All You Children

There are a clutch of albums lined up for release in late summer and autumn that all sound like contenders for 2024's end of year lists- Jamie Xx's will be among them, the album In Waves will see the light  of day in September. The latest single from it came out at the end of July, a collaboration with The Avalanches called All You Children, and it is a massive sample- loaded bag of summer fun...

'All you children gather round/ We will dance/ We will whirl', a woman's voice intones as the synths, drums and keys go off all around, 'All you children gather round/ We will dance together'. The sample apparently comes from The Sabbath Dress by Hanny Nehmias, a typically Avalanches sounding sample. Back in 2020 Jamie and The Avalanches worked together on Wherever You Go from the sprawling double Avalanches album We Will Always Love You. This is next level though, a loved up grin turned into bouncing, mesmeric sound. 

Winter Is Blue

Vashti Bunyan's Winter Is Blue is a pretty dark song lyrically. The first two verses go like this-

'Winter is blue/ Living is gone/ Some are just sleeping/ In spring they'll go on/ Our love is dead/ Nothing is crying/ Love will not find even/ One more new morning'

Later on she sings, 'Winter is blue/ Everything's leaving/ Fires are now burning/ And life has no reason'. This version of the song came out decades after it was recorded. Vashti recorded it for Andrew Loog- Oldham's Immediate label but it was left in the vaults until 2007. The bleakness of the lyrics are countered by the sweetness of the arrangement, the finger picked guitar (said to be Jimmy Page) and strings, the sort of sound Loog-Oldham created for Marianne Faithful and tried to replicate with Vashti. It was re- recorded for Vashti's 1970 album Just Another Diamond Day, the album that sold so few copies on release that she packed up and left, moving to Ireland and then Scotland before being rediscovered in 2000 and giving her a second musical life, three decades after she abandoned the first.

Winter Is Blue (Immediate Version)

This one minute thirty seconds long clip from the 1967 documentary Tonight Let's All Make Love In London shows Vashti at the mic in the studio and Andrew with Glyn Johns at the desk. 

In 2020 The Avalanches returned with several singles that led to their third album, We Will Always Love You, a vast, widescreen, genre hopping double album. It included this sumptuous pop- soul song, Reflecting Light, singer Sananda Maitreya sharing the vocal space with a sample of Vashti (from her 1970 song Glow Worms), the two voices coming together for the line 'dreamers moving slowly through the reflecting light'. On Reflecting Light is as much a sound collage as a song, the synths, samples and soft padding drums conjuring up something genuinely cosmic.

Reflecting Light

Half An Hour Of Kids

A bit of a diversion from my Sunday mix series of (roughly) thirty minute mixes of tracks and songs by a single artist- today's mix is themed around the sound of children's voices/ children's choirs. Do not fear though, there are no St Winifred's School Choirs here, no Primary School end of year shows. This is I hope a bit further left of there. Sometimes the use of children's voices in songs can be quite unsettling, that combination of sweetly sung innocence and the feeling of something being lost. Sometimes they provide a higher register counterpoint. Sometimes they add to a sense of trippiness and dislocation. Sometimes they just sound good, a contrast to adult voices and instruments. Sometimes, as The Clash and Mickey Gallagher's kids prove, they're a joke to ensure that Sandinista! had six songs on each side, making thirty six songs in total. 

Thirty Minute Kids Mix

• Family Of God: Family Of God
• Frank Ocean, Mick Jones and Paul Simonon: Hero
• The Children Of Sunshine: It's A Long Way To Heaven
• The Avalanches Ft Jamie Xx, Neneh Cherry and Calypso: Wherever You Go
• Gorillaz: Dirty Harry
• Soul II Soul: Get A Life
• Poly High: Midnight Cowboy
• The Clash: Career Opportunities

It's only right I should give a nod of the head to David Holmes whose crate digging inspired some of this mix. He played the Poly High song on his Desert Island Disco on Lauren Laverne's 6 Mix show earlier this year, included the Family Of God track on a free CD that was given away with the NME in 2000 and put the Children Of Sunshine song on his superb Late Night Tales compilation from 2016. The Frank Ocean, Paul Simonon and Mick Jones song was a one off done with/ for Converse in 2014, produced by Diplo, with the West Los Angeles Children's Choir providing backup. The Avalanches song also has Mick Jones playing on it but this time piano not guitar, and samples The Voyager, NASA's tape for aliens, currently somewhere out there way further than any of us have ever been. The album We Will Always Love You came out in 2020. Gorillaz, Damon with Dangermouse, was released in 2005.  Soul II Soul's Get A Life was a huge hit in 1989 and includes Jazzy B's still excellent advice- 'Be selective, be objective, be an asset to the collective/ As you know, you got to get a life'. Something in that for all of us perhaps. 

I Found The World So New

This is the beach at Thurstaston on the Wirral, a quiet and sandy stretch with cliffs in danger of collapse behind it and the Dee estuary and North Wales in front. We went last weekend, the first time I've been to a beach or the sea for ages. The tide was out so we didn't see much sea but just being on a beach after so long was lovely. 

The debut album by Australian samplers/ band The Avalanches came out twenty years ago- we'll let that pass without too much comment but twenty years, WTF etc. Since I Left You famously is made up of 3, 500 samples, a swirling, technicolour, happy go lucky, kaleidoscope of a record, dizzy and in love with summer, sun, the sea, parties and living your best life. 

Since I Left You

The single Frontier Psychiatrist was/ is a fine example of the art of turntablism, the band's turntablist Dexter Fabay cutting and scratching. This remix by Mario C, a long time Beastie Boy associate, takes it all further. 

Frontier Psychiatrist (Mario Caldato's 85% Mix)

Since I Left You is out now as a twentieth anniversary double CD/ quadruple vinyl edition with fifteen remixes including ones from Prince Paul, the recently deceased MF Doom, Stereolab, Cornelius and this techno/ disco thumper remix of A Different Feeling by Carl Craig.

Futura Music

I've been feeling a bit out of inspiration this week. In Pennie Smith's book of photos of her time touring with The Clash in 1979 the band members provided captions- in one Joe Strummer wrote 'to have output, you gotta have input' and maybe that's the problem, not enough input recently. Tying that and some of this week's posts together (Unkle, David Axelrod, DJ Shadow) brings me to Futura 2000, the New York graffiti artist who provided words and artwork for The Clash. On their 1981 European tour he would paint the band's stage backdrop live behind them. Coincidentally I found this magical clip recently, Mick Jones playing guitar while Futura raps with Fab Five Freddie at the Bataclan in Paris, Mick looking every inch the hip hop/ punk rock star. 

Futura did the lyric sheet on Combat Rock and the sleeve for This Is Radio Clash and was instrumental in kicking off the French graffiti and urban art scene. In the 1990s he hooked up with James Lavelle and alongside Ben Drury worked on the sleeve art for Mo' Wax and Unkle- his distinctive graffiti aliens adorned the front cover of Psyence Fiction and established a strong visual identity for the label. Mick has largely retired from music. Ten years ago he resurrected Big Audio Dynamite for a tour of the UK. I missed it due to being on holiday, something I still regret. Last year Mick came out of his retirement and appeared on The Avalanches multi- guest star album We Will Always Love You. The song We Go On was one of the highlights, a bouncy, optimistic piece of cosmic pop built around a Karen Carpenter sample and a rap from Cola Boyy- 'we go on/ hurting each other' Mick and Karen sing. 

Mick's friend and Clash bandmate Joe Strummer died nearly two decades ago but previously unreleased recordings still surface. A solo best of called Assembly has just been released, remastered versions of the pick of his post- Clash work and featuring a 'new' solo acoustic recording of Joe singing Junco Partner, a song he sung throughout his adult life from The 101ers to The Clash, from Latino Rockabilly War to The Mescaleros. Junco Partner, a 50s New Orleans blues written by James Waynes for and about users and dealers, appears on Sandinista! in both reggae and dub versions and it's one of the handful of Clash songs that I'm a bit ambivalent about, I can take it or leave it.

Junco Partner

This version though, just Joe, a guitar and some echo, shows the man in fine voice.  

We Go On

The new album by The Avalanches came out recently. I haven't heard it yet but the single they released back in the summer, Wherever You Go, was a firm favourite, space age exploration and the quest for peace set to appropriately modern music with input from Neneh Cherry, Jamie Xx and CLYPSO. Last week We Go On came out as part of the twenty five track album (We Will Always Love You), a song with Cola Boyy (not the early 90s pop- rave St Etienne offshoot sadly) and Mick Jones on board. 

Mick Jones seems to have been in semi- retirement for the past few years but his London tone, familiar from The Clash and B.A.D., is clearly evident among the helium chanting and twinkling melodies. The album has guests to spare, the sort of list that makes me wonder if it can survive the weight of all those names- Johnny Marr, MGMT, Vashti Bunyan, Tricky, Perry Farrell, Kurt Vile, Karen O- but on the evidence of what I've heard so far, it seems that it can. 

Today, 22nd December, is the eighteenth anniversary of the death of Joe Strummer, Mick's song writing partner in The Clash. This is a Christmas card Joe hand painted and sent to his friends in 2002. 

I don't know whether Joe would have guested on The Avalanches album had he lived but Mick might have cajoled him into it. Mick and Paul both played with Gorillaz a few years ago and I could see Joe having been drawn into that, his voice on top of that sound. The pressure for a Clash re- union would have grown greater, the clamour for a slog around the world's arenas and festivals would have been huge. There were times when he was alive when he was up for a re- union, it was talked about and they were almost ready to do it once but Paul was the one to say no, who wanted to leave The Clash as they were. Joe would certainly have had opinions about 2020. I'll be raising a glass to him tonight. 

This is an early version/ drum machine demo of the song that became Burnin' Streets on his last album Streetcore, which was completed by The Mescaleros after his death. RIP Joe Strummer. 

London Is Burning

Wherever You Go

More new stuff for this week in the shape of a multi- guest star release from The Avalanches. Sometimes projects with large numbers of guests feel a bit overwhelmed or weighed down them but that isn't the case here. Wherever You Go is expansive electronic music, taking off with a sample from the Voyager Project, music sent into space with the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft in 1977. Co- produced by Jamie xx and with Neneh Cherry and Clypso on vox and with piano from Mick Jones it sounds like a meeting of minds and talents, a song that picks up the pioneering spirit that sent music out of orbit and into the solar system and runs with it. The children's voices suggest '70s TV shows, the drums coming in just after two minutes and the pumping bassline make it more contemporary, and the layering of sounds, Clypso's rap and sheer bounce of the last couple of minutes plant it in now. The promise of space exploration coupled with the sort of sounds that should be heard from a car radio passing by in the street.



'Why do we send music to the stars? Is it because we want our voices to live forever? How else should we become pure spirits, singing forever in the dark?'

The Avalanches, July 2020

Since I Left You

The Avalanches 2000 album Since I Left You was a one-off work of near genius by a six piece from Australia, made up of over 3500 vinyl samples, and a total joy to listen to. The song that made the biggest impact over here was Frontier Psychiatrist but the rest of the double vinyl album was just as good.

Laid back vibes-check. Jazzy flute sample- check. Ghostly backing vocals- check. 60s style lead vocal sample- check. Sumptuous strings- check.

Since I left You