How sad am I? #5
Posted on June 13th, 2008 by Andy
Lovely new Damon & Naomi poster = £10
Nice frame for the said poster = £40
How sad am I? The answer is very.
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My Top 6…music fan sites
Posted on June 13th, 2008 by Andy
As the proprietor of a fan site I’ve always had an interest in what fans are doing on the web, a year or so ago I posted ruminating on the fan site and whether it had a place in the brave new 2.0 world…
Whatever the reason it seems the days of the fan site is over and all that’s left are the few excellent sites run by the few dedicated individuals that will remind the world what things were like in the days before MySpace and Wikipedia and blogs…
David Jennings, the author of the excellent book Net, Blogs & Rock ‘n’ Roll, responded arguing that things maybe aren’t so gloomy…and he’s probably right.
Anyway…I was talking fan sites to a couple of people over a lemonade yesterday (more of which maybe at a later date) and I was asked about what my favourite fan sites were. It was a question I found a bit overwhelming in a noisy pub but a lot easier when I was sitting in front of my computer later on. It seemed an ideal opportunity for the long since neglected My Top Six… category to be prodded back to life.
My fondness is for a lot of information so these are mostly concentrated on content occasionally at the expense of aesthetics. Looking over the list they all seem very “traditional” - very web 1.0 which possibly only reinforces David’s counter that…
the next phase of fan site development will see the development of more collaborative projects, whereby fluid groups of fans work together complementing each others’ skills and filling in when someone drops out.
So here is “My Top 6…music fan sites”…
- Stereolab
In the early days of A Head Full of Wishes the best fan site on the web (IMO) and one it aspired to be like was Robin’s Stereolab site. It was packed with every sort of anything and encouraged users to vote and contribute. Sadly Robin closed down (and passed on his site) so it can only be seen in most of it’s glory on the Internet Archive… - Go-Betweens.net
Jonathan’s site is an awesome resource and one that has managed to get an online community going successfully which I never managed to do with A Head Full of Wishes…maybe it’s time to try again…or maybe the time has passed. - Low
Another site that you have to head over to the Internet Archive to see it as it should be. I adored the Low website before it became official (and actually for quite a while after) but sadly a lot of the content has gone astray and it looks less like a fan site and more like what I guess it is now - a promotional resource. - Electricity Comes From Other Planets
Olivier Landemaine’s Velvet Underground site is utterly breathtaking in it’s detail - it makes me feel like such an amateur. - Milky Moon
The Joanna Newsom fan site Milky Moon is a site I like a lot, for a relatively new artist the site has a gorgeously old-fashioned way about it. - Sparklehorse: What Kind of Name is This?
Another site overflowing with content and another one that sadly seems to have been neglected of late.
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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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Nina Nastasia @ The Theatre Royal, Brighton
Posted on May 19th, 2008 by Andy
Silje Nes
There were four acts on the bill at the second Fat Cat Records night at the Theatre Royal in Brighton - the middle two Frightened Rabbit and The Twilight Sad were both enjoyable enough guitar rock bands…but they weren’t the reason we were there. The first act Silje Nes also was not the reason we were there but was interesting and different enough to deserves more than a cursory comment.
Silje makes sweet and mostly quiet layered music using guitars a violin various bits of percussion and a loop pedal or two so that she could play them all at the same time…almost like a one woman band only she was accompanied by another musician who also had many instruments (drum kit, guitar, melodica and various other bits of percussion) and a loop pedal. Her voice and some of the gentler sounds were reminiscent of Little Star era Stina Nordenstam but the performance was unique and the songs were lovely and the wig-out that featured in one of them was perfect…the way a wig-out during a quiet set should be ((old) Low and (more recent) The Clientele do lovely wig-outs when quiet is what’s expected).
Take a setlist Ms Nastasia
Nina Nastasia was the reason we were there, the bit of paper at the bar implied that she had set that should have started at 10 and finished at 10:40 - a weekend in Brighton for a 40 minute set might seem a little extreme but this was Nina whose five albums contain no sign of a dud track and whose voice I never tire of. But still…40 minutes…
She arrived on stage, sat down with a pen and a piece of paper and asked for requests - jotted down the shouted song titles (or near song titles or extracts of lyrics) and that was the setlist. And she played…it was a relief when she said “I have to be off by eleven” because by the time she started it was beginning to look like we mightn’t get more than 30 minutes…a more talented person could think of better words thant stunning or sensational to describe the set, the singing and the playing but that’s all I have to offer - the sight of me open mouthed and on the edge of my seat for most of the performance might have made a more impressive description of just how good this was. So relaxed and funny and comfortable - Nina was in very fine form.
Nina Nastasia rocks!
By eleven o’clock a fair chunk of the setlist was still unplayed…so she just kept on playing. She went off when she thought she probably ought (”I don’t want to get anyone in trouble”) but the audience weren’t going to let her get away so easily and despite the house lights coming up she was (literally) shoved back onto the stage for more…quite a lot more. I suspect that she would have played all night given the opportunity but by 11:25 the Theatre staff were obviously wanting out and the house lights came up again and Nina left us. An hour and a quarter and one of the most enjoyable gigs I’ve been to made the trip to cold and rainy Brighton more than worthwhile.
Posted in I heart/I hate, Music | No Comments »
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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Marissa Nadler + Jesse Sykes @ The Luminaire
Posted on May 13th, 2008 by Andy
Jesse Sykes
I was so tired yesterday and tempted to give this concert a miss in favour of an early night…except I never have early nights and would have stayed up until 1am anyway with nothing to show for my late night. I arrived in Kilburn about 7:30, the only bike rack near the venue had two sawn through U-Locks as evidence that leaving your bike unattended in Kilburn is probably unwise. I took a chance although I locked to a lamp-post as the bike rack was clearly bad luck!
Entered the lovely Luminaire, grabbed a bottle of water and waited for an hour in the too dingy to read light for Jesse Sykes to come on. Jesse performed with an electric guitarist, Phil, who I guess is “the Sweet Hereafter” for this tour. She proclaimed her shaky nervousness but managed to get through a short sweet set with neither her fingers nor her rich voice letting her down (I keep wanting to describe her voice as “smoky” but I think I’m being influenced by the album sleeve picture of her smoking)
Marissa Nadler
Marissa Nadler came on to the stage which was set up with her three microphone - one normal, one with a bit of echo and one with a stack of echo (she picked the wrong one for between song banter a couple of times). Sometimes it seemed as if she might just be a normal, sweet, folkie singer-songwriter but then she’d do something that made you realise that she was just a bit special, a lovely “Diamond Heart”, or “Rachel” which despite her commenting on the missing “acid leads” of Greg Weeks still had enough going on with the one acoustic guitar that it really didn’t matter.
The bike was still chained to the lamp-post when I got out - obviously the fact that it’s knackered (looking) and grubby, and the saddle is taped up with masking tape to keep the insides inside meant that the theives took their saws and bolt-cutters elsewhere. The ride home was a joy, mostly downhill, wind at my back and not too many other road users getting in the way!
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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.
Posted in I heart/I hate, Music, just dug this one out | 1 Comment »
Probably the best video that will ever be on YouTube
Posted on April 9th, 2008 by Andy
Obviously that last post was the very pinnacle of uncool so in attempt to restore my damaged credibility…
What’s not to love about this video - Beat Happening set up in the street and life goes on around them…kids wandering around…traffic drifting past…customers wandering in front of the camera…all oblivious to the fact that they were a crucial part of making this the very best video that will ever be on YouTube.
Posted in I heart/I hate, Music | 1 Comment »
How sad am I? #4 - Listen the Snow is Falling
Posted on April 6th, 2008 by Andy
It snows so rarely in London that I really shouldn’t miss an opportunity to post a picture and use a Galaxie 500 (via Yoko Ono) track as a title…
How sad am I? The answer is “very”.
Posted in How sad am I?, Music, a head full of wishes | No Comments »
Finishing the book
Posted on March 14th, 2008 by Andy
I’ve just finished Dean Wareham’s book - for a fan it is a slightly frustrating gem of a read - it’s written in an easy casual style with Dean’s dry wit recognisable from 20 years of listening to his lyrics. Too often, however, the story ends too quickly - I know it’s because I’m a fan and the book is written for people who don’t necessarily care about every little detail of every little tour. That’s possibly why the extended chapter on Pup Tent is so one of the high (and simultaneously low) points of the book.
There’s a last page spoiler coming - you have been warned…
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