Just dug this one out #30: English Settlement by XTC

Posted on May 8th, 2009 by Andy

I’m not entirely sure how I became a fan of XTC but for a very short period of time in the early 80s I was. At the time I was listening to, almost exclusively, heavy metal. The two exceptions (that spring to mind) were XTC and Kate Bush. I’ve regularly listened to Kate over the years since but very rarely revisit XTC. My love of XTC covered their Black Sea, English Settlement and Mummer albums, at which point it pretty much stopped. I do own a copy of Skylarking but honestly couldn’t name a track off it and suspect it was bought second-hand in a fit of nostalgia in the late 80s and filed away barely listened to.

English Settlement always felt like the archetypal XTC album: It had their best single (Senses Working Overtime); Their most recognisable cover (the Uffington White Horse); and from title to tracklisting has that Englishness that was XTC.

The last time I gave English Settlement a listen was in 2006 when I took my first (and only) shot at NaNoWriMo. My awful (I mean really awful) novel, Plan 4, featured a chapter where the three protagonists decide to hunt down the chalk carving on the front of XTC’s English Settlement and spend a night there.

“Are you sure it’s a real thing Anna? I mean…they could have just made it up”, Spirit was not convinced of the plan as yet.

“Of course it exists, it’s a chalk carving.”

“But it’s not a photo, it’s only a drawing, maybe they just doodled it.”

“For fucks sake Spirit, it is real!”

(You get the idea with that)

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I remember being disappointed in it back then, so disappointed that when my characters reached the White Horse they chose to listen to My Bloody Valentine. Listening today though it seems so much better than then. There are annoyances and it occasionally shows its age but for the most part it stands up pretty well, I’ll probably not leave it three years before I listen again.

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Just dug this one out #28 – Hanoi Rocks

Posted on March 28th, 2009 by Andy

OK – I haven’t really dug anything out…but a sudden wave of uncontrollable nostalgia inspired me to post this to the Galaxie 500 Mailing List – which got (mostly) the whistling silence it’s astonishing off-topic-ness deserved. I thought it really ought to live here where it can offend no one…

Back in the early 80s (I might have mentioned a few hundred times before) I was a huge metal fan – but the metal I liked wasn’t the tight-trousered, eye-liner-wearing glammy type; I liked my metal a bit grubby. But as a music obsessive I considered any band that passed through Guildford as fair game which meant that I saw lots of bands that it would be cool to boast about but I barely remember the gigs (e.g. The Jam, Buzzcocks (I think), SLF, Pretenders) and lots more forgettable crap (or crap I wish I could forget (Gary Moore, Budgie, Toyah)).

Anyway Hanoi Rocks came through town and they wore girly-clothes and make up, they were not all hard and manly like I liked my rock, but we went along anyway expecting to snigger, and probably heckle. But they were awesome – they rocked so hard, they played for hours, Michael Monroe, the lead singer, looked great (something I probably wasn’t ready to admit out loud at the time…I liked my rock stars like Lemmy remember!) and played a saxophone, and clambered up the PA and just gave us an awesome show. Most of the audience left before the second encore, I could never figure out why, which just made the ending so much more special because we got 20 minutes more just for the 50 or so of us who stuck around. I think they covered Train Kept a-Rolling.

I bought albums but they were disappointing and I never saw them again – shortly afterwards Razzle, the drummer, died in that Motley Crue related accident and it seemed that my Hanoi Rocks love was destined to be all about a couple of hours at Surrey University in 1984.

So today, on the back of this nostalgia trip I found myself at YouTube thoroughly enjoying the stacks of Hanoi Rocks videos from that period and seeing exactly why this gig is one that I never forgot. I’m about to reacquaint myself with a couple of albums but am expecting to be disappointed.

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Lux Interior

Posted on February 5th, 2009 by Andy

Lux Interior, Cains Ballroom, 1980

There was a time in the early/mid 1980s after Fast Eddie Clarke left Motorhead and before The Pogues released Rum, Sodomy and the Lash were I was lost in a frustrated grasp to find a musical place for myself. For a short time during that aimless wander through the obscure and unloved musical movements I decided that maybe ‘psychobilly’ could be where I settled. I went to three or four gigs at the Clarendon in Hammersmith and the energy and noise was exceptional, I saw The Guana Batz and The Meteors and a myriad of lesser (in fame and quality) bands. I sadly never got to see The Cramps but they were the band that defined that music more than any other, and I suspect that if I had seen them maybe I would have taken a different course.

The Cramps albums got filed away and to be honest I’ve listened to very little since then and had pretty much forgotten that nine months or so until I read today that Lux Interior had passed away and I was filled with a desire to hear The Cramps (thanks last.fm) and a regret that I never did see them live.

R.I.P. Lux Interior

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Buddy Holly

Posted on February 3rd, 2009 by Andy

Today is 50 years since Buddy died in that plane crash and given that I’m not yet 50 obviously his death wasn’t really something that had any sort of impact on me…but his music did. I grew up with a lot of Buddy Holly, my dad had a pile of original albums (that I think he acquired from his brother and that are now in my posession/shed). There was a period in the mid 70s where me and school friend Dave would spend an awful lot of our breaks talking about Rock ‘n’ Roll. I remember we smuggled a cassette player in on one school sports day and sat on the field listening to some great music during the events we weren’t required to be a part of.

Dave, Greg and myself met up in Woking to go and see The Buddy Holly Story and then got chased around the streets of Woking by some hooligans – TheyDave and Greg lived in Woking so I dived on a train at the station and they probably got chased home. I enjoyed the film if not the after film entertainment.

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Just dug this one out #21 – Be Seeing You by Dr Feelgood

Posted on August 31st, 2008 by Andy

My dad used to volunteer at the local St John’s Ambulance book sales and for a while in the late 70s and early 80s you’d always find a pile of records at these sales that had clearly been donated by some local, music industry insider. Stacks of unplayed promos and, being a St John’s Ambulance sale, I was probably the only person under 50 and therefore got the opportunity to plough through and fill my boots without any competition. A flick through my record collection even now would reveal a fair few with “Promo only – not for resale” stickers.

One such record was a 7″ single of She’s A Windup/Baby Jane by Dr Feelgood and, like a fair few of the records I got from the sales, it went a good many weeks unplayed. A school friend was a huge Feelgood fan and so I offered it to him because he would obviously appreciate it more. He said he would gladly take it off my hands but insisted that before I even thought about giving it away that I really ought to listen to it so I went home that afternoon and had another one of those life-changing moments – the awesome opening guitar riff just blew me away…I still have the single and treasure it.

Suddenly I was a Feelgood fan and ploughed backwards through their catalogue, went to gigs (well into the 80s) and discovered Wilko Johnson (who had left the band before I discovered them) and saw him even more and even longer. Even now I occasionally dip my feet into that river and get a buzz that is more than just nostalgia.

Be Seeing You probably isn’t my favourite Feelgood album, the lyrical obsession with sex gets tiresome and borderline misogynistic (moreso than on any of the other albums) most notably I guess in the song that got me into them. Some of the songs are pedestrian or formulaic (”That’s It, I Quit”, “Sixty Minutes of Your Love”, “As Long as the Price is Right”) but in Windup, “Looking Back” and “Baby Jane” there is so much energy and thrill that I understand what happened to me when I put on that single all those years ago.

A few years later my life was changed again by a record I found at the St John’s Ambulance sales…REM’s Reckoning.

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Just dug this one out #20: Me & Mr Ray by Miracle Legion

Posted on August 12th, 2008 by Andy

Ken turned me on to Miracle Legion and I picked up a CD of Me & Mr Ray at an indie record shop in Epsom and over the next months filled in a collection. This is probably my favourite though (actually…no…thinking about it now Surprise Surprise Surprise is much, much better) , probably because it was the first album I’d heard and because it was just Mark and Mr Ray when we saw them that first time being supported by The Breeders.

It’s another album (and this series is filling up with them) that has slipped off my radar so it was quite peculiar going back to it – it still sounded good but Mulcahy’s delivery grated after a while. The songs I remembered liking first time round, “Ladies from Town” and “If She Could Cry” I felt less comfortable with than I had back then but “You’re the One Lee” and “Old and New” still sounded exceptional (although the woo woo woos at the beginning of the latter had me leaning for the skip button).

Brian recorded the demos for the first album “Understand” in a crappy house just off the Hanger Lane Gyratory System (as it was called back then I think it might just be a “junction” or a “roundabout” now) we set up all the equipment in the damp smelling living room and while Ken and Niall pulled together the songs my task was to try and get the hang of the Tascam Portastudio, Alesis Quadraverb and a drum machine proficiently enough to get decent enough recordings onto cassette.

One long afternoon/evening session descended into farce as Niall and Ken started bickering over the intro to a song that hadn’t been written – one (and I can’t remember which one) of them wanted to have a spoken intro like “If She Could Cry” has (”Shall I tell you how it is?…I’ll tell you how it is…) the other didn’t and what started as one of them voicing a half-baked idea descended into bickering, shouting, storming-off to the kitchen, long charged silences, more storming off…

Eventually we withdrew to LA Pizza and laughed at the idea that a band could fall apart over the intro to a song that hadn’t even been written. At that moment I was, as Ken would later often point out, Brian’s Derek Smalls – I was the lukewarm water between them.

When Understand was finally released there was no song with a spoken intro and Niall (Nigel Tufnell?) was no longer a part of the band.

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(Almost) random old picture of the week #3

Posted on July 27th, 2008 by Andy

Scrapper
originally uploaded by grange85

This is me holding Scrapper – the first and only dog I was ever given – like I suspect many of my age (what am I 10??) the idea of having a puppy (the playing and the loyal friend) was more interesting than the reality (the walking on cold mornings and the cleaning up poo) – eventually Scrapper was given a more cat-like life, wandering around the village at his leisure and terrorizing the local farm life.

After threats from a local farmer Scrapper was “given to the laundry man” which Helen and I assumed was a euphemism for being put down and it was only many years later that we discovered that he really had been given to a laundry man!

Yesterday we visited Ju and Mary to meet the kitten that would become our new family member in a few weeks time. Penny will have a cat-like existence by default and Hanwell doesn’t have too many farm animals to terrorize.

Hazel meets Penny
originally uploaded by grange85

More pictures of Penny and her family on Flickr

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(Almost) random old picture of the week #2

Posted on July 15th, 2008 by Andy

Summer 1998

All the good pictures of my dad are currently out of reach so this one will have to do – this was taken 10 years ago but he hasn’t changed that much.

Happy Birthday Dad! – and here’s your pressie…

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(Almost) random old picture of the week #1

Posted on July 9th, 2008 by Andy

Adam has his Grade 4 piano exam on Saturday this is by way of a good luck wish and to show that, like the insanely ambitious parents we are, we started him off at a very young age

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My Top 6…gigs at the Royal Albert Hall

Posted on October 3rd, 2007 by Andy

(originally uploaded by the_moog)

Between acts at the Albert Hall last week I started looking around the venue thinking of all the different places I’d sat and I suddenly realised that I’d been to quite a few shows so here’s a top 6 (but aside from the first one they’re not really in any order)…

1. Joanna Newsom – September 2007 – Seat: Arena floor
   The view from the floor was surprisingly good although it helped to have an aisle seat. Spectacular show…but I’ve said all that already.
2. 10,000 Maniacs – November 1989 – Seat: Box
   We were in a box to the left of the stage, a friend of mine got the tickets through his work – we shared the box with this nutter who sang along at the top of his voice for most of the show (until I asked him not to and then he mimed for the rest). I think Indigo Girls may have supported.
3. Elvis Costello & The Attractions – January 1987 – Seat: Stalls
   Elvis was doing a run of shows at the Albert Hall split between being backed by The Confederates and The Attractions…we chose, obviously, to see The Attractions. The seats and the view were excellent, the show wasn’t too bad.
4. Elvis Costello & The Attractions – (July 1994) – Seat: Box
   In 1992 Elvis appeared on Desert Island Discs and chose a bunch of music pretty far removed from the music that he had made (up until that point) and while I was aware of his high-brow pretensions I was disappointed that he seemed to not love the music he made (or the music that influenced the music he made) it was this point that I stopped being a fan. I was surprised therefore that the Elvis wiki seemed to suggest that I saw him play at the RAH in July 1994. We sat in a box at the back of the hall so the stage was a bit distant. Difford and Tilbrook of Squeeze supported.
5. Cowboy Junkies – 1992 – Seat: Circle
   My abiding memory of this gig was the "new" percussionist getting an onstage telling off for making a noise between songs which made me sneer at the precious-ness of the band. I’d loved The Trinity Sessions and quite enjoyed The Caution Horses but my Cowboy Junkies thing pretty much ended there – or maybe, more specifically ended at the point at which Margo turned and stared at the new boy and apologised for him.
6. Frank Sinatra – 199? – Seat: Cheapest – up in the gods…
   We had great seats for this – they were (relatively) cheap and supposedly (I think) restricted, but we were looking right down onto the stage, admittedly from a long way away. We could see Frank’s autocue and so could easily sing along, even to the songs we didn’t know…not that there were any. This was really a case of going because we wouldn’t have another chance…and it was in the days when cheap tickets were within reach (rather than the £100 you’d have to pay for the cheapest Barbra Streisand tickets this year!

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