I walked out of the studio today to go pick up my lunch and took three paces into the street before I turned back for my trusty LFC umbrella and then I remembered it’s summer in Cornwall. Outside between the studio door and the alleyway that leads up to Rowe’s the bakers there were two lads in their twenties standing talking getting wet but they didn’t seem to be too bothered. By the time I’d nipped back in for my umbrella they were gone. But on the right of the door was another youngish fellow, just standing there leaning against the wall with a cup of take away coffee. He was getting very wet, not sheltering from the rain at all and he was still there when I went back for my umbrella. I suppose some people love the rain, I do too, but not when I’m getting soaked, the rain is lovely from inside the house, staring out of the window. I love swimming when it’s raining either in a pool or in the sea. After Rowe’s I went to the greengrocers and plucked two rain-covered broccoli crowns from the outside display. They were a deep green and looked so much healthier than they ever do in the supermarket. Why would we have sacrificed these small businesses with their high quality wares for rotten and inferior versions wrapped in plastic with an inconsequential price difference. Humans are insane, convenience for its own sake as if the effort to lift that extra finger isn’t worth the rise in quality. I listen to music on a STEREO, it’s wonderful!
I had three sessions today, Noelle in Montreal, Chris in New Jersey and Craig in Atlanta. All three of them are making great progress with the songs. It’s a lesson to everybody that you just have to do it, put in the time and you’ll get results. It’s the same with my French lessons, if I stick with it I will know something! Ha ha, hopefully that something will be a lot. There’s also the idea that your brain is a muscle and it needs exercise. That’s why it’s good to write. In between seshes today I had a few minutes to peruse some YouTube vids and for all of you that might like the debate between atheists and believers, even if you don’t want to watch the whole thing, listen to the incredible opening arguments from Christopher Hitchens which start at 3:45 and end at 19:30. That’s as far as I got. I’ll be watching the rest later, remember it is a debate, there’s always the other side of the story. That’s civilization, clearly and succinctly presenting your case without emotion and shaking hands when you disagree (well not anymore).
Dare came in the studio today to upload more Ahad demos for an album that we will begin in earnest next Tuesday when our drummer Ed arrives from Bristol. Yesterday we approved the final mastering of the Space Summit album. The artwork is still being worked on but with another album finished we need to start thinking about when this and the new MOAT album will come out and yet it’s hard to know. We will release a song from Poison Stream (MOAT) in a few weeks in preparation for a release campaign. But in reality we are still waiting to see where the world is at with the pandemic. We see an opening up in the street outside, in the cities and yet at the same time we hear of new outbreaks and fears of a new spreading into the population as people once again start to encounter each other in public places. In China they are closing down again, in Brazil it’s got really bad and there are growing cases in lots of states in America but Tulsa seems to be going ahead – with a disclaimer! If you die you do so at your own risk. Nice, encouraging.
Olivia is practicing the violin next door and it’s comforting to hear the dulcet tones of her instrument playing plaintive melodies over a solo piano supplied by the internet. She is playing Gymnopedie Nr. 1 by Erik Satie and Salut d’Amour by Edward Elgar (both 1888). I was wondering today about the enduring quality of today’s sounds. The future decides what survives and slips into legend. Here in the archive I sit with a collection full of both timeless classics that have endured and forgotten classics that will rarely be brought out and played, it’s hard to know the worth of something beyond personal taste. It seems that the only guaranteed survivors are the classical composers, their future has proved that or has it? When will the funding of orchestras be added to the list of unnecessary costs? Jimi Hendrix never dies but who listens to Glenn Miller anymore? Will Jimi Hendrix and The Beatles be as famous as Mozart is 229 years after his death? Imagine this, a man and a woman are driving down the Pacific Coast Highway in their automatic hoverjet on holiday listening to Drive My Car by The Beatles written in 1965. The year is 2194, if it works for Mozart, why not for The Beatles? It’s 2202 and after hearing The Beatles this futuristic couple decide to listen to a famous record from 1973, The Dark Side Of The Moon by Pink Floyd. Of course now the dark side of the moon is a bustling metropolis, there’s even a famous night club there with that very name populated by alien travellers and exotic dancers. Have I been watching too much Star Trek?
For music today I had a burning desire for Roxy Music’s first record (1972) before Bry got too slick, Eno got famous and the makeup and fake leopard skin was rife. Bob Harris famously introduced Roxy Music on England’s premier music show (OGWT) as a band he didn’t like. I’m not sure why, perhaps he saw them as pastiche with their theatre but musically they explored fascinating areas. Ferry’s vocal was unique, but perhaps that was seen by Bob as too affected. Even the straightforward Re-Make/Re-Model is weird, and the weird Ladytron is surprisingly straightforward. There’s just so many ideas and no fear of tradition or experimentation. They were part Glam, part Rock, part Punk and part Electronic and on If There Is Something Ferry’s warble was even a challenge to Family’s Roger Chapman. Add in Andy Mackay’s effected oboe and saxophone, Eno’s treatments (and backing vocal), Paul Thompson’s meaty drumming with Phil Manzanera’s unorthodox guitar with founder member Graham Simpson’s moving bass and not forgetting Ferry’s piano, and you have one unique band full of magic. Dear Bob, what happened? Side 1 ends with 2HB (To Humphrey Bogart), some faded Hollywood nostalgia appears here in the vocal but musically it’s reminiscent of where Eno might go on his solo albums. I always thought 2HB was about a pencil.
Side 2 starts with that eerie electronic pulse, The Bob (medley) is an odd one, it’s the Battle Of Britain and comes complete with the sound of, well, battle. It then flows into a very weird reedy Gong or Hawkwind type instrumental section, Andy Mackay wailing and then into a pastoral piano piece, before returning to the noise of the verse and then onto a bombastic end. Weird. The beautiful Brief Encounter, inspired again by a moody British film from 1945 about a pre-war love affair. Next is Chance Meeting filled out with a whole track of perfect Manzanera feedback with piano and bass as a support pulse. Simpson finally taking a melodic stroll.
Would You Believe? is almost 10cc’s Donna and surely IS pastiche as it then goes to The Hop with Dany And The Juniors. If this song had been in the Rocky Horror Show you wouldn’t have blinked. There was something oddly fifties in the great Glam bands, Mott The Hoople also had it and other bands of the day subscribed to it, Showaddywaddy anybody, Mud?
On the beautiful and evocative Sea Breezes, Mackay again makes all the difference with the oboe, so atmospheric, perfect above the calm of the electric piano. It’s almost Middle Eastern and that with the straight ahead guitar noodling it creates an incongruous perfection. And then the song changes with the oddest drum part and bass and feedback madness fading in and out and unnervingly rumbling underneath the angular direction the track has unexpectedly taken – and then it reverts back to quiet.
The short Bitters End might have been based on a vocal influence from the thirties and the song is rather an indecipherable nod to nothing seventies and might be more at home with Noel Coward.
By Roxy Music’s second album For Your Pleasure (1973) Eno was about to invent a world that only a theorist could inhabit. One foot in lipstick, another in intellectual pursuit. Finding commercialism in minimalism, he was imagination wrapped in satin. He left Roxy Music soon after For Your Pleasure was completed and made four fantastic vocal albums between 1974 and 1977 – Here Come The Warm Jets (1974), Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy (1974), Another Green World (1975), and Before And After Science (1977), as well as the minimal Discreet Music (1975). But in 1974 he joined Kevin Ayers, John Cale and Nico and a whole lot of cool musicians (The Soporifics) for the June 1st 1974 live concert at London’s Rainbow Theatre. He opens the album with stirring versions of Driving Me Backwards and Baby’s On Fire from Here Come The Warm Jets.
John Cale is next doing a bracing ‘modern’ version of Heartbreak Hotel followed by Nico and her pump organ singing The Doors’ The End. Oh my that voice, but what happened to the release of the other tracks by these three artists? Wikipedia says “Other songs that were performed but did not make the LP include Ayers’ I’ve Got A Hard-On For You Baby (with Cale on backing vocals), Cale’s Buffalo Ballet and Gun, and Nico’s Janitor Of Lunacy and her rendition of Das Lied Der Deutschen. One track from the concert was added to a Nico CD reissue.
Side 2 is all Kevin Ayers – the great Kevin Ayers. I stood next to him once at the urinal backstage at a Go-Betweens concert in London at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire and had a talk with him (there and backstage). I have all his albums, love, love, love. Oh and I say it again, that voice. We covered Decadence from Bananamour (1973) with the ex band on the Box Of Birds album (1999). He opens the side with May I? followed by Shouting In A Bucket, Stranger In Blue Suede Shoes which features collaborator Ollie Halsall on lead guitar. Rabbit is on organ, Archie Leggatt on bass, Eddie Sparrow on drums and Robert Wyatt on percussion. This is the lineup for most of the tracks although Mike Oldfield joins for lead guitar on Everybody’s Sometime And Some People’s All The Time Blues, and Eno and John Cale guest on Two Goes Into Four. Mike Oldfield had released Tubular Bells a year earlier and was riding on that album’s massive success, but he was here because before that he had played in Ayers’ band The Whole World.
John Cale’s Fear (1974) is one of my all time favourite albums. The opening track Fear Is A Man’s Best Friend ends in frenzy before the beautiful second track Buffalo Ballet. There’s something about the Art Rock of 1974 before Punk had happened that is some of my favourite music. Barracuda comes next with Phil Manzanera doing his unorthodox thang again on guitar. On Emily, Irene and Doreen Chanter sing backing vocals with Liza Strike. They were all over records in this era, the go-to backing singers. This song again beautiful with synthesizer tropical wave sounds. The melodic Ships Of Fools ends Side 1 of this most poetic album.
Gun opens Side 2, Phil Manzanera going nuts again on the guitar, Archie Leggatt on bass and Fred Smith on drums with the deepest snare you ever heard. It’s not Fred Smith the bassist from Television, it’s not Fred Sonic Smith guitarist from MC5 and Patti Smith’s partner for many years. It’s Fred Smith the drummer! That could have been quite a band if they’d decided to play together, but what would they have been called?
The very odd The Man Who Couldn’t Afford To Orgy comes with its tongue firmly in its cheek to lighten you up and with special guest Judy Nylon and then another lovely song in You Know More Than I Know with Irene and Doreen and Liza. The last track Momma Scuba seems to have lots of guitar players and a different lineup. Manzanera is still there but there’s appearances by Richard Thompson and Bryn Haworth. It’s The Winkies’ Brian Turrington on bass and Michael Des Maris on drums. What’s great about this album is its beauty and its edge and somewhere in there Eno also appears.
In 1974 Nico released The End, what a year it was, John Cale plays and produces, Phil Manzanera and Eno are there, too, fantastic instrumentation, perfect. It’s a mystery how Nick Cave became so popular when Nico was only ever a cult. She does everything he does but without the showbiz, there’s your answer. It’s also the era we are in, the whole world is changing all the time and like the wheel of fortune your number comes up, Nick got lucky. Rather Nick than…well you know who they are. The End is a wonderful album, the atmosphere Nico creates, and guess what, I’m going to say it again, oh that voice! All the songs bar The End are written by Nico. She plays harmonium and takes you under the sleeve of her ancestors’ shawl, leads you into the dark forest, even the mist parts to let her by. In her eyes the darkness overpowers the daylight, birds fall out of the sky, she takes you without explanation to a place you don’t want to see. When you arrive she laughs and scares the giant trees, the mountains outside the forest shudder in her presence. It’s as if she has inherited the eternal sadness of the ages.
I saw Nico live twice in Stockholm in the eighties, amazing, unforgettable. This is the track listing from The End, because I simply cannot decide which songs to single out on this amazing album.
SIDE 1
It Has Not Taken Long
Secret Side
You Forget to Answer
Innocent and Vain
Valley of the Kings
SIDE 2
We’ve Got the Gold
The End
Das Lied der Deutschen
Song Of The Day is Where The Rainstorm Ends from Seeing Stars, because there is always The End.
Where The Rainstorm Ends
Say you’re gonna be there
At the rainstorm’s end
Say you’re gonna be there
At the rainstorm’s end
I know change
Say you’re gonna be there
At the rainbow’s end
Say you’re gonna be there
At the rainbow’s end
I know change
Say you’re gonna meet me
Don’t be late
Say you’re gonna meet me
Don’t be late
I know change
Say you want to meet me
At the rainstorm’s end
Say you want to meet me
At the rainstorm’s end
I know change
(Willson-Piper / Cousin / Price)
Seeing Stars – Seeing Stars (1997)