Birdland - Hollow Heart

Lazy
LAZY13 (LAZY13T 12")
1989




Birdland were a breakneck amphetamine firecracker of a band. Four guys from the English midlands with peroxide bobbed hair, shrill, pacey, feedback sodden yet melodic, like Psychocandy on 78rpm.

A big influence on the early Manic Strret Preachers, their 1989 debut single Hollow Heart blazed so bright. The 12" had three songs on the A-side, all crashing into each other in a wail of feedback, no gaps. And that's exactly how they played it live.

I saw this band devotionally. I first went cos a friend recommended it and you got a free live LP. What a great idea! In the days before burnable CDs, bands just did not give away their music at gigs. Birdland figured that to press up a one-sided vinyl LP with no outer sleeve was cheap, if it's live there's no recording costs, and it'd surely bring enough extra punters in to cover its costs. And yet it's not a con-gimmick, everyone gets something worthwhile. It worked on me.

God, they were fucking incredible. Fast and guitarry, taking punk speed, 60s Stones cocksure energy, Patti Smith art-primal attitude, and shooting out these white hot shards of kinetic force with something soaring and pop in there.

The later singles had their merits - good songs and a lot of energy - but sounded somewhat two dimensional. There was a full-surround fury to the live shows that only the tracks on Hollow Heart and its follow up Paradise get close to.

It's like when you listen to Merseybeat bands like Gerry & The Pacemakers or Billy J Kramer & The Dakotas and they all sound so twee, but it doesn't take a big effort to mentally scrub them of their record company gloss and put them in leather jackets belting out rock n roll to a sweaty walled Cavern and see what the fuss was about.

When Birdland's album came out I hitch hiked round Britain following the tour, 13 gigs in 15 days. Every one amazing, though often radically different vibes. Sometimes an hour and a half and five triumphant encores. Sometimes the gear goes wrong ten minutes in and they'd smash everything up and leg it.

The first 10,000 copies of the album, incidentally, came on white vinyl, white label, in a plain white sleeve with 'BIRDLAND' printed on the front in white (you have to tilt it to the light to read it). Oh fucking yes. They were great for that sort of thing - singles coming with a limited edition 4-track EP version with posters and a badge and what have you.

No band can sustain such power and intensity for long, so we can't really lament their passing. We should just be glad that we have those blinding screaming early singles like Fuzzbox's XX Sex or Birdland's labelmates The Primitives' Stop Killing Me.

Birdland hit that thing in a way that no other band ever quite did. Still sounds so incredibly exciting and explosive, an amphetamine pessary of a record.


[MP3 deleted to make way for new ones. Sorry!]

Lieutenant Pigeon - Opus 300

Decca
F13365
1972




This is the maddest thing a major label ever released on 7 inch.

A distorted marching drum beat, the single repeated word 'mother', with a spliced in section of jazzy calypso singing 'get your shoes from the menders and don't be late'.

Madder, it's done by a band consisting of three blokes and one of their mums.

Lieutenant Pigeon are a great one hit wonder. Out of nowhere they got to number 1 with Mouldy Old Dough. Bizarre, hyper-real nightmarish and insanely catchy, with the only lyric being the title, it somehow won an Ivor Novello songwriting award.

The follow up, Desperate Dan, barely scraped into the top 20 and there were no more hits after that. Opus 300 is the B-side of Desperate Dan, and it is just fucking nuts.

[MP3 deleted to make way for new ones. Sorry!]

Cowboy Junkies - Dead Flowers

RCA
COWBOY1
1990



Cowboy Junkies are, to my knowledge, the only band who consistently do cover versions that far exceed the originals.

Whilst they have a major songwriting talent in guitarist Michael Timmins, it's in the way they tackle the works of others that we get the clearest view of their power and worth.

They find a dark melancholic stillness in the heart of a song, and Margo's strong yet delicate voice curls like smoulder smoke through the core of the track and up beyond it.

Neil Young's Powderfinger, Springsteen's State Trooper, they even do Sweet Jane in a way that - coming from a very different angle - equals the Velvets' original.

It appeared they'd drawn the short straw on the Rubber Soul tribute album This Bird Has Flown, doing John Lennon's worst song, Run For Your Life. Disposable, unimaginative, misogynistic, disowned by its writer, we'd be none the poorer if it had never existed at all.

Then the Junkies work their magic and once again do a cover that teases out a sombre and compelling atmosphere. Their Run For Your Life is a brilliant seething sinister threat of a track.

The Rolling Stones' 1971 masterpiece Sticky Fingers has several classic riffy corkers, but also a couple of astonishing Cowboy Junkies-esque slow dark spacious tracks in Sister Morphine and Moonlight Mile.

The Junkies, though, went for Dead Flowers. The Stones do it upbeat with Jagger's voice delivering the lyric in a semi-comic twang. Cowboy Junkies see the lyric has an unrelenting broken, morbid, desolate sentiment perfectly suited to them. Slowing it down, giving it their classic arrangement of guitar, voice, bass, subtle drums, mandolin, accordion and slide guitar, they make it entirely their own.

Dead Flowers comes from an aborted first attempt at recording the album that would become 1990's The Caution Horses. The tracks from that session have recently had a full release as Sharon. It was only released on the cassette single of Sun Comes Up It's Tuesday Morning, and on two promo-only CDs.

I got it on one of the latter, a limited promo CD that came with initial copies of 1992's Black Eyed Man bought at HMV shops in the UK. It shares the disc with two album tracks and a cover of the traditional tune Captain Kidd (another Sharon session track, previously released on the single of Sun Comes Up, It's Tuesday Morning).

The band released a B-sides and out-takes album that didn't include Dead Flowers. A track that's better than most bands best efforts, just left lying around on a long forgotten promo. Twenty years and still making magnificent, ornate, sad and beautiful music. Talent to spare.

[MP3 deleted to make way for new ones. Sorry!]

Red Guitars - Good Technology

Self Drive
SD006
1983
(reissued 1984 SD009 7" and SD008 12")



In December the venerable Zoe over at Goldfish Nation did a post quoting the lyrics for this track. I asked her about it and she didn't know the song, so it's nudged me to post it here. With the pulling-me-apart pace of my life these days it takes me ten fuckin weeks to get round to doing a half-hour job. I need to amend this.

Incidentally, whilst I can refer to Zoe as 'Zo-ster' (rhymes with 'toaster'), I find it very difficult to find a way to spell the word. 'Zoster' looks like it rhymes with 'roster'. 'Zohster' likewise. 'Zoaster' looks like there's a syllable break there, 'Zo-aster'. The hyphenated version used above delivers the right phonetics but looks a bit clumsy. I'd be grateful if you'd tell me of a solution to this problem.

So, on with the music. Good Technology is one of those tracks that grabs you by the ears on first listen, the sort of thing that even before it's halfway through you know you love. Tense pulsing background with sharp spikes of guitar, it's clearly not long after early Talking Heads and New Romantics. It swells and spreads, expansive and awkward, but the thing that sets it apart and makes it worthy of remembering 20 years on is the arresting lyric.

We've got photographs of men on the moon
We've got water that is good for us
We've got coffee that's instantaneous
We've got buildings that are very tall
We've got cigarettes that are low in tar
We've got policemen can tell us who we are
We can reproduce a work of art
We've got missiles can tear the world apart
Good, good, good, good, good, good technology

We've got trains that run underground
Aeroplanes that fly very fast
We've got music that is popular
We've got machines that sound like orchestras
We've got ability to transplant a heart
We've got freezers full of body parts
We've got computers that can find us friends
We know roughly when the world will end
Good, good, good, good, good, good technology

We've got animals with transistors in
We've got pills that can make you slim
We've got factories turning frozen chickens out
We've got ovens that cook in seconds flat
We've got plastics that are indestructible
We've got deodorants that make us smell of flowers
We've got detergents to clean up the sea
We've got sounds can turn you inside out

Sometimes I wonder what it is all about
There's lots of leisure time to sit and work it out
There's a TV show I've got to see
Good, good, good, good, good, good technology
Good technology

It's that final bit that does it for me. After this random list of the things that we have, the mundane and the extraordinary, the fucked-up and the fantastic, it turns to the liberation from drudgery offered by labour saving devices. And what do we do with the time given us? Watch telly.

As I've said elsewhere

These days the hearth is the TV. Living rooms are arranged exactly like a hundred years ago, but with that one difference. The average Briton watches four hours of TV every day!

Which is really worrying. People would spend four hours looking at a hearth, but TV is so one-way. It doesn't present you with coloured patterns that let your mind wander and exercise, it tells your mind to shut the fuck up while it tells you what to think about and what to think about the things you think about. It delivers itself as absolute and authoritative. It shows 'experts' in whatever field, who are always portrayed as more informed and eloquent than you, which takes away your sense of power and feeling of ability and worth, and the idea that you might be able to go out there and affect the things that affect you.

And they are lying, TV is so superficial that its main task is to stop you realising its superficiality and artificiality. They pretend things aren't carefully edited to make implications. They try to make it look like the situation being shown is normal, and not rendered fake by an intrusive TV camera being there. We think if someone looks shifty on TV they must be shifty, whereas it's probably actually cos they're not used to having 600 watts of lightbulb in their face while they try to explain years of experience in an eight second soundbite. It's all about veneers. I've actually done TV shows where I've been portrayed as an authoritative expert, and I got believed. I found the MPs and ministers and journalists were bluffing even more than I was!

It doesn't matter that loads of TV is junk. The problem is that it treats everything the same, that a war or a football match or a McDonalds special offer are treated with equal import. It's OK when junk is undisguised junk, when it's meant to be forgettable nonsense. But when it pretends to be serious it distracts us from the real serious stuff, it lowers the standards of what we consider serious. As TV has become the dominant medium, other media have learned that they must imitate TV or die. Have you noticed how our newspapers now look like TV, and our radio sounds more and more like TV? Even when the TV is off, it has set out the methods by which we understand what's going on. The result is a whole TV culture that makes us as individuals insignificant and disconnected, and everything seem irrelevant and unreal.

Four hefty paragraphs, yet Red Guitars say it all in three lines. That, my friends, is what we mean by poetry.

Background stuff about the track - recording info etc - is on this page.

[MP3 deleted to make way for new ones. Sorry!]

Feargal Sharkey - Listen To Your Father

Zarjazz
JAZZ1 (JAZZY1 picture disc)
1984



Less than a year after singing Never Never for the one-off Assembly single, Feargal Sharkey did another great oddity.

Madness had been around for years and had just left Stiff Records to set up their own label. Peculiarly, they didn't kick off with their own stuff, but with this.

It is basically a Madness single with Feargal on vocals. It was written by Madness' Carl Smyth (aka Chas Smash), and Madness play all the music.

Like other Smyth songs such as Michael Caine, there's no clear meaning but somehow the words fit the music brilliantly; impressionism rather than literalism.

Madness shifted to a more reflective vibe for much of their remaining work (basically the Mad Not Mad album) as typified by the haunting elegant anti-Tory single Yesterday's Men. This, though, has all that gleeful pounding stomp we knew and loved them for.

A year later, autumn 1985, and Sharkey was back with his eponymous debut album and it's flagship single, the Maria McKee-penned A Good Heart. It was all a bit glossy and saccharine, lacking the kick of the Undertones, the emotional punch of Never Never and the kinetic bounce and boistrousness of Listen To Your Father.

At the end of 1985 Madness did a new year's eve concert at Hammersmith Odeon, and Sharkey came on and did Listen To Your Father with them (relased on the Mad Not Mad Party bootleg album if you can find it).

[MP3 deleted to make way for new ones. Sorry!]

The Assembly - Never Never

Mute
7TINY1
1983



He didn't hang around much in the early 80s, Vince Clarke. Formed Depeche Mode and wrote their debut single I Just Can't Get Enough, then promptly left them to form Yazoo. Barely a year of that, then split.

A few months later he got together with EC Radcliffe of The Silcon Teens and put together The Assembly. Clarke wrote Never Never and thought Feargal Sharkey's plaintive pleading tone would suit the song. They rang Sharkey who readily agreed and swiftly cut the track.

Thinking it would always be that easy to get well known high calibre singers on to their record, they started planning an album but nothing ever came of it and this single remains an anomaly.

The lyric is one of relentless isolation, beautifully complemented by the starkness of Clarke's electronics, yet there is a sparkling splendour to it too. This song of alienation and coldness is one more example of how we can put our darkest feelings out and create something of beauty and consolation, something affecting and gorgeous that has the net effect of enhancing those it touches.

Grant McLennan of The Go-Betweens said, 'it's neither fair nor reasonable to expect sadness to confine itself to its causes'. Letting it beyond its causes into art and bright pop music is certainly nothing new, and in that arena we can see that it also seems neither fair nor reasonable to expect the only effect of expressing sadness to be more sadness.

The tremendous ache and tingling icy beauty of Never Never are utterly captivating and, provided you're not a hopelessly alienated outcast like the protagonist, the fact of something so gorgeous existing scatters shards of silvered affirmation all over you, it prods your heart and makes you feel more alive.

Veteran British sessionist Clem Clempson gets a credit for guitar on the track but I'm buggered if I can hear a guitar in it.

There were a few such peculiar 'let's get an established singer' projects around that time. The previous year Heaven 17 put together British Electric Foundation Presents Music of Quality and Distinction Volume One, an album featuring all kinds of oddities; Tina Turner doing Ball of Confusion, Gary Glitter doing Suspicious Minds, Billy MacKenzie doing Bowie's The Secret Life of Arabia. MacKenzie also wrote a lyric for an excellent Yello single, The Rhythm Divine in 1987, that had Shirley Bassey doing lead vocals (the 12inch had a version of MacKenzie's own take).

See what I mean? Loads of this sort of thing at the time.

Within a year of The Assembly, Vince Clarke put together Erasure and Feargal Sharkey recorded Listen To Your Father, a corking one-off single with Madness that I'll put up as the next post here.


[MP3 deleted to make way for new ones. Sorry!]

Tom Robinson - Truce (live)

Well haven't I been the slackest of music bloggers this month. Damn me and my inability to share the hidden musical gems I have. I had this plan to do a bunch of great lesser-known christmas songs - The Cocteau Twins' Frosty The Snowman, The Dickies' Silent Night, The Greedies' A Merry Jingle and others - but it's just all been too hectic and I'm sadly finding that when I get busy Dust On The Stylus is the first thing to suffer.

Still, one festive one's making it up here. As I've left it till after christmas I thought I'd go for something a little sharper than most seasonal songs. A strong candidate was Legendary Pink Dots' Government Health Warning. Set to out of tune playing of the chords of Paul McCartney's Wonderful Christmastime, the lyrics deal with that age old tradition, drunken car crashes:

They followed stars
and drank in bars
and wrapped their cars
round lamp-posts
as the posters whistled "Think before you drink!"
They didn't!

Toasted ghosts in different angles
tangled up in metal
as the cameras clicked and stretchers rolled
and sheets were laid out white.

It's Christmas.
Happy birthday Christ.
Let's have another drink!
Fa la la la la....

Great as it is, I've plumped for Tom Robinson's Truce. Like Government Health Warning there's an ascerbic tinge giving it a refreshing knowingness that makes the point with dark wit.

It's a motif common in Robinson's political songs, giving them all the power of the uncompromising protest song but with an additional under-no-illusions clarity borne of having tried and failed and thus seen how big the dissenter's task is, yet still being just as big-hearted and determined to try.

Glad To Be Gay, one of his earliest political songs, is still the giant among his works. There had been no out-and-proud rock star before him, let alone one so militant.

Even today, it's not easy. When Jonathan King got seven years for having sex with teenage boys in the early 1970s, one had to wonder if the same treatment would've been dished out if it was Mick Jagger fucking girls. King was treated harsher cos of the differences, namely he's ugly, he's a smartarse, but mostly because he's gay.

Robbie Williams, a man who's flirted with a homo-friendly image for ages, recently sued The People and a couple of other idiot gossip rags for alleging he'd had gay sex.

Of course, a newspaper should not make false allegations and when it does it should be punished.

But again, I doubt the newspaper would've been prosecuted if they'd wrongly alleged Williams had had sex with women. Certainly, in asking for an apology for 'the injury and distress caused', he's made it clear that he regards allegations of being gay is derogatory to his character.

In 1979 after the split of the modestly named Tom Robinson Band, Tom did a gig of gay songs to mark the 10th anniversary of the Stonewall riots. He mixed his own songs with some great covers - notably Noel Coward's Mad About The Boy, which the 'Noel wasn't gay, really he wasn't' Coward estate refused to allow men to cover.

Among the Robinson originals were several that were never released in studio versions. Prime among these is Truce, a solo acoustic guitar and vocal number with all the yearning, wit, bite and boldness of Robinson's best work.

The live tape was released in 1982 as Cabaret 79 (Panic Records, NIC2), and then - the place I've lifted it from - reissued in 1997 as part of Robinson's excellent Castaway Records reissue series with quality rare bonus tracks thrown in (Castaway, CNWVP003CD).

Truce

Truce, call a truce
Stop all the firing and the fighting
Christmas morning, 1914
What would the good Lord say?

Truce, call a truce
Stop all the shelling and the shooting
Froehliche Weinacht Kamerad, Freundschaft
Let's all be friends for a day

In the man made hell
In the putrescent smell
In the mines and mud and trenches
The men from the Rhine
Crossed over the line
For a truce with the Tommies and the Frenchies

But the very next day
There were hand grenades
There was gunfire, gassing and slaughter
As we blasted the Hun
To Kingdome Come
With machine guns, shelling and mortars

It was nice to pretend
We could all live as friends
With the Christmas angels calling
But the dream turned sour
In a matter of hours
And we made it all up in the morning

Truce, call a truce
Stop all the bitching and backbiting
Who'd leave their lover
Or send in the bailiffs
This one day of the year?

Truce, call a truce
Stop all the sackings and the stealing
Who'd rape a schoolgirl
Or cut off someone's pension
And spoil all this Christmas cheer?

There's a couple of days
When the bashers of gays
Who oppress, arrest and charge us
All leave us alone
To return back home
For a truce with our mothers and our fathers

But the very next day
It's back to the fray
And setting our homes in order
Bashing lesbian mothers
And underage lovers
Disowning gay sons and daughters

Well it's quaint to pretend
We can love our fellow men
With the Christmas angels calling
But the dream turns sour
In a matter of hours
And they make it all up in the morning

[MP3 deleted to make way for new ones. Sorry!]


Incidentally, Robinson has released about a dozen versions of Glad To Be Gay. Determined not to let it become a museum piece he's updated it frequently - e.g. jettisoning the bit about the older age of consent, adding bits about AIDS and topical cases - and the altered versions have cropped up on loads of b-sides and compilation albums. It'd be cool to maybe do a fortnight of posting all the different versions on this blog or something, if it's wanted. Anyone think it'd be a good idea?