It’s
‘Running Up That Hill’ by Kate Bush
Interesting intro, good beat…Mia (age 11) 10 out of 10
VERSUS
‘Love and Happiness’ by Al Green
It begins like Madness which is Are House…Evie (age 7) 10 out of 10
Great beat, good instruments, good intro, good singing (the type), good tune, nice backing singing…Kit (age 8) 10 out of 10
WINNER: Kate Bush
It’s
‘Name of the Game’ by ABBA
Very good, good beat, I like the chorus….Tess (age 10) 9 outof 10
VERSUS
‘Fool’s Gold’ by Stone Roses
I have no idea how much my esteem for this song is just residual adolescent affection from 18 years ago, and how much is actual critical / aesthetic judgment. When I was 15 this sounded utterly alien to me.
WINNER: Stone Roses
It’s
‘Purple Haze’ by Jimi Hendrix
Jimi simply blew away the opposition and re-drew the lines of rock music in 1967. A riff that has been played on guitars and tennis racquets ever since. No better combination of rock/psychedelia/funk.
VERSUS
‘Freak Scene’ by Dinosaur Jr.
The best alt-rock song of the 80s, 90s, whenevers. Listen no further, Freak Scene has everything you need. Tumbling energy, carelessly gummy vocals, the two best solos AND the two best breakdowns in rock, both containing the word ‘Fuck’.
WINNER: Jimi Hendrix
It’s
‘Senses Working Overtime’ by XTC
The perfect breath of English pastoral pop. Eccentric but utterly loveable. XTC wrote a handful of delicious singles which wove their way through my childhood radio listening. ‘Senses’ is the one I cherish the most.
VERSUS
‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ by Joy Division
Sleek, bitter, despairing, elevating, bleak and beautiful. ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ gets to the heart of what it means to be human but sounds like it was made by ghosts trapped in the studio. An eternal wonder.
WINNER: Joy Division
‘Atmosphere’ by Joy Division
A posthumous UK release after Ian Curtis died in 1980. Poetic, majestic, sparse and haunting. Has an emotional pull similar to the finest pieces of classical music.
VERSUS
‘Sympathy for the Devil’ by the Rolling Stones
Let’s face it, if Gimme Shelter had ever been released as a single it would be here. However the lucky people of Germany and Japan both enjoyed this as a single release. Primeval rhythms, hypnotic and much copied backing vocals over intellectualised guff about the devil, “simples”. Always a good move in rock to ally yourself with the devil.
WINNER: Rolling Stones
And we’re off!
First round, first tie is:
‘Common People’ by Pulp
The class war won in a single blow from a gangly bloke from Sheffield. The only Britpop anthem to retain weight, it remains as sharply pointed as ever. You may think you wore it out back then, or through years of radio play, but stick it on loud , let yourself go and the charge is still there.
VERSUS
‘Two Tribes’ by Frankie Goes To Hollywood
Manufactured pop doesn’t have to be drek. Frankie were a shocking slap in the face, part Paul; Morley’s situationist fantasy, part Trevor Horn’s megaton hi-nrg bomb, all improbable and laudable even without three of the finest, most compelling singles of the last 30 years.
WINNER: Pulp
To celebrate our first 50 meetings, in June 2013 we’re hosting our first, and likely last, Devon Record Club Singles World Cup.
Each player has nominated 8 singles to enter competition. We’ll be drawing them to contest a series of knockout ties until only one remains to be crowned Official Devon Record Club Singles World Cup Best Single Ever 2013.
Follow the draw on the evening of Wednesday 5 June and help us to decide the winners and pretend this is important!
Listen to the Singles World Cup 2013 Spotify playlist
I worried a little about bringing this. Too predictable, too recent. But in the two months since I finally got my copy, I’ve been completely hooked, entranced, unable to shake these songs from my head. One thing DRC does well is exorcism.
Dirty Projectors are Dave Longstreth’s band, from Brooklyn, NY, and this is their seventh album, released in 2012. Seemingly revered and reviled in equal measures for their near cubist approach to songwriting and brains-before-brawn reputation, I think they’re one of the great outfits of the last decade, genuinely challenging the form whilst never losing contact with harmony, soul and electric force.
‘Swing Lo Magellan’ may be their best yet. All Dirty Projectors records take a while to process, but this time around the problem for me wasn’t complex time signatures or abstract guitar work. Instead I found the first four tracks so irresistible that I couldn’t stop myself rewinding them. Eventually I had to force myself to begin the record at track 5 to snap out of it. Turns out the rest is almost as good, but these four are as fine an opening quartet as I can remember.
Appreciated as a whole the album reveals itself as a thematic journey. The first three tracks are attempts to dissect various flavours of existentialist terror, followed by the title track, a beautiful lilting pop song about getting out, getting on and exploring the world. This moves us into songs about there being people out there worth striving for, then to love, being thankful about what you have and finally how music can make life worth living.
Musically it’s just fabulous. Complex, but in a simple way, consisting of just guitars, bass, voices, drums and occasional other flourishes. There are some terrific details: bouncing percussion, electric and acoustic guitars switching in and out, a cannily played handful of uncanny noises, but these are never foregrounded. And whilst Amber Coffman and Haley Dekle are as vocally virtuoso as ever, their voices are always in service of the songs. Amidst all these, the songs are ultimately held together by perhaps the least technically proficient instrument: Dave Longstreth’s voice. He gives a great performance, lashing his most accomplished lyrics yet to his most immediate, careening melodies.
It must take incredible hard work and precision to be as composed and yet as wild as Dirty Projectors, and it’s becoming clear how much they are now in control of their powers. The savagery of ‘Offspring Are Blank’ is mercilessly shepherded. ‘Gun Has No Trigger’ is a triumphant composition, setting itself constraints of melody and form and then showing that within these anything is yet possible. Anyone can be experimental with voice, guitars and drums, but to bring forth new ways of making rock music and use them to produce songs anyone could sing along to is quite some achievement.
Above all ‘Swing Lo Magellan’ is a heady record full of sweet music, from the honey dripping ‘Impregnable Question’ to the jubilant campfire romp ‘Render Unto Caesar’. Whatever else they are, boffins, aesthetes, oddballs, on this evidence, Dirty Projectors are also a hell of a lot of fun to be around.
I always thought that, for music nerds, clubbing presented a number of challenges. Principle among these was how on earth to retain the air of authority and composure which surely set you out as a mastermind among dunces when literally any track could be coming up next, bearing in mind that constantly trekking over to the booth to ask “what’s this?” wasn’t an option. With the invention of acid house things got simpler – no-one cared – and nowadays, one imagines, the invention of the portable telephone and the applications therein has rendered anyone able to surreptitiously fire up SoundHound or Shazam a total know-it-all.
My heyday (and what a day of heys it was) was from 1987 to 1992 and for that period, by and large, I had the Student Indie Disco Canon pretty much nailed. Nonetheless there would always be one or two tracks I couldn’t quite place, or hadn’t heard before. And sometimes these felt gripping, even life-changing. So it was with ‘Add It Up’ by Violent Femmes, which was in irregular rotation through the Saturday Night crates at DeVille’s in Manchester. It’s hard to imagine a song which would make more of an impact on an unfamiliar crowd, with it’s plaintive accapela intro, brusque, irresistible ignition and point blank lyrics. It came and went like a mysterious superhero, there and gone some weeks then absent for months, leaving half the dancefloor wondering what it was (and presumably the other half wondering why they couldn’t get just one screw).
When we found out, the album it came from was also both a mystery and a revelation. ‘Violent Femmes’ is the work of three teenagers from Milwaukee, with most of the songs apparently written whilst singer Gordon Gano was in high school. It’s almost all acoustic, including the bass guitar and brushed snare drum, but it’s played with the pace and spirit of heads-down punk rock. It’s completely distinctive, one of those records that sounds like nothing else you’ve ever heard, but also, from the moment you hear it, entirely archetypal, like it had to happen.
Musically, it’s undeniable. The songs rattle and tumble and jerk along with such momentum and gusto that there’s nothing to do but give in. The sheer energy and brio of the playing communicates itself directly to the listener. It takes real magic to use these three instruments over and over again and turn in such a delirious, captivating set.
Add to this Gano’s lyrics and vocal performance and the album deserves every little bit of its late-bestowed classic status. He is the bratty loner with a spiteful comeback for every girl who ever ignored him, every jock who ever got there before him. If there’s a better encapsulation of teenage angst and self-loathing then I haven’t heard it. Which is not to say that this is just a hormonal splatterfest. Take ‘The Promise’ for example, its lyrics following Gano’s half of an imagined dialogue (“Could you ever want me to love you?/Could you ever want me to care?”) and spiraling in on themselves as he tortuously talks himself into and out of the reckoning (“You know that I want your loving/But Mr logic tells me ain’t never gonna happen/But then my defences say I didn’t want it anyway/But you know, sometimes I’m a liar”). There is simply no better evocation of what it is to be a lovelorn teenage boy.
‘Violent Femmes’ achieved what is claimed to be a unique feat by going gold in the States four years after its release, without ever making an appearance on Billboard’s Top 200 album chart. It’s one of the records that, when I play it, make me feel glad, giddy even, that I love music. Treasures like this are out there. They can give you a charge like nothing else on earth, and ultimately be life-changing. I still cling to ‘Violent Femmes’ 25 years after I first heard Gano snarling “Why can’t I get just one kiss?” across a packed Manchester basement. I don’t wonder that anymore, but I do wonder what I’d do without this record.
Nick listened: Being that bit younger than Rob, I was at youth clubs playing board games and pool or playing round at friends houses when he was hearing this in nightclubs, and so my first exposure to Violent Femmes came when I saw Grosse Point Blank (still a great film) several year later in the mid-to-late 90s. Blister In The Sun featured prominently in the soundtrack, and I loved it; I seem to recall that the album was either hard to get or else expensive at the time though, so I never picked it up. Plus, there was something so bizarre, so snotty and compelling and hooky and weird and alternative, about Blister In The Sun that I think my brain decided it must be some kind of freaky one-off. Hearing the whole album for the first time, it clearly wasn’t; there are hooks and energy and great moments all over the place. Brilliant.
Tom Listened: My oldest mate, Alex Phillips, went to Camp America and brought back, amongst other things, this weird record by some band with a weird name that featured weird little songs and a VERY weird singer. I couldn’t stand it!
Of course, I was wrong and the record was The Violent Femmes and I went on to really like it; for me it is one of those records that I could do quite happily without but that I always enjoy whenever I hear it (usually by chance as I rarely seek it out). There’s a great energy to the songs and a playfulness and lack of pretentiousness that lifts the material into something unique and delightful.
That said, I definitely get something different from the record to Rob. We discussed this on the night but, for me, when I listen to The Violent Femmes I have always pictured snotty frat boys who are a little too clever for their own good (part of the problem I have always had with the musically very dissimilar Vampire Weekend). I’m not sure where this image has come from as Rob has assured me that the truth couldn’t be more different (and he is usually right in such matters) but it seems to remain unshakably in my mind and it always slightly mars my enjoyment of this excellent record a touch.
Graham listened: Despite being older than Rob, four years in work before I went back to being a student means my days of hey were fairly similar. It was a joy to hear this again. Somewhere lurking in a box is a TDK C90 (those were the days) with this on. I’m not sure they featured so much on the student nightclub scene “daan sarf”, but were certainly on my radar at the time.
I like to make my choices early. It’s rare that I haven’t decided which record i’ll be taking to the next Devon Record Club within a couple of hours of the end of the preceding meeting. When Nick imposed ‘Turning Points’ as a theme I immediately flashed on records like ‘It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back’ and ‘Nevermind’ as records which saw their artists becoming everything they could be. But these aren’t really turning points, more progressions, realisations. I knew I needed to find an artist who had clearly changed direction, and to do so they must have established one trajectory before and another after.
Once I started looking for favourite acts with a dozen or so albums, the list started to format itself. Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy? Well, i’m not sure direction of travel is a property one can ascribe to Will Oldham. The Fall? Plotting their career path would likely sketch out a three dimensional pentagram. Nick Cave occurred next and ‘The Good Son’ was my immediate and natural choice. Cave and his band are a desert island artist for me. I firmly believe they are one of most accomplished and significant acts in the history of rock and roll. I’ve thought bringing them to Record Club many times, but never with ‘The Good Son’ in mind. Nonetheless, their sixth album, released in 1990, was, for me, a triple turning point.
Personally, I’ve loved every album the band made after ‘The Good Son’. All the ones before I like and admire and listen to, but I would line them up behind this one and those which followed.
In the context of the band’s career, ‘The Good Son’ seems constitute a taking of breath. The songs, and their playing, is calm. Even when the pace picks up and the heft increases, see ‘The Hammer Song’ and ‘The Witness Song’, there is very little sense of the frenzy, the possession, that charged the earlier records. On ‘The Good Son’ Nick Cave is no longer the deranged swamp church preacher. Now he is in control.
Legend has it that fans of the band, perhaps those who had stayed with them since The Birthday Party were at their savage peak, were confused or dismayed at this turn, at the sound of tender piano ballads where they had become accustomed to hollering, slashing blues. But since ‘The Good Son’ Cave and his compadres have released four records which I would consider masterpieces. The frothing Wild West opera ‘Henry’s Dream’, the state-of-the-21st-Century opus ‘Abattoir Blues’, ‘The Boatman’s Call’ – a prayer to love and ‘And No More Shall We Part’ – a recapitulation and perfection of cave’s milleu and the Bad Seed’s brilliance. It seems to me that none of these would have been possible without ‘The Good Son’, which reset the meter for the band and opened up a whole new set of possibilities.
Finally, for me, i had a turning point with this album itself. this was The third album i bought by the band, if you include ‘Tender Prey’, which I took back to Piccadilly Records, convinced I had a bad pressing. Thereafter ‘Straight To You’, one of the all time great love songs, was the flame that drew me to Cave, and I loved the album it came from, ‘Henry’s Dream’. ‘The Good Son’, released before ‘Henry’ but purchased after, made little sense to me at all, until suddenly it did. I think Shane MacGowan’s stumbling, winning version of ‘Lucy’, released in 1992 as a B-side to the pair duetting sort of pointlessly on ‘What A Wonderful World’, may have broken me in, or maybe the pure, dripping beauty of ‘The Ship Song’ finally penetrated my stern heart. I don’t think I’d ever clicked with such a slow record, a collection of such apparently plodding songs, but when ‘The Good Son’ came into focus for me it also opened up a world of possibilities which would take me from Tindersticks to Tom Waits, Palace Brothers, Low, Lambchop, Scott Walker and on and on to much of my favourite music today.
So, not the Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds record I would have chosen, but the right one for this evening. I firmly believe that the band and their singer songwriter took a big step here and have grown better and better as they have matured in the near 25 years since. In that time they’ve produced albums as rich, complex, self-contained, witty, engaged, moving, poetic, playful and rewarding as anything from Dylan’s back catalogue, but with a tiny fraction of the acclaim. If ‘The Good Son’ was the breath which made that possible, i’m sure glad they took it.
Tom Listened: Little do I want to pop Rob’s bubble of bliss since becoming a father less than a week ago, but I have to say that in the case of Mr Cave he’s just plain wrong. Having gone back and listened to 1986’s album of cover versions, Kicking Against the Pricks and then, immediately afterwards, the post Good Son Henry’s Dream…and fully expecting a DRC epiphany, I regret to say that things panned out exactly as I remembered them. The former is, for me, so wonderful, in a teasing, vaguely cheeky, yet wholly reverential way to the originals and it easily surpasses any of the latter works of Mr Cave’s I own (coincidently they comprise solely of the four ‘masterworks’ that Rob has mentioned in his write up). I found Henry’s Dream as patchy as ever – some fantastic songs sure (When I First Came to Town is my favourite) but it doesn’t hold up as a complete work as far as I am concerned.
So I guess it makes sense that The Good Son worked for me much more than I expected it would. I knew some of the tunes already (The Ship Song and The Weeping Song) but, on first listen they in no way eclipsed the rest of the material and all the songs seemed to neatly sidestep Cave’s occasional over-earnestness that at times muddies my enjoyment of his later work. So I am very grateful to Rob for highlighting the transition point in Nick Cave’s career but, unlike Rob, I expect I will be exploring the pre Good Son material before delving further into the latter half of his chronology.
Nick listened: Like The Smiths, I bought my first Nick Cave record whilst at university; The Boatman’s Call. I loved it dearly at the time, though I’ve come to understand that it’s pretty atypical of his oeuvre. I’ve not really explored beyond that, though; I bought No More Shall We Part when it came out but found it very dry, despite the obvious care and craft that had gone into its construction. The fact that I’m using words like ‘craft’ ad ‘construction’ is telling; I like Cave’s assertion that he works on music in an office, like it’s a day-job, in theory, but something about the outcome didn’t do it for me. I’ve listened to Murder Ballads a couple of times, and the first Grinderman album (which I really quite liked), but nothing more.
This was really good though (as was the track from Abattoir Blues that Rob also played), and makes me want to investigate Cave’s ominously large catalogue a bit more. Without contextual knowledge of what came before, or much of what came after, I have no idea if it’s a turning point or not – it sounded like I expected Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds to sound, although perhaps more supple?
Graham Listened: It was great to finally find time to listen to a whole album of the man’s work. I have been dipping in and listening since the days of the Birthday Party, but strangely, never felt the need to buy an album for myself. Every time I catch him on the TV performing live I find his work fascinating and engaging. It’s almost as if since he struck out on his own, nearly 30 years later, the size of his back catalogue has become too intimidating to know where to begin. This was great and sounded like something I should own, but reading other members comments, I still don’t know where to start.
Devon Record Club 