The Lemonheads

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

The Fall

Anthropologists are agreed that Humanity can be divided into 3 main groups. There are the people who love The Fall. It tends to be love rather than like...mainly because you’ve got to put so much effort into it to get the benefits (It’s a bit like the 15 years training to be a Sushi chef, or fisting).

Then there are those who think that Mark E Smith is a poisonous alco-dwarf bellowing stream of unconsciousness nonsense like “Hogwartian dogtrumpet ahh” over the tuneless racket of soon to be sacked musicians.

The third and largest group is of course ex Fall Musicians. There about 50 of them who have been in (and mostly out) of The Fall over the last 27 years.

The thing about The Fall though is that it’s always been the sound of Mark E Smith’s vision of how a band should sound. The continual churn of musicians has changed the sound over the years and like a musical geologist you can identify the different eras of the band and the different layers of sound, but essentially it’s Smiths vocals, his delivery and his dense, baffling lyrics, stories and characters that define The Fall. It’s his bus and he’s driving.

And it’s his contempt for most contemporary values, styles and musicianship that have kept The Fall sounding unique and instantly recognisable. He berates the band on Slates with “For God’s sake don’t’ start improvising” and Madchester era bands were “Idiot groups with no shape or form, out of their heads on a quid of blow”.

He listens to Beefheart and Bo Diddley but basically has kicked all the line ups of his band into playing a distinctive Fall boogie. Discordant, relentless, layered but basically simple in structure

Smith’s vocals are best summed up in his own words on Your Heart Out, from 1979’s Dragnet lp. “I don’t sing I just shout-all on one note...aaah.” Surprisingly then on 1990’s Extricate album he comes close to a croon on Bill Is Dead.

They‘ve notched up a lot of cover versions. Last year they covered The Move’s I Can Hear The Grass Grow, They played it very straight, with the band wound tight under Smith’s croon (well it was 15 years since his last one.)

They cover White Line fever by Merle Haggard on the forthcoming album Reformation Post TLC. It’s their 26th studio album. Previously they’ve also done Victoria by The Kinks, R Dean Taylor’s Ghost In My House and Groovin’ With Mr Bloe.

The two most informative covers that actually show where Smith got his sound from is Black Monk Theme by the Monks and Mr Pharmacist. The Monks were a 60’s garage band of US soldiers who wore monks cowls and played simple, pared to the bone rock’n’ roll. (I defy you to come up with a better title than Boys Are Boys And Girls Are Choice). Mr Pharmacist originally by The Other Half shows his influences both musically and chemically.

There’s always been a belligerent non-academic intelligence about what they did. In the earliest stages of the group with Una Baines and Tony Friel the band used to write and play drug music in Salford bedsits to accompany the poems they’d write. Smith arrived late for an early interview because he’d been to an English literature evening class. His ex wife and ex Fall member Brix Smith said “He wasn’t educated, but he was extremely well read. The way he looked at the world was so different. Because he wouldn’t see things the same way, he wouldn’t speak the same way.”

Mark Smith sees the continual personnel changes and sackings as being like a football manager where every now and then you’ve got to get rid of the centre forward. Brix is now the owner of London up market jeans shop. (Pre Brix, Mark E always just looked like he’d got his clothes from the market.)

Steve Hanley was the bass player through some of my favourite Fall years. He had a really harsh middley bass sound, like shovelling gravel. After he’d been sacked he became a school caretaker.

Mark Riley was sacked after a legendary dance floor fight in Australia. After a lacklustre show in 1982 Smith spotted 4 of the band dancing to The Clash’s Rock The Casbah and stormed over slapping each of them in turn. Riley punched him back and had to find alternative work....first as a Creeper (one of the very few bands who did nail the Fall sound...as well he should ) and later as a Mark Radcliffe’s sidekick Lard and a Radio 6 dj in his own right).

The 1998 line up disintegrated after Smith attacked drummer Karl Burns (he who had been in and out of the revolving door Fall since the second single) on stage in New York.

Smith’s current wife (and current Fall member) Elena Poulou describes him as the best on stage mixer in the business. What she actually means is Mark E will go and mess about with the amps behind the musicians backs in an attempt to unsettle them.

In earlier years he would produce a kazoo or a squealing Dictaphone to produce similar chaos. It’s either a case of a tactical mastermind who is trying to coax an edgier performance from his band or it’s an out of control, drink and drug crazed megalomaniac who can’t stop messing about.

The proof’s in the results though and I’ve seen the Fall about 30 times over the years and seen some storming performances, with the band locked into a moment, concentrated and radiating malevolence.

You probably would not want him as a neighbour or employer but he is utterly unique, like a Punk Dylan who has just stuck to his musical guns and followed his own path (stopping at the pub on the way.)

His talent is almost certainly getting a battering from his lifestyle. Nick Cave has a similar self destructive past but he’s been able to write novels and a film as well as raising the standard of his own musical output. You just can’t see MES doing projects outside music.

When The Fall did the ballet collaboration with Michael Clark in 1988, Mark E Smith’s take on the 300th anniversary of William of Orange probably doesn’t stand up to rigorous academic debate. MES as a day time drinking Simon Schama anyone? Lyrically could he really just be spouting nonsense? Or is it just that it‘s different nonsense to anyone else’s?

Paul Morley said he sometimes he wonders if collectively, we may have all been had by MES.....we’ve spent all these years thinking that he’s a genius, but what if he is really just a pissed old tramp shouting at traffic.

Thing is though, for each year that I’ve been ready to write off The Fall, they’ve done something that makes me glad he’s still there....and there still isn’t anyone else who sounds like them.

Lady Sovereign

The very fact that I like her record should be the end of her career. Poor Lady Sovereign. The people who enjoyed her in the first place have moved on and she’s left with me and the rest of the Radio 6 audience.

That is the problem for underground acts though. Once you are in the mainstream, you’ve lost your underground status, your mainstream career will be probably be short-lived and then the underground won’t have you back because they can’t forgive you for ever leaving them in the first place and anyway they’ve got someone new who‘s better than you ...and they were lying when they said they fancied you.....and anyway.... you smell.

As always there is a bit of a story. Lets introduce the characters and hope there’s a happy ending. Once upon a time Lady Sovereign, was cast as the reverse Miss Dynamite. So while MD and her positive message was welcomed into Indie arms as a Brits Nomination and a breath of fresh air from the underground, Lady Sov was the stale air wafting up the escalator, the female Mike Skinner, brash white trash and in tabloid terms...The First Lady of Chav.

She appeared on a remix of The Streets Fit But You Know It and also as The Ordinary Boys vs Lady Sovereign on 9 2 5 (which was a remake of her own song 9 to 5). Her original version of 9 to 5 had a bit of an Eminem feel and the video is vintage era Madness, camcorder style. Well it’s got a bus, toy saxophones and hats. Her material is based on the specialist subject of Rappers since the dawn of time. Me, me, me and me...and (the obligatory) Haters.

By the time Julie Burchill had built a Chav documentary round her for Sky 1 (that would be a existential Pot and Kettle conversation on the meaning of blackness....followed by an episode of Britain’s Hardest Pubs) the game was up.

So she hauled herself off America, where she became the first non American woman to sign to Def Jam. Now her gimmick is that she’s a female British Rapper rather than the British view of her as MC Chav. So, are we ready to buy her back?

Love Me Or Hate was released as a single last year in States, but is only just starting to get mainstream radio play here. (ie I’ve only just heard it... I make no apologies about that. I find it hard enough keeping my ear to the ground, let alone to the Underground especially as I’m not actually a teenager and I don’t live in the ‘Hood, although I do sometimes catch a bus that goes quite near it)

The backing track is a descending series of squelchy electronic bleeps and sounds like the music from the Boss scene of a particularly crazed video game, you know the bit where you’re on a skateboarding donkey and are trying to dodge the low flying coconuts. It sounds excellent. It may well provide ammunition for any one old fashioned enough to actually like a tune, to complain that “All modern music sounds like a ringtone.” But so what. As I said, it sounds excellent.

It’s a killer playground taunt of a chorus...Love me or hate me that is the question. If you love me Well thank Yooooooooou. If you hate me well Fuck you.” The way she sings Yooooooou just make s me laugh. It’s not big or clever or even original but it’s funny and jauntily juvenile.

To put the record in a context, it’s a gimmicky song that just sounds right. It’s like the “Ow” in Althea and Donna’s Uptown Top Ranking, or Salt ‘n’ Pepa’s Push It or even (and I’m loathe to mention it in case I have to make a defence for it) Whigfield’s Saturday Night.

There are lines about missing shepherds pie and “I’m the funky little monkey with the tiniest ears, I don’t like drinking fancy champy I’ll stick with Heineken beers.” She plays to American perceptions of England with “Oh gosh I’m not posh” and about being The Royal Highness who doesn’t own a corgi (but she did have a hamster that died ‘cos she ignored it) but the line that really shows that she’s English and means business in America is the defiant “I’m English try and deport me.”

Lady Sovereign is the Wembley girl, the self styled “Biggest midget in the game”, who started rapping and doing online rhyming battles in chat rooms because “I didn’t go to school because it was boring so I stayed at home watching Trish and that was boring.”

The UK sent her packing after too much Vicky Pollard and Catherine Tate but America has not got that baggage. She’s got through customs and she may well be picking up her lost luggage. But will we have her back?

Fred Wesley

It hasn’t happened yet, but someday I may be asked “Who is your favourite funk trombone player”. Well I’ve been practising my answer for years... Fred Wesley. He was James Brown’s trombone player and musical director for crucial periods of Brown’s career and made some terrific records as part of the JB’s and their offshoots, Maceo and the Macks and later as the George Clinton spin off The Horny Horns.

Fred Wesley was born in Mobile Alabama on 4th July 1943. He’d played with Ike and Tina Turner but was about to start a job as the first black milkman in Mobile when he got the offer to join James Brown in 1967. You can say what you like about James Brown (and thanks to his recent death and the libel laws you probably could) but one of his greatest skills was as a band leader.

Like Bowie George Clinton or Kevin Rowland, JB always surrounded himself with top notch musicians and then used them as a spring board for his own immense talents. He had it all....His voice spanned the full range of Soul singing from “Huh” to “Ugh” and could go from The Willie John style Please Please Please Me pleading to spoken tracks like King Heroin.

He had the dancing, the showmanship, the capes, the sloganeering and the ability to make a phrase like “Let a man come in and do the popcorn” have almost the same cultural and political significance as “Say it loud I’m black and I’m proud.” But the funky foundations were built on the performances of supremely talented players, who had to take their musical cues from James Brown’s movements, his spur of the moment rearrangements, improvisations and a habit of fining musicians.

Brown wrote the words and gave the songs the star quality, but it was the bands who supplied the tunes and grooves which Brown would twist and pummel into funky shape. Wesley describes how Brown needed someone to translate and organise his ideas. “James Brown would give me horn things to write, but sometimes it would be incoherent musically and I would have to straighten it out, so to speak. When it came out of my brain it would be a lot of James Brown’s ideas and my organisation....he was the instigator”

James Brown pretty much invented the Funk style, and commercial success meant that he could run a parallel career for his backing band; releasing the records on his own People label and grab song writing and production credits as well. A marvellous mercenary idea and the records were great too. Different band names, same personnel. Essentially Fred Wesley on trombone, Maceo Parker on sax, Jimmy Nolen on guitar and Fred Smith on bass

Breakin’Bread came out in 74 and was credited as Fred Wesley and the New JB’s. Each of it’s 8 tracks is preluded by snippets of a 9th track of supper club schmaltz, where Fred will say a few words about the song. A kind of Funky Chicken in the basket.

I’ve never been afraid of cheese and these snippets only make me love the album more. As an album opener you can’t beat “Hi, this is Fred Wesley introducing our new album to you. It’s called Breakin’ Bread. We wanted the album to remind everybody of how it was with the folks back home, not only how good the food was but how we had a lot of fun, with all the groovy people, relatives and girlfriends. We hope it’ll bring back some pleasant memories and make you feel good”

And then with a trumpet fanfare it’s straight into the title track....and it’s about food, funk and good times; about cooking up hoecake bread on a skillet (it’s a corn bread traditionally cooked on a hoe or spade) dropping crumbs all over the place and having a good time.

It’s a great song and fits nicely in the tradition of Soul songs about Soul Food, such as Memphis Soul Stew, Barbara Acklin’s Gonna Bake Me A Man or Grits Ain’t Groceries by Little Willie John (who was one of James Brown’s idol’s).

The reason I like the album so much is it just sounds so warm and joyous. There’s a moment on the track Little Boy Black where after a line about “A hungry man can hardly think straight” there’s a shout to Wesley of “Show me how a hungry man plays”....and he does, playing a hustling, dancing, trombone shuffle, that sounds like it’s busking on a street corner for attention and spare change.

It’s a crazed riffling through some Starsky and Hutch type theme. Then “Show me how a full man plays” and Wesley plays a solo so full of rich, snoozy contentment that it’s virtually calling out to the waiter for brandy and cigars. The opening verse sounds like James Brown himself is sharing call and response vocal lines with Fred Wesley or at least adding an “Uh huh”, “Say it again” or “Tell me”.

There’s no chorus as such, but the link between verses is a soaring sweep of strings, brass and flute, that sounds like it should come from the closing credits of the best Blaxpoitation film that was never made. It’ll do me fine for a chorus anyway. As a title Rockin’ Funky Watergate anchors the album securely to it’s era, while Rice n’ Ribs gets the theme straight back to the kitchen.

The final track Step Child may need approaching with some caution though, depending on your sensibilities. For those with more jazz attuned ears than mine, it may indeed be a masterpiece. It may be a blistering work out with each horn part egging the other on, the musicians shouting encouragement to each other as they take turns to solo over crashing milk float drums and walking bass lines. To me though it’s a blether and squawk too far though and I just don’t get it.

Another of the interludes has Wesley thanking James Brown for “Giving me a chance to do my thing. Thanks to him there’s a little meat to go along with the bread”. Like I said the whole Brown /JB’s/ People enterprise kept the money rolling around the same group of people and a watchful George Clinton pulled the same stroke later by using the same pool of musicians and signing them to different labels as different bands.

George Clinton was a buy to let Funk landlord, with an expanding portfolio of often bewildering properties. Parliament, Funkadelic, Brides of Funkenstein, Bootsy’s Rubber Band, Parlet and The Horny Horns.

James Brown was a notoriously hard taskmaster and all his band line ups had a turnover of musicians that would make the Fall seem stable. Many of the graduates, leavers and runaways from the James Brown School (including Bootsy Collins, Maceo Parker and Fred Wesley) would become part of George Clinton’s parallel universe. Fred Wesley himself saw James Brown as the creator and founder of the funk style but saw Clinton as the innovator who took it as far as it could go.

But then George Clinton would take everything as far as it would go anyway....it’s a frightening funky thought. I like Parliament a lot but within the George Clinton set up Wesley just was one part of the huge simultaneous explosion of garish colour and craziness. It was the sound of George Clinton’s hair. Fred Wesley’s Breakin’ Bread though was the sound of simpler pleasures....food and funk.

Seasick Steve/Morphine

My New Years celebrations this year followed my usual routine…. traditional naked conga down the High Street and then back in time for the real party…Jools Holland’s Hootenanny.

The best thing on this year was SeaSick Steve. He’s a busking blues singer with a big check shirt, an even bigger beard, a 3 string guitar, a raw sound and really entertaining patter.

“I’d like to introduce my band here…. on percussion we have the Mississippi Beat Box.” This high tech marvel turns out to be a wooden box which he stamps out a rhythm on.

It’s decorated with a Mississippi number plate and a piece of carpet. “On my lap here is the 3 string Trance Wonder…most guitars have got 6 strings - this one’s only got 3 strings.”

It’s a sentence that could have come straight out of Spinal Tap…but he’s absolutely correct. It’s a battered acoustic with pick-ups gaffa taped to it which he plays with a slide…and it does indeed have only 3 strings.

He claims that he bought it for $75 dollars in Mississippi from a man called Sherman Cooper, and was so outraged that there was $50 mark up on a guitar with 3 strings missing that he vowed he would not replace the missing strings but would travel the world telling people how he had been ripped off. Well it makes a change from the traditional blues biography of riding freight trains and killing a man (or at least mildly annoying him)

Seasick Steve’s mum calls him Steven Wold and he actually grew up in Oakland California where he learnt some chords from Delta bluesman K C Douglas. He started playing the West Coast clubs in the 60’s and during the 90’s he ran a studio in Seattle and for a time had Kurt Cobain for an upstairs neighbour

Doghouse Blues on Jools Holland sounded fantastic. Rough, autobiographical, funny and loud, it sets out the stall for the whole SeaSick Steve persona as he sings “Daddy left home when I was 4 years old, when I was 7 Mama got a new man….It was hell y’awl.”

Leaving home at 14, riding freight trains (It is a blues song remember, so you’ve got to ride freight trains…it’s the law), getting cold and hungry and “I’d pick on a guitar, put the hat out and try and get your spare change…that’s an advertisement”

Apparently Doghouse blues “Aint the kind of blues you get for a day, you have it your whole life long.” The song itself is John Lee Hooker chug with a bit of a Norman Greenbaum Spirit in the Sky feel and some Warren Zevon Werewolves Of London style howling.

He plays sitting down, hammering out a huge sound from his unlikely pair of instruments. He also sometimes uses the The One Stringed Diddly-Bo which is a guitar string nailed to a plank.

If the man looks and sounds like he should be playing the blues on his porch you suspect the only reason he isn't is that the instruments look like they are made out of the porch.

He’s a compelling and entertaining performer and this has probably come out of his busking past where “I learned storytelling. The guitar was just a thing to keep it going, to keep people from walking away!”

Before Seasick Steve the former champions of missing strings were Morphine. This Massachusetts 3 piece had an unusual sound, which they branded Low Rock. A bit like a jazzy Violent Femmes or a minimalist Eels.

Singer Mark Sandman played a 2 string bass with a slide, getting a sinuous bendy sound. Sax player Dana Colley would often play 2 saxes at once like Roland Kirk used to. These were baritone Saxes as well…enormous instruments, outrageously raspy and fruity.

1993’s Cure For Pain is a really good album and includes the excellent adultery song Thursday that starts with meeting every week for a couple of beers and a game of pool and ends in tears.

“Well her husband he's a violent man a very violent and jealous man. Now I have to leave this town I got to leave while I still can.” Over a clattering drums and a chukka chukka bass thrum he delivers the sorry tale in a rich crooning voice full of resignation. The sax egging him on in a “Tell me More Tell me more” style.

Unlikely as it sounds there is something about the lyrical structure and phrasing that reminds me of Prince. The pause as he delivers the line “And the name of the motel was the Wagon Wheel” makes me think of Sign o’ The Times.

I’m Free Now could be a continuation of the purple diddy man’s Nothing Compares to you with lines like “I'm free now to direct a movie Sing a song or write a book about yours truly.” It’s good stuff though. The sax lines build up as long slow ascending notes that then come tumbling down with the singers black mood of despair and self loathing

The song Cure For Pain has got the elegantly simple line. “Someday there'll be a cure for pain That's the day I throw my drugs away.” It just sounds completely right coming from a band called Morphine.and with it’s line “I propose a toast to my self control You see it crawling helpless on the floor” it could sit comfortably (and numbly) alongside the Johnny Cash version of Hurt.

Sandman collapsed on stage and died of a heart attack in Rome in 1999 but the remaining members still tour as Orchestra Morphine. I don’t know how many strings they use now though.

Phantom Limb - The Shins

Just as I thought that I’d got all my years favourite records mentally wrapped for the festive season, along comes a record that undoes all that Anthea Turner/Nigella Lawson musical planning.

Phantom Limb by Albuquerque based 4 piece The Shins has gone straight to the top of the pile, top of Santa’s list and is scampering up the tree like a bauble crazed kitten, leaving the year’s other singles contenders languishing, unloved, with the slipper and tea towel gift set. The single is released in advance of the bands 3rd album Wincing The Night Away due to be released at the end of January on Sub Pop.

Phantom Limb didn’t so much jump out of the radio; it sort of sidled up to me with a knowing look and an air of “I’ve got all the things you like.” There’s a whiff of Weezer, The Beach Boys and Jesus and Mary Chain’s Some Candy Talking. There’s a touch of a Morrissey inflection to the vocals and a hint of Always The Sun by The Stranglers.

Psychedelic 60’s folky pop meets The Rubinoos soaring Beach Boys Powerpop version of I think We’re Alone Now. I’ll pass (possible mis print) on the Tiffany version. The song starts on a dum de dum bass line (back to the Mary Chain/Shangri las) and the opening guitar chords ring out clearly, but feels like the strings have just been stroked. And I know how they feel.

Singer James Mercer was previously in Flake and has got a high, clear, wide ranging voice and can definitely carry off a Beach Boys type melody. The lyrics sound intriguing and baffling...There’s a line about “They are the fabled lambs, Of Sunday ham” and the slightly more obvious “Another afternoon of the goat-head tunes, And pilfered booze.”

I definitely got the hang of the vocal line “Oh woagh oh oh oh” and sometimes that’s all you need. The icing on the cake for me is the 2 note organ cheese and a twangy guitar on the fade out.

It’s complete twisted pop gorgeousness and I’m really excited by the record and looking forward to hearing the new album and investigating the previous 2 albums, Oh, Inverted World and Chutes Too Narrow released in 2001 and 2003 respectively.

I instantly liked Phantom Limb, and it set me thinking about another 2 songs that I instantly took to and got that same feeling of “Rightness” from. The thing about listening to Music is sometimes you want to hear brand new stuff, new ideas or be challenged but there are also times when it just sounds great to hear a new song that uses building blocks that you, as a listener, just feel absolutely at home with.

It’s not about being derivative, it’s just good solid house building. The opening bars of The Thrills, One Horse Town has got that Soul Pop opening feel of Gates of The West by The Clash. The bass guitar and the hammered low notes from the non tinkly end of the piano sound like Luther Ingram’s Northern Soul masterpiece If It’s All The Same To You Babe.

It just instantly felt right. I liked the vocals too, dissatisfied, yearning and a bit breathless. Absolutely right for an Irish small town band whose hearts and record collections were in the USA.

"Yeah you're burning
Oh you're burning
My ears with your travelling tales
But my in laws
Oh baby my in laws
Well they're trying to tie a young man down
Well I never should have settled down
Hanging around in a one horse town"

The other record that got me with that instant grab was Belle and Sebastian’s The State I’m In. I first heard it on Mark Radcliffe’s show in 96. The track was from the album Tigermilk that had been recorded as part of a College music course and had been released as a limited edition 1000 copies. I was hanging wallpaper at the time.

I remember my heart sinking as Stuart Murdoch’s high trembling voice started a stately warble across gently strummed guitars. The world did not need more fey indie nonsense. As a reluctant wallpaperer I certainly didn’t need it...except of course...I was wrong. The record gradually builds a momentum and the lyrics are waspish and sharp, clever and Morrissey literate.

"I got married in a rush
To save a kid from being deported
Now she's in love
I was so touched; I was moved to kick the crutches
From my crippled friend
She was not impressed
That I cured her on the Sabbath
So I went to confess
When she saw the funny side,
We introduced my child bride
To whisky and gin"

By the end of the record, I was hooked. In this case it was not so much the sound of the record, but the lyrics and story that had reeled me in. It had knocked my socks off and hung them out to dry along with my pre conceptions.

There have been more than 3 records that I instantly loved. There’ll be others in the future too no doubt.....but for now Phantom Limb and I are definitely making plans.