Monthly Archive

Hurry on over to Kiwi Tapes and avail yourself of a copy of the Able Tasmans’ debut LP for Flying Nun.  Released in 1986, A cuppa tea and a lie down alternates another take on that dynamic far side of the world sound (much discussed in Backed with’s recent Dunedin double series) with more contemplative instrumental pieces, resulting in a satisying whole not unlike the pips and the flesh of the kiwi fruit itself.

Thanks to the ever-alert Kevin P for the pointer.

Reconvening with the same trio of Verlaines as for the last album Over the moon a decade ago, Pot boiler is a hybrid mix of my favourite Graeme Downes record (Some disenchanted evening) and least favourite (Hammers and anvils), though these are relatively slim and ever-narrowing margins in what is a consistently impressive body of work (as described in a recent B/w here).  Back on Flying Nun for the first time since 1990, Graeme appears to have been afforded a budget for brass and strings more or less throughout, rarely the case in days of old, allowing these songs orchestral flesh.  Not that he is one to deploy this fortification in any way but judiciously.

Graeme has returned about as disenchanted as he was in 1990, probably more so, for there’s less solace in making art out of misery in middle age.  The sleeve dedication, along with songs like ‘All messed up’, ’16 years’ and ‘Midlife crisis’, suggest that this is to some greater or lesser extent a break-up record.  Not surprising if you look back over the Verlaines song book, which is riddled with failing romances, or at least relationships viewed in the coldest light of day – but little before has been this sustained or quite this bitter.

Perversely the highlights are the songs least a part of this blood on the tracks.  With lyrics by not by Graeme but by David Kominsky, ‘Sunday in Sevastopol’ portrays that ruined and rebuilt city, and the challenge of writing music for someone else’s words has broken free one of Graeme’s loveliest melodies as well as orchestration with a suitably Crimean feel.  Far be it from me to suggest that the singer is identifying here with Sevastopol’s ravaged and bloody history.  On ‘If you can’t beat them’ Graeme knocks out a great little pop song about relenting and writing great little pop songs, even if, as he confesses in the lyric, those are ones with a musical phrase or two borrowed from 20th century French composer Darius Milhaud.  ‘It’s easier to harden a broken heart (than mend it)’ objectifies the loss that seems to have driven Graeme Downes back in the studio, while ‘Real good life’ closes the album with a trombone-fuelled but typically double-edged high.  The final lines ‘You’re a winner, you’re a shiner / But you’re out of time you’re too damned tired so / Say goodnight’ sound pretty final.

But that would be to read too much into the words of a performer who has always relished the drama he puts into his song writing, for work has apparently already begun on the next Verlaines album.

Earlier this week I saw the best Underground busker I’ve come across in some considerable while.  He was droning on a didgeridoo, with a mike at the mouth of its horn.  Somehow while he blowing on his instrument, he was also adding a quite satanic vocal – pitched between the kind I imagine appears on Laibach’s songs and the ork-ish underworld spewing and grunting of the likes of Extreme Noise Terror and Carcass – deepening the evil of the drone beyond the point of comedy.  A welcome relief from the polished blandishments (or blandished polishments) of 99 per cent of the buskers who put themselves up for and pass the official auditions that Transport for London have required for a licensed slot on one of its sponsored semi-circular pitches since 2003.

I’d so much rather be exposed to those who failed the audition, or the fuck-ups who know there’s no point them attending one, even if they were of a mind to.  Give or take the guy who regularly used to assail me on the District Line with REM numbers.  There’s only one thing more irritating than Michael Stipe singing ‘Losing my religion’, and that’s a Michael Stipe imitator singing ‘Losing my religion’ in your carriage, and no escape possible until Putney Bridge.

As you will have divined from the cover of Too Much Hanky Pantry, the second issue of my fanzine came with a flexi disc by the McTells and Rig Veeda and the Twins.  Paul McTell and his Bi-Joopiter partner in crime Gillian very nobly put up the money for the flexi, despite being not that much less impoverished than I was.  It was also distributed with The Hip Priest and Escape From Bereznik fanzines and was played by John Peel, resulting in a deluge of SAEs and a trickle of demo tapes.  I singularly failed to do anything with these, which is a great shame as I might well have beaten Sha-la-la to Exeter’s Visitors and subsequently gone on to found an extremely successful independent record label, rubbed shoulders with Alan and Noel at the infamous 10 Downing Street party in ’97, stuck the knife into Blair when it all went sour, and blew my ill-gotten gains on a habit which mollified the disappointment of losing out to fresher and more entrepreneurially astute labels on all the groups who might previously have wished to associate themselves with me.  Rehab, gradual dwindling of activity, retirement, death.

In an extremely unlikely conjunction of old and new formats and technology, one of the tracks on the flexi, ‘Virginia M.C.’ is available in video form on YouTube.  The suitably sepia-toned and murky footage (from a compilation video for the housing and homelessness charity Shelter) looks like something from the dawn of cinema, but clearly audible is the electroconvulsive racket made by these pioneers of the international pop underground.

Amazing.  Someone has been moved to make use of the same bad pun that I employed two decades previously.  Perhaps the marketing department at Royston Pickles is headed up by a one-time indie kid who bought my fanzine at a Bodines gig and, if nothing else, its title stuck with him or her.

My thanks go out to Tim Hopkins, who not content with being this blog’s chief chutney scout, is also the singing half of the First Division.  Their ‘On the city’ mini-CD has just been released by Cloudberry (‘Downriver’ mp3 here).  Its three songs offer a celebration of London life which manages to be both impassioned and ambivalent – not an easy trick to pull off.  ‘We don’t need espresso round here / everybody’s wired on the fear’ indeed.

And so in this slow serial presentation of juvenilia as cultural artefact, we come to the second issue of my fanzine.  This variant on the Pantry title was suggested by Mark Fisher, then the editor of Limelight, a fanzine dedicated to XTC, who featured inside Too Much Hanky Pantry, as a subsequent scan will reveal.

It’s evident from the unholy alliance of imagery on the cover that this issue’s battle for my soul was between the situationist interpretation of the world as spectacle and the cutie interpretation of throwaway pop as spectacular.  I thought myself a natural soixante-huitard, for that was the year I was born.  Eighteen in 1986, I was also a natural proponent of throwaway pop.  It’s not giving much away to say that in the end neither won, as you will eventually see if you stick with this cut-and-paste feature.