Monday's Long Songs

Sheffield's Crooked Man released a new album last Friday, Crooked Stile. It is packed with bangers, many of them well into long song territory. The second song on the album is Don't Leave Me This Way, eleven and a half minutes of electronic mayhem, a massive bassline and deeply soulful female vocal, turning the Harold Melvin and The Blue Notes song inside out, into a modern basement classic. The second half, past the six minute mark, goes off, the synths even more distorted, and after the breakdown at seven minutes it builds back up for an intense final few minutes. 

As well as several Crooked Man originals there are two further covers. The first is also a long song, an eight minute version of Fleetwood Mac's Big Love warped into dark, epic, bouncy dancefloor manna- if Fleetwood Mac sounded more like this, I'd be more tempted to listen to them. 

The album also has a long song with long term friend and collaborator Roisin Murphy, Projection, and finishes with a cover of a fellow son of Sheffield, Jarvis Cocker's 2006 tribute to the wonderful people that run the world, Jarvis' more polite Running The World re-titled by Crooked Man simply as Cunts. It's just two minutes thirty three seconds long but says a lot in that time. Donald Trump, and all who follow him, this one's for you...

Crooked Man's album can be found in full at Bandcamp. Here's the Jarvis original, a nineteen year old protest song that has lost none of its power or relevance. 

'It's the ideal way to order the world/ Fuck the morals, does it make any money?'

Running The World

Heroes

This is another post brought via my box of magazine freebie CDs, this time a CD from Mojo in 2020- 'Mojo Heroes The Best Of 2020' (from the January 2021 edition but on sale December 2020- it came with a cover story about The White Stripes, a free calendar to go with the CD, and promised that inside you'd find the 75 best albums of the year- Bob Dylan's Rough And Rowdy Ways- along with articles about Neil Young's lost classics, Pharaoh Saunders, and AC/DC). 

2020 it's fair to say was not a year that turned out the way anyone thought it would. The news footage early on in the year from China and the Far East of deserted city streets and hundreds of thousands of people living in- new word alert- lockdown. It was followed by the news that Covid 19 had reached Europe and then the terrifying scenes from Italy. The government here was new, Boris Johnson having won an election in December 2019 by promising to 'get Brexit done' and to level up the places that lent him their votes in the general election based on the despair with Brexit and fear of Corbyn. Johnson would soon prove to be the worst person in charge at the worst time, literally the least suitable person to run a government during a crisis. Within weeks, March 2020, we were locking down here with workplaces and schools closing - and I remember the fear, the sense of being on the edge of chaos and loss of control in the week leading up to the announcement that schools were closing. Some people suggested it would only be a few weeks. In the middle of the year, May 2020, the killing of George Floyd by North Carolina police officers sparked the Black Lives Matter movement which soon became international. In the summer the Chancellor Rishi Sunak announced the Eat Out To Help Out scheme, where people received subsidised meals in restaurants and pubs in order to help the hospitality industry- a policy which many have linked with an autumn surge in re- infections. People were hospitalised and some died because the government offered half price pub food. By the end of the year we were in a muddle of Covid tiers, city lockdowns, a government that locked down too late, opened up too early, was determined (egged on by the tabloid press) 'to save Christmas' and then had to lockdown again in January 2021. 

We've forgotten a lot of this haven't we? Moved on. People talked of a restructuring of the way we do things but I'm not convinced that's really happened (although more people do work from home than did before). Over quarter of a million people in the UK died of Covid. Every one of them has a name and a family. One of them was my son Isaac, although he didn't die until 30th November 2021, long after the world had for most people returned to 'normal'. 

So, not the year anyone was expecting and in some ways it feels along time ago. A once in a century event, I hear occasionally as one minister or another tries to dismiss claims the Tory government has been incompetent (if you didn't want to have to deal with a crisis maybe you shouldn't have gone into government, I always feel like replying). A week today we get the chance to consign this government and the four Tory ones that preceded it to oblivion, the worst run of Prime Minsters and cabinets this country's had in modern times. I for one cannot wait. 

The CD is titled Heroes and the front cover, an African american woman in a beret with her fist raised in the air, reflects the Black Lives Matter side of 2020. Inside the cardboard slipcase we get Bob Dylan, Frazey Ford, Cornershop, Run The Jewels, Nick Cave (Galleon Ship from Carnage), Phoebe Bridges, Bill Callahan, Moses Sumney, Toots and The Maytals (Toots Hibbert died in August 2020 of Covid), Fleet Foxes, Tony Allen and Hugh Masekela (Tony also died in 2020, of an aneurysm), and Nubya Garcia. 

We also get this by Khruangbin, a lovely fluid and laid back piece of melodic pop with a very apt song title...

So We Won't Forget

Jarv Is... are present too, this from the album Beyond the Pale, Jarvis Cocker's album recorded in 2019 and then released in summer 2020. 

House Music All Night Long

The other band on the CD are Fontaines D.C. who have shown up in blogposts at No Badger Required and Dubhed over the last week. In 2020 Fontaines released their second album, A Hero's Death, the title track striking a deep chord with me- I've written about it previously. The song on the Mojo CD was this one....

I Was Not Born

How's that for electrifying? Pummeling drums and post- punk guitars and Grian's strident vocal declaring, 'I was not born/ Into this world/ To do another man's bidding'. It's a young man's song, the lyrics giving two fingers to the world of work and convention. 

Fontaines have released two new songs this year ahead of an album in August called Romance. The first single was Starburster. Starburster starts off like hip hop, rumbling in slowly. Last week they followed it with something very different, the childhood referencing and home video guitar pop of Favourite, a song that rattles along with guitars like mid- to- late 80s Johnny Marr and footage of the five Fontaines skateboarding and hanging down the pub. 

In A Forest

The BBC re- runs of Top of The Pops have got to the end of 1995 recently. I record them and watch them in bunches, fast forwarding through the rubbish and watching the good stuff- in this way I can get through some episodes in just a few minutes, the charts in 1995 being a smorgasbord of rubbish, big selling pop, guitar bands breaking through and some genuine moments of brilliance. In late August 1995 Bjork was back at the Top Of The Pops studios promoting Isobel, the second single from her album Post. Jarvis Cocker was presenting...

Isobel is a strange choice for a single, not a natural radio friendly unit shifter but I think Bjork's confidence in 1995 was such that she did whatever she wanted to and her record company largely went along with her- I think Isobel was an important song for Bjork and she wanted it as a single. The third single would be It's So Quiet which it's fair to say crossed over. Isobel is one of post's highlights, a dramatic and enticing song with sweeping, cinematic strings, very mid- 90s percussion and a trip hop breakbeat, co- written by Nellee Hooper (who co- wrote and produced Debut). There's a sense that Isobel is a film or play condensed into song form, part of something much bigger than a five minute song. Bjork's lyrics were co- written with Icelandic poet Sjon, and a based on a story Bjork wrote about a girl who goes back to live in a forest. The lyrics were sparked a year earlier in 1994 by a moth that Bjork found in her collar one day and which stayed there until the evening. She saw the moth as an omen and went off creating a story and a person around it, writing apparently 900 pages of a diary. On the verge of mania and almost throwing the book away, but wanting the song to be completed for her next album, she contacted Sjon, explained it all to him and they collaborated on the lyric. 

On Eurotrash (!) in 1995 she explained the story of Isobel- 

'She [Isobel] was born in a forest by a spark, and as she grew up, she realized that the pebbles on the forest floor were actually skyscrapers. And by the time she was a grown-up woman and the skyscrapers had taken over the forest, she found herself in a city, and she didn't like all the people there so much, because they were a bit too clever for her.

She decided to send to the world, all these moths that she had trained to go and fly all over the world and go inside windows of people's houses— the ones that were too clever— and they'd sit on their shoulder and remind them to stop being clever and start to function by their instincts. They do that by saying "Nah-nah-nan-nah-nah!" to them... and then they'd say "Oh! Sorry! I was being all clever there!", and start functioning on instinct'

Isobel is isolated, lives by herself In the city she danced on tables and fell in love with the wrong people so she returned to the forest, living in isolation. It seems fairly clear that Isobel is at least partly autobiographical and in the song Bjork switches between third person and first person. It's a superb, dramatic and complex combination of words and music- pitched among the sheer madness of mid- 90s Top of The Pops it almost seems like a completely different artform. 

Isobel

Bjork has said that Isobel is part of a song cycle, preceded by Human Behaviour (from Debut in  1993) where Isobel is a little girl, living with animals, happier in the natural world than with people. Human Behaviour is one of the best songs on Debut, and that's saying something, a bouncing house beat and typically outstanding vocal. 

Human Behaviour 

Bacholorette was on 1997's Homogenic, part three of the story, more strings and timpani and another co- write with Sjon, and sees Isobel go to the city, finds things not working out and returns to the city. 

Bacholorette

In the 00s Bjork added two further songs to the Isobel song cycle- Oceania from Medulla from 2004 and Wanderlust from 2007's Volta. Oceania is sung from the point of view of the ocean, all human life emerging from it and a place with no borders, races or religions. Again Sjon was on board lyrically. This song, the last recorded for Medulla, was commissioned by the International Olympic Committee for the 2004 Athens games opening ceremony. That's some journey Ms. Gudmundsdottir has made, from Icelandic punk to Top Of The Pops to the Athens Olympic games. 

A Bientot

There will now be a break in transmissions for a fortnight while we head south to France for our summer holiday, the Atlantic coast for a week (near Royan, south of La Rochelle) and then a week in southern Brittany near Quimper. Static caravans this year, an upgrade from tents. I'm looking forward to the wine, the cheese, the sun and the heat, the sea, the sunsets, the slower pace of life. I'll also be less well connected to events back here so I'll miss Boris Johnson's ascension to the Tory throne and installation as Prime Minister. Since 2016 I keep thinking we've hit the bottom of the barrel but someone or something always comes along to keep scraping lower- Trump's outright racism recently a new low. I'm sure Johnson will provide us some further depths to tunnel. According to reports Jarvis Cocker finished his set at Blue Dot last weekend with his 2006 song Running The World, a song that keeps giving. Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, David Cameron, everyone in the European Research Group, the Conservative Party generally, the Murdoch press and anyone I've forgotten- this one is for you...

Running The World

Ever since The Cure played Glastonbury I've been immersing myself in their back catalogue and this song has been a real earworm for me over the last few weeks. In 1990 The Cure released an album of remixes and extended mixes called Mixed Up, a double album and one that stands up very well still today. Lullaby was a big hit in 1989, fuelled by a claustrophobic Tim Pope video. The extended mix (done by Robert Smith and producer Chris Parry) fades in gently, a funky guitar part and a shuffly rhythm guiding us. Once the bassline hits the whole thing shimmies along, Smith's tale of dread and spidermen, taken to an outdoor disco, dancing under Mediterranean skies.

Lullaby (Extended Mix) 

Anyway, that's yer lot for the moment, hope the weather holds up while we're away, play nicely, look after yourselves and each other and I'll see you in August.

Whither Goest Thou America?

I appreciate that here in the UK we don't have too much room to shout at the moment, being led as we are by the most incompetent government since the end of the Second World War who are attempting to put into law, by most reckonings, the most disastrous political decision any major western country has taken in the same period. But, as the question at the top of the post asks, 'whither goest thou, America?' When Jack Kerouac asked the question in On The Road it was in a different context but still, the question stands.

In the last two weeks alone Trump has-
* legitimised a brutal dictator who uses torture and murder against his own people, orders assassinations of those in his government who he falls out with and who has used forced starvation to bring the population to heel.
* professed admiration for this dictator, praising him as a a man whose people listen when he speaks and said he wants the same from the American people
* removed the USA from the United Nations Committee on Human Rights because it criticises Israeli policies against the Palestinian people
* continued to support a policy that has led to toddlers being imprisoned in cages on the USA's southern border

This is the normalisation of anti-democratic practices by the US government. We know from history where this leads. It's never too late to shout about it. One of the things David Byrne talked about between songs on Monday night was about how at his shows in the US they had a table in the foyer to register people to vote there and then, and about how important it is to get people to engage, to vote in local elections and national ones. It beats 'Hi, how are you?' (response usually a big cheer) and 'this is a new one' (response, a trip to the bar or the toilet). Unless Trump abolishes elections in the next 2 years (as his new friend in North Korea might advise), he is removable and defeatable. Same over here. We've got to rid of these people. The chorus of this 2006 Jarvis Cocker song is truer now than it was when he wrote it...

Running The World

' I mean, man, whither goest thou? Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?" "Whither goest thou?'

In 1997 an album called Joy Kicks Darkness was released, a spoken word tribute to Kerouac by artists including Michael Stipe, Lydia Lunch, Patti Smith, Thurston Moore, John Cale and Juliana Hatfield and also featuring surviving Beats like Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. This track is Joe Strummer and Jack Kerouac together. 

MacDougal Street Blues

Miami

This remix of Baxter Dury's Miami is going to be released on Record Shop Day. RSD has become redundant, some limited edition releases to be fought over once the eBay scalpers have pillaged the racks plus a load of unasked for reissues. Yes, there are one or two things I'd like. No, I won't be queuing up to get into a record shop.

Miami is from Baxter's album that came out last year, that I meant to listen to and didn't get around to. This expansive, electronic remix with gorgeous sweeping strings, a disco beat and Baxter's seedy, in character vocal scattered about, is a joy, and comes to us from the combined talents of Parrot and Jarvis Cocker.

Play The Five Tones

One of the many very specific offshoots of the acid house revolution of 1988 was bleep 'n' bass, an almost exclusively northern sub-scene. The first bleep 'n' bass record came from Bradford (Unique 3's The Theme) but after that Sheffield and Warp Records became the home of a style of dance music pretty much defined by its name- pocket calculate bleeps with deep, heavy, sub bass over a drum machine. A vocal sample to complete. Minimal, intense, British techno. Between 1989 and 1991 a load of great bleep 'n' bass records were made, best heard at full volume in pitch darkness with a strobe flashing away (but home listening will do too).

Sweet Exorcist were from Sheffield, a duo of Richard Kirk (of Cabaret Voltaire) and DJ Parrot (Richard Barratt). Their first record, in 1990, was Testone- made using some test tones and a vocal sample from Close Encounters Of The Third Kind. It is absolutely essential. Only LFO came close to this.

Testone

The video was directed by a certain Jarvis Cocker, pre-fame, and is a classic of its kind too.

Well Did You Hear There's A Natural Order

Here's another protest song. Jarvis wrote this while watching the Live 8 spectacle on TV almost a decade ago. He starts out with some globalisation issues...

Now the working classes are obsolete
They are surplus to society's needs
So let 'em all kill each other
And get it made overseas


But he also saves some special bile for the people we all know at the local level...

Oh, feed your children on crayfish and lobster tails
Find a school near the top of the league
In theory, I respect your right to exist
I will kill you if you move in next to me

Ah, it stinks, it sucks, it's anthropologically unjust

Extra marks for getting the word 'anthropological' in there.
Then he aims for business and the political parties that prioritise it over people...

The free market is perfectly natural
Do you think that I'm some kind of dummy?
It's the ideal way to order the world
Fuck the morals, does it make any money?

And Jarvis' conclusion in the chorus is truer now than it was back in 2008. All together now...

Running The World

On

Until a couple of days ago I never knew there was a video for Apex Twin's 1993 song On (from the e.p. On).



I caught it by accident on TV, on a music channel I flicked onto while waiting for a lift. On is a delicious track- it could be serene ambient were it not for the buzz and distortion of the bass and the harshish drums. Yet it still manages to be beautiful. I was then doubly surprised that the video was directed by Jarvis Cocker, making brilliant use of water dripping, a beach, a deep sea divers outfit, a cardboard cut out of Richard D James and stop-motion photography. The only shame with the video is it's only three minutes forty five seconds long. Luckily the e.p. version is seven minutes long.

On

Is This The Way The Future Is Supposed To Feel?

Or just fifteen thousand people standing in a field?

I found this footage online, ten minutes of videotape from the massive Sunrise Energy rave in 1989. It's a fascinating piece of social history, so many people dancing in an aircraft hanger and outdoors in broad daylight. The stars are the crowd- black and white, male and female, all of them dancing- all of them- a mass of colourful clothing and dry ice. At the end a couple of cars are on fire- no-one really seems to notice.



'You want to call your Mother and say ''Mother, I can never come home because I seem to have left an important part of my brain somewhere, somewhere in a field in Hampshire.''

Away from the utopian dream of a new rave based way of life the two men largely responsible for Sunrise Energy were Tony Colston-Hayter and Paul Staines. Colston-Hayter was a young Tory entrepreneur and named in the papers as 'Acid's Mr Big'. He claims he was an anarcho-capitalist. The Shoom crowd say he was regarded as a Hooray Henry, a 'loud dickhead and a laughing stock'. Last year he was jailed for five and a half years for masterminding the theft of £1.3 million from Barclays by hacking into bank accounts. Paul Staines is the unpleasant right-wing blogger Guido Fawkes. Nice one, top one, sorted.

Moss Side Story

Barry Adamson, formerly bass player for Magazine and currently a Bad Seed, has a back catalogue I've never really explored enough. This song from his Oedipus Schmoedipus album has Jarvis Cocker in full on 'sexy' mode and is rather good. The album takes in everything from film John Barry style soundtracks to jazz, dub, soul and electronic stuff. Worth looking out for.

Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Pelvis

Moss Side Story was a film noir soundtrack and homage to the streets he grew up in, released back in 1988 and found Barry a slot on Snub TV...

Hawley Philharmonic

Richard Hawley performed a set accompanied by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra for 6 Music recently, a selection of songs off his latest album and some older ones. You can listen to it here (but only for the next few days). Introduced by Jarvis Cocker at the Great Hall at Magna near Sheffield, it's in two parts and doesn't start until about half an hour in. I'm not always a fan of orchestral versions of pop songs but this is stunning in parts. Hawley has a track record of playing in off the beaten track places, playing in gig in The Devil's Arse a few years back. The Devil's Arse is an underground cavern in Castleton, Derbyshire.

Death In St. Petersburg

This popped up earlier on random play and I'd forgotten how good it was- Death In Vegas' Dirge (Cossack Apocalypse Mix). Part of a 12" remix promo of Dirge (with One Dove's Dot Allison on vox) the other side was the Adrian Sherwood dub remix I posted ages ago. This remix takes DiV to Russia with a lovely extended finger picking intro and some vocal samples, then ramping up the ramshackle groove for eight minutes, all mist, fog, fur hats, revolutionaries and cossacks on horseback. The remix was by The Chocolate Layers, Jarvis Cocker and Steve Mackey of Pulp who provided a remix of Black Box Recorder posted here last month. This is a really good remix if somewhat unsuited to the glorious sunshine we've got in M33 at the moment.

dirge cossack apocalypse.mp3#1#1

Select Shun Two

Another track from a series of free cds that came with Select magazine ten-plus years ago. This is Black Box Recorder, a band formed by former Auteur Luke Haines, John Moore (previously in The Jesus and Mary Chain and John Moore's Expressway) and singer Sarah Nixey. They made some interesting records, a bit like a sarcastic and caustic St Etienne. This song, The Facts Of Life, is remixed by The Chocolate Layers, a psuedonym for Jarvis Cocker and Steve Mackey (both from Pulp, obviously). For the record this cd was Revolutions 01, and also featured Stereophonics (urgh), Queens Of the Stone Age's Feel Good Hit Of The Summer (yes!), Alpinestars (Manc electronica), The Go-Betweens (I really should feature something by them), Tailgunner featuring Noel Gallagher (nein danke), The Automator and Kool Keith (turn of the millenium hiphop), The Delgados (never really checked them out but believe they're very good), Brothers In Sound, My Vitriol, King Adora (ha, remember them), Underworld (Pearl's Girl live) and Grandaddy. Mixed bag then really.

04 The Facts Of Life.wma#1#1

Dance To Organised Noise

Bagging Area likes Pilooski, and he's one half of Discodeine (along with fellow Parisian Pentile). Bagging Area also likes Jarvis Cocker, and he's singing on this track. Jarvis gets to put his snarls and growl to a proper disco/house record with a swelling chorus, and very good it is too.

Discodeine_Synchronize (featuring Jarvis Cocker).mp3#1#1

Yes They Are

Conservative Party Conference, Birmingham October 2010. Jarvis Cocker is here to remind us that those people are still running the world. A brilliant piece of bile-pop.

running the world.mp3

Richard X, Hope Sandoval and Jarvis Cocker 'Into U'

I've been listening to the Massive Attack and Hope Sandoval song (Paradise Circus) over the last few days, especially the Gui Boratto remix, and that led me back to this. Richard X, acceptable face of the mash-up (or something). This was off his album from a few years ago. He took Mazzy Star's Fade Into You, jazzed it up and got Jarvis to sing over it. That's a technical description of the recording process. Very good track it is too. Wasn't convinced by some of the rest of the album (Liberty X?).

Looking for pictures to accompany this post, it was beardy Richard X, beardy Jarvis or Hope. Hmmm....

14 Into U.wma