My favourite album of the year is 'Watertown' by Frank Sinatra, from 1969. It is a concept album about the decline of a marriage. Unfortunately they get back together agin, which kind of spoils it for me. There does not appear to be any film of him performing any of the songs, but as a more than compensatory bonus, there is this footage of Nina Simone wringing every last drop (and a few more besides) of emotion from this song, which is actually quite a minor one on the album. No happy ending for Nina, God bless her.
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
25 from 2009
Dear friends,
Here is my end of year roundup "tape". As ever, few tracks are actually from this year, but my toss-giving capacity is greatly reduced. Please make up your own sleevenotes for the time being. The files themselves have funny names, but they have been tagged properly, so they should be fit to grace any portable listening device, and even be listened to in the right order, should you shun the shuffle as you should. Obviously you might like to buy anything you like, blah blah blah, unless it is by millionaires, they can sod off, innit.
http://www.mediafire.com/file/ndtnmzm0gqy/2009%20version%202.zip
Do not thump me Hiawatha if you object to any of this. Just tell me.
Cheers,
Peter xxx
Here is my end of year roundup "tape". As ever, few tracks are actually from this year, but my toss-giving capacity is greatly reduced. Please make up your own sleevenotes for the time being. The files themselves have funny names, but they have been tagged properly, so they should be fit to grace any portable listening device, and even be listened to in the right order, should you shun the shuffle as you should. Obviously you might like to buy anything you like, blah blah blah, unless it is by millionaires, they can sod off, innit.
http://www.mediafire.com/file/ndtnmzm0gqy/2009%20version%202.zip
Do not thump me Hiawatha if you object to any of this. Just tell me.
Cheers,
Peter xxx
Friday, November 27, 2009
NOTES FROM THE GOOD SHIP SHOPPIE POP
NOTES FROM THE GOOD SHIP SHOPPIE POP
Under Thatcher, both practitioners and aficionados of the arts were considered enemies of the state. Thus any output from anyone halfway aware of the situation can be considered political, regardless of content. Here is moored the good ship Shoppie pop.
Edith, 4 years old, said to me in an accusatory tone, "Daddy, you don't know much about girls, do you?"
"No, I bloody don't!" I guffawed bitterly. We were not talking about the same things.
It's the Need for Symmetry again. Geometrical patterns forming around the retina. Here she is, everyone's little investment.
I am unaware unsure intrepid and unavailable, unfathomable and intractable, tumbledown and slapdash, helium-filled and Simonized, celibate and consumptive, terrible and indifferent.
Playdoh clit-flick Anti-Christ.
The first EP proper came in a hand-coloured sleeve. Like all hand-coloured sleeves, hand-coloured meant carelessly scrawled upon. Still, it was carelessly scrawled upon by one of the objects of one's obsession, and therefore to be pored over and treasured. I imagine these hand-colouring session were a riot: all the band members lying on their fronts, Chelsea boots kicking leisurely in the air, tongues lolling out with the effort and concentration. Mine must have been done towards the end of the session, when the colourist was dying to get back to their effects pedals or watching a battered videotape of The Monkees or The Banana Splits, maybe Get On Board With The Double Deckers, in their very own Shop Assistants hideout, a converted bus in an Edinburgh lock-up, electricity pilfered from a lamppost outside.
I am one of the select group of people who think The Shop Assistants are one of the best bands of all time. What's more, I am one of the even more select group of people, a group that might just be a one-man band, who think they went downhill after their first single, which is actually their second single.
I got the third single on twelve inch because it was on offer. I bought it from, sin of sins, HMV on Sauchihall Street, Glasgow. The person who served me was the kind of 80s vintage HMV employee, job for life, who seethed with contempt for anything that might not have been willing to bow down before the twin gods of Buster-era Phil Collins and frizzy-haired conquerors Dire Straits, anything that might labour under the weight of the "alternative" label a label that meant hhomosexualityand socialism, to name but two 80s evils that required eradication, preferably through the effective wweed-killer of the approved blandathons known as Radio One playlists. The barcode rang up the normal price. I meekly, that is to say, indiely, pointed to the dayglo orange pay-no-more-than 79p sticker. Mulletman sighed heavily, brutally, much like a Glaswegian taxi driver if you ever dared not to have the right change. I thought I was finally going to be able to die for my art, decapitated by a black vinyl disc, a martyr to buzzsaw guitars smothering plaintive melodies. But he just sent me to another till, where the correct price was applied and I lived to dither another day.
I had a friend who was a fellow Shop Assistants fan. I guess it brought us together. She walked through Angel Delight, I stumbled through porridge. She was from Edinburgh and she told me the Shoppies' singer Alex could often be seen "clanking around Edinburgh in her leathers." Think about that image for a moment. The streets of Edinburgh, I think it is fair to say, have seen their fair share of clanking, both real and supernatural, but rarely has it been caused by a young woman with a fine folk voice dressed head to toe in black leather. She wore a Marlon Brando cap and went on to front a group called The Motorcycle Boy. She probably couldn't afford a motorbike until she reached middle age. In fact I bet she's still saving up now. Her vocals were like a rainbow slick of oil on an autumn puddle, and her defiance was as old as the volcanic rock she walked upon - You leave me and I'll scratch your eyes out.
The Shop Assistants gave one of the best concerts I've ever been to. The Beastie Boys were still in Cookie Puss mode, so support band Pop Will Eat Itself were still good, the ideal warm-up really. What's so fucking good about Candy? That kind of thing. Then, sandwiched between The Poppies and The Shoppies, came Peter Case, a bewildered Jay Gatsby who was forced to suffer a great deal of vociferous abuse. For some reason, I had heard of him, and tried to listen. But it was hopeless, and so was Peter Case. Then came the Shop Assistants and they were loud and brash and had two drummers and if they were shambolic, as legend has it, I didn't notice. I don't know if it still happens now, but in those days women performers got lecherous comments hurled at them by drunks and numbskulls. After a while this became intolerable for the guitarist, whose name was, I think, David Keegan. I think he might have been from up north. He kicked someone in the crowd in the head, or rather he brought his Cuban heel down on someone's head, pressing it down like one of the plastic footballers in Subbuteo poor-substitute Striker. The atmosphere became electrified with the promise of rioting. It didn't really develop into anything major, but it was thrilling, it was rock'n'roll, it was what I wanted from life. Add to this the troubled expression of one of the drummers as events unfolded, and I was in something approaching heaven. This was what eighteen-year-old me wanted from life. Rarely was I to experience it again in such a mountain-pure form.
I got their album on the popular musicassette format, a format second only to the cassingle in the embarrassment stakes for pop fans. It's a hard-contested field. 8-track cartridges have been revered for some time, lauded by Big Black et al, but there are, as far as I know, no songs about musicassettes or cassingles. I would like someone to take the opportunity to tackle these artefacts in song before they disappear from the collective memory for ever.
The album was, at the time, a dreadful disappointment. It was on some kind of major label, Chrysalis, I think, so it had to be shit. And that was the end of that really. They disappeared, dissolved. The unavoidably inferior Motorcycle Boy, drumming for Meat Whiplash, guest guitar on a Vaselines record, not much else as far as I know. Which is the way it should be really, like a slowly disappearing vapour trail in a blue blue Scottish sky.
Under Thatcher, both practitioners and aficionados of the arts were considered enemies of the state. Thus any output from anyone halfway aware of the situation can be considered political, regardless of content. Here is moored the good ship Shoppie pop.
Edith, 4 years old, said to me in an accusatory tone, "Daddy, you don't know much about girls, do you?"
"No, I bloody don't!" I guffawed bitterly. We were not talking about the same things.
It's the Need for Symmetry again. Geometrical patterns forming around the retina. Here she is, everyone's little investment.
I am unaware unsure intrepid and unavailable, unfathomable and intractable, tumbledown and slapdash, helium-filled and Simonized, celibate and consumptive, terrible and indifferent.
Playdoh clit-flick Anti-Christ.
The first EP proper came in a hand-coloured sleeve. Like all hand-coloured sleeves, hand-coloured meant carelessly scrawled upon. Still, it was carelessly scrawled upon by one of the objects of one's obsession, and therefore to be pored over and treasured. I imagine these hand-colouring session were a riot: all the band members lying on their fronts, Chelsea boots kicking leisurely in the air, tongues lolling out with the effort and concentration. Mine must have been done towards the end of the session, when the colourist was dying to get back to their effects pedals or watching a battered videotape of The Monkees or The Banana Splits, maybe Get On Board With The Double Deckers, in their very own Shop Assistants hideout, a converted bus in an Edinburgh lock-up, electricity pilfered from a lamppost outside.
I am one of the select group of people who think The Shop Assistants are one of the best bands of all time. What's more, I am one of the even more select group of people, a group that might just be a one-man band, who think they went downhill after their first single, which is actually their second single.
I got the third single on twelve inch because it was on offer. I bought it from, sin of sins, HMV on Sauchihall Street, Glasgow. The person who served me was the kind of 80s vintage HMV employee, job for life, who seethed with contempt for anything that might not have been willing to bow down before the twin gods of Buster-era Phil Collins and frizzy-haired conquerors Dire Straits, anything that might labour under the weight of the "alternative" label a label that meant hhomosexualityand socialism, to name but two 80s evils that required eradication, preferably through the effective wweed-killer of the approved blandathons known as Radio One playlists. The barcode rang up the normal price. I meekly, that is to say, indiely, pointed to the dayglo orange pay-no-more-than 79p sticker. Mulletman sighed heavily, brutally, much like a Glaswegian taxi driver if you ever dared not to have the right change. I thought I was finally going to be able to die for my art, decapitated by a black vinyl disc, a martyr to buzzsaw guitars smothering plaintive melodies. But he just sent me to another till, where the correct price was applied and I lived to dither another day.
I had a friend who was a fellow Shop Assistants fan. I guess it brought us together. She walked through Angel Delight, I stumbled through porridge. She was from Edinburgh and she told me the Shoppies' singer Alex could often be seen "clanking around Edinburgh in her leathers." Think about that image for a moment. The streets of Edinburgh, I think it is fair to say, have seen their fair share of clanking, both real and supernatural, but rarely has it been caused by a young woman with a fine folk voice dressed head to toe in black leather. She wore a Marlon Brando cap and went on to front a group called The Motorcycle Boy. She probably couldn't afford a motorbike until she reached middle age. In fact I bet she's still saving up now. Her vocals were like a rainbow slick of oil on an autumn puddle, and her defiance was as old as the volcanic rock she walked upon - You leave me and I'll scratch your eyes out.
The Shop Assistants gave one of the best concerts I've ever been to. The Beastie Boys were still in Cookie Puss mode, so support band Pop Will Eat Itself were still good, the ideal warm-up really. What's so fucking good about Candy? That kind of thing. Then, sandwiched between The Poppies and The Shoppies, came Peter Case, a bewildered Jay Gatsby who was forced to suffer a great deal of vociferous abuse. For some reason, I had heard of him, and tried to listen. But it was hopeless, and so was Peter Case. Then came the Shop Assistants and they were loud and brash and had two drummers and if they were shambolic, as legend has it, I didn't notice. I don't know if it still happens now, but in those days women performers got lecherous comments hurled at them by drunks and numbskulls. After a while this became intolerable for the guitarist, whose name was, I think, David Keegan. I think he might have been from up north. He kicked someone in the crowd in the head, or rather he brought his Cuban heel down on someone's head, pressing it down like one of the plastic footballers in Subbuteo poor-substitute Striker. The atmosphere became electrified with the promise of rioting. It didn't really develop into anything major, but it was thrilling, it was rock'n'roll, it was what I wanted from life. Add to this the troubled expression of one of the drummers as events unfolded, and I was in something approaching heaven. This was what eighteen-year-old me wanted from life. Rarely was I to experience it again in such a mountain-pure form.
I got their album on the popular musicassette format, a format second only to the cassingle in the embarrassment stakes for pop fans. It's a hard-contested field. 8-track cartridges have been revered for some time, lauded by Big Black et al, but there are, as far as I know, no songs about musicassettes or cassingles. I would like someone to take the opportunity to tackle these artefacts in song before they disappear from the collective memory for ever.
The album was, at the time, a dreadful disappointment. It was on some kind of major label, Chrysalis, I think, so it had to be shit. And that was the end of that really. They disappeared, dissolved. The unavoidably inferior Motorcycle Boy, drumming for Meat Whiplash, guest guitar on a Vaselines record, not much else as far as I know. Which is the way it should be really, like a slowly disappearing vapour trail in a blue blue Scottish sky.
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Sunday, November 08, 2009
THE JESUS AND MARY CHAIN: THE RIOT YEARS
THE JESUS AND MARY CHAIN: THE RIOT YEARS
Everybody loves a riot, and I am no exception. But real riots can be so unpredictable. It's all too easy to get a brick in the back of the head or a truncheon up the jacksy. One rioter once asked me if I could lend him a handkerchief with which to obscure his features, but the only I had had bogeys, so I was forced to pretend I hadn't got one. When I first started working in the Basque Country, Friday night was riot night. We would come out of work to be met by the huge hulking figures of riot police and would have to basically follow a line of them up to the railway station, which was being guarded to dissuade the disaffected youth from indulging in one of the favourite pastimes, setting fire to means of public transport. This is all very well, but it can (and did) go wrong, and the regular bouts of stone throwing were as unpredictable as forest fires. Good fun, I admit, but best to keep your distance if you value your freedom and/or physical integrity. So what better way to enjoy a riot than in the controlled environment of a small concert hall or nightclub? This was the brave social experiment carried out by followers of The Jesus and Mary Chain in the mid-eighties. Like May '68 without the slogans. The Jesus and Mary Chain made great records, records with cheese wire solos and dustbin lid drums. They were unavoidably exciting, and the experience of very loud feedback in a confined space could be quite agitating. Add to this the group's habit of playing for ten minutes or so before skulking off-stage and it is no real surprise tempers could be stretched to breaking point, if indeed this is what happened rather than just people "having a laugh" or whatever.
I went to see The Jesus and Mary Chain at Nottingham Rock City when the riot thing was still in the air. I was under-age and had borrowed my brother's provisional driver's licence. I had some kind of mental block at the door when the bouncer asked my date of birth and was ejected from the queue and put in some kind of holding pen, all my rock'n'roll dreams in the balance. I can't remember how I managed to convince my interlocutors that I really was over eighteen, but I did. Me in my cut-off donkey jacket. This was, after all, the time of the miners' strike (another false legend) or thereabouts and a cut-off donkey jacket seemed like a nice balance between a statement of solidarity and Duranee-baiting stylishness.
Once inside the venue (a fairly charmless place next to a car park, but by the far the most exciting place I had ever been) the long wait began. I think there were two support bands, but they were the kind that pay to get on the tour and everybody hates them. They must have got a fair bit of abuse that night. Someone's elder sister was working behind the bar (no doubt a glamorous student at Nottingham Poly), and gave my friends cheap drinks, but not me, because I had embarrassed myself in front of her in some drunken incident or other involving vinegar. I considered being mortified but... nah, no point. We waited. And waited. We had some chips. We waited, waited, waited. By now the venue was filling up and it was clear that quite a few people were there for a ruck - men with moustaches and white trainers, Terry-from-Brooksidealikes, Clough-era Notts Forest fans, definitely not people interested in The Jesus and Mary Chain and their clearly delineated scalpel slice through Warhol-fuelled selective rock'n'roll history. My clearest memory of the night is everyone, JAMC freaks and ruck boys alike, standing around trying to look tough when the DJ played Time Flies By When You're The Driver Of A Train by Half Man Half Biscuit at ear-bleeding volume. Try it some time, it's a pretty tricky pose to pull off.
Eventually the objects of our adulation shambled onto the stage. Obviously at the time I had a Bobby crush, so I was disappointed that Gillespie had either decided on a new sticky-uppy haircut or had been replaced. It later transpired (via the Hello Goodbye section of Mojo Magazine) that this gig was the début of John Moore. Bobby G was there, but backstage, giving his replacement moral support. Apparently he told him that all that was expected of him was to keep time, look good and dodge the bottles. Well, he didn't look good, and there were no bottles thrown. It was a disappointment, Bobby G not playing, and I find it hard to cling to the notion that this was some kind of historical event, a new drummer being baptised. I suppose in effect it was the beginning of a very slow end. The gig itself wasn't very good really, not after such a long wait. I think they were on for about half an hour, and I think they'd learned to defuse the latent violence by playing an excruciatingly long version of one of their more tuneless B-sides. Certainly the aforementioned Terrys from Brookside were hoping to start something by shoving and pushing and swearing and threatening, but the majority of punters were gentle souls more inclined to Pastelism than punishment, and nothing really happened. I'm glad I went, but to be honest, it wasn't much good. I loved the feedback, loved the melodies, loved the idea, but the vocals were almost inaudible, the shape and texture of the records was lost, and you couldn't help feeling that the band's obvious contempt for their audience was kind of deserved. That's not a nice feeling. So we all trooped out and some of us returned to the land of the tractor and the cow-pat, and went back to school next day with something to brag about and a legend to start building.
Years later I saw The Jesus and Mary Chain again in Prague. They were fantastic, but my abiding memory of that particular ghostly tube stop on the Revolution line from 1968 to 1989 was the wonderful sound of Big Star's Big Black Car hollowing its way from the PA in a cavernous venue as the audience trickled in. This time I was with people who'd taken real risks in the name of rock'n'roll, for which read freedom, people who'd run samizdat printing presses and so on, people who felt it was a really big deal to see The Jesus and Mary Chain. So I knew I was in the right place, and that I had been in the right place all along.
(I wanted to embed this, but I can't get it to work, but please click away.It is a video entitled The Jesus and Mary Chain North London Poly Riot)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hclcrEpui64
Everybody loves a riot, and I am no exception. But real riots can be so unpredictable. It's all too easy to get a brick in the back of the head or a truncheon up the jacksy. One rioter once asked me if I could lend him a handkerchief with which to obscure his features, but the only I had had bogeys, so I was forced to pretend I hadn't got one. When I first started working in the Basque Country, Friday night was riot night. We would come out of work to be met by the huge hulking figures of riot police and would have to basically follow a line of them up to the railway station, which was being guarded to dissuade the disaffected youth from indulging in one of the favourite pastimes, setting fire to means of public transport. This is all very well, but it can (and did) go wrong, and the regular bouts of stone throwing were as unpredictable as forest fires. Good fun, I admit, but best to keep your distance if you value your freedom and/or physical integrity. So what better way to enjoy a riot than in the controlled environment of a small concert hall or nightclub? This was the brave social experiment carried out by followers of The Jesus and Mary Chain in the mid-eighties. Like May '68 without the slogans. The Jesus and Mary Chain made great records, records with cheese wire solos and dustbin lid drums. They were unavoidably exciting, and the experience of very loud feedback in a confined space could be quite agitating. Add to this the group's habit of playing for ten minutes or so before skulking off-stage and it is no real surprise tempers could be stretched to breaking point, if indeed this is what happened rather than just people "having a laugh" or whatever.
I went to see The Jesus and Mary Chain at Nottingham Rock City when the riot thing was still in the air. I was under-age and had borrowed my brother's provisional driver's licence. I had some kind of mental block at the door when the bouncer asked my date of birth and was ejected from the queue and put in some kind of holding pen, all my rock'n'roll dreams in the balance. I can't remember how I managed to convince my interlocutors that I really was over eighteen, but I did. Me in my cut-off donkey jacket. This was, after all, the time of the miners' strike (another false legend) or thereabouts and a cut-off donkey jacket seemed like a nice balance between a statement of solidarity and Duranee-baiting stylishness.
Once inside the venue (a fairly charmless place next to a car park, but by the far the most exciting place I had ever been) the long wait began. I think there were two support bands, but they were the kind that pay to get on the tour and everybody hates them. They must have got a fair bit of abuse that night. Someone's elder sister was working behind the bar (no doubt a glamorous student at Nottingham Poly), and gave my friends cheap drinks, but not me, because I had embarrassed myself in front of her in some drunken incident or other involving vinegar. I considered being mortified but... nah, no point. We waited. And waited. We had some chips. We waited, waited, waited. By now the venue was filling up and it was clear that quite a few people were there for a ruck - men with moustaches and white trainers, Terry-from-Brooksidealikes, Clough-era Notts Forest fans, definitely not people interested in The Jesus and Mary Chain and their clearly delineated scalpel slice through Warhol-fuelled selective rock'n'roll history. My clearest memory of the night is everyone, JAMC freaks and ruck boys alike, standing around trying to look tough when the DJ played Time Flies By When You're The Driver Of A Train by Half Man Half Biscuit at ear-bleeding volume. Try it some time, it's a pretty tricky pose to pull off.
Eventually the objects of our adulation shambled onto the stage. Obviously at the time I had a Bobby crush, so I was disappointed that Gillespie had either decided on a new sticky-uppy haircut or had been replaced. It later transpired (via the Hello Goodbye section of Mojo Magazine) that this gig was the début of John Moore. Bobby G was there, but backstage, giving his replacement moral support. Apparently he told him that all that was expected of him was to keep time, look good and dodge the bottles. Well, he didn't look good, and there were no bottles thrown. It was a disappointment, Bobby G not playing, and I find it hard to cling to the notion that this was some kind of historical event, a new drummer being baptised. I suppose in effect it was the beginning of a very slow end. The gig itself wasn't very good really, not after such a long wait. I think they were on for about half an hour, and I think they'd learned to defuse the latent violence by playing an excruciatingly long version of one of their more tuneless B-sides. Certainly the aforementioned Terrys from Brookside were hoping to start something by shoving and pushing and swearing and threatening, but the majority of punters were gentle souls more inclined to Pastelism than punishment, and nothing really happened. I'm glad I went, but to be honest, it wasn't much good. I loved the feedback, loved the melodies, loved the idea, but the vocals were almost inaudible, the shape and texture of the records was lost, and you couldn't help feeling that the band's obvious contempt for their audience was kind of deserved. That's not a nice feeling. So we all trooped out and some of us returned to the land of the tractor and the cow-pat, and went back to school next day with something to brag about and a legend to start building.
Years later I saw The Jesus and Mary Chain again in Prague. They were fantastic, but my abiding memory of that particular ghostly tube stop on the Revolution line from 1968 to 1989 was the wonderful sound of Big Star's Big Black Car hollowing its way from the PA in a cavernous venue as the audience trickled in. This time I was with people who'd taken real risks in the name of rock'n'roll, for which read freedom, people who'd run samizdat printing presses and so on, people who felt it was a really big deal to see The Jesus and Mary Chain. So I knew I was in the right place, and that I had been in the right place all along.
(I wanted to embed this, but I can't get it to work, but please click away.It is a video entitled The Jesus and Mary Chain North London Poly Riot)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hclcrEpui64
Monday, March 09, 2009
It's good to hear your voice, you know it's been so long
And it's hard to believe this song is 30 years old.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPq9tF1FbnA
(having trouble embedding it if someone can help me out?)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPq9tF1FbnA
(having trouble embedding it if someone can help me out?)
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