Songs From The Sabres Tour Bus

Sabres Of Paradise board the tour bus and head out on their UK tour tomorrow, a gig in Bristol first, followed by The White Hotel in Salford on Wednesday, Leeds on Thursday, the Forge warehouse in Sheffield on Friday, Bugged Out at Tramsheds in London on Saturday and then bringing the curtain down in Brighton on Monday. Back in May and June they played Fabric in London and Sydney Opera House and a pair of festival appearances- Primavera in Spain and Dekmantel in The Netherlands. I saw them at Fabric and am going to The White Hotel. I'm sure I can't be the only person who did not start 2025 expecting to see Sabres Of Paradise play live, twice. There are a handful of tickets still available for some of the venues I believe- try here.

Back in the 1994 Sabres Of Paradise played twenty two live shows, on their own and supporting Primal Scream. They finished the year with some dates in Japan. The live band- the Sabres studio pair of Jagz Kooner and Gary Burns along with Rich Thair (percussion and drums, on loan from Red Snapper and The Aloof), Nick Abnett (low slung bass) and Phil Mossman (guitar, later of LCD Soundsystem)- would kick up a storm, a heady stew of programmed drums, samples and live instruments bringing those classic Sabres tracks to life on stage- Smokebelch, Wilmot, Theme, Tow Truck... Andrew Weatherall started out on stage with them, playing some keys, but said he felt like a fraud and preferred to DJ before and after, and skulk around in the crowd watching them play, smoking and enjoying seeing his band play the gig. 

The Sabres re- union comes in part from a night The Flightpath Estate put on at The Golden Lion two years ago, a Q&A with Jagz and Gary (with me in the David Frost hotseat) and then Jagz DJing. Rob Fketcher, of Herbal tea party fame, has a live recording of Sabres playing at the club in 1994 and we played it after the Q&A. Jagz stood by the speakers listening and nodding his head. 'We really pretty good back then', he said. Two years down the line, the Sabres albums re- issued in the summer, rave reviews from the shows they played in the summer and a UK tour imminent, the horses saddled and ready to go, I thought it might be good to get a Bagging Area exclusive, songs from the Sabres Of Paradise tour bus in 1994 and 2025. I asked Jagz and he and the rest of the Sabres were happy to oblige...

Jagz Kooner

1994 tour bus song: Nas feat Az and Olu Dara, Life's A Bitch (from Illmatic in 1994).   

'Remember listening to this on the tour bus and when that chorus landed it was a proper 'damn that's a hook and half!', so much so that Bob G improvised it over a Primal Scream song when we toured with them too'.

Life's A Bitch

2025 tour bus song: Rapture in Blue (Midnight Version) by Daniel Avery with Cecile Believe (from Tremors)

'This whole album is a sonic masterpiece and I love the fact he has an entire full live band with him when he tours too. Respect to Dan!'

  

Gary Burns

1994 tour bus song: Cypress Hill, Hits From The Bong. 

Hits From The Bong

'I remember listening to this (very stoned) on the bus quite a lot. Loved the fact it sampled Son Of A Preacher Man by Dusty Springfield which was always a favourite of mine too'

2025 tour bus song: Bloomy Mulberries by K2W0.

'Downtempo and dirty. Reminds me of old school acid house times'. 

Get Bloomy Mulberries at Bandcamp. 

Rich Thair 

1994 tour bus song: Depth Charge- Bounty Killers.

'For me in the 90s J Saul Kane was a huge influence, an amazing, creative producer and sculptor of beats. Jon produced fantastic remixes for The Sabres & Red Snapper. RIP J Saul Kane x'

Bounty Killers

2025 tour bus song: Snorkel- Sirene

'Frank Byng’s Snorkel deserve more recognition for their inventive rhythm chaos. Check the new album'.

Find Snorkel's Sirene at Bandcamp.

Nick Abnett 

1994 tour bus song: The Beach Boys - God Only Knows. 

'Weirdly enough the only music I ever remember being played on a Sabres bus was the Pet Sounds album! Andrew bought it in a service station and we listened to it on the journey to wherever we were heading'.

God Only Knows

2025 tour bus song: Nia Archives / Clipz- Maia Maia. 

'There’s an exciting new school of jungle producers around at the moment. Nia is a great example of an open minded generation of new artists. Good vibes and killer tunes!'

Get Maia Maia at Bandcamp. 

Adam says- a bang up to date blend of Brazilian sounds and new generation jungle, new to me and very good indeed.  

Phil Mossman 

1994 tour bus song: The Sandals- Feet (Slam remix). 

'The thought of the Sandals always brings a smile to my face and takes me straight back to those days. The Slam remix is a seminal piece of 90s techno'.

Feet (Night Slam VI)

2025 tour bus song: Sunn O))) with Scott Walker, Herod. 

The whole Sunn O))) and Scott Walker album is at Bandcamp. It is, it almost goes without saying, pretty intense. Those miles shuttling round the country this week with Scott Walker and Sunn O))) on the bus sound system are going to be quite a trip. 

I've sequenced those ten tracks into one mix, a Sabres 94/25 tour bus tape- it comes in at just over forty six minutes so with a bit of trimming you could get it on one side of a 1995 friendly c90 cassette. It starts with God Only Knows and ends with Herod so it could be described as Biblical. 

Sabres Tour Bus 94/ 25 Mix

• The Beach Boys: God Only Knows
• Cypress Hill: Hits From The Bong
• Nas ft Az and Olu Dara: Life's A Bitch
• Depth Charge: Bounty Killers
• Nia Archives & Clipz: Maia Maia
• Snorkel: Sirene
• K2W0: Bloomy Mulberries
• Daniel Avery ft. Cecile Believe: Rapture In Blue (Midnight Version)
• The Sandals: Feet (Night Slam IV)
• Sunn O))) and Scott Walker: Herod 2014

If you prefer to stream the mix is at The Flightpath Estate's Mixcloud here. Massive thanks to all five Sabres Of Paradise for doing this- see you at The White Hotel on Wednesday Night. Love and Sabres to you all. 

Forty Five Minutes Of Cover Versions Part Two

Last Sunday's cover versions mix worked well enough for me to undertake a second. I started with Jah Divison and went from there, a succession of dub and reggae covers, wasn't happy with it and scrapped it and started again, setting off again with Jah Division but heading in a noisier, more guitar laden direction, all a bit more shambolic. Then it slows down and blisses out before kicking up a storm again for the finish. 

After I posted last Sunday's mix Steve from Andres y Xavi messaged me to say he had a series of cover version mixes called Under The Covers, up at Mixcloud. The latest, his ninth, covers a lot of ground from Lady Blackbird to The Droyds with Isaac Hayes, Bobby Womack and Jose Feliciano among the people sandwiched in between. Plenty to enjoy. 

Forty Five Minutes Of Cover Versions Part Two

• Jah Division: Dub Will Tear Us Apart
• The Fall: Mr Pharmacist
• The Jesus And Mary Chain: Surfin' USA
• Sonic Youth: I Know There's An Answer
• Sonic Youth: Computer Age
• Hardway Bros: 1979 GLOK Remix
• Andy Bell: Our Last Night Together
• The Liminanas: Ou Va La Chance
• The Vendetta Suite: Who Do You Love?
• Fontaines DC: 'Cello Song

Jah Division is a Russian reggae band, formed in Moscow in 1990. This is what it says in Wikipedia. It also say that the founder of Jah Division, Gera Morales, was the son of Leopold Morales, an associate of Che Guevara's. Elsewhere (Bandcamp) it says Jah Divison are from Brooklyn and their 2004 12" of four covers of Joy Division songs is their sole release. According to Bandcamp Jah Divison features members of Onieda and Home, began as a joke and the four tracks were recorded in the shadow of the Williamsburg Bridge. Take your pick. None of which stops Dub Will Tear Us Apart from being a genius cover version whoever recorded it. 

The Fall's Mr Pharmacist is a cover of a song by Los Angeles 60s psyche garage band The Other Half, a 1986 Fall single from the Brix period and produced by John Leckie. The original was on an early 80s Nuggets compilation. Mr Pharmacist was also on The Fall's Bend Sinister album, an opinion splitting album derided by Mark E. Smith and John Leckie.

Surfin' USA was a Darklands outtake, all feeedback, rough and rowdy drums, breaking glass, East Kilbride sneers and TV preachers. The Reid brothers knew how to cover a song. The original was a 1963 Beach Boys single...

... and I Know There's An Answer was a 1966 Beach Boys album song (from Pet Sounds). Sonic Youth's cover comes from 1989, recorded for a Brian Wilson tribute album released in 1990 and sung by Lee Renaldo- no one else could sing it according to Lee who says J. Mascis helped out in the studio too. Appropriately squally and rather wonderful. 

Sonic Youth also recorded a Neil Young cover in the same time frame for a Neil Young tribute album, The Bridge (a superb album). They chose a song from Neil's most misunderstood album, Trans. Like the Mary Chain, Sonic Youth instinctively know what makes a good cover version. Computer Age is a gem in the SY back catalogue. 

Sean Johnston's Outre Mer label is an outlet for Hardway Bros recordings. In January 2024 he released an EP called My Friends which included a cover of Smashing Pumpkins 1979 (a song which is itself pretty much a New Order tribute). A remix EP saw GLOK tackle 1979, and has a massively overloaded guitar sound that makes you check your speakers are OK. 

Andy Bell's covers EP Untitled Film Stills contains four covers- Our Last Together is an after hours beauty, impressionistic, woozy and moving. Well, it moves me. 

The Liminanas featured in last week's mix and they're back today with a song from this year's album Faded. Ou Va La Chance is a cover of a Francois Hardy song, closing the album in fine style.

The Vendetta Suite are from Belfast and their 2021 album The Kempe Stone Portal is packed with electronic, acid house, Balearic and cosmische sounds plus this slowed down, electronics and feedback rumble version of Bo Diddley's classic (also covered by The Mary Chain back in the 80s). The Vendetta Suite's Gary Irwin goes all the way back to David Holmes and Iain McCready's nights at Belfast's Art College in 1990 and has worked with Holmes on and off ever since. 

Fontaines DC's cover of 'Cello Song has featured in at least three previous Sunday mixes- a Nick Drake one, a Fontaines one and an end of 2023 mix. I make no apologies for its re- appearance here. They take Nick Drake's 1969 song, a beautiful poetic song and retune it, turning it into a modern rock 'n' roll thrill with Grian Chatten finding new meaning in Nick's words. Both versions, original and cover, struck me quite profoundly in the time since Isaac' died, these lines in particular...

'For the dreams that came to you when so young
They told of a life where spring is sprung

So forget this cruel world where I belong
I'll just sit and wait and sing my song

But while the Earth sinks to its grave
You sail to the sky on the crest of a wave'

And that's where we're ending today. 

God And Soul

A couple of edits/ remixes of past songs for those of you who are fans of them- I know some people consider some songs to be untouchable and to even attempt an edit or remix is sacrilege. This may be one such case but I love it, a dubbed out, tampered with version of God Only Knows by The Beach Boys from fifteen years ago that resurfaced recently when Brian Wilson made his final voyage...

God Only Knows (Michael Cook Re- Touch)

Much more recent is this Hardway Bros remix of Soul Train by 80s band Swans Way. Sean Johnston often does long and thumpy and this remix is both- eight minutes forty seconds long and filled with acid house drums, sirens and synths, acidic squiggles and the chant of 'it's alright' looped over and over.  

The remix can be purchased here. Sean talks of discovering Swans Way via a performance on Friday night fixture The Tube in 1984 and how they fitted in with he was into at the time- Dexys, The Bunnymen, Prefab Sprout, all of whom had as Sean says 'a sense of outsider glamour'. That live performance on The Tube is a time capsule, a small corner of the 80s captured on film...

Brian Wilson

Brian Wilson’s death at the age of 82 came just days after Sly Stone’s at exactly the same age, another of the giants of the 60s departing from the stage. And there’s no doubt Brian Wilson was among the giants of that decade, the pop culture decade that played such a huge part in creating the world that we live in. Brian Wilson’s genius on those recordings the Beach Boys made in the 1960s is pretty much beyond compare. By the age of 21 he was producing mini- symphonies, elevating pop music (itself only a decade old) into an artform. His musical genius is evident in his songwriting, his skills at arrangement (his brothers' and bandmates' harmonies, the cream of LA's session musicians and entire orchestras), and his production (Good Vibrations, splicing together different recordings, the weirdly smooth but out of kilter psychedelic pop of songs like Surf’s Up and ‘Til I Die, the phased, magical sound of Feel Flows written by his brother Carl, the spooked eeriness of In My Room).  
Good Vibrations is a hymn to teenage emotions, love and lust as religion and mystery, something unknowable, the ultimate 60s pop song with theremin and harmonies, the most expensive single ever recorded at the time- and worth every cent.

'I don't know where but she sends me there...'

Good Vibrations

He had another side to his genius too. Brian Wilson grew up in Inglewood and Hawthorne, those south Los Angeles suburbs that grew as the city sprawled in the 20th century, post- war America's economic boom fueling mass expansion of the cities, rows and rows of identical houses with driveways and gardens and picture windows. His father was a brute, physically and emotionally abusing Brian and his brothers Carl and Dennis. Despite those domestic difficulties Brian grew up in post war California, the place at the centre of the most advanced consumer society in history, a utopia where every (white) family owned their own perfect home, where everyone had a well-paid job for life, where everyone owned a TV and a car, where the shops were always full and the ocean was always blue, where the 20th century dream was a reality. Brian knew, and you can hear it in some of his earliest songs, that there was something wrong with this, that there was a hole in the American Dream, that utopia had an emptiness. The beach, the tan, the perfect smile, the ice cold Coke bottle with a straw, the surf, the girls, the little Deuce Coupe, the endless sunset and forever summer- it wasn’t the answer. 

In 1963, following a run of singles most of which celebrated surfing, The Beach Boys released Be True To Your School. What could be more wholesome than that?

Flip the disc over and there’s Brian’s first real moment of fragility, the melancholy that emanates from much of his work, and maybe a sign of the mental health problems that affected him all his adult life. In My Room is an aching plea for solitude, a song about wanting to be away from the world and although the lyrics suggest his room is a place of safety, the minor key eerie beauty of the song suggests something else.  

In My Room

You’re So Good To Me, California Girls, Don’t Worry Baby, Wouldn’t It Be Nice, God Only Knows, Caroline No, I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times, I Know there’s An Answer/ Hang Onto Your Ego… all these songs have that at their core, a sadness, a searching quality, an answer to a question that you don't want to ask and can't be found.

You're So Good To Me

This melancholy and emptiness inside Brian Wilson- no amount of 20th century consumerism can fill it and as Brian discovered LSD couldn’t fill it either. Nor could religion. Pet Sounds is a sumptuous, perfect pop album and also the sound of a man welling up, his eyes filled with tears but he’s not sure why. 

In 1968 Brian invented pop culture’s first real moment of nostalgia, nostalgia for the early 60s, the desire to get back to a pre- Kennedy assassination, pre- Vietnam world where everything was simpler. ‘It’s automatic when I talk to old friends/ The conversation turns to girls/ We knew and their hair was long and soft/ And the beach was the place to be… let’s get back together and do it again’.  

And then in 1971 called time on the whole thing...

Surf's Up

In the 70s he struggled with mental and physical health problems. The other Beach Boys filled his absence with their own songwriting but he could still create absolute magic, his own version of psychedelia that mixed doo wop and barber shop quartets with 60s pop and tape effects. The albums Sunflower, Surf’s Up and Holland are peppered with Brian’s genius, with otherworldly songs that have a huge emotional power not least Surf’s Up, Sail On, Sailor and ‘Til I Die. There were various comebacks, upheavals, arguments, battles and re- unions, ill health and moments of resurrection. I never saw him play live but know people who did and who talk about it in terms of religious experience. A diagnosis of dementia in early 2024 meant that Brian's death was not unexpected but even so, what a loss.

'Til I Die

'I'm a cork on the ocean/ Floating over the raging sea/ How deep is the ocean?'
He was a one off in many, many ways. RIP Brian Wilson. Sail on.

I Know So Many People Who Think They Can Do It Alone

Today's post comes from the box of CDs that have come cover mounted on music magazines over the years. I scooped this one up a while ago, and wasn't sure that I'd ever even listened to it- and it contains two recent Bagging Area postees in shape of Saint Etienne and The Liminanas. The CD came free with Mojo in June 2012, a Beach Boys/ Pet Sounds cover story with articles on Rufus Wainwright, My Bloody Valentine, Sandy Denny, Buzzcocks and Michael Kiwanuka all also trailed on the cover along with the return of Public Image Limited and (gulp) Rush. The free CD is Pet Sounds related.

It's more than related, it's a bespoke re- recording of Pet Sounds in full with Saint Etienne, Magnetic North, The Sand Band, Tim Burgess, Jeffrey Lewis, The Neil Cowley Trio, Tom McRae, The Flaming Lips, The Liminanas, Jodie Marie, Gaz Coombes, Human Don't Be Angry, Here We Go Magic and Superimposers. Some of these names mean as little to me now as they did in 2012. 

Pet Sounds is such a heavyweight, canonical album but with such a lighter than air sound that I guess it could be difficult to know how to go about doing a cover one of its thirteen teenage symphonies, Brian Wilson's beautiful melodic songs, those sing song vocals and Tony Asher's perfectly weighed words, lyrics that stand as some kind of mid- 60s poetic pop highpoint. Many of the artists take the standard route and stay pretty faithful to the source material. Saint Etienne open up with Wouldn't It Be Nice...

Wouldn't It Be Nice 

It's very sugary, the first minute or so just Sarah's voice and some backing vocals. The band come in, easy listening style before building into a bit of a 60s swirl. 

Tim Burgess, at that point releasing his excellent Oh No I Love You solo album, covers Don't Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder), acoustic guitar, a ton of reverb, and musical box melodies- pretty, also very faithful to the original. The fade out and ending is lovely. 

Don't Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder)

The Neil Cowley Trio (who I've featured before in remixed form) cover Let's Go Away For A While, modern jazz style, piano and rattling snare drum. 

Let's Go Away For A While

The Flaming Lips come along to rip things up a bit, the ones who don't hand in a standard cover, but go with distorted guitars, a psychedelic haze and wobbling synths, Wayne warbling the famous words, 'I may not always love you/ But as long as there are stars above/ You never need to doubt it/ God only knows what I'd be without you...' A lovely, frazzled, drift towards the centre of the sun. 

God Only Knows

The Liminanas, French psyche/ beat duo take on I Know There's An Answer, with authentic 60s groove and heavily accented vox- they sound like they're having fun, dropping out in the middle and then thundering back in and adding what sounds like a theremin twanging away. Hang on to your ego. 

 I Know There's An Answer

V.A. Saturday

Don Letts is a bit of a various artists compilation guru- the man who introduced the punks to reggae, who ran Acme Attractions clothes shop on King's Road, who filmed The Clash and then became integral to Big Audio Dynamite, who managed The Slits, and who made The Punk Rock Movie and Westway To The World. He put together two compilations for Heavenly back at the start of the 21st century (the Dread Meets B- Boys Downtown one I featured a couple of Saturdays ago and his Dread Meets Punk Rockers Uptown which pulled together the 7" singles he played at The Roxy between December 1976 and April 1977). 

In 2021 Don compiled an album for the Late Night Tales label and series. Late Night Tales is a rich seam of V.A. compilations in itself. Don's Late Night Tales, Version Excursion, is a tribute to the sound systems and sound clashes, to the music of Jamaica, the Jamaican diaspora and bass culture. It's also a compilation with a sense of humour, a celebration of the unusual cover version, an alternate history of rock 'n' roll with a dub perspective. 

The Beach Boys' Caroline No is for many the apex of mid 60s pop, the heartbreaker that closes Pet Sounds, the song that seems to foretell the end of innocence, the Kennedy assassination and the death of the American Dream, the end of the 60s, Vietnam, Nixon, Altamont, anything you want really... Maybe it is just the words of a man disappointed that his girlfriend has cut her hair short. 'Where did your long hair go? Where is the girl I used to know?'. It's not a song that naturally suggests a Lover's Rock cover but Zoe Devlin Love and Tim Hutton make it their own.

Caroline, No

Sixteen Tons, a coalminer's song written by Merle Travis but made best known in the Tennessee Ernie Ford version from 1955. It was a Clash favourite, a tour bus favourite and gave its name to a 1980 tour. 'You move sixteen tons and what do you get?/ Another day older and deeper in debt'. This dub cover is by OBF.

Sixteen Tons Of Dub

On his Late Night Tales Don finds the sound system spirit all over the place- Love Will Tear Us Apart, Black Box Recorder's cover of Uptown Top Ranking, covers of White Rabbit and Lost In The Supermarket- and also in this by the man himself as The Rebel Dread, a cover of Big Audio Dynamite's E=MC2 with Gaudi and Emily Capell, with the film samples re- created, and Mick's song turned into a skank...

E=MC2

Forever

The grief that we've been feeling since Isaac died at the end of November last year has been all consuming but it also has been shifting a little as the months have passed. Sometimes now it's an ever present but lower level thing, a heaviness or a dull ache, which is liveable with and different from the sheer, raw, physical pain it was back in the spring. There were days back then when functioning was an act of survival. Now it- the grief, the loss- underpins everything but isn't at front all the time. It comes back with a vengeance sometimes, with a force that can leave me feeling like I've been winded and as if I actually have to catch my breath for a moment. One unexpected trigger or thought can be overwhelming. Occasionally recently I've been in meetings or at events and I catch myself wondering what I'm doing there when everything has changed beyond recognition for us. But I suppose the truth is that the world does go on and the sun still comes up and normality (whatever that is) does have to be restored. We can go out, we can talk and laugh and enjoy things, step outside the grief I guess, but it comes back, ebbing in, almost tidal in the way it moves. I have some further bereavement counselling starting soon which I think will help. We have a daunting autumn ahead. In late November it will be Isaac's birthday and then a week later the first anniversary of his death. Both of them loom over us. The speed at which time has passed and is passing is disconcerting too, as each month ticks by the further away in time he is. We don't know yet what we're gong to do to mark his birthday and the anniversary of his death- I don't think any of us are looking forward to it. Nearer the time we'll work it out. 

We haven't got a gravestone arranged yet either which remains a thing which has to be done but without a deadline. There's something about a stone which is so permanent. The planter and potted flowers that have been marking his grave are ever changing. We've been visiting weekly, more than that sometimes, tidying up and staying for a while. It helps, it keeps him close to us, but it's hard too and it brings the enormity of it flooding back in sometimes. In some ways though, that flood of grief and tears is a good thing, a reminder that while we can attempt to get something of our normal, lives back, he will always be there even though he physically isn't. 

I'm back at work this week. I went back to work in January after Isaac died on reduced hours, only going in to teach my classes. I had a late start some days and left early every day due to my timetable. I had none of my wider whole school responsibilities and this worked I think, helped me establish a routine (even if there were times when I wondered what the fuck I was doing being back at work and dealing with some of the stuff a busy secondary school chucks at you). My classes were all exam classes, GCSE or A level, and I felt I should be there for them. In the summer it was agreed that I would step down from my whole school role and return to be head of department, a much smaller role, lower down the hierarchy (and with the pay cut to go with it). This was much chewed over back in June, caused me a lot of thought, but I think I've made the right decision. But, being back now, full time in a new role, watching other people doing my old role, is taking some getting used to. Being back full time is also another sign of things going back to 'normal' (whatever that is- I'm not sure things will ever be normal again). Being 'back to normal' is another sign that things change, everything moves on and in some ways it doesn't feel right to move on. There's something to talk over and attempt to resolve there. 

These things come together sometimes in a way which is neat and tidy and coincidental. In 1970 The Beach Boys released an album, Sunflower- yesterday's post was a pair of sunflower pictures and a pair of sunflower songs. The Beach Boys' Sunflower was recorded when they were out of fashion, massively out of step with the rock sounds of 1970, post- Woodstock and post- Altamont. They were in massive debt and Brian was at his most erratic and reclusive. It is probably their best post- Pet Sounds album. Two of the songs slipped into my consciousness recently, suggested subliminally maybe by the sunflowers. One of them then hit me good and proper.

Forever was written by Dennis Wilson, a two minutes forty two seconds song of devotion, a ballad and in the words of his brother Brian, 'a rock n roll prayer'. 'Let the love I have for you/ Live in your heart/ And beat forever' they boys sing, harmonies ascending and soaring. The song floats away with the lines, 'So I'm goin' away/ But not forever/ I gotta love you anyway/ Forever'. 

Forever

Half An Hour Of Yo La Tengo

New Jersey three-piece Yo La Tengo make a very particular kind of US indie rock- their sound comes from the New York traditions of 60s folk, CBGBs punk, angular post punk and The Velvet Underground married to the wall of shoegaze feedback. The husband/ wife duo of guitarist Ira Kaplan and drummer Georgia Hubley and bassist James McNew all contribute vocals. Starting out in the mid 80s, in the 90s and 2000s they made several superb albums, filled with the kind of songs that hit a certain spot, an emotive, just out of reach, dewy eyed fuzzed up guitar rock, melodies smothered in noise. 

1993's Painful album, 1995's Electr- O- Pura and 1997's I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One are their high watermarks. In 2000 they released And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside- Out, the record that saw the music press catch up with them, at the exact point they slowed down, turned the amps down and created a much softer sound. Since then they've released a further seven albums, meandering between the differing points of US underground indie. 

I saw them play at The Roadhouse in Manchester, a basement venue on the edge of the Northern Quarter that closed its doors to bands for the last time in 2015. Today it's a restaurant. The internet tells me the gig was 9th November 1997 and who am I to disagree. I'm pretty sure this is correct, '97 (pre- kids for me, touring to promote I Can Hear The Heart...) but don't remember it being November, it seemed like the end of summer in my memory but maybe that's just the YLT sound. They played a dozen songs, the wondrous Autumn Sweater included (a song I never get tired of) and encored with an unrehearsed version of Borstal Breakout and spine tingling covers of However Much I've Lied (Gram Parsons and Emmy Lou Harris) and Speeding Motorcycle (Daniel Johnson) before a ear splitting, amp bursting Big Day Coming. One of those gigs in a small, sweaty, dimly lit basement that lives long in the memory. 

Half An Hour Of Yo La Tengo

• Autumn Sweater
• From A Motel 6
• Big Day Coming
• Sugarcube
• Tom Courtenay
• Here To Fall
• Stockholm Syndrome
• Little Honda

Autumn Sweater, Sugarcube, Stockholm Syndrome and their cover of The Beach Boys Little Honda are all from '97's I Can hear The Heart Beating As One, a sixteen song double vinyl album that is one of the 90s unsung guitar peaks. Autumn Sweater, with it's dry, woody drum intro and heartstring tugging descending organ chords, and Ira's thin, enervated vocal, is beautiful as I said before. 'When I heard the knock at the door/ I couldn't catch my breath/ Is it too late to call this off?' he sings, 'We could slip away/ Wouldn't that be better/ Me with nothing to say/ And you in your autumn sweater'. A film scene in a few lines. 

From A Motel 6 and Big Day Coming are from Painful (which isn't far behind I Can hear the Heart Beating As One, a superb self contained album that seems to summarise a world). There are two versions of Big Day Coming on Painful, a quieter, hushed one led by a droney organ that opens the record and then a noisy, amps and pedals turned up one- the one in this mix is the latter one. Tom Courtenay, which starts with the line 'Julie Christie/ The rumours are true' sung over a wall of fuzz, is from Elect- O- Pura. Here To Fall is from 2009's Popular Songs, an album that had noise and atmosphere plus strings. 

Yo La Tengo is Spanish for 'I have it!', from a story connected to a baseball team in 1962 and confusion between team members who spoke English but no Spanish or vice versa.

We Can't Wait Til June

If you're going to do a cover, do it like this- rip it to shreds with volume and feedback and stick an American TV preacher over the end with the sound of breaking glass.

Surfin' USA

What A Feeling

A song from 1990's Four To The Floor e.p. where Manchester's A Certain Ratio returned to the dancefloor. Good Together is possibly my favourite ACR song- it opens with a vocal sample (Lou Reed) before a 303 kicks in, the song takes over, the Beach Boys get referenced and Bernard Sumner and Shaun Ryder give backing vocal assistance too. I never get bored of this.

Good Together

Hang On To Your Detuned Guitars

Sonic Youth do their Sonic Youth thing to I Know There's An Answer, a song off The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds, which as everyone knows is one of the greatest albums since blah blah. This is pretty good actually, nicely ramshackle.

I Know There's An Answer started life as a song called Hang On To Your Ego, which some members of the Beach Boys refused to sing claiming it was hippy nonsense. Which it probably was. Doesn't make them right to make Brian go and change it though does it?

I Know There's An Answer

Carry Me Home Twice

And here's the original. Everyone knows the story of Dennis Wilson- the only Beach Boy who could surf, good looking drummer, fell in with Charles Manson, lost much of the 70s to drink and drugs, made a great lost album, drowned. Carry Me Home, a lament for a dead soldier in Vietnam, was an out-take, never officially released. Dennis' vocal is wracked with pain and sandblasted by coke and cigarettes. His great lost album Pacific Ocean Blue was re-released a while back and is well worth getting even though it can take a bit of getting into, but give me Dennis over re-recorded versions of Smile and Beach Boys copyist bands any day of the week.

carry_me_home original.mp3