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Sunday, 16 February 2025

Forty Five Minutes Of Mercury Rev

Mercury Rev had a brief flurry of fame/ renown in 1989- 1991, often in conjunction with fellow travellers The Flaming Lips. In 1993 founder member David Baker left the group and Jonathan Donohue and Sean Grasshopper Mackowiac carried on, playing experimental psychedelic rock until they collapsed in 1996/7. Grasshopper retreated to a Jesuit guest house in upstate New York while Donahue sat around listening to children's music and playing melodies on a piano. He was invited to play with The Chemical Brothers on the track that became The Private Psychedelic Reel and when he returned to the US contacted Grasshopper and from all the wreckage- debt, psychedelic and experimental rock that made them a cult band but seemed to be bus constantly hurtling out of control, drugs, lost members and management, depression, broken relationships- they regrouped in the Catskill Mountains pulled the songs that became Deserter's Songs into being. Deserter's Songs is one of the best albums of the 90s, a heartfelt, concise, weirdly affecting record that harks back to the songs of the 1930s and '40s. It also featured a pair of musicians from The Band, Levon Helm and Garth Hudson. Garth died two weeks ago, the last survivor of the men who made Big Pink. 

RIP Garth Hudson.

Last year Mercury Rev released an album called Born Horses, an album I bought and which divides me- half of it I don't like at all, easy listening pastiche with Donahue abandoning his upper register  singing for something deeper and half of it I really like, a few genuinely revelatory songs a bout birds and horses that are like nothing else. 

For this Sunday mix I've focussed mainly on the years 1998- 2004 and the trio of albums they made in those years- Deserter's Songs, 2001's stunning All Is Dream and 2004's mixed bag The Secret Migration. These three, well the first two, are albums that everyone should own and which bear repeat playing. I don't know if the end of the century/ millennium things was a factor in their creation but it seems like a good story, that pre- millennial uncertainty fed into Deserter's Songs, sent them back into America's weird past, and the new century gifted them All Is Dream. 

Forty Five Minutes Of Mercury Rev

  • The Dark Is Rising
  • Holes
  • Observatory Crest
  • Endlessly
  • Tides Of The Moon
  • Diamonds
  • Opus 40
  • Delta Blues Bottleneck Sun (Chemical Brothers Remix)
  • Dream On

The Dark Is Rising is the opening song on 2001's All Is Dream, a song infused with both fragility and strength, in those huge Hollywood strings, a piccolo and Donahue's so human voice. It's a late night, freak- you- out song that in some ways has become mixed up with my feelings about Isaac's death, my grief and especially those mornings when I wake up having dreamt about him. 'I dreamed of you on my farm/ I dreamed of you in my arms/ But my dreams are always wrong', are the lines that hit me. 'I always dreamed I'd love you/ I never dreamed I'd lose you' too. A friend who has been through a similar experienced pointed me to the end of the song though and the last line- 'In my dreams I'm always strong'- and I started to see it differently. Tides Of The Moon is from the same album, an album that closes with the seven minutes epic Hercules which I tried to fit in here too and failed. 

Holes opens Deserter's Songs, a truly stunning piece of music, orchestral pop with a saw wobbling its way through it and Donahue's voice and lyrics, not least the break down and extraordinary moment where he sings, 'Holes/ Dug by little moles/ Angry jealous spies/ Got telephones for eyes', and makes it sound deeply profound. 'How does that old song go?'

Observatory Crest is a cover of a 1974 Captain Beefheart song, recorded for a 2001 Peel Session and included on the 2006 compilation Stillness Breathes, complete with birdsong. 

Endlessly is from Deserter's Songs too. I could have included Goddess On A Hiway instead. Both are highlights from an album packed with them. Endlessly seemed to fit with the feel better, the sound of the 1940s cinema/ 1890s theatre/ psychedelic Willy Wonka/ late 90s alt- rock crossover. 

Opus 40 is also from Deserter's Songs, possibly its peak, tripped out psychedelic/ silver screen freakery with the line, 'I'm alive she cried but I don't know what it means', as fine an eleven word summation of the human condition as any.  

Diamonds is from The Secret Migration, released in January 2005, an album that flirted with Tolkien- esque imagery and which was probably a few songs too long, a song of nature, love and devotion.

Delta Blues Bottleneck Stomp was an upbeat way to end Deserter's Song (apart from the hidden track that came after it), a joyous harpsichord/ piano riff that sounded like they'd heard it on a late 80s house record and repurposed it for an album recorded in the woods of upstate New York by men dressed in late 19th century clothes with two former members of The Band. The Chemical Brothers repaid the favour Donahue had done for them on The Private Psychedelic Reel by remixing it, one of their best. 

Donahue also sang on Dream On, the closing song from The Chemical Brothers' 1997 album Surrender, an album not short of guest vocalists- Bernard Sumner, Noel Gallagher and Hope Sandoval all show up. Dream On is a sleepy, half asleep, blissed out and gently building psychedelic finale, and in some way completes this mix by going back to the start, a dream sequence. It also has a false ending and after a period of silence the song wakes up again briefly.

Saturday, 15 February 2025

Soundtrack Saturday

Performance came out in 1970, the year of my birth, a druggy, graphic, psyched out crime thriller. I'm not suggesting my birth and the film are related in any way, merely coincidental. Nic Roeg signed Mick Jagger up for the role of Turner (also my surname), Mick playing the part of a reclusive late 60s rock star (largely playing himself except for the reclusive part) holed up in his West London home (Powis Square, Notting Hill) suddenly brought into contact with the violent criminal underworld when Edward Fox (Chas) gatecrashes his home. Turner is in a three way relationship which involves Anita Pallenberg (playing Pherber). Inevitably drugs are taken and Chas is given mushrooms. Chas and Turner begin to become each other, a drug fuelled identity crisis that ends in violence. 

Part of the drama and mystique of Performance is the real world that intersected it. In the opening scenes Jagger and Pallenberg have sex. The rumours were that the sex and drug trips were real and not acted. At the time Pallenberg was Keith Richards' girlfriend (having abandoned Brian Jones the same year on the ill fated trip to Morocco Jones, Pallenberg and Richards undertook). Keith became suspicious his songwriting partner and friend was going beyond the acceptable boundaries- although in Rolling Stones world, what are acceptable boundaries and where do they lie? He spent days during the filming parked outside the house in Powis Square in his Rolls Royce waiting to pick Anita up after filming, silently seething that Mick might be inside being filmed having sex with Anita. 

The soundtrack, also released in 1970, is  a proper soundtrack, the score written by Stones associate and producer Jack Nietsche, with Ry Cooder contributing some filthy slide guitar. Merry Clayton sings on two songs- she famously provided the vocal on The Stones Gimme Shelter (from 1969), an epic piece of singing that completely defines the song. The title track is a short two minute ambient piece, whooshing noises and a hum (recorded by Bernie Krause), unsettling and intense. Merry's voice comes in after a minute, instantly recognisable and equally instantly evoking Gimme Shelter. 

Performance

There are songs by Randy Newman, Buffy Sainte- Marie and The Last Poets and several more Nietsche pieces including this one, Ry Cooder's guitar the soundtrack to Turner's nocturnal, shadow existence in the house in Notting Hill...

Powis Square

The Stones were originally lined up to do the soundtrack.They were in the middle of their hot streak, that run of four albums from 1968 to 1973 where they released Let It Bleed, Beggar's Banquet, Sticky Fingers and Exile On Main Street, the albums where they live up to the legend. Needless to say Jagger and Richards personal relationship was not at its best during the filming of Performance and the soundtrack ended up coming together via Nietsche, Crawford, Cooder et al. Except for one song, Memo From Turner, a Jagger- Richards co- write. And what a song it is...

Memo From Turner

Raw '68/ 69 Stones, Ry Cooder's slide guitar, groove and swagger, instant late 60s cool glamour/ dirt, Jagger drawling like he's come in from Louisiana, singing lines about Spanish speaking gentlemen, leather boys, Coke conventions and soft machines. There are three versions, the one above that appeared in the film and on the soundtrack and as a Jagger solo single, and two earlier ones- one played by Traffic and a second with Al Kooper and Richards. In the film, when the song plays Jagger/ Turner lip syncs to it, breaking the fourth wall and inventing a whole sub- genre of indie/ rock videos. Fans of Happy Mondays and Bummed will spot the 'we've been courteous' sample. Fans of Big Audio Dynamite will know that e=mc2 is written about Nic Roeg's films, verse two about Performance and spot the 'you'll look funny when you're fifty' sample.



Friday, 14 February 2025

An Oasis Of Slowness

In May 2010 Andrew Weatherall and Sean Johnston started a club night at The Drop in Stoke Newington,  a Thursday night in a small, 140 capacity room. Sean and Andrew met back in the early days of acid house and the fun that went with it all. As one of Flash Faction Sean had a 12" released on Andrew's Sabres Of Paradise label, the mighty techno rush of Repoman, and Sean had joined Sabres on tour. In the 2000s they re- connected. Andrew invited Sean to DJ at the launch for his Watch The Ride compilation and when Andrew was short of a driver for a jaunt to Brighton to play a DJ gig, Sean stepped in and took the wheel. In the car Andrew asked if Sean had anything they could listen to. Sean had recently been enjoying the slowed down sounds of Daniele Baldelli and the early/ mid 80s Italo cosmic disco scene (as detailed in Bill Brewster's book Last Night A DJ Saved My Life). After re- emerging with some remixes and a bit of a reset around 2007/ 8, Andrew was looking for a new thing and they hatched a plan to play together, slowed down, cosmic sounds, 'never knowingly exceeding 122 BPM' as the tagline later stated. 

Weatherall had frequently turned away from whatever he had going on, moving onto a new sound or night or band, and with A Love From Outer Space (as the night was called, named after an AR Kane song that Andrew had played at Shoom in the late 80s) he did so again. Sean gave an interview to The Quietus last month which outlines the history of ALFOS and also thirteen tracks that span and summarise ALFOS. Read it here. Make sure go all the way through to the end, there are some great stories attached to some of the records not least the one on page 8, Superpitcher's Voodoo and 'the genius of Andrew Weatherall'.

ALFOS became a travelling club night finding residencies outside London (Phonox in Brixton has become its London home). There have been regular ALFOS trips to Glasgow, Belfast, Dublin, Leeds, Manchester, Chieti in Italy and The Golden Lion in Todmorden. When Andrew died (17th February 2020, the anniversary coming up soon) Sean played Phonox the same week, a pre- booked gig for the pair. He made the emotional decision to go solo. During lockdown Sean began broadcasting the ALFOS Emergency Broadcast Sessions out of his kitchen in Hackney, a crowd of ALFOS devotees tuning in via the internet for some communal musical action to lighten the lockdown load. ALFOS, in real life and online, has become a community, the crowd as much a part of the ALFOS ethos as the music.. As an attendee both at The Golden Lion and in Manchester, I can confirm this. People make new friends at ALFOS. ALFOS is undoubtedly about fun. It's hedonistic. It's about dancing and being locked into the groove. It's about new music played alongside old, about the joy of digging out new tunes/ old tunes, slowing down records to that 122 sweet spot, the pitching down revealing something new. A lot of the ALFOS records have an emotional heft too, something that pulls at the heartstrings and the soul. It's connected to the tempo, the 118- 122 BPM pulses like the human heartbeat and forges some kind of connection to the blood pumping from the heart while dancing. 

To celebrate ALFOS's fifteenth birthday Sean has put together a compilation album of selected ALFOS tracks, some never available before. The artists are as wide a variety of nationalities as you'll find in one place with musicians and producers from  Portugal and Mexico, from Italy and Poland, south east Asia and from Denmark, from Belfast and from Slough. Spaced out chug, cosmic krautrock, spun out Scandi- disco, records that nod to the Balearic and acid house roots but with their eyes locked on the present. The vinyl has twelve tracks across two discs, kicking off with Neville Watson's previously unreleased dub of The Blow Monkeys' Save Me, a slow motion sundown moment. Further in there is Popular Tyre's Feel Like A Laser Beam, eight minutes of drum machine powered, interstellar robo- disco, a track rescued from an abandoned hard drive that Weatherall and Johnston turned into an ALFOS classic. 

The digital/ CD release is expanded, nineteen tracks and a twentieth track, all the previous ones sequenced into a continuous mix. It's already shaping up to be one of 2025's best compilations. When taken together, on either vinyl or digital, what's clear about all of the music- from Laars to Secret Circuit via Das Komplex, Briosky, Kimo, Duncan Gray and more- isn't just the slowed down tempos, the famed cosmic sheen or the peaky, trippy edges, it's the warmth of the music, the inclusive nature of it. Come on in, it says, it's lovely in here. 

You can buy A Love From Outer Space// A Compilation at Bandcamp and your local record shop. 

The album comes with a fanzine, which has an essay/ interview written by Tim Murray and masses of photos. On the back of the fanzine there is a page of thank yous from Sean and down towards the bottom, there is a very nice mention to The Flightpath Estate, something I don't think any of the five of us would have dreamed of a few years ago. 'The eternal brotherhood of The Flightpath Estate for keeping the record straight'. That's my next t- shirt/ badge/ tattoo sorted. 




Thursday, 13 February 2025

Powder Waxing

10:40 released an EP back in 2023 as Powder Wax Vol. 1, a dancefloor oriented track called Little Black Dress with vocals by S.A.A.R.A. There were three mixes. The Undressed Dub bent the original most out of shape with rattling drums, juddering synths and acres of space. Eventually the four four drums kicked in and a fragment of vocal remained among the swirls of FX.

Little Black Dress (Undressed Dub)

Now there's a follow up, Powder Wax Vol 2, two more tracks aimed at the floor and the lights, no nonsense, four four fun. Actually, lots of fun and nonsense is likely to be ignited by this pair of tracks. Beneath The Waves is quality machine funk, squelchy synth sounds, some 80s sci- fi chord changes, a snippet of voice that's been chopped up and the feeling that this could go on and on.... Second track Miracle Me comes in on thumping drums, bending synth sounds, stepped chords and a snare kicking away. There's more vocal on this one, 'I need you/ Deep inside', sung soulfully and housed up, while the synths and FX get wiggier. I could see this one filling floors and raising hands. 

Which handily, we'll get the chance to find out in person when Jesse and Darren bring their Jezebell takeover to The Golden Lion next month, on the 15th and 16th March. Me and Martin are taking part on the Sunday, playing tunes alongside Jesse and Darren, Adam Roberts, Kim Lana and FC Kahuna. The previous day/ night has a line up consisting of OBOST playing live and DJ sets from Stuart Alexander, Nessa Johnson, Martin Moscrop from ACR, Jamie Tolley and Jezebell finishing things off. It should be a lot of fun. 

Powder Wax Vol. 2 is out today and it should be available here


Wednesday, 12 February 2025

Anywhere

Causeway are an Idaho duo, Marshall Watson and Allison Rae, who have an album out on Friday on Manchester's Sprechen label- Anywhere. Appropriately enough, Friday is Valentine's Day, and for much of the album Allison sings of the pain that that particular emotion can bring. 'My heart is an empty well', she sings on last year's single Dancing With Shadows, a single that came with multiple remixes, all worth hearing, remixes by label boss Chris Massey, Hardway Bros and Kiaki and one by Marshall himself. 'Tragedy I'm here for you/ This loneliness is meant for two'. 

The album is built on the foundations of the 80s indie disco classics- New Order, The Cure, Depeche Mode, OMD- with cavernous drums, a wall of synths and pulsating sequencers, a dreamwave reawakening of being lost in dry ice on the floor. It's not totally retro- the production is sleekly 2025, there's the chug of 21st century cosmic disco hitched to the cinematic feel of club music. Opener Love Me Like Your Last Time turns all the buttons up to eleven, a sheen of synths and vocals caught under the neon and laser lights. The pain and melodrama of love is shot through the songs like writing in a stick of rock- It's Never Enough should soundtrack the final scenes of a lost 80s film, a figure in a trench coat walking away from the camera, perfect 80s noir. Criminal opens with bursts of synth noise and distant vocals, 'I'll always be a criminal baby'. The title track, Anywhere, rattles along rapidly, the drum machine firing underneath the chord changes and a squealing topline. 'Here we are/ One last time', she sings, another song, another break up, another ending. The penultimate song is Ruin Me, a crunching, industrial rhythm and hissing snare underpinning Allison's dual vocals, with a chorus begging for more pain- 'Ruin me gently/ Again and again'. Anywhere finishes with a cover of Nobody's Diary, from Yazoo's second album, 1983's You And Me Both, a single written by Alison Moyet when she was sixteen. Causeway's version updates Yazoo's synth duo pop, the multi- tracked synths and surging sequencers pumping away as Allison songs Alison, more heartbreak, more hyper- melancholy. 

Anywhere is out on Valentine's Day, an album for lovers and for those who want to wallow in the pain of lost love while dancing under the neon lights. Get it on vinyl and digitally at Bandcamp

Tuesday, 11 February 2025

Stranger Than Kindness

Back in the early days of The Bad Seeds Anita Lane was for a short time a member of the band along with Nick Cave, Mick Harvey, Rowland S Howard and Blixa Bargeld. She painted, wrote and contributed to lyrics- she co- wrote From Her To Eternity, a key early Bad Seeds song- and wrote one Bad Seeds song in its entirety, Stranger Than Kindness, from 1986's Your Funeral... My Trial. 

Stranger Than Kindness is a key Bad Seeds song, the lyric a list of the problematic issues of being in a close personal relationship with an addict with some vivid imagery- 'bottled light from hotels', 'soft cold bones', no home and no bread, passion dying in the light and being a stranger to kindness. Musically its wired and tense, Cave's voice deep and flat over detuned strings and guitars. It's a powerful and moving song, one that seems to retain its mystery no matter how many times you hear it (although Nick says that it has revealed more of itself to him over time).

Stranger Than Kindness

The Bad Seeds have performed it live since the mid- 80s,  In 2013 they played it at KCRW, a Santa Monica radio station set that became a full live album release. Over the decades and line up changes it's changed a little, slightly less of the edge of chaos feel of the original version. 

Stranger Than Kindness (Live at KCRW)

Anita was from Melbourne and went to college with Rowland S. Howard. When she first met Nick in 1977 they began a relationship. She was in The Birthday Party and moved to London with Cave and the band, leaving The Bad Seeds after the release of their first album and the group's relocation to West Berlin. Her impact on Nick was profound and even after their personal (and intermittent) relationship hit the rocks she remained a presence in his life- and the lives of various related bands. She released two solo albums, played and recorded with Mick Harvey and returned to The Bad Seeds with vocals on two songs on Murder Ballads in 1996. Mick's song from last year, When We Were Beautiful And Young, a moving lament for the power of youth and reflection on aging and mortality, is at least partly about her. 

Anita died in 2021. She appears on last year's Bad Seeds album Wild God, on the song O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is), a celebration of her with her voice (taken from an answerphone message) speaking for the final minute of the song about a flat she and Nick shared next to Brixton Prison and how they attempted to write a contract of love but never got beyond drawing the border on the piece of paper. The song also contains an opening line that jars somewhat, each time I hear it- apparently I'm not the only one who was a bit thrown by the line. Nick recently wrote about it at The Red Hand Files

Monday, 10 February 2025

Monday's Long Songs

Something else from the Eclectics label to kick start the week- see yesterday's edits mix that included No- Thing, a tribute to David Lynch by Resident Rockers, Eclectics in house DJ/ edit producers. Grant Williams relaunched Eclectics a few weeks ago and one of the first fruits was a track he recorded while on the turntables. In his own words an 'experimental fun track' with the emphasis on experimental and the fun of the mind melting variety. Voices is eight and a half minutes of wiggy, tripped out electronic psychedelia, 'a slowed down tech track, the vocals grabbed [from elsewhere] matched the bpm and I played the two simultaneously in sync and then messed about with the vocals in real time'. Grant then added more delay and echo and recorded it live in one take. Titled Voices, its free to download at Bandcamp under the Resident Rockers name. 

Also out now and slightly more direct but equally good fun is Blavatsky And Tolley's latest release, four tracks for Berlin label Nein. Falling (What Time Is Love?) is ten minutes of slow mo intensity, electronic disco- punk featuring Gene Serene, a certain KLF keyboard riff contained within, and remixes by Tronik Youth, Ian Vale and Ed Tomlinson. The original mix is slowed down and souped up, the stuttering, robotic vocal intoning 'deeper and deeper', a ghost in the machine. Falling comes out in early March- find it and pre- order at Bandcamp