A new Adrian Sherwood release is always something worth giving one's attention to. A 10" Discoplate release under his own name would seem to be worth one's absolute full attention. The four track EP, titled The Grand Designer, comes out this Friday and has been trailed by a track of the same name. It's a superb piece of dub music, spiritual almost, with a wonderful groove and array of FX laid over the top- sirens going off, hisses of cymbal and percussion, a snatch of guitar, deep bass, explosions and growls, bongos, pianos, whatever... it's beautifully realised and perfectly produced.
The other tracks include Let's Come Together complete with vocals from the departed Lee Scratch Perry and two that promise a lot just by their titles- Russian Oscillator and Cold War Skank. The vinyl is unfortunately sold out but the digital is available here.
The death of Sly Stone rippled and then flowed through the world of music and social media on Monday evening and into Tuesday. He was 82 and had lived quite a life. I think I first caught sight of him in 1989 with the 20th anniversary release and TV screenings of the Woodstock movie. His name became a fashionable one to drop and Sly And The Family Stone's multi racial, mixed gender, good time dance music from the late 60s fitted in with the times. When people mentioned acid house, S- Express, The Stone Roses, Bass-o- Matic, De La Soul and a host of others, Sly Stone and The Family were never far away. Like many people I bought the Greatest Hits album, an album stuffed wall to wall 60s dance floor hits, a fusion of pop, soul, funk and psychedelia played by people with long hair and Afros wearing dungarees and floral shirts. They were tailor made for 1989- I Want To Take You Higher, Dance To The Music, Everyday People, Hot Fun In The Summertime Everybody Is A Star...
It's fair to say as well that when the Woodstock film is taken as a whole, Sly is very much the star... boom lackalackalacka...
Later on in the early 90s Arrested Development sampled Sly for their hit People Everyday and then people began to refer to There's A Riot Goin' On. In 1991 Los Angeles went up in flames with the acquittal of four policemen who had been filmed brutally beating Rodney King. It seems frighteningly apt that when Sly died, there was indeed a riot goin' on again in L.A., this time caused by the President and (again) racially motivated.
The album There's A Riot Goin' On is a very different record from the feel good anthems the Family Stone made in 1967/68. Recorded largely by Sly on his own and featuring one of the first sues of drum machines, it's a dense, pessimistic and disillusioned album, murky funk. The arc of the civil rights movement is reflected in it, from I Have A Dream in 1963 to the assassination of King in '68, from the Freedom Rides and the Greensboro Sit Ins in the early 60s to the Watts riots and Black Power by the end of decade. It's a pissed off, militant and on edge. Sly had mixed with the Black Panthers and was being urged to make music that reflected the times, with an all Black band. Drugs and paranoia play their part. It's one of those albums that everyone should own a copy of.
Jerry Harrison and Adrian Belew have been touring Remain In Light in Europe- they played Oslo, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Hamburg and Cologne, three dates in the Netherlands and then Brussels, Warsaw and Luxembourg and last week arrived in the UK with gigs in Manchester and Wolverhampton and then London. Harrison was a Talking Head, guitar and keys/ synths, and Belew played guitar on Remain In Light in 1980 and then as part of the touring band (documented on the second disc of The Name Of This Band Is Talking Heads and an incredible film of the band playing live in Rome in 1980).
The band that took to the stage at The Ritz last Thursday night is a dozen people strong, Harrison and Belew centre stage accompanied by two female singers, a man right in front of us who sings a lot of the David Byrne parts (and not afraid to bring his own take to some very well known songs) and plays a huge saxophone, several keys/ synth players, another guitarist, a drummer, a percussionist and a bassist. Most of them are also the support band, Cool Cool Cool, and they do a superb job of re- animating those Talking Heads songs. They have the necessary funkiness and can do the New York edge too. I've seen David Byrne perform many of these songs before- Harrison and Belew do them just as well but without the performance art that Byrne always brings to his shows (and I loved his American Utopia tour).
The set isn't just Remain In Light. They dip into other parts of the Talking Heads back catalogue and beyond, kicking off with Psycho Killer (a crowd pleasing place to start) and hit us with four Remain In Light highpoints- the jerky, uptight but loose art- funk of Crosseyed And Painless, Harrison and Belew trading guitar licks, followed by House In Motion and a brilliantly slightly manic but very much on the button I Zimbra. From this they roll into Born Under Punches, the sax/ singer in front of us screaming the vocal lines, 'Take a look at these hands/ The hand speaks/ The hand of a government man'. The band are dancing around, the 76 year old Jerry Harrison is doing that thing where he closes his eyes and rocks back on his heals, his long curly locks framing a very contended smile.
Cities from Fear Of Music follows and then Harrison plays Rev It Up from his 1987 solo album Casual Gods (I have Rev It Up on 12" and I'd be surprised if its been out of the sleeve since 1988). Slippery People sounds huge, Jerry's synth and keys solo a particular joy. Adrian Belew takes the spotlight for a King Crimson cover (Thela Hun Ginjeet according to SetlistFM- I'll have to take their word for it, a man's got to got o the toilet and the bar at some point) and then they launch into Once In A Lifetime, a refreshingly off kilter take on the song- the part three quarters of the way through where Harrison hits some huge synth chords is grin inducing. By this point we're right at the front. Everyone's dancing. There are a lot of younger people in the crowd as well as the usual middle aged audience and the feeling (I hesitate to use the word vibe but probably should) in The Ritz is amazing, evryone really enjoying hearing these songs so close up played by people having the time of their lies. A one point the two singers, the keys players and the sax/ singing man do a choreographed turning on the spot dance, a nod maybe to Stop Making Sense- it's a wonderful moment.
More? They play Life During Wartime, easily one of Talking Heads' best songs, Byrne's endlessly quoteable lyrics reeling by as the band cook up a storm- 'We dress like students/ We dress like housewives/ Or in a suit and a tie/ I changed my hairstyle so many times now/ I don't know what I look like....'- and then they close with Take Me To The River.
The encore is just two songs, the first Drugs (from Fear Of Music), a woozy, fractured, distorted song, and then they dive into The Great Curve, maybe the most dancey, most poly- rythmic, most Remain In Light of the Remain In Light songs, Belew providing the squeals of guitar and bursts of electricity, as the band bring the futuristic sound of 1980 into now. When it ends the players line up across the front of the stage for the ovation and it's clear that Jerry Harrison (plus Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz) as well as additional players like Belew, brought a huge amount to these songs, both in the studio and live- Jerry Harrison is unflashy and un- rock starry, New York cool and an innovative guitar and keys player- and as the house lights come on its all smiles on the floor of The Ritz.
Hugo Nicolson's return to musical action has seen him land at Brighton's Higher Love Recordings, a thoroughly reliable source of Balearic and electronic music. His new EP, Black Stick, came out last week, three tracks, all over seven minutes long and all first rate. The lead track is Little Kind, nine minutes of acid madness with burbling 808s and crunchy drums, a seabed- depth bassline and some of those wiggy melodies that send dancefloors off into orbit. You can get all three at Higher Love's Bandcamp.
The two that follow- Spanner and Zombie- are equally good. Spanner is percussive, thumpy and has a voice talking about destiny. Zombie is swampy and tribal, lots of FX and a squeak at the top end. The descending synthline sounds a little like a distant relative of Don't Fight It, Feel It, a record Hugo produced with Andrew Weatherall many, many moons ago.
Back in 1991 Hugo remixed Julian Cope's Beautiful Love, a track that came out on bright pink vinyl. The drums are a slowed down sample from a jazz record- someone told me which record once but was ages ago and I've forgotten. Hugo drops in a wobbly bassline, some FX and gets Copey into a very '91 groove.
Stereolab's new album Instant Holograms On Metal Film is an unexpected joy, their first for fifteen years and containing song titles that could have been created by a Stereolab song title generator bot- Mystical Plosives, Transmuted Matter, Vermona F Transistor, Melodie Is A Wound... The music though and the energy the songs contain make the band sound like they've been fired up after touring to support a series of re- issues and have a lot to do and say.
The album kicks from the outset, the familiar Stereolab elements all present and correct- motorik drums, analogue synths, Moogs being very Moog, guitars and Laetitia Sadier's flat but engaged vocals, an amalgam of krautrock, ye- ye, easy listening, bossa nova and jazz, library and sound effects albums, with a healthy dose of Marxist politics. They sound like they did in the 90s but also sound like now, updated and refined. The songs fly by, some short, some six or seven minutes long, a rush of retro- futuristic avant- pop. Aerial Troubles catches the mood of the album perfectly, both sonically and visually.
Sadier said in an interview that the album is inherently political even if the lyrics aren't directly political- by creating and by being positive they're countering the relentless negativity in the world, the poison of Trump and Farage, the mass murder taking place in Gaza, a Labour government taking benefits from the disabled and attacking the vulnerable (the list is mine not her's but I'm sure she was thinking of those things and others).
Space Age Bachelor Pad Music (Foamy) is from the 1993 mini- album of the same name, released on Too Pure and a calling card for the groop- Tim Gane, Laetitia Sadier, Mary Hanson, and Sean O'Hagan.
Jenny Ondioline was the lead song on a 10" EP from 1993, Transient Random Noise- Bursts With Announcements, a rush of guitars and noise. The version here is from the three CD box set Oscillons From The Anti- Sun. In 1993 they appeared on The Word playing French Disko, a song from the same EP. Stereolab made the absolute most of a bit of a cultural mismatch, a song that ends with the rallying cry of 'la resistance!'
The Noise Of Carpet is from the band's 1996 album Emperor Tomato Ketchup, possibly their best album- complex, multi- layered, vibrant, obtuse. It's a 90s banger.
Lo Boob Oscillator was originally one side of a 7" single from 1993 that came out on Sub Pop. It was then compiled onto Refried Ectoplasm. Gotta dig those album names.
Orgisatic is from Peng!, a 1992 album, a rattle of guitars that indicate Tim Gane's indie background - noise and distortion and sing song vox. My Bloody Stereolab.
Ping Pong was the lead single to their third proper album, Mars Audiac Quintet. The lyrics are critique of the west's addiction to boom- bust economics with vintage synths and brass leading the way, all very melodic and 60s pop.
Les Yper Yper Sound is also from the box set Oscillons From The Anti- Sun, a stunning, hypnotic five minutes of thumping drums and distorted synths sounds.
The Free Design came out in 1999, a bossa nova/ tropicalia song from an EP of the same name and then on the album Cobra And Phases Group Play Voltage In The Milky Night.
Iron Man was a 1997 7" on their own Duophonic label and sold at the merch stand on the Dots And Loops tour.
Melodie Is A Wound is from the new album Instant Holograms On Metal Film. Which is highly recommended.
Brian Eno's soundtrack work is many decades old. A selection of tracks were compiled as a double vinyl/ CD in 2020, cunningly titled Brian Eno- Film Music 1976- 2020. One of the remarkable things about the album and its seventeen tracks is that it works as a whole and feels like a cohesive piece of work despite the music bookending it being separated by forty six years and spanning a wide variety of films and TV programmer, from the Apollo moonshot documentary For All Mankind to Top Boy, from an Arena documentary on Francis Bacon to the 1984 version of Dune, and Married To The Mob to a film about sharks, Natural World- Hammerhead.
I've posted some of Eno's soundtrack music before- An Ending (Ascent) from For All Mankind, Deep Blue Day from Trainspotting, The Sombre from Top Boy and Prophecy from Dune have all featured here previously so thought I'd post some other tracks from Eno's film music, all of which is wonderful.
Dover Beach is a four minute ambient excursion, a hum, a ringing drone, the sense of time passing and things changing. It's from the soundtrack to Jubilee, Derek Jarman's 1978 drama/ trip, a film that transplants 16th century occultist John Dee and Elizabeth I into 1970s Britain, a country decaying and shot through with anger, despair and nihilism. It's wildly impressionistic, largely plotless and infused with London punk. Everywhere looks like a World War II bombsite. Various punk figures star in the film- Siouxsie Sioux and Steve Severin, Adam Ant, Jordan, Gene October and Toyah all appear and some of them are on the soundtrack too which concludes in ambient style with Slow Water and Dover Beach.
In 1995 Michael Mann directed a crime/ heist drama bringing together two giants of American cinema, Robert De Niro and Al Pacino for the first time. Eno contributed to the soundtrack, the very cinematic track Late Evening In Jersey, all long synth chords, a single guitar note, explosions echoing and rattling snare drums.
Eno recorded with U2 for the soundtrack too, appearing as Passengers, and Einsturzende Neubauten turned up as did New Order covering a Joy Division song, New Dawn Fades, with Moby. I'm not sure that was a collaboration anyone needed.
Reasonable Question is from the 2021 soundtrack to the film We Are As Gods, a documentary about pioneering free thinker and environmentalist Stewart Brand. Brand was one of the Merry Pranksters on Ken Kesey's Magic Bus and an advocate of cyber- utopianism. Apparently he coined the phrase personal computer. He's now in his 80s and big on rewilding ecosystems. Reasonable Question sounds like a computer programme turned into music- that's not a criticism.
Justin Robertson's recent dub excursions, both his remixes and his own productions, have been first rate. He's kept that winning streak going with a pair of dubbed out versions of Fluke's I Wanna Be under his Five Green Moons name (the Five Green Moons album Moon 1 was one of my favorites of 2024).
I Wanna Be (Five Green Moons Dub) is a world of deep bass, crashing drums, rattling rimshots and FX, unfolding over eight glorious dubbed out minutes- groove, space and echo. You can get the remix and the dub- there isn't much between them- at Bandcamp.
Fluke's re- emergence last year was a welcome return. The original version of I Wanna Be came out a week before the Five Green Moon ones and is very much in familiar Fluke territory- throbbing, pulsing, widescreen progressive techno with Jon Fugler's vocals up front, 'I wanna be/ The very best me I can be'.
New out from Tici Taci is the second full length album by Mr BC, ten tracks bound together as Smart Dust. There is plenty here for those fond of the chuggy/ ALFOS/ electronic indie- dance community to enjoy, with sparkling. cosmische synth sounds, low slung bass and slow mo machine drums pumping and hissing away. Ultrasuede is a starlit opening track, a sleek shimmy under the mirror ball with robotic vocals and melodica.
Title track Smart Dust throbs and shimmers, with a topline that could be either a clipped guitar or a vocodered voice, and gorgeous sequencers, keys and piano runs.
The album glides by, each track a man/ machine joy, Hospital Blues and Frequency Illusion, bringing deep, funky bass and thudding kick drum, and nu disco sparkles and synths. Previous single Make It Burn is present in its Disco Mix form, Chic style guitars, while Are You Acperienced is stellar with a pulsing acid bassline. After nine slices of uptempo cosmic chug Smart Dust ends with Endless Loop, a four minute piano and FX piece. Halfway through the drums pad in and it lifts off, Kling Klang synths firing off in technicolor before it all drops out leaving just the piano. A rather lovely way to finish. Smart Dust is at Bandcamp, available on CD and as download.
I read Elijah Wald's Dylan Goes Electric! recently, the book that the film A Complete Unknown is largely based on. Wald is a veteran of the folk scene himself, an author and teacher. The book builds up to Bob Dylan's pivotal appearance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 with an electric band and the moment they crashed into Maggie's farm and then Like A Rolling Stone. Wald acknowledges their are multiple accounts and perspectives of what happened next- the boos, the shock, the applause, the disappointment, the reactions of Pete Seeger and his axe, whether the booing was in reaction to Dylan's electric guitar and band or to the poor sound quality and overloaded live mix... all this and more.
Wald goes back to the start though and looks at the American folk movement and the split in it that became crystallized by Dylan's arrival, the split between the purists who thought that folk music should only be the songs of the traditional American communities and working people of the previous decades/ century and the modernists who were happy with topical songs. The notion of seeking commercial success also split the folk scene, the view that anything gimmicky was abhorrent and a sell out versus chart success bringing new people to folk music who might then appreciate the 'real folk music'.
Reading all of this you realise of course that this story and schism has split every music scene ever since. As the reader follows Wald through the stories of Seeger and Dylan between 1961 and 1965 you also realise this- that in Wald's view, Dylan didn't go electric, Dylan was always electric.
Wald's storytelling is first rate and his description of the various Newport Folk Festivals and their line ups is superb. I'd never really known much about the Mimi and Richard Farina and was sent to YouTube several times looking for their music. Richard Farina was a folk singer, songwriter, poet and novelist. His only published book, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me, is a 60s counterculture cult classic. He met Mimi Baez, the seventeen year old sister of Joan in 1962. She was already an accomplished singer and guitarist. They married and became a performing couple, Mimi and Richard Farina, appearing at Newport and recording two mid- 60s folk albums, 1965's Celebrations For A Grey day and 1966's Reflections In A Crystal Wind, both on Vanguard Records. Richard was killed in a motorbike accident in April 1966, on the day of Mimi's twenty- first birthday. I've become a little obsessed with some of their songs since reading the book although neither album seems easy to get hold of on vinyl this side of the Atlantic. Here's a song, one from each album. The first was written about three white college students murdered by the Ku Klux Klan on their way to a peace march in 1964. The second is the title track from their second and final album.
Iggy Pop's arrival on stage at 9pm on Saturday night in front of a crowd of 3000 fans was electrifying. The crowd was all ages, from teenagers up to fans in their 70s. Almost every single leftfield and punk band t- shirt you can think of was being worn somewhere in the building. His band filed onstage, two guitarists, a drummer bassist, keyboard player and two piece horn section, and then Iggy appeared to a roar from the crowd. By the time he'd reached the microphone stand he'd ripped his waistcoat off and was topless. The band then careered into TV Eye from the 1970 Stooges album Funhouse. TV Eye is reduced, mechanised rock 'n' roll, the 60s rock dream brutalised and moved to Detroit, Iggy boiling his lyrics down to just two phrases, 'see that cat', and 'she got a TV eye on me'.
Iggy Pop is 78 years old. Occasionally he sat on a stool for a few seconds between songs but for most of the ninety minute set he prowled and worked the stage, his voice sounding great, strong and growly, leading the band through a 20 song set that was exactly what you'd want him to play. Iggy knows what his back catalogue should sound like and this band played them as they should be played- plenty of late 60s and early 70s punk rock menace, with that groove that The Stooges had, and the horns adding the free jazz element. When not singing he works the crowd, standing at the front of the stage, slightly lopsided due to the decades of physical abuse he's put his body through, waving his arms, pointing at people in the crowd. There isn't much chat between songs- 'fucking Mancunians' he says approvingly at one point, and he introduces Some Weird Sin by saying it's 'time for some poetry'.
The Victoria Warehouse is a large brick hall. People have been critical of it as a venue in the past- the security for being over the top, the sound being muffled, it being oversold- but there are no issues tonight, its a seething mass of Iggy Pop fans. In front of me a 20- something couple dance and bounce around, clearly having the night of their lives. Beer is flung across the crowd, there are some crowd surfers- gigs can sometimes be very sanitised affairs these days- the mayhem around us is a joy to behold and as the gig goes on it gets hotter and hotter. I didn't go to the bar once during the gig. There was no way I was going to miss any of what was going on and carrying three drinks back through the crowd without spilling them would have been risky (especially at £8 a pint).
The first half of the set is sensational, one classic after another, a steam train of proto- punk and 70s rock, Iggy blasting through them with the energy of a man half or a third of his age. TV Eye is followed by Raw Power, then I Got A Right and Gimme Danger slowing things down a little. Five songs in he plays The Passenger and follows it with Lust For Life- that's two of his best and best known songs played in the first 20 minutes. Lust For Life is spectacular, the drums swinging and guitars punching, Iggy at full throttle. Then Death Trip and Loose (those horns really adding to the Funhouse songs) and I Wanna Be Your Dog, the audience chanting the chorus back at him. During the guitar solo he hurls his microphone stand across the stage and at the end of the song asks, 'where's my fucking microphone stand'.
By this point I'm a mess. It's hot, my shirt and jacket are stuck to me, I'm dancing around, Iggy is twenty feet in front of us, the sound is loud and punchy, the band sound superb, he's playing all the songs we want to hear. After the crowd pleasing, ecstatic thump of Lust For Life he plays Search And Destroy, the ghost of James Williamson's squealing guitar re- animated, Iggy's Vietnam stream of consciousness unfurling, those lines about being a streetwalking cheetah with a heart full of napalm and of love in the middle of a firefight spat out in that gravelly tone. Iggy plays the crowd- at one point a girl in front of us is up on her boyfriend's shoulders, phone in hand. Iggy spots her, head and shoulders above the crowd, a girl young enough to be his grand daughter, points straight at her and sticks his tongue out.
He goes into a few deeper cuts- Down On The Street, 1970 with a wailing free jazz trumpet, Iggy telling us that the song is what it was like to be alive 55 years ago, I'm Sick Of You and Some Weird Sin. It's high octane and exhilerating stuff, genuinely life affirming despite all the nihilism of the songs, Iggy as Godfather of Punk, the originator, last man standing, still there, giving it his all, 2 years short of 80. It slows down a little for the last 20 minutes. He plays Frenzy (from 2022, a song that starts with the line 'I got a dick and 2 balls, that's more than you all'), the song ending with a full band freak out, drummer thumping round the kit, guitars howling, horns blaring and out of this cacophony the drum machine lurch of Nightclubbing emerges, Iggy back to the front of the stage, singing his 1977 song about Bowie and the cool crowd, numbed out in West Berlin. Nightclubbing doesn't stick around for long and Iggy introduces a recent song, Modern Day Rip Off, muttering that he feels like he's been cheated his whole life.
We're nearing the end. Iggy wanders over to a speaker stack mid- song and gives it a few tugs but decides against pulling it over or climbing it. Then they play I'm Bored, from 1979's New Values, Iggy as apathist in chief, 'I'm bored/ I'm the chairman of the bored'. After nearly ninety minutes he's having a bit of a rest, slowing it down, the sound slightly muffled, but it doesn't last long as Iggy and his band slam into Real Wild Child, the song sounding huge now shorn of its 80s production. The pair of 20- somethings in front of me are still dancing, occasionally stopping to shout lines of songs into each other's faces. Iggy finishes us off with Funtime, his 1977 gothic/ kraut lurch with its blank eyed chant of 'all aboard for funtime', a fine way to leave, and after singing his last line he wanders off stage, the band left to see the song to its conclusion. No encore, house lights on, an exhilarated and sweaty crowd wandering out into the Old Trafford streets, wrung out and spent.
Kieran Hebden (otherwise known as Four Tet) and William Tyler (guitarist in among others Silver Jews and Lambchop as well as a solo artist) may not seem like obvious candidates for a collaborative album but they share a love of folk, various cosmic sounds and it turns out late 80s country. There's an album on the way in September called 41 Longfield Street Late 80s and ahead of it is this eleven minute beauty, If I Had A Boat...
If I Had A Boat sets out with a long gentle drone, which builds and shifts, some feedback and static drifting in, and then two minutes in, the faint sound of finger picking on a guitar- then, suddenly the guitar is at the foreground on its own. The synths and Kieran Hebden production parts drift back in as Tyler picks away, and gradually everything is balanced again. This is only six minutes in, there's still half the track to go and the second half is a delight, constantly evolving and revolving, melodies and synths, drones and squiggles, round and round.
If I Had A Boat is a cover of sorts- a long instrumental re- interpretation might be a better description- of a Lyle Lovett song from his 1988 album Pontiac. Lyle was in the news a lot in the late 80s, his idiosyncratic take on country garnering a lot of praise. He was also for a while in a relationship with Julia Roberts after they met making the 1992 film The Player and married in 1993 (divorcing two years later).
Sabres Of Paradise took the stage in Fabric at 9pm on Thursday night to sirens and red spotlights, the first date they've played in 30 years, and a re- union that is missing the main man, Andrew Weatherall. Jagz Kooner, red shirt, black suit and tie, is behind a large console. To his right Gary Burns and a bank of keyboards and synths and beyond him Phil Mossman, guitar and bowler hat. To Jagz's left, Rich Thair with drums, congas, cymbals, black hat and Palestinian flag on his chest and next to him Nick Abnett, black suit, bass guitar, sharp haircut. They look ready to go. The trip hop drums of Tow Truck rumble in and we're off, Haunted Dancehall reborn for 2025, the track being reconstructed in front of us, transforming into the Depth Charge remix (another missing man tonight- J Saul Kane died last year).
Fabric is in Farringdon, a cavernous venue with several rooms all below ground level and a warren of connecting corridors and staircases. The room Sabres are playing is low ceilinged and dark, lit only by red lights, and feels industrial- it's perfect for the bass- led, swampy Sabres sound, the tracks filling the space. The room is packed with fans, friends and family, everyone willing Sabres on. Three tracks in Theme snaps into place, the horn sample and massive drums bouncing off the walls and Phil Mossman's gnarly guitar cutting through. Theme takes us into the bumpy, rough edged dub of Edge 6, these three decade old tracks sounding electrified and alive, not exactly the same as the recorded versions but retooled and remade on stage.
Having felt their way in, the band and the room step up a gear with Wilmot, Nick Abnett's bassline working its magic and the horn riff snaking around. Jagz at the centre and always busy, his Cheshire Cat grin showing how much they're enjoying it. After Wilmot the chimes of the Beatless version of Smokebelch ring out, twinkling synths and piano. I have a long and intimate history with this track- we played it at the graveside at Isaac's funeral- and I'm sure I'm not the only one with tears in their eyes as Gary and Jagz play their blissed out ambient serenade.
The second half of the gig is a stunner, energy levels raised, crowd and band in sync. The Ballad Of Nicky Maguire comes next- acid squiggles and burps, chunky drums, metallic dub clanks and eventually those long, melancholy chords, a track that as much as any seemed like the soundtrack to the James Woodbourne noir novel excerpts from Haunted Dancehall's inner sleeve (James Woodbourne is yet another Andrew Weatherall pseudonym and Nicky Maguire's identity is a closely guarded secret). They play Clock Factory, the fifteen minute long industrial ambient from 1994's Sabresonic, all clicks and whirs, and follow it with Ano Electro, more metallic drums and huge distorted bass and then they're done, to huge applause and waves of cheers and whoops. Sabres Of Paradise come back quickly, no messing about and launch into Sabresonic's opening track, the hard edged, acid house and thumping kick drums of Still Fighting, Jagz dropping in the whistling synth sound from Still Fighting's source material, Primal Scream's Don't Fight It, Feel It. It's is fast and frenetic, physical, techno you can feel, and it cuts deep.
Then they push everything a notch higher with the return of Smokebelch, this time the David Holmes remix (Holmes is in the DJ booth watching having warmed the crowd up with ninety minutes of dubby sounds). Holmes's remix, released a week after the original 12" (itself a version of LB Bad's New Age Of Faith) did what seemed impossible- it made Smokebelch peakier, upping the ante. Jagz and Gary, Rich, Nick and Phil, are at the centre of a storm in Fabric now, the crowd going nuts as the drum troupe drums rattle around the room, the whistles and piano ride around on top and that huge acid line runs through the centre of it. I have a thirty second clip of it, the piano runs and drums, red lights and a sea of hands in the air- mayhem, everyone dancing and lost in the music, a thirty year gap vanished, Smokebelch very much in the present.
It's also very poignant. Andrew Weatherall's not here and he started this whole thing, Sabres a result of a late night conversation with Jagz and Gary in a club in 1992. I'm sure I'm not the only one who, as the five man Sabres live band gather centre stage and take their bow, can imagine Lord Sabre himself, somewhere in the shadows at the side of the stage, nodding and smiling, giving them his blessing as The Sabres Of Paradise ship sails on to Sydney Opera House and then to Spain.
The gig at Fabric coincided with an announcement that Warp are re- pressing the long out of print pair of Sabres Of Paradise albums, Sabresonic and Haunted Dancehall, remastered and available either red or black vinyl.
In September 2023 I put together a mix made up of various versions of Smokebelch to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the 12" release, five versions of the track sequenced together for extended enjoyment. It seems the right time to repost it.
Iggy Pop plays at Manchester's Victoria Warehouse tonight and I'm going to be there. Iggy feels like the last man standing in a way. He hasn't played in Manchester for years and at 78 years old I can't imagine there'll be too many opportunities to see him on home turf again. Although it wouldn't surprise me if Iggy lived to be 100 and carried on performing with his shirt off for another two decades.
Two weeks ago the Soundtrack Saturday featured Iggy's title song to the 1984 Alex Cox film Repo Man. Iggy got a massive boost in the 90s when his songs were included on the soundtrack to Danny Boyle's Trainspotting. Included seems a bit reductionist- it's fair to say that the film, its publicity and its opening scene would be nowhere near as memorable as they were without this song bursting out of the cinema speakers as a shoplifting Ewan McGregor attempt to outrun security guards and ends up almost splayed across the bonnet of a car, laughing at the poor driver...
Lust For Life was the title song from Iggy's 1977 second solo album, recorded at Hansa in West Berlin with David Bowie in the producer's seat. The band were Iggy's touring line up- Ricky Gardiner on guitar and Tony and Hunt Sales on bass and drums. Ricky Gardiner came up the famous guitar riff, based on the Morse code opening to the US Armed Forces Network news programme and written on a ukulele. The guitars are great but its the drums which are first out of the traps, the loudest, most perfectly recorded drums. But there's no escaping the riff, everything just has to fall into line and follow.
On top of this, essentially punk crossed with a sped up Motown backbeat, Iggy songs and sneers, at the top of his game, lines about Johnny Yen, liqour and rugs, hypnotising chickens, flesh machines and GTOs fired off, always coming back to the hilariously brilliant, 'well I'm just a modern guy... I got a lust for life'. Jon Savage (I think) once wrote that in just four years, from Raw Power to Lust For Life, Iggy went from Death Trip to Lust For Life and what a strange trip it was.
Trainspotting also featured Iggy's song Nightclubbing, a genuine solo Iggy Pop classic, from Iggy's solo debut The Idiot (also recorded with Bowie but at Chateau d'Herouville, France). Bowie and Iggy had both left the USA to kick addictions and ended up in Europe making records that soaked up the new sounds of West German rock and electronics. Nightclubbing has Bowie on keys and a very mechanistic drum machine, a weird, dislocated electronic pulse, cocaine numbness and Iggy intoning his lyric about what it was like hanging out with Bowie every night, seeing people, 'brand new people', and doing 'brand new dances like the nuclear bomb'. Bowie wanted to replace the drum machine with 'proper' drums but Iggy stuck his ground, correctly, seeing that the drum machine gives the song its blank, lurching edge.
Iggy wrote the words in ten minutes in the studio and later said Nightclubbing was about"about the incredible coldness and deathly feeling you have after you've done something like that and how much you enjoy it. It could be Los Angeles or Paris or New York or anywhere, really." In Trainspotting the song soundtracks a scene involving shooting up in a desolate Edinburgh apartment and ends with the death of a baby.
The Trainspotting soundtrack is a superb 90s soundtrack. It turned Born Slippy into a massive hit and rebirthed Lou Reed's Perfect Day. It included Brian Eno's Deep Blue Day and Pulp's Mile End and a ten minute Weatherall produced Primal Scream title track, a slow, snakey instrumental with the street sounds from an all day session outside a pub in Soho, the assembled Scream party people shouting to friends and associates from the street to a first or second floor room.
Friday this week is a bumper post, new music from three artists old and new- OBOST, James Hardway and Reverb Delay, between them all showing electronic music- techno, acid, dub, house, whatever- is in good health and flourishing.
The very young and very talented Bobby Langfield, who records as OBOST, released an album and some singles/ EPs last year and played live at The Golden Lion in March. Today sees the release of a two track EP- Define/ Redefine. Define is led by a robotic stutter and squiggle, a voice, distorted toplines and piano kicking in and out. The vocal eventually reduces to the title, just the word 'define' repeated as keyboard notes rising and falling.
Redefine is a tougher, muckier and heavier take on the original, some serious acid techno at play, the rhythm thundering away, the sequencer caught in an endlessly addictive groove and the vocal several octaves deeper. Define/ Redefine are both available at Bandcamp.
Half the world away in Los Angeles David Harrow has resurrected his James Hardway persona for brand new tune and an eight track EP packed with versions and some remixes courtesy of the very much in form Rude Audio. Take A Minute appears in DnB version, a TikTok Mix, a 3Step one, the Footwork Mix and here as the House Mix where it feels like a crossover, some long lost futuristic 90s house playing in the third decade of the 21st century, the vocals by DangerRed beamed in from the aftermath of a party.
Rude Audio's remix reworks the tempo and the rhythm, dropping the vocal down (as OBOST did too) and adding some typically South London dub to the LA dubstep. All eight versions/ mixes/ remixes are at Bandcamp.
Reverb Delay is Marcus Farley whose EP Horizontal Rain came out on Mighty Force last month. A new thirteen track album, The Ghosts Of Dawn, is out today, an album that is in part a tribute to Berlin, its techno and dub sounds- for Marcus, the album is about the thrill of 'chasing the dawn', the ride on public transport to the centre of the city, entry to the clubs, immersion in the dancefloors, and then the journey home.
The Ghosts Of Dawn starts as it intends to go on- with an eight track dub techno excursion, rattling drums and gliding synths called Into The Night. As well as the music of Berlin, Detroit is very much present as is the Birmingham techno scene much loved by Marcus, Sandwell District and Surgeon, plus the mid 90s speaker shaking sounds of Bandulu. On One Four the kick drum hammers onward while synth stabs and arpeggios dance away at the top end.
The title track comes into the second half, a sense of calm and space, a slight lessening of the tempos and tension. Underground Overground is a nine minute wait for the train home, the night's adventures still running the mind and then Train Three brings station announcements, train noise and ambient techno chill. It's very much an album to be listened to in full, a piece and not just a collection of tracks, a journey into and through the night- you can find it at Mighty Force.
Tonight The Sabres Of Paradise play live at Fabric in London, the first time the band have played since a handful dates in Japan in 1995. The live band line up of Jagz Kooner and Gary Burns, guitarist Phil Mossman, bassist Nick Abnett and drummer Rich Thair are one man down- Andrew Weatherall is absent for obvious reasons- but Jagz and co. have decided to revive the band, do some gigs and finish the job, put Sabres out there and then put Sabres to bed. There may/ will be some further announcements about Sabres activity to follow- in fact, I think there may be some today and then more in a few weeks.
After the gig at Fabric Sabres fly to Australia to play at Sydney Opera House and then they return to Europe to play Primavera and Dekmantel. I'm going down to London today to see them. I missed Sabres play live back in the 90s and wasn't going to miss out twice. Also, The Flightpath Estate are partly responsible for the reformation happening. In 2023 Martin from The Flightpath Estate approached Jagz about marking the 30th anniversary of the release of Sabresonic and suggested a Q&A at The Golden Lion in Todmorden with a Jagz DJ set. Jagz was up for it and I agreed to be the host of the Q&A, asking the questions and trying to maintain a semblance of order. Jagz brought Gary along, two Sabres for the price of one and both were great fun, answered all the questions and entertained us with stories and tales of their lives and adventures with Andrew Weather al, making records in the mid- 90s.
We had a live recording of Sabres Of Paradise playing at Manchester's Herbal Tea Party, recorded back in 1994 provided by Rob Fletcher, and in between the Q&A and Jagz's DJ set we played it through the pub's PA. Jagz stood by a speaker listening intently and said to us at one point, 'You know, we sounded pretty good back then...'.
The live recording is at Mixcloud, Andrew on the decks for the first half hour and then Sabres playing Bubble And Slide II, Tow Truck, Theme and Smokebelch.
Cogs started turning in Jagz's head and once he got agreement from the other five Sabres live players, wheels were set in motion. There have been some rehearsal footage clips on social media this week, Jagz and Gary at the keys and synths, Rich standing at the drums and percussion and Nick rocking a low slung bass guitar, Phil front and centre with his Les Paul. There are a few photos from that time of the group on stage- this one is from Sugar Sweet in Belfast...
At the Sabresonic 30th Q&A we discussed where Andrew got the name Sabres Of Paradise from. The NME at the time suggested excitedly it was a play on Sex Pistols but there are two more plausible and possible sources. One is a 1960 novel by Lesley Blanch, a tale of pre- revolutionary Russia, cossacks and the Caucuses. The other is a 1983 Haysi Fantayzee B-side, a six minute dubby/ synth excursion by Jeremy Healy and Kate Garner (produced by Tony Visconti) with rambling, spoken word vocals. No one seemed entirely sure which one was the source, and equally, it could be both.
There are still a few tickets available for the Fabric gig tonight. David Holmes is playing a supporting DJ set and the place is sure to be filled with friendly faces. It's not too late...
Saint Etienne are about to bow out after thirty five years of making records. Sarah, Bob and Pete are releasing their final album, International, in September and ahead of it put out a song last week, the irresistible, uptempo, Northern Soul on synths sounds of Glad...
Glad was co- written by Chemical Brother Tom Rowlands and has Dove Jez Goodwin on guitar but it's Saint Etienne through and through, a song celebrating taking joy in small things.
Back in February they released some remixes of Alone Together from last year's The Night album. The Hove Lawns Sunset Mix is a Balearic joy, lazy drums and summer horns. They did a vinyl release, pressing up the number that were ordered. My copy has never arrived, lost somewhere in the postal system rather annoyingly.
The Cure's remix album, a slew of artists tackling songs from last year's Songs Of A Lost World, promises to be one of 2025's highlights. The recent Four Tet remix of Alone has now been joined by Orbital's version of Endsong, the album's final track and Robert Smith's meditation on staring into the abyss of loss, grief and memory, 'left alone with nothing at the end of every song'.
On Endsong (Orbital Remix) the Hartnoll brothers turn their hugely emotive techno up to eleven and take The Cure to new places. Skyscraping, beautiful, cosmic gloom.
I was going through one of the shelves of CDs recently and rediscovered the compilations of remixes by The Orb, double disc CD albums titled Auntie Aubrey's Excursions Beyond The Call Of Duty, a massive round up of remixes The Orb undertook in the 90s for other artists. Volume 1 came out in 1997 and took in Primal Scream, Killing Joke, Zodiac Mindwarp, Yello, Depeche Mode, Erasure, Pop Will Eat Itself and a slew of others. Volume 2 came out four years later and threw The Orb's net even wider- Wendy And Lisa, Lisa Stansfield, The KLF, Robbie chuffing Williams, Penguin Cafe Orchestra, Can, The Grid, System 7, Meat Beat Manifesto and Art Of Noise among others, and this one...
Eight minutes of mid 90s Orb remixing the mighty Tangerine Dream, from the when Thrash had left and Andy Hughes was working as Alex Paterson's right hand man. The familiar Orb sheen and sampled voices are there, a lovely chuggy rhythm kicking in and washes of synth shifting from left to right across the speakers. It's a blurred area with Orb remixes to know where the original artist ends and The Orb begin- there's as much Orb in this as there is Tangerine Dream. By three and a half minutes in everything's cooking nicely, ambient house with the emphasis on house, chunky drums and bass. The radio/ TV voices return during the break down and then the drums thunder back in and its all systems go for a few more minutes before everything ends with a dust storm.
The original track came out the year before on Tangerine Dream's Goblins' Club album, the German band's twenty fourth studio album. It's not a TD album I know- my TD knowledge is limited to Zeit, Phaedra, Rubycon and Force Majuere and I feel that on the whole that's enough. Apparently The Orb's remix was unsolicited and unofficial leaving TD's Edgar Froese both furious and litigious. The remix came out as a CD single paired with the original track so it's a bit odd that Edgar seemed to know nothing about it. Record company shenanigans maybe.
A few weeks ago an email arrived promising a new album from the duo Ultramarine- it is in fact a new old album, thirteen previously unheard and unreleased recordings from 1996- 7 about to be compiled as Routine and released by Blackford Hill. A single, Sunrise, came out on Friday as a taster and it's been part of my commuting playlist for the past fortnight, three and a half minutes of sunlit synths, keys and a hissy drum machine, and very nice indeed.
Ultramarine were/ are London and Essex duo Paul Hammond and Ian Cooper and back in the early 90s their fusion of ambient/ ambient house and folk was a refreshing and very English pastoral sound. Their best known song, Kingdom, saw them recruit Robert Wyatt on vocals and over the course of several albums they refined their sound and always stayed interesting- 1990's Folk, 1991's Every Man And Woman Is A Star and 1993's United Kingdoms were all essential early 90s electronic/ ambient/ folk and they've made four in the 2010s that have kept the standard high. Routine is available at Bandcamp for pre- order ahead of its release in July. Some of the track titles- Avebury, Crop Circle 5am, Runic Calibration and Astro Navigation- are pure Ultramarine.
I thought a Sunday mix to accompany the new single was in order and revisiting their music this week has been a joy. The tracks below are all from the duo's 90s recordings and are perfect for a Sunday in May even if the weather isn't doing quite what it should be.
Kingdom came out in 1993 with Robert Wyatt on vocals, the nearest they got to a hit. Wyatt's doleful, haunting, double tracked voice singing words of Medieval suffering and protest- 'We're low, we're low, we're rabble we know, mere rabble we know' and 'We're not too low the cloth to weave/ Too low the cloth to wear'. The folky/ Medieval pipes and 90s electronic squelch sound superb together. Goldcrest was the B-side of the Kingdom 12". The album United Kingdoms followed complete Incredible String Band sample. The Badger was also on United Kingdoms, one of several tracks remixed by among others Carl Craig and Fila Brazillia, and the one here by Cabaret Voltaire's Richard H. Kirk.
Hymn is a cover of a 1974 Kevin Ayres song, and came out in 1994, the sumptuous Ultramarine electronic sound and traditional instruments- accordion, clarinet- plus the voice of David McAlmont. The version I've included here has Kevin singing and came out on a remixes EP.
British Summertime was on 1991's Every Man And Woman Is A Star album, an ambient techno/ house classic, the folk influences seamlessly stitched in with early 90s technology, an ambient hippy/ folk crossover. The word pastoral was used a lot in reviews and the folky/ jazzy sound of the late 60s Canterbury scene, John Martyn and Rob Harper, that gentle English psychedelia, was a very strong presence on the album's dozen tracks.
Stella and Interstella were a 1990 single recorded for Belgian Le Disques Du Crepuscule in 1989 (a Factory sister label). They are always together for me, Stella and Interstella, and separating them seems wrong. They were added to the group's first album Folk, also released by Le Disques Du Crepuscule in 1990, an album that crosses boundaries from psyche to house to Balearic and back again, breakbeats and folk. Stella bounces around, bleeps and bass and warm synth chords, the 'You and me together' sample at its heart. Interstella (Stella) in particular is a dream record, ambient house, acoustic guitar and vocal samples, a voice saying 'I can do anything' perfectly encapsulating the feel of the times, when music was infused with the sense of endless possibility.
Sunrise is from the forthcoming Routine album, which is where this post started.
The pair of recent New Order Sunday mixes and yesterday's Fadela, a single released on Factory Records in 1987, have led me to Salvation! Directed by Beth B, Salvation! was a 1987 film, black comedy about an evangelical/ televangelism sex and blackmail scandal, starring Viggo Mortensen, Exene Cervenka (of Los Angeles punk band X) and Stephen McHattie. I've seen the film once, way back in 1988 at a film night when I was a student at Liverpool university and I honestly couldn't tell you much about it- a very of its time film I think.
The soundtrack however is a different story. It was released on Factory's Benelux label and its sister label Le Disques De Crepuscule and featured five New Order songs, four of which only ever saw the light of day on the soundtrack until the New Order Retro box set in 2002 included Let's Go on John McCready's disc.
Let's Go is very New Order in 1987, shiny and bright, sounding like it could easily have been an album track on 1986's Brotherhood, not quite a lost gem perhaps but a missing New Order song all the same. The five songs were all recorded for the film- Touched By The Hand Of God was deemed worthy of a full Factory release as a single in 1987, remixed by Arthur Baker and released as FAC 193, the follow up to True Faith which was a big hit that summer.
In the Retro box set booklet Stephen comments that Touched... was a 'land speed song- writing attempt', written for the film, a case of sit down and write a song in a day. In Substance Hooky says he arrived at the band's Cheetham Hill studio first and wrote the juddering synth bassline on his own. Bernard turned up and was impressed enough to want to turn it into a song. The way Hooky describes this suggests that gaining Bernard's approval was important in the summer of 1987.
The other three songs are Salvation Theme, Skullcrusher and Sputnik. Skullcrusher is short, bass-led, some feedback running through it and a gnarly Sumner guitar solo, a curio in the NO back catalogue.
As well as New Order the soundtrack has songs by Arthur Baker, Cabaret Voltaire, The Hood (the musical outfit for legendary New York doorman and party promoter John Hood) and Dominique (Davalos, an actor and musician, best known for her role in Howard The Duck, a film I had entirely forgotten about until now), and Jumpin' Jesus (Baker and Stewart Kimball with actor Stephen McHattie on vocals). Of all of these Cabaret Voltaire's Jesus Saves is the keeper, a 1987 industrial synth pop moment.
