Sabresonic At Thirty

Big news announcement! Sit down, hold tight. Sabres Of Paradise, the early 90s dub techno trio of Andrew Weatherall, Jagz Kooner and Gary Burns, released their album Sabresonic thirty years ago (the exact release date is a matter of some debate but we're settling on 11th September 1993).

Over at The Flightpath Estate, the Andrew Weatherall Facebook group we set up nine years ago, the admin team (Martin, Dan, Mark, Baz and me) have had some discussions about things that have seemed ridiculous to us and have then actually started to take shape and happen. One of these is under wraps for the moment but the other is taking place three weeks today. Martin had the idea of holding a Sabresonic 30th birthday listening party at The Golden Lion in Todmorden and of inviting Jagz Kooner to do a Q&A session with him DJing after. We knocked it around a bit, a few calls were made and amazingly the Sabresonic 30th Anniversary party is happening at The Golden Lion on Friday 3rd  November. The event is free. Jagz is going to have a chat/ answer a few questions about Sabres of Paradise, the making of the album Sabresonic, working with Andrew, the Sabres remixes from the period and whatever else comes up, we'll listen to the music and open it up to the floor. The Q&A part of the evening is going to be hosted by someone new to the David Frost/ Graham Norton role (that would be me). Fingers crossed eh?

Back in 1994 Sabres remixed James and the results came out as a two track, half hour epic titled Jam J. On Andrew's residency at Kiss FM he played an early version/ remix of what became Jam J. This was never released but has been ripped from that Kiss FM broadcast, a Sabres remix of James' Honest Joe. It contains all sorts of signature Sabres sounds, the Weatherall/ Kooner/ Burns team working their magic with seven minutes of 1993 four- four dub techno, Mr Booth et al bent into all kind of new shapes (with a Kiss FM ident annoyingly appearing in the middle).  

Honest Joe (Unreleased Sabres Of Paradise Remix from Kiss FM Radio Mix)

November at The Golden Lion looks increasingly like the month of dreams. The night after the Sabresonic 30th party Red Snapper are playing. The following Friday David Holmes is DJing, a launchpad for his forthcoming album Blind On A Galloping Horse. On Sunday 19th November Manchester's Aficionado team of Jason Boardman and Moonboots host at 25th anniversary bash. That's just four of the highlights. David Holmes' recent single Necessary Genius was followed two weeks ago by a remix package, David and Raven Violet's song reworked by Skymas, Phil Keiran, Decius, Robin Wylie and Lovefingers. They've taken some time to worm their way into me but now all the different versions offer up something new and different. Lovefingers slows the song down, sticks a big, reverb heavy piano part into it and samples snippets of the people in David and Raven's list (a bit of Loaded, a brief snippet of Sinead, some Morricone). Decius do their Decius thing, chopping up a bit of vocal, raisng the tempo and making it very intense. Phil Kieran stretches the song out, bringing the synths to the fore and eventually hitting the button marked 'massive I Feel Love sequencer'. Find them all here. 

The Way I Feel

In the days immediately following Isaac's death we were overwhelmed with cards and flowers, so many that it became difficult to find space for them all in the front room. Among the hundreds of messages of love, condolences and support came a card from a friend with a quote from Raymond Carver on the front. It turns out that this little piece of poetry called Late Fragment is inscribed on Carver's gravestone.

The poem had a big impact on me when it arrived in December, in the early stages of grief while also organising Isaac's funeral and trying to pull together his eulogy. It hits me still reading it now. It's beautiful, saying so much in so few words. 

Raymond Carver wrote short stories, usually about the quiet and sometimes sad and lonely lives of ordinary American men and women. His writing tends to lean towards brevity, realism and reflection. I remember reading a book of his short stories in the late 80s, probably because I read a review of it when he died in 1988. I hadn't then thought of Raymond Carver's work until three summers ago when I read Dave Haslam's Sonic Youth Slept On My Floor and he mentioned Carver. I ordered a book of his short stories and read it while on holiday in France and found it a very different experience reading Carver and about the people in his stories in my late 40s compared to first reading them in my late teens. 

Yesterday while scrolling aimlessly through Twitter on my phone I was stopped in my tracks by a poem by Constantine Cavafy, written in 1904. Cavafy was Greek and wrote in Greek so are a few few slightly different translations but this one was the one I found and had a similar impact to Carver's all those week's ago. 

It doesn't go away, it's always there but sometimes I now find myself doing things- reading, writing for the blog, teaching, watching something on TV- where for a few minutes it has gone to the back of my mind, where it's not immediately present and causing a ball of pain in my chest and stomach. It crashes back in suddenly, hitting me anew. Sometimes it's triggered by something- a photo of him or being in a place where we used to go. Sometimes, like yesterday while out walking before it went dark, it was suddenly thinking about his hands, possibly because when we walked I'd hold his hand. Grief is a fucker, it sneaks up and crushes you and does it time and time again. Onward we go though, because there's nothing else to do, is there?

Today's music is more from James plus this blog's patron Andrew Weatherall. James moved to Rough Trade after leaving Sire and put out two singles that again should have been hits but weren't- Sit Down and Come Home. The latter was a November 1989 release, the Manchester scene well in the ascendancy, The Roses, Mondays and 808 State gatecrashing Top Of The Pops. Finally, leaving Rough Trade and washing up at Fontana, in June 1990 Come Home was re- released and made it through to radio and TV. According to Wiki it still only peaked at number 32- I thought it got much higher- but it slipped into indie disco and popular consciousness. It was remixed by Weatherall, a massive sounding summer of 90 indie- dance tune, a track that is all sirens and synths, a breakbeat and a huge bassline, a sample from Stutter, a lovely piano riff five minutes in, and that breathless Tim Booth refrain, 'and the way I feel just makes me want to scream/ come home/ come home/ come home'. 

Come Home (Skunk Weed Skank Mix)

On some releases the remix is labelled the Andy Weatherall Remix, on some the Skunk Weed Skank Mix. It seems they are the same mix. I think Skunk Weed Skank seems more likely to be what Andrew would have titled it. 

I Would Prefer To Be Anywhere Away From Here

James were an interesting group back in the mid- to- late 80s, when they were an eccentric indie- folk- pop group before becoming the arena filling band they became in the 90s. After leaving Factory (for whom they made some genuine Factory classics in 1985, the James II single and the Village Fire EP both featuring Hymn For A Village) they signed to Sire and in 1986 released Stutter, recorded on a small budget with Lenny Kaye in the producer's chair. Two years later they released Strip- Mine. Sire were looking for a hit single and became frustrated with the band. The album was pushed back by the label several times and went from a scheduled March 1987 release to September 1988. It's an album I remember buying in HMV in Liverpool, flushed with my newly arrived student grant. That didn't last long. The hoped for single which wasn't a hit was What For. It reached the dizzy heights of number 90 in the UK chart.

What For

It's a shame because What For is a cracking song but I can't really imagine in what world, especially 1988, anyone thought this was going to be top twenty material. It bounces in on jangly guitars and clipped rhythms, Tim Booth singing about the contrast between Manchester's traffic polluted air and the birds singing on a beautiful sunny day, his voice all clear enunciation and naive. The breakdown and chanted 'I would prefer to be anywhere away from here' part is a treat and then Larry Gott's highlife guitar outro speeds the song's way to its end, while Tim whistles the melody line. 

This version recorded live for Granada TV's Other Side Of Midnight is brilliant, spindly and frenetic,  almost on the verge of falling apart. At the end Tim starts to lose his jacket, whirling around, eventually falling over at the end. 

James left Sire after finding a loophole in their contract and went on to self finance One Man Clapping, a live album which closed with the song Stutter, a song dating from 1982 and which they could never get a studio take they were happy with- the One Man Clapping version has all the energy and spark needed.

Stutter

Really Hard

Yesterday's post showed both the limitations and advantages of blogging as a medium for writing. I wrote yesterday's piece about the rush of great guitar music in the 1988/89 years in response to a comment on Facebook from a friend. I'd thought about it a bit in advance- on the way to and from work mainly- and came home and wrote it in the evening, an hour's work probably. I proof read it and re-read it, did a bit of tinkering and then published it yesterday morning.

The limitations of blogging are that it's usually just one person, writing a fairly quick response. I didn't bounce it off anyone or discuss it. I didn't really research it, talk to others for their point of view, haven't got an editor to to make suggestions or propose alternatives. A more widely considered piece with the opinions and perspectives of others would be better, more reliable maybe, more thought through and joined up.

The advantages of blogging are that it gets some instant responses by people, in some cases hundreds of miles away and in different countries, who can throw in their perspectives straight away, in the comment box on the blog and by commenting on social media. It becomes a conversation (and therefore the original post is in some ways just the first draft. Kerouac said first thought is always best- he'd have loved social media wouldn't he, Tweeting his way back and forth across America). Going back and inserting new sections into the original post didn't seem like a good idea but adding a follow up post did so that's what is here today, the perspectives of others who chipped in to answer the question Aditya posed on Facebook on Tuesday- why was 1988/89 such a fruitful time? (I hope this isn't just a case of Blog Will Eat Itself).

My post is here but in summary I said that guitar bands flourished by the late 80s because of the gains made by punk and the ensuing construction of the independent scene (labels, distribution, outlook); John Peel; the weekly music press; post punk's spirit of experimentalism; cheap technology; the dole and full grants for higher education; a gap left by the split of The Smiths; the polarised and oppositional nature of culture and politics in the 1980s which led to a defiantly non- mainstream mindset.

Martin left a comment about the split of The Smiths and the vacuum they left behind in the music press and the way that for ages they, the NME especially, used to constantly label bands 'The new Smiths' (they did the same with the Sex Pistols too). James and Raymonde both got that particular kiss of death, and I've got a feeling it was associated with The House Of Love and The Wedding Present too. Being branded The new Smiths didn't do James any favours- it raised expectations they couldn't meet, they sounded nothing like The Smiths anyway and by 1988 they were without a deal, had left two record companies and had to persuade their bank manager to loan them the money to release a live album. One Man Clapping was recorded at Moles in Bath over two nights in November 1988 and came out on their own label. The bank manager agreed to lend them the money after attending a gig in Manchester and being blown away by both band and crowd.

Really Hard (Live)

For a Smiths related extra the photograph at the top is one of mine, taken recently at Stretford Mall (formerly Stretford Arndale), a shopping centre Morrissey must have spent some hours in. There's a second hand record stall called Reel Around The Fountain.

Mark Ratcliff left a long comment on Facebook in reply which adds masses to my original post-

'The dole in the 80s was like art school in the 60s and 70s...it enabled you to pursue an interest whilst still being able to put a roof over your head and food in your belly. But i think there was another factor at work, too. The early to mid 80s were a dour time and youth culture was quite dogmatic. The music press at that time was very powerful and dictated what the hipper end of mainstream youth culture was allowed to like...God forbid you own up to having a Zeppelin lp in your collection of agit prop, post punk and proper soul. I left the UK to go to uni in the States at the time of the miners strike and everything in the culture felt either shrill and dictatorial, or incredibly earnest, obsessed with authenticity. Plus politics was horrible - there was no light at the end of the tunnel. A trip to a London club in 1984 or 1985 was terrifying if you didn't look the part. I remember coming back from New Orleans for a summer break and going to clubs with my sister, where everyone felt hyper conscious about what they looked like, or what kind of music they were allowed to enthuse over. But by the end of 86 and early 87, when i came back, i felt a change in the air - i think people felt that Thatcher was no longer quite as omnipotent and there was a loosening up of all those stifling musical strictures that had made it very hard to be completely honest about what you liked. The music press lost some of its authority around that time. People had got bored with being serious and po- faced. I remember going to Wendy May's Locomotion club at the Town and Country in late 86 and very early 87 and the sense of fun in the club was liberating. There was no E around, very few people had even heard about it and there was no house music being played but the mix of northern soul, a bit of Motown, some hip hop and the occasional dance inflected indie anthem from a band like That Petrol Emotion (Big Decision!) felt liberating after all the mid 80's London club bullshit. When E and acid house hit town in early 88 all the faces i used to see at The Locomotion pitched up at Land Of Oz and Spectrum - they were ready for it because they were chomping at the bit for something different, having had a taste of it already. In effect they had been primed for it. I also have some theories about why guitar music had a resurgence then, too but this is already the longest fb post i have ever written and is in danger of becoming a rant. '

Feel free to drop those theories you refer to at the end off whenever you're ready Mark.

Michael agreed with Mark about That Petrol Emotion, a band who embraced new technology (sampling) and the sense of possibilities that was in the air as well as guitars plus a large dose of politics. Big Decision was a massive song at the indie disco/alternative night.

Big Decision

Michael sees '88/89 as 'an incredibly liminal period where barriers between music started to drop... people became less precious or scared about shouting their influences, people rifling through their parent's record collections for great tracks or sounds for samples'. The barriers dropping definitely seems to be important in the Manchester guitar bands. The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays with one foot in the 60s and one at a club and the music they made being two different sweet spots in between.

The barriers were coming down all over in '88/89- not least physical barriers in Berlin- and the pick 'n' mix approach to making records resulted in several great singles that broke new ground and sold in vast quantities- Pump Up The Volume, Beat Dis and Theme From S' Express for three. Maybe liminal, transitional periods are much more interesting than periods where things are finished and fixed. That seems to be as a good a theory as any.

Beat Dis (Extended Dis)

Aciiieeed

I'm on an acid house tip right now. These two pictures go some way towards proving the maxim that it was a scene where the crowd were the stars. The one above of party goers at The Hacienda, indie kids losing it, is a favourite.

I had navy blue James Come t-shirt back in the day. It was really good quality, kept its shape and colour really well. It also provided opportunities for wags to point out that I had come all over my chest etc.

This picture (below) from the legendary Shoom is a cracker too- shame about the watermark, I couldn't find a version without it. The clothes, bandannas, the look on the faces, the wide eyes...

Shoom was held in a leisure centre in Southwark, a wonky version of what Danny Rampling and others had experienced in Ibiza the previous summer. Danny Rampling has recently uploaded this two hour acid house mix. Not entirely nostalgia either, being a mix of acid house old and new. It will rock your house. It has been rocking mine.

Sunday Jam

If Friday night was about Weatherall's Disco Deviant dancefloor mix then Sunday morning is the time for the most recent edition of Music's Not For Everyone, covering all the bases and all the basses from rockabilly to psychedelia to electronica and beyond. Listen to it here.

Someone reminded me yesterday of Jam J, a 12" single from 1994 where an already experimental studio jam session with James and producer Brian Eno was then further reworked by Sabres of Paradise into a thirty three minute outer space/inner space dub with echo and all kinds of tinkering. The record was in four parts, labelled A1. Arena Dub A2. Amphetamine Pulsate B1. Sabresonic Tremolo Dub B2. Spaghetti Steamhammer. This is all four parts, both sides in one handy mp3.

Jam J (James vs Sabres of Paradise)

Johnny Yen

Johnny Yen is the main character in Iggy Pop's Lust For Life- 'here comes Johnny Yen again, with the liquor and drugs and the flesh machine, he's gonna do another striptease' is the song's opening line, before beating our brains and Johnny's with a pulverising Motown drumbeat and David Bowie's beefed up ukulele riff. Iggy borrowed Johnny Yen from a William Burroughs novel- The Ticket That Exploded- where Johnny Yen is described as 'the boy-girl other half striptease God of sexual frustration'. He is also known for hypnotising chickens. Iggy's Johnny Yen is a self-destructive hedonist and therefore is partly/mainly Iggy himself.

Johnny Yen reappears in the James song of the same name, on Stutter in 1986. For Tim Booth Johnny Yen is a performer- 'Ladies and gentlemen here is my disease, give me a standing ovation and your sympathy', before going off and setting himself on fire again. Tim Booth further borrows from Iggy/Bowie by referencing the Jean Genie, and then goes onto suicide pacts, young men itching to burn and waiting for their own star turn. He then gets compared to Evel Knievel, hitting the seventeenth bus, before Tim urges someone to put Johnny Yen, the poor fool, out of his misery, to finish him off. I'm guessing that mid 80s vegan, yoga, indie-poet Tim Booth was despairing of the old rock 'n' roll cliches, with their leather trousered frontmen and drug habits, but by borrowing Johnny Yen he's lining himself up alongside Iggy Pop and William Burroughs to some extent. The James song was from when they looked like a really interesting group, spindly, spiky, uncompromising, almost folky, indie-rock. They went on to become a stadium band, which I don't hold against them by any means, but they sacrificed something when they expanded their line up and sound and began appealing to a wider audience.

Johnny Yen

Audrey's Half Century

Today, April the 6th, is Lord Sabre Day, Andrew Weatherall's birthday- and today he turns 50. The top picture shows him djing in the early 90s. I'm fairly certain it was taken at Cream during the Sabres Of Paradise tour (note gear borrowed off Sandals).

Two decades later...

Having followed him since his earliest vinyl adventures, I've spent a fair amount of time over the last twenty odd years tracking down, buying, listening to, and more recently surfing for, his music. I think he's one of British music's genuine mavericks, always interesting, always on the move and always worth listening to- on wax and in print. Always looking forward but with the past in view. His remixes from the last few years are among the very best stuff he's done and The Asphodells album is a contender for album of the year so far. This is a bumper selection of  fairly randomly chosen Weatherall tracks from my hard drive to celebrate his half century...

Any brief internet/magazine biography always links Weatherall and Screamadelica. When the Scream put their collective boot on the monitor and released Give Out But Don't Give Up many felt that it was a backwards step. It was. But proving you can make a dub purse out a sow's ear, Weatherall reworked their Stonesisms into a heady twelve minute dub excursion that goes a little Screamadelica-esque in the final few minutes of this Sabres remix of Jailbird.

Jailbird (Weatherall Dub Chapter 3 Mix)

Similarly you get all the references to the artists he remixed in the early 90s. This one took that main keyboard refrain from James' second best known song and sent a thousand indie kids sprawling across the dancefloor. Confusingly there are two different names for this remix but they are I think the same mix.

Come Home (Weatherall Skunk Weed Skank Remix)

Lino Squares was one of many aliases and pseudonyms Weatherall used during the late 90s, outside Two Lone Swordsmen. As Lino Squares he put out a six track vinyl pack of minimal, electro-oriented  music. These days it's more linocuts than Lino Squares.

Neuprhique

The first piece of vinyl to bear the Weatherall name as a solo artist was an e.p. entitled The Bullet Catcher's Apprentice- the lead track Feathers was sold to sell cars, the Ford Tipp-Ex according to Weatherall. This song featured vocals from Weatherall and lists many things that are possible- but how one should never make disco without a Stratocaster.

You Can't Do Disco Without A Strat

And he followed it with a wonderful solo album- A Pox On the Pioneers- a couple of years ago, drawing on glam, rockabilly, and post-punk. This was a dub of Fail We May, Sail We Must (from the Japanese version of the lp).

Fail We May, Dub We Must

Two years ago he remixed Clock Opera. I'm not sure I know much about Clock opera but remember reading a so-so review of their album. In fact I'm not even sure I've listened to the original track despite owning the 12". But the Weatherall remix is a gem, one of many remix gems from recent times. This is a superb piece of electronic music, crisp beats, lovely synths and a fantastic repeated bit where everything goes all wonky.

Once And For All (Weatherall Remix)

In the last few years there have been a shedful of podcasts and mixes on the internet. This one, for Fact Magazine, remains one of the best, joining the dots over the course of an hour between (amongst others) CircleSquare, Dum Dum Dum, Bert Weedon, Wayne Walker, The Monks, Stockholm Monsters, Mogwai, Durutti Column, Dennis Wilson and The Mighty Wah! Proper stuff this.

Fact Mix 85 (September 09)

Weatherall and Fairplay's Asphodells lp, Ruled By Passion, Destroyed By Lust, has been sent out to the remixers. This one sees their cover version of AR Kane's A Love From Outer Space get remixed by Mugwump- spaced out.




That should be enough to keep you going. I could have doubled the size of this post and still only scratched the surface. I don't what a luxuriantly bearded, Edwardian clothes-wearing, heavily tattooed, dancefloor and leftfield legend does for his 50th birthday but I for one will be raising a glass in his honour tonight, somewhere  in a caravan in north Yorkshire. Happy 50th birthday sir.

This Song's Made Up

I heard this earlier today and it took me right back and reminded what a funny little song it is, but stunning with it. I loved James right up until they became the acceptable face of arena rock and then I lost interest and other things came along. I loved Stutter and Stripmine and One Man Clapping, and the 12" of Sit Down (the Lester Piggott version), and then there was the Weatherall remix of Come Home. I had a long sleeved T-shirt with Come on the front (note to self- check this sentence for double-entendre). The last one I bought was Gold Mother and I think that one was alright too. But I especially loved this song- Hymn From A Village- with it's folky guitar parts, clattering drums and Tim Booth's raw vocal. It's one of those songs that I can't adequately describe, you just have to listen to it, and realise how different this sounded to what was going on around them. Wonderful. It was from their stint on Factory Records and has two Factory catalogue numbers- FAC 119 (the 7", James II) and FAC 138 (12", Village Fire e.p.). I know these details are important to some people.

James - Hymn From A Village.mp3#2#2