More More

Some more more today, following Pink Floyd's More yesterday. First dose of more is from Iggy Pop, and his song I Need More from his album Soldier.

I Need More

Released in 1980 Soldier was Iggy's fourth solo album, an album that doesn't have a great reputation but this song is a highlight. A clipped guitar riff, driving drums, somewhat murky sound and Iggy riding on top in good voice. Ex- Stooge James Williamson was supposed to be on board for producing but walked out after disagreeing with Bowie (who was hanging around, helping Iggy out). Glen Matlock, at a loose end himself after the Pistols broke up and flitting between various bands and projects that didn't come to much, came in to co- write and play. He suggested that the final mix had a lot of the lead guitar removed by Bowie (following an argument between guitarist Steve New and the Thin White Duke over girlfriend Patti Palladin, that ended in New punching Bowie). The lack of squealing lead guitar doesn't do this song any harm in fact, keeps it grungy. Simple Minds turn up on Soldier as well, providing backing vocals on Play It Safe. They were recording at Rockfield at the same time. Iggy's 80s albums are patchy in quality but I Need More is good stuff. I Need More was also the title of Iggy's 1982 autobiography, out of print and currently very expensive second hand. 

A few years earlier, 1976, Can released a single called I Want More, a song that gave them a hit and took them to Top Of The Pops. The B-side was an extension of the A- side, Jaki Liebezeit at the krautrock disco, the bass and sparse guitar licks dancing around the rhythm, the whole group breathily chanting the title. Superbly funky stuff. 

... And More

Monday's Long Song

It's become one of those things you see on the internet, that since David Bowie died in January 2016 the world has gone to pieces, and while the two may be coincidental rather than related you can't help but feel some grand cosmic imbalance was created when David Jones breathed his last breath and that we've been sinking into the abyss ever since. The five years since 2016 seem to have passed very quickly too, events hurtling at us at a rapid speed, leaving us no time to get to grips with things before some other calamity strikes us. 'News had just come over/ five years left to cry in', the man himself wrote and sang in 1972. 

In 2013 James Murphy, the LCD Soundsystem man I posted about last week, got his hands on one of the songs from Bowie's comeback album The Next Day. He cut and looped some clapping from a Steve Reich track, sampled the synth from Ashes To Ashes and created a monumental remix, minimal, sleek and modern. Bowie sounds superb too, back in touch and vital, 'your country's new... but your fear is as old as the world'. The full ten minute version is the one you want obviously, a long remix that you don't really want to come to an end. 

This the edited version. It's worth mentioning that the 12" release was a beautiful artefact, white vinyl, die cut and embossed sleeve. The hole in the centre was square rather than circular.

Love Is Lost (Hello Steve Reich Mix By James Murphy For The DFA Edit)

The Next Day was trailed by Where Are We Now?, Bowie's nostalgic tribute to the years he spent in Berlin in the mid 1970s. He recorded it (and the whole album) in secret in autumn 2011 and released the single onto the internet without fanfare on his 66th birthday. 'Had to get the train from Potsdamer Platz/ You never knew that I could do that', he croons, a man looking back at his youth, 'just walking the dead'. Time passes, everyone ages, nothing stays the same. The Berlin of 1975 and the Berlin of 2011 are as different as a city could be. David Bowie of 2011 was not the same man he was in 1975. And though he and we didn't know it then, he had just five years left, almost exactly to the day. 

Love

February 14th, Valentine's Day. St Valentine, a 3rd century saint, has been associated with the traditions of courtly love since the Middle Ages. As a priest in the Roman Empire who ministered to Christians during the period of their persecution he was caught and killed, martyred on 14th February 269 AD. According to a version of his death  when he was arrested the Prefect of Rome ordered that he be either beaten to death with clubs or beheaded. But if you think he had it bad, consider this- I'm in charge of a Year 7 Valentine's disco tonight.

Love is the number one topic as the subject for songs and writers. As Joe Strummer said 'subject covered, case closed, don't you think?' A cursory search of my hard drive throws up hundreds with love in the title. Here's two for Valentine's Day, both ace in different ways.

Veteran disco remix King Tom Moulton took Diana Ross' 1976 hit Love Hangover and extended it for seventeen sumptuous minutes, all strings and breathy vocals until a shift in tempo at around six minutes. A song in a version that just has to be surrendered to.

Love Hangover (Unreleased Tom Moulton Mix)

In June 1977 Iggy Pop was recording Lust For Life with Bowie in West Berlin. To change things around a bit the players all swapped roles, guitarist Ricky Gardiner sitting in on the drums, drummer Hunt Sales took brother Tony's bass and and Tony took the guitar. Carlos Alomar joined in with Bowie on organ. Iggy improvised a vocal, a song to the girl. It's got a weird groove and is a wonderful way to close the album.

Fall In Love With Me

Why Don't You Play Us A Tune Pal?

Nicolas Roeg has died aged 90. The films he made in the 1970s and 80s were the type of films you read references to and in those days where things were scarcer you hoped they'd eventually be shown late at night on BBC2 (with a VHS cassette close by). Performance is a counter-cultrue classic, Mick Jagger, Anita Pallenberg and James Fox all going slowly mad in a big house in Notting Hill Gate (and when it was being made Keith Richards waiting in his car outside the set, paranoid about what Jagger and Pallenberg might be up to). The soundtrack was legendary too and this (with my surname too, which added to it for me) is a genuinely great Jagger vocal with slide guitar from Ry Cooder...

Memo From Turner (Alternate Version)

Mick Jones paid tribute to Roeg, his films and especially Performance in Big Audio Dynamite's 1985 single E=MC2, peppered with dialogue from the film and a verse about taking a trip in Powis Square with a pop star who dyed his hair, mobsters, gangland slayings and insanity Bohemian style. The opening verse is about Walkabout (1971) and the 3rd verse is about The Man Who Fell To Earth, another late night, video tape film that had the capacity to freak the viewer out.

E=MC2

The chorus took me years to fully work out and I'd sung all kinds of words along to it but I think it goes...

'Ritual ideas, relativity
Holy buildings, no people prophesy
Time slide, place to hide, nudge reality
Foresight, minds wide, magic imagery oh ho'.

Happy Mondays 1988 masterpiece Bummed was also Roeg and Performance inspired with at least 3 songs referencing the film. Mad Cyril includes dialogue from it including the line that opens the song 'We've been courteous'. The Mondays played it on Granada TV for Wilson's The Other Side Of Midnight show, a band at their peak...

Once There Were Mountains

A year ago today we woke up to the news that David Bowie had died. After that, the whole year went to shit.

Station To Station is my number one Bowie album, one I've been listening to since a very cold winter in a student house in Childwall, Liverpool in 1989. The album is only six songs long, marking a transition from the Bowie of the USA to the Bowie of Europe, from Young Americans to Low. The influence of West German bands, mechanical rhythms, detachment, the flight to Berlin, the after-effects of years of cocaine use, a Bowie who needed change and to be saved are evident. All this and more- and plenty of things that even now I haven't got under the skin of.

Station To Station

And just after the The Last Five Years documentary finished on Saturday night a new e.p. was released online, the last recordings including this sax and vocals dominated piece No Plan.

Oh look, Newton Electricals...

Remain

The author Robert Harris tweeted last week 'How foul this referendum is. The most depressing, divisive, duplicitous political event in my lifetime. may there never be another'. Which just about covers it. Nigel Farage has forced a 'discussion' into public, a discussion which has unleashed all kinds of racist and xenophobic forces which have at least partly contributed to the murder of MP Jo Cox last week. Farage is a political charlatan, a fraud, a man who basks in a man-in-the-street image despite a wealthy, privileged background. A demagogue who hates the EU yet is paid by it, who represents constituents at the European parliament but rarely goes. A man who poses in front of Nazi inspired posters and complains that the murder of Jo Cox has 'taken the momentum out of the Leave campaign'. On every and any level, he is a disgrace.

David Cameron has to take the blame here too- despite being the leader of the Remain campaign, he is the one who called this referendum, a cynical response to the rise of Ukip and the defection of Tory votes, a piece of political opportunism that has blown up in his face, shown the cracks in his party and that he'll pay for politically at some point, win or lose.

Let's Kiss And Make Up

This is original The Field Mice version covered by St Etienne with their Eurocentric cover art.

A vote to Leave is a backwards step, a vote for a past that doesn't exist. I can't see any positives in leaving. Taking back control, taking back sovereignty is a smokescreen- how is leaving the 'undemocratic' E.U. increasing democracy in a country which has an unelected second chamber and is a constitutional monarchy? My vote today is to Remain. Let's stay together.

Enough preaching.

Stay 

Stay is off Bowie's Station To Station, sometimes my favourite Bowie album. The choppy guitar part, Carlos Alomar I assume, is wonderful.

And finally Portishead have released this cover of ABA's SOS, a tribute to Jo Cox.

We Learn Dances, Brand New Dances

I'm not sure if this is a 1977 themed week or an Iggy Pop themed week. Or if it's a theme week at all. In 1981 Grace Jones covered Nightclubbing, from Iggy's The Idiot- it was the name of the album as well as a cover of the song. Rhythm kings Sly and Robbie on bass and drums root the whole thing in dub coupled with a New Wave sheen and some hiss. In Iggy's version he's in the nightclub but dazed and distanced, an outsider looking in, numbed by party drugs. In this version Grace is imperious, glacial, in the middle of the dancefloor.

Nightclubbing

To Dusseldorf City

...meet Iggy Pop and David Bowie.

The title track to their March 1977 release Trans-Europe Express. Peerless and perfect, a sound in motion. Invented pretty much everything that came after it.

Calling Sister Midnight

Iggy Pop's The Idiot is a remarkable album. Released in March 1977 (and followed in the same year by Lust For Life) it is the first of the Bowie Berlin albums. All the songs on The Idiot are co-written by David Bowie and his fingerprints- words, tone, chords, structures- are all over it. The Idiot was Iggy's first solo album and doesn't really sound too like the rest of his work. No cartoon stagediving here, no songs chasing the sound of two chord Stooges. The Idiot sounds thought out, a piece of work. It is also sounds dislocated- Iggy and Bowie loose and lost in West Berlin. On most of the songs- just listen to Nightcubbing- the beat is always a bit behind where you expect it to be, a fraction deliberately late.

Opening track Sister Midnight is a blast. Played live by Bowie throughout his Station To Station tour, it's a powerful opener, a punch. Bowie's guitarist Carlos Alomar plays on it. Many of Bowie's songs from Chateau d'Herouville and Hansa Studio have a certain funkiness and a lightness. Sister Midnight has Alomar's wonderful guitar sound and playing but is murkier, with the synths and rhythm keeping it more earthbound. Three note bassline. Iggy in a hole looking out- 'what can I do about my dreams?' he sings at one point after a verse re-working Oedipus.

Sister Midnight

His voice is the human touch on an album inspired by the men-machines Kraftwerk, an album with a European heart moving away the blues base of the music of the 1960s and early 70s, written and played by men trying to kick different drugs. Sister Midnight re-appeared with new words as Red Money on Bowie's Lodger album in 1979, the album generally considered to be the final part of the Berlin series, completing the circle nicely.

Run For The Shadows

I've been doing what everyone else has been doing- a solid diet of Bowie, digging in and around his extensive back catalogue. These two extras came up and I thought you'd like them. The first is an edit of Golden Years. You might think that as possibly Bowie's greatest moment from a life of great moments that it didn't need mucking about with but this is a funky mid-set dance edit; loop that riff, add those beats, a smidgeon of vocals and lot of spirit. Strictly unofficial but very, very sweet.

Golden Years (Mano Le Tough Edit)

The Secret Life Of Arabia (off ''Heroes'' in 1977) always had more than a touch of disco about it. So why wouldn't someone beef it up, disco-not-disco style, and send it under flashing neon lights to dance? Little Leaf did so, very nicely.

Eno Returning

Brrrr- it's chilly out. How about some Brian Eno to start the week? In fact, how about an hour long mix of Brian Eno, originally put together by the Test Pressing website back in 2010, no longer available at their website as far as I can tell.

The Producers Series 2 Brian Eno

Many of the tracks selected here have that late 70s and early 80s sound rather than the ambient soundscapes he's as well known for. Strange syncopated rhythms, treated guitars, African influences, multitracked vocals, funk bass, oblique strategies.

Tracklist...
Brian Eno: Sky Saw
Brian Eno: No One Receiving
Brian Eno: Strong Flashes Of Light
Brian Eno: More Volts
Talking Heads: Double Groove (Demo)
Brian Eno: The Paw Paw Negro Blowtorch
David Bowie/Brian Eno: Abdulmajid
Brian Eno & David Byrne: Into The Spirit Womb
Brian Eno: St Elmo's Fire
Brian Eno & Harold Budd: The Plateaux Of Mirror
Eno Mobius Roedelius: Foreign Affairs
Brian Eno: In Dark Trees
Brian Eno: Mist/Rhythm
Brian Eno: By This River
Brian Eno: Just Another Day
Brian Eno: Bone Bomb
Brian Eno: The True Wheel

Them And David Bowie

The crazy, beautiful stream of all things David Bowie related this week has been both wonderful and very sad. The sheer amount of music is one thing, the words and memories another and then there's the pictures. This one of two South London boys enjoying a beer backstage at Shea Stadium popped up. As did this one below...

Big Audio Dynamite in New York in 1987, with Bowie, Peter Frampton, Jimmy Cliff, Dave Stewart (ugh) and Paul Simonon again (Havana 3am supporting B.A.D.) One of the later B.A.D. line ups did a cover of Suffragette City which I thought I had a digital file of but don't. I can't find it anywhere on the internet and can't rip my vinyl right currently either. You'll have to imagine it. The influence of Bowie on the punks is well documented. This picture of a pre-Sid Vicious Simon Ritchie on his way to see Bowie at Earl's Court has been widely shared too...

Bowie was enormous in 1970s Liverpool. Pete Wylie tweeted this week that Liverpool's 70s youth had to reject their city's homegrown music and find something new- and that was Bowie. Wylie's old mucker Ian McCulloch released an album of acoustic songs called Pro Patria Mori in 2013, coupled with Bunnymen songs done live at the Union Chapel. This was Mac's tribute to the Thin White Duke.

Me And David Bowie

And just because a Bowie post isn't complete without some music from the man himself, this is an absolute highlight, his best moment from the 1980s, a soaring, romantic song from a widely panned 1980s film, plucked out of nowhere with a hastily scrambled together bunch of musicians sometime in London in 1986. A favourite of mine (and Simon and Drew's too).

Bowie with Absolute Beginner Patsy Kensit. I had a bit of a thing for her in 1987.

Freak Out In A Moonage Daydream

We were in Paris at the end of October. At dusk we crossed the road from the Seine, by the bridge with the padlocks (now being removed), towards The Louvre. It had been stupidly warm for late October. The Eiffel Tower was lit up in the distance. We walked up to an arch leading into the courtyard of the Louvre as a busker was hitting some chords. As we walked towards him and the archway we got a fade in effect and as we passed him he hit the chorus of this song...



'Keep your electric eye on me babe
Put your raygun to my head'

I nodded and dropped a coin as we walked past and then as we moved away he faded out...

'Freak out in a moonage daydream, oh yeah'.
Magical.

You could put together a list of ten David Bowie albums and one hundred songs and still be arguing about what to leave out. I'd take his work over that of both The Beatles and The Stones. He inspired many of the people who came after him and who have been featured on this blog. I'd wager most of the people who blog in the blogroll to the right have his albums in their collections. His songs, his look, his art, his influence is almost incomparable in popular music. RIP David Bowie.

This Is Mind Control

Dame David Bowie has a new single out, ten minutes long. I haven't got around to it yet so cannot comment. But yesterday reader Paul Bob Horrocks pointed us to this, Adrian Sherwood's On U Sound dub version of Space Oddity which will do very nicely indeed. Full of dub apocalypse imagery- 'this is mind control to keep you dumb', 'Planet Earth is doomed'. Happy Sunday.

Five Years

Good morning- how's your head?

I started this blog five years ago today, January 1st 2010. At that point I didn't know if I had enough to last five weeks or five months, never mind five years. So it is some kind of achievement to still be here five years later, still typing, posting daily. I think it is a bit repetitive sometimes- a round and round blur of Andrew Weatherall, The Clash, certain other serial offenders, and more rockabilly than you can shake a stick at. There are other quicker, easier, more instant ways to do this kind of thing now than via a blog- Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and no doubt other platforms I don't even know about. Blogging seems a bit old fashioned. But it's the writing, the selection of images, the connections to the music, the importance of music, that keeps me doing it. Well, that and the connections I've made. And actually, they're the main thing- the contact, comments, conversations and friends I've made through doing this. Many thanks to all of you who take the time to drop in and make this a two-way, interactive thing. Really, thank you.

Every time I think I've run out of stuff, that I've got nothing else to say, something pops up and suggests itself, so I've got no intention of stopping now, despite being tempted a couple of times. Let's see how much further I can wring this cloth dry. My first ever post was Fowler's End by The Black Balloons, an obscure Andrew Weatherall track. If I remember correctly, I couldn't even get the link to the file to embed. 2015 is kicking off with the opening song off Ziggy Stardust And the Spiders From Mars- one of his best, from the drum intro to the astounding vocal.

Off we go.

Happy new year.

Five Years

Major Tom's A Junkie

No astronaut picture today but the space theme continues in the song- and I thought a picture of Warpaint's foxy bassist Jenny Lee Lindbergh might make a good start to Thursday. Ashes To Ashes was David Bowie's 1980 smash, complete with those lines harking back to Space Oddity and Major Tom floating off in his tincan/opiate haze. Warpaint covered it for a compilation album and did a magnificent, dreamy job.

Ashes To Ashes

Sue

What do you think of the new David Bowie song?

Bowie crooning over dark, cinematic jazz, Taxi Driver soundtrack style jazz, side two of Low maybe, a little bit Red Snapper too. It's not an easy listen and at over seven minutes long not the obvious choice of song to spring upon the world to announce a new Best of album. Good stuff I reckon.

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

A Big Hand Please

I didn't put this in my 2013 list. I can't imagine how I missed it when I listen to it now.

When You're A Boy

'When you're a boy
You can wear a uniform
Other boys will check you out
You can get a girl
When you're a boy'



With the great guitarist Carlos Alomar on drums. Because.