Tears, Tech, Loneliness

Last month I wrote about two new songs from Halifax born/ Manchester based trio The Orielles, a single ahead of their forthcoming album Only You Left, an album that ties up all their loose ends and creativity at the end of a self proclaimed seven year cycle. You Are Eating A Part Of Yourself/ To Undo The World Itself were both really impressive, blurry, shape shifting guitars riffs and FX and poetic/ expressive lyrics uttered on top. It felt like something significant was being communicated, a point arrived at. 

This week's new song, Tears Are, is even better. Those guitars are back, played through some lovely amps, drums kicking away and singer Esme giving another cool vocal, free form and ambiguous. Esme said the lyrics were partly about 'imagery of wood versus metal' and how 'everything fell naturally into either category'. The song collapses into an acoustic guitar coda, circling notes and whispers. A mid- February treat and one that suggests the album, when it comes next month, will be one well worth paying attention to. 

Also out this week is a new song from Anna Calvi sharing vocals with Mr. Iggy Pop. Iggy sang with The Moonlandingz last year, a song that was one of my favourites of 2025. He's repeats the trick here with Iggy showing no signs of letting go and Anna's getting the best out of him and herself. Iggy, once 'the world's forgotten boy' is now God's Lonely Man... thumping drums, a thunderous rhythm that calls classic mid- 70s Iggy to mind, Anna more than a match vocally and some wailing guitar to punctuate the two minutes forty nine seconds the song sticks around for. 

Kim Gordon's solo career continues, a post- Sonic Youth adventure that is more experimental and more adventurous than many people half her age. On Dirty Tech she half sings/ half speaks over low fi electro and skittering drums. It's so electric and vibrant it could probably wipe tape clean at close quarters and scare wild animals. Kim Gordon is 72. 

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. 

Forty Five Minutes Of Cover Versions

I held back from doing this for ages, a mix just containing cover versions, because it felt a bit lazy, a bit uninspired but the recent covers of Nick Drake by Joao Leao and The Velvet Underground by Thurston Moore twisted my arm into it. There are potentially more cover versions mixes to come. All these are relatively recent, although now I think about it Rowland S. Howard's Pop Crimes album came out in 2009 which is sixteen years ago and Calexico's in 2003 which is twenty two years ago- but the rest are all fairly recent. This mix leans towards the garage/ psyche/ guitar side of things. 

Forty Five Minutes Of Cover Versions

• Andy Bell: Smokebelch
• Joao Leao: One Of These Things First
• Calexico: Alone Again Or
• Rowland S. Howard: Life's What You Make It
• Moon Duo: Planet Caravan
• Moon Duo: No Fun
• The Liminanas: Angles And Devils
• Thurston Moore: Temptation Inside Your Heart

Andy Bell's cover of The Sabres Of Paradise's Smokebelch was begun on the day of Andrew Weatherall's death, 17th February 2020, and finished in late summer/ early autumn 2023 when I emailed Andy to ask him if he had a track for our then unreleased pipe dream album Sounds From The Flightpath Estate Volume 1. Andy's reply contained the completed cover and as soon as we listened to it, we knew it would close the album. Smokebelch itself began life as a cover version of L.B. Bad's New Age Of Faith.

Joao Leao's bossa nova flecked cover of Nick Drake's One Of These Things First, a song from Nick's 1971 album Bryter Later, came out as a 7" single on Toronto's Local Dish label and was posted here two weeks ago. 

Calexico's cover of Love's 1967 classic Alone Again Or doesn't stray too far from the original- Calexico were surely destined to cover it through with their combination of desert indie and mariachi horns. I thought I had a dub version of Alone Again Or- it sounded superb, dub groove, those horns and a snatch of vocal but I must have dreamt it. 

Rowland S. Howard's Pop Crimes was the former Birthday Party guitarist's second solo album. He was undergoing treatment for liver cancer at the time and died two months after it was released. Under those circumstances Talk Talk's Life's What You Make (second line, 'can't escape it') takes on a different meaning. Rowland's guitar playing- in fact just the way he held and approached the guitar- is pretty unique. His roiling guitar lines and feedback, the metallic clang and grim vocal delivery take the song into new places- which is what a cover version should do really. 

Moon Duo are represented twice here. First their cover of Black Sabbath's Planet Caravan was a summer 2020 release, their version of the 1970 original a chilled and weightless cosmic take. Their version of The Stooges' No Fun is from a 2018 12" single with Alan Vega's Jukebox Babe on the other side. Sonic Boom produced it. Again, a blank eyed, calmed down take on Iggy's 1969 proto- punk classic. 

The Liminanas released a compilation of singles and other rarities in 2015, I've Got Trouble In Mind Vol. 2 which included this cover version of Angels And Devils, an Echo And The Bunnymen B-side. The Liminanas, French psyche/ garage band par excellence, take The Bunnymen's Mo Tucker stomp and turn it Gallic. 

Thurston Moore's cover of The Velvet Underground's Temptation Inside Your Heart came out in September, a song he's been playing live for some time, MBV bassist Debbie Goodge plays the bass (as she does when Thurston plays live). Lou Reed's song first saw the light of dark on the 1985 outtakes album VU and has been a favorite of mine since the late 80s. Thurston more than does it justice.

It's Where He's From

Seeing Iggy Pop live at Manchester's Victoria Warehouse at the end of May has lived long in my memory. Two months on I can still get a little buzz of excitement from the thought of it and as Iggy has wended his way across Europe since then I get the same excitement from seeing clips of various gigs and festivals popping up in my social media. 

Iggy's solo career is perhaps the definition of uneven, wildly varying solo albums from the genius of 1977's The Idiot and Lust For Life to albums where he barely sounds interested or has unsympathetic bands bludgeoning songs to death. In between there are lots of Iggy albums that have some cherries and some stinkers and much in between. His 21st century solo albums run a similar gamut. 2016's Post Pop Depression felt like a late career high point, a top 5 solo Iggy album. 2001's Beat 'Em Up was uninspiring hard rock. In between he did a jazz album, an album sung mainly in French, a sixteen song album that saw him reunited with The Stooges on four songs including a song each with Peaches and Green Day, some reflective  crooning and story telling, and on 2023's Every Loser songs with musicians from Jane's Addiction and Guns 'N' Roses that try to cover every style he's played with on every previous album. 

This is a pick 'n' mix of 21st century solo Iggy Pop, not necessarily the best four, just four Iggy solo songs from the last quarter of a century plus a collaboration from this year that you might have missed from a few months ago. 

In 2003 Iggy released Skull Ring, a seventeen song monster with Green Day, Peaches and Sum 41 all in tow and seven songs recorded with a group Iggy put together called The Trolls. Sadly of the four musicians that formed The Trolls only two are still alive, guitarists Whitey Kirst and Pete Marshall. Bassist Mooseman was the victim of a drive by shooting, a case of mistaken identity and drummer Alex Kirst was killed in a hit-- and- run in 2011. 

The remaining four songs on Skull Ring were recorded with The Stooges, the first fruits of a re- union that led them to festival stages all over the world. The four songs on Skull Ring had Iggy with Scott Asheton and Ron Asheton, Minutemen's Mike Watt playing bass and Steve Mackay from Funhouse rejoining on sax. When Ron died in 2009 James Williamson rejoined. Scott died in 2014, Steve Mackay in 2015. The four songs were Little Electric Chair, Skull Ring, Dead Rock Star and Loser. 

Skull Ring

Sludgy guitar riffs, overloaded sound and Iggy chanting 'Skull rings/ Fast cars/ Hot chicks/ Money'. It's good enough and more than a little a little tongue in cheek. 

2009's Preliminaires was a quieter affair, jazz and blues and bossa nova, a definitive attempt to something completely different. On Les Feuilles Mortes (Autumn Leaves) Iggy covered a 1940s standard in the original French. It suits him. 

Les Feuilles Mortes

In 2016 Iggy released Post Pop Depression, an album written and recorded with Josh Homme (Queens Of The Stone Age) and Matt Helders (Arctic Monkeys) and followed it with a tour. The album was a big success, strong songs, well recorded and played by a band who knew how Iggy Pop should sound. Gardenia, Break Into Your Heart, Paraguay and American Valhalla all sounded like first rate Iggy Pop and Sunday saw him accepting his age and place in the bigger scheme of things as the band cranked out the best backing tracks he'd had for years. 

Sunday

In 2018 Iggy collaborated with Underworld on a four track EP, Teatime Dub Encounters. Both parties sounded like they given it their best shot and it was fun for the time it lasted. On Bells And Circles Iggy sings/ speaks about the golden days of the 1970s, when you could smoke on the plane rather than now when you just get told 'you can't do that'- and if it sounds a bit 'old man shouts at the clouds' thats because it is. 

Bells And Circles

There's probably a follow up post to this one about Iggy's various guest vocal appearances but for the moment can I just remind you that earlier this year, before he set off on tour, Iggy recorded a vocal with The Moonlandingz, a song called It's Where I'm From, and it still sounds like a 2025 highlight, Iggy's elder statesman melancholy hitting all the right spots.

 

Twenty Two

Eliza is twenty two today. The picture above was a school photo taken in about 2008 at a guess, so quite some time ago. Eliza came home from university a year ago and got herself a job straight away, working at the day care centre that Isaac used to go to, working with adults with a variety of special needs and disabilities. It's not a job everyone can do. In March she handed her notice and booked herself flights to and from Bali, travelling solo, spending nearly four weeks backpacking. Since she came home she's been looking for work, applying for various jobs with all the hassle and frustrations that job hunting involves. She's stuck at it, been penniless for the last few weeks, and has recently found a job at an SEND school. Her resourcefulness is a good quality and she gets stuff done. Happy birthday Eliza. Enjoy it. 

Twenty two is a funny age. Eliza joked (half- joked maybe) that she was having a quarter life crisis. I remember being twenty two and being a little adrift, university behind me and now being, as far as the world was concerned, an adult- but not really sure what I wanted to do or what the future might hold, feeling too young to start a professional career job, not having much money, living in a series of short term rented flats/ house shares. It's a tricky age I think. 

In 1969 Iggy acknowledged twenty two's difficult status on the opening song of The Stooges's debut album, a song that sets out perfectly the band's modus operandi. Noise, distorted wah wah, sludgy riffs, primitive thumping drums and this- 'Last year I was twenty one/ Didn't have a lot of fun/ Now I'm gonna be twenty two/ Oh my and boo hoo'.

1969

It's 1969. America is burning. Iggy's bored and sarcastic. 

Ten years later Neil Young and Crazy Horse recorded one of their epics, Neil slipping back into the past to deliver a song about war, family, death and youth. I always assumed it was set in the time of the American Revolution, the 'red means run son' a reference to the British army and their red coats. The narrator's family have all fallen by the way, Daddy's gone, Neil's brother's out hunting in the mountains, Big John's been drinking since the river took Emmy Lou. There's just Neil, his Daddy's rifle in his arms and just turned twenty two, wondering what to do...

Powderfinger

There are several other twenty two songs- Taylor Swift's 22, Lily Allen's 22 (same title, different tone), The Flaming Lips' When Yer Twenty Two and Bright Eyes' Land Locked Blues that contains the line, 'The world's got me dizzy again/ You'd think after twenty two years I'd be used to the spin'. Not really mate- twenty two is still ridiculously young. We'll finish with Billy Bragg and his 1985 calling card- 'I was twenty one years when I wrote this song/ I'm twenty two now but I won't be for long'. 

A New England

The opening line is a borrow/ steal from Simon and Garfunkel's Leaves That Are Green, a 1966 song about lost love. Billy places A New England in the early 80s, Thatcher's Britain with youth unemployment, the bomb, the miner's strike and the Falklands War as his backdrop. Among all of that he doesn't even want to find a new England, he's just looking for another girl. 

'I saw two shooting stars last night/ I wished on them/ But they were only satellites/ it's wrong to wish on space hardware/ I wish I wish I wish you cared'. 

I'm not sure there are many better lines in popular music than that. 

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

Soundtrack Saturday

Alex Cox's 1984 film Repo Man is one of those classic counter- culture 80s films, a combination of road movie, music, Los Angeles, science fiction, UFOs, crime, cars and black comedy and a satire on Reagan's America, 80s consumerism, the nuclear bomb and anything else Alex Cox, in his directorial debut, could throw at the camera. It stars Harry Dean Stanton and Emelio Estevez as repo men- 'the life of a repo man is always intense', says Bud (Harry Dean Stanton). 

The musical backdrop to the film, the scene around which Estevez's character Otto comes from, is 80s L.A. punk. The soundtrack is in part a snapshot of early/ mid 80s L.A. punk rock with the title track coming from Iggy Pop who wrote it specifically for the film after his manager saw a screening of it. 1984 isn't necessarily the best period in Iggy's musical back catalogue. In 1982 he'd released Zombie Birdhouse and the year before Party. Party is poor. Zombie Birdhouse isn't much better. For Repo Man he enlisted ex- Sex Pistol Steve Jones and Blondie's Clem Burke and Nigel Harrison and they make a decent fist of it, the song a heavy piledriver with Iggy in good voice. 

Repo Man

The rest of the songs, ten of them, take in The Plugz (last seen at Bagging Area backing Bob Dylan on David Letterman), Circle Jerks, Suicidal Tendencies, Fear, Burning Sensations (cvering Jonathan Richman's Pablo Picasso) and Juicy Bananas. As a document of Californian punk rock in Reagan's USA its pretty good. The soundtrack is completed by possibly the most archetypal L.A. punk band of them all, Black Flag, and their 1982 song TV Party. 'We've got nothing better to do/ Than watch TV and have a couple of brews', bawls Henry Rollins. 

TV Party

It's Where I'm From

The Moonlandingz are Lias Soudi, Adrian Flanagan and Dean Honer. All three have a rich history of music in other projects including Decius and Fat White Family for Lias, Acid Klaus for Adrian, and I Monster for Dean but currently The Moonlandingz is where it's at for them- their second album, No Rocket Required, is lined up for release later this month. Ahead of it, released yesterday, is It's Where I'm From, a single with Iggy Pop singing on it (released a day after Iggy's 78th birthday). 

It's Where I'm At is a beautiful, heartfelt, melancholic number, a ballad for the 21st century, a jazzy lullaby with Iggy at his most rueful, 78 years of hard won wisdom, staring down the barrel of the gun of mortality. Adrian wrote the song fifteen years ago, sitting at home whacked up on morphine following a bike accident that left him with two broken arms and sticking two metaphorical fingers up at the doctor who told him he might never regain the full use of his arms- home studio, one finger and a thumb on the Mellotron and a drum machine. Filled out with live drums and some Gallic sax, Adrian approached Iggy for vox and thankfully, he said yes. 

Iggy likes to dip out of rock and into chanson and jazz from time to time. In 2019 he recorded Free, a sombre, contemplative album of ambient jazz with nods to Lou Reed and Dylan Thomas. In 1999 he recorded Avenue B, a reflective, post- divorce album with several acoustic, jazz inflected, spoken word songs, including the title track...

Avenue B

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. 

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

Fifty Four

I am 54 today- and all of a sudden the mid- fifties have arrived. I have tried to put together a number 54 based Sunday mix. It turns out 54 isn't a particularly popular musical number. As so often happens Mr Weatherall came to my rescue along with The Clash and a very famous and debauched New York nightclub and a blinding reggae song. This mix is as a result somewhat varied stylistically and gets even more random towards the end- maybe that's a metaphor for one's 50s.

Forty Five Minutes Of Fifty Four

• Grace Jones: Nightclubbing
• Tom Tom Club: Genius Of Love
• The Clash: Ivan Meets G.I. Joe
• Two Lone Swordsmen: Shack 54 (Joe Mckechnie Remix)
• Patrick Cowley and Sylvester: Menergy (Rich Lane 'Too Hard' Cotton Dub)
• Big Audio Dynamite II: The Globe (Studio 54 Remix)
• The Velvet Underground: I Can't Stand It (2014 version)
• The Rolling Stones: All Down The Line
• Toots And The Maytals: 54- 46 That's My Number

Studio 54 was a New York nightclub located at 254 West 54th Street, midtown Manhattan. It was converted from a theatre to a club in 1977 and for a while was the world's premier disco nightclub, a place with a famously loose approach to sex, drugs and extravagance. It had apparently the world's most difficult entry policy but once in 'the dancefloor was a democracy'. A list of Studio 54's celebrity clientele includes Grace Jones, Woody Allen, Bianca Jagger, Salvador Dali, Andy Warhol, Bowie, Cher, John Lennon, Diana Ross, Lou Reed, John Travolta, Margaret Trudeau, Divine, Farrah Fawcett, Faye Dunaway, Jack Nicolson, Liza Minelli, Rick James and many more. Some of those people were thusly shoehorned into my mix above. Chic famously were turned away at the door and went home and wrote Freak Out, a disco track which started with the phrase 'Fuck You!' chanted as the chorus instead of the eventual title. 

Grace Jones, a Studio 54 devotee, released her album Nightclubbing in 1981, an early 80sunk/ reggae/ post- punk/ new wave/ disco masterpiece, recorded at Compass Point in the Bahamas. The title track is a cover of Iggy Pop's 1977 song, an ode to numbed out nighttime adventures on the floor. It's Grace's birthday today as well- happy 76th birthday Grace.

Tom Tom Club's Genius Of Love is also from 1981, a brilliant slice of New York post- disco/ synth- pop/ art rap that nods its head to a cast of black musicians- James Brown, Sly and Robbie, Hamilton Bohannon, George Clinton, Bootsy Collins and Bob Marley- and was a big tune at Studio 54. Its creators, Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz only went a couple of times, they claim, preferring the Mudd Club or Danceteria. 

The Clash went to Studio 54 once and Joe Strummer said they were observed by the Warhol crowd like animals in a cage. Joe wrote The Beautiful People Are Ugly Too about the experience. Ivan Meets G.I. Joe is from Sandinista!, and includes the line 'so you're on the floor at 54', imagining the Cold War as a competition on the nightclub's dancefloor, a Soviet- America disco face off, sung by Topper Headon. It's not my favourite Clash song but it fits this mix. 

Shack 54 was on Two Lone Swordsmen's Wrong Meeting Part 2, a 2007 album with Weatherall and Tenniswood by this pint deep into live rock 'n' roll/ garage rockabilly territory. It was great fun, Andrew once again turning on a sixpence and wrong footing people who expected him to keep doing the same thing. This remix of Shack 54 by Joe Mckechnie is I think unreleased. 

Patrick Cowley and Sylvester were both Studio 54 attendees. For his Cotton Dub edit Rich Lane ramps up the campness and Hi NRG to the max on a song that wasn't exactly lacking in either. 

Big Audio Dynamite II's The Globe was the best single the second incarnation of the band released, a  1991 single that samples Mick's most well known Clash riff. It was a Mick Jones and Gary Stonnage co- write and produced by Mick and Andre Shapps (making both of them related to current Tory Minister Grant Shapps, a man I sincerely hope loses his seat and his deposit come election day).  The Studio 54 remix adds some disco strings and keys and has never been officially released but is on the bootleg series The B.A.D. Files. 

The Velvet Underground have Studio 54 connections via Lou Reed and Andy Warhol but there's a big disconnect between the sound of the Velvets and Studio 54 so really this was just an excuse to shoehorn in this 2014 version of a Lou reed song that should be played daily by everyone, Lou and Sterling taking the Bo Diddey beat and rhythm guitar to its logical limit. The part where Lou counts down from 8 is among my favourite moments on any song. 

Bianca Jagger once rode into Studio 54 on the back of a white horse, an eye- opening way to celebrate one's birthday (a party for Bianca thrown by fashion designer Halston). Bianca later said she didn't ride the horse to or in the club, she just sat on its back once it was already inside. I was going to say, with a knowing smirk, hey, we've all been there- but then I remembered that at the Golden Lion last November at the end of a night David Holmes played at the pub there was a horse at the bar having a pint with its owner, so actually, maybe we have all been there. Bianca was married to Mick from 1970 to 1978, a period The Stones made their final absolute classic album, 1973's Exile On Main Street from which All Down The Line is one of four superb songs that make up the album's fourth side. 

Toots And The Maytals released reggae classic 54- 46 Was My Number in 1968. 54- 46 was Toots' prison number when he was jailed for possession of marijuana and for the next 365 day trip around the sun, 54 is my number. 

The Passenger And The Bus

More sad news with the loss of two more musicians in the last week. Ricky Gardiner died last week aged 78. Gardiner played guitar for Iggy Pop and David Bowie. That in itself marks him out as remarkable. But even among those two artists  and their rollcall of musicians, collaborators and players, Gardiner was special. He played the lead guitar line on Sound And Vision. He played the riff on Speed Of Life and on Always Crashing In The Same Car. He was Iggy's guitarist on the Lust For Life album, co- writing Success. He played drums on Fall In Love With Me. And, most of all, he wrote the riff on The Passenger, arguably the greatest rock 'n' roll guitar riff of them all. 

The Passenger

R.I.P. Ricky Gardiner.

A few days later the death of Cathal Coughlin was announced. Cathal, from Cork, died aged 61 after what was described as a long illness. He was previously the frontman of Microdisney and then Fatima Mansions. I first encountered Cathal and The Fatima Mansions on BBC2's Snub TV in 1990 and this specially shot clip for their song Only Losers Take The Bus. Intense and unforgettable, it made a big impression on me, Cathal tied to a chair firing off surreal lines like 'Churchill was shopping bag' and 'Paris is in India' while claiming he was 'born in hail and flames'. 

I've always assumed the song's title was taken from Thatcher's (possibly apochyphal) remark that 'any man over the age of 26 who finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure'. 

R.I.P. Cathal Coughlin. 

Songs For Isaac 3

The first time Isaac ever responded to a song I was playing was in the car on holiday in the north east of England, somewhere in Northumberland in the early/ mid 2000s. Iggy Pop's The Passenger was playing on my compilation tape and after one of the 'na na na na na na na naa' sections Isaac copied Iggy, na na-ing along. 

The Passenger

He never sung it again mind, a one off joining in. 

We're having to deal with the admin and practicalities of Isaac's death. A man called yesterday to collect Isaac's wheelchair. Isaac was in no way wheelchair bound but he had started to use it more in recent years especially for longer distances. One of the defining features of lockdown and our lives since March 2020 has been taking him for walks in the local area. We were shielding him so were avoiding indoor events and places but have walked all over the locality during the last two years- the streets round here, down by the Mersey and the canal, in Altrincham, Monton, Salford Quays, Stretford and the outskirts of Manchester city centre. All sounds a bit It's Grim Up North that doesn't it? Isaac loved these walks, sometimes with him walking and sometimes him being pushed in his wheelchair, stopping off at places with decent outdoor seating and heaters for a cup of tea and a cake or a pint. Sending his wheelchair back was another little wrench of the heart, another piece of him gone. 

Three Nights And Days I Sail The Sea

Mike Mitchell, the last surviving member of The Kingsmen, has died aged 77. He was a mainstay in the band from 1959. The Kingsmen, from Portland, Oregon, released their version of Richard Berry's Louie Louie in 1963 and in the process laid down one of the cornerstones of garage rock- three chord riff, primitive beat, the whole group crowded round one single microphone, muffled vocals about a sailor trying to get home to his girl and Mitchell's guitar solo. I'm sure Mike Mitchell achieved many, many things in his life other than just being the man who played the guitar solo on Louie Louie but if it were the only one, it's not too bad a thing to have as an epitaph. 

Louie Louie

If you've been in a band you've probably done a cover of Louie Louie or a song very similar to it. The Beach Boys, The Troggs, Jan and Dean, Motorhead, Toots and The Maytals, The Flamin' Groovies and The Sonics all covered it.

Paul Revere And The Raiders did too, also in 1963, intro riff played on sax.

Louie Louie

In 1981 US hardcore band Black Flag, with new vocalist Dez Cadena making his debut at the mic improvising the lyrics while the rest of the group, guitars like a wall of sludge, pummel the song into submission in one minute twenty seconds. 

Louie Louie

Iggy covered it for his 1993 album American Caesar adding the clanging piano from I Wanna Be Your Dog. 

Louie Louie

Coincidentally, yesterday was Iggy's birthday, 74 years young. Happy birthday Mr Pop and RIP Mike Mitchell. 

21st Century Pop

Back in 2018 Iggy Pop met Underworld in a hotel room. Rick Smith and Karl Hyde had got all their kit set up and some tracks worked up and ready to go and decided to see if Iggy fancied recording some vocals. The four track EP that followed, Teatime Dub Encounters, came out a bit like that sounds, fully realised backing tracks and Iggy improvising. On the lead song, Bells & Circles, Iggy went into a extended spoken word reverie about boarding a flight sometime in the 1970s, taking a gramme of coke, chatting up the stewardess but losing her number, being able to smoke on airplanes and the death of liberal democracy. A polished Underworld throbbed away behind him, Born Slippy reborn, Karl coming in on backing vocals. On Trapped Iggy has a pop at Johnny who has a mortgage. On I'll See Big he looks back at his inability to make friends, his falling into and out of bands, and making friends with other people who had few friends. The music on I'll See Big is low key and subtle. Iggy being reflective is a product of aging and surviving. 

I'll See Big

Two years earlier Iggy released what looked like his last testament, the Josh Homme produced Post- Pop Depression. Like all Iggy Pop albums since The Idiot and Lust For Life it's got at least one real stinker but it's also got several late period Iggy gems and that aging thing again, Iggy being reflective, looking back at a life lived and the seeing what's left. Gardenia is a genuine Iggy classic, Homme and the band finding a really good groove, none of the expected heavy rock but a really well crafted and sympathetically played song with Iggy recounting the days of his youth and an evening in a club with Allen Ginsberg. Equally good was Break Into Your Heart, an overloaded, smoky blues with Iggy examining his past tendency to woo women but then back out when he's asked for more. 

Break Into Your Heart

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

Loose

Some pictures just demand having some words attached to them, a song added and then being shared online. This picture of The Stooges on some swings in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1969 is one such picture. It looks like it's autumn '69, the leaves have fallen and there's a chill in the air. Iggy, Ron, Dave and Scott are at the playground in their leather jackets, hair grown out, Iggy in impractical white trousers and shoes. It's the end of the year and the end of the decade, a decade which began with sunshine and optimism, John F. Kennedy, The Everley Brothers, Jim Reeves and surfing songs and ended with Richard Nixon, Vietnam, Altamont, Charles Manson and The Stooges.

In the middle of the following year The Stooges would release Funhouse, a perfect distillation of voice, guitar, bass, drums and raw repetition, machine like riffs and stripped down simplicity. In the studio they pulled out all of the wall coverings, all the baffles and carpets, got rid of the screens that separate the musicians from each other. They set up the kit close together as if to play as they would at a gig. Iggy would record his vocals holding the microphone in his hands as if singing live to an audience, no pop shield or mic stand. He'd gave the band their cue, his vocals leading the songs. They were drilled. On the album's song named for the new decade they added the free jazz skronk of saxophonist Steve Mackey.

1970 (Take 1)

The sound of The Stooges on Funhouse is the very essence of punk rock, the primordial swamp from which everything else eventually crawled, a sound that by the end of the century could sell out stadiums and soundtrack adverts on TV. At the tail end of the 60s however it was music for freaks and weirdos, made with single minded obsession by a group of musicians who almost everyone else derided and dismissed. The Funhouse box set contains the entire session, every take of every song, each barely distinguishable from the next.

Loose (Take 4)

1969

A double celebration for us today, two parties, both with their origins in November 1969. The magazine covers above all date from fifty years ago- Cosmopolitan asking whether you'd rather be his wife or his mistress, Vogue leading with winter fashion and beauty and tarot cards for good measure and Popular Science with jet-packs.

This afternoon we are at a party for my parent's fiftieth wedding anniversary, who got married fifty years ago yesterday. I came along in May 1970- it was quite late on when I worked out the maths on that. Then tonight we are at a friend's 50th birthday party- his birthday was yesterday as well so he was born as my Mum and Dad tied the knot. Here we all are half a century later.

1969 in song gives so many opportunities but I'm going for this from The Stooges, the high octane, electrifying, wild, end of the decade brilliance that opens their debut album. Ron Asheton's wah wah guitar intro and the single hammer bang drum lead in Iggy's 'well alright' and then the group swing in bludgeoning the speakers, Iggy reeling off his stupidly clever lyrics about being twenty two and having nothing to do- meanwhile Vietnam burns and tears the USA in two, Nixon is in the White House, the FBI declares war on the Black Panther Party, Northern Ireland simmers with discontent, men walk on the moon, the hippie tribes gather at Woodstock and the Isle of Wight, the Stonewall riots mark the birth of the gay rights movement, the Manson Family commit mass murder, a coup in Libya brings Gaddafi to power, Brian Jones drowns at Pooh Corner, William Calley is charged with murder following the massacre at My Lai, Scooby Doo, Monty Python, Sesame Street and The Clangers all debut, the USA and USSR meet to talk about nuclear weapon reductions and the year ends with Rolf Harris at the top of the UK charts. 'Oh my and a boo hoo'.

1969

The press didn't take to The Stooges debut album. Rolling Stone said it was 'loud, boring, tasteless, unimaginative and childish'. The Village Voice called it 'stupid-rock'. In retrospect however those criticisms (apart from the bit about it being boring which it clearly isn't) make it sound utterly perfect.