The Patrick Hamilton Appreciation Society discussion
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“I loved the Velvet Underground and the Carpenters�...Well, yes.
I like lists, but am in the vanguard of the counter-charge against catergorising records into strait-jacketed genres, and fight a constant war against genre purists in my RNR reviews. The guitar player in a band I depped with for a single prestige gig in 2000 - and with whom I ended up playing two gigs a week for the next seven years - was a bit stunned at my “well, there’s fuck all left then� response to his assertion “I don’t like *The Blues, The Beatles, or Motown�.
I never quite understood what ‘New Wave� was supposed to encapsulate, where the genre barbed wire and armed sentry post installations were situated, but this looks like an interesting list:
?
*slack-jawed gape and quizzical double-take when I asked him to attempt a definition - I really should behave myself. I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.
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Interesting, but I can’t help thinking that by calling it New Wave, there’d automatically have been a best-before date, after which, everything is merely retro [for the hipsters] or tired [for the rest of us]. You may wish to sit down for what’s coming, David -- I don’t like The Beatles or Motown either. Though, in my favour, you’ll never hear me slag the Blues. But then again, The Blues, as a term, is every bit as sprawlingly vague as the term “Rock.�
Mod
These days the attempt to categorise has resulted in incredibly niche genres... chillwave, indietronica, vaporwave, yacht rock (I swear all of these really exist) and so it goes endlessly on, each genre becoming ever more meaningless
I'm like you David. In my iTunes library I manage with...
Rock, Soul, Folk, Country, Blues, Rock n Roll, Punk, Glam, Dance, Pop, Classical, Ambient, Easy Listening, Jazz, Soundtrack
Even that feels far too many but it works for me. Sort of.
Mark wrote: "I don’t like The Beatles or Motown"
Extraordinary
Not even one song by The Beatles?
No rush of excitement when you hear Paperback Writer, or a nod of appreciation for the psych majesty of Tommorow Never Knows, or the bucolic beauty of Blackbird?
Or any song on the Motown label?
No love for Levi Stubbs voice? The thrill of Standing In The Shadows of Love? Or the psych-soul beauty of Papa Was a Rolling Stone?
Are you sure Mark?
The world has just shifted on its axis
You’re right on the chimeric difficulties in pinning down amorphous concepts such as ‘rock� and ‘blues�, Mark, but that’s where the categorists live, so that they can order the artistic part of their lives in the same way as their kitchen spice racks are ordered. I’m uncomfortable with it, although my music collection is alohabetically ordered. Otherwise anarchy would prevail. I respect your views on The Beatles and Motown. Each to their own, and all that. Just the sound of Ringo’s opening tom-tom salvo on She Loves You, though, and it’s 1963 and I get the same adrenalin rush nearly 60 years on. The opening guitar riff of Pretty Vacant has a similar, if less nostalgic effect. One of these days Alexa is going to ask “Do you NEVER tire of Rubber Soul� and “Our copy of What’s Going On is getting very worn, you know�. In 1963 The Beatles spelt liberation from the needletime-limited blandness of the BBC Light Programme, and I was too young to have access to the pirate stations. My pal Jim, a bit older, said that nothing had ever been so life-changing as hearing Elvis. I think we all have our revolutionaries, et vive la difference.
It’s not so much that I dislike The Beatles, more like I’ve never been able to connect with anything to like in their music. It didn’t help matters to have my first musical love be the bombast of The Who, and my second being the dangerous swagger of the Stones -- bombast, danger and swagger are, if not completely absent, then imperceptible [to me, at least] in the Beatles catalogue.Growing up, I was always baffled as to why any word against The Beatles was sacrilege, while it was perfectly acceptable -- and somewhat expected -- to have a go at Elvis Presley, whom I was always a big fan of.
As for Motown, my distaste stems entirely from the fact that they must have been licensing their catalogue very cheaply during the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, because you couldn’t chuck a baseball without hitting a tv commercial or film that was soundtracked with Motown songs. The massive oversaturation left me feeling like I never needed to seek those sounds out ever again.
As for David’s point about The Blues vs The Categorists, I know what you’re saying and, for the most part I totally agree. But the term The Blues encompasses such a wide range of music that I can’t help but categorise. I’ve never quite been able to connect with Delta Blues, preferring instead Howlin� Wolf or the Jump Blues guys like Wynonie Harris or Big Joe Turner.
Are you hep to the 1930s recordings of Kokomo Arnold or Casey Bill Weldon? Superb bottleneck stuff. I’ve taken the liberty of uploading a sampling for you, if you’re interested. The link expires in one week...
Thanks Mark. I'm familiar with Kokomo Arnold, but not with Casey Bill. I've been listening to a lot of Scrapper Blackwell recently, and will listen with interest.I'm a Chicago/Detroit enthusiast myself. I spent far too much of an almost non-existent income 40 years ago on Charly's R&B series, and on heavy duty Chess Masters compilations of the big hitters of the label. South Michigan Avenue was first on my planned itinerary in the Windy City in May until lockdown intervened. I still reach for Elmore James and Jimmy Reed as go-to's when nothing else will do - the aural equivalent of comfort food. With fries and sweet smoky sauce.
And despite its rather Einsteinish overtures, Muddy's She's Nineteen Years Old is probably my favourite three minutes of Windy City excellence - it's got everything that the Delta and Chicago combined to bring to life.
The Blues didn't only have one Baby which They Named Rock n Roll, they were blessed with many children. I try to use that self-derived cliche very sparingly in reviews, but at the moment am preparing appraisals of the latest Kat Riggins release (electric blues, terrific soul singing), Sandra Bouza's Falling Away From Me (a step-step-stepchild of the Blues parents verging on 'nu-soul'), and The Best of Rory Gallagher (guaranateed maximum stars), all of which will be in the mag's Blues review section.
Mod
Man, I bought so many Charly reissues back in the 1980s, which wasn’t cheap, given that they were imported into the states. Loads of Blues, but even more rockabilly and hillbilly boogie stuff.I've never made it to the old Chess studios, but if I ever find myself nearby, I’ll make it a priority. Just to stand in the spot where Bo Diddley did his thing... here’s hoping that once this whole CV19 headache is behind us, you manage to make it to Chicago and set foot on the hallowed ground!
Ah, Mr Ellas McDaniel. He’s a hero too, naturally. I’d even have allowed one of the kids to intone “You look like you bin whooped with the ugly stick� in my direction had we been able to pay due homage at Blues Central (North). His Chess Masters double album’s never far from the turntable. As my friend Graham once said, you could write a novel around:I walk 47 miles of barbed wire
I use a cobra snake for a necktie
I got a brand new house on the roadside
Made from rattlesnake hide
I got a brand new chimney made on top
Made out of a human skull
and I was delighted to introduce Who Do You Love? to an ex-colleague Arlene who claimed that she’d never been mentioned in a song.
Apologies to the yet-uninitiated...Who Do You Love?
Say Man.
Mod
Real talk
If anyone in the UK failed to attend Teddy Pendergrass: If You Don’t Know Me when it was on release in our cinemas last year, BBC2 is showing it at 9.45pm on Saturday. Philly soul was my mid-70s guilty pleasure when Motown had lost its soul and pop immediacy, and after Stax had been contractually torpedoed by Atlantic, just when I needed respite from the filthy grind of Humble Pie and Robin Trower’s bluesy flights of psychedelic fancy. The Bluenotes were the most soulful and sparkliest star in the Gamble and Huff glitter ball.
You know what you have to do.
Mod
Thanks for the tip
I will definitely watch this. I remember when the film came out but I never saw it.
By the by, this might be old news but I have only just discovered that Sky Arts is now on Freeview. It's a trove of great stuff. I'm currently watching a Marc Bolan doc I recorded on Friday night. There's also a Guy Garvey programme showing lots of punk and new wave clips - he seems to have access to the ITV footage so it's different from the TOTP/Whistle Test clips that crop up regularly on BBC.
My copy of 'Bubblerock Is Here To Stay' turned up yesterday from Cherry Red, and I’m presently working my way through the set. So far, as predicted, it’s a hell of a lot of fun (to varying degrees, as is usually the way of all things). Loads of fascinating ineptitude, which is always a plus, and nearly all of the tracks and bands are new to me.
Mod
I've had mine for about 10 days now and it's a pretty good hit rate. At least half is good and there's quite a few interesting tunes on there. Well worth the outlay.
My only gripe is that I’ve now joined the legions for whom the tiny text in cd booklets is far too small to read.
Mod
My weekly BBC Culture bulletin brings news to me of this, celebrating the very DNA of the blues. I think we have Netflix buried deep in the unexplored innards of our TV.“Chicago, 1927. Ma Rainey, the pioneering ‘Mother of the Blues�, is due to record a new album, but things go badly wrong due to a white manager who is exploiting her, and a trumpeter with ambitions of his own. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is adapted from the acclaimed play by August Wilson. The film version is produced by Denzel Washington, and it stars an almost unrecognisable Viola Davis as Rainey. But it will be remembered, above all else, as the last film Chadwick Boseman acted in before he died of cancer this summer. According to BBC Culture’s Caryn James, “Boseman deserves the awards buzz. While his delivery is fiery, it is not histrionic. It is piercing.� Meanwhile, Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian calls it a “detonation of pure acting firepower... ferociously intelligent andy violently focused, an opera of passion and pain�.
On Netflix from 18 Dec
I think this was the first Ma song I ever heard, offered in a folk club, longer ago than my birth certificate would suggest.
I saw the soundtrack listed somewhere, but wasn’t aware of the film... so, thanks for clearing that one up for me.Meanwhile, Julien Temple’s new documentary on Shane MacGowan is now streaming. I love the subject matter, but find Temple’s films to be a bit tedious in their one-tricky-pony-ness.
Thanks Mark. I’ll look that up. The Pogues were magnificent. My first awareness was a tiny piece in NME around 83, when the journo raised Shane’s hackles by mentioning Dexys� Too Rye-Ay excursion into Hiberniana. Accusations of soft-centred Irish sentimentality ensued. They were always fantastic value live - I was twice in their audience - and the ‘cowpunk� movement that developed in their wake was a brief but energetic delight. These guys even played in a local venue, where the chefs were preparing next day’s carvery lunch in the open kitchen behind them as they washboarded their way through their set.
Mod
I'm looking forward to both films very much
Ah, the Boothill Foot Tappers! I remember them from the gigs listings in the NME, and I think one of their tracks appeared on a compilation album that I had back then... maybe something on the Big Beat label? The figureheads of the stateside cowpunk movement were Jason & The Scorchers, whose gigs back then remain some of the finest I’ve ever seen.
Mod
The Boothill Foot Tappers were a splendid group and, as David suggests, were many of their cowpunk compadres.
I don’t think you really need to go much beyond their first 7-song e.p., Fervor [1983]. Nothing afterwards was anywhere near as masterful. Good, but not masterful. Their first proper lp, 1985’s Lost & Found, was quite good, but it’s diminishing returns thereafter... mainly because they fell under pressure from the label to sell, sell, sell, and it all turned a bit metal-influenced. Good, but not thrillingly great.Let me know if you want me to upload for you... will happily and swiftly do.
Mod
Also, from the same time, The Blasters were invincible. Their gigs were blinders, and much of that carried over onto their recordings. Again, their gigs in the early and mid 1980s were some of the best I’ve ever seen.Never cowpunk -- rather a perfect amalgamation of American roots music, from country blues to rockabilly and folk. Absolutely superb musicianship. They were sorta lumped in with The Stray Cats, which was completely unfair. The Blasters were infinitely more refined in their influences and presentation.
Here’s proof, in the form of their 1982 tv special, featuring guest appearances from Carl Perkins and Willie Dixon.
Less than two feet from my left is a stack of LPs, numbering fewer than a dozen. Among them is Fervor, in the good company of Green On Red’s No Free Lunch, The Long Ryders� State Of The Union, and a bit of an outlier, but of equal influence, Los Lobos’s Will The Wolf Survive. Those were days of aural luxury.
Those were indeed the days! The whole Paisley Underground think passed me by, but bands like The Blasters and The Scorchers and The Knitters thrilled the hell outta me!
Just saw Ace Records� announcement for this forthcoming release -- seems like a great concept for a compilation album, and some interesting content...Cafe Exil - New Adventures In European Music 1972-1980
"When David Bowie and Iggy Pop escaped LA to go Interrailing in the mid-70s, they heard a new European music that was largely devoid of Anglo-American rock influence: the German motorik sound, flashes of jazz, experimentation and electronica. In West Berlin, one of their favourite haunts was Kreuzberg’s Cafe Exil, a smoky hang-out for beats and intellectuals. This is its imaginary soundtrack.
I imagine like many an Ace compilation, the impetus for “Cafe Exil� came from a record-playing session. One Sunday afternoon Bob and I were pleasantly pulling out LPs. Everything we played had a mildly electronic and European feel, perhaps as an antidote to the dreaded and then still looming Brexit. The majority of records we spun were fairly extensive in length, largely instrumental and hailed from the mid to late 1970s, with a few just edging into the following decade. Over subsequent conversations, we began to imagine ourselves going back in time and enjoying a pan-European sojourn, soaking up the sounds and cultures of the rapidly shifting time.
David Bowie, of course, had done something similar, becoming a kind of cultural antenna as he sought to expand his horizons and open himself up to new influences. Though he had flown for the majority of his 1973 Ziggy Stardust tour schedule, after completing concerts in Japan, Bowie convinced his record label that he would require safe passage back to England by sea and land. Initially travelling from Yokohama to Nakhodka aboard the SS Felix Dzerzhinsky, Bowie travelled onwards with childhood friend and back-up singer Geoff MacCormack via the Trans-Siberian railway from Vladivostok to Moscow. The trip concluded with a stopover in Moscow, the witnessing of the May Day parade and a visit to the Kremlin and the GUM department store. A second Russian train trip occurred in April 1976 during the tour to promote Bowie’s “Station To Station�, this time in the company of his formidable assistant Coco Schwab, photographer Andrew Kent and Iggy Pop. Bowie and Iggy relocated to Berlin following the recording of Iggy’s “The Idiot�, abandoning bad finances, the trappings of Bowie’s stratospheric stardom, failing marriage and perilous cocaine addiction for an apartment in the relatively working-class Schöneberg district in West Berlin, which was then home to many of the city’s gay clubs. Living in Berlin from 1976-1979, Bowie was attracted both by the emerging Kosmische music and the cheap living and anonymity it afforded him.
So what then are some more of the actual parameters for the songs you are about to listen to? In attempting to conjure the musical mood in the period referred to above we wanted to try and imagine some of the sounds and musical textures that fed into them and then expanded out of them. To do this we set ourselves a timeframe of 1972-1980. We were originally going to choose only instrumental tracks with a strong electronic element but then took various deviations and detours as we tried to imagine ourselves speeding through strange European cities and landscapes, meeting in cafes and soaking up new sounds and visions. We wanted to try and capture a mood and tone rather than something entirely concrete (or concrète), so have drawn upon motorik, library music, progressive rock, Italian folk fusion and more. There is a balance that leans quite naturally towards German artists and the inclusion of a track by Eno that acknowledges both his role as a sonic alchemist and his ability to act as a conduit and conductor for all music that is dictated by mood but not constrained by boundaries. The whole exercise came together quite seamlessly, really, the only thing that Bob and I still haven’t agreed on is which of us is David and which of us is Iggy."
Mod
That does indeed look like an intriguing compilation and, as I only know the Eno track, very enticing too
I’m thinking that, at £11.50, it’s a worthy gamble for me to take. The only track that I’m already familiar with is the one from Michael Rother -- I’ve got most of his post-NEU! solo albums, and none disappoint in the slightest.
Mod
Mod
Only David Johansen left
I really enjoyed his memoir There’s No Bones in Ice Cream: Sylvain Sylvain’s Story of the New York Dolls
/review/show...
Never paid no mind whatsoever to the Butthole Surfers and, presumably, they never paid no mind to me. It was a simple arrangement, but it worked. Now, though, it seems like their guitar player, Paul Leary, has a new solo album out soon, and the lead-off single has knocked me sidewise. It sounds like a Lee Hazelwood song that Lee forgot to write and record. Probably best enjoyed without watching the utterly crap video, which only distracts from a very good song.If this hints at the general quality of the rest of the album, I'm in.
Sky Arts next Thursday (28 January) 1320-1415 - “Trailblazers: Pub Rock�.
Mod
Thanks David - first I'd heard of it
100% gonna be having a bit of that action
Another public service announcement.....
Stewart Lee has made a film with Rob Lloyd of The Nightingales/The Prefects fame called King Rocker which will be shown on Sky Arts at 9 pm on Sat 6th Feb 2021
Billy Sloan appraises Alex Harvey’s The Mafia Stole My Guitar:
Mod
I've never heard The Mafia Stole My Guitar - sounds as though I should be putting that right
I'm currently getting acquainted with the new album from Arab Strap aka Falkirk's finest - As Days Get Dark. I'm not any great fan but have to say first impressions are very positive and I'd say it's well worth a listen.
David wrote: "Billy Sloan appraises Alex Harvey’s The Mafia Stole My Guitar:"
Appraised correctly, in my opinion. I’ve got a lot of time for that album, which I have as part of the massive 14-disc The Last Of The Teenage Idols boxed set from 2016.
Mod
Just off a WhatsApp video call to my daughter in Toronto, and when I said that I’d send her the link to Billy’s article, she said that she wore her Alex t-shirt when she hopped round the lake and over the border to see a band in Cleveland Heights. The venue was the wonderfully-named Grog Shop, and she was approached by what seemed like half the crowd because of her display of Alex fandom. He’s got some sort of cult following in Cleveland, apparently.
Mod
Bands line SAHB & Mott found their stateside audiences in Cleveland, at the time. Not really sure why, but Clevelanders were very receptive to touring UK bands in the 1970s.
This came up when I was interrogating Spotify to put the Alex album on my list for this week. so it’ll be given a blast too. The concept of the podcast looks interesting. I’ll investigate.
From today's Herald...It Must Be Love: TV focus on Madness
THEY are known as the Nutty Boys and have enjoyed pop success since the 1970s. Now, a three-part television documentary will tell the story of how the band Madness became a household name.
Based on the biography of the same title, Before We Was We will explore the ska music pioneers� beginnings in the Camden Town scene of the late 70s, using original footage and interviews with band members.
Across a four-decade career, the band, led by frontman Graham “Suggs� Mcpherson, have scored 10 top 10 albums, 15 top 10 singles and won a series of awards including an Ivor Novello.
The documentary will be shown in 60-minute episodes and offer insight into the band’s rise to the top of the charts, pop fame and fortune .
Reflecting on his career, Suggs, 60, said: “I don’t remember ever thinking about whether it was going to last. You see this polished Madness that’s been going for years and people would think, ‘Course you knew�. But I didn’t have a clue. I wasn’t taking it the slightest bit serious.
“That’s why I got thrown out of the band at the start, because I just thought it was a laugh and just something to do � hanging out with pretty cool geezers.
“The idea I was ever going to make a career out of it was totally beyond my comprehension.�
Before We Was We: Madness By Madness will be broadcast on the US Studio AMC via BT TV in May.
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“Alexa, play songs by The Mighty Wah�, I commanded.
- Come Back (The Story of the Reds) �...and it’s hats off to Hatton�.
- Story of the Blues Pt 1.
- Story of the Blues Pts 1&2, right down to the backing singer’s “Bye!� at the end, after Pete’s masterly rallying peroration. I will always remember where I was when I heard the full version around December 82. Apologies to all other road users on the A93 in Aberdeenshire.