The Return Of Friday Night Is Rockabilly Night 138

We're going to a wedding tomorrow. It won't be a rockabilly wedding but I hope Dave makes a bit more effort than the groom pictured above. A suit wouldn't have gone amiss.

Mel Robbins recorded Save It in the 1950s, making the short hop from honky tonk to rockabilly- that bandwagon won't be around for long, better get on board. Save It is piano led with a thumping solo and a giggly, hiccuping, heavy breathing vocal.

Save It

The Cramps covered it, slowing it down, ramping up the heavy breathing and adding a distinct air of sexual tension. This fan made video is very good.

Brody

Brody Dalle is one of those punk girls our mothers used to warn us about- fags, tattoos, black eyeliner, bad attitude. Which only made them more attractive. She was in LA punks The Distillers and then the more alt-rock Spinnerette; both have engine revving guitars and a massive drum sound, her big husky voice and Joan Jett looks. If my LA punk gossip knowledge is correct she was married to Rancid's Tim Armstrong and is now married to Queen Of The Stone Age's Josh Homme. Brody has a solo album coming out- there is a song below to listen to (with Shirley Manson and Emily from Warpaint on backing vox). I quite like it in a regressive shoutalong kind of way.

Silvermac

Westworld crossed Eddie Cochran with beatboxes and had a few chart hits in 1987, the best known being Sonic Boom Boy. This one, with a slowed down Bo Diddley riff and a cracking vocal from Elizabeth, only reached number 47 but was just as good. I picked the 12" up recently, in pristine condition, in a charity shop for 50p- both a bargain and a charity shop classic.

Silvermac

And doing the promotional rounds on Pebble Mill At One here. Is it just me or have Youtube changed the embedding thing? Can't get it to work. Never mind- you can click. It seems bizarre now that bands would travel to Birmingham or wherever Pebble Mill was for a two minute slot at lunchtime, mime their way through their latest offering in between a few light items and some news, for the benefit of... who? Pensioners, the unemployed, students and some stay-at-home parents ( I resisted typing housewives there although in 1987 it was probably fairly accurate) . Who of these was going to rush out to buy Silvermac? The pluggers must have worked all the way through lunch to get the Pebble Mill slot as well.

Candy Says

Today's song is a beautiful cover of the Velvet Underground's Candy Says by British folk star Kathryn Williams. I had this on a compilation cd but can't find it, can't even remember what the cd was, it came with a magazine I think but I didn't get around to buying the album. Anyway, this is quite lovely. I always thought it funny that she didn't hit the high notes that Lou Reed did.

Candy Says

Girl From New York

Billy Nicholls is one of the forgotten men of 1960s pop and as such has an album that is one of those legendary, hard-to-find records- his take on Pet Sounds, shelved by Immediate just before it was due to come out (Andrew Loog Oldham's label ran into financial difficulties).This song is an absolute joy with blistering guitar parts from Steve Marriott, the rest of The Small Faces thumping along and a superb vocal from Billy.

The lyrics take some beating too...

She came from New York in the summer
We went to the zoo
She said that London was lovely
We had a good view

I called her at four in the morning
She came to the phone
We met in a park as the dawn came
I picked her a rose

Some how we found the time
To love each others mind
Peanut butter's fine

I can't stand peanut butter personally.

Girl From New York

Quiet Village

Monday morning- let's start the week with Martin Denny's 1959 instrumental hit Quiet Village, a song which summarises the 1990s (and beyond) ironic, lounge/exotica revival in three minutes and thirty six seconds of piano, woodblock and parrot noises. Very nice.

Quiet Village

Hollywood

Make your own here.

It's Just The Sun Rising

Echorich frequently leaves the most considered comments here and the man also has exquisite taste. When I posted A Man Called Adam's Barefoot In The Head he offered the opinion that that record and this one here today were among the three best songs of their ilk. The Beloved's Sun Rising is a peach, a song that sounds like it's title. It has been remixed to death but sometimes the original mix is all you need. The bass, whispered vocals and electronic rhythm- sublime.

The Sun Rising

Polar explorer Tom Crean must have seen many sun rises though possibly not in the altered state that The Beloved were writing about. Got to love a man in sub-zero temperatures who still smokes his pipe.

Library Walk 2: Direct Action

My most read post at Bagging Area this week has been the one about Manchester City Council's plans to despoil library walk, blocking it off with gates and a glass box. Unlike me, who just sits and types and moans, Manchester Modernist Society are doing something about it and more importantly YOU CAN TOO. You need to write a letter. An actual letter, on paper with a pen and post it too, costing you 60 pence for a first class stamp, but I think it's worth it. Because a) they shouldn't be able to block off a public right of way b) they shouldn't be able to spoil two Grade II listed buildings, a much loved feature of our city centre for eighty years and c) they are numpties for even thinking it was a good idea. Details are here. We can oppose the stopping up order, triggering a legal review by central government. You don't even need to be a resident of Manchester. But you do need to be quick- all letters must be received by Friday 28th February. Pens out people! Save beautiful architecture and fight the power, fight the powers that be!

Your Lips A Magic World

This concrete brutalist building is a nunnery in Yucatan, Mexico.

This is a dub-disco re-edit of Echo And the Bunnymen's The Killing Moon by Something For Kate. It is superb. You didn't know you needed a dance floor version of this song... and yet you do. Mac never bettered himself lyrically than with this song- heavy duty, time shifting, portentous nonsense.

The Return Of Friday Night Is Rockabilly Night 137

After a two or three week absence Friday night rockabilly is back! Back once again like the renegade master, D is for damager, A is for.... Al Sweatt. Al's 1958 single I Hate Myself is a hard to find piece of rockabillly (hard to find in a physical format- it's dead easy to find on the internet, you just type it into  a search engine and it appears). This song was the flipside.

Let's Paint The Town Red

Return Leg

                                                                Polar Explorer Tom Crean

Daniel Avery recently remixed Audion's Sky- full on dark dancefloor stuff, in two halves. I can't get enough of this type of thing at the moment..... as you may have noticed.



Now Matthew Dear (who is Audion) has played the return leg by remixing Avery's Need Electric. This is spooky dance music with a skippy beat and ominous, end-of-days noises.



Both versions are to be released on vinyl in March with extra remixes by Factory Floor and Matt Walsh out digitally.

Pain Relief

This is one of those lovely dance tracks that abound at the moment- chugging rhythm, some nice phased effects and noises, throbby bass, a distant robotic voice to unsettle you ever so slightly...

Tronik Youth remixed by Sean Johnston (as Hardway Bros)

Library Walk

This picture shows library walk in central Manchester, a curving space between the Central Reference Library (on the right) and the Town Hall extension (on the left). It is a beautiful space as well as a handy cut through from St Peter's Square to Albert Square. Photographs of it have been printed on postcards and used on websites promoting Manchester city centre and its architecture.

So it beggars belief that the City Council and some fuckwit architects would decide to fill the space in. Currently under construction is a glazed box to link the two buildings and a set of gates at the Albert Square end, as illustrated below.

Various groups are complaining about this piece of vandalism, including the Manchester Modernist Society. Sir Richard Leese, the chair of Manchester City Council and leader of the Labour group, recently commented on Twitter that he couldn't see what the fuss was about, library walk was 'just the space between two buildings'. Philistine and idiot. By this logic Trafalgar Square is just the space between Whitehall and The National Gallery, the Mediterranean is merely the space between southern Europe and north Africa, and the Grand Canyon is just a gap between two cliffs in Arizona. All would be much better off filled in with crappily constructed glass boxes and gated off. 

As a cleanser after all that idiocy and sheer wrongness here is Allen Wayne and two minutes of r 'n' b brilliance, a song which became a Northern Soul favourite.

Chills And Fever

Boiler

This is the control  panel for the Worcester Boiler 28Si II, which controls our central heating and hot water. Or at least it did up until Friday night. On Saturday morning it was intermittently controlling it. By the afternoon it was dead. Some internet research showed that the fault is a common one with the Worcester 28Si II, that the reset button will reset a few times but after 5 tries it will lock out. As ours has. At that point every piece of advice on plumbing chatrooms (I know...) was to get an engineer in. This was not possible on Sunday. A friend had a look. He has a friend who is a plumber, who is coming to fix the Worcester 28Si II today at 2.00 pm.

On Saturday night I ran a bath by boiling the kettle and four saucepans of water on the hob repeatedly. After three quarters of an hour this delivered a bath of about 5". I know that under such circumstances one should shrug and  laugh and look at people under flood water in Somerset who are having a much worse time and see the bright side, spirit of the Blitz etc etc. I did not possess such qualities. I just want hot water and central heating back.

This song is by experimental, psychedelic, electronic 60s group Silver Apples, who may well have lived in a cold water flat on the Lower East Side. I couldn't stand it for long. I reached my tolerance several days ago.

Water

Mesmerising

There's something mesmerising about concrete brutalism. I've long been a fan of these post-war monuments to modernism and have occasionally trekked to stand beneath some, such as Trellick Tower in West London and Preston Bus Station (best viewed from a distance, up close it's a dirty and somewhat unloved car park/bus station). I watched Johnathan Meades on BBC 4 last night. He operates on a different level- at times it's best just to switch off and let his commentary wash over you while enjoying the visuals.

Richard Norris (in his Time And Space Machine guise) has remixed Temples. Temples are four young men from Kettering making psychedelic rock circa 1966-7 and have been tipped by Johnny Marr, Bobby Gillespie and Noel Gallagher (could be offputting to some I suppose). I saw them briefly supporting Primal Scream last December and the song and a half I saw were alright. Richard Norris loops them about the place, reverb heavy vocals, phased guitars and backwards guitars, psychedelia firmly intact. NME were offering a free download but I think the capacity got reached by a mad rush of 60s psychedelia fans.

Edit: free download is back.

My Mind's Wide Open Baby

This is another song I've posted before, back in 2011 which is practically neolithic in blogging terms. I've long been partial to the Balearic dance-pop of A Man Called Adam. Barefoot In The Head is a staple of chill out compilations but that shouldn't prejudice you against the song- it is a beautiful record. Sally Rodgers and Steve Jones made up A Man Called Adam but Paul Daley worked on this too, before leaving for Leftfield.

Barefoot In The Head (12" Mix)

Sally Rodgers wrote the lyrics by cribbing pagan translations of the poetry of Robert Graves (or so it says at both the Museum of British Pop Culture and wiki). It also turns out that...

'Rodgers is conducting doctoral research in modern poetics at the University of St Andrews and Jones recently gained an MSc in sound design from the University of Edinburgh. Together they continue to work as sound designers on museum, film and theatrical commissions, notably the BME - a museum charting the history of British music from the end of World War II, and The British Museum's major new exhibition Journey to the afterlife: The Egyptian Book of the Dead. Their music continues to be licensed all over the world for film, television and release.'

You don't get that from ex-members of Oasis. 

Terry Hall On The Wireless

Terry Hall knows, don't argue. On the iPlayer, standing in for Jarvis Cocker on Radio 6 throughout February- everything from The Clash to Hamilton Bohannon via Deee Lite, the Breeders, Bowie, Jackson 5, Susan Cadogan, Dolly Parton, The Carpenters and a whole load more. Terry is very droll. Here.

That Old Town

While in London we took the students to the O2 arena to see the Museum Of British Pop Culture. As soon as you put rock 'n' roll in a museum it seems to lose some of its charm in some ways but some of the exhibits were good. There were large projections playing in slow-mo (The Smiths, Wham and The Stone Roses on Top Of The Pops in the 80s, The Clash and Sex Pistols from 70s TV), different rooms for different periods, a room full of guitars and drum kits to play on and a rather nifty touch screen virtual record box which tried to tell the story of dance music (a good selection of tracks although I tutted and shook my head at what I thought were a couple of factual errors). In the rooms, as well as some touch screen stuff, there were various pieces behind glass- some Bowie costumes from the early 70s, a Small Faces bass drum, a royal flush of Spice Girls outfits, dresses belonging to Petula Clark and Dusty Springfield, a pair of Rickenbackers- Weller's pop art guitar and Mani's abstract expressionist bass (John Squire's handiwork, along with Mani's paint splattered clothes from that NME cover, visible in the right of the second pic).  Art-rock crossover. I was hoping for a Cubist drum kit but left disappointed.

It transpired that two of my 6th form students' Dads were present at Spike Island along with me, a quarter of a century ago. They say working with kids keeps you young- it can also make you feel very old. I then spent some time racking my brains trying to think of when Weller and Mani might have played together and came up with this 7" single from a few years back, a super sharp slice of Mod pop, recorded with Graham Coxon. 

This Old Town

And here played live on the gogglebox- Weller, Mani, Coxon and Zak Starkey on drums.

They probably played together on a Primal Scream B-side too ('Til The Kingdom Comes, XCLTR era, sounds like The Who) which I have posted before. In fact having just searched the blog, I've posted This Old Town before too. 

King Dubby

I got back from London last night, everyone safely delivered home. While I was down south the north nearly blew away and the rest of my family bunkered in and were warned by the TV not to leave the house unless absolutely 'essential'.

This appeared on the internet yesterday and while I apologise for delivering you yet more Andrew Weatherall stuff this remix for San Francisco's Group Rhoda is a splendid piece of digital dub (done under Weatherall and Timothy Fairplay's Asphodells umbrella). What a lovely way to start Saturday and a half term holiday. A commenter at Soundcloud disagrees though- 'it is tiring' he/she says, 'the drums are stiff too much and gave me headache. I do not like it at all!' Each to their own.