Martyrs to the Cause

Here's an interesting, if somewhat callous, piece from The Guardian about the legacy of those who died too soon:

Thom Yorke doesn't like me very much. Big deal, I hear you say, there must be a lot of people that don't like you. And there are. But Thom Yorke doesn't just dislike me. He wants to kill me. Or at least he wanted to. He once spent a sizeable chunk of an Uncut cover story saying as much. And a few years back I had a very unpleasant encounter with the great (small but great; well, great-ish) man in the lobby of the Chateau Marmont hotel in Los Angeles, during which he made known his feelings towards me in front of the rest of Radiohead, who seemed to find the whole scene as embarrassing as I did. The reason for his latent homicidal tendencies? When I was at Melody Maker, we put Yorke's face on the front of the paper, to go with an in-depth interview, next to the immortally provocative question, printed in big, bold type: "Is This the Next Rock Martyr in the Making?"

This rock martyr farrago was in 1995, around the time of The Bends. More pertinently, it was just after the death of Kurt Cobain and disappearance of Richey Edwards of the Manic Street Preachers. There was a lot of talk about rock star depression and self-harming fans in the air. And we at the paper, perhaps like many of the readers, were wondering, I guess, whether Yorke would be the next to go - to buckle under the weight of expectation, to recoil from the pressure of being everybody's favourite tortured rock artist. To commit suicide. We thought it was a fair question. Yorke didn't: he thought it was irresponsible; that we were somehow suggesting that the logical extension of, and final solution to, his downcast worldview was to take his own life; that we were taking a sort of perverse delight in it all, almost encouraging him to absent himself forever because we thought it would be cool. Because, in rock'n'roll, there is nothing cooler than a premature death, especially when it's at the hands of the person dying.

We were only saying what people have been saying for years: that dying young, even if it's not the result of living fast, can be a good thing, if you want to preserve the integrity of your art. Come on, we've just experienced two years of Joy Division mania during which Ian Curtis has been canonised as the patron saint of despair. Can we finally accept, now that he's dead and so worthy of consideration not condemnation, that Tony Wilson knew what he was talking about when he concluded that Curtis' suicide was the best career move he could have made? Not that it was the best thing for his wife and daughter, or for his friends. Instead, Curtis' decision to hang himself at the age of 23 was the ultimate confirmation of his commitment to his lyrics and music. Would Joy Division have been taken less seriously today had Curtis lived? Would there have been films and books about them?

[Read the whole article]

Listen to "Transmission" by Joy Division:

[Download the MP3 Here]
[Band Wiki]

That Nation's Saving Grace

Here's a nice treat from The Guardian:

My rise and Fall

Outspoken singer Mark E Smith has led his group the Fall for 32 years, surviving continual fights with an ever-changing cast of musicians to create dozens of albums in his own maverick style. At 51, he remains one of rock's most individual voices. In this first extract from his autobiography, introduced by Dave Simpson, he looks back at the formative moments of his childhood and the birth of the band.

Mark E Smith has been called a drinker, a druggie, a tyrant and a nut. He has spent a night in the cells following one punch-up and been ordered to attend anger management. With his group the Fall, he has become one of the most influential musicians of the past 30 years. However, he is as famous for sacking band members as for his music, having dispensed with more than 50 musicians - including various wives and girlfriends - while making approximately 26 albums (there have been so many that no one seems entirely sure).

Smith formed the Fall - based in Salford - in the punk movement of 1976 and fired his first musician, a drummer whose name no one can agree on, before the group had made a record. Since then, he has been the sole ever-present member, in a reign that has seen off five prime ministers, the Falklands, Balkans and Gulf wars, more than a dozen record companies and innumerable changes in British music, while making the hard-driven, repetitive music that John Peel described as "always different, always the same". The Fall have never been a household name, but have had more non-top 20 chart hits (16 in all) than any other group.

The Fall's fans, who include everyone from Alex Kapranos to Frank Skinner and David Bowie, routinely hail Smith's "genius". It's less certain what that genius is. His horror-humorous lyrics - inspired, perhaps, by the sci-fi writers HP Lovecraft and Philip K Dick, along with hallucinogens - are pored over like the Bible as fans chuckle at his descriptions of British People in Hot Weather ("beached whales in Wapping, drunk before ya!") and ponder the true meaning of bizarre songtitles such as To Nkroachment: Yarbles.

Apparent prophesies, such as the song Powder Keg, released just before the Manchester bombing in 1996, convince many that he is psychic. And yet this musical colossus can barely play a note. He is reliant on musicians - whom he holds in contempt - for his lifetime's work.

[Read the whole article]

Listen to "Bombast":

[Download the MP3 Here]
[Band Website]
[Band Wiki]
(Thanks Phil)

Talk Talk: April 5th

Listen:

[Download the MP3 Here]
[Band Wiki]
[Read Alan McGee's Blog Post about Talk Talk]
[Read My Special on Talk Talk]

Frankly, Mr. McNicholas

If there was any doubt about who would come out on top of the Morrissey/NME "racism" scandal, it's been settled now. One can only imagine the tears in the NME editor's eyes when he read this diatribe by none other than Morrissey himself:

I abhor racism, and apologise - for speaking to NME

I grew up a chanting believer in the New Musical Express. Last week however, I was the victim of the magazine's agenda to cook up a sensational story...

On Friday of last week I issued writs against the NME (New Musical Express) and its editor Conor McNicholas as I believe they have deliberately tried to characterise me as a racist in a recent interview I gave them in order to boost their dwindling circulation.

I abhor racism and oppression or cruelty of any kind and will not let this pass without being absolutely clear and emphatic with regard to what my position is.

Racism is beyond common sense and I believe it has no place in our society.

To anyone who has shown or felt any interest in my music in recent times, you know my feelings on the subject and I am writing this to apologize unreservedly for granting an interview to the NME. I had no reason whatsoever to assume that they could be anything other than devious, truculent and unreliable. In the event, they have proven to be all three...

Into the 90s, the NME's discernment and polish became faded nobility, and there it died - but better dead than worn away. The wit imitated by the 90s understudies of Morley and Burchill assumed nastiness to be greatness, and were thus rewarded. But nastiness isn't wit and no writers from the 90s NME survive. Even with sarcasm, irony and innuendo there is an art, of sorts. Now deep in the bosom of time, it is the greatness of the NME's history on which the 'new' NME assumes its relevance...

he editorial treatment given to my present interview with the 'new' NME is the latest variation on an old theme, but like a pre-dawn rampage, the effects of the interview have been meticulously considered with obvious intentions. It is true that the magazine is ailing badly in the marketplace, but Conor doesn't understand how the relentless stream of "cheers mate, got pissed last night, ha ha" interviews that clutter every single issue of the 'new' NME are simply not interesting to those of us who have no trouble standing upright.

[Read the whole post]

Listen to "Everyday is Like Sunday":

[Download the MP3 Here]

Primal Scream: We're Gonna Boogie

Listen:

[Download the MP3 Here]
[Band Website]
[Band Wiki]
[Guardian Blog on Bobby G's new role as a model for a Japanese fashion company]

Buy it:

Amazon CD


Amazon CD

The Libertines are just Dandy

Finally someone in the press gets it. This from The Guardian:

The Libertines rule, OK?

Released five years ago this month, the Libertines' debut album Up the Bracket remains the most influential and important British album since its release. Maybe of the decade, even. It's not the best, but in terms of cultural impact it has yet to be surpassed.

Which is surprising, but not that surprising given that they referenced the better bits of post-war English culture - Peter Ackroyd, Ray Davies, Steptoe and Son, the Buzzcocks - and in doing so, created an over-romanticised vision of a country that never really existed anyway: Albion. Up the Bracket was as a conceptualised jumble, a musical psychogeography of London, from the Caledonian Road across to Whitechapel, New Cross up to Bethnal Green.

Perhaps I need to contextualise this argument by pointing out that a combined poll of the major UK music press best albums of 2000 had the likes of Doves, Coldplay, Dandy Warhols and JJ72 featuring highly: not exactly life-changing bands.

Pivotal albums are about time and place and for all its faults (bad production, crap artwork, half-realised ideas), Up the Bracket offered more than just the music - thankfully, some might say. It also offered a lifestyle and an outlook. From their bog-standard yet suitably self-explanatory name to their good use of accessories (brogues, hats, cravats, gaffer tape) to an unspoken understanding that rock bands were meant to be interesting, preposterous, indulgent and indulged the Libertines injected a new energy into shabby old indie rock...

Read the whole post

Listen to "Death on the Stairs" (Bernard Butler Version):

[Download the MP3 Here]
[Band Wiki]
[Read my (rejected) book proposal for an "Up the Bracket" 33 1/3]

Why's This Bus Taking Me Back Again?

Writing in The Guardian, Alan McGee thinks we should give Ride their due:

With the resurgence of shoegaze - or nu-gaze - and Panda Bear, Animal Collective, Deerhunter and No Age all referencing them as an influence in interviews, I feel it's time to look back at one of the all-time underrated Creation bands, Ride.

In '91, Ride had the critical and commercial world at their feet. Their full-length debut Nowhere marked them out as teenage saviours of rock'n'roll. The Nowhere cover pictured an ocean wave, a knowing tribute to the wall of sound they were creating. And what a wall of sound: Andy Bell and Mark Gardener's guitars and harmonies underpinned by Steve Queralt and Loz Colbert's eight-mile-high bass-and-drum dance groove.

Nowhere fused Byrds and Sonic Youth influences with the exuberant spirit of their contemporaries, the Stone Roses and the House of Love. It epitomised the feeling that something was happening in independent music beyond twee C86 and third form baggy. However, by the time they released the follow-up, Going Blank Again (an album that originally had the title of Prog Rock), a year later, they were up against it. Critics accused them of having nothing to say. Their influence had spread - now they were competing with a hundred shambolic versions of themselves. Despite this, they triumphed with the lead-off single which went to the top ten - the first Creation single to do so. Leave Them All Behind was no longer the sound of shoegaze but full-blown psychedelic stadium rock. Their second single, Twisteralla, was played non-stop on Radio One. Going Blank Again demonstrated how powerful a group Ride had become. The sound they explored on Nowhere had coalesced into classic songs. The album's success kept Creation Records going during the My Bloody Valentine aftermath. Their sound was a revelation.

[Read the whole article]

Listen to "Twisterella":

[Download the MP3 Here]
[Band Wiki]
[Read my piece on Ride from "Creation Week"]

Strangeways, There They Came

The Guardian has a nice write-up on The Smiths' final album:

Being a Smiths fan in the 80s meant learning to accept the occasional disappointment. There was none greater than hearing their debut album for the first time.

Those of us who'd fallen in love with their first three singles, and had heard the legendary the Jensen and Peel sessions, were expecting nothing less than brilliance.

But John Porter's poppadom-flat production crushed the life out of their best songs. And only The Smiths could have been so wilful as to leave even better songs off that album (This Charming Man, Back To The Old House).

Meat Is Murder repeated the same tragedy, this time reduced to farce. You should have heard the almost holy hoedown that was Barbarism ... when it was played live. And where was Please, Please, Please?

I hardly ever play those first two Smiths' albums now. But I still love Hatful Of Hollow, The World Won't Listen and Louder Than Bombs - their de facto greatest hits.

The Queen Is Dead also stays stuck to the shelf. The problem is isn't that it's bad. In fact, it's just far too good, far too close to home and near the bone, flipping me right back to being 16 and suicidal. There are too many bad memories there.

The Smiths album I keep returning to, though, is Strangeways, Here We Come, 20 years old today. It's very much Johnny Marr's record - a deliberate attempt to escape the "jangling" indie band albatross round his pretty white neck. Tellingly, there are no guitars on the opener, A Rush And A Push. Elsewhere Johnny laid on synths and saxophones. Musically, it's their most brilliantly realised piece and expansive of work. It just flows.

[Read the whole article]

Listen to "I Won't Share You":

[Download the MP3 Here]
[Band Wiki]

Visa Woes

This from The Guardian:

As reported yesterday a new threat to hinder the current British music invasion are the ever-tightening US immigration and work visa laws. Lily Allen this week had her visa revoked and missed a potentially career-making MTV Awards appearance, while 12 months ago Klaxons cancelled their crucial CMJ performances because the press clippings they submitted suggested they hadn't been going very long. Which, of course, they hadn't. But then this is pop music - no one goes for very long. And if longevity is the criteria by which incoming touring artists are judged, then the US can have nothing but the boring white rock of Elton John and The Police tours to look forward to for the next - ooh - decade, when they could have the pan-international flavours of MIA. It's not just the hip young guns suffering either - Holly Golightly, New Model Army and Mystery Jets are some of the artists whose tours have been nixed by the authorities.

It's a Catch-22 situation. To guarantee an easy passage stateside artists have to fill a P-1 visa, requiring acts to prove that they have been "internationally recognized" for a "sustained and substantial" amount of time. But can someone really be internationally recognized if they have never performed in the US?

Such red tape is standard practice for a country run by lawyers, but it will surely have a detrimental effect. America will be deprived of new foreign culture from abroad, an existing suspicion that the US government are not very nice will fester even further and everyone from venues to concert promoters to merchandise vendors - people who thrive on live shows rather than record sales - will lose out if tours are cancelled at the last minute.

It's no conspiracy to say that this is all a by-product of the paranoia, fear of outsiders and strict border control that has been present since the white man first took over the country, and which has permeated deeper since September 2001. Any non-famous person who has attempted to enter the US either for a short stay or under the guise of work will likely have similar stories.

As it stands, anglophile US music fans are facing government-endorsed rock 'n' roll.

On the upside, though, they may be spared Razorlight.

[Read the whole article]