Lucky 7s

Over at Ban Ban Ton Ton Dr. Rob gave over most of January's posts to celebrations of music from 2025. Rob is based in Japan where 7 is considered to be a lucky number. He asked Ban Ban Ton Ton contributors, friends and musicians to submit their Lucky 7s of 2025, starting at the tail end of December with Mark Barrott, and then saw in the new year with the Chinese Year of the Horse. 

When I Was On Horseback

Lunar Dunes in 2007, sitar driven space rock for the Year of the Horse.

Throughout January Rob published Lucky 7s from a slew of Bagging Area adjacent people including Richard Norris, Sean Johnston, Deeply Armed, Davie Miller of Fini Tribe and Jason Boardman as well as Rob's own selections themed into Balearic, techno, reggae and dub, and rock (guitars really rather than rock). Rob asked the five of us in The Flightpath Estate if we wanted to contribute our own Lucky 7s. 

My Lucky 7 got their own post, six records from 2025 that saddled my horse and one from 1989 (in tribute to Mani). You can find that post here. 

Martin, Dan and Mark all sent in their favorites from 2025, playing fast and loose with the concept of 7 in some cases- Martin opens the post with 7 compilations from last year, Mark compiles his favourites including Crooked Man, 10:40, Psychemagick, Death In Vegas, Hugo Nicolson and the Johnny Halifax Invocation while Dan brings in his 7 including Maria Somerville, Sydney Minsky Sargeant and Daniel Avery. You can read that here. 

Rob asked me if I'd also like to contribute a Lucky 7 gigs post. I went to sixteen gigs in 2025 and narrowing them down to seven highlights was tough but you can find my Lucky 7 gigs here with reports of memorable evenings of live music in the company of Mercury Rev, Red Snapper, Shack, The Sabres Of Paradise (twice), Iggy Pop, Working Men's Club and The Charlatans, as seen at a variety of venues, large and small. Just thinking about Iggy Pop rocking the Victoria Warehouse, shirtless and wild at the age of 78, Sabres dubbing out The White Hotel and Mercury Rev's dreamy excursion into the Blade Runner soundtrack gives me a slight shiver, the memories still quite vivid and alive- and just listening to this Iggy and The Stooges blast of raw power from 1973 brings it all back. 

Raw Power

Sixteen

Bagging Area is sixteen years old today. On the cusp of adulthood, at the age of majority, able to leave school, join the army, get married (with parental consent) and buy an aerosol in a shop. 

The world I started typing this stuff into- 1st January 2010- seems a very long way away in all kinds of ways. Back then I thought I'd do this for a year and see what happened. What happened was I just kept going and here we are, still going, 6, 296 posts later. 

Some sixteens from my record/ CD/ downloads collections...

In 1955 Tennessee Ernie Ford recorded Sixteen Tons, a song about the coal mining industry in the USA, being owned by the company, having to haul sixteen tons every day and every day ending up deeper in debt. A series of strikes and the growth of trade unions put an end to the practices of the truck system and debt bondage that Merle Travis describes in the song and that Ernie sings about. 

Sixteen Tons

In 1980 The Clash gave their European tour the name Sixteen Tons, the band comparing their situation with CBS to coal mining in the 1930s and 1940s, trapped by debt. The band kept gig and record prices as low as possible, the record company took it out of their royalties. 

Clash associate Don Letts released an album on the Late Night Tales series, Version Excursion, that included Sixteen Tons Of Dub, a dub version of Ernie's tune by OBF...

Sixteen Tons Of Dub

In 1983 Jazzateers released a 7" on Rough Trade, Show Me The Door and Sixteen Reasons. Glaswegian post- punk/ New Wave, with Ian Burgoyne and Keith Band as the core members and on this single with Paul Quinn on vocals. The band split and became Bourgie Bourgie and then reformed as Jazzateers.

Sixteen Reasons

Let It Be is The Replacements masterpiece, a 1984 album where it all came together for the band. On Sixteen Blue Paul Westerberg writes yet another anthem for teenage outsiders, one about empathy and sexual blurriness. His vocal on Sixteen Blue is maybe the best on the entire album, not least when he croaks and then goes full throttle with the line, 'Your age is the hardest age/ Everything drags and drags/ One day baby, maybe help you through/ Sixteen blue'.  There are entire teen/ rites of passage films that don't manage to nail what The Replacements do in three minutes here... 

Sixteen Blue

Oh look out, here's Iggy...

Sixteen

'Sweet sixteen in leather boots/ Body and soul I go crazy'. From Lust For Life, Iggy's second solo album and his second in 1977, the band sound totally on it, fully focussed and as one, straight ahead drug/ proto- punk rock with Bowie at the producer's desk. In 1982 a gaffer taped Iggy turned up on The Tube and did Sixteen for the early evening teatime crowd. I'm going to end this post here because I'm not sure it's going to get any better than this today. 

See That Cat

Iggy Pop's arrival on stage at 9pm on Saturday night in front of a crowd of 3000 fans was electrifying.  The crowd was all ages, from teenagers up to fans in their 70s. Almost every single leftfield and punk band t- shirt you can think of was being worn somewhere in the building. His band filed onstage, two guitarists, a drummer bassist, keyboard player and two piece horn section, and then Iggy appeared to a roar from the crowd. By the time he'd reached the microphone stand he'd ripped his waistcoat off and was topless. The band then careered into TV Eye from the 1970 Stooges album Funhouse. TV Eye is reduced, mechanised rock 'n' roll, the 60s rock dream brutalised and moved to Detroit, Iggy boiling his lyrics down to just two phrases, 'see that cat', and 'she got a TV eye on me'.  

TV Eye (Take 1)

Iggy Pop is 78 years old. Occasionally he sat on a stool for a few seconds between songs but for most of the ninety minute set he prowled and worked the stage, his voice sounding great, strong and growly, leading the band through a 20 song set that was exactly what you'd want him to play. Iggy knows what his back catalogue should sound like and this band played them as they should be played- plenty of late 60s and early 70s punk rock menace, with that groove that The Stooges had, and the horns adding the free jazz element. When not singing he works the crowd, standing at the front of the stage, slightly lopsided due to the decades of physical abuse he's put his body through, waving his arms, pointing at people in the crowd. There isn't much chat between songs- 'fucking Mancunians' he says approvingly at one point, and he introduces Some Weird Sin by saying it's 'time for some poetry'. 

The Victoria Warehouse is a large brick hall. People have been critical of it as a venue in the past- the security for being over the top, the sound being muffled, it being oversold- but there are no issues tonight, its a seething mass of Iggy Pop fans. In front of me a 20- something couple dance and bounce around, clearly having the night of their lives. Beer is flung across the crowd, there are some crowd surfers- gigs can sometimes be very sanitised affairs these days- the mayhem around us is a joy to behold and as the gig goes on it gets hotter and hotter. I didn't go to the bar once during the gig. There was no way I was going to miss any of what was going on and carrying three drinks back through the crowd without spilling them would have been risky (especially at £8 a pint). 

The first half of the set is sensational, one classic after another, a steam train of proto- punk and 70s rock, Iggy blasting through them with the energy of a man half or a third of his age. TV Eye is followed by Raw Power, then I Got A Right and Gimme Danger slowing things down a little. Five songs in he plays The Passenger and follows it with Lust For Life- that's two of his best and best known songs played in the first 20 minutes. Lust For Life is spectacular, the drums swinging and guitars punching, Iggy at full throttle. Then Death Trip and Loose (those horns really adding to the Funhouse songs) and I Wanna Be Your Dog, the audience chanting the chorus back at him. During the guitar solo he hurls his microphone stand across the stage and at the end of the song asks, 'where's my fucking microphone stand'.

I Wanna Be Your Dog

By this point I'm a mess. It's hot, my shirt and jacket are stuck to me, I'm dancing around, Iggy is twenty feet in front of us, the sound is loud and punchy, the band sound superb, he's playing all the songs we want to hear. After the crowd pleasing, ecstatic thump of Lust For Life he plays Search And Destroy, the ghost of James Williamson's squealing guitar re- animated, Iggy's Vietnam stream of consciousness unfurling, those lines about being a streetwalking cheetah with a heart full of napalm and of love in the middle of a firefight spat out in that gravelly tone. Iggy plays the crowd- at one point a girl in front of us is up on her boyfriend's shoulders, phone in hand. Iggy spots her, head and shoulders above the crowd, a girl young enough to be his grand daughter, points straight at her and sticks his tongue out. 

He goes into a few deeper cuts- Down On The Street, 1970 with a wailing free jazz trumpet, Iggy telling us that the song is what it was like to be alive 55 years ago, I'm Sick Of You and Some Weird Sin. It's high octane and exhilerating stuff, genuinely life affirming despite all the nihilism of the songs, Iggy as Godfather of Punk, the originator, last man standing, still there, giving it his all, 2 years short of 80. It slows down a little for the last 20 minutes. He plays Frenzy (from 2022, a song that starts with the line 'I got a dick and 2 balls, that's more than you all'), the song ending with a full band freak out, drummer thumping round the kit, guitars howling, horns blaring and out of this cacophony the drum machine lurch of Nightclubbing emerges, Iggy back to the front of the stage, singing his 1977 song about Bowie and the cool crowd, numbed out in West Berlin. Nightclubbing doesn't stick around for long and Iggy introduces a recent song, Modern Day Rip Off, muttering that he feels like he's been cheated his whole life. 

We're nearing the end. Iggy wanders over to a speaker stack mid- song and gives it a few tugs but decides against pulling it over or climbing it.  Then they play I'm Bored, from 1979's New Values, Iggy as apathist in chief, 'I'm bored/ I'm the chairman of the bored'. After nearly ninety minutes he's having a bit of a rest, slowing it down, the sound slightly muffled, but it doesn't last long as Iggy and his band slam into Real Wild Child, the song sounding huge now shorn of its 80s production. The pair of 20- somethings in front of me are still dancing, occasionally stopping to shout lines of songs into each other's faces. Iggy finishes us off with Funtime, his 1977 gothic/ kraut lurch with its blank eyed chant of 'all aboard for funtime', a fine way to leave, and after singing his last line he wanders off stage, the band left to see the song to its conclusion. No encore, house lights on, an exhilarated and sweaty crowd wandering out into the Old Trafford streets, wrung out and spent. 

Funtime

Soundtrack Saturday

Iggy Pop plays at Manchester's Victoria Warehouse tonight and I'm going to be there. Iggy feels like the last man standing in a way. He hasn't played in Manchester for years and at 78 years old I can't imagine there'll be too many opportunities to see him on home turf again. Although it wouldn't surprise me if Iggy lived to be 100 and carried on performing with his shirt off for another two decades. 

Two weeks ago the Soundtrack Saturday featured Iggy's title song to the 1984 Alex Cox film Repo Man. Iggy got a massive boost in the 90s when his songs were included on the soundtrack to Danny Boyle's Trainspotting. Included seems a bit reductionist- it's fair to say that the film, its publicity and its opening scene would be nowhere near as memorable as they were without this song bursting out of the cinema speakers as a shoplifting Ewan McGregor attempt to outrun security guards and ends up almost splayed across the bonnet of a car, laughing at the poor driver...

Lust For Life

Lust For Life was the title song from Iggy's 1977 second solo album, recorded at Hansa in West Berlin with David Bowie in the producer's seat. The band were Iggy's touring line up- Ricky Gardiner on guitar and Tony and Hunt Sales on bass and drums. Ricky Gardiner came up the famous guitar riff, based on the Morse code  opening to the US Armed Forces Network news programme and written on a ukulele. The guitars are great but its the drums which are first out of the traps, the loudest, most perfectly recorded drums. But there's no escaping the riff, everything just has to fall into line and follow. 

On top of this, essentially punk crossed with a sped up Motown backbeat, Iggy songs and sneers, at the top of his game, lines about Johnny Yen, liqour and rugs, hypnotising chickens, flesh machines and GTOs fired off, always coming back to the hilariously brilliant, 'well I'm just a modern guy... I got a lust for life'. Jon Savage (I think) once wrote that in just four years, from Raw Power to Lust For Life, Iggy went from Death Trip to Lust For Life and what a strange trip it was. 

Trainspotting also featured Iggy's song Nightclubbing, a genuine solo Iggy Pop classic, from Iggy's solo debut The Idiot (also recorded with Bowie but at Chateau d'Herouville, France). Bowie and Iggy had both left the USA to kick addictions and ended up in Europe making records that soaked up the new sounds of West German rock and electronics. Nightclubbing has Bowie on keys and a very mechanistic drum machine, a weird, dislocated electronic pulse, cocaine numbness and Iggy intoning his lyric about what it was like hanging out with Bowie every night, seeing people, 'brand new people', and doing 'brand new dances like the nuclear bomb'. Bowie wanted to replace the drum machine with 'proper' drums but Iggy stuck his ground, correctly, seeing that the drum machine gives the song its blank, lurching edge.

Nightclubbing

Iggy wrote the words in ten minutes in the studio and later said Nightclubbing was about "about the incredible coldness and deathly feeling you have after you've done something like that and how much you enjoy it. It could be Los Angeles or Paris or New York or anywhere, really." In Trainspotting the song soundtracks a scene involving shooting up in a desolate Edinburgh apartment and ends with the death of a baby. 

The Trainspotting soundtrack is a superb 90s soundtrack. It turned Born Slippy into a massive hit and rebirthed Lou Reed's Perfect Day. It included Brian Eno's Deep Blue Day and Pulp's Mile End and a ten minute Weatherall produced Primal Scream title track, a slow, snakey instrumental with the street sounds from an all day session outside a pub in Soho, the assembled Scream party people shouting to friends and associates from the street to a first or second floor room. 

Trainspotting

I Love To Watch Things On TV

A few months ago I  committed myself to a dive into Lou Reed's solo album back catalogue, a journey to be undertaken with a bit of caution I've always felt- there is some variability in the quality in his solo career. This was inspired by a post at The Vinyl Villain at the tail end of 2024. He posted the songs from a 1981 Lou Reed Best of called Walk On The Wild Side and I listened to some songs with fresh ears- Wild Child and I Love You from his 1972 solo debut, How Do You Think It Feels from Berlin, Sally Can't Dance and Coney Island Baby, both the title tracks from 1970s albums that I hadn't heard for decades. I decided that where possible I should revisit Lou's solo career in the format it should be heard as far as possible- vinyl (or cassette but I have no functioning cassette player and am not about to buy one). Since then I've done Berlin  back in February (Lou's masterpiece more or less I said) and his solo debut, Lou Reed (a mixed bag, good/ great songs, marred by some strange production and mixing choices). 

I was going to skip Transformer. It felt too obvious. Everyone knows and loves Transformer. If you only have one Lou Reed solo album, it's Transformer. It had a massive 90s resurgence too due to Trainspotting and the BBC. I was going to move onto Sally Can't Dance and/ or Coney Island Baby but to date haven't tracked down second hand vinyl copies at acceptable prices and there's surely a limit to the number of solo Lou Reed albums one person should buy on second hand vinyl in a fairly short period of time. I had both on cassette in the late 80s but those are long gone. I do however own Transformer on vinyl, 1972 vinyl too, bought in the late 80s/ early 90s. Transformer it is then...

Transformer came out in November 1972, just six months after his overcooked solo debut. That album was stacked with songs that dated from Velvets days. Transformer has four songs are from the VU period although the band played them only in demo or live form. The big difference in sound fromt he debut to Transformer is what David Bowie and Mick Ronson bring. Lou's debut had been a commercial disappointment. Bowie, very much a rising superstar in 1972, was a big fan and used his fame and clout to help Lou out. Ronson's playing (guitar, piano, backing vox) and co- production are key to the album's sound. It's glam- ish rock crossed with Lou's New York scuzz and street smarts but beautifully produced- it sounds alive, it's not overloaded or weighed down by too many guitars, there is space and distance between the instruments, it has a great feel. The sleeve art is equally important, a Mick Rock shot, cropped and overexposed with some early 70s street cool on the back- the man's tightly stuffed jeans apparently the result of a banana being stuffed down them for the shoot. Peel slowly and see.

The songs are among Lou's solo best too. Walk On the Wild Side complete with the famous Herbie Flowers bassline is his best known but its matched by others. Vicious is a stunning opening song, the lyric suggested to him by Andy Warhol, Lou being told to write a song about being vicious. 'What kind of vicious?' said Lou. 'Oh, you know, vicious like I hit you with a flower', replied Andy. Meanwhile Ronson's guitar fires off squalls of electricity over Lou's perfect three chord VU trick. 

Vicious

The album rattles by, never outstaying its welcome, songs passing by like NY subway trains. Andy's Chest and Hangin' Round come either side of Perfect Day- a song that enjoyed a huge second life in Trainspotting and then as an all star BBC advert. Separated from all of that now Perfect Day sounds like what it is- classic Lou Reed, minor chords, soft piano, Lou's downbeat, sombre vocal about spending the day in Central Park, drinking sangria and then home. Walk On The Wild Side takes us to the end of side one in under twenty minutes. 

Flip Transformer over and there's the whimsy of Make Up, a celebration of androgyny, cross dressing, gender identity and then Satellite Of Love...

Satellite Of Love

Satellite Of Love has piano, drums, strings, and Lou in romantic mode, serenaded by the backing vocals, wondrous melodies and a sense of awe, Lou/ the narrator watching the launch of a satellite on TV coupled with a change of tone as his feelings of jealousy about his partner being bold with Harry, Mark and John kick in. Bowie's touch is all over it- a magical, cosmic song. 

Wagon Wheel and I'm Set Free add to the fun, Lou sounding unleashed and happy. New York Telephone Conversation is a bit of humour, a slightly bitchy, tongue in cheek novelty. Goodnight Ladies romps us to the end, some oom pa pa to bring the curtain down. Lou would go much further with Berlin, a Weimar descent into squalor and domestic abuse, drugs and violence. On Transformer everything sounds up and more carefree, even the more sombre moments, Bowie and Ronson bringing some light to Lou's shade. It really is one of those albums everyone should own.

Perfect Day (Acoustic Demo)

Soundtrack Saturday

In 1986 Julian Temple directed the film version of Absolute Beginners. The book, a 1959 Colin McInnes novel about life in London, race, class, sexuality, fashion, teenagers and jazz, is a post- war British classic, part of a trilogy McInnes wrote about life in London and youth culture. The film is maybe less a classic, more a brave/ doomed attempt. 

It has its charms- at the time of its release I was sixteen and quite taken with Patsy Kensit- and an all star cast- James Fox, Edward Tudor Pole, Sade, Ray Davies, Steven Berkoff and David Bowie- but it was panned on release, seemed more of a marketing exercise than a film and couldn't quite work out what it was trying to do. The two leads, Patsy Kensit and Eddie O'Connell were unknowns and apparently didn't get on. The production company, Goldcrest, had two other major films on at the same time (The Mission starring Robert De Niro and Jeremy Irons and Revolution starring Al Pacino) and Absolute Beginners didn't get the same financial support. Goldcrest went bust not long after. 

The soundtrack however, is a different cup of tea entirely. There's plenty of jazz - Gil Evans, Slim Gaillard, Charles Mingus- along with some 80s London names- Clive Langer, Nick Lowe, Jerry Dammers, Ray Davies- as well as Sade and Smiley Culture. There's also Bowie's stone cold classic single title track, maybe his last truly great single...

Absolute Beginners

Glossy 80s production, sweeping chord changes, the ba- ba- ba- oom backing vocals, and Bowie's lead vocal, a glorious, crooning, soaring thing, ever going upwards, the sound of young love. 

The soundtrack is also home to one of Paul Weller's best Style Council songs. A film about 50s mod made in the 80s was always gong to have Paul turn up somewhere and The Style Council pulled out all their bossanova/ modern jazz/ pop chops for the song.

Have You Ever Had It Blue? (Soundtrack Version)

Ourika

Bagging Area's adventures in Morocco part two. Day two in Marrakech saw us up early for a trip to the Atlas Mountains, the ridge of snow capped mountains that separate the Sahara Desert from the sea, spanning Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. The part we went to, Ourika, is about 40 km south of Marrakech, and gave us a good idea of the spread of the city out through its suburbs to the mountains, the swarm of traffic giving way to emptier roads. Driving in Morocco, especially in Marrakech but also out beyond the city can be a bit hair raising, motorbikes and scooters weaving in and out among cars and busses, pedestrians stepping out into roads and onto zebra crossings no- one seems to intend to stop for, cars overtaking constantly and everyone honking their horn as often as possible. Once out into the countryside our minibus took us to the foothills of the mountains, heading for the Ourika Valley, beginning to climb and wind our way through Berber villages. Funnily, the only piece of Western pop music we heard all week came on the local radio station as we began to climb the road pictured above, the van's tinny speakers and ever more spectacular scenery making Mr Bowie seem even more otherworldly than usual...

Ashes To Ashes

We stopped on the way for a break. Any taxi ride out of Marrakesh built in a break that involved us admiring a view and then visiting a shop where Berber products were offered to us- pottery, textiles, jewelry, Argon oil. We then re- boarded our bus and headed further into the mountains.

We were up early for the trip, our guide keen to get us to the waterfall as early as possible so it would be quiet. It was worth the early start. We began climbing the route following our guide, a scramble up rocks and mountain paths, over rickety foot bridges and through villages and houses built into the hillsides, all set up for tourists coming through several times a day. 

The local people are the Berber people, who speak a different language to the people in Marrakech (Shilha is the local dialect). They've eked an existence out in the mountains for centuries and today are pretty reliant on tourism. The climb eventually brought us to the waterfall and an opportunity to sit down, drink more mint tea and enjoy the mountain view. 

Our descent took us back to the village and lunch at a riverside restaurant. Yes, it felt touristy but hey, we were tourists, and it was quite an experience, sitting on cushions beside the fast flowing Ourika River, eating the wonderful food while a pair of local musicians played. Across the way, the parking of the minibuses and vans over the river from us was fairly alarming, their back ends hanging out over the drop to the river, Italian Job style. 

                                             

This is Goul El Hak El Mont Kayna by Moroccan singer Najat Aatabou, a song from 1992. If you click play and let it run you'll recognise the riff that comes hits at fifty seconds, an instant blast of Moroccan music that ended up with Ed and Tom Chemical settling out of court after they borrowed it for their song Galvanize. 

Looking At The World Through The Sunset In Your Eyes

No Sunday mix today and no more posts until next weekend either; we're off to Marrakesh, Morocco for a few days, a holiday to celebrate my brother-in -law's 60th. Marrakesh is by all accounts an busy and vibrant city, with plenty of exploring to be done in the Medina, the souks, the palaces and gardens. We also have an excursion to the Atlas mountains planned which should be good. 

Graham Nash wrote this song while on the train from Casablanca to Marrakesh in 1969, a reaction to everything and everyone he saw on the train. The Hollies rejected the song as not commercial enough- Nash was already moving beyond The Hollies and the song became a Crosby, Stills and Nash one, recorded for their 1969 debut. It was also a May '69 CSN single. 

Marrakesh Express

In the interests of balance Iggy Pop has said that Marrakesh Express 'may be the worst song ever written.'

Funtime

Back next weekend. See you then. 

Barbed, Feathered, Reeled, Skinned, Snappered

Red Snapper have an exciting and busy 2025 ahead of them. The band Ali Friend and Rich Thair started with David Ayres in 1993 celebrate the 30th anniversary of their 1995 album Reeled And Skinned, an album that was one of '95's highlights from Beth Orton's voice on Snapper and the extended ten minute guitar freak out In Deep to the endless groove of Sabres Of Paradise remix of Hot Flush. The re- issue on vinyl and digital is on Warp and expands the album out to ten songs, with the extra track Area 51. The re- issue is out this Friday- find it at Warp's Bandcamp. 

Reeled And Skinned's fusion of electronics with live double bass, drums and percussion, guitar and keys/ synth saw them cross between smoked out trip hop, rocking jazz, funk, Afro, surf, dub, sci fi blues and all points in between. They head out on tour this week, starting in Swansea on Thursday and finishing in Glasgow on the 29th March. I saw them at The Golden Lion two summers ago, a venue they're playing again this time around, and they rocked the house, the full band sound bouncing round the pub, Ali's double bass and Rich's drums always leading the way. 

They also have a new album coming out in April, Barb And Feather. Last year they released an EP called Tight Chest, four tracks led by a collaboration with David Harrow, the superb dubbed out sounds of  Hold My Hand Up...

Those four tracks are going to be on the new album along with four other new ones, recorded by the rocking and raucous Red Snapper live outfit. The breadth and power of the four new songs shows a band not just trading on former glories but in the flow of a creative period, new songs to stand alongside the old ones. Opening track Ban- Di- To is a riot, the sound of 1940s jump blues welded to fuzz guitar, horns and Zoot suits a- go- go, punchy and funky, infectious, pounding rhythms. Tolminka slows things down, basement blues, a cinematic noir sound with echo, sax and spindly guitar. It's followed by Sirocco, the groove coming together slowly, clipped guitar and jazzy percussion and then a wonderful snaking, descending sax line. The EP closes with a cover they played live on the last tour, Bowie's Sound And Vision, the stand up double bass bubbling away, a stew of instruments providing the song's famous melody lines and Ali's vocals playing off against the horns. Lovely stuff. Hear Ban- Di- To and find Barb And Feather at Bandcamp. 

As a bonus here's The Thin White Duke, David Bowie himself, in Tokyo in 1990 playing Sound And Vision, teeth gleaming white and hair in a perfect quiff and Adrian Belew on guitar, for the enjoyment of a stadium of Japanese Bowie fans. 

Forty Five More Minutes Of Edits

In recent weeks I've done two Sunday mixes made up of edits. Part One is here and Part Two is here. Today is Part Three, another forty five minutes of edits, this one largely dancefloor oriented and with an 80s feel. 

Forty Five Minutes Of Edits Mix Three

• Can't Cope (Cotton Bud Re- Master)
• No- Thing
• M&M Hardway Bros
• Swamp Shuffle
• Never Let Me Down (Hunterbrau Edit)
• Jackie (Cotton Dub)
• Longed

Can't Cope is from Jezebell's Jezebellaeric Beats Vol. 1, a dubbed out and spaced out way to enter into the mix, our friend the Archdrude Julian H. Cope sent spinning even further out into the cosmos than he was previously. Safesurfer is from 1991's epic Peggy Suicide, the start of Julian's imperial period. Swamp Shuffle is also from Jezebellaeric Beats Vol. 1, the closing track, this time David Byrne, Tina Weymouth, Jerry Harrison and Chris Frantz given the treatment by Jesse and Darren. 

No- Thing is from Resident Rockers, the in- house edit team at Eclectics. Heroes. Twin Peaks. Moby. Acid. No- thing will keep us together. 

The M&M Hardway Bros edit takes Sleaford Mods Mork and Mindy, a song from 2020's Spare Ribs, with Billy Nomates on guest vocals, a tale of a childhood spent in colourless suburban council estates, Action Man and Cindy and mum and dad being out, long afternoons with nothing to do. Sean monkeyed about with it and turned it into an ALFOS at The Golden Lion moment. 

Hunterbrau's edit of Depeche Mode's 1987 classic Never Let Me Down came out on Paisley Dark, dark disco/ slowed down sleek goth.

Rich Lane's Cotton Dubs are second to none. His edit of Sinead O'Connor's Jackie (from her debut, the Lion And Then Cobra) repurposes Sinead with an 808 while losing none of her power. 

Longed is an edit of All Day Long from New Order's 1986 album Brotherhood. The chopped, looped and edited version here, largely instrumental, is from an intriguing project I was tipped off about on Bandcamp, a highly unofficial edit service by Follytechnic Music Library. Longed is from a collection of New Order edits called Ordered 86- 93 but there's waaaay more there than just one album of nine New Order edits. Have a dig around, see what you can unearth. 

V.A. Saturday

Bob Stanley (of Saint Etienne) is no stranger to the various artist compilation- sometimes it seems he's a one man compilation machine, firing out niche and obscure VA albums into the void to be picked up by the curious and adventurous. In 2020 along with Jason Wood he compiled a sixteen song album called Cafe Exil (New Adventures In European Music, 1972- 1980) that came out on Ace Records (themselves a deep and rich gold mine for compilation albums). Cafe Exil was the soundtrack for a new Mittel Europa, devoid of Anglo- American influence, the songs that could have been playing as David Bowie and Iggy Pop took their morning coffee in Cafe Exil in Kreuzberg, West Berlin (I love the fact that when Bowie and Iggy decided to leave the USA to kick cocaine they headed to one of the most extreme places in the world, half a city hemmed in by a wall and surrounded by a paranoid dictatorship). 

The motorik and the kosmische feature heavily as you'd expect- Cluster, Faust, Amon Duul, Popol Vuh- along with other sympathetic names- Soft Machine, Brian Eno, Toni Esposito, Annette Peacock- and some outliers- Jan Hammer Group. These two are among the stand outs. There's never a bad time to hear Michael Rother playing guitar is there?

Feuerland

Feuerland is originally from Rother's Flammende Herzen, a 1977 solo album that holds its own in the Rother back catalogue (and sounds as central to '77 as any of Bowie and Iggy's Berlin albums). Conny Plank produces, Jaki Liebezeit plays drums, Rother the synths and guitars. 

This one is by Steve Hillage, from his album Motivation Radio, also from '77, instrumental psychedelia/ prog. Iggy and Bowie would have been tapping their teaspoons along while this was playing in Cafe Exil, strong black coffee and pastries helping flush their systems clean. 

Octave Doctors

More More

Some more more today, following Pink Floyd's More yesterday. First dose of more is from Iggy Pop, and his song I Need More from his album Soldier.

I Need More

Released in 1980 Soldier was Iggy's fourth solo album, an album that doesn't have a great reputation but this song is a highlight. A clipped guitar riff, driving drums, somewhat murky sound and Iggy riding on top in good voice. Ex- Stooge James Williamson was supposed to be on board for producing but walked out after disagreeing with Bowie (who was hanging around, helping Iggy out). Glen Matlock, at a loose end himself after the Pistols broke up and flitting between various bands and projects that didn't come to much, came in to co- write and play. He suggested that the final mix had a lot of the lead guitar removed by Bowie (following an argument between guitarist Steve New and the Thin White Duke over girlfriend Patti Palladin, that ended in New punching Bowie). The lack of squealing lead guitar doesn't do this song any harm in fact, keeps it grungy. Simple Minds turn up on Soldier as well, providing backing vocals on Play It Safe. They were recording at Rockfield at the same time. Iggy's 80s albums are patchy in quality but I Need More is good stuff. I Need More was also the title of Iggy's 1982 autobiography, out of print and currently very expensive second hand. 

A few years earlier, 1976, Can released a single called I Want More, a song that gave them a hit and took them to Top Of The Pops. The B-side was an extension of the A- side, Jaki Liebezeit at the krautrock disco, the bass and sparse guitar licks dancing around the rhythm, the whole group breathily chanting the title. Superbly funky stuff. 

... And More

Monday's Long Song

It's become one of those things you see on the internet, that since David Bowie died in January 2016 the world has gone to pieces, and while the two may be coincidental rather than related you can't help but feel some grand cosmic imbalance was created when David Jones breathed his last breath and that we've been sinking into the abyss ever since. The five years since 2016 seem to have passed very quickly too, events hurtling at us at a rapid speed, leaving us no time to get to grips with things before some other calamity strikes us. 'News had just come over/ five years left to cry in', the man himself wrote and sang in 1972. 

In 2013 James Murphy, the LCD Soundsystem man I posted about last week, got his hands on one of the songs from Bowie's comeback album The Next Day. He cut and looped some clapping from a Steve Reich track, sampled the synth from Ashes To Ashes and created a monumental remix, minimal, sleek and modern. Bowie sounds superb too, back in touch and vital, 'your country's new... but your fear is as old as the world'. The full ten minute version is the one you want obviously, a long remix that you don't really want to come to an end. 

This the edited version. It's worth mentioning that the 12" release was a beautiful artefact, white vinyl, die cut and embossed sleeve. The hole in the centre was square rather than circular.

Love Is Lost (Hello Steve Reich Mix By James Murphy For The DFA Edit)

The Next Day was trailed by Where Are We Now?, Bowie's nostalgic tribute to the years he spent in Berlin in the mid 1970s. He recorded it (and the whole album) in secret in autumn 2011 and released the single onto the internet without fanfare on his 66th birthday. 'Had to get the train from Potsdamer Platz/ You never knew that I could do that', he croons, a man looking back at his youth, 'just walking the dead'. Time passes, everyone ages, nothing stays the same. The Berlin of 1975 and the Berlin of 2011 are as different as a city could be. David Bowie of 2011 was not the same man he was in 1975. And though he and we didn't know it then, he had just five years left, almost exactly to the day. 

Love

February 14th, Valentine's Day. St Valentine, a 3rd century saint, has been associated with the traditions of courtly love since the Middle Ages. As a priest in the Roman Empire who ministered to Christians during the period of their persecution he was caught and killed, martyred on 14th February 269 AD. According to a version of his death  when he was arrested the Prefect of Rome ordered that he be either beaten to death with clubs or beheaded. But if you think he had it bad, consider this- I'm in charge of a Year 7 Valentine's disco tonight.

Love is the number one topic as the subject for songs and writers. As Joe Strummer said 'subject covered, case closed, don't you think?' A cursory search of my hard drive throws up hundreds with love in the title. Here's two for Valentine's Day, both ace in different ways.

Veteran disco remix King Tom Moulton took Diana Ross' 1976 hit Love Hangover and extended it for seventeen sumptuous minutes, all strings and breathy vocals until a shift in tempo at around six minutes. A song in a version that just has to be surrendered to.

Love Hangover (Unreleased Tom Moulton Mix)

In June 1977 Iggy Pop was recording Lust For Life with Bowie in West Berlin. To change things around a bit the players all swapped roles, guitarist Ricky Gardiner sitting in on the drums, drummer Hunt Sales took brother Tony's bass and and Tony took the guitar. Carlos Alomar joined in with Bowie on organ. Iggy improvised a vocal, a song to the girl. It's got a weird groove and is a wonderful way to close the album.

Fall In Love With Me

Why Don't You Play Us A Tune Pal?

Nicolas Roeg has died aged 90. The films he made in the 1970s and 80s were the type of films you read references to and in those days where things were scarcer you hoped they'd eventually be shown late at night on BBC2 (with a VHS cassette close by). Performance is a counter-cultrue classic, Mick Jagger, Anita Pallenberg and James Fox all going slowly mad in a big house in Notting Hill Gate (and when it was being made Keith Richards waiting in his car outside the set, paranoid about what Jagger and Pallenberg might be up to). The soundtrack was legendary too and this (with my surname too, which added to it for me) is a genuinely great Jagger vocal with slide guitar from Ry Cooder...

Memo From Turner (Alternate Version)

Mick Jones paid tribute to Roeg, his films and especially Performance in Big Audio Dynamite's 1985 single E=MC2, peppered with dialogue from the film and a verse about taking a trip in Powis Square with a pop star who dyed his hair, mobsters, gangland slayings and insanity Bohemian style. The opening verse is about Walkabout (1971) and the 3rd verse is about The Man Who Fell To Earth, another late night, video tape film that had the capacity to freak the viewer out.

E=MC2

The chorus took me years to fully work out and I'd sung all kinds of words along to it but I think it goes...

'Ritual ideas, relativity
Holy buildings, no people prophesy
Time slide, place to hide, nudge reality
Foresight, minds wide, magic imagery oh ho'.

Happy Mondays 1988 masterpiece Bummed was also Roeg and Performance inspired with at least 3 songs referencing the film. Mad Cyril includes dialogue from it including the line that opens the song 'We've been courteous'. The Mondays played it on Granada TV for Wilson's The Other Side Of Midnight show, a band at their peak...

Once There Were Mountains

A year ago today we woke up to the news that David Bowie had died. After that, the whole year went to shit.

Station To Station is my number one Bowie album, one I've been listening to since a very cold winter in a student house in Childwall, Liverpool in 1989. The album is only six songs long, marking a transition from the Bowie of the USA to the Bowie of Europe, from Young Americans to Low. The influence of West German bands, mechanical rhythms, detachment, the flight to Berlin, the after-effects of years of cocaine use, a Bowie who needed change and to be saved are evident. All this and more- and plenty of things that even now I haven't got under the skin of.

Station To Station

And just after the The Last Five Years documentary finished on Saturday night a new e.p. was released online, the last recordings including this sax and vocals dominated piece No Plan.

Oh look, Newton Electricals...

Remain

The author Robert Harris tweeted last week 'How foul this referendum is. The most depressing, divisive, duplicitous political event in my lifetime. may there never be another'. Which just about covers it. Nigel Farage has forced a 'discussion' into public, a discussion which has unleashed all kinds of racist and xenophobic forces which have at least partly contributed to the murder of MP Jo Cox last week. Farage is a political charlatan, a fraud, a man who basks in a man-in-the-street image despite a wealthy, privileged background. A demagogue who hates the EU yet is paid by it, who represents constituents at the European parliament but rarely goes. A man who poses in front of Nazi inspired posters and complains that the murder of Jo Cox has 'taken the momentum out of the Leave campaign'. On every and any level, he is a disgrace.

David Cameron has to take the blame here too- despite being the leader of the Remain campaign, he is the one who called this referendum, a cynical response to the rise of Ukip and the defection of Tory votes, a piece of political opportunism that has blown up in his face, shown the cracks in his party and that he'll pay for politically at some point, win or lose.

Let's Kiss And Make Up

This is original The Field Mice version covered by St Etienne with their Eurocentric cover art.

A vote to Leave is a backwards step, a vote for a past that doesn't exist. I can't see any positives in leaving. Taking back control, taking back sovereignty is a smokescreen- how is leaving the 'undemocratic' E.U. increasing democracy in a country which has an unelected second chamber and is a constitutional monarchy? My vote today is to Remain. Let's stay together.

Enough preaching.

Stay 

Stay is off Bowie's Station To Station, sometimes my favourite Bowie album. The choppy guitar part, Carlos Alomar I assume, is wonderful.

And finally Portishead have released this cover of ABA's SOS, a tribute to Jo Cox.

We Learn Dances, Brand New Dances

I'm not sure if this is a 1977 themed week or an Iggy Pop themed week. Or if it's a theme week at all. In 1981 Grace Jones covered Nightclubbing, from Iggy's The Idiot- it was the name of the album as well as a cover of the song. Rhythm kings Sly and Robbie on bass and drums root the whole thing in dub coupled with a New Wave sheen and some hiss. In Iggy's version he's in the nightclub but dazed and distanced, an outsider looking in, numbed by party drugs. In this version Grace is imperious, glacial, in the middle of the dancefloor.

Nightclubbing

To Dusseldorf City

...meet Iggy Pop and David Bowie.

The title track to their March 1977 release Trans-Europe Express. Peerless and perfect, a sound in motion. Invented pretty much everything that came after it.

Calling Sister Midnight

Iggy Pop's The Idiot is a remarkable album. Released in March 1977 (and followed in the same year by Lust For Life) it is the first of the Bowie Berlin albums. All the songs on The Idiot are co-written by David Bowie and his fingerprints- words, tone, chords, structures- are all over it. The Idiot was Iggy's first solo album and doesn't really sound too like the rest of his work. No cartoon stagediving here, no songs chasing the sound of two chord Stooges. The Idiot sounds thought out, a piece of work. It is also sounds dislocated- Iggy and Bowie loose and lost in West Berlin. On most of the songs- just listen to Nightcubbing- the beat is always a bit behind where you expect it to be, a fraction deliberately late.

Opening track Sister Midnight is a blast. Played live by Bowie throughout his Station To Station tour, it's a powerful opener, a punch. Bowie's guitarist Carlos Alomar plays on it. Many of Bowie's songs from Chateau d'Herouville and Hansa Studio have a certain funkiness and a lightness. Sister Midnight has Alomar's wonderful guitar sound and playing but is murkier, with the synths and rhythm keeping it more earthbound. Three note bassline. Iggy in a hole looking out- 'what can I do about my dreams?' he sings at one point after a verse re-working Oedipus.

Sister Midnight

His voice is the human touch on an album inspired by the men-machines Kraftwerk, an album with a European heart moving away the blues base of the music of the 1960s and early 70s, written and played by men trying to kick different drugs. Sister Midnight re-appeared with new words as Red Money on Bowie's Lodger album in 1979, the album generally considered to be the final part of the Berlin series, completing the circle nicely.