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
Saturday, August 24, 2024
Old Wave / New Wave - same place, different times
Sunday, August 18, 2024
Mundmusik versus Hexenrock
(That's mouth music versus witchrock)
Kind of wish there was no guitar in it at all (there's only the odd wisp and curlicue-of-flame admittedly).... that it was just voicescape (or rather voice-vortex )
As incantatory multitracked delay + echo stimmung-maelstroms go, it's sort of the missing link between Tim Buckley's "Starsailor" and this Roy Harper piece when it really takes off...
Also a bit Animal Collective in their most lights-out tribally freakout mode...
Also Gibbytronix.
What other things in the psych / prog / Krautrock zone does "Truth And Probability (A Lexicon Of Self Knowledge)" (shit title though innit) resemble?
Amazing to think that Achim Reichel, who was A.R & Machines, was previously the main force in The Rattles, who did this ridiculously exciting nifty-groover with a necromantic theme.
Monday, August 12, 2024
Bo - wow wow!
Some years ago I saw a fantastic slice of Bo Diddley footage on TV, a long clip from a live concert. It wasn't from the '50s or '60s, I don't think - 1970s by the look of it - but I took it to be his act, more or less the same as the heyday.
It was all noise and all rhythm.... hypnotic, almost Velvet Underground level, but more physically convulsive - made to make you jump rather than trance out.
The recordings are terrific but they don't approach what I heard, in part because they're generally short and to the point, whereas whatever the song was I saw in this clip seemed to go on and on, almost like a Neu! track. Perhaps there's a live album that captures it.
This clip below isn't the thing I saw but it has something of the same "European Son"-endlessness quality. But - being Diddley - it's more rhythmically lively than the VU.
Diddleybeat beats Tuckerbeat any day of the week.
In this concert clip I originally saw, I was also struck by the odd hard-angled guitar shape. Like this rectangular one.
This post started as an excuse to display the photograph at the top - what on Earth is he wearing?
A sort of metallicized corset, made out of several belts.... with further belts, or straps on the arms, and a couple of belts creating a halter top effect. All that leather, all those buckles and metal eyelets and studs - it has the look of some sort of DIY version of Skin 2 fetish wear. The cinching at the midriff - the pinched overhang of moob flesh - it all gives off kinky vibes.
It's a bit Rob Halford, now I think about it.
Making a fur-covered guitar also seems slightly kinky
This guitar - one of many square / rectangular / polygon-shaped guitar bodies he designed and had built for him - has a set of effects-processors built into the body.
"Bo Diddley created a brash sound that opened new frontiers for the electric guitar, as he experimented with reverb, echo, vibrato, tremolo, distortion, and flange effects. He designed his own guitars, including his signature rectangular Gibson; a hexagon-shaped guitar with a built-in effects processor"
What a tumult!
That last one suggested by Ed in Comments
A very repetitious artist - every song pretty much is a chip off the same block - but then again Bo Diddley is his own genre, so being "generic" is just being himself all the more forcefully.
Genius-as-scenius-of-one.
And then Diddleybeat becomes a real scenius through being so widely copied.... and copied across quite a duration too ("Faith" by George Michael is Diddleybeat)
Copy of a copy
Copy of a copy
Apparently Bo was wowed by Bow Wow Wow's reinvention
Now this - from the early 1960s - is a funny bit of meta-rock: a "Love and Theft" confessional by The Animals.
It tells the story of Bo Diddley and entourage turning up at an Animals show and hearing them covering his songs.
“And I overheard Bo Diddley talkin'
He turned around to the Duchess
And he said, "Hey Duch
What do you think of these young guys doin' our material?"
She said, "I don't know, I only came across here to see
The changin' of the guards and all that jazz"
Well, Bo Diddley looked up at me and he said
With half closed eyes and a smile
He said, "Man...," an' took off his glasses
He said, "Man, that sure is the biggest load of rubbish...
I ever heard in my life"
Sunday, August 11, 2024
sweatin' all over
The foetid stenchwaves of Dingwalls almost reach your nostrils nearly fifty years on!
The Pirates - pub-rocky continuation of Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, as in "Shakin' All Over"
The rendition here (at 5.48 mins in) of that imperishable classic (the first really great English rock'n'roll song?) is a lot less spiky and skeletal than the original record.
But then it's a different guitarist: here, in Dingwalls, in 1977, it's the highly regarded Mick Green, an avowed influence on Wilko Johnson.
The original guitarists were Alan Caddy (rhythm - so he must be responsible for that chopping crystalline riff) and Joe Meretti (lead - the swashbuckling flourishes)
With JK&tP, I have never thought to go further with them than "Shakin' All Over". This is pretty good in the same vein.
The Pirates were almost successful for a moment there in the pub-rocky / punky interregnum
I just listened to this - their second album - almost because of the cover more than anything
To be filed, perhaps, alongside Nine Below Zero
Good Lord, what was the singer thinking with these trousers....
A fairly faithful cover of "Shakin'" by The Guess Who
EverGreen
Talking about Mick Green from about 2.58
In Zaire
How amazing that after over four decades of unhealthy obsession with pop music, you can still come across astounding oddball songs from your...
-
Okay, let's see how things had shifted, in terms of the canon, slightly more than a decade after the 1974 appraisal by the critics of t...
-
Onto the third installment of this series - the NME 's list of the Greatest Albums of All Time, published on October 2 1993. Here, it...
-
I have written before about the Drops Away Syndrome... that thing where artists seem supremely relevant and core-canonic at a particular mo...