cocteau twins - garlands

For no obvious reason I played Garlands on the way into work the other day. This is the first Cocteau Twins album from 1982 - I thought, I've not heard that one for ages. But, having played it again, I realised why I've not played it for ages. It's not actually very good.

The drum machine dominates - that in itself isn't a problem, but the drum patterns are annoying, basic and very clunky, and the drum sound is harsh and unwelcoming. 

Elizabeth Fraser isn't really singing either - again, that needn't be a problem, but she's not really developed her own amazing voice as yet. I'm pretty sure she's still singing in English (or rather Scottish…), but beyond the odd word absolutely nothing is intelligible. Once more, in itself this doesn't matter - later Cocteau's records are full of singing in totally made up Fraserish, but here we don't yet have that gorgeous vocalising, that lovely warm, inviting voice that she developed. Instead Garlands is full of shouty blasts of twitchy yelps and gasps and mumbles.

And, finally, the songs themselves are just rather forgettable. A couple of very strong pieces - "Wax And Wane" and "Blind Dumb Deaf" both hint at later (and better) songs but on the whole the album is repetitive and sadly rather dull.

Fortunately the Twins improved enormously, and rapidly - the next album has stunning soundscapes like "From The Flagstones" and "Sugar Hiccup"; then they recorded the magical "Pearly-Dewdrops' Drops" and got really, really good!

legendary gigs - bataclan 1972

There are some gigs that have attained legendary status, and not always for musical reasons. The final Ziggy Stardust gig, the Sex Pistols at the 100 Club etc etc. Shows that are frequently talked about, written about, and are thus given a reputation that perhaps they don't always deserve.

 

In January 1972, Lou Reed, John Cale and Nico gave a joint performance at the Bataclan club in Paris. At the time none of these musicians were terribly well known, especially in Europe, and it's only with hindsight that this partial reunion of the Velvet Underground has gathered almost mythical status.

 

Oddly no-one seems very sure as to why this gig actually happened. It was Lou's first live performance since he left the Velvets at Max's Kansas City in the summer of 1970. And it was John Cale's first performance since he'd left the Velvets two years before that! 

 

With Lou sporting a big afro and playing acoustic guitar, John on viola, piano or 12 string acoustic, and Nico on her trusty harmonium, someone had the sense to film this show (though I've never seen the footage), and the audio has been bootlegged for years before a semi official release about 10 years ago.

 

Trouble is, the semi official CD runs too slow. Way too slow. Some time ago I created my own corrected version by increasing the speed by about 10%. Now it's a decent listen. The slow CD sounded like all three were doped up to the eyeballs - and while that was quite possibly the case, even Nico never normally sounded quite that sllllooowww…

 

The show opens with just Lou and John on a sprightly "Waiting For The Man" with John playing a rather jaunty piano. He stays at the piano for the first ever performance of "Berlin", which Lou would record later that spring for his first solo album. Then we get "The Black Angel's Death Song", not as scary as the original, a bit slower too, but the required scratchy, maddening viola is well to the front. "Wild Child" follows, another premiere, with both Lou and John on guitars.  Then "Heroin" - the viola is back, droning menacingly throughout the song, just as it should be. A really good version. 

 

Then it's John's turn to take centre stage. "Ghost Story" is a cracking song, and this solo performance is excellent. Then two oddities "The Biggest Loudest Hairiest Group Of All" is a funny look at the misfortunes of a rock band, quite possibly the VU… Cale rarely does strum along folky songs but that's basically what this is. The audience even claps along good-naturedly - you never got that happening at VU shows! Then "Empty Bottles" which he wrote for Jennifer Warnes. A nice Paris 1919 style ballad, but not terribly remarkable. 

 

Finally, here's Nico. The boys strum and sing backing vocals on "Femme Fatale" - lovely performance. Then Lou sits himself down on a stool at the side of the stage to watch Nico at the harmonium while John accompanies on the viola - "Frozen Warnings", "No-One Is There" and a stunning, as always, "Janitor Of Lunacy". They wrap up the show with all three on a delightfully sweet "I'll Be Your Mirror" and an oddly ragged encore of "All Tomorrow's Parties". 

 

It's all very interesting, but overall it's not the most satisfying of gigs. At times it's clearly badly under-rehearsed, and occasionally rather lacklustre. This may be a little surprising considering who's playing, but perhaps not so surprising given that this was the first gig for many years for both Lou and John. It may be a legendary show, that wonderful near Velvets reunion, but as is frequently the case with legends, the truth of the matter is sadly rather less exciting. I've not listened to this gig for a good many years, and I doubt it'll get played again for a good many more. 

 

It's a bit daft really, but I'd never get rid of this recording as it's yet another one of those that I'm really glad I've got. Even if I don't play it much.

omd - dazzle ships

Riding a wave of popularity after the huge success of Architecture And Morality and the "Joan Of Arc" singles, OMD went back into the studio with a big ol' budget and plenty of time - but they were somewhat short of ideas. Dazzle Ships was the last blast of experimentalism from OMD for some time but what a blast it is!

I mean, how on earth did they get away with this record? Just what were they thinking? 

 

I remember reading that Andy McCluskey described it as OMD wanting to mix the pop sensibilities of ABBA with the avant garde experiments of Stockhausen. I guess they sort of achieved that with Dazzle Ships, but it begs the question WHY on earth would anyone want to mix ABBA with Stockhausen?

 

Today people seem to love Dazzle Ships. But in 1983 OMD got slated for it. After the increasing success of the first three albums, their label was expecting a smasheroonie poptastic hit of an album. So was the Great British Public. Then we got Dazzle Ships and OMD lost a lot of their audience, and the label lost a lot of money.

 

It's a shame, though understandable, that OMD then retreated from this experimental approach so completely and became a fairly anodyne pop band for the rest of the 80s. I jumped ship at this point - not because I didn't like Dazzle Ships, (I did, but not as much as Architecture… or Organisation) but I got fed up with OMD because the next record wasn't Dazzle Ships or Architecture… it became too poppy and didn't interest me.

 

For a long time I tended to avoid Dazzle Ships as a complete album. I really liked the 'proper' songs a lot, but the time zone announcements and all that seemed too self consciously a copy of the similar interludes on Kraftwerk's Radioactivity and they could get a bit irritating. But in more recent times I enjoy the whole album, partly because it has all these funny little interludes. It's clearly a little bonkers, the sound of a band floundering and struggling with their sense of direction. The ABBA meets Stockhausen tag line smacks slightly of desperation, as if Andy had to somehow justify the weird mish-mash he'd created and so came up with what he thought was a terribly clever description. It's very much of it's time too - the limits of the technology are painfully exposed occasionally, but the whole album has a pleasingly Cold War feel to it, clinical, stark and forbidding at times, but with flashes of sheer joy and silliness too. But despite the schizophrenic nature of the record, there's a clear sense of a band pushing boundaries, perhaps too far sometimes, a band going beyond their limits, but a band having a whale of a time doing it.

 

"This Is Helena" for example, is tremendously good fun, exuberant and uplifting in a way that you wouldn't imagine a synth pop band could be. "Genetic Engineering" is a noisy, shouty pop song about a very emotive subject, but it's astonishingly catchy. The two leftovers from the Architecture sessions, "Romance Of The Telescope" and "Of All The Things We've Made", have a weary grandeur about them which is truly impressive. "Of All The Things..." has an especially final feel to it, and is a fitting closer to this period of OMD.

 

scott walker / sunn o))) - soused

In 2014 Scott Walker joined forces with drone metal noise-mongers Sunn O))). The resulting album Soused actually gathered decent reviews, though Scott's output these days always seems to get good reviews, partly because I think that writers simply don't know what to make of it and are afraid of sounding silly if they criticise some work of art because they don't 'get it'.

 

I've had this album for the best part of a year and I still don't know what to make of it either. I'm not even sure if I like it, actually.

Soused is, well, I'm not sure what it is really. 

 

For one thing it isn't quite as odd as I was expecting. It's still probably the maddest record I've heard in years (since the last Scott Walker album Bisch Bosch), but it's still not quite as utterly bonkers as I thought it might be. 

 

Not knowing anything about Sunn O))) other than what I've read I was expecting a much noisier record. But although the guitars growl malevolently they don't squeal and roar and they're not, generally, being terribly rowdy. Instead we get lots of droning walls of noise, rolling through the 'songs', but mainly these are kept as the backdrop to Scott's vocals.

 

So, frequently these songs don't sound greatly different in approach to those on Scott's recent albums. But where an orchestra might have been used on Bisch Bosch to create an uneasy, unsettling soundscape, here it's a bunch of guitars doing the same. 

 

I've only played the entire album a handful of times, and it's not something I could say I enjoyed. But then I don't 'enjoy' The Drift very much, certainly not in the same way that I enjoy, say, Scary Monsters, or Before And After Science. Scott's recent albums are not a fun experience and Soused is more of the same. Impenetrable words, the bits that you do catch being worrying and disquieting and hinting at all sorts of unpleasantries. "She's hidden her children", he repeats at one point, which sends chills down my spine, and we get phrases like like "bristling through damaged fingers" (I think) with "bristling" all elongated to sound like brist-el-ing… which makes it sound even more worrying.

 

The vocals are awe-inspiring, as expected, and it's clear that, as always, he has absolute total command of his voice. It's hugely impressive. He sings some astonishing things, not least in the last track "Lullaby", (which is a reconfigured version of the song Scott recorded with Ute Lemper) where at one point he deliberately sings all over the place, off key, all around the key, but with total precision. Nothing is left to chance here, everything sounds exactly how Scott wants it to sound. Quite why he wants it to sound like this is something only Scott can answer. He always seems such a mild, reasonable chap when he's interviewed - yet he writes and records music and lyrics that are frequently full of horror and disturbing imagery. What is going on is his head? 

 

Scott's albums need to be played in full. They don't lend themselves to picking out your 'favourites'. At just 50 minutes and only 5 songs this is an easier album to get through than Bisch Bosch (which I think I've only played 3 or 4 times, ever). Bisch Bosch is perhaps too daunting for me. It needs a lot of time to be invested in it - there's no way you can't listen to it if you're doing something else, it's way too demanding a record, and so I need to find 70 minutes to set aside to play the whole thing. And to be honest, if I ever have a spare 70 minutes and nothing else to do I can think of plenty of other albums I would rather devote that time to… 

 

Anyway, I need to try Soused again, another day. I have this nagging feeling that it's actually quite an accessible album, in a decidedly weird and rather off putting sort of way, and that one day it will click and all fall into place. Scott's 1995 album Tilt did this to me; after about 15 years I suddenly found one day that I loved the record, all of it, so I still have hope!

 

 

associates - party fears two

Amongst random tunes the other day was the utterly mad “Nude Spoons” from the Associates’ marvellous album Sulk. I'd genuinely forgotten how loopy this song was and I was astonished that not only was this track ever recorded but that it was included on one of the best selling albums of 1982! 

 

Then I got to thinking about the Associates, and principally “Party Fears Two” – one of my all time favourite songs. I've little idea what the song is actually about - and that's fine, as many of my favourite songs baffle me with their lyrics. The mix of the mundane lyrics - "I'll have a shower, then phone my brother up" and the utterly euphoric music is wonderful. Billy Mackenzie's vocals are shockingly good - odd, operatic, tender and mad all at the same time. The jaunty keyboard motif that runs through the song is hustled along by a chunky rhythm track and the whole thing is brilliantly catchy, but seriously strange too.

 

A while back I searched you tube for a Top Of The Pops performance of this song. I first found one where Billy Mackenzie was wearing a fairly sensible suit, but this wasn’t the one I wanted. I was after the first time the Associates appeared on TotP - Billy was wearing a long beige mac, buttoned up to the neck, and a beret. This would probably have the first time I'd heard "Party Fears Two" and that performance had stayed with me since 1982! On rewatching this clip 33 years later, it wasn't perhaps quite as overtly camp as I'd remembered but it's still one hell of a performance. Billy prances around like a flouncy Frank Spencer, pouting at the cameras, giving it everything he's got. But the best thing is his expression – he genuinely looks like he really can’t believe he’s on TotP; he’s grinning like a loon, (and was probably off his face, actually), and you can just see he’s thinking "we’re getting paid to do THIS??"

 

I don’t recall now if it was this clip or the other performance that featured guitarist Alan Rankine miming badly on a banjo (which doesn't feature on the song anyway...) whilst improbably dressed like an extra from Blake’s 7 – he looks marvelously sci-fi but sadly the cameraman barely shows him. Instead the camera lingers on the glamour of keyboard player Martha Ladly (also one of the Martha’s from the Muffins) who has huge hair, loads and loads of makeup, a long slinky dress and elbow length gloves – she’s so 1982 it hurts!

 

 

mick ronson - slaugher on 10the avenue

For no good reason, today I decided to play Mick Ronson’s debut solo album Slaughter On 10^th Avenue. I’m not entirely sure why, but it’s been years since I played this one, and it came as a welcome blast of glam pomp. I’d forgotten how variable this album was – there are some great moments, and some truly dreadful ones. Sadly one of the worst comes right at the start – the hideously overwrought cover of “Love Me Tender”. Avoid.

 

But the album picks up immediately with the nicely stompy “Growing Up And I’m Fine” which sounds rather like early Queen, but without Freddie’s histrionics. “Only After Dark” is a weirdly robotic slice of glam rock, and is surely the only song in history to have been covered by both Human League and Def Leppard – but oddly you can see how it suits both bands.

 

The rest of the album is generally solid, well produced 1974 rock. The band is basically Bowie’s Pin Ups band – Ronno, Trevor Bolder, Aynsley Dunbar and Mike Garson, and the overall sound is just like Pin Ups. There’s surprisingly little guitar showofferey, with the emphasis more on the songs and the excellent arrangements rather than pyrotechnics. And Ronno is a very good singer, but perhaps a little unremarkable.

 

There’s a strong parallel to be drawn with Bernard Butler’s first solo album. Both were superb guitarists who were pushed too quickly into solo careers. After Butler left Suede he quickly came up with a solid, excellently produced album, but again there’s something lacking. It’s hard to pinpoint why it doesn’t quite work, but Butler’s album is very much a poor relation to Suede's Dog Man Star, just as Ronno’s album comes off a clear second best to Aladdin Sane or Pin Ups.

 

the stooges - ready to die

A couple of years have passed since the Stooges' last album was issued and I revisited it the other day after ignoring it for some time.

 

The Ron Asheton version of the Stooges died with Ron’s passing a few years ago, but James Williamson took early retirement from his role as a VP at Sony and began to shred once again. Two hard years of touring with the reformed Iggy and the Stooges led to this – Ready To Die, the follow up to Raw Power, 40 years on. 

 

Is it as good as Raw Power. No, of course it isn’t. What could be?

 

But it’s not the mess that The Weirdness was, the 2006 reunion record with Ron and Scott Asheton. It’s a fine, solid, and occasionally spectacular record. The production is excellent, sharp and clear, unlike the muddy thump of The Weirdness. Clocking in at an economical 34 minutes, with two distinct ‘sides’ just like in the ol’ days, we have seven fiery songs plus a couple of ballads and a lament written in honour of Ron. Aside from the slowies, which contain much world weariness, and Iggy’s deeply sonorous voice crawling up from the grave, the upbeat numbers genuinely don’t sound like they were written and played by guys in their sixties. 

 

Iggy clearly spent some time on the lyrics (unlike the Iggy by numbers of The Weirdness) and although a couple of tracks betray a rather juvenile leaning (“DDs” is, of course, about a large female chest) on the whole the lyrics match the blistering pace of the songs. It’s not pretty, it’s not terribly poetic, but it fits the music – for example the chorus of “Job” runs simply ‘I got a job, but it don’t pay shit’.

 

Jams Williamson spits out nasty riffs just like he did 40 years ago, Steve Mackay is still on board to blast some saxophone, and Mike Watt is demonstrably one of the world’s finest bass players. On the drums Scott Asheton is assisted by the Stooges semi-permanent touring drummer Larry Mullins. Scott had been ill for some time and was unable to play as much he wanted on the record, but Larry filled in well. 

 

So, if you want a rocking, angry, furious album of short snappy riffs and snarly vocals, Ready To Die is the one for you. The final track, now called “The Departed”, was originally debuted at Ron’s memorial concert a few years ago. It’s as close as the Stooges have ever come to a truly tender song, and the poignant quotes from “I Wanna Be Your Dog” (James mournfully plucks out the notes at a couple of points) mean that the album ends on a surprisingly emotional note.

 

The title track is one of the best – despite Iggy's advancing years, despite the deaths of some of his compatriots, despite his pronounced limp due to hip problems, Iggy Pop clearly isn't Ready To Die just yet. You know how they say that cockroaches could survive a nuclear war, well I suspect that Iggy, with his indestructible leathery skin, would be standing right next to them, shirt off, punching imaginary foes, leaping and whirling like an insane dervish. Iggy seems to be able to survive anything.