xPQwRtz

xPQwRtz Podcast Number Four - Fathers' Day Special

2010-06-20T01:10:00.000-07:00

Hello.
It's Fathers' Day here in the UK and to celebrate I have put together a bunch of saongs that all have father or somesuch in the title.
Apart from the first song, that is.

HAPPY FATHERS' DAY.

The tracklisting:

Father - Now I've Changed My Minder
Gorky's Zygotic Mynci - Sometimes The Father Is The Son
Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 - Father
The Cannanes - Go & Tell Your Father
Keith John Adams - Dad
Can - Father Cannot Yell
The Bats - Daddy's Highway
Aphex Twin - Father
Thee Headcoats - The Day I Beat My Father Up
The Cravats - Daddy's Shoes
Keen - Daddy
Bogshed - Hand Me Down Father
The Yummy Fur - Father Ubu Says
Stump - Our Fathers

Get it here: http://www.mediafire.com/?mmyqywmjyjj

XPQWRTZ Podcast Number 3 - The Pefect Eight Track

2010-05-21T04:00:00.000-07:00

Hello again.
Here's the new podcast.
This time it's simply a bunch of songs that I love singing along to in the car.
There are a lot of songs that I like to sing along to in the car, but the fifteen in this selection are the ones that really make me smile and sing extra loudly to when they come on.
You see being a dad with a full time job these days, the only place I get to listen to music is in the car.

You might be pleased to know that other than saying hello at the beginning I don't talk during this podcast.
There didn't seem to be much point.

Track listing:

The Free French - Vowels
The Wolfhounds - Disgusted, E7
Age Of Chance - Be Fast Be Clean Be Cheap
bIG fLAME - Man Of Few Syllables
Stump - Alcohol
Marc Rile & The Creepers - Shadow Figure
The Knack - My Sharona
Julian Cope - Kolly Kibber's Birthday
The Verlaines - Doomsday
Robert Lloyd - The Part Of The Anchor
Dr. Feelgood - Roxette
The Shrubs - Edith
Swell Maps - Art
Adam & The Ants - Catholic Day

Get it here.

XPQWRTZ Podcast Number Two

2010-04-25T08:29:00.000-07:00

This time it's all about cassettes.

Apologies for the sound quality in places but some of the music in this edition are from nigh on 30 year old tapes I've found in boxes in my garage.

The tracklisting is thus:

McTells - Expecting Joe
Beat Happening - Don't Mix The Colours
The Cannanes - Skeleton Is Your Little Boy
Yximalloo - My Washing Machine
Plant Bach Ofnus - Pyrdredd
The Lungs - The Day James Cagney Died
Howl In The Typewriter - Kelp
Remember Fun - Apple Of My Eye
Kokoshkar - Alaquon
God Is My Co-Pilot - An Irish American Forces His Death
The Twins And Rig Veeda - Never Mention

Get it here

xPQwRtz Podcast Number One

2010-04-08T21:25:00.000-07:00

Ok, here we go.
This is the first podcast for this blog.
I began it with an idea of what I wanted to talk about but it's ended up as a barely linked wander through my decaying memory.

Tracklisting:

The Bachelor Pad - Albums of Jack
We The People - You Burn Me Up And Down
The Pastels - 25 Unfinished Plays
St. Christopher - Remember Me To Her
Pregnant Neck - Crispin Glover
Death by Milkfloat - TTYF
Membranes With Phillip Boa & The Voodoo Club - Spike Milligan's Tape Recorder
Palookas - All The Will
Midget - Heaven Is Crazy
Hulaboy - Mermaid Sister
The Keatons - Gene Pool
Nina Hagen - Zero Zero UFO

GET IT HERE

Enjoy.

XPQWRTZ Rides again!!!

2010-04-04T06:10:00.000-07:00

Hello there.
I've been thinking about this blog for a while and quite frankly I've missed doing it.
I've also been doing some podcasting for various other sites.
So I've made a decision.
This blog is going to turn into a Podcast thing.

The first installment of the XPQWRTZ podcast will be ready for download shortly.

Is this a good idea?

Time will tell.
See you soon.

Jacob's Mouse

2009-11-29T04:28:00.000-08:00

Hello.
I'm back for a brief time.
I've just read John Robb's marvelous "Death To Trad Rock" book (for which I designed the cover and within which I am interviewed. Me? Blowing my own trumpet? Of course!).

Anyhow, while reading it I was listening to a bunch of records that it related to.
And then I started pondering about where everything went.
I've mentioned the filthy noise of Silverfish somewhere else in this blog, but so far I don't think I've ever touched on Jacob's Mouse.

Do you remember Jacob's Mouse?
They were the pop end of the Wiiija (You do know what Wiiija is don't you? What it means? Think about it) early 90's noise fest that centered around The Camden, Silverfish, Terminal Cheesecake axis.

I first saw them one evening in a funny little club in Derby city centre.
I can't remember what the club was called but I'm sure Karen Ablaze was there too - she (or someone pretending to be her) gave me a 7" split single:

Anyhow, I thought Jacob's Mouse were terrific. Deep and dark as the grave bass rumblings, high as possible trebled out guitars and a singing squealing drummer.

"Good" was and is my favourite JM song and one of my favourite 7" singles.

That first sighting of Jacob's Mouse in the flesh was probably around 1990/91.
The following year they played The English Bridge Centre in Shrewsbury (where I'd put on the 14 Iced Bears show a few years earlier where they were so loud they blew out the windows).
The weekend prior to Jacob's Mouse playing I'd decided to buy a dress.
Yes.
A dress.
It was an ankle length long sleeved black dress which I wore with black leggings and para boots.
I didn't wear it often - the idea of it was far better than the execution - but I did wear it to go and see Jacob's Mouse.
Tey were tremendous and, sitting in the back room chatting with them both before and after their set, they were a very nice bunch of chaps.
Were they posh?
I remember them to have 'proper' accents.
But then I was sitting there in a dress so who can say.

A year or so later I saw them again.
Once again it was in Derby.
I have no idea why.
They were doing their "Group Of 7" period stuff (the last record I really liked by them) and once again they were a truly terrific live act.
By this time I'd ditched the dress.
In fact I'd had my dreadlocks cut off and was sporting a Terrie Ex crop and a pyjama top.

So, Wiiija.
You know what it means don't you?
Come on.

W11 1JA

Just off Portobello Road there's a record shop out of which a whole musical movement sprang forth and Wiiija was is it's post code.

Hello? Where've you been?

2009-06-13T01:54:00.000-07:00

I wasn't intending on adding anything much to this blog.
Just got so bored of it.

BUT.

I just put together a podcast for the Anorak Forum after discussing "Awkward" music, so I thought it might be nice to share it here too.

Right then.

I couldn't decide on a downloadable compilation type thing or a podcast.
So I went with a podcast (easier than trying to arrange the comp and re-tag everything).
If you'd prefer a comp so's you can listen to individual songs let me know.
Also, if you know how to arrange podcasts so that individual songs can be played rather than one long mix please let me know! (I've had GarageBand for a long time but never really used it before, so this might all be a bit clunky as I'm learning as I go).

Also:

1. there are probably some glaring omissions.
2. I was very temped to stick some old Two Tone songs on it as there's a real link (to my ears) between that and the scratched guitars of Dog Faced Hermans for example.
3. Most of the songs will be a bit clicky and scratchy as, with the old xPQwRtz compilations, most of the songs are from my old records.
4. It's not strictly in chronological order, though it is more or less. Some of the songs sat better in the positions I've put them. Yes, I actually thought this through and everything (and even though I titled it 79-95, there's a song or two from 96. So shoot me).
5. Enjoy!

Download here: http://sarandon.net/Anorak1979-1995.zip

Track Listing:

Swell Maps - Another Song (Rough Trade, 1979)
The Slits - Instant Hit (Island, 1979)
The Diagram Brothers (New Hormones, 1981)
Yeah Yeah Noh - Trini Lopez (Cordelia, 1985)
Nightingales - Use Your Loaf (Cherry Red, 1981)
The Cravats - Daddy's Shoes (DCL, 1982)
Vee VV - Keepbeat (Vinyl Drip, 1986)
The Membranes - Big Nose And The Howlin' Wind (Criminal Damage, 1984)
The Higsons - I Don't Want To Live With monkeys (Romans In Britain, 1981)
Splat! - Yeah...The Dum Dum (Ron Johnson, 1983)
The Very Things - Wall Of Fur (DCL/Reflex, 1986)
bIG fLAME - Man Of Few Syllables (Ron johnson, 1985)
MacKenzies - New Breed (Ron Johnson, 1986)
Jackdaw With Crowbar (Ron Johnson, 1987)
The Noseflutes - Catcheel Maskhole (Ron Johnson, 1986)
World Domination Enterprises - Hotsy Girl (Product Inc, 1988)
A Witness - Camera (Ron Johnson, 1985)
Twang - Here's Lukewarm (Ron Johnson, 1987)
The Shrubs - Edith (Ron Johnson, 1987)
Stump - Ice The Levant (Ron Johnson, 1986)
Bogshed - The Fastest Legs (Shelfish, 1986)
Sperm Wails - Lady Chatterley's Lover (Sprat & Mackerel, 1988)
Dog Faced Hermans - Frock (Vinyl Drip, 1989)
Death by Milkfloat - The Man Whose Senses Failed (Ediesta, 1988)
Dandelion Adventure - Jinx's Truck (Action, 1990)
Stretchheads - Acid Sweeney (Blast First, 1991)
Dawson - Leaf Sweepers And Sandwich Men (Gruff Wit, 1992)
Gag - Full Seaside Antics (Voice Of Shade, 1993)
Badgewearer - Short Fast Control (Guided Missile, 1994)
Mecca - Civil Kong Smasher (1992)
Nostril - Bewdong Canoe Start (Gruff Wit, 1996)
Yummy Fur - Amelia Scoptophilia (Guided Missile, 1995)

GIVING UP

2008-10-13T23:25:00.000-07:00

I just don't have the time to keep this blog going.
Too much real life, babies, work, to think about.

I might come back to it some time in the future - god knows I've got a lot more to gripe about.

Thanks for the support I've had.
Apologies that you can no longer get the compilation downloads - But you were getting them for free so please stop complaining at me.

See you soon.

KILL TWEE POP!

how pop made my thighs ache

2008-02-18T22:49:00.000-08:00

was it the siddeleys who had a single out with a photo of some 50's kids riding bicycles on the front?
i don't own any siddeleys records anymore so i can't check.
but i'm sure it was them.

there was a whole spate of record covers with this kind of warm-hearted-england-is-innocent-swallows-and-amazons cover art.
having said that i'll probably not be able to find any.
oh, hang on, here we go:

(all right - before you say anything - i KNOW this single predates the others by at least 5 years, but then in terms of indie pop the TVP's were way ahead of their time).

it was a hot and sunny summer as i remember.
i had newly started work as a screen printer.
my job was a 20 minute bus-ride from home.

one afternoon i spotted a bicycle in a second hand shop.
not just any old bicycle either.
it was one of these:

(thanks to the stones & bikes of wales for the image)

i thought it was beautiful.
and it fitted in with my indie lifestyle and image.
old jumpers that were my grandfather's, shirts from oxfam, desert boots and a satchel.
my stephen pastel haircut.

i handed the shopkeeper £50 and took the bike home.
the following monday i rode the bike to work.

it took for-f*cking-ever.
i finally arrived at work late, sweaty and aching.
of course i had to ride the damned thing home again too.

the following saturday, with every inch of my body in spasm, i took the bike back to the shop and sold it for £20.

the warm-hearted-england-is-innocent-swallows-and-amazons-1950's./early 60's myth is a painful untruth.

old, bored, hard of hearing

2007-12-25T23:26:00.000-08:00

i was thinking the other day, "i haven't posted anything on xPQwRtz for a while".
so i headed towards my laptop, turned it on and found my attention taken up by completely different things.
you see, right now i can't be bothered and this is mainly due to, 1. being busy and, 2. what i've been listening to recently.

i'm still not listening to anything new - there's nothing new worth listening to is there?
but i've been getting bored of the same old sounds and so i spent a month or so digging through my record collection looking for stuff i'd not listened to for, literally, years.

and i came across these gems:

genesis' "nursery cryme" has become my favourite album of recent weeks, closely followed by rush and hall & oates.
a few of these records got ripped to MP3 and as a consequence were logged on my lastFM playlist.

and this is where the point of this post finally arrives.

someone took a look at my playlist one day and left a remark, "hall & oates! how did THAT happen??!!"
i replied, "because i like them. in the same way i like marillion and rush and...."
their response was, "well i have a fondness for marillion but i'd never TELL anyone about it."

and that immedieately struck me as ridiculous for reasons that i'll reveal shortly.

a few weeks ago i was driving up the M1 motorway with a friend of mine who happens to have been in a band that many of you regard as semi-legendary C86/post punk heroes.
his band of the 80's featured scratchy thousand mile an hour guitars, thumping bass and falling over drums.
i'd got my iPod on the car stereo and what should pop up but the 10+ minute wonder that is "the musical box" by genesis.
my friend sang along to EVERY note - vocals, guitars, keyboards, everything - halfway through he said, "do you have the version of this from the live album? that's my favourite."

so, why did the comment left on lastFM strike me as ridiculous?
well, look at my example above.
it's simple really.

it's SO MUCH COOLER to just be honest about EVERYTHING that you like rather than try and hide the things you think might not fit the "image" other people have of you.
why only let your stupid lastFM log jingley jangley sub-byrdsian guitars when on a friday night before going out you like nothing more than a short sharp hit of slayer?

get it?
good.

the end of the 80's. the worst record of the 80's.

2007-10-06T03:39:00.000-07:00

"plug" by the groove farm is a FUCKING AWFUL RECORD.
it has no redeeming features whatsoever.
just to be absolutely sure i'm listening to it again as i type.
and, yup, i was right first time.

it came out in 1989 and is simply half-arsed, lazy, awful.
i didn't buy it when it came out because i couldn't bear to be seen taking it out of a record store.
and why would anyone want to when at the same time you could buy:

FLOUR "L.U.V.7.1.3." - terrific and really quite funny mock rock nonsense.

FOETUS INC. "" - compilation of some of the best bits from jim thirlwell's back catalogue.

we all have choices in this life.
i made mine.
:)

compilations are back

2007-08-15T05:58:00.000-07:00

a shiny new host (thanks - you know who you are) means all the compilations are now downloadable again.
apologies for the problems.

one or two of the links in the original posts for each compilation may still not work.
i'll get round to them but, to be frank, i've got better things to do.

but all the links in the menu on your left should work just fine.

more rubbish soon.

thanks.

SERVER PROBLEMS

2007-08-13T09:08:00.002-07:00

hullo.
having slight server problems so the compilations will be unobtainable for a short while.
apologies for the inconvenience.
i'll let you know as soon as they're back.
thanks.
cx

xPQwRtz mULTIPLIED

2007-08-02T03:12:00.000-07:00

i forgot to tell you something.
xPQwRtz has a sister blog.
it's called xPQwRtz mULTIPLIED and all it contains is a bunch of entire records for download.
it doesn't get updated as regularly as i would like but i do try to keep it reasonably fresh.

go and take a look.

compilation 8 | lurching into the 90's

2007-08-02T02:48:00.000-07:00

right then.
here's another compilation for you.
a long time coming but, well, i've been busy - i do have a life you know ;)

so this latest compilation collects together a few things mentioned in the blog so far and a bunch of stuff that'll be mentioned later on.
all the songs span the late 80's and into the mid 90's.
there's nothing connecting them other than it's all stuff that i like a lot.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD (77MB FILE) - INCLUDES COVER ART AS PDF & JPEG

tracklisting

the yummy fur - british sounds
crabstick - the ballad of lee faust & di young
dawson - booger hall
gag - full seaside antics
the keatons - lightwood
nostril - bewdong canoe start
kenny process team - cats & dogs
wingtip sloat - web of ramps
caroliner rainbow susans & bruisin’s - hannah’s medicinal tick collection
blairmailer - fax
emperor julian - wonderful boyfriend
pregnant neck - crispin glover
father - now i’ve changed my minder
w.h.i.n.e. - snorkel
thinking fellers union local 282 - four o’clocker 2
ye ascoynes d’ascoynes - just the biggest thing
god is my co-pilot - bicycle girls
dandelion adventure - jinxs truck
thee headcoats - every little thing
kenickie - come in
sexton ming - the ranger
julian cope - hanging out & hung up on the line
astronauts - cold climate

PLEASE NOTE: AS USUAL 99% OF THESE SONGS ARE RIPPED FROM MY VINYL & THEREFORE CAN BE A BIT CLICKY & SCRATCHY IN PLACES.

incoming

2007-08-01T06:42:00.000-07:00

i suppose it's about time to do another compilation for you isn't it?

no escape from noise

2007-07-20T06:04:00.001-07:00

i think i may have mentioned before that i used to make frequent trips to stay with my friends up in blackpool.
if i haven't then, um, i used to make frequent...you get the idea.

going up there was always eventful.
i used to stay in the home of ex membrane turned ceramic hob, stan batcow.
and he'd get me into adventures.
stuff i'd not think cool enough to do, but once in the middle of it thoroughly enjoyed.
like flying kites in the park.
learning to ride a unicycle.
teaching a drum class to local kids even though neither of us could play drums.

stuff like that.

all this fun was always peppered with music.
sometimes making it ourselves (with varying degrees of success - my violin playing is really pretty rotten), but more often than not listening to it.

one weekend stan played me negativland's "escape from noise".
i'd never heard anything like it.
it was electronic.
it used all sorts of bits and pieces from radio, records, tv shows and spliced them altogether into an early pop form of, i suppose, what latterly got called plunderphonics.

it was the funniest, most astonishing record i had heard for a long time.

i hunted down a copy - it was second hand but it still had the huge booket inside and i played it endlessly.

then i found a copy of "helter stupid".
it wasn't so immediate and i put it to one side.
a concept album, it commented on the music censorship debate by suggesting that one of negativland's records had prompted a young guy to kill his family.
this was at the height of the PMRC.

over the years i've kept returning to negativland.
in the early 90's i unearthed a copy of their first album in it's handmade box in a record store in manchester.
shortly afterwards i got hold of a copy of what has become my favourite negativland record, "points".
it's more relaxed than other negativland releases and sounds a lot like the krautrock of faust and early kraftwerk - after all they did name themselves after a neu! song.

i ought to say a bit about negativland's run-in with U2 but instead you can follow these links:

"some facts on the negativland/U2 lawsuit"
"intellectual property issues"
negativland on wikipedia

and once you've read all this, have a think about how negativland used to run a radio show that took live feeds from other radio stations and cut & pasted them together on air - it sheds a whole new light on U2's "zoo tv" thing.

cud...good?

2007-07-20T05:26:00.001-07:00

both the first and the last times that i saw cud was at coventry university.
i had a friend studying there and used to go and stay.
i hadn't really been interested much in cud - their early singles didn't get me all excited like they did my friends.

i can barely remember the first cud gig.
i have no idea why this event has disappeared so completely from my memory because the one thing that i do remember is that i bought a cud t-shirt.
and if the show had been so terrible as to have been forgetable surely i'd have not bothered to spend money on merchandise.
it was white and had a large flourescent orange U with udders on the front.
i wore it approximately once.
then i put it in the bin.

then one day "when in rome kill me" came out.
i decided i didn't like it.
EVERYONE was going on about how fantastic cud were and it bored me rigid.
my girlfriend had bought it too and i had to listen to it constantly.
grrr.

fast forward a year or two and i'm no longer with said girlfriend and i have started drinking and i have a new bosom buddy.
the thing is, this new buddy likes cud.
A LOT.
he also likes lots of other stuff that i like - julian cope, the fall, you know...
but he likes cud.

around this time the dreaded "indie-dance" thing was really kicking off and that, as i've mentioned before, DEFINITELY wasn't for me.
one evening this buddy of mine suggested we go see cud - they were playing birmingham.
we caught a train over and i watched them and suddenly i 'got it'.

i'm sure me 'getting' cud has more to do with my initial attitude to them and the fact they were making music you could dance to without sounding like the now f*cking atrocious soup dragons or primal cr*ppy scream (don't even get me started on my views on "screamadelica" because it might make you want to kill me).

anyway, where was i?
ah, yes.

cud, and how i became a fan.

from this first cud epiphany i and my buddy - why on earth am i using the word "buddy", i never say buddy in real life - i and my friend saw cud in various venues at least half a dozen times over the course of a few months.

when "elvis belt" came out in 1991 i bought it and realised what i'd been missing out on by not buying the early singles.
but then something horrible happened.

the same year as "elvis bet" cud made some new records.
and they fell heavily into the catagory of "indie-dance".
my heart sank.

i bought the next album, "leggy mambo" but i knew i'd hate it before i even got it onto the record deck.

that same year the wedding present did a tour that was going to have a witness supporting.
i was so excited.
the tour called at coventry university and i just had to go.
sadly, a few weeks prior to the tour, a witness' guitar supremo rick aitken died in a rock climbing accident.
and who replaced a witness on the bill?
yes.
cud.
they played 40 minutes of poor dancey fluff and i booed them loudly and vigourously.
not one mention was made of why they were there and that infuriated me.
it wouldn't have hurt them to mention what had happened.
looking back of course i now think well why should they have.

i got home and filed my cud records away.
soon after my close friend and i drifted apart - he followed cud down the dance path towards the shamen, ecstacy, house music and raves in disused warehouses and i went back to my dog faced hermans, stretchheads, dawson thing.

nowadays i can listen to "when in rome kill me" and enjoy it.
but it's still tinged with a certain sadness at lost heroes, lost friends and lost bands i once loved.

hello again

2007-07-14T00:14:00.001-07:00

been moving house, getting reconnected, etc.

i WILL have more to say very shortly.
:)

facebook has made me want to KILL

2007-06-11T08:51:00.000-07:00

i'm sorry.
i know this blog is supposed to be about my time as an indie kid etc etc BUT does NOBODY LISTEN ANYMORE?????

i just checked into my facebook to find that some friends have joined a group called "WE LOVE C-86".
that in itself is fine, i love the C86 compilation too.

BUT BUT BUT.

here's the description of the group:

"In 1986, the British music weekly NME issued a cassette dubbed C-86, which included a number of bands -- McCarthy, the Wedding Present, Primal Scream, the Pastels, and the Bodines among them -- influenced in equal measure by the jangly guitar pop of the Smiths, the three-chord naivete of the Ramones, and the nostalgic sweetness of the girl group era. Also dubbed "anorak pop" and "shambling" by the British press, the C-86 movement was itself short-lived, but it influenced hordes of upcoming bands on both sides of the Atlantic who absorbed the scene's key lessons of simplicity and honesty to stunning effect, resulting in music -- given the universal label of "twee pop" -- whose hallmarks included boy-girl harmonies, lovelorn lyrics, infectious melodies, and simple, unaffected performances.

All in all, we share the love of C-86 and the twee movement."

it's utter rubbish!!!!!
what about the other half of the album:

wolfhounds
stump
bogshed
a witness
age of chance
half man half biscuit
mackenzies
bIG fLAME
...fuzzbox...
shrubs

?

or is it just nice and convenient to continue ignoring the stuff that doesn't fit your comfortable little pigeon holes?

and by the way THERE WAS NO SUCH THING, HOWEVER SHORT-LIVED, AS A "C86 MOVEMENT". IT WAS JUST A COMPILATION CASSETTE OF NEW BANDS THAT THE NME EDITORS LIKED AT THE TIME.

fer f*cks sake

yummy fur | comic book heroes without capes

2007-05-09T04:36:00.000-07:00

i really can't remember where i first read about yummy fur.
i certainly hadn't heard them as, if they were being played by peel, that didn't help as i stopped listening to the peel show in the late 80's.

actually, now i think about it, i think i simply got a slampt! flyer amongst a bunch of other flyers and fanzines.
reading through it most of the descriptions didn't fill me with enthusiasm.
but the yummy fur one stuck out - something about tiny beefhearty big flamey songs.
so i ordered the 10 track 7" and when it arrived i immediately fell in love.

it's a terrific record. short. punchy. fun.
i guess that what made it stand out even more for me was that it came at a time when i was being inundated with noise - cassette releases by cock ESP, dogliveroil, pain jerk, all those "noise artists" on labels like betley, face like a smacked arse and the like.

they were great in their way, and i enjoyed the noise thing, but i was beginning to really miss tunes.
songs you could sing along to instead of white noise and screaming electronics.

it seemed like ages before the next yummy fur record came out.
was it about a year?
it may well have been.

the second single was more of the same but just as exciting.
another 10 tracker too!
i just adored it.
i'd not felt like this about a record for years and years and years.
i thought, and still think, "british sounds" was terrific.
a song i wish i'd written.
an excellent ron johnson plays pop hook and great lyrics,

"i'm not american,
don't call me thurston,
i like my accent."

all in that lovely glaswegian yelp.

the second single had been put out by my friend paul's guided missile label and, not long after the "night club" LP got a split release with slampt.
there are some really good songs on it, but it felt a little too long.
10 songs on a 7" was poerfect for the pop that yummy fur were making and to stretch that out to 17 songs over an album was just a little much.
that said there are some top tunes on it and you really should have it in your collection.

after that yummy fur got a bit patchy.

"policeman" was a top idea for a single, but "plastic cowboy" was a bit of a waste given that it was only three songs, two of which were just reworkings of songs on the "night club" LP.

the "supermarket" single on vesuvius suffered from dreadful production - all the records before, even though being recorded on 4 and 8 track machines all sounded bright and thumpy, this was just mushy.

the next couple of singles, "shoot the ridiculant" and "roxy girls" failed to excite - in hindsight the "roxy girls" record isn't bad.
but the "ridiculant" record is just pish - poorly thought out casio keyboard buffoonery - sorry paul, but you shouldn't have released it.

but then "male shadow at three o'clock" came out.
it was a vesuvius released six track 10" and it's still my favourite yummy fur record.
t has the lyrical wit of the early songs coupled to some quite astonishing music.
pure tongue in cheek pop fun.
"st john of the cross" is a stunning, "colonel blimp" is laugh out loud funny.

not long after ,"sexy world" was released and was another great record.
you could hear the progression of the band from 4 track indie punk to pop ballad writing indie stars in the making.
you could also hear that this was the end.
ideas that had been played aroudn with had started to be used again and again.
you know, there's only so many times you can mention nina hagen, smack and the german disco scene before the joke turns to mud.

i saw the band at the bull & gate in north london just as they were splitting up.
they were pretty good (though i much preffered gag, who'd played support).

the band broke, john became the 1990's and the other lot went off to form some band called franz ferdinand - i group that i find insufferably boring.
to me they are the yummy fur without the wit or song writing ability of mr. john keown.

funny that.

the new wave of new wave of broken heavy metal

2007-05-02T06:58:00.000-07:00

it's the late 80's.
something's going on in the world of indie and i don't quite understand it or like it.
there's all sorts of talk about dance music and i find it all a bit frightening.
i don't do dancing.
that's not entirely true - i tried to do dancing for a short while but i felt just like what i was, a skinny and pale indie kid trying a bit too hard to not feel too conspicuous.

i just didn't get it.

so instead i headed off through my past.
i rediscovered my metal roots through a subtle blend of bands from north london (and ipswich!) and the USA.

terminal cheesecake were ferocious.
a huge mouldering sonic attack of sheet metal guitars, grinding bass and shouty druggy vocals.
listening back to them they're not a million miles away from the other bands i loved at the time - dog faced hermans, membranes et al - terminal cheesecake were definitely a left field indie metal band. albeit it a badly tripped out psychedelic buttholes inspired version.
if you can them then my advice is buy them.

then there was silverfish's first 12".
dunno what to say about silverfish. you probably already know.
all i want to say is simply that their first 12" was an astonishing blast of filthy rock.
yum.

my favourite of all the UK metal type bands was the stupids.
they were skatecore i suppose, weren't they?
i loved loved loved them - their AC/DC at 200 mph riffs, their geeky singing drummer and their childish humour (just check out "killed by a cripple" or "jesus do what you have to" from their "retard picnic" LP).

that was the UK then.

from the USA i got really into killdozer.
grinding guitar, churning bass, thumpy drums and honest-to-god laugh out loud lyrics.
i never saw them live but was told by a friend who did that the funniest thing in the world was to see a short-arsed singing bass player standing on a box to reach the mic.
that's the kind of band for me.

i'd continued buying big black records right up to the end and so when rapeman was announced i was at the front of the queue for my copy of the 12", "budd".
that was a good record, but "two nuns and a pack mule" was simply astounding.
it continues to be my favourite albini record.
it pisses all over anything by shellac.

i suppose all of this is what made me start making stoogey rockish music with my band rather than the noisy out of tune indie i'd been making previously.
i don't know whether or not that matters.

i think what i'm trying to come to terms with is an inate rockism in my record collection.
does that matter?
is it because i'm from that hotbed of rock that is the midlands?
why am i telling you all this?
more importantly why are you reading it?
and is there any point?

well, i think that if there is a point it is simply this - you should never lie to yourself about what you like, what you love, what you hate.
don't be guided by what is or isn't something you should be into.

if you like that record at number one in the charts then buy it and play it.
if you like the latest eric clapton album, then go for it.

there you are.
sermon over.

billy be childish

2007-05-01T09:58:00.000-07:00

some time ago i mentioned a cassette that stuart mctell had sent me with all sorts of exciting things on it - from swell maps to happy flowers, cult figures to sexton ming.

as you'll know if you've been paying attention, i still have this cassette and occasionally i still listen to it - even though i have most fo the songs on record nowadays.

in 1990 i started a new band. it was called pimp. we needed a second guitar player and the drummer worked with a guy he thought would fit in.
the chap in question did indeed fit in.
he was a third generation mod - he got it off his dad.
he loved the milkshakes, prisoners, all those medway bands.

apart from buying a couple of LPs by the james taylor quartet in the mid eighties, the medway scene was something i'd never really delved into.
just never seemed to get round to it.

i knew thee mighty caesars from stuart mctells cassette, but little else.
after visiting my guitarist's place and listening to a bunch of records i decided i should investigate.

i ordered a headcoats LP from hangman records and when it arrived there was a list of other things i could buy.
included in the list was a bunch of LPs by sexton ming.

i'd loved the 3 or 4 songs by him that were on that compilation cassette and so i ordered a couple of records.
i guess sexton is probably an acquired taste. i know people that love him and i know people that loathe him.
for me he's just a really funny, surreal and very clever writer who happens to make the occasional record.
he came out of the medway poetry/punk scene along with billy childish.

i started to correspond with the girl who ran hangman records' mailorder.
her name was kyra.
at the time i had no idea that she was billy childish's girlfriend and a member of thee headcoatees.
she had some of my cassettes to listen to and a couple of the short stories i'd published.
she suggested hangman stuff i might be interested in.
i bought one of sexton's books, "the man who created himself", thought it was terrific and so ordered one or two more along with one by billy childish.

when they arrived the book by billy had been signed, "to crayola, love billy" along with the date.
i wrote to him directly and thanked him and he sent me an invitation to the opening night of an exhibition he was holding in north london. sorry, the date and location escape me, but thee headcoats played too.
he gave me the same feeling that john robb had given me a few years before - here was a man who was totally pro-active, energetic and enthusiastic about other people making art and music.

a year or two later i was putting together a cassette compilation called "disasterous zoological experiments" for release on my label and sexton gave me a handful of songs to use.
there was a note with it, "bill says that you are OK and i can trust you. here's some songs" - that's basically what it said.
the note's been lost in the mists of time so i can't quote it word for word.

i never bought a huge amount of records by billy or any of his bands.
when the press picked up on his stuckism movement they never really got to grips with the fact that he'd been doing the same thing for 20 odd years.
and that's why i didn't buy a great deal of his records.
you only need five.
any five will do.
my favourite childish band is actually the blackhands.
kinda deep south blues with a hint of, dare i say, lo-fi calypso.
something like that.
i think i like them best because they don't quite sound like all the other childish groups.

i also really dug and still LOVE chris broderick's the singing loins - i'd bought their collaboration LP with billy and liked it so much i bought their two LPs proper.
both records are terrific modern english folk poetry.

i've kept in touch with bill on and off over the years and he's always genuinely interested in what i was doing.
and then in 2001, when i left the UK for a year, he kindly played a live set at my leaving party.

most of the people there were strangers.
most of them were japanese girls.

which made me very happy.

creationism vs revisionism

2007-04-21T08:04:00.000-07:00

in the summer of 1987 indie pop went a bit wrong.
someone broke it.
i think i lay the blame at the feet of alan mcgee.
he'd been a heroic figure to me through the 80's up to that point.

all those early creation records were astonishing - even the bad ones.
and there were a fair few bad ones - sorry everett, but yours is definitely amongst them (i do love "some of us still burn" if that's any consolation).

biff bang pow!'s "pass the paintbrush honey" was simply an incendiary slab of psyche punk pop.
mcgee had proved, to me at least, that he could make the records he preached about.

but by the mid 80's - as is beautifully described in david cavanagh's creation story - creation records and the world they'd created bought the rock cliché lock stock and barrel.
money offered by major labels didn't help.
leather trousers and cocaine.
the result of this?

two terrible records in my collection and a whole heap of disappointment.

"sonic flower groove" is, quite simply, a lame record.
listening back to it now it hasn't bettered with age.
i remember the weeks leading up to "sonic flower groove" being released.
getting excited that finally there was going to be a primal scream album.
then "gentle tuesday" came out as the taster for the album and it was SO bland.
"OK", i thought, "it can't all be like that".
and i was right - it wasn't all like that. most of it was worse.

but in terms of disappointment "sonic flower groove" had nothing on "mayflower".
the loft were a great pop band. they had that harsh wasp-in-a-tin-can (©the june brides) guitar sound that spat and sparked all over some great song writing.
unfortunately trying to be a bit rock round at creation records HQ seems to have somehow ended with someone saying, "yeah. i know. lenny kaye. that's what the weather prophets need".
now i have HUGE love for lenny kaye. after all he put together the first nuggets compilation.
and i can only imagine he had a torrid time in the studio faced with a bunch of pasty skinned english kids who thought they might like to try and be just a little bit like television (though without the style, artistry or knowhow).
the result of this crime against indie pop?
a record that sadly can only be described using the most terrible thing i think anyone can say about music..."mayflower" is pedestrian.
it's your mum's record collection.
it's a restaurant's muzak tape.
what a shame.

even the biff bang pow! records reflected the scene - punky psychedelia gave way to painfully faked california influenced wannabe west coast pop art experimental band boredom.

i gave up on creation and started buying more of the real thing - the afformentioned west coast pop art experimental band and joe byrd's astonishing united states of america.

music is like clothing - if it's dirt cheap then it's probably a fake.

caroliner rainbow | a bit frightening

2007-03-24T08:21:00.000-07:00

as i've mentioned before, in the middle of the 90's i started a degree as a mature student.
everyone seemed so YOUNG.
i felt so OLD.

i made some good friends - as you do.
but there was one guy on my course who had a remarkably similar taste in records to me.
we'd spend afternoons listening to kenny process team, old ron johnson records, wingtip sloat.
stuff like that.

then one day i stumbled across a record in his collection by a band called caroliner rainbow open wound corale and i was fascinated.
the record came in a hand made cover - basically a brown envelope with bits of paper stuck to it.

inside the music was surreal campfire country rock played by deranged psychopathic aliens.
yes, that's a good description.

i had to get me some.

a few weeks a later my copy of "the cooking stove beast" by caroliner rainbow susans & bruisins dropped through the door.
the record was more of the same - wierd and otherworldly, it left me feeling slightly queasy but wanting more.

the cover this time was made from what can only be described as 2 metres of filthy and stained material.
it wasn't (and still isn't) nice to touch.
i still feel the need to wash my hands after playing it.

the same friend that introduced me to caroliner went on a shopping trip to london - we met in the pub when he got back:

him: you'll never believe what i saw in rough trade.
me: what?
him: a caroliner t-shirt!
me: no!?! did you buy it?
him: well....no.
me: why?
him: because it was an old potato sack with hole cut in it for the arms and head and the word 'caroliner' scribbled across it in felt tip pen. i'm not paying £10 for that.
me: .....oh.

i was in college one day using the computers and stumbled upon an interview with the band.
they were asked about their hand made covers.
the interview went something like this:

interviewer: so you hand make all your covers then?
caroliner: yes - we use junk we find in the streets on california.
interviewer: that will explain why the cover of my copy of [album title] smells of incense.
caroliner: your lucky man, some of them smell of shit.

a couple of years later i was in the rough trade shop in covent garden and happened across a copy of "sell heal holler" by caroliner rainbow customary relaxation of the shale.
(they keep changing the suffix of their name)
the record was even more out there. barely audible songs hidden under layers of grime.
this time the record was wrapped in disposable incontinence briefs packaging.
it's got some nasty stains on it again.
not pleasent.

i still knew very little about the band and so i did a bit more research.
they claim to make music channelled through the spirit of caroliner the singing bull - a side show act from the USA of the 1800's.
caroliner's act was to write and perform her own songs.
(you read right)
the story goes there family owned the bull and, on it's death they ate it which gave them the power of remembering the animal's songs.

at least that's how i think it goes.

eventually i got bored with the records - like you do with everything - and they were left filed away on my shelves.

fast forward to 2002 and i'd just gone to live in italy (a whole different story for a whole different blog!).
there was a record fair in a town only an hour's drive away.
wandering around the stalls there were the usual offerings - hundreds of nina hagen records (looking back i wish i'd bought them), endless aisles of dire straits records, you know.

but in one corner there was a stall selling old punk records - dead kennedys, pistols etc.
i started to have a casual flick through and suddenly, there in front of me was an object that at once terrified me and made my heart race.

it was a caroliner rainbow 6 LP box set.
yes!
6 LPs in a found box.
i opened it - it was basically the band's back catalogue to date gathered together, hand made sleeves and all, in one handy-scary-filthy-wonderful-sickening-bewildering package.

i handed the bemused stall holder my 40 euros and drove home.

it frightens me but i LOVE IT.

go here for more info on caroliner rainbow.

the re-emergence of underground labels - or how to spend money like water.

2007-03-17T07:32:00.000-07:00

through the 80's i bought a hell of a lot of cassette releases.
this ended up in starting my own label and trading cassettes with label-folk around the world.
by the early/mid nineties the whole cassette underworld started to turn (back) towards releasing vinyl.
looking through the slew of catalogues from underground distributors like fisheye and betley welcomes careful drivers (both also labels in their own right) there was just masses to choose from.
and, for me at least, it was the first time in years that EVERYTHING sounded interesting.

at this time i was doing a degree as a mature student, working in a small record shop part time and bringing up a child.
all these records were an escape.
it simply reminded me of the excitement i felt a decade before when, as a teenager i'd spent my time living in the local record shop.

i distinctly remember looking through a fisheye catalogue that dropped through the door one morning and thinking "rather than fool myself by just buying one or two records and then buying one or two more in a few weeks time, i might as well by a whole stack now".
i wrote a cheque for over £100 and sent it off to paul fisheye.

paul, bless him, wasn't always the quickest mail order bloke and my order took over a month to arrive.
it was a long month.
and it meant of course that while i waited for this package i ended up ordering bits and pieces from other places too.

i took another part time job, cleaning a local high street store early in the mornings to make sure my finances didn't get too out of hand (it didn't help).

so, here then is a list of three of my favourites from this time (very roughly circa 1993-1997):

HARRY PUSSY were my absolute favourite. a 3 piece fronted by drumming screaming beauty adris hoyos. i don't think i can properly explain the screeching whirlwind that HP created. punk free improvisation? primitive rock noise? dunno.
what i do know is that they sounded like nothing else on earth - fresh, exciting and thoroughly frightening.
siltbreeze, who released a number of their records did a retrospective CD a few years ago. track it down if you can.

wingtip sloat came a close second for my affections. semi-improvised red neck white collar trash rock. the sloats had songs you could (almost) sing along to. released on the marvellous vhf records who have been threatening for far too long to release a retrospective CD.

oh i don't know how to order all these records. now i've thought about irving klaw trio i think they may be second to harry pussy. no wingtip are second. or are they?
irving klaw trio were a jazz inflected chicano improv group who roared. their self titled LP is a must have, but failing that their "utek pahtoo magoi" CD on road cone is storming too.

there're so many more bands and labels to talk about - hood, inca eyeball, gag, evil moisture - but they can all wait for another time.

julian cope | coventry | 1991

2007-03-16T02:34:00.000-07:00

if you've read this little blog of mine from the beginning you'll know that julian cope was (almost) single handedly responsible for getting me out of the heavy metal habit and into listening to indie pop.

in 1991 "peggy suicide" came out.

cope had spent a year or two wandering in the wilderness, releasing strange roky erikson style campfire albums like the sublime "skellington" and the rather frazzled "droolian", but "peggy suicide" saw him back in full control and creating huge pop songs.
"peggy" was quite rightly called a future classic by almost everyone who talked about it.

i'd never seen cope live but i'd wanted to and, i think, i needed to.

he was to be playing 2 nights at the tic-toc in coventry - a nice, middle sized venue (500 people maybe?) in a dodgy part of the city.
i had a friend at coventry university and so i bought he and i and a couple of other friends tickets for both nights.
it cost me a small fortune but i felt these people needed to see him as much as i did.

there was no support act - cope's band came on and did an hour's worth of songs from the "peggy" album, then cope played 45 minutes alone with an acoustic guitar before the band joined him again for another hour's worth of golden oldies and greatest hits.

so, this is what happened.

we went into the venue, we bought a drink, we took up a good position in the hall - close to the stage, but not too near the front - and we waited.
i could hardly speak.
i just stood there watching the stage and waiting.

the band came on and started up.
the julian cope walked on stage in his black leotard and pumps.

the entire audience jumped and cheered.
i didn't.
i burst into tears.
honestly.
i cried.
i was truly overwhelmed.
my friends, with a slight smirk i guess, put their arms around me and calmed me down.

(what a wimp!)

from beginning to end the show was sublime.
whatever problems you (and nowadays i) might have with the wigged-out-stone-circle-worshipping-wizard-dressing cope when that man is on form there is NO ONE better at holding an audience and , to put it simply, PERFORMING.

at the end of the show i noticed the bass player in the corner of the venue so i went over and had a word.
"come and find me tomorrow night", he said, "i'll introduce you."
what?
WHAT??
"just find me."

i barely watched the next night.
i just wanted it to be the end.

i found the bass player and true to his word he led me back stage.
one other guy had been allowed back there too.
he walked up to julian cope and in a big bold brash voice said, "hi jules!"
"you do not call me jules", came the reply and with that he was dismissed.

so i approached cope and politely said, "hullo mr. cope, it's a pleasure to meet you."
he smiled, shook my hand, signed the record i took with me and then scared the bejesus out of me by looking very intently into my eyes and asking, "so...have you read about kram the worm god?"

gulp.

"um. no. no i haven't."

"well i think that perhaps you should."

i quietly said goodbye and made a swift exit.
all those questions i had for him were gone.
i just wanted to be somewhere else.

oh, but i love him.

smiths | wolverhampton | 1986

2007-03-16T02:21:00.000-07:00

how were we to know?
having loved the smiths since hearing the early singles (mentioned elsewhere in this blog) i'd wanted to see them live so badly.

but how were we to know?

how were we to know that "the queen is dead" tour would be the end of the smiths?

i got tickets for the smiths' wolverhampton show - i'd be going with my cure-loving friend - and we caught the train.
i can't explain just how excited i was.
i, like so many other spotty teenage boys, simply adored the smiths. lived for the smiths. doted on the smiths.

most of the concerts i went to didn't have merchandise like t-shirts and stuff.
you didn't get that a lot with indie bands.
just a few records and cassettes on a table in a corner.
but of course the smiths were HUGE.
i bought a t-shirt.
(i've spent a while looking round this here internet thing for a picture of the shirt but i can't find one).
it was a pink shirt with a red print on the front - a small boy eating an ice cream cone.

i put it on in the toilets of the venue.
so did everyone else.
there was a sea of pink.
boys in pink.

with a good 30 minutes or so before the show started and the standing room at the front of the stage (i suppose you youngsters would call it the "mosh pit" nowadays) already looked far to scary to me and my friend.

we decided to take a position up on the balcony looking at the stage from the left hand side.
and in fact, due to the shape of the wolverhampton civic hall, we were far closer to the stage and the band than most of the rest of the audience.

supporting the smiths that night were the truly dreadful raymonde.
45 minutes of dire dour indie timewasting.

or was it just the anticipation of the smiths that made raymonde seem so awful?

finally the moment arrived.
prokofiev's "march of the capulets" blasted from the PA and the smiths came on.

i don't remember much of the show.
i simply stood in awe from beginning to end.
i didn't even cheer.
it was all a bit too much.

shortly after the tour ended the smiths split and that was that.
as i've mentioned before, personally i didn't like any of the band's last few releases - "last night i dreamt...", "strangeways" etc - and so for me the end of the smiths was a low in terms of records.

but it was a huge high in the case of seeing a band at the heights playing a show that turned the audience into raving, screaming animals.

surely that's how gigs should be?

gary numan & david bowie

2007-02-19T07:49:00.000-08:00

when i was 14 i had a girlfriend.
her name was melanie, but that's not important.

what is important is that she had a brother (in fact she had two, but one was away in the army).

her brother's name was mark and i thought he was super cool.
he had an ear ring and rode a very large motorcycle.
a cool one.
he also had a bit of a numan haircut going on.
in fact, thinking back, he looked a lot like this:

he was a really big fan of gary numan and david bowie.
but mainly gary numan.

the result of this?
i spent quite a lot of evenings tinkering with motorbikes with gary numan playing on a little cassette recorder.
i learned to ride that year - it's something i keep coming back to - i love the idea of bikes.
i've had three.
one at sixteen, one at 22 and one at 34.
unfortunately as soon as it gets a bit chilly the idea of riding a bike suddenly becomes a big turn off.
(i have no idea why i'm telling you this. this is, after all, meant to be a music blog).

one weekend i went on a trip to hay-on-wye with my dad - he'd got some work to do over there.
in the back of one of the many many bookshops i found a box of records.
and in that box i found a copy of tubeway army's 1st album.
dad bought it for me.
my girlfriend's brother tried everything he could to talk me into giving it to him.
i still have the exact same copy and it's still one of my favourite records.
i listen to it at least once a week.

through all the jokes that used to be made about gary numan's politics/failed flying adventures/marrying fans/fake hair/etc i continued to love his records.

over the last few years it's become cool(ish) to like gary numan.
the other day my daughter was watching an episode of "top of the pops 2" and numan came on doing cars.
"that's the sugababes music dad!", she cried.
so i gently explained the facts.
she understood.
after all, she's 13 and she likes bogshed.

as for bowie, i heard plenty of his records that year too but he was more of a slow burner for me.
i really liked the singles that were out around then - "ashes to ashes", "fashion", even "modern love" - but i couldn't get into the whole ziggy/spiders stuff much at all.
then, for the girlfriend's brother's birthday i bought him a copy of "low" on cassette and boy did that change things.
"low" seemed otherworldly and sexy and dangerous and i dug it to pieces. mainly "sound and vision", but "always crashing" was just super too.

what am i trying to say?
dunno really.
maybe that even those early fumblings behind the bike sheds can be more educational than you thought at first.

maureen tucker | valentines day 1992

2007-02-14T23:12:00.000-08:00

in 1989 maureen tucker's "life in exile after abdication" came out on 50 trillion watts records.
i loved maureen - she was always my favourite velvet undergrounder - she and sterling morrison always had a cool that i didn't see in lou reed or john cale.

anyhow, i got the record home and played it again and again - songs like "spam again" and "hey mersh!" were instant hits.
on the back cover was a contact address.
it can't be her personal address i thought - she's moe tucker!
but i thought i'd write anyway. just a polite letter to say hello and
stuff.
two weeks later i got a letter back.
it was from maureen herself.
we corresponded for a year or two, and up until 2000 i still got christmas cards from her.
in fact i probably still do but i've moved so many times since then.
i really ought to get back in touch.
she was always a great letter writer - funny, gentle, friendly.

anyway, in 1992 her band were set to come over to the UK for a small tour - london, manchester, liverpool, i forget where else.

i was put on the guestlist for the liverpool show and duly turned up, a couple of friends in tow.
the gig was at a small club that was then called mardi gras.
or was that just the name of the night?

i don't remember who supported - in fact i don't remember who was in maureen's band apart from sterling morrison, who was an absolute gentleman and was happy to take time to speak to everyone who wanted a word.
you know, that could even have been one of the last times he was in the UK - or was he involved in that velvet's reunion?

if anyone out there knows who maureen's nband was for that UK tour i'd love to know - her backing band on record was mainly made up of various members of half japanese.

the band were super.
crunchy clean guitars and falling apart drums playing 3 chord pop, maureen playing a gibson SG and singing from lyric sheets on a music stand in front of her.
absolutely the coolest thing i'd ever seen at that point.

i've recently dug the records out again - not heard them for a long time - and i've fallen back in love with the grand dame of female drummers, the patron saint of stand up drummers.

now i'm getting angry - postscript

2007-02-07T08:10:00.000-08:00

in case people don't read some of the comments left on this blog - all of which are always great and gratefully received, and because i think we could start a good debate on all this stuff, here's some extra thoughts:

i'm not having a dig at anyone in particular, it just gets so boring trying to navigate around tags for musical types all the time.

the bottom line, to me at least, is that all this music is pop music.
the dictionary again:

noun (also pop music) commercial popular music, in particular accessible, tuneful music of a kind popular since the 1950s and sometimes contrasted with rock, soul, or other forms of popular music.

because let's face it - all music is to some degree commercial or at least attempting to be.

maybe not commercially viable, but that's a completely different kettle of fish.

as soon as music is created and someone has bought it/heard it/hummed it/danced to it surely it's a piece of pop music.

ALL the music one can hear today (and as we all know there's a hell of a lot of it) can be traced back through popular music - taking in rock, punk, electronic music, rock & roll, skiffle, blues and further.

and of course people are always going to create catchall terms for types of music.

what i think annoys me most is that the term "twee" is derogatory - not in the way that the term "punk" was derogatory, but in an affected, knowingly coy, way that removes any notions of empowerment or action from the scene that might grow up around it.
the term "punk" for example, though it soon became used to describe a sound rather than a political understanding, at least had drive and excitement naturally attached to it, purely because of the connotations of the derogatory term "punk".
the "twee" on the other hand simply removes any sense of edginess, experimentation - it creates a safe and fluffy cushion on which people can comfortably sit without rebellion.

(excuse the convoluted sentences above - comes from thinking as i type. but i think my point's been made).

please bear in mind i'm simply trying to open a debate here.

personally i believe we should all be trying to reclaim the term indie so it can be used in it's proper form.
because independent has ALL the right connotations to empower us all as both listeners and creators of music.
and let's face it, 99% of the music we all love has that in common.

the fight starts here!

think i need a bit of a lie down.

now i'm REALLY getting angry

2007-02-06T22:38:00.000-08:00

or is that i'm immensley frustrated?

OK, i know this blog is set out to be tales from an indie boys youth in the 1980's BUT some things need talking about.

you'll recall my little rant about C86 and how it's been mythologised into something that it never was?
well recently i've noticed a rise in the term "twee" to describe a musical genre.
in fact to describe the same musical genre as C86.
and used by the same people.
now, can someone tell me EXACTLY how this works because:

A - the dictionary describes the term twee as:
twee |twē| adjective Brit., chiefly derogatory excessively or affectedly quaint, pretty, or sentimental : although the film's a bit twee, it's watchable. ORIGIN early 20th cent.: representing a child's pronunciation of sweet .

B - there are of course (and have always been) certain bands that could rightfully be described as twee. BMX bandits for a start. or the field mice. there are also, i imagine, swathes of bands alive and well today who've been influenced by sarah records and it's fall-out in the early 90's that may well be a bit twee.
but the problem i'm really having is that, like with the term "indie" in the early 90's someone's created a catchall term and is trying to shoe-horn anyone and everyone who is hip/liked/influential/etc into the catagory of "twee".

HOW ON EARTH are the following bands twee?:

bIG fLAME
bogshed
josef k
june brides
age of chance
a witness
dog faced hermans
fire engines

...and that's just off the top of my head.

does this mean that in the next couple of months SWANS' "public castration is a good idea" live double will turn up as a twee masterpiece simply because it was released in the mid 80's and "twee-pop" kids will be swinging their man-bags to the gut-wrenching sounds of a band going at 2 miles an hour at maximum volume?

because by what seem to be the rules of what makes a band twee, these people SHOULD BE CHAMPIONING SWANS as they were highly influential on the wall of noise that my bloody valentine became.

and i'm told that my bloody valentine are, of course, twee.

(writer scratches head and has to have a sit down).

why i don't DO festivals - OR "i am a grumpy old sod"

2007-01-22T10:20:00.000-08:00

i don't DO festivals.
i've never understood the draw of them.
why be uncomfortable, crammed into a skinny tent with a girlfriend/boyfriend/companion, your filthy stinking bodies itching and cramped?

(by the way - i don't DO camping. if we were made to camp why did god invent the travelodge?)

sorry.
where was i?

oh yes - i don't DO festivals.
you see one year i did.

i was kind of talked into it - my friends really wanted to go and i had some friends playing there that year.
the year was 1990.
the festival was glastonbury - in fact the last glastonbury in association with CND.

the whole weekend was doomed from the start - i had to drive, i was the only one with a car.
it was a mini cooper.
there were five of us.
and it was an OLD mini cooper.

so i borrowed a roof rack to which i strapped 2 tents, several bags of clothing, the usual camping nonsense.

it took a very very long time to drive down the M5 to glastonbury.
by the time i arrived i'd already decided i was right about not wanting to go to festivals.

then we got onto the festival site.
the car got stuck in the muddy ridges of the, ahem, "road" across the campsite.
that took an extra half an hour to sort out - no one would help, they were all too busy trying to get a good spot for their tents - so much for these events being about brotherly/sisterly love, helping one another and other such hippy shit.

OK, so we get the tents up - we're on an incline but at least they're up.

then it started to rain.

a lot.

i needed the toilet and so walked down to the designated area.
it was the first morning and the toilets were already full.
and i mean FULL.
so much so that whoever had used them last must have had to balance above the toilet to perch their (i'm sorry there's no other word for it) log on the top.
it was like a pyramid of poo rising from the depths.

i didn't go for the rest of the weekend.
mind you, for me and my rather agrieved friends it was a short weekend.

we spent the rest of friday wandering around the shopping area looking for something to eat.
even cold and damp and caked in mud i was NOT going to pay THAT much money for a potato.
or some tofu.
or some soup - soup? boiled noodle water.

i opted for drugs.

and god how i hate hippies!
gurning fools entering my space with muddied faces, "like wow, hi man. like get into it".
(they were all of 18 years old).
bollocks.

anyhow, the next morning my friends were playing - it was saturday.
the main day i guess.
pale saints came on about 11am and the wind picked up.
the result of this was that, apart from the opening chord of their first number you couldn't hear a single note.
not from anywhere in the amphitheatre.
no, the wind took it all away.
i kid you not.
ALL OF IT.

i went back to the tent and told my friends i would be leaving very soon if this situation didn't change.
"but we really want to see the cure", they replied.
they were headlining that night.
"ok", i said, "i wouldn't mind seeing courtney pine anyway" - he was on at about the same time on the world stage.

and so, at about 7.30pm i found my way to the world stage.
approximately 15 minutes later pine's band came on.
another 10 minutes later pine himself came on, blew one note and decided he wasn't going to perform.

i very calmly went back to the tents, packed them all up, strapped them (along with the clothing, food etc) to the roof of the car and went and found my friends.
they were happily watching tiny dots in the distance who may or may not have been the cure.
"i'm off home, you can come if you like", i told them.
"but we're watching the cure and there's all tomorrow...", they replied.

so i told them honestly - "look, i hate humanity right now and i'm full of BAD DRUGS. if i stay here I WILL KILL SOMEONE."

and so they duly got into the car and we drove.
halfway up the M5 i fell asleep at the wheel and was woken by the rumble strip.
phew.
about an hour away from home with the sun coming up the engine started to pack up and i got us the rest of the way, including dropping everyone off at their respective homes on 3 valves.

no.
i don't DO festivals.

the best and worst gigs of my life?

2007-01-19T03:53:00.000-08:00

both the best gig i ever went to and the worst were at the same venue - the manchester boardwalk.
i used to go there quite a lot.
manchester was only just over an hour away by car, and there was always interesting things happening there.
it's the club where, downstairs a certain bunch of mancs rehearsed before signing to creation and releasing 10 or more years worth of the most boring and fatuous rock music.
we'll return to them later.

so, the best gig i've ever been to ever was at the manchester boardwalk in 1991.
it was a triple header - the ex, dog faced hermans and dawson.

i took some friends with me, along with my girlfriend at the time - they were much more interested in flowery indie pop and as a result they stood in a corner for the entire evening looking a bit perplexed that they were the only people in polka dot skirts and hair grips.

dawson were on first and i was held transfixed.
i'll still argue with anyone who cares that dawson were the natural successors to bIG fLAME - all superfast barbed wire guitars, ridiculous bass lines and careering drums.
they were intense.
they were mental.
i fell totally and utterly in love.
ali, the bass player, ran the length of the stage and bounced off walls, jer screamed into the mic and bled over his guitar and all the time richie kept up his unstoppable violent pummeling of his drumkit.

dog faced hermans were up next.
they'd been one of my favourite bands since buying the "unbend" ep after a tip off from a friend.
i'd not had chance to see them live before but i'd seen the live footage of them on TV - it was a show called FSD and there were also live performances by soup dragons, bmx bandits and a whole bunch of others (were the cateran on?).
DfH were a fantastic live band.
exciting, full of energy, they had the ability to make me dance and I DON'T DO DANCING.
but i did that night.

the ex were the last band on and i'd heard a lot about them - i had a few of their records which i liked a lot but live they were something else!
joined for a few songs by members of DfH's they blended straighforward punk with odd time signatures, skronky improvisation and utter noise.
since that first time i've seen the ex many many times and they remain one of my favourite bands to go and see.
if you get a chance to catch a live show then go! go! GO!

after the everything was over and i'd made my acquaintance with one or two people i'd been corresponding with - andy dog face, ali dawson - and caught up with john robb who was in the audience along with daren who i've talked about in an earlier entry in this here blog (he was everywhere!) i gathered up my friends and we went back to the car.

i was so excited about what i'd spent the evening witnessing that i just couldn't shut up about it.
so much so in fact that i made a wrong turn in altringham and ended getting us all home via unknown country lanes and almost three hours of driving.
my friends weren't impressed.
my girlfriend even less so.

i promised i'd make it up to them.

and that's where the worst gig i ever went to happens.

as i mentioned they all liked jingly jangly whimpy pop.
a few weeks later there was a gig at the boardwalk and i promised i'd drive them to it.
it was another triple bill - the field mice, st. christopher and rain.

rain were on first and they made a horribley boring 3 chord rock thing. i ignored them as much as possible and caught up with glenn st. christopher who i'd not seen since playing with them 2 or 3 years before.
i take it on good authority that rain got the singer's brother in to play guitar and became some pop group called oasis.
i don't care.

st. christopher were on second and they did what st. chris always did - they made glimmering shiny 60's tinged indie pop.
i had a soft spot for them - after all they drove all the way from york to play in front of a dozen people for my birthday party.

the field mice were on last - headlining no less - my friends rushed to the front, hairbands slipping, flowery print dresses swirling and bobbed their heads about in faux childish swooshes and sweeps.
i sat on a stool by the bar and waited for it to be over.
i have NEVER seen a band with so little prescence, so little enthusiasm.
forget shoegazing bands - they at least had noise and power on their side.
each member of the field mice looked bored - perhaps they were - stood still, barely spoke to the audience, sung away from the mic whenever possible so all the singing sounded muffled and amateur.
i could go on for another paragraph or so about it, but you get the idea.

i never took my friends to another concert and, soon afterwards, i split up with my girlfriend.

probably over musical differences.

LPS & singles i just can't live without - a compilation (well actaully two)

2007-01-18T10:45:00.000-08:00

here we are again.

with the last two posts containing lists of records released in the 1980's that i couldn't possibly live without, it was mentioned to me that a downloadable compilation of these lists might be nice.

and so, being the ever agreeable blog that i am and it having been my birthday yesterday, here for your delight are two double compilations (they should each fit onto 2 CDs if you so choose).

the first one compiles a song each from the list of LPs with the track listing in the same order as the original list.

the second one compiles a song each from the list of singles, again with the track listing reflecting the original list.

as usual each comes with cover art and stuff.

ENJOY!

LPs PART ONE (1980-1986):

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD (108MB)

tracklisting:

adam & the ants - feed me to the lions
gary numan - the aircrash bureau
xtc - burning with optimism's flames
monochrome set - the lighter side of dating
fire engines - get up and use me
swell maps - real shocks
motörhead - (we are) the road crew
creation - biff bang pow!
fall - just step s'ways
violent femmes - blister in the sun
nightingales - crafty fag
scritti politti - asylums in jerusalem
supreme cool beings - your name here
swans - big strong boss
julian cope - quizmaster
lloyd cole & the commotions - four flights up
prefab sprout - green isaac
smiths - miserable lie
talking heads - psycho killer
biff bang pow! - wouldn't you?
june brides - i fall
membranes - typical male penis
chills - pink frost
a witness - car skidding

LPs PART TWO (1986-1989):

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD (125MB)

tracklisting:

age of chance - be fast be clean be cheap
beat happening - what's important
bogshed - jobless youngsters
creepers - old man's treat
west coast pop art experimental band - i won't hurt you
wire - dot dash
bIG fLAME - new way
sonic youth - green light
stump - tupperware stripper
television personalities - adventure playground
that petrol emotion - fleshprint
mctells - take the car
cannanes - skeleton is your little boy
band of holy joy - don't stick knives in babbies' heads
buy off the bar - peanut butter boy
felt - silver plane
josef k - sorry for laughing
wolfhounds - cruelty
napalm death - the kill
pastels - hitchin' a.
shrubs - edith
datblygu = tymer aspirin
dog faced hermans - balloon girl
rapeman - marmoset
stretchheads - everything's going to break in a minute
13th floor elevators - you're gonna miss me
red crayola - transparent radiation
dandelion adventure - infant child gutter vulgar
de la soul - potholes in my lawn
john zorn - chronology
maureen tucker - hey mersh!

SINGLES PART ONE (1980-1986):

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD (118MB)

tracklisting:

young marble giants - final day
television personalities - three wishes
membranes - muscles
fall - fit & working again
bodines - paradise
nightingales - urban ospreys
smiths - hand in glove
microdisney - fiction land
public image limited - this is not a love song
beat happening - our secret
hit parade - forever
jesus & marychain - upside down
yeah yeah noh - beware the weakling lines
june brides - every conversation
marc riley & the creepers - snipe
a witness - lucky in london
bogshed - slave girls
shop assistants - all day long
that petrol emotion - keen
wedding present - once more
primal scream - it happens
pastels - million tears
swans - time is money (bastard)
pigbros - hedonist hat
mackenzies - new breed
bIG fLAME - cat with cholic

SINGLES PART TWO (1986-1989):

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD (121MB)

tracklisting:

datblygu - braidd
dragsters - it takes a worried girl
14 iced bears - blue suit
mctells - m.t.b.
razorcuts - big pink cake
soup dragons - i know everything
stitched back foot airman - wouldn't you like to know
woodentops - traveling man
age of chance - liquid jungle
mccarthy - frans hals
shrubs - black saloons
rumblefish - solid wood
buy off the bar - in the back
close lobsters - pimps
dog faced hermans - cruelty
sea urchins - everglades
wolfhounds - me
this poison! - poised over the pause button
bachelor pad - jack & julian
great leap forward - hope's not enough son, ask your parents
cannanes - stories
death by milkfloat - breakbone
adamski - n.r.g.
fugazi - break in
kilgore trout - seventh dog
lard - the power of lard
tad - wood goblins

*NOTE: AS PER USUAL 99% OF THESE ARE TAKEN FROM MY SCRATCHY OLD VINYL AND SO SOUND QUALITY IS QUITE MIXED.

records i just couldn't live without 2

2007-01-16T05:26:00.000-08:00

ok, here's part two.
7"s and EPs i couldn't bare to be without.
i listen to all these regularly.
just check my lastFM thing if you don't believe me.

anyhow, here we go:

1980

- young marble giants - final day

1981

- television personalities - three wishes

- membranes - muscles

- fall - slates

1982

- bodines - god bless

1983

- nightingales - urban ospreys

- smiths - hand in glove

- microdisney - pink skinned man

- PiL - this is not a love song

1984

- beat happening - our secret

- hit parade - forever

- jesus & marychain - upside down

- yeah yeah noh - beware the weakling lines

- june brides - every conversation

- marc riley & the creepers - shadow figure

1985

- a witness - loudhailer songs

- bogshed - let them eat bogshed

- shop assistants - all day long

- that petrol emotion - keen

- wedding present - once more

- primal scream - all fall down

- pastels - million tears

- swans - time is money (bastard)

- pigbros - the blubberhouses

1986

- mackenzies - new breed

- bIG fLAME - cubist pop manifesto

- datblygu - hwgr-grawth-og

- dragsters - albino

- 14 iced bears - inside

- mctells - jesse man rae

- razorcuts - big pink cake

- soup dragons - whole wide world

- stitched-back foot airman - wouldn't you like to know

- woodentops - good thing

- age of chance - bible of the beats

- mccarthy - frans hals

- shrubs - full steam into the brainstorm

- v/a - it sells or it smells

1987

- buy off the bar - the 2nd peel session

- close lobsters - never seen before

- dog faced hermans - unbend

- sea urchins - pristine christine

- wolfhounds - me

- this poison - paused over the pause button

- bachelor pad - the albums of jack

- great leap forward - controlling the edges of tone

1988

- cannanes - i think the weather's affected you brain

- death by milkfloat - uninformation

1989

- adamski - n-r-g

- fugazi - 3 songs

- kilgore trout - bad puddings

- lard - the power of lard

- tad - wood goblins

records i just couldn't live without

2007-01-16T03:12:00.000-08:00

this blog will shortly begin to include some musical stuff that happened in the early 90's.
the main reason being that i want to talk about my favourite ever gig and that was in manchester in the early 90's.

though i won't be drifting away from the 80's altogether, it seemed like a nice idea to make a list (because i'm anal like that) of the records i bought during that decade that i couldn't live without.

obviously this is for my own enjoyment more than yours.
i couldn't possible start to put them in order of very favourite to least favourite - that'd be impossible - so they're in order of the year they were released.
i bought some of the earlier ones later of course, though still in the 80's.

anyway, here's a list of LPs and cassettes that i just couldn't live without.
i tried to keep it down to 50, but that was impossible too.
the next entry will be singles/EPs etc.

1980

- adam & the ants - kings of the wild frontier

- gary numan - telekon

- xtc - black sea

- monochrome set - strange boutique

1981

- fire engines - aufgeladen und bereit fur action und spass

- swell maps - collision time

- motorhead - no sleep 'til hammersmith

1982

- creation - how does it feel to feel

- the fall - hex enduction hour

- violent femmes - violent femmes

- nightingales - hysterics

- scritti politti - songs to remember

- supreme cool beings - survival of the coolest

1983

- swans - filth

- julian cope - world shut your mouth

1984

- lloyd cole & the commotions - rattlesnakes

- prefab sprout - swoon

- smiths - smiths

- talking heads - stop making sense

1985

- biff bang pow! - pass the paintbrush honey

- june brides - there are 8 million stories

- membranes - the gift of life

- chills - kaleidoscope world

1986

- a witness - i am john's pancreas

- age of chance - crush collision

- beat happening - beat happening

- bogshed - step on it

- creepers - miserable sinners

- west coast pop art experimental band - transparent day (reissue)

- wire - play pop

- various artists - nme c86

- sonic youth - evol

- stump - quirk out

- television personalities - mummy you're not watching me

- that petrol emotion - manic pop thrill

- mctells - mctells

- cannanes - happy swing

1987

- band of holy joy - more tales from the city

- buy off the bar - it's up to billy

- felt - poem of the river

- josef k - young and stupid - endless soul

- wolfhounds - unseen ripples from a pebble

- napalm death - scum

- pastels - up for a bit

- shrubs - take me aside for a midnight harangue

1988

- datblygu - wyau

- dog faced hermans - humans fly

- rapeman - two nuns and a pack mule

- stretchheads - five fingers four thingers a thumb a facelift and a new
identity

- 13th floor elevators - the psychedelic sounds of (reissue)

- red crayola - the parable of arable land

1989

- dandelion adventure - puppy shrine

- de la soul - 3 feet high and rising

- john zorn - spy vs spy

- maureen tucker - life in exile after abdication

wire, school friends and cool parents

2007-01-15T08:02:00.000-08:00

the parents of all my friends at school seemed to be of a different generation to my folks.
my mum and dad were in their 30's when i was born.
on top of that, though my mum had gone to concerts (cliff richard & tom jones being one) in the 60's, pop culture completely passed my old man by, and he was the musical driving force
in the family.
he'd been in brass bands and was a professional singer (baritone) and music teacher
and my mum was in his choir.
as a result there was always choral and classical music drifitng through the house - lovely to listen to but not especially cool when friends came over.
on the other hand the parents of my best friend at school were in their late 20's and liked the tubes, PiL, cream and wire.

at fourteen, and with music having well and truly
taken it's place as THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN THE WORLD (except sometimes perhaps for girls) i really liked going over to my friends house.
we'd play on either his or my ZX spectrum and i would listen out for his dad putting records on.
i knew who PiL were - my next door neighbour had introduced me and their "this is not a love song" had become a favourite in school and at the house parties of school friends.
the tubes didn't really interest me and cream were just another rock band that i knew from my days as a teeny metaller.

BUT "PINK FLAG"!

now there was something i'd never heard before.
the songs were so SHORT.
the guitars were so CLEAN.

i had to buy the album.
i loved it and loved it and loved it.

after playing my copy of "pink flag" to death i was round at my friend's house and his dad put on "chairs missing".

i'm ashamed to say it left me cold.

i wanted more of the same.
not long songs and keyboards and stuff.

it took me a long time to come round to the fact that wire were always good.
partly it was "play pop", the mini album compilation released by pink records.
partly it was just growing up and realising my mistakes.

nowadays if asked, i would have to list wire in the top 5 or 10 bands that have meant most to me in my life.

mind you, i'd probably also have to have the Hadley & District Orpheus Male Voice Choir in there too.

the hit parade, or how to package records to make me buy them all.

2007-01-03T02:32:00.000-08:00

i'm a sucker for packaging.
i always have been.
especially packaging which builds a set.
stuff that matches makes me happy.
(i dread to think what a freudian might say about that but hey).

once upon a time i bought the hit parade's "forever" 7".
i'd read about it somewhere in a now forgotten fanzine and thought it sounded neat.
and i wasn't disappointed.
it was a lovely slice of 60's tinged summery pop.

then "my favourite girl" came out.
it was more of the same and i wasn't quite as excited.
except that the covers matched.

i couldn't wait for the next one.

over the course of the next year or two, another four hit parade singles came out on JSH.
each packaged in matching covers.
unfortunately, to my ears, each one got progressively less catchy.

but i still cherish them for the covers alone.

just look!!!

and a happy christmas to you!

2006-12-22T07:09:00.000-08:00

because it's christmas and it's very cold outside, here's a compilation to warm you up.

consider it an xPQwRtz gift to you.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD xPQwRtz compilation number 6 (with cover art) - 101MB

TRACKLISTING

band of holy joy - route to love
dragsters - albino
brilliant corners - delilah sands
david westlake - she grew and she grew
coachmen - radical lifestyle
buy off the bar - it’s up to you
3 action - it’s a good laugh
bogshed - loaf
biff bang pow! - lost your dreams
higsons - where’ve all the club a go-go’s went went
big paintings - minitrend friend
bats - made up in blue
datblygu - casserole efeilliaid
bmx bandits - rosemary ledingham
bachelor pad - the albums of jack
blue orchids - disney boys
bIG fLAME - why popstars can’t dance
king of the slums - fanciable headcase
a.c. temple - make mine music
y pants - that’s the way boys are

please note: as usual most of these are taken from my scratchy old vinyl so quality can be a bit poor in places.

enjoy and happy christmas.
see you next year.

dodge(y) commer - sutherland arms | stoke on trent | 1988

2006-12-20T05:07:00.000-08:00

one day the colgates decided to buy a van to go to gigs in.
we'd been travelling around the country in our morris minor but the poor thing was getting worn out.
we spotted a dodge commer van for sale - it was bright red and looked ace.
we didn't really think about it, just made sure it worked, handed over the money and drove away in it.

our first gig using the van was in stoke on trent - we played with honeycrash and blue light at the sutherland arms.

the dodge commer van is interesting to drive in that the engine is situated in the cab between the driver and passenger seat and you sit over the front wheels, meaning that turning has a very interesting feel - it swings like a bus does - you know, you're still looking forwards as you feel yourself drift to the left or right.

it took some getting used to i can tell you.

anyhow, we loaded the van up and also stuck a morris minor seat that we'd bought in the back as paul colgate and his girlfriend were coming along and there were only two seats up front.

we hadn't realised that the van had a top speed of approximately 40 miles an hour, and that was travelling in a straight line.
the journey to stoke on trent from telford is all winding country lanes.

during the journey we could hear bumps and bangs coming from the back of the van and i'd shout, "everything OK paul?", and get muted responses of, "yeah, fine."

when we finally arrived at the sutherland arms i tried to get into a parking space.
the van was too wide.
so i reversed back out and hit the side of one of the other bands' cars as they entered the car park.

after much apologising i opened the back of the van for paul and vicky to get out.
as the doors swung back i was greeted with the two of them pressed nose-first hard up against the doors, their legs tucked uncomfortably up against their chests.

i'd not bothered securing the seat to the floor in the back of the van and the minute we'd begun our journey the seat, paul and vicky had all begun to slide rather ungratefully around the van being chased by guitars and amplifiers.

they'd finally come to a halt when i hit the car, after sliding at speed from one end of the van to the other.

it was the the first time we used the van for a gig.
it was also the last.

SOMETIMES PEOPLE CAN BE SO KIND

2006-12-10T02:36:00.000-08:00

thanks to the lovely andreas at dancetothesun ALL the xPQwRtz compilations can be downloaded again!

i've fixed all the links in the relative blog entries.
or if you like here are all the compilations to date:

compilation number 1
compilation number 2 - indie girls
compilation number 3 - cover versions
compilation number 4 - cassettes & flexis
compilation number 5.1 - sad songs
compilation number 5.2 - happy songs

thanks again to andreas!

cx

the fourth man? the worst band

2006-12-08T02:02:00.000-08:00

my first attempt at being in a band came when i'd just turned 15.
i had a friend at school who had been playing classical guitar since the age of about 5 or 6 and was incredibly good at it.

unfortunately his favourite bands were big country and the proclaimers.
he also had a penchant for the housemartins.

a mutual friend of ours had decided to be a bass player.
mainly due to his love of geddy lee and rush.
he was also a big U2 fan.

i was listening, as you know by now, to a blend of june brides, smiths, sigue sigue sputnik and the jesus and marychain.
i also still liked marillion.
quite a lot.
still do.
oh dear.

one day the two boys - richard and neal - found me in the playground have a kick about and told me their plan.
they'd been writing some songs and wanted me to do the singing.
mainly because i was a bit of a show off.
no one had ever heard me sing.

they gave me a tape of 3 songs they'd recorded on some uncle's 8 track (!yeah i know!) with a heavy drum machine backing.

i listened and listened and then wrote some lyrics, the thought of which now make me feel rather unwell.
they were the lyrics of a 15 year old trying to be deep.
you know - BAD POETRY.
there were probably a couple of lines nicked from truman capote and oscar wilde as that's what morrissey did.

urgh, the cliche's still hurt when i think about them.

anyway, i recorded the lyrics using two tape machines.
one playing the cassette i'd been given and the other recording me singing along.

i was ever so pleased with myself.

we called ourselves the 4th man and neil the bass player went out and bought a geddy lee style white sports jacket in celebration.

our first and last, ahem, "gig" was one morning during school assembly.
we placed the drum machine on a table in the middle of the assembly hall stage and took our positions around it.
bass on the left, guitar on the right, and me in the front.

the rest of the school filed in and giggled and pointed as we waited for our cue.
neil had brought his jacket to school especially and had rolled the sleeves up in geddy's honour.
richard was wearing one of his dad's white button down shirts so that it was all floppy and hung down at the back in the nearest approximation of simple minds as he could manage.
i wore my school uniform.
but i TOOK MY TIE OFF!

we played three songs.
in fact we played them pretty well actually.
each one was greeted with sniggers hidden behind applause.
just as we were leaving the stage feeling like we'd just concquered wembley stadium someone shouted out, "NEXT TIME TRY DOING IT WITHOUT MIMING TO THAT TAPE RECORDER!"

turns out everyone thought the drum machine was our backing tape.

that afternoon i left the band.

i no longer have the tapes of the band.
phew.

a bit of the other

2006-11-24T07:12:00.000-08:00

were you as disappointed with the pastels video as i was?

i remember mark flunder telling me he'd been putting it together and i couldn't wait to see it.
it eventually came out on glass records in 1988 and was more than just a bit rubbish.

mark didn't like it either - supposedly the pastels had been really unhelpful in making it.
it really shows in the lack of interest they display in every scene of the video.

there's a scratchy black and white version of baby honey (that damn song was on every pastels record for 10 years! or so it seemed), and the "crawl babies" video was on there - that was probably the highlight.
poor mark - that's the one video he didn't make.

the rest of it is the pastels moping about, occassionally holding bits of plastic fruit while eugene and frances vaseline mope about in the background.

for the anoraks amongst you, stills from all this nonsense were used in the artwork for the "up for a bit" LP.

anyhow.
i recently watched it again.
i'd not sat through it in about 15 years.
it was even worse than i remember.
the music's fine - of course it is, it's a bunch of songs from "up for a bit" along with "truck train tractor".

at around the same time i got hold of a copy of this:

now this was more like it!

this video captures SWANS at their most brutal.
once described as "the sound of a man chained to a pole walking in endless circles" (sorry - can't remember who i'm (mis)quoting there), the live set on this video is intense and huge and frighteningly wonderful.
there's a couple of videos stuck on the end - the one for "a screw" is particularly fine.

and so i threw my hand in with the noise brigade.
i had loved the pastels, i really had.
soon after the video came the "baby, you're just you" single and the pastels had lost a fan.
from stephen pastel © haircut to burning my anorak over the course of one 4 minute pop song.

shame.

compilation #5 download problems

2006-11-21T10:10:00.000-08:00

apologies for the earlier download problems.
all the links should work now.

here they are again, just in case:

xPQwRtz #5 part 1

xPQwRtz #5 part 2

happy? sad? you be the judge

2006-11-21T03:53:00.000-08:00

you know how songs gather memories?
a song you love becomes inextricably linked with an event - the break up of a relationship or the buying of a fantastic pair of socks.

and sometimes these songs don't in themselves evoke a particular mood.
or the mood they evoke is the opposite of the effect they have on you.

with that said, here's xPQwRtz compilation #5.
like buses there are two at once this time.

#5.1 is songs that, whenever i hear them, make me feel sad or uncomfortable.
#5.2 is songs that always make me feel happy or make my heart race.

i'm not going to go into the reasons all these songs have their effect on me - it would take forever, i can't be bothered, and i'm sure you don't really care.
i'm also pretty sure you'll know a lot of these songs and you'll think, "why on earth does THAT make him sad/happy?"

so, here they are for your pleasure - two very personal groups of songs:

tracklisting:

felt - declaration
cannanes - woe
beloved - this means war
jazz butcher - susie
strawberry switchblade - trees & flowers
june brides - this town
chills - the great escape
kilgore trout - basilisk
marc riley & the creepers - shadow figure
microdisney - pink skinned man
pastels - surprise me
band of holy joy - mad dot
weather prophets - naked as the day you were born
sea urchins - please rain fall
biff bang pow! - if i die
stump - our fathers
television personalities - arthur the gardener
momus - murderers, the hope of women
these immortal souls - marry me (lie! lie!)
young marble giants - final day

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD PART 1 - 105MB

tracklisting:

pastels - heaven's above
prefab sprout - don't sing
robert lloyd - the part of the anchor
stitched back foot airman - wouldn't you like to know
bIG fLAME - man of few syllables
pleasureheads - something you're above
television personalities - and don't the kids just love it
wolfhounds - disgusted, e7
soup dragons - whole wide world
great leap forward - let's jive while we're still alive
that petrol emotion - it's a good thing
scritti politti - jacques derrida
haircut one hundred - favourite shirts (boy meets girl)
bogshed - tried & tested public speaker
hit parade - stop
fire engines - candyskin
tynal tywyll - '73 heb flares
teardrop explodes - ha ha i'm drowning
woodentops - good thing

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD PART 2 - 80MB

note: as usual the vast majority of these are taken from my scratchy old records and so the quality is a bit poor in places.

ENJOY!

being a shop assistant

2006-11-20T21:35:00.000-08:00

it's 5.30am.
i've been up since 4am worrying about some work i need to get finished.

now, full of coffee and with the work done (phew) my mind has turned to approximately 300 different subjects (that'll be the coffee), one of which is the week i spent working in my local record shop when i was 15.

i've mentioned the local record shop before.
it was called langland's.
it was my mecca.
weekly visits, sometimes daily visits almost always saw me coming away with something for the turntable.

with 21 years hindsight however the place was pretty nasty.
by midday there would be a half dozen blokes steadily drinking pints bought from the pub across the street - so much in fact that the shop became known as the langland arms.

the first thing that should have rung alarm bells for me was when the smiths' first album came out.
the owner of the shop didn't like the smiths.
which was fine. that was his choice.
i arrived after school to pick up my copy and as i was passed it across the counter a long splodgy line of biro was drawn across the front.
i didn't complain.
but i should've.
(i've since managed to clean the offending pen mark off the cover).

anyhow.
one week i was asked if i'd like to help out in the shop for a week as the owner was going on holiday.
i'd been in there so often i knew my way around and knew the shop's VERY odd system for filing the records behind the counter - this involved records sitting in their inner sleeves in alphabetical/numerical order of catalogue number sub-divided into record label.

obviously i jumped at the chance.
every morning i got to the shop half an hour before opening time to get the place together, tidy up a bit, get the doors opened to clear the fug of pub-like, stale beer and cigarette air.

i enjoyed the entire week.
especially tuesday and thursday morning when the orders arrived and i had to go through the boxes sorting out all the new arrivals and getting customer orders ready.

the following monday the owner was back and i went in to hand back the keys.
a couple of records had come in for me that week too, but i'd resisted taking them home.
through the mists of time i think one of them was this:

but i can't be sure.

i handed over the keys and hung about wondering what i'd get for my week's work.
would i be paid some money or perhaps i'd be given the couple of records i'd ordered as payment?

the owner thanked me and handed me my pay.

it was a pair of sunglasses sent to every shop in the country as a promotional tool by polygram.

they went in the trash as soon as i got home.

i'm stil angry about it 21 years later.
grrrr.

gaye bykers on acid | telford | 1987

2006-11-01T06:29:00.000-08:00

there was a pub that a lot of people from sixth form went to called (i think) pisces.
i didn't drink alcohol in my teens (i didn't start until i was 20) and, being a rather weedy indie-kid, i was always too nervous and afraid to go in.
after all it was full of guys in black and purple wearing mission or sisters of mercy t-shirts and girls with dangerously back-combed hair and doc martens.

but one evening gaye bykers on acid were coming to town and a couple of people i knew from college said they were going and they'd meet me in the pub.
so, feeling very uncomfortable, i went in.

the barman was wearing a balaam & the angel t-shirt.
i kid you not.
it was that kind of place.

as i walked further into the pub it was like that scene from "american werewolf in london" where the hitch-hikers go into "the slaughtered lamb".
everyone looked at me.
even the jukebox seemed to stop playing.
i knew quite a lot of the faces in there and they knew me yet not a single person acknowledged me.
so i walked back out.
it's the only time i ever went in and it lasted 2 minutes at the most.

in the end i went down to the venue that GBoA were playing and went in there early, bought a glass of coke and sat in a corner feeling very very nervous that someone would ask me how old i was.

it seemed like a long long time before the band came on stage and they weren't really worth the wait.
the excitement that was their first (and best) record became a muddy metal workout live.
i didn't even stay to the end.
i did however make my first sighting of the man who was later to become the drummer in my next band after the colgates.

he was asleep on the front of the stage throughout the bykers' set.

cassettes & flexis - xPQwRtz compilation #4

2006-10-21T09:08:00.000-07:00

after mentioning an old pastels bootleg tape i used to have i spent a long time hunting for it.
and i've found it!

listening to it made me want to make a compilation of songs from old cassettes and flexi discs.

and so i have:

i was going to keep it to myself for a while - after all you've had 3 xPQwRtz compilations in as many months.

but, having listened to the compilation this afternoon, i want you to have it NOW.

BEWARE - the quality is quite poor in some parts. after all some of these cassettes are 20 years old and some of the flexis are nearer 25 years old!

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD

the track listing reads like this:

pastels - 25 unfinished plays (kid jenson session track, circa '84)
savlons - and what's more
remember fun - apple of my eye
television personalities - biff bang pow! (creation flexi disc)
bob - brian wilson's bed
sperm wails - cheryl playthings
pale saints - colours and shapes (from their second demo tape)
twins & rig veda - creep
applicants - crush
emil - edwin blaze
mctells - english sinner
the williams - i know i'm nothing special to you
steamtown - living and loving
mackenzies - man with no reason (dog's breakfast) (ron johnson 4 track sampler flexi disc)
food scientists - my day today
kitchen cynics - our love was built to last (like simon dee)
big paintings - penny picture postman
st. christopher - remember me to her
14 iced bears - saloon bong (balloon song live)
haywains - shine
cannanes - sunday
sindy arthur - waiting for a raincoat
supreme cool beings - who's that? (old K cassette release)
laughing apple - wouldn't you? (creation flexi disc)

...so there you go - 24 songs taken from knackered old cassettes and creased old flexi discs.

hope you enjoy it.

:)

indie girls are back

2006-10-21T00:13:00.000-07:00

xPQwRtz compilation #2 (indie girls) is back on line.
hooray!

fires, flats & the band of holy joy

2006-10-20T23:45:00.000-07:00

do you have records or songs that come complete with smells, sounds and images?

band of holy joy were wonderful.
a beautiful sounding band with the most fantastic storyteller as a lyricist.
they're still on my iPod today.

but whenever i listen to their "manic, magic, majestic" album i can smell fire, see snow and feel the cold of winter.
it's a shame as the album is actually very summery - lively and warm.

so here's how it happened.

we'd moved into a tiny flat in shrewsbury, spent time decorating it in primary colours with matching habitat furniture and were working a few miles away in telford.
it was january.
it was snowing hard.
before going to work that morning one of us (and i'm pretty sure it was me) had put some washing around the fire to dry (remember the t-shirts i mentioned in a previous post? they were all there - mctells, 14 iced bears, television personalities, pastels, the lot).
at some point during the afternoon our cats had knocked the clothes horse against the fire.

we had a long drive home that day - it was slow going due to the snow.
i'd taped "manic, magic, majestic" and it was all we listened to in the car for weeks.
as we pulled into our street we could see a fire engine and all our neighbours.
"oh", we said in unison.
"oh dear."

our flat had been put out before the rest of the block went up in flames, but it was trashed.
we weren't allowed in that evening and so we found the cats and drove to wales.
we sat in shock until the following day before returning to view what was left of our home.

there is a kind of happy ending though.

our insurance company sent someone over to estimate the loss.
the man sent out met us in the early evening and it was dark.
he hadn't thought that the electricity may be out and he hadn't brought a torch.
i think he may have been new to the job, because instead of saying he'd come back in the daylight he simply asked us to make a list of all the things we'd lost and they'd cover it.
we also convinced him that we should be staying in a hotel until the flat was habitable again.

the next evening we sat in a rather nice hotel room in the middle of shrewsbury and decided on all the things we might like.

- we claimed for 500 LPs (we lost about 20).
- we claimed for a new guitar (a fender telecaster) and a new bass (like the one lemmy plays - can't remember it's name).
- i wanted a skateboard so we claimed for one of those.
- we claimed for our clothes of course, and the carpet and furniture.
- we got a professional cleanign crew in to clean all the records and put them back on our shiny new shelves in alphabetical order.
- we claimed for a whole heap of stuff we wanted. most of which we didn't have before the flat caught fire.

the only thing we couldn't replace was all those t-shirts i'd printed.
but that was a small price to pay as the money we received for the "lost" records bought us a new car.

an apology

2006-10-16T01:44:00.000-07:00

sorry to everyone for lack of communication and for the compilations disappearing for a few days.
i've been having serious server problems.

everything is now (fingers crossed) up and running properly.

as for the compilations, #1 and #3 are now back up for download.
i've mislaid #2, but it'll go back up as soon as i find it.

in the meantime normal service will be resumed shortly and i'll start boring you all again with silly tales of records bought, records lost, girls kissed, concerts attended....the usual.

also there'll be a new downloadable album coming very shortly that i'm quite excited about.

in the meantime why not have a quick glimpse at my old 80's band the colgates and download all their albums for FREE!

JUST CLICK HERE

an aside and an apology

2006-10-09T07:49:00.000-07:00

just realised that the last compilation (#3) seems to have disappeared from the server.
this will be rectified by tomorrow morning.

i wish someone had said!!!!

going under cover (and other rubbish titles)

2006-09-28T05:54:00.000-07:00

well now.
i know it's not been long since the last one, but i woke up this morning thinking about cover versions.

and so, after hoovering and general house-work, i made up a list.
then i made that list into a compilation.

so here we are - xPQwRtz number 3 - cover versions.

19 tracks in all and a printable cover again.
as usual i may well have missed out something important.
i may even have done something that's been done before - i don't really do much blog reading, web surfing etc so i don't know what's going on out there.

CLICK HERE TO GET A COPY

tracklisting:

age of chance - kiss
marc riley & the creepers - baby's on fire
soup dragons - our lips are sealed
shop assistants - what a way to die
bIG fLAME - testament to the slow death of youth culture
bogshed - gathering the mushrooms
pop will eat itself - like an angel
shrubs - another age
big black - my house
dragsters - rosemary
dog faced hermans - bella ciao
stretchheads - i should be so lucky
cud - the urban spaceman
14 iced bears - coming down
television personalities - respectable
ciccone youth - into the groovey
pigbros with the membranes - word up
swans - love will tear us apart
world domination enterprises - funky town

enjoy!

*note: most of this taken form my old scratchy records so please excuse the quality.

plaid cymru

2006-09-27T01:36:00.000-07:00

during the time i was sauntering between my folks' house and the small-holding in darkest wales welsh language bands seemed to appear in one big lump out of the undergrowth.
i know lots of them were around already of course, but it seemed like a sudden thing that peel was playing them and then there was a feature on some of them on (i think) snub tv (though i may be wrong).

i recorded the tv thing and watched it over and over.
were anhrefn on it? i don't remember. they were a bit straight punk for me (nowadays they'd be emo i suppose).
my favourite part was datblygu doing "casserole efeilliaid" ("the casserole twins").
oh i loved that song.

i was spending more and more time in wales and seriously considered learning welsh - i even made moves to start, and dipped into a few books on it.
then i realised what hard work it'd be.

then there was the adoreable tynal tywyll.
a welsh primal scream if you will.
shimmering, byrds-y guitars and a bobby-gillespie-out-of-the-valleys singer.
perhaps they did more than just the one 7" i bought.
i never found out.
but it's a great single - a real lost gem.
i may well stick it up here at some point - maybe the next compilation installment.

then this came out:

it was on the turntable forever.
didn't understand a word.
didn't care.

you know, there are friends of mine who i love dearly who say stuff like,
"urgh. sorry but if it's not sung in english and i don't understand it then i don't really like it because i don't get the point of it."

that's an attitude that drives me crazy.
and it's that attitude that makes bands sing in english.
and it spoils so many bands.

i'm thinking now of my time living in italy a few years ago.
i know this is nothing to do with my life as an indie-kid, but i've made myself think and now i need to get this out.

take consorzio suonatori indipendenti for example.
CSI are a heavily political band and having them sing their agitprop in english about what they see to be the problem in italy would make a mockery of them.
but then in terms of their sound, if they sang in english they could well be all over the music media all over the world.

what am i trying to say?
i don't know really.

oh, perhaps i do - i LOVE bob hund but they wouldn't be who they are if they sang in english.
i love the welsh bands as much for being bloody-minded enough to sing in welsh as for sounding great.

that said i love melt banana and they sing in english.
kind of.

note: i promise to try not to digress from the 80's indie thing anymore.

nightingales - a lesson in lyricism

2006-09-18T03:20:00.000-07:00

i came to the nightingales perhaps a little bit late.
i bought my first nightingales record in 1987 - it was the "urban ospreys" single and it's still one of my all time favourite records.

i loved the tangled guitars, how they bullied each other from seperate speakers but seemed to hang together just right.
and i loved the words.

that summer i found a copy of the "pigs on purpose" LP in cob records, bangor.
it was a bit beaten up (i still have it and adore it - though nowadays i play the cherry red reissue) but it played OK and stayed on my turntable the whole of the rest of that year.

initially, i think, nightingales helped me see some kind of historical context into which my favourite bands of the time - the shrubs, bIG fLAME, you know the ron johnson lot - fitted.
i'd just started listening to beefheart, the incredible string band and red crayola and links were made in my head that made everything sit just so.

and it wasn't simply the jagged, nervey, broken music.
in fact more importantly than that it was the lyrics.
robert lloyd is superb with a pen.
he writes intelligent, clever, deadpan words that create worlds.
it's been said before (and i forget which journo it was) that lloyd is one of britain's greatest lost songwriters.
forget morrissey - he was good but surely he was far too interested in quoting literature to be truly great.
i love nick hobbs' otherworldly songwriting for the shrubs, i adore the dark americanisms of david thomas, the bruised romanticism of phil wilson.
for me robert lloyd is the truest of English writers.

it's not simply about singing in an accent - it's about a certain tone, like setting a scene in which you know it's raining without the song once saying "it was a rainy night".

you know?
sure you do.

the worst all-dayer | telford | 1986

2006-09-18T02:44:00.000-07:00

telford has an ice rink you know.
it was built in the early to mid eighties and to this day i can't imagine anyone going.
i presume that telford probably has an ice hockey team or somesuch too.
a couple of friends have been and said they'd never go again.
they appeared to find skating round and round in circles a bit boring.
i could probably have told them that and saved them the entry fee.

however, one day i went to telford ice rink.
there was a, excuse me, "punk all-dayer" going on.
yes.
you read right.
it was, if i remember correctly, late summer 86 and even back then the line up didn't fill me with enthusiasm.
but stuff like this didn't happen in telford and so i went along.
getting off the bus at telford town centre it seemed like every neo-goth/punk/grebo in the midlands had gone along.
frankly i found it a little bit frightening.
i didn't know anyone else that was going, it was a hot saturday afternoon, hundreds of strangers on their best pixie boots and studded belts were looking at me through cider-filled sunglasses and i was very conscious of not really liking new model army.

new model army were to be the headline act.
below them were red lorry yellow lorry, alternative radio (NOT TV - shame), a couple of local bands whose names have disappeared in the mists of time, joolz "the punk poetess" (cough) and, of all people, the bible!

having been rather afraid and lonely during most of the day there was a moment i remember feeling part of the event.
it was the moment the entire audience groaned, shrugged and then gritted it's teeth as joolz launched into yet another diatribe on anarcho-feminism (accompanied i'm sure by a beardy bloke with a bongo - crass have A LOT to answer for).

after joolz anything would feel refreshing, and indeed i quite enjoyed red lorry yellow lorry.
they were a bit lumpen and tuneless but i bought an album by them so they must have done something OK.

by this point i was feeling a little bit more comfortable in the cold goth-strewn ice rink and had a wander about.
i saw a couple of girls i knew and said hello.
both (seperately) gave me exactly the same half arsed "oh hi" as they swooshed their heavily back-combed hair and clung on to their older, drunker boyfriends.

that was the beginning of feeling the need to sink back to a corner and observe.
but the worst was to come.
the bible! came on.
in amongst all these depresso-goth-punk acts the bible! to me and me alone sounded great.
uplifting chiming guitars, tunes you could hum, i went to the front of the stage and applauded.
looking over my shoulder i realised that as i had moved forward the rest of the gathered throng had moved to the bar to wait for the band to finish.
i was alone.
but i really enjoyed the bible!
as soon as theyd finished i sheepishly left and went home.
that week i bought the bible!'s "walking the ghost back home" and it just wasn't the same.
it sounded middle of the road, something your mum might enjoy.
the brass was too shiny, the lyrics to self-righteous.
a shame really as they were the only bright point in a very dark day.

indie girls - a slight aside

2006-09-08T01:17:00.000-07:00

i've had a few conversations with friends over the last few weeks who have said, "i liked the xPQwRtz compilation but there were no girls singing any of the songs!".

honestly, i'd not noticed that at all.

so in order to redress the balance here's xPQwRtz #2.
a compilation of 18 of my favourite songs from the 80's with girls singing.

i know you'll probably find some glaring omissions (don't mention the flatmates - i know. but i never did like them much. sorry).
as with the last comp it's all in alphabetical order.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD A COPY

tracklisting:

archbishop kebab - holli kapolli
baby lemonade - secret goldfish
beat happening - i let him get to me
cannanes - cardboard
cocteau twins - ivo
dog faced hermans - mary houdini
marine girls - leave me with the boy
miaow - sport most royal
opal - fell from the sun
primitives - really stupid
rosehips - the last night
shop assistants - all that ever mattered
sindy arthur - girls on reins
strawberry switchblade - since yesterday
sugarcubes - birthday
talulah gosh - i told you so
twins & rig veda - dance with a fish
we've got a fuzzbox and we're gonna use it - rules and regulations

*excuse the scratchiness of some of these - most of them were taken from my dodgy old vinyl.

nirvana vs tad | birmingham | 1989

2006-09-03T22:42:00.000-07:00

i didn't take a whole lot of notice of the indie-rock movement that was coming out of the american north west - you know, sub pop and all that.
i just didn't see anything in it that was new or exciting or, i dunno, fresh i suppose.
but a friend of mine dug it all to death and was buying a lot of 7"s and playing them to me whenever i saw him.

he convinced me to go with him to see nirvana play at edwards no. 8 in birmingham.
i'm guessing it was part of the "bleach" tour.
in preparation for it i bought "bleach" and it left me cold.
to me it just sounded like pub rock with american accents.

i wasn't holding out much hope for the evening - in fact i was more interested in seeing what the venue was like as i'd never been there before.
edward's was a nice place for gigs - a low ceiling meant not there wasn't the greatest sound in the world, but it had the atmosphere that i like to this day: a bit claustrophobic, sweaty, dark, you know.

thing is, i wasn't really expecting what i got when the first band came on.
the tour was a double header with tad.
tad were FANTASTIC.
from the first chugging chords of the opening song i was enthralled.
everything seemed to be in E.
in fact the bass player did nothing more than dampen 3 of his strings and hit his E string hard for the entire set.
wonderful.
and tad doyle himself?
a huge man, he was witty, clever, and a little frightening.
AND he'd got a colgates sticker on his guitar!
to this day i've no idea where he got it from.

tad had stolen all their licks from early black sabbath and budgie albums and made the most wonderfully grinding noise.

the high point of their set was tad (who was, i'm guessing, about 20 stone of huge american flesh) stage-diving into the crowd of weedy, thin, pale birmingham indie boys who had mistakenly crowded the front of the stage.
i bet some of them went home broken.

after tad, nirvana just seemded pointless to me.
i watched them, i got bored.
20 minutes into their set someone at the front of the stage knocked cobain's microphone stand and it fell into the audience.
cobain, like a spoilt child, stormed off stage and refused to come back on for almost 15 minutes, until he had been assured that his performance wouldn't be spoiled again.

from that moment i hated him.
i thought him pointless.
by the time "nevermind" came out i couldn't care less.

hyped pub rock?
i'd rather listen to dr. feelgood.

1986 - first time in a recording studio?

2006-08-28T08:27:00.000-07:00

having played a bit we decided we should release a cassette.
we had 11 songs.

there were some old punks who ran a community arts centre and they often recorded local bands so we hired them.
turned out we weren't even recording in the arts centre.
no, we were in their flat on the 8th story of an 8 story block.
being old punks they were a bit grumpy.
and a bit stinky.
but loveable all the same.

recording should have been fine as we were drum machine driven so there was little setting up to do.
except i had a very cheap gibson es333 copy and it wouldn't stay in tune.
in fact, by the time you had tuned the final string the first one was already out again.
and it was difficult to play given that i had painted the entire thing, including the fretboard (!), in blue and white stipes using acrylic paint.
that was fine and dandy when playing live but we were making no friends in this squat-by-numbers we'd, ahem, booked.

so the whole thing was a pretty miserable experience.
the vocals were done sitting on the toilet with the door shut to deaden the sound - the light didn't work in there and it smelt a lot like it was used by slightly dirty vegans.
which of course it was.

but, by the end of the day we had our 11 songs recorded and we were happy.
i printed some covers at work the next week and we had our first release:

listening to it now it's pretty poor.
we thought we'd made it when, during a piece about bands doing the batman theme in sounds, john robb had mentioned his favourite was "batman" by the cheese engineers.
he was obviously trying to be as obscure as possible as we may have called the tape batman but it didn't contain that or any other theme song.
in fact the picture had been drawn by my friend's then 7 year old sister and i thought it was neat.

never trust a journalist eh?

crystal clear - how to not get featured in a fanzine

2006-08-28T07:26:00.000-07:00

it was the middle of 1988. my band had played around enough by now for fanzines here and there to start wanting to talk about us.
which was nice.

there was a guy whose name escapes me (brett?) who had a 'zine called "crystal clear" - named after st. christopher's first 7".
he seemed to like us and would often come over to see us rehearse (we were using my folks' garage at the time - you could here us right down the street every sunday afternoon), and talk about doing a 'piece ' on us in his 'zine.

one weekend we'd been asked to go up to york to do a gig with st. christopher and the pale saints at the spotted cow.
it's a long way to york from telford.

brett lived in stafford which was about a half hour drive away from us.
he offered to drive us up for the gig and we gratefully accepted.

the gig was fun though only attended by approximately a dozen people who each paid £1.50 or so to get in.
i think it was here that i was given this flexidisc:

i would have been given it by a girl who iw ouldn't get to know until some 15 years later.
life's odd like that.

anyhow, we had fun even with no real audience and at the end of the night packed everything into the car ready to be driven home.
i opted for the passenger seat and promptly fell asleep.
about every 10 minutes of the 3 hour journey back home i would be forcably shoved by our fanzine-writing chauffeur as he tried to drive with me slumping across the gear stick and onto his shoulder/arm/thigh.
i probably dribbled on him too.

poor guy managed to get us home safely.
but to this day i've never heard from him again, and we certainly didn't appear in his fanzine.

a hip to the hop to the hippety bippety bop (or something)

2006-08-17T23:03:00.000-07:00

remember when people used to have "ghetto blasters" and breakdance on street corners and carry their music on their shoulders rocking the block with the electro beat?

it only happened in movies didn't it?

at my school, as with (i imagine) every other provinicial school across the UK, there were a few boys who got into breakdancing.
they'd flatten big boxes or steal a sheet of linoleum and play herbie hancock's "rockit" endlessly while pretending to be a robot or having a seizure on the floor.

and, for my sins, i joined in.
only for a short while i hasten to add!
i learned how to do the windmill and had brusied elbows and shoulders for a fortnight.
this also coincided with not having a girlfriend.
funny that.

anyhow, other than herbie hancock i didn't really get the electro thing.
it left me a bit cold.
i'd much rather jump over things and ride around backwards for a bit on my BMX.

i did however like the idea of wandering about carrying an oversized portable stereo.
it didn't last long.
but i have to admit that it did happen.

you'll be pleased to know that i look back at that brief time with huge embarrassment.
especially when i think about the old-timer who crossed the road to politely ask, "would you mind turning that down please son?"

as i've pointed out i didn't really like electro or hip hop very much then.
so what was my favourite thing to annoy the neighbourhood with?

it was a pastels bootleg i found at a record fair.
it had two live recordings on it, some demos and a bunch of session type things.

it was tinny and a bit weedy.

i've currently misplaced it but if it turns up you can be sure i'll let you know.
the highlight was "truck train tractor" in it's original form when it was called "25 unfinished plays".

wandering the streets making everyone listen to the pastels didn't last long - perhaps a couple of months at most.
honestly.
i quite quickly realised how silly i looked.
and my arms ached.

it wasn't until "3 feet high and rising" came out in 1989 that i got hip hop.
it had rapping and beats and samples.
but it also had an indie kinda sound - scratchy, a bit thin, wonderful.
i loved it.

after all, it was the daisy age.

sonic youth & john zorn | south bank show | 1989

2006-08-11T03:13:00.000-07:00

through the 80's the south bank show had some pretty good documentaries.
the smiths' one immediately springs to mind.
but one episode of the south bank show changed what i listened to and how i listened to it in a totally life-altering way.

the program was called "put blood in the music" - it was a documentary on the new york music scene and i was watching it because sonic youth were on.

what i wasn't prepared for was 30 minutes on john zorn and the effect that watching him had on me.
i had recorded the program - again because of sonic youth, but it wasn't them i watched.
over the next few weeks and months i kept returning to the john zorn piece.
i still watch it at least once or twice a year, just to remind me of how important music can be.

i bought "spy vs spy" within a week of the south bank show airing - life would NEVER be the same again.

"spy vs spy" and the interview with zorn taught me how important musical heritage was.
not about classifying, more about connecting.
like seeing the footsteps from robert johnson through bee bop, 60's garage punk, beefheart, prog, punk and into 80's indie as a continuous journey that embraced all types of music.
even the ones i didn't like.

the cure | birmingham | 1987

2006-08-11T02:09:00.000-07:00

why is there a pastels record in a post about the cure you might ask.

there's no reason other than the day that i went to see the cure i had printed myself a pastels t-shirt.
as i mentioned before i was a screenprinter in the 80's so lunchtimes were often taken up making screens of record covers and stuff and making them into t-shirts that i wanted.
i had a nice 14 iced bears one - blue with this cover on it:

the pastels one was actaully a print of the back of the "truck train tractor" cover. the drawing of a lady.
you know.

but i'm still not talking about the cure am i?

i'm trying to put it off.
i never liked them.
oh, i tried quite hard.
i bought 3 or 4 albums.
i even did a couple of cure cover versions in a short-lived and not very good duo called i use a pink comb.

OK.
enough.
here's the short cure anecdote.

i had a friend who was a huge cure fan and i had a car.
the cure were playing the NEC and he asked if i'd take him over if he bought the tickets - we'd not been to a concert together for a very long time.
mainly as he didn't really want to see any of the bands i liked.
so i took him.
it was a nice warm evening as we drove down the M6 to the NEC and joined the queue.

that was about the height of my evening.

i don't remember who supported but by the cure's second number i had fallen asleep in my seat and didn't wake until my by now rather annoyed friend poked me in the shoulder and said, "it's all finished, we can go now".

snub tv - or how to link the darling buds to napalm death

2006-08-09T02:16:00.000-07:00

i used to watch snub TV religiously - as i used to watch the tube religiously.

i've already admitted to my continuing love of metal.
it's nothing to be ashamed of (apart from tygers of pan tang of course).
i'd bought napalm death's "scum" album and when no-one was looking i'd play it very loud in my room and want to jump about and shout a bit.

one evening snub did a feature on napalm death and exteme noise terror.

i watched it, laughed at the naivety of some of the things the band had to say - i still have the video somewhere and i love them. trying so hard to be right on but without the vocabulary to really get their point across.

anyhow, as i watched i thought, "i know that bass player from somewhere".
i looked at my napalm death record but he wasn't on it.

a few days later i was in the local record shop and there he was - the bass player from napalm death.
shane embury himself.
turned out he lived a few roads up from my house.
we exchanged cursory hello's and then he asked if the records he'd ordered had arrived.
they had and he bought them.
it was a bunch of darling buds records - various different versions of their singles and stuff - you know, poster bags, picture discs, the usual nonsense.
after he'd left i was told he was a huge darling buds fan.

to this day i find this fact hard to imagine.

xPQwRtz - a compilation

2006-08-08T00:25:00.000-07:00

i thought it might be nice to make a compilation of some of the things i've been talking about.
i'm sure most of you have the songs included, but nevertheless here it is.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD A COPY

beware it's a big file - 98MB
it includes 25 songs and a nice cover for you to use.

the track listing is:

3 action - if only i had the guts
14 iced bears - inside
a witness - camera
age of chance - bible of the beats
big flame - xpqwrtz
bob - prune
bodines - god bless
bogshed - six to one and likely
buuy off the bar - stretch out
cannanes - i think the weather's affected your brain
death by milkfloat - your independence (depends on me)
june brides - heard you whisper
mccarthy - in purgatory
mctells - push
membranes - everyone's going triple bad acid, yeah!
noseflutes - body hair (up in the air)
patrik fitzgerald - irrelelvant battlespigbros - excessive
shrubs - blackmailer's heartache
soup dragons - quite content
swell maps - h.s. art
television personalities - miracles take longer
verlaines - it was raining
wolfhounds - stars in the tarmac
yeah yeah noh - cottage industry

yes, i know it's in alphabetical order.

enjoy!

buy off the bar | birmingham | 1988

2006-08-07T07:08:00.000-07:00

do you like buy off the bar?
well you should.
i have friends who think they were a bit of a joke.
perhaps they weren't cool enough.

buy off the bar were from holland and seemed obsessed with the length of their favourite songs.
so much so that instead of saying one of their songs was 1:30 the timing would say "the same as buzzcocks orgasm addict".
that kind of thing.

i thought that was a great idea.

in 88 they did a short tour of the UK with the mctells and my band was asked to support them at the birmingham gig.
it was at sinatras - as i've mentioned previously i loved that venue.
we were really excited.
it was to be the only time we ever played birmingham.
odd that.

i've never been one for being late.
i like punctuality.
in fact i like punctuality so much that i'm often an hour early for everything.
as a result i spend a lot of my life sitting around waiting for stuff and getting a bit frustrated.
we arrived for the gig about 2 hours before the soundman got there.
so we wandered around birmingham for a bit.
eventually buy off the bar turned up in a mini bus with the mctells.
the only buy off the bar record i had at this point was the then just released "parboiled" mini album.
i introduced myself to the band and, during our chat told them how much i liked the new record.
"oh. thanks. we have all the other records in the van if you want them. i'll sort them out for you after the show", said a BotB chap whose name escapes me now.

as i've mentioned i like punctuality.
and i've said above that buy off the bar and the mctells turned up together.
that's not entirely true.
one third of the mctells - mark to be precise - wasn't there.
he was driving up from london seperately.
he was about an hour late and i wasn't very happy.

until i saw him pull up outside the venue.
i was so blown away i instantly forgot being mad about his timekeeping.
it was a hot and sunny summer evening and mark pulled up outside the club looking like a 50's filmstar (he always dressed well) in suit and raybans.
his girlfriend sat next to him dressed to match.
he was driving a triumph herald coupé. a light blue one.

that day he officially became the coolest man i'd ever seen.

the gig?
well - about 20 people came.
not bad for midweek i suppose and anyway i didn't care.
we went on first to mild applause from the punters, but encouragement from the other bands.
mctells played a blinder - they were so good live - fire engines meet june brides at 100 miles an hour.
then buy off the bar took the stage.
they were fantastic. trumpets blared, drums rattled and guitars went SplAaAAAaAAnnnGGGG!

after they'd finished we were chatting and the BotB chap (whose name still escapes me) called me over.
"i have those records for you".
"ooh! thanks very much!", i said.
i looked at them and smiled, thanked him again and began to walk away.
he grabbed me, "that'll be £5 for the album and £2 for the single."
i was so embarrassed i paid him.

from the wilds of wales to chester

2006-08-07T02:26:00.000-07:00

during 87 and 88 i lived between my parents home in telford and my girlfriend's home in the depths of powys.
living there is a whole other story involving morris minors, pet goats, sheep, and a donkey.
but that's not a story for here or now.

anyhow.
harriet (she was also in the colgates with me) shared my taste for records - in fact when we met it appeared we had identical collections - and we used to go record shopping a lot.
there was a small record shop in oswestry that we visited now and then.
it's where i bought both of these from:

and we used to go into shrewsbury a lot.
there were a couple of shops there that were always worth investigating.
there was one called durants which no longer exists - they used to have boxes of unsold 7"s under the counter which, if you asked nicely enough, you could rifle through.
i found this:

and across town, hidden in the basement of a shopping precinct was a tiny shop that sold second hand clothing, sticks of incence and some old records.
it was run by a guy called john who was also responsible for putting gigs on in shrewsbury (he put us on a number of times with pale saints, 14 iced bears, rosehips). he now runs caroline true records.
the only things i remember getting from his shop were these:

but our favourite place to go record shopping was chester.
it was an hour's drive away but it's a beautiful little city.

there were two record shops there at the time that i liked - both of them now gone - and we'd spend hours going through the racks.
i always came home with something great and i was always SO excited when asked, "fancy going to chester this weekend?"

of all the shopping trips there the one that sticks in my mind more than any other is the day i found all four of these:

you can imagine what that did to me can't you.

mind you, after that things were never the same going to chester.
there was always something to buy but it was never ever going to be as exciting as that day.

how could it be?

after C86, V87

2006-08-05T23:29:00.000-07:00

early in 1987 there was an advert in melody maker for a video, the proceeds of which would go to the shelter campaign for the homeless.
initial copies of the video were only available through the melody maker order form - a few months later the video was released through the cartel with a different cover. still for charity though if i remember right.

i think this video should be looked after and cherished like so many people cherish the "C86" cassette/LP.
think about the track listing of "C86" and then take a look at the track listing of this video:

john peel - introduction
shop assisitants - i don't wanna be friends with you
talulah gosh - talulah gosh
14 iced bears - balloon song (live footage)
pastels - crawl babies
big black - fish fry (live footage)
world domination enterprises - hotsy girl
sperm wails - lady chatterley
dragsters - i'm not an american
laugh - paul mccartney
3 action - i get around
close lobsters - never seen before
bmx bandits - what a wonderful world
bats - made up in blue
wedding present - you should always keep in touch with your friends
ac temple - ulterior
wolfhounds - cruelty
mctells - virginia mc
verlaines - doomsday
mighty lemon drops - out of hand
that petrol emotion - keen
jesus and marychain - never understand
membranes - kennedy 63 (live footage)
june brides - in the rain
chills - i love my leather jacket
telelvision personalities - the painted word
sonic youth - schizophrenia (live footage)
pigbros - excessive
janitors - wall star
pop will eat itself - sweet sweet pie
bambi slam - don't it make you feel
stump - buffalo
soup dragons - can't take no more
james taylor quartet - blow up

i loved this video at the time - i would watch it endlessly.
there was just so much there. so much music. so much everything.
seeing the shop assistants miming on top of a block of flats was amazing at the time, or seeing june brides' "in the rain" video.

the more i think about it, the more difficult it is to explain just what this video was like for me and my friends in a small town 1987.
we couldn't get to london regularly to check things out.
we could go to birmingham and manchester but the bands weren't always there.
we could of course buy the records and read the music press - when it covered this stuff - the press then as now is was more concerned with the big bands of the day.
so to get an idea about what these bands really looked like, how they dressed etc, this video was priceless.

AND the money went to a good cause.

ron johnson - the greatest label in the world?

2006-08-04T07:02:00.000-07:00

my favourite label of all time, ron johnson put out some fantastic records (and one or two really bad ones).
i won't go to into the label as rhodri covers ron johnson beautifully here.

but i do want to have my say about the label and, more importantly i suppose, some of the bands i loved.

if you're not familiar with ron johnson and you can find a copy of "the first after epiphany" on eBay then you should buy it.
it's a great overview - it has everything you need to show what the label was all about: stump, a witness, shrubs, jackdaw with crowbar, bIG fLAME.

the shrubs.
other than bIG fLAME (who kind of don't count as they're my favourite band anyway) shrubs were my favourite ron johnson band.
when "bullfighter's bones" was on C86 i thought it was an astonishing song.
i bought the "take me aside for a midnight harangue" LP and was surprised at how gentle it was - intricate dual guitars that seemed to be playing completely obtuse things that only just fit together.
most ron johnson releases would be likened to captain beefheart and generally that was wrong.
but with the shrubs it was reasonably near the mark and after all nick hobbs, the shrubs singer, had worked with the magic band in the early 70s.

my favourite shrubs song was and is "blackmailer" (or "blackmailer's heartache" as it was titled on the album). on the album it was a sublime, drifting thing.
like the ghost of something sinister.
the version of "blackmailer" on the "blackmailer" EP though is a different beast altogether.
played at quantum speed the guitars clatter and the drums go haywire while hobbs' vocal takes on the role of dervish - shouting, yelping, heading for another place - not so far off the mark actually, as only last year nick under his alias of nikolai galen released a solo album for improvised voice which is the nearest thing to speaking in tongues i can think of.

if i was ever able to make a final list of my top 5 LPs i would struggle to decide which albums were in and which weren't.
the only thing of which i'm certain is that "take me aside for a midnight harangue" would be in there.

shrubs remain a legendary (to me anyway, and a few people i know) band.
they deserve to be - they sounded mythical.

a witness.
for a short time i corresponded with vince from a witness.
he was a nice chap (i recently met up with him again and he's still a nice chap) - somewhere i've got A4 sheets of typed a witness lyrics that he sent me.
he also sent me a mix tape that contained swans next to jimi hendrix which at the time i found very odd indeed.
i sent him my band's first cassette and he said he liked it except that we should lose the drum machine and get a drummer.
a witness had recently done just that, getting alan brown of bIG fLAME to drum with them.

i'm torn about which part of a witness i like the most.
i love the drum machine driven attack of "loudhailer songs" and the album "i am john's pancreas" is quite simply one of the best records of the 80's - it's just been reissued on CD by euphonium. go buy it.

but i also love (for different reasons) the later a witness of their peel sessions - they weren't released by ron johnson but came out as an album on strange fruit.

sadly the death of rick aitken, a wintess' guitar supremo, ended the band.
both rick and a witness will always be missed by anyone who loved the band.

great leap forward.
after bIG fLAME split alan brown started making dance music - well, no, not quite. but he'd bought a witness' drum machine from them and began the great leap forward project.
it sounds like the obvious next step after bIG fLAME to me.
whiteboy funk with scaping guitars and great bass lines all smothered in intelligent, intellectual lyrics.
great leap forward were the top dancefloor band that never was.

stump.
the first record i bought by stump wasn't on ron johnson. in fact they only released one record on ron johnson (not counting compilation appearances).
they were always a ron johnson band though - even once they'd signed a major deal they remained a ron johnson outfit.

"quirk out" was my first stump record.
that old friday night TV favourite "the tube" had made a video of the band doing "buffalo" and it was stunning - it later turned up on the "gimme shelter" video compilation.
i ordered the album - a 6 track EP really - and collected it during my lunch break one wet wednesday afternoon.
wednesday afternoons at sixth form were dedicated to sports and other such activities.
i was being made to do table tennis that afternoon, the only good thing about that was that table tennis was played in the hall and it was raining very hard outside.
i spent 2 long hours knocking a tiny ball across a table at a friend who didn't want to be there either, knowing my stump record was sitting in a bag in the changing room.
finally - and it seemed like forever - it was time to go home.
i barely managed to change from gym kit to normasl clothing before i was rushing up the road to listen to it.
"tupperware stripper" was funny as all hell, "buffalo" didn't disappoint after the tube performance - what a record.

other notable ron johnson releases.

mackenzies promised so much.
their 7" release "new breed" was fantastic.
but then they, along with a bunch of ron johnson bands, got into remixes and the whole thing went belly up.

as with mackenzies, twang's first single was a great record. harsh, whiteboy non-funk. brash and agressive.
their other releases were a bit poo.

noseflutes were interesting.
still are.
probably the least listened to of my ron johnson records, but when i do i always wonder why i never listened to them more.
a little bit beefhearty (now i'm doing it!), some great african styled percussion - in fact quite a world music-y feel now i listen back.
the lyrics were always great - check out "body hair (up in the air)" from the "heartache is irresistable" EP.

so, that's the bands that remain top of the pops for me when it comes to ron johnson.
a label that was always exciting, and in the mid 80's released records that sounded like nothing else.

the soup dragons & my favourite jumper

2006-08-04T02:05:00.000-07:00

another band i never saw.
some friends from 6th form went to wolverhampton to see them but i stayed home.
to this day i have no idea why i didn't go along.

"whole wide world" was a great single.
both songs were around a minute and a half and they raced along and left me smiling.
soup dragons sounded like buzzcocks on speed - a great ball of buzzsaw guitars and singalong melodies.

there was a small piece about them in sounds which included a colour photo of them.
i fell in love with sean's jumper and so my girlfriend's mum knitted me one.
i gave her the photo and a few days later i was wearing the jumper!
and i adored it.
in fact it stayed with me until only 5 years ago when it finally got lost - i'd not worn it for a long time (honestly!).

anyhow, i can't find the picture of the soup dragons and that jumper so a picture of me wearing my replica will have to suffice.

this is more or less what it looked like:

soup dragons' next single was also a blast - "hang ten" was ridiculously catchy and stayed on my turntable for weeks and weeks.
and the 7" was on blue vinyl!
oh the joy.

i liked the next few singles, and soup dragons became a band i bought whenever something new came out.
until they did "backwards dog".
it just wasn't right.
as for their 'baggy' phaze - the less said about that the better.
but for a short while soup dragons were the bees knees.

sonic youth, or how i broke christmas 1986

2006-08-03T22:46:00.000-07:00

you remember the girl who stopped me seeing bogshed?

well now, one day she was in the record shop when i went in.
she was arguing with ian who owned the place.
i said hi and flicked through the second hand records while i listened to them.
ceri (that was her name) had ordered sonic youth's "bad moon rising" but decided she didn't want it after all.
ian was always a bit funny about that kind of thing.
after all, he'd be stuck with a record that few people in telford would want and he only just made enough to keep the shop going - even then, especially in small towns like ours, high street stores like woolworths were taking all the sales of chart records and that's where the money was.

i didn't know much at all about sonic youth.
i'd read about them in the NME and stuff, but i didn't really know what i was letting myself in for when i eventually stopped the argument by saying, "i'll buy the record instead of ceri".
she smiled and thanked me and a shiver went down my spine.
teenage lust - it's a powerful thing.

i got home with the album and didn't know what to make of it - it seemed so strange and otherworldly, but i worked hard at understanding what was going on with sonic youth.
then "starpower" was released as a single and "evol" followed soon after.
i loved "starpower" - i could understand it. it was almost a pop song and it fitted much easier into my frame of reference than, say, "ghost bitch" or "brave men run".

i asked for "evol" for christmas that year.
then i acted like a silly child.
i saw the record sat on the shelf in the record shop.
then one day i noticed it was gone.
when i got home i had a dig about in the usual places that my folks hid our christmas presents and found a 12" wrapped in christmas paper.
i sneaked it into my room, carefully unwrapped it, put a cassette in my deck and stuck the album on.
by the time i'd got to the locked groove of "expressway to yr skull (madonna, sean and me)" i had fallen in love.
all the things in "bad moon rising" that i didn't get were now easily accessible through "evol" - the churning, oddly tuned guitars were still there but this time there were - how do i put it? - tunes?
yes, tunes.
i wrote the tracklisting on the cassette case and re-wrapped the album before putting it back as i'd found it.

that was only about a week before christmas.
and it was a week filled with endless plays of "evol".

then christmas morning came.
the family opened our gifts.
i unwrapped the album for the second time and said thanks.
"is that the right one?", asked my mum.
"yes", i replied, "thanks".
"you don't seem very keen - aren't you going to play it?", she asked.
"maybe later", i said.
then the penny dropped with her and my dad.
they gave me a hard stare and told me i was 16 and shouldn't be acting like a little boy.

they were probably right.

housemartins 0, hull 2

2006-08-01T23:34:00.000-07:00

i've only been to hull a couple of times.
the first time was to help a friend of mine move up there to do his degree.
i found a smashing record shop and spent a good hour or so looking through the records.
can't for the life of me remember what it was called - it appeared to be in the basement of a house (or at least that's how i remember it). down some steps outside and into the store.

i went back up there once to check the shop again but couldn't find it - i went through a stage of travelling long distances to record shops.
how the internet has changed life eh?

but that's not the reason for this entry.

apart from "sheep" i didn't like the housemartins - i bought their "london 0, hull 4" album, listened to it once and filed it away.
i think it might have been due to the overkill of the "happy hour" video on TV.
it was everywhere.
drove me mad.
perhaps i ought to dig the album out and listen to it again.
though i doubt time will have been kind to it.

however, there were two bands from hull that i really liked.

one of them was 3-action. a band that seems to have been written out of the history of 80's indie pop.
i'd not heard of them until they appeared on the "gimme shelter" video (man, i really ought to write something about the "gimme shelter" video. it's as important a document as the "C86" album).
the footage on the video was a live recording of "i get around" and it was ramshackle, falling apart, amateur, but GREAT.

i checked my cartel catalogue - yes, i was sad enough to buy the distributors catalogue and browse it, marking off things as i bought them.
3-action had two 12" EPs out on ediesta and i ordered them both (i later foudn they'd released a 7" but could never get hold of it).
"i get around" was an instant top tune. very surfy, like a schlock jan & dean, trumpets blaring and two chord chugging guitars.

stealin' feelin'" />

"if only i had the guts" from the other 12" was the killer though.
another two chord wonder, but this time far more spiky and a little bit lurchy.

death by milkfloat were the other band from hull.
the BEST band from hull.
the trebliest bIG fLAME-y guitars scratched like fingernails on a blackboard, the bass was all thundering funk and the drums were a rollercoaster of jazz mess.
and their longest song came in at under two minutes.
for a long time they were THE band for me.
they captured all the best bits of my favourite bands, mashed them all together, and spat them out in bursts of pure joy.

in 1988 vinyl drip released "uninformation" and death by milkfloat could do no wrong.
they're still welded into my iPod and i still listen to them just about every day.

some thoughts on a movement or a lack thereof

2006-07-31T05:54:00.000-07:00

i was asked for my thoughts on the term C86, it's links to the tweepop of today and whether or not i thought there was a specific C86 scene.
after writing it all down i thought it might make an interesting addition to this here blog.
it also serves as a continuation of my first entry.
it's more or less directly edited from my emailed answers so it may read a bit oddly in places.
anyway, here goes.

i've been thinking about it and i don't remember there really being a word or phrase used to collect bands together.
it was all just indie - when that word meant records released on independent record labels and not how the word started to be used in the early 90s.
the 80's indie charts would include ANYTHING released on an indie label - which meant that some dance record (like early stock aitken and waterman stuff) would often be top of the chart for weeks on end as they were selling enough to be top of the national charts too.
but right next to them in the chart would be laibach, the smiths, talulah gosh.
to me that seems logical and healthy.

i mean, i was buying razorcuts and talulah gosh AND swans and laibach and the fall AND the pet shop boys and scritti politti.
a real mix of sounds.
just whatever i heard that i liked.

there was never anything about only listening to jangly guitars etc.
this is proved in the kind of concerts that were being put on - you would have for example the shrubs playing alongside rodney allen, and my band (who were quite noisy - a bit like the membranes or sonic youth) would play with the rosehips and the williams.

at the time the name C86 was purely the title of the NME cassette and LP (and the week of concerts in london) - and i think listening to all the bands on there you can hear what i'm talking about...a witness alongside the shop assistants, mackenzies and mighty mighty.

it is only in retrospect that people started to use the C86 name for a certain thing - that's where i have a problem with it because the sound now associated with the name has little bearing on the actual record.

i think it came about through sarah records and similar labels and the jangly pop they were releasing - these labels were obviously inspired by a lot of the bands, though actually to me they seem more inspired by slightly earlier bands - june brides, jasmine minks, orange juice (all of whom are really early 80's bands coming out of post punk rather than mid eighties bands coming out of post post punk).

the other thing that didn't help how the term C86 gets used was the BMX bandits releasing an album called C86 and the BMX bandits are a twee band for sure.

it's been mentioned that everett true used the term cute - he's used it a few times but it was for specific bands rather than a scene as far as i recall - like talulah gosh who were undeniably cute, dressed as school girls from 50's kids books (which, when you think about it is really quite subversive - grown women dressing as children!)

john peel used the term shambling to describe bogshed but that term quickly got taken over by the NME, sounds and melody maker to describe bands that really did sound like they were shambling - like the pastels for instance.
i personally don't recall anyone ever saying to me that they were into shambling bands. though of course i did get told by people that they lvoed the pastels.

it's why i get a little annoyed sometimes when reviewers of my band today say things like "sarandon have made the odd choice of going to the angular part of C86" because in truth we're far more like a C86 band than many of the tweepop bands that use the C86 tag to try and sell records - something that my band have never done (which is perhaps why we don't sell many records!!) - i always admit that i am inspired by those bands because that's obvious but i'm not going for a specific sound.
in actual fact i think we're a lot more like the bands of the early 90s like dog faced hermans, dawson and the keatons.
anyway, off the top of my head i can only think of 3 or 4 bands on the C86 record that are in any way twee: shop assistants (though their song on C86 was a very odd choice. they didn't write many slow and quite songs. they wanted to be the ramones), servants (who sounded like they had a syd barrett fixation at the time - check their song against barrett's "octopus") and primal scream...

anyhow, i hope that's interesting enough for you.
i'm really pleased that there are people championing what was going on in the 80s as it's very special to me - but then if i was a huge metal or electro fan in the 80s i would say the same thing if that was being championed wouldn't i?

pink records

2006-07-31T02:00:00.000-07:00

i don't think enough is ever said about what a wonderful label pink records was.
i've just done a cursory google and other than tweenet and indiepages no one really mentions them.
and yet....

at the time i don't remember thinking, "ooh! there's a new release on pink - i'd better buy that", but i do seem to have an awful lot of records on pink.
in fact some of my favourite records and some of my favourite bands.

i know i've already talked about the june brides - i won't go into them again, just wanted to remind everyone that pink was the label that unleashed them into the world.

the wolfhounds!
surely everyone in the world adores the wolfhounds.
"cut the cake" is an astonishing record.
i mean, the guitars are so fierce, so grating, the voice is so angry and frustrated - whata record to make as a debut release.

"unseen ripples" is one of the records i distinctly remember bunking sixth form for.
i had actually asked my mum to pick it up for me.
she used to go home during her lunch break from work and, though i knew the record should be waiting for me when i got home from college i just had to check.
i was so excited.
mum was there when i opened the front door.
bless my mum - she's always understood - she didn't ask me why i wasn't in classes, she just handed over the record, told me to make sure i ate something and went back to work.
i spent that afternoon listening to the album over and over, reading all the lyrics and staring at the cover thinking how cool it was that it was printed back to front.

my first that petrol emotion record was "manic pop thrill" on demon records.
i don't remember why i'd bought it but i tried hard to like it. half of it i thought was amazing (like "fleshprint" and "lettuce"), the rest didn't really move me.
i'd not heard "keen" until the video of it was on the "gimme shelter" video that you could buy through the melody maker.
i loved "keen" and hunted down a copy of the 7".
it's still my favourite TPE song and one of my all time favourite singles.

so, mccarthy then.
another band that's remained a favourite. one of the bands that really had an effect on the way i thought politically and musically.
no one could make guitars chime quite like mccarthy did on "red sleeping beauty" and no one seemed to fit so much into such short songs.

"frans hals" was another killer pink release.
beautiful cover (though my copy's a little bit grubby nowadays) and such clever words.
a tune you could sing with a message included - made a change to have a band use melody to put across their message instead of either ranting and raving or sounding like a folky.

if you don't own a copy of the pink compilation, "beauty", then i suggest you go directly to eBay and have a look for one.
it's always selling pretty cheaply but should worth a fortune.
as a snapshot of why pink was a wonderful label and what was happening away from the spotlight of the NME and their ilk, you can't do much better than buy this album.

jamie wednesday released a couple of 12"s with pink. i didn't like them too much (apart from "we three kings of orient aren't") but due to them transforming into the ever terrible but ridiculously well-liked carter USM these are the only pink records that appear to fetch large amounts of money.
so my advice - ignore jamie wednesday but invest in pink.
one of the great forgotten labels of the post punk indie scene.

mudhoney | birmingham | 1989

2006-07-30T08:40:00.000-07:00

i wasn't a big subpop fan really. in fact i only really liked tad.
but i REALLY liked tad (there's a story about them too...but it can wait for now).
they appealed to the heavy metal side of me that, though deeply buried, had never really left me.

but the membranes were supporting at edwards no. 8 in birmingham and john robb had asked me along.
it wasn't a memorable gig musically.
but something happened that evening that still makes me laugh when i think about it.

edwards no. 8 had a really nice backstage area - it was in fact a seperate bar that i presume was opened during certain nights, but was solely for the use of the bands on gig nights.

dog faced hermans had just released "every day timebomb" on john's label vinyl drip and i was sat at a table with the membranes discussing just how f*cking astonishing a record it was.
(and it was).

mudhoney were sitting at the next table with their entourage.
a brummy journalist came in, had a quick look around, and made a beeline for the membranes.
he introduced himself and we all said hello and then he started interviewing john.
now, for those of you that don't know (though i'm sure a lot of you do as he's all over the TV nowadays) john has a particularly broad lancashire accent.
the journalist's opening question was, "so are you enjoying the UK?".
"erm, yeah - it's alright", john replied, and the interview continued.
it went on for a good 15 minutes as i remember.
and from that first question it was obvious that the journo thought the membranes were mudhoney regardless of the fact that at the next table a bunch of longhairs sat drinking beer and talking in loud american accents.

packed lunch to school

2006-07-27T23:29:00.000-07:00

i and my friends at school used to wander into town at lunchtime.
we'd make a beeline for the record shop, hang around a bit, eat chips on the way back to school and generally mess about.
chips.
every day chips.
you see i was given a couple of pounds each day for lunch and chips were about 50p, which meant that by the end of the week i had enough money to buy a record.
but then record prices went up a bit and it meant i needed that extra bit of cash.
so if there was a record i felt was particularly important for me to have i'd go without lunch for the week and i could afford to buy what i felt i NEEDED.
friends had paper rounds and the like to earn some money but i was, to be frank, lazy.
i thought i was on to a winner.

but i can be dim.
something that i can could never say about my old man.

i really really REALLY needed "psychocandy" (well, you would wouldn't you?).
when it came out i went down to the record shop during my lunch break and bought it.
but i was hungry.
i knew dad was out (he worked funny hours so you couldn't always be sure) and so i ran home and made a sandwich.
realising i was going to be late back to school i grabbed my bag and left the house.

dad got home, saw a dirty plate and glass in the kitchen and immediately knew what was going on.
the first thing he did?
he phoned the record shop.
yes i'd been in there at lunchtime.
he didn't shout at me or anything.
he simply insisted that from now on i would take a packed lunch to school.

it all comes back to XTC

2006-07-27T22:33:00.000-07:00

i remember really liking "sgt. rock" when XTC mimed to it on top of the pops.
it would be played at our school discos but no one would dance to it.
girls didn't seem to like it too much, but it's a song with a great chorus for young boys to shout along to.

that's my earliest memory of XTC.
i would've been about 10 going on 11.

a couple of years later "senses working over time" came out and i loved it.
in fact i bought the 7".

and that was that until the summer of 1986 - it was 10 years after punk and the BBC aired a documentary which cobbled together bits of live footage and old grey whistle test appearances.
the program included buzzcocks, iggy, magazine, joy division, the usual pistols and clash stuff and some footage of XTC performing "neon shuffle" live in a rehearsal room (or so it appeared).
i had recorded the program, though i no longer have it, and of all the bands that appeared it was XTC that i kept rewinding to watch again.
and in my head a link was made - "sgt. rock", "senses working overtime", "neon shuffle" (and before you get all pedantic on me i know that's not chronologically correct, but that's the order it worked for me).

that summer of 86 i was between school and sixth form college and i worked most days helping to renovate my girlfriend's house. ripping out ceilings, mixing concrete, i even bricked up a door - my first and only bit of bricklaying (and it's still standing).
i was being paid reasonably for my efforts and decided i would buy all of XTC's albums.
i started with "waxworks", the singles collection. at the time you could still get copies of it shrinkwrapped with "beeswax", the b-sides album, free.

i adored side 2 of "waxworks" for 7 days and then i bought "white music" and, following that, week after week i bought another couple of XTC albums.

then "skylarking" came out towards the end of the summer and i was completely thrown by it.
it sounded really really grown up.
like an adult's record.
and it put me off XTC - i just stopped listening to them.
i'd invested all that time and money and like a typical teenager moved on to something else.

now of course i adore XTC and i LOVE "skylarking", though i can see why a 16 year old boy might not have enjoyed it too much.
it's definately a grown up record.

but my favourite XTC album is "black sea" and thinking about that now i feel it's fitting that it should be as it contains that first ever glimpse i had of the band - "sgt. rock".

we return once more to the mctells (kind of)

2006-07-26T10:28:00.000-07:00

as has become painfully obvious over the short life of this blog that the mctells were huge to me in my teenage years.

here’s another reason why.

shortly after playing my birthday stuart mctell – he was the bass player by night and a gravedigger in hertford by day (as far as i know he still is) – sent me a cassette of some of his favourite songs.

i still have it – though i no longer have the cover he made.
here it is:

boy oh boy there were some gems on there.
i learned about so much over that 90 minutes than i think i’ve ever learned.
there was stuff on there that i knew – television personalities, wire, swell maps, specials.
there was stuff that i’d heard of but never listened to – pere ubu, mighty caesars.
and there was stuff that i’d never heard of before – patrik fitzgerald, sexton ming, astronauts, cult figures (who, it turned out, were swell maps in disguise).

over the weeks that followed receiving the tape i went out and bought a ridiculous amount of records.

like pere ubu’s “the modern dance” which quickly became one of my favourite albums.
and it still is.
odd really when, many years later, I ended up as assistant manager to them and david thomas for a while.

i never did find a copy of the cult figures’ “zip Nolan” single though – I know it’s floating around the internet but I’m loathed to pay £25 for it.

but of all the things on that cassette I think the one song that really got me jumping around the room was “irrelevant battles” by patrik fitzgerald.
it took me over 10 years to eventually find a copy of the 12” that it was on – released by small wonder in the late 70’s it also includes the hauntingly beautiful “cruellest crime”.
brings a lump to my throat every time.

my bloody valentine | birmingham | 1988

2006-07-26T06:13:00.000-07:00

a monsterous f*cking cacophony.
that's what it was.
playing stuff from isn't anything AND playing "you made me realise".

i don't remember the other bands on the bill (though i have a vague recollection that primal scream were playing).

i never bought any MBV records.
i didn't think much of them.
my girlfriend adored them and had everything - that rubbish german release included.
but i admit that for the 30 or so minutes that they were onstage they blew me away.

it wasn't just the volume.
it was belinda's seeming fragility staring out across the audience and kevin shields' mighty fender jaguar (was it a jaguar?) made an unholy screaming mess.

there didn't seem to be any security that night and so i wandered backstage afterwards and i had a chat with kevin shields.
he seemed like a nice bloke though i remember little of the conversation except for (and this is why i vaguely remember primal scream playing) telling me, as bobby gillespie sauntered past, "ignore bobby. he's pretending to be a smackhead".

primal scream | birmingham | 1987...or when i decided not to like primal scream anymore

2006-07-26T05:59:00.000-07:00

call me a purist.
call me silly.
call me anything you like.
just don't call me a primal scream fan.

it started out so well.
"all fall down" was a GREAT single.
"crystal crescent" was a great single spoiled by RUBBISH production.

but man oh man, by the time i saw them live they'd released "sonic flower groove" and had decided they were going to be the new rolling stones or somesuch*.

bobby had the hair, he had the big spotty shirt, but he had such a wimpy voice.
it was a great voice for the psyche-like jangle of early primals, but he sounded like a tone deaf child by the time they played birmingham.

i was really disappointed.
bobby g could've been one of my greatest heroes but he blew it.

mind you, the gig wasn't all bad.
first on were sea urchins (it might have been their first gig. it was certainly one of the first).
they set up on the dancefloor of the venue and did 3 songs.
they were REALLY untogether.
i loved 'em.

next on, and the 'proper' support band i guess were the jasmine minks.
now then, the jasmine minks really did know how to rock.
and roll.
they seemed like grownups, old men even.
i suppose i was only 17, but that wouldn't have made them much more than 25.
they were the highlight of the night though.

funny the stuff remember isn't it - like the purple vomit at the door of the venue.
dunno why but that always stuck.

*i know that "sonic flower groove" isn't a stonesy album AND i know that the following album, "primal scream" is, but trust me they already had the gibson les pauls and the silly posturing.

sinatra's - a club in birmingham

2006-07-26T01:30:00.000-07:00

for a few months during '87 and '88 sinatra's, located opposite snow hill station and just off the aston expressway was my favourite club in the world.

i seemed to be there weekly - in fact i think i was.

it was tiny.
entering from the street you appeared to be stepping into a seedy, drug-riddled, pool cue wielding drinkers den.
and i guess you probably were.
the club itself was up a flight of stairs on the first floor.
a tiny bar and room for about 50 or 60 people.
the sound was always really good.
there wasn't a stage - just an area cleared at one end of the room.

occassionally lawrence used to loiter around at the back of the room. no one ever seemed to speak to him, just acknowledged his presence and let him get on with being lawrence.

i can't tell you if the bar was any good as i was drinking nothing stronger than pepsi in those days.

bands i saw there?
um...some of my favourites were:

razorcuts
sea urchins
mctells
buy off the bar (my band was support for this one)
st. christopher
onionhead

i've just thought, it's the place where greg razorcut singed this for me:

happy days.

*i can't find any links to the venue so if you have any more info about what went on there i'd love to know.

age of chance | keele | 1986

2006-07-26T01:10:00.000-07:00

i thought age of chance were marvellous?
didn't you?
no?
oh well.

just after the release of their prince cover version they played a small tour that visited keele university.
i had a friend there and so i went along.

i don't know what the university's like now, but back then it had a lovely campus - all tree lined lawns and a posh refectory.

hang on, this is meant to be a blog about being an indie kid in the 80's not universities unlimited.

the person i stayed with had just bought the smith's "the world won't listen" and that afternoon she played it endlessly.
and i really do mean endlessly.
you know, i liked that record, but i didn't want to hear it over and over and over.
i smiled and made polite conversation - after all she was letting me sleep on her floor.

so.
age of chance.
they'd just started modelling their cycling gear look (and let me make it clear right here and now that it was never a look that i tried out). they did look FANTASTIC on stage though!
as i mentioned earlier "kiss" had just come out and it spoiled the entire gig.
both for me and, judging by the mounting annoyance on their faces, the band.

they opened the set with it. huge cheers from the audience.
then they played (if memory serves) "the morning after the 60's".
no cheers this time just multiple calls for them to play "kiss" again.
the band tried to ignore the requests and played "bible of the beats".
one person in the hall clapped - that was me - i couldn't be heard over the shouts for "kiss".
so they played "kiss" again.
after one or two more songs the pressure from the audience was ridiculous and they played "kiss" a-bloody-gain.
and again.
i really felt for them - they made an amazing noise - HUGE bass rumble, glass & barbed wire guitars and steven elvidge's nasal half sung/half rapped vocal.

in the end they cut their losses and left the stage earlier than they should have.

i just hope they got paid well.

bi-joopiter

2006-07-24T02:47:00.000-07:00

in an earlier post i mentioned bi-joopiter and said i would be returning to the subject.
i just received an email that made me want to write about it immediately.

but now i'm not sure quite how to start.

umm...how about at the beginning - how i got involved with buying bi-joopiter cassettes.
it was 1986 and the first time i heard mctells they were played by john peel.
i bought the 7" - it was a 4 track EP on the frank label and it looked like this:

inside was a beautifully hand screened flyer for a mctells cassette released by bi-joopiter, so i sent my couple of quid and a note and a few days later it arrived.
before i even put it into the cassette deck i knew i was going to love it.
the packaging was super - a pink cassette mounted onto a 7" sized screen printed card in a plastic bag.
it turned out that paul mctell was one half of the bi-joopiter label, whilst mark mctell (aka flunder - ex television personalities) ran the frank label.

pretty soon i was buying a fair amount of stuff from the label and had built a decent friendship with paul and gillian.
around this time i'd also fallen madly for the first beat happening LP and bi-joopiter stocked K releases - i got hold of the first beat happening cassette, a couple of their 7"s and a lovely cassette by the cannanes:

suddenly there was a whole new world opening up to me.

there was great music out there being made and released that didn't care about distributors, record shops and the like.
this was about a network of people just getting on with it.

the mctells were my favourite (something which i have to admit is blatantly obvious if you listen to the sarandon records. try playing "prove it" right after the mctells' "push". oops).

the first time i saw them they played aston university - it was a peculiar evening - they were on quite early and after them the frank chickens did a set, though it appeared that there were 2 completely different promoters putting each band on. i couldn't hang around after the mctells for frank chickens. i had to go out and then pay to get back in.
so i never saw frank chickens (though i wish i had).

anyhow, back to bi-joopiter.

as i mentioned a few posts ago the mctells played my birthday party.
i'd not long had my band together and paul and gillian were immensely supportive.
always seeming to have time to listen to the recordings we'd made, always encouraging.
they took copies of our cassettes to sell and they asked us to appear on a compilation cassette they were releasing called "what feet" - i still have it and i still love it more than any other compilation we were involved in.

around the time that i lost contact with the bi-joopiters i started my own cassette label.
i had been talking to my friend and mentor stan (of pumf cassettes) about it and he had told me i should just do it.
i thought about bi-joopiter and how it worked, it's aesthetics and it's ideology and knew that if i was going to do it myself then bi-joopiter would be the standard by which i judged what i did.

and you know, bi-joopiter was a label that taught me lessons about how and why to do things that still hold true to the way i operate today in all aspects of my life.
and for that i am eternally grateful.

lloyd cole & the commotions | birmingham | 1987

2006-07-23T23:00:00.000-07:00

i had wanted to go and see lloyd cole and the commotions when "easy pieces" came out but i had to wait two years, and by that point they were playing places like the NEC.
this meant that the easiest way to see them was to buy a ticket that included a coach trip and the last time i'd done that it was to go to manchester to see frankie goes too hollywood (who, by the way, were massively disappointing).

i bought my ticket and arrived at the bus station at the appropriate time.
the concert was OK - a bit bland, workman-like, note-perfect, excitement free.

but the concert itself isn't really the reason for this story.
it was the coach trip that i remember.
specifically for this:

the coach arrived on time.
there were about 20 people waiting at telford to go to the show.
the bus made it's way to shifnal to pick up a dozen more.
from shifnal the next stop was to be birmingham coach station and from there we were to go directly to the NEC.

except we got on the motorway (the M54 for those of you who might be interested) but instead of travelling directly to birmingham the driver took us off the motorway and dived down country roads, through a couple of obscure villages and then, shouting through the carriage, "won't be long", the driver pulled the coach over at a farmhouse, got out and disappeared through the front gate and into the side door of the building.

we all looked at each other in bewilderment.
if this had happened today no-one would even have made eye contact as we'd all be immersed in our iPods and PSP's, but back then as we waited talk started of what on earth was happening.

the driver left us on the side of this lonely country lane for nearly 20 minutes before climbing back onto the coach and, without a single word of explanation, drove a strangulated route back onto the motorway and continued our journey.

to this day i have absolutely no idea what was going on (though i could probably take an educated guess).

the smiths - it feels like a long story

2006-07-21T02:38:00.000-07:00

you know how when you were at school there was always someone cooler than you were?
and whatever you did they always managed to trump you.

there was a guy i was at school with, a friend of mine in fact, who always seemed to have all the good records.
for a short time at least.
he'd come into school with microdisney's first album, the fall's "cruiser's creek", talking heads records, that kinda thing.

one day he came in with the smith's "hand in glove" single.
we listened to it in the music room and it sounded strange and exciting.
i bought it that same week and played it over and over.
then "this charming man" came out and so i bought that too.
when the debut album came out i had pre-ordered it from the local record shop.

the smiths became a massive thing.
not neccessarily my favourite band - though certainly for a time they were - they just seemed to always be there.
a constant companion.
perhaps it was because there seemed to be a new 7" out by them about every 8 or 9 weeks.

i saw them at wolverhampton civic hall on their ill-faited "queen is dead" tour and they were thrilling.

shortly afterwards they announced a split.
this resulted in a glut more singles and of course the final album, "strangeways, here we come".

i admit i cried when they split up.
yes - i cried.
i cried because this band that had been a daily and important part of my life had gone, but also the tears were shed because i HATED "girlfriend in a coma" and i LOATHED "strangeways, here we come" (i still do) and i felt let down that they had gone out on such a low.

wedding present | birmingham | 1987

2006-07-21T02:16:00.000-07:00

it felt like i lived at burberry's in birmingham for a few months.
there was just someone playing every week that i wanted to see - primal scream, jasmine minks, my bloody valentine....a looong list.

i went to see the wedding present.
they were supported by the close lobsters.
the place was packed to the rafters but everyone was at the bar while the close lobsters played.
they missed a treat - close lobsters were a fantastic live band. a lot more edge than their records - big trebly, cutting guitar sound and lots of attitude.

during the change-over people started heading towards the stage.
now, the stage at burberry's was all of 18" high - i had stood right next to it during the close lobsters set and wasn't going to move for the wedding present fans.

looking back, wedding present fans at that point in time were a strange lot (certainly aroudn the midlands). they were your obvious smiths/john peel/indie fans BUT they always seemed a bit harder, a bit more like rugby players - lots of beer, big muscles, shouting.

as the band came on everyone in the place pushed forward.
HARD.
my knees were in trouble of being broken against the stage and so i stepped onto it and sat down.
a bouncer pushed over to me and tried to get me to move, but grapper intervened and told him i should stay where i was.
perhaps he thought i looked too weedy to survive in the crowd.
so i spent my first ever wedding present gig sat at the feet of david gedge looking at the churning mass of polo-shirted hard boys jumping about with fists and pint glasses raised above their heads.

after they'd finished i was led by grapper off the stage with the band.
back stage i got them to sign this for me:

they were a lovely bunch of chaps.

the day i didn't see the chesterfields (or mighty mighty for that matter) | dudley | 1987

2006-07-20T06:57:00.000-07:00

"kettle" had just been released.
i'd bought it but i wasn't a big fan.
one afternoon a friend came over for beans on toast.
the reason i know this fact is that at that point beans on toast was THE ONLY THING HE ATE.
he was of a slightly orange hue from it too.
he'd brought the NME with him and in the concert listings it said mighty mighty and the chesterfields were playing that night at dudley JB's.
like the exciting young men that we were we decided there and then to go.
he finished his beans (i didn't have any - to this day they make me ill) and we wandered down to the station.
dudley, though only 15 miles or so from telford, is not the easiest place in the world to get to.
trains all go via somewhere else and neither of us could drive.
so we got a bus.
it took a disgustingly long time.
when we finally arrived we spent a good half hour wandering round looking for the venue.
no-one we asked seemed to know where it was.
eventually we found it.

or so we thought.

it seemed odd that there was no-one on the door.
on getting inside it seemed even stranger that the floorspace was littered with tables and the tables were littered with old men drinking heavily.

it wasn't immediately obvious that this wasn't the right venue.
but it was immediately obvious that neither the chesterfields nor mighty mighty were playing there that evening.

i can still feel the hard stares on the back of my neck when i think about leaving that place that night.

we caught the next bus home and i made beans.

14 iced bears | shrewsbury | 1988

2006-07-20T06:35:00.000-07:00

i mentioned in an earlier post that i'd be returning to the 14 iced bears.
so, here we are.

i'd kept in touch with robert since we met at the beat happening show and, through thunderball records, i ended up printing the bears t-shirts (it was my job - i was a screenprinter) along with the "drugs not jobs" t-shirts which were made for kilgore trout but made famous by some bloke out of spacemen 3 wearing one in some glossy mag a few years later.

anyhow, we put the bears on at the english bridge centre in shrewsbury with my band supporting.
by this point the 14 iced bears had stopped writing 2 minute scratchy pop songs and were quickly turning into psychedelic monsters.
i suppose the first sign of this was the united states of america cover ("coming down") on the "mother sleep" EP (mind you the title track was pretty psyche-y too).

the venue was full of indiepoppers.
to be honest you could've put on anything under the banner of an indie gig and people would have shown up from miles around.
not a whole lot happened in shropshire.

the 14 iced bears began quietly, ebbed and flowed and then got loud.
then got louder.
and louder.
and they blew out two very large windows alongside the stage.
glass pushed out into the street.
a mess.
those stood along the sides of the hall moved inward.
some left.

the indiepoppers didn't know what had hit them.

there was trouble with the venue manager after the show.
fortunately, though i had booked the bears, i'd done it through a promoter who put on a bunch of things around town.
so, like the coward that i pride myself in being, i left him to it.

pastels | birmingham | 1988

2006-07-19T07:17:00.000-07:00

towards the end of 88 and through 89 i went through a stage of getting into gigs for nothing.
the first one i remember was the pastels at burberry's in birmingham.

i and a couple of friends had arrived early.
i was wearing my best duffle coat, jeans and desert boots and sported a scruffy basin haircut.
i could hear the pastels soundchecking inside.
i banged on the doors.

eventually a doorman opened the door, peered out at us and asked, "yeah? what d'you want?"
i asked if he could tell stephen pastel that mark flunder was at the door (mark was a mutual friend - he was in the mctells and he'd filmed the pastels movie, "a bit of the other").
the doorman duly disappeared off into the venue and a few minutes later returned to let us in.

we wandered down towards the stage and as we came into view stephen shouted, "that's not f*cking mark flunder!!"
"no", replied aggi, "it's not - but he looks more like you than you do".

that broke the ice and after saying our hello's we found a corner of the venue to sit down and wait for the evening's entertainment to start.

as it turned out this was to be the night that i met another future friend.
the pastels support for the gig was dandelion adventure - they were yet to release their debut LP , "puppy shrine" - and we watched them soundcheck.
i thought they were great and so, after they were done, i went over to the guitar player and introduced myself.
"did we sound OK form out there?", the guitar player asked.
"i thought you sounded great - really liek the membranes!", i responded.
the guitar player gave me a hard stare and then in a raised voice said, "don't you know who i am? don't you recognise me? i'm stan! i was in the membranes!".
oh.
oops.

i apologised profusely, bought him a lemonade, and he forgave me (he's a very forgiving chap).

there was, i'm sure, a third band on the bill that night but i can't for the life of me remember who it was..
if you know, please tell.

my eighteenth birthday

2006-07-16T23:36:00.000-07:00

"what would you like to do for your eighteenth birthday?", my mum asked me.
"i'd like to waste a LOT of your money hiring a venue and having bands play with nothing left to show for it other than 3 months worth of crisps".

that wasn't my reply, but it may as well have been.

for my eighteenth birthday i hired out a local church hall, arranged for st. christopher and the mctells to come up and play, made posters and flyers, bought several boxes full of crisps, enough beverages to fill a small boating lake, rehearsed my band and got all over excited.

13 people came and let me leave you without any doubt - 13 people make a church hall look HUGE and EMPTY.

a friend of mine brought his mobile disco - unfortunately he wasn't from the same world as me and had brought lots of simply red/simple minds/level 42 records.
i ran home and grabbed a handful of compilation albums and had him put those on instead.

does all this make my birthday party a disaster?

not at all.
it began what became a bit of an event - bands turning up at my parents' house to have dinner cooked for them before playing gigs (we cooked for 14 iced bears and pale saints amongst others).

st. christopher were great in their ever-so-slightly pretentious way and the mctells were utterly fantastic.
my mum quickly developed a crush on stuart mctell and danced alone in the middle of the hall to their whole set.

of the 13 people that did turn up were 2 girls from nearby shrewsbury who had heard about the gig but had to see it to believe it.

at the end of the night, while handing over expenses to the bands i was dreading them saying, "never EVER contact us again".
but both bands invited us to play with them in the future - as we did several times.

it did however take over 10 years before i felt like having a party again.

june brides - now i can be in a band

2006-07-13T22:54:00.000-07:00

the on-going mythologising of UK punk has pushed so many lies into the realm of truth that i rarely believe anything i read about it anymore.
but the one claim that punk makes that i can completely understand is how it encouraged people to form bands and start making music of their own.

the band that did that for me was the june brides.
again it was a peel session that hooked me.
late 1985, four songs, beautiful tunes played on scratchy guitars.
and that voice.
i think it was, more than anything else, that voice.
it's a punk voice for sure - cracked, occassionally unsure of itself, full of fun and emotion.

you know i like so many thousands of other boys my age, adored the smiths (more of them later).
but the june brides came from a completely different place.
the smiths wrote lovely and very clever pop, but they were so obviously musicians with a capital M.
and they were being pushed so hard into every corner of the pop media.
for me the june brides created music equally as lovely, equally as amusing, equally as important.
and they had a sound that made me think for the first time that 1, i want to do this and 2, i really COULD do this.

after hearing their session i bought their album, "there are 8 million stories".
it's battered and scratchy now, but more often than not, when i listen to the june brides i listen to that record.
the recent compilation on cherry red is wonderful but my old old vinyl has so many important things locked in it's crunchy grooves that that's how i have to hear the june brides.

so much more than a favourite band.
within weeks of the june brides coming into my life i had started a band.
it was a rubbish band.
i mean really bad.
but it was a band.
and it was my band.

here's a thing.
i'm sure i mentioned this in my other blog after recording the last sarandon record - but it's fitting to repeat it here.

throughout the 80's and well into the 90's (and occassionally in the 00's) my favourite daydream would be bumping into phil wilson and starting a band with him.
i make no apologies for this silly little bit of childish wishing.
when i met phil i had already decided that the latest sarandon record would be called "the june bride".
in a moment of bravado i asked him if he'd sing on the record and he said yes.
i was excited.
but i hadn't realised just how much it would affect me.
i could barely contain myself - hearing phil singing a song i'd written and chatting with him is the first time i think i've ever been truly starstruck.
the rest of that day and for a good few days afterwards i was bursting into tears like a great big girl. completely overcome with what had happened.
when i got copies of the record and put it on i burst into tears again.

i can deal with it now.
it's under control.
i can shoot the breeze with mr wilson in a calm collected way.
phil - i'm sorry for being so embarrassing.

bIG fLAME - another pivotal moment

2006-07-13T22:26:00.000-07:00

this was the first bIG fLAME record i bought.
i had recently heard them in session on the john peel show. it was a session that included a cover version of 'wake me up before you go-go". that's what got me first i think. that use of a huge pop hit - not quite mangling it, but certainly f*cking with it's innards.

soon afterwards i got hold of this:

and at that moment bIG fLAME became my favourite band in the world.
and they still are.
they are a yardstick by which i measure a lot of things - mainly my own music.

you see, to me bIG fLAME are a pop band. they made two minute slices of sheer unadulterated joy.
each song just xPLODES!
and whether you like it or not young pop-picker, bIG fLAME songs are full of tUNES.
mELODIES underpin the lyrics - and they're great lyrics.
it's just that bIG fLAME did all this at about 300 miles per hour, threw in some odd time signatures, and used a guitar sound thinner - no, not thinner - LEANER, than you imagined possible.
but it is POP!

i never saw them live, though i know someone who did - and, though he's a very dear friend, i hate him for it.

membranes | wolverhampton | 1988

2006-07-12T05:20:00.000-07:00

wolverhampton polytechnic had a small subterranean student bar.
you could get about 50 people in there.
we'd heard that cud and the membranes were playing and so hopped in our old morris minor (god this blog gets more indie schmindie with each post!) and trundled along.

cud didn't show and so the membranes treated the 20 or so people there to a very long set.
i know a lot of people who claim not to like the membranes.
live they ROCKED.
some of the records are a bit drab but i still have a fondness for every one of them.

over the course of the 80's and early 90's i saw the membranes a LOT.
but this gig stands out for one reason.
it was the first time i had any contact with a brummie called daren.

we were leaving the poly and in front of us was a young chap wearing a denim jacket.
the back of this jacket was hand painted with the cover of a bogshed record.

i had to say hello.

we spoke briefly and went our seperate ways.
i mention daren here as he will probably turn up in several of these posts.
i might as well get the rest of the story out of the way now.

after meeting the boy in the bogshed jacket i thought nothing about it.
a few weeks later i went to a concert in manchester and there he was.
we said hello.
just about every gig after that featured a brief exchange of hello's.
he seemed to be everywhere i went.

the last time i saw him was in the early 90's when i bumped into him at a blues explosion show and he informed me he was in a new band called pram.

i didn't see him again until last year when his nephew contacted me about my band, mentioned his uncle had joined the nightingales as their new drummer, and gave me his email address.
and there he was - brummie daren with the bogshed jacket.

now we're firm friends.
our conversations mainly concerning ridiculous gigs we both attended, how much more beer we can drink and how it seems like we've known each other forever.

(apologies for the sappy ending, but it's a nice story).

regrets? i've had a few - or why i never saw bogshed

2006-07-12T03:36:00.000-07:00

bogshed are one of my favourite bands ever.
i never saw bogshed live.

here's why:

it was autumn 1986 and i was in love with "step on it", bogshed's debut album.
i'd recently started 6th form, supposedly doing A levels in english and art.
what i did mainly was bunk off and go sit in the local record shop - especially on a monday and a wednesday.
that was when the deliveries came.
i would buy the cartel's catalogue and go through it with a pen marking off the records i really NEEDED to own.

sorry, i digress.

bogshed then.

so, i was at 6th form.
the few friends i had liked the smiths and the bunnymen, one or two of them were gothy-types.
but it seemed that no-one else liked bogshed (or stump for that matter).

but there was a girl in my english class.
a girl i thought was beautiful.
we would have a laugh together if we bumped into each other in corridors and i quickly developed a crush.

then one afternoon she came and found me in the canteen.

"would you like to come and see bogshed with me tonight?", she asked.
i couldn't believe my ears.
this girl liked bogshed.
she was asking me out THAT NIGHT to see them!
"yes", i replied in a rather shaky voice, clutching my satchel (yes, i had a satchel and yes, there was the usual indie kid nonsense in it. like a copy of "now we are six").

it was arranged that we would meet back at the college later.
as i arrived i noticed she was waiting in a car with a BOYFRIEND.
(she'd not mentioned THAT to me).
i made some excuses and went back home.

beat happening | london | 1988

2006-07-12T01:31:00.000-07:00

here's where this blog stops being linear and starts being random rememberances.

early 1988 i found out beat happening were visiting the uk.
i got excited.
well you would, right?

paul & gillian bi-joopiter invited me down to stay with them in finsbury park so's we could go see beat happening at the fulham greyhound.
it was a wonderful weekend for an indie-kid such as i.
we spent the afternoon in paul's flat listening to his old swell maps singles and scritti's "songs to remember" before heading over to the venue.

the bill that night was supposed to be beat happening, the vaselines and the boy hairdresser, but boy hairdresser didn't show.
this pleased me no end.
firstly because i wasn't a big fan - their 12" on 53rd & 3rd ("golden showers") didn't do a lot for me.
secondly, and more importantly, it meant duglas from bmx bandits - who happened to be around - did an impromptu set singing along to a cassette of queen greatest hits while wearing pyjamas.

i bumped into bob stanley (latterly to be known for his band saint ettienne) who i knew through his fanzine caff (i still have a caff valentine card from him and pete somewhere), and we had our first and only conversation face to face.

the vaselines were great actually. pretty dirty rock'n'rolly live. and frances looked lovely.

but beat happening were something else.
raw, fun, funny, energising - calvin was the sexiest man in the world for the 40 minutes they were on stage.
it was the first time i'd seen a band swap instruments, not worry about guitars being properly tuned, go out of time without a care in the world and that was a crucial moment for me in terms of how i would change the way i made music with my band(s).

on the way home on the tube we bumped into everett true and then robert secula - leader of the 14 iced bears. i'd met him once before at a show in birmingham and we agreed we should play together soon - more of that in a later post.

paul & gillian bi-joopiter were incredibly important to me. paul was in the mctells and gillian ran the bi-joopiter cassette/record label, and between them they pushed me towards the things i did. from cassette labels to bands to the music i bought.

there'll be more about them later too.

1984. church halls and white noise

2006-07-10T22:39:00.000-07:00

i played and played and played this record.
inside the wraparound cover (my first ever wraparound cover i think) there was a ticket to buy a J&MC t-shirt.
i bought it.
it was rubbish.

i was invited to a birthday party at a local church hall.
i took this record.
i asked the DJ to put it on.
absolutely everyone left the hall for the 2 minutes that this record played.
then they came back in and got on with their lives.

i felt fulfilled.

how did it begin? do you care?

2006-07-10T06:11:00.000-07:00

i arrived in england in 1978. planet telford.
i had no idea of what to expect.
i was 8 years old.

junior school seemed huge though seperated into just 3 sets of people:

rockers
mods
girls who liked the nolans

however unwise it may have been i plumped for the rockers and duly found the delights of status quo and ac/dc.
(actually, that's not so surprising - during a brief soujourn to england in 1973 for my brother to be born my mum had bought me "sladest" which i dug so much i'd put on her platform boots and dance about to).
the problem was this. though i was trying hard to be an 8 year old rocker, by 9 i really liked a lot of the stuff the, ahem, mods were listening to.

then, at the age of 10, a couple moved in next door.
they were in their early 20s.
i got on really well with them - they had motorbikes. they even HAD A TRIKE!
i used to go next door to hang out and they introduced me to marc bolan, rezillos and adam & the ants.
that year i was bought "dirk wears white sox" for christmas (if i remember rightly).
i didn't realise at the time but it was the beginning of a lot of changes.
i barely listened to the record at the time - it just made me feel good to have this record in my possession - but when adam & the ants relaunched as pop superstars i was converted.
school discos would never be the same again.
a 4th group had arrived....wait for it....the ant people.
HA!
(and i STILL loved my metal records).

the next big thing?

saturday morning children's TV circa 1982.
in the ad-break there was an advert for a new single.
it was called "the greatness and perfection" and was by someone called julian cope.
that afternoon, in town with my mum, we went into the local record shop (a place that i would return to so often over the coming years that it was the one place my family knew they could find me) - the record was due out on the following monday and we put an order in for it.

that single meant the world to me.
it was ever so pop but copey still wore a leather jacket.
i know he wasn't the first, but remember i was 12.

to begin with

2006-07-10T03:38:00.000-07:00

OK, so this is blog may well be dull to some, most, or all of you.
ho hum.

before i start whittering on about various records, incidents, whatever i want to say something about the whole 'C86' thing.

so here goes...

now i like quite a lot of twee & jangly guitar music BUT aligning those bands to what was happening on the C86 cassette and the concerts at the ICA is all a bit wrong.

there were only 3 or 4 twee or jangly bands on the C86 compilation - shop assistants, pastels and primal scream spring immediately to mind.
the majority of the compilation was taken up by angular, jerky bands like the mackenzies, bIG fLAME, bogshed, shrubs, stump, age of chance.
that's what made the C86 compilation special to me and i think it's about time someone mentioned it.

so there.

furthermore, whoever has put it about on this here internet thing that these bands were part of the (ridiculously named) "shambling" movement (ha!) needs to do a bit more research.
the bands mentioned above weren't a part fo the shambling thing. the bands that were are the same few bands on C86 that spawned what's now described as tweepop - pastels, shop assistants, etc.

so there again.

rant over.
next up the first useless anecdote of an 80's teenage indiekid.