Standard, and Poor.


The forward march of labour halted.

Two things I wrote recently on the music, culture and politics of that weird, desultory decade, the 1990s:

1. Up Close and Personal: Lost Girls
For the decade blogs, my Tesco Value Greil Marcus number on gender, class, Britpop and everything after, chav-hysteria and narrowing of access.

2. Rebel Music #5: Manic Street Preachers
For New Left Project, a cleaned-up and condensed version of my customary closing-time rant on the politics of the Manic Street Preachers. I know I fail to mention, eg, Soviet chic, or Castro, or self-harm and anorexia, or the band’s appeal to teenage girls, or anything after This is my Truth Tell me Yours. It’s not that they’re irrelevant, they’re just relevant to a different article. Or possibly a whole book.


Cover Girls and Typical Girls

There were several predictable bones to pick with this piece in which former editors of the New Musical Express select their most noteworthy covers. The feature leaves out a lot of the former Accordion Weekly’s history, notably anything prior to the late 1970s, but what struck me most about the covers chosen was the disparity between the first one and the last. Pennie Smith’s 1979 cover shot of the Slits, then a relatively obscure and resolutely uncommercial dub-punk girl-gang, mudlarking in the grounds of their Surrey recording studio, was part of a set which became a defining image of the band, notably through being used on the cover of their debut album Cut. This article looks briefly at the controversy generated by the images themselves, and how it relates to subsequent and current presentation of women in the UK music press. Read the rest of this entry »


Seen a lot of bullshit, I wonder what’s next.

I mean, I don’t hate ‘Ill Manors’. I did at first, almost instinctively, but I like it more the more I hear it. I also find it easier to take in without the video. (Also that sample of ‘Alles Neu’ gives me flashbacks to 2008 when an ex of mine would repeatedly play it; fair enough you can never escape your past, but I don’t think anyone expects theirs to pursue them in the form of Peter Fox.) Still, the alacrity with which it’s been leapt on as the protest song we’ve all been waiting for has slightly surprised me, even though it’s more vital and switched-on than, from a year ago:

and – maybe – more accessible than, lest we forget its glory, and the possibility of ‘TOSSAH’ being the present Secretary of State for Health’s epitaph:

I’m not convinced ‘Ill Manors’ taps the roots of the present malaise with any greater degree of elegance and articulacy than, say, Dizzee Rascal did in 2003:

Something that seemed to get overlooked in the past few years’ constant referencing of a ‘lost generation’ and of ‘graduates without a future’ was that, lower down the socio-economic scale, little had substantially changed. For many with memories that stretch beyond the credit crunch, the last recession and the last UK election, attaining comfort and security has always been a struggle, prospects have never been great, and home-owning and independently funded internships, for instance, have always been implausibilities. For many there has always been poverty, precarity, petty criminality and police animosity, even if the past few years have exacerbated their reach and increased their visibility, resulting in their sudden horrified pointing out by those who might previously have missed them due to being shielded by better prospects and broader horizons.

Although ‘Sittin’ Here’ is nearly a decade old, running through it is a very relevant current of chill and clampdown. But ‘Sittin’ Here’ is not a ‘protest song’. It’s a laconic, fatalistic and very mature anatomy of socio-economic melancholy. Simmering but unspoken discontent, alienation, anomie and lacking signs of positive change have for a long time been a way of life to which many have of necessity had to reconcile themselves, not a sign of the final crisis or a spur to mounting the barricades.

I guess timing is everything, though. There’s an inescapable sense (as in, one is constantly given the impression) of right now being either turning-point or snapping-point. The recently added ingredient of a recklessly ideological government seems to have clarified and amplified things that have been the case for a while, made them more immediate and obvious. ‘Ill Manors’ does validly externalize rather than brood over its anger and confusion, and doesn’t assume some golden age of mortgages for all and paid internships cruelly wrested from this generation by everyone over the age of twenty-four. ‘We’ve had it with you politicians you bloody rich kids never listen / There’s no such thing as broken Britain we’re just bloody broke in Britain / What needs fixing is the system not shop windows down in Brixton / Riots on the television you can’t put us all in prison’ is a very hard line to argue with.

I do wonder if something like this, with its self-aware, borderline-camp slickness, and its even-handed disdain for party politics, might have been a contender, though. From 2007? Again, timing is everything:

(And embarrassingly enough, this is how some of us did it in the mid-90s, eh.)


Privatize everything > Occupy the tollgates.

You’re all joking about the roads being next for privatization, aren’t you. Aren’t you. Oh, you’re not.

It’s just that in another lifetime, one of toil and blood, I did my whole thesis about a little local difficulty which centred around privatized road networks: the ridiculous/amazing “Rebecca riots”.

Part of what I liked about the study of history was that it did occasionally seem – by no means always, of course – as though society in general wasn’t too disparate, atomized, hopelessly confused, thick, or arrogant to learn from its mistakes.

For example: ‘Wow, at least private roads wouldn’t be an option /these days/’, I’d often muse, back in the day, having conducted hours of research and written thousands of words about how badly it had all worked out in the face of popular insistence upon public utilities being kept for the collective good rather than left to the profiteering of incompetent private companies.

(The Rebecca riots were a lot more complex than that, obviously, hence my studying them in the first place, and my bringing in their use of masking, cross-dressing, ritually smashing stuff, inter-class cooperation, liminal states, gender essentialism, and the disparity between lived experience and political and media discourse – don’t worry, neither the Taxpayer nor Hard-Working Families were paying for me to study any of this – but the general resentment of private ownership as leading to general neglect and profiteering holds true as a contributing factor – as indeed it holds true over two hundred years on.)

I’m sick of saying we’re being taken back to the Victorian age, but this? Is the government just trolling, now?

Or, with less (or perhaps more) conspiracist fervour: RT @bengoldacre Wouldn’t it be a shame if this distant roads nonsense distracted you from the Lords’ final vote on #NHSbill.


Last night a DJ ruined my life: a Valentines Day playlist

My resolutely unromantic Valentines Day playlist this year consists of:

- Robots in Disguise, ‘Chains’
- Einstürzende Neubauten, ‘Jet’M’
- The Bush Tetras, ‘Too Many Creeps’
- The Slits, ‘I Heard it Through the Grapevine’
- Amy Winehouse, ‘Back to Black’
- Pulp, ‘Bad Cover Version’
- Magazine, ‘Permafrost’(apocalyptic version off one of their Peel sessions)
- Super Furry Animals, ‘Juxtapozed With U’

It can be listened to here on 8tracks, if you like.


A quick request (re. images of women in post-punk).

So: I’ve written a chapter on female post-punk musicians* for a forthcoming women-in-music book. I mostly talk about the Slits, the Raincoats, Linder Sterling, Lydia Lunch (unavoidably), ESG, the Au Pairs, Delta 5, Pauline Black, Barbara Ess, Ut., Mars, the Bush Tetras, the Bloods, Malaria!, Kleenex/LiLiPUT, and latterly Erase Errata, Sonic Youth, Scissor Girls, Karen O, Nisennenmondai etc.

Now: I didn’t include any illustrations with the writing, because my grasp of decent visual art is comparable to Boris Johnson’s grasp of his handlebars after a heavy night out. But apparently it would be nice to have some.

Therefore: I’m looking for suitable images – photographs, illustrations, cartoons – for inclusion in the chapter. Anything relevant considered especially if it pertains to the bands mentioned. Full credit given, further details on request, please pass this on if you can think of anyone who’d care. Thank you.

Also: it is my birthday. I’m going to celebrate with fresh air and daylight.

* Of which there is an excellent overview here.


On Thatcher: Icons and Iron Ladies.

A spectre is haunting London. My daily commute, never a joyful affair, has recently been granted a further dimension of irritation by adverts on buses, hoving into view with tedious regularity, bearing the image of Meryl Streep dolled up as Mrs Thatcher in The Iron Lady. Thirty years on from her rise to power, and after a minor rash of small-screen depictions – Andrea Riseborough in The Long Walk to Finchley, Lindsay Duncan in Margaret – Streep will now portray her on the big screen, the prospect of which I could have happily lived without.

Having as I do firsthand experience of Thatcher’s impact, her government’s break with prevailing consensus and bloody-minded devotion to neoliberal orthodoxies, an objective and rational evaluation of the woman is probably beyond me. That said, her presumably impending death, although I do have a longstanding appointment at a pub in King’s Cross to dutifully raise a glass, is something I’ll be largely indifferent to. It won’t matter. Thatcher as a person has far less bearing on the current world than what she represents. The damage has been done, the battle lost, and much as I might appreciate a Truth and Reconciliation Commission into the 1980s, Thatcher and her co-conspirators are by now too old and whiskey-soaked to be held to any meaningful account.

Efforts to humanise Thatcher, even when they enlist Meryl Streep, seem discomfiting and deeply bizarre. What she means has transcended what she was, is and will be. The purpose of this post, therefore, apart from being an exercise in detachment for me, is to look briefly at some aspects of Thatcher’s image in political and pop culture, the effect of her gender in her role as a woman in power, and her political legacy. Quick, before the next bus goes past.

Read the rest of this entry »


Head-on with stuffed graveyards.

Darkness at the break of noon
Shadows even the silver spoon
The handmade blade, the child’s balloon
Eclipses both the sun and moon
To understand you know too soon
There is no sense in trying

Read the rest of this entry »


Subtle Subversion: how I learned to love The Raincoats (a bit)

Written for Bad Reputation.
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“So, I’m supposed to buy her some noodles and a book and sit around listening to chicks who can’t play their instruments, right?”
10 Things I Hate About You

As a twelve-year-old in a post-industrial backwater, I discovered punk a long time after the fact, but when I did I took to it like a mohawked and safety-pinned duck to water. With the snobbery and omnicognisance of youth, I quickly developed a doctrinaire approach whereby if ‘punk’ songs weren’t short, sharp, and shouty, I didn’t want to know. Man, did London Calling fuck with my head, with its rackety punk take on reggae and soul and funk and lovers‘ rock and, god forbid, jazz. When I first heard London Calling I swore never to listen to a good two-thirds of it again because it clearly wasn‘t Real Punk. Like all teenage girls, I was insufferable. Read the rest of this entry »


Musicians and authors in the digital world.

I have an essay in this month’s New Welsh Review on the impact of digitization on publishing as compared to the music industry. I wrote it without anticipating FutureBook’s overview, which does commendable spade-work explaining the situation’s background, present and future, whereas I mostly just snark from the sidelines.

In essence: big publishing houses have, like velociraptors, watched and learned from the music industry’s floundering and are now primed to do better out of e-publishing. My piece also covers the Indelicates’ ‘post-internet’ site Corporate Records, the pros and cons of self-publishing, the unpleasant prospect of e-books becoming the new disposable mass-market paperbacks while physical product becomes concentrated on luxury hardbacks, and why Hodder’s dubious flipback format is the literary equivalent of the MiniDisc.

Perhaps ironically, it’s unavailable online, but the print copy is accessible in all good stockists, or at least all Welsh ones.


Revolting Women, a History.

Written a while back to kick off Bad Reputation’s series on women in protest. Reposting it has mostly reminded me of how fast politics is moving now.

Last winter’s wave of student and youth protests held many points of interest, but one of the most amusing was the Daily Mail’s pearl-clutching front page on what it chose to call Rage of the Girl Rioters, in which it claimed that ‘rioting girls became the disturbing new face of violent protest’. While the article betrayed anxieties about social protest in general, the inclusion of visible female agency occasioned a particularly salacious shock. Read the rest of this entry »


The outside of everything: a Howard Devoto primer.

Speaking of boredom, let’s start with Tony Wilson’s gloriously earnest and nonchalantly pretentious Buzzcocks/Magazine documentary from 1978. In many ways it seems far longer ago than that, what with girls who work in Woolworths and all that quaint smoking indoors. Don’t make ‘em like this anymore, eh? Read the rest of this entry »


Rare articles that make me want to stand on a chair and throw flowers.

Bravo, Stuart Jeffries, although this piece is about a third too long.

Also, you know what I’m bored of? I’m bored of middle-class pontificators referencing Situationism. It’s a useful analytical tool for any bedroom-bound fourteen-year-old Manics fan (hi!), but give it a rest now, you’re making it about as interesting as dubstep.

God I’m restless.


The plugging will continue until morale improves.

Flood Theatre again. Kickstarting the comedy resistance so you don’t have to.

I apologise in advance for both these sketches’ lack of contempt for the weak – or ‘edge’, as Channel 4 call it.


Ginger snaps: Nicola Roberts, Cinderella’s Eyes

Written for Wears the Trousers 10.10.11.

With Cheryl Cole having reached the apex of her particular fairytale upon her elevation to international pop princess, spare a thought for her Girls Aloud colleagues still at home raking the embers. While Cinderella’s Eyes is by no means a game-changer in the pop world, it succeeds at least in making a more engaging claim to the pop crown than either Cole or Coyle. After a so-so opening with the admirably obnoxious ‘Beat Of My Drum’ and the disjointed ‘Lucky Day’, Roberts lets the veil fall. Listing a litany of woes – her own insecurities, displacement, resentment at being subject to the whims of others, an endless parade of ‘fakers’, mean girls, industry executives, backstabbing, vaulting ambition, superficiality, disingenuousness and the inability to speak openly and honestly – against a relentless, incongruously chirpy off-kilter electro pulse and drum machine pounding, studded with the odd stab at Feminism 101 (“Makeup is make-believe”), it’s like finding extracts from The Bell Jar slipped inside a copy of Heat. Read the rest of this entry »


Retromania

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Amanda Palmer live at Heaven, 02.09.11

Written for Wears the Trousers 08.09.11

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I’m loath to compare anything to a box of chocolates, but Amanda Palmer gigs do come close. The choice as to what you might get ranges from the likelihood of a soft-centred collaboration with her husband Neil Gaiman, to the slightly bitter aftertaste of something from 2010’s ill-advised Evelyn Evelyn project. Read the rest of this entry »


Patti Smith, Outside Society

Written for Wears the Trousers 09.09.11

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The past few years have consolidated Patti Smith’s position as godmother and high priestess among women musicians. Following her induction into the Rock N Roll Hall Of Fame in 2007, last year saw Just Kids, her memoir of life in ’70s New York, receive a National Book Award and a future stage adaptation, and just last week she was awarded the coveted Polar Music Prize by the King of Sweden. Where this leaves her as an artist who once proudly and profanely proclaimed her position “outside of society” is anyone’s guess, but the establishment’s recent embrace of Smith appears to have been the spur for the release of this collection, a primer or sampler of her work aimed, presumably, at those discovering it for the first time. Read the rest of this entry »


St Vincent, Strange Mercy

Written for Wears the Trousers 30.08.11
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After her virtuoso debut Marry Me and 2009’s nicely disorientating follow-up Actor, singer and guitarist Annie Clark returns with this itchily anticipated third album. Recorded in her pre-Manhattan hometown of Dallas, Texas, Strange Mercy enlists the assistance of several musicians, including Beck’s musical director Brian LeBarton on keyboards, but Clark has no problem asserting her own musical, lyrical and vocal presence here. Her original concept for the album was to “redefine the idea of the guitar hero, utilising the instrument as a pointillist artist might wield a brush,” and it’s an approach which translates into a glistening, lush and luxuriant listen, full of digital cascades and string-laden crescendos, underpinned by an unsteady percussive stomp. The overall effect evokes a more fragile mid-period Blondie, or Goldfrapp with less of the sledgehammer sleaziness. Read the rest of this entry »


Why ‘Chav’ is a Feminist Issue.

Chav, n. British slang (derogatory). “In the United Kingdom (originally the south of England): a young person of a type characterized by brash and loutish behaviour and the wearing of designer-style clothes (esp. sportswear); usually with connotations of a low social status.”
– Oxford English Dictionary

1. The C word

If ‘cunt’ is reportedly losing its power to shock or offend, don’t worry, other c-words are available. ‘Class’, for instance, appears to have become unsuitable for use in polite society these days, while ‘Chav’ has never been so commonplace in the respectable parlance of those who would never dream of using any other c-word so blithely. Owen Jones’ book Chavs, a welcome and necessary analysis of the latter phenomenon, identifies it as a culture ‘created and then mercilessly lampooned by the middle-class, rightwing media and its more combative columnists’, and examines the word’s place in current political and cultural discourse in the context of a simultaneous narrowing of socio-economic opportunity. Read the rest of this entry »


The Raincoats, Odyshape

Written for Wears the Trousers 26.08.11
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The wave of musical experimentation which took place in the wake of punk generated many new and startling sounds, some of which endured and grew in influence while others became lost to musical history. The Raincoats, a London-spawned, ever-shifting collective based around the partnership of Gina Birch and Ana Da Silva, are now firmly in the former category. Their self-titled debut was described by Vivien Goldman as “the first woman’s rock album” to emerge, its lack of musical or vocal hierarchies or focus-pulling solo virtuosity pioneering an arresting and persuasive kind of rock without the cock. In 1981, Odyshape continued to shift the rules of the game. Read the rest of this entry »


Placeholder.

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Yeah, I’m still here, although increasingly writing elsewhere. Notably I wrote for BadRep on Why ‘Chav’ is a Feminist Issue.

Have some more songs.

Lupen Crook, Junk n Jubilee
This from oh, such a while back now. Seems like a whole other London. A cut-off video, which is all I could find, but do hear the proper version, which still makes me tense with the urge to put my fist through the window of the Hawley Arms:

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Manic Street Preachers, A Design For Life
This from the band too weird to talk about when you talk about the 90s. Included half because I’ve just been back to the place I grew up (and for ‘grew up’, read ‘grew up a Manics fan’) and half because the song resonates with me right now, with reality topping dystopian visions at every turn almost faster than one can think them up:

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Oh, and I went to an Amanda Palmer gig last Friday. Not to damn with faint praise or anything, but I liked her more than I did when I wrote this.


Robots in Disguise, Happiness v Sadness

Written for Wears the Trousers 19.07.11
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Dee Plume and Sue Denim return with their fourth studio outing, another of the increasing number of albums funded by fans through the Pledge Music scheme. It’s a testament to the enthusiastic loyalty that Robots In Disguise can command that they have a following prepared to keep the faith when the mainstream industry isn’t. And, you know, why should it be? The pseudonymous duo are an intensely idiosyncratic band, still ploughing their furrow of superior electro-punk, with occasional shades of a sharper-toothed, steelier Shampoo, faux-naif femme fatale Claire Grogan, or a Fisher-Price Kills. Their music is curiously compelling more than it is kitsch or cutesy, though, and their chosen personas are insouciant, no-nonsense and utterly unafraid of independence. Read the rest of this entry »


My bombers, my dexys, my high: on Amy Winehouse.

Written for Bad Reputation 25.07.11

Amy Winehouse, for all the typically Machiavellian marketing behind her early development and signing, was an atypical star to launch, even before the drink, drugs, bisexuality, tattoos and self-harm and sprawling domestic disharmony on the streets of Camden set in. 2003 was a year of slickly manufactured, crowdpleasing pop anthems spawned by reality tv or established industry hit machines: Britney, Christina, Avril, Beyoncé, Sugababes, Rachel Stevens, Girls Aloud. In this climate, Winehouse’s debut Frank, an engagingly personal and subtly powerful blend of jazz, soul, dub and heavy drinking, stood out as an album of grit among gloss, accomplished and ambitious, recalling the eclectic and impeccably imperious style of Dinah Washington and Nina Simone. Read the rest of this entry »


Eleanor Friedberger, Last Summer

Written for Wears the Trousers 18.07.11
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Eleanor Friedberger’s restless spirit is in full effect on her first solo voyage. On this album, she’s left behind the esoteric detours through genres, viewpoints and time-shifts which characterise most of her work with her brother Matthew in The Fiery Furnaces; Last Summer takes its cue instead from the relative accessibility of the band’s last album I’m Going Away, on which Eleanor edged further into the spotlight as both a songwriter and a vocalist. Her solo album builds on this foundation to construct an engaging and enjoyable set of songs, its tone breezy and light, if laden with occasional melancholy, with Friedberger offering an open and confident delivery of her trademark spoken-sung vocals. Her voice is gaining in distinction, too, sounding agile and effortlessly melodic, at times husky, fluid and smooth as scotch over ice. Read the rest of this entry »


Girls in Trouble, Half You, Half Me

Written for Wears the Trousers 11.07.11
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You can argue that the Devil has all the best tunes, but the Bible at least occasionally does a nice line in storytelling. Melodrama and metaphors for human existence pour off the scriptural pages etched in blood and tears. For Brooklyn poet, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Alicia Jo Rabins, stories from the Hebrew scriptures contemplate the complexity of women’s lives in a way that remains relatable today. Her attempt to demonstrate this is Girls In Trouble, an ongoing art-rock project undertaken with her partner and bassist Aaron Hartman, wedding an interest in ancient scriptural stories to expertise in string-led indie and folk-rock. Read the rest of this entry »


Reading the riot act.

After Blair Peach, after Cynthia Jarrett, after Jean Charles de Menezes, after Ian Tomlinson, why is the Metropolitan Police’s instinct still to slander and misinform first, and let the consequent complexities unravel later?

Anyway. I live near Tottenham. It’s been this city’s run-down, neglected little secret for years. But for the past three nights, if it weren’t for the news coverage, I’d never have known there was any more trouble in London than there usually is of a Saturday night. My neighbourhood, where local shopkeepers turned out in force to safeguard their homes and businesses, seems to have pioneered a wave of local protective action. A similar tactic, from a similar demographic, happened down the road in Dalston.

Now, because this neighbourhood is largely Turkish, what these men got for their pains was being described as ‘mobs’ engaged in inter-community violence. Bollocks. They are small businessmen prepared to defend their livelihoods, by violence if necessary. The Daily Mail should love them. Me, I wish I wasn’t in the unlikely position of being grateful for the presence of an armed wing of the petty bourgeoisie. They’ve allowed me to sleep relatively safely while other bits of London burned with the ferocity of a circle-jerk involving J G Ballard, Charles Booth and Nietzsche.

We are all Londoners, there’s no getting around it. The rioters are Londoners, the vigilantes are Londoners. The criminals and the cleaners-up are Londoners. The London mob has a history, not noble or coherent but deep-rooted and unstoppable. We conflict, we clash, we come together, we behave like cunts or we choose not to.

As previous lines of division are blurring, lines of socio-economic difference are being increasingly sharply drawn. There are no excuses for what’s happening, but there is certainly a context. To attempt to explain that context is not to excuse what’s happening. And to ignore social, economic, and political explanations of what’s happening is simply to invite more of the same.


Thea Gilmore, John Wesley Harding

Written for Wears the Trousers 21.06.11
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Bob Dylan’s seventieth birthday a few weeks back was marked, in part, by reflections on the essentially blokey nature of his observable fanbase. While largely true, this has done nothing to lessen the appeal of his songs as cover material for women from Mae West to Sheryl Crow, not to mention Cate Blanchett’s turn as the man himself in the 2007 biopic ‘I’m Not There’. This re-recording by Thea Gilmore of Dylan’s 1967 album John Wesley Harding then, isn’t a revolutionary move, but not a foolish one either. It follows Gilmore’s performance at a Dylan tribute concert earlier this year, as well as, all the way back in 2002, her acclaimed recording of his ‘I Dreamed I Saw St Augustine’. That song appears again on this album, as do guitarist Robbie McIntosh and drummer Paul Beavis, along with Thea’s longterm collaborator, bassist and producer, Nigel Stonier. Read the rest of this entry »


Housekeeping: do or don’t adjust your set.

If you look to the right there, you’ll see that I have made my Twitter account non-public, for no more intriguing reason than that I also work full-time in a job that isn’t this blog. If you really want to follow my account, for every scintillating signifier of my slow descent from the noble ranks of the expatriate Welsh scholar-proletariat to the hopeless impoverished morass of the North London hack-secretariat, if you really want to be notified of which Dexys Midnight Runners song I currently wish was soundtracking the film I wish my life was, if you really can’t live without reading another retweet of @BretEastonEllis’ most recent sardonically dickish pronouncement, then by all means get your own account and follow mine, I can’t think why I’d deny you the pleasure.


Emmy the Great, Virtue

Written for Wears the Trousers 14.06.11

There always was more to Emma-Lee Moss than the flimsy whimsy of many of her contemporary dabblers in the rapidly evaporating pool of antifolk. This album confirms that she has greater things to offer. Virtue, written and recorded with Younghusband’s Euan Hinshelwood, released on the band’s own imprint, and financed through the Pledge Music fan-funding scheme, is a very different animal to her 2009 debut, First Love. It’s luxuriantly and smoothly produced, assured and accomplished, its ten tracks forming a cohesive whole in contrast to the debut’s collection of endearingly raw and disparate songs. Read the rest of this entry »


Sons & Daughters, Mirror Mirror

Written for Wears the Trousers, 13.06.11

Given how quiet they’ve been since 2008′s This Gift, you’d be forgiven for thinking Sons & Daughters had called it a day. Not so. The Scottish quartet are back on the road and back on record this summer with third album Mirror Mirror, a record that not only marks a change in direction for the band but also offers Optimo Music’s JD Twitch his first role as producer, making it something of a gamble. But it’s one that pays off. Read the rest of this entry »


Chasing Amy.

I’ve written here on the influence and significance of Amy Winehouse. Haters can swivel.

I’ve little else to say, apart from some disjointed reflections on the similarities and differences between her and Doherty in terms of public attitudes, how men and women are allowed to do downward spirals of self-destruction, and the horrible nature of the ~London ~scene in the first half of this decade – but that all seems somewhat crass and premature. In the meantime, and especially on that last point, have Russell Brand with the only decent tribute I’ve read yet.


Never Mind the Bollocks.

Music books written by women, list of. Go, compare, question, critique.

Why don’t more women write about music – or do they? And why don’t more women write about Dylan? It can’t just be me and Sady Doyle.

Also, with due apologies for more self-promotion – I don’t think I’ve mentioned this here yet, but I’m currently writing a chapter on female postpunk musicians for a forthcoming anthology on that shy and elusive creature, the girl band. This book will be a contender with or without my contribution though. Watch this space.


In Defence of Rihanna’s ‘Man Down’.

Written for Bad Reputation, 8.6.11
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Another week, another women-in-music controversy, and another hotly debated video from Rihanna. Having ticked domestic violence and sadomasochism off the musical list, she’s responded to recent accusations of being a major player in the oversexualisation of pop by upping the ante, making her latest offering a blend of sexual violence and violent retribution. The video for Man Down, which opens with Rihanna shooting a man who is later revealed to have assaulted her after they dance at a club, has kicked up a predictable media dustcloud. It’s all a far cry from ‘Pon de Replay’. Read the rest of this entry »


FLOOD THEATRE: aprés-moi, le deluge.


 
Laughter in dark times becomes necessary, providing both critique and consolation. And the nights are certainly drawing in. I mean, look at all this. Or, on what seems by comparison a light note, this surreal attempt to humanise the employees of an organisation geared solely towards turning a profit by trading in hatred and tits.

Satire has never seemed so conspicuous by its absence. It is one thing to see corruption, incompetence and venality occasionally exposed; it is quite another to see so many practitioners of corruption, incompetence and venality incessantly expose themselves with the bafflingly brazen insouciance of compulsive flashers drunk in a town park. So the news has turned horribly, endlessly funny – far funnier than any current attempt to dissect or diagnose its disgustingness. Look at this, or this, or the point at which the dark arts of spin, the erosion of journalistic enquiry, and the vacuum at the heart of the Labour Party coalesced to form a revelatory moment of pantomime androidry – and how quaint, how nearly comforting, how spot-on then but now unremarkable those past satirical visions seem, eh?

The lunatic reality of contemporary politics is galloping ahead of satire by significant furlongs, and few seem capable of or even interested in catching up. Which is where Flood Theatre come in.

Flood takes all the above into account, and styles itself ’the new comedy for the new politics’. In soundscapes and sketches drawn with a dramatic flair for language and a fine sense of the absurd, it outlines our rats’ nest of politics, media and society with unflinching precision.

There’s a long and noble history of art that takes life in all its grim, bleak splendour and manages to wring out disbelieving laughter. There’s been Chris Morris, there is Stewart Lee, and, soon, there will be Flood.

Flood perform at the Edinburgh Fringe, August 5th-27th. Book now.


Can Adele and her Marketing Men change the face of Women in Music?

Written for Bad Reputation, 1.6.11
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Poor old millionaire superstar Adele, eh? No sooner has the dust settled on the furore over her objections to being a higher-rate taxpayer, than she gets thrown into the vanguard of another of those putative Real Women in Music revolutions. A mere three years after she started out, and after just seventeen weeks of her second album at Number One, it appears to have suddenly dawned on Richard Russell that Adele exemplifies all that’s healthy and hopeful in the otherwise dire and overheated state of contemporary pop. Read the rest of this entry »


Death of a Good Pub.

Some of my juvenilia, from when I lived south of the Thames. I wrote this in 2005 for the much-missed marvel that was Smoke, A London Peculiar, and I was inspired to dig it up by reading this post on Transpontine, the compendium of south-east London life. It’s an elegy on my favourite ex-pub in London, which I still miss. Now only the Montague Arms keeps a remnant of the dream alive.

*

Number one on absolutely no one else’s list of Good London Pubs is the sadly defunct Goldsmiths Tavern. When I lived in New Cross as a student I didn’t go near this place for months – it was open past 2am but was extremely dodgy in look and reputation, you heard various stories about plans hatched and deals done that would’ve made Guy Ritchie come on the spot. Read the rest of this entry »


The Indelicates, David Koresh Superstar

Written for Wears The Trousers.
Go go Corporate Records.
*

The word ‘provocative’ retains about as much meaning in contemporary art as the word ‘revolutionary’, but I’d still like to think that the Indelicates’ latest enterprise deserves more than a wearily raised eyebrow. Earnest, arch and irreverent by turns, their concept album on late cult leader David Koresh and the 1993 Waco siege is an achievement along the lines of Luke Haines’ Baader-Meinhof or Jerry Springer the Opera, and while I realise that only a certain demographic will regard that as a ringing endorsement, it is. Read the rest of this entry »


Madam, Gone Before Morning

Written for Wears the Trousers.
*
You might recognise Sukie Smith from various acting roles, but her background on the small screen has little bearing on the widescreen feel of her current musical project. Madam are a six-piece band fronted and produced by Smith, and this is their second release after 2008’s In Case of Emergency. Smith is an accomplished composer who provided the music to the 2007 thriller Hush Your Mouth, and much of this album has the air of a similar kind of film score. The album’s title is indicative of its overall atmosphere: it brims with clandestine deeds done under cover of darkness, cryptic confessions, and regretful departures pre-sunrise. Read the rest of this entry »


Philip Roth wins the Booker Prize: Carmen’s Complaint

A now outdated post written for Bad Reputation.

Philip Roth is a good writer, but I wouldn’t want to shake hands with him.
- Jacqueline Susann’s verdict on Portnoy’s Complaint

Last week was a busy week in the book world. Sainsburys found itself anointed Bookseller of the Year to the chagrin of actual booksellers, the beleaguered Waterstones chain was saved from the asset-stripping abyss, and the Man Booker International Prize went to the veteran novelist Philip Roth. The last of these events made the biggest splash in the mainstream press, due to the consequent resignation in protest from the judging panel of Carmen Callil, the redoubtable founder of Virago Press, who – cue shock, horror, and the frantic ordering by booksellers of Roth’s backlist – disparaged Roth as a writer and disputed his worthiness to win. Read the rest of this entry »


Lupen Crook, Waiting for the Postman

Whenever I listen to a lot of Lupen Crook songs I can’t help (affectionately) picturing Poor Tom, the displaced nobleman in the guise of a beggar capering upon the blasted heath in King Lear. I realise this is unfair to Mr Crook aesthetically and stylistically, and in any case has hardly happened at all while listening to his latest. Home-produced and recorded in the months just before spring, Waiting for the Postman is a still and contemplative record of domestic claustrophobia, comedown and loss and their ultimate transcendence.

‘The Domestic’, low and lugubrious, starts things on a bitter and hard-bitten note, but the album’s darkly groovy self-laceration – heartbreak and paranoid withdrawal on ‘Cold Alone’, fame anticipated as soul-sucking pull on ‘Tale of an Everyman’ – is leavened with rippling rainy-afternoon melancholy and gently melodic reflections on friendship, love and their loss. ‘Chasing Dragons’, heartfelt and warm, is straightforwardly gorgeous. So is ‘Where the Crow Flies’, so is ‘Arts and Crafts’, and so is the intricately self-referential ‘A Little More Blood on the Tracks’ (and the chutzpah of giving it that title, unusually, didn’t even tickle my Dylanist gag reflex). ‘Hard Times’ is some kind of madly gleaming apocalyptic eurodisco that’s worth the price of admission by itself.

Just an all-round awesome album. This record sounds like a long-held breath let out, like the aftermath of trauma, and it feels like balm applied to wounds.

*

Lupen Crook, Waiting for the Postman is available here.


Libraries Gave Us Power: notes on the Manic Street Preachers and class

So I liked Owen Hatherley’s piece on Pulp, and I knew reading the comments would spoil it all, but reader, I read them. The majority were bafflingly wet-blanket in nature, wildly and wilfully missing the article’s point, if studded with bits of valid and interesting discussion. Specifically, though, I was surprised to encounter in both the article and the responses a lack of any mention of Manic Street Preachers. Surely you can’t reach back into the 90s, grasping for lines to describe the sociopolitical here and now, without burning your fingers on the white-hot irony of ‘A Design for Life’?

‘We don’t talk about love,

We only want to get drunk

And we are not allowed to spend

As we are told that this is the end’

If Pulp were the last art-school band (and I’m by no means convinced of that), then surely the Manics were the last artistic gasp of a certain breed of late 20th-century industrial working class? Read the rest of this entry »


Holly Golightly & The Brokeoffs, No Help Coming

Written for Wears the Trousers.

*

Holly Golightly – real name, no gimmicks – has worn a variety of hats in her almost twenty years as an iconic and inspirational recording artist, taking in styles from three-chord garage to R&B. Since 2007 her chosen outfit has been Holly Golightly & The Brokeoffs, a country-infused collaboration with her longtime bandmate Lawyer Dave. Read the rest of this entry »


Stop me if you think that you’ve heard this one before.

Simon Reynolds has decently condensed his new ‘un into a Guardian article:

As the last decade unfolded, noughties pop culture became steadily more submerged in retro. Both inside music (reunion tours, revivalism, deluxe reissues, performances of classic albums in their entirety) and outside (the emergence of YouTube as a gigantic collective archive, endless movie remakes, the strange and melancholy world of retro porn), there was mounting evidence to indicate an unhealthy fixation on the bygone…

The book is not a lament for a loss of quality music – it’s not like the well-springs of talent have dried up or anything – but it registers alarm about the disappearance of a certain quality in music: the “never heard this before” sensation of ecstatic disorientation caused by music that seems to come out of nowhere and point to a bright, or at least strange, future.

I don’t wish to dollop even further layers of irony on top of this particular trifle – but we’ve been here before, too, haven’t we? This is repetition, if not revival. What Reynolds castigates as ‘retromania’ has been sporadically identified throughout the past decade, most perspicaciously by several of my mates around about the point at which the third pint starts to make its presence felt, because we’re old enough to remember when revivals seemed novel, if only because this was the first we’d heard of them. Read the rest of this entry »


Offcuts (The Indelicates, David Koresh Superstar)

My review of the new Indelicates album is now up at WTT. I couldn’t find a non-clunky way of including the fact that Jim-Bob of moderate Carter USM fame is on it, singing the part of Timothy McVeigh. So, uh, he is, and he does it well.

One thing which didn’t really merit a mention in the review is that the opening lines to ‘Ballad of the ATF’ fit perfectly with the opening lines of ‘Bad Romance’, which gives me a disconcerting mash-up of both in my head every time I hear either.

I also excised a paragraph of dubious necessity which ended: ‘You’d have to be an idiot to take offence at anything on this record. But as the aspiring Congressman said, there’s an awful lot of idiots out there and don’t they deserve some representation?’

And I took out the description of a particular vocal as ‘a crystalline vessel belying the bitter draughts it can contain’, because reading that back was making me want to put my own head down the toilet and flush the chain.

This album, though, go get it.


On liking American Psycho.

In 1874, Samuel Clemens called Ambrose Bierce’s latest effort The Vilest Book in Print, writing that ‘…for every laugh that is in his book there are five blushes, ten shudders and a vomit. The laugh is too expensive.’ I mean, it’s anyone’s guess what Samuel Clemens might have made of Bret Easton Ellis. Read the rest of this entry »


How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bo(m)b

So the next scheduled Apocalypse isn’t until October. Good; I have stuff to do before October, but little to do after it, and at the current rate of Armageddon I won’t need to pay off my student loan. More importantly, Dylan was 70 on Tuesday.

One of my favourite theories/lies/facts about Dylan is that the lyrics to ‘It’s a Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall’ consist of titles or opening lines for other songs which Dylan felt he wouldn’t have time to write before nuclear conflagration moved these matters rather lower down everyone’s list of concerns. In similar manner – and because I’m quite aware that most of my writing is what you’d get if you fed ‘The Libertines’, ‘class war’, ‘wank’, ‘appalling pun’, and ‘cultural history’ into a Random Lyrics Generator – here is a blog post consisting of titles for other blog posts which I doubt I’ll ever get around to writing. Only about two of these are serious proposals, of course, and the rest self-parodic. But the two keep changing. Read the rest of this entry »


Rapture’s Delight: the Indelicates, David Koresh Superstar

A colleague of mine regularly decries musical theatre as ‘choreographed public disorder’. Life can’t be easy for him, working as we do within earshot of several West End productions. I, on the other hand, love musical theatre and always have done. In the manner of many children of the 1980s, I saw things growing steadily worse under a Conservative government and I despaired of the drab, donkey-jacketed methods of resistance which we offered to it. And then at the age of nine I was dragged to see Les Miserables, because a clause in the contract of every parent in south-east Wales between 1987 and 1992 stated that they had, at least once in a lifetime, to descend upon London’s Theatreland en masse, attend a musical, block the traffic on Charing Cross Road like slightly less belligerent sheep while queueing to get back on their coach, and sniff disparagingly at every other aspect of the city, before travelling back to the Valleys and reverting to the curious folk belief that London doesn’t actually exist.

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Diminishing gigs and gigs of diminishing return.

There are times when I think that readers of this blog are simply bearing witness to the Orwellian tragedy of someone once boundlessly enthusiastic about live music slowly having it ground out of them by the suspicion that I’d be better off reading a book than spending yet another evening squashed, skint and bored in Camden while some overindulged former public schoolboy vomits down a microphone, but oh well, on with the motley.

I was sorting through some things last night – ticket stubs, diaries, anal-retentively compiled whathaveyou – and look, these are all the gigs I went to in 2004, back when Dirty Pretty Things was still a club night named after a Stephen Frears film rather than a by-word for frustratingly pedestrian musical spin-off projects:

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Oh bondage, no more.

Jesus, it’s been a bad week. 53 is no age.

This is my favourite X-Ray Spex song:


Oh, negative: The Kills, Blood Pressures

It’s been three years since the sparsely angular stylings of Midnight Boom, and even longer since the garagey growl of their early work, but the transatlantic partnership of Alison Mosshart and Jamie Hince has survived the former’s sojourn among The Dead Weather’s demon blues to produce what the duo describe as their most ambitious and accomplished recording to date.

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I Don’t Like Mondays: The Third Rail, ‘Run, Run, Run’

Picture, if you will, one of the more vividly and outlandishly grisly works of Hieronymus Bosch. (Hell, in these days of Web 68.0, you don’t even have to waste your energy on picturing it; here y’are.) Now imagine that some vengeful spirit has, in a fit of malevolent magic, brought such a scene to life and has set it trundling between north and central London, twenty-four hours a day, its creatures and creative torments crammed into the stifling confines of a bendy-bus. And there you have a basic idea of what it’s like commuting on the number 29.

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A lot of people won’t get no justice tonight.

Cards on the table: I am a (very) former Labour Party member, a former unaligned-far-left hack, a former student politician, and a current jaded burn-out who’s more or less lost the faith. What I’ve regained since the last election is not the faith but the fear. The welfare state – the establishment of which was a reckless act of altruism and optimism by the best government we’ve ever had – is perhaps this country’s finest achievement and seeing this government use the excuse of debt reduction to conduct a sustained assault on the welfare state’s structures and foundation is not something I can stand by and watch. The question, as ever, is how to express this opposition. I spent my late teens and early twenties variously shouting at the House of Commons, painstakingly compiling research papers and tabling motions in the cause of social reform by inches, and being sandwiched between riot shields and that supremely unhelpful element of the extraparliamentary left that in any given protest Always Pushes From The Back. As such, I had some inkling of how Saturday – a TUC-organised official march, fringed with unofficial peaceful protests and unofficial direct action – was likely to go.

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Des Ark, Don’t Rock the Boat, Sink the Fucker

Without wishing to damn with faint praise, Des Ark are very good at titles. Despite the rule about not judging a book by its cover, Don’t Rock The Boat, Sink The Fucker is a statement of militant intent which almost inevitably leads to expectations of a harder-edged musical style. Frontwoman Aimee Argote has long been steering an inconsistent course between post-punk, Appalachian folk and blistering blues-rock, and likes to keep the listener guessing. But any hopes or fears for a more aggressive direction get neatly overturned as soon as opening track ‘My Saddle Is Waitin’ (C’mon Jump On It)’ announces itself with tremulous chimes and a delicate shimmer of strings.

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I don’t want a world in which Thatcher outlives Elizabeth Taylor.

Sloe-eyed and gin-soaked goddess Elizabeth Taylor (1932-2011), then. Quite genuinely gutted about this – I thought she’d carry on forever, like Shane MacGowan, or the Highlander.

We don’t have to argue about her talent – she was a very good actress, apart from when the film she found herself in was unrescuable shite, in which case she didn’t bother trying. Onscreen, her lush, immaculate, unapologetically high-maintenance, Old Hollywood glam made me want to use words like ‘luminous’ and ‘incandescent’. Offscreen, she did enough to advocate gay rights to get the Westboro Baptist Church consider picketing her funeral. And she combined being an impeccably classy dame with having the spark to remark that her marriage to Richard Burton made her ‘Welsh by injection’.

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10 O’Clock Live: Three Men and a Little Lady?

Seen Ten O’Clock Live, then? …Yeah. Breathlessly billed as Britain’s answer to the Daily Show, a return to the satirical standard set by 1962’s groundbreaking That Was The Week That Was and the grand guignol glory days of Spitting Image, with hype like that the show was perhaps doomed to fall short of expectations.

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All Quiet on the First Great Western Front

Last week I returned to the Old Country – well, not the Old Country itself, but rather Cardiff, my land’s increasingly swish and cosmopolitan capital, with its rapaciously expanding shopping-and-eating quarter and its incongruous postmodern street sculptures making it feel a bit like a Torchwood theme park. The second most immediately notable thing about Cardiff at the minute is the preponderance of Emo kids there. I know Emo hit the subculturally-attuned youth of south Wales hard, but that was some years previously, and I was aghast to discover that the wretched thing still holds much of the city in its terrible, slappable, Lego-fringed grip. Will we never be set free?

This weekend I’m going to Southampton to be a superstar DJ. By which I mean, to hand over some mix CDs and hope for the best. I hope you all have good weekends; here are some curios to take you into it. Read the rest of this entry »


Analysis of international politics is being done better elsewhere, so here’s…

1. Pepe Escobar on Libya and environs.

2. A Steve Bell cartoon on the grotesque chaos of a British Brime Minister scuttling round the region pimping arms to despots. Business as usual, I know, on both Bell’s part and Cameron’s, but these things need to be called on sight.

And 3., to cheer us up, Rachid Taha’s obvious-now-you’ve-said-it reworking of perhaps The Clash’s finest hour. Lacking St Strummer’s patented brand of lyrical whatthefuckery – I mean what’s an electric camel drum* when it’s at home? – but retaining all the fabulist brilliance of the original.

* Is it this? Can they be electric? Do camels dream of electric drums? Etc.


Women, Men, and Music: the XY Factor

Let me begin with some residual New Year bonhomie by saying that the New Yorker‘s Alex Ross is not the problem here. It’s just that you sometimes need to take an inventory of the symptoms before starting on the cause. Last month I attended a talk by Ross on the release of his latest book. The talk and the discussion which followed were interesting enough, but throughout the evening I couldn’t help noticing that, although there were several women in attendance, every single raised voice in the room was male.

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Father, Ruler, King, Computer: alternative Valentines playlist redux

In recent days, the search terms leading the unwary googler to this place have heavily featured the words ‘alternative valentines playlist’. I did one of these last year, and, self-evidently, haven’t done another since. I have re-uploaded the file from last year’s post though, so if that’s what you’re after, it’s here: Happy Highly-Expensive Chocolate Day.

But what, pray, do you want with googling ‘alternative valentines playlist’ and variations thereon? Are you going to snaffle this playlist for substance or suggestion? Make your own, Madam: your other half is totally going to appreciate your own playlist more than one you downloaded from the bitterest Howard Devoto obsessive on WordPress. And if you don’t have another half, then I’m frankly baffled to learn that you spend your time doing anything other than making playlists and then playing them. I know I don’t.


Shilpa Ray & her Happy Hookers, Teenage & Torture

In music writing as elsewhere, shortened attention spans and a craving to be spoonfed have led to the unfortunate development of lazily reductive shorthand, enabling a user-friendly pitch of a particular artist even as it simplifies and undervalues their complexity. Hence Amanda Palmer’s pigeonholing as kooky cabaret diva, Nicki Minaj as cartoonish pocket Missy, and Shilpa Ray as whiskey-soaked wildwoman, when they’re all more interesting than that. Sure, Teenage & Torture, like 2009 debut A Fishhook An Open Eye, has the requisite blues-rock base and throat-shredding vocal superstructure to justify this stylistic categorisation, but the Mad Bad Girl tag is particularly pernicious. It’s a comforting label that makes sense of the discomforting, allowing, in this case, Ray’s rage-fuelled dissections of feminine ideals, sexual mores and consumer culture to be glossed as hysterical spectacle. The more we exoticise a performer as irrational and unfamiliar, the less valid and identifiable in our everyday surroundings we render her concerns and accusations.

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Oi! to the World: Blaggers ITA, ‘The Way We Operate’

Following my attempted rehabilitation of S*M*A*S*H, here is another song snipped from the forgotten High Agitation Pop tapestry of 1990s Britain, to which I haven’t listened for a good ten years.

Oh, remember Agit-Pop? Remember when mixing punk with hip-hop and electronica in the name of antifascism seemed like a good idea? Remember Blaggers ITA? Their Wiki helpfully did-you-knows that ITA is ’90s slang for “in the area”‘, which I didn’t in fact know at the time. There you are, that’s the 1990s for you: we made the word ‘here’ two words longer, then we developed an acronym for it.

I discovered Blaggers ITA via their short-lived support slot on the Manic Street Preachers’ 1993 tour. This was curtailed amid controversy over their singer having allegedly lamped a journalist over an alleged accusation of his past, intensely regretted, involvement with the far right. (I’m always less shocked than perhaps I should be by the number of people who switch political extremes, starting off by, when young, channelling frustration and resentment through a right-wing filter before seeing it for the repugnant sham it is. A similar trajectory was taken by the young Ricky Tomlinson, whom I like less than I like the late Matty Blagg. Maybe that’s because Tomlinson went on to do The Royle Family, which gradually decayed into a pseudo-sentimental piece of confected class voyeurism, whereas by contrast the 1991 Blaggers effort Fuck Fascism, Fuck Capitalism, Society’s Fucked is perhaps the best lairily succinct summation of a certain late twentieth-century mindset we’re likely to get.)

Anyway, ‘The Way We Operate’ was a response to the racially-inflamed brutalization of Rodney King by Los Angeles police in 1991, and the riots which convulsed that city the following year after the defendants’ acquittal by an all-white jury. It mixed televised reportage and calls to arms with guitars that swirl like circling news helicopters, riffing on Public Enemy’s ‘Burn Hollywood Burn’ and segueing the admirable internationalism of ‘West Belfast, Brixton, Broadwater Farm, Soweto, East LA – it’s all the same thing’ into its inanely earnest chorus.

Don’t write ‘em like that anymore, do they? Not a great song, maybe. But with most of popular culture – comedy, tv, literature as well as music – currently punching downwards when it punches at all, I find it helps to be reminded that songs can have worthier targets. Even if these days this sort of thing could almost be described as fucking quaint.


This one time, at band camp…

Interesting article on Bandcamp:

Bandcamp drew its inspiration from intuitive blogging platforms such as WordPress. ‘[T]here, if you’re a writer, you can set up your own site that’s rock-solid for free. It struck us as crazy that if your artistic output happens to be music instead of text, that your options were bad.’

Bandcamp functions as a middleman site rather than digital DIY culture proper, but still. The expectation of profit from music is now firmly weighted towards auxiliary activities – touring, merchandise, licensing, ’360 sponsorship’ (hmm) – and the surgical excision of an artistic heart from the petrified industry establishment continues.


2010 in clicks.

I received some relatively pointless stats from WordPress this morning, but perhaps it’s worth recording the most-viewed posts here:

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

What Carlos Did Next: Carl Barat and Sadie Frost in Fool For Love February 2010
3 comments

2

Handbags and Gladrags: the glittery genius of Kenickie March 2010
10 comments

3

I Love You But You’re Wood Green: Carl Barat at the Big Green Bookshop October 2010
3 comments

4

If the Beatles had read Blake: a word on the Libertines August 2010

5

About March 2009
1 comment

In the coming year I’d like to write more on women in music, both as artists and as fans; on punk as a revolutionary cultural moment; and on the near-certain death of the record industry in the age of the one-click download. I’d also like to write, but probably won’t, a retrospective on post-Libertines London bands entitled ‘The Good, the Bad, and Thee Unstrung’.

Is there anything you’d like to see more of on this blog, or, for that matter, less of?


If You’ve Never Then You Ought: Half Man Half Biscuit

My belated Christmas present to you all, in the dead days before New Year, is the recommendation that you get into Half Man Half Biscuit, if you haven’t already. After five or so years of listening to their back catalogue I don’t have a particular song to recommend, but I recommend you discover your favourite yourself.

Many bands polarise opinion; with ‘The Biscuit’ (as absolutely no one outside the febrile hive-mind of the Guardian weekend supplement calls them) it’s more that people divide into those who think they might like them, and consequently do, and those who think they won’t like them and never give themselves the opportunity to discover how wrong they are.

Always a risky business, innit though, ‘comedy’ in music. I don’t know how I’d class HMHB – as comedy goes, they’re more Chris Morris than Carry On, although they’re as quintessentially British as both. They skewer pretension in all its forms – sometimes satirically, sometimes whimsically, sometimes with nailed-on bleak observation of the nation’s corpse picked clean. But there’s a lot more to them than sneering, and a hell of a lot more than self-conscious zaniness. They’re not, as their detractors often presume, the musical equivalent of that bloke in your office who thinks that owning a novelty tie and a mug with a ‘comedy’ slogan makes up for having a wit and charm deficit the size of the national debt – in fact, they’ve probably written a song about him. They also provide, more or less, a running commentary on the spiralling absurdities of the British music scene.

Their lyrics are studded with nods to Thomas Hardy, and their music is often wickedly parodic. They are much, much cleverer than you think. Nigel Blackwell employs the Birkenhead accent’s capacity for dry disdain building to banked fury in a manner only bettered by Paul O’Grady’s anti-Tory tirade last October. In a sane and well-ordered world, Nigel Blackwell would already have turned down the post of Poet Laureate.

Just occasionally, this band make me feel alright about the world and my place in it. Happy new year.

I’ve also half-inched my new tagline for 2011 from them – the old one was getting me an alarming number of hits from bemused Nietszsche enthusiasts.


Gaye Advert and the Great Cock ‘n’ Balls Swindle

‘Sexuality in Rock’n'roll is one more area weighed down heavily by its history and language. While none could or should deny the aspects of sexual interest and thrill inherent in live music, the performance space is problematically male-dominated.’ – Ian Penman, NME, 1979

‘I really wish that I’d been born a boy; it’s easy then ’cause you don’t have to keep trying to be one all the time.’ – Gaye Advert, 1977

Women in bands, when under the media spotlight, often find themselves swindled out of due credit by virtue of their gender. If they’re not being accused of clinging to the coattails of their backing boys to disguise their own lack of musical ability, they’re being judged on their aesthetic appeal to the exclusion of anything more relevant. It’s disappointing to observe how ubiquitously this principle applies. Even in the midst of punk, as girls picked up guitars, bass, and drumsticks, taking the stage alongside boys as more than cooing vocalists or backing dancers, they attracted that lethal combination of critical suspicion and prurient interest.

I love punk partly for the number and variety of women it involved and the freedom of expression it offered them. I loved X-Ray Spex – a Somali-British teenage feminist demagogue whose vocal screech swooped like a bird of prey over twisting vistas of saxophone. I loved the Slits and their slippery, shuddering dub-punk hymns to the tedium of sex and the joys of shoplifting. And I loved Gaye Black, bassist for The Adverts and widely regarded as punk’s first female star.
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An Open Letter to Charlie Gilmour.

Oh Charlie, you silly arse. What did you go and do that for?

How interesting the story of last Thursday could have been, eh? But with grim predictability, a story which could have focused on a movement intriguing in its complex, leaderless and hydraheaded nature was swiftly simplified into a tale of two Charlies. The first, your Royal namesake, had his little local difficulty on Regent Street quickly depicted as a drive into the heart of Dickensian darkness, the heir to the throne haplessly thrown into a perfect storm of grimy underclass anarchy. And then you, Charlie, when you swung from the Centotaph by a union flag, and then giggled and gurned your way through an apology, were equally if not more unhelpful.
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Sunday Service: ‘Twas the Riot Before Christmas

If you’re an easily suggestible sort, the last few weeks’ flurry of alarmist headlines on strikes, snow, and student riots might lead you to think of London as the convulsing epicentre of the end of the world as we know it. In fact, it’s still perfectly possible to work and play on the streets of the capital without detecting any signs of the collapse of civilisation, although that doesn’t mean they aren’t there.

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Good taste is death. Vulgarity is life.

My life at present is alarmingly full of content, so, in order for me not to dwell on that, here’s a post that’s almost entirely content-free.

*

All I want for Christmas is a brand-new leopardskin pillbox hat. I have wanted a brand-new leopardskin pillbox hat ever since I heard the song, at the age of eight or so, an early inkling of my eventual adoration of Dylan. I had at that age very little idea of what a leopardskin pillbox hat might be; all I knew was that it was undoubtedly a Fabulous Thing, and that I coveted one of my own. In all my subsequent years upon this earth, I have sought and never found one, but still I do not give up hope. I would look upon such a thing, should I obtain it, as the sum total of all the earthly richness and splendour that any soul could hope to possess.

NB please do not link me to online images of brand-new leopardskin pillbox hats; they will not be the hat I seek. I have seen and discarded these pretenders, and anyway they cost more money than I have to spend. The hat I seek is a Platonic ideal of a hat, one in all probability too Fabulous to exist within this mortal coil. It would ideally be shiny, and have some sort of black netting forming a veil over one of the wearer’s eyes. I know not if this embellishment would render it no longer, strictly speaking, a pillbox hat. Nor do I care if it does.

I will not receive a brand-new leopardskin pillbox hat this year either. But I do hope I come by such a hat, one day. I have exactly the shoes to go with it.

*

This song has proved difficult to find online, although, really, every home should have a copy of Blonde on Blonde. Here instead is Dylan being awesomely young and obnoxiously awesome, from the Martin Scorcese documentary No Direction Home.


A King of Shreds and Patches: Lupen Crook, The Pros and Cons of Eating Out

The Medway Towns, just far enough away from London for it to matter, have sheltered this country’s conscientious contrarians from Charles Dickens to Billy Childish. The Pros and Cons of Eating Out is the third album from the Kent Delta’s current wandering minstrel, Lupen Crook.

I hesitated over that ‘wandering minstrel’, you know, in case the description was fast becoming a cliché (or had, I don’t know, been copyrighted by Frank Turner). If that other frequently pigeonholed troubadour, Patrick Wolf, has reportedly considered changing his name to “please use a thesaurus or a brain to find another word for ‘flamboyant’ Patrick Wolf”, I wonder if, in time, Lupen Crook might end up requiring similar measures to get rid of the wandering minstrel tag.

Not that it’s an inappropriate or unhelpful label – much of Crook’s artistic strength does lie in a picaresque sense of threadbare and ramshackle rootlessness, a commitment to collectivism, a DIY approach to distribution and a palpable desire to entertain.

Anyway, the album. The Pros and Cons… is eclectic in content and form. Crook and co-conspirators Clayton Boothroyd and Bob and Tom Langridge draw on indie, ska, rockabilly, folk and anti-folk, sea shanties, twangs of grungy alt-country and swirls of Gypsy-punk, in songs that inhabit abandoned underpasses, pirate ships and blasted heaths, full of the crooked, the feral, the raw and the hopelessly romantic. They swing from the sharply catchy, gently despairing (and spanktastically-videoed) single ‘Dorothy Deserves’, to the delicacy of ‘World’s End’ and ‘How to Murder Birds’, to the full-tilt indie-rockism of ‘Devil’s Son’ or ‘Scissor Kick’.

As a frontman, Crook seems able to caper from darkly observant court-jester (Ray Davies sketched by Jamie Hewlett) to millenarian social critic (Scroobius Pip with less of the finger-wagging). The Pros and Cons of Eating Out maintains the same dignified distance from the mainstream and the metropolis which granted Crook’s debut a distinction from the post-Libertines litter, and which continues to set him apart from his peers.

*

Lupen Crook, The Pros and Cons of Eating Out is available here.


Those are the headlines. God, I wish they weren’t.

A rant, minor and ignorable. I get like this sometimes.

You know one of my earliest memories? My parents dressing me up in a bloody stupid costume in order to attend the street party that my town was holding in honour of the Royal Wedding of that clot the Prince of Wales to that vacuous brood-mare Lady Diana Spencer. All the children in my town were in fancy dress. Fuck knows why, it must have been a temporary madness. We’ve still got a sodding commemorative mug.

I was born in the 1980s. I grew up to get away from them. The only good thing about getting older was, I fondly deluded myself, that at least it wouldn’t be the fucking, fucking 1980s anymore.

And now what have we got? A Tory Prime Minister, unemployment through the roof, pointless wars abroad, strikes, bankers still raking it in and now a fucking, fucking, fucking Royal Wedding that we’re all expected to take a blind bit of notice of because it’ll take our minds off how SHIT everything is. And we will, of course.

And some of you are wearing bleached denim, crimped hair and the type of horrible moustaches more usually seen on sex offenders – not because it’s the perfectly laudable Movember, but because it’s in some way ~cool. Well, screw the 1980s revival in its overstyled Thatcherite ear. What the fuck are we doing as a nation?


Not Raving but Frowning.

 

Everybody asks your name, they say we’re all the same
And it’s “nice one, geezer” -
But that’s as far as the conversation went.


Last weekend was notable for a mass rave held in the heart of London’s West End, in the shadow of Trash’s last resting place. Inevitably, this ended up breathlessly reported in the Guardian as having marked ‘the return of rave culture’. Did it bollocks. Rave culture is, like the poor, always with us, and free sub-legal gatherings are scattered over the country like the unspeakable flakes shaken from a white boy’s dreadlocks.

Last Saturday has, like several other online-organised mass Doings of Cool Stuff, both social and political, set an interesting precedent for the relative power of a sufficiently large group of citizens to dodge, outstrip or overcome police opposition or obstruction through the power of social networking. But that’s as far as my positivity can stretch. I was dubious about the article’s claim that it marked the return of alternative culture – specifically, the free party – as a channel for political opposition, and perversely heartened by the similarly-minded cynicism swamping the comment section. The article has things arse-backwards: a confrontation between the law and people having a good time is a side-effect of the event, not its objective.

As shown by Emma Goldman’s frequently misquoted maxim and, I’d like to think, this blog in general, music is inherently political. Any song retains the imprint of its conditions of production, and you’d be a fool and a Ramones fan to think otherwise. But the question of whether a particular form of music and culture is inherently radical or revolutionary is much murkier. Read the rest of this entry »


You’ve got to become what you can.

I’d be failing in my daytime duty as a till-jockey if I didn’t let you all know that peerless proletarian Sunderland sensation Lauren Laverne has branched out into the book world. I don’t know what kind of book I’d expected her to write – possibly a Jackie Collins style bonkbuster set among the highs and lows of Britpop, with a severely metaphorical cover depicting a swirl of glitter round a bathtub plughole – but what she’s actually come up with is the first in a series of children’s books, Candy and the Broken Biscuits.

No, I haven’t read it. But the title made me smile for what I presume is a reference to Pulp’s ‘Mis-Shapes’, a song which cushioned every fall of my adolescence. The series’ title itself, less happily, brought back repressed memories of Bis, who only had one good song, and it wasn’t this one. I guess you can take the girl out of the 1990s but you can’t take the 1990s out of the girl.


Just a quick hello…

… to those of you who are here as a result of my cameo in this month’s Marie Claire, thanks to the fabulous Miss Ellen Burney.

I’ve been writing here for just under two years. I write on music, London, and popular culture old and new. I tell stories, I rant, and I put a socio-political spin on things when I can. Very occasionally, I try to make sense of the 1990s.

So, take a look around. I hope you find something you like here, and please let me know if you do! <3


Offcuts #3

The Walkmen: Lisbon

The Walkmen return with their sixth studio album, inspired by two trips to the Portuguese capital. The eleven songs here are confidently, intricately constructed miniatures of life, love and loss felt on a grand and sweeping scale, deftly nostalgic rather than knowingly quaint. There’s a clean and buttoned-up feel to much of Lisbon, all neat backbeat, coruscating strings, and fluidly simple arrangements reminiscent of early Sun records, while elsewhere it revs into drum-driven overdrive or dips into orchestral plunges with a flash of gleaming brass. Hamilton Leithauser’s throatily plaintive vocals dilute the surges of surf-rock, while the lyrics, reaching their summit in ‘Stranded’, conjure up images of isolation, empty streets and endless rain against a windowpane. Beside the straightforward retro-rush of ‘Angela Surf City’, ‘Blue as Your Blood’ races like a nervous pulse and ‘Victory’ sways with punchdrunk triumph before the title track brings down the curtain in epic, elegiac style.

*

Written for Fashion Music Style – issue #7 out now


I Love You But You’re Wood Green: Carl Barat at the Big Green Bookshop

As Gilbert and Sullivan never quite got around to observing: Carl Barat’s lot is not a happy one. An ‘unpopular’ Home Counties childhood and ‘disappointing’ studenthood; the Libertines’ brief and glorious flicker of fame marred by burglary, breakup and breakdowns; hauling a zombie version of the band around the world on tour while Doherty languished at home pointing the finger; surgery; a solo descent into spurious “DJ”ing, club nights and generally wandering lost among Primrose Hill scenesters old enough to know better; Dirty Pretty Things – still a band of admirable, workmanlike effort but diminishing returns and an inevitable grind to a halt – and then a self-confessed ‘year of demons’. (Only a year, dude?) Even if things currently seem to have taken a deserved upturn – new girlfriend Edie Langley, incipient fatherhood, solo album and book just out – the path that got him here’s still not the sort of beat a chap would choose.
Read the rest of this entry »


Being a female music fan online and offline

While the 1990s weren’t the greatest decade for feminist comings of age, as a small-town girl who loved her music, I didn’t do too badly. I’d grown up on the leftovers of punk, awed and enthralled by women like Poly Styrene, Patti Smith, Ari Up and Gaye Advert. Closer to home, I had Shampoo’s deadpan, dead-eyed bubblegum-punk and Kenickie’s bracing uber-proletarian blend of grit and glitter.

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Shock of the Newport: notes on Goldie Lookin’ Chain’s ‘Your Missus is a Nutter’

Marx’s Europe was haunted by a single spectre, but the furthest shores of the Welsh cultural psyche are stalked by two figures as powerful as they are petrifying: the Mam and the Missus. Such well-ploughed dichotomies as that of Madonna/whore are wholly inadequate as explanations of this particular view of feminine duality. Here I shall focus on the Missus, a figure who inspires both hypersexualised fascination and visceral dread of her destructive powers. This delicate divide between titillation and terror is nowhere more suggestively straddled than in Goldie Lookin’ Chain’s seminal release ‘Your Missus is a Nutter’. A full transcription of this sadly underexplored work is available for reference here. Read the rest of this entry »


If the Beatles had read Blake: a word on the Libertines

Prelude: a cautionary tale.
The Libertines’ decision to reunite for August’s Reading and Leeds festivals came as some surprise to me. It shouldn’t have done, because, some weeks prior to the announcement, I got unexpectedly wrecked at a Little Episodes night where I spoke at length to an equally wrecked Romanian dude, mostly on the subject of whether or not Gogol Bordello had sold out (he thought so; I know too little to have an informed opinion so just offered noncommital understanding). While that has nothing to do with what I’m about to relate, I also spoke to an acquaintance of the band, who, again in a slurred and stumbling manner, told me that the summer of 2010 would be made glorious by the Libertines reforming.

Now, being a stylishly cynical sort, I set my mouth in a disbelieving sneer and responded along these lines: “Oh, right, yeah, John’s got a lot on at the moment has he? What, with the Libertines reforming for Reading, oh right I see? Chinny reck-on, mate, I asked you when Yeti are playing the Old Blue Last next, let’s stick to the important stuff here shall we.”

Well, don’t I feel foolish now. Drunken cynicism does you no good, kids. The next time I’m told something implausible in a club, I’m going straight to the NME news desk. NB this is a lie.

Anyway: the Libertines. Reforming. Okay. I won’t be going because a) I abhor festivals; b) I cannot see Peter showing up, or being on good form if he does – NB this will be even more likely if I spend time and money on going, because of Sod’s Law; c) they will be playing to a large contingent of gawping fourteen-year-olds in manner of the Manics these days, and okay, good for the fourteen-year-olds but I sure as hell don’t want to be there, feeling my age and reminded of better times past and absent friends; d) there’s not a chance in hell that I can justify the expense; e) no, I really, really hate festivals. If you can be allergic to festivals, I am. They’re composed almost entirely of crap bands, bad weather, and other people.

Enjoy it if you go, like, obviously. I hope it’s a well-received performance, not a car-crash or an all-round disappointment, and I hope they take the opportunity to cover Squeeze’s ‘Cool for Cats’, which every time I hear it sounds like Pete and Carl’s theme song.

*

Here’s the original of an article I wrote for Britain’s bestselling peace-and-socialism daily:

If The Libertines haven’t crossed your musical radar, you may have heard of their erstwhile frontman Pete Doherty, courtesy of several tabloid headlines charting his brief reign as poster boy for sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll excess in an age of diminishing expectations. Doherty’s unedifying decline and fall – a Carry On Crackpipe stumble from Kate Moss to courtroom, pausing only to turn up nine days late for a live performance – has unfortunately ensured that The Libertines will be remembered more as a footnote to the crash-and-burn of their most volatile component than for the shaken-up musical Molotov cocktail with which the band set the London scene alight in the early 2000s.

Read the rest of this entry »


Flood Theatre, The Suicide of the Rev. Lens, 12.07.10

Masturbation is never far from the mind when surveying the current state of mainstream British comedy, besmirched as it is with the self-absorbed and self-indulgent spatterings of established onanists. Flood’s philosophy, though, is the timely and welcome exhortation: ‘Don’t just sit in and wank’.

Flood Theatre is a new enterprise representing several young actors, directors and writers drawn predominantly from the East 15 Acting School. Their first performance of The Suicide of the Rev. Lens took place in Islington’s Old Red Lion Theatre before a respectably large and appreciative crowd. Boxed-in and wilting in relentless midsummer heat as we were, the venue’s incipiently claustrophobic atmosphere aptly set the tone for a journey into Flood’s unsettling, murky and merciless world.

The production’s titular creation is a fulminating clergyman equally cursed and blessed with the ability to detect the cardinal sin of self-love. Around this central conceit, the seven cast members weave a loose narrative of episodic sketches and musical interludes. Their material blends darkly surreal digressions with incisive dissections of socio-political absurdities, hitting the usual government and media targets but also taking in an inventory of irritants ranging from the Free Hugs campaign to homeopathy to the vagaries of mental health diagnosis.

Flood deftly take inspiration from the surrealist and satirical work of Chris Morris. The show’s curiously haunting arrangements of prog-rock and indie recall the ambience of Blue Jam, and his influence is visible too in sketches touching on incest, paedophilia and abuse within the Catholic Church, in which uncertain laughter is shocked from the audience rather than cued or coaxed.

The presiding tone is one of intelligent irreverence, avoiding both gratuitous puerility and the laboured haranguing which plagues much overtly political comedy, edged with a fine sense of the absurd and grotesque. Flood is an engaging and important new arrival.

*

More information on Flood is available here.


Bloody Chamber Music: Rasputina, Sister Kinderhook

Like any fetish, a fondness for Victoriana needs delicate handling. Admiration for an era in part defined by the creation of a particular proscriptive femininity can easily imply a rose-tinted romanticising of what was an age of repression, oppression, division and hypocrisy. Thankfully, Rasputina have a sufficiently modern sensibility, and their lynchpin Melora Creager is enough of a genuine history buff for the group to take an informed and analytical approach to the epoch that inspires them rather than merely revelling in the unexamined edginess of creepy girls, corsets and consumption.

This long-awaited new studio release is a return to form after 2007’s patchy Oh Perilous World!. Now established as a ‘cello-rock’ genre in its own right, on the edge of the spidery shadows cast by Siouxsie, Marilyn Manson and, more recently, Smoke Fairies, Rasputina’s music remains defined by the swoop and scrape of sharp, spindly strings. Creager’s vocals remain effectively impressionistic, if sometimes overly wedded to the Bush/Amos/Newsom school of Breathy and Tremulous. A few songs here are touched by more traditional folk, with queasily seesawing slide guitar and an occasional Appalachian twang that recalls Creager’s work with Nirvana.

Thematically, Sister Kinderhook reflects Creager’s interest in the colonial settling and taming of a restless land, as well as attendant historical oddities like the 1844 Anti-Rent Wars explored in ‘Calico Indians’ and the discovery of giant bones in Ohio. The latter tale, ‘Holocaust Of Giants’, is shrilly piped in a vocal trill conveying childlike fervour and jubilation, the song managing to suggest a look both backwards to the Victorian dinosaur craze and forward to ironic parallels between yesterday’s doomed global giants and the belligerence and hubris of today’s. ‘The 2 Miss Leavens’ explicitly compares Victorian sentiment with modern methods of remembrance, while ‘Utopian Society’ is a tragicomic-opera in miniature and ‘The Snow-Hen of Austerlitz’ is a tale that could have escaped from Angela Carter’s clutch of twisted fairystories The Bloody Chamber.

The album is also full of varying types of captivity. Creager weaves tales of girls imprisoned by domestic or social tyranny or the imperatives of industrial capitalism – the twin support-struts of Victoriana – in attics, factories, graves or “marble dressing gowns”. In the eponymous factory of ‘Kinderhook Hoopskirt Works’, Creager reimagines its workers toiling in “privileged captivity” to produce the sartorial emblems of their age, while strings are plucked like plied needles and, in the spaces between, birdsong suggests an imitation of the twittering of caged factory girls. The elegiac closing track ‘This, My Porcelain Life’ is a cool hand laid against a fevered forehead, swelling spirals of emotional cello held in vocal check by an outwardly composed narrator aware of the implausibility of her wish for independent happiness.

Emily Dickinson, another of Creager’s recurring interests, could be the inspiration for many of Sister Kinderhook’s protagonists. This perhaps accounts for the preponderance of lines recalling her ‘Hope is the thing with feathers’: feathers abound here and – despite the dire straits ascribed to the inner lives of characters more often portrayed as porcelain figurines or painted miniatures – so does hope.


Offcuts #2

Smaller reviews written for Wears the Trousers:

Izzi Dunn, ‘Tits & Ass’ [Blunt Laser remix] (single, reviewed 11/09)

Is it unfortunate or serendipitous that ‘Izzi Dunn’ sounds like the question which follows a barely bearable mauling at the hands of an incompetent inamorato? As names to conjure with go, her latest single’s not bad either. ‘Tits & Ass’ (out now – hoHO!) is the first release from the West Londoner’s second album, Cries & Smiles, expected in March, and continues to showcase her skills as a versatile singer-songwriter, arranger, and cellist – a role in which she’s played and toured with the likes of Mark Ronson, Damon Albarn, Roots Manuva, Beverley Knight and Chaka Khan.

So, ‘Tits & Ass’, eh? Was there ever an expression so superficially glossy, giggly and glamorous, and so apt to devolve upon deconstruction into its tawdry, manipulative components, leaving it looking as flat as last week’s Page 3 and only marginally more appealing than a night with Peter Stringfellow? Arguments over sexual exploitation – particularly within the entertainment industry – have filled volumes, columns and lecture halls for the past half-century. While Dunn has no dazzlingly new take on things, her lyrics offer a succinct summation of the story so far. Her vocal soundbites scattershot from sisterly pleas for self-respect (”You know there’s more to you than tits and ass”) to Sex-Positivity for Dummies (”With her pockets full, who’s exploiting who?”).

This sloganeering slips down smoothly and soulfully between blaring brass and sharply stabbing strings, while elsewhere Dunn’s voice spikes into the insistent refrain’s slippery vocal shuffle. This curiously early-’90s musical backing is perhaps incongruously euphoric – the line “Tits and ass makes the world go round” sounds closer to ironic celebration than critique – but overall Dunn hits her targets (hypocrisy, objectification and counterproductive competition) more often than she misses. ‘Tits & Ass’ is a welcome reigniting of debate on hot-button issues, as well as a reminder that there’s little better than controversy you can dance to.

Read the rest of this entry »


Schlock Horror: Evelyn Evelyn, ‘Evelyn Evelyn’

I’m sorry to prick such a bubbly artistic conceit so early on in the game, but Evelyn Evelyn rejoice in not being real. This is the latest project from punk-cabaret diva Amanda Palmer, an album which has kicked up a predictable, and, no doubt, gratifying amount of controversy. Your enjoyment of it will ultimately hinge upon how edifying or entertaining you consider the concept of Palmer and co-conspirator Jason Webley playing ‘Evelyn Evelyn’, conjoined twin sisters, whose grim history and eventual redemption is recounted in this musical misery-memoir.

It’s hard to argue for this album on its musical merits. Evelyn Evelyn is a wearily familiar imitation of the Dresden Dolls at their most by-numbers: listlessly insistent piano and vocals that murmur and sigh broken confessions. It’s evocative enough in its drawing on imagery and music from turn-of-the-century music-halls and carnivals, creaky backwoods Americana and the shlocky horror of Todd Browning, but, aside from its retro-curiosity value, it contains little of musical substance. Maybe ‘Have You Seen My Sister Evelyn?’ or ‘You Only Want Me ‘Cause You Want My Sister’ will strike you as halfway amusing parodies of, respectively, rictus-grinned ragtime and maudlin country. Maybe you’ll find some shred of sympathy or wonder in the tripartite ‘The Tragic Events of September’, in which the sisters pick over their story so far in spoken-word that manages the remarkable feat of being harder to listen to for how cloyingly cutesy it is than for the morbid nature of what it describes. Maybe you’ll be charmed by the closing cover of ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’, even though it sounds like the Ukelele Orchestra of Great Britain without their comic panache. Or maybe, like the punters played to in ‘A Campaign of Shock and Awe’, you’re just happily, unironically here for the freakshow.

This project would perhaps have been better received had Palmer in particular not spent so much of her career singing – far more convincingly and movingly – from the inside of the socio-cultural cages in which she now gleefully imprisons her protagonists. Palmer and Webley’s decision to play both ringmaster and self-styled circus freak; their thoroughly unexamined ability to step between the powerlessness of the controlled and the privilege of the controller; and their appropriation of objectification for what amounts to a sniggering cabaret turn rather than the deadly-serious lived experience it comprises for others, leaves a bad taste in the mouth. Neither of them appears able to sing without smirking, but there’s little sense that their creations are there to be laughed with, rather than at.

The album tackles its chosen themes – disability, exploitation, sexual abuse – with an alarming mixture of the knowing and the mawkish. Its flaws are not that it goes too far in its attempts to épater le bourgeois, or that it pushes any boundaries worth pushing; it’s just self-satisfied and slightly – not even shockingly – distasteful. So in awe of its own edginess that it loses the necessary self-awareness to rein in self-indulgence, this album is as much a study of the vanishing of hipsterdom up its own fundament as it is a critique of performance, modernity or fame. For all the overblown horror and tawdry tragedy detailed in the story of Evelyn Evelyn, the spectacle you’re really rolling up for here is Amanda Palmer jumping the shark.


Mixing Pop and Politics

The upcoming election will be, in one respect, a remarkably quiet one. Modern British politics has been notable for the occasional involvement of leading musical figures, especially expressing support for the Labour Party. Throughout the 1980s, bands lined up to rock against Thatcherism: the 1987 election saw Red Wedge, a collective of musicians fronted by Billy Bragg, Paul Weller and Jimmy Somerville, tirelessly touring to promote youth engagement with politics and Labour in particular. A decade later, one of New Labour’s many strokes of superficial genius was its marshalling of musical endorsement. But in 2010, bands aren’t singing from party-political hymn sheets any more.

Read the rest of this entry »


England Swings: The Indelicates, Songs For Swinging Lovers

At a point where contemporary bands have as much edge as a beachball, the Indelicates have proved indispensable. Julia and Simon Indelicate have been in the vanguard of artistic response to new media, following the release of their 2008 debut American Demo by shaking off the coils of their label and founding the musical workers’ collective Corporate Records, on which this album is available on a pay-what-you-like basis. Their guitar and keyboard folk-punk owes something to the murky margins of the Nineties, notably Carter USM’s winning twinning of righteous sociological skewering with a lyrical patchwork of cultural references and wordplay, as well as the Auteurs’ and Pulp’s cerebral chic and puncturing of airy pretensions.

Recorded in East Berlin, Songs for Swinging Lovers is appropriately imbued with similar cabaret stylings to those of the Dresden Dolls. The pervading Weimar atmosphere draws implicit parallels between the present culture deconstructed here and a past culture gone softly dissolute and succumbing to totalitarian creep. An entire continent gets it in the neck in opener ‘Europe’, a stop-motion stagger of drunken piano, cymbals that clash like wine glasses smashed on bourgeois floors and piled-up images of queasy cultural decay. ’Be Afraid of Your Parents’ is a cautionary tale of entrenched liberal hegemonies, a nervy, tottering quickstep of Derrida-quoting dinner-partiers leading a fatuous and self-satisfied dance round the ruins of the decadent west, oblivious to the insinuation of encircling uniforms. As a metaphor it’s typically bold, and as arresting as the visual pun on the album cover.

Full of ferocity, disgust and frustration, its meat bloody and raw, Songs for Swinging Lovers seethes with the wish to be cleansed. ‘Flesh’ continues Julia’s cutting critique of contemporary feminism (“Hey girls, ain‘t you heard we‘re more concerned about the hegemony than the women?”), her voice a deceptive lilt with Simon’s sinisterly silky backing vocals beautifully conjuring up an appeased patriarchy breathing down her neck. The savagely sleazy ‘Your Money’ sticks it to the corporate world and the wide-eyed singalong ’Jerusalem’ lampoons private education’s gilded youth.

Elsewhere, the frenetic riffs, contemptuously drilled Rs and Julia’s hammered keyboards give way to reflection and yearning, making the album as much barricade as battering-ram. Contemplating flight to the border in ’Sympathy for the Devil’ or envisioning the calcified grotesques of ’Europe’ drowned by rising tides, Julia and Simon sound as if they’re bunkered against zombie-like hordes of encroaching socio-cultural horrors, both the last gang in town and the only lovers left alive. Their outsider stance is burlesqued in ’We Love You, Tania’, the insistent siren-song of Patty Hearst’s terrorist seducers, and critically examined in ’Savages’, a celebration of social rejection shot through with fatalism and self-doubt. ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ closes the album with a gently mocking lullaby for a generation whose short-sighted solipsism has elevated post-adolescent angst to an art form.

Songs For Swinging Lovers has a dark depth and complexity, not only providing the satire and savaging modern society requires, but also supplying its own self-questioning critique which acknowledges rebellion’s own pretensions and built-in obsolescence. Tomorrow doesn’t belong to the Indelicates – it never will, in a country that coined the phrase ‘too clever by half’ – but the remains of today should.

*

[Written for Wears the Trousers which is currently down for maintainance, hence this reposting of my latest. Longer and more rambling piece on the band to follow when I have the time.]


Back in the Garage: The Pack a.d., We Kill Computers

When is a blues band not a blues band? When you ask Vancouver duo The Pack A. D. We Kill Computers follows 2008’s Tintype and Funeral Mixtape, and a 2009 in which Becky Black and Maya Miller played 157 gigs, gaining themselves a reputation for explosive, beer-and-sweat-drenched live performances. The band insist that this third album will prove that their music puts the emphasis less on blues and more on garage-rock. “We are not a blues band, even though people keep putting us there,” says Miller. “We both love the blues, but we are a garage rock blues group.”

Read the rest of this entry »


The Greater Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle.

So. Farewell then, Malcolm McLaren, one of the best trolls of the twentieth century. With splendid synchronicity, last week also saw the passing of the Digital Economy Bill, railroaded through in Parliament’s pre-election wash-up in front of a pathetic forty MPs. The legislative enshrining of this particularly sweeping and short-sighted sop to failing business models shows up the UK government as shills to the interests of industry over democratic debate.

Take 1980. McLaren’s chosen wheeze that year was Bow Wow Wow, a fusion of Burundi, Latin, punk and épater la bourgeoisie which saw Adam Ant’s band backing child star Annabella Lwin. Bow Wow Wow have the distinction of releasing the first ever cassette single, a gleeful paean to empowerment through home taping:

In 1980, famously, home taping was killing music, and was definitely illegal. We kept doing it. And yet record companies somehow struggled on, charging exorbitantly for CDs and picking up and dropping bands unable to generate fast enough revenue as they did so. The reactionary blustering over home taping at the dawn of the cassette era parallels today’s filesharing debates, and today’s anti-internet arguments are more transparently disingenuous. The big-money industry model which has held sway for the past fifty years has been a blip, not a fundamental cultural cornerstone without which all popular music will collapse into dust. Artists themselves are adapting to the new opportunities offered by digital distribution and online word-of-mouth – go here for one obvious and shining example – it is an industry grown bloated on its previous parasitical lifestyle that can’t or won’t. It’s more than unfortunate that the latter is where the majority of money and string-pulling power still resides.

Discovering new music, and sharing your own, is and will remain one of the most fantastic, altruistic and mutually beneficial things that culture has to offer. The Digital Economy Act is not necessary to ‘prevent Britain’s creative industries haemorrhaging money’; it is a flailing, ham-fisted attempt to prevent Britain’s creative industries advancing to their next evolutionary stage. Death-throes are never dignified.


Offcuts #1

Small reviews written for Wears the Trousers.

Chores – the subtle politics of the Public Hammock (album, July 09)

First of all: Chores? ‘Chores’? Really? Are we suffering such a drought of linguistic invention that bands are reduced to picking names which lend themselves all too easily to lines like ‘listening to them is certainly one, ho ho!’? As for the subtle politics of the Public Hammock (sic) … well, the most I can say is that it’s less of a hostage to fortune than ‘Chores’.

I really want to like the first full-length album from this Portland foursome, though: any band, especially US-based, with the anticapitalist impulse on show in ‘New New Deal’ and ‘Noinsuranceland’ gets my vote. The latter is a possible nod to R.E.M.’s ‘Ignoreland’, but suffers badly from the comparison. It’s a shame that much of what seems likeable about Chores is often hard to make out over squalling guitars and murkily thumping percussion. The band are at their most engaging when they polish up their post-punk tendencies, as in the choppy ‘Touching Can Harm the Art’ or the Television-stalking ‘My Own Private Esperanto’, sacrificing shouty rhetoric for icy, controlled impressionism.

At their best, Chores make a creditable stab at the shadows of Talking Heads and the B-52s. At their worst – yes, I’m afraid they live up to their name. I’ll be here all week. Tip your waitress.

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Cogwheel Dogs – Greenhorn (EP, July 09)

The latest EP from Cogwheel Dogs continues the Oxford duo’s experiments in anti-folk. Vocalist Rebecca Mosley does a good line in raw-throated bitterness interspersed with sudden stabs of yearning clarity, backed by the strings of her musical partner Tom Parnell. The four songs on ‘Greenhorn’ are murkily intriguing sketches of domestic horror and emotional ferocity, evocative of childhood nightmares spilling from dark places. ‘Spit’ makes a lunge towards lilting before collapsing back into a percussive pit, chased by downward-spiralling strings. Cogwheel Dogs are adept enough at creating a counter-melodic mess, although one’s immediate thought is that this particular niche has already been filled by their fellow demons of the dreaming spires, Ivy’s Itch. Closing track ‘Octavia’ is perhaps the most accessible song here, with portentous swoops of cello backing a creepily insistent vocal that just might be about a drug-addicted doll with a thousand arms. Accessibility being a relative thing, of course.

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The Langley Sisters – ‘It’s Strange to be in Love’ (single, September 09)

It’s disappointing how little of the ’50s retro/girlgroup revival has seen its musical proponents concentrate on sound as well as style. Thankfully London’s Langley Sisters, currently touring with Paloma Faith, appear to be looking deeper than the regulation puffball skirts, polkadots and pompadours to ensure that their music sounds as authentically timewarped as they look.

Kicking off with rippling piano and gloopily giddy vocals, ‘It’s Strange to Be in Love’ initially feels as though it could have skipped straight off the credits of a Doris Day movie. Dig deeper, however, and its lyrical references to the brain as a broken mirror and frolicking in fields of withered poppies, suggest a more intriguing pastiche of their chosen genre. Evoking love as psychosis, the song begins to scratch at the unsustainable instability and emotional repression that boiled beneath the socio-cultural surface of a decade which, like the song’s protagonists, is “destined to be extinct” and nonchalantly steering a course towards a disastrous denouement. Any scene with this soundtrack would have to show a bored, beehived housewife blissfully tripping on vodka and Valium while her husband dozes at the country club and her lover parks his motorbike against a white picket fence.


Patti Smith, ‘Because the Night’ (live)

Like a certain kind of Dad tends to ruin Bob Dylan, Julie Burchill almost ruined Patti Smith for me. I only really trust Julie Burchill’s opinion on the need to outlaw asbestos, and my early-teenage reading of her enthusing over Smith made my eyes roll like a pill dropped on the floor of Soho House. A year or so later, I listened to Horses and kicked myself. Her stark and disdainful image on the record sleeve left me as amazed as the music. To realise that not only was it okay to be female, to be queer, to be ungroomed, to read, to write, to have ambition, to want to get out, to let yourself go – it could actually be brilliant.

On Saturday I went to her book-signing at the South Bank. The book itself is interesting, not least for its function as a kind of anti-confessional, a memoir shrouded not in prudishness or desperate self-mythology but content, affectionate dignity. She also played three songs, the second of which was her cover of ‘Because the Night’. She asked the crowd to join in to cover her nerves, and we did, hesitantly and subdued, nearly reverent:

There is something in her recasting of Springsteen’s song, the swooping and quavery way she delivers ‘they can’t hurt you now…’, that perfectly captures for me the certainty of protection afforded by music and its sharing, the sense of at once standing recklessly, defiantly before the world and taking refuge from it with another who understands. Making it so by proclaiming that it is so. On Saturday, collectively participating in its singing felt like something primitive, a basic ward against the elemental world outside my head. (It’s the chorus that does it. Not that the security, trust and defiant resolve embedded in its primal thump is peculiar to this song; I’d think, and frequently have thought, the same when singing drunkenly along to Bon Jovi’s ‘Livin’ on a Prayer’.)

Did you know Patti Smith used to work as a bookseller? She talked a bit about that, about having the permanent mark of the bookseller that means that, when in bookshops these days, she still occasionally gets asked for directions, and about the pre-fame certainty of failure and unappreciation. This led on to her method of getting over this by recalling that William Blake was an unappreciated and ridiculed failure for his entire life. I must admit, my optimism worn down to a stump, that whenever I hear variations on this theme I find it trite at best and depressing at worst, rather than comforting, but I managed to avoid thinking so for the duration of her saying so. It helped that her speaking voice is gorgeous: low, hypnotic, sleepy, vaguely like Dylan’s, chopping off the ends of words and pronouncing ‘cigarette’ without its middle syllable so it sounds like ‘secret’.

Face to face, she was astonishingly old, I thought: nerve-thin, tightly strung, beatific. Smile. Clasp of the hand. I skipped off down the South Bank in the spring drizzle, the book clutched to me like it could stop bullets.


Handbags and Gladrags: the glittery genius of Kenickie

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Inspiration can spring from the strangest of places. Kenickie were three girls with guitars and an unassuming boy drummer, a band preoccupied with glitter, Grease and Gary Numan. They began in the north-east lo-fi scene of the early 90s before kicking over the traces and high-tailing it to London in a blur of lipstick and leopardprint, attaining industry fame around the time I was sitting my GCSEs. Two albums and a trail of metropolitan mayhem later, Kenickie split up live onstage with the parting shot ‘We were Kenickie… a bunch of fuckwits’. In this piece, I’ll be speaking against the motion.

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What Carlos Did Next: Carl Barat and Sadie Frost in Fool For Love

The last time I saw Carl Barat, he was still playing a rock star. Dirty Pretty Things’ final gig brought down the curtain on a part he played exceptionally well. A year on from their demise, out in the wilds of west London, Neil Sheppeck’s production of Sam Shepherd’s Fool for Love sees Barat audition for a different role. He’s always been a performer, with the Libertines’ and DPT’s gang mentality a fairly transparent protection against chronic insecurity and fear of isolation. There’s a similar protection afforded by having a part to play – a costume to wear and a script to follow which relieves the worry about being judged on your own merits. Doing so for a living seems a logical if precarious next step.

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Heart Beats Up Love: an alternative Valentines Day playlist

Songs on love, sex, relationships and their discontents. Quite a few of these are songs or bands that I used to like a lot less than I do now, which maybe indicates ways in which my experience of and perspective on This Kind of Shit has altered, and maybe indicates nothing of the sort. Click to download:

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Existentialism for Dummies: Magazine, ‘Boredom’

Most of my favourite bands are in some way preposterous, with an awareness of their own absurdity as their biggest saving grace. One of the best things about Magazine is the fact that a band of such glacial heights and dour, majestic melodrama were also perfectly capable of keeping a straight face and playing for laughs. There are productions and performances too at odds with expectation and image to be taken entirely seriously, while at the same time constituting serious brilliance.

Take Magazine’s Peel Session of 1978, which includes a version of ‘Boredom’, the song written a year earlier for Howard Devoto’s only official, trailblazing recording with the Buzzcocks. The original goes like this.

Although boredom found a natural home in punk neurosis, it is a concept that belongs to an earlier generation of existentialist philosophy. The Buzzcocks’ original took the 50s-rooted sense of isolation and imprisonment in spectacle and distilled it in subversive, snapped and snappy couplets, undercutting its pale and intense intellectualism with that gleefully amateur two-note guitar solo as sharp as an ironically raised eyebrow. Magazine’s cover sees this subversion break the surface, spilling over in an obnoxious psychedelic froth of keys and manic drum fills that swirl around a dry but sugar-high vocal burlesque. Giddy and exquisitely piss-taking, the song of a bubblegum pop trio composed of Sartrettes in white gloves and ponytails smoking candied clove cigarettes, it abandons both punk’s blank-eyed minimalism and philosophy’s aching po-face to twirl its black beret around one finger, kick up its circle skirt and turn cartwheels across genre boundaries.

Like all good covers, this makes no sense until the moment you hear it and afterwards makes all the sense in the world.


Non-Stop Punk Cabaret: Ian Dury, Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll

Last week I went to the Barbican Centre to see the Ian Dury biopic Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll. Rarely has a film-showing had a more appropriate environment: the Barbican is stunningly early-70s, a symphony in brown and orange inside its concrete Brutalist exoskeleton. By the time the opening credits rolled, my hair had developed a Farrah Fawcett flick and I was fully expecting to be served a prawn cocktail by someone complaining about the three-day-week. Anyway: I enjoyed the film. It’s an accomplished pinch-of-salt portrait of Dury as child, father, husband, bandmate and musician, peacock-strutting his way from a semi-Dickensian institutionalised childhood to an adulthood spent in raucous and truculent self-actualisation. Andy Serkis is immense, as are the quietly cool portrayals of Dury’s long-suffering first wife and his largely unsung girlfriend, jobbing bassist and general muse Denise Roudette.

How punk was Ian Dury? Speaking musically: less so than his ubiquity on punk retrospectives might suggest. His closest association is with the big-band sound of an earlier generation. Into this mix his band stirred sinuous, sinewy funk, jazz and reggae in a brew that anticipates much of 2-Tone and later white-boy ska. The Blockheads’ sound has the confrontational physicality of early rock n roll, too, dextrous and muscular and thuggishly full-on. The opening verse of ‘Sweet Gene Vincent’ is a rare gem of moonlit delicacy in a barrowload of brutalising rhythms, terrace-chant choruses and that glorious, swaggering, leering, brandished clenched fist of a voice.

Dury’s other big influence is music-hall, traceable in his arch delivery, left-field rhymes and the maudlin lost-world sentiment of ‘My Old Man’, and peaking in the posturing of his Essex swell Billericay Dickie. The chancers and romancers who populate his songs are sometimes indistinguishable from his stage persona, but Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll efficiently unravels the layers of performance inherent in this: Dury’s wideboy geezerisms are adopted, transposed on a background of art-school bohemia which he memorably describes onscreen as ‘[not posh;] we’re arts-and-crafts’.

Despite his musical distance from it, there is an edge to Dury which aligns him squarely with punk and its particular anti-aesthetic. Not only did punk’s appreciation of the vulgar and iconoclastic dovetail with Dury’s own, but he also embodies empowerment through the owning and reclaiming of one’s own social marginalisation, which Lester Bangs identified thus:

… one of the things that makes the punk stance unique is how it seems to assume substance or at least style by the abdication of power.

Punk allows you, if you can’t emerge butterfly-pretty and slide smoothly away from your shell, to fight your way half-out and carry on, dragging the smashed and broken pieces with you as an integral part of yourself. An uncomfortable, uncompromising process made spectacular. Punk’s gifting of defiant and unapologetic visibility to the powerless, and to those socially excluded on economic or aesthetic grounds, swirls in the venom with which Dury injects his music. It found particular expression in his 1981 commercial swansong ‘Spasticus Autisticus’, a reclamatory refusenik anthem which achieves a dignity of its own through refusing to accept it in its patronising, socially-ordained form. The song’s conception and subsequent banning are explained in this clip:

‘Sex and Drugs and Rock n Roll’, with its exhortations to reject the ordinary and take sartorial and aesthetic pride in oneself, is a manifesto that should be nailed up in every schoolroom and recording studio in the land. Dury was one of our last great originals, a genuine outsider resistant to external definition by background or ability, quintessentially punk and unmistakeably English, whose absence highlights the threadbare, barren and character-free state of contemporary music. As a national treasure, he gives every other contender an unsteady run for their money.


Last Drags on the Decade’s Dog-end #4

Patrick Wolf, ‘The Libertine’ (2005)
Pretentions to militant outsiderdom were ten a penny in the past decade, but few walked the walk like Patrick Wolf. ‘The Libertine’ takes the millenium’s tendency towards no-more-heroes melodrama, fuses it with a sense of self-belief you could bend steel around, and forges it into an unstoppable flight of righteous prickly petulance. Bleak and Yeatsian in outlook and atmosphere, the song opens with delicately poised piano and slowly-unravelling strings that bow under the weight of a thumping backbeat. Its galloping rhythms swoop and loop through outcrops of dark electro, spurred on by lyrics that scatter at swordpoint a slew of romantic and chivalric tropes before Wolf, alone in ‘a drought of truth and invention’, pulls us along through a full-throttle tilt at the darkness of a dried-up dystopia and over the edge into a better world.

The Avalanches, ‘Frontier Psychiatrist’ (2001)
Cut-and-paste is a dubious technique, missing more often than it hits, but when it works it’s wondrous. The Avalanches’ debut album provided a seemingly-effortless masterclass in superior sampling, with ‘Frontier Psychiatrist’ as a deservedly acclaimed star turn. The dustbin of vinyl and B-movie history gets comprehensively upended in search of quality cast-offs, before these scraps are stitched together into a kaleidoscopic collage underlined with an imperious blast of brass that carries all before it like the flags of a conquering army.

Snow White, ‘Bored, Somewhat Detached’ (2004)
Perhaps the most defiantly runty of the decade’s squalling angular litter, the late and disappointingly little-lamented Snow White were always too good for relegation to a residency at Nathan Barley‘s Nailgun Arms. Their comparative strength lay in a Sonic Youth-derived lo-fi sensibility, song titles like ‘It’s Not Art, It’s Paedophile Porn’ and a preference for sneering over self-aggrandisement. Debut single ‘Bored, Somewhat Detached’ sticks out like a spike through the floorboards, the recording’s muffled and murky quality making the band sound as though they’re being held hostage in a coal shed. Full of densely scribbled white-hot guitar overwriting staticky bass and a buzzsaw vocal drone, rarely has a song done so exactly what it says on the tin with such bloody-minded and furious aplomb.

[written for Sweeping the Nation's best of the 00s.]


And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.

Get the fuck in. Last night I listened to the Top 40 with breath so bated it recalled the near-asphyxiating sixteen weeks when ‘Everything I Do (I Do it for You)’ held sugary sway. And, just for a very brief period, I listened to the 2009 UK Christmas Number One and I was happy enough to want to do the absurd nu-metal dance to it where you appear to be trying to stab your knees with your eyebrows. Oh to be thirteen again and able to snottily explain that it’s Actually about institutionalised racism in the police force and not just anti-authoritarianism, Actually.

I am astonished at this campaign’s success. I know it proves nothing more, and benefits nothing other, than the British public’s appetite for bloody-minded belligerence, but – and this is me saying this – lighten the fuck up. Rage’s victory is a lovely little concordance of popular discontent at the increasingly piss-taking nature of reality tv and the internet’s facilitation of grassroots organisation, and as such a highly positive note on which to end the decade. And it’s probably the best news I’ve had in what for me has been a horrible, dismal, unforgiving, cannot-catch-a-break year. Merry bloody Christmas.


Fuck You I Won’t Tidy My Bedroom: Rage Against the Machine versus The X-Factor

So, the planet’s on fire and our former Prime Minister appears to be an unabashed war criminal, but let’s turn our attention to what really matters, shall we? Namely, the controversy currently raging over whether this year’s UK Christmas number one will be a stage-managed triumph of mass manipulation, or whether it’ll be the winner of this year’s X-Factor again.

Over 700,000 of you so far have pledged to protest at the X-Factor’s stranglehold on the festive music scene by sending Rage Against the Machine’s debut single to number one in time for Christmas. ‘Killing in the Name Of’ is an uncompromising, monolithic beast, rearing its head from the mists of the early Nineties. In a world that also contains the Muppets’ version of Bohemian Rhapsody, it seems an odd choice of challenger. Rage Against the Machine’s chosen vehicle was rap-rock, a clumsy Heath Robinson contraption that eventually collapsed under the baggy-shorted bourgeois weight of Limp Bizkit. As a genre it was never that appealing past the age of criminal responsibility, and I wonder to what extent the pro-Rage campaign is imbued with as much affectionate nostalgia as indified indignation.

That said, I would love to see the seething boiling whirlpool of chips on the shoulder of the British public wash Rage Against the Machine to the top spot, there to earnestly quote Franz Fanon at their enemies until they give in, sobbing, and promise to buy Fair Trade. What I would point out, however, is that the same record label, Sony, is behind both acts. So it’s a purely cosmetic exercise – but okay, let it be one. The principle stands that getting Rage Against The Machine to number one is a symbolic stretching of the standing-up muscles, a semi-Situationist prank, and also that rarest of commodities: a laugh. I can’t do better than this here post at explaining why. The pro-Rage campaign mines a deep seam of appreciation for throwing a spanner in the socio-cultural works. And if it’s possible to harness this collective urge to act purely in the interests of what is known as the lolz, then I’d rather it were done for a purpose more amusing and less terminally embarrassing than, say, the election to Mayor of Boris Johnson.

‘Killing in the Name Of’ has been validly criticised as sludgily, tinnily adolescent, and yes, the massed uniform stomp in defence of self-determination that makes up its petulant chorus is indeed a contradiction in terms. Well done. Enough joyless fuckers have stressed that latter argument, in the same smug and point-missing manner as people so pleased with themselves for having spotted the ironic double-negative in ‘We don’t need no education‘ that they mention it every single time they hear the song, like Pavlov’s dog doing A-level English Lit.

Rage are, of course, much more than their most irritatingly and counterproductively lowest-common-denominator work might suggest. You wouldn’t judge Radiohead on ‘Creep’, or the Manics on ‘A Design For Life’, or poor brave Kylie on ‘I Should Be So Lucky’, would you? Oh, you would? Fair enough then, I’ll see you at the Damon Albarn Country House theme park. The Phil Daniels novelty wheelbarras of condescending moribund Mockney cliche are on me. If you wouldn’t, there’s always this or this or this or this.

A disclaimer: at a formative age, I caught Rage’s 1993 appearance at Lollapollooza, where the band’s response to censorship of music by the batshit-insane Parents’ Music Resource Center was to appear onstage naked but for some strategically placed strips of duct tape. That sight made such an impact that, for ages afterwards, I confused righteous political indignation with near-unsuppressable sexual attraction, to the equal bemusement of my previous boyfriends and the local Revolutionary Communist Party by-election canvassers. Speaking less self-parodically and more seriously, I have also spent a streak of my previous New Year’s Eves in a sticky-floored, damp-ceilinged dive deep in the bowels of Cardiff known as Metro’s, a club more grot than grotto. Metro’s would redeem itself for this one night by a) handing out free tea and toast in the early hours when not even our hardest Valleys Commando could face another triple JD in an indelibly-smeared glass, and more importantly b) at the stroke of midnight, segueing ‘Auld Lang’s Ayne’ into ‘Killing in the Name Of’. It was glorious.

So, at least half of my Rage associations are seasonal, and I have what might euphemistically be termed a soft spot for them. How do I feel about the prospect of their being the Christmas number one? I really don’t think I feel any way at all. Anyone who believes the end-of-year charts to be anything other than a cesspit of cashing in and brand consolidation, a cold-eyed tying up of old rope left dangling by the previous twelve months’ worth of cash-cows, is so touchingly naive that I’d like to have them round to dinner and watch It’s A Wonderful Life. If Rage Against the Machine are made the Christmas number one, it will prove nothing and convert nobody, and Sony will make a killing either way. The collective impetus to make one’s voice heard in this particularly pointless arena is sadly unlikely to translate into participation in, say, next year’s general election. Or at least not unless some enterprising soul decides to exhume Screaming Lord Sutch.

What it will do, however, is demonstrate that there still exists a demographic which clings limpet-like to the hull of bloody-mindedness, prepared to momentarily stir themselves in the interests of nudging the seat of mainstream popularity with a heated toasting-fork. And that, in a society of spectacles and an age of diminishing expectations, is about all we can hope for. Do your duty.


Last Drags on the Decade’s Dog-end #3

Missy Elliot, ‘Get Ur Freak On’ (2001)
The best of several crossover cuts with which a bona fide goddess in hoop earrings and an inflatable binliner punctuated the first half of the decade, ‘Get Ur Freak On’ leads with a whiplash bhangra-bashing beat that doesn’t bother catching the ear but goes straight for the hips. Missy jerks the song’s strings like a demon puppetmaster, firing off smokily spare vocal rounds. Instantly infectious and a sufficiently sparkling gem as an original, its jittery genius was also picked up and polished in a glittering array of remixes that made the post-Nineties dancefloor a brighter place to be.

The Coral, ‘Dreaming of You’ (2002)
The Coral debuted in 2002 with a melting-pot of an album, bowled along on waves of retro-rummaging and sea-shanty-imbued psychedelia. Second single ‘Dreaming of You’ is perfectly structured pop that shines like a diamond dug out of a Merseybeat time-capsule, but remains sufficiently scratched with the band’s spirit of unpolished experimentation to rise above mere emulation of their influences. It’s a deceptively jaunty two-and-a-bit minutes, smoothing over the raw melancholic isolation displayed in its lyrics with a torrent of ramshackle harmonies and a restless and infectious melodic vitality. While subsequent albums would see The Coral’s envelope-pushing lead them down increasingly complex musical paths, ‘Dreaming of You’ is a slice of straight up-and-down genius whose star has yet to fade.

The Libertines, ‘Time For Heroes’ (2003)
Not the spuriously-compiled Best Of lately issued by those intent on picking clean the bones of a band long-buried, but the five-years-younger standout single from a band lean, hungry and arrestingly articulate. Its guitar-led opening clamour was urgent enough to turn heads away from the barren wastes of contemporary indie and onto the sea of possibilities and passions that swirled in the space between stumbling drumbeats and Doherty’s smoothly confident evocation of a once and future urban utopia. Amidst flashes of modern May Day folklore, ‘Time For Heroes’ forged its own mythology of young bloods, obscene scenes and stylish rioters, its lyrics rich with in-jokes, countercultural cast-offs and quietly camp wit. How long had it been since the charts were troubled by a piece of such grammatical, political and aesthetic perfection as the line ‘There are fewer more distressing sights than that of an Englishman in a baseball cap’? The song throws open the doors to a kingdom of self-reference and self-reverence and, with a knowingly urchinish doff of the cap, ushers you into Arcadia and urges you to consider yourself at home. The Libertines flame was soon to be extinguished in a whirlwind of smack, self-destruction, supermodels and speculation on Pete and Carl’s domestic harmony, but, while it lasted, this was a band on fire.

[written for Sweeping the Nation's best of the 00s.]


Last Drags on the Decade’s Dog-end #2

Saul Williams, ‘Black Stacey’ (2004)
In a just and rational world, the stunning and eminently quotable work of Saul Williams would have seen him hailed as the Messiah by now. ‘Black Stacey’ is part confessional memoir, part consciousness-raising rallying-cry, all righteous, fluid articulacy over flowing, portentous beats. Willliams’ cool, composed and self-possessed narration, refreshing as a slug of cold water, argues down braggadocio in favour of a clear-eyed self-respect. The song’s apotheosis is its languidly swaying chorus laid down over the steady piano-led pulse of an artist who knows where he’s from, where it’s at and where we should be heading. Someone get the man a pulpit and a personality cult.

Lupen Crook, ‘Junk n Jubilee’ (2006)
Reportedly recorded in Mr Crook’s hallway, presumably during one of his rare fixed-abode phases, ‘Junk n Jubilee’ is scene-savaging par excellence, flecked with spit and sarcasm. Its tune is built around a steely scrape and skitter that sounds like the malfunctioning of a music-box, and a spray of squealing laughter that makes you tense with the urge to put your fist through the window of the Hawley Arms. Lupen’s pinched-tight vocal squeezes itself through the gaps between, with all the disgusted Cassandrine despair of the only sober passenger on a nightbus home from Dalston.

Amanda Palmer, ‘Oasis’ (2008)
It’s the fag-end of the future’s first decade and, in the land of the free, darkness is spreading under the shadow of a right-wing fundamentalist ascendancy that threatens reproductive rights and freedom of information. Who you gonna call, if not Boston’s finest punk-cabaret force of nature? On ‘Oasis’, Amanda hammers out a relentlessly breezy Beach Boys clap-along, face set in a rictus grin as her teenage protagonist recounts My Rape and Consequent Abortion: the Panto Version. This satire on received expectations of feminine behaviour sees life’s little misadventures pale into dismissible insignificance before our heroine’s life-affirming receipt of a signed photograph from Oasis. And why not? Described by Palmer as ‘pro-choice but anti-stupid’, the song’s strength lies not in trivialising real and immediate horrors, but in rendering them absurd enough to laugh at, and by extension pointing up the equal absurdity of their treatment in the social and political sphere. In a predictable if appropriately head-desking twist, the song’s subject matter meant that both the single and its Palin-baiting video were subject to an airplay ban in the UK. God knows what the Gallaghers made of it, but ‘Oasis’ remains a jaw-dropping counterpunch for times when laughter is the most powerful weapon to hand.

[written for Sweeping the Nation's best of the 00s.]


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