This track was released a month ago today, Forearm Smash, by Sons Of Slough- eight minutes of chugging, bleep- laden, slow motion electronic music. Big bass, rising and falling synths, and two minutes in a voice slowly intoning, 'Same thing, over and over again', over and over again. After that it all goes a bit wobbly and intense. You can listen to and buy Forearm Smash from Tici Taci at Bandcamp.
A year ago Sons Of Slough played the Convenanza festival at Carcassonne, playing outdoors in the courtyard of the castle. This clip has Ian and Duncan playing Mission Implausible.
This happened last night- Paul Simonon and Dan Donovan DJing at The Golden Lion in Todmorden. They were both lined up to play in August 2023 but Paul had to pull out and Dan played solo, a set of reggae, ska, rockabilly, punk and Clash songs. I wrote this post in advance of the show so can't report back yet but will do so soon.
In the meantime here's a forty minute mix of Paul Simonon songs, presented roughly in chronological order, featuring the dulcet tones, reggae inspired bass and beating heart of The Clash, Paul Simonon, the coolest man to ever wear and play the bass guitar, the sharpest dressed man in punk.
The Crooked Beat was Paul's song on Sandinista!, a bass- led groove celebrating the blues parties and shebeens of his youth in South London with Mikey Dread at the controls. One of Sandinista!'s hidden gems.
The Guns Of Brixton was written by Paul, initially titled Paul's Tune, and worked into the song we all know during the London Calling sessions at Wessex. Paul had realised during 1978 that the real money was in songwriting and elbowed his way into the Strummer- Jones partnership. Live Paul would sing/ shout the song with Joe switching to bass. Paul's bassline, instantly recognisable, was borrowed for Beats International's Dub Be Good To Me, a 1990 number 1 single. CBS released a 12" of Guns Of Brixton shortly after to cash in with some club friendly remixes by Jeremy Healy. I was going to include both Dub Be Good To Me and return To Brixton on this mix but wanted to keep the running time down to under forty five minutes. I still think Dub Be Good To Me is a great record and should have put it in this mix.
Bank Robber was a 1980 single, recorded at Manchester's Pluto studio, produced by Mikey Dread, and originally released on import. When it charted by import sales alone CBS put out a UK release in August 1980. According to Paul in the Westway To The World documentary at first CBS executives didn't want to release it, saying it sounded like 'David Bowie backwards'. Bank Robber is a Clash classic, heavy, reggae inspired bass and drums. The Robber Dub first the light of day on Black Market Clash.
Red Angel Dragnet is from 1982's Combat Rock, Paul on vocals on a song about the New York Guardian Angels with a Taxi Driver quote section narrated by Kosmo Vinyl. The free association lyrics in the end section are bewilderingly brilliant- 'Hands up for Hollywood/ Hooray/ I hear you/ Snappy in the air/ Hang in there/ Wall to wall/ You saved the world/ What else? You saved the girl/ Champagne on ice/ No stranger to Alcatraz...'
After The Clash 2 eventually split Paul formed Havana 3am with Nigel Dixon, Gary Myrick and Travis Williams, naming themselves after a 1956 Perez Prado album Paul was fond of. They played a cut and shut mix of rockabilly, Latin, dub and Spaghetti Western. Nigel died of cancer in 1993 and the rest of the band split. Paul lived in LA for a while in the late 80s/ early 90s, riding his motorbike with Steve Jones. During this period Paul and Steve found themselves in a studio with Bob Dylan- Dylan had been looking for a band to record with and somehow they got the gig. Paul recounts Dylan playing them a song, them playing along, then another, and another. After six songs Dylan said they'd go back to the first and record it and then the others. By this point Paul had forgotten the first song and the others too. This became Down In The Groove in 1988, which is nobody's idea of a great Bob Dylan album. In fact it may be his wrost. I don't have a copy any more (I once had it on cassette) and therefore can't include any of the Simonon- Dylan songs. Paul moved back to London, put his bass away, and began painting again- he'd been at art college in 1976 when he met Mick Jones and started The Clash.
In the early 21st century there were rumours and rumblings that The Clash were going to re- unite to play at the Rock 'n' Roll Hall Of Fame to celebrate their induction. The Rock 'n' Roll Hall Of Fame is an awful idea and I imagine a terrible place too. Joe apparently was up for it, Mick was in Topper was clean. Paul kiboshed it saying if they did reform it wouldn't be for a bunch of people paying hundreds of dollars for a ticket but for real fans. He also said what he took from punk was not looking back- 'I never wanted to go back and relive the glory years; I just want to keep moving forward'. Joe tried to persuade Paul to do it by saying he had Mani on standby. It was the last time Paul spoke to Joe. He died in 2002, just days after the conversation.
In 2007 Paul made an unexpected return to bass playing as part of The Good The Bad And The Queen, a Damon Albarn supergroup with Tony Allen on drums and Simon Tong from The Verve. Paul first met Damon at Joe Strummer's wedding in 1997 and although some friends advised him not to work with the Blur singer, he went ahead. The debut album was a low key, melancholic state of the nation, urban Victoriana set of songs. Kingdom Of Doom seems to sum up the end of the Blair years, pubs, the Iraq war and Damon's general dissatisfaction with things. The title track to the group and album is frenetic, with constantly building tension and Tony Allen's drumming finally unshackled at the end of the album.
Paul continued with Damon on Gorillaz's 2010 album Plastic Beach, playing on the title track with former- Clash bandmate Mick Jones. Both of them then joined the full Gorillaz live band touring in 2010, the entire band in nautical and naval inspired wear. Paul Simonon just looked like Paul Simonon. Plastic Beach featured a wealth of guest stars- Snoop Dogg, Kano, Mos Def, Bobby Womack, Gruff Rhys, De La Soul, Mark E. Smith, and Lou Reed- and played Glastonbury in June 2010, a performance instantly memorable for the moment Mark E. Smith wandered onto the Pyramid Stage in a leather jacket and approached the microphone...
Hero was an internet only single in 2014 from a series of pump/ trainer related musical tie ins from Converse called Three Artists One Song. The three artists on Hero were Frank Ocean, producer Diplo and one half of The Clash, Paul and Mick (plus the West Los Angeles Children's Choir). The result of this unlikely origin story is a song that does more in two and a half minutes than some bands manage over the course of an album. I made it the Bagging Area Song Of The Year 2014 (I mean, what accolades come higher??) and I stand by that ten years later. Mick's guitar prominent in the mix and Frank's lyrics and voice at the peak of their powers as he dissects the experience of being a young black man in modern America.
Lonely Town is from the album Paul made with Galen Ayres last year, Can We Do Tomorrow Another Day?, a collection of charming acoustic guitar and twin voice songs that began with Paul busking with some locals in Mallorca after Covid some folk, some sea shanties, some Nancy and Lee vibes, some Spanish songs. Imagine how funny it would be to be walking down the street in Palma, on holiday, enjoying some Balearic sun, and there's Paul Simonon playing songs in the street....
In late 2020 Dutch label Music From Memory released Virtual Dreams, a triple vinyl/ download album (with different tracks on the two different releases). Virtual Dreams: Ambient Explorations In The House And Techno Age , 1993- 1997 took up residence on my turntable, six sides of vinyl that featured ambient techno from a slew of electronic artists including Richard H. Kirk, The Primitive Painter, LFO, Bedouin Ascent, Dubtribe Sound System, MLO, Pulusha and LA Synthesis. The compilers did a superb job, selecting and sequencing the lost, the obscure and the beautiful, presenting the futuristic music of the mid- 90s in such a way that it sounded like a cohesive album and utterly fresh and weirdly contemporary. It was a sound, as they said, that came from the chill out rooms, from the spaces next to the rooms where everyone was dancing, where people wanted to slow down and contemplate/ come down. 'Ambient in this new age now though had sharper teeth', the sleeve notes said, 'than in Brian Eno's keynote text Music For Airports, instead the sounds here the mode of transport rather than the backdrop.'
Virtual Dreams is futuristic, machine music made by humans with emotions, with new technology at their disposal and looking upwards to space, outer pace and sci fi and a cyborg inner space too. It's a perfect various artists compilation album. The digital version of Virtual Dreams is here.
This is Levitation by The Primitive Painter- glassy synths, warm pattering drum pads, and a familiar female vocal sample, all bound together by some unearthly robotics. The Primitive Painter were Roman Flugel and Jorn Elling Wuttke, and yes, they named themselves after the 1985 indie classic by Felt.
Music From Memory are about to release a second volume of Virtual Dreams, this one shifting their ambient techno focus to Japan in the same 1993- 1999 time period, where in the clubs of 1990s Japan ambient- techno went by the name of 'listening techno'. Rob wrote a great review at Ban Ban Ton Ton this week with some of the tracks up to listen to- you can read it here. Virtual Dreams II is at Bandcamp.
I still have a load of photos from our holiday in Fuerteventura that I haven't used as images for this blog. I should probably stop using them now. As we approach the end of September it makes me a bit sad to keep seeing beautiful Canarian beaches and landscapes, and sunshine in the heat of early August when we've got a British winter ahead of us. At least today's song and photo have a link though.
Walking In The Heat is the new song from Decius, a four minute long, sexually charged electronic romp with a video that you might want to think twice about watching if you're at work or in the presence of small children, if you don't to have to answer too many questions about what's going on and why- a virtually naked man in the boot of 1970s hatchback, a car wash, said man in nothing but leather underpants washing the car in a manner which could be described as sexual. It's very funny. The track is a blast too, juddering synths and electronic drums, moaning voices and Lias' falsetto vocal.
Decius are Lias Saoudi from Fat White Family with Luke and Liam from Trashmouth Records and Quinn from Paranoid London. Their first album, Decius Volume 1, sounded like an acid disco in a gay sauna. It was one of my favourite records of 2022, a record that The Quietus described as 'sordid. hilarious and hardcore'. I reviewed it for Ban Ban Ton Ton. The review at The Quietus was a fine read, knocking mine into a cocked hat.
Mike Wilson's Dublin based 100 Poems has already released two albums this year- Everything's Balearic When You Believe and Everything's Possible When You Balearic. Last week he released a third, Balearic As A System Of Belief. Mike shared one of the tracks with me in an unfinished form a couple of months ago but the work he's done since then and the music he's created for this third album is something else, going beyond the day- glo, downtempo, feelgood, anything goes songs from the first two and heading off in new directions.
Mike's in love with the creative process- the empty page, the blank track- and the sense that anything is possible, the process of sitting down and starting with nothing but ending with something a little while later. Balearic As A System Of Belief covers the range of human emotion, from love and euphoria to grief and sorrow with Mike's irrepressible love of life shining through on each and every one of the seven tracks. The opener, In This Cosmos Everything Has A Place, takes the words of Sadhguru and a speech about the interconnectedness of nature, insects, worms, people and animals, the planet's survival, the solar system, the smallness of the human race, and the entire cosmos, and sets them against some widescreen acid house, throbbing and whooshing synths, piano, big drums, sirens, timpani, rattling hi hats, and a dozen more elements besides.
The second song, Elonna, She Brings The Sun is blissed out and wide eyed, with sunshine dappled acoustic guitars, sweeping strings and ecstatic, deeply in love vocals. It's followed by Song For Claire (Your Life Is Your Life), a song dedicated to and named after a recently lost friend, Claire, and borrows Tom Waits reading Charles Bukowski's The Laughing Heart- 'Your life is your life/ Don't let it be clubbed into dank submission/ Be on the watch/ There are ways out/ There is light somewhere'. Strings and guitars, synths and horns, whispers and tears, and 'a tiny piece of acid house has gone to heaven...'
The use of sampled voices continues with the next two songs. On Come, Hear Me Now, rumbling rhythms and the hiss of hi- hat bring a different feel to the album, some darkness and moodiness thunder in- until a flute breaks in and suddenly we're off again, up in the blue skies, a guitar line singing the lead. The voice, when it arrives, is that of Mikey Dread (from Break Down The Walls in 1980), bringing the reggae toasting and Jamaican vibes. Dubmobalearicswithmybreaksman moves us from Jamaica to Los Angeles and Jim Morrison in 1969, discussing blues and folk and American music, with a skittering drum beat, chopped up sounds, and distorted guitar. 'Rock is kind of dying out', says Jim, 'soon, they might be relying heavily on electronics and machines' (an interview and sample that made an appearance coincidentally earlier this year on Jezebell's Weekend Machines EP).
From the heavy sounds of Dubmobalearicswithmybreaksman Mike changes gear again on Peace, Love And Dancing, straight ahead party music, Sly And The Family Stone style, with big analogue bottom end, clipped guitar and 70s funk horns. Balearic As A System Of Belief comes to a close with Until Next Summer, acoustic guitar and the pitter- patter of a drum machine, echo and an angelic vocal, ending with the fading sound of a lone trumpet.
The pair of albums 100 Poems released earlier this year both had loads of highpoints, with tunes to enjoy and a feelgood vibe. This latest album moves Mike's sound on again, with a wider range of sounds and a different feel, the sonic and emotional net being cast wider and further.
Balearic As A System Of Belief is at Bandcamp where you can pay what you want- as Mike says, 'give what you can afford, if you can't afford anything, no problem please download and enjoy this album and I wish you better times'. Any monies raised will be donated to Women's Aid and The Suzy Lamplugh Trust
A couple of weeks ago I posted Get Up by R.E.M., the Athens foursome performing it in 1989 on the Green tour, a brilliantly spiky, psychey guitar pop song, Michael Stipe singing about dreams and how they complicate his life. YouTube is an easy place to get lost in and there are plenty of other songs from R.E.M.'s Tourfilm on there at the moment, an audio- visual record of them on stage in '89, at the peak of their powers as a live band. Fairly soon I was watching R.E.M. doing Finest Worksong....
Stipe was a consummate, and unique, performer and front man by 1989. On the tour that became Tourfilm (a tour I saw them at in Liverpool in May '89), he had different dances and actions for different songs. On Finest Worksong he does a sideways run, a run on the spot, and a lithe, hip swinging boogie/ shuffle dance, as his ponytail swings around and mascara runs down his cheeks.
Finest Worksong was the first song on Document, their 1988 album, the fifth in a run of records that took them from playing tiny venues to big ones. It became a single, the third from Document and the last one they released on IRS before the move to Warners and Green.
Finest Worksong is a classic opening song, a call to arms- 'The time to rise/ Has been engaged/ Your better best/ To rearrange'. It's difficult to not hear the lyrics, oblique in places maybe but more overt in others, as a plea to resist the conservative 80s, Reagan and the incoming Bush, a decade of Reaganomics increasing the US's poverty gap- 'You are following this time/ I beg you not beg to rhyme' and 'What we want and what we need/ Has been confused, been confused'.
Peter Buck's guitars sound like a call to the barricades, crunchy, big riffs, ringing lead lines, the guitarist moving from Rickenbacker to Les Paul.
The Other Mix was on the 7" and 12" releases, a big booming late 80s drum sound that wasn't really necessary. The single mix added horns which in retrospect was probably also superfluous. The B-sides included the gorgeous live performance of Time After Time Etc, a medley of Time After Time, Red Rain and So. Central Rain (but we'll come back to that another time).
Document saw them become a rock band, the guitars toughened up and the production much clearer and punchier. Michael Stipe's lyrics had already become more audible and less stream- of- consciousness on the previous two albums (on Fables Of The Reconstruction where he tells stories about people from the south and on Lifes Rich Pageant where he engages with politics, the environmental crisis and the wider world). Document had a hit single (The One I Love), a Wire cover (Strange), some political sounding songs (Welcome To The Occupation, Exhuming McCarthy) and the rattling, end of night, end of the gig, end of the world show stopper, It's The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine). On release in 1988 Document was very much an album that chimed with the times- but maybe a holding record too, not a discernible move on from Lifes Rich Pageant. Maybe they were saving themselves for Green.
Hugo Nicolson and David Harrow are both former Andrew Weatherall collaborators. Hugo was Andrew's number one studio right hand and engineer on almost all the early remixes and on the Screamadelica- era Primal Scream songs and One Dove's Morning Dove White album and attendant singles, the words 'ably assisted by Hugo Nicolson' appearing on the sleeve notes of a multitude of Weatherall remixes and productions. David Harrow worked with Andrew a few years later, writing, recording and producing with Andrew as Blood Sugar, Deanne Day and Planet 4 Folk Quartet and releasing in his own right as Technova on the Sabres Of Paradise label. They've come together (arf!) now to release a mammoth, genre busting seven track EP on Brighton's Higher Love- two versions of the track Revolvalution and a slew of mighty remixes.
Revolvalution is a ten minute epic, a sampledelic, kaleidoscopic riot of electronic psychedelia, with sounds whizzing by in a blur of arpeggios, fizzing synths, lasers, and cartoon- like snatches of voices, underpinned by a non- stop sequencer bassline and four- four drums. Occasionally it shifts, a key change and bass drop accompanied by whoops, and then another shift, a breakdown into squiggles and snares, and then that bassline comes back in, Moroder banging at the door and a helium voice chanting.
David Harrow provides two of the remixes, the heavy and acidic Square Circle Remix and the percussive, deep dub Circle Squared Remix. Rule Six bring their own take with their remix, some disco stylings and mirror ball action and a sprung bassline straight from the early 80s.
Hugo and David both spent significant periods of time with Adrian Sherwood and On U Sound, a large part of the reason Andrew was so keen to work with them I'm sure. It's no surprise therefore that dub is present and correct on the EP. Rude Audio and Dan Wainwright put out an album together last year, the dub splendour of Psychedelic Science, and they bring a pair of dub remixes of Revolvalution, cutting the tempo and finding the echo and the space. The Original Remix is a ten minute psychedelic dub excursion, with an opening four minutes of bass, reverberations and FX, that eventually falls apart into a raga, with a lovely sitar solo, shakers and blips and boings. The bass comes back, the rhythm picks up, the springs and whoops return, a Hawaiian guitar glides on top, tropical birds call- its all very lovely and very early 90s Weatherall in spirit.
The Rude Audio and Dan Wainwright VIP Remix is slower and lower, supremely spaced out, with a lazy hip hop drum break, loads of delay and echo, and a reel to reel feel that goes on and on. Grin inducing, head nodding stuff.
More LCD Soundsystem long song Monday action. In 2005 DFA released a single CD titled Holiday Mix, nine DFA tracks over fifty minutes, almost all remixes of DFA artists by others. Black Dice, LCD Soundsystem, The Juan MacLean, Delia Gonzales and Gavin Russom all appear with remixes from Loumo, Booka Shade, Cajmere, X- Press 2, Soulwax and Tiga. When playing this in the car recently this pair stood out...
Tiga, a producer, programmer and DJ from Canada, ramps up one of the key songs from LCD Soundsystem's self titled debut album, nearly eight minutes of uptempo, messed up, four- four dance floor mayhem. James Murphy doesn't appear until three minutes in, with a very New Order- esque vocal line- 'Everybody makes mistakes/ But I feel alright when I come undone'. Tiga keeps going, turning the knobs, synths and drums piling in, and there's a tension building breakdown at four and a half minutes, just Murphy and a bassline, before the snare and kick drum core- enter and everything gets full on and whizzy again.
As this is a mixed CD the next track segues in at seven minutes, the Soulwax remix of Daft Punk Is Playing At My House, and then unfortunately it comes to a very abrupt end. But you can cue this up to take over straight away and let it frazzle your senses. Soulwax pull no punches, everything in the red and overloaded.
I first heard the music of 10:40 three years ago when 10:40 (Jesse Fahnestock) shared his edit/ dub of Spacemen 3's How Does It Feel? in a few groups I'm a member of.
Jesse takes an already somnolent/ tripped out Pete Kember and co and filters him through a dub filter, everything stretched out and reverberating slowly.
From there I dug into the 10:40 back catalogue and found a treasure trove of edits, dubs, original music, remixes, Balearic shufflers, chuggers, bangers and a lot of slow, repetitive psychedelia. Jesse's big influences- Andrew Weatherall, Hardkiss, Spacemen 3 and Spiritualized- all made use of repetition and the long groove. After a while Jesse got in touch and stated sharing tracks with me, both as 10: 40 and his partnership with Darren Bell as Jezebell. At the start of 2023 10:40 released Transition Theory, an album that is a full conceived piece of work, each track flowing beautifully into the next one. Jesse was one of the people we approached to be on Sounds From the Flightpath Estate Volume 1, a relative unknown next to some big hitters- David Holmes, Justin Robertson, Sean Johnstone, an unreleased Weatherall and Tenniswood track for crying out loud!- and his track Three Rings stands along side any of the others on the album.
I thought it was time for a Sunday 10:40 mix. Once I started going through my folders and realised how much music Jesse has made my head swam a bit- so much music, what to include? In the end I went for a mix of slow and low, dubby electronic psychedelia, a world where it's permanently twenty to eleven. Maybe the bangers need a mix of their own. This was a tricky one to do in some ways and the tempo speeds up and slows down which maybe I should have fixed and shifted the sequence around to make it flow more evenly. And yes, that Spacemen 3 edit should really have been on it too.
One Way To Go was on the B-side of the first 12" Verve released, back in 1992 when the Wigan psychonauts were four young, straggly haired, psychedelic/ shoegaze noise explorers, a genuinely brilliant live band and hadn't yet been forced to add The to their name or become balladeers. All In The Mind was a calling card, a gauntlet thrown down. Jesse does a full on dubbed out treatment. I suggested to him once that he should remix and dub the entire early Verve back catalogue. I think he thought I was joking.
Last December Jesse re- presented the entire 10:40 back catalogue as an advent calendar, putting everything out there one more time before deleting it. Green Shoots was the behind 5th door, Neighbors Dub was 8th December's door, Sea Quenched the 18th, Iz Um was the 19th, and Left Behind Blues the 21st.
Kissed Again is an absolute beauty, the lead track on a three track EP that came out on Brighton's Higher Love label, the home of some truly wonderful modern Balearica. In September 2021 I described Kissed Again as ' a blissed out glide- by track from Jesse Fahnestock's 10:40 alias, an eight minute trip, with gently rising and falling synths, bubbling sounds, rolling piano chords, some acid squiggles and a sense of reaching an ending that'll leave you either grinning or slightly dewy eyed. Maybe both'. I'm sticking with that.
Hey You is a cover of 14 Iced Bears song Hey Fever by Puerto Montt City Orchestra with original singer Rob Sekula recording new vocals for the song. Jesse goes all Spiritualized, nearly eight minutes of trippy psychedelia.
Tumbling Down is the opener from Transition Theory and really, once you've let this mix paly through and ended on Tumbling Down you should cue up the album and go straight on through.
We're getting some lovely evenings in the Manchester area at the moment, the fall of dusk and warm September weather combining to give us some pretty spectacular moments just before it goes dark. Out for a walk by the river Mersey on Thursday night I saw this cross in the sky. Maybe it's a sign...
Last week I wrote a review for Dr. Rob at his esteemed Ban Ban Ton Ton blog. Jason Boardman, a Manchester DJ, promoter, crate digger and record label owner of note, is putting out a sixteen track compilation on his Before I Die label, a record called No- One's Listening Anyway: UK DIY Post Punk And Dubs 1980- 1984 (Vol. 1). It's a fantastic collection of obscure singles from the intersection of scratchy guitars and bass culture, dole culture and pop culture with bands including Swamp Children, The Sirons, Club Of Rome, Skeet, The Four Kings, Sprout Head Rising and Methodisca Tune. My review of it is here.
Rifling through my collection of various artist compilation CDs for something I knew I had from a similar area I found Messthetics Greatest Hits: The Sounds Of D.I.Y. 1977- 1980, twenty two songs from the frontline of the D.I.Y./ indie world, indie before indie even, people fired up by punk, with something to say and in some cases the barest notion of how to go about playing, writing, recording and releasing. Messthetics includes one crossover with Jason's album- Anorexia appear on both- but otherwise its another rollcall of the obscure, the lost and the forgotten. These three jumped out at me, almost at random.
We Love Malcolm is well under two minutes long and is the work of O Level, a DIY band formed in London in 1978 while all the band members were still at school. Some of them would reappear many times in the 80s and 90s- Ed Ball, Dan Treacy, Joe Foster and John and Gerald Bennett would between them later make records as The TV Personalities, The Times, and Slaughter Joe and Foster would be one of the trio who formed Creation in 1983. We Love Malcolm is an answer to The TV Personalities single Where's Bill Grundy Now?, a tribute to Malcolm McLaren- 'We love Malcolm/ Cos no one else does'.
Cardiff band Puritan Guitars released £100 In 15 Minutes in 1980, the lyrics concerning not the recording costs for making the single but the money Rough Trade put behind the bar at the final gig on a Raincoats tour, a party attended by the assembled indie/ punk/ DIY world who drank the free bar dry in quarter of an hour. Primitive, out of tune guitars, cardboard box drums, flat spoken vocals, no production- all of these are good things obviously.
Girl On The Bus is by Thin Yoghurts, from Carlisle and released this single in 1980 Lowther Street Runner Records, a song recorded in Shap in Cumbria. The sleeve notes thank 'Robin for the use of his drums, and Boggis for fetching beer and pies'
Empyrean: relating to the heavens or the sky, the highest part of the heaven, thought by the ancients to be the realm of pure fire.
Last Friday night while chatting to Andy Bell after Ride's gig at New Century Hall he mentioned that underneath New Century there is a recording studio and that he'd been in there that morning with Timothy Clerkin, an artist/ DJ who used to be based in Manchester. A few years ago Timothy put out a 12" as Heretic which included an Andrew Weatherall remix. It was via Andrew that Timothy and Andy Bell met and Tim remixed Andy's GLOK track Dissident. Yesterday the first fruits of the GLOK/ Clerkin collaboration were released, a single- Empyrean- ahead of a seven track album in November called Alliance. Much of the album was done in lockdown, ideas and files bouncing back and forth between the pair, and then finsihed since.
Empyrean is equal parts GLOK and Timothy, a massive synth bassline that'll shake any morning cobwebs away with electronic drums coming in and hissing away, washes of synth chords and a vocal sample that sounds like it's come from Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Vol. 1. One of those tracks that you have to stick with and which then engulfs you a little, rewarding more with repeat plays. You can buy Empyrean in its full version and Radio Edit form at Bandcamp. The album is available for pre- order at Bandcamp too.
Today's post is another raid on the box of free CDs that with magazines, a random selection of three tracks from two CDs, both coincidentally from December 2021. First is Will Sergeant, Bunnyman and solo artist. Themes For 'Grind' originally came out in 1982, Will going analogue synth and experimental ambient, an album of eleven tracks. At first all were titled Untitled but since all have been named Scene followed by a Roman numeral, I through to XI.
Scene V was on Electronic Sounds Best Of 2021 CD, a double album with both new and re- issued music from that year starting with cover star LoneLady and finishing with Me Lost Me. Scene V is early 80s, Cold War/ Liverpool experimentalism, the sound of someone spending some time alone with a room full of synths. Theme For 'Grind' is available to buy in full at Sgt. Fuzz's Bandcamp page.
Over at Mojo in December 2021 the cover stars were hoary old Led Zeppelin in all their 70s pomp. The free CD however was compiled by Idles, titled Acts Of Resistance, and pulled together a disparate fifteen artists and songs from that year's releases and re- issues, kicking off with Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds' The Mercy Seat and wending its way through Bush Tetras, Idles, Au Pairs, and James Holden among others, with these two finding themselves transferred from disc to my hard drive.
In 1989 The Waterboys were riding the crest of a wave, the Big Music replaced by traditional Irish and Scottish music, a move partly due to fiddle player Steve Wickham joining the band as well as Mike Scott's move to Dublin in 1986. The album Fisherman's Blues was a huge success, crossing over and winning new fans. The title track is Dylan- esque, the band in full reel behind Mike and the lyrics all about escape- 'I wish I was a fisherman/ Tumblin' on the seas/ Far away from dry land/ And it's bitter memories... I wish I was a brakeman/ On a hurtlin' fevered train'- and conclude with 'Light in my head/ You in my arms'. The live recording was from Toronto's Masonic Hall, 11th October 1989, a long way from home but in sweeping form. It came as part of a seven CD boxed set of the group in 1989- 90, Fisherman's Blues and Right To Roam album, a huge number of live recordings, versions, remasters and outtakes.
1000 Miles is by Dirty Three and their 1996 album Horse Stories. Jim White, Mick Turner and Warren Ellis formed the band in 1992, instrumental music on guitar, drums and violin. 1000 Miles is cinematic, but one of those films that stays with you afterwards leaving you slightly disturbed.
Some new music, one from very recently and one from the other side of summer. First up a song Spencer sent me back in August, a group from Paris called Les Nuits Primitives and their song Vietnamese Travel Company, a delicious collision of 60s Saint Etienne/ Stereolab style leftfield pop,/ yé-yé and some big crunchy guitar chords. There's an album from 2018 at Bandcamp which includes Vietnamese Travel Company, but a different version so I'm assuming the one from June 2024 is a newly recorded one. At YouTube the comments are all in French- 'C'est très chouette!' and 'pouahhh je voulais que ça s'arrête JAMAIS !!! c'est bordel taille de incroyable' are the two standouts.
Much more recent, out yesterday in fact, is a new single from Mogwai, God Gets You Back, a six minute calling card/ odyssey from the Glasgow band that starts out like Tangerine Dream, synths and long chords building slowly and repetitively for two minutes until the drums and vocals kick in. Even then we're drifting fairly slowly towards the burn out husk of some dying star. The lyrics were written by Barry Burns' seven year old daughter due to Barry being stuck for words. In no way is this a bad thing. Mogwai have also announced a world tour in 2025 and presumably there will be news of a new album at some point. If its as good as God Gets You Back it'll be worth waiting for.
I haven't done a Bagging Area Book Club post since June and have several things lined up to write about. Previous posts took in the Weird Walk fanzine, a quartet of Benjamin Myers novels and Richard Norris' autobiography. One of my summer holiday reads was Revolutionary Spirit: A Post Punk Exorcism by Paul Simpson. Paul was a Liverpool face, in an early bedroom band with Ian McCulloch and Julian Cope (A Shallow Madness) and in a band with Will Sergeant before that (Industrial Domestic), one of the Eric's crowd, friend of the Bunnymen, a member of the early Teardrop Explodes, worked behind the counter at the Armadillo Tea Rooms on Matthew Street, flatmate of Pete de Freitas (and briefly Courtney Love) in the Devonshire Road flat that Cope vacated after the break up of his first marriage, founder member and singer/ guitarist of The Wild Swans, and half of Care with Ian Broudie- and that's a very potted history of the highlights.
His book is a delight. He writes in the present tense, a deliberate decision to give the prose immediacy and to avoid reflection perhaps, everything happening on the page in front of you. Paul is a witty, eloquent, and elegant writer, a storyteller and has the gift of bringing the past/ his past to life. There are parallels between his early life and his friend Will Sergeant's (who has written the first two volumes of his own memoirs). Both have overbearing, emotionally unavailable fathers, men from a generation suffering from undiagnosed post- war stress. Both seek out others who share their outsider interests- music, Bowie, dressing up- seeking refuge in the burgeoning punk scene in Liverpool city centre. Paul recounts the violence of life in Liverpool in the mid- to- late 70s where looking different was genuinely dangerous. He has a pin- point memory for the importance of clothes to him and his friends, the army surplus shops and charity shops that provided him and them with their post- punk look- jodhpurs, leather flying jackets, pleated pegged trousers, a candy striped ambulance driver's shirt, army boots from the Spanish Civil War, the barber's down by the docks that do the ultimate 1940s short back and sides. For a while, everyone on the scene is competing to have the ultimate short back and sides.
It's clear from the book that Paul has suffered from repeated episodes of poor mental health. He describes a childhood mental breakdown under a bridge and he self- sabotages bands repeatedly, walking away from the Teardrops, abandoning Broudie and Care at the verge of success, as well as having the first incarnation of The Wild Swans abandon him and form The Lotus Eaters (and according to Paul stealing his chord sequence and having a hit with it- First Picture Of You in 1982). His life in his flat on Rodney Street is described in epic detail, deep nights in with Will Sergeant and psychedelics, the world of 80s Liverpool vividly drawn. .
The book opens with a short chapter about The Wild Swans and their legendary 1982 single Revolutionary Spirit, a song that came out on 12" only with a beautiful minimal sleeve design on Zoo. It was recorded and produced by Pete de Freitas, at his expense, and for some reason it was accidentally recorded in mono with barely audible bass. Revolutionary Spirit surges, the guitars urging the song on, a whirl of drama and at- the- edge dynamics, Paul's highly charged, romantic lyrics skirting the line between pretension and poetry- 'Lost in the delta of Venus/ Lost in the welter of shame/ Deep in the forest of evil/ We embark on a new crusade', a sort of pre- Raphaelite psychedelia.
It's a phenomenal piece of post- punk pop, inexplicably great. In the hyper- competitive Liverpool scene Cope and McCulloch are dismissive of it, obviously. As Paul notes in his book though, as far as he's concerned it's not even the best Wild Swans song- that honour goes to a song only recorded for a Peel Session and not released until 1986, No Bleeding.
Care, Paul and Ian Broudie, only recorded a handful of singles. Paul doesn't even seem entirely sure in his book why he walks away from Care. Flaming Sword, a 1983 single, is on the verge of going mainstream. Radio 1, TV, videos lined up, interviews being conducted and Paul runs away back to Liverpool, breaking his contract and skint. Care's debut was My Boyish Days, a perfect slice of 1983 pop.
The Wild Swans gain a second and then third life. A version from the late 80s spilt in 1990. They reformed in 2009. Bizarrely, they were massively popular in the Philippines. The book opens with Paul and a new version of the band including old school friend and ex- Bunnyman Les Pattinson on bass, a hurricane about to hit Manila as the band prepare to play a huge outdoor gig and Paul paranoid that members of the band are grumbling about payments. From there his autobiography goes backwards and then forwards in time, Paul eventually reaching some kind of equanimity, a reckoning with his past and the his depression. In 2011 Paul and the then version of The Wild Swans released an album called The Coldest Winter For A Hundred Years, Paul re- united again with fellow founder Wild Swan Ged Quinn. It is a beautiful piece of work, in part a tribute to the late, great Pete de Freitas who died in June 1989, Paul's flatmate in the 1980s, a man who everyone who knew him describes as being a beautiful soul. This is English Electric Lightning, literate, chiming guitar pop. The album is in some ways a musical and poetic version of the book, a reflection on his life. I can't recommend either highly enough.
Today's long song, all nine minutes and seventeen seconds of it, comes from 2017, a remix of Mama's Unmask Me by Ashley Beedle. Unmask Me comes from an intersection between Deep House and modern soul, floating by very nicely with wispy synth chords, the vocal beamed in from another dimension as the drums shuffle away. Ideal for summer and outdoor parties so maybe I've posted it a few weeks too late.
Mama is Simone Ogunbunmi, from London but now resident in Berlin. And here's a reminder that Ashley Beedle is very unwell. There is a Go Fund Me page to raise money to provide him the support and equipment he will need in the future. You can find it here.
I saw Ride at New Century Hall on Friday night- they are a superb live band right now, powerful and punchy, light and shade both represented, noise and melody. In an interview Andy Bell once said that his vision for the band came to him when at home listening to The Beatles while his mum was vacuuming, that blend of 60s melodies (with twin vocals) and a wall of noise and fuzz. Tonight they have plenty of all of that. They open with Monaco from this year's Interplay album, straight ahead modern rock with a glossy sheen, Mark Gardener centre stage and in good voice. They finish the main set an hour later with Seagull, the huge shoegaze tour de force that opened Nowhere in 1990, the song where they transcended their MBV and JAMC influences.
In between there are songs from almost every point in their back catalogue- new ones like the sweeping, Byrdsy Last Frontier and anthemic Peace Sign with its spirit of 1969/ 1989 chorus, 'Give me a peace sign/ Throw your hands in the air/ Give me a peace sign/ Let me know you're there' stand out. Future Love from 2019's This Is Not A Safe Place album. The crushing, wall of noise teen angst of Dreams Burn Down. 1992's Cool Your Boots, the Withnail And I sample kicking it off and the band powering into it, Loz and Steve proving they were indie rock's secret best rhythm section, Andy's squally guitar at the centre of the storm. The last two are Seagull and before that Vapour Trail, Andy's epic, romantic song from 1990 that closed their debut Nowhere, the crowd singing the cello part, a sea of middle aged shoegazers and indie kids la la la la- ing as the band wind down and stop, grinning at us and each other.
The encore spans the years again, in reverse. Light In A Quiet Room followed by Leave Them All Behind, twin guitars and vocals, distortion and thunderous drums, the one where they left all their peers behind. Then Chelsea Girl, from their first EP, the red roses one on Creation when they (and we) were barely out of our teens, young and full of dreams.
After the gig we have a chat with Andy Bell in the bar downstairs. I thanked him for giving us his cover version of Smokebelch for our Sounds Of The Flightpath Estate Volume 1 album and said he was honoured to be part of it.
In October 2022 I put together a mix of Ride songs from the re- union years. You can find it here. To complement it I've done an early years for today's Sunday mix, from the first EP to Going Blank Again, singles, album songs and EP tracks/ B-sides. Two sides of a c90 tape.
Cool Your Boots is from 1992's Going Blank Again. The album was very much a step on from the debut Nowhere, confident and wide screen, shoegaze but buffed up. Leave Them All Behind is a single from the same album- it reached number nine in the charts and got them onto Top Of The Pops. On release it had a statement feel, Ride are back and have left the others behind. Hammond organ intro, Mark and Andy on twin vocals, tumbling rhythms and endless guitars (especially in the full nine minute version).
Seagull opens Nowhere, the fastest song on the album and a ferocious piece of indie guitar rock. Nowhere is in some ways a classic debut from that period, 1988- 1993- eight songs in forty minutes with ebb and flow, a sound that permeates every song, a sleeve image that hints at what lies inside, a self contained piece of art. Dreams Burn Down comes from the same album (and was the A-side on the Fall EP, out in October 1990 with three new B-sides, the third of four four song 12" EPs, a run of records and songs that stand alongside Nowhere) . Vapour Trail is the last song- 12 string guitar intro with a repeating chord pattern that keeps resurfacing throughout the song, Loz's brilliant on- the- note drums, Andy's voice and love song lyrics and then the two minute coda with cello. A proper last song on the album feel.
Taste was on the Fall EP, a new song along with Here And Now and Nowhere (the title track from the album that wasn't on the album). Three minutes of noisy indie rock with a vaguely euphoric vocal.
Sennen was on Ride's EP Today Forever, four new songs released in March 1991. A video album was made for the EP, each song getting its own video. The video for Sennen is exactly what some of us looked like in 1990/ 1991- fringes, long sleeved t- shirts, baggy jeans, hooped tops, desert boots. The song is all strummed guitars and a stop start rhythm, stoned harmonised vocals, the Byrds the morning after a night at Phuture. 'The memory fades away', Mark and Andy murmur, the vocals themselves sounding like a memory fading. Sennen is I assume named after Sennen Cove in Cornwall.
Chelsea Girl is from the Ride EP, released in January 1990. A new decade. The first song on the first release on Creation to make the proper charts. The first Ride song most of us heard. A two and a half minute thrashy marriage of noise and pop, the Mary Chain and My Bloody Valentine in there for sure, but its own thing too.
In 1989 house music burst its way into the popular consciousnesses and the mainstream. Dance acts began to top the charts. No one exemplified this better than Black Box, an Italian team, who took their single Ride On Time to the top of the UK charts at a time when doing that meant selling serious amounts of vinyl. Ride On Time was genius, a huge uptempo dance track, powered like a rock song, and a gateway to rave. The trio behind it- Daniele Davoli, Mirko Limoni and Verlio Semplici- sampled three separate vocal lines, one an unauthorised line by Loleatta Holloway's 1980 single Love Hangover. They sampled Love Unlimited Orchestra too and went out to road test their new song in a club in Italy. Davoli played it in his set, 1000 people on the floor. It cleared the floor. Daniele was heartbroken. His mates told him that it wasn't the record, it was the wrong club. Excellent advice.
After legal action from Loleatta they re- recorded the vocals, an uncredited Heather Small, later of M- People, taking over at the mic. Just to show we were not in indie/ rock land any more where credibility is everything and miming is deception, they hired a model to be the frontperson/ 'singer' for all the TV appearances- of which there were many. Katrin Quinol was as unforgettable miming and dancing as the song itself.
Ian Brown said in an interview at the time that there were only three good records in 1989- his own band's Fool's Gold, Doug Lazy's Let It Roll and Ride On Time. He missed a few I think but he's right to include it.
From Ride On Time it was a short step for many people to the various artists compilation Italia (Dance Music From Italy), a budget price album clad in a distinctive blue sleeve, packed with further gems from the Italian club scene, from the beaches of Rimini and the bars of the Amalfi Coast. Dr. Zharkov, Gino Latino, The Jam Machine, D.F.C. Team, and Psycho Team all contributed more uptempo, piano-led dance music for all your partying needs. And this one, Starlight's Numero Uno, another massive crossover hit.
Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds released Wild God at the end of August, the eighteenth Bad Seeds album with the main man four decades into a career as the Bad Seed singer. Over the years fifteen different men and women have been Bad Seeds. The original line up- Cave, Blixa Bargeld and Mick Harvey- in some ways bears little relation to the current incarnation, a band with Warren Ellis as Nick's creative foil and Thomas Wydler, Martyn Casey, Jim Sclavunos and George Vjestica (and sometimes Radiohead's Colin Greenwood on bass) doing the rest of the work. But in some ways, the Bad Seeds remain the same- Wild God sounds to me like a Bad Seeds record.
The previous three Nick Cave albums were all informed by the tragedy of the death of his son Arthur. Skeleton Tree was started before Arthur died but completed after. Ghosteen was written about Arthur (and as Nick says with Arthur alongside him). Carnage was a Cave- Ellis album and although not entirely informed by Arthur he's very much there in many of the songs, not least the stunning Lavender Fields. The sound of those three albums is less 90s Bad Seeds (and the predecessor, Push The Sky Away was moving in that direction) with Warren Ellis' synths and strings and choral backing vocals becoming the core sound, a shift that seemed to be a reaction to events the sombre, confessional, harrowing nature of some of the songs reflected in the spare, synth sound Warren Ellis conjured up. On Wild God there's a move to a different sonic field again- this isn't a return to the chaotic, guitar wrangling, pots and pans noise/ blues of the early Bad Seeds and it's not the full on Grinderman assault either. It's a new Bad Seeds- strings, piano, choirs, foreground basslines. The brittle, sparse Skeleton Tree and Ghosteen music has been replaced by or evolved into a warmer, full, cosmic, optimistic Bad Seeds. It's still a record that is 'about' Arthur - and about Nick's son Jethro who died last year aged 30 and also ex- band mate and former partner Anita Lane who died in 2021 and appears via a phone message in a song about her, O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is). But it's an album about recovery, about choosing joy over sorrow and about living again.
The album bursts into life with the opening song, Song Of The Lake, a massive ascending orchestral sound and Nick speaking about an old man on the shore of the lake, looking at a moment worth saving. Nick starts various lines and then pulls away with the phrase, 'never mind, never mind', choosing, I don't know, the moment, life, love... The bassline thumps away and the drums rattle and then the choir swells in again.
It's followed by two singles- the title track and Frogs. I've posted about both before. Both have grown and grown since their release. I don't think Nick's written a better song than Frogs- it's a career high and the album's centre, a psychedelic Scott Walker pop song, with Cain and Abel, walking home in the rain on Sunday, the frogs jumping for joy from the gutter, and Kris Kristofferson 'Walking by kicking a can/ In a shirt he hasn't washed for years'. It's extraordinary. I can't fully explain it and don't really need to. It's how it makes me feel that's important.
Frogs is followed by Joy, a song that took my breath away the first time I heard it. In Joy as piano plays and an ambient noise floats around and a lone horn pipes up, Nick sings in a quavering voice, 'I woke up this morning with a blues all around my head/ It felt like someone in my family is dead', and then he picks up and moves on, describing a nighttime visitation by a teenage boy, 'a ghost in giant sneakers, laughing, stars around his head'. Nick doesn't name the ghost as Arthur- that's for us to do. Then 'the flaming boy' sits on Nick's bed, and says, 'We've all had too much sorrow/ Now is the time for joy'. The song flows on, horns and a swelling bed of music, Nick on top singing of people all over the world shouting angry words, and then of mercy, love and joy. Around him a choir ahh ahh ahhs.
Wild God doesn't let up, the ten songs an emotional hit one after the other, the music sounding wide screen and epic in parts, intimate in others and Nick making some kind of sense of the world as it is now for him- Final Rescue Attempt has someone (his wife Suzie presumably) coming for him. 'After that nothing really hurt again', he sings.
Side Two (and this feels like a two sides of vinyl, forty minutes and ten song long album of the kind from before CDs and streaming) launches with Conversion is dark, cinematic gospel. Cinnamon Horses is another standout, a string- laden meditation on love, Nick concluding, 'I told my friends that life was sweet/ That love would endure if it could'. He has spoken and written about about moving on with grief and consciously choosing to be happy. This is a recurring theme on Wild God- life is for living, we carry the dead with us but have to make the most of what's around us and that the real essentials, the things that keep us alive are love, family, friends, moments.
Long Dark Night is a Cave piano ballad that was the final pre- album single and works much better as a part of the album than it did on its own. O Wow O Wow is beautiful and bouyant, a tribute to Anita Lane that ends with her voice chattering away in a phone message, talking about when they lived in a place near Brixton prison, laughing and remembering about 'mucking around and making up songs'. The album ends with a short song, As The Waters Cover The Sea, a song which is over and done with in two minutes, a musical box melody and strings, soft and either about his wife Suzie or maybe his Christianity, and suddenly joined by the choir again- and as it finishes my main response is to flip the disc over and go back to the start, to go on Nick's journey out of pain and into a beatific state again.
It won't surprise you that much of this resonates with me strongly. Since Isaac's death in November 2021 Nick's songs, his words at The Red Hand Files and in his book Carnage, have been a help to me. The songs on Wild God are something else- they don't necessarily mirror me or where I am but they strike me, I recognise them, I feel them. In the end, with music, maybe that's the main thing- what it does to you, what makes you feel.
Oops! Due to a technical fuck up this post didn't publish at 8 am this morning as it should have and has only gone live now, nine hours later.
Fluffy Inside released an album on Mighty Force last year, Nylon Corners- inventive ambient techno and electro from Exeter, analogue synths, 303s. They put out a new EP in August, four tracks of wonderful melodic braindance/ acid called Mushroom Harmonics. This is the title track...
A dark acidic bassline, fluttering synths and FX, the propulsive thud of the kick drum and tsk- tsk- tsk-tsk of the hi hats and some hypnotic acid squiggles that come to the fore out of the dry ice. Lovely stuff. The other three tracks - Added Vinegar, Raven and Craving Nature- hit the same sweet spot. You can buy it here.
I've been having particularly vivid dreams for about a year now. Last summer I got a high cholesterol reading and started taking statins (as well as cutting down on crisps, cheese and cake). Statins can have all kind of side effects and apparently vivid dreams and disturbed sleep is one. The dreams aren't all necessarily nightmares but they aren't always pleasant either and they are often vivid enough to wake me up suddenly, unsure for a few seconds what is real and what is dream, and then I spend a few minutes calming down as the reality sinks in and I try to drift back to sleep. These vivid dreams, coupled with the fact that occasionally I dream about Isaac, means my sleep is pretty erratic- and dreaming about him always wakes me up, leaving me unsettled. In my dreams he's still alive. I also have some lucid dreams, where I think I'm aware that I'm dreaming. I have got used to it over the last year to some extent but it's all quite odd.
R.E.M. are named after the stage of sleep where dreaming occurs, where brain activity is high and there is rapid eye movement. In 198 on Green Michael Stipe wrote a song, Get Up, where he deals with sleep and dreams. I say deals with- it's as close to dealing with as Stipe got in the 80s. Get Up is wonderfully simple sounding song with layers of complexity. Peter Buck's guitars clang and riff, the drums and bass thump and surge, there's a kaleidoscopic, psychedelic breakdown/ middle eight and some of the best vocal interplay between Stipe and Michael Mills on any R.E.M. song, especially in the 'Dreams, they complicate my life/ Dreams, they complement my life' call and response vocals. In the late 90s, on stage, Stipe announced that song was written about Mike Mills and his tendency to lie in and then be late to the sessions for Green. Get up Mike.
It's right up there as one of my favourite R.E.M. songs. In 1989 they toured the world playing Green and songs from their previous albums. I saw them at the Royal Court in Liverpool, 26th May 1989, what felt like a big venue at the time but pretty small in comparison to the arenas and domes they played in the mid 90s. They were superb- electrifying, urgent, arty, rocking- and it was impossible to take your eyes off them all night. R.E.M. filmed some of the U.S. shows and released a concert length video Tourfilm, based mainly around the gig at Greensboro in November but also containing some sections from four other American shows. In the middle of Tourfilm R.E.M. play Get Up and if anything it's even better live than on Green. They power into it, all the guitar psyche- pop turned up to the max, Stipe bouncing around in his ragged white clothes, his late 80s pony tail hanging down his back, the strobe effect projections producing a dream- like effect. Get Up at breakneck pace, two and a half minutes of intense dream/ indie/ psyche. 'Where does time go?', Stipe sings, the smudged mascara blurring around his eyes. 'I don't know'.
Herbie Flowers, session musician and bassist, died at the weekend aged 86. In 1972 he played the bass on the sessions that would become Lou Reed's Transformer, an album produced by David Bowie and Mick Ronson. On Lou's most famous Herbie came up with an instantly recognisable bass part, the song's main hook in many ways, for which he was paid a session fee of £17.
In the song Lou celebrated all kinds of New York outsiders and misfits, the late 60s and early 70s demi- world around Reed, Warhol and all the rest brought to life in a few beautifully crafted lines- transgender actresses Holly from Miami FLA and Candy Darling, Little Joe, the Sugar Plum Fairy (Joe Campbell, a dealer) and Jackie (Curtis). Throw in some references to drugs and oral sex and you have the perfect slice of transgressive pop music. It's the sort of song that you can remember the first time you heard it, the door to another world opening slightly.
Herbie played loads of other sessions, over 20, 000 apparently, and created loads of other basslines including Space Oddity and Diamond Dogs for Bowie. But Walk On The Wild Side remains the one.
In 1990 New York hip hop group A Tribe Called Quest sampled the bassline for what became their best known song, the call and response sample- fest/ piece of genius that is Can I Kick It? As well as Lou/ Herbie it samples Lonnie Smith, Ian Dury and The Blockheads and Prokofiev. Lou Reed took pretty much all the profits from the sales apparently. Such is the music business.
In 2018- 2019 Rick Smith and Karl Hyde decided 'out of boredom' to write and release new/ previously unreleased Underworld material on a weekly basis, every Thursday. They wanted to disrupt the write/ album/ tour schedule and do something more instinctive and responsive. It could have gone horribly wrong. Instead, Drift (as it became known) saw them produce the best material of their post- 1990s career. At the end of it they cherry picked ten tracks and compiled them as Drift Series 1 Sampler, an album that is the best they've done since, as I said opined before, the 90s. It closed with the ten minute track Custard Speedtalk, a track that sounds like classic Underworld, all straight lines and railway rhythms, Cowgirl synth squiggles and Karl's overheard fragments of conversation- 'I can't be soft at work/ They'd eat me alive'- and stream of consciousness emotions- 'You're really good at making people feel good/ You don't realise what a mess you're in/ Listen to yourself...'
By happy coincidence, last week Underworld announced a new album, Strawberry Hotel, a record they've been drip feeding tracks from for the last year- denver luna and And The Colour Red have already signposted where Karl and Rick are at. On Friday they put Black Poppies onto the streaming services and now we've got another what looks like essential album for 2024 ahead of us.
Ashley Beedle is one of those people whose music is written through our record collections like the word Blackpool through a stick of rock, for those of us of a certain age. He recorded with David Holmes and Lindsay Edwards as The Disco Evangelists, as Black Science Orchestra and with Rocky and Diesel as X- Press 2 and The Ballistic Brothers, as a DJ in his own right and has been responsible for more great remixes than you could fit into one post.
In 1995 The Ballistic Brothers released this tribute to a London record shop, a magnificent slice of uptempo dance dub.
Sadly Ashley has been very unwell. After recovering from prostate cancer Ashley suffered an enormous brain bleed and seizure in November 2023. During a sixteen hour operation to remove a brain mass he had a major stroke. He's been in hospital ever since, losing the movement in his arm and leg on his right hand side and his speech too. Ashley is recovering some speech but is still very unwell and requires a wheelchair and other assistance due to the loss of mobility on his right side. There is a fundraising page here with more details and if you wish to and are able, you can help.
Back in 2009 Ashley recorded an hour long mix for New York's Beats In Space, an inspired mix that finds dub in all sorts of places.
Generations Walking - Midnight Bustling (Francois Kevorkian Dub) Basement 5 - Immigrant Dub The Pop Group - 3:38 Dub Pistols feat . Rodney P - You'll Never Find (Dub) Stiff Little Fingers - Bloody Dub Generation X - Wild Dub Flesh For Lulu - I'm Not Like Everybody Else (Dub Version) The Pogues - Young Ned Of The Hill (Dub Version) The Clash - One More Dub Bauhaus - Here's The Dub (She's In Parties) Leftfield - Dub Gussett Air - How Does It Make You Feel? (Adrian Sherwood Mix) Massive Attack vs Mad Professor - Radiation Ruling The Nation (Protection) Reverend And The Makers - Sundown On The Empire (Adrian Sherwood On U Sound Disneydubland) The Clash - Robber Dub The Specials/Rico Rodriguez - Ghost Town (Extended Mix)
Bandcamp Friday yesterday dropped a ton of new music into my Inbox and while today is a day late in terms of the benefits the artists get from the monthly Bandcamp Friday (Bandcamp waive their fees for one day a month) it's still worth posting some of the highlights- and yesterday was packed full of highlights.
We'll start with a 10: 40 remix of Puerto Montt City orchestra, a song called Hey You, out on Brighton's Higher Love label. By his own admission Jesse's work as 10: 40 has been an ongoing mission to make music/ remixes that channel Spiritualized and this one takes that to the nth degree- cue up Jason Spaceman's Lay Back In The Sun either before or after this and enjoy the sun drenched, blissed out ride....
The song is a cover of 14 Iced Bears' Hay Fever, an 80s indie classic. You can get buy the 10: 40 remix of Puerto Montt City Orchestra at Bandcamp.
Next, another murky, underground, radiophonic, analogue synth missive from Pye Corner Audio, the first one for a few months, this one titled Texture Reels. Four minutes and forty five seconds of subterranean, kosmische reel to reel intensity. Get it at Bandcamp, pay what you want.
Thirdly, Emma. Matty Ducasse records as Skylab. His Skylab International offshoot released a new single onto Bandcamp yesterday, a cover of Hot Chocolate's Emma. Mat plays and produces, Zoe Filthy- Rich songs. The drum machine pitter patters, chunky machine rhythms. The synths ping and blip. Hot Chocolate's mid- 70s pop- soul hit is darker than you might think. Producer Mickie Most asked singer Errol Brown for 'darkness and depth'. Errol gave him lyrics about lost childhood and suicide, a film star 'who can't keep living on dreams no more'. Mat and Zoe dredge up all of the pain and darkness that Errol piled into his lyrics. The EP is at Bandcamp, remix, edit and instrumental.
Lastly, Richard Norris whose Oracle Sound dub project has become essential listening. Richard has recorded three albums of dubs, available digitally and on vinyl via his subscription service. Recently he hosted his friend Jon Carter, who DJed at the Heavenly Social in the 90s and recorded as Monkey Mafia as well as under his own name. Richard wanted to show Jon some new kit. They ended up making a dub track called Ceefax- rocking drums and bass, space echo, melodica and an Ampp Freq live dub machine. The results come in three parts- Ceefax, a Norris dub and a Carter dub. All three are at Bandcamp. As I keep typing.
You can buy all the music above for less than the price of a pint of lager in central London (and some central Manchester pubs). And while the lager may look briefly colder and more enticing, the music will last longer.
