Live: The Warlocks, Engine Room, Brighton

So here we are again. Listening to a single chord, stretched out to encompass a million possibilities: filtered through circuits and electronic gates, treated, distorted, echoing, abused, spinning off into an almost infinite series of sounds within sounds, suggestions, associations, layers and angles, as though sound were light, passing through a hall of funhouse mirrors on its cyclical journey around this hot and dingy basement club. How can such deliberate simplicity and repetition never grow old or stale? To those of us doomed to worship forever in the temple of droning, harmonic noise it retains a hypnotic power and freshness, mystically reborn each time and causing other, more complex and melodic styles of music to seem almost facetious and unsatisfactorily ephemeral by comparison. The Warlocks’ churning psychedelia moves slowly uphill, bearing its own crucifix towards Calvary, and we follow dancing behind.

Tonight’s show nearly didn’t happen. ‘Technical failure’ pushed the door times back from 7.30 to 9, meaning supporting sets from Esben and the Witch and The Kool-Aid Electric Company were cancelled altogether, and clusters of pale-faced club rats watched an impressively flaming sun setting orange and egg-like over the beach, before being allowed back into their natural habitat. Some trouble with monitors, apparently, although that may have been the least of it. There was no way the 10.30 curfew could be extended either, as heroic promoters ‘Put It On’ found themselves stuck between a rock night and a hard place (forgive me…).

However, in the event The Warlocks rose to the challenge to deliver an incandescent set that fully justified our long wait. A short-haired Bobby Hecksher seemed in surprisingly ebullient spirits, while Amazonian bassist Jana Risher proved both solid rhythmic anchor and pleasing visual foil, literally giving Bobby a cowboy-booted kick up the arse on more than one occasion. Regular guitarists Ryan and JC were joined by a mysterious fourth axeman, hunched in hat and scarves and impressive classical tattoos stage left, and sadly only a single drummer, though whether the Engine Room’s cramped stage could have accommodated any more musicians is debatable. But when they played a well-received brace of Phoenix era numbers mid-set, including ‘Shake the Dope out,’ ‘Hurricane Heart Attack’ and ‘The Dope’s No Good,’ I missed the duelling beats and pounding cross-rhythms of the two-drummer line-up from that era.

Ultimately though it hardly mattered, any more than the abscence of The Warlocks usually overwhelming fog of dry ice did. It was great to hear the darker and denser songs from last year’s excellent Heavy Deavy Skull Lover album being given a live workout, and the band even managed an encore, Bobby strutting the boards sans guitar and thrusting his mic into the protesting, overloaded amps as effects pedals were sorely abused all round and the other Bob, behind his kit, did his best to drum for two. The Warlocks finished on a high; the hill climbed, their cross erected. Now- how do we get back down?

Live: Nisennenmondai, the Freebutt, Brighton

My new discovery: though certainly not an unknown band judging from the chatter buzzing around the net when I tried to google them, Nisennenmondai are an outfit I’d never heard of until last night, and who still remain amazingly underexposed considering just how jaw-droppingly good they were. Three skinny Japanese girls playing infectious, noisy, kraut-metal-disco-post rock; but more in a moment. First, a word or two on the more than worthy support acts.

Bad Orb opened the evening: Sarah from Jettatura stood behind a mad scientist’s lab table of gadgets and devices, tape players, little toy keyboards and mixers, gradually building up one long sonic piece layer by layer that sounded like the soundtrack to the creepiest of horror films, or actually the noises from beyond conjured up at your last acid-assisted ouija board session. Whispering, chattering voices gnawed at the periphery of our consciousness, unintelligible but certainly unfriendly I’d guess, while bleak winds blew across vast desert plains and a cosmic drone shifted in pitch and tone throughout. Musically, it was extremely impressive; as a performance, less so, feeling more like an art installation than any kind of interactive musical experience. But that’s the nature of a night like this, I guess. Was it a one-off? If so, I’m certainly glad I caught it.

Little Creature was next, another experimental solo turn and one that I had mixed feelings about. As this kind of thing goes, it wasn’t bad, but I think now I’ve seen enough contemporary avant-garde music of this nature to start to be a little more discerning about it. Yes, we’re here to be open-minded and encourage experimentation for its own sake, but there are certain paths that we really only need to go up so many times, certain experiments that have already been carried out and the results duly noted. Just because the sound made is never going to be commercially popular doesn’t neccesarily make it avant-garde and original: it often just means that its an unpleasant, unmelodic noise.

It’s wrong of me in a way to heap all this on Little Creature, as in a way he wasn’t bad, but these were the thoughts running through my head as I watched his set. Loop pedals, for instance, have grown old quickly: only a couple of years ago, they seemed to open up all kinds of exciting possibilities in the hands and feet of someone like Alexander Tucker, but now they just seem lazy and gimmicky when every noodling guitar boy has got one so that he can jam with himself to his heart’s content. Watching Clive Henry playing skronking sax into a variety of effects pedals and manipulating the resulting electronic noise, I confess to a certain sense of ‘So what?’ These are electronic devices mass produced for manipulating sound; that’s what they do. But where is the soul? And what’s it all meant to mean?

I’m probably in entirely the wrong place, I guess, if I want things to mean something. What a quaint, old-fashioned question! But it’s the saxophone’s fault. When Ornette Coleman and Albert Ayler and John Coltrane and the other pioneers of free jazz first started playing this kind of noisy, atonal, freeform skronk back in the 60s, it meant something alright. These were musicians whose instincts naturally turned to melody and beauty, who had striven all their lives to represent the ecstasy of living, loving, and the profound sadness of these things too. They turned from that to noise because they felt they were backed into a corner; it was an extreme protest against the treatment of black men and women in a white world, a historical acknowledgement of solidarity with the Black Panthers and the urgency of the civil rights movement. It was shocking, and it was meant to be: it was the only way to express the pain and frustration of their situation, even if it meant destroying the very thing- beauty, melody, rhythm- that they loved the most.

And now here we are, and that musical heritage is just a meaningless toy in the hands of priviledged white boys, making harsh, non-committal, masturbatory noise to each other and desperately avoiding communicating anything resembling meaning or emotion.

But, having got that of my chest, there was much I enjoyed about Little Creature’s set. Particularly when he turned to a deconstructed guitar, laid on the stage on its back, which he ‘played’ by touching it lightly with a spinning cymbal. Also the music box- like player piano strips which evoked a childlike innocence amid the noise. But there I go, looking for meaning and significance again. Ignore me.

Vitamin B12 are often a hit-or-miss proposition for precisely the reasons mentioned above, but tonight they were triumphant. With three members onstage and another four (I think) scattered around the room, which was plunged into darkness apart from a selection of intermittently flashing coloured lights which dictated the performance of the individual musicians. That is, they each improvised in time to the flashing of a different light, with instruments ranging from electric guitar, flute and some kind of woodwind instrument to electronic devices including one that triggered huge booming beats like the pounding of a slaver’s drum. The result was a total sensory experience, the audience immersed in a mesh of white noise assaulting you from all angles. You’d never know what gentle, mild-mannered chaps they are from this Throbbing Gristle-worthy performance. P-Orridge would be proud!

So, back to Nisennenmondai. As I said, they were a revelation. Despite some initial teething problems, and a bass drum determined to vibrate its way across the stage and into the audience, this youthful trio managed to lock together quite spectacularly on three lengthy pieces that compelled you to shake your ass throughout even as you marvelled at the beauty of their deceptively simple arrangements. I haven’t been able to find out their individual names, but the drummer was definitely the star; a blur of swinging pony tail and flailing sticks, maintaining a solid disco pulse as in the main she restricted herself to kick and ride, hitting snare and toms only when absolutely neccesary, and so locking into that almost-sexual pattern of tension and release that distinguishes all the best dance music. The bass was restricted to the most minimal of punk-funk figures, laying down a repetitive, Pigbag-like groove, while the guitarist almost seemed to be playing high school metal riffs, utilising the ubiquitous loop pedal but only in a functional way, not allowing it to dominate any more than the wah-wah, distortion or any of the rest of her admirably basic FX set-up.

All clad in matching white linen sleeveless dresses over black leggings, Nisennenmondai (the name means either ‘two thousand years of trouble’, which I prefer, or ‘Year 2000 problem,’ relating to the Millennium Bug of yore, which is more likely), recall the irresistible post-kraut grooves of a more guitar-led Holy Fuck, or perhaps Battles if they weren’t a bunch of irritating prog-rock musos. There’s a Japanese lineage too, going back to The Boredoms and Keiji Haino, but they’re equally akin to Neu! or Can, or for that matter some kind of power trio heavy metal take on Chic. But I’m grasping at straws now. If you like post-rock that you can dance to, that can take you to the same places the best raves did back in the nineties, that’s sexy and psychedelic and doesn’t smell of chess clubs and chin-stroking nerds with pocket calculators- go see Nisennenmondai. Before they explode.

Live: Wooden Shjips, The Heads, Freebutt Brighton

I’m typing this with my ears still ringing and my head still cloudy from last night’s show: the penultimate date of the psychedelic package tour of the year, a double header of west country gonzo stalwarts The Heads and hotly-tipped (some say hyped) San Francisco drone brothers Wooden Shjips, on their first full-length outing across the UK. The Shjips in particular have excited and divided opinion with a string of extremely limited vinyl singles and a debut album at the end of 2007 that drew on such perhaps now over-familiar influences as The Velvets, The Doors, Spacemen 3, Krautrock, The Stooges, Hawkwind and The Thirteenth Floor Elevators, but crucially to those of us who were converted (and many weren’t), managed to make the combination sound fresh, edgy, unexpected and sinister all over again.

Moved to the Freebutt after the mysterious and sudden closure of the Brighton Barfly a couple of months ago, the show was surprisingly not a sellout, but felt packed enough as temperatures rose with the volume levels and the Butt went into its usual summer impersonation of one of those sealed windowless sweatboxes used for punishment purposes in old prisoner of war camps. Whatever other improvements the Joiners have made since they took over and renovated the venue, air conditioning ain’t one of them.

The bands weren’t exempt from this torture and The Heads in particular seemed to be suffering from the heat. After a strong start the Bristol quartet seemed to wilt somewhat in the middle of their set, drummer Wayne slowly losing the will to live and their loose and heavy, murky space rock jams becoming somewhat turgid and directionless in places as a result. Having said that, when they did pull it all together The Heads tonight were thrilling, a Frankenstein’s Monster of Stooges/Mudhoney raunch and Loop/Hawkwind noise ragas, wrapped in a tattered black leather jacket and strapped to a hotwired Norton rocketing up the A46 to oblivion.

Keepers of the psych-rock flame since the early nineties, The Heads have mostly existed well below the critical radar, releasing their own records and, due to the need to maintain day jobs, rarely venturing far from their Bristolian heartland. Nevertheless they’ve built up a deserved cult following, remain hugely under-rated and will one day receive due recogntion when the history of the contemporary underground scene is truly written. Though I have several of their albums, this was the first time I’ve seen them live and they didn’t disappoint. But at times, during the less riveting passages, I yearned for a shamanic frontman in the Iggy mould; Simon’s vocals (you couldn’t call it singing) are an afterthought and, live, an unwelcome distraction even from the real business at hand. That business is a sonic bludgeoning of mind and body into grateful human lentil-mush, and when they achieve it The Heads scrape nirvana, as when against all odds their set rose to a sublime, shuddering and triumphant climax, the band locked into a series of descending churning riffs that each time bottomed out into a subconscious pit of clamouring freakish insect life before rising up to the heavens to do it all again. Finally, the foursome transcended their human frailty to serve the cruel, demanding god of their groove, and it was good. 

If The Heads set out to level the walls of Jericho and slice open the top of your heads with great solid slabs of unbroken guitar blast, then Wooden Shjips in contrast put the boogie back into space rock. Though hardly undemanding it’s an altogether mellower, more subtly rhythmic groove, drawing in parts on the motorik pulse of Neu! or Harmonia, but more so on the funk-derived rhythm guitar of the Velvet Underground, the gospel-tinged inner shimmer of Spacemen 3 or The Doors’ decadent roadhouse blues. In fact, one could make a case that in some degree Wooden Shjips are at least acknowledging the black music roots of what has become an overwhelmingly caucasian genre of experimental noise-drone music, Jason Pierce’s endless references back to gospel and blues tradition excepted.

Another amusing contrast between Wooden Shjips and The Heads is how comparatively healthy the Californian combo look. The Heads’ grey English pallor befits Brit rock veterans no doubt used to a diet of greasy chips and speed-cut acid, Ginsters’ pasties and cheap lager, Whereas Wooden Shjips in their hand-stitched moccasins look young and alert on San Francisco organic wholefood diets, warm sunshine and the finest pure grass joints. This comes over in the music, too: where The Heads are seeking merciful, brain-blitzed oblivion, Wooden Shjips seek to open up, to become more alive and awake to the world around us, behind the lazy facade of consensual reality. There’s a darkness in their songs, certainly, particularly in the echoed-to-indecipherability vocals of cultishly-bearded guitarist and band leader Ripley Johnson, but there’s an optimism too, a Kerouac-like sense that it’s in the mystery and the shadows that the diamond truly shines.   

The mantra of interlocking guitar and organ is constantly broken up by chattering maracas, and bassist Dusty Jermier’s trumpet solo towards the end is a highlight. I’ve got a tape somewhere with Miles Davis on one side and The MC5 on the other, and for a moment it was like I was listening to that tape but I could hear the 5 with Miles pushing through. Tonight was like that; a recognition that the droning one chord OM contains multitudes, that the obsessive worship of feedback and repetitive guitar noise can be inclusive and innovative still, and that rather than approaching a dead end, psychedelic rock in the 21st Century can still open up to the entire universe.

The Rolling Stones- Goat’s Head Soup

 

The original, unused album cover artwork

 

 

  Conventional wisdom has it that Goat’s Head Soup was a disappointment after the Stones’ supposed career-best triumph of Exile on Main Street, and the start of their 1970s decline. In fact it’s their most under-rated album; a classic record with a completely different feel to its admittedly hard-to-follow predecessor.

  A melancholy, autumnal LP with echoes of Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, Goat’s Head Soup is a hungover comedown record for the end of the 1960s party, blinking in the cold grey light of the 1970s. Maybe the hostility towards it was partly because nobody at the time wanted to be told that the party was over, least of all by the Rolling Stones. But viewed objectively there’s not a bad song on it, and some great ensemble playing when the band- augmented by session players including Billy Preston and Nicky Hopkins on keyboards- get stuck into a groove.    

  It opens with the sinister, loping groove of ‘Dancing with Mr D,’ in which Mick meets Death in the graveyard and asks him in what manner he’ll meet his eventual end. Later he hooks up with a beautiful woman, “wearing boxing gloves and a black top hat,” only for the flesh to fall from her bones and for her too to be transformed into the Grim Reaper. You don’t need to be a Freudian psychologist to guess that Mick’s got some issues to deal with here, to do with growing older, facing his mortality and the fate of all flesh. I’m reminded of Jack Kerouac’s Oedipal obsession with the “meat wheel” of birth, desire, sex, procreation and death, a hang-up that saw casual sex become something that just brought him closer, mentally and physically, to the grave. Guitars and piano intertwine like tendrils of vine around an ancient tomb.

  The Van Morrison-esque ‘100 Years Ago’ is one of the great forgotten Rolling Stones numbers, a song of regret and loss with the hookline, “sometimes don’t you think it’s wise not to grow up.” The laid-back funk of Billy Preston’s clavinet playing gives way to a strident wah-wah guitar solo and a brilliant, double-time, heart-quickening jam session coda. ‘Coming down Again’ is a sorrowful piano-led ballad, with wah-d guitars chiming like distant bells. “Where are all my friends? The sky fell down again,” Keith sings plaintively, like Johnny Thunders never quite could.

   ‘Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo (Heartbreaker)’ struggles free of the world-weary torpor however, animated by genuine anger at the injustices of the world and the corruption and unfairness of society. It’s a powerful, city-smooth rocker, driven by a blaring brass section, which has a similar feel to Dylan’s later ‘Hurricane’ in its rage at the shooting of an innocent black kid by New York cops. But the song’s anger is ultimately impotent and frustrated, offering no hope of restitution, of justice being done or the world ever becoming a better place. Indeed, the sense of regret and hopelessness in the classic ‘Angie,’ which follows- ostensibly about the end of a love affair- could as well be about the failure of the idealistic 1960s and the dawning of a new, harsher decade. “All those dreams we had, they all went up in smoke… where do we go from here?” But still, “they can’t say we never tried.”

  ‘Silver Train’ is a rolling blues driven by Ian Stewart’s piano and a combination of harmonica and slide guitar, that’s all about travelling across some state line to have sex with a prostitute: “I did not know her name, but she laughed and took my money.” Mick plays piano himself on the equally bluesy ‘Hide your Love,’ which also features a great guitar solo and a powerful, rock-gospel conclusion that Primal Scream have ripped off more than once. ‘Winter’ is wonderfully evocative of a dirty, freezing London and Withnail-esque hippies huddling in their greatcoats after they’ve put their last sixpence in the gas meter, and dreaming of the California sun. “I’ve been burning my bell, book and candle, and the restoration plays have all gone around,” is a great line, whatever it means. The influence of Astral Weeks is particularly apparent on this track, especially when the strings swoop in. Meanwhile, ‘Can You Hear the Music’ is a psychedelic jam that builds from eastern-sounding atmospherics into a chanted, communal but ambiguous celebration that finds Mick admitting “sometimes I’m dancing on air, but then I get scared, when I hear the music.” It’s a track that I would say Anton Newcombe of the Brian Jonestown Massacre has heard more than once. 

   The LP ends with the controversial ‘Star Star,’ originally titled ‘Starfucker.’ In a career filled with paeans to meaningless sex with underage girls, this is the most blatant and cynical. “Your tricks with fruit are pretty cute, I bet you keep your pussy clean.” Yet the band are aware that this girl only wants them because they’re famous, and that they’re essentially anonymous trophy-objects to her. Their macho bluster fails to disguise their need for what she has to offer, and they’re powerless in the face of her rapacious sexuality. Musically, the song is raunchy Stones-by-numbers, the sort of strutting, crowd-pleasing riffs that have been largely absent from this album, replaced in the main by something more fragile and uncertain. Goat’s Head Soup- it’s title suggesting darkness and decadence, but more likely referring to the catering at the Jamaican studios where it was recorded- strips away the groupie-attracting, strutting machismo of the Stones myth to reveal a band growing older, beset by doubts and regrets, acutely aware of loss and at a crossroads in both their careers and their personal lives. Altamont loomed large in their immediate past; disco, Ronnie Wood and self-parody were soon to come. But Goat’s Head Soup stands both as a tantalising glimpse of the more honest, less aggressive direction they could have taken, and as the last great Stones LP; the end of an era, a final gathering of energies and a brave stare into the mirror before the long darkness draws in.

David Bowie- Hours

 

 

 

Alongside the earlier Buddha of Suburbia soundtrack, Hours is the largely unheralded beginning of Bowie’s 21^st Century renaissance. Following on from his bold, partly-successful but ultimately trying-too-hard dabblings in drum n’ bass on Outside and Earthling- which have dated badly and now sound more like a mid-life crisis than anything else, the musical equivalent of buying yourself a flash sports car for your fiftieth birthday (or, ahem, marrying a gorgeous young model)- and coming before his acclaimed “return to form” with Heathen, Hours is the album where Bowie finally shook off the creative malaise that had dogged him since Scary Monsters, stopped worrying about keeping up with all the other Joneses, gave up on twenty years of role-playing and delivered a batch of strong, traditional, heartfelt songs that played to his strengths as a singer and songwriter, that drew on his own musical and personal history but came out somehow sounding clean, uncluttered, and, most paradoxically of all- young.

  Admittedly, by comparison to his previous couple of albums, Bowie is playing it safe on Hours. It sounds like the kind of album you’d expect a 52-year-old millionaire rock legend to make- tasteful, sedate, well-tailored synthesised rock moving at a stately pace, with lyrics largely about looking back and wondering what it was all about. But, crucially, it’s far better than you expect it to be. As someone who grew up with ‘80s Bowie, got into Ziggy and, especially, the Anthony Newley-influenced World of David Bowie album in my teens, and became obsessed with all his ‘70s personas in my mid-twenties, I nevertheless saw Bowie as a legendary figure from some mythical past- rock’s long-gone, pre-punk golden age of the sixties and early seventies- and had no interest in him as a current performer until I saw him at the Glastonbury Festival in 2000. Suddenly I saw him as still active, not remote and legendary- alien- but someone here and now, flawed, human, approachable, and still capable of good work. So I borrowed all of his recent albums from Brighton library when I got back, and taped them. And Hours, then his most recent, was the one that I kept coming back to. Before Glastonbury I had thought that Bowie, like all rock stars, had it for a time when he was young, and then lost it, as was inevitable. Maybe I was becoming a bit more forgiving as I approached thirty myself; maybe, God forbid, my tastes were mellowing. But Hours certainly struck a chord; it sounded honest, elegiac, and real.

  As the title suggests, this is an album all about the passing of time, almost relentlessly so.  And as Bowie cradles his dying self on the cover, all dressed in white, so on the back sleeve he appears in triplicate, all in black and sat round a coiled black serpent. The figure on the left has his head in his hands. The exact symbolism of all this escapes me, but I’d guess we’re talking about death and rebirth, temptation and regret. The album is co-written with guitarist Reeves Gabrels, Bowie’s right-hand man since the arguably unfairly reviled Tin Machine, and the pair also handle production duties.

  “All of my life I’ve tried so hard,” it begins, on ‘Thursday’s Child,’ before continuing “nothing much happened all the same.” The mood seems similar to another turn-of-the-decade identity crisis, in ‘Ashes to Ashes’ twenty years earlier, when Bowie sang, “I’ve never done good things; I’ve never done bad things…” Melancholy waves of synthesiser and fretless bass wind round a laid-back shuffle beat, and when the girlie backing vocals come in on “throw me tomorrow,” even the hardest punk heart melts in the face of such smooth perfection. If the lyrics seem a touch self-pitying then at least the sentiments seem sincere, and ultimately the mood is positive: “Seeing my past to let it go… Everything’s falling into place… I don’t regret that I was Thursday’s Child.”

  The dramatic ‘Something in the Air’ finds Bowie the old showbiz pro singing in his trademark tense, closed-mouth style from back in his throat, allowing for maximum impact when he opens up just a bit more on the chorus, restraint being everything you see (always leave them wanting more… always keep something up your sleeve). The lyrics tell of a love affair that’s gone on far too long, the moment of realisation that the feeling has gone, a metaphor doubtless for Bowie’s broader sense of ennui.

  The shrugging regret of ‘Survive’ finds Bowie singing in his native, though somewhat affected, cockney accent, which always suggest a heartfelt nakedness and autobiographical content to the lyrics. It could just be another calculated device, but as he sings of “Beatle Boys all snowy white, razzle dazzle clubs every night,” it’s hard not to believe him. And ultimately, if it works, does it really matter? He shifts into his alienated Bing Crosby-in-space croon for ‘If I’m Dreaming my Life,’ with its suggestive, haiku-like lyrics and effective time changes, Bowie floating, disconnected, into the void at the end with Reeves Gabrels sounding more than ever like a digital age Mick Ronson. On ‘Seven’ he plays slide guitar like George Harrison, over acoustic strumming and Bowie ruminating carelessly on mortality and loss. It’s a beautiful, simple song and a reminder that beyond all the concepts and what-not, Bowie just has an amazing, expressive voice, which has carried him through more lean material than many would admit.

  The big questions- complex yet dreadfully simple- continue to recur on ‘What’s Really Happening?’ and ‘The Pretty Things are going to Hell,’ which references both one of Bowie’s favourite ‘60s beat groups and a song from Iggy’s Raw Power (which Bowie of course produced), in a song about the excesses and ecstasies of doomed, or damned, youth, and where they leave you in the end. “The pretty things are going to Hell, they wore it out but they wore it well.” Of course, all us flaming teenage existentialists knew how it had to end- you might die, or you might even live- but we Did It, and we knew it counted for nothing, because doesn’t everything count for nothing, isn’t it all just bravado and the angle that you turn your collar, but isn’t that everything too?

  And suddenly, on ‘New Angels of Promise’ it’s like we’re listening to a lost track from Low, albeit with conventional late-nineties production values. It’s those odd scales he’s singing, and the cut-up sounding lyrics. ‘Brilliant Adventure’ is even more so, one of those ominous, eastern-sounding instrumentals, all minimalist synthesiser, woodblocks and windchimes. After these late treats, the relatively tuneless ‘The Dreamers’ is a slightly disappointing, anticlimactic ending, Bowie murmuring apocalyptic imagery in self-parodic vocal style. “So it goes, just a searcher, lonely soul, last of the dreamers.” These are the final lines; resigned, philosophical, world-weary.  

  Apparently Bowie intended this album to be a dialogue between a middle-aged man and his younger self. While the lyrics are often as cryptic and ambiguous as ever, there’s certainly a strong existential theme running through the record, and no masks or characters- just an aging rock star / artist wondering if it’s all been worth it. Definitely melancholy and autumnal, but uplifting and empowering in the end, this is the best late-period Bowie album- his most consistent record since Scary Monsters, and better than the still-fine albums that came after. At Glastonbury, I realised that David Bowie was human after all; Hours is the recorded proof.

 

 

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 )

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