talking heads live - recent discoveries

Remain In Light, Talking Heads' 1980 album, remains one of my all time favourite albums. The complexity and density of the polyrhythmic songs is something quite unearthly, something so stunning that it's almost impossible to work out how it was done. The sheer number of overdubs and overlapping vocal lines is astounding.

Yet during the late summer and into the winter of 1980 Talking Heads not only played most of this album live, but they somehow actually improved on many of the songs, live on stage.

I've mentioned the debut show of the expanded Heads before, and if you want to hear what they could do then I recommend the brilliant The Name Of This Band Is Talking Heads - one of the finest live albums ever made. But recently a soundboard from the Amsterdam show in December 1980 has circulated. It's not as slick as TNOTBITH, but in many ways it’s more fun as this was what the expanded Heads sounded like in the flesh, warts and all, having an absolute ball on stage. Adrian Belew has a real blast on "Warning Sign" and goes suitably nuts on "The Great Curve", but the whole band is really on form. "I Zimbra" is perhaps the best version I’ve ever heard and "Houses In Motion" is superb too. The only less than successful track is, oddly, "Once In A Lifetime" which appears to be played too slowly and as such it loses all it’s energy. Dolette Macdonald sounds like she’s trying to speed things up with her excellent backing vocals but to no avail. You clearly can’t get Chris Frantz to change his rock solid playing mid song! Very odd, as I’ve never heard a duff version of this song before.

Another recently discovered Dutch soundboard, from Leiden on 01 July 1982 has been tickling my ear hairs too. This was the opening show of the Heads summer 1982 tour and first night nerves are all over the place. The gig itself is full of energy and many of the songs are played with an aggression and sense of excitement that you just don’t get the following year on the far more polished Stop Making Sense. In many ways these 1982 shows are my favourite Heads gigs – Jerry gets to perform “Slink”, Tom Tom Club were the opening act (basically the whole expanded Heads band minus David) and Byrne gets to perform four new songs from The Catherine Wheel (the three “Big” Songs and “What A Day That Was”), all of which are killer live tracks. And they find time to debut the newly written but not yet recorded “Swamp”. So, out of the 14 or so songs played every night, almost half of them were unfamiliar to the audiences.

A wonderful tour and there’s a few partial radio broadcasts of some of the gigs, but this is the first complete soundboard show I’ve come across. As I said first night nerves plague the band, especially Byrne who messes up loads of words; though he rarely stuck the ‘official’ words in concert usually he sounds far more confident that he does here, repeating lines and getting verses the wrong way round which really confuses poor Dolette Macdonald who tries to keep up with him but simply can’t! Jerry’s vocal on “Slink” is mixed rather low too, though this might not be a bad thing as he’s rather off key, but the biggest problem is poor Raymond Jones. He had the unenviable job of replacing Bernie Worrell for this tour but on this opening night his synths really aren’t working properly. His burbly interjections don’t always come in on cue, and are frequently too loud or too quiet or simply wrong. Later gigs that I have are much much better, so it seems his problems were sorted out, but it’s a shame that we have, say, a perfectly good version of “My Big Hands” that is thrown off kilter by his sometimes wayward keyboards. Otherwise it’s a great show, with some surprisingly hard and aggressive playing on tracks like “Life During Wartime” and “Cities” – Alex Weir is perhaps no match for Belew when it comes to bizarre animalistic guitar noise, but he sure has a wonderfully fast, furious and funky style which works brilliantly on tracks like “Big Business”.

And speaking of The Catherine Wheel. I played some of this again the other day, and I still love every single note. I had the LP (which just had the songs) for quite some time before I was able to get hold of the cassette containing the full length work. As a consequence I perhaps love the songs slightly more than the rest of it, but the whole thing is just magnificent. And I was delighted to learn that I perfectly remembered every single word of "His Wife Refused" as I sang along in the car. Mis-spent youth? Well, at least I wasn’t smashing up phone boxes or anything. Learning the words to obscure and bizarre David Byrne songs seems like time well spent to me…

talk talk live

Talk Talk live comes in three major chunks - 1982, 1984 and 1986, and, apart from a few one offs this is the extent of it.

I recently played a bunch of 1984 shows as the band were plugging It's My Life.

First up was a show from the Hammersmith Odeon right at the start of the gigging for that year...

At this early April show the band seem rather tentative; it was one of their first performances since late 1982, and the first with an expanded six piece band (the core of Hollis, Webb and Harris are augmented by Ian Curnow on keyboards and synths, Phil Ramocon on piano an Robbie Macintosh on guitar (and at some shows percussionist Morris Pert appears to have played)). Lots of It’s My Life tunes in the show of course, but most of these would really flower later in the year as TT became far more self assured.

After a month or so of European gigs in the spring, TT played in the US for much of the summer, usually supporting other bands such as the Psychedelic Furs, Berlin, Sparks, or here, at San Francisco’s Warfield Theater, the Alarm. Macintosh had prior commitments with the Pretenders, so John Hook comes in on guitar with Phil Reis installed as full time percussionist.

This radio broadcast is magnificent, and show itself opens brilliantly with a long build up into "Such A Shame". Arguably their best opening number, so it's, ahem, such a shame that this song would more usually be played as an encore. 

Then in September the band returned to Europe and the UK for more shows. A number of these gigs were televised on the rapidly expanding European tv channels. A May show from Florence had appeared on MTV Europe (though no concessions were made to the tv audience and the performance seems very dark and gloomy on tv – these days the show would be lit differently to benefit the tv cameras), the Dutch show Veronica’s Rock Night, which was syndicated across mainland Europe, broadcast a show in September (much better filmed as the gig was set up for broadcast) and the November show in Dortmund was reshown numerous times on Germany’s ZDF network. In addition I have at least another 5 shows that were aired on European radio stations, one of the best being the Paris gig from late September (although I could do without the annoying DJ interruptions). So 1984 was a great year for TT shows, and yields a large number of very good quality recordings (plus a healthy number of pretty decent audience recordings too).

And every recording I have is uniformly excellent. This was a very strong live band, and a very consistent one too.

february random music

Some more random shuffled music - 

 

“In The Clouds” from All About Eve. Brother Rob would be very happy with me! But this is a terrific track actually, really summery and cheery, and I’d forgotten what a lovely voice Julianne Regan has. Nice chiming guitars in a very 80s, almost Cocteau Twins way. 

 

“I Follow Rivers” from Scandanavian popster Lykke Li. Excellent and extremely catchy song, and an enjoyably unusual production too, with lots of percussion well to the fore.

 

“Secret Side” from Nico’s The End… very slightly mad, especially the hissing and wheezing of the harmonium, and with added white noise washes from Cale and Eno’s synth backings. Chilly stuff. 

“Endless Summer Of The Damned” – from Bauhaus’ last album Go Away White, an album that the band didn’t live to see released as they’d already fallen out and broken up, again, even before the sessions were complete. This one has a terrific glam riff and the Murph in full declamatory vocal mode. Rather wonderful actually. 

“The Apparent Chaos Of Stone” – Robert Fripp and Theo Travis live at Coventry Cathedral in 2009. This piece is more Theo than Robert as he noodles away on the flute for nearly ten minutes with the Venal One creating gentle wooshes and whirrs via the Lunar Module. This whole album is very good, the flutes really work well with the soundscapes, adding a warmth that the soundscapes can sometimes lack.

 

“Heroes” – Bowie live in Tokyo, December 1978. This was the very last show of the Stage tour and Japanese tv broadcast about an hour of the show, resulting in this excellent quality recording. Cracking rendition of “Heroes” with DB really going for it vocally. 

 

“Down Colorful Hill” – Cheer Up!!! Do Red House Painters ever smile I wonder? Or laugh? Having said that, this is a very lovely song. 

“I’m Not Satisfied” – from the Mothers Of Invention’s Cruisin’ With Ruben & The Jets – an album of doowop style greasy love songs. As the sleeve says, it was a last ditch attempt to fool DJ’s into playing the Mothers’ music on the radio. As with previous attempts it failed, as Zappa and the Mothers were seen by the upstanding moral guardians in radioland as being subversive, dirty and politically suspect. Can’t have them polluting the airwaves with their songs about how vegetables keep you regular (“Call Any Vegetable”), and songs about people with largish limbs - “Big Leg Emma” was actually on a list of banned records because, according to Zappa, a girl with a big leg ‘caused unease’ in the higher echelons of an LA radio station!

 

“Ali Click” – what a great song this is, lots of Enoid percussion and those weird almost nursery rhyme-like lyrics about Jolly Roger which are virtually impossible to understand but still, in Eno’s measured reserved English tones, somehow sound slightly rude.

  

“Flight Into Space” from the Moonraker soundtrack, which is one of the best soundtracks that John Barry ever did for the Bond films. This is quite an epic piece. 

"Sugar Hiccup” from the Cocteau Twins' second album Head Over Heels. This song, (and the equally excellent “From The Flagstones”) marks the exact point that the Twins moved from doing second rate Siouxsie knock offs with terrible drum machine beats, to giving us sprawling mini epics of full of reverb, spangly shimmery guitars and Elizabeth Fraser’s astonishing vocals. Musically “Sugar Hiccup” is almost a dry run for the following year’s “Pearly-Dewdrops’ Drops”, but it’s a marvellous song in its own right. The only downside is that it very rapidly fades out halfway through a chorus, which gives the impression of someone saying ‘yeah, that’s long enough, next one please’ and just fading it out without any attempt to make it fit the song. 

 

“Everything” from Anathema’s superb 2010 album We’re Here Because We’re Here. This is a tremendous album, mixed by the ridiculously busy Steven Wilson. It’s a huge sounding record, every track is big and wide and sounds like it was meant for vast open spaces. This is a lovely ballad, starting off fairly intimately but expanding as the song progresses into another epic.

 

“Not A Young Man Anymore” in which Dean and Britta play a Lou Reed song far better than Lou and the Velvets ever did. Here, it’s not a bad song at all. The bootleg I have of the VU playing it in early 1967, well, it’s pretty awful. Lou’s singing is especially painful. 

“Reynard the Fox” – Julian Cope basically goes utterly loopy before your very ears. Yet, somehow, it’s still very entertaining. That whole Fried album is like that – clearly Mr Cope is a long way out of his tree (I mean just look at the album cover), yet the songs are cracking.

 

“Where Are We Now?” – I’ve not played this for a little while, but it’s still absolutely marvellous. I’m so excited about the new Bowie album. A couple of weeks to go now…

“Don’t You Get Me Down” – one of the brilliant set of songs that Charley recorded last year. Her tunes are very clever, slightly offbeat, some very unusual chords and stuff, yet the songs are nearly always incredibly catchy and very easy to sing along with. I wish she’d record more.

 

“Dominion” – the last part of Tangerine Dream’s Logos. Classic synth sounds. 

“Night School” – from Zappa’s Jazz From Hell. This was an all instrumental album that Zappa recorded on the Synclavier synth back in 1986. Just to satisfy the fans he added one guitar solo track. But this one is a jolly, very commercial sounding, tune that was originally intended as a tv theme for some late night educational programmes. The Synclavier sounds are horribly dated now, but it’s a fun little tune.

 

“Hong Kong Garden” – named after a Chinese restaurant favoured by the Banshees. What a song! This is just brilliant. And it was their debut single – it shows such confidence. Amazing. 

“Autobahn” recorded live in 1991 on The Mix tour. Not much else to say. It’s “Autobahn” – it runs for 11 minutes, it’s great. As always. 

“Neal And Jack And Me” – just the interlocking guitar parts, with some nice Frippian squeaky mouse overdubs. This must have been one of Dear Old Mr Stormy’s Monday Selections some time ago. These little snippets of rehearsals and workings are always pretty interesting. However some, the little 20 seconds fragments of Lizard tunes and such like are interesting once or twice and that’s it – but others, like this one, 2+ minutes long and recognizably part of a song, repay repeated listens and have thus made it onto the iPod.

“Pop Muzik”  - M's brilliant single which is of course one of the greatest ever pop songs in the history of the world. It’s also very cleverly produced: towards the end the stereo image suddenly expands – it starts off as a really tight little synth pop song but then suddenly it seems to cover the entire sky as everything is hugely opened up. I’d never really noticed this before and I would think you’d only really get this impression on headphones, but it’s very clever, and very effective.  

 

“Moss Garden” from Dave ‘n’ Brian. Love that Japanese Koto that DB plays, and the backing synths and atmosphere’s from BE are fab. 

“Black Metallic” from indie also-rans Catherine Wheel. They never really made it as big as everyone expected – this single and the accompanying album, Ferment, came out in 1992 and everyone seemed convinced that they’d be huge, but it never really happened and as far as I know they split some years ago. “Black Metallic” is however a monster of a tune and it sounded extremely good 20 years on. 

“Whole Lotta Rosie” from AC/DC. Rock doesn’t get much rockier than this! 

 

And finally - “The God Of Adverbs” from the recent David Sylvian collaboration with Jan Bang. We have DS’s calm, measured narration over some very odd squiddly backing ‘music’. “In Azerbaijan there are no adverbs, merely meandering circumlocutions. The God of Adverbs finds this deeply distressing.”

It's a really compelling record - and a strange one - but I love strange records...

 

random music again

Haven’t done this for a while but I shuffled the iPod recently and this was what it gave me –

 

“Fame” – classic Bowie to start us off, this was a live version from 1978, and darned fine it was too. 

“Instant Karma” – Peter Murphy’s cover of the Lennon song, from 2009. The Murph more than does the song justice. Great fun. 

“No Reply” – the Fabs from before I was born. What a great track this is.

“Jealous Guy” – again a live version, from Ferry’s 2007 tour. Always a popular live song, and Ferry always delivers on this one. The whistling is a bit of a show stopper too. 

And then I realized that the first four songs all had Lennon’s hand in them in some way! Weird or what. But we moved on from John and next up was –

 

“North Star” – lovely stuff from Robert Fripp and Daryl Hall. Gorgeous vocals and a lovely laid back guitar part, which comes about 3 years before the very similar and also very lovely “Matte Kudasai”. 

“Frozen Roads” from Brett Anderson’s 2009 album Slow Attack. This is a superb album from start to finish and is by quite some distance Brett’s best album – all tracks were co-written with and produced by Leo Abrahams. “Frozen Roads” is a stunningly good piano led ballad which seemed very appropriate with all the snow around.

 

”Distant Lights Of Olancha Recede” – a Harold Budd poem (these are always welcome – his well worn recitations are tremendous) was followed by another Budd track from By The Dawn’s Early Light – “Boy About 10”, which has that wonderfully mournful violin on it. This is one of my favourite Budd albums. 

“River Deep Mountain High” – the classic Ike ‘n’ Tina Turner song. Pretty epic stuff I think you’ll agree.

“Zannat” from the Hector Zazou and Zwara album – quite a contrast to the super high energy of the Spector production of the previous track. A marvellously atmospheric meld of modern and ancient. 

“Its-a-happening” from the Magic Mushrooms! This is from Nuggets and it’s charmingly loopy. Imagine what you think a song called “Its-a-happening” from 1968 by the Magic Mushrooms would sound like. And it does. It’s exactly like that. 

 

“Ohm Sweet Ohm” from a Kraftwek show just a few nights ago in Dusseldorf where Ralf and the boys are playing Der Katalog over eight nights with all the 3D gubbins (like they will at the Tate Modern later this year). I grabbed the Radioactivity show that appeared on Dime the other night. The quality is pretty good and having the full Radioactivity album played live is a real treat - new performances of tracks like “Antenna” and this one, the always good “Ohm Sweet Ohm” – a joke that surely only works in English?  

 

“Third Uncle” from the 801 Live album. Furious guitarwork from Phil Manzanera, and Eno belts out the vocals which he’s never done since. What a great track. 

“Two Pints Of Lager And A Packet Of Crisps Please!” the one and only hit from Splodgenessabounds. I’ve always liked this one – it still makes me laugh, the way that the singer is getting progressively more and more frustrated. 

“”Life Is A Minestrone” - 10cc – I have a handful of 10cc tracks, and they are terrific. Pity they got so dull after a while, but for a time between 1973 and 1977 they turned out some absolutely impeccably constructed pop songs.

And to end the iPod came up with –

 

“Upon The My-O-My” from the unique Captain Beefheart. This is one of his more commercial songs, from the Unconditionally Guaranteed album that most Captain fans dislike, but which I think has some cracking songs. And it’s not as willfully bonkers as something like Trout Mask Replica, or later albums like Ice Cream For Crow. He performed this one on the OGWT in 1974 and this clip often crops up on those Sounds Of The Seventies type programmes – the good Captain keeps leering at the camera and reaching out as if to grab the viewer through the television, and you feel that he could actually do it!

steven wilson - the raven that refused to sing...

I'm listening to a sneaky early download of Steven Wilson’s upcoming album The Raven That Refused To Sing (And Other Stories). I love the nicely pretentious title, and at times the music is like jumping back 40 years. Imagine Zappa’s early / mid 70s ensembles playing with the Mahavishnu Orchestra underpinned by Crimson’s Bruford / Wetton rhythm section (all that heavy thud work and monstrous complex drumming), and you are kind of approaching the density and sheer bonkers-ness of this music. 

But it sounds oddly modern too - the production is amazing, as you'd expect with SW, and it sounds so immediate; on headphones the band is all around you. 

There’s mellotrons and flutes too, which are clearly a nod to early King Crimson, but also some very pretty melodies as well as some heavy riffing and insanely complicated stuff too. It made me smile a lot too, which is always a good sign. The music is endlessly fascinating and actually quite exhilarating. The title track is uplifting and epic and claustrophobic and personal and downright emotional all at the same time. Quite a feat. 

I can’t think of anyone else creating this complex, yet still accessible jazzy, rocky, proggy, fusiony music like this these days. Wilson is absolutely in a field of his own. There’s even some seriously sharp guitar shredding courtesy of Chelmsford’s own Guthrie Govan, now a permanent fixture in Wilson’s band it seems. Whilst I’m doing fine with my MP3 download at the moment it’s very clear that the cd will sound incredible on a decent system.

ultravox! / john foxx

The first three Ultravox albums are very different from the band that hit the big time in 1980 with Vienna. Under the leadership of John Foxx, Ultravox! (with the ! apeing that of the German band NEU!) issued three albums between 1976 and 1978 which run the gamut of trashy glam, punk,  and eventually synth pop. It’s occasionally a bit rubbish, especially when they try too hard to be punks, and clearly they’re way too nice and middle-class to pull it off convincingly. But on the whole it’s a cracking mixture of the punk sensibility, the clear musical influences of Roxy and Bowie, and Foxx’s literary inclinations (especially his JG Ballard influences which see his lyrics peppered with lines about machines and liquids and stuff). Plus this band can play.

The first self-titled album sees all sorts of instruments thrown into the mix – wobbly synths, manic violins, incongruous acoustic guitar on the epic "I Want To Be A Machine", even some r’n’b style harmonica. It’s all a bit of a muddle to be honest, but in the same way that first Roxy album was a huge mess of ideas. It’s not as good as the first Roxy album, not be a long chalk, but the ambition is clear. The whole thing is a bit rough and ready, but the assistance of both Steve Lillywhite and Brian Eno helps pull the album together. Eno was at Island studios mixing some of this album when one of Ultravox took a call for him. Eno didn’t like being interrupted, but he was told it was an international call, and the guy on the other end says he’s David Bowie. Still thinking it was a prank, Eno reluctantly took the call, and by the end of the week he was helping Bowie record Low at the Chateau d’Herouville just outside Paris.

The second Ultravox album, Ha! Ha! Ha! was recorded in the first few weeks of 1977 and has an appealingly vital live sound. The songs are way more focused and tighter and display a far stronger commercial sense than on the debut. And the best ideas are those that clearly point the way forward – the closing track, the hugely electronic "Hiroshima Mon Amour" is an astounding leap forward from the opening punky thrash of "ROckWrok" (and check out that crazy spelling folks, and surely the title came from the not at all punk 801’s "RongWrong"?) But despite the chilly Germanic soundscapes of "Hiroshima" that song on this album that really sums up the Foxx era is "The Man Who Dies Every Day" – a stomping electronic beat, woozy keyboards, jagged guitars and a very English lyric which marvellously rhymes ‘a moment in the rain’ with ‘a gesture of disdain’, delivered in Foxx’s clinical croon. And it’s supremely catchy.

The third Foxx album, 1978’s Systems Of Romance, is more of a precursor to Vienna in terms of the overall sound, but apart from a few key songs, it seems to me to be rather confused as to what’s it’s trying to achieve. There’s still a number of guitar-led tracks that try to hang onto the punk sound even though it’s clear by now that Ultravox don’t do that very successfully. The more synth based songs are notably much better – the dreamlike "Slow Motion" is especially good and "When You Walk Through Me" is basically a psychedelic Beatles-type song (complete with phasing and Warren Cann playing the drum part from "Tomorrow Never Knows"). It’s a good album, but perhaps not as enjoyable as Ha! Ha! Ha!.

And then Foxx was gone, intent on becoming a Machine, delivering the astonishingly good Metamatic at the start of 1980. Gary Numan steals much of the Systems Of Romance sound for Replicas and The Pleasure Principle (and steals Billy Currie to help him achieve it) and has massive success with a sound and style that Ultravox had originated. By then of course Ultravox had basically split up, during the middle of 1979 (Warren Cann drummed for the Buggles for a while, and Currie played with Numan and then Visage where he met Midge Ure.) Ultravox then reformed with Midge in the winter of 1979 / 1980 and came up with Vienna. And they didn’t look back after that!

neil young & crazy horse live

I've downloaded a few recent gigs from Neil and the Horse but none are as good as the superb show they played I've downloaded a few recent gigs from Neil and the Horse but none are as good as the superb show they played just three nights ago at the Borgata Hotel in Atlantic City. It was part of a Hurricane Sandy benefit, but they didn’t change their regular set at all, so it’s just 13 songs... however, as some of these run for more than 20 minutes each you still get a gig lasting more than two hours. 

And, although I’m not sure it’s entirely appropriate, they encore with a 25 minute “Like A Hurricane” which does what Sandy couldn’t, and blows the roof off the Hotel. It's surely one of the best “Hurricane”s I’ve ever heard. The energy from the Horse is incredible throughout the whole show, and Neil is on fire, singing his socks off, and coaxing the most amazing sounds out of Old Black – how the hell that guitar is still going, after all the abuse it’s had over the past 40 years, is something that only Neil can explain, but I’m so glad that it is still functioning, as no other guitar sounds quite like it.

There are so many highlights - “Ramada Inn” is the best I’ve ever heard; lovely new song “Singer Without A Song” finds Neil at the piano with the Horse clustered round him helping out on harmonies. The show heads for the home straight by cranking up the Crazy Horse Time Machine - the always brilliant “Cinnamon Girl” is followed by the even older “Mr Soul” and then it's straight into a spirited but rather ragged “Rockin’ In The Free World” (rarely played on this tour) and then a stompingly good “Hey Hey, My My”. The encore is the aforementioned amazing encore of “Hurricane”. 

No UK dates so far, but Neil has just announced Australian dates for next March so he and the Horse are obviously planning on continuing this tour next year. I would LOVE to see them live, especially playing as well as they are right now.