Unauthorised item in the bagging area

Wednesday, 31 August 2011

Juan More For August


Summer looks like it's packed it's bag and gone south for the winter and it's the 31st August which always seems like the cut off point, so for no particular reason let's have some four to the floor Detroit techno action. This is Model 500, Juan Atkins by another name, and a track that can lay a claim to have invented modern machine music. Phased synths, bass, those snares, the sinister and robotic vocal. And let's not forget this record was released in 1985.

A man called 'John' has phoned on the landline while I'm writing this post, claiming he is from Windows. He says my computer is sending lots of error messages to the server and that I have downloaded many files which may corrupt my hard-drive. He says if I just switch on my computer he can talk me through the solutions. Does anyone really fall for this kind of thing?

You Ain't Never Caught A Rabbit


...because as H pointed out when we were camping last week, Lieber and Stoller's Hound Dog just makes more sense when it's sung by Big Mama Thornton.

Tuesday, 30 August 2011

Get A Move On


Mr Scruff is a modern day Manchester legend. Stand in a record shop with an M postcode the morning after one of his djing nights and hear middle aged men with beards and trainers cooing over obscure 80s funk B-sides that they don't know the name of, blowing their cheeks out appreciatively (and enviously). His 1999 album Keep It Unreal is a treasure trove of low key funkiness. Get A Move On starts with some ragtime jazz and when the drums comes in gets very funky indeed. Nice vocal sample too. Mr Scruff also has a very nice tea shop, highly recommended if you're ever in the Northern Quarter. As is this song.

Plonk


I don't go much for mid-70s rock but for top mod Ronnie Lane I can make an exception. After The Small Faces split up, the remainder of the band hooked up with Rod Stewart and Ronnie Wood to make the beery, blokey rock that eventually sent Rod Stewart to superstardom. I'm no expert on The Faces to be honest. Ronnie Lane wrote songs throughout and when Stewart left he continued with a solo career and various bands (Ronnie Lane's Slim Chance for one). Ronnie was described by many as a fine songwriter and musician and a top chap to boot. He died from Multiple Sclerosis in 1997, after living with it for twenty years. This is a Faces song, Ooh La La, performed at the BBC by a line up of Slim Chance. It's very mid-70s- rough hewn, good times, having a lock-in music with all in it together vocals, acoustic guitars and accordians and woody drums, coming across like a band of highly trained buskers playing good songs in the snug bar.

Monday, 29 August 2011

People They Don't Understand


Watching the Reading festival on the tv on Saturday night I realised that the headliners line-up was exactly the same as several years ago. Back in the early/mid 00s Mrs Swiss and I got into the Saturday night of the Leeds leg of the festival at around tea time. Some old friends of Mrs Swiss ran a baked potato stall and we got in as baked potato sellers, not that we stuck around to sell many spuds. We saw the last part of Janes' Addiction, then Pulp and then The Strokes. Janes were noisy, playing a set of new stuff. Pulp were excellent. The Strokes were hampered by Julian Casablancas having his leg in plaster and by the rain. Most of the crowd seemed to be there to see them though and they were pretty good, if strangely uncharismatic. Since then they've lost their way- duff follow up albums, interband strife, people and scenes moving on- but they single handedly popularised skinny jeans for men (cheers Strokes) and got guitar bands going again (not entirely a good thing, but we can't hold them personally responsible for some of the chaff that came in their wake). Despite it all, this song, from their 2001 debut Is This It, remains a cracking tune.

I Only Went With Her Cos She Looks Like You


I saw the reformed Pulp playing Reading on Saturday night (on the telly I mean. I wasn't actually there). They looked in fine form, with Jarvis more the raconteur between songs than ever, a hits heavy set and Richard Hawley joining them towards the end. So here's one of their best moments, Babies, with Jarvis hiding in the wardrobe to spy on his friend's sister who was 'two years older and had boys in her room'.

Sunday, 28 August 2011

It Came From Outer Space


Camping companero H tipped me off about this one which I completely missed last year. Jon Spencer (who has featured here before with his Blues Explosion and with his Heavy Trash) also has an on-off side project (Boss Hog) with his wife, Cristina Martinez (that's her up above). I've got an album of theirs which I haven't played for years but may go back to. Last year they teamed up with Solex to make an album called Amsterdam Throwdown and this was the freebie mp3 to promote it- Galaxy Man. Super funky, sexy, blues with modern beats, filtered through 1950s science fiction movies. It's as good as that sounds.

Walking Through the Suburbs, We're Not Exactly Lovers


Yesterday's trip hop heroes Portishead remix Massive Attack's Karmacoma, also from 1994, turning it all spacey and spooky. Or even more spacier and spookier. Portishead also stick a great big phased Hendrix style guitar solo in the middle, for no particular reason other than it sounds good. I suppose it explains why they called the remix Portishead Experience. It's a very good example of the art of the remix.

The lyrical refrain goes 'karmacoma, Jamaica aroma', misheard for years round our way as 'karmacoma, d'you make her in Roma? Duh.

Saturday, 27 August 2011

I Brought 'Em All


..or something very like that, goes the sample at the start of this- Portishead's own remix of their defining moment Sour Times. The vocal sample and scratching gave Sour Times a hip-hop makeover for the B-side of the 12", from 1994. Good stuff from seventeen (!) years ago.

Camping in Sherwood Forest, no sign of Robin.

Thursday- sunny.
Friday- rained all day.
Saturday- sunny.

Didn't quite manage to empty the five litre plastic barrel of red we brought back from France either, despite mine and H's best efforts. Still, a good but soggy time had by all.

Friday, 26 August 2011

The Return Of Friday Night Is Rockabilly Night 24


It's Friday night. I am somewhere in a field in Nottinghamshire. I may be wet. But that shouldn't stop us having our rockabilly action. Rock Billy Boogie by Johnny Burnette's Rock and Roll Trio is one of the building blocks of modern music. I don't know who the cool couple in the photo are but if either of you are reading, pop in and say hello.

More wine please, it may be a long night.

Thursday, 25 August 2011

Second Hand


I've been listening to the first volume of the Cafe Del Mar series recently, the compilations that dubiously invented 'chill'. I don't like the concept or genre of 'chill'. And it became an adman's wet dream. But Cafe Del Mar Volume 1 is really good, with Sabres of Paradise, Penguin Cafe Orchestra, A Man Called Adam, Leftfield, Underworld and others. The only other Cafe Del Mar comp I got was volume 2, then I abandoned the series in a fit of anti-chill, anti-populist pique. My loss probably. Tucked away on the third side of vinyl (or track 8 on the cd) is Second Hand by Underworld. Second Hand is a re-working of a track from Dark And Long. It is still long (9 minutes plus), pretty dark, but subtle and very hypnotic, head music and dance music, all minimal squiggles and ticks and swooshes. Then the drums come in at around the half way point and we're off...

Wednesday, 24 August 2011

Lazy


Following Moon Duo's Mazes album, one of Bagging Area's albums of this year, comes a new album from Wooden Shjips. San Francisco's premier garage/drone/kraut/beard band have released several albums or collections of two chord, organ and guitar freakery. New album West promises much of the same but with a less dense sound and more clarity. Whether this comes from ex-Spaceman 3 Sonic Boom working on the mixing I don't know- he did provide several good remixes of Moon Duo earlier this year. This is Lazy Bones, freebie taster for West.

Tuesday, 23 August 2011

Why Do You Try To Cheat?


I'm trying to keep summer going despite the weather forecast and an imminent camping trip with this blast of ska from 1966. The Rulers warn us about cheats and liars and people who trample others under their feet, while rocking up a storm with some heavy piano. Wrong 'Em Boyo was covered by The Clash, almost note for note, on London Calling.

Tubby And Rodigan


This is David Rodigan, a reggae dj for various London radio stations since the 1970s. Not that I can tune in, up here in the northern wastelands. But help is at hand in the form of this new compilation David Rodigan's Dubwise Shower. It's chock full of quality Jamaican dub and is well worth a tenner of your disposable income, featuring lots of King Tubby, some Augustus Pablo, a clutch of Sly and Robbie and many more (as they say on the ads). The selection here is King Tubby, with some horns, some delay and some bass. Very cool dub.

Monday, 22 August 2011

Monday Voodoo


A Guy Called Gerald's 1988 hit Voodoo Ray sounds like it came from another planet. It came from Hulme, which in the mid-to-late 80s was a kind of other planet. Space bass, odd plinks and plonks, voodoo vocal, completely timeless, totally unique.

Sunday, 21 August 2011

Quatre Hero


It's Sunday evening and here's 4hero's 2001 cover version of Minnie Riperton's Les Fleur, which came to prominence for many people via a Baileys advert or more bizarrely an episode of Top Gear (the sublime soundtracking the ridiculous). 4hero veered from techno to drum and bass before finding a jazzier, breakbeat, Talkin' Loud sound. This cover version features stunning vocals from Carina Anderson, sticks pretty close to the original, and presses the button labelled 'epic'.

Sunday Orb


Minnie Riperton's voice features heavily on this record too, so heavily she got a writing credit for the liberal use of her very well known, multi-octave Lovin' You. The Orb's A Huge Evergrowing Pulsating Brain That Rules From The Centre Of The Ultraworld is a definitive slice of 1990 ambient dance dub, and to these ears The Orb's stuff from this point sounds better and better as each year passes. Someone once wrote that this type of music at this time had a huge sense of possibility, that in the studio (often a bedroom) and on vinyl anything was now possible. As the dance scene fractured and split and people ploughed their own furroughs in the years afterwards that sense of possibility receded a bit. Written and recorded with The KLF's Jimmy Cauty at Transcentral, this is eight and a bit minutes of open minded, open ended brilliance.

Saturday, 20 August 2011

The Flower


I've got nothing much to say about Minnie Riperton's Les Fleur, other than that it is a completely perfect piece of cosmic-soul-pop. It's utterly lovely.

Punk Slime


Atlanta, Georgia's Black Lips have been making garage punk records for the last decade, and performing chaotic live shows. They got deported from India for 'homosexual behaviour' and more shockingly have just released an album produced by Mark Ronson. From their 2005 album Let It Bloom, this is the self explanatory Punk Slime.

Friday, 19 August 2011

The Return Of Friday Night Is Rockabilly Night 23


The rockabilly's back- this week the amazingly named Jackie Morningstar and Rockin' In The Graveyard from way back in 1959. Inevitably this song was covered by The Cramps. Have a good weekend rockabilly lovers...

Watch Him Dance


Roots Manuva is back with a new album. This is a freebie in advance of it- Watch Me Dance. It's a real summer groover, dark and funky. I love it. You can't knock a man who rhymes Boulogne with groin. Written with Sheffield's Toddla T a version of it appears on Toddla's album too, which is worth looking out for. The killer is the Weatherall remix which I pointed you towards on Soundcloud a few weeks ago and which you should have ordered from Ninja Tune already.

Thursday, 18 August 2011

A Good Day


Dirk read this morning's Lily Allen post and commented that he hoped Lily and Mick Jones' cover of Straight To Hell was still up. It wasn't but I'm having a good day so it is now. A Level results have been good and I've just opened a letter that says I successfully overturned a parking ticket from UK Parking Control that was looking like it was going to cost us 90 quid. Victory is mine!

*punches air, high fives wife, does little dance*.

Blank Expression


As a part two to the Amy Winehouse ska covers e.p. Lily Allen did a similar thing releasing a Two Tone inspired single (on vinyl obviously). The A-side was a cover of The Specials debut Gangsters (recorded with Terry Hall and Lynval Golding) and this was the B-side, a cover of Blank Expression. It's a corker.

I didn't expect when I started Bagging Area that Lily Allen would get three posts. Equally, when checking the statistics for the blog I've long been puzzled why the Lily Allen and Mick Jones cover of Straight To Hell is the most visited, most read post here, many thousand ahead of the next most read post. Then I realised it's probably because of the picture I used. Amazing what a bit of cheek will do isn't it?

Wednesday, 17 August 2011

If They Move...


From the 12" single of Primal Scream's If They Move, Kill 'Em this is the 12" Disco Mix, a lengthy mixture of funky drums, noise, guitars, other noises, and that Wild Bunch sample. I don't know what disco this would be played in though.

In a magazine interview recently Mary Ann Hobbs referred to a Weatherall remix of this song, released for one day only. I can't find any other reference to such a remix. Anyone?

Tuesday, 16 August 2011

Dad's In The Navy So Use A Granny Knot


Liverpool's Shack have had an up-and-down kind of existence with albums being raved over by the critics but largely ignored by the record buying public. At one point in the 90s the NME called Michael Head 'Britain's greatest living songwriter' or something similar. Some of their albums have a kind of mythical status (Waterpistol for one). This song is from 2006's The Corner Of Miles And Gil lp, and as a single peaked at number 114 in the charts. It's a brilliant little song, lovely melody, sweetly sung, wonderful horns and catchy as anything. About bondage.

More Monkey Man


Following the previous post here's another song called Monkey Man, this one written by Toots Hibbert of Toots and The Maytals though rather than Jagger/Richards, and sung by the recently departed Amy Winehouse. She released an e.p. of ska covers several years ago, songs that had been covered by The Specials, with whom she sang live a few times.

Monday, 15 August 2011

Keef


While on holiday I read Keith Richards' autobiography Life. I'd stayed away from it for ages- it seemed like such a middle aged, music Dad thing to read, but then saw it cheap and thought it might make a good holiday read. Which it did. The first three quarters are highly entertaining, despite Keith's sometimes questionable attitudes towards women, or at least his terminology. His recollections of Dartford in the fifties are almost proper social history and the story of the Stones through the sixties is gripping- their desire to be a genuine blues band and not a pop group, writing Satisfaction, touring, the Redlands drug bust, Altamont, Brian Jones, Anita Pallenberg, exile in France and beyond. His several pages explaining the five string open G tuning are brilliant. Really. It's funny how quickly the cream of the London sixties pop glitterati began mixing with the upper classes slumming it and the eurotrash (Prince so-and-so of such-a-place, Lord this-and-that). Some people barely feature- Bill Wyman for example hardly gets a mention, apart from when he joins, and that's only because he had an amplifier. His description of his heroin addiction through the seventies and repeated attempts to clean up seem honest. I don't know how much you can take at face value- he claims never to have thought about what to wear, which can't be true, seeing as there isn't a shabby picture of him before the mid-seventies (see above). There's a lot of brogaddacio, pirate/outlaw lifestyle justification, tales of rockstar hissy fits and minor acts of violence, and many pops at Mick Jagger, although he does give Mick his dues as well. The last quarter gets a bit tedious but all in all it's a good read, much better than it could've been. This is Monkey Man, a rocking, groovy,adrenaline fuelled, junkie rock song from 1969's Let It Bleed.

More Audrey


Last year Bagging Area's patron saint Andrew Weatherall remixed Danish electronica wizard Trentemoller's Silver Surfer, Ghost Rider, Go! single, turning it into a supercharged glam rock stomp. He also provided a second remix, the Sky 81 Mix, a dreamier version, more echo and more submerged. I listened to an internet interview with Weatherall a month or so ago where he said this second remix had never been released. But, look, here it is...

Sunday, 14 August 2011

Tres Chic


Reggae cover version of Chic's I Want Your Love for Sunday anyone? Recorded at Sir Coxsone Dodd's Studio One by Norma White and house band the Brentford Disco Set. The 12" had a dub on the B-side.

Saturday, 13 August 2011

Song Of The Summer. Maybe.


I've missed this song during the last two weeks. It came up on Soundcloud just before going to France, and I don't have a download of it to listen to in the car (cos, like, that's illegal), and I tried to completely ignore the internet while away (fairly easy actually, personally and connection-wise) but I'd been listening to it a lot before going away. Our aging mod hero, grumpy fella, clothes horse and newly found musical chameleon Paul Weller revisits the least popular sound of his career (late period Style Council), marries it with some blissed out Balearic vibes, and comes up with a standalone single, Starlite, released on 12" vinyl later on this month (I think it's already out on iTunes). It's more summery than owt and totally wonderful. Give it a listen-


And if you're up for that then get over here too-


...where you can download a cracking remix of Starlite by Drop Out Orchestra. Weller at the disco. I'll type that again. Weller at the disco. There's also a remix you can download by Deadboy on Soundcloud. I'm sure you can find that yourselves. Style Council, Balearica, remixes, disco- I remember when it were all dadrock round here...

Hello?


Hello? Anyone there?

What are you lot like? I leave the country for two weeks and there's full scale civil insurrection. Not that we heard anything about it in the middle of rural France until things were several days old. This photo apparently shows Manchester city centre. Jesus. I've read that after destroying Salford Precinct and the Arndale Centre heavy rain kept people off the streets the following night. Typical Manchester. I'm still playing catch up with all of this.

France was chuffing great since you're asking. Beautiful landscape, lovely towns and villages, fantastic weather, friendly people, cheap wine, lakes, swimming pools, no medical disasters with I.T., ... wish we'd never had to come home.

This is a very chilled out dub version of White Riot by Dub Antenna, from the shatter the Hotel dub reggae tribute to The Clash which many people liked when I posted Don Lett's cover of London Calling several months back.