Simon Fisher Turner / Espen J. Jörgensen 'Soundescapes'

A new Documentary Evidence review.

Simon Fisher Turner / Espen J. Jörgensen 'Soundescapes' - http://bit.ly/tkeOVJ

Can 'Tago Mago' / Inspiral Carpets 'You're So Good For Me'

Two new Documentary Evidence reviews.

Can 'Tago Mago' (1971) 40th anniversary edition - http://bit.ly/uJeaR1

Inspiral Carpets 'You're So Good For Me' (2011) - http://bit.ly/t60XTH

Simon Fisher Turner / Espen J. Jörgensen

To confirm that I am, musically at least, still alive here is an interview I just completed with Simon Fisher Turner and Espen J. Jörgensen on 'Soundescapes', their collaboration which is released by Mute Records on Monday: http://bit.ly/vWi5xK

The Last Post

Dear readers,

I have decided, after two years and nearly one hundred posts, to terminate my Audio Journal blog. Thank you for your support, comments, challenges, disagreements and general levels of encouragement since I started this weekly (and more recently sporadic) survey of what I've been listening to.

Going forward I'll be concentrating on composing short stories and my Documentary Evidence music website. Anyone interested in following my writings there should point themselves to the following links.

Documentary Evidence (RSS feed / updates available by email through Feedburner link below)

http://feeds.feedburner.com/DocumentaryEvidence-AnUnofficialMuteRecordsWebsite

My Other Blog (use 'subscribe by email' button on the right)

http://mjasmith3.blogspot.com

Thanks again for reading and supporting my naïve writings.

MJA Smith, 25.07.2011

- fin

Audio Journal : 17/06/2011 - 27.06.2011

17.06.2011

In the post: Komputer 'Valentina' 12” (1998) – in advance of an interview with Dave Baker from the band, I thought I'd better gen up on their back catalogue; Perplexer 'Acid Folk' CD (1994) which is a weird way-too-fast bagpipes-meets-acid-house track from 1994 possibly transcending stoopidity by the fact that Ramon Zengler from second-wave acid pioneers Hardfloor was an occasional member; field research for Documentary Evidence as it was released via Mute; Moby and Orde Meikle (from Slam) mix CD from Mixmag in 1992; again field research for Doc.Ev. I had the Moby mix on cassette but can't find it. It includes 'C3 Bells', an exclusive Moby track which I don't think has ever seen the light of day.

18.06.2011

Listened to Cry by Simple Minds while ferrying Daughter2 to ballet. Cry came out in 2002, I think. I hadn't really taken an interest in Simple Minds during the Eighties, and I only got this since Erasure's Vince Clarke wrote a track for the album. I always stuck them in with U2 as 'rock' bands that I'd never learn to love. I hadn't by then watched The Breakfast Club and so I had no particular warmth to something like 'Alive And Kicking', but when I did finally watch that film a few years ago, it made me appreciate Simple Minds for the first time. Cry has some really good electronically-enhanced pop / rock tracks, although in places its 'cleverness' hasn't lasted the passage of time well. I think its release was generally overlooked at the time, which strikes me as a shame. I spent a week in Corfu in 2002 listening to this over and over whilst sunbathing.



Prepared some interview questions for Moby at night (though doubtful this will actually happen) and recorded old vinyl from Bomb The Bass ('Say A Little Prayer') and (Die) Krupps ('Wahre Arbeit – Wahrer Lohn').

19.06.2011

We were off out for a visit to Stowe Gardens for father's day and I took my two lovely daughters to the shops to pick up some lunch for a picnic before collecting Mrs S and heading off. Just lately Daughter1 has started requesting the Glee songs that Mrs S has on her iPhone while they drive to school. One of the songs she and her sister love is a cover of 'Don't You Want Me' by The Human League. The version by 'Rachel' and 'Blane' (I've probably spelled those wrong, but I can't be bothered to check IMDB) is, I have to say, pretty good, though it does re-cast the song as a dancey, Europop track; a bit like a Lady GaGa track, I guess. Having been subjected to this track a few times over the last few weeks, I decided it was high time that I played them the original Human League version from 1981's Dare. Daughter1 loved it as soon as the electropop beat kicked in. It is, and always will be, a fantastic track, and I don't mind if it appearing on Glee brings it to a whole new audience. Daughter1 is the same age that I was when 'Don't You Want Me' was released, so her being into the Glee version has a neat symmetry.

Mrs S played me a couple of tracks that she'd downloaded last week. For someone who describes electronic music as 'plinky plonky' music, she seems to alight upon tracks with an electronic edge surprisingly frequently. One was a track from Battles' new album Gloss Drop ('Inchworm') which has a processed funk sound not unlike a remix of Talking Heads' 'Houses In Motion'. The other was 'Now That I'm Real (How Does It Feel)' by Chad Valley, which is languid, hazy electronic pop in the style of Toro Y Moi. There's a lot of this type of dreamy, unabashed synth stuff kicking about at present, all trading under the banner of 'hypnogogic pop' and it's all – mostly – very good.

In the evening Mrs S and I took ourselves off to the Barbican Centre to watch an acoustic performance from Ryan Adams. I've been listening to Adams's music for no more than a couple of years. It started with 'New York, New York' from Gold, back when I was trying to create a playlist of songs exclusively concerned with New York (I started one for London too). My immersion into his music proper when Mrs S bought Love Is Hell after reading about how good it was, and my interest in his music just sort of grew from there. I never thought I'd ever get to see him perform live, especially since he effectively quit music two years ago because of annoying audience members and hearing problems. Although, it seems, healthy, Adams had a reasonably chequered past and an interview I saw with him showed him to be a pretty troubled soul.

Live, he turned out to be far more light-hearted and self-deprecating than I had expected, despite his history of on-stage volatility, and in spite of his guitar refusing to stay in tune. It felt like a complete privilege to have seen him perform his songs so utterly stripped back, in spite of the vastness of the Barbican's main auditorium. And he only lost his temper – mildly – once.

20.06.2011

Continued the Ryan Adams mood by listening to his punky Rock 'n Roll album whilst driving to and from a meeting. I could have listened to some of the more fragile, acoustic type songs he played the night before, but you can't drive to those. And besides, I wanted to try and preserve my memory of his performance as long as possible. Alas, it's too late and I've forgotten most of it.

21.06.2011

Finished off two reviews for Documentary Evidence today; a piece I pulled together six years ago on Modey Lemon's fantastically acid-fried 'Sleepwalkers' EP but never posted, and the review of Perplexer's 'Acid Folk'. I thought acid-house-meets-bagpipe-folk-music would sound naff, and it really does. Listened some more Ryan Adams.

22.06.2011

Mrs S and I went to London today, ostensibly for yet another Kings Of Leon concert at Hyde Park, but the best part of today was buying records in Rough Trade East (me: Bush Tetras double A-side 7”, 1979 New York 'no wave' CD; Mrs S: Bon Iver) and Fopp (me: Yeasayer; Mrs S: PJ Harvey, Tom Petty, Queens Of The Stone Age).

Maybe it was the mud. Maybe it was the audience. Maybe it was going to Ryan Adams on Sunday and the fact that most other concerts after that would have been rubbish anyway. Maybe it was the support slot from Paul Weller, who I don't really like (the Brendan Lynch dub mixes of some of his tracks notwithstanding). Whatever it was, Kings Of Leon completely bored me, and we left after about seven songs, though they were mercifully the old ones, the ones before the abysmal 'Sex On Fire'.

23.06.2011

Wrote a review of Bomb The Bass' 'Say A Little Prayer' which I'd bought as a 7” from CD Buttek beim Palais in Luxembourg last month. Listened to more Ryan Adams.

24.06.2011

Watched the film adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis's The Informers. It opens with 'New Gold Dream (81 - 82 - 83 - 84)' by Simple Minds played at a party and it made me want to find my greatest hits CD, or buy the movie soundtrack, or both.

It turns out that it's not actually on Glittering Prize (though it clearly should be), and the soundtrack CD is ridiculously overpriced. Another great song on the soundtrack is Devo's 'Freedom Of Choice', a really perfect New Wave tracks; in the movie Chris Isaak plays a drunk dad trying to engage with his disinterested son. He puts on the radio in the back of the limo they're sharing and on comes this Devo track. He starts tapping along and says the track's 'cool', which of course renders it totally not cool.

Post-film, I decided not to consume more TV and stuck on Pop by U2, probably because I was aware on some subconscious level that they were just about to take the stage down at Glastonbury. Pop was released in 1997, the same year as Depeche Mode comeback, post-heroin album, Ultra. At the time I was sharing a house in King Stephen Road, Colchester with Neil, Barry and Craig. Neil was a U2 fan; I was a Depeche Mode fan. There was a bit of media-fuelled competition as to whether U2's 'Discotheque' or Depeche's 'Barrel Of A Gun' would get to number one in the ye olde UK singles charts. As if there was actually a competition – Depeche would never, ever score a number one in Blighty, whereas U2 had a slick, Flood-produced electro-rock single and a video that had the band ripping off the Village People. Was I annoyed that Neil's band won the 'competition'? Not at all. Was I disappointed when U2 remixed Flood's intricate synth-augmented originals for their second best of compilation? Absolutely. I thought it was an act of extreme cowardice. Neil told me later that they didn't play any songs from Pop at Glasto. Cowards.

25.06.2011

A few weekends ago we watched a Foo Fighters documentary. After, I tweeted words to the effect that I still found proper rock music intimidating, that Dave Grohl came across as a really nice guy, but that I ultimately didn't like the Foo Fighters. Mrs S subjected me to their best of album today, which reinforced just how little I like their songs.

It's funny how you alight upon certain things, musically or otherwise. We came upon a CD of early Lonnie Donegan tracks whilst wandering around a French market at Waddesdon Manor on mother's day. The sound I heard coming out of the tannoy CD player at the music stall was a sort of big-band be-bop, which to me sounded like the sort of jazz that appears consistently in Woody Allen movies.

I had a fixed impression of Lonnie Donegan as a banjo or ukele player, which is true. I also thought that he only played cheesy, humorous songs such as 'My Old Man's A Dustman', and that's probably also true, but he first cut his teeth as part of a jazz group led by Chris Barber and often featuring the vocals of Ottilie Patterson. Hence the unexpected big band sound. On most of the tracks you can barely hear Donegan's banjo (and what's a banjo doing in a jazz band anyway?), although there are a handful of tracks where they are his own, non-Chris Barber recordings, such as 'Rock Island Line' (a track I only know as a Johnny Cash song) or the blues track 'Diggin' My Potatoes'.

The point is, I would never have even looked at this CD if it wasn't for having heard it playing, and because of its branding – as a Lonnie Donegan CD – I'd have completely ignored it. As it happens, that old-fashioned, big band standards sound has been played a lot in our house since we bought this.

26.06.2011

More Glee songs in the car.

27.06.2011

Stayed overnight at the Novotel in Edinburgh. The nice, simple touch in this hotel is that you can connect your iPod to the TV in your room and listen to songs through the TV. The TV in my room was obviously broken somehow and the screen filled with static as soon as I stuck a song on; the static lines would change their pattern when the beat of the music changed. It was quite cool, if a little reminiscent of Poltergeist.

The songs I was listening to were recorded from the double 12” single of Underworld's 'Born Slippy', released in 1995. Everyone knows the version of 'Born Slippy' which Danny Boyle included on the soundtrack to Trainspotting. That wasn't the original version, and no-one seems to remember that at all. It was an instrumental drum 'n' bass track, a world away from the euphoric 'Lager! Lager! Lager!' stomp of the NUXX version used in Trainspotting.



I remember getting pretty excited about 'Born Slippy', and I recall going into the Music Junction in Stratford-upon-Avon on the Saturday before it came out, just to check if they were going to be stocking the single. The two guys who worked there were your archetypal Nick Hornby High Fidelity record shop workers and they knew how much I wanted that single. They told me that not only were they going to be stocking it, but that it was tucked away in the store room already; not only that but that they'd been listening to it. It really wound me up, and since I've always revelled in smug satisfaction when I've received a promo in the post, or received something before it's officially released.

Audio Journal : 16/06/2011

It seems that my last post about BBC4's Primal Scream documentary on the making of Screamadelica generated a mixed response.

Martyn wrote 'Love it. Best blog yet.' Thanks Martyn. The cheque's in the post.

Alistair, who has released a slew of self-released CD-Rs, commented 'You seem to have similar feelnigs to me about Screamadelica – it's a remix album from which we were mercifully spared the originals (mostly). The only album I had any real time for was XTRMNTR which has a lot to do with [My Bloody Valentine's] Kevin Shields's production on the relevant tracks.'

But the best comments came from Ian, with whom I clearly hit a bit of a nerve. Here's his views, warts and all.

'How can anyone who likes non-mainstream music hate The Stone Roses? And resist Nirvana? But love Erasure? Why do I read anything you write?'

And on Screamadelica: 'Lucky that they were in the right place at the right time to release this album? How many psych indie bands were scratching about at the same time lacking the vision to make the zeitgeistian leap Bobby and his boys did?

'I don't recall anyone else taking the same chance in giving so much control to a producer and thus creating what will remain a classic album. I saw them play it six months ago at Earl's Court and having seen a few of these ATP classic album replays, this was without a doubt the most enthusiastic and reverential crowd I've ever seen for any album re-hash. This album for me and many others judging by that crowd, was the catalyst for a leap from rock to “druggy” musical tastes and therefore massively important for changing many previously closed attitudes to various musical genres. Not many albums soundtrack a period for so many people as Screamadelica clearly did, and shouldn't be sniffed at for doing so.

'Weatherall is obviously massively influential on the album but afterwards look at XTRMNTR (their best album by far) to see that they weren't spaced out so far as not to learn and develop from their time with a techno producer like Weatherall. Forget the Stones tribute album afterwards [Give Out But Don't Give Up], biggest pile of shite they ever did but an intentional effort to lose transitory fans.

'I love Primal Scream and I'll see you round the back of the building 5pm Friday to sort this out.'

Gulp.

Vinyl Corner

A couple of recent 7" purchases that have finally found their way into my shiny new iPod.

The first is '23' by the brilliantly-named Death Dub, which appears to date from 2006 but looked like a new release in Rough Trade East. The helpful Rough Trade notes identified it as the project of Touch Recording artist BJ Nilsen and Joachim Nordwall, and '23' was described as an exploration of their interests in dub and industrial noise. Meanwhile the label stuck this squarely into the Rough Trade 'Industrial / free jazz' category.



The industrial connection I get. The artwork, such as it's simple one-sided sleeve insert is, has a design reminiscent of Throbbing Gristle and the usage of the number 23 sticks this work in with the William S. Burroughs-influenced fraternity that dominated industrial music in the late Seventies. The dub connection I don't get. I was expecting some sort of heavyweight Godflesh-style abrasive dub style, and not the murky, impenetrable bass-heavy swamp that this track represents. Even the 'version' on the B-side carries nary a whiff of anything I'd associate with dub. Well, as for free jazz, I don't hear that here at all.

Still, I like the edgy, dark sonic immersiveness that this represents, and listening on headphones reveals lots going on within both the original track and the version. And also, in John Peel style, it sounds great at the wrong speed too.

I mentioned '3 A.M. Eternal' by The KLF in my last post, and I recently happened upon a 7" version in a tiny Luxembourg treasure trove of a record shop that I've mentioned before. '3 A.M. Eternal' was The KLF's first really successful single, but the version presented here isn't the original; that was released in 1989 as a proper dance music 12" and is supposedly not a pop track like this ultimately was. I don't have the means / inclination to track that original down, but all reports suggest that it's a brilliant track.

Looking back, I never really liked this track as much as 'What Time Is Love?' and 'Last Train To Trancentral', the singles that appeared either side of this. This seemed something of a novelty with all that fake Mu-Mu mythology sprinkled all over it. Listening to the main single version today feels pretty nostalgic and it has a deep quality to it, like 808 State's seminal 'Pacific State' thanks to the inclusion of some frozen-in-time saxophone. The B-side, the Guns Of Mu-Mu edit, has an early house feel, with a proper 4/4 beat and a liquid bassline that predates the derivative garage low-end by a good few years.

Audio Journal : 24/05/2011

Once again, it is to BBC4 that I turn to bring you this post, specifically two programmes broadcast back-to-back a few Fridays ago. The first was one of those Classic Album documentaries on Primal Scream's Screamadelica and the other collected Top Of The Pops performances from bands in 1991, particularly those who were part of the fertile rock / dance crossover scene that seemed to flourish that year.

Watching the second programme made me incredibly nostalgic for a year that my music tastes started to develop properly. Just being reminded of 808 State's 'In Yer Face', which I bought (and still have, somewhere) on cassette single made the hairs stand up on my arms. Likewise '3AM Eternal' by The KLF (I have a German 12", bought several years later, and a 7” picked up in Luxembourg last week). Likewise 'Move Any Mountain' by The Shamen, which I had on the album En-Tact (the programme has hastened my need to have KLF's The White Room and En-Tact on CD rather than the over-played tapes sitting in my loft). Incidentally, 'Move Any Mountain' is a classic track, though much maligned because of Mr C's dodgy rap. What's often overlooked is that Mr C was a fantastic techno DJ. He couldn't rap for toffee (see 'Ebeneezer Goode'), but as a DJ he was pretty unequalled. I saw him play once; he gave me a flyer after his set. Anyone who has heard the dodgy hippy stuff The Shamen knocked out before Mr C arrived will also appreciate just how much he improved this otherwise unimpressive band.



What I found, to my surprise, was that I remembered most of the songs that were played, and indeed have most of them now, but hardly any were purchases at the time. I'm not revisionistic enough to try and claim that I had bought every single track at the time: 'Feel Every Beat' by Electronic (the album was borrowed from my friend Steve and my own copy purchased years later); 'X, Y And Zee' by Pop Will Eay Itself (borrowed from my friend Jon and a 7" copy bought years after); 'Human Nature' by Gary Clail (never even heard this at the time and yet bought a 7" of it from a charity shop some five years later); 'Sit Down' by James (I hated this when it came out but have since become enamoured of its oft-overlook lyrical depth, and now own most of the James back catalogue); 'I Wanna Be Adored' by The Stone Roses (ditto 'Sit Down'; hated this band at the time and mostly still do, but I think this track has an understated self-deprecating quality); 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' by Nirvana (I resisted Nirvana actively for years until I met Mrs S; I concede that even when Kurt fucked up his voice deliberately to sabotage the TOTP performance, he still sounded amazing); 'Loose Fit' by Happy Mondays (thanks go to Neil for getting me into the Mondays at University; I hated the entire 'baggy' scene at the time).

Partly this paucity of purchases was logical - I was still living off pocket money and a 2p-per-paper free newspaper round at the time, so disposable income for record purchases was slim. The only other record I actually bought of those played was 'Dizzy' by Vic Reeves and The Wonderstuff. This was again bought on cassette single, but even by the time I left Music Junction in Stratford-upon-Avon I regretted it. So I gave it to my friend Rob that afternoon; his brother, Chris, who would later influence my love for all things electronica, took offence at Rob having this single in the house and threw it out of a first floor window, whereupon it shattered.

So, happy 20th birthday to Primal Scream's Screamadelica. As with most of the music above, I didn't buy this when it came out. I bought it three years later, by which time I was absorbed in all things dance music and kept reading about how important Screamadelica was, how influential blah blah blah. Up to then I'd considered them a bit too 'rock' and more than a bit druggy. The programme confirmed both those old prejudices, although on the latter front Andrew Innes seems to have weathered pretty well, unlike Robert 'Throb' Young and Bobby Gillespie.

I bought Screamadelica on a date with a girl from school called Claire. I think she was a little bemused when I took her into Our Price in Stratford and started raving about how important this album was, how I was amazed she'd never heard of it etc. Christ, I must have sounded like such a geeky trainspotter, especially as I hadn't heard it myself until later that afternoon. I also bought a shirt from Principles while I was with her. It is no surprise to me that there was no second date.

When I first heard Screamadelica, it was filtered through all the pure dance music that came after, all of which felt more authentic; consequently I felt a little cold toward the hybrid nature of the songs and the whole thing felt a little scattergun. This was explained during the programme - initially, Screamadelica wasn't intended as an album, but a series of singles, mostly produced by Andy 'Sabres Of Paradise' Weatherall and Hugo Nicholson. Finally, Alan McGee, boss of Creation Records, suggested that they couldn't keep churning out hastily-recorded singles and remixes, and that an album proper was required. Accordingly it hangs together with little coherence, despite Weatherall's attempt to sequence it into a uniform trip, from the euphoric 'Moving On Up' to the comedown epic 'Shine Like Stars'.

Don't even get me started on 'Moving On Up' and 'Damaged', two good but straight rock tracks linking the band back to their previous eponymous album and Screamadelica's Stones-esque follow-up Give Out But Don't Give Up. These two tracks sadly reinforce the view that Primal Scream were a rock band first and foremost who happened to dabble fortuitously in dance music to further their otherwise slight reputation; without the guiding hands of Weatherall and Nicholson, the Scream were just a rock-by-numbers band with little going for them.

Don't get me wrong, 'Don't Fight It, Feel It' and the cover of 13th Floor Elevators' 'Slip Inside This House' are superb. The Orb's production of 'Higher Than The Sun' is one of the best (and druggiest) things The Orb ever recorded; the gnomic Alex Patterson from The Orb was one of the talking heads on the programme and spoke glowingly of the track, believing it a worthy successor to their own 'Little Fluffy Clouds'.

Overall, the documentary left me thinking that the trio of Gillespie / Innes / Young don't recall much of the making of Screamadelica, thanks to the E and also because - call me cynical - they don't seem to have been that involved. Screamadelica is, to me, Weatherall's baby and it sounds far better when listened to as a remix album. Bassist Henry Olsen (formerly of Nico's backing band The Faction), later usurped by The Stone Roses's Mani, came across as a thoroughly decent individual, as did 'Don't Fight It, Feel It' vocalist Denise Johnson, mainly because they actually remember what happened; that said, listen to Olsen smugly eulogise his performance of the main riff on 'Damaged' and it again reinforces the notion of a rock band that lucked out with a hip dance producer. (Olsen, incidentally, is the son of my first primary school teacher.)

Perhaps that's one sacred cow too many?

Audio Journal : 27/04/2011

Mrs S confiscated my iPod on the night before we set off for our week-long holiday in Portugal. Therefore there's 'officially' no blog this week since I haven't really listened to anything. Unless you count the chilled-out Parisian house music played by the pool, which, whilst very trendy and absorbing, isn't something I'm terribly equipped to write at length about, though it does make me want to drink cocktails.

We have been listening to The Beatles' 'red' and 'blue' albums in our hire car. Once again, prolonged exposure to the Fab Four reminds me that a) with only a solitary exception of the tracks included ('Back In The USSR'), I don't like the Paul McCartney songs at all and have been making judicious use of the buttons on the steering wheel to move past his tracks; b) the singles the band released are generally irritating thanks to familiarity (even Mrs S, an avowed, long-standing Beatles fan from her teenage years, agrees); and c) 'Yellow Submarine' is a brilliant song for kids.

I knew this already, well before I heard my girls asking for it repeatedly and then singing rapturously along in the back of the hire car. I knew this because I was taught it as a children's song in primary school (this was about 1982; much later I began to suspect that my teachers were all LSD-dropping, pot-smoking ex-hippies made good; we didn't, as far as I can recall, ever learn any Grateful Dead songs). What is it that John Hannah says to Gwyneth Paltrow in Peter Howitt's Sliding Doors? Something about us learning Beatles songs in the womb? Well, in my case, not quite; I was about six, or thereabouts. My parents had a solitary Beatles EP (Magical Mystery Tour), which is probably more responsible than anything else for turning me on to fetishising collecting records, and for making me think that The Beatles were plain weird thanks to the oddball gatefold sleeve. (I used to collect postcards and keep them in that sleeve; my nerdish tendencies began early.)

'Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds' is another song that I was taught at school, in about 1986 (Christ, what were my teachers on?). We created a mural for the back of that teacher's classroom, with each of us given a phrase in the song to create an image. I had two - 'newspaper taxis' and 'marmalade skies' - and created an oblong car with then-current headlines scribbled on it, as well as orange cloud with thick lines dotted around it; we were a strictly Robinsons, orange peel-in family. It was a literal depcition of a song that made no sense at all to me and my fellow ten-year-old classmates. And why would it?

By way of padding, here are some things I've written for Documentary Evidence lately: a review of Junip's Fields (http://bit.ly/hYN9dr) and an interview with Espen J. Jörgensen on his collaboration with Simon Fisher Turner as SOUNDESCAPES (http://bit.ly/g9s2cx).

Audio Journal : 22/04/2011

This week I've been catching up with the work of David Fleet, aka M075, 75 Surveillance and Laica. For some fairly logical reason, when I saw the various aliases and the reference to 'surveillance', and titles like 'Cosy Funk' and 'Audio Out' I was reminded of the work of Cabaret Voltaire co-founder Richard H. Kirk. Kirk, whose music began as harsh industrial noise with the Cabs slowly and deliberately evolved into something more purist, much more electronic. His solo work alongside the Cabs releases was initially as harsh as his dayjob, a far cry from the multi-cultural dub ambience of his later Nineties work for Warp, or the early rave of Sweet Exorcist. There are many other aliases that Kirk has used, including Electronic Eye, whose LPs were adorned with grainy images of nascent CCTV technology, hellish signals of that word I picked out, 'surveillance'.

Fleet's Bandcamp page contains a number of tracks which I've been enjoying since I downloaded them about a month ago. Apart from making me feel nostalgic about Richard H Kirk and Cabaret Voltaire, I've also found Fleet's music reminding me of many great electronica artists from the Nineties, where artists like Plastikman (Richie Hawtin), Luke Slater, and Photek, as well as the likes of Autechre, dragged me away from listening to electronic pop.

That's not to say that Fleet's music isn't original; far from it. The major boon here is the eclectic restlessness of Fleet's music, with tracks moving from skeletal Hawtin-esque beats ('Riddime' from MO75's Suppress), to post-industrial electronic body music in the vein of Nine Inch Nails or Nitzer Ebb ('Hell Machine' from MO75's Surrender), to frozen ambience (Laica's Kos tracks), to electro that sounds like it's being played through shattered glass ('Anderson's Ground' from 75 Surveillance's Honed), as perfected by Link, Plaid and Aphex Twin.

'Audio Out' (from Surrender) has a pattern of scarce beats that sounds like dropping a pingpong ball on a glass-topped table, while 'Cosy Funk' (from Honed) has a fidgety, ricocheting electronic dub rhythm and deep bassy sounds; it's like an otherworldly electro funk, hence the name. The longform 'Puls (Complete)' by Laica is a 19-minute ambient epic, much like Global Communication soundtracking a Clive Barker movie. Dark industrial sounds evolve out of clouds of noxious ambience while uptight dub beats drift in and out. It's engaging, absorbing and all those sorts of words.

Fleet kindly sent me an instrumental demo version of his take on Depeche Mode's 'See You', highlighting his ability to turn in electronic pop as well as the array of styles mentioned above.

It seems vaguely odd to be writing about downloads in the wake of Record Store Day 2011. That's mainly because I didn't participate in supporting independent record shops on 16 April, though I would have liked to. There were a number of highly limited items from artists that I like being made available, but instead I elected to spend my morning ferrying my two girls to various Saturday activities and parties. In the trade-off between records and my kids, my kids won the day. I couldn't be bothered with the queuing on the day, nor the sixteen mile drive to my nearest record shop, to be honest.

Does that make me a traitor to the cause?

Audio Journal : 12/04/2011

This isn't a post about The Strokes' new album, Angles, though it perhaps should be. I bought the album a couple of weeks back, have their previous three, but am not terribly struck on 'Under Cover Of Darkness', the first single from Angles; so I can't bring myself to listen to it properly. I've had it on in the background in the car, Mrs S has digested it properly, says it's okay, but I just can't be bothered.



The Strokes first came into my awareness one Friday evening. Mrs S (then Miss G) and I were eating dinner and watching Top Of The Pops. On came The Strokes with 'New York City Cops', the first single from their début album Is This It. Miss G said 'This is the type of song that my dad would mute when it came on the TV'. At the time the musical diet of our house was a blend of pop and R&B (it's not a period we're proud of) and The Strokes sounded like they came from another time, somewhere deeply unfashionable and clunky.

'Last Night' changed all that for me, and by the sound of things a lot of other people as well. It arrived like an urgent wake-up call from musical staleness, and I loved it. At the time my research into all things punk had been constrained to the UK post-punk duo of Magazine and Wire, and I'd yet to delve into NYC punk. Whether 'Last Night' encouraged that exploration or not, I forget. I know I bought Patti Smith's Horses and Televsion's Marquee Moon around this time, but I don't believe I was inspired to do so by The Strokes.

'Last Night', to me, at the time, was a refreshing slap in the face away from the dreary post-Oasis drudgery sound of Coldplay and Travis. I didn't get the album straight away and only came to own it a few years later and if I'm honest I still couldn't tell you much about the first two albums. The third album, First Impressions Of Earth I'm much more familiar with, and it's a very different proposition to the first two – more polished, cleaner, less angular; more commercial or more experimental with its sounds, or maybe both at the same time.

Having spent the last few years avidly delving into NYC punk and its antecedents, what now is evident to me is that The Strokes weren't original in the slightest, however necessary and fresh they felt at the time. I now see that 'Last Night' shamelessly borrows its uptight guitars from the New York Dolls' lurid pre-punk emission 'Trash'. This realisation only came to me relatively recently thanks to a compilation CD given away with Mojo years ago. I have several CDs that survey the CBGBs / Max's Kansas City scenes of Manhattan in the second half of the Seventies, but the one that came free with that edition of Mojo remains my favourite. So much so that I had to buy it again recently from eBay after getting rid of my original copy by mistake.



I Heart NY Punk is a good survey of the NYC punk scene, and highlights just how much more diverse the Stateside scene was in comparison with the UK scene. You have lewd bar-room blues courtesy of Wayne (aka Jayne) County & The Electric Chairs' 'Fuck Off', a live version of James Chance's 10-minute demonic skronking sax 'n soul desperation epic 'King Heroin', the gritty electronic work of Suicide, Mink Deville's pre-Huey Lewis soul scratchings on 'She's So Tough' and a live rendition of Television's guitar precision on 'See No Evil'. Plus of course the New York Dolls glam-punk stomp mentioned earlier. The point is that punk, US style, was much more diverse than UK punk; where US punk was an uncompromising, alternative, artistic attitude, UK punk was more or less just a sound and a corresponding image. Mohawks and safety pins couldn't be further from David Byrne performing at CBGBs with Talking Heads in tucked-in shirts and a tidy college boy haircut.

The closest the two siblings came was in The Ramones. It may have been the nearest US punk ever came to our Sex Pistols, but The Ramones' sound was more or less just an amplified, fuzzed-up strain of joyous rock 'n roll and teenage rebellion. Phil Spector's later work with them thus makes complete sense. Dee Dee Ramone's heroin opus, 'Chinese Rocks' is included on I Heart NY Punk in the form of a cover by the doomed Johnny Thunders & The Heartbreakers. The chorus to this song is just about the most perfectly pure punk lyric ever – 'I'm living on Chinese rock / All my friends they are in hock / I'm living on Chinese rock / All my things are in the pawn shop'. As much as anything this acts as an allegory for the commitment-addiction of many of US punksters to the scene they were part of.

I have thus far resisted the bleak notion which I first heard espoused by a drummer school friend who said that there was 'no new music any more'. Yet now when I hear The Strokes and contrast it with punk, NY stylee, I see that they may have felt new and essential at the time, but they were really just shameless plagiarists.

I wonder if we'll feel the same about The Vaccines in a few years. Part of me hopes not. What Did You Expect From The Vaccines? was released the week before Angles and has attracted much hype. I listened to it for the first time a week or so ago and was initially absolutely floored, sufficiently so to post on Facebook and Twitter that it was totally worthy of the hype – and I normally have a real hatred herd following.



Two weeks after buying it, I'd say I still feel an excitement at songs like 'Wrecking Bar (Ra-Ra-Ra)', 'Blow It Up' and 'Norgaard', but apart from that there is a vague sense of having heard this all before. Vocalist Justin Young sounds like Tom Greenhalgh from Mekons crossed with Tom Hingley from Inspiral Carpets; 'Blow It Up' sounds like Jesus And Mary Chain covering Wreckless Eric; 'Wetsuit' sounds like Vampire Weekend produced by Phil Spector on day release; the NME described 'Wrecking Bar (Ra-Ra-Ra)' as the exhumed skeleton of Joey Ramone, still in his trademark leather jacket; and so on.

There is also the vaguest sensation of feeling that I'm a little too old for this album, concerned as it is with teenage models ('Norgaard'), adolescent relationship tensions, revenge sex ('Post Break-Up Sex') and the like, feeling 'smart' by dropping in references to F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Times pondered whether the album would be 'a soundtrack for a generation of students').

Last year I raved, along with just about everyone else, about The Drums' début album, and What Did You Expect From The Vaccines? has similarities in its instant-ness ('Norgaard' even has a Beach Boys-style vocal harmony reminiscent of The Drums). Repeated listening starts to make you feel queasy, like eating too many cream cakes. The Drums seemed to have more of an enduring appeal somehow.

Don't get me wrong, it's a great album. It just feels at times like an album of covers, even though I know it isn't.

At least Silicon Teens' Music For Parties from 1980 set out to be (mostly) an album of covers. A collection of synth pop versions of old rock 'n roll hits, like 'Do Wah Diddy', 'Memphis Tennessee', 'Sweet Little Sixteen' and 'You Really Got Me', it punkishly slaughtered some holy cows and somehow bypassed kitsch. My full review of this early synth gem can be found here.

Audio Journal : 07/04/2011

A text conversation from earlier today.

Mrs S : 'Runaround Sue' by Dion is such a great song x

Me : But wouldn't it be better performed by [ex-Red Hot Chili Pepper guitarist John Frusciante]? x

Mrs S : No that's 'Runaway'. Have just gone from 'Runaround Sue' to 'Runaway' by [him] and now 'Runaway' by Nuyorican Soul. Taking a tour of my iPod while mopping x

Me : 'Run Run Run' by VU x

Mrs S : Now done Velvets and 'Run For Your Life' by The Beatles. Tired of running and moving on to something else x

Me : 'Walk Like An Egyptian' x

Mrs S : I tell a lie. Quick blast of 'Run Rudolph Run' by Chuck Berry before moving on. Could have had 'Run' by Snow Patrol, New Order, Vampire Weekend and 'Runaway' by The National or Kasabian. Also 'Run With The Boys' by Carl Barat but getting pretty close to 'Rusty The Cowboy' by The Wiggles. PS I will sell you the rights to my sonic adventure as a starting piece for your next blog x

Audio Journal : 23/03/2011

Third time lucky: I have booked tickets to see Interpol three times; the first time was for a huge (for them) concert at Alexandra Palace in 2007; the second time was for a far smaller gig in Birmingham last year. I didn't go either time and both times sold the tickets. This disappoints me no end. I have said many times that Interpol are right up there among my favourite bands, the band that have soundtracked my darkest days like no other, and yet twice I bailed on going to see them after letting life get in the way. Third time lucky, since after being well and truly smitten by this New York band since the release of their second album, 2004's Antics, tonight I finally saw them live, albeit from a lofty perch at Shepherd's Bush Empire, ably supported by electronic punk-funk Brooklynite Matthew Dear and his band.

Mrs S is responsible for getting me into Interpol. It was she who first heard 'Slow Hands' and it was she who bought Antics at the old Fopp in Leamington Spa. I was hooked after one listen and they fast became 'my' band. Belatedly, I bought their debút (Turn On The Bright Lights) from Other Music in New York's Lower East Side; it was somehow important, somehow entirely logical to me, to buy this quintessentially New York album in Manhattan. Two days earlier, 'Obstacle 1' from that album was the song playing when Mrs S discovered we were expecting our first daughter, giving that song a perpetual frozen poignancy in our lives. When Our Love To Admire (ordered from Other Music instead of nipping down to my local HMV, natch) came out in 2007 it would come to fuel, drive, encourage – whatever – the most subdued period of anxiety, depression, misery – whatever – that I've ever experienced. Even now I sometimes shudder when I put that album on. I think I wrote here a while back that I'd started to hear levity in that album; after hearing the band perform that album's 'Rest My Chemistry' tonight, in all its devastating melancholy glory, I think I was probably tricking myself.

2010's Interpol marked the departure of bassist Carlos Dengler and a conscious decision by the band to move away from the big venue / stadium aspirations that seemed to be being foisted upon them. An NME review of a gig in a tiny NYC venue last year painted a picture of a band suddenly freed from record company pressures of conformity to the 'scale' befitting a band approaching their fourth album, much more at ease in their surroundings. Live, they are undoubtedly a weird proposition, shrouded in barely-there lighting and near-darkness. Singer Paul Banks barely moves; drummer Sam Fogarino – the only member of the band not to wear black – effortlessly replicates the tight yet complex drum patterns of their recorded work; guitarist Daniel Kessler has legs that seem to operate independently of his upper body, all elastic moves and spontaneous angularity, a bit like a court jester with a six-string. The stand-in bassist spent most of the set with his legs just about as far apart as is possible without falling over, Peter Hook stylee. They don't do reinterpretations of their songs, just play faithful versions of the album tracks. Only 'Evil' and 'C'mere' (both from Antics) were subtly changed, both delivered with a greater speed and urgency than on record. The epic 'Lights' from Interpol was, unfeasibly, more towering in its slow-building grandeur than on the LP and the textural 'NYC' (a song plagued by disenchantment and consequently one of my favourite songs from Turn On The Bright Lights) seemed to be rendered with heightened emotions, even if the ruminative backing vocal of 'Got to be some more change in my life', delivered by either Kessler or the keyboard player, was sadly lost somewhere in the mix.

So, third time lucky, as I said. I don't quite know how to feel in many ways – elated that I've finally gotten to see one of my favourite bands or miserable as fuck after the songs they played and the effect they continue to have on me. If nothing else, tonight reinforced that I have a very real dependency on this band and that doesn't show signs of abating any time soon.

Audio Journal : 16/03/2011

Mrs S and I spent most of Friday night and the early hours of Saturday morning watching music TV, which is something that we don't do very often.

The selections were remarkably parochial in focus, given how many more channels there were available than the last time we found ourselves channel hopping. Most of the 'rock' channels appeared to be showing endless Foo Fighters videos, while Nirvana's 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' seemed to pop up with alarming regularity. It also seems that whenever we flick on music TV, we always seem to come upon the video for Deniece William's 'Let's Hear It For The Boy', always appearing to be some worn-out, grainy, sub-YouTube quality copy of the video. Then there's the other channels showing endless Beyonce videos. Remarkably, Beyonce's Destiny's Child bandmate Kelly Rowlands with her dubious duet with Nelly – a song I thought I'd managed to forget about, at last – kept cropping up inescapably as well. Plus ça change and all that.

We came upon a few gems. Weezer's still-timeless video for 'Buddy Holly' being one, some early Green Day (which reminded that before they went all rock-opera on American Idiot they could still knock out quality punk-pop) and Offspring's 'Pretty Fly (For A White Guy)'. We also chanced upon Nirvana's 'Heart-Shaped Box', which, as an avowed non-Nirvana fan, is the only song of theirs – harrowing and maudlin though it is – that I really like. I was listening to electronic music while everyone around me fell in love with Kurt and co, though I did think their performances on the 1991 - The Year That Punk Broke video were inspiringly raw.

And then, as the divided attention disorder of flicking rapidly between channels in order to find something to watch became plain boring, we found the video for The Vapors' 'Turning Japanese'. This is a song I've always thought of as being fundamentally 'novelty', and there is a definite whiff of that, but hearing it that night made me realise it's a good song; sort of art-rock in the vein of The Cars. Sufficiently enthused, I dug out a compilation of tracks by the likes of Tom Robinson, Ian Dury, The Jam and the aforementioned track by The Vapors and listened to it as I was ferrying my girls around in the car the next day. Yeah, I think we all know what this song's title refers to, and that litle riff that heralds the chorus may enforce the novelty angle, but it's good all the same. Here's the video. Email readers should click here.



At some point during that same evening, I don't especially know why, I decided I really wanted to listen to De La Soul's De La Soul Is Dead. Hip hop is a style of music that is fairly alien to this blog, and my enthusiasm for the genre pretty much started and ended with this album. (Okay, I also had Vanilla Ice's To The Extreme; I'm not ashamed, and besides that was more of a 'pop' album than purist rap.) De La Soul Is Dead was released in 1991 and arrived at a point where I'd still broadly been consuming a pop diet, and I got on board with this album because of the hit single 'Ring Ring Ring (Ha Ha Hey)' with its ripped-off Curiosity Killed The Cat chorus. Me and a bunch of classmates (I was 14) used to know every word to this song and we'd occasionally break out into renditions of this at breaktime. Yep, very Glee.



No-one else from my class bought the album, though. I picked it up on cassette and initially found it confusing as hell, mostly because I wasn't au fait with hip hop's vernacular, but also because it was just so damn weird. Not hippyish, as was the label applied to De La Soul after their flower-power debut, but just odd; the series of playground 'skits' which attempt to humorously bookend the album I didn't understand. I also didn't understand some of the wackier Burger King / donut references. All that, and the fact that the album version of 'Ring Ring Ring' wasn't anywhere near as good as the single. After a few listens I began to 'get' the album and for that reason I've never binned it, unlike some of the other things I listened to back then.

Have I listened to this since, I don't know, 1992? Probably not. I haven't had an accessible cassette deck for years, so that night I bought a second hand CD copy from Oxfam via Amazon Marketplace and was amazed at how much I remembered nearly twenty years on. I love the memory aspect of music; those musical memories lay in your subconscious, undisturbed and unused for years yet come back instantly and vividly as soon as you hit play. I really enjoyed listening to this again, and even found myself smiling at the 'skits'. 'Let Me In', with its samples from a recording of The Three Little Pigs, and 'Fanatic Of The B-Word' (with one of the heaviest beats here; the 'B' word is baseball) are two of my favourite tracks.

Meanwhile, over at Documentary Evidence you can read reviews of German rock band Can's seminal Ege Bamyasi from 1972 and Josh T. Pearson's Last Of The Country Gentlemen, released in the UK on Monday.

Audio Journal : 04/03/2011

Last week I found myself at Koko with Mrs S to watch Cold War Kids, fresh from the release of their third album Mine Is Yours.

Cold War Kids were supported by Wye Oak and Wild Palms. Wye Oak are a Baltimore duo of Jenn Wasner on guitar and vocals and Andy Stack on drums / keyboards (he plays drums with one hand and his feet, and plays basslines on a keyboard with his other hand; go figure). Their music has been described as folk, but I don't hear it myself. In fact, I couldn't make out very much thanks to heavy distortion on Wasner's guitar which rendered everything fairly flat and uninteresting. I also wasn't really paying attention, so they may have been far better than I give them credit for. Blame a slew of out-of-hours work emails for that.

Wild Palms are a band I've been aware of for a while but have never seen live. Their début album, Until Spring, is just around the corner and I have a couple of their singles ('Over Time' and 'Deep Dive') kicking about on my iPod. Their début was recorded by Gareth Jones, whose work with Depeche Mode, Grizzly Bear, Interpol and others makes him one of my favourite producers (see my interview with him here). Live, the five-piece Wild Palms are a brilliant combination of angular guitars, odd drum patterns, distortion and squalling keyboards courtesy of their vocalist. Vocalists playing keyboards have been forever tainted by Brandon Flowers of The Killers, but Lou Hill manages to sidestep that image, though his Ian Brown-meets-Andy McCluskey dancing at Koko was a little baffling. Their spiky sound brings to mind the taught post-punk tension of Gang Of Four, who they are also supporting this year. An album review will feature here soon, I'm sure.

I haven't really listened to the new Cold War Kids album, which turned out not to be an inhibitor when it came to this concert as they seemed reluctant to play more than three of four tracks off Mine Is Yours (for a band only three albums into their career, this is a little worrying); a shame in many ways as having now heard it a few times since, there are some good tracks here. Gone admittedly is the sonic adventurousness of their début (Robbers And Cowards), replaced by a MOR musical maturity that Kings Of Leon seem to be aspiring toward, yet never quite achieving. (As an aside, David Keenan, writing in The Wire, accurately described bands maturing as 'shorthand for playing the game by someone else's rules'.)

As it happens, if I'd wanted to prep properly for this gig, it would have been their second album that I should have listened to, as the tracks from that release dominated the set. Stalwarts like 'Hospital Beds' and 'Hang Me Up To Dry' from Robbers And Cowards garnered the biggest crowd reaction, and I could just about hear them above the chattering inchworms stood next to us, making me wonder once again why people buy tickets to gigs and then natter away like they're in a pub.

I remember reading back when Cold War Kids arrived that on stage the guitarist, bassist and Woody Harrelson-meets-Charlie Brooker vocalist Nathan Willett would whirl about the stage like three out of control aircraft independently crashing, or words to that effect. That sense of clumsily working in three different orbits was in full effect last week and how the three musicians didn't get tangled in each other's cables and fall to the floor is beyond me. I came away more than a little impressed with Cold War Kids after this gig, and we're booked to see them again later in the year when they return to the UK.



Elsewhere this week I've been listening to Josh T. Pearson's first single from his début album Last Of The Country Gentlemen, 'Country Dumb.' Pearson's album has been anticipated for years and this Texas-born, preacher's son has a unique sense of countrified drama. 'Country Dumb' is a beautiful, beguiling track which actually brought tears to my eyes when I listened to it this week. As Last Of The Country Gentlemen is released by my beloved Mute Records, click here to read my review over at my Documentary Evidence website.

Audio Journal : 01/03/2011

The press release for début album by The Silver Pesos, Born At Midnight, is potentially misleading. The album is described as 'the result of a collaboration across several continents', going on to explain how the album was recorded by producer Peter Brambl in LA, Paris, Belize and Bali; the vocals are delivered by Chloe Conger in English and Spanish and several of the album's songs were tracked at co-producer Robert Weber's Indonesia studios with local rhythm sections augmenting the mixes.



All of which, whilst undoubtedly true and evident across the songs here, adds up to what sounds like a very 'global' album, working across cultures, continents and musical styles, but that's not necessarily how it sounds. This is much more of a lower-case globalism, an intelligent pop music with a pan-global approach. 'The multicultural nature of the music is a really interesting area to explore,' Brambl explains to me by email. 'We've tried to make an educated attempt at incorporating other influences. The odd thing is that although we've studied many of the traditions – like west African guitar music – whenever we introduce elements that sound too "authentic", we end up with something that sounds, to our ears, less interesting. Swirling around these influences seems to produce more artistically satisfying work, and it also gives us a lot more freedom. We find ourselves asking questions like "what would a mid 70s Fela Kuti song sound like if it were produced by King Tubby and remixed by Lindstrom?"' The output of that blend is the ballsy, confident disco-pop-meets-African-guitar of 'Remember The Land'.

Brambl adds that the multi-cultural element isn't just a case of deploying global instrumentation, but in the lyrical content of the songs themselves. 'One theme that emerges is how music is carried over borders, usually by people who are experiencing some kind of hardship. So we came up with a few stories for the songs along those lines. We've tried to make the lyrics somewhat opaque, but the meaning is there if you look for it.' The album's first single, 'Regresando' turns out to be about a refugee dreaming of home. The track 'No History', whose lyrics give the album its title, is about a person suffering the consequences of political violence; the track, one of my personal favourites, has a pop delicateness with an extended breakdown section at the end that swiftly moves into Tubby / Scientist dub territory. The bonus remix takes that several stages further into reverberating dub reggae authenticity, including what sounds like some Augustus Pablo-style melodica washes. Conger's ethereal vocal drifts in and about the mix, anchoring the song back to its more mainstream-leaning original version. 'Picture On The Wall' is downright beautiful philosophical pop, a shimmering opus that is wrought with all manner of emotional hooks and chord changes.

'Regresando' arrived in my inbox some time last year in the wake of the unexpected (and successful) return of shoegazer pop as fashioned by the likes of The XX. That inwardness and introspection, best championed by the 4AD and Factory labels back in the Eighties, is the other dominant sound on Born At Midnight, both in the reflective guitar melodies and Chloe Conger's quietly captivating vocals. Conger sounds like a less depressing Tracy Thorn at times, the same muted euphoria that made a Todd Terry-remixed Everything But The Girl such an oddly compelling blend, especially on the dancefloor-friendly remix of 'Regresando' included at the end of the album. If you imagine shoegazer pop suffused with a Mexican / Californian warmth, you might come close to the particular take on pop that The Silver Pesos have crafted for Born At Midnight.

I asked Brambl whether that strain of Eighties UK indie music was another influence on the sound of Born At Midnight. 'Definitely,' replies Brambl before going on to explain his other influences. 'I enjoy a lot of early New Wave, post-punk and ska, as well as Krautrock like Can and Neu! From a producer's point of view, the theme running through all of these influences is the evolution past blues-based rock. I love the blues, but I'm also interested in that period of time in the Eighties when people realized that many of the options had been exhausted and it was time to look for new forms.'

Born At Midnight is a brave, confident début enriched by multiple, layered influences, embellished by beautiful vocals and an absorbing sonic tapestry that the statements in the press release could undersell. This is globally-minded, yes, but first and foremost it is a perfect, intelligent and atmospheric pop album.

www.thesilverpesos.com

Audio Journal : 24/02/2011

Depeche Mode are a band that I first heard around the time of Violator; a girl in my class at school, Sarah, had plastered pictures of the band all over her English folder and I assumed they were some sort of New Kids On The Block boyband, though their music didn't exactly sound like 'The Right Stuff'. At the time, 1990, the songs off Violator that graced the charts were annoying to me, 'Personal Jesus' in particular.

Fast-forward a years: by 1991 I'd settled upon Erasure as my favourite band. Finding a brochure from the record label called Documentary Evidence in the 12" single of that band's hit 'Chorus', I discovered that Vince Clarke from Erasure had started his musical career in Depeche Mode, before moving on to found Yazoo, The Assembly and finally Erasure. All of a sudden I didn't know what to think – I almost felt obligated to revise my opinion of Depeche Mode and so began tentatively running through their back catalogue. Knowing that Vince had only been with the band for their first album, 1981's Speak & Spell, I figured I'd only want to listen to that. Instead I borrowed their first singles collection from my local library in Stratford-upon-Avon and promptly fell in love not just with the Vince-era singles ('Dreaming Of Me', 'New Life' and 'Just Can't Get Enough'), but the whole lot.

This blog is supposed to be a personal record of what I have been listening to and, accordingly, I don't make any apology for the occasional emotional content or degree of recollection of the text below. It doesn't have the word journal in the title for nothing. However, I surprised myself at just how important these songs – which were compiled for Mrs S as an introduction to the band many years ago – are in my personal history. Those looking for less of an autobiographical post should tune in next week for a return to business as usual.

Nodisco (Speak & Spell, 1981)



I bought a CD copy of Speak & Spell in 1992 and found its distinctive, pure analogue electronic sound highly captivating. Many years before I'd been exposed to 1981's contemporaneous Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret by Soft Cell and Human League's Dare. Speak & Spell sounded utterly different to those other records. Aside from the singles mentioned above, the track that I liked best was 'Nodisco', an arch and vaguely sleazy track whose percussion noises sounded just like Erasure's version of ABBA's 'Lay All Your Love On Me'.

I spent that summer in love with a girl who roundly spurned me.

My Secret Garden (A Broken Frame, 1982)
Pipeline (Construction Time Again, 1983)



I got both of these albums on cassette for my sixteenth birthday. It was something of a Depeche Mode-dominated birthday that year; I got a black Violator t-shirt (long since lost and finally replaced when I went to see them at the O2 Arena in 2009) as well, and possibly a poster. Oh, and I also got a Phillishave electric razor.

'My Secret Garden' remains my favourite track on the mostly fey A Broken Frame, recorded hastily after Vince's swift exit from the band. The track is ethereal and mysterious, developing out of an extended, laconic instrumental section before breaking out into a serene, wry take on synth-pop.

By 1983's Construction Time Again, things had begun to darken in the Mode camp. Martin Gore had developed a new, more complex writing style and new boy Alan Wilder added a new inventiveness to the band's sonic palette. The key track was 'Pipeline', a six-minute track sung by Gore which roundly dumped the confines of electropop in favour of sampled industrial sounds culled from a visit to an East London railway yard; the lyrical theme was the anguish of hard labour, an effective counterpoint to the album's huge single 'Everything Counts' with its cynical Eighties Yuppie greed Gecko-isms. Engineer Gareth Jones, who began working with the band on this album, told me it was an absolute pleasure recording this. You can read more comments from Jones in my Documentary Evidence review of Construction Time Again.

Lie To Me
Somebody (Some Great Reward, 1984)



Sticking with my sixteenth birthday, I bought this the Saturday after, from a record shop in Stratford-upon-Avon called Music Junction, a place sadly no longer in existence where I bought a lot of music during my teenage years. I was on a date with a girlfriend; she didn't like Depeche Mode. No-one I knew did. She dumped me within a fortnight.

'Lie To Me', Some Great Reward's opener was a stand-out song for me from the moment I listened to it. It is one of Gore's most darkly humorous songs in my opinion, Dave Gahan singing about putting someone's leather dress on. That wasn't the reason I liked it, mind. Don't get any ideas. It just felt weirdly nihilistic and savagely dark and I loved it.

'Somebody' is the most perfect ballad Martin Gore has ever recorded; a plaintive love song sung by himself with Alan Wilder on piano, whose lyrics detailed a wish list of all the emotional qualities that he wanted in a partner. I first heard this song on The Singles 1981 - 1985 and loved it immensely. I would wait another eight years to find someone for whom the opening lines applied to: 'I want somebody to share / Share the rest of my life'.

A Question Of Lust (Black Celebration, 1986)

Each successive Depeche Mode became that little bit darker, and by Black Celebration it was hard to see anything at all. Yet in amongst this was another stand-out Martin Gore-sung track, the tender 'A Question Of Lust', a counterpoint to the urgent, harrowing 'A Question Of Time'. Gore really has a handle on writing emotional ballads, and 'A Question Of Lust' is another perfect example. The drums and percussion sound like something Phil Spector may have fashioned from his wall of sound; big, reveberating sounds, dramatic tension and all those sorts of words and phrases.

One day at work many years later I was talking to a guy called John in the lift lobby of our office building. To date, he's only the second similarly ardent Depeche Mode fan I've ever met. I thought I was a pretty solid fan at that point, and in a second John roundly shattered that illusion. 'Life in the so-called space age,' he said. 'What's that from?' I racked my brain trying to find that lyric somewhere in a Depeche song, and seeing my blank expression he decided to put me out of my misery.

'Black Celebration, back cover, right at the very bottom.' He's right of course, and I realised in that moment where he described the placement of the nondescript white text on the rear of that sleeve that obsessive fans can be a bit, well, nerdy, can't they?

The Things You Said (Music For The Masses, 1987)

The year was 1994. It was summer. A girl had just dumped me earlier that day. (There's possibly a theme emerging here.) I listened to this on repeat all afternoon until it got dark. It seemed to suit my mood of disappointment, detailed perfectly a sense of betrayal at learning you'd been led a merry old dance and been made a complete fool of by someone you thought you were in love with. Sixteen years on and it's still what I think of whenever I hear this song, though I have naturally stopped caring about that day and that girl.

Enjoy The Silence (Violator, 1990)

Buying Violator, knowing that I'd detested 'Personal Jesus', almost felt fraudulent somehow. I bought this album on a trip to Coventry with the girl who I was seeing at the time of my sixteenth birthday. Admitting to myself that the sleek, polished sounds of the album were appealing was an uncomfortable move, but I'm glad I did. Violator has now become probably my favourite Depeche Mode album and it's the one I listen to the most overall. I played it to my then-girlfriend who just found it boring.

Violator was a progression again from Music For The Masses. Where Music For The Masses used occasional guitars, Violator sprayed them over the songs liberally. 'Personal Jesus' remains the biggest surprise, what with its overtly religious leanings and ominous blues riffs. Johnny Cash would later record the song with assistance from Depeche fan John Frusciante (ex-RHCP and future Dave Gahan collaborator) on guitar. For me my favourite track here remains 'Enjoy The Silence', a shimmering, upbeat track with a strange and captivating chorus. It is a towering moment in the band's catalogue.

I Feel You (Songs Of Faith And Devotion, 1993)

By 1993's Songs Of Faith And Devotion, I was a Depeche Mode fan proper. I had all their albums and had started collecting their singles back catalogue. When Radio 1 announced a 'Depeche Mode Day' and the premiering of their new single 'I Feel You', I woke up early to make sure I could hear the song before I went to school. I was dumbfounded when I heard the song. There was not a trace of anything the band had done previously at all; no electronics and no reference points to their back catalogue. It was almost like Dave Gahan fronting another band, a band who played heavy rock. It was a million miles (yet only twelve years) from Speak & Spell. I learned to love the song, loved the album and saw them live for the first time during that tour, a tour which saw the culmination of Gahan's drug taking, Andy Fletcher leaving the band temporarily with stress, Alan Wilder almost losing his life when an RAF jet crashed near his car and Gore drinking way too much.

'I Feel You' is a song I always equate with tragedy; the single was released a few days after we learned of the death of a school friend, initially thought to be a suicide bid after getting dumped by a girl but later found to be because of an unknown heart defect; consequently it's hard to separate the song from that event. In complete contrast, the orchestral 'One Caress', a beautiful if black ballad, reminds me of Stephen King's It, which I was reading at the time. That book terrified me and this song still raises the hairs on my arms.

Useless (Ultra, 1997)

Post-heroin, post-near-death, post-Alan Wilder, Depeche Mode returned in 1997 with a much more Violator-esque album – much more electronic and less out-of-character than Songs Of Faith And Devotion.

By 1997 I was at university and it wasn't a great year overall. This song soundtracked my personal disenchantment at not being able to save a certain person from themselves and their troubled thoughts, and the line containing 'All my useless advice' has a definite poignancy. Elsewhere that year Nick Cave And The Bads Seeds' 'Into My Arms' soundtracked the rare moments of optimism. On the positive, the girl that I'm referring to didn't dump me, but two years later we would mutually call it quits. 'Useless' could well be an apt description for three pointless, uniformly wasted years, come to think of it.

Dream On (Exciter, 2001)



'Dream On' was the first single from 2001's Exciter. Arriving on waves of almost Latin guitars and a conspiratorially-delivered vocal from Gahan, it was an unusual song which would later be overshadowed by the much more upbeat, dance-floor friendly 'I Feel Loved' which received a sterling remix from Armand van Helden.

I promised there would be no more heavily autobiographical episodes after this post, so here are my final words: I chiefly remember listening to this singer whilst preparing for my wedding to Mrs S. It's not my favourite track from Exciter, but I find it hard to separate the song from those positive days.

She hasn't dumped me. Yet.

Audio Journal : 15/02/2011

Tom Tom Club's début album was released in 1981. The band consisted of Tina Weymouth (the sexiest bass player the music industry has produced) and husband Chris Frantz (a drummer by trade) with assorted other musicians and singers, including two of Tina's sisters. Weymouth and Frantz's day-jobs were in Talking Heads, producing the funk rhythms over which guitarist Jerry Harrison and de facto leader David Byrne would add their own similarly vital ingredients. Recorded in downtime after Remain In Light, Talking Heads' fourth album, Tom Tom Club's success outstripped Talking Heads significantly.



In some ways it's not hard to see why Tom Tom Club were successful. The lengthy 'Wordy Rappinghood' and 'Genius Of Love' are big pop tracks, but to me feel like novelty pieces. The rapping on the first piece is frankly cringe-worthy at times, though I really like the hip-hop groove. 'Genius Of Love' was performed as an intermission by Tom Tom Club during Talking Heads' Stop Making Sense and I've removed it from that album's playlist as I really don't like it.

The remainder of the album – with the exception of the dreadful cover of 'Under The Boardwalk', which sounds like a bad pairing of Bananarama and August Darnell – is better, principally because the band stop trying to sound like they're aping Grandmaster Flash. 'L'Elephant' is my stand out favourite, but with good reason. When I first heard this solid funk groove I thought it sounded familiar, then it struck me that the main elements of the backing track cropped up on Talking Heads' Remain In Light CD/DVD reissue as an unfinished demo. Then again, reading This Must Be The Place – The Adventures Of Talking Heads In The Twentieth Century by David Bowman, most of that track was written by sometime Bowie / Talking Heads / Zappa / King Crimson guitarist Adrian Belew anyway. 'As Above So Below', which Belew also claims he wrote whilst recording with the Club, though he didn't receive so much as a mention, is my other favourite song here.

Iggy Pop's Lust For Life is an enigma of an album. Produced by David Bowie and released in 1977 sometimes it feels like a confusing amalgam of some of the releases Bowie himself would release – the closing track 'Fall In Love With Me', for example, has a disco-funk stomp, a more clarified take on the sound the Thin White Duke would make (but not remember making) on Station To Station; 'Tonight', with its watery keyboard melody has all the grace and poise of Bowie's '"Heroes"' and his own distinctive backing vocals give the track a melancholy depth. In many ways Iggy doesn't seem to know where he fits into all of this, a malleable, jerking puppet for his master to direct as he sits fit. Iggy's plight was proven by 'China Girl', a track written for him by Bowie (admittedly not on this album), which Bowie released later himself and had a lot more success with. Perhaps the vilification Iggy has faced since he took the insurance advert gig isn't fair after all. It's hard to be hard on the youthful, beaming Iggy on the front cover.



I don't listen to this album very often, and consequently every time I do it feels like I'm hearing it for the first time. Aside from the obvious songs (the glam-tastic rumble of 'Lust For Life', whose profile received a shot in the arm thanks to Trainspotting, the wry 'Passengers'), the rest never sound familiar at all. Sometimes it reminds me of a less goofy take on the first New York Dolls album, and its themes are clearly pretty dark and decadent ('Sixteen' is just plain lewd), but sometimes those guitars do sound a bit ELO (as on the louche 'Success').

When Antony Heggarty and his Johnsons won the Mercury prize a few years ago, there were sighs of consternation that he wasn't British enough; he was born British, true, but he'd lived in the States for years. Possessing a voice that evoked the depth and colour of Nina Simone with the theatricality of a Brecht / Weil composition, people were quietly in awe of this figure, and that voice, which had come up from the murkiest Manhattan depths thanks to patronage from the likes of Lou Reed, and was now receiving critical public acclaim.

His is not a voice I can listen to too often; it's not that I don't like it, it's more to do with the songs themselves. One could argue that his songs are plaintive, almost euphoric in their transcendence, but they are also very dark; if I wanted music to be depressed by, an Antony & The Johnsons album would be my first port of call.

The reason for mentioning Antony is because of an album by a band called Hello Lovers entitled Gone With The Wind. I didn't buy this; it was mistakenly packaged in with something else I'd bought. I know nothing about them and I've tried to listen to the album a few times but kept giving up – because of the singer's voice. His voice is like Antony's but bigger, less subtle, more prone to jazzy switches in key, from baritone to soprano, and it's hard to warm to. It's a shame, because the music itself, a fusion of Satie-esque piano motifs, mournful violins and café jazz styles, is really beautiful. Mercifully there are a couple of good instrumental tracks which offer relief from that voice.

Audio Journal : 07/02/2011

Wire are a band best described as 'post-punk', although I think there's an argument that UK punk was so brief, and the bands that became successful in its wake have endured so much longer, that the term can no longer apply.

I wasn't aware of Wire's legacy when I first heard them; I just knew them as a band that were on my favourite independent record label, Mute. I bought a compilation called International Compilation Mute in Southend-on-Sea in 1993 and on it was a Wire track, a version of the track 'Drill' which came to define their Eighties-period sound. To say I hated the buzzing, quirky sound of that song would be too strong, but suffice to say it was always the one track I'd never listen to all the way through. I then read about the band in magazines, understood their importance and how they stretched back to 1977, but I just figured that they weren't a band I was ever going to be into.

By the time I arrived at University a couple of years later, I'd built up a collection of electronic music, latterly focussing on edgy yet listenable dance music. In the first term of my first year you would regularly hear Daft Punk's 'Da Funk' blasting out loudly along the corridors from my room, much to the irritation of my neighbours. I found dance music's focus and drive appealing; while my fellow students were falling over themselves for every indie band that seemed to be the feted successor to either Blur or Oasis, I was happiest listening to repetitive beats.

Wire changed that, abruptly. Specifically their debut album Pink Flag, released in 1977 in the slipstream of UK punk's rude arrival. I was shopping with a friend, Kit, in Colchester one day. Kit had been subtly warning me for a while that I was spending too much money on music; I had become a vegetarian that term in order to spend the money I'd have earmarked for meat on records. I didn't listen to him and, scratching around for something to buy in Our Price, came upon Pink Flag, ignored my reservations about the song of theirs I'd heard before, ignored my reservations about guitar music in general, and just went ahead and bought it.

In the space of about two days you were as likely to hear Pink Flag blaring out of my student room as regularly as the likes of 'Da Funk'. Pink Flag has a sound which is very much influenced by punk, and I found some resonance in the repetitive guitar riffs and urgent drums, something which reminded me very much of the minimal progressions of dance music. It helped that Pink Flag didn't contain solos, that the lyrics were so strange and that the pace occasionally dropped into punk-baiting slowness. I also felt smug that while my friends fawned over Menswear's 'Daydreamer' and Elastica's 'Connection', I had the songs that directly influenced those tracks, almost to the point of plagiarism (something our lecturers were always banging on about). I am certainly not alone in having found 'punk' via dance music; a guy I exchanged emails with at Uni did exactly the same, and Wire had been his stepping-on point as well. Wire's de facto frontman, Colin Newman, who I also exchanged emails with at Uni, and who I've since interviewed a couple of times, went the other direction, from art punk to techno and back, repeatedly.

So I fell for Pink Flag in a big way, and over the next few months soaked up their Seventies trilogy of albums – Chairs Missing then 154, both of which were artier than the one preceding it – before moving on to their Mute period and their sundry offshoots and solo projects. It helped that they approached 'punk' from an art-school perspective, rapidly moving from punk's simple lump-headedness into slower, more calculated territories; somehow I found that more appealing than anything current in the indie Nineties, and any guitar-based music I'd ever heard up to that point.

The reason for waffling on about Wire is that I went to see them at The Scala last week. For those interested in reading my review of that gig, my review of the excellent Red Barked Tree (released but a week or so into 2011 and already my album of the year) or my short biography of the band, follow the links below.

Wire - Start To Move - A Short History Of Wire

Wire - Red Barked Tree

Wire - The Scala, 2 February 2011