Time Takes A While

Three years ago today we buried Isaac at Dunham cemetery. The recent anniversaries- his 26th birthday on 23rd November, the third anniversary of his death on the 3oth November- were heavy and gruelling, the weeks of build up as they loomed over us and then the days themselves. The anniversary of his funeral is a bit different, it doesn't feel as heavy somehow although I had a couple of twinges yesterday when it bumped up against my emotions. 

I was down at the cemetery on Sunday, just popping by to say hello and check the flowers were all still ok. It struck me that we've developed all sorts of little acts of remembrance in the three years since his funeral. The weekly visits to see him (and now when we go it doesn't feel like we're going to see him- at first it felt awful, a bottomless hole of grief, standing in a wind and rain blasted field staring at his plot, but the more we've been the more it's changed): the replacing of the flowers; the way that when they're in season I always want to have sunflowers in the vase next to him; the bringing back of trinkets and mementos from holidays for his grave; the association with the number 23; the thing with robins I wrote about last week; the busses that go past on the road in the distance; even the electricity pylons that cross overhead very close by and the pigs that live in the field behind the cemetery have become part of the whole. When we go to the grave I always touch his name on the headstone before leaving. All these have become mixed up in his death and in his grave. I'm not a religious person but I understand why people light candles in cathedrals. Acts of remembrance and little rituals that bring some kind of comfort. 

We played some songs for him at the funeral- North Country Boy by The Charlatans as we entered the chapel, You And Me Song by The Wannadies (Eliza's choice), Sketch For Summer by Durutti Column as a slideshow of photographs of him played, and then at the graveside Race For The Prize by The Flaming Lips and the Beatless mix of Sabres Of Paradise's Smokebelch. 

Isaac's Funeral Mix

I can listen to them all now, something I wasn't sure I'd be able to do three years ago- You And Me Song has the capacity to move me to tears and North Country Boy still packs a powerful punch but when I hear them I want to listen to them play in full, I don't reach for the off button. Three years on from that day it does feel like a lot of time has passed while seeming like it was just yesterday too. 

In 2023 Daniel Avery followed his Ultra Truth album with a seven track collection of B-sides and bonus material which included this beautiful piece of weightless ambient techno...

Time Takes A While

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

Bank Holiday Monday Long Song

Nine minutes of wide eyed joy and wonder from the combined talents of The Flaming Lips and Scott Hardkiss should be more than enough of a way to celebrate not just a bank holiday but a week off work for me too. The Flaming Lips cemented their status as one of the early 21st century's best bands with the release of Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots in summer 2002, an album which if described to someone who'd never heard it (or of the band) would sound ridiculous...

It's an eleven song album, psychedelic, space pop which starts out with a world where a young girl Yoshimi is engaged in a life or death battle with some evil machines, giant pink robots. The story of Yoshimi and her fight is dealt with on the first four songs and then the album turns into a metaphysical/ philosophical record with the band taking electronics, hip hop drums and acoustic guitars to create some achingly beautiful, lush, experimental and incredibly memorable songs that deal with life and death, ruminations on beauty and mortality, physics, science fiction, emotion and suffering, ending with a soaring neo- classical piece called Approaching Pavonis Mons By Balloon (Pavonis Mons is a volcano on Mars). It is an album that can make you laugh and make you cry. 

See? That doesn't do it justice at all does it? Or capture what Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots actually sounds like or what it feels like. 

The Flaming Lips followed the album with several singles and EPs. In 2003 they released Fight Test, a seven track EP led by the title track and covers of Kylie's Can't Get You Out Of My Head, Beck's The Golden Age and Radiohead's Knives Out, a song for Jack White, another Lips song and this remix of Do You Realize?? by Scott Hardkiss.

Do You Realize?? (Scott Hardkiss Floating In Space Mix)

Scott Hardkiss stretches Do You Realize?? out for over nine minutes, the song's cosmic wonder underpinned by throbbing bass and rackety machine drums, piano, bells, heavenly choirs and Wayne Coyne's vocal front and centre. 

The lyrics are something else aren't they? Again, written down they could look trite or like the kind of positivity affirmations one sees on social media but Wayne's voice gives so much emotional heft and conviction that they feel like the truth being given courtesy of a kooky 21st century Moses.

'Do you realize? That you have the most beautiful face? 

Do you realize? We're floating in space

Do you realize? That happiness makes you cry

Do you realize? That everyone you know some day will die'

All these things are true. Happiness can make you cry, it happens all the time. Everyone you know some day will die, time is short, we're here for an instant. Whenever I look at photos of people from a century ago, those people and their lives, the stories you can see in their eyes, the battles they faced and the things they felt- I feel this and think of Wayne's line, all those people, they're all gone. 

Wayne doesn't just hit us with these four lines though, revealing the vastness of space and time, the bigger than us nature of the universe. He follows them with something to do about feeling infinitesimally tiny.

And instead of saying all of your goodbyes

Let them know you realize that time goes fast

It's hard to make the good things last

You realize the sun don't go down

It's just an illusion caused by the world spinning round

These would be just more Instagram positivity quotes in the wrong hands but Wayne Coyne is the right pair of hands. Scott Hardkiss is too, allowing the remix to serve the song and ending with Wayne, as the song should, his isolated voice gasping and singing 'Do you realize?'.

I read an article last week that made me think of this song, an article with this headline- 'Euclid telescope spies rogue planets floating free in the Milky Way'. Apparently astronomers have discovered dozens of planets that have broken free from the gravitational hold of their suns and are floating freely, inside the Orion nebula, a giant cloud of dust and gas, 1500 light years away. The article says they are 'destined to drift through the galaxy unless they encounter a star that pulls them into orbit'. 

Do you realize? We're floating in space. 

Isaac's Mix

This is Isaac's name on the Covid memorial in London, and his heart too, recently renovated by a friend. It was his funeral a year ago today. The recent anniversaries of his birthday and a week later the first anniversary of his death weighed very heavily on us for weeks before and there was quite a hangover after too. The anniversary of the funeral hasn't had the same effect. 

The day of the funeral itself, a year ago,was awful- the waiting for the hearse, the drive to the crematorium, the wait I had to stand up and read out the eulogy I'd written, the walk to the grave... all of it. It's not something I'd ever wish to live through again. 

The wake afterwards was a blur. I spoke to some people and barely to others. We found ourselves asking each other, 'was so- and- so at the wake? Did I speak to them?', for days and weeks afterwards. The number of people who attended either or both events was testament to Isaac and the effect he had on people. The friend who wrote the epitaph on his heart at the Covid memorial got it exactly right. 

These are the five songs we played at the funeral, sequenced into one mix in the order that they were played. They've all changed for me since that day, the songs and their meanings shifting in ways big and small. I guess that was inevitable. 

Isaac's Mix

• The Charlatans: North Country Boy
• Durutti Column: Sketch For Summer
• The Wannadies: You & Me Song
• The Flaming Lips: Race For The Prize
• The Sabres Of Paradise: Smokeblech II (Beatless Mix)

Back in 1998 a friend, Neil, bought Isaac a copy of North Country Boy on 7" when he was born and it's a song I've associated with him ever since. Isaac was after all a north country boy. When we walked into the chapel as the drums and slide guitar kicked in I did briefly shudder and think to myself, 'Oh shit, what have we done, I'll never get through this song'. Some of the lines have an extra resonance now. You can probably work out which ones. In September this year I saw The Charlatans play it as part of their hits set at New Century Hall in Manchester. Quite a moment. 

Vini Reilly's music has been part of my life since about 1987 and I wanted some of it played at the funeral. There was a section in the service where a slideshow of photos of Isaac played and Sketch For Summer was the accompanying music, Vini's wonderful guitar and Martin Hannett's production and synths filling the room. Originally I wanted to use Otis but the sampled vocal, 'another sleepless night for me' was too much. 

You & Me Song was Eliza's choice and I can't hear the song now without crying. She has a print of the lyrics on her wall in her room. It's her song, and his, forever.

Race For The Prize tells of two scientists competing to find an un- named cure, with the pay off line, 'they're just human/ with wives and children'. The strings swoop and swell and it careers to its ending. It's a glorious song, emotional and inspiring. Back at the turn of the millennium my brother- in- law Harvey used to film everything. When we went on family holidays or met up he'd shoot loads of camcorder footage and he'd then edit it into short films with songs over the top. There's loads of footage of Isaac, his cousin Orlan and Eliza being children. In 2002 we went to the north east for a week in August and stayed in a cottage near Alnwick. Isaac had spent the period 1999- 2001 in and out of hospital, including in 2000 a long period of time undergoing two bone marrow transplants. Isaac's transplant was cutting edge, revolutionary stuff, only the second of its kind in the world. It saved his life and gave him the next two decades with us. Two scientists racing for the prize. Harvey's film of Isaac aged three and Orland aged two running around the garden in the sun with Race For The Prize playing, a beautiful coming together of images, music and words stuck with me, and it made sense to play the song at the graveside even if the meaning was unknown to almost everyone there.

Smokebelch II- Weatherall's moment of beauty from 1993. I've lost myself a few times to that song. I will do again I'm sure. 

One Year Ago Today

Isaac died a year ago today, 30th November 2021 at around quarter to two in the afternoon. He was twenty three. When the worst thing that could possibly happen to you has happened, it's difficult to know which way is up. The last few weeks have been really difficult as this day has borne down on us. I go over the events of the last few days of Isaac's life in my head sometimes, reliving them. Earlier this year I suffered some quite extreme flashbacks, which put me back in to the the room with him as he died. It was so quick which has made it more traumatic. Covid came and took him in less than a week. He was out of sorts on his birthday, tested positive for Covid the following day (Wednesday) and then became more unwell until on Saturday evening we phoned an ambulance. They took him into Wythenshawe hospital. On the Monday morning the consultants told us there was nothing they could do, that the Covid was in his lungs and given his weakened immune system there were no drugs that would work, that he would die within the next couple of days. He died the following day, Tuesday. The three of us were there when he went. I was sitting on his bed facing him, holding his hands. The flashbacks, auditory and visual, were often of this moment. I haven't had any since May, something I feel relieved about but it doesn't take much for me to go back to those days and to replay what happened. I'm not sure if it helps or not but as this date has come closer an closer my mind has been going back there more often. 

It's difficult to believe it is already a year since he died when it feels so recent and still feels so raw. The passing of time is a real fucker and dates and anniversaries have been extremely difficult to deal with, mainly something to get over and be done with. Today may prove to be the toughest of them all, the coming to terms with the fact that it's a year now that he's been gone, that it's now over a year since he was in the house with us, living with us. People keep saying that a year really isn't actually very long at all, especially at our age, but still, a year... it baffles me somehow. 

Writing about it all here has helped. I'm sure at times it has been an uncomfortable and difficult read for others and I don't blame anyone who quietly closes the page and goes to read something else. Some people have said it has helped them, to know where we're at or where we're up to. Writing it down and posting it has helped me get my thoughts in order and I think it has worked as a form of therapy. 

We made the decision to have Isaac buried and we're glad we did. Having his grave as somewhere to go has helped. Early on, back in January and February, it was difficult and I liked going, it felt like he was closer to us while we were there, but leaving was tough. It's still very difficult sometimes, standing there can bring home very suddenly the enormity of what has happened and it has the power to floor me, leaves me feeling like I have to catch my breath. But it's comforting too. It's good to go and see that other people have been, that people have taken flowers or left things for him. We still haven't sorted a headstone and I don't feel any particular need to do that in a rush. The planter we filled with flowers has changed as the year has passed. I started photographing it when we visited, keeping a record of it and how it has changed with the seasons. This picture was quite recent, mid- November. There is a road in the distance of that picture- you can't see it but it's there. The road runs between Broadheath (near Altrincham) and the road to Lymm (I've never checked the timetable but I wouldn't think it's a busy or profitable route and I can't imagine there's more than one bus per hour). We try to go to see him at least once a week. Almost every single time we visit, a bus goes past which always makes me smile. Isaac loved public transport and the bus shuttling back and forth between Altrincham and Warrington has begun to feel like a little tribute to him. 

This place started as a music blog in January 2010 but became intertwined with my life from quite early days and Isaac (and Eliza) have featured regularly. This year especially the music and Isaac's death and my/ our grief have become more wrapped up in each other. Here are two songs that have come to mean something to me in the last few weeks, that have become part of Isaac, his death and my grief, and in some way a part of trying to deal with it all.

Ten days ago I posted a forty minute Flaming Lips mix. I knew some of the songs would be affecting, that they might get to me. Do You Realise?? has that power in any circumstances, even without dealing with the death of your child. Race For The Prize has been connected to Isaac for me since very early days. Jesse Fahnestock questioned- quite reasonably- why Fight Test wasn't part of my mix. 

Fight Test

Fight Test definitely should have been included and for a while it was but I took it out. After our conversation I went back to it and some lines really jumped out...

'Cause I'm a man, not a boy/ And there are some things you can't avoid/ You have to face them/ When you're not prepared to face them'

That's a truth right there. There's some lovely imagery in the song too, something to hold on to...

'I don't know where the sunbeams end/ And the starlights begin/ It's all a mystery'

It's funny how the meaning of songs and the way you hear them can change, that they can be one thing at one point in your life and another at another. That's definitely true of Fight Test. My other song for today is this one by Nick Drake...

'Cello Song

A few weeks ago I pulled out a compilation CD from a pile of homemade one that date back years, to listen to in the car. 'Cello Song came on and it worked its magic as I drove. I kept playing it, pressing back, playing it again, pressing back. It's a gorgeous, almost weightless, song, finger picked guitar melodies and deep sonorous cello sweeps wrapping themselves around each other. I've known and loved it for years without ever really noting the words. Like many of Nick Drake's songs, it's poetic and melancholic but there is a tinge in his voice which suggests hope. The words began to come into focus but I had to wait to do an internet search for them to read them in full-

'Strange face, with your eyes
So pale and sincere
Underneath you know well
You have nothing to fear
For the dreams that came to you when so young
Told of a life
Where spring is sprung

You would seem so frail
In the cold of the night
When the armies of emotion
Go out to fight
But while the earth sinks to its grave
You sail to the sky
On the crest of a wave

So forget this cruel world
Where I belong
I'll just sit and wait
And sing my song
And if one day you should see me in the crowd
Lend a hand and lift me
To your place in the cloud'

They struck me hard, left me gasping a little bit and then as I wiped my tears away and read them again, they made me smile. This is never going to leave us and it hurts like nothing I've ever known before, but we have to find a new way to live without him and to find a way to come to terms with the feelings of loss and grief that we have been left with. Isaac will always be with us - and in a funny way I can find him now in places, like in the lines of songs by Nick Drake and Wayne Coyne. 

Forty Minutes Of The Flaming Lips

'The Flaming Lips', it says at Wikipedia, 'are an American psychedelic rock band formed in 1983 from Oklahoma City. I suppose psychedelic rock band covers them but they're much, much more too, they're the sort of band who have an idea- let's come on stage in a giant bubble and roll out over the audience, let's have confetti cannons, and dancing skeletons, let's do a twenty three track album with Miley Cyrus, let's record an album with instrumentals, drum machines and the most gorgeous, existential acoustic guitar pop song of the 21st century- and then just do it. I haven't followed their entire career, there are gaps in my collection but what I have I love. Psychedelic music is, I think, supposed to be expansive- in terms of sound, ambition and minds and Wayne Coyne and the musicians, dancing aliens and skeletons, fellow travellers and merry pranksters are very much on a long trip of expansion and adventure. 

The bulk of the songs here are taken from the trio of albums they recorded between 1999 and 2006 with Dave Fridmann producing. 

Forty Minutes Of The Flaming Lips

• The Observer
• Approaching Pavonis Mons By Balloon (Utopia Planitia)
• Pompeii Am Gotterdammerung
• She Don't Use Jelly
• Silver Trembling Hands
• Ego Tripping At The Gates Of Hell
• The W.A.N.D.
• Race For The Prize
• Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots Part 1
• The Golden Path
• Do You Realise??

The Observer and Race For The Prize are both from 1999's The Soft Bulletin, an album that shifted their sound from alt- rock into something else, a lush, wide eyed, tripped out, expansive, late 20th century Pet Sounds psychedelia. Race For The Prize,a song about two scientists competing to do good for the whole of mankind, is a song that is always associated with Isaac for me for various reasons that I may come back to at some point in the next few weeks.

Approaching Pavonis Mons By Balloon, Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots and Ego Tripping At The Gates Of Hell are all from Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, their 2002 masterpiece, a maybe/ maybe not concept album about a Japanese girl fighting giant robots, space, life and death, mortality, gravity, the precarious nature of existence, love, survival and pretty much everything in between. They do this with a mixture of lighter than air pop songs, instrumentals and electronic/ acoustic melancholic joy, reaching a climax with Do You Realise?? a universal secular hymn to human existence.  

The W.A.N.D. and Pompeii Am Gotterdamerung are from 2006's At war Wit The Mystics. The W.A.N.D. is Black Sabbath at the indie disco, pure exhilaration. W.A.N.D stands for The Will Always Negates Defeat. 

She Don't Use Jelly is a 1993 single, a U.S. indie rock ode to idiosyncrasy. She don't use jelly (jam for those of us in the U.K.)- she uses vaseline. 

Silver Trembling Hands is motorik psyche from their 2009 album Embryonic.

The Golden Path is not a Flaming Lips song but singer Wayne Coyne with The Chemical Brothers, released on Tom and Ed's first greatest hits CD in 2003. Over thumping, pulsing, festival dance music Wayne talks about a meeting with a mysterious spectre, the afterlife and his lack of belief in a heaven and hell, worlds in opposite duality before breaking down at the end and pleading to be forgiven.  

Sun Blows Up Today

There are Flaming Lips songs and albums I love with all my heart and Flaming Lips songs and records that I don't. The last album, Embryonic, didn't appeal to me at all. Previous one, At War With The Mystics, had two or three out-and-out winning songs. Yoshima and the Soft Bulletin are superb from start to finish. Wayne Coyne is interviewed in this month's Mojo and seems to be in the midst of some 50-something crisis but he always comes across as honest, a wide-eyed believer and a man who wants to keep doing something different. Which is good.

There's a new album, The Terror, out in April. Unlike Embryonic it's a concise nine song job, not a seventy-odd minute slog. If you pre-order it you get a bonus song as a download straight away- Sun Blows Up Today. Wayne has described the forthcoming lp as 'bleak and terrifying' but this bonus song sounds like the work of indie-punk chimpanzees on happy pills. Listen at Soundcloud. It's chuffing great. Apparently they performed it at the Superbowl (?) and gave it for use on a car advert(?).

Their 2006 song The W.A.N.D. was a George Bush baiting, Black Sabbath channeling, up, up and away thing of brilliance. Until this week I had never seen the video. Here it is.

The Flaming Lips 'She Don't Use Jelly'

Some wonderful indie-rock nonsense from Oklahoma's Flaming Lips for your Sunday enjoyment, concerning a girl who spreads vaseline on toast, a guy who sneezes into magazines and a woman who washes her hair using tangerines. The band's own website says 'It's a happy little ditty about strange people and their individual idiosynchrasies... with crunching but still harmonious noise', and I can't describe it any better than that.

Tonights World Cup final? I'm not sure I care that much. The Netherlands are effective and not in the habit of losing. Van Bommel seems to be setting some kind of record for committing fouls and getting away with it, while the undoubtedly talented Robben draws as many fouls as possible and rolls over a lot. Espagna play lots of very nice little passing triangles, have the most talented strikers in Europe, and struggle to win every game One-Nil. Neither are exactly setting my heart racing with anticipation. Who knows, maybe we'll get a Four-Three classic.

She Don't Use Jelly.mp3

The Flaming Lips 'The W.A.N.D.'

I saw some of Glastonbury on the TV last weekend, most of the Gorillaz and some other bits and bobs. The reviews have all been pretty negative about Gorillaz. It looked fantastic on the telly, but apparently the Top Shop/Hollyoaks Glastonbury massive wanted a band with more hits and couldn't maintain interest in a band featuring the frontman from Blur, half of The Clash, Mos Def, Bobby Womack,Shaun Ryder, Mark E. Smith, Lou Reed and anyone else who was wandering past and fancied a bash at vocals. Does sound a bit rubbish when what you really wanted was U2 doesn't it? Young people today eh?

At some point I saw the end of The Flaming Lips set, where they played a mind-blowingly great version of their greatest song Do You Realise? and I finally got round to watching the rest of The Flaming Lips' set on the BBC's Glastonbury website last night. For a bunch of drug-crazed, leftwing, middle-aged acid-hippies they may be just about the most entertaining band on the planet. Apart from the sheer quality of the songs (Do You Realise?, She Don't Use Jelly, The Yeah, Yeah, Yeah Song, Yoshimi Battles The Giant Robots etc) they have charisma and presence in spades. Wayne Coyne's gigantic beach ball entrance, confetti, projections and films, random dancers wearing orange, aliens, the lot. I can appreciate that they're not everyone's cup of tea but it was very impressive stuff. The W.A.N.D. was a 2006 download single, that later turned up on their slightly disappointing At War With The Mystics album. It's an anti George W. Bush, anti-war lyric set to a huge riff and crashing drums, like Black Sabbath if they'd actually been any good and had a sense of humour.

10 The W.A.N.D.wma