Music

Herne Hill Save The Half Moon music event

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Last minute gig addition, I’ll be playing some music at this on Saturday, it’s a local event for me and there have been lots of things going on in the area recently that threaten the livelihoods of local businesses in this community. A sudden 70% increase in rents to property by the local Dulwich Estate group has already caused one shop to close and the Half Moon Pub, already closed for over two years due to a flood, has had it’s music license revoked unexpectedly. There’s more about it here but basically it boils down to the seemingly unending desire to squash any life and vitality out of London and replace it with the dreaded luxury flats as property owners cash in and squeeze the people who made these areas desirable in the first place out.

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45/7 Vinyl Club mix #20: DJ Food

A new all-45s mix I did for the 45/7 Vinyl Club (not to be confused with the 45Live crew but the aims are similar). Each guest is asked to provide a mix made from vinyl 45s only, answer 5 questions and choose a unique hand-painted cover which they are then sent with a special 45/7 Vinyl Club 7″.

Click into the mix link for the interview and, as there’s no track list provided, here it is below

Dr. Donald B. Louria – Is Marijuana really dangerous? (Teach Records)
DJ Shadow – This Time (I’m Gonna Dub It My Way) (Universal / Island)
Sixtoo – Incedental 1 (Bully)
Dr. Donald B. Louria – Does LSD increase creativity? (Teach Records)
Controller 7 – Wandering Song (Bully)
Primal Scream – Kill All Hippies (Creation)
The Giallos Flame – Vultures feat. Wolf People (Analog Screams)
Cavern Of Anti-Matter – Total Availability and the Private Future (Peripheral Conserve)
Blues Explosion feat. DJ Shadow – Fed Up & Low Down (Edit) (Mute)
The Go! Team – Grip Like A Vice (Memphis Industries)
Paul Weller – Rip Up The Pages (Lynchmob mix) (Island)
The Protein Bros – Drainpipe (Rural)
The Edgar Winter Band – Frankenstein (Epic)
John Rydgren – The Noise (Teach Records)
Beck – Mixed Business (Geffen)
Chaps – Ascension To Virginity (Decca)
The Zutons – Why Won’t You Give Me Your Love? (Deltasonic)
Ocean Colour Scene – Hundred Mile High City (MCA)
The Soundcarriers – Boiling Point (The Great Pop Supplement)
D.O.T. – Say Your Prayers (Twisted Nerve)
The Dirty Feel – Get Down (No Label)
Toolshed – Pazuzu (Theme From Exorcist II) (Black Deck)
The Giallos Flame – Italia Violenta (Analog Screams)
Alan Copeland – Mission Impossible/Norwegian Wood (ABC Records)

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Sisters of Transistors

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This Sisters of Transistors LP had passed me by when it was released in 2009 although I remember hearing a remix of one of the tracks by Hot Chip that really floated my boat. It was a project featuring Graham Massey and four female organists if the sleeve notes be believed and there a fair few of them, weaving a tale of lost music and organ quartets that goes back to the second world war. It comes encased in a white plastic sleeve with sealing sticker and silver logo screened on the front. The design is by ehquestionmark who you might know from all the amazing work he’s done for the Skam and Lex labels and the attention to detail, as with all his work, is second to none.

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Inside we have a sleeve with a front cover like some vintage classical performance document and a back showing a the band setup with Graham at the center and the four organists circling him in a sea of swirling wires. The real treat is the large insert which comes with it though, loose leaves with punched out ring binder holes, library stamps and the cheesiest set of band photos ever. Straight out of some 70s accountancy firm or teachers end of year book, the players – all given aliases – couldn’t be more convincing with muted green/brown tones and outfits and hair to match.

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The music is a real mix, almost uncategorisable, of course organs feature heavily but it’s more complicated than that. There’s distorted grooves, fuzz, female chants and harmonies, lots of live drums and the whole thing has the air of a mass or seance about it. The pieces are all reputedly from different eras of the 20th century so styles flip constantly. All in all I think this will become one of those overlooked curios, collected and coveted by those in the know in the future. You can buy it digitally from iTunes as the label seems to have no obvious shop, or Discogs is a good bet for physical copies. See the covers being assembled in the video below, including the special undies randomly inserted into some copies

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Coming soon… I Love Acid 45s mix

ILoveAcid45s

I put this pile of 45s down in a mix last week, possibly the world’s first all 7″, all-Acid mix? I’ve been collecting acid tracks on 7″ for a while now and, when Josh from I Love Acid asked me to do a mix for his I Love Acid Radio slot, I thought this would be the perfect slot to showcase them. The mix is due to debut on March 10th, I’ll post a link here when it does. Pete Isaac from 45 Live is also a big acid 45 collector and we’ll be doing something in that vein later this year…

Acid on 45 is a pretty niche area, a lot of the releases are UK pressings as several tracks made the charts at the end of the 80s and record labels were still pressing 7″s alongside the 12s to get radio play. There are also a lot of european singles from around that time too, tracks that were big in countries like Belgium, the Netherlands and Spain but won’t maybe be known elsewhere. In the 90s a lot of acid on 45 is confined to the more uptempo almost gabba-techno kind and there are slim pickings to be had until the 00s when the sound made a resurgence back into techno.

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‘Near Mint’ part 2 + Resonance FM fundraiser

ResElectroHThe second part of Robin The Fog & Hannah Brown‘s ‘Neat Mint’ show for Resonance FM just aired tonight with the continuation of their peek into the odder end of my record collection. Hear what these records sound like below.


ResHellersResHellersbackResMassageResRydgrenResDreamiesResColours

Also we’ll all be playing at The Book & Record Bar in West Norwood on Friday alongside the landlord Micheal (not listed below) and Zoe ‘Lucky Cat’ Baxter who, I just found out, is the daughter of Glen Baxter! Come down, the shop is less than a minute’s walk from the West Norwood train station. £5 entry in aid of Resonance FM who have their annual fundraising drive on at the moment to keep them on the air for another year. Some very unique prizes to be auctioned off in a very good cause, truly independent radio with no playlist.

ResonanceFlyerKev

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Found In Sounds #12: Malcolm McLaren special

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Malcolm McLaren would have been 70 years old today, here’s a collection of articles surrounding his seminal ‘Duck Rock’ album release in the early 80s from Sounds. Click to enlargeMcLaren Sounds 4.12.82 2web
I’ve added a small news piece about the Double Dutch girls to the interview above to fill space. Big interviews were frequently cut up and placed at different points of the paper and I’ve cobbled this one back to a double page spread.

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Above: The Garry Bushell-penned review of ‘Duck Rock’ which is rather damning – see the three ads below that were run in the paper the next week, all deftly extracting a rather different angle using quotes from the piece. There’s a definite whiff of Paul Morley on the tagline at the bottom and this would have been around the time when he and Trevor Horn, the album’s producer, would have been setting up their ZTT label.

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It quickly became common knowledge that McLaren had ripped off several compositions and taken writing credits on the album (something he had already done with Bow Wow Wow and would do again with ‘Fans’). Not even two months after the album’s release the writs were already flying.
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Back in 1981, Fred Vermorel – never one to mince his words and badly burned by his experience with Malcolm over the extremely dodgy ‘Chicken’ magazine – laid into him over two pages. It’s hard to justify what McLaren was intending with this publication (and I wouldn’t try) and thankfully we’ll never find out. There’s also a piece about the pirate fashions McLaren and partner Vivienne Westwood created that they launched Bow Wow Wow with.
McLaren Exposed Sounds 11.04.81 1webMcLaren Exposed Sounds 11.04.81 2web

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RIP Clarence Reid aka Blow Fly

Blowfly Disco frontweb
I found the record above at a carboot sale around 1987 in a muddy sports ground in South Park, Reigate. It was shortly after I had started to ‘dig for breaks’, inspired by hip hop and sampling, in as much as a skint 17 year old could ‘dig’ in a small town 30 miles south of London with only an Our Price, a Woolworths and one other indie record shop to excavate. I had no idea what this was but, with a cover like that and on a label called Weird World, I wasn’t about to leave it in the box.

There were no track titles and for good reason; ‘Shake Your Ass’, ‘Bad Fuck’, ‘Suck It’ and ‘Spread Your Cheeks’ were some of the delights contained within. But I knew the signs were good: black artist, 70s release, the word ‘Disco’ put me off a bit but there were all those other LPs on the back too. Who was Blow Fly? The dude in the mask and home made super hero (villain?) suit presumably, and why were all these women naked around him? The ‘For Mature Adults Only’ sticker needn’t have been on there, it was pretty obvious that this wasn’t for kids.

I got it, probably cost 50p, and never showed my parents that particular cover. It contained enough profanity to sink a ship as Blow Fly took established songs and changed the lyrics to suit his dirty mind. The classic ‘What A Difference’ took ‘What A Difference A Day Makes’ and turned it into ‘… A Lay Makes’ while ‘Suck it’ paraphrased ‘Do It ‘Til You’re Satisfied’. Purile stuff for sure and the blueprint for every Blow Fly album I’ve ever heard since but hilarious stuff to a teenage boy. With no internet it was impossible to find out more about the masked man and it wasn’t until I started touring the States in the late 90s, buying from a wider range of records, that I found out who he was and picked up the other albums on the back cover.

The Fly was the alter-ego of Clarence Reid, record producer and songwriter since the 60s, who had started changing the lyrics to hit records for a laugh at parties. Recording an album of them, he created the Blow Fly persona to protect his respectable career name and the rest is history. ‘Disco’ isn’t his best album (and he got sued good and proper for that ‘What A Difference…’ cover) but I’ll remember it with the most affection as it was the first one I found and for introducing me to his weird world. RIP Clarence Reid aka Blow Fly.

Blowfly Disco backweb

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Kosmischer Läufer

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I’m extremely late to this particular party but have to flag them up for the care and attention that’s gone into the presentation and back story of these releases. There are now three volumes of ‘Kosmischer Läufer’ (Cosmic Runner) released on Scottish label, Unknown Capability Recordings. Subtitled ‘The Secret Cosmic Music of the East German Olympic Program 1972-83’ and packaged in beautifully designed 70s-era psychedelic sports graphics on black, red and yellow coloured vinyl (see what they did there?), with a biography that gives a new twist on the ‘unearthed private tapes from unknown Krautrock-inspired musician who rates Kraftwerk, Cluster and Neu! as influences’ story.

This particular angle concerns a certain Martin Zeichnete who was working as a sound engineer in Dresden with his ear to the sounds of the emerging West German underground in the early 70s. Martin, a runner who had the idea to make music for athletes to train to, is spirited away to Berlin by the authorities to work in secret on just such a project for the ‘Nationales Olympisches Komitee’ to help strengthen their team for the next Olympic bid. The music is a perfect distillation of the motorik, synth-driven grooves you’d expect when thinking of the above influences and I don’t believe the story for one minute as the sounds are too clean and knowing.

But that doesn’t matter because the music contained therein is good and, coupled with the entertaining setting, you want to believe it. Sometimes music is all about the mindset and these releases set you up and frame the work perfectly. I’ve lost count of the amount of music I’ve listened to in the wrong mood or place and initially dismissed only to hear the same thing again later and be knocked out by it simply because the circumstances and setting were different. Had I heard this dry, without the illusion (or is it? – yes it probably is) of the liner notes and cover art, then maybe I’d have reacted differently to it – I’ll never know.

Some of the best music is made by artists making their own myths – Boards of Canada, Kraftwerk and yes, Bowie while we’re still all on that page – and these releases do it with love and care. Now, has anyone got a copy of vol. 2 at a decent price please? Buy vinyl and digital from here.

KosLaufback

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Blackstar thinking

Ziggy1138

Woke up still thinking about Bowie this morning. Watched a bit of the BBC coverage in the wake of his death last night and was struck by a vintage interview clip which ended with the reporter saying that he wasn’t your average rock star. Bowie countered that he was wrong and that he wasn’t a rock star at all.

Elsewhere some pundit they’d wheeled in seemed to want to press home the title ‘The Picasso of Pop’ in relation to him and repeated it in a couple of instances. Personally I found the analogy tacky, Bowie wasn’t like anyone else, more like parts of many people and comparing him to Picasso is a limiting comparison. As someone else pointed out yesterday, no one is ever proclaimed as ‘the new David Bowie’.

In the lyrics to ‘Blackstar’ he states what he is and he isn’t;

I can’t answer why (I’m a blackstar)
Just go with me (I’m not a filmstar)
I’m-a take you home (I’m a blackstar)
Take your passport and shoes (I’m not a popstar)
And your sedatives, boo (I’m a blackstar)
You’re a flash in the pan (I’m not a marvel star)
I’m the great I am (I’m a blackstar)

I’m a blackstar, way up, oh honey, I’ve got game
I see right so white, so open-heart it’s pain
I want eagles in my daydreams, diamonds in my eyes
(I’m a blackstar, I’m a blackstar)

Something happened on the day he died
Spirit rose a metre and stepped aside
Somebody else took his place, and bravely cried
(I’m a blackstar, I’m a star star, I’m a blackstar)

I can’t answer why (I’m not a gangster)
But I can tell you how (I’m not a film star)
We were born upside-down (I’m a star star)
Born the wrong way ‘round (I’m not a white star)
(I’m a blackstar, I’m not a gangster
I’m a blackstar, I’m a blackstar
I’m not a pornstar, I’m not a wandering star
I’m a blackstar, I’m a blackstar)

What a Blackstar is I have no idea but it seems he wanted to be remembered as something or someone unique and unclassifiable rather than a ‘pop’ version of someone else.

The top image is included for no reason other than it’s the combination of two iconic designs, the Ziggy Stardust flash now seemingly becoming the main graphic identifier for Bowie. I don’t know who did the image but it’s fun.

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