BLIND LEADIN’ THE BLIND…

This week’s “question about music you’ve always been afraid to ask”:

Why were so many of the rural / delta blues singers blind?

I mean, you’d be hard-pressed to name more than a handful of notable blind musicians in any other genre, but when it comes to the blues, well…

First of all, you’ve obviously got big hitters like Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Willie McTell and the Rev. Blind Gary Davis.

Then Alan Lomax’s ‘The Land Where the Blues Began’, which I’m reading at the moment, also features sections on at least half a dozen other influential musicians and composers who just happened to be blind, even though they didn’t attach it to the start of their names.

And looking at lesser known figures, John Fahey’s ‘American Primitive Vol.1’ compilation alone chronicles the work of Blind Willie Davis, Blind Joe Taggart, Blind Roosevelt Graves and the superbly named Blind Mamie Forehand.

Yet as far as I know, nobody has actually addressed the reasons behind this prevalence of blindness…

Was there a tradition in poor black communities of blind people taking up music in order to support themselves… singing for their supper, so to speak?

Or, thanks to harsh conditions, non-existent healthcare, disease and work-related accidents, were there simply a whole load of blind people hanging around down in the delta?

Or alternatively, did the overriding influence and legendary status of Blind Lemon Jefferson encourage blind people to follow suit and take up the blues, or even lead people with healthy sight to create their own blind alter-egos to boost their cache of mythic blues-ness (hey, it worked for Blind Joe Death)?

Enquiring minds want to know!

"So you want to build an altar on a summer's night / So you want to smoke the gel off a Fentanyl patch.."

Silver Jews - 'Punks in the Beerlight'.

The most unexpectedly amazing opening to an album I've heard all year; knocked me halfway across the room, I swear.

Sounds like David Berman got up one morning and accidentally wrote the most sublime, hard-edged power-pop song since Big Star and Springsteen walked the earth*. Being an obtuse, miserablist bastard, he made a few attempts to camouflage it, throwing together some of the most oddly moving lyrics of his career in the process.

Then he shrugged his shoulders, surrendered to it, called up his band and got cracking.

*I know officially speaking they still do, but.. y'know..

Old Records and Too Much Coffee part#2:

OAR

The record which has been by far the most constant fixture on my stereo / mp3 player over the past month or so has been Alexander ‘Skip’ Spence’s lone (in more ways than one) solo album, Oar.



This is quite a long post, so I hope you have time to read it. Slip into something comfortable, get some herbal tea on the go, put on something spaced out and echoy – do what you gotta do. Read it in sections if you like, or don’t read it at all, see if I care.

I.

Chances are some of you will already be familiar with the legend of Skip Spence and Oar, and if not I’m sure it’s only a google away, but nonetheless it’s a good, weird story and bears repeating, spreading, embellishing, so I’ll tell it again;

In 1967 Skip Spence was a member of Moby Grape who, whilst not terribly well known today for whatever reason, were briefly the most commercially viable group to emerge from the San Francisco psychedelic rock scene after Jefferson Airplane (whom Spence briefly drummed for), and doing quite nicely for themselves thanks to a heavily publicised debut album on Columbia (and it’s a great album too – check it out).

It seems Skippy (and, yes, they did actually call him that, it’s not me being cute) was the ‘wild card’ member of the band – he looked cool, acted nuts on stage, added some awesome extra guitar and singing when he felt like it and wrote a couple of great songs, but basically they could still get along pretty ok as a working band if he wasn’t around.

It was in New York whilst recording their second album that he really started to go a bit peculiar. Reminiscences of other band members speak, inevitably, of heavy drug use, a scheming girlfriend heavily into ‘witchcraft’, a sinister hobo he adopted as an oracle, heavy conversations about the war between Love and Hate, and of some of the most bizarre facial hair known to man. Sounds to me like he had the weird-turn-pro vibe of 1968 down perfectly, but things got a bit out of hand when some kind of jealous rage inspired him to launch a violent attack on his band-mates’ hotel room with a fire-axe (thankfully they weren’t inside at the time). It’s difficult to establish whether band and management were horrified or relieved when this stunt resulted in Skippy being diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic and committed to Bellevue mental hospital for his own safety.

The band moved on, and he stayed there for six months. Upon release, he proclaimed that he’d been working on some songs, and someone at the record company evidently still liked him enough to front him a small advance to make a record. With this, he bought a motorcycle and rode straight down to Nashville where he spent a week in a small studio, making what became Oar. He worked alone, handling the recording himself and playing all the instruments, then spent a few hours with an engineer mixing the album, and entrusted him with the tapes. Then he got back on his motorbike, rode into the sunset and was never seen again.

II.

Now with a back story like that, it’s inevitable that Oar (and what a strikingly odd name for a record that is – the fact it’s pronounced the same as ‘awe’ only the tip of an ice-berg of strange associations) would become a bit of a cult concern, even if it was no good. Thankfully though, it is in no uncertain terms a masterpiece – an utterly unique recording that stands entirely apart from anything else that was going on in music at the time, and one that casually draws the listener into unfathomable emotional depths. A daring attempt to express the inexpressible on the part of a man who sounds like he’s sinking into his own sub-conscious, on the point of no return. Heavy shit you’re probably thinking, only…. that’s not quite it. Because this music is also immensely enjoyable to listen to – funny, laidback, full of subtlety, effortlessly beautiful, endlessly intriguing and, as Greil Marcus puts it in the review reproduced in the reissue’s sleevenotes, “some of the most comfortable music I’ve ever heard”.

A lot of good writers have used up a lot of ink talking about Oar over the years, partly perhaps because it’s such a challenge – it’s not the kind of album where you can talk a bit about the guitar-playing or the song-writing or whatever, make a few pertinent comparisons and call it a day – it’s one where, like some great literary text of old, you’ve got to take the bull by the horns, immerse yourself completely, try to understand and get an angle on the whole damn thing and pull something special back out to help others in their appreciation.

So far I’ve gone through several levels in my appreciation of Oar. First off, I didn’t get it. I bought the album in the winter, and when I was relatively cheerful – not perfect. Oar’s beauty is sufficiently fragile that external conditions can make or break it as a listening experience, and if you’re not feeling sympathetic enough to meet it halfway, the songs won’t push themselves on you, they’ll just bounce off. So the murky acid rock guitar of ‘Little Hands’ crawls dazed from the speakers, sounding like it could be a promising demo for an anthemic Grape / Airplane track, if only it wasn’t sung agonisingly slowly by a man who sounds like he’s suffering from emphysema, has never sung a song in his life before and insists on pronouncing ‘cheering’ as ‘charon’. And in terms of easy comprehension it’s all downhill from there. So ok, I think, this is one of those ‘damaged’ albums, like ‘Sisterlovers’ or ‘Barrett’, and file it away for damaged times.

III.

These arrive on one of the earliest and heaviest weekends of summer – you know, when even the breeze is warm, wafting in through the windows making things more airless and suffocating than they ever really need to be – too fucking hot to get anything useful done. I’m on my own when I don’t want to be, and I don’t really know what I’m feeling, except that it isn’t good. Now is the right time for Oar to rise from the racks and claim me. Nailing a certain odd emotional headspace that other music has hinted at but never fully embodied – the unbearable pathos of the Delta Blues and the desert-frazzled confusion of the 13th Floor Elevators are atmospheric if not necessarily musical reference points – this is something perfect, indelible, and it hits the spot. At the exact point where the concepts of ‘summer’ and ‘sadness’ meet, that is where Oar lives.

THAT voice – how could I possibly have dismissed it? Whether by accident or design, Spence sings like no one else on earth. 22(!!) years old at the time of recording, he somehow manages to sound like an 80 year old who’s spent his best years in the Mojave desert, gargling dust and reading the Tao, before opening his mouth to sing for the first time, dredging up songs near crushed before they can assume form by sheer weight of insight and experience. That old chestnut about some people “just having old souls” inescapably springs to mind. It’s impossibly strange, impossibly moving, crazily sinister, and when you find you find yourself feeling just "...", you can wash your face in his voice like you can in the sea, forgetting what you did for respite before it was there.

Musically, everything is deep, dark and swathed in reverb, the instruments sounding minimal, disassociated from each other, but still exploding into a unified wash of sound that’s hard to pick apart or explain. Skip’s guitar-playing varies wildly – sometimes he sounds like he’s stumbling blindly like an all-out nutcase, trying and failing to beat out some syncopated rhythm he can hear in the back of his head, sometimes he barely seems to be playing at all. And then when you least expect it he’ll break into a heart-stopping moment of musical alchemy, momentarily as expressive on the acoustic as Skip James, as transcendent on the electric as Neil Young.

To my mind, the best psychedelic music of the ‘60s isn’t necessarily the stuff that’s brash and crazy and obvious, but the quieter, more low-key songs that are off on some whole other shit entirely, grasping at something fleeting and intangible and capturing it, however briefly. Maybe on an album by some good people you might be lucky enough to get one or two songs that embody that – Oar has it going on throughout.

IV.

So I’ve got the sound, I love it, it affects me deeply and I feel the need to listen to it A LOT. Now the next stage – time to familiarise myself with the songs, to learn to live with them, understand them. For me, ‘Cripple Creek’ is the immediate hit, a perfectly realised acoustic blues in odd 3/4 time, lilting, otherworldly vocals singing of a dying cripple meeting an angel - a song I could listen to a million times and not tire of. Can a tune be simultaneously jaunty and despairing? It can in Skip’s world. ‘Diana’ is the album’s first shot of darkness, a song of unbearable yearning and loneliness so minimally outlined that emotion takes over from form almost entirely, sparkling guitar-work saving the day as Skip’s voice gives over to complete exhaustion. The guitarless ‘Margaret – Tiger Rug’ is the one the outsider art vultures will gather round, as Spence sings quietly of Margaret the daring songwriter, who later becomes an ice-skater, accompanied only by a lurching, rumbling bass-line that sounds like it’s escaped from the circus. This is also where Oar’s creeping insanity first shows it’s hand; “sent you off to treatment with the tiger by the tail..” he sings delightedly, as well as treating us to genius free associative fragments like “she’s got muscles in her eyes..”. Let’s add ‘perceptive and nonsensical’ is the list of contradictions.

‘Weighted Down (the Prison Song)’ presents five minutes of deep, brooding depression, a folk-blues waltz so unnaturally slowed down and drained of life it threatens to grind to a halt altogether but for Skip’s doleful crooning. Despite witty mutterings dealing with a murderous love triangle, it’s impossible to divorce from his recent incarceration, and that the singer of such a poignant expression of suffering was a happy-go-lucky rock n’ roll scenester barely a year earlier is almost unimaginable. There’s a bitter, resigned frustration at work here too, one of numerous hints on the album that Skip hasn’t only been betrayed by his mind and his band – “weighted down by the cunt” he seems to sing at one point, sneakily adding a ‘t’ to the ‘gun’ of the song’s other choruses.

The segue from this black hole straight into Oar’s most transcendent moment, the incredible ‘War in Peace’, is pure genius. Cocooned in a positively supernatural amount of echo, Skip howls near wordlessly over backing made up of reflections of his own voice, but now listen listen listen as the electric guitar slowly creeps in, feels out a space for itself and then explodes into just the most exquisite melody, like blinding lights in the sky, accompanied by a mysterious sound like a whizzing firework! A startling and divine piece of psychedelic production work that you might like to compare and contrast with Buffalo Springfield’s ‘Expecting to Fly’… three minutes of joy that washes away the proceeding odes to confusion and depression like the touch of God. Further evidence of insanity is to be found though when he decides to start jamming on ‘Sunshine of your Love’ towards the end…

‘Broken Heart’ is another of the Oar’s best songs, with a tune more or less identical to ‘Weighted Down’, but cheerier despite the title and featuring the album’s strangest and most well developed lyrics, detailing how a broken heart can unite us all – unity through loneliness, anyone? I particularly like the line about “a honey-dripping hipster, whose bee cannot be bopped”. Then we’ve got the openly apocalyptic ‘Books of Moses’, where Skip urges us to get some “brimstone news” with a sampled thunder storm as his backing band, and ‘Dixie Peach Promenade (Yin for Yang)’ a peculiar, horny love song of sorts in which he cheerfully sings “I bought me some zen food / to learn me how to think / but I can’t think of anything more that I'd adore / than to see you in the pink” at the exact moment the wolves and bad vibes started to close in on hippie culture.

The album ends unsettlingly with ‘Lawrence of Euphoria’, some kind of stunted drug culture comedy song with vaguely filthy lyrics sung by a man who sounds like he’s never going to laugh again in his life, leading up to the closing ‘freakout’ track ‘Grey / Afro’, which if nothing else certainly goes to demonstrate what an unstable and unhappy man Skip was whilst making this wonderful record. Not freaking out in any very predictable or satisfying manner, a distant, ketamine paced bass and drum dirge plays out slowly and achingly, over which Skip mumbles incoherently. Perhaps there is a hidden beauty here, I don’t know yet. After nine minutes or so – just when it’s starting to get weirdly funky, perhaps sounding like Can if they’d been forced to play at gunpoint for 18 hours or something - it cuts out seemingly at random with no conclusion or explanation, and Alexander Spence’s transmission is lost to the world forever.

V.

I suppose it’s rare that I feel inspired to do such a detailed track-by-track of an album, but Oar is a special case, and it feels like I’ve only just begun to explore it’s mysteries. Somehow it manages to haphazardly combine everything that fascinates me about ‘60s music into one shambolic, unrepeatable package, as well as affecting me on a personal level into the bargain. Here’s hoping for more hot, sad days where I can feel it’s spirit again...

LINKAGE:

So just in case you’re bored out of your skull at the moment with internet time to waste, here are links to some articles in which some hip people talk to other hip people, or themselves, about things which may prove tangibly interesting;

1.One of my current favourite music writers (and poster designers) Chris Summerlin can’t get an interview with Sonic Youth, so he instead interviews himself about Sonic Youth, and the reservations he has about the band and their legacy. It’s a couple of years old, but his observations are still mighty pertinent, even to a dedicated Thurston-lover such as myself; LINK.

2. Fantastic guitarist and noted asshole (allegedly..) Tom Verlaine is interviewed at length…. about books. In some ways this is completely pointless, as he doesn’t appear to be terribly enthusiastic about books and his choices don’t really relate back to his music in any real sense, so it’s probably pretty similar to any other conversation that could have taken place between two random literate New Yorkers. But on the other hand, it’s strangely brilliant and I wish more musicians would get interviewed about books; LINK.

3. Matthew Flux interviews Bryan Lee-OMalley, creator of the most enjoyable comic in the whole world ever, Scott Pilgrim. Matthew appears to have book#3. Why do I not have book#3?? LINK.

Old Records and Too Much Coffee, episode # 1:

RAINCOATS!

Here’s a picture of The Raincoats;


They look pretty cool, don’t they?

Well after probably half a decade or more residing on my really-should-check-it-out list, the Raincoats debut album (as released on Rough Trade in 1979 and reissued in the early 90s after Kurt Cobain took to talking the hind-leg off a donkey about how great it is, much as I’m about to do) is finally in my hands, thanks to an odd series of events brought about by my friend going to the local library to enquire after it, them not giving it to her but still digging it up from the archives and putting it on the shelf for some reason, and myself randomly strolling in and finding it...

...but anyway, enough faffing about, what was I talking about? Oh yeah, the Raincoats rule because:

They take all the best elements of punk (loud, chaotic, shouty, impassioned, cheap, homemade, funny, strange and free!), and get further out with them than most of their peers, not just stripping away the flesh of professional musicianship and production values, but kicking down the skeleton of male rock music tradition altogether and building up from scratch with no crappy teachers and music books getting in the way – the alpha and omega of the DIY feminisation of rock n’ roll, no less!

Which is a mugs game commercially speaking – despite being an absurdly talented, tight and generally shit-hot band, they are destined from the start never to achieve recognition of such from anyone who uses phrases like “tight and shit-hot band”. Few people, when throwing The Raincoats on their stereo for the first time, will immediately decide “hey, this rocks”, even though it does, because the signifiers of hey-this-rocks are buried a bit deeper than usual; they’re not blasted across the surface and straight into yr face, like most rock music – depths are at work here within strange frameworks, but it still rocks.

Three or four listens, and well-adjusted ears will be well into the Raincoats, I guarantee it. Listen to what a spectacular drummer Palmolive is – like all the best drummers, she’s totally all over the place whilst still keeping a flawless, instinctive rhythm, and all those martial proto-blastbeats and double-time ‘jump-up-and-down!’ bits she keeps throwing in, perfectly formulated for pogoing in stripy tights and combat boots (or so I would imagine..). Man it’s so joyously awesome – one of the great heroines of the Girl Drummers Appreciation Society, that’s for sure. Then there’s all the rad amplified violin, kinda like Cale on the first Velvets album, but down to earth and punkier, merging into some great electrifying skree with Gina Birch’s jagged, trebly telecaster shredding. And what of Ana De Silva’s totally mad, meandering bass-lines – the kind of things that I’d imagine no one who’d learned to play bass in the conventional fashion would ever come up with. They don’t begin or end, but just sort of lurch daringly through unexplored territory in constant danger of collapse – genius. And listen to Lora Logic crash in on her guest-spot on ‘Black & White’ –HONK!HONK!HONK!– yeah! – since when has any song ever NOT been improved by a frenzied one-note sax solo?

And the songs are killer too of course… they speak of weirdness in supermarkets and the sad lives of kids who are fooled into joining the army and seeing the void opening up before you as you walk down the street, and is it love? If not, what is it? and of not wanting people to look at you, and of plenty of other stuff I must guess at because I can’t make out the words (which is kinda cool in a way, reminds me of hearing the Ramones ‘It’s Alive’ for the first time and not knowing what the hell they were on about half the time, but instinctively knowing it must be great, and isn’t it potentially kinda exciting when you hear a song and just pick out the odd yelped phrase and have to guess the rest, rather than having it all spelt out for you….? but that’s a story for another day, and nobody apart from me seems to obsessively listen to lyrics anymore anyway..). And don’t even get me started on their cover of ‘Lola’ – obviously one of the greatest moments in the history of pop music, that goes without saying, and the perfect first step if anyone fancies going on a downloading spree to investigate what I’m on about.

So yeah, drop-dead brilliant singing too with home-baked tough girl harmonies, yelpin’, squalling, rantin’ and hollerin’, and that unmistakable sense of the band actually playing together in a room, listening to each other and kicking up sparks, each player going all out to summon that extra bit of energy, to avoid boring ‘this-is-my-role-in-the-band’ playing and to throw something new, crazy and off-kilter into every track.

So basically, what I’m building up to here is that, yes, taking into account all of the above, The Raincoats are essentially the girly post-punk equivalent of The Band, and my god, how often does a concept that good come down the rails??

When the Foreground becomes the Background...

You know what I really hate?

Well I’ve been hanging around in coffee shops a bit recently, and you know how they always endeavour to have, like, ‘good’, ‘tasteful’ music going on in the background, and due to the universal critical consensus which hovers over us at all times, ready to leap up and tell the layperson which are the best records to listen to, this inevitably boils down to a small selection of really, really awesome stuff – “Kind of Blue”, “Five Leaves Left” and tons of Billie Holiday and Nina Simone.

This is then run through on a constant loop, being gently inflicted on the uncaring staff and customers ten, twenty, thirty times a day, with nobody listening. And even if you know the music, and do listen, the repetition still drives home the connection to the extent that the next time you’re sitting at home and decide to put one of those awesome records on, you’ll find yourself with a big, flashing light in your head the whole time saying “Lame Coffee Shop Background Music – not cool!”. Eventually this flagrant misappropriation, as repugnant in its own way as Moby (remember him?) ripping off the voices of dead plantation workers to lend stolen pathos to our commercial breaks, could sour the wider world’s relationship to this fine, moving music altogether.

If coffee shop chains are going to continue with this policy, I feel they should employ muso weblog bores such as myself to stand on platforms in the corner and loudly interject into people’s conversations with the occasional “You there sir, are you enjoying Richard Thompson’s sterling guitar work on ‘Time Has Told Me’?” or “Listen up everybody, Coltrane is about to take a solo!” or “Excuse me young lady, but do you not find the historical resonances of this song emotionally affecting? Are you grateful for being able to live your life without fear of being hanged?” and so on.

Or alternatively, they could revert to doing what such bourgeois high street institutions have done since the dawn of time, and just play old fashioned bad, boring, non-descript music that no one will ever give a shit about. Because god knows, there’s enough of it around without wrecking and devaluing the good.

MY WEBLOG, MY RULES.

So for the moment, I can’t be bothered to review the second All Tomorrow’s Parties. It was pretty alright, but it wasn’t as good as the first one, or at least, there weren’t really any exciting new discoveries that I absolutely HAVE to tell you about, and I haven’t got any photos either. And as readers of this weblog, I guess you’ve probably had your fill of ATP for the moment. If you do desperately want to hear about it in detail though, don't hesitate to let me know via comments or email, and, thoughtless slave to public pressure that I am, maybe then I’d get round to it.

Otherwise though, here’s some other stuff I’ve been enjoying recently;

Angus Maclise – Counter-Culture Chronicles
You know Angus Maclise right..? He was the NY-dwelling beat/hippy guy who played drums in an early line-up of the Velvet Underground, participated in a lot of the Theatre of Eternal Music stuff with LaMonte Young, John Cale et al, and probably did a whole bunch of other stuff so cool and underground we never got to hear about it? No? Well anyway, this is a CD of some stuff by him recorded between 1964 and 1980, and it’s absolutely superb. Some truly beautiful and forward-thinking transcendental drone work featuring mesmerising webs of Eastern / DIY percussion, murky field recordings and heavenly waves of impossible-to-identify sound rising and receding – this will be sending me off to sleep for a long time to come. I know, I know, you’ve heard all that before, but seriously – this one is a keeper. I don’t really know whether ‘Counter Culture Chronicles’ is the name or the record label or the name of a series it’s part of or what; the packaging is rubbish and it looks like a bootleg to be honest, but regardless, the real news is that it comes with a bonus DVD! And not just any DVD, but one featuring Jonas Mekas’ film of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable – loads of dark, fuzzy abstract imagery and unique live recordings of a transitional VU line-up featuring Maclise on percussion and Cale on lead vocals – and Ron Rice’s totally-far-fucking-out psychedelic film ‘Chumlum’ (for which Maclise did the soundtrack)! GEAR! (Yes, it’s another rare sub-cultural treasure-chest provided to me for a not inconsiderable sum by the nice people at Volcanic Tongue.)

‘Acidic Brain Spit’ and ‘Distortion & Cough Ups’ CDRs
These are mix CDs sent to me by an American guy called Tanner with whom I’ve intermittently swapped music for a few years. What can I say, except that he has great taste and is ALWAYS on point; previous tapes and CDs have provided my first exposure to such varied big-hitters as Neutral Milk Hotel, Gospeedyoublackemperor!, Anaal Nathrakh, Iron & Wine, Dillinger Escape Plan and Derek Bailey, amid much other fantastic hardcore, black metal, noise and improv, for which I am eternally grateful. Highlights of the two new discs include Ultralyd, Jennifer Gentle, Leviathan, Tetuzi Akiyama, Cold Bleak Heat, Brendan Murray, Byard Lancaster and Iran. Needlessly to say, replying to such devastating stuff with my own CDs is always a challenge, especially since these days I basically find myself just listening to Neil Young and the Kinks all day long.

Fabulous Foxes – Glaciers
Fabulous Foxes is the vehicle of singer/songwriter/guitar player/whatever Bob Clueley, whose presence will be familiar to regular gig-goers in the city of Leicester, both through his own performances and his mischievous habit of contriving a way to get on stage even when he’s not playing. Fabulous Foxes live experiences have a tendency to veer closer to unintentional performance art than music, regularly attracting such superlatives as “shambolic”, “incompetent”, “confusing”, “rude” etc., which obviously is great, but I’d argue that whatever happens, you can usually hear the inherent qualities of Bob’s songs shining through. And here is a CD with some of those songs on it (an ‘album’ I suppose you’d call it), recorded with the help of various Leicester / Nottingham folks, and damn me if it doesn’t defy all expectation by being just totally, straightforwardly great. The songs are simple, memorable and moving, taking as their theme good old unconditional love with a hint of desperation, explored with a sense of humour and with some pleasantly weird lyrical digressions, all of which suits my sensibilities down to the ground. Bob’s voice itself is also a thing of unexpected joy; slow, clear and pronounced but rough around the edges, recalling the syntax of the Albion folk singers of old. At times I’d almost swear he sounds a bit like Alastair Roberts... but less Scottish, obviously. And there’s much else to enjoy here too; the way the arrangements (the Foxes big band utilising electric guitars, drums, horns, violin..) sound nice and complement the songs rather than swamping them; the admirable sense of brevity (10 songs in 20 minutes); the general lo-fi charm of the whole business – leaving in false starts and between song banter to capture a bit of the chaos of the live shows and to emphasise that, yes, there’s no secret here and we could do it too if we dared get off our backsides and sing some songs. So there we have it – he’s gone a made a fucking good record, the cheeky sod. If you declare an honest interest, maybe he'll send you a copy; www.fabulousfoxes.net

Oneida – “up with people”
This is the new song by Oneida. It has often been said in the past that Oneida sound kind of like rave music played on rock band instruments, and here they do that more literally than ever before, using their drum kit, organ and guitars to create a perfect facsimile of some kinda totally euphoric early ‘80s New York disco / proto-house dancefloor smash, only, like, gnarly and rocking! It’s great! “You gotta get up to get free” the vocal hook advises us, correctly I’m sure, but still on some level recalling the old linguistic gag of the dopey farmer who cuts down a tree and then cuts it up. Presumably to take the promised freedom all the way, one must get up (onto one’s feet) and then get down (on the dancefloor)...? Meanwhile, the dancefloor and its freedoms have come and gone, leaving me alone in the chill light of dawn, still stuck pondering the vagaries of hipster slang.

Royal Trux – “money for nothing”
More hopeless confusion where there should be only fun as far as the eye can see! Is this meant to be ironic? Or is it just awful? Or, alternatively, does it completely rule? To what extent does the answer to the first question affect the answers to the second and third? I honestly can’t tell. My head hurts. God rock n’ roll can be a complicated business...

Comanechi
Well no ambiguity here! Comanechi are brilliant. They are a rock dude who plays the guitar and a crazy girl who plays the drums, and all their songs go like DUR-DUR-DUR DA-DA-DUR-DUR-DUR DA-DA-DUR-DUR-DUR, and they’re totally loud and fast and sloppy and their recordings are totally cheap and bad quality, but they don’t give a fuck cos they’re too busy being brilliant. Most of the lyrics are the name of the song shouted again and again. (The songs on the 7” I have are ‘Naked’, ‘I Knew’ and ‘I Feel Fantastic’.) If anybody out there has a better recipe for perfection, I’d like to hear it.

Hawkwind - Space Ritual
Ah, Hawklords, take the pain away....