What I did on my summer holiday

September 30, 2017 //

There’s nothing political in this one, except an admission that I’m well aware of how privileged I am to be able to take a two+-week vacation in a nice country and do next to nothing.

Note also that these notes get a little repetitive. Apologies in advance.

Holiday – 25 August – 10 September 2017
25/8 – Flew to Split, taxi to our AirBnB – probably got ripped off a little by the cab driver, but not enough to sweat. Airport is very small – saw JayWay Travel’s man on the ground, but he was gone by the time I thought to say hi. Had lunch in the centre near (in?) the palace at one of Charlie’s recommendations. R had a really nice tuna salad and I had a tasty steak sandwich. We wandered the old centre for a little while – identified the location of the old synagogue, but it was not open (not surprisingly). Had supper at Apetit, another recommended joint where I had beef and R had fish. Aside from the astounding quality of the mains, the olives were divine. Saw a band play some cool rock and roll by the waterfront for a little bit. Also nice.

26/8 – Explored the palace some more, got my hair cut. Breakfast at Galerija – R had shakshuka and I had a really nice chia pudding with mango. Visited a church and the underground part of the palace (part of which was used as a Game of Thrones location – lots of those in Croatia). Supper at Mazzoon – we both ate ratatouille. Nice. Window shopped a little, but didn’t buy anything.

27/8 – Breakfast at Banana Split, just a bit downhill from our apartment and then packed our stuff and got the hire car. Two stops on our drive to Starigrad – Klis fortress which was another GoT location (and a good hike up a hill) and to some lovely waterfalls just south of Zadar in Krka National Park. Getting to the waterfall involved a nice hike, but then we could bathe just in front of the falls. Very cool. Arrived at the hotel in Starigrad at about 7, dropped our gear, and walked across the street to Degenija, a restaurant owned by the family of one of my colleagues. I had the mixed grill and R had fish. Well pleased. (We went back four times, I think.) Josip’s aunt, who runs the place, and his cousins had already returned to Zagreb, so I didn’t get to meet them. By the time we got back to the hotel, several coach loads of English people had arrived to share the holiday with us.

28/8 – Got up early and ran 4.4km up the road before 9:30 orientation. Mostly relaxed after checking out the things on offer. R did some sailing theory and then we had cocktails at the sky bar at sunset. Read the rest of this entry »

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Eno’s Warm Jets

August 16, 2017 //

Brian Eno – Here Come The Warm Jets – 2017 half-speed master reissue.

When I first purchased this album on CD in 2002 or so, I knew three of the songs. Driving Me Backwards and Baby’s On Fire appear on the Ayers/Cale/Eno/Nico live album (which I originally purchased for the Velvet Underground connection, not the Roxy/Soft Machine connections). Album opener Needles In The Camel’s Eye is used over the opening credits of Todd Haynes’ criminally underrated Velvet Goldmine.

And there’s a reason Haynes used it: That opening rush of instrumentation (which accompanies a rush of glam-rocking teenagers chasing a pop star) pulls the listener right in. The intrigue doesn’t let up through the album’s 42 minutes. Lyrically, it’s almost all (in the words of Blank Frank) incomprehensible proverbs, but musically it’s a gorgeous grab-bag of styles, the way the best glam albums were back in ’73. This new remastering does a wonderful job of separating the musical components so that you can hear the strange fuzzed out guitar on the title track as something separate from the drums, keyboards, and the vocals (which are still too indistinct to figure out).

Aside from those songs, I mostly knew Eno for a lot of non-pop work – ambient work like Tuesday Afternoon (and Music For Airports), production jobs (U2, Devo, Bowie), and his collaboration with David Byrne, My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts. And as I write that, I realise I knew bits of 801, Bauhaus’ cover of Third Uncle, and a good bit of the first Roxy Music album. I’m pretty sure I bought Roxy’s debut the same day I acquired Warm Jets and, for the same reason – a bunch of its songs are used in Velvet Goldmine as well.

I wish I could be more articulate, but there’s nothing about this album’s 10 tracks that isn’t insanely cool. Occasionally I find myself annoyed with albums on which each track is faded out, as if neither the musicians nor the producer knew where the song ended. HCTWJ is the opposite – every track knows what it’s doing – there are crossfades between songs – like how Some Of Them Are Old weaves right into the the title track at the end of the album. On Some Faraway Beach (the original opener of side two, here the opener of side three), a slow piano-based track which ends abruptly on a strange but clear keyboard run is followed by rocker Blank Frank, but the transition between them has always felt absolutely purposeful to me. Blank Frank is another revelation here in terms of the clarity of the instruments. Keyboards and drums and guitars all seem to be in competition, but they’re all winning. Oddly, this song does fade out, but over only five or six seconds. The martial drums that anchor the next track, Dead Finks Don’t Talk (apparently a kiss-off to Bryan Ferry) work their way through some very strange guitar work before surrendering to a blast of distorted synthesizer which concludes just where it needs to.

Two thumbs up. Go buy it.

(Eno’s other three mid-70s rock albums, Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy), Another Green World, and Before and After Science have also been reissued on vinyl with the half-speed master treatment. I’m sure those are tasty too, but I don’t love those albums quite as much as I love this one.)

Tags Brian Eno, half-speed master, Velvet Goldmine

Categories 70s, Music, Rock, rock and roll

Shriekback – 1988 – Go Bang!

July 17, 2017 //

After two pretty flawless major label releases, 1985’s Oil & Gold and 1986’s Big Night Music, Island Records wanted a hit. At the time, I’d heard some of their music but nothing I could have identified as them. Go Bang! came out several months before I moved in with a flatmate who played me the glory of Oil & Gold. I don’t think I heard Big Night Music until about 1991. So really, I knew of them by reputation only. I was working at Rainbow Records on Stanyan and the store manager was very keen on hearing it the day it came in. I recall feeling the affair was all too disco (which I definitely did not appreciate for another ten years or so), not helped by the first single, a mostly faithful cover of KC and the Sunshine Band’s Get Down Tonight. I’m pretty sure the manager was disappointed too.

As they’re touring this year for the first time in forever, I’ve started to dig into the catalogue. Go Bang! is the only album I didn’t have in some form or another and which isn’t available on Spotify. Four quid and a week in the post, and some fine Amazon seller has me taken care of. Whereas Oil & Gold is balanced about half and half with hard tracks like Nemesis and softer tracks such as The Only Thing That Shines, and Big Night Music tends very much to the jazzy, Go Bang! is almost entirely hard dance music. Only Nighttown and the closer, Dust and a Shadow hint at Shriekback’s downtempo tendencies.

It’s not as though the album isn’t recognizably Shriekback, though. Producer Richard James Burgess (Spandau Ballet’s Journeys to Glory, Adam Ant’s Strip) has maintained most of their signature sound – Barry Andrews’ tenor augmented with the female voices heard on the previous releases, the bass. Even going back to their stripped down earliest releases, the bass and the funk were always prominent

s-gb Lyrically, side one has more of the depth found in their earlier work. I can’t really tell if they arranged the tracks for LP release or CD, but major releases still came out on vinyl at the time. After Nighttown, side two has the disco 1-2-3 of the title track, Big Fun, and the aforementioned KC and the Sunshine Band cover. Big Fun has big horns and lyrics about going out and (long before Daft Punk) getting lucky. The chorus of Well-e-o, well-e-o here we go / We got a bite like a pit bull yeah we don’t let go / Well-e-o, well-e-o under the sun / Everybody looking for…big fun doesn’t really suggest the seriousness of purpose the band was known for. On the other hand, the bass and the brass are used to good effect. Even considering the lyrical silliness of Big Fun, the only real embarrassment of the album is the rap that Andrews injects into Get Down Tonight. (All one can say is that it was a thing at the time.)

Dust and a Shadow very much harkens back to the sound of Oil & Gold, to the point where back to back, it sounds like a brasher but inferior reworking of This Big Hush.

At a meagre 32 minutes, it’s a sugary and tasty confection, but not the perfection found in their other work.

Tags Richard James Burgess, Shriekback

Categories 80s, Music, Rock

David Cross Band / David Jackson Cultuurpodium Boerderij 19 May 2017

May 22, 2017 //

David Cross and David Jackson

So I saw this gig announced a few months ago after I’d spent several weeks listening to almost the entire Van Der Graaf Generator catalogue. David Cross played violin on Starless and Bible Black and Larks’ Tongues In Aspic by King Crimson. Jackson played horns with VDGG for most of their run. So, yeah, two incredible musicians who had each been in the game for more than 45 years. It was a gig I didn’t want to miss. Especially given the recent resurgence of King Crimson, I was quite surprised that the gig was far from sold out. Fine, I’ll take middle front at this relatively small club. (When packed, Boerderij can hold an audience of 750 or so and my guess is there were about 300 there.) To open, Cross and Jackson came out alone and traded a little humour before taking on Starless Loops from the recent Cross/Robert Fripp album of improvisations on the Starless theme, Starless Starlight. After a few more pieces, they played another from Starless Starlight. There’s one ripple of chords from Starless that always gives me the shivers and did again when Cross played it Friday night. My friend Corniel, who joined me for the gig complained that it would have been better for him if they’d just played and not joked around so much. There’s some merit to that argument, as the joking detracted from their sheer expertise. Their duo work owed more to improvisational jazz than to the progressive rock they’re best known for. After a 30-minute set, they took a break before coming back with the full David Cross Band.

In the main set, the band played several numbers from the new (very good) album, The Sign of the Crow including Starfall, the title track, Rain Rain and The Pool. Current vocalist Jin Wilde has a very interesting voice (having come out of a dance music background, it seems) handles the new stuff quite well. His tenor is well suited to the music, generally. The band’s set includes (and if the 2008 live album I bought at the merch counter is anything to go by, has included for a long time) three King Crimson songs: Exiles (from Larks‘), Starless (from Red), and the encore 21st Century Schizoid Man (from In The Court of the Crimson King). The last of these featured Greg Lake on vocals, and the other two John Wetton. On these songs, Wilde doesn’t seem to take ownership. He seems to be trying to sing like Wetton, but his voice is too different. The band, however, quite made up for it. After Exiles, the band left the stage to drummer Craig Blundell who did an appropriately hair-raising solo. (Blundell has played with numerous folks including Steve Wilson.) The band returned playing George Martin’s Theme One (recorded in ’72 by Van Der Graaf Generator) before a slightly ragged Starless. Paul Clark and his Gibson Flying V are very very good and he doesn’t try to be Robert Fripp. After a quick moment back stage they closed with an appropriately wild Schizoid Man. I wasn’t expecting it and was well impressed. (Someone commented on Blundell’s facebook page that Crimson currently has three drummers and was impressed with how well he did his part solo.)

Overall a great evening with a couple of bona fide legends.

Tags David Cross, David Jackson, King Crimson, Sign of the Crow, Van Der Graaf Generator

Categories Music, rock and roll

Eyes like cameras move their lenses

May 9, 2017 //

I don’t recall why I first bought The Age of Plastic by the Buggles. I might have heard Video Killed The Radio Star; it might have been because I knew the Yes connection, though I’m pretty sure I knew the album before the Drama tour (which my sister saw, but I did not). Al of that said, it had a huge impact on me. I played it quite a lot when I was 13 or 14. I’m quite sure I knew it well before we had MTV. Those eight songs were all mini movies in my head, the way the best pop is. (One track is indeed about a real movie studio, Elstree.) The fact that they’re all quite sci-fi as well appealed to my teenage literary tastes.

Much later I found the Bruce Woolley version. Woolley co-wrote it with Trevor Horne, and released a more guitar-heavy version with a crew called The Camera Club, which also featured a pre-Age of Wireless Thomas Dolby and Matthew Seligman. The most recent issue of Mojo (#283) has interviews with Woolley, Horne, and Geoff Downes who was the other half of the Buggles. At the close of the article, it’s mentioned that Woolley has recorded a new version with Polly Scattergood. It’s a very beautiful, slower, lower interpretation that reminds me of why the original excited me so much when I was a kid. (Keep an eye out in the vid for Thomas Dolby.)

After replacing Jon Anderson and Rick Wakeman for one album (Drama) and ill-fated tour (Horne didn’t have Anderson’s range or vocal stamina and on the later dates especially, his voice was a liability), the Buggles released a second album, Adventures In Modern Recording, but had already gone their separate ways before its release.

Horne went on to produce a stack of classic albums (Welcome to the Pleasuredome, The Lexicon of Love, 90125, Seal, Dear Catastrophe Waitress, and Who’s Afraid of the Art of Noise to name a few) and Downes founded Asia and took prog rock into that weird 80s pop direction. Asia’s a weird animal, too. Downes was the only consistent member (in fact there was one lineup of Asia that even he wasn’t in on) of almost 30 who have passed through, but at different times it was fronted by John Wetton and Greg Lake (both ex-King Crimson among many other bands).

When John Wetton passed away, I flitted through a bunch of videos of ELP and Asia and King Crimson and came across a fantastic concert he and Downes performed in a church which featured a gorgeous arrangement of Elstree. (Track four on this video.)

But back to The Age of Plastic. Giving it another listen now (and it’s a pretty consistent part of my listening – I don’t think a year goes by that it doesn’t come up in the rotation), I’m both 13 again and trying (as I still do with the music I love) to get my friends to hear its brilliance, and the 50 year old wannabe rock historian. More often than not, my friends thought I was enthusing on The Bugaloos, anyway.

The music is almost entirely keyboard/synthesiser-based, but the arrangements are impeccable and multi-layered. Considering the new wave acts of the time, the arrangements put them more in the category of disco (when there were still live string sections) and the intricate productions of Joe Meek. Johnny On The Monorail has both a disco bassline an almost a surf-like hook, and a 70s folk guitar bridge.

Horne is quoted in the album’s wikipedia page as having wanted to make music like Elton John was doing, but didn’t feel he had the chops. He then heard Kraftwerk and learned ‘you didn’t even have to emote’ to make hit songs. That said, all of the musicians had been working for most of the decade (Downes, Horne, and Woolley all worked with a singer named Tina Charles who had several hits, for example), so it’s not a surprise that the album has so many facets. It still rates five stars with

Tags Asia, Bruce Woolley, Geoff Downes, King Crimson, Living In The Plastic Age, Tecnopop, Trevor Horne, Yes

Categories 70s, Music, Rock