When I Think Of All The Things I've Done

A few weeks ago I decided to start working my way through Lou Reed's solo albums, sparked by a Lou Reed post at The Vinyl Villain last year and then by my rediscovery of his 1973 album Berlin, an album that is possibly his 70s masterpiece but also a heavy trip into the netherworld story of Jim and Caroline- drugs, domestic abuse, children being taken into care, ending with death. An album that makes some people fell that they need to brace themselves for before dropping the stylus on the vinyl. 

I'd decided that this irregular, meandering Lou Reed extravaganza should be done as far as possible by listening to the albums on second hand vinyl, surely the most Lou Reed of all the formats. I was planning to move on to Sally Can't Dance or Coney Island Baby but while walking out from work a couple of weeks ago to pop to the post office I noticed that the fools have opened a second hand record shop just round the corner from my school. Why would they do that? Don't they know the last thing I need is the opportunity to buy records near my workplace? Luckily it was closed but when I walked past/ went back a few days later it was open and flicking through the Lou Reed/ Velvet Underground section saw a copy of Lou's self- titled 1972 solo debut. And that was how I ended up owning a copy of a rather overlooked and unfancied Lou Reed solo album- and also how I realised that I was taking this Lou Reed trip seriously.

Lou's solo debut is a curious record. It seems it was largely seen as disappointing, a damp squib, on release. Lou was two years on from leaving The Velvet Underground, still signed to RCA/ Victor and put into a studio in Willesden, London with a load of session musicians including Rick Wakeman and Steve Howe of Yes. The album's sessions took place between December '71 and January '72, usually in close to total darkness (at Lou's request). Eight of the ten songs are leftovers from The Velvets, some of them unreleased in their original until the mid 80s when VU came out. The production is odd, it sounds unbalanced. Guitars and drums leap around in the mix, sometimes too murky and sometimes too bright, the drums and cymbals ridiculously loud and present in the mix on some songs. Lou is in good voice and the songs are among some of his best. I approached the album with an open mind- once I'd got past the fairly awful front cover, a very early 70s airbrush painting of a Faberge egg and a duckling about to be engulfed by a wave swooshing down a New York street- and found that it has a lot to enjoy inside its fifty three year old grooves. 

I Can't Stand It is one of my favourite Velvets songs, the 2014 remixed version especially, Bo Diddley guitars and drums and Lou's nonsense lyrics about it being hard to be a man and living with thirteen dead cats. The version that opens Lou's solo album is blunt early 70s rock, session men electric guitars and drums, Lou's familiar sneer intact but supported by female backing vocals. It kicks along, no nonsense style. Going Down follows, piano and country guitar, Lou's voice now in gentle, three in the morning mode, seeing things clearly- 

'Time's not what it seems/ It just seems longer when you're lonely in this world/ Everything, it seems/ Would be brighter if your nights were spent with some girl'

It shifts at two minutes and he's crooning now, the backing vocals lower in the mix and the drums tumbling. Lovely stuff. Walk It And Talk It purloins the riff from Brown Sugar and surrounds it with session musician rock, the players trying to sound sloppy- the production is all over the place, partly muddy and partly trebly. Lisa Says follows, a gorgeous song, Lou and piano and the band more sympathetic now, a late night basement cabaret feel- at three minutes everything changes, the song stops and restarts as a show tune. It should be ridiculous but Lou pulls it off and then slips back into the original song at the end, Lou and the backing singers coming together, 'Lisa says...'. Side one ends with Berlin, the song that would be the fulcrum of the album of the same name a year later, Lou again crooning and sounding great over five minutes of the song, candle light and Dubonnet and 'it was very nice'.

Side two really works (despite the production flaws). I Love You is a minor gem, the simplest love song he wrote, a swirl of country guitars and acoustics and Lou's voice- then the drums thump in and we're exactly where early 70s, post- Velvets Lou Reed should be.

I Love You

It's followed by Wild Child, a electrifying rocker with arch, observational lyrics about Chuck, Bill, Betty and Ed and the wild child of the title, a song that could sit on any of his more celebrated 70s albums. 

Wild Child

Love Makes You Feel is also great even if the odd decision to mix the drums and cymbals really high in the mix nearly spoil it- Lou at his street poet best with Steve Howe's guitars fizzing around the speakers. Lou sings the chorus line, 'love makes you feel ten foot tall', the drums and guitars crash around, and everything sounds alive and vital. Ride Into The Sun, yet another unreleased Velvets song, ringing guitars and cardboard box drumming, two note vocals and the messy production actually adding rather than taking away. Lou Reed finishes with Ocean, a song the Velvets recorded in 1969 but didn't release and which wouldn't see the light of day until VU in 1985. Ocean is a key Reed/ Velvets song, arguably as good as any that he and they wrote and recorded. Lou's solo version opens with a gong and splash cymbals, then the bass and guitar sound that would inspire dozens of groups not yet even formed, the swirl of instruments sounding, yes, like the waves crashing on the shore, and Lou singing adrift on a raft, down by the sea. Drama and despair, New York cool up against London session men. 

Lou Reed is an album which feels flawed but has some good moments at its core, and which would have benefitted from better production and possibly from less accomplished musicians at times, but which catches fire more often than it doesn't. It's very much a period piece and an outlet for songs he'd been sitting on for a few years. But it's fair to say, it also does not necessarily sound like an album by a man who's going to light up the early/ mid 70s with some of its most distinctive rock songs.

Which is what happened a few months later he released Transformer. 

Strange Little Consequence

I spent Sunday afternoon at Yes in Manchester, a free event with the added promise of a free pint for the first hundred people through the door- Daniel Avery, Syd Minski (of Working Men's Club) and Ghost Culture DJing in the main bar. Two years ago Daniel did a similar session at Yes and it was really good so I didn't need asking twice to go again for some Sunday afternoon/ Mother's Day techno. 

I got there at 2pm and stayed for a few hours. By the time I left it was gathering pace, the bar filling and the music getting quite loud and thumpy, techno's promise kicking in. At the start Daniel was playing ambient techno, a sound he's made his own since 2019, and the bpms were slow. Death In Vegas' 1999 track Soul Auctioneer, pitched down a bit, was played along with The Black Dog's minimal techno take on Bjork. Syd took over and jolted it up a bit with some noisy synth action and then Ghost Culture played Depeche Mode's Never Let Me Down and Bowie's The Man Who Sold The World. The Cure in remixed form appeared and then things got increasingly more techno and intense. It was good fun and I wish I'd stayed longer.

The trio have joined forces to make music too, as Demise Of Love. The first fruits of this are a track called Strange Little Consequence, which starts out very alienated and then goes all dreamy when the synth chords wash in. Everything's up in the top end of the frequency range, with fractured drums and Syd's voice going from spoken to softly singing. If New Order were starting out now, and in their twenties again, this is probably what they'd sound like. 

Monday's Long Song

Kevin Rowland is a genius isn't he? Genuine genius is pretty rare- people use the word all the time in pop music but I think it probably applies to Kevin. The late 70s through to mid 80s run of albums Dexys Midnight Runners made show him to be an auteur, a songwriter who could tap into the popular consciousness (not once but twice, Geno and then Come On Eileen, were both via wildly different styles, huge pop records). His mercurial nature, obsessive character and anti- everyone else stance led to many arguments and departures. The first line up of Dexys jumped ship and his paranoia about Top Of The Pops appearances and perception that Al Archer was trying to steal the limelight by wearing a red woolen hat show him a difficult person to deal with and be around. But the music and the ideas and inspirations that went into it- genius.

1985's Don't Stand Me Down is one of those completely misunderstood on release albums, a record that only really came to be listened to and seen for what it was years later. Seven songs, four over six minutes long, with the quartet dressed in suits and ties on the sleeve, songs with lengthy spoken word sections, the songs forming a backdrop to conversations between Kevin and other members of the group. This Is What She's Like is the longest song on the record, a twelve and a half minute discussion between Kevin and Billy Adams, partly written by Helen O'Hara, in which he never really reveals what she's like but meanders all over the place, Kevin eventually explaining what she's not like and listing the people he dislikes- people who put creases in their jeans, people who are members of CND, people who have 'home bars and hi fis and all that stuff'. 

Kevin has mellowed somewhat since this song was written I think, is less wound up by those people, but he clearly meant it at the time. In the end he gets round to the point of the song, something he got from watching The Godfather, the part where Michael Corleone is in Sicily and gets married, and the word the Italians have for being stuck by a thunderbolt and falling in love. 

'That's my story', Kevin says, 'Strongest thing I've ever seen'. 

This Is What She's Like

Forty Five Minutes Of The Beta Band

The Beta Band's reformation to play some gigs in the autumn and maybe make some new music is one of 2025's most cheering stories (in a year not exactly over- burdened with cheering stories admittedly). Sometimes people say that The Beat Band 'should have been massive' but it's a comment that makes me scratch my head and think 'in what world?'. 

It's difficult to imagine a world in which songs, the sheer number of ideas, the weight of experimentalism and out there nature of what they were trying to do, crossing over into the world of millions of albums sold and stadium gigs. Steve Mason, John MacLean, Robin Jones and Gordon Anderson and later bassist Richard Greentree were not making music for the masses- and they seemed ill equipped to deal with that anyway. Besides, somethings are best kept n a smaller scale. 

The Three EPs overshadowed everything they did subsequently, all three albums that followed felt like they failed to meet the expectations the Three EPs placed on them. Listened to now, they seem less burdened by that weight and there's a lot worth listening to in The Beta Band (1999), Hot Shots II (2001) and Heroes To Zeroes (2004). 

Forty Five Minutes Of The Beta Band

• Push It Out
• Dry The Rain
• Eclipse
• Assessment
• Inner Meets Me (10:40's Outer Hebrides Dub)
• The Cow's Wrong
• The Hard One (Manmousse Remix)
• Simple 
• Dr. Baker

Push It Out is the opening track on 1998's Los Amigos Del Beta Bandidos, the third of the three EPs that announced them as the late 90s flagbearers for genre busting low fi, experimental indie. Is indie the right word? It seems too small for The Beta Band. Attempting to dissect or explain what makes Push It Out and the other songs from the three EPs is pointless. You just have to listen to them and feel them. The pots and pans percussion, dub basslines, acoustic guitars, samples and space/ atmosphere is solely their own. Steve Mason's vocals- double tracked, doleful, oblique, melancholic- sound more and more like a man trying to work his way through the depths of depression. Dr. Baker is stunning, a song that tells the story of the titular figure, a man whose 'dog was dead and wife was dead/ misery planned inside his head', a song with Mason singing the line 'see me lost inside' over and over, that sounds like a long dark night of the soul and yet somehow makes it all seem OK. Genius. Not a word I use lightly. 

Dry The Rain I wrote about recently. If it's what they end up being remembered for, it's probably more than enough. 

Eclipse is from 2001's Hot Shots II, a song about questions. The album was a complete piece of work, minimal hip hop beats and their experimental sound refined with the help of producer Colin C- Swing Emmanuel. 

Assessment opened their third and final album Heroes To Zeroes, self produced and then mixed by Nigel Godrich. Over blistering ringing electric guitars Steve Mason sings 'I think I cracked my skull on the way down/ I think I lost my head when I lay down' and everything goes leftwards from there. The crunchy guitar breakdown in the middle is exhilarating and the pile on of instruments at the end, trumpets joining in, is a rush. Simple is also from Heores To Zeros, more lovely, expansive experimental indie with another lost and broken lyric from Mason- 'I tired to do my own thing/ But the problem with your own thing/ Is you end up on your own'. 

Their albums are all overshadowed by The Three EPs but there's gold in all of the three proper albums and this is one of the pieces of gold. And the video is unbelievable. No- one else was doing this sort of thing or doing it so effortlessly (it cost them the band though- they split owing the record company one million  quid, partly the result of making expensive arty videos).

Inner Meet Me is from the second EP, The Patty Patty Sound. Jesse Fahnestock's 10:40 Dub is exactly what it says it is. Jesse's a big fan and I think you can hear it in a lot of his work. This edit originally came out on Paisley Dark in May 2021. 

The Cow's Wrong is from their self- titled 1999 debut album, an album they legendarily slagged off to the music press. 'It's fucking awful', they told the NME, 'one of the worst records that'll come out this year'. Experimental pop, ambient drone, excursions into trip hop and cosmic balladry crossed with folky psychedelia and late 90s indie together with the mass of acclaim for The Three EPs  took its toll on its makers. It's better than its creators had us believe at the time but its also dense and abstract, a complex and ambitious album. They also got into legal trouble with Bonnie Tyler and Jim Steinman on The Hard One. The Cow's Wrong and The Hard One are both from The Beta Band (The Hard One Manmousse Remix came out as an extra track on an extra disc, an ambient- abstract hip hop version of the song). They were following their noses and taking risks and that's what artists should do. 

Soundtrack Saturday

Following last Saturday's soundtrack into Hill Street Blues here's another 80s TV cop show with a very memorable theme tune and possibly the diametric opposite of Hill Street's gritty realism- the glitz and glamour of the waterfront world of Crockett and Tubbs and Miami Vice. 

Theme From Miami Vice

Miami Vice ran from 1984 to 1989. Jan Hammer's theme tune is a ridiculously over the top collision of synth pop and 80s rock guitar by Jan Hammer, a piece of music that says 1987 to me as much as anything else released that year- Strangeways Here We Come, It's A Sin, La Isla Bonita, Respectable, Pump Up The Volume, The One I Love and April Skies all included. It's also impossible to hear the tune without the opening titles flashing through my mind...

80s Miami was as alien a world as any for someone living in the north west of England in 1987, palm trees, flamingos, wind surfing, women in bikinis... none of these things featured much (if at all) in my seventeen year old life. Like the Balearic beauty of the Hill Street Blues theme tune, the theme tune to Miami Vice provides an instant Proustian rush.

Miami Vice was visually a riot of rich colours, buildings, cars, boats and clothing, Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas providing fashion inspiration (even in rain lashed northern England, rolled up suit jackets and loafers with no socks, pastel tees and white cotton trousers became sought after for a while but wasn't a look I ever dabbled with). I enjoyed Miami Vice in a sort of anti- indie kind of way. It's rollcall of guest stars from the music world was long and varied too- Miles Davis, James Brown, Leonard Cohen, Frankie Valli, Eartha Kitt and Sheena Easton all appeared, as did Phil Collins who I loathed then and still do. 

Three For Friday

Some new dance/ electronic music for Friday, from a variety of sources. First up is the latest release from Leeds based label Paisley Dark, an EP by Airsine- the title track Like Fire and a trio of remixes. Like Fire is a low slung, dark corners chugger, pulsing with the stuff of lost nights and speaker systems. Rolling bassline, distorted voices, acidic toplines to mess with the synapses....

The remixes come from Mindbender, The Machine Soul and label boss John Paynter with Ben Lewis doing their Space Age Freak Out thing- stripped back and hypnotic, going nicely weird around the edges.  The EP is available at Bandcamp. 

Secondly, here comes the latest from Raxon whose track Your Fault was one of late 2024's peakiest peaks. Based in Barcelona but originally from Egypt, Raxon's newest release came out on Cologne's Kompakt in February, two tracks released as Speicher 134. Acid Call is in your face, high energy thumping acid. The flipside, Don't Cry Pluto, is slightly subtler but comes from a similar place and is no less nutty- kick drum and synth madness that is very persuasive. Available digitally and on 12" here. 

Thirdly/ finally Manchester's Sprechen label have just released an EP by Hull maestro Steve Cobby,  a man who over the course of a long musical career has left few musical stones unturned. His four track EP on Sprechen, UNO+, is unabashed house music and kicks off with No Rope Will Bind Those Who Refuse To Submit, a straight ahead, four four banger with percussion, synth whooshes, chopped up Afro vocals and all manner of seductive noises.

After that This House jacks and jerks, with stuttering vocals, rave breakdowns and massive bass. I Need A Fix slows things down slightly, a classic late 80s house tempo and synth chords- then the 303 kicks in and we're off again. On the last track Koreo Mr Cobby strips things down to drum track and single synth part, some bleeps and bloops and the deepest bassline. Fine work from Hull's hardest working shed based musician. Buy or listen here. 

Tenterhooks

Ellen Beth Abdi came to our attention first when she joined A Certain Ratio on their 1982 album and live shows, singing on some of the songs on the album and a lot of the songs when playing live. She has a solo album ready to release in May and preceded it with a single, Tenterhooks, three weeks ago. 

Tenterhooks has a woozy, off kilter rhythm and melody, a wheezy organ sound picking up the tune, jazz and soul both a part of the sound and the tune. The song is about the infernal wait after sending a message, the waiting for a response and the doubt that kicks in. 

This week saw the release of Sad Chord, a short song that never quite does what you might expect it to- the drums and organ keep shifting, there is a flute, the bass bumps around and Ellen's vocal melody keeps things off centre.