Beulah's Miles Kurosky's brilliant solo album

I have eulogised about Beulah here before and it was great news recently that the band's lead singer Miles Kurosky had released a debut solo album The Desert of Shallow Effects. Here's a stunning video released on Miles' website.

Do you know a lad down the chippy who thinks he's Elvis?

Again, another of my blog posts on The Word Magazine which gained some very funny replies.


Camping in beautiful Pembrokeshire last week I marvelled at the night sky of an evening.
On Thursday night I saw two shooting stars - when I mentioned this to the GLW she replied in a cod Barking accent 'But they were only satellites.' Everyone's a Billy Bragg these days.
The shooting stars weren't satellites, they were shooting stars and no camping holiday is complete without seeing one, or two in this case.
What have you heard in a song and experienced in real life?

Who would be in your Fantasy Writers team?

I wrote this on The Word magazine blog - there were some interesting replies.
FOR a long time I have pondered the death of the print only publication as we are apparently amid the 'vinegar strokes' of getting writing from one roster of writers. With the impending revolution of the iPad/ slates many writers believe that it will herald the opening up the possibility of a new era of micropayment-as-you-go media which unpackages the old print bundles. 
But that's not enough for me.Alas, a google reader service is not enough, I want it in a leaf through package - either physical or online.
What I mean is a product a bit like the service The Week provides now. I kind of crave for the time when I can get an aggregation of all the writers I like on a given day - weekly or monthly - whereupon I can indulge myself.
I read several newspapers daily most weeks and a few monthly magazines and have a wish list of people I would gladly pay to follow if there was, say, a nice iPad app which packaged them up in a format which I found agreeable aesthetically. I'd buy an iPad solely for that express service.
My list is:
Laura Barton
(The Word Sycophancy alert) Hepworth, Du Noyer, Fitzpatrick, Jim White
Paul Kimmage/ David Walsh (Sunday Times)
Charlie Brooker (The Guardian)
Sandy Toksvig (The Telegraph)
Mark Steel (The Independent)
Andy Gill (see above)
Caitlin Moran (The Times)
Matthew Norman (The Guardian)
Dave Simpson (see above)
Gavin Martin (The Daily Mirror)
William/ Alistair Fotheringham (cycling & rugby)
Eddie Butler (literally the king of sports writers) (The Observer)
Joe Queenan (The Guardian)
Mark Lawson (The Guardian)
Tom Humphries (Irish Times GAA writer, see Eddie Butler) (The Irish Times)
Brian Reade (The Daily Mirror)
(Irish politics writers) Eamonn Mallie, Mark Devenport, Mick Fealty, Jason Walsh, Malachi O'Doherty, Eamonn McCann, Splintered Sunrise & Anthony McIntyre.
These are the people I always read.
NB:If Drakeygirl, Backwards7, Pat Carty, Archie V, Crowther, Amitri, Law, Stimps et al (sorry if I missed someone out) wanted to put their heads above the parapet and write a column on a semi regular basis, I'd also pay for an aggregation of that.
Who would form your Fantasy Writers League?

Thanks Da for introducing me to Freddie White

MY da gave me the second greatest gift of them all: the first album I ever treasured: Freddie White Live On Tour (1978).
I still play parts of it at least once a week such is my deep affection for it.
I went to the primary school that da taught in 10 miles away and every day the car was filled with great music.
Pa H was never what you could have called a trendy - illustrated by the fact that the journey to school was always Mike Murphy's breakfast show on RTE Radio 1.
But on the way home it was always his home made tapes of Beatles/ Stones/ Dubliners/ Van/ Chieftans/ Paul Brady/ The Johnsons/ Planxty/ Moving Hearts/ David McWilliams albums.
It really was a great, unspoken education into my own culture in the midst of the Troubles.
And while all those albums were fabulous, the one album that got me into music when I was about nine or ten was Freddie White's live covers album.
It was the perfect gateway drug to the history of modern music - he did songs by Hoagy Carmichael, Tom Waits, Guy Clarke, Frank Zappa, Randy Newman and Joan Armatrading.
His guitar playing was beguiling, his voice gorgeous and soulful and his version of Guy Clarke's 'Desperados Waiting for a Train' was so brilliant that it haunts me to this day - in a good way.
After 25 years, I still have the thread worn TDK C90 with it on one side with Paul Brady's Hard Station on the other. (Don't start me on what Brady's song Nothing but the Same Old Story means to me, there'll be tears before the looming bedtime. See Gobshites passim.)
Freddie never achieved big success and moved to Boston for years making money in the clubs of the eastern seaboard. He returned to Ireland a few years back.
He remains a kind of underground national treasure, but I hope some of you here get something from the clip below and if you do, raise a glass to Freddie and to my da too. I'll always treasure the music the oul fella introduced me to.

Top 5 Liverpool albums

RADIO contact resumed after a tough month at work and we start off with another doozy of a subject beloved of saloon bar bores in fading tour t-shirts the world over - Top 5 albums.
And we're kicking off with one of the most contested of all - a Liverpool Top 5.
As an introduction, below is a wonderful wee slice of the late and much lamented Brian Reade Show on City Talk. I contributed to the show and guest hosted it on a couple of occasions too, but that's enough self-regarding nonsense.
Here Brian (right, looking like he's heard Gillett and Hicks have called for Liverpool to move out of Anfield and on to Stanley Park's public pitches) talks to Al O'Hare of The Trestles in his day-to-day guise of music journalist, Ian Prowse former lead singer of GM faves Pele and now the main man in Amsterdam and award winning journalist Mike Chapple about a survey conducted in 2008 to see Liverpool decide its own Top 50 greatest albums.

Political songs for after election day: Part 3

A FEW gems, I think you'll agree, from 'Widnesian' and Tom who responded to Part 2 on Friday night. Please keep them rolling in.

Fire Next Time are a new one on me, but there are fewer more knowledgeable music fans than Widnesian Tony Dagnall, a Cheshire lad safely billeted in Winston Salem, North Carolina.








It's featured here before, but this is mine (and Tom's) favourite song about being Irish in Britain.

Political Songs for after election day: Part 2

IF YOU have read the last post, you know the score, add your own political songs below the fold. If you haven't read the last post, what you waiting for?

Here's Part Two of my favourite political songs for after election day.

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised – Gil Scott Heron: Intellectual black consciousness, proto rap which lambasts the growing commercialisation of American life in the age of television advertising. Sadly, not on his play list in Liverpool last week, but still a very potent example of political polemic nearly 40 years since it was first written.

Shipbuilding – Elvis Costello: The bitter sweet ironic reality of politics in a song. Costello juxtaposes the prosperity that the Falklands War brought to the working class shipbuilding communities in the early 80s with the reality that these people were building ships to kill in the South Atlantic. Best version is this much shown Robert Wyatt cover from the Whistle Test.

Beds are Burning – Midnight Oil: There can’t have been many more political bands to have worked over the last 30 years and there can be very few who have had a global hit about Australian Aboriginal land rights. Lead singer Peter Garrett is now Australian Minister for Environment Protection, Heritage and the Arts.

Killing in the Name - Rage Against the Machine: A popular anarchist/ left wing band writes an anthemic protest song that accuses the military and police of being in the Ku Klux Klan. And now all we know about it is that it kept Joe McElwotsit off the Christmas Number 1. Go figure.

Vive la Quinte Brigada – Christy Moore: He wasn’t afraid to put his head above the parapet during the Troubles and say what he felt even if it was controversial, but this beautiful song is a loving tribute to the Irish Socialists who fought on the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War. It’s an education listening Christy.

If you are in the orbit of Spotify, I have started a playlist here Political Songs for Election Day

Political Songs for after election day: Part 1

PETER Guy over at Liverpool's brilliant Get Into This blog asked to me to put together a Top 10 political songs for the momentous British General election day. But as anyone who has ever tried put together Top 10s, it’s virtually impossible, so here’s 10 of my favourites but please post yours below the fold.

A Change is Gonna Come – Sam Cooke: A beautiful hymn for change in Segregation era USA by a man who possessed the voice of his generation. Inspired after his arrest for trying to book into a whites only motel in Louisiana, Cooke set about his masterpiece in1963, the year of Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.

The final verse ‘There have been times that I thought I couldn't last for long/but now I think I'm able to carry on/It's been a long time coming, but I know a change is gonna come’ is one of the great refrains of the civil rights-era and the combination of Cooke’s wonderful voice and atmospheric production could make stone cry. Otis and Aretha versions are also worth a listen.

Alternative Ulster – Stiff Little Fingers: It may have been a cut price version of The Clash and lambasted by many in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, but Alternative Ulster has strangely stood the test of time.

Belting final verse too: ‘Take a look where you're livin'/ You got the Army on the street/ And the RUC dog of repression/ Is barking at your feet/ Is this the kind of place you wanna live?

Is this were you wanna be?/ Is this the only life we're gonna have?/ What we need is/ An Alternative Ulster’ Like all great political songs, it’s a call for change.

Eton Rifles – The Jam: Weller’s somewhat naïve call for class war by taking on the officer classes of the British establishment wrongly endorsed by Cameron a couple of years ago. Weller’s always been an uppity outsider: ‘All that rugby puts hairs on your chest,’ ‘What chance have you got against a tie and a crest?’ kinda lay bare his intent. His best political lyric is however on ‘Down in the Tube Station’ ‘They smelt of pubs and Wormwood Scrubs/ And too many right wing meetings’ That’s the 1970s right there and tragically parts of Essex and the North today.

It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back – Public Enemy:  And album, I know, but it is a complete political history class in urban black America at the end of the 20^th Century. Focussing on drugs, violence, government neglect, segregation, black consciousness and militant Islam, it’s hard to separate any one song. Perhaps ‘Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos’ or ‘Night of the Living Baseheads’ illustrate the primal anger and power that made Chuck D the greatest songwriter of his generation. And always remember: freedom is a road seldom followed by the multitude.

Waiting for the Great Leap Forward – Billy Bragg: It was a toss-up between Housemartins-era Paul Heaton and the big nosed bard of Barking, for who wrote the best lefty lyrics in the 80s. But, Bill it had to be, especially given he’s still harassing the BNP whenever he can. 

A lyric that is brilliant from start to finish, but the opening verse has a beauty we don’t often ascribe to Billy: ‘It may have been Camelot for Jack and Jacqueline/ But on the Che Guevara highway filling up with gasoline/ Fidel Castro's brother spies a rich lady who's crying/ Over luxury's disappointment/ So he walks over and he's trying/ To sympathise with her but he thinks that he should warn her/ That the third world is just around the corner’.

Best thing is, he’s still rocking this and updating it at every available opportunity. Check out this performance on Craig Ferguson’s Stateside Talk Show.

Sefton Central - not so much a sh*t sandwich as a 'merde baguette'

THIS billboard defacement is as far as we got to some cut and thrust of political debate in the new Sefton Central constituency, a parliamentary area which hugs the Mersey shore from the prosperous towns of Crosby and Formby and stretching five or six miles inland towards Maghull.

Each of these stolidly middle class enclaves still quaintly cling to their former village status but are essentially commuter towns home to the many public servants, professional white collar workers and the prosperously self employed who have prospered in the New Labour era.

The mortgage boom has seen these towns grow and the middle class demographic has deepened in recent years with average house prices in Crosby and Maghull stretching from the £170k mark through to £220k.
Formby comes in at around £270k - but that is skewed by the millionaires' row of Freshfield which is home to Steven Gerrard, some other footballers past and present and snooker legend John Parrott.
House prices have more than doubled in the last 10 years as they have become desirable communities for those public servants to raise their children.

It is not hard to see why they are desirable places to live. Strong, cheap public transport links to Liverpool (no more than 30 minutes away) make them commuter-friendly and each is home to a large number of reputable schools and each still has fairly strong church communities - Crosby, especially, is an historically strongly Catholic town with some excellent state faith schools.
But, despite Tory promises to axe many public sector jobs to cut the deficit and Labour's pledges to boost the economy without touching the public sector, this constituency has seen virtually no electoral campaigning by any of the three main parties - at least down our way, anyway.

Perhaps, due to boundary changes, that may be down to the perception that it's a shoo in for the Tory candidate Debi Jones, a former BBC local radio and shopping channel personality who has been a councillor for Crosby's Manor Ward for four years.

The constituency  was until 1997 solidly Tory - Thatcherite Sir Malcolm Thornton ruled the roost from 1983 to 1997. It's true that Baroness Shirley Williams held it briefly for the SDP after a by-election in 1981 but she briefly replaced Tory grandee Graham Page who had held it from 1953.

A spanner was thrown in the Tory years by boundary changes in 1997 which saw the solidly Labour wards of the Waterloo area, essentially part of Crosby, taken out of Joe Benton's Bootle constituency and rightly thrown into Crosby.

Britain's one time most expensive MP, Claire Curtis-Barking Thomas, one of the much vaunted Blair babes was parachuted in from Crewe and took the seat at a canter. She has made little or no mark on the area in her time and succeeded only in: a) boosting the sales of lads' mags in an ill-conceived campaign to get them stocked on the top shelf and, b) garnering headlines for her vast office expenses.

But now Waterloo has ridiculously gone back in to Bootle (where a voter's influence was seen to be about 0.0003 in a recent BBC exercise) and Sefton Central was created, with Maghull coming back from the Knowsley North/ Sefton East constituency that George Howarth has held from its creation in 1997.
So, getting back to the defaced billboard, what debate has there been in Sefton Central? That's an easy question to answer: none whatsoever.

In the four weeks of the campaign I have met only one candidate - the safe encumbent of Coventry North East - defence secretary Bob Ainsworth (above) who was out on the stomp for Labour's Bill Esterson.
Esterson is another parachuted-in Labour candidate, coming this time from Medway where he was a councillor for 15 years.
My sole experience of him has been some badly designed leaflets through the door which prove only that someone he knows can't take photographs or use Photoshop's magic lassoo tool - but more of rubbish election leaflets this week.

The Lib-Dems have Richard Clein, a member of Liverpool's Clein LD dynasty, a former BBC journalist who now works for leading global PR firm Bell Pottinger. He again hasn't been near the stoop of GM Towers and has also only posted poor newsletters through the letter box. I have written previously about how one leaflet looked like a An Phoblacht off-cut from the 80s.

In fairness, I haven't contacted him until today when he dilligently replied to a tweet, but a man of his talents, family experience and undoubted personality should have been out on the stomp much longer, if indeed the Lib Dems thought they really could take the seat. I think the Shinners could show them a thing or two about campaigning when it comes to the kinds of apparently lost causes even my ma's favourite saint of lost causes, St Luke Jude might blanch at.

So it all comes down to the bookies' favourite La Jones, the Tory candidate. Selected in 2005 to run this year, she presumably jumped to the front of the queue thanks to her media background and ability to switch on Christmas lights - despite the fact that there were a number of longer serving councillors who could have done the job too.

We have had a couple leaflets from the Tories, but Dave Cameron has written more often than those closest to home and Debi's entire pitch seems to be that 'she is just like us', but again more on crummy election literature tomorrow.

On the issues, such as they are locally and nationally, there have been no hustings and no public debates on what Crosby is going to get after the election of whatever government. The Tories, in particular have resorted to reprinting scare stories from the right skewed press (see below) in a bid to scare us to vote for them - now that's mature.

Thanks to slashing of editorial staff by Trinity Mirror, which controls the local newspaper market, media coverage isn't what it might have been in previous years.

It's not as if this corner of middle England isn't going to suffer from any cuts to the economy and particularly the public sector economy. Dave Cameron has already targeted the North West, North East and Northern Ireland as areas of public sector reliance to be addressed. Extrapolating wildly from my anecdotal experience, that's going to affect the many teachers, school administrators, doctors, nurses, coppers and local government media types I know from my extended social circle.

Labour and the Lib Dems have spent most of their time telling us that we should vote for them because the other can't win it, again without telling getting into the issues that matter in the constituency. Presumably because GM Towers is in a safe Tory ward, we are not deemed to be worth a visit in these cash strapped and volunteer light times.
However, most importantly, like the rest of North Merseyside we will be electing yet more back bench fodder.Just as Liverpool Walton, Bootle, Knowsley North/ Sefton East etc have got in recent years, we are not going to get an MP who will make a blind bit of difference to the national debate - unless of course it's on the key issue of getting the prisoners' favourite, Nuts magazine, banished to the top shelf.

Debi Jones is not going to get a high ranking Tory portfolio as she has neither the ambition nor Tory central office links - she is a strictly a very provincial answer to an anti-Labour question.

Richard Clein has the ambition and personality to make a career out of it - in the manner of Southport's John Pugh - but he's still a Lib Dem and Esterson will be back in Medway before you can say Billy Childish.

So, for voters, it all amounts on a local level to a simplistic and democratically self defeating exercise of a) getting rid of the hated Brown, b) hating the vacuity of Cameron's empty flim flam or c) daring to believe that the untested Clegg could usher in an era of mature three party politics and the most recent opinion polls tend to mitigate against the latter option, now.

The conclusion, therefore, is that in this era of re-branding and electoral marketing the choice in Sefton Central is not so much a shit sandwich but more of a 'merde baguette' - same old same old, just a different title.  Bon appetit, mes copins!

Liverpool Comedy Festival Preview - Part 1

THE opening two nights of Liverpool’s 2010 Comedy Festival have one of the finest arrays of comics the city must have ever hosted with big names scattered across the arena, theatres and clubs.

On Thursday, John Bishop (above) kicks the big gigs off with a 5,000 seat sell-out ECHO Arena show which just illustrates how a year is a very long time in comedy.

In an interview with Catherine Jones in today's ECHO he explains how he has gone from selling out the 250 seater Unity Theatre last year to selling out the Arena this time around.

At the same time Chris Cairns and Keith Carter debut their specially written one off one hour shows at the Slaughterhouse. Cairns is doing ‘The A-Z of B Movies’ (interview here, Tuesday) about a life watching rank bad films while Carter is bringing his scallydelic musician alter ego Nige back for a musical evening of songs from the stoner King of Park Road’s new album ‘Dark Side of the Meff’. (Interview here Wednesday)

Daniel Kitson, held by many as the best stand-up working in Britain today brings his new one man theatre show ‘66a Church Road – A Lament Made of Memories and Kept Suitcases’ to the Everyman for a week. It’s a clever, literate story of nostalgia and life gone by told from a series of battered suitcases.

But in each of the five main weekly clubs that the city now boasts, there is an absolute welter of quality acts. At Comedy Central at Baby Blue on Thursday the brilliant Paul Sinha headlines while at Rawhide downstairs in the Royal Court, Paul Tonkinson is the headliner. They are both quality acts.

While the clubs normally have some of the best bills anywhere in the country most weeks, next Friday they have really upped their game for the festival.

Promoter Tongue in Cheek Comedy’s three clubs lead the way. At their flagship club in the Slaughterhouse, regular compere Neil Fitzmaurice (Phoenix Nights and Peep Show) welcomes charismatic Canadian Tom Stade who has gone through somewhat of a career renaissance recently.

At their second night at the Slug and Lettuce, TiC have Ste Porter compering the brilliant surrealists Mundo Jazz and Seymour Mace and having taken over Comedy Hell at Lenny’s Bar and Grill the brilliant Nick Revell and Adam Bloom pop in.

At this stage it's not clear whether Mundo is going to be doing his Liverpool inspired hit  'Scally Scally Scouse' but hopefully he will be doing the his touching cri de ceour for racial integration 'Peace Song'.

 

Rawhide, with more than a decade of putting on brilliant shows is, as ever, a study in comedy club booking excellence. Paul Tonkinson returns for a second night while the glamourous Jonathon Mayor joins him.

At Comedy Central,  Paul Sinha stays on for another night, and is joined by Kevin Hayes and the ever brilliant and energetic Simon Bligh. All bills remain for Saturday.

In an exclusive text message he cut and pasted from the press release, Festival marketing director Iain Christie said: "The Festival comes around so quickly every year and we can't wait to get into this one, With 75 shows in 10 days you won't be able to move for funny stuff wherever you are in the city."

You’ll not get a ticket for Bish at the Arena so get out and see some high quality comedy at often bargain basement prices.

My night with Stuart Maconie

A YOUNG man pitched up at Edge Hill College in Ormskirk in 1979 with the trifecta of cultural high points of the 80s, leggings, David Hasselhoff and Haircut 100 a heartbeat away but as yet unimagined.
Within seven years he was to see one of the first gigs by The Smiths and be rescued from a life teaching English and Sociology at Skelmersdale College by the NME which whisked him around the world interviewing independent music’s luminaries, including INXS.
Stuart Maconie returned tonight to Edge Hill to help celebrate the now university’s 125th anniversary for a thoroughly enjoyable lecture. It was essentially a pimped-up reading session by one of Britain’s biggest selling travel writers, but no less entertaining for it.
Interspersing a hitherto unseen talent for stand-up style raconteurship with reading extracts from his three books, ‘Cider With Roadies', ‘Pies & Prejudice’ and ‘Adventures on the High Teas,’ he affectionately recounted his life as a student and then indulged in the deep love of England which has been the focus of his literary output.
There’s no ‘Big I Am’ about Maconie, a writer and broadcaster of some considerable stature, he has a lovely problem with the definitions of his work. As he said, although ‘Cider with...’ is stacked in autobiography he had to move it back in a shop recently because he was ashamed it was shelved alphabetically beside Nelson Mandela’s.
Likewise being called a travel writer perhaps overplays him, somewhat, he says: “Bruce Parry chops bits of his own body off and is constantly drinking hallucinogenic potions and falling into comas, I go to chippies.” Nor does he write the kind of books he brilliantly typified as ‘To Azerbijan in a Cement Mixer.’
Maconie, as befitting a man whose favourite gig is still The Smiths at Edge Hill Students’ Union in 1983, is in love with the nostalgic and unthreatening minutiae of British life. He loves half day closing, regional foodstuffs and deeply held love of place and people.
His patriotism is not that of bigotry and slagging off immigrants, his Englishness is one of civic pride and love of people and place. Recounting a phone call from his mum during his first week as a freelancer after leaving the NME, when she asked what he had done, he told her he had written a piece for the Observer, “What, the Wigan Observer?” she proudly inquired.
The kind of love of ‘nostalgic’ Britain, which inspired him to help invent those still de rigeur ‘I Love the...’ talking heads TV shows, allows him to shine a light into England of recent past and say much about what he sees wrong with that of the present.
He loves Britain’s invention of the railway, old public information films, Celia Johnson and Marmite. As he told a café waitress in Burton Upon Trent ‘an uncooked spaghetti stick dipped in Marmite makes a great emergency Twiglet.’
But, he is fully aware of the fact that the Englands of the past he so loves have a different resonance in the modern world. While the first Joy Division album, he says, sounded like Manchester of 1978 - of tyres under rainy overpasses and dodgy lifts in Hulme high rises - Manchester has changed, now it’s all skinny de-caff lattes and loft apartments.
For Maconie, Englishness is Orwell and the non-jingoistic Kipling. It’s the Wigan Casino Northern Soul club and The Smiths and Echo and the Bunnymen and Radiohead, it's Nick Drake and Pink Floyd.
Most beautifully, England for Maconie, is the romantic but ultimately tragic moment of English summertime elementally captured by Edward Thomas in the poem ‘Adlestrop,’
‘And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.’
Thomas would die soon after in World War One.
For Maconie, these artists’ England is wistful, elegiac and ‘mustn’t grumble'. Today's Britain, he says, might benefit from a slice of the stoic, pent-up melancholia of Celia Johnson in ‘Brief Enounter'.
Even as an Irishman, Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ soared in my heart - the Billy Bragg version, mind.

Jimmy Fennessy rocks: Great Joe Strummer street art

THANKS to my mate Jimmy Fennessy for this great pic from New York City of Joe Strummer street art. He took it on the south side of Thompkins Square Park on the corner of Avenue A and 3rd Street. I wish there were more murals of this kind in Northern Ireland.

Lenny Bruce documentary in narrator #EPICFAIL

WHEN you are doing a documentary about the hippest of hep cats like Lenny Bruce, I think you need a narrator to match the hard hitting script. Maybe Christopher Walken or Dr John or someone who doesn't sound like they have come off the set of BBC1's Doctors or Antiques Roadshow.
I think, with that in mind, this is, in the words of modern social networking, an #EPICFAIL.
So who else would be a bad narrator of the Lenny Bruce story? Comments below, please.

Clash Week: In Their Own Words

I'LL LET this wee audio package to speak for itself. Topper, Joe, Mick and Paul as they saw it. From the great Rockers Galore CD sampler.
Right click on the DivShare logo on the listening bar and download the package to listen to again on your iPods, mp3 players or wherever.

It really did all sound the same

I HAVE been listening to this album this week and was struck that a) most of the Chew Lips style new stuff sounds like late 1970s early 1980s electro bands I stupidly ignored and b) may be the rockists were right, it did all sound the same, originally.
This double bill from OMD and Our Daughter's Wedding shows extraordinarily similar thinking from each band. OMD's came first, that's all I am saying.
It's a tremendous album with some tracks I had never heard of (Telex  Moskow Diskow anyone? Brilliant) and which have bridged the generation gap between Mrs GM (undisclosed) and Miss GM (9).

Play it for that motherf***ing money, boys: First thoughts on Treme

TREME, the new  HBO show from The Wire's creator David Simon has all the hall marks of one he intends to run and run.
Produced by Simon and Eric Overmyer it is set three months after Hurricane Katrina in the predominantly black neighbourhood of Treme which sits behind the French Quarter in New Orleans, a traditional home for the musicians and Creole community.
After the first couple of episodes those of us familiar with the greatest TV show ever will notice similar narrative and character hints being dropped slowly into a heady gumbo of a drama. Not much of major dramatic impact has happened in the first two episodes, but another large cast of characters has been introduced and plots and themes are emerging tentatively.
Signed up for at least two series by HBO, the experienced among us will know it may take all that time for everything to be tied up, by which stage series three will be taking on another set of injustices.
I'd say this series is going to deal with the institutionally racist neglect of flood victims, the deadly stasis brought on by Federal bureaucracy and the inherently corrupt political systems which allowed the huge humanitarian disaster to unfold down in N'awlins.
One thing already apparent is there's a tremendous cast working their socks off. The Corner and CSI Miami's Khandi Alexander is stressed bar owner LaDonna Batiste-Williams looking for her brother missing in the prison system, Clarke 'Lester Freamon' Peters is the Indian chief Albert Lambreaux looking to get his carnival gang back together, Wendell 'Bunk Moreland' Pierce (above) LaDonna's gifted but priapic trombonist ex-husband Antoine Batiste hustling for work while Steve Zahn plays the middle class white musician and DJ Davis McAlary in love with black music, its musicians and culture.
However, the stand-out character, and perhaps the moral barometer of the show, is English Literature professor Creighton Bernette played by  John Goodman, a man leading a crusade to get the truth about Katrina known. It's not a natural disaster he says, 'but a federal fuck-up of epic proportions, decades in the making.'
The music is incredible, in what has to be one of the best opening sequences of any TV show, a panorama of the city's heritage from ragtime to revival, be bop, rock and dirty south hip hop all comes together before concluding with a full New Orleans jazz band marching the streets of Treme.
British and Irish gobshites, content yourself with this trailer and others like it on YouTube - as yet there are no dates for either a  screening or DVD release in these parts.

 

Guns of Brixton: Paul Simonon the beating heart of The Clash

GUNS OF Brixton could be the very zenith of the kind of 'wiggerism' many Clash critics point to in their criticisms of the band, and perhaps rightly so.
Bass player Paul Simonon gets a chance to live his roots reggae dreams of outlawism in a cod Jamaican accent while telling a story of police lifting a bandito in the far off flung climes of Brixton.
Well, it may be flawed, but 'Guns of Brixton' has an awe inspiring bass line, some great guitar fills from Jonesy and the vocal is spot on from Simonon.
And the composer is the heart of this debate: there really hasn't been a cooler wielder of the four string rhythm section axe in history than Simonon (right).
I reviewed him in the overblown and overhyped Albarn-helmed four piece The Good, The Bad and The Queen and even 30 years on the man was the essence of rock and roll cool.
And this song has haunting harmonies, is underrated and wsn't even spoiled by the fey shit sandwich that is the Nouvelle Vague cover.

Beware the propaganda: Rock the Casbah

THIS  interview with Strummage would lead you to believe he was the driving force behind 'Rock the Casbah', The Clash's most successful single, but don't be fooled - it's all about multi-talented drummer Topper Headon. (left).
1) The original interview I am using was done while Headon was still suffering from the effects of heroin dependency and he had no chance to give his side of the story. He has since got clean and the record been set straight.
2) Strummage, like the rest of The Clash entourage, love the process of myth making, especially while recording sound bites for American radio and especially when needing to promote something. Disappeared front man anyone?  
3) Bar the bloody lyric and a few guitar fills, Topper had written the most successful song the bastards ever recorded.
At least the story has a happy ending - some time ago it was decided the royalties were to be split four ways and there is no rancour among the Last Gang in Town, it's still a great song.
It's still Topper's song despite what Joe says below.

The true sound of the suburbs: Lost in the Supermarket

THE STORY goes that during the Rehearsals Rehearsals years of the early Clash, their first manager Bernie Rhodes urged them to write about their lives, not about America or love songs or the kind of ephemeral stuff that many pop songs were about, but to reflect the often manufactured gritty realism that punk was supposed to have heralded.
So, in the mythology created by the Last Gang in Town,  Strummer, Jones and Simonon adjourned to Jones' nan's 18th floor flat in Wilmcote House high above the Westway motorway flyover in Notting Hill in West London, looked over the tiny balcony (above) and resolved to write about life as it affected them.
It took another two and half years before they found the highest point of their writing about their own lives.
To my mind, the highest point of The Clash as songwriters is 'Lost in the Supermarket' from the London Calling album, a song which almost poignantly pinpoints the alienation many of us in suburbs can feel at various points of our life.
It's easy to forget that in the 1970s the big supermarkets that have become a fabric of our lives were a relatively new concept and that life in high rises and housing estates had been heralded as a new utopian example of communal living paradise by modernist architects only in the two decades before. The terrible reality of the latter lie would only become apparent in the 1980s and 90s.
Mick Jones, Strummer too, often get stick for not being great singers, unfairly in my opinion, but I really love Jones' vocal on 'Supermarket.' It's febrile and light and worthy of the insecurity of the narrator created by  Strummer in his lyric.
And one line is the best: 'I got my giant hits discotheque album/ I empty a bottle, I feel a bit free.' It says it all about getting your kicks where you can when you are feeling lost in whatever isolated reality you are living.
Over to you Mick and Joe...

Turning rebellion into money: White Man in Hammersmith Palais

OF ALL the nonsense that is often thrown at The Clash, the most common criticism is that they were opportunist arrivistes always flying to Belfast for photo ops and using DM shod, biker jacketed revolutionary chic to sex up their meat-and-two veg rockism.
But that kind of cynical critique doesn't allow for the likes of myself who will be forever in their debt for opening my eyes to a legion of great music that I wouldn't ordinarily have heard of. They were a music library waiting to be explored, because unlike many, they always wore their influences on their sleeves - sometimes literally.
Guitarist Mick Jones once described their fabulously eclectic album fourth album Sandinista as 'music for people who work on oil rigs,  a bit of everything,' but I have always seen The Clash as a practical equivalent of those long lists of artists you got in the credits of Def Jam rap records: after listening to The Clash, I had to search out Prince Far I or Culture or Ken Booth or Vince Taylor.
It was more than just music. Through The Clash, I went and read about movie star Montomery Clift (from The Right Profile from London Calling) and photojournalist Sean Flynn (from Combat Rock). (He worked with John Steinbeck's son).    
On Thursday last, I was struggling with a mountain of work and fired on Under Heavy Manners by Prince Far I, you think I would have known about that 20 years ago living in a new town of roundabouts and little else without The Clash? Possibly, but it was thanks to interviews with them that I did.
The Clash back catalogue is like the big revolving racks of tapes that were in Craigavon library when I was an awkward, mostly friendless teenager stuck in his room. I got The Clash from those racks and those racks contained a lot of the music The Clash lionised and covered and I also listened to that.
The Clash, unlike a lot of commercially successful bands had the ability to make other worldly sounding music, stuff a band in their position would usually not make and 'White Man in Hammersmith Palais' is perhaps the best example. A reggae tinged story of being an outsider in a black venue, not the stuff of  zeitgeisty, successful figureheads of British punk in 1978.
And that's the point: it is Joe Strummer's story of being an outsider during an evening of the black culture they so loved. It's about people and love and enthusiasm before turning to pointing a finger at the cynical pricks who make life bad.
It also has the best 'Oooh A hooo A oooh' harmonies ever committed to tape. That might be the best thng about it, too.
Listen to the interviews below from Joe and Mick to tell the story.
(I'll hypertext this up soon)