To The Sea

I'm trying to fend off the clocks going back with a photo from summer (the sea at Cleveleys, north of Blackpool) and some very laid back Balearic vibes from Cantoma. To The Sea is an accordion led four minute lilt that sounds like nothing really matters much at all. Buy it at Bandcamp. 

I would very much like it if Cantoma and Eric Cantona joined forces for a song, a Cantoma/ Cantona face off. The Ibizan sounds of Phil Mison and Eric talking about something/ anything would be a joy. 

Isolation Mix Two

A second Bagging Area mix for lockdown, an hour of tunes starting out ambient, taking a turn toward the Balearics and some fizzing electronics before the jetstream sends it back into more ambient, melancholic lands with waves and seagulls. Having the time and space to think about putting these together is one of the upsides of social distancing and isolation.

Private Mountain: Coming Back Home v Eric Cantona ‘When the seagulls follow the trawler…

Nils Frahm: Over There, It’s Raining

Steven Leggett: Bathhouse

Seahawks: Rainbow Sun

Peaking Lights: Beautiful Dub

Circle Sky: Ghost In The Machine

The Neil Cowley Trio: Echo Nebula (Vessels Remix)

Fila Brazillia: Midnight Friends

Mark Peters: Jacob’s Ladder (Ambient Innerlands Version)

Jan van den Broeke: Memories

A Man Called Adam: Easter Song (Gospel Oak FX)

Bjorn Torske: First Movement

Isolation Mix One

'Don't create congestion in commonly used space', a poster from the Soviet Union, 1950s.

I thought I'd do something new today and maybe make it a regular feature. Everyone and their dog is transmitting DJ sets at the moment. One thing we've all got lots of is time. So in the moments between phoning in to long video conferences, teaching online lessons, wiling away hours absentmindedly surfing the internet and social media, spending time with my family and getting my state sanctioned daily exercise allowance I've also put together the first Bagging Area mix, fifty four minutes of music called Isolation Mix 1.



It's actually Isolation Mix 1.1, the first one wasn't quite right and I removed a couple of tracks and replaced them with some other ones. It's a mix of old and new, largely ambient and instrumental, a bit of dub and dub techno in there and appearances from Rutger Hauer and a retired French footballer.

Daniel Avery and Alessandro Cortini: Illusion of Time v Eric Cantona 'As Flies To Wanton Boys...'
Four Tet: Teenage Birdsong
Durutti Column: The Second Aspect Of The Same Thing
Richard Norris: Shorelines
Sabres Of Paradise: Jacob Street 7am
A Winged Victory For The Sullen: Keep It Dark, Deutschland
Vangelis: Tears In Rain
The Orb: The Weekend It Rained Forever (Oseberg Buddha Mix (The Ravens Have Left The Tower))
Dub Trees: King Of The Faeries (Avengers Outer Space Chug Dub)
Two Lone Swordsmen: As Worldly Pleasures Waves Goodbye...

As Flies To Wanton Boys We Are For The Gods

The last day of the year, time to get 2019 over and done with. I said in my end of year review that musically it's been a bumper year but in many other ways 2019 has been a headlong descent into the abyss, a continuous political nightmare with no way out for at least five years. Johnson looks set to carry out the formal separation of the UK from the EU at the end of January, getting Brexit done as he hammered home during five weeks of campaigning. His majority in parliament and electoral mandate gives him the freedom to do it as he pleases. Some kind of hard Brexit will be done by the end of 2020 with the Farage/Johnson fanboys and fan girls triumphant. Grim as fuck. In the USA imperial tyrant toddler Donald Trump is in the process of being impeached but it doesn't seem to actually mean anything as the Republicans in the senate will fall in line and clear him regardless. Again, grim as fuck.

*shakes head, slaps cheeks, exhales*

Blogging is a good platform to celebrate the positive and to find the best in things and in these circumstances you've got to get your kicks where you can. I posted this clip at the end of the summer but it remains one of my highlights of 2019. Back in August Eric Cantona stood up at the UEFA to receive the President's Award, a recognition of his commitment in helping to improve the lives of others and as 'a man who refuses compromise, stands up for his values and puts his heart and soul into supporting the causes he believes in'. In accepting the award Cantona quoted King Lear and then went off at an even further tangent...



“As flies to wanton boys, we are for the gods. They will kill us for the sport. Soon, the science will not only be able to slow down the ageing of the cells, soon the science will fix the cells to the state and so we will become eternal. Only accidents, crimes, wars will still kill us but unfortunately crimes and wars will multiply. I love football.”

I ripped the audio from the clip above and have dropped it into playlists and onto compilation CDs. You can do the same if you want. 

Eric Cantona speech August 2019

This came out in the summer, a long slow deep house thumper from Scott Fraser and Louise Quinn. It still sounds like a good way to spend ten minutes. 



And then there's this one from Roisin Murphy, one of the most creative, consistent and exuberant writers and performers on the planet. In June I fell hook, line and sinker for Incapable. Her next masterpiece Narcissus came out in November and is disco perfection. I didn't post it at the time and today feels like as good a day to do it as any.



Happy new year everyone. Have a good one tonight whether you're in or out, going big or staying small and to quote Mr Weatherall from his monthly transmission for NTS radio 'don't let the grubby little opportunists drag you down'. See you in 2020 for more of the same. 

As Flies To Wanton Boys

“As flies to wanton boys, we are for the gods. They will kill us for the sport. Soon, the science will not only be able to slow down the ageing of the cells, soon the science will fix the cells to the state and so we will become eternal. Only accidents, crimes, wars will still kill us but unfortunately crimes and wars will multiply. I love football.”



I'm not going to comment on the genius of Cantona, his quoting King Lear or his dress at a formal UEFA awards ceremony. It's all there to be enjoyed by each of us. It is worth in the clip below watching the faces of the footballers in the audience, Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo among them, and wondering what they are making of King Eric, the only footballer that matters. 

Taking The Knee

King Size

Eric Cantona turned forty nine a couple of days ago. He was, as far as we're concerned in this part of the world, the King. In modern football terms, as they said about The Clash, Eric is the only footballer that mattered.

King Tubby's productions are rightly the stuff of legend, the work of a man who re-shaped music. Ideally some of the dubs he cut in the 1970s should be listened to alongside the A-side, running together. This one from 1976 has the lead side of Johnny Clarke's Don't Trouble Trouble and then at 3.27 Tubby's Ruffer Version from the flip. Phased horns, machine gun fire, underwater sounds, sirens, the odd snatch of vocal and the sublime bass of The Aggrovators original rhythm track.

Upon Westminster Bridge

Upon Westminster Bridge is a poem by William Wordsworth. In said poem he did not ponder a difficult decision to be made regarding Motley Crue. Nigel Blackwell did, in the Half Man Half Biscuit song of the same name. In the HMHB song we also get a new version of The Twelve Days Of Christmas sandwiched in...

'Spoiling Good Friday my ex-love sent to me
Twelve drummers singing
Eleven chairmen dancing
Ten mascots whinging
Nine stewards flapping
Eight christening invites
Seven cows a-barking
Six vicars strumming
Nick fucking Knowles
Four boring words
Carphone Warehouse and Matalan
And a pulled up at Bangor-on-Dee'

Nick fucking Knowles. Merry Christmas.

The song has many, many other delights- dry stone wallcharts, Ken Hom wok sets, iron age hill forts, low cost school trips, Ladbrokes and the return to earth of Jesus Christ and the resulting use of No Need For Nails. It is almost the quintessential Half Man Half Biscuit Song.

Upon Westminster Bridge

The other alternative version of The Twelve Days Of Christmas familiar in this household is The Twelve Days Of Cantona (the only modern footballer that really mattered).

Are you a farmer?

At this time of year, during duller passages of play, a romp through the whole song is always entertaining at the match. 'On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me an Eric Cantona' and so on...

'Five Cantonaaaaaaas
Four Cantonas
Three Cantonas
Two Cantonas
And an Eric Cantona'

Dull is the game that goes all the way up to twelve.

I finish work for the Christmas holidays today. Halle-fucking-lujah.

Meetings With Footballers 3

It is 19th May 1995. It is my 25th birthday. We go into town and have beers and tequila at Ten Bar. We meet the man. We go to Home, in retrospect a very dubious nightclub. We drink more bottled beer. In the bar area above the dancefloor, flanked by two minders in black MA 1 bomber jackets, is Eric Cantona. Eric is serving a long ban for attacking a Crystal Palace supporter as he was leaving the pitch, still one of the most extraordinary things I've seen take place at a football match. We shake Eric's hand. Things are a bit messy now all round. A queue forms. We go up to shake his hand again, reasoning he won't remember our faces. Eric takes all this with good grace, despite us clearly being worse for wear. I drag the soon-to-be Mrs Swiss off the dancefloor, so she can meet Eric. She asks Eric if he minds being hassled by drunken/gurning idiots in nightclubs. 'No' he replies, 'Not really'.

In 1995 The Stone Roses disintegrated. They lost Reni, the finest drummer of his generation. They released Ten Storey Love Song as a single, the only song off the Second Coming that sounded like the work of the same band that made the first album six years earlier. On their singles to support the first album the B-sides were as good as the A-sides- Standing Here, Mersey Paradise, Going Down... By the time they came to finding B-sides for Second Coming singles the quality was dipping. The 12" of Ten Storey Love Song had two B-sides- Ride On, a Brown/Squire number, slow, stoned, dirgy, and Moses, a pile driver of guitar riffs and heavy groove, with a breakdown and the riff tumbling back in. Credited to Squire/Mounfield/Wren you felt it was a warm-up, practice tune that had never gained vocals. Heavy and a long way from waterfalls, sugar spun sisters and her banging the drums.

Moses

RVNG of the NRDS Pilooski 'AAA'

A bit of recycling here- I got this track from North Country Bhoy a few weeks ago, and I hope he doesn't mind me reposting it. It's one of the best things I've heard for ages, and my 12" vinyl copy from ebay turned up yesterday, and it sounds even better than the mp3 I've been playing on a loop for the last 2 weeks.

RVNG of the NRDs is a series of re-edits and remixes by folk like Tim Sweeney, Optimo, Lovefingers and Greg Wilson, and in this one, the last in series, French Discodeine hero Pilooski, my second favourite Frenchman *. Pilooski's done some fantastic re-edits in the last few years, but this is something else. He takes reggae singer Nora Dean's Angie La-La and monkeys about with it sending it towards the ten minute mark. We start in a tropical jungle, parrots screeching, birds taking flight, then Pilooski adds a big kick drum, the funky looped guitar riff or two, and then the amazing eerie vocal 'Where have you been all my life boy?'. A breakdown, extra drums, riff comes back, more and more, onwards and upwards. Perfection. Transporting. I like this a lot. Get it now people.

* Eric Cantona is my favourite Frenchman, obviously. For a year or so I'm guessing he was North Country Bhoy's as well. Heh heh.

a1-pilooski-aaa.mp3