I try to post these cultural blogs every couple of months, but on account of circumstances intervening (life, in other words), this latest one includes three months of listening and reading experiences. This means it’s a bit of a lengthier read than normal, but at least I’ve finished all the Ian Rankin novels now, so that makes my reading experience a little more catholic of late. My musical tastes have always been so. Amazingly, there’s a dozen new musical purchases and four live experiences to recollect. Anyway…
MUSIC:
Looking back through my notes, the first event I attended during the period in question, was Jon Langford & The Bright Shiners at the Central Bar in Gateshead, touring in support of their Where It Really Starts album. Despite having spent the best part of 4 decades in the Greater Chicago area, Jon still has an accent that makes him sound like an extra from How Green was my Valley? This band, unlike The Mekons, Three Johns, Men of Gwent or half a dozen other outfits he’s been associated with, is a gentle coalition. The album is a delightful series of touching alt-Country narratives of loss and regret, especially the standout numbers Discarded and Seahouses (which, he admitted, was actually about Seaham), as well as the rousing Old Lost Dog and superb On a Scale of One to Nine. Live, in front of a decent crowd of over 50, numerically and chronologically, the album got a good airing, but there were a couple of Mekons classics in there, of course, and also a lovely take of Streets of Your Town, originally by The Go-Betweens. Afterwards, it was a pleasure, as ever, to catch up with the great man himself, who announced that The Mekons will be recording and touring next year. Brilliant news.
Sadly, the tragically early death of Steve Albini means that Shellac are no more, though their album To All Trains is a wonderful epitaph for the most influential American guitarist of the post punk era himself. Like all their other records, this one is a masterclass in delivering musical precision with an undercarriage of scuzz and tension. Weighing in at a shade over 28 minutes, it proves, yet again, that brevity can be the soul of wit. This is lean, mean cynicism, pared back to the very bone. The likes of Tattoos and Days Are Dogs retain the minimalist vision that has coursed through Shellac since their earliest releases. Cutting humour and concise storytelling or grim narratives remain essential lyrical impulses, with the introspective Wednesday a perfect example of the latter. Scabby The Rat and How I Wrote How I Wrote Elastic Man certainly refuse to adhere to an idea of album-as-epitaph, but the swinging Scrappers, with its child’s eye view of a father quitting his job would carry a certain poignancy under any circumstances. And there is, ultimately, no getting round the fact that the last song on the final Shellac record is I Don’t Fear Hell, an unwittingly perfect and unsentimental full-stop to the career of one of North America’s greatest ever bands. Steve Albini was a hell of a man. RIP.
Jon the Postman (Jonathan Ormond) died in 2015. Having adored his Puerile mini album since I first came across it in 1978 and the utterly obscure follow up, Psychedelic Rock’n’Roll 5 Skinners Steppin’ Out (of Holts Brewery), especially the manic, delirious Senegal, I was compelled to purchase the hitherto unknown to me Above God on vinyl for a fiver. What’s that sound? It’s a barrel being scraped as by 1980, his seam of creativity had long been worked out. Instead of making it up on the spot (check out the vacuum cleaner solo on Toothache from Puerile or the insane harmonica on PJ Meets TD), Above God sees a bunch of reasonably competent musicians in a studio, doing some kooky cover versions; the opener Merry Go Round is funny for the first couple of minutes, but extended to quarter of an hour, it begins to grate, as does the Wild Man Fischer tribute. Best thing about it is the straight take on the Blue Orchids’ greatest hit, Work. Seriously, this is for completists only.
While we’re on about autodidacts, Bandcamp came to my aid by posting me in the right direction for the re-released Tyres EP by the gloriously abrasive Deaf German. Garbled shouting and mobile phone noise on 4 tracks that are less than 6 minutes all in may not be your bag, but it is definitely mine. Absolutely adore this lot and wish I could see them live. I did see Lee Dickson live, with his band Deafbed, when I supported them on that infamously grim night at Blyth Headway. However, Lee is a real talent, and his stunning Birth School Work Death CD is a quasi-concept album that is, I believe, more than a shade autobiographical. I love it to bits and also enjoy the broader canvas of his solo no-fi Gerry Mandarin release Oddrophenia. It contains first takes of many of the pieces that make up the Deafbed album, but some solo stuff and covers as well. A really great bedroom recording that the Swell Maps would have been proud of.
Moving on from the shallows of the NAU and associated acts, I’ve been digging deep into folk music recently as well. Firstly, and it took longer to get hold of than an Allegro made at Longbridge in the 70s, was the Shovel Dance Collective’s delightful Offcuts and Oddities CD. Comprising live takes, rehearsals and disparate bits of discarded ephemera, it was available at The Lubber Fiend the night I saw them supported by Milkweed, but I ran out of cash. Hence the long wait for the postman (not Jon) to show up with the goods. Goodness, it is wonderful; from the Tyneside miners’ song, Jowl, Jowl and Listen, to the Copper Family’s Sussex anthem Down by the Claudy Banks, they reimagine an eclectic range of geographically diverse folk songs ancient and modern in a decidedly left-wing way. This is Chumbawamba, Crass and Here & Now picking up the baton after Fairport lost the plot. As ever, the best is the splash of Irish on here; I’ve loved The Clancys’ take on My Singing Bird for over 50 years. The one here is its equal and almost as authentic as The McPeake Family’s version on Will Ye Go Lassie, Go? which I’ve also recently purchased. As I listened to the Belfast gang’s wonderful period recording, where Óró, sé do bheatha 'bhaile always pricks my eyes with tears, an email announces a new Shovel Dance Collective album in the autumn. All I can say is the teaser release The Merry Golden Tree is simply incredible. Three cheers for finger in the ear, hey nonny nonny shite, eh?
I’m sure that’s a sentiment people who’ve come across legendary Offaly traveller and sean nos practitioner Thomas McCarthy would get in bed with. His Last Man Standing CD does tend towards love songs, concerning death, loss and trips to fur Amerikay, though it’s worth the purchase price for a lusty rendition of Tommy Makem’s The Battle of Benburb. Of a considerably more sedate style is the charming selection of traditional songs and obscure music hall ballads on Goodness and Guile by the eccentric South London duo, going by the name of Dove’s Vagaries. I saw this advertised in Folk London, took a punt and I’m very glad I did so. Charming and esoteric would be the two words I most identify with this release and, even though I know little of the English folk tradition, this does inspire me to find out more.
What about rock music huh? Well, if Shellac aren’t noisy enough for you, seek out the brilliant Peony; a guitar and drums power duo who lit up The Globe at a recent TQ gig. These boys can really rock, in an early 70s way. You could be watching The Pink Fairies or The Edgar Broughton Band. It’s loud, it’s hard, it’s surprisingly melodic and the vocals can charm the birds from the trees. I love these lads. I also love Dragged Up. No new releases since I last saw them in Sunderland in May, but they essayed a different set where Missing Person and Bible Study rule the roost, at an appreciative Cumberland Arms. This lot should be famous and if you don’t know them, do some research now!
Stephen Pastel and Gavin Thomson, returned to teenage recordings Pastel had made with his old pal Corky and came up with gold, uncovering amazing ‘lost’ original compositions like We Have Sex, which perfectly capture the affirmative joy and madman energy of two kids crazed on the possibilities of art, sex and music. These are set alongside contemporary recordings that are thick with small town romance and melancholy. Crucially, the album works as a standalone listen, telling the story of the group in episodic flashbacks that run from single-note Industrial scale drone works through caveman punk, lush, cinematic instrumentals, bare spoken word, and a final expanded reckoning of the last recording of Memorial Device vocalist Lucas Black that would end the theatre performance on a life-affirming high.
This is Memorial Device has become a huge cult since the book was first published in 2017, but this LP represents the first attempt to capture what the world of the book actually sounds like. Fans of The Pastels will pick up on the romantic/DIY approach but there is so much else here, so many aspects of the world of possibility that the book unlocks, with a narrative thrust that comes on like an emotional rollercoaster, at points hilarious, at others heartbreakingly sad. This is the lost sound of Airdrie, which is the lost sound of small working-class towns and villages all across the UK at the moment when post-punk turned the streets into avant garde performance spaces. It captures the bold spirit of tribal musical communities in these small towns, and the daring it took to believe. Because after all, as the book says, “it’s not easy being Iggy Pop in Airdrie.”
Finally, back after a dozen year hiatus when they’ve been flat out busy on a dazzling array of other projects, Dirty Three have dropped a stunning set with Love Changes Everything. Occupying a niche few other bands can reach, this presents us with rigorous periods of elevated calm, mingling with churning crescendos of distorted chaos. Warren Ellis brandishes a hard-rocking violin, played through more pedals than Frank Marino ever dreamed of, offset against Mick Turner’s eloquent guitar, with jazz-shuffle cha cha cha drummer Jim White providing space and perspective. Ellis also puts down his fiddle, to splurge waves of menacing keyboards and hovering drones. Six tracks, all titled Love Changes Everything, build and explore like a spreading cross from an unknown planet, intensifying in depth, colour, beauty and malevolence. We start off with the lo-fi textures of the opening track, while the more pensive shades of the album’s midsection emphasise a wistful beauty. It all inevitably ends on a pair of riff and drone saturated pileups, with Ellis’s violin leading the inevitable, restrained charge his bandmates beneath. A wonderful release. A work of genius. Buy this and the Shellac album to find out what 2024 means, as well as keeping a few pennies aside for the Shovel Dance Collective release in October.
BOOKS:
There hadn’t been a place on my bibliophilic wish list for Ronnie Spector’s Be My Baby, but when I came across this book in the name your own price, all proceeds to charity discarded pile of unloved books in the coffee bar at work, I thought I’d take a punt on it. After all, who can grow tired reading about Phil Spector’s personal demons and bouts of insanity? I already knew he was a psychopathic, control freak, but what really tickled me was the stuff about his pathological hatred of his male pattern baldness, to the extent that, like the editorial committee at True Faith of the late, great Enver Hoxha, he disguised this by having several, interchangeable Irish jigs of different lengths and cuts, from short and neat to shaggy, semi bouffant, to appear more natural as part of his evolving trichological cycle. He also only ever changed them in the dark in his bedroom. Obviously, he went on to do rather more heinous crimes, while Ronnie dealt with the inevitable post-fame comedown by squandering her cash, drowning in booze and gorging on blues and reds, while recording, and sometimes releasing, a few dozen cover versions of questionable provenance that sold the square root of fuck all. A sad tale we’ve all read before, written in the kind of schmaltzy, tearjerking, handwringing style so common Stateside. Well worth 20p.
A somewhat better book is Paul Hanley’s Sixteen Again: How Pete Shelley & Buzzcocks Changed Manchester Music (and me). As well as a storied career with the sticks for The Fall, The Creepers, The Extricated and now House of All, Paul Hanley has proved himself to be an erudite and entertaining writer about Manchester music, with his previous works Leave the Capital, an evaluation of the greatest Mancunian albums ever released and Have a Bleedin’ Guess, the story behind the recording of The Fall’s masterpiece, Hex Enduction Hour. This time, assuming the perspective of his 14-year-old self, falling head over heels with Another Music in a Different Kitchen and solidifying that bond with Love Bites, he takes us back to those acrid late 70s days, beautifully recreating the smells, sights and, obviously, sounds of an era I lived through, on Tyneside admittedly, though going through a similar period of addiction to the songs of Pete Shelley. Even better, Hanley effortlessly transports us to the here and now, interviewing all the major figures involved, so he obviously doesn’t need to talk to Steve Diggle, asking for their perspectives and insights on events that happened more than 4 decades ago. It is a wonderful read and one that you wish was 100 pages longer. Sadly, rather like The Buzzcocks’ initial career, it all rather peters out after the problematic genius of A Different Kind of Tension. Clearly the music book of 2024 so far.
Two music books and two cricket books as well. Hell for Leather by Robert Winder is the story of the 1996 Cricket World Cup in India and Pakistan, written as an overview rather than a retelling of England’s pathetic capitulation in the bad old days. You know, the ones Jos Buttler is trying so hard to recreate, though Matthew Mott’s departure may hamper his efforts to become truly mediocre once more. Anyway, back in 1996 on the sub-continent, corruption, bureaucracy, incompetence on and off the field, barely constructed stadia and a relentless “us and them” siege mentality, as perfected by the irascible, curmudgeonly Ray Illingworth, whose moaning Yorkshireman act outstripped both Fiery Fred and Sir Geoffrey in terms of performative irritability, pervaded the tournament. It seems that watching the games was almost an ordeal, partly explaining why it must have been even more of a grind to play in them, especially when crowds varied between 100,000 plus screaming home fans and about 400 bored corporate glad handers, depending on location and participants. Still, as we all remember, Sri Lanka won that tournament so at least it had an unpredictable, if not happy, ending. Winder writes well, allowing the exhausting narrative to tell its own arduous tale, without the need for asininity or embellishment.
I’m ashamed to say I’d never read Beyond a Boundary by CLR James until the other week. It’s a tough, rigorous and forensic read, examining all aspects of cricket, culture, radical politics and questions of moral obligation, in the West Indies, England and America, refracted through the lens of cricket obsession that had been the lifelong passion of James. It is an extraordinarily rewarding read, involving figures as disparate as the sport-hating Leon Trotsky, who had something of a crush on James, and Norman Yardley, who sadly didn’t. Despite being written over 60 years ago, it tells a tale still depressingly true of the limiting impact of the Old School tie on the English domestic game, in the south certainly, while speaking of the vibrant love of the game in the Caribbean. It’s just a bit of a shame I read it at the same time as the West Indies capitulated to a grim 3-0 test series loss to an England side, strengthened by the absence of Mott and Buttler. This is a book I’m glad to have read and those of you who have not done so already, could do worse than combine it with Different Class by Duncan Stone.
As regards fiction, I’ve read 5 novels over the past while, and the only way to deal with them, is alphabetically by author. I know he only passed away a few months ago, and it is unwise to speak ill of the recently deceased, but I absolutely hated The Dumb House by John Burnside. I found both the characters and the action repugnant in the extreme. I know he was a poet and I’m fully aware this was his first novel, but goodness it tells a bleak tale of misogynistic exploitation and psychopathic murder, all bound up in a cloak of supposed scientific experimentation. It’s a grim, humourless, pale imitation of Iain Banks’ The Wasp Factory, with added dollops of class prejudice. The unreliable and grotesque narrator seeks to answer the question of the universal language, by grooming and destroying two already damaged women, as well as killing 3 children, two of which he fathered. It isn’t gothic. It isn’t classically grotesque. It’s unpleasant and I regret ever reading it.
The list of offbeat American counter cultural heroes I’ve yet to engage with, is growing shorter as my age advances. The latest tick was Harry Crews. I should have read him sooner but having mistakenly bought the quite awful Kim Gordon and Lydia Lunch extreme noise vanity project Naked in Garden Hills by The Harry Crews, I was somewhat put off back in 1989. On deciding to finally remedy this omission from my cultural experiences, some 35 years later, I found it difficult to find any of his works in print. Thankfully, Ebay came up with a reasonably priced solution and I got hold of Scar Lover, one of his later, barely recognised, works. And I loved it. This is your actual Southern Gothic in extremis, a quasi-Bildungsroman where the protagonist grows up pretty late in life and really fucking quickly. Alongside a ludicrously implausible plot, suffused with screamingly funny vignettes and interpolations, we get to meet an array of mad, bad and dangerous characters that veer between a dying, foul-mouthed materfamilias and an English public school educated Rastafarian Princess with a cut glass accent, who are trying to make a good husband out of Pete Butcher. Discharged from the Army and dropping out of university after 3 days, wracked by guilt at a youthful indiscretion that seriously injured his youngest sibling, he finds the girl next door to his rooming house has decided to marry him, rather than falling in love with him. Things happen. Crazy things happen and those left living do so happily ever after. I must read more of this man’s work.
One of the regrets of my own writing career is the fact I have as yet failed to get a novel or a book of short fiction into print. I hope there may still be time. Someone who printed well over a decade ago was the editor of PUSH, who writes under the nom de plume of Joe England. He’s already had two novels published by East London Press and now has produced a third, more of a novella actually, that has been published by prolific and praiseworthy Spinners magazine, that I contribute regularly to. Lone Moor Road is the story of young Ryan Robson being taken by his mother, with his younger siblings, to his mother’s hometown of Derry, in the aftermath of Bloody Sunday. Now I didn’t set foot in Derry until 10 years after this, but the atmosphere, material living conditions and sense of a community at war with an invasive, occupying Imperialist enemy, and a young child’s initial bewilderment and subsequent comprehension of his relatives’ attitude bleeds through every sentence uttered by the superbly naïve yet impassioned and eloquent narrator. This is a proper book, reminding me of Shadows on our Skin, by Jennifer Johnson. Lone Moor Road shows Literature has no need to be even handed. Literature may be used to point out what is wrong, without being accused of polemicising. What the British Army enacted in the Six Counties was an almost unending series of war crimes, often with the collusion of the evil, homegrown terrorists, ostensibly out of a desire to defend their heritage, religion and crown. Even an 8-year-old child could tell this was horseshit. Lone Moor Road is a quietly impassioned work of beauty and loss, with a stunningly sad conclusion.
This years offering by Magnus Mills, The Encouragement of Others, is the same as it ever was. A gullible, naïve narrator does a normal activity, in this case sailing, only for his efforts to be deflected and ultimately hijacked by people who do little and explain less. On one side of the estuary, the unnamed narrator lives an ascetic existence, sailing his pleasure craft up and down the shore. After being told not to, he sails across the bay to another settlement, where he finds a massively busy, friendly pub, where people queue up to buy him drinks. On returning to the other side, he is not socially excluded, but has his boat confiscated and replaced with a less flashy, utilitarian version. For about 250 pages, he sails happily backwards and forwards, drinking a lot and having inexplicable conversations, before the book abruptly ends. I love his work.
On Twitter, I ended up following the writer Marc Nash (@21stCscribe). He seemed a good bloke; similar age, similar music tastes and on the left, so I bought his novel The Death of the Author (in triplicate) and I’m very glad I did. Not that I’ve had time to get my teeth into the rest of his work, but Nash appears to be an experimental novelist and regular producer of flash fiction. The Death of the Author (in triplicate) takes its title from the famous essay by French polymath and semiotician Roland Barthes (Il a été tué par un camion de blanchisserie qui faisait marche arrière…) and runs with the concept. Part 1, a police procedural (could this be un homage to Alain Robbe-Grillet?), during which the copper drops dead with a dodgy strawberry. Part 2, his widow has a heated argument over the phone with his agent, while trying to extract a few quid in delayed royalties. Part 3, the author is tidying up his study after completing the novel, deciding what needs to be thrown out. It’s all very post Modern and quite jolly too. Marc Nash is a synthesis of Flann O’Brien, BS Johnson, Peter Handke and yer man Roland Barthes. I’m looking forward to reading more of his stuff.
Where next? Well Irvine Welsh’s Resolution has just arrived and David Peace’s Munichs is in the post. If I’m expecting my next cultural blog in 2 months, then new novels by Roddy Doyle and Michel Houllebecq are due to land in September. I also want to read William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and The Enormous Room by ee cummings. Also, you never know what I might get for my 60th birthday, not that I’m hinting…
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