Oblique Saturdays

A series for Saturdays in 2026 inspired by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's set of cards, Oblique Strategies (Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas). Eno and Schmidt created them to be used to unblock creative impasses and approach problems from unexpected angles. Each week I'll turn over an Oblique Strategy card and post a song or songs inspired by the suggestion. 

Last week's Oblique Strategy card said this- Use 'unqualified' people.

I came up with Mancunian punk group The Nosebleeds and their calling card Ain't Been To No Music School. The Smiths, Gang Of Four and Shane MacGowan and The Popes with Johnny Depp guesting on guitar all followed. The Bagging Area community was inspired to suggest Ed Harcourt's Kakistocarcy, Bob Dylan getting the pros in to nail Visions Of Johanna, Billy Bragg, Paul Bowles, Sparks, The Shaggs and Fire Engines- thank you to Brainlizard, Darren, Rol, Ernie, Walter and Chris and to JC from The Vinyl Villain who nominated himself for a pair of musical contributions he's made this year, once in live in LA and again on the forthcoming Broken Chanter album. 

This weeks Oblique Strategy is this- Tape your mouth.

I turned the card over on Wednesday evening. I ruminated a bit on the double meaning of tape- one could be to cover one's mouth with tape, to be censored or to self- censor, to keep the vocals out and focus on the instruments and the other could be the instruction to record one's mouth. These things percolated for a while and a few ideas floated towards the front of my mind and then on Thursday morning this miraculously appeared on the internet and it replaced all the other ideas that were simmering gently... 

Boots On The Ground is a collaboration between Massive Attack and Tom Waits, the first new music from either artist for a long time. If you're going to tape a mouth for a new song, a powerfully 2026 anti- war, anti- authoritarian song, then that mouth may as well be the that belongs to Tom Waits- his mouth sounds like no other.

The music- clacking rhythms, some very late period Massive Attack piano chords- is claustrophobic and tense. Then Tom Waits starts up, a voice as old as time, commenting on the growing militarisation of the police in the USA, the BLM protests of 2020 and the anti- ICE protests of this year, the murder of US citizens by ICE and by chance of timing, the repeated title phrase coinciding with Trump's illegal war on Iran, one in which he is so far out of his depth he cannot even see the shore any more. Waits recorded the vocal some time ago and Massive Attack, never a group to rush things, haven't got the track completed until now- when it transpires the moment is exactly right. 

Waits takes no prisoners. 'Fucking ass machine gun war... holler and burn down cities... federal pricks... air conditioned fuckstick loafers... killed a brown man... he rotted in the sand and all they found was his boots on the ground'

There's an unsettling pause partway through, Wait's breathing and a choral swell rising and the music twists and turns inside itself. Then Waits recovers his flow and the piano comes back in. In the seven minute version/ film of Boots On The Ground, there's an entire section after five minutes which is more or less just the sound of Tom Waits breathing at the microphone. Tape your mouth. 

Last weekend Massive Attack's 3D (Robert del Naja) was arrested while protesting in London against the ban on Palestine Action. 'A few hours in a police cell... is a small price to pay', he said later. 

Tape your mouth, say your piece.

Feel free to drop your own suggestions into the comment box. 

Oblique Saturdays

 

A series for Saturdays in 2026 inspired by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's set of cards, Oblique Strategies (Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas). Eno and Schmidt created them to be used to unblock creative impasses and approach problems from unexpected angles. Each week I'll turn over an Oblique Strategy card and post a song or songs inspired by the suggestion. 

Last week's suggestion was Breathe more deeply.

My responses were some deeply heavy dub techno from Basic Channel and Deanne Day's Hardly Breathe, Weatherall and Harrow mid- 90s deep house/ techno. Both encouraging deeper breathing. The Oblique Saturdays crowd made some excellent and varied suggestions- Blu Cantrelle's Breath, Kylie's Breathe, Warren Zevon's French Inhaler, Thandi Ntuli and Carlos Nino's experimental breathing, Kate Bush, Serge and Jane engaging in deeper and heavier breathing, Massive Attack's Teardrop and Aggelein by Valium. Thank you Jake, Khayem, Rol, Ernie, Jase, Iggy, Walter and Scaley Pecker for your contributions. Here's Kylie from 1998 with a song that as Scaley observed has a touch of William Orbit's Ray Of Light production about it.

Breathe

This week's card said this- Abandon normal instruments.

Eno was surely a man who would gladly abandon normal instruments. At first I thought about Einsturzende Neubauten, Blixa Bargeld and co. using homemade instruments constructed from scrap metal and tools, wielding angle grinders, hammers and metal plates and with jackhammers drilling through the stage at the ICA. This is Kollaps, eight minutes of industrial and experimental sounds from West Berlin in 1981...

I also remembered Jagz Kooner and Gary Burns describing Sabres Of Paradise recording what would become Sabresonic in London in 1993 and they mic'ed up Gary banging a scaffolding pole with a wrench and shaking a tray of matches to create the drum and percussion sounds for Smokebelch. 

Smokebelch (Exit)

Back in October 1988 I went to a gig at Liverpool Royal Court, a triple bill headlined by Billy Bragg with support from Michelle Shocked. The first act on the bill were The Beatnigs, a San Francisco band who combined punk, industrial and hip hop and played the bonnet of a VW Beetle with metal chains, a rotary saw and a grinder. I don't have any Beatnigs recordings but Michael Franti and Rono Tse would go on to become The Disposable Heroes Of Hiphoprisy and reworked one of the songs from Beatnig days in the new band, a hip hop/ spoken word, alt/ industrial classic from 1992. 

Television, The Drug Of the Nation

Lastly I thought about Tom Waits and especially 1999's Mule Variations, an album which uses normal instruments- brass, violin, bass, guitars, harp, pump organ and also turntables and samples- but sounds like it was made in a junkyard using bits of metal and old car parts. What's he building in there?

Feel free to abandon normal instruments and give up your suggestions in the comment box

Christmas Eve Trio

I was going to start off this post by saying I've been trying to feel a bit more positive towards Christmas this year, having not found much to enjoy in it for the last three, but the songs I'm about to post would suggest otherwise. It's good to be on holiday though and to have some time to socialise and spend time with people and it's good to be feeling a little bit more positive about it as an event. 

Over at My Top Ten Rol's been wondering whether some Christmas songs should be cancelled. Rol and fellow bloggers dissected A Fairytale Of New York here and then Do They Know It's Christmas? here. 

In place of the awful annual succession of Christmas songs you can currently hear being piped out in shops and on TV here are a trio that give a different slant on the festive season.  

In 1978 Tom Waits released Blue Valentine, an album which included the song Christmas Card From A Hooker In Minneapolis, a first person sketch which revels in the low life street level characters Waits loved and wrote about and which comes with a lyrical twist at the end. 

Christmas Card From A Hooker In Minneapolis

In 1988 Julian Cope added a fourth song to his Charlotte Anne 12" single, the sparkling pagan psyche- pop of Christmas Mourning. 

Christmas Mourning

In 2000, as they prepared for the release of their third album This Is Happening, LCD Soundsystem contributed some songs to a Ben Stiller film, Greenburg. Oh You (Christmas Blues) is a raw and distorted blues song, sounding like the result of a collision between 70s Pink Floyd and James Murphy coming down hard at the end of a very long session. 

Oh You (Christmas Blues)

Fifty Minutes Of Soundtrack Saturday

2025's year long Saturday series Soundtrack Saturday has reached the final reel but before the credits roll it seemed that a Sunday mix of various songs and scores from the various film soundtracks I've written about would make a good Sunday mix. This is the result, seventeen tracks from sixteen films, sequenced with something approaching a narrative arc- it starts out in the desert with Harry Dean Stanton tramping round the dust, stays out west for while and then shifts to Tokyo, sleeplessness and jet lag. We jump around some other locations- Long Island, France, Memphis- and have visions of a post- apocalyptic USA before the climax, a death, some levity and then Rutger Hauer in the rain. 

The photo at the top is of Stretford Essoldo, a former cinema just up the road from me, a beautiful 1930s building that has been sadly empty and unused for decades. 

Fifty Minutes Of Soundtrack Saturday

• Ry Cooder: Cancion Mixteca
• Ennio Morricone: Watch Chimes
• Bob Dylan: Billy 7
• Joe Strummer: Tennessee Rain
• Tom Waits: Jockey Full Of Bourbon
• Kevin Shields: Intro- Tokyo
• Kevin Shields: City Girl
• Mick Jones: Long Island
• David Holmes: I Think You Flooded It
• John Lurie: Tuesday Night In Memphis
• Gabriel Yared: 37 Degrees 2 Le Matin
• Nick Cave and Warren Ellis: The Road
• John Barry: Theme From Midnight Cowboy
• Brian Eno: Deep Blue Day
• Son House: Death Letter Blues
• B.J. Thomas: Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head
• Vangelis: Tears In Rain

Cancion Mixteca is from Paris, Texas, Wim Wenders' 1984 film, a Ry Cooder soundtrack with some dialogue from the film that stands up as an album in its own right.  

Watch Chimes is from Sergio Leone's For A Few Dollars More, the second installment of the Dollars trilogy, released in 1967. 

Billy is from Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid, Sam Peckinpah's 1973 Western, Bob Dylan contributing the soundtrack and appearing in the film. 

Joe Strummer did the soundtrack for Walker, Alex Cox's 1987 Western- one of Joe's best 'wilderness years' songs. 

A Jockey Full Of Bourbon appears in Down By Law, Jim Jarmusch's 1986 film- Tom Waits is one of the three stars of the film as well as being a key part of the soundtrack. 

Intro- Tokyo and City Girl are from Lost In Translation, Sofia Coppola's 2003 film, Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson lost in Tokyo. 

Mick Jones provided three tracks for the 1993 film Amongst Friends- Long Island is the most complete, a Jones solo song. 

I Think You Flooded It is from Out Of Sight, the first of many David Holmes- Steven Soderbergh soundtrack collaborations, released in 1998. 

John Lurie's score for Mystery Train had to compete with some big hitters- Elvis' Mystery Train for one, Roy Orbison's Domino for another. A second Jim Jarmusch film in this mix- the use of music is central to Jarmusch's films. 

Gabriel Yared's guitar playing is from the soundtrack to Betty Blue, another late 80s film that made a deep impression on me- Beatrice Dalle made quite an impression too. 

Nick Cave and Warren Ellis' soundtrack work spans all sorts of movies and documentaries. They began with the soundtrack to 2009 film The Road, a harrowing version of Cormac McCarthy's equally harrowing novel. 

Theme From Midnight Cowboy is gorgeous, a John Barry highpoint from a composer who recorded dozens of soundtracks. That harmonica. Stunning. 

Brian Eno's soundtrack work is wide and varied and an Eno only soundtrack mix would definitely work- Deep Blue Day is from the 1996 film Trainspotting but originally on Another Green World, Eno's 1975 album. 

Son House's Death Letter Blues is from 1965, just Son and a metal bodied resonator guitar. It's a stunning song and performance, Son's lyrics and performance can chill to the bone. It appeared on the soundtrack to On The Road, the  2012 version of Jack Kerouac's novel. 

B.J. Thomas' Raindrops Keep falling On My Head was a worldwide smash following its appearance in the 1969 film Butch Cassady And The Sundance Kid. The song is probably what the film is best known for, along with the two stars- Robert Redford and Paul Newman- and the famous shoot out ending. 

At the end of Blade Runner, Ridley Scott's 1982 sci fi/ film noir version of Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, Rutger Hauer sits on top of a crumbling building in the rain, holding a dove and improvises a farewell speech as Harrison Ford slumps in front of him, his life saved. 'All these moments will be lost in time', Hauer says as Vangelis' synth score plays. But they're not are they- they replay endlessly, equally moving each time. 

Soundtrack Saturday

Since writing about Tom Waits a week ago I've listened to Rain Dogs more times than at any point since buying it in the late 80s. I've been dipping my toes into other Waits albums too and think I may continue down this route for some time. Rain Dogs also took me back to Jim Jarmusch and his 1986 film Down By Law, a film that had Waits in a starring role and came sandwiched between Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise (1984) and Mystery Train (1989, already covered in this series). 

Down By Law is classic Jarmusch, written and directed by himself and shot in grainy black and white, the first he made with Wim Wenders' cinematographer Robby Muller. The film follows the story of three convicts who escape from a New Orleans jail- Waits, John Lurie (also on the soundtrack) and Roberto Benigni.

Waits' music and slow tracking shots of the city of New Orleans feature heavily. The films follows the jailbreak, discussions about the men's crimes, the interactions between the three convicts and their escape through the swamp to house in the forest occupied by Nicoletta Braschi. It's a neo- noir character study as much as an escape film. 

Tom Wait's song Jockey Full Of Bourbon plays repeatedly as the camera. The song was also on Rain Dogs. Marc Ribot's guitar twangs away, the clanking railway rhythm clatters away and waits mutters about being on the run with another man's wife and being on the corner in the pouring rain

Jockey Full Of Bourbon

As with Mystery Train John Lurie provides the incidental score but much of the film is music free, the naturalistic sound of voices and ambient noise very startling and close up. As in this famous scene...

Tango Til They're Sore, also from Rain Dogs, appears and a pair of early 60s hits, Irma Thomas' It's Raining and Roy Orbison's Crying (the lines said by Waits just before he is stopped by the police while driving). Irma Thomas playing on the jukebox soundtracks this scene, Banigni and Braschi dancing while Waits and Lurie sit at the table watching. Jarmusch uses of music as part of the plot rather than a permanent feature playing behind the action, something that marks Down By Law out very different to many other films both at the time and since. 

Outside Another Yellow Moon

A conversation about Tom Waits last weekend directed me to this track by Akira The Don, a track with a borrowed vocal, Tom Waits reading Charles Bukowski's The Laughing Heart, a poem about existence, fulfillment and finding light among the darkness- 'Your life is your life/ Don't let it be clubbed into dank submission/ Be on the watch/ There are ways out/ There is light somewhere...'

I read Bukowski's Ham On Rye in the summer, a semi- autobiographical novel based partly on his own teenage and young adulthood in Los Angeles in the 1930s and 40s- it's a grim read in many ways, the young Henry Chinaski not fitting in at school or the private college his father sends him to, and he pulls no punches in his first person description of school brutality, domestic violence, masturbation, alcohol, terrible acne and indifferent doctors and the growing misanthropy of Chinaski (a thinly veiled Bukowski). That Bukowski wrote an existential poem that concludes there is light somewhere is remarkable given how dark much of his writing is. 

The Laughing Heart

Akira The Don adds piano, a jazz club feel and some very lazy hip hop drums, all very sympathetic to Mr. Waits. I then remembered that 100 Poems used the Waits vocal for Song For Claire (Your Life Is Your Life) on their 2024 album Balearic As A System Of Belief. 

It got me looking through my collection for more Tom Waits. I've posted this before but it's always worth a re- post, Tom Waits' Closing Time spliced with Allen Ginsberg reading his poem America, a Ginsberg peak, the young Allen looking around at the nation and his life- 'America/ I've given you all and now I'm nothing'. 

America features the use of a racial slur which was part of Ginsberg's America and very much not acceptable now. 

America (Closing Time)

Tom Waits is in a way one of the last links to the Beats, an artist in the Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs tradition. His bohemian life and scenes from the underworld/ underbelly of American society street poetry seems very 20th century now, a dying art form in some ways. I can't think of many artists existing in the same milieu- those that do, Jim Jarmusch say or Bob Dylan (also a Beat inspired writer), won't be around forever. David Lynch departed earlier this year- his music fitted into a Waitsian world. 

I don't have a huge amount of Tom Waits, I never committed to going the full hog. I used to have Swordfishtrombones on cassette but I didn't replace it after my cassette collection got slimmed down in the 90s, probably something I should rectify. I had a copy of Mule Variations too but can't find it now. Mule Variations came out in 1999- I was amazed it's that long ago. I always loved this piece of weirdness and neighbourly paranoia, What's He Building?

I do have Rain Dogs, Tom's 1985 album, often lauded as one of his best. It's got the full Waits range of carnival music, Weimar oompah, jazz, experimental rock and blues, New Orleans funeral marches, various styles of outsider music stitched into a whole. Rain Dogs was written by Waits in a basement room in Lower Manhattan in a two month period in the mid- 80s. He wandered round the city with a tape recorder taping sounds and noises which he then layered guitars, marimba, trombone, piano, accordion and banjo on top of and made drumbeats out of banging pieces of furniture, drawers from cupboards and cabinets. Sometimes the album's madness, variation and cacophony is too much- I have to be in the mood for it. But peppered among the underbelly pieces and bursts of chaotic noise are some of his best loved songs too- Time, Hang Down Your Head, Downtown Train. 

Clap Hands is the second song on Rain Dogs, with uneven pots and pans percussion and Tom narrating the lives of New York's dispossessed.

Clap Hands

Hang Down Your Head was released as a single, a song with a proper structure that nodded to his earlier work, Waits at his most direct and songwriterly, that gravel voice accompanied by electric guitar. 

Hang Down Your Head

9th And Hennepin finds itself in the gutter with broken umbrellas and dead birds, a girl with a tattooed tear and the train going by, an NYC Beat Generation blues poem. 

9th And Hennepin

Downtown Train is one of his most famous songs, covered by Bob Seger, Rod Stewart and Everything But The Girl. Tom's song has Robert Quine playing a wonderful electric guitar part (Quine turned up at Bagging Area last week playing guitar on Lou Reed's The Blue Mask). Downtown Train has become a classic and for good reason.

Downtown Train

Ninety Minutes Of Psychedelic Dub From Rude Audio

Rude Audio's Mark Ratcliff is a fan of all things dub and many things psychedelic. He recently put together a psychedelic dub set, a ninety minute chugged up, dubbed out selection featuring some of Rude Audio's own recordings (with Dan Wainwright), some Duncan Gray, GLOK remixed by Hardway Bros meeting Monkton uptown, The Orb, a Richard Fearless remix of KXB, Future Sound Of London, Channel 15,  Tom Waits (!) and many more. Mark's very good at this kind of thing and with the temperatures in Amsterdam (where I am today, on a school trip) and at home in the UK due to top 30 degrees, this is an ideal soundtrack. You can listen at Soundcloud. 

If you're looking for a further Tom Waits/ dub interaction here's the mysterious B:dum B:dum and a punningly titled slice of deep dub, a sound that is all hiss, space and rhythm. B:dum B:dum were an early 90s Manchester outfit- members have since migrated into Marconi Union and Shunt Voltage. There's a 12" single isted on Discogs which contains four tracks, Istanbul, Angel, Check This and Good May Weep. I've no idea where this track came from. 

Tom Waits For No Man

Balearic As A System Of Belief

Mike Wilson's Dublin based 100 Poems has already released two albums this year- Everything's Balearic When You Believe and Everything's Possible When You Balearic. Last week he released a third, Balearic As A System Of Belief. Mike shared one of the tracks with me in an unfinished form a couple of months ago but the work he's done since then and the music he's created for this third album is something else, going beyond the day- glo, downtempo, feelgood, anything goes songs from the first two and heading off in new directions. 

Mike's in love with the creative process- the empty page, the blank track- and the sense that anything is possible, the process of sitting down and starting with nothing but ending with something a little while later. Balearic As A System Of Belief covers the range of human emotion, from love and euphoria to grief and sorrow with Mike's irrepressible love of life shining through on each and every one of the seven tracks. The opener, In This Cosmos Everything Has A Place, takes the words of Sadhguru and a speech about the interconnectedness of nature, insects, worms, people and animals, the planet's survival, the solar system, the smallness of the human race, and the entire cosmos, and sets them against some widescreen acid house, throbbing and whooshing synths, piano, big drums, sirens, timpani, rattling hi hats, and a dozen more elements besides. 

The second song, Elonna, She Brings The Sun is blissed out and wide eyed, with sunshine dappled acoustic guitars, sweeping strings and ecstatic, deeply in love vocals. It's followed by Song For Claire (Your Life Is Your Life), a song dedicated to and named after a recently lost friend, Claire, and borrows Tom Waits reading Charles Bukowski's The Laughing Heart- 'Your life is your life/ Don't let it be clubbed into dank submission/ Be on the watch/ There are ways out/ There is light somewhere'. Strings and guitars, synths and horns, whispers and tears, and 'a tiny piece of acid house has gone to heaven...'

The use of sampled voices continues with the next two songs. On Come, Hear Me Now, rumbling rhythms and the hiss of hi- hat bring a different feel to the album, some darkness and moodiness thunder in- until a flute breaks in and suddenly we're off again, up in the blue skies, a guitar line singing the lead. The voice, when it arrives, is that of Mikey Dread (from Break Down The Walls in 1980), bringing the reggae toasting and Jamaican vibes. Dubmobalearicswithmybreaksman moves us from Jamaica to Los Angeles and Jim Morrison in 1969, discussing blues and folk and American music, with a skittering drum beat, chopped up sounds, and distorted guitar. 'Rock is kind of dying out', says Jim, 'soon, they might be relying heavily on electronics and machines' (an interview and sample that made an appearance coincidentally earlier this year on Jezebell's Weekend Machines EP).

From the heavy sounds of Dubmobalearicswithmybreaksman Mike changes gear again on Peace, Love And Dancing, straight ahead party music, Sly And The Family Stone style, with big analogue bottom end, clipped guitar and 70s funk horns. Balearic As A System Of Belief comes to a close with Until Next Summer, acoustic guitar and the pitter- patter of a drum machine, echo and an angelic vocal, ending with the fading sound of a lone trumpet. 

The pair of albums 100 Poems released earlier this year both had loads of highpoints, with tunes to enjoy and a feelgood vibe. This latest album moves Mike's sound on again, with a wider range of sounds and a different feel, the sonic and emotional net being cast wider and further. 

Balearic As A System Of Belief is at Bandcamp where you can pay what you want- as Mike says, 'give what you can afford, if you can't afford anything, no problem please download and enjoy this album and I wish you better times'. Any monies raised will be donated to Women's Aid and The Suzy Lamplugh Trust

Another Imaginary Album

Another imaginary album. Previously I speculated about the Andrew Weatherall, Jah Wobble and Sinead O’Connor album that could have followed Andrew’s remixes of Jah Wobble’s Invaders of You in 1992 and the album that he was lined up to produce for The Fall in 1993 but which didn’t happen, as well as a re- united Joe Strummer and Mick Jones album c.1989. Today’s imaginary album is another Weatherall one, this time one that existed for a while on paper but was never followed through. In 1994 following the artistic success of Sabres Of Paradise’s Haunted Dancehall, the record company, Warp, were keen on a follow up with Sabres and some hand picked guest vocalists. The Chemical Brothers and Leftfield had both made records with guest vocalists by this point, including Beth Orton, Tim Burgess, Toni Halliday, and John Lydon and Warp felt Sabres should be getting in on the action. In an interview with NME during this period, possibly the dance music page Vibes (which Andrew’s friend Sherman edited and wrote), Andrew mentioned that he was looking forward to working with Ice T. Jagz Kooner has confirmed that Ice T/ Tracy Morrow’s name was on a list of names of people that Warp were hoping would take to the microphone on this mooted Sabres Of Paradise plus friends album. 

At the Sabresonic 30th event at The Golden Lion last November Jagz and Gary Burns confirmed that a list of names was drawn up. Dot Allison and Bobby Gillespie were both on it, both singers with close connections to Andrew, Bobby via Andrew’s production on Screamadelica and Dot via Andrew’s post- Screamadelica production on One Dove’s Morning Dove White. There is a cassette that belongs to Chris from Soft Rocks, given to him by Andrew as a thank you along with a pile of records, that contains an unreleased Sabres Of Paradise track that goes by the title of Al Green (Revenge Of Dove). The track has that blissed out electronic dub sound that Andrew helped shape with One Dove, possibly even contains a One Dove sample, and although the cassette is not top quality in terms of sound, it’s a real shame it was never finished, it’s very much a lost Sabres track. I’d love to share it but I think doing so would get me into trouble.

Sirens

The tantalising thing about the track’s title is the possibility that alongside guest vocals from Ice T, Bobby Gillespie and Dot Allison, the Reverend Al Green would be making an appearance. Imagine something like Sirens, above from One Dove's Morning Dove White, with Al Green singing on it.

According to Jagz the next name pencilled in by Warp was that of Tom Waits. Tentative enquiries were being made and it was at this point that Andrew got cold feet, getting the fear about working with some of his heroes, and kiboshed the whole project, not willing to put himself in a studio with someone who he regarded as highly as Tom Waits, a hero of Andrew’s since his teenage years.

Heartattack And Vine

Again, close your eyes for a moment and try to imagine Tom Waits' growl and gravelly tones, his gutter poetry, over the top of some mid- 90s Sabres dub. Think of the remixes that could have come from this imaginary album.

Andrew was quite vocal in interviews in the second half of the 90s about dance acts using guest vocalists, in a disapproving way, so he may have had doubts from the start but sitting here three decades later, the prospect of a Sabres Of Paradise album with Tom Waits, Ice T, Al Green, Dot Allison and Bobby Gillespie all singing on it feels like a lost opportunity, one that will have to live in our imaginations only.  

Thunder Underbelly

Some epic leftfield music from Renegade Soundwave back in 1990 for a Saturday in early June. This is Thunder, techno/ electro built around a pounding breakbeat, a throbbing dubby bassline and a distorted guitar sample or two, intense dance music made for hot nights in dark nightclubs. There's a Perry Como sample buried in there too. Superb sounding stuff, over three decades since it was released. 

Thunder

From a few years later, 1994, this is Renegade Soundwave remixing Pop Will Eat Itself, a dark, dubbed out, claustrophobic, industrial piece of music, with samples this time from Tom Waits and Jeru The Damaja. 

Underbelly (Renegade Soundwave Blackout Mix)

This Is The Impression I Get From Looking At The Television Set

Whoever spliced Allen Ginsberg reading his 1956 poem America with Tom Waits' Closing Time created something beautiful and profound. You can take as much as you want from Ginsberg's poem at the moment.


America (Closing Time)

Sacco And Venzetti Must Not Die

It's funny how these things develop in little bursts and how one thing leads to another. My compadre, technical advisor, guitarist and brother-in-law H has started a blog called Spoken Word Rock. He posted this which I just had to re-post here; Allen Ginsberg's poem America (which I wrote about back in August) read by Ginsberg, set to the music of Tom Waits' Closing Time, with some great cut and paste visuals. All of which ties in with my recent rediscovery of the Beats, and has some kind of message for tomorrow's Presidential election. Maybe.



Sacco and Vanzetti were a pair of Italian-American anarchists charged with murder in the 1920s and convicted on flimsy, xenophobic/racist evidence. A witness recalled in court one of the assailants 'moved like a foreigner'. The judge added his own prejudices and the two men were sentenced to death. Both were eventually executed.

America (Closing Time)

Cahuenga

Strange voodoo/bluesy/r'n'b cover versions of Tom Waits songs that were used in multinational jeans companies' adverts topping charts worldwide and led to apologies to Mr Waits for using his song without permission aren't ten a penny. Good job then that this one is so good. Screaming Jay Hawkins and Heart Attack And Vine.

Cahuenga, mentioned in the song, is a street in Los Angeles. And slang for 'an unusually large male sex organ'. Just so you know.

Heart Attack And Vine.mp3