“Listen To This” is back with another chance to snoop into the record boxes of those with far better tastes than you or I. This time around I’d like to welcome Jez from Horse Latitudes who’ll pick three tracks, and hopefully not develop an allergic reaction to my selections. Aside from contributing to the excellent Horse Latitudes blog, Jez is co-editor of Finger magazine as well as being responsible for officially the 28th best tune of 2006 (well according to me anyway). With industrial strength brown nosing like that its hardly surprising he agreed to do this feature!
Incidently if youre a lover of lists, top 10’s and records to fall in love to questions check out the latest edition of Finger Magazine. Its got lists galore from dozens of musicians from Richard Hawley to Sven Vath, and Coldplay.
Anyway on with the tunes: First up my selections - 2 brand new and one oldie but goldie. In a slight change of format Jez responds with an opinion piece at the end. It seems my accidental choice of two remorselessly bleak relationship songs has given the poor sod the blues… thank god for the Jackson’s riding in to save the day.
Pt.2 with three selections from Jez will follow in the next few days.
MLD: Ever wondered what Mike Skinner would sound like if he’d listened to more Bragg & John Cooper Clarke, and less 2-step? Well wonder no more, the answers Stuart James. Hailing from South London he arrives armed only with acoustic guitar, wonderfully inventive lyrics, and a delivery style to leave Daddy Freddy wheezing like a red faced pensioner (Daddy Freddy on Record Breakers).
In fact the lyrics compel you to write them down, but don’t bother its bloody frustrating (actually do bother, then send them to me!)
On a separate Myspace to his original own name recordings Stuart offers up these “Camberwell Hit Factory” versions that meld his slam poetry style delivery to brilliantly basic beats and samples. The simplest keyboard line, a pulse, and a 4:4 beat are all that back an accusatory tale questioning an unknown man’s worthiness to be with his woman, culminating in the accusation that “you’re not worth the food between her teeth”.
“Does she make you melt
when you hear her voice
Do you give her time
Do you know she’s cool
Do you play her for a fool
Does she make you blush“
All the tracks on the Camberwell Hit Factory page are worthy of your time, as are the original acoustic versions. Definitely one of the ones to watch in 2007 (although Im those with their fingers on the pulse were saying that last year). Thanks go to Dan Le Sac for gently *cough cough*ing in Stuart’s direction.
MLD: Declaring “Morrissey met Neneh Cherry. They procreated. The end” on your website takes some bravado, but fortunately CocknBull Kid is well on the way to delivering on these rash claims. “There’s A Mother In Our Bed” sounds less like Mozza & Cherry and more like Grace Jones taking Jamelia down a dark alley with a strap on - but maybe that’s just me - either way it’s the ultimate Mother-in-law song, delivering viciously witty rebukes to her mummy’s boy boyfriend:
“I understand you want to put your mother first
wouldn’t ask you to choose between me and her
but to be honest id rather see her in a hearse…in a hearse“
The music matches up to the razor sharp lyrics, a looped “1.1.1.1.2.1.2” starts it off, while a joyously batty operatic chorus provides the killer “Why Don’t We just face it our relationship is very fucked up” hook. Her listed influences range from Morrissey to East17 and The Spice Girls, showing that while she may operate on the bleedin’ edge she’s not afraid of a good old fashioned pop hook or a healthy dollop of wit.
Check YouTube for a bizarre interpretative dance performance to Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights” featuring a horse’s head and a man who’s clearly never kissed a woman in his life - odd!
MLD: For anyone old enough to remember the dance Snoopy did when he was happy, this is what he must have been listening to, or at least its the reaction the track has on me. In my overactive imagination its the perfect end of set track, the music’s gone down a storm, the crowd are ecstatic, and it sends everyone home delirious. The beats, euphoric strings, fat bass, and MJ’s beautiful beautiful imploring voice crying out “Its Great to be Here“, hands are in the air, smiles are on faces and life simply doesn’t get any better.
Its difficult to listen to the track when typing as its not something you sit and admire, its a tune that lifts the spirit, warms the soul, and more often than not gets you on the dancefloor.
Released on the Jackson’s fourth album, which with the exception of “Never Can Say Goodbye” actually wasn’t a great success, but has since proved a gold mine for samplers. P’Diddly and Mariah Carey have pilfered from “It’s Great To Be Here” probably due to its inclusion on Volume 10 of the famous “Ultimate Breaks and Beats” bootlegs in the mid to late 80’s (It’s where I first fell in love with the track, and numerous others).
HL (JEZ): …I’d like to first thank the Academy, and my broadband provider for the fact that I’ve been asked here to review music on ‘Listen To This’. The call came and I was off scrabbling around the ‘Net trying to find some new blood to offer up as sacrifice. Drawing in favours and hanging around Hoxton corners, ears pinned back for a URL to be casually dropped…I thought it was hard to pick my own music choices, I find it much harder to review someone else’s…
Having found my own tune reviewed kindly on these glowing pages it would be churlish to commit to anything but the greatest praise for Music Like Dirt’s offering, but then again I may be neglecting my duties over at Horse Latitudes if I did.
I therefore have done my best to keep an open mind – and to steer clear of the whole “there’s no such thing as bad music” non-opinion pole dance…
Listening to the two tracks (’Mother’ and ‘The Food Between’) side by side I couldn’t help but wonder what the world had come to. Here I was listening to the Kylie & Jason of 2009. The lovers and fighters of the generation below me, and the role models for the generation below them…and I was left thinking like some insipid ‘Peas once said “Where is the Love?”.
Now I know it’s all about the sparse production. Pushin’ the plug-ins. Wrecking that soundcard and setting your PC speakers on fire. That modern yout’ take punk up a notch and it is attitude and t’ing that rocks, not just the words that are strung together.
But this is where I guess I come across as too old, and where the younger generation gleefully dance on my grave. I mean it’s right that I don’t get it isn’t it? There would be something wrong with the music if I loved it, innit? When Jason Donovan and Kylie Minogue roamed the airwaves, criticizing the Mother-in-Law was unheard of. When I was a youth, girls wanted fellas who got on with their mums, it showed balance… or something…and they always respected the rule of the house they were visiting. I reckon The Cock n Bull Kid needs her head checking and her mouth rinsing. If she’s clever enough to drop the word “thus” she’s wise enough to know that the Mother-in-Law is better with you than against you. Believe.
And for his part Stuart James too seems to have a very distopian view of relationships. These two should get together a la Jason & Minogue, I think they’d make a stunning collaboration. Possibly with Wyclef on the production…
Which brings me to The Jacksons. Here is the love! Exactly what I’m talking about. Something to shake my rheumatic tailfeather to, and bathe in lyrics of love. Maybe I’m just in turmoil because CnBK & Stuart James seem to have a handle on the truth about Love. That The Jackson’s and Michael with his sweet turns were actually lying to us. Perhaps life and love - real life and real love are not really the subject of pop songs…
Perhaps these “love” songs are showing us what post-millennial post-teenage life and love is really all about. This is what you get in a world of 24 hour news, illegal wars, illegal searches, crumbling education systems and roaming Wi-fi mobiles phones. You don’t learn about love incrementally over 40 years. Like Milla Jovich in the Fifth Element, you get the knowledge of the World over night. In an instant. In a download.
Or maybe this is what the Supremes and the Shirelles would rather have been singing about, if they weren’t being handled by older male producers. Maybe if we always let the kids speak for themselves the truths they know will always shock us. Having not yet learned to curb their lack of enthusiasm…?
The more I think about these songs, the more I warm to the fact that they are unrestrained. That CnBK and Stuart James didn’t feel the need, in the world of digital music and downloads to limit their strong sentiments for a radio play that will never happen. I wish them both luck in finding a real love that they will enjoy, and I hope they can sing as strongly and as purely about that too. In the meantime though, I’ll be listening to The Jacksons with my old lady - while I hope CnBK and Stuart really do get together and make sweet music.
There’s a new “Listen To This” coming in the next few days, but before that I’ll indulge myself in a non-music related post.
Adam Curtis is one of the finest, most thought provoking documentary makers around, and his latest series has just finished its all too brief run on Beeb 2. “The Trap” looks at what Freedom means, and how “in an attempt to liberate us, Western governments have simply narrowed our choices and created a system where class and money mean everything“. As usual it puts forward complicated idea’s in an accessible rich visual style, pop culture references, footage from movies spliced into the narrative and music from the world of pop and film.
Thanks to the wonders of the internet “The Trap“ is available to watch online, or download direct to your ipod. His previous work “The Power Of Nightmares” was one of the best documentary series of the last decade, and along with “The Century Of Self” (which I’ve just started to watch) is also available to view/download.
In the past our politicians offered us dreams of a better world. Now they promise to protect us from nightmares.
The most frightening of these is the threat of an international terror network. But just as the dreams were not true, neither are these nightmares.
The Phantom Victory looks at how two groups, radical Islamists and neo-conservatives with seemingly opposing ideologies came together to defeat a common enemy.
Part 3 - The Shadows in the Cave - (Google Video + download)
Assesses whether the threat from a hidden and organised terrorist network is an illusion. In the concluding part of the series, the programme explains how the illusion was created and who benefits from it.
In this episode, Curtis examines the rise of game theory during the Cold War and the way in which its mathematical models of human behaviour filtered into economic thought.
The second episode reiterated many of the ideas of the first, but developed the theme that the drugs such as Prozac and lists of psychological symptoms which might indicate anxiety or depression were being used to normalise behaviour and make humans behave more predictably, like machines.
The final programme focussed on the concepts of positive and negative liberty introduced in the 1950s by Isaiah Berlin. Tony Blair wrote to Berlin in the 1990’s arguing that positive and negative liberty could be mutually compatible. He never received a reply, as Isaiah was on his deathbed.
(UPDATE 14/04/08: Full video posted at bottom of this post!)
First up an admission, much as I could - with judicious googling and wikiing - carry off a convincing impression of a knowledgeable Robert Anton Wilson fan, I have to hold my hands up and say I didn’t actually know much about his work before this evening. I was there because, well put simply any night that brings together my favourite act of all time, Coldcut, ambient legend Mixmaster Morris, V for Vendetta/Watchman author Alan Moore, and Bill Drummond from the KLF immediately ticks the boxes for unusual and absolutely essential.
Wilson is best known for his 69-71 Illuminatus! Trilogy a “satirical, postmodern, science fiction-influenced adventure story; a drug-, sex- and magic-laden trek through a number of conspiracy theories” or so says wikipedia (I will be attempting to read it myself soon). The evening served an education for those unaware of Wilson’s work but also got across not only the swarming mass of ideas involved but also the mans wit. Such as this posted on his blog a few months before he died:
Wavy Gravy once asked a Zen Roshi, “What happens after death?”
The Roshi replied, “I don’t know.”
Wavy protested, “But you’re a Zen Master!”
“Yes,” the Roshi admitted, “but I’m not a dead Zen Master.”
Compère for the night was the wonderfully theatric Ken Campbell who unfurled great sprawling anecdotes about RAW, while his eyebrows courtesy of some heavy up-lighting appeared to reach up and over the entire front row. He also unintentionally got the biggest laugh of the evening declaring “and now more music from Mixmaster Morris and Coldplay“.
It was in fact only one half of Coldplay (Chris was busy), but Matt Black, Morris and Mike Sterling (Juxta) created an hour and a half’s worth of stunning audio visual trickery, that resembled a documentary being remixed on the fly. According to Mixmaster Morris they cut up 15 hours worth of Wilson’s lectures, including a whole day purging all the “umms” and “errrs“.
It’s a pleasure to see Mixmaster Morris again, some 15 years after an acid charged student incarnation of myself last saw him wandering around Brixton Academy at an Orb all-nighter in a splendid head to toe silver spangly suit. The suit has been replaced with a brand new purple? number but his blissfully chilled out sounds and DJing remain as good today as they were back then.
Some of the initial tracks suffered due to RAW’s voice being slightly muffled (a bit like listening to a philosopher through a cup held up to your next door neighbours wall) but thankfully the majority of the set placed the wit and intelligence of Robert Anton Wilson right to the fore. The later tracks in particular were superb, culled from a video reply Wilson sent in response to Matt Black’s questions a couple of years ago and had never been aired before.
“a mix of ambient electronica, with elements of dub and shoegazer, and fragments of Wilson’s lectures/recordings dubbed over that, along with topical visuals, processed, layered and mashed up in quintessential Coldcut fashion. The music was divided into four segments, with different themes: Wilson’s life, conspiracies, reality tunnels, Timothy Leary’s 8-circuit model of human consciousness, Aleister Crowley, Terence McKenna’s 2012 singularity, and so on.”
Sadly the Rising High label folded so Morris’s first two albums can be found on ebay
Aside form the music there was of course a feast of guests to pay tribute. Introducing one Ken Campbell explained that he had first come across the person as a brilliantly talented young set designed when he was creating a stage version of Wilson’s Illuminatus Trilogy. He managed to fashion wonderful sets on a budget of virtually nothing, and the production successfully transferred to the Roundhouse. One day the set designer said he was popping out to “get some Araldite” and was never seen again! “Ladies and gentlemen Bill Drummond” said Campbell.
“I’m a total fraud even being here. I don’t actually know much about Robert Anton Wilson, and I couldn’t be arsed to help him when he was dying “
Not the most conventional opening to a tribute you’ll ever hear from former KLF’er Bill Drummond, who went on to explain himself.
As Wilson’s life slowly slipping away over Christmas, Drummond was contacted to try and raise some money to see him through his dying days. Guiltily he admitted his reaction was “No fuck it they should have an NHS, why should I pay?“. As if this wasn’t bad enough when Wilson died, he got a call asking him to come do this, and even worse he was offered a fee (which he managed to get doubled).
With some of the audience suggesting he “Burn it” Drummond requested that people came and saw him in the foyer after the show with suggestions of what he should do with the 750 quid he eventually got for doing the show!?
It was an artfully under-prepared but very entertaining speech Drummond explained how Wilson’s “Illuminatus! Trilogy” somehow weaved itself into every stage of his career from his early work on the Illuminatus stage show back in the 70s, borrowing the name “Justified Ancients of Mu Mu“, right through to his latest project “17″, the last of which he only realised when rereading the book for the third time for this show.
He also recounted a difficult period when working with Teardrop Explodes. Finding himself short of inspiration and direction, he persuaded the band to head to Scotland in the hope that Ken Campbell would be just the man to show them what to do next. Unfortunately Campbell was still sore from the Araldite incident and demanded £100 for any advice. What’s more having scrambled the money together, Drummond and the band eagerly awaited Campbell’s wise words, to be simply told… “Wilder“. And so that’s what the album ended up being called.
Next up Alan Moore - something of a legend in the world of graphic novels - has the audience spellbound reading two extracts from Wilson’s work. With a huge grey beard and his fingers covered in elaborate metal gothic finger jewellery, Moore is a charismatic figure. The first extract from “Masks of the Illuminati” tells of an LSD induced orgy featuring Queen Victoria, dildo’s and buggery, read in a manner that had you savouring every line, although there’s a strange antipodean lilt to Moores voice. According to Ken Campbell, Moore will be featuring in a Simpsons episode called “Husbands & Knives” later in the year
He finished with what looked like a hand written poem on Wilson’s life and work. In turns serious and funny its a perfectly pitched tribute to the man, and another magical moment in an evening it was a privilege to attend. Mixmaster Morris has since mentioned making some of the footage available soon, and possibly doing the event elsewhere in the country.
Robert Anton Wilson:
“I would hate to be taken seriously. Serious people are always so grim and uptight that they make me want to dance naked on the lawn playing a flute. Of course, as Mavis says in the first volume of the trilogy, nothing is true unless it makes you laugh, but you don’t really understand it until it makes you cry. The basic situation of humanity is both tragic and comic, since we are all domesticated apes with marvellous 30-billion-cell brains, which we seldom use efficiently because of domination by the older mammalian parts of the back brain. I mean, we’re living on the Planet of the Apes, man. Is that funny or serious? It depends on how broad your sense of humour is, I guess.”
Dan Le Sac vs. Scroobius Pip - “Thou Shalt Always Kill”
Can’t decide if I still like them though… they seem to be getting very popular
Dan & Scroobius reviewed and recommended some tracks donkeys ago so if anyone missed it. Check here for “Listen To This“. See also review of Scroobius Pip @ The Fly… or catch them live yourself more details on Myspace.
On stage nudity, marijuana smoking, and random members of the audience screaming “Pussy” into microphones, just an average gig for the Brazilian Girls, and their not exactly shy front woman Sabina Sciubba. Sadly this evenings show was positively Women’s Institute by comparison (and I don’t mean the nude calendar WI). Of course Sabina’s not a woman who does dowdy, emerging looking every inch the femme fatale in an all in one skin tight pink number puffing away on a cigarette as the gig progressed (whether it was wacky backie or Camel’s I couldn’t say).
Despite the amount of blog and press coverage centring around the band, the gig initially had a slightly subdued feel to it, as if they really should be playing bigger venues than this by now, but Sabina used that old trick of dragging the audience up on stage to get the place moving. A succession of girls took a song each to dance front stage, and a full crowd invasion enevitable had the oddly officious Luminaire security not rudely interrupted some serious rump shaking before administering a sound telling off to Sabina.
So that was the crowd’s stage participation over and the singer half jokingly threatened to either leave the stage as a protest, or smoke a joint (eventually settling for the latter). Even contained to the dancefloor the audience loved it, especially the aforementioned “Pussy“, and of course their most well known song “Don’t Stop (until Im coming)“. However for me at least with the exception of three or four numbers I left feeling slightly underwhelmed, although as I said I was probably alone in feeling that!
While Sabina is a brilliant performer and a handful of songs superb, their brew of worldly jazzy samba/reggae infused house is perhaps just a little too coffee table for my palette.
That said why they haven’t yet reached a larger audience remains a mystery to me?
Take David Gest, add one camera phone, one friend then mix with copious amounts of red wine and perhaps a dash of cider. Allow to ferment for a few hours and you should have a fine case of great embarrassment for an esteemed or should that be steaming blogger.
Having spotting the Ex-Mr Minelli & Concert promoter David Gest holding court for tv cameras outside The Jazz Cafe it seemed a reasonable request from my inebriated buddy to borrow my camera phone. What was less expected was that as I stood watching her snapping away she’d suddenly decide to bellow “David David… this man is a very important blogger you need to have your picture taken with him!!“.
I’m not sure who was more horrified, me or David, who in a split second went from a gaggle of women on his arm to 6ft 6″ of startled and slightly puce me.
Declaring that he hoped “I blogged him” (a euphemism I’ve not heard before) I’ve since discovered ITV were filming for a David Gest reality series. If I end up looking like a prize pillock to an audience of dozens on ITV4 those responsible will be hunted down and the punishment swift.
An inspired suggestion by Jez: David’s Ex jazzing up Bill Withers
- odd!
