Monthly Archive

The latest Shivers Inside takes as its cue the Jasmine Minks 1985 single, ‘What’s happening’, one of the most attacking, celebratory, anxious slices of vinyl released by Alan McGee.  A perfect gem of sixties garage pop meeting punk rock at the grass roots of Creation, I took this record as a seventeen year old to my home town’s one ghastly niteclub on a night when for some forgotten and improbable reason they were letting in the likes of me, and twisted the DJ’s arm.  None of my friends had heard the record before, but they all followed me on to the dance floor and orbited the glitter ball like exultant, fiery comets.  Suffolk then was a little further away from the centre of things, and I never saw the Jasmines play while Adam Sanderson was in the group, but this remains for me a rarely matched moment of dance floor joy.

John Carney’s tale recreates those very moments of Creation, giving a unique perspective on the ‘riot’ during the Jesus & Mary Chain performance at North London Poly and the recording of what became the Minks’ ‘Cold heart’ twelve inch.

From Alphabet Soup to E-Z Rollers, the sheer range of the Shivers Inside series (and Fifty Thousand Reasons before it) is dazzling.  One a week without fail or columnist’s holiday, it’s like it used to be listening to John Peel: you never know what’s coming next.  The narrative tone varies from characters who are clearly inhabited to crafted memoir conflated with the vox pop oral history of youth first proposed in the original Generation X.  I’d love to see both series in book form, with two front covers, readable both ways – that would be a double A side to match Shena MacKay’s debut Dust falls on Eugene Schlumberger / Toddler on the run.  What chance of that, John?

Up at Dundry, by St. Michael’s church, whose late gothic tower is given a Victorian echo by the edifice dedicated to Cabot on Brandon Hill down in the city, you can look to the north and see the whole of Bristol spread out beneath you.  The view flattens out what is a hilly city when you’re cycling or walking around it, but it’s good to be able to see the whole of it at once.  Long since an ex-Bristolian, I often imagine myself there, viewing both the space and the time, two panoramas blended into one, governed by squalls of rain and snow, periods of unending grey and, at the last, Redland sunshine.

I went to Bristol for friends already encamped in the south west’s capital, and I went there for music – for the songs those friends sang, for the pop idealism that revolved around Sarah Records, and for the cutting edge of Massive Attack.  These days, it always warms the heart to hear of sounds around which scenes not dissimilar to my own must revolve.  There’s Gravenhurst, whose thunder is quieter than Warp label mates Maxϊmo Park, but much worthier of attention.  I hope something comes of the Gloaming, Benjamin Shillabeer’s follow-up to the Playwrights.  And – with thanks to Tim, one of the broader circle of those encamped friends, for pointing me in the right direction – I can’t wait for the new album by Rachael Dadd.

Part of a sort of Bristolian version of the Fence collective, with an outpost or original base in Winchester, Rachael has previously released three long-players forming a set of songs which seem to evolve according to the musicians with whom she teams up – one song, ‘No sleep on the meadow’ appears on all three.  When the filigree and curlicues of Joanna Newsom’s collaboration with Van Dyke Parks become too much, as from time to time they do, then hers is the voice and the music to go to.  Take Songs from the crypt, that being the space beneath the church in which she recorded with the Missing Scissors, a mini-chamber orchestra of strings, harp, and clarinet.  Her voice is straight and true, within it only the barest tremor, unless she forces loudness, as she occasionally does.  It sits atop the Missing Scissors as a perfect tonal fit.  The orchestration is perfectly integrated and the results are thrilling, especially on the sequence ‘No sleep in the meadow’, ‘The scientist’, and ‘What we wait for’, which in a folkier way is as great as the heights reached by the Rachel’s collective on The sea and the bells or Selenography.

These three and other Songs from the crypt first appeared on Summer / autumn recordings, where it’s just Rachael’s voice, harmonica and guitar – and barking dogs and bird song.  Rachael sings and the birds sing back (let’s forget about the dogs).  It’s hard to call between the simpler and the orchestrated versions, but ‘My wealth that is you’ is such an intimate, domestically beautiful song that it works best here.  Occasionally she guilelessly turns a holiday or the taking of a photograph into song, but mostly they’re poetically conceived, with lines as striking as ‘Ten thousand seagulls circling high / drawing threads around you and I’.

In between Summer and Songs Rachael played as Whalebone Polly with Kate Stables and Virpi Kettu, all three contributing songs.  When Rachael adds her clarinet to the brew, Recording with the window open has something of the legendary Emily of ‘Boxing Day Blues’ and ‘Ocean’ about it, but predominantly it’s Kate’s banjo which sets the tone and somehow americanizes the old Wessex folk harmonising.  It takes a little more listening to come through, but come through it does.

Next up, The World Outside is in a Cupboard, which often is a good place for it to be.  Meantime there’s dates in September and more in November, when the album sees the light of the day.  I confidently predict another post around about then.

Rachael Dadd website
Rachael Dadd MySpace – where currently you’ll find something unexpectedly and fantastically Low-ish recorded with the ‘Missing Mountains’.
Whalebone Polly

Apologies for trying to set the record for the greatest number of post titles utilising Go-Betweens songs, but The Clientele’s cover of ‘Orpheus beach’ can now be heard on the Rare victory tribute to Grant McLennan site (as previously mentioned here).

You might also want to get yourself over to Bradley’s Almanac, where the full Clientele set from Boston Museum of Fine Arts earlier this year is available with a quality of sound that anyone who’s seen them in London will not be entirely used to.  On the subject of covers, there’s a great, concise rendering of Television’s ‘The fire’ for one of the encores.

As ever with Momus, the plot is a woman, but you also get his take on Tony Wilson:

‘It infuriates me when people say (as some have, even on the day he died) that Tony was a bad businessman. He was an amazing - and influential - businessman. Or should we say “anti-businessman”? His contract was a verbal one based on trust. He split profits with the band 50/50. I didn’t sign to Factory in 1982, but in 1986 I signed to Creation and Alan McGee was operating the same deal with his artists, directly inspired by Tony Wilson. No paper contract, a handshake deal, 50/50 profit split. I recorded cheaply, and made profits almost immediately. True to our deal, Creation split them. All my Creation releases made profits. It was enough for me to live on. I signed off the dole in 1989. Thanks, Tony!’

‘Hey everyone have you worked it out?
Who do you think we’re talking about?
If you know him, you love him no doubt
He goes on and on, and yet he says nowt
And he’s so proud of the club
But it’s just a glorified pub ha ha ha
Because he’s condescending and he’s running a joke shop…’
- ‘Joke shop’ by the Wake

One of Caesar’s finest moments, ‘Joke shop’ comes from the Wake’s Make it loud mini-LP, released by Sarah Records in 1991.  The irony of it appearing on the record label that took elements of the Factory approach and aesthetic further than anyone else should be noted.  The song encapsulates an alternative view of the experience of being Factory Records recording artistes, one that might also be shared by the Stockholm Monsters and Section 25.  ‘Joke shop’ goes on to gripe that ‘when he released our four track EP it could not be found in the Megastore’.  History will be kinder to these groups precisely because of their Factory attachment, and we can’t have it both ways – Tony Wilson’s belief in music above business gave us so much in the way of inspiration; there were always going to be casualties.  I like to think that Tony would have enjoyed the bilious humour of ‘Joke shop’ if he ever heard it.

The latest Durutti Column album Idiot savants might have been named with Tony in mind, or several of the musicians he worked with.  Its song titles – ‘Interleukin’, ‘For Anthony’, ‘Please let me sleep’, and ‘Gathering dust’ – suggest that Tony’s illness has cast a pall over Vini’s year.  Themes of elegy and lament also suffused Someone else’s party; much of Vini’s music, really, though he rallied for last year’s Keep breathing.

An earlier ‘Anthony’ can be found on the Sex and death album, released on the short-lived second incarnation of Factory (Factory Too) in 1994.  It’s unusual in having a trumpet (or trumpet sound) played against a typically shimmering Vini guitar solo, giving it more of the air of lift music than most Durutti portraits in sound.  But it catches both the beauty and brevity of a life, and suggests that beyond the bluster and the myth-making, Vini had a true friend in Anthony H. Wilson.

Hurrah!  Alistair’s back in action here in a nostalgic, fictional vein and here, where he’s set me a task.  As this might to some extent help to unmask the shadowy figure variously known as A jumped-up pantry boy and A wild, slim alien, I accept the challenge.  I’ve to set down ‘8 things people don’t know about you’.

1. I dislike, nay abhor, lists in both journalistic and canonical senses and yet I am an obsessive list-maker.  The list of the lists I make would be a long one.

2. At the age of twelve I was diagnosed with Osgood-Schlatter syndrome – dodgy knees, essentially – and was excused from school sports for three years.  Bang went my chances of playing for Ipswich Town.  Yes, I am a frustrated would-be professional footballer as well as frustrated would-be pop star.  Osgood-Schlatter – sounds like a fantasy Chelsea strike force.

I also had a ranula and came very close to being presented as a case study to medical students.

3. My hypochondria is in remission.

4. I was offered the editorship of the jazz section of Venue, Bristol’s listings magazine, one week before I was due to leave the city for good.  I left and the saxophone has never loomed quite as large in my life since.

5. The first group I saw live was the Boomtown Rats at the Ipswich Gaumont.  I recently bought their Best of for £3 to hear again songs which were staples of my pre-teen listening.  They certainly had energy, and Geldof wrote taut, catchy tunes employing relatively intricate arrangements and day-glo lyrical imagery.  My retrospective opinion of them artistically is that they are holed beneath the waterline by Bob’s histrionic vocal braying – rodent by name and asinine by nature.  The CD has an extensive sleeve note by novelist Joseph O’Connor, brother of Sinead, which articulates nicely how a brash gobshite can become number one in a young boy’s heart.

6. I was one of the hundred or so people injured during the poll tax riots around Trafalgar Square in 1990.  Reflexively I headed a brick which had bounced off the side of a police van, still dreaming of playing for Ipswich.  The doctor who treated me at University College Hospital had a flat top and wore a bright yellow tie.  It hurt my eyes almost as much as the brick hurt my head.

7. The book I would most like to read has not yet been published; there may not yet even be a complete draft.  It is the long-awaited third segment of the journey that Patrick Leigh Fermor made across Europe in the 1930s, written from the perspective of age, looking back on a fearless and carefree period of his life with a longing well-disguised by the freshness of the recollection.  A Time of Gifts (1977) and Between the Woods and the Water (1986) contain some of the best prose ever written.

‘Memory encircles [Prague] with a wreath, a smoke-ring and the paper lattice of a valentine.  I might have been shot out of a gun through all three of them and landed on one of its ancient squares fluttering with the scissor-work and the vapour and the foliage that would have followed me in the slipstream.’

But beware, for when reading PLF you are often set adrift on a doldrum-esque sea of digression.  One chapter can maroon you for days.  Yet in others you are zipped along with a zephyr behind you.

8. I am both young and old enough to have an ‘O’ level in Computer science.  My generation is the one which straddles the jump from manual, predominantly sequential ways of writing to the non-linear facility that word processors offer or promote.  Leaving aside form, style, or the knight’s move around an oversize chessboard which determined the chapter sequence in Georges Perec’s Life a user’s manual, we have had to learn about the effect of the physical process on writing twice.  I have moved from pasting pieces of typewritten text onto master artwork to copying text from word editors into WYSIWYG blog generators.  I am participating in the current, moving into the future, but my brain was hot-wired in the past.  There must already be plenty of younger writers who have never written anything substantial longhand.  I wonder if, sick at some point of the keyboard, they will pick up a pen to see how it feels, to see what happens.

I believe I’m supposed to tag five or eight people with the task of continuing this meme but as a diffident novice, I don’t feel I know any other blogger well enough to presume this of them.  So this branch of a chain dies with me.  Not for the first time.