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

Well, what can you say? More specifically, what can I say?

I’ve set myself a precedent here for doing posts of this nature on the occasion of significant deaths, so can’t really bow out of this one.

Well, given the mountain of material we’ll shortly be chewing over from massive fans and self-proclaimed experts (for DB must be second only to BD when it comes to those guys) when the quote-unquote “music community” picks itself up off the floor over the next few days, I thought it might prove interesting to throw together a few thoughts from a… well, not a ‘non-fan’ exactly. Certainly not a hater or resenter or non-enjoyer, but just, well, y’know, he’s never been a big deal for me, the way he has for so many others. An ‘almost-fan’ let’s say. A ‘tipping-over-the-edge-into-fandom-not-quite-there-yet’ sort of deal.

Could such a piece be interesting? Well it probably wouldn’t be for most artists, but the sheer breadth and depth of Bowie’s hold over popular music is such that he still had an effect – dozens and hundreds of little effects, direct and second hand, all overlapping – on my enjoyment of music, and indeed yours too. Those of sufficiently wide listening who claims otherwise are probably either lying to themselves or playing an aggressively contrarian a-hole position for reasons best known to themselves. So…. Yeah. I have no particular conclusions to make here, but perhaps these formless reflections might amount to something. Let’s just see how it goes.

One thing you realise as you grow older as a music fan is that hating Bowie, like hating The Beatles, is a mugs game. The more time you waste bellyaching about their allegedly unjustified ubiquity, the more untenable your position becomes, as warm memories of melodies, lyrical flourishes, funny ideas and likeable images flood the minds of those you seek to convince, whilst your continued banging on rings hollow. Do us all a favour, leave it behind with the craftily rolled bedroom spliffs, UCAS forms and MOR emo-rock. ‘Suffragette City’ is on the radio. Drop your defenses and just smile, you twat. Life’s too short, etc.

Through teens & early’20s, I was disdainful of Bowie. I know that for many people (especially those raised in the ‘70s of course) he acted as a “gateway drug” in much the same way that Sonic Youth did for me, bridging mainstream-ish pop/rock and more challenging/underground concerns - but I came at him from the opposite angle. Already familiar with The Velvet Underground, Kraftwerk, Iggy, Syd Barrett et al by the time I began consciously considering his music, I largely saw him as some kind of magpie-like art-rock Machiavelli, cherry-picking ideas from all my messy, misunderstood faves and watering them down for tidy public consumption, reaping misappropriated plaudits for godlike originality from the uninformed in the process.

The fact that, at the time, he seemed largely concerned with making decidedly iffy ‘cyberpunk’ drum n’ bass tracks and telling everyone how much he liked The Pixies a decade after they split up only served to fuel this narrative, and as such I closed the case.

When, sometime around the turn of the millennium, NME did a big thing voting him “the most influential artist of all-time” or somesuch, and someone sent in a letter the next week saying “Sorry, all we had him down with is fucking up the production on ‘Raw Power’, signed, The Kids” I not only found it highly amusing, but more or less agreed.

The thing that changed my mind, basically, was song-writing. Specifically, a scratched up double A-side of ‘Life On Mars’ b/w ‘The Man Who Sold The World’ that I pulled out of my Mum’s long-neglected record collection whilst bored and in search of interesting stuff one summer. Now, say what you like about the big picture, but you can’t argue with material like that. Both songs remain shiver-up-the-spine-inducing to me to this day, not due to any memories or associations or whatnot associated with them, but just in and of themselves, as compositions and recordings. He wasn’t copping anyone else’s moves (as far as I know) when he sat down and knocked those two out, and even the most embittered Bowiephobe would be hard pressed to deny that they display the touch of an exceptionally gifted writer/arranger/performer.

I further began to contemplate the idea that DB was pretty damn good at this song-writing lark when considering the credits and background to an album I liked (and still like) a great deal, Iggy Pop’s ‘The Idiot’. What swiftly became clear upon closer examination was that this album was a Pop/Bowie joint through and through, with Dave’s generosity toward his troubled buddy being the only thing that allowed the Ig to take sole credit. In fact, with Bowie sharing a writing credit on every tune, producing, arranging, probably selecting and briefing the musicians and god knows what else, ‘The Idiot’ is arguably about 75% his gig, with Iggy merely contributing some lyrics, vocals and a slightly more nebulous sense of ‘attitude’.

Possibly not the most promising division of labour given the aforementioned flubbing of ‘Raw Power’s initial mixes, but somehow, it works splendidly. A perfect halfway meeting between Bowie’s consummate professionalism and Iggy’s feral wild man antics, ‘The Idiot’ presents a darker, more damaged and rockist take on many of the same tropes found in Bowie’s mid-‘70s output, and as such, it appealed more immediately to my punkoid sensibilities, further increasing my one-step-removed appreciation of Bowie’s talents.

The next step was a random VHS viewing of D.A. Pennebaker’s Ziggy Stardust documentary - a film whose visibility & historical significance has suffered hugely from the fact that it wasn’t widely released until over a decade after the events recorded within it (a particularly chronic failing where ol’ Chameleon Bowie is concerned). Taken on its own merits though, I think it’s an absolutely fantastic concert film, and one that I highly commend to fans of such things who may have overlooked it.

Although Bowie’s trotting out of songs by The Velvets and Jacques Brel (via Scott Walker) in his stage-show here does seem motivated more by an opportunistic attempt to steal their thunder than by a need to introduce his fans to the originators, I’ll nonetheless admit that the performances captured in the film still blew me away. Again, the feeling of grudging respect intensified. Well you can’t say he didn’t put on one hell of a show…etc.

Perhaps because some of the turns in the movie were so unexpectedly mind-blowing (‘Moonage Daydream’ with Mick Ronson contributing the most ludicrously OTT guitar solo I’ve seen in my life whilst the entire audience of teenage girls appear to lost in the throes of sexual ecstasy is pretty hard to beat as an absolute apex of never-to-be-repeated rock star ridiculousness), my subsequent belated acquisition of the Ziggy Stardust album felt like a bit of an anticlimax.

Well, I say that, but… mixed feelings, y’know? I mean, there’s certainly nothing anticlimactic about ‘Five Years’, that’s for sure. Jesus Christ. If he’d recorded that song and never done anything else in his entire life, I’d still be writing a generous old deathblog here today. Breathtaking. In fact, purely in terms of songwriting, most of the record is indeed the masterpiece people often claim it as. ‘Ziggy Stardust’, ‘Suffragette City’, ‘Rock N Roll Suicide’ of course, and the hilarious first few minutes of ‘Moonage Daydream’ (although the live version in the movie was much better). Oh, and ‘Lady Stardust’! My god, yeah, fantastic. Yes, there are five or six (or seven or eight) songs on there that are not to be messed with.

Nonetheless though, it’s not an album I’ve really felt the need to put on that often. I don’t know, it’s just…. something about the sound of the whole thing just bugs me. That oh-so-early’70s mixture of plinky-plonky pub piano, big ‘parody’ gestures and flat, “careful now, watch the levels” type production. It frustrates me in much the same way all those ‘70s Springsteen albums do. For all the rock n’ roll posturing, there’s just not a great deal of rock n’ roll happening here. Too much piano; too much saxophone; not enough guts. The material might be exceptional, the players might be great, but the performances sound way too neutered for my taste, dry and cold, and it’s no fun. You will disagree, of course, but what can I say?

To be honest, similar discrepancies between material and recorded sound compromise my enjoyment of most of the ‘70s Bowie albums I’ve taken the time to listen to front to back over the years. ‘Ziggy..’ aside, ‘The Man Who Sold The World’ is probably my favourite – some great songs on there, and quite a weird, tough sound, followed by about half of ‘Hunky Dory’, and after that he kinda loses me. ‘Aladdin Sane’ I couldn't hang with at all (although I like ‘Jean Genie’), and ‘Diamond Dogs’ gets WAY too overcooked / underpowered for my liking, much as I might love the artwork and concepts behind it. Never got that whole ‘thin white duke’/’Young Americans’ era either – I find it hard to get beyond the idea of it being a particularly contrived pastiche of a great form of music that really did not need his intervention.

Throughout all this, I suppose he just had an idea of what his records should sound like that was just a *little* too complacent and mainstream-acceptable for my liking, saturated as I am with what audiences at the time would have considered the real weirdy beardy stuff (Beefheart, Eno, Sabbath, Can etc.)

So then, I should love the ‘Berlin trilogy’, right? Well, I don’t really know, to be honest. These albums are so critically lauded and loaded with storied mythology of pre/post-punk gloom (of which I have little interest) I can barely even dare to approach them as an agnostic, uncommitted listener. Maybe one day I’ll finally put them on back to back and get the point? I hope so.

I mean, I’ll cop that if you’ve not heard ‘Heroes’ pop up unexpectedly on the radio and felt you’ve been hit in the stomach with a brick at least once or twice in your life, you must have a hard heart indeed, but beyond that… I dunno. They’re on the waiting list. Thereafter, I like ‘Ashes to Ashes’ and ‘Let’s Dance’ because they sound so weird, and… let’s cut the embarrassment and end this thing now shall we?

What this is all leading up to really is the horribly snide realization that, in the spirit of Alan Partridge, my favourite David Bowie album is probably ‘David Bowie’s Greatest Hits’ (yes, I do own it – I got it for DJing). Play that in isolation and you’d be hard-pressed to deny he was a real big fish in the small pond of chart-orientated white pop for most of his career, however much I personally might struggle with the deeper mysteries of his wider catalogue.

So where does all this mealy-mouthed hot n’ colding on the subject of Bowie’s recorded work leave me? I don’t know. An almost-fan? Is that an applicable status?

Actually, the more I’ve thought about it over the past few days, the more it seems to me that the veneration of Bowie is very much a generational thing.

As far as I know, most music fans in a vaguely similar age braket to myself take a similar approach to Bowie as the one I’ve outlined above. We like Bowie - maybe we even own a few of his records, and we’re happy when we hear his songs on the radio. But in no way can we comprehend the experience of really loving Bowie, the way that so many critics and musicians and DJs and pundits who were raised in the ‘70s clearly do (or did).

Growing up in the ‘90s, when the man himself was a bit of a has-been, headmaster-like figure, whilst the charts were frequently topped by ‘indie’ bands playing blatantly Bowie-derived material* and shops and libraries offered whole pantheons of ‘alternative’, non-mainstream music for us to explore on cheap CD reissues, we could take or leave his overriding influence really. His ‘meaning’ to us potentially didn’t extend much beyond that of some guy who did some good songs in the ‘70s.

For that older generation though, he was a BIG DEAL, a singular entity, an absolute game changer in a largely bland and stifling media landscape, where that particular combination of style, intelligence and transgression had no counterpart anywhere on the TV or in the mags. For a kid growing up in Britain in the early ‘70s, if you didn’t like heavy metal or prog or sensitive singer-songwriters, he must have been IT (T. Rex being unfairly dismissed by many as ‘kiddie stuff’, but that’s another story). And once you’ve got Bowie of course, you can find your way to Lou Reed, to Iggy, to Eno and Roxy Music and John Cale and Nico – inquisitive minds look further, doors to intoxicating new worlds open up. Like I say, a perfect gateway drug for that particular generation.

What percentage of early punks morphed out of an earlier identity as Bowie kids? Off the top of my head, I know members of bands as unlikely as The Germs and The Fall initially coagulated around their Bowie fandom… how many hundreds more did too? Of course, the best bands did not pass Go and went straight to The Stooges, but with three TV channels and the NME (or nearest local equivalent), many weren’t lucky enough to have that option. In short, the scatter-gun spread of his influence over those who defined half-decent music culture through the late ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s is incalculable, even if it is often unrecognisably diffuse.

Which leads me to wonder, if he was no great shakes for us ‘90s kids, how does he continue to figure for generations AFTER my own, who have largely grown up with him as a lauded cultural icon, curating festivals, wearing sharp suits and delivering ‘honest, disarming’ interviews left, right and centre?

Again, I don’t know. I suppose in the past few years, we’ve seen a big resurgence – led from the top of course - in the idea of the pop star as a kind of grand artistic visionary (witness second/third winds for the likes of Kate Bush, Laurie Anderson, David Byrne et al), and true to form, Bowie’s been all over this, meaning that it is likely to be in this mode that many obits will see him. Is this good, bad, appropriate, accurate, irrelevant? Will it mean anything to a 19 year old, a 90 year old, a 40 year old? I don’t know. I’ve said my piece, and just about run out of steam here I think.

R.I.P. David Bowie. He was never really my guy, but he seemed like a nice bloke, and he sure made some good songs.

Actually, you know what one of the best ones was? ‘Little Liza Jane’, by Davey Jones & The King Bees, 1965; I heard that on the radio yesterday for what I think might be the first time. Totally bad-ass! Sounds like Vince Taylor singing for The Yardbirds or something, brilliant rock n’roll….. and off we go again…..



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*One thing that occurred to me whilst listening to about four hours of tributes on the radio yesterday whilst doing the cooking & housework was that, alongside his myriad of cooler innovations, Bowie’s ‘70s material pretty much wrote the book for what eventually became ‘brit-pop’ – something I’d never much bothered to think about before. Consider: four minute plus ‘big singles’ in which mild-mannered rock arrangements are beefed up by horns, strings, keys and what-not; off-beat/culturally resonant verses matched up with immediate, ‘anthemic’ choruses; conscious attempts to fuse popular and critical appeal. It’s all there right? Not just Suede’s more obvious imitations, but Pulp, The Manics, Supergrass, even second-stringers like The Boo Radleys, Sleeper etc etc… Bowie owned that shit, far more than he did anything related to ‘krautrock’ or ‘the avant garde’ or whatever else his more high-falutin’ defenders may claim.

Labels: David Bowie, deathblog, rambling, thinkpiece

So we’ll begin with another contradiction. All that cynicism and distance that surrounds the public perception of ‘Lou Reed’ like a block of ice, how do we match that up with the fact that so much of his music is so fucking achingly sentimental, so nostalgic, so fixated on some fleeting moment of zen-like universal comfort, in spite of all the sneering and street hassle and leather daddy hi-jinks? Because that’s the essence that keeps me coming back to him really.. the former I mean, not the latter.

Of course, I guess I still like all the shrieking dissonance and hair-raising guitar noise and decadent droning plenty too (yes, I had the “John Peel played ‘Heroin’ and everything changed forever” moment same as everyone else, even if mine was closer to 1998 than 1968… and it speaks volumes, I think, that it sounded just as ‘what the fuck is this’ jaw-dropping at the dawn of the 21st century as it did when copies of the banana album first started to sneak over to these shores). But that’s not what I feel like discussing today, I suppose.

Let’s talk about ‘Sweet Jane’ instead. I don’t know if it’s Lou Reed’s best song, or even my favourite one, but it’s the one, I think, where that moment of calm, basic-level happiness he always seemed to be striving for was first fully illuminated.

I remember ages and ages and ages ago, reading the booklet that accompanied the cheap ‘best of the Velvet Underground’ CD that I bought shortly after hearing ‘Heroin’ on the radio, the writer saying something about how Lou Reed’s lyrics always seem to reflect this obsession with the idea of things being “alright” - and indeed, that writer was really on to something I think. In song after song, it is a state of unspectacular ‘alright-ness’ that is sought out and celebrated: “..it was alright”, “it’s gonna work out right”, “..everything was alright”, “it’s gonna be alright”, on and on, like some endlessly repeating mantra. And it’s not some great, transcendent moment of happiness or revelation of love or anything that he’s after either, it’s just… things are alright. Sitting quietly at home, looking out of the window, coffee on the stove. Sitting next to your beloved over breakfast, walking out to get groceries – whatever. Things are alright. I can dig that.

At heart, this seems to be where most Lou Reed songs (all of his more upbeat numbers, anyway) are coming from. In fact, maybe this realisation even allows us to take a more sympathetic approach to his legendarily aggressive attitude toward journalists and interviewers. Imagine, the poor guy sitting there in his apartment, savouring his moment of perfect alright-ness in the morning, when suddenly there’s some whiny jerk on the phone wanting to interrogate him about his sexuality and his drug habits, and David Bowie and Iggy Pop, and why his latest album sounds like he recorded it in a dog kennel. Awful. No wonder he got a bit shirty with them. Who wouldn’t? Why couldn’t they all just leave him alone? He had nothing to say. He probably just wanted to take in the silence, or put the radio on, sit back and enjoy his breakfast.

Anyway, it is this holy ‘alright-ness’, this quiet contentment, that “Sweet Jane” is of course really about. I know that there’s an actual Jane in the lyrics (of most versions), but if you think it’s just her who’s being hymned during the chorus, well…. I hesitate to say ‘you got it wrong’, but suffice to say you have a very different understanding of the song from me. Sweet Jane, as yelled exultantly on the pre-‘Loaded’ demo version, hesitantly whispered on the ‘Live ‘69’ version, dutifully intoned on the album version, represents instead a state of mind; an ideal place to be; a totem of the kind of basic, everyday happiness and contentment that most men & women seek, most of the time. Quietness, and companionship, and the sun shining in in the morning.

Of course Reed recorded this song umpteen times during his lifetime, but, predictably enough, it is the three most prominent Velvet Underground-era recordings that keep me spellbound.

The first of these, chronologically speaking, is the ‘Live ‘69’ version, when the song was still in pretty embryonic form, before all that business with Jack and Jane had come into being, and in many ways this version is all the more perfect for its simplicity. As that indelible guitar riff rolls out slow and steady, the band sounding like they’ve just been taught it and they’re following the leader to establish the feel, Reed goes straight to the heart of the matter, softly intoning the verse that ended up being the big emotional crescendo of the completed version, repeating it several times, rolling the words around his mouth like their message is still in the process of filtering down through his heart/brain: “anyone who’s ever had a heart / they wouldn’t turn around and break it”; “anyone who’s ever had a dream / anyone who’s ever played a part”.

If we were to listen to this version without the context provided by subsequent recordings, it could perhaps be read as a pretty sad song. Could the Sweet Jane he’s addressing in the chorus have ditched him? Did SHE turn around and break it? Well if she did, Reed doesn’t sound too upset about things. It sounds like the nostalgic warmth of the happy memories are enough to keep him going, resigned to his fate as the totemic Jane of the chorus (like the verses, elucidated quietly, carefully and somewhat hesitantly here) assumes her wider, cosmic significance: Sweet Jane.


So here then, on the demo version, we have Jane and Jack, though they’re a little different from the ones you may know if you’ve only listened to the eventual album version. There’s no rock n’ roll band (HUH!) here, but instead it opens with what is possibly my favourite line in any version of this song, and one that just suits Lou Reed’s voice so well:

“Standing on the corner / thinking of the best..”.

He could have just left it there really. This song, his whole career. Just so, so, just… y’know. Says it all really. But nonetheless, the show must go on. This time round, Jane is in her corset, and Jack is in his vest – which, with no hetero-normative-ness intended, I much prefer to be honest. The brief intrusion of ‘Transformer’-era gender-bending when Lou reverses the garments on the album version strikes a bit of an odd note, I’ve always thought, in the middle of a set of verses that otherwise go out of their way to celebrate a very conventional, straight-laced kind of domestic contentment.

(In a way, the verses of this song seem like Reed’s attempt to remind his audience, “hey, normal people have feelings too” – a very humane and somewhat brave gesture in the midst of all the late ‘60s ‘squares vs. hipsters’ type palaver, especially from the man who’d soon reinvent himself as the “king of the underground street freaks” or whatever.)

So, thus far then, probably my favourite version of the song’s opening verse, but sadly I think he drops the ball a little as the demo version moves on to the second verse (the only drawback of this otherwise brilliant recording). Whereas the album version introduces ‘children’ and ‘villains’ into proceedings, here Reed just assigns all of his various rose-tinted, old worldy activities (blinking eyes, studying rules of verse, fainting, blushing etc.) simply to ‘women’ and 'ladies', rather giving the impression that he’s going off on some tirade about the decline of old fashioned femininity or something. I doubt that was the intent; In actuality I think he probably just hadn’t filled out this bit of the lyrics much yet and was just filling the gaps etc., but still – could be better.

What REALLY elevates the demo version though is the gloriously raw, uproariously sloppy nature of the band’s playing here, which at a push you could even see as prefiguring the work of such paragons of DIY earnestness as The Television Personalities or Half Japanese, complete with percussion provided by what sounds like someone with zero sense of rhythm banging two saucepans together (I think we can safely assume Mo Tucker was on maternity leave by this point). All of this serves to lend things a kind of strained, raggedly emotive genius that completely overwhelms any lyrical reservations as soon as the song hits the chorus and the band bellows together, out of key and barely in time with each other: SWEEET JAAAANE!

God, it’s just so beautiful, their inhibitions seeming to vanish as the song goes on, each chorus repeat adding more gusto, more chaos until the final ones, following the big “wouldn’t turn about and break it” crescendo and the peculiar baroque bridge section (Reed did a lot of these, but they rarely worked as well as this one), just fly free, really nailing the sheer joyfulness of the song’s message. NA NA NA NA, NA NA NA.

In this version, ‘Sweet Jane’ isn’t just a chorus, or a song title, it’s a universal exclamation, something to shout from the hilltops whenever you feel that everything is alright. It’s just it man, it’s right there. With this song as a vessel, and that whoever-the-hell-it-is banging those saucepan lids, this bunch of uptight white guys really rouse the spirits and raise the soul to new heights.

Often of recent, I’ve felt like turning to my own beloved and shouting, SWEEEET JANE!! She’s not much into the Velvets though, so it would probably just freak her out. If you’ve read up to this point though, I guess you must be into the Velvets. You know what I’m saying. You know it’s not all about heroin and sneering and Andy Warhol. We can do the secret handshake, and can leave this post right here because what else is there to say about music you love this much.

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(1) The demo version is available on CD 2 of the “Fully Loaded” special edition of ‘Loaded’ – an absolutely essential document for all Velvets fans, by the way. I mean, I love the original album too, but I think about 75% of the demo tracks are so, so much better than their album equivalents, and there’s a bunch of other great stuff too, and, and...

Labels: deathblog, Lou Reed, rambling, The Velvet Underground

Come on in, pour yourself a drink!

Let us assume that you’re a guest in my wood-panelled Victorian study, and that I have already helped myself to much refreshment from the crystal decanter. After an initial show of friendship, I’m basically going to talk at you indefinitely in a semi-aggressive fashion whilst you sit there uncomfortably and try to find a non-rude way to make an exit. Is that acceptable? Well afraid it’ll have to be. If you don’t like it you, can start your own weblog.

(I will, by the way, be speaking in the voice of Andre Morell, if that helps you make your mind up either way.)

Ahem.

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I know I’ll be upsetting any solo Lou partisans who happen to be reading right off the bat here, but for me, The Velvet Underground is all.

And even if Lou took all the songwriting money, I definitely prefer to see the band’s achievements as a group effort. As such, I think it's notable that ALL of the VU recordings sound spontaneous and passionate, whereas pretty much all solo Lou Reed stuff sounds like carefully groomed moments of "rock n' roll" spontaneity being performed by actors under laboratory conditions. I could never really get into that. Lots of "oh, well, theoretically I suppose this is quite a good song, but..." moments whenever I've tried, in between the frequent bouts of “by god, I’m turning this off right now”.

That said though, recent adventures in learning to love the collected works of such contrary buggers as Alex Chilton and John Cale have reminded me that, when you’re in it for the long game, there’s more to the appreciation of a record than immediate aural pleasure and basic emotional connection. And surely, no one more so than Lou Reed managed to exemplify that (very ‘70s) idea of using whole decades’ worth of mass-produced vinyl and fan-produced cash to sketch out some kind of grand, conflicted, ever-changing statement about something that nobody ever quite seemed to ‘get’, but that keeps the die-hards fascinated & guessing, and the detractors shrugging and suffering, to this day.

So yes, a proper excavation of the Reed back catalogue has long been on my ‘long-list’ of things to get around to, now that I’ve reached that point in life where I can buy 2nd hand LPs with impunity and sit around laughing at the drum sound and so on, free from concerns of contemporary relevance or financial stability. But I haven’t done it yet. Which is pretty damned inconvenient for the purposes of writing a conventional obituary.

It’s funny actually - when the news filtered through last Sunday night, perhaps my third or fourth thought was “well that's one tough fucking obit that a few hundred journalists are going have to file by the morning”.

For years the whole “Lou Reed is an arsehole” meme has been a running joke in the music world, and it is an idea that I very much abided by through my (ahem) youth, maintaining a strict “Velvets = BRILLIANT / Solo Lou = GHASTLY” policy with a stubbornness that precluded any hope of flexibility. I once even drew a cartoon (subsequently lost) of Sterling Morrison and Moe Tucker trapping Lou’s soul in a magic crystal on the night that he left the VU.

But these days, now that I find myself feeling rather more sympathetic toward the intentions of these – how you say? – “grumpy old bastards who waste our time making difficult, unlovable records”, I don’t know if the “Lou’s an asshole” approach holds much water to be honest. Certainly, it’s at the very least an uncharitable simplification of his character: for every anecdote you read about him being a dick to someone or making a really bad decision, there's another story about him being incredibly kind and eloquent, and so on.

And I’m certainly not here to try to whitewash him for all the occasions on which he undoubtedly did act like a prime arsehole, but…I dunno… I guess on reflection I tend to see him more as someone who was always pushing awkwardly towards some kind of... *something* that nobody except him ever quite managed to see, both in terms of his music and his personal conduct. Kind of tragic in a sense, I suppose. Millionaire rock star who never managed to make anyone 'understand' – boo hoo hoo, etc.

(And whilst we’re on the subject, how did he even manage to become a millionaire rock star in the first place? I mean, I suppose the singles off ‘Transformer’ must have done fairly brisk business, and sales of the VU albums must have snowballed since their reissue in the ‘80s, but nonetheless - he’s never really been a big unit shifter, has he? He’s never had a ‘hit’, outside of college radio / indie land. In fact, can you think of ANYONE who’s managed to assume the position of an “I can do whatever the hell I like” major label-backed legacy artist on the basis of such little quantifiable commercial success..? That in itself must count as some kind of an achievement… ‘fake it ‘till you make it’, perhaps?)



I guess he was just a bit of a complicated, mixed up guy really… as were all the members of the Velvet Underground, come to think of it.(1) In fact, read an interview with each of them in turn and it's amazing that they managed to work together for so long without killing each other. But then presumably that clash of personalities is what helped make their output so astonishingly bold and varied.

For, brace yourself for Ultimate Cliché here, but one of the things that makes the Velvet Underground so continuously fascinating is that they were a band built from the start upon a foundation of total, overlapping contradiction:

Often held up as progenitors of punk, in ‘White Light, White Heat’ they recorded the most certifiably PUNK album of all time. Yet they also represent the birth of the strain of self-aware, collegiate art-rock (later indie) music that by-passed the atavistic guts of ‘punk’ altogether when it began to take off via their disciples in the later ‘70s and ‘80s. (In stark contrast to just about every other mid’60s rock group, three quarters of the classic VU line-up had a background in post-grad academic study, a fact that showed through in their aesthetic presentation as well as their lyrical & musical pretentions – “kinda faraway / kinda dignified”, quoth Jonathan Richman).

Frequently pigeonholed by lazy copywriters as a band defined by their cynicism, ‘coldness’ and embrace of decadent, taboo subject matter (an instant cliché aided by the shades, turtlenecks and grim demeanour of their Warhol-era publicity), The Velvet Underground simultaneously produced some of the most off-handedly honest, humane and open-hearted music of their era - not to mention the most conventionally melodically beautiful. And this isn’t the Cale-era / Yule-era dichotomy it’s often assumed to be either: it’s right there from the word go with ‘Sunday Morning’ and ‘I’ll Be Your Mirror’, whilst the departure of Cale and his supposed avant garde tendencies led straight on to the band laying down some of the most extended droning and shrieking of their career (cf: circa ’69 live versions of ‘Run Run Run’ and ‘What Goes On’, not to mention total weirdness like ‘The Murder Mystery’), whilst Cale himself went straight on to make a really boring country-rock album! (Post-Warhol, the Velvets also spent quite a long time wearing flares and floral-patterned shirts, growing unruly hair and grinning at the camera, if anyone bothered to notice.)

Sometimes pegged (justifiably) as marking the point at which rock music shook off the stigma of merely imitating black music and became an identifiably ‘white’ form for the first time (remember the stories about Lou keeping a dollar jar to fine anyone who played a blues lick in rehearsal?), Lou and Sterling Morrison both still somehow managed to talk up their background in dirty, no-good r’n’b clubs, unashamedly playing choppy, urban 12-bar boogie during the height of psychedelia, and pledging eternal allegiance to Bo Diddley and John Lee Hooker whilst sneering at Bob Dylan and Frank Zappa.

I mean, how the hell did that work, even on a practical level..?! Who knows, but you certainly can’t argue with the results.

And I guess it was this spirit of beautiful, explanation-defying contradiction – which seemed so effortless and instinctive when the Velvets did it – that Lou tried to cling to through his solo career, with what I think we can safely classify as “mixed results”.

I was joking earlier with the magic crystal / soul extraction thing, but nonetheless, I think some big part of Reed’s world definitely changed forever after that night at Max’s Kansa City in 1970, when he threw in the VU towel. And as ever with Lou Reed and The Velvet Underground, there’s mystery hovering around the whole issue, never quite giving us an answer. Sterl recalled that he knew something was up, because Lou suddenly wanted to introduce everyone to his parents - they being strict and straight-laced upstate New York upper-middle-class types from whom he had been long estranged.(2) As I recall, the rumour goes that after that, Reed spent a year or so keeping a low profile back at the family home, as mom and pop tried to medicate him back to ‘normality’, to the extent that he was on the verge of packing it in and getting a job in a lawyer’s office.


I’m unsure of the ins and outs that followed as he decided to return to a music career (and it’s not really our business anyway), but by the time his self-titled ‘Lou Reed’ LP appeared in 1972, I think it should have been clear to most observers that something had gone seriously awry: a tepid collection of re-recorded Velvets tunes, captured in a sterile, “keep the levels low, folks” studio environment by a session band featuring members of Yes (of all the god-damned things!), and topped by this freaking bizarre cover painting of a big, like, dodo or something, surrounded by D&D rulebook-style treasure!(3)

We can laugh about it now maybe, but for any original fans keeping the faith at the time, this plus ‘Squeeze’ must have signalled a rather depressing march into the wilderness. Bowie stepped in with a guiding hand, and the rest is history that we don’t need to plough through here I suppose….

But in its own way, that weird, thoroughly forgotten first album already highlights everything that Lou had lost and (according to my current opinion at least) never really regained.

I know I was going on about it earlier, but what was really lacking was the sense of spontaneity. Lou Reed was, intermittently, one of the most sublime rock/pop lyricists who ever lived. But his gift always worked best when encountered in an elusive, unpredictable context. And whilst sadly it took no time at all for Solo Lou to become the kind of guy who liked to see his words dried in ink, preserved forever as nuggets of rather underwhelming ‘genius’ for the faithful to pore over, VU Lou was a very different dude. Wonderful things seem to pour from his croaking gob throughout the duration of the Velvets recording career, floating off into the ether never to be heard again, and if there are bits on the studio albums where he sounds like he’s making this shit up as he goes along, that’s because he probably WAS.

One of the great joys of excavating the VU’s demos and live recordings is in hearing the way that the content and delivery of his songs developed and changed and changed again, never really reaching any ‘complete’ version as he went from irreverence to piety and back again at the flip of a coin, his capacity for lyrical improvisation often bordering on the extraordinary.(4)

As a more earnest young fellow, I used to get a bit pissed off with various 'placeholder' lyrics that seem to survive on many of the VU’s not-released-at-the-time recordings – my assumption always being that these were just some nonsense and bad taste joke stuff that Lou knocked out as a guide track, meaning to replace them with something more refined at a later date. But now I think I understand that such improvisation was the basis of his whole approach to song-writing (or at least, the best, least preppy parts of his songwriting) – an approach in which the actual content of the verses very much came last, in which the song’s title and emotional ‘feel’ were instead very much the key component, slowly subliminating the accompanying verbiage over a matter of months or even years.

True, the undercurrent of cheery sexual violence that mars the otherwise incomparably brilliant ‘Foggy Notion’ still grates (presumably the work of the same heeeelarious Lou Reed who deadpanned through ‘I Wanna Be Black’ many years later), but whatever, I can live with it. And I certainly don’t have to force a grin for the nonsense verses on ‘She’s My Best Friend’, which provide a black horse pick for one of my favourite Reed lyrics ever:

“Here’s to Newspaper Joe / knocked his teeth on the floor / caught his hand in the door / I guess that’s the way the news goes”.

 Edward Lear eat your heart out. Cracks me up every time.

The thing about stuff like this though is that it only works once – do it today, and then throw it away. I was quite depressed when I once listened to an (extremely bad) version of ‘..Best Friend’ that Reed re-recorded in 1976-ish, to hear all that silly old rubbish still there, in exactly the same place, as if Lou had listened back to the old recording, scratched his chin and thought “hmm, yes, that is rather amusing”, grimly carving it for all time into the Official Lou Reed Book of Beautiful Poetry (I bet they keep a copy in a glass case at the ‘Rock N Roll Hall Of Fame’), the rancid icing on the lumbering, digital funk hash that his band of the day were busy making of the breezy, strummin’ bubblegum of the Velvets original.

I want to stay positive though, so let’s back straight back to the ‘60s and slam the door.

I was meaning to continue with an emotional trawl through the various extant versions of one of my favourite Reed numbers, ‘Sweet Jane’, but it is now the weekend. And I promised myself I’d post this at the weekend, so… you’ll have to excuse me gentlemen, I’m not quite feeling myself this evening, and, I….

…..

..

Nurse! Nurse! Come quickly!





(1) Well except Doug Yule I suppose. He just seems like a nice bloke who wanted to play some tunes.

(2) And enough with that “bard of Manhattan” jive by the way – like just about all the most successful New York art/glam/punk types, Lou moved in from elsewhere, moneyed and educated in advance.

(3) I think it’s kind of a great cover actually, but total WTF in the context of a Lou Reed album.

(4) Although we’re obviously just talking Reed here, you can of course check out ‘Temptation Inside Your Heart’ for a demonstration of how brilliantly the VU’s collective spontaneity and irreverence toward their own work functioned – hopefully it speaks for itself.

Labels: deathblog, Lou Reed, rambling, The Velvet Underground

We (Pity?) the Fucking NME.

This song has popped up a few times on my mp3 player recently, and whilst it’s still good fun (I mean listening to Billy Childish deliver an indignant two chord list song about the pricing of veg in his local corner shop would probably be good fun), it strikes me that, for the first time in recent history, the song’s sentiment seems kinda… unnecessary.

Does the NME still exist? I guess it must do, because I see its masthead sometimes, stacked up behind some other stuff in the newsagents, and No Rock n’ Roll Fun gives me the lowdown on its lame awards ceremonies and editorial shake-ups and falling circulation figures and the like, but… I honestly have no idea who’s been on the cover of the NME in the past year. Do you? I have no idea what kind of presumably terrible bands they’ve been hyping recently, or who they currently consider to be big news or who still writes for them, or anything really.

Partially this is no doubt due to wilful ignorance (the same way I have no idea who’s been in the Top 40 for about the past decade), but still – I think it is safe to say at this point that the king-making power of the British music press has long since departed. Whatever variations on the old “build ‘em up and knock ‘em down” games the NME tries out in 2011 will probably be noted by a few thousand people at best. The genesis of seismic hype-cycles has moved elsewhere, and it is probably only a matter of time before NME is put out of its misery, ala Melody Maker.

Back when Thee Headcoats recorded this song in the early ‘90s, the NME was still a publication that right-thinking people would have cause to glance over and even purchase. They still had some good writers, and covered some decent music. More to the point, the position of the IPC papers as sole information distribution system for the British music fan went unquestioned – an eternal part of the industry’s infrastructure, as unavoidable as (ha) the labels or (ha, ha ha) the shops.

By stating their disgust with the paper’s nefarious agenda in song, Thee Headcoats were being somewhat daring and iconoclastic circa the early ’90s – effectively saying ‘fuck you’ to the only game in town, and indeed ushering in a decade during which Billy C’s unstoppable cottage industry was almost entirely ignored by the media after a brief buzz of grunge-era interest.

Move forward to the early ‘00s and the song would be an obvious anthem for any self-respecting music fan. The NME was unquestionably a hateful rag by this stage, and the internet existed as a space for much better communication, but for some reason the paper still packed a massive industry clout that demanded immediate opposition – see their role as the main engine behind the whole post-Libertines landfill indie era, most obviously.

Now here we are in 2011, and the song sounds like a complete anachronism, stimulating roughly the same nostalgic pleasure centres you’d get dancing to Lush at an indie disco. Directing hatred at the NME in this day and age feels like kicking a tramp who’s slipped over in the park because he did you a bad turn twenty years ago – nasty and pointless.

But the great thing is, there is no obvious target you could redirect the song’s anger at. “We Hate Fucking Pitchfork”? Well I mean, of course we do, but it just doesn’t quite the same ring to it, does it? However narked one might get at the indignity of 4.6 could-try-harder reviews and breathless updates on the doings of bearded men, P-Fork is just not in contention for the same kind of monopoly of opinion NME and MM commanded in their prime. Nobody is.

There’s a lot wrong with music-blogging culture, but that’s a diatribe for another day. For our purposes here, the point is that blogs and associated info streams shift things more naturally, blogger by blogger, listener by listener. Trends emerge and hypes explode and careers are created/destroyed, as before, but the central editorial voice laying down the law is gone forever. Who picked up on The XX and James Blake and made them famous? I have no fucking idea to be honest – PRs probably – but it certainly wasn’t a music paper or a webzine.

Where do broadsheet journos go to crib their shit from these days? That might be the crux of it I guess – the Guardian and Independent used to follow IPC’s lead like kittens – do they still? Again, I’ve got no idea, I’ve got better stuff to read. But without wishing to sound too dramatic about it, the fact is that the monolithic structure of “the music press” has crumbled like the walls of Jericho, which is surely something to celebrate. And that calls for some Headcoatees!

Labels: 90s nostalgia outbursts, Billy Childish, rambling, the NME

Sansa Mp3 Players Suck.

Hey everybody, welcome to our regular consumer guide slot, and…. well, yeah, but loathe as I am to interrupt this blog’s valuable contribution to global discourse on contemporary musical cultures, can’t let this one go by without a quick warning – after all, I owe it to my loyal readers to help them avoid potential hazards and stay happy and safe and slowly going deaf however I can.

So my beloved old Rio mp3 player packed in last week – can’t complain I suppose, it’s done pretty damn well in this age of inbuilt obsolescence, serving faithfully for over five years in the face of innumerable pavement droppages, rainstorms, battery fuck-ups etc. It was a good little blighter.

So naturally I thought I’d pick up another one to replace it, until a brief web search revealed that Rio actually went bankrupt back in 2005, meaning I must have bought one of the last batch of their machines to actually hit the shelves. Oh well. Let’s see what else is out there.

In short, I went for a Sansa; looked cheap and practical and reliable and works drag-and-drop style with both OS.X and Windows, gets a near-universal thumbs up from online reviewers – suits me. When it arrives it’s nicely designed and reassuringly weighty for its size and works straight away and has an interface so instinctive a gorilla could probably use it, and gains extra points by vestige of the fact that the whole spin-wheel thing has been ripped off wholesale from the iPod with an applaudable sense of “fuck you, whatcha gonna to about it” gall. What could possibly go wrong, right?

Spent yesterday loading it up with music, and took it out for it’s first test run on the way to work this morning.

Oh, fuck me. This thing is quiet.

Ok, don’t panic, maybe it’s just this one mp3 being funny or something.

So I put on the MC5, and turn the volume up to max, and slide all the digital EQ sliders up to maximum (and I’m listening via Sennheiser high output in-ear ‘phones, I should clarify).

Still quiet.

Quiet like the free gift CD walkman that I used to wander around town wrestling with back when I was on the dole. Quiet like, I can hear traffic from the road clearly. Quiet like, forget any thoughts you might have of ever listening to anything other than ultra-compressed, distorted rock music on this thing, even indoors. Quiet like, FUCK YOU SANSA, I actually can’t BELIEVE you’re pulling this shit on people in 2010, take your mp3 player and stick it.

And not just quiet – I mean, I’m hopefully not some kind of morbid volume fiend or anything – but this just sounds crap - muffled, flat – kinda like the tape player on some old kitchen mini-hifi thing with all the EQ pushed down to minus whatever. Did Steve Jobs get his revenge for the spin-wheel thing by sneaking in at night and fucking up their preamps, or whatever the digital equivalent of a preamp is..?

Did all the people who gave this thing positive reviews just not like music much, or have I got a dud or something? Or is my hearing even worse than I thought?

Whatever the case, time to start to unpleasant process of hassling someone for a refund. I get the feeling that “yeah, it works, it’s just shit, sorry” isn’t going to go down well.

I guess I’ll get another Sony one instead – they’re tacky pieces of crap made by a company I actively dislike and I find the output a bit thin and trebley, but at least I can hear it.

Hey, remember when we all thought it was a flat-out miracle that you could carry a hundred and something albums around in yr pocket? What a life-changer, what a beautiful, extraordinary piece of technology.

The gag is, my Rio one has now come back to life and is working perfectly, so I can deafen myself further with Sex Vid and Overnight Lows on the way home. Viva 2005! They really made things to last back in them days.

Labels: impotent rage, rambling, technology

Thinkpiece: Stupid is the New Smart

(Disclaimer: As ever with these sort of torturous state-of-the-nation rambles, I pretty much thought this one up as I went along and am not presenting what follows as any sort of coherent manifesto. Critiques and mockery welcomed in the comments, and I reserve the right to violently disagree with myself by about, ooh, this time next month maybe? – Enjoy.)

There are so many great, fun new stupid, noisy, great bands popping out of the woodwork at the moment, I’ve been a bit lost for words trying to get my head around ‘em all.

I’ve been thinking recently about how the nature of myspace, last.fm (not that I use last.fm), hype machine and quick downloads of singles/mp3s have changed the way I approach new music, and presumably the way everyone else does too. Yeah, I know all of those things have been around for a while, but... uh, I dunno, maybe it’s taken a while for their wider ramifications to filter down to the heart of our listening process?

The last year or two has seen a lot of people (myself included) trying to formulate a rationale/explanation for the “lo-fi/DIY boom” or whatever you want to call it – y’know, the one that’s seen an ever increasing number of scrappy, home-recorded bands of variable quality finding themselves pushed into the public eye, with results both pleasing and deeply silly in equal measure.

And naturally, we aforementioned commentators have been quick to call bullshit on all these oft-times lazy, arrogant, unimaginative, borderline unlistenable groups, deriding the whole business as a cynical hype perpetrated, presumably, by soulless, unsavoury, self-regarding characters of some ill-defined description. Meaning, perhaps: people from the generation below us…? Scary thought, huh?

Anyway, as far as the established model of music appreciation goes, bullshit calls = fair enough. I mean, if that guy from Wavves lived across the street from me and gave me a tape of his stuff, I’d probably think he was a pretty cool kid to be blaring out such a ridiculously silly Muppet Babies do The Dead C type racket in his spare time, and I’d wish him well. But at the same time, anyone who would consider him a World Class Prospect on the indie-rock circuit, able to stand alongside all those clever, consummate, committed bands that top all the end of year polls and charm festival crowds across the globe, would clearly be some kind of abject fool or simpleton. Not because his music is worthless or doesn’t have its place in the world, but, y’know… it ain’t exactly The E Street Band is it? Multiply by the fact that he also seems like a bit of a dick, and finish this paragraph with yr own comment re: his 15 minutes sliding down the drain.

But clearly this disjuncture between ‘Local’ and ‘Global’ approaches to appreciating music requires some thought. I guess the two levels have always been there, but it’s the world-shrinking power of the internet that’s caused this strange rupture in the relationship between the two that people are still trying to get their heads around.

And, pondering this, it suddenly occurred to me that this here “lo-fi-whatever boom” is not so much a trend or movement or hype that can be analysed via the codified music industry pattern we grew up with - it’s more the result of a basic sea-change in the way we’re experiencing music.

Put it this way: I’ve always loved trashy, slapdash, noisy, weird, amateurish, geeky, fun-loving, indifferently talented punk-ass bands. In fact, I probably enjoy them a hell of a lot more than most of the ‘World Class Prospects’ out there, and it’s always been comforting to know that pretty much any populated area in the western world will have a few of these kinda bands, just kicking around and having some laughs for the benefit of whoever’s around, without ever having to worry about becoming World Class or, god forbid, ‘proper’.

What’s changed is that now THE WHOLE WORLD can hear these bands, where previously the mechanics of record distribution & critical approval would have kept them below the radar. And we can all listen to them on the same day that somebody first brings a mic and a 4-track/laptop to one their practices too. And, apparently, a lot of us are enjoying the opportunity to do just that. And, in essence, that’s PRETTY AWESOME, right?

If we can get past the tiresome critical notion that ‘innovation’ is somehow prime currency in music (as if it were a research project or something… but sorry, that’s another rant entirely), then can’t this be seen as the original spirit of the Desperate Bicycles and Television Personalities (and Dead Moon and The Gories, and Jim Shephard and Maureen Tucker?), writ large across America in permanent marker?

So a few shitty bands might accidentally create a hype snowball, and end up touring the world without a clue what they’re doing, as everyone yells “huh?? I thought these guys were supposed to be the future, they can barely even play, and they just sound like a shit version of [insert cultish ‘80s band here] anyway! I paid £10 for this! What a bunch of crap!” Yeah, well… what of it?

Personally, I’ll go on record as saying I’m happy to grab the opportunity to share in whatever racket a bunch of hip teenagers in Galeburg, Illinois are banging out this week in preference to having to make do with whatever Matador or Secretly Canadian deem to be a real strong release. And if a few people get burned as the indie establishment tries to engage with the garagebound masses…. well, so it goes.

Not that I’m suggesting that the hype perpetrated by limited edition 7” labels, by the bands themselves, and by certain shadowy conglomerates of guys who I assume probably wear baseball caps indoors and speak ominously of “jams”, is necessarily benign or well-intentioned. Indeed it often has a rather toxic feel to it that I would wish to avoid if possible. And neither am I advocating blanket acceptance of any old rubbish – many of the names more frequently thrown around in the ‘noisy & badly recorded’ sphere do nothing for me, and indeed can easily seem almost offensively useless to the untrained ear. But the negatives, I feel, are more than outweighed by the positives.

Namely, to return to my initial point, by the vast amount of music that’s streaming my way every day that’s fun, that’s energetic, that’s positive, that makes me want to jump around and praise the heavens. More of it than I can really find the time to compose any worthwhile thought about to post for you here. And it’s not like a lot of these bands require much thought from me anyway…. they’re just doing what they do and it’s good fun and it makes me grin. Hence: posting quandary.

So I’m going to do about it is: three or four brief posts, each of them throwing out the names of five new bands in this general vein who get the thumbs up from me. Some of them you might have heard about, some of them not so much, it depends where you do your reading/listening I suppose. But all of them in their own weird way embody what I love about rock n’ roll.

Just don’t expect ‘em all to be the new Guided By Voices, for that kind of genius comes but once in a lifetime. Just imagine you’ve had a few beers and you’re watching ‘em play at a barbeque or in a garage or something and all will be well in the world for a few minutes. And if it turns out any of them actually are the new Guided By Voices, well.. BONUS!

Nodzzz we’ve already done of course, and Dum Dum Girls, and I’ve written tons about The Vivian Girls, not to mention Hotpants Romance, Cheap Time (damn, those guys are great) and Thee Oh Sees. They’re all still my faves – probably my tips for the brightest sparks of 4-track sunlight out there - but they’re increasingly looking like the surface of a very groovy, everlasting iceberg, so….. man the boats, people!

Labels: punk rock, rambling

Five Years!

No, not a tribute to the best song David Bowie ever wrote, unfortunately. Just a lame ‘happy birthday to me’ post to acknowledge the fact that, unlikely as it my seem, I’ve been doing this shit for five years.

Yes, it was on May 6th 2004 that I sat down before my old PC in my palatial rented room in Swansea’s Uplands district, mucked about a bit with the blogger template you still see before you and wrote:

So I’ve decided to do a music blog. Well why not?

REASONING:

1. It seems like every other fucker’s got one, and some of them actually have ones that other people bother to read, thus making the whole enterprise seem slightly less masturbatory.

2. Whether I like it or not I spend an inordinate amount of time listening to, and collating opinions upon, music, and opportunities to get a copy of my print zine together or post decent reviews elsewhere are few and far between, so what better form than a weblog in which to chronicle my day to day adventures in the world of popular music?

3. Maybe if I prove to be good at it, people might eventually start sending me free stuff (seriously – anybody out there who has the power to send me free records, please, go ahead, I’ll be sycophantic as hell, I promise..)

MY UNIQUE SELLING POINT: whereas most other music bloggers are fairly hip and down with all the latest tunes and able to brush aside huge swathes of MP3s ‘twas if they were matchsticks on a daily basis, my music consumption is far more eccentric and random; basically, I don’t have much spending money, I don’t have a fast internet connection, I don’t live in a cool, hipster-saturated community and I don’t listen to daytime radio. Hence the music I end up digging is almost entirely down to chance most of the time, so prepare for many wild tangents about stuff I recorded off John Peel, stuff I just borrowed from the library, stuff I bought in a clearout sale because I thought it looked cool, pointless mix CD tracklistings etc., as well as the occasional standard drivelling about new releases from my favourite currently active bands and so on..

Hmm, yes, well. I’m not too sure about that.

To refer back to my original three point justification for this weblog's existence: 1. fair enough I suppose, 2. dude, do you think maybe there's a reason for that?, and 3. thus far, this weblog has earned me about five free records that I actually liked, zero guestlist places, and a lot of publicists in my inbox trying to convince me to listen to 'americana' bands. Result! Of course, with availability of music not being such an issue these days, and with the increasing impossibility of anyone making a profit out of independent music, free stuff is scarcely the point, and I'm happy to pay decent bands/labels for their labour, so that's cool.

It should probably be pointed out that at the time I was unemployed and living in Swansea, so the idea of writing a militant no mp3s/no pictures blog about stupid shit I randomly stumbled upon seemed reasonable enough. Swearing a lot and throwing about phrases like “cool hipster-saturated community” also appeared to come naturally.

Despite having no social life, no money and nothing to do all day, I actually have extremely fond memories of that period of my life – denied the opportunity to obtain more than about one newly released album every couple of months, aimlessly wondering around town, across beaches and carparks and dilapidated terraced streets for days on end with my £20 discman, expanding my horizons to soak in the brilliance of Crazy Horse, of Soft Machine, of Black Sabbath, Miles Davis, Fairport and Pentangle, Can, The ‘Dead, Mingus, Fahey, Robert Wyatt, Love, The Byrds etc. I might have been logging onto ebay every day desperately trying to find a copy of the new Sonic Youth or Liars albums for under £6, but I sure wasn’t going hungry music-wise – where there’s a will there’s a way.

And, in such a culturally deadened climate, every single thing that happened that was even slightly noteworthy – going to a see a local punk band, chatting to somebody who seemed interesting, scoring some old metal albums or a Lucio Fulci movie from the depths of some crappy junk shop – became a towering incidence of excitement that I remember to this very day. I swear, sometimes I even find myself fondly remembering some occasion on which I had a particularly satisfactory cup of coffee, or one time when the weather was quite good.

It seems that during my first month on-air, I chose to write of my admiration for Wendy Case & The Paybacks, The Mummies, Ian Svenonious, The Shins second album and PJ Harvey, to rejoice in the fact that Arthur Lee was playing a show at a Victorian pavilion down the road from my house, and to critically evaluate a few Terrorizer cover CDs, stating my clear preference for satan/apocalypse themed black metal over ugly man-tantrum themed metalcore. Man, that kid was alright.

Cut to the present, which finds me still writing from a slightly dilapidated front bedroom in a student district, still having trouble with my internet connection, but otherwise I am gainfully employed, perhaps a bit more grown up, and able to go and see great bands every night of the week should I so wish, to play in bands of my own and to buy as many records as I like. I can listen to stuff online and download on a whim, raid other people’s iTunes for swag, dragging it back to my 140Gb and counting stash of digital sound, all whilst enjoying the, uh, myriad cosmopolitan delights of our capital city. So naturally it stands to reason that I can scarcely even remember what I was listening to/doing/thinking this morning, as awesome stuff and stimulus of one kind or another bombards me day in and day out.

Which is BETTER, obviously. End of discussion. What was my point again? – oh yeah, the weblog.

I guess it had a pretty slow start, and it’s always been a pretty inconsistent. Sorry about that. A huge thanks to anyone out there in reader-land who bothered to stick with us over those first few years. I seemed to have picked up the slack a bit recently though, bar the odd extended absence, and I’m enjoying writing for Stereo Sanctity more than ever.

Actually, I was initially going to use this anniversary as an excuse to do a self-indulgent post linking back to various notable posts and high water marks in Stereo Sanctity history, but the truth is, everything I wrote more than about, say, eighteen months ago, I find pretty cringe-worthy. Even pieces of writing I was really proud of at the time now seem pretty florid and hyperbolic and pointless and dumb, and I’d probably rather not draw any extra attention to them. So it goes though. I’m sure most bloggers feel this way when looking back over their old stuff – I’m sure I’ll feel the same way looking back over my current posts before long.

So, what I’m going to do instead to mark this dubious landmark is quite different:

For ONE WEEK ONLY, I’m going to pretend that this is like some proper weblog, like Fluxblog or something, and will be putting up a new post dedicated to an individual song EVERY DAY. (Well, maybe not over the weekend, because I probably still won’t have internet access, but every weekday at least).

Yep, new “content” every day this week, beginning tomorrow! Start your engines!

Labels: announcements, birthday, lameness, rambling

JUST A QUICK ONE...

No, I just couldn't keep the cynicism at bay.

As a brief devil's advocate appendum to yesterday's slightly misty-eyed post, just thought I'd quickly draw people's attention to this open letter to the new president from everybody's favourite fly in the ointment, Ralph Nader. Worth a read.

As a reponse, I'm going to say that sincerity is pretty much a moot point in modern politics, and that whatever Obama actually believes has been near irrelevant up to this point; the shortcomings of his campaign in the eyes of leftists and humanitarians were likely a matter of cruel necessity. He had his work cut out for him as it was staying one step ahead of potentially state-losing bigotry and slander from the right wing peanut gallery; clearly a candidate who'd also NOT delcared his support for Isreal, and had hung out for photo opportunities in mosques and publicly associated himself with Jimmy Carter, would not be preparing to move into the Whitehouse right now.

Of perhaps deeper concern is his sadly inevitable reliance on corporate finance to get where he's going. The ability of corporate interests to effectively buy themselves a president is perhaps THE biggest problem in Western democracy as it currently stands, and, as the happy beneficiary of that process, it would be foolish to expect B.O. to do anything to rectify matters, however much he may (or may not) push other aspects of policy in the right direction.

Those of a more overtly paranoid persuasion may also wish to remember Bill Hicks' routine about the optimistic new president being ushered in the room with the cigar-smoking bigshots. "Roll the film.... any questions?"

Meet the new boss.... etc?

Labels: political shit, rambling

WORLD SAYS: ALRIGHT.

So I should get a post down on the U.S. election, for sure. I know I’ve managed to put pop music aside for a few minutes each time there's been a US or UK election over the past five years to chip in with a bunch of hand-wringing, cursing and venomous cynicism. So to ignore the one where, suddenly, against all the odds, something unexpectedly good happens, would make me out to be an inveterate humbugger of the highest order.

But you see, given the ceaseless nightmare of corruption, greed, vote-theft, lies and horrifying stupidity that we’ve all got used to politics in America (and elsewhere) being over the past decade or so (not that it was any great shakes before that), it’s almost EERIE to have something good to say the day after an election; it’s not something my young mind is used to. My standard litany of Reagan-era punk bands and Hunter S. Thompson quotes will not help me to find anything well-balanced and original to say here, in this stunningly uncynical circumstance.

Such is my political pessimism, I spent the first few days of November just *waiting* for some contrived "turning of the tables", for some colossal unforeseen (OR WAS IT?) fuckup or unexpected shift in the voting, for The Ugly American to raise his head and say "what, you didn't REALLY think we were gonna let the black guy win did you?"

But no; I checked once, I checked twice – and whilst I fear the ‘rat-bastards’ of HST’s comic book worldview are still out there planning something nasty, for the moment it looks like he actually made it.

I mean, politically-speaking Obama's obviously no utopian anticorporate revolutionary or anything, but having a vaguely left-leaning Democrat in charge after near a decade of neocon chuckleheads still feels like a huge relief from at least some of the madness and chaos hanging over the world, and it'll be great just to be able to hear things like 'Secretary Of State' and 'Whitehouse Spokesperson' and not have to hate yourself slightly for immediately wanting to launch a psychic axe at the face of whoever appears on the TV screen. But, as has already been repeated a million times over, in purely symbolic terms, Obama's election is MASSIVE.

Just to think that a man who looks like - as my Dad might put it - "the guy who'd always die first in all the war movies" is now in charge, insofar as anyone can be, of the system that made those movies (and the wars for that matter)…? As a dude I’m going to get onto in a minute once put it: ain’t that good news!

And, whilst Obama's words thus far have stuck closely to the accepted 'I want to win an election' school of vague, optimistic rhetoric, that acceptance speech was sounding pretty good. Yeah, the ‘equality for all’ style of blather may be well played out in American political vocab, but an incoming president explicitly pledging his support for Americans “male and female, black and white, gay and straight”? – THAT’S not something I remember hearing before. And I don’t recall any previous president-elect paraphrasing Sam Cooke either. If he’d just taken the trouble to get photographed in a Ramones shirt too, I’d be 100% sure me and Barack were gonna get along.

Stupid I know, but it’s the Sam Cooke thing that really blows my mind.

I mean, even if you find the overly sentimental approach to politics a little cringeworthy, just check this out from a music fan’s point of view:

“I was born by the river, in a little tent
and just like the river, I’ve been running ever since
It’s been a long time coming, but I know
A change is gonna come”
- Sam Cooke, 1964

“It's been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, a change has come to America.”
- Barack Obama, 2008

....

So you've got this great, unspeakably beautiful, noble yet desperate song of hope for the future that everybody loves. And everybody listens to it, and they think “ah yeah, one day....”. And yesterday morning, this dude got on stage in front of millions and effectively said “HEY – IT’S TODAY”.

Obviously I know that at heart the whole thing's as cynical as any other political 'victory', and he's only there thanks to the fact he raised shitloads of money, had a few good lines, deliberately avoided raising any divisive issues and was lucky enough to face an opposing team who were an even bigger bunch of clowns than usual, and I know that the grim economic/social reality of race relations in America probably isn't going to change very much, but still..... how often in a lifetime do you get the chance to take the message of a famous, rhetorical hope-for-the-future song and, for a moment at least, declare it DONE?

It’s like if an international panel of experts announced that a man only has to walk down one road to be called a man, or if somebody started issuing certificates of land ownership signed by God and Woody Guthrie’s grandson, or if the silver spaceships started flying in the yellow haze of the sun.

Crazy, and wonderful.

Now of course, I’m duty bound to post the song. I guess I should have had some smart-alec obscure cover version lined up really, and well, I hear Baby Huey’s version is a blast, and The Wave Pictures recent rendition is beautifully executed and reassuringly heartfelt, but…. if you’re up against Sam Cooke, Sam Cooke wins, y’know?

I don't know if I've mentioned it as often as I should have done on Stereo Sanctity in the past, but man, I love Sam Cooke SO MUCH. If you've ever had a party where this guy's recorded works weren't close at hand: well, you could have had a better party. Enjoy.

Sam Cooke – A Change Is Gonna Come
Sam Cooke – Ain’t That Good News

Oh, and hey, let’s remember:

Sam Cooke – Rome (Wasn’t Built In A Day)

Labels: political shit, rambling, Sam Cooke, soul