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Skeletons

We’ll be making our Jack’o’lanterns shortly (would’ve made them earlier, but we’ve been off relaxing in West Somerset the past few days). I’ve concocted a lovely Halloween mix to accompany the carving, which you can snag for yourselves here. Tracks below.

All The People I Like Are Those That Are Dead - Felt
There's No Blood In Bone - Spell
Halloween - Sonic Youth
For the Dead - Gene
The Sad Witch - Hefner
Witches & Lightning - Hands on Heads
Black Cat - Broadcast
Monsters - Boy Least Likely To
The World Is A Very Scary Place - The Gothic Archies
My Girlfriend Is A Witch - October Country
Skeleton And The Roundabout - The Idle Race
Halloween Candy - The Spinanes
Fat Angel Skinny Ghost - Windsor For The Derby
Ghost Dance 1492 - Beachwood Sparks
Skeleton Staircase - Loft
Everybody Is Dead - Microdisney
The Ghost And The Black Hat - The Go-Betweens
Halloween - The Dream Syndicate
Skeletons - Art Of Fighting
Death Is Not The End - Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds

Fallen By The Wayside

I’ve been playing this mix on and off for a month or so now, so figured it was about time to share. It never fails to please me, from the opening match strike on that wonderfully downbeat Quigley cut, through the storming pop thrust on afterburners of The Three O-Clock to the cool charm of the Left Outsides. Hopefully you will feel the same. Download the whole thing here. Don't forget to buy the things you like, especially for those groups still making music like the Left Outsides.

The photo was taken in the Venice cafe in Troon, clicked one August morning whilst watching elderly figures shuffle past the window all dressed in mourning black, off to a funeral at the church up the street.

The Truth's Out, Darling - Quigley
Half Cut, Wholly Yours - Jack
Throw The Wine - Swell
Content - The Railway Children
Mouthful Of Brains - The Corn Dollies
Timebomb - Old 97's
I Can't Seem To Make You Mine - The Stars Of Heaven
Jet Fighter - The Three O'Clock
No Backward Glances - Seachange
The Looming Past - The Bats
Goodbye - Seeland
My Everyday Silver is Plastic - Saloon
The Afternoon Turns Pink - Black Moth Super Rainbow
I Never Dreamed - Slumber Party
Pinky Tuscadero - Grenadine
No One Can Hear You Cry - Susan Christie
Don't Wait Up For Me - Chris Connor
Fallen By The Wayside - The Left Outsides

I Think I Need You

More blasts from the past (with the Lodger as an eager interloper, chivvying along the oldies but also possibly glancing around worryingly and wondering just why they aren’t at the hip party on the other side of town with all the pretty young things). This mix was started back in pre-Crash July but only finally came together the last couple of days. As a result it gets me confused because in my head it is part summer and part early Autumn. Then again, wasn’t September all about that? Days of sunshine and warmth, then evenings of increasing sharpness with leaves starting to tumble.

It occurs to me too that my sleeve design looks like an advert for the Orange mobile network, for which I apologize. I just wanted to use that photo... Oh, and thanks to Emma for the toy penguin who stars.

Summer In A Small Town - Cleaners From Venus
I Think I Need You - The Lodger
Halcyon Days - One Thousand Violins
They Fell For Words Like Love - Hangman's Beautiful Daughters
Sleepy Sad Cafe - The Status Cymbal
My Favourite Wet Wednesday Afternoon - The Siddeleys
You Ain't Lookin' In The Right Place – Baby Motherlode
Susie - The Jazz Butcher
I've Got A Crush On You - The Green Pajamas
Breaking Point - Bourgie Bourgie
That's What Your Love Means To Me - Popcorn Blizzard
Did You See Her - Pink Military
Valley Of The Morning Sun - Kendra Smith
Up In The Air - Heidi Berry
San Francisco Again - Rote Kapelle
My Life Is Wrong - East River Pipe
A Song Of Changes - Cindytalk

Download it all here.

Remember That Day

I’m making at tape, it isn’t for you... Oh no,hang on a minute, it IS for you after all.

Saturday nights in September are surely made for supping wine and relaxing into sweet sounds new and old. Okay, almost exclusively old. Just call me a reminiscing romantic old codger. Ah, you already did? Okay. As you were then.

Listening to the mix again it sounds oddly schizophrenic, taking a tumble in the second half into mostly Americana, although with a rather splendid rally by the delightfully English right at the end courtesy of The Times, Wolfhounds and The Clientele. Title of the mix comes, as you may have spotted, from that awesome Scrawl track. Now I had all but forgotten about Scrawl, and was ecstatic to discover their independent label catalogue on eMusic. Gosh, but they were good, weren’t they? I’d especially recommend their Velvet Hammer set for the Simple Machines gang as a way in.

And always good to hear Pylon, huh?

As always, normal rules of engagement apply: if you like something you hear, go out and buy it. Otherwise Lily Allen and/or Lord Mandelson might throttle your/my broadband. Oo-er missus.

You Are The Generation That Bought More Shoes And You Get What You Deserve - Johnny Boy
You Got A Spell On Me - Bill Wright
This Is A Lovesong - The Horror The Horror
Didn't Understand - Swirlies
The Afternoon Turns Pink - Black Moth Super Rainbow
Only One Flower - The Rockingbirds
St. Paul's Cathedral at Night - Trembling Blue Stars
Rubber Fish - The Corn Dollies
I Wanna Be With You - The Sneetches
Flags For Everything - Let's Active
Sunlight Bathes Our Home - Clinic
Yes She Is My Skinhead Girl - Unrest
Noel, Jonah And Me - The Spinanes
Remember That Day - Scrawl
Cool - Pylon
This Can't Be Today - Rain Parade
Jacking the Ball - The Sea and Cake
Goodbye Piccadilly - The Times
Ropeswing - The Wolfhounds
North School Drive - The Clientele

This mix was brought to you by a cheeky Cabernet Sauvignon out of the Don Cayetano stable.

Final Day part 1

Fitch Desk 1, originally uploaded by unpop.

Yesterday was the Year 11 students’ last proper day of school before the GCSE exam season starts in earnest (though some would say it already started in earnest with the English Lit exam on Tuesday this week!). My tutor group continued the tradition of leaving messages on the big old wooden teachers’ desk. The tradition was started many years ago by my Art classes, and as I have said in the past it is nice to look back and see the fading messages of generations past. Sure, it makes you realize we are all getting old, but that’s not such a bad thing to be reminded of sometimes.

Anyway, in celebration of the whole ‘final day’ theme, here’s a Final Day mix which includes three takes on the Young Marble Giants song of the same name. Tracklisting below.

The Last Time - The Rolling Stones
The Final Word - The Feelies
Final Scene - Delta 5
Final Day - Young Marble Giants
Sentimental Endings - Park Hotell
Beautiful End - Strawberry Switchblade
Final Day - Belle & Sebastian
I Found the End - Broadcast
To End With - The Durutti Column
Last Time - The Woodentops
This Is Where The Story Ends - The Scattered Pages
In The Final End - Delta
Last Time I Saw Her - Glen Campbell
Here's Where The Story Ends - The Sundays
Where The Rainbow Ends - Television Personalities
The End - Whistler
Final Day - Galaxie 500
The Last Time I Saw Richard - Joni Mitchell
It's Over, It's Ended, It's Finished, It's Done - The Montgolfier Brothers
The Darkest Ending - Felt

Spirit Of A Vampire

Have you see Let The Right One In yet? We managed to get out to the cinema last night to catch it. What a delight. Certainly one of the best movies I have seen in a long time. The more so since seeing it came so soon on the back of being subjected to Twilight, which is surely one of the most dreadful things ever committed to celluloid. Or DV tape, or whatever it was filmed in. I mean, what a cop-out for letting the vampires go out in the sunlight; oooh, their skin glistens like diamonds, what a tragedy. Bless their little Emo souls. Oh hang on, do they have souls? Whatever.

At least these Swedish vampires obey the rules of the game. And are the first vampire characters who I think work effectively as characters that you can identify as victims. I’m sure that others with a much greater knowledge of the genre will let me know of other examples of that, but hey, I think they’d have to go some to be as effective as the ones in Let The Right One In. There are so many great things about the movie. It’s staggeringly beautiful and outrageously ugly, deliciously uplifting and heartbreakingly depressing. Often in the same instant. Wonderful.

I guess I also liked it because it touches on an idea I’ve been throwing around in my head for a while, which is that of characters who span essentially endless stretches of time but who remain the same age ("Twelve. More or less.") and are therefore unable to acquire the wisdom that aging supposedly brings. Also the ideas of impossible (or at least improbable) love and of the sacrifices made for that love, which in many respects is essentially what Let The Right One In is all about of course.

But of course it’s also about vampires, which gives me the excuse to share my vampire mix with you. I compiled it last year for my Twilight loving friends. Usual rules about buying things you like apply. If you don’t, I’m sending the vampires round to rip off your heads. They know where you live…

Blood Bitch - Cocteau Twins
Vampire Island - Drexciya
I'm A Vampire - Future Bible Heroes
Spirit Of A Vampire - The Go-Betweens
Vampire Girl - Jonathan Richman
Night Of The Vampire - The Moontrekkers
Vampire - Sebadoh
Teenage Vampire - Sultans of Ping F.C.
Secret Vampires - bis
Shopping for Blood - Franz Ferdinand
Si Vous Connaissez Quelque Chose De Pire Qu'un Vampire, Parlez M'en Toujours, Ça Pourra Peut-Être Me Faire Sourire - Stella
Blood Is Sweeter Than Honey - Jazzateers
Maize Stalk Drinking Blood - The Mountain Goats
Love With Blood - The Siddeleys
Blood - Tindersticks
(Nothing But) Blood - This Mortal Coil
Dracula - Kevin Tihista's Red Terror
The Vampire - Buffy Sainte-Marie
Vampire Forest Fire - The Arcade Fire

Do you need direction? (you know I do)

I put this together some time ago, uploaded it to my Box and then promptly forgot about it. So here, resurrected from its digital tomb, is my needy mix.

Download here. Tracklist below. As always, if you like something, buy the records and support the artists please.

I Need Direction - Teenage Fanclub
Needing Someone - Gene Clark
That's All I Really Need - The Springfield Rifle
Where Were You When I Needed You - Deep Six
You're Going To Need Somebody - The Blue Aeroplanes
Don't Need Food - Hurrah!
If You Ever Need A Stranger - Jens Lekman
I Don't Need You Any More - The Kinks
All I Need Is Everything - Aztec Camera
I Think I Need A New Heart - The Magnetic Fields
I Don't Need You - My Bloody Valentine
She Don't Need You - The Primitives
If You Need Me - The Purple Hearts
You'll Be Needing Me Baby - Nino Tempo And April Stevens
Everything A Man Could Ever Need - Glen Campbell
I Need You - Position
If Ever You Need Me - Sandie Shaw
I Need Your Hand In Mine - Twinkle
Nobody Needs Your Love More Than I Do - Tammy Grimes
All You Need Is Love - The Justified Ancients Of Mu Mu

Silence Will Do

I don’t often walk with music these days. It feels like a betrayal to the world somehow. Blocking out the sounds of, if not nature, then at least the reality of the environment. Nature is overrated anyway, so it’s definitely not about wanting to hear the sound of the bloody birds or the wind in the trees. Rather the hum of electricity when you stand beneath the pylons. That’s more like it. The sound of electricity directed by wires. Connections between the cities and towns and villages; an imposition on nature. I like that.

It used to be that I would spend all my time within music. Commuting alone is good for that. I see myself from years ago every time I travel on the tube. People with headphones plugged in, drifting in their personally soundtracked movies. Sometimes I envy them with their ability to cocoon themselves and exist in their bubbles of sound. Sometimes I miss that feeling of being intentionally alone within the crowd, of disengaging and of creating a new world inside. But these days I find that harder each year. The result perhaps of a working life spent talking to people. Drawing people out. Feign an interest long enough and you find yourself genuinely interested. Some days I think my younger self would pour scorn on how I turned out, and whilst most days that doesn’t bother me, at others it makes me immeasurably sad.

So like I say, I don’t listen much to music when I’m walking now. Maybe that’s why I make more playlists and mixes than I ever used to. Playlists for imaginary walks in non-existent cities; the creation of illusory memories by proxy; a collage of moments half glimpsed and quarter remembered cut and pasted into new meanings that ultimately mean nothing at all. Constructed corny narratives that slip away inside themselves, looping and leaping off at tangents to fizzle out in a breath of impossible thoughts of ‘perhaps’ and ‘if only’ and ‘oh well, whatever’.

The archaeology of playlists and mixes is an interesting one. New interpretations to be made. Old meanings recalled and re-examined under new lights and hence restructured into something subtly different. No big picture, only snatches of evidence: like recreating a manor house from a fragment of plaster and glass.

A bus ride to the sea. Giant wind turbines frozen to the spot in the fields, only their arms moving like flailing white dervishes desperate to escape. A flash of snow past the window. Smiles somewhere and lines drawn in the sand. A walk on a beach; a month and a world apart. Years between and the feelings the same: isolation and regret; sweet, sweet love and affection; pooling tears and burning eyes; hay fever and headaches.

Green parks. A circle of trees. Bicycles lined up in rows. Sculptures in the woods that no longer exist. Ghosts of colour burnt on retinas. Smiles and waves passing in a flash of an eye. Parallel lives somehow meeting for an instant and then departing again, alone. 

Half in shadow beneath the trees, across the river a woman parks her bicycle and unpacks a blanket and a newspaper. A couple slide past on the water, idly rowing their boat and laughing in the sunlight. Behind the boathouse vagrants sift through bins, pick up cigarette butts from the path. Champagne gone warm. Red wine and chewing gum.

Spring and winter, yellow rooms and brown beer. Stockings and skirts. Dilated pupils, cornflower blue above and below. Record spinning at 3 a.m. and spot lit tracing paper confetti. Pink stars. Headphones bruising ears. Empty bottles, heartaches, candles and cake.

Alone again with the dawn coming up.

Silence Will Do.

Tracklisting:

Family Portrait - Rachel's
Tears Are In Your Eyes - Yo La Tengo
Hear the Wind Blow - Opal
In a Different Place - Ride
Silence WiIl Do - Frances McKee
Final Day - Young Marble Giants
Nostalgia - Weekend
Sorrow - Life Without Buildings
Leave Me Alone - New Order
Vanishing Point - Velvet Crush
To Keep Your Heart Whole - Trembling Blue Stars
Unfinished Business - The Go-Betweens
I Was Just Dreaming - The Orchids
Egon & Wally Embrace and Say Farewell - Rachel's

Love At Last

Here’s the second of the ‘Love’ mixes. Some classy numbers here, I hope you agree.

I Found Love - The Free Design
The Song Is Love - Montage
Love At Last - The Millennium
My Love Explodes - The Dukes Of Stratosphear
La La Love You - Pixies
18 Carat Love Affair - The Associates
Gotta Make You Love Me - Lori Burton
Baby I Love You - The Ramones
Our Sweet Love - The Beach Boys
Love Is A Four Letter Word - Lee Mallory
Give My Love To You - Joey Stec
If I Love You - Pete Wylie
Love Will - Suburban Kids With Biblical Names
If You Find Yourself Caught in Love - Belle & Sebastian
Love Story - The Brothers
A Lover Sings - Billy Bragg
Don't Fall In Love If You Want To Die In Peace - Comet Gain

When I Close My Eyes I Fall In Love

Corny as hell, yes, but here’s a little St Valentines day treat of ‘Love’ songs for you. Of course I could not bring myself to make the mix entirely upbeat and positive, so there’s a few heartbreakers in there too. I actually compiled two mixes last night over a bottle of red, so if you are lucky you will get the second one later today. I can’t decide which one I like best…

Long Live Love - Sandie Shaw
I Love You (Yeah!) - The Action
Love Me 'Til The Sun Shines - The Kinks
All For Love & Love For All - The Lilac Time
I Dreamt That Love Was A Crime - Foxgloves
A Simple Thing As Love - John Hartford
Love Is Not A Game - Glen Campbell
Baby I Love You So - Colourbox
Love Eternal - Paul Haig
Love Is On The Right - Eltro
When I Close My Eyes I Fall In Love - Oppenheimer
All Of Me Loves A Little Piece Of You - Jacques
Love Is Driving Me Insane - Stephen Duffy
I Love You Much Too Much - Honeys
Love Is a Rainy Sunday - The Love Generation
A Europewide Search For Love - Ballboy
So What About Love - Small Factory