And so we
come to the end of another year; another decade in fact, so I’d like to tidy up
the bits of cultural rambling I’ve not discussed before, especially as they
appear at appropriate points in the various lists that follow these words.
Perhaps I ought to have done a top 10 of the decade for albums and gigs at
least; actually, I might still do that. Anyway, here’s what I’ve been listening
to and reading since the last one of these.
MUSIC:
Only one gig
since my account of Ben and I’s trip to Glasgow to see The Raincoats in
November, and that was the colossal, brutal, unflinching experience of Shellac
at the Boiler Shop. It was the first time I’d seen them, but it did complete my
Albini hat trick, after Big Black at Leeds Poly in July 87 and Rapeman at the
original Riverside in October 88, which was the last time the man himself had
been on Tyneside. No word of a lie, it was like going back in time 30 years, in
terms of the number of friends and acquaintances who were around. We could have
been going from The Egypt Cottage to the Riverside, instead of Box Social to
Boiler Shop; I’d estimate there were at least 50 of us from those days. And, on
the night before the election, every single one of us were voting Labour, which
meant that when Albini gave an impassioned oration, urging the audience to cast
a progressive vote for Jeremy Corbyn, the roof almost came off; tragically, the
sky fell in on our world 24 hours later.
From the
opening bars of a relentless, unapologetic Canada
to the closing, coruscating anger of Dude
Incredible, this was a set of astonishing power and grace. There was to be
no End of Radio alas, but a
terrifying Compliant, the best ever
version of the dogmatic, moralistic genius of Billiard Player Song and the unexpected highlight of Wingwalker made this as special an event
as any of us could wish for. We await the next album and tour with bated
breath, patience and anticipation.
Crate
digging provided me with a couple of pearls this month; John Cale’s superb 1977
12” EP on Illegal Records, Animal Justice.
The lead track Chickenshit was
inspired by a hired hand quitting Cale’s band after the mercurial Taff bit the
head off a hen on stage at The Vortex. Marvellous, grungy before it existed,
down and dirty blues that inspired The Gun Club, John Spencer and a million
others seeps from every bar. The straight reading of Memphis Tennessee is a surprise, before the closing, contemplative Hedda Gabler that shows the former
Velvets Boyo has always been skilled at turning the word polymath into a term
of abuse by being the most cantankerous bastard outside the Rhondda.
I’m
delighted to have filled a hole in my collection by finding a copy of Wah!
Heat’s Better Scream, which to me
always had more style, gravitas and depth than the slightly too rushed Seven Minutes to Midnight. While it may
be a little too much of a tribute to Scott Walker, Pete Wylie proves again, as
he did on Somesay, Remember, Death of Wah
and several others, he was the true alchemist from The Crucial Three. It is
such a shame that his live performances now pander to most commercial moments,
though I doubt he’ll ever better this number.
At The
Raincoats’ gig, I picked up a copy of Odyshape,
to replace the cassette version I’d lost years back, as I discussed in the blog
of that weekend. However, I also looked to find a more contemporary piece of
the band’s history, in the shape of 2018’s Island
by Ana da Silva and Japanese feminist DJ Phew! Now, if you came to this in
search of ramshackle DIY Post Punk, you’d be sorely disappointed. However, if
you came with an open and curious mind, you’d be rewarded with an intriguing
and beguiling experimental set, where the two women, continents apart, bounce
ideas off each other to produce a rather special release that combines the
dancefloor with the artist’s studio, precise beats and improvised practice. The
synthesized drones and stray noises that curl around each woman’s voice when
they speak-sing to each other in the other’s native language, make their words
fly like detached missives. Their communication shudders out in fits and
starts: a corrupted distress signal. Island
seeks not to close the linguistic and cultural gap between its two participants,
but to explore that vast distance between them.
Island’s strongest, climactic track The
Fear Song begins with a whisper and a trace of voice that sounds like it’s
sampled from someone’s answering machine. A drone buoys the two voices, and
then the voices evolve to take the place of more typical instrumentation. As the drone swells, Phew and da Silva raise
the volume of their voices to rise above it. They sing few notes; it’s not the
complexity of their melodies that makes their performances compelling, but the
striving quality of their delivery, the searching, reaching urgency to their
wails. The beat picks up, and both women hasten their words to match it,
repeating the same phrase to each other. It sounds as if they were running towards
each other in pitch darkness, navigating only by the sounds of their voices and
their echoes. The album’s closer, Dark
But Bright, is characterised by joyous melodic development. It even samples
birdsong, as if the world inside Island
were finally allowing the sun to rise. In these moments, Phew and da Silva
sound like the air has cleared, and in the new light, the two musicians can
finally greet each other and embrace.
The last
time I bought a copy of The Wire, the
free Wire Tapper CD on the front
introduced me to the brilliant Woven Skull, so I was delighted to find that the
issue I bought to keep me entertained on my most recent trip to Glasgow proferred
CD number 50. To be more accurate it is a double CD featuring 40 different acts
of utter obscurity. Admittedly, as this is the kind of stuff all those lads
with the tote bags and bad beards at TUSK Festival go potty over, you’ve got to
wade through knee-high piles of landfill ambient and noise synth based twaddle.
However, there are plenty of nuggets that can be sieved from the atonal swamp.
On CD1, the first three cuts provide a strong, strong opening. The insane free jazz caterwauling of The Nest
on Das Fantastische Kraut, gives way
to the sort of jolly African pop Andy Kershaw used to popularise on Han Yan by Carl Stone, before Floating by Lealani recalls the kind of
brutal, metronomic Krautrock Miss Kittin became infamous for. Thick Skull by Michael Donnelly is
pulsating Sunn>> meets early Swans, while Headboggle’s Blue Guitar is a
lovely, Lounge Lizards style amateur be bop mess. There’s unintelligible spoken
word cut upss and formal, minimalist piano on Leo Svirsky’s impressive River without Banks and ferocious Lydia
Lunch style proto Goth barking at the moon on Scum by MoE, before a joyous harp instrumental, Tier 4 by
Panos Ghikas
and Alex Ward, brings the first disc to an end.
In
recognition of the fact The Wire has given away 50 CDs over the 20 years of its
existence, the second disc is a sort of greatest hits from previous releases.
Frankly it is a massive let down on the first part, with far too much welcome
to drone club empty sounds. However, as ever, a few joyous snippets exist; Trudal
Zenebe’s Gue is the spit and dab of a
Klezmer cover of Adam Ant’s Goody Two
Shoes, while John 3:16 produce textbook bass led post rock on Into the Abyss. Master Musicians of Hop
Frog recreate Sonic Youth circa 1985 on Song of the South and the
closing Aphasic Semiotics by Giulio Aldinucci recreates Tangerine Dream
a decade earlier. All in all, this is a top-quality
freebie, that points a way forward for some of my future musicological adventures
and ensures I’ll get a copy of The Wire every time I’m in a main line station.
Providing there’s a CD on the cover of course.
I love Irish
Folk Music. I love Scottish Folk Music. I love much English Folk Music,
especially the Copper Family and Peter Bellamy’s legacy. However, I fucking
hate almost all Northumbrian Folk Music, so I’m not quite sure why I bought the
pristine copy of Johnny Handle’s The
Collier Lad I found in Tynemouth Market. Almost certainly the main reason
was because it was on Topic, the finest exponents of Folk records in history.
They released the truly wondrous Canny Newcassel compilation of Tyneside
songs and ballads I inherited from the old fella, after all.
The main
problem I have with Handle and other proponents of Tyneside traditional song
and reworkings in such a tradition, is that once you’ve talked about the
privations of workers in mines and shipyards, there’s not a lot else to sing
about, apart from drinking Broon in
the Clerb. There’s no articulation of
struggle or commonality; nowhere else do folk ballads celebrating male domestic
violence than in the Northumbrian canon. Seriously, if you can point me in the
direction of a proper ballad of the North East that doesn’t resort to
sentimentality or the demotic, other than Tommy Armstrong’s imperious Trimdon Grange Explosion, please direct
me to it. Incidentally, Johnny Handle was a school teacher rather than a
collier, though I do give thanks to him, Alastair Anderson, Louis Killen, Tony
Corcoran and all the others who formed and nurtured the Bridge Hotel Folk Club
in the 50s.
BOOKS:
Barry Hines
was known mainly for A Kestrel for a
Knave, on which Kes was based, as
well as later TV scripts such as the bleak, post-apocalyptic Threads. However, his first published
work was The Blinder, the story of a
precocious Yorkshire teenager who had to choose between an academic career or
sporting glory as his home town club’s centre forward. Set in the coalfields of
the West Riding, where Hines grew up, this is a muck-and-nettles story that
would probably read like science fiction to a present-day 18-year-old Premier
League goalscoring prodigy whose agent is negotiating his first five-figure
weekly wage packet. The schoolboy Lennie Hawk gets a brown envelope each week
containing an illicit £10, the same as his dad takes home for a week at the
colliery.
The human
side of the story is more important than the football background but Hines does
give us a fascinating vignette of a huge tactical change then taking place in
English football. Town’s manager lays on extra training sessions for the team
to practise the new 4-2-4 formation which is consigning the last vestiges of
the old W-M line up to history. In their first practice match, they lose 5-0 to
their own reserves. When Hines wrote The
Blinder, he was still finding his literary voice, but despite the
occasional patches of tentative overwriting and a few melodramatic plot-twists,
the story rings true.
Prior to
reading Falconer, all I knew of John
Cheever was The Swimmer, as a
tortured back story of alcoholism and sexual repression. Falconer takes place in the fictional Falconer State Prison and concerns
a university professor and drug addict named Farragut who is incarcerated after
having murdered his brother. He is subjected to brutalizing treatment by the
other inmates, and there is much elaboration of both loving and sadistic
homosexual prison relationships. Deeply poignant and meaningful human strivings
also are depicted. After beating his drug addiction in the prison, Farragut
escapes by hiding himself in the shroud of a dead cellmate. Totally evading all
pursuers, he finds himself finally at an ordinary laundromat and nearby bus
stop and, in that banal setting; he experiences a new sense of compassion and
freedom. Clearly, it is a tale of resurrection and redemption. Cheever examines
these grand themes with irony, unforced eloquence, and exhilarating humour,
making Falconer a triumphant work of
the moral imagination
Without
doubt, the serial killer Levi Bellfield, whose victims included poor Millie
Dowler and Amelie De Lagrange, is one of the most evil murderers this country
has ever produced. The dramatization of his capture, starring Martin Clunes as
the copper who ran the successful operation to bring Bellfield to justice, was
one of the highlights of home-grown TV early in 2019. However, the book on
which it is based, Manhunt by former
Detective Inspector Colin Sutton, is a dreadfully dull account of the police
investigation, concentrating solely on a meticulous, chronological explication
of the stages the coppers went through. There is no human element to it, other
than Sutton revealing his character; a typical Tory-voting, golf-playing,
Motorsport-obsessed Freemason who I’d run a mile from if he turned up in the
local. In fact, Bellfield probably has a more appealing character than Sutton,
and I’d long given up caring how justice was served after Sutton’s tedious
reactionary asides had rendered me as the kind of poor sap who would confess to
every crime imaginable just to get some peace. Anway, here are those lists I
promised you -:
Gigs
of 2019:
1.
Alex
Rex – Cumberland Arms 1st September
2.
Lavinia
Blackwall & Stilton – Cumberland Arms 29th June
3.
The
Raincoats – Glasgow Mono 16th November
4.
The
Wedding Present – Academy 27th October
5.
Shellac
– Boiler Shop 11th December
6.
Alasdair
Roberts – Gosforth Assembly Rooms 16th October
7.
The
Burning Hell – Cobalt Studios 23rd June
8.
Jandek
– Sage 6th October
9.
The
BMX Bandits – Head of Steam 18th May
10. Gnoomes – Cluny 1st June
Albums
of 2019:
1.
Alex Rex – Otterburn
2.
Shellac – End of Radio
3.
The Mekons – Deserted
4.
Alasdair Roberts – The Fiery Margin
5.
The Burning Hell – Bangers & Mash
6.
Youth of America – YOA Rising
7.
Various – Wire Tapper #50
8.
Professor Yaffle – A Brand New Morning
Singles
& EPs of 2019:
1.
Alex
Rex – Night Visiting Song
2.
Lavinia Blackwall – Waiting for Tomorrow
3.
Lavinia Blackwall – Troublemakers
4.
The
Wedding Present – Jump In, The Water’s Fine
Albums
from Other Years:
1.
Woven
Skull – Woven Skull
2.
Josef
K – Sorry for Laughing
3.
Ana da Silva & Phew – Islands
4.
The Raincoats – Odyshape
5.
Mike & Solveig – Here Comes Today
6.
Kojaque – Deli Dreams
7.
Unwound – Fake Train
8.
BMX Bandits – Forever
9.
Johnny Handle – The Collier Lad
Singles
& EPs from Other Years:
1. Suicide – Dream Baby
Dream
2. Wah! Heat – Better
Scream
3. John Cale – Animal
Justice
4. Jacques Brel – Amsterdam
5. Woven Skull – Cracking
of Limbs
6. The Wedding Present – Go
Out & Get ‘Em, Boy
7. Waste Fellow – Post
Human
My Albums of
the Year; 2010-2019:
2019: Alex
Rex – Otterburn
2018:
Trembling Bells – Dungeness
2017: Alex
Rex – Vermilion
2016:
Teenage Fanclub – Here
2015:
Trembling Bells – The Sovereign Self
2014:
Shellac – Dude Incredible
2013: The
Pastels – Slow Summits
2012:
Godspeed You! Black Emperor – Allelujah! Don’t Bend, Ascend!
2011:
British Sea Power – Valhalla Dancehall
2010:
Trembling Bells – Abandoned Love
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