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Listen to my album from 20 years ago

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There’s a real trend at the moment for doing a show that is based around a complete performance of an old album. I’m not sure how this differs from a band that has lost its way creatively and is just doing “nostalgia” shows for the money but it seems that it does in the mind of the audience. It seems to work. I caught John Foxx last year doing a complete performance of Metamatic (from 1980), b-sides, outakes and all. It was a great night. In retrospect though I didn’t enjoy it as much as when he toured “From Trash” earlier in the year or when he did his art-house stuff like “Tiny Colour Movies” so I remain a little ambivalent.
One of the best tours I ever saw was All About Eve when they were performing with Toni Haimi on guitars doing a set that was almost entirely new material and which had never been committed to disc. All lot of that material still hasn’t. It was boundless energy and unpredictable. A little different from here’s the song that was side 1 track 4 on the original vinyl release.
Anyway, life is for living and I’ll take both. Just booked to see Gary Numan performing the whole of “Replicas” in the Spring….. Seems a whole lot more credible than Sweet whose remaining members are doing a Seventies show with the Rubettes and Showaddywaddy. Why is this that? I wish I understood the difference.

A Fantasy world?

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An old song by T-Bone Burnett. Lyrics bear reading:

Somewhere between Never Neverland and Wonderland
In a land called Never Wonderland
There lived a beautiful wealthy young divorcee
With a chequered past and a bad memory
Who should probably remain nameless
And men travelled from far and wide and try to win her hand
And she took in stragglers from all over the known world

Her newest guests were (as her mother called them)
“The latest Russians to defect”
One’s name was Hefner
The other’s name was Disney
Disney smoked a pipe and was very philosophical
He was constantly surrounded by go-go girls
And he used to take pictures of them without any clothes on
And sell them to the neighbourhood children

Hefner on the other hand was not so introspective
He loved a good story just like anybody else
In fact he loved the myths of Never Wonderland so much
That he made elaborate moulded plastic sculptures
Of the characters in the myths
Then … he would put them out in the garden
Until …. he had built a whole nother land in Never Wonderland
Which he called Hefnerland

And the neighbourhood children loved them
They had lots of fun playing in Hefnerland
And looking at all Disney’s go-go pictures
Because they didn’t know any better
And they didn’t know any worse
But the beautiful young wealthy divorcee thought
That they were only after her money
Sometimes she even wished they would go back to Russia

(But between you and me they were really dupes of the Wicked King
Who wanted to rob the children of their dreams)

Jazz snobs

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Jazz snobs irritate me. You know the kind of guy who claims it’s not jazz unless it is some kind of standard or follows some kind of bebop form. For a music that is all about improvisation, it sure seems to attract a lot of people who like pigeonhole things. For me, improvisation is the heart of jazz. On one extreme, I like Thelonious Monk, Dave Brubeck. In the middle ground, I’ll listen to a little Danilo Perez or Eliane Elias. Out on the other edge I love the music of Bob James. It should be obvious by now that piano is my favourite instrument when it comes to all kinds of jazz. But one thing all these piano players have in common is that they surrounded themselves with some great bands.

A guy who used to play with Bob James in the early eighties is Mark Colby, the tenor saxophonist. He’s been making some great straight-ahead jazz on Hallway Records. His latest is a tribute to the sax great Stan Getz. It’s one of the finest albums I’ve heard in the last two years. Here’s a guy who has made some great modern jazz but has also done the contemporary stuff too. Where there’s real talent there’s no room for jazz snobs and their pigeon holes. Just room for great music.

Electronic

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I’ve been a longtime lover of electronic music. It began in the late seventies and early eighties with Kraftwerk, John Foxx and Gary Numan. I was in a band called “Sonic Dude” for a while who cut one single on an indie label. We came up in Sheffield at the same time as the Human League, Heaven 17 and Pulp. There had to be one band who didn’t make it. We were it. Our career peaked with a sellout show at the Leadmill in Sheffield. It all went downhill from there.

Anyway, back to the broader electronic scene. In the mid-80s, Foxx disappeared, Numan went off the boil and Kraftwerk began to recycle their old material. I got into jazz in a big way and began to prefer Thelonious Monk on piano to what anyone was doing on synthesiser.

Numan recaptured my interest with his “Sacrifice” album. I didn’t care much for what he’s done since then but it was enough to get me checking out that scene again. John Foxx reappeared and has made the best albums of his career. “The Pleasures of Electricity” is the pick of the bunch but all 3 “Cathedral Oceans” sets and “Tiny Colour Movies are interesting and exciting in a minimalist sort of way whilst “Crash and Burn” and “From Trash” are more unrestrained and more mainstream.

Even more exciting have been the smaller new bands that have appeared in the UK. One favourite is Ladytron who have achieved a modicum of success and exposure. More obscure and hidden are “Swarf” who are simply quite wonderful. They have one of the finest female vocalists on the planet and some of the most inventive electronic melodies you are ever going to hear. Amazingly, they have remained an underground phenomenon who need greater exposure.

They have one album on Cryonica – “Art, Science, Exploitation”. Do yourself a favour and buy it.

You can also find them on a number of compilations and I-Tunes. There were rumours of a new single but nothing seems to have happened. Listen to them, get them the exposure they deserve.

Posters on walls that come to life

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So I was talking about the fact that I do some writing…… One interesting side effect of this is that I’ve got to know most of the artists who were posters on my wall when I was a kid. Very strange. I’ve been interviewing Bernie Leadon who was in the Eagles and the Flying Burrito Brothers. I’ve been doing interviews with him now for 12 years which go out in a booklet I produce occasionally called Natural Progressions which would be of particular interest to fans of those bands.
One of the interesting side effects of this is that I hope I had a little role to play in encouraging him back into to the studio and on to the road to promote an album called Mirror which he made 3 or 4 years ago. The sales of that album weren’t all they could have been and Bernie’s not doing much musically again but it was nice while it lasted.