Monday's Long Songs

This compilation came out back in May but I missed it and have been catching up recently- Occupied Minds Vol. 1, an eighteen track multi- artist album from Belfast released in solidarity with the people of Palestine and raising funds for Medical Aid for Palestinians (MAP). Many of the artists are new to me and the range of music is huge, from ambient to folk to techno and covering a range of emotional responses. This one, We Are! We Want!, is by The Light Brigade, who you might know as an alias David Holmes uses.

We Are! We Want! rides in subtly but gathers pace with rattling drums and metallic percussion and the wobble of synth bass. There are pauses and stabs of synth, the ever present rumble of the bass and some early 90s tension. 

Over the top of this is the voice of James Baldwin, speaking about humanity and love, about the actions of individuals and what people choose to do and who they choose to be.  

'What you’ve got to remember is what you’re looking at is also you. Everyone you’re looking at is also you. You could be that person. You could be that monster, you could be that cop. And you have to decide, in yourself, not to be'

Baldwin was talking about life in the USA in 1970 and the daily racism he and other black Americans faced. He was honest but optimistic- grace and humanity would save the world from despair he believed. 

Occupied Minds is at Bandcamp. 

In some ways We Are! We Want! reminds of some of David's earliest work, tracks like Johnny Favourite and Four Boy One Girl Action and their sole release, the 1993 single The Hawaiian Death Stomp. Eleven minutes of early 90s progressive house/ techno spliced and an equally long, slowed down thumping, stompy dub. Moody, tribal and Sabres- esque.

The Hawaiian Death Stomp

The Hawaiian Death Dub

The four boys were Holmes, Jagz Kooner, Gary Burns and Kris Needs. The girl was Patti Smith, sampled, fucking with the future. 

Also on Occupied Minds is Timmy Stewart, Belfast producer, DJ and promoter who along with Aaron Black records as Black Bones. Timmy's track on Occupied Minds is The Right To Life, a rattly, spacey slice of 2026 dub techno. 

In April Black Bones released a self titled album pulling together tracks they'd released on 7'', 10'' and 12''. It's here and highly recommended. In May they put out an EP/ 12'' single called Black Bones 008, four pieces of dark dance floor Balearica/ electronic edit mayhem that sound great in the mid- August sun. Listen/ buy here.  

Oblique Saturdays

A series for Saturdays in 2026 inspired by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's set of cards, Oblique Strategies (Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas). Eno and Schmidt created them to be used to unblock creative impasses and approach problems from unexpected angles. Each week I'll turn over an Oblique Strategy card and post a song or songs inspired by the suggestion. 

Last week's Oblique Strategy suggestion was Emphasise difference.

I responded to this with Iggy Pop's journey from 1973 to 1977, from Death Trip to Lust For Life and with The Clash who went from White Riot in 1976 to Death Is A Star in 1983. 

Someone pointed out this week when commenting on the race riots in Southampton and Belfast that they didn't think this was the kind of White Riot Joe Strummer was talking about which is indeed true. Joe would have been appalled by the rise of far right politics in the UK. But I digress...

The Bagging Area OS squad came up with some great replies emphasising difference- Martin Carthy covering Slade, Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood's very different voices, Thomas Dolby and Prefab Sprout, Talk Talk, Cindytalk, Rodney Allen's Happy Sad, Paula Abdul and a cartoon cat...

... Elvis, Propaganda, Donny and Marie Osmond, Tonio K, and Boogie Down Productions. Thanks everyone- Chris, Walter, C, Khayem, Ernie, The Swede, Jase, Al G, Rol and Beerfueled as ever for your considered contributions.

This week's card says this- Ghost Echoes.

Just a few days before I turned the card over I finished Patti Smith's memoir Just Kids. It was published in 2010 and I've no idea why I only got a copy recently but I'm glad I did. It's a beautiful, powerful and poetic account of her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe. Patti promised Robert she'd tell his story as he lay dying from complications due to AIDS. She attempted to do this with The Coral Sea but was often unable to get through a reading of the poem. Twenty years after his death, she felt able to write their story down. Her use of the written word is beautiful, as you might expect- she's a wordsmith if nothing else. The book is gripping, open and honest, with versions of their two childhoods and then their chance encounter in New York. She writes about her move to New York as a nineteen year old, an intense and slightly damaged young woman in love with Arthur Rimbaud, inspired by The Doors and Bob Dylan. Her early life in the city is a life of penury, of living hand to mouth and sometimes sleeping in doorways. Eventually she meets Robert (he rescues her from a predatory middle aged man who has taken her out for a meal and now expects something in return) and they live together as lovers and as artists, a completely bohemian life, inspiring each other. Robert is clearly struggling with his sexuality during this period and eventually they split but remain together. Their move to the Hotel Chelsea and the people they meet there changes both their lives and their relationship and their art. Just Kids tells their story up to the release of Horses, Patti finding her calling as a poet and then merging poetry with rock 'n' roll- and then to Robert's death in 1992. 

The copy I have has extra material at the book, and Robert Mapplethorpe's ghost is present there in photos and drawings, in poems and art. He haunts the pages as he undoubtedly still haunts Patti. In a sense though, in the pages that make up the bulk of the book, the story of Robert and Patti, he is very much alive; she brings him (and a lost world, New York in the late 60s and early 70s) to life. In the book, after speaking to a very ill Robert on the phone in 1992, a conversation she knows will be their last, she wakes up a few hours later and intuits his death.

Land (Part One: Horses Part Two: Land Of A Thousand Dances)

There is no shortage of songs with the word ghost in the title- step up The Gun Club, Andrew Weatherall, The White Stripes and Tegan and Sarah, Fine Yong Cannibals, The Fall and R. Dean Taylor, Daniel Avery, Broken Chanter, The Jam, Reverb Delay, Kristen Hersh, The Orb, Burning Spear, The Replacements, The Vendetta Suite,  Denise Sherwood, Hollie Cook, Trentemoller and The Style Council among others.... on and on we could go. 

This 2019 song from Circle Square though seems the one that has both ghosts and echoes contained within, Richard Norris and Martin Dubka's Ghost In The Machine,  a voice trapped inside a machine, echoing on and out for as long as the machine is plugged in.

Feel free to drop your own Ghost echoes into the comment box. 

I Lose My Sense Of Gravity

Patti Smith's historical importance probably can't be overstated. From the release of Horses in 1975 she provided the spark for several generations of New York and US punk/ post- punk and indie musicians and her entire being is an act of willpower- inspired by transformative powers of rock 'n' roll she decided to become an androgynous poet/ punk and that's exactly what she did. The Patti Smith Group played every venue New York had to offer in the mid- to- late 1970s, from CBGBs upwards while recording four albums- Horses, Radio Ethiopia, Easter and Wave. The last one of those four, 1979's Wave, had this as a single...

Dancing Barefoot

Less a song, more an incantation (as someone at YouTube rather succinctly puts it). Dancing Barefoot has become one of her best loved and most covered songs. It doesn't sound specifically 1979 either, it could just as easily have been recorded in 1995 or 2001- a two chord acoustic guitar riff, an electric on top, folk rock/ indie punk and Patti giving her all lyrically, a song (according to the sleeve notes) dedicated to women such as Amedeo Modigliani's mistress Jeanne Hebuterne. Love as addiction (heroin and heroine used deliberately in the lyric), love as sublimation, love as intoxication. 

After the release of Dancing Barefoot as a single Patti withdrew and semi- retired, the band fell apart and she spent most of the next decade at home with husband Fred 'Sonic' Smith, raising their two children Jesse and Jackson. 

Monday's Long Song

Twenty years ago Patti Smith and Kevin Shields appeared at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on the South Bank in London. Patti had written a poem for her friend and one time lover Robert Mapplethorpe called The Coral Sea, a poem she started when he died of AIDS in 1989. She tried to perform it as a spoken word piece but could never get through it all, the sheer weight of the emotions, his illness related suffering and death too much for her to complete a public reading. 

Performing it with Kevin Shields changed the performance for her- Kevin's guitar and FX soundscape altered the performance and provided Patti with a bedrock to explore the words and her feelings. They performed it live twice, once in June 2005 and once in September 2006 and released both as a double CD in 2008, each disc the best part of an hour long. It's not something one pulls out and listens to very often and it was probably best seen live, a book length poem set to improvisational and experimental guitar playing by the My Bloody Valentine man but when it hits, it's very powerful. This is Part 4 from the 2006 gig, a fifteen minute long section, the climax of the performance, Kevin's glide guitar shimmering, the drones and vibrato ebbing and flowing as Patti reads her tribute to Mapplethorpe with passion. As they egg each other on Shields' playing becomes an MBV style wall of noise, an ecstatic You Made Me Realise freak out section only a flick of the finger and stomp on an FX pedal away. 

The Coral Sea 12/ 09/ 2006 Part 4

The section from ten minutes in, where Patti is silent and Kevin drones and glistens, is ripe for sampling- put a drum beat underneath it and add some flute and whispery vocals and you could have a new MBV track out before the band do. 

The Hawaiian Death Stomp

I found a box of cd recently, cds I made myself between 2006 and 2010. I used to regularly burn compilation cds and make handwritten or typed tracklists and then print covers for them. Is that sad? I'm surely not the only person who did it. Am I? Anyway, one of them was a bunch early 90s progressive dance tracks and in the middle was this by Four Boy One Girl Action, David Homes, Kris Needs, Jags Kooner and Gary Burns being the four boys. It was the first release on Holmes' Exploding Plastic Inevitable record label in 1993. The One Girl was Patti Smith, sampling her 'I haven't fucked much with the past but I've fucked plenty with the future' line. Strangely, in all the time I've been doing this blog, this is Patti Smith's first appearance here. The Hawaiian Death Stomp is long, pounding, percussive and pretty essential.

The Hawaiian Death Stomp