Category: Pop music

Isn’t it funny how frequently inspiration comes from the most unexpected of corners? Who would have thought that my latest musical obsession would have stemmed from a chanced upon half hour programme…on Radio 4 of all things?

Until the point I heard Isy Suttie talking enthusiastically about Jake Thackray on the radio station’s Great Lives slot, I had never heard of Thackray at all. But I was immediately captivated by the snatches of his music played on the show and won over by the reverence shown him by both guest and presenter and so I went and bought myself a cheapo compilation of his songs straight away. However, until last week, and Nick’s ‘Bring Something That Isn’t An Album’ theme, I hadn’t actually got round to listening to it. In fact I almost didn’t at all. I thought we were planning to miss a week due to Nick’s imminent birth so I had ordered a couple of records that would have fitted the theme perfectly. Upon realising my mistake with the dates, though, I knew that my new purchases would not arrive in time so I thought, with low expectations it has to said, I would give Jake a go. I would never have guessed at the treasures contained within.

Thackray’s songs have left me spellbound. Utterly charming, witty and poetic but often cut through with pathos, they also have an honesty, an integrity that make them so, so hard to resist. Put it this way: within seconds of first song The Blacksmith and the Toffee Maker starting up, Thackray was already my latest hero. And that status was only strengthened when it became apparent that this was a man for whom seeking that status would be, genuinely, the last thing on his mind – Thackray’s modesty is obvious and is rendered by his infatuation with his songs’ characters, their tales and the sound and words of the English language in general that are on display throughout this compilation.

But Thackray’s music is also intriguingly hard to pin down. His background is interesting and sheds light on some of the juxtapositions of his music. Born in a poor part of Leeds in the late 1930s, Thackray became an English teacher upon leaving university and started out on his career in France teaching in Lille, Brittany and The Pyrenees. Whilst there he discovered a love for the songs of Jacques Brel and Georges Bresson, before heading back to the UK (via a brief stint in Algeria) to teach in a school in Leeds.

As a result you are frequently blindsided by his songs – English scenes are often tinged by the faintest echoes of Gallic chansons, irreverent one minute, heartrendingly melancholy the next, every word carries weight, every song tells a story; what seems at first to be seaside postcard smut is often turned on its head when the next line reveals a previously undisclosed double meaning. This is clever stuff, disarmingly simple music that reveals a hidden depth with lyrics that demand to be listened to, worked out and, crucially, enjoyed.

And I have enjoyed Thackray’s lyrics like little else I have heard. On the night, I printed out the lyrics to Thackray’s tour-de-force Lah-di-Dah for Rob and Graham to read through as the song played. I think these lyrics are amazing, not just because of the tale they tell (about a bridegroom telling his prospective bride how he will get along with her gruesome family for her sake) but because of the sound of the words themselves and their meter:

 And I’ll smile and I’ll acquiesce

When she invites me to caress

Her scabby cat

There’s not a duff track on this compilation. If you don’t like the music, the story will have you in stitches (in Leopold Alcocks he rhymes wisteria with hysteria, Brasso with Picasso), if he plays it straight you’ll be close to tears (Old Molly Metcalfe, The Hair of The Widow of Bridlington). Accusations of misogyny miss the point – even though these were unenlightened times, I’m not so sure Thackray wasn’t being ironic all along. Besides, seeing as he’s now my latest hero, it’s better to switch off your PC detector and enjoy the magnificence of the wordplay, the luminosity of the music, the genius of the man, warts and all!

Well this is a first. A review of an album I didn’t actually intend to play at DRC. I took this along simply as evidence that I had found something in line with my spontaneous theme. Before I could reach for my ‘theme stretching’ offering everyone else decided they wanted to hear it and it was already on. Still I’m sure I can find another theme to stretch in due course to squeeze in my original choice.

So what are my qualifications for writing up a review of this offering? I don’t own ‘Nevermind’, in fact I don’t recall ever  listening to it all. I came to Nirvana post ‘Unplugged’and being impressed by the tracks on here like ‘Dumb’, ‘All Apologies’ and ‘Penny Royal Tea’. Until this week’s round, they were really the only tracks I would flick to on this cd.   Without labouring the point then, this isn’t going offer much insight for Nirvana officienados out there.

But a strange thing happened during playing of this album. For the first time I actually sat there in Nick’s optimum listening position on the sofa and listened properly! I’ve clearly never done that before as I found power, angst, desperation, rawness, riffs, hooks and all sorts of stuff I’ve never tuned in to in previous listens when in car and in the background at home. Its obvious Kurt wasn’t a ‘happy bunny’ and it simply pours out of this record. How can you follow up  the explosion of  ‘Nevermind’? I don’t suppose you can, but then ‘muppets’ like me should at least be prepared to give this a proper listen and give it the credit it deserves.

Rob listened: I was there for Nirvana from the start. I loved them the first time I heard ‘Bleach’. I first heard the songs from ‘Nevermind’ live one afternoon at the Reading Festival before the album had been released and can still remember how it felt to have my mind blown that day by ‘Teen Spirit’ and ‘In Bloom’. I was waiting when that record came out and waiting when ‘In Utero’ was released 2 years later. I loved Nirvana hard.

Why then have their records been more or less shelf-bound for the last 20 years? Other artists get regular run-outs. I can only posit something to do with the total over-exposure to ‘Nevermind’. I’m not referring only to over-exposure in the culture, but even just in my house I practically wore the thing out, so much so that it just doesn’t seem to make any sense to go back to it. I do occasionally spin ‘Sliver’ or side one of ‘Bleach’. I’ll occasionally get an urge for ‘Molly’s Lips’ or ‘Been A Son’, but I never go back to the three studio albums in any serious way. Which, considering just how much I loved them first time around, is pretty stupid.

Unless, unless, these records are maturing, enriching with age. For sure, ‘In Utero’ gets better and better with age. Tonight it absolutely killed. Lyrically lacerating, rhythmically piledriving, packed with hooks and aggression and, yes dammit, good old fashioned corrosive angst. It has to be one of the finest rock records in history, a piece of work which both extends and justifies the form. If you’ve never heard it, hear it. If you’ve heard it before, hear it again, you’ll be amazed just how good it sounds.

Nick listened: I’m glad we ‘bullied’ Graham into playing this, because not only was it the most relevant choice for the theme, it’s also awesome, and I hadn’t heard it in a long time. I wasn’t around for Nirvana in anything like the way Rob – I was only 14 when Kurt died – and only really came to this album five years on from that, although I’d absorbed it via osmosis seemingly long before. I think it’s amazing, and much prefer it to Nevermind. Some people may have seen it as a failure, for whatever reason, but has a mainstream, multi-million-selling album ever been more sonically and emotionally brutal?

The seed was sown when we were preparing for our Singles World Cup round. Whilst musing over my eight favourite singles of all time, it became evident to me just how much I needed to own a copy of We Are Family by Sister Sledge. You see, great though the title track, Lost in Music and He’s the Greatest Dancer are, for me, Thinking of You is simply one of the very best pop songs ever made, good enough to have made it into my top eight…and I would have proudly submitted it had I had owned it at the time.

I loved it then, as a 14 year old, hearing it on the radio on the school bus, doing its bit to make the journey to school (on what was, no doubt, another grim and gloomy November morning) a little more bearable. And I love it now, just as much, from the spare choppy guitar riff that lets you know you’re in for a treat, a mouth watering appetiser that presages the glorious delights to come, to the spectacular (no other word will do – especially now that ‘awesome’ means next to nothing) bassline, to the melancholic strings that anchor the song. It’s just sublime.

But it would be wrong to suggest that We Are Family the album is all about one song. In fact, I am sure that many fans of the Sledge would not even place Thinking of You in their top three on the album. Yes, all four singles from the record are top drawer but it’s the quality of the non-singles that’s the greatest surprise to me.

I always assumed that disco records would be all about the singles. After all, wasn’t disco about dancing…and you’re not going to hear an album being played at the local nightspot…so it made sense, in my mind at least, that a disco album would be a couple of great singles and a bunch of filler. Such was my desire to own a physical copy of Thinking of You, that I was prepared to overlook this presumption. But, in the case of We Are Family (and the two Chic albums I own) the strength in depth is remarkable. In fact, to my mind, the only track on We Are Family that outstays its welcome is…wait for it…We Are Family itself, which is obviously fantastic, for the first four or five minutes at least, but the final three minutes are unnecessarily repetitive and feature the only example of over singing on the entire record – Kathy’s usually honeyed, easy singing style being pushed dangerously close to Whitneyesque shrillness, it does at least help you realise just how great the singing on the rest of the record is!

As Rob suggested in his post on Saturday Night Fever, disco had become a somewhat maligned art form over the years (more for what it represented than the music itself), but Chic’s triumphant return to the stage last year has ensured that once more they are right back where they belong, in the zeitgeist, the hottest ticket in town and the purveyors of cool. And what could be cooler than donating eight of your very best songs to a struggling girl group with a bunch of talent and a wonderful set of lungs, to produce (by your own admission) the best front-to-back album of your entire career?

Rob listened: The recent rehabilitation and elevation of Nile Rodgers and the Chic Organisation feels like a major wrong righted, although perhaps not on quite the universal scale I had assumed. Until recently I’ve had a major block on the pre-punk 1970s and disco is an easy target for dismissal. It’s a deliberately apolitical music which became the soundtrack for elitist hedonism in a time when across town others were attempting kick culture up the backside. For me as a young music follower looking back, although not all that far, disco represented an abnegation of duty. Others, it should also be noted, were declaring ‘Disco Sucks!’ for entirely different and entirely reprehensible reasons.

Looking back today, and having to gaze a lot further, it seems possible that most people knew Chic were incredible all along. I guess I just like to stick to my guns, even if they are aimed at the wrong targets.

Hearing ‘We Are The Family’ for the first time in full brings home just how dunderheaded you’d have to be to find against this music. It’s absolutely exquisite, an object lesson in balance, restraint, technique, precision and polish. The sound Chic constructed is as distinctive, original and self-owned as the Beach Boys, Public Enemy or Led Zeppelin, and at least the equal of all of those. At least three of the songs on this record would be unarguable choices if we had to submit examples of the highest cultural output of our species to visiting alien dignitaries.

I’m going to stop writing now, as I have nowhere left to go.

Nick listened: This was great.

To be honest the chances of me finding any “hidden gems” by Round 73 were thin on the ground. Any curios I possess had probably been presented by now which left me looking for an album I liked (rather than cherished) but haven’t thought to bring along before. Consequently I really can’t find much to say about it!

Having produced ‘Ocean Rain’ at my virgin initiation  round way back, I found myself turning to the Bunnymen’s self titled 5^th album for this choice. I can’t think of too many artists that have waited until their 5^th album to go down the eponymous route (but expect someone will be along soon to point out how wrong I am on that), but maybe that suggests something about how the band were on the point of implosion by this point and maybe there was something of marking the end of an era.

My basic view is that there are 4/5 great pop songs on this album that lack maybe the edginess that people had come to expect from the band and meeting the standard set by ‘Ocean Rain’ was always going to be next to impossible.  ‘The Game’, ‘Bedbugs and Ballyhoo’, ‘Lips Like Sugar’ and ‘All My Life’ still all tick big boxes for me. The struggle with various recording locations, production and band cohesion give the album a strange bright and brash sound. The lush strings on ‘Ocean Rain’ are replaced by colder sounding keyboards which don’t work on all the tracks by any stretch of the imagination.

Scratch away at the surface and I still think some of their catchiest and best crafted songs are on this album with Ian McCulloch’s vocals complementing the songs rather than being overly dramatic/bombastic. Not their best, but certainly enough to keep me listening. Break-ups and reincarnation followed and I can’t comment on what came later as I’d moved on.

Rob listened: I can’t recall where we went on holiday in 1987, but I know that when I managed to get into the nearest Woolworth’s (I assume) to fork over my pocket money for a new cassette to stick in my walkman to pass the hours in the back seat of the family car, this is what I chose. ‘Songs To Learn and Sing’ was an iconic record for a mid-80s school-kid, and I knew half the songs on there from fleeting radio contact, but this was the first Echo and the Bunnymen record I got my hands on. And it didn’t sound quite as I’d hoped or expected. No drenching reverb, few yearning strings, relatively little solipsistic grandeur. Almost a different band, except for that voice. I listened to the album a lot, as I did everything I owned then, and whilst it never crossed over to become a favourite, there were songs here that created an itch I found very hard to scratch. Opening track ‘The Game’ is the best example. There is drama in there but it’s carefully, economically dispensed. I didn’t understand that at the time: I wanted maximalism. But all the same, I couldn’t stop listening, rewinding, listening again.

Hearing the album again was a treat. There are, as Graham says, some great songs herein. Mostly though it reminded me of how it felt to dive into music just because it was what you could get your hands on, to go deep and, when you surfaced, to find you still had some of it inside you. And try as I might, there’s something here I can’t scratch away.

Tom listened: As someone who never really got the appeal of Echo and the Bunnymen (I could never get past McCulloch’s ego…and I only became aware of the band when said ego was already fully formed in about 1984), I was surprised at how palatable the eponymous album was. I probably preferred it to Ocean Rain, I imagine for precisely the reason I am supposed to like it less, in that it doesn’t sound so much like an Echo and the Bunnymen album. A collection of nice enough songs!

Nick listened: My Bunneymen knowledge and interest pretty much starts and stops with Ocean Rain, although I do own a couple of the albums from earlier in their career. So I’d never heard this, and didn’t really recognise any of the (pretty fine) tunes. The production did definitely feel at odds with what I understood the Bunneymen’s signature sound to be, and though I don’t object to the overall aesthetic in general, I don’t feel this was the best embodiment of it.

Whilst playing Bull of the Woods at record club I postulated that, in this day and age, it is unlikely I would ever have got my grubby mitts on 13th Floor Elevators’ third and final album…not because acquiring music is any more difficult now than it was back in the late 80s – it’s not, it’s easier – but because information is so easily accessible (and because I am such a sucker for it) that I would have read one too many lukewarm reviews and dismissed the album as not worth owning. I would have also have been pushed into buying one of The Elevators’ first two albums, seeing as popular opinion would seem to suggest that these are far superior. Just in case any of you reading this have those first two albums and don’t really like them…well…don’t give up on Texas’ finest purveyors of acid fried psychedelia just yet as, to my ears, Bull of the Woods is by far the best record of the three and I enjoy it as much as pretty much anything else from that era.

Note that I haven’t made any grand claims for Bull of the Woods’ greatness as yet. And I’m not going to. After all, the record has all sorts of flaws that, to many, get in the way but to me makes the thing even more intriguing and captivating. I love the fact that the album sounds like it was recorded in a swamp, I love the fact that the vocals come and go in and out of the mix as if the singer (mainly Stacy Sutherland I believe) was moving from one room to the next. And I absolutely love the fact that Tommy Hall has ditched his bloody electronic jug in the canal! Listening to the ‘classic’ first album and then to this, I was struck at just how different the two records are. Whereas The Psychedelic Sounds Of…is all spiky, jangly and wobbly, Bull of the Woods is a true blues groove swamp monster. Obviously Roky Erickson’s lack of involvement in Bull of the Woods makes a big difference and the two tracks he had a hand in writing – Never Another and May The Circle Remain Unbroken – are probably the albums two most distinctive songs, the former veers all over the place in much the same way as, say, Love’s The Daily Planet and the latter is a weird mantra type coda, shimmering away like the sun setting as if on the bands’ very own career (seeing as it is the last song on their last album).

But surrounding these two cuts are nine songs that show a side of the guitar driven sound of late 60s US rock’n’roll like little else I’ve heard. I remember listening to Bull of the Woods for the first time having bought it on impulse, being vaguely aware of the name of the band from a Melody Maker interview with Spacemen 3 or Loop, and being held spellbound for the entire sitting; from the first murky blues riff of Livin’ On slithering into view to the last heartrendingly fragile vocal of May the Circle slipping out of reach. And for a while, Bull of the Woods was my favourite album, supplanting the House of Love’s eponymous (sort of) debut album and Spacemen 3’s Playing With Fire.

On the night Nick asked me if I still loved this record. I took a while to answer because I really wanted to take the time to differentiate between the love of nostalgia and the love of something you truly cherish for what it is, unencumbered by the warm glow of memories of times long gone. Well, it will come as no surprise to my fellow record club chums that in light of Graham’s theme for our next evening together I have been listening to another album I held in high regard from that time in my past and, inevitably, I have compared the two records. Nostalgia pah! I can now say Nick, with utmost confidence, that my love for Bull of the Woods is as strong as it ever has been (the other record sounded dated and somewhat adolescent in comparison). I think it’s a great, great record warts and all and I wonder just how many other ‘disappointing’ third albums I’ve let slip through my grasp over the years!

Rob listened: This is a great call by Tom. He and I, in our own very different ways, are constantly having our musical choices curated by taste-makers or, more often in this age of democratic star-ratings, the masses.

Tom is a student of discographic lists. Name any artist and he will be able to tell you which album is supposed to be their apogee. He has an extensive mental list of records he is looking out for, and these are always winnowed down to one or two from any particular artist. How many potential connections has he missed out on this way?

I, meanwhile, am just gullible and act under the constant sense that others know what’s good for me much more than I do. A score below 7.0 is enough to strike a record from my ‘listen-to’ list, whilst a negative review of a record I have already become pleasantly acquainted with is all that’s required for me to question my own response. If that guy says it’s bad, it must be bad. What do I know? How much great stuff do I miss out on by allowing others to act as arbiters for my own taste?

My musical journey never took me to the 13th Floor, and therefore I never got into the Elevators. I did come to feel great affection for Roky Erickson when I reviewed his 1995 album ‘All That May Do My Rhyme’, a sweet collection of naive universal folk boogie that was very hard to resist. In common with most bands I would have had no idea at all which of the 13th Floor Elevators records was supposed to be the best or worst, other than recognising the iconic cover of the first album. In general I guess this gives me slightly better odds of picking out the hidden gem in any particular band’s back-catalogue. I have a list of bands I fancy, but rarely specific records although this does sometimes lead to record-store paralysis (“Hey, I always meant to try The Byrds. I wonder if this record is one of the good ones or not? Perhaps i’ll just leave it…”).

On the night ‘Bull Of The Woods’ more or less passed me by, but listening back to it now on headphones, i’m loving it. Groovy, direct, sharper than i’d expected and packed with great tunes. It sounds more than a match for any of those other records by big names of the 60s that I have no idea I’m supposed to own. For this band at least, I now know which album i’m looking out for.

Graham Listened: Opening signs weren’t good for me and researching the construction of Electric Jugs (take care when googling) was a welcome distraction. After a while I began to get past the mess of production and recording and actually started to “hear” it! Although far more bluesy, I picked up on some notes of early Barrett era Floyd in its psychhier moments and by the end, quite enjoyed the groove.

Nick listened: I own the first two 13th Floor Elevators albums, but to be honest I’ve never got past the (really) tinny, uber-cheap late-60s garage production on them. Or the incessant wibble, which is, on first encounter, kind of like an awesome sampled loop that would be a great big irresistible insistent hook if it were in a piece of techno, or something. I do adore the original version of “Slip Inside This House”, though. This, shorn of so much wibble, and with slightly meatier sound, I thought probably was better. I’m not sold on the “Roky Eriksson is a genius” myth, though.

When the history of British music is written there’s a fair chance that Cornershop will be forgotten. That’s a shame, a crime perhaps. Many, many bands have made much bigger splashes but much smaller contributions.

Cornershop, like XTC before them, came out of a scene which they soon transcended, going on to make truly original music, blending influences in new ways, testing the limits of their talents and steadily finding sounds that others were missing. In doing so they made their way out into territory that they alone mapped and colonised. This left them seeming outliers when in fact, again like XTC, they are, at their heart, a deeply British band. In their records can be found a sound collage of the last 40 years of at least one, if not more, of Britain’s histories.

By the time they reached ‘Handcream For A Generation’, their fourth album, they were at their most confident. They were buoyed by the success of ‘When I Was Born For The Seventh Time’, a record that had perfected the loose-limbed groove they had been working out over the preceding two and, thanks to a Norman Cook remix, rode it all the way to number one. Four years later, with ‘Brimful of Asha’ still echoing through playlists up and down the nation, they returned with easily their most ambitious album. Whilst it may not have captured anything like the attention of its predecessor, for me it’s their definitive statement, or at least my favourite. It’s a record of pure and flawless pleasure and always the record of theirs I choose, always without hesitation and never to be disappointed. It’s never not a pleasure to hear.

Which is not to say that the pleasures herein are steady and consistent. The wild variety of ‘Handcream’ is confounding, but ultimately one of the reasons to love it. It swerves fearlessly from lazy funk to pulsing trance to pastiche 70s cock rock to playground singalongs to 15 minute Eastern bliss-outs with apparently no grand purpose or scheme. The whole collection wears a huge smile on its face and, like a stick of rock, this attitude is evident wherever and however you slice it. Each song does something different yet all retain a hazy upbeat vibe and none fail to get fingers, feet and heads moving happily.

Zoom in even further and the detail is a microscopic treasure trove. There’s the three different telephone tones used to propel ‘People Power’, the repetition of song titles across several tracks as if political slogans, the moment in ‘Motion the 11’ when the MC stops the session just to make sure the engineer is recording because “this might just be the one”. ‘The London Radar’ straps flight announcement samples together, Avalanches-style, and gets the whole thing airborne like a 70s British Airways advert. Then there’s the simple pleasure of the opening track ‘Heavy Soup’ which introduces the main players and trails several of the tracks they are about to perform, as if this were live at the Harlem Apollo. It’s playful, endearing and pulled off with just enough verve and attention to detail.

Those who waited five years for ‘Handcream for a Generation’ to land seemed to struggle to know what to do with it. The trick was simple, just enjoy it. For me, it’s much better than ‘When I Was Born…’. Here they combine not just happy grooves, but 70s rock, 90s electronica, millennial hip-hop, timeless dancehall and sunrise mantras and the whole melting pot thing has more spike, more juice, more joy, more thrills.

In the midst of all this there’s a subtle, oblique politics at work. Even post-millennium there seemed to be something of an open challenge in the seamless combinations, as opposed to clashes, of sounds, cultures, languages and styles in this record. Although the band make no direct claims herein, the album stands as a state of the sound of the nation address more freewheeling and convincing than any others I can recall from the period.

It’s the Cornershop album I always reach for and in the 12 years since I first heard it, I’ve reached for it a hell of a lot.

Tom listened: Before this evening my knowledge of Cornershop did not extend beyond Brimful of Asha. I liked that single well enough, kind of in the same way as, say, Wake Up Boo, it cheered me up to hear it on the radio, gave me hope that all was not lost with chart music (unlike nowadays, I have to say) but it didn’t occur to me to delve any deeper into Cornershop’s music – I always thought it would be a case of ‘more of the same but less so’.

I certainly never imagined that Cornershop would cover the breadth of musical landscapes in evidence on Handcream for a Generation. In scope it reminded me of In a Bar Under the Sea era Deus and the Beastie’s Check Your Head – high praise indeed. As Rob has suggested, it is charming and fun, like the kid in school that makes everyone else laugh just by showing up, it all seems effortless.

My only gripe was the 15 minute Noel Gallagher sullied jamathon. Some long songs seem vital (Marquee Moon, Halleluwah, Sister Ray), others outstay their welcome. This one could have ended after 5 minutes!

Graham listened: What a revelation this was. I just about knew that Norman Cook had reinvented Brimful of Asha in to a hit but suppose I just thought that might be the only interesting thing Cornershop were capable of. No need to study to hard on this, just sit back and enjoy a groovy, funny, cultural mash-up that ensues from the beginning.

A real, between the eyes reminder, of the value of DRC!

Nick listened: I actually really liked the 15-minute Noel G-powered ragga-drone-groove-thing. As an album this was all over the place and difficult to get hold of mentally, but thoroughly enjoyable. I vaguely recalled a couple of the singles from the time it came out, and recalled it being moderately well-received, but it had pretty much evaporated from my memory over the intervening years. I own When I Was Born… (and recall the shop assistant in Northampton Spinadisc being visibly pleased to sell it to me when I was at university) but have barely listened to it in 15 years, which makes for a weird kind of ‘what if’ sensation with the band when presented with later work which is just as good but not blessed with a seismic hit single (or three; “Sleep On The Left Side” and “Good Shit” were all over the radio way back when, too, if I recall).