Music & Books in 2025...
MUSIC:
I suppose at some point I’m going to have to accept that I’m too old to go to gigs. Well, big ones at least. Not that I am suggesting I’m at that stage in life yet, but there are questions that need to be addressed about age and infirmity and the risks to personal safety caused by attendance at live events. The reason I’m thinking about this is that I went to see live music on three successive nights the other week: Orange Claw Hammer with Peony at a TQ soiree at The Globe on Thursday 20th, Rumours of Fleetwood Mac at The Exchange the night after and then Mogwai at Leeds O2 on Saturday 22nd. If I’d had the energy, I’d even have considered heading off to see Shovel Dance Collective in York on the Sunday. It probably won’t surprise regular readers to learn that Mogwai was the best night out, on account of the fact that live they are absolutely impeccable and that the new album, The Bad Fire, is a stunning piece of work, but we’ll come to that.
Those of you who know the work of Don Van Vliet, the late, great Captain Beefheart, will be aware that Orange Claw Hammer took their name from a track from his seminal work of weirded-out jazzy blues, swamp stomp Trout Mask Replica. They aren’t just a rip off covers band, though they are directly influenced by the great man and do reworkings of loads of his stuff. Their website expresses it better than I ever could; Orange Claw Hammer take the music of Captain Beefheart & the Magic Band and bend it into shape for the 21st century. Founded in 2011, the band's sax driven, mostly instrumental, reworkings of Don Van Vliet’s back catalogue highlight the blues, jazz and experimental roots of this music. A million miles from being a tribute act, Orange Claw Hammer take classics of Avant-rock from the 60s through to the 80s and use them as vehicles for improvisation and re-invention for contemporary sensibilities.
They’ve a couple of CDs available, Cooks the Beef and New Beef Dreams, that cover stuff from Clear Spot to Doc at the Radar Station, showing respect for the whole gamut of Van Vliet’s work. In their two sets, there was still time for the odd crowd pleaser, with events being brought to a close by “Big Eyed Beans from Venus” and a raucous “Willie the Pimp.” Expert musicianship and a great stage presence. I enjoyed them immensely, as I did Peony. It’s the third time I’ve seen them in 18 months and the opening new song raised the fear level as it appeared they’d gone mainstream, but it was only a temporary detour for the jumpsuit-clad grandchildren of the Pink Fairies who were as loud, louche and artistic as ever. This duo really must go further.
Another act I’ve high hopes for are Isolated Community. My old pal Richard Dunn gave me a copy of their latest CD with There Are No Birds Here, of experimental found sounds from abandoned WWII gun emplacements from the Northumberland and Norfolk coasts, we are the Wreckage of our Former Selves. It is a beguiling, almost hypnotic piece that always avoids lulling you into any sense of security, by the regular hints of menace that drift on the eerie soundscape. A tremendously affecting album and as good as anything else I’ve heard this year, apart from Mogwai of course. It is similar, though far superior to, Dead Dimension by Spacelab, from 2021, which I was given just before the turn of the year and have only recently got round to listening to. I’m not sure why, but the absence of found sounds makes it sound a mite too emotionally cold for me. I’m not a connoisseur of ambient and drone by any measure, and this is perhaps too specialised for my ears. Not unpleasant, but not exciting either. The final one of my freebie gifts was from Spinners’ editor Roaul Galloway, when sent me a copy of Celestial Skies by the hitherto unknown to me Randy Mundy. It’s an absolutely glorious slice of mid 70s Nashville Country Rock. Born in 1952, I’m not sure if Randy is still with us, as his website lists the only upcoming show as 3rd August 2012 River Woods Gazebo in Provo, Utah with the Mundy Mourning Band. Make of that what you will. Nice relaxing album though.
You certainly can’t say that about my other purchase this year; A New Form of Beauty, parts I-IV by The Virgin Prunes. Forty-five years on, the crazed, anarchic post-punk doodling of these madcap Irish troubadours still bridges the gap between an apolitical Crass and a more intense Pere Ubu, with a splash of a less than tolerant Here & Now included. Gavin Friday’s hectoring bellows lead the group down to the centre of the earth in a way only perhaps The Birthday Party were capable of doing at the same time. If you like “Release the Bats,” then try “Come to Daddy” on for size. A howling, disturbing, discordant miasma that still makes me laugh and try to dance at the same time. Why did I wait so long to buy this?
After the TQ night out, I was delighted to scrounge a lift home from Martin Donkin of Shunyata Improvisation Group, who are now down to a trio (like Rush or Take That after Robbie left) and who I’m hoping to see at Cullercoats Watch House on Friday 11th April. The lift was important, not only because it was quicker than public transport, but also so I could rest my aching bones. One of the effects of growing old is severe pain in my lower back and calves if I stand up for too long. This is why I lean against barriers at the football, when ever possible and take a seat in pubs. While I still prefer standing gigs, I have occasionally sat on the floor when lumbar pain has become too much. I was a little worried about going to see Rumours of Fleetwood Mac at Shields Exchange, because I knew it was sold out. Shelley and I had been a fortnight previously for my first gig of the year, Lindisfarne, who were brilliant in a three-quarters full hall of longtime fans and attentive devotees of the band. It was the first time I’d heard this iteration of the band in the flesh, which did miss the mandolin and harmonica of Ray Jackson, especially on a wizened, truncated “We Can Swing Together,” but who produced an otherwise storming set of material from the whole back catalogue, masterfully steered by Rod Clements and Dave Hull Denholm.
The main problems with Rumours of Fleetwood Mac, and it won’t spoil any surprises by saying Shelley and I left at the interval, was not the fact the place was packed, which it was, but the absolutely abysmal sound and the extraordinarily ignorant behaviour of a good 50% of the audience. If you’re going to do a faithful take on latter period Fleetwood Mac, I’d suggest you don’t open your set with a cursory, limp version of “Dreams” that you don’t even announce to the audience, who may not have been aware that the event had started because the house lights were still on. Not that most of the coked-up, half-pissed, entitled me-me-me generation tosspots in attendance were interested in anything other than the sound of their own braying voices. I don’t know what was worse, the inane chatter of bourgeois pricks or the anodyne apology for a band on stage. The guitar was as absent as the vocals, while it appeared that the drums were being handled by the reincarnations of John Bonham, Keith Moon and Philthy Animal Taylor at the same time. It got no better as the set drew on and so we made a choice to write of nigh on £80 in tickets and do one at the break, along with a good 50 or so other disappointed punters, who all cited bad sound and worse behaviour as their reasons to walk. Probably a good hundred or so were ensconced in the bar, showing no desire to subject themselves to one of the worst live experiences I’ve had in years.
In contrast, Ben, Dave and I had a spellbinding, transcendental experience seeing Mogwai in Leeds. Heading down after Percy Main’s magnificent win away to Stobswood, we arrived for around 6.45, which meant we’d already missed support act Cloth, who had gone on at 6.15, because of the insane 9.30 curfew for this gig. That was a bit of a damper before we’d even got in the place and things got worse when trying to deal with the pre-entry searches by Showsec, that were seemingly modelled on the kind of human rights abuses you’d normally associate with the IDF. Luckily enough, the headliners absolutely blew the roof off the place in a staggering show of power, grace and imagination. Ben and Dave took their spot behind the sound desk, as that’s the optimum for oral pleasure but I, slightly spooked by the enormity of the crowd, took myself off to a side nook, right at the front, on a slightly raised bit at the side of the hall. It meant I could lean backwards to support my lumbar region, while still being deafened. Of course, it meant all I saw of Stuart Braithwaite, in the main, was the peak of his baseball cap, but it didn’t matter once the soundstorm started hitting.
The Bad Fire, like every new Mogwai release, is a heralded event; one where the listener is met with challenges and intimidation at every point. Yes, they somehow manage to raise the bar yet higher in terms of punishing volume and cerebral dissonance, while all the times forging objects of celestial beauty from the belching flames of their sonic furnace. Spread cutely across 3 sides of a double album, six of the tracks made up half the set, from the charming robotic pop of “God Gets You Back” to the aural assault of “Fanzine Made of Flesh” and “Lion Rumpus,” this was a spellbinding event. However, as you could only expect, the truly cathartic explosions of emotional noise were to be found in unsurpassable versions of “Christmas Steps,” “New Paths to Helicon” and the closing “Like Herod.” This was a special evening in the company of a very special band who continue to evolve. Like John Peel said of The Fall; “always different; always the same.”
BOOKS:
I’ve not read much this year, I’m sorry to say, but I am still trying to plug gaps in my literary knowledge. This is why I asked for books for Christmas and was pleased to receive two volumes by James Baldwin. I adored his slim selection of essays from the 1960s and 1970s, Dark Days, that tell much about the position of the Black intellectual in US society at that time, in the same way that CLR James explained what it was like to be a Black Marxist in the Caribbean and England from the 1930s onwards in Beyond a Boundary. I really must put Angela Davis on my next reading list. Another James Baldwin book was 50 Famous Stories, a rewrite of historically apocryphal events for children. This was by a very different James Baldwin, but it was nice to reacquaint myself with the legend of Rip van Winkle at least…
I have started reading The Guardian’s obituaries more assiduously and taking prompts from them about who I should read. Last year, I came across the name of Robert Coover, an American writer, generally considered to specialise in the recondite genres of fabulation and metafiction. He became a proponent of electronic literature, was a founder of the Electronic Literature Organization and died last October. Santa gave me a copy of Gerald's Party, his fourth novel, published in 1986. The book encompasses a single night at a party given by the title character and narrator. Though the murder of a beautiful actress at the party is central to the plot, Coover's text has little in common with a traditional murder mystery. He appears to be approaching the murder mystery genre with the goal of subverting/exhausting its possibilities. It certainly exhausted this reader as it took me almost 6 weeks to plough through the unforgiving 350 pages of text.
As Gerald tries to describe the things around him in painstaking detail, he recounts simultaneous conversations and events as they happen. After describing a small part of a situation or a conversation, he moves on to a small part of a different conversation, then returns to the first conversation, or maybe moves on to a third or a fourth, returning each time to try to be as accurate as possible while recording the events. There are also graphic depictions of various bodily functions, including different types of sexual intercourse. Gerald, speaking in what could be described as stream-of-consciousness, often appears unaffected by the decadent and orgiastic events that surround him, and, in addition, he comes across as an unreliable narrator. And I’ve absolutely no idea who committed the murder.
Bertrand Blier was a French film director, who died in January aged 85. As well as making pretentious, unwatchable movies, he wrote borderline pornography as a side hustle, getting right on the nerves of devotees of le nouvelle roman. His debut novel, Les Valseuses, which translates as The Waltzers, is also French slang for testicles. Published in 1972 and in English the year after as Making It, it was turned into a film, called Les Valseuses that was rendered as Going Places in English. Confused? No need to be. I’ve not seen Going Places, but I have read Making It, and it is brutally funny in a way was guaranteed to epatez les bourgeoises. Two yobboes Jean-Claude and Pierrot graduate from stealing cars to crimes of violence, sexual assault and eventually murder. However, it is written in such an offhand, matter-of-fact manner that it doesn’t glorify these terrible deeds, all the time adding to the sense of cultural deracination the main characters feel. They fall in with a bored nymphomaniac Marie-Ange and all die simultaneously in a car accident when a wheel falls off their stolen vehicle. It’s a strange read, but I enjoyed it.
I didn’t enjoy Slow Vision by Maxwell Bodenheim that much. Bodenheim was a crazy, drunken proto-Bukowski of the Depression, who was shot dead with his hooker girlfriend by a mentally deranged dishwasher in a flophouse. Slow Vision tells the story of the starving and skint trying to make ends meet in the Bowery in 1932, against a backdrop of Red agitation. Strangely little, if anything, happens “on stage,” with the major events mentioned in passing. It’s a curiously unappealing read, with little to recommend it in terms of character, plot or prose style.
