Morrissey: Sunny

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[Download the MP3 Here]
[Artist Website]
[Artist Wiki]

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Amazon CD

Radiohead: Headmaster Ritual (Smiths Cover)

Webcast Video:


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[Download the MP3 Here]
[Band Website]
(Thanks Pearly *)

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]

The Smiths: Soundcheck Rarities

"How Soon is Now" (Instrumental):

[Download the MP3 Here]

"Purple Haze" (Jimi Hendrix Cover):

[Download the MP3 Here]

"Asleep":

[Download the MP3 Here]

"There is a Light that Never Goes Out" (Instrumental):

[Download the MP3 Here]

[Band Wiki]

Severed Alliances

Here's a good piece from the Guardian about musical partnerships:

The announcement last week that Jimmy Page and Robert Plant had decided to reform Led Zeppelin for One Night Only, despite years of simmering resentment and the suggestion that hell would have to freeze over before they once more bestrode the stage like corkscrew-haired colossi, got me wondering: is rock'n'roll really just a history of men's love affairs with their other halves - their male partners in the band? And, without those love-hate relationships and the desire, in US shrink parlance, to complete unfinished emotional business, would rock'n'roll have ever sounded the same?

Most of the biggest bands ever have been dependent on a co-dependency, the sort that makes the most dysfunctional marriage look healthy and sane. From the hyphenated to the ampersandy, there have been Page and Plant, Lennon and McCartney, Jagger and Richards, Morrissey/Marr, Strummer/Jones and Wilson/Love... Think of a great band and it usually contains two warring partners who might otherwise, at least if Freud had his way, be copulating wildly on the studio floor; think of an all-time classic rock song and it's more likely than not the result of friction between two rampaging egos who are secretly vying for each other's love.

And it's still going on: in the 90s, Suede's Brett Anderson and Bernard Butler loathed each other with a vengeance, publicly so, making their recent reunion all the more weird ("Actually, not that weird." - Anderson and Butler's accountants), while Carl Barat and Pete Doherty's entire output as the Libertines would appear to be based on unresolved issues between them, blurring the line between creative and sexual tension. The rivalry that seems to spur on the Gallagher brothers is, of course, something else entirely, but even there the conflict between two artistic (term used advisedly) individuals would appear to be the motor driving the band.

[Read the whole article]

Listen to "Europe is Our Playground" by Suede:

[Download the MP3 Here]

Seven Ages of Rock: British Indie

Part I:

Part II:

Part III:

Part IV:

Part V:

Part VI:

Part VII:

Part VIII:

Part IX:

The Smiths: Half a Person

Listen:

[Download the MP3 Here]

A "Slow Music" Movement?

Here's an interesting piece on classical music from The Guardian:

Mark Ravenhill was spot on in his remarks about "fun". "More than ever before, the word 'fun' has slipped into our everyday vocabulary", he wrote. "We are all learning to impersonate the Californian teenager who is the contemporary role model for the western world. 'How was your weekend?' 'Oh, yeah - fun.' 'How was the opera?' 'Fun.' After all, if you're not having 'fun', what kind of sad loser are you?"

As fun has climbed to the top of qualities desirable in a night out, we classical musicians have become rather sensitive about our perceived funlessness. Some years ago, I and my colleagues in the chamber music group Domus had an interesting skirmish with fun. At the time we were playing concerts in a geodesic dome, a white tent that we put up and took down ourselves. It could seat 200 people sitting on the grass inside. Our idea was to go to unusual places, present the music we loved and gain new listeners for it. Part of our approach was to talk about the music before we played it.

Thinking that fun would have to be of the essence, we began by saying what fun the music was, and what fun our audiences would have listening to it. We spoke about what fun it had been to rehearse. Then we played masterpieces such as the Schubert String Quintet, Beethoven's Archduke Piano Trio, the Brahms Piano Quartets, Ravel's Piano Trio, Fauré's Piano Quintet. As we played, the audience fell silent. Often they were gripped by the music, and sometimes they were moved.

It didn't take long before listeners started telling us there was a disjunction between the "fun" they had been promised and the actual experience they had had. They suggested that it wasn't helpful to describe such music as "fun" when it was actually moving, complex, absorbing, challenging and satisfying. We were well aware of those qualities, but we'd consciously decided it might be off-putting to flag them up at the start.

Reminds me of a Morrissey quote:

"I would never, ever, do anything as vulgar as having fun."

Morrissey: Still Ill (Live)

Morrissey: Why Don't You Find Out For Yourself

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[Download the MP3 Here]

How Do You Afford Your Rock n' Roll Lifestyle?

A Short History of the Smiths

From the Guardian:

Morrissey - so much to answer for

Sean O'Hagan
Sunday May 6, 2007
The Observer

Twenty-five years ago this month, a bequiffed 18-year-old called Johnny Maher turned up unannounced at the door of 384 King's Road, a nondescript terraced house in Stretford, Manchester. 'It was a sunny day, about one o'clock,' he recalled years later. 'There was no advance phone call or anything. I just knocked and he opened the door.'

'He' was Steven Patrick Morrissey, then a 23-year-old misfit who inhabited the fringes of Manchester's fragmentary postpunk music scene. Morrissey had already tried his hand at being a writer, sending live rock reviews to Record Mirror, penning non-fiction books for a small publisher, Babylon Books, (a homage to James Dean, a tract on his favourite group, the New York Dolls) and even sending unsolicited scripts for episodes of Coronation Street to Granada Television. His fitful attempts at rock stardom had been even less successful, and had all but petered out following a few eccentric appearances as the lead singer for a little-known local group, the Nosebleeds. Back then, Morrissey's effortless oddness was such that Manchester scene-maker and head of Factory Records, Tony Wilson, would later remark: 'Anyone less likely to be a pop star from that scene was unimaginable'...

No other group carried such a weight of expectation - and tradition - as the Smiths. Had they not risen to the occasion, it is not overstating the case to say that the entire trajectory of recent British rock music as we now know it - that's the line from the Smiths to the Stone Roses to Oasis and on to the Libertines and today's indie darlings, Arctic Monkeys - would not have been traced.

From the Peel Sessions:

Listen to "Still Ill":

[Download the MP3 Here]

Listen to "This Charming Man":

[Download the MP3 Here]