An Hour Of Midsummer Ambience

Today's mix is inspired by the music Martin and I played last Saturday might at Soup with Contours and Marconi Union, sixty minutes of largely ambient music with a tendency towards the cosmic and the odd detour into dub, on this day, the mid point of 2024- how did we get to 30th June so quickly? It seems like only recently it was New Year. The picture is from December last year and an Anglo- Saxon cross in the churchyard of St. Edward's church in Leek, Staffordshire (my Dad's hometown and home to the local delicacy, the Staffordshire oatcake). Anyway, midsummer, late nights, warm days, ambient bliss, dub bass. What more could you ask for?

An Hour Of Midsummer Ambience

• Underworld: Dark And Long (Most 'Ospitable Mix)
• Khartomb: Swahili Lullaby (Synkro's Balearic Dub Mix)
• M- Paths: Emerge
• Sabres Of Paradise: Chapel Street Market 9am
• Zoe: Moonsister (Lunar Dub 1)
• William Orbit: The Story Of Light
• Coyote: Every Forest Tells A Story
• The Woodentops: Dream On (Balearic Ultras Brooking Bass Remix)
• Andy Bell: Smokebelch II
• African Head Charge: Dub For The Spirits
• Sedibus: SETI Part 3

Dark And Long opened Underworld's 1994 album dubnobasswithmyheadman. The single version came with four different mixes, the ambient Most 'Ospitable one being a thing of great beauty. 

Khartomb's 1983 single Swahili Lullaby, post- punk dub,  has recently been re- issued by Jason Boardman's Before I Die label along with this ambient/ Balearic remix courtesy of Stockport producer Synkro. 

M- Paths album Submerge came out on Mighty Force earlier this year, one in a long line of outstanding releases from the reborn Exeter label. Emerge is the final track, piano and synths combining to give the feel of surfacing from underwater to feel the warm hit of sun on your face. 

Chapel Street 9am was on Sabres Of Paradise's 1994 album Haunted Dancehall, Weatherall, Burns and Kooner creating a morning walk through the streets of London after a night at the titular nightclub, electronic seagulls yapping overhead and the gumshoe Maguire heading home. 

Zoe had a huge hit with her song Sunshine On A Rainy Day, a pop- rave classic from summer 1991. The Orb and Youth were involved and The Orb remixed her song Moonsister for the 12".

William Orbit's Strange Cargo 3 is a lost ambient/ global/ dub gem from 1993. The Story Of Light is a blissed out ambient peak.

Coyote released Every Forest tells A Story earlier this year, another spoken word vocal sample layered over laid back ambient/ Balearic music. 

The Woodentops released their album Fruits Of The Deep in April and a single Dream On a few weeks before with this floaty remix by Brighton's Balearic Ultras. 

Andy Bell's cover of Sabres Of Paradise Smokebelch II is from our album Sounds Of The Flightpath Estate Volume 1. In a chain of events that still leaves me scratching my chin, we had almost every track ready for mastering and I emailed Andy (he'd been on tour in the US with Ride) to see if he had anything for us. The following day he sent me Smokebelch, saying I'd inspired him to finish it. He started it the day Andrew died and completed it for our album, inspired by Andrew. Coincidentally, our album made Piccadilly Records mid- year top 25 collections round up a few days ago. 

Dub For The Spirits came out on African Head Charge's Churchical Chant Of The Iyabinghi, an album of previously unreleased tracks and dubs from their 1990 classic Songs Of Praise. Every home should have one.

Sedibus's SETI (The Search For Extra- Terrestrial Intelligence) came out at the start of the year and I'm still going back to it, a lovely mix of synths, samples and 'real' instruments and an endless, questing vision of outer space as a place to find something else/ yourself. 

V.A. Saturday

In 1982 Bill Drummond and Mick Houghton compiled an album called To The Shores Of Lake Placid, a various artists compilation rounding up releases by on the Zoo label. Bill set up Zoo in 1978, initially to put out a single by Liverpool punk group Big In Japan (the band Drummond played guitar in along with at various times Jayne Casey, Ian Broudie, Holly Johnson, Dave Balfe, Budgie and Clive Langer among others). The Big In Japan single was a four track EP, From Y To Z And Never Again- the song Suicide A Go Go appeared on To The Shore Of Lake Placid along with Society For Cutting Up Men. 

To The Shores Of Lake Placid is a round up of some of what was going on in Liverpool between 1978 and 1982. A clutch of lesser known, semi- legendary Zoo groups are all present- Whopper, Troy Tate's The Turqoise Swimming Pools, Birkenhead's Dalek (I Love You) and Those Naughty Lumps whose song Iggy Pop's Jacket Bill Drummond plays guitar on. 

Lori And The Chameleons, a short lived Bill Drummond and Dave Balfe outfit with singer Lori Lartey, are there twice, with Lonely Spy and this one, Touch, a lovely piece of late 70s disco- pop...

Touch

The Teardrop Explodes and Echo And The Bunnymen both show up, each represented by three early classics (the Bunnymen with Pictures On My Wall, their Julian Cope co- write Read It In Books and live favourite Villiers Terrace, The Teardrops by When I Dream, Camera, Camera and Take A Chance). 

My mp3s of the original versions of Read It Books and Pictures On My Wall, the ones from Lake Placid with Echo the drum machine keeping time, are corrupted and won't play. This version of  Read It In Books is from a session at Rockfield with The Chameleons producing, and was added to the U.S. release of Crocodiles. 

Read It In Books

A few years later Echo And The Bunnymen would be huge. In 1984 they released 'the greatest album ever made' (to quote Ian McCulloch), Ocean Rain. Drummond gave the Bunnymen something else as manager, something out of the ordinary. On 12th May 1984 there was a Crsytal Day, a day of activites in and around Liverpool city centre- breakfast in a greasy spoon, a bike ride that traced the outline of the head of the bunny god, a ferry trip across the Mersey and a banana fight. In the evening the band played at St. George's Hall, the neo- classical building opposite Liverpool Lime Street station, visible in the centre of my photo above, taken from the viewing platform at St John's Beacon. The gig was filmed and transmitted on The Tube, a tea time treat.

Bill's adventures as the Bunnymen's manager came to end not long after and in some ways they were never the same without him, professional record company management taking over and the operation losing the madness of Bill's days- the tours of Scottish islands, gigs on ley lines, post- punk bicycle rides. In his book 45 Bill details his time as their manager in a chapter called From The Shores Of Lake Placid, a book written and published for his 45th birthday and also the revolutions per minute of the ultimate pop culture artefact, the 7" single.

Walk On Air Against Your Better Judgement

Some uptempo positivity for Friday and two new releases that should encourage some head nodding, foot tapping, beers in the garden and a general feeling that all is well. Back at the start of the year 100 Poems released a seven track album called Everything's Balearic When You Believe, an irrepressible album from the eternally upbeat Mike Wilson, the man behind 100 Poems. Mike is from Ireland and dropped the first 100 Poems album onto an unsuspecting internet, the sound of soul, psych, pop, funk, Balearic pop with a dash of acid house/ dance music. He followed it last week with a follow up, Everything's Possible When You Balearic, seven more slices of sun drenched sonics and forward facing music (six new songs and a rmeix of Tambores En Benirras' Generadora De Rayos). The album kicks off with applause, a crowd clapping and then long synth chords before a big voice takes us into Gettin' Down With George, 80s soul funk guitar licks and images of neon lit Top Of The Pops. 

All remaining five originals are filled with Mike's signature touches. Believe (Everything Is Possible) is a slow paced sundowner, two voices, one whispering, the other oohing, acoustic guitar, padding drums and horns- ascending, life affirming horns. 

Mike's song titles and sound are perfectly synced- Into The Light, When Night Begins To Shine, and Warm Breeze On Our Face (Like A Hot Summer Sigh) all sound like they should. It's got moments of joy, an album to play in the car with the sun out and the windows down. Available at Bandcamp at a Pay What You Want deal with any proceeds to Jigsaw and Shelter. 100 Poems is named after the collected poetry of Seamus Heaney, the most celebrated Irish poet and playwright. On his headstone is the epitaph, 'Walk on air against your better judgement', a line about throwing off inhibitions and abandoning caution, something which I think Mike does with each song he records. 

Also out recently, yesterday in fact, is the latest EP on Duncan Gray's Tici Taci- Tail Feather by Rule Six. There are two versions, the original version of Tail Feather and a Meat Katie remix. The first is a slow motion chugger with bass and guitar, rim shots and descending synth notes, squiggles and bounce. 

The Meat Katie Remix is lower slung and squelchier, ideal for playing an hour or two later than the first, when the floor's packed and everyone's forgotten themselves a little, inhibitions left behind and cares forgotten for a while.  

Heroes

This is another post brought via my box of magazine freebie CDs, this time a CD from Mojo in 2020- 'Mojo Heroes The Best Of 2020' (from the January 2021 edition but on sale December 2020- it came with a cover story about The White Stripes, a free calendar to go with the CD, and promised that inside you'd find the 75 best albums of the year- Bob Dylan's Rough And Rowdy Ways- along with articles about Neil Young's lost classics, Pharaoh Saunders, and AC/DC). 

2020 it's fair to say was not a year that turned out the way anyone thought it would. The news footage early on in the year from China and the Far East of deserted city streets and hundreds of thousands of people living in- new word alert- lockdown. It was followed by the news that Covid 19 had reached Europe and then the terrifying scenes from Italy. The government here was new, Boris Johnson having won an election in December 2019 by promising to 'get Brexit done' and to level up the places that lent him their votes in the general election based on the despair with Brexit and fear of Corbyn. Johnson would soon prove to be the worst person in charge at the worst time, literally the least suitable person to run a government during a crisis. Within weeks, March 2020, we were locking down here with workplaces and schools closing - and I remember the fear, the sense of being on the edge of chaos and loss of control in the week leading up to the announcement that schools were closing. Some people suggested it would only be a few weeks. In the middle of the year, May 2020, the killing of George Floyd by North Carolina police officers sparked the Black Lives Matter movement which soon became international. In the summer the Chancellor Rishi Sunak announced the Eat Out To Help Out scheme, where people received subsidised meals in restaurants and pubs in order to help the hospitality industry- a policy which many have linked with an autumn surge in re- infections. People were hospitalised and some died because the government offered half price pub food. By the end of the year we were in a muddle of Covid tiers, city lockdowns, a government that locked down too late, opened up too early, was determined (egged on by the tabloid press) 'to save Christmas' and then had to lockdown again in January 2021. 

We've forgotten a lot of this haven't we? Moved on. People talked of a restructuring of the way we do things but I'm not convinced that's really happened (although more people do work from home than did before). Over quarter of a million people in the UK died of Covid. Every one of them has a name and a family. One of them was my son Isaac, although he didn't die until 30th November 2021, long after the world had for most people returned to 'normal'. 

So, not the year anyone was expecting and in some ways it feels along time ago. A once in a century event, I hear occasionally as one minister or another tries to dismiss claims the Tory government has been incompetent (if you didn't want to have to deal with a crisis maybe you shouldn't have gone into government, I always feel like replying). A week today we get the chance to consign this government and the four Tory ones that preceded it to oblivion, the worst run of Prime Minsters and cabinets this country's had in modern times. I for one cannot wait. 

The CD is titled Heroes and the front cover, an African american woman in a beret with her fist raised in the air, reflects the Black Lives Matter side of 2020. Inside the cardboard slipcase we get Bob Dylan, Frazey Ford, Cornershop, Run The Jewels, Nick Cave (Galleon Ship from Carnage), Phoebe Bridges, Bill Callahan, Moses Sumney, Toots and The Maytals (Toots Hibbert died in August 2020 of Covid), Fleet Foxes, Tony Allen and Hugh Masekela (Tony also died in 2020, of an aneurysm), and Nubya Garcia. 

We also get this by Khruangbin, a lovely fluid and laid back piece of melodic pop with a very apt song title...

So We Won't Forget

Jarv Is... are present too, this from the album Beyond the Pale, Jarvis Cocker's album recorded in 2019 and then released in summer 2020. 

House Music All Night Long

The other band on the CD are Fontaines D.C. who have shown up in blogposts at No Badger Required and Dubhed over the last week. In 2020 Fontaines released their second album, A Hero's Death, the title track striking a deep chord with me- I've written about it previously. The song on the Mojo CD was this one....

I Was Not Born

How's that for electrifying? Pummeling drums and post- punk guitars and Grian's strident vocal declaring, 'I was not born/ Into this world/ To do another man's bidding'. It's a young man's song, the lyrics giving two fingers to the world of work and convention. 

Fontaines have released two new songs this year ahead of an album in August called Romance. The first single was Starburster. Starburster starts off like hip hop, rumbling in slowly. Last week they followed it with something very different, the childhood referencing and home video guitar pop of Favourite, a song that rattles along with guitars like mid- to- late 80s Johnny Marr and footage of the five Fontaines skateboarding and hanging down the pub. 

Dream Food Resistor

This came out last Friday, a superb slice of slinky, wonky dance floor action, Dream Food by Spatial Awareness. The title is apt- there are aspects of this track that do feel very dreamy, the warm disorientation of waking from an odd but pleasant dream, the distorted vocal playing off against the synth melody as the drums patter away in a 122 BPM sweet spot. Lovely stuff- there's a dub mix too, seven minutes of pared back, stripped down but equally tripped out music. 

Meanwhile over at Paisley Dark in Leeds, Shunt Voltage have released an EP of dark, dancefloor mutant acid house, a track called Resistor. 

There are remixes too, one from label boss John Payntor as Space Age Freak Out, a lovely chuggy one courtesy of Cosmikuro, a banger from Mindbender, and one by Adult DVD (possibly not an act to Google if you're on a work computer). Find them all here. 

Live At Soup- Marconi Union, Contours and The Flightpath Estate

On Saturday evening, as Manchester basked in the June sunshine and Stephenson Square was crammed with afternoon drinkers, The Flightpath Estate DJs (me and Martin on this occasion) arrived to play support to Contours and Marconi Union in the basement of Soup, a bar and gig/ club space in the corner of the square. Soup’s live space is a small room, capacity 150, with some of the most graffitied toilets in the city.

We started early, 6.20pm, with some ambient sounds, Martin and me playing back to back- Sedibus, Synkro’s brand new remix of Khartomb, Coyote, M- Paths, Andy Bell’s cover of Smokebelch, the Sabres of Paradise Endorphin remix of Bjork, Underworld’s Dark And Long (Most ‘Ospitable), Richard Fearless, Sabres Of Paradise’s Chapel Street 7am and a little bit of dub courtesy of African Head Charge and KlangKollektor. At 7.20pm promoter Paul Watt, the man who sorted it for us to play and sporting an Acid House Chancer t- shirt, introduced Contours.

Contours is Tom Burford, from Cumbria but now Manchester based. With his equipment set up at the front of the stage- Moog synth, oscillator, laptop and a large wooden xylophone- Tom starts out slowly, chilled washes of synth filling the space. A minute or two in Tom brings a beat in and from that point on he’s in constant motion, head bobbing, sudden flicks of the wrist that change the sound, drop out the drums and bring them back in, flitting between bits of kit and several times moving to the xylophone, little bursts of wooden melodies on top of the ambient/ electronic/ synth action. Tom doesn’t stop, the set building and flowing for forty minutes, shifting about as he works his way through his tracks. It’s vibrant and engaging, some hints of Four Tet in the sounds emanating from the stage, and very enjoyable.

This is Arp Phase from Contours' recent album Elevation, minimal, futuristic and organic sounding, the synths and oscillators sounding like they've come alive. 

We get fifteen minutes of DJ time while Contours’ equipment is moved and Marconi Union get set to play. There are three members of Marconi Union, from left to right, one playing keys and synth, one with a bank of synths and pedals and playing guitar, and the third on laptop. All three have headphones on and are seemingly lost in their own world, concentrating intently, fully focussed on their part in making the music. 

The songs build slowly, synth chords, waves of sound, drums thudding in, arpeggios from the Telecaster, piano lines and disembodied and distorted voices. Things happen slowly- glaciers move slightly and tectonic plates shift a little in while we wait for chord changes- and then suddenly, walls of noise swell and break. The films projected behind them echo what’s coming through the PA, variously liquids flowing, cityscapes, lines of people walking past from old films- tension and release, ebb and flow, light and shade. This is A Citizen's Dream from Signals, from the end of  2021. 

Monday's Long Song

Back to 2001 and Le Tigre, Kathleen Hanna's Riot Grrl/ electronic rock outfit remixed by turn of the century wise guys DFA. A remix that is tense and funky, expansive and focussed, disco and rock. Kathleen asks all the key questions that you want the answers to when you're under the strobe and the mirror ball, 'who took the bomp from the bompalompalomp? who took the ram from the ramalamadingdong?', while the guitars, cowbell and handclaps do their thing. 'Wanna see me disco?', she asks.

How did a record which seems so recent, come out so long ago?

Deceptacon (DFA Remix)

Over at Twitter Anthony Teasdale posted a thread about the impact LCD Soundsystem and DFA had on a bored, staid early 21st century music scene- the wallop and knowingness of Losing My Edge, the cowbell dancefloor mayhem of House Of Jealous Lovers, some of DFA's remixes (the one above, the one of Soulwax, their version of M.I.A.'s Paper Planes) and the timeless, emotive brilliance of Someone Great. All of which sounds like a Sunday mix waiting to happen. 

James Murphy gets a mention in the new single from Galliano, Circle Going Round The Sun. Galliano have long been residing in the 'where are they now?' file and now they're back.

I've always had a massive soft spot for Galliano, loved their early 90s releases on Acid Jazz. I saw them at The Hacienda in the early 90s, a gig nowhere near to sold out but Rob Gallagher, Snaith, Valerie Etienne and Mick Talbot played like it was crammed to the rafters. The new song is a stream of beat poetry and influences with references to Andrew Weatherall, Murphy and Gil Scott Heron (also name checked in Losing My Edge) over a pulsing bassline and live percussion. A welcome return to the fray.  

Forty Minutes Of Music From Reviews At Ban Ban Ton Ton

I've been writing guest reviews for Dr. Rob's Ban Ban Ton Ton website for a few years now, Rob operating out of a remote location in rural Japan (having emigrated there from London) and me in south Manchester. Rob gets sent all sorts of music- Balearic, electronic, cosmische, ambient, jazz, dub, reggae and all points in between- and he passes some of it on to me to listen to and write about. He's keen that Ban Ban Ton Ton has different voices and I'm happy to receive the music and write about it. I currently have a few things lined up to do not least a review of Contours who me and Martin supported at Soup last night along with the headliners Marconi Union. Full reviews to follow both here at Bagging Area and at Ban Ban Ton Ton. One of the wonders of the internet age is the shrinking of distances and the ease of distribution of music. 

In 2024 I've already reviewed seven releases at Ban Ban Ton Ton. I've pulled tracks from each of those seven albums/ EPs into one mix below that works both as a sampler and as a forty minute mix in itself, starting out quite chilled with some dub/ post- punk from the early 80s, heading into ambient territory, then becoming more rhythm heavy with some cosmische and some early 90s Italo cosmic disco. 

Forty Minutes Of Music From Reviews At Ban Ban Ton Ton 

• Khartomb: Swahili Lullaby
• Project Gemini: Colours & Light
• Sedibus: SETI Part 3
• Caolifhionn Rose: Constellation
• Kosmischer Läufer: Spargelspiegel
• Sordid Sound System: It's About Time
• a.s.o.:Go On (Extended Remix)
• Meo And Steve: Global Village (Funk Version)

Khartomb were an early 80s post- punk/ dub/ bossa nova outfit with one 7" single and a Peel Session to their name. The single- Swahili Lullaby- has been picked up by Jason Boardman's Manchester based label Before I Die and re- issued along with two new remixes. My review was at Ban ban Ton Ton last week and you can read it here. Before I Die is fast becoming essential, every release testament to Jason's ability to find new music. Earlier this year he put out the excellent Dubtapes Vol. 1 by KlangKollektor and last year's Konformer was a superb album too. 

Project Gemini is the freak beat/ funk/ soul/ 60s/ cinematic outfit for Paul Osborne. His new album Colours & Light is packed full of guests and is a trip through the night, a kaleidoscopic night out with a  '60s flavour, Turkish and Arabic influences and some French vibes. My review is here. 

I've written about Sedibus here and at Ban Ban Ton Ton. The latest Sedibus album, SETI, is one of this year's records that has stuck around my turntable, The Orb's Alex Paterson and Andy Falconer in fine form. My Ban Ban Ton Ton review is here accompanied by Rob's own thoughts on the album. 

Caolifhionn Rose is a Manchester based artists and her album Constellation is out now on Manchester label Gondwana.  Previously Caolifhionn (pronouced Kallin) has sung with The Durutti Column. Her musical background is in jazz and folk. The album is a wonderous thing- piano, jazz and folk shades, ambient and classical, samples, saxophone and a lighter than air feel, a response to 2020's lockdowns and the power of nature. Read my review here. 

Fred Und Luna's The Future Sounds Of Kraut Vol 2 is a seventeen track compilation of music inspired by the West German bands of the 1970s. I've included two of my favourites here, Kosmischer Läufer and Sordid Sound System. My review at Ban Ban Ton Ton is here. 

a.s.o. are based in Berlin and make downtempo, hip hop influenced dance music. They released a remixes EP this year which I wrote about here. 

Meo and Steve's GLobal Village was one of six slices of Italian cosmic disco/ Afro/ funk/ house from the 1990s, originally out on Riccione's Tribal Italia label and now re- issued on Dualismo Sound. Read more here. 

V.A. Saturday

The 1977 various artists compilation album New Wave looks like a major label cash in (it came out on Vertigo, a subsidiary of Phillips/ Phonogram). The cover, bright red with a photo of leather jacket clad punk spitting beer at the camera in front of a corrugated iron fence, is typically '77 punk. The album's title looks like an attempt to make something threatening palatable, new wave rather than punk. But the fact is, it's a really good primer of mainly American 1977 punk bands with some pre- punk or proto- punk acts thrown in and there's hardly a song on it you'd skip (I make an exception for The Boomtown Rats who I'd always skip). The sleeve thanks Linda and Seymour Stein (who scooped up most of the US punk/ New Wave acts for Seymour's label Sire) and also Jake Riviera and Kosmo Vinyl from Stiff Records, both of whom knew their stuff. 

New Wave opens, as all punk compilation albums probably should, with The Ramones and one minute thirty two seconds of rushing buzzsaw guitars and Joey's snarled vocals about Judy and Jackie...

Judy Is A Punk

From there it's bam- bam- bam of U.S. punk and proto- punk- The Dead Boys, Patti Smith's Piss Factory, The Runaways, New York Dolls, Richard Hell and The Voidoids and Love Comes In Spurts. France and Australia are represented by Little Bob Story a Skyhooks. Flip it over and side two kicks off with Talking Heads (if you've placed the needle past The Boomtown Rats), jerky, staccato, New York art with two loves  that go tweet tweet tweet tweet tweet like little birds. 

Love Goes To Building On Fire 

The Damned show up with New Rose, the first UK punk single and the one that got them blackballed by the punk crowd for the crime of speeding up the recording in the studio, studio trickery being NOT PUNK. More Ramones, more Dead Boys, more Runaways, more Dolls and The Flaming Groovies who always seem like the outliers on this record, their 1967 San Francisco garage rock always feeling a bit too studied and retro for 1977 despite Shake Some Action being most definitely a good song. 

New Wave was a second hand shop staple for years- all the way through the 80s a record you could guarantee finding in the Punk section. Pulling it out again and playing it for this post, it still packs a punch, a 1977 sock to the face. 

Bagging Area Book Club Chapter Three- Solstice Edition

Today is the summer solstice, midsummer, the longest day and shortest night, a celebration of the sun that has been observed since the Neolithic era. To mark this event I thought I'd add to my recent Bagging Area Book Club posts with some solstice adjacent reading material. In May 2019 the first edition of Weird Walk was published, specifically timed to coincide with May Day (Beltane in Gaelic). Since then there have been a further six editions, with the Number Seven in 2023 the most recent although as the photo above shows I only have issues one, three and seven so far. Weird Walk was started by three friends 'walking and engaging with the British landscape and its lore'. Forty pages printed on good quality card, well designed with quality photographs and illustrations and packed with interesting articles, Weird Walk is a treasure trove to be dipped in and out of. The first page of the first issue quotes Julian Cope in The Modern Antiquarian- 'people don't go anywhere unless there's a signpost'- and from that point has included articles on Medieval graffiti, dolmen, Dungeon Synth, flat roof pubs, a walk around Avebury, a feature on the life of 'seminal Tudor loon' William Kempe, an interview with writer Ben Edge, the folklore of booze and of cheese, explorations of portals in Wiltshire, acid folk, author Benjamin Myers writing abut Lindisfarne, and the pastoral ambient cassette sounds of the label Verdant Wisdom. 

Acid folk? Here's some Pentangle from 1969...

House Carpenter

Weird Walk is well worth looking out for and can be bought online from their website, each edition available for £5.50. 

I thought I'd throw in some more sounds for the solstice, some acid house rather than acid folk, recent releases to soundtrack tonight and beyond. First up is Temples remixed by Jono from Jagwar Ma, originally released in 2014 for Record Shop Day and recently made available at Temples' Bandcamp page. Shelter Song (Jagwar Ma Jono's Wrong Mix) takes Temples psyche rock and gives it an electronic thump and pulse, the synthline twisting its way round and round. 

Richard Sen, who compiled one of the best compilations of last year and a superb remix EP to accompany it (Dream The Dream) and who appeared on our Sounds From The Flightpath Estate Volume 1 album with the speaker shaking sounds of Tough On Chug, Tough On The Causes Of Chug, is set to release a debut solo album later this year, an album called India Man. To lead into it he's released a single, Hills Of Kashmir, a cosmic disco/ acid house thumper that goes on with little let up in intensity and is very good indeed. 

Richard also turns up today at the latest release by teenage wonderkid OBOST who's debut album Er... Hello? I wrote about a month ago. Sen has remixed Don't Want To Be Alone, a star sailing, bleepy, dynamic version of the song with Bobby's vocal on top. The EP is out today at Bandcamp. Richard's remix is worth the price of admission alone but you also get OBOST's own Jittery remix of the song and a new track, Take The Message. Happy solstice. 

Go Easy Step Lightly

The big stack of CDs that came free with magazines that I wrote about a few weeks ago continues to give up the goods as I work my way through it. It seems that people at Uncut and Mojo were well connected to Pete Wylie- Pete and Mighty Wah! songs have turned up on several CDs. 

In 2011 Mojo came accompanied by a CD called Panic- 15 Tracks Of Riotous '80s Indie Insurrection!, a fifteen track compilation that opened with Madness and included Billy Bragg, The Three Johns, Robert Wyatt, Half Man Half Biscuit, Orange Juice, Redskins, and Felt among the line up. Halfway through was this...

The Day Margaret Thatcher Died (A Party Song)

At the point this CD was given away (and until this year with the release of Teach Yrself Wah!) Panic was the only physical release this song got. In the song Pete imagines the celebrations that would ensue with the news that Thatcher had died. He wasn't wrong either- when she died in April 2013 there were indeed places that celebrated. There has been some revisionism in political and popular culture over the years, Thatcher portrayed in some televisual accounts of the 1980s as a slightly eccentric but loveable Prime Minister with big blow dried hair, a handbag and blouses with big bows who did the UK a lot of good. This rose tinted view of Thatcherism, her governments, their policies and the 1980s is also propagated by various right wing rags and is one of the few things the factions in the current Tory Party agree on. But let's not kid ourselves- the Thatcher governments were hard right wing, authoritarian and deeply unpleasant, pushing a set of policies that among other things demonised huge sectors of the British working class, talked about the 'managed decline' of a city (Liverpool), gave their friends huge tax cuts (paid for by North Sea gas and selling off nationalised industries), ran down entire industries in the name of 'the market', creating the subsequent social problems which the people living in those communities were then blamed for. Trickle down economics- wealth doesn't and hasn't trickled down, it's flowed up. On top of that she deployed police as the military wing of the Conservative government and was very friendly with all sorts of unpleasant and murderous dictators and regimes (Pinochet, apartheid South Africa). Also, Clause 28. So, no thank you to the revisionist view of Thatcher. 

The song is great with Pete in fine form- crunching guitars, rousing vocals, and a chant, 'build a bonfire/ paint the sky/ come on down/ I'll tell you why/ She's gone/ and nobody cried'. Celebrating anyone's death may seem needlessly callous but for many people who lived through the 80s, Thatcher is an exception. 

In April 2000 Uncut magazine gave away Unconditionally Guaranteed 2000.4, sixteen songs for the fourth month of the new millennium, opening with Chappaquiddick Skyline and ending with Mercury Rev. Five songs in was Pete Wylie and The Mighty Wah!'s Disneyland Forever. 

Disneyland Forever

This is Pete at his biggest and grandest, a huge sounding song with widescreen production, massive chiming guitars, pounding drums and Pete's soaring vocal. The song originally came out on Wah!'s 2000 album Songs Of Strength And Heartbreak. Pete tells the story of the inspiration for this song when he plays it live. He met Gerry Conlon backstage at GMex, a Stop Sellafield show set up by Greenpeace with a line up including Big Audio Dynamite, Public Enemy, Kraftwerk and U2. Gerry Conlon had spent fifteen years in prison as one of the Guildford Four, wrongly convicted of being an IRA bomber. Gerry and the other three of the Guildford Four were released on appeal in October 1989- much to the chagrin of the Thatcher government. The Birmingham Six, similarly locked up on invented charges and police incompetence/ corruption, were freed not long after in 1991. Pete spoke to Gerry backstage, a man who had spent a decade and a half in prison for something he didn't do, wrongfully convicted by the British justice system. Gerry struggled with life after being released, suffering from mental health issues, drugs and alcohol dependency, and a suicide attempt. When they spoke backstage at GMex they talked about life inside and injustice and Pete asked Gerry what he was going to do. As Pete tells it, Gerry said, 'I don't know for sure but whatever happens its going to be Disneyland forever'. Pete found this inspiring, a man who could be consumed by hate and bitterness seeing the world and the rest of his life in that way. Gerry died of cancer in 2014 aged sixty having recovered from some of his issues and becoming a campaigner for those who have suffered miscarriages of justice. The song is Pete's attempt to do justice to the man- and justice he does. 

The third Wylie/ Wah! song from my pile of freebie magazine CDs was from 2003, a CD titled White Riot Vol Two (A Tribute To The Clash), sixteen Clash covers and a Joe Strummer song. The covers include Jesse Malin, The National, Joy Zipper (posted a few weeks ago), Sparks, Billy Bragg, Stiff Little Fingers, and Nouvelle Vague. It also had Pete Wylie captured live at The Railway, Haddington Festival in 2002, covering Mick Jones' Stay Free, just Pete, his acoustic guitar and more passion than can be measured.

Stay Free (Live)

Saturday Soup

This Saturday Marconi Union play a gig at Soup in Manchester supported by Contours with further support by The Flightpath Estate DJs. On this occasion the Flightpath Estate DJs are me and Martin. We are starting things off at 6.30 and then on again between Contours and Marconi Union at about 8pm- we're playing ambient/ electronic sounds and it would be lovely to see anyone who fancies a night of electronic music. There are some tickets left and they're priced at under £14. 

I saw Marconi Union last march, an audio/ visual experience, three people playing laptop, synth and keys with a guitarist centre stage playing the least guitary guitar. Layers of ambient sounds but with real intent and propulsion. This is from an EP that came out in 2022, The Ilex, a moody and compelling piece of electronic music, non- stop drums and ripples of dark synth textures. It's from Versions which you can get here. 

In 2021 Marconi Union released a seven track album they recorded with Jan Wobble, a Record Shop Day exclusive. The album opened with Wealth, seven minutes of abstract experimentation, a long slow fade in of ambience and then the deep, dub bass of Mr. Wobble. Jah's repetitive bass riff provides the bedrock for the sci fi synths and keening guitar lines. 

Wealth

Contours provides support on Saturday, the project of Cumbrian born/ Manchester based DJ and producer Tom Burford. Contours released an EP in April- Elevations- which I'm going to be reviewing for Dr. Rob's Ban Ban Ton Ton so I won't steal my own thunder or Rob's by posting anything about that. Instead here's The Programme from a 7"/ digital release from October 2021 (available at Bandcamp), a three and a half minute focussed excursion on drum machine and synth with some lovely percussion and the hint of some acid.

 

Sprechen Presents...

On Saturday night gig goers in Manchester had multiple options. The new Co- Op Arena in east Manchester hosted Liam Gallagher who was playing Definitely Maybe in full and then whatever else it is Liam plays after he's done all the good songs. Old Trafford cricket ground had Foo Fighters. Manchester city centre on Saturday afternoon was packed with people coming and going, Liam and Foo fans, hen parties and earlier on glammed up Taylor Swift fans heading for trains to Liverpool. The other option was a walk up Cheetham Hill Road to The Yard and a Sprechen Records Presents night with live performances by Chris Massey's The Thief Of Time and Psychederek. I took the non- Liam, no- Foo option and headed to The Yard. 

The Thief Of Time's debut album Where Do I Belong? came out towards the end of last year and became one of my favourite albums of 2023 very quickly. Chris Massey usually makes dance music and ultimately that has one aim- to make people dance. The Thief Of Time is song based and more autobiographical, Chris bringing together a lifetime spent soaking up pop culture- music, films, comics, songs, bands, clubs- and forming into one seven song record. There are nods of the head to 80s pop, to mid- 80s New Order, electronic music and guitars. A Certain Ratio helped out as did Psychederek, Bay Bryan and Alison Rae who all provided vocals. At 9.45 pm on Saturday night Chris stepped on stage at The Yard for the debut live appearance as The Thief of Time, switching between guitar, synth drums, keys/ synths and vocals with a guitarist to his left. The songs definitely work live, pulsing and building, electronic pop with psychedelic and lots of film references. The projections behind added a visual dimension, sci fi loops, Manchester tower blocks, the footbridge over the M60 at Stretford and pulsating computer animations. Many of the songs have snatches of dialogue sampled from film and TV and Chris had synced up the vocal samples to the moments of the films he took them from, the actors from various black and white films appearing on the screen as their voices came through the PA. It was hugely impressive and hopefully the first of many future performances. Towards the finale, with twin guitars chiming away, as the motorik/ cosmische rhythms thumped on and the synths soared, the effect was magical and hypnotic. This one, Rendezvous On A Lost World, with the ghostly refrain sung by Psychederek, 'You're not alone', echoing through the Victorian school building, sounded especially good.

The Thief Of Time were followed by Psychederek. His single Test Card Girl was one of my favourite releases of 2023 and his recent EP Alt! is already shaping up to be one of my favourites of '24. Behind a bank of synths, drum machines and a laptop, a microphone and a guitar, Psychederek began with the dreamy, phased, blissed out synth chords of Test Card Girl, stretching the sounds and filtering them before the drum beat kicked in...

From there he went from one song straight into the next, a blend of gig and DJ set, the songs joined seemlessly. Hapi from Alt! had his singing, his voice floating from the PA, followed by the crunching cosmische rhythms and Neu! guitar/ synthlines of Nowhere To Nowhere. I had to leave before the end of Psychederek's set but what I caught was superb and I'll be back for more next time he plays. 

Psychederek's Alt! is available at Sprechen, four songs for summer '24 including his sun baked cover of 808 State's Pacific. Digital and vinyl here. 

The Thief Of Time's Where Do I Belong? is here, digital, CD and vinyl options plus posters and tote bags. 

Monday's Long Song

In 1993 David Sylvian and Robert Fripp released a single- Jean The Birdman- across two CDs with different B-sides on the pair. CD Two came with Endgame, a beautiful, understated acoustic song, and the ten minute and fourteen second wonder that is Earthbound/ Starblind. Effectively, it's two songs stuck together. The first half is David singing over acoustic guitar, close and melodic with lyrics about magic and nature and a woman who is 'giving me questions and quizzical looks/ She tears up my papers and burns all my books', someone who has 'been through this world before'. At four minutes seventeen seconds the second half starts, six minutes of Frippertronics, the conjuring of ambient guitar soundscapes. The first half is earthbound I guess and the second half is starblind. 

Earthbound/ Starblind

Forty Minutes Of Pop Will Eat Itself

This goose lives at Portland basin in Ashton- under-  Lyne, East Manchester. When we were there a couple of weeks ago they warned us that the geese were nesting and could be aggressive if disturbed. They didn't mention this one though, who has necked two cans of Stella and now wants a fight. 

Pop Will Eat Itself are touring this autumn. I'm quite tempted. Back in autumn 1988 I saw them at Liverpool University. In my head they were one of the first gigs I attended in Liverpool, close to the start of the academic year, maybe just after Fresher's Week- but false memory syndrome has had me here because according to PWEI's own On Patrol gig history at their website they didn't play the Mountford Hall until 2nd December 1988. There is a live recording of the gig on Mixcloud, probably one I bought at some point on cassette from the bootleg tape sellers in the student's union. 

The gig was great, PWEI hitting the stage and giving us an hour of their mash up of rock, rap, dance music and samples. The room was a real gathering of the late 80s tribes, grebos, indie kids, and goths all standing around waiting. I was wearing Levi's, Converse, a black t- shirt and dark green waistcoat (with Watchmen smiley face badge) combo with, for some reason, a bandanna tied round my head. This sticks in the memory for reasons I cannot fully ascertain- as does my conversation with Tracey, a hippy girl who was on my course. We had a chat, all going well, but at some point I referred to Poppie Clint as Clive and Tracey was withering in her look and response. 'Clint, Adam, he's called Clint'. They came on stage to rescue me from my embarrassment (Tracey later came with us to see The House Of Love in Widnes though that could have been because Al had a car). 

Stourbridge's finest were huge fun, a riot of sounds, samples, buzzsaw guitars and shouting. B.A.D. may have got their before them but they were fairly ground-breaking in their approach and records. The mix below reflects that I hope, forty minutes of late 80s and early 90s collisions of styles, pop culture references all over the place, focussing mainly on singles and finishing with a song released for Italia 90, an unlikely music- football- politics crossover.

Forty Minutes Of Pop Will Eat Itself

• The Incredible PWEI v Dirty Harry
• Can U Dig It (7" Mix)
• Dance Of The Mad
• Eat Me, Drink Me, Love Me, Kill Me
• Karmadrome
• Wise Up Sucker
• Def. Con. One.
• Orgone Accumulator
• Inject Me
• Touched By The Hand Of Cicciolina

The Incredible PWEI v Dirty Harry is from the 92 Degrees single from 1991, a superb acid house/ film sample fest. 

Can U Dig It was a single in 1989, from their second album, This Is The Day.. This Is The Hour... This Is This!, a list of influences and references from TV, film, comics, records and that sounds like what life felt like in 87/ 88 from The Twilight Zone to Alan Moore (knows the score), V For Vendetta and Into The Groovy, Run DMC and Renegade Soundwave, Marvel and DC. Wise Up Sucker is from the same album, a single too as is Def. Con. One., the lead single from 1988's This Is This!, the archetypal grebo rock song, a collision of punk, hip hop, rock, indie and samples. Inject Me was on the album too. 

Dance Of The Mad is from 1990, a single that lost the word Bastards from the end of the title to make it more acceptable for TV and radio play. Produced by Flood and taken from the third PWEI album, Cure For Sanity, and recorded at Paul Weller's Black Barn studio in Surrey. It's Weller's studio now, I'm not sure if he owned it then. I can't imagine much common ground in 1990 between Weller and the Poppies but who knows.

Eat, Me, Drink Me, Love Me, Kill Me and Karmadrome are from 1992, a double A- side single. You need both sides. 

Orgone Accumulator is a cover of the Hawkwind song from a 1987 covers EP along with Sigue Sigue Sputnik's Love Missile F1- 11.

Touched by The Hand Of Cicciolina is from Cure For Sanity and a summer 1990 single, one of the songs of the summer (a summer that wasn't short of memorable songs). It features/ pays tribute to Hungarian- Italian porn star Ilona Staller who was elected into the Italian parliament in 1987. A couple of years later she offered to have sex with Saddam Hussein in exchange for peace. The piano riff, Gary Linekar sample and chant of 'Cicicolina/ Ciciolina/ This time for I- tal- ya', are all PWEI gold. 

V.A. Saturday

Back in 2013 Astro Lab Recordings released a double CD compilation called Treasure Hunting. At the time the whole A Love From Outer Space/ chuggy cosmic disco/ Golden Lion/ Scandi- Italo house thing was quite underground and some distance from the bright lights. The Golden Lion didn't even exist in its current form. I was just typing away at this blog in isolation, chasing Andrew Weatherall remixes and music by related artists, and I wasn't really plugged into at all apart from vicariously via the internet, and hadn't made any of the connections and friendships that I have now. Our kids were both young and weekend nights spent dancing until ungodly hours weren't really possible. Treasure Hunting was one of the ways that connected me to that sound, an eighteen track compilation that pulled me in because of the Andrew Weatherall remix of Timothy J. Fairplay's Blizzard/ Snowride. Other names on the CD were by artists I already had music by- Deadstock 33s (Justin Robertson), Daniel Avery (whose debut album Drone Logic came out that year and reconnected me with techno sounds), and some Weatherall associated names from the Scrutton Street axis- Scott Fraser and Hardway Bros- plus the odd name I recognised from mixes Andrew had done for various websites and clubs- Mugwump for instance.

Treasure Hunting is a superb set of tracks, all connected by the chuggy/ sci fi/ cosmic disco sound but many sounding pretty individual too. Across the rest of the CD there are first rate tracks by Marc Pinol, Toby Tobias, Ana Helder, DJ Kaos, Cage and Aviary and several more. There isn't a weak track on it and you can pick it up cheaply second hand. It's probably not a particularly sought after various artists compilation, I doubt it will be seen as a classic in years to come, but it's one that drew me into a sub- world I was looking in at, part of what I was hearing at a distance in 2013, the year coincidentally that Martin and myself started The Flightpath Estate. These three give an idea of the treasure contained within, starting with the 80s synths, bleeps and robotic voices of Marc Pinol's Monotony In Germany, then Mugwump's slower, spacious Belgian grooves on God Is Gracious and finishing with Hardway Bros and an exercise in sci fi, booty shaking hypnosis. More cowbell please. 

Monotony In Germany

God Is Gracious

The Prince In Outer Space

Sean Johnston/ Hardway Bros continues in rude health, DJing, remixing and making his own music. Shortly he will release an EP on Rekids, an EP called Murky, with vocals from Beth Cassidy and a Beyond The Wizard's Sleeve remix. To celebrate this Sean has done a ninety minute mix for House Of Rekids, a deep dive into thumpy, dark electronic music- don't let the slow start get you thinking this is a chilled out mix, it goes in deep quite quickly. Superb stuff from Sean, as ever. Listen to it at Soundcloud. 

Tracklist

• Luminodisco - Jazzclub 
• Rees - Früg (Edit) 
• A.B.Habibi  - Mother Africa 
• Innuendo - Kreaturen Der Nacht 
• Len - Steal My Sunshine (Version Idjut) 
• Roland Leesker -Let It All Go (feat. Dan Diamond) 
• Romare -Wolf's Teeth 
• Shakespeares Sister - Black Sky - Apiento Edit (Unreleased) 
• Toby Tobias - Get Wit Me 
• Jezebell - Weekend Machines 
• Phil Kieran - All Gonna Hurt (Unreleased) 
• Rafiki - Lofi Dreams 
• Crooked Man - YowYow 
• Session Victim - Screen Off /w Ras Stimulant 
• Timo Maas & Marc Werner - Barca Boys 
• Burglar Tom - Lonesome Tonight

And if you want more David Holmes returned to NTS this week for another two hour session with his long running God's Waiting Room series. The latest edition opens with the sublime sounds of Marvin Gaye and then goes full on into spiritual jazz, psychedelic soul and freaked out folk. Listen here.  

Twenty One

Eliza, our daughter, is twenty one today. We had the party last weekend at a venue in Altrincham because today she is at the Gottwood festival in Anglesey. Coincidentally Sean Johnston is playing Gottwood, doing A Love From Outer Space, the travelling cosmic disco he and Andrew Weatherall started in 2010. I've told Eliza she must attend ALFOS as part of her birthday celebrations, a cross generational handing on of the torch or something. A couple of her friends asked what ALFOS is. '110 BPM chuggy cosmic disco', I told them, which they seemed to find quite amusing in a 'what's the old man on about?' kind of way. 

A few weeks ago Eliza told me I had to do a speech at her twenty first. I gave it some thought and then, capitalising on her love of Mancunian poetry I decided to do it based on Mike Garry's St Anthony: An Ode To Anthony H. Wilson. Eliza loves Mancunian poetry, Mike Garry's poem and also Tony Walsh's This Is The Place. Despite Eliza's concerns that my poem would be 'cringe' I wrote and read it out anyway, an A- to Z of Eliza set to Mike Garry's structure, cadence and style. Apologies to Mike.

It finished, as Mike's does, with 'Talk to me of all these things and there's one thing that's for certain/ That I'll see the face and I'll hear the voice of Eliza Ramona Turner'. Not a dry eye in the house. Including mine. 

St. Anthony: An Ode To Tony Wilson (Andrew Weatherall Remix)

When she was born a nurse looked at her in her cot as travelled in a lift up to the next floor in Wythenshawe hospital. Eliza was wide awake and looking round. The nurse said to us, 'that is the most alert baby I have ever seen'. And that's kind of how she's been ever since. 

Happy birthday Eliza. You've been through more than any twenty one should have to in recent years and have come through it with your love of life intact. Enjoy Gottwood, enjoy ALFOS. Sean, if she turns up wrecked and harangues you endlessly, please accept my apologies. I don't know where she gets it from. 

Forgiveness Is Yours

Fat White Family released a new album in April, Forgiveness Is Yours and inch by inch it's been creeping into my consciousness, an album I keep coming back to. Like any Fat White Family album there are moments where they cross the line- crossing the line is very much par for the course- but this album has songs to spare, a dynamic and vital sound. They parted company with guitarist Saul Adamczewski during the making of it (not for the first time) and maybe this has given them a focus, a line to pursue. Singer and frontman Lias Saoudi has trodden the path of excess in the past and has since lockdown moved into writing. Several spoken word pieces appear on Forgiveness Is Yours, a harbinger maybe of what could come next. With the guitarist gone the band have stretched into synths and orchestration, funk and disco. Opening song is one minute thirty seconds long, starts with the blast of a ship's funnel and then out of tune horns and woodwind as Lias reads... something. From there the throb of sci fi synths wobble in  and the song John Lennon wanders into earshot, pastoral psychedelia and Lias muttering, gradually becoming clearer and more upfront. Bullet Of Dignity (remixed brilliantly by Beyond The Wizard's Sleeve) is slinky, sinuous funk, and Lias' still striking first line, 'you say you're just thirty one/ what's that in cannibal years?'. The bass sax blows and the distorted funk bubbles away and a refrain from Middle Eastern horns picks up.

Bullet Of Dignity

The album continues onwards, earworms and discordance in equal measure, drum machines and horns, synths and disco bass and Lias always saying or singing something interesting. something that makes you go, 'what did he just say?'. The song titles Polygamy Is Only For The Chief and Visions Of Pain give you some idea of where things are heading although Today You Become A Man is a surprise and maybe something you won't listen to that often- weird funk, Miles Davis horns and Lias offering a spoken word explanation of his brother's circumcision (performed without anaesthetic) in Algeria in the 80s. 

Once Today You Become A Man is over there's a slight breather in the slowed down lounge music/ cabaret vibes of Religion For One. Nothing stays still for very long and the record then hurtles into the home straight, with the hectic groove and whispered vox of Feed The Horse, the noisy pop of What's That Say, Work's 80s synth throb, as if they've suddenly decided to play a stadium- a small stadium but a stadium nonetheless. After all that Forgiveness Is Yours finishes with a torch song, You Can't Force It. A burst of noise followed by piano and the distinct whiff of Weimar. Lias croons like a jazz club singer and then a choir of backing singers join him, all in unison singing, 'you can't force it/ no matter what they say'. Crescendo and final piano plunk. Over. Goodnight. 

It's a remarkable album I think, the work of a band who have pushed at the limits. At their Bandcamp page where you can listen to the entire album, the artist bio merely says 'It's all about the struggle'. If they had a struggle making the album it was worth the effort. 

A few days ago they appeared live on French TV, a show called ARTE Concert at Ground Control in Paris, playing surrounded by a crowd on four sides. Lias is in a body stocking. The synth/ sax player is in a beret, crop to, knickers combo. The three guitarists/ bassists look like the thirty somethings from the cafe/ bar down the road. Fat White Family often approach performing as an opportunity to provoke and to push the audience out of their comfort zone. Lias is off the stage and in crowd before the intro to the first song has been dispatched and finishes the song on the floor. From there it's thirty minutes of intense, disco/ funk/ rock 'n' roll magic. 

Back In The Water Again

Today I offer you three new songs from artists who all found fame/ infamy in the 80s and have kept ploughing their particular own furrows ever since- The The, Pet Shop Boys and Nick Cave. All three have devoted fanbases, all three are artists who have something to say, and all three are associated with a distinct sound and style. The need to keep writing and recording seems to be as strong as ever with them all and the idea propagated by Pete Townshend in The Who about dying before he gets old is long gone. In the 1980s there was a certain amount of derision for The Rolling Stones et al still playing rock 'n' roll in their forties. There is nothing ridiculous about this anymore- artists keep going and we are still interested in their music. None of the three here today are solely nostalgia acts either u their old songs will often get the biggest cheers when played live but the new songs are all trying to get something across- about themselves, about aging, about life and death and the state of the world. 

First is Matt Johnson, back as The The, with a single called Cognitive Dissident and a video by Tim Pope. The song has a gnarly blues guitar riff from Little Barrie's Barry Cadogan, plenty of atmosphere and Matt's low register voice, the song swelling with backing vocals into the chorus, 'left is right/ black is white/ Inside out/ Hope is doubt'. Matt has always written the state of the world and the lyrics on Cognitive Dissident circle around our post truth world, emotion and democracy, alienation and AI. The song is the first from an upcoming album Ensoulment (the first for twenty five years) and some gigs. Cognitive Dissident sounds like The The- no surprise there maybe- but the 90s, Dusk era incarnation with Johnny Marr on board rather than the 80s one of Infected and Soul Mining. Matt says the album is hopeful, even though this single is laced with fear, gloom and bad things.

Pet Shop Boys have a new album, Nonetheless, and a single, A new bohemia, and a video starring Neil and Chris, Russell Tovey and Tracey Emin. The Pet Shop Boys are a long way from their Imperial Period of the late 80s to mid 90s, are currently playing an arena tour of greatest hits and on A new bohemia are in reflective, melancholic mood, men in the 60s looking back to their youths and noticing that the passing of time has seen them moved aside by the new generation. 'Like silent movie stars in 60s Hollywood/ No one knows who you are in a hipster neighbourhood', Neil sings noting the invisibility that comes with being old. Later on, as the strings swirl, he confronts mortality and death, 'Every day is a warning evening might forget/ Then the following morning has the sweet smell of regret'. If Matt Johnson has found something to be hopeful about, Neil Tennant does too by the end of the song. 'Where are they now? Where have they gone? Who dances now to their song?', he sings, surrounded in the video by young revellers, Neil and Chris static on the dancefloor. And there is regret too, 'I wish I lived my life free and easier', he says before concluding, 'I'm on my way to a new bohemia'. I don't know if Neil and Chris are raging at the dying of the light, as Dylan Thomas had it, but they're going with disco strings, a day at the beach and acceptance of the turning of the wheel, the struggle of the past forty years replaced by something else- contentment maybe, peace of mind. It's moving stuff. 

Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds are back too with a second single from their upcoming album Wild Gods and an arena tour in the autumn. The online fanbase seem a bit split about the new songs- they're also split about Nick's music pre- and post the death of Arthur Cave in 2015. Some want Nick to return to the hammering, chaotic Old Testament and murder ballads songs of yore. There's a feeling that Warren Ellis and the move to a synth dominated sound over the last decade is weaker in comparison to the bone crunching sound of the Bad Seeds of the 90s. Maybe what the long standing fans are really missing is their own youth, their own past in the 90s where a certain amount of chaos and noise was part of life and they were young enough to deal with it. I get why some of the albums Nick's written since the death of Arthur can be uncomfortable to listen to, difficult to find a way into- I've written before about how much I personally get out of Skeleton Tree, Ghosteen and Carnage. Wild Gods so far feels like the first album where the songs aren't directly about grief and loss (although that will all be in there somewhere I expect), but this one is feeling like Nick's found a way to get in touch with something else. The song Wild Gods was sung from the point of view of a carouser now living in a retirement home- Nick and Neil Tennant at similar stages in life. The new single Frogs rolls in on rippling piano, cymbals and strings and a fantastic bassline, references Cain and Abel early on, and keeps coming back to walking in the Sunday rain, frogs jumping in gutters, the song building and building, endlessly rising towards something that is ever just out of reach. A choir of backing vocals appear, ahh ahhing away, and Nick sings of being 'back in the water again'. Kris Kristofferson walks past kicking a can. It's epic, emotive and uplifting and feels like Nick is choosing life and hope and joy. 

There's A Sound Of Distant Living

A couple of weeks ago JC/ The Vinyl Villain updated his run through 1979- a year he's saying may be music's best ever year- and one of the songs he posted was Japan's Life In Tokyo. I've become mildly obsessed with it ever since, playing it repeatedly. 

Life In Tokyo

Recorded with Giorgio Moroder, who co- wrote it with David Sylvian, it builds on Moroder's supercharged late 70s disco records with Donna Summer but with some very overt Roxy Music influences in there too. One of those records that bears repeat plays, keeps on giving, keeps rewarding in different ways- the synths, the bass, the lyrics, the production, the vocal. It's a superb slice of 1979 art- pop. 

Life In Tokyo (Long Version)

It was re- released several times, the record company looking for a hit and as each Japan album after 1979 came out, so did Life In Tokyo. In 1981, hot on the heels of Gentlemen Take Polaroids, Hansa released it on 12" with a seven minute extended remix and then again in 1982 after Tin Drum and two hit singles (Ghosts and Cantonese Boy) it was remixed and re- released for a third time. 

David Sylvian's lyrics are suitably impressionistic, with plenty of late 70s apathy- 'it seems so sentimental/ why should I care'- coupled with Ballardian existentialism- 'somewhere there's the sound of distant living/ locked up in high society/ it seems so artificial/ why should I care'- and then the chorus, 'oh oh oh life can be cruel/ life in Tokyo'.

In 2019 Sean Johnston wanted a version to play at ALFOS, a turbo charged edit with Japan, Moroder and Roxy Music crossed with a cosmic, sci fi Latin disco feel that goes on and on for nine minutes. So he made one.

Life In Tokyo (Hardway Bros Re- edit)

Monday's Long Song

The latest release on Paisley Dark, Leeds based home of electronic psychedelia, is a five track EP by Ian Vale. It opens with Many Times, six minutes and twenty five seconds of dark acid house, four- four drums, a bouncing bassline and shimmering arpeggios- dark dub disco action.

It's followed by an Al Mckenzie remix, ten minutes of wobbly, slowly building electronic music, a twisting and turning, rising and falling remix that keeps on giving- it really is where the action is. Get both and three other tracks- a Ben Hunt remix of Many Times, another Ian Vale track  Oh Malone and a Julius remix of that- at Bandcamp. 

Al Mckenzie is one half of D:Ream whose 1993 hit single Things Can Only Get Better has recently made the headlines again, pumped out of a speaker at the public end of Downing Street when Rishi Sunak stood in the pouring rain and tried to make it sound like calling a general election was a good idea for the Tory Party. From there, it climbed the charts again and Al and Peter ended up having to make a statement saying to Labour, 'please don't use this song'. They haven't got over it being used by New Labour in 1997- the decision by Tony Blair to invade Iraq alongside the USA did for the relationship between D:Ream and the Labour government (as it did for any people). Singer Peter Cunnah described the song as 'a very odd piece of gravity that you just can't escape'. Al added, 'There's no way- our song and politics, never again'. I understand that decision but in a way it's also a shame- the sight of Sunak, unable to even find an umbrella never mind run an election campaign, piss wet through as the song drowned him out was priceless. Given what Sunak's done since however, it looks like one of the slicker parts of his election campaign.