Apologies (to both of you) for not posting for an age. I've got lots of good excuses - death (not mine), new job and so on. Anyway, I'll ease my way back in with some spam, before neglecting it for a couple of months again.
If there's one hyped band out there at the moment which seems capable of living up to all of the gushing internet wittering, it's The Teenagers. You've probably all heard their beautiful, haunting Grease-like "Homecoming", but here it is again just in case.
The Teenagers - "Homecoming"
They're also very adept remixers. My favourite is their reworking of Simian Mobile Disco's inane-Technotronic pastische, "It's the Beat", which turns a piece of plodding disco fodder for gurning fashionistas into something truly amazing, all minor key church organs. A depressing dirge in an entirely good way, if that's possible.
Simian Mobile Disco - "It's the Beat" (Teenagers Remix)
The Teenagers Myspace
Time for a bit of posh boy art wank from The Soft Machine.
Personally I prefer the early stuff (haha) made when the group included Kevin Ayers on bass and vocals... when they were a bit more psychedelic art-wank than jazz-rock art-wank, if you will.
One reason for this is that I've always been a little unconvinced by Robert Wyatt's chirruping mockney 10 year old-a-like singing, apart from on 'Shipbuilding', but I can't get enough of Ayers' lilting molasses-like vocals, at their finest here on 'Why Are We Sleeping?'
'We Did It Again' is probably my favourite from the early stuff; it sounds something like Can would've they come from Kent and had mothers in the W.I. and fathers in Tory Party.
The Soft Machine - We Did It Again
The Soft Machine - Why Are We Sleeping?
The Soft Machine
There's a dearth of some seriously amazing bands from the 80's and 90's on the web. Typing The Charlottes into 'The Hype Machine' yields just a single track, for example. Well, it did until now. Finally getting hold of their sole album, and listening to it for the first time in about ten years, has been a revelation.
I guess 'Lovehappy' sits in the middle of a post-shambolic twee indie-pop/pre-shoegazer moment in history. Albeit a moment that probably lasted about 22 days. This is kind of reinforced by drummer Simon's eventual graduation to prime ethereal mopers Slowdive. He should've stuck where he was.
Lovehappy is one of those perfect LP's which struggles to weigh in at the half hour mark. It pisses all over more highly regarded female-fronted, fuzzy guitar pop acts of around the same period like, for example, The Primitives. They're also that rare thing - a decent East Anglian band.
'Are You Happy Now?' beats Primal Scream's 'Velocity Girl' to the title of shortest indie-pop classic of all time. 'In My Hair' is just stop-start genius.
The Charlottes - Are You Happy Now?
The Charlottes - In My Hair
The Charlottes History
If you're anything like me, the sound of a children's choir is enough to turn you into a homicidal maniac, googling for the nearest primary school and scrabbling for the bread-knife.
Keith West's "Grocer Jack" is a case in point. It's a song I like in spite of the annoying posh kids. In fact, it's a song I like in spite of myself. If anyone ever asks you for a definition of the word 'twee', force this horror upon them.
It comes from Mark Wirtz's 'Teenage Opera' - described somewhere as Camberwick Green meets the Beach Boys, which is pretty accurate. I challenge you to listen to the whole thing without vomiting.
Anyway, 'Grocer Jack.' A song about a dead grocer. Probably for the best, as Tesco would've forced him out of business anyway.
Keith West - Excerpt From A Teenage Opera (Grocer Jack)
To counter it, some schoolchildren singing the word 'motherfucker' on a record about a nuclear holocaust. This is Yo La Tengo covering the Sun Ra 'hit.' Very poignant. Nuclear war is indeed, 'a motherfucker', I'm sure we all agree.
Yo La Tengo - Nuclear War
Totally NOT a pathetic attempt to get the 16oz hit counter up by posting an MP3 by some East London flouro-hipsters...
I was wondering if NYPC had much life left in them. Sure, "Ice Cream" was pretty amazing when I first heard it, with it's ESG-lite basslines and playground lyrics, but after a while it does begin to grate.
However, every new song I hear is first class.... we've had "Get Lucky" and flipside "Hiding on the Staircase", and now upcoming 'breakthrough' (has anyone said that yet?) single "The Bomb." It's quite literally 'the bomb.' Expect to hear that again.
There's the obligatory remixes out there - Phones and the Teenagers and so on, but the original does it best for me.
Lead singer Tahita is officially my latest crush. She's got an amazing voice, which sounds like a bizarre cocktail of Bob Dylan, Christina Monet and Mark E Smith, and with her Phil Oakey-with-a-perm haircut, she oozes the same ball-breaking cool as Mutya Buena, albeit it a very Shoreditch version.
New Young Pony Club - "The Bomb"
My second ever All Saints post, out of a total of around 30. They must be top of some kind of 16oz blogger chart down the right hand side of the page or something?
Anyway, polished turd #2.
Kissy Sell Out is FUNNEST remixer out there at the moment. He's also made out of wax (see illustration.)
This pretty much rips the piss out of the plodding original, speeding it up to Minnie Mouse proportions, also consigning the excellent Mstrkrft remix of the previous single to the recesses of the mind. It sounds like it's been produced by Stock, Aitken and Waterman on crack/helium.
All Saints - shit comeback... best remixes ever. I've listened to this song about 27 times in a row now, and all is well with the world. Even if the world is spinning at about 180 bpm.
All Saints - "Chick Fit (Kissy Sell Out's Excellent Adventure)"
Kissy's Myspace
2004 Norwegian Pop Idol also-ran Margaret Berger comes on like Girls Aloud if Cheryl Tweedy was brought up in the land of £10 pints, oil wealth and whaling, and had never heard the word 'jigaboo' in her life.
Debut album "Pretty Scary, Silver Fairy" is a triumph, something like "Love Angel Music Baby" fed through a twee machine.
"Seek I'll Hide" is my favourite.
The don't you put me under pressure choral bits remind me of the Libertines in a weird way. Not that I like the Libertines.
Anyway...
Margaret Berger - Seek I'll Hide
Margaret Berger Website
Ah, Grecian man-mountain Demis Roussos, prime purveyor, along with James Last and Klaus Wunderlicht, of charity shop fodder.
FACT: It's actually illegal under UK law for a charity shop not to stock an LP by at least one of these artists at any time.
Demis LPs were a respectable fourth behind straw donkeys, sombreros and those funny wine pouring things as the top souvenir from sunshine holidays in the 1970's to carry off the plane... a time when the working masses could first afford a foreign holiday, as long as it was taken in country under right-wing military rule.
Anyway, a few years earlier Demis was rocking out with his pal Vangelis ("Chariots of Fire" theme tune and so on) and some other bloke, in the glorious Aphrodite's Child. Quite possibly the best band in the world ever. If only because:
a) they were Greek. How many Athenian progressive rockers do you get to the pound?
b) they made a concept album about the Book of Revelations called "666.'"I used to own this, but I didn't like having it in the house. I couldn't sleep.
c) see picture above.
"Magic Mirror" was, I think, their first single. It's a perfect slice of mod-prog, organ-driven psych. They followed this up with a couple of attempts at apeing Can (very well - check out "Funky Mary" and "Let me love, let me live"), then made the afore mentioned "666", before Demis quit and started making balladry for 70's honeymooning couples to drink Retsina to.
Aphrodite's Child - "Magic Mirror"
The smoker has a lot to complain about...in fact, the list is almost endless.
I mean, I could drone on about how we single-handedly fund the NHS through the 1000% tax on a packet of twenty. Or there’s the constant assault on my freedom of choice by governments and shady tobacco-terror cells like A.S.H and their spiritual guru the late Roy Castle. Then there are the persistent reminders of how I’m due to suffer a slow, painful, yellow-fingered death. But you’ve probably heard it all before.
Besides, none of these things get my blood boiling more than one particular phenomenon; something which invariably increases as the general population seems to gradually kick the habit. Yes readers, I’m referring to the rampant, unstoppable rise of any serious nicotine addict's arch-nemesis - the 'social' smoker.
Plot this rise on a graph with the aforementioned decline of the regular smoker, and I'll bet my bronchial tubes on a big fat X appearing across the page. Nothing, nothing at all in the world of smoking annoys me more than these people.
Let’s get this straight; I’m not talking about the rough as arseholes, crack-addled guy or girl you encounter on the street. Against these people I have nothing. I harbor no grudge against them for praying on the unreasonable fears of middle class ponces living in ‘edgy’ parts of
No, the people I’m talking about are encountered primarily in bars, pubs and nightclubs. Worse still, they’re often my friends. Yes, if you’re reading this – I’m talking about YOU. You know who you are.
A few years ago, when you could rely on something like 50% of a social group being laden with cigarettes, it was just about bearable. These days I may as well dress as a Phillip Morris cigarette girl and parade around in a sash with an usherette-style tray around my neck.
There are several irritating factors at work here:
a) 20 cigarettes are now well over £5 per pack. (OK, £3.50 in my local shop if you stand on one leg and wink.) But still; say on average five cigarettes are dished out to these freeloaders on an average night in the pub, that's just under £1.25 a night. If you go out three times a week, that equates to a whopping £195 per year on keeping your friends in 'social' nicotine. Social nicotine. What a set of bastards.
b) We smokers know that we are weak-willed plebs; living and breathing (just) examples of evolutionary theory, destined to shuffle off this mortal coil early to make way for the Uberlunged. I know I'm a failure, and a friend demonstrating with consummate ease how he can just nonchalantly have a couple of fags, then lead A NORMAL and UNHINDERED life without milligrams upon milligrams of nicotine pumping through his veins, well... it doesn't make me feel good about myself.
Anyway, I for one can’t wait for this year’s anti-smoking laws to come into place, if only to eliminate the work of these parasites. That’s when I'll carry out my plan to become a social drinker, spending my evenings in bars quaffing nothing but glass upon glass tap water, and asking people in a faux-embarrassed voice if it's OK if I just have a couple of sips of their beer.
