Devon Record Club

It’s tempting to hear and see ‘Love Streams’, the eighth album from Canadian electronic artist Tim Hecker, as his warm and fuzzy record. It certainly has a more organic, perhaps even welcoming sound than his previous couple. Also, it has a nice pink-infused cover, so, y’know, it could be ‘Chill Out with Tim’ couldn’t it? Well no, not quite.

Hecker, as far as I can see, has always used the building blocks of ambient electronic and contemporary classical music as his canvas and then employed distortion and degradation as his primary operating methods. He takes sounds as roots and nicks and chips and twists and bends and burns and intertwines them into shapes and forms that seem simultaneously to have burst from within and withered dreadfully away from their original forms.

Previously he’s been heavily into pipe organs, pianos, guitars, software, the ‘virginal’ (an early percussive harpsichord) and anything else he can get his hands on. He treats these instruments seriously, with reverence and technical curiosity, never as playthings or sound fodder to be thrown willy-nilly. Instead he uses them as serious thematic elements, to enhance, divert, combine and amalgamate, as colours to use to build shapes and as shapes to use as foundations for colours.

I don’t go all the way back with Hecker, not yet at least, only to his last three full lengths. ‘Ravedeath 1972’ took as its intent the destruction of music, and was suitably scabrous. ‘Virgins’ used live ensemble sessions as the basis for its explorations. It seemed to me to say something about the degradation of the human spirit, signified by the juxtaposition between the virginal instrument itself and song titles and cover imagery both of which invoked some of the darkest places in our recent history. It was a remarkable piece of work. I can’t explain why, but that’s always part of the wonder.

Now, with ‘Love Streams’, the human voice is given primacy, featuring for the first time in any of Hecker’s original work. He recorded raw material with the Icelandic Choir Ensemble, reportedly having them sing nonsensical words and abstract sounds, all to give him a source of sound to electronically manipulate, the way he has previously done with acoustic instruments.

The result is simultaneously warm and accessible – the human voice draws us in to any soundscape, almost no matter what else lurks therein – and endlessly fascinating. Following the routes of the interplay and entwined, slow-motion combat of voices and synths and percussion is both challenging and intriguing. the sounds confound, deflect, obfuscate and delight. Still, this is no twinkly piece of ambient electronica. It’s an floating, abstract miasma, an imagination of the way another species might invoke music. Whereas long-time Hecker buddy Daniel Lopatin seems to delight in deconstructing and then reconstructing music, twisting, perverting and destroying its body but retaining superficial traces to allow us to identify the corpse, Hecker is in another realm from start to finish, a place where music evolved under different influences into a different life-form.

There are breathtaking moments on ‘Love Streams’ and a thousand moments that will slip by un-noticed until the hundredth time. There are combinations of colour and flavour and texture that you will not have heard before. It will make little sense to you on many levels and perfect sense on others. Ultimately this is a beautiful work of sound, and perhaps my favourite thing to listen to this year so far.

Tom listened: It’s confession time…I can recall very little about this album, although I do recall liking it! And I think that’s the problem I have with music that is predominantly electronic – generally I enjoy the experience of listening to it, but don’t find myself seeking it out for repeated spins (Fourtet’s Rounds has sat on my shelf for years and year, gathering dust. Music Has the Right…by Boards of Canada has been doing a similar trick in my car, Dubnobasswithmyheadman I’ve pulled out on a few occasions more recently, loved it, but it’s drifted back into the lesser visited recesses of my collection over the last couple of years). So, it makes me even more pleased that Rob and Nick bring this stuff to Record Club – surely exposing you to music that you wouldn’t naturally encounter is what it’s all about!

Apart from those bees.

nick listened: can’t remember a bloody thing about this but wrote it on my list of things to buy, so assume I liked it. Have two other Heckers and feel as if they’re more like homework than hobby, but this seemed to bridge that gap.

 

Imagine you’re watching one of those films whose opening sequence starts off with a view of a distant galaxy. The image starts to magnify and suddenly you are hurtling into an arm of the Milky Way (for it’s that galaxy), about two thirds of the way out from the galaxy’s centre. The magnification continues apace, now we’re being given a tour of the solar system, zooming past the gas giants, on through the asteroid belt and past Mars. Earth comes into view, we whizz through the atmosphere,  puncture a wispy cumulus or two to hurtle (invariably) into a suburban landscape, through an open window to focus on, perhaps, the main character of the movie. But rather than cut to the inevitable ‘get ready for school’ off camera dialogue of the protagonist’s mother, let’s continue to their record collection. The dude is an indie kid, but left field indie rather than middle-of-the-road indie and so, of course, has all the Of Montreal albums…and there they all are chronologically arranged pretty much smack bang in the middle of his alphabetically ordered albums. The camera continues to zoom in right to the heart of the Of Montreal selection, to Hissing Fauna (which is the middle album since the kid has a promo of 2016’s Innocence Reaches) and on it goes, to the centre of the album, to the gargantuan groove fuck that is The Past Is  A Grotesque Animal (track 7 out of 12), which happens to be the kid’s favourite 12 minute long existential dissection of a relationship gone bad in, like, ever. We carry on to the middle of the…I hesitate to say ‘song’ as that’s, kind of, doing it a disservice…piece, and examine the lyrics either side of the median:

‘Somehow you’ve red-rovered the gestapo circling my heart
And nothing can defeat you
No death, no ugly world

You’ve lived so brightly
You’ve altered everything
I find myself searching for old selves
While speeding forward through the plate glass of maturing cells’

and you’re amazed that something so poignant, so devastating and poetic could reside there. It’s only later, when you check out that song/opus/monster that you realise that going to its heart and finding such eloquence is not coincidence at all – dissect any part of The Past Is A Grotesque Animal and you’ll find similar, incredible, lyricism; lyricism as exorcism perhaps, as our hero, Kevin, tries to come to terms with the disintegration of his marriage, but, hell, his loss is our gain, so let’s rejoice that his world falling apart has led to such an outpouring; an outgushing if you will!

I only own the one Of Montreal album. There may be other Grotesque Animals all over their catalogue, but I doubt it. It feels so right that this is central, not just to the album, but…to everything! Listening again just now, the twelve minutes sped by. As those of you who follow the blog will know, I’m not, by nature, a lyrics kind of guy, but these, well they’re something else! Every line is quotable in isolation (in fact one of the music forums I used to follow went through a phase where pretty much every regular poster used a different line from TPIAGA as their tagline) but together they tell the tale of a man’s suffering that is heartbreaking in its honesty and breathtaking in its eloquence.

Spiraling out from TPIAGA are all sorts of kaleidoscopic goodies, pop gems mostly, skewed pop gems almost entirely! Some run off in every direction like disorientated mice, tangential to the point of abstruseness but always clinging onto the pop wreckage that Of Montreal choose to inhabit. Others, like the closing pair of She’s A Rejecter and  We Were Born The Mutants Again With Leafling are more straightforward but no less brilliant (She’s a Rejecter features the unforgettable lyric:

‘Oh no, she’s a rejector
I must protect myself

There’s the girl that left me bitter
Want to pay some other girl
To just walk up to her and hit her
But I can’t, I can’t, I can’t’

which is (a) hilarious, (b) shocking and (c) really sad). I love these songs, but they are exist in the shadow cast by their ever looming big brother and, as such, they feel like hors d’ouevres; wonderfully tasty but appetite whetters/palette cleansers.

My eleven year old son Kit described Hissing Fauna as sounding like a cross between Bowie and Prince when I played it to him the other evening. I guess what he was hearing was the same inventiveness and creativity, someone sounding as though they are not taking themselves too seriously, enjoying the process of making music that is shot from the heart, true to the self, groundbreaking yet familiar enough to be accessible. And whilst Hissing Fauna doesn’t make it onto my turntable all that often these days (it’s almost ten years old…blimey!), I always enjoy it, especially as I get closer and closer to its epicentre!

Nick listened: Emma bought this when it came out, but it kind of got lost in the hustle and bustle of other great records from 2007, which I rate as about my favourite year for music in the last couple of decades (Battles, LCD Soundsystem, Caribou, Patrick Wolf, Spoon, Stars of the Lid, Beirut, Studio, The Field, Radiohead, MIA). it wasn’t the only casualty; I got sent a promo of Boxer by The National and shelved it without listening for years. So Hissing Fauna got listened to a couple of times without penetrating what it was doing really, and then put away, eventually ending up in a box under the spare bed with hundreds of others when we cleared the bottom shelves to toddler-proof the livingroom. But I’ve dug it out now, and it’s back in the active collection.

I was especially p*ssed off on 24th June when the EU referendum result was announced. There, I’ve said it. So the result for Brexit has influenced my choice this week. I wanted an antidote to this result. To celebrate all that is European. For me Europe represents a big melting pot of culture that crosses borders, breaks down barriers and this album does this in spades. Lætitia Sadier, Stereolab’s French born (UK living) lead singer mostly sings in her native tongue, in a style that sounds indifferent (yeah, f*ck you Farage), hypnotic and although my language skills are a little rustique these days – je comprends en peu. I originally wrote ‘je comprends en petit peux’ which roughly translates ‘I understand in small can’, which was odd because the first track of this album is an out-and-out tribute to Can! Shifting in tempo and all soggily and beautifully ‘beepy’, with a Hammond organ overlaid, the opening track ‘Metronomic Underground’ sets the tone for this album’s wonderful blend of europop, electronica and Krautrock. Most of the tracks on this album sound like they could carry on improvising into the night, just like Can were fond of doing during their legendary sessions.

Sadier’s vocal throughout this album is flat, but intentionally so, as it adds metronomy in itself. Repeating phrases, for example “Les pierres, les abres, les murs racontent…” (‘the stones, the tress, the walls tell’) on ‘Cybele’s Reverie’ evokes Sartre (pseud’s corner for me) and his hopelessness in amongst inanimate objects in his existential nightmare ‘Nausea’. There are nods in the direction of the punk band X-ray Spex (‘Germ Free Adolescents’ is lined up for DRC) and the saxophone on ‘Percolator’. The lyrics to ‘Les Yper-Sound’ seems especially prescient given Brexit in all its narrative for pitching camps against each other

“You go in that team
I go on this team
Divide everything
A flag or a number

Make ’em opposites
So there’s a reason
Stigmatization
Okay, now we can fight”

‘Spark Plug’ explores the ills of society and its ability to heal (‘There is no sense in being interested in an ill person. Or unwell a society if one cannot believe their readiness and the capacity for proper recovery’). I’m feeling better already about societé! The album is, despite the flat vocals, very uplifting. It makes you feel like part of a happening, an underground avant garde show, like you are in the experience, pushing the boundaries.

The title track ‘Emporer Tomato Ketchup’ resumes the metronomic, and Can-like beats of the opener. Here the tempo is quicker though, and the interchanging vocal melodies of Sadier are accompanied by Mary Hansen (who sadly died in London in 2002 in a bike accident), making a delightful and blistering Krautrock belter of a tune. All forlorn and introspective, a weep for ‘the sought after union bought us together’ on ‘Monstre Sacre’ takes an altogether different tone. These are the highs and lows of life in full, born out in glorious euro-technicolour.

I can’t help but feel that this “proud to be British” bullsh*t would not have come to the fore if we were more honest about our influences, perhaps more open to other European cultures and the way they have shaped us as a nation. On ‘Motoroller Scalatron’ Sadier sings “What’s society built on? It’s built on, built on bluff. Built on bluff, built on trust”. Come on people. Feeling British means nothing. Feeling part of society has far more to tie us together. Or does it? Is it more simple and perhaps therefore fragile than that? Sadier appears to question this.

Looking back, Sadier reflects “Discovery of fire, America. The invention of the wheel, steel work and democracy. Philosophy, the Soviets and other events in history of humanity. Happened at a certain given moment in time” over strings and a variety of retro electronic jiggery-pokery. There’s no going back on history, only forwards. Again, flatly sung, matter of fact, but backed with glorious electronica. The final track ‘Anonymous Collective’ focusses on the unseen things that hold us together….”You and me are molded by things. Well beyond our acknowledgment”. Maybe that’s it. Don’t focus on the differences (f*ck you again Farage), let’s hold together and to the things that bind us, the things unseen. To Europe! Vive les similarities.

Tom listened: A while ago now Rob mentioned that he was keen to do a podcast/radio type thing and one of the features he was hoping to instigate (Rob is an ideas man!) would be a slot where we would listen to an album by an artist we had previously overlooked, generally the bigger the artist, the better (big in terms of influence as opposed to sales, I suppose). When he mooted this to me I drew a blank. Which, in retrospect, was ludicrous! There were hundreds of missing pieces in my musical jigsaw puzzle but I just couldn’t come up with any when put on the spot.

Well, Record Club has been the equivalent of a rummage down the back of the sofa and, as a result, many gaps have been plugged. The Stereolab piece now being in place, my listening life feels a little more complete. Of course, I have heard them many times on the radio over the years and Emperor Tomato Ketchup sounded more-or-less as I expected it would…but better; the grooves particularly towards the end of the record really locking me in. The closest thing to them in my record collection is Pram, another mid nineties indie outfit, but listening to this made me realise that it was the right band that won the accolades – on the basis of this album Stereolab simply had the better tunes and grooves!

 

Nick stipulated ‘no white dudes’ when he set Graham’s theme for him and as the record club crew were leaving my house, my mind had already begun sifting through the possibilities. Almost committing to numerous options – Prince, Smokey, Marley’s Rastaman Vibration…another Al Green album just to wind Graham up…I found myself gravitating, at the eleventh hour, to The Roches self-titled debut album, attracted by the bizarrely magical musical delights contained within as much as its adherence to Nick’s diversity agenda (do we bother with diversity anymore now that we have gained glorious independence from the tyranny of Europe?). It was surprisingly difficult to find records that fitted exactly to Nick’s criteria anyway…these white dudes have a habit of cropping up all over the place…but I contented myself with the knowledge that at least my chosen band had white dudes in the minority, most of the time, and that they probably didn’t really need them at all (although Fripp does play a blinder on the breathtaking Hammond Song and, presumably, twiddled the production knobs with aplomb).

Another jewel exposed by The Spin Guide to Alternative Music (still not returned…whoever has borrowed it, please can I have it back!), I can remember feeling distinctly sceptical as I held The Roches debut in my hands in the record shop pondering whether to purchase an album that looks this bad – could it really reward the trust I was placing on one music journalist’s opinion? As covers go, it’s pretty atrocious and in failing light and with a bit of a squint, you could be looking at a Nolan Sisters record sleeve. The sisters look too self-consciously wacky, their mannered poses smacking of coffee shop kookiness and hinting at bad jokes, syrupy vocals and fey arrangements.

Turns out, that’s not far from the truth.

It also turns out that you do not have to be too far from that truth for the shit to turn to diamonds. Turn the ‘quaint’ dial around a notch and what could so easily be cloyingly unpalatable transforms into a thing of beauteous splendour, the use of humour veering from embarrassing to affecting. The Roches, on their debut album at least, are something to cross the road to rather than from!

A record of two halves, the first side of the platter fluctuates from the ridiculous to the sublime and back again with the aforementioned Hammond Song shining out like a towering beacon amongst the four other tracks – songs such as Mr Sellack and Damned Old Dog sail perilously close to the line of kooky but, to my mind, get away with it through a combination of charm and restraint. The final track on side one, The Troubles, raises the stakes – the sisters pondering as to whether their lives will be in greater danger whilst visiting the emerald isle as a result of the IRA’s firearms or the posited dearth of health food shops in Dublin! They get away with it…but God only knows how! But for an insight of just how incredible this album is, listen to the first two tracks back-to-back. The introductory opener We seguing into Hammond Song might be one of the most startling transitions in my record collection as the (frankly bizarre) chipmunk like sped up vocals at the end of We merge into the exquisite, close harmonies of Hammond Song. What follows is six minutes of bliss, chord changes to die for, a guitar solo from the gods and some of the sweetest singing ever committed to vinyl. It’s tempting to wish for the other tracks on side one to be more similar to Hammond Song but, on reflection, that would only serve to dilute the experience….a perfect palm fringed beach feels a lot more special if it’s the only one around!

That said, there are other moments of Hammond Song-like beauty scattered through the album and side two is much more consistent in tone and atmosphere, most tracks managing to amalgamate the aesthetically pleasing and the weird to form five cuts of the very finest female urban acoustic folk singer songwriter fare. Separating out the two halves, I’d take the second side every time (despite Hammond Song being elsewhere), but really they are intractable and, together, they form one of the more surprisingly captivating albums I own.

Rob listened: Loved it! Tom’s right about the delicate, wobbly balance between twee/kooky and funny/charming and also about the mercurial way in which the Roches walk the line. Some heartstopping songs and some that are laugh out loud funny for reasons that aren’t immediately explicable. Reminded me of Kimya Dawson, but without the artifice and the Be Good Tanyas without the weight of historical reenactment. Loved it.

When was the last time the album of the year was made by the biggest pop star on the planet?

‘Thriller’ in 1982? ‘Sgt Pepper’s’ in 1967?

Give it six months and there will be another name to add to the list.

‘Lemonade’, Beyonce’s sixth studio album is a breathtaking piece of work in which production, author, subject and songs all contribute, all are bound together inextricably and yet all are worn so very lightly. This is no portentous, overbearing statement double album, it’s a breezy 45 minutes that manages to be uplifting, inspiring and sharp as whilst diving deep into dark and difficult personal and political issues. Again, again, again, I can’t stress enough how, despite the rawness on display, the execution of the 12 songs here is so deft as to be giddily exhilarating.

And let’s remind ourselves once more, this is the Biggest Pop Star on the planet pulling all of this off.

What’s more, she’s pulling it off amidst the meteorology of the interstellar forces between her and her husband, one Shawn Carter aka Jay-Z. Not only is this a remarkable record by the world’s biggest star, it’s one which is laced with implied criticism and public admonishment for one of the other top 5 stars in pop. Who she lives with.

It must have been some first listen in the Knowles-Carter house.

And so what do we have?

A record full of beautiful detail and flourishes. The bingo hall organ that rills through ‘Pray You Catch Me’, is incongrous, and just a bit weird, and deliciously fleeting. It’s gone before you realilse it’s happened, leaving a background echo and a sense that not everything is going to be okay on this fairground ride.

Elsewhere there’s the horn riff that emerges from the middle of ‘All Night’. It’s the hookiest thing I’ve heard in ages and it’s used so delicately that it becomes genuinely nagging and moreish.

It’s a record packed with moments too.

Like when the air horn cuts through the phasing sample from Andy Williams ‘Can’t Get Used To Losing You’. It’s subtly amazing, an act of low-key genius. The sound of a sweeping clash of cultures, and it’s a throwaway in the first 10 seconds of what becomes ‘Hold Up’, an exquisite track.

It’s also a record packed with startling, revealing, insightful and nuanced words. Take ‘Hold Up’. It’s no simple ‘you done me wrong’ diss track for a disloyal partner. Here is introspection, guilt, self blame, defensiveness, possessiveness, confusion, anxiety. This is a song written from the perspective of a woman who feels completely isolated by her jealously and, ultimately, by her husbands infidelity. It holds its tension until the very end and the repeated refrain “I look in the mirror, say ‘what’s up’?” a hopelessly defiant cry of loneliness.

The ambiguity and self-relexive power of these lyrics, even when plumbing the dark recesses of the heart, is a pure joy. “What’s worse, to be jealous or crazy, jealous or crazy?” And earlier, the psychological insight that delivers the line “I’m praying you catch me”, the protagonist yearning to be found running through her partner’s call list just so the suffocating suspicion and the dread she is writhing in can be brought out into the open.

The suspicion and self-doubt boils over in the next track, don’t hurt yourself a writhing, seething, excoriating smack down of a track. Underscored by thrashing barbed-wire guitar from Jack White, she bellows:

WHO THE FUCK DO YOU THINK I AM?…
(You can here her rage splattering against the mic here)

I am the dragon breathing fire
Beautiful mane I’m the lion
Beautiful man I know you’re lying
I am not broken, I’m not crying, I’m not crying
You ain’t trying hard enough
You ain’t loving hard enough
You don’t love me deep enough
We not reaching peaks enough

Uh, this is your final warning
You know I give you life
If you try this shit again
You gon lose your wife

Cards on the table, all I know about Beyonce’s marriage to Jay-Z I know through listening to this record. I have no idea whether this record alludes to true events or is an elaborately imagined and constructed fiction. It doesn’t matter.

It’s either a staggeringly frank statement from the most popular powerful performer in pop music, a performer who could have made an album of sugar kisses and butterflies and sold just as many copies, or it’s a work of astonishing authorial vision. If she’s putting herself into a character’s head, then it’s a different, but no less astonishing achievement.

And you shudder for the man who may have unleashed this avenging angel. And then you think, you go, you go, go give him what he deserves.

Elsewhere, there are wonders, from the country stomp of ‘Daddy Lessons’, again more complex than first apparent, and perhaps not quite so autobiographical, to
‘Formation’ which closes it off, with her rallying cry to black women to form up and slay in the struggle for gender and race power and equality. It’s no meek call for philosophical egalitariansim, it’s a red raw assertion of life, love, sex, money, greed, determination and power, inabashed and undeniable.

And once again, to close, all of this is in a set of 12 exquisitely constructed pop songs.

I’m going to stop now. Perhaps you have ‘Lemonade’ in which case you don’t have to take if from me, but here it comes anyway: This is quite something.

Tom listened: I wish we hadn’t had Lemonade with curry on the night, not because of any ensuing issues with my digestive system but because our physical removal from Graham’s living room to his dining table, coupled with his children’s bedtime meant that it was almost impossible to discern. I definitely felt the album suffered as a result and, occasionally found myself tuning in to something that sounded as if it was probably amazing, only for it to fade away just as rapidly in a melange of coriander and chit chat. A shame as I am sure I would have been impressed (and have been mightily by the stuff I have heard on the radio) and am very keen to acquire the album once it gets released on a decent format. I wish I could say more about it!

 

“Jesus died for somebody’s sins….but not mine”. The opening line for my ‘pick’ for this meeting smacked me in the face as a 16 year old record collector and indoctrinated Christian. I wa
s exploring punk at this time, and aside from the Damned, Buzzcocks and the comedic elements of the genre I was also looking at what had gone before, the roots of the culture and musical forms. I was signposted by narrative, mainly from the pages of the NME, to where the links were – Iggy Pop, Television, Richard Hell. Of course Patti Smith was cited in these narratives, and she is often called the queen of Punk, the punk poetess. On this album you hear much more than simply a poetry set to furious guitars and drums – although there is plenty of that too.

Patti Smith was born in 1946, and so was a “child of the 60s”, starting out life as a poet and “hung out” with Robert Mapplethorpe – the artist who was to photograph her so evocatively for this album’s cover. I now read that she was also bought up in a religious home, eventually rejecting organised religion in favour of her own ways during her teens. Such was the strength of this rejection that it led to the writing of the opening line – this is even more poignant for me now knowing that fact.

The album is so defiant to me in many ways, from the androgyny of the cover to the way she spits and snarls through the opening track ‘Gloria’. The album returns to the same guitar sequence on the opening track in ‘Land’ – a three part movement of dream like sequences blending horror and majestic images of “horses, horses, horses….”. In this section of the album she has her own vocal overlaid on her own voice, as though she is speaking against herself even – it evokes the tossing and turning of a nightmare, and yet mixed with incredible images of horses in the water. PJ Harvey has been often compared to Smith, and I invite you to listen to ‘Horses in my Dreams’ on Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea (definitely on my list to bring along) as her own (I feel) interpretation of ‘Land’.

The fact that I jump to ‘Land’ reveals that I do think there are some bum tracks on this album – ‘Free Money’ being one. Other listeners did not like the reggae pastiche of ‘Redondo Beach’ but in this track lies another link to the punk fraternity and its roots. Reggae was blossoming in the mid-70s, both in the UK and US, and raised the spirit of revolution that the hippy movement brought along with it, but this time in anger. Punk is often held up as a reaction to the past, and the pomp of the 60s and 70s, rather than a natural progression of the anger and frustration with the world that was borne out of that period. Blondie, and Debbie Harry particuarly, have a foot in the 1960s optimism – Harry was a member of the hippie 60s psychedelic band Willow the Wisp. Patti Smith, like Debbie Harry also has a 60s connection. She fraternised with the beat generation poets, and started life in spoken word. On Horses she brings that poetry into song, and gives it an urgency. It’s like “you weren’t listening then, but you’d better now”. We also asked during the night if she was more a contemporary of Bruce Springsteen – well he co-wrote ‘Because the Night’ on her next album Easter, so I suppose he was. He however developed frustration of the lack of progress in the 60s into songs about the plight of the working man. Channeling his ire against the US through a different blue-collar background. No less angry, but cut from the same cloth. Patti Smith was all art-house and poetry. Of its time the poetry stands alone on this album compared to its contemporaries. Nobody was doing this cut up poetry set to angry guitars, and this is why it lays the path towards punk.

In terms of shared influences between Blondie and Smith, Redondo Beach is what Debbie Harry possibly stole from her on a night out in CBGBs (I am speculating here) and recreated in a more popular form in the 1980s to sell records. Both artists also display femininity in their music, but in different ways. Smith is more gutsy and there’s no sheen or gloss to it, and yet there’s beauty to behold. “Elegie” – the final track – is just a heartbreaking tale of loss of love “I just don’t know what to do tonight. My head is aching as I drink and breathe. Memory falls like cream in my bones, moving on my own”. It’s a stunning, choking and realistic end to a failed relationship and Smith lays it out bare on the bones. It almost leaves you a little hollow and yet changed. A bit like a failed relationship really.

When I first heard this record the opening line was really a set of gateposts for me. I listened to it but was quite fearful of its consequences and couldn’t go through ‘the gate’ to other songs. Later on I have been much more prepared to explore. I love the way music can empower and change the way we view the world. It would be wrong of me to say that opening line was the deal breaker for me in terms of my religious belief, that would come much later, but it certainly marked out an alternative school of thought. I did not need those “rules and regulations”, or at least I could question them and to me that embodies what this album represents: empowerment. “Except for one who seizes possibilities, one who seizes possibilities.”

Rob listened: I’ve avoided ‘Horses’ until now, no longer because i’m fearful of it, but, well, because I used to be and, just because. I heard a documentary about it earlier int he year and realised it wasn’t quite the challenging art-noise I had perhaps expected (not sure why) and hearing it front to back tonight, especially in the context of Steve’s experience, it sounded great.  If there’s a better opening line in rock history, I’ve not heard it, and the rest of the record that followed managed to maintain that aggression, that defiance and that sense of striking out alone. Absolutely deserves it’s place.

Tom listened: Rob hit the nail on the head when he talks about defiance – everything about this record screams it, from photo to lyrics to vocal delivery. It’s not surprising that Steve was scared of it at first; it’s an intimidating listen and its unrelentingly abrasive nature has ensured that my copy has mainly gathered dust over the course of the quarter of a century I have owned it. In fact, Horses was earmarked for our Guilty Displeasures round (and, strangely, I was on the verge of throwing this into our conversation on the night just before Steve revealed it). It is a perfect example of what I was getting at in that theme – on the face of it, Horses ticks all my boxes but there’s something about it that I find hard to embrace…maybe it’s the coldness at its core, maybe it’s to do with Smith’s vocals; I don’t know but I go back to it every so often, expecting it to click (I do admire it even if I find it hard to like) but my reaction has always been (and is still) to turn and run!

By the time Tom’s theme got to my ears, I was only hearing “childhood sweetheart”, none of this “records bought before you were 18”, “records you bought before you thought music was cool” etc. etc..  I operate on a mainly literal basis, so had my reasons for bringing this along for a very brief airing.

The only U2 album I will even think about listening to these days is ‘Achtung Baby’. For U2 to do anything remotely on the scope of “cool” is a huge challenge and they may have got closest with that album. Otherwise I would never dream of spinning a whole U2 album, but our burgeoning numbers and the theme, opened the possibility of a vignette section on the night.

Back to the theme then. This album was responsible for me ending ties with my first proper girlfriend. I’m sure Paula still thanks me for it in any case. I had good reason though. I’d entertained all sorts of pop whimsy in her company, even taken her to see Nick Heyward/Haircut One Hundred in some shape of form. I’d been dabbling in prog/heavy rock and the only other current band I had any real feeling for was Big Country (oh what irony on Round 90). Let’s face it, at 17 in 1983 I was naive and vulnerable. ‘War’ blew me away. It sound vital, harsh, bold, unique, earnest, honest and with hearts literally pinned to the “record” sleeve. I was taken in hook line and sinker and spent much of the next year wearing a long grey coat doing my best to look earnest at every opportunity. Had their been an O level in looking earnest, I would have been a straight A student. Back to the childhood sweetheart for a moment though. She could not understand how important this album really was and simply, “didn’t mind it”. Well that was it, this lily livered approach could not stand in the way of my earnest crusade, so it was curtains on that relationship.

Obviously U2 became a horrible monolith, normally best ignored. I only inflicted ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ on the team, but for nostalgia reasons I can still sense a little of that feeling I got when I first heard it. I remember being impressed by Bono’s confidence in writing the song while bombs were still going off and everyone seemed too entrenched to dare dealing with such subject matter. Unfortunately this was only a glimpse in to how bleeding confident Bono would shortly become…………..

So Steve and I brought the same record to record club.

It was bound to happen eventually, and with hindsight now seems inevitable that it would be this record given that there are now two Mancunians of a certain age in our little club. Factor in our theme of “records from when your cement was still wet” and it was a recipe for duplication, even though it’s notably odd that we’ve never really talked about The Stone Roses at record club before.

But that’s OK, because I was 10 years old and living in Devon when this record came out, so my story is a little different to his. I first heard The Stone Roses through the wall from my older brother’s bedroom, and later as a teenager I felt a connection with this album (I’m hesitant to say this band after everything that followed) and the singles and b-sides around it like pretty much nothing else I’ve experienced as a music fan.

By the time I got to The Stone Roses the band were essentially no longer a going concern; friends saw them live in Exeter when they toured Second Coming but it wasn’t until a few months later, I think summer of 1995, that I really got bitten by them myself. And by then it was too late. Years and miles away from ‘baggy’ or ‘Madchester’ or whatever you want to call the scene that The Stone Roses germinated within, they were an abstract artefact to me.

With no prospect of new records by The Stone Roses themselves, or engagement with a local cultural movement happening around me, I went to the local record shop and ordered a copy of Ege Bamyasi instead, because I saw a reference to how “Fools Gold” sounded like “I’m So Green”. Detective work followed: The Byrds, Hendrix, Marvin Gaye, Love, Simon & Garfunkel, Funkadelic, Public Enemy, etc etc; there was a lot to explore just from references in interviews and articles. Instead of accepting The Stone Roses as the be-all-and-end-all of music, I took it as a beginning, and it broadened my horizons immensely.

One of the key things about The Stone Roses for me is that it’s not really a ‘rock’ record; it swoons and sways rather than rocks. The postpunkiness that clattered through “Elephant Stone” had evolved into something different by the time they recorded the album. Take “Shoot You Down”; with its sashaying drums and delicate, supple guitar, it’s closer to jazz than to the sound of Oasis, who so many people seem to think of as The Stone Roses’ heirs.

So given that Steve had brought the same album, I played a handful of the tracks from Turns Into Stone, one of many Silvertone cash-in compilations taking advantage of their miniscule early discography, but one that I can’t begrudge because it’s magical, and I’ve listened to it as much as, if not more than, the actual debut album. I played from “Standing Here” through to “Fools Gold”, and then skipped on to “Something’s Burning”; this handful of tracks taken together are the closest thing to what an album recorded directly after “Fools Gold” might have sounded like. (That this potential record never got made is a musical tragedy as far as I’m concerned.)

The instrumental coda of “Where Angels Play” is so mellifluous it practically levitates before your ears, content to exist as music and be beautiful without making a fuss. There’s something you’d probably have to objectively call a guitar ‘solo’, but it’s a million miles away from the cockrocking nonsense Squire would inflict in later years. Likewise the guitar playing on “Standing Here” feels effortless and lightweight, from the opening distorted yowl to the constantly varying chops through the verses, and the beatific, sad-eyed coda. And I’ve not even mentioned the rhythm section; Mani and Reni are doing things on these songs that I’ve never heard another ‘rock’ band do, rolling, floating, and swaying. If other music exists that sounds like this, I’ve never found it.

Even “Simone”, which I believe is simply a portion of “Where Angels Play” spun backwards, looped, and played around with, lead me outwards to ambient music; I doubt I’d have as much love for Eno or Stars of the Lid if I hadn’t spent hours as a teenage trying to figure out what it meant or how it made me feel things despite doing basically nothing but oscillate gently for four minutes.

Which is why the new single, their first in 20+ years is so disappointing; that subtlety, control, and grace that I was obsessed with, and which I still adore on the rare occasions when I revisit it, has evaporated completely. It shouldn’t be a surprise; it had gone by Second Coming (though I still rate “Begging You” as a fabulous piece of music), and there’s no trace of it in The Seahorses, or any of Brown or Squire’s solo music.

I feel like I listen to and enjoy a completely different version of The Stone Roses to the incarnation of the band that other people hear; we’ve often talked at record club about how we often like the same records as each other but for quite radically different reasons, and this band are a definite case in point for me.

Tom listened: The Stone Roses are a funny one as far as I am concerned. Loved them at the time, bought the debut on its release (despite the lukewarm reception from both NME and John Peel – two of my early musical barometers), went to an early gig at The Leadmill just as it was all kicking off, listened to little else during the glorious summer of 1989. Then Fools Gold came along, as well as that other single I can’t remember the name of and, for me, the lustre was gone and what came before was tarnished beyond recognition. A bit like Dorothy pulling back the curtain, Fools Gold revealed the mechanisms, showed the cogs at work, was ponderous and plodding and I fell out of love, just like that.

Fast forward almost thirty years, having barely listened to their stuff since, and I feel a mixture of emotions. The songs, in the main, have not recaptured that initial magic; I Wanna Be Adored just makes me think of the risible brothers Gallagher, Made of Stone whiffs of straightforward indie rock as pilloried by Lou Barlow a couple of years later, Bye Bye Badman does nothing for me and I never really got the appeal of She Bangs The Drums in the first place. However, the rest of the album gave me a huge dose of warming nostalgia, took me back to those endless sunny days when I felt that I was witnessing something culturally significant. It was a good time to be in the north of England and, possibly precisely because I haven’t been regularly revisiting it, The Stone Roses took me back in a way that few albums I’ve listened to recently have.

If there happen to be any regular readers of our blog, they may by now have cottoned on to fact that I love a theme – the manoeuvring of my record club chums (and myself) into redundant, dust ridden corners of our respective collections brings me great pleasure, especially when the process uncovers long forgotten or unfairly neglected treasures. To be honest, I suspect that we all own more than enough music now to keep us happy for the rest of our lives yet still we push on looking (usually in vain) for the next pearl, when we already have necklaces worth of the buggers lying dormant, waiting to be re-discovered. That’s where the notion of a theme comes in…put it this way – I have probably bought less new music in the last five years than at any time since my late teens!

As Rob has intimated, this particular theme was not that well formed in my mind when I hamfistedly attempted to articulate it to the others but its aim was, ostensibly, to direct us to parts of our record collections beyond that which we would normally consider, pushing back through those early forays into what we considered ‘cool’, back to a time in our lives when music was simply music – all the other accouterments; the image, the album art, the lyrics, the message and, crucially, whether it was ‘OK’ to like it or not….well they weren’t even a consideration. In other words, the stuff you loved when you were a kid!

I listened to nothing other than the Beatles for years. Eventually, having acquired all their major albums and most of the solo and Wings related McCartney (whoops) I thought I might dabble with the dark side and turned to their arch rivals The Rolling Stones. And there it ended for a significant amount of time – as far as I was concerned that was enough music for me to last a lifetime (it probably was, to be honest!). I stopped exploring, hunkered down with my copies of Revolver, Get Stoned and Pipes of Peace and played them over and over and over, stubbornly refusing to accept (whenever anyone was foolhardy enough to suggest it) that anything else of worth was out there. Alternatives were superfluous and, inevitably, inferior.

I have my Aunt Beatrice to thank for breaking this cycle. She had a cassette of Elton John’s Greatest Hits in her car and played it to me and my brother on one occasion when she was giving us a lift. At first I tried to resist but those songs were just undeniable and it wasn’t long before one of my parents’ friends who actually owned some records that weren’t jazz or classical (I found this hard to compute at the time) was, somewhat foolishly, lending me his Elton John LPs.

I’m pretty sure the self-titled second album was one of them, Honky Chateau was definitely another and maybe Goodbye Yellow Brick Road was in that original batch. But, somewhat bizarrely, Tumbleweed Connection was the one that really hooked me in. Why a 14 year old from rural Somerset would particularly enjoy listening to adult orientated psuedo-Americana as sung by a young man from Pinner is beyond me – all I can say looking back with over thirty years of experience is that, the tunes are still damn fine (on the whole) and, for the 14 year old me, that was enough.

I posited on the night that perhaps the fact that the album was a unified statement as well, as opposed to the wide ranging eclecticism of the Beatles and Stones best regarded work (and, for that matter, the majority of Elton’s other major albums) might have added to the fascination. Whatever, I was hooked and can vividly recall, to this day, sitting in my parents’ back room waiting in fevered anticipation as the dual cassette assault of the mid 80s (the computer game uploading whilst the music rewound) played out – much to my mum and dad’s annoyance, no doubt!

What of the album itself? Well, until only a few years ago, I hadn’t heard Tumbleweed Connection since my mid teens. The cassette had probably warped or snapped and by then I was probably listening to Husker Du or That Petrol Emotion…or Dire Straits(!) and so I wasn’t going to waste my money buying an album I already knew so well and which simply wasn’t cool enough to like!

Becoming re-acquainted with it in the last few years has been interesting. I find about a third of the album bemusing, perplexing and..pretty boring to be honest! Opener Ballad of a Well-Known Gun is as plodding a piece of southern fried pub rock as you could ever have the misfortune to meet and Country Comfort has some of the most (unintentionally) hilarious lyrics ever written – come on Elton, do you even know one end of a barn, let alone a hammer, from the other? Musically its as predictable as the lyrics are surreal. Son of Your Father is risible in its lack of ambition, every note signposting itself before it arrives, this is country rock by numbers and, frankly, my teenage self should have known better! And closer Burn Down The Mission…well, it’s alright but it doesn’t half go on a bit!

But the other songs are as sublime today as they ever were. From the heart wrenchingly tender ballads Come Down In Time and Love Song (a dead ringer for some of Mark Eitzel’s more touching moments), to the soulful My Father’s Gun, which has an exquisite instrumental interlude proceeding it and, possibly best of all, the rollicking Amoreena, the good bits of Tumbleweed Connection more than make up for the rest and showcase a rare talent – the piano playing is, at times, breathtaking, the singing so unforced, so easy and the lyrics…oh, dang it, they are actually just awful pretty much all the way through the album!

But despite the fact that I now own plenty of records that Elton was trying to ape here (most directly The Band’s first two albums) and even though they are, in most cases, superior in pretty much every department (apart from the piano playing, of course) I still have a soft spot for Tumbleweed Connection..and I guess that after all these years, I probably always will!

Steve listened: Tom thought that I would hate this. Someone from the UK apeing an American sound. Parallels were drawn, before he revealed who it was, between Ronan Keating singing “life is a rollercoaster” with an Atlantic drawl that is about as contrived as it gets. But then the unmasking of the album itself. When I was a teenager I frequented the library for my early musical meanderings. MOR typified the non-distribution of taste within the libraries’ record collection – although there were a few gems that I will endeavour to cover at our subsequent meetings. I remember this album from their collection well, and actually quite liked it at the time. Listening again with fresh ears I can hear the terrible lyrics and the clear posturing to an American market by both singer and songwriter (Bernie Taupin was writing at this stage). There are moments of beauty though and you can hear the formation of the hits hiding around the corner. He is,on this album, one step away from “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road”, “Rocket Man” etc. Waiting in the sidelines where he could probably still walk down a street and not be recognised we catch Elton here at a time in his career when it was all about to break through. So, perhaps this is more experimental than all his other albums as we hear him honing his craft?

Rob listened: Well, this is quite something. I guess we can’t be too surprised to find our Elton adopting a musical persona that he thinks is natural, but viewed by anyone else seems a little… over the top? Still, some of the moves he tries to pull off on ‘Tumbleweed Connection’ are simply jaw-dropping. Tom has referenced ‘Country Comfort’ and, well, wow, it’s amazing. We picture Elton in his grimy dungarees, a mouth full of tacks, sweating under the summer sun just to fix up old Grandma’s barn. It’s amazing to think that just 10 short years after he worked on the Grammy’s farm and rode the riverboat to New Orleans (whilst planting the seeds of justice in his bones) he was sat behind a white grand piano dressed as Donald Duck playing to 400,000 people in Central Park. What an incredible journey.

I think Steve has a point in that you can hear classic Elton tucked away beneath the surface here, waiting to break through. What’s remarkable for me about Tumbleweed Connection is just how completely he commits to the concept. For someone making only their third album it’s quite some side-step, perhaps the sort of thing we might have expected him to try 20 years into his career once he was safe in his own success. And so, as silly as it seems to a newcomer like me, it’s still quite a thing to behold, and weaved throughout here are some lovely moments. As I type I’m listening to ‘Where To Now St.Peter?’ which seems to be a melange of about five different other songs by Elton, Creedence, Joni, Skynyrd, all delivered from the perspective of a man who is keen to make it clear that “I took myself a blue canoe”. It’s very silly, but also very lovely. Perhaps a little like Elton John himself.

Graham listened: I did not know this album existed. I’ve never listened to an Elton John album until now. Was this a serious attempt to break America? Was it a record company idea? Was it drugs? It’s wonderfully bonkers, even down to the fact they made the sleeve photos look like they had been taken in ‘sweet home alabama’. Unfortunately every time something musically interesting happened, Elton soon popped up with some lyrics about the sawmills, barns, rocking chairs, bayous and porches of Pinner.