music on Tales from the Bitface

The First Band I Ever Saw, 46 Years Later

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 14:26:59 +0000

As I teased, Saturday saw me and my friend John buggerdefanoblog.wordpress.com heading for Camden once again to see Stiff Little Fingers. It is far from the first time I’ve seen them. They were the first band I ever saw, back in 1980, at the Glasgow Apollo, and they might be the band I’ve seen most often. I’m not sure, but they’re certainly up there with The Pogues, The Fall, and James.

But before they got going the other night, there was a support band. The Meffs are that slightly unusual format, a two-piece. And in a mirror image of perhaps the most famous band of that format, they have a female singer/guitarist and a male drummer (and singer).

They were pretty damn good. Noisy, shouty, melodic at times, and well worth a listen. Plus the guitarist, using the incredible power of a pitchshifter (the effects pedal, not the band), we must suppose, created an incredible bass sound along with her lead/rhythm work. Remarkable.

And then on to SLF. They tour in March most years, and to be honest there were no surprises — one new song, which was pretty good. But I enjoyed it a lot more than the last time, and that was partly about atmosphere. I don’t really care for the Roundhouse as a venue. It’s a great building, but I feel like, for a rock venue, the ceiling is too high. Not to the detriment of the sound, it just feels too open above your head.

Which doesn’t make much sense, given the atmosphere can be great at an open-air gig. But there you go, it’s a feeling. However, that’s what I was feeling before I went. This time it was much better, and I think that’s at least partly due to getting there early, seeing the whole of the support act, and generally getting into it. They don’t call it a warm-up slot for nothing.

They love a backdrop, so SLF, as you can see there.

Next year it’ll be 50 since they started out, so we should expect something big. Or not, but I hope they’ll be back, and us too.

The Olympic Park, the V&A, and Bowie

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 19:42:59 +0000

The Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A) is in Kensington in West London. At least, its original and main site is. It has others. The newest (I believe) is in the Olympic Park, over in East London, quite near me. They call it the V&A East Storehouse, and it’s in a building that I think was the broadcast centre in 2012, and afterwards was a shared-use office-for-hire sort of place, I believe.

I guess that business must have dried up, because the museum takes up the entirety of the building now, from what I can tell. And it’s a really intriguing way of presenting parts of their vast collection. It’s a bit like an Ikea warehouse. On tall shelves, over three floors, items are arranged in seemingly random order and mostly without grouping, and minimal information. There’s a web site and QR codes so you can look things up, at least as to a title, description, and date.

I like this way of seeing a museum’s collection. The randomness leads to interesting juxtapositions: you might get a 14th century mahogany chest next to a 1960s electric guitar; a Piaggio scooter, decorated by a modern artist, sits with ancient pottery, and so on.

There’s a good article about it at Visit London, with photos that give a flavour of it.

Our main reason for going there was the permanent collection of David Bowie’s archive. Only a tiny fraction of his huge collection is on display, but it’s worth a look. Mostly photographs and letters and such, and some costumes and the odd guitar or synthesiser.

My favourite thing was a rejection letter Bowie received in 1968, saying he wasn’t quite right for the label. Which was Apple Records! Can you imagine what it would have been like if Bowie had joined the Beatles' label?

Essentials Playlist, Allegedly

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 23:26:22 +0000

This was an Apple-Music-generated playlist. It considers the following to be my ‘essentials’, as of yesterday.

The Fall — Kicker Conspiracy
The Velvet Underground — White Light/White Heat
James — What For
John Cale — Fear Is a Man’s Best Friend
The Beatles — I Am the Walrus
Joe Strummer — Gangsterville
Warren Zevon — Something Bad Happened to a Clown
New Order — Your Silent Face
David Bowie — The Motel
Kenickie — Spies
Big Country — Harvest Home
The Stranglers — Dagenham Dave (1996 Remastered Version)
10,000 Maniacs — My Mother the War
Cocteau Twins — From the Flagstones
Wet Leg — Convincing
Radiohead — Anyone Can Play Guitar
Sonic Youth — What We Know
The Long Blondes — Separated By Motorways
Arctic Monkeys — A Certain Romance
Ramones — Baby, I Love You
The View — Same Jeans
Stiff Little Fingers — Go For It (Remastered)
Grizzly Bear — While You Wait for the Others (BBC Maida Vale Session)
The Big Pink — Dominos
Thea Gilmore — Heart String Blues

I can see where it’s coming from, to a degree. The Fall, of course, and I’ve been playing them a lot recently for reasons I’ll go into later. Joe is there (though not The Clash), The Velvets, John Cale on his own (though not Lou). James, SLF of course (but the strange choice of their only instrumental).

All fine. Odd choice of Bowie track, but then, I did play through all his later albums recently, for reasons that I also might go into later.

10,000 Maniacs, though? I hardly know the track (though I like it), and I don’t think I’ve ever listened to an album by them. I don’t much like Arctic Monkeys, though that song is fine. But the Grizzly Bear one? I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything by them, including that one.

Oh yeah, and a very odd choice of Warren Zevon track.

It closes well, though: I love that Thea Gilmore track.

But you’ve got to wonder what goes into the algorithm that generates this kind of thing.

Crucial Track for 10 October 2025: Clash City Rockers

Fri, 10 Oct 2025 15:20:40 +0000

"Clash City Rockers" by The Clash

Listen on Apple Music

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Damn, I haven't added a Crucial Track since June? What's been happening?

Today's prompt is:

A song from the 1970s that you like or means something to you.

Well, I mean. If the golden age of music is 14, as the old saying has it, then we're talking about 1978. Let's go straight to the top, then, with The Clash, and 'Clash City Rockers', indeed. Can't go far wrong with that.

What does it mean to me? I first became aware of it by hearing friends who already had it, singing it. Brendan, I think. And the first time I heard it might have been at a gig by the band he was in with Friendy, The Varicose Veins, doing a version of it.

I certainly didn't buy it when it came out (14, remember), but a couple of years later, at one of the Glasgow record shops. Possibly Listen Records on Renfield Street, but it might have been the Virgin Megastore, down the bottom of that street — or rather its continuation, Union Street — on the corner with Argyle Street. I think it probably was, because they had a lot of space and kept a lot of browsable back catalogue.

Great song, great B-side in 'Jail Guitar Doors'. I once saw Primal Scream at the Reading Festival invite Mick Jones on stage and do a version of that.

'Rock rock, Clash City Rockers!'

View Martin McCallion's Crucial Tracks profile

Listen to my Apple Music playlist

📗 Books 2025, 11: Blitzkreig Bops, by Alli Patton

Thu, 22 May 2025 06:49:37 +0000

I picked this up at a stall at the local market a few weeks ago. It’s a slim volume, taking its title from the Ramones' song ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’, and subtitled, ‘A Brief History of Punks at War’. Alli Patton is a music journalist from the southern US and this slim book takes a look at how punk, from the 70s through to the 20210s, has been used to resist war, and call for peace and justice.

She starts with Stiff Little Fingers and the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and moves on through apartheid South Africa to Chile during Pinochet’s regime and punk bands in East Germany during the Cold War.

And then beyond that, decade by decade. There are always wars and oppression, and it seems there are always punk bands resisting and calling for peace.

Worth a read, and she includes a YouTube playlist of some of the artists she covers.

Waiting for Yellow Ribbons

Fri, 16 May 2025 23:35:35 +0000

Searching for the Man

The state of internet search these days is such that it can be hard to find things that — while you don’t know they’re there — you know must be there.

It’s as if the search engines give up after a bit and just show more links to the same videos. Or lyrics sites, in this case. I found myself at the Wikipedia page for answer songs, and idly scrolled through it. Mainly I wondered what they’d say about ‘Here Comes Your Man’, by the Pixies. If you’ve swum in the same pools of the indie/punk/post-punk floodwaters as me, you’ll have long realised that Black Francis must have written that song, in part at least, as an answer to The Velvet Underground’s ‘I’m Waiting for the Man’. (Note the formulation of the title from the first album; many people and versions characterise it as ‘Waiting for My Man’, since that’s what the lyrics say.)

There was no reference to the song on the page. Slightly odd, I thought. I looked at the song’s own page. No reference there to the Velvets or Lou Reed.

If you doubt the connection, just listen to the two songs. There’s the riff on the Pixies song, plus all the references to ‘waiting’ in it, as well as the obviousness of the title. Sure, it’s not only that, or even, really, about ‘I’m Waiting for the Man’ in any sense. But it’s unthinkable that the one didn’t inspire the other. Let’s not forget Black Francis wrote, in another song, ‘I wanna be a singer like Lou Reed/I like Lou Reed.’

Others must have written about this, I thought, and started googling around. Well, I use DuckDuckGo, but you know. And I even tried switching to Google. Nothing came up, except for the odd little Reddit post saying, ‘Hey, this song’s a bit like that song.’ Yet you’ve got to imagine — it’s hard not to imagine – people will have written about it. Music journalists, bloggers… hell, I’m surprised I haven’t mentioned it before now.

But nothing turned up. I’m sure those pages are out there, lost for now in the deep pools of the web. But the search engines just don’t want to go there anymore.

Tying Ribbons

I was looking into answer songs because I’d been reading the page on ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree’, and it mentioned there being an answer song.

I was looking at that page because we were talking about the origin of people tying yellow ribbons when they’re waiting for someone to come home. I thought it might have originated with the song. It was certainly the first time most of us here in the UK heard the expression. When Americans festooned buildings with yellow ribbons during the Iran hostage crisis, it seemed like a reference to the song.

But the page suggested the origin is much older, possibly going back to the US civil war. So much for that.

We were talking about yellow ribbons because people are displaying them again: waiting for the remaining hostages in Gaza to be freed.

Israel’s government is doubtless guilty of war crimes, probably crimes against humanity. And October the 7th was a crime against humanity. I’m all for freeing Palestine, but free the hostages too, and if you can get rid of Hamas too while you’re doing it, so much the better.

Free Palestine from Hamas.

Crucial Track for 1 May 2025: Mario Y Maria

Thu, 01 May 2025 23:22:02 +0000

“Mario Y Maria” by Butch Hancock

It’s annoying that the song I want to use for the prompt, ‘Share a song that tells a great story,’ isn’t found on Apple Music. It’s sitting right there in my music library being fantastic, ever since I ripped it from a cover CD from Uncut magazine, back in 2002.

It tells the tale of a pair of lovers that we might describe, in the clichéd form, as ‘star-crossed’. But it’s not a tale of young lovers. Rather, the titular pair are experienced, world-weary (certainly by the end), but they keep on keeping on.

I don’t know if creating this entry will even work with the song not found, but if it doesn’t, I’ll create the post manually. (It didn’t; I did.)

Turns out it’s on that there Tube thing, though.

📗 Books 2025, 8: The History of Rock ‘n‘ Roll in Ten Songs, by Greil Marcus

Fri, 04 Apr 2025 18:13:31 +0000

I got this as a Christmas present some several years ago, and read bits of it. It’s episodic, though — a separate essay on each of the songs, plus an ‘Instrumental Break’ — so I dipped in and out of it. I was encouraged to pick it up again recently because of the name-similarity with a great podcast I’m listening to and keep meaning to write about here: A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs, by Andrew Hickey.

Marcus’s title is overconfident to the point of arrogance by calling the book the history. As if there was and could be only one. To say nothing of the idea that it could be encapsulated in ten songs. Hickey’s is more aware, and he makes the point repeatedly that his is only a history.

But Marcus is a terrific writer, and, like Hickey’s, the title is not literal: when discussing any one song he’ll touch on several others, plus various events in the lives of the artists and the goings-on in the world.

I can’t honestly say that I learned much from this, or retained much of what I may have learned, but it’s a joy to read. The pleasure is in the journey more than the destination.

Memories, Facebook, and The Clash

Tue, 29 Oct 2024 22:27:05 +0000

It seems Facebook still has the odd use, apart from keeping in touch with family and friends who still use it. I popped in late last night, and it told me I had memories on this day. It seems the 29th of October has been a day on which I’ve often posted in the past, because there were several. But the one that really caught my eye was this one:

15 years ago, it tells me, in 2009, I wrote:

Jason Ringenberg doing The Clash’s ‘Ivan Meets Gl Joe’: a thing of rare beauty. Spotify URI: http://is.gd/4Hcr7.

Now that’s quite telling, in several ways. First of all, remember the is.gd URL shortener? Remember URL shorteners that aren’t t.co?

Also, I haven’t used Spotify in a long time, being a happy Apple Music subscriber. But that doesn’t matter. What’s really weird is that I have absolutely no memory of Jason (out of Jason & the Scorchers, as I’m sure you know) doing any Clash song, much less a surprising choice of Sandinista album track.¹ And back then I was listening to Jason quite a lot.

Obviously I quickly searched for it on Apple Music. To find that it’s part of an album. Not one by Jason, though. The Sandinista! Project² is a compilation album of covers of the entirety of Sandinista by different artists.

Why was I not told such a thing existed?

Of course, it’s entirely possible that I was told of it, one way or another. Some passing mention, a mental note, quickly forgotten… maybe it was mentioned in Jason’s newsletter or some such.

I mean, it’s not a totally off the wall idea. It’s subtitled ‘A Tribute to The Clash’, and I’ve had or listened to things like it before. I had something called London Booted once, which was sort of techno-ish covers of some or all of the tracks from London Calling. And I remember listening to a reggae version of that album, or tracks from it, at least.

But this is every track on what is famously a triple album. Yes, including ‘Career Opportunities’ (though not, to be fair, ‘Blowing in the Guns of Brixton’). And the great thing about it is, almost no track is a carbon copy of the original. We get jazz instrumentals, ska versions, rocked-up versions of ones The Clash took slowly, and everything in between. Most of the performers are little known, or unknown, to me at least. But we get Katrina of Katrina and the Waves, Jon Langford of the Mekons, Wreckless Eric, The Coal Porters, and of course the aforementioned former Scorcher.

It is really, really good. Highly recommended if you’re a fan, and even if you’re not, I imagine you’ll find something to enjoy. Go on, find it on your favourite service here.

Incidentally, I love that the label it’s on is called 00:02:59 Records. ‘The band went in/And knocked them dead/In two minutes fifty-nine,’ as ‘Hitsville UK’ says.³

Not that Jason being a fan would be in the least surprising. ↩︎
I don’t remember the the exclamation mark being part of the title. But the Wikipedia article renders it that way, and indeed, there is an exclamation mark right there on the cover. Still, I don’t think we wrote it that way back in the day. ↩︎
Katrina’s version runs to 3:44, but then the original is 4:22 or so. ↩︎

… And Took the Road for Heaven in the Morning

Thu, 30 Nov 2023 20:41:17 +0000

In a way it was surprising that Shane MacGowan survived this long, considering his noted and dramatic habits. But it’s still sad that he’s died.

I count The Pogues as one of the bands I’ve seen live most of all. The only other one that comes close would be The Fall, and either could be the winner. Goes back to 1985, either way.

The Pogues were vey much a band of supremely talented musicians and songwriters. But Shane was the driving force. What they did was to meld punk with Irish folk music. The former, of course had helped me through my adolescent years and would remain a lifelong love. The latter: well, I came from a Scottish Catholic background, so it was pretty familiar, between Scottish folk and Irish songs sung at Celtic matches.

So on the instant that I first heard them — certainly on Peel, and probably ‘Sally MacLennane’, I’d say — they clicked. There was no learning curve, no adjustment to this new sound. It was just there, it belonged, as if it had always existed.

The Pogues may have been inevitable, but Shane was a genius. And his songs, as I wrote when Phil Chevron died were steeped in death imagery.

I’ll leave you with a couple of excellent screen grabs from Twitter (where, just to note, as I write, ‘Sodomy and the Lash’ is trending under a ‘food’ heading, which is just beyond weird.

First, this excellent mashups of the day’s deaths of noted figures:

And this typically topical ‘Fairytale’ reference (even if it does misspell his surname):

So it goes.

Suzanne on the Stage

Sun, 26 Feb 2023 15:21:24 +0000

To Cambridge, on Thursday just past, and to the Corn Exchange, to see Suzanne Vega. My one-word review: spellbinding.

I had never been to the Corn Exchange before (to be honest I’ve rarely been to a gig — especially an indoor gig — outside London these last thirty-six or so years). But it’s one of those places that feels slightly legendary to me, because I’d see it listed among the tour dates in Sounds or NME back in my youthhood.

Turns out it’s a lovely, clean, modern venue, with Old Speckled Hen on tap. We were seated in the balcony (on the balcony?), which was fine.

And as to Ms Vega: I’m not steeped in her work, so the fact that she essentially played a ‘Greatest Hits’ set was ideal for me. She even explicitly said, ‘I’m gonna play some of the well-known ones early, so people don’t worry that they won’t get them.’

This after she’d opened with ‘Marlene on the Wall’, followed by ‘Small Blue Thing’.

She had one accompanying musician, a guitarist called Gerry Leonard, who has worked with Bowie, among others. He was great, making heavy use of those sampling/looping pedals, making him sometimes sound like three or four players at once.

So, like I say, the whole thing was spellbinding.

Twenty Years Without Joe

Fri, 23 Dec 2022 19:55:06 +0000

I missed posting this yesterday, what with one thing and another. Twenty years ago yesterday, the 22^nd of December 2002, my friend Tony texted me and the other members of our then-band, Burn, to the effect:

Nooooooooo!

Strummer’s dead.

I was at work, and immediately googled for the story. Joe Strummer, dead at 50 from an undiagnosed heart defect. We didn’t hear the reason at once, of course.

I wrote The Death of a Hero at the time. Not much has changed, in some ways. I still play his music, both The Clash and his solo stuff. I sometimes wonder what he’d have to say about the times we live in now.

Hard to imagine he’d have been 70 this year. Such is life, and death.

Wed, 21 Dec 2022 08:02:25 +0000

I was listening to The Specials yesterday because of the sad death of Terry Hall, of course.

I was mildly distracted by this text early in that Guardian report:

The pioneering 2 Tone band rose thanks to the support of Joe Strummer,¹ who invited them to support the Clash live,² and of BBC Radio 1 DJ John Peel.

While not wrong, it ignores the fact that The Specials were bloody brilliant! The piece does make that clear later, to be fair, but it seems slightly the wrong way to weight it.

I also listened to some Fun Boy Three, and they were far better than I remembered, too, both with and without Bananarama.

For whom there’s a big anniversary tomorrow. ↩︎
I wish I’d seen The Clash on that tour, though. ↩︎

Next Songs, Elon Musk, and Joe Strummer

Sat, 29 Oct 2022 17:50:48 +0000

Since Musk’s takeover of Twitter has been confirmed, there has been a lot of chatter about free speech. Musk, we are told, describes himself as a ‘free speech maximalist’, and there are fears that he’ll have Twitter reinstate the accounts of Trump and other white supremacists.

But I’ve been thinking about Joe Strummer.

More specifically, I’ve been wondering why his ‘The Road to Rock ‘n’ Roll’ was popping into my head so often. It wasn’t a problem: getting an earworm of a song I like doesn’t bother me. But I wondered what was triggering it.

I can often work out why I get a song in my head. I knew, for example, why I often had The Clash’s ‘The Prisoner ' in my head through the summer. The words ‘The Prisoner ' are written on the whiteboard in our kitchen, along with the titles of the other serieses we’re watching.

And in fact I sing ‘The Prisoner’ every time I hang out the washing, owing to its line referring to ‘hanging out the washing and clipping coupons and generally being decent.’

It clicked today, though. You know how — if you’re an old-school album listener (or just old) like me — when you play an album, one track’s ending often triggers the expectation of the next? So that, when you hear a song in isolation, on a playlist or on the radio or something, and the wrong song plays next, it can be quite jarring?

The song before ‘The Road to Rock ‘n’ Roll’ on Rock Art and the X-Ray Style is ‘Techno D-Day’. Joe’s celebration of illegal raves ends with the line, ‘And this is about free speech!’

So it turns out my head was just playing the next song whenever the phrase came up.

Wednesday Night is Music Night

Thu, 29 Sep 2022 21:42:02 +0000

God, I have missed this so much. Live music FTW.

I get emails from the Joe Strummer Foundation . The most recent one told me that their artist of the month for September was someone called Gemma Rogers. I hadn’t heard of her, but was interested when I read that she’d had an album launch at Paper Dress Vintage. That’s a place just down the road from me on the Narrow Way. It used to just be a second-hand clothes shop, but now it’s more, I guess.

Anyway, the thought that she might be a local piqued my interest, as well as the JSF recommendation, so I gave her a listen, and liked what I heard a lot.

She was booked to play at a place called Folklore, on Hackney Road, so I thought, why not? In support was Gabi Garbutt and the Illuminations , who I saw once a few years back, because Sean Read, whom I know from round these parts, was producing them and playing in the band. Back then. Not anymore. Not tonight, at least.

Going to a gig in a small venue? No big deal, right? Except… this is the first gig I’ve been to since I saw Glen Matlock. At the end of February 2020.

It felt like quite a step.

But after a bite to eat across the road, we made our way in through forbidding, castle-like doors. Inside is a smallish bar area, and a classic pub backroom. The stage made of two layers of forklift pallets topped with hardboard. It was smoky. Visually, it was like being back in the eighties. But of course, it was stage smoke-machine smoke. Exactly why it filled the air before anyone had taken to the stage escapes me.

Unless it was to show the lasers. It looked like this:

The back room of Folklore Hoxton

Anyway, Veronica Bianqui brought her Hollywood-fuelled LA tones to Hackney Road. Though it turned out she had been on the bus with us down from Clapton.

Veronica Bianqui on stage

I probably enjoyed Gabi Garbutt’s performance most of the three. Because at times? At times they sounded a bit like late-period Clash.

Gabi Garbutt on stage

They sounded. Like. The Clash. Combat Rock-era. I think it was mainly the bass player sounding a bit like Paul Simonon. Whatever, I can pay no higher compliment. No higher compliment can be paid.

But Gemma Rogers was also great, with the singalong of ‘Rabbit Hole’ being the highlight. Not often you get the band applauding the audience.

Gemma Rogers on stage

But yes: I had missed it so much more than I realised. Just getting together in room with a hundred or so people, while others make rocking sounds up the front? How could I have forgotten?

The Title of The Smiths' Third Album

Thu, 08 Sep 2022 19:04:35 +0000

I’m a republican, but you’ve got to acknowledge that old Queenie had a good run. Apparently the direct descendent of Mary, Queen of Scots, which I didn’t know.

My favourite story about her is the one about the landrover and the Saudi crown prince.

The weirdest thing about the change of monarch for me? The King’s Speech is an Oscar-winning movie, not something to ignore on Christmas Day.

Cold Winter Morning

Fri, 21 Jan 2022 10:07:41 +0000

I was never a huge Meat Loaf fan, but I always liked Bat Out of Hell, and of course enjoyed him in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. So I’m saddened to hear of his death.

I’ll be playing Bat Out of Hell today.

Pour One Out for Joe

Wed, 22 Dec 2021 22:20:33 +0000

Or maybe that should be ‘flame one up for Joe’, considering his preferences. It’s the anniversary of Joe Strummer’s death today. Nineteen years. I still miss him.

Get Back to Christmas

Fri, 26 Nov 2021 16:02:19 +0000

We subscribed to Disney+ last night, so that we could watch Peter Jackson’s The Beatles: Get Back. I had thought it was going to be a movie, but it turns out it’s a miniseries: three two-hour episodes. The second drops today, and the third tomorrow.

It’s built from hours of footage that were recorded for the Let It Be documentary back in 1969. I remember watching that once and being disappointed by it. The main problem was that it was presented as a fly-on-the-wall thing, but the fly was aurally challenged.

In other words, you couldn’t make out much of the chatter between the guys. That, almost as much as hearing them rehearsing and working on the songs, was kind of the point.

If you were making a documentary like that today you’d probably have all the band members wearing microphone packs, as the participants in reality TV shows do, so that what they said would make it to storage. Back then, though, even if that had been practical,¹ it was far from obvious that the individual Beatles would all have complied. Plus we’d want to hear from Brian,² and Mal, and Glyn, and the other George, as well as John, Paul, George, and Ringo.

That’s a lot of microphone packs. So of course, the original producers relied on ambient miking. It’s fine when the speaker is near one of the vocal mics, or when they’re right under a boom, but otherwise… well, as I say, Let It Be was a frustrating experience.

However, technology has come a long, long, way in the succeeding fifty years. Every word in this is clear as a bell,³ undoubtedly with the help of modern digital audio editing. It’s slightly ironic to note that one of the first things the band say is that the place they’re working in – a warehouse in Twickenham – is acoustically bad. An odd choice of a place in which to work on writing and performing songs.

Anyway, as of the cliffhanger ending of episode one, this series is fucking amazing! Totally brilliant!

But only if you’re a fan. If you only take a passing interest in The Beatles, or (weirdly) none at all, you probably shouldn’t waste your time on this.

The Disneyfication of Christmas

Disney have made a genius move in launching this when they did. We will be far, far, from the only people who took out a subscription to watch this, with the intention of cancelling it after a month.

A month. What’s a month after yesterday, the 25th of November? Oh yes.

All those subscriptions that are due to renew on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day? So many of them won’t be cancelled, either just to have things to watch over Christmas, or to keep the kids happy, or because people will forget with everything else going on.

I don’t mind, I’ll probably try to catch up on some of the newer Marvel and Star Wars stuff, of which there is just far, far, too much now, in my humble opinion.

But there’s not too much Beatles.

It wouldn’t, because they would have had to be wired microphones ↩︎
I don’t know what I was thinking here. Obviously Brian Epstein was dead by 1969 and isn’t in the film. My thanks to Tony for pointing this out. ↩︎
The odd line is given a subtitle, but I think those are more about Scouse accents than inaudibility. ↩︎

Songs and Singles

Wed, 10 Nov 2021 20:18:11 +0000

You’ve probably heard a song off an album – you’ve heard the album, maybe a few times, but it’s just kind of washed over you, not really made much of an impression – you hear a song, maybe on the radio, maybe some random or curated playlist, and you go. ‘Wow! What a great song!’ And then you realise it’s from that album, the one that washed over you.

That’s what singles were for. Still are for, since they’re still released, though it’s not quite the same.

I just had that experience with Radiohead. Kid A never made much of an impact on me, but when I turned BBC 6 Music on tonight, a killer track was playing. Steve Lamacq back-announced it. He was playing the whole album, and the track was ‘The National Anthem.’ I knew Kid A had a track of that name, but it had never really got to me. But there, now, tonight, it was just amazing.

A similar, if inverted, effect is when the album is so good that it kind of drowns out a brillant single. I can only think of one example of that at the moment. If you cast your mind back (assuming it goes that far) to when The Jam released ‘The Eton Rifles,’ it was an incredible song.

But Setting Sons is such a good album that I hardly notice ‘The Eton Rifles’ on it.

Anyway. Singles. Yes.

Jonathan Richman and the Handwritten Interview

Mon, 07 Jun 2021 13:58:43 +0000

Great story about interviewing Jonathan Richman, by writing a letter to him and receiving one back.

‘Jonathan doesn’t use the internet, email etc. and has never owned a computer or cell phone.’

– Oscar Zambuto, An interview with American music legend Jonathan Richman – all in handwriting

Though he does have an assistant who can say that.

Mark E Smith (Co-)Wrote a Screenplay

Tue, 25 May 2021 16:27:34 +0000

A screenplay by Mark E Smith, cowritten with Graham Duff? Sounds like it could have been great:

… Smith was an unexplored writer of strange fiction. Duff sums up the narrative of the film: “Essentially, the Fall are trying to record an EP at a studio on Pendle Hill, while the surrounding countryside is at the mercy of a satanic biker gang and a squad of Jacobites who have slipped through a wormhole in time.”

– John Doran, Satanic bikers, time portals and the Fall: the story of Mark E Smith’s secret screenplay

Never made, sadly, but it’s coming out as a book: The Otherwise: The Screenplay for a Horror Film That Never Was.

Wed, 07 Apr 2021 07:15:10 +0000

‘New single by Belly': not what you expect to see on your phone in 2021. Thanks, MusicHarbor.

However, as I wrote in ‘Colliding Names,’ back in October, this is a different performer with the same name. The Wikipedia article tells us that ‘our’ Belly are active again, though.

A Year Passes Like Nothing

Sun, 28 Feb 2021 15:42:00 +0000

It’s exactly a year since I last went out to an event.¹

I referred to ‘being out on a cold, virus-infested night’ to see Glen Matlock in Leytonstone, and it seems really weird now that I did it.

What were we thinking? Gathering together in a small hall, where people were singing and shouting. And not a mask to be seen! Masks? who had masks? How would we have drunk our beer while wearing a mask? You probably wouldn’t have been let in if you had turned up wearing a mask.

Although I had good social distancing at the start, when I was almost the only one there.

Memory, eh?

I actually thought it was on the last day of February 2020, which was the 29th, not the 28th, making it hard to hit the exact anniversary, but my blog and calendar both tell me I was wrong. ↩︎

Xstabeth by David Keenan (Books 2020, 29)

Thu, 31 Dec 2020 10:20:10 +0000

Following on from number 27, then, we have David Keenan’s latest novel. Again we’re in a kind of magic-realist setting, without any obvious magic. In St Petersburg a young woman lives with her father, who is a failed or fading musician. The daughter – who is the viewpoint character – starts a relationship with her father’s friend, and gets pregnant. She keeps all of this from her father.

Her father, meanwhile, puts on a show at which he performs some seemingly-otherworldly music. He starts to believe that it was actually created by some sort of mystical entity called Xstabeth.

For reasons that escape me at the moment they go to St Andrews,¹ where they get involved with a professional golfer. The ‘tenuous, ambiguous, confusing event’ that I referred to in the earlier note happens from this side too, but you’d only notice it if you’d read The Towers The Fields The Transmitters.

The novel is presented as if it were an academic work about a novel called Xstabeth, by someone called ‘David Keenan,’ who killed himself by jumping from a tower in St Andrews. So there are cod-academic sections or extracts between the chapters.

It’s all very meta, and I enjoyed it, but I’m not sure I totally understood it. The strangest thing about it, in some ways, is the use of punctuation. Almost the only punctuation used is the full stop. But that doesn’t just mean he’s avoided using commas and semicolons, and constructed appropriately short sentences. It reads as if he wrote it with conventional punctuation around dialogue and so on, and then replaced every other mark with the full stop.

For example, consider this:

This is singular. He said. This is music that cannot be repeated. This is music that can never be toured. This is music that can never be applauded. I pointed out to him that there was applause on the record. Muted Applause. Awkward applause. Uncomprehending applause. But still. Applause. What is the sound of one audience member clapping. I asked him. He laughed. Yes. He said. Yes. Yes. There is no mechanic in the world for this music. He said.

A more conventional way to punctuate that and lay it out, might be:

‘This is singular,’ he said. ‘This is music that cannot be repeated; this is music that can never be toured; this is music that can never be applauded.’

I pointed out to him that there was applause on the record. Muted applause; awkward applause; uncomprehending applause; but still: applause.

‘What is the sound of one audience member clapping?’ I asked him.

He laughed. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘yes, yes. There is no mechanic in the world for this music,’ he said.

There are, of course, other ways you could present it. As an experimental way of presenting text, it’s interesting enough. I found it intruded, in that I constantly noticed it; but not so much as to be annoying. Though there were places where it was slightly confusing. I paid particular attention to it because we recently discussed ways to present dialogue on my course.

Still needs an apostrophe. ↩︎

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 16:48:48 +0000

Honestly, it’s great: I love the fact that I can stream all the albums in the world for one flat monthly fee.

I just wish that so many of them didn’t end their titles with ‘(Expanded Edition)’.

Or at least that the ‘Original Edition’ was there too.

Tue, 22 Dec 2020 12:01:05 +0000

The soundtrack for today starts with Earthquake Weather. How can Joe Strummer have been dead for eighteen years already?

I know, that’s just the way time works. The music lives on.

Colliding Names

Mon, 19 Oct 2020 15:20:29 +0000

A few years ago I wrote about how I was notified about the wrong band called (The) Nails. In that case the names were different, though only by the subtle presence or absence of the definite article. Things have got even more confusing recently.

I have an app on my phone called Music Harbor (sic). The idea is, you give it access to your music library, and it notifies you of forthcoming releases by artists you already have tracks by. It sometimes throws up some oddities, like people I’ve never heard of just because they’re ‘featured’ on something I have. But mostly it’s pretty good. It’s how I know that Bruce Springsteen has a new album coming out in a few days, for example.

A few years back I heard a track called ‘Bass Down Low,’ by someone called Dev. I liked it, both musically and lyrically. I mean, it’s not profound, but ‘I like my beats fast and my bass down low’ is a sentiment I can get behind.

So there was a new track by Dev out today. However, the guy rapping on ‘El Erb’, is not, I feel sure, Dev, the female singer & rapper of ‘Bass Down Low.’

It’s also a scunner of a name to search for, what with it being an abbreviation for developer, the TV show, and Google completely owning the .dev top-level domain.

Multiple people with the same name: it’s a problem. It’s why actors have Equity names, I guess.

Still, there should be no problem with the early nineties Scottish indiepoppers Bis, right? Who’d have thought they’d be back with a new single, this long after ‘The Secret Vampire EP’?

No-one, it turns out. This Bis is someone else (and his single ‘Streets’ is also nothing to do with The Streets).¹ It’s also hard to search for, not least because it’s an abbreviation for several different organisations. I even used to work for a company called BIS.

I don’t think the English language is running out of names, but if you’re planning on using a short one as your professional persona or brand, you probably want to check out whether or not someone has already used it in your field. Though it’s not always that easy, as I’ve noted.

There’s even a music magazine called Clash, which has nothing to do with The Clash.

Still, ‘Sugar sugar kandy pop/Push it down and pull it up,’ as I’m sure we can all agree.

Shit, and I’ve just found out he was murdered last year. ↩︎

Fri, 12 Jun 2020 22:20:00 +0000

It’s funny when you hear the DJ on BBC 6Music saying, ‘I borrowed some records from the John Peel Archive’; and then you realise it’s Tom Ravenscroft. ‘I got some records from my dad’s collection’ doesn’t sound quite so… distinguished.

Tue, 02 Jun 2020 15:55:21 +0000

Listening to the Bikini Kill Peel Session, and it does have Peel’s intros. So good to hear his voice again.

Peel Sessions

Mon, 01 Jun 2020 11:39:37 +0000

Warren Ellis draws our attention to this incredible listing of links to Peel Sessions. They’re on YouTube, so there’s always the chance that any of them will go away, but in the meantime, what a resource.

Got to ask, why doesn’t the BBC make this available officially?

I have only one complaint about that page: it needs use stop-words in its sorting, or otherwise deal with bands called ‘The’ Something. I scrolled down to the ‘F’ section and thought, ‘Well there’s a bit of a large gap here, surely?’ Until I scrolled down to ‘T’, where we find The Fall.

Also, it would be even better if we had Peelie’s introductions, but I guess those aren’t in the released versions.

I’m listening to Dolly Mixture as I write. Who remembers them? Well, hardly even me, to be honest. But they introduce themselves in their very first track.

The Beat(les) Generation is Slipping Away

Fri, 22 May 2020 16:30:48 +0000

Sad to read in The Guardian that Astrid Kirchherr¹ has died. She was 81. That’s not a bad age, and it’s not like I had followed her career. I just knew her as a photographer who had worked with The Beatles, and been Stuart Sutcliffe’s partner till he died.

But from my early reading of Beatles books – like The Beatles: An Illustrated Record – onward, I was aware of her as part of their story, their mythology.

More than that, though, as the article above, as well as her obituary, will tell you: she was the one who gave them their early look. She made them the “lovable moptops.” They’d have been successful without the haircuts, of course, but there’s no denying the importance of that early image.

I think I’m saddened more because of what her death represents. I was born the year The Beatles took America. They had long split up by the time I developed any musical awareness.² But they were the first band I really got interested in, when my sister gave me a tape. They were my favourites until punk came along, and I love them still.

But that whole generation is ageing – well, who isn’t, of course – and will soon be gone. And mine not too far behind it. So what it all comes down to is that Astrid’s death reminds me of my own mortality, and there’s no excuse for that!

Brilliant photos, though.

I note that I always thought her name was Kirchnerr. But there’s no “n” to be found. ↩︎
Though I did shock my grandma when I was very small, by singing “Obla-di, Obla-da.” She thought I was “swearing”. And it might have been The Marmalade’s version that I’d heard at that time. ↩︎

No More...

Mon, 04 May 2020 18:15:56 +0000

Sad to hear of the death of Dave Greenfield from Covid-19. The Stranglers were not really like other punk bands. But they were the band that got me into punk. I heard ‘No More Heroes’ on the radio one weekend, after hearing my school friends talk about punk, and I never really looked back.

I never saw them live, and I didn’t follow their career after the first three or four albums; but there’s a lot of good stuff in those early ones.

Greenfield is, I think, the first musician of that generation to die from the pandemic.

The Clash On Display

Mon, 02 Mar 2020 21:27:27 +0000

Paul Simenon’s Smashed Bass

My favourite band have become a museum piece.

Or at least, some of their instruments, clothing, lyrics, and memorabilia are in an exhibition which the Museum of London¹ has been running since the fortieth anniversary of London Calling in December. I popped along today.

Clash Shirts and Guitars

It’s small, but pretty good. The centrepiece is Paul Simenon’s smashed bass from the famous cover photo. It lies under glass on a red velvet cushion, like a fallen warrior lying in state (see above).

It’s actually kind of gruesome. “That’s no way to treat an expensive musical instrument,” as someone once said.

Joe Strummer’s White Telecaster

I didn’t learn anything I didn’t already know, I don’t think. Except maybe that Joe had a backup white Telecaster, that I don’t think I’ve ever seen him use, either live, in video, or in photos. His iconic black one is in the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame, I believe. Or another museum.

Oh, and see the poster in that shot? “Two for a fiver”? When I bought London Calling it was only £3.99. Both times, as I’ve written about before.

Anyway, worth checking out, especially since it’s free. My main complaint: there are a lot of songs that could have been playing, even if they kept it to the relevant album. Instead they had a loop of just three (“London Calling,” “Train in Vain,” and “Clampdown,” the latter two live versions).

Big Display of the London Calling cover

Which I had never before visited, in thirty-two years living here. ↩

Glen Matlock Remembers How to Rock, but Nearly Forgets the Songs That Put Him Where He Is

Sun, 01 Mar 2020 14:13:43 +0000

Glen Matlock doesn’t seem to have much time for the past, except the past as he sees it. Cover versions of the New York Dolls, or one or other size of The Faces, are fine. But the songs that he co-wrote? The songs that are responsible for what fame he has — for 200 people being out on a cold, virus-infested night, to see him?

Those songs — that single song, in fact ¹ — is relegated to the encore.

Glen Matlock and his band at the Red Lion Ballroom in Leytonstone

There’s nothing wrong with keeping your best-known songs for the encore, of course. But when the ticket site said “Curfew: 10:30,” and it’s 10:27 and there hasn’t been a single Pistols song, you can start to get a bit twitchy.

On the plus side, he did introduce “Pretty Vacant” by saying, “This is ‘SOS’,” referring to his borrowing of the intro riff from the Abba song.

It was a good night, though. His originals and the covers were all fine. It’s just that, if you heard a no-name pub band playing those songs — well, you wouldn’t bother going out specially for it.

The night was billed as “Glen Matlock + Earl Slick.” I’m embarrassed to admit I had to look up who Slick was. Turns out he only replaced Mick Ronson in Bowie’s band, and worked with John & Yoko! And now he’s playing lead guitar in Glen Matlock’s band. Oh well.

There’s no point in asking what that is. You’ll get no reply. ↩

Eyes Full of Tinsel and Fire

Fri, 27 Dec 2019 15:15:28 +0000

Christmas is the time of year when the devil doesn’t have all the best tunes. The other side gets some of them too.

I love Christmas songs. Not all of them. of course, but many. And that includes some of the Christmas carols. A full choir singing ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing,’ or ‘Oh Come All Ye Faithful’? I’m there.

The best Christmas songs, though, do belong to the — let’s say — secular side of things. I have a hierarchy of my personal favourites. Things move around a bit, and very occasionally new ones arrive; and you won’t be surprised to learn that ‘Fairytale of New York’ remains unassailable in the top spot.

One of my other favourites is Greg Lake’s 1975 hit, ‘I Believe in Father Christmas.’ Now, if you haven’t listened to the words too closely — written, I’m surprised to discover, by Peter Sinfield, of whom I had barely heard before researching this — you might think it’s a simple celebration of Christmas, set to a jaunty tune, much like Slade’s ‘Merry Xmas Everybody,’ from a couple of years earlier (and every year since). It’s not, though. It’s much darker and more interesting than that:

They sold me a dream of Christmas
They sold me a Silent Night
They told me a fairy story
Till I believed in the Israelite

And that closing couplet:

Hallelujah, Noel, be it Heaven or hell
The Christmas we get we deserve

Lake and Sinfield have argued that it’s not anti-religious or atheistic. Well, you can have your interpretation, guys. I know what I think.

I mainly wrote this because I’ve wanted to use the line I’ve stolen as a title for years. And I’ll leave you with the wishes the song provides:

I wish you a hopeful Christmas
I wish you a brave New Year

I think we’re all going to need some hope and some bravery in 2020.

Calling From London

Sat, 21 Dec 2019 17:25:40 +0000

Forgetting for a minute the slightly-disappointing conclusion of a 42-year-old story that we spoke about the other day, this month gives us the 40th anniversary of an even more significant creation, for me at least.

The Clash released London Calling in December 1979. Rolling Stone went on to call it the best album of the 80s, but it got a later release in America. And in any case, many wouldn’t have heard it until 1980. ¹

Including me. I remember being at school, at the start of a term, so it must have been January, and Watty saying, “I envy you: you haven’t heard London Calling yet.” That idea of how important the first listen is. I’ve said similar things myself over the years, about various things.

But honestly, I couldn’t tell you anything about my first hearing. I had probably heard the title track — it was a single, after all — and I went and bought the album, most likely at John Menzies in Dumbarton (though maybe at Hall Audio, the nearby hi-fi shop, or Woolies, or Boots, who used to sell records in those days). I do know it cost £3.99, because the band took a reduction in their royalties so it — a double album — could be sold at the same price as a single album. Excellent value, for one of the greatest records ever made.

Though I paid for it a couple more times over the years. Someone walked off with my copy during a party at my student flat in Edinburgh. I replaced it with a second-hand copy, probably from Record Shak (sic) on Clerk Street. Though possibly that was much later and in London. I had a tape of it to tide me over. I do know that the replacement cost the same: £3.99.

The CD must have cost me a bit more, but I didn’t get that until the 25th-anniversary version, with The Vanilla Tapes, the rehearsal-room recordings of early versions of several of the songs.

I could probably tell you a few things about the 7852 ² times I’ve heard it subsequently, though. But it would be better for you to listen to it yourself.

And lastly, just a reminder that tomorrow is the 17th anniversary of Joe Strummer’s death.

Or at any time in the intervening 40 years, to be fair. ↩
Approximately. ↩

You Gev It Away

Sat, 07 Dec 2019 15:02:10 +0000

I got Whammed¹ in the bakery this afternoon. Walked in, took my earphones out, and, Wham! there it was. George Michael geving his heart to someone. Ever noticed that? He doesn’t say “gave,” he says “gev.” My daughter pointed this out a couple of years back, and now I can’t unhear it.

Oh well, there was never a chance of not hearing it, and to be honest, I don’t hate it like I used to. Remember back when we thought that bands like Wham! or Duran Duran were somehow “the enemy”? Those were stupid ideas. Music is music, and people have different tastes. Let’s let everyone enjoy what they like without judging them.

The most amusing part was that I heard a little girl in the queue behind me saying to her mum, “I just got Whammed.”

Also it’s odd that I haven’t heard ‘Fairytale of New York’ yet this year, except as a weird brass band version that was on the telly advertising some programme.

Sense 2 at the time of writing. There doesn’t seem to be a way to link to a specific definition, which is surprising. ↩

Jason & Dan

Tue, 10 Sep 2019 12:45:22 +0000

If you saw my post the other day complaining about typography, you might have been confused. I went to see Jason & The Scorchers last Friday. They were playing in a co-headline tour with the Kentucky Headhunters and Dan Baird & Homemade Sin.

On the night we saw them, the order they took the stage was: Headhunters, Scorchers, Homemade Sin.

That was completely the wrong order, at least for the audience at London’s Shepherd’s Bush Empire on that night. The energy and connection of the Scorchers meant that the peak for the whole event came as they finished their set — in the middle of the evening.

No doubt you think I just think that because I’m a fan of the Scorchers, and not particularly of Dan Baird. And there is some truth to that. But I watched the last twenty minutes or so from off to one side — OK, I was standing at the bar — so I had a good view of the front of the crowd; and it was clear that they weren’t as excited, as into it, as involved, as they had been an hour before.

No matter, it was still a great night, and I’m sure some people were happy that the running order was that way round. What drove me to post that picture, though, was the distraction that backdrop caused me. I couldn’t really appreciate the music for staring at it.

In case it’s not obvious to you, take a look at the ampersand, and tell me how there’s any possible way it can make sense in that orientation.

The Beats: a Very Short Introduction (Books 2019, 4)

Fri, 01 Mar 2019 23:00:09 +0000

The Beats VSI alongside a heart-shaped pottery gift

Since I announced back in October that I’m writing a novel called Delta Blues: Beat Poet of the Spaceways, I thought I should learn a bit more about the Beats. Not that my character is necessarily going to be very like the actual Beats, and maybe her poetry won’t be like theirs either, but you need to know about what you’re using for inspiration, right?

Books in the “Very Short Introduction” series do exactly what their shared subtitle suggests, and this is no exception. You get a brief prehistory and history of the movement, then a look at the major novelists, another at the major poets, and then a piece on their influence.

In common with the last two books I read, The Clash get a mention, because Allen Ginsberg worked with them, adding spoken-word part to “Ghetto Defendant,” on the Combat Rock album.

I know more about the Beats now than when I started, and that’s exactly what I wanted out of this book.

Fri, 01 Mar 2019 11:32:34 +0000

“’80s Indie Essentials,” from Apple Music. Really good, and has several things I didn’t know, as well as much I did. Perhaps too much Smiths, especially with Morrissey’s fall from grace, but they did make some good records.

England's Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock, by Jon Savage (Books 2019, 3)

Mon, 25 Feb 2019 23:50:20 +0000

England’s Dreaming alongside a shaving brush

I didn’t start reading this just because I read a book about The Clash recently. In fact I started it sometime last year. But reading the Clash book did make me want to get back to this, and refresh my memories of the early days of punk.

Reading a history of a time you lived through is interesting. Not that I was involved in the events, but I was distantly aware of at least some of them. In the years the book covers I was between 12 and 15. Or maybe just 14, as it only gets as far as early 79. It’s a short period of time, looking back, and they — the Pistols, and most of the other bands too — were incredibly young. They were just 20 and 21 when they signed their first deal. And their second. And their third.

At times Savage appears to think that punk was over when the pistols split, if not before. And generally to have quite negative thoughts about it as it developed Though he undercuts that contempt later, in the appendices and in the notes scattered through the huge discography at the end. He acknowledges the influence of punk, though considers it just to be one of a range of genres or forms that influences popular music. Which is fair enough, though there are still, even today, bands that consider themselves to be punk. Whether that’s a good thing or not, I don’t know.

Something that came out of it that surprised me — though doesn’t, now that I know the facts — is that you can no longer get the film of The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle in any form (though you can still get the soundtrack album). That’s because it was McLaren’s project, it sets him up as hero, and makes Lydon the almost-unseen villain. Lydon hated McLaren by the end, and eventually won control of the Sex Pistols name and assets in a series of court cases. Presumably he controls whether it will ever be released.

I find this mildly annoying, because I saw it couple of times when I was a student, and enjoyed it, and wouldn’t mind seeing it again. Second-hand DVD copies are available, but they’re mostly pricey and/or being shipped from the States.

I suppose the more recent, documentary film, The Filth and the Fury, might be worth seeing. I see that, like The Swindle, it is directed by Julien Temple. Clearly Lydon didn’t mind his work on McLaren’s film.

What doesn’t come through very much is any sense of Jon Savage himself. What was he doing, and how did he get involved in all this? I gather he wrote a fanzine, London’s Outrage, and he became a journalist writing for Sounds, according to his Wikipedia entry. While he has done extensive research, and interviewed many of the participants, some of the story clearly comes from his being there at the time.

But the only real sense of that we get is that, towards the last third or so of the book, a series of dated, italicised entries appear. They clearly are — or are meant to be — diary entries from the time. Or notes for articles he wrote at the time, perhaps, giving us something of a first-person view of some to the gigs and so on. I would have liked to see more made of these, or more generally about his experience and from his point of view. A book about punk ought to be a bit more gonzo, I think.

But on the whole it’s a great read.

We Are The Clash by Mark Andersen and Ralph Heibutzki (Books 2019, 2)

Fri, 01 Feb 2019 19:56:50 +0000

We Are The Clash with the Cut the Crap CD

This is the book that I mentioned before Christmas. The subtitle is “Reagan, Thatcher, and the Last Stand of A Band That Mattered,”¹ which captures well its structure. It interleaves the politics of what was happening on both sides of the Atlantic — the miners’ strike, Reagan’s nuclear brinksmanship, the Iran/Contra scandal — with what was happening with the most political of the original punk bands.

It’s interesting to read a history of a time you lived through and were, however tangentially, involved in. Andersen and Heibutzki more than do justice to their material. The research they must have done is impressive. I know personally that Andersen came to the UK on a research trip, but aside from that they have interviewed the three non-original members of The Clash, Kosmo Vinyl, and various other people who were involved or just had something useful to say.

And they must have spent a lot of time listening to concert tapes and studying set lists — which doesn’t sound like a chore to me, it’s fair to say.

I learned two major things: first, I’d forgotten how good Cut the Crap is. I haven’t listened to it in ages, and when I went to do so on Apple Music, I found it isn’t there. Nor is it on Spotify. I have it on vinyl, but I don’t currently have access to a record player.

Luckily Amazon and CDs both still exist, so I put some more money the way of… Bernie Rhodes, as it turns out.

That’s the other big thing I found out: how — difficult, let’s say — Rhodes was. Not least since he signed the band — well, Joe and Paul: the others were effectively employees — into a contract that gave him, Rhodes, control over the album, as well as the name “The Clash.”

But worse was the way he treated the new members while they were with the band. Constantly haranguing them, telling them they weren’t up to scratch, shouting at them… it’s a wonder they stayed. It sounds like an abusive environment.

Joe could and should have stopped it, but it seems like he was still to some extent in Rhodes’s thrall — Bernie did bring the band together, after all — and possible suffering from depression. Certainly he was drinking heavily, and during that time his dad died and his mum got ill, and he became a father himself. It was a difficult time for him.

I have more to say about the album, but I think that’s for a separate post. For now, this is a great rock book about a little-discussed time in the history of my favourite band.

Good to see the proper use of the Oxford comma there. ↩

Bragging

Tue, 29 Jan 2019 23:46:48 +0000

Went to see Billy Bragg in Islington on Friday. A benefit for Hope Not Hate, the anti-fascist organisation, it was the most mainly-political gig I’ve seen from Billy in — well, maybe ever. By which I mean, ‘Sexuality‘ and ‘Upfield‘ were the only non-political songs he did. And at least the latter of those actually is political (“I’ve got a socialism of the heart,” after all), despite being about meeting angels.

He was on great form. He’s turned sixty now, and was joking about having a bus pass.

Support were The Wakes, a Glasgow band with obvious Irish connections. Very much in a Pogues mould. I only heard the tail end of their set, but thoroughly enjoyed it.

Oh yes: and I think this was the first time I’ve ever seen Billy when he didn’t do ‘A New England.’

Nick Cave on AI and Songwriting

Wed, 23 Jan 2019 15:18:39 +0000

If we have limitless potential then what is there to transcend?

Mr Cave’s latest newsletter muses on the potential songwriting abilities of AIs.

Rude and Rough

Mon, 26 Nov 2018 00:43:43 +0000

I watched Rude Boy for the first time in many years. It is, in case you don’t know, a film from 1980 about and featuring The Clash. It’s kind of a fictionalised documentary, in that the titular character, Ray Gange, is both someone who was a sometime roadie for/hanger-on of The Clash, and playing the part of “Ray Gange.”¹

The worst part of it is, as I recalled, his “acting.” Well, that’s not quite true. Viewing it as a film, that’s the case. But viewing it as a document of the end of the seventies, the worst part of it is the casual racism. And indeed the organised racism of the National Front rally shown at the start.

Also bad are the violence from police and bouncers, and the general horribleness of Britain in the seventies. Nothing looks clean, everything looks run-down or broken. It looks, in fact, far worse than I remember it being.

Don’t worry, by the way, if you don’t remember what it was like, are too young to have experienced it, and/or don’t want to watch the film. It’ll be like that again in a couple of years if things go as we fear.

The best parts are, of course, the scenes of The Clash live and in the studio. And we won’t get them back after Brexit.

Also, in looking up the IMDB article, I discover that a) Ray Gange has actually been in a couple of other movies, and b) far more importantly, there is a 2016 movie called London Town, which is a drama about those times. With people acting as The Clash. Whaaaat? Why did no-one tell me about this?

Or not quite. That’s how I remembered it, but Wikipedia suggests the story is slightly different. ↩

Musical Malady

Tue, 09 Oct 2018 23:28:23 +0000

This morning I saw a poster for Heathers: The Musical. Err, What?

I rewatched Heathers fairly recently and I thought, this could never get made today. I figured teenage suicide is too high-profile, and the facts of people being driven to it, and the fear of copycatting — these would put a treatment of it like the one in Heathers off the table today.

Yet there’s a musical version playing in the West End, apparently.

Not that you can’t make a musical about serious subjects. I’ve just been to see one about the founding of the USA, after all. But Heathers is not what you’d call sensitive about the subject. It could have been changed significantly for the musical, of course, but to remove that aspect would be to take out an important part of the story, so I don’t know where they’d go with it.

Turns out that it’s been around since 2014; and that there’s a even a “High-School Edition,” made more suitable for kids.

Furthermore, it seems there’s a TV series based on the film as well, so what do I know? But it makes me wonder if I’m remembering a different film.

This Is Memorial Device by David Keenan (Books 2018, 24)

Sat, 08 Sep 2018 00:22:50 +0000

I don’t know where I learned about this. It’s been sitting on my Kindle for a while. I have a feeling that a friend recommended it on Facebook. It’s subtitled “An Hallucinated Oral History of the Post-Punk Scene in Airdrie, Coatbridge and Environs 1978–1986,” which annoys me, but only because of that “An Hallucinated.” Not because it’s a subtitle. I like subtitles.

And this subtitle describes its book extremely well, especially with respect to that incorrectly-articled vision. It’s the fictionalised biography of a band called Memorial Device. Or at least that’s partly what it is. It verges on magic realism at times. It’s presented as a series of interviews and parts written by other contributors (as opposed to the supposed author, “Ross Raymond”). The actual author does a fine job of presenting those different voices and making them sound different. The whole thing reads like an actual music biography where the author has drawn on the experiences of a range of people as well as their own experience.

The hallucinatory part comes from the way some of those people speak, or write. They are variously damaged or otherwise otherworldly, and their mental strangeness comes across well — or is it the world that’s strange?

Airdrie is in the west of Scotland, not far from Glasgow, so it’s very much the same part of the world I grew up in. This feels very realistic: there was a similar swathe of bands inspired by punk and the post-punk/new wave/new romantic scene around Dumbarton and environs. None of the characters were as much larger-than-life as some of the members of Memorial Device — or at least not that I knew — but that’s why this is fictional, I guess.

Not the best thing I’ve read this, year, but not bad.

Espedair Street by Iain Banks (Books 2018, 14)

Thu, 21 Jun 2018 23:02:35 +0000

This is not a book about an imaginary rock musician: it’s a book about guilt.

Of course, it is about an imaginary rock musician too, but reading it now, for the third or perhaps fourth time, it’s striking to me how totally it’s about guilt. And not very subtly, either. It’s right there at the start of chapter 2:

Guilt. The big G, the Catholic faith’s greatest gift to humankind and its subspecies, psychiatrists . . . well, I guess that’s putting it a little too harshly; I’ve met a lot of Jews and they seem to have just as hard a time of it as we do, and they’ve been around longer

I had forgotten that the character of Daniel Weir (or “Weird”) was brought up as a Catholic. I don’t think any of Banksie’s other characters were. The man himself wasn’t. Not that it makes a lot of difference: his (and our) Scottishness has a lot more impact on his character — and his characters — than any religion his parents may have had.

As always, I had forgotten some key parts, but I remembered more of this than of most. It’s still great.

And I realise that these notes are becoming more about me, and what I remember, than about the books. But that’s fine. It’s my blog, after all, and as much as anything these are for me. They’re just out there in public in case anyone else is interested.

Anyway, if you haven’t read any Banks, then this would be a damn fine place to start. Though it’s interesting to note that — set as it is in the 70s and early 80s — it’s so dated that it feels almost like a period piece. One example: one of the members of the band buys an IBM mainframe and transfers recording-studio tapes to it, so he can play any track at the touch of a button. Something we can do from our pocket computers today.

But there was one point that I thought seemed anachronistic. Maybe not, but aluminium takeaway cartons? Chinese & curries? In 1973? Hmmm. I mean, it is in the foaming metropolis of Paisley, not Balloch. And even we had a Chinese by 1980, 81, or so. Still, I wonder when those things started to become commonplace.

Top-Ten Album Lists

Sun, 22 Apr 2018 22:08:00 +0000

Two album-related memes have been doing the rounds on Facebook lately. Both involve posting cover images of ten favourite albums across ten days. One involves doing so without any comment, but the more interesting one to me involves the poster writing about their thoughts on each album. I was nominated by my friend Peter to join in with the long-form version.

I’m all about owning my own content, as you know, and not having it locked away in Facebook’s walled garden. So my plan is to write about ten albums, but to do so here, on my blog. Links to the posts will automatically be crossposted to Facebook anyway.

I started compiling a list of possibles, and thinking about starting to write posts. First I decided to restrict it one per artist. Otherwise I could just pick five by The Beatles and five by The Clash.

But then I played some albums, and thought some more.

See, I knew right up front that it was going to be almost entirely a white-guy fest. I wanted to approach it honestly, and not try to appear to be anything I’m not, so that’s how it would have to be. It would be reflecting my life as a music fan. As it stands the long list has one woman and no non-white people.

But as I played those albums — albums I love — and as I thought about them, I realised two things:

I know these albums too well. I’m not bored of them, but they can drift past without me really being aware of them, through overfamiliarity.
This won’t be very interesting, and certainly won’t have any surprises for anyone who knows me.

So I’ve come to a decision, I think: I’m going to do it slightly differently. I’m going to write about ten albums that I like now. Ones that I’ve discovered in the last few years, maybe, or that I’ve known for a while but have listened to a lot more in recent years.

I’m not entirely sure what that list is going to look like. I only have two, maybe three definites on it at the moment, and it’s going to take a while to construct it. But I think it could be a much more interesting list — certainly for me — when it’s done.

And I’ll do a post with a rundown of what the original list would have been, just for completeness.

So watch out for those in the next few days.

I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead: The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon by Crystal Zevon (Books 2018, 2) 📚🎵

Tue, 30 Jan 2018 17:28:08 +0000

You know how they say you shouldn’t meet your heroes? Well it turns out that sometimes that includes not meeting them between the pages of a book. I’m not sure I’d call Warren Zevon a hero, but he’s definitely a hugely respected and much missed singer and songwriter.

I knew of the tales of wild and crazy behaviour, though I hadn’t actually read any of them — except inasmuch as they come out in the songs. And anyway, those tales are a dime a dozen in rock’n'roll. A lot of this biography, though, is concerned with the people he hurt.

Which is fine, not least since the author — his wife and the mother of one of his children — is a major one of those people. Most of his bad behaviour happened while he was an alcoholic — or while he was drinking, I suppose I should say, since the standard twelve-step narrative is that you never stop being one. Alcoholics Anonymous helped him to stop, though he eventually stopped going to meetings. He didn’t drink for seventeen years, and the opening chapter tells us that when he was diagnosed with terminal cancer he had a scotch. Who could blame him for stepping off he wagon at a time like that?

So he comes across as a far from pleasant character. But my disappointment with the book is more about the complete focus on the man and his relationships, almost to the exclusion of the music.

“The man and his relationships” sounds like an important set of themes to address in a biography. But in the case of a creative person — or really any person worthy of a biography — a key part of the story of their life is their works. If it’s a writer you’ll expect to read about their books; a politician, their victories and defeats; a general their battles. And of course, a musician, their music. It would be strange to read a biography of Beethoven or the Beatles that told of their personal lives but largely elided the music.

Which may be the key: this isn’t a biography, as such. It makes no attempt to be comprehensive, and there’s no real narrative. Although there are plenty of reminiscences from Crystal, the vast bulk of the book is reminiscences from people in Zevon’s life, directly quoted and preceded with their names; almost like a play script. Presumably Crystal interviewed them all, but she herself comes across as just one of the interviewees.

There are quotes from Zevon’s diaries, but he either wrote them in a very fragmented, abbreviated way, or they have been heavily edited. An example:

Jan. 12, 1975
… Took Jordan, visited Father at the steam baths. He gave me a handsome Seiko watch and $135 … quarreling with Crystal … T-Bone came over for spaghetti and I quaffed vodka martinis all night. T-Bone trounced me soundly at chess which surprised and aggravated me, but pleased me, too, by mellowing my lonely-giant-of-the-intellect trip … Made love.

Jan. 15, 1975
… Snorted coke which kept Crystal awake all night … she’s thinking of pregnancy and worried about chemicals in her body …

(All ellipses in original.)

After he gets sober the diary entries become more frequent, which is good. But as a fan of his music, I would have liked to read a lot more about it: its creation, how it was accepted or not at the time, stories of gigs and recording studios, and all that. Unfortunately Crystal wasn’t really involved in that part of his life, and the interviewees who were — like Jorge Calderón or Jackson Brown — either weren’t asked to talk about it, or weren’t quoted doing so.

So not quite the music biography I’d have liked, but not without interest.

Lana, What?

Thu, 11 Jan 2018 19:57:12 +0000

Turns out Lana Del Rey was… mistaken? about Radiohead having brought a lawsuit against her. After me leaping to her defence. I’m very disappointed.

Amanda Petrusich, writing in The New Yorker, tells us:

Eventually, Warner/Chappell*, Radiohead’s publisher at the time of the song’s release, refuted her claim: “It’s clear that the verses of ‘Get Free’ use musical elements found in the verses of ‘Creep’ and we’ve requested that this be acknowledged in favor of all writers of ‘Creep,’ ” the company said in a statement. “To set the record straight, no lawsuit has been issued and Radiohead have not said they ‘will only accept 100%’ of the publishing of ‘Get Free.’ ”

Which seems fairly clear. Read the whole article, though. It’s interesting.

Crazy Copyright Claim

Tue, 09 Jan 2018 14:34:00 +0000

Gotta say I hope Radiohead (or their lawyers) lose this case:

Pop star Lana Del Rey says she’s being sued by Radiohead for copying their breakthrough single, ‘Creep.’

I’m not a fan of Lana Del Rey, but I just listened to her song, ‘Get Free,’ and the only similarity is the chord progression in the first verse. You can’t claim copyright in a chord progression. Or if you can, you shouldn’t be able to.

If the chords and the melody were the same, they’d have a point, but even then apparently they want 100% of the publishing royalties; don’t the words count? Del Rey has offered them 40%, and I think that’s way too much.

I’m amused that the album containing the song gets its title from a doubtless much better one by the same name: Lust for Life. There’s no copyright in titles, of course.

Tue, 01 Aug 2017 11:46:14 +0000

Weird. I go to Ted Leo’s Soundcloud page. A track by someone called Lil Purpp starts playing. Nothing to do with Leo or the page I’m on, as far as I can see.

Not the Nails I'm Looking For

Wed, 19 Jul 2017 11:20:10 +0000

I got an email from Songkick about a forthcoming gig in Camden by Nails.

You’ll recall, being the avid reader of this blog that you are, that a while ago — OK, six years ago — I wrote about a great song called ’88 Lines About 44 Women’ by a band called The Nails. I know nothing else by them, but the idea of seeing that song live in a tiny basement club is pretty cool.

But I had my suspicions. Especially when the first comment on the Songkick page was all about how it was the loudest gig they’d ever been at. Clicked through to the band’s page, played the video there, and it was immediately obvious that the hardcore band Nails are not indie/new wave/whatever band The Nails.

Just goes to show the difference a definite article can make. Nails sound pretty good, but I don’t think I’ll be going.

You Choose

Mon, 10 Apr 2017 19:37:10 +0000

Funny where thoughts of current affairs take you.

All the fawning (and, to be fair, condemnatory and neutral) coverage of Trump’s bombardment of a Syrian air base in response to Assad’s gas attack have stated the quantity and type of munition that was used: “59 Tomahawk Cruise missiles.”

Those of us who lived under the shadow of the mushroom cloud in the 80s will remember that missile. It was the one stationed at Greenham Common, which of course was the subject of much protest, mainly from the Women’s Peace Camp.

The Greenham camp was primarily part of the anti-nuclear movement, as the missiles stationed there carried nuclear warheads. Obviously the ones the US launched a couple of nights ago didn’t, but what the whole thing did was remind me of a song from that time: “Tomahawk Cruise,” by TV Smith‘s Explorers.

I recall hearing that song in my Dad’s car¹ back when it came out. It’s possible that I only heard it that one time, but it has stuck in my mind all these years, just waiting to be shaken loose.

On listening to it on Apple Music I’m pleased to find the chorus is almost exactly as I remembered. The rest of the lyrics are more oblique than I’d have expected. It was an anti-nuclear song, but less obviously than I’d have thought.

It’s very 80s, as you might expect (it was released in 1980), but there is, of course, nothing wrong with that. Inevitably it’s to be found on YouTube and Spotify.

Not sure whether this counts as nostalgia, in terms of my post the other day, but I don’t really care. What definitely isn’t, though, is the album I’m listening to as I type: The Chiswick Story by Various Artists² (most of whom I haven’t heard) is a potted history of the label. Lots of good stuff on there.

Bit weird, as he never listened to Radio 1, and there’s no way it would’ve been on Radio 2. I guess maybe I was waiting in the car while my parents shopped. ↩︎
It was suggested because that’s the label “Tomahawk Cruise” was on. ↩︎

Swim, Test, Shop, Film, Sleep

Sat, 08 Apr 2017 23:31:30 +0000

Yesterday I kind of wilfully skipped a day. At some point in the evening I realised I wasn’t going to write a post, so I just said, “Fine: that’s allowed.”

Today I started by going for a swim. After my new regime of exercise last summer, I got out of the habit once I started a new contract. So it was good to get back to it. (Which is not to say I haven’t swum or gone to the gym in all that time, but it’s been a few weeks at the moment.)

After that I took a HackerRank test for a new job opportunity. It’s a site that does programming tests. This one was, I suspect, a disaster. I hate doing that kind of thing: you’ve got a timer running, and the problem you’re trying to solve is unlike anything you’d have to do professionally… Anyway, suffice to say, it didn’t go terribly well.

This evening was all about falling asleep in front of the telly. We tried to watch 20,000 Days On Earth, the film about Nick Cave from a few years back. I got it a few Christmases or birthdays ago, but hadn’t got round to watching it till now. I enjoyed what I saw of it, but there was definite falling asleep on the sofa and missing chunks. Oh well, it’s a DVD: we can always go back.

Oh yes: there was also a trip to Westfield, the time-void where hours go to die.

Looking Back and Forward

Fri, 07 Apr 2017 00:47:48 +0000

My recent and forthcoming live music experiences all involve bands of my youth that have reformed and are touring their old material.¹ Wallowing in nostalgia, some might call it.

But there’s nothing inherently wrong with bands getting back together. It can be problematic if you are the band that tours as the Dead Kennedys, of course. There’s a whole saga there that I won’t go into, but if Jello Biafra’s not involved, and in fact is actively against it, then it’s not the Dead Kennedys.

Indeed, in his song “Buy My Snake Oil” Jello suggested that a way for old punks to make money off their history would be to

Give in
Ride the punk nostalgia wave
For all it’s worth
Recycle the name of my old band
For a big reunion tour
Sing all those hits from the “good ol’ days”
‘Bout how bad the good ol’ days were

Which is a fair criticism of old bands doing their thing in modern days, I guess. But I see two arguments to counter it, from a gig-goer’s point of view.

Unfinished

The first was made by my friend Andrew, around the time that the Sex Pistols reformed and toured. This would have been in 1996.

“I missed them first time round,” he said when I challenged him about it. “This is unfinished business for me.”

Which was a good point, and kind of made me regret playing the purist and not going.

In 1993 I had investigated going to see the reunited Velvet Underground. But I really didn’t want to see them at an all-seated venue. Partly because I’d had a bad experience seeing Lou Reed a year or so before (despite having had a very good experience with him a year or two before that).

I recall that I phoned the venue — Earl’s Court, I think — and found that it did have some standing room. But those tickets were sold out. So I didn’t go. Regretted that, too. So I’m taking the chance to see bands like the Rezillos, or The Beat and The Selecter, that I missed first time around.

OK, But What is it Really?

The second point about the “punk nostalgia wave” (or any similar accusation of nostalgia) is: that is not what it is.

Because here’s the thing: it isn’t nostalgia if you’re carrying on with something that was always there.

Nostalgia (noun): a feeling of pleasure and also slight sadness when you think about things that happened in the past

according to Cambridge.

But this isn’t that. Because while those bands’ heydays might have been in the past, their music has remained available and frequently-played. You can’t be nostalgic for an album you listened to last week, or last night.

And a live performance always happens in the present.

This train of thought was kicked off for me a couple of years back when there was an article in the Guardian, prior to The Force Awakens coming out. I can’t find it now,² but it claimed that “nostalgia” was part of the cause of the excitement for the new film.

And I thought, no. Well, maybe for some people. But for many of us, if not most of us, Star Wars never went away. We’ve watched it, talked about it, read theories about it, and so on. It has been part of our lives.

Or take Doctor Who. Sure, there were the wilderness years before 2005, but The Doctor never really went away. The Tardis and Daleks are burned into Britain’s cultural memory, and I think they always will be.

Now if I were to see an episode of, say, Marine Boy: that would be nostalgic. I remember it fondly from my childhood, and have never seen it since. I’ve never even seen it in colour, because those were the days of black & white televisions.³

But I can’t be nostalgic for punk bands or Star Wars or Doctor Who, because they never went away. The sense of warmth and shared experience they bring: that’s not nostalgia, it’s something else. Familiarity, at worst. Or better: community.

Or a mixture of old and new, as with The Rezillos. ↩︎
This is why you should always save links, folks. ↩︎
God, I really come from another time, don’t I? ↩︎

Punk and Hugo

Wed, 05 Apr 2017 23:42:58 +0000

I hadn’t come across Garageland London before, though I approve of the name.¹ They came across my radar the other day with a piece called Cease and Desist: An open letter to Brewdog from PUNK, which says:

It has recently been brought to our attention that you are claiming legal ownership of the word ‘punk’ and are sending threatening legal notices to those you feel are infringing on that ownership by using that word.

I hadn’t heard this about Brewdog. If it’s true, they’re being beyond ridiculous (or possibly winding people up). I’ve got a lot of time for a Scottish company making craft beer, even if it’s only OK (and too damn strong most of the time: I like a beer you can drink a few of without falling over). But like the Garageland people, I thought their “Equity for Punks investment portfolio did raise some eyebrows.”

The open letter ends:

Definitions of punk are varied and debates over those definitions have been going on since before you were born. However, one thing punk is not is a bully! That goes against everything punk stands for. If you continue in this vein your punk credentials will be revoked and you will be called upon to cease and desist.

Kind regards and a middle finger salute

and is then signed by hundreds of bands. So many that I can’t really believe the website got agreement from all of them. But I heartily endorse the message.

In other good news, the Hugo Awards nominations were announced, and it looks like a great list, and also like the Puppies have been almost totally wiped out this year. Yay fandom!

I also note that one of the novel nominees is the very Too Like the Lightning that I was writing about the other day. Hugo nominated, and you still can’t buy it in Britain. Come on publishers!

Also: WordPress tells me that this is my 600th post on here. Not that many for the time the site’s been going for, but a milestone — or at least a round number — nonetheless.

It’s named after a Clash song, as if you didn’t know. ↩︎

Garden and Barbican

Sun, 02 Apr 2017 23:34:58 +0000

Spent most of today in the garden, making a start on clearing it up for the summer. Not exactly gardening, as such. More gathering sticks and leaves, and putting them into brown bins for collection. Nice day for it, though.

Then this evening to the Barbican, for the New York Philharmonic doing a couple of pieces by John Adams, as part of the “John Adams at 70″ series. Oh, and in the middle they had a cello concerto by Esa-Pekka Salonen. Who was the cellist? Nobody special. Just Yo-Yo Ma.

It was clearly a virtuoso performance, but I didn’t enjoy the Salonen nearly as much as I did the two Adams pieces. Especially the second, “Harmonielehre.” Among other things, it’s good to see something orchestral where the percussionists have some serious work to do.

Not that we could see the percussionists, mostly. We were effectively in the front row. Which is to say, it was row D, but row C was right up against the front of the stage, and not being used because the stage had been extended into rows A and B. That orchestra is big. The downside of having such close seats is that you can only see the first few rows of the orchestra: the string sections, basically.

The big upside of the position, of course, is that you get such a close view and intimate sense of the performance. It’s almost like you’re inside the music at times.

Meanwhile British politics has gone even crazier, with Michael Howard crawling out of the woodwork to threaten war with Spain.¹ But that’s a discussion for another time.

To be fair to Howard, that’s not at all what he said. Just that May should be as steadfast with Spain as Thatcher was with Argentina. But “war” is of course how the papers are hyping it. It wouldn’t surprise me if Gibraltarians (96% remain) now wanted to become part of Spain. ↩︎

Interesting Lineup

Fri, 31 Mar 2017 23:43:30 +0000

Interesting generation-spanning lineup at the British Summer Time festival in Hyde Park: Green Day headlining, with the lower-on-the-bill bands including The Damned and The Stranglers. Interesting questions of seniority there.

They should really get Stiff Little Fingers as well, for the full High Fidelity vibe.

Singles

Mon, 27 Mar 2017 23:43:39 +0000

I was thinking about the loss of singles. Not individual tracks released individually: that still happens, of course; perhaps more than ever. But back in the days of actual, physical singles — 45 rpm records, or even CD singles later — you didn’t just get an individual track.

I’m here to celebrate — and maybe mourn the loss of — the B-side.

When you bought a single you usually knew what the main song was going to be, because you had heard it on the radio, or at least read a review. Or you might just know and trust the artist’s work, and believe that the chosen track would be worth your 75p.¹

But there was always the promise that there would be something good on the other side, too.

Often, of course, the B-side track was really “B” quality, or lower. It was genuinely just filler. Which was always a shame. I remember flipping Elvis Costello’s “Oliver’s Army,” to find out what “My Funny Valentine” was like. I hated it, and never listened to it again. Though as (in other versions) it’s something of a jazz classic, it’s possible that I’d like it more now.

The Members’ classic “The Sound of the Suburbs” was backed by something called “Handling the Big Jets,” which always sounded slightly rude to us² and I think was an instrumental.

But for every one of those you could get a “Jail Guitar Doors,”³ or a “The Prisoner.”⁴ Or almost any Beatles single.

Then there were double A-sides, wherein both sides were supposed to be worthy of being playlisted. They always felt like slightly better value for your hard-earned pocket money.

And when CD singles came along they usually had three tracks, raising them arguably into the EP category.

But now, tracks are realised for streaming or download, completely on their own. It’s very sad, and I’m sure they must feel lonely. Plus if you’re buying the download and you want what would have been the B-side, you have to pay for each individual track.

I was going to say, as well, that if you search for single on your streaming service of choice, you only get one track. But I found out the other day that’s not quite true. I wanted to listen to “Elephant Stone,” by the Stone Roses; and in fact the B-side, “The Hardest Thing In the World” was listed too. Its “Album” tag was given as “Elephant Stone — Single (2009)”.

Which apart from the wrong date (and ok, it could’ve been a reissue ⁵) is not a bad example of misused metadata. Or maybe just misnamed: not every gathering or carrier of a group of songs or musical pieces is an “album”.

Or maybe that’s just a change of meaning: what we used to call a single or an EP is now just a very short album.

Only 50p, in fact, when I first bought them. ↩︎
We were schoolboys. ↩︎
The B-side of “Clash City Rockers,” of course. ↩︎
B-side of “(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais.” What, you think I’m not going to talk about Clash singles? ↩︎
But how you should give the date for reissues is a whole nother conversation ↩︎

Demo

Sat, 25 Mar 2017 19:14:50 +0000

Sadly, I couldn’t make it to the anti-Brexit/pro-Europe demo today. I had a work thing that ended up taking most of the day. But I was there in spirit.

Last night was Comic Relief, which included Red Nose Day Actually. I thought the speech by Hugh Grant’s prime minister character was amazingly relevant to the times. Obviously that was intended, generally; but specifically it had resonance with London’s reaction to the Westminster terrorist attack.

Also about that, Mitch Benn has written a song called “London’s Had Worse,” in which he sings of our resilience and the attacker’s crapness. Not his best song, but no bad.

And Then it Was All That

Sun, 12 Mar 2017 23:06:54 +0000

One of the blogs I follow is called And now it’s all this, by the mysterious Dr Drang. He writes mainly on engineering and provides lots of interesting Python scripts.

What I’m interested in his blog’s title and subtitle, though. “And now it’s all this”; and “I just said what I said and it was wrong. Or was taken wrong.” I’ve been reading it for years, and had only idly wondered about why it was called that, or what it really meant.

I’ve also been listening to, and reading about, The Beatles for years — for a great many more years. And so I was very familiar with John Lennon’s “more popular than Jesus” line, and the subsequent furore.

But not that familiar, it turns out. Or not with his apology, at least.

We recently watched the excellent Eight Days a Week film, which has lots of Beatles footage I’d never seen before, and puts it all together into a compelling narrative.

Of course, it covers the “Jesus” period. So there was John, at a press conference, making an apology of sorts. And out pops:

I just said what I said and it was wrong. Or was taken wrong. And now it’s all this.

Oh. OK. Right. I should have seen that years ago.

Of course there are two remaining questions:

Why did the good doctor choose to name his blog that?
And what does the “leancrew” mean in his domain name?

Saved Life

Sat, 11 Mar 2017 23:45:16 +0000

In International Clash Day I mentioned a life-changing song: “Wasted Life,” by Stiff Little Fingers. SLF’s anti-military song literally changed my life; or its potential direction, at least. I was probably moving in an anti-war kind of direction anyway, to be fair, but it was definitely a trigger point.

People say — or used they to, at least — that a song couldn’t change your life. By comparison, I don’t think there was ever a similar tendency to say that a book couldn’t change a person’s life. I suspect that is down to their comparative sizes: it seems respectable for something the size of a novel to have a major impact on a human’s psyche, while a three-minute song? Not so much.

Although if it were merely length, then people wouldn’t have complained if you said an album changed your life. I’m not sure that anyone ever said that,¹ but I suspect that if they had, their statement would have been pooh-poohed just as much as the same claim for a song.

At this point I feel I ought to quote Springsteen, giving the opposite view:

We learned more from a three-minute record, baby,
Than we ever learned in school

he sings in “No Surrender.” Hyperbole, certainly, but there is a core of truth to it: the truth of the feeling you can get from listening to a great song.

With “Wasted Life” the feeling for me was of sudden crystallisation, or realisation. I had, for some years, been saying that I wanted to be pilot, join the RAF. This was before the horrors of the Gulf War, or for that matter the Balkans. Though it was in the heart of the Cold War, and British soldiers were stationed in Northern Ireland during the troubles — though not so much RAF staff, I would think.

But I was blind to all that, brought up as I was on a diet of Second World War films, Commando comics, and Airfix models of warplanes. I had, in short, a thoroughly romanticised view of war. And I just wanted to fly.

But I didn’t want to kill. I had always known that, I’m sure. But two lines of that one song made it real for me:

Stuff their fucking armies
Killing isn’t my idea of fun²

And that was all it took. I remember that it was a while before I could tell my parents that I had changed my plans. Perhaps because they would have asked why, and I didn’t want to have to explain it. Maybe because I thought they’d be disappointed. I’m sure my Mum wasn’t. My Dad kind of was: “But you were going to be a Spanish-speaking pilot,” he said. He had always been slightly amused that my school taught half of us Spanish, instead of the then-much-more-conventional French.

A life can hinge on such a small moment.

Somebody must have, of course. ↩︎
In an amusing followup to recent thoughts, I originally wrote that as “army,” but find that lyrics sites think this plural too. Correctly, of course. ↩︎

Stiff Little Memories

Wed, 08 Mar 2017 23:52:48 +0000

I’ve just had two slightly odd experiences while researching Stiff Little Fingers.

SLF were the first band I ever saw live, and they had a major effect on my life — which is why I was researching them: I’m writing a longer piece about the effect they had on me.

So as I was reading the Wikipedia article about them, I became somewhat confused. Because it says they split up in 1983, and reformed in 1987. Now the breakup I’d forgotten about, but it seems right. However, I saw them on the tour in 87. I saw them two days in a row. I had tickets for the Brixton Academy gig, which I think was on a Saturday, and then when Time Out came out that week there was a small advert in the back (I’ve no idea how I came to see it), which said:

Tin Soldiers
Belfast’s finest. Shhh: a secret gig!

Or something very like that. It was on the Friday night at the Mean Fiddler. Which I don’t think I had ever been to at that time, and which was a bastard long way from Tooting. But I wasn’t going to miss the chance to see SLF in a small club.

What I mainly remember was that the Academy gig the next night was a bit of a letdown after the intensity of seeing them at the Mean Fiddler.

But anyway, the point of all of this is that as far as I remember things, this all was — or was billed as — their farewell tour. That’s why the t-shirt (which I still have) says “Game Over.”

Now obviously they’re around again, and I’ve seen them since, and bought albums they’ve released since. But my memory says they broke up in 87 (or it could have been 88, but I think not (though actually March 88 if this setlist site is to be believed)), and then reformed later. But Wikipedia and All Music both say I’m wrong.

I don’t know. Who would you trust?

Actually probably not me. I’m becoming more convinced as I look at that setlist site, that I must have seen them several times at the Academy, after moving to London in 87, and the supposed farewell tour must have been later. In which case the Mean Fiddler was a bastard long way from Walthamstow, but that’s still true.

The second odd experience was that I clicked onto the Wikipedia talk page to see whether the history was disputed at all. It isn’t, but around five sections in there’s a section entitled “the?”, in which someone asks whether they were ever referred to as “the Stiff Little Fingers.”

And back in 2007 some guy called “Devilgate” answered firmly in the negative.

Little, Feat...

Mon, 06 Mar 2017 23:58:37 +0000

Many songs these days involve one or more other artists guesting with the main one. Rappers adding a part to a singer’s track, for example. Nowadays such guests are always credited. Quite rightly: we’ve come a long way from the days when Billy Preston played keyboards on some Beatles songs uncredited (though visible in the famous Apple Records rooftop performance).

As featured artists, such guests are nearly always credited using the abbreviation “feat.” “The Beatles feat Billy Preston,” to give an example that was never used.

But “feat” is a word on it’s own, of course, as well as an abbreviation. Which I think may be why I always find the formation slightly amusing. And there used to be a band called Little Feat, if I’m not very much mistaken (I’ve never knowingly heard them).

So I’ve been wondering how the modern crediting style would have worked if they had ever been guests, or had featured guests, on any of their songs. “Little Feat feat Joe Feet.” “Legs & Co feat Little Feat.”¹

Alas, it was not the way back then. Though their Wikipedia article suggests they’re still around, so it could happen.

More surprisingly it tells us that they changed “Feet” to “Feat” as a “homage to the Beatles.”² I had no inkling of that connection when I mentioned the Beatles above.

Yes, I know Legs & Co were dancers. I’m just trying to make up mildly amusing names. I invented Joe Feet. ↩︎
I’m assuming that refers to the story of the Beatles naming that involved them wanting an insect name like Buddy Holly & the Crickets, but changing the spelling so it read as beat music. ↩︎

Reassessing

Fri, 03 Mar 2017 23:24:51 +0000

I never cared that much for Joe Cocker’s highly-rated cover of “With A Little Help From My Friends,” but I just saw it on BBC Four’s … Sings the Beatles, a programme whose title tells you exactly what it’s about.

And… hell, yeah: it’s really good. Apparently Steve Winwood and Jimmy Page are on the recording. But we won’t hold that against it.¹ Sometimes all you need is the passage of time; sometimes it’s just about the mood you’re in. But it’s often worth giving things another chance.²

Now it’s on Petula Clark’s weird-arse version of “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” during which the caption tells us that Petula is Britain’s best-selling ever female artist. I’m guessing this was made before Adele.

What? The Punk Wars never ended. ↩︎
I guess. But how far do you go? Napoleon Dynamite? I think not. ↩︎

Memorials

Mon, 27 Feb 2017 23:29:35 +0000

The Quietus reports on a crowdfunding proposal to build a memorial to David Bowie in Brixton. I like the look of it, but they’re going to have to go some to make the required £990,000 in 21 days, given that they’re only at £45,000 now.

In other news, the new series of Broadchurch started tonight. Strong start, powerful stuff. But it now seems weirdly old-fashioned to have to wait a week to see the next episode.

Ticket Captcha Fail

Fri, 10 Feb 2017 13:12:16 +0000

Just tried and failed to book Dylan tickets. Three nights at the London Palladium in April. I got an email from Songkick telling me about it yesterday, and jumped straight on it.

To learn that tickets didn’t go on sale till 10:00 today. At which time I was going to be traveling to King’s Cross to get a train to Edinburgh, which is a wee bit inconvenient.

As it happened by just after ten I was at KX, and buying my lunch for the journey. But of course at that time I had forgotten about the tickets. By the time I remembered it was 12:44. The Palladium only holds just over 2000, so there wasn’t much hope.

But I wasn’t helped by Ticketmaster’s ludicrous captcha overkill. Seemed like every time I moved from one page to another I had to click an “I am not a robot” checkbox and then select all the pictures containing street signs, or pickup trucks, or storefronts, from an array of tiny shitty pictures. Pickup trucks and storefronts? We barely have the former in this country, and we don’t use the latter term. And sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s in the pictures. I was doing this on a phone, after all.

I wonder how serious their problem with automated ticket-buying bots is. I guess it must be an issue, given that the whole business of an inflated resale markets and touts at venues still exists.

Anyway, all gone in London, but you may have a chance elsewhere.

International Clash Day

Tue, 07 Feb 2017 23:50:53 +0000

I saw a hashtag on Twitter this evening: #InternationalClashDay. Well, it doesn’t take a lot, and now my actual favourite Clash song is blasting out of the Sonos: “Death or Glory,” from London Calling.

I say “actual” because if asked I would usually say that “(White Man) in Hammersmith Palais” is my favourite Clash song (if not overall favourite song, and very probably that too). And then I listen to London Calling again, and am reminded of the glory of “Death or Glory.”

If anyone ever asks who my favourite band is I’ll unhesitatingly say, “The Clash.” Almost unthinkingly, which may not be good; but some things become part of us.

I can almost remember when I first heard them properly. It was at Bob McGarry’s house. He played a single and then tried to impersonate John Peel, saying, “Those were The Clash,” which is how Peelie often used to back-announce things in those days. I don’t recall what track it was: “White Riot,” probably. I wasn’t overwhelmed, to be honest. It certainly didn’t have a life-changing feeling; not like when I heard Stiff little Fingers’s “Wasted Life,” possibly in the same house, or maybe it was in Brendan Conroy’s. I must write about that one someday.

But other songs and albums were waiting. I can’t honestly say what it was that finally did it for me. Maybe “Tommy Gun” or “English Civil War.” Maybe “White Man” itself. I do know that shortly after London Calling was released, my friend Steven Watt said to me, “I envy you: you haven’t heard London Calling yet.”

Somewhere in there, though — after I bought my first copy of London Calling for £3.99¹, and before I bought Sandinista for the same price — I was fully onboard, and searching for all the old singles in Glasgow record shops.

Writing that makes me think that the point of transition might actually have been when I saw my friends’ band The Varicose Veins² doing “Clash City Rockers.” In which case a cover version was key. Which is fine. One of The Clash’s most famous songs, “I Fought the Law,” was a cover, after all.

I should probably be able to explain why they mean so much to me, but I’m not sure I can. It’s probably a combination of affinity for their viewpoint, the sheer raw energy of their early songs, and their lyrics.

But maybe not. Maybe it’s just that the golden age of music is around 14-15, and lessons learned then — lessons burned on the soul — stay with us.

“The only band that matters.” It’s been quoted so often it’s become a cliché. But that doesn’t mean it’s not true.

It later got stolen during a party in Edinburgh. I replaced it with a second-hand copy for the same price. ↩︎
Said Brendan was the bass player. ↩︎

Rezillos Gig

Sat, 28 Jan 2017 12:53:27 +0000

To the 229 venue on London’s Great Portland Street last night, to see the Rezillos, about whose reformation I’ve written before, here. I didn’t go to see them back then, so last night I put that right. I had never even heard of this place before, but apparently it’s been around since the sixties. Nice place: good sound system, and fair beer (though the Punk IPA was off).

We had a support band called the Tuts, who are three women from Brighton, and the first band I’ve instantly fallen for since Savages.

Despite what the backdrop and bass drum say, this was actually the Tuts.

Those are they. Check them out if you can.

And then we had the support band that I knew about in advance: Spizz Energi, who are a similar vintage to The Rezillos, and with similar SF-related sensibilities — at least as far as a couple of songs go. But on the night — and after the Tuts — they were actually quite dull.

But the Rezillos killed it. They were utterly fantastic. Eugene was playing guitar for the first song or two, which surprised me, but he soon put that away and just sang, along with Fay, of course.

My only slight regrets were that we didn’t get “Thunderbirds Are Go” or “Teenbeat.” But all the other top hits were there.

I realised as I was there that I only ever Instagram from gigs these days. Gig-gramming, I hereby christen it, though I expect I’m not the first.

Never Mind the Bollocks: Women Rewrite Rock by Amy Raphael (Books 2016, 14)

Sun, 09 Oct 2016 22:34:17 +0000

Been reading this over a period of a year or so, on and off, so it’s not really this year’s book. But that’s no reason not to write about it. It was published in 1994 and consists of interviews with a selection of the women who were relatively newly on the scene, or were established but getting some more visibility, around that time. It was the time of Riot Grrrl, among other movements.

So among the interviewees are Courtney Love, Huggy Bear, Liz Phair, Tanya Donnelly, Kristin Hersh, Kim Gordon… even Bjork. But there’s someone missing from the book. Nearly all of the interviewees, when talking about their influences or other women who were doing something interesting at the time, mention PJ Harvey. And she is not interviewed. Which is a shame. I would have loved to have read her thoughts on making music back then (or now, for that matter). And I’m sure Amy Raphael would have loved to interview her, so I’m guessing she didn’t want to do it.

But aside from that, it’s an interesting work. Very much a document of its time, though no doubt the problems and challenges that these women faced have not changed that much. A similar book today, though, would have a very different complement of interviewees; and indeed would need a different subtitle: women musicians are much more prominent in pop and R&B today, from Beyoncé on down. But maybe not so much in rock, unfortunately.

Well worth a read, though.

How in the World are they Making that Sound?

Fri, 15 Jul 2016 12:26:19 +0000

OK, so why did no-one tell me that Jonathan Richman -- of whom I am, or used to be, a fan -- released a song back in 1992 or so, called “Velvet Underground”? I’ve been a fan of them since long before it was cool, as you know.[^fn1]

OK, so though Jonathan wrote the mighty “Roadrunner” (and apparently was called by some, “The Godfather of Punk”, though I thought that was Iggy), he later moved to a much more mellow, quieter sound. And that’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with that. We don’t always want to to be listening to the loudest stuff.¹

But anyway, it turns out that there’s this song about the Velvet Underground, which is cool as fuck, as you might expect. Jonathan, of course, has been associated with the Velvets since the early days, roadieing for them and whatnot. So who better to write a song that tries to evoke the startling, shocking effect they had on people, on the music scene, back in 1966 or so?

Here’s his description of John Cale in action:

A spooky tone on a Fender bass
Played less notes and left more space
Stayed kind of still, looked kinda shy
Kinda far away, kinda dignified

They were “America at its best,” he says, and who could disagree? If you haven’t heard it, it’s on Apple Music, Spotify and even YouTube, where I understand the younglings like to go.

Both guitars got the fuzz tone on
The drummer's standing upright pounding along
A howl, a tone, a feedback whine
Biker boys meet the college kind

After one of the choruses where he sings, “How in the world were they making that sound?/Velvet Underground,” he says, “Like this,” and launches into a verse of “Sister Ray.” It’s all very, very cool.

Though let’s face it, we mostly do. If there was a god, and it didn’t want us to listen to loud music, then why would it have invented amplification? ↩︎

Career of Evil by Robert Galbraith (Books 2015, 9)

Wed, 04 Nov 2015 23:48:52 +0000

The pages, how they turn. I'm sure I've said that before of JK Rowling's work, but not in public, it seems. Amusing to note that The Silkworm was my number 10 last year.

Plenty of Robin in this one, and it’s probably the best of the three. Certainly better than the last one.

Strangest thing about it is the music. By which I mean: the title is taken from a song by Blue Öyster Cult, and quotes from them precede most of the chapters (some chapters have titles, and those are the titles of BÖC songs).

Now, I had no idea that Patti Smith wrote some lyrics for BÖC, but apparently she did¹

Still on a musical note, in passing, one of the ancillary characters roadies for a band who are called Death Cult. Since JK Rowling is about the same age as me, and since she obviously pays attention to music, I would expect her to know that The Cult used to be known as Death Cult, and before that as Southern Death Cult. But perhaps you had to read the music papers in the 80s to know about that kind of stuff.²

Anyway, the Death Cult here have nothing to do with either the famous Cult, nor the Blue Öyster one.

The ending is a tad unsatisfying, as it leaves a number of things unresolved – which is fine, as there will no doubt be more books – and doesn’t really give us enough time post-denoument to decompress with the characters.

Still, highly recommended, as long as you’re not put off by gruesome scenes.

We went to see her at the Roundhouse the other day, incidentally, on the 40th anniversary tour for Horses; but I digress. ↩︎
And it turns out not to be quite as I remember, as according to Wikipedia, the only connection between SDC and Death Cult/The Cult is Ian Astbury. ↩︎

On Djs, Beats 1, and Talking Over Songs

Fri, 21 Aug 2015 07:53:21 +0000

I hadn't heard Zane Lowe, as I mentioned before. So when Apple Music launched, with its Beats 1 streaming radio service, for which Zane is the flagship DJ, I was interested to check him out.

A number of sources had led me to the belief that Zane, at Radio One, had effectively been the new John Peel. Nobody can live up to that claim, I suspect, but to me it meant that he must have a particular set of talents and abilities:

plays music of their own choice, free from playlists mandated by the station management;
actively seeks out new music;
communicates their enthusiasm to the listener;
plays the tracks in full, without talking over the beginning or end.

I’ve now heard Zane on Beats 1 a couple of times, and he certainly fulfils the first three of those criteria. But he fails dramatically on the fourth.

The thing with Peelie was, he played the track. He respected it, gave it space to succeed or fail on its own merit. Certainly he’d say, “This is the new one from so-and-so, and I think it’s great,” or whatever; but then he’d let you hear the record. The actual record. All of it. The whole thing.¹

Zane does not do that.

No, I’m afraid he talks over the records. And not just over instrumental intros or “chasing the fade,” either. I’ve heard him popping up right in the middle of a song with a word or two.

One of the people who spoke highly of Zane was Myke Hurley of Relay FM, the podcast network. In particular I had heard him talking on the Upgrade podcast about what a good guy Zane was.

So when I heard Mr Lowe talking over the tracks, I tweeted with the #AskUpgrade tag, which is one of their feedback mechanisms:

#AskUpgrade Myke, if Zane Lowe is so great, how come he talks over the records (err, tracks)? Isn't meant to be in the Peel mould?
— Martin McCallion (@devilgate) July 10, 2015

They read out my question on the next episode, 45, I think. Make said I sounded “very angry”, which I wasn’t – just disappointed. And then we exchanged a few tweets:

[@imyke](https://micro.blog/imyke) Thanks for answering my Zane Lowe question on Upgrade. I wasn’t “very angry”, just disappointed, as I’d hoped for a new Peel.
— Martin McCallion (@devilgate) July 14, 2015

[@imyke](https://micro.blog/imyke) One of Peel’s gifts was that he talked about the music between the tracks. (Which among other things made it easy to record them.)
— Martin McCallion (@devilgate) July 14, 2015

[@devilgate](https://micro.blog/devilgate) I don’t know if I’d call that a ‘gift’
If all you’re looking for is the music, subscribe to zane’s playlists
— Myke Hurley (@imyke) July 14, 2015

[@imyke](https://micro.blog/imyke) No, “trick”, or “technique”, maybe. Thing is I’d like the talk, the enthusiasm; just not over the music.
— Martin McCallion (@devilgate) July 14, 2015

And that’s about where we left it. I don’t think I got across my main point very well (140 characters is hard sometimes). But I’ve expressed it clearly enough up top there, I think.

Beats One is still interesting, and Apple Music has many interesting features. But I’m still looking for a DJ that knows how to treat records right.

Sometimes that was true even when “record” equalled “album”. ↩︎

Drive-By Brucellosis

Sun, 12 Jul 2015 01:28:31 +0000

The day after I post linking to Patterson Hood's NYT piece, I get an email from Amazon recommending a Drive-By Truckers album. I assumed it was a new one.

Not too spooky – I doubt their bots are reading my blog. It’s nothing more than the fact that I’ve bought DBT albums from Amazon before. Only the timing was surprising – plus the fact that I had no idea that the album was coming out. Though further research shows that it’s not actually a new album, making Amazon’s prompt slightly more suspect again.

Anyway the interesting thing about this album – The Fine Print: A Collection Of Oddities And Rarities 2003-2008 – is that it contains a track called ‘Play it All Night Long’. I’m assuming that this must be a cover of Warren Zevon’s song of the same name.

Now, that song is a dissection of DBT’s beloved Lynyrd Skynyrd. Or at least it uses “that dead band’s song” as part of its critique of the South. For DBT to cover it must be an example of “the duality of the southern thing,” of which they speak extensively on Southern Rock Opera.

Of course, large parts of that album are about Skynyrd, so covering a song that is also partly about them isn’t much of a stretch. Thing is, Zevon’s song is less than positive about the South as a whole, or Skynyrd by implication. Not, of course, that the DBTs are entirely positive about the South; that duality again.

‘Play it All Night Long’ is also the only known song – known by me, at least – to contain the word “brucellosis”.

The first time

Thu, 19 Mar 2015 01:25:46 +0000

I've probably meant to write about this kind of thing for years: first records, the first bands I saw live, and so on. I was prompted to finally visit it by a post over at The Reinvigorated Programmer.

The Programmer tells us of his first record, and links it to his impending trip to see Paul McCartney. I note that, irrespective of his first single, he knows what the first album he owned was. I don’t. I can tell you the first singles I was given (one now spoiled by the epidemic of 70s celebrities having been slimeballs), the first I bought by choice (maximally embarrassing), and various other details. But the first album? I’m not sure. Not sure at all.

I can tell you the first album we owned as a family: it was called Bing and Louis, by Messrs Crosby and Armstrong. We had gone to a hi-fi shop in Glasgow to buy a stereo (which for some reason my parents pronounced “steer-ee-oh”, and did for years thereafter). We hadn’t had any kind of record player before then. I must have been about seven, maybe?

Anyway, the guy in the shop was using this Crosby and Armstrong record¹ to demo the turntable, and my Mum liked it so much that he gave it to us. As I recall it was always really badly scratched – crackly, not sticking – so it makes me wonder why on Earth he was using it to demo anything. Unless it was like, “This system is so good you’ll hear every crackle.”

After that initial record, my parents mainly had soundtrack albums – or at least, those were the ones that I remember listening to. The Sound of Music, Paint Your Wagon, Cabaret… I know, the latter was most unsuitable. Except the music isn’t (unless you’re overly influenced by “Tomorrow Belongs to Me”). It was years later before I saw the film.²

And as I think back to the cupboard under the stereo, I’m remembering a couple of albums that were bought for me that are not the one I was going to mention (inasmuch as was going to mention early albums at all, which I wasn’t when I started writing this).

There was an album of really bad versions of TV themes – mainly SF ones, I think, as the only ones I can remember are Doctor Who and Star Trek. The former was bad, but the latter was so bad that I remember my friend Scot saying, “The shite’s coming out” when it started playing one time, after I had described it as “shite”.

Why did we listen to it, then? I dunno. I guess we were musically starved to death.

And something from when I was a bit younger, called, if I recall correctly, Tubby the Tuba. I don’t even want to google that.

I think there was also at least one Disney soundtrack album. Maybe the animated Robin Hood?

The thing I was thinking of, though, that was at least something like a rock or pop album, was given to me by my brother one Christmas. It was called Blockbusters, and it consisted of songs by The Sweet, Mud and Suzi Quatro, making it a seminal influence on me, considering my origin story. And I still have that one.

The connection between the three, as the well-informed musicologist will know, is that they were all Chinnichap artists. Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman were the Stock, Aitken and Waterman of their day.³

It was a great album, with all the hits you could want: “Blockbuster” itself, of course; “Tiger Feet”; “Dynamite”; and of course, “Devil Gate Drive”, and more.

It was only years later that I realised that they weren’t by the original artists. These were the days before compilations like the Now That’s What I Call Music! series, which reliably package up a selection of the year’s chart hits, properly credited and in their original single form. Back then, every year saw another album in the Top of the Pops series, which shared only the name with the TV show. On them you got a selection of the year’s hits, performed by a studio band doing passable clones of the originals.

My Blockbusters album was the same kind of thing, but focused on a single songwriting team.

It was still good, though.

But none of this leads me any closer to remembering what the first album I chose to buy (or asked to have bought for me) was. Possibly it was something by The Beatles. It wasn’t till my sister gave me a reel-to-reel tape of Beatles singles that I really got into music.

But I suspect the only way to be sure will be to do a careful inventory of my records. Which is project for another time.

By now, though, you’re probably desperate to know about those embarrassing or spoiled early singles. Or, you’ve completely forgotten about them.

Some time after we got the stereo, I was given two singles: “The Laughing Gnome” by David Bowie; and “I’m the Leader of the Gang (I am)” by Gary Glitter. Who’d have thought that the second of those would come to be the more embarrassing?

Then a few years later, after Britain’s Eurovision triumph, I took a liking to the Brotherhood of Man, and bought “Oh Boy (The Mood I’m In)”. Which – oh my god! – was in 1977. I am ashamed.

I bought it in Boots (the shop, not the footwear), if I remember rightly. Remember when they were kind of a department store, and sold records?

I’m kind of sure it must be this one, except that’s shown as Bing & Satchmo, and I’m sure the title was as I gave it above. ↩︎
And I’ve still never seen Paint Your Wagon. ↩︎
I’m kind of amazed to read that they wrote Toni Basil’s “Mickey”, as well. ↩︎

On missing out on Zane

Fri, 13 Mar 2015 13:40:35 +0000

I feel strangely that I've missed out on Zane Lowe -- on knowing who he is as a DJ, as an interviewer; maybe even as the inheritor of John Peel's Radio One mantle. And now he's off to Apple.

I’ve just been listening to an interview with Lowe on Scroobius Pip’s Distraction Pieces podcast, and he comes across as very interesting and informed. And I heard about his Apple move recently on another podcast, wherein Myke Hurley talked about his move and how he had been the best introducer of new music at Radio One since Peel.

(Podcasts are the new rock ‘n’ roll radio: discuss.)

And I’ve never knowingly heard his show.

Which is a shame, on one level. But on another – how often have I listened to Radio One since Peel died? – maybe it’s not really my music any more.

Though on yet another hand, Lowe namechecks Neil Young and various other people that are my music, so…

As to what exactly he’s going to be doing at Apple, no-one outside knows for sure. “Music curation” seems to be the consensus, something to do with the streaming service they might be launching on the back of the Beats acquisition. The Pip podcast was recorded back in October, before he announced the move, so he doesn’t talk about it.

It’s clear, though, that, like Peelie, he’s a music fan above all else.

Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys. by Viv Albertine (Books 2014, 20)

Mon, 19 Jan 2015 20:58:39 +0000

A Christmas present: started on Christmas Day and finished just after midnight on the 3rd of January. So I could call it 2015 number 1, but it makes more sense to go with the year in which I started it and read most of it. Anyway, it’s all a bit arbitrary.

Viv Albertine, as I’m sure you know, was the guitarist in The Slits. They had only a short time in punk’s limelight (though as I learned from this, they released a second album, not just the one I’m familiar with).

This book is half about her early years and the punk days, and half about after. She went on to work as a filmmaker and then struggled to have a child, had serious health problems. Eventually she re-taught herself to play guitar, and started performing again (I saw her supporting the Damned a couple of years back, and then supporting Siouxsie at Meltdown a year and half back).

It’s really interesting reading about a time I lived through, events I experienced — from afar, true, but still ones I felt part of — from someone else’s point of view. Especially that of someone who was at the heart of many of the events.

And she writes with some style; it’s a compelling read. She makes some strange choices: for example, she only ever refers to her sister as “my sister”; we never get her name. Similarly with the man she marries. At first he’s “The Biker”, and then “my husband”.

I suppose it’s a matter of protecting the privacy of people who are still alive — especially in the latter case, because he doesn’t come out of it terribly well. Indeed, it may be the case that the only people who are named are those who were already in the public eye to some degree.

Any road, if you are into music, especially punk, at all, I would highly recommend reading this. I plan to get her new album — which came out two years ago, it turns out — The Vermilion Border.

Suzi Q, where are you?

Thu, 16 Oct 2014 00:26:18 +0000

I got a card in the post the other day, from my friends Di and Johnny. Regular readers will know Di as one of the most frequent commenters here (ie, she has commented). We disagreed over The Great Gatsby.

Anyway, the card had a post-it stuck inside, with some writing on it that I couldn’t quite make out. Di wrote, “Been trying to get this for you for ages… can you guess who it is?”

I was slow to realise that the “who” referred to the writing on the post-it. But she also said there was a clue on the back of the card.

On the back she’d written “devilgate.org”.

The post-it looks like this:

And I read it to say, “To Martin. Suzi Quatro.”

I mean, if it says that it makes sense considering my origin story; otherwise, not so much.

Thanks Di and Johnny. It’s a lovely thought.

BBC Music Greatest Covers

Wed, 15 Oct 2014 23:03:12 +0000

This BBC Music "Greatest Covers" poll has some quite good -- and interesting -- choices. It has the right answer, of course, but also Hüsker Dü and The Fall (and not even The Fall's best cover -- that would be "Xanadu").

Aye, (Head)Phones

Thu, 29 May 2014 17:49:48 +0000

I’m not in the market for a new pair of headphones. My venerable Sennheiser HD450s are still doing fine for over-the-head use, and the same brand have provided me with a series of earbuds for mobile use. But I tried a pair of Beats by Dre phones in an HMV the other day, just to see what all the fuss was about.

They looked pretty good, felt comfortable, and sounded great. But the price!

Apparently Apple bought Beats more for the streaming service than the phones. That makes sense: if they’d wanted a headphone company they’d have gone for Sennheiser, obviously (and if they cared about earphones in general they wouldn’t have made horrible ones for years).

But you’d think that if they wanted a streaming service, they’d have gone for Spotify, which is surely more established.

So I suspect the truth may include a combination of the two, plus a degree of cool cachet, in what is perhaps a demographic that they don’t currently reach.

Either way, if the next iPhone or Mac comes with a cool pair of phones (unlikely though that may be) I won’t be unhappy.

Some People Left for Heaven Without Warning...

Thu, 13 Mar 2014 23:59:49 +0000

Too many people died in 2013. So many, it seems, that when Philip Chevron of The Pogues died, I didn't get round to finishing my post. Here's what I wrote in October:

... Except there ain't no fucking heaven, and too damn many people have left for it this year. I hate 2013.
If there’s one slightly positive thing about Philip Chevron dying two days ago for me, it’s that I was reminded that the box set Just Look Them Straight In The Eye And Say… Pogue Mahone! exists; and also that it is now available in an inexpensive format for about £14. I ordered it on Tuesday night, and it arrived today.

I’ve been listening to it all afternoon. It’s a combination of outtakes, demos, live tracks and radio sessions, and it’s very good.

One thing that stands out at the moment, though, is that their music is steeped in the imagery of death. “Some people left for heaven without warning” is a line from “Sally Maclennane”, of course.

He's really a guitar player but he uses a camera

Wed, 09 Oct 2013 13:58:50 +0000

"He's really a guitar player but he uses a camera": Interview at The Quietus with Lou Reed and Mick Rock, the photographer who took, among many other things, the Transformer cover shot.

Understanding a Misunderstanding

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 17:36:40 +0000

Spotify has always behaved weirdly regarding how you queue tracks up. Today I think I realised why.

They think “Queue this track up” means “Cue this track up”. They’re thinking like DJs, but they are confused by homophones.

I’m thinking like a programmer, I admit: queues are first-in-first-out; but more importantly, like an ordinary person: you join a queue at the end, not just behind the person at the front.

See this discussion on their suggestions board which explains the weirdness, and is where (as I was adding a comment) I suddenly understood their thinking. Also definition 2 of “cue” is the appropriate one.

Edited: Queues are of course first-in-first-out, not last-in-first-out, as I wrote. That would be a stack, in programming terms. Whoops!

Weekend Warblers

Thu, 28 Jun 2012 01:11:11 +0000

The Radio 1 Hackney Weekend festival was fabulously well organised, loads of fun, and passed off with only three arrests.¹ Booking the tickets a month or two ago had turned out to be easy (we sat with multiple browsers and phones as the SeeTickets site crumpled, but in fact it was no trouble at all after we left it for a while). Being local residents helped, as half the tickets were for Hackney households.

It was a free show, so there were restrictions; most notably that you could only book for one of the two days, and only two tickets per person. We were doing it for the kids; and the kids in this family (to say nothing of most of their friends) favoured the Sunday lineup; so that’s the one we went for.

The lineup leaned heavily to the various dance subgenres: (modern) R&B, dubstep, and so on. Not forgetting hip-hop, of course; not only did Jay-Z headline the first night, he guested with Rihanna on the second.

For me the highlight of the day was Jessie J; though I was mildly disappointed that she censored herself in my favourite of her songs, ‘Do it Like a Dude’.²

Tinie Tempah was also good, though since I’ve subsequently been listening to Enter Shikari, I’m slightly disappointed to have missed them as they clashed with Tinie.

There was great secrecy and much speculation over who the “Special Guest” was to be. They managed to keep it hidden until the day, which, while impressive in its way, had me worried. I thought that, depending on who it was, there could be a disaster. In particular, if it had been Justin Bieber, as some kids were speculating, there would have been a vast, simultaneous, two-way flow, from and to the stage (my kids would have been running away from the stage; there are no Beliebers at Devilgate Towers).

Not long before the guest’s time I heard on good authority that it was going to be Beyoncé. Believable, as her hubbie was there, and she was said to be “in the house”. But I doubted it: isn’t she a bigger name than Rihanna? And anyway, I get the sense that she’d be too much of a diva to go on second on the bill.

Anyway, in the end it was Dizzee Rascal, which with hindsight made total sense, what with him being a local boy and all.

As we wandered through the stages and the day, we heard snatches of Rihanna’s ‘We Found Love’ seven times (I started keeping count at the third) from various between-act DJs and stalls. So by the time it closed the night, I was thoroughly ready to hear it properly. And a damn fine ending it was, too (though the fireworks were a tad tame).

I was hugely impressed with the organisation of the thing. We got there nice and early, and there was hardly any queueing, despite the airport-style security. The staff were all lovely and friendly, and – get this – there was hardly ever a queue for the toilets!

I would strongly support any moves to make it a regular thing. Radio 1’s event moves around the country, so it couldn’t stay free, but I could easily see it working as a commercial festival in the future.

I have it on the authority of a Hackney police officer. ↩︎
Hint: “Dirty dirty dirty dirty dirty dirty sucker” doesn’t rhyme with “D’you think I can get hurt by you, you [puts finger on lips]”. ↩︎

Paul Weller in "Good Album" Shock!

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 14:55:00 +0000

Who would have thought, this many years after The Jam, that Paul Weller could still make a decent album? Yet that's exactly what he's done. You can listen to it at The Quietus, an online music magazine.

The Felice Brothers

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 12:10:49 +0000

As if there weren’t enough reasons to love Outnumbered already, we recently saw an old Christmas special. It ended with the family watching the telly and singing along to a song. I didn’t know it, but liked the sound of it.

The internet knows all, and a bit of googling told me it was ‘Frankie’s Gun!’ by The Felice Brothers.

Emusic has the relevant album, and it’s great. Highly recommended.

Also their site tells me they’re playing London on the 20th of March. Hmmm…

Smashing Things Up for 35 Years

Sun, 13 Nov 2011 01:31:57 +0000

My friend (Wee) John(ny) called a couple of days ago and said, “Do you fancy seeing The Damned at the Roundhouse?” I’d never been to the Roundhouse, though it was one of those legendary London venues from my teenage years, like the Rainbow and the Hammersmith Palais. And I hadn’t seen The Damned in (I thought)¹ about 26 years. Not since a seated gig in the Edinburgh Playhouse the night before I had a High-Energy Physics progress test the following morning.²

I said “Yes”. I mean, why the hell not? I only really know Machine-Gun Etiquette and a few singles, but what the hell. They’re bound to do those, right? It’s a 35th-anniversary thing.

The Roundhouse is an amazing place. As a former railway shed, it’s just a stunning space. But it’s not the seedy old-school venue I half expected, because it’s been closed down and refurbished and reopened since the seventies. So it’s really nice: more like The Barbican, say, than The Forum.

Viv Albertine was supporting. I expected her to have a band, but she just stood up there on her own, with a Telecaster as old as punk, and sang us songs of non-love and stuff. She was great.

The Damned were… pretty much as I expected, actually. They came on, and the Captain said, “We’re going to do two ‘classic’ albums.” (He did the air-quotes.) I’m not sure about this recentish trend of doing a whole album live, but expect it could be good. Mostly, though, I’m amused that for classic punk albums, one would be too short.

So they kicked off into ‘Neat Neat Neat’, and I realised that we were much too close to the front: actually in the moshpit. As I’ve said, I’m really past that — much though I might enjoy dancing in the abstract, or in private.

Anyway, it was all very wild and excellent, and there were many people with t-shirts of bands I’ve seen or haven’t seen but wish I had or don’t mind that I haven’t but recognise anyway. In short, I was with, as Neil Gaiman describes it, my tribe.

It was all monstrously fine. Two albums with a break, then a few encores. Which included, as expected, several non-those-album tracks. ‘Love Song’, of course, they could hardly have avoided playing. A couple of others, and then came ‘Eloise’, which, punked-up though it was, we could frankly have done without,

Then they played ‘Anti-pope’ and were gone. I realise that the Roundhouse must have a strict 11 o’clock policy, but surely they were coming back…? No. DJ music and house lights… and no ‘Smash it Up’. I must admit, if you had asked me before I went out tonight whether there was any chance that they wouldn’t play ‘Smash it Up’, I would have laughed at you.

Very strange. And then there was a crazy queue to get out of the venue, because so many people had taken up the option to get an instant double CD of tonight’s gig. They obviously burn them straight from the sound desk while the gig is on. But it meant that you could hardly get out of the venue. There has to be a better way than that.

Anyway, my ears are sizzling, and I still owe NaNoWriMo a load of words, so I’ll call it a night here.

Johnny reminded me that we saw them at a festival in Milton Keynes Bowl in about 88 or 89. ↩︎
Though it’s entirely possible that I’m conflating that with my friend Andrew’s 21st birthday, which I also remember as being the night before a HEP exam. ↩︎

88 Lines About The End Of Reasons To Leave The Elements

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 21:36:03 +0000

Back when John Peel was still with us he played a song called '88 Lines About 44 Women'. I only heard it maybe twice, and never caught the name of the band. Later, when it became easy to find things out, I discovered they were called The Nails. I've recently been rediscovering that very fine song, which I like as much as ever; and I'm pleased to find that there are couple of different versions of it.

(According to the Wikipedia article on the band, Jello Biafra was their roadie, which was a strange and surprising discovery.)

It reminded me that I have a fondness for list songs, which as you can see from the link, is a sufficiently real genre, or class, that it has its own entry.

So I made a Spotify playlist of some I like. Click that link if you have Spotify, or this one if you don’t. Unfortunately it won’t show the contents of the list – there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to do that. It will just prompt you to sign up.

There’s a song on there by The Beautiful South which, if I remember correctly, was intended to mock the use of women’s names in songs. I wonder what they’d think of ‘88 Lines About 44 Women’.

Hardcore Knows the Score

Fri, 26 Aug 2011 01:35:53 +0000

For the last two months or so, it seems, I've been listening almost exclusively to a single album.[^fn1] That album is David Comes to Life by a Toronto hardcore band called Fucked Up.

That’s hardcore in the punk sense, not rap, or anything else. All genres have a “hardcore” subgenre, it seems. I’m sure that somewhere there’s hardcore pop.

Anyway, this album causes me to put together three words that I never thought I’d see in the same sentence, never mind describing the same thing: punk rock opera.

I know, I know, rock operas are the bloated detritus of prog rock, and part of what we fought the punk wars against. Though truth be told, I’ve always been quite fond of Tommy. But in a sense it was always something that was going to happen eventually. When a genre or a medium has been around for a while, people will try to take it further than it has gone before, and that’s no bad thing.

And when you get right down to it, it’s all about storytelling, and who can complain about that?

So I was pointed in the direction of this album by a post on Mike Sizemore’s blog. Sizemore is a scriptwriter; I probably started reading his blog when someone like Warren Ellis pointed me at a teaser or “sizzle” video he and some other people made for a prospective science fiction series.

Anyway, he posted a link to the video for the second track off the album, ‘Queen of Hearts’, and spoke very highly of it, as you’ll have seen if you followed the link. If you haven’t, you should. Go on, I’ll wait. I watched it a couple of times, and though, “That’s OK, interesting premise, I wish I could make out the words.”

And then I forget about it for a while.

But one day something made me go back. I listened again. I downloaded the album. I fell in… not love, exactly, but fascination.

North American hardcore bands have a certain vocal style, which is certainly not to everyone’s taste. In that way, I realised, it’s not unlike actual opera. Sure, the vocal stylings are about as far apart as possible; but they are both very stylised. And my biggest two problems with opera are that it’s hard to make the words out (even when they’re singing in english), and that I don’t really like the vocal stylings.

Not to everyone’s taste, as I said.

Luckily, operas tend to have surtitles; and albums have lyric sheets. The lyrics for David Comes to Life are available on the web, as you might expect.

Anyway, I’m writing about this now because I haven’t got round to doing so before, but especially because I’ve just got back from seeing Fucked Up live. They were playing at a Shoreditch venue called XOYO in a “co-headliner” with a band called OFF!.

I tweeted a lot about it, and among other things, I expressed a degree of concern as to what it would be like going to a hardcore gig:

Going to see Fucked Up and OFF! tonight. Not sure what to expect. Haven't been to a hardcore-type gig since... Napalm Death in 88 or so?Thu Aug 25 07:59:44 via EchofonMartin McCallion
devilgate

Hmm. Not seen a hardcore gig since Napalm Death? That may well be true, but they’re British (and technically grindcore, according to Wikipedia). I began to wonder whether I’d ever seen a US (or Canadian) hardcore band live. The only one I could think of were Hüsker Dü, whom I saw in Edinburgh in – oh, 84 or 85.

I feel sure there must have been others, and yet the only such band that I was really, really a fan of was the Dead Kennedys, and if they ever played the UK it happened either without me knowing about it, or they only played far away from where I was, or both.

I needn’t have worried, though. The venue was just the right size, and comfortably packed. The crowd were gentle and lovely. The moshpit was pretty wild, but I turned 47 yesterday, which is officially way past too old for the moshpit, and I was well able to stay clear of it.

And it was a totally brilliant night. The first band, Cerebral Ballzy, were on when I arrived, so I heard three or four of their songs. They sounded pretty good, and more to the point, the sound in the room was excellent. Clear, and powerful, without being so loud as to be overwhelming.

OFF! were classic hardcore, in that if you didn’t like a song there’d be another along in way less than three minutes. I thoroughly enjoyed them.

And Fucked Up just ruled. I was thinking before they came on that I would leave happy as long as they played ‘Queen of Hearts’ And they duly opened with it! They then proceeded to play edited highlights from David Comes to Life, interspersed with a few other tracks. There was stage-diving, crowd-surfing, the singer diving topless into the audience and walking almost to the back of the venue while still singing (and using a wired mike, with a very long cable).

Anyway, if you’ve read to the end of this rambling thing, you should go and listen to some things. Here’s the ‘Queen of Hearts’ video, and it’s the first time I’ve ever embedded a video. Let’s hope it works. Note that this version has the kids in the video singing on it, which is not how it is on the album, but is very cool nonetheless.

And the second video from the album, ‘The Other Shoe’, which they also did tonight.

Rainy Day Music and SF at the BL

Tue, 28 Jun 2011 23:31:07 +0000

The Saturday before last we went to the [London Feis Festival 2011](http://londonfeis.com/), in Finsbury Park. The weather was looking to be quite bad as we set out: it had been oscillating between sun and rain all morning. Would we be drenched or sunburned? Or both? Only time would tell.

I had been hitting the festival website to try to find out who was on when, exactly. There was a page which said (and still does, a the time of writing), ‘Band and Stage Times: To be released on the day’. I had taken that to mean, ‘… will be announced on the website on the day’. I did wonder about how much use that would be, considering many people would be getting on their way early in the morning, or the night before, and wouldn’t have had the chance to look at the website. Then again, everyone has a smartphone nowadays, right?

Anyway, it turned out that they meant, …. will be released at the festival.' On the bus to Finsbury Park I searched Twitter for the expected #feis hashtag, wherein some nice person had tweeted pictures of the running order (I can’t find those pictures now, but no matter). It appeared we were missing The Undertones, but we would get there in time for The Waterboys.

As indeed we did. We set up base camp near the back and listened to ‘Be My Enemy’ (timely, as I recently read Christopher Brookmyre’s novel which borrows that title) ‘Fisherman’s Blues’, ‘… And a Bang on the Ear’, and of course, ‘The Whole of the Moon’. It was great to see them again. Well, hear them; we didn’t see much from the back, and there were no big screens like at most festivals these days.

A trip to the second stage saw us Nanci Griffith, closely followed by Shane McGowan. Always good to see he’s still hanging in there, and he was in excellent voice. I note that it’s an alarming four and half years since I last saw The Pogues.

Heard a bit of The Cranberries while queueing for toilet and bar. They were OK. Some Irish youngsters at the bar sang along with ‘Linger’ very sweetly.

Then back to the main stage for Christy Moore, food, and finally Dylan.

That’s him there in the white hat; can you tell?

It’s been a long wait for me. I know he’s been over here in the last few years, but somehow I’ve never managed to hear about the dates until it was too late. Here we were, then, finally in the distant presence of the great man himself.

And it was, as I expected, like listening to him doing cover versions of his own songs. But there’s nothing wrong with that. It was quite a ‘greatest hits’ kind of set, though, to my surprise. I had gained the impression that he mainly did newer songs these days, but there was a strong focus on Blood on the Tracks and Highway 61 Revisited. And you can’t go far wrong with those. Here’s a full set list.

The only possible singalong moment was the ‘How does it feel?’ lines in ‘Like Rolling Stone’, and it made me wonder: maybe he started doing such changed versions of his songs because he doesn’t like people singing along.

I thought this stall would do roaring trade, but the rain mostly stayed off.

Then Sunday was Out of this World, the Science Fiction thing at the British Library. ‘Science Fiction, but not as you know it’, was the tag line. In fact, it was pretty much exactly as i know it, but I guess I’m part of some sort of rarefied elite, or something (or ‘fans’ as we’re known).

Anyway, it was very good, though perhaps it’s limiting, being a library: much of the exhibition was books behind glass. Which is fine, but sometimes you’d like to pick them up and handle them.

There was a Tardis in a corner of the Time Travel section, and a robot that seemed to be modelled on HAL 9000.¹

All in all, a pure dead brilliant weekend.

I know it wasn’t a robot. ↩︎

[H]is baritone sax tugged at the bottom of the track like taffy on the sole of a sneaker.

Sun, 19 Jun 2011 20:16:33 +0000

The quote is from this obituary of Clarence Clemons. Sadly, The Big Man died yesterday.

I saw him at a solo gig once, during the year I worked in Turin. He did a load of blues and rock standards, some of his own, and a couple of Springsteen songs. “Well what did you expect?” he said, “The Big Man wouldn’t be The Big Man without The Boss.”

And I saw the E-Street Band on the Born in the USA tour, where his sax, of course, tore the house down. Always a neat trick at an outdoor gig.

Sad to see him go.

Father's Weekend

Fri, 17 Jun 2011 22:43:33 +0000

I’m thoroughly looking forward to this weekend. Not only is it the London Feis festival tomorrow, with Bob Dylan headlining, but Sunday being Father’s Day, my treat is a visit to the SF exhibition at the British Library.

Let’s hope it all goes well; the weather forecast is rain, and at least three-quarters of the family are poorly.

Emusic Followup

Sat, 26 Mar 2011 12:32:27 +0000

eMusic got back to me. As I said, I emailed them to complain about the disappearance of re-downloading.

Randall, from eMusic Customer Support, said:

It would be great if we could offer the privilege of re-downloading music for free to our members, but the truth of the matter is that our agreements with our labels prohibit us from doing so

which is not surprising. But why the recent change?

while we have not had the tracking systems in place to enforce it before, we do now.

I see. He went on to say:

we believe it is the best policy for everyone involved because ultimately it benefits the artists that we all love.

I’m not convinced. It is in the sense that, if I want to get the albums I lost, I’ll have to buy them again, so the artists get paid again. But I’d be surprised if many artists really want to get paid more because of something that could be seen as ripping off their fans.

Though I suppose the comparison would be that if I had broken or lost a CD (or scratched a record, for us old types) I wouldn’t get it replaced for free.

But digital files, being so ephemeral, just feel like they belong in a different category.

Emusic and Re-downloading

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 00:30:41 +0000

OK, everyone knows about Emusic, right? Good site for downloading mainly independent stuff. You often find that you can only get recent stuff by bands and artists who used to be on major labels and have been dropped (or have split up and reformed).

Anyway, I am 98.763% convinced that they used to let you re-download tracks that you had downloaded before. So imagine my dismay, when taking, I thought, the final few steps in recovering from my recent disk replacement. Just download the recent Emusic tracks that I hadn’t backed up, right?

Oh, no. Not any more. Re-downloading is only for failed downloads.

I’ve emailed them about it, but I’m not expecting much. Not happy, Emusic. Not happy.

Come Gather Round, People

Wed, 16 Mar 2011 22:21:55 +0000

If you're like me, you've never seen Bob Dylan live, and you'd like to, sometime before he dies.

So here’s your chance, if you’re in or near London, or can get here: The London Feis, which seems to be the modern version of the Fleadh.

And not just Dylan; The Waterboys, The Undertones, Nanci Griffith… £70 for adults, and children go free. Booking fee is crazy, but, you know: Dylan!

Tank-Tops and Dolls

Tue, 02 Nov 2010 00:36:12 +0000

On our recent drive south from the Highlands there was a song that briefly seemed to be following us. First at an emergency food stop in a McDonald’s in Carlisle, and then the next day on XFM, as we rolled back into London.

Its key feature was the the refrain, which seemed to say, repeatedly: “You own a tank-top.”

While I can see the logic of outing someone for that particular crime against fashion, I was fairly sure it was a mondegreen.

So when I was back at a computer, I searched for “you own a tank top” lyrics mondegreen. No hits.

I removed the word “lyrics”, which gave me a single hit. Some IRC log. But it was enough. The song is, apparently, ‘You Overdid it Doll‘ by The Courteeners.

It’s kind of disappointing to know the truth. I’m listening to it as I type, and I can’t hear it saying “you own a tank-top” any more. Still, it has entered family lore, and will always be known that way to us.

In the interests of full disclosure, I should note that I once owned a tank-top. In my defence, it was the seventies, and I was seven.

Also, my nephew, Paul, who is travelling around Australia and other far-off places, and blogging about it, once tried to introduce me to The Courteeners. I wasn’t super-impressed, but I quite like this track.

On the same short drive Paul introduced me to Vampire Weekend, who I love, and you should listen to. And either way, you should read his blog.

The Day After Hallowe'en

Sun, 31 Oct 2010 23:27:27 +0000

Well, midnight on the 31st of October is fast rolling round. We're not long back from a week in the Highlands of Scotland (very wet, but great, thanks). It'll soon be the 1st of November, which means two things this year.

We'll be able to buy Mitch Benn's mighty 'I'm Proud of the BBC' in downloadable single format. So head off and do that now, and help it to chart. I'll wait.
Actually, it’s not yet midnight as I type, and I’ve just downloaded it.

NaNoWriMo is about to start. I'm having a go this year. Wish me luck.
I last tried it in 2004, which is much longer ago than I thought. I sort of had a half-hearted poke at it last year, but soon stopped. I’m hoping that expressing my intention in public like this will help to keep me going.

We’ll see, of course.

I see that the approaching start has brought the NaNoWriMo site to its knees. Oh well. Hopefully they'll get things back together.

Youssou N'Dour, Philip Glass, The Kronos Quartet, and Bela Lugosi

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 00:39:38 +0000

Most, but not all of them at one event.

Jamaica and Senegal Make Music

A couple of weeks ago we went to the Barbican to see Youssou N’Dour. In support were an acoustic reggae band called Inna da Yard. They were fabulous fun, and reminded me that I’ve been missing out on reggae since John Peel died.

Youssou and his band were amazing. They had more percussionists on stage than most bands have members (five, counting the drummer), which amused me.

The total number of musicians on stage was about sixteen. Plus they had a couple of amazing dancers.

And the professionals weren’t the only ones dancing on the stage. Several times members of the audience got up and joined in. Yes, a veritable stage invasion in the Barbican. The security people looked vaguely worried; I didn’t know the Barbican even had security.

I won’t try to dance about architecture and describe the music, but let’s just say it was the rockingest gig I’ve been to at that venue.

The Glass Eye

A few days later it was off to the Hackney Empire, where we saw the original 1931 Dracula, with a live soundtrack. Which was composed by Philip Glass, and performed by him, Michael Riesman, and The Kronos Quartet. That’s a pretty stellar lineup from the modern classical world.

I had at first thought that the film was silent, but it isn’t (I think I was confusing it with Nosferatu). Apparently it didn’t originally have a musical soundtrack, though.

While it’s clear that the film is the origin (or an origin) of many horror film clichés, and the story is of course very familiar, I don’t think I had ever seen it before – though I thought I had.

I thoroughly enjoyed the whole thing, though the film volume could have done with being louder, as the music drowned out the dialogue at times. And on a related note, I’m not convinced that the music was always only there to serve the film, as a true soundtrack should be.

But all in all a fascinating night.

Magnetism

Fri, 26 Mar 2010 00:53:17 +0000

On Monday I took my son to the Barbican to see The Magnetic Fields. It was his first proper gig. And an experience quite unlike most gigs I've been to before.

For a start it was entirely seated, and I’ve not been to one of those in a long time - and not just the audience, the band too. Secondly, it was in the Barbican Centre. We’ve been there a few times in the last few months for classical concerts and a dance performance, but it’s a strange venue for rock ‘n’ roll.

But then, rock ‘n’ roll isn’t exactly what The Magnetic Fields play.

Their 69 Love Songs is, as I was tweeting recently, one of the finest albums ever. It’s from 1999, it turns out, but I’ve only known it for a year or two. The first half of Monday’s show contained a good number of songs from it, and also some from the recent Distortion.

The highlight for my boy wasn’t even a Magnetic Fields song at all, but rather one by The Gothic Archies, one of their several alter egos. It also featured the only instance in the evening of singing along with the band; and that was just him, quietly singing ‘Shipwrecked’.

We were right up at the back of the balcony, but despite the distance and low volume, we could still hear everything perfectly. Well, except when they spoke between songs. The vocal mix wasn’t really designed for making that kind of thing audible at the back.

In fact Merritt’s vocals were at their best during the final song, when he took the mike off the stand and walked about. That got him closer to the mike, which suits his croonerish voice.

So they sent us off into the night with a fabulous ‘Papa was a Rodeo’.

A quote from Amanda Palmer: asking for money for your art is not selling out

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 12:28:18 +0000

ASKING FOR MONEY FOR YOUR ART IS NOT SELLING OUT.
selling out is when you go against your own heart, ideals and authenticity to make money.

selling out is an action, a 180 from a stated position.

i don’t consider pop stars to be sell-outs. the lady gagas, britneys and madonnas of the world are UNABASHED about why they got in this game: fame, money, über-success, chart-topping hits.

but if neil young were to suddenly hire the matrix to write him a thumpin' dance album and then appear on saturday night live snogging bob dylan, i’d have reservations about his integrity.

From Virtual Crowdsurfing

Live Jello show

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 16:35:01 +0000

Yeah, I know, that sounds like something kinky. But I just got this from the Academy mailing list (that's "O2 Academy Brixton and O2 Academy Islington"; the former used to be called the Brixton Academy):

O2 Academy Islington: Tue 8 Sep: Jello Biafra and the Guantanamo School of Medicine. A longtime leader in the punk and alternative rock scenes, Jello Biafra is back in the recording studio and in the live arena.

Which is surprising and interesting and stuff. I never saw the Dead Kennedys when they were around; as far as I know they never came to Britain. Certainly not to Scotland.

Apparently Jello (or Eric, I now know) is 50. I feel old.

I'll stand before the Lord of Song

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 18:53:39 +0000

My friend Paul writes about the winner of The X-Factor's shot at the Christmas number one with a cover of Leonard Cohen's 'Hallelujah'. Since the original is one of my favourite songs of all time, I have opinions on the matter.

Not least about the assertion that Paul quotes (without holding that opinion himself) that Jeff Buckley’s version is “often described as definitive”.

I don’t think I had heard Buckley’s version before today, but definitive? Definitive? How could anyone say that? The definitive version is, by definition, Cohen’s. And the only cover that matters is John Cale’s.

I had heard Rufus Wainright’s version. In my opinion it is too respectful. And too slow. I like a cover version that does something new with a song, that grabs it by the throat and make’s it the coverer’s own. Think of Hendrix’s version of ‘All Along the Watchtower’, or the Clash’s of ‘Police and Thieves’ Or ‘I Fought the Law’, for that matter; there are those who don’t realise that’s a cover. You could say that the Clashified version is - I don’t know: definitive, maybe.

I maybe be in danger of self-contradiction here, but I don’t think so: I fully accept that it’s possible for someone to improve on the original version of a song. I just don’t think that anyone I’ve heard has done that for ‘Hallelujah’. Except maybe John Cale.

Having done some research into the matter (Last FM and YouTube are really astonishingly cool things) Buckley’s currently stands at second-best cover version/third-best version I’ve heard.

I haven’t heard Alexandra Burke’s version, except for a fragment in a BBC quiz (7 out of 8, by the way), but I fully expect to cringe when I do.

Furthermore, when looking for Buckley’s version on Last FM, I saw a comment to the effect that the version in Shrek is Wainright. Well, (I thought) either Rufus has become Welsh; or they redubbed the film for the UK market; or some people can’t tell the difference between two very different singers. But it turns out (at least according to that same BBC quiz) that while the version in the film of Shrek is Cale’s as anyone with an ear can hear, the version on the soundtrack album is Wainwright. Strange, but doubtless to do with licensing issues.

I wonder if they replaced that terrible version of ‘Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t Have Fallen in Love With)?’ from the film with the proper version for the soundtrack album?

The Gun Club

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 14:39:29 +0000

I just listened to The Gun Club's first album, Fire Of Love. They're a band that I heard of all through my student years - at least one good friend was a fan - but I somehow never managed to hear properly until now. It's a scorchingly good album, and I'd recommend anyone who likes either punk or blues (and let's face it, who doesn't?) to download it from Emusic forthwith.

Nutters, "Emigration, Death, Regret and Substance Abuse"

Sat, 22 Dec 2007 14:19:54 +0000

I see that Tony Blair has become a catholic. No surprise there. But as an ex-catholic atheist myself, I'm feeling down with Nick Clegg.

In other catholic-related news, there’s a fine analysis of ‘Fairytale of New York on the BBC website, after the Radio 1 farrago. And I hadn’t realised that Shane McGowan’s birthday is Christmas Day. So as well as Newtonmas, we can also celebrate McGowanmas on Tuesday.

Rationalism and excess: what a fine seasonal combination.

The Return Of Some Futurists From The Past

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 20:32:00 +0000

It seems that The Rezillos, mighty purveyors of sci-fi (I use the term deliberately, and very carefully) pop-punk reformed somewhere along the line. And they're playing right here in London on Saturday. At the Carling Academy in Islington, to be precise.

Seeing them live after all this time would be particularly fine, as I know them best through their second and final album, Mission Accomplished… But The Beat Goes On, which is a live album.

It was recorded at the Glasgow Apollo, which is now, sadly, long-demolished. But before all that, it was where I went to my first couple of gigs.

I don’t really do all the recent wave of reforming bands (I didn’t even go to see the Velvet Underground when they reformed, which I regret (but I’d been burned by one of Lou’s solo performances)), but I think I might make an exception in this case.

That said, I’ve just remembered that we’re invited to a party that night, and there are two other gigs on that evening that I’d like to go to (Patti Smith and Richard Thompson). Damn.

Still, the party is in Islington too, so maybe something can be arranged.

Redemption Song: the Definitive Biography of Joe Strummer, by Chris Salewicz (Books 2007, 1)

Fri, 15 Jun 2007 23:36:47 +0000

Ah, Joe. I can hardly believe that it's already four years since we lost him. I started reading this on Christmas day, and finished at about two in the morning on the 14th of January: exactly three weeks later. If I read a book every three weeks that would be seventeen in a year, which isn't very many. Anyway, during that time I completely immersed myself in Strummeriana; as well as reading the book I listened to little music other than The Clash or Joe's solo stuff, and I also put my bit in on the various Wikipedia articles.

And none if it can make up for the fact that he’s gone.

In fact, reading the book only makes it worse: it reinforces the sense of what we’ve lost. He was on a great creative upswing when he died, as the the posthumous Streetcore album showed. Its opening track, ‘Coma Girl’ (which, we learn, is about his daughter Lola) was the single best song he wrote since ‘Trash City’, at least.

Alas, we’ll never hear anything new from him again.

Or at least, not truly new: it seems from reading the book that there might be quite a few unreleased recordings out there, and he worked on more film soundtracks than I knew about.

Most interestingly of all, perhaps, is this piece of information. Around the time that Joe and the Mescaleros were writing and recording Global A Go-Go, the second of the comeback albums after the wilderness years, he also sent a set of lyrics to Mick Jones. He seemed to be suggesting that he was considering an alternative to the Mescaleros album. Mick wrote tunes for them and sent them back, but heard no more about it. Some time later, after Global A Go-Go had been released, Mick asked what had happened to the songs. Joe said, “Those weren’t for Global A Go-Go; those were the next Clash album.”

There’s no suggestion that he ever recorded any of them; but you never know: one day Mick might, when he’s not too busy with Carbon/Silicon.

What of the book itself, though? Well, it’s certainly compelling reading (at least if you’re a fan like me). It is flawed in some ways, of course. It can be hard to follow the early sections about Joe’s family, without an actual family tree to clarify things, though that’s not a big problem.

Despite its size and comprehensive nature, there are parts that come across as too anecdotal and perhaps incomplete. Certainly there are places where I would have liked to have a lot more detail. But a book this size could be written about The Clash alone (several have, of course, but perhaps none quite the size of this one).

Still, it’s totally a must-have for any Clash fan, or solo Joe fan (can you be the latter but not the former?)

I wonder what it would have been like if The Clash had kept going and had become like U2 (who were heavily inspired by them)? In a good sense: I listened to an interview with Salewicz, where he pointed out that, though Joe didn’t like the distance from the audience at stadium gigs, he was very good at handling them. So imagine them doing something like the Zoo TV tour (indeed, when I saw footage of that, all the TVs as backdrop reminded me instantly of the Clash Mk II ‘Out of Control’ tour).

Straight to Elgin Avenue

Fri, 16 Mar 2007 13:17:05 +0000

So I ordered the new Banksie from Amazon, and to get free delivery, of course, I had to order one or two other things, to bring the price up to the threshold. I tend to have a number of things queued up to buy when the time is right, so I selected some things from that list.

All three items I chose are things that I meant to get at the time they came out, but didn’t, for one reason or another. The book was Christopher Priest’s The Prestige, which I’ve meant to get since I read the reviews when it came out. I’m not sure why I never bought it (actually I did buy it once, but that was to give to a friend who had a particular interest in stage magic).

Anyway, my interest was recently rekindled because of the film coming out, of course. I may want to watch it one day, and I’m not going to read or not read something on the reported say-so of some film director. I can’t find a reference for that: the director is supposed to have said, “Don’t read the book before you see the film.” Though I suppose that I will, in effect, be doing exactly that – in a contrary way – by insisting on reading the book before seeing the film. Whatever: books come first.

But I didn’t bring you here to talk about books, for a change. No, this time it’s music. Because I also got two CDs from Amazon.

Regular readers might not be surprised to hear that I’m a huge fan of the late, and sadly missed,Joe Strummer. As such, I want to get a hold of anything he released that I don’t yet have. Now, during his so-called “wilderness years”, Joe did a lot of soundtrack work. I’ve got most of that on record, but I never got round to getting the soundtrack for Alex Cox’s Straight to Hell. I recall hearing a borrowed copy in ‘87 or so, and enjoying it, but not being overwhelmed by it. The one track I remembered was ‘Rake at the Gates of Hell’, by The Pogues, more of which later.

In the intervening years, I mostly forgot about the album. Once in a while I might have poked around a second-hand record shop, but it was low on my list of priorities. Recently, though, I discovered that it had been reissued, revised and expanded. Into my “buy later” list it went, until the other day.

As well, I discovered it was possible to jump back to an earlier part of Joe’s career, namely his pre-Clash band, the 101ers. Elgin Avenue Breakdown was originally released back in 19-something-or-other. At the time I was mildly interested, but saw no need to rush out and buy it. I had the ‘Keys to your Heart’ single, and it was OK, but nowhere near as good as the heights of The Clash. And Joe was still around, and we could expect new music from him in the future.

We are in that future now, of course, and we don’t have Joe anymore. So buying the 101ers’ album is a way to hear him again.

And a damn fine album it is. Straight ahead rock ‘n’ roll, jam-packed with bounce, verve and excitement. What it doesn’t have is the political sensibilities of The Clash. Or actually, it does have the first vestiges of them; and indeed, the first vestiges of The Clash’s excellent ‘Jail Guitar Doors’ (the B-side of ‘Clash City Rockers¹'), in the form of ‘Lonely Mothers Son’. And I’m sure that title should have an apostrophe in it, but I’m not sure where.

And the Straight to Hell soundtrack? It’s great. It’s mostly film music, of course: largely instrumentals. There are selections by Elvis Costello and Pray for Rain, as well as by The Pogues and Joe. Among the proper songs are one by Joe called ‘Evil Darling’, which is OK, and the original version of ‘If I Should Fall from Grace With God’, which The Pogues wrote during filming, apparently. Then there’s a version of ‘Danny Boy’, by the cast, led by Cait O’Riordan, and the album ends with ‘Rake at the Gates of Hell’.

It’s hard to express how good that song is. From the opening guitar riff, through Shane’s crazed-gunman-death-worshipper lyrics, to the shouldn’t-work-but-does device of the verse and chorus being exactly the same tune, it struts into your ears and rips your head apart. In a good way. I’ve hardly had it off repeat on my MP3 player since I got it.

Go and buy it. Now.

In googling to check that I had the right A-side (how crap is my memory?) I discovered an excellent project that Billy Bragg is involved in. Check it out ↩

Burning Silver Discs for Gold

Thu, 05 Oct 2006 23:56:31 +0000

In which I make a CD compilation, and blow whatever vestiges of my credibility remained

I’ve been a bit invisible on here for a while. First I had two weeks camping in France, during which (among much else) I managed to grow a beard (not that I was particularly trying to: it just kind of happened). In the first couple of weeks after getting back I spent much of my free time on preparing a CD for a special occasion.

The occasion was the golden wedding anniversary of my beloved’s parents. They had asked me to provide some music for after the dinner. The brief was to get the grandkids dancing. The theme we chose was to cover all the decades from 1956 to 2006.

Now, strange as it may seem, I’ve never actually made a compilation CD before, despite having had the technology to do so for several years. I was never really very big on making compilation tapes, either. So the first thing to do was to check that the technology worked.

Our CD writer hasn’t written under Windows since we got Dell to replace the whole drive when it broke down. It’s doubtless some kind of driver problem, but I haven’t bothered to try to fix it. I know what you’re thinking: CD writers are as cheap as potatoes these days; but never buy a new one when there’s a way to get the old one working, I say. The logical solution, then, was to use Linux, where the same drive does work; and which is my preferred working environment anyway.

I’m currently using the Kubuntu distribution, and as it is KDE based, the logical CD creation tool seems to be K3B. This is essentially a graphical front end to various command-line tools, which is a fine approach. Unfortunately the GUI is a bit clunky. Still, nothing I couldn’t live with (once I had dowloaded and installed the plugin that allows it to recognise MP3s, at least).

So the next thing was to consider how to get the tracks we wanted. We already had quite a lot, of course, but inevitably there were plenty that we wanted that we didn’t have. I briefly considered the iTunes Music Store, but rejected it because a) I was using Linux, so couldn’t use iTunes; b) my MP3 player is not an iPod, so it (ITMS) would have been little use to me after this project; and c) most importantly of all, I didn’t want to have to struggle with DRM(Digital Restrictions Management, thought they’d like you to believe it’s “Rights”.).

I already use eMusic, which is good for relatively recent, independent stuff, but is not really a source of classic tracks. I did get ‘Rock Around the Clock’ from there, though. As well as that, Frances bought a couple of new CDs: a Paul Simon collection and a disco compilation.

But for the rest, and for the maximum flexibility, there was only one solution: I would have to enter the murky grey-area waters of AllOfMP3.com.

If you haven’t come across this site, it’s based in Russia and a legal grey area. The people who run it claim to be following the copyright laws of Russia; and presumably that is true, because the site continues to operate. However, they are able to offer a vast collection of albums for mere pennies per track. And all in a selection of formats, and without DRM.

The grey area is that we may be breaking the law by using their services in other countries, such as the UK.

It’s still running, though, so let’s work on the assumption that it’s OK to use it.

I set up an AllOfMP3 account, and by a daft number of steps of indirection, got some money into it, and downloaded a few tracks.

It’s good stuff: they have a huge selection of tracks, and the prices are so cheap. I think it has something to teach iTunes and the other legal download sites: the less you charge (and the less encumbered the files) the more people will buy.

I don’t think there was a track, or at least an artist, that I couldn’t find on it.

Oh, OK, there were two, but they’re both a tad embarassing. We got a late request for the following tracks: ‘Summer Holiday’; ‘Y Viva España’; and ‘Remember You’re A Womble’.

Yes, I know. But since novelty hits (and songs from kids' TV shows) were by no means outwith the scope of the project (and since we aleady had both ‘Crazy Frog’ and the Bratz TV theme), I attempted to comply.

Which was harder than you might have expected. AllOfMP3 had the first, but the second was slightly harder. I did find it, though, squirreled away on somebody’s MP3 blog (which seems to mainly consist of tracks ripped from old tapes found in the Dalston branch of Oxfam: the ripper/blogger is practically a neighbour).

Those Wombles, though: they’re hard to find.

There is a strange class of sites out there that list the contents of albums, and appear to allow you to click through and buy the the tracks; but when you do, you get a screen saying, “That track is not available”, or “This album is not available”. Which makes me wonder why they bother to list it on their sites; or at least, why they list it with live links that make it look as if you can buy it.

Anyway, somewhere on the deeper, darker recesses of the net, on the very last page of sites that, as far as Google knew, contained the string, “remember you’re a Womble”, I found it. Or at least part of it: it ends very abruptly. But in the context of the compilation, that didn’t actually seem to matter too much.

The party was a great success. The music went down very well, with only one slight problem: we overran our time in the hotel’s function suite, and never got to play the second disk. Too much eating, not enough dancing, I suppose.

Still, now that I’ve done one, making other compilation CDs should be a doddle.

Oh, and the beard (I mentioned it earlier, you weren’t paying attention) came off before the party. The kids complained, but some things just have to go.

The track listing? Oh all right then:

Disc 1

Dean Martin - Memories Are Made of This (1956)
2 Unlimited - No Limit (1993)
Elvis Presley - Jailhouse Rock (1958) 4 Cliff Richard & The Shadows - Summer Holiday (1963)
Crazy Frog - Axel F (2005)
The Wombles - Remember You're a Womble (1973)
Queen - We Will Rock You (1977)
Pink - Get the Party Started (2002)
The Rolling Stones - (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction (1965)
Typically Tropical - Barbados (1975)
Busted - Year 3000 (2003)
Bill Haley and The Comets - Rock Around the Clock (1955)
Bratz - Bratz TV Theme (2006) 14.Paul Simon - Me and Julio Down by the School Yard (1972)
Rednex - Cotton Eye Joe (1994)
Blondie - Sunday Girl (1979)
Don McLean - American Pie (1972)
Black Eyed Peas - Don't Phunk With My Heart (2005)
Bob Marley - Three Little Birds (1980)
Dusty Springfield - I Only Want to be With You (1963)

Disc 2

The Pogues & The Dubliners - The Irish Rover (1987)
Bhundu Boys - Tamba Wega (1997)
The Beatles - She Loves You (1963)
The Dixie Cups - Chapel of Love (1964)
David Bowie - Rebel Rebel (1974)
Thin Lizzy - Whiskey in the Jar (1973)
Eurythmics - Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) (1983)
Sylvia - Y Viva Espana (1974)
Dexy's Midnight Runners - Come On Eileen (1982)
Sly and the Family Stone - Dance to the Music (1968)
Spice Girls - Wannabe (1996)
Earth, Wind and Fire - Boogie Wonderland (1979)
James - Sit Down (1991)
The Crystals - Da Doo Ron Ron (1963)
Chubby Checker - Let's Twist Again (1961)
Gnarls Barkley - Crazy (2006)
Pulp - Common People (1995)
Joan Baez - The Night they Drove Old Dixie Down (1971)
Doris Day - Whatever Will Be, Will Be, (Que Sera, Sera) (1956)

The Rocky Pogue to Brixton

Fri, 06 Jan 2006 13:59:00 +0000

This was written before Christmas, and is only being posted now. Such is… something. My ability to get things done, probably.

The Brixton Academy oozes rock ‘n’ roll history from its very walls; and a lot of that history is — or closely mirrors — my own. I saw my first London gig there: The Ramones, in 1987 (and I saw them a few more times there, too, I can tell you). The Sugarcubes spent a bare hour on stage, and it was one of the best hours of live music I’ve ever seen. The Pixies took the place apart and restored my faith in rock ‘n’ roll when I didn’t even realise I was losing it. Stiff Little Fingers — who were the first band I ever saw live (Glasgow Apollo, 1980) — played a farewell gig there (OK, they later reformed, but lets not worry too much about that). At one James gig there, a moshpit full of lovemuppets collapsed on top of me.

But I’ve seen The Pogues there more often than anyone else.

And The Pogues, it seems, have reformed, and are touring. To Brixton, then, with swisstone. I saw them so many times in the eighties and early nineties that I probably wouldn’t have bothered this time. But back in the summer karmicnull gave me a CD by an American band called the Dropkick Murphys, which I love; and guess who was the support band?

The Murphys take US hardcore (in the punk sense) and Irish (and a touch of Scottish) music, and mash them together in the same way The Pogues first did with UK punk and Irish music two decades ago. Loud thrashing guitars meld with bagpipes and rebel lyrics. There are about six or seven of them, and they move around the Academy’s huge stage like it’s their playground.

That said, and though they rocked mightily, the cavernous space of the Academy did them no favours. They would, I think, be enjoyed best in a smaller venue. About a tenth of the size, say. I found it hard work to appreciate some of the songs I don’t know, so I suspect that if you don’t know their work at all, they would be very hard work indeed, live. Then there’s their version of ‘The Wild Rover’. Maybe Americans aren’t as used as we are to every dodgy folk band or drunken denizen of an Irish pub singing this one: but you’d think that when your forté is speeded up, punked up versions of Irish songs, you wouldn’t do a version of it that is, frankly, plodding.

No matter: I’ve now heard them do ‘Fields of Athenry’, live, and am happy.

As to The Pogues: what with one thing and another, I wasn’t totally sure what to expect, after all this time. But I shouldn’t have worried: it was like coming home: both for them and for me.

Let me say this, in no uncertain terms: I don’t think Shane is anywhere near as fucked up as we think he is. Yes, he’s done himself damage over the years, and I’ve seem him interviewed on TV and been embarassed and wished they had left him alone. But that night, although he moved with something of an Ozzy-Osbourne-esque shamble, he was totally switched on. He didn’t miss a single word, as far as I could tell, and the only mistake he made was that he messed up the first verse of the very last song, ‘Fiesta’; and that’s the kind of thing that any singer can do.

Physically, too, he was very together. During one song he kept playing with the mike stand, for example, and seemed to constantly be on the verge of knocking it over: but he always caught it. And at one point he balanced a glass of water on his head.

But what of the music? It was, of course, superb. I say “of course” because The Pogues consists of some of the most talented musicians in rock ‘n’ roll, and perhaps the English language’s greatest living poet.

One of their greatest abilities is to make London seem magical, mystic ghostly: songs like ‘Lullaby of London’ is a fine example of this. And ‘London You’re A Lady’ and ‘Misty Morning, Albert Bridge’ are hymns to the city that are rooted in more mundane concerns; but they still evoke a lyrical beauty. In a way the effect is not unlike that of Wordsworth’s ‘Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802‘. Yes, I think Shane McGowan is as important a poet as Wordsworth, all right?

There was a spectre hanging over the show, though: it was nearly Christmas, and it was unthinkable that they wouldn’t do ‘Fairytale of New York’. But who would sing Kirsty McColl’s part? The song is inherently a duet; there is no way it could be done without two voices.

Tony told me he had heard that Cerys Matthews of Catatonia sang it at the Cardiff gig, but he didn’t think that she was touring with them.

So the end of the third encore and second hour drew close. “This is ‘Fairytale of New York’”, Shane growled, to cheers. Then one of the others introduced “Miss Ella Finer.” One of The Pogues is Jem Finer, as I’m sure you’ll know if you’ve read this far; so I suspected this was his daughter (and internet sources confirm this).

She wasn’t Kirsty, of course, but she did a fine job. Some of her vowels were on the plummy side (“Happy Christmas your arse, I pray God it’s our larst”, if you see what I mean): but you can’t hold that against her.

So as far as I’m concerned, The Pogues are back. Now, let’s just hope they write some new material and put a new album out.

Tears and Laugher in the Bookshop

Fri, 21 Oct 2005 15:36:00 +0000

I knew I would buy it, of course. I just didn’t necessarily know I would buy it today. But I popped into Waterstone’s at lunchtime, and had a look at Margrave of the Marshes, John Peel’s autobiography. It was posthumously completed by his wife, Sheila (once better known as “The Pig”, fact fans) and their (grown-up) kids.

Even reading the acknowledgements was curiously moving, listing as it did the likes of Billy Bragg, Andy Kershaw and Tom Robinson. So I read the introduction, which was written by the four kids. I found myself laughing and my eyes filling with tears just from those three or four pages. So obviously I had to buy it.

I’m now thoroughly looking forward to tomorrow’s Home Truths, which is a special edition featuring Sheila.

I also seem to have bought Singularity Sky, but I’ve been meaning to get that for ages.

Me Tired? Well Boo Hoo

Thu, 09 Oct 2003 14:46:00 +0000

Now, more than ever, I realise that we’ve lost one of the greats.

We all blogged Warren Zevon’s death, but now I want to write an appreciation of him. This may turn into a rant against death and the loss of the greats, but if so, so be it.

Seven o’clock, Eight o’clock, Nine o’clock, Ten
You wanna go home?
Why? Honey, when?
We may never get this chance again!
Let’s party for the rest of the night!

I got his last two albums a week or two back, and they haven’t been out of my personal CD player since. I’m listening to My Ride’s Here as I write this. At least as I start it. I’ll probably have alternated between it and The Wind a few times before I finish.

He died at the top of his game: the three albums that closed his career contain some of the best things he’s ever done: Life’ll Kill Ya, My Ride’s Here and The Wind. I don’t believe that there’s ever “a good day to die,” or even, really, that you can have a “good death”. ¹

But that’s a thought for another day. The point here is that Warren died having completed his final album, said goodbye to his family, friends and fans, and even seen the latest James Bond film. If you’ve gotta go, it’s better than most of us can expect. Unlike Joe Strummer, for example, who died at the tail end of last year, and who was taken from us totally by surprise: he wasn’t sick, and no-one expected it; and he had no chance to finish things. Which is how most people die, of course.

Eleven o’clock, Twelve o’clock, One o’clock, Two
Me, tired? Well boo hoo!
I’m starting to fall in love with you
Let’s party for the rest of the night!

I like to think though, that, despite all that, Warren went raging against the dying of the light; and ‘The Rest Of The Night’, from his last album, is the perfect roar of defiance to hurl at the darkness. Yet at the same time it shows some of the resignation, or acceptance, we see on some of the other tracks, such as ‘Keep Me in Your Heart’. Many have described the latter track, which closes the album, as the most affecting song on it; and I can scarcely listen to it without a lump coming to my throat.

Yet ‘The Rest Of The Night’ is the song that, for me, captures the end-times nature of the album more than any other.

As a straightforward party anthem it’s right up there with Springsteen’s ‘Mary’s Place’, from last year’s The Rising. (The comparison is particularly apt, because Springsteen provides guitar and backing vocal’s on The Wind’s other rabble-rouser, ‘Disorder In The House’.) But it’s in the context of his impending death that ‘The Rest Of The Night’ really takes wing.

“We may never get this chance again” is the key line here. Of course, considered rationally, that is true of any of us, any time, about any experience; Zevon must have felt it very keenly, though, whether or not he was well enough to party.

Then the line, “I’m starting to fall in love with you” suggests that, even as “the old whore death” was hovering in the background of his life, Warren was still willing to take a chance on the great rollercoaster ride that makes life even more worthwhile.

The song has a similar effect on me to the film Dead Poets' Society, with its advice to “seize the day”: it makes me want to grab hold of life with both hands and hang on for the ride. Because we’re only on this Earth for a short time, we don’t get a second chance, and (I believe) there’s nothing afterwards. We may not have this chance again — whatever it is — so let’s throw ourselves into it now.

Three o’clock, Four o’clock, Five o’clock, Six
Let’s throw it all into the mix
And open up our bag of tricks,
And party for the rest of the night!

[All quotes are from Warren Zevon’s song, ‘The Rest Of The Night’, and are reproduced without permission, but with journalistic intent. Somehow, I don’t think he’d have minded.]{.small}

Well, OK, some are better than others, but only because some are worse than others. ↩︎