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 Do nothing for as long as possible.

My responses were the Specials, The Stone Roses (who I've just realised also did nothing for as long as possible by releasing nothing between One Love in June 1990 and Love Spreads in November 1994), Underworld and Sandals with Leftfield. Brian and Peter's Oblique Strategy proved to rich pickings from the Bagging Area readership with a bumper comments box of responses- Brian (not Eno) suggested Black Flag, Swc came up with Notts post- punkers Do Nothing, Ernie suggested Elton John's Song For Guy, Khayem had multiple songs (John Cage, Orbital, Richard Norris' long running Music For Healing, and Love Is All), Anonymous proposed Andrew Ridgeley and Wham!, Rol went with Simon Armitage's Scaremongers, Beerfueledlad gave us Spacemen 3, C turned off her mind, relaxed and floated downstream with The Beatles, Dan went for Fugazi, Jase suggested The Beach Boys and Chris went for Stasis by Force Of Angels. 

This week's card is this- Use 'unqualified' people.

I didn't have much of an immediate response to this Oblique Strategy, I had to let it percolate for a while. If by unqualified it refers to musical training and qualifications, I'd guess that the majority of people who make the music I listen to are unqualified, at least in terms of formal musical training. Many musicians are self- taught, many of the vocalists who stand up in front of a microphone are several years down the line before they get any vocal training or singing lessons. I'd guess that there's a decent number of people I listen to who have some educational qualifications despite the ongoing pop culture suspicion of education. Punk made a virtue out of being unqualified- being able to play and having stayed in school and gained O Levels were seen as/ portrayed as un- punk. 

In 1977 The Nosebleeds released a 7" single, Ain't Been To No Music School. After a burst of classical music at the start we get a couple of minutes of very 1977 punk, fast and thrashy, shouty vocals, lo fi production. 1977 Mancunian punk. 

Ain't Been To No Music School

It probably wouldn't be of much wider interest if not for who was in The Nosebleeds (formerly Ed Banger and The Nosebleeds) and what they went on to do. Ain't Been To No Music School is the first recorded output of Vini Reilly, the pale young guitarist from Wythenshawe who went on to form The Durutti Column, a key Factory act and a huge Bagging Area influence and favourite. Vini co- wrote the song and the B-side (Fascist Pigs) with Ed Banger. Both Vini and Ed left The Nosebleeds after the single's release. Vini and the first version of The Durutti Column would also come to an end fairly abruptly and if it wasn't for Tony Wilson's intervention, pushing Vini into a recording studio with Martin Hannett, we might not have heard much more from Vini either. 

The drummer on this single incidentally was Philip 'Toby' Tomanov, also from Wythenshawe, who played with Linder Sterling's band Ludus and on The Return Of The Durutti Column after The Nosebleeds demise. He would also play in Martin Hannett's Invisible Girls and drummed for Nico (who lived in Manchester during the 1980s), John Cooper Clarke and Pauline Murray. In 1988 he joined Primal Scream and played on I'm Losing More Than I'll Ever Have, the song that Andrew Weatherall remixed into Loaded. Toby drummed on both Screamdelica and Give Out But Don't Give Up. 

The Nosebleeds continued for a while without Ed and Vini, a certain Stephen Patrick Morrissey arrived as singer and one Billy Duffy joined on guitar. There were two gigs and then The Nosebleeds split up in May 1978 but both The Smiths and The Cult have their origin stories in The Nosebleeds. Morrissey had his own views on education and the qualifications system and on The Smiths' second studio album he took his revenge on the Manchester schools and the 'belligerent ghouls' who ran them in the late 60s and early 70s . Given what he's become, it's probably best to remember him this way.

The Headmaster Ritual (Live on Spanish TV, 1985)

Punk and post- punk saw qualified/ educated musicians form bands as well as unqualified- for every Steve Jones (in his memoir Lonely Boy he tells of rarely attending school and leaving with nothing and says he was functionally illiterate until into his 40s) there's a Green Gartside (Fine Art, Leeds Polytechnic). Joe Strummer, Mick Jones and Paul Simonon all went to art college- Simonon and Jones met there, Simmo regularly pinching oil paints and brushes off the students from wealthier backgrounds. The Gang Of Four formed when the members met at Leeds University. Jon King, the group's singer, has been interviewed at two friend's music blogs this week, Plain Or Pan here and The Vinyl Villain here, to promote the publication of his autobiography in paperback, out shortly. 

To Hell With Poverty! is a key Gang Of Four song, scathing and frantic,Andy Gill's overloaded guitar feeding back and sounding like a siren, with rumbling but danceable post- punk bass and King's vocals, an anti- capitalist celebration of getting drunk on cheap wine while waiting for the giro to arrive. 

To Hell With Poverty!

It's telling that Eno and Schmidt's card puts 'unqualified' in inverted commas- unqualified for what? Maybe it suggests that in the studio the band should go and find someone from outside to contribute, someone who is not from the band, an unqualified outsider. I started to think of the guest appearances on songs and albums by people who might be seen as unqualified for the part just by being external. Johnny Depp appeared on guitar with both Oasis and Shane MacGowan (the latter on Top Of The Pops in 1994 with The Popes doing That Woman's Got Me Drinking). 

In his memoir Sonic Life Thurston Moore talks about arriving in the mid/ late 70s New York scene and how creativity was far more important than technique or training, that being unqualified is no object if you have ideas and the desire to do something. This is what keeps inspiring people to have a go, the idea that anyone can step up, plug in and have ago. It's the basis of most outsider pop music since the 50s really- the 60s art school bands, the punks, 80s indie, acid house, many of the groups and bands in the 90s, all very much making the art of the unqualified. 

Feel free to drop your own responses to Use 'unqualified' people in the comment box. 

More

Steve Hillage has had a long and interesting musical life- part of the Canterbury scene in the early 70s, solo and with Kevin Ayres and Soft Machine, then Gong with Daevid Allen (and where he met his partner Miquette Giraudy, his and Miquette's 1979 solo ambient opus Rainbow Dome Musick, production work with Simple Minds in the early 80s and The Charlatans a decade later and from 1989 his and Miquette's ambient/ dance outfit System 7 with The Orb and Youth and he played a key role in establishing the dance tent at Glastonbury.

Steve and Miquette are not standing still. System 7 are back with a new album, Flower Of Life, out later this month. A single came out ahead of it at the end of March, I Want More...

Coldcut's Matt Black is present on I Want More, which starts out with Can inspired bass and then mutates into pulsing synthlines, Matt's demo the launchpad for a soaring, insistent, four- four track that began as a discussion about Miquette's early 70s film soundtrack work, specifically a French underground film from 1969 about heroin addiction in Ibiza called More (to which Pink Floyd contributed the soundtrack). This short clip provides a flavour of the film...

This is Pink Floyd's Main Theme from the soundtrack, a very late 1960s Floyd track- cymbal splashes, wheezy organ, skittery drumming and throbbing bass. The sound of what they called a Happening. 

Main Theme

System 7's album follows in couple of weeks, ten tracks with early 90s ambient/ progressive house grooves and synth sounds. The title track pulses with positivity. On Beulah Alex Paterson from The Orb shows up, crunchy drums, synth squiggles, a Mae West vocal sample and visions of fields filled with dancers. There are faster and thumpier tracks, full on banging psy- trance on Atmosphere and an Eat Static collaboration Transceptor. Penultimate track Bonjour takes us down, three minutes of comedown with a slightly paranoid edge that eventually evens out. Flower Of Life finishes with a System 7 remix of Delia Derbyshire Appreciation Society, Dubby Chain Signal is an extended downtempo/ ambient, chill out room delight that could be twice its seven minute length and not outstay its welcome. 

Better Days Are Coming

Nightmares On Wax released In A Space Outta Sound in 2006, the fifth album by George Evelyn. The sound was a trippy blend of soul, reggae and electronics, a late night album for heads, lots of detail in the sounds. Flip Ya Lid has some cheerful whistling and a clanking machine rhythm and then a lovely warm reggae bassline. 

Flip Ya Lid

Soul Purpose is electronic soul, lo fi and scratchy like an old 7" playing with a new vocal sung alongside it. It's entrancing and not a little beautiful. 

Soul Purpose

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of In A Space Outta Sound Warp have released a box set which includes a set of  Adrian Sherwood versions, eight new dubbed out remixes that make a companion version, another side of the album. Sherwood's reconstructions head into dub space, that particular place and channel he operates in. He's been on a roll in recent years with solo releases, compilations and Dub Syndicate reissues. His album The Collapse Of Everything was a 2025 highlight. His work on In A Space Outta Dub is more of the same, the usual brilliance with Doug Wimbish playing new bass. 

On You Bliss Sherwood blurs horns, guitar lines and bass, all surrounded by echo and space. On Purpose starts out spindly and brittle but then the vocal kicks in, 'better days are coming you see', and we're into dub/ Lover's Rock territory. Flippin 'Eck has Flip Ya Lid's whistling and an entirely new rhythm, a Space Invaders sound. Final track, Nyabinghi Dub, is seriously good, a filmic piece of music with a 50s feel. You can listen to the whole album below or go to Bandcamp and get it there.

Out To Lunch

Glen Matlock's documentary I Was A Teenage Sex Pistol was on TV last week. It came out last year, based on Matlock's book of the same name and is very much the Glen Matlock side of the SexPistols story. Glen seems like a nice person, reflective and a music lover, fired up by an introduction to the bass guitar and a love The Faces in the mid- 70s. Various people pop up to support Glen- Clem Burke, Paul Cook, Steve Jones, Billy Idol, Cheetah Chrome and Wayne Kramer all make frequent appearances. The film traces the formation and rise of the Pistols, from Glen getting a job at Malcolm and Vivienne's shop Sex on the King's Road and meeting Steve and Paul through the shop, forming the band (originally with Wally Nightingale, who was later dropped in favour of John Lydon/ Johnny Rotten) and learning to play and write together. Things change when John Lydon joins and the story, which as Steve Jones says at the start of the film 'has been told a million fuckin' times', takes a familiar run through punk, bans, the jubilee, the scandal, the filth and the fury, Bill Grundy, EMI, A&M, cancelled gigs and all that.

Glen talks about his role in writing the songs that became the band's repertoire. He describes sitting in a pub and taking a melody line from an ABBA song playing on the pub's jukebox and writing Pretty Vacant from it. Jones wrote some words, later adapted by Lydon who took great glee in pronouncing vacant as two words, 'va- cunt'.  

Pretty Vacant

Glen also tells how he wrote the main riff for Anarchy In The UK on the bass guitar and took it in to Jones and Cook, and that Lydon then added the words, everything falling into place. As you'd expect the details of Glen's sacking from the band are central to the film. Paul Cook admits that he and Steve Jones could have stood up for Glen and didn't. Lydon was threatened by the make up of the band- he always felt a step removed from the other three. Cook and Jones were long term friends and a tight unit. Lydon needed an ally in the band and Sid Vicious was maneuvered in to do be that person- Glen had to go. Glen was supposedly sacked for liking The Beatles, a line McLaren came up with but in reality it was Lydon's paranoia and band politics. Jones and Cook knew that there wouldn't be a band without Lydon. 

Lydon is absent from the documentary apart from in archive footage- there's no new interview material from him and he's very much split from the Matlock, Jones, Cook version of the Sex Pistols currently playing with Frank Turner on vocals. Lydon's appearance and performance, his stare and stance, his vocal delivery and lyrics, made the Pistols into something else entirely but in no way does John look like he was ever an easy person to be in a band with. The lifespan of the Sex Pistols was always going to be short and when Lydon got Sid in on bass it was the beginning of the end- Sid's lack of ability, his heroin addiction and the US tour proved too much for all of them. Lydon, or Rotten, inadvertently destroyed the band from within. 

Glen talks very openly and a little ruefully about it all and says he made friends with Sid, offered to teach him the basslines and made a big point of showing Lydon that he bore no ill will about his sacking. The end section of the film has him looking round the Punk Rock Museum in Las Vegas (yes, such a thing exists and yes in such a place) and noting that they don't have a photo of the band with him in it on display. He clearly still feels a bit written out of the story. The film shows some post- Pistols Glen, The Rich Kids and other ventures, but weirdly doesn't really mention the 1996 re- union or subsequent ones at all, where Glen was reintroduced into the band and to his rightful place as co- songwriter and bass player with the Sex Pistols. 

Few, if any, bands have had such an impact on popular culture and with just one single album, a mere twelve songs. The world of 1977, the jubilee and swearing on television, councils cancelling gigs by a group who said 'shit' and 'fucking rotter' on early evening TV, seems so far away in some ways- a world where swearing on TV was actually shocking and had real life repercussions. The violence they faced was extreme and the relationship with Malcolm an obvious source of tension. Malcolm and Lydon presented their versions of events in the years after- now Matlock (and Jones) have given theirs. An entire punk scene spun off from the Pistols, in the UK and the US, thousands of bands forming over the ensuing years directly inspired by the Sex Pistols, by their sound, their image, their attitude, and that slim catalogue of songs. 

I went back to listen to Never Mind The Bollocks, to see what if any power it still holds. Hearing it again was a thrill- the sheer attack and energy of the songs, the power of Steve Jones' Les Paul, a wall of guitars, firing away is undeniable. Lydon is a one off, a complete presence, sneering and speak- singing his way across the album, from album opener Holidays In The Sun to E.M.I forty minutes later.

Matlock was actually asked to return to the studio to record the basslines for Bollocks when it became apparent Sid wasn't up to the task. He wanted payment in advance and when it didn't appear, he didn't go. The only song on Never Mind The Bollocks to include Glen playing on it is Anarchy In The UK. The rest of the bass parts were done by Jones. Bodies and Holidays In The Sun were written after Glen had left. Of all the songs on the album, Bodies is perhaps the most extreme, Lydon's lyrics about abortion and mental health issues and his anguished howl of the chorus, 'Bodies/ I'm not an animal', and the verse 'Fuck this and fuck that/ Fuck it all the fuck out/ She don't want a baby that looks like that/ I don't want a baby that looks like that', still shocking. Away from the pantomime, the who did what and why, the safety pins and the monarchy, Bodies is a visceral, uncompromising portrayal of Pauline, a Sex Pistols fan, 'who lived in a tree'. Meanwhile Steve Jones sounds like an explosion in a buzzsaw factory. 

Bodies 

Where's North From Here?

We had a really good weekend in London. The Flightpath Estate were part of the line up at the Acid House Chancers event at The Social on Saturday night, on this occasion me and Baz third on the bill in the downstairs room with Mark representing upstairs in his Rude Audio guise. It was a fantastic night, the reaction of the crowd to the music was off the scale and I will at some point recreate the set and share it here. We got loads of good feedback and my pre- set nerves at taking over from Jenny Leamon, who already had a room of people dancing, were settled fairly quickly but the fear of clearing the floor and playing to an empty room is real. 

While we were in London on Saturday we popped into Tate Modern. I wanted to see Mark Rothko's Seagram Murals (again). On turning into one of the galleries we were met straight away by Andy Warhol's Marilyn diptych, a piece of art so famous it's almost meaningless, just pop culture wallpaper. Seeing it close up and in full wall sized glory was an experience, fifty slightly different Marilyns fading from day glo colour to black and white. 

Mark Rothko's Seagram Murals take up an entire room, a series of very large, wall sized rectangles in deep reds, maroons and black. They become the room, swallowing you inside them. I can see why some people find them quite oppressive and they certainly suggest something about Rothko's state of mind when he painted them (for a restaurant originally). When I first saw them in Liverpool in 1988, an eighteen year old just arriving at university, they had an impact on me and going back to see them in London periodically over the years since, they still do. I like big art, art you can get lost in.

On Sunday morning we went out for breakfast in Soho, looking for a morning after cure and still on a high after DJing at The Social. Just round the corner from our hotel was It's Bagels, a New York style bagel shop offering breakfast bagels, the walls decorated with pictures of Bob Dylan and De La Soul. The people sitting in the window looked like they were enjoying their bagels so we went inside. The in- shop stereo was loud, playing a weirdly hallucinatory late 70s/ early 80s soundtrack, trippy yacht rock and stoned singer songwriters. Without warning Mark E. Smith suddenly boomed out, 'where's north from here?', beamed in from his guest appearance with Gorillaz in 2010. I actually laughed out loud in the queue. The expected Gorillaz electronic glam stomp never came- the syrupy yacht rock came back in, Mark E Smith's line isolated from its source and re- appropriated in a new soundtrack. 

Glitter Freeze

The bagels were very good. Not cheap but very good. 

Monday's Long Song

Sunn O))) are back with a new album, titled Sunn O))) and clad in a sleeve with two Mark Rothko paintings. Sunn O))) don't really deal in songs or melodies. They detune their guitars and play slow and sludgy drones, feedback as standard and amplifiers overloaded to the point of exhaustion. The sound and timbre are the thing, an utterly focused and single minded approach to music. For the new one there are some synths and field recordings but essentially they remain unchanged- the sound of continents colliding or ice ages passing. This is Glory Black... 

Two Hours Of Music's Not For Everyone At Terraforma

In June 2017 Andrew Weatherall played an afternoon DJ set at Terraforma, a festival near Milan, Italy. It was billed as a Music's Not For Everyone set, Weatherall's banner for an eclectic mix of music- rockabilly, dub, krautrock and cosmische, post- punk, weird indie, leftfield electronic/ Balearic, music from the fringes and the margins. The set he played at Terraforma is one piece of evidence to show what a master of the art of DJing he was, a two hour selection of songs that are perfectly selected and sequenced and that get a young and beautiful Italian crowd dancing despite the heat. 

The full two hour long genre and decades spanning set can be found at Soundcloud and there's an almost complete tracklist too. Anyone that lines up Fujiya & Miyagi's Extended Dance Mix, The Dream Syndicates' John Coltrane Stereo Blues, Moon Duo's Sevens and AMOR's Paradise in the same section of a DJ set is touched with genius.

• Karl Hector & The Malcouns: Kingdom Of D'mt
• M'Bamina: Kilowi-Kilowi
• Aşık Emrah: Bu Ellerden Göçüp 
• The Orielles: Sugar Tastes Like Salt (Andrew Weatherall Tastes Like Dub Mix Pt.1 (Live Bass)) 
• Gerry & The Holograms: Increased Resistance
• Fujiya & Miragi: Extended Dance Mix
• The Dream Syndicate: John Coltrane Stereo Blues
• Poncho Brothers: Danza Oscuro
• ?: ?
• Moon Duo: Sevens
• AMOR: Paradise
• Scientist: Step It Up (Black Star Liner RMX)
• Iries In Roots: Dub Signs 
• Winston Edwards & Blackbeard : Airport Smuggling
• Mugwump: At The Dub Front (Mugwump Extended Dub Version) 
• La Logia Sarabando: Todos O Ninguno 
• ?:?
• Klaus Dinger & Japandorf: Udon 
• Andrew Weatherall: Evidence The Enemy

Even better, if you go here you can watch the man at work for a section that starts with his remix of The Orielles, CDs in a plastic bag on the desk, sunglasses, workshirt and braces and jeans with big turnups, shimmying in the afternoon sunshine and air guitaring when he spins The Dream Syndicate.

John Coltrane Stereo Blues

Short of gorging oneself on chocolate I can't think of a better way to spend Easter Sunday. Happy Easter!