I went back to The Whitworth last week to revisit the Beneath The Great Wave exhibition, a selection of surviving prints from Edo period Japan by Katsushika Hokusai and Utogara Hiroshiga. I loved it when I went in March, its free, I'm off work- what's not to love?
The Whitworth is a beautiful building, stepping in through the front into the modernist interior and recent re- modelling is in itself a joy. The woodblock prints of Japan's floating world are visionary- the colours, the lines, the perspectives- and seem to be both old and modern at the same time. There are drawing of nature- the great wave of the exhibition's name and numerous prints of Mount Fuji.
The scenes portrayed in some of the prints, show Japanese people going about their daily business- farmers, travellers, actors, Geisha, merchants, urban dwellers and rural peasants, Samurai. The floating world (Ukiyo) became a phrase used to describe the growing urban world, where Edo (future Tokyo) became a place for hedonism and urban lifestyles. It and the prints also brought Japan into contact with the West.
As I walked into the gallery last Tuesday a primary school was in the large open room that overlooks Whitworth Park and as I started to make my way round the prints the children started singing Sly and The Family Stone's Everyday People.
I poked my head round the corner to have a look and the children's choir were singing for parents and carers, a teacher conducting this group of multi cultural and diverse ten and eleven year olds singing...
'There is a blue one who can't accept the green one for living with a fat one trying to be a skinny one, different strokes for different folks, and so on and so on and scooby- dooby- doo one... I I I I am everyday people'
It was quite a moment, completely unexpected and a little overwhelming.
In 1992 Arrested Development borrowed Sly Stone's hit for their own song, a tale of respect (and the lack of it) and a warning about the dangers of violence. Arrested Development were a big thing for a while in 1992-3, an alternative voice in the rap world.
A few days ago Echo And The Bunnymen's new single came out, a song called Brussels Is Haunted. They've been playing it live for some time- I heard at Manchester's Albert Hall a couple of years ago. I don't know how much of a contribution Will Sergeant made to it but it sounds like an Echo And The Bunnymen song, one that could easily have fitted on 1987's self titled 'grey album'. The guitars chime, Clem Burke plays drums, Ian is in good voice, there are some suitably Bunnymen lyrical touches- Brussels is haunted by the song, by world wars, by Plastic Bertrand, by Waterloo, by Annik Honore, by its past and by its present, while Ian is dancing at the Classic and drinking rum, cassis and beer blond. It sounds like Ian is still interested, still cares and is still up for it.
A day later they launched news of an album called Apples For Isaac. The title alone caught me in my tracks. I've no idea at the moment who the Isaac in the title is or what it's referring to but it has a personal angle for me. Time I guess, will tell.
Last year I did a Bunnymen Sunday mix which took in covers, versions, remixes, edits and samples, very much an inspired- by Echo And The Bunnymen mix. You can find it here. At the time I promised a follow up. Friday's Seven Seas on Top Of Pops post and Thursday's Brussels Is Haunted double punch provided the prompt for me to get it done. This is one for the purists, entirely songs from the 1979- 1987 period, the original line up, no singles, all album tracks, B- sides and alternative versions, the Bunnymen in all their pomp.
Over The Wall is from the second Bunnymen album, the mighty Heaven Up Here. Heaven Up Here has a powerful opening trio, with Show Of Strength, With A Hip and Over The Wall. In 1980 they recorded this version for John Peel ahead of the album's release, Will, Les and Pete perfectly locked in, guitars, bass and drums kicking up a storm and Mac imperious on vocals, all urgency, drama and poetic beauty.
All I Want is Heaven Up Here's final song, a celebration of life and living as the finale of an album of darkness and terror- spiky, pounding early 80s post- punk psychedelia. Will's guitar playing is choppy and angular, the sound of flashing lights against ink black skies. 'If we make the same mistake, who will we blame?', Ian asks as the song fades out. A question England fans have pondered since Wednesday night.
Heads Will Roll is from Porcupine, the third Bunnymen album. The extended Summer Version came out on the Never Stop 12". Porcupine is a heavy album, produced by Ian Broudie, one that no one particularly enjoyed making. They had to drag the songs out of themselves after a long period on the road. McCulloch has said that lyrically it's the most autobiographical and honest album- the lyrics are pretty oblique. Heads Will Roll is a highlight (along with the majestic pair of singles, The Back of Love and The Cutter) and those Indian strings provided by Shankar add a great deal to Heads Will Roll.
Ocean Rain. The greatest album ever made etc. My Kingdom is superb, skyscraping 1984 psyche rock, from an album with some huge pop moments and career defining songs. Ocean Rain is all drama, majesty, jewels and stormy seas. My Kingdom, organ intro, rackety dynamics, gorgeous sound and a twin Will Sergeant guitar solo, his semi- acoustic pushed through a 60s valve amp, utterly wonderful, while Mac sings of 'burning the skin off' and 'climbing the rooftops'.
Way Out And Up We Go was the B-side to 1983's The Cutter, Ian asking for money but being given alcohol, the bass and drums pounding away and Will chucking everything at it.
Over Your Shoulder is from 1985, a B-side to Bring On The Dancing Horses, the Bunnymen responding to the new pretenders- the Jesus And Mary Chain- by piling the guitars up and stomping on the fuzz pedal.
Happy Death Men is from their debut album Crocodiles, moody and isolated, more than a little frantic. Anguished. Neurotic even. The band sound as if they're playing under a strobe.
All That Jazz is also from Crocodiles- the Peel Session version here is from a May 1980 session. Ian's lyrics are funny, genuinely comedic- 'Where the hell have you been? We've been waiting with our best suits on/ Hair slicked back and all that jazz'.
Watch Out Below is an early version of The Yo Yo Man, recorded at a 1983 Peel Session. It shimmers, embers burning, a psychedelic sea shanty that became more overblown on Ocean Rain. The Peel Sessions album, double vinyl, twenty one songs, is an essential companion to the albums they made during the same period. If you haven't got it, you really should.
Ocean Rain- this alternative version of the 1984 album's final and title track is faster, less hushed and awed. They were right to slow it down but this version is fascinating, Will's guitar riff and Pete's brushed drums rattling away as Ian finesses his lyrical theme for the song and the record, 'screaming from beneath the waves'.
Turquoise Days is from Heaven Up Here, all of that album's melancholy, drama and dark energy brought together. Ian sets sail under rumbling skies, 'We got a problem/ Come on over', the unease and dread of 1981- Cold War paranoia, Ian Curtis' death, Thatcher's managed decline of Liverpool, inner city riots- a flickering backdrop. On the album's cover the four Bunnymen stand on the beach at Porthcawl, staring out to see beneath heavy clouds, silhouetted on the sands.
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 You can only make one dot at a time.
This made me start joining the dots between One Dove and Dot Allison, Arab Strap, Wire and Dot Dash, Ry Lichtenstein, The Jam and Pete Wylie and Ariadne's Labyrinth. From the wider Bagging Area community came these dots- C with Angines de Poitrine, Ernie with The Blue Aeroplanes ...And Stones, Al G and Jonathan Richman and Vincent van Gogh, Craig with Hot Chip's Over And Over, Noone and Les Rallizes Denudes, Rol and The Teardrop Explodes, the Swede with The Beat and Ranking Full Stop, Walter with !!! and Chris ZenArcade with some lysergic dots and E.D. 209's Metre and that Robocop sample...
This week's Oblique Strategy card is this- A very small object. It's centre.
My knowledge of physics is fairly limited. Last year a friend lent me Carlo Rovelli's Helgoland,a very readable account of the story of quantum physics. I still couldn't explain even in the simplest terms much about quantum physics but I enjoyed the ride.
I do know that atoms are extremely small and are the basic particles that make up everything. At the centre of an atom is the nucleus (which must therefore be smaller than an atom- right?). Atoms are so small we cannot see them, a million times smaller than the breadth of a hair. Coincidentally (and I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that nothing about this series is coincidental, it all seems to be connected), earlier this week I was wandering around the campus at Manchester University where I photographed the Humanities building, a rectangle of concrete opened in 1970. It is the picture at the top of this post. It is just round the corner from the Rutherford Building, which contains the room in which in 1917 Ernest Rutherford split the atom* and so created the modern field of nuclear physics (I once went on a course in the exact room where Rutherford made his discovery).
Sixty seven years later, also in Manchester, Factory Records released FAC 102, Atom Rock by Quando Quango.
Quando Quango were a dance act somewhat ahead of their time, Mike Pickering channeling electronic music from New York and Chicago into mid- 80s Manchester along with Gonnie and Reinier Rietveld. They formed in Rotterdam in 1980 and then relocated to Manchester in '82 when the Hacienda opened. Mike Pickering's role in modern Manchester and Factory cannot be overplayed.
Atom Rock is a light on its feet slice of 1984, pioneering dance music with jazz and Latin influences worn on its sleeves, produced by Be Music (Bernard Sumner and Donald Johnson of ACR). That jangly, funky guitar riff is a moonlighting Johnny Marr (the birth of Electronic, Marr and Sumner's late 80s band, is this record). It's one of those songs that made Factory such an interesting record label in the mid- 80s. 'Fela Kuti meets Kraftwerk somewhere between Rotterdam and Manchester', said Gonnie of the band's sound.
A year later there was a Mark Kamins remix, Kamins putting his Roland 808 through its paces (Kamins was the man who launched Madonna)...
Juan Moreno's Atomism Theory came out in 2024, an eight minute ambient piece that actually sounds like it could be the sound of atomic particles and nuclear fission.
And in a nice link to Carlo Rovelli's Helgoland, in 2009 Massive Attack released Heligoland (both named after the same piece of land, an archipelago in Germany). The first single from the album was Splitting The Atom, with Horace Andy on co- vocals and Damon Albarn on keys.
I have several other atom/ atomic songs but I'll stop there. Feel free to split your own atoms in the comments box or make any other responses to the Oblique Strategy card- A very small object. It's centre.
* Apparently 'splitting the atom' is a poor choice of words for what Rutherford actually did. The University of Manchester's website says that Rutherford was ''the first person to create an artificial nuclear reaction... now described as 'splitting the atom' in popular accounts''
Echo and The Bunnymen on Top Of The Pops, July 1984. A masterclass in making an effort and blowing early evening teenage minds, the Bunnymen at their most pop and most stoned.
The Bunnymen travelled all the down from Liverpool to the Top of The Pops studios to mime to the third single from Ocean Rain, their poppiest moment, the epic, swooping grandeur of Seven Seas. On the left, Pete de Freitas is dressed a penguin, white face paint and puffed out chest, a minimal kit (two cymbals and a snare). He looks deadly serious as only a man dressed as a penguin should.
On the right, Will Sergeant (I presume, it could be anyone) miming guitar and dressed as a fish. Unlike Pete there is less effort made at the miming. Will/ the fishman strums an F chord for the entire performance.
In the centre, Ian McCulloch. Ian is of planet Earth but not on planet , a man spiralling far away, distant and alone, porcelain skin and bird's nest hair, swimming on dry land, dancing in front of a mirror of his imagination, Narcissus in high waisted pleated trousers. Stoned immaculate. It's a miracle he can remember the words.
As the band give it their very best shot, a giant fish dangling above them and down the front Bill Drummond stands by, mouthing the words to Seven Seas and operating the stage prop waves as the band hit the third chorus. Where is Les? Missing, lost at sea...
Magnificent, the stuff that dreams are made of. Seven Seas is peak McCulloch, a song of romance and travel, cavemen and mother religious. The tortoiseshell is apparently a reference to cocaine and sex (or sex on cocaine) but let's not dwell on that right now, it might spoil the mood.
The Peel Session version of Seven Seas is a diverting take on the song, recorded in June 1983, the band still working the song out with Will's guitar front and centre and a drunken glockenspiel part that didn't make the final version.
A truly globetrotting post today, from the Far East to Europe, with two reviews I've done over at Dr. Rob's Japan based Ban Ban Ton Ton blog in the last month, a pair of albums that are lighting up summer 2026. Both albums have something in common in sound and outlook, a European cosmische sensibility, one from Italy and one from Germany.
First, Italian ambient artist Gigi Masin and an album called Movement which spans the electronic spectrum with ambient drones, heavenly choirs, cosmische excursions, sidesteps into jazz and breakbeats and more besides. My review is here and the album is at Bandcamp here.
Deception Dance is a seven and a half minute triumph, a marriage of the synthetic and robotic with the organic and human.
From Italy we head north through the Alps to southern Germany and Nuremberg's Konformer who have just released their second album, Konformer II. The band play instrumental kosmische, synths and drums following the bass guitar which usually takes the lead and creates the energy- loops of bass that become grooves, spacey, minimalist and motorik sounds. Three of the six tracks are named after places, Mont Ventoux, Marseille and Todmorden. The last of these three will host Konformer when they play a week long tour of the UK in late August/ early September, concluding at Manchester Psyche Fest.
My review at Ban Ban Ton Ton is here and the album, out now on Jason Boardman's Before I Die, is here and below.
In 2023 Andy Bell and Masal released an album, called Tidal Love Numbers- four long ambient pieces that wandered into psyche, folk, jazz and blissed out noisy drones and back again, Andy's guitar and Masal's harp and synths all blurring into a greater whole. Andy and Masal have a new album out in October called Common Primitives and ahead of it this single, The Morning Of The Trip...
The Morning Of The Trip is the soundtrack to something- a slow film about the passage of time perhaps, time lapse photography of the start of a new day, a long descent from the heavens by balloon. A theme tune. Visual music. Shoegaze/ ambient and harp.
You can buy it and pre- order the album at Bandcamp
In a handy moment of coincidence this is the morning of my trip too- I'm off to Glasgow for a couple of days where I shall meet up with JC (The Vinyl Villain) and a few other like minded folk. When I booked my train a few weeks ago I wasn't really thinking about the World Cup and which teams might have made it to the semi- final stage. It has transpired that tonight I shall be in Glasgow when England play their semi- final against Argentina, a place where an Englishman supporting England is unlikely to be particularly popular.
I have been drawn in by the World Cup despite my misgivings about it- about Trump's USA being the hosts, about the advert/ hydration breaks, about Infantino and FIFA (and some of those misgivings have been very much realised such as Trump pressuring FIFA to rescind a US player's red card not to mention their treatment of the Iranian team and Omar Artan, the Somali referee who was barred from entering the country).
The sheer variety the World Cup brings- teams and fans from countries as far afield as Japan, Morocco, Belgium and Mexico, the collision of styles and cultures, the colour and the spectacle- is very much to be applauded and soaked up. The world in all its varieties.
I often have an unease about supporting England- the flag, the national anthem, the fans dressed as crusaders, the endless recycling of that song and of 'football coming home'. It's all so, as the kids say, cringe. But in the current climate, a multi- cultural team of young men from a variety of backgrounds doing well is a good thing (three examples- Bukayo Saka, Nigerian parents, born in Ealing; Jude Bellingham, Irish and Jamaican parents, born in Birmingham; Djed Spence Jamaican and Kenyan parents, born in London; this is England and the racists, the Reform voters and the lamppost flaggers are having to deal with it. It's the England most of us are actually happy to be part of and to live in). When Jude Bellingham scored against Norway in extra time late on on Saturday night I was leaping round the living room like a lunatic. Fingers crossed we find a pub in Glasgow where we can watch England go one step further.
This was the sky on Sunday evening, taken from the back of our house- the sun being obscured by smoke and the air thick with the smell of burning moorland. There was a major fire on moorland around Dove Stone reservoir, east of Oldham twenty two miles away, started apparently by youths setting fireworks off. The fireworks were to commemorate an eighteen year old who died swimming in the reservoir last week. One depressing thing leads to another. The smell of burning was still in the air yesterday, depending on wind direction, there's a layer of ash everywhere and in the evening the skies became filled with smoke and dust again.
In 2009 a tribute album to Mark Mulcahy was released featuring covers by assorted stars from the indie/ alternative world- Thom Yorke, the National, Dinosaur Jr, Frank Black, Mercury Rev and Juliana Hatfield all contributed as did Michael Stipe.
Mulcahy was the frontman and singer in 80s guitar band Miracle Legion and then Polaris and a solo artist too. The tribute album was released to raise funds for Mark when his wife Melissa died unexpectedly leaving him to raise their then three year old twin girls single handedly. An expanded version of the album, Ciao My Shining Star, came out in 2016- you can find it at Bandcamp.
Everything's Coming Undone is a song from Mark Mulcahy's 2005 solo album In Pursuit Of Your Happiness, a visceral and misanthropic set of songs with J Mascis and Joey Santiago providing musical backup. It's also at Bandcamp.
R.E.M. were still active at the time of this cover. Michael's cover version has some lovely Velvets style organ drones, a rudimentary drumbeat and Stipe in very good voice, 'I know that I will be alright', he sings, the sort of line that sounds utterly convincing when coming out of his mouth. The chaotic, noisy end section is also a joy in itself.
