A guest series by Fraser Pettigrew (aka our New Zealand correspondent)
#15: Sterelab – Jenny Ondioline (1993)
I’ve never been a ‘completist’ nor a prolific buyer of singles, especially those that were otherwise available on albums. I also gave up reading the music press in the mid-1980s, somewhat limiting my knowledge of new releases. So even though I really liked Stereolab I didn’t religiously buy all of their releases unless I happened to see them during a foray into a record shop. Luck is therefore the main reason I ended up with copies of the Low Fi EP and the stand alone single of John Cage Bubblegum.
And although I wouldn’t normally buy advance singles taken from a forthcoming album, I nevertheless find that I have four such records by Stereolab. Each of their full-length studio albums from 1993’s Transient Random Noise Bursts With Announcements up to Sound Dust (2001) was preceded by a four-track EP, featuring one or two tracks from the album and two or three non-album tracks. The four that I possess were bought largely because they appeared under my nose and because I reasoned that I was getting at least two songs I wouldn’t otherwise get on the new album. Plus in two cases they were cute little 10” discs – hard to resist.
Miss Modular, the advance single from Dots and Loops (1998), won’t feature in this series because it appeared under my nose on CD and spuriously I’m sticking to vinyl here. The first of the other three is the 10” Jenny Ondioline EP that announced the arrival of Transient Random Noise Bursts.
The title track is of course only the first 3m52s of the track that on the album would stretch to over 18 minutes with the addition of a long Neu-like one-chord groove extending from the instrumental backing to the first part. A different six-minute take was also issued on a 7” single with an alternate version of French Disco (spelled Disko) sold on their tour supporting Pavement in early 1994. The latter track is available on Refried Ectoplasm (Switched On Volume 2) and the alternate Jenny Ondioline was reissued on the expanded 2019 reissue of Transient Random Noise Bursts.
As is common with Stereolab, the song’s title has nothing whatsoever to do with the lyrical content, which is all about political struggle. And if you are visualising a woman called Jenny you are also wrong. The Ondioline was in fact an early analog musical synthesizer developed in the years after 1939 by a French inventor called Georges Jenny. I know what you’re going to ask next and the answer is also no, the Ondioline is not part of the instrumentation on the track, despite The Groop’s well-known fondness for a bit of vintage analog synth.
Golden Ball is the other album track on the EP and in a shocking deviation from common practice the lyrics actually feature the words “golden ball” at one point, according to one of those online lyrics sites, but given how inaccurate they can be I wouldn’t guarantee it. I can’t hear it myself, but with my cloth ears that doesn’t mean much either. The music builds slowly from a monotonous twanging guitar into another long one-chord thrash. It’s a different mix from the album, running about 20 seconds shorter, featuring a bit of Velvets-style lead guitar early on as the vocals begin, and ending with a short return to the solo twanging instead of swerving into a brick wall with a moogy squawk and blood-curdling needle scratch as on the album.
French Disco is reassuringly not sung in French (apart from the words “la résistance”), nor does it sound like disco music. It’s a great riff and hook that wouldn’t sound out of place on Switched On Volume 1. The lyrics to remaining non-album track Fruition are printed on the sleeve, I was about to say helpfully, but that’s questionable. Allusion, tribulation, transmutation… (but no fruition). Well, whatever. It’s a gentler, downbeat number showcasing nice vocal harmonies from Hansen and Sadier.
Overall the music reflects the steady progression of Stereolab’s early heavier style as they gradually blended in more delicate pop touches but it’s all still very much more Krautrock than Sacha Distel, making it a very satisfying little disc from my perspective. It’s on plain black vinyl.
As well as a CD version there is also an extremely rare clear vinyl version (a rather cleaner version of clear than Low Fi), of which only 36 copies escaped into the wild, 25 of which are autographed by the band members. The remainder of the pressing (of unknown size) came out blemished by some contamination of the vinyl and were destroyed.
Presumably Stereolab switched pressing plant after this, as the album encountered problems too, with off-centre pressings and numerous returns of the gold vinyl version. My gold vinyl copy plays fine, but the label on side one is doubled up, with one of the prints spreading noisily over the run-off groove. If I was desperate for cash I could flog it for up to NZ$600 apparently, but it would break my heart to do so. Similarly, this EP is going nowhere.
The most recent ‘Book of the Month’ on TVV was To Hell With Poverty, the memoir of Jon King, singer and main songwriter with the Gang of Four. I mentioned that the paperback edition of the book is to be published by Constable on 16 April 2026, and with the date fast approaching, it seems to be the perfect time to share the chat over a Zoom call that I had with Jon a few weeks back, one which focussed on the book but made sure to touch on the music.
I began by asking Jon what drove him to write the book in the first place.
“I hadn’t really thought about doing it at all, and it came about through a chance meeting with Steve Diggle of the Buzzcocks.
“We happened both to be at Abbey Road Studios in London, being filmed for a documentary being put together for a Canadian production company, and I hadn’t seen him for about 40 years. It was great to catch up with him, especially given that Buzzcocks were our great friends and sponsors in the early days. I asked him what he was getting up to when he wasn’t being a Buzzcock, and he replied that he was writing his memoir.
“I said ‘Really?’ as I had never thought of Steve being a pen-man. He told me he was having it ghost-written and finding the whole experience very rewarding, and then caught me a bit by surprise by adding ‘Why don’t you have a go?’ I said that nobody would be interested, to which he said ‘no no no’ and he gave me the name and contact details of his literary agent, Kevin Pocklington.
“I met Kevin who was really encouraging. It involved, to start with, 10,000 words, as sample chapters which would be used to try and obtain a publishing deal. It was quite an effort as I wanted to do it all myself – I wasn’t going to have anyone else writing with me and I don’t use and thoroughly disapprove of people using AI to write things. So I did, and Kevin got me a deal with Little Brown in the English-speaking world outside the US and then a deal with Akashic Books for the United States.”
Jon then told me that he was very pleased and pleasantly surprised at the overwhelmingly positive reaction to the book, especially as the process over the weeks and months had proven to be a bit of a challenge.
“I’m of the gloomy school of rock and roll – I never expect anyone to turn up to our concerts, and I wasn’t sure that anyone would be interested in my story. It was very difficult at the beginning not being an experienced author, and although I was an old-hand at writing lyrics, there was an initial struggle to find my right tone of voice and the best way of writing.
“I didn’t want to churn out long and meandering chapters. I also took time to read, as research, a few memoirs, some ghost-written, others not and quickly came to the conclusion that stories about drugs and drink are boring, and once you’ve read Motley Crue’s story, well you can’t out-Motley Crue, Motley Crue!
“I was able to work out in my head that the book would work best if I wrote about how I was at particular points in time, and to also to reflect on what influenced and inspired me throughout my life. I also had really liked the way Viv Albertine had written her memoirs – quite sort of gossipy and chatty – and that was uppermost in my thoughts as I went about the task.”
As I mentioned in my own review of the book, it doesn’t go straight into the Gang of Four, with the first half looking back at Jon’s upbringing, family life, school, university and his ambition of being a visual artist.
“I did come from what is best described as an economically-disadvantaged background. Growing up, I was never aware of being poor as that was my surroundings living in a boring commuter village made up mostly of council house stock and low-income families. I ended up being very lucky to get a free place at one of England’s most elite public schools (Sevenoaks) where I very quickly encountered privilege, and realised that those who have everything get everything give to them.
“It’s something that has stayed with me my entire life, and as an old person I feel even more furious about the inequalities in this country.
“I’ve always had a modest ambition of just wanting to change the world! I remember being inspired at the age of 11 by hearing Highway 61 Revisited and how Bob Dylan was really able to excite people in a progressive way, and I wanted to try and do the same.
“But it turned out that I had a talent for drawing, which led me to study Fine Art at Leeds University. I continued to do well and achieve some success by winning a few prizes, which led to one of my paintings being displayed in the Mappin Gallery in Sheffield. That particular painting was political but I felt that the people looking at it during the exhibition and passing comment and judgement seemed to be well-heeled and well-off and I wasn’t comfortable. I don’t think my father in his entire life ever set foot in an art gallery, and so I thought to myself that what I really wanted to do was something creative that had the power to start a conversation, and I began to increasingly concentrate on music.”
Gang of Four first entered a recording studio in 1978 and the second half of the memoir covers the period through to 1984 during which time the band were signed to a major label and recorded four albums as well as undertaking a punishing schedule of live tours in the UK, Europe and increasingly the USA. I asked Jon why the book had stopped at that point, and whether, given its success, he was going to deliver a second volume.
“When I wrote the book two years ago, I wanted to have a natural arc of rags to riches and back to rags again. It felt like a natural place to stop. Things were changing for me as a musician, with Andy and I having a lot of difficulties because of his alcoholism. Things became a lot more complicated, and if the period covered by the book had extended, a lot of it would have been about the disintegration of our relationship. But I didn’t want to write bad things about Andy. We loved each other until a point. I’m never quite sure when it all went south, 82 or 83 maybe, and I really wish we hadn’t made that fourth album. I should have put my foot down and just stopped it.
“The paperback edition does include a coda just to bring a few things up to date. Over the past year, we did a huge farewell tour, including selling out a coast-to-coast tour of America. It was a remarkable experience, and I was astounded by it, both from the way the audience reacted and the fact that around one-third of them were under the age of 30. For whatever reason the Gen Z’s have adopted or seem very keen on what we do, while in the hip-hop community, Run The Jewels and Frank Ocean have sampled songs, and I’m name-dropping like mad now, but even Pharrell was saying that the inspiration for the album he made two years ago was Entertainment! You can’t help but be flattered by it.
“The immediate future is a short promotional tour around the paperback, and then in June we are heading back to the States for a handful of shows, with the band being myself, Hugo, Ted Leo and Gail Greenwood. We’ve been in the studio with the great producer Nick Launey, and we recorded for the first time a song we played all the time called Elevator which never made it onto Entertainment! because Andy and I thought it was too much like pop music, but it’s actually a really catchy punk rock song, and we are going to put that out once Nick has mixed it.
“We’ve also re-recorded one of our mid-90s songs, I Parade Myself, along with four entirely new songs. It’s really exciting as I never thought I’d ever record any new stuff. They will all come out at least on all the digital platforms in the fullness of time. And who knows, maybe I’ll win a Grammy for best new act!”
I ended our chat by asking Jon for his thoughts on the current music scene and whether he could readily identify a 21st Century Gang of Four.
“There is a need – there’s always a need – to agitate through contemporary music. Even back in the 60s, Elvis Presley made a song like In The Ghetto and the Supremes made Love Child about being a single-parent mother while Kenny Rogers wrote a song about a disabled Vietnam War veteran who couldn’t get it up. A song like that would never be made now.
“I don’t think there’s an identifiable Gang of Four these days. I am a bit puzzled by this given how dark and complicated things are at the moment.
“The problem is so much of music has been distorted and destroyed by the vampire digital platforms who just steal creative peoples’ money.
“Things are becoming even worse with AI coming along allowing people to copy and clone music without paying anybody. And of course in pop music, you’ve got that overwhelming dominance of say Max Martin who is now the most successful songwriter of all time after Lennon and McCartney, and so the similarity of big-selling pop music, with the exception of wonderful people like Beyonce, means you don’t have any pop band as distinctive as Abba or a new guitar band as distinctive as Nirvana or indeed anyone similar to Gang of Four.
“There are a lot of great bands and great music out there, but whether there’s anything like us, I don’t think so.”
We spoke about a few other things during a call lasting over 30 minutes, but I’ve edited things down to ensure this piece isn’t too long. My big takeaway from the chat is that Jon King is incredibly creative across all the arts. He has a quiet personality that is very unassuming and down to earth while still having that fire in his belly and a desire to change the world. Above all else, he is someone well worth listening to, and who will undoubtedly be great value at the upcoming events in support of the launch of the paperback edition of To Hell With Poverty.
Thursday 16 April : The Red Lion, 640 High Road, Leytonstone, London : In conversation with Miki Berenyi : Tickets here
Thursday 23 April : 1 in 100, Old Castle Road, Glasgow : In conversation with Douglas MacIntyre : SOLD OUT
Friday 24 April : The Voodoo Rooms, 19a West Register Street, Edinburgh : In conversation with Phill Jupitus : Tickets here.
I’ve been wanting to write this ICA for ages now… but, y’know… I waste enough time on the internet trying to get people to like the songs I like as it is. It can be quite exhausting, can’t it? Swimming upstream, while the curmudgeonly throw rocks at you from the safety of the riverbank. Why do we do it? Because, as Pete Postlethwaite once said, “Music matters”. And in this crazy, mixed-up world that gets crazier and more mixed-up every day, it’s one of only two things I can rely on to keep me afloat. The other thing? Books. Reading and listening to music are my lifejacket… which brings us to John Darnielle of TheMountain Goats. Because as well as being a superb songwriter (hipsters at the New Yorker called him “America’s best non-hip-hop lyricist”), Darnielle is also an acclaimed novelist. I read his most recent novel, and it blew me away. Here’s my review from Goodreads…
“A true crime writer moves into a house where an infamous murder took place… and it begins to affect his work.”
The title and cover suggest a generic horror tale, but this is much, much more – an investigation into the very nature of storytelling (but not in a wanky, “in’t stories brilliant?” Neil Gaiman way), questioning whether a narrative can ever be truly subjective, unbiased or reliable. There is horror here – most notably two gruesome murder scenes – but there’s far more psychological darkness, with superior use of perspective shifts and alternating voices, and a climax that manages to surprise without going for the obvious shock.
I’ve become increasingly enamoured with Darnielle’s work as a songwriter with his band The Mountain Goats, so it’s hard to believe he could be an even better novelist. Frighteningly good.”
Darnielle has only written three novels to date – most of his time is still devoted to the day job and since 1991, that means 23 studio albums from The Mountain Goats. I don’t claim to have heard them all – I’m still at the early stages of discovering the delights they have to offer. But I’ve already come across more than enough songs to make a decent ICA and hopefully try to get to get a few more people to like the songs I like.
You need a proper life-affirming anthem to kick off a mixtape, right?
My broken house behind me and good things ahead A girl named Cathy wants a little of my time Six cylinders underneath the hood crashing and kicking Aha! Listen to the engine whine
Shades of Springsteen’s Born To Run right there, but also the work of previous ICA honorary Craig Finn. Premier storytellers all. And if you’re looking for a chorus to thump the steering wheel to as you tear down life’s metaphorical highway…
I am gonna make it through this year if it kills me!
That’s become my mantra lately.
Here’s a great live performance of the song featuring US TV host Stephen Colbert on guest vocals.
OK, let’s take the mood down now. Waaaaay down, with a blacker-than-bleak doomed relationship song that a lot of old country music stars would have given their right arm for. I can hear George Jones singing a slowed down version of this, or Loretta and Conway turning it into a duet.
I hope I cut myself shaving tomorrow I hope it bleeds all day long Our friends say it’s darkest before the sun rises We’re pretty sure they’re all wrong
I hope it stays dark forever I hope the worst isn’t over And I hope you blink before I do I hope I never get sober
And I hope when you think of me years down the line You can’t find one good thing to say And I’d hope that if I found the strength to walk out You’d stay the hell out of my way
Now for something a bit more cheerful… how about a love song? Featuring King Saul, Sonny Liston, Raskolnikov and Kurt Cobain. Some things you do for money and some you do for love, love, love.
A lot of Mountain Goats records are thematically linked and tell a larger story between the songs. I won’t use the word “concept album”, because I know it’ll make some of you come out in hives. Anyway, this one is from the 2017 album Goths, which might be when I first started to pay attention to John Darnielle’s songwriting. I’m always attracted to songs about other singers, and as I go to work in Leeds, I was doubly intrigued.
Although he was born in Ely, Cambridgeshire, Andrew Eldritch went to university in Leeds, and that’s where he formed The Sisters of Mercy. The song isn’t strictly a biography, it’s more a metaphor about returning to your roots to get back what you’ve lost. In many ways, it seems like a direct reply to our opening tune, This Year.
There’s indifference on the wind But a faint gust of hope At a club nobody goes to With a musty velvet rope Guys in Motörhead jackets Who knew him way back when Haven’t raised a drink in years But now meet up again To remember how it was When they all thought they’d move away And ride in Lotus 7s Through the London streets one day
Bang up to date now with a song from last year’s album, Through This Fire Across from Peter Balkan, a “full-on musical” (track 1 is an overture) about three stranded shipwreck survivors, an idea that apparently came to Darnielle in a dream.
For those of you who don’t want your albums to tell complete novelistic stories, with each song a chapter, I’ll say this… much as I like the idea from a writing perspective, I don’t ever listen to these records with the larger narrative in mind. I take them song by song, as I do any other record. I have this dream that when I retire and have more time to find a comfy chair to sit back in, with the lyrics sheets on my knee, appreciating my favourite albums as a whole, like proper musos must do. I’m sure I’ll get even more out of the Mountain Goats back catalogue if I ever get the chance to do that. I guess what I’m saying is, the songs work on their own too. You don’t need to worry about the forest, just enjoy the trees.
The first thing you learn is there’s always a clock ticking somewhere And the next thing you learn is how cold it can get at night The first thing you learn is how strong you can be if you have to And the next thing you learn is how cold it can get at night
Speaking of which, here’s a song that… well, I have no idea what it’s about. But I think I read somewhere that the Goats wanted it to be the kind of tune you’d see Sylvester Stallone working out to in Rocky. It’s got a slow start, but around the thirty second mark it all kicks off and… well, if you’re not singing along by the end, check your pulse for signs of life.
Now forget all that larger narrative bunkum I was talking about earlier – how about a tune that tells a complete story in two and a half minutes? A story some writers would need a whole book to tell. Darnielle understands that a writer’s greatest skill is not what he puts on the page, but what he leaves off… making the reader fill in the blanks.
JD apparently wrote this song after working for a couple of years in a California Mental Health facility. He wrote a longer version as part of Bloomsbury publishing’s 33 1/3 series, ostensibly a tribute to Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality LP, but really just expanding on this song’s central premise: the awful impact of crushed dreams. So many great lines here, it’s both funny and very, very sad.
When you punish a person for dreaming his dream Don’t expect him to thank or forgive you The best ever death metal band out of Denton Will in time both outpace and outlive you
But if you’re looking for a more traditional pop song, try this. A classic “day after I was dumped” tune from 2006.
The first time I made coffee for just myself, I made too much of it But I drank it all just ’cause you hate it, when I let things go to waste And I wandered through the house like a little boy, lost at the mall And an astronaut could’ve seen the hunger in my eyes from space
And I sang, “Oh, what do I do?” “What do I do?” “What do I do?” “What do I do without you?”
John Darnielle always seems to be writing in character, so it’s hard to tell how much of his own life creeps into these stories, and how much of it is just his imagination. However, Damn These Vampires is apparently semi-autobiographical – the vampires in question being the heavy drugs he took back in the 80s, before he managed to turn his life around.
Crawl ’til dawn On my hands and knees Goddamn these vampires For what they’ve done to me
I wanted to close with this because it takes me back to my introduction, specifically the question of why I waste so much time on the internet trying to get people to like the songs I like. You see, it seems there are some people out there who get far more pleasure from rubbishing the songs they don’t like rather than celebrating the ones they do. There might even be one or two of them reading this post… except I doubt they’ll have made it this far. Have I mentioned that the first band I truly loved was Queen? Big ELO fan too. And as for Billy Joel…
Anti-Music Song is written from the perspective of a musical snob and/or internet troll. Over on Genius, the site that allows people with far too much time on their hands (Ha! Irony!) to pull apart song lyrics and offer “definitive” interpretations, there’s a suggestion that when Darnielle wrote this, he really did dislike all the people he mentions here – even Brian Wilson. (And if you don’t like the Beach Boys, you don’t like joy.) Although he apparently changed his mind about many of them with the wisdom of age.
Apparently he even changed his mind about the Stretford Segregationist after this song was recorded… although I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d changed it back again given recent infamy. Either way, I’m sure many of you will get a chuckle out of the way Darnielle repeatedly mispronounces That Guy’s name here. It would wind him up no end, if he ever heard it.
Those of us who devote time and energy to blogging about music are all very aware that the popularity of the genre peaked a long time ago. It’s always been the same with how we listen to and consume music.
I hate the word consume, but it’s appropriate in this instance. Growing up, it would have been nigh on impossible, in the UK, to imagine a world without Top of The Pops, and in later years, I would never have believed MTV and similar channels becoming irrelevant. Even when the streaming services in the shape of Napster etc began to have an impact, I think we would all have under-estimated the way most people, and particularly those who are young, would actually listen to music at the quarter-point of the 21st Century.
Today’s post, from a personal perspective, looks back to 6 April 2010, and what I consider to be the apex of the collective impact of music blogs. Paul Haig Day II.
It all goes back to events in March 2009, when the original Vinyl Villain blog was the subject of a DMCA takedown notice for an article about Paul Haig on the basis that the copyright holder of the song offered up as an mp3 download had demanded its removal as well as the words accompanying the article. But the article had been put together with the help and support of Paul Haig and his manager, meaning that the actual holder of the copyright article, far from raising a complaint, was actually in support of it being used.
Further chats with Paul’s management led to the idea of designating 6 April 2009 as Paul Haig Day, when as many blogs as possible would write about him – either as a solo artist, his time with Josef K or of one of his collaborations – and that the songs used in any articles would come with his blessing.
Twelve months later, the idea was to do likewise, but hopefully bigger and better. It was best summarised by one of the other bloggers who took part, “Home taping didn’t kill music and the world wide web isn’t going to either.”
The response to Paul Haig Day II was truly incredible, with everyone’s efforts boosted by the man himself, with what was an exclusive (at the time) brand-new remix of one of the songs from his most recent album for use on the Vinyl Villain blog:-
Here’s a list of the 38 bloggers and supporters who got involved in one way or another on the day:-
adam from ‘Pretending Life Is Like A Song’ ally from ‘Dusty Sevens’ Blogmeister from ‘Everything Starts With An A… Brian from ‘Consolation Prizes’ Chris & The Team at ‘Exit 97.7 WEXT’ ctel from ‘Acid Ted’ Davanelli from ‘The World According to Davanelli’ Davis McArdle (guest posting on The Vinyl Villain) Dirk from ‘Sexy Loser’ Drew from ‘Across The Kitchen Table’ Duncan from ‘Flippin Kids’ Ed from ’17 Seconds’ Erika from ‘1001 Fun Things To Do In Aberystwth’ Fernando from ‘Por si llueve’ FiL at ‘Pogo-A-Gogo’ Friend of Rachel Worth from ‘Cathedrals Of Sound’ G from ‘How Does That One Go Again’ Greer from ‘A Sweet Unrest’ HD from ‘Helpless Dancer’ Herbal T from ‘The Mixed Up World Of Herbal T’ James from ‘Appetite For Distruction’ Jim from ‘Aye Tunes’ JJ from ‘Spiralphoria’ Mel from ‘London Cafe : The Best Of UK Indie’ Mona from ‘Exile On Moan Street’ Nat from ‘Another Aging Hipster’ Paul from ‘You Would Say That Wouldn’t You?’ Phil Spector from ‘Plain or Pan?’ Postpunk from ‘Postpunk’ Rol from ‘Sunset Over Slawit’ Sean from ‘Battery In Your Leg’ Simon from ‘The Songs That People Sing’ Swiss Adam from ‘Bagging Area’ tart from ‘Love Shack, Baby’ The Cat from ‘Jock’n’Roll’ Webbie from ‘Football & Music’ Will from ‘Between Thought & Expression’ Will from ‘We All Want Someone To Shout For’
It was also mentioned across a range of music aggretator sites etc.:-
The Hype Machine elbo Broken Controllers Pop Librarian Cowbell FM Lintom Indieblips gigulate Blip FM wikio Friendfeed
And not one of us was the subject of a DMCA notice!
Sixteen years on, and most of the above blogs are no more. I know of at least one author who has passed away, and given the fact that many of us who were so heavily involved in blogging were of, shall we say, advanced years, there are likely to be others.
I can’t remember exactly why I didn’t push things for Paul Haig Day III, and sadly April 2013 is one of those period where all the posts on the old blog have been lost forever, not captured by The Wayback Machine, but I’ve a feeling that what I did was look around the blogging landscape and notice that fewer people were involved in posting regularly, and rather than have any event diminish in numbers, I decided not to pursue it.
Nor did I know that just a few months later, in July 2013, I’d have been on the receiving end of one too many DMCA warnings (I think it was my fourth) and Blogger.com decided to wipe the original blog off the face of the earth without any warning.
Scary to realise that the (new) Vinyl Villain has lasted twice as long as the original blog….but then again WordPress has shown itself to be much more sensible whenever it gets a DMCA complaint in that the opportunity is offered to remove the ‘offending’ piece of music.
Back in 2019, I had a short series looking at each of the Grinderman singles.
The group came into being in 2006, consisting of Nick Cave and three of his Bad Seeds – Warren Ellis, Jim Sclavunos and Martyn P. Casey. Having undergone an extensive and musically ambitious tour promoting Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus in which the Bad Seeds had been expanded to include a number of backing singers, Cave wanted to get back to basics and set about writing material akin to the days of The Birthday Party back in the 80s.
The debut single was released in January 2007. The eighth and last single appeared in July 2011. There were also two studio albums.
The Palaces of Montezuma was the sixth single. It was part of the album Grinderman2, and a few months later it was announced it would be issued with new mixes, initially as a digital download and then as a ‘limited to 1000 copies 12″ release’ as part of Record Store Day on 16 April 2011. My unwillingness to get involved in the shenanigans around Record Store Day means that, back in 2019, this was the only physical copy of a Grinderman single not in sitting somewhere in Villain Towers.
That changed in May 2021 when I saw someone on Discogs putting a copy of a CD single that had been issued as a promo, presumably to radio stations and such like to air one of the songs. It cost me £4.95.
The Barry Adamson remix is the one that does it for me on this occasion. I also mentioned that the remix of When My Baby Comes, another of the tracks on Grinderman 2, was of some interest.
Cat’s Eyes, formed in 2011, are a duo comprising Faris Badwan, lead vocalist with The Horrors, and Rachel Zeffira, a Canadian-born Canadian soprano, composer and multi-instrumentalist. The duo are quite unconventional but gained ever-increasing critical acclaim from the outset, in recent years, culminating in awards for their film score for the 2014 art-house release The Duke of Burgundy. Having said that, the duo haven’t released anything since the 2016 album, Treasure House.
#28: The Beatle$ : Edwyn Collins (Setanta Records, SET 093, 2001)
The collaboration with Bernard Butler which featured last week had been the first single in four years on which Edwyn had been credited as a performer. It’s not that he had been quiet, but it was a period in which he concentrated largely on his production work, although there were also two other projects to which he had contributed cover songs.
The first of these had been in 1997, when he was one of a number of contemporary Scottish artists to feature on the soundtrack of the 1997 film The Slab Boys, itself an adaptation of a John Byrne play that had been written in 1978, with its narrative set in a carpet factory in Paisley in 1957. The play has long been very popular in Scptland, having been revived on a number of occasions over the past almost 50 years. The film, however, wasn’t all that well received and its soundtrack, unsurprisingly, features songs from the era in which it is set, with Edwyn’s two offerings being his take on some of the best-loved and best-known songs by Bobby Darin and Fats Domino:-
The following year, he was to be found contributing to A Song For Eurotrash, an album issued by EMI Records to cash-in on what was a cult TV programme on Channel 4 and the staging of the 1998 Eurovision Song Contest which was taking place in the UK for the first time in 16 years. It’s a peculiar release with the likes of Bananarama, Dubstar, 808 State, Kenickie, Terry Hall & Sinead O’Connor (performing a duet), and Saint Étienne covering songs that had previously won an edition of Eurovision.
Five minutes in which there is more than a hint of him being influenced by trip-hop, with a lyric which I have long felt was aiming a punch in the direction of the fag-end of Britpop just as much as it poses questions about the music press’s obsession with the Fab Four.
It was released only on 7″, which went totally against the grain of most singles with the preferred format normally always being CD. There was next to no info on the sleeve or the label other than both sides of the single were written and performed by Edwyn Collins. Oh, and the b-side wasn’t a new song, as Welwyn Garden City had originally been released on the b-side of the 12″ of The Magic Piper of Love back in 1997.
Which is partly why this post has been padded out with the three cover versions….none of which could ever be described as highlights in EC’s career.
Kilgour describe themselves as a grumpy rock band from Glasgow. Whether that’s the nature of the music or the mindsets of the musicians, I can’t honestly say.
They’ve been making music since 2019, but it took until March 2024 before the debut album, How To Put Your Hat On, was released via Last Night From Glasgow. Incidentally, the band name is pronounced ‘Kil-Gore’ and were seemingly named after Kilgore Trout, a character in the book Breakfast Of Champions, written by Kurt Vonnegut that was published in 1093. (A band called Kilgore Trout will be part of the C86 series in a few months time).
The band’s frontman, Fionn Crossan, is in fact from Belfast, but the core of the group, Isaac Davie (lead guitar), Euan McMahon (bass) Katie Mackie (keyboards) and Jimi Maffei (drums) are from my home city.
As you might ascertain from the song offered up today, the band’s sound is influenced by the sort of guitar music that emerged in the early 90s, which is a plus in my book.
a guest series, courtesy of a very friendly lawyer
Beckoning
When I moved to L.A. in 1991 there was a lot of buzz around this skinny kid, Beck, who was some kind of lo-fi folk punk instigator. He’d show up at local haunts like the Alligator Lounge and Jabberjaw with an acoustic guitar and a gas-powered leaf blower. He was quirky and funny, and part of a homegrown scene. Mom and pop record stores carried his vinyl releases, which sometimes included little paintings and drawings he made with his friends.
Then ‘Loser’ came out, and you know the rest.
Since that landmark single was released in 1993, Beck’s made all kinds of great music. It would be surprising that no one’s come up with an ICA for him, but there are so many stellar songs to choose from it would take ages to narrow down a list of 10. Thankfully, he’s been equally prolific collaborating with other musicians, making the selection process for those efforts a bit easier. Here’s a look at some killer tracks featuring Beck on other people’s records. No matter the genre you always know it’s him.
From their seventh studio LP, Song Machine, Season One: Strange Timez. A collection of videos and singles the 2D band recorded with the likes of Peter Hook, Elton John, St. Vincent, and many others.
Wiki tells me that M83 is a pinwheel galaxy. I thought it might be a bus route! Not sure what the French electropopsters’ particular astronomical interests are, but it’s a sweet little number.
10,000 Hz Legend was the band’s second album, released in 2001. In addition to Beck singing and playing harmonica on a couple of songs, the album features a crowd of interesting folks. Justin Meldal-Johnsen and Roger Manning were both in Beck’s band at the time. Dr. Rigberg‘s buddy Jason Falkner shows up on a few numbers, too. The legendary Corky Hale plays harp on one track. She’s had a very long musical career in jazz, ran an eponymous boutique on Sunset Boulevard, was a teacher at Planned Parenthood, and founded Angel Harvest, a charity that distributes restaurant food to the needy. And she’s married to Mike Stoller of the Lieber-Stoller songwriting duo, who wrote a fair number of Elvis Presley‘s hits.
From Social Cues, the band’s fifth album. Here the Kentucky outfit branched out musically, adding complex orchestrations. Beck’s dad, David Campbell, is an accomplished conductor and composer, and he did the string arrangements. (He also did the arrangements on the Charlotte Gainsbourg album featured earlier in the set.)
Andy Samberg was a writer and performer on Saturday Night Live for seven years. If you’re a successful comedian you get to marry Joanna Newsom and make goofy records with other celebrities. In addition to Beck, Turtleneck & Chain featured famous folks like Snoop Dogg, Rihanna, cult filmmaker John Waters and…Michael Bolton?
This is from For That Beautiful Feeling, released in 2023. It’s cool that more than 30 years after he hit the scene all kinds of musicians are still interested in collaborating with Beck. In fact, most of today’s songs were released after the pandemic.
The Akron, Ohio duo are a couple of the only artists as prolific as Beck. They’ve released 14 albums since their 2002 debut, not to mention solo records, all kinds of guest appearances, and the producing that singer/guitarist Dan Auerback gets up to. This is from 2024’s Ohio Players.
TVV stalwart Chaval recently observed “Everyone Scottish likes The Proclaimers. it’s the law.” Not all New Yorkers are as devoted to JSBX, but they ought to be (even though they didn’t have a bass player). The band were like NYC in a way–an exciting mix of a lot of different things: blues, funk, punk, garage rock, urban raunch, and rockabilly, with Spencer waving a theremin wand around. Beck literally phoned in his rap for the tune. You can hear him asking, “was that good?”to which Spencer replies, “You got the flava!” Beck also shows up in the video for the song, along with Mike D. from the Beastie Boys.
I’m almost 63 years old, and therefore I count myself lucky that until very, very recently, I still had both my parents.
Dad passed away on 19 March and his funeral service will take place a few hours after this post is published. He was 90 years of age, and hadn’t been in great physical health for quite a while, although his brain and mind remained razor-sharp until the end. In many ways, it was quite remarkable that he lived such a long life given that back in 1991, at the age of 56, he was diagnosed with lung cancer (the result of having been a very heavy cigarette smoker since he was in his teens), and went through major surgery to remove the diseased organ.
He made a full recovery, learning to live and function with one lung, with the operation minimising the risk of the cancer spreading elsewhere. His illness caused him to retire from work early, and my mum did likewise. Financially, they were fine as both had made good plans in terms of pension schemes, and for the next 30 years or so, they enjoyed life to the full as much as their ages and health would allow them.
Back in 1991, the surgeons didn’t, and indeed couldn’t, say how long dad would live, advising that everyone reacted differently to the surgery. But his previously active lifestyle proved to be a huge help, and his body adjusted quickly to his breathing capacity being restricted. To everyone’s delight, he was back on the golf course within a matter of months, and out and about doing his singing and dancing in the pubs and clubs that he and my mum and their pals frequented in Glasgow. Oh, and then he was away overseas on holidays again.
About seven years ago, however, he really began to slow down as his body aged. The lung capacity issue led to him having mobility issues and affected his leg movements. Some days were better than others, but increasingly, he was unable to get out and about, particularly over the past couple of years, and for the first ever time we could see it having an impact on his state of mind. He was frustrated by it all, but he was determined that he would regain the power in his legs, buying all sorts of specialist exercise equipment that he would use in the hope he would regain some strength. Mum, who is three years younger than him, took on the role as his named carer in the eyes of the authorities. Between them, they were determined that dad would remain at home and not go into anywhere for specialist care.
The arrangements worked, albeit chest infections and respiratory issues (including COVID) saw him hospitalised a few times, but only for short spells. The most recent of these came last September when, unfortunately, he was admitted just two days before his 90th birthday which meant we had to cancel the planned party in a local pub. He was back home after a five-night stay and once again in the care of mum.
He was of an age that he was on a regular schedule of check-ups and scans at the local NHS hospital. One such scan earlier this year, in early February, would show up that he had developed a small cancerous growth in his kidney that was spreading. His age and the fact he had just one lung meant that there was little that could be done in terms of treatment. He was given palliative care, at home, with specialist nurses coming in once a week to check on him and advise my mum on how best to look after him.
If he was scared, he didn’t let on. He said he wasn’t in too much pain – more a discomfort – and his medication was nothing stronger than over the counter tablets. No timescale was asked for, nor was any given. I don’t think any of us wanted to contemplate him facing a slow, lingering and what ultimately would likely be an undignified deterioration over a period of months, but it was something we were prepared to deal with, and dad did accept that at some point, he would need to be put fully in the care of those who knew best and had the experience of dealing with cancer patients.
But things changed unexpectedly on the evening of Thursday 19 March, which was some four weeks after he had been given the diagnosis. At 8pm, he collapsed at home and passed away almost in the blink of an eye, despite the best efforts of a friend who lived nearby and the paramedics who were there within ten minutes. We are grieving our loss, but it comes with a sense of relief that he died without pain, and at home, with mum being the last person he saw and spoke to.
I’ve been busy over the past two weeks in terms of the funeral and sorting out dad’s estate, with a priority being to make sure that mum’s life can go on as best is can as she faces up to a life alone after nearly 64 years of marriage. The funeral will, as these things always are, an occasion to reflect and remember, and my hope is that any sad moments find themselves far outweighed by the thoughts of the happy times – that will certainly be the message throughout the eulogy later today at the crematorium.
Talking to the funeral director about various things, and indeed having to go out and buy myself a suit for the occasion, has seen me think a fair bit about one particular video and tune. I hope you don’t mind me sharing it.
From the album Everything’s Getting Older, released on Chemikal Underground in 2011.
The Copper Top is, indeed, the nearest pub to the crematorium in the town in which Aidan grew up. It’s an astonishing piece of writing, to which Bill, best known as a jazz pianist, has written the most perfect and moving piece of music.
Nothing Can Stop Us – Saint Etienne
Sit Still – Life Model
Just Like Heaven – Dinosaur Jr.
Talulah Gosh (Janice Long Session) – Talulah Gosh
Birthday – Sugarcubes
Insects – Altered Images
Everything Hurtz – The Fall
Nothing To Be Done – The Pastels
State Of Art – Friends Again
I Need Two Heads – Go-Betweens
Running Away – The Raincoats
T&A – Blondshell
World Leader Pretend – R.E.M.
Magic 8 – Annie Booth
Abandon Ship – April Showers
Coast – Kim Deal
Number 1 – Poster Paints
Hidden track to take it to exactly 1 hour
THE NEW VINYL VILLAIN 