Category Archive

Alistair has been posting live recordings of the triumvirate of groups who recorded for Kevin Pearce’s Esurient label, along with the handbills produced to advertise the shows.  In the absence of the half-dozen long-players that collectively the trio should have gone on to make, these sets formed part of my staple listening for many years. Subsequently whenever I’ve dug them out of the Pantry vaults, they have had the power to remind me of what I believed then – that on their night each was the best band on the planet.  The tapes may now have become a myriad of bits compacted into a file, but they have lost none of their wow and flutter.  Though very different from each other, what all three groups had in common was the ambition of their song-writing and the attacking edge with which they performed; the same edge and attack that led to the creation of their record label.  You knew in your heart that group and audience were the outermost of outcasts, hanging by a finger from the bottom rung of a ladder each were ambivalent about climbing, but these upstairs rooms above pubs – whether Horse and Groom or King and Queen – were the pitch for some of the most intense musical experiences of my life.  So intense that that for sanity’s sake I had to take a break from attending the Esurient shows.  Not being there was of course worse than the frustration I felt in the ineluctable sense when I watched them that these groups were never going to be allowed to rise above the level they had attained in finding someone who had enough belief in their greatness to stage their shows and put out their records.

They were joyful nights by and large but at its most intense, and when you are at your most susceptible to its intensity, there is as much pain as pleasure in music.  That’s what I still hear when I listen to either of the live versions of Emily’s ‘Stumble’ that Alistair has made available to a world which, I suspect, will be about as interested as it was near on twenty years ago.  But you’ll be pleased to hear I’m over it now.  Honest.

• Emily (acoustic, save for the set-closing ‘Stumble’) & Hellfire Sermons, 29th September 1989
• The Claim, 30th March 1990
• Emily, 30th March 1990
• Hellfire Sermons, 23rd March 1990

In the spirit of the fifty word fictions currently being posted by Chan over at A wild slim alien, here are some reviews of exactly that length – tips of the hat to my long-player listening so far this year.  With the odd hand gesture or wrinkled nose thrown in.

The Shortwave Set – Replica sun machine

Seduced by the alethiometeresque cover, but disappointed by the frequency with which the wan, characterless vocals of Andrew Pettitt displace the considerably more elegant singing of Ulrika Bjornse.  Danger Mouse production?  Check.  Van Dyke Parks string arrangements?  Check.  Tunes?  Mostly.  ‘Glitches ‘n’ bugs’, ‘Distant daze’ and ‘No social’ stand out.

Elbow – The seldom seen kid

In the last couple of years Elbow’s records have been surreptitiously stealing their way to the centre of my listening world.  This confirms their place there with its high musicality and wry humour.  Guy Garvey’s songs are lugubrious and beautiful, even managing to reanimate the corny image of the mirrorball.

DeVotchKa – A mad and faithful telling

Romany Mexican indie with Greek or Klezmer undertones, anyone?  Not forgetting occasional forays into chamber and oompah band territories?  Singer Nick Urata looks like a roughed-up cross between Clooney and Morrissey.  One song – ‘The clockwise witness’ – is truly great, throwing off excessive stylistic colouring for an affecting shade of blue.

Carl Craig – Sessions

How long it’s been since I was lost in niteklub rhythm.  For all that Craig is a master of dancefloor dynamics, Sessions ultimately feels relentless, at home or in car.  It’s a relief when the end is near and the unpredictable rhythms of ‘Bug in the bass bin’ take hold.

Four Tet – Ringer

A river whose flow is as relentless as Sessions, but out of the current more is going on.  I wish I had more time to relax into ‘Swimmer’’s patterns; fretted less about the time Kieran Hebden takes to develop his swirls and eddies.  Moments of life that won’t come again.

Neon Neon – Stainless style

After the Rhys-Boom Bip collaboration on Blue eyed in the red room, and Gruff’s loveable Candylion, a disappointment.  In evoking the worst aspects of the eighties, it’s loud, shiny, and as attractive as the boxy lines of the De Lorean car.  But ‘I lust u’ achieves a  Depeche Mode-esque melancholy.

Colin Meloy – Colin Meloy sings live

Just occasionally in these solo performances, Colin Meloy is one note short of a melody.  Otherwise he conveys the best of the Decemberists – as well as Shirley Collins and the Smiths – with songwriter’s conviction, stand-up comedy and helpings of the ‘campfire singalong’ spirit that he declares he is aiming for.

The Last Shadow Puppets – The age of the understatement

The chief northern monkey and his best mate perform a Dukes of Stratosphearic take on Scott Walker (and indeed Brel through Scott’s distorting mirror); in their turtleneck sweaters they’re photo-fit go-getters.  The result is a noirish existential beat group and the second of many reinventions Alex Turner may yet perform.

Goldfrapp – Seventh tree

I lost interest between Black cherry and the insistently decadent electro of Supernature.  Fortunately the duo are aware of the benefits of reinvention and return; Seventh tree is closest in spirit to Felt mountain but with added folk sensibility and pop nous.  ‘Little bird’ floats and ‘Caravan girl’ drives along.

British Sea Power – Do you like rock music?

Like Open season, this is eight-tenths of the way to greatness; if I were eighteen and at my first Glastonbury, I would wave my flag to it.  But it’s as rock as the substance you’d mine were you to tunnel into Mount Blanc, and for me that remains a problem.

Paul Weller – 22 dreams

Press would have you believe that Weller has suddenly emerged from a lengthy spell in rock purgatory.  Truth is he rediscovered his touch over the two preceding sets; you could not get more pastoral than ‘Pan’ on As is now.  22 dreams expands the lightness in familiar and fresh directions.

Portishead – Third

Top bombing from Barrow, Gibbons and Utley.  The avant-garde attack of the electronics is reminiscent of New Order discovering synthesisers.  Next time Portishead can worry less about making it impossible for anyone to countenance putting them on as dinner party listening; this is music with which to greet the apocalypse.

Robert Forster – The evangelist

The healing power of song – I’m so glad RF rediscovered it.  But how could the tone be anything other than elegiac, with fragments of Grant’s last songs among Robert’s lyrical responses to his death.  As we hear those last tunes, Robert sings ‘it was melody he loved most of all’.

Round these parts, the release of new Clientele songs is always cause for celebration, but especially so in the case of ‘Share the night’, which continues to mine the unlikely seam opened up by ‘Bookshop Casanova’, a sound inspired by Alasdair attempting to write a song with the petit four lightness of Spiller’s ‘Groovejet’.  In terms of underlying pick’n’mix, ‘Share the night’ once again manages a blend which in lesser hands would go horribly wrong, but in the Clientele’s becomes an extension of their very particular sound-world – a seaside pier from which to gaze not only at that alien mass of water that is the past but also at the skies of the future, their blues fringed with (a slightly menacing) orange.

Or, as one member of the Clientele Forum puts it, ‘kind of Sister Sledge meets Orange Juice round at Jimmy Page’s house’.  There’s also a little bit of Dylan in there (although as with earlier Clientele songs, it’s strange how you notice the likeness to Bob of Alasdair’s phrasing less with each subsequent listen).  But it’s that confluence of archetypal seventies and eighties guitar styles, chopping up the groove, and chasing the dragon, which brings ‘Share the night’ home more or less level with ‘Bookshop Casanova’.

The That night, a forest grew EP is out soon on Acuarela Records.

Tricky was back performing on Later last week.  Stripped to the waist, his torso covered in hieroglyphics (in addition to the underlying tattoos), and with hair which sprung pineapple-style only from the top of his otherwise shaven scalp, he resembled – presumably was intending to resemble – nothing so much as a native American.  But the war cry delivered by this Iroquois or Apache was called ‘Council estate’.

I could take or leave the music, which leaned a little too much towards the electro-metallic for my taste (though it sounds less like punky Hawkwind in its recorded form), but he remains the convincing, deeply focussed, pugilist performer he revealed himself to be on the same show thirteen years ago.  Then you could almost see inside of Tricky, see the exact point from which the dark articulations of ‘Black Steel’ and ‘Suffocated Love’ were emanating; not because he was being invitingly transparent, but because he was forcibly sucking you in.

Back then I thought he would gradually retreat into the studio, the role of producer being the ideal way to extricate himself from the diminishing returns of his records (though each has had at least something going for it).  But that was to underestimate the force of his character, which subsumes both the natural awkwardness / awkward naturalness of his rhythms and the uncharitable bleakness of his sound.  My guess is that Tricky needs to put himself in the line of fire.  And this time around, with a roots-referencing album entitled Knowle West boy, his battling will be serviced by Domino’s bespoke career rescue service.

This really should have been a Tangents article.

A couple of years ago, Tangents would have been for several reasons the perfect forum in which to rave about Rachel Cohen’s A chance meeting: intertwined lives of American writers and artists (Vintage).  The book explores the moments or points at which pairs or trios of artists’ and writers’ lives intersected or gently touched against each other and in so doing it becomes a celebration of literature, art, photography, and cinema, as well as of the common ideas connecting their forms and the lives of their makers.  Then there is the felicity – almost certainly unknown on the author’s part – of its echo of (the group) Josef K’s finest moment, and its probably known and knowing nod to a Brief encounter-esque sense of romance; for Rachel Cohen’s book is as much about what is left unsaid as about what history records as having been said.  Its acceptance and understanding that writers come in all shapes and sizes, that some write of a life of adventure in snatched moments between one escapade or assignation and the next, and others form adventure from a solitary life of sedentary reflection, is the literary equivalent of the stuff in which Tangents dealt over its ten year history.

In truth, beyond the shared title, there’s not much to link Rachel Cohen’s A chance meeting with Josef K’s ‘Chance meeting’, other than the somewhat deliberate circumstance of individual taste, and the suggestive nature of the song’s lyric, reprising the tone of David Lean’s film and Noel Coward’s screenplay:

‘The red sky behind you
The feeling you’ve been here before
You lived in the past dear
With things we all gave up then
I met you again there
But this time it weren’t for real’

But connections spark and snake in all directions as you read, inevitably going beyond the ones that Cohen herself makes, or gently presents without comment, like Willa Cather meeting Flaubert’s niece, and writing up the encounter in an essay called “A chance meeting”, or the title of the novel written by one of her subjects, W.D. Howells, A chance acquaintance.  Mention of Joseph Cornell will necessarily stir the attention of any fan of the Clientele’s music.  The story Cohen tells is this:

In 1943, Joseph Cornell wrote to Marianne Moore to thank her for some small amount of praise for a collage of his illustrating a story in an arts magazine.  The salutation was held up by an armadillo, armoured animals exerting a fascination for Moore displayed in her poetry, and Cornell wrote that her words were ‘the only concrete reaction I’ve had so far, and they satisfy and affect me profoundly.’  Cornell was voicing the gratitude that a deliberately lonely artist starved of reaction suffers through long years of obscurity.  His inclination was to fall in love with anyone who paid him attention, all the more so because it was someone he admired.  It led to an exchange of gently romantic letters, and to a meeting, though whether strictly speaking you could call it a chance one is debateable.  Of the meeting itself nothing can be said but that Moore saw Cornell’s basement workshop and his boxes-in-progress.  But Rachel Cohen gives us the tenor of their almost exclusively epistolary relationship and describes presents Cornell sent by post (a valentine of worm-work paper and an ancient book of rare animals), treading softly through the facts to offer from inside each story telling perspectives such as her notion that ‘people very often sent things to Marianne Moore in the hopes of getting back the language with which to talk about them, almost as if they were sending specimens to a zoological expert in order to find out the precise genus and Latin name.’

Along with three dozen other such encounters between writers, artists, photographers, thinkers, critics (and Charlie Chaplin), the book also narrates the second and third meetings between Cornell and Marcel Duchamp, which rested on Duchamp answering a phone call by chance.  Duchamp gives Cornell a present, perfect in its symbolism: ‘He had picked up a red-and-yellow glue carton that said “strength” on one side and, admiring the American phrase, had written “gimme” above it and then signed the whole “Marcel Duchamp,” dated Christmas 1942.’

Cohen’s book is full of such anecdotal gifts, but it is also strong on the way art forms and their purveyors rub off on (and up against) each other, and on the artistic urge which drives their creations, their lives, their relationships with the people to whom they are drawn and the ones from whom they retreat.  With its contextualised counsel from one writer or artist to another, it becomes a creative primer, and a caution against the wasting away of talent.

Carefully chosen photographs inform the text.  Richard Avedon’s 1960 picture of John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg and dancer Merce Cunningham is terrific; the laughing trio look like a particularly joyful early 1980s New York indie band.  Cohen’s description of the daguerreotype of Henry James Senior and Junior – ‘disturbing in the ghostly aliveness of its subjects’ – also stands for her own book.  She makes what must have been painstaking research seem effortless, stitching it into the whole so that you barely notice the thread binding the material together, and all without a footnote in sight.  There is empathy with all of her subjects, but not always sympathy –  for example, she has little time for the shellac vanity of Katherine Anne Porter.

Neither does she make more of the connections than there is.  Beyond the intrinsic pleasure she presents readers, she concentrates on her essential job, which is to make them want to go away and read the books of those of whom they were previously unaware; in my case William Dean Howells and Sarah Orne Jewett, the lesser known works of Mark Twain and Willa Cather, and maybe even Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs.  But she still allows me to draw the line at Gertrude Stein, and set me imagining the context of meetings that happened between artists of my own cultural acquaintance.  I’ve often wondered whether – as well as serve coffee to Thomas Mann when working in a dining hall – the young Jack Kerouac really did pass Thomas Wolfe on Brooklyn Bridge in a ‘raging blizzard’, as he reports in Vanity of Duluoz, and whether Wolfe might have taken the young football star for a drink if Kerouac had mustered the courage to speak to him.

In White bicycles: making music in the 1960s Joe Boyd writes of playing Nick Drake to John Cale, and of the amazed and excited Cale going round to see the young singer there and then, a seemingly improbable meeting of the confident Welshman and the diffident Englishman which the very next day resulted in the recording of ‘Northern sky’ and ‘Fly’.  The fleshed-out story behind an easily missed credit on the sleeve of Bryter later.

These connections, both real in terms of lives touching each other, and imagined, in the sense of the artistic repercussions of such encounters, are made of much the same stuff that informs A chance meeting.  And any regular readers of Tangents who have ventured into these obscure parts are guaranteed to enjoy it as much as I did.  Or your money back.

Elif Batuman’s recent piece in the Saturday Guardian’s Review section was unusual, in that music is rarely if ever covered there in and of itself, except as the subject of a book review.  Elif’s in-depth analysis of Vampire Weekend’s leading light, Ezra Koenig, contains within it precisely the same ingredients which render the Vamps intensely irritating to some, namely their preppiness, the associated perception of an air of dominion over both the earth and the sum of its inhabitants’ knowledge, and apparently a blithe disregard for what the world might be like for the 99.9% of its population whose schooling was either non-existent or fell short (seriously or otherwise) of the preppy mark.  But Elif gives much more than a glimpse behind both the hype and the pop surfaces of Vampire Weekend’s music, and in particular brings out Ezra’s pre-emptive refusal to allow his group to be straight-jacketed by the perceptions about their education and upbringing (a refusal I tried to elucidate here).  Elif digs out the following quote from a blog Ezra kept in 2005-06:

‘What is authentic for a guy like me?…  Growing up Jewish, you are presented with three images of your people:

- DESERT NOMADS BUILDING PYRAMIDS

- EASTERN-EUROPEAN SHTETL-DWELLERS WITH BIG BEARDS

- AMERICAN LIBERALS WHO EAT CHINESE FOOD ALL THE TIME

Now do you see where I’m coming from?’

The Vamps have already minted some great pop songs that leak, as James used to sing, down the left side, but Elif Batuman’s article suggests to me that their potential is greater than the goods delivered so far, assuming that they can keep their heads amid all the attention and don’t develop feet of clay.

XTC managed to interpolate themselves among the indie-popsters in the pages of my second fanzine.  But I was extremely harsh on (a) Colin Moulding – why I didn’t have time for ‘Grass’ back then is a mystery to me now; (b) Todd Rundgren, whose music a friend subsequently converted me to with a tape entitled ‘Todd is God’, and who – though his interpersonal skills were evidently lacking – can hardly be blamed for wanting to get XTC to make a great record; and (c) Skylarking in general – only half of it of value?  A letter Mark Fisher was good enough to publish in his excellent XTC fanzine Limelight the same year (1987) was much kinder, though I still had it in for Colin.  I also suggested that ‘Dear God’ – the subject of the latest Backed with - ‘could well be my favourite XTC song… mmm… ever!’ and that it should have been on the LP instead of ‘Earn enough for us’, contradicting what I wrote in my own fanzine about that song.  Teenagers, eh?

Graphically a good idea inexpertly executed.  I would get better at this kind of textual shaping later on.

The Brilliant Corners have not loomed large in my life since those times – whereas hip-hop has.

This excellent piece of (self-)analysis over at Unpopular rather neatly kicks off with a reference to XTC and then moves on to my other subject here: fanzines of the 1980s.  My fanzines, too, were ‘written out of some desperate need to communicate and make connections’, and Alistair was, of course, one of those with whom I connected.

How do you announce your return after a ten year break from releasing records?  Why naturally, you spray your every willing listener with a hail of metaphorical bullets.  Predictably spiky and unpredictably basic, as minimal as early Detroit techno and as compelling as ‘Blue Monday’ – Portishead’s ‘Machine gun’ does much more than its nominal job of whetting appetites for Third.

While discussing ‘Phenomenal cat’ in his balanced and context-embracing take on The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society (Continuum), Andy Miller excavates the following quote by Kinks’ bassist Pete Quaife:

‘I just let the whole flower people, L.S.D., love thing flow over my head.  I just laughed at it.  The trouble is it changed a lot of good blokes, who everybody rated, into creeps.  Instead of expanding minds, L.S.D. seemed to close minds into little boxes and made a lot of people very unhappy.  You still can’t beat going to the pictures, a couple of pints and a fag.  The Kinks all agree that Sunday dinner is the greatest realisation of heaven.’

Which might be thought a somewhat passé thing to declare but for the fact that Pete was saying it in November 1967, directly after the Summer of Love.

Miller’s exploration of Ray Davies’ idealised village green is mind-expanding in the non-chemically induced sense, showing just how out of step with the times the Kinks became in the space of a few short months.  Evidently it didn’t help that the Kinks’ record label, Pye, were also at odds with the times.  Together with last minute changes of heart by the perfectionist Davies, the mockers were put on the record at the moment of its release, and only the passing of time has corrected the silence that greeted it.

Still I wish that ‘Mr. Songbird’ had made the Preservation Society’s final cut, and not the throwaway floweriness of that minor concession to the times, ‘Phenomenal cat’.  But the songs were up against the shifting preferences and inner conflicts of Ray Davies, and so, rather than a perfect LP, we are left with an almost perfect one.

From the deliberately saccharine sweetness of ‘An MP speaks’ to the Byrdsian jangle and drone of ‘Write to your MP today’, McCarthy held firm conceptually.  Across their three LPs and nine singles or EPs, the music jangled and the words jarred.  And then that was that, the concept perhaps inevitably exhausted.  Malcolm Eden resurfaced briefly as Herzfeld while Tim Gane and Lætitia Sadier went on to form Stereolab, staying true to McCarthy’s melodic foundations but introducing Germanic rhythmic influences and a more abstract lyrical palette.  Which is not to say that McCarthy did not progress, for they were always trying out new settings and subjects.

For the second issue of my fanzine, before the release of I am a wallet, Malcolm sent me three sides of foolscap in answer to some deliberately vague prompts – you could hardly call them questions.  All I gave my readers of this was half an A4 page.  Twenty-one years later, it’s time to put this injustice right and, for the benefit of McCarthy fans and anyone who happens to be researching eighties indie-pop and left-wing militancy, reveal more of the contents of that ‘interview’.  In contrast to their image, the letter found them in light-hearted mode.

‘Thank you for your note.  Tim did buy your fanzine at the Razorcuts gig, so we’d read it before.  I’m glad you liked ‘Something wrong somewhere’.  Maybe you think, like some people we’ve met, that everything we do afterwards is a falling off.  It’s unfortunate that a song we wrote in 1966 in two minutes should be praised so highly.

Here are our loves and hates:-

GARY (he refuses to say which he loves or hates.  But he will say that 5 are likes, 5 are dislikes, and 5 depend on his mood.  What a difficult boy.): McCarthy, White Rabbit, Dogmatism, 1969, Blood simple, Jane, John, Malcolm, Tim, money, success, peanut butter, adverts, Five Star.

MALCOLM (Loves): Shelley, Bob Dylan, Samuel Beckett, Marx, Lenin, Freud, Joe Orton, Primal Scream, Shakespeare, The importance of being Earnest, the RCP, Cubism, Trotsky, Liz Fraser’s singing, ‘Panic’.

(Hates) Religion, mystification, bad P.A.s, moral panics, pop stars, landlords.

JOHN: (Loves): With the Beatles, The Jam: A beat concerto, William H. Cosby (comedian, dancer, doctor), the United States of America (the country), the Temptations, the Jackson 5, Marvin Gaye, J.D. Salinger, Colin MacInnes, Harpo Marx, Stephen King.

(Hates): White rock historians (the Presley, Beatles, Velvets, Joy Division theory), Jean-Luc Godard, designer violence (i.e. films Gary likes).

TIM: (Loves): The Byrds, David Lynch films, existentialism, Syd Barrett, Pop Art and art pop, ALF, Richard Dadd, absurdism, illogic and surreality, Dylan’s 3 electric LPs 1965-66, 1960s Rolling Stones and Beatles, green suede jackets, criminal history, Josef K, Felt, Primal Scream, Terry Thomas, Peter Cook, Psychocandy.

(Hates): work, rationality, computers, illness, logic and practicality, justifying your own actions, triviality, predictability, patriotism, insurance, meat, flares, bad haircuts, exercise, (most) comedians, religion, reactionaries, conservatism.

Q. ‘Sometimes bitter words’: [Malcolm] I don’t feel in the least bit bitter as a person, in fact I’m quite optimistic generally.  But there are a lot of ideas, viewpoints and arguments around that I object to strenuously, and in many of our lyrics I’m trying to combat them, ridicule them, do them down.  The nastiness of the lyrics isn’t I think attributable to me, to my being a horrible person, but to the nastiness of bourgeois, reactionary ideas.

Q. ‘Red sleeping beauty’: [Malcolm] The chords are E and A, and the odd F.  It’s a very old song, two or three years old.  It’s the only one of our old songs that we are willing to play nowadays, we’re sick to death of the others.  I was reasonably happy with the way the song turned out on the record.  The only thing is that, being on an independent label, we can’t afford to record in a very good studio.  We’re not intending to bung synthesizers and horn sections on our records if we signed to a major, but the overall sound of an expensive studio improves the quality of the record dramatically.  I think the songs we recorded in the BBC studios (the John Peel session) came out much better than anything we’ve done before or since, simply because they were better studios.  Those songs sound more or less how I imagined our songs should sound, whereas the songs on ‘Red sleeping beauty’ and on the next 12” [‘Frans Hals’], although fab, were not exactly as I’d imagined them.

Q. ‘Gary’s drumming’: [Gary] I have found drumming to be a singularly unrewarding pastime, mainly because songwriters in general think drummer = lobotomy.  However I must admit that nature has seen fit to bless most drummers with a below average intelligence just as it blesses guitarists and songwriters with an above average ego, and bassists with a very average style of dressing.  Anyhow for influences I cite Cesare Borgia on ‘Red sleeping beauty’ and Ruth Ellis on the forthcoming ‘Frans Hals’.

Q. ‘Big live sound’ [Tim] None of us weigh more than ten stone.

Q. ‘Wolfhounds’ [Tim] Currently recording their first LP for Decca.  ‘More songs about shrikes and warblers’.  A savage exposé of trash ornithology produced by former Tweets’ (‘The birdy song’) bassist. (True!)  ‘… makes the Byrds sound like the Eagles.’

Q. ‘Next’: [Malcolm] John buys all his jumpers there.  That’s a fact.

[Malcolm] The gigs you’ve seen us at we think were awful I should warn you.  Every ten years we deliver a stunning performance.

Barking is ugly ugly ugly.  We attended Billy Bragg’s school.  And the Tremeloes’.  Not at the same time of course.  It is a miracle that such a nice bunch of lads should have been produced by such a rat hole.  (The Tremeloes I mean.)’

• More substantial 21st century interviews with Malcolm Eden and Tim Gane, conducted by Tommy Gunnarsson for Penny Black Music
• An unreleased McCarthy song (‘Who will rid me of these turbulent proles?’) and several live Wolfhounds tracks
• McCarthy live mp3s
• McCarthy lyrics archive
• McCarthy MySpace
• Backed with on the Manic Street Preachers’ cover of ‘Red sleeping beauty’

A Peel listener with archival tendencies, I was always going to be a sucker for The Peel sessions, Ken Garner’s updated version of his earlier book In session tonight.  The story of how the sessions developed within the BBC is fascinating, and producers like Peel’s first at Radio One, Bernie Andrews, emerge from the background as stubborn, innovative heroes without whom Peel could not have had the impact he did.  It also makes you fully understand why, despite the protection afforded him by Andrews and John Walters, Peel always feared for his airtime at Radio One, his standing balanced against any new controller’s desire to make their mark by tinkering with schedules in which Peel stood out like a sore thumb.

It takes a little over a hundred pages to list the 4,400-odd sessions, personnel and track listing and all.  Your eye alights at every turn on great ones.  Laugh’s two very different sessions recorded less than eighteen months apart, before and after their Sensation number one reinvention.  The second Last Party, the one with ‘The full English breakfast’ and ‘Purple Hazel’.  The first P.J. Harvey.  Sudden Sway’s inventive non-musical interventions.  You cannot put a price on the oddities that Peel presented to formative minds.

Then there are those I might have heard but cannot recollect, like the second Autechre, for which the entry states that Peel, presented with an untitled session sheet, made up the titles himself: ‘Gelk’, ‘Blifil’, ‘Gaekwad’ and ‘19 headaches’.

Of particular interest are the mythic times before I became a Peel listener.  What are the sessions recorded by the Kinks in 1967, ’68, ’72 and ’74 like?  Also in 1968, the first of a succession of Bridget St. John sessions went before the fearsomely crusty and anachronistic institution of the BBC’s audition panel, who commented that it was ‘pretentious rubbish… her guitar playing is inaccurate and uninspired and her voice dull.’  Despite this, Bridget got a ‘borderline pass’ and so her session was broadcast.  From the early eighties, the first James session, and a subsequent and evidently much less well-known Fire Engines session in contrast to the much lauded and traded first.  ‘Young tongues need taste’, ‘Qualitamatic’, ‘Produced to seduce to’ and ‘The big wrong time’ were first broadcast on 23 November 1981.  On titles alone, it ought to be as renowned as the first, but interviewed by Innes Reekie in 2005 for a great but never formally published article, Davy Henderson said, ‘Around the time of the second John Peel session, we were shit…  Our compass was a fake…  We should have trusted our internal magnets…  We should have trusted our inability.’

So is Davy right, or does the music deliver on the promise of the titles?

Counter-intuitive it may be, but rather than hearing another paean to your favourite group it’s often more rewarding to read about why someone likes music with which you have no familiarity, that you are not interested in, or even actively dislike.  It challenges your preconceptions, widens possibilities, enlarges your rationale for listening to music.  Do it regularly enough and preconceptions are minimised and maybe even disappear.

When I came across Continuum’s 33 1/3 series, the title I was initially drawn to was Let it be, Colin Meloy’s memoir built on the raw and rugged substance of that album by the Replacements.  I’ve never knowingly listened to the Replacements, and have only ever been mildly inclined to seek them out, despite a certain fascination with their fucked-up mystique.  I was keen to learn more, and as curious to see how they were important to Meloy, whose group the Decemberists I have listened to as much as any since Alistair first mentioned them in dispatches on Tangents.  How great it was to work my way through the songs of a writer whose twin fascinations were historical narrative and life on the ocean, putting these to work against a well-defined musical sensibility to say more about the 21st century than anyone else seemed to care to do.

As it turns out, few of Colin’s pages go into any detail about the actual sound made by the Replacements on Let it be, and nor does he go out of his way to say exactly why he was attracted to the music of the Replacements rather than that of x, y or z, save for a sense of identification; that being from Minnesota, the ‘Placemats’ must have endured the same frozen winters and backwater culture as the young Colin in Helena, Montana.  They could be the band making the glorious racket in the garage down the street.

Colin’s story is all about agency and context – cultural, familial and social.  He writes about how a love of music arises out of the ashes of childhood, how in adolescence that love becomes so engulfing that it blinds you to everything else, and how slowly but surely you determine that you must become a participant.  At some point along the line you establish in your mind a connection with a band that are where you want to be.  It doesn’t matter whether this connection is real or illusory; what matters is that it’s conceivable.

Colin might have taken his musical rites of passage further, to the point where he has established a fully-functioning band, rather than end it arbitrarily at the point when he dares to dance aged fourteen with a girl in a bar.  But his take on Let it be captures something infrequently documented as well as it is here – the girl- or boyhood dreams, influences and life of the mind of a future musician.  And as with the gliding narrative lyricism of his songs, he gives the reader enough to generate the universal from the specific, letting us draw our own conclusions and parallels.

Certainly I’ve a greater curiosity to hear Let it be having read Colin’s memoir, but its immediate effect has been to send me back to the Decemberists first three albums, reflect again on the slight disappointment of the fourth, The crane wife, on which their lightness of touch deserts them from time to time, and hope that this is restored on the fifth.  While we await that, there’s the self-explanatory Colin Meloy sings live! to look forward to.

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.

For his BBC 4 programme Pop! What is it good for?, Paul Morley asked Simon Armitage to dissect the lyric of ‘This charming man’, one of six songs chosen as a handful to illustrate the greatness and (im)perfection of pop (the others were ‘Can’t get you out of my head’, ‘Ride a white swan’, ‘Lola’, Adam Faith’s What do you want’ and ‘Freak like me’) – a first draft for the slot on Desert island discs that he may never quite receive as due reward for years of service to the BBC.

Armitage described the line ‘this man said it’s gruesome that someone so handsome should care’ as ‘glittery and swanky and luxurious’.  Sadly the lit crit stopped short of the borrowed line which gives this blog its title, so issues of quotation and allusion weren’t discussed.  I chose the line because it extends the sequence of titles of fanzines I wrote in the eighties, but also for something like the same reasons PM chose ‘Ride a white swan’ – for the transformational impact it had on my life.  I can’t claim that A jumped-up pantry boy is consistent with any of those three adjectives, but hey, even a writer with spartan tendencies has time for a little glittery luxury in his blogging life.

PM’s enthusiasm for his subject, spinning off from the six chosen songs into many others, made me want to catch up with Words and music: a history of pop in the shape of a city, the book in which I guess some of these ideas were first espoused: pop as ‘a sensational metaphysical adventure’; ‘all great pop songs are great because you can imagine them sung by Elvis’ (a notion backed up by a half-decent impersonator giving three of the songs a go).  But he could have tried a little harder not to engineer the subject of the Art of Noise being brought up if he was going to be so bashful about it.  Nevertheless the programme is well worth catching via one of the many repeats BBC 4 content gets (the next is 1.10 a.m. on Sunday 13th January) or the BBC’s iPlayer.

I networked hard in the first issue of Pantry, 1986-style, reviewing – linking to – twenty-odd fanzines, all of which I would have laboriously written off for enclosing the obligatory SAE and coinage, following up reviews in other fanzines, the music press, and John Peel’s frequent plugs on his Radio One show.  The graphic limitations of the page itself stop me from offering it as a scan here, but the names are a treat:

Are You Scared To Get Happy?
Anarchy In Wonderland
Adventure In Bereznik
Baby Honey
Bandits 1-5
Big And Bouncy
Bludgeoned
Coca Cola Cowboy
Cursing This Audacity
Debris
Diana Rigg
Hand On Heart
Hello! Good Evening, And Welcome
The Hip Priest
Hungry Beat
The Legend!
1965 Kitchen
Pure Popcorn
Repose
Simply Thrilled
Skipping Kitten
Snipe
Trout Fishing In Leytonstone
When Saturday Comes

It wasn’t always the case that a fanzine’s name was the best thing about it.

Among the editors of these mostly forgotten screeds I can count:

One editor of Smoke: a London peculiar
One publisher of Plan B
One member of Teenage Fanclub
One Soup Dragon (as I recall)
One June Bride
One transvestite
At least one anarchist, possibly three or more
One Mancunian cultural commentator
One reviewer of computer games
One freelance sportswriter
And two folk with Kentish connections who remain very good friends to this day.

As for the others… I wonder what became of them all.

In the final part of Krystof Kieslowski’s Three colours trilogy, Red, there is a dazzling opening sequence in which the camera follows red cables from the starting point of a phone call made in Geneva through switches and under the sea to England, only for the call to be rebuffed at the last by the flashing red light of a busy telephone.  It’s imagery that ‘The wires’ by Rachael Dadd from her new album The world outside is in a cupboard brings to mind.  Wires are also what puppeteers use to manipulate their creations – another recurring theme of Kieslowski’s films – but here I think we’re talking about wires and distance, like the ‘Lines running north’ that the young Del Amitri sang about.  ‘The wires’ has all the elements that go to make up the best of Rachael Dadd’s songs – the trueness of the singing voice, the rising, reaching melody and harmonics, the gentle dynamics which occasionally engulf you, and unsparing personal observation.  In its execution, though, this song alone establishes a connection to the way Minnesotan trio Low make their music – there is that same purity of purpose.

Listening to ‘The wires’ I can’t help thinking of Red; listening to the rest of The world outside…, I can’t help thinking of a record called Blue, a record I admire more than like, for all the listening I’ve given it.  But The world outside… is a warmer kind of self-portrait than Joni Mitchell’s, though it travels from January blues to the autumnal end of a day’s work, from fear and bravery to a state of golden-maned happiness.  The last is a token of an engagement with the natural world that belies the album’s title, for throughout, there’s a weight of animal threatening to burst out of the cupboard, or into the world.  Not unconnected with this, there are moments – ‘And when I cannot dream’ is one – where The world outside… comes close to the mellifluous, pain-tinged joy that Tim Buckley perfected on Blue afternoon.

But Rachael Dadd is obviously not in thrall to the blues of Tim or Joni any more than she could be to the red of Kieslowski.  Though her music occasionally tips its hat to tradition, hers is folk music which is not mired in the past.  It has the quality of, if not timelessness, then the closest any of us mortals can come to that, either as listeners or music-makers.  She shows no sign of the quirkiness which undoes some who do things the Fence Records way.  The world outside… may not be pop in its immediacy, but it is immediately affecting.  Like her recordings with Kate Stables and Virpi Kettu as Whalebone Polly, it doesn’t necessarily imprint itself on first listen, but instead floats and flies free.  Listening brings its rewards.  Songs like ‘Caught in the weight’, ‘Hawk for a heart’ and ‘The party’ share unassuming beginnings, but where they travel melodically and harmonically remains surprising.  Her music retains the simple acoustic warmth of previous releases, though added now are loops and rumbles of piano, while ‘Ships’ has a metronomic beat and ‘Bold bear’ an electric guitar; but at root there is a familiar and welcome sense of space.  To my ears Rachael Dadd is more Leaf than Fence, with a musical sensibility as fine-tuned and essence-seeking as Colleen, although the latter is a composer of quite distinct minimalist instrumental pieces.  There is even a resemblance between the artwork for Everyone alive wants answers and The world outside is in a cupboard.

Rachael Dadd never pretends to be something she isn’t.  There is no bar code on this CD.  In as far as it’s possible for it to be so, this is music unaffected by the commercial processing of the music business.  You can’t get The world outside… on Amazon (instead you need to go here, from where it’s but a short hop to the Hand – Rachael in combination with kora wiz Wig Smith – whose excellent Berries from the rubble EP is also well worth hearing).  That’s alternately frustrating and partly why the music of Rachael Dadd appeals as much as it does.  I hope her audience continues to grow, slowly but surely.

A lot has been made of the very particular urban trajectories that the music of Burial typifies and soundtracks, but Untrue sounds as reflective of the surroundings in which I listen to it as I know it must of the night bus home across the city from a steaming Hackney nitespot.  And those are surroundings completely free of a coating of grime, let alone decades or centuries of the stuff: driving in the morning dark on a narrow, winding and little-used country road out in the shires, the mist rising from the great pond, a startled deer caught in the headlights before it canters up the embankment through which the road burrows.

And it would probably sound as great on headphones and the 2:00 a.m. walk home from the local town’s one night club through residential streets sleepy with enchanted dreams as an hour or two later on a journey through the atria and ventricles of the city.

The common thread is darkness, night as thick as blood entombing the beats and the bass.  It’s hard to imagine wanting to play Burial in the middle of a sunny day, and if you did, it would surely evaporate into nothingness, like a vampire caught short, napping, out.

Only the sampled snatches of young singing voices, as melancholic in their way as anything on Hatful of hollow, ground Burial’s music in time and space.  But otherwise Untrue – lighter than its seriously dark predecessor – remains sufficiently free to adapt to its environment; to adapt to a world away from the neighbourhood in which it was formulated and recorded.  And the mind is capable of infinite re-imaginings, plausible stories for why art works out of the context in which it was created, and in the context into which it has been brought.

Again from Lemon Meringue Pantry, a page which as it emerges blinking into the bright light of the digital age should now become a primary source for all historians of the flexi disc.

See also ‘Disposable pop: a history of the flexi disc’.

You’ll have to excuse the embarrassing assertion about the Pastels.  The affair didn’t last long, but I confess I did play the ‘Million tears’ 12 inch half a million times.

Shame the Shamen didn’t make the flexi chart that featured on the following page.  Their Wayward Wednesday in May affair dates from well before they encountered ‘Ebeneezer Goode’; both ‘Four letter girl’ and ‘Stay in Bed’ are classic examples of moody eighties psychedelia which at the time made them seem like the negative to the positive of the Jasmine Minks.  Acid or mushrooms rather than ecstasy, I guess.

Let’s give you that all-important flexi top ten:

1. The Oinklettes – The Oink song (Marc Riley in disguise and as part of a team launching a new comic called Oink!)
2. The Chesterfields – Nose out of joint
3. The Jam – Boy about town
4. The Pastels – I wonder why
5. The Soup Dragons – If you were the only girl in the world…
6. The Laughing Apple – Wouldn’t you
7. A Riot Of Colour – Skink (‘While you were out, I changed my address…’)
8. The Shop Assistants – Home again
9. Laugh – Take your time yeah!
10. XTC – Looking for footprints

Indie kids can’t win.  On the one hand we have Sasha Frere-Jones castigating their unfunky whiteness, and failing to spot the Motown motion that coursed through certain of Arcade Fire’s pre-Funeral recordings and that album itself (for example the second half of ‘Wake up’), not to mention not mentioning the Haitian roots of Reginé Chassagne, Win Butler’s being the grandson of swing-era jazz guitarist Alvino Rey, and their recording of Ary Barroso’s ‘Brazil’.  Frere-Jones’ article says more about his taste than it does about the complicated inter-relationship between black and white music, and let’s not forget, as Sasha seems to, between that of all the other colours under the sun.

On the other hand, when a group of white origin does show a strong tendency to incorporate music of black origin, we have Pitchfork saying that Vampire Weekend – whose indie-ness is faintly disguised (or enhanced?) by their preppiness – ‘rip off African music, for crying out loud.’

A pox on the homepages of both Frere-Jones and Pitchfork.  I know the issue is complicated by history, slavery, racism, imperialism, and Paul Simon, both in the States and in this country, but can we not just celebrate and accept a group’s enthusiasm for the music of other cultures?  It surely does more good than harm, and there are other ways to see it than as blood-sucking (sorry).  In any case it goes both ways and most grow up subject to a multiplicity of cultural influences now, so why wouldn’t we wear those trousers with that hat?  And if white boys and girls want to be more or less monocultural white boys and girls, then that’s fine too, just so long as their alleged lack of syncopation is not borne out by a predilection for goose-stepping.  In an age of exponential cross-fertilisation, it can make sense to return to the original flower, see how it stands up to the light and heat of the 21st century.

But Vampire Weekend take the opposite tack.  There’s a joy in this music that mixes the carefree freedom of the college boy with the exuberance and intricacy of African guitar playing, over a foundation of classical music education.  The result is much less obviously preppy than, say, Sufjan Stevens.  Owing to familiarity, I hear in ‘Mansard roof’ the jugular jangle of James’ ‘Hymn from a village’ recast against the rackety beat of Acoustic Ladyland rather more than I do Kanda Bongo Man or King Sunny Ade.  Listening beyond this seven inch, it’s clear that African music (or at least some of its many geographic sub-divisions) is an inspiration to Vampire Weekend in the best sense.  Though if you flip the record over ‘Ladies of Cambridge’ (a.k.a. ‘Boston’) confirms more than passing acquaintance with both independent pop and the courtyards and lawns of privilege, and perhaps rooms at Harvard which may well have echoed to the sounds of the Go-Betweens if Jessica Pavone’s playing is anything to go by, for she recasts Amanda Brown’s fiddle-playing from ‘Casanova’s last words’ in what is an equally spirited romp.

But how to explain why Columbia college boy Ezra Koenig has the same pickled, imperfectly soulful drawl as Amy Winehouse?  And even, on ‘APunk’, manages to sound like the vocodered version of Cher?  Could it be that Vampire Weekend are less easy to read than coverage so far has suggested?  There’s plenty in their music that’s not so definite, harder to trace, even as they toss out red herrings, deliberately exposing themselves as uncool (from a British perspective) by referencing Peter Gabriel and (from a US perspective?) Jackson Browne.

I think it’s safe to say that if Peelie were still alive, they’d have had a session by now, and that he would be as keen as I to hear their full-length debut come early 2008.

Having finally read the responses to Rockcritic’s group Q&A, there’s a fair degree of both alignment and contrast from a wide-ranging bunch of music blog characters, and a typically astute summation of the issues by Tom over at Freaky Trigger.

The ‘individualist mindset’ of music bloggers identified by David Moore (and many others) must be balanced against the recognition that people have offline lives.  I guess I have to plead guilty to such a mindset, but there’s plenty that could be said on another day about why someone is more loner than communer; in any case it’s a complex choice and the loner’s relationship with the world is not set in stone, varying with time and age.

The thing about conversations is that you do have to be able to set aside time to have them in both the online or real worlds.  Online I very rarely have that time, and in any case am too slow-witted and deliberate to zap out comments like a (hip young) gun-slinging bartender creating work-of-art cocktails.

As with music, so with writing about music – cross-fertilisation, amoebic cell-division, bacterial reproduction, and whatever biological process most resembles pick-and-mix have led to a proliferation of approaches, styles and perhaps conversely increasingly insular micro-communities.  Conversation is easier when you know who you’re conversing with.  There’s probably more linkage and conversation now than there was back when music blogging was about to gain critical mass, it just looks smaller set against the millions now blogging or plugging away.

Obviously, in terms of the exchange of comments that is the hat-tip of blogworld, if you say (as I did) ‘I wish I had more time to respond to what I read on the blogs of others’ your own blog-owning readers are going to think, well, neither do I on yours, Pantry boy; save perhaps for when you have said nice things about me.  Hey ho.  The issue cannot be forced.

I took newsstand to mean newspapers, at least one of which has taken on board blogging both as a means of two-way communication (online at least) and stylistically – the Guardian’s G2 section is full of first person commentary and only its consistency (though not necessarily its interest) sets it apart from the blogosphere.  Significantly I didn’t give a thought to the music publications I browse and occasionally buy in HMV.  I nodded my head at David Moore’s ‘The number of times I’ve learned anything or even particularly enjoyed myself in front of a printed piece of music journalism in the past few years is very low.’  While there are some excellent writers working for the British music monthlies, they do seem constrained by both the limited types of formats available to them and the inherent limitations of each format – the interview, the career retrospective.  Is that what readers want, or is it simply a scaredy-cat marketing perception of what they want?  The old lags on rotation on the covers would suggest the latter.  As for album reviews, only a few releases are given space in which a writer can range and explain and surprise.

Carl Wilson’s point about blogs having created an olde NME-style buzz effect in North America is interesting.  Makes me want not to add to the noise about Vampire Weekend, despite having immediately taken to them in a way that seldom happens during the most recent of my MySpace trawls for fresh sounds.

As per usual, I’m turning up for the match just as everyone is streaming away from the ground.  In fact I am almost certainly the night watchman, employed to keep an eye on the stadium when no-one else is around.  Nevertheless, I should capture my responses to these questions now, more or less at the outset of my blogging life, particularly as the answers have a bearing on this blog’s chronological reproduction of pages from my fanzines of twenty years ago.  I’m keen to map the common impulse which led to both forms of activity.  In terms of blogging per se, I’m answering without having read in detail the responses of others or subsequent commentary – that I’ll do when I’ve finished, and maybe signal which thoughts most and least accord with my own.

These questions appeared on rockcritics.com as a sort of a symposium.  I have never thought of myself as a rock critic, even during the brief spell that I could realistically have been described myself.  Both words in the term are limiting.  I prefer to think of myself as a music writer, or rather a writer about music.  Or perhaps to refine further, I’m a writer who happens to spend a fair amount of time on the subject of music, often more time than I think I ought.

1. Talk about your blog and how it has evolved over time. Why did you start to blog? What sorts of things do you do on your blog?

Evolution is obviously a question for the future.  I started to blog in anticipation of the end of Tangents, specifically to continue my Backed with series but also guessing that I’d need a space to let loose whatever seemed to have some letting-loose merit and potential.  Having written for Tangents since it was a paper-based entity, I had come to depend on it as a means of writing about the music I loved, but increasingly I was taking that means for granted and not being moved to file copy.  I very quickly came to feel liberated by Alistair’s decision to burn Tangents down, and would admit to having felt a little hemmed in there by the voracious tastes of the prodigious talents more regularly pouring forth their words.  I thank him both for the ten plus years of web space and for giving me the (unintentional) gentle shunt / kick up the arse.

I definitely need a space in which to express myself.  I’ve more or less always had one.  I would have felt lost and defeated without my three blogs, whose inception coincides with a surge of creative energy that for personal reasons had gone astray for two or three years.What I seem to be doing both with A jumped-up pantry boy and B/w is capturing the musical past and looking at it from the perspective of now.  Allied to this are the scans from my fanzines, which inevitably set me thinking about how I was then and what I think today.  My eighteen or nineteen year old self would be aghast at some of the things I’m saying about him.

With three blogs, I worry about not spending enough time on each, and losing momentum with one or other of them.  But each has a different purpose, and keeping each plate spinning prevents any of them from becoming boring (at least to their writer).

Here at A jumped-up pantry boy, I would like to be spending more time writing about contemporary music (of as many persuasions as I can muster, certainly beyond the independent guitar pop I major in) than I currently do, and increasingly I hope that I will, though it’s so easy to be nostalgically seduced by a reissue from twenty years ago.  But I like to think that it’s not impossible for a new group to better the songs of, say, the Go-Betweens and the pleasure they have given me.  In this I may be deluding myself, because of the crust that taste and age build up around you.  It is no longer possible for me to empathise completely with the worldview of twenty-somethings, but it is only (on an ongoing basis) this yet-to-be-jaded generation who stand a chance of besting Forster and McLennan.  Yet to be jaded, yet to be set in stone, yet to allow reality to diminish their creative ambition and belief.

Much as I admired John Peel and his never diminishing appetite for the new, I always had the sense that it was possible for him to continue as he did because he never became emotionally or intellectually attached to the vast majority of the music he played on the radio.  Had I ever become as thorough a DJ as John, I’m sure I would have given up in the face of the weight of it all and in the blink of a broadcasting eye, in comparison with his longevity.

So although I spend a lot of time listening to the new, it takes something really special to tear me away from the past and write about the present – The Clientele, Rachael Dadd and the Wraiths convince me to do so, while, for example, Battles, Burial, Cold War Kids and Candie Payne do not quite.

2. Is your blogging voice or the material you cover in your blog different than the voice you use or the material you cover in your professional music writing? If so, how?

I can’t describe myself as a professional for the reasons given in the preamble.  If we stretched the notion of professional writing to include what I did for Tangents, then as yet the voice and material has altered only slightly and not significantly.

On the other hand the blogging form does not seem to me to sit easily with the kind of in-depth writing I’m undertaking over at B/w and in particular the competing distraction provided by seductive links off to other more glamorous, entertaining or provocative worldviews.  I think I am still working my way to a finished blogging style.  I hope my posts will become more judiciously concise and frequent.

3. What are your thoughts on comments boxes in blogs? Do you or don’t you allow them, and why?

I positively welcome them, and at this early stage they are sufficient to create little flurries of excitement.  It doesn’t happen here yet – possibly because stylistically I close posts and argument off too readily – but the refinement that can be arrived at when comments don’t simply comprise of winks and in-jokes (fair enough in itself if the blog acts as a place to have pub-banter when not in the pub) is often impressive.  I wish I had more time to respond to what I read on the blogs of others – so much of it merits engagement, encouragement, hair-splitting, stand-taking.

4. Is your blog a forum to converse with or critique other writers? If so, please recount one (or some) of your more memorable blog dialogs or critiques.

It may become so.  More conversation than critique, I guess, although I welcomed the linking nod I got from Simon Reynolds having appraised Rip it up and start again.  Because I also write fiction, I don’t spend my whole creative life celebrating or dissecting music, and I think I would tend to bow to those that do on matters of critical principle.  I mostly want to share thoughts about great music and would agree with anyone who suggests that is a problematic endeavour in a world packed to the gills with music-makers, listeners and writers.  No-one should care that I have anything to say, but I aspire to saying it in a way which for the reader contains elements of idiosyncrasy, recognition, empathy, neurone-sparking potential.

5. Would you agree that the back and forth conversational aspect of the music blogosphere has died down somewhat in the last few years? Any theories as to why?

I don’t think I can answer the first part of the question having only followed it sufficiently closely since so recently becoming a music blogger myself.  Can anyone keep track of everything that’s going on?  At every moment a new young, middle- or old-aged blogger is starting out on their monologues or conversations.  Like most things, there will surely be waves of activity – some spurred by creative developments, others by technological advances – with certain relative constants.  I suppose for me Freaky trigger and the ILX boards provide a sense of those constants, even though I have never participated in either and rarely have a moment to look beyond the FT blogs to the boards.

6. A lot of music bloggers tend to start out with a lot of energy, then drop out altogether. You have kept at this for a while–what keeps you going, and are you ever tempted to just throw in the towel?

Obviously six months is not long, but when I start something I tend to want to see it through to the end of its natural life.  And as music has no end, and nor does writing about it, I reckon on keeping on keeping on, subject to occasional bouts of futility-induced depression.

I am definitely also subject to the (obsessive-) compulsive quality of blogging but my life aside from writing is sufficiently forceful that I’m obliged to do less than I otherwise might.  The addiction contains in it both noble and ignoble cravings (rather like fanzine writing, hence the reproductions) – you just have to try to obey the noble drive and resist as far as possible the ignoble.  So I don’t envisage needing to wean myself off of it anytime soon.  If I can keep blogs and life in balance, I think I’m here to stay.  The only thing I can see outside of war or apocalypse that that would make me reappraise the worth of continuing would be if the stats dropped to zero.  I need to do it, but I also need to feel that I am not simply speaking to myself, a straightjacketed madman in a white cell.  I take on board the risk that how I express myself may be turned by the existence of an audience greater than one.  I still have some small belief that writing ultimately attains the readership it deserves.

7. Do you think music blogs have any serious impact on record sales, or on how music is covered in newsstand publications?

I suspect negative impact on record sales as far as the influence of this blog is concerned!  I’m not sure I care about this as an issue, beyond wishing the groups that I write about well, in the sense that they make enough money both to support themselves and continue recording.

It must be next to impossible now to disentangle the various strands of increasingly viral marketing strategies, let alone distinguish between or even determine what is a genuine appreciative reaction and one which is tied to or compromised by the buzz.  But in terms of coverage it would seem to be the case that the mainstream media has taken on board the self-publishing revolution, and encouraged a greater level of reader participation, at least in an online sense.  You can see that with the music blog and Comment is free areas of the Guardian.  But perhaps other newsstand publications have not been so enlightened – or prepared to adapt to the changing balance of power in the name of self-preservation and self-interest.

8. What would you like to see more of in the world of music blogs?

Allowing that I probably have an incomplete or distorted sense of what the world of music blogs is, I would wish to see more imaginative responses to music which not only accept the contexts in which songs or pieces are written and recorded, but that give them their head as works of art as well as cultural artefacts.  I suppose I mean that everything is so heavily loaded; if it’s possible, I’d like writers to strip as much of that away as they can (or at least momentarily get past it) and look at the bones, the guts of the thing.  If I am being overly Romantic and culturally naïve about anyone’s ability to do this in the 21st century, carrying the weight of critical baggage that we do, then I suppose I that is deliberate.

9. What blogs, music or otherwise, do you most highly recommend?

In addition to the ones I link to on the left under what WordPress unfortunately insists on calling ‘blogroll’ (the ones that aren’t me in other guises are friends – though this shouldn’t discount how highly I rate what they do), I like An unreliable witness for prose which chases itself as might a plump dog following its strangely wiry tail, photography which blends idiosyncrasy with something you might find in a glossy product brochure, subversion of the post-it note, and all-round imaginative engagement with the blogging form.  Skyberries and voidmelons or voidberries and skymelons for Squirmelia’s photographic eye and diary-like interrogation of the oddities of natural and urban worlds.  The police diver’s notebook for Nick Talbot’s sharp political commentary on the state of the nation.  And I like La terrasse for its old-school literary range and flâneur erudition.

Music features prominently in only the last of these.  If the Guardian is right and there are now 4 million bloggers in Britain alone, then I suspect there are one or two more music blogs out there which I would wish to read on a post-by-post basis if I had the time to stumble across and stay with them.  As it is, I aim to write the blog I would wish to read if I were me, but I don’t doubt that there are people out there doing what I do better and more intensively.  They just don’t have my taste…

I admire those few blogs who don’t care to network the blogosphere by linking to a myriad of others in what can either be viewed as back-scratching or patting, or construction of a tapestry of interwoven concerns and cultural identification.  The problem is, they are extremely difficult to trace.  Perhaps there’s a Strange map of them to be found somewhere…

10. Anything else you care to add?

I have been struck at how much like starting a fanzine starting a blog has been.  It’s been a process of learning on the job, finding out both in terms of design and content what works and what doesn’t, reawakening friendships with people whose friendship was awakened in the first place by the fact that we exchanged fanzines.  There has been an element of what we might crudely term marketing with each; I’ve discovered that there really is a virtual equivalent of the (occasionally quite productive) madness of attempting to sell fanzines cold and off the cuff to people who attended the same gigs as me.  Making links to people – I can see how this would lead to real-world friendships in the same way fanzine connections did, were I not the age I am.  Those connections shot off in so many directions, and travelled so far from the initial musical meeting of minds, with letters as a testing ground for ideas, relationships, issues and ambitions.  It would be stretching the truth to call my entry into the world of blogging a creative renaissance, but it’s not far off that, and not far off the creative act of discovery that producing fanzines was.

I have also re-learnt the art of completion; towards the end of the Tangents decade, my ideas were mouldering, and for every article I sent through to Alistair, another nine remained unfinished.

Has anyone noticed the similarity between Róisín Murphy’s video for ‘Let me know’ and the Clientele’s for ‘Bookshop Casanova’?

While Róisín wins on the hat front, the Clientele are the better dancers, obviously.

The two pages by other contributors were easily the best thing about Lemon Meringue Pantry.  Here is the first of them – a masterpiece of provocative politico-aesthetics by Chris Jones, who under the pseudonym Tintin was editor of Bullfrog fanzine.  At the point I met him he had recently come up with the AAAA tag.  If you crane your neck and squint carefully, you’ll see from the scan that AAAA’s merchandising arm was Jesus – The Products.  I still have a piece of toast in a nicely labelled Jesus – The Products bag which Chris sold me at a later exhibition of what could loosely be described as his work.  Chris was one of the influences moving me to become increasingly politically active, and it was  largely through him that I got into the situationists – a more culturally satisfying route than via Malcolm McLaren.  Debord and Vaneigem made a lot of sense to me in those days, with theory and proposed practice that turned the world upside-down and inside out, but the demands an involved reading of them placed on the human psyche were cult-like in their intolerability.  What do I think of them now?  I would need the prompts provided by a re-reading The society of the spectacle and The revolution of everyday life to tell you that.

Chris later made music with groups called the Gore Vidals, Use and Pre-dog, put out creative writing in a publication called Fast Hard and reinvented himself as X-Chris before I lost touch with him.  Having often wondered what he might be up to in a world whose virtual or online versions has to some extent caught up with the kind of approach he espoused, I did battle with everyone’s search engine of choice and eventually found video footage of him in among the background material for the Tate’s displays marking the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade.  Chris argues – as I half-suspected and hoped he might still be doing – that resistance is not futile.  (He’s at 3:16, sandwiched between Mike Phillips and Mark Wallinger.)

Damn – you write a piece banging on about how surprisingly little poetry is set to pop music, then along comes a whole album full of the stuff.  These are the Wraiths, and they hail from – where else? – Bristol.

Theirs is just about the perfect moniker, given the poetry the duo set on This is Charing Cross.  Ford Maddox Ford’s title poem has the bereaved widows of First World War soldiers gathering at the station for trains which will never disgorge their husbands.  The women’s faces, and those of their children, are dead.  Living ghosts.  All of the poems the Wraiths set seem carefully chosen for their resonance, their timeless and lyrical beauty, and capture moments – ghosts of moments – that but for poets would go unrecorded, uncelebrated.  They set them to music which is decidedly more corporeal, more substantial, Elizabethan folk blended with the kind of acoustic instrumentation and guitar play that might have graced work at the literate end of eighties and nineties indie-pop (I wouldn’t be surprised if Mog Fry and Jon Hunt turned out to have form in this respect).  It’s a winning combination, as a listen to ‘The curlews’ on their MySpace site will bear out.

Mog comes across as a warmer Trish Keenan, trading the latter’s icy distinction for a far greater range, so that she’ll sing ‘The junk of many pearls’ with appropriate aquamarine ethereality and then go to town belting out ‘Movers and shakers of the world’ (Arthur O’Shaughnessy’s ‘Ode’).  And having been captivated initially by these more immediate songs, I’ve found myself returning to the softer settings.  ‘The darkness’ (D.H. Lawrence’s ‘At the window’) is as gently evocative of weather, season and mood as, say, ‘Saturday’ by the Clientele.  The Wraiths have the same lightness of touch and This is Charing Cross bears repeated listening.

Thanks are once again due to Tim, who increasingly seems to be this blog’s eyes and ears on the ground.  I really should get out more, as the Wraiths prove.

An inside page from Lemon Meringue Pantry.

500 print run, paid for out of my student grant, and sold at a loss on every copy – very Tony Wilson.  And yet, at gigs, in record shops and through the post – people bought the thing.  As my writing and layout improved with each subsequent fanzine, so sales decreased.  Had I carried on past four issues, I would have created the perfect, readerless fanzine.

Not sure why I had it in for Pete Astor, pasting him up as a crotchety old character from Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast.  I loved the Loft, particularly the songs on the Creation compilations Alive in the Living Room and Wow! Wild summer; ‘Why does the rain’ and ‘Your door shines like gold’ being more mysterious beasts than the bull in a china shop charge of ‘Up the hill and down the slope’.  Perhaps it was the transition from the elemental but intimate punk rock of the Loft to mature artiste and Weather Prophet that got my goat.  Anyway, a few years later I spent a very pleasant evening with Pete, drinking Leffe at a bar on Place de la Contrescarpe in Paris till the early hours.  He set me to reading The sportswriter by Richard Ford, which was no bad recommendation for an aspiring writer.

Following the tone set by the bright yellow cover, the inside pages of Lemon Meringue were alternately salmon and light green.  What was I thinking?

I can’t claim to have summoned this out of the ether with my last post, but coincidentally it transpires that a Microdisney anthology is about to appear, making their music more widely available than it has been for some time.  It includes six-tenths of The clock comes down the stairs, on which Cathal and Sean O’Hagan achieved a perfect blend of devastating couplets and melodies which trod the right side of the fine line between timeless and syrupy.  Let’s hope the anthology – a double CD which spans the group’s lifetime – generates sufficient interest to put the whole of that album (at least) back in circulation.

The Fatima Mansions are simultaneously getting similar treatment.  I confess I’m not familiar with any of Cathal’s solo work, having come to feel that neither he nor Sean ever quite matched apart what they did together.  But even so, as spiritual and intellectual kin to Jacques Brel and Tom Waits, Cathal’s status should be much closer to those two anti-legends than to the gutter of underratedness in which he currently seems to reside.

There was a time when I would have point-blank refused to let pages from my fanzines see the light of day for a second time, as looking back on my efforts has routinely induced a muscle-wearying degree of wincing embarrassment.  But it’s the distant past now and I offer what will be an ongoing selection in the spirit of cultural archivism and with lately-found affectionate amusement at my eighteen year old self.

So this was the cover of my first fanzine, published in the autumn of 1986.  Bear in mind it was printed on a shade of yellow considerably brighter than the curd of the titular pie.

An Ivor Cutler song supplied the line ‘I’m happy and I’ll punch the man who says I’m not!’  John Peel would have been playing lots of Ivor around that time and I would have been listening most evenings to John.

That’s Cathal Coughlan of Microdisney in the top-right hand corner, showing that already there was a battle for my soul going on between the forces of throwaway pop and the serious, literate, built to last stuff.

I love the music of the Beach Boys, but I’ve always felt the influence of Brian Wilson across the years has done more harm than good.  By that I mean his music seems to hold in thrall the recordings made by avowed fans to a degree that no other pop legend commands.  It puts me off investigating, for example, Panda Bear’s critically acclaimed Person pitch, for fear of harmony déjà vu.  As for covering the Beach Boys – best leave that to Brian.  But this version of ‘God only knows’, built entirely from the vocalising of Petra Haden, softens even the flinty heart of a old malcontent like me.  I think it betters anything on Petra’s highly entertaining a cappella recasting of The Who sell out.

The same page also gives you her extraordinary version of ‘Thriller’.

And elsewhere her take on Bach’s Prelude no. 2 in C minor may tickle your ivories.

All of which is partly an excuse to tell you about my favourite Nick Cave song, since it’s sadly ineligible for Backed with.  ‘Gates to the garden’ sees Nick ghosting round the mean streets of my old home town – ‘the bell from St. Edmunds informs me of the hour’ – which would be a surprising place to f