uncontrollable urge " "I’ve got an uncontrollable urge". The guitars alternate between crisp riffing and a bendy spring string sound. If anything it's like a bastardised Twist and Shout

But not quite as big a bastard as Satisfaction. The backing track pops, scratches and scurries like a little Captain Beefheart hamster all twitchy nose and whiskers. It's absolutely unrecognisable as a Stones backing track. The vocals yelp the familiar Jagger consumer blues lyrics. Marvellous

Mongoloid has electronic drum thwackery, synthesizer sighs and the guitar sounds thick but distant. Normally you hear an electric guitar and you want to know that the air around the speaker is actually moving. Noise and movement. But then you would expect oddities on an Eno production.

Gut Feeling speeds up as it moves from House Of The Ring Sun sound to a Stranglers style keyboard whirl segueing straight into the jerkiness of Slap Your Mammy.

The first album has a great mix of unfamiliar sounds teased out of conventional; instruments. I remember breathlessly asking an older mate who'd just been to see them in 1978 what instruments they used, as in my head these sounds could only have been made using strange futuristic instruments. I was a bit disappointed when he said “Just normal ones” Probably not even star shaped guitars either.

On subsequent albums they fully embraced electronics. The 3rd album Freedom Of Choice released in 1980 had the big hit Whip It which became an MTV staple but I'd lost interest after the first album really. They did mange to continue without me though. Bizarrely Oh No It’s Devo was produced by Queen producer Roy Thomas Baker, but the game was pretty much up by 1984’s Shout album. Day jobs beckoned

Mark Mothersbaugh, started a music production company Mutato Muzika , for commercials, films and TV soundtracks including the Rugrats and The Royal Tenenbaums. Gerald Casales makes commercials and music videos and has worked with The Foo Fighters amongst others.

The last proper Devo album was Smooth Noodle Maps in 1990, but there have been one off tours and side projects such as Jihad Jerry And The Evildoers and also The Wipeouters. And of course…. Devo 2.0 which was the Disney backed creation of a Devo covers band of child musicians and actors, with the videos directed by Devo and the lyrics cleaned up. Ouch! And if you really want to know what that sounds like. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnot_03IAbQ

A safer bet is Devo’s version of Satisfaction.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CvcuaJy9OwI&mode=related&search

Art Brut

2007-05-28T14:33:00.001Z

What exactly do you want in Pop Music?

There are times when I insist on chunky punky tunes, half spoken half shouted (and never knowingly sung) vocals, funny (but not novelty comedy) lyrics, arty leanings and maximum eyebrows.

Art Brut are just the band for those occasions.

Eddie Argos's luxuriant eyebrow and 'tache combination looks like something from a particularly gruelling bush tucker trial. It's not a Gallagher monobrow....these are free range beauties

There's definitely an arty chancer feel about the band. Now I don't know much about Art, but I know what I like...and what I like about Art is...it's usually to be found in interesting buildings full of arty women.

I also know that the name Art Brut comes from the translation of Raw Art, more commonly known as Outsider Art. One strand of it included art produced by psychiatric patients. It's the theory that Michael Stipe or Jarvis Cocker would use if they were trying to make an unwatchable video.

But would they have come up with a lyric as dumbly profound as Art Brut's song Modern Art. "Modern Art makes me wanna rock out. Wooooh!"

Eddie Argos used to be the singer in a band in his native Bournemouth called the Art Goblins and part of his stage act involved playing the vacuum cleaner and escaping from a sack. Art Brut though were formed in 2003 after he moved to London and pestered everyone he met at a party to form a band.

Debut single Formed A Band came out in 2004 with Argos declaring "Look at us, we formed a band...and yes this is my singing voice, it's not irony and it's not Rock 'n' Roll. We're just talking to The Kids."

Now we've been here before haven't we? Where the song describes what the singer is doing like Gang Of Four's Love Like Anthrax or Mark E Smiths lyric "I don't sing I just shout all on one note aah." And yes I do like that trick. And yes I like Formed A Band a lot too.

It sums up what Art Brut do, entertaining tunes and performances with quotable lyrics. They've also got a fine upstanding drummer (well he plays standing up)

In terms of Argos's vocals, though the closest match is Gerald Langley from Blue Aeroplanes. They had an arty bent and a Polish dancer Wojtek. (Historical note...the dancers were the amongst first wave of Polish migrants, just before the bus drivers and builders).

Their single Tolerance with it's meandering bassline was a DJ staple at The Click Club at Burberries in 86/87 and reason enough for me to go most weeks.

More knowing Pop referencing comes in the form of last years single Nag Nag Nag Nag which goes one Nag better than Cabaret Voltaire's mighty Sheffield industrial punk single Nag Nag Nag.

Art Brut's nagging has hanging chords, slight echoes of Magazine's Shot By Both Sides and there is a comic teenage petulance in Argos's lyrics:

"My record collection reduced to a mix tape/Headphones on I made my escape/I'm in a film with a personal soundtrack/I'm leaving home and I'm never gonna come back".

But when it comes to the lyric "I'm grown up now but refuse to learn that these were just adolescent concerns" there could be a lot of us diving for cover.

The significance and relevance of ideas about never growing up/extended adolescence/holding onto the things you think are important, depends on whether you're the accuser or accused. Guilty as charged M'lud...and I've got another box of records that I'd also like taken into consideration.

Good Weekend is a straight down to business celebration of his brand new girlfriend. It's a twisty shimmy of a song with a ringing snare intro and Gang Of Four crunchy guitars meeting B52's Love Shack. "I've seen her naked twice, I've seen her naked twice".

The video is worth a look just for the Eddie Argos Eyebrow experience

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AY4dQHsPdiI&mode=related&search=

More Brut goodies can be found at http://www.myspace.com/artbrut

Emily Kane is a plea to a long lost girl friend who may not know it but "If memory serves we're still on a break...Every girl that I've seen since, Looks just like you when I squint".

The debut album Bang Bang Rock 'n' Roll came out in 2005 and it's follow up It's A Bit Complicated is due out next month. They're fresh from touring with Maximo Park and visit Birmingham Academy 2 June 14th.

Cherry Ghost

2007-05-25T19:01:00.001Z

You do already know “Mathematics” by Cherry Ghost. It sounded equally at home on Radios 1, 2 and 6 but wherever you heard it was usually better than the records on either side if it. And like nothing else you'd heard that day...

Unless you spend your days listening to melancholic but uplifting Country waltzes, drenched in strings and glockenspiels, sung by a 30s something with his heart in Nashville and his boots in Bolton.

Cherry Ghost is actually the alter ego of Simon Aldred, who after years of playing in bands found that both the times and life experience had caught up with him.

"I guess it depends on what kind of music you do as to when you become good at it. I think probably, if you're doing rock n'roll, it requires a lot of youth and enthusiasm so, probably, your chances are better when you're first starting out in music. I'm a big fan of Johnny Cash; kind of the more weather-worn singer-songwriters so it was just, kind of, learning the art of songwriting basically, and it took a while.”

He worked as a book keeper, sold store cards and was a maths tutor. It's not picking cotton or working on the railroad, but that's the thing with Country Music and it's modern spin off, Americana.

The cliche may be that it's all death, divorce and drinking, but because the lyrics have always been so important to Country as a genre, it does give the smart musician some real room to manoeuvre.

And there is the whole history of Country music to work with, where it became The Establishment but still loved its rebels. And you can do it as you get older, and wear great shirts, cowboy boots, open a theme park like Dolly Parton's Dollywood, have your own fast food spin off (Kenny Rodgers Roasters) or your own designer jeans with a shotgun pocket (King Kenny again).

The question is why would anyone want to play anything else?

Aldred cites Bill Callahan, Sparklehorse and Wilco (Cherry Ghost comes from a lyric in “Theologians”) as influences and there is a Vic Chesnutt wooziness to some of the songs. The closest comparison though is Richard Hawley.

Although he'd played in bands for years, schlepping around in vans, knocking on record company doors, the actual breakthrough gig was a 20 minute solo acoustic set at a Glasgow Mexican restaurant after demos of “Mathematics” started to circulate.

“I played for 20 minutes, just me and a guitar. People started putting offers in the next day.It was a matter of three or four months from writing the tune to being offered five record deals"

He signed to Heavenly, which gives it a stamp of quality, having given board and lodgings, or at least a helping hand to artists as excellent and diverse as Manic Street preachers, St Etienne, The Rockingbirds, Beth Orton and The Magic Numbers.

Mathematics is an extraordinary record, the richness of the strings, the melancholy and slightly pinched sound of Aldred's vocal and the lyrical progression from self-awareness to inevitability, as Aldred sings “It's funny how I always seem to alienate the people that I'm trying to impress/Cold mathematics is making it's move on me now”.

I love its opening line “Meet my on the corner by the fire escape and I'll be waiting”. There are not enough songs about fire escapes. (But while it is important to be able to evacuate a burning building in a timely manner it also needs to be remembered that Scott Walker's Big Louise is the ultimate fire escape song).

Cherry Ghost appeared on Jules Holland Later last year playing a stripped down version of forthcoming single “People Help The People”. Piano powered, with a bottleneck guitar swell and the lovely simplicity of the lyric - “And if you're homesick, give me a hand and I'll hold it”.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8bRXxEusTk

It's just gone from his My Space site but “4am” was a corker. With it's picked guitar and brushed drums, it's got the sprightly feel of Kenny Rodgers’ “Ruby Don't take Your Love To Town”. It sounds supple and slyly rude. Possibly like the old silver fox himself.

There have been support slots with Amy Winehouse and The Magic Numbers, and he has been known to play 90's dance anthem “Suddenly” by CeCe Peniston (careful how you pronounce it)

The Hold Steady

2007-05-13T07:41:00.001Z

The Hold Steady and Arctic Monkeys were both on Jools Holland’s Later last week. They both do drinking songs about damaged characters and bad behaviour in clubs and bars, reportage from the front line of the sidelines. But the difference is …different tactics, different ages and different sides of the Atlantic.

The key to the Arctic Monkeys is Alex Turner’s lyrics and the bilious disgust in his voice. That’s what drags you into Monkeyland…. and while there’s a real pleasure in the spiky backing tracks, the instruments are just there to provide a backing to the vocals. That’s it. It’s fast and frantic, but it’s percussive and not melodic. The tunes have no tunes. I can’t see the music inspiring a generation of copycat guitar players, whereas the lyrics will. It’s all in the lyrics and attitude. I’ve also yet to read to read an interesting Arctic Monkeys interview, but apparently you can charge what you like for tiling a bathroom in London.

The Arctic Monkeys album was released last month, while The Hold Steady’s break through third album Boys And Girls In America came out in the US last year.

The Hold Steady bring you something you didn’t know you wanted. They’re still story songs but it’s Bruce Springsteen, AC/DC and Mott The Hoople played by a bunch of beardy 30 somethings with the musical skills and confidence so that it sounds like they could really do this all night. The lyrics are sharp, intelligent and literate and Craig Finn’s thick gargling holler of a voice rolls over the music, bouncing off the riffs or just getting on with the business of getting the stories out. Both the vocals and the music beneath stand up in their own right (unlike the characters that both Arctic Monkeys and The Hold Steady sing about).

The Hold Steady look like they’ve escaped the Stylist. Craig Finn sports the kind of full regular guy beard last seen on Discovery Home and Leisure features on master carpenters and fishing documentaries. The keyboard player’s curly waxed ‘tache looks it came off a mime artist…and it really should come off. There are also hats. Not good hats either.

Stuck Between Stations is the most Springsteen esque track, mainly for the Thunder Road type breakdown and piano. The ascending riff under the chorus though is like the mighty riff that underpins U2’s A Beautiful Day. You know, when the plane is coming down low enough for the pilot to see the pattern on the carpet but not quite low enough to take Bono’s head off. (I know Bono’s an easy target, but I never feel bad about taking the piss…after all it takes the pressure off Sting!)

The opening line of Stuck Between Stations is the Kerouac quoting “There are nights when I think that Sal Paradise was right, Boys and Girls in America have such a sad time together”

The chorus just made me sit up though.

“She was a real cool kisser and she wasn’t all that strict of a Christian, She was damn good dancer but she wasn’t all that great of a girlfriend.” It’s just an excellent line from an unlikely looking band. Sung with utter conviction over righteous riffing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nhwmk8mAaII

Finn grew w up in Minneapolis and his favourite band was The Replacements. As a kid he was impressed by the way that they used local references like the street names in Run It which is a song about jumping red lights. “Lyndale, Garfield Run it”

“I loved the Descendents. They sang about getting no chicks, and that's something I knew a whole lot about.” One of the dirtier Descendents asked Finn and his friends if they knew any girls who would…ahem…help him out. “If we knew that, what would we be doing at a Descendents show?”
On the second album Separation Sunday, he uses the characters of Hallelujah and Charlemagne to tell the tale of the “A real sweet girl who made some not sweet friends” but comes back from the brink/dead on How A Resurrection Really Feels. It’s all very growing up suburban and Catholic.

“I moved to New York when I was 29 years old, so maybe you’re hanging out with a better quality of person. When you’re 18, there’s some idiots who are like, “We’re gonna go drink this under a bridge, you wanna come?” And you’re like, “Yeah. Absolutely. How would we not want to drink under a bridge?” I think Minneapolis is pretty unique. The delinquents out there are pretty delinquent. And everyone’s got a car, so there’s like, a lot of mobility. A lot of bad ideas can be put into action quickly. ‘Cause you can like, haul stuff”

The Chillout Tent from the 3rd album tells the romantic tale of a boy (“Tennyson in denim and sheepskin, He looked a lot like Izzy Stradlin”) and a girl who have separate chemical calamities at a festival and regain consciousness in the Chillout Tent and start kissing as the nurses take them off their drips. It’s sung as a duet with Elizabeth Elmore. (Dave Pirner from Soul Asylum, another Minneapolis resident, is also on there.) It’s one of the standout tracks from the album, but scarily the boy girl vocals on the chorus end up sounding like Meatloaf. Also scarily …I like it.

The Hold Steady’s current label is Vagrant which is also the home of Paul Westerberg (The Replacements) and The Lemonheads. They’re playing in Portsmouth, London and Manchester in July. They feel like a band where you need to suspend your cynicism and possibly even consider using phrases like “The redemptive power of Rock ‘n’ Roll.” The Hold Steady sound like other bands…but better. The Arctic Monkeys don’t really sound like anyone else. And certainly would never talk about Rock ‘n’ Roll (except maybe in connection with a sadder, older, more desperate character in one of their songs)…. But do they sound better?

Julian Cope

2007-05-08T20:39:00.001Z

Is Julian Cope the Greatest Living Englishmen? Well he's more convincing in the stack heels and pointy hat department than Stephen Fry.

The thing about Cope is that he's pursued all the things that interested him, wants to others to share that interest and completely understands the importance of the grand gesture. From music to stone circles, he's a 21st century renaissance man with his heart in the Neolithic and his head in Haight Ashbury. Ok maybe he's not he's Psychedelic Da Vinci but his precarious balancing act between Pre historic Professor, dribbling loon, dogged music ferret, Shaman and shambles, Idiot Savant and idiot idiot is all done with such enthusiasm and charm.

There's a huge Cope back catalogue to work through from the Teardrop Explodes brief pop career through his mixed bag of solo albums. Since the late 90s he has withdrawn from the mainstream Record Industry, releasing material through his own labels and website. Although there is a lot to love about the man and his music, part of the real value of Copey is the interviews, his persona and the books. His monthly address to the nation is always worth a read and is always a good pointer to unusual music. (http://www.headheritage.co.uk/addressdrudion/96/2007/) His two autobiographies are both essential reading; well written, musically literate and chock full of some scary/funny drug stories from a man whose head was either in the clouds or up his arse.

Head On covers Copey's Tamworth childhood, escape to Liverpool Punk scene, the Teardrop Explodes brief brush with Pop Stardom in all it's Smash Hits glory and Cope’s transformation from resolutely drug free to determinedly drug filled.

It's really good at capturing the intensity of the desire in the early Liverpool days to make the band work. All the characters involved were out of control. Drummer Gary Dwyer spent one tour with a cassette of Frank Sinatra in his unchanged pants. Anyone unfortunate enough to fall asleep was likely to wake up to the sight of Dwyer "Getting the Frank out". People it’s bad…. but not as disgusting as Sacky Bill. This was Dwyer’s ability to stretch his bag over his bell and up to his belly until his genitals "Looked like a turtle covered in a tarpaulin."

Even as Reward was a hit, with its video of searchlights, the careering jeep (they bought it) and Copey in his now established uniform of leather flying jacket and jodhpurs, The Public were turning on him. Now I think an opening line of "Bless my cotton socks I'm in the news" the brass fanfare and swirling bass and keyboards is unbeatable. Some other people do not. Cope quotes 1981's best joke as

"What's the difference between a Cow and The Teardrop Explodes?"

"A Cow has got a twat at the back and horns at the front"

The first album was recorded with Cope dressed as Lawrence of Arabia and each morning Cope and Dwyer would take acid and ride down to the studio on imaginary horses. “I called mine Dobbin, Gary called his Bumhead”. By the sessions for the aborted third album they were playing a game called Brick where 2 people stood 15 feet apart and threw a brick at each other. Cope had the (Acid) advantage and he could see the vapour trails coming off the brick…. others were not so lucky.

I saw The Teardrops in Manchester during the Wilder tour. During a climactic final moment Cope ran towards a monitor looking as if he was going to do something dramatic.... as he tried to move it he realised that he couldn’t.... so he slunk off stage instead. It got worse. At one of their final gigs they, incongruously, supported Queen at Milton Keynes Bowl and were upstaged by Queen’s helicopter touching down mid gig. At their final Manchester gig at The University the tape machine broke and Copey stripped off. Milli Vanilli to Willy Vanilli

The second book Repossessed covers the period after the Teardrops split, as Cope retreated to Tamworth and started to revisit his childhood and rebuild his own myths about the landscape. In 1984 he sneaked 2 solo albums out past the record company (who’d only kept him on because he shared management with Tears For Fears) including Fried where he's naked under a tortoiseshell. I’ve always liked the albums but from a professional point of view, the industry had written him off, he’d become a byword for underachieving loon and he was underperforming at key gigs. He describes watching the support band The Woodentops as they used all his tricks and made it work. While the craziness of the first book is laugh out loud funny, it gets bleaker for the Tamworth years.

He started collecting toy cars, keeping them in a room in the attic. But he blocked up the door so that the only way to reach the sanctuary of the toy room was to crawl through a tunnel running the full length of the house. In 1985 his new obsession was speed walking round Drayton Bassett. Obviously he had a special outfit for it…. long johns and a hat made form his wife Dorian’s fake fur collars.

They became reclusive, unable to deal with the overflowing toilet and stockpiling food for an unspecified but imminent disaster. Eventually though they needed to go to the shop. He didn’t know how to get to the supermarket but couldn’t face calling a taxi. So he set off walking until eventually his path was blocked by a river.which he tried and failed to jump over. He eventually got to the supermarket but left a trail of silt along the aisles.

1987’s St Julian album and the accompanying tour saw him rejuvenated though, with a clanging “2 car garage band” sound and the Cosmic Asshole mike stand that that was equal parts mike stand, scaffolding and pulpit. The follow up, My Nation Underground was not the album that the record company, Cope or I wanted though. Cue another dispute and Copey sulk, and cue his sneaky recordings Skellington and Droolian. They go the full range from whimsical to silly, from acid casualty mumblings to Jelly Pop Jerky Jean’s pop perfection about Japanese hair spray. Unlikely to win new fans, but sure to remind the old ones exactly why they liked him.

The career highs are the Peggy Suicide and Jehovah Kill albums. Both sprawling, sweeping epics, with elements of Prog rock, Funkadelic, eco themes, Paganism and Goddess Worship and big-hearted Pop tunes like Beautiful Love or Try Try Try.

He’s now acknowledged as an expert on Neolithic sites and his books The Modern Antiquarian and The Megalithic European are huge labours of love based on visits to hundreds of sites across Europe. Part travelogue, part prehistoric guidebook.

“I'm past the stage of trying to theorize about these places. I know what I believe, but I'm more interested in getting other people to see for themselves. Yes, the book is heavyweight and archaeologically thorough, but, better still, it's full of amazingly photogenic sites across Europe that would make anyone travel”

Last time Cope was at The Glee Club, he delivered an entertaining talk that spanned uptight druid control freaks and Neolithic rock n rollers. This time round he promises old songs, lots of new songs from the new album You Gotta Problem With Me imminent and old Teardrop Explodes songs to celebrate 25 years since the split.

The Lemonheads

2007-05-08T20:34:00.001Z

Evan Dando's band The Lemonheads went from Boston schoolboy Husker Du sound alikes to a major label brush with early 90's global hugeness. With his girl friendly surfer looks, ear friendly hooks and some cleverly written songs about dumb subjects Evan Dando had it all...And friends like Oasis, Michael Hutchence and Helena Christiansen.

Boys wanted to be him, girls wanted to be with him and drug dealers wanted to be a phone call away. Scientists are still pondering why The Lemonheads never became bigger, but some of the brighter boffins have proposed the theory that it was Dando himself who blew it

Evan Dando is the only original and constant member of The Lemonheads, and even he got so sick of his own band that that he put out a solo album in 1993 and sang with the reformed MC5 in 1994. He's back as Lemonhead now though and I'm definitely ready for some stoner Punky Country slackness.

The original line up with Dando and Ben Deily recorded their debut ep, Laughing All The Way To The Cleaners, the day after their High School Graduation and then released it on their own Huh-Bag label. Subsequent recordings Hate Your friends, Creator and Lick on were all released on local Boston label Taang! The records show a gradual shifting away from the Punky beginnings but also show a power struggle within the band with Deily eventually leaving. Deily's final album Lick has a Power Pop version of Suzanne Vega's Luka. - The first of many quirky cover version which Dando would perform.

Things were getting more interesting though as The Lemonheads (now effectively Dando) signed to Atlantic and released Lovey. It's got the Gram Parson's cover Brass Buttons and Stove which is a song about preferring the old stove to the new one. Great song but honestly it's not as deep as it sounds.

The thing with Dando is that he could never sustain the song writing himself, he always needed people around him...hanging on to them was a different matter though, as The Lemonheads was a revolving door for musicians. Drummer Mark "Budola" Newman was sacked and then unwittingly answered an advert for his old job

A 1991 tour brought Evan to Australia, where he met Tom Morgan and Nic Dalton who would all contribute songs up to the present day.

The quality of the songs from this period, the distinctive sound and the interplay between Dando's languid drawl and Juliana Hatfield's wide eyed teen movie girl backing vocals make 1992's It's A Shame About Ray the definitive Lemonheads album. If Nirvana were the bad drugs, self loathing and bellyaching sound of the discontented suburbs, then It'A Shame About Ray was the amiably stoned goofy dreamboat singing songs like Ceiling Fan In My Spoon and My Drug Buddy. It's about the minutiae of the suburbs. The comfortably off and the comfortably numb and it steers a path from the gleeful Alison's Starting To Happen (Alison's getting a mohawk, Alison's getting her tits pierced") to the lethargy of My Drug Buddy ("Is this the same stuff we got yesterday?"). Lets face it Kids, his records were great but, you wouldn't want to live in Kurt Cobain's house...and actually I don't want to listen to Nirvana records that often either. I play It's A Shame about Ray a lot though

I like the actual sound of the album. It's just bass, guitar and drums with the occasional keyboards, but the chords sound unusual and the bass lines often use 2 or 3 note chords for a fat bottomed sound. (Right Sir Fred?)

Rockin' Stroll is a great opener with a flurry of guitar notes bouncing off big square chords like a downhill skier who can't stop hitting the poles.

The album is ludicrously short, 10 tracks including the cover of Frank Mills from the musical Hair. Later it got reissued with additional track Mrs Robinson, which is still a bit of a comedy cover but I do like the guitar thwacks in the middle and Dando's pronunciation of "cupcakes"

So everything was geared up then for The Lemonheads to become massive with the release of Come On Feel The Lemonheads in 1993...well in one sense they did. Dando became a staple of gossip columns with increasingly erratic behaviour, and the inevitable combination of drink, drugs and Courtney Love. Although there are some good songs on the album, there's more filler and some dubious/infuriating/down right ropey old toss like Jello Fund. As an opening track it's hard to beat the sweet and brief power pop of The Great Big No and the single Into Your Arms but tracks like Being Around end up sounding too lightweight. "If I was a booger would you blow your nose?"

Big Gay Heart was Dando's acoustic Country Pop strum-a-long single. During 93 and 94 He'd turn up every where to sing it....which was part of the problem. He was usually trolleyed and in a PR masterstroke he announced that he couldn't sing for 2 weeks because of the amount of crack he'd smoked. He was booed off stage at Glastonbury after turning up hours late...with his acoustic.

Atlantic dropped him after the 1996 album Car Button Cloth. I'd already lost interest. I think he missed their money more than mine though.

The solo album (although lets face it ...all his records are solo albums with additional musicians and songs from various sources) Baby I'm Bored came out in 1993 and was a definite return to form. More country pop flavoured than previous material but with some strong songs and strong vocal performances, if that's not a contradiction in terms for Stoner Pop

The standout track is It Looks Like You which is acoustic driven bruised Country Pop with the excellent line

"I can't for the love of Jehovah, Comprehend why you knock at my door"

I also can't fail to like a song that calls itself The Same Thing You Thought Hard About Is The Same Part I Can Live Without

After the bizarre spectacle of him fronting the MC5 he released an album last year simply called The Lemonheads. The single Become The Enemy is a really good song. The album was produced by Bill Stevenson (Descendents, Black Flag) who also contributed some songs, with others coming from Tom Morgan (Dando's Australian gold mine). The thoroughly back on form J Mascis plays on 2 tracks. It's not all old American Punk players though as Garth Hudson from The Band also crops up on one track. They met at a Halloween reading of Edgar Allen Poe poems. Well that's one way of avoiding Oasis and Courtney Love

I'm glad he's back; and it sounds like he's interested again. However as the famously Pretty and Vacant Dando struggled simultaneously to walk, talk and hold onto his ipod during a phone interview with the radiofreecanuckistan blog he revealed he's got a reason to be back

"I took 2 long breaks. One from 94 to 96 and then another from 97 to 2000. I was basically spending tons of money and living it up. Then I got close enough to the bottom of my bank account again to be motivated. It's weird, money is bad for me. I'm by nature a lazy person. If I have tons of money in the bank, I just want to go skiing or bird watching or take a nap. It's good when you need to work again"

Bill Callahan

2007-04-27T17:26:00.001Z

Bill Callahan is part of that American Alt Country/Folk thing, but definitely at the darker, more bitter end of the bile pile, like Will Oldham or the Handsome Family.

He serves up dark twisted tales of despair, death and a black humour with the vocal style of Lou Reed and the richness of Leonard Cohen. The songs tend to be stripped down, with a minimum of chords and a chord conserving attitude of "what's good enough for the verse is good enough for the chorus.

It's good stuff though and definitely suits those times when you find Prairie dust in your slippers.

Following a teenage interest in the SST bands and The Minutemen, he released bedroom recorded and bedroom quality cassettes on his own label but since 1990's debut album proper, Sewn To The Sky he has maintained a prolific output as Smog and also (Smog).

The forthcoming album Woke On A Whale Heart is the first album released under his own name. There are musical arrangements by Former Royal Trux man Neil Hagerty and it promises to be a more upbeat affair than his previous offerings.

So after having set the scene for an artist specialising in melancholic introspection, the first song up for grabs is dress Sexy At My Funeral from 2001's Dongs Of Sevotion album. The dearly departed's final request would certainly distract the mourners from the ham sandwiches.

"Oh Dress sexy at my funeral my good wife,

Wink at the minister, Blow kisses to my grieving brothers

Also tell them about how I gave to charity,

And tried to love my fellow man as best I could

But most of all don't forget about the time on the beach"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Idt56Y1hFs0

'Neath The Puke Tree was an ep released in 2000 containing re-recorded material and new songs. The best track is I Was A Stranger which pushes all the right Cowboy Junkies buttons for me.

With a warm steel guitar sound and a hesitant semi spoken vocal delivery, it feels like it should be a careworn and bruised but ultimately uplifting and comforting song. It's actually a haunting, potential serial killer serenade.

"In the last town, You should have seen what I was

I was worse than a stranger, I was well known"

The song fades out on a getting down to business solo like the Cowboys Junkies peerless Cheap Is How I Feel.

I Feel Like The Mother Of The World is from 2005's A River Ain't Too much Land.

The video with Chloe Sevigny is as bleak as it gets. The eye patched/black eyed chambermaid works her way round the hotel rooms while Bill Callahan is the TV newsreader on each telly in every room delivering the lyrics with intercut shots of disaster and turmoil.

Callahan has said it's about War or Peace. Israel, Palestine. The US and Iraq. The chorus is "I feel like the mother of the world, With two children fighting"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntUXyBiheIU

I like it's opening line "Whether or not there is any type of God, I'm not supposed to say". It echoes Nick Cave's song Into My Arms and that most unexpected opening line on religion in a pop song when Cave sings "I don't believe in an interventionist God".

I Break Horses is a subtle song worth a not so subtle metaphor...Guess what kids...it's not really about horses.

"I break horses. Doesn't take me long. Just a few well-placed words. And their wandering hearts are gone"

He's currently in a stable (ouch!) relationship with squeaky Folk elf Joanna Newsome and sings on her Ys album. Newsome also played piano on his song Rock Bottom Riser. He also had a farmer (Ouch! Ouch!) relationship with Chan Marshall (Cat Power) who recorded his song Red Apples.

The ultimate horse/woman metaphor song is The Byrds Chestnut Mare. Roger McGuinn's breathless croon never sounded better. The line "I'm gonna catch that horse if I can, And when I do I'll give her my brand" sounds more like the Rebecca Loos aspect of animal husbandry rather than a time honoured permanent method of identifying livestock.

But the real surprise for me was finding out that McGuinn's co writer was Jacques Levy: theatre director, song writer (later co wrote much of Dylan's Desire album) and clinical psychologist.

He met McGuinn after directing Oh! Calcutta! They were going to collaborate on a musical based on Peer Gynt, but the only song actually produced was Chestnut Mare. So let's get this straight then. Psychologist directs nudey 60s musical then goes on to write a song about chasing a horse that is actually a woman. And people wondered about Equus and Harry Potter in the chuddy nuddy?

Sycamore from the new album Woke On A Whale Heart is positively life affirming. Gorgeous Go Betweens guitar trills, a little less Lou Reedy and more of a Luna feel. Stop sniggering at the back. Researchers (some of them wearing white coats) have proved there is a difference. It's the feelgood end of Alt Country with dads teaching sons to box and "You won't get hurt if you just keep your hands up and stand tall like a sycamore"

Follow the link for as good a summer song as you'll hear this summer.

http://www.dragcity.com/mp3/dc332bcs.mp3

Frank Turner

2007-04-13T17:53:00.002Z

So what would you do when your Hardcore band splits up? Would you take your Black Flag tattoos, stage diving and go off and be a guitar strumming Folk singer......like a great big girl? Well, ex Million Dead singer Frank Turner is more of a Billy Bragg. He's got the personable personality, go anywhere, busk anywhere gig mentality, a bit of politics and a few love songs. He's also picked up on the Woody Guthrie slogan "This machine kills fascists" and subverted it to "This machine kills Hippies". The original was good enough for the guitars of Guthrie, Bragg and Strummer. I suppose you could also put a "This guitar kills fascists" sticker on a cappuccino maker or a vacuum cleaner....but it wouldn't feel quite right.

While Bragg worked to 77 style Punk Principles and took The Clash as inspiration, Frank Turner used the work ethic and discipline of 80's inspirational and confrontational California Punks Black Flag. He told Radio 1 that his version of Folk "Took the things that people in Punk talked about and actually did it instead of just talking about it"

My favourite Frank track has to be Thatcher Fucked The Kids. Music and swearing is just a timeless and classic combination. This song is making the perceptive (and screamingly obvious point) that if you spend 10 years denying there's such as thing as society then you end up with the society you deserve....but with swearing and a bit of humorous misanthropy.

"Whatever happened to childhood?
We're all scared of the kids in our neighbourhood;
They're not small, charming and harmless,
They're a violent bunch of bastard little shits.
And anyone who looks younger than me
Makes me check for my wallet, my phone and my keys,

YouTube clip Frank Turner - Thatcher Fucked the Kids

Million Dead split up in 2005 after 2 albums and non musical differences, but Frank had already been playing some solo shows as a sideline. He released the Campfire Punk Rock 4 track on Xtra Mile recordings in 2006, followed by a shared 12 inch vinyl release with Jonah Matranga where the artists did 2 covers each. Turner did The Outdoor Type by The Lemonheads and You Are My Sunshine, while Matranga, tellingly, did Billy Bragg's A New England

The album Sleep Is For The Week was released in January this year.

On Nashville Tennessee he makes the (fair) point that he's not pretending to be something that he's not. "I was raised in middle England, not in Nashville Tennessee...A simple scale on an old guitar and a Punk Rock sense of honesty"

Again it's the Bragg/Busker mentality that you have to engage with an audience, to entertain them but you also need them to trust you. Oh yes...And you've got to entertain them....again! You can do songs that are reflective and soul searching. Songs that are brutally honest about the state of your naval....but you've got to handle all the fluff and stuff carefully.

In an interview in DrownedInSound he said "Songs, and people, are thoroughly fucking dull if they can't laugh at themselves. That's the whole problem with Damien Rice - it's so fucking doe-eyed and self-serious, it just makes me want to vomit. Honestly, if you met someone with the personality of a James Blunt song, you'd fucking punch them in the throat at the first available opportunity, right? If you want to make a point, showing you're human before doing so is a good plan"

Black Flag would spend 200 days a year touring, often playing 2 shows a day to cater for both under 21's and legal US beer drinkers., as documented in Henry Rollins Book about his days in the band Get In The Van. As a solo artist Turner has notched up a fair few gigs. "Sometimes people offer me "beer, probably" to come play a houseparty in Cumbria or something. No. I'm getting a little pickier in my old age... I think I've paid my dues as it were. I have played some insane places in my time. As I enter the second half of my twenties I'm hoping to leave behind playing house shows in the middle of nowhere"

As a performer he is engaging, and the Hardcore/folk switch doesn't sound so strange when you think of the likes of Seth Lakeman trying to make a great big racket out of a small sound. But here's the thing.....on this video for Million Dead's 2003 I Am The Party ....Is this the worlds happiest Hardcore frontman?

YouTube clip Million Dead - I Am The Party

The band Rock mightily and Turner's vocals sound great but he doesn't look like the typical Hardcore frontman. Where's the screwey faced rage? Where are the big shorts? Will there be a stewards inquiry and a leg tattoo inspection? So maybe folky Levellers troubadour isn't such a giant leap for him. Anyway in the buskers tradition, if he's doing a show, he'll do it right here...and probably for The Kids. But not for the one's who are trying to nick his wallet

The Only Ones

2007-04-10T19:46:00.002Z

There are not many records better than Another Girl Another Planet. And we shouldn’t really hold it against them that The Only Ones never came close to matching it.

According to Peter Kay, “You only get half a bucketful” and Another Girl Another Planet delivers Pop Punk Perfection by the sack load.

Released in 1978, after the initial rush of mission statement and era defining singles, by the likes of The Damned, Pistols and Clash, the Only Ones straddled the pre and post punk era. Too muso for Punk yet they could not have happened without it.

Another Girl Another Planet has one of the best intros ever. A proper what’s this? Oh this sounds good...and it’s just got better. A scratchy guitar chug turns into a guitar twiddle and then takes off like the Tardis. All wheezing groans, building drums and a guitar line that starts off in the teddy Boy 50’s before heading off into orbit in silver shorts.

The song was used in a Vodafone ad last year which gave it a new lease of life, but really for many of us distinguished Gentlemen Of A Certain Age, it had never really gone away.

“I always flirt with death, I look ill but I don’t care about it" - the weary vocal whine, the sci fi lyrics that (sorry kids) are actually about Perrett's real life love affair with heroin and the way that the vocals slide into the guitar solo with a heartbreaking, resigned oh oagh!

I mean you just can’t beat vocal lines that that sing along to guitar solos. Think of Radiohead's Iron Lung, or Lump by Presidents Of The United States Of America. Think of them and then be glad they exist!

The guitar solo itself is concise, neat and perfectly formed. Near the end of the song as Perrett sings “Another girl is loving you now” the guitars play triplets as they slide down the scale, like brawling cowboys falling down the saloon steps and still punching each other.

That vocal whine though.... I still don’t understand how such grizzling can work with such an exhilarating song. I might have to listen to it again, purely in the name of research, obviously.

Like The Clash, they were signed to CBS. But while the Clash kept tight control of their image and used their tussles with the CBS and the corporate culture to bolster their Punk credentials, The Only ones presented a different set of problems for the company.

Like many of the bands signed in the great Punk Rock closing down sale The Only Ones were skilful musicians, with musical backgrounds that included the less than Punk Rock.

In The Only Ones case it was Brummie drummer Mike Kellie’s time in Spooky Tooth and veteran bass player Alan Mair who had been in Scotland’s top 60’s boy band The Beatstalkers.

No, the real problem that CBS faced was Perrett’s addiction, and resulting unpredictable behaviour, squandered talent and the fact that for me as teenager reading the music press, Only Ones interviews were always a depressing peek into an unattractive place. Even if they could come up with more songs of the calibre of Another Girl Another Planet, just how could the company market them?

American tours would be problematic as there was an outstanding warrant for attempted murder after Perrett had tried to run over a parking attendant and Alan Mair has described a gig in Amsterdam where Perrett was scoring drugs in the dressing room from the Baader Meinhof Gang. "I was like, 'Bloody hell Peter. You’re dealing with the Baader Meinhof Gang, what's wrong with you?

If the band’s musical abilities marked them out from Punk, then Perrett’s addiction gave them a way right back in. The Speakeasy became the club of choice for the London Punk crowd, snatched from the previous Rock generation in a musical land grab. It was owned Chris Spedding, Sex Pistols demo producer, Flying V wielding Womble and ex husband of Nora Forster who was John Lydon’s girlfriend.

By 1978 it had became the home from home for a generation of Punk and junk casualties who in turn became the assorted musicians associated with Johnny Thunders So Alone album and his sporadic gigs.

They included Peter Perrett and Mike Kellie, Steve Jones, Paul Cook and Sid Vicious. They even called themselves The Living Dead. When you think that Phil Lynott and the dead ones from The Pretenders were also regulars, there’s a part of me that keeps thinking.... why didn’t they go to a pub quiz instead or get an allotment. At least that would have spared the world the full horror of The Greedies A Merry Jingle

The Only Ones eponymous debut album in 78 has a New York sound to some of the tracks. Language Problem has the rickety feel and descending chords of Richard Hell’s Blank Generation. The Beast has got a Tom Verlaine type solo.

Even Serpents Shine, released in 79, is their best album although some of the keyboard and backing vocals give a slickness to some of the tracks that I could do without. Miles From Nowhere has got the excellent line “I want to die in the same place I was born, miles from nowhere, I used to reach for the stars but now I’ve reformed”

The last studio album Baby’s Got A Gun came out the following year with the band splitting in 1982. Perrett spent the intervening years doing very little except an enormous amount of drugs, although he did attempt a comeback in the mid 90’s as The One and released an album called Woke Up Sticky on Demon.

It’s all got a bit doomed Punk poet/Pete Doherty. So how about this for a connection…. Perrett appeared on stage with the Libertines in 2004 and his sons Jamie and Peter were in an early line up of Babyshambles.

There’s still a large amount of goodwill towards the band and the likes of The Replacements, Blink 182 and Belle and Sebastian have all covered Another Girl Another Planet. It’s great to think that the band are playing again. Although I can confirm 2 cases of star spotting to show what 2 of the band were doing while waiting for the reunion

Mike Kellie was spotted working at Rover a couple of years ago and Peter Perrett played football (Phil Daniels was also a regular) on my mate’s team. Apparently he’s a “Strange little pixie man…but very good at football”

Brett Anderson

2007-04-10T19:43:00.001Z

The long running Suede/Britpop/Bernard Butler soap opera has taken another twist as Brett Anderson releases his first solo album starts an accompanying tour.

He may keep turning up like yesterday’s pants in today’s trouser leg of pop, but the impact of Suede's breakthrough year, their first 2 albums and the whole intrigue of the Anderson/Blur/Elastica threesome makes it an interesting story.... and then you've got that whole will they/won't they reunion story for Anderson and Bernard Butler.

So far, so Morrisey and Marr.

Few bands have been as hyped and yet also welcomed with such an expectancy from a waiting audience who just knew they were going to like them. Melody Maker had put them on the front cover as the best new band in Britain. It had been 5 years since The Smiths had split up and here comes this generation’s Morrissey and Marr.

Anderson was Morrissey with his teenaged estranged lyrics, ambiguous sexuality ("I'm a bisexual man who hasn't had a homosexual experience") and Butler was Marr. The most exhilarating guitarist in town, with a swinging fringe that could take the heads off the front row of an audience.

Debut single the Drowners was a Ziggy style stomper with guitar thwackery and stampeding drums. Fresh yet familiar.

Anderson was the Haywards Heath escapee who'd been dreaming of London sleaze and glamour, he had the Bowie fixation, the make up, and some fine individual dance moves. Something like a cross between an angle poise lamp and a pantomime horse...while slapping his own arse.

The Mercury prize winning debut album Suede was released in 1993, and was the UK's fastest selling debut album. I didn't really like the clunky sounding production by Ed Buller but I did like doing the comedy yodelling pronunciation of the name Suede.

Think of David Bowie's most Anthony Newley style bray.....Swaaaayyyyyyed! Bet you did it too? The Good Ship Britpop had been launched....it's just we didn't know it yet.

That's the thing with Suede; there were lot of Britpop connections. They were also briefly managed by Ricky Gervais.

Elastica's Justine Frischmann was in the original Suede line-up and she and Anderson were lovers after meeting at University where she was doing an Architecture course and he was doing Planning.

I have seen some footage of that early Suede line up with the future Britpop queen in trackie bottoms. Brett may well be in hairnet and curlers, or I may have made that bit up.

She left Anderson for Damon Albarn from the then struggling Blur. In 2002 she described leaving Suede as "I just thought it was better to be Pete Best than Linda McCartney. I couldn't deal with being the second guitarist and having this strange, Lady Macbeth role in it, along with being general mother to four blokes."

Animal Lover from the first Suede album is reputedly about Frischmann/Anderson/Albarn. Tender is Albarn's version of his own split with Frischmann and Beetlebum is his song about her heroin use.

The tensions that surfaced during Suede's second album Dog Man Star lead to Bernard Butler leaving in 1994 and gaining his reputation as one of the most difficult men in pop.

It's a an excellent album, wildly ambitious and it moves from the Glitter Band squall of New Generation to the bleakness of Black Or Blue and Asphaltworld to the downright morose Scott Walker feel of Still Life.

Collaboration with All About Eve singer Julianne Regan was aborted with Regan accusing the guitarist of possessing "Diabolical tendencies" and Butler pleading "I'm not the anti-Christ. I'm Bernard."

He spent a week in The Verve after Nick McCabe temporarily left and recorded a batch of songs with David McAlmont. This also ended acrimoniously, but the album was released as The Sound Of McAlmont and Butler and is a really good plastic soul album. Like Bowie's Young Americans with added Glam and Bolan.

After running out of people to fall out with Butler released 2 solo albums with Alan Magee trying to promote him as a Neil Young figure moving from the sidelines to centre stage. What he really needed though was a collaborator.

Suede meanwhile had released Head Music and also Coming Up with teenage guitar prodigy Richard Oakes stepping into Butler's shoes. As a teenage prodigy Oakes is not allowed to age and is still officially 15 ½.

He fitted Suede duties in between paper rounds and happy slapping...just like those other teenage prodigies AC/DC's Angus Young and Jimmy Krankie.

Suede ground to a halt in 2003 under the weight of the underwhelming New Morning album and Anderson’s addictions. Almost too fittingly Anderson had sung the "You're going to reap just what you sow" line on the Perfect Day Children In Need single in 1997.

Astonishingly after years of not talking either to each other, or even about each other, Anderson and Butler reconciled enough to form a new band The Tears. Here Come The Tears was released in 2005.

It's a good album with some tracks that can stand alongside vintage Suede. And then as if one reconciliation wasn't enough Butler went and recorded another album Bring It Back with David McAlmont in 2006.

So where can the soap opera go next? Well obviously to Brett Anderson’s solo record. He's gone and found himself a new collaborator in the shape of Norwegian Fred Ball and the live shows have featured Suede bassist Mat Osman.

The single Love Is Dead is melodic, melancholic and actually rather good. It's back to his old concerns "Nothing ever goes right, nothing ever flows". It's Morrissey misery with the song’s title sung in Andersons best Bowie voice with the full kitchen sink production and the orchestra in the utility room.

The album Brett Anderson is released this week and the tour is in full swing. Of course where the Soap Opera goes next is anybody's guess.

Anderson has described the Suede story as like " Machiavelli rewriting Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. It involves a cast of thousands. It should star Charlton Heston ...It's like a pram that's just been pushed down a hill. It's always been fiery and tempestuous and really on the edge and it never stops. I don't think it ever will."

Maximo Park

2007-03-26T18:25:00.001Z

Hands up who thinks we need another gawky angular guitar band, all flailing limbs, skinny ties and tunes that elbow you in the ribs?

Maximo Park are a 5 piece Newcastle band with a spiky, urgent sound and in Paul Smith they have a charismatic singer with a Jarvis Cocker/Morrissey persona, and a combover. Form a queue ladies!

His voice jumps out of the undergrowth and gleefully and proudly opens it's coat. Songs about alcoholic amorous adventures and the desire to escape, all sung in his own North East accent. "When you write these songs you know what kind of person will like them....because you are that person."

He grew up in Billingham and dreamed of running away to the bright lights and fleshpots of Newcastle....40 miles up the road. Eventually he escaped to study Art History and Linguistics and teach pensioners to paint.

The original band members had also arrived in Newcastle for academic purposes and had been rehearsing for several years without a singer, without playing gigs and were on the verge of splitting up. The girlfriend of Drummer Tom English (he used to play with Field Music who are a top tip for anyone interested in XTC meets 10cc band.....that'll be everybody then?) spotted Smith singing along to Stevie Wonder's Superstition in a pub.

With his Oxfam suits, combover and jerky dancing, scissor kicking and Ian Curtis shaking, the gangly front man (careful how you Google that!) gave the band an immediate focus and personality injection. Debut single Graffiti was released on red vinyl as 300 copies, paid for by a friend. Within the year they had signed to Warp, the Sheffield techno label, toured with The Kaiser Chiefs and had their debut album A Certain Trigger nominated for a Mercury Prize. Phew!

The name Maximo Park comes from Maximo Gomez Park in Havana which, depending on how you look it, was either a hotbed for Cuban revolutionaries or a hotbed of old guys playing dominos.

Bassist Archis Tiku is one of those rare things in music, a genuine qualified, practising doctor of medicine. Dr Dre doesn't count as he qualified in Da Hood rather than at a recognised teaching hospital. Dr Fox isn't a real doctor (although I think the world is gradually waking up to that) and my own surgical skills are mainly tree based. Which leaves only Hank Wangford the singing Country and Western gynaecologist....there is something about that sentence that just trips off the tongue, but I can't quite put my finger on it..

Signal And Sign is the debut albums opening track and it pretty much nails the whole Maximo Park ethic. The drums fade in with the delicacy of Cybermen on a fun run and then we're off. The guitar riff has echoes of Don't fear The Reaper and the quick change of descending chords of Here Comes The Sun. He sings "Well I've been waiting here for hours....You left your hometown, where you grew up, I hadn't noticed how your accent had changed". It's familiar musical elements and familiar themes of escape from small towns. So far so Billy Liar...which is fine by me.

Apply Some Pressure has a frantic call and response guitar line and Smith vocally gurning with his look at me lyrics and here I am flasher's yelp. It's got another of Maximo Parks special moves, the mid song gear change. The song shifts from jerky chicken twitch to smooth upwardly mobile chords with a hint of keyboard. It just sounds really good as he sings "What happens when you lose everything, you start all over again."

Graffiti swirls around with a Doors/Stranglers/Inspiral Carpets feel. It's got a none more north easterly bellowed "That's enough I can't take anymore" refrain and an awkward step up that sounds messy...but right. It's a bit like on The Doors Touch Me which still sounds great even though you know the song is a sprawling mess, with sections just bolted together like a project in somebody's shed. It also enjoys the benefits of a gear change and a section that sounds like Broken Social Scene's 7/4 (Shoreline).

The Coast Is Always Changing has got the busy high bass sound and picked guitars of the classic Postcard era singles and Losing More Than I'll Ever Have (which is the title of the original Primal Scream song that Loaded was based on) has got a This Charming Man type riff. Acrobat has evidence of poetry (Stop! Police! Step away from the notebook!) and a bit of an atmosphere of Atmosphere.

The new album our Earthly Pleasures is due out next month and is produced by Gil Norton. The current single is Our Velocity. It's a careering, headlong rush through all their best moves from the last album and is easily my favourite thing they've done.

Even better it's on red vinyl. I've never been able to or wanted to resist the call of the coloured vinyl. Despite that I was disappointed to see that the Paul Smith's combover has been replaced by a Bowler Hat. It needs to be brought back. It was a hairdressing triumph and one of the best haircuts in Rock....Mercury Nominated album?.... pah! The haircut matters more!

The Shins

2007-03-26T18:21:00.001Z

The unique Special Relationship between Britain and the US works like this. We say "Yes Sir" to everything The US Military asks for. Then we get to send our boxers over the Atlantic to be painfully found out by their superior American fighters and in exchange they send us their geeky alt rock bands. Weezer, Ween, They Might Be Giants and now The Shins.

Thing is though, I do like The Shins...so I'm not going to slap them around too much. I first heard the single Phantom Limb last December and it was one of those songs that I instantly fell in love with.

I loved its mix of Jesus and Mary Chain fuzziness, Morrisseyesque phrasing, Beach Boys clear vocals and intriguing lyrics. I got there a bit late though. The Shins love in had already started and I was still wearing my coat. They'd already released two albums and the third was imminent. Now they're here amongst us, on tour....in all their Beardo US Alternative Geekery.

The band formed in 1997 in Albuquerque as a side project for vocalist and songwriter James Mercer who was playing in Flake.

The debut Oh Inverted World came out in 2001 followed by Chutes Too Narrow in 2003. Both albums were well received but the band band’s debut was given a massive boost by the line in the film Garden State when Natalie Portman's character says that The Shins song New Slang "Will change your life".

It also crops up in a Sopranos episode. It's a great tune that fades in as an acoustic picking Simon and Gunfuklesome slice of small town American Pie. It's beardy and Byrdsy with a low key crooned vocal style and some really good lyrics

"Gold teeth and a curse for this town were all in my mouth" and "God speed all the bakers at dawn, May they all cut their thumbs, And bleed into their buns"

Melodically it's one of their most straightforward songs without their usual tricky twists and turns. The atmosphere comes from the vocal style itself and the warm sound of the lo fi production.

God Inform Me has a Beach Boys type melody, while Pressed In A Book has a Small Faces type sound that contrasts with the high clear vocals. Your Algebra is the albums token bit of weirdness.

The Shins approach to song writing then is to mix up a lot of quite different and often quite English styles. You can hear the influence of The Smiths, or The Cure's poppier singles. The melody lines get complicated and even when it's still verse chorus/verse chorus, there are often so many vocal twists that it takes a few listens before you know where the song is going to go. So you've got to put a bit of effort into it.

2003's Chutes Too Narrow starts tremendously with the splendidly titled Kissing The Lipless. It's got that fuzzy guitar squeal like Buffalo Springfield's Mr Soul or The Flying Burritos Christine's Tune. Which is good...unlike the synth sound on Mines Not A High Horse which verges on the Ultravox and The Full Midge Ure horror. (great crossword clues of our time for a 5 letter word beginning with M. Something small and annoying about Ultravox?) The other elements of the song with its acoustic guitar and tumbling drums sound fine though.

Turn A Square is a lusty song about lust. It's got a great circular riff, coiling round the song like a leery Weezer "Just a glimpse of an ankle and I React like it's 1805".

So Says I is another really convoluted but impossibly catchy melody...you may need a map to see where it's going but it does sound great. It starts like AC/DC but has chiming guitars and that fuzzy Mr Soul sound again.

Wincing The Night Away came out this year and of all the three albums it is the most successful blend yet of their characteristic mix of the tuneful and contrary. Much of the recording was done at Mercer's house.

Opening track Sleeping Lessons starts with the treated keyboard arpeggios that sound like a doo wop Mr Sandman before it goes all a bit Keane/Snow Patrol.

Australia has a fine Pretenders style twangy guitar break, and then with the bass scampering excitedly round Mercer's ankles he goes for the full Morrissey lyrical treatment.

"Been alone since you were twenty-one, You haven't laughed since January. You try and make like this is so much fun, But we know it to be quite contrary".

Sea Legs has a Morrissey yodel and Red Rabbits has another wandering melody with a Teardrop Explodes/Lori and the Chameleons keyboard sound and a mix of slide and pedal steel guitar.

Turn On Me is terrific guitar pop, with understated keyboards and something of the feel of Steve Harley's Come Up And See Me.

But for all the other reference points that you can spot, and for all the Pop that they've evidently soaked up and then tried to squeeze out as something new, the Shins still have that American college band feel. Part of that feel is due to the vocals; that high, American singing style. Is it a whine or a plea? The Shins are cleverer than the last lot they sent us...and it's still a sound we like. I may have been late arrival at the Shins love in, but I'm here now...and I'm down to my socks.

Spiritualized

2007-03-11T21:59:00.001Z

Spiritualized make Drug Music. There’s no getting away from it. It’s not really that surprising though, as the bands driving force and only consistent member is Jason Pierce who was originally in Spaceman 3 who famously “Took drugs to make music to take drugs to”

The sounds and approaches used to make the albums have changed over the years and over the albums but the key to their sound is stoned slothful vocals, guitar drones and repetition (I’m with the Fall and Mark E Smith on the importance of the 3 R’s….Repetition, Repetition , Repetition). They also use the garage rock blasts of the Stooges or MC5 and gospel choirs, brass, strings and sometimes the full blown orchestra.

But it’s still drug music, written with the big themes of despair, release, heartbreak, and inertia. Love songs written with the language of drug use and an awareness of the history of Pop. Medication, Electric Mainline or She Kissed Me And It Felt Like A Hit (itself a top Pop pun. He Hit Me And It Felt Like A Kiss was written by Goffin and King, sung by the Crystals and produced by the entirely hands free and cuddly Phil Spector). The packaging for Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space is based on a prescription drug blister pack and the cover for Amazing Grace is simply an outstretched arm…that’s probably a hitch hiking reference.

While playing with Patti Smith in 2005 he ended up in intensive care with pneumonia and his heart had stopped twice. One of his first visitors was Bobby Gillespie. Now there is a definite link between the narcotic and rock interests of Pierce and Gillespie and also in the broad musical sweep of what their bands do…but if I was in Pierce’s flat out position hooked up to a heart monitor, I’d have been happier to see a doctor than a careers adviser.

Without getting too What Hi Fi /Tales Of Topographic Oceans blah blah song cycle blah blah spiritual and musical journey blah blah in a sonic cathedral, about it, all the albums really do feel as if they have been written to be listened in one sitting.

1992’s Laser Guided Melodies starts off simply, delicately and gorgeously with You Know It’s True and moves into If I Were With Her Now, which has a bass line that sounds like it was at the same resort as Blur’s Girls And Boys.

Pure Phase came out in 1995 and uses a lot more strings and orchestral arrangements. Sometimes it’s nerve jangling and Day In The Life discordant, sometimes lush as on the dreamy Spread Your Wings. The albums a bit of a headphone challenge as the sounds move between channels leaving a baffled space between the ears…probably just what the Prankster Pierce intended.

1997’s Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space was written after girlfriend and early Spiritualized member Kate Radley left and secretly married Richard Ashcroft. It’s the definitive Spiritualized album with it’s staggering arrangements of strings and horns and songs of loss and heartbreak.

By contrast 2003’s Amazing Grace is a much more Stooges affair fused with the country Gospel Soul of an Exile On Main Street era Stones.

Pierce has previously said “I’d sooner have 20 flugelhorns on stage than money in the bank. The forthcoming tour is billed as acoustic however it will feature strings and a choir so it’s not going to be a busking ruse to save money.

Kings Of Leon

2007-03-11T21:04:00.001Z

Just imagine if you’d dreamed up your perfect band, perfectly placed for the times....and then they turn out to be real.

It’s the early 2000’s and on the one hand you’ve got New York New Wave skinny sounding Strokes with their nervous tics and Swiss Finishing School of Rock. Kings of Leon are their fairground mirror image.

Three Southern sons of a travelling Pentecostal Preacher form a band with their cousin. Caleb, Jared and Nathan Followill and their cousin Matthew Followill. They even get to share the same last names...just like The Ramones. And The Nolans

Their Dad preached in tents and revival meetings and their childhoods were spent touring the Southern States in an Oldsmobile. Now any car that’s good enough for both Public Enemy (“Suckers to the side I know you’ll hate my 98”) and Jonathan Richman (“The Oldsmobile’s got the top down on it”) is just fine by me.

The boys grew up on strict gospel only musical diet, with the Devil’s music sneaked in through a radio under the pillow like a Jamie Oliver school dinner busting mum. When their parents divorced and their dad left the church, the good ole boys were ready to go right off the rails. And to Nashville.

"We realized that our dad, the greatest man we ever knew, in our eyes, was only human. And so are we. People are gonna fuck up. They're gonna want to experiment with drugs, have premarital sex. This whole new world was open to us."

Between bouts of debauchery they sang at Rodeos and were in the West Tennessee Mass Choir.

With the southern accents, long hair and full range of facial hair, early reviews always seemed to mention Lynrd Skynrd and The Allman Brothers although Kings Of Leon were a long way from that kind of stadium boogie band. They were actually closer to a hillbilly grunge Pixies.

Two guitars, a thick sound and Caleb's tight throat slurred vocal drawl. He sounds like his beard was on the inside of his face.

After signing to RCA in 2002 they bought a house on the same lake as Johnny Cash in Mt Juliet Tennessee. I'm just really impressed by that. Not the same town, not the same street, but the same lake.

In a Rolling Stone interview, Caleb talked about the lyrics. “Why should we be held to our own experiences? Why not do like our dad did as a preacher: Every day, he saw something that inspired him and told a story about someone different. I had to put myself in other people's shoes." Which must be why their two albums are predominantly about shagging.

“Red Morning Light” was an early single and is “Youth and Young Manhood's” opening track. It's a corker. A descending sequence of filthy overblown guitars run down the stairs to answer the door...and then collapses in a heap as a jaunty, almost ska like rhythm, with loads of cowbell takes over.

The lyrics are baffling “Hey Hey, Nah Nah, you're giving all your cinammon away” (I still think it's about sex though.)

“California Waiting” has the same epic sweep as Blondie's “Union City Blue. “ Obviously that's an epic sweep in a good way rather than a U2 way. “Molly's Chambers” has got a similar feel to Rocket From The Crypts excellent single “On A Rope.”

“Trani” is a Velvet Underground type song both in terms of its mix of delicately played chords (like the end of “Ocean”) and it's subject matter...sleaze, violence, the transvestite and the transistor radio. When Kings of Leon toured with Bob Dylan, the band claim he told them it was a hell of a song. What he actually said though was “Pha eshe war agnong”.

The second album “Aha Shake Heartbreak” is actually better. “Slow Night So Long” has got a Strokes type feel, Caleb's vocal is more of a yelp and there's a section where the guitars hammer along like a Wedding Present banjo strumathon.

“The Bucket's” recurring drum motif puts me in mind of an inbred 6 fingered(well it makes it easier to play the chiming chords) bastard son of Altered Images “Happy Birthday” and the chorus is cleverly written. Everything stops for it as the instruments drop out to accentuate the vocals before piling back into the riff.

“Soft” is certainly no let down. Even if it's subject matter is about exactly that. It's angular bass and guitars are rampant.

The new album, “Because Of The Times” is due out next month. The title comes from the huge Pentecostal conventions in Louisiana that the brothers used to go to.

The band have been better received and sold more records outside of the States. Part of that must be due to the fact that to British fans, this is a band playing fine fine music, with excellent lady scaring beards and the whole mix of religon and brotherhood just gives it that extra irresitible appeal.

Whereas to vast swathes of America the back ground story will either feel uncomfortable or irrelevant.

Just how would a British version of The Kings Of Leon work? Would it be like The Wicker Man? Ok...I'll have some of that too then.

Cowboy Junkies

2007-02-26T20:51:00.002Z

Norwegian not noisy boys Kings Of Convenience may have called their debut album Quiet Is The New Loud but Canada’s Cowboy Junkies late 80’s recordings had already beaten them to it. They rocked…but very very quietly.

Formed in Toronto in 1985 after songwriter and guitarist Michael Timmins moved back home after living in England and playing in an experimental band called Germinal who made the type of music that “Even we didn’t want to listen to”.

He teamed up with his drummer brother Peter and social worker sister Margo and they did what all bands should do… headed straight for the garage with one microphone (Oh yes, Joe Strummer was right about that one) where they recorded the blues influenced album Whites Off Earth.

It was initially released on their own Latent label in 1986 and includes songs by Lightning Hopkins and State Trooper by Bruce Springsteen.

The follow up The Trinity Session was recorded in Toronto’s Church Of The Holy Trinity over a 14 hour session in November 1987. Like the previous album they’d used a single Calrec Ambisonic microphone, which captures sound as 4 separate signals, namely 360 degrees and then as left/right, front/back and up/down. It’s kind of quadraphonic, but without the troubling Mike Oldfield connotations.

The sound of the recordings though is very special. What you hear is a band playing stripped to the bone arrangements with nothing out of place and just letting the songs breathe. You can hear the restraint…. and Margo Timmins voice.

The thing is that even though she doesn’t have a wide range, power or even a particularly expressive voice you just get sucked in by the arrangements, the fragility of her voice and the fact that it just sounds so right. The major feeling that comes through is resignation. And that resignation can sound bleak and scary.

The uniqueness of the sound is down to how it was recorded and conceived, with the band playing quietly and using the softness of Margo’s voice as a strength. Dusty Springfield’s unbeatable album Dusty In Memphis was recorded with the amps turned down low but everything closely miked.

By using the Ambisonic Microphone, the Cowboy Junkies would have been forced into really having to think about how the equipment was positioned and volume…just like at Chips Mormans American studios in Memphis in 1968

The Hank Williams song I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry and Patsy Cline’s Walking After Midnight are played as desolate Blues. Sweet Jane is played as the Velvet’s 1969 live version rather than Loaded’s. Misguided Angel is the bands own song; it’s played as a warm country folk song, with harmonica and accordion. Achingly beautiful.

The Caution Horses was conventionally recorded and released in 1990, after the band had signed to RCA. It includes a cover of Neil Young’s Powderfinger where the discordant guitar is replaced by mandolins. The tale of the Deliverance/Southern Comfort style shoot out between the Authorities gunboat and the baffled boy from the Backwoods gains the resignation in Margo’s voice but loses Young’s scowl. It still all ends in tears though.

Sun Comes Up (It’s Tuesday Morning) is a really good song about losing the familiar and comfortable routines after the end of a relationship, but gaining the benefits of having a bit more room in the bed. I really like the line “Telephone's ringing, but I don't answer it 'cause everybody knows that good news always sleeps till noon”

I saw them at Birmingham Town Hall on that tour, a really good venue acoustically where the band’s subtleties came through really well. If any pins were dropped they sounded perfect.

1992’s Black Eyed Man puts a bit more Country Rock into the Country feel and while it doesn’t have the distinctive and unusual sound of the earlier records, it does still have some dark, clever songs like Murder In The Trailer Park Tonight.

They left RCA for Geffen and are now releasing material on their own Latent label again. Subsequent albums and tours have included 15 minute swamp rock guitar wig outs. The forthcoming acoustic tour though could well capture the magical feel of The Trinity Session.

The new album, At The End Of Paths Taken is due out in April and new material has been posted on their My Space page. http://www.myspace.com/cowboyjunkies

Brand New World moves from a swirling cinematic feel into a Marquee Moon style build up…with strings. For old times sake though I’d look at Sun Comes Up (It’s Tuesday Morning) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_VmxI60kFM

It’s a terrific song but the video absolutely T’Paus. Slow motion bedrolling and all. I do have a friend though who is a connoisseur of Margo Timmins and has spent the last 18 years practising his Ranch skills in a Guildford semi ready for the inevitable day when they will be together on the Canadian Prairie.

She’s hoping to postpone the inevitable though…so it’s up to the rest of us to buy the album, t shirt and tickets for the gig.

Manic Street Preachers

2007-02-26T20:50:00.002Z

Manic Street Preachers are just such an odd band and their mix in terms of visuals, influences, attitudes, myths and a fanatical fanbase is often more interesting than their music.

Like Primal Scream, they know their music history and Pop culture inside out and have really thought about the kind of band they want to be, and what they need to do to make it work.

They’re also living proof that great music can come from small towns; where music and schemes are hatched in teenage bedrooms as a reaction to the small town mentality around them.

The Manics story is bound to small town Wales just as tightly as their music influences were to the iconic cities and Pop moments like The Clash’s London 77, Public Enemy’s New York and Guns ‘n’ Roses LA.

They formed in 86 while James Dean Bradfield, his cousin Sean Moore and Nicky Wire were still at school in Blackwood. Richey Edwards designed the cover of their first single Suicide Alley and would provide lyrics, do the driving and when he eventually joined the band he would mime his guitar parts.

New Art Riot (it even sounds like a Malcolm McClaren/Situationalist quote) was released on Damaged Goods in 1990 and in 1991 Motown Junk was released on Heavenly. Seven inches of sacred cow kicking, from it’s title to the line “I laughed when Lennon was shot”.

The Manics early interviews were shotgun blasts against the world. The band were fiercely and proudly literate. Books, films, history and philosophy were mixed in with Clash style posturing and trousers.

Gigs were 20 minute affairs of confrontation and audience baiting. All other contemporary British bands were fair game for a Manics slagging. The only bands that mattered were Guns ‘n’ Roses and Public Enemy and the Manics line was they were going to make an album as good as Appetite For Destruction, sell out Wembley and then implode.

Even the album sleeve was originally going to be made of sandpaper....to both destroy the record inside it and those around it.

They had great ideas, (or at least an exciting rehash of other people’s) great quotes and great song titles like You Love Us, NatwestBarclaysMidlandLloyds. They looked the part too, with their white jeans and spray painted slogans.

Stocky shouter and guitar hammerer Bradfield, Nicky Wire tall and gangly, bass slung low and dangly. Drummer Sean Moore always looked like he would rather be wearing an anorak and anorexic Richey Edwards dressed up as Marilyn Munroe for a video and carved “4 Real” on his arm during an interview forcing the cancellation of a gig at the Barrel Organ. Seventeen stitches worth of sincerity. It’s not a good look.

This was a band careering ahead, in all senses of the word. They weren’t cosying up to the established Indie Press values but they were generating headlines and controversy.

They were shouting about how many records they wanted to sell, but even as they wrote for Kylie and got Porn star Traci Lords to sing on Little Baby Nothing they were still dream material for the music press (after all here’s a band who can actually string a sentence together) and also for any teenage sensitive types who felt different, alienated or indeed as if they might have read a book.

The band from the Welsh bedroom with an eye on the stadium had got all bases covered, bedroom Metal heads and bedroom poets.

The first album was released in 1992. Generation Terrorists was sprawling, chaotic Punky Metal with some surprisingly MOR touches. That’s the thing with the band, despite their Stormtrooper interviews there have always been those blander moments.

On Motorcycle Emptiness for example there’s the full Gun ‘n’ Roses guitar wig out but underneath it there is the stuttering drum pattern that all the Indie Dance Acts of the time were using and a piano cascade that sounds like the Baywatch theme tune.

1993’s Gold Against The Soul has got From Despair To Where. Released as a single it hits the G ‘n’R target straight on. It’s got ambition, a great title, soaring riff, terrific vocal (helped by the fact that it’s not Axl Rose) and a massive orchestra. The other single La Tristesse Durera is based on a Van Gogh quote and has a really tight focused sound under a powerful vocal.

The Holy Bible came out in 94 as Richey’s health and personal problems developed into full blown Unhappy Bunny Syndrome and he was admitted to The Priory for treatment for anorexia and alcoholism. (When he took a razorblade to his arm was he actually trying to write “4 Real Ale”?)

He supplied the majority of the albums lyrics and titles such as 4st 7lbs, She is Suffering, The Intense Humming Of Evil, Of Walking Abortion, Mausoleum and Archives Of Pain have been cropping up as radio requests for swoony lovers ever since.

The band appeared on Top Of The Pops to promote Faster. The unlikeliness of the opening line as Bradfield barks “I am an architect” made more surreal given the fact that he was wearing a paramilitary style balaclava.

Richey Edwards disappeared on February 1st 1995 leaving his car near the Severn Bridge and has not been seen since. On a Pop History level, the whole Richey saga, his personality, disappearance and resonance with the more damaged elements of their fanbase, just adds to the uniqueness of The Manic Street Preachers as a Pop proposition

The band came back in 1996 with the Everything Must Go album, containing 4 of Edwards’s lyrics and the anthemic A Design For Life. You’ve got to love a song with the opening line “Libraries gave us power.”

For many people the subsequent albums This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours (1998), Know Your Enemy (2001) and Lifeblood (2004) have been less impressive.

However the Spanish Civil War single If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next reached number 1 in the Pop Charts in 1998. Just say that sentence again...that’s why the Manics are a good thing...they’ve got lyrical ambition and are not being constrained by a Pop formula or subject matter. In 2000 the limited edition instantly deleted single Masses Against The Classes also reached number one. Both Bradfield and Wire released solo albums last year.

Manics fans are exceptional in their obsessiveness, loyalty and Manics related trivia hoovering, but they do get out of chatrooms to go to the gigs and buy the records. Doubtless they’ll do the same for the forthcoming tour and album Send Away The Tigers. Super salesman Slick Nick Wire has guaranteed “Springsteenesque long sets, working class rage, make up and dumb Punk fun.” I believe him too.

Al Green

2007-02-26T20:46:00.001Z

Al Green's voice has got everything you could want from a male soul singer. The classic soul sound is built on songs about loneliness, temptation, love, lust and God.

Ideally the song has to actually sound like those subjects and if the singer appears to be living the life according to the soul script....then it just sounds better to my ears.

Al Green certainly does. On his breakthrough single So Tired Of Being Alone there’s the sound of desperation, but also the sound of a Man With Plans for exactly how it’s going to be when he’s not alone anymore

You can hear it in the way that his voice slides up to a falsetto for the “Oh Baby” and then slides back to the half spoken “I’m tired of being alone here by myself”.

But his voice sounds so tense it’s as if he can barely talk. If you listen very carefully, under the peerless superglued together bass, drum and guitar chug; under the swell of the Memphis Horns you can just about hear the swish of falling underwear.

The ten or so albums released during his early 70s secular peak, before he went Gospel, triggered a knicker elastic crisis under the Bible Belt. And like his life, the albums reflected that mix of sexuality and spirituality, a lot of covers and a very distinctive sound.

Al Greene was born in Arkansas, the son of a share cropper. He was kicked out of the family gospel group, which he’d been performing with since the age of 9 after his deeply religious dad caught him listening to Jackie Wilson.

His first group Al Greene and the Soul Mates had an R & B hit in 1967 with Back Up Train, which was how he first came to the attention of producer Willie Mitchell. There is a school of thought that puts the first Al Green (he’d lost the “e” by now) album, Green Is Blue released in 1969, as essentially him finding his feet. I disagree.

The opening track One Woman is as great a piece of cheatin’ soul as you’ll hear. It’s the tale of meeting his lover as “One woman’s making me happy while the other woman’s making my home.”

It’s got guilt, resignation and helplessness at his situation. It’s got the vocal that moves between the sung to the semi spoken. The album also establishes the pattern of using a lot of covers (the first lp includes My Girl and The Letter) although, over the years the lp’s would contain some stinky floaters amongst the polished soul jewels. Take special care to avoid Light My Fire....it could sink ships!

1971’s Al Green Gets Next To You was the album with So Tired Of Being Alone.

There is a fantastic clip of him performing it on Soul Train.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDXFXXud41Q&eurl=http%3A%2F%2F

You first see the furry pimp hat... the camera manages to ease a path through the dancers, and yes Al Green is wearing a vest (actually more of a pink camisole really) and thick gold chain.

Another set of flailing dancer’s limbs appear, it’s tricky to focus, but yes Al Green is definitely wearing knee length floppy topped suede boots....and black vinyl hot pants.....Oh and a purple shoulder bag. There’s some great hammy and literal choreography going on as he really does fold his arms to sing the line “Sometimes I fold my arms I say mmmah”

The sound of those Willie Mitchell produced 70’s lps is fantastic and utterly distinctive. The drums sound like they’re tuned flat and the hi hat sits high up in the mix. The bass is treacly, Teenie Hodges guitar is woody and the little horn stabs and organ drips all just knit together into one groove. There’s no superfluous playing...ever.

The hit singles like Lets Stay Together (and just how many ex lovers claim that as Our Tune?) and Lets Get Married (“I’m tired of messing around”) Call Me, Here I Am (Come and take me) and L.O.V.E are just timeless records that people can believe in, both in the singer and in their own circumstances. Which is what Pop Music is for. Right Kids?

After 10 albums (often 2 a year) the formula was starting to wear thin though. The Belle album released in 1977 wasn’t produced by Mitchell but the title track has got a key lyric to Al Greens state of mind. “It you that I want but it’s him that I need”.

What was happening in his personal life was pushing him towards the Church and Gospel. He’d been badly burned in 1974 when his girlfriend burst into the bathroom and poured hot grits over him before shooting herself. Soul Man attacked with Soul Food.

It’s a shocking and bizarre incident...and right up there with Soul Man shockers such as Teddy Pendergrass’s transvestite car crash and Marvin Gaye’s stint of living in a camper van in Belgium before being shot dead by his dad.

In 1976 Green had opened his church in Memphis The Full Gospel Tabernacle, where he still preaches as an ordained minister; and then in 1979 he injured himself falling off stage. He took that as a message from God to move fully into Gospel music. It was effectively a second and very successful career for him as he hit a gospel boom as The Rev Al Green.

There were some secular releases such as Put A Little Love In Your Heart with Annie Lennox in 1988 and The Message Is Love with Arthur Baker in 1989. In 1993 he released Love Is Beautiful Thing which is not only a great song in its own right but also has a spoken intro line “This is what I believe”. Now that is exactly the kind of phrase I want to hear from Al Green.

In 2004 he reunited with Willie Mitchell and many of the original Memphis musicians to record the return to form album I Can’t Stop on Blue Note.

There’s some really good You Tube footage of a performance from 2005 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JAv_6CYj_U

The band sound great, he can still sing but that big bunch of red roses he’s holding onto could show that he’s keeping his career options open....if the singing doesn’t work out son, there’s always flower selling.

I also remember him doing an utterly absorbing but harrowing version of How Do You Mend A Broken Heart on Jools Holland’s show 3 or 4 years ago. So the omens are good and the NIA show could be money well spent. And however it turns out....he’s still Al Green.

LCD Soundsystem

2007-02-06T23:13:00.001Z

LCD Soundsystem have pulled off the trick that nobody thought they wanted to see again. I hoped the Indie dance crossover had been locked in the cupboard with The Soup Dragons but what LCD Soundsystem do is to use dance music trickery with an American Punk Rock work ethic and real attention to detail. And it works.

Mainman James Murphy is half, (with Mo Wax’s Tim Goldsworthy); of New York label owners and remixers DFA. Murphy’s first band, Pony, were on Homestead, the US label that was the original home of Big Black and Dinosaur Jr. Nasty noisy uncompromising music. He moved into dance music because it was wide open and “Seemed like a great place to do something.”

LCD soundsystem was originally conceived as the opening act for DFA backed band The Rapture (who he memorably and very positively described as “Like someone had a big bag of band and just dumped it all over the stage and they'd all get up and start playing”) and he was going to use LCD Soundsystem as an excuse to play the contrary card by turning up to do DJ sets as a band and then doing band nights as DJ sets. In the Parliament/Funkadelic world that we should all live in, that’s called Who Says A Rock Band Can’t Play Funk Who Says A Funk Band Can’t Play Rock.

He originally envisaged the band as being something that nobody would like. That didn’t go to plan though as the album LCD Soundsystem came out in 2005 to fairly universal critical acclaim.

Early single Losing My Edge is a great tense sounding record that sets out the method well. It’s propelled by a synth riff that uses the rhythm of Talking Heads life During Wartime set to the electronic sounds of Marvin Gays Sexual Healing lp.

Murphy’s delivery is a caustic Fall style rant that puts the narrator, Zelig style, at the heart of a string of musical groundbreaking moments. At Suicide’s first rehearsals in a New York Loft, the dj booth at the Paradise Garage, Captain Beefheart’s first band and naked on a beach in Ibiza.

But he also knows that that “I'm losing my edge to the kids whose footsteps I hear when they get on the decks. I'm losing my edge to the Internet seekers who can tell me every member of every good group from 1962 to 1978”

The track ends with “I hear everybody that you know is more relevant than everybody that I know..... But have you seen my records?” He goes on to list a wide range of artists from Pere Ubu to Althea and Donna, The Bar-Kays to PIL, Todd Terry to The Slits. And Murphy is almost certainly a little man with a great big box of great records.

The video is just a headshot of Murphy being repeatedly slapped. Possibly by a disgruntled Soup Dragon.

Daft Punk is Playing At My House is an unbeatable title, and a funny, engaging clever record, it’s another relentless synth riff, and a jerky David Byrne vocal delivery. And the lyrics about his girlfriend working the door and the all the furniture in the garage remind me (again) of Talking Heads Life During Wartime and it’s line about “I’ve got some groceries, some peanut butter, to last a couple of days”....on the face of it they are mundane lines about little details....but made to sound really important.

There’s some little echoing guitar clicks that are a bit like how The Edge plays, but cleverly the record gets to sound more and more like Daft Punk as it heads towards a monstrous electronic splurge. Terrific stuff.

Disco infiltrator is a really apt title to come from the New Jersey Punk kid and the vocal is another salute to the Mark E Smith style “Stop. You can shake the waist...aah” while the electronics bubble up the octaves, rising to the surface like a windy bottomed bath night.

What makes the records interesting is the mixture of styles, clubby electronics, post punk sensibilities and occasional raucous guitar.

He built his first studio with the help of Steve Albini who described the recording process as “Look, you just put the mic in front of it and set the gain until it's correct. You just follow the rules.” The records are well constructed though, so the Punk Rock kid has still got the studio engineers careful methods. Murphy says “If you're creative, you'll be creative once you know the rules really well.” But in contrast he doesn’t write the vocals until the day they're recorded, because “I feel like it would make them false” which is a real American straight edge Punk angle.

There are more punk versus corporate contradictions with the release of the 45 33 album in 2006. It was commissioned by Nike and released as an ITunes only download. With a running time of 45 minutes it’s billed as being written with the warm up, midpaced temp, faster intervals and cool down periods designed for an ideal 45 minute run. To the pie shop and back.