V.A. Saturday

The 1977 various artists compilation album New Wave looks like a major label cash in (it came out on Vertigo, a subsidiary of Phillips/ Phonogram). The cover, bright red with a photo of leather jacket clad punk spitting beer at the camera in front of a corrugated iron fence, is typically '77 punk. The album's title looks like an attempt to make something threatening palatable, new wave rather than punk. But the fact is, it's a really good primer of mainly American 1977 punk bands with some pre- punk or proto- punk acts thrown in and there's hardly a song on it you'd skip (I make an exception for The Boomtown Rats who I'd always skip). The sleeve thanks Linda and Seymour Stein (who scooped up most of the US punk/ New Wave acts for Seymour's label Sire) and also Jake Riviera and Kosmo Vinyl from Stiff Records, both of whom knew their stuff. 

New Wave opens, as all punk compilation albums probably should, with The Ramones and one minute thirty two seconds of rushing buzzsaw guitars and Joey's snarled vocals about Judy and Jackie...

Judy Is A Punk

From there it's bam- bam- bam of U.S. punk and proto- punk- The Dead Boys, Patti Smith's Piss Factory, The Runaways, New York Dolls, Richard Hell and The Voidoids and Love Comes In Spurts. France and Australia are represented by Little Bob Story a Skyhooks. Flip it over and side two kicks off with Talking Heads (if you've placed the needle past The Boomtown Rats), jerky, staccato, New York art with two loves  that go tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet like little birds. 

Love Goes To Building On Fire 

The Damned show up with New Rose, the first UK punk single and the one that got them blackballed by the punk crowd for the crime of speeding up the recoding in the studio, studio trickery being NOT PUNK. More Ramones, more Dead Boys, more Runaways, more Dolls and The Flaming Groovies who always seem like the outliers on this record, their 1967 San Francisco garage rock always feeling a bit too studied and retro for 1977 despite Shake Some Action being most definitely a good song. 

New Wave was a second hand shop staple for years- all the way through the 80s a record you could guarantee finding in the Punk section. Pulling it out again and playing it for this post, it still packs a punch, a 1977 sock to the face. 

Bagging Area Book Club Chapter Three- Solstice Edition

Today is the summer solstice, midsummer, the longest day and shortest night, a celebration of the sun that has been observed since the Neolithic era. To mark this event I thought I'd add to my recent Bagging Area Book Club posts with some solstice adjacent reading material. In May 2019 the first edition of Weird Walk was published, specifically timed to coincide with May Day (Beltane in Gaelic). Since then there have been a further six editions, with the Number Seven in 2023 the most recent although as the photo above shows I only have issues one, three and seven so far. Weird Walk was started by three friends 'walking and engaging with the British landscape and its lore'. Forty pages printed on good quality card, well designed with quality photographs and illustrations and packed with interesting articles, Weird Walk is a treasure trove to be dipped in and out of. The first page of the first issue quotes Julian Cope in The Modern Antiquarian- 'people don't go anywhere unless there's a signpost'- and from that point has included articles on Medieval graffiti, dolmen, Dungeon Synth, flat roof pubs, a walk around Avebury, a feature on the life of 'seminal Tudor loon' William Kempe, an interview with writer Ben Edge, the folklore of booze and of cheese, explorations of portals in Wiltshire, acid folk, author Benjamin Myers writing abut Lindisfarne, and the pastoral ambient cassette sounds of the label Verdant Wisdom. 

Acid folk? Here's some Pentangle from 1969...

House Carpenter

Weird Walk is well worth looking out for and can be bought online from their website, each edition available for £5.50. 

I thought I'd throw in some more sounds for the solstice, some acid house rather than acid folk, recent releases to soundtrack tonight and beyond. First up is Temples remixed by Jono from Jagwar Ma, originally released in 2014 for Record Shop Day and recently made available at Temples' Bandcamp page. Shelter Song (Jagwar Ma Jono's Wrong Mix) takes Temples psyche rock and gives it an electronic thump and pulse, the synthline twisting its way round and round. 

Richard Sen, who compiled one of the best compilations of last year and a superb remix EP to accompany it (Dream The Dream) and who appeared on our Sounds From The Flightpath Estate Volume 1 album with the speaker shaking sounds of Tough On Chug, Tough On The Causes Of Chug, is set to release a debut solo album later this year, an album called India Man. To lead into it he's released a single, Hills Of Kashmir, a cosmic disco/ acid house thumper that goes on with little let up in intensity and is very good indeed. 

Richard also turns up today at the latest release by teenage wonderkid OBOST who's debut album Er... Hello? I wrote about a month ago. Sen has remixed Don't Want To Be Alone, a star sailing, bleepy, dynamic version of the song with Bobby's vocal on top. The EP is out today at Bandcamp. Richard's remix is worth the price of admission alone but you also get OBOST's own Jittery remix of the song and a new track, Take The Message. Happy solstice. 

Go Easy Step Lightly

The big stack of CDs that came free with magazines that I wrote about a few weeks ago continues to give up the goods as I work my way through it. It seems that people at Uncut and Mojo were well connected to Pete Wylie- Pete and Mighty Wah! songs have turned up on several CDs. 

In 2011 Mojo came accompanied by a CD called Panic- 15 Tracks Of Riotous '80s Indie Insurrection!, a fifteen track compilation that opened with Madness and included Billy Bragg, The Three Johns, Robert Wyatt, Half Man Half Biscuit, Orange Juice, Redskins, and Felt among the line up. Halfway through was this...

The Day Margaret Thatcher Died (A Party Song)

At the point this CD was given away (and until this year with the release of Teach Yrself Wah!) Panic was the only physical release this song got. In the song Pete imagines the celebrations that would ensue with the news that Thatcher had died. He wasn't wrong either- when she died in April 2013 there were indeed places that celebrated. There has been some revisionism in political and popular culture over the years, Thatcher portrayed in some televisual accounts of the 1980s as a slightly eccentric but loveable Prime Minister with big blow dried hair, a handbag and blouses with big bows who did the UK a lot of good. This rose tinted view of Thatcherism, her governments, their policies and the 1980s is also propagated by various right wing rags and is one of the few things the factions in the current Tory Party agree on. But let's not kid ourselves- the Thatcher governments were hard right wing, authoritarian and deeply unpleasant, pushing a set of policies that among other things demonised huge sectors of the British working class, talked about the 'managed decline' of a city (Liverpool), gave their friends huge tax cuts (paid for by North Sea gas and selling off nationalised industries), ran down entire industries in the name of 'the market', creating the subsequent social problems which the people living in those communities were then blamed for. Trickle down economics- wealth doesn't and hasn't trickled down, it's flowed up. On top of that she deployed police as the military wing of the Conservative government and was very friendly with all sorts of unpleasant and murderous dictators and regimes (Pinochet, apartheid South Africa). Also, Clause 28. So, no thank you to the revisionist view of Thatcher. 

The song is great with Pete in fine form- crunching guitars, rousing vocals, and a chant, 'build a bonfire/ paint the sky/ come on down/ I'll tell you why/ She's gone/ and nobody cried'. Celebrating anyone's death may seem needlessly callous but for many people who lived through the 80s, Thatcher is an exception. 

In April 2000 Uncut magazine gave away Unconditionally Guaranteed 2000.4, sixteen songs for the fourth month of the new millennium, opening with Chappaquiddick Skyline and ending with Mercury Rev. Five songs in was Pete Wylie and The Mighty Wah!'s Disneyland Forever. 

Disneyland Forever

This is Pete at his biggest and grandest, a huge sounding song with widescreen production, massive chiming guitars, pounding drums and Pete's soaring vocal. The song originally came out on Wah!'s 2000 album Songs Of Strength And Heartbreak. Pete tells the story of the inspiration for this song when he plays it live. He met Gerry Conlon backstage at GMex, a Stop Sellafield show set up by Greenpeace with a line up including Big Audio Dynamite, Public Enemy, Kraftwerk and U2. Gerry Conlon had spent fifteen years in prison as one of the Guildford Four, wrongly convicted of being an IRA bomber. Gerry and the other three of the Guildford Four were released on appeal in October 1989- much to the chagrin of the Thatcher government. The Birmingham Six, similarly locked up on invented charges and police incompetence/ corruption, were freed not long after in 1991. Pete spoke to Gerry backstage, a man who had spent a decade and a half in prison for something he didn't do, wrongfully convicted by the British justice system. Gerry struggled with life after being released, suffering from mental health issues, drugs and alcohol dependency, and a suicide attempt. When they spoke backstage at GMex they talked about life inside and injustice and Pete asked Gerry what he was going to do. As Pete tells it, Gerry said, 'I don't know for sure but whatever happens its going to be Disneyland forever'. Pete found this inspiring, a man who could be consumed by hate and bitterness seeing the world and the rest of his life in that way. Gerry died of cancer in 2014 aged sixty having recovered from some of his issues and becoming a campaigner for those who have suffered miscarriages of justice. The song is Pete's attempt to do justice to the man- and justice he does. 

The third Wylie/ Wah! song from my pile of freebie magazine CDs was from 2003, a CD titled White Riot Vol Two (A Tribute To The Clash), sixteen Clash covers and a Joe Strummer song. The covers include Jesse Malin, The National, Joy Zipper (posted a few weeks ago), Sparks, Billy Bragg, Stiff Little Fingers, and Nouvelle Vague. It also had Pete Wylie captured live at The Railway, Haddington Festival in 2002, covering Mick Jones' Stay Free, just Pete, his acoustic guitar and more passion than can be measured.

Stay Free (Live)

Saturday Soup

This Saturday Marconi Union play a gig at Soup in Manchester supported by Contours with further support by The Flightpath Estate DJs. On this occasion the Flightpath Estate DJs are me and Martin. We are starting things off at 6.30 and then on again between Contours and Marconi Union at about 8pm- we're playing ambient/ electronic sounds and it would be lovely to see anyone who fancies a night of electronic music. There are some tickets left and they're priced at under £14. 

I saw Marconi Union last march, an audio/ visual experience, three people playing laptop, synth and keys with a guitarist centre stage playing the least guitary guitar. Layers of ambient sounds but with real intent and propulsion. This is from an EP that came out in 2022, The Ilex, a moody and compelling piece of electronic music, non- stop drums and ripples of dark synth textures. It's from Versions which you can get here. 

In 2021 Marconi Union released a seven track album they recorded with Jan Wobble, a Record Shop Day exclusive. The album opened with Wealth, seven minutes of abstract experimentation, a long slow fade in of ambience and then the deep, dub bass of Mr. Wobble. Jah's repetitive bass riff provides the bedrock for the sci fi synths and keening guitar lines. 

Wealth

Contours provides support on Saturday, the project of Cumbrian born/ Manchester based DJ and producer Tom Burford. Contours released an EP in April- Elevations- which I'm going to be reviewing for Dr. Rob's Ban Ban Ton Ton so I won't steal my own thunder or Rob's by posting anything about that. Instead here's The Programme from a 7"/ digital release from October 2021 (available at Bandcamp), a three and a half minute focussed excursion on drum machine and synth with some lovely percussion and the hint of some acid.

 

Sprechen Presents...

On Saturday night gig goers in Manchester had multiple options. The new Co- Op Arena in east Manchester hosted Liam Gallagher who was playing Definitely Maybe in full and then whatever else it is Liam plays after he's done all the good songs. Old Trafford cricket ground had Foo Fighters. Manchester city centre on Saturday afternoon was packed with people coming and going, Liam and Foo fans, hen parties and earlier on glammed up Taylor Swift fans heading for trains to Liverpool. The other option was a walk up Cheetham Hill Road to The Yard and a Sprechen Records Presents night with live performances by Chris Massey's The Thief Of Time and Psychederek. I took the non- Liam, no- Foo option and headed to The Yard. 

The Thief Of Time's debut album Where Do I Belong? came out towards the end of last year and became one of my favourite albums of 2023 very quickly. Chris Massey usually makes dance music and ultimately that has one aim- to make people dance. The Thief Of Time is song based and more autobiographical, Chris bringing together a lifetime spent soaking up pop culture- music, films, comics, songs, bands, clubs- and forming into one seven song record. There are nods of the head to 80s pop, to mid- 80s New Order, electronic music and guitars. A Certain Ratio helped out as did Psychederek, Bay Bryan and Alison Rae who all provided vocals. At 9.45 pm on Saturday night Chris stepped on stage at The Yard for the debut live appearance as The Thief of Time, switching between guitar, synth drums, keys/ synths and vocals with a guitarist to his left. The songs definitely work live, pulsing and building, electronic pop with psychedelic and lots of film references. The projections behind added a visual dimension, sci fi loops, Manchester tower blocks, the footbridge over the M60 at Stretford and pulsating computer animations. Many of the songs have snatches of dialogue sampled from film and TV and Chris had synced up the vocal samples to the moments of the films he took them from, the actors from various black and white films appearing on the screen as their voices came through the PA. It was hugely impressive and hopefully the first of many future performances. Towards the finale, with twin guitars chiming away, as the motorik/ cosmische rhythms thumped on and the synths soared, the effect was magical and hypnotic. This one, Rendezvous On A Lost World, with the ghostly refrain sung by Psychederek, 'You're not alone', echoing through the Victorian school building, sounded especially good.

The Thief Of Time were followed by Psychederek. His single Test Card Girl was one of my favourite releases of 2023 and his recent EP Alt! is already shaping up to be one of my favourites of '24. Behind a bank of synths, drum machines and a laptop, a microphone and a guitar, Psychederek began with the dreamy, phased, blissed out synth chords of Test Card Girl, stretching the sounds and filtering them before the drum beat kicked in...

From there he went from one song straight into the next, a blend of gig and DJ set, the songs joined seemlessly. Hapi from Alt! had his singing, his voice floating from the PA, followed by the crunching cosmische rhythms and Neu! guitar/ synthlines of Nowhere To Nowhere. I had to leave before the end of Psychederek's set but what I caught was superb and I'll be back for more next time he plays. 

Psychederek's Alt! is available at Sprechen, four songs for summer '24 including his sun baked cover of 808 State's Pacific. Digital and vinyl here. 

The Thief Of Time's Where Do I Belong? is here, digital, CD and vinyl options plus posters and tote bags. 

Monday's Long Song

In 1993 David Sylvian and Robert Fripp released a single- Jean The Birdman- across two CDs with different B-sides on the pair. CD Two came with Endgame, a beautiful, understated acoustic song, and the ten minute and fourteen second wonder that is Earthbound/ Starblind. Effectively, it's two songs stuck together. The first half is David singing over acoustic guitar, close and melodic with lyrics about magic and nature and a woman who is 'giving me questions and quizzical looks/ She tears up my papers and burns all my books', someone who has 'been through this world before'. At four minutes seventeen seconds the second half starts, six minutes of Frippertronics, the conjuring of ambient guitar soundscapes. The first half is earthbound I guess and the second half is starblind. 

Earthbound/ Starblind

Forty Minutes Of Pop Will Eat Itself

This goose lives at Portland basin in Ashton- under-  Lyne, East Manchester. When we were there a couple of weeks ago they warned us that the geese were nesting and could be aggressive if disturbed. They didn't mention this one though, who has necked two cans of Stella and now wants a fight. 

Pop Will Eat Itself are touring this autumn. I'm quite tempted. Back in autumn 1988 I saw them at Liverpool University. In my head they were one of the first gigs I attended in Liverpool, close to the start of the academic year, maybe just after Fresher's Week- but false memory syndrome has had me here because according to PWEI's own On Patrol gig history at their website they didn't play the Mountford Hall until 2nd December 1988. There is a live recording of the gig on Mixcloud, probably one I bought at some point on cassette from the bootleg tape sellers in the student's union. 

The gig was great, PWEI hitting the stage and giving us an hour of their mash up of rock, rap, dance music and samples. The room was a real gathering of the late 80s tribes, grebos, indie kids, and goths all standing around waiting. I was wearing Levi's, Converse, a black t- shirt and dark green waistcoat (with Watchmen smiley face badge) combo with, for some reason, a bandanna tied round my head. This sticks in the memory for reasons I cannot fully ascertain- as does my conversation with Tracey, a hippy girl who was on my course. We had a chat, all going well, but at some point I referred to Poppie Clint as Clive and Tracey was withering in her look and response. 'Clint, Adam, he's called Clint'. They came on stage to rescue me from my embarrassment (Tracey later came with us to see The House Of Love in Widnes though that could have been because Al had a car). 

Stourbridge's finest were huge fun, a riot of sounds, samples, buzzsaw guitars and shouting. B.A.D. may have got their before them but they were fairly ground-breaking in their approach and records. The mix below reflects that I hope, forty minutes of late 80s and early 90s collisions of styles, pop culture references all over the place, focussing mainly on singles and finishing with a song released for Italia 90, an unlikely music- football- politics crossover.

Forty Minutes Of Pop Will Eat Itself

• The Incredible PWEI v Dirty Harry
• Can U Dig It (7" Mix)
• Dance Of The Mad
• Eat Me, Drink Me, Love Me, Kill Me
• Karmadrome
• Wise Up Sucker
• Def. Con. One.
• Orgone Accumulator
• Inject Me
• Touched By The Hand Of Cicciolina

The Incredible PWEI v Dirty Harry is from the 92 Degrees single from 1991, a superb acid house/ film sample fest. 

Can U Dig It was a single in 1989, from their second album, This Is The Day.. This Is The Hour... This Is This!, a list of influences and references from TV, film, comics, records and that sounds like what life felt like in 87/ 88 from The Twilight Zone to Alan Moore (knows the score), V For Vendetta and Into The Groovy, Run DMC and Renegade Soundwave, Marvel and DC. Wise Up Sucker is from the same album, a single too as is Def. Con. One., the lead single from 1988's This Is This!, the archetypal grebo rock song, a collision of punk, hip hop, rock, indie and samples. Inject Me was on the album too. 

Dance Of The Mad is from 1990, a single that lost the word Bastards from the end of the title to make it more acceptable for TV and radio play. Produced by Flood and taken from the third PWEI album, Cure For Sanity, and recorded at Paul Weller's Black Barn studio in Surrey. It's Weller's studio now, I'm not sure if he owned it then. I can't imagine much common ground in 1990 between Weller and the Poppies but who knows.

Eat, Me, Drink Me, Love Me, Kill Me and Karmadrome are from 1992, a double A- side single. You need both sides. 

Orgone Accumulator is a cover of the Hawkwind song from a 1987 covers EP along with Sigue Sigue Sputnik's Love Missile F1- 11.

Touched by The Hand Of Cicciolina is from Cure For Sanity and a summer 1990 single, one of the songs of the summer (a summer that wasn't short of memorable songs). It features/ pays tribute to Hungarian- Italian porn star Ilona Staller who was elected into the Italian parliament in 1987. A couple of years later she offered to have sex with Saddam Hussein in exchange for peace. The piano riff, Gary Linekar sample and chant of 'Cicicolina/ Ciciolina/ This time for I- tal- ya', are all PWEI gold. 

V.A. Saturday

Back in 2013 Astro Lab Recordings released a double CD compilation called Treasure Hunting. At the time the whole A Love From Outer Space/ chuggy cosmic disco/ Golden Lion/ Scandi- Italo house thing was quite underground and some distance from the bright lights. The Golden Lion didn't even exist in its current form. I was just typing away at this blog in isolation, chasing Andrew Weatherall remixes and music by related artists, and I wasn't really plugged into at all apart from vicariously via the internet, and hadn't made any of the connections and friendships that I have now. Our kids were both young and weekend nights spent dancing until ungodly hours weren't really possible. Treasure Hunting was one of the ways that connected me to that sound, an eighteen track compilation that pulled me in because of the Andrew Weatherall remix of Timothy J. Fairplay's Blizzard/ Snowride. Other names on the CD were by artists I already had music by- Deadstock 33s (Justin Robertson), Daniel Avery (whose debut album Drone Logic came out that year and reconnected me with techno sounds), and some Weatherall associated names from the Scrutton Street axis- Scott Fraser and Hardway Bros- plus the odd name I recognised from mixes Andrew had done for various websites and clubs- Mugwump for instance.

Treasure Hunting is a superb set of tracks, all connected by the chuggy/ sci fi/ cosmic disco sound but many sounding pretty individual too. Across the rest of the CD there are first rate tracks by Marc Pinol, Toby Tobias, Ana Helder, DJ Kaos, Cage and Aviary and several more. There isn't a weak track on it and you can pick it up cheaply second hand. It's probably not a particularly sought after various artists compilation, I doubt it will be seen as a classic in years to come, but it's one that drew me into a sub- world I was looking in at, part of what I was hearing at a distance in 2013, the year coincidentally that Martin and myself started The Flightpath Estate. These three give an idea of the treasure contained within, starting with the 80s synths, bleeps and robotic voices of Marc Pinol's Monotony In Germany, then Mugwump's slower, spacious Belgian grooves on God Is Gracious and finishing with Hardway Bros and an exercise in sci fi, booty shaking hypnosis. More cowbell please. 

Monotony In Germany

God Is Gracious

The Prince In Outer Space

Sean Johnston/ Hardway Bros continues in rude health, DJing, remixing and making his own music. Shortly he will release an EP on Rekids, an EP called Murky, with vocals from Beth Cassidy and a Beyond The Wizard's Sleeve remix. To celebrate this Sean has done a ninety minute mix for House Of Rekids, a deep dive into thumpy, dark electronic music- don't let the slow start get you thinking this is a chilled out mix, it goes in deep quite quickly. Superb stuff from Sean, as ever. Listen to it at Soundcloud. 

Tracklist

• Luminodisco - Jazzclub 
• Rees - Früg (Edit) 
• A.B.Habibi  - Mother Africa 
• Innuendo - Kreaturen Der Nacht 
• Len - Steal My Sunshine (Version Idjut) 
• Roland Leesker -Let It All Go (feat. Dan Diamond) 
• Romare -Wolf's Teeth 
• Shakespeares Sister - Black Sky - Apiento Edit (Unreleased) 
• Toby Tobias - Get Wit Me 
• Jezebell - Weekend Machines 
• Phil Kieran - All Gonna Hurt (Unreleased) 
• Rafiki - Lofi Dreams 
• Crooked Man - YowYow 
• Session Victim - Screen Off /w Ras Stimulant 
• Timo Maas & Marc Werner - Barca Boys 
• Burglar Tom - Lonesome Tonight

And if you want more David Holmes returned to NTS this week for another two hour session with his long running God's Waiting Room series. The latest edition opens with the sublime sounds of Marvin Gaye and then goes full on into spiritual jazz, psychedelic soul and freaked out folk. Listen here.  

Twenty One

Eliza, our daughter, is twenty one today. We had the party last weekend at a venue in Altrincham because today she is at the Gottwood festival in Anglesey. Coincidentally Sean Johnston is playing Gottwood, doing A Love From Outer Space, the travelling cosmic disco he and Andrew Weatherall started in 2010. I've told Eliza she must attend ALFOS as part of her birthday celebrations, a cross generational handing on of the torch or something. A couple of her friends asked what ALFOS is. '110 BPM chuggy cosmic disco', I told them, which they seemed to find quite amusing in a 'what's the old man on about?' kind of way. 

A few weeks ago Eliza told me I had to do a speech at her twenty first. I gave it some thought and then, capitalising on her love of Mancunian poetry I decided to do it based on Mike Garry's St Anthony: An Ode To Anthony H. Wilson. Eliza loves Mancunian poetry, Mike Garry's poem and also Tony Walsh's This Is The Place. Despite Eliza's concerns that my poem would be 'cringe' I wrote and read it out anyway, an A- to Z of Eliza set to Mike Garry's structure, cadence and style. Apologies to Mike.

It finished, as Mike's does, with 'Talk to me of all these things and there's one thing that's for certain/ That I'll see the face and I'll hear the voice of Eliza Ramona Turner'. Not a dry eye in the house. Including mine. 

St. Anthony: An Ode To Tony Wilson (Andrew Weatherall Remix)

When she was born a nurse looked at her in her cot as travelled in a lift up to the next floor in Wythenshawe hospital. Eliza was wide awake and looking round. The nurse said to us, 'that is the most alert baby I have ever seen'. And that's kind of how she's been ever since. 

Happy birthday Eliza. You've been through more than any twenty one should have to in recent years and have come through it with your love of life intact. Enjoy Gottwood, enjoy ALFOS. Sean, if she turns up wrecked and harangues you endlessly, please accept my apologies. I don't know where she gets it from. 

Forgiveness Is Yours

Fat White Family released a new album in April, Forgiveness Is Yours and inch by inch it's been creeping into my consciousness, an album I keep coming back to. Like any Fat White Family album there are moments where they cross the line- crossing the line is very much par for the course- but this album has songs to spare, a dynamic and vital sound. They parted company with guitarist Saul Adamczewski during the making of it (not for the first time) and maybe this has given them a focus, a line to pursue. Singer and frontman Lias Saoudi has trodden the path of excess in the past and has since lockdown moved into writing. Several spoken word pieces appear on Forgiveness Is Yours, a harbinger maybe of what could come next. With the guitarist gone the band have stretched into synths and orchestration, funk and disco. Opening song is one minute thirty seconds long, starts with the blast of a ship's funnel and then out of tune horns and woodwind as Lias reads... something. From there the throb of sci fi synths wobble in  and the song John Lennon wanders into earshot, pastoral psychedelia and Lias muttering, gradually becoming clearer and more upfront. Bullet Of Dignity (remixed brilliantly by Beyond The Wizard's Sleeve) is slinky, sinuous funk, and Lias' still striking first line, 'you say you're just thirty one/ what's that in cannibal years?'. The bass sax blows and the distorted funk bubbles away and a refrain from Middle Eastern horns picks up.

Bullet Of Dignity

The album continues onwards, earworms and discordance in equal measure, drum machines and horns, synths and disco bass and Lias always saying or singing something interesting. something that makes you go, 'what did he just say?'. The song titles Polygamy Is Only For The Chief and Visions Of Pain give you some idea of where things are heading although Today You Become A Man is a surprise and maybe something you won't listen to that often- weird funk, Miles Davis horns and Lias offering a spoken word explanation of his brother's circumcision (performed without anaesthetic) in Algeria in the 80s. 

Once Today You Become A Man is over there's a slight breather in the slowed down lounge music/ cabaret vibes of Religion For One. Nothing stays still for very long and the record then hurtles into the home straight, with the hectic groove and whispered vox of Feed The Horse, the noisy pop of What's That Say, Work's 80s synth throb, as if they've suddenly decided to play a stadium- a small stadium but a stadium nonetheless. After all that Forgiveness Is Yours finishes with a torch song, You Can't Force It. A burst of noise followed by piano and the distinct whiff of Weimar. Lias croons like a jazz club singer and then a choir of backing singers join him, all in unison singing, 'you can't force it/ no matter what they say'. Crescendo and final piano plunk. Over. Goodnight. 

It's a remarkable album I think, the work of a band who have pushed at the limits. At their Bandcamp page where you can listen to the entire album, the artist bio merely says 'It's all about the struggle'. If they had a struggle making the album it was worth the effort. 

A few days ago they appeared live on French TV, a show called ARTE Concert at Ground Control in Paris, playing surrounded by a crowd on four sides. Lias is in a body stocking. The synth/ sax player is in a beret, crop to, knickers combo. The three guitarists/ bassists look like the thirty somethings from the cafe/ bar down the road. Fat White Family often approach performing as an opportunity to provoke and to push the audience out of their comfort zone. Lias is off the stage and in crowd before the intro to the first song has been dispatched and finishes the song on the floor. From there it's thirty minutes of intense, disco/ funk/ rock 'n' roll magic. 

Back In The Water Again

Today I offer you three new songs from artists who all found fame/ infamy in the 80s and have kept ploughing their particular own furrows ever since- The The, Pet Shop Boys and Nick Cave. All three have devoted fanbases, all three are artists who have something to say, and all three are associated with a distinct sound and style. The need to keep writing and recording seems to be as strong as ever with them all and the idea propagated by Pete Townshend in The Who about dying before he gets old is long gone. In the 1980s there was a certain amount of derision for The Rolling Stones et al still playing rock 'n' roll in their forties. There is nothing ridiculous about this anymore- artists keep going and we are still interested in their music. None of the three here today are solely nostalgia acts either u their old songs will often get the biggest cheers when played live but the new songs are all trying to get something across- about themselves, about aging, about life and death and the state of the world. 

First is Matt Johnson, back as The The, with a single called Cognitive Dissident and a video by Tim Pope. The song has a gnarly blues guitar riff from Little Barrie's Barry Cadogan, plenty of atmosphere and Matt's low register voice, the song swelling with backing vocals into the chorus, 'left is right/ black is white/ Inside out/ Hope is doubt'. Matt has always written the state of the world and the lyrics on Cognitive Dissident circle around our post truth world, emotion and democracy, alienation and AI. The song is the first from an upcoming album Ensoulment (the first for twenty five years) and some gigs. Cognitive Dissident sounds like The The- no surprise there maybe- but the 90s, Dusk era incarnation with Johnny Marr on board rather than the 80s one of Infected and Soul Mining. Matt says the album is hopeful, even though this single is laced with fear, gloom and bad things.

Pet Shop Boys have a new album, Nonetheless, and a single, A new bohemia, and a video starring Neil and Chris, Russell Tovey and Tracey Emin. The Pet Shop Boys are a long way from their Imperial Period of the late 80s to mid 90s, are currently playing an arena tour of greatest hits and on A new bohemia are in reflective, melancholic mood, men in the 60s looking back to their youths and noticing that the passing of time has seen them moved aside by the new generation. 'Like silent movie stars in 60s Hollywood/ No one knows who you are in a hipster neighbourhood', Neil sings noting the invisibility that comes with being old. Later on, as the strings swirl, he confronts mortality and death, 'Every day is a warning evening might forget/ Then the following morning has the sweet smell of regret'. If Matt Johnson has found something to be hopeful about, Neil Tennant does too by the end of the song. 'Where are they now? Where have they gone? Who dances now to their song?', he sings, surrounded in the video by young revellers, Neil and Chris static on the dancefloor. And there is regret too, 'I wish I lived my life free and easier', he says before concluding, 'I'm on my way to a new bohemia'. I don't know if Neil and Chris are raging at the dying of the light, as Dylan Thomas had it, but they're going with disco strings, a day at the beach and acceptance of the turning of the wheel, the struggle of the past forty years replaced by something else- contentment maybe, peace of mind. It's moving stuff. 

Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds are back too with a second single from their upcoming album Wild Gods and an arena tour in the autumn. The online fanbase seem a bit split about the new songs- they're also split about Nick's music pre- and post the death of Arthur Cave in 2015. Some want Nick to return to the hammering, chaotic Old Testament and murder ballads songs of yore. There's a feeling that Warren Ellis and the move to a synth dominated sound over the last decade is weaker in comparison to the bone crunching sound of the Bad Seeds of the 90s. Maybe what the long standing fans are really missing is their own youth, their own past in the 90s where a certain amount of chaos and noise was part of life and they were young enough to deal with it. I get why some of the albums Nick's written since the death of Arthur can be uncomfortable to listen to, difficult to find a way into- I've written before about how much I personally get out of Skeleton Tree, Ghosteen and Carnage. Wild Gods so far feels like the first album where the songs aren't directly about grief and loss (although that will all be in there somewhere I expect), but this one is feeling like Nick's found a way to get in touch with something else. The song Wild Gods was sung from the point of view of a carouser now living in a retirement home- Nick and Neil Tennant at similar stages in life. The new single Frogs rolls in on rippling piano, cymbals and strings and a fantastic bassline, references Cain and Abel early on, and keeps coming back to walking in the Sunday rain, frogs jumping in gutters, the song building and building, endlessly rising towards something that is ever just out of reach. A choir of backing vocals appear, ahh ahhing away, and Nick sings of being 'back in the water again'. Kris Kristofferson walks past kicking a can. It's epic, emotive and uplifting and feels like Nick is choosing life and hope and joy. 

There's A Sound Of Distant Living

A couple of weeks ago JC/ The Vinyl Villain updated his run through 1979- a year he's saying may be music's best ever year- and one of the songs he posted was Japan's Life In Tokyo. I've become mildly obsessed with it ever since, playing it repeatedly. 

Life In Tokyo

Recorded with Giorgio Moroder, who co- wrote it with David Sylvian, it builds on Moroder's supercharged late 70s disco records with Donna Summer but with some very overt Roxy Music influences in there too. One of those records that bears repeat plays, keeps on giving, keeps rewarding in different ways- the synths, the bass, the lyrics, the production, the vocal. It's a superb slice of 1979 art- pop. 

Life In Tokyo (Long Version)

It was re- released several times, the record company looking for a hit and as each Japan album after 1979 came out, so did Life In Tokyo. In 1981, hot on the heels of Gentlemen Take Polaroids, Hansa released it on 12" with a seven minute extended remix and then again in 1982 after Tin Drum and two hit singles (Ghosts and Cantonese Boy) it was remixed and re- released for a third time. 

David Sylvian's lyrics are suitably impressionistic, with plenty of late 70s apathy- 'it seems so sentimental/ why should I care'- coupled with Ballardian existentialism- 'somewhere there's the sound of distant living/ locked up in high society/ it seems so artificial/ why should I care'- and then the chorus, 'oh oh oh life can be cruel/ life in Tokyo'.

In 2019 Sean Johnston wanted a version to play at ALFOS, a turbo charged edit with Japan, Moroder and Roxy Music crossed with a cosmic, sci fi Latin disco feel that goes on and on for nine minutes. So he made one.

Life In Tokyo (Hardway Bros Re- edit)

Monday's Long Song

The latest release on Paisley Dark, Leeds based home of electronic psychedelia, is a five track EP by Ian Vale. It opens with Many Times, six minutes and twenty five seconds of dark acid house, four- four drums, a bouncing bassline and shimmering arpeggios- dark dub disco action.

It's followed by an Al Mckenzie remix, ten minutes of wobbly, slowly building electronic music, a twisting and turning, rising and falling remix that keeps on giving- it really is where the action is. Get both and three other tracks- a Ben Hunt remix of Many Times, another Ian Vale track  Oh Malone and a Julius remix of that- at Bandcamp. 

Al Mckenzie is one half of D:Ream whose 1993 hit single Things Can Only Get Better has recently made the headlines again, pumped out of a speaker at the public end of Downing Street when Rishi Sunak stood in the pouring rain and tried to make it sound like calling a general election was a good idea for the Tory Party. From there, it climbed the charts again and Al and Peter ended up having to make a statement saying to Labour, 'please don't use this song'. They haven't got over it being used by New Labour in 1997- the decision by Tony Blair to invade Iraq alongside the USA did for the relationship between D:Ream and the Labour government (as it did for any people). Singer Peter Cunnah described the song as 'a very odd piece of gravity that you just can't escape'. Al added, 'There's no way- our song and politics, never again'. I understand that decision but in a way it's also a shame- the sight of Sunak, unable to even find an umbrella never mind run an election campaign, piss wet through as the song drowned him out was priceless. Given what Sunak's done since however, it looks like one of the slicker parts of his election campaign. 

An Hour Of Hardway Meets Monkton Uptown And Downtown

Hardway Bros (Sean Johnston) and Monkton (Duncan Gray) DJ and remix together. In both cases there's something about the partnership that pushes both to do something that's different from what each does on their own. Their remixes as Hardway Bros Meets Monkton reference the seminal Augustus Pablo album King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown and as a result you'd be right to expect lots of dub percolating through the sounds cooked up in the remix studio. Dub, bass, echo, melodica- all are present. So is plenty of glorious chug and the wide spaces of cosmic disco. Cosmic, psychedelic, dub disco. The remixes also tend to be long, usually going up towards ten minutes, so this mix was always going to be a long one. 

An Hour of Hardway Meets Monkton Uptown And Downtown

• Jack Butters: Shake It Off (Hardway Meets Monkton Uptown Version)
• Electric Blue Vision: Other Skies (Hardway Meets Monkton Uptown Version)
• Perry Granville: Sailing Ships (Hardway Meets Monkton Uptown Version)
• Fjordfunk: It's All Black (Hardway Meets Monkton Uptown)
• GLOK: That Time Of Night (Hardway Meets Monkton Uptown Dub)
• Psychederek: Screamadereka (Hardway Meets Monkton Uptown Downtown Remix)
• Phil Kieran and Green Velvet: Enjoy The Day (Hardway Meets Monkton Downtown Remix)

Jack Butters is from Stoke- on- Trent, a city fmaous for consisting of five towns, its historic past as the centre of pottery and ceramics, and for it's football team Stoke City (the old ground, the Victoria Ground, was a fairly fearsome awayday in the past). What Stoke should be famous for now is Jack's music, not least this dubbed out Hardway and Monkton remix. I heard this played by Sean at ALFOS at The Golden Lion last summer and it sounded immense.

Electric Blue Vision is Jesse Fahnestock of 10:40 and Jezebell with singer Emilia Harmony. Other Skies came out last November, a 2023 highlight with three great remixes- this one plus remixes by Tambores En Benirras and Balearic Ultras. Sean and Duncan's remix is more majestic melodica led dub, a complete reconstruction of Jesse and Emilia's song.

Perry Granville's Sailing Ships becomes a metallic- dub- by- way- of- post punk- and- acid house trip in the Hardway Bros and Monkton hands, noises rattling round and ricocheting as the bass pushes on and thunder rumbles. There are stuttering vocal sample and pulverising synths, drop outs and re- entries and always underpinning everything, huge, live sounding bass. 

Fjordfunk released It's All Back in 2020 on the Tici Taci label, an eleven minute cosmic disco tune remixed into an eleven minute cosmische dub disco tune by Hardway and Monkton with a squealing guitar line dropping in and out and an ultra- distorted voice saying things that are impossible to make out. 

GLOK is Ride's Andy Bell. Since 2019 Andy's released several albums and singles as GLOK, experimental cosmische/ synth songs and tracks. That Time Of Night was on 2021's Pattern Recognition and features the voice of Shiarra Bell, Andy's wife, talking about the pleasures of being lost on a dancefloor, 'just one person, one part of the whole mass of people.. the heat and the light and the flashing...'. Hardway and Monkton take the track and turn it into a sleek, propulsive, krauty trip, a keening guitar line running through it with a booming, metronomic kick drum.

Psychederek is from Stretford, just up the road from me, and has recently released one of this year's best EPs, Alt!. In August 2021 he released the Space Arcade 12" on Chris Massey's Sprechen label, with the very ace Screamadereka coming in double Hardway Monkton remix form- the Downtown remix and Disco Dub version. The Downtown Remix is a glorious sunlit thing in two halves, the first half dubby psyche and the second a chuggy, pacier, cosmische glide. 

Phil Kieran and Green Velvet's Enjoy The Day came out in late 2022. Phil is a Belfast based DJ and producer. Green Velvet is from Chicago. Enjoy The Day is full on, four four drums and techno bass, chopped up and FXed vocals, 'you got it', and a piano line that is the definition of happy/ sad. 

V.A. Saturday

This week's Monday Long Song was by Joy Zipper. Their song Check Out My New Jesus, a woozy ode to drugs/ sex, sparked some conversation among readers. For quite a few people the first time they heard the song and the band was on a free CD given away with the 17th June 2000 edition of the NME. The CD, London Xpress, is a contender for best ever freebie magazine CD. The internet tells me that the NME cover star that week was Richard Ashcroft, a feature where he faced readers questions including 'has all that acid fucked you up?', 'any dieting tips?' and 'what's the latest you've stayed up?'. Also featured in that week's NME were Graham Coxon, Bloodhound Gang, Bon Jovi and Deftones. None of these people should concern us right now, some of them ever, we are here solely for the free cover mount CD. 

London Xpress was done with the record label Nuphonic and featured three guest DJs providing three mixes of various artists. The DJs were Andrew Weatherall, Harvey and David Holmes- that's quite a line up. On the CD the different tracks were available as individual tracks although all three DJs had mixed their selections. The three files below are the three sets as one mixed file. 

London Xpress Andrew Weatherall

Andrew opens the CD with a typically eclectic and downtempo/ electro set. Stuttering, minimal, lo fi, dirty sounds that build into something quite frenetic and funky, a fair reflection of where Andrew's head was at that point given the Two Lone Swordsmen releases from the period. He finishes with German badn Lali Puna who Andrew and fellow Swordsman Keith Tenniswood were obsessed with, various remix exchanges taking place between TLS, Radioactive Man and Lali Puna. Andrew's selections here are first rate, the work of an inveterate record buyer and sound seeker. 

• Plaid: Tophapy
• Burnt Friedman & The Nu Dub Players: Hard Drive Dub
• John Tejlda: Daydreaming Disaster
• Steve Stoll: Supernatural (You're So)
• 7 Hurtz: Stockers Motor
• Lali Puna: Everywhere All Over

London Xpress Harvey

Harvey starts out all Balearic and laid back, Plaid making their second appearance on the CD, surf guitar and fluttering electronics. He brings the breaks in and the poolside/ sunshine sounds, a contrast to Andrew's much more urban set. Very nicely done. 

• Plaid: Ralome
• Addvibe: Love And Happiness
• Forme: Morfe
• ADNY: Tell Me
• Amalgamation Of Soundz: Salsin

London Xpress David Holmes

Possibly though, the best is saved for last- David Holmes' set is a journey in twenty five minutes, staring out with sweet sounding psyche with children talking about who God is, where he is and what he can do as organ and ba ba baa backing vox  flow behind them.  Then Joy Zipper's laid flat, woozy song, two slices fro David's about to be released album Bow Dow To The Exit Sign and then more scuzzy lounge funk and Ella Fitzgerald concluding with her cover of Sunshine Of Your Love. Stunning. 

• Family Of God: Family Of God
• Joy Zipper: Check Out My New Jesus
• David Holmes: Commercial Break
• David Holmes: Hey Lisa
• Keith Mansfield: Morning Broadway
• Gian Piero Riverberi: Cat Casanova
• Hot Butter: Getting Off
• Ella Fitzgerald: Sunshine Of Your Love

Tonight we are celebrating Eliza's 21st birthday-her actual birthday isn't until next weekend but she's away at a festival in Anglesey next weekend, so the party is tonight at a venue in Altrincham. It should be quite the do. 

Another Imaginary Album

Last week I floated the idea of imaginary albums, albums that could have/ should have happened but didn't- the pair I mused about were an imaginary Andrew Weatherall/ Sabres Of Paradise produced Sinead O'Connor and Jah Wobble album, building on the Visions Of You single, and also what might have happened had Andrew Weatherall actually gone on to produce The Fall in 1993, a meeting that went as far as the studio before there was a backing out. Today's imaginary album is going back to 1986 and the aftermath of The Clash.

This is what really happened.

Mick Jones was fired from The Clash in 1983 by Joe Strummer and Paul Simonon (and Bernie Rhodes, back as manager at Joe's insistence). Mick had become increasingly difficult to work with and there had bee major disagreements about the song selection and mixing of the album that became Combat Rock. Famously, Mick and Paul had a stand off for several hours about the level of the bass in Know Your Rights and their relationship broke down to the point where they weren't even speaking. Joe and Paul issued a statement saying Mick had drifted away from the original intention of the group and they would now pursue this without him. Joe and Paul recruited two new guitarists, Vince White and Nick Sheppard and drummer Pete Howard who'd replaced Terry Chimes, who'd replaced Topper Headon. The five man Clash went on to tour and record a much derided album called Cut The Crap (made mainly by Strummer and Rhodes- it's not all bad, the song This Is England is a genuine Strummer state- of- the nation classic, but much of the rest was done by Rhodes and doesn't add much to the band's back catalogue although some fan remixed versions have some merit). The Clash Mark 2's highlight was a busking tour. On getting home Strummer called it a day and the band broke up. 

Mick Jones was kicked out of The Clash, the band he started in 1976, and set about proving Joe and Paul wrong. He formed TRAC (Top Risk Action Company) who then became Big Audio Dynamite. Some of Mick's songs for the first B.A.D. album were already written while he was in The Clash and the rest came quickly. Recorded by the new band- Mick with Don Letts, Greg Dread, Dan Donovan and Leo Williams- BAD's first album, This Is Big Audio Dynamite, is a modern, fun, genre- clash and sample- fest, packed with great tunes- The Bottom Line, e=mc2, Medicine Show, A Party and the rest, fusing rock, reggae, rap, and dance music. After that Mick moved quickly, writing songs for B.A.D.'s second album. 

Joe was full of regret and self- loathing about the way The Clash had imploded, blaming himself for sacking Mick and for being (again) seduced by Bernie's talk. He hoped to make up with Mick and flew out to the Caribbean where Mick was staying. The legend has it that Joe cycled round the island looking for Mick, found him, presented him with some weed by way of apology and asked him to reform The Clash. Mick had no interest in reforming The Clash, B.A.D. was his future and he must have taken some pleasure at Joe's volte face. At some point Joe told Mick that the new B.A.D. songs were 'the worst thing I've ever heard'. Joe's retrenchment into three chord rock had characterised The Clash Mark 2. Mick was fusing the questing, experimental Clash of 1980- 81 with pop music and samples and he wanted to keep pushing forward. The two made up though and both Joe and Paul appeared in the Medicine Show video, the three former bandmates friends again.

Joe signed up for co- producing the next B.A.D. album and ended up co- writing several songs- Beyond The Pale, Limbo The Law, V. Thirteen, Ticket, and Sightsee M.C. Two more saw the light of day as bonus tracks on the U.S. CD release- Ice Cool Killer and The Big V (Ice Cool Killer is drum machine beats and Scarface samples. The Big V is a cooled down version of V. Thirteen). 

Ice Cool Killer

The Big V

The Strummer- Jones writing team was firing on all cylinders on No. 10 Upping Street. V. Thirteen is one of B.A.D.'s best songs, sleek and widescreen with a great Mick Jones lyric and vocal. Beyond The Pale is a crunchy, guitars and keys celebration of immigration with Joe on backing vocals. There are two songs further Strummer- Jones co- writes from this period. Love Kills (from Alex Cox's Sid And Nancy film) features an uncredited Mick Jones on guitar and backing vox and U.S. North, a song that sounds like a close cousin of love Kills, written in late '86 but not released until a posthumous Joe Strummer album a few years ago. 

Mick kept going and in 1988 B.A.D. recorded and released their third album, Tighten Up Vol '88, and then the rave influenced Megatop Phoenix in 1989. Joe worked on the soundtracks for Walker and Straight To Hell, and went to L.A. and recorded his debut solo album, Earthquake Weather. Paul formed Havana 3 a.m. and released an album in 1991. The original B.A.D. line up broke up after Megatop Phoenix and Mick formed B.A.D. II. 

But... this is what could have happened...

After No. 10 Upping Street and the success of the Strummer- Jones writing and production team, Mick and Joe could have closed ranks again and reformed their partnership. This could have been The Clash re- united. Joe probably would have done this, Mick would have been less keen, wanting to keep moving forward. Band re- unions weren't really a thing in the late 80s, not the way they are now. But if Mick had changed his mind some time in 1987, a new Strummer- Jones band could have formed and made a killer late 80s album. They could have brought Paul back on board. Poor Topper was deep into heroin addiction and driving a taxi- he appeared with Flowered Up in 1990 but then dropped off the map again. 

The Strummer- Jones '88 album could have cherry picked the key songs from Tighten Up Vol. 88 and Earthquake Weather. A fully fired up partnership in the studio would have brought further new songs. 

From Tighten Up Vol. 88 Mick's Other 99, a soaring, guitar- led song about doing the best you can, not being sucked into the rat race and sometimes accepting good enough is just that. The Battle Of All Saint's Road, a Jones- Letts co- write with banjo, reggae and a coming together of the Ladbroke Grove tribes, the rockers and the dreads. Just Play Music, 2000 Shoes and Applecart all pass muster and could all feature Mick and Joe swapping lines and singing together. The last thing the original B.A.D. line up recorded was Free, a song for the film Flashback (a Dennis Hopper and Kiefer Sutherland film adventure comedy about a aging on the run hippy and an FBI agent). A Mick and Joe version of Free would make the cut. 

Other 99 (Extended Mix)

Free (LP Version)

Joe's Earthquake Weather is an album cursed by muffled production, a weird mix and the sometimes unsympathetic and over the top playing of the band, L.A. rock musicians (a group Joe christened Latino Rockabilly War, which is a great name and could be the name of my imagined Joe and Mick band or album). But versions of those songs with Mick Jones playing and producing would lift them much higher. Gangsterville, Island Hopping and Sleepwalk are the obvious candidates, Leopardskin Limousines and Passport To Detroit maybe. The B- sides of the Island Hopping single include a lovely stripped down, swinging acoustic- ish version of the song re- titled Mango Street so we'll have that one too. 

Mango Street

Joe had already contributed the mighty song Trash City to the soundtrack to a Keanu Reeves film called Permanent Record, a that song would open and adorn any late 80s Strummer- Jones album. 

Trash City

U.S. North could have been dragged from the vaults, its ten minute length trimmed a little. Paul could have come back and contributed something from Havana 3 a.m.'s album- this spaghetti western song perhaps...

Hey Amigo

If we're not careful we're heading back into double album territory, one of the straws that broke the Clash camel's back, but an imaginary single album, Mick and Paul co- writing and co- producing, playing and singing together, Mick back with Joe and Joe fully focussed, is a great What If? and could have been a very good (imaginary) album. They'd still have argued and fallen out again when Levi's came calling in 1991 of course. But that's The Clash. 

Rotters

Chris Rotter and Pati Yang have two new songs out, both available at Bandcamp and both sending any monies raised to Medical Aid For Palestine. The first is The Killer Inside- synths fade in, a tambourine rattles, the bass throbs and and Pati sings. It's got that woozy, shimmery, shoegaze feel, a pop song wrapped up in a hazy guaze. Pay what you want, raise money for those in need, find it here. 

The second is Gravity (Take Me Home), a long lost, unreleased Rotter/ Yang song, now out in the wild and looking for a home. Acoustic guitar layered over a bed of synths, Pati singing of memory and loss. Again, pay what you want, find it here. 

Chris' brother Roger is the guitarist in The Early Years, a cosmische band from Hackney whose single Complicity in 2011 caused a stir, was played on the radio by Mr. Weatherall and led to 6 Mix and then remixing Paul Weller during his Sonik Kicks period. In 2017 they released an EP of remixes of songs from their album II which included two Andrew Weatherall remixes and an Andy Bell remix. Both Weatherall remixes are stunners obviously but Remix I is especially stunning, an exercise in krauty hypnosis, repetition, bleepy melodies interrupted occasionally by the sound of speeding cars. One of those remixes which is a little overlooked in the back catalogue. 

Hall Of Mirrors (Andrew Weatherall Remix I)

Hop On Down

I posted Clean On Your Bean by Dinosaur L on Saturday, a track from the New York Noise compilation on Soul Jazz. While going through the stack of free CDs from magazines I found a New York themed one from Mojo called Change The Beat: 14 Tracks From Madonna's New York Scene, a free CD from March 2015 with lots of New York Noise adjacent artists, including 23 Skidoo, ESG, James Black, Bush Tetras, and Delta 5 plus Curtis Mayfield, Funkadelic, and Section 25 among the others. It's a good CD, lots of great music, a time capsule and primer and shows that sometimes the people putting these magazine CDs together really get it right. I no longer have the magazine but a quick internet search shows Madonna was on the cover, promoting her album Rebel Heart (in my head 2015 is pretty recent but it's nearly a decade ago). 

One of the artists on Change The Beat was Arthur Russell (who recorded as Dinosaur L) and his track Hop On Down. Arthur Russell has grown and grown in stature and reputation in recent years, his back catalogue re- issued and his sonic palette an inspiration for lots of people. When he died in 1992 aged just forty he was largely unknown. Hop On Down is from a collection of twelve previously unreleased Arthur Russell tracks, an album titled Calling Out Of Context. His music is a sonic stew of cello, minimalist disco, whispered, crooned and/ or half sung vocals, disruptive noises, deep bass, keyboards, tablas and drum machines, all seemingly effortlessly stitched together and surrounded in acres of space and hiss. Deeply lovely music, art and pop music combined. 

Hop On Down

Songs For Skulls

Songs For Skulls is a five track EP by The Field Guide Radio, a duo from Margate of Chris F Clark and Lesley Malone who with their synths, drones, words and art have produced a musical response to a book called The Skull by Jon Klassen. The EP is at Bandcamp, a full on half hour journey into the woods, a crossover between experimental electronics, spoken word and folklore. It's out on The Fearless Few, a label and collective based in London. At the end of last week a remix EP came out, four of the tracks on Songs For Skulls reworked and remixed by Oliver Si, MSOM, Valtow, Greyfield Woods, and Melinda Bronstein, Songs For Skulls- The Fearless reworkings. 

Helpfully, in order to simplify matters and provide some background the Fearless Few asked the remixers to describe themselves and their remix, and each one of them did a really good job. Oliver Si's remix of The Bones & The Fire opens the EP, dark and persistent, a walk in the woods that has gone way off the path. Oliver's own description is 'a dark and majestic take on an already deep and strange theme'. MSOM's remix of The Headless Skeleton is an eight and a half minute slow building trip by a self- confessed synth obsessive, long synth chords, a rippling topline and then the thump of the kick drum. MSOM describes his remix as 'a dramatic intro evolving into a synth banging tour de noughties', as accurate a description as any. 

It's followed by Valtow's remix of The Forest, a 'dubby soundscape with syncopated grooves' according to Valtaw. It's definitely dubby- that kind of dark, industrial, electronic dub- and the drums are nicely off beat and disturbed. Greyfield Woods remixed The Dark, a short piece, less than three minutes, of soundtrack/ folk horror sounds, with a hushed voice and wash of grey synths. Greyfield Woods says it is 'whispers from a witch dabbling in borderline- pervy remote viewing', and also as 'occult, lusty and atmospheric'. The remix EP concludes with Melinda Bronstein's version of The Bones & The Fire, a drone, a folky, female voice, the peculiarities of the countryside turned into five minutes of sound. Melinda calls it a 'radiophonic torch song' and 'a crepuscular vision of desire and hope emanating from a flickering fire'. Again, spot on and better than anything I can do. The EP is at Bandcamp

Monday's Long Song

I uncovered a box of CDs recently which contained dozens of CDs that came free with magazines, some going back to 1998. Mountains of plastic jewel cases, endless tracklists of samplers from 'this month's latest releases' plus old songs from albums being re- issued, songs from themed CDs (things like '14 Tracks From Madonna's New York', 'Pet Sounds Revisited', and 'Panic: 15 Tracks of Riotous '80s Indie Insurrection'), several volumes of Jockey Slut's Disco Pogo For Punks In Pumps, and loads more besides. A treasure trove and some rubbish too. I've been working my through them, looking for songs I'd previously missed or overlooked. There's a potentially rich vein of blogging inspiration along with some chaff.  

Among them all I found a CD from the magazine Uncut titled White Riot Volume Two: A Tribute To The Clash, sixteen covers of Clash songs and a Joe Strummer and The Mescaleros song, Long Shadow. The covers include this one by Joy Zipper of Mick Jones' Hitsville UK from Sandinista!, a six minutes plus slow burning, shimmering, walls of fuzz guitar take on a Clash song that Mick wrote as a tribute to the UK's independent scene. 

Hitsville UK

Joy Zipper were from Long Island, a married couple, Tabitha Tindale and Vincent Cafiso. By 2003 (the date of the magazine and the CD) Joy Zipper had already been active for a few years. Their debut release was in 1999 and their second album, American Whip from 2002, had production and mixing courtesy of Kevin Shields and David Holmes. Their cover of Hitsville UK was the B-side to their 2003 single Christmas Song. It reminded me that I had the first two albums and of this song, a woozy piece of late 20th century psychedelia/ shoegaze that comes across like a hymn to slow sunny days, sex and Jesus. 

Check Out My New Jesus

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Thirty- five minutes of backwards songs.

This mix occurred to me a few weeks ago when I posted David Holmes' remix of Andy Bell's The Sky Without You, a remix of the opening song from Andy's 2022 solo album Flicker. Reversing the tapes and playing them backwards is an age old technique- The Beatles used it in 1966 on Rain and then perfected it on Tomorrow Never Knows (although both of those merely contain backwards elements/ instruments- most of what's included below is entirely backwards). They went the full hog on The White Album with Revolution 9. Those backwards noises- the sound of cymbals splashing in reverse, the trippy whirl of guitars backwards, the weird throb of bass- are all very evocative and possibly suggest too long spent in the studio, indulgence maybe, but when done well are superb. I've loved it as a sonic whoosh, an aural WTF?, since my first exposure to The Stone Roses and their B-sides in 1989 and Don't Stop. This mix will I suspect be an opinion splitter- you'll either roll your eyes and quietly close the page and go elsewhere for your Sunday morning music fix or you'll love this. I've played it through several times and each time can convince myself it's the best Sunday mix I've ever done. 

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• Andy Bell: The Sky Without You
• The Stone Roses: Simone
• The Clash: Mensforth Hill
• The Stone Roses: Previously Unheard Backwards Track 3
• The Stone Roses: Full Fathom Five
• Andy Bell: The Looking Glass
• Andy Bell: The Sky Without You (David Holmes Radical Mycology Remix)
• The Stone Roses: Guernica
• The Stone Roses: Don't Stop

The Sky Without You opens Flicker, Andy Bell's solo album. It was a deliberate nod to The Stone Roses, Andy looking backwards to Don't Stop and the B-sides of Elephant Stone, Made Of Stone, and She Bangs The Drums. Most of the rest of Flicker is fully crafted, 'proper' songs, from the lovely Something Like Love to the wistful Way Of The World. Halfway through, the start of the second disc on the vinyl version, is another backwards track, The Looking Glass, Andy's voice, guitar and what sounds like some organ fed backwards through the looking glass. I'm guessing it's one of the songs from Flicker flipped. 

Simone is Where Angels Play played backwards and for many years was only available as the B-side of a U.S. import version of I Wanna Be Adored, which found its way into U.K. shops in 1989. It was buying this 12" single for this one song, a 12" priced at £5.99 (a huge amount for a 12" single then) that made me realise I was in deep. Where Angels Play was the 'lost' song from the golden period of 1989- 1990, the song that didn't make the album but was often bootlegged live. It was eventually released on a 12" of I Wanna Be Adored, put out by Silvertone as a money spinner when the band and label were in dispute- a dispute that led to a court case that led to the band signing to Geffen and to the end of the group ultimately.  

By the time The Clash had committed themselves to an album which would comprise six sides of vinyl  and to having six songs for each side, they were in very deep indeed. Studio experimentation, Joe's lyric writing bunker, and hours through the night of recording dubs and versions with Mikey Dread were the order of the day. I've said it before and I'll say it again- London Calling may be their 'best' album, punk purists will go for the debut, some of the class of '78 will always argue for Give 'Em Enough Rope, but Sandinista! is where the true, questing spirit of The Clash is to be found. It's a treasure trove and as Joe says in Westway To The World, it's 'a magnificent achievement, warts and all'. Mensforth Hill is Something About England played backwards with studio chatter at both ends. 'Shall we do another one then?' asks Joe at the end. Yes please!

Previously Unheard Backwards Track 3 is She Bangs The Drums played in reverse- it came out as an extra on the 20th anniversary release of The Stone Roses (the one with the lemon shaped USB stick- no, I didn't buy it). 

Full Fathom Five (a nice coincidental link to Duncan Gray's album Five Fathoms Full that came out last week) is Elephant Stone backwards (the Peter Hook produced version of Elephant Stone, so if you can reverse the reversed version, you've got Hooky's mix of the song too). I think this is a little more than just flipping the tape round- Ian's vocals are unclear but recorded and dropped in forwards. Full Fathom Five is the name of a 1947 Jackson Pollock painting, one of his earliest drip paintings, a masterpiece, and a clear influence on John Squire's Roses sleeve art from this period. 

The Sky Without You has already appeared once here. For his Radical Mycology Remix David Holmes took all of Andy's backwards Roses swirl and took it further, adding forwards drums, a blurry sunny day feel and sirens. One of my favourite records of recent years. David's name for the remix came from some mushroom based experimentation he undertook during lockdown, dealing with some growing up in Belfast related PTSD

Guernica is Made Of Stone backwards with Ian singing a new vocal forwards- 'If you wanna hurt me stop the row' (or similar), can be made out fairly clearly. This one feels like a step towards Don't Stop. You can imagine them in the studio with John Leckie working their way through the songs backwards, hitting on certain ones, trying new vocals, flipping parts around and eventually getting it all together when they reversed Waterfall. There was an interview with Ian and John in '88 or '89 where they said they used to drive out the road under the flightpath at Manchester airport (I know exactly which road they mean too), sit on the bonnet of the car and wait for the jumbo jets to take off over head, and then try to replicate the roar of the engines with their reversed tapes. Guernica is a painting by Pablo Picasso, depicting the Spanish town that was obliterated by the Nazi's Condor Legion, Stuka dive bombers deployed to aid the fascists in the Spanish Civil War. 2024; see Gaza.

A Spanish Civil War Sunday mix anyone?

Don't Stop is more and more, as each year passes, the highlight of The Stone Roses debut album- don't laugh- the one where the experimentation, delight in backwards tapes, a modern psychedelic guitar band was fully realised. Reni's drums and Ian's vocals are both forwards, recorded over Waterfall played in reverse. There's more to it than just reversing the tape- the guitars are slowed down, sounding like an actual waterfall, and the fade in has been added from elsewhere. Things are out of sync. The flow of the backwards guitars and bass, bubbling, lightly drilling, is a rush and Reni's cowbell tapping away gives so much. John wrote the lyrics by listening to Ian's vocal for Waterfall played backwards and then transcribed what Ian's blurred voice seemed to be suggesting.Ian then sang them- the lyrics are among the best too- 'hey blues singer/ just the guitar/ from the top/ what can I steal/ what can I feel/ I wake/ ease into my heart/ one of us/ don't stop/ isn't it funny how you shine?'. Andy Bell used this technique on Flicker. Which is where we came in....