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 Look closely at the most embarrassing details and amplify them. 

This took me to the Beastie Boys and their embarrassment at Fight For your Right, a song which defined them in a way they did not like. It led us to Paul's Boutique and the 90s Beastie Boys so it all turned out OK in the end. The Bagging Area OS squad played a blinder with the following- Johnny Cash and A Boy Named Sue (Ernie), Are We Not Men? by Devo (Anonliz), Slade's How Does It Feel (Jake Sniper), Elvis laughing his way through a performance of Are You Lonesome Tonight? at Vegas (C)...

... Magazine's A Song From Under The Floorboards and Radiohead's Creep (Trail Of Bread), The Animals' Story of Bo Diddley (Al G), Half Man Half Biscuit's Petty Sessions (Rol), and Feel Good Hit Of The Summer by Queens Of The Stone Age, Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana and Prefab Sprout's From Langley Park To Memphis (Chris ZenArcade).

There was an interview with David Byrne this week at The Guardian where he was asked if they used the Oblique Strategy cards in the studio when Talking Heads worked with Eno. Byrne said 'The box of cards were present. I don’t know if they were ever really used, but they contain clever ideas, to help you break out of any ruts or ingrained thinking.' 

Avoiding ruts and ingrained thinking, this week's Oblique Strategy suggestion is this- You can only make one dot at a time. 

As a massive fan of One Dove and Dot Allison, one Dot is all we need.

Fallen

Fallen originally came out on Soma, a Glasgow based record label. One Dove were a trio, Dot Allison, Ian Carmichael and Jim McKinven. When the group signed to Junior Boys Own, an enconter with Andrew Weatherall on a boat party in Rimini led to him producing their album, fresh from his successes  with Screamadelica. Weatherall's version of Fallen lifted it to new heights, Dot's voice over the fractured intro, gasps and timbales, 'I don't know why I'm telling you any of this, one thing is don't ever tell anyone I told you this, don't save me, forgive me, I was only thinking of you... just you'... and just like that anyone hearing it was hooked.

After One Dove folded Dot released a solo album that was trailed y this gorgeous piece of mid- 90s soul/ pop... 

Mo' Pop

The same album, Afterglow, had this song on it, Message Personnel which was remixed by Arab Strap, who slow it down and take the blissed out pop of the original and make it typically something a bit darker...

Message Personnel (Arab Strap Remix)

I think Kevin Shields is on guitar on that one too. I could go on posting Dot Allison tracks all day but I'll stop there.

Wire's 1978 debut had the song Dot Dash on it, two and a half minutes of post- punk brilliance and there's a guitar band from Washington D.C. named after that song who put out this in 2018 on an album called  Proto Retro...

World's Last Payphone

Dots also make me think of the printing process for comic books, the four colour process, using small dots of colour to create shades. Roy Lichtenstein took comic book imagery and dot printing and blew them up for his version of Pop Art, most famously with Whaam!

Paul Weller had a Whaam! Rickenbacker guitar which he used in The Jam and which I've seen in an exhibition but can't find my photo of it. Here's Paul with it...

Pete Wylie, a Bagging Area hero, had a Pow! guitar...

That guitar made a prime time Top Of The Pops appearance in 1986 when Pete's single Sinful hit the charts and his friend Josie Jones had the privilege of playing it (special mention for the dancing nuns, The Sisters of The Anfield Road)

Sinful is an all timer for me, one of those songs that I can always go back to and if forced to make a list of my X number of favourite songs, would absolutely be on it. 

Sinful (Tribal Mix)

Recently I was sent an EP by Ariadne's Labyrinth which is on my list of releases to write about at greater length but Eno's card and this track, Terminal Dot, came together at the right time- Terminal Dot fuses classical violins, a lovely string arrangement, with some thumping beats and distorted bass, a collision or rave and classical that works really well. 

The portrait of the woman at the top of this post was above the fireplace in a pub we were drinking in, after the Protex Blue gig in Sheffield last weekend. I don't know who she is but she's definitely had enough of the person painting her or boring her with their constant banging on. Withering disdain. 

Anyway, feel free to drop you own suggestions to You can only make one dot at a time in the comment box. 

Kime Ne

This is a piece of Turkish psychedelic folk, from Insanlar, the in-house band at Istanbul's club Minimuzihkol (led by Baris K and Cem Yildiz). Kime Ne originally came out in 2013 and was then re-released by Honest Jon's in 2015 but I only discovered it recently thanks to a recording of Weatherall and Johnston playing their A Love From Outer Space night at Zukunft back in January. This is seriously good, a proper 'woah, rewind that and play it again' track.

That Old Town

While in London we took the students to the O2 arena to see the Museum Of British Pop Culture. As soon as you put rock 'n' roll in a museum it seems to lose some of its charm in some ways but some of the exhibits were good. There were large projections playing in slow-mo (The Smiths, Wham and The Stone Roses on Top Of The Pops in the 80s, The Clash and Sex Pistols from 70s TV), different rooms for different periods, a room full of guitars and drum kits to play on and a rather nifty touch screen virtual record box which tried to tell the story of dance music (a good selection of tracks although I tutted and shook my head at what I thought were a couple of factual errors). In the rooms, as well as some touch screen stuff, there were various pieces behind glass- some Bowie costumes from the early 70s, a Small Faces bass drum, a royal flush of Spice Girls outfits, dresses belonging to Petula Clark and Dusty Springfield, a pair of Rickenbackers- Weller's pop art guitar and Mani's abstract expressionist bass (John Squire's handiwork, along with Mani's paint splattered clothes from that NME cover, visible in the right of the second pic).  Art-rock crossover. I was hoping for a Cubist drum kit but left disappointed.

It transpired that two of my 6th form students' Dads were present at Spike Island along with me, a quarter of a century ago. They say working with kids keeps you young- it can also make you feel very old. I then spent some time racking my brains trying to think of when Weller and Mani might have played together and came up with this 7" single from a few years back, a super sharp slice of Mod pop, recorded with Graham Coxon. 

This Old Town

And here played live on the gogglebox- Weller, Mani, Coxon and Zak Starkey on drums.

They probably played together on a Primal Scream B-side too ('Til The Kingdom Comes, XCLTR era, sounds like The Who) which I have posted before. In fact having just searched the blog, I've posted This Old Town before too.