They’re
selling Hippy wigs in Woolworths man. (Danny; Withnail & I)
Huh you think
it’s funny, turning rebellion into money? (Joe Strummer; White Man in Hammersmith Palais)
Newcastle
has a proud and glorious tradition of independent record shops; not just second
hand ones like Pet Sounds or Tony
Fiddes’s wonderful Stay Free on Vine
Lane that I’ve mentioned here before and where I recently found a copy of the
very rare 12” Wedding Present John Peel session EP, including a blistering
version of Orange Juice’s Felicity. Incidentally,
the only gig I’ve been to this year so far was The Weddoes supporting The
Wonder Stuff at the Academy. It was
Good Friday; the Weddoes came on stage a 7.00 and were off by 8.10. How were
they? Fabulous frankly; 12 songs, 4 new, 8 old. Tight, good humoured, superbly
paced and blessed by a VERY appreciative crowd, which should ensure a sold out
Sage for their next visit in September. Highlights? You Should Always Keep in Touch With Your Friends starting like a
Fall pastiche with Mr Gedge coming on last, Click
Click, blinding, 56 sounding like
Big Black, Dalliance as ever, Corduroy as ever; simply superb.
Obviously I didn’t stay for the headline act.
Now
back to the main point, record shops. I’m talking about places to buy new
stuff; emporia like Listen Ear or Volume which, in my youth, gave off a
tangible frisson of excitement when you walked through the door, anticipating
the imminent purchase of your latest slab of obscure John Peel inspired
ephemera. These days we’ve got Reflex,
Steel Wheels, RPM and the venerable Windows
all catering for the expanding niche market that is vinyl sales.
Great
eh? Well, let’s stick with two cheers for them at the minute; you see while
they do a sterling job for 364 days of the year, there is the vexed question of
the existence of Record Store Day on the third Saturday in April; initially it
was a celebration of the highest format of music product available, though now
it is rapidly losing credibility, possibly as a result of the likes of Justin
Beiber having stuff pushed out on this date, but also the tragic spectacle of
Undertones re-releases coming out for north of £40. That’s got to be wrong
hasn’t it? Unfortunately, if you’re an independent record shop, you’ve no
choice other than to buy into the hype and blatant profiteering of RSD.
Despite
my principles, I still ended up lashing out just shy of fifty quid on a handful
of 7” singles in my store of choice, Reflex.
Now, don’t get me wrong, each of the 4 items I bought were of great merit,
though I wonder at my sanity when I spent £13 on a Best Coast single that
comprised two unreleased out-takes from their last album; Bigger Man and Late 30s
are cute slices of sugary, C86 meets the Ronettes girlypop, but I’d have been
happier to down load them in retrospect. The other 3 singles I purchased I am
delighted with; I’ll return to Who Call
the Law? by Trembling Bells later, but suffice to say grabbing the
rerelease of Pere Ubu’s seminal debut single 30 Seconds Over Tokyo, replete with claustrophobic, paranoid guilt
and a sense of primordial fear that equates to living on the set of David
Lynch’s Eraserhead, gave me a sense
of accomplishment.
Fifteen
years before David Thomas (aka Crocus Behemoth) was stirring in the suburbs of
Cleveland, Ohio, Shirley Collins was a fresh faced country lass up from Suffolk
to record for Topic Records. The rediscovery of the master tapes of English
Folk Songs 2 is a wonderful coincidence in Shirley’s 80th year on
earth and the 4 tracks, with minimal accompaniment by Robin Williamson on
guitar and latterly banjo, allow the clarity and purity of her untrained voice
to shine majestically through, especially on a glorious Dance to Your Daddy that pours scorn on Alex Glasgow’s hideously
mannered theme to When the Boat Comes In.
Of
course, records continue to be released at other points in the year; I’ve even
bought a few. Speaking, as we were, of Topic, they’ve released a fascinating
pair of 3CD sets of Irish traditional music recorded by the diaspora in London
pubs over the past 60 years; It Was Mighty
covers the 50s and 60s and It Was Great
Altogether brings us up to the present day, showcasing stunning
musicianship from fellas who also did 12 hours a day on the buildings before
drinking their fill in Camden, Kilburn and bars all over the capital. It’s
mainly instrumental, with a few attempts at lilting, but contains none of the
clichéd rebel ballads, so unsuitable for expanding my last orders in the
Tynemouth Lodge Sean Nos repertoire. Sadly.
Talking
of boring old drunks, I wish I’d not bothered with Wise Ol’ Man by The Fall. Title song apart, it’s a live rehash of
songs from last year’s Sub Lingual Tablet.
Title song included, it’s a dull load of tripe that seems to consist of a
homeless derelict mumbling unintelligibly over the top of a ponderous Killing
Joke style electronic thud and sludge fest. Utterly without artistic merit.
You
can’t say that about the awesome Spilt
Milk by former Loft and Weather Prophets frontman Pete Astor. This is a
classic album; pressed on milk white vinyl, it successfully harnesses the
legacy of Astor’s two previous bands; the charming C86 goofy pop sensibility of
The Loft and the slightly careworn Americana of The Weather Prophets. The
languid, insouciant brilliance of The
Getting There could be a spare track from the Velvets Live 69 it’s that good. Hat tips also to Really Something and Oh You;
Astor is a singer with something to say and he leads a band in no hurry to make
him say it too fast. Love this record.
Without
doubt, the finest new (I’m taking relatively) band in the world are Trembling
Bells. Last year’s Sovereign Self album
raised their profile and showed a band at the height of its powers. Could they
match the crazed, psychedelic early 70s atmosphere of that one? Oh yes indeed;
this year’s companion mini album, Wide
Majestic Aire, returns more to the folky roots of their early releases.
Indeed one of the many stunning moments is Swallows
of Carbeth, an optimistic postscript to their juvenile classic Willows of Carbeth. It is a song that
they’ve been playing live for around 3 years, while Alex Neilson’s sublime a
capella The Day Maya Deren Died has
been available as a download from their website for even longer than that. Of
course, this is not simply the equivalent of sweeping up fallen leaves for
compost; there are some glorious new songs as well, such as England Was Aghast and Marble Arch. Though the absolute
stand-out is Neilson’s autobiographical cri de Coeur that is the title track;
never have the band flown so daringly high, never has Lavinia’s voice been more
beautiful. If last year’s Where is Saint
George? is their A Sailor’s Life,
then Wide Majestic Aire is their Who Knows Where the Time Goes? A band I
love, individually and collectively; you should do the same. The Record Store
Day single, a whimsical cover of Dan Haywood’s Who Call the Law? Isn’t half bad either.
The
final purchase I’ve made of late is Wire’s Nocturnal
Koreans, a companion piece to last year’s eponymous album. Where Wire screamed, pummelled and petrified, Nocturnal Koreans caresses meditatively;
as ever the songs tell of arcane existential crisis, but smoothly played intelligent
pop sensibility than reminds one more of 154
than Chairs Missing is the keynote
approach. A delightful and beguiling slice of the alternative side of Wire,
which can still never be called optimistic.
So,
what’s next? Gig wise, there’s The Wedding Present in Leeds 28/5, Trembling
Bells at The Cumberland 29/6, The Wedding Present at The Sage 9/9, Vic godard
and the Band of Holy Joy at The Cumberland 14/10, before the big one; Teenage
Fanclub at Whitley Bay Playhouse on 16/11, which will no doubt coincide with
their new album. Remember kids, football always lets you down; music never
does.
Books:
Not
content with listening to music, I’ve continued to read a mixed bag of books,
on varying subjects and of varying levels of worth. Christian Ryan’s biography
of the lost genius of Australian cricket Kim Hughes, The Golden Boy, is by turns fascinating and maddening. While Ryan
clearly set out to write a worshipping hagiography, the refusal of Hughes to
give his account of events that fatally undermined his captaincy and scarred,
if not curtailed, his later career, is a major flaw. While we hear condemnatory
voices of the likes of Lillee, Marsh, Thompson and various Cappell’s, offset by
more measured and sympathetic noises by Inverarity, Lawson or Hogg, what would
have made this book dynamite would have been the shy, bibulous batsman’s take
on it all. Sadly, since his retirement, Hughes has kept his counsel and rarely
puts himself forward into the public eye. Considering some of the savage
attacks he’s suffered from the media, I can probably sympathise with him.
John
Tennant’s Football; The Golden Age is
a sumptuous picture book of hundreds of sepia and monochrome photos of football
players, supporters, managers and grounds in the first half of the twentieth
century. The achingly beautiful nostalgia of the images requires neither text
nor commentary, as the human imagination is enough to immerse yourself in the
world from when our fathers were infants and grandfathers thronged the
terraces. Lovely.
Richard
W Hardwick works with disadvantaged and marginalised youths in Sunderland and
Newcastle. I’m amazed, therefore, he found time to write a novel proselytising
the cause of the feral tac and cider radgies who jump the barriers from Shields
to Byker to Pelaw and back again. In all seriousness, the moral force of Kicked Out is seriously diluted by a
bafflingly large array of similar characters; there are too many for the reader
to gain any sympathy with, especially as Hardwick struggles to delineate them
properly. The novel is also too long, containing far too many needless
interpolations. Worst of all is the weak, inconsequential ending. Kicked Out is a decent idea and, with
judicious editing, could have made a decent book; unfortunately it’s a
sprawling, unsatisfactory mess.
Quite
the opposite is The Mermaid and the
Drunks by Ben Richards. Part murder mystery, part travelogue, part love
story, it a richly enjoyable love letter to Chile and her people. The
effortless prose and understated descriptions made the tale of rejected amour
and family fissures all the more alluring. An enticing and beguiling read. Now,
time to get Welsh’s Begbie-based book, The
Blade Artist…
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