One Year Ago Today

Isaac died a year ago today, 30th November 2021 at around quarter to two in the afternoon. He was twenty three. When the worst thing that could possibly happen to you has happened, it's difficult to know which way is up. The last few weeks have been really difficult as this day has borne down on us. I go over the events of the last few days of Isaac's life in my head sometimes, reliving them. Earlier this year I suffered some quite extreme flashbacks, which put me back in to the the room with him as he died. It was so quick which has made it more traumatic. Covid came and took him in less than a week. He was out of sorts on his birthday, tested positive for Covid the following day (Wednesday) and then became more unwell until on Saturday evening we phoned an ambulance. They took him into Wythenshawe hospital. On the Monday morning the consultants told us there was nothing they could do, that the Covid was in his lungs and given his weakened immune system there were no drugs that would work, that he would die within the next couple of days. He died the following day, Tuesday. The three of us were there when he went. I was sitting on his bed facing him, holding his hands. The flashbacks, auditory and visual, were often of this moment. I haven't had any since May, something I feel relieved about but it doesn't take much for me to go back to those days and to replay what happened. I'm not sure if it helps or not but as this date has come closer an closer my mind has been going back there more often. 

It's difficult to believe it is already a year since he died when it feels so recent and still feels so raw. The passing of time is a real fucker and dates and anniversaries have been extremely difficult to deal with, mainly something to get over and be done with. Today may prove to be the toughest of them all, the coming to terms with the fact that it's a year now that he's been gone, that it's now over a year since he was in the house with us, living with us. People keep saying that a year really isn't actually very long at all, especially at our age, but still, a year... it baffles me somehow. 

Writing about it all here has helped. I'm sure at times it has been an uncomfortable and difficult read for others and I don't blame anyone who quietly closes the page and goes to read something else. Some people have said it has helped them, to know where we're at or where we're up to. Writing it down and posting it has helped me get my thoughts in order and I think it has worked as a form of therapy. 

We made the decision to have Isaac buried and we're glad we did. Having his grave as somewhere to go has helped. Early on, back in January and February, it was difficult and I liked going, it felt like he was closer to us while we were there, but leaving was tough. It's still very difficult sometimes, standing there can bring home very suddenly the enormity of what has happened and it has the power to floor me, leaves me feeling like I have to catch my breath. But it's comforting too. It's good to go and see that other people have been, that people have taken flowers or left things for him. We still haven't sorted a headstone and I don't feel any particular need to do that in a rush. The planter we filled with flowers has changed as the year has passed. I started photographing it when we visited, keeping a record of it and how it has changed with the seasons. This picture was quite recent, mid- November. There is a road in the distance of that picture- you can't see it but it's there. The road runs between Broadheath (near Altrincham) and the road to Lymm (I've never checked the timetable but I wouldn't think it's a busy or profitable route and I can't imagine there's more than one bus per hour). We try to go to see him at least once a week. Almost every single time we visit, a bus goes past which always makes me smile. Isaac loved public transport and the bus shuttling back and forth between Altrincham and Warrington has begun to feel like a little tribute to him. 

This place started as a music blog in January 2010 but became intertwined with my life from quite early days and Isaac (and Eliza) have featured regularly. This year especially the music and Isaac's death and my/ our grief have become more wrapped up in each other. Here are two songs that have come to mean something to me in the last few weeks, that have become part of Isaac, his death and my grief, and in some way a part of trying to deal with it all.

Ten days ago I posted a forty minute Flaming Lips mix. I knew some of the songs would be affecting, that they might get to me. Do You Realise?? has that power in any circumstances, even without dealing with the death of your child. Race For The Prize has been connected to Isaac for me since very early days. Jesse Fahnestock questioned- quite reasonably- why Fight Test wasn't part of my mix. 

Fight Test

Fight Test definitely should have been included and for a while it was but I took it out. After our conversation I went back to it and some lines really jumped out...

'Cause I'm a man, not a boy/ And there are some things you can't avoid/ You have to face them/ When you're not prepared to face them'

That's a truth right there. There's some lovely imagery in the song too, something to hold on to...

'I don't know where the sunbeams end/ And the starlights begin/ It's all a mystery'

It's funny how the meaning of songs and the way you hear them can change, that they can be one thing at one point in your life and another at another. That's definitely true of Fight Test. My other song for today is this one by Nick Drake...

'Cello Song

A few weeks ago I pulled out a compilation CD from a pile of homemade one that date back years, to listen to in the car. 'Cello Song came on and it worked its magic as I drove. I kept playing it, pressing back, playing it again, pressing back. It's a gorgeous, almost weightless, song, finger picked guitar melodies and deep sonorous cello sweeps wrapping themselves around each other. I've known and loved it for years without ever really noting the words. Like many of Nick Drake's songs, it's poetic and melancholic but there is a tinge in his voice which suggests hope. The words began to come into focus but I had to wait to do an internet search for them to read them in full-

'Strange face, with your eyes
So pale and sincere
Underneath you know well
You have nothing to fear
For the dreams that came to you when so young
Told of a life
Where spring is sprung

You would seem so frail
In the cold of the night
When the armies of emotion
Go out to fight
But while the earth sinks to its grave
You sail to the sky
On the crest of a wave

So forget this cruel world
Where I belong
I'll just sit and wait
And sing my song
And if one day you should see me in the crowd
Lend a hand and lift me
To your place in the cloud'

They struck me hard, left me gasping a little bit and then as I wiped my tears away and read them again, they made me smile. This is never going to leave us and it hurts like nothing I've ever known before, but we have to find a new way to live without him and to find a way to come to terms with the feelings of loss and grief that we have been left with. Isaac will always be with us - and in a funny way I can find him now in places, like in the lines of songs by Nick Drake and Wayne Coyne. 

The Groop Played New Century Hall Music

If ever anyone was ever meant to play Manchester's recently restored 1963 venue New Century Hall it is surely Stereolab, whose retro futuristic music is perfect for a 60s version of the future, the white heat of technology and all that. I got an offer of a ticket from my friend Darren (the second this month, so many thanks Daz). On Sunday night we were down the front waiting for the band to appear. They arrive on stage at nine, the five members looking very much like a group of teachers on Inset day who took a wrong turn out of the conference centre and ended up on stage by mistake. The songwriting pair Tim Gane and Lætitia Sadier are very much the front pair, Lætitia welcoming us 'to the new century', chatting between songs, singing and switching between synth and guitar. Tim is in front of us with guitar and pedals. The opening song is Neon Beanbag, synths bleeping away, keys chiming, motorik drums and Lætitia's sung/ spoke vocals, 'I'm sad to see that you are sad'. After that there are a few technical issues involving leads and synths and missing plectrums that need sorting and then they're off into a twelve song set that is lapped up by a crowd spanning all ages, teenagers to sixty- somethings.

There are times when they sound very New York, a splicing of Silver Apples modular synth psyche and the feedback and organ of The Velvet Underground, Tim strumming gently but then a stamp on his pedals and it's all feedback and clanging notes. The funk, bossa nova and exotica influences are all in there too, a skillful blend of the obscure and the pop. This song from the 1993 mini- album from The Groop Played Space Age Batchelor Pad Music is aired early on, between Eye Of The Volcano and Refractions In The Plastic Pulse. 

U.H.F.- MFP

As they build to the conclusion, the drums get faster, the synths wiggier and the guitars more scratchy, it all coming together in bursts of noise and sing- song vocals, red and purple lights and the gorgeous ceiling of the New Century Hall reflecting back at the groop who finish with Super- Electric (from way back in 1991). Returning for an encore, after the briefest of disappearances (there's a 10.30 pm curfew so there's no time to be wasted), they blast into Allures and power straight into French Disco with its electrifying drones and guitars, synths and a call to rebellion and not giving into life's absurdities that is French Disco'ss two word chorus, 'La resistance!'. One  more song, Simple Headphone Mind, from the 1997 collaboration with Nurse With Wound allows them to rock out even more, channeling the spirit and sounds of West Germany in the late 60s/ 70s, filling the hall with cosmic, avant- pop.

French Disco

Monday's Long Songs

I've posted music from Feriasdasferias here twice this year- one release just a few weeks ago here - but make no apologies for offering you this today, a collaboration with Marcelo Gerab recorded live and then broadcast on radio in Sao Paulo. Cirurgical Cuts 54' 54'' is six long pieces, all eight minutes long except for the last one which is ten minutes. The sounds are hypnotic, rhythms and drones, repeating patterns and layers of synths, overlapping and returning, vague hints of voices dropping in and out, acres of reverb and echo, electronic lo fi dub from Brazil. By the time you get to the third part, 17'39'',  you're in so deep, so mesmerised, you have little choice but to follow it all the way through. You can listen and buy here. 

Another of Eduardo Ramos' many pseudonyms for making music in Sao Paulo is Pandit Pam Pam. As Pandit Pam Pam in July 2021 he released this track, Bondade. It was recorded in the countryside in deep summer, as Eduardo says, 'surrounded by trees and lots of sun... while looking at a small gathering of lemon trees and orange trees'. It sounds like it was too. 

Forty Minutes Of My Bloody Valentine

The other night I was about to go upstairs. Lou was halfway down, a quizzical look on her face.  

Her: 'There's a horrible, whining, drilling sound coming out of the computer... what is it?'

Me: 'Dunno'.

I rushed upstairs to see what was happening. I'd left my mp3 player plugged in to the USB slot to charge it. When it's fully charged it switches itself on and starts playing random songs, through it's own tiny, tinny speaker. The 'horrible, whining, drilling sound' was You Made Me Realise by My Bloody Valentine. 

Me: 'That's not a horrible, whining, drilling sound. That's You Made Me Realise by My Bloody Valentine.'

A My Bloody Valentine Sunday mix had occurred to me a while back and this seemed like an ideal opportunity to put it together. They are an acquired taste I think it's fair to say and there are times when if the mp3 player is in shuffle mode in the car, they can jar and disrupt a good flow of songs like few other groups. The string bending, feedback, tremelo, full on assault of Kevin Shields and Belinda Butcher against the sometimes raging rhythms of Colm O' Ciosoig's drums and Debbie Googe's river dredging bass can be a heavy jolt to the senses. Equally, the same noise can be uplifting and life affirming in a way all of their own. They also do a beautiful line in a sort of head- spinning, post- coital comedown wooze, something Sofia Coppola knew when she put the soundtrack for Lost In Translation together. 

The music below is almost entirely from their 1988- 1991 heyday. There's nothing from the 2013 mbv album- not deliberately as such, I just didn't have it to hand and couldn't remember anything about it, so if nothing else I will go back to that record and see what it sounds like now. When it came out in 2013 it was their first album since Loveless in '91 and was recorded in bursts up between 1991 and 1997, then resumed by Shields in 2006 and then again in 2011. Instead I've gone for songs from Isn't Anything, Loveless and the EP releases around those albums apart from a cover version they recorded in 1996. 

Forty Minutes Of My Bloody Valentine

• Don't Ask Why
• Slow
• Feed Me With Your Kiss
• Loomer
• Drive It All Over Me
• Map Ref 41°N 93°W
• You Made Me Realise
• Soon 
• Soon (Andy Weatherall Mix)

Don't Ask Why is my favourite MBV song, a gorgeous, swooning tripped out song, gently strummed, chiming, slightly off kilter guitar and Kevin's voice, very clear and upfront. Belinda coos in the background and a shimmering reverb covers everything until the moment at three minutes six seconds where a second guitar comes in like a weather system. It was on the Glider EP released in 1990 in the run up to Loveless, which kept getting pushed back. In his book on Creation Records David Cavanagh speculates that many of the song titles from this period were coded messages to Alan McGee- Soon, Don't Ask Why, Off Your Face. 

Slow was a B-side from the You Made Me Realise 12" in 1988, an indie rock (with the emphasis on weird, disorientating rock) about oral sex. You Made Me Realise is from a point in time when indie guitar music, as made by this band and a handful of others, was going somewhere it hadn't been before. Drive It All over Me is from the same EP, effortless, late 80s brilliance. 

Feed Me With Your Kiss was a single in 1988 and appeared on Isn't Anything. A friend of mine bought Isn't Anything on cassette, played it and took it back, assuming there was something wrong with it. 'The guitars keep slipping out of tune and time, the tape must be too slack or stretched or something', was the gist of his complaint. 'That's what they sound like', he was told.

Loomer and Soon are both from Loveless, released in 1991, a year not sure of groundbreaking, high quality albums. It sounds as breathtaking now as it did then. Soon is Brian Eno's favourite MBV song, the song which sounds like the six minutes where everything Shields was searching for came together- it is both very vague and sharply in focus, guitars hinted at and right in your ears, a blur of memories and feelings worked into something approaching a song. Belinda's vocals sighs and Colm's drums provide the top and the bottom. Everything in between is like the ghost of indie guitar rock, recorded onto tape and then faded, blurred, bleached. Loveless is according to legend the record that nearly bankrupted Creation and McGee's relationship with Shields and the group broke down as a result. He went from My Bloody Valentine to Oasis (you can probably insert your own sentence here depending on your point of view).

Andrew Weatherall's remix is a groundbreaking record too, the acid house dancefloor dynamics and samples taking Soon into another place. Hugo Nicolson, Weatherall's production partner at the time, was presented with the records Andrew wanted to sample and the pair (with the band in the studio wanting to check what was happening to their music and apparently wanting also to see what remix culture was all about and what the process was) went about inventing indie dance and then destroying it at the same time. I wrote about this remix here and the various samples Weatherall and Nicolson used- West Bam, Gang Of Four, Claire Hamill, The Dynamic Corvettes, Rich Nice and as Hugo told us, the voices from a Volvic television advert. 

Map Ref 41°N 93°W is a cover of a Wire song, recorded for an album of Wire covers that came out in 1996 called Whore- Various Artists Play Wire. Lush, Band Of Susans, Bark Psychosis. Lee Ranaldo, Mike Watt and Godflesh are among the other contributors.

Listen

Andy Bell has just released an EP of covers, three of which were already out earlier this year and posted here along the way. The songs make up some of the influences on Andy's solo album Flicker, released at the start of 2022. His cover of Arthur Russell's Our Last Night Together is a wonderful, small hours piece of music, so gently frazzled it almost falls to pieces while it's being played. I've posted the cover of Pentangle's Light Flight already. The third is a cover of The Kinks' The Way Love Used To Be. The fourth part of the jigsaw came out yesterday, Andy's cover of Yoko Ono's Listen, The Snow Is Falling...

How good is that? 

Very good. 

You can buy the Untitled Film Stills EP here. Worth every penny.

Yoko's original, what she calls 'the first pop song I wrote' came out in 1971, the B-side to John Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band's Christmas single Happy Xmas (War Is Over). The band was an all star/ John's friends affair- Lennon plays guitar, Klaus Voormann bass, Nicky Hopkins is on organ and Jim Keltner on drums and bells. Anyone who is a Yoko naysayer, should listen to this. 

Listen, The Snow Is Falling

Wilko

Several blogs from this corner of the internet paid tribute yesterday to Wilko Johnson who died earlier this week aged seventy five and I felt I should do so too. Wilko was diagnosed with incurable pancreatic cancer in 2013 and then went onto defy medical science by recovering from it. His past, guitarist and writer in Dr. Feelgood, playing hard, short, slashing r'n'b inspired guitar influenced all the punks who followed them- Joe Strummer, Paul Weller, Billy Bragg, Suggs and Bill Drummond were all fired up by Wilko and Dr. Feelgood. He was the latest (in the early/ mid 70s) in a line of English guitarists inspired by the music that came from the Mississippi delta, another English beat boom fanatic but one who stripped it back and sped it up, amphetamine frenzy, no plectrum, fuzz guitar, using the guitar as percussion instrument as much as melody. 

One of the things I like most about Wilko is that he took his home, Canvey Island, the Thames and it's industrial skyline and oil refineries and made it into a romantic, rock 'n' roll home, the Thames estuary now linked by his records and his guitar style to the Mississippi delta. Andrew Weatherall used to say that what he did was he took his influences and added his own wonky take on them, and that's exactly what Wilko did. 

I saw Wilko play at Sale Waterside, a ten minute walk from my front door, back in April 2012. Norman Watt- Roy was in the band on bass and they played an hour or so of Feelgood/ Blockheads style pre- punk, British r'n'b. Wilko was pure Wilko- black suit, strutting across the front of the stage, eyes bulging and occasionally holding his guitar up at his shoulder as if machine gunning the audience. Electrifying. I was in two minds about going, nearly didn't and was very glad I did. 

Roxette was Dr. Feelgood's debut single, released in 1974, written by Wilko. It turned up on their debut album Down By The Jetty and year later and a live version came out as a single in 1976. 

Roxette

R.I.P. Wilko Johnson. 

Twenty Three

Back in November last year, a week or two before Isaac died, I started reading a book about The KLF by John Higgs titled 'The KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band Who Burned A Million Pounds'. It is not a conventional band biography- Higgs supplies two different endings (read both, decide which one you prefer) and as someone somewhere quipped, at times the book is more a history of Discordianism with appearances by The KLF as much as the story of Bill Drummond, Jimmy Cauty and their adventures in the music industry. 

Discordianism is/ was one of the foundation stones of Drummond and Cauty's world, the modern day religion of chaos and irreverence dreamed up by Greg Hill and Kerry Wendall Thornley in 1963. Higgs brings in much more as well and branches off all over the place- Situationism, Dr Who, punk, rave, Carl Jung and Dada all show up. It's difficult to tell at times, and I think this is one of Higgs' key points, whether Drummond and Cauty know what they are doing and whether they are in control of what they unleash or whether the magical forces of Discordia and the Illuminati have taken over completely. I've always found it difficult to tell whether Drummond and Cauty are deadly serious or playing with it. Either way, it leads them to The Brits in February 1992 where they machine gunned the audience while Extreme Noise Terror thrashed away behind them, to having to be talked out of dumping a dead sheep on the steps of the venue and then to the Isle of Jura where they burned a million quid. Something they've been unable to explain (to themselves or others) ever since. 

The KLF v Extreme Noise Terror 3 A.M. Eternal (Top Mix)

When Isaac got taken into hospital with Covid I was a few chapters in. I didn't pick the book up for a while after all of that but at some point went back to it and almost immediately found myself in the chapter on Discordianism and specifically the number twenty three. Discordianism a parody religion. Probably. One of it's central practices is/ was Operation Mindfuck, an attempt to undermine all conspiracy theories by publicly attributing major events (wars, assassinations etc) to the Illuminati, thereby demonstrating how ridiculous conspiracy theories are- while also contributing to paranoia and creating more conspiracy theories. 

For Discordians the number twenty three is everything, the secret behind it all. The number five is also important because two and three make five and two and three are twenty three. William Burroughs cited the so called 23 Enigma to Robert Anton Wilson in an interview (Wilson wrote the Illuminatus! Trilogy). Drummond and Cauty took their name The JAMMs from the books and twenty three is littered through The Justified Ancients Of Mu Mu and The KLF's works. Drummond and Cauty burned the money on the twenty third of August and then agreed to not discuss it for twenty three years. This is where you suspect they're playing with it- except burning a million pounds is not playing. 

In a normal frame of mind all of this would have been amusing and interesting but in my raw and grief stricken state it fully freaked me out. Isaac was twenty three when he died and his birthday is on the twenty third of November. One of his birthday presents we'd given to him a week earlier, on the twenty third, was a United shirt with his name on the back and the number twenty three beneath it. The shirt was already with him, in his coffin. I put the book down and the day after- I don't remember exactly when this was but I think it was some time in December. The day after I picked the book up and read the chapter again and it disturbed me again. Moreso when I looked at my phone to see what time it was and it was, of course, 23.23pm. It disturbed me for some time afterwards- but then I was already very disturbed and it didn't take much to tip me over. There were a couple of other Isaac numerological coincidences around the same time which added to it all. 

Robert Anton Wilson, the writer and philosopher recognised in Discordianism as a saint, has since said that the mystery around the number twenty three is self- fulfilling, proof that the mind can find meaning or truth in anything. 'When you start looking for something, you tend to find it' he said, 'it is all selective perception'. I'm sure he's right. 

This is the twenty third record in my record collection. A Certain Ratio in 1990, remixed by Bernard Sumner. 

Won't Stop Loving You

Twenty Four

Today would have been Isaac's twenty fourth birthday. I can't find the words to adequately express myself about this at the moment. The weeks leading up to today have been awful at times and the thought that he's dead still has the power to stop me in my tracks and leave me trying to catch my breath. Isaac loved birthdays- cards, cake, presents, going out for tea, all the routines and traditions. I hope in years to come we can celebrate him and the twenty three birthdays that he had with us but right now it just feels like a date filled with massive loss. 

Often on his birthday I'd post songs relevant to the age he was turning, so today should have been songs with twenty four in the title or in the lyrics. I thought I may as well go ahead with this. Neither Joy Division's 24 Hours nor Happy Mondays' 24 Hour Party People seemed to strike the right note. I'm not really a fan of Gene Pitney's 24 Hours From Tulsa. Half Man Half Biscuit's Twenty Four Hour Garage People plays on Happy Mondays in the title and lyrically takes in the Rollright Stones, Talk Radio, Pringles, Marmite, scotch eggs, Kit Kats, motoring atlases, Leadbelly, various sandwich fillings and the worker at the all night garage. It is a song which can still, twenty two years after it was released, make me laugh out loud and today of all days that's a big deal. 

Twenty Four Hour Garage People

Neil Young's Old Man contains the line 'Old man, look at my life/ Twenty four and there's so much more'. Neil wrote the song after he bought the Broken Arrow ranch with the proceeds of his songwriting success. He was shown round the ranch by Broken Arrow's caretaker Louis Avila. The line is about Louis' incredulity that a young man could buy a $350, 000 ranch in 1971. When asked how he afforded it Neil told Louis, 'just lucky, Louis, just real lucky'. It goes elsewhere, as Neil Young songs often do, musing on the similarities between the old man and the younger man, that their basic needs and desires are the same- 'Old man, take a look at my life/ I'm a lot like you/ I need someone to love me the whole night through'. This version is from the legendary Massey Hall gig in 1971, a solo acoustic show in Toronto in January 1971. 

Old Man (Live at Massey Hall 1971)

Happy birthday Isaac. Love you. 

Gal Costa

Gal Costa died earlier this month aged seventy seven. I knew the name but didn't own any of her music. I was aware she was a Brazilian singer and heavily connected to the Tropicalia movement, the musicians and artists who married Brazilian rhythms and styles with psychedelic rock in the late 60s, upsetting the government and establishment in that country along the way. I have a compilation by Os Mutantes, fellow travellers in the Tropicalia movement, but no Gal. A friend sorted me out with a few choice pieces last week and I've been digging into them, the bossa nova rhythms, percussion, acoustic guitars and psychedelic rock influences providing a very welcome alternative to what I've been listening to recently. This song in particular has been hitting all the right notes...

Baby

Baby was written by Caetano Veloso, legendary Brazilian composer, singer, guitarist, writer and political activist and recorded for Gal's 1968 self titled solo album. The strings, the echo- laden percussion and Gal's voice, singing first in Portuguese and then English, are all gorgeous. 

R.I.P. Gal. 

Monday's Long Song

I missed out on Sault when they first started putting out releases in 2019 and I enjoyed Nine last year but didn't fully connect with it or feel like I really got to know it. The longer it went on, the bigger the back catalogue felt and the more I felt like I'd never catch up. When Air came out this year I downloaded it and went out for a walk with it in my headphones and didn't click with it at all. A couple of weeks ago they dropped five albums onto the internet for free- I've not even started on them yet. 

In between, on 10th October, they released an album called 10 consisting of one single song, a ten minute and ten seconds long song called Angel. It is a superb piece of music, three songs in one- the first part is reggae, rumbling bass, squealing guitar notes, lots of space and a righteous vocal (courtesy of Chronixx). Female backing vox join in singing, 'run to save your life', before at three minute thirty it suddenly drops out and becomes a piano ballad/ hymn. At six minutes forty it shifts gear again, spoken word eventually joined by acoustic guitar, the player's fingers moving up and down the strings clearly audible. 'Go gently and find your way', the narrator advises and and gives way to another singer and gentle blues guitar.

Angel

Forty Minutes Of The Flaming Lips

'The Flaming Lips', it says at Wikipedia, 'are an American psychedelic rock band formed in 1983 from Oklahoma City. I suppose psychedelic rock band covers them but they're much, much more too, they're the sort of band who have an idea- let's come on stage in a giant bubble and roll out over the audience, let's have confetti cannons, and dancing skeletons, let's do a twenty three track album with Miley Cyrus, let's record an album with instrumentals, drum machines and the most gorgeous, existential acoustic guitar pop song of the 21st century- and then just do it. I haven't followed their entire career, there are gaps in my collection but what I have I love. Psychedelic music is, I think, supposed to be expansive- in terms of sound, ambition and minds and Wayne Coyne and the musicians, dancing aliens and skeletons, fellow travellers and merry pranksters are very much on a long trip of expansion and adventure. 

The bulk of the songs here are taken from the trio of albums they recorded between 1999 and 2006 with Dave Fridmann producing. 

Forty Minutes Of The Flaming Lips

• The Observer
• Approaching Pavonis Mons By Balloon (Utopia Planitia)
• Pompeii Am Gotterdammerung
• She Don't Use Jelly
• Silver Trembling Hands
• Ego Tripping At The Gates Of Hell
• The W.A.N.D.
• Race For The Prize
• Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots Part 1
• The Golden Path
• Do You Realise??

The Observer and Race For The Prize are both from 1999's The Soft Bulletin, an album that shifted their sound from alt- rock into something else, a lush, wide eyed, tripped out, expansive, late 20th century Pet Sounds psychedelia. Race For The Prize,a song about two scientists competing to do good for the whole of mankind, is a song that is always associated with Isaac for me for various reasons that I may come back to at some point in the next few weeks.

Approaching Pavonis Mons By Balloon, Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots and Ego Tripping At The Gates Of Hell are all from Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, their 2002 masterpiece, a maybe/ maybe not concept album about a Japanese girl fighting giant robots, space, life and death, mortality, gravity, the precarious nature of existence, love, survival and pretty much everything in between. They do this with a mixture of lighter than air pop songs, instrumentals and electronic/ acoustic melancholic joy, reaching a climax with Do You Realise?? a universal secular hymn to human existence.  

The W.A.N.D. and Pompeii Am Gotterdamerung are from 2006's At war Wit The Mystics. The W.A.N.D. is Black Sabbath at the indie disco, pure exhilaration. W.A.N.D stands for The Will Always Negates Defeat. 

She Don't Use Jelly is a 1993 single, a U.S. indie rock ode to idiosyncrasy. She don't use jelly (jam for those of us in the U.K.)- she uses vaseline. 

Silver Trembling Hands is motorik psyche from their 2009 album Embryonic.

The Golden Path is not a Flaming Lips song but singer Wayne Coyne with The Chemical Brothers, released on Tom and Ed's first greatest hits CD in 2003. Over thumping, pulsing, festival dance music Wayne talks about a meeting with a mysterious spectre, the afterlife and his lack of belief in a heaven and hell, worlds in opposite duality before breaking down at the end and pleading to be forgiven.  

Full Way Round

Leftfield have a new album out next month. This Is What We Do will be their fourth since the early 90s and Leftfield now is only Neil Barnes, Paul Daley having departed some time ago. Barnes has had a rough few years not least recovering from cancer. The album continues the run of strong guest vocalists- John Lydon, Djum Djum, Toni Halliday, Afrika Bambaataa and Roots Manuva have all stepped up to the microphone previously. This time around vocal contributions come from poet Lemn Sissay and Fontaines D.C. singer Grian Chatten. Grian's voice and words on Full Way Round add much to the track, his Dublin street poetics playing off against and with Leftfield's distorted, hard hitting dub techno. 

Which reminds me that I still haven't caught up with Fontaines D.C. album from earlier this year, Skinty Fia. I do have though a pair of remixes from last year that get pulled out round the Bagging Area way fairly often, the giddy, joyous Balearic stylings brought to A Hero's Death by Soulwax (a song I find inexplicably moving) and the full on grungy bassline, needles- in- the- red, massive kick drum, bleep techno version of Televised Mind by Dave Clarke.

A Hero's Death (Soulwax Remix)

Televised Mind (Dave Clarke Remix)

Philly

This is one of those tracks which I've been listening to for over three decades now and when it plays I always get a rush of excitement, almost like hearing it for the first time again. Fluke were a Buckinghamshire based group, Mike Bryant, Jon Fugler and Mike Tournier, who were into the industrial/ electronic sounds of Cabaret Voltaire and were then fired up by acid house. In 1990 they found their way to Creation Records, who were at that point setting up a dance music division, the Creation office's enthusiasm for all things dance music having few limits at that point. 

In 1991 Alan McGee rounded up a killer selection of Creation's dance records and put them together on a compilation called Keeping The Faith. As well as Creation mainstays Primal Scream and My Bloody Valentine (both in remixed form courtesy of Hypnotone, Terry Farley and Andrew Weatherall) Keeping The Faith had Ed Ball in his Love Corporation guise, superb singles from World Unite and Sheer Taft, J.B.C. aka The Jazz Butcher covering The Rolling Stones in classic 1990 style, Hypnotone remixed by Danny Rampling, The Sound Of Shoom and Crazy Eddie and Q.Q. Freestyle. Opening the record was this...

Philly (Jamorphous Mix)

The sci fi whooshes, juddering synths, twinkling sounds, cymbal crashes, keyboard runs and sirens all kicked in within seconds of my then housemate Al dropping the needle on side one, the rush of the track instantly dragging us aboard. The vocal comes in, 'Put your hands up high... got to try to find a way to liberate our hearts', and it's wide smiles on faces. There are sweeping synth strings and a throbbing beat, more string stabs (borrowed from Philly soul in the 70s), bursts of electric guitar, more strings and the ever pulsing rhythms. More and more, strings, whooshes, chanted vocals, trying to find a way to put your arms around the world'. Four minutes in a tumbling drum break leads to the briefest pause and then we're straight back in for the final three minutes. Everything that was in the air in1990 is in this track- the sense of freedom and possibility, the technology of samplers, synths, drum machines spliced with singers and guitars, influences dragged from record collections and nights out and put into a giant, technicoloured stew. 

Creation had released Philly as a single the year before, a three track 12" with the Jamorphous Mix on the A-side along with the Jamoeba Mix and the Jamateur Mix. Jamorphous is still the pick of the bunch without doubt but the Jamateur mix has its moments, less song, more rave, more piano and no vocals except for a chanting crowd just about audible. 

Philly (Jamateur Mix)

Masculine Encounter

I've been writing reviews this year for Dr. Rob's standard setting, all- things- Balearic blog Ban Ban Ton Ton. Most recently I reviewed the new album by Decius, a group made up of members of Fat White Family, Paranoid London and Trashmouth Records. Decius have pulled together a bunch of tracks recorded and released as 12" singles into Decius Vol. 1, a riot of electronic dance music sounds, the thump of house with the sleaze of disco, and with Fat White Family singer Lias Saoudi on vocals, a romp through gay nightlife, bars, clubs and bathhouses, emerging blinking into the city streets at dawn having had the night of one's life. It is both ridiculously tongue in cheek and completely serious- song titles such as Masculine Encounter, Look Like A Man, Quick Reliefs, Bitch Tracker and Roberto's Tumescence might give you an idea what to expect. The review is here. The album can be bought here. 

Masculine Encounter II

Decius was a Roman emperor, ruling from the year 249 to 251, a distinguished senator who was proclaimed emperor by his troops after defeating a rebellion. He had a thing about persecuting Christians and had Pope Fabian put to death. Decius died in June 251 at the Battle of Arbritus, killed by Goths. We can only hope the band Decius avoid such a fate. 

If you're after high quality dance music with an edge you could also do worse than have a look at the three EPs New York label Throne Of Blood have released this year, a celebration of their sixteenth birthday. I reviewed all three EPs for Ban Ban Ton Ton. There are twelve tracks across the three releases, every single one a banger- EP 1 has Chloe, Liona, Justin Cudmore and Joakim and Max Pask. EP 2 features an outstanding Hardway Bros track plus Hapa, Curses and Split Sec. EP 3 has tracks by Pleasure Planet, Danse Alice, Man Power and Teleseen. My review of EPs 1 and 2 is here and the one of EP 3 is here and you can listen to/ buy EP 1 here, EP 2 here and EP 3 here. 

Every Single Day Of My Life

We've just passed the halfway point in November and I know you shouldn't wish time away but we (me, Lou and Eliza) just need November to be over, done, gone. We knew November would be tough- a week today is Isaac's birthday, what would have been his twenty- fourth, and a week after that it's the first anniversary of his death. The fact that the calendar tells us it's nearly a year since he died is enough of a hurdle to get over. It doesn't seem like it can be a year when the pain of his death, the loss and the grief, are so real and present. It will soon become the point where we no longer count the time since he died in weeks or months but in years and that is a painful thing to deal with. I know we shouldn't get hung up on dates- they arbitrary in some ways and people keep saying 'the calendar may say it's a year but it's really not very long at all', which is true but still, a year sounds like a long time in some ways. Too long for him to have not been around. The last couple of weeks have brought a lot of the symptoms of grief, the physical and emotional effects, back to the surface. Things feel very raw again. I find myself going over the last few weeks and days of Isaac's life, reliving them in my head. It is taking its toll on all of us. 

Grief is very extreme and strange- there is 'it', the whole enormous thing of the emotional pain, the physical symptoms (I have found my tinnitus returning recently and I still have a partially unexplained and unshiftable sinus and congestion problem), the finding a new life without him, the loss, the having to deal with it on a daily basis, other people's reactions, all of that (and more)- 'it'. Then there is him, Isaac, the person, our son. Sometimes he gets swallowed up by 'it'. He gets lost inside it', disappears a bit inside all the pain. The last few weeks have been like that at times but they have also brought him back in a way. We all feel on the verge of something, constantly. There is a great big hole reappearing, his birthday and the anniversary of his death a week later, looming over us. We're not sure what we're going to do on those two days- go to see him at the cemetery, go for something to eat maybe. It feels like the huge empty hole that was created by his death has opened up again, a chasm of grief that we're now standing next to again. It's a chasm so big that if you dropped a pebble into it, you wouldn't hear it hit the bottom. I'm hoping that once we get past the 30th November the chasm will close up a little, that it will recede again, that we'll edge away from the lip of it. 

I burst into tears in the kitchen on Saturday morning. It took me by surprise in a way, I wasn't expecting it although I was feeling very out of sorts. I was doing breakfast and listening to Revolver by The Beatles (on my phone via Youtube, a truly shit way to listen to music, through tiny crappy speakers and interrupted by adverts). Got To Get You Into My Life burst into life, McCartney's punching bassline, those Motown inspired horns and Macca singing a perfect 1966 song, one that sounds like it's about a girl but is actually about smoking weed. As he belted out the words, 'I was alone, I took a ride/ I didn't know what I would find there...', I cracked and sobbed. I was on the edge of it anyway but something about the exuberance and joy in song hit me hard. Revolver was a big album for me when I was eighteen and nineteen, spring and summer of 1989, a time when all this pain and loss didn't exist, when it was all unknown and ahead of me. Maybe my subconscious was doing something. 

Got To Get You Into My Life

In thirteen years of writing this blog I've never written about The Beatles, fairly deliberately. I remember starting the blog and thinking the last thing the world needs is yet more words about The Beatles. But we are where we are, as people like to say, and I am where I am. Revolver is my favourite Beatles album, a record so fresh and inventive and full of life (although I can happily skip Yellow Submarine every time). McCartney's songs are surely his peak- Here, There And Everywhere, Good Day Sunshine, Got To Get You Into My Life and For No One are all immaculately written and played, McCartney audibly in sheer joy, a young man at the very top of the game. Harrison's I Want To Tell You is a stunner and Taxman is guitar music being taken elsewhere, those stinging guitar lines and the jumpy bassline (even if hearing rock stars whinge about tax sticks in the throat a bit). Lennon's songs are next level too with their wired, tangled, double tracked acid guitar lines. And Your Bird Can Sing, Dr Robert, I'm Only Sleeping are all as good as any other three minute guitar pop song he wrote and She Said is full on lysergic existentialism, in both words and music- the vicious guitar lines, the 2am discombobulation skewered in the line, 'She said 'I don't understand what you said'/ I said 'no, no, no, you're wrong'/ When I was a boy....'. Every song other than two comes in at under three minutes, no fat or surplus, short bursts of sparkling brilliance. Rain, written around the same time and put on the B-side (the B-side!) of Paperback Writer, is a song some groups would base their entire career around, psychedelia being invented with trippy drumming, backwards guitars, weird phasing effects and slurred, distant vocals. Lennon's next step was Strawberry Fields and A Day In the Life, but his songs on Revolver are essential in the road to those two places and superb in their own right. 

As Got To Get You Into My Life played on Saturday morning every single line seemed directed straight at me, not least the end and McCartney's closing couplet, 'And suddenly I see you/ Did I tell you that I need you/ Ever single day of my life'. I dreamt about Isaac on Saturday night/ Sunday morning, waking up just as it was getting light and very clearly seeing him. It threw me as it always does when I dream about him. He's still alive in my dreams and it often takes a moment to fully comprehend that it was a dream and that he's gone. It's very unsettling. 

Revolver is a dazzling and life affirming record, four young men using the studio as an instrument and with the freedom to do whatever they liked and cut through with slices of British life- the National Health Service, the UK tax system, Prime Ministers, London doctors/ drug dealers and Eleanor Rigby's suburban lost souls. Ultimately though on Revolver, all roads lead to Tomorrow Never Knows, the most forward thinking of their recordings, a psychedelic acid house record way ahead of its time, with thumping, looped drums, backwards guitars, processed vocals, tape loops and mad seagull sounds and Lennon's tripped out vocal suggesting/ demanding that we/ you, 'turn off your mind, relax and float downstream/ It is not dying/ It is not dying/ Lay down all thoughts, surrender to the void/ It is shining/ It is shining'. As Tomorrow Never Knows played through on Saturday morning I was again briefly transported back to 1989 and a much younger me and then back to fifty two year old me, full of all this fucking horrible grief, wiping my wet eyes and thinking that Lennon's void and my chasm are two very different things. And also eventually, cheered slightly by the sheer energising magic of Tomorrow Never Knows and this line, buried in the middle of all that counter culture, spirit of '66 madness, 'That love is all/ And love is everyone/ It is knowing/ It is knowing'.

Tomorrow Never Knows

Blue Velvet Shoes, Jack Kerouac And Roman Candles

Of all of Pete Wylie and his different versions of Wah!'s lost singles, this one from 1991 is perhaps the most lost. In 1991 Wah! had become Pete Wylie And Wah! The Mongrel. This single, Don't Lose Your Dreams, spearheaded the album Infamy! Or How I Didn't Get Where I Am Today. It's a beauty, jam packed with classic Wylie trademarks and touches not least a ridiculously long title... 

Don't Lose Your Dreams (Excerpt From A Teenage Opera Part 154) Seamless... bursts in with synths and sitar, followed by crunchy Wah! guitar, some big '91 drums and multi- tracked vocals, a Wah-ll of sound. The song has everything- those massive, ringing Wah! guitar chords, layers of female backing vocals and Pete belting the verses out, including memorably this one- 'Blue velvet shoes/ You'll never lose/ Blue velvet shoes /Cos every time you lose, you learn/ Go tell them Jack Kerouac just said/ The Roman candle burns'. The chorus is a big singalong of Wylie wisdom, 'Don't lose your dreams/ No matter how far your tumble/ When people criticise your schemes/ Your wild extremes/ Don't you ever lose your dreams'. In lesser hands this could sound corny or overblown. In Pete's it sounds huge and beautiful. It fades out with echoes of The Who, Baba O'Reilly style. Thirty two years later, it sounds like the song 1991 forgot about. 

Don't Lose Your Dreams (Excerpt From A Teenage Opera Part 154) Seamless...

The CD single has two B-sides, Imperfect and Don't Lose Your Drums. Imperfect is an alternate version of Big Hard Excellent Fish's Imperfect List from the previous year, a beatific, loved up version of that track with a completely different vocal courtesy of Domino. 

Imperfect 

The third track is an instrumental remix of the original, a very nice, blissed out version. 

Don't Lose Your Drums (Excerpt From A New Age Opera Part 2001) 

There were several versions across the vinyl and CD formats. The 12" had a pair of excellent Cabaret Voltaire techno remixes and a 10" presented two very 1991, Danny Rampling acid house remixes. All seem to be out of print and unavailable digitally. Second hand copies of all are cheap and easy to find online. Someone needs to tidy up Pete/ Wah!'s back catalogue, re- issue the albums and do a career round up/ Best Of/ B-sides package. 

Monday's Long Songs/ Keith Levene And Nik Turner

Keith Levene's death was announced on Saturday. He died the day before peacefully at home, aged sixty five. He started in The Clash, was instrumental in spotting Strummer while he was with the 101ers and getting him into The Clash, and has a co- writing credit on What's My Name but parted company with them early on. Recruited by John Lydon following the Sex Pistols break up, Keith's guitar playing with Public Image Ltd, from 1978 to the early 80s, is the real deal, an extraordinary style and technique that sounded unique, not- punk but not rock either, shards of clear, sharp metal fired through the amp outwards. The debut single, Public Image, with Lydon, Jah Wobble and Jim Walker would on it's own be enough, with the thrilling rumble of Wobble's bass, Lydon's 'hello, hello' and then Levene's two chord slashing guitar part, wire shredded and tangled, the six string version of Lydon's voice. 

On 1979's Metal Box Levene's metallic guitar is a sharp, otherworldly presence, the definition of post- punk dread. Levene's Prophet synth is all over the album too, on Careering especially to the fore. No Birds has Levene's guitar part split in two, one as played, the other duplicated and fed through a harmoniser. On Radio 4, the startling semi- ambient piece that closes the album, Leven plays bass as imagining he was Wobble and layered up synth strings from a Yamaha synth. The spooked, paranoid, dub influenced post punk dance of Metal Box is in no way just Lydon's work, it is an album written, improvised and recorded by Lydon, Leven and Wobble plus the several drummers, all pushing and pulling to create a stunning piece of work. 

In December 1979 PiL appeared in session for John Peel, recording versions of Careering, Poptones and Chant. Careering is a thrilling, a breathtaking, intense seven minute cacophony. 

R.I.P Keith Levene. 

Careering (Peel Session)

The day before it was reported that Hawkwind's Nik Turner, the man who put the space jazz sax and flute into psychedelic space rock, had died aged eighty four. This song, from 1971's In Search Of Space, is nearly sixteen minutes long and is as good a send off as anyone could wish for, the sax twisting, turning, warbling and freaking out into all eternity. 

You Shouldn't Do That 

Forty Five Minutes Of Factory Floor And Gabe Gurnsey

Friday's Factory Floor single Two Different Ways sent me back into the group's back catalogue. I've also been playing Factory Floorer Gabe Gurnsey's Diablo a lot recently, an album that is up there with this year's best to these ears. Factory Floor, a trio but then slimmed down to Gurnsey (drums, programming, synths, production, vocals) and Nik Colk (vocals, guitar, samples) started out in the mid- 00s, all post punk dread and industrial noise before hitting a Chris and Cosey inspired, acid house/ techno groove. Dystopic dance music. Synth- noir. No wave electronica. 'Unsettling disco' according to New Order's Stephen Morris who has worked with them (like Morris, Gurnsey is a Macclesfield man). 

The idea to sequence a bunch of FF and GG tracks together seemed like a good one but technically has been quite tricky. I use Audacity where it's a matter of drop and drag, lining them up next to each other, slightly overlapping to give the impression of mixing. But without any actual DJ software, getting tracks to segue and mix properly can be difficult and this one took a lot of playing around with. There were a few that didn't make the cut- Two Different Ways and the Factory Floor remix of Grinderman were both vying for inclusion but didn't make it. 

The tracks here won't ease you into Sunday gently but if you want modular synths, acid squiggles, thumping 808 kick drums, slowly building tension and blank/ sexually charged vocals (courtesy of Colk on Factory Floor and Tilly Morris on Gabe's Diablo) to throw yourself around the kitchen to, then give it a whirl.

Forty Five Minutes Of Factory Floor And Gabe Gurnsey

• Factory Floor: Heart Of Data
• Daniel Avery: Drone Logic (Factory Floor Remix)
• Gabe Gurnsey: Eyes Over
• Gabe Gurnsey: Push
• Gabe Gurnsey: You Remind Me
• Factory Floor: ~(REALLOVE) (An Optimo (Espacio) Remix)
• Factory Floor: Ya

Heart Of Data came out in 2018, a pulsing modular synth score to Fritz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis, commissioned by London's Science Museum). Highly recommended. 

The remix of Daniel Avery's Drone Logic came out in 2013 along with a multitude of other remixes from Avery's first album. 

Eyes Over is from Gabe Gurnsey's first solo album, Physical, released in 2018. Eyes Over was a single and came with a very good extended dub mix on the 12".

Push and You Remind Me are two of the standouts from this year's Diablo, both with vocals from Tilly Morris. 'This is the kind of feeling I could ride forever/ Let's push together', Tilly sing speaks on Push, sounding like you're there for her amusement solely. 'You remind me of a sunrise/ You remind me of a good time', she sings on the latter, again sounding like she's pretty much done with your shit. 

Real Love (or ~(REALLOVE) came out in 2011 on DFA and was remixed by Scottish legends Optimo. A track that really goes for it brackets- wise and produced by Stephen Morris. 

Ya was on Factory Floor's 2016 album 2525, a juddering, minimal, floor filling electronic dance record with one foot in the Hacienda. 

Tell Them A Story

A three for one offer at Bagging Area today to celebrate the weekend, the yin and yang of music. First this song came out in mid- October, Orbital with Sleaford Mods and a coruscating, furious and perfectly timed piece of music called Dirty Rat. 

'Shut up, you don't know what ya on about/ You voted for 'em, look at ya!/ You dirty rat'

'Blaming everyone at the hospitals/ Blaming everyone at the bottom of the English Channel/ Blaming everyone who doesn't look like a fried animal'.

Written for and about the people who voted for the shallowest talent pool the Tory party have ever fished in for government, the three Prime Ministers, one elected and two unelected, and the incompetent, mean spirited and downright dangerous cabinets we've suffered since 2019, the worst group of people to ever end up in power- this one's for you. 

If that seems a bit much, a bit too angry for your Saturday morning and you fancy something more uplifting, more chilled and in places a tad more spiritual, this is David Holmes at NTS eleven days ago, back with his two hour God's Waiting Room show. This one is a tribute to DJ Alfredo, the man who who DJed at Amnesia in Ibiza from the mid 80s onwards and who David and his friend Iain McCready encountered there in 1990, a DJ set that took in reggae, Grace Jones, The Clash, Italo house, Eurodance, Talking Heads, Kraftwerk, Brazilian flamenco and much more, pulled together effortlessly. Alfredo has recently suffered some poor health and is recovering from a stroke. David's show, two hours of Alfredo's Amnesia inspired Balearica, is here, an absolute joy to listen to. 

Bonus- if you needed it, here's Jezebell's summer stunner, Jezebellearic, eight minutes of blissed out beats and percussion, a lovely warm bassline, a sprinkling of hints of pop songs you might be able to discern and the voice of Alfredo talking about the people who came to dance to his music, the songs he played and how to make them dance 'you have to tell them a story'. Still available here for free. 

Two Different Ways

The weekly Bagging Area/ Spencer collaboration continues here today. The previous posts in this series have featured songs from Jon Spencer Blues Explosion remixed by DFA, La Funk Mob, I-f and Model 500, a run of gritty, innovative floor shaking body movers. This week's song flying in from Spencer over the internet is this from Factory Floor in 2011...

Two Different Ways

Last weekend there was a documentary celebrating forty years since the Hacienda opened its doors, an hour of stories, contributions from familiar faces/ survivors and from punters and employees, and some archive footage of the club in its heyday. It was OK but very much entry level Hacienda, there wasn't much new to be learned if you know your Hacienda and Factory history or ever attended the club. At one point one of the interviewees (talking about the acid house glory years when the Hot and Nude nights, Mike Pickering, house music and ecstasy combined in a perfect way) said that the thing with the music was that it was repetitive and the more and longer the parts repeated, the more it seemed to get inside you and the more you wanted to dance- I paraphrase but that was the gist- and it was possibly the most astute comment of the programme. In house music/ dance music, repetition is key. 

In 2011 Factory Floor released a single for DFA. Prior to this they'd made music which was more industrial, more noise/ industrial based, infused with the chill of post- punk. On Two Different Ways they beamed themselves into the Hacienda or any number of British clubs from the '88- '93 period and set the drum machine, the synths and the arpegiator up, running in circular patterns, wheels within wheels. Thumping kick drum, squiggles, hi hats opening and closing like synapse connections between the music and your nervous system, distant woodblocks, snares rattling- meanwhile the synths continue ever on, round and round, in circles as Nic Colk's voice drops in and out over the top, half sung/ half spoken. Eight minutes of gloriously repetitive house/ techno. 

Fast Forward

Lol Hammond, formerly of Spiral Tribe and The Drum Club, has a band with Karen Frost and Stefan Gordon called Are We Superheroes? that sounds nothing like either of those two. Fast Forward came out in September and is a short blast of rattling, uptempo, fuzzy, guitar music, partly coming from post punk, partly from early 90s shoegaze/ indie, partly from mid period Mary Chain, partly from the guitar sounds of the 00s of groups like LCD Soundsystem and the post first album Horrors. They do a good line in melodic alienation and future shock. 

Duncan Forbes, collaborator with Lol on an overlooked 2020 ambient/ drone/ psyche album titled Who Will Stop The Robots?, has done a remix, stripping away the chug and loading it with some frantic, propulsive drums instead. 

Up The Junction

My friend Darren had a spare for Squeeze supported by Dr. John Cooper Clarke at the Apollo last Saturday night, a very kind offer which is the sort of thing you don't turn down (one of the pictures here is Darren's, the one at the top). We met in The Bull's Head, a traditional city centre boozer at the back end of Piccadilly Station, a fifteen minute walk from the Apollo. There was a bit if a head spinning culture clash in the pub- it was packed with Man City fans stopping off on the way back to town from the Etihad and glammed up, glittered up punters having a quick drink before going to Homobloc at The Warehouse Project across the road plus a few middle aged folks like Darren and I having a pint before the gig. We arrived in good time to ensure we saw the good doctor. Not long after we arrived and got served at the bar the man pictured below arrived on stage, the legendary Johnny Green, formerly road manager of The Clash, now John Cooper Clarke's tour manager/ fixer/ confidante/ best mate. 

Johnny gave a brief introduction and then the stick thin, behatted, skinny trousered John Cooper Clarke ambled on stage and commenced firing. His act is a well honed, non- stop, rapid fire performance, the jokes, stories and poetry all bundled up together, his one liners and stand up comedy all part of the act, slipping into a cartoon New Yoik accent at times for added effect. The poems, when they come, are delivered at breakneck speed, the nasal Salford accent still strong despite living in Essex of the last thirty five years. Hire Car, Get Back On Drugs You Fat Fuck and Bedblocker Blues are all fired off early on, the still relevant Beasley Street (the first of the classics) is followed by the recent updated version Beasley Boulevard. He reminds us all, that even though everyone thinks Beasley Street is about Thatcher, partly due to the line, 'Keith Joseph smiles and a baby dies/ In a box on Beasley Street', he wrote the poem before she took power. Home, Honey I'm High gets a lot of laughs and by the point he's mid- set, the latecomers are being shushed and the Apollo is hanging on every line. 

'I watched the milkman drive off with my wife. Longest three hours of my life'.

The end of the set is a best of JCC, I've Fallen In Love With Wife, the every other word fuckfest of Evidently Chicken Town (which is where I guess the New Yoik accent comes from, the song being played over the end of The Sopranos) and Twat, delivered with gusto and bile decades after it being written, the audience joining in for the last line/ word. Then he rattles through I Wanna Be Yours and he's off. 

Evidently Chickentown

I've never seen Squeeze before. In fact I don't even any of their records but their singles are so much part of post late 70s pop culture that skimming through their greatest hits online a couple of days before I was amazed how many of them I knew. Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook are well into national treasure/ classic English songwriter territory and coupled with their South London roots, plants them firmly in the kitchen sink, slice of life, the sort of space occupied by the likes of Ray Davies and Paul Weller There are times at the gig they seem to sit somewhere in between The Jam and Madness in terms of lyrics and melodies. 

So confident are they of their back catalogue that a song like Up The Junction, for me the pinnacle of their songwriting, that they can dispense with it just three songs in. The Apollo is seated for the gig, the stewards are very keen to ensure no-one is out of their seat much early on, there's no standing in the gangways and the crowd are middle aged plus and very polite. Squeeze power through one New Wave/ pop- / post- punk classic after another, Tilbrook's voice and guitar playing at the front and centre, Difford co- singing and taking the much more growly lead vocal spot on a few. Cradle To The Grave, Pulling Mussels (From The Shell), Goodbye Girl all blaze by. As we get near the end of the set and gorgeous version of Tempted, the audience are up on their feet and the last song, Cool For Cats, is played with no less energy and enthusiasm than it must have been in 1979. There's an encore, Slap And Tickle and then a full showbiz, individual band members solo spotlight affair during Black Coffee In Bed and then we're done, back into the drizzly streets of Ardwick and the walk back to town (a walk that became a long one for me. We went for a few more pints, missed the last tram home- this is sounding a bit like a Squeeze lyric now- and Darren ordered an Uber. It dropped Darren off in Old Trafford and then about half a mile up the road towards Sale the driver told me to get out because he was calling it a night and going home. The walk back through down King's Road, through Stretford and back to Sale took me an hour. Black cabs it seems don't exist any more. As I neared McDonald's in Stretford I considered a cheeseburger to give me the sustenance for the final mile of my trek but the Golden Arches had just closed its doors).

Up The Junction is a work of brilliance, the phrasing, colloquialisms, a feats of memorable lines, the images piling up one after another, with no chorus and the title of the song saved until the very end, 'And now it's my assumption/ I'm really up the junction'. Chris Difford was only twenty one when he wrote it, a novel in three minute pop song form. It was released, I've just noticed, the day before my ninth birthday. 

Mimi Parker

The dreadful news that Mimi Parker had died aged just fifty five came via her husband Alan Sparhawk on Sunday. Mimi, vocalist and drummer in Low, had undergone both chemotherapy and surgery after being diagnosed with ovarian cancer in December 2020. My social media feed and the blogs yesterday were full of genuinely bereft tributes, many people saying that live gigs by Low were among the best they'd ever been to. I never managed to see Low live, something which I regret. 

Growing up in rural Minnesota Alan and Mimi met, bonded and started playing music together, covering Neil Young songs. They moved to Duluth, later saying in an interview that the inspiration for their music was 'Eno, Joy Division and the boredom of living in Duluth'. I first encountered them on 2000's Things We Lost In The Fire, a record of hushed, intense, quiet, minimalist, glacial songs, a style that became known as slowcore. It was one of those records that left you changed by listening to it.  I bought the louder, gnarlier 2005 album The Great Destroyer and the follow up Guns And Drums. Their recent albums saw them turn the electronics and distortion up on 2018's Double Negative and last year's Hey What.  

Hatchet, from Drums And Guns, and sung by Mimi was released as a single with a remixed version, the Optimimi version, vinyl crackle and a 60s Southern soul sound Mimi sings, 'You be my Charlie and I will be your George/ Let's bury the hatchet like The Beatles and The Stones', a nod to the quieter and less showy members of those bands, and later, 'You be my Marianne and I'll be your Yoko', a nod to two women who are often reduced to stereotypes within the stories of the two groups. 

Hatchet Optimimi Version

Disappearing is from 2021's Hey What, Mimi and Alan's voices in unison over a wall of distortion and noise, 'Every time that ship goes out/ It feels like everything's complete/ But somebody, somewhere is waiting/ Some other ocean at her feet'. The song finishes with the overdriven guitar ever more distorted, Mimi and Alan aah aahing together and then the wrenching final verse, 'That disappearing horizon/ It brings cold comfort to my soul/ An ever present reminder/ The constant face of the unknown'. 

Disappearing

R.I.P. Mimi Parker.