1. No
Pussy Blues – Grinderman
2. Big in
Japan – Tom Waits
3. The
Decision – The Young Knives
4. Evergreen
– The Brian Jonestown Massacre
5. What
Have I Said Now? – The Wedding Present
6. Wings
– The Fall
7. House
of Cards – Radiohead
8. The
Rip – Portishead
9. Sugar
Mountain – Neil Young
10.
Brides
of Jesus – Little Feat
11. The Pink Room – Angelo Badalamenti / David Lynch
12. Pânico – Mercenarios
13. Give It Lose It Take It – Field Music
14.
Bennie
and the Jets – Elton John
15.
Contact
– Bridget Bardot
16.
Lucky
Number – Lene Lovich
17.
Harmony
in my Head – Buzzcocks
18.
On My
Radio – The Selector
19.
Gangsters
– The Specials
20.
Pull Up to the Bumper – Grace Jones
21.
Let’s
Dance – David Bowie
Bonus Tracks:
22. L.E.S. Artistes – Santigold
23. Black
Magic – Jarvis Cocker
24. Prodigal Son – The Rolling Stones
25.
Bird
of Beauty – Stevie Wonder
26.
Cracked
Actor – David Bowie
27. Wordy Rappinghood – Tom Tom Club
28. The Hungry Saw – Tindersticks
In
his book A New Time for Mexico (and
many other works besides) the Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes affirms
that, 'Religious temperament without religious conviction has branded some of
the greatest works of the twentieth century.' He offers up Luis Buñuel,
Albert Camus, Ingmar Bergman and Graham Greene as examples of artistes who have
attempted to make sense of suffering in the absence of Christ, to comprehend that
which might be deemed sacred when divested of doctrine. Theism is antediluvian
– predates the profits – but our contemporary morality is consociated with
scripture and, by definition, the numinous. In other words, you can’t get shot
of theology all that easily.
Fuentes
might also have cited Nick Cave, who is not a man of proclaimed faith but
nonetheless likes to make reference to Judeo-Christian subjects in his work. But
not so with Grinderman. The album Grinderman
is the sound of midlife crisis conveyed with such humour that you probably
shouldn’t assume that the midlife crisis in question is necessarily Cave’s – or
if it is then viewed from a distance. According to Cave, the song 'No Pussy Blues' was inspired by the
negative reactions his Zapata moustache received. Cookie dusters are divisive
at the best of times, so the result in and of itself is no firm indicator of
middle aged angst, but the fact that Nicholas grew such a thing in his late
40s/early 50s maybe is.
I
hadn’t made the connection when I put this compilation together – both tracks were
provided by the lad who used to beat me at snooker, so
I might have expected to – but Tom Waits was also 50 years’ old when he
recorded 'Big in Japan' and also appears
to be railing against his advancing years. Whereas Cave just isn’t getting any,
Waits can at least console himself with the fact that he’s doing business in
Asia. Despite Tom’s gruff incantations that form the spine of the song, 'Big In Japan' is a far more buoyant tune
than 'No Pussy Blues' but still
rough enough to perpetuate a sense of anxiety.
'The Decision'
by The Young Knives supervenes, a continuation of the millennial post-punk
revival, which was by now on the slide; credit to them that
their album Voices of Animals and Men
was nominated for the 2007 Mercury Prize in the face of this. 'The Decision' contains the lines, 'I'm your monarch, your supreme monarch. That decision was mine,' which I take to be a comment on the illusory nature of monarchy: as if to say, 'I am the Queen's subject, but might I not make the same claim for myself: that actually the Queen is in fact my subject.'
Have you seen the documentary Dig!? If you haven’t, and if you like
music, which you doubtlessly do if you’re reading this, then I recommend you
watch it. Its subject is the trials and tribulations of bands The Brian
Jonestown Massacre and The Dandy Warhols from the mid ‘90s through to the early
2000s. I was done with The Dandy Warhols but had heard nothing by The Brian
Jonestown Massacre, so I bought the double compilation album Tepid Peppermint Wonderland: A Retrospective which gathers together 38 tracks spanning a period of nine years. The Brian
Jonestown’ sound is various but can be categorised roughly into three parts: melodic
folk rock numbers, like 'Servo', 'Prozac v Heroin', 'Nevertheless'; tripped
out psychedelia of the kind you hear on 'Anemone'
or 'Whoever You Are'; and, especially
early on, a kind of lo-fi take on shoegaze. 'Evergreen'
is from the band’s first album, Methodrone,
and sounds like Slowdive jamming with Yo La Tengo. The common thread running
through their work is lead singer and multi-instrumentalist Anton Newcombe, who
comes across as a sort of malevolent genius who wears his heart and influences on his sleeve. However, his obsession with the 1960s is not parodic; making
use of 12 string guitars, tablas and sitars does not exempt ingenuity. 'The
Beatles were for sale. I give it away,' Newcombe tells us 20 minutes into Dig!. You can be cynical towards that, but it’s not the sentiment of someone interested in pastiche.
I used to listen to a taped copy of The Wedding Present's Bizarro during my second year at
university. I’d got rid of all my old cassettes by now and didn’t have anything
to play them on anyway. Cue Bizarro, completely
remastered and repackaged with seven bonus tracks and extensive sleevenotes, on
compact disc. This time around it was the tune 'What Have I said Now?' that caught my ear – specifically the moment
when, after chugging along in F (with transient forays into A#, A and C), it
crashes into E after the second verse.
Cologne
It took a while to compile this compilation. The
reasons might be: my continued indifference to current music; a temperamental
MiniDisc player and my decision to switch over to MP3; the difficulty
of converting vinyl to the MP3 format; training for the Fuller's Thames Towpath Ten (mile) run; vacations to Cologne, Istanbul, Lisbon and New York; handing in my notice in July 2008; a five week
sojourn in Southeast Asia and the period of unemployment that followed; apathy.
I’d also taken to making ‘best of ‘ playlists of individual artists: Best of… Stereolab, Best of… Talking Heads,
Best of… The Fall, and so forth. Putting together the best of The Fall
was especially rewarding for I had added the records Perverted by Language and Grotesque
(After the Gramme) to my collection, as well as acquiring digital copies of
The Wonderful and Frightening World of…,
The Frenz Experiment, Extricate,
Code: Selfish and Shift-Work to
supplement what I already possessed on vinyl. Such was the weight of material that
I felt it necessary to divide my anthology into two parts. (The only other
artist that has bid the same approach of me is David Bowie.) I took five tracks
from the album Perverted by Language
alone, although two of these – 'The Man
Whose Head Expanded' and 'Wings' –
were singles tacked on the end of the re-issued CD in the form of bonus
tracks. For the sake of this compilation, I went with 'Wings', whose tempo and monotonous groove is consistent with the
tunes I’ve placed before and after. In this respect, this playlist is more
calculated than many of my others, which is the benefit of working with MP3.
Although MiniDisc certainly provides for a cut-and-paste approach to recording,
with MP3 it's almost compulsory, and so one pays more attention to the order
of things. 'House of Cards' by Radiohead
does a good job of following on from 'Wings'
but works even better as a precursor to 'The
Rip' by Portishead. (Footage of Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead
playing an acoustic version of 'The Rip' appeared
on the internet shortly after.)
I received my copy of Decade by Neil Young at the end of 2006, so by rights 'Sugar Mountain' should have kicked off
this compendium. It wouldn’t have worked. 'Sugar
Mountain' is a lament for lost youth (written when Neil Young had freshly turned
21) and nearly six minutes’ long – it’s not going to get any party started.
Atheism, as it is currently understood, may one
day prove to have been a passing fad, if only because its antithesis –
theism – might itself lapse. Such a narrow view of things is problematic, not
least because the subject is rooted firmly in semantics. The scientific and the
religious – and I refer to the religious in the theological sense rather than
the dogmatic, which is merely the realpolitik of organised religion – are
interested in the same thing and destined to converge upon ontological grounds.
Whether this terrain will be defined as Cartesian or monistic remains to be
seen.
Jesus has a firm hold on
our collective consciousness and his presence looms large within the realm of
contemporary music, through gospel, blues, country, soul, and thus rock and
roll. 'You don't want to walk and talk about Jesus, you just want to see his
face,' incants Mick Jagger on 'I Just Want to See His Face', and he’s not alone: The Byrds, The Flying Burrito
Brothers, Big Star, The Velvet Underground, The Doors, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Manassas, Nick
Cave and The Bad Seeds, Felt, Spaceman 3, The Vaselines, Teenage Fanclub, The
Verve, The Brian Jonestown Massacre, Half Man Half Biscuit… The Nazarene turns up in the most unlikely
places.
Not a moment too soon, I discovered Minus Zero/Stand Out Records off Portobello Road. What’s this they’re playing? 'The
Factory, Lowell George’s first band – you know, the guy from Little Feat.' I
didn’t. After releasing but two singles, Lowell George joined Frank Zappa’s
Mothers of Invention as rhythm guitarist and co-vocalist. His tenure was short
lived and after contributing to Hot Rats,
Burnt Weeny Sandwich and Weasels Ripped my Flesh he left to form
his own band, called Little Feat. Not long after clarifying this chronology, I
returned to Minus Zero / Stand Out Records and purchased the Little Feat and Dixie Chicken albums, paired together as part of WEA’s slightly weird
‘2 Originals’ series, which repackaged two albums by the same artist in a
gatefold format. The music is reminiscent of that I heard playing in the Eiffel
Bar in Copenhagen more than a year earlier, although persons I’ve played it too
have tentatively asked if it might be the Rolling Stones – songs like 'Strawberry Flats' can give that
impression.
The title and the lyrics to 'The Brides of Jesus' suggest the Parable of the Ten Virgins [Gospel
of Matthew 25:1-13], yet the reference in
the final line to ‘entertaining angels unawares’ is attributable to Hebrews
[13:2]. It could be that Lowell is playing one proverb off against the other,
saying that the ‘five foolish virgins’ who did not bring surplus oil for their
lamps, and were denied entrance to the ‘wedding’ as punishment for being ill-prepared, should have been treated better, for they may have been actual angels. Lowell Gorge died of a heart attack in 1979, and I can find no evidence
that he ever expatiated upon the song’s subject.
'The Pink
Room' is from the soundtrack to the David Lynch
film, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. According to the credits, this swampy, instrumental
dirge was written by Lynch himself, rather than Angelo Badalamenti who composed
the film’s score. I once listened to 'The
Pink Room' in a static caravan on a campsite in the New Forest, with The
Wilkinsons, the guy who used to own a pager and Roz Childs, surrounded by conifers and pines.
The
Sexual Life of the Savages is a compilation of São Paulo post-punk that I requisitioned from my
Cornish friend. I must have kept hold of it for a while because it made more
of an impact on the anthology I put together over 2009/2010. In the meantime, I
recorded 'Pânico' by Mercenárias, which
sounds a bit like very early The Fall fronted by The Slits, only sung in
Portuguese. I wouldn’t ordinarily have followed on from something like this with anything by Field Music, but 'Give It Lose
It Take It' is one of their livelier numbers.
New Forest
Like a lot of people, I’m not too bothered with New Year’s Eve. Ideally, I’d attend
someone’s house party, preferably not mine, but for three years running I spent
New
Year’s Eve at the Hawley Arms in Camden. It was all down to the girl who used to live with my partner on the
Isle of Dogs who’d met the proprietors on a beach in Southeast Asia, kept in
touch, and extended a repeated invitation to see in New Year’s at their fashionable establishment. In 2004, rolling into 2005, there had been enough room to spray
a celebratory bottle of champagne around without getting in anyone's way. By
the time 2007 was imminent, there was barely enough room to raise a glass (I decamped to Lisbon with guy who liked ‘The Stars of Track and Field’ and our partners to see in 2008). I
don’t remember much else about that night but I do remember enjoying Elton John’s 'Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting'
playing on the jukebox. (Fortunately, it was a Sunday). Mr Wilkinson advised I
buy the 1974 album Greatest Hits, which I subsequently did. Rather than go through the
laborious process of recording 'Saturday
Night’s Alright for Fighting' from vinyl onto our laptop, in real time, I later
picked up a copy of Goodbye Yellow Brick
Road on CD from a charity shop for a couple of quid, introducing me to the
delights of 'Bennie and the Jets' in
the process. 'Bennie and the Jets' is a
strange song in that it’s made to sound like it was recorded live, which makes
me wonder whether it sounds much different when it is played live.
I
wandered into Beyond Retro in Soho and found something I hadn’t bargained for:
not an item of clothing but a sound. A lot of people would have asked what was playing, but I’m not one for talking to people
unnecessarily so instead memorised key components of the song and looked them
up on the internet when I got home. I didn’t have much to go on: it was sung in
French, sounded like it was more than likely recorded in the 1960s, and exhibited
a one-word chorus that exclaimed ‘Contact!’. It was French chanteuse Brigitte
Bardot, with a little help from Serge Gainsbourg, and I downloaded it from iTunes.
If
not French psychedelic pop then what had I expected to find in Beyond Retro? Not
sure but it won’t have been jeans, because fashion had finally caught up with
itself. That is to say that the slimmer profile appropriated by purveyors of
the post-punk and garage rock revival had begun to permeate the mainstream. Enter
the Levi’s 504/514, a comparatively slim-fitting jean with a tapered leg offering a welcome alternative to the bootcut 507/517/527. The 504 would
probably be considered fairly loose by today’s standards but in the mid-to-late
2000s was about as skinny as you could get. In 2007 I purchased a light blue pair of Levi 504s, which my partner ridiculed, and then a darker pair. In 2008, we flew to New York City and I
picked up a black pair of corduroy 514s for a little more than $20, on sale in
Urban Outfitters, which worked out at around £12. The 514s were
slightly less tapered than the 504s and I had them altered to match.
Slimmer
fitting knitwear was also now easier to come by. I’d been merrily buying my jumpers
from Marks and Spencer since 2005 – specifically their Collezione range – and I
was fine with that, but now I could find things in any high street store I’d be comfortable wearing: Fred Perry, Farah, Uniqlo, even Gap. Peacoats
were all the rage too, whereas a few years earlier I’d been sifting
through army surplus stock to find them. But it wasn’t as simple as that. Men’s
mainstream fashion may finally have been shedding the boyish, post-Britpop
baggy-isms that had preoccupied it for the last ten years but in its place was
something almost schizophrenic. Whereas American groups such as Arcade Fire,
Fleet Foxes, Bon Iver, and even Kings of Leon, were moving towards a leaner,
more rugged sort of look, British groups like Hot Chip, Mystery Jets and
Klaxons dressed like an explosion in American Apparel – tight jeans and baggy
T-shirts in dayglo colours, with crazy hair. Ultimately, the boots,
brogues and beards of our American cousins would win the war, but there was a
very confused period in between where some of the worst offences of the 1980s
threatened to take hold.
I
got wind of 'Lucky Number' by Lene
Lovich somehow – in another shop maybe. It was the brevity of the chorus that
caught my ear: four dissonant chords sung in rapid succession and the ostinato
that comes after. I found a copy of Singles Going Steady by Buzzcocks on CD
for £3 – the same album the chap who got me into Sarah Records had lent to me
back in 1994/95 – and so reacquainted myself with that. The guy who used to own a
pager was now playing guitar in a ska/two-tone covers band. Among other things,
they’d make a good go of 'On My Radio' by
The Selector and 'Gangsters' by The
Specials, and I was encouraged to download them (from iTunes). These four songs
were all released in the year 1979.
NYC
The
laptop I was working from was not my own: it was my partner's and a mere
repository for my music which I would then transfer across to my newly
acquired MP3 player. The problem with interfacing directly with a mobile device
is that you have direct access to everything stored upon it. You don’t even need to
make playlists: just ‘play all’ or select ‘shuffle’ and let the hits keep on
coming. The shuffle function is particularly pernicious. You find yourself continuously skipping tracks until something shows up worthy of your immediate
attention. Furthermore, there’s nothing random about the algorithm that drives the shuffle function. Certain groups will make remarkably frequent
appearances, whereas others will be conspicuous by way of their absence.
So
I stopped using the shuffle function and set about putting together a compilation. I’d have normally done this with a certain amount of pre-planning,
but found it simpler to make it up as I went along: Add to > playlist,
notionally entitled ‘2007’, to be renamed at a later date when I felt suitably
inspired. I listened to my incomplete playlist as I was compiling it, changing
the running order here and there and re-transferring it across to my MP3
player as and when I added new songs. The problem was this mutable approach
did not foment the urgency required to finish it. By the time 'Pull up to the Bumper' by Grace Jones and 'Let’s Dance' by David Bowie had been
appended to the running order, I’d reached what would under usual circumstances
have been my limit – the 80 minutes of time available on a MiniDisc. I had no
problem adding to this duration, but where would I draw the line? At what stage
would I stop subsuming music gathered in 2008 to a compilation intended to
reflect 2007?
As
it was, I felt the playlist worked well, so I decided to defer the tracks I had
left over until the year after. It was not to be. The recording of vinyl
continued to be an issue: the stupid device I had bought necessitated I record
in real time and use software to isolate the individual tracks that then had to
be saved as individual files of questionable quality. iTunes wasn’t as
comprehensive as I’d been led to believe either, so I couldn’t source as much
material as I would have liked. It’s conceivable that the reason why I included 'Pull Up to the Bumper' and 'Let’s Dance' is a direct result of this –
as filler.
I
have identified a number of tracks that might have originally featured on Harmony in my Head in less troubled
circumstances, or could have gone towards a playlist for 2008.
American singer Santigold's second single 'L.E.S. Artistes' had been getting airplay, culminating in an appearance on Jools Holland. Her album, Santogold, was voted 2008's 7th best by the NME, while Rolling Stone deemed 'L.E.S. Artistes' to be the second best single. (MGMT and Beyonce topped the magazines' respective polls.)
'Black Magic'
is off of Jarvis Cocker’s debut solo album Jarvis,
which I have on vinyl. I don’t regret having it on vinyl because it’s got good
artwork, and back then CDs were not much cheaper than their
shellac siblings, so why not?
'Prodigal Son' is taken from Beggars Banquet, the
record that kicked off the Rolling Stones’ golden age. The guy who used to own
a pager first introduced me to it when he brought it to Exmoor with us in 2003,
but it had been overshadowed by Their
Satanic Majesties Request. This seems odd because I’m now of the opinion
that Beggars Banquet is second only
to Exile on Main Street in the
Rolling Stones’ canon.
In
2008 I bought, in fairly quick succession, the Stevie Wonder albums Music of My Mind
and Fulfillingness' First Finale, and
was more satisfied with the latter. I recall being enamoured with 'Boogie On Reggae Woman',
but nowadays I err towards 'Bird of Beauty'.
In
September 2007, I went to see a David Bowie tribute band, at the Grey Horse in
Kingston, called The Thin White Duke. The keyboard player resembled the actor
Ian Smith, who played Harold Bishop in the Australian soap opera Neighbours, but they were actually quite
good and their rendition of 'Cracked Actor' motivated me to add Aladdin Sane to my collection (which I
think is a better album than Ziggy
Stardust, and maybe Bowie’s fourth best after Station to Station, Low
and Heroes).
Back
in April 2007, I picked up a vinyl copy of Tom
Tom Club by Tom Tom Club on a visit down to Plymouth (from Really Good
Records?). It’s a cool record to have and a very good album to put on if
you have people around socially. The Tindersticks tune was another offering from the lad who used to beat me at snooker.
There
were other purchases, most notably records by Black Sheep, Main Source and
Public Enemy. Maybe that’s why I never got around to creating a separate playlist for
2008: not because I was unemployed, spent five weeks in Asia or couldn't be bothered, but as a result of rediscovering a taste for the music I listed to in my youth after wandering into a bar in Cologne playing old-school hip hop.
