One Of These Things First

Another guest post from Spencer and a swerve in direction from the Balearic pop of Bruce Hornsby two weeks ago. Spencer's offering today is from a Canadian label and a Brazilian/ Canadian artist, Joao Leao covering Nick Drake.  

Spencer says...

'One of these things' is Joao Leao's lo-fi bossa take on Drake's dreamy next world poem. In many ways, his cover remains faithful to the original while still being quiet, measured and full of sorrowful yearning, but there's something else there too. The gently patted bossa box produces a beat that represents a kind of stealthy resilience. A defiant heart refusing to stop in the face of much provocation. As you listen you can hear the weariness but, there's wisdom too and that's what makes this one special'.

One of These Things First (Undui) is at Bandcamp, one side of a 7" single out on Toronto label Local Dish.

The collision of cultures going on here- late 60s English folk coupled with Brazilian bossa nova and released by a Canadian label dedicated to putting out 'eclectic analog recordings by local artists'- is exactly the sort of thing that we need more of- and that the internet is great for if you know where to look or have people pointing you in the right direction. Niche. Lo fi. Small scale. No borders.

Nick Drake's original is a thing of beauty too, a song from 1971's Bryter Later. The lyrics offer up all kinds of things, some real and some whimsical, that Nick could have been- a sailor, a cook, your pillar, your door, simple as a kettle, steady as a rock. In the end, he concludes he could and should have been one of these things first. Possibilities and missed chances. Regrets.

One Of These Things First

Spencer followed up his Joao Leao post with this from the same label...

'This one from the same label is just pure Balearic collage-pop joy. I can just imagine it being 'pick of the week' on the left field page in Jockey Slut back in the day...'

Encontro de Seca com Chuva by Nikitta (the track title translates as 'drought meets rain' according to my search engine). Listen to it here.

To my ears it also sounds like the sort of thing the Beastie Boys would have released on Grand Royal back in the 90s. The label hosted records by Luscious Jackson, Atari Teenage Riot, Money Mark and the Josephine Wiggs Experience and At The Drive In among others. Grand Royal was also a magazine, a goldmine of references, recommends and articles, from Ramen to Lee Scratch Perry, George Clinton to Evel Knievel, Viv Albertine and the mullet. The Beastie Boys were the kings of mid- 90s pop culture.

October

October already- 2025 continues to hurtle by. Some October songs for the first of the month, a blogging October fest. 

First, wonderful electronic pop by Chris And Cosey, originally released in 1983 but here in its 1986 version, two former members of Throbbing Gristle making something light and lilting but profound too. 

'You took my hands on the stairs/ No one was around/ You said we could be lovers/ I just had to say the word...'

October (Love Song) '86 Version

Fast forward to 1991 and Neil and Chris, the Pet Shop Boys, released their October symphony, a song inspired by Neil Tennant reading a book about the Russian revolution and a composer writing a symphony celebrating the October revolution that brought the Bolsheviks to power. Written in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall and break up of the USSR Neil has his composer wondering if the symphony if the work is still valid. Johnny Marr contributes some lovely little bursts of guitar. 

'So much confusion when autumn comes around/ What to do about October?'

My October Symphony

In October 2000 The Gentle Waves released October's Sky as part of an EP, Falling From Grace. Brass, organ, an off kilter rhythm and sound and Isobel Campbell's softly sung vocals on top, a slightly off centre love song. 

'When will we stop feeling haunted?/ For our ancient love must die/ Never have the stars shone brighter/ Underneath October's sky'

October's Sky

Lastly, from April this year, Maria Somerville's October Moon- drifting in with ambient drones and noise, recorded in Conamara and Dublin in 2021, gradually becoming a song, acoustic guitar and a vocal so soft and blurred its only half there, a song blown apart by the wind... 

The lyrics are difficult to make out, maybe 'I look away/ Somewhere I can...' 

October Moon

Coloured Lights, Smoke, Music

On Saturday night The Flightpath Estate DJ team (me, Martin and Dan this time, the Flightpath's northern branch) supported Pye Corner Audio and Shunt Voltage at The Yard in Cheetham Hill, north of Manchester city centre, a gig put on by Paul Watt and Beautiful Burnouts. The Yard is a lovely venue, an old Victorian building turned into a one room gig space and was close to sold out, 250 tickets sold. We had three slots- an hour before Shunt Voltage (an ambient/ dub hour), a twenty minute interval between the two acts and then an hour after Pye Corner Audio had finished to entertain anyone who decided to stick around. 

The ambient hour was fine, we played two tracks each in rotation and gave the room and gathering crowd some warm up music. We were set up on the stage, next to Pye Corner's kit and Shunt Voltage's equipment. A laser show was also set up for added visual entertainment. 

I was at the decks when the Shunt Voltage duo took the stage, just one track into my two. One of Shunt Voltage had to reboot his laptop so I stayed at the decks and then when they were ready to go cued up something so that when Shunt Voltage had finished I could just go back on stage and hit play. 

Shunt Voltage were really good, two men, a bank of synths and laptops, some FX pedals and a microphone which each member used at different times, gnomic repetitive phrases delivered over the crunching electronic sounds. At times it sounded like Mark E. Smith (aptly as The Fall have a song called Cheetham Hill) playing with early 80s Cabaret Voltaire/ late 80s 808 State, full on rhythms and bursts of synth noise and samples and a series of projections behind them that fitted the music perfectly. Manchester music- not the kind that's filled stadiums this summer but the more underground and leftfield electronic/ industrial/ acid techno that's as much part of the city's heritage as the guitars are. 

Resistor

As they completed their set and took their applause I slipped onto the stage behind the decks, waited a few seconds and then hit play. I'd been deliberating about whether to keep the thumpy, electronic energy in the room going, keeping the beats and bpms where Shunt Voltage had left them, or whether I should cool it down. Pye Corner Audio was likely to start with some slow, beatless, ambient stuff I thought but also I reckoned he'd have the audience eating out of the palm of his hand so I decided to keep the uptempo energy going. I hit play and James Holden's Blackpool Late Eighties boomed out. I fiddled with a few knobs, adjusted a few buttons and looked up...

It seemed like at that exact moment every single person in the packed out room was looking at me- instantly DJ imposter syndrome shot through me, 'What am I doing up here? What the fuck do I do next? How did I end up in this situation?' A bit nerve wracking. 

Heads were nodding I noticed and I quickly looked down, deciding to ignore them all and concentrate on cueing up the next track, getting it in exactly the right place to mix from deck A to deck B and pray I didn't mess up the transition. I slid the fader across and Jon Hopkins' remix of Daniel Avery's Glitter boomed into The Yard, tough, slo mo four four techno drums and a growing synth noise intensity. I was a minute or two into when Pye Corner Audio appeared next to me and I wondered if he was a bit pissed off that I'd gone a bit too hard- not that there was much I could do about it at that point, I was committed. He got his kit up and running, I mixed into a third track and then he gave me a smile and nod that he was ready to start. I hit the pause button, the track juddered for a few seconds and then I cut the noise. 

This picture shows what seemed to be two hundred and fifty pairs of eyes scrutinising my every move. It makes me feel a little anxious just looking at it. 

Pye Corner Audio started off with some very ambient synth sounds, quietening the room completely. Some brief interludes of sounds, bubbles and whirrs and then an FXed but recognisable voice came over the PA, Andrew Weatherall talking about smoke and music and coloured lights, acid house as gnostic ceremony. For the next hour Pye Corner was superb, gradually building the set, bringing in rhythms and bass, a larger and entrancing sound. Behind a lot of his tracks and sounds there's a sense of unease, the discomfort and folk horror of 70s public information films mixed with Cold War dread filtered through acid house and rave. The set built- no real gaps between tracks just a seamless segue from to another or the briefest of pauses, the crowd bobbed along, heads nodding, hands waved around, some dancing near the front. It was a superb hour of electronic ambient/ acid house synth music with this track at the heart of it...

Quarry Rave

Pye Corner finished by bringing the FXed and filtered Andrew Weatherall sample back. I'm not sure if he knows about The Flightpath Estate and our connections to Andrew's music but if not it was a lovely connection and coincidence. 

There's something about Pye Corner Audio's music I associate with lockdown. During the 2020- 21 period Martyn Jenkins dropped new tracks onto Bandcamp monthly and the subterranean, dystopic element in his music fitted with those times- but the warmth and communal spirit that is filtered through much of them was equally appropriate, a small community of people isolated from each other physically but listening to the same music via the internet. These things passed through my mind as the projections flashed away and the music filled the Victorian school room. 

After Pye Corner Audio ended his set we played some more tunes, from 10.30 through until 11.15, a hardy crew of dancers hanging around for more fun. It was pissing down outside so staying indoors and listening to our acid/ techno disco was the lesser of two evils. Dan got up and played David Harrow's AanDee, a track from Sounds From The Flightpath Estate Volume 2 named after Mr Weatherall and Martyn (Pye Corner) asked about a couple of tunes we'd played, later sending a message to Flightpath Martin saying it was really good night and 'felt like a proper rave'. We kept playing, enjoying the freedom and the sound system. We got some good pictures out of it too. Amazing what coloured lights, smoke and music can do. 

Monday's Long Song

Today's long song comes in conjunction with Saturday's Apocalypse Now! post. A photo kept popping up in some of my social media feeds last week, a photo of Sean Flynn (below on the right).

Sean Flynn was the son of Errol Flynn and Lili Damita. Being the son of Errol Flynn, one of Hollywood's most famous stars (not to mention a notorious party animal and womaniser) must have had quite an impact on young Sean. His mother was a dancer, model, singer and actor. Before she met and married Errol she'd been in a relationship with Prince Louis Ferdinand, grandson of Kaiser Wilhelm II. Trying to find your way through all of that as a teenager must have been interesting. Sean grew up and tried acting but got bored of it and in the mid- 60s he decided to become a freelance photojournalist. In 1966 he went to Vietnam. His photos of the war in Vietnam were soon being published in Time Life and Paris Match. Sean became part of a risk taking group of American photojournalists who wanted to take what they saw as the best pictures. This meant going into combat alongside US troops sometimes. 

Sean and friend/ colleague Dana Stone whizzed around South Vietnam on rented Honda motorbikes, wore military fatigues and took high risk jobs, going out on patrol with US soldiers. In March '66 he was wounded in the knee and a month later while out with the Green Berets they were ambushed by the Viet Cong. Sean and the platoon fought their way out of trouble, Flynn using an M16 assault rifle a Green Beret had given him. He later made a parachute jump with the 101st Airborne and helped an Australian platoon who he'd been photographing by identifying a mine and warning them. After spending part of 1967 covering the Arab- Israeli War he was back in Vietnam in 1968, photographing the aftermath of the Tet Offensive. He was struck by grenade fragments in a battle near Da Nang. It's probably fair to say that he blurred the lines around photojournalism and impartiality. I'm not sure Sean saw himself as impartial. He went to Vietnam to photograph American soldiers and he lived with them and among them while there. 

In 1970 Nixon invaded Cambodia as part of his attempts to end the war in Vietnam- some nicely contradictory policies there from President Nixon. Sean and Dana crossed the border into Cambodia on their motorbikes. They encountered a VC roadblock and decided they wanted to interview some VC. According to witnesses (other American journalists at the scene, ones who chose to travel by car rather than motorbike) Sean and Dana went up to the Viet Cong soldiers, were relieved of their motorbikes and then marched into a treeline. They were never seen again and their bodies were never found. The VC and Cambodian communist fighters the Khmer Rouge were responsible for kidnapping and killing several journalists around the time- it seems that Sean Flynn and Dana Stone were two of these. Sean's mother Lili spent a fortune trying to find her son. He was legally declared dead in 1984. She died a decade later. Errol was already gone- he died in 1959. 

Sean Flynn's story was part of Michael Herr's book Dispatches, a six part account of Herr's time in Vietnam in 1967/68. Dispatches is part journalism/ part fiction and was first published in 1977, a key text in the New Journalism. He also contributed to the script for Apocalypse Now! Dispatches and Apocalypse Now! were on The Clash's reading lists and film nights. Joe was fascinated by the Vietnam War, America's failure and the nation's guilt over it. 

The Clash spent months in New York in 1980 and 1981, recording some of the tracks that became Sandinista! in '80 and playing seventeen concerts at Bonds Casino in 1981. They met a Vietnam veteran, Larry McIntyre, who'd had both his legs blown off in Vietnam (as referenced in Combat Rock's Car Jamming). They wrote Charlie Don't Surf about Vietnam and inspired by Apocalypse Now! They wrote Washington Bullets about US foreign policy, the Cold War, Afghanistan and US actions in Cuba, Chile and Nicaragua. Straight To Hell included a verse about a child in Vietnam, fathered by an American soldier and refused permission to join him in the USA, left behind in post- war Vietnam. Joe found plenty of subject matter in Vietnam and in 1981 back in London, wrote a song inspired by Sean Flynn. 

Sean Flynn (Extended 'Marcus Music' Version)

The original version is over seven minutes long (cut down by producer Glyn Johns to four minutes for Combat Rock). In fact Sean Flynn may have been the song that tipped Bernie Rhodes over the edge when he complained 'does everything have to be a raga?!'. Strummer then used this too for the opening line to Rock The Casbah ('Now the king he told the boogie men/ You have to let that raga drop').

Musically and tonally, Sean Flynn (like Death Is A Star, also on Combat Rock) is a million miles from Career Opportunities and 1976, a song that shows how far the band traveled in just five years. Mick's guitar is covered in echo and FX, multiple guitars overdubbed over Topper's South Asian inspired drums and percussion. Gary Barnacle's saxophone wails away in the background, soundtracking Joe's existential ruminations. He sings some way off in the distance, low in the mix.... 

'You know he heard the drums of war

When the past was a closing door

The drums beat into the jungle floor

The past was always a closing door

Rain on the leaves and the soldiers sing

You never never hear anything

They filled the sky with a tropical storm

You know he heard the drums of war

Each man knows what he's searching for'

The full length version, the Marcus Music version (so- called as it was recorded at Marcus Music studios in April 1981), is an extraordinary Clash song, a real lost gem. It's atmospheric and experimental, Strummer writing an imagined poetic version of Flynn and his life and disappearance in South East Asia and Mick, Topper and Gary creating an inspired abstract, cinematic track. 

In Mick's version of Combat Rock, a double album with several songs running at over seven or eight minutes plus five songs that either became B- sides or were not released, and titled Rat Patrol From Fort Bragg, Sean Flynn is a centrepiece of the album, closing side two after Should I Stay Or Should I Go and the extended mix of Ghetto Defendant, The Clash pushing outwards and onwards. In the real world, the struggles over Combat Rock coupled with Topper's increasing drug issues and tensions between Joe, Bernie and Paul on one side and Mick on the other led to the band's demise. Maybe, as Joe once remarked, they should all have taken a holiday. 

Thirty Minutes Of Ambient Guitar Music

I'm not sure what it says about where my head is at right now but I'm being drawn back once again to the sounds of Vini Reilly's guitar and with that to the idea that guitars can make ambient music. A couple of albums have come my way in the last year that slot right into this- Kevin McCormick's Passing Clouds and Thought Leadership's Ill Of Pentacles. It may be no coincidence that both of the guitarists behind these albums are from the Manchester area (Kevin is now residing in Mobberley, a village not far south of Manchester and whoever Thought Leadership is lives in Edgeley, Stockport). Vini Reilly's guitar and echo and chorus pedals have been making their hard to pin down but spellbinding sounds since the late 70s when he was placed into a room with Martin Hannett and they came up with The Return Of the Durutti Column. I first heard Durutti Column's music in 1987 and it's been close to my stereo ever since. Vini has retired, his health poor since having three strokes back in the late 00s but his legacy as one of Factory Records' true geniuses is secure. 

This mix pulls together some Durutti Column songs ('silly little tunes', according to Vini) along with Kevin McCormick and Thought Leadership and the former Cocteau Twin Robin Guthrie who has been releasing ambient guitar tracks onto his Bandcamp page for some time. A chilled and slightly melancholic autumnal ambient guitar mix for late September 2025. 

The world is a shitshow and a bin fire. Trump and Netanyahu lie and deceive from the stage at the United Nations. Farage lies about immigrants. Starmer follows Farage down a path that can only be a dead end. Racists hoist flags from lampposts and paint roundabouts. Life seems to get a little bit worse every day. But we still have music- and we will have it long after Trump, Netanyahu, Farage and all the rest of them have shuffled off the stage and disappeared. 

Thirty Minutes Of Ambient Guitar Music

• Durutti Column: Sketch For A Manchester Summer 1989
• Robin Guthrie: Mountain
• Kevin McCormick: It's Been A Long Time
• Kevin McCormick: Alone In A Crowd
• Thought Leadership: III
• Durutti Column: A Room In Southport
• Durutti Column: Royal Infirmary
• Michael Hix: Pure Land

Sketch For A Manchester Summer starts with the rain falling, taped from the door of Vini's West Didsbury home thirty six years ago. It rains quite a lot in Manchester- you might have heard. The synth that bubbles away with the rain is joined by Vini's guitar and for a couple of minutes a rainy Mancunian summer is the only place to be. The song is tucked away on an album of rarities, sessions and unreleased recordings, The Sporadic Recordings- some of them were done at Sporadic Studios, Manchester. CD only, now fairly rare. 

Robin Guthrie's guitar lit up Cocteau Twins and for the last few years he's released all sorts of music onto his Bandcamp page, including lots of ambient guitar pieces. Montain was recorded in Brittany, France in 2022, a track Robin refers to as an 'orphaned track', one which didn't find a place at the time. Released on Bandcamp a year ago, September 2024.

Kevin McCormick made several albums of guitar music in Manchester in the late 70s and early 80s. His work was lost for decades and then rediscovered and re- issued in 2021 on the Smiling C label. In 2024 Kevin released a new album, Passing Clouds, one I can't recommend enough. It's Been A Long Time is from it. Alone In A Crowd is from an album recorded with David Horridge, Sticklebacks, polished at Stockport's Strawberry Studios after initial recordings on Kevin's  four track home studio. 

Thought Leadership's Ill Of Pentacles came out on cassette and digital in 2024 and then on vinyl via Be With this year (all gone, I missed out too). It's a wonderful album, recorded at home in Edgeley, Stockport and other than that there's very little information. It was recorded in January 2024 with guitar, pedals and drum machine and the tracks are numbered I to X. 

Snowflake is from Short Stories For Pauline, a lost Durutti Column album recorded in November 1983 that could/ should have been Vini's fourth on Factory. A Tony Wilson A&R oversight saw it shelved in favour of Without Mercy (the song Duet from Short Stories was expanded into Without Mercy). Tony got it wrong- Short Stories is a Durutti Column masterpiece that finally saw the light of day on Factory Benelux in 2012. Worth the wait. 

Royal Infirmary is from 1986's Circuses And Bread, Vini and drummer/ manager/ friend Bruce Mitchell joined by John Metcalfe on viola and Tim Kellett on trumpet. The piano/ guitar interplay on Royal Infirmary is next level Durutti Column beauty. 

Michael Hix released an album as Wonderful Aspiration Of The Source, a guitar only ambient/ cosmic instrumental ten track album that came out two weeks ago. Hix is one of the founders of Nashville Ambient Ensemble. Find it here. 

Soundtrack Saturday

I first saw Apocalypse Now! in the late night BBC2 slot at some point in the 80s. It came out in 1979 and in a few years became a record collection soundtrack staple- the blood red cover with the Vietnamese sun fading into an orange/ red haze, the scrawl of the film's title and then the disc inside, The Doors, The Ride Of The Valkyries....

It's still an astonishing film, Francis Ford Coppola's masterpiece maybe- even the story of its making is an epic filled with disaster. Martin Sheen's opening scene and narration, 'Saigon... shit, I'm still in Saigon', the ever present whir of fans and helicopter blades, and the increasing madness of the trip upriver to find Kurtz (Marlon Brando), a US officer who has gone rogue. The scene with the Playmates choppered in to entertain US troops, dancing to Suzie Q by Flash Cadillac, Cynthia Wood packing pistols- everything, all the time, on the brink of chaos. 

The soundtrack is absolutely key to the film, as much part of the movie as Martin Sheen, Robert Duval, Dennis Hopper, the surfing, the napalm and the horror. Coppola's use of The End by The Doors is inspired. The Doors 80s revival started via Apocalypse Now! and Danny Sugarman's book No One Here Gets Out Alive (publsuhed a year after the film, 1980), and their albums and influence grew through the decade all the way to Oliver Stone's misguided biopic ten years later. The End is Doors max, their closing song in concert and on their debut album, a song that began lyrically when Jim Morrison broke up with his girlfriend Mary Werbelow but became something much darker, more Oedipal. It suited Coppola's vision of the film perfectly, explosions and the sky on fire, the end.... The version from the soundtrack opens with slow motion helicopter blades and then Robbie Krieger's eastern sounding guitar...

The End (Apocalype Now! Edit)

Most of the score for the film was recorded by Carmine Coppola with Francis along with a host of percussionists, synth/ keys players and the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, twelve short pieces of music, thirty minutes long when sequenced together, that play a huge part in the film.

Apocalypse Now! OST

The Clash were paying attention, In 1980 they released their own epic, the six sides of vinyl of Sandinista! (an opinion splitting album- I love it, it's the very essence of the band for me). Mick's keyboard slashes and the slowed down helicopter blades that lead the song in are total Apocalypse Now! and the vocal refrain and song title is taken from Colonel Kilgore's famous line about the VC. 

Charlie Don't Surf

Danny Thompson

Danny Thompson's death at the age of 88 was announced on Wednesday, a giant in the background of the English music scene from the early 60s onwards. An obituary I read somewhere yesterday said, musicians didn't get Danny Thompson to play bass on their records because they wanted some one who could follow the guitarist and hold down the root note- they got him in because they wanted Danny Thompson. His stand up double bass, born out of school music lessons where he picked up trumpet and guitar before settling on double bass, was as much a lead instrument as any other sound on the many records he played on. He played blues with Alexis Korner and then folk/ jazz with Pentangle and then on albums by Nick Drake, Richard Thompson, Davey Graham, The Incredible String Band, Bert Jansch and John Martyn and then albums by a slew of artists including Talk Talk, Everything But The Girl, Kate Bush, Alison Moyet and David Sylvian. 

Until I started looking at the list of records his bass playing adorns, I hadn't fully realised how many I own with his playing on them and his name on the sleeve. Danny's playing was melodic and inventive, basslines that told their own story, that worked for the song but very much existed in their own right too. Sympathetic but full of the man's character. 

Pentangle rewrote the folk rule book in the late 60s, updating folk music by fusing it with jazz and a modern sensibility. This of course outraged the purists. In this clip Pentangle play live in January 1971 doing Light Flight , a song I've been playing on and off for several years since Andy Bell covered it. 

In 1969 Danny played bass on Nick Drake's Five Leaves Left, an album I love (not least 'Cello Song which has taken on a whole new meaning for me since Isaac's death- I've written about it, before more than once, and probably will again). Time Has Told Me is the album's opening song and Danny's also there on River Man, Three Hours, 'Cello Song, Man In A Shed and Saturday Sun, his bass bubbling away behind Nick's guitar and voice and Joe Boyd's production. 

Time Has Told Me

Danny's connection with John Martyn was long and went beyond music. They were notorious drinking buddies and trouble causers. In 1973 he played on John Martyn's the fourth album Solid Air, a groundbreaking blend of folk, jazz, Echoplex guitar, blues space rock and after hours music. The title track was itself a tribute by Martyn to Nick Drake, John's guitar and Danny's bass dancing together and wrapping themselves around each other...

Solid Air

There's loads more I could post, potentially hundreds and hundreds of songs, all to some degree improved by Danny Thompson's bass playing, but these three will do for now. RIP Danny Thompson.