In the wake of my Kylie ICA for The Vinyl Villain reader Tom W suggested that I should have included the Brothers In Rhythm remix of Where Is The Feeling?, a 1994 single that flopped (it was at the time her least successful charting single, in the days when these things mattered). Reader Khayem then got int touch to send me this…
Brothers In Rhythm were a London based DJ/ production team who worked on much of the 1994 album including Confide In Me. On Where Is The Feeling? they abandoned all restraint and went for a thirteen minute epic. Opening with hi- hat and atmospherics and acoustic guitar the song builds slowly, strings added to the mix, some synths and eventually Kylie’s whispered voice after four minutes. The bassline throbs away and Kylie sings ‘any time you want me to/ I can make you happy’, over and over, the strings sweeping in and out. Things reach a peak at seven minutes with a dramatic breakdown, Kylie’s voice and thunder, and then the breakbeat re- enters and the second half gets under way. It’s a long trip and worth every minute, all the way through to the end, the fade out of the music and there’s just Kylie saying ‘Just tell me everything’s gonna be alright’.
Something else new today, the latest in a seemingly endless flow of new music. Lovely, rippling, hazy psychedelic guitar music, ideal for the dog days of summer, arriving in the form of a solo album from Andy Bell (Ride and Glok Andy Bell not the Erasure Andy Bell). Love Comes In Waves is the sort of song that used to be delivered on a weekly basis in the late 80s and early 90s. Dreamy, driving, shimmering, indie- rock, all fringes, guitar pedals, love beads and suede jackets.
In contrast I wrote a post about Kylie (Minogue not Kardashian but I hope that goes without saying) for The Vinyl Villain, an addition to his long running ICA series. Ten songs plus four bonus tracks. It was posted yesterday. You can read it here.
Johnny Marr posted this photograph on his Twitter account yesterday with the caption Kylie Fucking Minogue. It got me thinking that I would definitely pay good money for an Imaginary Collaboration Album, Marr and Minogue covering songs from their respective back catalogues. Johnny and his current band with Kylie singing How Soon Is Now and Last Night I Dreamt Somebody Loved Me, Kylie cooing her way through Getting Away With It, The Beat(en) Generation and Still Feel The Rain by Stex and in return Johnny blazing his way through Can’t Get You Out Of My Head, finding a new slinky guitar version of All The Lovers and a jangle version of I Should Be So Lucky. Come on, make it happen.
Johnny Mar’s new solo album came out yesterday to uniformly good reviews. I’m not getting it until tomorrow (Father’s Day innit). This single came out a month ago and sounds like a song he meant to record with his most famous band but never got around to until now.
In 1994 Kylie went for some credibility- not that she needed it, everyone loved Kylie anyway- but she was fed up with feeling like a puppet in the SAW production line. Brothers In Rhythm were on board to provide some dance productions skills and she had signed to DeConstruction (then a pretty hip dance label). Confide In Me is a slow burner, opening with violin and piano. Sweeping Arabian strings and a didgeridoo join in with the indie-dance drums. Kylie does her thing.
I’ve posted this before but it’s worth a repost while I’m in Kylie territory, a Go Home Productions mash up of Kylie’s Slow and The Stone Roses’ Beggin’ You. Slow is a great, sultry pop song and was co-written by Emiliana Torrini, an Icelandic singer who has graced these pages before. It looks like The Stone Roses have called it a day again- the poor reception given to the two singles and Ian’s frustration with the others not wanting to do much work is one reason that was whispered about. Another is the ever present tension between Ian and Reni. To be frank, after the Etihad shows it looked done to me anyway. This mash up is good fun.
Ok, let’s do this. The internet consensus is that the new Stone Roses single, All For One, is dreadful and that includes the opinions of people I know whose taste counts for something in my eyes. The problems, in no particular order, are a) the lyrics b) the tune c) the guitar playing d) the drumming and (lack of) bass and e) the written for the football stadium nature of it. It arrived like Roses things do with a sense of event, fanfare and expectation. It was the first time I’ve listened to Radio 1 for I don’t know how long. They’re on a hiding to nothing really, the weight of expectation, the gap, the silence since the re-union gigs, all mean that almost whatever they put out would be not enough.
But still, a) the lyrics- yes, dreadful, completely. The Dogtanian theme tune. If they’re an attempt at an early 90s positivity, power-to-the-people style vibe, they’ve missed the mark. The buckets of reverb on Ian’s multi-tracked vocals don’t distract from the fact that these are unfinished, half thoughts that needed to be reworked. b) the tune- I don’t mind it, it’s sticks. There’s something lurking in there. I’ve been trying to like it. c) Squire’s guitar playing is the highlight for me, and pretty restrained by Second Coming standards. The comparisons to Beady Eye and The Seahorses are a tad unfair- the riff, breakdown and re-entry at two minutes thirty something and solo are pretty good to these ears. d) The drumming- it does seem to lack Reni’s trademark fluidity, thumping away in a Ringo manner. The bass is submerged beneath everything else. e) It’s undoubtedly been written with football stadia in mind, all together now, sun going down, ‘in harmony, all one family’ as Ian sings, beery blokes with shaggy haircuts hugging and spilling their lager. Which is a shame- if they’ve started writing for their perceived audience then they have got a problem. Because if you take the feedback fade in, the riff, the solo, the phased sections and remix them, pull the FX forward and drop the words further back, make it more experimental and psychedelic, rather than something to be bawled back at you by 75, 000 people, then you’ve got something that picks up where they left off at some point two and a half decades ago. Not a single maybe but a song. And this is the real issue with it- it does sound, as people have said, like a song from a mid-90s Britpop compilation rather than the headspinning, sweet rush of the psyche-pop Roses of Don’t Stop or Elephant Stone or the fluid dance influenced Roses of Fool’s Gold or Begging You or the lighter than air Roses of Waterfall or This Is The One. They’ve mistaken muscle for swagger, volume for presence.
Their recorded legacy (such as it is and they’re in danger of pissing it away) rests on the eleven songs on the debut lp, the Elephant Stone and Sally Cinnamon singles, a clutch of B-sides from the album sessions (Standing Here, Going Down, Mersey Paradise, Where Angels Play) and the shimmering, mutant funk of Fool’s Gold. What they had in ’89 was a sound that managed to be progressive- it was 60s influenced but it was moving forward. Those songs weren’t written and recorded to be played in stadia- they were just written and recorded. They’ve become a stadium band since then- even in 1995 they were playing halls like the Apollo not arenas. If All For One was written in a shared flat in Chorlton and performed at a polytechnic student union building with a low stage and ceiling it would be a totally different song. The massiveness of those gigs three years ago and the groups growing reputation with the now grown up children of the original fans has totally altered their approach- on the basis of this song. There’s a chance that the album may be better, more nuanced and varied. The other problem here is that the music All For One harks back to is a debased currency- mid 90s, Dadrock. No one wants that- except I suppose a large proportion of the 150, 000 people who bought tickets for the shows this summer. I think they need to show that they’ve moved on, that the progressive nature that led them from Sally Cinnamon to Fool’s Gold is still there and that the lightness of touch they had that characterises their best songs is not lost. Instead they’re aiming for back row, half a mile form the stage
For the record then, and I reserve the right to change my mind whenever I feel like it- I don’t think All For One is dreadful. But it’s not great either. It’s alright- I can almost quite like it. But if it wasn’t them, I wouldn’t listen to it more than once. Yet here we are, loads of us, talking about it.
Two further things- in the summer of 1990 we waited ages for the new Roses single. It was delayed, the cover art had to be redone, the release date kept changing. Then it came out, One Love, the follow up to Fool’s Gold, a band at the peak of their powers and the height of their notoriety, and …. it was a bit of a let down. A decent tune, a shuffly drumbeat, early 90s positivity and power-to-the-people lyrics, but falling short. That was the moment their forward momentum stalled. John Squire said later he didn’t like the song, that it felt like they were selling something for someone. Sound familiar?
I’ve written about The Second Coming before, a flawed, overcooked, guitar rock album with a handful of genuine thrills. I’ve long thought that if you could get hold of the mastertapes and had the technical skills, you could make a really interesting version- a long, drawn out twenty or twenty-five minute single track, an Orb style excursion, an Amorphous Androgynous psychedelic mix. Take the ambient, club influenced intro to Breaking Into Heaven and it’s burst into menace, the shimmering shards of Ten Storey Love Song, fade into and out of the campfire acoustic guitars of Tightrope and the wide eyed Your Star Will Shine, drop the vox in and out dub stylee, break down into Mani’s bass and Reni’s drums from Daybreak or Straight To The Man and then build up into Begging You. That, in my head, is where Don’t Stop, Waterfall, Shoot You Down, the backwards tapes experiments of some of those early B-sides, Fool’s Gold and Something’s Burning were heading. A headtrip. And that’s what All For One and whatever comes next should be.
How on earth have I got this much text out of three minutes thirty seven seconds of disappointment? Come on chaps, dig a little deeper and give us a little bit of something else.
And as a final thing, a few weeks back I saw this and it makes me smile…
I used to love The Face. Between the late 80s and early 00s I bought almost every copy (and many of them are in the loft, awaiting a good sifting through). Yes, it was silly, pretentious, over-the-top, often very London-centric, and over-styled. But it was also done well, trend setting, at times laugh-out-loud funny, with some really good writers, totally hit the spot at times (and completely missed the target other times), covered issuesas well as music and fashion, and its front cover felt like an event- in short essential monthly reading, a frippery but worth it.
Above, the Madchester issue, in which Nick Kent made up quotes various interviewees allegedly said… and below Tricky and Martina Topley Bird
I bought a copy in summer 1987, a double sized, special edition, 100th issue I think. It tried to review the 80s- ‘whatever happens now’ it said, ‘the decade is shaped, nothing can alter the way it looks from here’. Arf. Over the next two years acid house swept the nation, the north rose again, the Berlin Wall came down, Communism collapsed….
The pleasure of reading old magazines is seeing where they got it right and where they got it very, very wrong; the bands, records, trends and styles they were sure were the next big thing and are now buried in the ‘where are they now?’ file. I mean, no disrespect to The Farm (who at times I quite like) and I know Groovy Train was a big hit but ‘How to succeed in the music business’?
Whatever it did though, The Face was rarely boring and for a while it did document our lives (or aspects of them).
Raving, Aliens, Vodka, Discos, Ibiza… it’s got the lot.
Mmmmmmm, Kylie.
Sorry, lost myself there for a moment…
Actually I don’t remember this 90s Futures Issue one at all.
I more or less stopped buying it with this issue below- I was clearly too old for it, our time together had passed and besides I began to feel they were laughing at me.
The High Numbers (early Who as I’m sure you know). I was going to post the magnificent Face Up by New order from Lowlife but it’s not on my hard drive and I can’t be arsed ripping it at the moment. Laziness. Sorry. This is good anyway.
The ever wondrous Ms Minogue covering St Etienne’s third single (and one of their best) Nothing Can Stop Us, on the B-side of 1994’s Confide In Me. Why? I don’t know why. Just enjoy it.
I once took my daughter to see an exhibition of Kylie’s stage and video clothing at the City Art Gallery. She was pretty nonplussed. The clothing was very small and strangely unfinished, including the dress from the video for Can’t Get You Out Of My Head (pictured above).
Bagging Area 