Saturday Morning Interview

Here's Tom Waits on the David Letterman show back in 2004, promoting Real Gone (not that he actually mentions it during the course of the interview, you understand); possibly one of the funniest interviews I've ever seen...

Guilty Pleasures, Part 7 – I Heart Muzak

I spend an inordinate amount of time in Pret (sans laptop, as I’d only pour latte into it); one of things I love about the place is the incidental music that's piped into the store (or to use the correct parlance, Muzak). For the most part, it’s a pleasing mash-up of samba, laid back jazz, Vegas lounge and 70s porno movie soundtrack. Intrigued, I asked what it was. “Dunno – we get it from Head Office.” Further enquiries on the Pret website led me nowhere. So there we have it – one of life’s great mysteries: where exactly does the music in Pret come from?

The weird thing about muzak is that it isn’t really designed to be heard, or at the least properly noticed: aural wallpaper, I suppose you’d call it. It’s predominantly designed to create a pleasing ambience in whatever (mostly retail) space it’s used in. Of course, no discussion on ambient music would be complete without a mention of Brian Eno (and in particular David Toop’s book, Ocean of Sound, which contains this immortal line: Anal scents: what was their relation to a cultural shift?). Eno’s best known ambient recordings date from 1978: in the original liner notes, Ambient 1: Music for Airports contained references to Muzak Inc, and was even installed at the Marine Terminal at LaGuardia Airport for a while.

Even though the Ambient series is superb, Eno’s influence in the muzak sphere is vastly overstated. You’re more likely to walk into a department store and hear a recording of clapped out old session musicians murdering Oasis’s Wonderwall than some weighty Eno composition: and to me, that’s half the fun of muzak. It isn’t meant to be all po-faced seriousness, minimalism and heavyweight classical references (I couldn’t imagine going into Pret and sitting down to Gavin Bryars’s The Sinking of the Titanic - great music, but not something to sup your mocha to, unless you’ve got a couple of cyanide tablets to hand); it’s more likely to be Richard Clayderman-inspired piano foppery, or tacky instrumental arrangements of pop standards. And you know something? I love all of it: the more clapped out and cheesy the better.

The best muzak I’ve heard recently is the Beastie Boys album, The In Sound from Way Out, a collection of instrumental music culled from various albums released between 1992-96. Like the soundtrack to my Pret coffee, it’s a collision of influences – jazz, soul, laidback funk – all fed through a peculiarly seventies sensibility. And surprisingly for a bunch of instrumentals it’s funny, and delivered with exactly the right amount of cheese. Even the French sleeve notes are (unintentionally?) demented:

Un des premiers voyageurs de hip hop, il ont connu pour un mix de humeur et style. Avec leur beer swilling et glue sniffing (tactiques Brechtienne) ils ont ecrit leur signature definitive sur le face du rap.

Those crazy French, eh! As above, muzak is best served up without great dollops of silly pretension. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a coffee to finish.

Don’t Forget the (Rubbish) Lyrics

There was a news story a while back here, that aimed to find the worst ever lyric in pop music. From a list that included Oasis’s Champagne Supernova and Razorlight’s Somewhere Else, Des’ree’s Life came out top:

I don't want to see a ghost
It's the sight that I fear most
I'd rather have a piece of toast
Watch the evening news

It’s rubbish all right, but at least it means something (Des’ree has an understandable aversion to ghosts and would much rather stay in of an evening and watch Huw Edwards on the telly box – this I understand. However, comprehension does not make it any less rubbish). However, when bands stray into the realms of the nonsensical whilst pretending all the while to be profound and/or meaningful, that’s when truly bad lyrics come into their own.

How about this from Risingson, by Massive Attack:

Toy-like people make me boy-like

What the blue blazes does that mean?

Here’s a suggestion – it doesn’t mean anything: it’s a stream of clodhopping meaninglessness that just happens to fit the song. What’s worse, it has the effect of turning an excellent song into something that makes your toes curl up with embarrassment – as a result, I simply can’t listen to it any more. And it gets better (this made me laugh for a full five minutes when I first heard it):

Nicer than the bird up in the tree top
Cheaper than the chip inside my lap top

Massive Attack’s major problem seems to be the fact that the music comes first – most of their lyrics sound as if they’re an afterthought, written and recorded with all the care and craft of a Vengaboys song.

I have much the same problem with Interpol. Great music, supremely rubbish lyrics. This is from Slow Hands:

I submit my incentive is romance
I watched the pole dance of the stars
We rejoice because the hurting is so painless
From the distance of passing cars

Uh, hello? And that’s without the vomit inducing:

You make me want to pick up a guitar
And celebrate the myriad ways that I love you.

Or – Sweet Jesus! – this from Obstacle 1:

Her stories are boring and stuff
She’s always calling my bluff

Even the greats get it wrong. Here’s Nick Drake with Man in a Shed:

Please don’t think I’m not your sort
You’ll find that sheds are nicer than you thought.

To round things off with a truly monstrous cringe, here’s Sting from The Police with Walking in your Footsteps:

Hey Mr. Dinosaur
You really couldn't ask for more
You were God's favourite creature
But you didn't have a future.

Move over, Des’ree – I think we’ve found a new winner.

Tagged

Adaddinsane tagged me with this: If you could go back to live in any one year from your lifetime, which one would you choose?

Jesus H Christmas, that’s a bitch of a tag, isn’t it? I was tempted to go all wibbly and post-modern and select a variety of incidents from a variety of different years. Then I went and read Michelle Lipton’s post on the same subject (after which I got something in my eye), and came to the conclusion that doing things that way would be a massive cheat.

So, let’s see: oooh, 1988 looks like a good one to me (screen goes wavy as we enter flashback mode):

I played in a band named after a Russ Meyer film – our collective sound was described (by a friend, no less) as ‘five people all playing in different time zones’. One of the stupidest/best things we ever did was to get drunk prior to a BBC Radio Sussex interview, during which we talked about our (fictitious) love for progressive rock (I seem to remember making a fatuous comment about Iron Butterfly). We then all went to a sweaty Taxi Pata Pata gig, during which the band divided into two warring factions – after some Machiavellian manoeuvring by our guitarist (the phenomenally talented Mister Rose), the singer (and his stolen percussion) got thrown out. Trouble was, after that we couldn’t find anyone else even half as good. So that was that.

Of course hindsight is wonderful, but the way we played and wrote music was quite unlike anything I’ve experienced since. Within the band, there were some fiercely talented players (and me, struggling to keep up mostly, especially when the drummer dipped out of 4/4 time, the gifted swine), but nobody came to rehearsals with even half an idea of where things were going to go or even what we were going to do. Chaos reigned, but in a good way: songs were painstakingly built from the ground up via endless jamming and improvisation – if something sounded good, it went into the mix. And when it all got too tiring (rehearsals until four in the morning were pretty commonplace), we’d launch into our only death metal song just to shake things out.

Once the band split, I auditioned for a local band looking for a bass player. Jesus, were they boring: they wrote songs like this, where the autocratic guitarist would hand out sheet music to his hapless band members and then expect everyone to fall in line. Of course, I didn’t – which is why I lasted for exactly one rehearsal.

If I had to relive 1988 again, I’d slap my collective band mates round the back of their legs and tell them to pull themselves together; we obviously didn’t know a good thing when we were in it, and by the time the in-fighting had broken out, it was too late. The fact that I’ve never found a band since that I wanted to play with speaks volumes, which is perhaps something to do with the way we worked: chaotic, improvised, haphazard, and at times downright experimental. I’m not saying that we sounded great, and listening to demos today it of course sounds a little dated. But we had one helluva lot of fun.

Off on a Tangent, part 18 – Top 10 Basslines

In January/February’s edition of Bass Guitar Magazine (the mag of choice for supra bass nerds everywhere), there was a highly subjective countdown of the ‘40 Best Basslines Ever’. Just to give you a flavour, the most recent entry in the top 10 dated from 1980 (Queen: Another One Bites the Dust – not really my cup of sake, madam). So, to redress the balance, here’s my top 10 (which is also my attempt to win a Trace Elliot 715 combo - hmm, tasty. Send your top 10 to editor@bassguitarmagazine.com and you too could win, but first you got beat this lot – and to be honest, I don’t envy you that job):

Stars and Sons, Broken Social Scene (Charles Spearin) – the first rule of an addictive bassline: ensure that it’s an absolute joy to play. And this is.

Silentland, Material (Bill Laswell) – it’s amazing how little you can make a song out of. Silentland is all clattering, random percussion, a thin, reedy vocal and a busy, harmonic driven bassline that dominates over all else.

Dolores, Slab! (Bill Davies) – to slap or not to slap: that’s the question that has confronted bassists over the last three hundred years. Perhaps there’s something inherently naff about that bright, high in the mix, slappy sound that makes everything sound just too clean, too fresh (there’s no doubt that Mark King is an amazingly talented bassist, but you couldn’t pay me enough to stay in the same postcode as a Level 42 CD). Dolores by Slab! solves this problem with a twin stroke of genius – simply turn up the distortion and make it sound as dirty as you possibly can (coincidentally the criminally underrated Bill Davies is the son of Andrew Davies, the BBC’s adapter-in-chief, although trying to tie this fact into a big, dirty bass sound is probably doomed to failure; however, Slab! did star in an episode of Davis’s A Very Peculiar Practice – perhaps that counts?).

Debaser, Pixies (Kim Deal) – the thing I love about the Pixies is how uninflected their playing is – everything is played straight with no gruesome rock n’ roll flourishes and flashes of spandex so beloved of musicians who just love to show off. There’s no showing off here: four notes are all you need: fer chrissakes, this ain’t feckin’ jazz funk, y’know.

Buoy, Mick Karn (Mick Karn) – nothing screams the 1980s quite so much as the fretless bass, which probably hit its zenith with Mick Karn’s bass playing duties for Japan (when the band reformed as Rain Tree Crow in 1991, Karn’s bass was noticeable by its almost complete absence, allegedly mixed into near-silent oblivion by Sylvian himself). However, when treated with a modicum of restraint and looped backwards, it gives this song a warm, snug cadence. When Sylvian collected twenty years worth of recordings on the retrospective Everything and Nothing, this song shone out like a diamond – and it’s not even one of Dave’s.

Song 2, Blur (Alex James) – Blur’s finest two minutes, entirely driven by a big, dirty bass riff that elbows Graham Coxon’s ineffectual guitar out of its way and stomps all over this song with vicious abandon.

Pure, Siouxsie and the Banshees (Steve Severin) – Steve Severin has never been the most technically gifted of bassists, and most Top 10 lists would pass him by. But who cares? Listening to The Scream again recently, it’s scary to note just how contemporary it all sounds (incredibly, it’s 31 years old this year). Dark, stark and spiky, it’s an album of ideas, and that’s exactly where Severin sits in the scheme of things.

The Perfect Kiss, New Order (Peter Hook) – ignore Bernard Sumner’s amazingly daft lyrics (let’s face it, he’s no Ian Curtis) and concentrate on that bass: there are enough bass lines in this one song to keep a lesser band in business for at least three albums.

Tracy, Mogwai (Dominic Aitchison) – although the touchstone for this song appears to be Sonic Youth’s Providence, there’s no ear bleeding feedback and no 130dB of volume to contend with here. Tracy is essentially one long, lyrical bass line and nothing more.

Moon Over Marin, Dead Kennedys (Klaus Flouride) – you could be forgiven for thinking that most Dead Kennedy’s songs are 60 second 100 mph rants a la In God We Trust (which I love). However, they slow down and loosen up for this, the last track on Plastic Surgery Disasters – that bass sound is raw, loose and bottom heavy, and sounds great.

Saturday Morning Muzak – Sweet Billy Pilgrim

...different from Friday Night Muzak inasmuch as I can’t find a decent clip of a Sweet Billy Pilgrim song anywhere on the net (there are the inevitable YouTube vids, but the quality is patchy to say the least).

However, more important than finding old video clips is the news that SBP’s second album is to be released on David Sylvian’s boutique label Samadisound later this year (2005’s We Just Did What Happened and No One Came was my favourite album of 2008, if that makes any sense). The last I heard, Tim Elsenburg (who started the ball rolling on this thing) was pitching the completed second album to interested parties; Samadhisound obviously liked what they heard, and who’s going to argue with the judgement of a certain Mr D Sylvian? Not me, madam.

I Bin Bizzy

I’ve neglected the blog for nearly a week now, but I have some absolutely sparkling excuses:

* It’s Christmas – which means I have to do a lot of obligatory last minute shopping (have you any idea how difficult it is to buy a hat for a dog?), and then get bladdered at a variety of respectable locations. The best was a couple of years ago, when I got completely soused on free Champagne here (rumour has it that if the Champagne is good enough, you won’t get a hangover – a rumour that, I can report from extensive personal research, is a complete falsehood).

* Last night I found myself here. Why? Difficult to say really. As I tried to figure out exactly why I was surrounded by 3,000 hippies, Hawkwind came on. I was still none the wiser.

Here’s a picture of Huw Lloyd Langton, possibly the skinniest support act I’ve ever seen.


* Man flu, which as everyone knows, is probably the debilitating disease on the face of the planet.

* This.

* Trying to decide what to finish watching/reading first: the first season of Homicide, or the book Homicide by David Simon. That said, I have the first season of The Shield to watch, plus Dexter and the fourth season of The Wire. There’s just too much good stuff out there that needs to be watched right this very minute.

* Inbetween all this assorted nonsense, trying to find some time to rewrite my Red Planet misfire following some stellar script notes from Script Doc. The problem now is that – even after going down the route of writing a detailed step outline – two of my characters have now decided to sleep together, the bastards. How dashed inconsiderate of them.

What with shopping for dog hats, the odd bladdering, a bout of man flu and standing in huge rooms full of hippies, I’m all tuckered out. Time for another episode of The Shield.

Friday Night Muzak - The Go! Team

Just about to go and watch Apparitions (good old Sky Plus). Wish me luck.

Friday Night Muzak - The National

Fiendish Meme

I got tagged by Rachael on this furiously difficult meme, reproduced below (like Mr Campbell, I was hoping to avoid this one. Curses!)

Find a song that sums up what you think it means to be a writer and post the lyrics on your blog and why you've chosen it. NB: It doesn't have to be your favourite song, it just has to express how you feel about writing and/or being a writer. It can be literal, metaphorical, about a particular form or aspect of writing – whatever you want. Then tag 5 others to do the same (reprint these instructions).

Blimey. The best I can think of is this Mclusky lyric (from Collagen Rock) which just about sums up the plight of the perennial spec monkey:

The little kid pissed on the big kid’s porch
He thinks he’s amazing, he’s rubbish of course.

The only problem with this song is that the lyric above is where the writing analogy grinds to a halt, as it further mentions bands with ‘fake tits’. Ahem.

So I’ve alighted on this from Kevin Drew, which is probably something to do with posting off my Red Planet entry:

Well it’s gonna be really hard when we get to the end
It’s gonna be really hard when we get to the end
Well you love the start but it’s really just to begin
It’s gonna be really hard when we get to the end.

But don’t forget what you felt.

If there’s anyone out there who hasn’t been tagged with this thing, then consider yourself ‘it’.

Friday Night Muzak - Mclusky

There's no better way to end the week than with a smidgeon of punk rock and some ubiquitous instrument trashing cats...

Friday Night Muzak - Boris

It's been getting a little too folkified round this joint recently, so to remedy that, here's some Boris with My Neighbour Satan (question: does that mean Boris live at number 665?)

Friday Night Muzak - Broken Social Scene

Friday Night Muzak - Tim Buckley

'Cos essentially I'm an old folkie at heart...

Friday Night Muzak - Slab!

This recently digitised video has just shown up on the Ikon Video site at YouTube, and what a treat it is, from possibly one of my favourite bands of all time. Never mind the fact this is from 1989, People Pie still sounds impassioned and urgent today - tag team it with a video that feels like a shovel round the back of the head, and you have four minutes of extreme viewing pleasure (and one of the heaviest bass sounds ever to grace vinyl). Enjoy!

Friday Night Muzak

Wire's new album Object 47 is out July 15th, so what the hell, it's Friday: here's Eardrum Buzz from 1987.

Off on a Tangent. Part 15 – Broken Social Scene, Shepherd’s Bush Empire, 23rd May 2008.

Some cracked genius has decreed that Shepherd’s Bush tube station is closed for renovation, so getting off at White City, my brother and I had to figure out which way the Empire was (they used to film Crackerjack there, don’cha know). Just then, a bloke in a sari walked past – hmmm: I bet he’s going to the Empire – assumption correct!

The last time I was at Shepherd’s Bush Empire was for Helmet (featuring a stage diving Paul King – how bizarre was that?), and one of the last times my brother was there was to see Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, during whose set he dried his socks on a handy light in the balcony (as well as marvelling at the walking distillery that is Shane MacGowan, who was busy providing back up drunken roars, or ‘vocals’ as he probably calls them).

So, Broken Social Scene: I’m happy to report that BSS have regained a great deal of their ramshackle charm. Last time out, the touring band had been whittled down to an essential core, which meant that they came across more like a seasoned session band rather than a loose multi-headed pop thing, which is what they’re good at. This time round with Amy Millan and various members of the support band The Brunettes in attendance, BSS were back to their shuffling, tumbledown best.

At a guess, I’d say this tour was ostensibly to promote Brendan Canning’s album, Something for All of Us – not that you’d know it, as Kevin Drew leads from the front as he tends to. As Canning’s record isn’t out until July, you can only assume that these guys like touring to the detriment of everything else in their lives, the crazy eejits. That said, the couple of songs they play from Canning’s new record sound fantastic: instead of the usual BSS wall of bleeding sound, we get bass driven melodies with some much needed fuzzy space round the edges.

And then we get Charles Spearin’s Jazz Odyssey: the Do Make Say Think helmer unveiled a mini-collection of instrumentals that attempted to replicate speech patterns using just a gently strummed guitar and a wildly honking saxophone playing every conceivable scale known to man. I guess it gave the other members of the band some time off for a well deserved cup of tea.

Off on a Tangent, part 14: Leslie Feist, Albert Hall, 21st May 2008.

Leslie Feist wanders out onto the stage at the Royal Albert Hall and, faced with 5000 pairs of eyes staring back at her, says: “Oh my god.” And she’s right as well: this isn’t 93 Feet East or the Scala, and no doubt you could cram about a thousand Komedias into this cavernous bit of Victorian silliness. Last time I saw Feist, I was surrounded by about a hundred and fifty fellow hipsters and Alexis Petridis: you could reach out and shake Feist’s hand if you wanted to. Tonight, it’s totally different: 1234 has seen to that. Funny what can happen in a little over twelve months, that iPod advert notwithstanding.

The music veers from infectious indie joy to plaintive solo folk, although having to extend the set to a good 100 minutes does provide for the odd bit of banter that doesn’t really work: an audience hum-a-long falls flat, and some of Feist’s asides are just plain cryptic. In a smaller venue where everything is up close and personal, you can get away with this sort of unforced, eccentric charm. In a venue like the Albert Hall, it just sounds demented.

That said, Feist has obviously had to make some concessions in playing for a large audience, and the most noticeable is the completely berserk shadow show (I kid you not). Two ‘shadow assistants’ create an ever-changing panorama of volcanoes, ships at sea, birds and foliage that are projected behind the band as they do their thing. At one stage, someone climbs a stepladder behind Feist and throws torn up paper everywhere (it’s snowing, see?). Not exactly stadium rattling stuff, but we’re not talking Iron Maiden here: the visuals are great, and are done with a huge amount of lo-fi charm.

Only two things bring a slight downer on proceedings: 1) whoever they were, the support band were utterly dreadful. All I know about them is that they come from New Zealand, and that’s really all I want to know, and 2) a surprising lack of hipsters in the audience. I mean, good god, people were even dancing in the aisles! Whatever next? ;-)

Off on a Tangent, Part 13 - Vast Swathes of Generalisation

Apropos of absolutely nothing at all, here’s Alexis Petridis in a recent Guardian article talking about a Feist gig:

The audience was heavy on hipsters, presumably lured by Feist's long-standing associations with a succession of achingly trendy cult artists... There was an almost tangible air of come-on-impress-us about the audience, their cynicism perhaps compounded by the ads.

Er, are you quite sure about that, Alexis? I was at the very same gig and, whilst it’s nice to be described as a ‘hipster’ (I think), the audience was the usual Brighton melting pot mix of indie kids, scruffy students, people with silly haircuts/stupid hats and old geezers who had dragged their bored looking other halves along. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that the average audience age that night was well over 30.

At that point, The Reminder had not been released in the UK, so presumably everyone present had no doubt been drawn by the previous album Let It Die and Feist’s powerhouse performances with Broken Social Scene. The gig was also completely sold out. That curious breed ‘the hipster’ (how do you spot a hipster anyway? Do they stand under spotlights dressed in polonecks wearing berets?) was noticeable by its absence.

All of which says to me: if you can’t think of what to write, either a) make it up, or b) blandly generalise.

That said, if you want experience vast open plains of generalisation, pick up Made in Brighton, a series of essays on modern Brighton by Julie Burchill and Daniel Raven (who Julie just happens to be married to). Polemicists seem to thrive on generalisations, as the reality of any situation is just too knotty and complex to really get your knickers in a twist over I reckon.

Off on a Tangent, Part 12 - UK Subs, Freebutt, Brighton, May 5th 2008.

The last time I saw the Subs, there were a series of almighty bundles down the front, which meant that the band had to take turns to leap into the crowd to separate various tattooed hooligans from knocking nine bells out of anyone in their immediate vicinity. No-one was hurt, and in all honesty, it was more akin to a bit of playground pushing and shoving than anything even remotely violent. Twenty years later, and not a lot has changed – well, apart from the fact that everyone is much more polite. Watching people stage dive off a stage that is about a foot high is always entertaining, but the difference here is that no-one gets a Doc Marten in the face. “After you.” “No, please, I insist – after you.” Oh, that and the fact that the stage divers all seem to be about fifty years old.

That said, no-one is quite as old as Charlie Harper, who was just about to collect his bus pass when punk kicked off over thirty years ago. He spent much of the evening behind the merchandise stall, endlessly available to any old geezer who fancied a handshake and a chat. Well, rather that than having to stand through the bloody awful support bands. Kill Tim play a pointless amalgam of ska, punk, White Riot and anything else that comes to mind during their 30 minute set, 25 minutes of which is taken up by a panicked string change. The lead singer looked about 12. At one point, my brother (gig photographer par excellence) turned to me and said, “They should be locked in a rehearsal room for the next five years.” That was just after I had my bicep felt by the crazy dreadlocked guy who used to work in Dave’s book store making enquiries about the evening’s ‘muscle quotient’ – very low, my friend, very low indeed.

The Subs crashed through their set in a little under fifty minutes – these guys have been doing this for years, so there’s no hanging about. Actually, that said, only Charlie Harper and Alvin Gibbs survive from the ‘original’ line up, but I guess it hardly matters when your stock in trade are three chord thrashalongs (which sounded surprisingly sprightly for a band just about to enter their fourth decade of playing live). Good fun, though.