Love your enemies . . . a clock with a big face

Weekly Bulletin of The Socialist Party of Great Britain (97)

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the 97th of our weekly bulletins to keep you informed of changes at Socialist Party of Great Britain @ MySpace.

We now have 1484 friends!

Recent blogs:

Greatness - perceived and real

Crassness

Beggar's belief

Advanced notice:

The Socialist Party of Great Britain holds its annual Summer School 26 - 28 June 2009 at Harbourne Hall, Birmingham. Members and friends from across Britain and beyond will gather to exchange ideas and experiences in all aspects of socialist activity and thought. The theme this year is "Revolution: The Theories, The Past, The Future".

Quote for the week:

"If a working class Englishman saw a bloke drive past in a Rolls-Royce, he'd say to himself "Come the social revolution and we'll take that away from you, mate". Whereas if his American counterpart saw a bloke drive past in a Cadillac he'd say "One day I'm going to own one of those". To my way of thinking the first attitude is wrong. The latter is right." Kerry Packer, Australian billionaire.

Continuing luck with your MySpace adventures!

Robert and Piers

Socialist Party of Great Britain

Macro Micro

Sub-editor's Note

Should have been posted yesterday, but I was sidetracked.

Some more links relating to Microdisney:

Andrew Mueller's sleeve notes to the Microdisney's compilation album, 'Daunt Square To Elsewhere'. (No, I hadn't heard of it either.)

Being a proper journo-type, Mueller has the skewed compare and contrast off-pat:

. . . " a decent approximation of what might have resulted had Jonathan Swift ever joined The Beach Boys, Bertholt Brecht co-written with Steely Dan, Ambrose Bierce displaced Hal David by the piano of Burt Bacharach."

Pisses all over my "Walter Becker on a lost weekend" quip.

Over at Julian Cope's website, Head Heritage, somebody going by the nome de plume of 'Valve' has done a track by track retrospective review of 'Crooked Mile' (For half a minute, I thought it was Copey who had done the review. I'm a tad disappointed that it wasn't him.)

The 'Valve' blokewas a fan from the start, and draws an early musical comparison with Band of Holy Joy and the Young Marble Giants. Not two bands I know a lot about.

Valve throws a barb Phil Daniels way - "“See you then” I shout after him (meaning: “They’d be wasted on you yer talentless mockney twat. . . actually I quite liked you in Quadrophenia”)." - which is unworthy, if only for Mike Leigh's 'Meantime', but he redeems himself by being on the same page as myself with the view that the final track on 'Crooked Mile', 'People Just Want To Dream', is the bona fide classic track on the album. I loved that track so much that I put it on the 'The Secret Melody of the Class Struggle' mixed CD. There's no greater compliment in my mixing pop and politics book.

The other snippet from the review that has to be mentioned on the blog is the quote from Roddy Doyle's 'The Commitments' that opens the piece:

"“—We’ll ask Jimmy, said Outspan.—Jimmy’ll know.

Jimmy Rabbitte knew his music. He knew his stuff alright. You’d never see Jimmy coming home from town without a new album or a 12-inch or at least a 7-inch single. Jimmy ate Melody Maker and the NME every week and Hot Press every two weeks. He listened to Dave Fanning and John Peel. He even read his sisters’ Jackie when there was no one looking. So Jimmy knew his stuff.

The last time Outspan had flicked through Jimmy’s records he’d seen names like Microdisney, Eddie and the Hot Rods, Otis Redding, The Screaming Blue Messiahs, Scraping Foetus off the Wheel (—Foetus, said Outspan. —That’s the little young fella inside the woman, isn’t it?

—Yeah, said Jimmy.”

—Aah, that’s fuckin’ horrible, tha’ is.)"

First Lenny Kaye, and now Roddy Doyle's 'Barrytown Trilogy'? What else does Kara want before she finally embraces Microdisney?

Some random Microdisney (and post-Microdisney) links:

Excellent Microdisney fansite

Microdisney page in The Irish Punk & New Wave Discography

Microdisney MySpace Page

Fatima Mansions MySpace Page

The High Llamas MySpace Page

And, feck it, some samples of Microdisney at their best.

Best track off of Everybody is Fantastic:

'Come On Over And Cry' mp3

Best track off of The Clock Comes Down The Stairs:

'And' mp3

The best track off of the Crooked Mile:

'People Just Want To Dream' mp3

Best non-album track. B-side to 'Singer's Hampstead Home'

'She Only Gave In To Her Anger' mp3

And He Descended Into Muso Hell

Naturally somebody mentioning Microdisney means that I immediately have to wrap my lugs around some of their music.

I've been listening to 'The Clock Comes Down The Stairs' in recent weeks but as it was 'The Crooked Mile' that first got me into the band - was it seeing the 'Town To Town' video on The Tube that caught my eye? - I thought I'd check it out again. It really does stand the test of time, and I remember how I went through the album on cassette (twice). That's an indication of how much I listened to it at the time.

That was part of the problem with cassettes: their tendency to chew up on you at the most inopportune moments. I seem to remember the same happening with Orange Juice's 'In A Nutshell' cassette and a Cure best of.

Of course, the other problem with cassettes was the lack of information on the box. It' wasn't like a piece of vinyl where you would pore over the album sleeve notes whilst listening to the album or nowadays with a wiki or discog page for every conceivable album at your finger tips.. With a cassette, you'd be lucky to get a picture of the band and the tracklisting.

That's why I'm a bit embarrassed to finally discover 21 years after the fact that Lenny Kaye produced the 'Crooked Mile'. How was I to know that the bloke whose been Patti Smith's closest musical collaborator for nigh on 30 years and the guy who helped put together the Nuggets compilation was twiddling the knobs on the album? If I'd been asked to hazard a guess on who was the producer of the album, only working on the clue that it was a major American musician from the seventies, I would have guessed that the album was produced by Walter Becker during a lost weekend.

21 years too late but, with the new information to hand, Kara might look kindly on Microdisney from now on.

"I found New Wave, and so I was saved"

Ctelblog over at Vinyl Villain has a post on Microdisney, who just happened to record my favourite album of 1987, The Crooked Mile. What more is there to say or write? Except . . .

1) I really should read a post in full before firing off comments (see said post). It's a bad habit that always come back to bite me on the arse. 2) What is it about the city like Cork that produces Roy Keane, Cathal Coughlan and Danny La Rue?