Oblique Saturdays

A series for Saturdays in 2026 inspired by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's set of cards, Oblique Strategies (Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas). Eno and Schmidt created them to be used to unblock creative impasses and approach problems from unexpected angles. Each week I'll turn over an Oblique Strategy card and post a song or songs inspired by the suggestion. 

Last week's Oblique Strategy suggestion was Do nothing for as long as possible.

My responses were the Specials, The Stone Roses (who I've just realised also did nothing for as long as possible by releasing nothing between One Love in June 1990 and Love Spreads in November 1994), Underworld and Sandals with Leftfield. Brian and Peter's Oblique Strategy proved to rich pickings from the Bagging Area readership with a bumper comments box of responses- Brian (not Eno) suggested Black Flag, Swc came up with Notts post- punkers Do Nothing, Ernie suggested Elton John's Song For Guy, Khayem had multiple songs (John Cage, Orbital, Richard Norris' long running Music For Healing, and Love Is All), Anonymous proposed Andrew Ridgeley and Wham!, Rol went with Simon Armitage's Scaremongers, Beerfueledlad gave us Spacemen 3, C turned off her mind, relaxed and floated downstream with The Beatles, Dan went for Fugazi, Jase suggested The Beach Boys and Chris went for Stasis by Force Of Angels. 

This week's card is this- Use 'unqualified' people.

I didn't have much of an immediate response to this Oblique Strategy, I had to let it percolate for a while. If by unqualified it refers to musical training and qualifications, I'd guess that the majority of people who make the music I listen to are unqualified, at least in terms of formal musical training. Many musicians are self- taught, many of the vocalists who stand up in front of a microphone are several years down the line before they get any vocal training or singing lessons. I'd guess that there's a decent number of people I listen to who have some educational qualifications despite the ongoing pop culture suspicion of education. Punk made a virtue out of being unqualified- being able to play and having stayed in school and gained O Levels were seen as/ portrayed as un- punk. 

In 1977 The Nosebleeds released a 7" single, Ain't Been To No Music School. After a burst of classical music at the start we get a couple of minutes of very 1977 punk, fast and thrashy, shouty vocals, lo fi production. 1977 Mancunian punk. 

Ain't Been To No Music School

It probably wouldn't be of much wider interest if not for who was in The Nosebleeds (formerly Ed Banger and The Nosebleeds) and what they went on to do. Ain't Been To No Music School is the first recorded output of Vini Reilly, the pale young guitarist from Wythenshawe who went on to form The Durutti Column, a key Factory act and a huge Bagging Area influence and favourite. Vini co- wrote the song and the B-side (Fascist Pigs) with Ed Banger. Both Vini and Ed left The Nosebleeds after the single's release. Vini and the first version of The Durutti Column would also come to an end fairly abruptly and if it wasn't for Tony Wilson's intervention, pushing Vini into a recording studio with Martin Hannett, we might not have heard much more from Vini either. 

The drummer on this single incidentally was Philip 'Toby' Tomanov, also from Wythenshawe, who played with Linder Sterling's band Ludus and on The Return Of The Durutti Column after The Nosebleeds demise. He would also play in Martin Hannett's Invisible Girls and drummed for Nico (who lived in Manchester during the 1980s), John Cooper Clarke and Pauline Murray. In 1988 he joined Primal Scream and played on I'm Losing More Than I'll Ever Have, the song that Andrew Weatherall remixed into Loaded. Toby drummed on both Screamdelica and Give Out But Don't Give Up. 

The Nosebleeds continued for a while without Ed and Vini, a certain Stephen Patrick Morrissey arrived as singer and one Billy Duffy joined on guitar. There were two gigs and then The Nosebleeds split up in May 1978 but both The Smiths and The Cult have their origin stories in The Nosebleeds. Morrissey had his own views on education and the qualifications system and on The Smiths' second studio album he took his revenge on the Manchester schools and the 'belligerent ghouls' who ran them in the late 60s and early 70s . Given what he's become, it's probably best to remember him this way.

The Headmaster Ritual (Live on Spanish TV, 1985)

Punk and post- punk saw qualified/ educated musicians form bands as well as unqualified- for every Steve Jones (in his memoir Lonely Boy he tells of rarely attending school and leaving with nothing and says he was functionally illiterate until into his 40s) there's a Green Gartside (Fine Art, Leeds Polytechnic). Joe Strummer, Mick Jones and Paul Simonon all went to art college- Simonon and Jones met there, Simmo regularly pinching oil paints and brushes off the students from wealthier backgrounds. The Gang Of Four formed when the members met at Leeds University. Jon King, the group's singer, has been interviewed at two friend's music blogs this week, Plain Or Pan here and The Vinyl Villain here, to promote the publication of his autobiography in paperback, out shortly. 

To Hell With Poverty! is a key Gang Of Four song, scathing and frantic,Andy Gill's overloaded guitar feeding back and sounding like a siren, with rumbling but danceable post- punk bass and King's vocals, an anti- capitalist celebration of getting drunk on cheap wine while waiting for the giro to arrive. 

To Hell With Poverty!

It's telling that Eno and Schmidt's card puts 'unqualified' in inverted commas- unqualified for what? Maybe it suggests that in the studio the band should go and find someone from outside to contribute, someone who is not from the band, an unqualified outsider. I started to think of the guest appearances on songs and albums by people who might be seen as unqualified for the part just by being external. Johnny Depp appeared on guitar with both Oasis and Shane MacGowan (the latter on Top Of The Pops in 1994 with The Popes doing That Woman's Got Me Drinking). 

In his memoir Sonic Life Thurston Moore talks about arriving in the mid/ late 70s New York scene and how creativity was far more important than technique or training, that being unqualified is no object if you have ideas and the desire to do something. This is what keeps inspiring people to have a go, the idea that anyone can step up, plug in and have ago. It's the basis of most outsider pop music since the 50s really- the 60s art school bands, the punks, 80s indie, acid house, many of the groups and bands in the 90s, all very much making the art of the unqualified. 

Feel free to drop your own responses to Use 'unqualified' people in the comment box. 

V.A. Saturday

Another V. A. Saturday, another Soul Jazz compilation- this one a 2001 post- punk/ punk- funk/ industrial party with the demob suits and short back and sides groups from the UK in the late 70s and early 80s. In The Beginning There Was Rhythm has action from the regional outposts of the punk funk/ industrial scenes, from Manchester (two ACR songs, Shack Up and Knife Slits Water) and Sheffield (The Human League's Being Boiled and Cabaret Voltaire's Sluggin' Fer Jesus) and also the London based bands 23 Skidoo, Throbbing Gristle and This Heat.

The title track is a song by The Slits, originally a 7" single released by Rough Trade and Y Records in 1980, The Slits on one side and Where There's A Will There's A Way by The Pop Group on the flip. 

In The Beginning There Was Rhythm

It's a spindly, scratchy and idiosyncratic five minutes, the bass and beat bumping along and Dennis Bovell's dub production at the fore, Viv's abstract guitar and bursts of piano and Ari stopping every now and then to declare, 'Silence is a rhythm too'.

The Pop Group's She Is Beyond Good And Evil is also on the CD, a 1979 single with Mark Stewart using the language of unconditional love as an act of revolution, romance and politics bound together with some dub bass, wire scratch guitars and reggae drums. 

She Is Beyond Good And Evil

From Bristol to Leeds and Gang Of Four's thumping, atonal, driving racket, the 1981 song To Hell With Poverty, a song that dances in the face of having only a fiver in your pocket until Giro day/ pay day, 'To hell with poverty/ We'll get drunk on cheap wine'.

To Hell With Poverty

We finished school for the summer holiday yesterday, six weeks off working stretching out ahead of me, thirty one years of teaching completed and like Jon King and Gang Of Four, cheap wine tonight's option. 

Forty Minutes Of My Bloody Valentine

The other night I was about to go upstairs. Lou was halfway down, a quizzical look on her face.  

Her: 'There's a horrible, whining, drilling sound coming out of the computer... what is it?'

Me: 'Dunno'.

I rushed upstairs to see what was happening. I'd left my mp3 player plugged in to the USB slot to charge it. When it's fully charged it switches itself on and starts playing random songs, through it's own tiny, tinny speaker. The 'horrible, whining, drilling sound' was You Made Me Realise by My Bloody Valentine. 

Me: 'That's not a horrible, whining, drilling sound. That's You Made Me Realise by My Bloody Valentine.'

A My Bloody Valentine Sunday mix had occurred to me a while back and this seemed like an ideal opportunity to put it together. They are an acquired taste I think it's fair to say and there are times when if the mp3 player is in shuffle mode in the car, they can jar and disrupt a good flow of songs like few other groups. The string bending, feedback, tremelo, full on assault of Kevin Shields and Belinda Butcher against the sometimes raging rhythms of Colm O' Ciosoig's drums and Debbie Googe's river dredging bass can be a heavy jolt to the senses. Equally, the same noise can be uplifting and life affirming in a way all of their own. They also do a beautiful line in a sort of head- spinning, post- coital comedown wooze, something Sofia Coppola knew when she put the soundtrack for Lost In Translation together. 

The music below is almost entirely from their 1988- 1991 heyday. There's nothing from the 2013 mbv album- not deliberately as such, I just didn't have it to hand and couldn't remember anything about it, so if nothing else I will go back to that record and see what it sounds like now. When it came out in 2013 it was their first album since Loveless in '91 and was recorded in bursts up between 1991 and 1997, then resumed by Shields in 2006 and then again in 2011. Instead I've gone for songs from Isn't Anything, Loveless and the EP releases around those albums apart from a cover version they recorded in 1996. 

Forty Minutes Of My Bloody Valentine

• Don't Ask Why
• Slow
• Feed Me With Your Kiss
• Loomer
• Drive It All Over Me
• Map Ref 41°N 93°W
• You Made Me Realise
• Soon 
• Soon (Andy Weatherall Mix)

Don't Ask Why is my favourite MBV song, a gorgeous, swooning tripped out song, gently strummed, chiming, slightly off kilter guitar and Kevin's voice, very clear and upfront. Belinda coos in the background and a shimmering reverb covers everything until the moment at three minutes six seconds where a second guitar comes in like a weather system. It was on the Glider EP released in 1990 in the run up to Loveless, which kept getting pushed back. In his book on Creation Records David Cavanagh speculates that many of the song titles from this period were coded messages to Alan McGee- Soon, Don't Ask Why, Off Your Face. 

Slow was a B-side from the You Made Me Realise 12" in 1988, an indie rock (with the emphasis on weird, disorientating rock) about oral sex. You Made Me Realise is from a point in time when indie guitar music, as made by this band and a handful of others, was going somewhere it hadn't been before. Drive It All over Me is from the same EP, effortless, late 80s brilliance. 

Feed Me With Your Kiss was a single in 1988 and appeared on Isn't Anything. A friend of mine bought Isn't Anything on cassette, played it and took it back, assuming there was something wrong with it. 'The guitars keep slipping out of tune and time, the tape must be too slack or stretched or something', was the gist of his complaint. 'That's what they sound like', he was told.

Loomer and Soon are both from Loveless, released in 1991, a year not sure of groundbreaking, high quality albums. It sounds as breathtaking now as it did then. Soon is Brian Eno's favourite MBV song, the song which sounds like the six minutes where everything Shields was searching for came together- it is both very vague and sharply in focus, guitars hinted at and right in your ears, a blur of memories and feelings worked into something approaching a song. Belinda's vocals sighs and Colm's drums provide the top and the bottom. Everything in between is like the ghost of indie guitar rock, recorded onto tape and then faded, blurred, bleached. Loveless is according to legend the record that nearly bankrupted Creation and McGee's relationship with Shields and the group broke down as a result. He went from My Bloody Valentine to Oasis (you can probably insert your own sentence here depending on your point of view).

Andrew Weatherall's remix is a groundbreaking record too, the acid house dancefloor dynamics and samples taking Soon into another place. Hugo Nicolson, Weatherall's production partner at the time, was presented with the records Andrew wanted to sample and the pair (with the band in the studio wanting to check what was happening to their music and apparently wanting also to see what remix culture was all about and what the process was) went about inventing indie dance and then destroying it at the same time. I wrote about this remix here and the various samples Weatherall and Nicolson used- West Bam, Gang Of Four, Claire Hamill, The Dynamic Corvettes, Rich Nice and as Hugo told us, the voices from a Volvic television advert. 

Map Ref 41°N 93°W is a cover of a Wire song, recorded for an album of Wire covers that came out in 1996 called Whore- Various Artists Play Wire. Lush, Band Of Susans, Bark Psychosis. Lee Ranaldo, Mike Watt and Godflesh are among the other contributors.

Here We Go

Another Andrew Weatherall sample spotting post, my continuing attempts to try to identify and pull together the sounds that made the remixes. Today, the monumental, ground breaking, juddering dance/ rock remix of My Bloody Valentine's Soon. The long gestation period that led to the release of My Bloody Valentine's Loveless album has been well documented and is the stuff of indie legend- the record that broke Creation, the album that illustrates the manic attention to detail and difficulties of working with Kevin Shields and his single minded drive and obsession with the process and art of recording guitars, the failings of various London recording studios, the hand to mouth cash existence of Creation Records, the poor health of various participants (tinnitus not surprisingly given the volume the group played at) and so on. David Cavanagh's My Magpie Eyes Are Hungry For The Prize book describes the myths and the reality in detail. 

Soon first saw the public light of day as the lead song on 1990's Glider EP (along with Glider, Don't Ask Why and Off Your Face. David Cavanagh speculates in his book that the song titles from MBV's releases at this point can be seen as ripostes to Alan McGee and his frequent requests to give him some music to release). Soon is arguably the pinnacle of Shields' famous 'glide guitar' sound and technique- playing the strings and bending them using the tremolo bar. That underestimates Soon somewhat- Soon swirls and shimmers, disorientation and delight in equal measures, a riot of melodies and feedback, ghosts of guitars and washes of vocal. It rattles in with some percussion and then a storm of guitar chords, the queasy topline melodies (one that sounds very like a flute and may well be), echoing feedback and Belinda Butcher's barely there vocals. Soon is vaguely danceable and the guitar sounds, the vertigo inducing tremolo chord changes, give it a swirling, slightly out of control feel- you've had one too many, the edges of your vison and hearing are fuzzy, you're spinning and not in control. The video version here is under four minutes but the version on Glider and different mix that made it onto Loveless are seven minutes long, an ecstatic headrush of sound. 

When it came to remixing it Andrew Weatherall entered the studio armed with the records he wanted to sample and MBV's master tapes. It seems that the band were a little reluctant to hand over control to a DJ/ producer/ remixer (this was before Screamadelica had been released so Andrew's reputation in the studio wasn't established). The resulting remix, released in 1990, turned the highwater mark of shoegaze into a stomping, shuddering leftfield dance record, one that as much as any is where his reputation as a remixer rests. MBV accompanied him in the studio, either to keep an eye on him or to see how the process of remixing worked (or both). Indie- dance would quickly become tainted as a label, used more in derision than admiration- people use the term to describe Weatherall's remix of Soon, but there's a lot more going on in it than just sticking the Funky Drummer underneath the guitars and adding some cowbell. There would be plenty of guitar bands queuing up to have their feedback and four square rock refashioned but no other remix of a guitar band from this period comes close to Soon in its execution or the effect it can have on a dancefloor. 

Soon (Andy Weatherall Remix)

The Geiger counter intro, impossibly loud in the mix, is followed by a very un- MBV voice declaring, 'Here we go'. Then one of those guitars, stripped from the original song, appears high and centre. A thumping bassline and percussion hit in. The flute/ guitar part is punched in, on its own. 'Here we go' again. More layered guitars. The drums thunder away, the guitars are looped round and round. The 'aaah aaaahhhh' vocal sample is dropped along with a guitar part that sounds like wire being wound very tight and hit. It sounds like Soon but moreso, the drift and ghostliness of the original snapped into focus, equally narcotic but a different drug. The ending is dramatic too- the elements being stripped out one by one, faders, pulled down until there's just a voice, 'aaahhh aaahhhhhhhh/ aaahhhhh aaahhhhhhhhhh'. 

West Bam's Alarm Clock, a manic 1990 breakbeat/ house 12",  provides some of the feel of the remix and the clattering rhythm that Andrew uses to underpin Shields' wall of noise.  

Alarm Clock

West Bam had already borrowed guitars from this, Gang Of Four's What We All Want, from their 1981 Solid Gold album. Stentorian, Marxist funk rock which Andrew would surely have recognised instantly when he first heard West Bam. 

What We All Want

Some of the vocals are taken from this song- Tides- by Claire Hamill, released in 1986, an entirely acapella album, Hamill's voice overdubbed to produce all the sounds. Go to 44 seconds in and you'll find the vocal part Weatherall dropped in- it repeats throughout the song. 

Hugo Nicolson, Andrew's assistant, engineer and studio whizz, tells us that some of the voices were sampled from a Volvic advert (I can't find any trance of the advert on the internet). If you go to 3 minutes 15 seconds in this 1975 song, Funky Music Is The Thing by Dynamic Corvettes, you'll find a rhythm break that appears in the remix too- or one that sounds very like it. 

The website Who Sampled Who says that Weatherall's remix takes elements, the bassline probably, from this- The Rhythm, The Feeling by Rich Nice, a 1990 hip- house single. 

If anyone knows where the 'here we go' sample comes from, write in to the usual address and I'll add it to this post. 

The remix came out first as a white label 12" and was labelled the Andy Weatherall Remix. Later versions would by credited to his full name. It also appeared on Creation's superb 1991 compilation Keeping The Faith (and if you're after a vinyl copy now you'd be better off finding a copy of the compilation- cheaper and containing a slew of other era defining tracks to boot). Soon in Andy/ Andrew's hands is a record and remix in a class of its own. It still sounds like Soon but it's a Soon that My Bloody Valentine hadn't imagined and one that blurs all the lines and boundaries that existed at the time- not rock, not dance, not indie dance, not shoegaze but something new built from all of these but something else as well. 'Here we go'. 

Andy Gill

Andy Gill died at the weekend aged 64. His guitar playing with Leeds based band Gang Of Four is worth a book in itself. His style, partly copped from Wilco Johnson but then fed through punk and funk, is a massive influence on loads of people who came after him and once heard cannot be forgotten. At one point, about fifteen years ago, I became obsessed with his playing on At Home He's A Tourist, a counterpoint to the impossibly funky bass- Gill's playing is an attack, choppy and grating and slashing, chords you can almost feel through the speakers. In his playing you can hear the violence of the punk scene, pub gigs in Leeds and the Marxist theory he encountered at Leeds University, the Frankfurt School and cultural studies. It all seems part of what made him sound like that. His refusal to play solos is also admirable.

At Home He's A Tourist

There are other songs by Gang Of Four that had a similar effect on me, that really got under my skin, in particular I Found That Essence Rare and To Hell With Poverty. I Found That Essence Rare, also off debut album Entertainment! is a song that takes in bikinis and the atom bomb tests, the tabloid press and politicians acting in their own interests over a coruscating guitar riff, Gill scrubbing his guitar as much as playing it, stripping the paint off it, feedback in place of a solo. To Hell With Poverty is ultra punk- funk with a line w have all been able to identify with at some point- 'to hell with poverty, let's get drunk on cheap wine'. In this clip Gang Of Four play it live on TV in 1981, an incendiary performance by true one- offs.

Alarm Clock

This is the tune I was looking for before getting distracted by West India Company, a 1990 offering from German DJ West Bam (Maximillian Lenz). Offering doesn't really do this speaker shaking 12" justice. It's a slap in the face and a shiver down the spine with a juddering riff (sampled from Gang Of Four apparently and then borrowed from this by Weatherall for his legendary My Bloody Valentine remix) and a Tutonic breakbeat. Wakey wakey!

Alarm Clock

In 2013 West Bam released a new album which had this song on it, She Wants, with vocals by Bernhard Sumner (sic) and a slightly disturbing, NSFW video. If last year's new New Order album had been more like this, I'd have liked it more.

She's Dressed For The H-Bomb

Oh so influential and name-dropped left, right and centre a few years ago Leeds agit-post-punkers Gang of Four were dour but funky. This is one of their best songs- I Found That Essence Rare- with it's wire-scaping-against-wire guitars, propulsive rhythm and lyrics taking in the H Bomb, Bikini (Atoll) and bikini's, tabloid newspapers, politics, class war and other very 80s concerns. Gang Of Four also sang 'To hell with poverty, we'll get drunk on cheap wine'-definitely been there.

01 I Found That Essence Rare.wma