Miles And Miles Of Squares

I'll get my moan out of the way first- the crowd at The Apollo, or certain parts of it, were a pain on Saturday night, people talking constantly throughout the songs, especially the quieter ones where The Beta Band were locked into their soft psychedelic folk. What you really don't need at that point is several pairs of people, mainly men, chattering to each other all the way through loudly. The same people then treated Dry The Rain as their own personal anthem, sang along all the way through it and then went back to talking to each other at volume, louder now because the songs had got louder. Why anyone would pay the best part of £50 for a ticket only to talk all the way through the gig is beyond me. It wasn't just around me either. Several people standing in different points in the crowd on Saturday night said similar. It's a shame because it spoils the gig. 

The Beta Band, despite all of this, were really good, back together after a twenty one year absence and playing the last night of the UK tour before heading to the USA. The stage set and projections and films are superb, their left of centre, slightly freaked out sense of humour beamed out in the pre- gig films. The stage has bongos, congas and spare drum kits set up, banks of synths and decks, a bird of prey on a stick and potted plants. The four band members are welcomed like returning heroes and the first half of the set is littered with lovely moments- She's The One is spaced out folk, softly sung and played, the Jew's harp part right up in the mix with a pause before the second half's psychedelic freak out, the band sounding more like 1967 Pink Floyd than ever.

She's The One

The tour is billed as The Three EPs tour but they don't just play the tracks from the compilation, the y mix it up and throw in songs from the rest of their back catalogue too. Assessment from Heroes To Zeros is gnarly, Steve Mason's electric guitar and the drums bouncing around the venue. Opening song Inner Meet Me is a lost 60s folk/ psyche strum. Push It Out and Needles In My Eyes both stand out as spooked, hushed late 90s psyche/ folk high points. Dr. Baker and Dog's Got A Bone are accompanied by spaced out lights and projections.

The band jump between instruments, Mason often putting his guitar down to play the congas, John MacLean playing synths, keys, samples, trumpet, scratching on the turntables and visibly having the time of his life, and drummer Robin Jones leaving his drum kit to take the spotlight on guitar for one song.

They play Dry The Rain towards the end and it has an instant effect on the crowd, the crowd singing along, a sea of hands, pint glasses and phones in the air. When the band and crowd sing the last lines together it's genuinely a bit of a moment, and when the band put their instruments down there's a pause and the crowd starts singing the lines again- ' If there's something inside that you want to say/ Say it out loud, it will be OK'. The band look out, pick their guitars back up and slip back into the song, another minute of Dry The Rain, band and crowd feeding off each other. The encore is a stunner, Steve Mason in electric wrap around shades being the front man, out at the edge of the stage. They stretch out the trippy, waking- from- a- dream electronic hip hop of Squares, from 2001's Hot Shots II, built on the famous sample from Gunter Kallmann Choir, Mason repeating the line, 'Daydream/ I fell asleep amid the flowers'. They finish with The House Song, all four members of the band at drum kits, beating rhythms out as the lights strafe the stalls of the Apollo.

It's good to have them back. 

Squares 

Monday's Long Song

I own two albums by Chicago band Tortoise, their second album Millions Now Living Will Never Die, released in 1996 and containing the still astonishing twenty minute opening track Djed. Millions Now Living... made Tortoise the standard bearers for post- rock, a name/ genre they denied (and having recently got back together still deny- personally I quite liked the idea that as Britpop spluttered out into Richard Ashcroft solo albums and grunge was definitely over and done, that we were in some way post- rock but I can see why bands reject simple pigeonholing labels too and as a label post- rock was off putting, academic and a tad joyless). 

The other Tortoise album I own is a three CD/ 1 DVD box set from 2006 called A Lazarus Taxon, a compilation that rounded up singles, non- album tracks and remixes. There's a lot of music on A Lazarus Taxon and a lot of ground is covered. Tortoise were always as much about groove and texture as songs, and the triple crown of dub, krautrock/ cosmische and experimental electronic music inspired them as much as any guitar bands did- or that's how it seemed. Between them the group were big fans of minimalism, punk, hardcore and jazz as well. 

A Lazarus Taxon's first disc kicks off with Gamera, an eleven minute single from 1995 for the Duophonic label. It begins with an acoustic guitar playing a folky finger picking part, the squeaks of the fingers on the strings clearly audible. There is a hum growing in the background that gradually works its way forward and then at two and a half minutes drums, Can or Neu! like rhythms, the louder buzz of amps being overloaded and a guitar line, and then more sounds, organ maybe, keys/ synths, another guitar. Tortoise sometimes came across in print as a bit too cerebral,  an exercise in musical experimentation. There's none of that in the actual music- Gamera is thrilling and alive, an eleven minute journey that never lets up.

Gamera

Forty Five Minutes Of Beyond The Beta Band

I saw the reformed Beta Band at the Apollo last night- review to follow in a day or two. I posted a Beta Band Sunday mix back in March when the re- union was announced and the tickets went up for sale and I've previously posted a Steve Mason solo mix too. To complete a Beta Band hat-trick of Sunday mixes today's mix is an after The Beta Band mix, forty five minutes of songs from after they split, with Steve mason well represented in various guises and also The Aliens, the band Robin Jones and John MacLean formed after the four Betas called it a day in 2004. 

The Beat Band split up in 2004 and embarked on a farewell tour. Between forming in 1996 and splitting in 2004 they had followed their artistic and cultural noses, making music that spanned the groundbreaking Three EPS and then three further albums that all suffered a little in comparison to the initial trio of EPs. 

In 2004 they owed their record label Parlophone £1.2 million. There was enough money in the bank to pay each member a month's wages (£1000 each). On top of this there was a £120, 000 debt to the taxman, to be split four ways. Parlophone wrote the debt off (EMI signed Robbie Williams the same month for £80 million so money wasn't in short supply at major record companies in the early 00s). The Beta Band spent the money on art- records and recording, videos and films, gigs and touring. In an interview in March Steve Mason said 'We never wanted to be rock stars or make lots of money. Our ambitions were solely artistic and we pushed ourselves to the last minute. Then we split up. But how many bands can say the spent £1./2 million on art?'

Steve Mason went solo under a variety of names- first as King Biscuit Time, then as Black Affair and Good Face and has made five albums under his own name. The Aliens have blazed their own trail, in the 00s and the late 2010s with three albums and EPs and singles. Gordon Anderson records as Lone Pigeon. Between them they've made over a dozen albums since splitting The Beta Band, all of them filled with the same pioneering, willful and artistic spirit that was the core of their starting point in 1996- folk, psychedelia, electronics, samples and found sounds, weird pop, electro, post- rock... few stones left unturned. 

Forty Five Minutes Of Beyond The Beta Band

• King Biscuit Time: I Walk The Earth
• The Aliens: Sunlamp Show
• Alien Stadium: The Visitations
• Steve Mason: America Is Your Boyfriend (Tim Goldsworthy Remix)
• Black Affair: Tak! Attack!
• Emiliana Torrini and Steve Mason: I Go Out
• Steve Mason: Boys Outside (Andrew Weatherall Dub 2)
• The Aliens: Bobby's Song

King Biscuit Time was a Steve Mason solo project from before The Beta Band split, so the appearance of I walk The Earth here is a bit of a bending of the rules but whatever. It's got all the familiar Mason sounds and styles- acoustic guitars, hip hop drums and his melancholic and doleful vocals. 

Gordon Lone Pigeon joined his former Beta Bandmates Robin and John in The Aliens after The Beta Band split. The Aliens released Astronomy For Dogs in 2007 and then Luna a year later. Sunlamp Show is from the latter, a song that sounds like The Beach Boys after a week in a cottage in the Scottish highlands on happy drugs. Madcap psychedelia. The ten minute Bobby's Song closes this mix but opened Luna, an epic Lone Pigeon song. Robot Man from Astronomy For Dogs sat on this mix for a while but I took it out. Not sure why. 

Alien Stadium was Steve Mason and the late Martin Duffy, Primal Scream's keyboard wizard with Brendan Lynch on drum programming. They released Livin' In Elizabethan Times in 2017, widescreen and symphonic sci fi inspired songs about aliens destroying the planet. One of those EPs that makes you wish they'd done more. 

Black Affair was a Mason solo project, 80s electro from 2008, three singles and an album Pleasure Pressure Point. 

Tim Goldsworthy's remix of Steve Mason's America Is Your Boyfriend was a song on a four track EP called Coup D'Etat, three new songs and the remix and originally from 2019's About The Light. Tim Goldsworthy was in UNCLE with James Lavelle and then LCD Soundsystem (before a big fall out with James Murphy. He also produced David Holmes' Let's Get Killed.

I Go Out was a one off collaboration between Steve and Emiliana Torrini along with Toy, produced by Dan Carey and released on 7" single on Carey's Speedy Wunderground label in 2013. Six minutes of driving krauty joy, recorded and mixed in a day.

Boys Outside was a Mason solo album ,a soft and acoustic, folk-ish songs that came from a period of serious poor mental health. Andrew Weatherall did two remixes, a pair of dubs that still sound like some of his best remix work. There was talk of an album with Andrew producing or a remixing the entire Boys Outside album but it never happened more's the pity. there were some Dennis Bovell dub remixes too but I couldn't find them. Funny how digital files just vanish sometimes. 

Soundtrack Saturday

John Barry's status as one of the key composers of cinema and film tunes is set in stone- or celluloid maybe. His work on the James Bond films alone guarantees him that. Better still is his music for Midnight Cowboy which featured in this series back in March.  The Ipcress File from 1965 broke ground as a flipside to the Bond films, a downbeat, unglamorous, grittier spy film that contrasted 007 with a working class, almost film noir spy, caught up in red tape and workplace difficulties.

The Ipcress File

John Barry's theme tune is deliberately non- Bond too. The catchy electric guitar riff is replaced by a off kilter melody line picked out on a cimbalon while piano plonks away discordantly. It's London gloom, fog and a 1960s still in black and white. 

The Ipcress File was directed by  Sidney J. Furie and starred Michael Caine as Harry Palmer, a role that came between his one in Zulu the previous year thta made him a star and his leading part in Alfie in 1966 that launched him the USA. 

In 1969 John Barry and Hal David wrote We Have All the Time In The World, a Bond theme sung by Louis Armstrong for On her Majesty's Secret Service. In 1993 My Bloody Valentine covered it for the Peace Together compilation, an album to promote the peace process in Northern Ireland. An unlikely cover version pair up, John Barry and Louis Armstrong with MBV- but they play it fairly straight and it works. 

We Have All The Time In The World

Friday Triplet

A bumper post for Friday, several new and recent releases all worthy of your attention, all in the electronic music area- they say dance music is ephemeral by nature but much of it sticks around long after other things have faded away.

First, the first new music from Dirt Bogarde in a year, since the release of his debut album in October 2024. Pihkal is a single track inspired by Alexander T. Shulgin's 1995 book Pihkal- a chemical love story'. Shulgin and his wife Ann conducted in depth research into the use of psychedelic drugs and their effects on the human mind. He's also credited with introducing MDMA to psychologists in the 1970s as a therapeutic tool. Dirt takes the book as a starting point and builds an autumnal classic from it, a siren driven, thumping and electrifying piece of modern acid house- there are echoes of A Guy Called Gerald, Detroit techno, Orbital, 808 State and early 90s rave inside its five minutes but it also sounds utterly contemporary. 

One word review- banger! 

Buy/ listen/ enjoy at Bandcamp.

Over at Tici Taci Duncan Gray has been rebooting the machines and clearing the shelves. Two weeks ago he released Niemand, a seven minute foray into mirror ball chug, with rattling percussion, steel pan drums, a burst of descending bass and a range of synths and guitars that pull Niemand into some sweet spot where chug, psychedelia and dub meet, hug and frug. 

One word review- expansive!

Buy/ listen/ enjoy at Bandcamp. 

Down on the Kent coast things are happening with Michael Son Of Michael who has released the third of three EPs, the final installment in the Margate trilogy- Drifting Inland. The EP is inspired by those who have moved to the resort looking for the seaside dream and then... drifted inland. Four tracks: Cowbell Concerto is lively, rippling synths, four four beats, and some lovely synapse busting toplines; Sonido del Sureste is darker, inching away from the brighter lights, a little acidic and very insistent; Del Boy is a drive by track, gliding down coastal roads, drums and bass pushing on- there's a chopped up and FX vocal that chatters away on top; and New Signs Of Life judders in and then evolves into a gorgeous slice of Scandi- disco/ cosmische. 

One word review- Kentish kosmsiche! (I know, that's two words. I couldn't get Kentrock or Kentmische to work). 

Buy/ listen/ enjoy at Bandcamp. 

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. 

The Ban Ban Ton Ton Connection

Over at Ban Ban Ton Ton, Dr Rob invited me to review some new releases. This pair of releases have become part of my September listening, both highly recommended. There's daily posts at Ban ban Ton Ton by Dr. Rob and a cast of contributors, music and words that are always worth checking in on. 

Manchester trio Sonnenspot came together after times spent playing in various Mancunian related line ups and records- Alfie, Badly Drawn Boy's Hour Of The Bewilder Beast album, Jane Weaver's band and Mother Sky all feature as do the current Rainy Heart team who are doing some really good events around the city. Sonnenspot's debut album is out on Jason Boardman's Before I Die and so is automatically of interest and is in part a tribute to the sounds of Michael Rother and Klaus Dinger, Kraftwerk, Manuel Gottsching and other 70s cosmicshe bands as well as some 90s influences. 

My review is here and the album can be listened to at Bandcamp here. This is an edited, shorter version of the song at the album's core, Motorway.

Before that I took on the latest EP by Warmduscher, a song that didn't make their last album (2024's Too Cold To Hold) because it didn't fit and needed a release of its own- Yakuza. Warmduscher formed to play at a house party in 2014 and have close connections with some other top class London post- punk/ electronic punk/ sleaze- techno bands including Fat White Family, Paranoid London and Decius.

Yakuza is a Spaghetti Western theme crossed with Tom Waits and Big Audio Dynamite, a rollercoaster ride, a blur of action on the big screen. There are two remixes on the EP, one by Sworn Virgins and the other by David Holmes. Holmes doesn't hold back with his remix, turning everything up as far as it will go. My review is here. 

 

You Better Be Ready

The recent Sabres Of Paradise interview where Jagz Kooner selected eight tracks/ records that soundtracked the trio's studio listening while they made Sabresonic included Cypress Hill's 1993 album Black Sunday. Cypress Hill hit the jackpot with the sound, image and frequent homages to smoking weed. They were massive- the first hip hop act to have two US top ten albums. 

The two rappers, B- Real and Sen Dog, perfected their whiny, nasal delivery. DJ Muggs' production was incredibly good, the next step on in hip hop at the time, a fusion of deep bass, head nodding beats and deftly selected and deployed samples and scratching. Black Friday included this pair of tracks...

When The Shit Goes Down

Funky as you like, built over a lolloping groove and with some superb guitar licks dropped in and out (Billy Cobham's Stratus is in there as is Deep Gully by The Outlaw Blues Band). Sen and B- Real trade verses about being prepared for all eventualities.  

Hits From The Bong

Hits From The Bong opens with the sound of bubbles and inhalation followed by the guitar part from Dusty Springfield's Son Of A Preacher Man. Muggs throws Lee Dorsey's Get Out Of My Life Woman into the mix. Mary Jane is celebrated. 

That Sabres Of Paradise were listening to Black Sunday isn't too much of a surprise- they had a hip hop element in their sound and Andrew Weatherall played hip hop sets in the mid- 90s. DJ Muggs' production would no doubt have been dissected and studied. The clarity and space Muggs gets in his tracks is definitely evident in the Sabres sound from around this time. Jagz says they were 'completely obsessed' with Black Sunday. There's absolutely some of Cypress Hill in this...

Theme

Accelerated Life

The internet was abuzz yesterday with news that the rapture is due today. Not the New York punk- funk band (although they are reforming and re- appearing later on this year so their timing is both good but also bad depending on how things turn out) but the actual End Of Days when Jesus Christ re- appears and all good Christians alive and dead will ascend to heaven. The rest of us are done for at that point I think. If by any chance this does come true as foretold by a South African preacher then the post I've scheduled for Wednesday may be horrifically out of date but that's a chance at the moment I'm going to have to take. 

In the meantime, rapture notwithstanding, here's some outstanding new music from David Harrow. David cut his teeth in the early 80s with Anne Clark and then as part of the On U Sound studio and live band team. In the 1990s he recorded as Blood Sugar with Andrew Weatherall and the pair also recorded the fantastic dubbed out, chilled out beauty of Message To Crommie for the first War Child album. Andrew and David called themselves the Planet 4 Folk Quartet, a name they used just once.

I met Crommie a couple of summers ago, a real person living not far from me, at an event in Chorlton. He's a sound engineer/ live sound expert who's worked on sound rigs in Manchester since the late 80s, with a slew of bands including 808 State and The reformed Stone Roses. Andrew regarded him as the best in the business and when he and David Harrow were recording their track (all the tracks for War Child were recorded in one day) they were looking for a title for the song- at the same time Andrew asked for a message to be got to Manchester's sound engineer par excellence... 

Message To Crommie

Since the mid- 90s David Harrow has moved to LA and recorded under his name and as James Hardway. In the last few years he has been a Californian cottage industry, recording and releasing dozens of tracks and EPs. The latest has just come out on Exeter's Mighty Force label, a four track EP called Accelerated Life. David's music takes in modular synth ambient explorations, dub, acid, techno and almost every point in between. 

On Accelerated Life the sound is electronic, a deep house/ techno/ bleep/ braindance melting pot. The first track on the EP is a co- write with singer Sandy Mill, Catch Me, a track that pushes out of the speakers straight away and keeps bouncing, Sandy's voice cruising on top of the drums and synths. Macro keeps the bpms and kick drum active, a deep sea bassline bubbling away and piano/ synth stabs and a sense of perpetual momentum. Meso's jackhammer kick drum is matched by a speaker rattling synth bassline and more bleepy topline fun. Finally there is Supra, another four four drum machine rhythm, lovely warm bass tones and synths, a hi- hat and a cricket chirruping in time. All in all, more superb stuff from Mr Harrow and Mighty Force. Accelerated Life can be found here. 

Keith And Sonny

In July Keith McIvor (JD Twitch) announced that he had been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour and an appeal was started to raise money for his care. On Friday news of Keith's death came out via his DJ partner Jonnie Wilkes. Keith was just 57. He grew up in Edinburgh but moved to Glasgow in 1986 to go to university and became part of the city's dance music underground- at the legendary Pure and then with Wilkes as Optimo with a freewheeling musical policy that took in acid house and electronic dance music, post- punk, electroclash, punk and whatever they fancied playing. The pair continued to DJ as Optimo (named after Liquid Liquid's classic track). Keith as Twitch was also a producer and remixer. I have a load of Optimo productions, remixes and DJ sets. This one of Cold Cave from 2010 is always somewhere near the top of their pile...

Life Magazine (An Optimo Espacio Flexi Pop Mix)

The previous year they were one of the remix teams who took tracks from Journal For Plague Lovers, the Manics album from that year, into new places...

Journal For Plague Lovers (Optimo Espacio Remix)

In 2021 a JD Twitch DJ set was released on tape and then in 2023 onto Bandcamp (free/ pay what you want), two forty five minute sets to raise money for the Glasgow North West food bank. Let There Be Drums is a masterclass in track selection and sequencing, all manner of human and machine operated rums and percussion, hand drums, tribal freak outs, early 90s UK hardcore breakbeats and meditative German forest music. Find it here. 

The outpouring of tributes on social media since Friday by Keith's friends and the wider music/ DJ community is testament to the man and how much he was loved. 

RIP Keith. 

Sonny Curtis died on Friday too, aged 88. Sonny was a member of The Crickets and wrote I Fought The Law, as performed and recorded by The Bobby Fuller Four. Imagine a world without I Fought The Law in it. 

I Fought The Law

In 1979 The Clash released their Cost Of Living EP with their cover of the song as the lead track, an incendiary and career defining song for The Clash, a band with three front men all bellowing the song's title and refrain into their mics...

I Fought The Law (Live At The Lyceum)

On The Cost Of Living EP the song took pole position and was followed by two Clash deep cuts, Groovy Times and The Gates Of the West and the re- recorded version of Capital Radio. The EP then had a brief reprisal of the Sonny Curtis song with Mikey Dread's vocal advertising the EP. Not that this jingle was ever going to be played on the radio (as the band noted in the previous song).

I Fought The Law (Reprise)

RIP Sonny Curtis. 

Forty Five Minutes Of Autumn Songs

Some songs with the word Autumn in the title for a Sunday mix in late September, a day ahead of the autumn equinox- tomorrow, Monday 22nd September at 7.22 pm, a day which marks the end of astronomical summer and the onset of astronomical autumn. Buckle up. Winter's coming. 

Autumn definitely seems to bring out the melancholy and downbeat in songwriters- the songs on my hard drive in the mix below are firmly in that camp- it's OK to wallow in that sometimes and I think by the time we get to the end there's some catharsis.

Forty Five Minutes Of Autumn

• The Small Faces: The Autumn Stone
• Lee Hazlewood: My Autumn's Done Come
• Jaymay: Autumn Fallin'
• Pacific: Autumn Island
• Yo La Tengo: Autumn Sweater
• Higamos Hogamos: Harold/ Autumn Equinox Sunset
• The Prisners Dream: Autumn Days
• East Village: Black Autumn
• Marcel Slettern: Autumn
• Brian Eno: Dunwich Beach, Autumn 1960
• Coldcut : Autumn Leaves (The Irresistible Force Remix)

The Small Faces song The Autumn Stone is from their later period when they'd shed their initial skin and become a little more hippy, a little more reflective, they sound a bit... earthier and woodier. Written by Steve Marriot and recorded in September 1968, The Autumn Stone is a ballad with a beautiful slow glow. The Small Faces were such a great band weren't they.

Lee Hazlewood's autumn isn't just seasonal, it's a lifetime thing sung by a man who seemed to be permanently found in the autumn of his life. This song was the flip side to Sand, a 1966 7" single. 

Jaymay is an American singer/ songwriter, an indie/ folk artist, whose song You Better Run was a music blog song back in the early 2010s golden days of music blogging. Her 2007 album of the same name, Autumn Fallin' is a lovely pun for those on the US side of the Atlantic. 

Pacific were on minor Creation records band in 1990. Their song Jetstream was a favourite with me and a friend who went into a flat share in 1992, a song that sampled the sinking of the Belgrano. Autumn Island was on their 1990 album Inference which is probably Creation's least heard album, undeservedly so but in 1990 Creation had many other irons in the fire and some bands just fell through the cracks. 

Yo La Tengo's Autumn Sweater is one of my favourite songs by anyone, ever. Everything about it- the words, the singing, the drumming, the tone, the feel, the longing to be gone, to be moving on... it's all just perfect. 'We could slip away/ Wouldn't that be better/Me with nothing to say/ And you in your autumn sweater'. 

Higamos Hogamos are/ were Hackney based Steve Webster and various assistants and collaborators. I first heard them when Andrew Weatherall played some krauty/ cosmische tracks by them on a radio show in the dim and distant past- I think I followed up by going to the Higamos Hogamos MySpace page (which dates it). The track on this mix comes in two parts, the first half a lovely experimental instrumental and the second a field recording of the autumn equinox at sunset. 

The Prisners Dream (sic) were one of those American garage rock bands who made the grand total of one sole 7" single, released on Rene Records in 1967. They came from Canonsberg, Pennsylvania. Autumn Days is a gorgeously melancholic folk rock song, backed with You're The One I Really Love. Autumn Days was on a double album compilation from a couple of years ago called Ghost Riders, seventeen songs for a North American road trip with sleeve notes by Sonic Boom. I reviewed it at Ban Ban Ton Ton in 2022 and it's a record I still recommend highly. The Prisners were all between 17 and 19 years old when they recorded the song and sound utterly bereft, a state of being before they've even reached adulthood. 

East Village were on Heavenly, caught out in that short period between late 80s indie and early 90s indie- dance. Their album Drop Out has been re- issued several times, on each occasion to rave reviews. They made little in the way of waves at the time but every time Drop Out comes out again they attract a few new followers. 

Marcel Slettern is from Athens, Georgia,an electronic producer, writer and visual artist who goes for the single word title here- autumn, a few minutes of piano playing. I have no idea why or how this song ended up on my hard drive or where it came from but I'm glad it did. 

Brian Eno's Dunwich Beach, Autumn, 1960 is from his 1982 album On Land, a landmark ambient album. Dunwich was a Suffolk port that feel into the sea due to coastal erosion. It's one of those Eno ambient tracks which is absolutely beyond compare. 

Coldcut's cover of the jazz standard Autumn Leaves has been released in various versions and at various times. None of the versions quite matches The Irresistible Force's remix, a Balearic masterpiece and one which provides an ending that takes us to a better place. 

Soundtrack Saturday

Robert Redford died earlier this week at the age of 89, leaving a long and glittering life and career. One of the film of his most closely connected with its soundtrack is 1969's Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid, a film I never tire of. It's a classic buddy movie/ Western, Redford and Paul Newman, two Hollywood superstars playing the titular train robbers, who flee to Bolivia to avoid the U.S. Rangers, taking Katherine Ross with them. The film ends with a shoot out, Butch and Sundance holed up and wounded and surrounded by the Bolivian army. They discuss their next move and Cassidy suggests they should go to  Australia. Then they charge out of the building, guns blazing into a freeze frame...

The song Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head, written by Hal David and Burt Bacharach, sung by B.J. Thomas and with Carole King on bass, was written for the film. Not everyone, Robert Redford included, thought it as the correct choice. It didn't fit with the film, there was no rain, Redford said it 'seemed like a dumb idea'. It was massive, sold over two million copies and won an Oscar. 

Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head

R.I.P. Robert Redford. 

Some Folks

While I was on holiday in Italy in early August I received a message via one of my social media apps. It read, 'We see that you are on vacation. When you return would you like to review an album that is not available anywhere and has not been released?' It was from Ephraim Washington who has an Instagram profile titled Last Of the Ancients with a black and white profile photo of what appears to be a man with a heavy white beard, dressed in clothes that a 19th century homesteader might have worn, large belt buckle proudly halfway up his stomach. I was intrigued and replied 'Yes' and when I got home an album, also titled Last Of The Ancients, was in my inbox. 

Then, as per often happens with new music in my downloads folder, I forgot about it. Last week while scrolling it caught my eye and I clicked play on the first few songs. It might be partly the changing seasons, summer long gone round and autumn already moving in but the songs chimed directly with me-dusty songs, seemingly from a time gone, songs that could have come from the 1890s (or the 1990s for that matter)- acoustic guitars and banjo, drums that sound like they're being played in another room, down the hall, with the doors left open in between the two rooms, a folk/ Americana feel, a singer recorded close to the mic, choral backing vocals that fill a space in the near distance, a little away from the microphone, songs about Sunday morning, cracks in the sky, the early hours of the morning, storms and uninvited fools. There's something of Greil Marcus' 'old weird America' about the eight songs on Last Of The Ancients- I can hear some Deserter's Songs in there as well, some Giant Sand and some Will Oldham too.

The Last Of The Ancients crackles into life with Sunday Morning Scene, muffled drums and twangy banjo and rather lovely singing voice (whether the singer is Ephraim Washington or the band is, I don't know). This is the second song, Some Folks, Ephraim opening up with, 'Some folks don't like me at all', as the banjo and choir move in circles behind him. A fiddle joins in and Ephraim draws some conclusions about thinking once and thinking twice. 

Some Folks

On She's Not Alone there's more plucked banjo, a lot of echo and a ghostly swirl and then in the second half of the song it all snaps into focus, swelling and becoming really quite moving. Miles Of Blue shuffles in with a ton of echo and the sound of instruments playing in a room with timber walls. The album ends with The Storm, the sound of the wind howling and a bent guitar string, a song pitched somewhere between a long dark night of the soul and the first rays of morning. 

 

Breadcrumb Trail

In 1991 US band Slint released Spiderland, their second/ last album. The band had come together in Louisville, Kentucky in 1986 when two local punk bands folded (Squirrel Bait and Maurice). Slint's line up- Brian McMahon, David Pajo, Todd Brashear and Britt Walford- spent four days in August 1990 recording Spiderland, an album that got little press and coverage on release in the US but was picked up by the inkies in the UK and gradually grew to become one of the 90s rock's cult albums, an influence on the entire post- rock/ indie and alt- rock scenes. 

The sessions were intense, members of the  took things very seriously (as the US punk/ hardcore/ indie scene kind of demanded at the turn of the 90s- this was not done for laughs or as disposable pop music). Slint's quiet- loud dynamics, tempo shifts, unusual song structures and angular rhythms set the course for a lot of what would follow. Brian McMahon's spoken word vocals would explode into shouting and the lyrics were odd- strange narrative accounts, syntax all over the place, off kilter. Spiderland is clearly not Nevermind. It was never going to cross over and blow up like Nirvana did but in its own way it was just as influential.

The album opens with Breadcrumb Trail...

Breadcrumb Trail

David Pajo's guitar possibly recalling Tom Verlaine, stutters and repeats a riff, the drums rumble, there's a lot of space evident- you can almost hear the room they are recording in- and McMahon talks about the day the carnival came into town. Pajo repeatedly changes course completely, the song's structure changing instantly, switching to distorted riffs. McMahon's singing becomes pained and distant. The  they switch again, the bass and d rums following and becoming more of a presence. It's exhilarating and intense, a bit uncomfortable, not a song that could become background music or a prime time radio standard. 

The second song is Nosferatu Rock (which I really should have posted last Saturday in the Saturday Soundtrack slot). The song is inspired by  F.W. Murnau's the 1922 film, German Expressionist vampire horror. 

Nosferatu Rock

Snares and tom toms, more sharp and angular guitar playing with an intermittent electric guitar squeal that is impossible to ignore and an explosive chorus, all jagged riff slashing and cymbal smashes. 'I could just settle down, I'd be doing just fine', McMahon mutters at one point before the chorus bursts into earshot again. Eventually they settle into a grinding, crunching groove, riffs and drums in sync, before everything dissolves and burns up into thirty seconds of feedback. The remaining four songs are all equally powerful concluding with the epic end song Good Morning Captain, the bleak seven minute closing shot. McMahon made himself sick from straining to sing/ speak/ shout over the guitars. They split up before Spiderland was even released, the toll too much (but did reform in 2005 and played together for two years). 

Mogwai, Godspeed! You Black Emperor, Tortoise, Explosions In The Sky, Pavement.... all these bands (and more) must have been listening to Spiderland, all took something from it. It is frequently held up as one of those albums that was hardly picked up at the time but which as gone on to have a second and third life.