V.A. Saturday

The 21st December is the winter solstice. After today, it starts getting a little lighter every day. It may not be noticeable tomorrow but in a month or two it will. Something that is always worth noting I think.  

In 2006 Rough Trade celebrated a significant birthday by releasing a double CD compilation titled The Record Shop: 30 Years Of Rough Trade Shops. Across the two CDs, packaged in an expensive looking hardback book complete with dust cover and sixty pages of text and photos, were a wide range of leftfield and alternative music- thirty songs chosen by thirty different Rough Trade and adjacent people, from Geoff Travis to james Murphy, Daniel Miller and Seymour Stein to Jon Savage, Bjork and Jeff Barrett. Bobby Gillespie, Thurston Moore, Jarvis Cocker, Stewart Lee, Ana Da Silva and Erol Alkan all get selections, as Rough Trade punters. In the book it says that the selectors are all Rough Trade customers, and asked to choose a favourite record from the 30 years before 2006 and a memory or tale to go with it. As a result, it's wildly inconsistent as a listen but great fun and does actually sound like what a proper record shop staffed by obsessives could sound like on a busy Saturday if everyone got one go on the instore stereo.

The songs include late 70s punk cuts from The Modern Lovers, Swell Maps, The Mekons, Blue Orchids and The Rezillos, 80s indie from Mighty Mighty, Bongwater and Pixies, 90s alt from Bikin Kill, Stereoloab and Matmos and 00s randoms such as SchneiderTM vs Kpt. Michi. Gan's cover of The Smihths, The Carter Family and James Luther Dickinson and LCD Soundsystem. I've cherry picked four tracks, two from each disc, more or less randomly with two artists who have never appeared at Bagging Area before. 

Holger Czukay's Persian Love is from 1979 and was chosen by Don Letts. The Can man is in fine form on this track, sampling Iranian singers from short wave radio while his bass bumps along underneath, with a guitar line and some percussion. It's all rather lovely and sounds very contemporary, it could easily be slipped into an afternoon DJ set. 

Persian Love

Erol Alkan picked The Power Of Lard by Lard, a 1988 song from Ministry's Al Jourgenson with Paul Barker and Jeff Ward. Late 80s US Industrial rock that hit deep with the skateboarding crowd. 

The Power Of Lard

Gary Walker, the founder of Wiija Records, chose Bikini Kill's Capri Pants, a song that first appeared in the 1996 as a US import single, a period when punk was revitalised and kicking in all directions. Kathleen Hanna and Bikini Kill sound cool as fuck on Capri Pants, buzzsaw guitars, crashing cymbals and white hot vocals. 

Capri Pants

Lastly, Jeff Barratt's choice. As founder of Heavenly Records Jeff knows his musical onions and he plumped for Karen Dalton and a  1969 song re- issued in 1997, folk blues of the sort that, as Jeff says in the sleeve notes, 'you ain't never going to hear on the radio- word of mouth is the only way'. Word of mouth and record shops. 

In The Evening (It's So Hard To Tell Who's Going To Love You The Best)

Holger Czukay

Holger Czukay, bassist in Can and artist in his own right, has died at the age of 79. Holger joined Can in 1968 and was a key player, not just on the bass, but in engineering and producing their records and encouraging and exploring the experimental electronics they moved into. His basslines were recognisable and innovative. Can have become one of the names to drop, one of the 'seminal' influences, but they were also genuinely groundbreaking and have layers and layers of sound to soak up. The rhythm section was often right at the forefront and by placing bass and drums at the heart of Can's sound, minimal and repetitive beats, they made krautrock something you could dance to. White, German men making dance music. Drummer Jaki Leibezeit died earlier this year too. Yesterday's Spacemen 3 song was over ten minutes long. This is double that. Plus, you can spot Bobby Gillespie's lyrical steal.

Yoo Doo Right

And just to demonstrate one outpost the Can influence spread to here's a dreamy Carl Craig remix from 1997, Future Days (Bladerunner Mix).

How Much Are They?

It's turning into a kind of interactive week at Bagging Area with reader suggestions and comments leading onto the next day's posting, in a seamless blog-segue. Or something like that. Yesterday Echorich said he needed a Balearic compilation for a drive he's undertaking across the US and went looking for a Jah Wobble, Holger Czukay and The Edge 12". I' afraid I am philosophically and morally unable to post anything involving the tax avoiding, overblown Irish rock band. And this song from Full Circle in 1982 is better anyway, featuring also some girls who turned up at the studio asking 'How much are they?'



A little bit of internet digging led to this re-working/re-edit by Utopus, which is pretty smart.

Guten Tag

I unfolded myself off the bus, after thirty six hours from Krakow to north west England yesterday. Sleeping sitting up is a skill I've not quite got the hang of and my back has suffered. But our school trip to Krakow and Berlin was fantastic, all the moreso because we were in Berlin last Sunday night when Germany won the world cup. The streets of Berlin were flooded with thousands of Germans, most draped in the colours. We'd passed the Brandenberg Gate early on Saturday and had a look at the fan park but decided that keeping sixty-four teenagers safe while watching the final might be tricky. Eventually we all watched it on a big screen in the square outside our hotel and Hauptbahnhof, the main railway station. This ensured a constant flow of fans before and after the match. It was crackers and probably a once in a lifetime experience- watching a country win the world cup in that country's capital city. It certainly won't happen as a England fan.

Berlin is an amazing city, one which I want to return to. There's so much to see and do- in two days we squeezed in sections of wall, Checkpoint Charlie, a trip up the TV tower, Alexanderplatz with its 60s concrete architecture, Sachsenhausen and the Olympic Stadium. Seeing some of the wall was a highlight for me- something that was such a key part of world history and from my lifetime. After Berlin we went to Krakow, which has a beautiful square and buildings, and drank tea (black tea with cold milk, the English way) in Noworolski Cafe, frequented by Lenin in the mid 1910s. And had a couple of Polish beers.

I've downloaded a few of the pics off my phone here...

Holger Czukay of Can, was born in Gdansk, Poland and raised in Germany. He has recently remixed some solo tracks from his 1977 album Der Osten Is Rot and issued them on 10" vinyl through a Berlin based record label, Gronland Records. Click on the link for loads of grooviness. The remixed Sudetenland, with Jah Wobble, Jaki Leibezeit and Conny Plank, is out right now and you can listen to it here.