Oblique Saturdays

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

Last week's Oblique Strategy was this- Towards the insignificant- and my song choices went all existential, Pixies, Julian Cope and Tim Burgess. Suggestions from readers (Ernie, Khayem, JC, Walter and Chris) took in Talking Heads' Road To Nowhere, Nic Roeg's film Insignificance and its soundtrack song by Glenn Gregory and Claudia Brucken, The Indelicates and The Last Significant Statement To Be Made In Rock 'n' Roll, John Martyn's Solid Air, Richard Norris' Music For Healing series, anything by Nick Drake, and Frazier Chorus' Nothing (Land Of Oz Mix). That's as good a playlist about insignificance as we're ever going to assemble. 

Today's card is this- Put in earplugs. 

Which made me laugh out loud when I turned it over. 

Friends of mine attended the recent My Bloody Valentine gig at Factory Aviva Studios in Manchester (I missed out on tickets). They all wore earplugs, all found it deafeningly, unbelievably loud and couldn't tell, despite being confirmed and long time MBV fans, which songs were actually being played. Their account made me regret even more that I missed it in a way. 

You Made Me Realise

The loudest gig I've attended in recent years was Bob Mould at Manchester Academy 2 in March 2019, a gig that in retrospect I should have worn earplugs for. The hearing in my right ear has not been the same since. I wrote about it at the time...

Bob Mould at Manchester Academy 2 on Sunday night, twenty years after I last saw him play there. Back in 1998 he played almost entirely solo stuff, promoting his then new record The Last Dog And Pony Show, with just a Sugar song held back for the encore. This time around, promoting his current new album Sunshine Rock, he plays songs from the last forty years of playing and making records, from their earliest recordings to his latest. Backed by a high kicking bassist and a drummer engaged in a one man war of attrition with his snare drum Bob hits the stage loud and fast and doesn't really let up. His guitar/pedals/twin amp set up makes Bob sound like two or three guitarists and it's loud, really loud, with those crystalline melodies fired off within the sheets of distorted riffs. 

There are few gaps between the songs, no light show to speak of, no projections or backdrop- just songs from the Bob Mould back catalogue. He opens with 2014 song The War and then blasts straight into Sugar's A Good Idea, the bass riff on its own for a few seconds before being submerged in Bob's wall of guitars. Three songs in and we're into I Apologise off Husker Du's 1985 New Day Rising. There is then a liberal smattering of songs from Sunshine Rock, Bob's self-willed optimistic, happy album, an album written in the aftermath of the death of both parents and Husker drummer Grant Hart, songs like Thirty Dozen Roses and Sin King, and highlights from Sugar's 1992 album Copper Blue (Hoover Dam sounds enormous, bigger than the guitars and keyboards of the album version). People around me are adjusting their earplugs. 

Husker Du's 1982 hardcore single In A Free Land has been dusted down and in Trump's wake sounds no less relevant and no less alive. Bob has been unwell in recent days and on antibiotics for a chest infection, not that you'd guess- Sugar's If I Can't Change Your Mind roaring out of the amps, noise plus melodies, punk plus choruses. He pauses three quarters of the way through to thank us for coming and introduce Jason Narducy and Jon Wurster on bass and drums and then its back to business. Something I Learned Today, one of Husker Du's most vital songs, is a ferocious blast, spitting fire and piss and from this point, for the final fifteen minutes or so Bob and band go off setlist, launching into one Husker Du song after another, almost a medley- Chartered Trips, their cover of The Mary Tyler Moore theme Love Is All Around Us, a beautiful and raging Celebrated Summer with Bob stretching out the pause into the guitar picking section at the end, finishing with Makes No Sense At All, the single that paved the way for Pixies and Nirvana to name but two. No encore. Lights on. Ears ringing. Home.

Hoover Dam

Chartered Trips

Neither of those mp3s give any idea of how loud Bob was that night. At one point people were physically flinching and stepping back from the stage. I remember moving forwards into a gap and turning my head sideways on at one point as Bob turned the single guitar he was playing into three, all at max volume. 

Bob recently announced Sugar's reformation and a new single, Long Live Love. And gigs including one in Manchester at the end of May. Put in earplugs. 

Miracle

Between July 1984 and September 1985 Husker Du released three albums, the first  of which (Zen Arcade) was a double (and preceded by a non- album single, their scorching cover of Eight Miles High), followed by New Day Rising and then Flip Your Wig. Fifty two songs. Each album raised the bar, both songwriters, Bob Mould and Grant Hart, in a million miles an hour race to keep moving, keep writing and playing. 

Zen Arcade is a punk concept album of sorts, Bob Mould telling the story of a young boy leaving home and finding the world is a difficult and tough place to live in. It is a blur of riffs, melodies and rhythms, high octane punk rock filtered through psychedelia opening with Mould's killer Something I Learned Today and Grant Hart contributing a pair of huge songs- Pink Turns To Grey and Turn On The News. On the last song, Reoccurring Dreams, they play a hardcore jazz- punk instrumental, fourteen minutes long and not a moment wasted. 

Something I Learned Today *

New Day Rising, released six months later, is even better. Grant Hart was a songwriting, singing drummer whose long hair, love beads and bare feet marked him out as a non- conformist in US punk's sometimes fairly orthodox world. On New Day Rising he throws in The Girl Who Lived On Heaven Hill, Terms Of Psychic Warfare and Books About UFOs. Mould, struggling with alcohol and sexuality, countered with the title track, Celebrated Summer (where Husker Du slow down and Mould plays an acoustic guitar) and I Apologise among the album's songs, an embarrassment of riches. It sounds tinny and scratchy to modern ears, the guitars at times like a jetwash being sprayed on a metal fence, the bottom end hardly there at all. 

The Girl Who Lives On Heaven Hill

Six months after that they put out their last album for SST, Flip Your Wig, the band producing themselves for the first time and the sound bigger and fuller, the songs even better, everything slightly clearer (that's not to say Mould had turned the distortion down, he really hadn't)- Every Everything, Green Eyes, Hate Paper Doll, the single Makes No Sense At All, Divide And Conquer, Keep Hanging On (Grant's Husker Du peak for me), Find Me and Private Plane. Mould says Flip Your Wig is their best album and I can go with that. The fact it came within fourteen months of Zen Arcade is incredible.

Keep Hanging On

I don't think you'll hear a better song that that today. Please let me know if you do. 

Husker Du also toured incessantly, the three men playing across the USA and Europe, scorching a trail of melodic, emotional, hair raising live performances, playing as if Armageddon were upon them and they had just thirty minutes left and everything depended on Husker Du giving their all. Bassist Greg Norton has recently been working on a box set of live performances from 1985, an album called 1985: The Miracle Year. The first disc (single CD or double vinyl) is a full show from First Avenue in their home town Minneapolis, 30th January 1985, kicking off with the three word blast of New Day Rising and then powering their way through a set that takes in It's Not Funny Anymore (from 1983's Metal Circus) and then cherry picks from the Zen Arcade and New Day Rising. The sound is rough, it is like being there, the guitars are buzzsaws and hornet's nests, the drums are frenetic, the bass is big and muscular (more so than on some of recorded versions), and Mould and Hart sing their throats raw. They do the covers, searing versions of Eight Miles High, Ticket To Ride and Love Is All Around

The second CD/ pair of records is taken from a variety of gigs- Boulder, Long Beach, Newport, Washington, Hoboken, Cleveland, Frankfurt, Lausanne and Seattle- including songs form their at that point unreleased major label debut Candy Apple Grey (Don't Want To Know If You Are Lonely, Hardly Getting Over It and Sorry Somehow). It's thrilling stuff, life affirming and exhilarating to listen to to forty years later, transcendent even. You can hear it all at Bandcamp. Husker Du can never reform- poor Grant died in 2017 aged fifty six. But we can remember them through these recordings, a band full of life. Bob Mould has recently reformed Sugar for some live shows next year. But that's another story. 

A Good Idea

* This version of Something I Learned Today is one I found on the internet years ago, remastered and with the bottom end boosted. I can't remember who did this and its entirely unofficial- it does demonstrate that if Greg Ginn ever allowed someone to remaster the Husker Du SST back catalogue it would be a very worthwhile exercise.  

Sometimes I See You In The Water

Back to Bob Mould to end the week. In 1992 Bob formed Sugar with Dave Barbe and Malcolm Travis. His first two solo albums- Workbook and Black Sheets Of Rain- hadn't sold well and Virgin let him go. Back in a trio and released from his record contract Bob found a rich vein of form, working out of R.E.M.'s rehearsal room in Athens, Georgia and within the year Sugar played live, recorded two albums and signed to Creation in the UK (then on the crest of a post-Screamadelica, Bandwagonesque and Loveless wave). The first album, Copper Blue, came out and was an immediate hit, album of the year in the NME and spawned several singles.

Copper Blue doesn't have a weak moment, showcasing ten first rate Bob Mould songs. The production is fuller than it was with Husker Du, the drums and bass bigger and chuggier. The guitars fill up more space, crunchy and melodic. In the wake of Nirvana's success there was a crowd ready for more punk with choruses and suddenly Sugar found an audience. A year earlier Bob couldn't get arrested. The second song- A Good Idea- is a tale of two lovers down by the river, on a warm summer night where 'the air is thick with the smell of temptation'. They go in to the water at his suggestion- 'why don't we lay in the water? Let the water run over me...' he says and she replies 'that's a good idea'.  Inevitable tragedy ensues, she submerged beneath the surface, temptation turning to death by drowning.

A Good Idea

Come Around

I wrote a piece for The Vinyl Villain's Imaginary Compilation album series, ten Husker Du songs to brighten up your life. It's here. I also found this, a remastered version of Zen Arcade's opening song. The Youtube poster who put it up had done the new version himself, brought the bass up and balanced out Spot's trebly mix. A very good job done.

Something I Learned Today

At around the same time a friend reminded me of Bob's 90s band Sugar and their 1993 ep Beaster. Having signed to Creation and got some genuine success with Copper Blue they put out Beaster as a follow up The six songs on Beaster were recorded at the same time as Copper Blue but stand out as distinctively different- the guitars are heavier and denser. Very dense. Like other Bob Mould records (like Zen Arcade) Beaster was a kind of concept record and had a lot of religious imagery. Opener Come Around comes around slowly with bright acoustic guitar but then the Les Paul and Marshall stack kicks in, along with Bob's deliberately difficult to make out vocals.

Come Around

Sugar And Mould

Brian at Linear Tracking Lives is counting down his top hundred songs of the 1990s and included a song by Bob Mould's post-Husker Du power trio Sugar, off their final lp FUEL (File Under Easy Listening). Round these parts Copper Blue is the Sugar album to go to, brilliant from start to finish, but Brian did send me back to FUEL and this song which I always loved. Your Favourite Thing has one of those masterly, fluid Bob Mould guitar riffs that he can knock out in his sleep but other guitarists can only dream of.

Your Favourite Thing

I'm On The Centreline, Right Between Two States Of Mind

The other half of Husker Du's songwriters was Bob Mould, who had the more successful solo career. Sugar hit the big time with Copper Blue (on Creation in the early 90s), Workbook and a string of solo abums sold well and were highly rated, he took time out to write WWF scripts for TV (wrestling not wildife), and he did some housey electronic stuff (which bamboozled some of his fans). Recent interviews suggest he's mellowed a bit from the slightly dour figure he was. I like Bob Mould even if some of his solo albums can be hard work.

This is Hoover Dam, from Copper Blue- full of crunching guitar, melodrama and some strangely cheesy 80s keyboards. Turn it up.

Hoover Dam