As you might well imagine following my earlier post on the subject, my reading of Ian MacDonald’s ‘Revolution In The Head’ has rocketed far beyond the time I have had to listen to and write about the group’s LPs in parallel with my reading. Currently for instance, I’m crashing head-first into the book’s Sgt Peppers-era stuff, whilst my posts here haven’t got beyond their debut long player.

Time to catch up then! Let’s whiz through this lot quick as I can, and we’ll see what happens!

--

Following up rather unevenly on the fresh-faced wonder of ‘Please Please Me’ a few months earlier, I think this must be one of least loved of the group’s run of much-loved records, despite its iconic cover art and earth-shaking sales figures. Listening front to back, it’s easy to see why, that should not distract us from the fact that it gets off to a great start.

‘It Won’t Be Long’ has a more assertive, trebly electric guitar sound than anything on the previous LP, even as a Hank Marvin-style lead lick give a nod to the conventions of pre-Beatles British pop, and an aggressive Lennon vocal that undercuts the cheery blandness of the lyrics. Sounding a touch too harsh for the sunny image cultivated by subsequent Greatest Hits track-lists, it’s nonetheless classic early Beatles and a real keeper. Another solid Lennon number, ‘All I’ve Got To Do’, follows – it’s more subdued, but has a palpable weight of feeling behind it and some great ensemble playing, making it one of the band’s best blue-eyed soul numbers. Then, McCartney’s ‘All My Loving’ crashes in, and, as I’m sure you’re aware, it is BOSS.

Next up, George Harrison’s first original song for the group, ‘Don’t Bother Me’, is a weird and morose delight, allegedly written whilst he was confined to bed with flu in a seaside boarding house whilst on tour. It is, admittedly, one hell of a stretch to claim that the first stirrings of Harrison’s later obsession with Indian music can already be detected here, but the song’s verses certainly have a droning, mono-chordal kind of quality to it them, which, combined with some delicious, Bo Diddley-ish tremolo guitar textures and messy, smeared echo on the vocals, could probably qualify it as being at least a *bit* proto-psychedelic.

Four songs, split between three writers and vocalists, this opening quartet presents a fantastic snapshot of the variety of the band’s potential and the – then unique – aural excitement they were capable of creating.

Thereafter however, things go a bit awry, and the album never really recovers its momentum. Although The Beatles first grabbed people’s attention as a raucous, high energy rock n’ roll band, their attempts to capture this energy in the studio were patchy at best, with a handful of clear successes (‘I Saw Her Standing There’, ‘Twist & Shout’) outnumbered by at least twice as many blunders and mediocre/uninspired renditions of decent material – and sadly the latter very much predominates here.

Their take on ‘Roll Over Beethoven’ is merely adequate, whilst their covers of recent soul hits (‘You Really Got a Hold On Me’, ‘Devil In Her Heart’) feel lacklustre and, well, a bit soulless to be honest, despite the band’s obviously sincere love for black American music. Their imitative originals in a similar vein meanwhile (‘Little Child’, ‘Hold Me Tight’) are minor items at best, although the former – with a Ringo vocal – is ok, despite its dated and distasteful lyric.

Worst of all though, ‘Please Mr Postman’ is an artless, groove-free travesty of the charming Motown original (such a disappointment after their slam dunk with ‘Boys’ on the first LP), and McCartney’s buttoned up cover of Peggy Lee’s ‘Til There Was You’ is flat-out rubbish – emblematic of the kind of square, schmaltzy crap he’d bloody-mindedly continue to foist upon the band from time to time throughout their career.

With ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’ meanwhile, Lennon & McCartney contrived to write a rock n’ roll song of almost ‘Louis Louis’ level zen brilliance, but it is sobering to reflect that, at the time, neither they nor The Rolling Stones (to whom the song was initially donated) seemed capable of doing it justice in the studio. (To hear it done properly, I recommend The Milkshakes’ version from 1984.)

Overall then, the closing two thirds of ‘With..’ feel like a bust. The ballads are boring, and the only one of the ‘ravers’ that really comes off is the closing ‘Money (That’s What I Want)’, with a pounding groove and Lennon’s totally ragged tonsils propelling it into that select pantheon of Beatles rock n’ roll cuts that genuinely kick it.

In view of the considerably more rewarding direction the band would subsequently begin to develop, I’d speculate that, canny operators as ever, they must have been well aware that this LP’s epoch-making success was more of a ‘time and place’ thing than an honest reflection of its musical worth. Having said that, if just about any other white pop group in existence in 1963 had put this out it would likely be revered as a remarkable achievement – but, by the high standards The Beatles were about to set for themselves, it still falls a bit flat; not so much a difficult second album as just a slightly lazy one.

Labels: album reviews, old LPs, The Beatles

Like many people I suspect, I spent a significant stretch of my late teens and early twenties purporting to hate The Beatles. Since then though of course, I’ve gradually come to realise that, much like claiming to hate animals or children, hating The Beatles is a mug’s game; a dreary, contrarian stance suitable only for lonely, cantankerous misanthropes.

Of course, anyone who claims to unreservedly love all of The Beatles output should probably be regarded with equal suspicion – perhaps kept at the same arms-length usually reserved for conspiracy theorists and practitioners of “crystal healing” – but nonetheless; regardless of the issues one might reasonably have with the band’s members, their respective idiosyncrasies, and their overbearing influence upon 20th century music culture, to reach a certain age without acknowledging that a significant amount of the music the band made together is joyous, innovative and basically just a whole lot of fun, is frankly just weird, to be honest.

Personally, I never experienced any road-to-Damascus, blinding-light-of-revelation type moment regarding The Beatles; instead, just a slowly growing awareness of the fact that the general ‘feel’ of their music, which made me very happy when I listened to it under parental supervision as a child and early teen, still makes me happy as an adult, now that the spiky fences erected in the name of teenage rebellion have long been trampled.

Rest assured though readers, I’ve not been inflicted by the grown up, rock-bore variant of Beatlemania that afflicts so many males of a certain age – indeed, I remain confident that The Beatles will never become a group I would actually list as one of my all-time favourites, irrespective of the time I may or may not spend delving into their catalogue.

Throughout their career, there was always something a bit, I dunno, preppy, slightly too eager-to-please, about their music (McCartney’s influence, presumably) which, together with a slightly contrived, stand-offish air (Lennon’s irony?), prevented them from ever really crossing over into the instinctive chaos and aggression that characterises true rock n’ roll in its various forms – that of course being a lineage that both preceded and followed their blanket domination of the ’63-’69 period, and that (to a greater or lesser extent) provided the framework all the white rock music I really love.

But, I like The Beatles quite a lot, and I enjoy their music when I hear it… let’s leave it like that.

As such, I have recently found myself reading a remaindered copy of the late Ian MacDonald’s much-ballyhooed book Revolution in the Head: The Beatles Records and The Sixties (2005 revised edition). Mixing fairly high-brow musings and keen academic specificity with a rousingly Romantic (capital R) defence and celebration of the lasting and positive social change that emerged from the entity we now term “the sixties”, MacDonald’s central assertion that the progress of this transformation can be seen clearly mapped out in the chronological progress of The Beatles’ recordings is a heady one indeed.

Although some of MacDonald’s more music theory-orientated stuff goes straight over my untutored head (were the teenage Beatles really aware that they were singing harmony in recurring triplets, or instigating a daringly unconventional drop to B flat at the end of the chorus or whatever, whilst they were bashing through their sets in Hamburg?), as soon as I got to work on the detailed track-by-track analysis that makes up the bulk of the book’s text, it became clear that this thing would be nigh on impossible to read without simultaneous consideration of the songs being discussed.

Check out the ingenuity of Starr’s ‘backwards’ fill after the middle eight, MacDonald tells us, and listen out for the guitar flub at 1:27, and, can you imagine the effect all those unruly ‘woooo’s during the chorus repeats must have had on a mainstream pop audience in 1962, and so on.

I don’t know about you, but reading that sort of thing tends to result in my immediately being consumed by such an overwhelming need to listen to the thing myself and double-check these observations that it is difficult to eat, sleep or carry out my responsibilities as an adult person, until I have done so.

As a result, I’ve suddenly found myself doing something I’ve never previously gotten around to – namely, “acquiring” copies of The Beatles’ original UK LPs [ask no questions, and I’ll give you no answers] and listening to them closely, in chronological order. Which seems like something any pop/rock music fan should do at least once in their life, right..?

During my childhood, I should explain, our family had the red album and the blue album, and later a CD of The White Album, so that was the stuff I knew. I’ve subsequently filled in some of the gaps in their post’65 output myself, but, as a result, there is actually a lot of stuff on the mop-top era LPs that I’ve never knowingly heard before – so, going through it all, with MacDonald on hand to point at the blackboard and lay down the lore, is proving to be quite an enlightening experience.

Although these early albums are generally written off as a handful of great singles bulked out with careless, quickly recorded filler material (which, in fairness, is exactly what they are), I’m nonetheless going to go out on a limb here and say that ‘Please Please Me’ (cobbled together in the immediate aftermath of The Beatles achieving their first UK number # 1 with the title track) still stands up as a really great listen, despite some shaky moments.

The first nice surprise here is track # 2, ‘Misery’, a Lennon original that opens with what sounds like a bit of parody of the era’s solipsistic teen ballads, before the band pull a bait n’ switch on us and Ringo kicks in with a fairly propulsive 4/4 beat – hi-hat hissing metronome-style on every measure - and the track becomes quite a nice, laidback pop-rocker. If you want to hear an example of a good, early Beatles song whose simple pleasures haven’t been beaten into the ground by 50+ years of constant repetition, this is a good choice.

The prominence of the drumming here also serves to remind us that, irrespective of MacDonald’s more scholarly breakdowns, the genre that The Beatles were initially credited with spear-heading was Mersey-beat, not Mersey-three part harmony or Mersey-counterpoint bassline. I’m not claiming Ringo Starr was by any means the first drummer to lay down this kind of relentless, pre-motorik non-groove (it’s kind of a variant on the “Twist beat”, right?), but the importance of his decision to employ it on most of the best songs on this album cannot be underestimated, vis-à-vis it’s subsequent adoption as the foundation of pretty much all pop-rock, mod, power-pop and, eventually, punk records.

This point is perfectly demonstrated by skipping forward to what is probably my least favourite song on this record, ‘P.S. I Love You’ (track # 9). This was originally the B-side for ‘Love Me Do’, and, as per the A-side, poor Ringo found himself ignominiously kicked off the drum stool by George Martin (for shame!), demoted to maracas (the indignity!) for the duration of the session, and replaced by studio session player Andy White. I’m extremely glad the band didn’t go on to use this guy for any subsequent recordings, because his work here, though faultlessly ‘professional’, of course, is frankly pretty fucking rubbish. Whilst a lumpen, plodding rhythm actually adds to the primitive charm of ‘Love Me Do’, the “clippity cloppity”, rim shot-heavy beat White employs on ‘P.S. I Love You’ is absolutely insufferable.

Vaguely reminiscent of Ron Grainer’s theme for ‘Steptoe & Son’, it feels symptomatic of the drab, sexless, overly cautious British approach to pop that The Beatles are widely credited with instantaneously destroying upon their arrival in ’63 – a claim that is easy to believe if you skip back from ‘P.S.’ to the comparative hurricane of the ever-fantastic ‘I Saw Her Standing There’, probably the closest thing to a straight up, ‘50s style rock n’ roll classic the band ever recorded.

Herein, Starr’s relentless pulse drives things forward (even though his actual drum hits are muted by the over-dubbed hand-claps), adding an exhilarating touch of modernism to proceedings as the tempo accelerates beyond that favoured by, say, Chuck Berry or The Beach Boys, whilst the chiming, slightly overdriven tangle of John and George’s guitars cast a glance back toward Berry or even Hubert Sumlin, already ever-so-slightly anticipating the feedbackin’ excesses of the coming decade. It’s great, in other words.

Meanwhile, the inevitable suite of R’n’B covers The Beatles included here gets a lot of stick for generally being slap-dash and failing to live up to the originals - which again, is perfectly accurate, but I really enjoyed them nonetheless. You can hardly blame a bunch of teenagers, anxiously watching the clock on their first proper studio session, for failing to equal the performances of Arthur Alexander or The Shirelles, and, if The Beatles take on Goffin & King’s ‘Chains’ is a bit perfunctory (good as the band could be in early days, this song demands the kind of loose, heavy groove that these nice clean British lads were never likely to achieve), Lennon’s performance of Alexander’s ‘Anna (Go With Him)’ is actually very creditable (I really like Harrison’s little guitar riff too). Best of all though, Ringo’s token vocal, a take on The Shirelles’ ‘Boys’, is an absolute banger.

Although I didn’t intend to turn this review a spirited defence of Ringo, I’ve always felt that some of the songs he sang in The Beatles have been unfairly ridiculed over the years, and as far as this first LP is concerned, he’s probably neck-and-neck with John for MVP status, particularly when he’s bellowing his way through ‘Boys’, crashing away on his kit with the rest of the band’s “bop-bop-she-wop”s echoing away behind him. Were the vocals overdubbed? I’d like to imagine not, but either way, it’s pretty raucous, high energy stuff (check out his shout-out to George before the solo), fully aware of the humour inherent in handing a girl group number to a gentleman of Ringo’s gruff disposition. It must have gone down a storm in their live sets.

What probably comes across most strongly on this LP in fact is a glimpse of the indefinable charisma and good feeling that played such a huge role in winning The Beatles their popularity in their early years. Lest we forget, it wasn’t the band’s music that convinced George Martin to continue recording them after their disastrous first demo session at Abbey Road - more the fact that he just enjoyed their company and had a great laugh with them.

No doubt the audiences who reportedly went wild for them in Liverpool and Hamburg felt similarly, and, listening to ‘Please Please Me’, it’s easy to understand how they felt. Even through the dreary ballads, unconvincing concessions to popular taste and ill-chosen cover versions that make up about a third of the record’s track list, it’s almost impossible to listen to it front to back without being won over a bit by that intangible feeling of comfort, good cheer and happiness that came to define “The Beatles” in the popular imagination.

Partly as a result of the larger-than-life personalities and bracingly informal manner that made The Beatles so appealing in ’62-’64, there was also an unresolved conflict between mainstream showbiz populism and rebellious, trend-setting idiosyncrasy that persisted throughout their career, and this disjuncture remains fascinating to me, even though the former aspect generally won out (prior to ‘Revolver’, at least).

It would be easy to characterise this conflict as a straight McCartney / Lennon split, but digging more deeply into these early records reveals that it was never quite as simple as that. Even this early in proceedings, Lennon seems to have wanted to fall back on irony and pastiche to separate himself from the schmaltzy sentimentality that the rest of the band seem to have happily embraced (check out the consciously cheesy doo-wop backing vocals that pop up in several places on this LP, for instance). Although much of the material he contributed to the original songs here is excellent, he seems to have been keen at this stage on telling anyone and everyone that the primary goal of his song-writing was to become rich and famous – thus by implication retaining his rock n’ roll hipster cred by dismissing his band’s repetitious “baby love you” type numbers as a cynical commercial necessity. (Macdonald reports a story that Lennon at one point recorded a demo of a song he intended to sell to Billy J Kramer & The Dakotas in the toilet cubicle of a Hamburg nightclub, symbolically pulling the chain upon completion.)

The simple, winning earnestness of some of Lennon’s songs and performances however makes his disavowal of their sentiments feel at least a bit hollow. Specifically in regard to this LP, it is instructive I think to note Lennon’s apparent enthusiasm for emerging African American performers such as Arthur Alexander and Smokey Robinson. (He covers the former with some gusto here, and appears to have written the so-so ‘Ask Me Why’ in imitation of the latter.) In these fresh sounds of ‘60s soul, could Lennon have discovered a way to turn conventional, lovey-dovey lyrics into vehicles for genuine creative expression..? A bit of a Eureka moment, perhaps…?

Certainly, the many excellent songs he would go on to write within the confines of the band’s melodic pop formula over the next few years would suggest such an inspiration, as indeed does ‘There’s a Place’, the penultimate track on ‘Please Please Me’, and another rarely excavated highlight. This is a splendidly loping Lennon original whose spectral, down-at-heel optimism and raw, unfussy musical arrangement convey a warmth and honesty that parallels that of the emerging American soul sound, without resorting to imitating it. Again, it’s well worth a listen.

Indeed, along with McCartney’s pleasantly nostalgic arrangement of the theme song from the 1961 new wave drama ‘A Taste of Honey’, ‘There’s a Place’ is the only song here that actually dares to reflect the band’s Northern British roots instead of playing pop star dress up (as was the industry expectation at the time). Both songs are liable to raise goose bumps in anyone with a yen for the particular aesthetic of the era’s “kitchen sink” movies and literature, and both set the stage for the many similar excursions that would follow once the band officially hit “phenomenon” status, when, depending on which way you choose to look at it, they either felt secure enough to be themselves…. or else realised just how effectively they could sell their – ahem – cheeky working class personas around the world.

I don’t know whether or not I’ll find anything similarly pertinent (read: long-winded) to say about ‘With The Beatles’ (which followed later in 1963), but watch this space.

Labels: album reviews, old LPs, The Beatles

Well in this case, there really is nothing I can add to the hundreds of earnest obits and talking head tributes that no doubt fill today’s papers and radio/TV. Suffice to say, if you in any way like the idea of humans singing songs, you can probably dig some Aretha.

Personally, I dug out this 1973 LP which I picked up a few years ago and play often. It’s not generally regarded as her best work, but I like it a lot. It’s just spot-on cosmically-inclined Southern gospel/soul with some questing psychedelic excursions, underpinned by a proper, serious post-Black Power social consciousness agenda (on the first side, at least – side #2 goes a bit trad/show tune-ish towards the end). Beautiful Quincy Jones production – interestingly for the era, there’s not even a hint of funk or disco, but a fair bit of inspiration from ‘What’s Goin’ On’, I daresay. Slow, sun-baked Wrecking-Crew-goes-country kind of vibe (‘Sister From Texas’ could almost be a Bobbie Gentry track).

Perhaps in ’73, people thought this was a bit of a late hop on a departing counter-culture bandwagon, but today it just sounds like beautiful music, irrespective of context. Listening to it makes me want to hug somebody, be extra nice to people, and step outside to enjoy the breeze and the sunshine.

Absolutely love the crazy artwork (by Jim Dunn*) in the gatefold too. I’m sorry my photos aren’t very good, but the figure you see on the left hand side is a guy dressed as a matador, fighting a giant syringe. Nice! Love the idea of the winged, Egyptian goddess Aretha accepting an offering from her faithful supplicants (or something) too. Nice image for today. (Her microphone seems to be plugged into a potted plant, for some reason...?)

You’ll forgive me ignorance, but until yesterday I had no idea Aretha Franklin was so young during the early/defining part of her career. The fact she was belting out all those authoritative, empowering, generally un-fuckable-with performances when she was in her early/mid-20s just seems extraordinary to me; I’d always unconsciously assumed she must have had at least another decade under her belt to get to that particular level of sock-it-to-'em greatness.

No more blather needed. R.I.P., needless to say.


* Searching "Jim Dunn + artist"  doesn't seem to bring up anything of immediate relevance vis-a-vis learning a bit more about THIS Mr Dunn,  unfortunately.

Labels: album reviews, Aretha Franklin, deathblog, old LPs

Apparently this Bo Gritz lot live in the same half a city as I do, and presumably must have frequented some of the same places at some point. Perhaps some of them have played in some other bands that I may or may not have seen at some point, but I don’t think I’m familiar with any of them, as far as I’m aware. This is hardly surprising - I know very few people around town these days, and have a poor memory besides. Perhaps I’d recognise one or more of them if I saw a photo? Or perhaps not.

Well, never mind. Point is: of all the endless, minute variations of bad-tempered, hopeless noise-rock that exist in the world right now, Bo Gritz - on the basis of this cassette release at least - play one of the few that I actually want to listen to.

Which is to say: the guitar sometimes sounds like a demonically possessed analogue radio that’s come to life and started attacking people, the bass is content to lurk shadily in the background, a hooligan under a tree in a nocturnal park, whilst the drums thud away in exhausted, groovelessly utilitarian fashion, rather like Simon King of Hawkwind reaching his own personal dead-end after X hours of LSD fuelled battery. None of the players display any flash whatsoever. No time-changes, no ‘look-we're-tight’ turn-around bits, no twiddly riffs - it’s just pure ug. Simple, beautiful idiot-rock, laced with a bit of Messthetics bend n’ scrape.

There are vocals in there too I suppose – potentially snarled down the same drain-pipe that used to belong to Jim Shepard or The Heads, more recently liberated from City Yelps – whilst the four track tape recording keeps that nasty treble in check and helps to bake the band’s potentially upsetting, bulbous aggro down into a warm and nourishing aural porridge.

Wherever you are in the world and whatever you’re up to, chances are there is rain and cold and aggravation and petty bullshit on the horizon before long. This is the sound of walking straight into it... and subsequently standing on the street like an angry chump, refusing to admit that you went the wrong way and ballsed everything up. (Hey, it happens.)

If you do tapes, well you can no longer do this one because it’s sold out. Stream and download from here.

Labels: Bo Gritz, EP reviews, I like, tapes

I’m sorry for temporarily letting this blog die yet again. No particular excuse this time around, but, as UK residents in particular will appreciate, summer 2018 has thus far been… quite a memorable one, I suppose. Here therefore is a random seasonal mix of OLD MUSIC to celebrate the mixed feelings and sun-baked uncertainties that have surrounded it.

Dedicated to pubs with cold, well-kept cellars, anyone else who managed to throw the Vs at a scary green helicopter last week and the hope of a world in which those in positions of power don’t run their mouths like hustlers at a fucking dog race.

A few notes:

1. In stark contrast to most of this blog’s other recent content, this is largely a heavy rock/psyche free zone. Well, I mean, it kind of kicks off with a 7 minute plus ‘Tokyo Flashback’ jam, but beyond that… pretty low on the fuzz, in view of my recent tastes.

2. Instead, this initially started off as more of a “return to good old singer-songwriter values” kind of playlist, with a side order of drug-dazed ‘70s L.A. cynicism, but that was just too grim, so, as the hot weather persisted, it thankfully got hijacked by a lot of “lazing around in the sun” type material – which, to not put too fine a point on it, basically means busting out the funk.

3. At one stage, this was also intended to be one of those mix tapes in which each track has a connection to the one that preceded it. (I find these a lot of fun to do, because, I don’t know… I’m like that.) Subsequent revisions broke this up a bit, but many of the links still remain – some based upon pretty obvious musical similarities, others on vague lyrical/atmospheric themes that may at times remain entirely mysterious to anyone other than myself. If you don’t initially see the connections, why not think up some new ones (forge your own chains)? If you are INCREDIBLY BORED, why not write them down and send me a list? I’ll reward you by… being frightened, quite honestly.

4. In the even more unlikely event that anyone has been specifically following mix tapes/CDs I’ve made over the years, they may notice I’ve dug up a few old chestnuts / past enthusiasms here. I dunno. Maybe it’s another summer thing. Too hot to think, let alone find anything new. Let’s just play that Minutemen track again. Perfect.

5. If you are sufficiently behind the times to still download music from the internet and burn it onto CDs – well, first of all, WELL DONE. My belief that the years 2004-2008 represented a golden age for music lovers that has now been cruelly shit-canned remains strong, so possibly you agree. (Let’s talk about it, perhaps on a messageboard.) Secondly though, please note that the track-by-track mp3 version of this mix I’ve uploaded is *slightly too long* to fit on a CD (devious mixing techniques brought the single track Mixcloud version in at just under 80 minutes). Thus I would probably recommend picking the track you’re least liable to enjoy and ditching it before burning. Sorry about that.

Right then. Mixcloud box:



Full tracklist & timecodes:

00:00 Dennis Wilson - Friday Night
03:00 Overhang Party - Now Appearing! Naked Existence / 今立ち現れる
10:13 The Bevis Frond - Waving
13:26 The Mekons - Millionaire
18:00 Neil Young - Hawaii
20:35 Sly & The Family Stone - Runnin' Away
23:26 Tony Grey & The Black 7 - The Feelings
28:13 Baby Huey - Listen To Me
34:50 Bullfrog / Franco Micalizzi - Man Before Your Time
38:34 Kool G Rap - Money in the Bank
43:21 Alice Coltrane - Lovely Sky Boat
50:12 Silver Jews - Dallas
54:24 D.R. Hooker - Forge Your Own Chains
58:48 Greg Ashley - Pursue The Night Life
63:15 Minutemen - Dr Wu
65:00 Barbara Faith - The Bramble and the Rose
67:54 some unknown Korean kids - beach scene from 'A Woman After a Killer Butterfly'
70:16 The Band - Whispering Pines
74:15 Bobby Charles - Save Me Jesus

(Mp3 version.)

Labels: mixcloud, mixtapes, summer

Recorded back in late April and derailed by Desertfest coverage, this second foray onto the digital airwaves includes some discussion of the more, uh, sensitive side of Motörhead’s early catalogue, along with a pinch over two hours worth of other raging nonsense.

It’s better than the first one, guaranteed!

Questionable enlightenment awaits via the Mixcloud embed below, or alternatively, you can download the whole thing as a magnificently crushed MP3 from here.




TRACK LIST:

00:00 Terry Thomas - Bring Back The Cat
02:59 High Rise - Wipe Out
08:10 Loretta Lynn - Bargain Basement Dress
09:49 J.J. Cale - They Call Me The Breeze
12:12 *blather 1*
16:40 Motörhead - Motorhead
19:29 *blather 2*
23:54 Motörhead - City Kids
27:34 Solid Space - Tenth Planet
30:23 The Bats - Rooftops
34:45 *blather 3*
37:04 Feral Ohms - Super Ape
39:59 Betty Davis - They Say I'm Different
43:56 Midnight Mines - Do The Locomotion
49:43 Endless Boogie - Back in '74
56:18 *blather 4*
59:13 Motörhead - Lost Johnny
62:42 Midori Takada - Crossing
71:03 Smokin' Willie - Evil Ways
76:52 *blather 4*
80:10 Charles Mingus - Hog Callin' Blues
87:30 Jerry Jeff Walker - About Her Eyes
90:20 Motörhead - Iron Horse / Born To Lose
95:35 *blather 5*
100:20 Bong - Time Regained
117:10 Richard & Linda Thompson - The Dark End of the Street

And, relegated to playing behind the blather:

Demon Fuzz - Past, Present & Future
Harmonia - Watussi
Eno / Moebius / Roedelius - The Belldog
James Brown - Popcorn with a Feeling
Flying Saucer Attack - Instrumental Wish

Labels: Born Too Late, mixcloud, Motorhead, radio show

One of the depressingly small number of female musicians featured at Desertfest (it’s kind of a drag to even feel obliged to draw attention to such distinctions, TBH), Tanya at least seems determined to make an impression as perhaps the single loudest featured musician, running her bass through what looks to be no less than eight full size cabinets (well, they’re all switched on and miced anyway - I suppose we'd have to question the sound tech for full confirmation).

I rarely use ear-plugs for live music, but we’re very much in plugs-or-die territory here, as the sub-bass pummels like an enthusiastic masseur and the drinks shelf screwed to the venue’s back wall buzzes like a chainsaw. The noise kind of makes my teeth hurt, which I think is a first. For once, the plugs work well anyway. They let through most of the treble, and I can feel the bass, so it’s all good.

Though the bottomless depths of Bismuth’s glacial doom matches early Sunn 0))) in intensity, this is far from just a formless drone, with tightly composed sections allowing the band to scale back on the distortion for some passages of glimmering, oceanic beauty. The rise and fall of the noise feels a bit like watching storm surges build up and dissipate in real time across some rain-lashed, Turner-esque landscape perhaps, with crowds of gulls occasionally flying free through patches of blinding sun. It is vast, serious, frightening and impressive music. Highly recommended, although live immersion is not for the faint-hearted.

Shortly thereafter, Notts stalwarts Moloch begin to tear through their hardcore-informed depths-of-human-misery sludge at only marginally lower volume. Airless, grim and defeated, the vocalist favours wordless bellows of pain, and, whilst the guitarist occasionally manoeuvres his fingers through some sweet, Sabbathian riff patterns, you can almost feel his bandmates glowering at him for attempting something so perilously close to being fun. Friends, it’s “heavy”, in the sense that hippies used to use the word as a synonym for ‘difficult’ or ‘threatening’.

Checking bandcamp, I see they did an album back in 2011 based around Andrzej Zulwaski’s ‘Possession’. Word. Next time I feel in the mood for total self-annihilation, I’ve got it cued.

Although I enjoyed Moloch’s set, it feels suffocatingly unnatural to be soaking up such punishment in a blackened basement this early in the day on a sunny Sunday, and as such, it’s with palpable relief that I at this point make a break for the outside, purchasing a really big ice cream to enjoy as I cut through the back streets towards the far more salubrious environs of The Roundhouse.

So – Roundhouse. Pros and cons. Though its pompous ‘historic cultural centre’ branding leaves a bad taste in the mouth with regards to what is still basically a “pack ‘em in / pile ‘em high” gig venue, a festival scenario like this nonetheless makes the advantages of its big bucks refurb (many bars, opens spaces, places to sit, friendly staff) quite welcome. The main room remains a genuinely incredible space too (the next time you’re there, LOOK UP). I was initially a bit miffed that the balcony isn’t open to general ticket holders, but later in the evening it became obvious that this seated area had been put side primarily for older attendees or those with mobility issues, rather than just fenced off for VIPs, which is a genuinely nice idea – no problems there. Sound mix meanwhile is sadly a bit meh (not much better than yr standard Forum/Koko mud-fest at times), and both sight lines and comfort down on the floor could be pretty lacking for a sell-out show (which thankfully this isn’t – Desertfest’s headliners may have a certain pull, but the room is vast).

Despite claiming to have arrived dazed straight from the airport, Elder nonetheless manage to achieve a mix that is louder, and about ten times clearer, than any of the other bands who will perform at the Roundhouse today, making the space a perfect fit for the group’s particular brand of Epic Modern Rock (caps engaged). Not quite ‘psyche-‘, not quite ‘space-‘, not quite ‘progressive’ and not quite ‘metal’, but skirting a little around all of these things, Elder’s music is carefully-wrought stuff, achieving transcendence not through noise and chaos, but through confident playing and unified compositions. Which I realise sound boring as hell, but the band are actually quite compelling… it’s kind of like music for gliding across some bright, vast alien landscape of unknown flora and awe-inspiring rock formations and stuff, I suppose. Did I already say ‘epic’? Yes.

Moving into the final stretch, Desertfest’s Sunday line up seems to have been consciously split between the two extremes of the festival’s remit, with an intimidating line up of total-fucking-doom at The Underworld whilst quasi-mainstream space-rock type stuff hold sway at The Roundhouse. With all three headliners at the latter falling broadly into the category of “bands I have a great deal of fondness for, but am uncertain about the prospect of seeing in 2018”, my decision is to stick with it. Satori meanwhile largely favours The Underworld, and subsequently begins to make me slightly regret my decision via an impressive stream of photos and videos of groups like Fister (BIG FUN?) and Primitive Man (just BIG, and a bit terrifying).

But, I shall not be moved. Roundhouse it is.

Like those long distant formative gigs I began this post talking about, my personal history with Nebula goes back to the early ‘00s. Transcending the rather plastic, mass-produced sound of much late ‘90s Stoner Rock (which at its worst was basically Warped Tour pop-punk for boys with long hair and flares, right?) whilst staying true to its essential sonic ideals, they rose above thanks to a gnarlier recorded sound (courtesy of Jack Endino), song-writing that saw them spread their wings into proper cosmic/psyche territory, and, most of all, front man Eddie Glass’s gloriously OTT guitar heroics (which was/is basically a perfect expression of the sound all gormless Bill & Ted teens wishes they could sound like when they pick up their first strat copy).

Hearing unrehabilitated rockist action like this start to break through into the indie compound was a joyous thing to me at the time (their 2001 Peel session remains magnificent – perhaps the band’s crowning moment), and I recall striving hard to try to make it to a London headline show they were playing at around the same time. I didn’t make it, and the band subsequently fell off my radar, so…. a little delayed, here we are in 2018. As it transpires, this set is actually the first sighting of the band since they split up in 2010-ish, with a line-up comprising Glass and – alarm bells, anyone? – a new, younger rhythm section.

Contrary to his persona on the records, Eddie Glass seems an unassuming sort of fellow, shambling on stage, eyes to floor and just getting down to business with minimal fanfare. Having never caught the band before, I’m not sure if this reflects a lack of confidence after so much time away or if he’s just always been like that. Not that it matters, you understand – after all, this is not the kind of rock music that needs some fist-pounding oaf in the driving seat. It’s all about the riffs and solos, all about the groove, and staying true to the core, shining awesomeness of the rock dream. Which, by-now-expected murky bass sounds notwithstanding, Nebula 2018 do very well.

Ploughing manfully through hits like ‘All The Way’, ‘Sonic Titan’ and ‘Let It Burn’ – truly, songs that legitimately deserve to be described as “joints” – this is a truly sweet time. Disappointingly, the crowd is considerably thinner than it was for Elder, but hey, this band are reborn representatives or a scene that largely slid into creative irrelevance over a decade ago, and, as noted, The Roundhouse is a vast room for them to try to fill. Sipping a beer, reflecting on the notion that this is basically the music that I think should be playing on all car radios all the time (well, either that, or Creedence, or ‘90s hip-hop), I had a nice time.

Sadly, I don't think Glass indulged in his former endearing habit of pausing to announce "geetar!" shortly before he himself plays a solo, mid-way through a song in which he has been soloing more or less continually throughout - but you can't have everything.

A few songs before the end of the set, Glass breaks his G-string and seems somewhat at a loss as to how to proceed. It speaks poorly of the level of camaraderie on this bill that there are no members of other bands rummaging around in flight cases to save the day, but, apparently lacking spares and/or the wherewithal to conduct an on-stage change, Glass opts to see out the set sans G-string, harshing the set’s buzz somewhat with some awkwardly re-worked riff parts and a chronic reduction in the kind of string-bending, sustain blasting action for which that magic third string is, uh, kind of essential.

Like I say, it was a cool set, I’d really glad I had the chance to finally see ‘em, but for a sort-of-legendary band theoretically making their glorious return in front of a crowd of genre die-hards, the reaction seemed… a little muted, perhaps? I dunno, what can ya say.

So -- Hawkwind is a weird one. Which I suppose is exactly as it should be, but still.

I’m sure I don’t need to fill you in on my history with Hawkwind. Simply one of the best bands ever, no caveats required. I’ve been meditating upon their mysteries to the point of near obsession for the past five years or so in particular. Still though, I don’t think I’ve ever consciously listened to anything they’ve done since about 1984, so… there’s that. My understanding has been that, across the past few decades, the band has more or less been truckin’ on in power trio format, with stalwart Dave Brock backed up by a reliable but anonymous rhythm section.



Based on the Desertfest performance though, it seems the ever-shifting sands of Hawkdom have been rearranged once more after these years of relative stability. For a start, who is this large gentleman in a Stetson and cut-off leather jacket, standing centre-stage, reciting Michael Moorcock’s ‘Sonic Attack’ monologue through a megaphone? [As usual, Wiki provides the answer: apparently he is Mr Dibs, and he been in place as de facto frontman since 2011.] In-between twisting knobs for instant, cheesy UFO noises on a portable synth (think Higashi Hiroshi in Acid Mothers Temple), he proceeds to handle lead vocals throughout the set.

In an odd but somewhat inspired move, Hawkwind’s set both begins and ends with songs written by the late Bob Calvert for 1977’s ‘Quark, Strangeness and Charm’ LP, and fair dos, Stetson-man does a pretty fine impression of Calvert’s distinctive vocal style. ‘Damnation Alley’ certainly emerges as a bit of a banger, with a largely keyboard-led sound nailing a style I’m sure young ‘uns in the crowd would immediately term ‘motorik’ or ‘kosmiche’, though one doubts that even the more recently recruited Hawklords could give a monkeys about that, whilst the closing wig-out on ‘Hassan I Sabha’ transcends the inherent ridiculousness of proceedings to become genuinely sinister and disorientating.

Sad to say however, that is Baron Brock remains the undisputed captain of starship Hawkwind, he was captain in name only on this occasion. Though his disinclination to act as front-man has been a constant since the band's glory days, having single-handedly held the group together for over fifty years in the face of nigh on unimaginable madness, I’ve always imagined he must be some kind of Ginn/Iommi/Johnny Ramone style guitarist-dictator, and the dominance of his “roaring after-burner” proto-punk rhythm guitar style across the years would certainly suggest as much. Tonight though, he’s looking fragile, and feels very much like a marginal figure in his own band.

One of the only guitarists I saw at Desertfest to eschew the temptation of Orange/Marshall stacks, he instead seemed to be plugged into his own strange arrangement of floor-level apparatus with many flashing lights and… this didn’t seem to be working out terribly well, to be honest. He and a sound tech seemed to spend the entirety of the set fiddling with it, and guitar was entirely inaudible for the first few songs, leaving Hawkwind sounding rather like some weird electronic pop band (which at least suits the ‘Quark..’ material, I guess). When it does cut through the mix, his sound is transistor radio tinny – weak fuel indeed for this hulk’s engines.

Nonetheless, the band bash through serviceable reiterations of ‘Born To Go’, ‘The Watcher’ and ‘Upside Down’, but tellingly, the only moment that really sees Brock summoning up much enthusiasm is a number that I think must have been taken from one of their recent sci-fi concept albums (most likely 2015’s ‘The Machine Stops’). Moving closer to centre stage and grinning broadly, this one – which sticks pretty closely to the classic-era Hawkwind template, to be honest - sees Brock dropping some appropriately gnarly solos, whilst the band respond in kind, turning the whole thing into exactly the kind of chaotic, open-ended jam you might reasonably hope to encounter at a 21st century Hawkwind gig.

Charmingly, Hawkwind don’t appear to have updated their video backdrop since the rave era, and ‘Hassan I Sabha’s “hashish, hashish, hashish” chant is accompanied by a head shop screensaver vortex of spinning, VGA marijuana leaves (clearly the band have a good idea of the audience they’re playing for at this fest, although I don’t notice much repetition of yesterday’s ‘smokin in the boy’s room’ antics at The Roundhouse), whilst the band’s dancing girl performs a ludicrous fan dance during an extended, ‘90s techno style interlude. (Beat THAT, Primitive Man.)

Ah, yes. Did I mention that Hawkwind have a dancing girl? And she’s no Stacia either, that’s for sure. Most of the men on the stage are old enough to be her father (please god don’t let that actually be the case), and… it’s all a bit uncomfortable, to be honest, especially given that she is the only woman to set foot on The Roundhouse stage across the whole day.

Still, isn’t this all the kind of thing you’d expect to encounter at a Hawkwind gig? Weird, ramshackle, baffling, uncomfortable, funny, simultaneously grotesquely out-dated and defiantly futuristic, hideously uncool yet undeniably awesome? It’s all a far, far cry from the grandeur of ‘Space Ritual’, of course, but what can we expect – that was literally a lifetime ago by this point. The very fact that such a volatile, self-sabotaging band can still get the motor running at all is worthy of celebration… but I do kind of wish they’d been able to summon up something a bit more substantial than the gig-going equivalent of a “so bad it’s good” b-movie.

Which seems like the perfect juncture at which to move on to Monster Magnet.

I never stooped so low as to recognise that whole moribund notion of ‘guilty pleasures’ that was briefly en vague about a decade ago, but, put a gun to my head and I’d probably have to nominate Monster Magnet for that category.

Combining lumpen riffs, ludicrous, laugh-out-loud lyrics and obnoxious, quasi-ironic rock star machismo whilst waving the remnants of a noble psychedelic/space-rock legacy around like a tattered ragdoll, their existence adds approximately nothing of value to the sum total of human cultural achievement. Checking out the MTV-aimed videos they made during the ‘90s is enough to drain the colour from your flesh and potentially make your hair fall out (please don’t try this at home), and yet… somehow, the obscene beauty of Dave Wyndorf’s maniacal vision of the perfect, ultimate rock n’ roll band still always manages to shine through.

They were, and they remain, fucking Monster Magnet, and, ever since a random second hand CD purchase of their major label debut ‘Dopes To Infinity’ shone a light of new possibility into my teenage years, livening up a grim era in which “psychedelia” remained a dirty word for most critics and musicians, they have had a permanent place in my heart.

Of course, I tracked further back from there, investigating the genuinely heavy, creepy shit they put out before inking their big deal with A&M (lest we forget, ‘Tab’, ‘Spine of God’ and their debut EP remain potent listening to this day for all fuzz-breathing sleaze-fiends), and forward toward to ‘Power Trip’, ‘98’s gloriously flawed attempt at a mainstream breakthrough. Thereafter though…. well let’s just say that all I remember about ‘99’s ‘God Says No’ is sitting in a Uni housemate’s room marvelling at the lyric “..you will swim in the sweat of a thousand orgies”, and after that…. nada. I just had enough Monster Magnet in my life I suppose, and the emergence of Youtube and the ability to watch those videos certainly didn’t help (shudder).

From what I gather, earlier Monster Magnet tours have boasted pyrotechnics, dancers in cages, probably whatever other ridiculous nonsense you could possibly imagine, but, after a few year that seem to have been spent stripping back on their mainstream/stadium-filling aspirations and attempting to reconnect with their ‘core fans’, the band’s 2018 fronting is a bit more down to earth. Tonight, they’re a professional touring rock band playing a headline show to a medium-sized crowd inexplicably inhabiting a large-scale venue – no more, no less. The sound is muddy and unclear, with bass distortion swamping everything, but in spite of everything Dave Wyndorf remains a compelling frontman – his voice is still amazing, his enthusiasm contagious.

I don’t think any other band members have been held over from the ‘90s line-up I’m most familiar with, but both guitarists are happy to do exactly wehat guitarists in bands like this are supposed to do, striding up to the monitors on a regular basis, playing their well-practiced solos with appropriate panache. They’re doin’ their job, and it’s a job they love etc etc… but is that enough?

I never thought I’d say this given that even their best albums tend to melt into undifferentiated, bombastic sludge by the mid-point, but it’s the strength of Monster Magnet’s material that really lets them take flight. With no call-back to the pre-major label era, it’s a “hits plus new bits” set-list, and ‘Dopes To Infinity’s title track still makes for a transcendent opener, it’s drifting, unglued melody about as subtle as Monster Magnet ever get, and it’s elusive wordplay (“..seen your mind on the hood of my car..”) triangulate the band’s contradictory aesthetic of sleaze, materialism and chemical-induced cosmic revelation in fairly sublime fashion.

Other stuff however fare less well. The band’s new single ‘Mindfucker’ is frankly pretty bad, built around a half-hearted bit of reheated misogyny (yes, it’s a “stop fucking with my mind woman” song, like the rest of the world gave up writing in 1974), and suggestive of some middle-aged men’s desperate attempt to try to extract some dollars from rebellious teenagers, a fair few years after the market for this kind of swear-in-the-chorus novelty mosh pit hit packed up and left town. Bogus.

Each time I’m starting to wonder why I’m still standing here though, another fantastic moment crashes in. More than any other song performed by the three headlining bands here tonight, ‘Look To The Orb For Your Warning’ (also from ‘Dopes To Infinity’) really takes flight, Wyndorf wringing shrieks from a table of vocal-mangling electronics as a loop of awesome, Jack Kirby-style comic book srtwork dominates the video screen and the song’s central, monolithic riff hammers down…. for a moment or two there I’m genuinely floating in the rafters, wondering how a group I was snarkily dismissing just a few minutes back suddenly got so mind-bendingly great. Somewhere, some kind of bull-shaped power amulet is being charged.

I even quite enjoyed the inevitable set-closing rendition of the band’s 1998 novelty hit ‘Space Lord’ – a song I’ve always considered a bit of a neutered, shark-jumping farrago in its album version (hilarious lyrics aside), but performed live with Wyndorf working the crowd, the penny finally drops, and the glorious stupidity of hearing upward of a thousand people chanting “SPACE LORD, MOTHERFUCKER!” on cue is both pure Monster Magnet brilliance and as perfect a conclusion to a Desertfest weekend as could be wished for.

Or, I supposed it would be, anyway. Maybe it was just the sheer size of The Roundhouse, or the unfavourable ratio between die-hard fans and random/curious festival-goers in the crowd, but reaction to Monster Magnet’s set felt a bit muted.

The band’s whole bombastic concept would seem to demand either a purely rapturous response or else nothing, but the crowd are less than ecstatic – silence and the occasional wolf whistle after a few moments applause - and the enactment old encore ritual is as robotic as it gets. Always a drag, and a sad reminder that, rather than galaxy-decimating space-lords, these guys are just doing their job, egging out a mixed bag of a career a little bit longer before the fans get too old to turn out and buy tickets – finishing off Sunday, ticking London off the list before they plough on to some draughty barn in Hamburg or somewhere. Which, broadly speaking, is why I tend to avoid going to these big tickets gigs in the first place. Ah well.

I am however extremely glad I finally made it to Desertfest. As was initially promised, the people were lovely, the organisation and logistics across multiple venues was little short of awe-inspiring and I basically enjoyed every single band I heard across the entire weekend. In spite of all my minor gripes and bitching above, it was an f-ing brilliant time that made me feel happy to be alive in a time and place that allows me to experience the pleasures of so much excessively loud rock music. What can I say? As far as festivals go, it hit the spot. Sign me up again for next year.

Labels: Bismuth, Desertfest, Elder, Hawkwind, live reviews, Moloch, Monster Magnet, Nebula

Sloping back to the Electric Ballroom last afternoon after skiving off the day’s earliest sets, I’m just about in time to get a good sightline on Tokyo’s Church of Misery, just as they finish sound check.

Boy, I enjoyed Church of Misery so much. Though I’ve been aware of the band’s existence for a while, I’ve never really made an effort to listen to them in the past, because, well… serial killers. All their songs are about serial killers. I’m not going to try to scale any moral high ground here, but I’m just not very keen on that.

If performing gruelling, sadistic dirges of aural misery inspired by real life crimes is one thing however, what are we to make of a band who sing about them in the context of music that is totally fun and awesome? Ethically speaking, that’s got to be waaay off message, right? Well, regardless. The sound waves hitting my ears are telling my brain to shut the hell up and just enjoy the most exultant set of classic Sabbathian metal they’ve heard in living memory. I mean, it’s not like you can really make out any of the lyrics, y’know? Let’s just spend the next forty-five minutes or so pretending I don’t know about that whole serial killer thing, and enjoy some sweet head-banging.

Something I genuinely didn’t know until I spent some time researching the band prior to writing this however is that, whilst the band’s history stretches back over twenty years, three quarters of the current line-up have only been part of it for about eighteen months, having been recruited by bassist and sole founding member Tatsu Mikami after his former bandmates quit en masse at the end of 2014.

Whilst watching the band on Saturday night, I never would have guessed this. Indeed, with stereotypical Japanese professionalism, these relative newcomers play as if they’ve been carefully honing their material into shape for about a hundred years, hitting that perfect ‘Master of Reality’-into-‘Volume 4’ groove (the very sweetest of Sabbath sweet-spots) with such in-the-pocket conviction it’s impossible not to succumb.

To say Church of Misery are one of the more explicitly Sabbath-derived bands on the Desertfest line-up is… something of an understatement, in spite of the fact that current vocalist Hiroyuki Takano favours a grunge-like growl over an Ozzy yowl. Nonetheless though, they move between ‘Sabbra Cadabra’ boogie and full-on ‘Into The Void’ grind with such obvious love for the instigators of their sound, and whilst taking such care to avoid directly quoting them (something many doom bands could learn from) that…. well basically I’m finding it difficult to avoid finishing each of these paragraphs by just saying “Church of Misery is awesome – end of”. And, in fairness, there’s probably a bit of a Saint Vitus influence in there too, so I can’t accuse them of being too closed-minded.

Also of note here: evidently a man of extremes, Mikami-san appears to be going for a Guinness World Record for the lowest slung bass in history. Seriously, he has the body of his Rickenbacker hanging beneath his knee, meaning he is forced to play with both hands on the neck. How? I don’t know. Why? Probably just because it’s cool. (See the photograph on the band’s Wikipedia page for visual evidence.)

As Church of Misery play, there’s already the hint of a sweet smell in the air, and, suitably emboldened, three guys standing in front of me light up and begin sharing a spliff, Minutes later, security have pounced, escorting them the premises. What a bummer. I mean, I know it’s THE LAW and everything, but given we’re in a crowd within which legalisation of marijuana would probably get about a 95% approval rate, about to enjoy sets by Weedeater and High On Fire, a blind eye or two wouldn’t have gone amiss, y’know what I mean? I’m sure no one present would have lodged a complaint or whatever if a few of the bouncers strategically lost their sense of smell for a couple of hours.

As I vaguely ponder the means by which about twenty guys in arm bands can keep the peace against several thousand concert-goers, a fair number of whom seem to model themselves upon Viking warriors, I realise the Ballroom is swiftly getting pretty packed (far more so that it was for Napalm Death the preceding evening, sad to say), and that as such I’d better skedaddle to the balcony and find something to sit/lean on if I’d going to get a chance of seeing the stage again any time this evening. Even in this modest ambition, I was thwarted by sheer human volume, but thankfully, the upstairs bar was offering some half-decent beer in 500ml cans, so picking up a couple in advance meant I could defend my second row standing position for the next three hours or so. Friends, it was brutal.

(You may consider this dispiritingly nerdy gig-going behaviour, but hey – at least I went to the toilet at some point. The man standing immediately in front of me was there with his elbows on the balcony when I arrived at the venue at 5pm and did not move a muscle or talk to anyone until the end of the show – and believe me, I had my eye on him, coveting his space something rotten.)

Anyway. Weedeater are definitely worth waiting for. I’m aware that, in my writing for this blog in the past, I’ve repeatedly resorted to describing bands’ rhythm sections as “swinging like a wrecking ball” and suchlike, but I really should have held off and saved this terminology for Weedeater, because… they own it, basically, leaving all other potential wrecking ball swinging bands in the shade.

Often feeling like an experiment in how slow and over-saturated you can make a groove whilst still maintaining its integrity AS a groove, their riffs hit you almost viscerally, like a cloud of toxic, bongwater-filtered airbourne filth…. but, they still swing – slowly, fatefully, like watching the walls of your house tumbling in slo-mo.

North Carolina, from whence these bastards hail, may look surprisingly high up the East Coast to those of us on this side of the Atlantic, but Weedeater nonetheless give the impression of having clawed their way up from the very deepest of the deep South – trucker caps and woodsman beards present and correct - though somehow they never fall back on that shit in a way that feels phoney.

Bassist Dave “Dixie” Collins sings in a cracked, hissing croak, like some backwoods boogeyman from a spam-in-a-cabin horror movie, and, though obviously offered up in a spirit of black humour, the unsettling vignettes he intones on songs like ‘It Is What It Is’ (“I’m not quite right / FUCKED IN THE HEAD”) feel down-right terrifying when married to the mulch-thick primordial sludge of the band’s music. (Reading Weedeater’s Wikipedia page today, I learn that the band took a brief hiatus in 2010 after Collins shot himself in the foot “..whilst cleaning his favourite shotgun”, so, make of that what you will.)

Conjuring one of the filthiest, most stomach-churning bass sounds I’ve ever heard from the Electric Ballroom’s long-suffering PA, Weedeater’s music drips with a wild-eyed cannabis psychosis, a feeling of murderous paranoia only barely kept in check by the unbreakable backbone of rock n’ roll that injects a giddy pleasure into even their darkest material.

Much of their set still falls back on their landmark, Albini-produced ‘God Luck and Good Speed’ album from 2007 [if you’re new to the band, that’s the one to go for, I feel], and, as soon as the rousing title track (“mankind is unkind, man..”) tears the lid off the crowd like a fucking can of tuna , our only options are to flee or wallow.

Doom fans being a hardy bunch, the thousand or so folks crowded around me go for the latter. As the riffs reign down, little conflagrations and smoke signals intermittently drift up from the crowd below (never mind the pungent aroma hanging around the Smoking Area behind me), making me reflect that maybe those guys I saw getting busted earlier should just have kept their powder dry a little bit longer. By this stage, security have apparently decided that venturing into the throng every five minutes to pull some sucker out is more than their job’s worth.

The effect of Weedeater’s set is exhilarating and a little sickening. An unsettlingly intense, slightly scary band, I’m unsure whether five minutes in their company off-stage would be the time of yr life, or a trauma that would keep you waking up in a cold sweat for months. But it would be one or the other, that’s for sure – as with their speaker-jeopardising recordings, they provide a vision of life with the mid-range scooped right out.

Right on the final note of their final song, Collins kicks off his shoe, it makes a brief arc through the air, and drummer Travis Owen catches it, exactly on his final beat. So, maybe they’d be fun guys after all…? Jury is out.

“MNER RRAH SMO’ SM FUGGIN’ WEEED” Matt Pike (shirtless, leather wristbands) growls early in High On Fire’s marathon headline set, presumably indicating his support for all those naughty kids in the crowd, although to be honest it’s difficult to tell. He’s considerate enough to bellow the name of each song before the band launch into it, which is a helpful gesture given that I’m over a decade behind when it comes to listening to High On Fire albums, but unfortunately I can’t make out a word.

It’s funny, whilst I’ve always appreciated High On Fire, and own several of their early records, for some reason I’ve never really been able to fully get into them. I don’t know how best to put it really, but it’s as if, by attempting to create a previously undreamed of amalgam of Sleep, Slayer and Mötorhead, they’ve created a sound so monstrously unwieldy that it’s full heaviosity cannot actually be captured or reproduced by conventional recording and playback technology, making their albums difficult to really process or engage with.

I was hoping that, in a live context, their music would finally have room to breath and everything would fall into place as an overpowering cavalcade of AWESOME METAL, but, awe-inspiring though their seventy minute beat-down of a set is on many levels, for me at least, the same issues remain.

If you’ll forgive me for resorting to yet another iffy metaphor, it’s as if High On Fire have built the ultimate, ten wheeled heavy metal juggernaut, and, in the joyous moments when they’re thundering down the highway in it (whenever the drummer shifts into full tilt, Mötorhead-style double-time boogie and Pike shakes out another neck-throttling, synapse-disfiguring solo), it is absolutely mind-blowing, setting hearts racing and fists pumping. To get to those moments though, it takes a hell of a lot of awkward manoeuvring and grinding of gears. In other words, way too much tension, not enough release.

There sometimes seems to be a kind of sadistic impulse at work in their song structures – making us work hard whilst keeping the rewards tightly guarded. And, this evening more than ever, as my numb legs begin to feel like sharpened poles, painfully anchoring me to the ground, I could really go for some sweet release.

By the end of High On Fire’s set, their music has become a formless barrage, rolling over me like pure noise, as my concentration wavers and drifts. This is in no way a criticism of the band, who play comprehensively bad-ass music with tireless energy and dedication, more just some kind of conceptual glitch that occurs somewhere in the course of my consumption/enjoyment of it. One reporter’s opinion, and all that. It’s an awesome set. It’s loud as hell. The crowd go ape-shit. But I get exhausted.

Man. Saturday. I turned up late, I left early, and I still went home feeling like I’d spent ten rounds ducking blows from an angry gorilla. What a weakling. Ring the bell, Desertfest wins!

See you soon for Sunday….

Labels: Church of Misery, Desertfest, High On Fire, live reviews, Weedeater

For years now, I’ve been eyeing up London’s Desertfest as an event I would greatly like to attend, but in the past, prior commitments, grown up responsibilities and general lack of time/energy/money have combined to stifle my vague dreams of attendance.

In spite of all the reports I’ve heard about how well-organised and lovely the festival is moreover, there’s also been the fact that, given how much I’ve learned to HATE the myriad discomforts of attending music events in anything other than a thoroughly relaxed/DIY context in recent years, the idea of spending a bank holiday weekend pinballing around the sticky-floored venues of tourist-decimated Camden Town, suffering through endless bag checks, queues, beer-soakings, exit crushes, poor-sound-mix birthed tinnitus and midnight takeaways basically sounds like hell - especially when measured against the more tangible pleasures of quietly sitting at home, enjoying the comforts of food, wine, a sofa and some good movies, all with an additional £100+ still in my bank account.

But… this year’s line up. Oh man. For once, the weekend was free. The funds were present and correct. No immediate obstacles loomed. With a couple of weeks to go, we hit ‘confirm’ on the ticket booking. Three days and nights of unadulterated METAL (or, well, unadulterated HEAVY SPACE/STONER ROCK at the very least) loomed. Let me tell you how it went.

All photos are by Satori, by the way, for which thanks.

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Check-in and wristband collection on Friday afternoon is smooth and incident-free, and Desertfest HQ outside Camden’s actually-pretty-nice rock/metal pub The Black Heart is a happy and chilled out place to be. Lovely range of (I)PAs for drinking in the sun, and I highly commend their in-house milk stout for after dark.

Musically-speaking, proceedings begin upstairs, where The Quietus have (applaudably) been allowed to book a set of comparative outliers to the Desertfest remit (including the not-even-remotely rock or metal affiliated electro-punk band Snapped Ankles, who must have caused a few raised eye-brows amongst the purists).


No such concerns hopefully with Casual Nun, who deliver a far more straight forward, rock-orientated set that I had been anticipating - perhaps with one eye on the likely audience, or perhaps just because that’s the way they’re presently rolling, who knows. Anyway, we’re a pretty far cry from the pretty-fucking-out-there psychotropic improvisations found on their ‘Psychometric Testing by..’ and ‘Super Fancy Skeleton’ LPs, as the band’s Black Heart set finds them operating as a more or less trad v/g/b/d four piece, give or take the disorientating swathe of effects through which the ostensible frontman (sorry, I don’t know member names here) feeds his vocals. Working through a set of fairly structured/pre-planned material, they conjure a dense, legitimately deafening space-rock roar built upon the kind of forward moving, Can-via-Hawkwind grooves that remain quite impossible to fuck with, regardless of context. Despite the band’s fairly, well, casual attire (all four band members is front buttoning shirts and sensible shoes fergodssake, with only the vocalist’s Charlie Manson hair/beard combo giving any visual hint of sub-cultural affiliation), one hopes they might have succeeded in luring a few stray Fu Manchu fans into the choppier waters of their recorded output.


Next up, hard to contain my fanboy excitement at standing right in front of Mike Vest for a rare set by Melting Hand, the noise-rock sort-of-super-group he plays in alongside Gordon Watson of Terminal Cheescake/Luminous bodies on bass and Gum Takes Tooth drummer Tom Fug. A slightly tweaked line-up from the one that recorded their debut LP ‘High Collider’ a couple of years back now finds room for Marion Andrau (formerly(?) of Underground Railroad) on guitar and a chap named Wayne Adams (who is an unknown quantity to me at least) at synth. [Thank you to this Quietus interview for helping me with the name badges.]

Riffing on material presumably taken from their forthcoming second LP, I hereby declare that this incarnation of Melting Hand is fucking blinding, and I hope they stick with it for future engagements. Pedal LEDs glow and blink across the floor of the darkened stage like a miniature, nocturnal city, but these are players who know how to use such arguably excessive gear to its maximum advantage, primarily by doing what so many of those indie guitarists who spend thousands down the shops conspicuously fail to do – eg, turning it all on and turning it up.

The result is an exhilarating hurricane of chaotic, free-flowing noise-rock excelsis, sounding as if band-era Skullflower had lightened up, got the bunting out and had a birthday party, and it was bloody amazing. Though still very much centre stage, the rhythm section are a little less dominant in the mix here than they were on ‘High Collider’, thus encouraging the move toward a more full-on noise set-up (for this afternoon’s performance, at least), and a particular shout-out too must go to Andrau, who ably rises to the not-inconsiderable challenge of going head to head with Vest’s characteristic maximalist whiteout, transcending mere second/extra guitar status and adding her own wild and inventive contributions to the group’s sound at every turn. In fact the moment mid-set when she and Vest got about as close to trading/overlapping solos as Melting Hand’s oeuvre allows was a particular highlight for yours truly. Not quite 6PM, and mind and ears are both already blown.

Based on previous visits, I’ve always considered “Koko” (formerly the Camden Palace for those with long memories) to be a contender for one of London’s shittiest music venues. Though blessed with an exquisitely well-maintained (hopefully Grade One listed?) ex-music hall interior, the combination of irksome, unnecessary-queue-generating security procedures, poorly stocked rip off bar and TERRIBLE sound mix / acoustics have all helped make it a place to avoid since it re-opened a decade or so ago, and as such, I was happily surprised to find myself able to glide straight through the doors and into a good balcony position following a quick sprint in the Mornington Crescent direction, moments after The Obsessed began their set.


Sound is as echoy and murky as ever, making it difficult to catch the pearls of snarled, overgrown teenager wisdom Scott “Wino” Weinrich drops between songs, but when the drummer counts in, he and his recently recruited new rhythm section cut through the mix like pros. (Admittedly, the bass sounds a bit like someone distantly operating a machine lathe somewhere down the street, but, as I’ll learn over the course of the weekend, that’s something you’ve apparently got to get used to in these, uh, let’s say established, London venues.)

You’ve gotta love a guy who sticks to his story, and Wino is certainly that. Through Spirit Caravan, The Hidden Hand, his self-titled records and his contributions to Saint Vitus and Place of Skulls, Wino has kept his particular vision alive across four decades, and as a long time fan, I’m stoked to finally see this living, breathing personification of the heavy rock ideal in the flesh, fronting a new incarnation of his earliest, and many would consider most essential, band.

Recognisable songs aside though, we could easily be watching any of the groups Wino has led over the years, and, regardless of the name on the ticket, everything I could have wanted from a Wino gig is present and correct. Pitched somewhere between the raven-beaked solemnity of ‘80s trad doom and a vein of sneering, anti-social biker rock sleaze that reaches even further back, his songs have riffs carved to last out the centuries, a cycle-engine grind backing up his weirdly melodic, funereal hymns to drug-baked cosmic journeying and perpetual outsiderdom, whilst an unmistakable whiff of psychedelic spirituality enters the picture each time he goes for a solo, sending twelve bar wonders of screeching, atemporal jazz-damaged beauty reverberating through the lofty reaches of the former Camden Palace.

Though he operates within a genre that even it’s biggest fans would have to admit is rife with aesthetic posturing, ridiculous excess and general tongue-in-cheek silliness, Wino has been living this music – through periods of addition, poverty and god knows what else – for as long as many of us have been alive, and his songs, even stretching as far back as The Obsessed’s first recordings from the mid ‘80s, retain a quality that is dead-eyed, rock solid and serious as death. It certainly feels like a rare privilege to see him doing his thing on a Friday afternoon in Camden, and I hope I’ll be able to do so again very soon.


‘Serious’ is also a term that springs to mind when discussing Ghold, who we just about squeeze in to see in the packed out Black Heart shortly afterwards. An intense, progressively minded London-based unit who have grown from a duo to a trio, and now seem to have a fourth participant on board, apparently playing a Fender Rhodes no less. Ghold prove to be the loudest band of the festival thus far, and the first to have me reaching for my ear plugs. Though their music is impressive by yardstick, I’m flagging me this point (wimp that I am), and the constant, tension-building noose-tightening of their long, multi-part compositions soon proves pretty gruelling. Having already been warned that folks were queuing down the road to get into a packed-to-capacity Electric Ballroom to catch a glimpse of sludge-core bruisers Eyehategod, I’m secretly relieved when the decision is taken to bale early in order to sit down with some food before pitching out a good spot for Napalm Death in a few hours time.

Now, say what you like about the Electric Ballroom, at least it’s unpretentious. Complete with wall coverings and floor/ceiling surfaces that look like they’ve been pulled together from scrap material to fix up a previous disaster, it’s… long overdue an overhaul, you might say, but it also has the most satisfactory sound mix of any of the large venues used by Desertfest, and a relatively well-stocked/non-extortionate bar and publicly accessible balcony and lounge area seal the deal. Electric Ballroom, yr alright.

Now -- Napalm Death. I’ll admit this has the potential to be a weird one for me. Over the past few years, I’ve come to revere the band’s seminal late ‘80s recordings almost to the point of mania. If prompted in fact, I’ll be delighted to tell you in great detail exactly why ‘From Enslavement To Obliteration’ just edges out ‘Reign in Blood’ as the most important, innovative and/or mind-blowing extreme metal recording ever issued. [If you’re not familiar with it, please become so.] But – as much as I love their music from this era, that is basically where my knowledge of the band ends. I honestly know about as much about what they’ve done since 1990’s ‘Harmony Corruption’ as the average punter at a Yo La Tengo gig, so…. given that that’s about when the line up who are performing as Napalm Death this evening first began to cohere, this could be something of an issue, perhaps?


Well, I needn’t have worried. Far from legitimising such doltish fanboy dilemmas, it turns out Barney Greenway is such an ingratiating frontman, you could probably tell him you’ve just arrived from Venus and aren't really sure what this whole ‘organised sound’ thing is all about yet, and he’d slap you on the back and add you to the ranks of the chosen without further comment.

I’m sure that, for those who have been more closely involved with the metal scene than I have been over the years, Barney’s distinctive on-stage persona must be beyond a joke by this point, but, as a Napalm Death first timer, I’ve got to admit I found him a disarming and hugely charming presence.

How can I best put this… one of the things I’ve always loved about Napalm Death is the way they square the circle vis-à-vis making violent, hate-filled music dealing with subject matter of unimaginable horror, and presenting it as a positive, cathartic, morally integrated force for good in the world. In the three decades that have passed since the band’s initial burst of inspiration, it has become the norm for groups operating in all sub-categories of hardcore and extreme metal to shroud their work in imagery of misery, horror, mass death, torture, genocide, nuclear Armageddon, skulls, gas masks etc etc, to the extent that the original thinking behind this off-the-peg aesthetic is often lost behind a flippant attitude of “fuck everything” misanthropic prurience that, weirdly, seems almost unique to white males who have grown up in parts of the world not conspicuously ravaged by war and death.

I’m not trying to guilt-trip anyone for enjoying this aesthetic – god knows, as a fan of horror movies and doom metal, I’ve spent a fair amount of time wallowing in it myself over the years – but, as stated above, I appreciate the way that, ever since their inception, Napalm Death have been at pains to justify their work (and indeed, their name and artwork) in grown up, socio-political terms, and to make their intentions clear. Then as now, their music is framed as an expression of (and entirely legitimate response to) the horror they feel at the pain and injustice that is inflicted upon the people of the world every single day by those in positions of power, and, by forcing their listeners to confront it in the most visceral way possible, they hope to raise awareness, prompt action, and all that other good social activist type stuff.

They are not putting gore and dead bodies on their album covers just because they think it’s cool, in other words, and I’ve always liked the thought that, in the unlikely event that a benevolent global socialist republic suddenly came in to being, prompting universal equality and world peace, Napalm Death would gladly down tools and spend the rest of their lives playing nice, mellow music for dancing in the sun (perhaps changing their name to, I dunno, ‘Happy Children’ or something).

Anyway, getting back to Barney, I love the way he puts all this across so clearly over the course of a sixty minute Napalm Death set that no one could possibly be left in doubt re: where the band are coming from. In an area of live performance so often characterised (understandably) by muscle-flexing aggression or mute hostility, it is absolutely delightful to find this guy saying “okie dokey, right then, what’s next..” in the voice of a holiday camp comedian in between outbursts of guttural, throat-shredding carnage, hailing the audience as “friends!” with the enthusiasm and good cheer of the MC at an anti-war rally, even as he awkwardly jogs on the spot and hops about the stage like a middle-aged marathon runner warming up on the starting line. He’s just lovely, basically. What a great guy.

Again, I’m sure many in the crowd will have rolled their eyes as his political sloganeering, having heard it all before, but from my POV, he succinctly addressed the broad points that needed to be made to put the brutality of the music in its proper context - religious bigots, slum landlords, anti-abortion campaigners and assorted others can all fuck off; nuclear brinkmanship on the part of world leaders is insane; a happy and comfortable life free from discrimination on the basis of race, gender or sexuality is the right of every human being. Not exactly controversial stuff, I’ll grant you, but hard to restate it too often, right? By the time he’s exhorting us – “in a spirit of friendship and solidarity” – to help him complete the title of a certain Dead Kennedys song – I’m happy to yell along.

(Deep breath.) And of course it helps that the band are fucking great too. I mean, I may have been out to lunch for thirty years, but this is f-ing Napalm Death, innit? They’re hardly going to half-ass it. Shane Embury’s fingers on the bass still look as if they’re moving in X4 fast-forward, and Mitch Harris’s guitar tone sounds like a wolverine biting the head off a terrier. Danny Herrera’s drumming may not quite recreate the beyond human insanity of Mick Harris’s work in the ‘80s, but he still does the business well enough to send just about any hardcore band I’ve watched in the past five years fleeing in terror.

What a fantastic band. What a fantastic set. I need to catch up on those post-1990 records and pick myself up a (hopefully fair trade) T-shirt post-fucking-haste.

To be continued…

Labels: Casual Nun, Desertfest, Ghold, live reviews, Melting Hand, Napalm Death, The Obsessed, Wino