It's The Song I Hate

Two weeks ago JC at The Vinyl Villain posted Sonic Youth's 1992 single Youth Against Fascism, the CD single version with a mix he picked up second hand some time after the event (one I didn't have either). Youth Against Fascism has taken over in my world ever since, not least during last weekend when approximately seven million Americans marched in cities across the USA against the ever- increasing authoritarianism of Donald Trump's regime. 

There are mid- terms next year when conceivably Congress could swing to the Democrats. Trump keeps deploying the army into cities with Democrat mayors, under the spurious excuse that it's to restore law and order. Trump's acolytes/right hand men, Hegseth and Vance, further stir the pot- see Hegseth's recent demand of loyalty from army chiefs. ICE agents pick up people on the streets without any due reason other than skin colour. Women and people of colour are routinely fired from government posts. Trump pursues his enemies in the courts and orders them removed from the airwaves. 

Sonic Youth's Youth Against Fascism has lost none of its power in the thirty three years since it was released. In fact it only gains it. The version JC posted was this one, a cleaned up version produced by Butch Vig for radio consumption back in the early 90s...

Youth Against Fascism (Clean- Ex Mix)

Kim Gordon's distorted bass riff, four notes pushed hard, and Thurston and Lee's guitars- detuned, drum sticks against the frets- and Steve Shelley's tom tom thumping drumming are exhilarating enough, a powerful smack in the chops for dictators everywhere. Thurston sings of cans of worms, stupid men, the Ku Klux Klan, impotent squirts, fascist twerps and believing Anita Hill- all in all, the sound of resistance. Minor Threat/ Fugazi's Ian MacKaye turned up in the studio to add feedback guitar.

A friend remarked over the weekend that this song and the album it's from (1992's Dirty) were from the point when Sonic Youth had singed to a major label (Geffen) and were perceived in some quarters to have toned their sound down to become commercial. Go back to the cleaned up version of Youth Against Fascism above or this one from the album and see how commercial they sound now in the hyper- commercialised world of pop music in 2025... 

Youth Against Fascism (Album Version) 

In 1992 Sonic Youth played Youth Against Fascism on Italian TV- the band's performance is great, they play it like they truly mean it. As ever with music on TV, the response of the crowd is as much part of the fun. 

Sonic Youth signed to Geffen for 1990's Goo, taking R.E.M.'s move to Warners as a model of how to be on a major and still keep your credibility. In the 80s and 90s, especially in US indie- punk/ hardcore, independence and credibility were everything- to sell out was punk rock death. Signing to a major label carried huge risks. 'Corporate rock sucks' stickers and t- shirts were everywhere, in the UK as well as the US.

Now, in 2025, the war against selling out has long been lost; selling out is an attitude that is very last century. Primal Scream soundtrack Marks and Spencer. London Calling sold British Airways. Unknown Pleasures and Bummed are in Primark. It's a lost cause. The Cult's She Sells Sanctuary currently flogs a betting company's wares- you could argue that The Cult were already corporate rock by 1985 when the single came out but you'd like to think that advertising a gambling company might be a step too far. Apparently not. 

I tut loudly and roll my eyes noisily when 'our music' soundtracks multinational corporations and their products, their adverts reducing our songs to mere content, vintage cool co- opted for capitalism. But, before I get too far on my high horse and try to be too purist about this I should add that when The Clash went to number one in 191 via an association with a Levi's ad I thought it was great, Should I Stay Or Should I Go blasting out of TV and cinema screens worldwide. 

Eight years later I thought this was a superb, tick following tock... 

Meanwhile, to go back to where we started, here's Sonic Youth and some perfume, Marc Jacobs and Teenage Riot combining to make you smell better... just like teen spirit. 

 

Strange Phenomena

Rude Audio, South London dub- chug specialists, are back with a seven track EP to brighten and enliven late October. Opening track MGB1 bounces in, mind bending space disco destined for dance floor action.  North Star Dub is in familiar Rude Audio territory, Sabres style dubbiness, fat bass, chuggy drums and echoing rim shots. Swamp Ting goes further and deeper, downtempo bass and groove with lots going on on top- strings and synths and percussion ricocheting around. No Sleep is shorter, synth judders and whooshes, snatches of chopped up voices, whispers and echoes. Milo On A Hill is even more discombobulated, dubbed out and weirded out, picking up pace and the groove in its second half, the synths and drums sounding like the theme to a 90s sci fi you never watched at the time but binged in the small hours recently. 

Nobix is punctuated by a voice declaring, 'I had a dream last night... when I woke up I remembered it', and then, 'it's gone'. 

Much of this EP sounds like that vocal suggests- memories of a night out, thumping bass and drums, speakers rattling, a haze of people talking and dancing, glasses chinking, noises from the street bleeding in when the door opens, synths and mirror balls. The EP finishes with a Rich Lane remix of Milo On A Hill, slowed down and with some killer dub bounce and melodica. Strange Phenomena, highly recommended. Get it at Bandcamp. 

Monday's Long Song

Two years ago we went for an evening at an old friend's house. Like me he's an inveterate music lover and record buyer. The record spinning on his turntable when we arrived was The Ecstatic Music Of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda, a double album of music made by Alice Coltrane while at the Sai Anantam Ashram in California.

Even though I was only half listening it was a bit of a moment, this beguiling devotional/ spiritual music, a collision of synth drones, harp and Indian chanting, ensemble voices, melody and space. It left quite an impression on me. I ordered the album the next day. It's impossible not to feel uplifted by the ten tracks, some short and some very long. One reviewer (for Pitchfork) said the recordings feel like 'prayers for humanity' and that may be a tad pretentious but it also rings true. 

This one is nearly ten minutes long and like the rest of the album (assembled from a variety of cassette recordings in the 80s and 90s) has an energy unlike almost any other music.  

Keshava Murahara

Forty Five Minutes Of Cover Versions Part Two

Last Sunday's cover versions mix worked well enough for me to undertake a second. I started with Jah Divison and went from there, a succession of dub and reggae covers, wasn't happy with it and scrapped it and started again, setting off again with Jah Division but heading in a noisier, more guitar laden direction, all a bit more shambolic. Then it slows down and blisses out before kicking up a storm again for the finish. 

After I posted last Sunday's mix Steve from Andres y Xavi messaged me to say he had a series of cover version mixes called Under The Covers, up at Mixcloud. The latest, his ninth, covers a lot of ground from Lady Blackbird to The Droyds with Isaac Hayes, Bobby Womack and Jose Feliciano among the people sandwiched in between. Plenty to enjoy. 

Forty Five Minutes Of Cover Versions Part Two

• Jah Division: Dub Will Tear Us Apart
• The Fall: Mr Pharmacist
• The Jesus And Mary Chain: Surfin' USA
• Sonic Youth: I Know There's An Answer
• Sonic Youth: Computer Age
• Hardway Bros: 1979 GLOK Remix
• Andy Bell: Our Last Night Together
• The Liminanas: Ou Va La Chance
• The Vendetta Suite: Who Do You Love?
• Fontaines DC: 'Cello Song

Jah Division is a Russian reggae band, formed in Moscow in 1990. This is what it says in Wikipedia. It also say that the founder of Jah Division, Gera Morales, was the son of Leopold Morales, an associate of Che Guevara's. Elsewhere (Bandcamp) it says Jah Divison are from Brooklyn and their 2004 12" of four covers of Joy Division songs is their sole release. According to Bandcamp Jah Divison features members of Onieda and Home, began as a joke and the four tracks were recorded in the shadow of the Williamsburg Bridge. Take your pick. None of which stops Dub Will Tear Us Apart from being a genius cover version whoever recorded it. 

The Fall's Mr Pharmacist is a cover of a song by Los Angeles 60s psyche garage band The Other Half, a 1986 Fall single from the Brix period and produced by John Leckie. The original was on an early 80s Nuggets compilation. Mr Pharmacist was also on The Fall's Bend Sinister album, an opinion splitting album derided by Mark E. Smith and John Leckie.

Surfin' USA was a Darklands outtake, all feeedback, rough and rowdy drums, breaking glass, East Kilbride sneers and TV preachers. The Reid brothers knew how to cover a song. The original was a 1963 Beach Boys single...

... and I Know There's An Answer was a 1966 Beach Boys album song (from Pet Sounds). Sonic Youth's cover comes from 1989, recorded for a Brian Wilson tribute album released in 1990 and sung by Lee Renaldo- no one else could sing it according to Lee who says J. Mascis helped out in the studio too. Appropriately squally and rather wonderful. 

Sonic Youth also recorded a Neil Young cover in the same time frame for a Neil Young tribute album, The Bridge (a superb album). They chose a song from Neil's most misunderstood album, Trans. Like the Mary Chain, Sonic Youth instinctively know what makes a good cover version. Computer Age is a gem in the SY back catalogue. 

Sean Johnston's Outre Mer label is an outlet for Hardway Bros recordings. In January 2024 he released an EP called My Friends which included a cover of Smashing Pumpkins 1979 (a song which is itself pretty much a New Order tribute). A remix EP saw GLOK tackle 1979, and has a massively overloaded guitar sound that makes you check your speakers are OK. 

Andy Bell's covers EP Untitled Film Stills contains four covers- Our Last Together is an after hours beauty, impressionistic, woozy and moving. Well, it moves me. 

The Liminanas featured in last week's mix and they're back today with a song from this year's album Faded. Ou Va La Chance is a cover of a Francois Hardy song, closing the album in fine style.

The Vendetta Suite are from Belfast and their 2021 album The Kempe Stone Portal is packed with electronic, acid house, Balearic and cosmische sounds plus this slowed down, electronics and feedback rumble version of Bo Diddley's classic (also covered by The Mary Chain back in the 80s). The Vendetta Suite's Gary Irwin goes all the way back to David Holmes and Iain McCready's nights at Belfast's Art College in 1990 and has worked with Holmes on and off ever since. 

Fontaines DC's cover of 'Cello Song has featured in at least three previous Sunday mixes- a Nick Drake one, a Fontaines one and an end of 2023 mix. I make no apologies for its re- appearance here. They take Nick Drake's 1969 song, a beautiful poetic song and retune it, turning it into a modern rock 'n' roll thrill with Grian Chatten finding new meaning in Nick's words. Both versions, original and cover, struck me quite profoundly in the time since Isaac' died, these lines in particular...

'For the dreams that came to you when so young
They told of a life where spring is sprung

So forget this cruel world where I belong
I'll just sit and wait and sing my song

But while the Earth sinks to its grave
You sail to the sky on the crest of a wave'

And that's where we're ending today. 

Soundtrack Saturday

Soundtrack Saturday has been running all year and I've got this far- mid- October- without mentioning Quentin Tarantino. Tarantino had a big impact in the world of cinema 90s and if nothing else gave soundtracks a huge shot in the arm (maybe shot in the chest would be more appropriate given the famous scene in Pulp Fiction where they revive an overdosed Uma Thurman). Today's soundtrack isn't from a Tarantino film but instead Steven Soderbergh's 1998 movie Out Of Sight. Soundtrack albums with several revived pop culture songs with dialogue from the film spliced in are surely indebted to Tarantino and the popularity of his soundtracks for Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill and Jackie Brown.

Out Of Sight is based on an Elmore Leonard novel, a crime caper about a bank robber, Foley, played by George Clooney. Soderbergh said that Out Of Sight was a deliberate move on his part to leave the arthouse world ('arthouse ghetto' I think he may have described it as) and make a blockbuster. 

The soundtrack was scored by David Holmes who Soderbergh hired to do just a few scenes but they clicked and Holmes stayed around to do the whole film, working round the clock to meet the deadlines. In keeping with the film's influences Holmes drew on other soundtrack artists and their work- Lalo Schiffrin and Quincy Jones- plus a slew of American funk and jazz artists. The soundtrack is best listened to in one hit, it makes perfect sense as a single piece, fifteen songs, nine original Holmes pieces with dialogue from the film and two songs from The Isley Brothers and one each from Dean Martin, Walter Wanderly and Mungo Santamaria. You can probably pick the CD up for pennies.

It's Your Thing opens with Clooney giving instructions to a bank teller who he's robbing and then fades into The Isley Brothers and their 1969 song.

 It's Your Thing 

I Think You Flooded It is by Holmes but starts with the sound of a car engine not starting and voices from the film, followed by a jazzy Holmes instrumental.

I Think You Flooded It

Watermelon Man is a Herbie Hancock song, 1962 bop jazz. The version of Out Of Sight is by Mungo Santamaria, a 1963 hit for the Afro- Cuban percussionist. 

Watermelon Man

Rip Rip is another David Holmes piece, more dialogue, wah wah bass and organ, guitar licks and funky drums. 

Rip Rip

David Holmes has worked with Soderbergh often since Out Of Sight- the Ocean's films, No Sudden Move, The Laundromat and this year's Black Bag. David was booked to play The Golden Lion this autumn. Holmes at The Lion is always a great night out- he had to apologise for being double booked. It clashed with his required attendance at a film festival/ awards event in Toronto with Steven Soderbergh which as acceptable reasons for absence go, ranks pretty highly. 

Outside Another Yellow Moon

A conversation about Tom Waits last weekend directed me to this track by Akira The Don, a track with a borrowed vocal, Tom Waits reading Charles Bukowski's The Laughing Heart, a poem about existence, fulfillment and finding light among the darkness- 'Your life is your life/ Don't let it be clubbed into dank submission/ Be on the watch/ There are ways out/ There is light somewhere...'

I read Bukowski's Ham On Rye in the summer, a semi- autobiographical novel based partly on his own teenage and young adulthood in Los Angeles in the 1930s and 40s- it's a grim read in many ways, the young Henry Chinaski not fitting in at school or the private college his father sends him to, and he pulls no punches in his first person description of school brutality, domestic violence, masturbation, alcohol, terrible acne and indifferent doctors and the growing misanthropy of Chinaski (a thinly veiled Bukowski). That Bukowski wrote an existential poem that concludes there is light somewhere is remarkable given how dark much of his writing is. 

The Laughing Heart

Akira The Don adds piano, a jazz club feel and some very lazy hip hop drums, all very sympathetic to Mr. Waits. I then remembered that 100 Poems used the Waits vocal for Song For Claire (Your Life Is Your Life) on their 2024 album Balearic As A System Of Belief. 

It got me looking through my collection for more Tom Waits. I've posted this before but it's always worth a re- post, Tom Waits' Closing Time spliced with Allen Ginsberg reading his poem America, a Ginsberg peak, the young Allen looking around at the nation and his life- 'America/ I've given you all and now I'm nothing'. 

America features the use of a racial slur which was part of Ginsberg's America and very much not acceptable now. 

America (Closing Time)

Tom Waits is in a way one of the last links to the Beats, an artist in the Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs tradition. His bohemian life and scenes from the underworld/ underbelly of American society street poetry seems very 20th century now, a dying art form in some ways. I can't think of many artists existing in the same milieu- those that do, Jim Jarmusch say or Bob Dylan (also a Beat inspired writer), won't be around forever. David Lynch departed earlier this year- his music fitted into a Waitsian world. 

I don't have a huge amount of Tom Waits, I never committed to going the full hog. I used to have Swordfishtrombones on cassette but I didn't replace it after my cassette collection got slimmed down in the 90s, probably something I should rectify. I had a copy of Mule Variations too but can't find it now. Mule Variations came out in 1999- I was amazed it's that long ago. I always loved this piece of weirdness and neighbourly paranoia, What's He Building?

I do have Rain Dogs, Tom's 1985 album, often lauded as one of his best. It's got the full Waits range of carnival music, Weimar oompah, jazz, experimental rock and blues, New Orleans funeral marches, various styles of outsider music stitched into a whole. Rain Dogs was written by Waits in a basement room in Lower Manhattan in a two month period in the mid- 80s. He wandered round the city with a tape recorder taping sounds and noises which he then layered guitars, marimba, trombone, piano, accordion and banjo on top of and made drumbeats out of banging pieces of furniture, drawers from cupboards and cabinets. Sometimes the album's madness, variation and cacophony is too much- I have to be in the mood for it. But peppered among the underbelly pieces and bursts of chaotic noise are some of his best loved songs too- Time, Hang Down Your Head, Downtown Train. 

Clap Hands is the second song on Rain Dogs, with uneven pots and pans percussion and Tom narrating the lives of New York's dispossessed.

Clap Hands

Hang Down Your Head was released as a single, a song with a proper structure that nodded to his earlier work, Waits at his most direct and songwriterly, that gravel voice accompanied by electric guitar. 

Hang Down Your Head

9th And Hennepin finds itself in the gutter with broken umbrellas and dead birds, a girl with a tattooed tear and the train going by, an NYC Beat Generation blues poem. 

9th And Hennepin

Downtown Train is one of his most famous songs, covered by Bob Seger, Rod Stewart and Everything But The Girl. Tom's song has Robert Quine playing a wonderful electric guitar part (Quine turned up at Bagging Area last week playing guitar on Lou Reed's The Blue Mask). Downtown Train has become a classic and for good reason.

Downtown Train

What's In A Name?

Warrington- Runcorn New Town Development Plan, the synth based musical vehicle for Gordon Chapman- Fox, has a new album out, the sixth under the Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan name- Public Works And Utilities. The album buzzes with ideas and invention. A few weeks ago this track came out to promote it, Swift, Safe And Comfortable...

The video and sounds are in sync, the synths and drum machines replicating railway rhythms. This isn't just nostalgia for 60s modernism, concrete and the years of political consensus- Gordon is genuinely angry about the stripping of the UK's infrastructure in the 1980s by the Thatcher governments, the wholesale selling off of our public utilties. Forty years later none of the industries that were sold in the great Thatcherite privatisation scam are better for us as a nation- the services are worse and they're owned for the benefit of shareholders. 

The tracks on the new album are designed to play live, influenced by the tour W-RNTDP undertook last year. They are upbeat, for dancing too as much as listening too. On side B of the album there is a nineteen minute epic The People Matter which fades in slowly with drones, distortion and some horns before finding a cosmische pulsebeat. 

I have a friend who thinks that Warrington- Runcorn New Town Development Plan is a terrible band name, so bad it puts him off listening to them. But I think there are worse band names out there... 

Hello English Teacher!

English Teacher have pulled in some remixes and this one by Daniel Avery is predictably great, Avery building a wall of Stooges- esque guitars onto The World's Biggest Paving Slab. How good is that?

Todmorden's Working Men's Club have done a version too, skeletal acid house crossed with early 80s post- punk. 

And if we're talking about possibly poorly chosen band names Dry Cleaning are about to return with anew album and tour, the eleven song Secret Love (coming early next year). Dry Cleaning's debut, New Long Leg, was one of my favourite albums of 2021, grimy post- punk and flat, non- sequiturs. 

Scratchcard Lanyard