galactic mystery solvers

building the brand

2010-02-06T17:14:00.000Z

doing more with less. potentially.

the basics

2010-01-28T20:08:00.001Z

reasons i was wrong about the 80s.

"heavens above".

there but for fortune

2010-01-28T15:35:00.000Z

oh - wait a minute.

the basics

2010-01-27T20:01:00.002Z

julio iglesias: making CREAM like that n--.

willie knows how awesome this is.

bonus mathematics:

the basics

2010-01-26T22:22:00.000Z

suspended bicycle. bug-eyed gallic horndog. moral panic.

"when you go to the boondocks..."

full whack:

it's not just for workers rolling barrels.

the marsden rattlers - 'the lambton worm'

2010-01-24T19:11:00.002Z

the marsden rattlers - 'the lambton worm'

this story scared the be-jesus out of me when i were a lad. up in geordie-land, GMS' far-northern correspondent confirms, they taught the song to schoolchildren, in full dialect. fierce.

from bbc's folk on 2 presents: northumbrian folk

essential

gigsplurge 28: the mclusky reunion remuneration proposal

2010-01-21T09:18:00.000Z

mclusky, bullingdon arms, oxford, 18 january 2001 etc. etc.

i'll be honest: i'll struggle to write much about mclusky on the gigsplurge. the band played oxford approximately once every three months, for three to four years, playing the same venue virtually every time, always with a similar set of rasping, buzzing, Pavement-gone-ADHD, Albini-nasty punk screeds, always with a different set of sacred-cow targets for between-song Bill Hicks-riffing onstage outbursts.

mclusky were never less than the best, funniest band in britain, never much different. they had an evangelical preacher's knack for making you feel good by telling you you're a piece of crap. andy falkous could make you feel a craven moron for shilling for a 'blur: are shite' t-shirt. so:

mclusky's posthumous veneration as something bordering on the best british punk band since the pistols (if you hate the clash) or the clash (if you hate the pistols) is one of the more baffling--and pleasing--developments in the stateside indie media during the last ten years. in some sense, it provides a nice karmic balance to the equally-odd embrace of post-OK Computer radiohead records, balancing the pretence and pomposity of the latter lot with directness, energy, honesty, and an ironic wit blunt enough to cross the ocean. there we have it.

having seen a lot of the funky troupes of my provincial youth reunite for "that cheese", i'm brewing a formula for band reunion finances. ten points:

(i) the angle of incidence of increased critical acclaim is clearly a key factor, as is

(ii) the lack of people who saw the original incarnation.

(iii) the quality of subsequent bands' outputs, divided by

(iv) the profile of said bands also acts in msclusky's favour, what with all future of the left reviews announcing a great record by a band that isn't mclusky.

(v) the likelihood of a fracas, reigniting old tensions, and thus keeping the reunion short and maximally profitable.

(vi) three LPs, three nights at camden koko on the Don't Look Back Circuit.

(vii) the kanye of acerbic lo-fi post-punk, falkous will say something funny at the first gig, equalling mad blog hits.

(viii) the age of the target audience should be borne in mind for maximum cheddar extraction: GMS just turned thirty and found himself rich beyond the dreams of avarice (try it).

(ix) ATP didn't book them the first time around. as someone who has booked mclusky, that's a serious dent to credibility on the cut-throat alt-rock circuit. automatic headline slot at butlins.

(x) posters.

rest in peace: a blogger-slash-writer respects

2010-01-20T19:52:00.002Z

GMS is pouring liquor on the ground for those that ain't make it. don't worry, i have an absorbent cloth.

XXXXX had a major effect on me at a hard point in my ~~thesis~~ life. their passing made me reflect on the records they released commercially and think which mp3 or youtube video-link i would post, unless they were wrestlers, in which case a different kind of tribute is called for.

hope you're doing good, blog readers. stay strong.

*Note: Scott Walker isn't dead. The video is a "thematic choice".

gigsplurge 27: workhouse, reynolds, december 2000

2010-01-11T00:01:00.001Z

Workhouse, Reynolds, Bullingdon Arms, Oxford, 21 December 2000

As promoters, we generally had two ideas. One was greasy, swaggering blues punk in thrall to Jon Spencer, the Birthday Party and the Gun Club. The other was chugging minor chord post-rock made by blokes who felt Steve Albini had a 'look' worth cultivating.

Both sort-of-genres wore their budget credentials with a wry British underdog wit; neither had much success in the 00s, although there was the odd glimmer in chancers like Hope of the States and the Libertines. Indie-punk moved towards aloof CBGB revivalism, funk flailing or emo histrionics; post-rock headed for the earnest triumphalism of Explosions in the Sky or took a left turn towards Four Tet and Boards of Canada's pastoral electronica.

Workhouse still chug along, Reynolds split in 2007. Here are the latter, with what I'd describe as an agreeable stoner lurch. Very nice:

gigsplurge 26: gold blade etc., december 2000

2010-01-10T12:30:00.003Z

the GMS gigsplurge almost reached the end of 2000 by the end of 2009, and generated a lot of japanese spam in the process. a victory that you, reader, are welcome to share.

Gold Blade, Holy Roman Empire, Twister, Toby Slater, Bullingdon Arms, Oxford, 14 December 2009

amidst the ruins of britpop and in the absence of anything else particularly coherent, a pattern has emerged across 2000: ageing punky greasers with impressive hair playing deranged blues riffs to hopeful punters (liquor for Rowland S. Howard). hence, to round off 2000 we have gold blade, mancunian motormouth punk pundit john robb's nation of ulysses bootboy band, sham 69-ing christmas carols and hitting the stage from a broom cupboard in the corner of the bullingdon arms, the better to underline their grinning goon strummer-isms.

long since having retreated to bare-chested punk revival all-dayers, the blade in their prime (that is, the first one-and-a-half albums) rivalled king prawn in their toilet-venue omnipresence, and in their ability to inspire concurrent pogoing and frugging in the moshpit--the more delightful at the height of nu-metal and the NIN stomp. this gig was booked under the aegis of our then-online mag, full; but with the website stagnating (writing crap on the internets never being the most rewarding) it was also the launch of our promoting venture, strictly hardcore--named, appropriately, after the blade's single, the logo written on an arm like richey manic. it's beginning to look like we had an unhealthy belief in this sort of stuff.

support from the holy roman empire and twister, already covered in this series, and from toby slater, who sang songs locally and i believe still does.

sunn is funn. O))).

2009-12-15T18:41:00.002Z

if i was to interrupt this blog for a spot of how's-your-father, chances are i'd head to the stereo and stick on some sunn o))). those guys know a thing or two, i can tell you. they mostly hail from the good ol' USA, which we all know is the land that invented loving--just ask philip larkin, or the president of the united states.* we all like to have fun, don't we--as long as it's safe. and sunn's blade-hatted laser-fingered mind-goblin singer attila csihar is no different. but don't take my word for it. i'll give the last word to the boys in the band. the band sunn o))).

*I didn’t say his name because he might change, and then I’d look like a ninny.

gigsplurge 25: tompaulin, vigilance black special & servant, november 2000

2009-12-10T21:31:00.000Z

Tompaulin, Vigilance Black Special, Servant, Bullingdon Arms, Oxford, 30 November 2000

Finishing off the year with a trio of gigs GMS' gang booked at the Bully. Haven't a clue about Servant.

Vigilance Black Special were second only to the Workhouse amongst the Oxford bands of the time. Rarely, for a local outift, they sounded like grown-ups: dark Lee Hazlewood soul mixing with a countryfied take on Henry's Dream-era Bad Seeds. They now live dotted around the country, but are "keeping the band going", I'm glad to hear. Perhaps they might keep the band going in Oxford sometime soon.

The idea was for promising Peel-types tompaulin to be introduced by Tom Paulin--the sort of personal touch you'd expect from imaginative types like GMS et al. Sadly, the self-parodying Keats-misunderstanding late-night lit-pundit (who is surprisingly huge in person) sold us down the river for a date with Mark Lawson and that lot. He missed a cracker: tompaulin were likened to Belle & Sebastian at the time, but unlike a lot of imitators, they preserved the wit, range and occasional bile of B&S, while also being imaginative and versatile in their own right.

I hope they won't mind me nicking a lump from their myspace page: interesting stuff, in the context of this series:

Tompaulin formed in a bedroom in Blackburn, Lancashire in 1999. We loved records and wanted to make our own. Our first single was self-financed and released on a local label, Action Records. We had never even played live when 'Ballad of the Bootboys' sold out in a week. We borrowed some money and recorded another two singles with our friend Vinny Peculiar in Liverpool. 'Slender' and 'It’s a Girl’s World' also sold out very quickly. We were in the NME and all the music papers, and everyone contacted us wanting to sign, represent, remix and re-define us. We didn’t have a clue what was going on. Simon didn’t even have an amp. Vinny used to lend us all his stuff.

We signed to Uglyman Records in a pub in Blackburn. Guy Lovelady was the only person who came to Blackburn to see us and we were fed up with going to London every week. So we signed and made an LP, 'The Town and the City,' with him. It got good press and favourable radio play for the single, resulting in two Peel sessions and a gig at Glastonbury. More people came to see us live and we continued to receive great press and reviews, except we were surrounded by people who talked about units and strategies, features and angles and while all this was going on, the world went Strokes and White Stripes mad.
Our manager told us we were finished.
We didn’t feel finished.

We contacted Jim Reid from our beloved Jesus and Mary Chain records and went in the studio and recorded a new EP.

'Give Me a Riot in the Summertime' did very well for us, the Guardian Guide said we were on to something and we thought so too. We compiled all our singles on a CD we called 'Everything was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt.' Chris Roberts, writing for Uncut called it, "A revelation."

With the money we made from that we bought a small studio of our own and recorded 'Into The Black.' We asked Jim Reid back, this time to sing on 'Seams.' The Clientele, Ben Lurie (JAMC) and loads of other people came in to hang out and help and we had a good time recording it, despite the downbeat tone of the record.

Mojo and Uncut gave it four stars and all the usual press loved it, except the NME who ignored it.
The record label said, "Can’t hear a single."

We were fiercely proud of 'Into The Black' and decided to start playing live after two years off. We toured Germany and Scandinavia to sold out shows and came home to headline a sold out 'POW! To the People' mini-festival for Track and Field at the Barfly in London.

Then we split up.

the basics

2009-12-09T19:07:00.000Z

60s stuff. appalling interview. 80s stuff.

gigsplurge 24: six by seven, december 2000

2009-12-09T01:08:00.000Z

21st birthday spent with the punishing indie-drone misanthropy of six by seven. 30th birthday later this week, to be spent in the company of fuck buttons. if you've come here for damascene moments, the exit's that-a-way. if you've come here for lil' wayne, be my guest. underrated band that sounds like spacemen 3 of the decade?

gigsplurge 23: queens of the stone age etc., november 2000

2009-12-08T21:40:00.000Z

Queens of the Stone Age, Snake River Conspiracy & Backyard Babies, Astoria, London, 23 November 2000

Live venues enjoyed mixed fortunes across the decade. Increased revenues from live music masked a shift in the balance of payments in favour of the bigger venues and bands. In Oxford, half the small venues already mentioned have folded, ceased promoting new bands, or re-emerged under new management. In London, the Astoria was the most high-profile casualty.

Its closure was initiated by populist Mayor Ken Livingstone, but caused only a minor ripple of nostalgic protest. Its rivals had more obvious qualities and friends in higher places: it could not be defended as part of a community's musical heritage like Camden's striking Roundhouse; nor was it among the elite of Newsnight Review crossover venues like the ICA, the Barbican or the RFH--attacks on which would have the boradsheets editorialising on cultural decline; nor was it even a particularly nice venue, like the Brixton Academy or the Union Chapel. Yet it performed a key function in the career cycle of a certain class of band. The Astoria's claim was to be the biggest toilet venue in Britain: hosting bands with an NME buzz, one-and-a-half hit singles, and a shot at the big-time on the back of a national tour.

It felt, too, like an overgrown indie boghole. A strange, dank smell. Sticky floors. A shitty 'Star Bar' covered in cack-handed, unsettling portraits of Jimi Hendrix and Keith Moon, in which errant members of Three Colours Red could be spotted sipping warm lager from plastic pint pots. A weird tension between indie drudgery of weeknights and the second-rate pop acts booked for the G.A.Y. nightclub on weekends. Unfortunates flyering in the rain for nightclubs offering, appealingly, "indie / metal".

For all the mediciocrity of the venue, I'd seen some great gigs there: Pavement in their pomp in 1997; Machinehead playing heart-punchingly loud in 1998; Mogwai lifting the roof off in 1999. This gig was not among them, but it was sort of archetypal of what I remember about the Astoria. All three bands were typical fag-smelling "indie / metal" nightclub fodder. Backyard Babies were a 'glam / sleaze' metal band from Sweden, who wore sailor hats and leather and said lewd things into the mic. They didn't have any tunes, or any redeeming sense of humour, and hence weren't the Darkness. Snake River Conspiracy fulfilled the "indie / metal" quotient: Kerrang pin-up lady singer, flabby industro-metal blokes, laughable cover of 'How Soon Is Now'.

Queens of the Stone Age would go on to produce one of the best records of the decade, and to assemble one of the best live bands I'll (eventually) write about here. But in 2000 they were the familiar Astoria headliners, one-and-a-half singles in, nearly there. The Astoria gave them a big stage--the sort that they'd eventually fill with Mark Lanegan's howling vocals, Dave Grohl's irrepressible drums, and Josh Homme's weird, sideways take on stoner rock. On this night the skewed funk riffs broke up the flow; Oliveri and Homme never gelled; the band poised uncertainly between indie and metal, lacking the confidence and swagger to forge their own sound. The Astoria was a staging post: rarely the scene of triumphant victories, never an all-expenses-paid consumer experience, but consistently interesting and engaging as a place to watch the music scene change.

the basics

2009-12-08T20:58:00.000Z

rural pursuit. portly grunger.

beer labelled beer.

the basics

2009-12-08T12:55:00.000Z

all the basics. and then some.

"a pot from spaho ahmetovic".

goose towel.

the basics

2009-12-07T22:08:00.000Z

lariat. arm drag takedown. spinning toe hold.

the basics

2009-12-06T15:43:00.000Z

blurry stuff. big hair.

rocking out in a warm coat.

the basics

2009-12-05T21:59:00.000Z

darkened room. space nymphs. worried look.

ground control geek hat.

gigsplurge 22: penthouse & monkey island, november 2000

2009-12-04T00:32:00.000Z

Penthouse, Monkey Island, Oxford Point, 11 November 2000

The New Rock Revolution which the NME heralded at the start of the decade promised to re-inject sneering, swaggering, snotty rock'n'roll attitude into a directionless music scene. Of course, it did nothing of the sort. Beyond a few good debut albums, the scene opened up new possibilities for hair-care salesmen, mobile phone companies and teen drama scriptwriters, while closing down opportunities for rockers too sick, ugly or funny to market.

Penthouse (renamed Fifty Tons of Black Terror after legal action from wealthy pornographers) were far too nasty a proposition for selling leather goods to pre-teens. By which I mean they sounded like the Jesus Lizard dressed as the Bad Seeds playing Pussy Galore records in a dustbin. As did Monkey Island.

I miss these guys, and fellow travelers like Groop Dogdrill and Gallon Drunk. But I get a rare pleasure from reading the names of bands they moved on to (via Gin Palace's Penthouse page):

Jon Free is now playing in GIN PALACE, plus does occasional stints with Country Teasers and London Dirthole Company (ex-Headbutt).
Charlie Finke now fronts THE CESARIANS , featuring ex-members of Gretschen Hofner, The Auteurs, Monkey Island and even Christian Death!
Tim Cedar went on to found the uber-heavy PART CHIMP, and primal electro-droners DIE MUNCH MACHINE
Esme MacDonald has a new band called, laughably, 'THE HORN'. He sings and plays bass in this band. He tells me Lunasound ('home of the has-beens') are going to put out an album by them next year...
Graeme Flynn left the band in June '99. He is currently playing in an outfit along with Jim Jones from Thee Hypnotics. Previously called BLACK MOSES, I have it on good authority that they have changed their name to the (rather presumptuous) 'LICENSED TO DESTROY!!!':

the basics

2009-12-03T21:54:00.000Z

pouch for the tie.

gigsplurge 21: the workhouse, caretaker, union kid, november 2000

2009-12-02T11:58:00.000Z

The Workhouse, Caretaker & Union Kid, Bullingdon Arms, Oxford, 11 November 2000

Great music inspires great writing.

Local rag Nightshift on the Workhouse: "a sonic cathedral of sound".
Drowned in Sound on Union Kid: "dynamics which can be best described as dynamic ... But when Union Kid are sad, their music is sad. As you listen to the heartfelt lyrics and the music has been slowed right down, you can almost feel a frown coming on."
Skippscage--apparently--on Caretaker: "The sound of Caretaker tonight was fat - really fat - no… phat!"

Of all the nights our outfit organized at the Bully, this may have been the most enjoyable, in that it was Peel-tastic, short, and headlined by Oxford's greatest band.

the basics

2009-12-01T21:38:00.000Z

2CV. leggy blonde. playing the trombone on a bridge.

"i'm not a astronaut."

gigsplurge 20: digital hardcore records, november 2000

2009-12-01T18:58:00.002Z

Alec Empire, Nic Endo & ec8or, Oxford Zodiac, 7 November 2000

Listening to Atari Teenage Riot in the late 90s was like hearing the Wu-Tang Clan five years earlier. Not nearly as good, of course, but in both cases the music sounded like the work of dangerous, unpredictable nutters whose live shows might descend into violent mayhem in the blink of an eye.

For the Wu, this proved deceptive. Travelling to see them in Brixton, GMS fully expected to be run out of town like a common pygmy, only to find a crowd far friendlier than most indie gigs. Atari Teenage Riot, though, courted confrontation, inciting trouble if it didn't find its way to them naturally.

A worthy stance, perhaps, against far-right agitators in the German techno scene, or against heavy handed police on the Continent; and always wedded to a thrilling amount of noise and righteous energy. But in Britain their confrontational approach always seemed blunted. At the LA2 in 1999 they had goaded ageing punkers until one pushed Alec Empire off a speaker stack; in a support slot at Brixton Academy, they had offended Foo Fighters fans with a barrage of white noise; on record, Empire had pre-empted Dangermouse by flaunting copyright and tearing up Elvis records. Amusing enough, and always worth the asking price; but the band might have sought out some more threatening, less conservative targets: Eastbourne on a Sunday would have been a place to start.

This gig--a showcase of DJ sets, preaching to the converted--abandoned even the confrontational posture. Frustratingly, enigmatic frontman Carl Crack skulked by the t-shirt stand all night, while Nic Endo tortured a small black box, Alec Empire showcased his burgeoning nu-metal inclinations from the DJ booth, and one of them other ones--ec8or, I'm thinking--provided a tidy set of chaotic techno. An intruguing, occasionally brilliant band tailing off not with a bang, but with a really really loud whimper.

why women make good money for such a finger

2009-12-01T17:56:00.005Z

GMS welcomes and encourages commenters. By heck, our posts exist to spark discussion, maybe even to challenge your preconceptions. Isn't that, at the end of the day, what the internet is about, reader?

As a genre, our favourites are Portuguese men selling electrical goods, and Americans preoccupied with the End of Days (not the film, the real one).

Regular readers will be keen to know more about the engaging Japanese conversation currently underway in response to provocative November post, 'join me on a magical journey'. Our faithful Japanese correspondent, Dave, has provided the following translation:

Married woman
H socializing with their wives, of course socializing practical-minded and OK! Here are their wives to taste erotic frustration. Immediately met, a young wife, celebrity, Mature, SM wife, secret, six more women want to play Please select from one genre

Side business
Million - 5 per day offers you can get a side business. Female celebrities nymphomaniac the next man he met on the Internet people are lying about eating with the power of money. Why women make good money for such a finger

H Checker
H Checker everyone to enjoy! Only the hidden answers to your questions in a simple frequency H is known to tea! Now try to diagnose Chau Muttsuri like him more than once Bale

Runaways
The recent trend away from home message boards, and wrote many messages are runaway girl is walking around the Internet cafes, etc. stay. They are going to stay as soon as the men he met at the bulletin board at the house I have no money. Why even write you back an answer

I'm not sure where this conversation is going. But isn't that, at the end of the day, what the internet is about, reader? Don't click on the commenters' links, though: there are pictures of naked ladies!

Here's Shonen Knife, obviously:

the basics

2009-11-30T21:15:00.001Z

black clothes. fag smoke. stamping.

"a gargle was essential."

the basics

2009-11-28T21:09:00.000Z

high kick. bow tie. smoking drummer.

trousers match the guitar.

the basics

2009-11-28T20:44:00.000Z

white suit. cowboys. wandering bass.

outro.

the basics

2009-11-27T06:37:00.000Z

beard. shorts. costume change. gob.

drop the shoulder, burst of pace.

gigsplurge 19, mansun & my vitriol, october 2000

2009-11-26T19:07:00.004Z

Mansun & My Vitriol, Oxford Brookes, 19 October 2000

2000 didn't look like a fun year to be in a band, if eking out a career was your bag: stranded at the arse-end of Britpop, before the Strokes and White Stripes provided a coherent new model for indie types to work towards or against. This gig found two bands on opposite trajectories--Britpop somebodies Mansun in freefall, emo nobodies My Vitriol looking for a break--but united in glum resignation. Not a joy to watch.

Mansun never quite fitted the Britpop mold, which seemed to suit them fine. Blending baggy swagger, early-Verve psychedelia, Bowie shape-shifting, Oasis sneer and Blur cheek, they looked set to outlast the Casts and Sleepers of the mid-90s scene. They were a hard band to warm to, lacking much that was sympathetic beneath the artifice, but their ability to wring five singles and several EPs from their debut album was at least impressive.

The bursting of the Britpop bubble left Mansun without a scene less interesting than themselves. Their prog-disaster of s second (concept) album, Six, left them a laughing stock. By 2000 they were hawking its successor the "RnB-influenced" Little Kix. A couple of years before rockers started citing Timbaland as an influence--however spuriously--this was a pointless left-turn by a band that no longer cared.

My Vitriol (grrr) were also, perhaps, a little ahead of their time, peddling a spiky, glossy type of emo complaint rock. At the time, the only major point of comparison was Ash, who were already off the boil. The emo credentials were in no doubt: My Vitriol played like someone had insulted their shoes. Teenage angst? Touring with Mansun? Paying dues? Playing the blues? Nobody's smiling.

gigsplurge 18: webb brothers, trail of dead, autumn 2000

2009-11-23T18:59:00.002Z

The Webb Brothers, The Point, Oxford, 20 October 2000

...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead, Oxford Zodiac, 30 October 2000

...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead, Oxford Zodiac, 5 December 2000

Three galactic mysteries that can't be solved.

Did GMS see the Webb Brothers in October 2000? The odds are good, given that they'd just released Maroon, their one genuinely decent album. But I can't remember pondering which one was Christiaan with two 'a's, as in that Glenn Campbell song written by their dad, and which was the other one, as you might do when watching a set of consistent, dandyish, retro indie-pop. So maybe not.

Likewise, it's unclear how many times AYWKUBTTOD played Oxford in this period, and how many times I stumped up for them. My guess is that the first one was cancelled because of a 'bust-up' about one of their members' 'intense drug problems' and so forth, or they'd broken all their guitars and run out of money.

At any rate, this was between Madonna and Source Tags and Codes, so it's safe to say that whenever and hoewever often they did play, it was right loud and angry and good and that.

gigsplurge 17: blighted buzzbands at the bully, autumn 2000

2009-11-21T22:47:00.002Z

In 2009 "buzz" is measured in blog postings, the apex being a snarky deflation on Hipster Runoff. In 2000 it comprised a 50-word puff-piece in indie bog-roll The Fly, and a word-of-mouth endorsement by gravel-voiced Bullingdon Arms promoter the Sarge. GMS saw an awful lot of bands at the Bully in the autumn of 2000, in the process of organising our own gigs. Each and every one had a buzz about them; let's see where that got them.

Holy Roman Empire were an endearing, confusing, local version of Bis. The girl on keyboards looked the indie-hairgrip part; then there was a bloke in YSL shirt who looked a bit out of place; then there was a chap in eyeliner with a string vest, something like Richey Manic crossed with Alec Empire but somewhat less than the sum of the parts. One of them banged a gong, which was big at the time on account of the Flaming Lips. No idea about the name.

Samurai Seven were also local, and did things like guitar windmills and scissor kicks. One of them made the local news as the victim of a drive-by with an air rifle. He survived, you'll be glad to hear, though I'll bet it hurt like a bugger.

Twister and Remote Control were on most of these bills, and are indistinguishable in my memory as the sort of bands who'd describe themselves as "glam-punk sluts", fronted as they were by balding men spooned into leather trousers on the basis that Placebo were still selling records "in Europe".

Foil were a couple of notches above this lot, having had a couple of reviews in Kerrang, comparing them to people like Kerbdog and Tribute To Nothing. Likeable though not thoroughly enjoyable, they were kind of hardcore tinged with Sebadoh.

Nought were (are?) an Oxford band who played guitars with drills and made a lovely great headache of a noise.

Marconi's Voodoo had massive basslines, buzzsaw guitars, gurning faces, bugger's grips and orange trousers, like a goonish version of Billy Mahonie. Or was that Rock of Travolta?

Fiver were like a miniature version of Beulah, in that they were thinner and named after a plucky rabbit.

Mote no idea.

Seafood had Sonic Youth guitars and Pavement left-turns and Sebadoh melodies and Uresei Yatsura, erm, bits. The sort of band to have a string of NME singles of the week, back when that was the case, they were proper enough to make a record with Steve Albini and go on tour with Kenickie. I think that means they win this post.

Lights were a clumsy indie-soul band that made me wonder if it was all worth it. They were supported by the Afternoons, who weren't that other band called Afternoons.

War Hen were fucking awesome.

gigsplurge 16: mclusky etc., october 2000

2009-11-17T23:02:00.000Z

Mclusky, Cubare & Wingnut, Bullingdon Arms, Oxford, 12 October 2000

The second in our series of self-promoted evenings at Oxford's glamorous Bullingdon Arms. Can't remember anything about Wingnut, though I have a hunch they were a group of people's dads from Abingdon. Cubare were, I think, a bit Pavement (I'm going out on a limb here).

Mclusky were, of course, that insane Welsh band that Pitchfork still rave about years after their demise like they were a sort of Smash Your Head on the Punk Rock version of Tupac. Their feted status puzzles me--at the time, they never graduated from playing the Bully every second month--although it's entirely gratifying, given that they were one of the best punk bands Britain ever produced.

GMS is off to see Mclusky's successors, Future of the Left, in a couple of weeks. Can anybody guess where? Here's the barmy moment when someone let Mclusky on a telly show.

gigsplurge 15: jj72, october 2000

2009-11-17T18:45:00.004Z

JJ72, Oxford Zodiac, 7 October 2000

Lacking the hollow bombast and naked ambition of Muse and the pompous banality of Coldplay, JJ72 were in the more likeable half of bands touted as the new Radiohead. One of the few bands I saw purely on the strength of a press officer's bribe, they were a surprisingly canny live band; they did nothing much that 80s-tinged falsetto complaint-rockers like Geneva or Puressence hadn't done before, but Gene Pitney-esque Thom Yorke mini-me frontman Mark Greaney at least knew his way around a chorus.

They also marked the point at which bands started getting younger than me. They certainly seemed it: dreadfully serious and lyrically clumsy (see below: why, indeed, won't it snow?). But GMS felt kindly disposed towards the band, in the way you imagine one might when faced with earnest youngsters facing up to a career in a vacuous industry at the start of a vacuous decade.

I'm staggered to learn they carried on until 2006, and am not altogether convinced that they aren't the Subways.

gigsplurge 14: billy mahonie & mo-ho-bish-o-pi, june 2000

2009-11-15T12:43:00.001Z

Billy Mahonie, Mo-ho-bish-o-pi & Silverback, Bullingdon Arms, 8 June 2000

At the time, GMS and a couple of friends were writing the music section for a now defunct "internet magazine". We got sent a lot of records to review, some of which were worth keeping, some of which were worth selling, some of which were by Lolly.

We booked this gig as a launch party--someone must have said "why not?" at some stage. The magazine never took off, but the gigs did: organising them, in conjunction with the team at the Bullingdon Arms, was surprisingly easy, and gigs tended to be better when you were allowed to name the headliners. The headliners of this particular gig tell you something about our state of mind at the time.

This series prompts questions about how music has changed across the decade. I couldn't say how much booking on the live toilet circuit has changed, as we only did this for around 12 months. It was entirely done with a landline and through addresses found on the back of 7" singles we liked. Other than that, I'd guess the principles haven't changed much.

Part of the agreement was that the Bully's in-house promoter, Mark 'The Sarge' Sargeant, could book one or two bands on the undercard--favours to mates, as our nights generally brought in a decent crowd, by the pub's standards. Silverback came via this route, and I can't remember a thing about them.

Billy Mahonie and Mo-ho-bish-o-pi were giving me hope about off-kilter British indie at the time. Along with Mclusky, they would have been ATP regulars if the festival's focus hadn't shifred Stateside. The Mahonie played lurching, bass-heavy, jazz-chords post-rock. They were the only band of their ilk that you could (sort of) dance to; small, tight, and kinetic where Mogwai had taken the genre big, expansive and elegiac. They should have succeeded and Explosions In The Sky should not. Mo-ho etc. played fast, shouty, Pavement frenzy, like Mclusky without the sick jokes and bile; good fun.

gigsplurge 13: a hundred reasons etc, june 2000

2009-11-15T09:43:00.001Z

A Hundred Reasons & some other Brit-rock ordinaries, The Elm Tree, Oxford, 3 June 2000

Curly hair, big shorts, and loose limbs, A Hundred Reasons were a chundering, gurning Brit-rock band--the sort of thing you'd like if your big brother was into Feeder. Seen early in their careers and in a tiny venue, they had a good deal of energy, which counted for something, but not a lot. At the Drive-In and Cave In were big news at the time, and they made AHR sound extremely pedestrian. But they had a middling career, around the Kerrrang/Reading festival axis; a few years later, they might have been bracketed as emo, though they'd have needed a stylist.

This was something of a Brit-rock all-dayer, organised (I think) by the recently-formed The Club That Cannot Be Named--now a successful promoter of louder gigs in a number of cities. I can't remember who played, but at a guess, there would have been Black Candy, who played loud and ugly without thrill or joy; Jor, kids who wanted to be Korn; and Faith in Hate, whose name never fails to make me laugh.

The Elm Tree, then a god-on-a-string pub, is now a cheerful Chinese eatery. In fact, check out the Lan Kwai Fong on Cowley Road--it's cheap, the staff are friendly, and they have cider on tap.

gigsplurge 12: bellatrix & coldplay, twist, may 2000

2009-11-15T06:04:00.000Z

Bellatrix & Coldplay, The Point, Oxford, 22 May 2000

Twist, The Bullingdon Arms, Oxford, May 2000

According to youtube, Bellatrix is either the UK female beatboxing champion, or a Japanese "electric-classical" quartet, or Helena Bonham-Carter. I'd like to find out more about the world of attractive crossover-classical musicians: I'll bet it's brutal. Bellatrix was also a Scandinavian indie-pop group signed, I think, to Fierce Panda. They must have had something to recommend them, as the co-headliners were bloody Coldplay again. But I can't remember what.

Twist were also all girls, and also disappeared without trace. They sounded like Hole and weren't all that bad; but they had a row on stage and one of them ended up sat on the pavement outside, crying. Not worth it, ladies.

gigsplurge 11: doves, oxford zodiac, may 2000

2009-11-14T23:47:00.000Z

Doves, Oxford Zodiac, 20 May 2000

A month after the release of Doves' debut album, Lost Souls, Jimi Goodwin was the happiest man in music: genuinely overwhelmed by the opportunity to entertain people by playing songs, and to travel round the country in a big bus, which he breathlessly showed to GMS before the gig (hey--I'd never been on a bus that big). Understandable, given that their previous careers as techno producers in Sub Sub had culminated in a fire that destroyed three years' worth of work.

Lost Souls was Big Indie with a heart, rather than a cocaine habit; I haven't seen them since, nor listened to anything beyond 2002's Last Broadcast--I gather not much has changed, and I'm guessing Jimi is more than happy with how things turned out. But the show in 2000 was intense, drawing on the band's youths spent as Hacienda regulars, transforming bleak Northern ballads into Screamadelica epics.

gigsplurge 10: yo la tengo, neil innes, sonic boom, may 2000

2009-11-14T18:30:00.000Z

Yo La Tengo, Neil Innes & Sonic Boom, Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, 19 May 2000

Scrupulously tasteful in everything they do, Yo La Tengo assembled support acts to complement their two halves--a smirking, literate take on classic pop from 70s spoof-mesiter Neil Innes, and noisy noise from Spacemen 3's Sonic Boom.

Sonic Boom made feedback while sitting down, which I confess, was a novelty, though not a particularly enjoyable one. Neil Innes, backed by Mr Boom and the Tengo, gave an entertaining set of tracks from Rutland Weekend Television projects like the Rutles and Pommy. Having successfully sued Oasis for plagiarising 'How Sweet To Be An Idiot' on 'Whatever', Innes seemed in particularly good spirits. Several videos to follow.

Yo La Tengo played amidst plastic plants and led the audience in a funny dance to 'You Can Have It All'. Elderly ushers looked on with polite concern as awkward hipsters gingerly danced in the aisles. Mild, is the word we're looking for.

gigsplurge 9: brassy, april 2000

2009-11-14T12:51:00.004Z

Brassy, The Point, Oxford, April 2000

Reviews at the time suggested Brassy got where they did (which was nowhere, really) because singer Muffin Spencer was Jon's sister. Not so. For instance:

This one sounds like the Ting Tings, which suggests Jay-Z would have signed them, if he wasn't busy making The Blueprint.

While this one is bloody appalling, which suggests Grand Royal would have signed them, if they didn't already have Luscious Jackson.

In fact they were signed to Wiija, home of Bis. Truly, April is the schmindiest month.

gigsplurge 8: groop dogdrill, april 2000

2009-11-14T12:39:00.002Z

Groop Dogdrill, The Point, Oxford, 28 April 2000

If there was a fight, Groop Dogdrill would win. Born in the wrong country, ten years too late, these guys should have been signed to Sub Pop and sent on tour with Tad. Nirvana's gain.

gigsplurge 7: hefner, beulah etc, april 2000

2009-11-14T11:20:00.004Z

Hefner & Murry the Hump, The Point, Oxford, 15 April 2000

Beulah, Butterflies of Love & Pluto Monkey, The Point, Oxford, 21 April 2000

Encouraging thought the launch of ATP was, 2000 was the year of the schmindie credit crunch. Later in the year I was sent not one but two books giving retrospective accounts of Alan McGee's Creation Records. The Creation model--that one Oasis would fund investment in dozens of long-shot indie weirdos, one or two of which might become another cash cow--had become accepted wisdom during the Britpop boom of the late 1990s. The collapse of market confidence triggered by Be Here Now meant that by the turn of the millennium, major labels were foreclosing their indie loser divisions faster than you could say Northern Uproar. Pre-Myspace, the fallout provided an opportunity for old-school, postal-address-on-the-back-of-a-7" indie labels. Tow of them--Oxford's quaint Shifty Disco and London's Too Pure--sent tours GMS' way in April.

Dawn of the Replicants were a notable victim of the crunch: signed to Warners subsidiary East-West on the strength of brilliant Peel-fave 'Cocaine on the Catwalk', they never cracked the top 50 and were dropped within two years. Pluto Monkey were goonish frontman Paul Vickers' response. Displaying signs of incipient mental breakdown, Vickers donned a dress and recorded a set of loopy electronica Shifty Disco. Watching Pluto Monkey was bloody torture, but missing most of Butterflies of Love's quietly underwhelming set to listen to Vickers recount the peaks and troughs of the schmindie apocalypse was at least enlightening.

Headlining the gig were Beulah, Elephant 6's pudgy, well-meaning uncles, who released several UK-only 7" singles through Shifty Disco. The medium dates them, but the music didn't. Beulah's breezy, Neil Young-ish psychedelia would have them blog-buzzed as a squarer Grizzly Bear in 2009.

Uber Peel-faves Hefner never took major label money, though Darren Hayman's knack for a pop hook makes it likely there were offers. 2000 album, We Love the City, tipped its hat towards commercial success, beefing up their sound and channelling their self-loathing / girlfriend-loathing wit outwards on 'The Day Thatcher Died'. The girls in hairgrips and blokes hugging their pints preferred the early records--particularly the peerless Fidelity Wars--as did GMS, although they remained a vital live act until their split in 2002.

Support band Murry the Hump had graduated from Shifty Disco to Too Pure where they were touted, amazingly, as the Welsh Hefner; one of the cheeriest bands I've ever seen, the loveable Hump replaced Hefner's dark wit with aimless pop songs about dope. They split in 2001 to no great fanfare.

gigsplurge 6: mogwai etc, april 2000

2009-11-12T18:01:00.005Z

Mogwai etc., All Tomorrow's Parties, Camber Sands, April 2000

Alphabetical post-rock nostalgia your way comes:
Arab Strap typical festival band, rolled out all the hits; sales of The Weekend Never Starts Round Here saw a spike the following week.
Bardo Pond failed to live up to a rather high billing as stoner post-rock legends, were but reasonably spooky and diverting; side projects, I gather, include Harsh Jar Tempo and Prairie Dog Flesh.
Delgados sat down so nobody could see them and played cellos really quietly.
Fly Pan Am were the guitary chaps out of Godspeed; they started loud and got louder until they finished. I'm dead keen on Fly Pan Am.
For Carnation started quietly and got quieter. Various other ex-members of Slint also played, sparking rumours there would be a reunion--which did eventually happen at ATP in 2005. At the time this was simply curious, though not quite curious enough. I spotted John Peel looking fed up: God bless the dead.
Gorkys Zygotic Mynci had tunes, which would have made them more than welcome on any ATP line-up. They ought to reform, and maybe play ATP.
Godspeed You Black Emperor had been on the cover of NME the previous year. At the time, the magazine frequently reviewed post-rock albums with descriptions like "sounds not unlike the Sonora Pine". I'm guessing a lot of 'paymasters' breathed a sigh of relief when Conor McNicholas turned up. Godspeed were staggering: preceded by two of their side-projects, marching to the stage through the crowd, blowing out speakers. What on earth happened to them?
Hood played, as did Pram; one or both played frosty British post-rock, not too far removed from the third Portishead album. But which?
Labradford were a sign of things to come for ATP, by which I mean, the sound of whirring fridges.
Ligament were a slightly dreary hardcore band, kind of like Sparta but without the massive air of disappointment.
Mogwai My Father, My King (Live at ATP, 2000) Listennnnnnn!
Molasses were the strings bit of Godspeed, as opposed to the guitars bit. Pretty much the parts of the sum, which is no faint praise.
Papa M popped up with various bands across the weekend; his own set consisted of a 20-minute version of 'Turn, Turn, Turn'. On a scale of one to 'Slint reunion', this ranked pretty low.
Pram played, as did Hood; one or both played frosty British post-rock, not too far removed from the third Portishead album. But which?
Radar Brothers had the tunes; sleepy, sleepy tunes, but tunes they were.
Scott 4 are much missed.
Shellac went on to curate their own ATP, and to play most days of most festivals, until they were politely shuffled off to make room for Bon Iver. Taut, horrifying and, pleasingly, extremely witty, they were the perfect bar band for beardos with, you know, souls full of agony and rage.
Sigur Ros soooop soooop sweeeep sweeep; this was a bit feeble, really--though harmless. I never quite got why they won; possibly by singing about elves, rather than the New World Order.
Snow Patrol were a likeable, slightly shit indie band before they started writing Lou Barlow songs with X-Factor choruses for car companies. This was a likeable, slightly shit performance.
Sonic Youth spent this gig blowing trumpets into guitar pickups. I’m glad I saw Sonic Youth when they were behaving, too.
Stereolab did their thing; you can't knock Stereolab, after all.
Super Furry Animals were still the right side of Status Quo at this stage.
Ten Benson pork sausage … rock cottage! This project has just caused me to discover that Ten Benson have reunited. I am screaming inside. See them.
Trail of Dead sounded like Sonic Youth covering the Who at this stage. Presumably they broke some stuff. I could do with seeing the old Trail of Dead again.
Two Dollar Guitar belonged to Steve Shelley out of Sonic Youth and were precisely that whelming.
Wire reformed before it was profitable, but still got the headline slot; everybody came to see them, and adopted a serious look.

gigsplurge 5: all tomorrow's parties curated by mogwai, april 2000

2009-11-11T20:47:00.003Z

All Tomorrow's Parties curated by Mogwai, Camber Sands Pontin's, 7-9 April 2000

This was the first All Tomorrow's Parties (though, technically, not the first indie-hipster holiday-camp shindig: that honour went to Belle & Sebastian's Bowlie Weekender, 12 months before). Since 2000, ATP has become an unavoidable, faceless fixture on the indie circuit. Festivals on three continents; four in the UK this year; a series of standalone gigs, and the 'Don't Look Back' concept--a licence for anybody from Rodan upwards to print indie money. The final instalment in gigsplurge will cover their tenth anniversary festival, due in December.

At the time, festivals were failing: Phoenix, one of the big four, disappeared completely. The others narrowed their focus: Reading as a naff punk-metal showdown, with an occasional rap or pop act for throwing bottles of piss; Glastonbury as a Sunday-supplement bonanza; T in the Park as a bland boozefest. Right now, festivals are failing: the mid-decade boom of micro-festivals contracted quickly, with numerous outfits folding over the past two years through lack of bands, or lack of audience.

What did ATP do right? Their development is closely mirrored by the expansion across the decade of Pitchfork, with whom they are now closely involved. ATP followed Pitchfork's canny refinement of critical vision. Not always to the good: in a narrowly nationalistic sense, the 2000 festival was the only one which gave more than a cursory presence for British bands--though moving elsewhere hasn't hurt the business model. For the first half of the decade, ATP was frustrating for the overbooking of unlistenable post-rock nonsense; it's now frustrating because of a surfeit of highly competent Canadian side-projects.

The signs of impending enormity weren't immediately apparent in 2000, though that shouldn't reflect badly on the organisers. Postponed from September 1999 due to poor ticket sales, this was still as smoothly-organised a festival as I'd seen, and on a relatively new model. Casino was on telly from 3am. Nonetheless, compared with ATP's plush, colourful new venue at Butlin's Minehead, Camber Sands was cold, sandblown, and fuelled by electricity tickets sold from a front office disguised as a tree.

It was also in the middle of nowhere--although on a particularly tune-free morning the GMS team did make it as far as Rye, where we bought a board game based on Neighbours and the best of Kenny Rogers. The Kenny cover was beautiful--an artist's rendering of the big fella in an open blue tracksuit with nothing on underneath. If I could find it on the internets, I'd share.

Reviews to follow.

gigsplurge 4: capdown & king prawn, april 2000

2009-11-10T20:36:00.004Z

Capdown & King Prawn, Bullingdon Arms, Oxford, 3 April 2000

Militant ska punk, indeed. I'm happy to believe kids still get down to this sort of fun and always will. Not that Capdown seemed too pleased about how things had turned out, the last time I saw them. Capitalism's Downfall, to give them their due (I think), were a pretty straight-ahead safe-bet on this occasion, though, hoping hard for 'change' when they weren't rollerskating or pulling at their trousers.

In this most serious of genres, though, a little fun goes a long way--something the mighty King Prawn worked out early. Regular stand-outs on those mix CDs sold in Camden millinery outlets, rubbing shoulders with bands called things like Dub Skeletor and Bumface, King Prawn spent ten years as the most energetic band on the toilet circuit, pitching up halfway between 'Check Your Head' and the first Rage Against the Machine album, and with a beserk bearded bald bassist to boot.

This show was in support of third album, 'Surrender to the Blender'. A bid for a modest amount of crossover success--lead single 'Day In Day Out' turned up on the soundtrack of Channel 4 drama Teachers, for real--the album also saw them begin to trail off.

Never too confident with an idea that lasted longer than a kick-ass riff or merry horn solo, King Prawn failed to make the leap to producing records people wanted to buy, splitting in 2003. A late single sounded a bit like Linkin Park--not that people begrudged buying the odd Linkin Park record. In a venue too small for their demented energy, though, not to be beat.

gigsplurge 3: gallon drunk, march 2000

2009-11-10T18:41:00.002Z

Gallon Drunk, Oxford Zodiac, March 2000

Here's where the memory starts to falter. GMS talked to Gallon Drunk frontman and occasional Bad Seed James Johnston in the service of 'music journalism' prior to this gig. It transpired that Gallon Drunk were big in Greece (possibly still are--why not?), and Johnston was preoccupied with Greek toilet roll commercials.

In my memory, this was because the Drunk had recently licensed a murderously-brutal ode to the bottle to a Greek advertising company, enabling them to continue as Britain's hardest-working underrated swamp rock outfit for another few months. Perhaps Johnston was simply weighing up an offer. Perhaps he was inveighing against selling out to advertising execs, after Groop Dogdrill beat him to the Huggies contract. Can anyone enlighten me?

Anyway, a good gig by a greasy band with four brilliant albums under their belt, at which, futuristically, I used a digital camera. Gallon Drunk are still going, you know.

gigsplurge 2: coldplay & terris, march 2000

2009-11-10T18:12:00.003Z

Coldplay & Terris, The Point, Oxford, 13 March 2000

This was a proper bloody stinker. The two bands had been hyped by the NME as, respectively, the new Radiohead and the new Joy Division, on the strength of an EP and a single. Both niches made sense: Radiohead's release of Kid A a few months later left a gap in the market for a band willing to write tunes for teenagers, rather than dirges for opponents of globalisation; borrowing from Joy Division proved a successful formula for bands throughout the decade.

No joy. Chris Martin pratted and yodelled in curly fright-wig and baggy jumper. Terris, long-forgotten, provided more cheap thrills. Less a 21st-century Joy Division, more a post-punk Bon Jovi from south Wales: tunes-free and anxious, with plenty of arm-waving--co-ordinated on the choruses, otherwise not.

What separated these two lousy outfits, such that one became the UK's biggest musical export in decades (Coldplay, for those not following), while the other sank so fast, and earned so little affection, that there is no trace of them even on youtube (...Terris)?

The difference between Coldplay in front of twenty blokes in an Oxford pub and Coldplay in front of 20,000 couples in the Reese's Peanut Butter Arena, -----sville, appears to be little more than refinement. Out went the baggy jumper and curly 'fro, in came singing lessons, natty jackets and the odd piano line. Someone clearly saw the goblin in the marble on this one, and he's a richer man than I.

gigsplurge 1: primal scream, jan 2000

2009-11-09T13:36:00.004Z

Primal Scream, Oxford Zodiac, 19 January 2000

A belting start, at least. Primal Scream missed a trick by not splitting up at the beginning of the decade. With three-and-a-half good-to-great albums from Screamadelica to Xtrmntr they would have been prime candidates for reunion money and the 'Don't Look Back' treatment.

This gig was big news at the time: a secret show by a band at the height of its powers, warming up for much bigger venues. By the end of a decade in which they did nothing of particular relevance or elegance, the 500-ish capacity Zodiac looks about their size.

Not that terminal decline seemed likely at the time. The band was augmented both by Mani from the Stone Roses, and My Bloody Valentine's Kevin Shields on, I guess, rhythm guitar. A supergroup without an ounce of bloat or self-indulgence, this line-up was only rivalled by Song For The Deaf-era Queens of the Stone Age.

What happened? Over-driven guitars, deafening house beats and agit-prop sloganeering seemed as decent route as any out of Britpop, avoiding both string sections and ideas nicked from Pavement. A couple of lousy bands followed their lead--Cooper Temple Clause and Kasabian spring to mind--but within a short time, listeners opted for backward-looking guitar bands with more modest ambitions. And, indeed, for the band featuring in gigsplurge 2....

join me on a magical journey

2009-11-09T11:36:00.003Z

Oh Word threw down the gauntlet, and GMS picked up the baton. The baton, if you will, of blogging about gigs.

Yes, patient reader, between now and the end of the year, GMS aims to write about every gig we have seen this decade. Around 600 bands and counting.

Why? This decade is nearing an end, and lists loom. The worry is that condensing these experiences into a list of ten - or even fifteen - of the 'best' would confirm my suspicion that I was wasting my time with the rest. So, instead, an open ended tapestry in all its warty glory.

Will lessons be learnt? I assure you they will not. Have no fear that this will resemble anything like a personal journey: one that starts by accidentally watching Coldplay and ends by deliberately seeing Dananananackroyd shows little capacity for self-examination or redemptive awakening.

Nor is accuracy promised: gigs will be missed, venues and support bands invented, dates mangled. Not even the internet can confirm whether I have seen the Modey Lemon twice or just once.

Be it as it may. Please do add points, counterpoints, clarifications, memories, and adverts in the comments section, if so moved. Let battle commence.

i aksk god why

2009-09-15T11:16:00.001Z

"should have stayed on the farm"

2009-08-31T17:44:00.003Z

The artwork for rap artist Ghostface's forthcoming album, The Wizard of Poetry, takes as its inspiration L. Frank Baum's 1900 children's fable, The Wizard of Oz, in which a young American girl, displaced from her rural home, must travel to the Emerald City to obtain assistance from a kind-hearted wizard. The girl acquires a small band of companions, whom she helps to overcome various personal failings while traveling to the city. However, at journey's end, Dorothy comes to understand the simplicity and goodness of the moral values associated with her agrarian upbringing, and wishes only for a return to the homestead.

The use of the Wizard of Oz has its antecedents in popular culture. Elton John, whose association with hip hop stems from an unlikely collaboration with public homophobe Eminem at the 2001 Grammy Awards show, and from 'Ghetto Gospel', a 2004 duet with the late 2pac Shakur, which reached the number one spot in the UK, Ireland and Australia, used Oz's central motif - the Yellow Brick Road along which Dorothy journeys - as a framing device for an album about the voyage from innocence to experience [Ed's update: the title track of which is sampled on the final track of Raekwon's Only Built For Cuban Linx II, an album which, suspiciously, hit the internets just hours after this GMS investigative post]. The album's mawkish lead single, 'Candle In The Wind', was revised in 1997 as a tribute to Diana, a 'fairytale princess' whose ability to articulate a 'down-to-earth' morality endeared her to the public as much as it provoked friction with the British royal family.

'Candle In The Wind' was released in the same year as Puff Daddy's 'I'll Be Missing You', a similarly sentimental tribute to a recently deceased celebrity, which also appropriated a middlebrow hit single by a wealthy Englishman - in this case Sting, with his post-punk band the Police - as a strategy to lend the tribute a sense of gravitas and permanence. Just as 'I'll Be Missing You' featured R'n'B singer Faith Evans, one-time paramour of the dead subject, as a counterpoint to the rapping of Sean 'Puffy' Combs, so The Wizard Of Poetry promises a suite of 'RnB collabos', finding their artistic drive in the interplay between female singers and Ghostface - who, like Elton John and 2Pac, used modern technology to collaborate with his dead contemporary and sometime rival, the Notorious BIG, on the 2006 track 'Three Bricks'.

The Wizard of Oz has been descirbed as 'the first American fairy tale', and while it draws on several European folk traditions, and on the work of Northern European compilers such as the Grimms and Hans Christian Andersen, its themes speak directly to first and second generation immigrants, adjusting to the mixture of hardship and promise provided by the plains of the midwest. Nevertheless, the tale lends itself to reconfiguration, as is underscored by the 1978 musical adaptation The Wiz, which presented Oz as a tale relevant to a black, urban audience.

Employing the idiom of the blaxploitation movies which are a recurrent theme in Ghostface's studio albums, the Wiz starred another recent celebrity casualty, Michael Jackson, whose music Ghostface has sampled on several occasions. Jackson claimed an affinity with Diana, and P. Diddy, who performed his tribute to the Notorious BIG at the 1997 'Concert for Diana', also contributed a verse to 'Better on the Other Side', a hastily-assembled tribute to Jackson, helmed by the Game, sometime labelmate of Ghostface's frequent collaborator, Chef Raekwon.

Jackson's co-star in the Wiz, Nipsey Russell, has also been the recipient of a hip hop tribute in the form of Nipsey Hussle, an upcoming West Coast rapper who has also worked with the Game. Russell, a comedian and regular on Hollywood Squares, was known as 'the Poet Laureate of TV'.

Unlike his fellow member of the Wu-Tang Clan, Method Man, Ghostface is not known for his TV work, but his album title makes his concern with poetic form clear. Likewise, the centrality of the Emerald city in the artwork signals associations with Irish culture, which esteems poets and the poetic tradition. Dexys Midnight Runners, a second-generation Irish group who named their string section 'The Emerald Express' on their Celtic-themed sophomore album, Too-Rye-Aye, share with Ghostface a reverence for classic soul, forthright seduction techniques, amphetamines and dungarees.

More firmly within the Irish tradition, poetry is often deployed as a response to the socially corrosive effects of violence, and as a way to reformulate identities fragmented by colonisation, mass emigration, and the diaspora. Just as Yeats spoke of 'a terrible beauty', so rap has often been upheld as a cultural space in which those denied social or economic power can make sense of their experiences, and can build a sense of pride, purpose, and a community not of letters, but of words - a 'slang democracy', in the words of Raekwon. Hence the 'street' becomes the Yellow Brick Road, New York 'the Emerald City', as seen across the river from the impoverished housing projects of Ghostface's native Staten Island, with Central Park foregrounded on the album cover, a leisure-space of sexual opportunity where the trappings of status and class are in one moment leveled on the picnic rug.

This opulent and optimistic visual language is out of step with Ghostface's conventional artistic choices. Unusually for a rapper, two of his solo albums locate him in a live music environment, while four picture engaged in professional work: for his debut, Ironman, he is employed in a colourful shoe factory; his third album, Bulletproof Wallets, sees him in the role of a chef, while two later albums, Fishscale and More Fish, pivture him as a fishmonger, once a profitable and respectable working class profession in the port city of New York. Ironically, of course, Irish immigrants formed the backbone of the incipient New York Police Department - a recurrent bugbear of Ghostface's street-level narratives. Their descendants are often themselves policemen, not just in New York, but in the immigrant towns of the Eastern seabord and the northern United States - as was recently emphasised by the Wire, a series which drew parallels between white and black working class communities in urban America, and which featuring Method Man as a mid-level Baltimore criminal.

HBO, the channel which commissioned the Wire, also played host to a long-running prison drama entitled Oz, which feaured a high-security prison known to the inmates as the Emerald City. Oz offered journeys of personal discovery and occasional redemption for its characters, but generally without the female companionship that Ghostace's vision suggests. Nevertheless, it has found appreciation in the hip hop community: fellow New York rhymer and former Def Jam labelmate NORE identified himself as "Adebisi", a powerful black rapist from the series, in his 2002 single 'Nuthin'.

Ghostface's most recent album, the Big Doe Rehab, signalled a move towards more aspirational and less masculine concerns, featuring Ghostface attended by a buxom nurse and surrounded by medicine and piles of money. Nevertheless, The Wizard of Poetry marks a new departure in being the first Ghostface solo album not to feature the visage of the once-masked rapper. A similar facelessness was a tactic of the prog rock band Pink Floyd, whose Dark Side of the Moon - released just months before Goodbye Yellow Brick Road - is popularly rumoured to have been composed as a soundtrack to the Wizard of Oz. Certainly, the album's cover, which illustrates a monochrome light beam broken into a rainbow by a prism, echoes the film's most popular song, 'Somewhere Over the Rainbow', while also paying tribute to MGM's innovative use of technicolour.

An appreciation of colour distinguishes Ghostface from many rappers, particularly of the 90s generation. In a skit on Raekwon's debut album, Only Built For Cuban Linx, Ghostface details his technique for dying shoes, his favourite combination being "blue and cream". A similar do-it-yourself aesthetic informed the album covers designed by Pen-n-Pixel studios, which combined colours, visual effects and luxury items beyond the budgets of regional rap performers with computer trickery, and towards which the fantasia scenery of The Wizard of Poetry knowingly nods.

Just as Pen-n-Pixel juxtaposed poor, disenfranhised black artists with diamonds, bejewelled goblets, neo-Georgian mansions, luxury motor vehicles and exploding helicopters, so the Wizard of Poetry emerges at a time of economic strife, which has affected not only the poorer neighbourhoods that Ghostface often 'represents' in his raps, but also the more affluent sections of his audience - consumers on whom popular musicians depend, and who play as much a key role in shaping the contemporary cultural landscape and the artists themselves.

The choice of the Wizard is apposite, casting as it does a link not only to the agricultural depressions of the 1880s and 1890s - the first to affect the global economy - but also the Great Depression of the 1930s, from which MGM's colourful musical version offered both a respite, and a note of hope that personal courage and traditional morality would overcome the 'whirlwind' of economic collapse.

Many critics have seen in The Wizard of Oz a political allegory - a fear that economic strife may lead to political injustice and misrule. It has been suggested the 'Oz' itself is a reference to the ounce, signalling a support for the charismatic Populist leader William Jennings Bryan, who advocated bi-metallism as a response to the economic crisis, inflating the currency and thereby relieving small farmers encumbranced by debt and unable to borrow on future earnings. Bryan's famed 'Cross of Gold' speech was dense in its biblical imagery, as is much of the most successful American rhetoric, black rights leader Martin Luther King's speeches being a case in point.

Rap, too, draws on biblical and religious themes to highlight personal and social struggles. Although Ghostface has never recorded a religious song as direct as Kanye West's 'Jesus Walks' or as recondite as the works of Wu-affiliate Killah Priest, Ghostface has often deployed the language and lore of the 5% Nation of Islam in support of his musical perspectives. Perhaps more directly, Ghostface links the 'ounce' of Oz, and the 'brick' of the Yellow Brick Road (he revisves his own 'Three Bricks' theme with a guest appearance on Raekwon's Only Built For Cuban Linx II, entitled 'Ten Bricks'), to the hard-nosed rationalism of the drug trade where, indeed, "a kilo weighs a thousand grams".

Like Jennings Bryan, and indeed like many modern populist opponents of the complex world of high finance, Ghostface harbours a suspicion of the parried and fluid realities of stock dealing, which is implicit in his artwork: the journey provides the heft of the story, but it is the return to a fixed neighbourhood, where values are static and frequently reinforced, that provides the logic of the pilgrimage.

Men and their hats

2009-08-06T09:22:00.004Z

Slaughterhouse is a boyband aimed at twenty- and thirty-something rap fans who spend a lot of time on the web, and who feel that things "used to be better". Their debut album--also named Slaughterhouse, to belabour the point--follows a series of unofficial mixtapes including, somewhat gloriously, one called The Leaked Shit. The key points being:

to 'step up' from the 'mixtape scene' with an album that is 'shorter' and 'more focused', full of unfamiliar tunes by cheap producers;
lots of boasting, some of it recorded after Michael Jackson died;
to sell some records to people who buy records;
the condition of being "on one's grind"; and
to not be the lousiest member of Slaughterhouse.

What with the emphasis on bombast and dense rhyme schemes, there isn't much to separate our four musketeers: the lack of variety in the pacing, flows and concepts is the reason this isn't too much fun after four or five tracks. All of this lot have free mixtapes on offer, mostly superior, though when this works, it's very good. But let's try to tease apart these rapping buddies:

Joe Budden is an Atlas of self-regard, forever shouldering the weight of public indifference to his career in the entertainment industry. At one stage, he suggests something like "I had a fight with my shadow after he dissed me on Twitter", which, even in jest, suggests he lacks more perspective than a high-mediaeval cyclops. No Bushwick Bill. Playing with other kids helps Joe a bit here, encouraging him to 'come out of his shell' and 'pack it in for a bit', though his chums do indulge him with a couple of unlistenable moaning Tupac-style "aksk God why" tracks towards the end. On the front cover, Joe is pictured sporting a hat.

Joell Ortiz has a deep-seated need for affection and approval, what with his 'class joker' schtick, his breathless reverence for everything old, and his funny beard. I do hope this potential weakness doesn't lead him to fall in with the wrong crowd, for Joell's principal poke-power is helpfulness: his ad-libs, hooks and serviceable raps hold the album together. Given more confidence, he could have made Slaughterhouse more than the sum of its parts. As it is, this has neither the sense of place to match his The Brick: Bodega Chronicles nor the versatility and fun that marked Covers the Classics. On the front cover, Joell is pictured sporting a hat.

Crooked I has a simple job, which he fulfils creditably. Whereas New York is made of burning dustbins, hard knocks, jazz, and concrete stuff, Crooked's native Los Angles is a cartoon city, full of curvy women, sticky weed, funk, and colourful gang handkerchiefs. The album could have done with a few more tracks that played up these contrasts, and a few more beats favouring his behind-the-beat, half-whispered flow; at times, he is indistinguishable. On the front cover, Crooked I is pictured sporting a hat.

Royce da 5' 9" is best suited to mixtapes, where he can say jaw-droppingly unpleasant things in exceptionally complex metres without interference from 'radio', 'A&R dudes' or 'Tipper Gore'. Not that Slughterhouse are going to be guesting on Graham Norton anytime soon, but albums seem to cramp Royce's style. Is he willing himself to fail? Would he like to share with the group? Again, the production doesn't flatter him: running barmy adenoidal rings around beats only succeeds as long as the beats can carry the song. On the front cover, Royce da 5' 9" is pictured sporting a hat.

Here's the most bangingest track:

best behaviour

2009-03-11T12:00:00.000Z

if i could sing, i would sing 'never turn your back on mother earth' by sparks.

sparks - 'never turn your back on mother earth'

given half a chance, i would do so while riding on the bonnet of a car, carrying a massive sword. the result would be pretty faithful, moderately countrified, and would sit comfortably towards the middle of my well-received album about love and the forces of nature.

there's nothing silly about this, so why you choose to hate?

buy neko
buy sparks

sloop jay dee

2009-03-10T12:00:00.001Z

GMS has never been a raving apostle for james 'j "jay dee" dilla' yancey, possibly because i don't smoke weed / take myself seriously / own an expensive stereo / respect the dead.

however, i was surfing the internet, looking for pictures of young men playing with goats, when i came across this:

i think this is from a while back. it's by a chap called bullion. well done, that man. it's good because hearing snippets of songs i know makes me feel cool, knowledgeable and safe.

nobody tell mike love, please.

beach boys / j dilla - 'here today'
beach boys / j dilla - 'i know there's an answer'

liquor and poker

2009-03-09T12:00:00.000Z

i'm pleased - moved, even - that cam'ron has worked a "barely even know her" gag into his new record. i invented that gag, children, but cam'ron can have this one for free.

cam'ron ' 'cookies and apple juice'

i'm even more impressed that he's dovetailed it with a reference to the Flying Scotsman.

it's downhill from there, though - i think he's talking about wee.

final level boss

2009-03-07T18:24:00.004Z

here's footage of my chemical romance completing rock band on 'moderate difficulty'. hark - they've unlocked bob dylan.

is this emo, though? i'm keen to know where i stand.

it's a new dawn, it's a new day, it's a new life for me

2009-03-01T11:44:00.003Z

fish in the sea, you know how i feel.

"a universal language"?: the cultural semantics of busta rhymes' "arab money (remix)"

2009-02-28T19:24:00.005Z

to post this ridiculous video any fewer than six times would be an act of disrespect. it might even be racist.

to achieve the best effect: start video 1; after ten seconds, start video 2; start subsequent videos at 10-second intervals; when video 1 ends, start the process again. we're through the looking glass here, people.

t.i. shows up towards the end. as t.i. is on house arrest for buying a machine gun in a pub car park, presumably this is what t.i.'s house looks like.

acorn: "let me exchange the currency 'cos it's all foreign". does acorn look sad to you? like a really deep, existential sadness?

at first i was confused and a little nonplussed. then i became angry, then hungry. after that, diddy turned up, and i started to feel nostalgic and rather warm. i did the pointing dance a couple of times, but i wasn't grinning enough to make it work. after it was all over, i went and had some yoghurt.

where is spliffstarr?

NME Awards Tour - Glasvegas, Friendly Fires, White Lies, Florence and the Machine

2009-02-20T16:26:00.005Z

I haven’t been to any of these 80s revival package tours, where they have hen parties and David Van Day and possibly other cool 80s stuff like remote-control cars and Saint and Greavsie. But this NME gig provided a general sense of it, albeit with shitter tunes, less alcoholic sports presenters, and a toilet venue (RIP the C***ing Academy, long live the O2 Academy).

Florence and the Machine are like bands that journalists compare to Kate Bush, with a leavening dose of Kate Nash. Florence – for ‘tis her – does lots of toothy head-girl yelling, and really is quite enthusiastic. There’s lots of dressing up involved, but none of the intimacy that this kooky-lady template seems to be based upon. The effect is less Kate Bush and more T’Pau, except that T’Pau were completely awesome.

T’Pau – ‘China In Your Hand’

White Lies are preposterously serious, like an entry-level Interpol with occasionally operatic vocals copped from Bruce Dickinson by way of emo. The lyrics don’t bear scrutiny, but at least with keyboards you’re guaranteed a couple of tunes, and the Lies deliver, tolerably. The effect is less OMD and more Ultravox, except that Ultravox were completely awesome.

Ultravox – ‘Vienna’

Friendly Fires skew this 80s revival thing a bit by sounding like one of those grim dance-punk bands from the early 00s, like the Rapture or Radio 4 or what-have-you. At a push, they’re like the Happy Mondays, except with a plummy voice nonentity instead of a lardy Mancunian drug-hoover as a frontman, and with no knack for dub or funk or house. So, then, less like the Mondays and more like one of the bands Factory signed after the Mondays made it big, I guess. Incidentally, Happy Mondays were completely awesome.

Happy Mondays – ‘Kinky Afro’

Glasvegas are supposed to be the Jesus & Mary Chain crossed with the Proclaimers, but they have nothing to do with the economy and wit of either. Tonight it’s all chest-beating and yearning howls, which is to say, more like Simple Minds. I can’t vouch for whether Simple Minds were completely awesome: I suppose not, but given the logic of this review, maybe I’ll have to revise that opinion.

Glasvegas play throbbingly loud, which suggests they caught a My Bloody Valentine concert last summer. Occasionally this works, as on aggressive terrace shouters like ‘Go Square Go’ and Tonight-with-Trevor-MacDonald-style emotive sucker-punches like ‘Daddy’s Gone’ and ‘Flowers and Football Tops’. The rest of the time, it only unbalances their odd combination of yelling, girl-groups, Elvis, RAT-pedals, and late-90s Manics.

To be fair, all these NME package tours are a shower. As far as they go, this one wasn’t bad. I hope they all become big and famous, like the Coldplay or the Killers, and don’t disappear without trace, like the Llama Farmers or Alfie: that way, I’ll end up feeling pretty ‘with it’, as far as that goes.

si

2009-02-16T19:34:00.005Z

songs called 'yes' > songs called 'no'

transexual prostitute 'yes':
manic street preachers - 'yes' (live at the astoria, december 1994)
pour out a little liquor for the astoria. dead with the mystery jets and the black kids on the front of the venue. shameful shit.

idiot savant 'yes':
lil' wayne (feat. pharrell) - 'yes'
this is the best neptunes thing since 'nothin' by NORE.

mcalmont & butler 'yes':
mcalmont & butler - 'yes'

that's that, then.

uke sighting

2009-02-14T11:15:00.002Z

beard? check.
willie nelson cover? check.
'95-era will oldham steez? check.
ukulele? bingo.

phosphorescent - 'too sick to pray', 'at death'

Phosphorescent - Too Sick To Pray + At Death (Ukelele)
Uploaded by noahmTV

more phosphorescent on GMS
buy to willie

NASA - 'The Spirit of Apollo' - album review

2009-02-08T11:58:00.003Z

if i could invite anybody i wanted to a dinner party, i'd invite barack obama, homer simpson, a porn star, and einstein. the conversation would flow, and a few of the world's more pressing problems would be set to rights. on the menu would be baked potatoes and wine.

in the background, i'd play NASA's guest-list-heavy fantasy-dinner-party past-present-and-future-of-critically-approved-rap-rock-and-pop debut album, the spirit of apollo. i've no idea who these NASA folks are, except that they're two middle-aged chaps with silly names, as if gnarls barkley didn't put them off. i do know that they've got a massive, retro-looking rolodex, from which to make hip musical alchemy and shit. hence: collabos :-

NASA - 'Hip Hop' (feat. KRS-One, Fatlip & Slim Kid Tre)

tom waits makes great records by prentending to be mad; kool keith makes mostly-awful records, possibly because he is mad. david byrne is gawky, white and likes gadgets; chuck d is shouty, black, and likes terrible puns. ol' dirty bastard is un-self-conscious, drunk and dead; karen o is hip, sardonic and possibly past it. so it goes on. will they make musical magic, fuelled by baked potatoes and wine? or will it be more like that dreadful movie starring raekwon and bijou philips?

of course, reader, it's neither of these. the spirit of apollo pitches its pretend-united-nations tent somewhere between an above-par jurassic 5 record with a more singing, and a woolly-minded-liberal version of neon neon. "money is the root of all evil", sings someone who might be seu jorge. "you can be whatever you want to be", wails david byrne. "hip hop", declares KRS-One, king of say-what-you-see. "sizzla", replies sizzla. "strangling the monkey with the hands of a clock", suggests tom waits. all civilised repartee, at least until scarface arrives.

NASA - 'Money' (feat. David Byrne, Chuck D, Ras Congo, Seu Jorge & Z-Trip)

ten years hence, this won't look a shabby monument to late-00s mash-up hipsterism, especially if you skip over santogold's contributions (or leave them in as a warning to future generations). then again, this exactly the record the beastie boys could have made in 1999 with their grand royal roster and friends. nor does it look that far removed from 1989, when chuck, KRS, del tha funkee homosapien, kool keith et al were more than just list fodder, and when another daft-named white hip hop act was pushing things forward.

so, to break the ice, whatever happend to peanut butter wolf?

number's up

2009-01-14T18:40:00.004Z

patrick mcgoohan, off of the prisoner, who outwitted number two but couldn't fool columbo, has kicked the bucket. pour out a little liquor for one of the best that ever did it. by 'did it', i mean battle a giant plastic guard-ball in a colourful-yet-sinister spy-prison from the 60s.

weren't they meant to be remaking the prisoner, with nicholas cage, or something? by 'they', i mean amazing people, touched with genius.

here's ed 'television personalities' ball's band the times with their 1982 tribute, 'i helped patrick mcgoohan escape'. which, to be fair, isn't all that great:

and the original intro sequence, which, to be fair, is:

ed ball > ed balls

ye olde

2008-12-26T10:38:00.012Z

it's not all bad news. i can think of two or three lamer years: 2004 was pretty dull, and in 1943 there was a war on!!

notwithstanding the invasion of poland, 2008 was the year of old man strength. the best albums were all by musicians at least ten years 'deep' in the 'game': aidan moffatt's rambling spoken-word sexpert opus i can hear your heart, tindersticks' elegant, modest hungry saw (review), and the breeders' woozy, nagging grower, mountain battles. the best gigs, too, were by chaps who might have liked a sit down afterwards: leonard cohen bringing electric clarinet to the royal albert hall, my bloody valentine bringing earplugs to the roundhouse, and the jesus & mary chain paying tribute to earl brutus' nick sanderson at the forum.

most of the middling stuff was also from veterans: dependable records rather than career highlights from nick cave, bonnie prince billy, portishead, gutter twins, glenn campbell and spiritualized, from ageing metallers like the /dc, the priest, and the 'N Roses, and from rappers around since at least the late 90s: EMC, pete rock, heltah skeltah, lil' wayne, scarface, q-tip, nas, vast aire, el-p, RZA, GZA, tricky and roots manuva. Not Common, though. hell no.

next year one can only expect the same, as market forces, the global credit crisis, and the collapse of the once-sturdy rock pension scheme forces more and more ageing rockers onto the comeback trail.

do remember to keep warm during the winter months.

west coast bad boys - 'high fo' xmas'

2008-12-25T00:00:00.001Z

christmas and rapping go together like pigs and shit, if you'll excuse my language.

from 'christmas rapping' to 'christmas in hollis' to a dipset xmas, there's enough material for a guardian blog post, let alone an entry in galactic mystery solvers. put simply, violence is that much more violent at christmas; incarceration that much more bleak; smoking weed that much more festive.

if i could go back in a time machine, dispensing goodwill to my fellow man, i'd travel to no limit HQ in 1998, and convince master p to put together a christmas album featuruing his full-strength roster (and mr serv-on), cementing his position as the phil spector of mostly-awful southern rap.

of course, master p did release a christmas album, albeit with a thinner roster, in his early, indie days on the west coast. high fo' xmas by the west coast bad boys, a half-hour tape released in 1994, is far more enjoyable than its big-budget west-cast-counterpart, suge knight's xmas on death row.

saddeningly, there is no line rhyming "christmas tree" with "penitentiary", but there are a few gems, not least from king george, who laments that "christmas in the ghetto got me paranoid / makes me wanna spray around with my shiny toy". elsewhere, 'rev. do-wrong xmas party' injoins revellers to celebrate "til you throw up, with some egg-nog, gin and some roll-up" over a 'party n bullshit' sample. 'jackin fo xmas' pinches well-known west coast beats for an entertaining seasonal medley. strangest of all is 'ghetto nite', a thin, echo-laden rendition of 'silent night', which sounds like something animal collective might release: what it's doing on a numbskull gangsta christmas record is anyone's guess.

king george (feat. master p) - 'lock up fo xmas'

king george, big ed & lil' ric - 'rev. do-wrong xmas party'

west coast bad boys - 'ghetto nite'

"like a bottle of chateauneuf du pape"

2008-12-24T08:27:00.002Z

"i'm fine like wine when i start to rap"

what's that he's reading? ross mckibbin?

beastie boys - 'body movin'' (green lantern remix, with bits of gangstarr and ludacris, from ny state of mind)

"get my slippers, before i go gung ho"

2008-12-22T10:59:00.003Z

2
i've had my eye on these slippers for a while now. come christmas day, i might be in luck.

ghostface, predictably, says all that needs to be said about the lust, panic and envy of slippers. rrrrrremixx:

ghostface killah - 'hidden darts' (from hidden darts: special edition)

slang democracy

pavement - 'sebadoh'

2008-12-21T10:20:00.003Z

the first rule of successful metal is to name a song after yourself.

in an ideal world, this song would appear on your eponymous debut album. i'm thinking, of course, of 'iron maiden' by iron maiden, off of iron maiden.

in cases of extreme largesse, bands even name songs after other bands. talking heads wrote 'radiohead' more than a decade before radiohead were even formed. but radiohead are profoundly important like that.

pavement did this several times, paying tribute to the likes of jon spencer and (hey!) polvo, as well as singing the priases of REM, smashing pumpkins, and stone temple pilots. if they don't release them on their super-deluxe-back-catalogue-10th-anniversary-domino-records-reissue-fandango-series-of-decade-long-pitchfork-reassessment-reminiscence thing, i might post some more. i, too, pratice, largesse. here's the best one:

pavement - 'sebadoh'

it would be cool if sebadoh were to cover this. yeah, cool.

fiddle interlude

2008-11-16T18:06:00.001Z

no, not that kind of Test.

i’m fiddling around with my blog. don’t mind me.

if i like how it turns out, i might write some reviews of gigs that i’ve been to, by the dead kennedys, the gutter twins, built to spill, f***ed up and leonard cohen. would you rather i didn’t?

while i’m here, a video. this actually happened in england, which upsets the applecart somewhat:

SEMTEX TV: DELA SOUL, MOS DEF, NAS, WILL I AM, KANYE WEST, DAMON ALBARN ROC THE MIC @ THE G.O.O.D. MUSIC AFTER PARTY, LONDON, UK from DJ SEMTEX on Vimeo.

i like nas’ arran sweater, getting his clancy brothers on.

from the sound of it, i might get into trouble if i post an mp3. let’s see:

jelly roll morton - ‘dirty, dirty, dirty’

normal service presumed

2008-11-16T16:21:00.001Z

hello american mp3 bloggers!

so, what are your thoughts on the inspirational candidacy of sanitor obama? do you think he’s got what it takes to win? leave a comment in the comments box, saying who you’re going to vote for.

speaking personally as myself, i haven’t yet adumbrated this forum to speak on senteror obama’s candidacy, with it’s themes of hope and change, or to articulate due hommage to his eloquence.

now, that drought can end.

advisedly, i live in a foreign country and am asleep while the American Nation has elections. but, as someone who has occasionally posted rap tunes, i feel it would go without saying to post an enormous picture.

time was, i’d had enough of all these politicians. like my man dizzee rascal, i thought they were all pretty much the same. do you know what i mean? that was, until i saw this:

the bullingdon club and it’s social wing, the Conservative party front-bench, is the true face-image of HOPE. hope that things will CHANGE. hope that CHANGE will work.

just as dentistor obama’s selection of joe budden as his running mate epitomizes and endorses his status as the hip-hop candidate, so the bullingdon’s decision to name themselves after Oxford’s indiest venue ushers in a vital new period of grass-roots DIY politics. heads are starting to recognise this shit, and rest assured, GMS will be in the vanguard of this particular sweep.

no great popular movement is the same without the endorsement of musicians. here, bonnie tyler has stepped up to the plate and given dap to the bullingdons in the webclip for her street anthem, ’total eclipse of the heart’. if you believe in democracy, you’ll stand up too, and make his thursday a total eclipse of the ballot box.

guacamole

2008-10-22T17:06:00.004Z

i'm eating guacamole, courtesy of my fair companion, and goddamn it's doing me good.

according to the super furry animals, guacamole is a cure for insomnia, which is not something i'm in a position to confirm or deny. wikipedia is no help, although it does provide an extended digression about peter mandelson, hartlepool and mushy peas, if that's your sort of thing.

listen to the song, at least.

super furry animals - 'guacamole' (b-side to 'if you don't want me to destroy you', 1996)

sunday morning: jerk chicken, drum'n'bass

2008-10-06T17:50:00.004Z

if any of GMS' readers are holding it down in the dirty south, may i recommend hudson's caribbean and good food restaurant, st mary's street, southampton? their jerk chicken runs the show.

i wonder if jason pierce had some?

spiritualized - 'sitting on fire' (live, boston, 2007; original on songs in a & e)

bobbies on the beat

2008-10-04T10:45:00.003Z

favourite types of police:

natural pol-lice
murder po-lice
bad cops

and in pop:

dream police
karma police
jazz police

john vanderslice - 'karma police' (radiohead cover, from okx)

leonard cohen - 'jazz police' (from i'm your man)

cheap trick - 'dream police'

i had a friend who had a friend in jesus

2008-09-30T18:52:00.003Z

babies know what's up. if i had the choice, i'd be one of those dancing babies, with an intense look of concentration.

what would i be dancing to? damn right:

richard & linda thompson - 'mole in a hole' (from hokey pokey)

RIP Cool Hand Luke

2008-09-27T14:45:00.007Z

the flaming lips - 'plastic jesus' (from transmissions from the satellite heart)

the best thing GMS saw at this year's ATP festival was hud. think on, indie rockers.

dexys week: new material

2008-08-16T22:00:00.001Z

last year, kevin posted a demo of a new song, 'it's OK joanna' on his myspace. it's brilliant. who knows what'll come of it? watch his space ...

in the meantime, looks like he's keeping busy. children, avert your eyes:

dexys week: the 2003 comeback

2008-08-16T10:00:00.001Z

in 2003, dexys returned to the stage. GMS caught them in sunny basingstoke, and it was fine as fuck, if you'll pardon the expression. kevin's voice wasn't what it once was, but he was ably backed up by pete williams, re-creating billy adams' side-man role from don't stand me down. the lounge sound and theatrical interludes had a lot of the audience heading for the doors. for my money, it was the best reunion gig i've ever seen.

you don't see my bloody valentine or the pixies in pinstripe suits, after all.

'c'mon eileen'

'geno'

dexys week: reanimation

2008-08-15T22:00:00.001Z

a new century saw a new generation of british tv comedians finding humour in dexys. this is from series two of the underrated big train. that's simon pegg as igor, and 'the artist' kevin eldon as kevin rowland. and here's the mighty boosh, doing what they do:

dexys week: thong edition

2008-08-15T10:00:00.001Z

in 1996 kevin signed with creation records. three years later, he released the lush covers album my beauty. that year, the open-minded reading festival crowd bottled off our kev and his cross-dressing strippers. funnily enough, they seemed to dislike rowland's gender-bending karaoke even more than they disliked 50 cent's commercially-oriented homophobia.

GMS readers are a tolerant bunch, or at least i hope so. here's the thong-tastic video for his cover of unit 4+2's 'concrete and clay'.

service announcement

2008-08-14T23:29:00.003Z

GMS interrupts dexys week to direct you to the consistently high-quality mixing desk blog, who have a dutch bootleg (so to speak), of dexys from 1981.

it's mostly young soul rebels-era high-octane northern soul, with a couple of handy non-album songs - 'breaking down the walls of heartache' and 'show me'. but the inclusion of 'soon' and 'plan b' shows the way to the incredible five-songs-in-one second side of too rye ay.

while i'm at it, here's a clean-shaven dexys performing the irish-american traditional 'kathleen mavourneen'. this sort of thing used to happen on telly, you know.

dexys week: the four-minute comeback

2008-08-14T22:00:00.001Z

in 1993, an ill-looking kevin re-surfaced with a new dexys song, 'if i ever', on jonathan woss' saturday zoo. and, just like that, he was gone again.

dexys week: kevin goes solo, re-grows moustache

2008-08-14T10:00:00.001Z

kevin's 1988 solo album the wanderer wasn't as passionate as searching for the young soul rebels, as accessible as too-rye-aye, or as imaginative as don't stand me down. its dabbling in lounge pop and country was deliberately anti-fashion, as was kevin's new look, which fans of the league of gentlemen will recognise as the model for embittered businessman geoff tipps.

the video for 'young man' embraces the unfashionable aspects of british working class popular entertainment in a manner recently revived by GMS-favourite richard hawley.

dexys week: another comedy connection

2008-08-13T22:00:00.001Z

following the disastrous reception of don't stand me down, dexys tasted one last piece of commercial success: a top-twenty hit with 'because of you', a mediocre theme tune for the unfunny window-cleaning sitcom brush strokes. hey - another comedy connection! 'becuase of you' (1986)

dexys week: pre-empting the pogues

2008-08-13T10:00:00.001Z

like kevin rowland, shane macgowan is a displaced irishman with a background in punk who found success in the eighties playing big-band folk-influenced barnstormers, until addiction caught up with him and clouded his muse. macgowan's biggest hit, 'fairytale of new york', is as ubiquitous on both sides of the atlantic as dexys' celtic-influenced 'c'mon eileen'. but rowland was the first to try the anglo-irishman-in-new-york idea with 'this is what she's like' from the final dexys album, 1985's don't stand me down.

a critical and commercial disaster, don't stand me down mixed marvin gaye, 70s AM rock, conversational interludes and preppy clobber. the accompanying live show, 'coming to town ... park street south', interspersed songs with dramatic set pieces. the full version of 'this is what she's like' features a rambling monologue about the italian word for 'thunderbolt', a spectacular beach boys-style middle section, and a cagey, nonchalant chat between kevin and billy adams. the hostility with which this record was received is baffling. look out for the hipster on drums.

'this is what she's like' (1985)

dexys week: merry xmas everybody!

2008-08-12T22:00:00.001Z

dexys were to the eighties what slade were to the seventies: eccentrically-attired top of the pops mainstays singing oddball pop masterpieces in thick regional accents. in both cases, their reputation as novelty acts, but their albums revealed much greater depth. both bands made minor inroads into the US, but remained essentially, parochially, defiantly, british. here's the sort of thing that doesn't happen any more: dexys covering slade's inescapable 'merry xmas everybody', beamed into millions of living rooms on christmas day, 1982.

dexys week: featuring darts legend jockie wilson

2008-08-12T10:00:00.001Z

dexys are easy to lampoon, but GMS suspects they were usually in on the joke. here's their classic top of the pops performance of 'jackie wilson said' in front of a picture of diminutive scotish darts legend jocky wilson.

dexys week: the young ones

2008-08-11T22:00:00.001Z

moving on to the raggle-taggle armpit-bearing dungaree-sporting fiddling-gypsy celtic-soul schtick of too-rye-aye, dexys' second album. for all their pretension, passion and sentimentality, dexys have always had a broader streak of humour than most bands. here we have them setting up shop in the young ones' bathroom, to perform van morrison's 'jackie wilson said (i'm in heaven when you smile)'.

dexys week: 'i couldn't help it if i tried'

2008-08-11T10:00:00.002Z

searching for the young soul rebels was sold on its succession of up-tempo foot-stomping soul-shouters. but it's the slow-burning centrepieces, 'keep it' and 'i couldn't help it if i tried', which deserve as much attention, coming closer to edwin starr than to geno washington.

dexys week: "welcome the new soul vision"

2008-08-10T22:00:00.001Z

sticking with dexys in their projected passion revue rabble-rousing punk-soul ram-jam irish-literature-loving, clean-living, master-tape-stealing, manifesto-spluttering, marching-on-the-spot docker-chic phase, here we have 'there there my dear', released as a single in 1980. unlike its predecessor, 'geno', it didn't reach number one. but then, it was up against 'xanadu' by olivia newton-john and the electric light orchestra. don't f- with qubla khan, kevin. 'there there my dear' olivia newton-john & elo 'xanadu'

the bomb

2008-08-10T13:46:00.004Z

GMS takes a break from dexys week to point you in the direction of this excellent observer article on british protest music and the anti-nuclear campaign - featuring, among others, michael foot, tony benn, peggy seeger, billy bragg and GMS-favourite Martin Carthy.

CND is fifty this year, and this weekend sees the anniversary of the nagasaki bombing. music, maestro:

uncle tupelo - 'atomic power' (louvin brothers cover, live, 1992)

yo la tengo - 'nuclear war' (sun ra cover, from prisoners of love)

nation of ulysses - 'atomic bomb' (from 13-point program to destroy america)

the crystals - 'little boy' (from back to mono)

derrick harriott - 'fat man' (from trojan - jamaican hits)

george clinton - 'atomic dog' (from computer games)

rivers cuomo - 'the bomb' (ice cube cover, from alone)

dexys midnight runners week

2008-08-09T16:18:00.004Z

hello readers! it's dexys midnight runners week all week here on GMS.

over the next seven days, we'll be revisiting the peaks and troughs of kevin rowland's brilliant, eccentric career. by re-visiting, i expect i mean posting some youtube videos. we'll also be exploring dexys' intriguing relationship with UK tv comedy. by exploring, i expect i mean posting some youtube videos.

we'll start at the beginning, with 'dance stance (burn it down)' from 1979 - one of the greatest opening tracks, from one of the greatest debut albums, from the greatest british band evarr. except maybe pulp. play it loud. "jimmy? yeah! sal? yeah! for god's sake burn it down..."

Raekwon goes to the cinema (erm, in a time machine)

2008-08-04T11:41:00.003Z

...after a quick stop at the bodega.

Raekwon has always been one of the Wu's most perverse characters - sullen and belligerent where most of his fellow MCs are playful and nerdy, insular and defensive where his long-time foil, Ghostface, plays the ebullient, effusive, eccentric extrovert.

Raekwon's debut album, Only Built For Cuban Linx, is an undisputed classic - groundbreaking and sumptuous, consistently ambitious in its widescreen mafia fantasies, yet endlessly rich in its vivid details, classy production and impenetrable slang. His decision to follow it by replacing producer RZA with a string of no-name, low-rent New York beat-makers, and to swap Ghostface for his clumsy, embarrassing posses, American Cream Team and Ice Water, resulted in one of the most dramatic creative down-turns in rap history. Can he rescue his career with the long-threatened Cuban Linx II?

Raekwon and his third-favourite producer

Raekwon's performance at this year's All Tomorrow's Parties festival offered few clues. The rapper recreated his debut song-for-song, assisted by Ghostface and Theodore Unit, adding a few classic Wu verses here and there (mostly the same ones Ghostface had performed the previous evening). There was no new material and little showmanship, beyond some ostentatious cognac-drinking and a rather fetching beard. GMS is partial to the sight of muscular chaps lumbering around a stage, shouting in unison into microphones while a DJ makes gunshot noises, but many people weren't. The crowd thinned, more rapidly than Ghostface's audience, and more rapidly still once Broken Social Scene brought their Fleetwood Mac-style communal indie drivel to the main stage.

Raekwon may not know much about entertaining ambivalent hipsters, employing handy weed-carriers or beat selection, but he sure knows his way around a dense crime narrative. Not content with re-hashing 'Scarface', Scorsese and John Woo, 'Musketeers of Pig Alley', the best track from his middling third album, The Lex Diamond Story, takes inspiration from D.W. Griffith's pioneering 1912 short noir of the same name. If you've got 15 minutes to spare, the whole film is below, and comes highly recommended by yours truly, and, erm, Raekwon.

raekwon (feat. masta killa & inspectah deck) - 'musketeers of pig alley' (from the lex diamond story , 2003)

'musketeers of pig alley' (1912)

More D.W.? 'The Reformers', from the following year, is a priceless skewering of moralising interventionist liberals, as 'Dickensian' in its way as 'Musketeers'. Word to Scott Templeton. The League of Civic Purity - now there's a posse.

'the reformers' (1913)

Pop Just Ate Itself: Clipse release a turd

2008-08-03T15:22:00.005Z

Every year, come December, bloggers compile lists of their favourite albums of the past twelve months. And every year, without fail, rap-loving bloggers start to argue about whether mixtapes count as albums.

Those who would exclude mixtapes from their imaginary competition insist on the need for a level playing field. They find one in the legal and commercial constraints governing the creation of albums. Mixtapes' illegal use of un-cleared samples, borrowed beats and previously-available songs, they argue, makes it impossible to judge them on equal terms with commercial releases. Defenders of mixtapes argue that market forces and intellectual property rights provide an arbitrary and unhelpful framework by which to judge works of art. Mixtapes, they argue, offer artists freedom to express themselves without the need to gratify record company marketing departments; they also allow the use of samples that would otherwise be prohibitively expensive.

An aesthetic argument runs in parallel. Critics argue that mixtapes are often uneven, hastily thrown together, and poorly-mastered, and that they offer instant gratification rather than anything of lasting value. Supporters counter that, originality notwithstanding, mixtapes are frequently more coherent and satisfying than albums. Why bar Wale's excellent Mixtape About Nothing from an end-of-year list on the grounds that it was given away for free? Why make apologies for Nas' patchy Untitled when his N****r Tape stands as one of the best releases of his career?

After all, the idea of an album as a 'statement' or free-standing original work of art only developed in the mid-sixties: its gold standard has always been a certain type of predominantly male, white rock music. Hip hop, with its traditions of freestyling and DJing, has more in common with folk music, where performers constantly adapt, re-interpret and add to existing tunes and lyrics. Using the idea of the 'album' to judge rap distorts our appreciation of the art-form: for instance, many consider Kool G Rap one of the all-time great MCs, but he rarely appears on lists of great rap albums, let alone great albums.

None of this matters, of course. Artists will continue to make music, and will, on the whole, struggle to make a living doing so. Bloggers will continue to bicker and list. My opinion? Of course mixtapes aren't albums. They're mixtapes. The clue's in the name.

None of which makes me any the wiser about what the hell's gone on with the new Clipse album, The Clipse present the Re-Up Gang. Is it a mixtape? Is it an album? One thing's for sure: it's bloody awful.

The Virginia duo's series of mixtapes, We Got It 4 Cheap vols. 1-3, saw them adding vocals to familiar beats, frequently improving upon the originals. On Present the Re-Up Gang, they reverse the formula, recycling verses from Volume 3 that originally accompanied tracks by the likes of Shawty Lo and B.G., fitting them instead with original beats. If new rhymes over old beats makes a mixtape, what about new beats under old rhymes? Further muddying the waters, Present appears to have secured a commercial release, via Koch Records - a label that operates in a grey area between albums and mixtapes, offering artists one-off album deals, together with an unusual degree of creative control, low overheads, fast turnarounds, competitive royalty rates and an allegedly relaxed approach to sample clearance. Finally, the logic of claiming to 'present' the Re-Up Gang is baffling. The Gang is made up of the Clipse plus Philadelphia rappers Ab-Liva and Sandman, who featured heavily on all three mixtape volumes, and were given equal billing with the Clipse on the third. What is the point of this album?

None of this would be a concern if Clipse's round-about manner of creating original music was at all successful. Instead, the recycling process has diluted any distinctive qualities the group ever possessed. Fulfilling the dictum that a free market tends towards homogeneity and mediocrity, Clipse have hit the golden mean of turgid drugs-and-money-rap: something like a G-Unit album, but with slightly sharper metaphors and less memorable beats.

When not damping their once-chilling drug-talk with dead-eyed celebrations of wealth, Clipse use the album to air rap's dullest and most self-indulgent theme: record label politics. This mind-numbing tendency, a favourite of the world's most boring rapper, 'Regular' Joe Budden, has become so prevalent that prissy complaints about altered release dates and threadbare promotion budgets have even tainted the latest album by the Roots - an otherwise creative and intelligent group. Clipse's attempt to make a fast buck by recycling lyrics and rush-releasing a sub-par album renders such complaints insincere. The apparent ease with which they reconcile money-talk and self-pity while expecting fans to pay for work vastly inferior to that given away for free six months ago raises questions about their integrity and judgement.

It's interesting that one of the album's recycled verses features threats against Lil' Wayne, another successful mixtape rapper. Where the Clipse's heavy release-schedule has seen them creeping steadily towards mediocrity, Wayne's constant output has seen him embrace eccentricity. The resulting commercial album - though entirely uneven - has already sold over two million copies. Clipse Present the Re-Up Gang would do well to equal G-Unit's Terminate On Sight, which has yet to sell a tenth of that.

homunculus wingding

2008-08-02T10:45:00.004Z

good news from freak-folk-land, readers!

GMS had long considered devendra banhart a respectable tyrannosaurus rex tribute act who would never raise his game and pen 'ride a white swan'; always destined to be indie-rock's second-best r. kelly fan.

but here's his new video, for the tropicalia-style 'carmensita'. it brings back memories of watching the mahabharat on saturday afternoons in the early 90s. the BBC needs to bring that back - it was like the wire, only in 9th-century-BC India, and with cardboard weaponry.

'carmensita' also contains mention of a homunculus. uncle lawrence would be proud.

more fun:

tyrannosaurus - 'deborah' (live at kempton park, 1968)

disambiguation

2008-07-25T13:56:00.004Z

discuss.

barry chuckle covers jay-z

2008-07-24T10:12:00.002Z

oh lord:

somebody once told me they'd put "scriptwriter for the chuckle brothers" on their CV. can anybody beat that?

another banger from the brothaz:

roots manuva in pun pile-up

2008-07-23T16:09:00.002Z

rick ross, exposed again?

the new roots manuva video is wicket. the beat isn't 'deep cover', but i like his delivery. as usual with roots, the order of play is eccentric englishness, with no mention of balling and certainly no gatting. it's not gully by any means, but i reckon it's on point. predictably, the contest is likely to end in a draw.

roots manuva - 'again and again'

here's another teaser from his new album,
slime and reason, 'buff nuff', a true homage to raekwon's 'ice cream' video:

and more on the sportz theme: 'witness (one hope)'

British albums of the year, 1979-2008

2008-07-15T14:16:00.004Z

Hello there! The internets are going ape for the latest viral-blogging think-piece phenomenon: listing your favourite album since the year of your birth. Well, not your birth; my birth.

I’m happy to help out, but I might as easily just list all the Nick Cave and Will Oldham albums, plus the same rap albums as everyone else. So here’s my favourite British albums. How’s about that, eh?

I was born in 1979, and Smashing Pumpkins wrote a song all about it:

The best British album of 1979 was nearly Judas Priest Unleashed in the East, but art-snobbery got the better of me. Anyway, a number of observations:

• The collapse of the British music industry in the late 90s was quite dramatic. A few smaller-scale bands kept things competitive – Mogwai, Arab Strap, Tindersticks and Gorky’s made it in; Hefner, Dawn of the Replicants, Four Tet and McLusky were all contenders. I’m sure the Brit blogrollers could think of more. But aside from breakthrough releases by the Libertines, Franz Ferdinand, the Streets, Dizzee Rascal and the C***plays (and waves of imitators), it’s been a pretty shapeless decade. I'm not crazy about Franz Ferdinand, The Life Pursuit or Curses, but the competition's pretty thin. Thoughts?

• I’m surprised My Bloody Valentine, Primal Scream, Radiohead and trip-hop and didn’t get a look-in. Are you?

• Perhaps I should invest in lots of Elvis Costello and PJ Harvey records to make myself cooler and more knowledgeable.

• 1994 was right difficult.

• I might have forgotten a few.

Here we go, one video per decade:

1979 Joy Division, Unknown Pleasures
1980 Dexys Midnight Runners, Searching for the Young Soul Rebels
1981 Iron Maiden, Killers
1982 Richard & Linda Thompson, Shoot Out The Lights
1983 David Bowie, Let’s Dance
1984 Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Welcome to the Pleasuredome

Frankie Goes to Hollywood - 'The Power of Love'

1985 Jesus & Mary Chain, Psychocandy
1986 The Smiths, The Queen is Dead
1987 Happy Mondays, Squirrel and G-Man Twenty Four Hour Party People Plastic Face Carnt Smile (White Out)
1988 The Pogues, If I Should Fall from Grace with God
1989 Vaselines, Dum Dum
1990 Happy Mondays, Pills, Thrills & Bellyaches
1991 Teenage Fanclub, Bandwaggonesque
1992 Spiritualized, Laser Guided Melodies
1993 Tindersticks, Tindersticks

Tindersticks - 'City Sickness'

1994 Suede, Dog Man Star
1995 Pulp, Different Class
1996 Manic Street Preachers, Everything Must Go
1997 Gorkys Zygotic Mynci, Barafundle
1998 Arab Strap, Philophobia
1999 Mogwai, Come On Die Young
2000 Belle & Sebastian, Fold Your Hands, Child, You Walk Like a Peasant
2001 Tindersticks, Can Our Love
2002 Libertines, Up the Bracket

Libertines, 'A Time for Heroes'

2003 Waterson : Carthy, Fishes and Fine Yellow Sand
2004 Franz Ferdinand, Franz Ferdinand
2005 Art Brut, Bang Bang Rock n Roll
2006 Belle & Sebastian, The Life Pursuit
2007 Future of the Left, Curses
2008 Aidan Moffat, I Can Hear Your Heart

disco apache

2008-07-11T12:56:00.004Z

Is this what Ira Hayes saw at the bottom of his whiskey bottle?

I hope Nas samples this on his next LP.