Audio Journal : 03/05/2010

Two albums in one week from two of your favourite artists is a rare treat, but so it was in April with Rufus Wainwright's All Days Are Nights: Songs For Lulu and David Byrne's collaboration with Fatboy Slim (and just about every female vocalist under the sun) on Here Lies Love.

Both albums, coincidentally, are 'tributes' of sorts to women. In Wainwright's case that woman is a character played by actress Louise Brooks in the 1929 movie Pandora's Box, but also serves as a tribute of sorts to his mother, the late Kate McGarrigle, who passed away at the start of this year; whereas Byrne's album depicts the life of shoe-addicted dictator's wife, Imelda Marcos and juxtaposes that with the life of Estrella Cumpas, the woman who raised her.

Both also have their origins in theatre. Byrne's project with Fatboy Slim was originally conceived as a performance (albeit in nightclubs), while Wainwright's recent opera success with Prima Donna and love of all things Wagner has informed much of his work; the live performance of All Days Are Nights I went to on 13 April at Sadler's Wells saw Wainwright performing the entire album, almost faultlessly, in a 17ft ball-gown as a song cycle with the express request to the audience not to applaud until he had left the stage; theatrical indeed. As an album, All Days Are Nights sits neatly into Wainwright's opera-inspired oeuvre, and despite being just the man and a piano, is his most dramatic album to date. Mrs S says it's dreary, and at times it is certainly more plaintive and reflective than previous albums (check out the takes on three Shakespeare sonnets), but it is also by subtle shades uplifting and humorous (as on the most upbeat piece 'Give Me What I Want And Give It To Me Now' or the positively euphoric start to 'The Dream'). My personal favourites are the opener, 'Who Are You New York?', a ruminative long song to the City itself, and 'Martha', a song whose lyrics comprise the answer machine messages left by Rufus to his sister while their mother's illness worsened; it also signals the recent tentative reconciliation, through grief, of Rufus and his father Loudon.

Perhaps not as instantly, and bombastically accessible as previous Wainwright fare, All Days Are Nights is probably the most authentic, personal album Wainwright has produced thus far. Previous albums have always featured pieces for piano only, and in the live setting are always firm favourites with the audience (especially when Wainwright messes up, plays the wrong section or ad libs theatrically – think of an extremely camp Les Dawson); in an odd sense, the scaling back of the instruments to just a solitary piano ties in neatly with the reconciliation with his father, who has made it his business to produce album after album of music consisting of just his voice and a guitar.

David Byrne and Rufus Wainwright have worked together once before on a song, and that song was also theatrical in origin. 'Au Fond Du Temple Saint' appeared on Byrne's 2004 album Grown Backwards. The former Talking Heads front man's voice may have not been perfectly matched to Wainwright's dexterity on this piece from Bizet's Les Pêcheurs de Perles but all I wanted was a segue in this blog from one album to the other, and that seemed to work. Plus, more earnestly, the idea of Byrne tackling an opera track would – when watching the videos for 'Road To Nowhere' or 'Once In A Lifetime' – have seemed nonsensical; however, Byrne was an art student before starting Talking Heads and his interest in all manner of art forms is manifest (check his blog for the proof). And so I stand by my segue. The other possible one would have been Martha Wainwright, who is one of the female vocalists employed by Byrne on this project.

Of this album, critics have dubbed it the most accessible David Byrne album he's produced since the Talking Heads days, thanks to the input of Fatboy Slim, but I'd disagree; yes, it's more obviously 'pop' than other Byrne albums, but with the exception of albums like My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts (with Eno) or Big Love: Hymnal, Byrne is no stranger to traditional song structures, albeit conceived with his typical vision and the odd Brazilian flavour here and there. Plus Talking Heads weren't exactly what I'd describe as 'pop' anyway.

It certainly sounds more like a Byrne album that a Fatboy Slim one, but it serves to remind that Norman Cook is a brilliant producer as well as a purveyor of daft chart-bothering fare. The sound leans to a glossy funky disco blend, which apparently has something to do with Marcos' fondness for Manhattan nightclubs, although I don't know anything about her so can't say if I just made that up or not. I opted for the limited edition version – two CDs, a DVD and a 120 page book detailing the background to each song (which, hands up, I haven't read completely yet therefore this review isn't as well informed as it could have been). The lyrics for each, according to Byrne's typically exhaustive introduction notes, were centred around actual Marcos quotes (so shouldn't she have a writing credit?).

Byrne adds backing vocals to a number of tracks and delivers the superb 'American Troglodyte' himself, but in truth this is a vehicle for the assembled ranks of female vocalists, each hand-picked to provide a depiction of Marcos / Cumpas according to the theme of the song. So you get the likes of Tori Amos, Santigold, Cyndi Lauper, St. Vincent and Florence Welch (who, sans Machine, delivers the gorgeous title track). At 22 tracks it requires quite a commitment on the part of the listener, but it makes most sense when heard in a single sitting. I was really excited about this release, and suffice to say I wasn't disappointed.

Vinyl Corner



LFO 'Tied Up Remixes' (Warp Records 12”, 1994)

Some people know the Warp label as the home of leftfield bands like Grizzly Bear, Battles and Broadcast; others remember when it was the principal go-to label for the leftfield electronica of Aphex Twin, Autechre, Sweet Exorcist and the duo of Mark Bell and Gez Varley – LFO – whose Steve Wright-bothering sub-bass anthem 'LFO' kicked the Sheffield label into existence.

From humble origins as a behind-the-counter indie label at a Sheffield record store, Warp has become a well-respected, broad-minded label that's also branched out successfully into film, examples including the new Chris Morris movie Three Lions and the excellent documentary A Complete History Of My Sexual Failings.

Label owner Steve Beckett mentioned in a recent Esquire interview that after a while he began to find the slew of acts producing electronica in the Aphex template – which could be summarised crudely as distorted beats and glacial synths – wearying. He began to turn his ears towards the kind of alternative rock music being produced by the likes of Jason Pierce's Spiritualized; as such, this out-of-print Warp 12", remixed by Pierce, could well represent the point the label began to think more eclectically.

Pierce's nine-minute mix is a beautiful thing, a phasing and shifting drone work that has little or nothing to do with the harshness of the original. I'd call it 'ambient', and it does share much with Eno's brand of 'discreet' music, but it also has a depth best observed by listening on headphones.

The B-side, a remix by LFO of their 'Nurture' is more dancefloor-focussed.

I sold my copy of this recently to someone who, coincidentally, works at Warp.

Audio Journal : 26/04/2010

This isn't the piece I was intending to publish this week; that piece – on the new albums from David Byrne / Fatboy Slim and Rufus Wainwright – will have to wait.

Instead, here are some selections from Mrs S's iPhone which formed the soundtrack to our driving around the UK last week following the cancellation of our Portugal holiday. I have no control over the contents of her iPhone, just for the record, and, as you will see, increasingly neither does she.

Noah And The Whale The First Days Of Spring



'What's this?' I barked, on the way down the M1 to London, frustrated at the plodding, quiet songs I was hearing and which were affecting my concentration at the wheel. Three dreary songs in, with the added sound of two toddlers hollering at one another in the back, it had been turned off. I hope that's all I get to hear of it.

Devendra Banhart What Will We Be

More than anything else – apart from the collection of downloaded odds and ends in the playlist called The A List – this was the soundtrack to the second leg of our staycation. A breezy collection of whimsical folksy / oddball songs with Latin embellishments, this album continues in the vein of earlier Banhart albums, bound together by his unique vocal style. Paul Rees, Q's editor, says this is the first album where you don't want to punch Banhart in the face; I find this amusing, as, despite being a pacifist, I'd be quite up for punching Paul Rees in the chops.

Lawrence Arabia Chant Darling

When I saw this getting purchased from iTunes, I figured it would be some turgid indie garbage on the name of the band alone. It smacked of barrel-scraping in the 'what shall we call ourselves?' stakes, and of course I was proven wrong. We didn't listen to it often enough for it to leave a lasting impression on me, but the track 'Apple Pie Bed' could well become my personal soundtrack to the summer of '10. Judging by how my almost-four-year old eldest daughter would spontaneously burst into a rendition of the unbelievably chipper chorus ('Apple pie bed / When my body's made of lead') during quiet points on the holiday, it passes the toddler test for catchiness too.

Mrs S's A-List

Listening to albums in the car is something we rarely do apart from on holidays or long journeys. Usually we'll listen to whatever odd tracks Mrs S has read about or heard on 6 Music, usually until she buys something new or just goes off the songs. The A-List, as she named it years ago, at least this time around, included the aforementioned Lawrence Arabia song, some stuff by The Cars, Chew Lips, The Knife, The Crookes, Sunshine Underground (too Killers for me), MGMT's sublime 'Flash Delirium', a newly-discovered Hendrix track and others.

Whilst I find listening to a bunch of songs I don't know by artists I've never heard of pretty enjoyable, I usually don't have much of a say over what goes into the playlist (The Knife's 'Heartbeats' and the two Cars songs were squirrelled in by me), and as I alluded at the start of this, neither does Mrs S these days.

The reason is that almost-four-year-old Daughter#1 who has developed an early passion for upbeat, electronic-y poppy tracks which would never have graced Mrs S's iPhone in a million years. Thus we found ourselves smiling to ourselves as she and her little sister sang along to the likes of 'Just Dance' and 'Poker Face' by Lady Gaga and 'The Boy Does Nothing' by Alesha Dixon. Parentally heart-melting stuff indeed, but from this seed of compromise will grow a tree that can only lead to that A-List getting more and more poptastic over the next few years.

Vinyl Corner

'Daddy, what are records?'

Nuff said.

Audio Journal : 05/04/2010

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

Two albums have dominated my listening this past fortnight. The first is Goldfrapp's Head First, which was released a couple of Mondays ago. A neat antidote to the already bland synth-pop-with-girls of La Roux, Little Boots et al, Head First finds the duo of Alison Goldfrapp and Will Gregory kicking the younger upstarts into touch with a shimmering collection of mostly upbeat pop tracks eschewing the early Eighties leanings of most retro popsters in favour of the late decade digital-analogue blend as perfected by the likes of Erasure. A full review can be found here.

The other album is Complete Greatest Hits by The Cars. Until about a month ago my knowledge of this Boston, MA band was limited to the track 'Drive', used heavily by Bob Geldoff during Live Aid clips; it's not a bad song, but it suffers from over-exposure, plus it provides few clues to the much better material elsewhere in their back catalogue.

The Cars were described as being a blend of punk's minimalism, art rock and Fifties rockabilly riffery; for me, it's the big Eighties keyboard sound and the clipped, funk-esque guitar riffs both of which bring to mind the work of their fellow alternative / college radio luminaries Talking Heads. Tracks such as 'Best Friend's Girl', 'Let's Go' and 'Good Times Roll' are stand-out songs on this twenty-track compilation, and I'll definitely be delving into their albums proper soon.

Let it be known that I am not a fan of The Beatles. I bought The Beatles (aka The White Album) for its avant-gardist leanings and wasn't disappointed, but apart from the odd poppy song here and there, I'm just not a fan. Mrs S, introduced to their music by her father, is a fan and has – time after time – scolded me for my repeated question 'So, is this John singing or Paul?'. I do, however, enjoy their music on a Sunday. Don't ask me why.



Imagine this: listening to every Beatles album, sequentially, in one sitting. Nothing would send me insane quicker, but there is a solution. Avant garde soundsmith Steve McLaughlin, for his piece Run For Your Life, sped up every song by 800% and combined them together into one hour-long track. What's surprising is how, even at this speed, you're able to identify recognisable sections of tracks. 'A Day In The Life', for example, retains much of its drama despite losing any sense of subtlety. The early tracks, all speed and rock 'n roll energy, zip by in a messy amphetamine blur, while the more interesting stuff (from Revolver onwards) – where speed was sacrificed in favour of a more considered sonic template – make for interesting listening at this high velocity. Strangely enough, it's still the McCartney tracks that grate. As with the plunderphonic work of John Oswald, it's not exactly easy listening (but to me, listening to The Beatles at the regular speed isn't either). Judge for yourself by downloading the track from the Ubuweb archive here.

Vinyl Corner

More Eighties pop this week, this time from Howard Jones; Jones was famous for using 'keytars' and for having enormous hair, even by Eighties standards – as evidenced on the sleeve to 'What Is Love?'.

'What Is Love?' was arguably Jones's biggest hit in a career which spanned both sides of the Atlantic. Wikipedia states that his sound was an appealing mix of New Wave and Sixties hippiness – I don't hear that on this track; instead you get some ruminative psychological musings on the meaning of love (a popular theme among New Romantics, naturally) and a big Eighties sound dominated by Fairlight horns and springy bass synths. In one of my earlier websites, during one of my 'charity shop round-ups' of records I'd bought from local Colchester thrift stores that week, I remember being quite disparaging of this song and Jones generally. Looking back I don't honestly know why, as I think this is a really good track.

The B-side on the other hand ('It Just Doesn't Matter'), is rubbish.

Audio Journal : 22/03/2010

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

Julian Plenti's Julian Plenti Is ... Skyscraper has sat in my iTunes Wish-List since it was released last year, and I finally got around to buying it over the weekend. This was mostly prompted by listening to Interpol's Antics in the car all last week; from the paucity of Interpol music I thought it was high time to get Plenti's album; Plenti is a pseudonym for Interpol's vocalist Paul Banks. Given that one of the things that has always appealed about Interpol is Banks' Ian Curtis-esque delivery, expectations were pretty high for his first solo album under the Julian Plenti alias.

As is so often the case, approaching something with heightened expectations often leads to disappointment, and that's exactly how ... Skyscraper is. I truly hope that it will grow with repeated listening, but so far – three listens in – my conclusion is that it's a good album, but it's just nowhere close to Interpol at all. For one, it's far too optimistic; I've become used to the negativity and world-weary disenchantment across their three albums, and, well, this just isn't grumpy enough for my tastes. Secondly, like the good, but un-Strokes-y output of Albert Hammond Jr and Julian Casablancas, Banks's album has a totally different sound to anything his parent band have produced; I've never understood this. Does this imply a dissatisfaction on the part of a group member about the personal direction he or she wants to go in? Pondering aside, like I said, not a bad album, just not an Interpol album.

An album that I haven't listened for a good few years is Set Yourself On Fire (2004), the third album by Canadian band Stars. We bought this after Mrs S had heard the tracks 'Your Ex-Lover Is Dead' (how Morrissey is that?) and 'Reunion' on BBC 6 Music, but the album was a disappointment. The orchestral grandeur of 'Your Ex-Lover Is Dead' seemed to be a one-off, the rest of the album struggling to know what it wanted to be; there are tinkly keyboards, fey indie rock songs and the occasional burst of wistful violin. So I tend to avoid it when I'm scrolling through my playlists. But this week I was in one of those restless moods where I couldn't settle on anything in my iPod and decided to give it a listen. I was pleasantly surprised to see that it had grown on me, and whereas previously I'd got annoyed at the chopping and changing of styles, now it simply has a pleasing variety.

Talented family patriarch Loudon Wainwright III released a new album this month. Songs For The New Depression is a collection of songs for guitar and ukele, the common theme of which is the poor state of the post-Lehman, post-Madoff, post-Bush US economy. So you get songs about the difficulties in the real estate market ('House'), cynical pieces about their car scrappage scheme ('Cash For Clunkers') and the track which neatly summarises the whole sorry affair, 'Times Is Hard'. It's a good, cynical album with Wainwright III's trademark wry humour, but it would have been nice to hear some of the songs delivered as full band pieces (as on Strange Weirdos or Recovery), but if you're a fan of solo folksy performances this won't disappoint.

Vinyl corner



Okay, let's start with the sleeve of Bill Sharpe & Gary Numan's 'No More Lies' (1988) – it's awful, even by Eighties standards. Attempts at futuristic bleakness come across more like two leather-clad Village People in a gay bar than the look I suspect they were trying to cultivate. If it wasn't for the 'computer'-y font around the edge, you'd be mistaken for thinking this was some sort of hair-Metal record.

It's not. It's actually one of the better tracks in the entire, patchy Gary Numan back catalogue. Numan is someone who for me went off the boil after 'Cars' and the earlier work as Tubeway Army and I rid myself of my greatest hits CD many moons ago. The record box was spared, leaving the blue vinyl limited edition 7" and another track 'Your Fascination' (1985); in keeping with the 'weeding' I'm doing at present with my music collection, 'Your Fascination' (actually another good song come to think of it) was slung at a charity shop (the sleeve still bearing the price tag of the charity shop I bought it from years ago) and 'No More Lies' is on eBay.

'No More Lies' is a defiant, soulful Eighties pop track that could've been recorded just as well by Human League or even any of the Stock, Aitken & Waterman crop of singers. It's certainly not like any of the robotic synth pop Numan produced in his earlier years, nor does it provide any clues to his later, doom-laden electro-rock output. It's just a piece of breezy, polite pop music. The B-side, 'Voices' has a more muscular synth bass-line but mines a similar vein. As seems to be happening a lot lately, I found myself preferring the B-side to the lead track.

Audio Journal : 15/03/2010

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

Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark, or OMD as they are more easily abbreviated to, are one of those bands that I remember distinctly from my childhood. Two of their tracks, 'Joan Of Arc' and the companion 'Maid Of Orleans' were on a cassette my dad had that we used to listen to in the car on Saturdays. Between those two tracks, seeing Gary Numan on the Old Grey Whistle Test driving a Sinclair C5, and watching a Soft Cell video (Non-Stop Exotic Video Show) you have probably the three biggest influences on my early musical tastes; no surprise that it would coalesce into a love for electronic music that endures to this very day.

Those two tracks were taken from Architecture And Morality, OMD's 1981 album. I finally bought that album from RS McColl in Colchester while I was at University there in the mid Nineties along with some of the pre-Dare Human League albums. I love Architecture And Morality, especially the dystopian post-punk opener 'New Stone Age', but – sacrilegious though this must sound to 1981 purists – it doesn't do as much for me as their 1991 'comeback' album Sugar Tax. Again, my principal love for this album was from my dad playing the cassettes while we drove around Stratford-upon-Avon's boroughs and neighbouring villages on Saturday mornings. It's a glossy album that manages to deliver the stellar pop of 'Sailing On The Seven Seas', 'Pandora's Box' and 'Speed Of Light' but it also sees Andy McCluskey pay homage to his musical heroes Kraftwerk on the cover of 'Neon Lights' (Kraftwerk alleged quite happily that McCluskey nicked the melody for 'Electricity' from their 'Radio-Activity' but I don't hear it myself). Like the Pet Shop Boys with the orchestral stabs that dominated their early work, so too does the sampled choral harmonies that became an OMD staple dominate the sound of Sugar Tax.

I'm not too proud to admit that one of my favourite slushy films is Serendipity (2001), a 'rom com' about fate set in Manhattan starring Kate Beckinsale and John Cusack. In it, Beckinsale's fiance, the always annoying John Corbett (Lars) makes music effectively comprising his clarinet, drum 'n bass beats and sitars to create what jazzists would describe as 'fusion' but that I just call 'naff'; it goes without saying that his irritating character and the risible faux ethnology of the music is of course a convenient directorial vehicle for making the musician appear inferior to Cusack's own figure.

The reason for mentioning this is because this week I stuck on Loop Guru's Amrita...All These And The Japanese Soup Warriors and was struck by the similarity to the music made by Corbett's character in Serendipity, and it was a comparison that I couldn't get out of my head whilst listening to Amrita... and which ultimately prompted me to turn it off. I loved the album at the time, Loop Guru being part of one of the infinite substrata of 1990s 'dance' music genres, and I saw them live in Colchester at a very memorable concert at the Arts Centre in 1995; but something now seems so horribly dated and inauthentic about the sound. 'Yayli' – the track which least tries to orient itself into this ethnic-techno genre – still sounds good, but the rest may find themselves in the deleted items folder fairly soon. I hate it when you go back through your music collection and feel dissatisfied with albums you haven't heard for ages.

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In the world of music, Pavement are regarded (along with, say, Sonic Youth or Dinosaur Jr.) as principal architects of an alternative sound which has influenced countless bands over the years. Even the musical magpie that is Damon Albarn cited the band as an influence for the patchy Blur album Blur (though I fail to hear anything but Blur therein). With a new compilation of their material just released, it's fair to assume that more people and bands will begin to be influenced by the band.

I own only one Pavement record, 1999's UK-only 'Carrot Rope' 7", which I've listened to more since recording it this week than I ever have since I bought it upon its release. It's a brilliant track, but – and I know this sounds superficial – I never want to put on the record because of the sleeve. Something about the peeling orange rope makes me feel nauseous, thus causing me to avoid it when I scour the box. Having overcome that reaction this week, I've been reminded of how much I love the jaunty, upbeat 'Carrot Rope', but also how much better the grandiose B-side ('And Then') is. I recall that at the time this came out I'd intended it to be the start of a proper immersion into the music of Pavement, which clearly never happened. Though I don't normally buy artist compilations, preferring instead to work my way through the albums sequentially, perhaps I should get that new 'best of'.

Audio Journal : 08/03/2010

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

This week I've mostly been listening to Goldfrapp's 'Rocket', the first single to be taken from their new album Head First. A return to electronic pop after an experiment with Wicker Man-esque folksy mysticism on their last album (Seventh Tree), 'Rocket' takes the Eighties preset keyboard sound of Van Halen's 'Jump' and hitches it to a high-energy beat and a singalong chorus to create a perfect pop track which could easily grate after a few weeks of repeated listening.

To stop that from happening I've also been listening to Wild Palms' '...Over...Time...' a single that was released on the Popular Music label last year. Wild Palms are a four-piece London band producing clipped, funky rock tracks with a whiff of Durutti Column, Devo or Talking Heads. A stellar cover of Bjork's 'Human Behaviour' is available for free download here.



At the weekend I watched the BBC Arena documentary on Brian Eno. Eno's 'Another Green World' is the title music for the BBC's long-running occasional high-brow arts documentary series, so it seems fitting that they would finally turn their attention to the enigmatic Eno and his wide-ranging interests. During the hour-long programme he spoke about his love of gospel music, choral music, Darwinism, art and science. I didn't get most of it, but it was fascinating to see Eno conjuring improvised ambient tracks effortlessly from his Mac.

I have an enduring love for Eno's music, but actually own depressingly little of it. However, I do have a number of records produced by Eno for other artists – the aforementioned Devo and Talking Heads, plus Bowie, U2, the last Coldplay album and James. James are still most famous for their massive hit 'Sit Down'. At school, when 'Sit Down' arrived in the depths of the Madchester / Baggy scene, I couldn't have hated it more. Everyone was wearing those ubiquitous James 'flower' T-shirts and it all seemed so irritating. Perhaps it was just because I wasn't in with the cool kids.

A few years later, my friend Rachael played me Laid when it was released. The jangly, semi-acoustic Laid was produced by Eno, and I really loved it. I was, in truth, most attracted by the production credit, having spent the previous couple of years borrowing CDs from Stratford-upon-Avon Library's seemingly limitless collection of Eno albums. The follow-up to Laid, the now rare-as-hen's teeth Wah-Wah was even more up my street. Essentially a loose collection of jams recorded during the Laid sessions and re-processed into complete tracks by Eno, Wah-Wah was a departure for James but utterly in keeping with the Eno spirit. Whiplash, which followed also saw Eno helping out on curiously electronic-embracing James (the track 'Go To The Bank' is one of my favourite, out-of-character James tracks), while Millionaires (another Eno production) was a return to the stately Eno rock productions of The Joshua Tree and "Heroes".

I really only fell for James big-style when I saw them perform three songs on Jools Holland to promote their Best Of compilation in 1999. They played 'She's A Star' and 'Runaground', both of which were overshadowed by the towering grandiosity of 'Sit Down', and after almost a decade of detesting that track I finally fell in love with it thanks in the most part to Tim Booth's vocals. This week I've listened to Gold Mother, which birthed 'Sit Down' to remind myself of just how good that song really is. A musician acquaintance once said to me that James tracks always have a plaintive, emotional quality because of the way their choruses use minor chords; I don't know if that's true, but 'Sit Down' now stands (or sits?) as one of my favourite tracks of all time to sing along badly to at high volume.

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Space were a three-piece band from Marseille whose biggest hit was the instrumental 'Magic Fly' (1977), which I appropriated from my parents' music collection when I left home. Not to be confused with the band of Scouse reprobates who had hits in the Nineties with songs like 'Female Of The Species', this Space were exponents of a short-lived 'space disco' scene.

Led by the upper-octave monophonic synth melodies of Didier Marouani (also known as Ecama), along with bandmates Roland Romanelli and Jannick Top, 'Magic Fly' is essentially a Giorgio Moroder-esque high-energy disco track propelled by a thudding proto-techno beat. Sure, it's more Käse than Kraftwerk, but it's difficult not to like it. The B-side 'Ballad For Space Lovers' is more sedate and altogether more Prog-tastic.

Audio Journal : 01/03/2010

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

Mrs S and I were sat in a hotel room a few weekends ago; she'd just bought an iPhone and was keen to show off what it could do. I initially held the iPhone with the same disregard as I did for the iPod, but I rapidly came round to appreciating that device and will no doubt feel the same way about her iPhone – in time – also.

We decided to watch some music TV, but the options on the hotel TV were limited to one (it was some trashy pop-only channel; these channels seem to spring up then die with alarming regularity, so even if I could remember what it was called, it probably wouldn't be there now). So we sat there, slack-jawed at just how crass modern pop music is and bemused at Craig David's comeback. And then came Jedward's cover of 'Under Pressure', replete with interjections from Vanilla Ice reprising his 'Ice Ice Baby' (which of course famously 'borrowed' the intro from the Queen / Bowie track). Awful though it clearly was, Jedward do thus have the dubious accolade of making Vanilla Ice, a terminally-derided white rapper from the early Nineties, look cool for perhaps the first time in his career.



So Mrs S and I got to talking about To The Extreme, Ice's 1990 album which we both owned on cassette. Such wistful recollections of our respective musical yesteryears are fairly commonplace between us. As an impressionable (yet tasteless) teenager I thought To The Extreme was brilliant and it was rarely out of my tapedeck, and in my head I thought I was as cool as my mate Rob's brother Chris, who was into Public Enemy. At the time I hadn't started reading the music press, nor had I started listening to 'underground' (i.e. credible) music, so I wasn't really able to see just how lame Ice was, and how mistaken I was.

Still, during the course of our chat about To The Extreme, we both said how – at the time – we thought the song 'Stop That Train' was infinitely better than 'Ice Ice Baby' (but then, it wouldn't have taken much). Before I knew it or could protest, Mrs S had launched iTunes and had purchased and seconds later was playing that song, and then in short order the Keith & Tex version of the song as well. No good can come from having portable access to near-instant music purchasing, I fear. Not only does it create the conditions for the inevitable capacity to overspend wantonly on ill-considered song purchases, but also it destroys any of that sense of anticipation that you used to get between buying a record and getting home to play it. However, without it we wouldn't have known about the Keith & Tex track, which is an outstanding piece of early, skanking Sixties rocksteady reggae. The Vanilla Ice song, on the other hand, was obviously always rubbish. Delete. Now.



From music TV to radio, specifically to the plight faced by BBC 6Music, which may face closure as part of a wave of proposed cuts at the national broadcaster. 6Music remains the only non-commercial station to broadcast music which can be broadly classified as 'alternative'. Imagine the sorely-missed John Peel presenting his eclectic mix of old, new, archive performances / sessions, the forgotten and the 'classic', twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and you get the picture as to what this specialist broadcaster is all about.



Some of the things I've written about in this blog have reached my ears because of the exposure that non-pop music receives on 6Music. Without the station, there really is little alternative for anyone truly passionate about the music that is not acknowledged by Radios 1 and 2, leaving us with little more than Zane Lowe's brief weekday slot filled in the wake of Peel to satisfy curious ears. To lose 6Music from the BBC portfolio would be an absolute travesty for music fans. To act, do one or better still all of the following:

1. Take a listen at:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/playlive/bbc_6music/

1. Join the Facebook group at:

http://bit.ly/bbc6music

2. Sign the online consultation at:

http://bit.ly/srconsultation

3. Tweet with the hashtag #savebbc6music

Vinyl corner



Last week I said I'd resurrect my practice of digging out an old record from one of the boxes hidden away in the darkest corners of my house.

This week's slice of vinyl comes from The JAMs, aka The Justified Ancients Of Mu-Mu, aka The KLF. The anarcho-techno duo of Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty of course produced some brilliant dancefloor records with the trio of 'What Time Is Love?', '3AM Eternal' and a remixed 'Last Train To Trancentral', perfect club hits interspersed with faux cult mythology. They also appeared on Top Of The Pops with Gary Glitter back when they went under the name The Timelords, performing an early example of the mash-up genre with their blending of their 'Doctorin' The Tardis' with the now-deposed Glitter's 'Rock N' Roll'. The KLF quickly descended into artistic dubiousness – machine guns and dead sheep at The Brits, heavy metal re-versions of their biggest hits, burning a million quid on the Isle of Jura, not to mention a questionable duet with Tammy Wynette – but we should never forget that one of their earliest 'releases' as The KLF was a book, published in the wake of 'Doctorin' The Tardis' hitting the top spot of the UK charts, called The Manual: How To Have A Number One The Easy Way, a book whose opening fragment of advice to budding popstars is 'Firstly, you must be skint and on the dole'.

So, not a band to be taken especially seriously then and on one hand 'It's Grim Up North' continues the theme. Basically a list of Northern English towns and cities spoken through a megaphone over a thudding 'What Time Is Love?' acid house track, occasionally punctured by the distorted 'chorus' of 'It's grim up north', it's classic KLF and pointed to a future where they'd ditched some of their more wayward tendencies in favour of a return to the dancefloor; the album that this was purportedly taken from (The Black Room) has become the stuff of legend and has never, and probably will never, see the light of day.

If the A-side ('It's Grim Up North (Part 1)') is still a bit pranksterish for you, or you don't like the grandiose orchestral conclusion, a straightahead techno dub can be found lurking menacingly on the B-side.