Where Do We Go On A Saturday Til The Morning Light?

Back in February I started writing some guest posts at Ban Ban Ton Ton, Dr. Rob's one stop shop for all things Balearic, electronic and dance music oriented. I haven't posted any links here since I wrote about Richard Norris' February Music For Healing, a twenty minute long ambient track called Chrome, and Nina Walsh's Music To Fall Asleep To and then in March the new album by Belgium's Rheinzand, Atlantis Atlantis, a record shaping up to be one of 2022's best. Last month I went to the launch party for Disco Pogo, the relaunched Jockey Slut magazine. Mo and Charlotte from Rheinand were one of four people scheduled to DJ in Electrik in Chorlton. At an opportune moment I spoke to Mo and told how much I like the album and that I'd reviewed it for Ban Ban Ton Ton. In response he gave me a big hug. 

Since March I've written a further six reviews, hopping around Europe and the world musically, with more in the pipeline. In chronological order then, with links to Ban Ban Ton Ton where you can listen to many of the tracks from the albums- 

Field Works- Stations

An album in two parts, the first a set of recordings done by Stuart Hyatt (in association with The National Geographic Society and The Anchorage Museum) where Hyatt used microphones and ground recording devices to record the sound of the earth. He then added human voices to create a found sound/ ambient ten track album that is frequently beautiful. The second part sees the ten tracks (Field Stations) remixed. My review at Ban Ban Ton Ton is here. 

Société Étrange- Chance 

French instrumental three piece cooking a storm- there are references and comparisons to A Certain Ration, King Tubby, Tortoise, Adrian Sherwood, Can and Jah Wobble in my review which you can read here. Six echo laden, post- punk/ cosmic instrumentals.

Andreas Kunzmann- Album

Austrian 90s IDM/ techno made for home listening. Lots of fun and very engaging. Read more here. 

The Balek Band- Medicines

Back to France, Nantes to be more exact, and some delirious, open minded dance music, a melding of synths and electronics with live instruments to make some lovely, exuberant, shape shifting Balearic/ cosmische/ nu disco/ house/ whatever else you can think of. Read and listen here. 

BSS (AMS)- Bredius

Mysteriously titled artist and EP from Amsterdam, Dutch ambient techno with splashes of Detroit and Blade Runner and more besides. Four track EP, my review is here. 

Rich Ruth- I Survived, It's Over

Nashville ambient/ instrumentalist Rich Ruth made the excellent Calming Signals back in 2019. His new album builds on the sounds on that album and the trauma of a carjacking outside his home to make one of 2022's most far reaching records, righteous drone/ ambient/ spiritual jazz. Read more here. 

For those of you who'd like a Bagging Area meets Ban Ban Ton Ton uptown primer/ sampler I put this together, a forty minute mix featuring one song from each of the albums reviewed above. 

Bagging Area Meets Ban Ban Ton Ton Uptown 

• Field Works: Station 2
• Field Works: Station 4 (Afrodeutsche Remix)
• BSS (AMS): De Regenboog
• Andreas Kunzmann: Sputnik Rave
• Société Étrange: La Rue Principale Grandrif
• The Balek Band: Cosmic Barry
• Rich Ruth: Doxology
• Rheinzand: Atlantis Atlantis

There will now follow a break in transmission until early August. School finished yesterday and we're getting away today, off on our holidays for ten days in the sun in the Canaries. See you all when I get back. Adios amigos. 

Go On

I was reminded of this poem earlier this week while reading something else, sweltering in the heat we've had hanging over us. It's called The Dead and it's by US poet Billy Collins.

'The dead are always looking down on us, they say,
while we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich,
they are looking down through the glass-bottom boats of heaven
as they row themselves slowly through eternity.

They watch the tops of our heads moving below on earth,
and when we lie down in a field or on a couch,
drugged perhaps by the hum of a warm afternoon,
they think we are looking back at them,

which makes them lift their oars and fall silent
and wait, like parents, for us to close our eyes'

It was the final reading at Isaac's funeral last December, read by the celebrant at the graveside. I found it in a poetry anthology I have and it seemed appropriate. How we managed to do anything last December baffles me looking back, never mind plan a funeral- it seems now like we were alternating between being on numb autopilot and stumbling round in a fog. I haven't thought much about the poem since the funeral but reading it two days ago, sitting and sweltering in the heat we've had hanging over us for the last few days, it moved me (again) and I was struck (again) by the sentiment in it and it seemed to provide some comfort in a way I hadn't considered when I chose it back in December. 

I've not been very well recently. In the middle of May I developed a cough which refused to go away for six weeks. After three weeks of coughing I went to the doctors and they sent me for various tests- a chest X- Ray, blood tests and so. All came back clear. It was suggested I might have developed asthma and I was prescribed an inhaler which made no difference. Just as the cough started to clear up I went deaf in my right ear (nearly four weeks ago now). At a rough estimate I'd say I've got about 10% of my hearing in that ear. It's muffled and feels blocked and no matter what I do I can't pop it. It seems my sinuses and eustachian tube are blocked but nothing seems to be unblocking it and as well as being incredibly frustrating (not being able to hear is grim) it veers between uncomfortable and painful. In the morning it has sometimes cleared but as soon as I get up and stand up, it fills up again. At times the tinnitus in the right ear is very pronounced too (although that was there before it got blocked). Since going back to the doctor I've been on a steroid nasal spray and decongestants but nothing seems to be working. I've had some hay fever in the past but nothing like this. I don't know if the pollen is particularly bad this year- some reports say it is- and maybe my hay fever has been exacerbated by having Covid last December, everything inflamed by the virus, or if the stress of the last seven months has poleaxed my immune system, or if it's something else, but having never been a particularly ill person, it's really affecting me being unwell for so long. I can't help but feel it's in some way connected to Isaac's death and the aftermath of all that. Apart from anything else, it's really affecting my ability to listen to and enjoy music, which is shit. 

This is new from Panda Bear and Sonic Boom, a summer infused slice of Beach Boys style psychedelic pop called Go On with a Troggs sample contained within it's grooves. An album follows in July. It's got little to do with either the Billy Collins poem above or my medical woes but it's a feel good piece of music for the middle of July and even heard in mono lifts me up. 

Machine Music

Machine Records is based in Cardiff, a production line of electronic music emanating from South Wales. Their Bandcamp page is a treasure trove of releases, umpteen singles, albums and EPs going back to the mid 00s. Here's two of the more recent ones. Out soon is an EP by Cardiff artist First Third, a three track release called 1, 2. The two main tracks, 1.1 and 2.2, are glitchy electronic pieces, patterns and structures set up and then altered. As well as these two there's a remix by label boss Dan under his Stereo Minus One name. All three tracks can be bought here, in New Zealand dollars. Is there a ley line that connects Cardiff and Wellington? And is First Third named after Neal Cassady's rambling, freewheeling autobiography? 

Also on Machine Records, out last month, is Stereo Minus One's Lodestone, a thirteen track album which finds some weird new spaces, sounding a bit like the industrial works of South Wales, coal mines and engineering plants, taken over by computers. Again, glitchy but with some industrial ambient, reminiscent in paces of the 90s/ early 2000s work of Richard D. James. In some places, Other Worlds for example, it's all quite unsettling, in others more contemplative. Miserable Miracle has echoes of Two Lone Swordsmen (the late 90s era output, and Tiny Reminders). Rewind is one minute of repeating, filtered sounds and a rattle. The album is here. It finishes with a mix of Alarums by Cape Canaveral which is in a similar place to a lot of Pye Corner Audio's music from the last couple of years, murky, submerged, experimental but enthralling electronic shapes. 

Wrote For Luck, Takes Me Higher

There was further sad news at the weekend with the announcement of the death of Paul Ryder aged fifty eight. Paul aka Horse was brother of Shaun and the bass player in Happy Mondays, and when you listen to their records you realise how much of their unearthly groove was due to his basslines. Self taught and trying to copy the basslines from Motown, Parliament and Funkadelic and house records, his basslines are the foundation on which the Mondays were able to base their chaos. I first saw them at the Mountford Hall, Liverpool University in March 1989, a gig like no other, the entire room dancing from front to back, the stage a shadowy blur with Shaun sitting on the drum riser to deliver his stream of consciousness street poetry for most of the gig, Bez appearing through the dry ice, grinning and bug eyed. Paul and guitarist Mark were left and right, shrouded in darkness churning out their weirded out funk rock grooves and noise. They finished, as they had to, with Wrote For Luck.

Wrote For Luck (Dance Mix)

This performance has the band in full flight on Club X in September 1989. Club X was on Channel 4, one of the channels late 80s, late night programmes aimed at catching the youth audience. 

RIP Paul Ryder.

Another long lost/ never seen before TV performance from the 1989/ 1990 period came my way a few days ago, this time loved up rave heroes The Beloved. The group are miming (unlike the Mondays) but this clip of them doing Your Love Takes Me Higher on Hit Studio International, recorded at Limehouse in London, is rather good and a perfect little time capsule.

Your Love Takes Me Higher is a superb piece of house- pop, encapsulating the optimism and wide eyed feel of the times. The Beloved duo Jon and Steve have expanded to a full band for TV appearances drafting in friends, everyone giving it everything, all long hair, long sleeved t-shirts and baggy jeans. 

Your Love Takes Me Higher (Demo)

Monday's Long Song

A swift return to these pages for Jezebell with the release last Friday of their three track Jezebellearica EP. Two of the three have been released previously, the slinky groove of Le Funk Et Moi and the White Ilse stomper Stop Bajon (Primavera), summer songs built around the works of Max Berlins and Tullio Piscopo. The lead song, Jezebellearic, is seven minutes and forty three seconds of laid back, easy going charm, a groove and song that according to Jesse 'just seemed to write itself', pushed along by a lazy vaguely familiar bassline. It is sprinkled with the voice of legendary DJ Alfredo, the father of the Balearic Beat and resident of Ibiza since 1976, who picked up the residency at Amnesia and proceeded to play the contents of his record collection, a unique and eclectic blend of rock, pop, dance, soul, jazz, soundtracks, instrumentals and eventually house to a crowd of pleasure seekers from all over the world who 'all knew each other by their first name'. Jezebellearic is magic bottled, a feeling compressed into bytes. And much more. Get it here and name your own price. 

In the track Alfredo lists some of the records he played, including this one from Art Of Noise in 1984. How's that for cooling you down on the hottest Monday of the year/ decade/ century?

Moments In Love

Forty Minutes Of Seahawks

Since 2010 Seahawks, a duo made up of Pete Fowler and Jon Tye, have released a hatful of albums, singles and EPs, plus done multiple remixes of other artists- dreamy, drifting, brightly coloured ambient/ Balearic/ cosmic music that ebbs and flows in waves. The mix below is a sample of some of their own tracks with a couple of remixes stitched in, perfect for the heat that's arrived this weekend and which promises to be something else next week. Music to do nothing to. 

Forty Minutes Of Seahawks

I've listened back to this mix several times since putting it together and have to say it sounds really good- that's all credit to Seahawks. Making a lovely sounding mix from their music was not difficult at all. Islands, Missed and Rainbow Sun are all from the Paradise Freaks album, released in 2014. The Pye Corner Audio remix of Sky Is You comes from a remix EP the same year that also featured a Prins Thomas remix that I couldn't fit on here but is very much worth checking out. Escape Hatch is from their 2016 album of the same name. The remix of Tim Burgess, every gloriously broken and wasted eleven minutes of it came out in 2012 and their remix of Private Agenda was one of last year's highlights from a six track remix mini- album called Submersion.

• Seahawks: Islands
• Private Agenda: Malanai Ascending (Seahawks Remix)
• Seahawks: Rainbow Sun
• Seahawks: Escape Hatch
• Seahawks: Sky Is You (Head Tek Pye Corner Audio Mix)
• Tim Burgess: A Gain/ Stoned Alone Again (Seahawks Remix)
• Seahawks: Missed

Saturday Theme Nineteen

After Mark E. and Brix Smith divorced MES threw himself (or shuffled himself maybe) into a new line up and a new album, what would become The Fall's twelfth studio album, 1990's Extricate. Martin Bramah rejoined on guitar and at the height of Madchester (something Mark was fairly scathing about not least on the song Idiot Joy Showland from 1991's Shift- Work). However in a nod tot he changing musical times The Fall had worked with Coldcut on Telephone Thing, the song which leads Extricate, a chunky drums, dance music influenced song which fitted in very well with the then current sound. Extricate also had possibly the most sincere and personal song The Fall recorded, the beautiful Bill Is Dead. It also had Black Monk Theme Part 1.

Black Monk Theme Part 1

Keyboards and guitars plus a loping drumbeat Black Monk Theme Part 1 is a cover of I Hate You by 60s garage band The Monks. I Hate You is one of the great songs of the 60s, an organ led, minimalist piece of nihilistic thuggery, the flipside of the 60s dream of peace and love pre- dating both The Stooges and The Velvet Underground (I Hate You came out in 1966 on the album Black Monk Time). The Monks were five GIs stationed in Gelnhausen, West Germany. The brutal rhythms, chanted vocals, lyrics about the war in Vietnam, whiny organ, banjo and feedback gave them a pretty unique and far out sound. If that wasn't enough, they dressed as monks in black robes and shaved their heads into tonsures.

I Hate You

Mark E. Smith retitled another of their songs, Oh, How To Do Now for Black Monk Theme 2 which came out as a B-side on the Popcorn Double Feature 12". The highspeed backing track and chipmunk like backing vocals make it all sound a bit ridiculous until Mark wades in to bring the song under control. 

Black Monk Theme Part 2

The original can also be found on Black Monk Time, a blast of proto- punk rock from five men playing U.S. airbases and in West German beat bars at a time when being sent to die in the jungle of South East Asia was a daily possibility. 

Oh, How To Do Now

When their time in the army came to end they stayed on in West Germany honing their abrasive, high energy, non- conformist and distorted sound. Their record company, Polydor, decided against releasing the album in the States, it was they reasoned 'too radical and too non- commercial' and Black Monk Time didn't get a full U.S. release until 1994.  

Extricate got rave reviews in 1990 and remains one of The Fall's finest albums. In typical Fall style Martin Bramah and keyboard player Marcia Schofield were sacked by Mark while the group were touring the album in Australia. 

Dexter And Lumux

Last November I posted a track from a Higher Love compilation, a record label based in Brighton, a five minute slice of dubby euphoric house called Dexter In Dub by Perry Granville. 

In May this year Dexter was remixed by Bedford Falls Players, a seven minute reworking that takes Dexter into entirely new places, starting out blissed out and then getting chuggy, long synth chords and rattling drums and an echo- laden voice, building intently. At three minutes thirty six it explodes into controlled chaos, beats and chopped up vocal before a piano returns to take us down again. Things go back and forth over the next few minutes as BFP pull out all the stops, twisting Perry's melon all over the place. Dexter In Dub (Bedford Falls Players Remix) is available at Bandcamp, name your own price.

Perry has a new track about to press all your acid house buttons, an intense and pumped up piece of hypnotic Friday night, dancefloor mayhem called Lumux. Echoes ricocheting around, acidic squiggles, 303 bassline, voices muttering in the flashing of the strobe, drums clattering about. It's heady stuff. Lumux is also at Bandcamp and at the end of the month the full release comes with remixes from Peza and Exildiscount, neither slowing down or taking it easy.  

This Is Joe Public Speaking

In September 1977 The Clash released their third single, the adrenaline rush, punk high watermark and righteous fury that is Complete Control. Written and recorded in a fit of disgust at CBS who had put out Remote Control as a single, a song that was already available to fans on the band's debut album (the single came with a B-side that was a live version of London's Burning to add to the sense that fans were being ripped off). In the hyper- consumerist days of late stage capitalism that is 2022 you could be forgiven for thinking that there are worse things a record company could do than release an already available song as a single but that's to underestimate things. For The Clash this was a sure sign that their record company were the enemy. 

Complete Control

Complete Control is The Clash's single most exhilarating moment in a career full of them, a high octane rush of guitars, Topper's drums (his first recording since joining), Joe's voice and a lyrical state of the punk rock nation address. It starts out with their disgust at CBS releasing Remote Control...

'They said 'release Remote Control'/ But we didn't want it on the label' 

...and then goes elsewhere, record company press jaunts next in the firing line...

'They said 'fly to Amsterdam'/ the people laughed/ the press went mad'

For a band as obsessed with smoking weed as The Clash you'd think they'd be happy to go to Amsterdam but they won't be told to go. The song's title, referenced in the next line, comes from a meeting with the group's manager Bernie Rhodes at The Ship on Wardour Street, who kept saying he wanted complete control. Strummer and Simonon had to leave the pub, collapsing through laughing so much. Again, the state of punk in 1977- Rhodes (and Pistols manager McLaren) demanded control of their bands. The bands didn't want to be controlled by anyone. Or at least, seen to be. The group's run ins with the law and habit of letting ticketless fans in to gigs by pushing open fire exits get a verse too, punk credentials further established. Joe and Mick are still furious though, ramping up the lyrical content to match the adrenaline rush of the guitars with lines about being 'artistically free' and 'bits of paper' and record companies who want to 'make a lot of money and worry about it later'. Joe's so angry that during the guitar solo he takes the Mick down snarling 'you're my guitar hero'. Mick must have been happy to leave this in. Mick was happy to be a guitar hero, even in the No Beatles, Elvis or Rolling Stones frenzy of 1977. 

The second half of the song breaks down, a brief pause from Mick's wall of treble, with Joe adopting the point of view of tabloid press and TV news and their view of punk as 'dirty, filthy... ain't gonna last'. The call and response vocals between Joe and Mick are incredible, a weapon lots of the other punk bands didn't have- 'Control/ C- O- N/ Control'. Everything about Complete Control, all three minutes and ten seconds of it, is as good as punk rock guitar music can be.

Lee 'Scratch' Perry produced Complete Control. He heard their cover of Police And Thieves, was in London with Bob Marley and The Wailers and invited to come to Sarm East studios in Whitechapel to produce. Legend has it that the group, Mick especially, took Lee's production and re- produced it somewhat, bringing the guitars further forward, dialing the dub echo down. In the punk rock cauldron of autumn 1977 you can understand why- a weirded out dub version of the song would have been confusing and at odds. Jon Savage, so disappointed with the band by the time of Give 'Em Enough Rope that he penned the line 'so do they squander their greatness' in a review of that album, said in England's Dreaming that Complete Control was not a 'piece of cynicism [but] a hymn to Punk autonomy at its moment of eclipse'. 

In 1999, promoting The Clash's posthumous live album From Here To Eternity a live version of Complete Control was released by CBS. The album jumps about, live versions from different venues and different years and despite this holds up well. Complete Control is from The Clash's lengthy residency at Bond's Casino, Times Square, New York, in 1981 (13th June to be exact). The fire that fuelled them writing it and recording it in 1977 is still burning brightly- it's an incendiary and hair raising version, Mick's guitars firing on all cylinders, Joe at his very best, and Topper's drumming is ' incredible- his kick drum at the start, the snare drum during the 'all over the news spread fast' section and his fills as the song rushes towards its conclusion- especially. This version has popped up on my mp3 player during my drive to work three times this week, every time sounding as exciting as it possibly could. 

Complete Control (Live at Bond's)

Concurrence

For some reason I missed posting this when it came out back in the middle of June (and previously when it was first released in September last year) but better late than never. Walking out in the late evening sunshine last week with my headphones in, Concurrence by Jezebell came onto my playlist. 

A slow motion, dark slice of dubby house that picks up with a thunderous breakbeat a little way in and proceeds to mess things up with a chopped up vocal snippet that twists its way in and around the track. Ominous synths add to the moodiness as the vocal burrows its way in. Leaves one feeling slightly frazzled- in a good way. 

It was originally available here as part of When Disco Goes Wrong with several mixes, remakes and dubs, including one very acidic one from Sweden's Mindbender. Then last month it was re- released here with more remixes courtesy of Akio Nagase, 33rd December, Super FU and Pete Bones. Jezebell are Jesse Fahnestock and Darren Bell and despite featuring their music here several times in the last year I have only just now twigged that the name Jezebell comes from the start of Jesse's name and the end of Darren's. 

Slip Inside

I went to see Primal Scream on Saturday night playing outdoors at Manchester's Castlefield Bowl, the last night of a week of gigs from bands including James, Pixies, Crowded House and a Hacienda Classical night. Primal Scream have been touring to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Screamadelica, playing Glastonbury, rapturously received two nights in Glasgow, Halifax's Piece Hall and moving onto London this week. I've seen them a number of times over the years and always enjoyed it, from a gig in a basement in Planet X in Liverpool in August 1989 when they played Ivy Ivy Ivy and songs from their leather trouser/ long hair period to an audience of about twenty people, to the original Screamdelica tour in the early 90s, to the XTRMTR tour where three guitarists- Andrew Innes, Throb and Kevin Shields plus Mani on bass- made a racket unlike anything else. In 2013 they toured More Light (the last good album they made I think), two hours of sinuous psyche, krauty grooves and trippy songs. I saw them do the Screamadelica 21st anniversary shows back in 2012, Screamadelica at full pelt with Weatherall as support. Saturday night for me didn't quite match up. On the tram home- fuelled by some lager I should say- I opined that it was poor stuff, heritage/ festival rock and 'boring shite'. 

Castlefield was rammed, the sun shining and people had been out all day. It was very much a party mood. On the way to meet my brother in the pub before the gig I passed three hen parties. In the pub we saw Mani, who'd taken the stage with his former bandmates in Glasgow a few days earlier for the encore. He looked like he might have a date with a bassline later. The crowd was bouncing from start to finish and reactions on social media have been really positive, Primal Scream at their best. I wasn't so sure on Saturday night and I'm still not sure now. They play Screamadelica, more or less in order, starting with Movin' On Up, a slow intro before Innes cranks out the riff. In the past they've had two, sometimes three guitarists. Now it's just Innes and I don't think it works as well, they need a fuller sound. The twin pairing of Slip Inside This House and Don't Fight It, Feel It were both good and felt right, samples and keyboards filling it out, loose but the early 90s rhythms on point.

Slip Inside This House

A five piece gospel choir are on stage all night which really adds to the vocals. They're the best thing about Come Together. They play both versions, the Farley and Weatherall mixes jammed together, but it doesn't really take off- it did at the Apollo in 2012, it really flew, but it doesn't make it here for me, a big disappointment. Inner Light, the gorgeous Beach Boys- esque instrumental is lovely, Bobby slipping off stage for a few minutes. Then they play the title track that didn't appear on the album, Screamadelica, Weatherall and Nicolson's ten minute masterpiece from the Dixie Narco EP. It should sound huge and effortless, gliding and gleaming- it doesn't, it feels lumpy and sketchy, like they've not worked out to play it best. By now I'm feeling a bit like we're into end of the pier mode, Screamadelica as cabaret. The two ballads, I'm Coming Down and Damaged, are played as the sun sets and then Simone Marie plays the bassline to Higher Than The Sun. Bobby gives a nod to Denise Johnson at one point between songs, acknowledging her- she's as much the voice of the album as he is in many ways. During set closer Shine Like Stars the backdrop projections are images of Andrew Weatherall, the man who produced the album and brought it all together for them, the rock and the dance, samples and guitars. Where we're standing, sideways on to the left, we can't really see the projections and I think people in the centre have got a much better experience.

The record that kicked it off (the group's longevity and Weatherall's career as a remixer) Loaded, is played as the first song of the encore. Swastika Eyes follows, an electrifying, pumped up version (based on the Chemical Brothers remix from XTRMNTR) and then we get the standard Primal Scream encore. Just as in the early 90s they turned away from the dance floor and embraced their inner Rolling Stones, they do the same here, three festival rockers- Jailbird (Stonesy rock), Country Girl (always a very silly song, almost a pastiche) and Rocks (ditto). Mani joins them on second bass for the last two, beefing the sound up further. I came away feeling that they've become festival rock, endlessly repeating themselves, not fully able to do Screamadelica justice, a guitarist short and whacking out faux Stones songs for encores. So, in summary, I may have been a bit over the top in describing it as 'boring shite' but with a few days to think about it, I'm not sure it was that good either- but let's face it, it could be me, because almost everyone else seemed to have a great time, and I'm a bit out of sorts at the moment anyway (to put it mildly). 

Shine Like Stars

Monday's Long Song

Nick Cave and Warren Ellis have a new mini- album out, on 10" vinyl available from Nick's Cave Things website. Seven Psalms is seven short spoken word meditations set to semi- ambient, dreamlike music. They flow one into the other and deal with the big questions and big issues Nick Cave has been asking and grappling with for decades now- God, love, loss. They were written during lockdown, one a day for seven days, and recorded at the same time as Carnage but there's not the same level of drama and tension and outright hilarity that Carnage's songs contain. These are straight and honest, directly from him. On Such Things Should Never Happen two mothers lose their children- 'such things should never happen... but they do'- and when I first heard that line it took my breath away. On I Have Wandered All My Unending Days he asks for entrance to 'the mansion in the sky'. 

On the B-side is a twelve minute instrumental, the music from the A-side, Psalm Instrumental, as one long piece. Washes of synths, piano, reverb, a choir fading in and out, some violin, chanting, music from a ceremony. Five minutes in Nick is heard speaking the line about the mansion in the sky. It's a long way from The Birthday Party and The Bad Seeds, Stagger Lee and Deanna but it's a moving piece of work. 

Forty Five Minutes Of Homer

David Holmes is in a purple patch, two singles of wonky indie dance brilliance (Hope Is The Last Thing To Die in 2021 and It's Over, If We Run If Of Love this year, both with Raven Violet on vocals) with a follow up 7" out on Hoga Nord later this year, two Unloved albums mining that 60s Now! sound and another due in the autumn, not to mention some stunning remixes. Throwing all of these together with a couple of choice songs from his past that fit in with those seemed an obvious Sunday half hour mix. The main problem was what to leave out- in the end there were several Unloved songs, some of the remixes of the two recent singles, some songs from his solo albums and a smattering of Andrew Weatherall remixes (of I Heard Wonders and Unloved's Devils Angels) that I couldn't fit in so a Holmes Mix Two may have to follow at some point.

Forty Five Minutes Of David Holmes

• David Holmes: Hope Is The Last Thing To Die
• David Holmes: I Heard Wonders
• David Holmes: 69 Police
• Unloved: When A Woman Is Around
• Phil Kieran: Think Too Much (Unloved Remix)
• The Vendetta Suite: Purple Haze, Yellow Sunrise (David Holmes Remix)
• Unloved: Mother's Been A Bad Girl
• David Holmes and Steve Jones: The Reiki Healer From County Down
• David Holmes: It's Over, If We Run Out Of Love

 

Saturday Theme Eighteen

Back in 1987 the three headed monster of Stock Aitken and Waterman produced a single for model and singer Mandy Smith and somehow created a record which went on to become a Balearic classic. It's an opinion splitter of a record and probably one of those which fits into Andrew Weatherall's description of the impact of E- 'you start off dancing to Throbbing Gristle and end up dancing to Chris Rea. That's how dangerous a drug Ecstasy is'. Mandy's Theme (I Just Can't Wait) was played out on the White Isle by those pioneers who ventured out there in the summers of 1987 and 1988 and ended up on the Balearic Beats Vol. 1 album, a compilation with a tracklist selected by Trevor Fung (who was a DJ at Amnesia in Ibiza from 1982 onwards). The album cemented for many people, not least those who didn't ever get to Ibiza during those halcyon days, the Balearic sound of summer in Ibiza in the late 80s- The Residents, The Woodentops, Code 61, Electra, Fini Tribe, Thrashing Doves, Nitzer Ebb. Interestingly, Trevor recently gave an interview to Dr. Rob at Ban Ban Ton Ton where he said that there were other tracks that were on his shortlist for inclusion but didn't make it. The missing songs would have made the album a much more house based affair- you can read it and find out what they are here. There's a full interview with Trevor here too. 

Mandy's Theme (I Just Can't Wait) (Cool And Breezy Jazz Version)

Mandy's Theme sonically is in a similar place to some of those mentioned above, the drum machine and bassline, the piano, the Spanish guitar. Mandy doesn't arrive until four minutes in, singing about being called a fool and a baby (which may or may not be a reference to her relationship with Bill Wyman, who she first met aged thirteen. He was thirty four years older. They went public, widely reported in the tabloids, on the day of her sixteenth birthday, married two years later and divorced two years after that. He wrote in his autobiography' she took my breath away... she was a woman at thirteen'. Different times eh?). Anyway, moving on from that which all seems even more distasteful now than it did then, Mandy's Theme is a perfect holiday record, the sort of tune that hits the spot in discos in holiday resorts and maybe doesn't sound quite as great back home in Britain in November.  

CCFO

Yesterday brought with it some good news- finally- with the departure of Boris Johnson from Number 10 Downing Street. On Wednesday night he seemed to have gone into full on bunker mentality, hiding in a hole in the ground, last days of Der Fuhrer madness, claiming to have a mandate of fourteen million (that's not how British politics works) and determined to plough away and 'get on with the job'. Then, on Thursday morning, he was announcing his resignation. In the words of Ernest Hemmingway and a quote I've seen in a few places recently, from The Sun Also Rises, a character named Mike is asked how he went bankrupt. 'Two ways. Gradually', he says, 'then suddenly'.

I didn't feel the jubilation I thought I'd feel at seeing him go, not last because his departure speech was spectacularly charmless- it's all everybody else's fault. That's been his default position throughout life. He was never fit for office in the first place and there's no surprise that a man who's been sacked for lying previously should eventually be got rid of for lying. What happened in between- illegally proroguing parliament, repeated misconduct in office, £850 a roll wallpaper and undeclared donations, the deaths from Covid of all who died due to him locking down too late in March 2020, spreading infections through the Eat Out To Help Out campaign and 'saving Christmas' later that year, Partygate, presiding over an administration that received over 120 fines for breaking lockdown rules, intentions to break international law over his own Brexit deal and the Northern Irish border etc etc- was all par for the course for someone who believed that the rules that others abide by didn't apply to him. But in the end, the lying got him. Lying connected to sexual misconduct and cronyism, aptly. He wants to hang on as caretaker according to reports yesterday because him and Carrie have planned to have their wedding reception at the PM's official residence Chequers which seems completely fitting for the pair of them. I look forward to the public inquiry into the his handling of Covid. His supporters keep saying he 'got the big calls right' but I can't think of any- in fact, he got them wrong. And any Prime Minister would have done the same with the vaccination campaign. 

Meanwhile, those members of the Cabinet and the wider Conservative party who like Hemingway's Mike, gradually and then suddenly, found their integrity/ backbone can go fuck themselves too. They put him there in 2019, knowing what he was like and what they and we would be saddled with. Over the last few days it's been noticeable how many of them urged him to resign to do the right thing for 'the party and the country'. In that order, always. The survival of the Conservative Party and keeping it in power is the main thing that the Conservative Party cares about. The rest of us are collateral damage in the ongoing Tory Party psychodrama and especially it's relationship with Europe (which is why we're here isn't it? David Cameron called the referendum to shore up Tory party unity. Johnson is a result of that decision). 

The expectation that things will improve now seems pretty naive. They, the MPs and party membership, will elect someone who is a combination of rabid right wing/ incompetent/ over- promoted. Given that the Conservative Party has given us in succession the three worst Prime Minsters in living memory, I don't have much faith in them doing any better this time around. Johnson and Cummings purged all the relatively sensible ones back in December 2019. What's left is detritus floating around after the ship has sunk below the surface. 

Julian Cope recently announced a new song/ single, available from his Head Heritage website as a download (the CD single sold out quickly). It's called Cunts Can Fuck Off and it's more fitting for Boris Johnson today than any other person I can think of. There's no video/ audio of the single version available. Instead, here's Julian at the Dreamland Ballroom in Margate in January 2020, performing Cunts Can Fuck Off live. 

For your download pleasure instead here's the Archdrude back in 2005 on his Citizen Cain'd album and a song that sounds like The Stooges on Gimme Danger. 

I'm Living In The Room They Found Saddam In

Light Flight

Andy Bell has a new single out to further promote his solo album Flicker, much played round these parts since it came out earlier this year. The B-side to Lifeline is a cover of Light Flight by Pentangle. 

Light Flight has some lovely cascading guitar riffs and a sweetly sung lyric about getting away from it all, getting your head together in the countryside, 'Let's get away... find a better place/Miles and miles away from the city's race'. Andy throws in a superb little backwards guitar part in the middle before the pace picks up again in the second half, the jazzy time signatures and acid- folk pastoralism collapsing the timespan of the half century between Pentangle's original recording and Andy's cover. Along with his recent cover of Arthur Russell's Our Last Night Together Andy is putting some superb and unexpected cover versions out into the world. 

I'm not an expert on late 60s folk rock by any means and find some of it an acquired taste I've not fully acquired- I've got Nick Drake's LPs, a smattering of Bert Jansch albums, a Sandy Denny compilation, Vashti Bunyan's Another Diamond Day, some Fairport Convention and a Bob Stanley compiled CD called Gather In The Mushrooms: The British Acid Folk Underground 1968- 1974. That album has this Pentangle song on it...

Lyke Wake Dirge

An eerie, traditional English folk song, choral voices and a picked acoustic guitar. A dirge is a funeral song and a wake, obviously, is a ceremony for the dead. The song describes a soul's journey from earth to purgatory and the hazards faced making that trip. It features lots of Christian references but some think it pre- dates Christianity. Pentangle were a five piece, fusing folk, jazz and folk rock- Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, Danny Thompson, Jacqui McShee and Terry Cox. Jansch and Renbourn shared a house and were the rising stars of British folk rock, their guitar parts interlocking and complex. I have to be in the right mood for this and maybe I appreciate it more than I enjoy it. 

It reminds me though that I did and do really enjoy this record, also out earlier this year- Richard Norris' superb Lore Of The Land album, recorded by the Lewes, West Sussex based acid- folk trio he formed called The Order Of The 12. This is the title track...

Steam

In 1996 Carl Craig (dressed up as Paperclip People) released one of the best albums of the 1990s, The Secret Tapes Of Dr. Eich, twelve thunderous, funky, driving and intense slices of house/ techno from Detroit. That may put some people off and it shouldn't- there's nothing inaccessible about the album. Tucked away on side three, coming after the slipping and sliding magnificence of Throw, is Steam.

Steam

Steam is built around rhythms and sounds that would have been at home on an early 80s dancefloor in Sheffield or West Berlin (it's partly based on a sample from Steam Away by early 80s post- punk group The Flying Lizards, to be found on their 1981 album Fourth Wall, a record which travelled a long way to get to 90s Detroit). There's some underground industrial funk, tough drums and looped sounds, all retooled for the mid- 90s. The keyboard part that comes in is straight out of 70s Detroit, soul and funk. The Secret Tapes Of Dr. Eich was remastered in 2012 and still sounded utterly contemporary. It's all effortlessly brilliant. 

Someone Somewhere

Two songs linked by similar titles and a home town for Tuesday. In 1982 Simple Minds released New Gold Dream (81- 82- 83- 84), an album where they stepped into the big time, their Mittel Europa and Bowie influences becoming something bigger and bolder. Jim Kerr has said that the album was where they discovered a maturity and a depth. It was where they connected with a bigger audience. I've written before about how getting into early 80s Simple Minds has been one of the biggest musical turnarounds and over the last couple of years they've become one of my favourite bands, certainly all the albums and singles up to and including New Gold Dream. They managed too find a balance and interplay between keyboards and guitars, neither being the lead instrument and which gives them a distinct sound. The third single from New Gold Dream was Someone Somewhere In Summertime, a dreamy slow burning, yearning song.

Someone Somewhere In Summertime (Extended)

Also from Glasgow The Poems released an album called Young America in 2008 which has recently been re- issued on vinyl. The Poems are straight out of the classic Scottish indie tradition, breezy, low key songs played on guitar and drums, female singer, tons of hooks, a bit of Country and Western in there, some 60s soul too (The Bluebells Robert Hodgens is a key member of The Poems so none of that should be a surprise). This song- with a title not a million miles from the one above- opens the album, piano and shakers to the fore and some guest start harmonies from Glaswegian indie royalty (Norman Blake and Justin Currie).

Sometime Somewhere Someone Should Say Something

Monday's Long Song

The Tour de France rode out on Friday, kicking off the 2022 edition in Copenhagen (the furthest north le Tour has ever been). It started with a time trial and the Bahrain Victorious team being raided by the police. Today is a day off for the riders as the teams transfer from Denmark to France for the racing to pick up again tomorrow as they head towards the Alps. To celebrate the Tour coming to Denmark, Copenhagen label Music For Dreams released a four track EP of covers by their artists of some of Kraftwerk's Tour de France songs. Charlotte and Reinhard, both of Rheinzand, covered the eight minute long Vitamin in a pleasingly non- Kraftwerk style, Reinhard's violin taking the place of the keyboard melodies. 

The EP also has covers of the title track by Danish duo Subneisa (where Kraftwerk's synth melody is replaced, brilliantly, by a trumpet)- not a long song but it will brighten up your Monday. You can buy the EP here. 

Back in 2003 Kraftwerk updated their 1983 single and expanded it out into a full album, timed to come out on the hundredth anniversary of the first Tour de France. Fittingly, for a bunch of perfectionists, the album didn't appear until August so missed the race itself. It was their first album since Electric Cafe seventeen years earlier and while it's a very good album, it also shows just how Kraftwerk have been treading water and repeating themselves since the mid- 80s. But then, if you've already invented electronic pop (and had a big hand in the foundation of hip hop and techno too) it's fair enough really. 

Vitamin

Forty Minutes Of Fearless And Vegas

I took this photo the other day by accident with my phone in my pocket. There were several and a couple of short videos too but this was the pick of the bunch- someone said, 'it's like you have a portal to another dimension in your pocket'. If only I'd known it was there all along. It looks very much like a record sleeve too, maybe one by The Cocteau Twins, definitely something on 4AD. Anyway, I like it but despite my best efforts haven't been able to recreate it. For now, the portal remains closed. 

How about some dystopian disco for your Sunday? Earlier this week Jesse questioned whether the new Ron Trent album is actually any good and rather than being the Balearic masterpiece it is being lauded as (not least here), it is actually more akin to the incidental music from 80s US cop shows, Miami Vice when it went soft or Magnum P.I. perhaps. I think with Balearic and ambient music there's always a danger of slipping over the line into bland New Age cocktail bar music but I guess everyone's line is in a different place. I've got a couple of Balearic compilations with songs and tracks where I can feel my younger self shaking his head and wondering what has happened. 

There's no danger of the music in today's mix being labelled soft focus, pastel anti- jazz. In recent years Richard Fearless, both solo and in his Death In Vegas guise, has made some very anxiety inducing, tense and dystopic ambient/ industrial/ minimal techno. Sheets of metal, cavernous reverb, subterranean synths, icily detached vocals from Sasha Grey, thick urban fog, night terrors, dancing in a damp deserted warehouse somewhere in East London with one lightbulb flickering on and off... it's all here. Plus Chris and Cosey, formerly of Throbbing Gristle, on remix duties and Richard's beautifully mournful piano house remix of Django Django. It's all very intense but also perfectly executed and very cathartic. 

Forty Minutes Of Richard Fearless And Death In Vegas

• Richard Fearless: Driving With Roedelius
• Richard Fearless: Earth Tapes
• Death In Vegas: Honey
• Death In Vegas: Consequences of Love (Chris And Cosey Remix)
• Death In Vegas: You Disco I Freak
• Django Django: Giant (Richard Fearless remix)
• Richard Fearless: Gamma Ray

The opening pair of tracks are from the recent Deep Rave Memory and Future Rave Memory albums. Consequences Of Love and You Disco I Freak were on 2016's Transmission album. Honey and Gamma Ray were standalone singles from 2018 and 2014 respectively. The Django Django remix dates from 2016 but was only released properly in 2020. 

Saturday Theme Seventeen

The World Cup should be on now, in normal circumstances. Covid massively affected international sports tournaments of recent years- the 2020 Euros were played in 2021 for example. But the 2022 World Cup not being played now, in June and July, is not a Covid decision or a sporting one, it's a financial/ corruption one. FIFA in their wisdom decided that Qatar should host the 2022 World Cup. It's much too hot to play in Qatar in the summer so it's not being held until November and December. Qatar has no footballing history or heritage to speak of and while taking the game to corners of the world where football is a noble idea, there's little doubt that the money pouring into FIFA from the oil rich Middle Eastern theocracy made the move easier for the FIFA committee to make. Then there's the number of deaths from slave labour used to build the stadia to think about (Qatar claims thirty seven migrant workers died constructing the stadia. The Guardian puts the figure closer to 6, 500). Homosexuality is illegal in Qatar. Human rights abuses are widely documented. There are stories of state sponsored terrorism. It's probably best avoided by all concerned- but it won't be.  

In 1986 Colourbox released their Official World Cup Theme, to time with the tournament in Mexico. Colourbox are one of the 80s unsung heroes, signed to 4AD and sounding nothing like their labelmates combing reggae and soul influences, beat boxes, sampling, synths, pop and dub- and on their World Cup Theme making something that could be described as jaunty. 

The Official Colourbox World Cup Theme

Head Full Of Steam

This is one of those 'just because' posts, no real reason for posting it other than it's a great song by a band who seem destined to remain a cult concern but who had the songs if not the temperament to be massive. The Go- Betweens, formed by Robert Forster and Grant McLennan in Brisbane in 1977, made six albums between 1981 and 1988, all of which are worthy of your time and money. They reformed and made three more in the early 2000s but were brought to a halt by the premature and tragic death of Grant McLennan in 2006. During the 80s they moved to London and signed to various labels (Rough Trade, Sire and Beggars Banquet), expanded their line up and sound and in 1986 recorded what drummer Lindy Morrison says is their best, Liberty Belle And The Black Diamond Express. Every song on it could be a single- jangly guitars, clear production, melodies and poetic, personal lyrics by Grant and Robert. This song, Head Full of Steam, was a single, remixed slightly for radio ,with friend Tracey Thorn on backing vocals and a new middle eight. Lyrically, like many of their songs, it's about lost or unrequited love, 'I don't mind/ To chase her/ A fool's dream/ I'm 104 degrees/ With a head full of stream'. 

Head Full Of Steam

Was it a hit? No, it wasn't. Sometimes it just doesn't happen. It's not that they didn't have the songs but maybe they were just too something to reach a bigger audience- quirky isn't the right word nor is awkward but something stopped them crossing over. Maybe the mid 80s only had room for a certain number of literate alternative/ indie guitar bands and The Go- Betweens fell outside the number who made the cut. Whatever, the songs and the albums remain. Here they are on Whistle Test in '86 promoting it in an empty BBC studio, showing exactly what a great band they were.