Month: March 2024

Spoon – Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga: Round 115(?), Nick’s choice

Amazingly, it doesn’t seem as if I’ve ever written anything about Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. Googling my name and pseudonym alongside the album title brings up pretty much nothing, which is crazy, because this has been one of my favourite records for about 17 years. So much for just copying and pasting something I’d written ages ago and slapping a new intro on it…

Anyway, I had intended to play Heaven or Las Vegas by Cocteau Twins, but then Steve pulled out Blue Bell Knoll, so I decided we’d have a Cocteau only child, and plumped for my plan b instead. My instruction was to bring something you know well but haven’t listened to in a while, inspired by the purchase of a new hi-fi system following some… incidents… over the Christmas period. It was an indulgent purchase, but necessary (the 18-year-old amplifier may have been full of cat hair that set alight), and I’m still very much in love with it, hearing new details in records I know well…

One of the most revelatory moments came with Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, and specifically “The Ghost of You Lingers”, which I liked, but nowhere near as much as the snaky grooves (copyright Rob Mitchell) or big, brash pop moments (also copyright Rob Mitchell). Suddenly, with an expanded soundstage (apologies for audiowanker terminology) pulling extra layers of detail and feeling out, it transformed into something completely different. In fact, the whole album, which I’d always thought was just a mite over-compressed at mastering, stretched out and expanded and breathed in a way I’d never heard before.

Spoon get away with stuff I would laugh in the face of other bands for even trying. Like having a song called “Rhythm and Soul”, and another called “Merchants of Soul”, and another that’s about “a Japanese cigarette case” that makes no sense. Maybe the Spooniest song on Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga isn’t even by them: I was astonished to realise, months in, that “Don’t You Evah” is a cover of a song by a band they toured with once. “Finer Feelings” and “The Underdog” are just unimpeachable. “Black Like Me” closes the album with perfect Ringo drums. There’s no magic or sorcery at play in what Spoon do – they’re not weaving entirely new sounds that no one else has imagined – but maybe there’s some alchemy, in that they take base materials and turn them into gold.

When I listen to Spoon I get a very strong sense of wanting to be in a band that rehearses in a big double garage in an Austin suburb, where they leave the big double garage door open because it’s sunny and there’s grass outside and you’re just with your buddies and you’ve been in this band forever and you just do it because it’s fun and simple and you like doing it, and all your songs are about the dayjobs you’ve had, and the local paper you used to read, and that guy from a few blocks away who had a ride-on lawnmower even though his yard was tiny, and the malt shop you go to (or take your kids to, as you get older) (whatever a malt shop is). And I’m from Devon and have never been and will probably never go to Texas, and I’ve never really wanted to be in a band. But Spoon make me want to be in a band, especially from Kill the Moonlight onwards through Transference. That four album run is just perfect, and everything either side is so damn good too that it might as well be perfect.

Steve listened: I love this album too, and like Nick I can almost imagine myself in a band like Spoon….if I had any musical talent. They effortlessly make great music that avoids cheesy clichés, and yet on the face of it they could easily fall into that trap were they not just damn brilliant.

Cocteau Twins – Blue Bell Knoll: Round 115 – Steve’s Choice

Ok, it’s been a while since we actually wrote anything on here, but we have met, sporadically, in the intervening years post-Covid. We even met during Covid, huddled round our screens, staring into what seemed like an eternal abyss. I use these words since the night started by bringing up that ever existential threat, our mortal coil. Life for some of us has thrown that into clear perspective, and so this album choice of mine too at the tender age of 17. We lost a classmate. She died of meningitis at sixth form. I walked into our common room at the school, where with the transition from the playground we were allowed to play our own music, hang out in our own clothes, and encounter all those rights of passage into adulthood, including the loss of one of our own it seems. Everybody was silent that morning following her untimely death, and no music was playing. It was normally customary to dash to the turntable, or cassette player. No CDs back then. I was a little oblivious to the mood that morning, not knowing what had happened and I put this album on. Well, the last track ‘Ella Megablast Burls Forever’. When it ended, I can’t recall exactly what happened, but someone told me that we were supposed to be sitting in silence to her memory. Mortified, I went over to her best friend to apologise, and she said it was ok, and the song seemed to fit the mood well anyway. Which it did, in retrospect, and many years after. Since then I can’t hear it without thinking of that, and the death later that year of my sister’s boyfriend (who was also in our sixth form) in a tragic road accident. In that year I had experienced the fragility of life, and this was my soundtrack. RIP Jo and Glyn.

So, now years later, and having lost the vinyl version of this somewhere along the line I bought a CD copy. The brief for tonight was to bring an album (on CD) that we hadn’t listened to for a while, but wanted to hear on Nick’s new stereo. Something of a wonder it is too. All shiny and pulling out hidden vocals and backing music, beats previously unheard. The Cocteau Twins to me have always been an audio wonder. Shimmering guitars, other worldly vocals. Maybe I would hear something new with Nick’s new kit!

Blue Bell Knoll was released in 1988, and even some 36 years after it’s release (where did that time go?) we all agreed that although you can date it to that decade, it still feels fresh today. Younger generations seem to take to it. Perhaps it’s the ethereal indistinguishable lyrics that convey emotions, rather than concrete verbal meanings? From the opening hypnotic electronic percussion of the opener and title track ‘Blue Bell Knoll’ this album unfurls itself like a black flower, deep, dark and sometimes (for me) moody. I still tap into those emotions felt as a 17 year old all those years ago, experiencing life, and death. The guitar blends effortlessly with the drum machine, and the vocals of Elizabeth Fraser rising and falling on ‘Athal-Brose’. For those who are new to the Cocteaus, this is perhaps one of their more accessible albums. There’s much trickier material on Treasure and Victorialand, but this could easily wet the appetite of those of a poppier persuasion. For instance ‘Carolyn’s Fingers’ boasts a backing beat that was not out of place with the dancier elements of the late 1980s. It’s almost if they adapted and bent towards the times, but without compromising their uniqueness, without hiding or flinching from the darkness of goth. The stand-out track for me is ‘Cico Buff’, which Tom told me was a top 5 selection for many journos in the Melody Maker that year. Then, the final track, which for me carries so much emotion. On the night we didn’t listen in silence, but ‘Ella Magablast’ will be forever burned on my memory of those early years, and the knowledge that time is passing, fleeting, and yet the world opens and unfurls in its beauty and majesty captured here perfectly in the Cocteaus’ musical delight. Simultaneously real, ethereal and imagined it’s one for the senses.