and one of my favourite movie soundtracks
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
Thursday, July 26, 2012
another category: New Wave collapsing back into prog, or a sort of prog
The Cardiacs, the true children of Punishment of Luxury
I actually saw the Cardiacs early on in the career, quite by accident, and only realised much later, when they started to get some attention in the music papers, that it had been them.
Living on post-graduation in Oxford, on the dole, in Jericho in the north of the city, we often would go for a night time wander across Port Meadow. Because it was idyllic but also a little spooky -- water bird sounds carrying eerily across the pitch black dark. One summer night we set out only to find ourselves in the midst of a free festival. We had little idea such things even existed, I don't think. This is 1984, 85, so pre-Battle of the Beanfield. I remember a hippie girl, tripping out of her head and tripping on the guy-ropes of all the tents, as she ran in a panic through the camp ground.
If it had been your typical free festival fare -- Hawkwind/Here and Now type music, Magic Mushroom Band et al - we might have stuck around longer, enjoyed the trippy spacey-ness of it. But no, strangely, it was the Cardiacs, herky-jerky to the power of 10000. To say I was appalled -- grimly mesmerized, too, but mostly appalled -- would be an understatement. It was so not - so the antithesis - of what I was about at that point, which was Husker Du type blur, or The Smiths. We left pretty quick, which I kinda regret. The Cardiacs drove me away from an alternate destiny, of becoming a crusty-traveler. (Unlikely scenario)
I guess below (from a 1984 videotape) is what they would have sounded like when we saw them.
Almost Eastern European... coming from not dissimilar places as that Soviet band Zvuki Mu, maybe.
Are the Cardiacs also a little bit like what pre-New Wave, late-prog Split Enz sounded like?
Sad to hear about the health torments of singer/mainman Tim Smith.
The Cardiacs, the true children of Punishment of Luxury
I actually saw the Cardiacs early on in the career, quite by accident, and only realised much later, when they started to get some attention in the music papers, that it had been them.
Living on post-graduation in Oxford, on the dole, in Jericho in the north of the city, we often would go for a night time wander across Port Meadow. Because it was idyllic but also a little spooky -- water bird sounds carrying eerily across the pitch black dark. One summer night we set out only to find ourselves in the midst of a free festival. We had little idea such things even existed, I don't think. This is 1984, 85, so pre-Battle of the Beanfield. I remember a hippie girl, tripping out of her head and tripping on the guy-ropes of all the tents, as she ran in a panic through the camp ground.
If it had been your typical free festival fare -- Hawkwind/Here and Now type music, Magic Mushroom Band et al - we might have stuck around longer, enjoyed the trippy spacey-ness of it. But no, strangely, it was the Cardiacs, herky-jerky to the power of 10000. To say I was appalled -- grimly mesmerized, too, but mostly appalled -- would be an understatement. It was so not - so the antithesis - of what I was about at that point, which was Husker Du type blur, or The Smiths. We left pretty quick, which I kinda regret. The Cardiacs drove me away from an alternate destiny, of becoming a crusty-traveler. (Unlikely scenario)
I guess below (from a 1984 videotape) is what they would have sounded like when we saw them.
Almost Eastern European... coming from not dissimilar places as that Soviet band Zvuki Mu, maybe.
Are the Cardiacs also a little bit like what pre-New Wave, late-prog Split Enz sounded like?
Sad to hear about the health torments of singer/mainman Tim Smith.
Wednesday, July 25, 2012
veering away from the New Wave to that postpostpunk moment i've sometimes dubbed the Bad Music Era, Cathy Unsworth's trawl at Quietus through the circa 84 records that influenced her new novel reminded me that I'm not sure if I ever actually heard New Model Army
straining my memory-muscles, no aural image of their sound came to mind beyond a vague sense of a sort of stocky stalwart stompiness or do i mean stumpiness....
and so i turn to the memory-machine
Ah! I recognise that first tune. And the general sense was pretty on the ball. Sort of vaguely folky but without any actual direct reference to the traditional musics of the British Isles.
The look of the band, more than the sound, reminds me of one of my earliest assignments as a cub reporter at Melody Maker, going to review Balaam and the Angel.
An odd period of music in the U.K. -- after postpunk and New Pop, a shift back to rockiness but without fully mastering the basic skill set that underpinned British hard rock / heavy rock in the first half of the Seventies
particularly evident (here I ventriloquise Carducci) in the rhythm sections
at best they would be merely solid, pounding away insistently... at worst a dirge-trudge ... or mock-tribal tom tom scuttling motion
compare Budgie
to The Cult
the former smokes and swings... the latter has this irritating giddy-up cantering motion... like a nine stone weakling version of Iron Maiden (and yeah, they had a song about Red Indians too...)
Cult got slightly more convincing by the time of the Rick Rubin album, when they were explicitly referencing the early 70s Brit (and Commonwealth) greats like Free and AC/DC, but it was still ersatz... and the drummer is just a steady plod, might as well as be a drum machine
straining my memory-muscles, no aural image of their sound came to mind beyond a vague sense of a sort of stocky stalwart stompiness or do i mean stumpiness....
and so i turn to the memory-machine
Ah! I recognise that first tune. And the general sense was pretty on the ball. Sort of vaguely folky but without any actual direct reference to the traditional musics of the British Isles.
The look of the band, more than the sound, reminds me of one of my earliest assignments as a cub reporter at Melody Maker, going to review Balaam and the Angel.
An odd period of music in the U.K. -- after postpunk and New Pop, a shift back to rockiness but without fully mastering the basic skill set that underpinned British hard rock / heavy rock in the first half of the Seventies
particularly evident (here I ventriloquise Carducci) in the rhythm sections
at best they would be merely solid, pounding away insistently... at worst a dirge-trudge ... or mock-tribal tom tom scuttling motion
compare Budgie
to The Cult
the former smokes and swings... the latter has this irritating giddy-up cantering motion... like a nine stone weakling version of Iron Maiden (and yeah, they had a song about Red Indians too...)
Cult got slightly more convincing by the time of the Rick Rubin album, when they were explicitly referencing the early 70s Brit (and Commonwealth) greats like Free and AC/DC, but it was still ersatz... and the drummer is just a steady plod, might as well as be a drum machine
Tuesday, July 24, 2012
Monday, July 23, 2012
veering away from new wave back to postpunk, a group i always remembered (from Peel) as interesting, but could never find while digging in the crates for Rip It Up
remember Out on Blue Six as weirder though, less frantic Delta 5/Maximum Joy-y, and more "Opec-Immac" lunar / cratered....
funny thing, memory
remember Out on Blue Six as weirder though, less frantic Delta 5/Maximum Joy-y, and more "Opec-Immac" lunar / cratered....
funny thing, memory
at Our God Is Speed, Greyhoos chips in with his own thoughts 'n' memories of New Wave
from his selections, this:
fuck me, is that a find or what?!?
The opening riff is pure Franz Ferdinand.
Funnily enough I was just yesterday perusing Chuck Eddy's second edition of Stairway to Hell, his eccentric guide to heavy metal, and in the afterword he lists a whole bunch of records that he's subsequently to the first ed's publication fallen in love with and shoulda included, and one of them is Alice Cooper's Flush the Fashion. But i hadn't realised that this was AC's noo-wave-move!
Who else in America, out of the Old Wave, made a Noo Wave move?
Billy Joel, I guess, with much of his Eighties material. Although this track is not sonically a new wave move but more a kind of New Wave acknowledging yet also recuperating / deflating manifesto of catholicity ("music-is-music/there's-only-two-kinds-of-music-good-music-and-bad-music") -- which has in fact becoming the programming policy and raison d'etre of post-Ipod middle-aged geezer targeting radio stations like Jack FM ("playin' ... what we like" said in a voice that sounds like Huey Lewis).
Another one: this album El Loco by ZZ Top was their New Wave move (although hints of it were on the one before, Deguello)
And then they really went for it with Eliminator and the album after that, by which time they often had a sequencer pulse chugging along alongside the drumming (which was already getting straightened out into something pretty metronomic and Billy Idol/Keith Forsey like).
One of my LA radio revelations since moving here was hearing the Cars and realising that not only could they play but that most likely before punk, they were probably playing similar kind of blues-based rock to ZZ Top or Foghat or James Gang... it may even have been a direct segue on Jack FM from "La Grange" to "Just What I Needed It" that brought it home to me...
Well in terms of Old Wave to New Wave, they weren't Well Known before punk, but Huey Lewis & the News is old old style music given a New Wave-ish production finish and tautness
Didn't the musicians in the News play with Elvis Costello very early on (Clover?)
And then H & the News went back to the roots and did a bluesy album that totally tanked.
Here's another good example - shameless Rod Stewart
i suppose those aren't really Noo Wave as in skinny tie / Devo-jitters though, more like just trying to do a commercial post-Moroder / synthpop era club-friendly radio-ready please-help-me-keep-up-me-mortgage-payments-on-me-mansion type job (cf the Stones records in the early-mid Eighties)
More troo Noo is Robert Palmer, another bluesy-rock Brit rasper who remodelled his sound, several times...
right up to the point of doing a Gary Numan cover
and then went electrofunk/postdisco
And of course the J.Geils Band, the same Old-to-Noo syndrome...
Oh and classic old-into-Noo is the production job (dry and sparse) on this imperishable tune by all-American heartland rocker Johnny Cougar
i'm sure there's scores more examples...
postscript: how could I forget, Neil Young (Devo fan supreme) and Trans!
Neil's movie that he got Devo to do a scene for
postpostscript: and I forgot (that i'd remembered, a week or two ago) all about Bill Wyman's Je Suis Un Rockstar, which is Old Wave goes New Wave par excellence, and maybe the most successful, on all levels (middling hit; sounds reet nifty and not embarrassing like yer dad trying to dance to disco) out of all these Old-into-Noo mooves)
what i found out after posting it the first time the other week: he wrote it as a demo for Ian Dury's consideration. But nobody in the Stiff camp would actually present it to Dury! Were they afraid of incurring his wrath? I love this little fact because I once averred that the Blockheads were the best British groove group since the Stones. Ian should have done it, he'd might have arrested his decline as UK hitmaker!
of course there's a most unfortunate resonance to one of the lyrics here -- "they'll think I'm your dad/and you're my daughter" -- given Bill's love life later in the decade
from his selections, this:
fuck me, is that a find or what?!?
The opening riff is pure Franz Ferdinand.
Funnily enough I was just yesterday perusing Chuck Eddy's second edition of Stairway to Hell, his eccentric guide to heavy metal, and in the afterword he lists a whole bunch of records that he's subsequently to the first ed's publication fallen in love with and shoulda included, and one of them is Alice Cooper's Flush the Fashion. But i hadn't realised that this was AC's noo-wave-move!
Who else in America, out of the Old Wave, made a Noo Wave move?
Billy Joel, I guess, with much of his Eighties material. Although this track is not sonically a new wave move but more a kind of New Wave acknowledging yet also recuperating / deflating manifesto of catholicity ("music-is-music/there's-only-two-kinds-of-music-good-music-and-bad-music") -- which has in fact becoming the programming policy and raison d'etre of post-Ipod middle-aged geezer targeting radio stations like Jack FM ("playin' ... what we like" said in a voice that sounds like Huey Lewis).
Another one: this album El Loco by ZZ Top was their New Wave move (although hints of it were on the one before, Deguello)
And then they really went for it with Eliminator and the album after that, by which time they often had a sequencer pulse chugging along alongside the drumming (which was already getting straightened out into something pretty metronomic and Billy Idol/Keith Forsey like).
One of my LA radio revelations since moving here was hearing the Cars and realising that not only could they play but that most likely before punk, they were probably playing similar kind of blues-based rock to ZZ Top or Foghat or James Gang... it may even have been a direct segue on Jack FM from "La Grange" to "Just What I Needed It" that brought it home to me...
Well in terms of Old Wave to New Wave, they weren't Well Known before punk, but Huey Lewis & the News is old old style music given a New Wave-ish production finish and tautness
Didn't the musicians in the News play with Elvis Costello very early on (Clover?)
And then H & the News went back to the roots and did a bluesy album that totally tanked.
Here's another good example - shameless Rod Stewart
i suppose those aren't really Noo Wave as in skinny tie / Devo-jitters though, more like just trying to do a commercial post-Moroder / synthpop era club-friendly radio-ready please-help-me-keep-up-me-mortgage-payments-on-me-mansion type job (cf the Stones records in the early-mid Eighties)
More troo Noo is Robert Palmer, another bluesy-rock Brit rasper who remodelled his sound, several times...
right up to the point of doing a Gary Numan cover
and then went electrofunk/postdisco
And of course the J.Geils Band, the same Old-to-Noo syndrome...
Oh and classic old-into-Noo is the production job (dry and sparse) on this imperishable tune by all-American heartland rocker Johnny Cougar
i'm sure there's scores more examples...
postscript: how could I forget, Neil Young (Devo fan supreme) and Trans!
Neil's movie that he got Devo to do a scene for
postpostscript: and I forgot (that i'd remembered, a week or two ago) all about Bill Wyman's Je Suis Un Rockstar, which is Old Wave goes New Wave par excellence, and maybe the most successful, on all levels (middling hit; sounds reet nifty and not embarrassing like yer dad trying to dance to disco) out of all these Old-into-Noo mooves)
what i found out after posting it the first time the other week: he wrote it as a demo for Ian Dury's consideration. But nobody in the Stiff camp would actually present it to Dury! Were they afraid of incurring his wrath? I love this little fact because I once averred that the Blockheads were the best British groove group since the Stones. Ian should have done it, he'd might have arrested his decline as UK hitmaker!
of course there's a most unfortunate resonance to one of the lyrics here -- "they'll think I'm your dad/and you're my daughter" -- given Bill's love life later in the decade
Sunday, July 22, 2012
Saturday, July 21, 2012
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