Of course we knew this day would come, but still.

So, let’s get straight to the point here – Morricone IS film music, so far as I’m concerned. Even if he didn’t contribute to it all directly, a vast swathe of the cinema I love would sound very different without his influence.

Years before I actually saw any of the Leone films, hearing Morricone’s themes from them pop up on the radio (which they sometimes did in those days) was an event. My Dad (who, like many dads, had a yen for all things cowboy-related) would turn up the volume, and for a few minutes we’d soak it in. The drama, the atmosphere, the wild sounds were just completely intoxicating. They didn’t need any context – as always, Morricone’s music creates its own context. That was almost certainly the first time I stopped to think about music in films, about a kind of musical vocabulary which extended beyond lyrics and pop songs, and about the different ways in which sounds and images can combine to create emotion and excitement. Thirty years later, I’m still thinking about those things.

The medium by which I enjoy the Leone scores has moved over the years from radio, to parental vinyl, to CD, and back to my own vinyl, and during my adult life I’ve of course hovered up all the other Morricone I can find within my price range (which of course still only represents the tiniest fraction of the monolithic range of his total achievement).

From what little I know of Morricone’s beliefs and personality, I think it’s probably safe to say that he would wish to be remembered to the world for his work rather than his biography, so instead of rabbiting on further, I’ll share a swiftly cobbled together mix of fifteen (which could easily be thirty, or one hundred) personal favourite smash hits from his vast catalogue, assembled in no particular order. I’ll keep commentary to a minimum, because otherwise my responses to most of these tracks would just consist of variations on a theme of holy fucking shit.

Though the magic which Nicolai, Dell’Orso, Alessandroni and so many others brought to his recordings cannot be overlooked, Morricone remains a giant – one of the greatest composers and musicians of the 20th century, no questions asked.

For ease of ad-free listening, I’ve compiled these fifteen cuts into a mix on Mixcloud (embed below), but will also go through them one-by-one via Youtube links for those who wish to pick and choose.




1. ‘Titoli’ from ‘A Fistful of Dollars’ (1964)

Here’s where it all began.



2. ‘Il Grande Silenzio (Restless)’ from ‘Il Grande Silenzio’ (1968)



3. “Valmont’s Go-Go Pad” from ‘Danger! Diabolik’ (1968)



4. ‘Svolta Definitiva’ from ‘Violent City’ (1970)



5. ‘La Lucertola’ from ‘A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin’ (1971)



6. ‘Guerra E Pace, Pollo E Brace’ from ‘Grazie Zia’ / ‘Come Play With Me’ (1968)



7. ‘Giorno Di Notte’ from ‘A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin’ (1971)



8. ‘Magic and Ecstasy’ from ‘Exorcist II: The Heretic’ (1977)



9. Main theme from ‘The Thing’ (1982)



10. ‘Canzone Lontana’ from ‘Il Serpente’ (1973)



11. ‘Fraseggio Senza Struttura’ from ‘The Bird with the Crystal Plumage’ (1970)



12. ‘Ballabile No. 2’ from ‘La Cosa Buffa’ (1972)



13. ‘Titoli’ from ‘A Sky Full of Stars for a Roof’ (1968)



14. ‘Astratto 3’ from ‘Veruschka’ (1971)



 
15. ‘Once Upon a Time in the West’ from ‘Once Upon a Time in the West’ (1968)

This theme makes me involuntarily break down in tears each time I hear it. Really, every time, like clockwork. Which has proved quite embarrassing whenever I’ve watched the film in company.

My reaction has nothing to do with any personal/biographical connections, or anything in the film itself (incredible though it is). The sound of the music is just completely overwhelming.

It is simply one of the greatest pieces of music ever recorded, and any classical buffs who want to fight about that are welcome to. Everything that is worth feeling within the human experience, I can hear in this.

R.I.P. Il Maestro.

Labels: bad news, deathblog, Ennio Morricone, Italy, mixcloud, soundtracks

Of course it’s never been my intention to turn this blog into an all-obituaries-all-the-time kind of effort, but my love and admiration for the musical cultures of our fading civilization’s ‘50s-‘70s peak era (plus adjacent decades) remains vast and unquenchable, whilst we are meanwhile faced with the bad luck of living through an epoch in which the remaining denizens of said cultures are, to not put too fine a point on it, dropping like flies.

As some kind of self-appointed memorialiser of such things, it’s really been getting on top of me recently… it’s difficult to find the necessary time to process, let alone get anything suitable down in words.

Sticking strictly to those whose music I am familiar with, or that has affected my life in some small way, there’s Little Richard, Florian Schneider, Phil May, Henry Grimes, Betty Wright, John Prine, Lee Konitz, Henry Grimes…. am I missing anyone here? Almost certainly. Smaller, non-household names and non-band leaders especially, I’m sure. Syphoning news has become increasingly challenging lately, so please hit me up in the comments if there are any other departures I should be aware of.

It’s interesting to note that, of the more elderly folks on the above list, very few have had covid explicitly linked to their deaths, yet the numbers, compared to the quantity of noteworthy musicians we’d normally expect to lose in any given Spring, remain exceptionally high. Makes you wonder, doesn't it…. but this is most assuredly not a good time or place to take one’s wondering off in that direction. It won’t end up anywhere nice. Let’s all just pray daily for our surviving heroes and heroines who are not on the above list. Wishing health, long life and the divine spark of creation to them all.

SO, ANYWAY – Little Richard. That’s a strange one, right? Seems like much of the entertainment media didn’t quite know how to play it. Perhaps in some crazy sort of fashion, we’ve still not quite caught up with him yet.



Seems to me that, for the generation of more rebellious/anti-authoritarian rock fans growing up back in the day, he was little short of a GOD, the real number # 1, not-to-be-fucked-with well-spring for that wild, anarchic rock n’ roll energy, but his perceived importance seems to have waned pretty significantly over the years, to the extent that to those of my age or younger, he’s often not much more than that guy did track 5 and track 7 on that Big Bumper Retro Rock n’ Roll hits CD comp you always had lying around.

Perhaps he’s suffered to a certain extent from “wow, is he still alive, I had no idea” syndrome, a symptom of the long, slow 50 year plus come-down experienced by almost all of the household name ‘50s rock n’ rollers, doomed forever to some gothic, ‘Sunset Boulevard’-esque existence – a long life defined almost entirely by the shadow of some mad shit they laid down without a second thought in their early ‘20s.

For the old timers though, growing up without a supply of raging feedback and animalistic punk/metal nonsense on tap at all times…. well, he was something else entirely. As Simon Reynolds notes, writer Nik Cohn significantly christened his pivotal poetical history of rock n’ roll tome ‘Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom’. I just pulled it off the shelf to check the spelling of the title, and to quote from within (pp. 31-34):

“For instance, the first record I ever bought was by Little Richard and, at one throw, it taught me everything I need to know about pop.
The message went: ‘Tuttie fruiti, all rooti, tuttie fruiti, all rooti, tuttie fruiti, all rooti, awopbopaloobop alopbamboom!’ As a summing up of what rock n’ roll was really about, this was nothing short of masterly.
Very likely those early years were the best that pop has yet been through. Anarchy moved in. For thirty years you couldn’t make it unless you were white, sleek, nicely-spoken and phoney to your toenails – suddenly now you could be black, purple, moronic, delinquent, diseased or almost anything on earth and you could still clean up. Just so long as you carried excitement.”
[…]
“Most of his records sold a million each – ‘Long Tall Sally’, ‘Lucille’, ‘The Girl Can’t Help It’, ‘Keep a Knockin’’, ‘Baby Face’. They all sounded roughly the same: tuneless, lyric-less, pre-Neanderthal. There was a tenor saxo solo in the middle somewhere and a constant smashed up piano and Little Richard himself screaming his head off. Individually, the records didn’t mean that much. They were small episodes in one unending scream and only made sense when you put them all together.”

Man, that’s a great book. I should read it again.

Jumping off from this idea, I distantly remember Greil Marcus (I think?!) waxing lyrical about Little Richard as the guy who first introduced a sense of surrealism / situationism to rock n’ roll, marking out a space in which meaning and coherence entirely disappeared – form transmuted into pure energy, combined with a kind of musical glossolalia (and, that’s a trick which naturally ain’t gonna hold up too well over 60+ years).

Personally, I’ve always found Little Richard’s music – great tho it it – makes for an odd fit amongst the first generation rock n’ rollers with whom he is invariably lumped in. Really, his stuff feels less like fully-fledged r’n’r, and more like a form of super-hyped up jump blues, foregrounding horns and piano and powerhouse vocals in a manner that makes it feel more like a weird, ultra-aggressive adjunct to the parallel development of what would soon become soul music, than to anything connected with the thinner, ghostlier, whiter sounds emanating from the Sun/rockabilly universe. A kind of blunt-yet-brilliant musical dead end of the kind more usually dug up on static-drenched compilations of totally obscure, indie label 45s – not on the freakin’ radio, or the Sunday Times obits page.

In a way, he’s always struck me as the kind of anti-Chuck Berry. Whereas Chuck gifted us with smart lyrics and story-telling, emphasising at all times the primacy of the electric guitar, L’il R (as no one has ever called him) made a point of smashing the loose remains of verbal narrative against the wall until they died bleeding, then proceeded to do the same to a brutally over-miced piano, doing his best to drown out the holy rhythm section entirely.

In a sense, perhaps Bo Diddley serves as some kind of weird, stylistic peacemaker here. By which I mean, his songs told stories, but they were nonsense stories, full of his own self-aggrandising, made up blather, whilst he simultaneously drew our attention to the drums and percussion as the most important part of the pie, because I mean, of course they are, you idiots. But, I’m getting off the point….

Whereas Chuck could number the Beach Boys, Beatles and Stones amongst his white boy descendants, Little Richard took a flying leap straight to The Sonics – which kind of says it all vis-à-vis his place in the canon, I suppose. Punk lineage, A plus 1.

P.S.: having just google-searched his image (try it), I’m inclined to realise that, throughout his life, this guy managed to look genuinely insane and frightening about 90% of the time someone was pointing a camera at him. I’d like to see you beat that across six decades, entire world of heavy metal.

Labels: bad news, blather, deathblog, Little Richard, Nik Cohn, rock n' roll, thinkpiece

Given that every single music event or film screening I had pencilled in in my diary for the next few months is now officially cancelled or postponed, it’s difficult to imagine that much of the always precarious world of DIY / non-state sponsored culture will even still exist when we emerge from the other end of this damned thing.

Thus – an idea. A very obvious one, admittedly, so apologies if I’m just reiterating something everyone’s already been talking about elsewhere, but I don’t do social media, so I’ll just throw it out there.

1. If you’re lucky enough to be a music-making person whose work at least some other people know about and like, now is very much the time for home recording. Dust off that long-neglected solo project, play gargantuan improv jams with your co-habitants, wood-shed new songs – whatever.

2. When you’ve made something, put it online to download, for some money. This money should then be donated in its entirety to your nearest decent music venue / community space / pub / rehearsal space / etc, because god knows, those guys are going to need it.

And, that’s it. Creative, fun, can stave off cabin fever and could be genuinely helpful re: ensuring a future in which we can still get together to listen to horrible loud music and drink beer, if enough people were to get going on it.

(And needless to say, if you’re in an existing band/music entity that already sells stuff online, please consider donating proceeds from that too, assuming you don’t desperately need it to recover manufacturing costs and/or pay rent.)

I realise that posting stuff on ye olde weblogs isn’t exactly an A+ way of getting an idea out there in 2020, but if yr reading and you like this idea, please do pass it on via less luddite-ish means.

Labels: bad news, disasters & emergencies, ideas

Labels: bad news, political shit, The Mekons

God. I only just heard.

In spare half hours recently, I’ve been pulling together a long, rambling blog post laying out my mixed feelings about David Berman and Silver Jews, to sort of contextualise a brief discussion of his recent ‘Purple Mountains’ record. So, I’ve been listening to and thinking about his stuff a great deal, for better or for worse.

All that’s out of the window now of course, but there were some heart-felt words in there I hope, so I’ll try to rake it over with this awful new knowledge, see where it goes and get back to you.

As with so much of his later output, it’s difficult to tell whether the Purple Mountains record represents a troubled man desperately trying to sound cheerful, or a happy man trying to sound troubled, and this uncertainly lent it an unpalatable whiff of insincerity on pre-8th August spins…. but I guess he’s given us a pretty irrefutable answer now.

Basically, I fear there is precious little room here for hope, or serenity, or closure, or whatever the good feeling you’re supposed to have when looking back on the legacies of people who have died is. This is nasty, unplanned, improper. Ghastly in the strictest sense. The new record has a few fleeting breaths of wisdom, grace and charm about it, but they are suffocated by a pall of ugly, clown-ish self-pity most unbecoming for a gentleman of his age, which I did not feel should be encouraged. For an artist who liked to unpack his life story in public every few years, it makes for a weird and terrible epitaph.

Berman was an incredible talent, perhaps the single best lyricist ever to work in popular song, and some of his recordings remain close to me always. For him to go out this way is unspeakable.

What else can you say? I feel so sorry for everyone who cared about him, I hope he’s at peace somehow.

Labels: bad news, David Berman, deathblog, Silver Jews

I have, of course, been devastated to learn this evening that Roky Erickson has passed away at the age of 71. As regular readers will recall, Roky has long been one of my absolute favourites. I return to his music constantly, and it never fails to inspire me and make me happy. In spite of the oft-discussed damage, tragedy and darkness that characterised much of his life, he was both a colossally talented artist / songwriter / musician / rock n’ roller [select whichever designation you favour], and a warm and genuine human being. The vision he brought to underground rock music was utterly unique, and, though individual tolerance may vary, it fits my own sensibilities like hand meeting glove.

Unfortunately I’m not really in a position to compose a proper obit post right now, but watch this space—appropriate tribute will be coming soon.

To jump on the line that will no doubt figure in about 98% of social media obits - we’re gonna miss him, baby.

Labels: bad news, deathblog, Roky Erickson

Ever since I started weblog writing all those years on, I’ve felt a kind of responsibility to mark the passing of musicians and sundry other creative types whose work has had an impact on me. These things always flit in and out of showbiz news feeds far too quickly for my liking (when they make it into them at all), so it behoves me to at least pay tribute before my own tiny audience.

Increasingly though, they are periods when they come in such a flurry it’s impossible to keep up… in addition to Dick Dale (see below), the past couple of weeks have seen the loss of Hal Blaine, who basically played drums on everything (seriously, I used to joke about instigating a drinking game based on how long you could spend reading allmusic.com or a mags like ‘Mojo’ before his name came up), Yuyu Uchida of Flower Travellin’ Band (also a fine actor and a wonderful, eccentric figure within Japanese pop culture across the decades), garage-punk affiliated r’n’b belter Andre Williams (think of him as, like, the ODB of the retro soul circuit), and now, suddenly staggering from a double heavy blow on this sunny Monday morning.

On the movies side of things, looks like we’ve been forced to say goodbye to Larry Cohen (one of my favourite directors, and one of the wildest and most gifted figures ever to labour in the trenches of commercial genre cinema), and on the music side... the last few minutes of the Today Programme as I finish by breakfast and run out the door (late as usual) brings the news that Scott Walker is no longer with us. (Nuff said.)

Though I’ve always loved his music (who else in the pop music realm can heft such a mad combination of awe, absurdity, fear, melancholy and simple, rockin’ pleasure?), I am not in a place right now where I feel like I could bang out a proper Scott Walker obit, and I can’t really bring myself to just fudge it with a few bits of career recap and personal anecdotes. So, I dunno… watch this space, I suppose. Maybe I never will feel I can write one. I mean, I’ve probably spent over fifteen years intermittently wondering how in god’s name one can properly respond to something like ‘Scott 4’ (never mind his later work), so I’m unlikely to figure out the answer in the next few hours. I know it’s a cop-out, but it just speaks for itself really, doesn’t it?

(Ok, one random anecdote before we move on: many years ago, back when all the critics were going ga-ga over ‘The Drift’, I had a dream in which I attended a secret Scott Walker concert, which took place in a small, classically decorated university seminar room, lined with book shelves and suchlike. Various musical figures and writer/critic types were present, and Walker sat at the piano with his face hidden by some kind of African tribal mask. He began to play and sing in a grating, formless, out of tune sort of fashion that (somewhat surprisingly, given his avant garde rep) offended the audience so much that they began heckling and trying to disrupt him. In response, he physically picked up the piano, and threw it, Incredible Hulk style, at the wall, where it destroyed a bookcase. The audience tried to flee, but found that the doors to the room were locked, whilst Scott meanwhile charged into the crowd and began violently attacking people. That’s all I recall. Perhaps there’s a dodgy ‘career overview’ level metaphor buried in there somewhere – thanks, my 2006 sub-conscious! - but I’m not desperate enough to need to go that route right now.)

The faster these deaths being to pile up, the emptier sections of my music & film collections become of still-living souls, the more I’m drawn to muse upon the horrible, banal inevitability of mortality and generational shifts.

It’s no secret, I suppose, that my cultural tastes remain rooted – presumably forever – in the ‘60s and ‘70s. I do my best to plug into contemporary stuff from time to time (still got a toehold at least in rock/noise music and ‘cult’ movies), but I always feel a bit of an outsider in the present, and it’s the time before my birth that I inevitably head back to for comfort. And, like the proverbial college lecturers perpetually grousing that their students don’t know who Humphrey Bogart is, it saddens me terribly to see this era, which still felt just-round-the-corner whilst I was growing up, fading inevitably into the mist of the historical past.

There’s nothing to be done about it – it’s simple maths, and the brutality of the ticking clock. The late ‘60s were now over 50 years ago, and most people who were doing stuff then would at least have been in their early ‘20s. Most people, basically, die in their ‘70s. Twenty plus fifty, equals. We are entering the phase in which that era – which still feels so alive, so relevant to me every time I put my headphones on or watch a movie – is beginning to disappear from living memory, just like the Second World War and the First World War have before it. Before too long, if we want to know something about the 1960s, we won’t be turning to the active participants anymore, we’ll be going straight to the history books and the newspaper archive.

To me at least, this realisation just hurts too fucking much. I’ll name no names, but there are certain people whom I’ve never met face to face (well, I have met one of them actually, but that’s another story) whose continued good health I cross my fingers and pray for almost every day – yet I know I’ll be here, trying to write about them, sooner or later.

That’s life, of course (particularly when you choose to live in the past), but it still stinks. And always, generational time ploughs on. People who were the-age-I-am-now when I first got into music are now just a few years away from being officially elderly. How long ‘til I’m writing about them? If time’s supposed to be relative, can’t it give us a break now and again? I mean, we’ve already got the punk obits coming almost as thick n’ fast as the hippie ones, as we hit the thin end of that generation’s mortality scatter graph.

I don’t know where I’m going with this, or how to segue it back into something that’s not utterly bleedin’ obvious, so here you go – it is what it is.

I could end flippantly and say, well, I bet The Rolling Stones will still be touring, and I still won’t bother going to see them – but a few years ago we could have said the same about AC/DC, or Motorhead. As we get older, new rituals and certainties become harder to identify and hang on to, as the old ones vanish. Or something. I don’t know.

Labels: bad news, deathblog, rambling, Scott Walker, thinkpiece

Update, 11/2/19: If some of my accusations in the post below seem a little obscure, I refer readers to this helpful article posted this morning on The Quietus, which is far from obscure. Please read it and draw your own conclusions. 

When I composed the post below, I was still reeling with disbelief to a certain extent. On reflection, I'd like to put things even more clearly: even in the extremely unlikely event that Matthew Bower were to offer an apology and disavowal of his actions and associations, I still have no place in my life for anyone who could even get within spitting distance of these hateful ideologies. 

Personal forgiveness - sure, why not, it's possible, but I don't know the guy personally and neither do I wish to at this point. Artistically speaking, this music is tainted - he's off the creative register so far as I'm concerned, and I'd encourage all readers to reflect this in their future listening & purchasing choices. It has long been my belief that the best way to deal with fascists, racists and the like is to let them know that their views place them outside of any civilised discourse or culture, and that they have no one to blame but themselves when they are excluded from it.

Following this public 'outing', I'm sure that Bower's assorted band names will continue to flourish in the nasty far right subculture he increasingly seems to have been moving toward in recent years. So be it, but it's up to the rest of us to stay strong and ensure that the numbers willing to support this subculture remain sufficiently small to prevent it's denizens from, say, making a living or gaining any wider recognition through their activities.

Of course, in respect to the Bower issue, I feel like a complete idiot for failing to put the necessary pieces together to get the full picture until now. They've all been there, hiding in plain sight. I'll have to try to be more careful in future. 

I'm sure there must be other fans, promoters, label owners and fellow musicians who feel the same. Now that everything is pretty much out in the open, I hope that they will have the strength to act appropriately and to let him and others like him know that their presence is no longer welcome in any self-respecting music scene or record collection.

Unlike some sick fantasists on the far right, I'm not keen on re-writing history, so, after some reflection, I've decided to leave the words I've written about Skullflower, Sunroof, Hototogisu etc in the past on this blog untouched. I've removed all links however, and have added a link to this post, just to clarify matters.

That's my final word on the subject for the moment - my original post from last week is below.

--- 


Ack. I’ve got a bad taste in my mouth this evening.

With typically horrid timing, less than two weeks after I christened Skullflower #1 in my 2018 records list, I’ve been appraised of some fairly regrettable evidence concerning Matthew Bower’s political associations – ironically via the man himself, who has chosen to reproduce images of an email containing said evidence on his band’s weblog.

Now – I don’t want to be the kind of person who permanently writes off an artist just based on their use of an ‘improper’ phrase or image or something. As any fool knows, there’s enough space in art for reinterpretation, reclamation, differing understandings and legitimate provocation concerning just about anything, and where possible I like to give ‘em enough rope. Aforementioned evidence however suggests that, in this case, Bower has been quietly fashioning a pretty swell noose for himself in recent years. (I’m not posting any links here, but I’m sure you can probably google up all the gory details, should you wish to.)

As the author of the reproduced email readily admits, any of the presented exhibits, could, if taken alone, amount simply to a mistake, a misunderstanding, a “we’re apolitical and don't judge other people’s beliefs, man” black metal-style cop-out, or a snarky attempt at humour, even allowing for the fairly vile character evident in several of them. But, as another hoary old racist once observed: once is a happenstance, twice is a coincidence…. and you know the rest (see post title, above).

I take no pleasure in writing this – it both upsets and angers me. Bower’s music is unique, and I have enjoyed his recordings for many years, under many different guises – moreso than ever recently. I don't like the idea of cutting it out of my life, but what else can I do; I don’t want to hear those sounds congealing like rotten fruit.

As to anger meanwhile, it pisses me off immensely that I’ve given the guy money, and have encouraged readers here to do likewise. I don’t like giving my money to people who are dicks (and, being a UK tax payer, I’m obliged to do so quite enough without bloody noise guitar players getting in the way).

I dunno man….. sometimes I wonder. I’ve always taken comfort from the fact that the vast majority of people involved in underground music are basically Good Johnsons, in the parlance of a hoary old (alleged) misogynist, but it increasingly seems that, the further we venture Beyond The Fields We Know, the more likely we are to encounter people like this, with affiliations of the most pathetic, hateful, puerile, lunatic variety hidden away in their back pocket – kept ambiguous and out of sight lest they hurt the knob-twiddling careers of these brave ary*n mystic warriors. (Seems as if that ‘Hidden Reverse’ David Keenan wrote about way back when has been developing some really nasty warts.)

But, I’m getting rhetorical here, so I should reel it in. I could go on, but let’s just say that it’s a stone fucking drag, and leave it at that.

Labels: bad news, political shit, racism, Skullflower

Labels: bad news, Dead Moon, deathblog, Fred Cole

I’m sorry for recent blog-death. Ideas for potential blog-rebirth are in progress, but in the meantime, I couldn’t let this one go by.

On those pre-major label Huskers records, Grant Hart is a force of nature, busting through your speakers like a hurricane. I actually cannot believe the sheer force with which he plays drums on some of the ‘Zen Arcade’ era material. With all due respect to Bob, the band’s “hardcore energy + heart-on-sleeve pop = ?!?” dynamic was largely down to him, and the intensity of his best songs remains undiminished.

Fans can/will argue long and hard about which songs those are of course, but for my part I’d advise you to click through to the following and play them as loudly as is practicable as soon as possible: 1, 2.

The first is one of the first songs I ever learned to play on the guitar, the second is as good a pick as any for the last song I want to play on the guitar, when some fantasy final encore comes.

I’ve had enough of cancer recently. R.I.P. Grant.

Labels: bad news, deathblog, Grant Hart, Husker Du

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

In happier times, perhaps I’d have been rustling up a proper Deathblog right now, ruminating about how I first discovered Leonard Cohen, and of all the things my younger self did or didn’t get out of listening to his records, and of all the friends I listened to them with. Of how in recent years I’ve instead found myself sniggering somewhat at the pomposity and earnest inscrutability of the early records I used to love, whilst being slowly drawn toward the weirder, wonkier charms of the later stuff I used to dismiss, even whilst a handful of those early numbers still slay me, and so on. Maybe I could do you a top five favourite moments, or top ten.

But today I just don’t have the heart.

As one or two people have no doubt already noted, Field Commander Cohen was so cool, he somehow managed to record the perfect song for 2016, back in the relatively care-free days of 1992.

I recall hearing this song on the radio a few years back and finding its lyrical bombast absolutely ridiculous. This week? It fits like a glove, and its prescience is terrifying.

Labels: bad news, deathblog, Leonard Cohen, worse news

Labels: bad news

Sick of words following last week’s big you-know-what in the UK, I thought I’d fall back - as ever - on music and throw together a brief sonic response.

No mixing, no gimmicks, no chat here - just tunes. Little subtlety, much anger – hopefully some catharsis. Inevitably, we can’t offer 100% lyrical relevance, but, a few dated topical references aside, I hope the spirit of some of these songs still hits home.

More ambitious mixcloud outings are a possibility in the future if this one proves workable [I’ve not used their site before – any comments/issues, let me know], but for now, just think of this as an emergency aesthetic sticking plaster for a set of festering wounds that’s not going to start getting better any time soon.

Labels: bad news, misery, mixtapes, politics

Believe it or not, I was planning to hit “publish” early this week on a post entitled ‘Collective Deathblog’, rounding up thoughts on the passing of several noteworthy musicians over the past few weeks. Needless to say, following certain tangentially music-related events this weekend, that title now hardly seems prudent.

To give the elephant in the room a good kicking then –

Whilst I am painfully aware that the events that put a damper on most of our weekends are directly comparable to those that currently hit a number of nations in the Middle East on a semi-regular (or indeed actually, definitely regular) basis (usually directly or indirectly supported by one or more Western or Eastern power blocs, and almost never accompanied harrowing eye witness accounts in Western media), it nonetheless hurts like a blow to the stomach to see such violence perpetrated within, I hate to say it, ‘our’ world - within a context that’s familiar to any of us who have spent time attending big-ticket gigs in capital cities.

As a friend pointed out to me on Saturday, we might not know anyone who likes The Eagles of Death Metal enough to go and see them in Paris, but, as people who have ended up drawing the majority of our peer group from among fellow music fans, how far do we need to go through degrees of separation before we find someone who does, or maybe did?

Complacent and over-protected as we – ahem - ‘young people’ on this side of the world generally are, the uneasiness and hollow-stomach feeling prompted by running such thoughts through our heads is not welcome, and the idea that said feeling may eventually become a pretty common one as the now-officially-noticeable slide toward global chaos continues is something I find very difficult to face.

There may be everything left to say, but there’s also nothing to say. Having no desire to add to the mountain of disposable chitter-chatter any more than I already have done, let’s just say that we here at Stereo Sanctity second the words of Simon HB at XRRF for rhetoric, and refer readers to Jeremy Allen’s piece at The Quietus for purposes of sobering personal context.

The post I was originally going to write today will hopefully be up soon.

Labels: bad news, politics

As far as content on this increasingly death-fixated blog goes, one obit I’ve had more time to think about than usual (not that it’s been called into service quite yet, thankfully) is that of Wilko Johnson, who, as you may have heard, was diagnosed with terminal cancer in December, and played what will most likely be his final live performances back in March.

Last weekend, Radio 6 broadcast a one hour interview with him, interspersed with some tunes, and I just thought I’d do a quick post to point readers in the direction of the programme’s seven day tenure on the BBC iPlayer.

Sounds potentially heavy-going, but trust me – it’s worth making time for. Partly because Wilko is, as ever, a funny, erudite and hugely likeable fellow, and partly because every song he chooses is fucking brilliant. But mostly it’s worth listening to for the final section, in which he discusses his illness. Let’s just say that if any of us can approach our own mortality with a spirit half as level-headed and positive as this guy, we’ll be doing bloody well, and that if you can get to the end of this programme without welling up for a good cry, you’ve got a harder heart than I.

Labels: bad news, BBC, Dr Feelgood, radio, Wilko Johnson

People Who Died.

Guess a lot of people are gonna be posting that video this evening.

Given that I often do obituary posts here, I never know how to handle it when someone whose records I like dies, but I don’t really have anything pertinent to say about them that you can’t find in a thousand other places.

I had the same problem a couple of weeks back when MCA died. I mean, just re-posting videos for the hit songs and saying “gee, s/he sure wuz a great guy” seems a bit redundant.

Oh well. Having got that out of the way, let’s belatedly waste some bandwidth, because, as recent karaoke and DJing engagements have proved, this one never gets old;

And this one and ‘old’ are not even concepts belonging in the same universe, I suspect;

RIPs duly issued: you know the score.

Labels: bad news, deathblog, Donna Summer, The Beastie Boys

Friday, March 02, 2012

Sunday, September 04, 2011