December

A day late with the December songs but better late than never. The obvious starting point is this one...

December

December was on Teenage Fanclub's 1991 album Bandwagonesque, a song about lost or unrequited love and 'wanting to assassinate December'. I know how they feel. 

Those guitars though... perfect. 

Creation labelmates Pacific, very much a forgotten Creation band, released a couple of albums and had a song on Doing It For The Kids. their 1990 album Inference was a compilation and probably the best entry point. This song came as one track on a split flexidisc cover mounted on The Catalogue, a music trade magazine. Indie pop with violin and doleful vocals. Very late 80s indie, rather endearing and about to be swept away by Manchester and by Creation releasing Screamadelica, Bandwagonesque and Loveless on the same day. 

December, With The Day 

Finally, from 2019 and Belfast's The Vendetta Suite is this two minute slice of nostalgic, psychedelic December...

Three Days In December

Forty Five Minutes Of Autumn Songs

Some songs with the word Autumn in the title for a Sunday mix in late September, a day ahead of the autumn equinox- tomorrow, Monday 22nd September at 7.22 pm, a day which marks the end of astronomical summer and the onset of astronomical autumn. Buckle up. Winter's coming. 

Autumn definitely seems to bring out the melancholy and downbeat in songwriters- the songs on my hard drive in the mix below are firmly in that camp- it's OK to wallow in that sometimes and I think by the time we get to the end there's some catharsis.

Forty Five Minutes Of Autumn

• The Small Faces: The Autumn Stone
• Lee Hazlewood: My Autumn's Done Come
• Jaymay: Autumn Fallin'
• Pacific: Autumn Island
• Yo La Tengo: Autumn Sweater
• Higamos Hogamos: Harold/ Autumn Equinox Sunset
• The Prisners Dream: Autumn Days
• East Village: Black Autumn
• Marcel Slettern: Autumn
• Brian Eno: Dunwich Beach, Autumn 1960
• Coldcut : Autumn Leaves (The Irresistible Force Remix)

The Small Faces song The Autumn Stone is from their later period when they'd shed their initial skin and become a little more hippy, a little more reflective, they sound a bit... earthier and woodier. Written by Steve Marriot and recorded in September 1968, The Autumn Stone is a ballad with a beautiful slow glow. The Small Faces were such a great band weren't they.

Lee Hazlewood's autumn isn't just seasonal, it's a lifetime thing sung by a man who seemed to be permanently found in the autumn of his life. This song was the flip side to Sand, a 1966 7" single. 

Jaymay is an American singer/ songwriter, an indie/ folk artist, whose song You Better Run was a music blog song back in the early 2010s golden days of music blogging. Her 2007 album of the same name, Autumn Fallin' is a lovely pun for those on the US side of the Atlantic. 

Pacific were on minor Creation records band in 1990. Their song Jetstream was a favourite with me and a friend who went into a flat share in 1992, a song that sampled the sinking of the Belgrano. Autumn Island was on their 1990 album Inference which is probably Creation's least heard album, undeservedly so but in 1990 Creation had many other irons in the fire and some bands just fell through the cracks. 

Yo La Tengo's Autumn Sweater is one of my favourite songs by anyone, ever. Everything about it- the words, the singing, the drumming, the tone, the feel, the longing to be gone, to be moving on... it's all just perfect. 'We could slip away/ Wouldn't that be better/Me with nothing to say/ And you in your autumn sweater'. 

Higamos Hogamos are/ were Hackney based Steve Webster and various assistants and collaborators. I first heard them when Andrew Weatherall played some krauty/ cosmische tracks by them on a radio show in the dim and distant past- I think I followed up by going to the Higamos Hogamos MySpace page (which dates it). The track on this mix comes in two parts, the first half a lovely experimental instrumental and the second a field recording of the autumn equinox at sunset. 

The Prisners Dream (sic) were one of those American garage rock bands who made the grand total of one sole 7" single, released on Rene Records in 1967. They came from Canonsberg, Pennsylvania. Autumn Days is a gorgeously melancholic folk rock song, backed with You're The One I Really Love. Autumn Days was on a double album compilation from a couple of years ago called Ghost Riders, seventeen songs for a North American road trip with sleeve notes by Sonic Boom. I reviewed it at Ban Ban Ton Ton in 2022 and it's a record I still recommend highly. The Prisners were all between 17 and 19 years old when they recorded the song and sound utterly bereft, a state of being before they've even reached adulthood. 

East Village were on Heavenly, caught out in that short period between late 80s indie and early 90s indie- dance. Their album Drop Out has been re- issued several times, on each occasion to rave reviews. They made little in the way of waves at the time but every time Drop Out comes out again they attract a few new followers. 

Marcel Slettern is from Athens, Georgia,an electronic producer, writer and visual artist who goes for the single word title here- autumn, a few minutes of piano playing. I have no idea why or how this song ended up on my hard drive or where it came from but I'm glad it did. 

Brian Eno's Dunwich Beach, Autumn, 1960 is from his 1982 album On Land, a landmark ambient album. Dunwich was a Suffolk port that feel into the sea due to coastal erosion. It's one of those Eno ambient tracks which is absolutely beyond compare. 

Coldcut's cover of the jazz standard Autumn Leaves has been released in various versions and at various times. None of the versions quite matches The Irresistible Force's remix, a Balearic masterpiece and one which provides an ending that takes us to a better place. 

Protect And Survive

We had a family day out yesterday to Hack Green Secret Nuclear Bunker, near Nantwich in Cheshire. Let no-one say we don't show our kids a good time. The bunker is not so secret any more, there are signs for miles around, but this lump of concrete and underground passageways and rooms would've been where parts of north-west England were run in the aftermath of a nuclear attack. It's all quite spooky- press offices and a radio room for broadcasts, early warning systems, horribly dated computers and phones, desks for top ranking civil servants and ministry officials, decontamination suits and areas, geiger counters, a dormitory with bunk beds. Chilling posters, wall charts and documents about casualties, food dumps, walking wounded, death rates. That Protect And Survive film playing. Gives you a shiver. In the shop you can buy Cold War relics and artefacts, Hack Green pencils, the Protect And Survive leaflet from 1980, and Hack Green snowdomes with the snow replaced by fallout. Yep, we bought one. The place was deemed redundant in 1993, sold off, and has become a macabre tourist attraction. Recommended if you're in the area.

One of the displays was the exact piece of equipment that Thatcher used to order the sinking of the Belgrano during the Falklands War. The Belgrano was sailing away from the Falklands exclusion zone but was sunk regardless. I remember this clearly at the time as an eleven year old, knowing at some level this was wrong, one of the first events that began to politicise me (followed fairly quickly by the miners' strike a year or two later).

It all made me think of this track, by an obscure Creation act- Jetstream by Pacific. It was on the cut-price Creation sampler Doing For The Kids from 1988, which I've bought on cassette and vinyl (twice). This song has some sweet acoustic guitars, some polite electronics, boy-girl vocals and samples from parliament about the sinking of the Argentine ship. I know little about them, and the net doesn't turn up much. I think at some point a friend taped their album for me, but it's long gone, leaving us with this indie anomoly- one part of the 80s which hasn't been revived recently.

11 - Pacific - Jetstream.mp3#2#2