The Flightpath Estate At The Social

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This was last Saturday night at The Social where Acid House Chancers hosted a tribute to Andrew Weatherall on what would have been his 63rd birthday with a line up spread across the venue's two floors. 

The Flightpath Estate had been asked to play a few months ago and the prospect of playing The Social was pretty exciting. The Social is on Little Portland Street, just north of Oxford Street and a stone's throw from Soho. Dan and Martin couldn't make it and Mark was also playing as Rude Audio, so me and Baz travelled south to represent on the decks. We were on downstairs, a club space with a dancefloor, DJ booth and bar area. When I arrived there were already a good number of people downstairs, Stuart D. Alexander at the decks and Jenny Leamon taking over from 5.15 pm. Jenny had a crowd up and dancing before 6 pm, something that caused me some pre- gig nerves with visions of clearing the floor, playing the wrong tunes and various technical mistakes all running through my mind. 

I shouldn't have worried. I got the obligatory minor technical fuck up out of the way early on and then we were off and in a groove. As the room filled up the energy levels kept rising, more people arrived to dance with some familiar faces from gigs at The Golden Lion, and it was a total blast- one of those times when you're completely caught in the moment and wish you could revisit, soak up and enjoy. It just flew by. 

                                             

This was the scene looking out from the booth- red lights, dry ice, a blur of dancers... the most mayhem we've ever caused on a dancefloor. Alex Knight, formerly of Sabresonic and Fat Cat records and the Sabres Of Paradise tour DJ, took over from us, playing a seamless set with some Weatherall and Sabres inspired mid- 90s techno. 

Our set wasn't recorded but I've recreated it since and it's available to download below or you can find it at The Flightpath Estate's Mixcloud is you prefer to stream. What a night we had. 

The Flightpath Estate At The Social

• The Light Brigade: Shuffle The Deck
• SOP: Ysaebud (From The Vaults)
• Bim Sherman: World Dub
• The Clash: Ghetto Defendant
• Coyote ft Daniel Gidlund: Butterflies
• Paul Weller: Kosmos (Lynch Mob Bonus Beats)
• New Order: Your Silent Face
• Doves: Kingdom Of Rust (Prins Thomas Diskomiks)
• Mark Lanegan: Ode To Sad Disco
• Le Carousel: We're All Gonna Hurt
• Unloved: Turn Of The Screw
• Fontaines DC: A Hero's Death (Soulwax Remix)
• Bedford Falls Players: Fool's Gold- en
• The Pogues: A Rainy Night In Soho

The Light Brigade is David Holmes and guests/ collaborators. On Shuffle The Deck it's former Swordsman Keith Tenniswood and a floor shaking, civil rights leader sampling tune, opening with a rousing speech- 'It's time for a new course, a new coalition, a new leadership... somebody gotta rise above race, rise about sex... Don't cry 'bout what you don't have, use what ya got... Our time has come!', and after several minutes of bass- led oompty boompty finishing with Andrew's musings on acid house as gnostic ceremony, music, coloured lights and smoke.

SOP was Sabres Of Paradise, a one off, one sided 7" single from 1996 with a righteous vocal sample from Count Ossie and Mystic Revelation Of Rastafari- 'Ever since I was a youth/ I've always been searching for the truth'. 

Bim Sherman and Adrian Sherwood's Ghetto Dub album came out in 1988 and due to all kinds of legal complications over the late Bim Sherman's back catalogue has remained out of print. A German label have unlocked some of the problems and re- pressing of Ghetto Dub is out shortly on Week- End Records. 

Ghetto Defendant is from Combat Rock, The Clash and Allen Ginsburg rocking out in dub reggae style, Strummer lamenting the drug addiction and heroin pity that prevents civil resistance'. Paul Simonon's bassline and Topper's drum keep the song grounded in reggae/ dub groove. A late Clash classic. 

Coyote's Butterflies is a moment of Balearic calm, from a forthcoming 12" with vocals by Daniel Gidlund. Last Saturday night it slowed things down a little and gave the dancers a breather.  

Playing at The Social was a big deal. In the 90s I'd read about the first Heavenly Social nights at The Albany pub, accounts in the music press of exhilarating music and wanton debauchery, Weatherall, The Chemical Brothers, Tim Burgess, the Heavenly and Creation crews, a cast of thousands. One of those accounts was of people flipping out to Andrew playing Brendan Lynch's version of Paul Weller's Kosmos, a dub/ trip hop/ jazz noise fest that scrambled minds as it squawked and ricocheted on a Sunday evening. I'd been to The Social on Little Portland Street before but only as a punter so to actually take to the decks was a big moment. Playing Kosmos was a nod to all of that. 

New Order's Your Silent Face is one of the great New Order songs and therefore one of the great songs. It provoked a few moments of emotion on Saturday night, Hooky's bass, those one finger keyboard notes and everyone waiting for Bernard's kiss off last line 'So why don't you piss off'. It was released in 1983 on Power, Corruption And Lies and is one of those New Order songs that really should have been a single, had New Order in the 80s operated along the lines other less obtuse bands at more conventional record companies did. 

Doves' Kingdom Of Rust remixed by Scandi- disco legend Prins Thomas is one of those tunes that always gets people asking what it is (or Shazaming it on their phones). A hypnotic, locked in groove, bass and drums circling, guitars picking out little melody lines and then sweeping strings joining in with Jimi's vocals- glorious Mancunian melancholy. 

Mark Lanegan's Ode To Sad Disco is a New Order- esque song from man usually more associated with grunge and gnarly blues rock. The synths and guitars are heavenly and Mark's imagery is memorable- subterranean eyes, the factory line, a mountain of nails, a white horse that drowned on parade, an Arcadian twist and a hollow headed morning all stand out. The 'mountain of nails' mentioned in the second verse links rather nicely to the 'kingdom of rust' and 'ocean of trust' in the Doves song too I've just noticed. 

Le Carousel's The Humans Will Destroy Us is already one of 2026's best and most prescient albums and We're All Gonna Hurt is its emotional centre and heartbeat, a Giorgio Morodor via Belfast acid house banger, dance music that is up and happy but sad and broken. 'Sooner or later/ We're all gonna hurt'.

Unloved's Turn Of The Screw came out on 2022's The Pink Album, David Holmes' beat group joined by Raven Violet for a 1960s in the 2020s song with a philosophy and attitude to admire. 

A Hero's Death was from Fontaines DC's second album and was remixed by Soulwax in 2021, the clanging guitars replaced by stripped back Balearic dance- cowbell and bass- with Grian Chatten's Dublin street poetry riding on top. 

Fools Gold- en is by Berkshire's Bedford Falls Players, a crowd pleasing mashing together of The Stone Roses and Rockers Revenge that hits all the spots and really gathers pace in its last few minutes, the bass and drums tumbling and thumping, a looped Reni and Mani doubling and powering on. 

Finishing our set with A Rainy Night In Soho, just a few hundred yards north of Soho, felt right. A Rainy Night In Soho is from the 1986 Poguetry In Motion EP, one of Shane MacGowan's most loved songs that ends with one of his best verses- 'Now the song is nearly over/ We may never find out what it means/ Still there's a light I hold before me/ You're the measure of my dreams/ The measure of my dreams'. 

Forty Minutes Of Adrian Sherwood

Adrian Sherwood's career in music dates back more than four decades. You can dip into it at point since he started producing, mixing and making records in the early 80s and not be disappointed- there is no weak spot, no off period, no loss of quality; everything he touches is worth hearing and much of it is music of the very highest calibre. Various people have spoken about watching him in the studio, using the mixing desk as an instrument, throwing sound around the channels, pushing faders up and down, his use of echo and space and reverb creating music from somewhere else, inspired by Jamaican dub but identifiably British too. Through his label On U Sound he has released hundreds of records, Sherwood's golden touch for sound, space and rhythm all over many of them, a man with a sound that is always moving forward, always modern. As with The Fall a few Sundays ago, I could sit down a do another two or three Sherwood mixes without any bother at all- what is in this mix is just a selection of Sherwood recordings, productions and remixes. 

Forty Minutes Of Adrian Sherwood

• Whirlpool Dub
• Nocturne (Adrian Sherwood Remix)
• Acid Tabla (Adrian Sherwood Remix)
• I'm A Winner
• Dub For The Spirits
• Haunting Ground Dub
• Ju- 87
• Long As I Can See The Light (Adrian Sherwood's Dub Lightning)
• Bless Those
• The Way Of The World

Whirlpool Dub is from this year's Reset In Dub, Adrian's reworking in dub style of the entire Reset album, released by Sonic Boom and Panda Bear in 2021. It is one of this year's best albums. The vinyl arrived this week, a December dub treat. 

Mark Lanegan has never sounded darker or more doomy than in Adrian's hands (and that's saying something. Mark made a career out of dark and doomy). This remix came out in 2017 on a Mark Lanegan mini album, Still Life With Roses (Gargoyles Remixes) along with remixes of Beehive by Andrew Weatherall. 

Suns Of Arqa's Acid Tabla EP came out in 2016, produced by Sherwood and Wadada with the late Style Scott on drums (of Dub Syndicate). The bassline, tabla and rocking rhythms are all spot on. The original version of Acid Tabla was on Suns Of Arqa's 1980 album Revenge Of The Mozambites, Adrian credited as Adran Riddims.  

I'm A Winner is one of the standouts on this year's Africa Head Charge album A Trip To Bolgatanga, an album where Adrian and Bonjo shift the African Head Charge sound yet again. When they set out with AHC back in 1980 the idea was create 'a vision of a psychedelic Africa'. They made several definitive albums between 1980 and 1990, dub, sound FX, samples and African drums fused in a mystical sound. In 1990 they released their pinnacle, the mighty Songs Of Praise. In 2020 an album of extras including unreleased tracks from Songs Of Praise came out including Dub For The Spirits.

Bim Sherman became one of the key figures of the On U Sound collective, a man with a golden voice. Haunting Ground was on 1986's album of the same name, an album which featured Dub Syndicate and Roots Radics. The dub mix coming out on one of the pair of CD compilations titled Sherwood At The Controls. Bim died of cancer in 2000. His 1996 album Miracle is one of the lost gems of the 90s, songs from his back catalogue given a Bollywood makeover, re- recorded with Indian strings and Talvin Singh's percussion. 

Adrian dubbed out Primal Scream's entire Vanishing Point album, released as Echo Dek on Creation in 1997. Ju- 87 is a dub version of Stuka, a fairly uncompromising track in its original form. Adrian adds doorbells, and pulls rattling echo, deep bass, ricocheting bleeps and a scuzzy, screwed up dub to the fore. 

Long As I Can See The Light was a 1998 single by Monkey Mafia, released on Heavenly, a cover of a 1970 Creedence Clearwater Revival song. Monkey Mafia's cover is a lovely late night, downtempo cover. Adrian bends it into a new space. 

Bless Those is from Pay It All Back Vol. 4, released in 1993. Pay It All Back is a long running series of compilations/ samplers dating back to 1985. Little Annie has been part of the On U family since the early 90s, with David Harrow, Doug Wimbish and Skip McDonald all contributing music to Annie's vocals. A dense sound, distorted horns and dub FX.  

The Way Of The World is by LSK and Sherwood, a track on Pay It All Back Vol. 7 from 2019. LSK is British singer/MC Leigh Stephen Kenny, born in Kent and now in Leeds. This track is a suitably dubbed out way to close this mix, two and a half minutes of digital dub, noise and samples, unease and LSK's honeyed vocal.  

The Sun's Tolling Bell

Mark Lanegan's Blues Funeral, a 2012 album contained a few songs where he broke away from the gnarly post- grunge, industrial/ blues rock that usually accompanied his voice- a voice that sounded like it was carved from granite cliffs and blasted in an foundry- and moved into synthpop territory. On Ode To Sad Disco he did this so well, so perfectly, that it made me wonder why he didn't pursue this more often. 

Ode To Sad Disco

It must be seen as at least partly a homage to 80s New Order, happy/ sad dance music with sequenced basslines, descending synths and shimmering keys (plus a guitar line weaving its way through). On top of this celestial synthpop Mark sings of subterranean eyes, hollow headed mountains, a white horse that drowned on parade, diamond headed serpents, mountains of dust, Arcadian twists and other equally biblical sounding imagery. The drum machine kicks on, the synths shine, the guitar rings and Mark concludes, almost like Bernard does in Temptation, 'here I have seen the light' (in fact you can sing 'oh, it's the last time' quite easily over the end of Ode To Sad Disco). Glorious stuff- dancing with tears in our eyes as Ultravox put it. 

Lightning Coming Out of The Speakers

The news came through on Tuesday night that Mark Lanegan had died aged 57 at his home in Ireland. Mark Lanegan is one of those people who had been around in one form or another since the early 90s and whose music had come in and out of my musical radar but when I heard him, he often hit really deep. From his grunge band Screaming Trees to his time with Queens Of The Stone Age to his various solo albums and his records duetting with Isobel Campbell he was always a huge presence, especially his voice- sometimes a deep raspy growl, sometimes an emotional soulful baritone- that sounded like a force of nature, vocal chords as old as time. 

It was a voice that told of a life lived too. His recent autobiography is a tale of childhood descent into alcoholism, theft, robbery, heroin addiction, guilt over his role in Kurt Cobain's suicide and his getting clean after an intervention by Courtney Love as well as his continuing adventures in music. He wrote a second book about his near death brush with Covid in 2021. Neither book is for the faint hearted although his description of Liam Gallagher, who he encountered when Screaming Trees toured with Oasis in the 90s, is hilarious, not to mention dismissive of Gallagher Junior. 'Where I was from', Mark writes, 'he [Liam] wouldn't have lasted a week behaving as he did. One day they'd simply disappear, their mangled body discovered years later, haphazardly tossed into a shallow grave somewhere deep in the woods'.

Rather than offer up one song I pulled a few from different albums and put them together into a thirty minute mix, a range of styles and sounds all centred around his voice, that I've titled HOney Just Gets Me Stoned after a vocal line in the remix Andrew Weatherall did of Beehive. Ode To Sad Disco is a particular favourite, a switch in 2012 from writing on the guitar to writing with a drum machine and synth that led to a beautiful and mournful piece of New Order- esque electronics. Snake Song is a cover of a Townes Van Zandt song, Bombed is desolate short song sung with his then wife Wendy. Hit The City is a crunching, distorted industrial blues with co- vocals by PJ Harvey.

R.I.P. Mark Lanegan. 

Honey Just Gets Me Stoned

• Isobel Cambell and Mark Lanegan: Snake Song
• Mark Lanegan Band: Bombed
• Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan: Keep Me In Mind, Sweetheart
• Mark Lanegan Band: Hit The City
• Mark Lanegan: Ode To Sad Disco
• Mark Lanegan: Old Swan (Pye Corner Audio Remix)
• Mark Lanegan: Beehive (Andrew Weatherall Remix)

Old Swan

The Keith Haring exhibition at Tate Liverpool is a worth a visit if you're in the North West of England, a really well put together collection of his work, from his early chalk on paper art to large pieces on tarpaulin and the huge, thirty foot long mural Matrix (a section of which is above). I was a big fan of his cartoon/graffiti/comic book art in the mid to late 80s and seeing it all close up was exciting. Liverpool has changed so much since I was a student there in the late 80s/early 90s, the city centre transformed (like so many other cities) but it also still feels like Liverpool, a city with a definite sense of place and its own culture.

Back in 2017 Mark Lanegan collected the remixes commissioned for his album Gargoyle. Among them were two remixes of Beehive by Andrew Weatherall, a version of Nocturne by Adrian Sherwood and this one by Pye Corner Audio. I must have overlooked this one at the time- when I pulled the record out recently I couldn't recall anything about it which was a mistake- this is dark, electro- noir with Lanegan's voice surrounded by a storm of drums and synths. Old Swan is an inner city part of Liverpool, a mainly streets of terraced houses. I don't know if it has anything to do with Mark Lanegan's Old Swan- coincidence probably.

Old Swan (Pye Corner Audio Remix)

Mark Lanegan has a new album out, Somebody's Knocking, which I haven't heard yet but the reviews are good. Anther one to add to the never ending list.

Double Up

Not one but two new Andrew Weatherall remixes for your enjoyment today. The first, a brooding remix of Mark Lanegan's Beehive from his new record, brooding but shot through with electricity. Lanegan's voice gets fed through an echo unit and there's a nice guitar part half way through before the beat comes back in. Very good indeed.

From the press release- Weatherall says of the remix, “I’ll be honest, when executing a remix usually the first thing to go is the vocal track. There are however exceptions. Mr Lanegan singing ‘lightning coming out of the speakers’ (or let’s face it Mr Lanegan singing full stop) is one of those exceptions.”





The second is a remix of Sydney duo Heart People, fired up breakbeats, whooshing synths, fast paced with a cool vocal. Free download.

Sad Disco

This song would fit really well on a compilation or playlist with the previous two posts (Glass Candy's Warm In The Winter and Forest Fire's Future Shadows)- Mark Lanegan's Ode To Sad Disco (off his lp from this time last year), one of my favourite songs of 2012. I'm not sure I'd have put much money on this grunge survivor recording a convincing, uplifting yet melancholic dance track- but Mark Lanegan did it and did it in some style.

Ode To Sad Disco

Digging Graves, Digging Disco

Mark Lanegan, grunge survivor and scary guy, has a new album out which you should think about getting. Not now, when pay day comes in a week or so. It's got some of the sparse blues his 2004 Bubblegum lp had, and that voice that sounds like gravel but it's also got some fuller rockers and the uptempo drum machine and keyboard song Ode To Sad Disco, almost worth the price of admission on it's own. Seriously, grunge-disco, it's really good. While you're waiting for payday listen to this one.

The Gravedigger's Song

Edit- Ode To Sad Disco; listen here at Soundcloud. The best new thing I've heard this year.

I'm Not Scared Of The Dark

I hardly ever listen to this kind of thing anymore. I suppose that in the early 00s there was so much good alt-country/noir/whatever you want to call it, after I while I just got a bit bored of the whole sound. Isobel Campbell and ex-Sreaming Tree Mark Lanegan do it so well and three albums later it's not running out of steam. From last year's album Hawk this is Come Undone, and it's totally mesmerising, with brilliant backing and the voices wrap themselves around each other beautifully. Plus, it still amuses me that a former member of Belle And Sebastian is mucking about with Mark Lanegan, and is telling him what to do.

Come Undone.mp3