Magazine, Morrissey, Smiths, Strangeways Glasgow

I STARTED SOMETHING I COULDN’T FINISH

A few years ago, a couple of folk I knew from the Little League events decided that a night dedicated to The Smiths and Morrissey would be a good idea. I’ve long-planned to get myself along, but for one reason or other it just never happened until last Friday night when Aldo made sure of it by purchasing a ticket for me in advance.

Even then, I almost never made it along. I was very tired after a hard few days at work and wasn’t sure if a night in basement venue beneath one of Glasgow’s best pubs was really what I was after.

One of the things I most feared was that it would be a hardcore crowd made up of Morrissey look-a-likes standing around just trying to pose and be noticed. There were a handful of such creatures, but the vast majority of the 200 souls who were lucky enough to get tickets were there for a great night out on the dancefloor. I wasted little time joining in despite the fact that I had told Aldo beforehand that in an effort to pace myself I had mentally drawn up a list of songs that were certainties for dancing to and a list (including some of the better-known band and solo material) that were strict no-nos. I got carried away (as I feared!!) and danced myself dizzy, mostly without the aid of alcohol to throw off any inhibitions as I was very quickly onto bottles of water to stop the dehydration.

Even when the DJs played non-Moz material I couldn’t drag myself off the floor – not when you get stuff like The Wedding Present, The Cure and Associates thrown in….and as the night went on I knew I’d pay the price the following morning when I’d inevitably wake up with another realisation that I’m not as young or fit as I used to be and that I really out to know better at my age.

And all this despite me leaving more than an hour before the end of the event to catch the last train just after midnight and so missing what many of the showstoppers that the younger Aldo was able to shake his frame to before the lights came up.

The next Strangeways night will be in August 2014. Details will be unveiled at this facebook page (where incidentally a photo of my good self taken last Friday night can also be found).

So a huge thanks to Robert, Carlo, Angela and Hugh for a magnificent and memorable evening, made all the more special by the fact that all proceeds, as with all the Strangeways events, went to a local charity with a second charity benefiting from food bank donations on the night.

Sadly, the laptop that was used to supply the tunes for the evening was missing a few of the more obscure b-side cover versions which meant my request for the one that matched my t-shirt couldn’t be realised. I’ve been promised it will feature next time….so I better get myself along to make sure….and next time I will finish the night along with everyone else.

mp3 : Morrissey – A Song From Under The Floorboards

It’s a good version. But nothing can ever hope to match the original….

mp3 : Magazine – A Song From Under The Floorboards

Enjoy.

Raw Herbs

CULT CLASSICS – ‘SHE’S A NURSE…’ by THE RAW HERBS

Dear JC,

The news that you’ve run out of contributions for your Cult classics feature has finally spurred me into penning a few words (I thought you’d be inundated so I kept putting it off) – I hope you can still find room for it. Keep up the good work!

Misterprime

I first came across The Raw Herbs’ excellent single ‘She’s a Nurse’ on a compilation cassette called ‘Strum ‘n’ Drum’ given away with the short-lived indie magazine ‘Underground’ in, I think, 1987 and it remained, as far as I was concerned, a tantalising one-off until such a time as the internet came along and allowed all of us sad, anoraky types to finally chase down some of our little accumulated musical obsessions.

Apparently this East London band were only with us for a few short years in the late eighties before disappearing, as is the way, into the musical ether, despite having seemingly impeccable indie credentials: their first single, ‘Old Joe’, was a flexi disc and their third, ‘Don’t Bury Me Yet’, cracked the indie top twenty, both were on Manchester’s Medium Cool label. Unfortunately the fourth single – a 12″ entitled ‘The Second Time’ on their own Rooster Records – was also their last and, apart from a Janice Long Session and a few other oddments that you can pick up trawling the net, that’s the band’s whole slim legacy.

That said, all of their releases display in fine style that trademark eighties-indiepop jangle offset perfectly with a beautifully yearning, slightly braying vibrato vocal and occasional touches of harmonica, banjo and fiddle suggesting wider horizons and a possible interest in the country-twang of early ramshackle rock’n’roll.

‘She’s a Nurse…’ was the band’s second single (as more mathematically minded readers may already have deduced) and is narrowly the pick of the bunch, heralded by a propulsive harmonica-led twanging intro and coming on like a less cocksure, more Sarah Records version of the La’s, with vocalist Derek Parker seemingly unable to believe his own good fortune – not only is she a nurse, but “…she’s alright!” The Medium Cool singles were available as downloads on Amazon last time I looked (‘So Wired’, the languid b-side to ‘She’s a Nurse’, makes up a pitch-perfect 7″ package) and recent inclusions on the CD86 (‘He’s Blown In’, a ‘Second Time’ b-side )and ‘Scared To Get Happy’ (‘…Nurse’) compilations would seem to indicate that I’m not the only person who still remembers them.

All that’s needed now is for someone at LTM or Cherry Red to licence the whole catalogue and issue it on one handy-sized CD compilation – that’s an album that I already rank, in imaginary form, in my indiepop Top Ten, along with the likes of ‘Stardust’ by the Sea Urchins, ‘Snowball’ by the Field Mice, ‘Lyceum’ by the Orchids, Another Sunny Day’s ‘London Weekend’ or the Popguns’ ‘Snog.’

mp3 : The Raw Herbs – She’s A Nurse But She’s Alright

JC adds….anyone else that wants to submit a cult single and keep the Moz series at bay is more than welcome to drop me a line.

Pastels

SATURDAY’S SCOTTISH SINGLE (Part 85)

For such an important and influential band, the wiki entry is a bit light:-

The Pastels are an independent music group from Glasgow, formed in 1981. The group consists of Stephen McRobbie (vocals, guitar), Katrina Mitchell (vocals, drum kit), Gerard Love (bass guitar), John Hogarty (guitar), Tom Crossley (flute, keyboards), and Alison Mitchell (trumpet).

Their early records (1982–85) for record labels such as Whaam!, Creation, Rough Trade, and Glass Records, had a raw and immediate sound, melodic and amateur, which seemed at odds with the time. But an emerging fanzine culture identified with the group’s sound and image, and slowly The Pastels started to influence a new wave of groups, which interested the NME and other UK media.

The Pastels’ sound continued to evolve and, although part of the NME’s C86 compilation, in interviews they always sought to distance themselves from both twee and shambling developments.Their debut album, Up for a Bit With The Pastels (Glass, 1987; re-issue Paperhouse, 1991) moved from garage pop-punk through to ballads with synth orch splashes. The follow-up, Sittin’ Pretty (Chapter 22, 1989) was harder but less eclectic. Reports started to appear in the UK music press that the group was splitting up.

Eventually it became clear that a new line-up was configuring around original members, Stephen McRobbie and Annabel Wright (Aggi), now joined by Katrina Mitchell. This line-up is probably the best known of The Pastels’ various phases, and often featured either David Keegan (Shop Assistants) or Gerard Love (Teenage Fanclub) on guitar. They signed with the emerging Domino Records and completed two albums, Mobile Safari (1995) and Illumination (1997), which showed them developing an odd, particular sound – melancholic and awkward, but warm and engaging. A remix set featured My Bloody Valentine, Jim O’Rourke and others on the album, Illuminati (1998).

Their next release is the soundtrack to David Mackenzie’s The Last Great Wilderness (Geographic, 2003), which, made for film or not, is one of the most completely realised Pastels albums. It featured a track recorded in collaboration with Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker. In 2006, The Pastels developed and completed new music for a theatre production by Glasgow based company, 12 Stars. In 2009, The Pastels, in collaboration with Tenniscoats from Tokyo, Japan, released an album called Two Sunsets.

The Pastels featured on the soundtrack for film,The Acid House (1998).

The Pastels now operate their own Geographic Music label through Domino, and are partners in Glasgow’s Monorail Music shop.

On 21 February 2013, the band announced it would release its first album since their 1997 album, Illumination, called Slow Summits. It will be released on 27 May 2013 through Domino.

“Check My Heart”, the first single from Slow Summits was released digitally on 8 April 2013. The song was released physically as a 7″ single on 29 April 2013 with the B-side “Illuminum Song”. Both songs were available digitally on 27 May, upon the full album’s release.

My favourite Pastels single dates back to 1986. It’s astonishing to think this is not far off being 30 years old.

mp3 : The Pastels – Truck Train Tractor
mp3 : The Pastels – Breaking Lines

I still get a thrill when I walk into Monorail at this venue to buy records and Stephen is working behind the counter. It’s the equivalent of royalty serving you with your milk or bread down the corner shop….

Psychedelic Furs

REMEMBERING THE PSYCHEDELIC FURS

The Psychedelic Furs are about to get a 14-date American tour underway starting tomorrow, so it seems a good time to have a quick look back at their career. I’m going to lazily crib from the bio on their official website:-

If you sit and talk to many of the alternative rock artists dominating today’s music, you’ll find that many of them pay homage to the The Psychedelic Furs. Led by front man and songwriter Richard Butler, the Furs won over fans and critics alike by combining poetic lyrics, innovative rhythms and melodies driven by an aggressive, punk desperation. Through it all, the band scored major hits with “Love My Way,” “Pretty In Pink,” “Heaven,” “The Ghost In You,” and “Heartbreak Beat” in all releasing seven studio albums and spawning several compilations, a boxed set, and a live concert DVD.

The Psychedelic Furs came together in England’s emerging punk scene in 1977 initially consisting of Richard Butler (vocals), Tim Butler (bass guitar), Paul Wilson (drums), Duncan Kilburn (saxophone), and Roger Morris (guitars). By 1979, this line up had expanded to a sextet with Vince Ely replacing Wilson on drums and John Ashton being added on guitar.

The Furs debut, a self-titled album from 1980 was produced by Steve Lillywhite. The LP quickly established the band at radio in Europe and was a top 20 hit in the UK. The album also found success in Germany, Italy, France, Spain, New Zealand and Australia. The US version of the album was resequenced, yet failed to have as strong a commercial impact.

The Furs did find success in the U.S. with their next release, 1981’s Talk Talk Talk, which saw the band making its debut on the US album charts. In New Zealand, meanwhile, the band became immensely popular, as Talk Talk Talk reached the top ten in the charts, the first in a string of Furs’ albums to chart in the New Zealand Top 10.

In the UK, the album spun off two charting singles, “Dumb Waiters” and the original version of “Pretty in Pink”. The latter song served as inspiration for the 1986 John Hughes film of the same name, and was re-recorded for the film’s platinum-selling soundtrack.

In 1982, the Furs, now a four-piece with the departures of Morris and Kilburn, recorded Forever Now, with producer Todd Rundgren in Woodstock, New York. This album included “Love My Way”, which became yet another UK and US chart hit.

Ely left the band after Forever Now, although he would return for the 1988 single “All That Money Wants” and the 1989 album Book of Days.

The Furs’ 1984 release Mirror Moves was produced by Keith Forsey, and featured the songs “The Ghost in You” and “Heaven”. Both charted in throughout the world, and “Heaven” became the band’s highest charting UK hit at the time. Strangely, however, “Heaven” was never released as a single in the U.S. Instead, Columbia Records opted for “Here Come Cowboys”, despite both international success and heavy MTV airplay for “Heaven”. “Here Come Cowboys” failed to chart, but “The Ghost In You” was a hit single on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100.

By the mid-80s, the band had become a staple on both U.S. college and modern rock radio stations. Simultaneously, they were experiencing consistent mainstream success, placing several singles in the pop charts on both sides of the Atlantic.

In 1986, the band recorded a sax-infused version of “Pretty in Pink” for the soundtrack of the film of the same name. Butler later claimed that the success of “Pretty in Pink” caused the band to be pressured into entering the recording studio to record a follow-up release before they were ready. The result was Midnight to Midnight, their biggest Top 40 success to date, but also a more overtly commercial effort than the Furs had ever recorded before. The album also featured the single “Heartbreak Beat”, which became the Psychedelic Furs biggest hit yet on the U.S. Top 40. The album also featured drummer Paul Garisto and sax player Mars Williams, both of whom continue to tour with the band.

In the wake of Midnight To Midnight, the Furs found themselves dissatisfied with their new commercial direction, and subsequently returned to a rawer sound with “All That Money Wants”, a 1988 track especially recorded for a best-of compilation album “All Of This And Nothing”. 1989’s Book of Days and 1991’s World Outside also saw a return to the earlier Furs’ style.

The Furs’ steady chart success continued with three #1 hits on the newly-established U.S. Modern Rock chart between 1988 and 1991. “All That Money Wants” was a #1 hit in 1988, while “House” topped the chart in 1990, and “Until She Comes” was #1 in 1991.

The band went on extended hiatus in the early 1990s, with the Butler brothers going on to create the band “Love Spit Love” along with guitarist Richard Fortus and drummer Frank Ferrer. Love Spit Love released two albums and enjoyed some chart success as well.

After spending most of the decade apart, the Butlers and Ashton reignited The Psychedelic Furs in 2000, and released a live album Beautiful Chaos: Greatest Hits Live, which also featured a new studio recording, “Alive (For Once In My Lifetime).” A DVD version of the performance included live versions of “Alive” and three other previously unreleased songs: “Anodyne (Better Days),” “Cigarette” and “Wrong Train.” Since then, lead singer Richard Butler has released an eponymous solo album produced by Jon Carin, and has hinted at the possibility of a new Psychedelic Furs album.

These days, the band continues to tour around the world. The current Psychedelic Furs touring lineup remains Richard Butler (vocals), Tim Butler (bass), Rich Good (guitar), Mars Williams (saxophone), Amanda Kramer (keyboards), and Paul Garisto (drums).

I’ve not bought anything in the last 30 years and in the build-up to this feature I did give a spin to each of the first four albums and found that quite a lot of it sounds dated and a bit dull and safe. I certainly didn’t hear too much of the ‘punk desperation’ mentioned in the bio….and what is now more bleedingly obvious than it was back in the day is just how hard they (and/or their record label) tried to package themselves for the American market. I found myself wondering why it was that I once thought they were an important part of the alternative music scene in the UK in the early 80s when in fact they were really always a mainstream act bordering on the different.

Having said that, it would be very unfair to completely dismiss them. There’s actually enough listenable early stuff that could be compiled into one reasonably decent album while some of the singles remain infectiously catchy but I feel if you were to be exposed to them on a very regular basis you would soon get irritated.

Oh and they should never have allowed Pretty In Pink to be re-recorded in such a dreadful and cliche-ridden fashion…the sax all but kills it. Anyways:-

mp3 : The Psychedelic Furs – Sister Europe (Peel Session)
mp3 : The Psychedelic Furs – Dumb Waiters
mp3 : The Psychedelic Furs – President Gas
mp3 : The Psychedelic Furs – Heartbeat (NY remix)

Be warned, the last of these tracks is more than 8 minutes in length and has a real 80s sounding production….

Enjoy!!

James

THE JAMES SINGLES (7)

In the wake of the fiasco surrounding Strip-Mine, the band finally escaped from what had been a disastrous relationship with Sire Records in late 1988. But they were completely skint although confident of making a success of things thanks to what they believed was really strong material that had been written in the 18 months they had been waiting for Strip-Mine to be released.

To get themselves back on their feet, they borrowed a substantial sum of money from a friendly bank manager which was used to fund the recording and release of a live album. One Man Clapping was a huge success as far as the indie charts went and re-established James both commercially and critically and ultimately led to Geoff Travis signing them to Rough Trade in early 1989.

The first new single was called Sit Down, released in June 1989.

It was lauded by all, but the label didn’t promote it hard enough to get the critical crossover to mainstream and daytime radio. That such a tremendous and catchy record had stalled at #77 was nothing short of a disgrace….but of course the situation would be rectified in the not too distant future (although nobody knew that at the time).

I’ve got the 12″ version of the single….and it extends all the way out to eight minutes ending with a bit of a strange reprise in which one of the sound engineers chants the name Lester Piggott over the outro…

mp3 : James – Sit Down (Rough Trade 12″ version)

Three tracks were on the b-side – Sky Is Falling, a demo that the band had contributed to a compilation LP featuring bands from the Manchester area, live favourite Goin Away, a two-minute track that was the usual opener to most concerts in 1989 and Sound Investment, a song that could well be taken as an attack on their old record label. As ever with James, they were prepared to give fans value for money with the quality of songs seemingly tossed away on b-sides:-

mp3 : James – Goin Away
mp3 : James – Sound Investment
mp3 : James – Sky Is Falling

Enjoy!

Placebo

YOU DON’T CARE ABOUT US

Placebo are a band that have long divided opinion. I’m willing to confess that I really like an awful lot of their earlier material and own all three of the albums they released between 1996 and 2000. I’ve no reason to explain why I stopped paying attention to them other than I was moving away somewhat from the goth/punk/glam concoctions that they were so good at doing and finding myself mellowing out somewhat.

There’s one particular single of theirs that I have a lot of time for and it’s as much for the quality of the b-sides as it is for the greatness of the actual single which has guitar licks that the Wedding Present should sue for:-

mp3 : Placebo – You Don’t Care About Us (radio edit)

A #5 hit in 1998, it was made available on 2 x CDs (as indeed were most singles in that era). The first of them had a more than half-decent Placebo song as its b-side along with a fabulous cover that paid homage the huge influence that Marc Bolan had on Placebo and particularly frontman Brian Molko:-

mp3 : Placebo – Ion
mp3 : Placebo – 20th Century Boy

The second CD could have been a bit of a rip-off as it featured two remixes of an earlier hit single but avoids such an accusation for the simple fact that both of them are very good and different sounding in their own right and indeed one of them, by Les Rhythmes Digitales, is IMHO, THE definitive version of the song:-

mp3 : Placebo – Pure Morning (Les Rhythmes Digitales mix)
mp3 : Placebo – Pure Morning (Howie B mix)

Enjoy

Courtney Barnett, Future Of The Left, Japandroids

FROM THE SOUTH-WEST CORRESPONDENT….NEW CLASSICS

Cardiff, Canada and Courtney

First a question – When does a song move from just being a song to qualifying as a classic? Does it have to be a certain age? Or does it just have to be infuriatingly brilliant? I ask because this week I have chosen three songs that are less than three years old, one is less than ten months old and I think all three are already classics in my mind. I know that in ten years’ time just after JC has done his 60 best C60 mixtapes at 60 series, he will revisit ‘Cult Classics’ and some young whippersnapper will pick and post a wonderfully witty tribute to these three songs, so I am getting there first. I am aware that this probably makes me Mystic Meg or something but it’s a stigma I’m willing to bear (oh and Aquarius watch out on your normal walk to work, there will be a stranger bearing bad news, particularly if you work in the public sector).

So let’s start with a blast from the past – well November 2011 at least – and ‘Polymers Are Forever’ by Cardiff’s Future of the Left. Future of the Left formed in 2005 when the much missed McLusky and the not so much missed Jarcrew split and some of its members formed Future of the Left. The driving force behind the band is one Andy ‘Falco’ Falkous, and I do not shrink from this statement, a man who is perhaps the greatest songwriting talent in Britain today. Yes better than Morrissey, and yes even better than Gary Barlow. His lyrics are brilliant, funny, political, polemic and poignant. He has written sings about everyone and everything from Seb Coe to Robocop (Wonderfully called ‘Robocop 4 – fuck off Robocop’) via Kim Kardashian.

In November 2011 they released the track ‘Polymers Are Forever’, which in my mind is the closest thing Future of the Left have ever got to writing and recording a pop song, although they would probably kill me for saying it. This is one of the things I love about Future of the Left, behind all the noise and ferociousness of the lyrics and energy of the guitars there are tunes snapping away. This one has a chorus that includes the words” ba ba ba ba” for christs sake. It is kind of two songs in one this, the first bit is a shouty pop song and then it goes into a beautiful little ode to Polymers. It is also the only song ever written to feature the words ‘Quantum Mechanics’ and for that reason alone, you must own this song.

mp3 : Future of the Left – Polymers Are Forever

It was the taster for the bands second album ‘the plot against common sense’ in which all songs were listed without capital letters, I don’t know why. It comprises 15 tracks and its worth every one of the seven pounds or so that I paid for it. It is a wonderful album and one for me that gets better everytime I play it.

After this the band announced that their next album would be crowdsourced through the website Pledge. After five hours they had enough money to record it. We then saw the release of ‘How to stop your Brain in An Accident’. That too is wonderful.

Next time a short hop into 2012 and to the Canadian rock duo Japandroids. At the end of 2012 when everyone was writing lists of their Top Ten this and that, one song for me stood out – it was in nearly everyones lists (not interestingly the NME’s) – and yet I have never heard of it or of the band that made it. That song was ‘The House that Heaven Built’ by Japandroids. So I checked it out.

Japandroids for those of you who don’t know describe their music as one part classic rock one part punk and claim to be heavily influenced by Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen. I was say that they are more than two thirds punk and little under a third classic rock, but I’m a pedantic arse. What they are bloody brilliant. I can’t think of a better place to introduce their music to you if you haven’t heard it than ‘The House That Heaven Built’ – for me its one of the best songs of the last fifteen years. How this hasn’t been a massive hit in the UK I have no idea (actually I have but let’s leave that debate for the Daily Mail Comments Page). It sounds a lot like the early 90s grunge sound that I’ve written about – and if you liked the Buffalo Tom song I wrote about a few weeks ago then you will love this. Simple riffs, massive chorus, repeat until you tired of smiling.

mp3 : Japandroids – The House That Heaven Built

On top of this song Japandroids then released the album ‘Celebration Rock’ an album which Rolling Stone claimed to be ‘One of the Ten Coolest Albums Ever’. Now regular readers will know that I am all over cool and am happy to act as the ‘Spokesperson of cool’ for this blog, and I have to say normally I find Rolling Stone so far up its own arse its shoving tissue up it to blow its nose – but on this occasion they are right. ‘Celebration Rock’ is one cool record. One you need to own if you don’t already. It is already a classic, there I’ve said it. Happy now.

Coming right up to date, earlier on I said that Andy Falkous was the songwriting genius of this generation, well time to meet another one. An Australian one at that. Not sure why that is relevant right now, but bear will me and my closely edited Guardian reading acceptable xenophobia.

Around Christmas 2013 was the first time I heard ‘Avant Gardener’ by Courtney Barnett. It was ‘One of those Moments’. I was running through the streets of Exeter in a pathetic attempt to shed that extra mince pie I had the night before. This came on the Ipod it was on a bunch of songs given to me by a friend. I had to stop, not because I was tired, sweating and looking like a stuck pig, but because of this song. A song that tells the story of a lady who has an anaphylactic panic attack whilst gardening in the sun in the middle of an Australian heatwave (See it was relevant). Lyrically it is wonderful as well, it contains the immortal line “The paramedic thinks I’m clever cos I play guitar, I think she’s clever cos she stops people dying.” Brilliant. It also I think is the only song written to feature the word ‘Pseudoephedrine’.

mp3 : Courtney Barnett – Avant Gardener

It featured on the EP ‘A Sea of Split Peas’ and got precisely nowhere in the charts. Yet there at the end of year polls it sat, It was song of the year according to Pitchfork, number 6 in the NME Tracks of the Year. It is an incredible record, half sang, half rapped in a lazy, wonky kind of a way that makes you wonder what on earth you have just heard. Now this song is only ten months old but is anyone going to tell me that its not a classic….

S-WC

Skids

THE ABSOLUTE GAME

In 1980, The Skids released The Absolute Game, their third LP. It’s really some achievement when you consider that on its release, lead singer and main lyricist Richard Jobson was not yet 20 years old while Stuart Adamson, whose guitar playing has rarely sounded better (even when he hit his commercial peak with Big Country) had not long turned 22.

There is a very strong case for Side One of this vinyl artefact to be considered the best single side of an LP ever recorded by a Scottish band. Three of its tracks were released as singles, although criminally only one of them made the Top 40, while the other two songs could also have been chart hits if the public had been interested.

One of the reasons that the LP didn’t do as well as it should was down to the band’s unwillingness to promote it properly as Jobson and Adamson had fallen out badly by this time. It was a record that, as I said earlier, had some of the guitarist’s finest ever tunes but with the singer wanting to go in a totally different direction, tensions were high all the way through the recording process. Virgin Records, in an effort to hold things together, gave the green light for initial copies of the LP to come with a bonus record of songs called Strength Through Joy, a collection that sounded very unlike The Skids but betrayed the sort of style the singer wanted to adopt for the future.

Having said that, there’s a view that musical differences weren’t the main reason for the fall out between the two main men. Jobson was very much having his head turned by London and was very keen to locate the band in the capital full-time while Adamson was far too fond of life in Dunfermline to ever agree to that. Nowadays, modern communications, cheap travel etc would make light of such a problem, but in 1980, having one half of the partnership in London and the other 400 miles away was insurmountable.

The live shows to accompany the release of the album were unhappy affairs and it was no great surprise that Adamson quit not long after, as did Mike Baillie, leaving Jobson and Russell Webb to continue as The Skids. Together they would make one more LP, Joy, released the following year before making a clean breast of things as The Armoury Show.

I thought it would make a great contrast to let you hear all five songs on Side A of the LP along with the 8 tracks that made up Strength Through Joy just to compare and contrast. It is a really remarkable thing to realise just how young these guys were at the time and the extent of their different talents:-

mp3 : The Skids – Circus Games
mp3 : The Skids – Out Of Town
mp3 : The Skids – Goodbye Civilian
mp3 : The Skids – The Children Saw The Shame
mp3 : The Skids – A Woman In Winter

mp3 : The Skids – An Incident In Algiers
mp3 : The Skids – Grievance
mp3 : The Skids – Strength Through Joy
mp3 : The Skids – Filming Africa
mp3 : The Skids – A Man For All Seasons
mp3 : The Skids – Snakes and Ladders
mp3 : The Skids – Surgical Triumph
mp3 : The Skids – The Bell Jar

Enjoy.

Morrissey

THE MOZ SINGLES (Part 2)

I promised at least one reader that when the Cult Classics series ended I’d use the Sunday slot to feature all the Morrissey singles. Those of you who don’t like the idea have only got yourselves to blame….if you’d submitted more of your own cult favourites then we wouldn’t be here today looking at the career of a bloke who has invited Cliff Richard and Tom Jones to be special guests on upcoming shows in NYC and LA…..

As I mentioned back in January, Morrissey has released 39 singles across his solo career. Three of these have been US only releases, while another was a gorgeous duet with Siousxie Sioux. For an awful long while, particularly at the beginning of his solo career, many of his singles weren’t included on any studio albums (although inevitably, they would find their way onto one or more compilations).

This particular release was a stand-alone single, and was actually the fourth and final 45 Morrissey released back in 1991. It was regarded by many as a return to the more recognisable and better-loved sound after a flirtation with rockabilly, albeit this single and its new b-side had lyrics that allowed critics to lazily throw the miserablist tag at him.

My Love Life is a song that didn’t really anything for me at the time, but while I’ve grown to like it a lot more over the years I still think its about 45 seconds too long. It features Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders on backing vocals

But if I wasn’t always fond of the main track, that’s not a statement I’ll ever apply to the new song that was put on the b-side as I’ve Changed My Plea To Guilty has always been one of my favourite solo Morrissey tracks.

I really feel this was the sort of musical road that The Smiths were beginning to go down at the end of their career with Johnny Marr trying to introduce more keyboards to the band’s sound, and I’m convinced it’s one that would have been near the top of many ‘my favourite ever Smiths song’ polls had it been written and recorded a few years earlier.

The bonus track on the 12″ is a live recording of There’s A Place In Hell For Me And My Friends. It’s a version recorded for KROQ radio station in Los Angeles, and one that is completely unrecognisable from the original piano-led version that closed the LP Kill Uncle.

My Love Life hit #29 in September 1991, and the cover shot, which shows the famous quiff at its finest, was taken in Dublin while the aforementioned Kill Uncle album was being toured.

mp3 : Morrissey – My Love Life
mp3 : Morrissey – I’ve Changed My Plea To Guilty
mp3 : Morrissey – There’s A Place In Hell For Me And My Friends (live)

Happy Listening.

Orange Juice

SATURDAY’S SCOTTISH SINGLE (Part 84)

Well it couldn’t be any of the Postcard singles as they were all featured a short time ago. Instead, on this alphabetical trace through singles within my collection by Scottish bands, here’s something from 1984 for Part 84:-

mp3 : Orange Juice – Bridge
mp3 : Orange Juice – Bridge (Summer 83 version)
mp3 : Orange Juice – Out For The Count

As found on the 12″ of catalogue # OJ5, released on Polydor Records in February 1984.

This is one of THE great lost and forgotten Orange Juice singles. Funky as fuck.

The b-sides contain a live version of the single (although I can’t find any details at all of where it was recorded and which precise date in the Summer of 83) while this tremendous version of Out for The Count has some terrific keyboard and guitar solos. A much more downbeat version would be re-recorded later on and included on the self-titled LP from later in the year.

Oh and the 7″ version of the single also had a flexidisc on offer:-

mp3 : Orange Juice – Poor Old Soul

Almost unrecognisable from the Postcard version. I can just imagine Pharrell Williams getting his hands on any of these tracks and turning them into huge hits……..

ENJOY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Bodines, Dub Sex, Happy Mondays, Laugh, New Fast Automatic Daffodils, World Of Twist

AND ON THE SIXTH DAY, GOD CREATED MANCHESTER

I make no apologies (again) for going into the archives over at the old blog for today’s piece. It was one I stumbled across when searching for Dick Van Dyke’s adventures that were recounted just the other week. This is from another of my old Sunday Correspondents gang who goes by the name of Cullen Skink. He didn’t half select some banging tunes……….

If there’s a city outside Scotland whose impact is recurrently felt on The Vinyl Villain, it must be Manchester with its Magazine, Morrissey, New Order…

I lived there as a student in the late 80s and early 90s, a period when Manchester gained its reputation for being the centre of the music world.

I was certainly enthralled by the musical heritage. My all-time favourite bands were Buzzcocks and The Fall. Joy Division/New Order too – though I eschewed The Smiths. And I was intoxicated by the contemporary scene: a huge Happy Mondays fan, I followed the Inspiral Carpets for a while, though wasn’t arsed about the Stone Roses…

But you can hear all those bands any time, so here are some others that I loved around that time – bands that deserve to be glorified not forgotten. As behoves a VV Sunday Correspondent, let me turn once more to ye olde vinyl…

The Bodines made glorious, glimmering pop music, the pinnacle of 80s indie before syncopated funky-drummer beats took over. There’s a good case to be made for Therese (1987) as the greatest single ever. Certainly it should be on heavy rotation on all music radio.

mp3 : The Bodines – Therese

Laugh‘s funky swagger jumps out of this fantastic single from 1988. It drags you onto the dancefloor and shouts in your ear. They missed the Madchester bus, until they regrouped in time for the second wave as Intastella.

mp3 : Laugh – Time To Lose It

A forgotten music of the time is that loose agglomeration of ugly noiseniks that pointed sharpened sticks at earnest ears. I thought Dub Sex were Manchester’s best, though I wonder if anybody else did…

mp3 : Dub Sex – Swerve

As the Madchester phenomenon peaked, bands were chewed up and spat out as the media trendsetters moved on – to grunge or whatever the next big thing was. But of these second-wave bands, the New Fast Automatic Daffodils meant the world to me, and Big might be my most loved record of the time. As far as I was concerned it was indie-dance crossover on a par with Loaded or Fools Gold.

mp3 : New Fast Automatic Daffodils – Big

To my eternal chagrin I never saw The World Of Twist, though their concerts have become the stuff of legend. I just never imagined it’d be over so quickly – a couple of miraculous singles, a disappointing album, then nothing (and their frontman Tony Ogden died far too young in 2006).

mp3 : World Of Twist – Sons Of The Stage

Oh and while I’m in this mood, we’d better have some Mondays after all…

mp3 : Happy Mondays – Freaky Dancin’ (live)

Don’t sit down……

Cullen Skink, Sunday 25th April 2010

Interpol

BLUE JEANS AND CHINOS; COKE, PEPSI & OREOS (Part 7)

In the days before blog’n’roll I used to spend quite a few hours watching music videos on MTV2. Most of the time it was the same old, same old, hour after hour, but every now and again something would come on by a band or singer I was completely unfamiliar with. Sometimes I would be able to hit the record button on the VHS machine and go back and listen to the song/watch the video again just to see if, on second or third listen it was worth pursuing. Sometimes there was no tape in the machine and I had to go with instinct.

The latter is what happened when I heard Interpol for the first time. But it was relatively easy in this instance as I reckon my ears were picking up the Bastard Son of Ian Curtis on lead vocal.

I went out and bought their debut album the next day. I should have in fact bought their EP instead as its reasonably rare and changes hands for not bad money while the album can be found relatively cheaply in some record shops (remember them?) every now and again.

Interpol seem to be one of those bands, like countrymen The Strokes, who got a lot of great things written and said about them initially, but when eventually they become commercially successful were dismissed by the critics as glory-hunters interested only in fame and fortune whose new songs aren’t as good as the old stuff.

There is a wee bit of truth in that sentiment in as much that after two cracking LPs in 2002 and 2004 to begin with, things went a bot downhill with 2007’s Our Love To Admire and while 2010’s self-titled LP was a bit of an improvement it still didn’t quite capture the magic of the early material.

2014 is set to be an important year for the band. Their first new material in four years is due for release, but crucially it will be the first without bassist/keyboardist Carlos Dengler who, depending on which version you believe, was sacked for persistent drugs misuse or left of his own accord to pursue his own musical direction. The thing is, many think Dengler’s talents were the essential element of Interpol, so as I say 2014 is set to be crucial,

In the meantime, here’s a few things for your enjoyment:-

mp3 : Interpol – PDA
mp3 : Interpol – Obstacle 1
mp3 : Interpol – Evil
mp3 : Interpol – The Heinrich Maneuver
mp3 : Interpol – Lights

Enjoy!!!

Silverfish

LIFE ON THE ROAD AS SUPPORT TO MY BLOODY VALENTINE

Today’s effort was inspired by a comment left yesterday by The Robster when he reminisced about seeing Silverfish supporting My Bloody Valentine.

This posting was originally part of a 2009 series in which I invited readers to take over the blog for the months of May, partly as I was going on holiday and partly as I needed a bit of a break from blogging. I got a brilliant response and the series ended up running into a fair bit of June as well. One such response came from Chris P Mowforth on the understanding that it was published on his 45th birthday on 29 May 2009:-

“On the day this blog is posted I’ll be as old as the speed a 7” record plays at. In 1989, when the band I played bass with, called Silverfish, first started playing gigs, I suspect I would have regarded this age as ancient. I still play in a band (called Giant Paw), I never got around to trading in my bass for a set of golf clubs.

I’ve agreed to reinvestigate the early gigging days of Silverfish, for The Vinyl Villain, with the help of a fanzine article I wrote, dug out from under the stairs, entitled, Life On the Road As Support to My Bloody Valentine.

Initially I thought about paraphrasing the whole article but the specifics of sound checks and whether bean burgers are served in ozone destroying CFC blown plastic containers is probably more detail than anybody need really know.

Re-reading the article certainly reminded me of the sights, sounds and smells of being a struggling band on the road though. From dodgy van drivers, to greasy caffs. From getting pissed and falling asleep in the back of transit vans, to stopping the van every twenty miles for someone to have a piss. From the glamour of loading equipment in and out of a venue every night, to the salubriousness of sleeping on someone’s floor. The initial method of travelling around, to entertain others, playing as a band is not altogether as enchanting as may be perceived from the outside. The hours are long, tedium can set in from the journey and the lack of sleep can only be caught up with after the whole thing is over.

Of course there are great laughs, late night banter, all sorts of people to meet and the ego massage of getting to show off onstage. I’ve always found it easiest to think of my persona onstage as someone different from who I am the rest of the time. In this way I get to be over the top when playing and a whole lot more quiet and unassuming, when I’m not. Injuries wind up being not uncommon too. I’ve cut my forehead from headbutting my bass. I’ve had metal staples put in my head after jumping off the drum riser, into a metal beam, In Edinburgh. I’ve made my knees bleed from diving onto them (in the style of James Brown) one too many times. I’ve stage dived, with my bass still on, into a modest audience number, with the vague hope of someone breaking my fall. And this is without dwelling upon any problems our feisty Scottish female vocalist, Birthday Party obsessed guitarist and rocking drummer may have had.

In the days before the Internet, touring was the way of getting your music directly to like-minded people, in a particular town or city. With the advent of Myspace and the accessibility of music online intense touring schedules no longer seem to be appropriate. Indeed it was probably a three-month tour of the USA that killed Silverfish off. There’s almost a danger of gigs becoming solely virtual events, to be logged on to. However the face-to-face interaction of a band with an audience is definitely something special. If you enjoy music, at whatever age, it is still your duty to get out there and support bands by going to see them however occasionally, or performing in one yourself.

All the best.”

Chris was kind enough to supply two live tracks recorded from a gig on 2 February 1990 – One Silver Dollar and Driller – explaining that the former was a cover of a Marilyn Monroe song from the film River of No Return and that the lyrics for the latter were put together by two band members from random headlines in a Sunday newspaper. Sadly, these particular mp3 files were lost in a computer crash not too long ago…..so instead here’s the best I can do:-

mp3 : Silverfish – One Silver Dollar
mp3 : Silverfish – Big Bad Baby Pig Squeal
mp3 : Silverfish – Crazy
mp3 : Silverfish – Damn Fine Woman

Enjoy.

Chapterhouse, Collapsed Lung, Tiger

FROM THE SOUTH-WEST CORRESPONDENT…SOME MORE RAMBLING NONSENSE

Bad Dancing, Bad Haircuts and Bad Timing

You remember those little blue disabled cars that used to be everywhere in the 1980’s? Three wheels, shaped like a movable portaloo, did roughly the speed of an asthmatic dog on crutches – that people was a Thundersley Invacar, and that is the name of a rather marvellous track by Collapsed Lung which is todays first ‘Lost Classic’. If that is not the best segue you read this year I don’t know what is.

There has been a lot of talk recently about first gigs. I won’t bore you with mine as it was Neds Atomic Dustbin. I will however bore you with a tale of my first gig at University and one of the main reasons why I now no longer dance. My first gig as a student at University was Collapsed Lung on a Sunday night in October. At the time I was just becoming aware of Collapsed Lung, my good friend Martin (who is in the band Thee Faction, you should check them out, they are great) had lent me a cassette with some of their music on it. I never gave him that tape back – it also had Mambo Taxi, Echobelly and Dub War on it. It was a good tape.

Collapsed Lung formed in Harlow in 1992 and were one of a few bands around at the time who blended hip hop with rock (hello Senser and Asian Dub Foundation) and even counted Radio One DJ and minor Z List Reality TV star Nihal as a member. The lead man was Ant Chapman who was also a bit of a DJ and I think involved in a band called Bogshed, who I never ever listened to but was intrigued by because of their name.

Thundersley Invacar should have been more famous than Collapsed Lung’s best known single and only hit Eat My Goal (A Top 20 smash in 1996, thanks to the football tournament going on which played it every 15 minutes). ‘Thundersley…’ was on the aforementioned tape and got played an awful lot by me on my stereo. At that concert in the Students Union, when they played this, I went mental (I was young, well 19 and didn’t know any better). I threw myself around, jumped up and down and generally lost myself in the music. When it stopped, I was the only one dancing; in fact I think most people were looking at me and not Collapsed Lung. My friend John, who was standing next to me, said, rather brilliantly, that watching me dance, was like watching Kermit the Frog in a blender – messy and that it was not to be encouraged. I’ve rarely danced since. I mean I want to dance – but I’m terrible at it. I love this track though and with the risk of repeating myself, it should have been a hit.

mp3 : Collapsed Lung – Thundersley Invacar

Fast forward three years and we come to Tiger and their track Race.

Tiger were a band who were more famous for their mullets, metal T-shirts and crap jumpers than they were for their tunes, which is a shame, because debut album We are the Puppets is something of a lost masterpiece. The thing about Tiger for me was that they had two keyboardists (at least one was a Moog, which is always cool) and a multitude of members who played various things, the sound was fuzzy, inventive and at times brilliant. Once they reminded me of the B-52s at their greatest (a sentence I rarely type that) but mostly it evokes the spirit of Stereolab if they were fronted by Mark E Smith.

Debut single Shining in the Wood showed much promise, but it was Race and following single My Puppet Pal that underlined their potential. By this time Tiger had an image and that was that they were amazingly uncool and they knew it which almost made them cool – not that I understand anything about being cool – I had a pony tail until I was 35 (I know please don’t hate me). At a time when music was fast becoming solely about Oasis and Britpop, Tiger at least offered an alternative. Debut album ‘We Are The Puppets’ was well received and Tiger went on tour as part of the NME Awards shindig and for a while it looked like they were destined for great things (also on that tour Three Colours Red and Geneva, they pick ‘em, the NME), sadly fame and fortune never materialised. ‘Race’ for me sums up this band, it is a happy energetic little song, that despite radio play and positive press coverage peaked at Number 37 in the UK Chart. They gave up shortly after album number 2 Rosaria bombed.

mp3 : Tiger – Race

Finally for today, we travel back to 1991 and we have some shoegaze.

After Slowdive, Ride and Moose, came Chapterhouse. Five good looking, well groomed, middle class lads from Berkshire with floppy fringes and a habit of whispering their lyrics whilst feedback and swirling guitars do their best to drown them out. They were seen as the next big act to emerge from the so called ‘Scene that Celebrates Itself’ and to earmark that boast they released the jawdroppingly amazing Pearl.

You will have heard ‘Pearl’ I’m sure. Its gorgeous, it has Rachel from Slowdive on backing vocals it has dreamy lyrics and sleepy guitars, and as you listen to it and drown in it wonderfulness – your shoes will have never had some much attention, what is not to love about it? If you look at an online dictionary and search on Shoegaze you should get a video of ‘Pearl’. After ‘Pearl’ you wondered how can they top that? – the truth was that they couldn’t. They peaked way too early. Debut album Whirlpool reached the higher reaches of the Top 25 but it was just too dreamy, almost too shoe gazey for its own shoes (although listening to it again 20 years later, its actually very good).

But then came the Reading Festival of 1991 (incidentally the first Reading Festival I went to) Chapterhouse played the Friday afternoon slot hitting the stage at around 5pm, I saw them, they played for 45 minutes, a haze of smoke machines, feedback, whispering and staring, they weren’t that bad. The problem is, precisely one hour before them, Nirvana arrived and pretty much nothing else mattered after that, because nothing on Earth was going to top that performance. Chapterhouse had the misfortune of following Nirvana who had just arrived punched everyone in the face with Smells Like Teen Spirit, gave a performance that was utterly utterly brilliant and left everyone open mouthed and pretty much speechless. They couldn’t follow that and from that point onwards Chapterhouse were doomed.

mp3 : Chapterhouse – Pearl

Hope you enjoy the music. Oh and if you haven’t already done it by now you should be thinking about downloading the new Eagulls album. The best 37 minutes of the year so far.

SW-C

Honey At The Core (cassette)

HONEY AT THE CORE

Named after the Friends Again single from a few years earlier, this cassette-only compilation was put together in 1986. It features 15 tracks from a variety of Scottish performers and bands (mainly from the Glasgow area), some of whom in later years would go on to find fame and fortune. Indeed, one of the performers would go onto be an enormous star in the entertainment world, though I’m thinking nobody involved in this tape, nor indeed anyone who saw the performer during this particular era, would have imagined it would turn out that way.

It’s a cassette that I knew about for years long before I ever saw a copy. And even when I got my paws on a copy, I was too scared to try to convert the tracks to mp3 as the item seemed so fragile and ready to snap if played one more time. I’d long ago given up ever featuring the tracks when this e-mail dropped in:-

Hi,

I’ve been a regular visitor to your site for some time now. I recently converted some old cassettes to mp3. One of which was the 1986 Honey at the Core compilation. You may already have it, but if not you’re welcome to a copy of the mp3 link if you’d like to stick the odd track on your site.

All the best

Tom

So today’s post is very much courtesy of Tom Brogan, a writer and actor from Clydebank (a town, famous for decades for its shipbuilding, which borders Glasgow on the west side). You can see from clicking on this website that Tom is a very talented individual who will be appearing in shows at the upcoming Glasgow International Comedy Festival later this month.

Honey At The Core was compiled by John Williamson who for the best part of 30 years has been a hugely important and influential figure in the Scottish music scene. It’s interesting looking at the limited information available on the tape that more than half of the acts featured had, at the time, no record or publishing deal, so it’s clear this was an important stepping-stone in the careers of many.

Tom’s e-mail thought I might want to stick the odd track on the blog. But I’m going to be greedy and showcase the lost of them. A word of warning…..these are taken from a cassette that was in its day fairly lo-fi and of course has been subject to a fair bit of wear and tear, so the sound quality isn’t what you might usually expect on the blog….but I’m making no apologies:-

Side A

mp3 : Wet Wet Wet – Home & Away
mp3 : Wyoming – Ambition
mp3 : Goodbye Mr Mackenzie – Skimming Stones
mp3 : Kevin McDermott – The Right To Reply
mp3 : Deacon Blue – Take The Saints Away
mp3 : Tony O’Neill – Try Again
mp3 : Painted Word – Worldwide
mp3 : Pride – Love Night

Side B

mp3 : The Big Dish – Reverend Killer
mp3 : Hue and Cry – Dangerous Wreck
mp3 : Kick Reaction – Your Favourite Song
mp3 : The Floor – It Really Doesn’t Matter
mp3 : White – Fear Of God
mp3 : Bing Hitler – A Lecture For Burns Night
mp3 : The Bluebells – Guns And Accordians

I won’t waste your time mentioning those who went on to bigger things in the music industry, so instead I’ve tried to find out some more things about the lesser-known names:-

Wyoming : One of the members was Ross Campbell who had previously been part of Sunset Gun (label-mates of Wet Wet Wet) who had released an LP in 1985 and then broke up. I can’t find any trace of Wyoming material outwith the cassette.

Tony O’Neill : If it wasn’t for the fact that I have worked alongside Tony for nearly 20 years I wouldn’t have been able to tell you anything. Outside of his day job he is still singing and performing, nowadays as the frontman to a band that is often hired to entertain at corporate-style events while I’ll always be grateful to him for bringing his then band along to the Mitchell Theatre in Glasgow in September 1997 to play at mine and Mrs Villain’s wedding party. Oh…a little know fact about Tony’s contribution to the tape is that he is accompanied on vocals by a young lady who in later life has become incredibly well-known in Scotland as a newsreader and programme presenter. Click here (although part of that wiki profile features an urban myth…..)

The Painted Word : Around the time of the tape they were regarded as a band ‘most likely to succeed’ on the basis of signing a deal with a Mother Records, a label backed by U2. Nothing however came of this and the band began to fall apart, although vocalist and songwriter Alan McLusker Thompson kept the name going long enough to sign a deal with RCA and release two singles and an LP in 1989, none of which set the heather alight.

Pride : can’t find anything.

Kick Reaction : Another of the label-mates of Wet Wet Wet. As far as I know, they released one single in 1986 and then disappeared from view. I’m fairly certain I caught them live back in the day as they were active on the gigging front

The Floor : can’t find anything.

White : The tale of this band can be found here

Bing Hitler: I saw this guys loads of times doing his stand-up routine in some very insalubrious venues and to incredibly hostile audiences. I never thought under his real name he’d become one of Scotland’s best known exports.

Enjoy!!!!!

Venigmas

CULT CLASSICS – STRANGELOVE by VENIGMAS

This contribution is from a mate of mine called Michael Donnelly. For those of you who haven’t heard of this particular 45, the key to its inclusion might be in the final sentence:-

My pitch would be for Glasgow band Venigmas and their first single Strangelove, backed by Souls on Fire.

Came out in early 80s on the short lived Biba music label, pressed by Mayking Records and was produced by Tony Spath.

At the time of release, the band were :

Owen Paul( McGee) -guitar and lead vocals who would become a one hit pop wonder with My Favourite Waste of Time and brother to Brian McGee, original drummer with Simple Minds. Owen provided some backing vocals on some early Simps recordings and is still gigging as Owen Paul and recently was part of XSM (Ex Simple Minds) with Brian and Derek Forbes.

Martin Hanlin – drummer who later played with The Silencers and is now a producer in The States.

Michael Campbell – bass player from Coatbridge , founder member of Strasse from the Iron Burgh. Michael would give up a career in local government in Monklands to head south with the band to promote the single. Now works for South West Trains and keeps his hand in via a couple of tribute bands in West London. He is my main connection with the band and we remain close friends to this day. He was my best man in 1984 and was a star turn at the wedding reception in Airdrie.

By the time of the release, Frank (Fruit) O’Hare had left the band and would later hitch up with H20 back in Glasgow. (and later work with Mrs Villian briefly). Frank has been involved in a number of band projects in Glasgow over the years and is currently part of folk-rock outfit Celtic Fire.

The single was part of a package; The Venigmatic Principle…..There were 3 elements TVP1 (the record) TVP 2 (a VHS video) and third was an electronic version of both songs on a cassette. All 3 failed to catch the attention of the public and despite getting some airplay via Billy Sloan and Peter Powell ( the latter was part of the same management stable) the single did not chart. The band remained based in London and cut about the pub/club scene for a few years before they went their seperate ways. They played the Marquee, 100 Club and had a brief residency at the Half Moon in Herne Hill.

The band’s strapline was Forever Crowding Mirrors and it all seems rather pretentious now but at the time I was excited because my mate was in London making records……

mp3 : Venigmas – Strangelove
mp3 : Venigmas – Souls On Fire

Enjoy!!

Mull Historical Society

SATURDAY’S SCOTTISH SINGLE (Part 83)

From wiki:-

Colin MacIntyre is a Scottish singer, song-writer, and multi-instrumentalist. He has released most of his work under the name Mull Historical Society

MacIntyre coined the name Mull Historical Society after seeing an advert for an organisation which has since changed its name to the Mull Historical and Archaeological Society. His first album under the name was ‘Loss’ in 2001. It was inspired by the death of his father and his upbringing on the Isle of Mull, and contains samples from a Caledonian MacBrayne ferry and the waves on Calgary Bay in Mull. In 2000-01 MacIntyre played support for Elbow and the Strokes,and in 2002 for R.E.M. and the Delgados.

After ‘Us’ (2003) his record label, Warners, dropped him. ‘This Is Hope’ (2004) was inspired by a two-month visit to the United States, ending in New Orleans, listening to David Bowie, Lou Reed and Television. One of its songs is about the death of David Kelly. The album also includes a recording of his grandmother.

The first release under his own name was ‘The Water’, released on 4 February 2008, and produced by Nick Franglen from Lemon Jelly. MacIntyre had produced the first three albums himself. The last track, “Pay Attention to the Human”, features a poem written and performed by Tony Benn.He wrote the album in New York, his wife’s home city. In 2009, Irvine Welsh used the track “You’re a Star” from The Water in his comedy Good Arrows.

MacIntyre’s fifth album ‘Island’ (the second under his own name) was released in the UK on 6 July 2009. The first single “Cape Wrath” preceded it by a few weeks. In 2012, MacIntyre returned to the Mull Historical Society name for his sixth album ‘City Awakenings’.

This is taken from he debut LP and was the third single lifted from it:-

mp3 : Mull Historical Society – I Tried
mp3 : Mull Historical Society – Some You Win, Some You Lose

Enjoy.

James

THE JAMES SINGLES (6)

Some of you might be confused by the fact that Ya Ho has a catalogue # of NEG 26 and yet is being featured as a later single than What For with its catalogue # of NEG 31.

The simple fact is that Ya Ho was intended for release in September 1987 as a precursor to the release of the Strip-Mine LP. But as I mentioned in the last posting there were serious issues between band and label that led to the delay of the album and as part of the compromise solution the single What For was written, recorded and released in March 1988.

Strip-Mine was eventually released in September 1988 and as part of the promotional push (although that’s not an entirely accurate phrase given the label were not the least interested in the band) Ya Ho was dusted down from the shelf and shoved out on 7″ and 12″.

It’s a really decent song with a hugely catchy chorus that is an indication of what wasn’t too far away….

It’s also a different version than appears on the LP (the 7″ is about a minute shorter in length as well) but it’s the b-sides that many long-standing fans were taken by – there’s a touch of country/americana that was very unfashionable at the time and something that James hadn’t really given a hint of previously (or since)

I’ve only got the 7″ in the collection:-

mp3 : James – Ya Ho
mp3 : James – Mosquito

This was released in a sleeve that had Ya HO +1 on the cover. The sleeve illustrating this piece is from the 12″ which says Ya Ho +3 and here’s the b-sides from that bit of vinyl (courtesy of The Robster):-

mp3 : James – Left Out Of Her Will
mp3 : James – New Nature

Enjoy!!

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds

STAGGER LEE (A re-post from March 2010)

A story appearing in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat in 1895 read:

William Lyons, 25, a levee hand, was shot in the abdomen yesterday evening at 10 o’clock in the saloon of Bill Curtis, at Eleventh and Morgan Streets, by Lee Sheldon, a carriage driver.

Lyons and Sheldon were friends and were talking together. Both parties, it seems, had been drinking and were feeling in exuberant spirits. The discussion drifted to politics, and an argument was started, the conclusion of which was that Lyons snatched Sheldon’s hat from his head. The latter indignantly demanded its return.

Lyons refused, and Sheldon withdrew his revolver and shot Lyons in the abdomen. When his victim fell to the floor Sheldon took his hat from the hand of the wounded man and coolly walked away. He was subsequently arrested and locked up at the Chestnut Street Station. Lyons was taken to the Dispensary, where his wounds were pronounced serious. Lee Sheldon is also known as ‘Stag’ Lee.

Lyons eventually died of his injuries. Shelton was tried, convicted, and served prison time for this crime. This otherwise unmemorable crime is remembered in a song.

The version recorded by Mississippi John Hurt in 1928 is considered by some commentators to be definitive, containing as it does all of the elements that appear in other versions.

A cover with different lyrics was a chart hit for Lloyd Price in 1959; Dick Clark felt that the original tale of murder was too morbid for his American Bandstand audience, and insisted that they be changed to eliminate the murder. In this version, the subject was changed from gambling to fighting over a woman, and instead of a murder, the two yelled at each other, and made up the next day. However, it was the original, unbowdlerized, version of Lloyd Price’s performance that reached #1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 and was ranked #456 on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.

But “Stag O Lee” songs may have predated even the 1895 incident, and Lee Sheldon may have gotten his nickname from earlier folk songs. The first published version of the song was by folklorist John Lomax in 1910 by which time the song was well-known in African-American communities along the lower Mississippi River.

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, by contrast, present an even more violent and an homoerotic version of the tale on the 1996 LP Murder Ballads. It also appears to be set in the 1830s…..

mp3 : Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – Stagger Lee

Over the years, this has become a live favourite on just about every Bad Seeds tour, with subtle little changes making the performance just a little bit different each time. One of the most stunning versions came on the Abattoir Blues tour, where the band were augmented by backing singers from a gospel choir and the results were truly breathtaking:-

mp3 : Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – Stagger Lee (live)

Nearly nine minutes long. And not a single second was wasted.

See you all in hell.

Public Image Limited

SOMETIMES IT TAKES YEARS TO APPRECIATE SOMETHING

1979 was the year that the Sex Pistols enjoyed the most success in terms of the singles charts with three Top 10 hits. But by then they were a parody of a band – after all it was two Eddie Cochran numbers covered by Sid Vicious plus a Steve Jones rocker that we’re talking about.

The spin-off however was that John Lydon could do no wrong, and even some of his strangest recordings were huge hits.

Like this:-

mp3 : Public Image Ltd – Death Disco

There’s probably never been any better description of this record than that penned by Gary Mulholland in his brilliant book This Is Uncool – The 500 Greatest Singles Since Punk & Disco.

Despite turning his back on the Sex Pistols’ audience, John Lydon could’ve farted into a paper bag and made the British charts in 1979. The more he told us to fuck off, the more we loved him, at least, for a while longer anyway. So he pushed it as far as it would go.

This record did just about everything a punk rocker was not supposed to, It was long, It had no shoutalong choruses. It has a disco beat, of a sort (the NME originally announced that it was called ‘Death to Disco’, in a air of punk-reactionary wishful thinking). It was based on a diseased Arabic mutation of Tchaikovsky’s ‘The Dying Swan’ from Swan Lake. And it was about his mother, who was dying of cancer. The result was disturbing, blackly comic, moving, profound and so far removed from anything resembling punk, pop or anything else that it had the desired effect – it got rid of the punks.

Oh, how I struggled with this when I was 16 years old. So much so, that it is one of the few records I bought and then gave away to someone else. I got two old singles by The Jam in exchange, which at the time felt like a bargain.

Fast forward to 1990 and my purchase of a CD copy of the P.I.L. greatest hits compilation and me listening to Death Disco again for the first time in eleven years. By now I knew that great songs didn’t need hooks or memorable, hummable tunes, and that a cauldron of noise in which a screaming vocal fights for your attention alongside screeching guitars over a bass/drum delivery that on its own would have you dancing like a madman under the flashing lights could be a work of genius. I was now able to appreciate Death Disco…..

It is astonishing to realise that this song spent 5 weeks in the charts in the summer of 79, entering at #34 on 7th July, and then taking the #32, #20, #26 and #28 positions thereafter, which means it got at least five plays on Radio 1 (but I’d place a bet there weren’t many more than that unless John Peel gave it a spin).

Mulholland was right. Thanks to Death Disco and follow-up 45 Memories, the punks truly denounced Lydon as an art-rocker. But then again, if the punks had paid closer attention to what he was always saying about his main musical influences, the early P.I.L. material shouldn’t have come as a big surprise.

Here’s yer b-side:-

mp3 : Public Image Limited – No Birds Do Sing

Enjoy!!!!