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.
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.
