Music Features and Interviews with Bands, Musicians, Djs and Solo Artists.

Marty Rev Interview

ClashMusic — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:50:56 +0000

When Alan Vega delivers Suicide’s urban nightmare bulletins and damaged love calls as crowd-baiting provocateur and crooner-from-hell, Martin Rev is the mysterious, huge-shaded figure to his side, extracting anything from tumultuous cacophony to doowop lilt from his battery of synths and drum machines.

After nearly four decades of dogged struggle against often hostile opposition, Suicide now find themselves in a position of feted reverence as both proto-punks and innovators laying the blueprints for synthesised music as we know it.

For most of the 21st century, it’s seemed as if the world has caught up while, paradoxically, the duo have spent more time exercising their solo projects, returning occasionally to reap credit for their immeasurable contribution to today’s musical landscape.

- - -

This is an excerpt from an article that appears in the January issue of Clash Magazine. Pick it up in stores from December 3rd.

- - -

Both Vega and Rev started their solo careers in 1980, the former initially indulging his rockabilly fixation to somehow end up with the terrifying onslaught of 2007’s ‘Station’. Meanwhile Rev has charted a similarly-unique and highly-personal furrow, his eight albums often worlds apart from the coruscating backdrops he constructed around his comrade’s vocals, although closer examination reveals a common thread and commitment to moving forward while reflecting his emotions of the time.

‘Stigmata’ is unlike anything Rev has done before, and beyond anything else released this year, as he harnesses his panoramic electronic visions to modern classical forms. Using his synthesised orchestra, Rev has created an immensely-powerful and often beautiful 21st century masterpiece, resonating with soaring melodic flights and delicately ethereal textures enhanced with intricate electronic micro-surgery, while his own voice adds a sepulchral, haunting quality.

With this church-like element and titles like ‘Sanctus’ and ‘Te Deum’, the album has a notably religious theme: a concept established before the tragic passing of Rev’s wife Mari during the final stages of its creation, which gives the high emotional content of the music another poignant, spiritual dimension. Like everything else the two Suicide members seem to do, it may take years for the album’s fearless innovations and eternal emotional resonance to be fully recognised but, as the decade draws to a close, rest assured it will.

Rev’s ever-questing methods of presenting the human voice against his synthesised backdrops have taken an ethereal turn on ‘Stigmata’, adding a haunting dimension to his intricately-arranged synthesised orchestra. Although it may denote a calmer, even more mature direction, the album’s creation spanned what Rev now calls “the most tumultuous time of my life” after his wife, muse and soul mate Mari passed away around eighteen months ago.

Rev can now talk about Mari with simple affection and unreserved admiration, although it was months before he even confided in Alan Vega [“Thankfully, nature provides some clarity”]. The pair met before Suicide formed early in the ’70s then Mari would design flyers and album sleeves, often providing Marty with his inspiration, like the Vivaldi music she recorded off the radio which provided a launch-pad for ‘Stigmata‘.

“It was just the right time. Sometimes you hear something that hits you and you go, ‘That’s exactly where I am now and I should really take off on that’. It was just right at that time. I just started from there listening to other things that related to that kind of search. She was with me most of the time when I recorded the album.

Each album is really starting from scratch again each time. You have an idea of maybe what you’d like to try. You throw it down on the canvas, but it’s not necessarily working right away, so you keep trying and arranging things in different places. It’s like, ‘Okay, this works’ and then you realise about yourself; where you are, where you’re going, what you want at that time. We change our focus and values in periods of months or weeks, certainly years. You realise it in the work, in the process.”

Like everything else Rev has been involved in, ‘Stigmata’ goes against the grain and expectations, a remarkable work which lingers long after it’s over and Spiritualized’s Jason Pierce rightly describes as ‘genius’.

To celebrate its release, Rev played London’s Corsica Studios on November 27th while Neu Galleries will be showing a collection of his ‘abstract instinctive scores’, documenting his music from 1975. Next May, following the success of September’s All Tomorrow’s Parties event in New York where Suicide played their first album (described as the most extreme act out of many participating), they repeat the exercise opening for The Stooges at Hammersmith Apollo.

Suicide will always lurk in the shadows while both Rev and Vega pursue their solo careers. He says the pair recording together again is “always a possibility” but, for the time being, has his remarkable new album to promote and cherish in his own heart.

Words by Kris Needs

Nirvana's Final UK Appearance

ClashMusic — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:53:58 +0000

Journalist Everett True became friends with Kurt Cobain through his dedication to the grunge scene while working at Melody Maker. He is responsible for bringing together Kurt and Courtney Love. He is also the man who pushed Kurt on stage (in a wheelchair) at Reading Festival in 1992. Here, he bursts five bubbles of Nirvana legend from that historic day...

1. His band didn’t know what was going on when Kurt turned up on stage in the wheelchair

This one is patently not true.

Aside from anything else, Krist Novoselic introduced Nirvana that evening as I appeared on the edge of the stage with the wheelchair, “…he’ll pull through. With the help of his friends and his family, he’ll pull through”. The whole stunt had been planned the previous night as a burn on those who’d been gossiping about Kurt and his wife, who’d just given birth to Frances Bean: Kurt’s in hospital, Kurt’s been arrested, Kurt’s OD’d, Courtney’s OD’d, the baby’s been born deformed… Admittedly, the rumours had been fuelled by the weird-ass paranoia that had lingered around the eerily quiet backstage all day, the fact Nirvana were late to show up - despite the fact Sunday at Reading 1992 was ‘Grunge Day’, bands that played included Mudhoney, L7, ABBA tribute band Bjorn Again and Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds.

But, from where I sat, slumped against a wall in Nirvana’s tiny backstage trailer, swigging from a bottle of vodka and fervently wishing there was something else to eat aside from M&Ms and the curling, stiffening slices of processed ham and cheese, it all seemed like a grand jape. “Where’s the wheelchair? Where’s the wheelchair?” came the cries. What wheelchair? “Oh, it’s meant to be a joke on the stuff journalists have been writing about me,” Kurt explained patiently to his drunken English buddy. “The idea is I’m going to pretend to be ill, straight from hospital. Look, I’ve got some overalls somewhere and some hair extensions so I look more like Courtney…”

Oh, in that case, why don’t I push the wheelchair on stage? It’ll be way funnier. You can’t do it if you’re supposed to be ill. And you can wear this blonde wig that my sister sent me. It’ll be much funnier. No one could think of a good enough reason to stop me.

2. You can see anything on stage at Reading

That’s not true, not at all - at least, certainly not at night. All I can remember - and it’s not much: alcohol and hedonism will do that to a man - is the lights.

The lights, and pushing Kurt around in the wheelchair beforehand, chasing the girls from L7 in ever-increasing circles, oblivious to the amount of damage I could cause if I lost control. The lights, and the clamorous noise that became an overwhelming din as the curtains were pulled back; the noise, and the steam rising from sixty thousand expectant bodies, and the lights, and the fact I didn’t know what the fuck was going on. I really didn’t. At some point while I was pushing him towards his microphone, the singer reached up and grappled me. “Oh great,” I thought in my intoxicated state. “Kurt wants to have a mock-fight on stage like we used to in the old days.” So I reached down and began to pretend to punch him. “No, you asshole,” Kurt fiercely whispered. “You’re pushing me to the wrong microphone.” Oh. Fuck.

3. Reading is a friendly haven, a home from home Uh-huh.

No way. You know why I had that blonde wig in my possession, why my sister sent it to me the previous week? That’s cos she knew I’d been threatened several times at the previous year’s festival, by punters - including a pair with knives. So she sent it to me as a disguise. I wore it on the Saturday, dancing to Teenage Fanclub in the rain, and everyone was like, “Why’s Everett True wearing a wig, dancing to Teenage Fanclub in the rain?”

The week after Reading, Melody Maker ran a competition on the gossip pages, announcing “Win the wig that Kurt Cobain wore at Reading”. No one believed us. We didn’t have a single entry. So we ran it again, printing stupid photos of me wearing it alongside grunge ‘celebrities’ such as Mark Arm and Eugene Kelly: this time round, we got a ton of erudite, urbane and generally kick-ass entries.

Only problem was, I’d lost the wig!

4. No one used mobile phones back in 1992

Not true either.

How else do you think Kurt managed to famously get the crowd to chant “Courtney, we love you” halfway through Nirvana’s final UK appearance? It’s just that they were the size of a small house back then. “I remember Kurt calling Courtney on the cell phone from on stage,” said L7 bassist Jennifer Finch. “I’d never seen a cell phone before. Yes, there were all these people yelling, yet I was just sitting there, transfixed on this cell phone.”

5. Nirvana weren’t aware of the influences on their songs

Nope. Not at all. No way.

For example, how about their early song “Aero-Zeppelin”… part Aerosmith and part Led Zeppelin? Want further proof? Have a look at the DVD of their Reading Festival performance: twelve songs in, the band deliberately cocked up the intro to ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ as Dave Grohl bellowed out the words to Boston’s ‘More Than A Feeling’. They knew all right.

6. Nirvana’s final UK performance was also one of their greatest

Oh okay. This one is just about right.

Words by Everett True

Ones To Watch: Little Red

ClashMusic — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 10:54:20 +0000

Songs that burst out the stereo like Little Red’s do can’t help but sound fresh - even when they take ’50s rock and roll and doo wop as their main inspiration.

“Fuck electro” exclaims drummer Taka, pronouncing judgement on the 2009 music scene. “All electro bands suck.” It’s not that surprising to hear, given the Melbourne five-piece’s harmony-laden songs about drinking Coca Cola and taking girls out in their car.

But, having toured with Vampire Weekend and claiming fellow Aussies The Temper Trap as mates, they’re not as out of step with the contemporary pop world as they might seem. Recent single, ‘Waiting’, could have been written by The Beach Boys but, with its foot-stomping bass line and razor-sharp guitar licks, it sounds more like a cover by Franz Ferdinand. They’ve even given up wearing matching suits.

“We don’t just do the retro thing,” says keyboardist Tom, who assumes songwriting duties along with guitarist Dom and bassist Quang. Names like Neil Young, Nirvana and Nick Cave crop up, and Tom swears that his love of Michael Jackson hasn’t just developed since the singer’s death. “When I was sixteen I did a home stay in Japan with this woman who thought she was MJ. She wore the glove and everything.”

Not following trends is key point for Little Red. “We never try to sound like this band or that band; we just try to make something individual,” says Taka. “The worst thing is bands who pick a new group and say ‘I wanna sound like that’,” adds guitarist Adrian.

If the band have found the time to develop their own sound from its stylised beginnings, it’s due to a relentless two-year touring schedule, which even helped them win a place at Australia’s V Festival. “Richard Branson said we were the best band in Australia,” says Tom. “I don’t think he’d ever heard us though.”

It’s only just seen a UK release, but Little Red’s debut album ‘Listen To Little Red’ has been out in Australia for over a year, and the group are already getting ready to record a follow up. Veteran producer Stephen Street (Blur, Morrissey) has even expressed interest, and could probably help ease the transition to a more indie-influenced style of writing.

“We couldn’t make the same album again,” explains Dom. “We were already in a state of change when we recorded the first album. We want to go deeper lyrically and we’re not in such a rush to get through each song.” But fans needn’t worry about Little Red losing their signature harmonies (all of the band sing except for Taka). “We just love singing,” says Dom. “This is an exclusive,” announces Tom. “We’re keeping all the harmonies.”

Words by Steve Harris

Fact box
Where: Melbourne
What: Indie doo wop
Unique Fact: They once appeared on an episode of Neighbours as part of the show’s attempt to modernise
Get 3 songs: ‘It’s Alright’, ‘Witchdoctor’, ‘Coca-Cola’

ClashMusic's Ten Best And Worst Producers

ClashMusic — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 09:37:59 +0000

Welcome to Polls Apart, the Clash barometer of the best and worst facets in music.

At ten, the antithesis of cool – the worst perpetrators of musical crimes. At one, the most influential and heroic saviours. Let count down commence!

This month: PRODUCERS!

-

10. Phil Spector

Ike & Tina Turner - River Deep Mountain High

In a recent interview with The Guardian, Indiglo rich kid La Roux brazenly stated that “I’m still going to listen to Gary Glitter’s records even though he’s a kiddie-fiddler”, adding for good measure “don't let his problems ruin your life. You’re not buying their personality, you’re buying their music.” So, to summarise; whatever an individual gets up to in their spare time has no bearing on their artistic output. Fucking brilliant. Despite raping minors and callously removing a child’s fundamental right to have their innocence preserved without question, Glitter’s shitty hairspray appropriation of glam rock can nonetheless be enjoyed guilt-free, according to Junior Ackland, as the person who made the music has no emotional bearing on their output. Ignoring for a moment the distress his victims are subjected to every time they unwittingly come into contact with some of his tawdry output, as a society are we really willing to grant artists a free pass to indulge in whatever indiscretion or facile fantasy they desire without it negatively impacting upon our interpretation of their work? Of course not.

Art is the articulation of human emotion and to ignore that would be to remove all subtext and interpretation from its inception. To arbitrarily ignore this past is immature. To acknowledge it and incorporate these personal bruises into any assessment you make of their output is sensible. All of which brings us (eventually) to Phil Spector - a producer who defined much of what we consider modern pop music through his Wall of Sound technique and girl group schematics, was feted by four decades of musicians (The Ronettes and The Beatles through to The Ramones and, erm, Starsailor) and is currently nineteen years deep for murdering actress Lana Clarkson in 2003. So, does the last element make him a shit producer? Nope, but it does retrospectively taint everything he’s done with the grubby smear of a homicidal, egomaniacal, bewigged cunt.

-

9. Calvin Harris

Dizzee Rascal - Dance Wiv Me

Fancy seeing you here. It’s old lanky chops - lurking in the background like a crippled daddy longlegs, turning everything he touches into tracing-paper chart fodder so ephemeral its anaemic synths expire halfway down your cochlea. He’s a faecal Midas! Having first emerged with his god-awful appropriation of Eighties culture, Bomber Harris then castrated national treasure Dizzee Rascal through the gashtival of ‘Dance Wiv Me’ before metaphorically lacerating his tongue on the appalling ‘Holiday’.

Should you be suffering day-glo-vu, then it’s probable you endured the late-Nineties boom of garage producers such as MJ Cole; wherein an exciting musical genre is filleted for bones and presented as a bland facsimile intended for the kind of people who use the word peng whilst wearing keffiyahs. Digested read; Calvin Harris is dog eggs.

-

8. Stock Aitken Waterman

The Reynolds Girls - I'd Rather Jack

Pop (pp) Informal - Noun; of or for the general public, popular or popularized music. A lively barometer of youth culture turned pejorative in 1986 at the behest of Stock/Aitken/Waterman. See Aryan twins John and Edward Grimes for legacy... Should you be under the age of twenty-five, it’s likely that pop music has always been a debased art-form which functions primarily as a tool in the media planner’s arsenal. Yet hard as it is to believe, there was once a time when a single release represented something more than a multimedia spoke in their journey from soap stardom to Loaded cover shoot.

Despite some early success with the likes of Dead Or Alive and Bananarma, the SAW triptych soon settled into a malignant schematic that valued celebrity over any notion of artistic merit or musical substance. With a litany of aural crimes stretching from The Reynolds Girls and Roland Rat through to Rick Astley and half the cast of Neighbours, this was production line conformity wherein music represented nothing more than a column in an Excel worksheet.

-

7. Mark Ronson

Mark Ronson feat. Santogold - Pretty Green

Fuck about mate. Stop pressing the pseudo-Motown button on your laptop. Stop it. RONSON! STOP IT. You posh wanker... Having tried his hand at gentrifying hip-hop through the trite ‘Here Comes The Fuzz’, Ronson hit pay dirt in 2006 producing Amy Winehouse’s now ubiquitous ‘Back To Black’, giving a chewy appropriation of soul for the iTunes generation.

Rather than revel in his successful coercion of a beehive into Britain’s favourite fuck-up (permanently supplanting smack-oik Doherty), Ronson instead sought to sprinkle his magic (read: wank) all over other people’s songs through the dreadful ‘Versions’. With his Motown-lite coating everything in a thin veil of irrelevance, the horns parping jauntily throughout soon began to sound distinctly like a rape alarm being repeatedly sounded by yet another cover version succumbing to Ronson’s aural rohypnol. Does exactly what it says on the twat!

-

6. Trevor Horn

Frankie Goes to Hollywood - Relax (Don't Do It)

In the red corner we have ABC, Frankie Goes To Hollywood and Paul McCartney. In the blue, Robbie Williams, t.A.T.u and Charlotte Church. Somewhere betwixt is Trevor Horn’s reputation - daisy-chaining itself to confusion in an attempt to understand why the svelte pop of ABC’s ‘Poison Arrow’ garners critical acclaim, whilst ‘Bodies’ by Gobby Williams is (charitably) not quite so bad as cancer.

As synonymous with the Eighties as cocaine, Dogtanian and the systematic dismantling of our welfare-state by a toff government, Horn is best when joyfully encouraging his charges to jizz their ambitions up the wall. Yet where this creates moments of pop greatness (see 1983’s ‘Relax’), it is also prone to egocentric noodling which Buggle Trev seems worryingly happy to indulge.

-

5. Basic Channel

Basic Channel - Octagon

Faceless and enigmatic, Basic Channel treat production in a manner that would likely baffle every other fucker on this list. ‘Shun the limelight you say? Retire behind the glass and let the music speak for itself?! But what about the groupies?!! I want my underage blow-job and I want it now!’

The pseudonym of Berlin blokes Mark Ernestus and Moritz Von Oswald, Basic Channel wove minimal tech into spacious tapestries that were released over a yard of extremely limited vinyl that acted as a clear inspiration for the dubstep hauntology of Burial (both in sound and visibility). Alongside luminaries such as Carl Craig, Richard D. James and Mika Vainio, Basic Channel took electronic music and expanded its boundaries with a lightness of touch that left fingerprints all over contemporary music without recourse to manu stuprare.

-

4. Timbaland

Missy Elliot - Get UR Freak On

Question! Timbaland. Kanye. Pharell. What do they all have in common? Answer: they don’t know when to say no... Confusing prodigious talent with prodigious output, hip-hop producers seem more prone than most to merrily churn out releases with little recourse to an effective quality-control filter. So, whilst Timbaland (real name Timothy Zachery Mosley) can list stone-cold classics like Justin Timberlake’s ‘My Love’, Missy Elliot’s ‘Get Ur Freak On’ and Jay-Z’s ‘Dirt Off Your Shoulder’ on his CV, there is a shit-load of fiscal filler oozing throughout his discography. But do we care? Frankly no.

Timbaland may have an unappealing egotistical streak that sees him mugging away in videos and muttering his way into countless performance credits, yet his production peaks are of such unfettered clarity it would surely nullify bestial incest when negotiating guest-lists with St. Peter. Fidgety, broadminded and oft understated, Timbaland’s place on this list would have been assured if he had nothing other than Aaliyah’s ‘More Than A Woman’ to call his own. Or Justin’s ‘Cry Me A River’. Or Missy’s ‘The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)’. In other words, he’s earned the right to be shit.

-

3. Rick Rubin

Johnny Cash - Hurt

Looking like a cross between Karl Marx and the chap who hawks The Big Issue outside Manchester’s Arndale Centre, on a purely aesthetic level Rick Rubin is not your stereotypical producer. But then neither is his client list. Bringing with him a sonic genealogy that introduced hip-hop to the mainstream through the Beastie Boys’ frathaha, Rubin has a remarkable ability to highlight an artist’s defining trait then bring it to the fore in a fashion that seems retrospectively obvious but notably absent in previous forays.

Two recent examples of this are Jay-Z’s ‘99 Problems’ and Johnny Cash’s rendition of Trent Reznor’s ‘Hurt’ - wherein arguably the regents of their respective genres tackled emotionally blunt subject matter that explored the entwined notions of mortality and legacy. Whilst lesser producers could have struggled to rein in these egos and become cowed by their formidable reputations, Rubin deftly folded their XL personalities around pristine distillations of what people expected to hear; resulting in two songs that on first listen appeared stereotypical but soon revealed a portmanteaux of texture and emotion.

-

2. Quincy Jones

Michael Jackson - Billie Jean

Being a good producer requires patience, encouragement and a willingness to sacrifice your creative output to someone else’s career. Being a great producer requires the ability to admit you were wrong. Having slagged ‘Billie Jean’ off to high-heaven and attempted to get it shanked clean off ‘Thriller’, Quincy Jones eventually recognised its unfettered greatness and set about getting it mixed ninety-one times to achieve what became possibly the greatest pop single of all time.

Already an artist in his own right, Jones earned his production stripes tweaking the desk for Sinatra, Peggy Lee, Andy Williams and Ella Fitzgerald - but only came to indelibly mark Western culture with his work alongside Michael Jackson. Chronicled across three albums (‘Off The Wall’, ‘Thriller’ and ‘Bad’), Jones guided Jackson from broiling funk and strobed R&B through to agit-pop and saccharine ballads, whilst ensuring those who delighted in denigrating and vilifying the man would always have to negotiate a formidable body of work that will long outlive the callous sterility of a toxicology report.

-

1. George Martin

The Beatles - A Day In The Life

When The Beatles first auditioned for George Martin he was not impressed. Christ no. To paraphrase; ‘You, my chaps, are gash wipe - fire laughing-boy on the skins and speed things up.’ They did, and now we have The Beatles: Rock Band... Accurately referred to as the fifth Beatle, George Martin can legitimately lay claim to having helped define the cultural landscape in which we currently reside - acting as a musical Sat-Nav to McCartney and Lennon’s raw combustion of talent.

Examples of Martin’s overt influence include his insistence that ‘Please Please Me’ should be cluster-fucked from a soppy ballad into its teeth-rattling incarnation, the introduction of a string quartet to further blush ‘Yesterday’, and firing up ‘A Day In The Life’ through a breathtaking orchestral dynamo. Yet for all his tacit musical contributions it is the backroom machinations that establish Martin as the peak of production fitness, taking two separate takes of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and through meticulous deployment of vari-speed creating something that is nigh on perfect. That’s right; perfect. And if you don’t agree, we’ll set La Roux on you.

Words by Adam Park

The Northwestern

Robin Murray — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 17:31:47 +0000

Hope Of The States lived fast, recorded young and left an almost immaculate back catalogue.

Limiting themselves to just two albums, a few singles and some incendiary live performances the group suddenly split three years ago leaving a sizeable hole in the heart of British music.

Since then, lead singer Sam Herlihy has occupied himself with The Northwestern. Always the perfectionist, the frontman has already jettisoned one album's worth of material in an effort to discover a new songwriting voice.

Where Hope Of The States were emotionally linked to the musicians involved, The Northwestern are deliberately more vague, more mysterious. Crafting a veil around the group, Sam Herlihy agreed to sit down with ClashMusic recently and talk about exactly what he's been up to...

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

What happened at the end of Hope Of The States?
Well things didn’t really go wrong. We were sat on the bus on the way up to Leeds festival and somebody – although no one recalls who it was – just said “can we not do this anymore?” Everyone agreed, and we felt that was the right time to stop. It didn’t tail off it just came up that day and it seemed like the right thing to do.

Was it important to go out on a high?
I think that we all wanted to do different things by then, work with different people, and get on with our lives in different directions. It was nice, we were playing with one of our favourite bands – Broken Social Scene went on after us – and we’ve always loved Reading and Leeds. It felt like the right time to stop really. There’s no ill will, we just all wanted to do different things.

How intimidating was it to step outside Hope Of The States?
It was exciting. We took a long time writing songs, I mean we recorded a whole album with The Northwestern which we put in a drawer somewhere. By the time it was finished we had written a whole lot more songs that we liked better. It was scary, I suppose, starting again but that was kind of what we wanted. To live without that name, working with a new name and a different type of music for us.

What lead to that initial material being dropped?
The stuff that we did was probably a lot closer to Hope Of The States. It wasn’t the third Hope Of The States record because obviously there was a load of different people on it. It was closer to the first Hope Of The States record, perhaps, than the second. But again different in feel. It just took a long time, it took a long time to do. I actually took it out the other days and listened to it for the first time in a long time, and I really enjoyed listening to a lot of the songs on it. But it didn’t feel right to be playing that sort of stuff. We do still play a few of the songs live but in a very different way, not the way that we recorded them.

Will this material be released at all in any way?
I think we would have to re-record it again. The songs are really good but at the moment it just doesn’t feel right to be recording it and putting it out there. Hopefully it will come out at some stage as the songs are really good.

The Northwestern seem a lot more immediate and streamlined than Hope Of The States – was this an intentional move?
Yeah I think so. I think ‘Left’ was pretty direct. But I think these kinds of songs are direct, more melodic and more up-sounding. The last thing I wanted to do was record a load of songs that were so intense and miserable sounding, or angry sounding because that’s not really the way I feel anymore. It’s not the kind of music I want to do and it’s not the words I was writing.

Was simplicity an important factor in songwriting sessions?
In some ways it’s more complicated for me than Hope Of The States was because I write more of it now. Before, I would write stuff and then put it out there for everybody to put their ten pence in. Now I have to work out everything on a song and then hand it over to people to have their standing point. In some ways the songs sound simpler but they are actually more complicated.

Have your influences shifted at all? What music inspired The Northwestern?
I think I stopped listening to a lot of the stuff I listened to when I was in Hope Of The States. I didn’t find it exciting anymore. I started listening to a lot of the records I liked a longer while ago. Really great guitar pop records like The Strokes. I don’t think I could make a record which is as straight as The Strokes – they are so well crafted and I don’t have that sort of craft. But some of those repetitive guitar parts and stuff are really exciting, compared to big epic tracks. So the minute we get into the studio we just put everything on it and it always sounds pretty big anyway. I’ll never quite be able to wean myself off having lots of instruments and tracks.

The new has been described as your reaction to leaving Hope Of The States – is that something you’d agree with?
It’s a bit more like early 90s college rock than it is Hope Of The States. The Northwestern stuff is a lot more vague and a lot more scattered than Hope Of The States. Especially on the last record we were writing about specific circumstances and it seemed like it was too much for people. After that I didn’t want people to have assumptions like that about us personally. I wanted to keep things vague.

Did that connection take a lot out of you?
I mean it was what I wanted to write about at the time. All I could write at the time was lyrics like that. The new songs are a reaction to that I suppose, but if you played guitar then I hope you’d play guitar differently three years on from now. I think it’s the same with words.

Who produced the single?
We did. With James Godfrey who was engineer on ‘Left’ and did work on ‘The Lost Riots’ as well, but he’s a friend. We thought we’d do it with him, together.

The Northwestern - Telephones

How did things go in the studio?
We still managed to make rods for our backs. The EP was really good. All The Northwestern stuff we’d previously done in a studio in London and when we did the EP we wanted to do four tracks, so we got out of London. So we went to a place in Wales, which was nice as I hadn’t done that thing in a while. We just got set up in a big room, then hung out and drank too much. We worked through the songs until they were all finished. It always turned out different to what you expected – sometimes in a good way, other times in a really painful, awful way. But we’re pretty pleased with it.

How are you going to avoid The Northwestern becoming too complicated?
I don’t know. I think we particularly had a plan in Hope Of The States, other than what type of record we wanted to make. So we don’t think about the type of music we want to make, we just.. I don’t know write songs and hopefully do good things. Shows, tours, records or artwork. I just think it’s difficult to plan ahead as everything can change so quickly, especially in a band. You get different records that inspire you and that changes how you view music. We’re definitely in a more relaxed phase right now.

Are album sessions set to begin next year?
Possibly. We have a few things that we need to do but hopefully. I still really love albums and would really like to make one. I know a lot of people say “oh the album’s dead” but I personally think you still get some songs that just work together really well as an album. However sometimes the songs just seem quite crap together and they’d work better as a series of EPs which you could maybe comp together at the end like The Beta Band did back in the day. I’d love to make a record, definitely, but I don’t have any concrete plans. Over the next year would be nice.

By the sounds of things you’re continually writing.
Oh yeah! We write together and we write apart, and I write some other things as well. I’m not very good at sitting still.

Any aspects of the tour you are particularly looking forward to?
I love all the ups and downs. I like being on tour, it’s really good fun. It’s nice to play places we haven’t played, even just to see people come out and pay money to see our show.

How do you think people will react to the new material?
I still think there’s emotion in our music, just not as nailed down as in the old band. The reaction to the music so far has been really positive. People seem to really like it and so all we really do is continue. The introspection about what we’re doing now as a reaction to what Hope Of The States did comes apart when you see us live – we make a bit more sense.

The Northwestern's new EP 'The Ghostrock' is out now.

Singles Round Up - 16th November

ClashMusic — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 12:09:19 +0000

Thankfully a decent bunch before the Xmas silly season descends, Singles Round Up today sees new releases from the Monkeys, the Rabbit, the Dragon, the Boots, the Weld, the Earth and the One.

That's not very helpful is it? Oh well, now you'll have to read on to see who that badly thought out intro refers to ;-).

Needless to say, Single of the Week goes to Clash favs, the Arctic Monkeys with the latest release from their excellent 'Humbug' album (read ClashMusic's review of it HERE). The band are currently out on tour in the UK with them appearing at the Liverpool Echo Arena on Friday night. Check the exclusive snap from the night above (Pete Doherty / Retna).

- - -

Arctic Monkeys – Cornerstone

The next single taken from their ‘Humbug’ album, ‘Cornerstone’ sees more of that Last Shadow Puppets vibe come to the fore. The mid tempo pace, heavy reverbed tremolo guitar and Alex Turner’s matinee idol croon all transposed over from his between albums liason with Miles Kane.

-

(The Real) Tuesday Weld - The Ugly And The Beautiful

Propelled by a creepy, Lynchian feel, (The Real) Tuesday Weld (Do you think someone stole ‘Tuesday Weld’ like they do with usernames on Twitter?), ‘The Ugly and the Beautiful’ sounds like an old 78rpm transported from the 40s onto my turntable. Outside the strict stylistic setting, it’s a pretty decent little ditty.

-

A Mountain Of One – Lie Awake

http://www.myspace.com/amountainofone

Sounding like no one else recording today, A Mountain Of One are “happy to just lie awake” with that laidback attitude including what’s considered acceptable with the in-crowd. Recalling Pink Floyd and any number of prog/psych 70s rock groups, AMO1 are on a different planet sonically and, thankfully, in terms of quality meaning their anachronistic output works a treat.

-

Samuel & the Dragon - Diamonds on a boat

The debut single from Sam and his fiery pal sounds more like it should be credited to Samuel & The Bumblebee given the buzzing synth line that dominates here. That aside, and the fact that Sam looks like that weirdo antiques expert kid who is now a woman, it’s a nice first outing that makes me want to hear more from this one.

-

Frightened Rabbit - Swim Until You Can’t See Land

Brand new material from T’Rabbit is always greeted by excitement round these parts. Skimming along nicely, it takes its time to build into something approaching full speed, though favours a rather too civilized climax than we’re used to. That’ll be third album maturity maybe. Still, I’m looking forward to it.

-

Little Boots- Earthquake

After ‘Remedy’’s all out surrender to cheese chart pop, ‘Earthquake’ is a classier beast more in the area of Annie or Robyn (what is it with these mononomial Scandanavians), and, just to be awkward, I have to say it is missing something for it. She make be the new Kylie yet but she'll have to keep at it a bit longer for me.

-

We Fell To Earth – Deaf

Getting more and more interesting, We Fell To Earth, featuring UNKLE man Rich File, steps up to the mic for ‘Deaf’, their huge, swooshing new single. All it needs is sleigh bells and we could have a credible Christmas number one! Sounding more shoe-gaze-y than anything else, it’s a welcome diversion from their initial sound and a great sign for the future.

Classic Album: The Who - Quadrophenia

ClashMusic — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 13:58:37 +0000

With internal bust-ups and tranquilizer overdoses punctuating a continuous creative power-struggle, The Who’s ‘rock opera’ Quadrophenia pushed the definition of a concept album to its limits while demonstrating the transparency of youth subculture.

The album told the story of Jimmy, an archetypal Sixties mod. With sharp gear, tailored suits and slim-line Italian scooters key to mod life it was difficult for kids like Jimmy to keep up with the head ‘faces’. It was the inadequacy felt by those unable to meet these high expectations that provided the album’s narrative, particularly on ‘I’m One’ and ‘Cut My Hair’. For inspiration, Townshend revisited the band’s early days when, in 1964, they fell under the watchful eye of a new manager. Pete Meaden, a publicist and major mod ‘face’, had a vision to make The Who the focal point of his scene. He dressed them in Ivy League and Levi’s, cut their hair, and taught them how to dance, walk and talk, projecting his image onto the group.

Unable to keep up with the ‘faces’ Jimmy spirals out of control, descending into quadrophenia - a form of schizophrenia dividing the patient’s personality into four. This also represents the clashing personalities of The Who’s four members. After trashing his scooter and absconding to mod hacienda Brighton on ‘5:15’, Jimmy is saved by the realisation that Brighton’s iconic Ace, who he idolised, is just a hotel bell boy, a discovery that forces Jimmy to accept the transparency of a scene that for him has been a religion. After realising London’s existing recording studios would not be able to accommodate the scale of Townshend’s vision, the band chose to build their own state-of-the-art facility in Battersea which, although still unfinished when the sessions began, was capable of meeting the sophisticated production demands of ‘Sea And Sand’ and ‘Love Reign O’er Me’.

The studio was awaiting a new sixteen-track desk that would enable Townshend to create the most complex work of their career. However as work commenced the place looked like a war zone and it was necessary to bring in [The Faces’] Ronnie Lane’s mobile studio in order to record around the unfolding chaos.

As the album was recorded among the debris it became clear to the band that Townshend saw ‘Quadrophenia’ as ‘his’ record. After six months of megalomania and no finished product, other members spoke to Townshend about his autocratic control. The most vitriolic complaint came from singer Roger Daltrey regarding his vocals being recorded low in the mix. At the time, Townshend merely dismissed these complaints as “ungrateful” but during the rehearsals for the ‘Quadrophenia’ live shows the bad feeling boiled over into violence. Pete swung for the singer several times before Daltrey, a tough Shepherds Bush bruiser, hospitalised him with a well-timed uppercut.

This animosity leaked into the sold-out live shows, cultivating a tense and bitter atmosphere where the smallest of mistakes could blow the band apart. With the album’s material relying heavily on complex technology to be reproduced live, disaster soon struck. During a show in Newcastle the spot tapes failed, spiralling Townshend into a state of anger and despair.

As the band took the live show to America the problems festered like an open wound. The behaviour of drummer Keith Moon was causing grave concern. While playing in San Francisco, Moon suddenly collapsed on stage after having been ‘spiked’ with an alarmingly high dose of monkey tranquilizer, which hospitalised him for three days.
Following the jailing of the whole band in Montreal, Townshend banished ‘Quadrophenia’ from their live shows for twenty years, adding a ghostly mythology to the story of a young mod’s mind coming apart at the seams.

The story, all self-destruction and mental breakdowns, bore an eerie resemblance to the life of Pete Meaden who, after losing control of the band in 1964, descended into a downward spiral of drug abuse and depression. which saw him detained under the Mental Health Act during the early Seventies.

However, fast-forward to 1978 and Meaden was again working with the band on the film version of ‘Quadrophenia’. Working on the film reinvigorated his passion but he never really recovered from losing the band and unfortunately, the character who many believe Jimmy to have been truly based upon, soon succumbed to the album’s curse.
He was found in the bedroom of his parents’ house in Edmonton after taking a barbiturates overdose. In 1979 NME’s Steve Turner described Meaden’s death – in the teenage bedroom of his parent’s cramped terraced house – as a very mod way to die. What is clear is his untimely death drew parallels with Jimmy’s demise in ‘Quadrophenia’ in that it explained the emptiness of his chosen religion’s utopia and proved, to both Meaden and Jimmy, that mod was nothing more than deception and pretence.

Meaden, who said of ‘Quadrophenia’: “It’s me, Townshend’s writing about my life”, was laid to rest at Southgate Cemetery, where his scattergun mind finally found peace.

Words by Shane Gladstone

- - -

The Who - Quadrophenia

Released: 19th October 1973
Producer: The Who, Kit Lambert, Glyn Johns

TRACKLIST
01. I Am The Sea
02. The Real Me
03. Quadrophenia
04. Cut My Hair
05. The Punk And The Godfather
06. I’m One
07. The Dirty Jobs
08. Helpless Dancer
09. Is It In My Head?
10. I’ve Had Enough
11. 5:15
12. Sea And Sand
13. Drowned
14. Bell Boy
15. Doctor Jimmy
16. The Rock
17. Love, Reign O’er Me

MUSICIANS
Roger Daltrey: lead vocals
Pete Townshend: guitars, synthesizers,
piano, vocals
Keith Moon: drums, percussion, vocals
John Entwistle: bass, horns, vocals

1973: IN THE NEWS
• UK and Ireland join the EEC
• Elvis Presley’s concert from Hawaii is
watched by over a billion people worldwide.
• Gram Parsons died of an overdose at the
Joshua Tree.
• The World Trade Center is opened in
New York.
• QOTSA’s Josh Homme is born.

1973: THE ALBUMS
‘Berlin’ Lou Reed
‘Black Caesar’ James Brown
‘For Your Pleasure’ Roxy Music
‘Joy’ Isaac Hayes
‘Mind Games’ John Lennon

-

Read a feature on the film, 'Quadrophenia', celebrating it's legacy after 30 years with interviews with Pete Townshend and director Franc Roddam HERE.

Classic Album: The Velvet Underground - The Velvet Underground & Nico

ClashMusic — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 13:51:36 +0000

In 1966, Andy Warhol, pop-art superstar, hooked up with mysterious group The Velvet Underground. Together they created pioneering multimedia art in a series of shows in New York that revolutionised the worlds of music and performance, before their eighteen-month partnership soured with the bungled release of the original art-rock record ‘The Velvet Underground And Nico’, leaving the outfit to disappear into a foggy enigma.

These multimedia spectacles featured freaks from Warhol’s Factory performing as the Exploding Plastic Inevitable. The artist’s films were projected onto walls over which psychedelic lights flirted, while on stage The Velvet Underground played avant-garde rock, sending dancer Gerard Malanga into head-swirling gyrations on the floor. Warhol hoped working with the band would make cash for his unprofitable films; even he could never have predicted the legacy this partnership would create.

Lou Reed and John Cale were the Velvets’ driving force. At a time when The Beatles were singing about ‘love’, and western counterculture was falling under the spell of psychedelia, the Velvets were crafting a cerebral juxtaposition of social commentary and experimental art, telling sleazy tales of drugs and degradation.

Cale, the band’s viola player, was a classically trained musician who was heavily influenced by the avant-garde electronica of John Cage. He was struggling between the discipline of classical music and the liberation of the avantgarde when he met Lou Reed, a middle-class Brooklyn kid who had recently dropped out of Syracuse University. As the Velvets’ chief songwriter, Reed embodied the group’s spirit. Delivering his words in a diffident mumble, the singer documented the underbelly of the city he loved; although the subject matter was dark and depraved, a romanticised hope sliced through. However, the band remained unknown outside their circle until Warhol acolyte Paul Morrissey appeared.

The Velvets and Warhol met in 1965 when Andy was looking for a group for his club night. After meeting the band, he knew he had found his way into the music industry - a move he had planned for some time. Warhol was doubtful Reed was frontman material. In support, Morrissey drafted in Warhol muse Nico as co-singer, saying the group needed “something beautiful to counteract the ugliness”. Blonde, willowy and shockingly thin, Nico was the perfect foil for Reed’s lyrics - her ethereal, icy looks contrasted sharply with the subversive musicians, adding a captivating allure to the band’s aesthetic.

The ensuing debut record dealt with controversial themes of drug abuse and prostitution, and eventually achieved huge critical acclaim for its experimental instrumentation and recording techniques. Cale is credited with creating the album’s sound, utilising his background in classical and the avant-garde to develop innovative recording techniques on tracks such as ‘Venus In Furs’ and ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’.

In bringing The Velvet Underground to the public eye, Warhol’s input was crucial; it was his idea to revolutionise the way music was consumed, pulling together the separate mediums of music, film and dance to create a complete product. On record, however, where visuals are non-existent, there was little for the artist to do. Warhol, however, was not a businessman, and with no business brains behind the band things went drastically wrong. Ironically, the very subject matter which made the album so relevant to the underground scene became a noose around their neck. Banned by New York radio stations for its content, the record received no airplay at all, and as the songs were not being aired, advertising also drew a blank.

There were more problems to come: Eric Emerson, whose face appears upside-down on the back cover, refused to allow the use of his photograph, causing the album to be removed from the shelves while he was airbrushed out.

The failure spread like cancer and the band themselves soon lost interest in playing gigs to promote the album, leaving MGM to abandon the expensively-packaged record and pump money elsewhere.

After this the band severed their relationship with Andy Warhol and the album disappeared eerily from view until decades later when rock critics began fervently discussing the work, and its subsequent mythology, celebrating how influential the record was on modern music and cementing its place in the ‘greatest album ever’ lists of the modern age.

WORDS BY SHANE GLADSTONE

-

The Velvet Underground - The Velvet Underground & Nico
Released: March 12th 1967
Producer: Andy Warhol/Tom Wilson

TRACKLIST

01. Sunday Morning
02. I’m Waiting For The Man
03. Femme Fatale
04. Venus In Furs
05. Run Run Run
06. All Tomorrow’s Parties
07. Heroin
08. There She Goes Again
09. I’ll Be Your Mirror
10. The Black Angel’s Death Song
11. European Son

MUSICIANS
Lou Reed: guitars, vocals
John Cale: electric viola, piano, bass guitar,
backing vocals
Sterling Morrison: lead/rhythm guitar,
bass guitar, backing vocals
Maureen Tucker: percussion
Nico: vocals

1967: IN THE NEWS
• JFK’s body is moved permanently to
Arlington National Cemetery.
1967: IN THE NEWS
• Elvis Presley marries Priscilla Beaulieu
in Las Vegas.
• The Monterey Pop Festival is held.
• Kurt Cobain is born.

1967: THE ALBUMS
The Monkees ‘Headquarters’
The Jimi Hendrix Experience
‘Are You Experienced?’
The Doors ‘Strange Days’
Bob Dylan ‘John Wesley Harding’
Love ‘Forever Changes’

Classic Album: The Rolling Stones - Aftermath

ClashMusic — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 13:38:25 +0000

Spotlighting favourite albums from years gone by, Clash celebrates the 40th anniversary of The Rolling Stones’ first step into maturity with their classic ‘Aftermath'.

Up until the release of ‘Aftermath’, the Rolling Stones were a phenomenon. Marketed as the bad boy counterparts to The Beatles, their music - R&B and blues covers - played second fiddle to their image, their overt sexuality and their headline grabbing conduct, all mostly cooked up by manager and press manipulator Andrew Loog Oldham. Aware that there were only so many obscure songs his band could cover, and knowing that Lennon and McCartney had found a lucrative business in song writing, Oldham took it upon himself for the good of his charges to lock Mick Jagger and Keith Richards in their kitchen until they came up with their own song. The result ‘As Tears Go By’, although a tad saccharine for the Stones’ palates, was successful in the hands of Marianne Faithful and started the ball (or stones) rolling the in blossoming creative partnership of Jagger/Richards.

Their progression as authors reflected the boom in inventiveness that was happening throughout the arts in the mid-Sixties, especially pop music, where barriers were pushed on a daily basis. By 1965, the Stones could now pad out their albums with their own compositions when the covers ran dry. Hits such as ‘Satisfaction’, ‘The Last Time’ and ‘Get Off My Cloud’ demonstrated the rapidly maturing savvy of Mick and Keith as capable pop authors while staying true to their blues roots. But it was with their landmark 1966 album that the band could finally lay to rest their musical tributes and boast that every cut was their own.

The development in pop in 1966 was so competitive that the Stones had to find their own niche in which to excel. Their strutting manifesto was to challenge the older generation while imperiously indulging in leering bravado. And it worked. Speaking to Clash, Andrew Loog Oldham says of the band at that time: “You can see [their] confidence in the broad range of styles. From the nonchalant to blues or dance based; the seamy to the soppy ballad, Mick and Keith had nailed writing about their manor and the folks who live in it.” As such, the band excelled by elaborating their dangerous and exciting blues roots through the medium of pop and rock, thus arousing the sexual awakenings of teenagers everywhere. Andrew continues: “It was a year when the Beatles were high but still hopeful, Ray Davies captured the essentially superficial, Pete Townshend got fed up on your behalf and the Stones took you home and took your clothes off.”

Sessions for ‘Aftermath’ took place at RCA Studios in Hollywood in days off between Australian and US tours. The leisurely pace of the recording meant that there was time for everyone to experiment with ideas and sounds, as Oldham explains. “The group arranged them out and we ran the tape until it felt right. I did not go nuts over this one,” he says of his role as producer. “I knew who had done the work: the band, who had to deal with the fact that they had written, arranged and made a big step forward that might be difficult to play on the road. It still is.”

That giant leap in sound was due in no small part to the expanding horizons of Brian Jones who, disillusioned slightly by his guitar, had picked up exotic instruments on his travels to decorate his already extensive repertoire. Sitars, dulcimers, marimbas and bells may be a million miles away from the slide guitar that this Elmore James blues obsessive once championed, but his contributions to the artistry of this album can never be underestimated. “So important that only listening to ‘Aftermath’ can explain it,” Andrew concurs. Paradoxically, although fruitful in his donations, Jones had by now lost his grip on the band he’d founded and once led. As Jagger and Richards combined to push the group further ahead, Brian was increasingly sidelined and, due to his mounting dependence on drugs, could never really compete. “He was already a guy who could no longer drive the car,” says Andrew, “but he sure could wax and polish it.”

Also credited by Oldham for their duties is pianist Ian Stewart, friend and producer Jack Nitzsche, engineer Dave Hassinger and of course the ever-reliable rhythm section of Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts. “Everybody was clocked in,” he says.

The album launches with ‘Mother’s Little Helper’, a caustic dig at amphetamine-addicted housewives, then ‘Stupid Girl’ demonstrates Mick’s growing criticism of his female companions. In contrast, the acoustic ‘Lady Jane is a romantic ballad painted Elizabethan by Jones’ dulcimer and Nitzsche’s harpsichord. The dark diatribe ‘Under My Thumb’ continues Jagger’s anti-feminist stance, while ‘Doncha Bother Me’ nods back to the Delta blues and hints at the edgy decadence that would later emerge on ‘Exile On Main Street’. ‘Goin’ Home’ ends side one as an 11-minute loose jam, the tapes kept rolling at a session visited by Brian Wilson. ‘Flight 505’ morbidly describes a plane crash, ‘High And Dry’ is country-folk bolstered by the crashing cymbals of Charlie Watts. ‘Out Of Time’ is Motown soul carried by Brian s maribas and Mick’s casual brushing-off a girl who’d dropped him. ‘It’s Not Easy’ is a light Chuck Berry-ish riff, ‘I Am Waiting’ is a yearning folky ballad. Admittedly weak, ‘Take It Or Leave It’ and ‘What To Do’ end the UK version and were unsurprisingly left off the US release (the fuzzy ‘Think’ was saved).

Jagger and Richards had hit the ground running as a creative force to be reckoned with. ‘Aftermath’ hit Number One in the UK, while its noninclusive single ‘Paint It Black’ hit the top on both sides of the Atlantic. Whether the album compared to the consummate releases of their rivals that year is open to question, but as the rebirth of the world’s greatest rock and roll band, its importance is undisputed.

WORDS BY SIMON HARPER

Facts
Released 15th April 1966 (UK) / 20th June 1966 (US)
Recorded 3rd-8th December 1965 and 6th-9th March 1966
Produced by Andrew Loog Oldham

Band:
Mick Jagger - Vocals, Harmonica
Keith Richards - Guitar, Vocals
Brian Jones - Guitar, Dulcimer, Marimba, Sitar, Bells
Charlie Watts - Drums
Bill Wyman - Bass
Ian Stewart - Piano

Track Listing (UK Version)
01 Mother’s Little Helper
02 Stupid Girl
03 Lady Jane
04 Under My Thumb
05 Doncha Bother Me
06 Goin’ Home
07 Flight 505
08 High And Dry
09 Out Of Time
10 It’s Not Easy
11 I Am Waiting
12 Take It Or Leave It
13 Think
14 What To Do

1966: In The News
• John Lennon tells The Evening Standard that The Beatles are more popular than Jesus. He’s right, but it doesn’t stop the US Bible Belt from burning their records.
• The Moors Murderers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley are sentenced to life imprisonment.
• Bob Dylan is involved in a motorcycle accident and subsequently goes into hiding.
• England beat West Germany 4-2 and win the World Cup.
• Walt Disney dies.

1966: Albums
‘Pet Sounds’ - The Beach Boys
‘Revolver’ - The Beatles
‘Blonde On Blonde’ - Bob Dylan
‘Fresh Cream’ - Cream
‘A Quick One’ - The Who

Classic Album: The Pixies - Surfer Rosa

ClashMusic — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 13:32:19 +0000

Most acclaimed bands have one ‘classic’ record and an ‘underground’ one. In the former category are those that contain most of their best-known songs and tend to clog up those interminable ‘Top 100’ lists. The latter category comprises albums that did not attract the same level of critical and commercial success at the time of release, but score points for showcasing the band in its rawer or more experimental form.

These ‘underground’ records are usually introduced in conversation thus: ‘Yeah [insert classic album title] is alright, but [underground album] is the one the real fans prefer’. This is often nonsense. The Velvet Underground’s ‘White Light/White Heat’ is supposedly their ‘underground’ work, but only the cloth-eared would favour it above their melodious eponymous album of 1969.

Sometimes, though, the argument holds water. If ‘Doolittle’ is the Pixies’ classic – packed as it is with indie disco staples like ‘Debaser’ and ‘Here Comes Your Man’ – then the abrasive, ragged ‘Surfer Rosa’ is their underground effort.

‘Surfer’ doesn’t have the consistency of songwriting that ‘Doolittle’ can boast. Compare and contrast their respective last tracks: while ‘Doolittle’ strides off confidently with the malevolent ‘Gouge Away’, ‘Surfer Rosa’ fairly limps off with ‘Brick Is Red’ – pleasant enough, but something of an anti-climax after the preceding maelstrom. But ‘Surfer Rosa’ has a thrillingly propulsive energy that ‘Doolittle’ lacks. Despite being twenty years old today, the album genuinely hasn’t dated. That’s due mainly to Steve Albini’s production – sorry, recording – methods. Compared to other records from the era - which tend to sound indistinct now, as if wrapped in aural gauze – ‘Surfer Rosa’ still sounds razor sharp. You need only listen to the opening bars of its first track, ‘Bone Machine’ - a barrage of immense, rib-shaking drums, jagged, Magic Band-style guitars and bizarre lyrics about attempted molestation and infidelity.

The album as a whole sounds like it was recorded in an aircraft hangar. Black Francis would seem to have been locked in the room next door throughout recording, which may explain why he spends most of the album screaming his head off. OK, so neither was the case, but Albini’s recording methods were indeed unusual. He’s like a less extreme Martin Hannett. For Kim Deal’s vocals on ‘Gigantic’, Albini moved the studio equipment and recorded in a studio bathroom to achieve real, rather than studio-induced, echo. On the vicious ‘Something Against You’, Francis’ vocals go through a guitar amp for maximum distortion.

But this is far from a being a precious, studio- crafted ‘headphones’ LP. Like, say, ‘A Hard Day’s Night’, ‘Surfer Rosa’ sounds as if it was recorded in a single, frenetic session (it was actually ten days). Adding to the off-the-cuff atmosphere are the snippets of intra-band studio banter. One – an awkward encounter between Francis and an off-mic Albini – is a track in its own right. The other, in which Kim Deal gabbles excitedly about a teacher with a sordid predilection for "field hockey players", crops up before ‘I’m Amazed’.

Like all the very best albums, ‘Surfer’ has a memorable, highly apposite cover. The image of a topless dancer sashaying before a crucifix is the perfect representation of the music inside – sexy, a little unhinged and replete with religious imagery. You’d imagine it was shot in some seedy Mexican cantina, but it was actually taken in a London pub where the photographer built a suitably evocative set.

Pixies’ influence on alternative rock – in particular their use of loud/quiet dynamics - has been spoken about ad nauseum. Let’s not add too much to the subject’s word count here. There are, however, a few musical connections which haven’t been pointed out before: for instance, the bassless ‘Cactus’ could easily be a White Stripes number. (Despite MIA dropping some lyrics from ‘Where Is My Mind?’ into her 2007 track ‘20 Dollar’, the album’s influence on hip-hop remains negligible.)

But, overall, Pixies were a truly singular band. Their most interesting elements are those which have been copied the least. Which other band has merged flamenco with punk rock, as the Pixies do here on ‘Oh My Golly!’ and ‘Vamos’?

Like many underground albums, ‘Surfer Rosa’ was widely ignored upon its release, a reminder that ‘alternative rock’ was appropriately termed in the late 1980s. In 2005, seventeen years after its release, it was finally certified gold in the US. It’s indicative of the band’s unwavering popularity, something that that led to their reunion in 2004. Recent interviews with band members suggest another album will not be forthcoming, but fans can content themselves with this evergreen classic – sorry, underground - album.

WORDS BY CHRISTOPHER MONK

Released: March 1988
Produced by: Steve Albini

Tracklist

01. Bone Machine
02. Break My Body
03. Something Against You
04. Broken Face
05. Gigantic
06. River Euphrates
07. Where Is My Mind?
08. Cactus
09. Tony’s Theme
10. Oh My Golly!
11. "…You Fuckin’ Die"
12. Vamos
13. I’m Amazed
14. Brick Is Red

Musicians
Black Francis : vocals, guitars
Dave Lovering : drums
Mrs. John Murphy (AKA Kim Deal) : bass, vocals
Joey Santiago : Lead guitars

1988: In The News
• The Iran/Iraq war comes to an end, with an estimated one million lives lost.
• George Bush wins the US presidential election, and Benazir Bhutto is sworn in as Prime Minister of Pakistan.
• Pan Am Flight 103 is blown up over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing a total of 270 people.
• Actor and raconteur Kenneth William dies after an overdose of barbiturates.
• Wimbledon beat Liverpool 1-0 in the FA Cup Final.

1988: The Albums
‘Daydream Nation’ Sonic Youth
‘It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back’ Public Enemy
‘...And Justice For All’ Metallica
‘Bug’ Dinosaur Jr
‘Tender Prey’ Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds

Classic Album: The KLF - Chill Out

ClashMusic — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 13:25:54 +0000

The truth has always been stranger than the fiction that surrounds Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty. Whether throwing money into the crowd at a Chipping Norton rave back in 1989, machine-gunning the audience with blanks at the Brit Awards and turning up with a dead sheep at the after-party, or, as the K Foundation, handing out lager to London’s homeless on Christmas Eve or burning a million quid in the name of art, experimentation and risk-taking have never held any fear for them.

Following their success as The Timelords with ‘Doctorin’ The Tardis’ in 1987, they wrote the rules of how to have a number one the easy way in ‘The Manual’, then rewrote the rules as the KLF through hits such as ‘What Time Is Love?’, ‘3AM Eternal’ and the Tammy Wynette crooned ‘Justified And Ancient’. The duo didn’t just send shockwaves through popular music, they knocked the whole institution down and rebuilt it in their own image.

Their ‘Chill Out’ album in 1990 was no different in the way it redefined and reshaped music, albeit in a quieter and more subtle way. Apparently recorded in one live take (“We’d get near the end and make a mistake, so we’d have to go all the way back to the beginning and set it all up again,” Cauty told Record Collector in 1991) they laid down an artistic blueprint that has formed a source of inspiration and imitation for many since.

Following on from Cauty’s drifting ‘Space’ album (apparently recorded as The Orb’s first album, Alex Paterson’s contributions were later removed when Cauty decided to focus on working with Drummond), ‘Chill Out’ carried on the ambient theme, but this was a more focussed work, a concept album. Essentially a collage of samples and original synth parts, the concept is based on a journey through the Deep South of the US with track titles plotting the route along the Gulf Coast from ‘Brownsville Turnaround On The Tex-Mex Border’ through to ‘The Lights Of Baton Rouge Pass Me By’.

Rather than being inspired by personal experience, the journey was an imaginary one. “I’ve never been to those places,” Drummond revealed to X Magazine in 1991. “I don’t know what those places are like, but in my head, I can imagine those sounds coming from those places, just looking at the map.”

The sounds of a train rolling past and chattering insects mingle with steel guitar and basic ambient chords to set the tone before samples of chanting throat-singers and bleating sheep make their way into the mix. The tracks drift from one to the next, in what has become typical ambient fashion, as different places are passed en route and the steel guitar playing of Graham Lee becomes the focus. ‘Elvis On The Radio, Steel Guitar In My Soul’ adds to this Elvis Presley’s ‘In The Ghetto’, wafting in and out of the mix as the train rolls through again.

Other well-known samples can also be found emerging through the rich audio soup. The strum of Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Albatross’ fades in and out on ‘3AM Somewhere Out Of Beaumont’ before ‘A Melody From A Past Life Keeps Calling Me Back’ sees the seemingly incongruous 808 State’s ‘Pacific State’ and Acker Bilk’s ‘Stranger On The Shore’ eased naturally alongside each other.

The album also contains some of the building blocks for Cauty and Drummond’s future works. The chorus of ‘Justified And Ancient’ makes a few appearances and the triumphant chords used on both ‘It’s Grim Up North’ (a future top ten hit under the duo’s JAMs moniker) and ‘Last Train To Trancentral’ drench ‘Wichita Lineman Was A Song I Once Heard’ in euphoria, with the help of a ranting evangelist.

The album’s rich depth of layered sounds and samples set the yardstick for contemporaries such as The Orb, whose seminal ‘Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld’ stands shoulder to shoulder with ‘Chill Out’, and formed a huge progression forward from Brian Eno’s original minimal ambience. This was mellow music that could at times demand centre-stage as well as calming and complimenting its immediate environment.

Ronnie McPherson of Izu says, “‘Chill Out’ was directly and hugely responsible for making The Orb possible, and in turn The Orb fathered pretty much everything ‘ambient’ from 1991 onwards, so in that respect it was massively influential. The music it influenced has been an influence on me.” Thor Sideb0ard, who runs the Highpoint Lowlife label, agrees. “I don’t believe the ‘Chill Out’ album had that much reach or influence beyond the UK, but the people they did influence in turn greatly shaped and moulded the ambient soundscape.”

The KLF’s art-inspired exploits sometimes drag attention away from the music but they did contribute a unique legacy to electronic, cut ‘n’ paste, sample-based composition. The influence of ‘Chill Out’ can still be heard in some of today’s leftfield electronica, a huge achievement for an album that sold well but didn’t chart, is just 44 minutes long and, according to Drummond, took a mere two days to put together in Cauty’s squat-based Trancentral studio in South London.

“It made the electronic album viable and the dance producer was then allowed to indulge more,” Doug Hart of Chamber believes. “Kraftwerk were always the dons of course but KLF added madness and pop culture to mix. It really was the catalyst for a lot of amazing work through the 90’s by others.” While Ruaridh Law of The Marcia Blaine School For Girls simply states, “One: the KLF are the greatest band of all time. Two: ‘Chill Out’ may be one of the greatest albums of all time (certainly top ten). Three: anyone who disagrees with either of the above is dead inside.”

The year after the release of ‘Chill Out’, the KLF were the biggest selling singles act in the world and the following year they announced their retirement from the music industry. With Drummond and Cauty both now immersed in the art world, the KLF’s musical legacy may have been deleted at their own request but, above and beyond the heavily marketed chill out explosion of a few years ago, today’s down-tempo scene would be markedly different without it. A spectacular cultural bootprint on the face of popular music that will continue to survive down the years.

WORDS BY IAN ROULLIER

Fact File
Released: 5th February 1990
Recorded: Trancentral, Stockwell, London
Produced by: The KLF
Band: Jimmy Cauty & Bill Drummond - “composition, compilation and collation”
Graham Lee - pedal steel guitar
Nick Coler - programming and keyboards.

Track Listing
01 Brownsville Turnaround On The Tex Mex Border
02 Pulling Out Of Ricardo And The Dusk Is Falling Fast
03 Six Hours To Louisiana, Black Coffee Going Cold
04 Dream Time In Lake Jackson
05 Madrugada Eterna
06 Justified And Ancient Seems A Long Time Ago
07 Elvis On The Radio, Steel Guitar In My Soul
08 3am Somewhere Out Of Beaumont
09 Wichita Lineman Was A Song I Once Heard
10 Trancentral Lost In My Mind
11 The Lights Of Baton Rouge Pass By
12 A Melody From A Past Life Keeps Pulling Me Back
13 Rock Radio Into The Nineties And Beyond
14 Alone Again With The Dawn Coming Up

1990: In The News
• The first McDonalds in Moscow opened.
•Nelson Mandela was released from Victor Verster Prison, near Cape Town, South Africa.
• Sammy Davis Jr. and Muppets genius Jim Henson died on the same day.
• The 1990 FIFA World Cup is held in Italy.
• Blues musician Stevie Ray Vaughan died in a helicopter crash along with 4 others following a concert near East Troy, Wisconsin.
• Margaret Thatcher resigned as Prime Minister of the U.K.

Classic Album: The Beatles - Abbey Road

ClashMusic — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 13:17:58 +0000

As swan songs go, ‘Abbey Road’, although not the last Beatles album to be released, is a near perfect climax of not only the world’s most adored band, but of the decade in which they rose and fell. Once a tight, impenetrable force, by 1968 the cracks within The Beatles had started to show.

Their eponymous double album from that year, known as ‘The White Album’, demonstrated the divisions within the group, as solo compositions and individual recording sessions combined to form an album that, while bountiful and rich with creativity, lacked cohesion and consistency. Ringo Starr, finding his responsibilities diminished and inspiration limited, quit the band in frustration, but was coaxed back two weeks later.

Subsequent studio sessions, which ultimately became ‘Let It Be’, were fraught with acrimony. Intentions for the album - to take things back to basics and rejuvenate the band’s energy and bond - were observed at first, but soon were lost amid the intrusion of the film cameras documenting the detached affair. John Lennon directed his devotion towards Yoko Ono, who was unnervingly present throughout proceedings, Ringo was looking for something to do, Paul McCartney was desperately trying to inject order and motivation into the sessions, and George Harrison - irritated by McCartney’s apparent attempts of control and Lennon’s complete disinterest - walked out, announcing he was leaving the group. Work resumed a week later upon his return, and it was generally accepted that this would be the last time the group would work together.

Therefore it came as a shock to producer George Martin when McCartney, disillusioned with the results of ‘Let It Be’ (which was then delayed and eventually released after ‘Abbey Road’), proposed they convene to make one more album, to focus, work hard and create a great album they’d be proud to bow out with. They all agreed, and by the summer of 1969, were in Abbey Road Studios with the enthusiasm to do something special.

The bulk of the music from ‘Abbey Road’ dated back to the final sessions for ‘Let It Be’, where their foundations were formed, but ironically the unity desired for the previous album was far more evident here, manifesting itself in the distinct collaboration that make this album unique - the suite of songs that occupy side two.
After a strong first half, which featured impressive performances from each of the Beatles - including ‘Something’, George Harrison’s only A-side single release and a beautiful song to boot - listeners flipped over to find The Beatles pushing themselves to deliver a proper sendoff. ‘Here Comes The Sun’ introduces the optimism that’s set to continue throughout, then ‘Because’ sees the return of The Beatles’ striking three-part harmonies, largely unseen since ‘This Boy’ and the advent of Beatlemania, before the medley really begins with ‘You Never Give Me Your Money’. McCartney’s track was a thinly-veiled condemnation of The Beatles’ financial and business matters and was the opening bracket of side two that would close in the reprise of ‘Carry That Weight’ - both songs reflecting the end of the idealistic Sixties dream and presaging the realism and distrust that was to burden the band for the rest of their lives.

That the final song was called ‘The End’ (excluding the ‘secret’ track, ‘Her Majesty’) may have been more than just a coincidence, but, as each Beatle exerted themselves into what became the last session with all four present, it became a poignant but suitably boisterous finale. Ringo’s drum solo kicks it off, then gives way to guitar solos from Paul, then George, and finally John, before Paul delivers the album’s - and The Beatles’ - tender pay-off line: “And in the end / The love you take / Is equal to the love you make”.

Forty years later, ‘Abbey Road’ is cherished as the curtain call of the band that changed music forever. Its final line resounds, and we’re comforted by the fact that even though The Beatles are no longer, even though two are no longer with us, we’ll always have the magic that they made and its eternal charm. This is the best goodbye you’ll ever hear.

WORDS BY SIMON HARPER

TRACKLIST
Released: September 1969
Producer: George Martin

Side 1
1. Come Together
2. Something
3. Maxwell’s Silver Hammer
4. Oh! Darling
5. Octopus’s Garden
6. I Want You (She’s So Heavy)

Side 2
7. Here Comes The Sun
8. Because
9. You Never Give Me Your Money
10. Sun King
11. Mean Mr. Mustard
12. Polythene Pam
13. She Came In Through
The Bathroom Window
14. Golden Slumbers
15. Carry That Weight
16. The End
17. Her Majesty

MUSICIANS
George Harrison: guitars, bass, vocals
John Lennon: guitars, piano, vocals
Paul McCartney: bass, guitars, piano, vocals
Ringo Starr: drums, percussion, vocals

1969: In the News
• Jay-Z is born.
1969: IN THE NEWS
• ‘On The Road’ author Jack Kerouac dies, aged forty-seven.
• Charles Manson’s followers carry out the Tate/La Bianca murders.
• Monty Python’s Flying Circus first airs.
• BBC1 and ITV introduce colour broadcasting.

1969: THE ALBUMS
Grateful Dead ‘Aoxomoxoa’
The Byrds ‘Ballad Of Easy Rider’
Marvin Gaye ‘Easy’
Aretha Franklin ‘I Say A Little Prayer’

Classic Album: The Beach Boys - Pet Sounds

ClashMusic — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 13:03:02 +0000

The early 60’s had been filled with images of sun drenched beaches, the perfect wave, prettygirls and car cruises for the Beach Boys, but in 1966, the harmony group was to change the sound of pop forever.

Illness, drugs and differences split members of the band and while the Beach Boys toured with their well loved and polished surf sound, the heart and soul of the group, Brian Wilson, remained on home turf writing what was to become one of the most inspirational albums of all time.

It was hearing the Beatles’ own 1966 classic album, ‘Rubber Soul’, that spurred Brian into the challenge of writing the perfect album - one that drew on all his own influences, using the latest recording technology, the finest musicians, a concoction of varying time signatures and the thickest and gloopiest of vocal harmonies.

‘Pet Sounds’, the 12th Beach Boys album, was Brian’s baby that he nurtured while at his most creative - all at the age of 24. It was still rooted in his love for 50’s vocal groups, the Four Freshman harmonies with a hint of Chuck Berry, but it was to be more of an intelligent album. It was the last thing the fans, the record label and even the returning Beach Boys were expecting. It was fresh, it broke boundaries and it saw every instrument as an integral part of forming Brian’s desired outcome; a concept album which spoke of the fears of growing up and falling in love.

“I made each track a sound experience of its own. I was obsessed with explaining, musically, how I felt inside,” Brian said in the sleeve notes of the stereo mix release in the UK ten years ago. “I was in a loving mood for a few months and it found its way to recorded tape. I experimented with sounds that would make the listener feel loved.”
The love that was created by the album was equal to the love poured into it by Brian; every second deeply thought out yet giving the musicians the freedom to add to it, making it gel beautifully. The parts that now epitomise the Wilson/Beach Boys sound from the soft French horn on ‘God Only Knows’, theremin, harp, bass harmonica and vibraphone to plucked piano strings, bicycle bells, dogs barking, trains, heart beats, takes the listener on a journey of emotion. This was mirrored by the lyrics, penned in two months by a collaboration between Brian and advertising jingle writer Tony Asher.

The only track on the original album not part of this intense rollercoaster ride of feeling was ‘Sloop John B’ - a traditional West Indian folk song suggested for the album by Beach Boy Al Jardine and recorded months before the rest of ‘Pet Sounds’. It is still considered as the one song that maybe doesn’t fit as snugly on the album as the others. Tony helped Brian turn the sounds into pictures, even rewriting some of the lyrics already completed - the bicycle bell and horn remain on ‘You Still Believe In Me’ from its first life as ‘My Childhood’, but the effects were too deeply embedded to remove.

Although he had never written song lyrics before, Tony brought an innocence and simplicity to the complex musical masterpiece. He was the man who put the word ‘God’ in a commercial song for the first time in ‘God Only Knows’, sweetly sung by Brian’s brother, Carl; he wrote ‘I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times’, reflecting Brian’s own feelings that he wasn’t fitting in with society; and ‘Caroline No’, Brian’s favourite, a tale about the loss of innocence, which was actually about a blonde cheerleader who had cut her hair.

But it is the music that speaks volumes on ‘Pet Sounds’, recorded using the very latest 8-track equipment, the finest quality microphones, which were surrounded by the Beach Boys singers on the return of their three-week tour of Asia, blind to what had been happening in their absence, and the talents of such renowned musicians as Glen Campbell, Hal Blaine, Carol Kaye and Jim Horn - 79 collaborators in total. The genius production, heavily influenced by Phil Spector’s wall of sound, lifted the album above the heads of other singer/ songwriter/producers. Brian double tracked instruments and vocals, re-recorded and rerecorded, and took complete control of every part of the process, even calling up a session musician on the spur of the moment if he had a flash of inspiration. But he would also let his creative juices flow, often coming into the studio in Los Angeles with an uncompleted song.

The outcome, released in mono in May 1966, was remarkable, especially considering Brian was almost completely deaf in one ear since childhood. ‘Pet Sounds’ was inspired and has become an inspiration for many a musician. Paul McCartney became such a Brian fan, he won a starring role on ‘Smile’ as chief vegetable cruncher and said there would be no ‘Sgt Pepper’ without ‘Pet Sounds’. ‘Pet Sounds’ only reached number 39 in the US charts, but hit number 2 in the UK. It failed to sell enough copies to reach gold status on release and only went gold and platinum in 2000.
To celebrate 40 years since its release, a limited edition CD and vinyl of ‘Pet Sounds’ has been released with a DVD of previously unseen footage and unheard tracks, bonus tracks, including the early version of ‘I Know There's An Answer’, ‘Hang On To Your Ego’, which was dropped for being too LSD-inspired, and a behind-the-scenes documentary, as well as a previously unseen colour promotional film for ‘Good Vibrations’.

WORDS BY GEMMA HAMPSON

Pet Sounds/ Fact File
Released: 16th May 1966 in mono/first stereo mix released in 1997
Recorded: 12th July 1965 and 1 November 1965-13 April 1966.
Produced by: Brian Wilson
Label: Capitol Records

Lead vocals mainly by Brian Wilson, apart from ‘That’s Not Me’, Brian Wilson and Mike Love; ‘Sloop John B’, Brian Wilson and Mike Love; ‘God Only Knows’, Carl Wilson; ‘I Know There’s An Answer’,
Mike Love, Al Jardine and Brian Wilson; ‘Here Today’, Mike Love.

Track Listing:
All songs by Brian Wilson and Tony Asher, except where noted.
01. Wouldn’t It Be Nice (Wilson, Asher, Mike Love)
02. You Still Believe in Me
03. That’s Not Me
04. Don’t Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder)
05. I’m Waiting For The Day (Wilson, Love)
06. Let’s Go Away For Awhile (Wilson)
07. Sloop John B (Trad. arr. Wilson)
08. God Only Knows
09. I Know There’s an Answer
(Wilson, Terry Sachen, Love)
10. Here Today
11. I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times
12. Pet Sounds (Wilson)
13. Caroline, No

1966: IN THE NEWS
The first Star Trek episode, ‘The Man Trap’, is broadcast on 8th September. The plot concerns a creature that sucks salt from human bodies.
The Food and Drug Administration declares the Pill safe for human use.
Singer/Songwriter and genius of Grace, Jeff Buckley, was born 17th November, 1966. He drowned on 29th May, 1997.
Alfie, starring Michael Caine, was released.
Johnny Kidd of Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, died in a car accident on 7 Oct, 1966.

Classic Album: Talking Heads - Speaking In Tongues

ClashMusic — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 12:56:26 +0000

It’s 1981. Talking Heads have just released the wildly ambitious ‘Remain In Light’, but the band’s future is far from assured. How could they possibly follow such an album? Where next? Bassist Tina Weymouth said at the time: “We spent so many years trying to be original that we don’t know how to be original any more.”

So Talking Heads did what any highly creative band on the verge of splitting up should do: the quartet went on hiatus to distract themselves with side projects. David Byrne made ‘The Catherine Wheel’, a soundtrack for a ballet by his choreographer girlfriend Twyla Tharp. Weymouth and husband/drummer Chris Frantz cut their first album as Tom Tom Club, a pop-by-numbers moneyspinner. And guitarist/ keyboardist Jerry Harrison, not to be outdone, released his first solo album, ‘The Red And The Black’, which satisfied Jerry Harrison, if no-one else.

When they regrouped, the niggling jealousies within this famously dysfunctional band had not disappeared, but they had receded sufficiently. In his seminal Heads bio-graphy This Must Be the Place, David Bowman writes: “They still appeared more Addams Family than Brady Bunch, but they no longer seemed to be embittered.” The new congenial atmosphere allowed them to make their fifth great album, ‘Speaking In Tongues’, released in late May, 1983.

For three reasons, ‘Speaking In Tongues’ was a departure from the norm for Talking Heads. Firstly, all four core members had now proved they could work independently of the band. Secondly, it was the first album to benefit from the interracial ‘Expanded Heads’ group that appear in the Stop Making Sense concert film. Thirdly - and most importantly - it was Talking Heads’ first post-Brian Eno release.

Eno’s influence on Talking Heads cannot be understated. Band and producer met in London in 1978 when the Heads were supporting The Ramones. Their instant bond was such that Eno would produce their next three albums and loom large over the most fertile phase of the band’s history. Famous for his musical non-ability, Eno described his input as “listening to what they were doing and picking out sounds and making new sounds from them... using delays to create new rhythms within their own.” In the following years Byrne and Eno were almost joined at the hip, hanging out among the Manhattan trendies, collaborating on the leftfield LP ‘My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts’, even dressing alike; their relationship as fellow artists was intense, but platonic. But within the fragile power structure of Talking Heads, their exclusive cosiness inevitably caused tension. Note that Eno is just one letter from Ono.

The final insult for the other Heads was the biased credit on the sleeve of ‘Remain In Light’: “All songs written by David Byrne, Brian Eno and Talking Heads”. Byrne sensed that Eno’s ongoing influence would spell the end of the band that had taken him from a skinny young art student in Rhode Island to a skinny rich rock star in New York, and ended the relationship. Eno being Eno would say that it was he who lost interest in such conventional music makers.

Following the ‘Big Suit’ tour with the Expanded Heads, the band flew down to the Bahamas to start work on the as-yet-untitled ‘Speaking In Tongues’. But the exotic surroundings weren’t inspiration enough for Byrne, who would fly back to New York to pace around his SoHo loft with a tape recorder, mumbling lyrics to himself day and night – in short, speaking in tongues. Byrne was no Dylan: he didn’t do narrative – his lyrics were disembodied slogans and Dadalike verse. But this time, Bowman reports that “the words weren’t just random. David was actually saying something, it just wasn’t in a linear fashion.”

Musically, ‘Speaking In Tongues’ takes the Heads’ love affair with funk to its orgasmic conclusion. The rhythms are complex, African, black. The relentless pulse of the music was boosted by the Expanded Heads, especially by the talents of Parliament keyboard legend Bernie Worrell and Wally Badarou, a classically trained funk maestro. That’s not to say the white Heads couldn’t do rhythm of course: Frantz’s drumming, Weymouth’s bass, and Harrison and Byrne’s guitars are all tighter than ever.

Side one (in vinyl terms) is practically flawless. The beats are hypnotic, the synths dark, Byrne’s voice fizzing between paranoia and elation. Side two starts with the electro-blues of ‘Swamp’, where Byrne pulls off a convincing Delta growl, before – sadly - two filler tracks, ‘Moon Rocks’ and ‘Pull Up The Roots’. The album ends on ‘This Must Be The Place (Naïve Melody)’, with everyone apart from Frantz playing instruments on which they’re not proficient. The result is aptly naïve but beautifully sincere.

With ‘Speaking In Tongues’, Talking Heads sold a million copies for the first time, most in the emerging Japanese format of pre-recorded cassette. The record industry was changing. MTV was dominant. The dollar-eyed Eighties were in full swing. Punk was dead. Post-punk was dead. Talking Heads, now one of the biggest bands in America, would spend three more albums trying to reclaim their former edge. As it turns twentyfive, this landmark work of prog-funk genius is definitely due a reissue.

Words by Nick Mitchell

Tracklist

Released: 31st May 1983.
Produced by: Talking Heads.

01. Burning Down The House
02. Making Flippy Floppy
03. Girlfriend Is Better
04. Slippery People
05. I Get Wild/Wild Gravity
06. Swamp
07. Moon Rocks
08. Pull Up The Roots
09. This Must Be The Place
(Naïve Melody)

Musicians
David Byrne: vocals, keyboards, guitar, bass, percussion
Chris Frantz: drums, backing vocals, synthesizer
Jerry Harrison: keyboards, guitar, backing vocals
Tina Weymouth: synthesizer and string bass, backing vocals, guitar
Alex Weir: guitar
Wally Badarou: synthesizer
Raphael DeJesus: percussion
Steve Scales: percussion
David Van Tieghem: percussion
Richard Landry: saxophone
Nona Hendryx: backing vocals
Dolette MacDonald: backing vocals
Bernie Worrell: synthesizer
Shankar: violin

1983: In The News
Diana Ross stages a free concert in Central Park, New York, in front of 800,000 people.
A Korean plane is shot down by the Soviet Union, killing all 269 on board, and straining tensions in the ongoing Cold War.
U.S. President Ronald Reagan declares 1983 ‘The year of the Bible’.
Seatbelt use for drivers and passengers becomes mandatory in the UK.

1983: The Albums
‘Murmur’ REM
‘Synchronicity’ The Police
‘War’ U2
‘She’s So Unusual’ Cindi Lauper
‘Swordfishtrombones’ Tom Waits
‘Madonna’ Madonna

Classic Album: Sly and the Family Stone - There's A Riot Goin' On

ClashMusic — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 12:49:30 +0000

In the late 1960s, Sly Stone would often be asked, “Who's family in the Family Stone?” I imagine him smiling at this point, a knowing, playful smile to fill the pause before he delivered his customary line. “We all are”, he would inevitably reply.

It was, of course, in the way these things have to be, too good to be true. An inter-racial ‘family’ embodying all that was good about the hippy dreams of the Age of Aquarius; an R&B band who embraced psychedelia, who could rock harder than your favourite rock band; a band who couldn’t be anything but political just by dint of their being, but who wrote subtly brilliant political songs and got the party started with it.

But everyone loves to hear of the fall rather than the rise, so here’s the question: how, after just five years, did Sylvester ‘Sly’ Stone find himself holed up in a secret studio behind a bookcase, strung out on cocaine, PCP and more, muttering into a mic, fiddling with a simple little drum machine, slowly piecing together a load of seemingly half-finished, unstructured songs with the Family Stone almost nowhere to be seen? And how - and this is the amazing part - and just how is the resultant muddle one of the most beguiling masterpieces pressed to wax? Oh, and one more thing: what’s with the yodelling?

Sylvester Stewart was born in Texas in 1941 and moved to California as a child. His recording career began at the age of 11 and by his early 20s he had some pedigree as a singer and producer, an A&R job for a local label and a Saturday night radio show in San Francisco. Sly and the Family Stone came together around ’67, as Sly’s own project Sly and the Stoners crumbled around the same time as his younger brother Freddie’s band, Freddie and the Stone Souls. So there’s the first ‘real’ family: Freddie played guitar. More family came after the debut LP, in the form of keyboardist and sister Rose Stone. Cynthia Robinson took the trumpet, Larry Graham Jr. the bass. They all sang, more or less.

Then there were the white boys, two Italian Americans: Jerry Martini on saxophone, and Greg Errico on drums. A white drummer! Was this some happy, hippy accident, or was Sly playing with us? It wasn’t like Errico was the hottest drummer in town, nor Martini the finest saxophonist. And mid- 60s San Francisco wasn’t exactly short on musicians. Whatever: this was a pretty radical proposition, and if we’re now jaded by hyperbole and deceitful pronunciations of novelty, we should read the sleeve of their ’67 debut album with whatever naivety we can muster. ‘A Whole New Thing’ was pretty good on its promise, if no revolution. It didn’t really sell and ’68’s ‘Dance To The Music’was a more conservative affair, a successful swipe at the pop jugular. The rockier, superior ‘Life’ followed hot on its heels and then the real breakthrough: ’69’s ‘Stand!’

You can make it if you try, they sang: black and white, boy and girl, rock and funk. They were Everyday People. America loved them.

By 1971, the story goes, everything had changed, both for the band and in the world around them. They had achieved stardom: their performance at Woodstock in ’69 helped see to that. Their label rushed out a Greatest Hits in 1970 to meet demand as fans waited and waited for the new album. Many of them were to be disappointed. 1971’s ‘There’s A Riot Goin’ On’ was a long way from the gleaming exuberance of old. It sounds tired. Not dated, but exhausted. Jaded. Bitter. The ‘end of the hippy dream’ angle has been done to death but if there’s a sound to match the disillusionment of the time, of the breakdown of the civil rights movement, of Richard Nixon, of Altamont, of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, of Vietnam, of Jimi Hendrix, it’s deep in these grooves. Not of the title track though: that doesn’t exist. 0 minutes and 0 seconds. I don’t know why Sly did that. I wouldn’t be sure he does either.

Recorded in a $12,000-per-month Bel Air mansion, replete with secret studio behind that bookcase, details of the recording are hazy at best. Most of it was done alone by Sly, or members of the band recording single overdubs – despite the track, this is no Family Affair. It was overdubbed to death, creating that awfully seductive murky sonic sludge. The world’s sharp corners are blunted, its bright lights are dimmed. There were bodyguards, guns, groupies, in-fights, affairs, a constant stream of celebrity guests, from Ike and Tina to Miles and Herbie. You can hear Bobby Womack, Ike Turner and Billy Preston on the record, you can sometimes hear the Family Stone. But what you can really hear is Sly, and Sly’s crying. Even when he’s yodelling.

WORDS BY ALEX ROBINSON

Tracklist

Released: 20th November 1971
Produced by: Sly Stone

01. Luv ‘n’ Haight
02. Just Like a Baby
03. Poet
04. Family Affair
05. Africa Talks To You ‘The Asphalt Jungle’
06. There’s a Riot Goin’ On
07. Brave and Strong
08. You Caught Me Smilin’
09. Time
10. Spaced Cowboy
11. Running Away
12. Thank You For Talkin’ To Me Africa

Musicians

Sly Stone - vocals, organ, guitar, bass guitar, clavinet, piano, harmonica and drum programming.
Rosie Stone - vocals, piano, keyboard. Freddie Stone. background
vocals, guitar.
Larry Graham Jr. - background vocals, bass guitar.
Cynthia Robinson - trumpet.
Jerry Martini - saxophone.
Gregg Errico - drums.
Gerry Gibson - drums.
Little Sister (Vet Stone, Mary McCreary, Elva Mouton) - background vocals.
Bobby Womack - guitar.
Ike Turner - guitar.
Billy Preston - electric piano.

1971: In The News
• The United Kingdom and Ireland both switch to decimal currency.
• The original Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is released.
• Jim Morrison from The Doors is found dead in his Paris, France apartment.
• Walt Disney World opens in Florida.
• Ricky Martin is born. The world rejoices

1971: The Albums
‘What’s Going On’ Marvin Gaye
‘Roots’ Curtis Mayfield
‘Revolution Of The Mind’ James Brown
‘John Wesley Harding’ Bob Dylan
‘Maggot Brain’ Funkadelic

Classic Album: Public Enemy - It Takes A Nation Of Millions to Hold Us Back

ClashMusic — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 12:41:23 +0000

“London, England. Consider yourself warned.” It’s two decades since Public Enemy rocked my world. In authentic b-boy fashion, the sounds from what was to become hip-hop’s seminal supergroup first reached my ears from the speakers of a battery powered boom box.

This device, the size of a small suitcase and with its volume locked at maximum, was carried into our hangout, the shopping arcade of a Bedfordshire backwater, by an Italian school friend – our very own rebel without a pause. The crashing breakbeats, thunderous subs and Chuck D’s unmistakable baritone certainly upset the Saturday shoppers, and almost knocked me from my concrete perch. I’d always figured myself an open minded kid, having already embraced the pop end of the rap pack, with singles from Tone Loc, the Beasties and Run DMC dubbed from the radio, but the sounds which emanated from the stereo that Saturday were, to my mind, more likely to have originated from outer space than New York’s Long Island. After a little coercion, and with his original vinyl safely stored at home, my musical educator popped the C90 cassette from the player and handed it over - the words ‘PE: A Nation Of Millions’ and, on the flip, ‘PE: Yo! Bumrush The Show’ - scratched into its faded grey plastic.

My life changed direction the moment I got home and loaded the tape into my ancient Amstrad stack system. Played repeatedly for weeks, ‘A Nation Of Millions’ brought politics, history and ideas of social activism into my life for the first time and prompted me to seek out books on the Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan, Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey and Martin Luther King, in addition to expand my knowledge of soul to extremities far outside of the suburban schtick of James Brown and Kool And The Gang. Some years later, I bought turntables and began to DJ, worked briefly in a studio, and eventually followed PE’s own media assassin, Harry Allen, into a career in journalism.

The album, the central component of a seminal triptych bookended by PE’s aforementioned debut ‘Bumrush’, released in 1987 and ‘Fear Of A Black Planet’, released early in 1990, was intended by Chuck D, born Carlton Ridenhour, to instigate a paradigm shift from the cartoon-ish gangsterism, misogyny and braggadocio which had dominated rap since the 1970s to something truly revolutionary – “a black CNN”. While ‘Yo! Bumrush The Show’ remains a powerful record, perhaps one of hip-hop’s greatest records, it pales into comparison with ‘A Nation Of Millions’, which represented a high water mark for Public Enemy through a perfect storm of production, street knowledge, and design.

Pioneering studio team The Bomb Squad - Eric ‘Vietnam’ Sadler together with brothers Keith and Hank Shocklee - blended a range of sources so disparate that the record felt outside of the law. The percussion was unforgiving, prowling funk loops supplemented by thumping drum machine programming, but it was the noise that surrounded the rhythm section which matched the power of Chuck’s rhymes through production densely packed by samples from sources as disparate as Slayer, Bowie and Bob James, reconstructed by the Squad into a wall of noise as mentally startling as it was physically asphyxiating, all supplemented by the astonishing turntable work of the crew’s DJ, Terminator X.

Chuck D’s lyrics were on the same page as contemporary KRS-1, both concerned with social issues though the latter’s tendency to preaching and social consciousness, the rhetoric on the album had astonishing range – challenging the playlist policy of College radio in ‘Don’t Believe The Hype’ through cultural historicism to the unrepresentative numbers of black males incarcerated in the US prison system, in the chilling ‘Black Steel In The Hour Of Chaos’. Most controversially, PE proposed direct action, social activism and resistance against the state; Chuck’s stonily faced sincerity complemented by light relief of Flavor Flav, PE’s comedy lieutenant, keeping time with his giant clocks.

Perhaps as important as the music was PE’s astonishing visual presence. The album was littered with interstitials, recorded during a live performance at Hammersmith Odeon a year earlier. These now legendary shows were unlike anything I’d seen before, one part rap concert to one part military parade, where Terminator threw breaks and cuts from an elevated position draped in PE’s striking logo, as Chuck spat rhymes and Flav whipped the crowd into a frenzy, all the while Professor Griff led his Panther-like militant entourage (the UZI equipped S1W’s) around the stage.

‘Fear Of A Black Planet’, which followed, completed the triptych with a polished and impressive set which featured ‘Welcome To The Terrordome’ and ‘Fight The Power’, though the band have never quite recovered from the botched dismissal of Griff, following accusations of anti- Semitic comments in an interview with The Washington Post, with their subsequent albums having ranged from the middling to the sublime, the best of which, ‘He Got Game’, accompanied the Spike Lee movie of the same name. “Time for me to exit. Terminator X it.”

Words by Kingsley Marshall

TRACKLIST

Released: 28th June 1988
Produced by: The Bomb Squad

01. Countdown To Armageddon
02. Bring The Noise
03. Don’t Believe The Hype
04. Cold Lampin’ With Flavor
05. Terminator X To The Edge Of Panic
06. Mind Terrorist
07. Louder Than A Bomb
08. Caught, Can We Get a Witness?
09. Show Em Whatcha Got
10. She Watch Channel Zero?!
11. Night Of The Living Baseheads
12. Black Steel In The Hour Of Chaos
13. Security Of The First World
14. Rebel Without A Pause
15. Prophets Of Rage
16. Party For Your Right To Fight

MUSICIANS
Vocals: Professor Griff, Chuck D., Fab 5 Freddy, Flavor Flav, Erica Johnson, Oris Josphe, Harry Allen
Engineers: John Harrison, Jeff Jones, Nick Sansano, Chuck Valle, Greg Gordon, Jim Sabella, Matt Tritto, Christopher Shaw
Mixing: Steven Ett, Rod Hui, Keith Boxley, Chuck Chillout
Scratching: Norman Rogers, Johnny Juice Rosado
Turntables: Terminator X, Johnny Juice Rosado

1988: IN THE NEWS
• The Piper Alpha oil rig explodes in the North Sea killing over 160 people.
• - The 1988 Summer Olympics are held in Seoul, South Korea.
• Pan Am Flight 103 is blown up over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270.
• Red Hot Chili Peppers’ original guitarist Hillel Slovak dies of a heroin overdose.
• The Big O, Roy Orbison, dies aged 52.

1988: THE ALBUMS
‘Viva Hate’ Morrissey
‘Surfer Rosa’ Pixies
‘Tighten Up, Vol. 88’ Big Audio Dynamite
‘Rattle And Hum’ U2
‘Bummed’ Happy Mondays

Classic Album: Prince - Sign O The Times

ClashMusic — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 12:33:39 +0000

Prince Rogers Nelson has been busy damaging his reputation for the past decade or two. Despite that - despite all the middling records, the changes of name and giving his latest CD away to the Mail on fucking Sunday - his past achievements retain a granite-like durability. There are few right-minded music lovers who would deny his genius.

Given his subsequent decline, it’s enticingly easy to assume that Prince’s Eighties were monolithic in their success. But that’s not quite true. ‘Sign O’ The Times’ came off the back of ‘Under The Cherry Moon’ and ‘Parade’, both relative commercial flops. For that we can be perversely thankful. Were its two predecessors more successful, it seems likely that Prince’s label Warner Brothers would have had to approve his plans to release the album as a triple record set. Instead, his commercial clout clipped, Warners felt justified in demanding that it be trimmed to a two-record volume.

Perhaps that really was our loss; perhaps ‘Sign O’ The Times’ would’ve been equally fantastic in its original form. However, it can’t be denied that the album that was released eventually in 1987 is a masterpiece. You could deny that it’s the best album of the 1980s, but you’d be wrong.

Like all the best double albums, ‘Sign O’ The Times’ makes a virtue out of eclecticism. Listening to it, you feel that all human life is here. Throughout, the record flits expertly between full-blown excess and austere minimalism. Indeed, for a musician whose career has often been floored by his tendency to gild the lily, Prince is a master of minimalism. The title track is ascetic in its simplicity: for the most part, it consists of nothing more than Prince’s rapped voice and a drum machine; additional instruments only appear to illustrate lyrical points. The song also showcases a lyrical acuity that’s all too often neglected in favour of daft innuendo; the opening reference to AIDS ("a big disease with a little name") is a particularly smart touch.

Prince has always had an, ahem, thing for sex. While it’s far from chaste, ‘Sign…’ is one of his least overtly sexual records. Even when he addresses the subject most directly on ‘It’, his desperate vocal makes sexual infatuation sound like a judicial sentence – even the drum noises make their best impression of the clinkclunk of prison cells.

Despite the occasionally sombre mood, the album is sprinkled liberally with some of the best pop songs of the decade. ‘Starfish And Coffee’ indulges his occasional penchant for psychedelia. ‘I Could Never Take The Place Of Your Man’ is an absolute joy, and features the best breakdown in any song ever. ‘U Got The Look’ was, correctly, a massive hit, and even gets away with an appearance from Sheena Easton, the Esther Rantzen-endorsed TV talent contest winner from Scotland – the equivalent of a Michelle McManus collaboration in 2004. (Actually, Sheena’s a great singer – where is she now?) Elsewhere, ‘Slow Love’ teeters perilously close to cheese with its ‘dim the lights’ loverman shtick, but gets away with only the faintest whiff of Stilton. ‘Housequake’ and ‘Hot Thing’ could slay any dancefloor to this day. Thanks to their brutally pared-down sound, they haven’t dated a bit.

A couple of songs defy categorisation because they’re just plain weird. An unspecified melancholia hangs over ‘The Ballad Of Dorothy Parker’, articulated only by a synth noise that suggests the keyboard’s batteries are running out. ‘If I Was Your Girlfriend’ is stranger still. Its curious lyric about gender-hopping makes it the only Prince song that would warrant inclusion in a literary exam paper.

Prince’s influence is far-reaching. There’s the obvious: for example, Justin Timberlake’s falsetto-led future pop is as indebted to His Purpleness as it is to Michael Jackson. But Prince’s sphere of influence extends beyond the pop world and into the predominately white ‘alternative’ genre. For instance, the lascivious funk of the most recent Of Montreal album (one of the best releases of 2007), has Prince’s fingerprints all over it.

Of course, dullards would assert that Prince is himself derivative, taking his cues from James Brown and Sly Stone. Which is true to a certain extent. But, for any artist who wants to fuse funk with art, he remains the benchmark. As for ‘Sign O’ The Times’ itself, the double album remains the Holy Grail for artists who want to indulge in a bout of musical dickswinging, but most recent attempts have failed (step forward, Red Hot Chili Peppers!). It takes a truly great musician who can maintain the listener’s awestruck attention for more than an hour. Twenty years ago, Prince was most definitely that musician.

WORDS BY CHRISTOPHER MONK

Tracklist

Released: March 1987
Produced by: Prince

Disc 1
01. Sign O’ The Times
02. Play In The Sunshine
03. Housequake
04. The Ballad Of Dorothy Parker
05. It
06. Starfish And Coffee
07. Slow Love
08. Hot Thing
09. Forever In My Life

Disc 2
01. U Got The Look
02. If I Was Your Girlfriend
03. Strange Relationship
04. I Could Never Take
The Place Of Your Man
05. The Cross
06. It’s Gonna Be A Beautiful Night
07. Adore

Musicians

Prince: all vocals and instruments with occasional support from. Susannah Melvoin: backing vocals.
Eric Leeds: saxophones.
Atlanta Bliss: trumpets.
Sheena Easton: vocals.
Sheila E: drums, percussion.
Clare Fischer: string arrangements.
Wendy Melvoin: guitar, backing vocals, tambourine and congas.
Lisa Coleman: backing vocals, sitar, wooden flute. Miko Weaver: guitar.
Jill Jones: vocals.
Gilbert Davison, Todd Hermann, Coke Johnson, Brad Marsh, Mike Soltys, Susan Rogers and “The Penguin”: party noises.
Greg Brooks, Wally Safford, Jerome Benton and “six thousand
wonderful Parisians”: backing vocals.

1987: In The News
• The Simpsons makes its televisual debut on The Tracey Ullman Show.
• Andy Warhol dies at the age of 58.
• Hurricane-force winds batter the south of England.
• On October 19 stock market levels across the world fall sharply; this date is known hence forth as ‘Black Monday’.
• Joss Stone is born on April 11; this date is known henceforth as ‘Black Saturday’.

1987: The Albums
‘Appetite For Destruction’ Guns ‘N’ Roses
‘Yo! Bum Rush The Show’ Public Enemy
‘Hysteria’ Def Leppard
‘Document’ R.E.M.
‘Warehouse: Songs and Stories’ Hüsker Dü

Classic Album: Nirvana - In Utero

ClashMusic — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 12:20:59 +0000

It’s easy to forget, now that Dave Grohl is the eversmiling official ‘friendliest man in rock’, that he once occupied a drum riser behind the man Middle America held up as evidence of society’s decay. Take it from a fan who experienced the grunge explosion in real time; Nirvana were a band your parents didn’t want you to like.

But what else was there? As the ’80s gave way to the ’90s, music was in a state of perpetual confusion. Hair metal had bastardised guitar music, hip-hop and rap were still largely underground and generated a considerable level of fear, and pop was an endless succession of Mariahs, Michaels and Madonnas, all churning out three-and-a-half minute slices of guff for the masses to gobble up at will.

Rock music was at its most stagnant for years, and it is simply impossible to overestimate the impact ‘Nevermind’, and in particular ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, made in 1991. Suddenly, rock music was viable, cool, and dangerous once again. Millions of naked baby-adorned copies flew from the shelves, and in Kurt Cobain, Generation X had its ideal poster boy.

Two years later however things had changed. THAT song had become a millstone around his neck, and Kurt was finding life in the spotlight much harder than he could have imagined. Exhaustion, addiction and the newfound pressures of family life were also taking their toll. So when it came time to record their third LP, it was with a very different attitude that Nirvana entered Minnesota’s Pachyderm Studios.

Listening back to ‘In Utero’ now, it is immediately striking how the slick, polished sound of its predecessor is eschewed for a coarse noise and much more nihilistic lyrics. ‘Nevermind’ might have forced grunge and alternative rock into the mainstream, but this record was destined to defy such categorisation, adhering to no blueprint and wilfully flying off into acutely murky directions.

The opening couplet from ‘Serve The Servants’ sums it all up nicely enough; “Teenage angst has paid off well / Now I’m bored and old”. Kurt goes on to attack the media’s negative treatment of his wife and his estranged father; it was clear grunge’s messiah wasn’t happy. A noted feminist, he would later become immensely frustrated at ‘Rape Me’ being banned and churning up such controversy, yet had the PC brigade bothered to delve further than merely viewing the track listing, they would have discovered far more unsettling topics.

Lashing out with his lyrics, cancer (‘Heart Shaped Box’), mental illness (‘Frances Farmer…’), murder (‘Scentless Apprentice’) and abortion (‘Pennyroyal Tea’) all emerge as dominant themes.
Steve Albini’s production, scratchy and stark in places, (and later remixed heavily by Scott Litt) managed to tease out previously unheard aspects of Cobain’s vocals. Hence we get tracks like ‘Dumb’, a dreamy acoustic number augmented by cello and a wistful vocal line that is a million miles from growling about mullatos and albinos. The similarly restrained ‘All Apologies’ ends the record, but only after the penultimate two tracks threaten to plunge into a wail of feedback. Arguably the band’s finest track, its reflective repeated outro of “all in all is all we are” provides a fitting conclusion, and one that is made all the more poignant by subsequent events.

In hindsight, it is so tempting to read into Nirvana’s third and final studio release and pick out the warning signs. Check out those lyrics; “I lie in the soil”, “Look on the bright side is suicide”, “Throw down your umbilical noose”. How about the famously discarded song and original album title, ‘I Hate Myself And Want To Die’ or the gruesome, Cobain directed artwork? In truth, we’ll never know the full extent of what was going on in Kurt’s mind as the album was written and recorded, though listening back now can be a harrowing experience. In the same vein as Joy Division’s ‘Closer’, it can certainly be viewed as a very public, and very accomplished, statement of grisly intent.

In an interview with French television just after ‘In Utero’s release, Kurt talks frankly about his drug use and anger at the press, arguing that most of the album is very impersonal. Then a chilling prophecy; “Eventually, I want to be seen as a singer/songwriter rather than a grunge rocker, and sit on a chair and sing like Johnny Cash and it won’t be seen as a big joke, but who knows?” Just weeks later, he realised this dream at the group’s last meaningful live performance, leading them through the triumphant ‘Unplugged In New York’.
If you want to capture the essence of Nirvana, ignore the over-hyped ‘Nevermind’ and go for the record that best holds up Cobain as a musical genius. ‘In Utero’ is his triumphant epitaph; highly literate songwriting, deft guitar skills, pure visceral energy and the desire to do things his own way. To burn out at his brightest, rather than fade away.

Words by Marcus Foley

TRACKLIST

Released: 21st September 1993
Producer: Steve Albini

01. Serve The Servants
02. Scentless Apprentice
03. Heart-Shaped Box
04. Rape Me
05. Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge
On Seattle
06. Dumb
07. Very Ape
08. Milk It
09. Pennyroyal Tea
10. Radio Friendly Unit Shifter
11. Tourette’s
12. All Apologies

MUSICIANS
Kurt Cobain: guitar, vocals
Krist Novoselic: bass
Dave Grohl: drums, backing vocals
Kera Schaley: cello

1993: IN THE NEWS
• Film icon Audrey Hepburn dies aged 63.
• Nelson Mandela and FW de Klerk share the Nobel Peace Prize.
• Czechoslovakia is divided into Slovakia and the Czech Republic.
• Bill Clinton becomes the 42nd President of the USA.
• Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, both aged 11, are convicted of the brutal murder of two-year-old James Bulger in Liverpool.

1993: THE ALBUMS
‘Republic’ New Order
‘Pablo Honey’ Radiohead
‘Modern Life Is Rubbish’ Blur
‘Gold Against the Soul’ Manic Street Preachers
‘Vs’ Pearl Jam

Classic Album: Neil Young - On The Beach

ClashMusic — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 12:14:28 +0000

It began with a Lincoln Continental and a bottle of Mateus Rose. It ended in a drug-addled implosion that signified LA noire’s final trippy comedown, writhing on its belly like a hallucinogenic serpent, baying for blood.

What transpired in between these two fabled bookends is the story of Neil Young’s seasick salute to the demise of the Sixties, in all its glory/glorious failings. ‘On The Beach’ would be released to an apprehensive and critical audience, led by a Rolling Stone headshake that labelled the record “one of the most despairing albums of the decade.” Thirty years later its demented deterioration of sound would come to define Young’s knife-edged spirit in the face of critical acclaim, spurring over five thousand fans to sign an online petition in 2000 calling for the release of the album on CD. In 2003, their prayers were answered…

Released before the demonic cackle of ‘Tonight’s The Night’, ‘On The Beach’ was deemed a bleak follow-up to the critically acclaimed smooth sounds of bestseller ‘Harvest’. In all respects, this was Neil Young’s statement of intent: an unforgiving one-fingered salute, brought to life by opening track ‘Walk On’, a vitriolic mix of world-weary cynicism and focused drive that would spur Young to keep moving, whatever the cost. “I hear some people been talkin’ me down / Bring up my name / Pass it round,” he gnarls. “Walk on,” he concludes. It’s an anthem that still continues to define the lone wolf’s career…

‘On The Beach’ came to being at the Sunset Marquis Hotel, suffocating beneath Hollywood’s bleak underbelly at the close of 1973. Porn star Linda Lovelace was a regular visitor to Young’s congregated players, as were the Everly Brothers, who would often prop themselves up amidst a sprinkling of Playboy bunnies. As bassist Tim Drummond succinctly put it, the hell-raising sessions embodied “Hollywood Babylon at its fullest”.

In 1973 the sleazefest was fully in session, fuelled by ‘honey slides’, a homemade concoction of sautéed marijuana and honey, labelled by Young’s own manager Elliot Roberts as “much worse than heroin…within ten minutes you were catatonic.”

As guitarist Rusty Kershaw’s wife Julie cooked up the debilitating psychedelic goop, wolfed down by Young and co in-between regular trips to Dr. Feelgood for B12 “popcorn” shots, Neil Young turned his attentions to flesh-eating feelings of antagony and disintegration. No stone was left unturned: what with his marriage to actress Carrie Snodgress on the rocks, vampire sucking oil tycoons/Richard Nixon/CSNY weighing on his mind and baying critics on his back, the singer was hardly starved of inspiration. Defined by his own distinctive take on the blues, ‘Revolution Blues’, ‘Vampire Blues’ and ‘Ambulance Blues’ act as soulful psalms amidst the chaos.

Whereas ‘Vampire Blues’ launches a millionaire rock star’s attack on the blood-sucking exploits of the oil industry, the concluding knell of closer ‘Ambulance Blues’, inspired by Bert Jansch’s ‘Needle Of Death’, addresses fractioned feelings of antagonism towards critics, Richard Nixon, and even fellow collaborators CSNY (lamenting lyric “You’re all just pissing in the wind” is a direct quote from manager Elliot Roberts regarding the inactivity of the quartet).

Crucially, ‘Revolution Blues’, inspired by Charles Manson, who Young met in his Topanga Canyon days, best sums up the record’s juxtaposition of fiction and reality, as musician-and-ringmaster Rusty Kershaw bewitched the track’s recording, instigating chemically in-balanced anarchy during recording: Kershaw bizarrely claimed to be possessed by animal spirits and slithered like a snake on the floor, even managing to spook chief hellraiser David Crosby and Graham Nash, who contributed to tracks ‘On The Beach’ and said ‘Revolution Blues’.

The circus-act wasn’t lost on Neil Young, who adopts a demented Manson persona during the song as he manically rants the couplet, “I hear that Laurel Canyon is full of famous stars / But I hate them worse than lepers and I’ll kill them in their cars.”

As the sessions became increasingly frenetic, the shambolic goings-on proved too far-out for engineer Al Schmitt who walked out on the session before its completion, amidst exasperated exclaims of “what the fuck is goin’ on?” Good question: what the fuck was going on?

Simple: Neil Young was making his escape. The iconic album cover speaks the only truth you ever need know: trailer trash patio furniture is strewn under the grey breezy sky as a 1959 Cadillac fender rises out of the sandy rubble. The day’s paper is discarded on the anaemic sand, reading ‘SENATOR BUCKLEY CALLS FOR NIXON TO RESIGN’.

Someway in the not-too-distant horizon, a windswept Neil Young stands with his back against the world, staring out to sea in a yellow and white polyester suit. Subversive when you bear in mind the album’s defining mantra: “The world is turnin’ / I hope it don’t turn away.” With that, Young’s pre-emptive strike against the world is complete… Half a heartbeat before the world dares contemplate turning its back away from him…

WORDS BY KAT LISTER

TRACKLIST

Released: July 19th 1974
Producer: Neil Young, David Briggs, Mark Harman, Al Schmitt

1. Walk On
2. See The Sky About To Rain
3. Revolution Blues
4. For The Turnstiles
5. ‘Vampire Blues’
6. On The Beach
7. Motion Pictures
8. Ambulance Blues

MUSICIANS
Neil Young: guitar, vocal, piano, banjo, harmonica
Ben Keith: slide guitar, vocal, steel guitar, piano
Tim Drummond: bass, percussion
Ralph Molina: drums

1974: IN THE NEWS
• ABBA win the Eurovision Song Contest.
• Martin Luther King’s mother is murdered.
• Richard Nixon resigns as President.
• Kate Moss is born.

1974: THE ALBUMS
Elton John ‘Caribou’
Lou Reed ‘Rock ‘N’ Roll Animal’
Queen ‘Sheer Heart Attack’
AC/DC ‘Red’

Classic Album: Michael Jackson - Thriller

ClashMusic — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 12:05:15 +0000

In 1982, the eyes of the world rested upon the Falklands War; Aston Villa won the European Cup; Ozzy Osbourne bit the head off a live bat; The Jam disbanded; and Sony launched the first CD player. But in musical circles, the year will be remembered because of a 24 year-old Michael Jackson who was set to change the industry forever with the release of ‘Thriller’ – the follow up to ‘Off The Wall’ – that would define Jackson’s growth from childhood prodigy to adult genius and cement his place in the record books.

Despite Jackson’s aspirations for the album to be the biggest of all, no-one could have predicted that ‘Thriller’ was set to become the blueprint of the modern pop/R&B record and an album that would turn the recording industry on its head commercially (album sales were only about 2 million at best). It would consequently catapult the partnership of Jackson and legendary producer Quincy Jones alongside the successes of Lennon and McCartney. Jones wasn’t wrong when he said, “the ‘80’s were ours!”

Twenty-five years later, Thriller, according to Sony it has now sold 104 million copies worldwide (statistically that is the population of the UK and Spain each owning a copy), making it the world’s biggest-selling album of all time. Its intricately crafted blend of pop, rock and R&B/funk has surfaced in every corner of the world, and infiltrated every demographic; to quote Jackson himself, it epitomises a universal music that reaches “the lady who scrubs the toilets in Harlem to the farmer in Ireland.”

Thankfully, Jackson and Sony seem to have put reported differences on hold (he is no longer signed to the label) to celebrate the release of the landmark album with a re-issue that has seen the ‘Gloved One’ team up with some of today’s superstar producer’s including Black Eyed Peas’ Will I Am, Kanye West, Akon and Ne-Yo for a selection of remixes.

This timeless masterpiece combined everything we know of Michael Jackson the artist – the graceful and aggressive vocals, the infectious melodies, trademark dance moves, and an unparalleled interpretation of song via the pop video for which he has never really been given due credit.

With what he would call his answer to Tchaikovsky’s ‘Nutcracker Suite’, Jackson (overseen by Jones) laid down a collection of killer tunes and put his unmistakable stamp on the music industry, following 20 years of hard work, dedication and desire to be the number one artist in the world. This prodigious raw talent that had been carefully honed amongst musical dignitaries such as Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Smokey Robinson and Gamble and Huff at grade school had finally graduated.

As on ‘Off The Wall’, the songwriting prowess of Heatwave’s Rod Temperton was employed, joining Jackson as the record’s chief songwriter. These giants would have friendly duals in an effort to challenge each other and nail the knockout tracks to Quincy’s production desk. Temperton’s title track met Jackson’s love of fantasy head on in one giant collision of funk (not forgetting Vincent Price’s ghoulish rap) that proved to be the album’s signature track; and with John Landis’ 15-minute video, Jackson would again break new ground by creating a whole new dimension in how the pop video was used. In fact sales of the album would triple the day it was first broadcast.

With the sultry ‘Lady In My Life’ Jackson exhibited a soulful majesty not heard since his Motown days and alongside the exuberant ‘Baby Be Mine’, Temperton confirmed himself as one of the greatest writers of our time.

Jackson’s songwriting skills are often overlooked – perhaps his singing and dancing prowess are to blame. But whilst ‘Thriller’ became the signature track, it was Jackson’s ‘Billie Jean’ that was the gem and subsequent highlight of his career so far. The song’s autobiographical tale of an obsessed fan who claimed he was the father of “one of her twins”, is cleverly expressed through the dark basslines and orchestration that creates a feeling of apprehension and danger. It goes down in the history books as one of the greatest dance records of all. Whether the ‘super-producers’ of today should even begin to reproduce it is a debate for another day – but at least Mark Ronson was not involved.

Jackson expressed his versatility as a writer and vocalist with ‘Beat It’, surpassing the drama of ‘This Place Hotel’ recorded with his brothers two years previously. Its unmistakeable menacing foghorn opening, coupled with Eddie Van Halen’s guitar, brought in legions of the most arduous of white rock fans (another demographic off the Jones/Jackson checklist!). Thanks to ‘Billie Jean’ and ‘Beat It’, Jackson went on to single-handedly break down the invisible ‘White Artists Only’ doors at MTV and became the first black artist to appear on the channel – paving the way for his ’80s rival Prince and many others.

On listening to the joyous Swahili chants behind the stabbing baselines of ‘Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’ the aggressive lyrics Jackson spits out offer early insights into the inner turmoil the singer would expand on in later efforts. Whilst the teaming of Paul McCartney on ‘The Girl is Mine’ doesn’t have the effect that one would expect from two musical giants – proving to be a sweet and sickly affair – it is a taste soon forgotten thanks to the imaginative ‘Human Nature’ that rose to further heights in the early ’90s thanks to the heavily sampled ‘Right Here’ by SWV.

Reportedly currently in the studio creating a new album, his influence 25 years after ‘Thriller’ is unsurpassed in today’s pop/R&B climate. There can be no doubt that he has influenced Justin Timberlake, R Kelly, Beyonce and countless others. He did more than that; Michael Jackson redefined the meaning of the pop star and what a musician can accomplish. And ‘Thriller’ set the benchmark of what a pop album could achieve. With each listen of the album, the ear finds a new unheard dimension, even 25 years after its release. Indeed it is the nearest to perfection that the pop canon has to offer.

Perhaps blinded by questions over his private life, many people seem intent on writing Michael Jackson out of the history books.But no matter what you think, you cannot ignore what he and his album achieved – nothing less than world domination.

WORDS BY DAVID AARON

Tracklist

Released: 1st December 1982
Produced by: Quincy Jones

01. Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin
02. Baby Be Mine
03. The Girl Is Mine
04. Thriller
05. Beat It
06. Billie Jean
07. Human Nature
08. P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing)
09. The Lady In My Life

1982: In The News
• The 1982 FIFA World Cup is held in Spain.
• Prince William is born.
• Knight Rider gets its debut screening.
• Channel 4 is launched.
• John Belushi dies aged 33 – the cause of death is 11 speedballs…

1982: The Albums
‘Avalon’ Roxy Music
‘Combat Rock’ The Clash
‘The Gift’ The Jam
‘The Hunter’ Blondie
‘Nebraska’ Bruce Springsteen