Not Even Stevie Nicks

Fleetwood Mac. Since some time in the 00s, or the 90s maybe, there have been lots of prompts and suggestions that we should be listening to Fleetwood Mac. Their 70s albums- Rumours, Tusk- are routinely held up as works of genius now, a revisionist view of the wisdom that I grew up with, a post punk and indie rejection of their psychodrama, cocaine California soft rock. The monthly heritage rock magazines have been all over Fleetwood Mac-their lengthy career and story is ideal for their format. More recently their 1987 album Tango In The Night has crossed over, winning the hearts and minds of both a younger generation, who seem to be all over the songs. back in 1987 Tango In The Night was the opposite of what I wanted to hear although I know there's a strong Balearic thread running through it and I'm sure songs from it were spun in Alfredo's sets in Ibiza. 

For a long time I have stood my ground. Fleetwood Mac- I'd rather jack. On occasion I'd relent and see if they could do anything for me and approaching YouTube with an open mind I'd hit play on Dreams or Go Your Own Way or see if Rhiannon or Don't Stop did anything for me. And every time, they just didn't. A while ago channel surfing after a glass or two or red wine I happened upon a live concert from 1982, and it was OK, the crowd were definitely into it and it had an energy and a vibe but also it didn't send me rushing to the Fleetwood Mac back catalogue. 

It turns out on earching through my files and folders that I have this, a Psychemagik extended disco/ house/ Balearic edit of Everywhere. It is a 2020s synth update that I can imagine could work very well in the correct circumstances.  I'm not sure I'd be the man to drop it in a DJing environment but I probably would play their edit of This Must Be The Place by Talking Heads that they paired it with on the release. 

Everywhere (Psychemagik Remix)

I have however developed a soft spot for Stevie Nicks' Edge Of Seventeen. I can't explain it- I think it's the guitar riff (which I realised Beyonce borrowed for Bootylicious). This is a Mojo Filter edit of the song...

Edge Of Seventeen (Mojo Filter Edit)

Stevie wrote it for her uncle who was dying of cancer and for John Lennon, shot the same week her uncle died. The title came from a conversation with Tom Petty's wife Jane who said she and her husband met at 'the age of seventeen' but her southern accent made age sound like edge. 

The only other Stevie Nicks song I have is this one by Calexico from 2003, a song which mentions her name in the title which is bleakly beautiful and rather bereft. The man in the song drives off a cliff and not even she, the priestess, the voice of Stevie Nicks on the radio, not even that could save him. 

Not Even Stevie Nicks

Monday's Long Songs

In 2006 Nightmares On Wax released In A Space Outta Sound, a classic of its kind, mid- 00s Warp records bleepy/ dubby electronica. To celerbate the 20th anniversary of its release in March this year a new version came out, an Adrian Sherwood reworking of George Evelyn's entire album (and haven't we we've sped from March 2026 to September 2026 in the blink of an eye).

The original album contained a bunch of tracks that were aimed at the centre of the unconscious, tracks that operate in a very chilled out, downtempo state. I Am You is six minutes forty two seconds of spaced out dub cut with jazz, soul and slow, stoned hip hop. Minimalist but filling the room when played at some volume with singer Mozez adding a deep vocal. 

I Am You

On the Sherwood remix album, Inna Space Outta Dub, I Am You becomes Looking At You Dub, the On U sound and players stretching the song out and finding new spaces to play- a heady dubbed out excursion that seems to go on much longer than its six minutes twenty seconds running time. 

Looking At You Dub

Fifty Five Minutes Of Andrew Weatherall v Primal Scream

Andrew Weatherall's 1989 meeting with Bobby Gillespie and Andrew Innes changed the lives of all involved. Andrew travelled to Exeter to review the band while they were on a last ditch tour to promote an album no- one was interested in. This led to Loaded where under the band's encouragement, he (to quote Innes) 'fucking destroyed' the source material- the emotionally wrought ballad I'm Losing More Than I'll Ever Have- and built a dance floor, indie- dance crossover monster. From there they went to Screamadelica, much of which Andrew produced in the studio with Hugo Nicolson as his right hand man and a series of remixes that defined 1991 for both him and Primal Scream. 

Andrew's work with Primal Scream went on after that for the rest of his life. He went to Memphis with them where they made thee more songs together, remixed Jailbird from Give Out But Don't Give Up as Sabres, remixed numerous tracks from Primal Scream's bunker years with Keith Tenniswood as Two Lone Swordsmen (where the 'just fucking destroy it' attitude was taken to the nth degree- the TLS remix of Kill All Hippies is a razing to the ground of the original song), produced songs from Evil Heat and then remixed several Scream songs under his own name in the 2010s. 

There is way too much to fit into one mix but this one is a starting point, almost an hour of tracks from the AW v PS back catalogue, starting and ending with the Screamadelica era and in between visiting some outliers and lesser heard ones.

Fifty Five Minutes Of Andrew Weatherall v Primal Scream

• Inner Flight
• Higher Than The Sun (American Spring Mix)
• A Scanner Darkly
• Substance D
• Some Velvet Morning (Disco Heater Dub)
• Stuka (Two Lone Swordsmen Instrumental Mix)
• Jailbird (Sweeney 2 Sabres Of Paradise Remix)
• Goodbye Johnny (Andrew Weatherall's Nyabinghi Noir Mix)
• Don't Fight It, Feel It (Scat Mix)

Inner Flight is from Screamadelica, one made in the studio when the run of remixes from Loaded to Don't Fight It, Feel It turned into an album. Inner Flight is gorgeous, an acid house crossed with Pet Sounds glide through the outer reaches with samples that dig deep  into combined Weatherall/ Gillespie record collections- Brian Eno (The Great Pretender), Dr John (Gris Gris) and CB Cook and Alan Lomax (Whoa Buck). It's virtually an instrumental. There are some cooing backing vocals early on but Inner Flight is all about the music which swirls and floats around your speakers. 

Higher Than The Sun was the third pre- Screamdelica single, a breakthrough for everyone involved and had lots of involvement from both Andrew and The Orb. The lesser heard American Spring Mix was produced by Andrew, a spooky harpsichord and echo- drenched led version takes the ecstasy and rhapsody of the original versions into a darker, morning after place. Named I've always assumed after the 60s girl group duo American Spring, produced and co- written by Brian Wilson. I think it's fair to assume Hugo did a lot of the work on this under Andrew's direction- he was very much the man with the studio knowledge and expertise at this point. 

A Scanner Darkly is from 2002's Evil Heat, a follow up to 2000's blistering XTRMTR (which the band are touring currently- live review to follow this week). Evil Heat is a bit scatter shot with tripped out blues, Stooges style rock 'n' roll, synth- rock and at its best Andrew Weatherall and Keith on production. They produced Autobahn 66, a soaring kraut/ cosmische song, and A Scanner Darkly, included in this mix. Named after a Philip K. Dick book, A Scanner Darkly is a fairly demented electronic rock instrumental. Numb Motorik drumming, synth squiggles, a huge Mani bassline and guitars that push their amps to the edge. Andrew and Keith keep all of this in check and manage to streamline it into a hypnotic kraut/ synthpunk track. Substance D (from the Autobahn 66 CD single) is Andrew's remix of A Scanner Darkly that takes the numb, endless drum beat and fucks everything up a bit more. Including it in this mix along with A Scanner Darkly is probably a tad gratuitous.

Stuka was on 1997's return to form album Vanishing Point. Andrew and Keith remixed it, an electro TLS remix peak with Bobby's vocal transformed into a nihilistic Dalek. Deep and dark electro with bonus World War II dive bomber flirtations.

Some Velvet Morning is from Evil Heat and a bit of an opinion splitter, some reviews/ fans hating it and some not. Kate Moss sings the lead, the Nancy Sinatra part and Bobby plays Lee Hazelwood. The Disco Heater Dub is the Two Lone Swordsmen remix and came out on the 12" in 2003. The album version was co- produced and mixed by Jagz Kooner. David Holmes, Lydia Lunch and Rowland S. Howard all get thanked on the sleeve- Rowland and Lydia covered the song themselves in 1982. 

Sweeney 2 was one of two remixes Sabres Of Paradise did of Jailbird, a single from Give Out But Don't Give Up era. Primal Scream and Weatherall had gone off in different directions at this point, Andrew deeper into techno and Sabresonic and the Scream into Rolling Stones- esque rock. The music press labelled the band Dance Traitors on the release of the album, a tag that stuck for a while. Whoever came up with the line clearly hadn't seen the band on the 1989 pre- Loaded tour. Sweeney 2 takes the drumbeat, isolates it and goes downbeat 70s cop show crossed with King Tubby over the top of it. The 12" came with other remixes- a Dust Brothers one and a Kris Needs version and there was a second Sabres remix, the superb, speaker rattling twelve minute dub odyssey of Weatherall Dub Chapter 3.

Goodbye Johnny is from 2013's More Light, the first album they made after Mani left to rejoin The Stone Roses and one with David Holmes at the producer's desk. Goodbye Johnny is a cover of a Jeffrey Lee Pierce song originally on The Gun Club's seminal debut album Fire Of Love. Andrew's remix, the Nyabinghi Noir Mix, came out on a Jeffrey lee Pierce tribute album and is a bit overlooked in the 2010s Weatherall remix world. Starts out as slowed down rockabilly and becomes a seven minute African Head Charge inspired psychedelic dub excursion. We're definitely not in Kansas any more.  

Don't Fight It, Feel It needs no real introduction from me. The fourth of the singles that led into Screamadelica, one that saw Bobby not even on the song with the much missed Denise Johnson on vocals. For the Scat Mix Andrew and Hugo chop Denise's vocal up into kaleidoscopic fragments and the music is a long long way from Ivy Ivy Ivy of only eighteen months before. Rama lama lama fa fa fi....

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 Not building a wall but making a brick.

I made bricks with Goldfrapp, Jimi Hendrix, Circus Underwater, Lee Scratch Perry, he Comet Is Coming and Moon Duo. Suggestions came in from the Oblique Saturdays brick making community- Ernie with Dexys and the walls of heartbreak, Jake Sniper with Jacob's Optical Language, Braynemeout with Chicago 's Wesley Willis, Walter and Nirvana, Rol with the Ben Folds Five and Chris with Pixies and their red bricks. 

This week's Oblique Strategy card reads like this- Remove ambiguities and convert to specifics. 

Which when I read it left me cold. Nothing. No response. Zilch. A cursory search of song titles containing the words ambiguities, convert or specifics brought little too, very uninspiring. 

So I thought about it a little and took some internet advice and settled on this. Removing ambiguities and converting to specifics is a suggestion to simplify things, to streamline and to focus on the bare essentials. To get down to brass tacks. To lessen the abstract and go for the straight ahead choice. 

'Hey ho let's go....'

Blitzkrieg Bop

February 1976 and four pretend brothers from Forest Hills, Queens, rewrite music history by inventing punk rock. No frills, no ambiguities, no extras, just the specifics of a brilliantly dumb chant, three chords and a pulverising guitar, bass, drums combo. Blitzkrieg Bop still reverberates down the years, half a century later, still sounds like the manic and basic thrill of picking up an electric guitar and plugging it into an amplifier and hitting the strings....

Later on that year The Ramones recorded a cover of California Sun for their I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend single and then put it on 1977 album Leave Home (released 10th January 1977- by 11th January the Ramones had already released two albums). 

1- 2- 3- 4 ....

California Sun

California Sun was written by Henry Glover and the most well known version in the 60s was by surf- rockers The Rivieras. It was later seen as the last American rock 'n' roll hit before the British Invasion. 

Pete Seeger said of Woody Guthrie, 'Any damn fool can make something complex; it takes a genius to make something simple'. At least I think he did. It gets attributed to Woody too and to others. Here's one of those unfinished/ unrecorded Woody Guthrie songs that Billy Bragg and Wilco recorded.

Way Over Yonder In The Minor Key

Feel free to make your own suggestions and responses to Remove ambiguities and convert to specifics in the comment box. 

Fragile Time

More music from Mighty Force, a label reborn in 2019 after a period of inaction and whose current mission statement reads 'We just release music we think is good'.

The latest album in the roll call of music which is good comes from Paddy Thorne, a twelve track opus called Fragile World. The techno of the first and second wave of Detroit artists rings down the line in Paddy's work, the futuristic and science fiction sound of drum machines, synths and keys, that emotive machine music. Back in 1988 Derrick May described techno as 'George Clinton and Kraftwerk stuck in an elevator' and that collision of Black American dance music crossed with European synthpop going upwards is very much at the heart of Fragile World. 

Highlights? They're all highlights... the fourth track Space Between Breathing is gorgeous, breakbeat techno with synth chords that pull at the heartstrings. Nine tracks in First Signals sounds like a series of communications from outer space, digital transmissions underpinned by dancing melody lines. The final track is Fragile, Still, a synthesized meditation on existence with a chuggy rhythm that suggests perpetual motion, departure and (I think) the possibility of escape. It's optimistic music, despite the times. 

Fragile World is at Mighty Force's Bandcamp. 

While you're there you could do worse than check in on fellow act D3 who released an album in late July called Time. D3's music is also techno. On the opening three tracks, there are thundering breakbeats and big synth chords. Trust takes a breather rhythmically, with bleeps and long chords and a whispered voice, before the breakbeat kicks in at one minute forty. Chill! slows things down, some sinister distorted chords and more veiled voices. Electro influences sit alongside the techno ones and again, as with Paddy Thorne (and other Mighty Force artists) there's a sense of futurism. Final track Time is an epic piece of breakbeat acid techno.

Techno has been around for four decades now but the sounds and possibilities of it are endless and Mighty Force don't appear to be merely retreading old ground or reviving old sounds. The possibility of the new is written all the way through both Time and Fragile World. 

Time is also at Bandcamp. 

Tower Of Babylon

Andy Bell (Ride/ GLOK) and Masal promo-ed a new album (Common Primitives) two months ago with a new track called The Morning Of The Trip. They've followed it recently with the next one, Tower Of Babylon. Andy plays guitar and with GLOK and maybe Masal too some synths/ keys. Masal are an Anglo- Turkish duo, Al Johnson and Oslem Simsek, who blend synths, found sounds and electronics with harp, theremin and Oslems's Turkish folk influences, a fairly unique and interesting coming together of three musicians.

That being said I sometimes get to the point where I listen to instrumental music- ambient/ cosmische/ shoegaze/ psychedelia- and am blown away by it and then come here to try to describe it and.... end up repeating myself, using the same old phrases and imagery. 

Tower Of Babylon has fluttering harp, a sharp and bumping rhythm, distorted guitars and/ or synths. The music builds and loops, breaks down and re- assembles. The harp returns and then the buzzing starts again, the drums return. It's a trip of its own making, a dreamlike detour. 

Oslem grew up in Turkey studying classical harp and when she moved to England met Johnson who found common ground in ambient/ electronics and world sounds. They supported Andy at a gig in 2020 and began to work together after that. In Turkish the word Masal means fairy tale or folk story which feels relevant to the music that they make. Al has referenced Pharoah Saunders and Vini Reilly as key influences (as well as a Turkish folk song Oslem remembered from growing up) on the forthcoming album, which comes out in October, nine tracks on vinyl or digital. 

Non- Konformism

Sunday night in Stockport at The Red Bull, an end of tour gig for Nuremberg's Konformer and a Before I Die party. Jason Boardman's Before I Die has become a must- purchase label, every release guaranteed to be first rate outsider and outlier music, the label capturing the stuff that happens in the margins and away from the bright lights. Putting on a label party in a Stockport pub on a Sunday night, just because, and filling the pub is testament to what he's put into BID over the last few years. 

There were DJs from 4 pm and by the time I arrived at around 6 pm J-Walk was on the decks spinning Sunday evening tunes. J-Walk released a 7" single on Before I Die earlier this year called Never Go Home- blissed out Spacemen 3 style indie on the A, King Tubby style dub on the B. It's one of the singles of the year- you can listen to it here and grab one of the four remaining copies of the vinyl if you're quick.

Before that in 2024 there was an album, Broken Beauty, made in Stockport. Tonight J-Walk steps out from behind the decks and plays a set of four songs so new no one has heard them yet, Martin on synth and guitar, FX pedals and vocals, finding a sweet spot where early 80s New Order met King Tubby. The four songs will fingers crossed end upon the next J-Walk release on Before I Die. 

Konformer are a three piece group from Nuremberg who have been in the UK for a tour playing grassroots venues with open minded bookers and crowds. Margate's Music Hall, The Golden Lion in Todmorden and Manchester Psyche Fest plus Bristol, Barrow in Furness, Deptford and Liverpool. By the time they open up at The Red Bull they are a well oiled machine, their heavy motorik grooves, layers of droning krauty keys and synths and Hooky- esque basslines rocking the pub's wood panelled walls,

Konformer's second album, Konformer II, came out in the summer and the band motor through the tracks from it, Mont Ventoux, Marseillel, Todmorden and the album's opening pair Konfectio Suite I and II. All instrumentals, no vocals to distract from the sound, the bass guitar leading with Kristian Krauss' synth/ keys adding the drones and cosmische textures. Mont Ventoux shimmers and pulses, drummer Andreas Berg absolutely on the beat and Rainer Ruder's bass climbing and looping round and round. At the end of the gig it's smiles all round and then trying to find a way home by public transport from Stockport on a Sunday night.