unpopular

Thunder and lightning

Woken this morning by the sounds of thunder cracking and rumbling loudly around the Exe valley. And in my head “thunder… thunder and lightning… one drop of rain on the back of my hand… stop breaking in my heart…” a biblical torrent of guitars clashing and meshing; delirious, gyrating beat noise.

But Tom Verlaine or Blue Aeroplanes? Both, of course, although I will admit that for me the first exposure is the most memorable, and that belongs to the Bristol gang – an explosion on a small Glasgow stage, overflowing with guitars and magic, or so it seemed. Then captured on Friendloverplane for posterity. Magical, mesmerising, wishing it would go on forever.

I was convinced I had it in my iTunes library too, but no. For some reasons it was left out of the CD and download versions of Friendloverplane. A travesty. And am I right in saying that the only digital version of the studio recording was on the Warhol’s 15 compilation? Does anyone have an mp3 rip of that perchance?

Whatever, here is a rip from my vinyl Friendloverplane. Tom Verlaine’s studio and live versions are available on Tom Verlaine and The Miller’s Tale respectively. Enjoy…

The Blue Aeroplanes: Breaking In My Heart

Who broke Susan Boyle?

Here's a coupla YouTube vids. Thanks to ET for pointing me to the Milk Kan one. Of course after watching that I felt it necessary to dig out Dylan as well...

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ET

Garden room day 1

Garden room day 1, originally uploaded by unpop.

We're having the 'shed' converted into a 'garden room'. The builders moved in this morning, and this is the state of play at the end of the day. We're very excited about having a place to lounge and read books away from TV. Plussing as which we'll actually be able to sit somewhere indoors and be able to see all the fine work that C has put into making the garden something that's well worth looking at. C has bought a second hand sofa and chairs from Otto Retro, so the furnishings are already well in hand...

Kaleidoscope World

So I’ve been laid low with a virus recently. I’ll spare you the details, but suffice to say that just about all of my half term holiday was spent confined to bed and sofa. I’m struggling back into some semblance of life now, blinking meekly at the sunlight and valiantly throwing chocolate bars down my throat in a bid to replace the scary amounts of weight lost in the preceding seven days. It’s a tough strategy, but I think I can keep it up for a while.

Of enormous soothing power in the last few days have been the sounds of Copenhagen’s rather wonderful People Press Play, whose eponymous debut set has been spinning around the ether and laying down delirious threads of spidery electronic dreampop magic. I was led to them tangentially (as is always the best way) via Bobby Baby, whose work as It’s A Musical and Bobby & Blumm I was just catching up with (and incidentally, both the Music Makes Me Sick and Everybody Loves sets are wonderful and well worth picking up). Anyway, whilst at the MORR shop, I decided to take a chance on the Not Given Lightly set, wherein a bunch of people I was mostly not previously aware of tackle some of the finest Flying Nun pop of previous ages. Now I admit I approach cover versions with some degree of trepidation at the best of times, but the prospects of anyone taking on ‘Kaleidoscope World’ and not leaving me frowning in dissatisfaction were, frankly, not great. Chapeau then to People Press Play for taking The Chills’ soft garage psych guitar masterpiece and giving it a fresh air of spooked early summer salaciousness.

People Press Play: 'Kaleidoscope World'