replacing Hardly Baked whose feed is broken for reasons unknown. Original Hardly Baked + archive are here http://hardlybaked.blogspot.com/
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^"Really awful is more interesting to listen to than pretty good" - Eno
The mystery of subcultural persistence, aka non-synchronisation: the fact that rock epistemes overlap and Eras do not end punctually but bleed across the supposed periodizations that journalism (first draft of...) and history (second draft of...) work with
Example: this NME 1977 review of a benefit in Brighton for Release - the hippy era organisation that defended people charged with drugs possession. This in an issue with The Clash on the cover
Release was started by Caroline Coon, who had herself already nimbly transitioned to being a figure in the punk scene as a journalist (working on the first book about the music in fact) and would quite soon manage The Clash (she can be seen in Rude Boy).
Intriguingly one of the bands reviewed in the 1977 Release Benefit concert is Here and Now, featuring teen drumming prodigy Kif Kif Le Batteur, also known as Keith Dobson - within a few years he'd be leading his own noisepunk outfit The O12's and running the ultra-DIY cassette label Fuck Off Records. Then a few years after that, he'd front as singer-guitarist World Domination Enterprises who were either late postpunk or bang-on-time noise-rock (a British parallel to Big Black, except with a human drummer and humane lyrics)
Here's some subcultural persistence I eye-and-ear-witnessed myself: a free festival in early 1986 in Oxford that me and my pals accidentally stumbled upon when going for a night time stroll across Port Meadow. Probably just months before I interviewed World Dom for the first time.
World Dom not on the bill, nor any remnant of Here and Now as far as I can tell (although Robert Calvert and Nik Turner are separately there, sans Hawkwind), but loads of groups I never ever heard of and clearly on a completely different circuit to the one that was covered in the weekly rock press
And then high on the bill - despite being I'd have thought fairly unknown then - Cardiacs, whose frightmare theatricality boggled my mind when I saw them (not knowing even their name when I saw them and completely unprepared for their early Split Enz lunacy)
Cardiacs seem like a New Wave sore thumb in this company of Magic Mushroom Band and Webcore and Mournblade.
One name I do recognise: Shake Appeal, who would later become Swervedriver, but at this stage - one assumes from the name - are modelled directly on The Stooges
I also recognise with a shudder the name Jake the Pilgrim, a Goth combo whose dry ice adorned performance I would endure a year later when they supported A.R. Kane in some South London pub.
Oh yes, and Ozric Tentacles, in nascent form here I should imagine, later to be big figures in the free festival / techno-trance crossover moment of the '90s (and from who I gleaned a revelation: you can be tripping balls and you still retain your aesthetic discrimination... drugs don't improve a middling experience, they just intensify and 3D-ify its middlingness.)
Reprisal taken belatedly...
Something in between punk and the new hippie resurgence
A student's suggestion for a DIY micro-scene of the 21st Century - Rominimal (Romanian minimal techno)
When I heard it, I thought this is a bit son-of-Villalobos and apparently he is the foundation stone of this sound.
Which is a bit of a for-discerning-types-only scene, I'm told - sophisticated. They drink wine on the dancefloor!
I'd never heard of this sound but the scene has had a smidgeon of attention from the electronic dance media.
As a child I had a phase of being really interested in Romania, or Rumania as it was often rendered then. But for other reasons - I believe it had and still has the largest area of wild forest in Europe and as a result a lot of cool animals (see I was into the idea of being a naturalist when I grew up - my other big obsession as a country was Canada, for similar reasons). Then a bit later I got really into the legend of Vlad the Impaler and did a school project, with the grisly bits penned in red Indian ink. Somewhere in the middle of that, I had a phase of wanting to go on a cruise - and one of the more intriguing ones you would see in the back of colour supplements and the TV Times and Radio Times was a Black Sea cruise that stopped off in Romania. And in our house, we were fans of Ilie Năstase, the literally dashing tennis player with an exciting style of net playing who brightened Wimbledon at a time when remorseless speed machines and baseline playing was starting to dominate. Got a faint memory that he might have soured in his old age, politically speaking, but I could be wrong.
Grown up interests related to that country: the philosopher E.M. Cioran (Oneohtrix Point Never's favorite), who extracted darkly witty aphoristic gems from his melancholy view of the world, a sort of post-Nietzsche Morrissey. There's a lot of cool electronic composers also from that country.
But I am unfamiliar with the popular music of that part of the world, or indeed the underground dance music.
Interesting thing I learned recently - Romanian is not a Slavic language as you'd expect with the Balkans, but a mutant form of Italian (Perhaps that's why it's called Romania - they speak Roman)
The return of Student Selection - a series that never really got started (just one post I think - actually two) but was intended to showcase cool music that my students have turned me onto.
Quite a few classes are based around a prompt - send me a clip of your favorite tune in such-and-such a genre, or sometimes a specific artist (Bowie or Joni). For a recent class on New Wave / Postpunk, a student who is very knowledgeable about the genre nominated this from a Japanese group that shamefully (what with being a postpunk historian and all) I'd never heard of.
Listening it struck me initially as "none-more-New-Wave" - like how could anything be more New Wave than this? The angularity, the synth bit, the strained vocals....
But then, listening more, I discerned an odd resemblance to Led Zeppelin - the beat reminded me of "When the Levee Breaks" (or Billy Squier's Zep-clone "The Stroke"). The vocals get quite soaring and Plant-y. And when the noisy guitarburst comes in, it's excitingly noisy but it's definitely a solo - not so far from something Jimmy Page might let loose.
And what d'ya know? As the knowledgeable student revealed, P-Model is a classic example of the Old Wave / New Wave switcheroo. Before, they had been an unsuccessful prog band and like so many Western counterparts (Police, Cars, etc) they wholesale embraced the New Aesthetic - sonically, sartorially, in terms of record design.
Geometrics heightened by the obi-strip
None-new-wavest of all time, possibly, this back cover:
And not least a significant element of the total make-over is the band name P-Model, which is "we are product" / "we are machines" in its oblique sleekness.
But you can tell these dudes can really really play - they got the chops and in classic crypto-Oldwaver fashion are shoving all that snazz into the strictures of the New Thing.
Listen to the demented clockwork virtuosity of this one
Long loved this album title and record cover (the shot was taken by John McVie) , but never listened to the music until now.
The image has a powerful English-nostalgia effect, memories of walking to school through fog or mist
But the Bare Trees cover photo could easily have been taken in California
The fog in the Bay Area is something else. I once approached San Francisco in a taxi from the airport, which is further inland. As we drove along, getting steadily nearer to the coast, I could see tentacular plumes of low-lying mist creeping up the creek beds - the fog was able to extend further inland on lower ground than the main mass of its miasma could reach. An eerie sight - the fog tendrils seemed to be the sinister vanguards of a larger occupying army, stealthy prehensile auguries of an all-subsuming formlessness.
All along the California coast, right down to San Diego way, you can get fog at certain times of day or year. I remember staying once in a hotel in Torrey Pines and the Englishy flashback thrill of seeing the adjacent golf course completely shrouded in grey, visibility drastically reduced, the normal sunbright clarity of rolling green vistas muffled and bleached…
It's also been misty morned here in LA recently. Which I've noticed because I seem to be waking up at 5.30 AM or 6 AM no matter when I go to bed. This happens in old age, right?
The record? Well, it's post-Peter Green and pre-Buckingham/Nicks, the inbetweeny years, the hitless years (Green-era FMac actually had way bigger UK hit singles than the later, poppier phase). So it's got this kind of amiable, washed-out, bluesy quality, not unlike Climax Blues Band.
Actually what it reminds me of is Wishbone Ash - pleasant but inessential.
Perhaps the thematic of misty greyness in the title and image was suggested by the music's indistinction.
I say "hitless" - but until the Buckingham/Nicks era this was the only Fleetwood Mac record to sell a million in America. I guess it's very Frampton-like blandness helped on FM radio.
However there is the remarkable track at the very end.
from Fleetwood Mac wiki:
Aileen Scarrott, credited as Mrs Scarrott, was a resident of Headley in Hampshire where Fleetwood Mac lived between 1971 and 1974. She was featured reciting her poem Thoughts On a Grey Day on the band's 1972 album Bare Trees.
She was born Aileen Katie Mary Huggett in 1904 at Eastbourne in Sussex. At the time of the recording she was married to Harry Scarrott, the third marriage for both of them. Harry had lived in Headley for at least forty years beforehand. Her previous marriages were to Alfred F. Cager at Brighton in 1935 and Charles E. Smith at Willesden, London in 1947.
She died in 1984 at Cannock Chase in Staffordshire.
The recording of Ms. Scarrot's poem "Thoughts On A Grey Day" that was used for the Bare Trees album was actually read by Mick Fleetwood who was trying to sound like a sweet old lady.
I wonder if that last bit of contradicting info is really true? If so, it's a bloody good impersonation of a dear frail old lady.
Some other versions of the cover have a faint mauve tinge to them
Ah, there's a back cover with a similar sort of wintry image
Pix taken recently by local photographerMartin Rance in the area of West Herts I grew up and still have ties. Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness….
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Bunch of suggestions in the comments, and via email, as to other blurry, muzzy covers
Seventeen Seconds is the one where I'm kicking myself:
About the audio contents of The Cure's album, I recently mused the following:
The aspects that Nick Kent (original NME reviewer of the album) finds frustrating - the vagueness, the tentativeness, the foggy pensiveness, a sense of things being withheld, emotional indeterminacy - are exactly the qualities of the album I find intriguing and attractive.
I feel like it's a record that could only come out of English suburbia... (Crawley is almost exactly the same distance from London as my hometown Berkhamsted is, just on the other side of the metropolis).
Yet having said that, the atmosphere sometimes puts me in mind of Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet
Because of my life experience it inevitably conjures Home Counties memories of listlessness-as-bliss... mystical mundanity...
A Thursday afternoon in an unseasonably damp, overcast August. Poor visibility, light drizzle muffling the sense of distance.
A much more recent group - Lo Five, from the Wirral - taps into similar states of suspended-from-Time mystic listlessness. The greyscale sound of releases like The Geography of the Abyss always makes me think of rivulets of rain streaking the windows of a coach... drizzle so faint it almost hangs in the air rather than fall to the ground and that creates a reduced-visibility effect, foreshortening the landscape and making it seem like it's disappearing into formlessness
"Bare trees" reminded me of some self-help books I spied recently in a UK book store, based on the concept of wintering - how to get through fallow seasons of the heart and mind.
The top one by Katherine May was the best-seller that started the trend, seemingly. They all have the same generic style of artwork
The follow-up from May shifts to a spring-like vibe while still acknowledging the exhaustion idea
This one seems to be more literal - winter in the weather / climate sense rather than winter of the soul
I wonder what pearls it contains
Wrap up warm? Drink soup? You can't beat a hot water bottle. Roast chestnuts. Crumpets are nice....
Albums you grudgingly respect / dutifully acknowledge the objective eminence, but when push comes to shove you never actually want to play / could happily never hear again.
Velvet Underground - White Light, White Heat
The Beatles - The Beatles aka White Album
The Band - Music From Big Pink
David Bowie - The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars
David Bowie - Station to Station
David Bowie - "Heroes"
Can - Ege Bamyasi
Rolling Stones - Exile on Main Street
The Aphex Twin ...I Care Because You Do
"Bypasses You Almost Completely" - the "almost" here refers to the one or two tracks on the album you unreservedly love. Usually these are The Obvious Singles e.g. "'Heroes'", "The Weight" - even when it isn't literally a single (was "Vitamin C" a single? Perhaps it was in Germany). Sometimes there's like one other track you really like e.g. "The Secret Life of Arabia".
With Ziggy, it's just "Ziggy Stardust" and "Suffragette City".
With Station, it's just "Golden Years", which is one of my absolute favorites by Bowie. The title track's eminence in people's hearts continues to perplex.
White Album, the actively liked songs would be "Blackbird" and "Something", "Back in the U.S.S.R"... A few others are nice enough ("Guitar Weeps", "Mother Nature's", "Dear Prudence", “Warm Guitar”) Its grade is lowered by the excrescent presence of some of the very worst things they ever made: "Glass Onion", "Ob-La-Di", "Bungalow Bill", "Do It In the Road". Most anything perpetrated by McCartney. Mainly, it's just very very long.
Exile is just a samey slog really. "Happy" and "Let It Loose" would be my picks here.
Apart from the sublime "Alberto Balsam" nothing from .... I Care Because You Do has ever managed to lodge itself in the memory or the heart, despite periodic attempts at "giving it another go"
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Albums that don’t qualify for this category -
- universally accepted as duff /disappointing records by Canonic artists (eg Television’s Adventure)
- albums by Canonic artists where there is no consensus about whether it’s great or shite (Strangeways Here We Come).
(I am not sure what Smiths fans feel about Meat Is Murder - to me is it is a mystifyingly slight and sterile sounding album redeemed by two luminously wondrous songs, “Well I Wonder” and “the Headmaster Ritual” and if I am feeling generous “That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore” which is lushly appointed (it is lowered in my estimation by being a bizarrely misguided choice as a single - continuing a long stretch in which the Smiths could do (almost) no right when it came to the Single (from Shakespeare’s Shitstir to well the end really - save perhaps Thorn, Shoplifters, Sheila). Meat also contains some of their slightest tunes - "Rusholme", "Want The One I Can't Have", "Nowhere Fast", "Barbarism Begins" - and a couple of real graters ("What She Said", "Meat Is Murder" itself). I suppose on balance, added up, it totals out as simply not very good, even before you factor in the clinical production. But I'm sure many would disagree).
Amazing clip of Tom Jones leaving nothing to the imagination
A lovely memento of a moment when we thought desublimation was, if not, revolutionary, at least, liberating...
Although showbiz always had its raunchy side, but not perhaps ever this pelvic - Jones folds early "Memphis Flash" Elvis into variety, makes Vegas virile
Apparently Tom used to address the rare man in the audience who'd come with his wife or girlfriend, say "don't worry fella - I'll pump up the tires, you can ride the bike".
Part of his stage routine was to catch panties thrown from the audience and dab the sweat from his face and brow.
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The original hit version (co-)written and performed by Roy Head
The music is starker, more subdued - less showbizzy .... Roy's dancing not so much sexy as gymnastic, even contortionist
Gender-flipped country version by Barbara Mandrell
first and last appearance of George Thorogood on this blog solely because his cover version includes a cameo appearance of Roy Head in the video
Countless other versions exist... it was something of a standard
The Tom Jones rendition changes the line about getting a reputation as a loving man to "get a reputation as a dirty old man"
Here's a lovely reminiscence from Woebot about the first records he owned - a pre-cool collection of children's music initially, graduating gradually to proper pop music and a genuinely cool record to have bought at the age of nine (no spoilers) and perhaps even more so as a pre-recorded cassette.
Matt's meditation got me thinking about my own start with music.
And I realised that with the exception of a single single - the theme from The Sting, better known as Scott Joplin's "The Entertainer" - I didn't buy any musical recordings until.... the age of 16. Not one!
My brothers and I did between us get some comedy LPs - Monty Python, The Goodies, National Lampoon's That's Not Funny, That's Sick!. These had some songs on them - "Winter Sportsman" by the Goodies; a pretty tight and slick funk track on the Lampoon album titled "The Shere Hite Disco Report" - but they were not primarily music. They did, each one of them, get played scores of times - this was the pre-videocassette era when if you wanted to re-enjoy your comedy faves, the LP (or the spin-off book - of which we also had loads) was the only option.
So music for me, growing up, was the music that my parents played.
Which was musicals (mainly West Side Story), comic song (Tom Lehrer), light jazz (Oscar Peterson, Dudley Moore Trio - these didn't impact me much, although as a grown-up I would adore Dudley's Bedazzled soundtrack LP). Sinatra's Songs for Swingin’ Lovers, which is engraved in my bones.
And then there were a few famous classical things.
Which is why to this day my favorite classical works are Beethoven's Pastoral and Holst's The Planets.
The latter was a particularly favorite - I used to listen to this on the Grundig radiogram in my parent's bedroom, sprawled on the coverlet. "Neptune, the Mystic" especially would have me drifting and swooning into a trance.
The embarrassing truth is that my favorite classical music - the stuff that I can actually remember - is from before the age of 16. Things I heard from my parents. Or at school, like Carmina Burana (although its "O Fortuna" sequence was also in the famous aftershave advert).
Further embarrassing truth: the only things added to the small classical faves list subsequently would be things heard through movies: Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries", Saint-Saen's "Aquarium", the Ligeti bits on 2001, A Space Oddity....
The classical I like is all the most famous bits that get either portioned out on the radio as if they were singles and "hits". Or that you just hear around (in film, or adverts).
Take Satie. I am not sure how I would first have heard Satie's "Trois Gymnopedies" - was it in a TV drama? That's another one that would have been heard young. At a certain point, it seemed to be everywhere. But again, despite later efforts, I have failed to fall in love with any other Satie.
Yes, it's not for want of effort in this department. But even things I like as I'm listening, e.g. Debussy, or Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, it doesn't stick somehow.
I think rock and pop and electronic music have spoiled my ears. My ears want insistent rhythm (meaning drums and bass). Production. Studio spatiality. Timbral range and richness.
It's one of the reasons I found this Morley book such a surprise - and why, in a strange way, even while enjoying it, on some fundamental level I couldn't quite believe it. How could someone who grew up listening to and deep-feeling the Velvets, the Stooges, John Martyn, Roxy, Eno, go through such a total conversion? I mean, yeah, he who fucks nuns will someday join the church... but still!
There is a great novel about this (well, not exactly this, but on theme) - Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach. The conflict between the young woman and the young man - in love, but unable to function sexually - is paralleled by her love of classical music and his passion for blues and rock 'n' roll. It's set around the turn of the 1950s into the 1960s and he's going to places like Eel Pie Island and seeing people like, I dunno, Alex Korner. He tries to play her rock'n'roll records and she tries to make nice comments ("bouncy!"). But the four-square rhythm sounds impossibly crude and rudimentary to her (she plays in a string quartet so has a deep understanding of and immersion in the music). Conversely, when she takes him to concerts, it all sounds ridiculously fussy to him, a prim agitation that makes him itch with restlessness.
Spoiler alert! The marriage breaks up almost instantly (on their wedding night in fact) and they go divergent paths. He is caught up in the adventure of the Sixties, free love, etc. He organizes some rock festivals. He becomes part-owner of a record shop. Never marries or has kids. She meanwhile steadfastly and with great discipline continues with the string quartet, who become acclaimed and renowned.
There is an extraordinary short passage near the end where the young man, now old and red faced and bald, looks back on his life and concludes that it has amounted to nothing. Whereas his ex-bride... She has made a contribution.
McEwan is saying that the whole of post-WW2 culture - the cult of youth, sexual liberation, informality, spontaneity, living for the now - was a gigantic detour and waste of energy. That the true strength of Western civilization is its high culture traditions. This is what will endure. This is what has value and spiritual profundity. He is saying that sublimation and deferred gratification are the mettle out of which lasting cultural worth is forged. That there's an upside to repression.
(The childlessness of the rock-and-roll loving boy-man symbolizes this, and is McEwan tipping the hand a bit. Perhaps the only clumsy touch in what's otherwise a delicate and subtle book).
Ah, this turned into a bit of a detour in itself, from the original point of the blogpost which was a little nostalgic cast-back to those days you are innocent of an idea of "pop", let alone "cool" - a internal aesthetic hierarchy within rock (one that mirrors and duplicates the high versus low opposition that once cast all of pop rock etc into the lowly category).
We used to watch Top of the Pops every week. And I used to love certain songs (Hollies "The Air That I Breathe", Bachman Turner Overdrive "You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet") and was fascinated by others (the bass-detonations and "t-peculiar way" in "Space Oddity", reissued in 1975 and an even huger hit. or the wah-wah guitar in "Theme from 'Shaft'", which I didn't know was wah-wah or even a guitar - it sounded to me like helicopter blades). Sparks's "This Town" made a big impression.
But it never once occurred to me to buy any of these as a 7-inch single.
My slender resources money-wise went to books or Indian ink (I was an aspiring cartoonist, obsessed with Windsor & Newton's range of products) Or to other hobbies / pastimes / obsessions, of which there were a great succession.
Actually, now I remember, there was another source of music in my life before my brother Tim introduced me to punk.
Granny had one of those small portable record-players that look like picnic hampers, with a built-in mono speaker.
For some reasons she had a copy of the Beach Boys Greatest Hits (I think her eldest son, finally moving out, left it there - her own attitude to pop was "it's all rhythm", meaning the drums were too strident).
But the record that we did play a lot was Evita. Despite generally reviling Andrew Lloyd-Weber, this is a really pretty tune, I think.
