There was a recent article in the storied business journal, the Harvard Business Review, on the tactical genius of the French Boulanger. Through a study of the bakers in Lyon, the three learned professors “analyzed the location strategies of 177 bakeries within the city of Lyon, from the beginning of 1998 to the end of 2017”. They were surprised that Traditionalist bakeries (in the food capital of France) had survived. Bread making in France is a relatively simple business and is regulated in part. The ‘baguette traditionnelle’ specifically by law, can contain only flour, water, salt, and yeast. By their name, the Traditionalists don’t use a variety of “time- and cost-saving practices (such as the use of mixes and frozen dough), which are more or less invisible to consumers”. My emphasis in bold. What does not appear once in the research paper is the word or even the concept of taste. I could be snarky and make the case that as 2 of the three researchers are Dutch and the third Swiss that we should not be surprised. But really? The authors of the article were shocked, that despite these disadvantages, the Traditionalists have maintained a strong majority share of the French bread market despite modernist competitors using the cheaper efficient production tricks. They came to the mystifying conclusion that there was a logic defying trick by the Traditionalists, who instead of shunning being next to or nearby a modernist bakery, actually more often than not, set up right under their modernist competitors noses. So you make something you love making, in a time honored traditional way using natural ingredients and as sure as shit, tastes better than the bland cheaper option, and you are in business in a country that loves bread, in a city that worships at the altar of nourriture every day. Unsurprisingly, you are successful. In other news, wine is wet.
Other bread loving nations include the English and the Irish. Ireland has one of the highest natural incidences of celiac disease, yet you will not find a lot of gluten-free options. It seems the Irish have made a conscious decision that if they are to suffer, it will not be for a lack of bread. Nor for a lack of Guinness, although I was surprised to see the UK drinks more of the foamy browny-black stuff than its country of origin, closely behind Ireland is Nigeria. In a hot, sticky, equatorial humid climate the last thing I would be craving is Guinness, but that’s why I am not running a global drinks business like Diageo. Where you will not find cans of Guinness for sale publicly is the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The Kingdom is dry and has been since 1952 when King Abdulaziz banned it after one of his sons got drunk at a diplomatic function and killed the British Consul with his sword.
This Thursday, continuing our own swordless tradition, we celebrated the saint’s day of Sainte Clemence. Yet another German widow of nobility who when her hubbie, Menginard I, Count of Sponhiem (a minor kingdom yet again in the Holy Roman Empire) went toes up, goes into a convent, does some good work and then mysteriously ends up beatified. If you are born on this day, the French refer to you as a Clementine, which could be confusing if you became so ridiculously successful in business to the point you are dubbed a mandarin.
Wednesday through this weekend was the “Le Temps Est Bon” (Good Weather) food festival which, although it’s the third week of March, was prophetic in its timing. It was 22 yesterday, and everyone is behaving like it’s spring. We went to one of the events, a dinner with the Mich 1 starred chef Vivien Durand from Lormont, near Bordeaux was invited to take over the kitchen by Florian Remont of the Bistrot du Potager, which is in the 7th, the Gerland area. Remont’s place is known for his South Western Pays-Basque style cuisine, so it was obviously a meeting of the minds. In a small world coincidence, we drove so many times across the Pont d’Aquitaine to and from Bordeaux airport to the cottage in Duras. On the headland to the south of the bridge’s entrance was a ruined château that in its day, i.e. before they built a 6 lane suspension bridge at the bottom of the garden, it must have had great views over the Garronne estuary. For all those years it was a graffitied husk of its former greatness, but in the latter few years of our journeys it was being refurbished, and it just so happens that Durand’s Black Prince restaurant is situated in the château’s former stable block.
The menu was a 5 course tour de force. Brussels, young and fried whole like a flower with a syrupy dressing of shitaki mushrooms kicked it off. Followed by sea-bass carpaccio, then a glorious sous-vide prepared monkfish dish. I think sous-vide is generally preposterous, but this was ‘melt in the mouth’ so I get it was worth the faff.
The main event was kid goat from the Basque Country, spit roasted and served in an unctuous sauce with girolles and perfect roast potato. It was then followed with a selection of spring veggies – roast baby leeks and roast white asparagus on a bed of fried kale and spinach with pea-shoots garnish. It would have pleased Popeye and my Olive Oyl thought it the best dish of the night. Dessert was a bit of a mess with some crispy chocolatey sticks that were nearly inedible, on top of hazelnut cream and a bread flavored sorbet that just didn’t work together. Otherwise, pretty great food in quite a cool space.
The other oddity of the night was the total fail on the music. As well as the French do food, they do music as badly sometimes. We dined with a soundtrack of electronic disco at a volume that was just annoying enough that you noticed it, yet too low so all you really heard was the tinny repetitive beat. The music that if played loud while the young bucks were doing prep in the open kitchen would have been fine, but not dining music, never, ever. In the loos downstairs they seemed to have replaced the ceiling speakers with former earpiece speakers from old telephones so the tinny beat was something otherworldly, laughable even. It’s a shame as the French can do dance music – Justice, Daft Punk, Cassius, Laurent Garnier but this was just crap. This is what good French dance music sounds like.
It’s been a long and weirdly deflating winter. Milder than it should have been for weeks, wetter than it should have been for more weeks, and cold but not for long enough so far. The whole mess in Gaza continues to be an affront to supposedly Western democratic norms, but then again, the ongoing one in Ukraine is also a long-running festering sore. The climate summit was hosted by the head of a Petro-state’s national oil company and attended by over 4000 lobbyists; the climate crisis has devolved into nothing but the script of a bad 1990’s disaster movie.
We seem to be living in the shadow of many megalomaniacs, as I have mentioned in prior outbursts. I feel a particular sense of failure about them as a group, as they are all of my generation. When I misguidedly thought that we were all reaping the benefits of the baby boom on our cruise towards a better place, some were in fact being formed to become tyrants. Viktor Orbán, two months younger than my brother, Xi Jinping, 3 years older than me but a year younger than Putin, a year older than Recep Erdoğan, baby boomers one and all. They obviously were not concerned about what car to drive, where Frank Zappa’s house was in Laurel Canyon and what was the best modern novel. The best car for them was chauffeur driven and bullet proof. They could plunder enough personal wealth to buy most of Laurel Canyon and the best book is obviously one written by them telling the proles what to do. There are some other minor characters strolling around the world stage, Nehandra Modi is an elder statesman having been born one year after the partition and departure from India of the British is 1950. He is well-loved by the Hindu majority of Indians and feared by those of other faiths, but he loves a bit of authoritarianism alongside his vegetarian and abstemious lifestyle. Benyamin Netanyahou, born the following year, is meanwhile bombing children with US-funded and supplied weapons in an effort to prolong the ‘war’ against Palestine helping him to avoid criminal charges, let alone the admonition for the terrible sequence of events that the supposed hard man of Israeli politics oversaw, that led to the horrific deaths of 1139 of the citizens he was supposed to protect. But the country is at war and that’s no time to stop taking action, or look at what you are doing for now and the future?
Lurking and gurning, stage left, is public enemy number one, the Donald. He is actually the oldest of this august group, born the same year as my sister in 1946. He is ahead in any poll you care to read, across most age groups including for some frightening reason the young. He is leading over everyone’s favorite grandfather Joe Biden. ‘Sleepy Joe’, as Drumpf dubbed him and Fox have continued to remind everyone, is at best underappreciated, at worst sleepwalking into an electoral disaster. Not that the Democrats don’t have experience with that, just wait until the numbers get worse mid-year and some bright spark will suggest Hilary should come back and throw her hat into the ring. Biden is four years older than Trump and wears each year like a decade. He walks across a stage, or down a flight of stairs and if successfully accomplished, we all breathe a collective sigh of relief, like parents watching their child negotiate his first nativity play as Shepherd Number 2, little Joe didn’t fall over or drop his Crook.
He is however single handedly keeping Western Democracy functioning. He is keeping China from invading Taiwan, he is keeping Putin out of Ukraine and doing this while what passes as the Republican party nowadays careens around the Washington political institutions trying to stymy him in anything and everything he does. The Federal Reserve has tried to kill the economy under Biden, but he has survived and the economy has survived. A little bruised but still punching. The general standard of living has improved and improved most for the people at the bottom. The jobs are still more in demand of job fillers than the prior decades of people hunting in vain for a job, a situation that continues to support modest and successful wage rises and better conditions for Union workers. The administration has ramped up green energy infrastructure, even if most of it has occurred in the south and southwest where it’s easier to build anything, period.
Sadly, Biden is the very embodiment of Rodney Dangerfield. He is old and he does not get no respect. Our common hope is now reduced to Trump being so deranged during the primary campaigns, where he will assume that the nomination should be his by right, without having to go through the motions, and that the legal convictions pile up enough doubt that enough people hold their nose, forget about his age and re-elect Biden. What then happens we can probably look forward to another B-Movie script too.
So as 2023 slips into collective memory I am not the most enthusiastic about what 2024 holds for us. There was some great new music created in the past year or more accurately discovered by me in the past year. So in the spirit of making an effort to finish on an upward tone here are some highlights of what the young people have been doing musically while my cadre have been busy fucking shit up:
The links are to Bandcamp/YouTube but for those inclined there is a Spotify playlist here.
Geese – Album: 3D Country – bunch of young gents from Brooklyn or at least currently based there. They defy simple description but sound like the product of many nights drinking and listening to old 90’s geezer rock like Primal Scream’s Exile on Mainstreet Phase or Ash or Supergrass, but through a very American lens, almost a C&W bastard child. 2122 or Mysterious Love
Lil Yachty – Let’s Start Here. Where do you start with this? Yachty is a 26-year-old from Mableton Georgia, rapper, cool looking guy, man about New York City, hanging with the stars. Had some big hits including Broccoli with DRAM. All so normal then this drops. This album is the stepchild of Axis Bold as Love, Fulfillingness First Finale and Dark Side of the Moon, just insanely layered and fun and if Floyd or Stevie Wonder had the use of a vocoder this is what they might have sounded like. My favorite album of the year without question. Drive me Crazy or Black Seminole.
Fever Ray – Album: Radical Romantics – Karin Dreijer is a unique voice and has produced some of the most interesting electronic music of the last 20 years as half of The Knife and her solo stuff as Fever Ray. Some of her output is admittedly hard work but she has a great turn of phrase and the very Swedish electronics work well. This album is melodically stronger and dare I say it quite fun, the live video is worth finding. Kandy or Carbon Dioxide for the atmospheric gas fans amongst us.
Baxter Dury – Album: I thought I was better Than You. I was late to the Baxter Dury party. I was a massive fan of his Dad and had the good fortune to meet him once and have a drink with him while he serenaded my girlfriend to the dulcet sounds of J.J.Cale. Baxter has his Dad’s way with a lyric but has added his own louche style, girl backing singers a key part of his sound. I have consumed his early stuff now thanks to Rachel for the introduction to I’m Not Your Dog which for obvious reasons is popular with the French. Aylesbury Boy or Celebrate Me ‘lick my head’ indeed!
Steve Mason – Album: Brothers and Sisters. I have been a fan of Steve Mason’s happy, clappy, mellow soft rock since the Beta band 3Eps days and their 30 seconds of stardom in High Fidelity when John Cusack drops it into play. He continues to make great music and it’s all pretty upbeat, he has also done some dub versions with Dennis Bovell and that deep bass sound has permeated his work. There is yet another reworked sample of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s qawwli song Musst Musst as well. Brixton Fish Fry or No More.
Will Butler + Sister Squares. What happened to Arcade Fire? There was a period when they defined cool, “it” and relevant and then they disappeared into a haze of seriousness and a bad Christmas album. Will Butler was the earnest front man and happily this album, his 5th or so since the Fire went out, is fun, upbeat and catchy, still with Will’s quirkiness at times. Saturday Night or Stop Talking.
Hania Rani – Album: Ghosts. Hania is an accomplished Polish jazz pianist who has played with Portico Quartet and released some moody piano instrumental works like “On Giacometti” from earlier this year and her memorial pieces on behalf of Ukraine. This album shows her amazing voice and cool arrangements, interesting rhythmic stuff also going on from the Portico’s who back her on several songs. Don’t Break My Heart and Dancing with Ghosts.
Do Nothing – Album: Snake Sideways. In the wake of the earnest singy-shouty bands from the British Isles like Idles, Fontaines DC, BCBR or Yard Act comes Do Nothing. Two well received Eps were followed this year by the Snake Sideways album and it’s a lovely little grower. You have to like the spiky post rock guitars and Chris Bailey’s voice but there is some really great stuff here that rewards repeated listens. Amoeba or Happy Feet.
Ian Sweet – Sucker. Ian Sweet is the stage name of Jillian Medford and is the other side of LA to LDR’s glossy Hollywood glitzy antics. Her songs are of the young poor strugglers that make up most of the striving artists and actors in SOCAL. Gritty electric pop with some production that really pulls it together. Sucker or Fight
Skinny Palembe – Album: Hardly The Same Snake. Doya Beardmore grew up in South Africa but then moved to Doncaster of all places and his music reflects a global vibe that works as well in Donny as Jo’burg. It swings, it has a jazz inflection but works as a good collection of songs and his voice is more sustainable than Alex Turner’s striving eeforts at crooning. Don’t Be Another or Like A Heart Won’t Beat
Lana Del Ray – “Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd?” Lana continues to get better and better, and this oddly named paeon to LA, the Carpenters and 70’s soft rock is superb. Couple of self-indulgent spoken voice segments by guests apart this is faultless. She has more confidence in her voice so happy to share the vocals with others. She wrote this on her phone and then built it up over time with collaborators and finally Jack Antonoff to pull it all together in an LDR album way, her 9th for god’s sake. Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd and Fingertips.
The Reds, Pinks and Purples – Murder, Oral Sex and Cigarettes. The RP&P is the performing name of Glenn Donaldson who lives in the Inner Richmond (I know as he released an album called that) in San Francisco and is prolific to say the least. He can be accused of sounding like Morrissey but he is way much more than the baritone which is indeed at times a bit familiar. All heart ache and frustrations, very, very catchy songs and then a throw away guitar instrumental that is glorious. What will heaven be like? Or Use This Song If You Need One.
There was a time when any self-respecting band featured a self-confessed king of the fret-board, a string-bender extraordinaire, a shredder. Bands played long extemporized songs featuring guitar solos for at least half the length of the song. In a twist there later developed a genre of bands whose whole style was the long rambling instrumentals that were made up on the spot, live, around a base melody or motif, the jam-band, whose music arose out of love for the Grateful Dead. However, as to be expected with a bunch of Deadheads the live noodling was short on melody or rhythm and long on meandering. As much as the blues rock of Clapton, Page and Beck was long on solos they came through the same pop training with the YardBirds to know that solos should be parts of songs not the reason for the song.
The blues from Chicago and Memphis produced great guitar highlights but few self-indulgent solos, even the magii of BB, Albert and Freddie focused on their guitar as punctuation for their songs, maybe they understood the audience in a blues club came to dance and not to play along with the guitar. The arrival of more and more ‘heavier’ music brought the long emotive solo, Skynnerd’s ‘Freebird’, Zep’s ‘Stairway to Heaven’, the Dan’s ‘Reeling in the Years’, Niel Young and Crazy Horse’s ‘Down By The River’ made way for metal and Guns’Roses ‘Sweet Child O’Mine’, and album after album of pouting masculine rock from AC/DC, Sabbath, Ozzy, Judas Priest, Bad Company, Panthera, MSG, Queens of the Stone Age, Van Halen. The list is sadly nearly endless, over the 30 year period from 1975 to 2005 nearly every rock song features as the key selling point the guitar solo, squeezed out at high decibels and high register. The perfect accompaniment for Beavis and Butthead to head nod along to before building up to the guitar climax where the aficionado would play the guitar solo themselves on an imaginary guitar in the air. The perfect climax accompanied by the face distorting into various shapes, in time to the various notes and string bends, effect pedal and shrieks in the classic ‘face melt’.
Unsurprisingly, not a lot of women were a, interested in taking part in this bizarre ritual nor b, encouraged to play this kind of guitar as it is hard visually to make the best effort at being attractive while gurning along to the guitar in your hand. Joan Jett made a career out of one song that both celebrated and parodied this phase in music with “I Love Rock’n Roll”.
The clock spins forward and the guitar solo got lost along the way, certainly as a staple. Whether it was just the self-indulgence of it all. Drum solos lasted even less time. Other than the Doors, Rick Wakeman and ELP, keyboards had never really held the crowds attention, it’s the same with the modern version with earnest looking guys hunched over computer keyboards desperately trying to look rock while yet another loop starts in a synth driven band. The fossilized white rock approach probably didn’t help and people wanted something new and while melody will always be king, his queen is a good lyric. So RnB, rap, alt-rock and pop abandoned the guitar for the most part, at least the part you could play on your air guitar.
Post rock brought the noise and the technical chops, but you would hardly accuse Mogwai of long wanky guitar solos. St Vincent is one of the hardest guitar soloists playing today, but she always tethers the solo in her song structure. Jack White has a great blues touch, but he seems to have got lost of late in a cage of fuzz and reverb, and he is too much of a smart businessman to mess with the needs of streaming, so nothing he releases is ever over 5 minutes and most under 4 minutes. So where are the guitar licks for those who hanker for some twang without the torch song accompaniment?
Well, Uncle Jim is here to help! The guitar hero is alive and well, he is just hiding out in Niger, Houston, Leuven and Peckham. I realized that what drives Mdou Moctar was wanting to play electric versions of taureg songs and having been forced to build his own first guitar he was not going to let tradition get in the way. He brings a hard rocking energy and the guitar leads everything, and he will happily solo his head off, especially since achieving some traction in the West and is now backed with a band.
Kruangbhin sound like they are also from somewhere off the beaten track yet without insulting my friends in Houston, they are not, they are Texas through and through but they have a unique sound that is not in anyway country or western. They are guitar led and long on instrumentals, a re-imagining of the classic rock power trio, Beck Bogert and Appice but Bogert is in a mini-dress and heels and the front two wearing matching Beatle-mop wigs. Mark Speer, the guitarist, has very good technical chops and can play tons of styles and his sound is unique, lots of clever down tempo stuff but he can let it rip, especially live.
Leuven is known as the home of the largest university in Belgium that had been around since 1425, and is also the home of Stella Artois. Like Cambridge without the pretensions and lots of lager. Brutus is a hard post-rock band with classic hard rock vocals although in a twist, it’s actually the drummer Stefanie Mannaerts, who does the singing while beating the crap out of the drum set. The guitarist Stijn Vanhoegaerden can shred.
South London is the home of Dry Cleaning. In the way of the world they have been classified as yet another arty, spoken-word English rockband alongside Squid or Black Country, New Road, who both broke through around the same time, post Covid. If you listen to them, particularly live, there are two things going on, for sure the surreal visual images elucidated by Florence Shaw, and launched like float glass on top of the batshit riffs of Tom Dowse’s almost hardcore guitar. Dowse, a fan of Sonic Youth and Pavement had spells in metalcore bands, he played support once for his heroes Converge. What is interesting about Dry Cleaning is that being in their 30’s they have none of the fears of not doing something, in case it prevents fame and/or glory. There was an interesting comment by Mike Skinner, aka ‘The Streets’, who at 44 is promoting a film he has spent years putting together: “Essentially, it’s all nostalgia. Most of a musician’s career is nostalgia for those few years when they were the thing…. When you’re a musician, your 20s are amazing, and then the rest of your life is about dealing with that.” Unsurprising that many bands disappear only to decide to tour their eponymous, multi selling album 25 years later, when they are all in their late 40’s, and probably need the cash.
I wonder whether it was just the amazing options that computers delivered that killed the guitar? To the budding musician you could learn to play guitar, endlessly playing chords like ‘Play in a Day’ with Bert Weedon, trying to replay the riff you heard that you cannot get out of your head. Hope you find someone else to play with, the way that most bands started for over 50 years. Or you could learn to play basic piano and then GarageBand, Pro Tools, Reason or Logic Pro will open up a complete panoply of musical styles, sounds and rhythms just for you in your headphones – you don’t even get to annoy the neighbors “I’m calling the police!”. For sure, there are never a shortage of indie guitar bands around, but the vast majority of music is not that anymore. I am not sure many 15-year-old boys are playing, on repeat, a shredding guitar solo, while they airplay the imaginary chords and melt their faces to each note; Spotify would only go and interrupt it with something else they are sure you want to hear anyway, or at least something they have been paid to play you.
The guitar solo is not dead, it has just seen better days. If you want to air-guitar away while pretending to do some housework, play this: I added a few older guitar classics for your enjoyment – hopefully Spotify leaves it as is, it boils my brain when they decide to add a song to my playlist playback….
Every now and then the compulsive urge to try something new manifests itself in me taking on a new activity. Luckily, my desire to try out the new is equally matched by my ability to quickly see the errors of my ways and to stop the pointless pursuit of unrealized mastery of the new activity. I had shown a keen interest in music as I entered my teens and following in the Britton family tradition my parents thought I should learn a musical instrument. Having studiously ignored the piano sitting in the living room, they kindly bought me a guitar for Christmas and armed me with Bert Wheedon’s “Play in a Day”. I duly practiced “Bobby Shaftoe” solidly for about 4 days until, with my Trumpian-short fingers struggling with the steel strings of the two chords, I decided that maybe guitar was not for me. I spent more time electrifying the guitar with a small mike attached to the body and recording my echoey guitar effects on my reel-to-reel than I ever spent playing songs.
My only other musical venture was singing, we sang hymns every morning at school assembly and whenever we went on the bus to an away sports match to play another school I was one of the ring leaders of the back of the bus impromptu choir treating the compliment of the 3 or 4 teams to our cheery terpsichorean efforts. The songbook at that time included childhood favorites like “3 Wheels on My Wagon”, “Do Re Mi”, “My Old Man’s a Dustman” the inspirational “Jerusalem” and “Swing Low Sweet Chariot” and the classics from our parents like “New York, New York”, “Chicago”. As we got more into music we added “Feel like I’m Fixing To Die Rag” from Woodstock, “The Boxer”, “Pinball Wizard”, and some Beatles – “Rocky Raccoon” and “Back in the USSR”. I kept some of those into my rugby playing days, adding ‘actions’ to the Swing Low and Jerusalem songs, picking up some new and far more tasteless ditties along the way. Into our late twenties, we serenaded packed pubs on our cricket tours with many of the same songs. (If you would like to hear what those songs were supposed to sound like, listen here). My only formal effort at singing was I joined the choir for Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore, which was fun but not something I was going to find a lot of time for in a busy teenager’s life.
I am sure on hindsight that joining the choir was more an ironic act than a genuine desire to improve my singing. In the same vein, one day when we were signing up for the local East Somerset sports tournament we all thought it would be hilarious to enter the 3000-Meter Walk. When the final entries were registered it turned out that as much as the hilarity at the time was communal I was the only one who had actually registered, so alongside my modest efforts with the discus I now had to learn to speed walk. I duly practiced walking in large circles and on the day I triumphed in a field of 4 and qualified for the County sports event, something my discus throwing did not qualify me for. At the County Event I scraped second and went on to the Regional Championships, which was getting embarrassing as the other athletes at this point were serious, focused and making an effort whereas I was not. In the Regionals I came a respectable 3rd out of 8, but that was the end of the line for my speed walking and the peak of my athletic career.
Over the years, I have tried my hand at various other sports out of curiosity or a desire for some fitness. Games with balls and rackets, tennis, badminton, ping pong, squash and the far inferior racquetball. Rolling ball games like boules, bowling, both Crown Green and 10 pin. Couple of efforts at the martial sports, boxing and judo. Team sports like football or rugby, cricket, field hockey, basketball (although years of playing rugby created habits of movement that proved bruising to my lunchtime pick-up compatriots) and Ultimate Frisbee. I have studiously avoided golf as I have neither the patience nor the desire to dedicate the time necessary to get any good at it, and the peripheral displays of male conformity and snobbery interwoven into the game alienated me from the get -go. I have held positions where it was obligatory for me to play, and I would happily hack around as part of a fun best-ball game, however on one occasion I was paired up in a four that was teeing off early in the draw and I had to take my tee shot in front of the gathered group of senior Japanese customers and serious American golfing colleagues. I was dressed correctly to look the part, but I gamely completely whiffed twice before shanking the top of the ball, for it to roll slowly and drunkenly down the side of the tee box. Before it got any worse, one of my Japanese colleagues smartly moved me to a different group at the back and spared everyone further embarrassment at my flailing efforts to kill the ball with a #1 wood.
I tried yoga while dating a yoga-loving Californian, but if ever there was an activity that smacked of temporary suspension of disbelief under the guise of a foreign and superficially spiritual activity, yoga was the poster child. I gamely accompanied her to her fave Sunday class in SOMA, only to be disdainfully rejected for not having the necessary experience for a class of this level. I think the guy could see that I would probably fart and would most definitely laugh and kill the serious vibe they were after. So my yoga career fell to the mat and never sprung back.
Another equally serious and ultimately annoying sports activity is skate skiing. It’s a revenge sport for the skinny and the short who were bullied in main stream team sports. The physics of the skis work against weight and height as they come in a basic size and surface area, the smaller and lighter you are the coefficient of friction is in your favor. If you are not, the ski is harder to move while propelling yourself on the flats and up hill, and insufficient to give you much control in the odd moments of relief down hill. It’s basically an unpleasant way to run fast in freezing cold weather with sticks on your feet.
One of the benefits of maturity is gaining a modicum of knowing one’s self, the self actualization process, knowing more accurately one’s own strengths and weaknesses. Logic then would suggest that we focus more on the things we can do well and enjoy, rather than persevering with those things that we ultimately will struggle with. The problem is that life throws challenges at us, especially in the work environment where it is harder to admit that we suck at something, especially if the thing we suck at is part and parcel of the job. I have spent a lot of time in customer facing environments, I have headed sales organizations yet the one thing I am terrible at is the networking gathering, the mixer, the early evening conference cocktail party, the schmoozing free-for-all amongst a large gathering of people. The goal of these events is to meet new contacts, introducing yourself, making polite small talk, sipping your drink politely cradled, as it always is, in a small paper napkin. Firstly, I have been doing what I do for such a long time, I struggle to get intrinsically excited about any industry event, it’s slightly more interesting than reading the minutes of the Chinese Politburo Central committee report on rice production but less interesting than watching reruns of the Simpsons. Secondly, I am just not that extraverted, I’m happy to wallflower or talk to the 3 people in the room who I know quite well rather than make the effort with the 297 I do not. I sit at lunches where it’s free seating and as much as I am French enough now to always say hello individually to everyone at the table, I marvel at the easy way some guys lean in, introduce themselves and chat as if they have known each other for years. With aging eyes I struggle to make out the name of the person on the name card, let alone the company name, so I am not going out on a social limb to introduce myself to someone who it may turn out is a vendor selling ‘insurance solutions’ or yet more software. I usually quietly eat my lunch and move on, same with the ‘cocktail events’, I meander around, drink one beer and desperately find someone I know or give in, and take my ball home.
Knowing when to quit is a learned skill, one I think I have mastered.
I think being the eldest child teaches you to be bossy. My brother Bob arrived home from the hospital with my mother when I was 3 and a half, already precocious I immediately enquired when he would be able to play cars with me. He duly became the dastardly Jerries to my plucky Tommy hero, the noble Indian to my brave cowboy, the dastardly Japanese to my Chindit. He was my goalkeeper when I later decided to be a footballer, so I could fire my dream shots into the top corner, or at least into the garage door and annoy my long suffering grandfather whose workshop was behind the goal. As our games outgrew just the two of us I recruited the Twohig brothers from across the road to our gang, then the Cornish brothers moved in around the corner and we had two opposing armies to work through our wars, raiding parties and bloodthirsty campaigns which were played out through the wooded world that was Tardis-like enfolded into our back garden.
I was the major general in charge of the maneuvers, the head coach making the tough calls and the CEO responsible for the division of labour. I was the oldest by one year from Kim Twohig and Neil Cornish but it was less a function of the height giving authority rather than desire for taking the authority, giving direction and leading the group off on our adventures. Whether foraging a path through the jungle of the bamboo thicket in our garden or trekking down the back lane of Webbs Hill to Vallis Vale and the overgrown former quarries that regularly became more strange lands to be explored and conquered.
My first formal interaction with a superior, other than dealing with my teachers, parents, grandparents and a much older sister, was Mr Wells of Wells Coaches. He ran the school bus services in the mornings and afternoons and day trips to Weston-Super-Mare, Bournemouth, Weymouth and Longleat. Children, sweet eating old ladies, smoking pub groups, travel sick as often as not, all his regular clients kept his coaches filthy. Myself and an everchanging cast of characters emptied the ashtrays on the back of every seat, swept and mopped the floors. We also got to clean the outside of the coach with a brush and a hose, I got to clean the outside until Mr Wells caught me cleaning my colleague with the hose and was told to clear off and never come back.
My next boss was a little more understanding but in her own way a little more intimidating. Barb Roberts was a bespectacled Yorkshirewoman adrift with her portly little husband in our little Somerset market town. She and George were friends of my parents and drank together at the Royal Oak, next door, every Friday evening. My mother and Barb did most of the talking, working through their packs of Silk Cut while my Dad and George punctuated with nods, chortles and knowing looks. My Dad’s pipe fulls of Condor tobacco completing the recreation of the great smogs of the 19th century while George, the non-smoker of the group, sipped his half of bitter. Barb was the manager of the Spar supermarket on the corner of Gore Hedge and Keyford. I worked for the going rate of 3 shillings an hour Friday after school and Saturdays stacking shelves and packing groceries. I moved on to other jobs that paid more or fitted around my school and, latterly, my sporting commitments better but I would see Barb and George with Mum and Dad on their Friday evening socials as they came back to our place for a night cap. This was the era of dressing up for an evening out so both the men wore suits, and the women in full make up, jewelry and dresses. George developed an increasingly large swelling in his groin that was never discussed, even as it became the size of a small football, more and more visible in his suit pants. He died suddenly of testicular cancer and it was still never disucssed. Barb went grey completely over the next few months and then died herself of a broken heart within a year. I looked to see on Google StreetView if the Spar was still there in some form but it has also disappeared under what is now a small housing development.
Bill Lewis was another outsider in Frome. He had been in the army but was a cockney who married a local woman. He had started a small cleaning business from scratch. He drove around town in his little van with ladders on the roof, hustling window cleaning when larger jobs were scarce. He managed to get a couple of contract cleaning jobs and then needed help and with my coach cleaning experience I was a shoe in to help him sustain his growing enterprise. I cleaned the floors of the large supermarket in the new West Way Centre every morning at 7.00am using a new fangled wet-vac. I balanced atop his highest ladders cleaning office windows. We cleaned windows of the houses on the new estates. We cleaned PVC storage silos during the factory shutdown at Wallington Weston, where my sister and her husband had worked before setting off to darkest Essex for him to be a programmer. We also cleaned the canteen at the Express Dairy in Oldford, I did the cleaning and then Bill would help himself to chocolate bars and sweets which he smuggled out in the wet vac. Oldford is full of odd memories, the Vaughn family farm at Park Farm, home of first serious girlfriend Jude, The Ship pub where I ended up working as bar man and outside of which myself and a friend spent an afternoon mooning cars as they drove by. The Express Dairy is now owned by Bonne Maman for some reason and in the early 2000’s my brother Bob ended up in charge of HR for whoever was the owner at the time.
Time moved on and I stacked more supermarket shelves, I was a White Hunter at the Lions of Longleat for 3 summers, worked bar, was a cook in a Good Food Guide listed restaurant, did shift work in a carpet factory running looms, was a fitter’s mate in a factory in Newport South Wales where I broke my toe, as Zappa would have been happy to see I wound up “working in a gas station” and before leaving for France after my final summer after graduation, before starting a real job, I worked in an early waste recycling project at a cement factory in Westbury, where I broke my little finger on my left hand while rebricking the immense kiln. So much for health and safety.
My first few months with Unilever were typical of the ‘graduate trainee’ scheme. Weeks of training in the SPD’s head offices in Watford interspersed with weeks in branch operations. My attempt at getting into the shipping part of Unilever failed and I ended up in their distribution business appropriately named Speedy Prompt Delivery. There were various companies all in one way or another moving raw materials into or finished goods out of Unilever businesses in the UK. Romantic intentions of being in a global world of shipping and exotic ports in foreign climes were dashed by the day to day reality of managing warehouses and delivery trucks in Warrington, Eastleigh, Doncaster and other lifeless towns in England enduring strikes and power cuts of the 3 day week and the famous ‘winter of discontent’. So when I was offered a market research project in the Potteries for a newly established international freight subsidiary I had little sense of what path I was headed down. I arrived on the train in Stoke late on a cold Monday morning in February and was picked up by the General Manager’s secretary, Carole. A woman, it saddens me to say, that having worked with her for 3 years my enduring memory is that she was prone to severe constipation and had to be reminded by her father to do something about it when she was starting to look ‘peaky’. She was engaged to a milkman, who because he got up at 3.30 every morning was not exactly the life and sole of the party, she referred to him as Bert, even though his name was David, it was if she had decided remembering boyfriend’s names was too much like hard work so for short hand they all became Bert.
I was asked to wait as my new boss, the GM, was not yet in. At about 12.05 he exploded through the office door rummaged through his in-tray and then came back out, all without taking off his mackintosh. “Lets go and grab lunch!” he said and off we went, me trailing him in an attempt to make small talk, as we jumped into his brand new gold Ford Capri 2.0 GLS and headed off to a pub. As this was late 70’s England pub lunch was a sandwich and a couple of pints of bitter consumed while my new boss, Pete Meyrick, in his broad Swansea accent, explained that there was no project but if I was interested they needed a salesman to cover Britain, the Benelux and France. If I did that for him I would get a company car and he would fight the political battles to make it a long term job. So with a very used maroon Ford Cortina complete with 8 track player and the promise of international travel I was bought. I became the Marketing Development Manager for the Powder Tank Division of Unispeed Intermodal. Meyrick was a hard driving pugilistic manager. I am not sure I learned that much from him as communications were not his forte; he was a team builder in so far as he put effort into the group socializing after long hours. He developed an esprit de corps by belittling the other two sister divisions, their efforts, their GMs especially came in for his withering disregard and the support staff who we shared the offices with in Newcastle Under Lyme. He ultimately left two years later to set up his own operation and became rich by stealing the core contracts from under the nose of the Unilever business. He took two of my colleagues with him and the fact that he didn’t invite me to join him ultimately showed how little he thought of me. I, meanwhile, was sent to another sinking ship of a division in Southampton, whose whole management team upped and set up in business to replicate what they had been doing for the by now embattled Unispeed group.
I have had 14 jobs since then, some were a lot of fun, some less so. Some I am embarrassed about in hindsight. I did learn something from each of them, even if the lessons were simply to never do something again. Some were very financially rewarding and some I spent more money than I earned. I have managed or lead teams as large as 300 and at times as small as me on my own, some of the those colleagues have become life long friends. I have a couple of times joined a completely different industry with differing mores and ways of doing business, that is tough and ultimately not easy to do successfully. So the one conclusion is that you probably need to be thoughtful about making a commitment to a job when you are young, as it tends to direct you down a path that guides or constrains the future career options. I always wanted to work internationally and escape the rainy little island of home so on balance when I sold my soul for the used maroon Cortina that was the bargain that I made and I am happy I did.
Every week I write one to two newsletters for work that I then spam out into the world with the help of a small mail monkey. It has been a salutary experience to have done that over the last couple of years. Every week I start with a potted update of what the world has been up to for the prior few days; that has been a constant parade of unpleasantness, as you can imagine.
I try and find some gallows humour amongst the pestilence, gluttony, famine and war that now makes up what has become our very own post Biblical age. Remember those heady days of the late 90s when the good guys could and did win? The End of History by Fukayama had made it clear that neoliberalism had triumphed and the last remaining autocratic regimes like China would go the way of Russia, Levi’s, i-pods and Nikes would be the out-riders of democracy as it swept across the globe. I remember waking up early one morning in a boutique hotel in southern Denmark and watching on the TV news the shiny happy version of Tony and Cherie Blair walk through Sedgefield, savoring his stunning victory over the sclerotic Tory regime. I spent many weekends amidst the hustle and flow of unflappable Hong Kong as the rich of China washed their ever-growing billions through the banks and buildings there, ever ready proof, if proof was needed, that China was accelerating towards democratic normalcy on a bus fueled by commercial frenzy.
I lived for most of the last ten years in the at the time, searing hot cradle of high technology, San Francisco and the Bay Area which, together with the peninsula to its south, forms the amorphous Silicon Valley of legend.
The hubris of these days probably helped bring about the global clusterfuck that life is now. The very closeness of the impending success, so close we not only read and talked about it, but we could literally smell its approach, it of course smelled like pinot noir. This much fan-fared triumph of the supposed rule of liberalism brought about the subsequent decline and fall of the rumoured empire of hope. You could make a pretty good case that in fact it was nothing but a charade, that the liberal social democrats chose riches for themselves over true egalitarianism, that they never committed to solve the prevailing inequalities and just undermined the left as a viable option for a very critical 10 years or so.
The financial crash of 2008, or more critically the bungled bail-outs of the rich banks and large companies while destroying the lives of millions of normal people in the US, followed by the hollowing out through austerity in the UK and other places breathed new life into the autocrats. The mirror that was held up to Russia and China that was western success and rich lifestyles was shown to be a pastiche; yes, we have corruption but look at them, they are just as bad! Throw in a couple of self-serving wars and mass destruction of poor brown people, and the moral high ground wasn’t so heady. Failing to be the good guys in Syria, Crimea and Libya just showed the bad guys how weak and divided we really were.
I have seen two similar descriptions in the last couple of weeks of the US and the UK being poor countries with a small number of very rich people. This was backed up in both cases with slightly different sets of analysis of standards of living, quality of life, life expectancy trends etc, but both made compelling cases. We continue to provide a very limited example of how to manage our societies to places with less democracy. The role of society is to provide support to the common weal, the tradeoff for the rights of man is ‘I give you power, you look after me`; whether such gift of power may be via the ballot box or acquiescence to the Party.
In both the land of my birth and the country I spent the majority of my adult years, the most distressing change to me is the acceptance of bullshit. You can make a logical and reasoned argument with someone who holds another viewpoint based on their perspectives and judgements about the circumstances that apply to a situation. That is what politics is, the debate and the compromise. If, however, someone is basing their view or argument on bullshit that is simply self-serving, and that avoids logic or the facts and cannot be resolved politically. The whole of the Presidency of Donald Trump was based on such a suspension of truth by not just the MAGA fanatics, but by every republican who turned a blind eye or held their nose and let him and his cronies enrich themselves. The Facebook fueled support for and provided the microtargeting to get Brexit delivered, it was and continues to be supported by the ruling government of the UK, willfully ignoring the facts that their actions have harmed and continue to harm the majority of their citizens that they supposedly represent. The campaign for Brexit was based on bullshit, and its resulting implementation was turbocharged by the same suspension of common sense. The alternative reading of both situations is that people actively chose to support the bullshit arguments because knowing full-well they were flawed in the general case it gave a small sense of expressing their frustration with the status quo, regardless of the obvious fact that they suited and rewarded personally the key elites they were so frustrated with. How is that different from Xi rewarding the cadres loyal to him or Putin and his chorus of oligarchs?
We also experienced a global pandemic. In a cliched way, this showed humanity in its most Dickensian. It was indeed the best of times, with scientists delivering vaccines in record time, nurses and doctors fighting to save the sick. That it was also the worst of times when ‘mates’ of the cabinet were fast tracked to immense wealth for securing contracts to supply the government with much-needed personal protection equipment, without competitive bidding or any oversight. That much of the PPE did not work in a basic sense of providing any protection or any value for its delayed and very expensive provision other than personal enrichment for a precious few didn’t ultimately come as a surprise. It didn’t seem to be that newsworthy either, for some reason, only Private Eye held up a mirror to the wide-open festering sore of the Tories continuing corruption. Who needed functioning medical equipment when you can have a round of applause and bang on a saucepan down the street.
We have enjoyed the recent implosion of the new version of unconstitutional leadership, Liz Truss is not enjoying much support in denial of her own nominative determinism. It seems like years of the same shit sandwich but ‘Margarine Thatcher’, as she views herself in this latest right wing cos-play at government, has actually been fucking things up for less than one month. Biden, thank heavens, is keeping western democracy in shape and supporting the Ukrainians’ effort to bring down Putin. His administration continues to pass meaningful legislation which is a pleasant surprise after 12 years of minor tweaking at the fringes, but we have McConnell and Trump’s real legacy, the Supreme Court as a constant threat, casting its shadow like Sauron over the land, its black heart ready to pump more hatred and bile into popular discourse. Every time I see Joe Biden he looks one step closer to a comfortable retirement at home, surrounded by Labradors and grandkids, sipping cocoa; but in fact he is almost single-handedly fighting for global peace and stability. I am avoiding thinking about what happens in 2024, but quietly hoping by then Putin is buried in an unmarked grave somewhere in the forest outside of Moscow following a bloody and painful demise at the hands of his own inner circle.
Who knows, maybe by then we may have also seen the last of what used to be called the Conservative and Unionist Party as it self-destructs following the landslide victory of the coalition of the sane.
Plus, “My shoe organizing thing arrived. Thank God! I don’t want to go on about it but we are back in business” – I knew I could bring a positive conclusion to the current malaise, after all. Here are some dark songs to listen to as the evenings close in.
There is a glorious luxury to settling in to a lazy Saturday. Not a Saturday full of tasks around the house, no chores, no pressing need to battle the great unwashed in the shopping center. Saturdays waking slowly, slightly hung over from the relief of Friday evening, drinking in the sounds of the birds, soft light of Spring through the silk of the curtains. Saturdays rituals, reading Blind Date in the Grauniad app, debating whether to get up and get croissants from the bakery down the road, pondering the culinary choices for the weekend. Looking forward to the Fulham game, this year has been odd, not just because we have to get used to the expectation of winning but because success brings the attention of Sky and games moved to Friday nights, Sunday lunchtimes and 1.30Pm kick offs. Today is a treat, a normal British Saturday 3.00pm kick off which fills the end of my French afternoon nicely.
Dressed for an unhalfbricked Saturday morning
I dont want to go all Nigel Slater and confessional but one of the other treats is wandering through the cookery tomes to find inspiration. I have flétan, Atlantic Halibut, from the football loving fish guy at the weekly market. I also have the last remaining cabbage that survived the winter, or survived me harvesting them too early assuming they were struggling, sweet potatoes and a large cauli to do something with. Coffee and one of the French biscuits that they call “Petit Dejeuner”, which are whole grain and have chocolate nibs and nuts, accompany a catch up with Private Eye. I know my biases are just being confirmed but the journalism of the Eye is the one consistent investigative effort holding the despicable and corrupt ruling Conservative party to account as they undermine or destroy what is left of the England I had the good fortune to grow up in. It’s ironic that at this very moment, across the plagued island there are many of my peers reading through their Saturday’s Daily Mail or Daily Telegraph feeling the same disgust and distaste but about whoever their target of their privileged ire is today, likely some part of the woke, liberal elites that are in their eyes undermining their world.
Tomorrow France goes to the polls to elect the President for the next 5 years and by the time you read this we hope that we are not reliving that sense of bewilderment that we felt when the desperate and angry elected Donald Trump and voted to leave the EU. There are many desperate and angry French people who Marine Le Pen has spoke to with resonance about their cost of living, their frustrations when they fill up their battered old Peugeot 208’s with diesel to drive the 40 minutes to their poorly paid job. They blame Macron. They blame the establishment. They blame them for their lack of the piece of the western liberal pie they feel they deserve, they blame the dark skinned people for taking their jobs, for causing crime, for not being French and Mme Le Pen nods along with them and smiles in agreement when they vent their spleen. She promises France Unicorns like all populists, “tous et n’importe quoi’, no taxes for the under 30’s, reduced VAT on diesel, no hijabs, no benefits for foreigners, standard stuff. The divisions across Europe and the Western World that are exploited by the Populists are thanks in no small part to the efforts of Mr Putin aided and abetted by the uncontrolled greed which powers social media to be such a sustained force for evil. However, globalisation and capitalism has failed all but a moderately sized slice of French society and that is reflected in the polls where over 60% has voted for either far left or far right candidates. If there were such options in the USA we would probably see that kind of reflection too.
Saturday is also a day to reflect on what music have I been listening to or newly discovered this week, new vinyl arrivals have been slower of late as I am trying to be less compulsive. I got the quite lovely Wet Leg album this week and its no surprise they are the darlings of the rock media currently, as well as the new Jack White which is a nice and quite surprisingly good return to form. It’s also a day to dig through the back catalog and revisit old favorites. I consume vast amounts of music but quite a lot of it blends into itself. I definitely have different preferences for different moods and contexts.
As my Saturday moves sleepily at first it gathers pace and then late morning the coffee kicks in and energy levels go up so this playlist brings its game from folky to funky to just fun, enjoy!
Buxton in Derbyshire is what is laughingly referred to as a spa town. The English do not really do spas like here in France, where taking of the waters is not only normalized but forms part of the basic health care system. Nor like the Germans where, in combination with self flagellation with particular shrubs and bushes and rolling naked in the snow, spas are a much loved healthful activity. For a gallant few years in Regency England the upper classes went to towns like Buxton, Cheltenham, Lymington and of course the longest running show in spaszle-dazzle, Bath. I can confidently assert that after the fall of the Romans the baths in Bath were an underused resource, the English not being overly fond of water or strong on personal hygiene. So when the Regency court decreed that “taking the water” cured all ills the fashionable ‘ton’ took off to stay in these genteel sleepy country towns, see and be seen, and drink the naturally occurring waters that flowed from the local springs. Like Bridgerton, but with mineral water and less multicultural sex. Note that ‘taking of the waters’ was to drink it, still at this point we were not too keen on getting into it and cleaning off any accumulated dirt and detritus.
Buxton in January 1981 was a sleepy forgotten town, this predated the English rediscovery of drinking bottled water so the spa element of the town’s history was reduced to the public rooms like the hotels and council offices forming the original Crescent, a copy of the one in Bath, and the Pavilion Gardens. I had recently discovered the latest thing to come out of Liverpool, Echo and the Bunnymen, through their remarkable debut album ‘Crocodiles’. The closest place to where I was living at the time to see them was Buxton and thanks to the NME and a special invite off we forayed. They played under a camouflage net and had this serious nothing can touch us attitude, part Scouse, part being on that crest of acclaim that comes with Peel sessions, positive noise from NME and Sounds. Their sound live back then was driven by Pete de Freitas machine gun drumming, fills and rolls and the bass and guitar chugging the rhythm along, this was not a band to come to see if you wanted long guitar solo improvisations. At this point in their career Ian McCulloch’s voice was reasonably strong, before the booze and cigs ripped out what little range he had. Live, they drove a hard sound anchored in the drums but with the ‘Heaven Up Here’ album, which they were starting to play tracks from, the bass heavy Echo of their best period was to the fore. The closed the set with Over the Wall and All My Colours (or Zimbo as most of us know it as). McCulloch loved to improvise the endings with snippets from hits by the Stones, Del Shannon and the Velvets sprinkled among the original words. The audience laps that shit up as you all know the words and sing along. Will Sergeant wore sunglasses throughout the whole gig.
‘Heaven Up Here’ even now is a regal album, full of confidence and brimming with creative energy. They knew they were good and enjoyed showing off. ‘Porcupine’ was the follow up, more doom and less pop, They were tired out and starting to get tired of each other, Ian Broudie was guitarist Will Sergeant’s flatmate and his upbeat production could not make it a happy album. Iceland was the ideal backdrop for the album artwork and the videos that supported it and they look miserable, cold and lacking inspiration amongst the stalactites and frozen waterfall backdrops.
They released some great 12″ singles over this mid 80s’ period and you got an interesting sense of where and how they were experimenting on the B-sides. They somehow got over their creative hump and ‘Ocean Rain’ the 4th album did good box office and creatively expanded their sound to a richer more symphonic swell. Whereas the debut ‘Crocodiles’ was all scratchy guitars, ‘Heaven Up Here’ hard bass and drum driven anthems, ‘Porcupine’ was the angular peaks and troughs of dark days, ‘Ocean Rain’ was acoustic guitars and string sections, brushes not bass drums, it even included glockenspiel and xylophone . They still maintained the elemental graphic image, this time on a boat in a cave in Cornwall. The album produced two classic singles, The Killing Moon (much abused in every werewolf movie and tv show but they obviously need the royalties) and Seven Seas.
Nocturnal them
And then it all went a bit pear shaped. Any band that records, tours and plays nonstop for 7 years gets tired. They all react differently to the fame, the pressure for repeat success and the underlying hard work takes its toll. As I said as much as McCulloch’s voice and lyrics, his world view, whether dark or romantic, was the sound of Echo, the anchor was Pete De Freitas’s drums and Les Pattinson’s bass. De Freitas had major mental and drug issues by the time they were pressurized to record a new album by Warner Borthers (WEA) in 1987. And not just produce any old album but to do their version of Gabriel’s ‘So’, Will Sergeant was apoplectic that Warner executive Rob Dickens played them Gabriel’s album, declaring “I want you to sound like this!”. So not much of a surprise then that the next album was crap.
They could not even be bothered to come up with an interesting title. I couldn’t be bothered to buy it, I got the cassette at some point of “Echo and the Bunnymen’ but it was released in 1987. They got two hit singles off it in the US, ‘Bedbugs and Ballyhoo’ and ‘Lips Like Sugar’. They got some movie song exposure and then it became the last real Bunnymen album. McCulloch was sick of it and left the band. The other three tried to continue – which was ironic in that De Freitas was a paid employee rather than in the band for the last year due to his drug and health issues. They brought in another singer and made a terrible album.
And then De Freitas got killed in a motorbike accident so it really was over. Will and Ian made an album in 1995 as ‘Electrafixion’, which was pretty rubbish, they then worked with Les Pattinson again and made another 7 albums, not one of which I have bought or listened much to. They obviously worked out how to co-exist as creators together for the long haul, they both have done solo projects and Will Sergeant has done lots of atmospheric instrumental stuff. There have been several remixes and numerous Echo compilation albums and they still play live, usually for the summer festival and 80’s revival crowds.
La Chute – The camou years
For me though, they will always be the dark heroes under the camouflage net in Buxton Pavilion Gardens in January 1981. You can hear how great they sounded that night yourself as 4 songs were released as the live EP ‘Shine So Hard’. I owned this as a Cassette single in a cigarette box style packaging and had no idea where it had been recorded. Later it got re-mastered in 2003 and the credits listed the location and I realized I had actually been there.
Here then is my selection of the best of Echo: Listen here.
Pictures on My Wall [Original Single Version] 1979. The original Echo as in the drum machine, catchy little pop number!
Rescue – 1980. The spiky guitar sound appears first
All That Jazz – 1980. That drum sound first appears (Shine So Hard live version from Buxton)
The Puppet – 1980. …and it all comes together on this single
Show of Strength – 1981. Heaven Up Here opener.
A Promise – 1981.
Over The Wall – 1980 (Shine So Hard live version from Buxton)
All My Colours – 1982 (the best version is Live at Womad with Burundi Drummers but too random for Spotify so this is also from Buxton)
Broke My Neck -1981 B-side to A Promise single
Fuel – 1982 – B-side to The Back of Love
The Cutter – 1983 Opener to Porcupine
The Back of Love -1983
Clay – 1983
Heads Will Roll – 1983 yes, they added strings to their bow
The Killing Moon – 1984 ( John Peel session version without strings)
Angels and Devils – 1984 (B-side to Silver)
Nocturnal Me – 1984 ( John Peel session version without strings)
A little bit of France in Odessa, Duc De Richlieu getting some cover
Well, that went from crappy to ‘end of days’ whatthefuckery very quickly!
It’s tough not to have a sense of everything just got very trivial compared to what is unfolding less than 2500 kms to the east. I have experienced a mix of emotions.
Mostly dark, accepting the full despotic nature of not just what Putin has done but the complete propagandist twist of every evil action into something for the ordinary Russian to cheer on. The lower levels of disgust experienced in looking at the British government’s spinning of their decision not to enable Ukrainians to come into the UK in any numbers or at the Republicans and their facilitators at Fox News glibly parroting Putin’s line while using the situation to take shots at Biden. The pride in the constant, unrelenting, unperturbed resistance that the Ukrainian nation has shown. The immense balls of Zelensky, the immense balls; contrast his behavior with the puffy little guy in the jacket and tie at the end of the 50′ table in a bunker? The smile when Anonymous does the type of hybrid technical hacks that we expect to get from Russian. The amazing response of people all across Europe; nearly every town in France has collection points for support and aid for Ukraine. Towns like La Rochelle, donating 55 hospital beds and delivering them to Ukraine, towns organizing to rent buses and providing drivers and support to go and pick up a bus load of women and children to welcome them to their homes.
I hope that somehow we take something good out of this carnage and destruction, maybe Putin is done at some point in the near future and his regime crashes down with him and then all the other tinpot despots, propped up by Russia, in Kazakhstan, Belarus and Turkmenistan tumble over too. It would also be timely if the oil and gas price spike encouraged a quicker transition to sustainable energy rather than a rush to start fracking everywhere again and augur a commitment to address the climate crisis.
In the meantime I have been distracting myself with this playlist of music. It’s a selection from the various albums old and new that I have been playing this grey and cold March. Let’s listen to it while doing something to help Ukraine!
Jarvis Cocker – Save The Whale – Mister Deltoid Remix – Sheffield’s favorite son in groovy deep remix of one of his confinement classics on the 2020 ‘Jarv Is’ album
Animal Collective – Prester John – the three strangely named guys from the Collective back with new toons and familiar fey electo-pop. Rachel and I saw Panda Bear play at a barn behind a winery in Napa. We rented an AirBnb that the hostess tried to pretend the place was ours in privacy, only to find she had snuck in during the night to sleep in the other bedroom…..
Black Country, New Road – Concorde – uniquely English noisy jazz poprock. The angsty sounding lead singer managed to screw the collective pooch by announcing he was leaving the 7-piece band on the eve of the new album’s release; his voice is a big part of their sound so how they transition will be interesting.
Cate le Bon – Running Away – the one time I managed to fly Concorde Simon and Jasmin Le Bon were the only celebs on the same flight, or at least the only ones I recognized.
Chudahye Chagis – Binasoo+ – Holly’s friend Suzie introduced us to the rabbit-hole that is Korean Folk music. So this, to stretch the allegory, is as Fairport Convention is to Dolly Collins, as these new Korean artists are to the 16th-17th century folk songs. The singer Chudahye Chagis is part of the SsingSsing band whose visuals are fabulous.
Talking Heads – The Overload – as this downbeat song overlooked on the superb Remain In Light album describes today’s terrible days – “The gentle collapsing of every surface’
Ian Sweet – Sing Til I Cry – Jill Medford’s songs are always double sided and this is that slow building, take down that is classic Sweet. Her best recent song is of course F*ckthat but this flows rhythmically better.
Eno – Fat Lady of Limburg – I was introduced a couple of weeks ago to the live 801 album from 1976 which I had probably written off at the time as being ridiculous, old school Prog, on my drive for the new wave at the time. It is a fabulous window into a time when some very clever musicians came together for a very short period of time and luckily, for posterity, they were recorded live on a real soundboard. They did a super version of this song but Spotify of course does not have it so I went back to the original, to share.
Big Thief – Time Escaping – these folks are the archetypal new hippies in many ways. They ‘woodshed’ most albums, even before Covid times; they include former lovers amongst the line-up yet are insanely productive, so no spats but the energy is working for sure. This is from the latest double album and well, yes….
Lana Del Ray – Dealer – this is a throw away track on Blue Bannisters, its from aborted sessions with Alex Turner and Miles Kane’s side project the Last Shadow Puppets. As most of you know I am a massive Lana fan and try not to miss an opportunity to preach the gospel of Norman Fucking Rockwell.
Findlay – Strange One – trailer for the new album, “The Last of the 20th Century Girls”, which is a title that could be applied to Putin.
Soul Coughing – Screenwriter Blues, another old song but as you might have spotted from a prior blog the line about its “5.00am and you are listening to Los Angeles” is from this on the money take down of Glitter Town.
Leenalchi – Tiger is Coming – yes, its Korean folk again and if you do not listen to this and start dancing you need to drink more. Here is an essential video.
Butcher Boy – Carve a Pattern. I heard this first on the excellent The Culture Bunker podcast, chosen by Stuart Murdoch of the much loved institution that is Belle & Sebastian, they are a fellow Glaswegian band.
Joy Orbison – swag w/ kav. Some gorgeous grungy UK dance from a superb album: Still Slipping Vol 1. which is on Bandcamp here
Ural Thomas – Dancing Dimensions. As war is about to break out over the Urals an 80 year old soul singer from Portland OR is getting us to dance, what more can you want?
Squid – G.S.K. – a song about drugs in a name check that I am sure Pharma giant Glaxo Smith Kline would rather do without, just keep channeling nice Lucazade thoughts…
Yard Act – The Overload – another overload in the same playlist, how lazy is that! The hottest thing out of Yorkshire since Bielsa has been thrown to the curb. More angry young British lads speak/singing; but if you had to endure their government you would be driven to protest in any way possible. Yet again I am so embarrassed about my fucking generation and how we have destroyed a nationstate in the pursuit of personal self gratification. ” What does tomorrow’s world have for me?” what indeed?
Mannequin Pussy – Drunk II – if you have not been drinking more in the past two years it can only be because you have taken the pledge. This song demonstrates why we probably should drink less.
Jarvis Cocker/Hot Chip – House Music All Night Long – To finish up, dance away with two acts from an earlier more dishonest time when we celebrated English exceptionalism as if that was something to be proud of rather than serially embarrassed about. Another remix but the original album is so good if it nudges you to check it out, my mission is complete.
“Who the hell would live in a house like this? Head deep in the basement, one foot on the pedal bin This ain’t easy listenin'”
“My Dad got a Fender Telecaster when I was 7, before that he would goof around on a crappy keyboard and a drum set, he got from a surfer buddy, but the look of that Telecaster, man, I was hooked.” Nate Wrigley didn’t get his own until he was 22, he had played cheap copies, “Walmart guitars” as he called them. He didn’t mind as he liked the trashy sound. He had never decided what he would do with his life, therefore was hesitant to attend college. After high school, Nate wrote songs and played with bands in the preternaturally surf obsessed backwater that was Pacifica. His comrade in arms in the struggle not to conform to the corporate drudge was his cousin Kyle.
Kyle grew up surfing in Seal Beach. His mother, Nate’s aunt Amy, had settled there after college and married a handsome and democratic-leaning refugee from Orange County. Kyle was smart like his Mum, and got into Long Beach State University and chose without much thought to study Marketing. The one thing he had enjoyed at CSULB was volunteering at the performing arts center, the school had a quietly impressive performance space sponsored and named after the Carpenters, who were alumni. The arts and artists themselves were, as you would expect, targeted at wealthy locals rather than the students so it ran the gamut of Al Jarreau, the Beach Boys, Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion and the odd classical artists not able to make the big leagues in LA. They would sashay up in their Lincoln Navigators and E-Class Mercedes convertibles with the casual SoCal mix of blue jeans, (men and women), sparkly tight shirts and big hair for the women, suit jackets, open neck dress shirts with bouffant chest hair and chains for the men; deep tan compulsory for all. This was Long Beach after all, not real LA and yet it somehow could never create its own identity. People made good money there in the port and real-estate but never Hollywood money, never stupid money. Kyle liked working the sound board and backstage. Even if he was not a big fan of Al Jarreau or Journey getting to work alongside their roadies and technicians was a good learning and like Nate, he was into music and playing drums or bass guitar. He never played at the Richard and Karen Carpenter PAC but played the working bars down by the container port at weekends with various short-lived bands.
They played bar-room rock, 60’s covers and in the summer of his junior year Nate had spent the whole summer crashed at his apartment and they both played with what was basically the band Wavves, but missing a couple of folks. Wavves were a band that had some success the year before but were having to take a hiatus after the abrupt cancellation of their first European tour, after the lead singer, off his face on valium and ecstasy insulted the Spanish crowd, started to fight the drummer midway through their third song and got driven off stage with an avalanche of water bottles. So Kyle and Nate played drums and guitar and did some vocals with the rest of Wavves while the lead singer and main man did some long overdue rehab at his record company’s expense and the drummer left to join the Scientologists. They got to taste touring life, as in driving around Southern California and Arizona in a rental van, staying at Motel 6s and playing larger bars and clubs as the warm-up act the Broken Wavves.
That came to an abrupt end in September when, rehab successfully completed, the mainman returned alongside two old buddies from Jay Reatard’s band and promptly fired Kyle and Nate after their last gig as Wavvers in Barstow. They got paid off but their career in the lights came to a bumpy end as they had to go home via Greyhound, Nate’s Walmart guitar in its carry case, the drums were the band’s luckily, so that was one thing less to schlepp across the Imperial Valley.
Nate went home to Pacifica and nothing much and Kyle finished his last year at CSULB. After 4 years of learning about 20-year-old ad campaigns for detergent, cars and cereals and mid-20th century management science he graduated. He looked around at what the world was offering a young man in 2008 and the answer was not a lot.
He tried out for several ‘marketing’ jobs but that seemed to be code for him sitting in a Dilbert cartoon doing call center work with a bunch of equally desperate young graduates trying to really get excited about their monthly call quotas. The world of Monday morning sales ra-ra sessions with bad muffins, neon orange juice and coffee strong enough to strip paint may have worked briefly as a motivation tool during the 1980s but it was a self-parody by the time Kyle was in his third customer service job. It was servicing a TV cable and internet bundling giant, and of course it wasn’t actually a good job with benefits for the actual giant, publicly-listed company. It was an hourly paid job for an outsourced service provider, working out of an anonymous 5 story office building in an equally anonymous office park without sidewalks, or stores or places to eat, in a suburb of Reseda.
The San Fernando valley was hardly the place of your dreams, unless they were pornographic. It seemed far from the beach and the SOCAL lifestyle he had grown up being part of, but the rent was cheap. He shared a condo with Kent, a college buddy in Canoga Park who had an accounting job in a shiny glass office building with manicured lawns and a fountain out front in Westfield Village. Still no sidewalks, or stores or places to eat but that was standard developer chic and its LA, so everyone has a car to go and get some food to bring back to their desk and eat, quickly and guiltily. His roommate was chill, low maintenance and being Korean American had family in the Valley. Kent would be away most weekends with them and would bring back mounds of Tupperware containers, full of insanely good homecooked food; as long as you didn’t mind chile, spice and garlic you were golden. With his roommate gone he could practice drums for hours, he had to use pads to prevent the neighbors from wanting to kill him but technique wise, it taught him better control than just pounding with hammers.
After they had been in the apartment for a year Kent came up with a strange proposition. It turned out he had a girlfriend Shayla, who he had actually been spending most of the ‘family’ weekends with. Shayla was a petite, bouncy, blond Mormon from east Texas who he met waitressing at the Applebee’s near his office. Kent’s deeply religious parents wanted him to marry a Korean girl, who had a degree in a real subject like accounting or life sciences and who was evangelical in outlook. Shayla was striking out on all three of these so she had become the secret girlfriend. Kent’s cunning conundrum solver was to have Shayla pose as Kyle’s girlfriend and for them all to move in together. They talked it over some brewskis and the deal was sealed. They would move into a larger house and Nate became the 4th roommate. If and when Kent’s parents came over to visit, Shayla was Kyle’s life problem and in return Kent got regular guilt free sex, Shayla moved out of her shithole converted motel and Nate could get the band together again.
They rented a down at heel large 3 bedroom 1950’s ranch-style house in Northridge with the only items of mid-century life style that no-one , other than the Maytag Guy, to this day wants: a 1950’s electric stove, washing machine and fridge. More importantly it was detached and had a garage which became the practice room. Shayla decided that maybe she would learn bass as her shifts were mainly evening now, she got better tips, so she had time in the day to futz around and practice chords. She had no noticeable musical talent but stuck at it and she had a pretty good sense of rhythm. Kyle kept up the customer service job listening to the elderly customers struggling with the switch from the cable box that had not changed in 40 years to a new controller and all the joys the newly accessible interwebs brought them. Mostly they just wanted someone to talk to and Kyle would do that. He was compensated for talking to people and as long as he got high service scores, which he did, he would listen to their gripes and family concerns, just as if they were technical issues to be resolved.
Nate got a job in Kinko’s, doing photocopying for harassed parents working on their kids’ homework projects, solving minor technical issues for the many realtors working out of their homes, accepting parcels, selling office supplies, generally being nice.
They started writing songs, in their minds crappy pop songs about their crappy lives but their relentless optimism cut through and when they got asked back to play the same pubs, bars and small rock clubs around the Valley people liked their songs. They played a couple of times as the Beach Bunnies then found out someone else already had a band called the same, then settled on Tiny Bunny. They played 2 or 3 gigs a week, all booked by their own efforts asking for slots, then promoting with their own hand designed and laid out posters, luckily they knew where to get printing done cheap. They didn’t exactly build up a following or anything but they noticed, even as 3rd on the bill at Country Club in Reseda or the Glass House in Pomona, people would actually listen to their set not just studiously ignore them and shout, talking to their friends with their backs to the stage. One night the following summer Kyle, Nate and Shayla had come off stage to almost a round of applause after their 20 minute 6 song set of self-penned instant classics. They were finishing their free beers with Kent, who by this stage was booker, roadie and manager by night, still staff-accountant by day, when an unattractive guy in his lost 30’s sporting a Road to Ruin t-Shirt and a bleached white denim jacket came over to them and said “Caught your set guys, you write this stuff yourself?” When they managed to nod affirmatively he introduced himself. “I’m Jake Gaines, I do A&R for Mom and Pop Records, we are looking for rock pop acts so we might be able to help each other, can I buy you a drink”.
The fact that he said the magic words A&R and drinks ensured they were all smiles and they took their drinks out back to the smoking room, more commonly called the garden. Kent did most of the talking in his manager role. He looked the part as he didn’t dress like the others because he had come straight from work and had basically removed his tie from his button-down work shirt as the only nod to casualness. Nate’s sported his surfer dude meets Kinko’s look and Shayla and Kyle’s more obvious efforts to be pop stars was mainly on-stage attitude rather than a look but they went as far as the ubiquitous black t-shirts, jeans and Chuck Taylors.
Kent got slightly pissed when Jake spent most of the time addressing Shayla’s chest rather than look at him or the other two. But Gaines dropped the right names of bands he had signed Freelance Whales, Tokyo Police Club and Shadow Shadow Shade, who they had supported a couple of time as Beach Bunnies, so they felt at home to be associated with, if not kindred spirits maybe folks they admired.
Two days later they found themselves in the downtown offices of Mom & Pop. The address was actually in Culver City but as they drove through the shiny skyscrapers atopped with big media company names they exchanged glances and “Dude!” exclamations. The four of them were a little disappointed when the directions turned them away from the glitz and glamour down a slightly seedy back street and to the office. It was a beige, 2 story 1970’s office building that would not look out of place hosting a dry cleaners or a realtors, not very rock and roll at all. The record company was actually based out of New York so the LA office was smaller, on a cheaper budget and more sleepy than they expected. They were greeted by the receptionist and walked through the 3 quietly working young kids to the brown glass Board Room and offered sodas and coffee. At least in here it was a bit more R’n’R with 2 framed gold records (not anyone they had heard of) and framed tour posters of acts on the roster. Jake walked in wearing a slightly sheepish grin followed by a heavily tanned and gold chain bedecked slim guy in his 50’s wearing what could best be summarized as pimp casual. “Marvin Klein, heard a lot about you guys, thanks for coming in today, you got coffee, soda, what can we get you?”. He welcomed them, sat them down and told them how excited they were to have them sign to their label, how much Jake had sung their praises and how their accessible pop rock sound was something that’s missing from their label. Jake then excitedly jumped in and explained that they would start promoting them on YouTube and getting them touring slots with real stars, and threw out names Andrew Bird, White Stripes, The National, LCD Sound System. This was starting to sound more like a teenage dream rather than a business meeting. Marvin asked whether they felt they had enough material for an album. Nate tended to be the mouthpiece, so he explained they had 10-12 songs they really liked that they had played live, and the audience liked, and they had been playing with some new ideas adding a keyboard and effects. The others sat there oscillating between sheepishly looking down in their laps and checking out the ridiculous showbusiness style and way of talking that Marvin had, holding court. Shayla again got loads of eye contact and Kent squirmed. He felt a fraud as the pretend manager, which was not helped when Marvin described how he would get them a real manager who would help them “monetize your merchandise and get your brand going, we gotta get several revenue streams going, get you exposed on all the platforms like Spotify and I-tunes”. After what seemed like the whole morning flew by, but actually turned out to be 48 minutes from entering the door and falling back through it into the morning sunlight, they stood on the sidewalk with a 14 page document that they should take to their attorney and if ok, sign and send it back, “so we can get going and make Tiny Bunny the hottest band around, make you guys famous, and make us all a shit ton of money!”
They stood outside and looked at each other, no-one said anything for what seemed like a moment in time frozen until finally Kyle, who had not said a word finally said. “I don’t know guys, I would go on tour, but I never really took this as a serious job up until a couple minutes ago. We have to decide if we really want to make an effort at it. It’s been a real long, slow practice over the years to get here, I am not sure I am ready to just do this. What if we fuck up? What if I fuck up, what if I am just not fucking good enough? Nate and I have been doing this shit since we were kids and we don’t have 10-12 songs we have 7, 7 fucking songs after what? 10 years?”
It was all giggles, applause, and stage lights in the eyes as a break from mundane day jobs until then. Now it was a job and none of them had really trained for it. What sounded so carefree and fun in the room with gold disks and the smooth guy with gold chains and silky speech now seemed like a slip’n’slide to serious work and growing up.
Anecdotes and Antidotes in Burgundy 