Forty Five Minutes Of Cover Versions Part Four

One more cover version Sunday mix then I'll leave it alone for a while. I've been finding cover versions in all sorts of places since I started the first mix four weeks ago, songs springing to mind at random moments. Most of the ones I've chosen do something with the source material, take it somewhere else emotionally or stylistically. Some rip the original to shreds, some pay their respects but still tear it up. Some nod their head to their influences or pay something back. 

Forty Five Minutes Of Cover Versions Part Four

• Spectrum: True Love Will Find You In The End
• Spiritualized: Any Way That You Want Me
• The Kills: Pale Blue Eyes
• One Dove: Jolene
• Galaxie 500: Don't Let Our Youth Go To Waste
• John Cale: All My Friends
• Monkey Mafia: As Long As I Can See The Light
• Raz and Afla: Windowlicker

Sonic Boom formed Spectrum after Spacemen 3 split up and his cover of Daniel Johnson's True Love Will Find You In The End is a gorgeous, angelic take on the song. Released in 1992 as a single and later included in two versions on a Sonic Boom/ Spectrum compilation.

Two years earlier Jason Pierce/ J Spaceman flew the Spacemen 3 coop first, releasing the first Spiritualized single, a cover of The Troggs 1966 single. Jason doesn't radically alter it but he makes it a Spiritualized song all the same. 

The Kills cover of The Velvet Underground's Pale Blue Eyes is gloriously ragged and fuzzed up, the guitar stuttering and ripping a hole in the speaker while Alison gives deadpan vocals. It was a B-side to their 2012 The Last Goodbye single.

One Dove's dubbed out, trippy reggae cover of Dolly Parton is a blast, Dot's beautifully off key vocals perfect for the band's blissed out but slightly on edge comedown re-imagining of the song. It came out as one of the B-sides to the 1993 single release of Why Don't You Take Me.

Galaxie 500 recorded several fantastic covers- their take on New Order's Ceremony may be the best NO cover ever recorded. Their cover of Jonathan Richman's Don't Let Our Youth Go To Waste is superb, Jonathan's ninety second original stretched to to seven minutes, a thrilling Galaxie performance, the rumble of drums and bass matched by Dean's trebly, overdriven guitar. They only existed for four years, 1987 to 1991, but what a great band they were. 

John Cale covered LCD Soundsystem's All My Friends for LCD's own release of the single back in 2007- it came out as the B-side on 7" along with a sister 7" that had  Franz Ferdinand cover of the same song. Cale's version, piano, clipped krautrock guitars and his lived in, baritone voice give James Murphy's song a new dimension- when Cale sings, 'where are your friends tonight?', it conjures all sorts of imagery. 

Monkey Mafia's cover of Creedence Clearwater Revival's was a 1998 single, a late 90s revisiting of a 1970 song, a call out to the weary travelers and wanderers, a song about going home. Pre- millenial tension?

Raz and Afla's cover of Aphex Twin's Windowlicker came out this year, a fantastic synths and percussion Afro- electronic floor filler- well, I can imagine some floors that it might fill. 

Weatherall Remix Friday Thirteen

The afterglow of last Saturday night's Spiritualized gig has had me diving back into their back catalogue all week, in the car and at home- 1997's Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space mainly but also Pure Phase (from 1995), and the pairing of  Everything Was Beautiful and And Nothing Hurt (2018 and 2022). It seemed an obvious choice for today's Weatherall Remix Friday to feature the 1998 Two Lone Swordsmen remix of Come Together (the encore at New Century Hall last week and an utterly thrilling blast of psychedelic rock, a lurching, furious hymn/ lament to serious drug addiction). The Two Lone Swordsmen remix goes somewhere very different indeed. 

Come Together (Two Lone Swordsmen Mix)

'How big are your eyes?' a dislocated voice enquires as other indistinct voices and noises swim around. A taut detuned guitar line and what could be FXed horns appear. The voice goes on, to no one in particular, 'What of the sun?' Two minutes in there's a crash of noise, some drums rumble and then a dirty, broken breakbeat kicks in. It goes on, a quite unsettling piece of music, a cacophony, squawks of sax and bursts of trumpet, bass and rums the only real constant, Jason's expansive, symphonic, psychedelic rock spun into the outer edges by Weatherall and Tenniswood for fifteen minutes. Vinyl only, 1000 copies, embossed cover. 

Those Tracks Of Time

Towards the end of Saturday's Spiritualized gig at Manchester's New Century Hall, the ceiling a mass of coloured lightbulbs and 1960s modernist moulding, the lights from the stage bouncing off the enormous mirrorball and the word Bar illuminated, the sold out venue's crowd were caught between staring at what was going on on stage and looking around the room at the lightshow. One of those moments where you realise you're watching something special take place. 

I haven't seen Spiritualized play live for a long time. The current line up has Jason seated at the right hand side of the stage, Fender Jazzmaster in his lap and shades worn all night. Next to him three backing singers, the drummer, bassist, two guitarists and the keyboards/ organ/ synth/ pedal steel player whose contributions underpin a lot of what happens tonight. Most of the songs played are from the last two albums, 2018's And Nothing Hurt and last year's Everything Was Beautiful, a pair of albums that were recorded at the same time and released apart. There are long songs, songs stretching out for seven and more, gradually building, the instruments coming in in layers, reaching huge crescendos. There are moments of hushed, fragile beauty, Jason's weary voice sighing and quiet as pedal steel and bass surround him. At one point towards the end, for several minutes of intro, the loudest sound any of the nine musicians onstage are making is the synchronised fingersnaps of the three backing vocalists, the almost ambient backdrop punctuated at the end of each bar with a crisp click. 

There are moments of loud, three guitar psychedelic/ showgaze rock, an explosive sound filling the room. The second song tonight, She Kissed Me (And It Felt Like A Hit), is a lurching blast of garage rock. Let It Bleed (Song For Iggy) was full on, Detroit rock transformed by the nine piece band. Jason deals in the classic lineage of underground rock, the sounds, the chords and the lyrics of those bands and songs. At times Spiritualized can play like a very well polished garage, expansive garage band or bar band. At times, when the sounds are swelling and all the musicians are all playing in unison, it's like an amped up Elvis in Vegas band, Jason's voice the human, vulnerable element at the centre as he whispers and croons about souls on fire, the best thing you never had, being your man and shining lights. 

Always Together With You, currently sound tracking a national lottery advert, is a highlight. The thumping, gliding groove and triple guitar attack of Here It Comes (The Road ) Let's Go is countered by the spectral beauty of Sailing On Through, both songs showing Jason's four decade career of blending garage rock and The Velvet Underground with country, gospel and blues didn't necessarily peak with 1997's Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space. The Morning After, from And Nothing Hurt, opens with Velvets guitar, bumping driving bass and Jason's lines about Janey and her problem with the modern world, 1969 Lou Reed transported to 2023. It catches me unawares briefly, the instruments dropping out as Jason sings the line, 'Every mother wants to die before her children do', making me draw a sharp intake of breath. The band re- enter and plough on, everyone getting louder, the rhythm faster and then multiple strobe lights go off for, bright white lights against black space. 

The Morning After

The set finishes with Sailing On Through, a short, desperate and delicate song. Jason applauds us and mutters the only words he says to us all night, 'thank you', twice. After a few minutes they return for So Long You Pretty Thing and then Come Together. Come Together is everything about them turned up to the max, a song that grinds into gear, three guitars sounding like thirty, and Jason singing about heroin addiction, Little Johnny, all fucked up, dulling pain and killing joy. It is immense, a garage rock song that sounds the size of a continent, the backing singers piling in on the chorus, 'come on, come together'. Exhilarating, powerful and transcendent music, Spiritualized at the limits. 

Come Together (Live) 

Saturday Live

Spiritualized offer a full on live experience, Jason at the microphone and with Fender guitar and a group of musicians- drummers, bassists, guitarists, keys, horns, strings, backing vocalists- capable of transforming the expansive sounds of his albums on stage, starting softly and quietly and building. This is a full performance from the end of August 2019, Spiritualized live at Nox Orae in Switzerland. 

The set opens with Hold On and then catches fire with Come Together, a reliable live favourite with Jason's story of Johnny and the ape who lives on his back. From then it's one after another- Shine A Light, Soul On Fire, She Kissed Me (And It felt Like A Hit)- Jason's cut and shut of guitar rock, drug addiction and gospel blues seeing us through to the end an hour an half later with Oh! Happy Day. Emotional and epic stuff. 

A lot has changed since the days of 2019. The album And Nothing Hurt came out the year before but it's follow up, Everything Was Beautiful, recorded at the same time and really sounding part of a whole rather than two separate records, was delayed until 2022 due to Covid and all that came with it. Jason's taking the band out again this autumn, a gig at Manchester's New Century Hall already in my diary. 

I've got quite a lot of Spiritualized live tracks on my hard drive. Here are three. First, I Think I'm In Love from the Royal Albert Hall in 1997, the band touring the then just released Ladies And Gentlemen, We Are Floating In Space album that remains their high watermark, a version floating in on free jazz sax and discordant guitar, twelve minutes inside Jason's burning world- 'Sun so bright I'm nearly blind...' he coos with the choir singing softly behind him. It all kicks off later as you'd expect. 

I Think I'm In Love (Live at The Royal Albert Hall)

This is Soul On Fire live in Reykjavik in 2010, Jason on acoustic guitar, the strings and backing vocals swelling behind him.

Soul On Fire (Live in Reykjavik)

Finally, seventeen minutes of Spiritualized live at the Hultsfred festival in Sweden in 2002, bootlegged as an album titled Light Of The Sight Side, a run of three songs as one, overloaded fuzz guitar and frazzled psychedelic rock as standard.

Shine A Light/ All Of My Tears/ Electric Mainline

200 Bars

Yesterday 200 miles, today 200 bars. On Spiritualized's debut album, 1992's Lazer Guided Melodies, Jason closes an hour's worth of pain and beauty, spaced out symphonies and gliding garage rock, with 200 Bars. Over waves of organ and chiming guitars Kate counts from 1 to 100, the bars (musical) and bars (drinking) word play driven home as Jason starts singing/ whispering, 'I'm gonna lose my thoughts in 200 bars/ You know I've tried but now I'm tired/ I'm losing track of time in 200 bars'. The music comes to a stop and Kate closes things with, '200'. 

200 Bars

In the same year, Jason's erstwhile bandmate Pete Kember, was moving on slowly as Sonic Boom/ Spectrum. Soul Kiss (Glide Divine) came out that year on translucent vinyl in a liquid sleeve. The ten songs housed in that liquid sleeve find Sonic in an even more dreamy, drifting spaced out place than Jason. Tranquil, dappled, blissed out, waves of sound.

Waves Wash Over Me

Forty Minutes Of Spiritualized

I've been going back through some of this year's albums and playing them again. Spiritualized's Everything Was Beautiful is one of them, the second part of Jason's double offering to go with 2018's And Nothing Hurt. Both still sound like a real return to form, the guitars, horns and rhythms all exactly as they should be and Jason's spaceman voice more wracked than ever. Today's mix is a bunch of Spiritualized songs and remixes, not quite chosen randomly from my hard rive but definitely not intended as a best of, more of a set of songs that flow together. The back catalogue is so deep and wide that I have a feeling I could compile multiple Spiritualized mixes and not get near a definitive one- so it is just what it is, a set of songs that sound good together. 

Forty Minutes Of Spiritualized

• Goldfrapp: Monster Love (Goldfrapp Vs Spiritualized)
• Spiritualized: I Think I'm In Love (Chemical Brothers Vocal Remix)
• Spiritualized: Come Together (Live At the Royal Albert Hall)
• Spiritualized: The Mainline Song
• Cut Copy: Free Your Mind (Spiritualized Version)
• LFO: Tied Up (Spiritualized Electric Mainline Remix)
• Spiritualized: Ladies And Gentlemen, We Are Floating In Space (Original Unreleased Mix)

Goldfrapp v Spiritualized was one of the B-sides from a Goldfrapp CD single, Happiness, in 2008. 

The Chemical Brothers remix of I Think I'm In Love came out in 1997, one of the Ladies And Gentlemen, We Are Floating In Space singles. Spiritualized Live At The Royal Albert Hall is from the same year, a full on space rock extravaganza

The Mainline Song is from this year's Everything Is Beautiful. 

Jason's remix of the Cut Copy song came out in 2013, with a new vocal from Jason and guitars, organ, noise and repetition combining to produce what is essentially a new Spiritualized song.  

The remix of LFO, nine minutes of soundwaves, drones and oscillating ambient techno bliss is from 1994. 

The unreleased original mix of the title track of Ladies and Gentlemen... dates from 1997 and fell foul of the Elvis Presley estate who didn't like the borrowing of a line from Can't Help Falling In Love With You. More fool them. 

Wise Men Say Only Fools Rush In

We went to the cinema last week, the first time we'd been since pre- Covid. There's nothing quite like sitting in the dark and seeing a film on the big screen for that full immersive experience. The film we chose was Baz Luhrman's Elvis, a brash, hyperactive, high camp, historically inaccurate take on the life of Elvis Presley. It was great fun of course if an hour too long. Elvis' musical life splits into three stages for me- the raw, untamed brilliance of the Sun years followed by a succession of increasingly tame songs made to promote films he was starring in followed by a kind of renaissance- the '68 comeback special (the first heritage rock show?) and then the Vegas years (a mixture of sublime inspiration and utter schmaltz). Elvis released Can't Help Falling In Love in 1961 to accompany the film Blue Hawaii, a song which has a life of it's own- Elvis crooning with his heavenly backing choir, some emotional button pushing lines but some genuine beauty too. It was covered by UB40 and the supporters of several English football teams have made it their own too- hearing massed ranks of Sunderland fans singing it at Old Trafford once was quite a moment.

Can't Help Falling In Love

In 1997 Jason Spaceman was going through the recording of Spiritualized's then latest album, what would become Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space. He wrote and recorded the title track, a weightless, wracked and wasted piece of space pop/ rock, introduced by a deadpan Kate Radley, blending his own song with the melodies and words from Can't Help Falling In Love. Obviously, by the time the album was ready to be released, Spritualized's finest album, the Presley estate were not happy and the Elvis parts had to be removed. Bootlegs exist of course. As a song, it is almost too much.

Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space/ Can't Help Falling In Love 

Last summer Jesse Fahnestock was having his own blues and revisiting Ladies And Gentlemen... and in search of a musical outlet for this found himself playing the song everyday, focusing on the line 'getting strong today/ a giant step each day'. I'll let Jesse describe the next steps...

'A lot of my music is about touching the hem of Spiritualized/Spacemen's cloak anyway, so I decided I’d pick up the baton. I spent a couple of weeks at the piano writing my own melancholy folk song in the round, keeping the “fools rush in” and adding some hopeful sentimentality to try to pull myself out of my funk, some words about daring to be happy, taking a chance on love and life. I called it “A Giant Step”, but that title didn’t stick.

In parallel I’d been toying with the idea of sampling some archival footage of the West’s last great philosopher (and personal hero), Bertrand Russell. I didn’t have a song for what I’d found, so when I started producing “Giant Step” on the computer, I stuck Russell on the intro, just as a whim. And then suddenly I heard what Russell was saying in that clip … it was about acting “vigorously” in spite of one’s doubt, about how modern philosophy was there to help you dare to live, even without the certainty of religion.

Making music is full of serendipitous moments, but this was the best one I’ve had yet. The song is more appropriately called “The First Step” '

10:40's The First Step has now been released as one of the songs on Higher Love Vol. 2, a compilation on Brighton's Higher Love label. You can get it here. It's a slow burning, sombre and emotive piece of music, the voice of Bertrand Russell surrounded by the laid back groove and the spectral female voices that join whispering, 'fools rush in'. It's a different take again from the feelings Elvis provokes and from the ones summoned by Spiritualized, a new feeling, and it shows how music can transform itself, shift its shape over time, one person taking a song somewhere else. 

The rest of Higher Love Vol. 2 is uniformly superb too, from the skittering sunset vibes of Perry Granville to the blissed out twinkling of Joe Morris, the heady brew of Secret Soul Society and enormous symphonic, spinning, giddying sound of Mass Density Human, and plenty more besides- if you need a soundtrack for the dog days of August, you'll find one inside Higher Love Vol 2. 

I Would Walk The Galaxies For You

Spiritualized's new album, Everything Was Beautiful, as taken up residence on my turntable, a forty four minute, seven song companion piece to 2018's And Nothing Hurt. The songs for this album were recorded at the same time as the ones that make up And Nothing Hurt and could have been packaged as a double but I think breaking the songs into two sets across two albums released four years apart, has worked best, each record having the time and space to reveal itself. They're clearly related works- the two titles are supposed to run together, Everything Was Beautiful And Nothing Hurt (taken from Kurt Vonnegut) but they stand alone too. Pain runs through both, emotional and physical, and at time his singing sounds like one long exercise in heartache- but there's masses of beauty in them too. 

Reverting to his J Spaceman name Jason has delved into his own back catalogue, referencing the packing of 1997's Ladies And Gentlemen, We Are Floating In Space, with more medication styled art on the sleeve and he's dug deep into his usual influences for the songs too- there's Stooges style rockers, blues guitar riffs, gospel choirs, those wasted, enervated vocals, fuzz guitars and free jazz saxophone, sweet calm and sudden noise, with the mono- like production that balances the huge number of instruments. If he's repeating himself (and I think Spiritualized is an exercise in repeating himself, repetition and refinement are what he does) he's doing it very well. It's got depth and a genuine emotional heft in among the mantras in the lyrics and the sounds. This one opens it, and starts out as Ladies And Gentlemen... did, the album's title spoken by a whispered female voice...

Always Together With You 

Isolation Mix Four

A bit of a change again for this week's hour long isolation mix, this time a trip into more psychedelic and psyche areas, some guitars, a couple of cover versions, some remixes and a re-edit of an 80s alt- classic with an eye, a third eye maybe, on the cosmic and the blissed out. One of the segues is a little bit clumsy but I can live with it. I've had to move the host over to Mixcloud as I'd used up all my available space at Soundcloud without going to the paid for service.



Tracklist-
The Durutti Column: Otis

Wixel: Expressway To Yr Skull (Long Champs Bonus Beats)

Moon Duo: Stars Are The Light

Curses: This Is The Day

Le Volume Courbe: Rusty

Sonic Boom/ Spectrum: True Love Will Find You In The End

Mogwai: Party In The Dark

The Liminanas: The Gift (Anton Mix)

Goldfrapp v Spiritualized: Monster Love

Julian Cope: Heed Of Penetration and the City Dweller Head Remix by Hugo Nicholson

Edit Service 8 by It’s A Fine Line: The Story Of The Blues (Talkin’ Blues)

The Early Years: Complicity

Monday's Long Song

This song isn't particularly long, not by the standards of some songs in this series, but it feels long- and not in a bad way. In 2008 Goldfrapp released a second single, Happiness, from their Seventh Tree album. J Spaceman's remix/version came out on the CD #2 (back when record companies got you to buy two CD singles by spreading the remixes and B-sides out). There is a very good Beyond The Wizards Sleeve Re-Animation too, a very 60s European sounding re-working, boulevards and the Champs Elysee, but the Goldfrapp v Spiritualized song, Monster Love, is something else. Strings, drone, bells, a lazy tambourine, a wheezy organ and Jason's numbed out vocal just drifting, sighing 'everything comes around', repetition and seemingly endless. It's only five and a half minutes long but feels like an eternity.

Monster Love

You Make It All So Fine

In a record shop at the weekend they were playing Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space. The long fade in, the electric organ chords and then the horns and strings sound-tracking the streaming tears of Broken Heart stopped me in my tracks.

Broken Heart

Cool Waves followed and sounded immense. When I came home I played this, which is cut from similar cloth and is almost weightless and achingly beautiful.

Don't Go/Stay With Me

Lay Back In The Sun

Views from our hotel in Sorrento, from the balcony at the front (top) and the same balcony at sunset (bottom) and from my room facing inland (middle). I could stare at these views for hours. 

It seems to be commonly accepted that Spiritualized's best album is Ladies And Gentlemen, We Are Floating In Space and maybe rightly so but I think the preceding album Pure Phase runs it very close. Pure Phase isn't as song based, although there are straightforward songs on it, but is more into groove and tones and drones. There's a section in the middle, a kind of crescendo, starting with the short, whispy Born Never Asked which then segues into the utterly tremendous 7 minutes and 40 seconds of Electric Mainline, a masterclass of flow and repetition. It is then followed by Lay Back In The Sun, a song so glorious and elegantly wasted it burns the ears. The sun Jason was singing about probably wasn't the big ball of fire seen above but a more narcotic warmth, a hit of something strong. But the song is blast of bass and horns and bliss, rolling and sliding for over 5 minutes. 

Lay Back In The Sun

Spacemen

I never saw Spacemen 3 play live. I bought Playing With Fire when it came out and was attending gigs in the period the group were active but for some reason our paths never crossed. I have recently got round to reading Playing The Bass With Three Left Hands, the memoirs of Will Carruthers, who spent a few years playing bass and taking drugs with Spacemen 3. The book is a must if you're a fan of the band or of the ones that came afterwards- Sonic Boom/Spectrum and Spiritualized.

Will is a gifted writer and there are two chapters that deal with the Spacemen 3 live experience in lurid detail. The first is a performance at an arts centre in Hammersmith billed as An Evening Of Contemporary Sitar. Will hits the one note groove early on and holds onto it for forty minutes or so while Pete and Jason do their thing. As the feedback rings out to close the set he leans to turn off his amp only to find he is so out of it he hadn't turned it on when starting. The set is recorded and released as one of the tracks on Dreamweapon. The cinemagoers and attendees of the gig are so horrified by the first set that Spacemen 3 are paid not to play their scheduled second set.

The second gig is a show in Chester, re-arranged to a health spa by the promoter, who also gives the group their first experience of E. A bunch of Ellesmere Port football fans turn up, not to beat the band up as they first think but to take drugs with Spacemen 3 and enjoy the music. The spa and it's facilities are thoroughly wrecked by the band and their fans. Will gives an honest, funny and at times bleak account of  outsider life in a small town in the Midlands, of the impact of being open about drug-taking on the band, their families and the people they know. He describes the recording of Recurring, with the band working on Pete and Jason's songs separately, the subsequent break up of the band and the divergence of Sonic and Jason into their post-Spacemen activities. It's out in paperback and available for less than a tenner and well worth picking up.

Sonic Boom (Pete Kember) has had the lower profile career of the two main men but his varied back catalogue since Spacemen 3 is full of one and two chord gems.  This one hits a blissed out organ tone early on and Pete's guitar ripples over the top of some celestial backing vocals.

True Love Will Find You In The End

Jason has gone on to Spiritualized, a group that have  recorded some of the most brilliant music of the last two decades. They can be prone to repeating themselves, but I've come to realise it's a act of refinement rather than just repetition. There's a new album out later this year and the lead song, I'm Your Man, is rather gorgeous.

Tied Up

The 1990s frequently brought together strange bedfellows in remix terms- this 1994 release saw Spiritualized take on the Leeds bleep techno of LFO. Nine minutes of white noise and ambient drones. Lovely stuff.

Tied Up (Spiritualized Electric Mainline Remix)

How Big Are Your Eyes?

The stats page on the dashboard of this blog tells me that in the last couple of weeks one of the most read posts has been one from July 2010, Two Lone Swordsmen's remix of Come Together by Spiritualized. I don't know why there's been a sudden interest in people looking for this track. But if you're one of the people looking for it, here it is again.

Come Together (Two Lone Swordsmen Remix)

It sounds nothing like the surging garage rock of the original. Instead there is fifteen minutes of stoned, gritty machine music with a voice sampled specifically to freak you out.

Come Together

After that lovely Spiritualized song yesterday I sifted through their songs on the hard drive and on the shelves. I've got a lot more Spiritualized than I thought I had. Come Together was released as a shot at having a hit single from the Ladies And Gentlemen, We Are Floating In Space album. It got re-recorded at Abbey Road and lost some swear words (and lost a bit of it's power as a result) and there were two remixes- a long, paranoid and freaked out Two Lone Swordsmen remix and a long, less paranoid and still pretty freaked out Richard Fearless one.

Come Together (Richard Fearless Mix)

Good video.

Space Project

This beautiful and melancholic song came from Jason Pierce's Spiritualized on a space themed compilation for Record Shop Day earlier this year. All the songs used sounds found by the Voyager 1 and 2 space probes. Actually, they're not really sounds at all but 'electromagnetic radiation fluctuations in the magnetosphere of the planets, moons and large asteroids the Voyager probes traveled near. Each celestial body is composed of different elements, has its own size and mass, and therefore sounds unique.'  

Free Your Mind

You might have seen and heard this already but if you haven't get your ears opened up- Cut Copy remixed by Spiritualized. Cut Copy decided to write a call to arms for a new youth movement. Jason Pierce remixed it with some organ, some guitar notes and a lot of controlled noise and static, with some of his whispered bottom-of-the well vocals appearing about reaching for the sky. Quite superb.

Electric Sound Of Summer

I pointed you in the direction of Fuxa back in the Spring, who recorded this beautiful, blissed out version of the Fun Boy Three/Go Go's Our Lips Are Sealed. Whispered vox, analogue keys, primitive percussion, effects.



Something reminded me of it the other day and I realised I hadn't gone looking for the album, which came out in May. It's called Electric Sound Of Summer, and that title describes it pretty well. It's got wooziness all over it, the aural equivalent of the sun going down over a beer garden when you've had exactly the right amount to drink and everything feels good. On the other hand there's a sadness about it too. The sun will soon disappear behind the trees, a chill in the air, Autumn's just around the corner. Lovely stuff.

As well as the aforementioned cover there's a ten minute version of Suicide's Cheree, a cover of a Daniel Johnston song (below) and guest spots from Dean and Britta (from Luna and Dean and Britta), Seefeel's Sarah Peacock, and members of Spiritualized, Spectrum and Spacemen 3.

Some Things Last A Long Time

Dr And Spaceman

Dr John, the Night Tripper, released Gris Gris back in 1968, still the spookiest New Orleans, gumbo voodoo rock album ever. Not rock music at all really, more a bad but funky r'n'b trip. Walk On Gilded Splinters is in a field of it's own. He's got a new album out called Locked Down, recorded with The Black Keys' Dan Auerbach, which I haven't got but am tempted by come payday. Which is today. Hurrah!

This song Gris Gris was given away on an NME cd in the late 90s, remixed by another psychedelic explorer J Spaceman of Spiritualized (who also have a new album out, which I don't have but am tempted by). I'm sure I've got the cd somewhere but couldn't find it. I found the remix at ireallylikemusic and I hope the original poster doesn't mind me re-presenting it.

Gris Gris (J Spaceman Mix)