Dry Your Fears M8 (sadsack UKpop of the 2000s)

An interesting piece on The Streets's A Grand Don't Come For Free by Fergal Kinney at The Quietus... 

.... it got me thinking about "Dry Your Eyes" and a certain strain of emotionally-frayed post-Britpop... loosely-speaking in the New Wave tradition: observational realism... ordinary blokes and blokettes singing about workaday worries and mundane luvlife miseries...  one of those phases when the weak become heroes, or at least the protagonists, in pop. 

Despite the blokey-ness, or geezer-ness, of The Streets, the bulk of  Mike Skinner's progeny, or fellow-travelers, are women. 

The very first time I heard this it struck me as a post-"Dry Your Eyes" move, and a calculated one most likely (if not by the artist, then the record company). 

 But in the Wiki entry, Mike Skinner doesn't appear in the long, large list of Kate Nash's avowed influences.  

One of those avowed influences is John Cooper Clarke - which I can't quite see but it would bolster this notion of the 2000s wave as New Wave flashback, the reactivation of a tradition of tragicomic verse and grubby realism. 

I can't think of another vocal delivery that is so glottal-stoppy.

Mind you, rather than a female Mike Skinner, Kate Nash could be seen as a post-Lily Allen artist.

In recovery from an amorous setback: 

"See, you messed up my mental health

I was quite unwell

I was so lost back then

But with a little help from my friends

I found the light in the tunnel at the end"

Now right as rain but revenge-minded

"You left me in such a state"  - the emotional bruises still yet to fully fade.

My favorite on the album, "Everything's Just Wonderful" - the title is ironic. 

Distraught and insomniac from the pressures on the modern metropolitan girl - fashion-implanted weight-worries, mortgage-impossibilities

"Do you think, think

Everything, everyone is going mental?

It seems to me we're spiraling

Out of control and it's inevitable

"...It seems to me, we're on all fours

Crawling on our knees, someone help us please

Oh, Jesus Christ, Almighty

Do I feel alright? No, not slightly

Lyrics shift from the personal (worrying about that spag bol for "days and days and days" after eating it) to an existential-political register: 

"Don't you want something else

Something new, than what we got here?

And don't you feel it's all the same

Some sick game, and it's so insincere?

I wish I could change the ways of the world

Make it a nice place

Until that day, I guess we stay

Doing what we do, screwing who we screw

By "The Fear", even Mark Fisher noticed and approved.  

"I don't know what's right and what's real anymore

And I don't know how I'm meant to feel anymore

And when do you think it will all become clear?

'Cause I'm being taken over by the fear

Life's about film stars and less about mothers...

But it doesn't matter 'cause I'm packing plastic

And that's what makes my life so fucking fantastic

And I am a weapon of massive consumption

And it's not my fault, it's how I'm programmed to function"

Lily Allen is addressing the same kind of malaises (personal-amorous and small "p" political) as Florence Shaw,  but in a more pop-forward and lyrically more direct, less artfully fractured, way. (It's one reason - along with his Sleaford Mods admiration - that I have argued that almost alone of contemporary groups, K-punk might have rated Dry Cleaning).

While he had his canon, Mark could always surprise us with a taste swerve - e,g, his fondness for Dido (for similar reasons). Who belongs in this company, I think. 

'White Flag' was one of my favourite pop singles of last year.... Belying her reputation for AOR confectionery, 'White Flag' is a song of desperate love, coming from the thin line between loving dedication and stalker-obsession..... Dido's delivery - almost stilted, lacking in the throaty passion de rigeur in these r and b dominated -times - is refreshingly cool. 'White Flag' forms a neat contrast with 'Life for Rent', the title track of the LP, which sings of the opposite condition: a dissolute inability to commit. It's like Jean Paul Sartre meets Sex and the City. Wandering aimlessly through the hypermarket of the postmodern, fingering all the options but never settling on any one of them, Dido castigates herself for her failure to really engage, to stick at or believe in anything for very long, to make meaningful choices. She concludes that, if this is the case, she 'deserves' nothing, because nothing is really hers"

Probably my favorite bit in the Kinney piece on A Grand Don't Come For Free is when he quotes Skinner discussing "Dry Your Eyes" with his record company and telling them "this is the song that's going to put me on regional radio" 

I actually heard this next song on a regional radio station - indeed, not living in the UK I might never have heard it otherwise. We were driving to Dorset after my brother's funeral, to visit one of his favorite places on Earth, Swanage, scene of our boyhood holidays. Perhaps my state of mind  made me vulnerable to its AOR charms? But no - t's a gorgeous song - I love the curling melody of the chorus, the way KT Tunstall's voice seems to shift and catch the light.

 

It's not actually as melancholic as other songs in this selection - the stance is resilience...  battered a bit by life, getting older but with nothing figured out as yet. 

It's that wistful whistle that places it in this company! 

(Somehow I have never got it together to listen to anything else by KT). 

I suppose we ought to have some Skinner... 

This, and "Blinded By the Lights", were my favorites on A Grand

But overall, I wasn't taken with the concept / narrative. And the sound seemed Happy Shopper cheapo  - shabby and spindly - compared to Original Pirate Material. 

Probably that very flimsiness is what enabled "Dry Your Eyes" to cross over so massively: its Jona Lewie-ness  put it across on Chiltern Radio and the like. Radio 2-ready from the off.  

As opposed to the first album which rhythmically and sonically was closer to the sound of the, well, streets, rather than the sound of the suburbs. 

This is probably the bleakest song on Original Pirate Material, because it has a memory of better days, a higher way of life, taunting at it.

The prototype for "Dry Your Eyes" in some ways, much better though

Winding up my selection  -  mostly stuff I like or love -  here is my favorite album of whatever year it was: the s/t debut of The Good, the Bad and The Queen. 

I described all this stuff as post-Britpop... and Lily Allen and Damon Albarn's supergroop fit that in two senses:

1. It's Britpop corrected - multi-racialised in sound, with Jamaica at its core (lover's rock in Allen's case, dub and roots with TGTBaTQ) and Africa too through Tony Allen's contributions to the latter.

2. I always like to contrast Damon's affect in TGTBaTQ with Blur - how he carried himself.  The perky,  perpendicular cheeky-chap persona of "Parklife" is replaced by a slumped bleariness. There's a documentary from around this time in which Damon appears - he's unshaven, he mumbles, seems vaguely downcast,  and is clad in a drab-colored hoodie. You can practically smell the stale weedsmoke.  This album likewise captures a man sagging into middle age, looking out at a crumbling and stagnant society, an England that's no longer Swinging Again... where the NuLab initial excitement has long since soured... 

"A stroppy little island of mixed-up people" 

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Bearing in mind that I didn't live in not-so-Great Britain for the entirety of the 2000s (well, except for the summer of 2002, when I came over to do Rip It Up research), I must have missed a LOT of Sadsack UKpop of that era.,,, 

Nominations please!

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Ed suggests Adele's "Chasing Pavements", pointing to the Anglicism of the title. 

Can't really hear it as being part of this company  - the song seems too dramatic, retro-soul, pop-classicist. Sonically there's not that sense of exact-same-size-as-life.  But I remember my mum really liked Adele at this point, i.e. before she lost all the weight, partly because she seemed like an ordinary person plopped in the middle of pop. 

Anonymous suggests this by Jamie T, an artist I have never heard (not living in the UK) and only very faintly heard of

The frail vocal tones reminded me of Calvin Harris's "I'm Not Alone" which feels like it kinda belongs in this zone while not having the mundane mise en scene particularly 

It also has the glottal-stop chorus, which creates a sort of just chatting not singing feeling, and a gulped emotionality. 

"I Wanna Be Your Dog" - translated into English

 

"(I Wanna Love You Like A) Mad Dog" was actually released in 1969, the same year as The Stooges's debut. 

One-man band vibes even though it's not a one-man band

Flipside - extraordinarily pithy, just 37 seconds long - "Greasy Haired Woman"

Like this title of the B-side of the follow up single - "Rampant on the Rage"

Staveley Makepeace and Lieutenant Pigeon - the Parliament-Funkadelic of Brit novelty-pop and sub-glam tat

Did they intend to out-oldtimey Mungo Jerry? 

Actually appears they were on this tradjazz-skiffle-ragtime-oompah-whathaveyou meets music-hall-novelty-act vibe before "In the Summertime" annexed the number one spot for months. 

Seems like something World of Twist and Denim would have made a talisman and totem out of. 

Ah well, of course, this retrospective was compiled by Bob Stanley. 

 

Getting quite... not experimental exactly, more studio-shenanigans-y

The missing link between United States of America and Darts. 

Like if Hotlegs had never become 10cc but had tried to do the 10cc-ish studio-wizzardry within Hotlegs and recording in their front living room.

Also reminds me a bit of The Scaffold 

Lieutenant Pigeon was the side-project, but scored vastly in comparison  - "Mouldy Old Dough" reached #1 in the UK, Belgium, New Zealand, and Ireland. 

Not just a one-hit wonder either - this was a smaller chart success. 

"Written by Nigel Fletcher and Rob Woodward and first produced by them under the name of their other band, Stavely Makepeace, "Mouldy Old Dough" was recorded in the front room of Woodward's semi-detached house in Coventry, and featured his mother Hilda Woodward on piano, in a boogie-woogie, honky-tonk, ragtime style. The only lyrics, 'sung' by Fletcher, are the growled title "Mouldy Old Dough" and "Dirty Old Man". When asked by Fletcher what those words meant, their author, Woodward, said he had no idea.

It is the only British number one single to feature a mother and son.

Originally released in early 1972, it flopped initially. But picked up in Belgium and used on a current affairs programme, it became a hit there, reaching number one in the Belgian singles chart. Decca Records, encouraged by this success, re-released it in the UK, and with the backing of then BBC Radio 1 DJ Noel Edmonds, it became a hit there, and spent four weeks at the top of the UK Singles Chart in October 1972, selling 790,000 copies. 

"Mouldy Old Dough" (the title being an adaptation of the 1920s jazz phrase, "vo-de-o-do") became the second biggest selling UK single of the year, behind The Band of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards' bagpipe version of "Amazing Grace"."

Fascinating interview with Lieutenant Pigen (including the mum), conducted with quite cutting hardness -  cruelty almost  - by a young Chris Tarrant, and revealing the bathetic fruits of pop fame. 

As recommended by Doug Keeley in comments, a stompy fuzzer of a B-side (flip to "Mouldy Old Dough"

It's rather short, though!

Stretched out to 10 minutes it might been a West Midlands twin tune to Faust's "It's A Rainy Day" 

mouth music (vout to lunch)

 

Non-vout but a lot of fun: 

Cale versus Cale

Flicked past this mellow fellow's elpees in the racks so many times over the years, always faintly intrigued, but never enough to listen 

This is moderately exciting (if you can push the thought of Eric Clapton out of your mind)

An influence on Jason of Spacemen 3 / Spiritualized, probably because it legimitized having a pale, murmured, barely-there singing mode in a genre that usually favors the biting and rough-edged

This is a cover of the first song on the first J.J. Cale album -  but given a different title. 

Is that actually a drum machine, or even a preset on a keyboard? Mouse-kiss soft, as rhythmic pulses go. 

The cover of the debut is evocative of that era - I'm getting a Leon Russell whiff maybe, or America

Anything else worth bothering with? 

The other Cale couldn't be more different - John Cale's much more harsh-toned as a singer, with zero blues influence. 

(I say the other Cale but it is really the other "John Cale" because J.J.'s first J stands for John. Oddly the second J doesn't stand for anything, as his actual second name is Weldon.) 

People say of John Cale's solo albums of the early-to-mid  '70s that they were among the only punk-anticipating excitements around. I've never really got to grips with them

Vintage Violence certainly sounds punky as titles go, but my - admittedly faint - memory was of something rather baroque and fussily-arranged. Or is that Paris 1919 I'm thinking of... 

It's the three Island albums that were influential on the likes of Howard Devoto

Actually that one is slightly bluesy. 

I liked that one - odd gnarly sounds swirling around in the mix. Maybe it's time to take the plunge, properly. 

Other stuff, though... it's got that mid-70s stodge rock quality....  not a real band sound, a bunch of session players and famous friends...   like a Welsh Warren Zevon maybe. 

Rock critics love this kind of thing, of course

Talking of famous friends, I'll tell you something - this is a big heap o' nothin'

Talking proto-punk - the image here is certainly quite Lou Reed-y 

Didn't he kill a chicken onstage or something? 

Apparently it was already dead. 

(Rock's mini-tradition of fowl play onstage - and offstage - Alice Cooper, John Cale, Ozzy Osbourne)

Off his rocker

This is a disconcerting album cover 

As is this

Now I do love this album though, which reminds me of Peter Skellern - like if Skellern had undergone a transformation as stark as the leap from The Walker Brothers to Scott  4. 

Actually what it reminds me of, even more, is Richard Harris's "MacArthur Park" crossed with Nilsson 

Didn't realise this was his second take on this song

Now that really does sound like Peter Skellern

It also had a bit of the sad-sack quality of Andy Fairweather-Low (another Welshman) on "Wide-eyed and Legless"

Which I love - loved it even at the time

The soundscape on this is almost like Cale doing for himself what he did for Nico

Definite Scott Walker circa Tilt and the pounding-lumps-of-meat album vibes here. 

Hark at these lyrics:

She was so afraid

Since her mother, white with time

Told her, she was a failure

She was so ashamed

Of everything she said

And everything she did for her mother, white with time

Everything around her mother, white with time

And dirty

Her mother was greedy with dirt

Greedy

Then she heard choir of angels

Singing choirs of angels

Greedy angels

Spitting glory on her failure

That stardust of failure

As if it was medicine that didn't work, anyway

Anyway

The windows they were closed

And the midwives had locked their doors

They didn't understand

And after all what was there to understand?

But the angels, cheer choirs of angels

In a friendship

No, more than a friendship

It was a marriage, a marriage made in the grave

The shivering night

The searching of the river continued

The bullet of searchlight

That searchlight found her so cockleshell and sure

Sick and tired of what she saw

But cockleshell and sure

Sure of what the world had offered a tired soul

From Istanbul to Madrid

To Reykjavik, to Bonn

To Leipzig, to Leningrad

To Shanghai, Pnonm Penh

All so that it would be a stronger world

A strong though loving world 

To die in

Fuck me, where was his head at? What was he on? 

Actually, lyrics-wise, that reminds me more of Climate of Hunter

More tortured poet bizniz

The children are all leaving school today

Mama said, don't worry, I'll be back one day

The blue men in uniform smiled and waved goodbye

She was hiding those tears in her eyes

Roll up the history books, burn the chairs

Set fire to anything, set fire to the air...

Cancel the day, cancel the night

Cancel the day, cancel the night

'Cause who could be watching when she steals and runs away

Full of hysterical laughter, and say

Mama, mama

I've left school today

I hope I get to see you in that funny school far away

But those gentlemen in blue, and those in grey

Say I'll never, never see mama again

'Cause she took those lives in her hands

Yes, she took all those lives in her hands....

Bajeezus

Wiki provides context:

Cale described his mood while making Music for a New Society as "grotesque." In an interview with Melody Maker shortly after the album's release, Cale said, "That album was agony. It was like method acting. Madness. Excruciating. I just let myself go. It became a kind of therapy, a personal exorcism. The songs are mostly about regret and misplaced faith." 

In What's Welsh for Zen? (1999), Cale further commented that "There were some examples where songs ended up so emaciated they weren't songs any more. What I was most interested in was the terror of the moment... It was a bleak record all right, but it wasn't made to make people jump out of windows."

The bright lights in the eyes of the ones you love will tell us nothing

Like the scars of imagination

The scars of imagination

The bright lights in the eyes of the ones you love will tell us nothing

Except that we're the thoughtless kind

 

Ooh looky here - another version of "Close Watch", for the 2016 M.FANS project, which as Gutterplekz in Comments informs was a remake of Music for A New Society. 

Here's Cale on how the project was triggered - or rather, disrupted and redirected -  by the death of Lou Reed

"Losing Lou [too painful to understand] forced me to upend the entire recording process and begin again...a different perspective - a new sense of urgency to tell a story from a completely opposite point of view - what was once sorrow, was now a form of rage. A fertile ground for exorcism of things gone wrong and the realization they are unchangeable. From sadness came the strength of fire!!!"

All this burning torturedness.... doesn't serenity, or at least stolidity, come with age? 

Actually listening, rather than "strength of fire" I'm getting more a kind of ashen exhaustion...  dying-but-still-faintly-glowing embers. 

Using various voice-processing technologies - Auto-Tune, Melodyne, Harmony Engine? 

I rather like it. And you have to admire his attempts to stay modern. 

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Talking of staying modern... one of my favorite tidbits about John Cale is that in the early 2000s he got really into LA gangsta rap and the Dre-style G-funk sound, 50 Cent, that kind of thing. He did an album influenced by the rap and R&B sounds of that time.

I always chuckle over a quote he gave to Uncut, something like: "speaking as a man, I like Snoop Dogg's style"

You can just hear the "speaking as a man" in the gravelly Welsh accent. 

He would have been 60-plus then.

Before Stylo brings it up, yes, he produced Happy Mondays. 

Also Patti Smith's Horses - it wasn't a happy experience. 

Nico, the Stooges obviously. Modern Lovers too.

And he was lined up as a potential producer for the debut Pop Group album - a meeting took place,  but the clean-livin' Bristol boys were a bit taken aback by his habits.

Come to think of it, John Cale ought to have covered J.J. Cale's most famous song.  

Actually he didn't need to, did he? 

Interesting to ponder what Y might have sounded like if Dennis Bovell hadn't got his hands on it... 

I suppose Spacemen 3 / Jason must be unique in being influenced by both Cales (via Velvets)

Well that's a funny coincidence - I had no idea when embarking on this blogpost that John Cale has a new album out soon, POPtical Illusion

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Ah I misremembered the Cale-on-Snoop quote. This is from something Uncut did with Cale in 2006:

Desert Island Disc

Tha Dogg Pound--Call Iz Active

This record is different from all Snoop's others, it's got more personalities in there. He doesn't sing all the time, there are different characters that pop up. They work in crews, four or five people involved at one time. It's a discussion group, in a funny kind of way. I saw him the other day on TV, and he was talking about his sponsorship of football teams; he had 2000 members already. It's funny because Al Sharpton was complaining about how rappers should contribute more to the community. I like Snoop's style, as a man. He's the one that got away. the one that did something.

Album of the Year

Kokane--Back 2 Tha Clap

One of the originators of G-Unit finally gets his turn. His take on the whole West Coast Gangsta Hop is much more soulful than gangsta, especially the track "When It Rains, It Pours", a heartbreaking song that most uncharacteristically ends with a comment about his mother.

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We end as we started - with "Cocaine" / Kokane. 

Dial-a-Disco

An advert in Sounds, April 1983. Love the drawing of the punkette with her piercings and badges. 

"Outside London, 24 hours a day, except during the season's major cricket matches, when it's available at the end of play"

Even without the summertime disruption caused by cricket, this doesn't seem the most compelling of offers to the pop-loving public: "all your favorite singles" but that translates to "four different songs" during the week, going up to five at the weekend. 

How much did they charge per minute? 

Easy to picture parents up and down the land with steam coming out of their ears when they opened the  phone bill.  

I could find very little information about Discline online.

But in the 1960s a service called Dial-A-Disc was offered by what was then known as the GPO - General Post Office . 

Same issue with the cricket competing for limited phoneline bandwidth!

Excerpts from a Retroscoop post about Dial-A-Disc:

"Dial-a-Disc was trialed first in Leeds, springing to life at 6 pm on the 7th July 1966. It ran for just under a month, before being hailed as an outstanding success! The service was started again on the 8th December 1966, again only in the Leeds area, but it was rolled out to the rest of the country gradually over a four year period.  On-demand music streaming had arrived. But Hi-Fidelity it wasn’t.

"Transmitted in Mono, with the bandwidth heavily squeezed, the music was accompanied by the obligatory background crackle and static hiss generated by sending the audio down miles of copper cable. But despite its shortcomings in musical quality, it was a truly magical experience – and one that had an indefinable charm about it....

"The service ran during the ‘cheap rate’ hours from 6 pm in the evening to 6 am the following morning every weekday, and all day on Sundays.  Initially only the top 7 records in the charts were played on the service, with a new record being played every day. This was soon increased to the top 8, with two records being played on Sundays. Eventually, the service expanded in its latter years to include the whole of the top 20.... 

"People who used Dial-a-Disc have fond memories of the quirkiness of the service.  Some individuals recall that on some occasions they could sometimes hear other people talking on the line during the gaps between the end and start of the records. This appears to have been more of a problem when listening to Dial-a-Disc via public phone boxes. In some inner-city booths, youths would dial into the service specifically to chat to other local users during the quiet spots. One woman from Birmingham claimed to have met her future husband in this way!"

Like fiddling the lecky or your gas meter, crafty kids found a bunch of different ways of getting to hear the pop tunes for free. 

However this one doesn't sound very satisfying: 

"Listening to the record in installments.  The GPO allowed users to listen to the first 10 seconds of the recording for free before you had to insert money into the coin box. Users would ring the service multiple times until they had managed to listen to the whole disc. Tedious, but achievable."

But wouldn't it just replay the first 10 seconds of any given song again and again? 

Another juicy, yet also somewhat puzzling and unconvincing snippet:

"There was another problem caused by the service that particularly affected small towns and villages that only had one public phone box. Clusters of youths began to hold what the press began to term ‘telephone-a-gogos’, where dozens of teens pooled their pocket money and hogged call boxes for hours on end listening and dancing to the same record over and over."

Hmmm... look,  I know people in the sticks were culturally deprived - I can remember what it was like living in a smallish town in the semi-country in the 1970s  - but really, would kids cluster around a public telephone to hear pop music? What is the broadcast strength and range of a phone receiver not held to the ear but aloft for a group of people to hear?  Fairly feeble, I'd say - and then the level of fidelity would be barely existent. And talking about capacity - "dozens of teens" were squeezing themselves into a phone box, were they? 

For a moment there I started to wonder if this blogpost was made-up.

"Telephone-a-gogos" is good. Alernative pun: dial-a-disco party. 

The second half of this also strained credulity:

"My ‘love affair’ with Dial-a-Disc occurred during the summer of 1979, where I would often dial in to hear the latest sounds. However, the first quarterly bill brought my happy ‘affair’ to an abrupt end.  I did attempt to call from a Phone box on one occasion, but a bunch of local yobs ran round the box with a roll of masking tape and sealed me in. Luckily, a passer-by spotted me and managed to get me out."

Yeah, pull the other one, pal.

Ditto for your story about the mate who, heading home drunk from a party, got in a phone booth and dialed up "I Will Survive", then fell asleep. Only to wake in the morning and find a long, irritated queue of people in the morning waiting to use the phone,  but too typically English and polite to disturb the occupant. 

Ah, so -  as the reference "the summer of 1979" indicates -  Discline would appear to have just been a rebranding of Dial-A-Disc, which had carried on through the 1970s  and under its new name would make it to the other end of  the '80s,  finally winding up in around 1991.  

 

vinyl mysticism

At Washington Post, an interesting video-illustrated feature on how vinyl records are made today 

Interesting, even though I have almost no interest - and zero participation - in the Vinyl Revival

Can't remember when I last bought a new LP ....  and buying a second-hand, from back-in-the-long-ago elpee has become a vanishingly infrequent occurrence too.  

I've almost fully shifted over to streaming... the logic of ultra-convenience has vanquished me...  the sound is good enough for most situations....  It's so much easier than having to sift through my collection, which is not as well-organised as it should be.

And so all those LPs I hunted down over the decades, the CDs I got sent or bought... they mostly just sit there. 

Still, even though it's all in the past for me now, the vinyl record remains one of the things that makes me feel a little bit mystical... even after having the production process demystified in that WashPost article.... because even after seeing all the stages of the manufacturing, I still don't have a rational understanding of how vinyl records work.... and consequently continue to find it more than a little magical. 

This applies to any record in any genre really, but for some reason particularly stands out if I play an LP of avant-garde electronic music, something I bought back in my second-hand record shop haunting days... or in recent years, that I've borrowed from the amazing record library at the place I work, so I'd be playing it in on my turntable in order to burn it onto a CD-R.  

These avant-electronic / musique concrete recordings are radically spatialized, teeming with minute textural details, sounds darting around the stereofield....  

Their almost glossy sound jumps out of the speakers.  

And I'm always like: "how do they get that into these narrow grooves... engrave all that information and space into these tiny furrows gouged into slabs of petrochemical matter?"

"How can all of that sound-and-space get extracted on demand via what - on the face of it -  would appear to be a crude electro-mechanical process: the friction of a stylus - this pointy shard of mineral - dragged through that incredibly constricted furrow?"

It still seems magic to me....  it defies comprehension...  it's a real "can't believe your ears" situation.

A mundane miracle.

And then to realise further that my decent but quite old hi-fi is extracting a tiny portion of what a record is capable of releasing, if it were to be put through some really advanced, superior, high-end equipment. 

When I did a piece on the revival of interest in '70s underground disco that was going on in the 2000s with Body & Soul and so forth, I interviewed David Mancuso. After  a plate full of pasta at a local restaurant, he took me round to a friend's apartment in the East Village, where this old Loft believer had allowed Mancuso to stash his ultra-expensive stereo. 

He had to assemble parts of it and also let it warm up before playing a record. 

The stylus alone cost something like $5,000, a multiple of my entire hi-fi's cost.  The cartridge even more.

Memory is hazy, but I believe the turntable's platter was suspended in some kind of special cocooned space, held in place by springs maybe, so as to protect the playback from the effect of external vibrations.  

The speakers were large, chest-height things. 

I thought how generous and loyal and self-sacrificing it was of Mancuso's friend to allow such a large part of their apartment - which wasn't huge - be so dominated by this musical machinery. 

Finally, he was ready to play some records - one was Van Morrison's Astral Weeks, a favorite of mine, rather than a disco record. And it truly was incredible, the shimmering, fluttering depth and detail in the playback, the sheer sonic presence. 

I started to see how you could go down that path (which can become a tragic obsession as with this story of an audiophile fiend, who more or less ruined his life in pursuit of perfect sound) 

The other tune Mancuso played was, if memory serves, this Loft classic by Holy Ghost Inc., who I know for their fabulous hardcore-era tracks, but this is a wafty ambient house era track:

Anecdotally, over the years I've noticed that most music critics I've know have had a fairly crappy hi-fi - sometimes I'd be surprised by the poor quality of tapes they'd do for me. Probably it was the case that all their money was going on records, rather than the mechanism for releasing their musical content - they were greedy for new sounds. 

Conversely, the people I've known who were obsessed with hi-fidelity often had really small record collections - and distinctly square, conservative taste. 

There's been some examples recently of lifelong vinyl fiends shedding their lifetime's accumulations, or preparing to do- perhaps sensing that time is running out, "you can't take it with you"

Maybe it's time for me too, to divest - or at least, to undertake a radical thinning down. 

Practically speaking, I'm not getting use out of this stuff. Someone in Japan or Argentina would get more buzz of owning such-and-such a techno 12-inch or postpunk obscurity.  Maybe it's time to strike while the iron is hot. While the demand is out there still.

But the idea of the effort involved - the expenditure of time and energy - makes me all weak at the knees and I put it off again. 

Perhaps I will end up interred in a gigantic burial mound...  shelves lining the vaulted interior, crammed with LPs and box sets.... my mummified body draped across a huge pile of unsleeved vinyl - like Smaug lying on his treasure in The Hobbit... 

More demystification of the process

snippet on the vagaries of vinyl science, from Kevin Shields, interviewed by Taylor Parkes for tQ

"So when you're making a record, it's a hard thing... different cuts of the record sound different, the kind of vinyl has an effect.

"I mean, what the needle looks like is a snowplough, because there's always dust in the air and the grooves have all got shit in them, and the needle just throws all that out the way, ploughing through it. 

"So depending on the vinyl and how heavy it is and how dirty it is, the needle can be dancing and jumping as it goes... so you get all those variations in the sound. "

do the hokey cokey (hell / heaven)

 

Of the three, Arthur Brown is perhaps the least hokey

It must have been genuinely alarming for parents and middle-of-the-roaders to see this witch-doctor prancing in the Top of the Pop studio, fringed with flames.  

Taunting the squares in their sitting rooms: 

"You fought hard and you saved and earned

But all of it's going to burn...

You've been living like a little girl

In the middle of your little world

Also, this is 1968 - riots and sit-ins and disorder in the streets. "Burn baby burn!"

It's like a frightfully English mummer show / Medieval carny type version of the Doors's Dionysianism (keyboard-dominant sound too)

That strange, hip-dislocating jive Arthur B does at one point! The demonic laughter! 

Of course those three do not exhaust the rock thematics of Hell, the Devil, Satan, etc

Huge amounts more in the metal area

Hmmm, doing the Stones or Sabbath seems too obvious

What else? 

I was about to say Killing Joke were an genuinely infernal band (before they shlocked out)

And then saw that actually have a song on this topic, or near it 

Revelations is the ungodly peak 

I assume "pandys" is some kind of reference to pandemonium in its original / literal meaning 

Probably crops up a lot in soul and country and reggae and such

Ah, how could I forget?  Not hokey at all this, absolutely terrifying. I tried to listen to this album in the dark when I first got it, but had to turn the lights back on. 

Had a very pleasant conversation with La Galas in, I think, late '86, interviewing her in cafe in Queensway.