Wednesday Trio

Some mid- week electronic/ dance music/ techno to shake the speakers and rattle the window frames- in three parts. 

First up Boy Division and their new single, Lazarus, a slice of laser beam focused, Italo disco/ cosmic chug. A resurrection one might say. The production is slick, the guitars neatly post- New Order, the piano straight out of Rimini and the controls set for the heart of A Love From Outer Space, a space the Boy Division chaps (Duncan Gray and Bob Salmond) know very well. Out now on Tici Taci. 

Next, South London dub/ house/ chug suppliers Rude Audio have a new EP out at the end of October, seven tracks and forty five minutes of excellence titled Strange Phenomena. It's led by an advance party, the seven minute long MGB1, and sees Rude Audio slide out of the dubbed out shadows to the strobe lit dancefloor with some gorgeously lit up wonky leftfield disco.  The video is worth sticking around for too. 

Lastly we go back to Belfast and Deeply Armed, a trio I posted a couple of weeks ago. Their debut single The Healing is a 2025 must have, and on release earlier this year came with a couple of remixes (Andrew Innes with Brendan Lynch and former Swordsman Keith Tenniswood). The Richard Fearless remix came out recently. The Death In Vegas main man doesn't so much remix The Healing as completely strip it down and rebuild it. Driven by one of Fearless' thumping kick drums, the ghostlier elements of the original song forma  backdrop of synth waves. Matches on a tea tray percussion. Deeply distorted acid squelch. Reverb and delay. A certain amount of techno disquiet. Lovely stuff indeed. 

Make Something Of All The Noise

Back in the 00s there were a lot of two person bands,  some maybe inspired by the sudden ascent of The White Stripes who proved that less could be more (and put a lot of bass players out of work perhaps). One of them were The Kills, formed in 2001 by singer singer Alison Mosshart and guitarist Jamie Hince. Between 2003 and 2011 they put out four albums- Keep On Your Mean Side, No Wow, Midnight Boom and Blood Pressures. In 2016 they released a fifth, Ash & Ice. I dipped in and out and can't remember what the first thing I heard by them was but I think it came from a music blog- they always strike me as an early days of music blogs band.

The Kills were dark and messy, four track/ eight track recordings, garage blues and Velvets sounds, Jamie's gnarly guitars and basic drum machine programming and Alison's chain smoking vocals. In 2011 I heard this song and it became one of the songs of the year for me...

Baby Says

Jamie's guitar playing is superb, the tone and ringing, fuzzy lead line endlessly brilliant. Alison comes in with one of those gutter punk love song lyrics, instantly conjuring the Chelsea Hotel, leather jackets and dirty jeans, a life shot in grimy black and white- 'Baby says/ A howl of romance I'll get/ From all your sleeping dogs/ You thugs of God/ I'll get one yet'. Eat your heart out Allen Ginsberg. 

They released The Last Goodbye as a single from Blood Pressures too which had a cover of Pale Blue Eyes on it- so many bands have covered The Velvet Underground's Pale Blue Eyes but The Kills bring manage to something of themselves to it, a scratchy, lo fi, rickety version.

Pale Blue Eyes

Last week Thurston Moore released his own Velvets cover to mark Sterling Morrison's birthday, a version of Temptation Inside Your Heart. Debbie Googe (ex- MBV) plays bass on it. Thurston's been playing the song live for ages and its probably about time he committed it to tape...

Thurston plays that riff like its all that matters and his NY drawl is perfect on this. The Velvets version didn't come out until 1985 when it was on the VU album and is one of my fvaourite VU songs- Lou is all the place vocally, funny asides, laughter and goofy lines thrown about. Lou starts off saying, 'somebody shut the door', and, 'somebody get her out of here'. Later on he chucks out, 'electricity comes from other planets', and there's more nonsense at the end- 'the pope in the silver castle'. The 'wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong' backing vocals are a joy too. Sterling and Lou's guitars are locked into each other in a way that makes the Velvet Underground in 1968/ 9, the perfect guitar band. 

Temptation Inside Your Heart

Alison Mosshart turned up last week too on the latest preview from Daniel Avery's forthcoming album Tremor. Greasy Off The Racing Line is dark electronic blues, a grimy, overloaded bassline, synth noise explosions and Mosshart back at the mic, ten chain smoked cigarettes in and falling down a deep hole. 

Monday's Long Songs

A new EP from Andres y Xavi came out last Friday, four tracks all named after cities- hence the title of the EP, Cities. All four are lovely pieces of work but two in particular stand out and both are well over eight minutes long. The first is Lagos, which rolls in with tumbling piano chords and the chk chk chk of a shaker. Then there is bubbling, Afro- funk bass and the thump of the kick drum, both chilled and hot. Halfway through there's a breakdown, stuttering synths and the start of a chant and then on four minutes a vocal works its way to the front, a lovely combination of Afro vocals, Balearic piano and dancefloor shuffle. 

New York and Chicago are two of the other three other cities the tracks are named after. Lastly there is Sant Antoni, eleven minutes of Mediterranean facing electronic beauty, a long into with synth chords, bleeps and rising ripples. The bass turns up eventually, prodding, and then a Soul II Soul drumbeat kicks in. Late evening down by the waterfront. At six minutes it all drops out to just the piano and an ambient synth sound, the bleeps and then just the piano on its own, gently heading towards what seems to be the end.... and that drum break kicks back in and we're off again...

Cities is out now on Higher Love at Bandcamp. 

Four Hours And Twenty Minutes Of Rude Audio And Richard Fearless AT STP

Apologies if it feels a bit like every third post at Bagging Area at the moment is related to Sounds From The Flightpath Estate Volume 2 but there's been quite a lot going on. On Tuesday this week BBC 6 played the previously unreleased Sabres Of Paradise track Lick Wid Nit Wit, a track that has been sitting undisturbed in the vaults at Warp for three decades and which is out now on our album, Jagz Kooner, Gary Burns and Andrew Weatherall at the mixing desk with twelve minutes of sinuous dub/ downtempo, a serious Jah Wobble- esque bassline and the prototype Wilmot horns running through it. 

Jamz Supernova was sitting in for Lauren Laverne and played it in full- leading to a flurry of sales from the Golden Lion Sounds website and Bandcamp. The numbers available online are dwindling fast and soon the only copies available will be those in record shops- Stranger Than Paradise, Piccadilly Records, Phonica, Shake The Foundations and Lovebeat. The power of national radio! The photo above was sent to me by a friend who happened to be driving and tuning in at the time- he pulled over the took the picture and sent it to me. The radio show can be caught at the BBC 6 website for the next twenty four days here. Jamz plays Sabres about two hours and five minutes in but there are several references given to it, The Golden Lion and our album throughout. 

Two weeks earlier there was a lunch party at Stranger Than Paradise in Hackney with The Flightpath's own Baz and Rude Audio/ Mark Ratcliff at the decks and then a three hour set by Richard Fearless. STP have uploaded the recording of Mark and Richard's sets at their Soundcloud page, four hours and eighteen minutes of top quality music kicking off with some very dubwise selections from Mark, then gathering pace with some electronic chuggery and spaced out weirdness. Fearless arrives with a masterclass in DJing- the selections, the flow, the mixing, its superb stuff. He does dub techno, slow and low, and crunchy distorted acid/ dub/ techno tomfoolery, robot funk, thumpy techno and more besides. You can listen here. 

Soundtrack Saturday

A bit of a soundtrack detour today into the world of late 60s and early 70s children's TV, not a topic that gets much coverage round here. In 1969 the BBC began broadcasting The Clangers,  stop- motion animation series about a group of knitted creatures that lived on the moon who spoke by whistling and who ate only green soup and blue string pudding. The Clangers one of my earliest childhood memories. 

The Clangers ran from 1969 to 1972 and was made by Oliver Postgate, who wrote, filmed, animated and narrated the series. He also scored the soundtrack by drawing it out graphically and then had it turned into music by his friend  Vernon Elliott (a composer and bassoonist). They recorded it together in a village hall in Kent. Late 60s BBC English eccentricity at its finest. The music is classical crossed with kid's TV, the minor chord variations echoing minimalist composers such as Erik Satie

In 2001 Jonny Trunk released a CD of music from The Clangers, compiled with Oliver Postgate and containing lots of very short pieces, some only fifteen or twenty seconds long along with the intro music (with narration), some longer pieces, a self explanatory four minutes titled Useful Musical Sequences, another called Running Around Music and finishing with A Clangers Opera, Act One, an eleven minute libretto Postgate compiled from The Iron Chicken and The Music Trees. Enjoy.

Episode One/ Intro Music and Dialogue

Useful Musical Sequences

A Clangers Opera, Act One

It's Curtains For You

When The Stone Roses- The Remixes came out in October 2000 I was very much not interested in it.It seemed to be yet another Silvertone cash in on an album and a band they'd been bleeding dry for over a decade, by a record company the band took to court to part company with. Remixes of the songs from the debut album also seemed to me to be an inherently un- Roses thing. Sacrilege. Heresy. Those songs don't need anything else doing to them. Why would someone even think of it? 

I'm not a person who dislikes remixes either as has been well established over the lifetime of this blog- I often prefer the remix to the original track (depending on the remixer obviously). The Stone Roses- The Remixes also came at a time when it felt very unlikely that there was any involvement from the band in this. Squire and Brown weren't talking. Reni was whereabouts unknown. Mani was heavily involved with Primal Scream. Ian's solo career was well under way and they all seemed happy to move on. 

I've shifted my attitude to this album twice, once a few years ago when I heard the Justin Robertson remix of Waterfall out in a bar and found myself enjoying it. Justin didn't do anything too radical to it, a skippy acid house drum beat, some atmospherics and a xylophone, and then the guitar riff comes in with Ian's vocal, those lyrics about a girl dropping acid and boarding a cross channel ferry, leaving 'the filth and the scum/ this American satellite's won'. There's a spaced out and stripped down state to Justin's remix that I like now.

Waterfall (Justin Robertson Remix)

A few weeks ago my friend Spencer sent me a link to the Soul Hooligan remix of Shoot You Down. Curiosity won and I clicked through. Lots of reverb, the strum of a guitar isolated, a loop of brushed drums, Ian's hushed vocals, the hum of an amp switched on behind everything. Ian's line, 'I'd love to do it and you know you've always had it coming', gets looped up, the guitars pile up a bit, cymbals splash- it's nicely done and, again, not a radical re- working but different enough to hear the song anew.

Shoot You Down (Soul Hooligan Remix)

Soul Hooligan are/were Austin Reynolds, a producer from Essex. I played their remix of Shoot You Down at The Golden Lion last weekend. 

After finding that I enjoyed that one I went back in and have dipped in and out of the some of the rest. This one, Kinobe's remix of Elizabeth My Dear stood out...

Elizabeth My Dear (Kinobe Remix)

Ian and John's anti- monarchical ditty opens side two of the debut album, the circling Strawberry Fayre guitar part re- purposed with Ian wishing death upon the monarch, all less than a minute long. A statement as much as a song. Kinobe turn it into a sweetly 60s psychedelic folk song, looping, delaying and FXing it out for nearly five minutes. 

Liminal

Brian Eno and Beatie Wolfe have an album out in October- Liminal. It's the third of a three album series. I missed the first pair- Luminal and Lateral- so have some catching up to do. Eno's very prolific isn't he? One of the pieces of music from the forthcoming one, Ringing Ocean, came my way recently and it struck me as being very beautiful...

It's somewhere in the intersection between neo- classical, ambient and dream sequence music, very difficult to describe adequately but blissful, restrained, repetitive and hypnotic music that suggests rather than tells. Eno and Wolfe say it's liminal because it sits in the borderland between song and non- song. 

This one, The Last To Know, is from the same album and is evidently halfway between song and non- song, ambient drift and slow synths with a vocal that at first seemed quite out of place to me, the song and non- song colliding...

I suspect that over the course of an eleven track album it will all make perfect sense, the flow from one piece to another.

This seems the ideal time to re- post this track by Brian's brother Roger, a gorgeous but really quite melancholy ambient piece called Tidescape from October 2023 which I loved but never followed up (possibly because I thought an entire album might be a bit too melancholic). Roger plays piano and is joined by Alexander Glucksmann, Jon Goddard and Christian Badzura, between them contributing clarinet, electric guitar, organ, vibraphone and synths. Music in/ for a state of flux. 

Nothing's Changed I Still Love You

We were in a bar in Sale recently, early evening, fairly quiet, one of those new type of bars set up in a former shop unit. There were a few customers/ drinkers scattered round the edges of the bar, couples and a small group of friends. The bar staff (all ridiculously young) were busying themselves and selecting songs from an iPad. One of them cued up this song and as Johnny Marr, Andy Rourke and Mike Joyce crashed in, building to that micro- second pause before Morrissey starts singing it seemed to inject a jolt of electricity into everyone in the room. At several tables people were singing along or mouthing the words.

Stop Me If You Think That You've Heard This One Before

Johnny's guitar playing is immense, clanging and melodic, indie- glam played on a twelve string Gibson which gives it that huge sound and Morrissey, well, we don't like to talk about him any more do we but the lyrics are among his best, witty and clever, memorable and tailor made for singalongs. Famously it was lined up to be a summer 1987 single but the Hungerford massacre and the song's line about a 'shy, bald Buddhist' reflecting and planning a mass murder jinxed it- the BBC said they wouldn't play it and Rough Trade went for I Started Something I Couldn't Finish instead. Johnny also nails a guitar solo, something not many Smiths songs contain.  

Johnny is a big fan of the song, playing it live with his band- he did it when I saw him at The Ritz a few years ago. This clip is from The Tonight Show.

Thinkin' Bout U

Psychederek's new single, Thinkin' Bout U, came out last Friday, four versions of the track. The first- Thinkin' Bout U Pt. 1 (Mercury)- picks up where his cover of 808 State's Pacific State from last year's Alt! 12" left off, with sumptuous synth chords, birdsong, ambient house vibes and a killer saxophone line. 

Pt 1 (Mercury) eases us in gently. Pt 2 (Venus) adds drums, an insistent groove with a driving bassline, the sax a little lower in the mix, a Stone Roses- esque guitar line, shifting from ambient house to indie dance. Pt. 3 (Mars) is dance floor gold the drums and bass in A Certain Ratio territory, heads down and funked up. Pt. 4 (Jupiter/ Reprise) turns the sax line into an accordion, the vibe gone all Balearic. It's a wonderful EP that shows the possibilities in music, and that one version is never the only way to do something.Get it at Bandcamp. 

September Songs

Few months mark the start of something new as much as 1st September does, a real change in the seasons, change of mood, new phase of the year,  the whole back to school routine (which as someone who has worked in education since the early 90s is very much part of my annual rhythm). 

In 1984 Ian McCulloch tested the water for a solo career with a single released under his own name, outside the Bunnymen with a cover of Kurt Weill's September Song. Weill's song looks forward to autumn coming...

'But it's a long, long while from May to December
And the days grow short when you reach September
And the autumn weather turns the leaves to flame
And I haven't got time for waiting game

And the days dwindle down to a precious few
September, November
And these few precious days I'd spend with you'

September Song (Long Version)

In 1987 David Sylvian released a solo album, Secrets Of The Beehive which had this song to open it, one minute and seventeen seconds of David and piano. For David, the inevitability of September and the changes it brings are shot through with melancholy...

'The sun shines high above, the sounds of laughter
The birds swoop down upon the crosses of old grey churches
We say that we're in love while secretly wishing for rain
Sipping Coke and playing games

September's here again'

September

Much more recently, in 2021, Chris Coco and George Solar released September On The Island, a tribute to Ibiza after all the tourists have gone home...

September On The Island (Dub Version)