Punctured bicycle on a hillside desolate
A reminder that the Claim open for the Dentists in a Medway spectacular at Dingwalls in Camden on Thursday 25th March. Here to celebrate this once in blue moon appearance are two songs from their Boomy Tella LP which can consider themselves unlucky not have made it on to last year’s Black path retrospective.
I’ve been listening to Alela Diane a lot of late; she has a voice that repays a lot of listening. It’s straighter than Joanna Newsom’s, but twistier and rootsier than Rachael Dadd’s. A beautiful river voice running over a bed of flinty stones, and to judge from the subject of ‘Oh! My mama’ and what little I know about her, one that she has been encouraged to use almost from birth in a musical family where to sing was as natural as to talk. And so she sing sing sing sing sing sings melodies, having no doubt put in close on the ten thousand hours that Malcolm Gladwell reckons is the minimum to be great in any field.
As well as her two solo albums and her EP of traditional or traditional-sounding songs with Alina Hardin, she takes the lead vocals on the Headless Heroes’ collection of cover versions, where interpretations of ‘Just like honey’ (yes, the now twenty-five year old Jim & William Reid chestnut) and I Am Kloot’s ‘To you’ rub shoulders with songs rescued from the sixties like Jackson C. Frank’s ‘Blues run the game’ and Linda Perhacs’ ‘Hey, who really cares?’ This middle quartet of songs on The silence of love is as fine a run of covers as you’ll come across – and the rest of the record is not far off that standard, particularly when at the last Alela hits and holds the high notes on ‘See my love’, another rescued nugget written by Pamela Polland and originally recorded by the duo of which she was one half, the Gentle Soul.
It’s worth seeking out her two Daytrotter sessions, as songs from The pirate’s gospel benefit from her voice being in better shape than it was three years earlier when they were recorded, while those from her second long player sound more striking in solo acoustic renderings – To be still is not quite as still as it ideally might be, with overegged instrumentation now and again distracting attention from the wonders of the singing and the poetic clarity of the writing.
One or other guise would be enough in itself, but that her voice works so well in both settings suggests an adventuring spirit that may well take her and us to many other musical places worth visiting.
I’ve started a new blog. Stupid, I know, when I have the challenge of juggling three already. But this is just songs and pictures, with the verbals kept to a minimum – easy on the brain, easy on the ear, easy on the eye. Hopefully. The subject? Songs about birds. My challenge to you is to help me out with songs that, er, fit the bill. Have a read of the preface for the somewhat sketchy principles I’ve set myself for this bird-brained project. And be sure to tweet all your friends about it too…
Images by John Foker from rooks.org.uk.
Rachael Dadd’s Moth in the motor package is high on concept. A ten inch vinyl record with a choice of hand-printed or artist-created covers, an accompanying exhibition and a digital download which includes an animation by Betsy Dadd, it majors on Rachael’s piano-written songs, while the tour running alongside the record’s release reinforces the point that piano is her current instrument of choice. The release brings together three excerpts from her last album, After the ant fight, one from the preceding The world outside is in a cupboard, and three new songs. The stunning ‘Table’ from After the ant fight leads off, and seems to take on extra zip, punch and flight from the vinyl pressing. It’s entirely appropriate that Rachael’s sister should so painstakingly and fluidly animate that song, given its intimately domestic subject matter.
None of the other re-released songs quite match ‘Table’ for impact; solid album tracks that they are, the lesser of them seem a little exposed in this piano sampler format. To my mind Rachael is a more distinctive songwriter with strings and a fretboard in her hands; when sat on a piano stool, she strays towards territory in which ten-a-penny singer-songwriters are camped. But as if to defy me thinking that, she really stretches out over the keys on the ten inch’s title song. ‘Moth in the motor’ combines the dynamics of ‘Table’ and the animated insect chirpiness of ‘Ant and bee’ from After the ant fight, but with added Thelonious Monkiness, and maybe dashes of Laurie Anderson and Jane Siberry. Well worth seeing Rachael attack the ivories on this song in a live setting, I should think.
The covers are great – a fabulous range of designs and takes on the title – though you may balk at paying some of the quoted prices. I plumped for a cheaper Dadd design and got a rather fetching purple deer-owl hybrid, but if I’d had money to spare for one of the artist creations, I’d have gone for Emma Lawton’s, as featured at the head of this post, for it too is high on concept.
Its name was always going to tempt me to investigate, but I’’m glad I did, because Fontlian is a site worthy of the song it honours. First, it’s visually striking, down in no small measure to the great photographs. Second, its words intrigue and amuse. And third, you get a choice and varied selection of tunes. Well worth adding to your regular bus route round the blogosphere.
And for those of you who don’t know the song in question, Fontilan has posted the demo version here.
Italo Calvino’s novel Baron in the trees (1957) is a picaresque affair in comparison with the beautiful metaphysics of his later work. The Baron is Cosimo, who as a boy of twelve argues with his father over the eating of a plate of snails, and heads up a holm-oak.
Cosimo climbed up to the fork of a big branch where he could settle comfortably and sat himself down there, his legs dangling, his arms crossed with hands tucked under his elbows, his head buried in his shoulders, his tricorne hat tilted over his forehead.
Our father leant out of the window-sill. ‘When you’re tired of being up there, you’ll change your ideas!’ he shouted.
‘I’ll never change my ideas,’ exclaimed my brother from the branch.
‘You’ll see as soon as you come down!’
‘Then I’ll never come down again!’ And he kept his word.
Cosimo starts to map out the rules of his refusal to return to the ground that same day, in conversation with Viola, the capricious little girl in the garden next door. Many pages and years pass before she finally ventures into the hollow of a nut-tree to be with him.
It’s unsurprisingly a great novel about trees, though in a less explicit way than Murray Bail’s Eucalyptus, in which a man named Holland promises his daughter’s hand to the suitor who can correctly name all of the hundreds of species of eucalyptus tree that he has planted on his land. But Baron in the trees also manages to combine the elegiac spirit of Giuseppi Tomasi di Lampedusa’s contemporaneously published The leopard with the comic aspects of the adventures of Casanova. And it makes you yearn a little for the age when England was covered in trees rather than fields, roads and buildings, and you might have chosen to swing through its forests from one county to another, an arboreal aristocrat and, like Cosimo, a proponent of a Project for the Constitution of an Ideal State in the Trees.
I was saddened to read of the early death of Sean Body while researching the latest entry in the Backed with annals. Reading Sean’s book Wish the World Away: Mark Eitzel and the American Music Club was – I thought – the first time I had come across him, but I hadn’t realised that he was the co-founder of both the Helter Skelter publishing concern and the bookshop of the same name in London, in which I had happily browsed and bought on several occasions, even attending the odd book launch there.
I never met Sean but I’ve got a sense of him through reading his book about Eitzel, and like to think we’d have rubbed along fine if we’d ever struck up conversation in the Angel, the pub that was nearest Helter Skelter.
At the end of Wish the world away Sean gives a personal selection of the best less well known American Music Club songs, and a song called ‘Mrs Wright’ is number one. A Mark Eitzel home demo from the time between California and Everclear, it obviously meant a lot to Sean, and in his memory, it deserves a wider audience. This is what he wrote about it:
It is often easy to exaggerate the brilliance of unreleased songs, because they have a mystique missing from released material. Also, they are judged against much weaker yardsticks than an artist’s best released work, set against which they might often be found wanting. It would be difficult to sustain an argument that ‘Mrs Wright’ in its demo-ed version is a better piece of work than finished Eitzel tracks such as ‘Western sky’ or ‘Blue and grey shirt’. Nonetheless, it is somehow strangely more compelling than many of his better-known songs. The introduction lasts only four bars, before Eitzel begins singing, and the performance itself is less than two minutes. … When the final passage turns out only as a half-verse, the effect is startling. What we are left with is a mystical, beautiful fragment – the shadow of a ghost or a fading dream. Because of the technological and commercial processes involved in making a record, there is often very little mystery in pop, but this home recording of ‘Mrs Wright’ remains inscrutable, undocumented and frozen in time – untainted by either artistic or commercial compromise. … It would be difficult to imagine this fragile performance worked into a full band arrangement, without taking something more pure away. And in this, the song is representative of some of Eitzel’s fundamental problems in bringing his music to a wider audience, both in terms of the double-edged sword of musical collaboration, and with regard to commercial considerations. Nonetheless, with ‘Mrs Wright’ Mark Eitzel realised his quest to make timeless, beautiful music. In terms of his artistic achievement alone, it may not really matter that the song was never released. In AS Byatt’s novel Posession, the narrator comments: ‘There are things which happen and leave no discernable trace, are not spoken or written of, though it would be very wrong to say that subsequent events go on indifferently, all the same, as though such things had never been.
From her 2008 digital release Trains and boats and planes, the ever-wonderful Laura Cantrell’s version of the New Order song. As is often – but not always – the case with the best cover versions, it’s a thorough inhabitation and re-creation, alighted upon by Laura no doubt because it happens to be one of Bernard’s more affecting efforts as a lyricist.
And here’s a great short essay in the ranting style that Laura wrote the same year about the dearth of female artists in the Country Music Hall of Fame, complete with songs by eight women currently excluded from the canon.
Robert Forster’s collected music writings 2005-09, The 10 rules of rock and roll has found its way here from Australia. The piece which gives the book its title is appropriately succinct, covering less than a page. My favourite of the ten are:
o The second-last song on every album is the weakest.
o Great bands tend to look alike.
o The guitarist who changes guitars on stage after every third number is showing you his guitar collection.
o The three-piece band is the purest form of rock and roll expression.
Reading this piece and the rest of Robert’s writings (together with having been at this game myself in some form or fashion for over twenty years) suggested the following 10 rules of rock and roll criticism.
1. Three facts and a gag.
My friend Mark Morris once told me that this was Steve Lamacq’s rule for reviewing an album or a gig. It’s a method that underpins Robert Forster’s criticism, only in a rather more refined and artful sense than you suspect Lammo was after from his NME freelancers. Robert takes his duties seriously, gives you the salient facts, and has the same dry humour in print as he does when crafting lyrics.
2. Tell the good from the bad.
Throughout this collection Robert demarcates between the good songs on a record and the fillers or missteps. He’s generous with his praise and sharp with his criticism.
3. Make the reader want to hear the music.
The obvious one. What is it that makes this a great or a great but flawed record? Put across its particularities and peculiarities; what it does both for you personally and what it might therefore do for anyone that goes out of their way to listen to it. There are at least half a dozen records I would never have sought out that I want to listen to as a result of reading Robert’s pieces about them: Sarah Blasko’s As day follows night, Espers’ II, Beth Orton’s Comfort of strangers, Paul Kelly’s Songs from the south, Neil Diamond’s 12 songs, and Kasey Chambers & Shane Nicholson’s Rattlin’ bones.
4. Don’t get so excited that you lose all sense of measure; equally don’t be so measured that you lose all sense of excitement.
It’s a difficult balance which Robert almost always gets tightrope-wire perfect. Bloggers are prone to the former; journalists the latter.
5. Bring the knowledge you have to bear.
In Robert’s case this means a thorough understanding of the value of production and the way songs are arranged and rendered; and what might be thought an old-fashioned – or a recording artist’s – concern for the balance of an album, its rightness as a set (Cat Power’s The greatest gets this wrong in Robert’s eyes, despite the great songs it contains). This gives his criticism a revealing edge. He is also honest about what he doesn’t know, a rare trait among critics.
6. Don’t be a snob (or a knob, for that matter).
Robert writes with openness and fondness for Australian rock and pop music, and in so doing gives the measure and depth of it on terms that I’d not previously encountered. There are many ways to be snobbish (or knobbish) about music; disdaining your own is one of them. As is pooh-poohing the efforts of allegedly less fertile pop musical cultures.
7. Don’t ignore the lyrics.
That means pointing out their infelicities as much as their wonders. As a lyricist himself, Robert treats the words with a seriousness that isn’t common among music critics.
8. Don’t give way to sentiment.
A great album doesn’t make the next great. A hero can develop feet of clay.
9. Don’t let yourself be bought, whatever the currency offered.
This is what damages music and music criticism most.
10. Surprise the reader, at least every now and again.
It’s the pieces about artists whose records you suspect the reviewer would not ordinarily have gone out of his or her way to listen to that are often most revealing, both about the critic and the artist. So, like Robert, challenge yourself, and your readership.
As we head into the time of year at which the Festive Fifty was unveiled, thoughts turn to our old Uncle John. Actually he’s never far from my thoughts – all sorts of associations trigger his memory. The thread of Peel’s influence is stitched throughout five decades of popular music’s development, after all. In all the emotion surrounding Terry Wogan’s semi-retirement this week – as far as I have heard or seen – no-one has thought to make the connection between two of the Corporation’s greatest broadcasters, especially in terms of the connection with listening publics. I imagine Terry spent a fair portion of time responding off-air to letters from listeners. John certainly did. The letter I received from him in about 1985 is a treasured possession. It’s the one I mention it in this piece, written shortly after his death in 2004.
The two groups whose contact details I was after were Sudden Sway and the Popticians. I was intending to interview them for my first fanzine. It never happened, because – possibly even before I received a reply from John – Creation Records had become the centre of my musical world. Having grown up in NHGs – National Health Glasses – I was a sucker for John Hegley’s poems and songs about spectacles and bullying. He would have been easy to interview. Heaven knows what I would have asked Sudden Sway, whose conceptual approach to music remains unique. I think I understood what they were up to, but I seriously doubt that at the time I could have elucidated it in the form of questions.
I never routinely voted for my three favourite tracks of the year, but here’s one I do remember voting for in 1985, alongside ‘What’s happening’ by the Jasmine Minks and a third now forgotten song. Big Flame’s ‘Debra’ remains a favourite, its conjunction of world and personal politics, wild abandon, tight structure and lo-fi hiss rarely if ever surpassed. Of course as a flipside it failed to make the Festive Fifty, though the lead song from the Rigour EP, ‘Man of few syllables’ was an unbroadcasted number 62 and the group’s subsequent A side ‘All the Irish (must go to heaven)’ pushed to 58. Minority tastes even then.
Robin has gone into overdrive on his new blog, Include me out. It’s great to be able to read his writing again and catch up on what he’s thinking. As well as highly refined and more than occasionally provocative takes on music and film, he’s been posting all sorts of imagery, including some much loved covers from his book collection. This and our recent Fire Raisers escapade have prompted me to post one of my favourite covers:
More than a little ragged round the edges – it was a 1980s Holloway Road second-hand bookshop find – but William Belcher’s design is very possibly one of the earliest examples (1964) of a book or magazine with two front covers and right-way round and upside down text meeting in the middle. I’m sure there’s a technical term for that in graphic design.
Dust falls on Eugene Schlumburger / Toddler on the run was Shena Mackay’s first book, published when she was just nineteen. It’s far from the vivid, synaesthetic grace of her best work, but it contains flashes of the brilliance that was to come:
Abigail broke loose from the encircling arms and began sliding and spiralling down the hill until all Eugene could see in the moonlight was her red hair spinning into the white eternity. He started to run but his legs were heavy with cold and snowflakes melted in his eyes blinding him. He ran, heavy and lost, his hard feet pounding the slithering ground. Then he tripped on a lump of ice and fell, hitting his face on the kerb. The sky flashed round his head and he lay there for a minute, his cut face bleeding into the snow, and desolation in his heart feeling he had lost her forever. He raised his weak legs and tried to walk, but his steps degenerated into a slide. As he cruised unsteadily round the corner, he saw himself as she would in a second – ‘I am a man of thirty sliding in the snow with blood on my face.’
She stood at the bus stop, her hair spiked with snowflakes, waiting for him. She wiped his face with her hair because she had no handkerchief. As the bus drew away a street lamp lit the face of a battered mole.
You won’t be surprised to hear that it ends badly for Eugene.
Ooh la la – Davy Henderson’s latest troupe – The Sexual Objects – come on like a surprisingly unsurprising composite of the Fire Engines, Win and the Nectarine No. 9, with the edges rounded off, the surfaces slick with lubricant. The whole doubles as a homage to Thin White Duke Station to station-era Bowie, with dabs of the glam that came before; it’s easy to assume that as for so many of his generation, the first alien pop star’s arrival on planet Earth was the young Davy’s wake-up call. And now I see it – the song ‘Win’ on Young Americans.
If the Sexual Objects really are recording an LP with the Boards of Canada as is reported here, then that I’ve got to hear. Absent since 2006 and the successive disappointments of The campfire headphase and the Trans Canada Highway EP), I hope that in passing some of Davy’s undiminished energy rubs off on the Boards boys and gets them back in action in their own right.
There are two presents I would like for Christmas. The first is a McLennan Monkees t-shirt. The second is a copy of Robert Forster’s book, The 10 rules of rock and roll, which collects together the music criticism previously discussed here. There’s a new piece in the book called ‘The 10 rules’. That I can’t wait to read – the 10 rules in the opinion of the man who wrote ‘Rock’n’roll friend’.
In other Go-Betweens news, brought to us by the ever dependable Go-Betweens.net, the group are having a bridge named after them in their home town of Brisbane. It’s called the Go Between Bridge. Not the Go-Betweens Bridge plural, but Go Between singular. More of a referencing bridge than one named explicitly after them, I suppose.
This post is also an excuse to post the cover of one of my most cherished CDs. The Go-Betweens, Robert Foster, Grant Mc Lennan & me was given away as a cover-mount CD with French music magazine Les Inrockuptibles in 1991, and comprises six songs by the group, and three each from Grant and Robert’s first solo LPs. It doesn’t have anything a Go-Betweens nut wouldn’t have these days but at the time the remixed, alternate version of ‘Head full of steam’ was notable for the extra lines that Robert sings: ‘Steam may rise, steam may dare / Can I come to your place, and can I wash your hair?’
And it would be a dereliction of duty not to point you in the direction of a later Go-Betweens CD for Les Inrocks, which gave the French-speaking world a chance to hear acoustic demos for 16 Lovers Lane. These didn’t make it onto the enhanced version of the album released by Lo-Max Records in 2004, so I’m guessing that if you’re a fan, you’ll want to head down under and visit our friends at That striped sunlight sound.
Just about living up to my promise of spending more time in the 21st century, here’s an edited version of my review of the Go-Betweens’ The friends of Rachel Worth, which mysteriously disappeared from the Tangents archive (probably during one of Alistair’s well-documented technological meltdowns). It was one of our three-way jobs, but the other two have also sadly fallen down a virtual crack as well.
NB I actually quite like Sleater-Kinney these days.
Before hearing The friends of Rachel Worth, I confidently predicted to a friend that Sleater-Kinney’s involvement would not have a detrimental effect on the album. He raised a large eyebrow, the very soul of scepticism. Never to my knowledge having heard Sleater-Kinney, it was a rash thing to say, but showed at least my faith in Robert and Grant’s judgement. On the first few listens, I was ready to concede that he was right. It seemed that just about any of the musicians Robert and Grant have worked with since the group raised a headstone to themselves in 1990 would have helped create an album more characteristic of the Go-Betweens. I thought that the reminders of Pavement – or does it all go back to Sonic Youth? – in what I take to be Sleater-Kinney-influenced elements of the sound was unfortunate. I don’t mind Pavement, you understand, I just didn’t want to hear echoes of them on a Go-Betweens record. It makes for jarring images in a familiar landscape; maples among the eucalypts.
In any case, it’s not a comeback, because they never really went away. Each have turned in fine solo efforts since 1990. I’m particularly fond of Robert’s Warm nights, with its aura of straight roads, motels and diners. This is a reunification, a resurrection of an identity Grant and Robert have carried with them throughout their solo years. Here are two well-travelled musicians, with influences from across the Western world, who have forged their own sound in records made on three continents. By fourth or fifth listen, the jarring images have faded into the background, and the opening twangs of ‘Magic in here’ start to resemble nothing so much as the Go-Betweens themselves. Further in, there are echoes of the Able Label singles, and of Before Hollywood rock’n’roll toughness, and perhaps that’s what the well-intentioned young American helpers were encouraged to evoke. Having been bowled over by their performances as a duo last year, I was hoping that Grant and Robert would use this chance to go or stay acoustic. But the temptation of being a band again must have been too strong, and since this is an album which is as at ease with itself as 16 Lovers Lane, I can’t complain.
I read that they were drama students. I never knew that, although Robert’s desperate pelvic banging of the podium on which Lindy Morrison sat drumming during a rendition of ‘Draining the pool for you’ at the Astoria in 1986 told you all you needed to know on that score. It shows in Grant’s approach too, comparatively and characteristically understated as ever. His knack for storytelling and his understanding of the weight a small detail can carry is that of a dramatic poet.
Both offer songs which could easily have been written when they were starting out. A goofy optimism combines with typical dryness on Robert’s ‘Surfing magazines’, as ephemeral as its title suggests, while Grant’s ‘Going blind’ is effortlessly pop, alarmingly sing-along. More often than not, the prevailing wind is the familiar one, the heartfelt reflection on loss and the past that also permeates the novel from which they take their name. ‘Orpheus Beach’, for example, immediately joins the ranks of bruised McLennan classics, with its yearning chorus and brooding verse.
The best Go-Betweens albums have stood the test of time as well as any made in the 1980s. Through the nineties, the memory of the majority of their peers faded while Grant and Robert’s music continued to remind us what evocative, pin-sharp song writing there could be, if only good hearts were married to individual minds. The friends of Rachel Worth has ten gems of the Forster-McLennan variety, songs I expect to find endlessly fascinating, with an edge that once again ensures the Go-Betweens dip their collective chest to win at the line.
Our journey into our magazine-publishing past concludes with The fire triangle, which is now live over at Alistair’s Unpopular. Incendiary comments positively welcomed!
The three printed issues of Fire Raisers can be downloaded in PDF format there or here:
In case you’re coming to the conversation late, here are the previous parts:
Backed with A wild slim alien
