49. The National – You’ve done it again, Virginia

/ Lit up, Beggars Banquet, 2005

They’re the kind of group whose fans are fervent enough to call ‘heresy!’ over this, but with Boxer, the National have come as close to making a great album, start to finish, as I suspect they ever will.  Boxer’s charm goes beyond the obvious, attention-grabbing immediacy and idiosyncrasy of ‘Fake empire’ or ‘Mistaken for strangers’; there is for example ‘Start a war’ with unwittingly or otherwise its acoustic guitar echoing ‘Don’t send me away’ by the Verlaines and its title the song on Pacific Street by the Pale Fountains (a record also bedecked in yellow and black); or ‘Racing like a pro’ in which the glow of youthful dreams are turned into grim adult reality using an everyday melody that no-one had yet thought to pluck off the shelf in the vast repository of tunes that the Muses watch over like the curatorial librarians of a past, present and future Alexandria.

What separates the National – two sets of brothers and an unrelated vocalist – from those at the level to which I suspect they aspire – REM, U2, Bruce Springsteen – is that Matt Berninger is a world-weary front man rather than a world-dominating one, a self-confessed fuck-up (to judge at least from the National’s earlier releases) whose self-deprecating humour leavens the mood in ways that rarely happens with our good friends the spiky extraterrestrial, the bombastic evangelist and the everyman storyteller and sentimentalist.  Their songs provoke imaginative responses and touch in unexpected ways on the lives of their listeners (‘Mr. November’, ‘Gospel’).  The world-weariness jars gently and beautifully with the messianic energy of the National’s extra large music, propelled by the big, propulsive drumming of Bryan Devendorf.  When the National’s mood slows or saddens, then they have more in common with Tindersticks, Tom Waits or even the Blue Nile than with Michael, Bono or Bruce; city sickness, night owl melancholy and romantic yearning are there in abundance.  I’m also reminded of Mark Eitzel’s desperate humour when coupled with the sustained tension and wild release of the American Music Club’s California, though the contrast the National generate is less extreme, less a thing of beauty.  But there’s still the same America-sized scale, the same underlying anglophile audiophile tendencies.  Messrs Curtis, Sumner, Hook, Morris, and Hannett, take a bow.

So it will be fascinating to see which way the National go next – aiming for the worldwide glory and fame that supporting both REM and Barack Obama suggests, or steering clear of those treacherous waters, deftly navigating round the whirlpools and offshore rocks to explore quieter seas of greater marine interest.  Most likely will be a middle path, one that might be interpreted either as a healthy disregard for the spoils of pop war, or an unhealthy shirking of the historical imperative for groups of their type to be bigger than is strictly necessary.  Either way, I reckon they’ll scale some more heights, even if they probably can’t top Boxer.

To fill the merchandising gap between Boxer and the record due in 2010, we have had the A skin, a night / The Virginia EP film and offcuts combo.  The film makes a nice enough background for dabbling either with hallucinogens or on your laptop, though I suspect it would irritate if you actually paid too much attention to it.  But fair play to the National for letting director Vincent Moon go his own way.  The offcuts are of the kind of quality that makes them collectively another fine but not great LP, and I had a hard time choosing from the four B sides included in the set, each of which presents a different facet of the National.  Should we eliminate ‘Without permission’ because it’s a cover?  That would be harsh, particularly as Caroline Martin’s beautiful song in its original form is so Nationalesque; how it comes to be that way is almost certainly one of those quirks of fate that determines a style of song writing can emerge independently in two geographical locations at more or less the same time.  But you can see why the National were drawn to it.  The song burns like a slow fuse and crucially both writer and performer resist the temptation to let it lead to a stack of dynamite.

‘Blank slate’ and the maudlin but graceful tarrying of ‘Santa Clara’ are presumably outtakes from the Boxer sessions, but might have been at home on the record.  Time can make the artist and the offcut-seeking admirer wonder why they left off these but put on, say, ‘Green gloves’.  ‘Blank slate’ has the kind of sonic propulsion perfected within the grooves of records released on Flying Nun and later adopted by residents of Sub Pop.  But really it all goes back to Joy Division.  The lyric is an imaginative wonder in keeping with the song’s title that Ian Curtis could never have sung:

I keep it upstairs
Gonna be a blank slate, gonna wear a white cape
But I keep it upstairs
Gonna jump out of a cake with my heart on a string

In the end I’ve gone for ‘You’ve done it again, Virginia’, another short story about an individual struggling with life and drink, another Berninger pen portrait, another secret meeting in the basement of his brain.  Lyrics like ‘a cool, tall drink of water is all you ever wanted to be’ are scored with an undercurrent of the kind of old-timer, sepia-toned brass that Tom Waits used to colour ‘In the neighbourhood’.  It’s an irresistible combination.

• The National – You’ve done it again, Virginia 
• Daytrotter session 
• The National MySpace 
• The National and Caroline Martin perform ‘Without permission’
• Caroline Martin MySpace

48. Hit Parade – Huevos Mexicana

/ You didn’t love me then, JSH Records, 1985

Huebos Mexicana is a breakfast dish served in the cafes of Palenque, Chiapas. Rumours maintain that the barrios and cantinas still ring to the beat of this infectious tune.

You may not remember, but in the mid-eighties the Hit Parade – school friends Julian Henry, Matt Moffatt and Raymond Watts – managed a run of six Top Ten singles.  For a while it seemed that only Bananarama could match them for consistency – but then Bananarama failed to hit the Number One spot, which is just what the Hit Parade achieved in 1986 with ‘See you in Havana’, that fabulous ballad on which Julian Henry ceded vocal duties to Cath Carroll, herself already well on the way to being a household name as frontwoman of her group Miaow.  Possessed of that wonderful voice which we all used to argue about – was it the blend and nip of Irish coffee and cream, or rather the sweetness of honey with the zest of lemon? – she helped push the Hit Parade to that next level of stardom.  It seemed there was no stopping them now.  But then Hi-NRG follow-up ‘I get so sentimental’ was trumped on the dance floor and kept off the top by Rick Astley’s ‘Never gonna give you up’; and despite a heart-breaking melody and the continued kick of Carroll’s presence, ‘The sun in my eyes’ barely scraped the edges of the top forty.

The game seemed to be over.  It was left to the considerably more image-conscious Pet Shop Boys to clean up with their similarly melodic sequenced pop.  Still, the singles collection With love from the Hit Parade did good business in the album charts on its release in 1990; nostalgia had already had a chance to settle on the Hit Parade like morning dew on particularly green and well-tended grass.

You may not remember, because I’m making it up.  In a perfect world, it might have happened.  In any of many alternate realities, it probably did.  In those perfect or alternate worlds, the recordings of this world’s Hit Parade might well have been beefed up and generally enriched to the point that – as they sprang from tinny daytime factory transistors – no population of human beings could have said no to them.  In this world, had some of Julian Henry’s songs found their way into Stock, Aitken & Waterman’s clutches, it’s conceivable that they would now be staples of eighties discos and Magic 105.4 FM’s playlists, though not necessarily with the Hit Parade as the artist’s name.  But the imperfectly crafted pop songs of such a perfectly named pop group merited them finding themselves in that mythic place, whether or not the intention of the name was ironic.  (There must have been dozens of new groups since who’ve thought, damn, wish I’d got to that name first.)

And in an imaginary past where the Hit Parade were regulars in the Hit Parade, we might recall that ‘You didn’t love me then’ was the A side – fine as it was – overturned by its flip immediately attracting all the radio play; hastily resleeved as the A side, we might plausibly pretend that ‘Huevos Mexicana’ went top five, and in so doing disqualified me from writing about it.

But in this world on this blog I can say that I love ‘Huevos Mexicana’.  The spindle hole on my copy of the vinyl was punched slightly off centre, so to my ears it has always had an unintentional elliptical sound effect that somehow added an extra woozy glow to its already euphoric charms.  Lyrically it captures all sorts of things within the finely woven web of its pop – the Beats, summer holidays, spicy scrambled eggs for breakfast in Tijuana, fishing marlin, the Zona Rosa in Mexico City; even Malcolm Lowry’s metaphysically challenging novel Under the volcano is cutely referenced.  What a contrast with almost all of the rest of Julian Henry’s songs of the time, which majored on love breaking down against a west London backdrop.

In the real world, the Hit Parade did not seem unduly dented by their failure to set the charts alight, going on to record two singles and an LP for Sarah Records in the early nineties before coming back to life in the 21st century.  And here’s where perfect or alternate and real worlds collide, for now of course it’s possible to imagine all this for yourself by downloading that collection of hit singles, With love from the Hit Parade.

• The Hit Parade – Huevos Mexicana
• The Hit Parade
• The Hit Parade – MySpace
• JSH Records Beginner’s guide to the music industry

47. Cowboy Junkies – Witches

/ Sun comes up, it’s Tuesday morning, RCA, 1990

Light and dark: rarely has a single as successfully conveyed each on either side of its flipped coin.  On the A side, the joy of sleepily waking alone into a sunlit room, and lazily contemplating the day ahead and how ‘I kind of like the feel of this extra few feet in my bed’ and ‘everybody knows that good news always sleeps till noon’.  On the B – the dark side – the essence of the occult distilled into a few carefully chosen notes of acoustic guitar and the ice water of Margo Timmins’ voice, simultaneously wondering whether to answer the call of witches, and summoning them up.  It’s a preternaturally still piece of music, and yet when Margo sings of the night winds, suddenly they whistle through your already moonlit mind.  The song’s atmosphere is sensuous beyond words; shivers of delight and fear run down Margo’s back, and yours.  You can’t help but be drawn to those witches.

I first heard this not long after its release, set apart from the album on which it also appears (The caution horses).  Taped for me by a girl whose sensibilities tended occasionally towards the eldritch, it stopped me dead in my tracks.  If you’ve never heard ‘Witches’, I hope it does the same to you.

• The Cowboy Junkies – Witches 
• The story of the making of The caution horses

46. Aphex Twin – Bucephalus bouncing ball

/ Come to Daddy, Pappy mix, Warp, 1997

Very few B sides can have found themselves chosen as official BBC Radio 4 Desert Island Discs, but ‘Bucephalus bouncing ball’ is one such, selected by comedian Vic Reeves in 2003.  Possibly it’s the one and only Desert Island B side.  It’s also been selected by Warp co-founder Steve Beckett for Chosen, one of a plethora of releases celebrating twenty years of Warp.  Somewhat inevitably, Beckett has gone for a more engaging set from the Warp back catalogue than has resulted from the top ten popular vote for the first of the CD’s two discs.  Complete with the landscape photography of Dan Holdsworth, it’s a typically beautiful package, and along with Recreated, on which Warp artists cover favourite moments from the back catalogue across another pair of discs, we are given as good an overview of Warp’s breadth of vision as we were likely to get.  And, the top ten classics aside, they work as compilations, one track flowing into the next, snaking back and forth through the years, and opening up for further investigation those Warp artists you may have missed through needing to blink occasionally.

Aphex Twin’s presence is felt across the Warp20 releases, of course.  In the future, they’ll write musicological monographs about the work of Richard D. James.  They probably already have.  While there are a number of Warp recording artists I like more (Autechre, Broadcast, Boards Of Canada, Gravenhurst, Guillermo Scott Herren, Antipop Consortium), it’s impossible not to admire both RDJ’s range and his approach to making music, not to mention the image or anti-image that he has either deliberately crafted or carelessly and haphazardly fostered in retaliation to the irritation of interactions with the media.

A latter-day tour-de-force demonstration of stereophonic effects, ‘Bucephalus bouncing ball’ sounds not so much like a single sphere at work as several, metallically pinging round the insides of RDJ’s brain – or at least his computer – like a speeded-up multi-ball version of Pong, the early video tennis game.  Set against the condescension of a simple melody picked out on his synth and an accompanying mournful wash of chords, the balls proliferate mathematically, trying to effect their escape.  Released from the speakers, they burrow their way into your brain and who knows what the consequences will be then?

Miscellany

1. Bucephalus was the name of Alexander the Great’s favourite horse.
2. ‘Bucephalus bouncing ball’ was also used in the soundtrack of the film Pi and appears in several scenes of the movie each time the main character repeats his monologue.
3. Arcade Fire associates Bell Orchestre have recently recorded a cover version of ‘Bucephalus bouncing ball’ for their album As seen through windows.
4. The unsettling jungle-punk and techno smears of ‘Come to daddy’ made it to number 36 in the UK charts.
5. Richard D James deliberately holds back his best music from public consumption: ‘You end up hating your own music.  So you have to protect it.’ (Interview with The wire, 2003)
6. ‘Acrid avid jam shred’ is an anagram of Richard D James.
7. Vic Reeves’ pick of his eight choices was ‘Lark Ascending’, while his book was  Three men in a boat.  And his luxury?  Potato seeds.

• Aphex Twin – Bucephalus bouncing ball

45. Last Party – English road film

/ Selective memory, Dishy, 1995

Before they decided they’d be better off making a fresh start as the Bitter Springs, Last Party recorded two final singles for the fledgling Dishy label, also home to the Hellfire Sermons.  After the epic double A side of ‘UCIT’ / ‘Fax me wacko Jackseed’ (whose opening lines – ‘It’s a boy, Mrs Jackson; another boy…’ – confirm that yes, you-know-who is its subject) came ‘Selective memory’, typically Last Party with its meandering lead guitar cutting a scythe through an underlying bedrock of fuzz and in its constantly quizzical, fearless lyricism.  Simon Rivers is after all the man who sang, ‘So now I have to work for my erections / but I know how everything’s changed / in the months leading up to an April May June July August surprise surprise election’.

He is often an undeniably angry songwriter.  Occasionally it’s hard to work out what he’s livid about.  Take ‘Fax me wacko Jackseed’ – even after all this time, I can’t work out if he’s angry with Mr and Mrs Jackson, or with the wacko their son became, or at his own songwriting insignificance when set against the mad enormity of mega-stardom and the potential for abuse of power that comes with it.  Or all of those things, and more.  ‘Have you ever met the Sandwich family?’ he says at the end of ‘Fax me’, apropos of apparently nothing.  You’re never quite sure that it’s supposed to make sense; somewhere between Joycean stream of consciousness and Barney Sumner scribbling out a lyric five minutes before putting his vocal down on a tape which contains the otherwise perfected sounds of New Order, Simon Rivers lies.

Last Party’s music always suits Rivers’ moods, whether that’s the rage of ‘Fax me’, the reflections of ‘Selective memory’ or the tragicomic tone of ‘English road film’.  There are always tunes a postie might whistle on his or her round, and as many hooks as jokes.  ‘English road film’ opens with a gag: ‘I was addicted to Cola, so I switched to caffeine-free’ / ‘now I’m on eighty cans a week’.  Of course, the concept of an English road film is in itself a joke – in whichever direction we go, the road runs out after a day’s driving at the very most, and then you’ve reached the sea.  There are no endless space between towns, and our dereliction is of a different order to the tumbleweed romance found during a coast to coast trip across the States.  The tone of melancholy Simon Rivers offers up ‘English road film’ reflects that feeling of being hemmed in by the boundaries of our small island, and of being at the mercy of the weather patterns that result when warm tropical winds meet cold polar air.

When I wrote about Last Party twenty years ago, I called Simon Rivers a ‘southern Martin Bramah’, the reference twice leading back to the Fall – Bramah was of course an original member before forming the Blue Orchids, while the Jazz Butcher song I also invoked was ‘Southern Mark Smith’.  Would Simon Rivers have felt empowered to become the kind of lyricist he did without the guiding light and shade of Mark E.’s sarcasm and vitriol?  If Mark E. hadn’t existed, would have been necessary to invent him in the form of Simon Rivers, and might it be Last Party who ended up recording a score of Peel sessions rather than the two they did?  The second Peel session was as good as any recorded in 1989, but none of the songs – ‘Purple Hazel’, ‘Full English breakfast’, ‘Platforms and trains’, ‘Creature lake’ – made it onto the following year’s Love handles LP, and only the last of the four has appeared since.

Live, Last Party were a furiously comedic, comedically furious bunch, with Simon Rivers even more energetically engaged than he sounds on record.  There were two great LPs, Porky’s range and Love handles, though the latter was contained within what must be ranked as a serious contender for the worst sleeve ever, and had a muffled and murky production which detracted from the excellence of the songs.

The download edition of Cacophony on Port Hampton: singles and rarities 1985-1995 is exceptionally good value – at £5.99 for 34 tracks, it’d be rude not to.  Last Party never released a duff single, and the B sides are almost all up to scratch too.  The rarities include a bunch of songs that might have formed the bulk of a decent third LP, but sadly neither of those Peel sessions.

Frustrated at how they were perceived, Last Party decided to reinvent themselves, and from 1996 set out their stall as the Bitter Springs.  But that’s another story, though one not so different as a name change might suggest.

• Last Party – English road film
• Last Party at A jumped-up pantry boy
• Bitter Springs MySpace

44. The Claim – God, Cliffe and me

/ Wait and see, Esurient, 1989

Heaven knows I’ve written enough already about the Claim elsewhere, so for once I’ll be brief.  With Black path: retrospective 1985-1992 in circulation at last, I hope that an afterlife as long as the Action’s now awaits the Claim.  With roots in two generations of mod, the two groups bear close comparison.  The Action were the great mod-soul group of the sixties, while in the eighties the Claim brewed up a blend which nodded to the Action’s more successful peers but refused to be contained by historic mod mannerisms, or those of more recent memory. 

The connection goes beyond the association back and forth in time established via Paul Weller, whose affection for the Action was instrumental in bringing them to the attention of the next generation of mods and associated travellers.  The Claim grew up listening to the Jam, and even put their producer Vic Coppersmith-Heaven at the helm for ‘Wait and see’, though the experience wasn’t entirely successful.  Both Reg King and Dave Read drew their respectively mellow vocal styles from a soulful well without there being any sense that either was feigning where he was from; both were largely overlooked in their time in favour of groups who were more artful in their self-presentation; and both were left high and dry with so much more to give.  If you’ve heard the Action’s retrospectively released Rolled gold LP as well as the singles compilation you’ll know what I mean.

There is one important difference: to my knowledge the Claim never played or recorded a song they hadn’t written themselves, while some very familiar names feature beneath the titles on Action packed. But nevertheless the Action share with the Claim the ability to perform gloriously heart-rending, ageless songs which seem all the more heartbreaking in the light of how few people got to hear them at the time of their release.

‘God, Cliffe and me’ is as fine a song as you’ll ever hear about the places we grow up in, love ’em and loathe ’em.  Its exuberance emphasised by xylophone, Dave Arnold’s lead guitar is irrepressibly jaunty, all the more so when set against Dave Read’s wonderfully Eeyore lyric, which in its simple but opaque lines manages to capture that gloomy feeling of being trapped by your origins, playing out time, and looking for the answers in games of cards.  Had his musical interests been a little different or his geographical origins located further north or west, Dave Read might have made a great folk singer, for there’s an undeniably traditional quality to his voice, and a keenness to capture the experience of living in a little-known corner of his country which comes through with particular sharpness on ‘God, Cliffe and me’.

I leave the last words to Nicholson Burr, someone who evidently does know that corner of the country:

Medway remains largely a disgrace, still a mish mash of dereliction, failed cosmetic surgery and fatigue and the Claim made an effort to document this where other bands of the time let it go. People will tell you about the Milkshakes and The Prisoners, both great bands, but if you were lucky enough to see a Dentists and Claim double bill, maybe at the Hammersmith Clarendon or, god forbid, upstairs at Churchills in darkest Chatham, you’d learn everything you needed to know about growing up in Medway from just being in that room for those couple of hours. The Dentists would show you how things could be and The Claim would tell you how it was.  [Comment three here.]

• The Claim – God, Cliffe and me
• The Claim MySpace
• On lightness and left-handed Indian knife throwers: the Claim and the Clientele
• A jumped-up pantry boy on the Claim

43b. The Beatles – Rain

/ Paperback writer, Parlophone, 1966

On reflection, concealing a piece about the Beatles’ best B side within an entry ostensibly about an obscure group who might at best be taken to be merchants of late sixties whimsy (and at worst a novelty act) doesn’t count as B/w’s smartest ever move, even if the group in question – the Psychedelic Filberts – had already had their origins deliberately obscured for the release of their live cover version of ‘Rain’.  (Look away now if you do not want to discover that the Filberts were in fact Diesel Park West, the name change being suggested by their label, Food Records).

So, now properly flagged for Beatles admirers, agnostics and abominators alike, the text is here.  With all due apologies should you have already imbibed too much Fab Four-related media over the past few weeks.

43. The Psychedelic Filberts – Rain

/ Temple of convenience by Yeah Yeah Noh, In Tape, 1985

I love the Beatles.  I can’t help myself.  I love their sound from the first raw notes of ‘Love me do’ to the last disaffected sigh of ‘I me mine’.  I love the journey they took.  I love the fable that surrounds the Fab Four.  I love the biopics about them.  I love the model they created.  I love the phrase ‘four lads who shook the world’, and I love Half Man Half Biscuit’s take on that phrase, substituting ‘the Wirral’ for ‘the world’.  I love the fact that Paul Morley writes articles speculating on what the world would be like if the Beatles had never existed.  I love the fact that John met Paul at a church fête.  I love JohnPaulGeorge&Ringo, all for one and one for all.  I love their cheeky played-up Scouse humour.  I love the Monkees, who came into being because of the Beatles.  I love the influence the Beatles have necessarily had on all subsequent Liverpudlian groups, not just Shack and the La’s.  I love the length of time (eighteen months) that it took for America to get the Beatles.  I love the way they then conquered America like no country has been conquered before or since.  I love the fact that their first American LP was called Introducing the Beatles, and I love the echo of closure in DJ Shadow calling his first album – constructed thirty-odd years later from the vinyl imprint of the music of others – Endtroducing…

I love the songs of the Beatles that I don’t love.  I love the fact that certain friends of mine don’t love the Beatles at all.  I love the family copies of the early EPs that in some inexplicably circuitous manner have come to nestle in my singles collection.  I love my battered vinyl copy of Revolver, issued by EMI Greece.  I love the song-by-song dissection of the songs I love, and the songs I don’t, in Ian MacDonald’s Revolution in the head.  I love to read that MacDonald does not love ‘Do you want to know a secret’, but that he does love ‘All my loving’.  I love George Martin, and the ‘gracious, open-minded adeptness’ with which he tended to the Beatles’ music.  Did I mention that I love the Beatles’ music?

I love the fact that the Beatles played shows in places like Aldershot.  I love the mass hysteria that greeted their live performances (‘a ceaseless avian shrilling’, MacDonald calls it) and I love to recall my mother – no great fan of any music – recalling that she saw the Beatles, so becoming a part of that mass hysteria.  I love knowing exactly where I was when I heard that John Lennon had been shot dead.  I love to picture John and Paul head to head – eyeball to eyeball – with a guitar each, conjuring a song out of nothing.  I love the songwriting partnerships since made in their image – Forster and McLennan, Handyside and Hughes.  I love being reminded that a group called Episode 4 (later to become East Village and influenced by the Beatles more through the kaleidoscope of Hurrah! than directly) released a single on Lenin and McCarthy Records.  I love the title of a chapter in a book called ‘Every sound there is’ – ‘The Beatle who became a man: Revolver and George Harrison’s metamorphosis – and that it happens to be by Matthew Bannister, once of the Sneaky Feelings.  I love the near-perfect recreation of ‘Strawberry fields forever’ made by XTC’s Dave Gregory purely for his own amusement; surprised in the act of recreation by Andy Partridge, Dave had him complete the fake by impersonating John’s vocal.

I love the parts Stu Sutcliffe, Astrid Kirchherr, Pete Best, Brian Epstein and Yoko Ono played in the story.  I love the Quarry Men and the Silver Beatles.  I love the footage of the final performance on top of Apple’s Savile Row building.  I love the pedestrian crossing in St. John’s Wood.  I love Abbey Road studios.  I even love the arguments about whether the mono or stereo versions of the LPs are truest to the Beatles’ vision and sound.  And – no surprise this – I love the Beatles’ B sides.

There are plenty of candidates for the best Fabs B side.  In The heart of rock and soul, Dave Marsh expresses affection for ‘I’m down’.  Ian MacDonald rates ‘I’ll get you’.  But he also recognises the primacy of ‘Rain’, and without much thought it’s the one I have to pick.  If I could travel without limitation in time and space, I would reserve one stop-off for June 1966 to observe the faces (and minds, if I’m as omnipotent as time travel suggests) of fans when they flipped over ‘Paperback writer’ and played ‘Rain’ for the first time.  Because, released before Revolver and ‘Tomorrow never knows’, and with due deference to the Byrds, who had by this time superseded the Beach Boys as the one group encouraging the Beatles to greater heights, there had been nothing like it.  ‘Rain’ suggested new possibilities, possibilities which for better or worse are even today being explored by groups of psychedelic leaning.

I hear its echoes in the music of two of the groups I love most, Shack and the Clientele.  The former leant heavily on ‘Rain’ for ‘I know you well’ but still managed to do something novel in blending Scouse psychedelia and the loose-limbed Manc dance rhythms of the late eighties.  The Clientele, meanwhile, have explored the metaphysical possibilities suggested by Lennon’s vocal and captured in the sonic weight of ‘Rain’ more than any other group – crucially without becoming trapped in psychedelic cliché.

As was always the case when the best were at their best, the writer could not have done it alone.  ‘Rain’ is propelled forwards and held in check by the interplay between Ringo’s complex, just-so drum patterns, the spiralling wiriness of George’s lead guitar, and the bob and weave of that wonderful McCartney bass line.  All of which – slowed down by Martin –  allows the varispeeded John to float free and, as befits an early example of the successful conversion of drug experience into transcendental pop, his singing is perfectly pitched between carefree and couldn’t-care-less.  In a mere three minutes the song establishes that drone and harmony can co-exist within the same space, that with rain in the air and sun in the sky, you can see a rainbow.  There’s so much going on – without there being too much going on – and so many points which touch and set in motion not only future Beatle songs but future strains of pop music.

Echoing, distorted, chaotic and exuberant, the apparently live version of ‘Rain’ by the Psychedelic Filberts contains within it the echo of all the ingredients so carefully assembled by George Martin and JohnPaulGeorge&Ringo in the Abbey Road studio.  The Filberts version mysteriously appeared as a B side on the 12 inch of ‘Temple of convenience’ by Peel favourites Yeah Yeah Noh.  Here’s what the sleeve note says about it:

The tape of Rain was discovered in the cellars of Barkby Road studios.  It was marked simply ‘Live in Hamburg’!!  If anyone has any information concerning ‘the Psychedelic Filbert’ or this recording please contact us at 9 Leire Street, Leicester LE4 6NU United Kingdom.

I very much doubt that Yeah Yeah Noh still live at this address – but if you have any information concerning the Psychedelic Filbert(s), you could always leave a comment here.

• The Psychedelic Filberts – Rain
• Rain

42. St. Christopher – The kind of girl

/ You deserve more than a maybe, Sarah Records, 1988

It was about time we inducted a Sarah flipside into the B/w Hall of Obscurity, for no other label made quite such a song and dance about the aesthetic and political value and impact of the seven inch single.  Influenced by the high standards and joi de vivre of Alan Horne’s Postcard, the ideals and aesthetics of Factory, and the punk rock attitude not only of Creation but also of Subway, the Bristol label that preceded theirs, Clare Wadd and Matt Haynes took the politics of format and value to new heights.  Unfortunately the content didn’t always match the solidity of the principles, and a fair number of the records they released were excessively gauche or incompetent, with to these ears few redeeming features.  But the Sea Urchins, the Orchids, Another Sunny Day, the Springfields, Even As We Speak, the Wake (on a free transfer from Factory), Blueboy, the Sugargliders, the Hit Parade, the Harvest Ministers, and yes, the Field Mice all had something going for them – usually more than something.  In terms of the ongoing battle in pop between those hoping to create timeless music and those happy to realise music specific to the times, Sarah may have had a foot in both camps – in his Are you scared to get happy? fanzines and through Sarah’s predecessor, the flexi label Sha-la-la, Matt had subscribed to the notion of ‘throwaway pop’ – but much of the music made by the groups listed above is standing up well to the 21st century.

The politics, the ferocity of eighties fanzine writers’ economic critique arose from having very little money to live on.  Money only went so far when you were a student or unemployed or working for peanuts.  Brought up to be distrustful of the economics of loans, disciplined to make do on very little, but addicted to music, you soon gained an awareness of and contempt for the financial excesses washing around the music industry.  The choice was often whether to give in and feed that vinyl craving, or keep it back for a pint or two at the gig that night.  Matt wrote evocatively of having to choose between the electric meter and the photocopier.  Not much give and take, very little room for manoeuvre.  So there seemed to be good cause to react angrily if groups chose to do a 3 track 12 inch, especially if you knew that they were not much further away from poverty than you.  That extra track would usually have fitted on a 7 inch at half the price.  But songs were more preciously meted out than they are now, for there never seemed to be a surfeit of them.  Then the musical landscape was finite; now it is virtually infinite.

Impoverished consumers with an addiction to pop got it for free wherever they could – taped by friends, from LPs lent by the public library, or off the radio – but they also spent what money they had on must-have purchases.  Home-taping never killed music, just as it won’t be killed by free downloading.  Kids today may on average be better off than we were twenty-odd years ago, but their disposable income is probably as limited in a relative sense; why would they apportion more of it to music than they do when so much is not only available for free but actually given away as teasers by the industry itself?  Twenty years on, I sit here surrounded by an instant eBay shop’s worth of vinyl and CD stock were I ever inclined to go down that business road.  Whether he likes it or not, the home taper turns out not to be the industry’s assassin, but its greatest supporter.  Kids may not buy music now, as kids, but as their earning power grows and their understanding of value changes in their adult lives, many will think through the consequences of not supporting the music they have come to love and be more inclined to part with their virtual cash.  Or – in defiance of the myth the industry likes to peddle – continue parting with that cash.

From 1987 onwards, Sarah Records carried its fight to the music industry, or at least its independent sector.  The majority of the label’s seven inch records offered three songs in transparent plastic bags with wraparound covers.  Ten inch and full LPs were very reasonably priced.  12 inches when they finally appeared were more like mini-LPs, or, as was the case with the Field Mice’s ‘Missing the moon’, bore the legend ‘this single sells at 7” price’.  Thematic care was taken over labels – Bristol’s transport systems were a feature – and the singles came with posters or postcards and/or inserts which were usually comedic but sometimes poetic, giving you the sense not only of care, attention to detail and wit, but also of a world view that was altogether more rounded than the music media of the time would have had you believe (‘monomaniacs’ is a brickbat that sticks in my mind).  Sarah’s first compilation Shadow factory thanked ‘all of our chums in the independent record industry, without whom none of this would have been necessary.’  They even devised a board game, Saropoly, documenting the trials and tribulations of being an independent, provincial record label in a world of Ivos, Tonys and Alans.

In a non-mainstream sense Sarah Records has been incredibly influential in the years since it reached 99 single releases and Clare and Matt decided to call it a day.  A host of labels have subsequently modelled themselves in Sarah’s image,  promulgating – for better or worse – the musical style it fostered.  You might even argue that those manufacturers of what until recently tasted like the best smoothies in the UK, Innocent, based their marketing style on Sarah’s inserts.  But then Sarah never sold part of itself to Coca Cola.

That Sarah’s political ideals often overshadowed the music is reflected even now by the fact that I’ve saddled a B/w entry nominally about St. Christopher with an account of the label’s ethos.  So let’s give old York’s St. Christopher their due, for as Sarah acts went, they were a particularly vibrant and musically competent bunch.  Glenn Melia’s trio delivered rolling waves of rhythm and jangle, topped with his impassioned, declamatory vocals and a recording technique which evidently involved an echo chamber.  The songs were high on melody and disinclined to outstay their welcome.  That sixties-fixated duo known as the Last Shadow Puppets are a not unreasonable contemporary parallel.  Although it has orchestral backing and a big production in comparison with St. Christopher’s solitary addition of keyboards to the basic guitar-bass-drums set-up, The age of the understatement is filled with a similarly stiff-backed dramatic style and a sound lovingly pilfered from the same sources (St. Christopher’s ten inch LP for Sarah was entitled Bacharach).  Glenn’s lyrics are, however, more Walker Brothers at the height of their popularity than they are ‘Seventh seal’ Scott.  But the atmosphere generated is suitably cinematic, a widescreen panorama of the emotions.  The sound and songwriting is very English, but its pop and folk roots have been treated with exposure to American culture, and some European, albeit indirectly.

‘The kind of girl’ starts dreamily enough, with a pretty flowers-in-the-meadow pattern picked out on Glenn’s guitar.  But the rude and sudden entrance of drummer Ian Kay soon puts an end to any daydreaming, and gives notice of altogether more urgent business, a celebration of the kind of girl she is – ‘the kind of girl that dreams are made of’.  Fellow B side ‘The summer you love’ is just as dramatic, swirling and joyous.  The A side has the same grandeur and haughty insouciance as the equally arresting work of Liverpool’s Wild Swans.  In its run-out grooves a dedication – ‘For Mark’ – is scratched, the tragic story relating to which is told in the sleeve notes of the label’s final compilation, There And Back Again Lane.

St. Christopher is still a going concern, and there are no less than three retrospective compilations available starting from their time with Sarah.  But as well as their Sarah singles, it’s to the three songs issued in 1987 as a flexi disc with the third issue of Caff fanzine that I most frequently return.  On the flexi St. Christopher prove they have a big enough sound to overcome even the deficiencies of the bendable plastic format (hundreds of groups at the time did not).  Had Stanley and Wiggs not got their hands on the songs first, these might have made for an even better Sarah debut.  ‘Forevermore starts here’ led the charge with shimmering, transcendental pop whose strumming was a model of controlled frenzy.  ‘Remember me to her’ again acts as a showpiece for Ian Kay’s wonderful drumming, part beat group, part raw garage, part orchestral timpani – yet amid all that rolling thunder, the group don’t forget to serve up another memorably melodic pop song.  Finally ‘Sinking ships’ snaffles the spirit of a Sean O’Hagan solo from the Microdisney instrumental ‘Michael Murphy’, but also delivers on a jangling sound that gets as close as any kids of independent leaning got to the super-bright celebratory guitar campanology that was contemporaneously emanating from various parts of Africa.  Now that’s what I call a ringing endorsement.

• St. Christopher – The kind of girl
• St. Christopher – Sinking ships
• St. Christopher MySpace 
• Sarah Records and Shinkansen Recordings: the official website 
• Sarah Records discography

41. Momus – What will death be like?

/ Murderers, the hope of women, Creation, 1986

I’ve written extensively about Momus, elsewhere and long ago, and over-exposure to his persona meant that for years I couldn’t listen to his music.  Yes, Nick Currie has the ability to irritate not only those who have never liked him, but also his own fans.

But sufficient time has passed that not so long ago I once again went to see Momus do his one-man digital vs vaudeville Brechtian cabaret act in the bar at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (a natural Momus habitat).  Subsequently I felt up to rediscovering the overt lyrical power and subtle emotional effect of Momus’ early records.  And now – if you haven’t already done so – you can too, for having previously posted a collection of demos from 1988 (Amazing blonde women, comprised of the songs that would form the bulk of Tender pervert and Don’t stop the night), Momus has made his entire Creation Records-era back catalogue available gratis.  He argues:

Creation doesn’t exist any more, and in theory Sony owns the rights to these albums, but isn’t doing anything with them and probably never will. In the meantime, only Russian pirates are profiting, charging punters for illegal downloads. … If you’re the sort of person who likes to donate to the artist when you download, do it here. But it’s not really necessary; these albums paid for themselves long ago.

I don’t want to risk becoming disenchanted with his music again, so I’m trying not to detain myself (or you) too long with the verbiage.  But ‘What will death be like?’ deserves a paragraph or two in its own right.  A relentless torrent of imagery, of the kinds of knowledge that might prove useful on University Challenge, it is superficially the work of intellect, but its cumulative effect is emotional.  In sorrowful celebration, it speaks of amazement at life’s infinite variety.  Against this Perec-esque inventory of horror and wonder, Momus squeakily fingers the strings of his acoustic guitar, twanging hard enough that the jarring notes dispute with the hypnotic seven minute march of images up and down the hills of your mind.

By the time he wrote ‘Murderers, the hope of women’ and ‘What will death be like?’, Momus had already developed his own unique style, but he was certainly still taking a dose of inspiration from Jacques Brel, and I would guess also from Leonard Cohen, whose ‘Who by fire’ is equally inventorial and death-fixated.  Had Momus been born Jewish, you can imagine that he might also have been tempted to call an album New skin for the old ceremony.

Momus’ own view of ‘What will death be like?’ is characteristically ambivalent:

How I rate this now: Powerful, but rather worthy. Oddly enough, it now sounds to me like a song about ambition, as if it’s not about death but about being a great writer.  It’s bloody difficult to play live (which doesn’t stop me trying).

Why was a 26 year-old man so obsessed with death?  Well, existentialism had been a big formative influence on my teenage years. I was steeped in that.  But there was also the fact that death was something you weren’t really supposed to dwell on in pop music, which made it ‘transgressive’, and that was something I wanted to be.  A difficult artist, a singing author hitting you with big themes.  Something like Léo Ferré or – of course – Jacques Brel, whose ‘La mort’ looms large behind this Wittgensteinian list of things death won’t be like, because they’re all things pointing towards death, but firmly anchored in life.

Every line is memorable for the image it conjures up, but perhaps my favourite couple of verses appear at the song’s mid-point:

Death will be unlike the wrinkling sea children glimpse through the chinks in the boardwalk
Death will be unlike the magical land of The lion, the witch and the wardrobe
Death will be unlike the treacherous virus that murders the lovers with AIDS
Death will be unlike the phantoms of freedom that lead the crowd over the barricades
Death will be unlike the night thoughts of ‘Late Call’ when ministers stop being cosy
Death will be unlike The pit and the pendulum co-starring Bela Lugosi
Death will be unlike the bulge of the mouse inside the boa constrictor
Death will be unlike that drunkard the phoenix, so tight on the moonshine of golden elixirs

Momus may be displaying his erudition, the breadth of his cultural knowledge, his peacock ambition to be a great writer, but there is also the honorable intention of trying to cram in all of human life.  The wordplay is impressive, first a complementary and then a conflicting image, but it’s equally expressive, and the listener’s pleasure is in the flight of the toss of this two-sided coin – the artful joy of the poetry, and the essential sadness which underlies it. 

Momus once wrote:

‘I’ve always been accused of being the most literary of songwriters. In fact I started off doing lots of experiments with guitars, bottles, tissue paper, smashed pianos and tape distortion which, eventually, out of sheer laziness, I stuck some words on top of. … For years I searched my guitar for the ‘missing chord’ that would stop time or make the whole world weep.  Now I scroll through a thousand types of digital delay to find the one that will switch the world into slow motion.  It’s music that really fascinates me.  Words come easy, I have a facility with them, I can ‘do’ words.’

With time, I’ve come to see this as less a typically knowing and crafty attempt to escape from people’s preconceptions, and more an essential truth that the man behind the mask has decided to let slip.  Though the music that accompanies the verses of ‘What will death be like?’ is not especially striking or original, its artful clumsiness gives the litany of images a perfect platform, and the resulting synthesis of musical and lyrical mood is undeniably mournful.  ‘The sadness of things’, as a later Momus song put it.  Life is fleeting and death unknowable.

In a suitably Momus-esque twist, I lent my copy of ‘Murderers, the hope of women’ to a girl who was keen on me, though I was sadly too dim-witted to work this out at the time.   The following year I got a postcard from her with Yorick’s skull on it.  Never got the record back though.

• Momus – What will death be like?
• Momus – the Creation back catalogue
• Momus – Amazing blonde women
• Click opera
• A way to connect: Momus and Tricky (Tangents, 1997)

40. Intastella – The right experience

/ The night, Planet 3 Records, 1995

Combining the song title ‘Interlove’ from the Sensation number one LP and the forename of vocalist Stella Grundy, Intastella were Laugh expanded and rebranded.  But major label marketing failed to find the new brand a niche, let alone national or global dominance.  Intastella fell between two points on the pop continuum – too bubblegum for the dance crowd, too conceptual for the mainstream audience of the time.  Their cause wasn’t helped by taking an early wrong turn; their first LP, Intastella and the family of people only really peaked with its ‘Baby you’re a rich man’-referencing single, ‘People’, possessed of a wonderfully melodic bass line and an chorus which crossed pulpit, soap box and football terrace.  Those segments of the market remained indifferent, and MCA dropped them.

Subsequent years saw Intastella launch two further long players and a string of singles, some great, others fair, in an increasingly desperate search for the hit that a sympathetic observer might think they deserved.  Laugh’s open-to-anything optimism was still there in the lyrics – ‘Point Hope’ suggested that if you ‘just close your eyes and believe, the future is for you’ – but the power of Intastella’s own positive thinking wasn’t enough to secure public affection.  They were entitled to ask: if a similar sort of trick worked for Saint Etienne, why was it not working for them?  No matter how kittenish and seductive Stella strove to be, the songs must not have been sprinkled with quite enough angel dust to satisfy casual listeners to Radio 1.  Neither were Intastella the kind to sell their souls down by the crossroads for privileged time in the sun; drafting in Tricky for a remix of ‘Grandmaster’ and releasing a full-on dance-pop cover version of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons’ Northern Soul favourite ‘The night’ both failed to work a spell for them.

‘The night’ B side ‘The right experience’ reworked ‘The Wright experience’, one of the many fine songs on the Sensation number one LP; it was fitting that at least one should again see the light of day.  Stella’s languid vocal reinterpretation of Martin’s original growling combines to magical effect with an equally blissed-out groove and the oft-quoted psychedelic spiral of scales from ‘Dear Prudence’.

In terms of dance music, where once Laugh had been ahead of the curve, Intastella were a little behind it.  But they were also commendably unwilling to deliver slavishly to order; it might have benefited them to keep the beats on 1995 LP What you gonna do coolly trippy, but instead they went for variety.  In a pop sense, alongside fellow travellers like Paris Angels, One Dove and Sugar Bullet, Intastella were just a little in advance of the moment.  You could argue that they helped prepare the ground for Goldfrapp, and perhaps even for ‘Can’t get you out of my head’, which (obviously unwittingly) has something of Intastella in its evolved and perfected genes.

And if memory serves, Martin Wright was certainly ahead of the current fashion for pop folk to be twitchers on their days away from studio and stage.  I salute him and his two groups, as I might a pair of magpies.

• Intastella – The right experience 
• 39. Laugh – It’s easy
• Intastella downloads at Madchester rave on

Sensation no. 1

A clamor went up for more Laugh, in the absence of a retrospective.  Over at A jumped up pantry boy, you’ll now find ‘Time to lose it’, the flexi version ‘Take your time yeah!’, and ‘Never had it so bad’; here you’ll now find both versions of ‘Sensation no. 1’ at the foot of B/w no. 39.

Alistair on Sensation number one from – my, how time flies – ten years ago.

And here’s a photo of a very camera-shy Laugh playing at the Falcon in Camden in February 1988:

39. Laugh – It’s easy

/ Sensation no. 1, Sub Aqua, 1988

Laugh were a group in a hurry, and as a unit if not in name, spent more than a decade journeying through the musical styles of their times.  Had the quartet from Manchester met with more encouragement, I suspect they would even now be travelling through the ever more subtle variations in 21st century pop.  But even with the addition of singer Stella Grundy and rebranded as Intastella, they were never quite able to sync with public taste.

The journey began with a triple A side, striking the kind of confident posture you’d expect from a group of Mancunians.  On ‘Take your time yeah!’ the group are in tearing haste, at delightful odds with singer Martin Wright’s ‘relax boy!’ lyric.  A wave of melody is also cut by skittering rhythms on ‘Never had it so bad’; Laugh would not have been Laugh without a gifted drummer, Spencer Birtwistle, who many years later would go on to take up the hottest seat in music, as drummer in the Fall.  ‘Hey! I’m still thinking’ offered up an eighties group’s version of a sixties beat group’s beat, only doubly urgent.  Again the lyric is charmingly self-critical, a comic admission of a young man’s inability to see what’s under his nose; what it is that, in the eyes of his girlfriend, he has done wrong.

If their debut threatened to skate out of control at any given moment, their next single was altogether more assured.  The significant lyrical intrigue of Martin Wright dreaming that he was ‘Paul McCartney’ was set to scratchy guitars and a stomping glam rock beat which gave way to varying pace as the song built to its closing peak.  On the B side was ‘Come on come out’, another fast and furious self-directed exhortation to get on with stuff, things, life, growling with energy, but notable also for the first signs of the group Laugh would become, in the form of a slowed down coda of hypnotic repetition that nodded to the freaky dancers with whom they shared a city and stage space.  By the time they re-recorded the song for their LP, that process would be complete.

Could anyone make a more urgent noise than ‘Time to lose it’?  Hard, relentless and heavy, their excoriating third single was the sound of a group in transition letting loose a volley of anger and frustration that their ambition was being so consistently scotched by disinterest.  A few people were interested, among them John Peel, for whom Laugh recorded two sessions, and former Factory press officer, Jeff Barrett.  In late 1988, Laugh released the first long player – Sensation number one – on Heavenly’s predecessor, Sub Aqua.  The LP’s arrival was signalled by a 12 inch of the same name.  ‘Sensation no. 1’’s impact was instantaneous, and, well, sensational.  The group had completely and rhythmically reinvented themselves, in the fine tradition of so many Mancunian groups.  Rhythms derived from the foot-stomping seventies funk of Hamilton Bohannon were steel-plated with the sequenced precision of house, and the change in style and tempo had beneficial effects on Martin Wright’s melodic lines too, allowing him more space to work with.  I must have played the two arrangements on the 12” and ‘It’s easy’, and then the equally inventive LP, more than any other records that year.  ‘It’s easy’ was just as good as the A side, combining human and machine generated rhythms for maximum groove.  It reappeared on the album in a slightly different mix.

Sensation number one was the sound of a group relaxing into their twenties, relaxing into the culture that the Hacienda had begun to foster.  (The Factory connection was further strengthened through Stockholm Monster Shan Hira’s presence as engineer.)  Guitars were still in evidence, but they were now adding flavour rather than leading the charge.  Relaxed, but not loose; Laugh retained and in fact reinforced the tautness of their earlier approach, attentive to the rhythmic dynamics, structure and detail of each track.  Neither were they noticeably druggy.  Songs like the ultra-baggy ‘Hearing sound having fun’, the South American flavoured ‘Good to feel good’ and the relentlessly upbeat ‘Up’ conveyed the euphoric flavour of the second Summer of Love without relying on what soon became bug-eyed, loved-up commonplaces.  Laugh’s positivity seemed more of a natural high, a rhythm-obsessed one.

Sadly Sub Aqua was John the Baptist to Heavenly’s Jesus, and with the stampede of interest in the Happy Mondays – whose Bummed LP was recorded after Sensation number one, but released at more or less the same time as it – few seemed to notice the warmth of Laugh’s glow.  As the eighties turned into the nineties, they regrouped, and re-emerged as Intastella.  [Continued here]

• Laugh – It’s easy
• Laugh – Sensation no. 1
• Laugh – Sensation no. 1 (B side version)
• Take your time yeah!, Never had it so bad and Hey! I’m still thinking over at A jumped-up pantry boy
• Time to lose it over at A jumped up pantry boy
• Paul McCartney (YouTube)

The riverbank

In my piece on the Jam’s ‘Tales from the riverbank’, I neglected to mention the version that Paul Weller released in 1998, itself a B side to ‘Brand new start’.  Recorded at Black Barn studios in Ripley, a stone’s throw from the Wey, it’s a gentle and more properly pastoral recasting of the original, sung with a softness that is at odds with both the rough-edged passion of the Jam years and the mature vocal command of his solo work.  I’ve now posted it alongside the original at the foot of the piece.

38. Guided By Voices – The pipe dreams of instant Prince Whippet

/ Everywhere with helicopter, Matador, 2002

‘I have this huge catalog of melodies in my head, and I’ve heard it all, the Merseybeat thing, late ’60s psychedelic, glam rock, prog rock.  I was there for it all.  So that’s all part of me, Guided By Voices’ name refers to all those influences.  That’s what the ‘voices’ are.’ – Bob Pollard, 2001, from Mouthing off: a book of rock & roll quotes, courtesy of GBVDB – Guided By Voices Database.

How do you get your head around the monstrous discography of Guided By Voices and Robert Pollard if you’ve not been lucky enough to follow them and him from the start?  This is after all a man who outdoes even Andy Partridge in terms of laying everything before the listening public, boxing up his unreleased material in accurately titled Suitcases; a man whose songs require not simply websites but a database as well.  And while Andy Partridge presented XTC’s offcuts retrospectively, Bob Pollard has also chucked things in as he’s gone along that might have better been left out, meaning that GBV LPs are a mixture of brilliantly realised songs and incomplete drafts, pop gems studded among dashed-off impressionistic works in pencil of the scenes immediately at the forefront of Pollard’s musical mind.  Music obviously pours out of Bob, but not always accompanied by meaningful lyrics; frequently he falls back on surrealism and nonsense, words chosen for their colour rather than their sense, mapping the territory between ‘I am the walrus’ and the Happy Mondays’ Squirrel and G-Man.

At least you need not trust the summary appraisals of others, or risk playing album-lucky-dip – the obvious place to start, if not with the mp3s below, is Human amusement at hourly rates: the best of Guided By Voices.  To judge from the albums I’ve subsequently invested in, GBV are pretty shrewd assessors of what constitutes their best work, a task in any case made easier by those rattled-off sketch-songs.  Though the inconsistency and sketchiness is frustrating, I think you have to live with and understand it as a necessary part of Robert Pollard’s pop art.  Besides, there’s a kind of joy to be had as fully-formed propulsive pop suddenly rears its head after a couple of so-so songs.

‘The pipe dreams of instant Prince Whippet’ is a miniature that was offered up alongside 2002’s Universal truths and cycles.  Its brevity is typically Pollardian – old English mod pop played with a North American looseness.  Play it twice and you have a perfect three minute pop song.

• Guided By Voices – The pipe dreams of instant Prince Whippet
• gbvdb.com mp3s 
• gbv.com mp3s 
• Robert Pollard mp3s