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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Just dug this one out #19: From Our Living Room to Yours by American Analog Set

Posted on July 31st, 2008 by Andy

From Our Living Room…

I loved From Our Living Room to Yours when I first got hold of it…so much so that I made a web page dedicated to The American Analog Set. In those early days of the Web that was a legitimate way of declaring love…well it was for me anyway

I remember listening on headphones to the adorable opening of Magnificent Seventies and being totally sucked in. But I stopped listening to Amanset – I kept buying the albums but stopped listening to them, I stopped updating the website and when Amanset finally called it a day it was frankly a bit of a relief. It turns out that I probably never really loved them at all – and maybe all I really, truly loved was the first 9 minutes of this album…and even that at a push…lets say the first 4 minutes…

And listening now I’m beginning to see why, I’m fond of drone and (clearly) not averse to gentle pace but something is missing, something that could pull this out of “nice” and into “gripping” something that could prevent the word B-O-R-I-N-G from popping into my head…but it keeps popping in. Maybe sometimes it almost pulls me back in but then it lets me go again and I drift away thinking of other things and not really hearing the music anymore.

Maybe it’s me, maybe I don’t have the patience and skill required to enjoy this music anymore.

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Just dug this one out #18: Overkill by Motorhead

Posted on July 7th, 2008 by Andy

I’ve always claimed Overkill as my favourite Motorhead album, the opneing (title) track is as pure Heavy Metal as it’s possible to be – and it’s a song about listening to Motorhead and the best thing about the band is being immersed in their music so the best Motorhead song has to be about nothing more or less than that. Listening now I’d have to say this is unquestionably the greatest metal track ever…by a country mile. Knowing that the album isn’t going to get better ought to be a problem but strangely isn’t. The rest of the album is patchy but there’s enough to maintain its top of the stack position…

Tear Ya Down is a love song – I’m not quite sure how the title reconciles, I’m guessing it must just be a euphemism for sex (as I suppose “rip you limb from limb” is later) and as such is unpleasantly aggressive but I love the idea that the protagonist has put effort into this relationship – “I was talking to you all night long, every line was a favourite song” and the “I’ll give you supernatural powers” ending is just lovely – who knew Lemmy could be so tender?

The angry/bitter/get-out-of-my-life songs are more traditional Motorhead fare and are variable – I Won’t Pay Your Price is pedestrian and possibly the worst track on the album (although the distasteful Damage Case is certainly the most unpleasant), whereas No Class is funny and clever and a classic – “no buddy I can’t spare a dime” or “I know you ain’t got the brain, to come in out of the rain”. It’s clear that pissing off Lemmy is not something you’d want to do.

Motorhead’s albums have always been a muddle of smart, angry, other-worldly, unpleasant and childish and Overkill is an album with a decent proportion of the good bits. This and the awesome live Golden Years EP define Motorhead for me, and define the time in my life when music became more important than anything else…

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Just dug this one out #17: Live Rust by Neil Young & Crazy Horse

Posted on June 10th, 2008 by Andy

Neil Young & Crazy Horse – Live Rust

One of the more embarrassing moments of my musical growing up was deciding (at some point in the early 80s) that I’d rather own a copy of Kiss Alive II than Neil Young and Crazy Horse’s Live Rust and so a savvy school mate exchanged his woeful album of clown metal for my copy of this album. I haven’t heard it since and over the years of not listening to it Live Rust has got better and better in my head. Better than the copy of Arc/Weld I have but rarely listen to. Whenever I hear Cortez The Killer or Powderfinger or Like a Hurricane it’s the Live Rust version that I compare it to…all those songs are there and good enough on Weld but not really the same.

I bought my copy of Live Rust in one of the big record shops in Oxford Street (probably HMV) with my birthday money on a trip into town with my parents. It was probably the same year when I got my own record player (it was white). We’d had a copy of Harvest kicking around the house but somewhere I had heard that Neil Young was more than acoustic folkiness and that I should check out that area of his work. Buying this album was an effort to address that (even if the first half of the album is that familiar acoustic folkiness).

So how does it hold up after 20+ years of not hearing it? Well…the album still sounds incredibly familiar (although I had forgotten those odd Woodstock bits dropped in) so I guess I listened to it a lot when I did own it. The second half in particular had me feeling strangely nostalgic. It made me realise that despite having spent very little time with Mr Young in the intervening years there was still something that bound me to him. I feel no desire to rush out and fill the gaps in my collection, on the contrary I feel confident that I could live with listening to just this one album once or twice every ten years or so – not because its “the best” or “archetypal” but becuase it’s comfortable it’s an album that I feel belongs to me…only it doesn’t it belongs to someone else…Kiss Alive II belongs to me.

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Just dug this one out #16 – The Hounds of Love by Kate Bush

Posted on May 16th, 2008 by Andy

Kate Bush, Hounds of Love

I’d been a fan of Kate Bush pretty much since the beginning, but it was a fanaticism that I kept to myself…she was making music that was far removed from most of what I was listening to at the time. Kate Bush was an artist I admired on my own and it stayed that way for a long long time.

The Hounds of Love was the first album I ever bought on CD and it seems a shame that I chose to make my first steps into the modern world of shiny, silver, plastic discs by buying an album that is so clearly an album of two sides, an album made for vinyl. Two sides that are so different and both so stunning – the pop side and the prog side, the safe side and the experimental side, “The Hounds of Love” and “The Ninth Wave”. There was a period of probably a year or two where I listened to The Hounds of Love every night – it was the album that I went to bed with but never slept until it finished (if I did doze off “Waking the Witch” would generally bring me back to consciousness).

Hazel is a huge Kate Bush fan and in the discomfort and awkward uncertainty of our fledgling relationship I found comfort in our mutual love of Kate Bush. It was something that we could talk about passionately and open up about, something that we could “try out” our relationship on, something that allowed us to see if there was more to this…and there was. I distinctly remember one of our first lunchtimes at the Nelson where I gushed uncontrollably about Kate and particularly about The Hounds of Love, in times of panic my mouth can occasionally run away with me because talking is better than awkward silences.

The album sounds as stunning now as it did on its first listen. It doesn’t sound dated and for an album released in the dire depths of the 80s to avoid the hellish taint of that time is testament to Kate’s genius. It is too rich and deep, too layered and arranged, too lush and clear, too real, too organic to sound anything but timeless. Until Joanna Newsom’s Ys was released a couple of years back there was no other album that could make as excited and enthralled by music the way that The Hounds of Love did…and still does.

If there’s one down side to the album it’s the sadly uninspiring sleeve but as Hazel pointed out a while back Kate has always had a tendency to wrap her masterpieces in “naff” sleeves.

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Just dug this one out #15 – Parallel Lines by Blondie

Posted on April 16th, 2008 by Andy

Today I woke up with Blondie’s Parallel Lines in my head. In my post from a couple of years ago where I picked out my favourite bands over time there were a few important acts that slipped through the woodwork. Blondie were one and, for a short time in 1978 and 1979, were just about my favourite band.

Listening to Parallel Lines now it feels so comfortable, so timeless unlike pretty much anything Blondie/Harry did subsequently. Parallel Lines was the second Blondie album I bought, Plastic Letters was OK, a couple of gems but all a little rough and patchy to make it a classic. Parallel Lines was a whole different ballgame. At lunchtime today Hazel suggested that there was only “three good tracks” on it (she meant “Hanging on the Telephone”, “Heart of Glass” and “Sunday Girl”) but surely to dismiss “Pretty Baby” and “Picture This” and “11:59″ and “Will Anything Happen” is just ridiculous, each of them as good as anything else on the album. To be honest, with the exception of the utterly dire “I Know But I Don’t Know” there isn’t any reason to reach for the skip button. This is as close to perfect as a pop album can get.

In February 1979 I went on a miserable ski-ing holiday with the school, I was sick, homesick, the food was rubbish, we had power cuts and barely enough snow to ski. Add to all that the embarrassment of falling over on my first day on the snow and not being able to get up, and being a woeful failure at using the drag lift, most of my memories of the trip and not good ones. The only exception is that “Heart of Glass” was on the hotel jukebox and we listened to it pretty much constantly over the whole week, no matter how sad and miserable I felt that track made me feel better. It pretty much still works now.

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Just dug this one out #14 – When I Was Born for the 7th Time by Cornershop

Posted on February 28th, 2008 by Andy

cornershop
originally uploaded by mediaeater

My mum was Anglo-Indian, she grew up in Calcutta with an Indian mother and a British father and they had a huge family. Ten or eleven brothers and sisters and all the aunts, uncles, cousins and nephews that comes along with that. And a good chunk of that family lived in or around London so I grew up tolerating huge family get-togethers, regular trips to Southall to shop, eating curries and hearing music that was different to the music I liked. Cornershop were a band that made the indie guitar music I liked but in amongst it were the sounds of those family get togethers or those trips to Southall.

“When I Was Born for the 7th Time” made it to my best albums of 1997 list but I very rarely listen to it these days while it probably didn’t deserve that accolade I’ve enjoyed listening to it a lot more than I expected I would

There are gems…”Sleep on the Left Side” is a fantastic opener, the moment when Paula Frazer arrives in “Good to Be on the Road Back Home” is almost perfect “make way for a lady”, and I love “Norwegian Wood” ever if it does have a slightly tacked-on-the-end-as-an-afterthought feel. Brimful of Asha hasn’t yet been ruined by over-familiarity and that Norman Cook remix…here’s the proof…

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Just dug this one out #13 – If You’re Feeling Sinister by Belle & Sebastian

Posted on February 7th, 2008 by Andy

Belle & Sebastian’s If You’re Feeling Sinister was released at the tail end of 1996 but all its memories for me surround the couple of months after Adam was born in May 1997. Adam came as a bit of a shock for a couple of lazy people resigned to not having children (probably because we thought it would be scary and hard work)…it was a good shock (and one we probably needed!) but a shock all the same.

The first few months were utterly exhausting, particularly for Hazel who had to spend the days (and nights) trying to deal with getting the reluctant little beggar to feed and to stop crying because he was hungry. I’d come home from work and retrieve Adam so that Hazel could get some shut-eye. So…many of my evenings (and nights, and early mornings) that summer, were spent walking up and down the living room trying to get him to sleep. Accompanying me on that walk were Belle & Sebastian.

I don’t think the album was chosen because it was necessarily an appropriate one for the job, just that it was an album that I thoroughly enjoyed listening to (and singing along to!). It was (and still is) a beautifully effortless listen. Coincidentally it turns out that it probably was an appropriate album for the job, perfect for a rocking, swaying walk and gentle singing along, no shocks or jars…sweet sounds and clever and funny lyrics.

At some point Adam started eating better and consequently sleeping better and I listened to the album less and less – I still dig it out periodically but this week was probably the first time for a few months that I gave it a spin. All those memories can’t help but give the album a nostalgic and slightly dated feel – more about me than about the music. None of B&S subsequent albums had the same impact but I have them all, and there are bits of all of them that I love (although not a lot of Dear Catastrophe Waitress) – but If You’re Feeling Sinister has nothing that has me reaching to skip a track or turn it down. It’s pretty close to perfect…and with the glory of hindsight I can forget the crying and the utter exhaustion and just remember my tiny little boy nestled in my arms listening to me singing “Get Me Away From Here I’m Dying”…

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Just dug this one out #12 – HUP by The Wonder Stuff

Posted on December 5th, 2007 by Andy

Wonderstuff
originally uploaded by mark benney

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