Month: May 2020

Destroyer – Have We Met: Round 110 (probably), Nick’s choice

Time seems to move both very quickly and very slowly under lockdown. In fact it’s done that for the last few years – maybe that’s just parenthood. Certainly the last two years feel like they’ve contained too much, both in my personal life and in the world at large.

This was the record I chose to play (part of) at our first virtual meeting under lockdown circumstances some 8 weeks ago – zooming each other, sharing audio, sharing screens, typing comments rather than talking as we listened, no curry, sitting in our own livingrooms/bedrooms/kitchens rather than sharing air with each other. It seemed appropriate for two reasons: firstly, it was the record I’d played most from 2020 so far and as such I was eager to play it to friends and see what they thought. Because that’s what record club is for.

And secondly, in interviews Bejar described it as having been recorded almost under lockdown conditions – singing songs quietly into his laptop in his kitchen after his wife and daughter had gone to bed, sending the files through the ether to his collaborators for them to do similar with drum machines, synthesisers, electric guitars. It struck me that if music is to be made under lockdown by anyone not cohabiting then it must be made like this; via Skype, or Zoom, or Teams, or FaceTime, FTPing sound files, discussing strategies and approaches and influences and intentions via email or IM or even phonecalls. It seemed like a positive example of what can be achieved despite isolation.

Because Have We Met is fabulous, as strong a set of songs as Bejar has done, and in an aesthetic that suits his latterday writing and singing perfectly – slightly motorik, electronic, somehow out of time (redolent of the 80s but not slavish to them), related to but evolved from Kaputt (the opening line steals a reference directly from that album, as only Bejar could) and Poison Season, taking the best aesthetic cues from Ken and expanding them (and with better songs).

Before everything went crazy I listened to this (almost) obsessively; it soundtracked my walk to work day after day. And then…

Emma was talking about coronavirus since before Christmas I think, hooked on reports since word first emerged of deaths in China. She’s a repeat offender when it comes to early-adopting, but this time it was with a pandemic rather than foofy boots or a Swedish rucksack. She knew it was coming and she knew it would change the world. She still says, occasionally, that she worries this could be the virus that actually, finally, does for humanity. For the sake of my children I hope that’s not the case. For the sake of human culture I hope it’s not the case, too, because I would hate for this record (and so many others) to be so meaningless in the face of the apocalypse.

But I’m being dramatic (I’ve had a cider): we’ll survive this pandemic, and adjust some of our behaviours, and we will carry on, and we will make music and listen to it.

I should write about the songs, but that feels trite. I enjoy them. There’s an instrumental towards the end that feels like peak Berlin Bowie and Eno. One is called “Cue Synthesisers” and it does that “Dance to the Music” trick of mentioning an instrument before it joins the mix. Overall it is very smooth, almost soporific, but every so often an electric guitar solo rips through it like… a virus through a populace… and upends everything. The lyrics are Bejar’s usual concoction of meaningless placeholders, repetition, and nonsense that somehow attain a level of pseudo-profundity through their delivery and context. I love what he does. Very Roland Barthes. All aesthetic, for the listener to project onto.

Tonight is only the second time I’ve listened to this record since lockdown, despite having been listening to it twice a day for a while before the world changed. There’s not a lot of opportunity for music in my current circumstances. I hope there is in yours.

Steve Listened: It is in my life, but only a little. Loved the album Nick, and thanks for the write-up. I do hope, as you do, that this is not the end. As the world collapses though this album comes close to a soundtrack to those times, if we are in those times, which I hope we are not….

Kraftwerk – Computer World: Round 113 – Steve’s Selection

Kraftwerk_-_Computer_World“I program my home computer. Beam myself into the future“. So the prophets and influencers of all things techno, acid house, electronic music, and Coldplay (!) sing in the synthesised voices on ‘Home Computer’.

It’s 1981, and one year before the release of the ZX Spectrum, my first home computer which I got as a present on my 10th birthday. I was too young then to know about Kraftwerk, and certainly not aware of the potential of computers to infiltrate, underpin, and govern the world and how it works today. Not so for one Florian Schneider (RIP; 7th April 1945 – 21st April 2020) and Ralf Hütter, on this their 8th studio album, and arguably (for me) at the height of their powers. They were predicting the future not just of technology on this album, but shining a light for a whole new form of electronic music. You might argue that had done that already through much of the mid to late 70s, on Autobahn, Trans Europe Express, The Man Machine and Radioactivity, but it’s here that it takes full flight in beautiful electronic gold plated glory.

I came to Kraftwerk through my church. I was brought up in a sometimes strange Christian sect (The Christadelphians). Some members shunned music, and especially anything that might deviate or challenge the faith. There was a member of our church who however revealed to me that he had quite a vast music collection, and he invited me to his house. His son also possessed a rather encyclopaedic knowledge of all the music he owned, and between them they had developed a cataloguing system of vinyl, CDs, tapes, and open reel tapes (they said this was audibly by far the best format – so there you go @sickmouthy). Anyway, to cut a long story short he taped a whole load of albums for me (Can, the Fall, Richard Hell and the Voidoids), including a complete set of Kraftwerk albums. I was smitten, but especially by Computer World. For me the rhythms, the beats, the clarity, timing, all had a purity and such a futuristic sound that it was hard not to fall in love with this rather iconoclastic group of Germans. By this time (around 85/86) I had stopped playing computer games, and had found a new love – music and in particular, record collecting. I bought a copy of Computer World, and Radioactivity (which I later sold and have only just recently replaced).

Computer World begins on the opening title track with a beat to die for and a sublime keyboard sequence that sings – without words – computer world (dee-dee-dah-dee). It’s subtle, but an Ohrwurm (‘earworm’ in German), that keeps coming back, time and time again throughout the album. I think is why, above all else, I love this album. The mere repetition of that sequence of notes….

Pocket calculator is also all electronic joy. The track had such a profound influence on Detroit techno, and subsequently dance and rave music over here in the UK. It was a few years later, after getting into Kraftwerk, that I heard A Guy Called Gerald’s ‘Voodoo Ray’ and felt like it was the same music being beamed back to me from outer space. It’s easy to understate and underestimate how influential Kraftwerk were on black African American audiences, and later the early UK scene by Gerald and the like. But as a clip demonstrates (at the bottom of the page…), ‘Numbers’ had such a huge important influence on the club and dance scene emerging out of Detroit, Chicago, and New York in the mid to late 80s.

The sound of Kraftwerk, because of their influence, can be found amongst the ‘bleeps and bloops’ of countless techno artists. But here on Computer World it also has funk. Kraftwerk were first through the door on this combination, and nobody at their time could replicate their sound, despite its simplicity. Perhaps that is why they are so heavily sampled. The sounds on Computer World are simple, and yet so complex. ‘Numbers’ segueways seamlessly back into the Computer World keyboard sequence to die for. It’s beautiful. ‘Computer Love’ is incredible too, with overlapping melodies and some timeless prophecies of ‘data dates’ to come. It’s no wonder that Bowie loved them, he too taking their cue to predict a computer age – we’ve all seen that clip of him predicting the internet. This album opens the door on that world. On the last track “It’s More Fun to Compute” I swear it says “It’s nearer to compute”, as opposed to “It’s nearer to commute” – and here we are, all joining each other virtually as Covid-19 continues to bear down and restrict our movement, at least for those of us who are privileged enough to be able to work at home and avoid the “unnecessary travel”.

In summary, I simply love this album. It’s certainly one of my favourites of all time. Let’s not get into that ‘top 10 albums that made me’ schtick though, but if we did, it would be in mine! We’ve not covered Kraftwerk before at DRC (I don’t think). For a band that is arguably more influential than the Beatles that seems strange. Paul Morley, who I normally don’t have much time for, contests in a Kraftwerk documentary on the BBC that they are more influential than the Beatles. He does this by dismissing the mop-tops’ musical influence (he asks ‘Who have the Beatles actually influenced? Elton John, ELO, Gary Barlow, and the Spice Girls’). The truth of it is the Beatles stole the sounds of Black African Americans and pretended it was their own. Whereas, he contends, Kraftwerk gave a unique sound back to black African American artists (e.g. Derrick May, Afrika Bambaataa), who adapted it and in turn gave back a whole new genre, and the love of which, for me, will never die. RIP Florian.

Pavement – Crooked Rain Crooked Rain: Round 112 – Tom’s Selection

Much of my life has panned out more or less as expected. If the twenty five year old version of myself was to have been told that at the age of fifty I would be living in a sleepy village in rural Devon with Karen and two wonderful children, still working in education, but not in school any more, and that I still get to go rock climbing every so often…I don’t think I would have been too surprised. However, if the twenty five year old me was to have found out that at this age I would have been in a record club that was convening for the one hundred and twelfth time and that in all the previous meetings not one of the members of the club had played an album by Pavement (and that, in fact, Pavement had barely been brought up in conversation), well I probably would have called you out as a liar!

In the mid nineties Pavement were top of my go-to list. Crucially almost everyone I listened to music with (the aforementioned wife, many of my friends…as well as my brother, Ben) held a similar point of view that Pavement could do no wrong. Whatever the situation: Friday nights in relaxing in our cherished little two up two down in Newton Abbot, car journeys in my newly acquired clapped out Citroen BX, holidays abroad (Brighten The Corners is the sound of the Costa Blanca for me), pretending to be grown ups whilst ‘entertaining’ friends at a dinner party…Pavement were ubiquitous. The one clear memory of the dreadful days after my beloved, brilliant brother shifted off his mortal coil is of driving out of my parents’ house to go home to Devon and having to pull the car over to the side of the road within the first mile as We Dance (Wowee Zowee’s opening track) reduced me to – literally – floods of tears; this was a precious music that held us connected  as adulthood was beginning to loosen the bonds that had kept us locked together through our youth and the track’s poignancy; its skewed lyrics, mournful chords and sheer bloody mindedness to be different without so much as a conscious thought was just too aligned to the character of the pal I had just lost for my fragile emotional state to cope with.

So it’s incredible that here were are, practically ten years into record club and this is the first time I have been able to write about what is, for me, the band of the nineties…their five albums spanning the decade from 1992’s incredible opening salvo (Slanted and Enchanted) through to their 1999 swansong, the misunderstood and probably underappreciated Terror Twilight. Until recently I have always held the sprawling, messed up, yet gem filled, Wowee Zowee as my pick of Pavement’s five albums but a chance encounter with Crooked Rain’s lead single, Cut Your Hair (a lockdown anthem that was being played on 6 Music as I was doing the gardening…a lockdown activity!) has encouraged me to re-evaluate. And I have fallen in love with this neglected masterwork all over again, probably 15 years at least since I last pulled it off my shelf and put it on the turntable.

I recall someone a long time ago on Desert Island Discs relating that he listened to pieces of music until he felt that he had ‘worked them out’, until there was nothing left to discover. I think he was explaining why Bruce Springsteen was so enduring a pleasure for him as he had never reached that point with any of his records. But I guess I had felt I was at that point with Crooked Rain, I had listened to it so many times over the decade since its release that it had worn itself out, every twist and turn could be anticipated, every lyric regurgitated, it aural landscape resembling the back of my hand! So familiar was it that I was no longer hearing its sound or appreciating its textures, warmth and sense of fun, I’d stopped seeing it holistically and could only consume it as a set of twelve distinct morsels all of which I had wrung dry.

But coming back to it recently I am once again in thrall to the album, the passing of time enabling me to appreciate the record as a complete piece of work. Sure, it’s got that trademark Pavement messiness going on; the lyrics are often off-kilter and surreal (but just as often hilarious: “Out on my skate board the night is just humming” or “til five hours later I’m chewin’, screwin’ myself with my hand”) and the songs are a stylistic smorgasbord that shouldn’t really work – check out the final five song run that goes through Dave Brubeck jazz tribute, country rock, indie folk, The Fall and then Bowiesque grandiosity.  But having immersed myself once again in this glorious high point of mid-nineties indie rock the one thing that I forgot to remember at the time I grew out of love with it way back when is the fact that these are pop songs par excellence (Gold Soundz, Cut Your Hair and Silence Kid being three of its finest exponents just in case you’re reading this and want to do a bit of YouTube ‘checking outing’). Pure and simple, wonderful pop music of a kind that I don’t think is (and am not sure, could be) made anymore.

Steve listened: Thanks for this account of why you love the album Tom. Hard to write I am sure. I loved hearing this album, but must confess to having only heard the ‘hit’ Cut Your Hair (which was an old dancefloor favourite in student days). The album does take a lot of genres in, all with a feelgood vibe going on. I really liked ‘The Fall’ track. The sort of music you could hang your leg out of the window whilst driving along to – if you were still young and carefree…

Bert Jansch – Bert Jansch: Round 112, Steve’s choice

Claire and BertJansch1965I moved down to sunny Devon, and Exeter, from the cold north nearly 10 years ago. We moved from a small town in the foot of the Derbyshire hills called Glossop, which had, at the time, a thriving music scene, playing hosts to many live acts with a diverse range of styles. Glossop was also only a stones throw away from Manchester, the place of my birth, and with a huge range of live music to choose from. Glossop had its fair share of folk artists pass through its venues. Maybe it’s the Venn of folk music with warm brown beer, woolly sweaters, beards, hiking, and the traveller that makes the space for this genre in such a place as Glossop? Sandwiched right between Sheffield to the East, and Manchester to the West, there may be an element of truth in that. In the absence of big names coming to town (other than Kate Rusby once before she got famous), Glossop held its own with the underground scene of ‘one man and his guitar’ type events. Now to Exeter…

I’m not sure what it is about the South West, but the Venn here is between holiday resorts and tribute acts. The further you head down the ‘nose’ of the SW, the less original the act…but that does beg the question about what constitutes originality anyway?

Exeter has a veritable venue in the Pheonix Art Centre, where I have seen amongst others, British Sea Power, Johnny Marr (more later…), Lambchop, and Half Man Half Biscuit. But, to see big names on a regular basis is again quite rare. Leading up to us moving down here I had started to furrow the back catalogue of folk, getting into the likes of John Martyn. With a severe lack of big name artists to see down here Claire and I decided to find a local folk club – we came across Topsham Folk Club. Established for 40 years, this folk club has been home over the years to many a ‘big name’. Topsham, is again a place for the traveller as it is a former port and trading post. We happened upon tickets for Martin Carthy, who for most aficionados would be considered folk royalty. He was great! A few weeks after that gig we saw an advert for Nick Harper, son of Roy Harper but an acclaimed folkie in his own right. Along to the gig we went – at the Pheonix in Exeter. His stage was set out as the living room in his childhood home, and as the gig started he began to explain how his life, from an early age, had been enriched by the presence of various folk legends brought to his home by his father. His early influences and acquaintances included Martin Carthy, John Renbourn, Davey Graham, and most importantly the late, great, Bert Jansch. These were the people that influenced him, and some of whom taught him his guitar style.

Jansch is revered in folk circles, and a major influence on many artists (more later). Born in Scotland, he adopted a style that drew not just on the traditional folk of his homeland, but blended jazz and blues rhythms from the deep American south. Jansch is considered to be one of the most incredible and accomplished guitarists of his generation. Nick Harper said at one point during the gig that he was going to attempt to play a notoriously difficult Jansch number, the last track on his eponymous debut ‘Bert Jansch’, a track called ‘Angie’. Having tried a few times to get it right he finally played it through note perfect. My mouth was wide open. Angie’s reeling intricate fingerpicking is beyond belief. To hear this being played live was an incredible treat. Jansch had died a few years before I had bothered to even get into him. ‘Bert Jansch’, the album, has been a very recent addition to my collection, and the only record I own by him. So, simply for the experience of hearing it live, I thought it was about time to give this record an airing at Record club. It turned out that we were all quite unaware of Jansch’s wider work. Nor were we aware of the synchronicity of my choice with the other independent choice for the night from Tom (more later…).

Bert Jansch’s debut solo album is pure stripped back folk. Just him and his guitar, slurred lyrics, and no doubt a few refreshers to help him get through (Jansch famously boozed his way through the 60s, 70s, 80s, only to give up in the late 90s). Jansch later founded the group Pentangle, where he would be joined by a female vocalist and other musicians. His earlier recordings are however regarded as his best. Many of the tracks on this, his debut album, are instrumentals. Indeed ‘Angie’ is an instrumental. While other tracks sound quite Dylan-esque in vocal, the guitar playing is much richer than Dylan. You hear him beat the side of the instrument in a blues style that is reminiscent of Big Bill Broonzy and other early blues artists. One of the standout tracks, ‘Needle of Death’, is an anti-drugs song about the death of one of his close friends to a heroin overdose. This, released in 1965, would have contrasted wildly from other more ‘lets experiment with substances’ type songs of the era. It’s thought that this song is the inspiration for Neil Young’s ‘The Needle and the Damage Done’ on Harvest. The opening track, ‘Strolling Down the Highway’, was later covered by Nick Drake – who was also influenced by Jansch. You can hear quite clearly the influences that tracks on this album had on later music, not just folk, but also rock, jazz and the slide into Van Morrison’s pastiche on Astral Weeks. For instance, it is well-known that Jimmy Page stole ‘Blackwaterslide’ (from Jansch’s 3rd album) and made ‘Black Mountain Side’ on Led Zeppelin’s debut – I never got along with Zep, despite trying really hard to like them in my youth. They always seemed quite derivative to me. Jimmy Page also nicked many of the picking styles of Jansch, and rocked them up, much to the chagrin of Bert in later life. Still, Jansch eschewed the high-life, and lived most of his time with a no-fixed-abode approach to the world. For him it wasn’t about the money…

Jansch’s debut is rootsy, yet complex. The rhythms and twists and turns each song takes draws you in. ‘Casbah’ contains eastern influences. Jansch famously travelled to Marrakesh and escaped back to London after a bout of dysentery. There he learned different playing styles which had a huge influence on him. He was tutored in guitar by Davey Graham (who originally recorded ‘Angie’, or Anji, I think – or a version of it). Graham was arguably the first person to bring Eastern influences into folk music, long before the Beatles ‘did it’ with rock & roll and claimed it as their own (hear him on this early clip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2-j89MnNCw which shows the link between oriental music and Irish folk – it all comes from roots…). This is the trouble with folk, it is accessible and nobody claims a right to own the music. It is passed on and down to the next generation, reinterpreted. This was why ‘Angie’, when played by Harper that night in Exeter, was so poignant to me. It dawned on me in that moment that this song, so fiendishly difficult to play, may never be heard live again unless people take the time to learn it and reinterpret it. Here I was, privileged to hear it, being passed on to another generation. Who will play these songs when they are gone forever? Nick Harper reckoned there were very few people who could actually play it, and nobody like Bert Jansch. So fragile is the legacy of folk, and yet its influence can be traced forwards to other music. Hearing it is like going on a journey. I often think that folk comes out from the ground, and the earth. It has a basic quality that you can trace through other styles and genres.

As pointed out on the night by Nick (not Harper, but DRC’s @sickmouthy), influence is a difficult thing when it comes to music. Nick said you don’t have to sound like the original to claim influence. Johnny Marr is a big fan of Jansch, yet you might struggle to hear him in the Smiths, apart from maybe those minor chords. Throughout ‘Bert Jansch’ the minor chords bring a solemnity to the feel of the songs. Jansch was apparently more into the ‘feel of songs’ than the music. Now, I love a minor chord. It’s that feeling of regret that they fill you with, or maybe they pluck the chords of my own regrets in life? I am told that minor chords in Western music are an influence from the East (I heard this on a Radio 4 documentary once). Perhaps it’s those Eastern influences, again feeding into Jansch’s music, that we are hearing here.

So, to the other choice of the night (@tomrainbow brought along ‘Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain’ by Pavement). I won’t steal Tom’s thunder too much but listening to the slightly off-kilter and bending the guitar to fit the lyrics style of Stephen Malkmus made me wonder if there was the faintest glimmer of a connectivity between the two artists? Low and behold, after a few Google searches following DRC I found that Bert Jansch is Malkmus’ favourite guitarist of all time, and he’s been massively influenced by him! I also found that Jansch plays guitar on a Babyshambles track (‘Lost Art of Murder’) on their album Shotters Nation, which for me is probably the best thing that Pete Doherty has ever done (his performance of it, without Jansch, on Jonathan Ross’ show is perhaps one of my most favourite live moments https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ct6jWKqJ3y0). I certainly think all that off-kilter stuff that Doherty attempts with The Libertines is right down the barrel of Pavement…and so the wheel turns. What is original anyway? Pavement have been accused of their own level of plagiarism – a tribute act to the Fall? Does all music pay homage ultimately to a roots music, displayed here perfectly by a stripped back folksy-bluesy-jazz infused Jansch? Is Jansch just a gateway from rootsy folk, blues and jazz to modern rock and popular music of today? Perhaps a step too far, but he was certainly at that juxtaposition in time between roots and more developed styles of the late 60s, early 70s. In that respect ‘Bert Jansch’ is a pivotal album, sitting in the middle of two worlds, the old and the new.

So, to Bert Jansch, where to go with him? I’ve got a long back catalogue to now furrow, and with so many lines of influence who knows where it will take me. ‘Bert Jansch’ is a great record, and is certainly a classic. Right after record club I went and bought a copy of Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, and Jansch’s second album ‘It Don’t Bother Me’. I’ll be listening harder now to find those connections. Listening harder to find the original sounds and follow them through to the present day. I’ll also have to get along to see Harper again if I want to hear that Angie again.

Tom listened: Folk is such a tricky genre for me and anything that evokes the ol’ finger in the ear warbling that, for me, is synonymous of traditional English folk music gets me running…in the opposite direction to where the sound is coming from! Yet I love Nick Drake’s folky take on arcadian England, there’s something deeply honest and vulnerable about his music that really draws me in, so close that its as if his hushed tones are whispering to me and me only.

When I think of other examples of folk inflected music from these shores that have found their way into my collection, it tends to be by artists of Celtic origin; Gorky’s and Cate Le Bon from Wales, Alasdair Roberts, John Martyn, James Yorkston from Scotland. I tend to like the quirkiness of the former and the pithiness of the latter and have avoided the Pentangle axis with relative ease and not much sense of missing out over the years.

I had been aware of Bert Jansch for much of my adult life, yet had never knowingly listened to him until last week. I guess I assumed that as he was around in the 60s his music would be neither pithy or quirky enough to fulfil my alt-folk needs; after all how likely was it that it would sound like There is No One What Will Take Care of You or A River is Too Much to Love? Well…funnily enough it wasn’t a million miles away from either and I was immediately surprised at how fresh, contemporary and nontraditional (to my untrained ears and ignorant mind) this felt. A dark record (I like it this way) I was reminded of Robbie Basho at times, Nick Drake at others but most of all this just felt like an inspired record from a singular artist who was simply getting the stuff from deep inside him out there.

And at no point did it sound like Pavement!