Both Ducks Ltd and Dolour were completely new to me in 2021. In Dolour’s case this is likely down to my inattention nearly two decades ago when Shane Tutmarc released ‘Suburbiac’, an album whose terrific PowerPop roots would surely have been just about visible beneath the kind of EmoPunkPop buffed sheen so prevalent at the time. Indeed Tutmarc himself has returned to those songs in recent times, scrubbing off some of that scent of Teen Spirit to reveal, in the newly recorded ‘Origin Story’ set, some of the jewels that lurked beneath. It’s the collection of new songs on ‘Televangelist’ though that really hit the mark in 2021 as Tutmarc reveals himself to be a conduit for the spirit of the Great American Songbook fed through a soft-pop psychedelic prism. Fizzing and sparkling with Raspberries flavoured Power Pop magic, these ten songs bounce down the sidewalk/pavement dodging Jan and Dean’s Summer raindrops. The Go-Gos are on speed-dial and there are piles of Tokens discs under the bed. You get the picture.
Then of course there’s the ghost of Tom Petty, summoned with love and devotion on uh, ‘The Day Tom Petty Died’. Tutmarc pulls off the tricky task of conjuring an homage from explicit references that manages to sound both reverential, celebratory and distinctively individual all at once. No mean feat.
Now if ‘Televangelist’ is a marvellous celebration of 1970s Power Pop then ‘Modern Fiction’ by Ducks Ltd performs a similar feat for 1980s guitar Indiepop. It all kicks off with a proto-Wedding Present jangle circa 1986 before taking up residence in a 1980s Dunedin transported to 2021 Toronto. There’s an explicit nod to The Chills in ‘Under The Rolling Moon’ but really the whole record is like some sort of magical portal to the past. It could be easy to level claims of pastiche to ‘Modern Fiction’, but it somehow just manages to deftly dodge such cheap shots. I mean, sure, ‘Always There’, with backing vocals provided by The Beths, could be a cover of a lost outtake from Look Blue Go Purple’s EP sessions filtered through Close Lobsters’ city of pattern, but that is no bad thing, surely? And if ’18 Cigarettes’ could have skived off the sessions for the Bats’ ‘Daddy’s Highway’ it’s also true to say that it manages to sound delectably fresh and current. Ducks Ltd may not so much wear influences on their sleeves as use the cloth to craft their entire outfit, yet they are such tremendous threads that you’ve got to applaud their taste and poise in carrying off the look.
‘Modern Fiction’ and ‘Televangelist’ each have ten songs of sublime Pop pleasure that’ll cost you just thirty minutes and change. Frankly, you’d be daft to miss either.
Someone somewhere recently wrote something about the tremendous ‘Glasgow 1980’ film that was made, somewhat confusingly, in 1971. Commissioned by Glasgow Corporation to promote their vision of the city’s future, it was meant to show a Bright New Tomorrow, and perhaps for a moment it did. Viewed through the lens of its own tomorrows, however, it now reads more as a lament for what was lost; a city scarred by massive canyons excavated for motorways and their supporting roads that scythed through its heart. In the end Glasgow ended up with roads that literally went nowhere, sweeping in hopeful arcs into the grey sky only to to be abruptly curtailed with a feeble metal grating that stopped any daring young Evil Knievels from using it as a ramp to jump the multiple lanes of the Kingston Bridge. There was a road bridge at the end of Sauchiehall Street that stood bizarrely alone too, linking nothing except fresh air. Later someone built an office block on top of it, which certainly made sense but still rather spoilt the surrealism. Anyway, the film was directed by Oscar Marzaroli, who this someone somewhere described as being more commonly known as “Glasgow’s Nan Goldin.” I admit I had to shake my head and mumble no, no, no, no, no. For if Marzoroli was Glasgow’s anyone he was perhaps its Berenice Abbot or at a push its Joel Meyerowitz. Or how about they were New York’s Oscar Marzaroli…
If there has been a Glasgow’s Nan Goldin, however, then my own money would be on Arab Strap. They might not make photographs but I’m not sure that anyone has captured the essence of the city and its wider environs better than they. Gerard Depardon perhaps came closest when in 1980 The Sunday Times commissioned him to document what had become of the Corporation’s future vision. His outsider’s eye saw through to the heart of the place with such extraordinary success, however, that it would take thirty six years for the photographs to be published.
Arab Strap have certainly always been cinematic, or photographic, in the sense of writing songs and making music that peer into cracks, illuminating what might otherwise remain unseen. Their songs so often lift the lid on what humans perhaps like to think of as the personal, the secret, the somehow shameful. Their songs have been unafraid to poke holes (metaphorically, symbolically, literally) in Middle Class priggishness, portraying life in all its sometimes seedy, pleasurable delight as much as its overwhelming existential void. Of course it could sometimes all get a bit much and if one wanted to be overtly critical one might blithely throw around lines about the group becoming a pastiche of themselves. There can be a fine line between pastiche, self-parody and successfully mining the seam of inspiration, however. Just as long as the work remains good. I mean, no-one ever suggests that Rothko’s paintings are pastiche’s of themselves, do they? And Arab Strap always remained good.
Still, it was right and proper that they split back in 2006. It meant, as much as anything, that Aidan Moffat and Malcolm Middleton could make some great solo and collaborative records with others. Middleton’s string of albums is as good as any, with 2009’s ‘Waxing Gibbous’ and 2016’s ‘Summer Of ’13’ being particular favourites. His collaboration with David Shrigley on ‘Music and Words’ in 2015 is an amusing enough diversion too. Moffat too has delivered some gems in the past fifteen years, his collaborations with RM Hubbert and Bill Wells being particularly appealing. At this time of year too, of course, it is good to revisit 2018’s tremendous Moffatt/Hubbert ‘Ghost Stories for Christmas’ set of chilling, bleak deliciousness. It’s hardly music for rocking around the Christmas tree, but what would you expect?
Yet if it was proper and right that Arab Strap split in 2006 it is equally fitting that they should be back together in 2021 with the aptly titled ‘As Days Get Dark’ that dives deep into the chasms of contemporary middle-aged (male) existence. So yes, there are drugs and there is alcohol and there is sex and there is pornography. Yes, there is desolation and sorrow. Yes too to pessimism, cynicism and escapist hedonism. There is too a poignant meditation on the plight of refugees and political/economic migrants, although all things are relative and this being Arab Strap the ‘Fable of the Urban Fox’ hardly pulls its punches, or indeed its cricket bat as it hits hard and mercilessly. These ingredients have always been part of Arab Strap’s idiosyncratic personality, of course, and we would surely feel cheated if they were not so extravagantly on show. So too we would be disappointed if the whole thing were not also shot through with the marvellous dark humour that always prevented their songs from falling into the cesspits of their own making.
There has always been something vaguely Mediaeval about Arab Strap, like a couple of rampant jester troubadours rubbing the Gentry’s faces in the shit whilst happily pocketing their gold. Something of that resonates in the depths of ‘Here Comes Comus!’, the cut that I’ve plucked from the depths of their fucked-up and fucked-off universe for the Unpopular advent. A tale of degenerates slinking in the shadows of our subconscious, it has the feel of an insider, fly-on-the-wall docudrama where smirks of knowing glisten from leatherette couchettes. It’s Soft Cell scouring the dens of debauchery; Suicide and Kathy Acker swapping notes with Diane di Prima and Smog.
“He’s always talking pish but he think he’s so profound” Moffat tells us of the main protagonist (Comus, as opposed to Camus, one assumes) and we can’t help wonder if this is another one of those sceptical self-deprecating piss-takes at Arab Strap’s own expense. Regardless, it is, like the entirety of ‘As Days Get Dark’ starkly, uncomfortably funny and an unsettlingly welcome reminder both of the essence of our times and the genius of the artists. Tonight, thank god it’s them instead of you…
David Lance Callahan – ‘She Passes Through The Night’ from English Primitive I
If in ‘Revolt Against an Age Of Plenty’ Alan Brown has made a record that observes and comments eloquently on contemporary society and its ills, all wrapped up in a super Popoid groove, then David Lance Callahan (of Wolfhounds and Moonshake infamy) plays a similar role whilst inhabiting a landscape of traditional folk music given a healthy twist of exotic raga weirdness and psychedelic extravagance.
‘English Primitive I’ opens traditionally enough with the terrific ‘Born Of The Welfare State Was I’ in which Callahan and Katherine Mountain Whitaker (formerly of Welsh punk-poppers Evans The Death) recount their good fortune at having lived through a period in the UK’s history when Governments saw their role as one of supporting and enriching the lives of all rather than protecting and expanding the wealth of a privileged minority. It reads as a hymn to tragedy, as a sweetly bitter plea for better times to come again. Don’t think anyone is holding out much hope, mind…
Elsewhere, the haunting ‘One Rainy September’ ploughs a similar folk path with its narrative of interwoven lives as Callahan and Whitaker again trade lines, this time as a father and daughter failing miserably to connect in any meaningful way. There are no winners here; both sides tragically caught in the eternal spiral of cause and effect. The song is eight and a half minutes of melancholic sorrow where the black hole of failed communication and fear of connection pulls the characters, and us, into a void of pain where love has curdled to despair. It’s like Fairport singing about John “Babbacombe” Lee in a spectral midnight mist. Bleak, brutal, yet hauntingly beautiful.
The twisted traditional folk flavour of the record warps further into ravaged peculiarity on tracks like ‘Goatman’ and the frankly terrifyingly addictive ‘Foxboy’. These magnificent songs are the animal-masked devotees of ‘The Wicker Man’ dancing wildly beneath timeless midsummer skies with the music sThe twisted traditional folk flavour of the record warps further into ravaged peculiarity on tracks like ‘Goatman’ and the frankly terrifyingly addictive ‘Foxboy’. These magnificent songs are the animal-masked devotees of ‘The Wicker Man’ dancing wildly beneath timeless midsummer skies with the music swirling around us in dense oscillating clouds of mesmerising psychedelic pattern. Everything hovers on the edge between East and West, between control and abandon, between darkness and light, the here and the other. It all reaches a kind of zenith on the seven minute blissed-out odyssey of ‘She Passes Through The Night’, a number that some might already be familiar with from it’s inclusion as a bonus track on WIAIWYA’s terrific ‘Seven at 77’ conceptual project back in 2018. It is a number where Alison Cotton’s viola lends a shivering drone that lurks behind guitar notes bent into circular repetitions of regret and imminent release, her vocals in turn lending a delectable mist of texture beyond Callahan’s semi-spoken delivery. The result is like a pagan choral communion with nature. It really is jaw-droppingly brilliant.
‘She Passes Through The Night’ then would be an undoubted highlight on any record, yet the fact that it merely nudges its nose in front of any of the other six songs surrounding it says much about just how fine an album ‘English Primitive I’ is. Deeply-rooted in a spectrum of folk traditions and drawing nourishment from a myriad of disparate wells, all of its fruits are spiked with a surreal magic. As far from blinkered, myopic English Exceptionalism and antiseptically curated museum pieces of ‘multiculturalism’ as you dare to imagine, ‘English Primitive I’ is a true sound of England’s dizzyingly rich, inter-connected social history: Messy, bleak, uplifting and uniquely, magically strange. Wouldn’t have it any other way.
I said a few days ago how the press release for the David Christian and The Pinecone Orchestra album reminded me of the letters that Richey Edwards used to write. I said those were letters to carry close to the heart and how they were better than any of the records that the Manics might have been making at the time. A little unfair that, perhaps, as the only record released at that particular point in history was the rabid Clash of ‘Suicide Alley’/’Tennessee’, and whilst its incendiary noise may have struck a chord it could not compete with the breathless rush of Richey’s passionate eloquence. Heady days.
It is true too that I have not had an enormous amount of interest in the music of the Manic Street Preachers since they/we lost Richey, but that feels more like a reflection of the way life goes than anything else. Over those decades if the Manics have drifted across my consciousness then it has always rather felt like seeing an old school friend in the street on the occasions you might return to your home town. A nod from the opposite end of the market square, each of you on different errands. A smile maybe, but nothing much to say. I’m really pleased for their success though. They deserve it. They’ve worked hard. Good on them, and rather the Manics than some band of sour-faced self-absorbed egoist right-wing vaccine-denying ‘rebels’ after all. With ‘The Ultra Vivid Lament’ though I admit that I’d like to take the time to divert from my trip in those old town streets and rest awhile for a natter over a beer, for it is the first Manic Street Preachers album in a long time that I’ve wanted to listen to repeatedly.
Oddly enough, after Saint Etienne’s time-travel excursion to the ’90s on ‘I’ve Been Trying To Tell You’, their former Heavenly labelmates revisit 1993 on album opener ‘It’s Still Snowing in Sapporo’. It’s a tremendous opener, full of light and brimming with the confidence and flaws the youthful group must have felt at the time. Naturally too there is a sadness running beneath the euphoria, with Wire’s lyrics neatly treading the treacherous path between subtle suggestion and the wearily obvious. That he manages to paint an image that is simultaneously universal and heartbreakingly personal is testament to his assured development as a writer. Put together with Bradfield’s music, which here finds a sublime balance between power and lightness previously missing (for me, at least) and you have a song that I swear down on some days, like today, can have me in bits.
Elsewhere on the album it seems like a lot has been made of musical reference to ABBA, and there is a lot of sense to this as many of the songs feel much more naturally melodic and effortless than I’ve previously heard in my admittedly cursory listens to Manic’s albums. Where in the past I know I have inwardly cringed at what I’ve heard as clumsy, lumpen Rock music, here things sound transported on waves of deft and playful delight. ‘Into The Waves Of Love’, for example, twinkles with weightless piano before reaching for the heavens in a gentle cacophony of soul backing vocals and the ghost of a squeezebox playing in the corner caff, whilst ‘Afterending’ is a gorgeous piece of orchestrated Pop masquerading as existential crisis. Or vice versa. Both these songs too feel like tremendous examples of Wire’s maturity as a writer as he navigates the waters of middle age, making sense of residual youthful idealism in a world where everything is validated and therefore stripped of meaning.
It’s the two songs where Bradfield duets with Mark Lanegan and Julia Cumming that really do it for me, however. ‘Blank Diary Entry’ sees Lanegan doing his finest Cash gruff grumble, setting Bradfield off perfectly, allowing his vocal to sound smoother and less stretched than it often does on Manics’ records (and which, I will admit, has often grated with me). Musically too there is something of a Cash Country rumble going on in the mix, as the song inhabits a landscape that is equal parts Giant Sand, Black Crowes and Dirty Three.
‘The Secret He Had Missed’, meanwhile, is ostensibly about the lives of Augustus and Gwen John, the Welsh brother and sister whose approaches to painting and life in the early 20th Century seemed so disparate and yet inextricably connected through both genetics and the lens of history. It is a big idea to address in a three and a half minute Pop song, yet it is carried off with a great deal of confidence. Bradfield takes the part of Augustus, reflecting on how a bohemian career of bravura where he both set and followed the fashions of artistic revolutions may have brought instant fame and fortune, but ultimately too led to a long term diminution of perceived value. Cumming (whose part is played by Aimee Ffion Edwards in the gorgeous video) meanwhile serves as the imaginary voice of Gwen, retreating to solitude and plagued by self-doubt to create works of minimalist grandeur that have resonated so much more strongly as the 20th Century has twisted into the 21st.
As a song it is a tremendous spotlight on two great artists and of course if those lines about “the girl in the long blue dress” encourage people to explore the paintings and the lives in more detail then so much the better. Again though, lyrically the song shows Wire’s maturity as he uses the historical narrative as a metaphor for something personal in the development of our lives. That necessary duality, the eternal conflict of our inner and outer voices. It’s why that guitar solo sounds so hilariously ludicrous and yet so perfectly apt. Life is never that easy.
The closing lines where the song moves more obviously into the realm of metaphor are particularly lovely, as those oppositions are inexorably drawn together in nature’s cauldron:
“Walls defeated by the sea Still resonate an imperfect dream The whispering waves still cleanse and clean They can’t wipe away what you’ve seen”
The lines too bring us back to that point in ‘Sapporo’ in which time wraps back on itself and shows us our impermanence in the face of it all. Salty tears of nostalgia bringing sorrow and solace.
Now what about that beer…
If we leap into our time machine again and dash back to the mid nineteen eighties, then I’m sure we would find Richey and perhaps other future members of the Manic Street Preachers obsessing over the records of Alan Brown and bIG*fLAME. With their fractious PostPunkPop crackling with discordant death disco exuberance and spiked with astute socio-political observation, bIG*fLAME may have made only a handful of records, but their influence has surely fed into generations of disaffected Pop where clanging guitars are held high and proud.
Those fractured guitars may have somewhat surrendered to the disco groove in Brown’s post-*fLAME materialisation as The Great Leap Forward, but that was never a cause for concern as the songs of ’87-’88 immediately positioned Brown in that marvellous camp where the likes of Laugh were similarly morphing their clang-clang-clang with contemporary urban dance sounds to create something fresh and exciting. Sad then to hear of Laugh/Intastella’s Martin Wright’s recent passing, so perhaps celebrate with listening again to ‘Sensation Number One’ or ‘Paul McCartney’.
Celebrate too perhaps with a listen to The Great Leap Forward’s superb ‘Revolt Against An Age Of Plenty’ LP, a record that welcomes Brown back some nine years after the last Great Leap Forward set graced our Unpopular advent series. In that particular entry I suggested that “if there has been a more acutely observed and danceable deconstruction of current times in any medium than this set of songs then I have yet to come across it”, and really those sentiments can be transposed across the span of time. Filled with infectious tunes that showcase Brown’s incisive social and political commentary, this time out the record also reflects a simultaneously broader and yet more personal meditation on the world. That’s particularly noticeable on the excellent ‘Can You Kanreki’ in which Brown celebrates the Japanese concept of second childhood and re-birth for those hitting 60. “We’ve come full circle” he sings, whilst elsewhere on the record he acknowledges that circularity with a tremendous reimagining of bIG*fLAME classic ‘dEBRA’ that, if it knocks some of the original’s wildly angular edges into a smoother finish, nevertheless retains enough stop-start sun-burnt energy to be an exquisite bruise of nostalgic bittersweet treasure.
As in 2012 though, it is the title cut from ‘Revolt Against An Age Of Plenty’ that I’m slotting onto my 2021 advent mix(tape). Distilling into two and half minutes much of my own feelings about Modern Life as a middle aged existentialist perpetually pestered by the itch of social-consciousness and the ghosts of youthful idealism, it is a song that calls to arms even whilst implicitly understanding its own impotence as an agent for change. Or maybe that’s just me…
I do not read a great deal about music these days. A monthly copy of ‘Record Collector’ is skimmed, at best, although I admit that the columns by Luke Haines and Bob Stanley bring me a great deal of pleasure. It’s strangely comforting to know that they are out there being reliably amusingly opinionated and engagingly informative respectively. Didn’t Stanley write something about the ’90s in there recently? Anyway, Cherry Red are putting out another of their 3CD boxes early in 2022, this one focusing on 1991. I’ve looked at the track-listing and listened to some of it, but the majority means next to nothing to me. Those tracks and acts that I do recall, however, I do so with a great fondness. World Of Twist, Paris Angels, Flowered Up and of course Saint Etienne. No Ariel on there, though, which is an enormous gap, for ‘Rollercoaster’ was certainly the best single of that year, though perhaps ‘Nothing Can Stop Me’ would run it pretty close.
It’s funny though, because if you had asked back in 1991 which of the acts would still be around some three decades down the line, and with a significant body of highly accomplished work to boot, I suspect very few would have put their money on Saint Etienne. Everything they did at that point seemed so marvellously in-tune with the transient nature of Pop, after all. ‘Fox Base Alpha’ was almost as an homage to that very essence of impermanence, although naturally too it shone a light on the peculiar paradoxical durability of the form. The whole artefact resonated with the irradiated glow of Pop’s nuclear core, yes, but it was surely a sublime one-off? To make one great album and then split up felt like the great dream of the day. An impossible one, on so many levels, as it turned out, and thank goodness for that. For here we are in a future that the past could never imagine, ‘Fox Base Alpha’ with a quarter century anniversary reissue box set under it’s belt and another Saint Etienne record to join an extended family of much-loved relations on the CD shelves.
Now I remember being at an education conference a few years ago where a Head Teacher was telling us the secrets of their success. It was a story very much against the grain of the dominant narrative of the times, and I think I turned to a colleague and said how it kind of proved that it doesn’t really matter what you do, it’s how you do it that counts. In other words, pick a direction and stick with it. Work hard on that vision and don’t be distracted. It seems to me that Saint Etienne are proof of this, for although they have wisely allowed themselves to weave down tangential avenues of interest, the core that emanates the energy of Pop’s eternal thrill has been a constant throughout.
That core of Pop’s energy is, as any fool knows, the power source for time travel, and Saint Etienne tap into it with typical skill on ‘I’ve Been Trying To Tell You’. They’ve used it to warp back to the turn of the century, swipe a bunch of snippets from records by the likes of Natalie Imbruglia, Lighthouse Family, Lightning Seeds, Tasmin Archer, Honeyz and Samantha Mumba, before zipping back to a pandemic blighted future to assemble it all into a record that captures the spirit of optimism soured. It may all be fabulously conceptual, but because this is Saint Etienne it never comes over as unbearably serious. I mean, the songs are apparently titled after horses that ran in the Grand National, for goodness sake.
It is unclear in what year a horse called Penlop may have raced at Aintree, but it certainly gives title to my favourite cut on ‘I’ve Been Trying To Tell You’. Five and a half minutes of cinematically seductive soft groove, it is a song that perfectly showcases Saint Etienne’s innate ability to be simultaneously Internationalist and peculiarly, naturally English in the same breath. Sarah Cracknell sounds as heavenly as ever, extolling us to discover the pleasures of Chester town, a sprinkling of magic lending the home of ‘Hollyoaks’ the Pure Pop allure of Kansas City, Phoenix, Albuquerque et al. Not content with this, however, Cracknell then invokes her inner Liz Fraser to beguile us with visions of the “ruby dusk”, into which we drive, dissolving to shimmering echoes on the horizon. Blissed out, and then some.
If you are happy to share data about your age with Big Tech then I heartily recommend watching the clip put together by photographer and film-maker Alasdair McLellan to accompany the track. A poignant Jarman-esque eulogy to elliptical time and memory that knowingly loops on itself, it is gorgeously shot and edited with a charmingly self-referential conclusion. A phone call spans the decades of technology; a conversation in a caff where we ask if we ever wonder where we are going and if we ever wonder where we’ve been; “Only love can mend a broken heart”. Kapow.
Speaking of time travel and things catching back up and catching one out, it was something of a wonderful surprise to hear new recordings by Rachel Love appear in 2021. Love (under her maiden name of Bor) was of course one of the Dolly Mixture trio whose ‘Been Teen’ single of 1981 gave title to my very first fanzine effort. A hand written edition of one passed around friends at parties, it was, in the fractured imagination of my dulled memory, a Tizer and Bezique fuelled piece of pure Pop escapism, mercifully immune to the existential ennui that I would ultimately peddle as Alistair Angst. That’s memory for you though.
Other members of Dolly Mixture have made some special records in the intervening decades of course. Debsey Wykes has made some amazing records as Birdie, whilst she and Hester Smith made that tremendous mini-album as Coming Up Roses for Billy Bragg’s Utility label in 1989. Also on that label in the same year was the ‘Arriving Late In Torn And Filthy Jeans’ set by New Zealand’s Dead Famous People, featuring one Donna (Dons) Savage who would of course provide the vocals for Saint Etienne’s cover of The Field Mice’s ‘Kiss and Make Up’. Puzzle pieces and all that.
Aside from a couple of limited run CDRs put out in 2018 and 2019 with husband Steve Lovell as Spelt, however, little had been heard from Rachel until the gorgeous soft-pop jewel of ‘Primrose Hill’ emerged out of the blue back in February 2021. Then, opening with a refrain surely borrowed from Strawberry Switchblade’s ‘Trees and Flowers’ (or was it the other way round?), a fabulous new take on Dolly Mixture’s ‘Down The Line’ followed a month later, with an album promised imminently.
Despite a teasing wait of another six months, the ‘Picture In Mind’ did finally materialise in late October, adding another eight songs to the mix to create an album that glistens with early morning dew and a delicate confidence that by turns calls to mind Stereolab at their sweetest or the sublime bedroom pop sophistication of Sophie and Peter Johnston. At times too it recalls the terrific Dusty Trails project by Josephine Wiggs and Vivian Trimble from way back at the turn of the Century, or going further back still, perhaps, to the source of Brazilian bossapop and French we-we that Gane and the aforementioned Stereolab gang helped shine spotlights onto. Digging the same sounds and sharing the same archaeological excavations, perhaps. And perhaps it is too easy to overlook or misplace the finds from those trenches, so maybe it is also time to dig out those old Kostars and Luscious Jackson records again.
For now, though, I’m spinning ‘Picture In My Mind’ again and revelling in its delicious warmth as an antidote to inevitable end of year chills.
Many of the ‘two-fers’ in the 2021 Unpopular advent are at least thematically linked, but today sees a more concrete connection with both Swansea Sound and The Catenary Wires featuring several of the same players. It’s been said (always, one rather hopes, with a tongue firmly in cheek and a wry smile on lips) that Swansea Sound are a kind of Indiepop Supergroup and with Rob Pursey, Amelia Fletcher, Hue Williams and Ian Button in the ranks there is surely some justification in that.
The group themselves tell us that they are “a band that came into being during lockdown and decided that fast, loud, political indiepop punk was the answer to being stuck indoors” and that seems fair enough. ‘Live At The Rum Puncheon’ then is by turns angry, poignant, thought-provoking, self-referential and, more than anything else, very funny. It is the sound of a bunch of friends getting together, by whatever means is available to them, to make a racket, to remember something of the(ir) past, to make some very pertinent points about the present and to not be afraid to laugh at themselves in the process. There is an obvious delight in how the individuals have put the pieces together here, yet inherent in that delight is perhaps also an awareness of the ridiculousness of making this kind of noise at this kind of age. That’s in no way a criticism, incidentally, and if there was a theme throughout many of the records I have enjoyed this year it might be of the struggle to find balance between youth and age, idealism and pragmatism, illusion and reality. Which naturally says much more about me than it does about the records themselves. ‘Live At The Rum Puncheon’ could be a soundtrack to part of that eternal duel: A thirty six minute escape to happier/angrier places where we can convince ourselves that we can make a difference; the primal scream in the closet we all need now and then in order to restore our balance. Cheaper than drugs or therapy, too.
If ‘Live At The Rum Puncheon’ is a scream in the face of modern life then ‘Birling Gap’ by The Catenary Wires is a significantly more measured reflection, where nuance and suggestion win out over obvious proclamations. In some respects it follows in the footsteps of the beautiful ‘Wealden’ record that Pursey and Fletcher made with poet Nancy Gaffield in that it connects with place and explores something of the historical traces that energise landscapes. In the case of ‘Birling Gap’ this means that much of the record concerns itself with mediated nostalgia, where collective memory is manipulated and weaponised as a tool of division. It’s perhaps most obvious on the terrific ‘Three Wheeled Car’ in which a couple drive to the cliffs, there to “gaze out to the sea” and to “conjure up old enemies and feel safe and warm”, but the themes of division, polarisation, self-deception and retreat to the comfort of constructed memory thread themselves elsewhere too. It’s something Pursey touched on in an extensive conversation earlier in the year with myself and poet David Herd, whose work forms the lyrical foundations for the superb ‘Cinematic’. That piece can be read elsewhere in the Unpopular universe: https://bit.ly/birling-gap
Musically ‘Birling Gap’ sees The Catenary Wires as a 21st Century folk band informed as much by lush West Coast baroque and gentle horn-inflected soul refracted through the waters of the Mersey, the Clyde and the Rother as the traditional tropes laid down by centuries of Kentish hops harvesters. The group sound tremendous, with the core of Pursey and Fletcher again joined by Ian Button and superbly bolstered by Andy Lewis (Spearmint/Weller Band) and Fay Hallam (formerly of the fabulous Makin’Time, her own ‘Modulations’ set from 2021 is also well worth your time). If the songs of Swansea Sound are necessarily punky Pop sparks of acid that burn immediately on contact , then many of the songs on ‘Birling Gap’ pack a punch where it takes several listens to feel the bruise. Even on songs like the supremely upbeat ‘Always on My Mind’ there is something of a dissonant depth-charge going off as the song seems to mock an inability to move on from rejection even as it (musically) celebrates the worship of moments cast in amber. ‘Mirrorball’ meanwhile similarly delves into the past, rooting around in the bittersweet experiences of youthful excursions to provincial (’80s) discos, this time emerging with something profoundly moving in the re-configuring of memory. Here a kind of release is found in an understanding of things previously (wilfully) misunderstood. Complex relationships between truth, reality and perception in time might be played out in a marvellously catchy Pop jewel, but Catenary Wires simultaneously know that its possible to fuck all that and just dance. Which they do.
Indeed, that same reverberation of hope filters down through the entirety of ‘Birling Gap’. For if crumbling cliffs and receding shorelines can be read as a metaphor for the erosion of honesty replaced by untruth then so it could be argued that this in turn will pass. Tides will turn. Ground will be reclaimed and scales tipped. See-saw. So we go on.
I’ve written in the recent past somewhere about how I do not have a record player anymore. This is only partly true of course because there is one sitting under a pile of bubble-wrap and Batman comics up in the attic. It is certainly staying there though, for if there is to be a battle for space between it and my little table-top printing press (and there is) the press wins out every time. I will admit too that there is also something appealing about being anti-fashion in a way. And yes, I’m wearing flares and not dressing down all the time. Honest I am.
In the same piece about the Paul Quinn boxset and The Second Coming of Postcard Records I also admit that in spite of the lack of a record player I do still buy the occasional piece of vinyl. Mostly for the purposes of supporting small labels and artists, although sometimes it is also about aesthetics, which cannot be undervalued. I mean, the best way to enjoy Frances Castle’s glorious illustrations for her Clay Pipe label is certainly to have them in a 12″ format, and there is something very satisfying about those Castles In Space subscription library releases. If there were to be a prize for the most beautifully packaged record of 2021 however it would almost certainly have to be laid at the feet of the fabulous Text Und Tone / Colloquium of Unpopular Culture outfit out of New York City for their treatment of Subway Sect’s ‘Moments Like These’. The record is sleeved in a design that follows the Text Und Tone house style of Risograph printing and is based on a photograph of Godard by Travis Elborough, whose ‘Through The Looking Glasses’ book was one of my great reading pleasures of the year. The Risographed booklet accompanying the album is a real treat too, collecting as it does new pieces by Stephen McRobbie (aka Stephen Pastel) and Steven Daly (former drummer with Orange Juice) alongside Kevin Pearce’s classic text on Godard from his 1993 book ‘Something Beginning With ‘O”. Each of the three pieces brings something special to the bigger picture, and I admit the juxtaposition of Pearce and Pastel makes me smile, for didn’t Pastel disparagingly refer to Pearce once as a New Puritan? A long time ago it would have been and a lot of water has flowed beneath a multitude of bridges since. I like the idea that it is Vic Godard and Subway Sect connecting them in 2021 though, even if just notionally in the context of printed words on paper.
Daly’s short essay is wonderful too, and neatly connects the dots from inside the Orange Juice and Postcard perspective, the label for whom Godard has been referred to as patron saint. The link is strengthened further with the inclusion in the packaging of a flexidisc containing the recording of ‘Holiday Hymn’ that Alan Horne made on his portable cassette player in Camden back in 1980. It’s the same recording from which the OJ’s learnt the song to which they famously lent their own inimitable flavour. Sweet circularity.
As for the actual ‘Moments In Time’ album itself, well, at the risk of again repeating a well-worn trope, it sounds very much like a new Vic Godard album, and there is nothing wrong with that. Reunited with players from the Club Left era Subway Sect (older readers may remember them as three quarters of JoBoxers), Godard is also reacquainted with original Sect member Johnny Briton and, perhaps most famously, Mick Jones. Lurking in the background alongside the likes of Terry Edwards and Pete Williams you will also find Simon Rivers of Last Party/Bitter Springs infamy, and really this is apt for Rivers and Godard alike have for decades been leaders of the unsung documentarians of the edges of England where life may be tough at times but is shot through too with dark humour and a steely tenderness. That soft yet hard thing again, perhaps.
‘Moments Like These’ is a record that circles around those notions of memory, regret, resilience, compassion, devout love and the fierce loyalties of fiery friendships. It is like a soundtrack to a creative process that can’t help itself; a time capsule of half-remembered reminiscence and re-constructed diaries. It may make its references to the misty near half-century old lairy beast of ‘punk’ but it is naturally no lumpen morass of stereotypes and rose-tinted spectacles. Neither Jones nor Godard have been ones for standing still or revelling in the past, unless you count their recycling of pre-Rock threads into something oddly recognisable yet strangely unique. ‘Moments Like These’ does sound like Subway Sect rummaging around in the dustbins of that early Rock’n’Roll promise and neatly sidestepping all the mistakes Rock made to arrive at something that sounds timelessly raw yet oddly, wonderfully, contemporary. It’s encapsulated perfectly on album opener ‘Since The ’80s’where a sonic ‘Heroin’ reference ushers in a song that is simultaneously celebratory and self-flagellatory; bruisingly honest and amusingly cynical; laser-sharp and confusing in the same breath. Is the song about Godard himself? Old friends and bandmates? Partners, lovers, reflections in mirrors? All or none of these, perhaps. Regardless, it is a song that astutely captures something of that essence of getting on and getting older, of looking back and looking in mirrors and failing to recognise or even particularly like what is seen. Not that there’s anything to be done about any of it, particularly, and as such there is also more of that sweet circularity in the album closer’s ‘Time Shoulda Made A Man O’ Me’ as that time loops back and laughs at itself and us, The Sect getting into their Swing groove again as Godard dons his tuxedo and thanks us all for coming out on such a wet night. He’d liked to have seen a few more of us, but he’ll be back next year. He knows its the/a story of his life, and that’s just fine “as long as the bees keep buzzin’ by” and he sees “robin in his tree”.
In yesterday’s instalment of this, the 2021 Unpopular advent-end-of-year-review-series, I mentioned that you might well have heard the sounds of Hannah Peel through her soundtrack work for TV. This is similarly true of Ralegh Long, whose compositions have graced the wonderful ‘Ghosts‘ show for the BBC.
Now it should be obvious to anyone with even a skimmed familiarity with my Unpopular words that I really have no clue about the technical aspects of music. There are vague memories of music lessons in school (in a room beneath the greened copper dome on the old Marr College building – I heard it later became a teachers’ staff room, which would actually have been very cool) where I was taught something about, uh, notes and what have you, but I never learned anything. Teaching and learning, you know, they are very different things. So music. I don’t have a clue, really I don’t. It may as well be magic, with one of the hardest conjuring tricks writing soundtrack music. Music that has to exist in a space where success is defined by being neither too imposing nor too invisible. That’s mixing the senses of course, but it’s no mistake because the relationship between sound and vision is the critical factor, isn’t it? The intention of the scene is the thing, but if the music can stand alone as ‘just’ music then that’s a bonus.
I don’t think Ralegh Long’s ‘Ghosts’ pieces are available anywhere except in the context of the wonderful TV episodes and to an extent I think that’s as it should be. Context being everything and all that. Of course I gave lie to that very notion just yesterday when mentioning Hannah Peel’s terrific music for ‘The Deceivers’, but the power and the pleasure of the contradiction wins over everything. So no music from ‘Ghosts’, but what Long has been doing throughout 2021 has been to release a string of tracks (‘singles’ I suppose they might once have been called in a pre-digital era) all of which are collected on the lovely ‘Blue Nights’ (mini) album. I’ve included ‘Instrumental in D’ in the advent mix largely because it fits so nicely in the sequence of things, but the majority of numbers on ‘Blue Nights’ are vocal pieces that showcase Long’s tender, brittle delivery atop his deceptively simple compositions and arrangements. At times it is rather like hearing the whispers of Blueboy playing in a dusty attic, at others like stumbling on a folkier sibling to Vetchnisky Settings, whose exquisite ‘Underneath the stars, still waiting’ LP was one of the triumphs of 2019. In other moments still (title track ‘Blue Nights’) it’s the sound of English folk traditions filtered through a Nashville Country radio station tuned into the late night downbeat show. Which is to say it sounds marvellous.
Perhaps at some point in the future I will learn something of the technical vagaries of music and be able to tell you more about why Ralegh Long’s ‘Blue Nights’ is such a terrific record, but for now you’ll just have to be content with knowing that it’s seven songs and twenty and a half minutes of magic.
Now it struck me that it might have been a wheeze to largely copy and paste what I just wrote about Ralegh Long to stand as the entry for GNAC’s terrific ‘Afternoon Frost’ record, but whilst I could likely make a compelling (spurious may be more truthful) argument for the conceptual reasons for doing so, I also thought it would be a bit tight. There are certainly threads that bind them though, and of course GNAC is the moniker of Mark Tranmer whose work with James Hackett as Vetchinsky Settings was mentioned just a moment ago.
‘Afternoon Frost’ is also a set of instrumentals; music that feels as though it is seeping into and out of the cracks of landscape. It is the sound of discovering ancient village churchyards and of walking the pathways on the edges of cities, memories drifting up from the cracks between cobbles as dust into the breezes. As ‘Cinematografica’ suggests, it’s a music rich in visual treasure, a Morriconi drift to a place where Sad Hill Cemetery is in Central Scotland and the Campsies are the Sierra de Cebollera. Visually too the record reflects the aesthetics of Tranmer’s photographs of the landscapes in which he has found himself these past years, a couple of which grace the sleeve. Both photographs and music suggest an artist keenly in touch with their environment, both physical and spiritual (in a non-ecuminical manner, except perhaps those aforementioned village churches, though their roots are often more ancient than those of organised religion anyway) and ‘Afternoon Frost’ is a wonderful meditation on the energies feeding in and out of that environment. It’s a symbiotic relationship this, just like that between music and film, real or imagined.
It’s ten songs and thirty five and a half minutes of magic.
The first time I came across the music of Hannah Peel was back in 2019 when I picked up her collaboration with Will Burns on the Rivertones label. ‘Chalk Hill Blue’ (a live recording is available on Peel’s Bandcamp) is one of those pieces of work that give lie to the Romantic vision of landscape and nature, showing it instead in its truer colours of disintegration, disease, decay and desolation, particularly in the context of human beings’ relationships with it. There is beauty in there too of course, not least in the sounds conjured by Peel to accompany Burns’ words, but its not exactly a record of pastoral gentility and is all the better for that.
Now it is entirely possible you may have heard Hannah Peel’s music without realising it, for she has composed pieces for documentaries about ‘Game Of Thrones’ and Lee Miller as well as thriller series ‘The Deceived’. I’ve watched none of these, although the Miller documentary is one I really do want to see and I am cross with myself for missing it whilst it was on the BBC’s platform. But TV and film is as bad (or as good?) as music these days in that there is so much available and so little time to consume it. I am sure I am not alone in having play/watchlists in multiple digital locations, each crammed with curios doomed never to be reached. And don’t even get me started on the piles and shelves of ‘to-be-read’ books, never mind the digital wish-lists of e-books. Still, it can be fun dipping into all these lists on occasion and wondering what on earth some of the items are and why they might possibly have found themselves there. Before launching off on yet more trips down rabbit holes and bookmarking multiple new artefacts for possible excavation at a future date. Wishful thinking or avoidance strategy? Both, perhaps. Oh, and to get back to Hannah Peel, you may also have heard her toy piano cover of ‘Tainted Love’ which has had over ten million Spotify plays and has likely earned her tuppence.
Peel’s work on soundtrack composition, particularly within the realm of electronics, naturally brings to mind the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and the almost mythic Delia Derbyshire. In the case of 2021’s ‘Fir Wave’ album, however, this is no mere stumble into the easy and unthreatening ground of familiar reference points, for ‘Fir Wave’ finds its roots largely in a musical excavation and reclamation job on the 1972 library music record ‘Electrosonic’, by Derbyshire, Brian Hodgson and Australian composer Don Harper. Not that you would know it from listening, for ‘Fir Wave’ retains only trace imprints of its source material and is a cohesive force that sits confidently amidst electronica from the likes of Pye Corner Audio, Lomond Campbell and Bicep that mine similar realms of wired nature. It’s the theme of nature’s circularity that Peel is particularly interested in here, which perhaps lends the music its rhythmic elegance as sequences loop around themselves and supple beats worm their way into the psyche. This is fluid techno, a blissful drift to the centre where we discern the idiosyncrasies and glitchy inconsistencies of existence. Perhaps too then it is not so distant from the preoccupations of ‘Chalk Hill Blue’ in that it casts these undercurrents of resistance, the itches of reality that scratch the surface of the Romantics’ persistent vision of Nature and pull on those threads until we see a much more complex and nuanced beauty.
Like the great fictional Inspector Knollis, I do not believe in coincidences so it makes perfect sense to discover that Peel worked as arranger and conductor on Dot Allison’s ‘Heart Shaped Scars’ that featured on day 2 of this advent-end-of-year-review-series. A shared interest in the point of flux between nature and technology, the here and the there, the shape-shifting dreams of perception marking out ‘real’ and ‘imagined’, perhaps. It all fits because we make it all fit and there is nothing wrong with that.
Mention too really must go to ceramicist James D Pegg whose artwork graces the sleeve of ‘Fir Wave’ and its associated ‘single’ releases. Working within the same theme of nature’s circularity, Pegg explored the Japanese Ensõ movement and produced a sequence of pieces that make for a delicious visual accompaniment. The series of seven exquisite porcelain vases that Pegg created to celebrate ‘Fir Wave”s nomination for the 2021 Mercury Prize may have all but sold out (at the time of writing, one remains for sale in Pegg’s online shop) but if you are lucky you might still find a 12″ vinyl release where Pegg’s designs resonate as powerfully as Peter Saville’s inner sleeves for ‘New Order: Substance 1987’.
Early in 2021 I was fortunate enough to review Lomond Campbell’s terrific ‘LŪP’ project for Caught By The River. By year’s end I was even more fortunate in having those words used as sleeve-notes for a vinyl release on One Little Indian. I may be biased, but ‘LŪP’ was one of my favourite pieces of electronica from 2021.
Some people struggle with conceptual art, and that’s fair enough. Nothing is for everyone and there is something for anyone. Bruce Nauman pretending to be a fountain doesn’t stop us from appreciating a classical sculpture. Enjoying Bas Jan Ader falling over (or should that be enjoying the IDEA of Bas Jan Ader falling over) doesn’t negate the pleasure to be had from looking at still life paintings of flowers. If you don’t dig something there is no need to make a song and dance about it. Unless you want to make your song and dance into a conceptual piece in itself, in which case knock yourself out. You’ll probably find that someone has done it before though (song, dance AND knocking oneself out). Probably in the 1970s.
There is something appealingly 1970s about Lomond Campbells intriguing ‘LŪP’ project. Both an album and an instrument, ‘LŪP’ is also by default conceptual. Commissioned by King Creosote, the instrument itself is a marvellous little kinetic sculpture that does things with magnets, eccentric cams, logic gates and tape loops, all of them connecting into ideas of disintegration and removing the artists’ hand from the work. Campbell explicitly references Basinki’s ‘Disintegration Loops’ as a key inspiration to the project, and as with, say Rauschenberg’s erased to de Kooning drawing, there is something paradoxically troubling and soothing in the concept of disintegration, for what is disintegration if not the gradual decay of memory? Proust knew the score, appreciating that some of our most pleasant memories so often drift off into the ether, dissipating like pollen in the breeze even as we attempt to reclaim them through a scent or a sound, whilst conversely our attempts to forget those moments we most regret feel like repeated, fruitless hacking at our own limbs.
‘LŪP’ doesn’t quite venture to those extremes, but it does meander pleasurably from ambient landscapes of soothing dawn skies dappled with dewy lawns to squawking industrial urban expanses peppered with deliciously melodic bird song. It’s like Delia Derbyshire making soundtracks for Joseph Cornell boxes; Boards of Canada dismantled and put together as an Arts and Crafts project; Autechre’s always out of sync ‘Flutter’ cut up and collaged into sketchbook pages dipped in acid; LFO played on a musical box with a tiny ballet dancer pirouetting back and forth into the void; Hannah Peel walking in ever increasing circles with Richard Long, composing all the sounds they hear into electronic embraces.
In her excellent ‘Wanderland’ book of 2020, Jini Reddy talks often and eloquently about feeling simultaneously drawn to, yet unavoidably resistant to notions of Magic in the landscape. It feels to me as though ‘LŪP’ navigates a similar realm, treading the edgelands between music, art, and craft, between Magic and Science, at once embracing the energies of timeless spirits and surrendering to shady scepticism. The relationships are symbiotic, all things are connected. We treasure the avenues they lead us down and take pleasure in the ideas they conjure. Travelling the ellipses of our own disintegration, we loop the ‘LŪP’ in delight: Backwards and forwards between concept and reality.
