Saturday Live

It would be utterly remiss of me, irresponsible even, to do a long running series of bands playing live (on stage and on TV) without including what is possibly the finest television appearance of any group ever. 

In 1988 Tony Wilson’s late night series The Other Side Of Midnight had a performance by Happy Mondays, at that point a group most definitely on the way up. Bummed, their second album and released in autumn ’88, is a record unlike any other, a delirious Ecstatic stew with funk rhythms, off kilter guitar chords, big rubbery basslines, a dense Martin Hannett sound and Shaun Ryder’s unique approach to lyric writing, snatches of nursery rhymes, Mondays’ in jokes, Salford street slang, lines stolen from films and all kinds of improvised weirdness. On The Other Side Of Midnight Tony, their record label boss and biggest cheerleader, introduces them proclaiming his ‘profound devotion to the cause’, and in a bright white Granada TV studio, they lurch into Performance, looking like they just wandered in off the street and started playing.  

The music is not entirely indie, not entirely dance, something different- scratchy, strange, out of key. Shaun in big glasses and neatly centred- parted hair, shakes his maracas and spins his lines. Bez, the lightning rod, the talisman, the puppet with no strings, dances in a world completely of his own. During the instrumental break Shaun and Bez twist around each other, Bez circling, Shaun conducting. It’s something else. As the performance finishes, Mark Day’s chicken scratch guitar and PD’s organ wheezes its last, Shaun gives a sly side eye grin to the camera. He knows what’s going on. He knows what they’re on. Everyone else will catch up next year. 

I saw them live around this time at Liverpool University, 3rd March 1989, a life changing gig in many ways. It certainly changed my perceptions of what a gig could be like, not just a bunch of people staring at four men on stage and clapping after each song while the front few rows bumped into each other. The whole room danced. Shaun spent the gig seated on the drum riser, never even standing up, a victim of the night before possibly. Not that it mattered. His voice was loud enough and the focal point visually, through the clouds of dry ice, was Bez. 

After that I saw them quite often between 1989 and 1991, always good but never quite like they were that night. In March 1990, by that point several steps up the fame ladder, they played a big gig at GMex in Manchester. The setlist included some of their older songs (Tart Tart, Kuff Dam, 24 Hour Party People), some of Bummed (Lazyitis, Do It Better, Performance), some from the breakthrough Madchester Rave On EP (Clap Your Hands,  Rave On, Halleujah) and some from the forthcoming and with Pills ‘n’ Thrills And Bellyaches (the crossover hit Step On and God’s Cop). By this point they’d expanded to include Rowetta on backing vocals and on Lazyitis Karl Denver is borugh on stage to join Shaun on vox. They finished as they always should, with the riotous peak Mondays’ song Wrote For Luck.

The gig was filmed and broadcast on Granada and later available commercially on VHS.  There were many occasions on returning from a night out the tape got pushed into the video player and we spent a hour marvelling at Happy Mondays in full flight. 

Weatherall Remix Friday Thirteen

The afterglow of last Saturday night’s Spiritualized gig has had me diving back into their back catalogue all week, in the car and at home- 1997’s Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space mainly but also Pure Phase (from 1995), and the pairing of  Everything Was Beautiful and And Nothing Hurt (2018 and 2022). It seemed an obvious choice for today’s Weatherall Remix Friday to feature the 1998 Two Lone Swordsmen remix of Come Together (the encore at New Century Hall last week and an utterly thrilling blast of psychedelic rock, a lurching, furious hymn/ lament to serious drug addiction). The Two Lone Swordsmen remix goes somewhere very different indeed. 

Come Together (Two Lone Swordsmen Mix)

‘How big are your eyes?’ a dislocated voice enquires, as other indistinct voices and noises swim around. A taut detuned guitar line and what could be FXed horns appear. The voice goes on, to no one in particular, ‘What of the sun?’ Two minutes in there’s a crash of noise, some drums rumble and then a dirty, broken breakbeat kicks in. It goes on, a quite unsettling piece of music, a cacophony, squawks of sax and bursts of trumpet, bass and rums the only real constant, Jason’s expansive, symphonic, psychedelic rock spun into the outer edges by Weatherall and Tenniswood for fifteen minutes. Vinyl only, 1000 copies, embossed cover. 

No One But Me

There’s an enormous five disc edition of The Wicker Man out this week, a 50th anniversary celebration of the film. The box contains three versions of the film (Director’s Cut, Theatrical Cut and The Final Cut) along with all manner of extras- interviews, trailers, documentaries, commentaries and photographs. There’s more info at the BFI shop. The final disc is a CD which has grown from a Katy J Pearson cover of Willow’s Song which was on her Sound Of The Morning album. Willow’s Song is from the film and supposedly sung by Britt Eckland, played by the band Magnet (Britt apparently struggled to hold a tune even when equipped with a bucket and Willow’s Song was actually sung by Rachel Verney. Or possibly Annie Ross). Written by composer Paul Giovanni, Willow’s Song is haunted 1973 psychedelic folk, genuinely beautiful, a moment of calm with a darkness residing inside it too. 

Katy J Pearson’s cover is psychedelic/ motorik, a krauty four four beat kicking up and echo laden guitar. As well as Willow’s Song the box contains several other songs from the film covered by Katy. 

The CD also contains a pair of new versions of Katy’s Willow’s Song, one a far more folky cover done with alt- folk group Broadside Hacks, the acoustic guitars and folk arrangement transporting it back to Summerisle in 1973 with visions of Edward Woodward, pagan rituals and Britt. 

The other is a seven minute remix by Richard Norris, a slowed down dub folk remix with long trumpet notes and deep bass. Katy’s voice eventually glides in on top, floating over the dubness. Richard’s recent immersion into dub sounds and production as seen in his new Oracle Sound label, is paying off massively with this remix, a track crying out for a vinyl release. 

Credit where it is due- earlier this week Khayem featured the Richard Norris remix over at Dubhed as part of a 2023 mix he put together, marking the slow fade from summer to autumn. All three versions of Katy J Pearson’s cover have the shiver of autumn about them, the dusk falling sooner and the mornings cooler and mistier even if the trees are still full of green leaves. 

Back at the tail end of 2021 Sean Johnston put Hardway Bros aside for a while and released a cover of Willow’s Song as The Summerisle Trio, a collective formed with Duncan Gray and singer Sarah Rebecca (later expanded to The Summerisle Six for the This Is Something 12″). Willow’s Song was only available as 7″ vinyl on Golden Lion Sounds, backed with The Emperor Machine’s chunky self explanatory dancefloor monster Dance Your Tit Out. The Summerisle Trio’s cover is less folky than Katy’s cover, the drum machine and synths casting an electronic shimmer behind the vocal. You can listen to it here. 

More Dreaming The Dream

In August I wrote about Richard Sen’s compilation album Dream The Dream, a ten track collection of UK ambient techno/ progressive house/ tribal house/ breakbeat. The labels don’t really matter too much- the music’s what matters and it’s a brilliant snapshot of early 90s underground dance music, spaced out sci fi sounds, thumping drums, glassy synths, trance rhythms, music that is the result of a revolution taking place and full of wide eyed wonder at what new technology can do. Richard Sen has remixed three of the tracks from the album and they’re out as an EP, available digitally at Bandcamp. All three are keepers. Unable to remix using the individual stems, Richard sampled various parts of audio and then added his own synths and drum parts, keeping the spirit of the original track but with his own essence added.  

The first is UVX’s Elevator, a ten minute remix with pounding drums, bleepy synths, whirly FX and ghostly backing vox, a remix that is both moody and euphoric. 

The second track is Sen’s remix of Bandulu’s Amaranth- Love Lies Bleeding, eight minutes of dark ambient techno fun, an insistent throbbing synthline, propulsive drums, rattling snares and lasers. 

The third is the hardest, built on a punishing kick drum and massive wigged out topline- Mind Over Rhythm’s Kubital Footstorm, the sort of thing that causes crowds to lose their collective minds. 

Burning Groove

Everyone loves a cover version, don’t they? In 1987 Mike Watt, suffering from depression in the aftermath of fellow Minuteman D. Boon’s death, pitched up in New York and stayed with Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore for a while, playing bass on some of the sessions that would become the EVOL album. To try to get Watt active and enthusiastic about music again they hatched a plan that become Sonic Youth offshoot Ciccone Youth. Watt covered Madonna’s Burning Up (as Burnin’ Up) playing all the instruments (except for a Gregg Ginn guitar solo). Watt’s cover is rough and ready, fuzzy and lo fi, a thing of beauty in many ways. 

Madonna’s original dates from 1983, early 80s New York dance pop that has buckets of charm and some key Madonna tropes already well in place.

Burning Up

The sessions Watt played with Sonic Youth resulted in this cover of Madonna’s 1985 smash Into The Groove.

Into The Groove(Y)

Like Watt’s cover it’s lo fi and sounds made for ghetto blasters and C90 cassettes, with grungy bass, a hissing drum machine and handclaps and Thurston’s ultra- drawled vocal. When playing in the studio Sonic Youth would play the original version through one of the channels and fade it into and out of their own version. Yes, I’d love to hear a recording of that too. In the meantime here’s Madonna’s Desperately Seeking Susan associated single. if you get both playing at the same time on your computer you might be able to recreate Sonic Youth’s experiment. 

Into The Groove

When Ciccone Youth’s album The Whitey Album came out in 1988, a few months after their landmark Daydream Nation, many people assumed they were taking the piss or covering Madonna ironically. Thurston says this was most definitely not the case, that they loved the song, danced to it in NY clubs and were paying tribute to the woman who’d played in two No Wave bands, including one (spinal Root Gang) that eventually transformed into Swans. Sonic Youth loved that someone from their downtown scene had broken out and become huge. 

The Whitey Album probably overdoes it, fifty minutes when it could have been a really good twenty minute EP but Sonic/ Ciccone Youth were into sprawling records in 1988. The album includes the track Two Cool Rock Chicks Listening to Neu, a track with J Mascis on guitar and the first time I was aware of Neu’s existence and Ciccone’s cover of Robert Palmer’s Addicted To Love, a cover with a vocal recorded by Kim in a karaoke booth and the video filmed with her lip syncing, looking cool as fuck in cut off jeans, while footage of the Vietnam War is projected behind her. 

Bizarrely, Robert Palmer had already crossed over into the US 80s indie- punk scene with his cover version of Husker Du’s New Day Rising, played live at San Diego University Amphitheatre in 1987.  

Those Tracks Of Time

Towards the end of Saturday’s Spiritualized gig at Manchester’s New Century Hall, the ceiling a mass of coloured lightbulbs and 1960s modernist moulding, the lights from the stage bouncing off the enormous mirrorball and the word Bar illuminated, the sold out venue’s crowd were caught between staring at what was going on on stage and looking around the room at the lightshow. One of those moments where you realise you’re watching something special take place. 

I haven’t seen Spiritualized play live for a long time. The current line up has Jason seated at the right hand side of the stage, Fender Jazzmaster in his lap and shades worn all night. Next to him three backing singers, the drummer, bassist, two guitarists and the keyboards/ organ/ synth/ pedal steel player whose contributions underpin a lot of what happens tonight. Most of the songs played are from the last two albums, 2018’s And Nothing Hurt and last year’s Everything Was Beautiful, a pair of albums that were recorded at the same time and released apart. There are long songs, songs stretching out for seven and more, gradually building, the instruments coming in in layers, reaching huge crescendos. There are moments of hushed, fragile beauty, Jason’s weary voice sighing and quiet as pedal steel and bass surround him. At one point towards the end, for several minutes of intro, the loudest sound any of the nine musicians onstage are making is the synchronised fingersnaps of the three backing vocalists, the almost ambient backdrop punctuated at the end of each bar with a crisp click. 

There are moments of loud, three guitar psychedelic/ showgaze rock, an explosive sound filling the room. The second song tonight, She Kissed Me (And It Felt Like A Hit), is a lurching blast of garage rock. Let It Bleed (Song For Iggy) was full on, Detroit rock transformed by the nine piece band. Jason deals in the classic lineage of underground rock, the sounds, the chords and the lyrics of those bands and songs. At times Spiritualized can play like a very well polished garage, expansive garage band or bar band. At times, when the sounds are swelling and all the musicians are all playing in unison, it’s like an amped up Elvis in Vegas band, Jason’s voice the human, vulnerable element at the centre as he whispers and croons about souls on fire, the best thing you never had, being your man and shining lights. 

Always Together With You, currently sound tracking a national lottery advert, is a highlight. The thumping, gliding groove and triple guitar attack of Here It Comes (The Road ) Let’s Go is countered by the spectral beauty of Sailing On Through, both songs showing Jason’s four decade career of blending garage rock and The Velvet Underground with country, gospel and blues didn’t necessarily peak with 1997’s Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space. The Morning After, from And Nothing Hurt, opens with Velvets guitar, bumping driving bass and Jason’s lines about Janey and her problem with the modern world, 1969 Lou Reed transported to 2023. It catches me unawares briefly, the instruments dropping out as Jason sings the line, ‘Every mother wants to die before her children do’, making me draw a sharp intake of breath. The band re- enter and plough on, everyone getting louder, the rhythm faster and then multiple strobe lights go off for, bright white lights against black space. 

The Morning After

The set finishes with Sailing On Through, a short, desperate and delicate song. Jason applauds us and mutters the only words he says to us all night, ‘thank you’, twice. After a few minutes they return for So Long You Pretty Thing and then Come Together. Come Together is everything about them turned up to the max, a song that grinds into gear, three guitars sounding like thirty, and Jason singing about heroin addiction, Little Johnny, all fucked up, dulling pain and killing joy. It is immense, a garage rock song that sounds the size of a continent, the backing singers piling in on the chorus, ‘come on, come together’. Exhilarating, powerful and transcendent music, Spiritualized at the limits. 

Come Together (Live) 

Forty Minutes Of Tracey Thorn

A January 1995 episode of Top Of The Pops came up on the repeats on BBC4 recently including this performance of Protection, Tracey Thorn and Massive Attack in imperious form. Protection is one of the 90s best songs, a genuine jaw dropper on first and subsequent listens and a song its impossible to turn off once it starts. Tracey’s voice is perfect for the song, her singing a perfect blend of strength and hurt and her lyrics, switching the gender around mid- song, spin the song around. Protection, the album, came out in  September1994. Following up Blue Lines was never going to be easy but Protection mainly manages it with the title track and others- Karmacoma, Sly, Better Things, Three and Spying Glass, some of their best songs. The cover of Light my Fire less so maybe. But Protection is the towering achievement, a song that even mid- 90s Top Of The Pops can’t ruin. 

Tracey’s songs and recordings outside Everything But The Girl, both solo and with other people, are many and various. I thought, having listened to Protection a few times and then heading to the Andrew Weatherall remix of Tracey’s Sister from 2018, that a Tracey Thorn solo/ collaboration mix might work. And it does. 

Forty Minutes Of Tracey Thorn

• Protection (Brian Eno Remix)
• Raise The Roof (Beyond The Wizard’s Sleeve Remix)
• Sister
• Sister (Andrew Weatherall Remix)
• Moving Dub
• Night Time

Protection came out in 1995, one of the singles/ songs of the 90s. The 12″ came with this Brian Eno remix, a ten minute ambient affair. It had already been the lead song on the album Protection, released in 1994 and an obvious choice for a single. 

Raise The Roof was a 2007 Tracey Thorn single, and on her solo album Out Of The Woods. Beyond The Wizard’s Sleeve, Richard Norris and Erol Alkan’s psyche outfit, twist it into new shapes and spaces.

Sister was the lead single from Tracey’s 2018 album Record, a song with Corinne Bailey Ray and Warpaint’s Stella Mozgawa on board. Tracey sings the line ‘And I fight like a girl’ and makes it sound like the toughest, most menacing line she’s ever sung. Andrew Weatherall ‘s remix (and the dub version too) are ten minutes of late period Weatherall brilliance, chuggy, dubby remix splendour. 

Moving Dub is from No Protection, the Mad Professor dub version of Massive Attack’s Protection. Moving Dub, with Tracey on vocals, is Better Things sent through the dub blender. 

Night Time is a cover of a song by The Xx, released as a standalone solo EP in 2011. It has husband Ben Watt on guitar. The Xx asked Tracey to cover it for a compilation of covers of their songs by their favourite artists they were planning. It never happened except for Tracey’s cover. Drums, programming and production were courtesy of Ewan Pearson. 

Saturday Live

Lost Village is a small festival in the woods in wildest Lincolnshire. Four Tet played there this summer, as he has done before. He’s been playing enormodomes in the US recently along with Skrillex and Fred Again, which didn’t look like it was up my alley at all, gigantic crowds and DJ sets with huge drops and rebuilds. His set at Lost Village though is a different animal, still full of crowd pleasing moments but on a much smaller, more intimate scale. The full two hours is at Soundcloud, freshly uploaded a week ago and a lovely way to spend a couple of hours, the ebb and flow of tracks and FX, rhythms and sounds constantly being tinkered with, the cutting between and layering tracks over each other, the long transitions and segues, the music always moving forwards. The appearance of LFO, early 90s bleep techno at its best at forty minutes is a superbly worked moment. 

Earlier this year Four Tet released a single track called Three Drums, eight minutes of classic Keiran Hebden. It starts in a fairly non- descript way, a slow beat and hissing hi hats and washes of synth but as it unfolds it takes on all kinds of new sounds and shapes, the synths becoming a wall of colours, stopping and starting again- his DJ set above in miniature. Really beguiling stuff. 

Three Drums

Fluffy Inside

I have to say, I expected more from utopia. It always seemed like it would be better than this. 

I missed this album when it came out in July and haven’t caught up with it until recently but it’s yet another hit from the run of great releases from Exeter’s Mighty Force label this year- KAMS, M- Paths, David Harrow and AP Organism have all lit up 2023, following last year’s Long Range Desert Group, Golden Donna and Boxheater Jackson albums. Fluffy Inside is the work of Paul Alexander and this album, Nylon Corners, is a fully realised ten track acid masterwork, the 303 and analogue synths building hypnotic, endlessly rewarding tracks. There are burbling basslines and intricate spiralling toplines, bleeps and waves of atmosphere, cavernous space and insistent floorfillers. The album is at Bandcamp, available digitally and on CD. All ten tracks are worth your time and attention- try these two.

Opening track Initial Pattern starts out in deep space, a bassline from the outer reaches cutting through the bed of FX. An acid squiggle works its way forwards, gathering steam. Whooshes shoot in from the edges. The sounds warp and weave, morphing slowly around each other. 

Over The Shoulder is a seven minute trip, the thump of a kick drum and hisses of percussion joined by the bassline, everything picking up pace and pushing onwards. A ringing synth sound nags away, fading in and out. Insistent acid techno. 

More Bands In Places They Shouldn’t Be: A Vinyl Villain Guest Edition

I spent last Thursday evening in the company of JC, the man behind the long running, standard setting blog The Vinyl Villain. He’d travelled down from Glasgow overnight and we met for a few drinks and a catch up taking in two legendary Manchester pubs- The Briton’s Protection (grade II listed, serving beer since 1806- the year not the time- with a mural of the Peterloo Massacre down one wall) and The City Arms (a pre- Hacienda haunt for many back in the day, situated just across the road from Fac51). Earlier this week JC sent this to me. A few weeks ago I started an irregular series of Bands In Places They Shouldn’t Be including Echo And The Bunnymen on Wogan, Prefab Sprout at Alton Towers, Ice T on The Late Show and Aztec Camera on Pebble Mill. I’ve got a few ideas lined up for further editions in the series but in the meantime JC has stepped in with a Bands In Places They Shouldn’t Be Scottish Edition. Without further ado, then, over to JC…

I was quite tickled by Adam’s previous posts in which he dug out some classic video clips of performances or appearances in the most unlikely of places.  So much so, that I’ve come up with a few more, all of which feature singers/bands from Scotland.

First up are Aztec Camera and a rendition of Walk Out ToWinter that was broadcast on Switch, a series aired on Channel 4 between March and September 1983.  It basically took over the Friday evening slot that had been occupied by The Tube, starting one week after the end of the first series and ending one week before the second series began.

Look closely and you’ll see that the normally immaculate Roddy Frame and his bandmates are wearing identical and hideous tracksuits.  That’s because the footage was from the afternoon rehearsals when they did their bit to help the camera operators and lighting technicians do their thing, returning later on for the actual performance that was broadcast.  Only thing is, the band decided not to perform the new single and thus leaving the record label a tad upset. Which is why, no doubt after much pleading with the producers of Switch, this footage was shown a few weeks later. 

Back in the days when the BBC actually were half-decent at putting out music shows, they came up with the idea of a 24-hour broadcast across BBC 2 and Radio 1, which was given the imaginary title of Rock Around The Clock.  I think there may actually have been a couple of these, with the shows being a blend of live performances from concert venues, studio performances, interviews, videos and specially commissioned film clips.   It also saw musicians dropping in for chats, as was the case when Edwyn Collins, Paul Quinn and Zeke Manyika were interviewed, from recollection around 1am, and it’s fair to say they were up for having a bit of fun.

I’ll divert for a few minutes, as the same show also had Billy Bragg and Echo & The Bunnymen in the studio at an even later hour.  They teamed up for an unforgettable cover of a Velvet Underground number.

Turning now to the first band ever to play at the Scottish Exhibition Centre, the cavernous venue on the banks of the River Clyde to which all the big names would flock after the legendary Glasgow Apollo was closed down and demolished.  History records that UB40 were the first to play in what became known as Hall 4 in 1985, but the truth of the matter is that a little-known local act called Snakes of Shake were the first as evidenced by this clip which went out on The Tube in 1984:-

OK….the building was still under construction, but let’s not split hairs.

That clip was part of a special on Scottish music that was broadcast by The Tube.  You’ll have to bear with me on the next one as I can’t find a segment where it’s just the song.  

It’s a seven-minute piece of film, in which presenter Leslie Ash turns up on a very wintry day in Dundee for a chat down in the dockside area with Billy Mackenzie.  The interview takes place on what appears to be a tug boat, while Billy then mimes outrageously to the Associates song ‘Waiting For The Loveboat’ on board the HMS Unicorn, a 200-year old frigate that operates as a museum/visitor attraction in Dundee.  The music begins around 4 mins and 24 seconds in.

You’ll have spotted by now that many of these clips are courtesy of the hard work of an individual who goes by the name of ScottishTeeVe who has taken hundreds of hours to take his VHS etc recordings and put them up on YouTube for our enjoyment.  All the clips thus far, I also have on dozens of different videotapes that are in boxes in a cupboard beneath the stairs, but I just don’t know how to now put them in places where they can be shared and enjoyed more widely.

I’ll finish off with a cheat.

It’s a clip that doesn’t feature anyone from Scotland, but it was filmed in Glasgow on 3 June 1990.

The location is Custom House Quay on the banks of the Clyde. It was part of ‘The Big Day’,  one of the centrepiece events in a year-long set of festivities to celebrate Glasgow being designated as the European City of Culture.  An all-day music festival that was free of charge across various locations, with the big-name acts performing on stages at the main civic square or in the largest of our inner-city parks.  Some more niche acts were put on at Custom House Quay, one of whom was Billy Bragg.  He didn’t let on that he was going to be joined for part of his set by some friends from America:-

You can see that the location is full to capacity, with maybe a couple of hundred folk sitting down and maybe as many again standing up at street level.  No mobile phones, so no way of letting anyone know that Michael Stipe and Natalie Merchant were singing their hearts out.  I don’t have this clip on video, for the simple reason that I was out on the streets that day, among what was estimated to be a crowd of 250,000.  Nor did I see it on the day…..I was half-a-mile away enjoying the one stage where the music was quite eclectic, watching the likes of Aswad, Nanci Griffith and Les Negresses Vertes put on great shows.  It wasn’t until the next day, reading the newspapers, did I learn about the Custom House Quay happening.  The performance has become the Glasgow equivalent of the Sex Pistols at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester in 1976 with thousands claiming to have been there.

Massive thanks to JC for this time capsule, a hugely enjoyable post.