Douglas McCarthy

In among the obituaries and remembrances for Sly Stone and Brian Wilson last week the news of the death of Douglas McCarthy slipped out. Douglas was vocalist in Nitzer Ebb and died at the very young age of 58. He was less well known than either Brian or Sly but Nitzer Ebb had a big impact in the 80s within a fairly niche world. Nitzer Ebb formed in Essex in 1982 and singed to Mute in 1986, making uncompromising and physical industrial/ EBM/ proto- house that demanded your attention. Their track Join In The Chant found its way to Ibiza and onto the legendary Balearic Beats Vol. 1 album alongside Thrashing Doves, Jibaro, The Woodentops, The Residents, Code 61 and Mandy Smith (among others).

Join In The Chant

Andrew Weatherall once said that the closest he came to finding God was dancing to Join In The Chant.

Let Your Body Learn like Join In The Chant came out in 1987, a singe recorded at PWL with Phil Harding and then remixed at Hansa. There can't be many records that link the two worlds of PWL and Hansa. 

Let Your Body Learn 

RIP Douglas McCarthy. 

When We Talk Of The Times

LCD Soundsystem began an eight night residency at Brixton Academy last week, the New York art- dance, post- punkers continuing their habit of rolling into a city and taking it over for a week. If I hadn't been down to London for Sabres Of Paradise I might have thought about going, although I'd prefer it if James Murphy decided the next UK destination for a residency is a bit closer to home- Manchester would do fine. 

In 2010 LCD Soundsystem released their third album This Is Happening, an album that at the time I remember feeling a little ambivalent about. It seemed quite stuck to the LCD template that Murphy and co. had established on Sound Of Silver three years earlier but it's grown on my over the years and songs like Drunk Girls, I Can Change and Pow Pow all worked their magic eventually. This Is Happening starts with this song...

Dance Yrself Clean

Many of LCD's songs are builders. Dance Yrself Clean is very much a builder and at nearly nine minutes long there's a lot of time to build. The first three minutes are very slow and low, a sparse drum machine pattern, James' voice compressed and alone, some backing vocals joining in and the thud of a piano. The lyrics dissecting friendship gone wrong or maybe some soul searching. The song explodes in the third minute, synths and FX, and continues ever onward, James now on the floor and dancing himself clean. 

Support at the second half of the residency comes from Working Men's Club, the Calder Valley's own electronic dance/ rock/ acid house/ post punkers, a group led by Syd Minsky- Sargeant. On Friday night Working Men's Club warmed up for those gigs with one at The Golden Lion, a much more intimate venue than Brixton Academy. 

The pub is packed, the downstairs stage is low and where I'm standing over by the DJ booth it's difficult to see much, Syd's head and microphone, the occasional glimpse of the other members of the band. A stuttering synth loop kicks in and builds over several minutes, other loops kicking in, eventually all coming into sync and then we're off, a full on WMC sound- synths, bass, 303s and 808s and on top Syd's vocals, repeated loops of lines. There aren't any gaps between songs, one song seguing into the next, an hour long megamix. Working Men's Club sound like New Oder if they'd kept pushing and got tougher after Technique or maybe Joy Division in an alternative 1983, one where Ian didn't die but they'd gone fully synth and electronics anyway. WMC's second album, Fear Fear, came out in 2022 and was informed by lockdown and existential dread, Syd's fear writ large. 'When we talk of the times/ We talk in the past tense', rattles round the pub over some very heavy post- punk/ New Beat. There's a healthy dose of late 80s rave and its defiance, its anti- authoritarian stance- the refrain from the song John Cooper Clarke, 'We dance and we smile/ We laugh and we cry/ We play and we fight/ We live and we die', sounding anthemic. 

Both Working Men's Club albums were mixed into single, twenty minute megamixes by Syd, versions of the albums and the live set. Megamix and Megamix II give you an idea of what the live set sounds like. 

Live the songs are even more physical than they sound on disc, Syd a bobbing and frenetic presence at the front of the stage, conducting and waving his hand around as his stream of consciousness is thrown around the pub, the soundman applying layers of FX to the vocals. We get an hour and then they're off. On the basis of tonight, anyone with tickets for LCD Soundsystem should get there in good time. 

Be My Guest was on WMC's self titled debut album, released in 2021, crunching drums and laser focused noisy guitars, Syd bursting out of a small town in West Yorkshire. 

Be My Guest

Syd is also a member of Demise Of Love, a trio made of him, Daniel Avery and Ghost Culture's James Greenwood. A four track 10" EP came out recently led by Strange Little Consequence which I posted in February. This song is also on the EP, Like I Loved You, a slow burning summer epic, some New Order gone interstellar synths, distorted vocals and a loud/ quiet dynamic that keeps the song shape- shifting. 

 

Twenty Two

Eliza is twenty two today. The picture above was a school photo taken in about 2008 at a guess, so quite some time ago. Eliza came home from university a year ago and got herself a job straight away, working at the day care centre that Isaac used to go to, working with adults with a variety of special needs and disabilities. It's not a job everyone can do. In March she handed her notice and booked herself flights to and from Bali, travelling solo, spending nearly four weeks backpacking. Since she came home she's been looking for work, applying for various jobs with all the hassle and frustrations that job hunting involves. She's stuck at it, been penniless for the last few weeks, and has recently found a job at an SEND school. Her resourcefulness is a good quality and she gets stuff done. Happy birthday Eliza. Enjoy it. 

Twenty two is a funny age. Eliza joked (half- joked maybe) that she was having a quarter life crisis. I remember being twenty two and being a little adrift, university behind me and now being, as far as the world was concerned, an adult- but not really sure what I wanted to do or what the future might hold, feeling too young to start a professional career job, not having much money, living in a series of short term rented flats/ house shares. It's a tricky age I think. 

In 1969 Iggy acknowledged twenty two's difficult status on the opening song of The Stooges's debut album, a song that sets out perfectly the band's modus operandi. Noise, distorted wah wah, sludgy riffs, primitive thumping drums and this- 'Last year I was twenty one/ Didn't have a lot of fun/ Now I'm gonna be twenty two/ Oh my and boo hoo'.

1969

It's 1969. America is burning. Iggy's bored and sarcastic. 

Ten years later Neil Young and Crazy Horse recorded one of their epics, Neil slipping back into the past to deliver a song about war, family, death and youth. I always assumed it was set in the time of the American Revolution, the 'red means run son' a reference to the British army and their red coats. The narrator's family have all fallen by the way, Daddy's gone, Neil's brother's out hunting in the mountains, Big John's been drinking since the river took Emmy Lou. There's just Neil, his Daddy's rifle in his arms and just turned twenty two, wondering what to do...

Powderfinger

There are several other twenty two songs- Taylor Swift's 22, Lily Allen's 22 (same title, different tone), The Flaming Lips' When Yer Twenty Two and Bright Eyes' Land Locked Blues that contains the line, 'The world's got me dizzy again/ You'd think after twenty two years I'd be used to the spin'. Not really mate- twenty two is still ridiculously young. We'll finish with Billy Bragg and his 1985 calling card- 'I was twenty one years when I wrote this song/ I'm twenty two now but I won't be for long'. 

A New England

The opening line is a borrow/ steal from Simon and Garfunkel's Leaves That Are Green, a 1966 song about lost love. Billy places A New England in the early 80s, Thatcher's Britain with youth unemployment, the bomb, the miner's strike and the Falklands War as his backdrop. Among all of that he doesn't even want to find a new England, he's just looking for another girl. 

'I saw two shooting stars last night/ I wished on them/ But they were only satellites/ it's wrong to wish on space hardware/ I wish I wish I wish you cared'. 

I'm not sure there are many better lines in popular music than that. 

Brian Wilson

Brian Wilson’s death at the age of 82 came just days after Sly Stone’s at exactly the same age, another of the giants of the 60s departing from the stage. And there’s no doubt Brian Wilson was among the giants of that decade, the pop culture decade that played such a huge part in creating the world that we live in. Brian Wilson’s genius on those recordings the Beach Boys made in the 1960s is pretty much beyond compare. By the age of 21 he was producing mini- symphonies, elevating pop music (itself only a decade old) into an artform. His musical genius is evident in his songwriting, his skills at arrangement (his brothers' and bandmates' harmonies, the cream of LA's session musicians and entire orchestras), and his production (Good Vibrations, splicing together different recordings, the weirdly smooth but out of kilter psychedelic pop of songs like Surf’s Up and ‘Til I Die, the phased, magical sound of Feel Flows written by his brother Carl, the spooked eeriness of In My Room).  
Good Vibrations is a hymn to teenage emotions, love and lust as religion and mystery, something unknowable, the ultimate 60s pop song with theremin and harmonies, the most expensive single ever recorded at the time- and worth every cent.

'I don't know where but she sends me there...'

Good Vibrations

He had another side to his genius too. Brian Wilson grew up in Inglewood and Hawthorne, those south Los Angeles suburbs that grew as the city sprawled in the 20th century, post- war America's economic boom fueling mass expansion of the cities, rows and rows of identical houses with driveways and gardens and picture windows. His father was a brute, physically and emotionally abusing Brian and his brothers Carl and Dennis. Despite those domestic difficulties Brian grew up in post war California, the place at the centre of the most advanced consumer society in history, a utopia where every (white) family owned their own perfect home, where everyone had a well-paid job for life, where everyone owned a TV and a car, where the shops were always full and the ocean was always blue, where the 20th century dream was a reality. Brian knew, and you can hear it in some of his earliest songs, that there was something wrong with this, that there was a hole in the American Dream, that utopia had an emptiness. The beach, the tan, the perfect smile, the ice cold Coke bottle with a straw, the surf, the girls, the little Deuce Coupe, the endless sunset and forever summer- it wasn’t the answer. 

In 1963, following a run of singles most of which celebrated surfing, The Beach Boys released Be True To Your School. What could be more wholesome than that?

Flip the disc over and there’s Brian’s first real moment of fragility, the melancholy that emanates from much of his work, and maybe a sign of the mental health problems that affected him all his adult life. In My Room is an aching plea for solitude, a song about wanting to be away from the world and although the lyrics suggest his room is a place of safety, the minor key eerie beauty of the song suggests something else.  

In My Room

You’re So Good To Me, California Girls, Don’t Worry Baby, Wouldn’t It Be Nice, God Only Knows, Caroline No, I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times, I Know there’s An Answer/ Hang Onto Your Ego… all these songs have that at their core, a sadness, a searching quality, an answer to a question that you don't want to ask and can't be found.

You're So Good To Me

This melancholy and emptiness inside Brian Wilson- no amount of 20th century consumerism can fill it and as Brian discovered LSD couldn’t fill it either. Nor could religion. Pet Sounds is a sumptuous, perfect pop album and also the sound of a man welling up, his eyes filled with tears but he’s not sure why. 

In 1968 Brian invented pop culture’s first real moment of nostalgia, nostalgia for the early 60s, the desire to get back to a pre- Kennedy assassination, pre- Vietnam world where everything was simpler. ‘It’s automatic when I talk to old friends/ The conversation turns to girls/ We knew and their hair was long and soft/ And the beach was the place to be… let’s get back together and do it again’.  

And then in 1971 called time on the whole thing...

Surf's Up

In the 70s he struggled with mental and physical health problems. The other Beach Boys filled his absence with their own songwriting but he could still create absolute magic, his own version of psychedelia that mixed doo wop and barber shop quartets with 60s pop and tape effects. The albums Sunflower, Surf’s Up and Holland are peppered with Brian’s genius, with otherworldly songs that have a huge emotional power not least Surf’s Up, Sail On, Sailor and ‘Til I Die. There were various comebacks, upheavals, arguments, battles and re- unions, ill health and moments of resurrection. I never saw him play live but know people who did and who talk about it in terms of religious experience. A diagnosis of dementia in early 2024 meant that Brian's death was not unexpected but even so, what a loss.

'Til I Die

'I'm a cork on the ocean/ Floating over the raging sea/ How deep is the ocean?'
He was a one off in many, many ways. RIP Brian Wilson. Sail on.

The Grand Designer

A new Adrian Sherwood release is always something worth giving one's attention to. A 10" Discoplate release under his own name would seem to be worth one's absolute full attention. The four track EP, titled The Grand Designer, comes out this Friday and has been trailed by a track of the same name. It's a superb piece of dub music, spiritual almost, with a wonderful groove and array of FX laid over the top- sirens going off, hisses of cymbal and percussion, a snatch of guitar, deep bass, explosions and growls, bongos, pianos, whatever... it's beautifully realised and perfectly produced. 

The other tracks include Let's Come Together complete with vocals from the departed Lee Scratch Perry and two that promise a lot just by  their titles- Russian Oscillator and Cold War Skank. The vinyl is unfortunately sold out but the digital is available here. 

Sly Stone

The death of Sly Stone rippled and then flowed through the world of music and social media on Monday evening and into Tuesday. He was 82 and had lived quite a life. I think I first caught sight of him in 1989 with the 20th anniversary release and TV screenings of the Woodstock movie. His name became a fashionable one to drop and Sly And The Family Stone's multi racial, mixed gender, good time dance music from the late 60s fitted in with the times. When people mentioned acid house, S- Express, The Stone Roses, Bass-o- Matic, De La Soul and a host of others, Sly Stone and The Family were never far away. Like many people I bought the Greatest Hits album, an album stuffed wall to wall 60s dance floor hits, a fusion of pop, soul, funk and psychedelia played by people with long hair and Afros wearing dungarees and floral shirts. They were tailor made for 1989- I Want To Take You Higher, Dance To The Music, Everyday People, Hot Fun In The Summertime Everybody Is A Star...

It's fair to say as well that when the Woodstock film is taken as a whole, Sly is very much the star... boom lackalackalacka...

Later on in the early 90s Arrested Development sampled Sly for their hit People Everyday and then people began to refer to There's A Riot Goin' On. In 1991 Los Angeles went up in flames with the acquittal of four policemen who had been filmed brutally beating Rodney King. It seems frighteningly apt that when Sly died, there was indeed a riot goin' on again in L.A., this time caused by the President and (again) racially motivated.

The album There's A Riot Goin' On is a very different record from the feel good anthems the Family Stone made in 1967/68. Recorded largely by Sly on his own and featuring one of the first sues of drum machines, it's a dense, pessimistic and disillusioned album, murky funk. The arc of the civil rights movement is reflected in it, from I Have A Dream in 1963 to the assassination of King in '68, from the Freedom Rides and the Greensboro Sit Ins in the early 60s to the Watts riots and Black Power by the end of decade. It's a pissed off, militant and on edge. Sly had mixed with the Black Panthers and was being urged to make music that reflected the times, with an all Black band. Drugs and paranoia play their part. It's one of those albums that everyone should own a copy of. 

Luv N' Haight

Family Affair

RIP Sly Stone. 

This Ain't No Fooling Around

Jerry Harrison and Adrian Belew have been touring Remain In Light in Europe- they played Oslo, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Hamburg and Cologne, three dates in the Netherlands and then Brussels, Warsaw and Luxembourg and last week arrived in the UK with gigs in Manchester and Wolverhampton and then London. Harrison was a Talking Head, guitar and keys/ synths, and Belew played guitar on Remain In Light in 1980 and then as part of the touring band (documented on the second disc of The Name Of This Band Is Talking Heads and an incredible film of the band playing live in Rome in 1980).

The band that took to the stage at The Ritz last Thursday night is a dozen people strong, Harrison and Belew centre stage accompanied by two female singers, a man right in front of us who sings a lot of the David Byrne parts (and not afraid to bring his own take to some very well known songs) and plays a huge saxophone, several keys/ synth players, another guitarist, a drummer, a percussionist and a bassist. Most of them are also the support band, Cool Cool Cool, and they do a superb job of re- animating those Talking Heads songs. They have the necessary funkiness and can do the New York edge too. I've seen David Byrne perform many of these songs before- Harrison and Belew do them just as well but without the performance art that Byrne always brings to his shows (and I loved his American Utopia tour).  

The set isn't just Remain In Light. They dip into other parts of the Talking Heads back catalogue and beyond, kicking off with Psycho Killer (a crowd pleasing place to start) and hit us with four Remain In Light highpoints- the jerky, uptight but loose art- funk of Crosseyed And Painless, Harrison and Belew trading guitar licks, followed by House In Motion and a brilliantly slightly manic but very much on the button I Zimbra. From this they roll into Born Under Punches, the sax/ singer in front of us screaming the vocal lines, 'Take a look at these hands/ The hand speaks/ The hand of a government man'. The band are dancing around, the 76 year old Jerry Harrison is doing that thing where he closes his eyes and rocks back on his heals, his long curly locks framing a very contended smile. 

Cities from Fear Of Music follows and then Harrison plays Rev It Up from his 1987 solo album Casual Gods (I have Rev It Up on 12" and I'd be surprised if its been out of the sleeve since 1988). Slippery People sounds huge, Jerry's synth and keys solo a particular joy. Adrian Belew takes the spotlight for a King Crimson cover (Thela Hun Ginjeet according to SetlistFM- I'll have to take their word for it, a man's got to got o the toilet and the bar at some point) and then they launch into Once In A Lifetime, a refreshingly off kilter take on the song- the part three quarters of the way through where Harrison hits some huge synth chords is grin inducing. By this point we're right at the front. Everyone's dancing. There are a lot of younger people in the crowd as well as the usual middle aged audience and the feeling (I hesitate to use the word vibe but probably should) in The Ritz is amazing, evryone really enjoying hearing these songs so close up played by people having the time of their lies. A one point the two singers, the keys players and the sax/ singing man do a choreographed turning on the spot dance, a nod maybe to Stop Making Sense- it's a wonderful moment. 

More? They play Life During Wartime, easily one of Talking Heads' best songs, Byrne's endlessly quoteable lyrics reeling by as the band cook up a storm- 'We dress like students/ We dress like housewives/ Or in a suit and a tie/ I changed my hairstyle so many times now/ I don't know what I look like....'- and then they close with Take Me To The River. 

Life During Wartime

The encore is just two songs, the first Drugs (from Fear Of Music), a woozy, fractured, distorted song, and then they dive into The Great Curve, maybe the most dancey, most poly- rythmic, most Remain In Light of the Remain In Light songs, Belew providing the squeals of guitar and bursts of electricity, as the band bring the futuristic sound of 1980 into now. When it ends the players line up across the front of the stage for the ovation and it's clear that Jerry Harrison (plus Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz) as well as additional players like Belew, brought a huge amount to these songs, both in the studio and live- Jerry Harrison is unflashy and un- rock starry, New York cool and an innovative guitar and keys player- and as the house lights come on its all smiles on the floor of The Ritz. 

The Great Curve