Ghost Dance- Gathering Dust

 

 Ghost Dance: still waiting for the last train…

 

 

Another one from the archives…!

 

 

Found in a Kemptown charity shop for 99p, this is a compilation of Ghost Dance’s first three EPs, and I already have everything on here, but I’m a completist aren’t I. Plus it’s nice to have everything on one album as my original singles are all quite worn by now, and there are brilliant Spinal Tap worthy sleevenotes from appropriately-named producer Bill Spectre, though the tracks he didn’t produce are the ones that have the best sound on this album.

  What can I say about Ghost Dance? They were I think probably the first band I fell in love with, though I swiftly fell out of love with them after the period represented here, which is only one year. Their second single was one of the first that I bought, early in 1986, and it was definitely a major part of the soundtrack to my early teenage years. It is a source of major regret that I never managed to see them live, though I nearly did twice, but I stupidly gave in to my parents’ 10.30 curfew and so missed them both times. But I painstakingly copied out their logo in felt tip pen, intending to have it painted on my leather jacket if I ever managed to get one, and had a considerable crush on lead singer Anne-Marie Hurst. She had previously been in first generation second-string goth band Skeletal Family, and had left them in 1985 when they signed a major label deal- her replacement was named Katrina I believe, she was blonde and they went rubbish shortly afterwards. Gary Marx- surely the unsung and unassuming ur-guitarist of gothic rock- had meanwhile just left the Sisters of Mercy, and had a load of songs he’d written for that band left lying around. They hooked up with Paul ‘Etch’ Etchell, former bassist with the Citron Girls (no, me neither), and a drum machine called Pandora, Dr Avalanche’s kid sister by the sound of things. Operating out of Keighley, they surfed the second generation goth wave alongside the Mission and Fields of the Nephilim, but were overtly a pop band from the start. Exhilaratingly uncomplicated and shallow, they gave the kids what they wanted- anthemic, catchy tunes you could dance to- and had just enough of a melodramatic, melancholy edge in their music to satisfy the sorrowful, romantic stirrings of the adolescent soul. 

  This collection starts with the lead track of their first single, ‘River of no Return.’ It’s classic autumnal goth-pop, from the high-in-the-mix chiming guitar riff to Anne-Marie’s curiously strident vocals, which almost recall the chick from Shocking Blue, another band I loved around this time. She mutters marvellously meaningless gothic clichés over a minimal bassline, and on the line “I can see you’re getting scared,” a scream rings out in the background. There’s a breakdown section after the second chorus; my copy jumps on this track too.

  ‘Celebrate’ was later re-worked for Ghost Dance’s debut LP proper, the disastrous major label, mainstream-pop crossover bid Stop the World. Here it’s another great combination of, er, chiming guitar riffs, low-in-the-mix vocals saying absolutely nothing and a relentless, less-is-more drum machine beat. There’s a 2-bar distorted bass solo after the second chorus that then gradually builds up again, and the whole song has a perfect chicken-dancing goth two-step rhythm.

  ‘Heart full of Soul’ has a classic chorus-plus-distortion guitar sound and is far better than the Yardbirds’ original in my highly subjective opinion. Everything is deconstructed down to its bare essentials, in a way that owes more to lumpen glam than punk, and as a result is ten times as powerful. Anne-Marie’s straining, yelping vocal is very sexy in a goth girl next door, Kim Wilde kind of way. ‘Can the Can’ is more perfect gothic bubblegum, but done completely straight and deadpan in spite of the absurd “eagle meets the tiger” lyrics- no more absurd than Ghost Dance’s own though, I suppose. Again, Anne-Marie comes over very sexy on the breakdown section, and does a fine scream, though she’s definitely more Joan Jett than Suzi Quatro.

  ‘Last Train’ is taken from the third EP, and a change of producer definitely shows in the clearer, crisper sound. This album is generally quite muffled all the way through, and I’m not sure if that’s due to the quality of the vinyl or the recording. Anyway, there’s a single-string Sisters of Mercy guitar riff, a four-square, bass-driven verse, and then the riff kicks back in for the chorus. The “last train” itself works both as mythic archetype and a social-realist reference to the actual last train from say, Leeds to Sowerby Bridge that your average Ghost Dance fan may find himself running for after the show. Indeed, he’ll probably be worrying about missing it while they’re playing this song, and may have to leave early to catch it, cursing his parents- so the hookline “take me anywhere but home” resonates particularly strongly. Going to gigs by train is probably an experience quite particular to growing up in small northern valley towns; incidentally, the Sisters wrote quite a few train songs as well, making it something of a classic northern gothic theme.

  Also from the third EP, ‘A Deeper Blue’ is built around a descending, circular riff and a surprisingly melodic chorus, probably stolen from ‘Blue Turk’ by Alice Cooper, providing more evidence of Ghost Dance’s glam rock roots. The hardcore punk-goth bridge section is definitely more Skeletal Family than Sisters derived. There’s also a fine, almost FM-rock guitar solo, and a neo-psychedelic fade-out.

  Side two opens with two of the band’s earliest numbers. ‘Yesterday Again’ is an old Skeletal Family song, also covered by Jude the Obscure. It’s a classic minimalist goth ballad, built on a pulsing, one-note synthesiser bassline that recalls the Sisters’ ‘Afterhours,’ a heavily echoed, minor-key guitar riff set on repeat and a ‘China Girl’ glam descend chorus. A break-up song that positively wallows in glorious self-pity, it’s wonderfully simplistic, even though by the end you expect it to turn into the Sisters’ ‘Some kind of Stranger’ at any moment- you can easily sing one song over the other… Roxy Music’s ‘Both Ends Burning’ is rendered as a straight-ahead rocker, with the drum machine set on autopilot and Marx playing the same three chords repeatedly over the top, the glam descend once again. It works though, and perfectly illustrates Ghost Dance’s seductive naivety. Despite the various members’ past experience in several successful groups, there’s a local-band amateurishness throughout proceedings, a DIY, primitive ethos that’s almost Billy Childish-like in theory, if not in actual sound. I guess that you could get away with that kind of thing in the 1980s, in a way that you certainly couldn’t now.

  Some- but not all- of that innocence had evaporated by the time of the band’s third single. ‘Grip of Love’ may be the band’s finest moment, a perfectly-conceived pop song with a great galloping rhythm and cleaner production than the previous two EPs. By now Richard Steele had joined on second guitar, and so the chorus-distortion main riff is underpinned by chiming 12-string. Yet its b-side, ‘Where Spirits Fly’ is a curiously charmless affair; driving and dynamic, it’s effective but formulaic. Of course, all of Ghost Dance’s songs are formulaic, but this one is too slick so as to sound almost cynical. It’s not a bad song- it was an old Sisters number that they never recorded- but it’s not one of my favourites. The album ends with ‘Radar Love,’ another cover that surpasses the stodgy original. There’s a driving bassline, a cute squeal from Anne-Marie, a top flight drum machine solo and then one of the great low E down the neck guitar scrapes on record. It jumps at the end though.

  After this, Anne-Marie went blonde, they replaced Pandora with a mere mortal (John Grant), and produced one last great EP- though I disliked it at the time- before signing to Chrysalis and re-emerging in 1989 as an AOR pop-rock outfit denying any gothic connection whatsoever. They lost all their old fans, failed to gain any new ones, flopped miserably and split up- though goth was dead in the water by the beginning of the 90s anyway, killed by the double-whammy of grunge and acid house. Etch briefly joined the Mission, and Richard Steele ended up in big-in-America ‘90s glam-rockers Spacehog, alongside members of cult Leeds fellow travellers the Dust Devils. Anne-Marie has recently been singing with a reformed Skeletal Family, having apparently spent the intervening years living the normal life, having kids and so on. And of the whereabouts of the great Gary Marx, I know nowt.

  This stuff has aged surprisingly well. It owes more to Kim Wilde, Joan Jett and the Sweet than Joy Division, and could still show the likes of The Killers a thing or too. It’s just classic pop music, gothic bubblegum indeed that still has me in the grip of love.

 

(edit: Etch also played in minimally-monikered and mightily-mulletted, but actually quite good on their day Bradford Metallers Loud, while Gary Marx can be found here: www.garymarx.com

And see also: www.ghostdance.co.uk )

Julian Cope- Dark Orgasm

 

Note: okay, I admit it, I’ve hit that typical first-few-months-in bloggers slump. I know I ain’t written anything on here for donkey’s. There are various reasons, all interlinked; poverty, apathy, depression and other work… for one thing, lack of money has meant that I haven’t actually bought any new release albums this year at all, and I haven’t been out to see a show since White Hills in April. There’s still plenty of stuff I could be writing about, and one day I will get round to that major critical re-appraisal of Hot Chocolate’s early back catalogue, but in the meantime, just to keep things ticking over, I’m going to dig out a few record reviews from my archives. Starting with this baby, from way back in December 2005…

 

  You wait years for a new proper Julian Cope album, and then two come along at once, etc… But then, what is a proper Julian Cope album these days? Both Dark Orgasm  and Citizen Cain’d have more in common with Cope’s Brain Donor heavy metal side-project than with the likes of Fried or Peggy Suicide. Dark Orgasm is “dedicated to freedom and equality for women,” and advocates death to monotheism, corporations, invisible gods and organised religion. It also shouts “Fuck the Pope” for good measure. All noble aims; the trouble is that Cope’s on such a moral crusade that the music seems to be secondary. So long as it’s loud, aggressive and anti-social, he’s happy, and it seems there’s nothing in his mission statement about not worshipping at the shrine of The Stooges, MC5, Van Halen, Black Sabbath, Blue Cheer and Kiss. But Cope is not a natural hard rock frontman- he only knows one metal riff, and his voice just isn’t suited for screaming and hollering this way. Forsaking the West Coast Psych-pop melodies and Syd Barrett-like observations that he has a gift for, Cope flounders and bellows in a swamp of distortion and clichés, hoping that sheer righteousness and volume will get him through.

  That said, it’s not all bad. ‘Zoroaster’ fades in slowly, a deep descending riff gathering force beneath rumbling stormclouds, literally- we hear sound effects of thunder and rain before Cope keens in, taking on that monolithic Christian desert god called ‘God’ one more time. Giving Catholics, Protestants and Muslims equal stick, he cries hail to the numbskull, the Godless and Horny, in a track that sounds like a beefed-up descendant of his classic Jehovahkill album. ‘White Bitch comes Good’ is like some FM-rock melodic metal anthem as played by cavemen, Cope paying tribute to the Norse goddess of the dead, Hel, re-awakening the dead and celebrating the Pagan underworld as opposed to the Christian Heaven up above.

  ‘She’s Gotta Ring on her Finger (and another one through her nose)’ rides a slow, seedy bass riff, backed up by Tony Iommi-like lead guitar halfway through the first verse. It’s pro-woman, anti-patriachy and anti-Islam in particular; dangerous sentiments for dangerous times, and expressed with a deliberate lack of subtlety or finesse. ‘Mr Invasion’ at least picks up the pace, attacking the American/ Western/ Capitalist/ Christian occupation of Iraq over what sounds like a collision of Stooges and early Blue Oyster Cult, with the emphasis unfortunately on the latter. ‘Nothing to Lose except my Mind’ sounds like it’s recorded live, either that or it’s just got crowd noise overdubbed all over it, which is more likely, given when was the last time Cope played stadiums- never- and it’s a gimmick used by many of his fave sixties bands. Anyway, this is a big, ugly, plodding heavy metal anthem to taking drugs.

  ‘I Found a New Way to Love Her’ is the first disc’s best track, combining slow, heavy, descending metal riffs with a reverb-ed organ, harmonica and, crucially, a tune in a catchy minor key with Cope actually singing rather than growling and barking. And it contains another so-sick-it’s great Cope lyric: “Just like Ken Bigley, I’m losing my head on account of you.” Oh yeah, it’s another attack on religion, patriarchy, American imperialism and all that. ‘I Don’t Wanna Grow Back’ is good too- more organ, less gonzoid guitars, and another minor-key melody, albeit quite a formulaic one, bringing us to the end of the first CD.

  CD 2 is one long, twenty-one minute epic, ‘The Death and Resurrection Show.’ I actually prefer this on the whole to disc one, it’s surprisingly melodic in places, especially the “let me run my fingers through your mind” section, and deeply psychedelic. It’s like Neil Diamond trapped inside a grunge Amon Duul II, with Cope doing his full Tamworth shaman, Jim Morrison bit over the top. Not sure what he’s going on about, but disc 2 pretty much saves the album. On the whole, this caterwauling hippy nonsense isn’t what I fell in love with Cope for, but as it’s him I can just about let him get away with it.

  Just.

Side Trips #1

Former Fall guitarist Ben Pritchard was a contestant on Ken Bruce’s Popmaster quiz on Radio 2 this morning, phoning in as a regular member of the public rather than as any kind of a celebrity. However, in the way of informing listeners of callers’ interesting jobs or hobbies, Ken did bring up the fact that ‘Ben from Bury’ had been a member of The Fall, and offered the opinion that his six-year stint was pretty good going, considering.

The guitarist, who played on Are You Missing Winner, County on the Click and Fall Heads Roll between February 2001 and May 2006, diplomatically described his time in the band as ‘an experience,’ which enabled him to meet ‘a lot of cool people’ and see parts of the world he wouldn’t otherwise have visited. Pritchard was actually sacked from The Fall in 2004, then swiftly re-instated, before resigning due to ‘irreconcilable differences’ with Mark E Smith, then re-joining, and then walking out along with the rest of the then-current line-up four dates into a disastrous 2006 US tour. When asked if he was currently playing in a band, Ben stuttered anxiously in the manner of a traumatised survivor of the Somme being asked if he was going to re-enlist, muttering something about playing along with records in a special room at home and trying to ‘improve himself.’

Choosing ‘this, that and the other’ as his bonus subject over ‘the Electric Light Orchestra,’ and despite being unable to identify the final hit by New Kids on the Block and wrongly guessing the year that ‘Puppy Love’ was a hit, Ben successfully answered questions on Imagination, The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, The Manic Street Preachers, Yazoo and ‘The UB40′, among others. He won the contest, but failed to bag a state of the art digital radio when he was unable to name three chart hits by The Animals in ten seconds. ‘We gotta get out of this place!’ he cried in the dying moments, no doubt echoing his words on that fated US tour, almost two years ago to the day.

The Indelicates- American Demo

 

A fierce, discriminating intelligence is always a turn-on. Especially when backed by tense, propulsive, tight-trousered, soaringly melodic, minor-key rock n’ roll. Which is why, despite sometimes coming across as uptight posh kids holding rock music gingerly at arm’s length, with equal degrees of anthropological fascination and bemused disgust (or maybe because of that?), The Indelicates are still a very sexy band.

So what do they sound like? Most obviously, The Indelicates recall The Auteurs, and Luke Haines in all his many misanthropic guises. Less obviously, but accurately, in that they constantly question the cliched conventions of the rock medium while happily using its greatest strengths (also cliches), and in that they always bite the hand that feeds them (but only after making damn sure they get fed), they recall The Sisters of Mercy, The Sex Pistols, The Psychedelic Furs, early Manic Street Preachers, and the John Cooper Clarke of ‘Beasley Street’. They’re the latest twist of the knife that began turning when Dylan first asked ‘how does it feel?’  and which continued through Johnny Rotten’s ‘ever get the feeling that you’ve been cheated?’, via not only the self-conscious artifice of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, but also the voracious, politicised self-empowerment of post-punk and riot grrl, yet without the paranoia and self-righteousness that ultimately resulted in said scenes being forever marginalised and impotent (In those terms, The Indelicates favour the entryism of Scritti Politti over the deliberate alienation of, say, The Pop Group, but without losing any of their genuine subversiveness or their neo-situationist critiques of the consumer media in which they operate. That their stated philosophy often seems closer to libertarianism than anarchism only further illustrates the degree to which they refuse to toe the party line).

The Indelicates hark back to a time, not that long ago, when it was taken for granted that a song would be about something, and music critics engaged with it and interrogated it on that basis. It was an approach that died out round about the mid-nineties beanfeast blandly labelled ‘Britpop,’ and perhaps it’s for this reason, as much as the band’s average age, that more than anything American Demo seems rooted in the indie and college rock of the earlier part of that decade; possibly the last stand of alternative music as a genuine outsider force, that did actually attempt to offer a constructive alternative to a stultifying status quo. It was the tail end of a noble tradition stretching back beyond punk, that a few years later was cheerily sold down the river in return for a few nosebags of cocaine, corporate major label sponsorship and the keys to number ten. But I’m getting off the subject…

For the sake of convenience, if not accuracy, The Indelicates are a Brighton band. The creative and songwriting core are a young couple, Simon Clayton and Julia Laird-Clowes, who moved to nearby Lewes precisely in order to avoid being labelled a Brighton band by lazy writers like myself. It was a fine, if futile gesture. Although having said that, they hardly ever gig in Brighton, aren’t on every guest list in town and don’t drink in the Heart and Hand, so they probably have a point. Ahem. Okay, The Indelicates are not a Brighton band. Simon and Julia were both Brighton poets for several years though, back when Brighton had a poetry scene that was worth being involved in, when it was good. Julia was also in The Pipettes, who are a Brighton band, back when they were worth being involved in, when they were good, when they still did that song about loving a boy in uniform (school uniform!), and had an edge that a few months later was cheerily sold down the river for… oh, hang on, I’ve already done this bit…

One criticism is that sometimes with The Indelicates, it seems as though the music comes second to getting their message across. American Demo is accomplished yet deeply conservative, musically, and Julia’s high, cut glass vocals, while note-perfect, can grate, while Simon’s range is limited to a Luke Haines / Rep Butler whispered sneer. One could be tempted to wonder whether the band have written these songs because they love music as such, or whether it’s merely the sugar coating to help the unpalatable medicine slip down. Are we being cynically manipulated into agreeing with statements just because they come wrapped in exhilirating rock n’ roll that stirs up the emotions? It’s an old trick, but it’s one that The Indelicates openly acknowledge. From Nazi propaganda to modern-day advertising, our unconscious emotional responses are constantly manipulated by those with an agenda, and The Indelicates expose and comment on these deceptions as they use them- the equivalent of the stage magician pulling back the curtain and showing us exactly how the illusion works, while knowing full well that we’ll still be fooled and impressed by the trick the next time around.

This is The Indelicates’ main theme: the dangers of romanticism in appealing to our buried, irrational impulses and allowing them to overwhelm any clear and logical, reasoned argument. This is how rock music works, they say; it’s insidious and deadly. Look, you see what we just did? And you fell for it. Watch out next time- oops, we did it again…  

 The Indelicates are also harsh realists; American Demo is so called because that’s what all British indie debut albums ultimately are. Yet there’s nothing in the least fawning or apologetic about this record. The cover features Simon, Julia and a can of white paint, engaged in the act of ‘drawing the line’ (faces straight, tongues in cheeks), while the opening overture, an orchestral, instrumental arrangement of the anthemic ‘New Art for the People’ (again, faces straight, tongues in cheeks…) announces their ambitions early, before Ed Van Beinum’s stomping drums herald the opening song proper, ‘The Last Significant Statement to be made in Rock n’ Roll’ (faces straight, tongues… oh, you get the picture).

If you’re still with me this far, then you’ll doubtless agree that an opening song called ‘The Last Significant Statement to be made in Rock n’ Roll’ is a great thing purely on the strength of its title alone.  That it’s every second the sardonic, post-modern, twisted glam anthem with a heart of bitter, beating darkness that you’d hope it would be just makes you realise the woeful lack of ambition in what passes for pop songwriting these days. ‘Everything that follows is a footnote,’ Simon insists, ‘that we can cling to when we are old.’ Rock n’ roll is over- the myth is over- it’s time to grow up. Rebellion is just a commodity and a tool of cultural imperialism. Rock n’ roll, once a thing of vicious beauty, must be killed by those who love it, before it can be corrupted and demeaned any further- before it can do any more harm. So The Indelicates begin their debut album by writing rock’s epitaph, its final word. Where do they go from here?

Well, if anything this incredibly strong opening is topped by Julia’s ‘Our Daughters Will Never Be Free.’ This is what The Pipettes should have sounded like: handclaps like slaps across the face and a burbling Lieutenant Pigeon moog sound that producer Brian O’Shaughnessy probably last used on the last Denim LP. ‘Our Daughters…’ brilliantly skewers the ridiculous (but oft-repeated) claims that The Spice Girls, laddette culture and post-ironic soft porn are somehow empowering women rather than betraying every advance that unfashionable, intellectually demanding, hard feminism fought tooth and nail for throughout the 1970s and ’80s (before being cheerily sold down the river for… you know). The fear expressed is that the history books really have been re-written, and that nobody under the age of thirty (and precious few over it) even remembers a time when you didn’t have to, would never want to, and wouldn’t dare suggest that you should, get your tits out in order to get on in life. In fact, ‘Our daughters…’ is a wider indictment of a culture built on vacuous, self-serving stupidity (’I think it’s fine to make people smile, I think it’s fine to force people to smile… let’s just be pretty, it’s more fun that way’), as much as it is a specifically feminist tirade. 

This theme continues in the wonderfully catchy and pop-tastic ‘Sixteen,’ which satirises the tendency, particularly in the so-called creative media, to wilfully retard one’s mental and emotional growth in the name of fun and profit. Note the way the climactic countdown (’I wanna be 16, even though I’m 23, 24, 25…’) stops just short of mentioning the dreaded 30, in much the same manner as The Clash’s ‘1977′ stopped just before the equally significant date of 1984. Clash fans, however, may quail at ‘Julia, we don’t live in the 60s,’ in which Simon dares to suggest that ‘we never had it so good- life is sweet,’ in our modern, liberal, cosmopolitan and conspiciously wealthy society. His thesis is that protest has been rendered meaningless because too many people choose to protest purely as a self-gratifying lifestyle accessory- ‘the war at home has been betrayed by too many boys on barricades.’ 

One could argue that there’s a whiff of ‘let them eat cake’ about The Indelicates’ position here; for a lot of people, both at home and abroad, life isn’t sweet at all. There’s evidence that all of our western affluence and freedom is actually making most of us unhappier than we were fifty years ago, and this can’t all be put down to a generation of spoilt, ungrateful malcontents. Plus our own high standard of living is directly maintained at the expense of those living under extreme poverty and/or oppression in less well-off countries. Yes, we may never have had it so good, and radical chic may never go out of fashion, and young men do like to have causes to fight for, worthy or not, but some people do make a stand out of an old-fashioned sense of morality and justice, too.   

Still, it’s easy to blandly like records that say nothing; it’s more enjoyable to engage with those that you may sometimes deeply disagree with, but which at least provoke you to think. The reflective ‘It’s Better to Know’ recalls Suede, or even These Animal Men’s more elegaic moments (specifically the magnificent ‘You’re Not my Babylon’ in its dying coda). ‘The truth can make you bitter, even when it sets you free,’ Simon admits. And yet, ‘the pursuit of liberty is still a noble cause.’

The disquieting, anti-romantic epic ’Stars’ is a stand-out, possibly the album’s centrepiece, building from pastoral orchestral balm to a wall of squalling guitar noise and stabbing violins. ‘I’m in love with the boy next door,’ Julia sings, ‘he treats me like a filthy whore.’ What follows is a perfect, self-contained kitchen sink drama of unfulfilled lives and potential betrayed, in which ‘the stars don’t shine for me and you,’ and increasingly threadbare and tawdry dreams are clung to at the expense of real accomplishment or happiness.

 It’s followed by ‘New Art for the People,’ a kind of companion piece which opens with the rather marvellous line, ‘But for the cum in your hair, the cocaine on your teeth…’ delivered over melancholy piano chords as though it were the most romantic sentiment ever uttered by man. The Indelicates’ world is full of mutually destructive relationships, girls who take up with unsuitable, abusive men just to upset their fathers and martyr themselves, and sensitive bewildered males running away from reality and responsibility through drugs, sex, romantic illusions and solipsistic, self-deluding ‘art,’ dreaming of ‘the dark days ahead and the blood on the bed and the front page of the NME.’

Taking these themes a stage further, ‘Unity Mitford’ is a love song to Adolf Hitler that manages to be disturbingly universal. ‘These people don’t even think like we do, you and I we’re a different species… I love it when you speak so passionately…’ It deconstructs romanticism to reveal the death wish and latent facism lurking beneath, while revelling in a Luke Haines-like fascination with the darker chapters of English history.

Some of the later songs don’t quite work: ‘Heroin,’ with its forgettable tune and flimsy conceit of ‘my heroine takes heroin,’ is the sort of idea that Chumbawumba might run with, and while ‘If Jeff Buckley had Lived’ is an improvement, and rises above being just an obvious criticism of the posthumous sainthoods conveyed on flawed human artists who just happen to die young and full of potential, thanks to lines like ‘there’s a flicker of religion in the chances you take,’ it still struggles to stand up to repeated listening, especially when Simon decides the pudding really needs a few more eggs and so rams the point home with a blunt instrument on the final chorus.

Be thankful then, for the brilliant single, ‘America’: a song you can headbang to, thanks to a big, culturally-appropriate riff that’s the equivalent of cruising into town in a beautifully clumsy, unsubtle, fuel-guzzling Pontiac Thunderbird. ‘This little England, it’s dingy and it’s mean,’ Simon begins, not so much embracing the current American regime as damning the state of Britain in favour of an ideal of America, and that reluctantly: ‘When they pin me to the wall, I’ll say I’m with America, with Godless America I’ll stand and I’ll fall; and though it cuts me to the soul that it must be America, it must be America, or nothing at all.’

Note that it’s godless America; stout rationalists and militant athesists that they are, The Indelicates have no truck with the fundamentalist Christian right that are behind the Bush administration. Indeed the song makes no excuses for the military adventures of the present government (the responsibility for which equally lies with the UK, after all), but merely points out how ridiculous and hypocritical it is for anyone involved in rock music to take a knee-jerk anti-American stance. The America that The Indelicates embrace is the America that gave us jazz, blues, rock n’ roll, hip-hop, civil rights, gay rights, feminism and a stated commitment to liberty, equality and freedom of speech that, while often flaunted and contradicted, remains unique among nations. The harsh truth is that, as a reigning super power, America is a lot better than any of the other alternatives around at the moment, and while she may be the neighbourhood bully, we’ll all be only too glad to hide behind her skirts when real trouble comes looking for us. Of course, that real trouble has most likely been provoked by America’s actions in the first place… 

The album closes with ‘We Hate The Kids,’ a bookending companion piece to ‘The last significant statement…’ in which the band bemoan their generation’s apathy, their art and their music, concluding that it’s just the same as what’s gone before, the same cliches churned out over and over again, to the same predictable emotional response. ‘Every generation gets fooled again, and I’m sorry that I can’t join in anymore.’ It’s all a con trick, and they even apologise for their part in it. Completely dissillusioned with everything that they tried to believe in, The Indelicates leave the party, front door swinging open behind them, having pissed in the canapes and vomited on the carpet.

Hell hath no fury like a romantic forced to accept reality. And while I don’t agree with everything The Indelicates have to say- no-one is as clever as they think they are- better this than another protest singer singing protest songs we already agree with. I said before that American Demo was a sexy record, and it is- because sex is the business of adults and grown-ups, and a record with intellectual as well as visceral and emotional content will always be more exciting than the petulant thrashing of whinging children, or re-heated, vacuous prog noodling. If you crave songs that accurately express your own bitter disgust with the state of the world, that engage with their culture with style, intelligence and dignity, then you need this record. The bar has just been raised.

American Demo is out tomorrow (April 14th) on Weekender Records

 Links: www.indelicates.com

           www.myspace.com/theindelicates

           www.weekenderrecords.com

 

    

 

Live: Cud, The Barfly, Brighton

I was all ready to write a review that was full of pathos and dry, dark, Didion-esque humour. I had my opening line set up: “this is where the indie bands go when they die.” It was going to be a tragic if affectionate portrait of a middle-aged, second division rock act reeling around in their twilight years, a piece full of telling details and unsparing prose. But I can’t do that. Because it wouldn’t be honest. Because last night was just too good, too free and unburdened, too much like old-fashioned, light-hearted, unqualified FUN.

At the same time, there’s no point in pretending that I went for any other reason than nostalgia. Cud were an important band in my youth; between the ages of 16 and 22 I saw them dozens of times, and I have hundreds of stories and memories attached to them and their songs. I was in the right time and place for them; they formed at Leeds University in 1985, when I was 14 in nearby Halifax, and for the first few years of their existence they were a massive northern cult, only gradually filtering through to the bemused London media.

Like their contemporaries Pulp, Cud combined an art school love of the camp and the kitsch with a self-deprecating sense of humour, style, drama, showmanship and a huge romantic streak, along with bellowing post-punk pop tunes that fused half-inched Radio 2 melodies to caustic slabs of juddering guitar noise and an increasing dose of funk.

I’m not going to try to make a case here for Cud as overlooked sonic innovators, or to try to argue for their place in the history books alongside the musical greats. I know full well that you had to be there. But if you were, they were great. Never the paradigms of dull, sexless, under-achieving indie rock they were often held up as (blame the name: there were plenty of other, more worthy candidates for that honour), Cud were always an exhilirating live act with a brilliant frontman in Carl Puttnam, a singer with a voice to rival Tom Jones and a lyrical wit and dexterity that would have done Wilde proud, as revealed in lines like “I was a teenage stamp collector, I’d lie on my back and you’d stamp on my face.” Ned’s Atomic Dustbin never had song titles like ‘An Epicurean’s Answer.’

 Tom Jones and Oscar Wilde- Carl’s physical presence and dress sense was also somewhere between the two, while musically Cud pioneered the indie-dance crossover at least as effectively as the Roses or the Mondays, but in their own unique fashion. And, as last night proved, they simply had an embarrassing wealth of brilliant songs.

As for me, well, unashamedly digging out a period t-shirt (Senseless Things ‘Pop Kid’ logo), and combining it with the ripped black jeans, black baseball boots and leather jacket I’ve pretty much been wearing for the past 20 years, I looked as though I’d gone out in 1989 without a change of clothes and hadn’t been home since. Even my hair is back to its teenage length, though somewhat greyer, and the Barfly had Olde English cider on draught. I can’t remember the last time I encountered Olde English in a bar; it was probably around the same time I last encountered Cud. If you’re going to relive your youth though there’s no point in half measures, or half pints, come to that. 

The support act, bizzarely, were an Eat tribute band. Eat, you will recall, were sort of a second generation Stourbridge band, a Wonder Stuff manque, but with somewhat more hard rock bluster, and have been duly consigned to the margins and footnotes of rock history. Why would anybody… aah, okay, it’s the original singer from Eat, Ange, backed by two younger guys on bass and acoustic guitar, and a drum machine, playing some of his old tunes. Which is fair enough, I suppose. They’re called Doolittle, a name which, to anyone of an age to remember Eat and Cud, must automatically trigger Proustian associations with the seminal and indeed generation-defining 1989 Pixies album of that title. It’s a loaded and in some ways inspired choice.

I must admit that I never really bothered much with Eat at the time (though my student band did record a demo using their amplifiers), but I seem to remember that Ange was generally regarded as a motormouth rock god in waiting, whose arrogance was almost justified by his talent. He was a good-looking chap too, who posed naked on one of their record sleeves I think. Now somewhat humbler, but with a trace of the old swagger, he looks… craggy, but still with an impressive mane of curly hair. He’s in fine voice and on last night’s showing has written some excellent songs, particularly the penultimate ‘Tombstone.’ Maybe I should have paid more attention when it mattered… but I said I wasn’t going to do pathos. Let me just say that Doolittle are well worth seeing if you fancy some brooding, low-key folk rock, and leave it at that.

As for Cud, it’s like they’ve never been away. Alright, so guitarist Mike Dunphy, now a deputy headmaster, has opted out of the reunion shows, but his place is ably filled by the youthful Felix Frey, sporting a splendid black beard that makes him resemble a young Warren Ellis of Bad Seeds/Dirty Three/Grinderman infamy. Drummer Steve Goodwin, now to be found playing alongside Felix in Lazerboy, may be flecked with grey and noticably pained and breathless during some of the more powerhouse drum parts he once executed so recklessly, and bassist, cartoonist and recently, childrens’ comic editor William Potter does seem to be turning into Melvin Hayes. But Carl Puttnam- singer, frontman, father of two and AWOL Oddbins employee- is resplendent in leather kecks, a tight, ruff-fronted purple shirt, shades and a handlebar moustache framing his magnificent collection of chins. And his voice? Well, as he demonstrates on ‘Vocally Speaking,’ with its ironic refrain, “I’m as limited as my vocal range,” those famously powerful and expressive lungs have plenty of life in them yet. Besides, being older suits Cud; it was always the joke that Carl was this speccy, geeky and rather portly fellow playing the part of a rock n’ roll love god. Now that he’s balding and middle-aged it works even better. It never seemed quite right that he was young.

Significantly, the rapturously-received set concentrates on songs from their first two albums, i.e. the good ones: When in Rome Kill Me and Leggy Mambo. There’s only a reluctant airing for their biggest hit, ‘Rich and Strange’ from airbrushed major label debut Asquarius, and nothing at all from the fatally compromised fourth album, Showbiz. 

What we did get were solid gold Cud classics like ‘Only a Prawn in Whitby,’ ‘Strange Kind of Love,’ ‘Robinson Crusoe,’ ‘Purple Love Balloon,’ ‘Now!’, ‘Hey Boots,’ ‘You’re the Boss,’ ’Love in a Hollow Tree,’ ‘Wobbly Jelly,’ ‘Eau Water,’ and ‘Not Exactly D.L.E.R.C.’ My only criticism is that they didn’t play for another hour, and it’s a testament to their songwriting riches that  so many other favourites went unaired: wither ‘Slack Time,’ ‘Push and Shove,’ ‘Hey! Wire’ and many others?

They encored with their Mission Impossible styled version of Jethro Tull’s ‘Living in the Past’ and, of course, traditional set closer ‘I’ve Had It With Blondes.’ If I was doing pathos, I would describe this song’s refrain of “things get worse when you get old” as poignant. But I’m not. And it isn’t. So I won’t. Because, on last night’s evidence, they don’t.

Not at all.           

Medicine and Duty- Flags and Cannons

 

This Brighton-based improvised music trio, made up of guitarist/bassist/keyboardists Matt Colegate and Jack Cooper, along with drummer Andy Pyne, evolved from the acclaimed Raised By Wolves and are part of a collective of forward-thinking, experimental acts that also includes Burning Idiot Noise and Puffinboy. Medicine and Duty, however, is arguably the most far-out and unhinged of all of them, operating in a wide-ranging sphere that puts them alongside such cosmic fellow travellers as Sunburned Hand of the Man, Merzbow, Lightning Bolt and Boredoms, and in the tradition of illustrious antecedents from Sun-Ra and Ornette Coleman to Can and Faust to This Heat and James Chance and the Contortions. It’s far-reaching shit.

Cannons and Flags opens with the startling, foghorn warning signal of ‘Going Down With the Ship,’ an urgent piece of no wave skronk built upon an insistent, one-note guitar drone spiked with virulent Teenage Jesus scrape shards of high-pitched unpleasant surgical noise. Barely audible beatific vocal harmonies attempt to sooth our terror as the pummelling drums kick in and we feel ourselves lurching towards the unfathomable depths of the vast dark universal ocean, where Cthulhu doubtless waits.

 ’A Better Place for Now’ recalls Holy Fuck in the way the untutored analog electronics and primitive guitar klang gradually revolve around the stuttering drums until a heavy, hypnotic, killer kraut dancefloor groove emerges. Urgent calls for prayer in some lost ancient language begin ‘Distinguished Gentlemen Be Aware’ -a language that is nevertheless disturbingly familiar on some subconscious, atavistic level. From electronic squiggles, free form tribal drum rolls and percussive tapping it grows increasingly disturbed and frenetic, never settling, always in motion and up in the air, simulating the jangled effect of several days’ sleep deprivation.

‘Mechanical Surgery Solutions’ is the sound of some hideous industrial machine or Kafka-esque torture device, the needle cutting intricate patterns deep into the victim’s body. Yet it’s an oasis of sinister calm after the preceding number, generating dread white English dub sonics almost in the manner of Cabaret Voltaire. Gradually the rhythms coalesce into something more assertive and menacing, and then it’s time for ‘The Tour Guide,’ in which a diatribe in what I now recognise as the ancient language of Mu (or is it some obscure Lemurian dialect?), is rhythmically chanted in the manner of turn-of-the-millennium art rockers Life Without Buildings. Guitars and drums interject and weave around this fascinating vocal discourse on the flora, fauna, history and architectural magnificence of the lost continent.

The chants and wails grow ever more ecstatic on the title track, a frenzy of orgiastic drumming and wild, Dionysian celebration that is nevertheless continually undercut by subdued, melancholy piano chords. It’s as though even in the hour of their greatest triumph, the people of Mu are still tragically aware of their imminent demise, along with that of their entire culture. Which of course is just as it would have been with a race of people so advanced that they occupied several different time streams simultaneously, and in both directions.

Indeed, ‘Last of the Lives’ begins with a sombre and spartan memorial tattoo for those brave Lemurian warriors prepared to go down with their country. Electronic noise stabs are arranged around appropriately seasick guitar wails, and as the music grows ever more hectic, impassioned and uncontrolled a hypnotic voice tells of the unimaginable courage and suffering of those hundreds of men, women and hermaphrodites who all died with their third eyes open.

‘Mars Battalion March’ is a spiky, sparse and brief interlude of quirky reflection before ‘Life Like Life Support’ once again evokes Holy Fuck with pummelling drums and repetitive electronic whistles and belches that may be a last ditch attempt from a dying civilisation to communicate with our alien brethren from beyond the stars. The results though are scrambled and overloaded- joyous to listen to, but as we know, historically tragic. This song uses the metaphor of the competing stimuli of a man with several hearts beating in different rhythms simultaneously, while hooked up to an erratic life support machine, to convey the intensity and chaos of those final, desperate days of Mu.

But then again, what if all of this is completely wrong? on ‘Theories Demolished,’ guitars, keys and drums all lock into a primal ur-kraut groove as the eloquent lyrics urgently refute all of my pat interpretations, ironically using the formal court language of High Lemiurian to devastating effect- a way of speaking, of course, that was expressly evolved in order to observe the intricate protocol of a decadent empire, so full of ambiguity, allusion, double-meaning and now-impenetrable subtleties that the speaker is never definitely committed to one opinion or point of view.

 ’Baby Please’ is a temporal anomaly- stray bass notes escaping from a Joy Division rehearsal circa 1978, in a disused mill complex still haunted by the vicious ghosts of dismembered Victorian schoolchildren. And suddenly we’re in howling, churning hardcore territory, beyond the valley of At The Drive-In. Whatever it is, she ain’t doing it.

The last track, ‘Whale Hunting’ is an epic finale. Great titanium-hulled longships set sail across uncharted oceans in pursuit of fabled magnificent beasts, each one the size and temprament of a modest post-war housing development. Here we have all the pathos and drama of that life or death struggle, driven by the martial drums of the whaling ships’ oarsmen and the haunting but deafening cries of the whales that the Lemurians hunted into extinction with laser harpoons and sonar nets, all of which are represented sonically on this song. Is it a metaphor for the state of music in 2008, sinking beneath the waves of corporate indifference yet paradoxically illuminated by the very technological innovations that threaten to destroy it? Probably not. But it’s worth considering.       

Flags and Cannons is a Foolproof Project- www.foolproofprojects.co.uk

www.myspace.com/medicineandduty

Live: Dead Meadow, the Freebutt, Brighton

Interstellar Hurricane. Silver Ray. Sister Machine.

Like an Overdrive.

Okay, so I don’t own any Dead Meadow records. Okay, so maybe I’m kind of guessing at the titles of the songs they played. It was something like that, anyway. I mean, it was that kind of thing. Like some kind of seared tuna mindmelt of all your favourite classic psychedelic hard rock moments- except actually nothing like them, either. Which is the ultimate paradox of the whole stoner rock phenomenon- and yeah, I think The Meadow, as we like to call them here, fit into that category- that while on the surface they seem to be nothing but revivalists, and actually strive real hard to give that impression, in fact the band that you think they sound like really only ever existed in your head.

So, on Saturday night Dead Meadow combined the heavy mystic sludge of Black Sabbath with the pulverising rhythmic swing of early Can. Something that could never have happened back in the day, but which now seems not just inevitable but essential. Drawing on hard rock, psychedelia, kraut, folk and metal in roughly that order, this is not music to work out your aggression to, but music to lose yourself in. This is heavy meditation.

 Mostly churning and slow, but occasionally stepping up a gear to a thrillingly mid-paced high, Dead meadow deal in rock as ritual, a pagan, molten summoning of spirits. It’s an evocation of the underworld, concerned less with sonic innovation, or even with songs as such, than with recreating the eternal moment, like ancient druids hauling us ass-first into their sacred groove.

It’s an increasingly valid function for rock to perform, and when it works, as on this occasion, it’s like opening a communal doorway into some primal, gnostic heartland. It’s the kind of thing that gets you talking about the rock musician as shaman, and the totemic significance of the power trio as representative of the magical power of three, the Celtic and Egyptian tradition of grouping divinities into triads- like birth, life and death- that long predates the Christian trinity.

 ’This is like a sweat lodge!’ comments guitarist Jason Simon. ‘Sweat that shit out!’ Yeah, it’s hot, but it’s not just that. It’s all in the rhythms, the interplay between the instruments creating a complex cross-hatching of sounds, interwoven beneath the ecstatic, obliterating surface drone, the feedback OM… the hypnotic, repetitive fuzz mantra.

Jason’s guitar does little more than add texture, eschewing the lengthy, masturbatory solos that plague this type of music in favour of a wall of sound fed through banks of wah, echo and delay, and giving Steve Kille’s bass and Stephen McCarthy’s drums the chance to lock together and really move. The emphasis is on the rhythm section throughout, and McCarthy’s drumming especially is both exciting and exacting; there’s a deceptive simplicity and precision to his playing which always serves the greater cause, never giving in to the flashy, splashy, chaotic showmanship of the Keith Moon school which I’ve personally always found boring and unnecessary. 

A note too, on Jason’s vocals, which have often been criticised as sounding weak on record. I don’t know about that, but live they were perfectly suited to the form, communicating emotionally while remaining low in the mix, never dominating but simply functioning as another instrument- again, serving the greater cause.

Support came from The Bowlide Awkwardstra, who played a set of powerful, noisy improv that recalled my first experience of seeing Sunburned Hand of the Man, some years ago now- a dark invocation of primal forces, replete with wordless chanting, grunts and howls, powered by driving, circular drumming. Electric guitar and bass flanked a shifting array of brass, woodwind, percussion, electronic effects and whistles and bells, mainly played by John Cassavetes lookalike Dan Spicer.

Dead Meadow. The moment begins again.

  

  

After The Flood

                          

When I was a child it was the 1970s, and we listened to Radio Two. Specifically, we listened to Terry Wogan’s Breakfast Show, to get us up in the mornings for work and for school. Apart from the epic Radio 4 serialisations of The Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy and Lord of the Rings on long rainy weekends, I don’t actually remember listening to the radio at any other time until, unbidden and certainly unapproved of, I discovered the poptastic tones of Radio One in my early teens.

 Wogan will always be remembered for his catchphrases, his banter and his gentle, mildly smutty, Anglo-Irish surrealism rather than for the music he played. And I’m sure he played a blandly diverse selection from across the middle of the road throughout the decade. But if my personal recollections are to be trusted, then Terry seemed to have been wallowing, for all of those years, in an almost endless tide of melancholy, adult-oriented soft rock and post-hippy musical detritus.

 ’Horse with No Name,’ by America. ‘Woodstock,’ by Matthews Southern Comfort. ‘The Cat’s in the Cradle’ by Harry Chapin. They kept on coming; songs suffused with such an unbearable autumnal melancholy that it’s a wonder we ever mustered the strength and optimism to get out of bed at all.

                          

Maybe it’s just my selective memory; maybe my temperament is such that it’s always the sad songs that stay with me. But certainly these brushed denim ballads, uncool as they always were, struck a chord in some deep part of my pre-teen psyche. Despite the fact that I was living in smalltown Yorkshire, part of me identified unconsciously with an airbrushed and cocaine-damaged California, sliding quite passively, from the sound of things, into the depths of the Pacific bay.

 ’Heart of Gold’ by Neil Young. ‘After the Goldrush’ by Prelude. ‘Me and You and a Dog named Boo’ by Lobo. Where other people remember childhood as being all long hot summer days that never ended, I remember grey rainy mornings soundtracked by minor-key acoustic guitars, plaintive mournful harmonies and lyrics about riding across the desert and trying to get back to the garden. Watergate, Vietnam, Altamont and Charles Manson meant nothing to me, but I was nevertheless immersed in the cultural fallout from these events, wearing mirror shades in the glare of the setting sun as the Aquarian dream turned sour, and the beautiful people all wondered where their future went.

 ’Hotel California’ by The Eagles. ‘On the Road Again’ by Canned Heat. Almost anything by Crosby, Stills and Nash or Jackson Browne. In these songs, people always seemed to be travelling long distances across empty, dusty landscapes, driven by disappointment and doubt, and with little hope of redemption at their journey’s end. These were not songs of, by, or for youth; they were full of the dissillusionment that comes with age and experience, songs of mourning for an idealistic golden age that was now irrevocably lost, elegaic hymns to some misplaced innocence.

 They say it never rains in Southern California, but it pours, man, it pours. Truly, I felt, I was living after the flood. 

Live: Eamon Hamilton, the Hand in Hand, Brighton

There are secret gigs, and then there are secret gigs. I mean, there are those shows when a big name band plays a slightly too small venue to try out new material or create a buzz, and everyone is alerted by text message earlier in the day, and the press all know and there’s a huge guest list and a gaggle of hardcore fans congregating around the doors in the afternoon desperate to get in- and then there is Eamon Hamilton, erstwhile British Seapower member and frontman of Rough Trade recording artistes Brakes, playing a solo acoustic set at my local. A show announced that same day solely via a handwritten sheet of paper stuck on the pub door. That nobody seems to have read.

Brakes are a popular, hip and very credible indie band, with two critically-acclaimed LPs under their belts. They have toured Europe and America, where they are particularly well-loved, and in their hometown of Brighton they’ve previously headlined the 1150-capacity Corn Exchange. The Hand in Hand struggles to hold 50 people. It is a small cosy room attached to the Kemptown micro-brewery, usually haunted by ruddy-faced men in late middle age who have little truck with the vagaries of fashion or the arty whims of esoteric pop groups. But presumably tonight the regulars have been usurped by an influx of youthful and enthusiastic Brakes fans, keen to hear Eamon perform stripped-down versions of all their favourite numbers? Erm, no. Like I said, this was a secret gig. He really hasn’t told anybody. And it’s pretty much the usual crowd.

The note said from 7, so I got there at 8.30, thinking it’ll probably be full, I probably won’t get in, but it’s not far to go home again and- oh, okay, there’s about a dozen people here as usual. Three or four nattily-dressed youngsters at the bar, getting in the way and laughing loudly at each other, but otherwise just the usual old soaks with their dogs and balding blokes in fleeces talking about cars and taxes. No buzz. No sign of any live music being planned. I nurse my pint of Old Trout for an hour (the Dragon’s Blood was off), reading the local free paper from cover to cover, watching the backs of the guys stood in front of me, wondering if maybe I misread the notice and it’s all happening somewhere else, or on another night. Someone knocks a glass of wine off the table, pushing past to get to the toilet. It’s filling up, anyway.  

 Then about 9.30 a beer crate is placed in the far corner and Eamon climbs on top of it, clutching a battered acoustic guitar. I stand up and move forward. Well, by a couple of feet. He’s completely unamplified, not even a microphone, and the regulars are doing their best to ignore this unwanted interruption of their evening. This is less a British Seapower-style situationist performance in an unusual location, and more a Brakes song brought to life- as in, ‘won’t you shut the fuck up, I’m just trying to watch the band.’  

So Eamon is singing ‘Ring a Ding Ding,’ possibly, but it’s hard to tell as I’m stuck behind this grey-haired scouser holding forth to his cronies about how his ex-wife is getting fuck all money from him, she’s getting a fiver a week and that’s all, she can try living on that and see how she likes it. Eamon is delivering the homesick country blues of ‘NY Pie,’ but the ex-wife has gone to university you see, she thinks she’s better than him now, she says she hasn’t got a boyfriend but he knows she’s seeing this fucking hippy, some long-haired twat- ‘Porcupine or Pineapple,’ Eamon wonders, in the manner of a skinny, English Black Francis, but his daughter’s gone to university now as well and she’s just as bad as her mum, she keeps ringing him up and giving it all this, she’s fucking 17, thinks she fucking knows it all, she’s got no use for him now, he says to her, who’s been telling you things, who’s been putting ideas into your head? And on the other side of me, sat at the bar, a bearded young groover is telling his girl yah, I rilly wanna go to ATP this year, but I don’t know, the line-up just doesn’t do it for me- Eamon airs a new song, possibly entitled ‘Consumer Producer Chicken Egg,’ in the same tradition of directness and brevity as Brakes classics ‘Cheney,’ ‘Comma Comma Comma Full Stop’ and ‘Pick Up the Phone,’ which are also performed tonight. ”These kids, they all think that’s great music- that’s a fucking university education for you, innit? I don’t fucking understand it, it’s just weird. It’s not music. It’s like speaking another fucking language, innit?”

Afterwards Eamon is at the bar, meeting his public. “I usually play with a band called Brakes,” he’s saying. ”No, B-R-A-K-E-S…” So are they all your own songs, this bloke wants to know, have you ever tried selling your songs to other people? I know it’s all just hype, but at the end of the day they need a good song, don’t they?

They do. “Put Phil Collins on!” someone shouts desperately as soon as Eamon finishes, with the genuine Brakes hit single ‘All Night Disco Party.’ The bar staff oblige. Eamon’s solo tour continues throughout the month- see www.brakesbrakesbrakes.com for details.    

Baby Dee- Safe Inside the Day

 

Anyone still thinking of the early ’90s dance act who hit big with ‘Let Me Be Your Fantasy,’ get wise. That was Baby D. God knows, she may still be out there somewhere. This is Baby Dee; a 54-year-old, transexual harp player and former performance artist from Cleveland, via New York. Including her shock of frizzy ginger hair, she’s not much under six feet tall, with an exaggerated stage accent somewhere between a Brooklyn cabbie and a Batman supervillain, and a frequent, irresistible laugh that has to be heard to be believed. She’s performed as a grotesque Shirley Temple tribute, a fake hermaphrodite, a touring circus freak and as the musical director of one of New York’s most respected Catholic churches. She’s worked with Antony and the Johnsons and Current 93, too.

None of which is really relevant, but on the other hand it is, because while Safe Inside the Day, her third album, is a remarkable record on any terms, it’s also a highly personal and autobiographical work that draws heavily on Dee’s intriguing, unconventional life history. Something else that doesn’t matter, but also totally does, is that Safe Inside the Day is produced by Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy and Matt Sweeney, who also play on the record, leading a band that includes, amongst others, a surprisingly subdued Andrew WK. The reason this doesn’t matter is that you should love this record regardless of whatever well-known, hip, cult names are attached to it, but the reason it does is that Billy, Matt and friends have done an incredible job.

You see, the full band arrangements on Safe Inside the Day sound very different from what you’ll have heard if you’ve seen Dee live over the last couple of years. Then, she’d have been singing and performing solo at the harp, occasionally taking a turn at the piano only if there happened to be one in the venue. But here, there’s actually hardly any harp at all. Any worries that a conventional band setting would dilute and tame Dee’s unique appeal prove unfounded, however; Matt and Billy more than do her songs justice, putting a whole different spin on them and evoking at various points Brecht and Weill, Celtic ballads, German lieder, French chanson, and contemporary artists like Tom Waits, Lou Reed, The Tiger Lillies and David Bowie, who have drawn on similar pre-rock, European chamber music in their own work. Safe Inside the Day is at times dark, tender, uplifting, frightening, funny, serious, raw, stylised, innocent and knowing; a high-wire act teetering between soul-baring vulnerability and contrived, vaudevillian performance, and all the more effective for it.

Dee was born in 1953 in Cleveland, Ohio, the son of a firefighting chief who was himself a somewhat eccentric, larger than life character; a man who was used to giving orders and having them followed, and who collected crowbars, a hobby alluded to in the song ‘The Dance of Diminishing Possibilities’ (”my father’s affection for his crowbar collection was Freudian to say the least”).  He also insisted on his children having piano lessons, and was particularly keen on hearing them play Schubert’s Der Erlkonig. This was a musical setting of the Goethe poem of the same name, a dark and haunting piece about a dying child being spirited away by the faerie king of the title, who uses first seduction and then force to drag the child into the realm of eternal sleep.

The family resonance was hardly surprising. Dee had an older brother who died in childhood before she was born, an event which dominated and overshadowed her existence until she left home, at eighteen, to finally begin her own life as a portrait painter in New York. This was in 1971, and in the Big Apple it was the era of Andy Warhol, Max’s Kansas City and The New York Dolls, but Dee remained almost entirely divorced from contemporary popular culture. Despite being a self-confessed high school hippy with a love for Jimi Hendrix and Johnny Cash, the rock scene of the late sixties had touched her only in passing and, renting a loft on 23rd Street, she completely ignored the goings-on at the Chelsea Hotel next door, concentrating instead on painting huge canvasses that filled her entire room. She also bought herself a piano, and later a harp, something she’d wanted ever since as a child she’d seen her Cleveland neighbours drag an old upright piano onto their lawn and smash it to pieces; the iron harp inside was the one thing that they couldn’t destroy, and for Dee it became an enduring symbol of the eternal, that essence that survives all assaults and transmogrification, even death.

Gradually, Dee found she was painting less and making music more. She began busking on the New York streets with her harp, and made a good income from it too. She decided to study classical music seriously, something she later put down to youthful insecurity and a need to fit in, but she soon found that she really didn’t belong in the uptight, conservative conservatory scene. She learnt her chops though, and was also introduced to perhaps the great passion of her life: Gregorian music.

Dee became obsessed with Gregorian chants and songs. With discovering them and owning them, in the sense that once you learn and understand them they become part of you, they’re inside you forever. They were so simple, but so vast and important and profound, that they seemed to contain the whole universe. Oh yeah, Dee was hooked alright. And she knew her stuff. Well enough to become the musical director of one of New York’s major Catholic churches, despite her lack of formal qualifications, or any formal religious faith, for that matter. For ten years she led the choir and headed up all the concerts, taking it very seriously, proud that they never played any schmaltzy crap during her tenure, not even a Schubert Ave Maria. It was strictly quality, and eventually Dee even made enough money for her sex change, so that she could really become a she. Unfortunately, this was a step too far for the church, and despite her ability and success, Dee rapidly found her position somewhat untenable.

It was time for the next phase of Dee’s mythical career. By this time it was the early nineties, and throughout the next decade Baby Dee became a legendary figure on the New York streets, performing on her customised tricycle with the harp fitted on the back, singing and playing the accordion, smoking a cigar and dressed as Shirley Temple, or a cat, or a bee, or… well, you know. It was Baby Dee. It was make ‘em laugh, make a buck, move on. And she was good at it. Some nights she would perform in clubs, but she had to take a cut in her income to do so, because there was no way they could afford to pay her what she was making on the streets. She even brought her act over to Europe, and the Edinburgh Festival, billing it as ‘The Invasion of the money-grabbing hermaphrodites.’ The former classical scholar had developed a real taste for the sleazy, carny imagery of places like Coney Island, where she worked for a summer as a bilateral hermaphrodite act, dressing one side of her body male and the other female, and falling in love with an angry young dwarf whose act included being crucified, crushed beneath slabs of concrete and broken glass, and dragging huge weights around with his penis. Other circus and freakshow gigs included stints with the Voluptuous Oddballs Circus Sideshow and the Brindlestiff Family Circus. They were crazy, heady times.

 

Then, in 1999, she gave it all up. She went back to Cleveland and nursed her father through his final illness. She took a job as a tree surgeon, satisfying her love of heights, and for the first time, began writing songs. Alright, not quite for the first time; she had written songs before, but comic songs, parody songs, bawdy, vaudeville numbers that would work out on the street or in a crowded drunken bar. But the new songs were different. They were personal, sensitive, introspective; they reflected Dee’s love of early classical music, her bittersweet experience of life and her feelings about people, the universe, and the sheer wonder of existence even amid the encroaching darkness. She sat at her piano in her room in Cleveland, writing and recording these songs, and when they were finished she would send them back to her friend in New York, Antony Hegarty.

Dee and Antony had met years ago on the city’s gay, transvestite, performance art scene, and had worked and played together many times. With his band The Johnsons, Antony had just released his debut album, for which Dee had arranged all of the string parts. Now she was hoping that Antony might like to cover one of her songs. Instead, he was sending them on to David Tibet, who had released Antony’s album on his Durtro label. Tibet, of course, is also the leader of the long-running experimental music collective Current 93, who have gone from being pioneers of gothic and industrial music in the early eighties to being founders of what’s now known as dark, apocalyptic or freak folk on albums like 1988’s classic Earth covers Earth. Tibet loved Dee’s demos just as they were, and released them as the first of several CDs she would put out on Durto.

This could have been the end of the story, had not fate intervened one more time. Apart from the odd gig with Current 93, Dee had no intention of playing her songs live, and wouldn’t have known how- her vaudeville background hadn’t exactly prepared her for presenting such personal, introverted material on stage. That is, until she dropped a tree on someone’s house. A little old lady named Mrs Ferrara, who Dee recalls to this day as a saint, emerged, thankfully unscathed, from the ruins of her home not to rage at Dee, who was in floods of tears, but to console her. It’s okay, Dee, she said; everything happens for a reason. Dee took the hint, and that night called every contact she had, looking for a way to get out of the tree business, and back into the music business. David Tibet put her onto Matt and Billy, who were coming through Cleveland touring their collaborative Superwolf album, and needed an opening act, and… well, that’s where we came in. Dee rearranged her songs for the harp, so that she could take them on tour, singing and playing the harp simulataneously for the first time ever. Well, a gal’s gotta do what a gal’s gotta do; there were cats to feed, after all. 

Since then, Dee’s toured Europe and America several times, opened for Marc Almond at his post-bike crash comeback show (where he covered two of her songs), and oh yeah, recorded this astonishing album for new label Drag City. The valedictory title track works as a powerful love song and even as a kind of hymn, but most effectively as a celebration of music’s power to heal even the gravest of wounds, and its ability to provide at least a temporary sanctuary from the world’s pain.

Dee’s voice is cartoon-like as it shifts from stage whisper to emphatic declaration, and the songs themselves could easily have come from some classic old Disney movie. The cartoon quality actually adds to the emotional power and depth of the songs, bringing something of the chilling resonance of nursery rhyme and fairy tale to the performance, and Dee herself seems almost like a vintage Disney character, with all of the darkness and pathos that implies.

‘The Earlie king’ is a case in point, a re-working of Der Erlkonig that uses the original song-poem to reflect on Dee’s relationship with her own father, and the piece’s resonance within their own lives. It also deals with the idea that real-life tragedy, and actions that determine our entire destiny, often have no grounding in reason and no rational cause. When we try to trace back the chain of thought and deed to where it all began, it leads nowhere, the trail disappearing in a haze of smoke and mirrors, phantoms and illusions, “fairy tales and falderal.” But by the time we realise this, it’s too late. And the song itself sounds like Disney’s Fantasia as re-imagined by Tom Waits, provoking first uncertain laughter, then chills, then finally alone in the dead of night tears of mingled joy and terror. For me, this is the album’s finest moment, and a key track in the overall narrative.

There are many gems, however. ‘A Compass of the Light’ feels like an ancient Irish ballad, a song that WB Yeats might have written new words for, Dee’s tender piano playing augmented by beautifully subtle curlicues of Lou Reed-like guitar from Matt Sweeney, and strings from Max Moston, Bill Breeze and John Contreras. Andrew WK brushes the traps softly in the background. ‘The Only Bones that Show’ has Dee playing some understated, funky stride piano, locking in perfectly with Andrew WK on bass- his playing really is a joy throughout- as gradually they’re joined by James Lo on drums and Matt Sweeney on clipped wah-wah guitar, and then the strings and woodwind doing a fine impression of a Stax brass section, via a tipsy 1920s tea dance, as Dee celebrates that existential moment when you know you’re really alive, inspired by her tree climbing experience.

 ’Fresh Out of Candles’ opens with the poignant lines, “Back in the fifties, Clark Kent died… it’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s suicide”, and concludes by asking, “when did it start feelin’ like a sin to hope, a sin to pray?” In between are images of religious dissillusionment, loss of faith and innocence, over a tense, low-key groove straight from Transformer, choppy guitars and bass underpinning Dee’s wistful vocal, the high, elegaic strings and a twist of woodwind. 

Dee is alone at the piano for the rambunctious vaudeville stomp of ‘Big Titty B-Girl from Dino Town,’ some ribald light relief declaring how “you just can’t keep a good albino down.” Two instrumentals follow: ‘A Christmas Jig for a Three-legged Cat,’ which sounds just like its title and could easily pass for an authentic seasonal tune from Medieval times, with Robbie Lee taking the lead melody on the recorder, and ‘Flowers on the Tracks,’ a gorgeously understated chamber piece featuring Dee on both piano and harp, accompanied by Max Moston on violin and John Contreras on cello.

‘The Dance of Diminishing Possibilities’ is the other key narrative track, telling the story of how Bobby Slot and Freddy Weiss went to town on that old upright all those years ago in Cleveland, and how when they did it was love at first sight for Dee. “There’s a harp in that piano, and there’s a girl inside that boy, and my daddy’s crowbars are his pride and joy,” she sings, belting it out like some drunken hillbilly showtune. Another instrumental follows, the queasy, seasick ‘Bad Kidneys,’ a Weill-esque interlude showcasing Dee’s accordion skills, before we conclude with ‘You’ll Find Your Footing,’ another celtic-sounding ballad, with Dee singing back through the mists of time (excuse the cliche, but you can feel the mist) to her younger self, reassuring her that, eventually, it will all be relatively alright. Just like in a Disney movie, you will find the place that you belong.

   Baby Dee UK tour dates:

March 19 Newcastle The Cluny

March 24 Coventry Taylor John’s House

March 25 Norwich Arts Centre

March 26 London Bush Hall

March 27 Reading South Street Arts Centre

March 28 Bristol Cube Cinema

Safe Inside the Day is out now.         

www.babydee.org

www.myspace.com/theonlybabydee