As I struggle forlornly to find a few minutes to get this stopped clock styled Best of 2016 “count-down” back in action, I have of course been aware that, like some awful annual ritual, a lot of people who fall within this blog’s orbit have passed away since Christmas.

January always feels so horribly medieval, doesn’t it? It gets cold, so the older or more infirm among us start to die. Hospitals buckle under a further escalation of their now-continuous “crisis”, comedic Dickensian undertakers rub their hands together in glee, and even the most chilled of Saturnine cult rock musicians, living (one hopes) in relative comfort, surrounded by the warmth and respect of their peers and loved ones, are not immune to the remorseless progress of death.

(Jesus Christ, always a barrel of laughs on this blog at the moment, isn’t it?)

Anyway. As I like to make a habit here of marking the passing of those whose work has made an impression upon me over the years, there follows a short round up of remembrance for the recently departed – all deserving of far more space than I have allocated them here.


There comes a point in every music fan’s life when he or she will cut through the derision engendered by Live Aid, ‘Whatever You Want..’, slicked back ponytails and that time they sued Radio One for not play-listing their new single, and realise that Status Quo were and are *A-OK*. And, given that the past few years have found me wearing double denim and listening to monotonous boogie-rock as a matter of almost daily routine, this liberating realisation has hit me with hit me particular force of recent.

As John Peel recognised, if ‘Caroline’ and ‘Down Down’ don’t get your dancefloor going, you need to have some serious words with your dancefloor, and indeed, extensive testing has shown that the Quo’s output remained certifiably bad-ass throughout the first half of the 1970s. (If you need further evidence, begin here.)

(As an aside, the band’s perpetual uncoolness has meant that key LPs like ‘Piledriver’ and ‘Quo’ remain among the few first rate, Vertigo-swirl era ‘70s rock records that can still be picked up for peanuts at the time of writing. As such, my PRO-TIP for any cash-strapped record collectors is to head down to Oxfam and fill yr boots before the wind changes. You won't regret it.)

Though Status Quo’s best work relies too much on a collective, unified groove for me to be able to hymn Parfitt’s individual contributions to their oeuvre with a great deal of certainty, he shares many song-writing credits for their best shit, and his unrelenting dedication to the art of high gauge Telecaster hammering should surel;y earn him legendary status amongst rhythm guitar players. As a key member of such a monster unit and (by most accounts) a lovely chap, he will be missed.


A relatively recent discovery for me (and for many others, if the proliferation of the ubiquitous ‘Who is William Onyeabor?’ compilation is anything to go by), Onyeabor was an entirely self-sufficient Nigerian musician, producer, record mogul and “industrialist” whose trademark combination of irresistible disco/funk rhythms, Stevie Wonder-esque keyboard/synth wig-outs and soulful, understated vocals delivering mighty, no nonsense themes of peace, togetherness and humility – delivered in the form of eight self-released LP between 1977 and 1985, at which point he apparently abandoned music altogether and became somewhat reclusive - created just about the happiest, most affirmative and immediately likeable sound I’ve heard in many a year. And apparently he achieved all this whilst dressed like JR from ‘Dallas’ too, which is awesome.

Tracks like Better Change Your Mind, Atomic Bomb and Why Go To War go off like wonky, eight minute smiles of DIY disco ecstasy, and whilst I’ve yet to spend enough time with Mr Onyeabor’s work to eulogise him further, I was very sad to hear that he passed away last week.



Well if you’re going to be a one hit wonder, this is the way to do it.

I’ve probably written before here at some point about how, before I was “into” music, when my age was still in single figures, the songs that initially captivated me and stuck in my mind during long, Radio Two-soundtracked drives with my Dad tended to be “story songs” with some kind of heavy, dramatic atmosphere – ‘House of the Rising Sun’, ‘Ode to Billie-Jo’, and of course, ‘Where Do You Go To, My Lovely?’.

Just like those other songs, I still love it too, and offer no apology. It would be my first choice in Karaoke, if the machines ever had it (I guess, being primarily lyric-based, it wasn’t a bit hit in Japan), and I could probably recite most of the verses for you straight off the bat.

At one point in my ill-starred past, I had a yen to record some sort of horrifying noise deconstruction of it, but, returning to Sarstedt’s original, I concluded that it remained absolutely great, and as such didn’t deserve to be subjected to any kind of “deconstruction”, despite its comedic flourishes and manipulative melodramatic turnaround.

These days in fact, the song carries more potency for me than ever, as it’s exhaustive litany of mid-century cultural reference points – which all sounded so mysterious and enticing to me as a child, suggestive of the wondrous promise of adulthood – now feel incredibly sad; fading memories of a world of guilt-free, Riviera-tanned European privilege that sat ready for the taking, tempered by just the right amount of quasi-Bohemian aesthetic daring to add substance to the argument that, for the lucky few at least, the time and place hymned by Sarstedt represented the pinnacle of Western civilisation.

In fact, there’s quite a thorny dialogue going on in the song vis-à-vis the way that the excesses the singer chronicles are ostensibly dismissed from the POV of (we presume) a penniless, working class troubadour grounded in a ‘reality’ unmentioned until the final turn-around - but at the same time, the aspirational, near mythical, glamour his subject represents is so absolutely irresistible that he cannot hide his covetous awe.

And, it is this grudging celebration of an era in which, in stark contrast to the conduct of the assorted paranoid shitbirds currently stockpiling the world’s capital, the privileged few still gave at least a surface level impression of being stylish and culturally sophisticated, that I believe most strongly resonates with the song’s audience, then as now.

Meanwhile, I’m sure Peter Sarstedt lived a fine and fulfilling life, enjoyed much happiness, many romantic adventures and indelible friendships, wrote bucketloads of other magnificent songs, and so on….. but I’m afraid I can’t tell you about any of that, because I have no idea. As far as his influence on my life thus far goes, he is The Song, and, whilst it is difficult to imagine that seeing him in concert would have been anything other than the most excruciating hour of “PLAY THE HIT” imaginable, I am nonetheless saddened by the way that his death sends the kind of world he delineated in The Song further and deeper into a soon-to-be-beyond-living-memory past of dry historical record.


Well… what can you say? If you know anything of Can, you know Jaki, and if you know Jaki, you know he was one of the most extraordinary drummers ever to grace the “rock” idiom. (And if, conversely, you don’t know anything of Can, it’s about bloody time you rectified that, don’t you think? [Try here for a compendium of good starting points.])

Because seriously folks, there is no way I can talk about the drums on most prime-era Can tracks without resorting to hyperbole – they are just phenomenal. Of all the preternaturally gifted members of that most gifted of bands, I’m inclined to think he was the most so.

(I’ve also always liked the fact that – as was pointed out in the hand-drawn caricatures of Can members that graced the set of Can CD-Rs that an extremely generous contact posted to me fifteen-odd years ago [I really must dig those out and scan them, they were great] – Liebezeit translates as “love time”, which is a sublimely good name for a drummer.)

In essence I suppose, Liebezeit was a key exponent of the idea that, if music is going to break new ground, the rhythm behind it has to break new ground, but that it can only do so by means of a killer groove. So if the killer grooves you’ve done before sound old – find new ones.

He was still playing too I believe, scheduled to participate in some kind of semi-Can reunion this year with Schmidt and Mooney, so…. just a terrible loss. R.I.P.


Lastly, and of a rather different character from the losses discussed above, perhaps this month’s saddest and most unexpected of news concerns the death of Mark Fisher, the writer and academic whose tangentially music-related K-Punk blog, and his subsequent books, offered what for many, myself included to some extent, proved a jumping off point into a new realm of critical thought, and a new lens through which to view the troubled era we find ourselves living through.

Although it must be said that I haven’t managed to engage with Mark’s writing quite as deeply as I might have done – reading his stuff purely online, rather than on paper, thus far – I have nonetheless always been very impressed by the directness of his writing, and his pointed avoidance of the kind of obscurantism that often blights such “theory”-based work, even whilst setting out some extremely challenging ideas. The broadness of his approach when it comes to approaching the contextualisation of the present (as opposed to the past) from a variety of entirely new directions is likewise remarkable – a difficult and potentially dangerous task without the safety net of hindsight, but one for which he possessed a uniquely sharp aptitude.

Now more than ever, as the slow descent into entropy and social collapse he often discussed seems to be picking up speed at a terrifying rate, Fisher’s absence over the next few years will be painfully felt in many quarters.

Whilst I never met Mark face to face, my day job sometimes entailed my contacting him in regard to some entirely tedious administrative matters, and I always meant to follow up one of those emails with a “by the way, love your writing” type note – but, hating the awkwardness of those “uh, I’m a big fan” type conversations, and aware of the fact that I had very little of use to add by way of commentary on his work, I never did – a decision I now regret.

To be honest, I still have little of use to add, beyond a gnawing sense of one-step-removed sadness of the variety that I daresay Mark may have found time to address in his final book, ‘The Weird and The Eerie’, whose online sample chapter I found extremely interesting, skim reading it between tasks at work in the days immediately before I heard the bad news.

All I can do is point you in the direction of some more worthwhile tributes – here, here or here – and also point out that a fund has been initiated to help Mark’s wife and son keep things together through this difficult time. From my position of one-step-removed abstraction, my heart goes out to them.

Labels: bad news, Can, deathblog, Mark Fisher, Peter Sarstedt, Status Quo, William Onyeabor