Rattle My Cage - The Primitives (Amazon MP3 ) Lego - Ok (soundcloud) Impressions of a City Morning - Brown Recluse (Soundcloud) Trances - Mariage Blanc (Bandcamp) Travelers - Arches (mediafire) Georgia - Yuck (soundcloud) Tokyo - California Wives (soundcloud) Time to Dance - The Shoes (soundcloud) Soul Handsome - Kuhrye-oo (soundcloud) Everyone Feels That Way Sometimes - Computer Magic (band site) Marshall Meadows - People Of Water (Amazon MP3 ) The Fall Of Great Britain - Factory Star (occultation label) Alexander Hamilton - Howth (bandcamp) Cold Weather Sunshine - Morning Teleportation (Amazon MP3 ) Small Garden Wedding - The Haints of Dean Hall (Bandcamp) Bunhill Fields - Amor de Dias (Soundcloud) The Millionaire - Ex Cops (Soundcloud)
This week's mail brought a hand screened edition of the brilliant 'Wholsesome' album by Hands and Knees, two Richard Yates titles and a further two from Dorothy B. Hughes. Interested to see how the novel of 'The Fallen Sparrow' compares to the movie, given that the cinema treatment of 'In A Lonely Place' was so different.
And is it just me or does everyone's accumulation of books generally outstrip the time available to actually read them? I think of it as stockpiling for holidays. Got to have something to look forward to, after all...
But wait! What's this?! A little further along the road I came across this sign. Another farm, this time selling 'Big Swedes'! And at half the price of a loose one! So it seems you can have either a 'big' Swede or a 'loose' one, but not both big and loose... Decisions, decisions...
Raise a glass, a shout, a finger. Head deeper underground, even if only in your mind. Spot the connections, make the hops, skips and jumps. This is how it goes: the songs that brighten the days and nights; the words that smother your dreams in imaginary kisses; the swords that pierce your heart. A last glance over the shoulder then disappearing in crowds of metropolitan isolation. Music for the lost couple.
Here’s a route for you then. Out over the farm roads towards Poltimore, skipping up past Killerton House, the brief 14 per cent ramp to the chapel and the drop to the bridge at Ellerhayes. Rise again to the dark corridor of trees on Park Road and on through Silverton, home to the Exe Valley Brewery. Across the Exe valley road, slipping through Up Exe and Latchmoor Green before passing fading remains of the old valley railway line; the former station house outside of Thorverton, the road cutting that once passed below the tracks, then on into the village itself before emerging onto the lower slope of Raddon Hill. Up past Raddon House, remodelled in recent years but mentioned in Pevsner’s Devon as the old, original house. Turning then down through Efford and Shute, on to cross Langford Bridge and eventually back to the main Crediton road just before Half Moon. Finally over Cowley Bridge and onto Stoke Road, skirting Stoke Woods with the flood plains opening over to the left, electrical pylons striding majestically beside river and London mainline alike.
And at Raddon, the halfway point, two horses in the field rushing to meet me. An apology for having nothing nice to share, but they let me stroke their noses regardless. Behind them the sun squints in an almost pristine blue wash of sky. The horses pose, as horses are prone to do, and as I ride on I hum ‘The Day I Was A Horse’. As you do. Well don’t you?
Of course ‘The Day I Was A Horse’ reminds one mostly of The Vaselines but for me it always recalls the fabulous Hands And Knees whose early recordings I released when they were still called La Fea (they changed the name a week or two after the first 3” CDRs went out in the mail, necessitating a hasty sleeve change...). A sparkling cover of ‘The Day I Was A Horse’ was but one of the highlights of their set.
Now it occurred to me as I rode the last few kilometres home that I had lost track of Hands And Knees after the excellent ‘Et Tu Fluffy?’ set of 2009. So a quick trip to LastFM, a hop to Bandcamp and there we have it: a brand new release for 2011 in the ‘Wholesome’ set. Fine stuff it is too. Easily up to the standard of their previous releases, it is the sound of Pop that revels in knowing its place. It is Pop that spins its clicking fingers back to the roots of rock’n’roll and that swings in tune with the spirit of, say a Postcard shimmy and a Flying Nun swirl (they previously recorded a more than satisfying version of ‘All My Hollowness To You’) infused with the warmth of the 20th Century American tradition of Byrdsian folk-rock. It’s already one of my favourite records of the year.
I seldom remember the routes I take.... No, let me refine that. I seldom remember the methods I use to find the routes I take. The routes themselves, if they are worth hanging on to, well, those stay inside forever. Secretive sometimes, like the previously mentioned stretch of cobbles my friend kept tucked away from us nearly thirty years ago. Or the means by which we might stumble on a new sound. The steps we take. The hours lost in wandering. Once through racks in flea-ridden second hand stores, cheaply copied pages in fanzines and barely decipherable scrawls in letters but now, perhaps, through the underground pipes of blogs and bandcamp pages.
So I don’t remember the route I took, and even if I did I doubt I would share that with you but, hey, I arrived at the Orchard Thief and let me tell you it’s a rather wonderful place to alight.
What is there to know about The Orchard Thief? Precious little, which is how it ought to be after all. A blog that hasn’t been updated in a year. Some drawings and collages. An empty Facebook page ‘liked’ by thirteen people. I like that number so I’m not going to add to it. What difference would it make anyway? There is more to numbers than counting.
A LastFM entry says something about coming from “the alluvial plains of La Crosse, Wisconsin” and you know, sure enough, I can hear this music as a soundtrack to ‘Wisconsin Death Trip’. Spooked and stretching to distant, glowering clouds. It also says that The Orchard Thief is self-described as “teenagers in outer-space” which is marvellously fetching and fitting. Indeed it puts me in mind of how we might once have described the recordings of a fledgling Orange Cake Mix, though I rather think Jim Rao’s teenage years were already distant when he recorded the magical likes of ‘When the sky was falling down on you’...
So what else does The Orchard Thief conjure? For me there are echoes of the madcap laughter of psychedelic pranksters Blackmothsuperrainbow; the fragile, history-soaked landscape paintings of July Skies; Durutti Column’s brittle guitar sketches of summer; sometimes hypnotic techno clashing with found sound noise; Maurice Deebank scouring the Pavement. Or, if you prefer, it’s the sound of a blasted heath sheathed in snow reaching far into the sky, kissing bronzed clouds gently on the horizon. Something like that anyway.
There are several Orchard Thief recordings to find, of which 2009’s ‘Work’ and last year’s ‘Coin Purse’ are the most fully formed and intriguing. The beguiling ‘GreenThingsMovingThroughtheWaterOnLand’ from the recent Total Bummer Compilation Volume 1 collection is also well worth tracking down.
My mate Gavin of the ace new ‘Rather Be Cycling’ holiday company (swooshy man logo courtesy of yours truly) had the pleasure of getting muddy on the cobbled roads of hell the other week. More than that, he did it in the company of a bloke called Bernard (plus a bunch of journalists). That’s him in the photo - third in line getting gapped by my mate in the grotty blue anorak. They used to call him ‘The Badger’ you know (that’s Bernard, not Gavin) and, oh yes, he won the Tour De France five times...
There is a nice wee article about the ride by magazine editor Guy Andrews on the Rouleur blog, although Gav’s yet to be published version sneaks it for me, if only for his mention of seeing Dickie Davies introduce a few minutes of the muddy glory of Paris Roubaix back in the early ‘80s. It is something I remember seeing too, though I admit it did not inspire me to go searching out muddy tracks in Ayrshire on which to train, as it did Gav. He admitted to me this week that he had discovered a stretch of cobbles out behind Prestwick airport on which he trained incessantly and which he kept secret from everyone else. I think it’s safe to say that if he had shared the info with me in 1984 I would have thanked him politely and stayed as far away as possible, not wanting to risk getting my La Vie Claire jersey muddied. Yes, I always was a bit of a wimp.
