Forty Five Minutes Of Tim Burgess

Tim Burgess is an instantly recognisable figure as frontman, singer and lyricist of The Charlatans, the young man with the pudding bowl haircut of Indian Rope and The Only One I Know who has weathered the fads, phases and storms of the music industry and life and who still looks barely a day older than he did back in 1990. Outside The Charlatans he’s written three books (including the brilliantly titled Tim Book Two), all three showing him to be a considered, thoughtful and witty writer. He has made six solo albums, from 2003’s countryfied I Believe to the synths and FXed sax of Same Language, Different Worlds with Peter Gordon, with songs written and recorded with Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner in between. He has a record label O Genesis which has put out solo albums by members of Factory Floor, by Martin Duffy and by The Membranes, among others. There is, it is fair to say, more to him than met the eye when he first shook his fringe with The Charlatans in January 1989. 

Today’s mix is a selection of Tim Burgess solo/ with others/ outside The Charlatans that starts out with some gloriously frazzled, hazy ambient drift and ends with some block rocking beats and industrial thump. 

Forty Five Minutes Of Tim Burgess

• Stoned Alone Again Or (Seahawks Remix)
• Tobacco Fields
• Another Version Of The Truth
• Hours (Tandy Love Remix)
• Begin (Carter Tutti Remix)
• The Economy II (Prince Fatty Remix)
• Life Is Sweet (Album Version)
• White (Factory Floor- Gabe Gurnsey Remix)

Stoned Alone Again Or was a 2012 one off 12″ single, remixed by Seahawks as a ten minute ambient epic, indie rock taken as far away from its roots as it can go. Seahawks are ambient/ Balearic duo Jon Tye and Pete Fowler, who have released umpteen albums and singles since 2010- I recommend Escape Hatch, Starways and Paradise Freaks as good starting points. 

Tobacco Fields is from Tim’s 2012 solo album Oh No I Love You. It is a beauty, with barroom piano, a frazzled vocal and an ambient backdrop, co- written with Kurt Wagner. 

Another Version Of The Truth was on As I Was Now, a solo album recorded between Christmas and New Year in 2008 but not released until 2018- music that is experimental, krauty and pop. The group for the album consisted of My Bloody Valentine’s bassist Debbie Goodge, Josh Haywood from The Horrors, Martin Duffy and Ladyhawke. 

Hours was on Oh No I Love You. Some editions of the CD came with a disc of remixes- the Tandy Love remix is by Andy Votel. Others on the second disc were by Tom Furse of The Horrors and Gabe Gurnsey of Factory Floor, whose remix finishes this mix. At the time Nik Void of Factory Floor was Tim’s partner.

Begin is from Same Language, Different Worlds, an album made with New York avant garde composer Peter Gordon, a member of the legendary Love Of Life Orchestra. Begin was remixed by Carter Tutti, Chris Carter and Cosey Tutti of Throbbing Gristle/ Chris and Cosey fame/ infamy. Oh Men, also on the album, was remixed by Stephen Morris and Gillian Gilbert, Peaking Lights, Grumbling Fur and Carter Tutti- that’s quite the line up. 

The Economy II is also from Oh No I Love You, dubbed out in 2013 by the superb Prince Fatty.

In 1995 The Chemical Brothers released their debut album Exit Planet Dust. Tim had been a regular at The Social, the Sunday afternoon/ evening party thrown weekly by Heavenly Records and Tom and Ed at The Albany on Great Portland Street. Tim sang on Life Is Sweet, a song which became the album’s second single. On an album not short of bangers, Life Is Sweet still stands out- a furious synth riff, crunching beats, whooshes, sirens and a dirty bassline, and Tim’s vocal, a celebration of mid- 90s hedonism. The Chemical Brothers returned the favour by working with The Charlatans on 1997’s Tellin’ Stories, most notably on One To Another.

Forty Minutes Of Spiritualized

I’ve been going back through some of this year’s albums and playing them again. Spiritualized’s Everything Was Beautiful is one of them, the second part of Jason’s double offering to go with 2018’s And Nothing Hurt. Both still sound like a real return to form, the guitars, horns and rhythms all exactly as they should be and Jason’s spaceman voice more wracked than ever. Today’s mix is a bunch of Spiritualized songs and remixes, not quite chosen randomly from my hard rive but definitely not intended as a best of, more of a set of songs that flow together. The back catalogue is so deep and wide that I have a feeling I could compile multiple Spiritualized mixes and not get near a definitive one- so it is just what it is, a set of songs that sound good together. 

Forty Minutes Of Spiritualized

• Goldfrapp: Monster Love (Goldfrapp Vs Spiritualized)
• Spiritualized: I Think I’m In Love (Chemical Brothers Vocal Remix)
• Spiritualized: Come Together (Live At the Royal Albert Hall)
• Spiritualized: The Mainline Song
• Cut Copy: Free Your Mind (Spiritualized Version)
• LFO: Tied Up (Spiritualized Electric Mainline Remix)
• Spiritualized: Ladies And Gentlemen, We Are Floating In Space (Original Unreleased Mix)

Goldfrapp v Spiritualized was one of the B-sides from a Goldfrapp CD single, Happiness, in 2008. 

The Chemical Brothers remix of I Think I’m In Love came out in 1997, one of the Ladies And Gentlemen, We Are Floating In Space singles. Spiritualized Live At The Royal Albert Hall is from the same year, a full on space rock extravaganza

The Mainline Song is from this year’s Everything Is Beautiful. 

Jason’s remix of the Cut Copy song came out in 2013, with a new vocal from Jason and guitars, organ, noise and repetition combining to produce what is essentially a new Spiritualized song.  

The remix of LFO, nine minutes of soundwaves, drones and oscillating ambient techno bliss is from 1994. 

The unreleased original mix of the title track of Ladies and Gentlemen… dates from 1997 and fell foul of the Elvis Presley estate who didn’t like borrowing of a line from Can’t Help Falling In Love With You. More fool them. 

Forty Minutes Of The Flaming Lips

‘The Flaming Lips’, it says at Wikipedia, ‘are an American psychedelic rock band formed in 1983 from Oklahoma City. I suppose psychedelic rock band covers them but they’re much, much more too, they’re the sort of band who have an idea- let’s come on stage in a giant bubble and roll out over the audience, let’s have confetti cannons, and dancing skeletons, let’s do a twenty three track album with Miley Cyrus, let’s record an album with instrumentals, drum machines and the most gorgeous, existential acoustic guitar pop song of the 21st century- and then just do it. I haven’t followed their entire career, there are gaps in my collection but what I have I love. Psychedelic music is, I think, supposed to be expansive- in terms of sound, ambition and minds and Wayne Coyne and the musicians, dancing aliens and skeletons, fellow travellers and merry pranksters are very much on a long trip of expansion and adventure. 

The bulk of the songs here are taken from the trio of albums they recorded between 1999 and 2006 with Dave Fridmann producing. 

Forty Minutes Of The Flaming Lips

• The Observer
• Approaching Pavonis Mons By Balloon (Utopia Planitia)
• Pompeii Am Gotterdammerung
• She Don’t Use Jelly
• Silver Trembling Hands
• Ego Tripping At The Gates Of Hell
• The W.A.N.D.
• Race For The Prize
• Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots Part 1
• The Golden Path
• Do You Realise??

The Observer and Race For The Prize are both from 1999’s The Soft Bulletin, an album that shifted their sound from alt- rock into something else, a lush, wide eyed, tripped out, expansive, late 20th century Pet Sounds psychedelia. Race For The Prize,a song about two scientists competing to do good for the whole of mankind, is a song that is always associated with Isaac for me for various reasons that I may come back to at some point in the next few weeks.

Approaching Pavonis Mons By Balloon, Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots and Ego Tripping At The Gates Of Hell are all from Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, their 2002 masterpiece, a maybe/ maybe not concept album about a Japanese girl fighting giant robots, space, life and death, mortality, gravity, the precarious nature of existence, love, survival and pretty much everything in between. They do this with a mixture of lighter than air pop songs, instrumentals and electronic/ acoustic melancholic joy, reaching a climax with Do You Realise?? a universal secular hymn to human existence.  

The W.A.N.D. and Pompeii Am Gotterdamerung are from 2006’s At war Wit The Mystics. The W.A.N.D. is Black Sabbath at the indie disco, pure exhilaration. W.A.N.D stands for The Will Always Negates Defeat. 

She Don’t Use Jelly is a 1993 single, a U.S. indie rock ode to idiosyncrasy. She don’t use jelly (jam for those of us in the U.K.)- she uses vaseline. 

Silver Trembling Hands is motorik psyche from their 2009 album Embryonic.

The Golden Path is not a Flaming Lips song but singer Wayne Coyne with The Chemical Brothers, released on Tom and Ed’s first greatest hits CD in 2003. Over thumping, pulsing, festival dance music Wayne talks about a meeting with a mysterious spectre, the afterlife and his lack of belief in a heaven and hell, worlds in opposite duality before breaking down at the end and pleading to be forgiven.  

When I See Your Eyes Arrive

Back in 1998 as the decade and century rushed to a conclusion people started fretting about Y2K, the millennium bug and aeroplanes dropping out of the sky. Mercury Rev had been a minor US alt- rock band with some major drug problems and poor sales and were about to be dropped. Their manager left and the drummer followed. Jonathan Donahue slipped into depression and took refuge in childhood favourites, fairy tales set to classical music. From this chaos and dissolution came Deserter’s Songs, an album that turned out to be one of 1998’s best records. 

Holed up in the Catskill Mountains, writing on a piano and reconnecting with guitarist Grasshopper, sharing studio time with The Flaming Lips (a band Donahue was a member of at the same time) they began to record the songs that would become Deserter’s Songs, a fragile, melodic, gently wasted album, filled with acts of leaving, with ghosts and farewells. They both assumed this would be Mercury Rev’s last throw of the dice. Somehow during the sessions the band/ duo signed to V2 and the money that followed allowed them to complete the album, filling the songs out with Dave Fridman, adding strings, horns, woodwind. This song, originally written by Donahue back in 1989, was found on an old cassette and reworked…

Goddess On A Hiway

There’s a back to the land/ get our heads together in the country/ Bob Dylan after his motorcycle crash feel to Deserter’s Songs. Add in to the fin de siecle vibe circulating by 1998, replacing all that mid 90s confidence. ‘I got us on a highway/ I got us in a car’, Jonathan sings, leaving somewhere. Later on in the songs it’s about her, ‘the goddess on a highway/ goddess in a car’, leaving. ‘And I know it ain’t gonna last’. The rest of the album sounds similarly blasted and wrecked, the sound of some people trying to hold it together- Holes, Tonite It Shows, Opus 40, Hudson Line. At the end the final song opens with what sounds like a house music piano riff being played on a harpsichord, the final splendour of Delta Sun Bottleneck Stomp. 

Before he started writing the songs for the album Donahue had been approached by The Chemical Brothers to play on what would become The Private Psychedelic Reel. At a time when he’d more or less given up and hit the bottom, the request and recording re- energised him. In the UK, Deserter’s Songs was then championed by Tom and Ed, especially in the NME and Melody Maker, and it all took off. The NME made it album of the year, the monthlies gave it five stars. The Chemical Brothers provided a remix adding their crunching 90s swirl of FX and beats to Mercury Rev’s 19th century chamber music- and picking out the word that is the opposite of the album’s main lyrical themes- ‘hello…’ 

Delta Sun Bottleneck Stomp (The Chemical Brothers Remix)