LINER NOTES: THE LOCKDOWN TAPES [2020]

 

    1.     Side Street Walker – Dolly Mixture
    2.     Splashing Along – Jesse Garon & The Desperadoes
    3.     Bad Night at The Whiskey – The Byrds
    4.     I am So Blue – The Poets
    5.     Four Women – Nina Simone
    6.     George Hamilton’s Dead – The Golden Dawn
    7.     The Helicopter Spies – Swell Maps
    8.     No (Personal) Connection – Soft Walls
    9.     Stepping Stones – Johnny Harris
    10.   A Ra – Joao Donato
    11.   Nonstop Disco Powerpack – Beastie Boys
    12.   McFlurry – Sleaford Mods
    13.   Dry the Rain – The Beta Band
    14.   French Press – Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever
    15.   Televised Mind – Fontaines D.C.
    16.   In Dreams – Peggy Sue
    17.   Black and Brown Blues – Silver Jews
    18.   Plastic Bird – Galaxie 500
    19.   Sand – Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazlewood
    20.   Old World – The Modern Lovers
    21.   Broadway Jungle – The Maytals
    22.   Glue – Bicep
    23.   Leave the Planet – Galaxie 500

 
 
It happened quickly. On Tuesday, the 17th of March, I was advised that my place of work was likely to close within a week, by the afternoon this became a certainty, then on Wednesday it did. At the same time the Government was advocating that the public avoid communal spaces. The pubs around my way were noticeably quieter, although in central London they were reportedly as busy as ever. Come Friday, pubs, bars, restaurants, cafes and gyms were ordered to shut up shop. You could still walk the streets freely, but then that changed too. On the 23rd it was announced that you could only leave the house for the purpose of buying victuals or for daily exercise. In other words, lockdown. Airplanes continued to offload passengers unchecked.

In December, before COVID-19 officially became a thing, Dolly Mixture reissued the album Demonstration Tapes and also put out Other Music, a collection of alternative takes and unreleased demos. By the end of the month these limited pressings had sold out, but not before I got my hands on a pair. They are splendid records and it was hard to choose just one song for inclusion on my annual compilation. 'Side Street Walker' is as good a choice as any and functions well as a lead-off track.

Lockdown coincided with a bout of unseasonably warm weather. This was something of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, being out of doors in the sunshine kept people's spirits up, on the other it meant that parks and greens were mobbed, which defeated the object. The roads, though, were clear and I cycled into town regularly on a single-speed bike I'd purchased in February. I also found myself going to the supermarket on an almost daily basis, savouring the reduced capacity. By night the streets were deserted and the air smelt fresh. In these respects, lockdown was a rather pleasant experience.

There’s only so much cycling and shopping you can do in a day, under any circumstances, so when my partner was summoned back to school in late April, to supervise the children of key-workers and provide online lesson plans for everyone else’s, I had to contrive alternative ways to while away the days. One idea was to re-watch My Secret World: The Story of Sarah Records, which prompted a series of email exchanges between myself and the chap who introduced me to Sarah Records, who then passed on a link to a website screening Teenage Superstars. This documentary focuses on the independent music scene in Glasgow from 1982 to ’92 and features the likes of Teenage Fanclub, The Pastels, The Vaselines, BMX Bandits. A group called The Shop Assistants are mentioned along the way, and I asked the chap who introduced me to Sarah Records whether they were worth bothering with. He thought not, which surprised me, and instead pointed me in the direction of Jesse Garon & The Desperadoes, an Edinburgh band from the same era. I was indifferent to the song he provided as an example but found another that I liked a lot: 'Splashing Along', the group’s debut single, dating back to October 1986.

I uncovered 'Bad Night at the Whiskey' by The Byrds in April. I was trying to track down one of Roger McGuinn’s better haircuts and found it on a programme called Playboy After Dark, hosted by Hugh Hefner. The Byrds play 'You Ain't Goin' Nowhere' and 'This Wheel's On Fire', the latter taken from the 1969 album Dr. Byrds & Mr. Hyde, a record I had ignored; Chris Hillman and Gram Parsons had recently left The Byrds to form The Flying Burrito Brothers and only McGuinn remained from the original line-up, so I doubted its quality. The band’s performance on Hefner’s show corrected my mistake. Clarence White, who had worked as a session musician on The Byrds’ previous three albums, was by now a fully paid-up member, while John York replaced Hillman on bass and Gene Parsons took over from Kevin Kelly on drums. The Whiskey in question is a club called Whisky a Go Go in West Hollywood, California, where The Byrds once performed badly. We don’t know what was so bad about it because the lyrics pertain to something else entirely.

I’d been furloughed and made the decision to sell some of my lesser played records, effectively so I could purchase others. One of the discs I elected to get shot of was a compilation entitled The Clouds Have Groovy Faces, released via the Bam-Caruso imprint in 1986. As the title suggests, it’s a compendium of 1960s psychedelia, and fairly obscure psychedelia at that, but not the best. 'I Am So Blue' by The Poets is the standout track, so I added it to this playlist for posterity. (Readers of my liner notes might recall that The Poets kicked off my 2005 anthology with 'That’s the Way It’s Got to Be'.)

The Nina Simone tune came later after listening to BBC Radio 6 in the company of my Cornish friend on a Sunday afternoon, drinking cans of lager and a parting shot of Drambuie, which became a kind of (socially distanced) lockdown ritual. I’d always found Nina Simone intriguing but never came across anything by her that especially appealed. In June I did. 'Four Women' is the only song on the 1966 album Wild is the Wind that she wrote herself – a perfectly normal state of affairs within the genre. It’s an emotive tune but delicately rendered, until Nina lets rip with the last line: 'MY NAME IS PEACHES!'

 
Early May, and there is cause for optimism. Despite the Government’s manipulation of the statistics (in which direction remains unclear), reported deaths ‘with’ COVID-19 have been on a downward trend getting on for three weeks. In other news, the gormless article we call our Prime Minister is back at work having spent a week in intensive care, and another two recuperating, after an attack of the covoids.

There are generally two schools of thought concerning the efficacy of lockdown. The first – and it seems to be where most people stand – is that we were a good two weeks late in shutting things down but have managed to contain the virus and less people are now dying. The other is that COVID-19 has been doing the rounds since the turn of the year, many of us have already had it asymptomatically, that the whole thing is a waste of time and we’re going to be worse off for it in the long run; we will be poorer and more people are going to die as an indirect result of lockdown than would’ve otherwise perished from the disease itself.

I’ve just been into Richmond to post Stevie Wonder’s Music of My Mind to someone and to pick up groceries, and it looked like an awful lot of people had the same idea. Yet we’re only in what I’m calling the second phase of lockdown and we’re told there’s still a very real threat lurking out there. Is everybody bored of staying in, or has there been a shift in their thinking?

Placing 'George Hamilton’s Dead' by The Golden Dawn directly after 'Four Woman' works surprisingly well. It’s one of a number of tracks that stood out when re-watching My Secret World: The Story of Sarah Records. I cannot understand why the chap who introduced me to Sarah Records never made me aware of it, for it amuses in a way that satisfies the both of us. The song also dispels the myth that Sarah was all about jangly guitars and heightened sensitivity. (The same goes for 'Dirty Mags' by Blueboy, another new find that I came very close to including on this compilation.)

I’d been meaning to look into Swell Maps for ages, so when Stephen Pastel alluded to them in Teenage Superstars I got on the case. They only recorded two albums, the second being 1980’s …In “Jane from Occupied Europe”, which I’d like to buy on the strength of the title alone. I can’t find a copy on-line, so for now I’ve downloaded 'The Helicopter Spies', the fifth track from its first side. Sounds like Magazine, but better.

In 2020 Soft Walls released Not as Bad as it Seems on vinyl. (You could get it on cassette in 2019.) I pre-ordered the record in December and it arrived late January. This was supposed to tally with seeing them in April but the gig was cancelled outright. Perhaps when all this is over I’ll try and get down to Brighton and see them, because they don’t come to London very often.

 

June: the weather has become unsettled, and it seems that lockdown is entering its third phase. Pubs and cafes are still shut, although some are offering take-outs. Non-essential shops have yet to open but are preparing for it. Museums, galleries, cinemas, theatres, hairdressers and sports and leisure facilities remain resolutely closed. On the streets, however, life appears to have returned to how it once was. A number of factors have contributed to this: a declining infection/death rate; a relaxing of the rules regarding meeting up with other households in an external setting; Dominic Cummings showing a disregard for the regulations and the Government sticking by him, the social contract broken.

Richmond Green is proving to be a particularly pleasing environment. Despite the heavy clouds and occasional rain, it is fairly warm and there’s a pent-up energy about the place. The Cricketers is selling takeaway draught, although financially it makes sense to bring your own. Towards the end of the month the heat begins to build again. While I cycle to Parsons Green to meet up with a couple of my bouldering buddies, half a million people travel down to Dorset to hang around on beaches. That’s the price the Conservatives pay for letting their PR man keep his job.

I don’t really get the point of Twitter, but I’m on there nonetheless. If I wasn’t then I may never have found out about the Scottish composer/arranger/producer Johnny Harris. Someone had been playing the album Movements in their car and tweeted a link to Harris’s impressive cover of 'Paint it Black' by the Stones. Further investigation proved another track, the self-penned 'Stepping Stones', to be more so. It's hard to know what to call this sort of music but there are elements of jazz, rock and even funk, all with a psychedelic undertone. You can imagine it appearing on the soundtrack to a film set in the swinging sixties.

The guy who used to own a pager now owns a boat. Prior to lockdown we saw Das Boot on it and the other day we watched Jaws. After watching Jaws we put on music. The guy who used to own a pager was under the impression that he introduced me to Joao Donato around the period we were listening to the Blue Brazil series (Blue Note in a Latin Groove). That was approximately 20 years ago so it’s possible he did, although of the two of us I have the stronger memory. I don’t recall having heard 'A Ra' so it can go on this compilation.

In between watching films documenting obscure indie-pop and hanging out on boats, I’ve been reading the Beastie Boys Book, its hard-backed 570 pages having remained undisturbed on my shelf since December 2018. The parts that reference the trio’s final record, Hot Sauce Committee Part Two, made me realise how little I’ve listened to it, which is something else I’ve put right. The album's concept was to use invented samples that were subsequently credited to fictional songs by imagined artistes. 'Nonstop Disco Powerpack' is the exception, which is a shame because it’s the best track on the album.

It was my birthday the other week so I’ve got the Sleaford Mods’ compilation All That Glue to listen to, personally delivered by one of the chaps from Eel Pie Records. I’m familiar with about half the double-album's content. I know and like 'Fizzy', and contemplate including it on this compendium, but decide that the novelty of either 'Snake It' or 'McFlurry' would be more appropriate, and opt for the latter.
 

Das Boot

Pubs have been permitted to re-open as of the 4th of July. Some will but others won’t, perhaps because they’ve not been given enough notice to sufficiently prepare, or maybe because they want to see if it’s worth the hassle. Many people are against it. Others – myself included – are enjoying drinking in parks, on greens, in gardens, and feel ambivalent. Moreover, this latest liberty comes with terms and conditions: table service, no standing, strict social distancing and prodigious amounts of hand sanitizer.

A few weeks before lockdown, Mr Wilkinson and I were climbing at Urban Ascent near Parsons Green when a song played we both recognised but couldn't name. It came to me later: 'Dry the Rain' by The Beta Band. Smashing tune and the way it starts off allows it to follow on from Sleaford Mods quite freely.

'French Press' by Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever sounds like Shaun Ryder singing over War on Drugs if Shaun Ryder could actually sing a bit. They’re an Australian 5-piece incorporating three guitarists, not counting bass, and 'French Press' is the title track of an EP they issued in 2017. I discovered them at the beginning of April by way of another track of theirs called 'Cars in Space'. I preferred 'French Press' and decided early on that I wanted this tune to appear further down the running order, due to its uplifting nature (musically at least; the lyrics concern estranged siblings).

Since the release of their debut LP a little more than a year ago, Fontaines D.C. have told us they’ve been kicking back to the sounds of the Beach Boys. You wouldn’t know it from the single 'Televised Mind', nor from the two singles that preceded it. 'Televised Mind' is a ridiculously simple ditty, but I kept hearing it on the radio throughout the summer and was slowly won over by its sheer doggedness.

I happened upon 'In Dreams' by Peggy Sue listening to the radio with my Cornish friend just days before lockdown. Peggy Sue are in fact two ladies from Brighton, and their music sounds a bit like Dolly Mixture as if produced by Phil Spector. As with 'French Press', it occurred to me that this tune would be better placed towards the end of this compilation, marking the point at which I begin to wind things down.

The actor and musician John Henry Westhead – best known for playing 'Olaf the Russian Metalhead' in the art-house comedy film Clerks – lives somewhere around my way. I know this because he’s posted songs relating to Isleworth on YouTube, and there’s footage of his band, The Shed Dwellers, paying tribute to the late David Berman down at the Cross Lances in Hounslow. This is how I came by the song 'Black and Brown Blues' by Berman’s old band, Silver Jews.

Dissatisfied with my Levi’s denim jacket I started looking on eBay for another. I searched specifically for the slimmer fitting 70500, identified one that was 'new with tags', made an offer, was counter offered, paid for it and then sold my 72334 to someone in Aberdeen for the same price – a neat piece of business. For some reason I associate denim jackets with a certain type of indie music, and I ended up mulling over the gaps in my knowledge regarding the group Galaxie 500 and then buying their second album, On Fire. An ostensibly dull turn of events, but it's worth pondering how one seemingly innocuous thing can lead to another. Consider also the possibility that anyone reading this might go about acquiring On Fire and be equally affected by the song 'Plastic Bird' as I am, all because I fussed over my wardrobe while on furlough.

Actually, by the time I received the denim jacket I was back at work. This coincided with the Government postponing a number of lockdown-easing measures scheduled to start at the beginning of August and simultaneously introducing this thing called Eat Out to Help Out. I didn’t think anything of it back then, but as the rate of infection slowly began to rise, and quarantine measures were introduced for people returning from selected foreign territories, the absurdity of the scheme became retrospectively apparent.

Apropos of nothing, I decided to put on a CD my partner gave to me some years ago: These Boots Are Made For Walkin' - The Complete MGM Recordings by Lee Hazlewood. The songs therein predate Hazlewood’s partnership with Nancy Sinatra but include some that were later re-recorded with her. 'Sand' is one such tune, appearing first on 1966’s The Very Special World of Lee Hazlewood, featuring the vocal of Suzi Jane Hokum, and in 1968 on Nancy & Lee. The collaboration with Nancy Sinatra edges it, not so much because of her intonation but more the song’s bizarre arrangement and orchestration. Producer and guitarist Billy Strange was responsible for this, and I assume it's his deranged guitar playing backwards during the instrumental breakout.

In August I resolved to sell my copy of The Original Modern Lovers and replace it with The Modern Lovers, the version released in 1976 five years prior to the so-called original. It’s generally accepted that the ’76 iteration is the definitive article, and I wouldn’t disagree with that. 'Someone I Care About', 'Pablo Picasso' and 'Old World' are all missing from the Kim Fowley produced record, although he does give us 'I Wanna Sleep in Your Arms', but it’s John Cale’s superior production that makes the real difference.

Frederick 'Toots' Hibbert passed away on 11 September 2020, the same day as stage 13 of what turned out to be an enthralling edition of the Tour de France. At some point in the stage Stefan Kung, wearing number 54, was out front, which got ITV presenter Gary Imlach thinking: if Kung finished first and Dries Devenyns, sporting number 46, came in second, it would present the perfect opportunity to play out with '54-46 Was My Number'. In the event, Daniel Martinez won the stage and so 'Broadway Jungle' was used instead – or 'Dog War' as it was originally known when The Maytals cut the tune in 1964. Unbeknown to them, the track was leased to Island Records who retitled it 'Broadway Jungle', credited it to The Flames and put it out in the UK. The new name stuck but has been re-attributed to (Toots &) The Maytals whenever it's appeared on any ska and reggae anthology.
 

The summer ended abruptly: temperatures pushing 30 degrees one weekend, scraping 15 the next. Nights drawing in, falling leaves, jumpers on. If that wasn't bad enough the Government imposed a ten o'clock curfew on all pubs and restaurants and made it a requirement that customers wear masks until they sat down at their table. Such measures made little sense. If public houses were that dangerous then they shouldn't have been open at all, and the curfew merely encouraged people to head out an hour or so earlier. What's more, because pub owners were overly mindful of the new arrangements, everybody was forced to leave at exactly the same moment, whereupon they loitered in streets and maybe accepted an invitation to continue drinking back at someone's house – the night was young, after all.

On the 24th of September – the date these restrictions came into effect – I tried to have a drink with my partner in the pub over the road. Twenty minutes after our arrival we were still trying, and so departed. As we waited, 'Glue' by Bicep came on. My Cornish friend introduced me to this tune in early March and it took a while to decide how much I really liked it. I understood that this was dance music, but was it too repetitive? In the end it grew on me, and there’s a wistful quality to it that felt pertinent to the situation.

And I was going to leave it at that, but I like odd numbers and fancied more Galaxie 500 – undoubtedly the discovery of the year. A lot of this has to do with the rhythm section: Damon Krukowski’s irregular drum patterns and Naomi Yang’s counter-melodies on bass. I’ve heard On Fire described as an ‘ambient’ rock record, and it’s not a bad way of putting it – certainly more indicative than terms like slowcore or dreampop. 'Leave the Planet' is mellower than 'Plastic Bird', and shorter too, which is a good note to end on before we're all locked down again.

[Listen to here.]

LINER NOTES: FEELGOOD BY NUMBERS [2004]

1.  Out on the Weekend – Neil Young
2.  Grand Fraud – Weird War
3.  Feelgood by Numbers – The GO! Team
4.  Sister Mamie – Yusef Lateef
5.  Thoughts and Words – The Byrds
6.  Think – The Rolling Stones
7.  Help Me Girl – Eric Burdon & The Animals
8.  All Summer Long – The Beach Boys
9.  Good to Me – Otis Redding
10.  Vonal Declosion – Stereolab
11.  Bag of Jewels – Lou Donaldson
12.  Elfin Orphan – Scene Creamers
13.  New Rose – The Damned
14.  Looking at You – MC5
15.  Wash in the Rain – The Bees
16.  Roadrunner – The Modern Lovers
17.  Marquee Moon – Television
18.  Reptilia – The Strokes
19.  Deeper Into Movies – Yo La Tengo
20.  Ramp of Death – Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks
21.  Goin' Back – The Byrds

2004: A terrible year for music. Debut albums by Razorlight, Kasabian, The Killers, Keane. Snow Patrol are milking last year’s record for all its worth, Bloc Party have come into being, and the release of their sophomore LP seems to have dashed any hope I had that The Libertines might jack it in.

Music is no different to any other art form. Just as bad novels, bad movies and bad paintings find a market, so too do bad songs. And just as it requires a deeper reading to appreciate good literature, good cinema or good art, so it is with music. One more than likely accepts that Vladimir Nabokov is a better novelist than, for instance, John Grisham (no disrespect to John Grisham), or that the movies of Stanley Kubrick are generally superior to those of Steven Spielberg (no disrespect to Steven Spielberg), and that Andy Warhol is a more interesting artist than Damien Hirst… so why feel uncomfortable with the idea that Franz Ferdinand aren't nearly as good as Talking Heads? That’s not say it matters if to your ears The Libertines are the same thing as The Strokes. Just be aware that there’s more to music than the ability to write vaguely catchy tunes coupled with a propensity for taking hard drugs.

The problem with contemporary rock music is that the music itself is often deemed to be less important than a band’s image or a musician’s personality. Rock and roll has never been a purely auditory phenomenon, but there was a time when groups actually put some effort into what they were doing, learnt their craft, paid their dues. When Keith Richards and Mick Jagger appeared before court on drug related charges in 1967, the Rolling Stones had released no less than SEVEN albums. Even if we allow that Richards, Jones and Jagger were probably getting high well before that, they’d existed as a drug free unit long enough to establish themselves as viable artists. With a lot of bands these days you get the feeling they’d rather not bother recording any music at all.

For the mainstream act the situation is different. More often than not they’re in it for the fame and adulation alone, in cahoots with their record company who probably take an even more cynical view about the whole business than they do. Together, they work to divest their product of anything approaching artistic integrity. To ensure that the unsuspecting listener doesn’t call out the cheap pop tune for the superficial drivel it often is, all aural distractions are erased. Everything is invested into the melody, which is typically conveyed via the vocal component of the song. Frequencies are equalised, textures are compressed, rhythm instruments are buried deep within the mix. You may struggle to identify the characteristic sound of any specific instrument whatsoever. The idea is to create something that is completely benign. Why? Because the music industry doesn’t consider that their art should demand anything of its audience other than slavish devotion. As far as they’re concerned, popular music serves much the same purpose as sport.

It’s mid-March. Myself, the guy who used to own a pager, the former Cohabitant from Brighton and his friend Charlie (also from Brighton) are leaving Monterey, California, in a Chrysler Sebring Convertible. We all have monstrous hangovers after an evening spent drinking more than we intended to at the London Bridge Pub down on Fisherman’s Wharf. Checking out of our motel was a mission in itself. No sooner had we managed it, we had to get one of cleaners to let us back into our room after realising we’d left something of value in there. I then had to deal with booking flights from Las Vegas to San Francisco (in person, from a travel agent). Finally, we paused to pick up supplies in a wonderfully spacious and air-conditioned supermarket before pushing on along the Cabrillo Highway to begin the coastal drive south.

What to listen to. How about Harvest by Neil Young? I’ve owned this album for almost a year, but it goes without saying I’ve never listened to in anything resembling my present environment. 'Out on the Weekend' kicks in and it becomes rapidly apparent that Big Sur was designed with country rock specifically in mind.

Big Sur

In the autumn of 2003 the former cohabitant from Brighton informed me of his plan to spend the spring of 2004 travelling around the United States of America. I received his proposition – for I was invited – with a restrained avidity. Although employed (at Nikon, since you ask) I was recovering from the economic damage my own Asian travels had inflicted upon me. At the same time I was itching to hit the road again, if only for a couple of weeks.

I made arrangements to meet the former cohabitant at a specific time and place in San Francisco, invited along the guy who used to own a pager, and then applied for credit. Less than a month prior to our intended departure I booked two return tickets at £240 a head, leaving from Gatwick Airport and only slightly soured by having to change planes in Charlotte, which sounds cheap, and was, but not ridiculously so. The economic conditions as they were, it’s possible that if I’d been more on the ball I could have found a cheaper deal still.

I’m in Haight-Ashbury browsing through records in Amoeba Music with the guy who used to own a pager, who’s off enquiring about lap steel guitars. I’m looking for If You Can't Beat 'Em, Bite 'Em by Weird War because I’ve not been able to find a copy in London. I am successful. Just as 'Out on the Weekend' is the first song off of Harvest, 'Grand Fraud' is the first song (proper) on If You Can't Beat 'Em, Bite 'Em. I find that such incipient energy is often transferable when compiling playlists.

Thunder, Lightning, Strike by The Go! Team hadn’t been released at this juncture, but I didn’t want to overload the front end of my compilation with tunes exclusively related to my two week vacation. My lady friend, the guy who passed out in Debenhams and I went to see The Go! Team play at The Spitz (supported by Field Music) in October. The song 'Feelgood by Numbers' reminds me of something Vincent Guaraldi might have composed for a Charlie Brown TV special. It’s an instrumental track which why is I’ve followed it up with jazz, although the tone of 'Sister Mamie' by Yusef Lateef is very different: a hard-bop groove with eastern textures. 'Sister Mamie' recalls our return to Lynton, North Devon, in the August, but it’s the only tune that does. The dye had been indelibly cast a year earlier and I will forever associate that place with the Rolling Stones' albums Their Satanic Majesties Request and Beggars Banquet.

We’ve not long left San Francisco, by way of an unplanned detour through downtown Oakland, and the guys from Brighton are flicking through their CDs. We are driving to Yosemite National Park on the first leg of a four-day road trip that will take us to Las Vegas (the long way around). After mildly enjoying Donovan’s greatest hits, it materialises that the guys from Brighton have with them Younger than Yesterday by The Byrds. I’ve played this record a lot, but I’m not tired of it. The song 'Thoughts and Words' now replaces 'Have You Seen Her Face' as my favourite – both are Chris Hillman's tunes. We will listen to the album again on the final leg of our journey: the drive from Santa Barbara to Las Vegas through the Mojave Desert.

Turns out I’ve not given Aftermath by the Rolling Stones the attention it deserves. 'Mother’s Little Helper', 'Lady Jane' and 'Under My Thumb' all made it onto my Best of the Rolling Stones MiniDisc compilation, but I’d left it at that. My loss, because there’s at least 'Think' to (re)consider. I’d imagined that a golden age era Stones’ album would be more suited to driving through California, but there’s something about Aftermath that seems to suit the mood – an innocence perhaps, or a particular type of sound. Whatever it is, it sits very nicely alongside Eric Burdon’s 'Help Me Girl', which was released the same year (1966 – although what we're really listening to is The Very Best of Eric Burdon & The Animals).

Coruscations of light bounce upward off the Pacific Ocean blue. Neil Young’s Harvest has drawn to a close. What’s next? The Beach Boys of course; All Summer Long. It may only be March but it looks and feels like July. The guy who used to own pager, who has had to do all of the driving on account of being the only one of us with a driving licence, thinks the song's hilarious.

Having exhausted my parents’ supply of 1960s and '70s rock and roll, as well as my father’s jazz, I’ve made a start on my mother’s limited supply of Atlantic Soul. (I never really understood why my parents decided to abandon their record collection. They only ended up replacing records with CDs, and the sound quality will have only suffered.) It’s The Soul Album by Otis Redding that’s caught my eye. It could well be that I’ve recently watched the film Catholic Boys (a.k.a. Heaven Help Us) for the hundredth time, which features the Otis Redding track 'I’ve Been Loving You Too Long', although that’s not on this record. My favourite track on The Soul Album is 'Good to Me', a similarly slow and plaintive tune. Within a year I will have purchased a copy of Otis Blue.

          Margerine Eclipse [sic] is the first Stereolab album that’s not lived up to my heightened expectations. Let it be known that there was never any question that something from it wouldn’t appear on my annual compendium, and it’s a very good record by anyone else’s standards, but I sense that the premature death of 'groop' member Mary Hansen in late 2002 has, understandably, taken its toll.

The quintet Lou Donaldson brought together to record Midnight Creeper in 1968 is quite something: Blue Mitchell on cornet, Lonnie Smith on the organ, George Benson on guitar, Idris Muhammad on drums, and the man himself playing alto sax. It’s another one of my father’s records, although funkier than most of the jazz he used to own. Jazz-funk is a mysterious genre looked down upon by some, but the calibre of the musicians that have indulged speaks for itself: Donald Byrd, Grant Green, Jimmy Smith, Herbie Hancock, Ramsey Lewis – even Miles Davis to some extent.

For a brief moment Weird War became Scene Creamers, subsequently reverting to their original name when an obscure French graffiti collective claimed legal ownership. Ironically, the album released under the Scene Creamers name is one of Weird War’s best (and if you google ‘Scene Creamers’ those Gaelic scribblers are nowhere to be seen). Released in January 2003, while I was bumming around in Southeast Asia, I Suck on That Emotion should have more rightly featured on the previous year’s compendium, but I didn’t get hold of it until late in the year and continued to listen to it well into 2004. [Incidentally, Ian Svenonius dedicated their performance of 'Elfin Orphan' at the Highbury Garage to me after I asked that they play it in return for the beer I bought him. (He’d actually wanted Grenadine, but it was off.) I hadn’t meant to hold him to ransom but the barman insisted he pay for his drink, despite the fact that Scene Creamers/Weird War were headlining, and Ian didn’t have any cash on him.]

Yosemite

The origins of punk have been attributed to innumerable sources. Did it begin with the Velvet Underground, MC5, The Stooges, The Sonics, The Seeds, The Monks, Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers, Dr. Feelgood, 'You Really Got Me' by The Kinks, 'Seven and Seven Is' by Love or 'Louie Louie' by The Kingsmen? No, it started with jazz. Or, more specifically, bepop.

The precursor to bepop was swing and big band jazz, which was driven by the individual, a bandleader or arranger: Count Basie, Glenn Miller, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman. Early rock and roll was similarly individualistic: Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Bill Haley, Elvis Presley. Bepop was interested in advanced harmonics, rhythmic intricacies, modal chords, with less emphasis on melody. There was no longer any need for a large orchestra and so the role of bandleader was diminished. The beat combos that resulted – quintets and quartets mostly – were therefore more democratic. It was customary for each musical component to contribute not just towards the rhythm but also improvise a solo. The nominal leader of these combos might write a piece with a specific instrument, or even musician, in mind. The song was no longer the sum of its parts but a grouping together of singular strands, recorded live, be it in the studio or in a club or concert hall, where it is left to the individual musician to regulate the volume of their instrument. There was no technical Svengali sat in a control room, twiddling knobs, deciding what sound should predominate, emphasising melody and/or dampening rhythm: all sound was equal.

Despite not being literally recorded live, punk aspires to very much the same thing. The idea is to allow the timbre of each musical constituent to flourish in an attempt replicate a live experience. Less emphasis might be placed on a song’s vocal, and the bass line is as likely to carry the melody as the lead guitar. Traditional hierarchies are disposed of. This is music following the path of least resistance, a communion between the artist and the listener.

'New Rose' by The Damned was purportedly recorded in a day. Released in October 1976, it has the dubious honour of being British punk’s first ever record – dubious because I imagine that sort of thing brings with it a certain amount of pressure. Fortunately, 'New Rose' does not disappoint. I borrowed it from the friend who crashed to the floor in Debenhams, who owned the greatest hits compilation album The Light at the End of the Tunnel.

My first go at MC5 had not been a great success. I purchased Teen Age Lust in 1998/99 only to find the sound quality wanting. The album is a live recording of a gig they played in 1970, which goes some way towards explaining that. I was careful not to make the same mistake twice and opted against buying MC5’s seminal debut, Kick Out the Jams, also recorded live, and instead purchased Back in the USA, which they cut in GM Studios, Detroit. My opinion of MC5 improved immeasurably and I was able to appreciate why some have claimed them to be a progenitor of punk.

I can’t recall how I came by 'Wash in the Rain' by The Bees but it would be a while yet before I picked up their album. It’s possible that I heard it on the radio and then bought it as a 7” single, but I can’t be sure. I’ve acquired a lot of music this way, where I’ve not known enough about a band to chance it on an actual album but I’ve been desirous of owing a particular song. My uncertainty stems from the fact that singles are not really a thing anymore, and all mine are stashed away somewhere. It’s too much bother to manually recalibrate my record player to play at 45 rpm, so I rarely do.

It’s Friday night in San Francisco and we’ve ended up back at Delirium, the same club we went to on Tuesday. That evening they played an eclectic mix of classic rock, garage, new wave, heavy metal, punk and indie – ‘A Rock & Roll Party for the 20th Century’. Tonight they’ll be spinning punk and new wave. I get talking to the DJ and put in a request for 'Terry Waite Sez' by The Fall, which he fulfils. Between that and the Sex Pistols, The Stooges, The Cramps and The Clash, something catches my ear. I consult the DJ to find out what it is: 'Roadrunner' by The Modern Lovers.

Proto-punk – designation after the fact. The Modern Lovers took their cue from The Velvet Underground, so how’s that supposed to work? The Modern Lovers was the first album I bought once I got back to Blighty (although I bought the wrong version: The Original Modern Lovers, produced by Kim Fowley and not John Cale). If this was indeed punk then it was my sort of punk. My problem with a lot of punk is that it’s quite shouty. I can’t listen to the Sex Pistols because of Johnny Rotten’s voice, and when I’ve made forays in other directions I’ve come up against the same problem. I really wanted to like 'Holiday in Cambodia' by The Dead Kennedys but couldn’t get past the vocal. It’s the same with The Ramones, although I must confess to being disappointed with them generally. Towards The Clash I remain ambivalent. And then there’s the clothing. I don’t really go in for all that ripped denim, heavy leather and graphic sloganeering.

I suppose this is why I’ve always erred towards new wave. Whether Television qualifies as new wave is debatable – post-punk at least, which almost amounts to the same thing. I knew 'Marquee Moon' was a great tune and took myself to Richmond Library to follow up on my interest. Unfortunately, the album Marquee Moon left me slightly cold. As with Big Star’s Third (aka Sister Lovers) its reputation may have adversely preceded it.

A guy I worked with complained that the first single off of The Strokes’ second album sounded like the theme tune to the children’s television show Rainbow. I could see where he was coming from. The second single, 'Reptilia', was an improvement, but I still had no intention of buying The Strokes’ new LP. In the end it was my lady friend who decided that Room on Fire was worth a punt, and so 'Reptilia' made it onto this compilation.

'Delirium'

In June our landlord decided he wanted to sell up. Putting aside the rigmarole of having to find a new place to live – as well the loss of the Royal Oak as our local – it wasn’t such a bad thing. Douglas Bader House had always been a dark and isolated tenement with too little furniture. We found a top-floor flat in Isleworth with an iron staircase leading up to it, which lent a certain frisson. Down the road was St. John’s Stores, around the corner Isleworth Train Station, and The Red Lion a few minutes’ walk away. We were better off.

Yo La Tengo released the album I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One as far back as 1997, which was before I had even heard of them. I’ve long since forgotten what it was that brought them to my attention, but theirs is another album loaned from Richmond library. It’s a great record encompassing a variety of styles; I found the noise-pop of 'Deeper into Movies' to be of particular interest. On end of the same MiniDisc I recorded this CD onto, I added a couple of tunes from Pig Lib by Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks, his second album since disbanding Pavement. 'Ramp of Death' is included here.

The last record I purchased before our move was The Notorious Byrd Brothers, also the last Byrds’ album to involve David Crosby (discounting 1973's eponymously titled Byrds, which brought the original line-up back together one last time). He'd fallen for the whole trippy hippy thing in a big way, much to Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman’s chagrin, who were by now exploring more traditional forms of American music: bluegrass, country and western, Appalachian folk. They also wanted to record the Goffin-King composition 'Goin’ Back', which Crosby thought was somehow beneath him. He had this smutty song called 'Triad' knocking about and wanted to cut that instead, so McGuinn and Hillman booted him out of the band.

Intended as a celebration of my trip to The States, these last three tracks were not present on the original MiniDisc. I appended them after making the transition to MP3, partly because they were discovered too early for inclusion on the following year’s compendium but also because they raise the overall quality of this one. I hope that you concur.

[Listen to here. To find out more about the 'American Adventure' go here.]