AH, BUT THEY’RE COOL PEOPLE…

Idly scanning the shelves in Balham library, I’m faintly astonished to see a book apparently named in honour of The Standells ‘Dirty Water’, and a few minutes later I’m walking home with Lovers, Buggers & Thieves, a volume put out last year by the intermittently great Headpress publishing house. It is the first in a proposed series of journals / books of essays covering what might generally be termed as cult rock n’ roll, with a writing style that strikes a pretty good balance – not-too-academic but at the same time not-too-stupid. And, well… it’s great.

Starting with the big-hitters of it’s chosen scene, the book features exhaustive histories / appreciations of The Stooges, The Sonics and The Monks, and, of particular interest to me, The Edgar Broughton Band (yes!) and a huge piece on Skip Spence (double yes!). There are also round-ups of Australian and Mexican psyche-punk, the Bonzo Dog Band, Charles Manson (somewhat inevitably) and a great piece by Johnny Strike of Crime examining the relative merits of Led Zeppelin and Iron Butterfly. And a whole bunch of other stuff too – this book certainly doesn’t short-change you on content.

The writing is sometimes subject to a few pitfalls, particularly with regard to contributors taking an easy ‘us vs. the world’ “while the charts were full of peace & love, our heroes were singing about MADNESS, SUICIDE and DESPAIR!” line, despite the fact this book’s very existence is evidence that there were as many gangs of disgruntled goons making crazed outsider rock music in the pre-punk era as there have been at any time since. The gonzo informality of some of the writing can also be detrimental at times, particularly in the Stooges article, which piles up irrelevant and unreferenced groupie/drug anecdotes with laddish glee – as if anyone who’s heard the records needs to be reminded that the Stooges liked to fuck. On the up-side though, it also brings up a lot of interesting new info, good insights into the personalities and chemistry at work in the band over different periods and a great appreciation of what made their music so unutterably awesome – so a vital bit of Stoogeology if you ignore its excesses.

For fans of this music (and if you’re reading this weblog I’d like to think you probably are one), “Lover, Buggers and Thieves” is an absolute gas - it’s written by people who care, it’s flaws fly by on a wave of over-riding enthusiasm and it’s definitely a few cuts above the kind of unmitigated hack guff that so often passes for book-based music writing. Have an Amazon link.

The end of the book promises future volumes, though there’s no sign of any yet on Headpress’s publishing schedule, so wish me luck as I go cap in hand to pitch a piece on the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band…

GOD DAMN RELIGION

Sir Richard Bishop and James Blackshaw
22/10/06, The Red Rose, London

Young British guitar-player James Blackshaw makes for an unassuming figure in performance, any excess energy in his body channelled directly into the blurred digits of his right hand turning cartwheels over 12 strings, but the distinctiveness of his playing makes it clear why he’s become a name on the lips of so many soft-spoken new music scenesters of recent.

He starts off with a series of invitingly naturalistic devotionals of the kind that make one feel like knocking on the door of a mighty oak and crawling inside for a snooze, open strings and hidden resonances of his 12 string providing momentary, fading bursts of pure-tone drone hovering above a dense nest of hypnotic, repetitive picking. Jolly, jolly nice all round, and material such as the more Fahey-esque “Transient Light” raises the bar further, melodies of startling purity descending upon the forest-drone mulch rather like the divine radiance suggested by the title.

Whilst Blackshaw numbs us gently with insistent beauty, Sir Richard Bishop of venerable subterranean paradigm-botherers Sun City Girls has come up with some rather more nefarious uses for the art of hypnosis. His film ‘God Damn Religion’, screened between performances tonight, is a sense-assaulting 30 minute montage of recontextualised imagery, Bishop’s avowed intention being to hi-jack the primal power of religious iconography via the techniques of Clockwork Orange style visual brain-washing, altering the viewer’s understanding of organised religion forever. Whether he succeeds or not is a moot point, but regardless, the film’s exhaustive world tour of “negative” religious imagery is a startling and awe-inspiring testament of the depths of human and/or divine madness, the seething subconscious of violence, domination and sexual dysfunction that underlies the respectable veneer of religious practice exploding in a wordless orgy of boggle-eyed, marauding demons, blood-crazed death goddesses, demented infernal torment, howling sacrificial innocents and grimacing, masochistic christs.

Sun City Girls’ shameless magpie approach to world culture has seen them accused of both irresponsible cultural voyeurism and bloody-minded obscurity over the years, but an occasional triumph of their aesthetic such as ‘God Damn Religion’ redeems all, not only as a beautiful, transformative film in its own right, but also by punching home with some decidedly concrete social and ontological issues of the kind sorely lacking in much of the formless chaos of the American psychedelic underground.

Lord Bishop’s musical set – another solo guitar venture - is overall less successful, but an event to behold nonetheless. An unapologetic virtuoso and the kind of guy who could over-play an elastic band, he’s all over the fretboard like a game of 5 dimensional hopscotch, coming on like some super-charged robo-tech Davey Graham, possessed of an unholy desire to career through a rambling, incoherent musical narrative taking in larger than life chunks of every guitar tradition under the sun; a whole pile of Django gypsy-jazz twisting through sinister Eastern modes, wistful folk-picking, dramatic mariachi madness, improv chaos, blues mutations and above all just non-denominational high-spirited prog wanking. Whether it all could be judged to be good or not is rather beside the point – the message here is that Sir Richard exists and he’s having a whale of a time playing the guitar like an absolute bastard and could probably benefit from cutting down on the coffee and getting out a bit more.

The best bit is where he sings – yes, he does one vocal song, completely out of the blue, and it’s fantastic! Hollering like a lusty pirate he sings what he dubiously claims is a “folk song from the ‘20s”, a demented tale of a stranger cut into six pieces by vengeful townsfolk on Christmas day or some such nonsense – it’s absolutely stunning. Sing more and play less Richard!

(I should note that I had to clear off home before the end of the set, so I guess he might have sung a bit more after my departure. I also missed United Bible Studies who were also on the bill – hope to catch them in future.)

LOOKING AT THE ROSE THROUGH WORLD-TINTED GLASSES

-------

So you’ve recently moved to London?

Yes.

And you’ve got nothing better to do than sit around at home interviewing yourself?

Yes.

Well.. why?

It seems to be a fruitful and straightforward way to instigate new writing.

It’s pretty self-indulgent.

I guess.

Fair enough. So what do you think of London?

Well it’s funny, back when I was a teenager I got completely overwhelmed with excitement during my occasional visits to London. Not having much knowledge of, or interest in, places for their own sake, I naturally assumed it must be THE big place where every kind of cool and exciting rebellious underground thing must be happening all the time around every corner, and consequently I wanted to go there a lot and explore and have fun. Then I did not live there.

In recent years I have considerably revised my opinion, and now consider it a hard and often actively unpleasant place to live in which offers less in the way of cultural rewards than a number of smaller and more congenial British cities. Now I do live there. So it goes.

Well why DO you live there then?

You’ve got to live somewhere. My other plans didn’t work out, and like I say, I don’t have much imagination when it comes to places. It’s going ok though, so don’t sweat it.

So I guess you must be looking for a job..?

I’ve got one. It’s boring and the pay is average. Let’s move on.

What’s your favourite part of a working day in your new London life?

My favourite part of the day is getting off the tube a few stops early in the morning and walking across Waterloo bridge listening to Syd Barrett or The Kinks or R.L. Burnside or Husker Du or The Modern Lovers. It’s all downhill from there. I know bridges in cities are basically just streets that go over some water, so why is walking across them in the morning or the evening so great?

And your least favourite?

Getting up in the morning and being duty-bound to put on trousers which are not jeans, thus making me feel not just tired and peculiarly hungry, but also like a total square.

I also dislike how there’s nowhere you can ever go – excepting one would hope your own bedroom and bathroom – where you are out of sight of other people.

Yes, people. There are absolutely loads of them all over the place, aren’t there? So what’s your general opinion of your fellow Londoners?

People in London are on the whole younger and far better dressed than people in other cities. However, a small minority of them dress in a fashion more idiotic than would really be socially feasible in any other city.

Unlike other places, people in London actually seem to buy and read crap modern novels, and can often be seen doing so in public. As a result, all of London’s charity bookshops are also stuffed full of last month’s crap modern novels and very rarely seem to have anything good. Now ask me some more challenging questions before I start to sound like some conceited observational comic.

Have you seen anything of beauty since moving to London?

Good question. I’m not sure I have any very inspiring answers. I haven’t had a chance to spend much time observing the city’s strange and majestic buildings or art galleries or anything, so, um.. I’ve sure seen some beautiful girls. Many of them have boyfriends who seem like total jerks. Such is life.

If you were one of those boyfriends, and you were observing yourself, wouldn’t you think you were also a total jerk?

No comment.

Comets on Fire were also pretty beautiful the other night by the way; right & proper mighty rock music with heart and soul and freedom… Ethan Miller’s exquisite closed eyes smiling-through-the-hard-work ecstatic Rock Face as he bellowed through the verses of their new big, soaring epic song… what’s it called?

“Lucifer’s Memory”

Yeah.. and Ben Chasny collapsing in exhaustion after busting all his guitars and having a roadie strap a new one over his neck and push him back on-stage just in time for him to lurch straight into his solo like a crashing concorde. Ah, rock music man, can’t beat it.

See, it’s not all bad – you’ve been going to some shows..? You’re a music fanatic and everybody in the world plays London at some point!

Yeah, I guess so. I saw Blood on the Wall too and meant to write it up for my weblog but couldn’t get it together.

I’ve got some great stuff lined up – Acid Mothers Temple are playing next month at some place near Elephant & Castle, and there’s Carla Bozulich, Sir Richard Bishop & Richard Blackshaw, Yo La Tengo, The Dead C & Charalambides, Magik Markers… I’ll probably be going to most of those on my own by the way, so if anyone else is going and fancies making a friend..

God, haven’t you had enough of that crap already this year, you Camber Sands bothering trend-following fucker… in a few years that whole malarkey will seem as dated as earnestly frowning over Squarepusher and Mogwai records, expecting the fat, bald future to jump out from behind the sofa any minute. If you want your friends to give a damn, maybe you should go see someone with some bloody tunes for a change!

Hey, fuck you man! I’ve been wanting to hear music that sounds like Acid Mothers Temple and Charalambides all my life, I just never had the access to it before!

And besides, I forgot to mention that next Monday I’m making a pilgrimage up the Northern line to see one of the world’s true heroes – JONATHAN RICHMAN! He’s got a few tunes.

Will he play of them though, that’s the question. How much did the ticket set you back?

Uh… twenty two pounds.

Alright. And finally – what, in a perfect world, would you like to be doing with yourself right now?

Being an art student in Glasgow.

Ok, last question - have you ever had the suspicion that all the objective power and meaning you claim to find in music is actually entirely self-created, and that far from having any interest in advancing the art-form or widening the audience of artists you enjoy, you actually use music and the phony philosophies you pull out of it in the most conservative way possible, as a safe old emotional crutch to distract you from the gaping black hole that is the utter lack of purpose and fulfilment in your life, and your consistent, cowardly failure to live anything like as varied and inspired a life as any of your so-called heroes, and…

This interview is over!

AXE x 2

Ecstatic Sunshine – Freckle Wars (Carpark)



Pretty awesome cover art here I think. Stare at it for a while - you'll feel all funny.

Now it just so happens that a lot of my preferred music over recent months has been that which involves two people playing guitars, and nothing else. Why is this? I dunno… I just like guitars I guess. And I like the soothing feeling of open space provided by the lack of fixed rhythm, additional instrumentation or attention-commanding vocals. I like the sound of two skilled, intuitive players pulling beauty out of the air through co-operation rather than via a single master ego. And, y’know, guitars man. They’re pretty cool. It’s pretty fucking easy to impress me with one. Two? All the better, come on in.

So, perfect timing for me to come across the debut album from Ecstatic Sunshine – 28 joy-filled minutes of two guys, two electric guitars, and nothing else. And I know that’s gonna be a hard band-concept to sell to a lot of weary music-eaters, simply because there are so many clichés and pitfalls such a set-up could easily be subject to. But Ecstatic Sunshine manage to side-step the lot of them, pulling off a neat little record in a style that is – to my ears at least – reassuringly original.

So firstly, let us tick off what Ecstatic Sunshine are not:
They’re not a pedal noise/drone duo ala Growing. Neither are they another Load records-style ADD-afflicted cartoon aggro assault unit (thank god). And they’re not some kinda blissed out, roots-stretching ‘Deadheads. They are entirely untouched by the ubiquitous spirits of Fahey/Basho/Takoma. And there’s definitely no improv shred on display here either – these guys play tight within solid compositions. They don’t work with classic rock / metal in any immediately obvious manner either, and although there is some fiendish twiddling to be heard, neither are they a gang of Fucking Champs-esque semi-ironic virtuosos.

Now let’s move onto what they are:
Brief, snappy songs in which neat, trebley, mildly fuzzy guitar-lines loop around each other, fighting or fucking like tripped out, delinquent Disney squirrels – here a diddleiddleiddle, there a DUR-DUR-DUR, then up they zoom up into some weird inverted Marquee Moon-meets-Black Dog melody/riff, then down the helter skelter and back off to their opposite corners for a quick hop around like wheeee… nice one dudes!

It’s such a pleasant change to hear some complex, instrumental rock music where the watch words are ‘playful’ and ‘fun’… not to mention ‘short’. Enjoyably goofy from time to time, such as on opening track ‘Ramontana’ - ingeniously composed of genetically modified Ramones riffs - Ecstatic Sunshine smother us in goodwill, have fresh chops to share and never even skirt the borders of Annoying.

As noted by John Darnielle in his write-up of Freckle Wars (link), the production here is perhaps a little thin, and hopefully future recordings will see Ecstatic Sunshine experimenting with denser and more varied sounds, but aside from that, cracking, perfectly balanced stuff from an intriguing band who are clever and know they are and get away with it too.

FIGHTING FOR THE MAN’S DOLLAR…

A thousand apologies for the ridiculous recent lapse in updates to this site… I hope you haven’t all deserted me in meantime.

The predictable truth is that since moving to London a few weeks ago, the only things I’ve had any time to write have been job applications.

Hopefully I’ll soon be able to get into a routine again and get my brain working though… we’ll see.

In the meantime, I’ll post a few quick, functional bits for you over the next few days.

Keep on Chooglin'.