Audio Journal by Patrick O'Donnell : Ned's Atomic Dustbin, 02 Shepherd's Bush Empire, 20.12.2009

Go to: My Other Blog / twitter.com/mjasmith

This week's blog comes to you from Patrick O'Donnell, with a review from the Ned's Atomic Dustbin concert at the O2 Shepherd's Bush Empire last Saturday.

"Dan Dan the fast drumming man, Alex plays one bass, Mat the other, Rat does the guitar, and Jonn sings". As it was in the beginning so it was on Saturday night at the 02 Shepherd's Bush Empire. The recently restored original line-up of Ned's Atomic Dustbin took to the stage to celebrate their 1991 début album God Fodder.

"Kill... your... television," Jonn spits at a decidedly older, balder and fatter crowd than the song was originally aired to as the band rip into their most famous track and album opener with trademark energy. The crowd responds in kind as the 'Lunatic Magnets' (Ned's Fans' moniker) roll back the years and a surging mosh pit ebbs and flows across the packed venue.

Having your 'crowd pleaser' as your opening track could be bad planning in other circumstances but Ned's stay true to the original listing and a knowing audience loves them for it. They tear into 'Less Than Useful' and 'Selfish' before a typically reticent Jonn pays a customary "cheers" to his adoring fans.

Ned's had in recent years played reunion gigs and even recorded new tracks with a new guitarist and second bassist but the return of Rat and Mat makes the occasion even more special. Mat was always the voice of the band and the most energetic and was clearly enjoying reliving happy days. The crowd seems to jump with him as fan favourite 'Grey Cell Green' kicks in and when he tells the audience he didn't "expect to be playing these songs at forty" a nostalgic note hovers in the air as the fans and band unite in a sense of history and belonging.

Next up is 'Cut Up', followed by 'Throwing Things' (surprisingly no one does) and 'Capital Letters'. The youngest of the late Eighties / early Nineties trio of 'Stourbridge Scene' grebo bands, Ned's always led contemporaries The Wonder Stuff and Pop Will Eat Itself in the t-shirt stakes and the Lunatic Magnets had squeezed into their faded favourites for the occasion. And by this point in proceedings, t-shirt after t-shirt moves through the air as IT consultants re-learn how to crowd-surf.

The excitement peaks with best song of the evening, 'Happy'. Aptly named and expertly executed.
Ned's finish off with 'Your Complex', 'Nothing Like', 'Until You Find Out', 'You' and 'What Gives My Son?' before heading off the stage with a big "thank you" from Jonn. The album track-list blitzed through in 35 minutes flat. Inevitable chants of "you fat bastard" ring out (maybe invoked by Les "Carter USM" Carter's support slot) as the crowd tries to coax the Fantastic Five back.

They duly oblige and Mat takes to the mic again, explaining that we are to be treated to "some other songs that would have been toured with God Fodder, hope you enjoy them". No fear. This is like a 20-year sober heroin addict enjoying another hit.

'Terminally Groovy' is first and gloriously energetically out of the blocks, followed by other B-sides and associated tracks 'Aim', 'Plug Me In', 'Bite', 'Flexible Head', 'Faceless' and 'Trust', and neither the band nor crowd relents. Which is why it seems poignant as they slow things down to end with usual curtain-closer 'Titch'. It gives the band and their fans a moment to reflect on what just happened and revel in a mutual respect.

Having been to see The Wonder Stuff flawlessly air their 1989 album HUP to 4,000 fans at the 02 Birmingham Academy on Thursday, followed by this early Christmas present from Ned's, it's easy to see why the bands from that rich pre-Brit Pop era are cashing in on the reunion circuit. There is a deeply-held affection for bands that give their all, have personality and are an antidote to the waves of manufactured and conformist rubbish that has followed.

In a disposable age when bands seem to come and go too easily, today's young Turks could do worse than take a look at Ned's, one of the Nineties' most underrated bands, who, thanks to years of touring and learning their craft, are, twenty years later able to enjoy a sold-out gig with adoring fans. Somehow I doubt Scouting For Girls will find themselves in the same position. Kill your television? I would gladly if I could go to gigs like this every night of the week.

Setlist
Kill Your Television
Less Than Useful
Selfish
Grey Cell Green
Cut Up
Throwing Things
Capital Letters
Happy
Your Complex
Nothing Like
Until You Find Out
You
What Gives My Son?
---------
Terminally Groovy
Aim
Plug Me In
Bite
Flexible Head
Faceless
Trust
Titch

Audio Journal by MJA Smith : 21/12/2009

Go to: My Other Blog / twitter.com/mjasmith

I have two other music-related projects aside from this here blog, one of which – my Nominal Musics label – sits in a state of permanent hiatus. The other, Documentary Evidence, my unofficial Mute Records tribute site just sit there, waiting for me to get around to turning some much-needed attention toward it.

This post will, eventually be about the Depeche Mode concert I attended at the O2 Arena this Wednesday; but before we get there I'm going to spend a bit of time telling you about Documentary Evidence.



Documentary Evidence grew out of a simple passion, that passion being for collecting records; specifically, those releases on a label called Mute Records. Following a particular artist, or genre, is fairly commonplace; following an entire record label's output is the exclusive reserve of a particular niche of train-spotting record collectors, yours truly included.

Mute Records was started by Daniel Miller in the late 1970s, quickly establishing itself in the post-punk anti-corporate, independent musical landscape as the place to go to get your fix of leftfield electronic pop and more challenging, noisy music. Miller himself released several records in the early days of Mute, including the very first release as electro-punks The Normal with the JG Ballard-referencing 7” single of 'Warm Leatherette' and 'T.V.O.D' (see my review here); he also hinted at one of his ambitions by recording quirky synth pop as Silicon Teens, a fake group consisting of Miller and an array of analogue synths covering Fifties rock n' roll numbers.



Mute's future was assured when Miller signed Depeche Mode to the nascent label, securing Miller's first hits with their second and third singles, 'New Life' and 'Just Can't Get Enough'. No sooner had Mute established itself than Depeche Mode's core songwriter, Vince Clarke, quit the band just as they were gearing up for a lucrative US tour. Just as things looked to turn sour for Miller, Clarke formed Yazoo with Alison Moyet and, after a few abortive side projects, Erasure with Andy Bell, while Depeche Mode continued to develop a dedicated fan base in the UK and abroad, and Mute went from strength to strength.

The success of bands like Depeche Mode and Erasure allowed Miller to recycle the label's profits into developing artists from other, more esoteric areas, such as Nick Cave – a cult figure who has only comparatively recently has gained more universal recognition – or Laibach, or Nitzer Ebb and countless other examples of bands operating just underneath the collective consciousness of the charts (see here for a less-than-complete list). The label reached a new level of success with Moby, whose Play was arguably the biggest success the label had scored (with the exception of Depeche Mode's albums), quickly leading to Miller's label getting snapped up by EMI and ending that particular stage of one of the UK's longest-running indie labels.



I had a resolutely pop music upbringing; the first band I really, really liked was Erasure. I've said it before, and I'll say it again that I still think the duo of Vince and Andy are still the best synth pop duo there has ever been, knocking spots off those irksome Pet Shop Boys, but I'm biased. Less logically, I also have Erasure entirely to thank for getting me into the wider Mute roster, and sub-pop music generally.

I bought my first 12” single, 'Chorus' by Erasure in the summer of 1991, from Woolworth's in Stratford-upon-Avon. As I took the black vinyl disc from its sleeve, a square pamphlet fell out. That pamphlet was titled 'Documentary Evidence' and something about it fascinated me; it was basically a brief biography of Mute Records by The Wire's Chris Bohn (writing as Biba Kopf) with a full list of all the releases that the label had put out up to that point. With the exception of Depeche Mode, who up to then I didn't really like, and Renegade Soundwave I hadn't heard of any of the bands listed in the booklet; I had no idea at all that music was made that didn't appear in the charts; I thought I must have just missed them or not taken any notice.



So from that point on I began avidly collecting releases from Mute, both new and old, and I'd say conservatively that 75% of my entire record collection is made up of bands and artists connected to the label. It got me into punk (both US and UK), noise, techno and rock and has cost me an absolute fortune over the years. So it was in 2003 that I decided to set up a website specifically as a tribute to the label, and I decided to call it Documentary Evidence.

Documentary Evidence contains biographies of Mute's artists, reviews of releases and live performances and occasional interviews with artists or people connected to the label, including Barry Adamson, ex Human League / Heaven 17 member and Vince Clarke collaborator Martyn Ware and Wire / Githead front man Colin Newman. I've barely touched it in the last eighteen months, but that will change in 2010 with a new interview and plenty of new reviews and biographies.



To kick things off I've added a review of the Depeche Mode concert at the O2 Arena last Wednesday, which if I remember correctly was what I said the point of this blog post actually was. You can find it here. Feel free to look around the rest of the Documentary Evidence site.

Next week's blog will be written by my good friend Neil Cullimore. Audio Journal by Neil Cullimore will feature a review of Ned's Atomic Dustbin's gig at the O2 in Shepherd's Bush as well as an interview with Jonn from the band. I'll return with more musical ramblings in 2010, as well as news of a new and totally gratis Nominal Musics release.

Audio Journal by MJA Smith : A Not So Silent Night Review

Go to: My Other Blog / twitter.com/mjasmith

Now that we are some way along on the runway to Christmas, seasonal songs have begun to pervade the airwaves in ever greater quantity; in our house it's no different. Our two favourite albums for the Christmas season are Phil Spector's A Christmas Gift For You and a compilation album given away years ago with Mojo magazine called Blue Christmas. The former is dominated by the joyously murky sound of the youthful Sixties pop groups that Spector produced, while the latter consists of a bunch of miserable songs by artists prone to introspection and cynicism. One such artist is Rufus Wainwright, whose 'Spotlight On Christmas' from an album recorded with his wider family is a folksy number with lots of festive tinkly bells and whatnot.



The Wainwright-McGarrigle clan, a family so talented they really shouldn't be allowed to have children just so other people can have a chance, descended upon the Royal Albert Hall on Wednesday for an event called A Not So Silent Night, a charity event for matriarch Kate McGarrigle's cancer foundation. This on-stage family get-together usually takes place at New York's Carnegie Hall, and this is the first time they've taken the festive jamboree off Manhattan Island and all the way to London. They were joined by a cast that included Boy George, various members of the Thompson family, including Linda Thompson and various grandsons and daughters, family friend Ed Harcourt, Elbow's Guy Garvey and Jenni Muldaur (also from a famous musical family – enough already).

Somewhat needlessly, the event was kicked off by Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders, which I could have done without, though they did make amusing reference to the apparent complexity of the family affair about to take to the stage. In essence, here's the score (as I understand it): Kate McGarrigle and Anna McGarrigle are sisters who have recorded many albums of American folk music over several decades; Kate married Loudon Wainwright III and produced two children, Martha and Rufus; Loudon's sister Sloan Wainwright is also a singer; Loudon worked with and became good friends with Fairport Convention guitarist Richard Thompson, who, with ex wife Linda produced a number of offspring (including Teddy Thompson, absent from tonight's proceedings), all of whom are talented musicians as evidenced at A Not So Silent Night. One can imagine that the stage performance is simply a public version of the family and extended-family get togethers this esteemed bunch of individuals would have had each Christmas. Imagine the impromptu sing-alongs that might occur at that party.

Highlights were many, and often from the most unexpected quarters. Ed Harcourt, for example, came a close second to Rufus as most impressive male vocalist here. His duet with Martha on The Pogues's Christmas hit 'A Fairytale Of New York' was probably the finest, most louche cover of the song I've ever heard, with both singers acting like the seasonal drunks in the song; later, his version of 'Merry Christmas Baby' descended into jazz nihilism and was arguably the most impassioned performance of the entire night. Imagine a more credible Jamie Cullum to the power of ten and you'd get somewhere close.



Far from being an uplifting pre-Christmas spectacle, the evening had a maudlin tone only leavened by more uplifting performances such as Boy George's take on 'White Christmas', here rendered as a cod-reggae song; working with Antony Heggarty has clearly emboldened the troubled former Culture Club vocalist, his voice now able to resonate with a new, treacly depth. His duet with Rufus on 'What Are You Doing New Year's Eve' was as camp as you'd expect from these two individuals combined, but again provided one of the most joyous sections of the show. Guy Garvey leading off all the singers in a version of the Lennon / Ono staple 'Happy Xmas (War Is Over)' was another, only bettered by Sloan Wainwright belting out a gutsy, bluesy take on Queen's 'Thank God It's Christmas'. Earlier in the show, two performances from members of the Thompson clan – the Chuck Berry song 'Run Run Rudolph' by Thompson grandson Zac Hobbs and another by Kami Thompson (who Rufus described somewhat unfairly as a 'Dickensian slut') – served as rock 'n roll interludes, both displaying a brilliant rawness that the Royal Albert Hall didn't seem to know how to respond to.

In spite of the stellar talents on stage, it was clear from the audience reaction that the main draws here were Rufus and Martha. Mic-less performances from the former have become standard feature of his concerts, and here he decided to test how good the Royal Albert Hall was for acoustics with 'Minuit Chrétien', which was as breathtaking as ever. His duet with partner Jorn Weisbrodt on 'Silent Night' – two thirds of which was actually in German, so we should perhaps more appropriately label it 'Stille Nacht' – closed out the first half of the show, Jorn's lumpen tone somehow perfectly complemented by his partner's range. Martha, who became a mother just three weeks ago seemed to have adopted a maternal air in the proceedings, shepherding her tiny mother around with evident concern. The song 'Mary Had A Baby' was dedicated to the son she delivered less than a month before with the band's bassist Brad Albetta. Consequently, the quartet performance of the Wainwright siblings, their mother and Brad on bass on 'In The Bleak Midwinter' was appropriately sweet in a 'let's have a sing along round the piano' post-Christmas-lunch fashion, in spite of just how damn depressing that song is.

Rufus's début opera, Prima Donna, whose female lead Janice Kelly performed a duet with Rufus at A Not So Silent Night arrives on UK shores in April 2010 at the Sadlers Wells Theatre in Islington – tickets can be bought from here.

Audio Journal by MJA Smith : 07/12/2009

Go to: My Other Blog / twitter.com/mjasmith

A Chance To Cut Is A Chance To Cure by San Francisco electronica purveyors Matmos was, upon its release, a new yardstick in the electronica genre. Along with Matthew Herbert with the sounds he culled from his kitchen, Matmos took the notion of sampling to a new level. In the not-too-distant past sampling was merely the art of stealing a section from a song or snatching movie dialogue and then re-contextualising those snatches of sound together in another song. With A Chance To Cut Is A Chance To Cure, Matmos took the bulk of their samples from a non-traditional, and potentially macabre, area – operating theatres and cosmetic surgeries – and then turned those sounds into rhythms over which other, more derivative electronic passages were laid.

The concept makes for queasy listening if you imagine the kinds of things they feasibly could have captured (there was some talk of a bone saw being recorded, as well as a liposuction procedure); on record it's mercifully impossible to deduce the sources of most of the sounds within the palette of the clattering electronica beats and skittish percussion that has informed this genre of music since Autechre, Aphex Twin and all those other early Warp acts deprogrammed their drum machines in the early 1990s. That and the prevalence of detailed 'real life' surgical programmes on TV these days somewhat inures you to Matmos's ideas. That said, if you ignore the fabled source of some of the sounds, A Chance To Cut Is A Chance To Cure remains as good an introduction to leftfield electronica as there is.

Matmos subsequently collaborated with Björk, an artist who has done more than most to bring the outer reaches of music into her and her fans' orbit. For those who believe the Björk phenomenon started with oh-so-irritating 'It's Oh So Quiet' and ended with a punch up in an airport, Medúlla will have come and gone without a trace. It is an album where vocals, or more precisely vocal sounds, achieve a prominence thanks to much sampling of Björk's voice and the conversion of those sounds into beats and otherworldly percussion. It's a genuinely inventive album, highlighting just how comfortable Björk is taking her music way out there, but it can occasionally become cloying and over-long. If you can't stand Björk's unique singing, this is not an album for you.

Over-long is a charge that could never be levied at Alistair Crosbie's one-track The Last Days Of Summer, which even at twelve minutes is far, far too brief. Crosbie self-releases music on his own Lefthand Pressings label, and in the case of The Last Days Of Summer this was released as a 3” CD-R in a handmade sleeve back in the summer of this year. The track is quite honestly one of the most serenely beautiful pieces of music I've ever heard. Constructed entirely of heavily-processed layers of guitars recalling Robert Fripp's Soundscapes series or Stars Of The Lid, the track approaches a kind of icy classicism whilst maintaining an air of ethereal stasis. Anyone interested in hearing how guitars can be made to sound is urged to get their ears around this release. Copies can be obtained from Alistair's blog.

In 2002 my mothballed Nominal Musics label released – in similar lo-fi style – Songs From The Shelley, the complete recorded output of Fungal Noise, a band of school-friends centred around Haywards Heath and the song writing axis of vocalist Patrick 'Pod' O'Donnell and guitarist Neil Cullimore. Their songs had a youthful exuberance informed by bands from the Stourbridge scene like The Wonderstuff and Ned's Atomic Dustbin and often the archness of Blur. Fungal Noise recorded several strong demos between 1993 and 1996 and I thought their songs were really good, blessed with the sorts of spiky guitars and wry, cynical and often highly abstract lyrics that only a bunch of hip school kids could have conceived of. I came across the tracks on my hard drive last week, and they haven't lost any of their adolescent kick. Nominal Musics is on the back-burner until 2010, but you can email me at info at nominalmusics dot co dot uk for details on how to get a copy – go here for a comprehensive biography of the band and more information on Songs From The Shelley. To find out more about the Nominal Musics project, point yourself here.



Interview with Simon Nelson (SixtyFiveMiles)

Last week I caught up with Simon Nelson, whose band SixtyFiveMiles released their début mini-album Finnish Tango via Cherry Red earlier this year. Check out their MySpace and my review of the mini-album.

MJASmith : So why the name SixtyFiveMiles?

Simon Nelson : It's the distance between Elton in Cambridgeshire and Atherstone in Warwickshire. I live in Elton, and the other guys live in Atherstone. We rehearse there too.

MJAS : What's a Finnish Tango?

SN : I've travelled regularly to Helsinki in the last three years. Between work commitments I ended up writing the lyrics to a few of the tunes. I was also very much inspired by the ballroom dancing clubs in the city where women ask men to dance on Tuesday evenings – if you dance three times you have to wed.

MJAS : How did SixtyFiveMiles come about?

SN : Ash Woodward, who plays guitar, and Neil Gordon, who plays bass, have been in bands for years – I joined them in May 2008. We got to know Ryan Vann, who plays drums, through the musical grapevine in the West Midlands.

MJAS : Who do you see as your biggest influences?

SN : My personal influences include The Byrds, The Who, The Beatles, Dylan, Television, The Undertones, The Pistols, The Waterboys, The Las – your usual guitary stuff basically.

MJAS : How did you come to release Finnish Tango through Cherry Red?

SN : Cherry Red approached us in June – they also they put out The Best Of The Milltown Brothers [Simon was the guitarist and song writer in the band] but I also feel proud to be associated with a venerable British indie like this.

MJAS : Where can fans see you live?

SN : We've got gigs coming up at the Derby Arms in Colne (Lancashire) on 12th December, the Dublin Castle in Camden on 21st January, and the Kasbah in Coventry on 22nd January.

MJAS : How do your songs tend to come about?

SN : I tend to write songs on the acoustic guitar before taking them to the band for orchestration. I pick up a lot of my lyrical ideas from travel experiences and personal relationship dramas.

MJAS : What's next for the band?

SN : We are aiming to release a three-track EP in the New Year. We've just shot a video to support this.

Audio Journal by MJA Smith : 30/11/2009

Go to: My Other Blog / twitter.com/mjasmith

One of the albums I've returned my attention to this week is the seminal Yankee Hotel Foxtrot by Wilco, which my good friend Martyn gave me a few years ago. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is in many ways the yardstick by which all subsequent alt. country albums should be judged, deploying all manner of effects and sounds ordinarily restricted to the more esoteric reaches of modern electronica and sampleadelica. The opener, 'I Am Trying To Break Your Heart' is a case in point – a fragmented, clipped ballad that hangs together for almost as long as it threatens to fall to pieces (which it ultimately does), whereas 'Heavy Metal Drummer' is a blissfully straight up slice of lo-fi folk rockery. Other strong tracks are 'Kamera', a cheerful Sixties-esque upbeat track, and 'War On War' which has an unexpected middle eight almost entirely comprised of buzzing synth firework chaos.

Further out, Ubuweb delivered an obscure Yoko Ono piece in the last fortnight or so. 'Coughing Piece' was recorded in Tokyo in 1961 and comprises a bed of rich background environmental sounds – traffic noise, subtle feedback, muffled conversation – over which someone (possibly Ono) occasionally delivers various coughing sounds. The overall effect is one of considerable sonic depth but claustrophobic edginess. Over the length of the track the sporadic coughing becomes more pronounced, and as a listener you can't help but feel short of breath yourself; a bit like contagious yawning, I found myself coughing along at one point. At just over thirty minutes in length, it may appear excessive but as a piece of avant garde sonic art it is nevertheless thoroughly absorbing.

Wire's IBTABA – shorthand for It's Beginning To And Back Again, a line from the song 'German Shepherds' – was an album I bought on vinyl from Andy's Records in Colchester on a 1996 summer's day after finishing my first year of degree exams. Of all the band's material from their second coming, IBTABA is perhaps the most comprehensive. The electronics which first emerged on The Ideal Copy and the spindly, frantic 'dugga-dugga-dugga' guitars of 'Drill' – a track which would, when performed live, take on an entirely amorphous dimension and length – are all present, as are some of their most obviously elliptical lyrics. Principally containing new versions of tracks taken from the earlier album A Bell Is A Cup Until It Is Struck, the album was conceived as a way of presenting the tracks in the studio the way they were realised in a live setting. Accordingly, the superior slow-building version of 'Boiling Boy' is probably my favourite track from Wire's entire 1980s / 1990s period, inspiring me to use the title as a moniker for a single electronic pop track I wrote a few years later.

Earlier this year I found myself at Piccadilly Underground station one balmy summer evening after a client event at the Royal Academy. Descending the steps from street level I saw a large poster containing the words 'Pop Will Eat Itself' and my pulse momentarily quickened – was this the return of the Stourbridge band that I listened to almost constantly throughout my A-levels? Sadly not; it was some sort of Art On The Underground installation. My friend Jon got me into PWEI, recording me tapes of the band's samples-and-punk-meets-Brummie-hip-hop albums, sizeable chunks of which I wound up sampling for my own tracks. The swansong album Dos Dedos Mis Amigos ('Two Fingers My Friends'), with its characteristic Designers Republic sleeve, found the band straddling the wry, cynically humorous elements of their sound with more robust, serious material – the single 'Ich Bin Ein Auslander' is an anti-Nazism rant while 'Familus Horribilis' (a play on the Queen's apocryphal 'annus horribilis' speech) casts the Royal Family as a Simpsons-style dysfunctional family. It shouldn't work, but it does. The bleak 'Everything's Cool' remains my anthem of choice for a hypothetical post-apocalyptic world.

Midlands band SixtyFiveMiles released a seven-track mini download album via the usual sites on the frequently pleasing Cherry Red label, one of the UK's most enduring independents. Finnish Tango is a small slither of indie-rock brilliance from the fourpiece band, key tracks being the Foil-esque opener 'Found Out' and the arid negativity of 'Don't Want You Hanging Around' which reaches the same depths of weary dystopia as Interpol, and knocks spots off the NYC band's hopeless copyists – and fellow Midlanders – Editors. 'Butterflies' and 'Manhattan' are, in contrast, upbeat and gleefully optimistic pieces. Definitely a band to check out. An interview with Simon from the band should appear here next week, but in the meantime check out SixtyFiveMiles's tracks on their MySpace.

Audio Journal by MJA Smith : 23/11/2009

Go to: My Other Blog / twitter.com/mjasmith

Many Christmases ago, my younger sister received a copy of the Oasis video Live By The Sea, recorded at Southend’s Cliffs Pavilion. As was often the case in a one video household, in the days between Christmas and going back to school, we’d frequently squabble over whose new video was going get put on.

Feeling especially spiteful when my sister won this particular fight and Live By The Sea went into the video recorder, I immediately adopted a critical stance; I’d already made it pretty clear by that early stage in the brothers Gallagher’s career that I couldn’t stand them, and so I spent the first few minutes of their performance throwing insults at the screen, mocking their accents and so on. Childish, I know.

My biggest, and I think most well-founded, criticism was that they were just boring. They didn’t move about, they didn’t really engage with the audience, and overall – despite their growing reputation as one of the most important of the Britpop bands – they just left me feeling like they couldn’t be bothered to put on a show.

That notion of a big band being boring came to the front of my thinking when we went to see the Arctic Monkeys at Wembley Arena this week. Here’s one of the most popular bands in the UK at present, with three (mostly) critically acclaimed albums under their belt, and yet they failed to excite me at all.

Even songs which I really like of theirs, such as the relentless, urgent onslaught of the single ‘Brian Storm’ or Humbug’s ‘Crying Lightning’, were unimpressive and failed to stop me actually yawning. During one of the plodding slow numbers or tedious album filler tracks, I know I briefly nodded off. Of the two concerts we went to this week – Kasabian and this – this was the one I was looking forward to. I was broadly indifferent toward Kasabian and their elaborate big venue pretension, but came away mostly thinking they were excellent. With Arctic Monkeys I came away feeling drained of any enthusiasm whatsoever.

Reading their fans’ comments on the concert, it’s fair to say that I’m in the minority with this view. For me they’re just not a stadium rock band, and to see them trying to fill a big stage and a big stadium is just painful. Their only concession to the standard gestures of the stadium band appeared to be the deployment of bigger lighting systems than could feasibly fill a small venue, video screens (more on those in a moment) and occasional meek requests to the audience to see how they were feeling. As for those screens, which were mostly coloured in artistically edgy red tones, they were split so that they statically focussed in on one band member – something that was uniquely possible with Arctic Monkeys since they never bloody move. Even the confetti-firing canon went off like it couldn’t be bothered.

Apparently, much of Alex Turner’s reticence toward crowd engagement, or indeed anything that appears to suggest that he actually wants to be on stage at all, comes down to confidence. I struggle to see how. Turner and co have had three albums – four if you include his side-project The Last Shadow Puppets – and many, many concerts in which to hone their craft. All of which tells me it’s sheer lack of charisma that is manifesting itself on stage.

When I edge into popular music and feel disappointed, I have found that my only antidote is to head further out into experimental territories. So it is in reaction to the Arctic Monkeys that I find myself bathing my ears in the harsh free jazz sounds of saxophonists Jim Sauter and Don Dietrich and guitarist Don Miller, aka Borbetomagus; specifically I’m listening to two performances delivered in New York and DC in 1988 and ‘89 respectively downloaded from the always resourceful Ubuweb site. These free improv pieces are not for the feint-hearted, comprising harsh blasts of distorted noise from Sauter and Dietrich’s saxes and Miller’s guitar.

Audio Journal by MJA Smith : 16/11/2009

Go to: My Other Blog / twitter.com/mjasmith

M and I went to see Kasabian at Wembley Arena on Sunday night. Wembley is quite possibly my least favourite venue, a feeling that was enhanced on Sunday by public transport issues and further compounded by not being especially bothered about seeing the band. M’s a fan, whereas I can’t seem to get past front man Tom Meighan’s laddish persona or Serge Pizzorno’s adoption of every rock pose in the Spinal Tap rulebook.

All that said, the most recent Kasabian album, West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum is a great album, as are their previous two come to think of it. As a live band, they’ve obviously more than mastered the dark art of stadium histrionics, which I often find irritating, but you have to concede they do it very well. So it’s fair to say, once I’d got past Wembley’s consistently terrible sound and the band’s onstage aloofness, I was really, really impressed… eventually.



The band arrived on their ephemera-cluttered and asylum-themed stage with the ‘Underdog’ B-side ‘Julie & The Moth-Man’, an upbeat crowd-pleaser which betters a number of tracks on West Ryder. The trouble was that the song packed such an instant sonic punch and required so much energy from the band that it took them several songs to get anywhere close to that song’s impact again. Consequently the single ‘Underdog’ fell flat, as did ‘Where Did All The Love Go’, one of my favourite tracks from the album. All was well by the crowd-sung coda of the anthemic encore track ‘L.S.F. (Lost Souls Forever)’, which carried on out of the stadium, into the Underground station and probably all the way to Baker Street. Even The Mighty Boosh’s Noel Fielding put in a typically creepy, elastic-limbed performance to a rapturous audience reception.

That reception was rightfully not extended to the second support act, Reverend & The Makers, a band who seem to rely on their front man’s aggressive, crowd-baiting arrogance and drunk-bloke-on-a-night-out posturing in the absence of a clear sonic identity. I wouldn’t say that their songs were necessarily bad, and they certainly seem keen to mine the same cocky electro-rock seam as Kasabian, but in comparison they are undoubtedly a much more mediocre offering. That, combined with the front man’s sub-Gallagher attitude and the skinny girl who seemed to be performing some sort of trite exercise routine behind her keyboards, and you get a band that will always be second on the bill.

On the train this past week I’ve listened to Grinderman’s eponymous debut. Grinderman is essentially a Nick Cave side-project, featuring a slimmed-down Bad Seeds and Cave himself on guitar for the first time. Described by Esquire magazine as ‘one of [the] five best mid-life crisis albums‘, the sound of Grinderman is the closest the latter-day Cave has managed to get to reclaiming the ur-punk nihilism of his earlier band The Birthday Party, the overall sound being one of atonal thrashing and noisy blues. My favourite track is the wild garage rock assault of ‘Honey Bee (Let’s Fly To Mars)’ with insectoid sibilant rasps from Cave in the style of The Cramps’s sadly-departed Lux Interior on the similarly bugtastic ‘Human Fly’.



Tom Waits’s Asylum Years was a weekend purchase, and provides my first immersion into the barrel-aged jazz torch songs of Waits’s seventies output on Asylum Records. Tom’s vocal sound is one that initially made for uncomfortable listening until I finally cottoned on to his Louis Armstrong-esque depth and tone. It is truly for artists like Waits that the oft-misused term noir was designed for, his emotionally-wrought songs clashing effortlessly with nocturnal tales of schlepping round New York’s seediest neighbourhoods, while all along you feel that a glass of bourbon was never far from Tom’s microphone stand. Next stop, Swordfishtrombones.

Magazine cover CDs are usually put together with a slapdash, unit-shifting mentality, but not The Velvets Revolution compilation given away with this month’s Uncut. The CD consists of fifteen artists supposedly influenced by The Velvet Underground and for once – with probably one exception from Espers – the tracks really do capture the spirit of the band Uncut are trying to draw comparisons with. It’s worth buying the magazine anyway for the profile and focus on the band, but the CD’s tracks from the likes of Suicide, Loop and the Brian Eno / Phil Manzanera project 801 all evidence the wide-ranging impact the Velvets have had on modern music, whether that be dirge-like scrapings (Fursaxa), motorik ‘Sister Ray’-inspired punk (Thee Oh Sees) or genteel Nico / Moe Tucker balladry (Hope Sandoval & The Warm Intentions).

Audio Journal by MJA Smith : 09/11/2009

Go to: My Other Blog / twitter.com/mjasmith

So where were we?

Ah yes. The last album I wrote about two weeks ago was Love Is Hell by Ryan Adams. This album has remained on relatively constant play during my week off, but has been joined by other Adams albums, namely 2003’s Rock N’ Roll (purchased on a late evening shopping spree at Sister Ray on Soho’s Berwick Street) and Gold (2001). The former is, as its name suggests, a pretty intense and rocky album in a post-Strokes sense, whereas the latter is much more country, like an MOR Bright Eyes. Like much of Adams’ work, evocative images of New York pervade the songs, though few are as overtly joyous about the city as Gold’s ‘New York, New York’.

The trip to Sister Ray also yielded David Byrne’s Live From Austin, Texas album, a live set from Byrne in 2001 wherein he sings plenty tracks from the Talking Heads days as well as songs from Rei Momo and Look Into The Eyeball. He even manages to throw in a surprisingly good cover version of Whitney’s ‘I Wanna Dance With Somebody’ whose strings lend the track a golden-days-of-disco feel. On later tours he’d go on to tackle Beyonce’s ‘Crazy In Love’, most notably accompanied by San Francisco’s Extra Action Marching Band at the Hollywood Bowl. The vibe here moves from the Latin rhythms that Byrne has embraced for many years to string-soaked pieces like ‘The Great Intoxication’. Good though it is, it does make me rue selling my ticket to his Royal Festival Hall performance earlier in the year.



Way back in my teenage days, I owned the first two Nine Inch Nails albums – Pretty Hate Machine and The Downward Spiral. It was a logical next step into darker musical territory from bands that I still listen to, specifically Depeche Mode and Nitzer Ebb. Typically, I’d only really ever listen to those two albums when I was in a negative state of mind, and so when life turned broadly more optimistic I gave them away. I downloaded a couple of tracks from The Downward Spiral a few weeks ago and was surprised at how very tame, and to my mind camp, the NIN sound actually was. Positing that view on Twitter, one of my followers told me to check out Ghosts, the instrumental collection put out by Trent Reznor a couple of years back.

I wasn’t prepared to commit myself to buying the $250 box set, and anyway, the thought of two and a half hours of bleak instrumental music wasn’t terribly appealing, so I opted for the free nine-track download and have been pleasantly surprised. The sound veers from basic instrumental tracks which, were they to have vocals, wouldn’t have sounded out of place on The Downward Spiral to more esoteric ambient tracks sprinkled with some nice Satie-esque piano. It’s totally recognisable as a Nine Inch Nails album, without the despair-inducing lyrics. So thanks @shreenas for recommending that to me.

Cezary Gapik started following me on Twitter in the last fortnight. Gapik is a Polish electronic music composer, much of whose material is available gratis via his MySpace. I downloaded The Limestone EP, a collection of six short tracks containing lots of sonic adventure using synths, found sounds and field recordings. I’ve been inching back into this sort of music lately, and Gapik’s music has a particular sonic depth which perfectly suits where my ears are at just now. Fans of textural ambient noise will not be disappointed.

Disappointed you should expect to be, however, if you decide to visit the British Music Experience at the O2. If you want a condensed, anodyne history of British popular music from the 1950s to the present day, I have no doubt that you’ll enjoy it. The exhibition is short-sighted in its ambition, focussing only on the most successful artists of the day and more or less casting the more influential, but marginal players to the sidelines as it tries unsuccessfully to present half a century‘s worth of music in a single exhibition.

So it is that the Pet Shop Boys dominate the 1980s display but the litany of other – and better – synth bands get overlooked. The only things I found of any major interest were Bernard ‘New Order’ Sumner’s lyrics to ‘Blue Monday’ and a selection of Bowie’s scribbled verses, both of which showed the two songwriters to have terribly childlike handwriting. There are lots of interactive displays, but overall I was just bored. Even the punk section, focussing principally on – you guessed it – the Sex Pistols felt diluted and sanitised, bereft of any of the bile and venom with which UK punk arrived in the seventies hinterlands. Definitely one to avoid.

Audio Journal by MJA Smith : 26/10/2009

Go to: My Other Blog / twitter.com/mjasmith

I have a habit of repeating myself throughout this blog, so apologies for that. One such thing I often find myself saying is how much Robert Fripp redefined the way I listen to guitar music. His Love Cannot Bear: Soundscapes – Live In The USA is a good example of this. Fripp, the backbone of the band King Crimson has, over time, developed techniques that allow his guitar to trigger electronic sounds – often dubbed Frippertronics – from a bank of equipment which fully disguises the fact that a guitar prompted the sound that emerges. The result is a serene suite of electronic atmospherics which allowed me in the past to bridge the gap between the apparently limitless possibilities of the synth and the enduring versatility of the humble electric guitar.

Fripp frequently played on records produced by Brian Eno, and the two have collaborated on a number of influential duo albums. Eno’s Desert Island Selection, a companion CD album to the vinyl More Blank Than Frank comprises tracks culled from his back catalogue and sees Eno’s progression from post-Roxy glam oddness on Here Come The Warm Jets to the pioneering ambience of Music For Airports. I already own More Blank Than Frank on vinyl, which I bought many years ago in Barcelona. I’d like to say that I was in the city on some sort of Hemingway-inspired bohemian backpacking expedition, but I wasn’t. Regrettably, whilst there’s a bit of cross-over between the two albums, the best track on More Blank Than Frank – ‘King’s Lead Hat’, an anagram of Talking Heads, who Eno produced – is absent here. ‘I’ll Come Running (To Tie Your Shoe)’ and ‘Here He Comes’, close second and third are here however.

One of the defining artistic collaborations Eno developed was with David Bowie, who began working with the producer when he uprooted to Berlin in the mid-1970s. Low is an album which found Bowie in introspective mode, Eno and others (including Robert Fripp) adding texture and colour on what has become an influential piece in the more experimental territories of Bowie’s back catalogue. Low has a reputation for being bleak and dark (it was a major influence on Joy Division, a band who made the words ‘bleak’ and ‘dark’ very much their own), but I don’t really hear that. The first half is made up of electronically-augmented leftfield pop while the second half is broadly instrumental and more like what you‘d expect from Eno.

David Bowie once had a very public spat in a New York restaurant with the imperious erstwhile Velvet Underground singer / guitarist Lou Reed which is well documented in Christopher Sandford’s Loving The Alien biography. Lou Reed and his former Velvets song writing partner John Cale reconciled some of their personal and artistic differences to record Songs For Drella in 1990. ‘Drella’ was a nickname adopted by Andy Warhol, who was by 1990 three years departed of this earth. Warhol, the sui generis poster boy for pop art, was responsible for launching the Velvets into the art and rock world’s conscience, ‘producing’ their debut album in the only way he knew how – by letting the tapes run and just recording whatever racket the band wanted to make, much as with the lo-fi hands-off way in which he produced his videos. The Velvet Underground And Nico was derided at the time by the establishment as being under-produced and, like much of the mainstream art world perception of Warhol’s work at the time, lazily crafted.

That backlash to someone who’s influence has been rewritten and made large over time is a theme that emerges in Songs For Drella. The album is basically a mini-operetta by the two musicians biographically detailing Warhol’s life from his upbringing in blue-collar Pittsburgh, his early employment as an illustrator for a shoe firm, through the speed- and heroin-addled craziness of the Factory, the development of Warhol’s signature repetitive style, his near-fatal shooting by Valerie Solanis, the creative void after and his ultimate corporeal decline. Cale and Reed take it in turns to deliver the songs, including one piece where Cale perfectly apes Warhol’s introspective and scattershot tonality on a piece which sees him read from the artist’s journals, a piece in which he mourns the loss of Factory stalwarts like Billy Name and curses those who he feels have disappointed him, such as Ondine and Reed. Reed responds on the final track ‘Hello It’s Me’ wherein he finally offers a heartfelt apology for neglecting their friendship, reaffirms his love for Warhol’s work, and sticks the boot in with a few feelings that he won’t let lie.

Reed and Cale both collaborated with Factory girl and Warhol muse Nico on her album Chelsea Girl. Nico possessed a leaden Teutonic intonation which can make listening to her singing somewhat uncomfortable. Me, I’ve gone from detesting the intrusion of her voice on the Velvets’ debut to finding new depths in her style, and so it was with the latter view that I approached Chelsea Girl, the title track of which explores the madness of the Hotel Chelsea wherein she reels off accounts of morally reprehensible behaviour by the Factory cast and crew. (I should at this juncture point out that another album I’ve been listening to over and over this week is Love Is Hell by Ryan Adams, which also includes a song about the Chelsea; more on that album below.) The entire feel of the album has a low-key Greenwich-Village-café-on-a-Sixties-Sunday-afternoon sort of vibe, with lots of flute and strummed acoustic guitars. Occasional strings colour the atmosphere tenderly.

Andy Warhol designed the homoerotic sleeve to The Rolling Stones’s Sticky Fingers, from which the hits ‘Brown Sugar’ and ‘Wild Horses’ were culled. Growing up at a time when the Stones were well past their peak and already on the mega-tour circuit which positioned them as greedy old dudes on a tour bus, I completely overlooked the powerful and sometimes challenging sound they perfected earlier on in their career; so I‘ll readily admit to being late to the party when it comes to albums like Sticky Fingers, where my favourite tracks are those – like the best Velvet Underground tracks – that deal with the darker side of life – ‘Sister Morphine’ is one long homage to chemical dependency while ’Can’t You Hear Me Knocking’ lurches perfectly from bluesy soul-rock to honky-tonk jazz via some Bitches Brew-esque percussion.



‘Sister Morphine’ was co-written with Marianne Faithfull, who also provided backing vocals on Ryan Adams’s Love Is Hell. All I will say about Love Is Hell is that very occasionally an album comes along which makes you think to yourself ‘You know what? If I never listened to another album again after this I wouldn’t mind.’ Love Is Hell is one of those albums. It’s moving, uplifting, bleak, disturbing all at once and I can honestly say I’ve heard nothing else like it. I must have listened to it a dozen times and counting and I’ve only owned it for a week.

There will be no Audio Journal next week as I need a break from turning this out each week. Instead I’ll be putting the finishing touches to a piece for My Other Blog about – I kid you not – teenage girls eating Pot Noodles on the train at 8.50 in the morning. Oh, and probably listening to Love Is Hell over and over.

Audio Journal by MJA Smith : 19/10/2009

Go to: My Other Blog / twitter.com/mjasmith

Though perhaps not as radical or aurally challenging as some of their earliest work, Einstürzende Neubauten’s Ende Neu (1996) still finds the Berliners hammering away at steel, deploying compressors and all manner of junkyard mechanics to produce their highly individual artistic sound. Frontman, vocalist and guitarist Blixa Bargeld, more recently departed of Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds, holds the lot together with vocal deliveries that transcend the German language’s supposed lyrical limitations, and on the highly un-Neubuaten string-soaked tracks with Meret Becker, shows that the gradual progression of Nick Cave’s writing while Bargeld was on board – from Old Testament fervour to romantic wonder – was not wasted on Blixa‘s own writing. Nevertheless, despite those stretching tracks, my favourite tracks are ‘Installation No.1’, with its vocal of ‘Disobey / It’s a law’ and the frantic, dystopian opener ‘Was Ist Ist’.

When I was a subscriber to The Wire magazine – a music magazine, not a monthly publication based on the cult US TV crime drama – they would rave about the elusive, illusory character Jandek, a prolific artist reclusively skulking on the fringes of alternative music. His music was always on my list to sample at some point, but I simply never got around to it. This week, UbuWeb, the go-to site for all things alternative, sent round a link to a blog containing 31 Jandek albums, from the early 1980s through to Skirting The Edge, released this year on Jandek’s own Corwood Industries label. I figured the latter would be a suitable entry point to his music. Essentially, Skirting The Edge is four tracks of vocal musings over incandescent acoustic guitar, with a bleak tone throughout. ITunes labelled it as ‘lo fi’ when I added it to my library, which is probably right, given its raw production aesthetic.

On to slightly more accessible things, this week I downloaded the eponymous debut from The Little Death, or, more appropriately, The Little Death (NYC) as there are apparently two bands with that name in existence. It’s tempting to describe the band as Moby’s low key side-project, as he is indeed a core member, providing guitars across their debut album. In truth, The Little Death is principally a vehicle for vocalist Laura Dawn, who has appeared live with Moby and contributed vocals to at least one of his albums. The overall sound is one of soulful blues, as filtered through a bunch of musicians living in New York. Gutsy female vocalists aren’t ordinarily my thing, but on this album I’ve found it pretty engaging. My favourite songs are the upbeat tracks ‘Mean Woman’, ‘Hurricane’ and ‘Love Or A Gun’.

From the blues I moved effortlessly to ambient electronica, as crafted by Sheffield’s Richard H. Kirk, founder member of Cabaret Voltaire, one of the bands – like Neubauten – who were grouped together under the banner ‘industrial’. Virtual State (1993) was released on Warp Records and contains lots of trademark Kirk elements – burbling synths, African percussion and distorted samples of speech covertly culled from radio frequencies. This was an album I used to stick on whilst at university to aid concentration while doing my coursework, and consequently hearing it again this week left me feeling rather queasy as I recollected hours spent poring over balance sheets and econometric calculations.



In response to the BBC’s Synth Britannia documentary, it would be all too easy at this juncture to prattle on about all the bands that I like from the synth-pop era, but I won’t. I was castigated by a reader a couple of weeks back for the admission that Erasure remain my favourite band, so let’s not even go there. Instead, in deference to the influence of the humble synth on popular music, I’ll mention a single released about fifteen years ago by Node – U2 / Depeche Mode / PJ Harvey producer Flood and Suede producer Ed Buller and a couple of others – called ’Terminus’ which saw the duo setting up massive modular synths on the concourse of Paddington Station. One can only imagine the reaction of travellers heading to the South West upon hearing the sounds the duo coaxed from their monolithic walls of dials, switches and cabling, but no doubt it was as similarly divisive as when Kraftwerk’s ‘The Model’ first graced the charts.

Audio Journal by MJA Smith : 12/10/2009

Go to: My Other Blog / twitter.com/mjasmith

Last week was spent listening – mostly – to music that prompts recollections of events, people and situations.

The first was Possessed by the Balanescu Quartet. Possessed is effectively a collection of classical arrangements of Kraftwerk songs – ‘The Robots’, ‘The Model’, ‘Autobahn’ – and a handful of other arrangements, including ‘Hanging Upside-Down’ by David Byrne.



I saw the Balanescu Quartet perform live at the Patti Smith-curated Jimi Hendrix tribute, the last event to take place at the Royal Festival Hall on London’s South Bank before it closed for a swanky refit. They performed four classical adaptations of Hendrix tracks, their version of ‘Foxy Lady’ being the best of the bunch; they certainly providing an accessible counterpoint to other acts on the bill, chiefly Red Hot Chili Pepper bassist Flea who provided ten minutes of looping bass and trumpet that bore little relation to any of the Hendrix back catalogue.

Alexander Balanescu is not simply known for these arrangements of music from other genres; he is an accomplished composer whose scores have adorned film and television soundtracks, but Possessed is what it is – an accessible classical album, but one that fans of Kraftwerk can listen to comfortably, hearing the tracks almost as remixes rather than re-arrangements.

This album has a tragic poignancy for me. The first time I listened to this album was on the Underground. I was stuck on a train a few feet below the streets around Kings Cross, having just left the bright platforms of the Tube station. The train stopped and just sat there, sporadic announcements from the driver that we’d be sat there for a few minutes more and that we’d be on the move very soon.

Me, I couldn’t have cared less. I was enjoying the album and the delay simply meant that I’d be late for work, which at the time was no bad thing. In the end, the train pulled forward to a disused platform beneath Pentonville Road, whereupon we were evacuated up into the bright lights of the early morning. It was only at this point that the chaos, panic and devastation of that day, 7 July 2005, became evident. The album played on in my ears but I just wasn’t listening to it anymore.

Listening to Possessed this week was the first time I’ve attempted to listen to it since that day.

Another album prompting memories to resurface is Warp Record’s Artificial Intelligence II collection of ‘ambient’ electronica from the likes of Autechre, Cabaret Voltaire’s Richard H. Kirk, Speedy J and Link. It was the summer 1994 and I’d just been unceremoniously and unexpectedly dumped by a girl. I spent the afternoon laid up on my parents’ sofa listening, initially, to the Depeche Mode song ‘The Things You Said’ on repeat, the accusatory disappointment of that song perfectly matching my despondency. After ten or twelve listens I decided to put something else on; it was a close call between the embittered rage of Nine Inch Nail’s The Downward Spiral or the much more chilled Artificial Intelligence II compilation. The latter won the afternoon, leading me to a more logical and calm state of mind.



While we’re heading down musical memory lane, I downloaded Radio Musicola by Nik Kershaw this week, the Eighties doyen’s third album. I bought this on cassette from Cash Converters in Colchester in 1997, the day after my first Valentine’s Day ‘with’ my ex-girlfriend. For some reason, we’d decided to spend the evening apart. So I went out into Colchester with my housemates, drank too many Moscow Mules and, well, it didn’t end terribly advantageously. The next day, bleary-eyed, my friend Neil and I went into town late in the afternoon and bought a load of second hand tapes from Cash Converters, one of which was Radio Musicola. While not as good as Kershaw’s first two albums, it nevertheless remains a pop gem. But it definitely sounds better when you’re not hungover.



Some other things on my iPod this week – ‘Horchata’, the new song by Vampire Weekend which they have punted for free this week (verdict : more of the same, only with bigger production and strings); In Rainbows by Radiohead (not a fan of the band per se, and I’m glad I only paid a couple of quid for this when it was made available as a ‘pay what you like’ download, but it is good); and Howyoudoin? by dub-influenced Sarf Londoners Renegade Soundwave. I don’t know why, but I stuck that last album on my dad’s car stereo one Saturday afternoon on the way to pick up my mother and sister. He balked at the messy, sample-heavy songs, but I insisted on listening to it. He turned to me when we were sat waiting at a red light and said ‘I don’t think your mum would like this,’ as the apocalyptic bad-drug-experience (but never exactly precautionary) account detailed on ‘Blast ‘Em Out’ started its slow and edgy journey out of the speakers.