Warpaint returned with a new song last month although it isn’t properly out for a while yet. No Way Out (Redux) opens with some dreamy harmonies, picked guitars and a ton of reverb. When the bass and drums kick in at one minute twenty-something it really takes off, tougher and upfront, but still with that just-woken-up wooziness feeling they do so well. The vocals continue to build and interlock and the rhythm keeps on spiraling, round and round. Hypnotic. There’s a live version that is seven minutes plus so I’m hoping the full release with have that one on it because this is much too short.
Good video- nothing wrong with just watching a 12″ record revolving is there?
Timothy J Fairplay gets the e.p. title of the year (so far) award with this forthcoming 12″ release on Crimes Of The Future. Recording as Haunted Doorbell along with Matilda Tristam, Unconnected Thoughts On Jacking is four tracks of rave influenced electronic music, a swirling science fiction dream sequence with a drum machine. Snippets to listen to below.
Or just fifteen thousand people standing in a field?
I found this footage online, ten minutes of videotape from the massive Sunrise Energy rave in 1989. It’s a fascinating piece of social history, so many people dancing in an aircraft hanger and outdoors in broad daylight. The stars are the crowd- black and white, male and female, all of them dancing- all of them- a mass of colourful clothing and dry ice. At the end a couple of cars are on fire- no-one really seems to notice.
‘You want to call your Mother and say ”Mother, I can never come home because I seem to have left an important part of my brain somewhere, somewhere in a field in Hampshire.”
Away from the utopian dream of a new rave based way of life the two men largely responsible for Sunrise Energy were Tony Colston-Hayter and Paul Staines. Colston-Hayter was a young Tory entrepreneur and named in the papers as ‘Acid’s Mr Big’. He claims he was an anarcho-capitalist. The Shoom crowd say he was regarded as a Hooray Henry, a ‘loud dickhead and a laughing stock’. Last year he was jailed for five and a half years for masterminding the theft of £1.3 million from Barclays by hacking into bank accounts. Paul Staines is the unpleasant right-wing blogger Guido Fawkes. Nice one, top one, sorted.
I’ve been listening to Joy Division recently, not just the singles but Unknown Pleasures and Closer. I find I have to be in the right place, to be receptive, to listen to them. Closer especially. It’s difficult to listen to Closer and not dwell on the fact that, particularly with the lyrics, the man singing the songs killed himself in the few months between finishing recording it and it being released.
Both albums are masterpieces musically, a band punching its way out of punk, with the assistance and oversight of production genius Martin Hannett. But specifically I’ve been listening to Peter Hook’s basslines, which are in a class of their own. Entirely self-taught, he wrote more killer basslines than the rest of the post-punk bassists combined. Hooky borrowed and stole and then made something new. His look was cribbed from Paul Simonon’s extra long strap and his sound from seeing The Stranglers and then buying the same amp set up as Jean Jacques Burnel. The playing developed from his and Bernard’s discovery of how to play together. Unable to hear himself above Bernard’s riffing in the early days with poor equipment, he played the higher notes and gained a completely distinctive style. I think it also came from being self-taught and not having served any kind of apprenticeship in standard blues-rock bands. There are no walking basslines, no follow-the-guitarist-just-playing-the root-notes stuff. The basslines in many Joy Division songs are the songs, the lead instrument, the melody.
Digital is a thrilling descending and ascending three note riff. Isolation has a fast two note riff with two alternating high and low ones after the main phrase, set against Bernard’s toy synth and goes straight to heart of it, Closer’s most instant song. The bass notes to Disorder, the opener on Unknown Pleasures, set the tone of the whole record. Shadowplay’s bass riff is genuinely threatening, tense, menacing. A Means To An End is repetitive, circling heavy-disco before it grinds to an unsettling halt. Peter Hook- I salute you.
Tuesday brings three Johnny songs, none of which I own in any format and all suggested by friends in the comments boxes. Simon went for Lucille #1 by Prefab Sprout and Echorich concurred. It’s from that moment in the mid 80s when some of the indie heroes went all sophisticated and adult. This performance is from the Old Grey Whistle Test in 1985.
Very nice. I had the Steve McQueen album on cassette but never replaced it after the tape died out.
Johnny #2 is from Drew and his almost annual pilgrimage to see Stiff Little Fingers, usually at this time of year. Simon loves this one too. SLF do a rip-roaring cover of Bob Marley’s Johnny Was. This version from a 1999 tour is seven minutes long and causes punk pandemonium.
Thirdly, Ctel, chronicler of all things dance music related at Acid Ted, requested Motorhead or Hawkwind doing Lost Johnny. The internet is sharply divided into those who favour Motorhead’s fast and angry version and those who go for the earlier, trippier and heavier Hawkwind one. Out of the two I prefer Hawkwind’s stoner rock, distorted bass and reverb-laden vocals. Lemmy it should be noted played bass and sang on both.
Top Johnny in a Google search is Johnny Depp, as I said last week when I started this. I have no real strong opinion on him. He seems alright. His previous girlfriends include Winona Ryder, Kate Moss and Vanessa Paradis. Vanessa is best known here for her 1988 hit Joe Le Taxi and her gap toothed smile. And pictured above last year seems to have opted out of the aging process, despite smoking.
Fine Young Cannibals’ Johnny left home and headed for the big city which sadly didn’t live up to his expectations. The verses are Johnny’s (‘what is wrong in my life if I must get drunk every night?’). The chorus is his parents (‘we’re worried, won’t you come on home’). Pop songs in 1984 didn’t shy away from real life stuff and despite the uptempo pop-ska the song is defiantly gritty. The bouncy guitar and bass, piano riff and trumpet are very good and there’s a great little shift from the verse to the chorus. The guitar, bass and rubber legged dance moves were provided David Steele and Andy Cox (both formerly of The Beat, who recruited singer Roland Gift from a support band). Roland had one of the most distinctive voices and faces of the mid 80s and moved into films- Sammy And Rosie Get Laid sticks in my memory but I haven’t seen it for donkeys.
Johnny Appleseed is one of the highlights of Joe Strummer’s Mescaleros years (and his entire solo career too), a beautifully crafted song with a chugging guitar riff, acoustic and electric, and some great vocal/backing vocal combinations. Uplifting.
Johnny Appleseed was an American pioneer who travelled the west scattering apple seeds. Nurseries and orchards grew up in his wake. He has become a symbolic hero of conservation, kindness and generosity. Johnny was respected by the Native Americans because of his respect for all living things, including insects. Hence the line about bees in Joe’s song- ‘if you’re after getting the honey, don’t go killing all the bees’. Joe also brings in Martin Luther King and a Buick 49 and the question of whether there is a soul. We don’t know, he concludes.
At the end of Protex Blue on The Cash’s debut lp Mick Jones shouts out ‘Johnny, Johnny!’ Written by Mick before the band even formed Protex Blue is a homage to pub toilet condom vending machines, done and dusted in one minute and forty five seconds. Rubber Johnny.
On their second album, Give ‘Em Enough Rope, Joe Strummer gets his Johnny song in, the trad. arr update English Civil War. A song that refers to the rise of the National Front and the right-wing generally, Johnny is coming ‘by bus and underground’. Strummer always stressed it was a folk song, a version of a American Civil War song called When Johnny Comes Maching Home, sung by the soldiers of the south. On a US tour they tried a slowed down, acoustic take and got booed by the audience. While we’re here Give ‘Em Enough Rope is, I think, the worst/least good Clash album, with too many half baked songs, some silly posturing and an FM rock sheen added by Sandy Pearlman. Having said that, it’s also got Safe European Home and Stay Free, so it’s not all bad.
Here they perform live in 1979 on a yoof TV show called Alright Now and everyone seems to be having a really good time.
In between the first and second albums came the mighty White Man (In Hammersmith Palais) single. The b-side to their reggae influenced, state of the nation address was The Prisoner, a breathless, thrilling, careering three minutes romp with a wild, distorted guitar solo from Mick. The lyrics cram in two Johnny’s, both music related at the start of the second verse…
‘Johnny Too Bad meets Johnny Be Good in the Charring Cross Road’
Johnny Be Good is (obviously) from Chuck Berry’s song. Johnny Too Bad is from an obscure Jamaican rocksteady group The Slickers, released in 1971 and on the magnificent The Harder They Come soundtrack, a Clash favourite. Johnny Too Bad is a rude boy- ‘walking down the road with a pistol in your waist Johnny you’re too bad’. I’ve posted it before, a long time ago.
The rest of Mick’s lyrics on The Prisoner are hilarious (in a good way) and packed full of Clashery- Camden Town, Coronation Street, the Germans and the French jamming themselves down the tube to re-enact the Second World War, rude boys being rude, drug addiction and jumping the train to stardom. There’s a cracking live version in the Rude Boy film and also this breakneck, amphetamine fuelled performance in Munich in 1977 (along with Janie Jones and Garageland).
The Friday night series that (just about) refuses to die. Imelda May has a song about Johnny. Johnny got a boom boom. Have a good Friday night- the bar is open if you want a drink.
Johnny also showed his face in New Order’s epic 1987 song 1963. Having recorded one of their highest high points in True Faith, a song destined to put them into the charts, New Order put 1963 on the b-side in what must be one of the strongest singles of the 1980s. And so 1963 got a bit overlooked. It was released in its own right in 1995 and got a video too (with Jane Horrocks in it). As a purist I don’t quite count that release as a ‘proper’ New Order single. Although I like Jane Horrocks and the video.
In the song Bernard’s lyrics start out ‘It was January, 1963,when Johnny came home, with a gift for me’. Events take a turn for the worse. Soon enough Johnny changes from being ‘so very kind, so very nice’. He comes home with another wife and eventually Bernard sings’Johnny, don’t point that gun at me’ and a shooting occurs. Producer Stephen Hague has called the song ‘the only song about domestic violence you can dance too’. Bernard has suggested that the song is, like yesterday’s post, about John F Kennedy. Accordingly, in the song JFK arranges for a hitman to kill Jackie so that he can ‘do one with M. Monroe’. Lee Harvey Oswald shoots JFK by mistake, leading to Jack Ruby bumping off Oswald for doing such a bad job and causing Marilyn to commit suicide. Barney has his chronology askew here- Marilyn actually died a year earlier and JFK was shot in November ’63 not January. But then I’ve never been sure Bernard was being entirely reliable in this explanation of the song.
The 1995 version of 1963 was re-worked by Arthur Baker (and isn’t nearly as good as the magnificent 1987 version but I don’t have the original on the hard drive at the moment so you’ll have to put up with it).
Bagging Area 