What If No One's Calling?

Over at The Vinyl Villain JC spent September counting down 800 songs that span the parameters of the blog and his musical world. Near to the business end of things was a song by Echo And The Bunnymen, a band who were a formative Vinyl Villain influence. The song was Heads Will Roll, from 1983's Porcupine. It was a choice that made me smile- out of all the songs from the classic four man line up, from Crocodiles to Ocean Rain, all those songs and moments, all those singles, JC went for a Porcupine album track. 

I spent some time going back to Porcupine and Heads Will Roll. The album was described by those involved in making it as 'horrible'. They'd been on tour and hadn't had time to write new songs. The songs they were writing didn't flow as easily as the Heaven Up Here songs. Mac doesn't like singing the Porcupine songs, as he feels the words are too personal, that he gave too much away. Will didn't like the record company telling him first version of the songs and the production weren't good enough and resented them having to be re- worked and re- recorded. Les didn't like the record industry full stop. Pete had been producing The Wild Swans, spent some time doing other things, and was a little isolated from the other three Bunnymen (as he often was). Not ideal conditions. That they made Porcupine at all is a miracle. 

The Cutter and The Back Of Love are songs one and two- two massive Bunnymen singles, adorned with Shankar's strings- and after that the album does become a bit heavy and self obsessed. My White Devil and Clay are both serious songs. The title track too. 

Side two opens with the drama and psychedelic post- punk of Heads Will Roll though and suddenly we're back down at the front, the band blazing and the violas and cellos linking 1967 with 1983, headspinning swirly psyche and Mac singing of 'partly politic' and 'no one calling', meetings in private places where he will 'stare you into the ground'. It's gripping and exhilarating stuff, psychedelic Bunnymen with verses and choruses. 

They recorded a longer version, the Summer Version, which eventually came out as a B- side on the post- Porcupine standalone single Never Stop, a song that broke the gloom. Lay down thy raincoat and groove. The Summer Version is longer, Will's spindly guitar at the fore and Les' bass powering everything along, before the viola comes in. It ends with Shankar's strings and Pete's drums going off on one for forty seconds,a section which could easily have been stretched out for longer. 

Heads Will Roll (Summer Version)

This clip of the Bunnymen on Dutch TV miming to Heads Will Roll demonstrates what was so great about them, the 1983 Bunnymen in all their pomp. 

The 2003 CD release of Porcupine (and the other canonical 80s albums) featured various B- sides and extras. Porcupine's extras included four previously unreleased versions from the original studio recordings, produced by Kingbird (Ian Broudie, who produced both the original and re- recorded songs for Porcupine) and before Shakar's strings were added. When you listen to them it's easy to see why Will was pissed off at them being rejected- there's nothing wrong with them, they're sparser and possibly less dynamic but still good takes. WEA/ Korova rejected them as 'too uncommercial'. I'm not sure Will was too bothered about being commercial. When they'd recorded The Back Of Love in 1982 tensions were so bad Drummond got them off to Scotland, a tour of the highlands and islands, to rebuild band relations, a tactic which didn't entirely succeed. The Porcupine sessions were tense and that can be heard in the original versions I think. Shankar's strings which added so much to The Back Of Love and The Cutter were brought back. This is the original version of the album's title track...

Porcupine (Original Version)

Ian's lyrics to the Porcupine song Higher Hell were inspired by seeing a Hieronymus Bosch painting while on tour in Madrid, Ian lost in the detail and crazy world of the 16th century Dutch painter. The lower heaven and higher hell of the song were Ian's version of Bosch's psychedelic/ religious freakout world of God, animals and monsters, birds swallowing people whole and bodies piled up after final judgement.

Higher Hell

Hieronymus Bosch appears on the new Bunnymen album Apples For Isaac, a link between the worlds of 1983 and 2026. 'What would Hieronymus say?', Ian sings in the single Brussels Is Haunted, a genuinely great late period Bunnymen song, Ian back at the top of his game, sounding good and writing lyrics that are memorable. 

It's difficult to listen to the album and hear it as a full Bunnymen album in some ways- Will only appears on a few songs and Ian has said that Will's 'weird stuff' didn't get used. It feels more like an Ian McCulloch solo album but the name Echo and The Bunnymen will get greater attention and sales. But even so, it's good, I like it. It feels weirdly personal due to the title but that's not the only reason. At least half the songs are much better than you might expect at this stage in proceedings and the fact that there's been so long between this one and the previous one (ten years) suggests Ian has worked at it, chosen his best songs, got them recorded as he wants them and not just rushed out some mediocre product. It feels like he cares. 

Clem Burke's drums give it some wallop, the guitars and synths sparkle, it sounds Bunnymen but not deliberately so, not chasing or reviving the classic sound- it's just that this is what they sound like. First song Take Me By The Hand charges in at a pace and Can't Be Sold follows, bold and confident in itself. Brussels Is Haunted is a beauty. On some of the songs Ian sounds his age, the voice a bit worn and weary- not in a bad way but in a way that works for the songs. 

An Unstoppable Force opens side two, Velvets acoustic guitars and Ian at the fore, wiser maybe, a man who knows time and tide wait for no- one. 

There are a couple more that stand up- Asimov has clipped guitar chords and some drama and The Light That Surrounds You pulls at the heartstrings. Lab Rats Ran has sax that recalls Roxy Music. Apples For Isaac ends with We Prayed In The Dark and by the time it finishes I've spent forty minutes listening to eleven new Echo And The Bunnymen songs and not wished I had Ocean Rain, Porcupine, Crocodiles or Heaven Up Here on instead. It's not any of those albums either but it's definitely, on its own terms, a minor triumph. 

Monday's Long Songs

The last two Spiritualized albums were released in 2018 and 2022, songs recorded at the same time and split over two records with titles that joined up to form a phrase courtesy of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5, Everything Was Beautiful And Nothing Hurt. 

There's an argument, not least in the pair of album titles, that the sixteen songs demonstrate that Jason has finally found some inner peace and buried the demons that were on his trail for the previous three or four decades and that dominated his songwriting. The songs were worked up on Jason's laptop with Jason playing a huge range of instruments- sixteen I read somewhere- and it is incredible what can be done on a laptop. The songs are huge, fresh and vibrant, a definite addition to the Spiritualized back catalogue after a couple of previous albums that didn't do as much for me (2008's Songs In A&E and 2012's Sweet Heart Sweet Light). If ...And Nothing Hurt and Everything Was Beautiful... end up being the full stop on Spiritualized, they're a good place to finish. 

Jason's no stranger to long songs. The longest song on 2018's ...And Nothing Hurt was The Morning After which blasts off with organ drone and Johnny B. Good guitar, totally Velvet Underground too, and then Jason's slightly broken voice, 'Jane said she had a problem with the modern world/ All the boys she ever loved are in love with another girl...' 

The Morning After

There's a view on various Spritualized forums that Jane is Jason, reflecting on his own problems with the modern world. The song is a blast, nearly eight minutes of rock 'n roll as catharsis, the ending overdubbed with free jazz sax and a pile up of instruments putting Jason's laptop through its paces. 

The longest song 2022's Everything Was Beautiful... was The A Song (Laid In Your Arms), seven minutes and seven seconds of exhilarating psych/ space rock. 'These are the words, they're as old as the hills/ Cooked on a diet of mushrooms and pills/ One man's crime is another man's thrill/ And we're gone'. Some kind of acceptance there. Guitars, horns, organ, drums, all weigh in, layered and distorted and all contributing to a mass musical delirium. 'We're laid in your arms'. 

The A Song (Laid In Your Arms)

Forty Five Minutes Of Post- Factory Durutti Column

More Durutti Column- there's already quite a lot of Vini here this year, hopefully you can stick with it. There's so much to find in his back catalogue, always a track you hadn't heard or noticed properly before. 

Today's mix is a post- Factory selection. Factory folded in 1992, debts killing off a fourteen year art experiment. Tony Wilson moved on and with typical bravado launched Factory Too (Factory 2) in 1994 with The Durutti Column the first band to sign up (Wilson was Vini's friend, mentor and manager so it seemed obvious Vini would follow Tony- everyone else had gone to London Records or elsewhere because under the rules of engagement at Factory, 'the artists own everything, the label owns nothing', a beautiful artistic stance that left the label nothing to bargain with when the creditors began banging on the doors and they tried to save the label in 1991/ 2). 

Factory Too/ 2, Wilson with original Factory co- director Alan Erasmus, also signed Hopper and The Space Monkeys (I recall nothing about Hopper but The Space Monkeys play a few times including a good gig at The Boardwalk). The Durutti Column released two albums for the label before it too folded- 1994's Sex And Death and 1998's Time Was Gigantic... When We Were Kids, and one in between on Le Disques de Crepuscule, a Factory Belgian offshoot. 

After that Vini's albums came out on Kooky or Artful leading to the 2010's tribute to Tony Wilson, A Paean To Wilson. In 2012 Vini suffered a series of strokes and that was that it seemed until this year's comeback, Renascent. The eleven albums he made after 1994 and the various recordings that came out as a series of CD only albums called The Sporadic Recordings are a treasure trove of lesser known and obscure Durutti Column songs. This mix only scratches the surface.

Forty Five Minutes Of Post- Factory Durutti Column

• Or Are You Just A Technician?
• It's Wonderful
• Fidelity
• Fado
• So Many Crumbs And Monkeys!
• Longsight Romance
• Nile Reprise
• Diazepam 5mg
• Drinking Tune (Version)
• Requiem
• Fate

Or A You Just A Technician? is the opening track from 2010's Paean To Wilson, recorded for Tony after his death in 2007. The track is a minute of sound manipulation, Wilson interviewing Martin Hannett about his role as a producer, ever the provocateur. Requiem is from the same album, a long eulogy for Vini's friend.  

It's Wonderful is a glorious explosion of sound from 2006's Keep Breathing, a huge and life affriming piece of music. I saw Durutti Column at Manchester Academy, in the small room at the top of the student union, around this time playing a set of songs mainly from the 90s albums and finishing with some Stooges style raw power. It's Wonderful was superb. In the 90s and 00s we saw them play several gigs in Manchester, a couple in unusual places- one at Atlas Bar where Vini and Bruce played in the window, their backs to Deansgate and another at the Comedy Club on Deansgate Locks around 2003/ 4 where Vini made some jokes about how he should be telling jokes and played the first two songs just him, his guitar and a ghetto blaster, before the band came on and joined him. It wasn't sold out- funny how patchy attendance was a some of the Factory related stuff in the 90s and 00s. I went to an afternoon at the Cornerhouse where Wilson introduced 10 videos that made Manchester or Factory, with a Q&A after. There were about twenty people there including The Other Two (sat in front of us). Memory tells me the Comedy Store gig an afternoon gig too. 

Fidelity is from 1996's album of the same name, a John Bonham sampling tune. Both track and album are very much lost DC. Eley Rudge guests on vocals with Vini on guitar, synths, piano and samples. 

Fado is from Sex And Death, a twelve track album that was his first for four years when it came out in 1994. Vini goes all over the place on the album, a real pick and mix job, with tracks in a dozen styles. In 1991 The Durutti Column played at Factory's Cities In The Park festival in Heaton Park, partly a tribute to Hannett. It was a hot day and the line up was strong- Durutti Column, Cath Carroll, ACR, De La Soul, New FADs, Revenge, Electronic (with Pet Shop Boys appearing on Patience Of A Saint) and Happy Mondays. One of those gigs you have to pinch yourself actually happened and cost less than £20. The version of Fado we were privileged to listen to in the afternoon heat was as good as anything else we heard that day. Fado is named after the traditional Portuguese music Vini heard on tour in Lisbon, music all about sadness, loss and longing. 

So Many Crumbs and Monkeys!is from 2008's Sunlight To Blue... Blue To Blackness, an acoustic, folk sounding song with a drum machine and Vini's guitar playing a total joy. Vini sings in the second half of the song.

Longsight Romance is from 2001's Rebellion. Longsight is a mile south of Manchester city centre on the A6 towards Stockport. The song is full of delay and FX, several guitar parts, hand drums and Vini's voice. The album takes in Irish folk, a song with a rapper, various guest vocalists and a banjo.

The Sporadic recordings came out in 1990 followed by The Return Of... in 2002 and a third volume, Sporadic Three, in 2007. The CDs are full of archival recordings, demos, lost tracks, experiments, all manner of rare and unreleased songs. Nile Reprise and Daizepam 5mgs are both from The Return Of The Sporadic Recordings and Drinking Time (Version) and Fate are from Sporadic Three. All three are typically Vini- inventive, expressive, off the cuff, and melodic. According to the sleevenotes, written by Vini, Drinking Time was an offcut from Time Was Gigantic... and has 'Laurie Laptop pulling all the FX he could find on the track'. Fate is described as  a 'little Portastudio tune from around the time of Tempus Fugit' (which was released in 2004). Fate is acoustic guitar with plenty of delay, notes echoing round the mix, a blur of background sound, an electric guitar drippling notes into the foreground and Vini's soft vocals. It's a gorgeous, lilting, middle of the night kind of song, the sort of thing it seems Vini was recording almost as an afterthought. 

Oblique Saturdays

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

Last week's Oblique Strategy suggestion was What are you really thinking about just now?

I was thinking about various things, both trivial and more important. Musically it took me to The Charlatans. There was an inspired response from the OSS (Oblique Saturdays Squad) which included Otavio August Fernades Cardoso (Ernie), Kurt Vile and The Charlatans (Al G, and a different Charlatans song from mine), The Housemartins, Broken Chanter, Happy Mondays, The Colourfield and Hifi Sean and David McAlmont (all JC), National Trust membership (Mrs G), the England 1970 World Cup squad (Jase), The B52s (Rol), Jake Thackray (The Swede), Jonathan Dee (A Telepathic Fish) and NOZZ (Chris Zen Arcade).

W.F.L. (Think About The Future)

At the start of this series in January I thought I might pull all the songs together into a mix or series of mixes but the sheer volume of them has left me a bit overwhelmed by the prospect. An end of year job maybe. 

Anyway, this week's card is this- The tape is now the music. 

A few weeks ago a friend who's moving house sent me a message to ask if it was worth trying to sell a box of old cassettes, 'mainly 80s pop' he said, 'Springsteen, Dire Straits, that kind of thing'. I said it was, the cassette revival was very much a thing and 80s pop was probably much sought after. I recommended Fountains records in Stretford. He came back with £50 in his pocket and promised to buy me a pint to say thank you (I've not had that pint yet it occurs to me). 

The photo at the top of this post and the one below are the tapes I still own, bought at various points since the late 80s. I sometimes bought cassettes back in the day- cheaper than vinyl, portable, often contained extra tracks, some bought for car listening- many of these pictured here were owned on vinyl as well (and possibly later on on CD too). A couple are magazine freebies, one is a bootleg of Andrew Weatherall DJing at Cream bought in a clothes shop in Wigan (funny the things you remember), a couple are promos from a magazine in Manchester I contributed a few things to in the mid 90s, a handful are very recent (products of the tape revival) and there's a few C90s in there too which for sentimental reasons I've never felt able to part with. I could probably equal my friend's £50 windfall by taking many of these up the road but I think I'd miss them. I do actually still have a cassette player too but am cautious about playing them in case they get tangled and snagged. 

Some tracks from a handful of the tapes pictured.

Waiting For The Great Leap Forwards

Possibly Billy Bragg's best song, certainly one of his most loved. I adored it when it came out and it evokes the world it was released into very much- the me as an 18 year old world and the wider world of 1988.

A Million Miles

See also The Wedding Present and George Best. 

The cassette single (they tried to make the word cassingle a thing and it didn't really take off) was a cheap way of picking up extra tracks and B-sides for Walkman listening, especially if you picked them up from the bargain bin in Woolworths after they'd dropped out of the chart. The 1993 One Dove cassingle of Breakdown cost me less than a quid and has the sublime Squire Black Dove Rides Out version of Breakdown on it, ideal for listening to on the move at a time when I didn't have the facility to tape from my vinyl. Andrew Weatherall and the Sabres boys with a ten minute cinematic dub odyssey, remixing One Dove and sampling Shades Of Rhythm and Tranquility Bass to fine effect. 

Breakdown Squire Black Dove Rides Out 

Klangkollektor is from Nuremberg and releases records on Jason Boardman's Before I Die label. Thoroughly recommended. The cassette release of The Stockport Tapes captures Klangkollektor playing live in Lower Hillgate, Stockport, two summers ago. Dubby Balearica with Roland Space Echo and tweeting birds. 

Evening Post (Live In Stockport)

Rentamax 2000's Straight To Tape came out in September 2025, the sound of the future past, Tomorrow's World, dial up and the 80s tape revolution.

Polytechnic

The tape is now the music. Feel free to drop your own responses and recommendations in the comments box. 

The Girl Of Our Dreams

One of the wheels set in motion by The Sex Pistols and the birth of punk in the UK in 1976 was the appearance of regional scenes where creative people suddenly saw a route to making music in a different way and didn't feel the need to go to London to do it. Don't ask for permission, don't wait for someone to offer you a contract, just get up and do it. In Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield, Leeds, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Bristol bands began to act. Another of the wheels was the realisation by some that you didn't need to sound like The Sex Pistols, you could funnel all sorts of other influences into your DIY sound. 

This was as true in Bristol as anywhere else. The Pop Group gave themselves the most generic name they could think of (only A Pop Group could have been a little more generic), a name dripping in irony. They took their influences- punk but also jazz and free, dub, funk- and fused them with radical politics to come up with some of the most uncompromising, intense and intuitive post- punk records. 

She Is Beyond Good And Evil was their debut single, released in March 1979. Mark Stewart was a didactic and intense frontman and lyricist. The song is about love as an unconditional force, a force where according to Mark, 'idealism and energy mix poetic, existential, and political yearnings with the romantic idea of passing through nihilism and emerging on the other side with something positive, something beyond'. 

She Is Beyond Good And Evil

The Pop Group were not making pop music, certainly not the chart bothering stuff. The guitars are vicious and trebly, similar to the scratchy sound ACR were brewing up in Manchester. The bass is from dub. The drums too. There is dub space and FX and Mark delivering with lines like, 'Western values mean nothing to her', and, 'She is the one thing you can't buy/ With zero reasons for living'. 

On We Are All Prostitutes, their second single, also released in 1979, the band sound angry, disturbed, raging, alienated and violent, the band hewing around, the sound veering from left to right, never settling for a moment with a skronking sax solo interrupting the middle of the song. 

We Are All Prostitutes

The B-side was titled Amnesty International Report On British Army Torture Of Irish Prisoners. 

The Pop Group released two albums, Y and For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder? and then split in 1981. The members went on to influence pop music further in all sorts of ways- between them they were instrumental in Rip Rig And Panic (and beyond that in Neneh Cherry's solo career), Pigbag, Maximum Joy, The Slits and with Adrian Sherwood and On U Sound. They reformed in 2010 at the instigation of Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons. Mark died in 2023 bringing the reunion to an end. Guitarist John Waddington died in the same year. 

Live In October

October already. I was going to welcome in the tenth month of the year with a post of songs with October in the title but on checking lat year's 1st October post I did that a year ago- Chris and Cosey's October Love Song, Pet Shop Boys' October Symphony, The Gentle Waves' October Sky and Maria Somerville's October Moon. It doesn't seem like a year since I wrote that post but tempus does bloody fugit these days. 

Instead here are some songs by a pair of Manchester bands recorded live in Octobers past, both at Polytechnics in Yorkshire, a decade apart.

First in October 1990 (the 25th to be precise, my wife's birthday although we hadn't met at that point) and The High caught live at Sheffield Polytechnic, part of a tour to promote their debut album Somewhere Soon. Four days earlier they played Liverpool Poly, a gig I was at. The song below shows what a good live band The High were, Andy Couzens guitar playing sparkling and John Matthews soft voice sounding really good, the rhythm section (Chris Goodwin on drums and Simon Davies on bass) punchy and dynamic especially during the end section of the album's title track where they take off.  

Somewhere Soon (Live at Sheffield Polytechnic 25th October 1990)

Ten years and two weeks earlier The Durutti Column played at Leeds Polytechnic, Vini introducing the calling card from his debut album, The Return Of The Durutti Column, the always majestic sounding Sketch For Summer...

Sketch For Summer (Live at Leeds Polytechnic 7th October 1980)

Also from the first Durutti Column album is this live version of Requiem For A Father, Vini's fingers running up and down the fretboard in tribute to his dad who died when Vini was just 16, a man he admitted later he did not nearly well enough. This song seems to suggest a lot went unsaid. 

Requiem For A Father (Live At Leeds Polytechnic 7th October 1980)

Ride The Train

The Coral's album from earlier this year, their thirteenth, is a good album that demonstrates their strengths and versatility. Also, their ability to follow their collective noses and the best part of three decades in still come up with the goods. For 388 they went back to the music they listened to as teens- ska, reggae, dub and rocksteady- and used it as a starting point. 1960s and 70s Jamaican and Ethiopian jazz crossed with West Kirby. The playing sounds live and rich and the nicely loose. 

'Play that song again/ You know the one/ The one we used to smoke to/ When we were young', the album opens with on Let The Music Play and James Skelly transports himself back to that time but singing with the voice of a middle aged man. There's no cod reggae on 388, it's not white men pretending to be Jamaicans but it's an authentic musical bedrock to their latest batch of songs. I can't promise it will change your life but its a cracking album, good songs, played and sung with feeling. 

Try this one Ride That Train...

Back in 2001 The Coral, still in their late teens and early twenties, released a debut album that veered between pirate songs about skeleton keys, mad 60s psyche, sea shanties and whatever else they fancied. It was exciting and weird, a psychedelic Wirral on black vinyl. They made Magic And Medicine fairly quickly after, slightly ironing out some of the crinkles and going 60s pop- Dreaming Of You was a deserved hit.

Dreaming Of You

The follow up, Nightfreak And The Sons Of Becker went back to the freak music, Beefheart and Love and gently surreal psychedelia of Super Furry Animals. In 2005, only four years after their debut hey released their fourth album The Invisible Invasion. It was produced by Geoff Barrow and Adrian Utley of Portishead, a stripped down version of the 60s psyche they'd been refining over the previous four years with some folk and pop thrown in. This song was everywhere for a while, a gorgeous tune with a real lightness of touch, Wirral psyche- pop.

In The Morning

On the album it's preceded by A Warning To The Curious, all reverb and echo, low key weirdness and with a hint of the Bunnymen lurking inside it.  

A Warning To The Curious