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 by MJA Smith : 17/08/2009

Though often broad-minded, this blog has generally been about that which can be described, however loosely, as music. But what is music? Is music art? Is music played without regular instruments actually something that can be adequately described as ‘music’?

Such are the questions that go through your mind if you should find yourself at Playing The Building, the installation by elastic-limbed ex-Talking Heads front man David Byrne at the Roundhouse in Camden until the end of the month. Playing The Building finds an old pump organ, fully gutted and kitted out with various electric switches in the centre of the historic venue, those switches in turn being connected by coloured wires to various hammers and compressors attached to the beams, hollow pipes and girders of the building. People visiting the installation are allowed to sit at the keyboard of the organ and play the keys, causing drones, clicks and whistles to fill the circular structure. In short, visitors are literally able to play the actual structure of the building.



In 1979 the Roundhouse, after incarnations as a turning shed for locomotives heading in and out of Kings Cross, a gin warehouse, a radical hippy hangout and a theatre, found itself a mecca for punk bands, especially those visiting from the CBGB scene in New York. One such band was Byrne’s Talking Heads, who played the venue that year. Thirty years on, Byrne’s art school tendencies and music have come together in this installation, which was first created at Färgfabriken in Sweden and most recently the Battery Maritime Building in Manhattan.

Time pressures meant that I only stayed for about twenty minutes when I visited last Monday, which effectively precluded me from joining the lengthening queue of people looking to play the Roundhouse. But I did grab a photo and three minutes of audio from two teenagers playing together at the organ. Apologies for the sound quality, but I only had an old Nokia with me. Better clips from earlier incarnations of the installation can be found here.

Download : two teenagers Playing The Building (10/09/2009) / .mp3 / 1.4mb

Incidentally, New York punk lost one of its pioneers last week. Willy Deville, who in the incandescent scene that burst forth in Manhattan’s Lower East Side recorded rockabilly-inspired punk with Mink Deville passed away last week. His ‘Spanish Stroll’ from his 1977 debut Cabretta has been in the eardrums a lot since died, as has his urgent, intense ‘Soul Twist’.

Is it punk? Is it art? Is it music? I found myself listening an album that I know, categorically, only around four people have ever listened to. Jason Gets His Fingers Burned was recorded by my good friend Matt Handfield and myself one evening in 2001 under the name Handfield / Smith. Matt played guitar while I processed his riffs and strumming in real time using various effects.

The result is a 45 minute jam with discernible melodies contrasted with lots of feedback. It was my vision to create something like how I thought the album Metal Machine Music by Lou Reed (this must be New York week, sorry) might sound; having listened to MMM since, I can confirm that it sounds nothing like it, but even though I’m normally extremely self-deprecating about any music I’ve ever made, it still sounds good to me. We planned a follow-up, which in my head was called Grow Beards. Handfield has now actually grown that beard, whereas I’ve stopped making music altogether in favour of listening instead. We coulda been huge in the alt.noise scene.

The second track on JGHFB was a noodling guitar passage that Matt created the same evening and which I then later remixed offline. You can find it by doing the right click / save as thing on the link below.

Download : Handfield / Smith 'Tsm / Dog Soup (Tsm)' / .mp3 / 4.1mb