Definite feeling of being in the home stretch now, which will be a relief for some of the subscribers who didn’t sign up for this and instead are expecting vignettes of daily life in France. Substack does seem to attract nerds of every artistic persuasion, and music anoraks are right up there with train spotters and the guys sitting on camping chairs on the other side of the fence at the bottom of the runway, tuned into ATC and writing down tail numbers. It seems like every day there is someone raving about an album from the 1980’s or something new they have heard. The other odd treat for us is seeing your heroes showing up and writing on Substack,
Stephin Merritt and
Rickie Lee Jones – although in fairness to RLJ she is writing about films, old films and generally having a metaphorical walk down memory lane.
Nick Hornby is also on here and although his books always share the joys of music from this side of the speaker he gets a mention purely because of the round about introduction to Steve Mason.
I have been listening to some cool new stuff over the last few weeks and as much as I have enjoyed writing about the aural bookmarks in my life you can see by the distribution of albums from the last 15 years over my top 100 I actually spend most of my time listening to new music. I will bring back ‘Gones for a Song’ in December with a top 20 albums of 2024. Anyway in the words of young Pink, lets get into it: one, two, “Free, Four”https://open.spotify.com/embed/playlist/5GUuKta1wlx1Y0AWOm9RB5
Number 40: TV On The Radio “Dear Science” 2008. I get obsessions about certain bands, when it’s not just I like a song or an album but I devour everything I can get hold of. With TVOTR I discovered them through an EP ‘Young Liars” in 2003 which had a Pixies cover ‘Mr Grieves’ and I was hooked. I didn’t get to see them live until 2012 after the unfortunate death of the bassist Gerard Smith. They of course hailed from Brooklyn, you could tell by all the cool kids who would turn up and do guest vocal spots, Bowie, Karen O, Grizzly Bear, Peter Murphy. The music is upbeat rythym driven alt-rock but clever arrangements and interesting melody lines and harmonies made it the thinking man’s music of choice for about a 5 year period from 2006-2011. The 3 middle period albums are all superb but this one has the better overall consistent flow over “Return to Cookie Mountain” or “Nine Types of Light”. Dave Sitek’s side project “Maximum Balloon” is worth checking out if you have never heard it. There is a potential top 20 list project of ‘no hit wonder’ side projects out there.
Number 39: Gil Scott Heron “I’m New Here” 2010. The backstory to this fabulous album and the subsequent two excellent spin-offs is cool in its own right. I remember Scott-Heron as a hipster jazz-poet in the 70’s when his ‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’ was a staple at any cool party. He was actually a poet and damn angry, he was the first one to make a political point about cultural appropriation. Then funk came along, and he missed it, he was still tied into a loungy jazz beat and flute, which could not get you arrested in the late 70’s, let alone a record deal, so he faded from the limelight, probably because he didn’t pull any punches about the institutional racism all around him. He released a few more albums in the 80’s (“Reflections” is actually really good and worth checking out), but he bubbled around in the background as a kind of godfather of Rap character. Like many black men of the time, he got busted and locked up several times for drug possession, while white men on Wall Street got rich while in possession of the same drug. Richard Russell of the fabulous ‘Everything is Recorded’ releases and lots of production work reached out to his former US label and traveled from England to record Scot-Heron while he was out on bail in 2007 and continued over the next 3 years, helping him get some kind of artistic life back. This album was released in 2010, a mix of his ruminations looking back on his life, his grandmother and interspersed with songs. Sadly, by this time he was HIV positive and in May 2011 he passed due to complications with pneumonia. Jamie XX released a remixed version of the songs under the name “We’re New Here” which is excellent, as is the “We’re New Again” by Makaya McCraven.
Number 38: The Knife “Silent Shout” 2006. You have heard Karin Dreijer’s voice if you do not necessarily listen to The Knife, she releases material as Fever Ray, she is on Röyskopp stuff, she has sung with Björk, some of which has made it to ads and TV show episode fade outs. You will however probably never seen what she looks like unless you are a fan, and even then would probably struggle to recognize her in the street, as live she wears masks and outrageous make up, there is a definitely a persona as a singer “dancing for dollars” and as a person she sees that as a separate life. The Knife is the project with her brother Olof, they did 4 albums before they gave up in 2014. This is hard core techno beats but very Swedish with awesome melodies, you can channel some Abba if you look hard enough beneath the distortions, it is also quirky; one of their first big songs was about ‘Lasagna’. They had a couple of hits on their first two albums, but this is peak, edgy Knife, sharp and pointed.
Number 37: Savages “Adore Life” 2016. I had the classic ‘day late and dollar short’ experience with these noisy women, I was really into this the debut album and then word came they were playing ‘The Bottom of the Hill’, a tiny hole in the wall club walking distance from my apartment in SOMA in San Francisco. I thought I should get a ticket for that, but they were so obscure Anglo/French gurrrl rock, no rush. They had such a rush they got moved a week later to the Independent and sold out there within an hour. So, I never saw them. I see Jehnny Beth all the time living in France, she is the Annie Nightingale/Lauren Laverne of French rock shows on ARTE the arts channel, she is also a reasonably well-known actress and was in ‘Anatomy of a Fall’. This is arty post-punk, louder and harder guitars than Warpaint, more catchy and less whiny than Sleater Kinney. They made 2 albums but have not played since 2017 so arguably not still a band. The Beth solo album is terrible, and I have not listened to the other side projects so about time for a reunion.
Number 36: Elbow “The Take Offs and Landings of Everything” 2014. Elbow now snuggle quietly in the bosom of the average British rock fan and Guy Garvey is practically a saint. The lead singer, main songwriter, Radio 6 DJ, professional Mancunian and general great man to have a beer with, in a way that the prior holder of that office Mark E Smith never was. They have released 10 albums since starting out as Elbow in Bury in 1997, they write together and share the credits, so the money is spread out equally. The early albums are claustrophobic, I got “Asleep at the Wheel” but didn’t play it much as I found it all a bit dour, but with each album they got more adventurous in both song structure and emotional heft. “Leaders of the Free World” and “Build a Rocket Boys” are both big, beaty and bouncy, but this is my favorite. Hard to say a bad word about Mr Garvey and his friends, anyone who can write a song called “Jesus is a Rochdale Girl” is a fucking legend.
Number 35: Dry Cleaning “New Long Leg” 2021. Yet another odd British art rock band with the vocals spoken rather than sung? Yes, it is post-rock with great scrunchy guitar and big bass lines with the odd tuning every now and then, that is just on the melodic side of atonal. Floating over that is Florence Shaw’s sprechgesang tales of mundane lives, which are like being part of a conversation in a pub, they are odd and funny as fuck: “I’d like to run away with you on a plane but don’t bring those loafers”, “I’ve been thinking about eating that hot dog for hours”, “What do you think your parents feel? That nod that says, ‘I’ve seen things’”. They have released “Stumpwork” and an EP since this and have had some reasonable commercial success, playing to adoring European festival crowds. I hope they can keep it up.
Number 34: Genesis “ The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway” 1974. Genesis were a nice bunch of public school boys who fell under the impresario Jonathan King’s spell, managed to wriggle out and added Steve Hackett on guitar and Phil Collins on drums. They were prog-rock defined, in fact I first heard their song ‘In The Beginning’ is on the “World of Progressive Music” which was the second album I ever owned. Flowery stories, lots of keyboard flourishes, nursery crimes indeed. Peter Gabriel’s voice telling the story, in this case of a Puerto Rican graffiti tagger in New York city. Gabriel had a dramatic flair and live wore odd costumes, including headdresses and makeup putting him into various characters like the ‘Watcher of the Skies’. “Selling England by The Pound” had set the scene as they got darker and less fey, but TLLDOB is their peak. But the recording of it was the end of Peter Gabriel’s involvement with the band, it was arduous, and he was absent for a lot of it due to his wife’s difficult pregnancy. They toured and performed the album in its entirety plus an encore, a decision that was not supported by the entire band considering the large amount of new material. The stage shows also involved new, more elaborate costumes worn by Gabriel, three backdrop screens that displayed 1,450 slides from eight projectors and lasers. When the reviews came in they focused on Gabriel’s theatrics and took the band’s musical performance as secondary, which pissed the others off. So, he left, and they produced a bunch of boring pop rock albums over the next 20 years while Collins became a mega star and father of Emily in Paris. Odd side note: Eno is on this album.
Number 33: The Tubes “Young and Rich” 1976. When I lived in SF The Tubes were ever present, a bit like the Quicksilver and various Dead spinoffs, well past their sell by date, playing bars and free concerts and I didn’t even bother to find out who was still in the band. In 1976 they tried to present themselves as a punk band on the back of a single “White Punks On Dope” which had been on the 1975 original Tubes album. I saw them on that tour when they were such a contrast to what the English punk scene looked like as to be laughable. They survived being ‘gobbed’ on incessantly – the quaint habit of standing in front of the stage spitting at the band. If it was good enough for the Clash or Souixie then the Tubes had to put up with it, even though they looked more like hair metal than punk. This album is so clever and fun and unlike much of what was produced in 1976 is still compelling. Its tongue is firmly in its cheek for sure with ‘Proud to be an American’ and ‘Don’t Touch Me There’ lots of ironic humor and good musicianship. They were not just vaudeville, the musicianship was consistently good, drummer Prairie Prince played for bunch of bands as a session musician and was part of Jefferson Starship, Vince Welnick ended up playing keys for the Dead.
Number 32: The Who “Live at Leeds” 1971. The Who were the Mod band to the Stones being the Rockers band. The 4 piece of drums, bass, guitar and singer never changed and was pretty simple, the songs were always poppy, they started out singing Tamala Motown songs and as much as Pete Townsend wrote two ‘rock operas’ they were mainly 3 minute pop songs, verse chorus verse chorus solo verse chorus. Townsend is and was a stunning guitarist, lots of reverb and fret runs, maybe not as technically as complex as Beck or Clapton but he could rock, and this album is his guitar show piece. It includes the Tommy medley of “‘See Me, Feel Me’, as features in the Woodstock movie, the expanded version includes the precursor to Tommy “A Quick One, While He’s Away”. Both demonstrate they had superb harmonies as well as the craziest drummer to ever grace the stage, Keith Moon. The original vinyl had just 6 songs and they were the perfect hard rock. I saw them at Charlton’s The Valley in 1974 with Lou Reed and others in support and they basically mixed this set with the more upbeat Quadrophenia songs.
Number 31: Ian Dury “New Boots and Panties” 1976. Ian Dury was a pub rocker, his band Kilburn and the High Roads (not to be confused with Hatfield and the North) were popular in that early 70’s gap before punk, they ironically supported the Who on their Quadrophenia tour in 1973. Dury, Davey Payne and Chas Jankel came out of the last iteration to become Ian Dury and the Blockheads, although this album, which made his fame was released under his name only although Jankel co-wrote most of the songs. Dury was a multi-talented odd ball, he had been at art school with Peter Blake and had a commercial art career before the music took off. He wrote stories about the characters in the demi monde of East London and Essex where he grew up, the names were changed to ‘protect the innocent’ but Randy Mandy, Plaistow Patricia and Clever Trevor are with us to this day, in the same way that Joyce’s Dublin characters are recognizable today. He was great live, and I was lucky to see him and the Blockheads on the Stiffs tour with Costello, Wreckless Eric and Larry Wallis. I somehow befriended Kosmo Vinyl and got myself, girlfriend and a mate back to the afterparty at The Midland Hotel, which was next to St George’s Hall in Bradford, up close you really understood the degree of his disability from polio but it didn’t stop Dury who, to the strains of JJ Cale’s “Okie” as he tried to seduce the girlfriend. Another small world factette, Dury and the Blockheads toured the US for the one and only time in 1978 supporting recovering former poet, Lou Reed.
Tidal Playlist version is here.
Anecdotes and Antidotes in Burgundy 