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 Look closely at the most embarrassing details and amplify them. 

This took me to the Beastie Boys and their embarrassment at Fight For your Right, a song which defined them in a way they did not like. It led us to Paul's Boutique and the 90s Beastie Boys so it all turned out OK in the end. The Bagging Area OS squad played a blinder with the following- Johnny Cash and A Boy Named Sue (Ernie), Are We Not Men? by Devo (Anonliz), Slade's How Does It Feel (Jake Sniper), Elvis laughing his way through a performance of Are You Lonesome Tonight? at Vegas (C)...

... Magazine's A Song From Under The Floorboards and Radiohead's Creep (Trail Of Bread), The Animals' Story of Bo Diddley (Al G), Half Man Half Biscuit's Petty Sessions (Rol), and Feel Good Hit Of The Summer by Queens Of The Stone Age, Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana and Prefab Sprout's From Langley Park To Memphis (Chris ZenArcade).

There was an interview with David Byrne this week at The Guardian where he was asked if they used the Oblique Strategy cards in the studio when Talking Heads worked with Eno. Byrne said 'The box of cards were present. I don’t know if they were ever really used, but they contain clever ideas, to help you break out of any ruts or ingrained thinking.' 

Avoiding ruts and ingrained thinking, this week's Oblique Strategy suggestion is this- You can only make one dot at a time. 

As a massive fan of One Dove and Dot Allison, one Dot is all we need.

Fallen

Fallen originally came out on Soma, a Glasgow based record label. One Dove were a trio, Dot Allison, Ian Carmichael and Jim McKinven. When the group signed to Junior Boys Own, an enconter with Andrew Weatherall on a boat party in Rimini led to him producing their album, fresh from his successes  with Screamadelica. Weatherall's version of Fallen lifted it to new heights, Dot's voice over the fractured intro, gasps and timbales, 'I don't know why I'm telling you any of this, one thing is don't ever tell anyone I told you this, don't save me, forgive me, I was only thinking of you... just you'... and just like that anyone hearing it was hooked.

After One Dove folded Dot released a solo album that was trailed y this gorgeous piece of mid- 90s soul/ pop... 

Mo' Pop

The same album, Afterglow, had this song on it, Message Personnel which was remixed by Arab Strap, who slow it down and take the blissed out pop of the original and make it typically something a bit darker...

Message Personnel (Arab Strap Remix)

I think Kevin Shields is on guitar on that one too. I could go on posting Dot Allison tracks all day but I'll stop there.

Wire's 1978 debut had the song Dot Dash on it, two and a half minutes of post- punk brilliance and there's a guitar band from Washington D.C. named after that song who put out this in 2018 on an album called  Proto Retro...

World's Last Payphone

Dots also make me think of the printing process for comic books, the four colour process, using small dots of colour to create shades. Roy Lichtenstein took comic book imagery and dot printing and blew them up for his version of Pop Art, most famously with Whaam!

Paul Weller had a Whaam! Rickenbacker guitar which he used in The Jam and which I've seen in an exhibition but can't find my photo of it. Here's Paul with it...

Pete Wylie, a Bagging Area hero, had a Pow! guitar...

That guitar made a prime time Top Of The Pops appearance in 1986 when Pete's single Sinful hit the charts and his friend Josie Jones had the privilege of playing it (special mention for the dancing nuns, The Sisters of The Anfield Road)

Sinful is an all timer for me, one of those songs that I can always go back to and if forced to make a list of my X number of favourite songs, would absolutely be on it. 

Sinful (Tribal Mix)

Recently I was sent an EP by Ariadne's Labyrinth which is on my list of releases to write about at greater length but Eno's card and this track, Terminal Dot, came together at the right time- Terminal Dot fuses classical violins, a lovely string arrangement, with some thumping beats and distorted bass, a collision or rave and classical that works really well. 

The portrait of the woman at the top of this post was above the fireplace in a pub we were drinking in, after the Protex Blue gig in Sheffield last weekend. I don't know who she is but she's definitely had enough of the person painting her or boring her with their constant banging on. Withering disdain. 

Anyway, feel free to drop you own suggestions to You can only make one dot at a time in the comment box. 

Knife Slits Water

Today is the first day of my summer holiday. Yesterday I completed my first year at my new workplace, a 6th form college in Salford after moving there last summer (I spent twenty four years in my previous school). The move has been positive for me in so many ways- a much shorter commute, a different environment, an escape from a place that I needed to get out of for various reasons- and I genuinely enjoy going to work now, teaching history and politics to 16- 18 year olds. One of the reasons I wanted to get a new job was the feeling that Isaac's death had forced so much change on us and the consequences spun off in all sorts of directions. Getting a new job would be a change I had chosen, a taking control of change. Moving jobs is a gamble at any point, in any profession but a year on I can say that for me it's paid off. And now I have six weeks of holiday to enjoy without the slight sense of fear and unease that accompanied me last summer. 

A Certain Ratio are touring in October playing two albums from their 1980s back catalogue in full, Sextet from 1982 and force from 1986. Force was the first ACR album in bought in real time, in the period when it was released. I got the compilation The Old And The New around the same time and have been following them live and on disc ever since. My copy of Force is on cassette, one of those beautifully packaged Factory cassettes that came in a book sized box wrapped in hessian with a fold out inlay card. I still have it. The imagery on the Force album- mountaineers, propeller planes, maps- really appealed to me, 

ACR have announced two new versions of the albums too, The Joy of Sextet and Force Majeure. Force Majeure is a different version of Force (recorded at Strawberry in Stockport) with eight unreleased, different studio versions of songs from the original album  plus the album's title track (which wasn't on the original album at all). These alternative versions were done with the late Stuart James, alternative arrangements and live run throughs. Martin Moscrop listened to them forty years later and thought they sounded good enough to put out as a companion version of Force. The only one available to hear so far is the FM version of Naked And White, ACR at their funk/ dance rock best, the band sounding urgent and live...

The Joy Of Sextet is a complete re- imagining of Sextet, ACR's bleak early 80s masterpiece, a record that is taut, abrasive and uneasy, the post- punk/ punk funk married to some art noise and African rhythms with vocals by Martha Tilson giving them a different edge. For The Joy Of Sextet they handed the master tapes over to Andy Meecham, The Emperor Machine, to remix and rework. 

The Emperor Machine version of seminal ACR track Knife Slits Water, Martha singing about Manchester and sex, has been released this week, an eight minute 2026 update on ACR's edgy, paranoid dance music. Those times spent playing with Talking Heads had some impact on ACR- some of Sextet sounds like a hotwired Mancunian Talking Heads. 

The Joy Of Sextet and Force Majeure can be ordered at Bandcamp ahead of a late August release. 

Sun King Summer

Back in January I featured the music of Glasgow born, Malaga based musician Solipsism, some very long and very beautiful ambient tracks inspired by natural phenomena- sunrises, woodland, birdsong... that post is here. Now Solipsism has released an album on the reborn and vital Exeter label Mighty Force, Herbalism, ten tracks that explore a different aspect of electronic sound, acid and techno, much more rhythm driven tracks. 

The opener Los Estafadores en el Paraiso sets Solipsism's stall out early with rapid fire drums, deep bass and acid squelches. It's followed by Frequency Mercenary, the drums once again the foreground and the focus. Synth stabs and FX as the decoration around the kinetic energy of the drum pattern and the distorted bassline. Sun King Summer leads off with the dull thud of the kick drum, then a breakbeat joins in, two rhythm tracks coming together. Eventually, Detroit sci fi synth chords, wobbling and bending, slide in. Sun King Summer exists on its own, absorbing your attention and shutting ot the outside world. 

The rest of the album continues in the same vein- physical sounding rhythm tracks, breakbeats and drum patterns, kick drums and snares, acid FX, sub bass, processed synth chords and a kind of pure focus. Nothing extraneous, no distractions, just the serious business of groove and techno. This is Plant Pot Conspiracies, five minutes forty seconds of energy. 

Buy/ listen at Bandcamp.

Somewhere Good

I received recommendations for this album from two different sources recently, one being Spencer (reader and friend of the blog whose judgement is always good). Somewhere Good by Bristolians Tara Clerkin Trio came out in June, an eight song album of jazz- ish/ leftfield indie/ avant pop. Comparisons could include Saint Etienne, Broadcast, The High Llamas, Stereolab, some of Belle and Sebastian's earlier records, those sort of artists and songs.

The album starts with Lake Walk, led off by a Clangers like woodwind part that could be irritating if the piano didn't join in and the song come together, the soundtrack to a Sunday afternoon with not much to do. Lake Walk gives way to Lazy Daisy, the rat- a- ta- tat of drums and squelchy synth bass, acoustic guitar chords and then Tara Clerkin's voice. And suddenly I'm entranced. 

The album moves on, a variety of styles and sounds, never sitting still for long, experimental but with a song focus. Ups And Downs is percussion and the shifting noise of a synth, some , piano runs. Silently opens with a choir and FX, then a drum machine. Whispers and softly sung vocals. The title track, Somewhere Good, has a lovely repeating guitar riff, more piano, modern classical crossed with mid- 90s avant- pop of some of those bands I mentioned above. The rhythm and playing are insistent, they draw you in. On Slow Island, one of the two men in the trio takes the lead vocal, the piano and drums nod slightly to Bristol's trip hop past- at the end an accordion or possibly a harmonium wanders past, and then the song stops. 

The notes at the Bandcamp page, written by Ryan Davies in Chicago, suggest that if the AI overlords took all of Ryan's music, posters, mixtapes and heartstrings and made a perfect band based on those, Tara Clerkin Band's Somewhere Good would be the result. But AI could never come up with music as nuanced and as human as this, it cold only be made by actual people. 

Listen/ buy at Bandcamp. 

At The Black Swan

On Saturday night, 4th of July 2026, it was exactly fifty years since the Clash played their first ever gig, supporting The Sex Pistols at The Black Swan in Sheffield. The five man Clash- Joe Strummer, Mick Jones, Paul Simonon, Keith Levene and a drummer (there appears to be some confusion about who occupied the drum stool, possibly Terry Chimes). The band were originally billed as The Weak Heartdrops but had become The Clash by the time they arrived in Sheffield. Paul Simonon said in the Westway To The World documentary that he was so nervous that he messed up the bass intro to Listen and an account by a reader in the NME a week or two later said they were 'a cacophonous barrage of noise'. As well as Listen it seems that The Clash played Rabies (From The Dogs Of Love), a song brought by Joe from the 101ers, a Mick Jones song Ooh Baby Ooh (It's Not Over) that was subsequently dropped and Protex Blue. 

On Saturday evening we gathered at The Black Swan for a guerrilla gig by a Sheffield band named after that song, Mick's tribute to a brand of condoms. Protex Blue busked a six song Clash set in the street outside The Black Swan (now very much an ex- pub, formerly known to locals as The Mucky Duck).

Someone had fly postered the building. A blue plaque (later raffled) was pinned up. Bemused motorists and cyclists stopped at the traffic lights. A crowd gathered and sang along. The band powered through their set and it was all gloriously good fun. Joe Strummer would surely have approved. Sheffield's main police station was just across the road. I think everyone was quietly hoping they might have shown up and moved us along. 

Protex Blue repaired to The Harlequin, a pub a few minutes walk away where at 9 pm they played The Clash's debut album in full to a raucous and appreciative, all ages, crowd, the pub getting hotter and hotter as they blasted and hollered their way through Janie Jones and White Riot, What's My Name and Career Opportunities and all those other songs  from 1977 that make up that album, ending with the mighty Garageland. 'Back in the garage with my bullshit detector...'

Protex Blue 

An encore was demanded. Clampdown, London Calling and White Man (In Hammersmith Palais), all also played outside the Black Swan earlier, plus Clash City Rockers and I Fought The Law. One more song? One more song. Complete Control, one of the zeniths of The Clash's back catalogue, a righteous blast of fury, furious guitars, a high octane complaint about dirty record company dealings. Well played Protex Blue.

Monday's Long Song

Another Monday, another long song, another Four Tet track to start the week... this one dates from 2009 when Four Tet and Burial released a two track 12" single. One of the two tracks was Moth, a nine minute excursion into the inner worlds of Burial and Four Tet. Moth starts out with ambient sounds, sounding like the noises that get caught when someone pocket dials you. A synth stab riff comes in and dubstep drums break through. 

There's lots of detail, lots of sounds and FX that enrich Moth, make it what it is even if you can't put your finger what exactly they are. A snatch of a vocal. Background washes. A bell ringing. Drop outs where suddenly the drums are the focus. Sections where an electronic squiggle and wordless vocal become the foreground. Rumbles of bass. Signals. Abstract, shape shifting and repetitive but also never settling still for long. 

Moth

Forty Five Minutes Of The Clash In Dub

A simple concept for today's Sunday mix- The Clash in dub. The band were steeped in their influences- dub, reggae, rockabilly, blues, rock 'n' roll, glam, garage rock, soul, disco- and once they got past Give 'Em Enough Rope and punk's orthodoxy they gave their influences free rein, their record collections filtered through the unique combination of Strummer, Jones, Simonon and Headon, each man bringing his own thing. Paul Simonon especially brought the dub and the bass. 

The dub began to surface with Armagideon Times, London Calling's B- side and then with Bank Robber and an association with Mikey Dread that brought some genuine Jamaican vibes, vocals and production to the sound. By the time they got to Sandinista! and they'd decided it would be six sides of vinyl, each side six songs long, the dub experimentation became as much part of The Clash as anything else. 

Forty Five Minutes Of The Clash In Dub

• Mensforth Dub
• Radio One (Reprise)
• Outside Broadcast/ Radio 5
• Silicone On Sapphire
• One More Dub
• The Crooked Beat
• Robber Dub
• Living In Fame
• Justice Tonight/ Kick It Over

Mensforth Dub is a dub version of Something About England, a song that more and more seems like one of Sandinista!'s peaks, Joe and Mick duetting on a song about immigration, the 20th century, the impact of two world wars and post- imperial Britain. It fades in with FX and echo, Mick's voice in the distance and a swirl of radio static and noise. Possibly named after Menwith Hill, an RAF listening post in North Yorkshire that is operated by the US air force still. 

Radio One was the B-side to Hitsville UK, a re- working of a Mikey Dread tune from his album Rocker Station, cavernous space and crashing echo. The Roland Space Echo is doing a lot of work. Gloriously dubbed out stuff. 

Outside Broadcast and Radio 5 were two of four versions on the 12" of the 1981 single This Is Radio Clash, Joe on the mic like a radio announcer and then FX, New York radio station samples, backing vox, a laid back early 80s rap courtesy of a very English sounding voice, 'I am the Lord of the dance, the lord of the dance said he'. It goes on for seven minutes, as dub often does, before seguing into Radio 5. 

Silicone On Sapphire is a dub of Washington Bullets, another key Sandinista! deep cut. Joe's lyrics are an account of superpower intervention and destabilisation in the developing world and the Cold War that gave the album its name. Silicone On Sapphire came out of the endless nights of dub experimentation during the Sandinista! sessions. Joe added a new spoken word vocal, a stream of consciousness piece that starts out wondering who holds the key that winds the clock on Big Ben and goes off into early 80s computer lingo, hardwired logic, RAM, data, input, system debugs and many other things that he possibly read out from a magazine or manual. One of those Sandinista! dubs that was overlooked for years and now sounds like a quintessential part of that album. 

One More Dub is a Mikey Dread at the controls dub of One More Time. On Sandinista! they run together, Mikey Dread linking the two with a shout of 'stop wastin' time!'. Bass and phasing to the fore, Topper's drums as ever on point. 

The Crooked Beat was a Paul Simonon follow up to Guns Of Brixton, his way of ensuring he got a cut of the songwriting income. Lovely roaming bassline and a tale of South London blues parties. 

Robber Dub is a dub of Bank Robber that didn't make the single release, eventually coming out on the 1980 compilation  Black Market Clash, a six minute version with drums and bass pushed up front and snippets of Joe's vocal. Classic Clash dub. One of the bar staff at The Golden Lion rushed up to us last weekend asking about it when I spun it as part of our seven hour long ALFOS warm up. 

Living In Fame is another Sandinista! track, a Mikey Dread vocal commenting on the various ska bands the UK had thrown up at the time, challenging them to live up to their names. If you call yourself The Specials he reasons, you better be pretty special, and so on with The Selector, The Beat, Madness and then turns his attention to The Nipple Erectors and Blockheads. Gary Barnacle plays bursts of wailing sax, Strummer joins in with shouts and cries and there's acres of Mick Jones echo- treated guitar.

Justice Tonight/ Kick It Over were the first real Clash dub experiment, a dubbed out version of their cover of Willie Williams' Armagideon Time. Spooked late 70s dread and fireworks, and Joe shouting 'OK OK, don't push us when we're hot!'. 

It often feels like we need The Clash more than ever.