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

Audio Journal : 01/02/2011

Vinyl Corner



Richard Youngs Atlas Of Hearts (Apollolaan Recordings LP, 2010)

The Dorset-based Apollolaan label issued their first vinyl release in December 2010, on the day of the Solstice. Previous Apollolaan releases have been made available as highly limited CD-Rs in hand-made packaging, and Richard Youngs' Atlas Of Hearts marks something of a departure, though the hallmarks are still there – an oil painting by Matthew Shaw adorns the sleeve, which was designed by Brian Lavelle, whose collaboration with Alistair Crosbie and Andrew Paine as Space Weather I covered a few weeks back. Lavelle has also collaborated with Youngs in the past.

Youngs is a looming presence on the Glasgow experimental music scene, with output ranging from acoustic guitar work through to the abstract electronic hinterlands, often created with other figures in the fertile territories in which he operates. One such collaborator, some of whose work provides a good reference point to Atlas Of Hearts, is the outsider songsmith Jandek, upon whom a similar level of underground cult mystique can be assigned.

Releasing this on the Solstice seems appropriate given the seven Youngs songs on this LP. There is a firm, simple spirituality and delicate references to nature crop up consistently in the lyrics and titles. I want to call this 'folk' music but somehow that doesn't seem enough. All I know is that its layers of guitar – mostly gently strummed or plucked but occasionally delivered backwards ('What Day Is This Day') or with stuttering, restrained distortion ('Heart In Open Space') – and overlapping vocal interweavings are absorbing and uplifting by turns. Sporadic use of subtle electronics, such as on the hypnotically sparse 'Joy Ride', augment the atmosphere perfectly.

Tracks like the opener 'Haze I' further highlight the blending together of guitar, unfathomable vocals and lightly-deployed electronics; the guitars have a detuned quality, a wobbly sound with the odd mistake left in. One of the most captivating songs is also the shortest – 'Sussex Pond' clocks in at just a minute but with its introspective guitar and mysterious vocal the song is a useful distillation of the rest of the album.

This was my first Richard Youngs album and, despite having read about him a fair bit over the years, I still didn't know what to expect. I also still have no idea if this is indicative of his usual style; further investigation is therefore clearly necessary.