unpopular

Just For Fun (slight return)

 

The very wonderful Alpaca Sports have made a second video for their ace 'Just For Fun' 7". It's full of Parisian frolics, though sadly no taxi appears to transport them to La Belle Epoque. And there is good news if you missed out on the 7" that sold out in the blink of an eye. For Susy Records of Peru are offering a 3" CD version, with a slightly better sleeve illustration (though it still raises a 'meh' from me I have to admit). 

What I didn't buy on Record Snore Day

So did you buy anything on Record Snore Day? I didn’t. Not least because there is no record store of any interest within reach. Hasn’t been for years. Does this bother me? Not in the slightest. 

I admit that sometimes I envy people like Brogues who have stores such as Monorail on their doorstep. But that’s quite rare, isn’t it? How many stores like Monorail are there in the UK after all? Not many I’d wager. And certainly not in remote rural outposts like Exeter. We might be getting a shiny new John Lewis’, but an independent record store/venue/bar/cafe? You’re havin’ a laugh. 

Not that I’d frequent it much if such a thing were to exist: it probably wouldn’t even open until 11am on a Saturday after all. By which time I would have been to town, done what needed to be done and be safely back home, drinking coffee in the The Geek Lair and listening to the latest of my spectacular Unpopular mixes.

So no, I did not buy anything on Record Bore Day. But you know what? I tend to buy records on other days too! One of which arrived this morning - the eponymous album by Solid Home Life, on beautiful blue/green vinyl. Filled with quirky downbeat gems, it’s a record of rare laid back warmth that reflects the social way in which it was largely recorded. For around a core of Greg Olin and Lindsay Shief there circulate a bunch of friends drifting in and out, contributing charming organ riffs and sax solos. Spacious and pared back, the songs are nevertheless sprinkled with perfectly poised decoration: a pinch of fairy bells here, a touch of tremulous tambourine there. A minimal guitar line meandering around a clarinet refrain. Just gorgeous.

The Sands

I Wonder Who She's Kissing Now - TV Girl (courtesy of Stereogum)
Sweetness In Her Spark - Lightships (YouTube)
Undegsaith - Y Niwl (Bandcamp)
Exterminator - The Beat Poets (YouTube)
Cathedral City Comedown - The Pre New (from Music for People Who Hate Themselves)
Kool Shoes - San Francisco Water Cooler (Bandcamp)
Sleazy Dreams - The Band In Heaven (Bandcamp)
Queen Of The Dancefloor - Billie The Vision & The Dancers (YouTube)
Me And I - Abba (YouTube)
Godrevy Point - Patrick Wolf (Soundcloud)
Little Lighthouse - The Dukes Of Stratosphear (YouTube)
The Sands - The Wake (from A Light Far Out)
Pink Frost - Drvg Cvltvre (Soundcloud)
Dark Fruit (The Cyclist Remix) - Alligator Indian (Bandcamp)
Down to the Wire - Eternal Summers (from The Dawn Of Eternal Summers)
Killing Time - Veronica Falls (Soundcloud)
The Ballad Of Jim Jones - The Left Outsides (from an iWishiWasUnpopular EP)
Let's Go To Bed - Solid Home Life (Bandcamp)

Good lord it was a beautiful day

1976 - You Should Be Dancing

The third and final mix spans August through to the end of December, when the EMI release of 'Anarchy In The UK' briefly propelled The Sex Pistols into the charts, only for the single to be withdrawn after their exploits on the Grundy show.

You Should Be Dancing - The Bee Gees
Dancing Queen - Abba
(Shake, Shake, Shake) Shake Your Booty - KC And The Sunshine Band
Blinded By The Light - Manfred Mann's Earth Band
The Killing Of Georgie [Part I And II] - Rod Stewart
Let 'Em In - Wings
I Want More - Can
Love And Affection - Joan Armatrading
She's Gone - Daryl Hall & John Oates
Livin' Thing - Electric Light Orchestra
Money, Money, Money - Abba
Maid In Heaven - Be Bop Deluxe
Teenage Depression - Eddie & The Hot Rods
Anarchy In The UK - Sex Pistols

She's juicy and she's trouble...

1976 - Young Hearts Run Free

The second mix from 1976 covers roughly May to August. I think that sequence from Bowie to The Sensational Alex Harvey Band is a treat and a half.

There's A Kind Of Hush - Carpenters
Love Hangover - Diana Ross
Fool To Cry - The Rolling Stones
You're The Reason Why - The Rubettes
TVC15 - David Bowie
You To Me Are Everything - The Real Thing
Young Hearts Run Free - Candi Staton
The Boys Are Back In Town - Thin Lizzy
Boston Tea Party - The Sensational Alex Harvey Band
Silly Love Songs - Wings
Let's Stick Together - Bryan Ferry
Don't Go Breaking My Heart - Elton John & Kiki Dee
Harvest For The World - The Isley Brothers
Me and Baby Brother - War

Don't be no fool when loving is all there is 

1976 - Golden Years

Having teased you with my mention of a 1976 Pop Playlist yesterday, here is the first of three mixes for that year. This one roughly covers January to the end of April. I was hoping that ABBA might have been number one on my tenth birthday, but sadly it hit the top a couple of weeks late, on May 5th. The pleasure instead belonged to The Brotherhood Of Man, whose 'Save All Your Kisses For Me' unsurprisingly has not made this memorial mix. Here's what has:

Golden Years - David Bowie
Love to Love You Baby - Donna Summer
Forever and Ever - Slik
Squeeze Box - The Who
Funky Weekend - The Stylistics
50 Ways To Leave Your Lover - Paul Simon
Ships In The Night - Be Bop Deluxe
Evil Woman - Electric Light Orchestra
Falling Apart At The Seams - Marmalade
Concrete And Clay - Randy Edelman
Here, There And Everywhere - Emmylou Harris
City Lights - David Essex
Fernando - Abba
I'm Mandy Fly Me - 10cc

opening doors and pulling some strings

God Save The Dancing Queen

I have been in the habit recently of compiling playlists of songs from the years of my murky teen and pre-teen past. In many ways I suspect it is a typical thing for a middle-aged man to do. Attempts to reconnect with an earlier age. Lost possibilities. Evaporated desires. Something like that, perhaps. But then again perhaps just simply as a means of rediscovering and enjoying songs that had passed into the strange outer space of half-remembered echoes; tunes from the radio that reverberated in the airwaves on drives to school and back. Attempts to piece together a sonic jigsaw puzzle of vague imagination and reconstructed memory.

In the week before Easter I embarked on 1976. The NME Charts book was open in front of me (my only rule is that the songs must have appeared in the NME chart - for no other reason than I have had that book since the mid-90s and do love dipping into it) whilst my iTunes and Amazon accounts quivered in anticipation. 

There were some truly great records in 1976. Donna Summer’s ‘Love To Love You Baby’; Diana Ross’ ‘Love Hangover’; Bowie’s ‘TVC15’; The Real Thing’s ‘You To Me Are Everything’; Candi Staton’s ‘Young Hearts Run Free’; Thin Lizzy’s ‘The Boys Are Back In Town’. And of course there was ABBA. ‘Fernando’. ‘Dancing Queen’. ‘Money, Money, Money’. Such classic singles.

Of course there is a lot of nonsense put about where the 1970s are concerned, particularly with respect to music. After all the distillation of subjects into bite-sized nuggets comprised of lowest-common denominator ingredients has been a defining factor in mass-mediated cultural documentation for decades. Far easier to endlessly regurgitate the accepted facts and canon of ‘greatness’ than to investigate something new. Which in turn results in the spectacle of ten year old shows masquerading as contemporary retrospectives. And just as you think ‘hang on, these guys look remarkably good for going on 50’ Phil Oakey talks about 1971 being thirty years ago and it all clicks into place. Pop eats itself, vomits, eats its own vomit and repeats the process endlessly.  That’s just the way it goes. 

If you are reading this blog you are doubtless aware that Dave Haslam wrote an excellent evocatively ‘alternative’ history of the decade. First published in 2005 as ‘Not ABBA’, it has since been reprinted under the title of ‘Young Hearts Run Free’; a reference of course to the classic Candi Staton single by which Haslam defines 1976. I am glad that the book has been re-titled, for much as I love the content, I find the original title somewhat disingenuous. Particularly since in recent years I have come to unapologetically love ABBA’s records in a way that I once did as a pre-teen.

I admit that there was a long period in my life when I would not have admitted to loving ABBA records. Such is the nature of growing up after all. One must define oneself as much by what one rejects as what one embraces. And there is nothing so important to growing up as rejecting the things that were important to us as clueless youngsters. As Haslam inferred by the original title of his book, for such a long time ABBA were inextricably tied to the industry of the nostalgic fiction of the 1970s: their records portrayed as ‘cheesy’ or ‘ironic’; hideously neon-lit decorative soundtrack elements of hen nights; the sonic equivalent of dildo deely-boppers. Not good.

Perhaps for many people that is still true of course. If so it is a great shame, for disconnected from such appallingly depressing reference points ABBA’s records still sound like the unashamedly brilliant, unapologetically Pop records they were when originally released. Which perhaps explains why they were so successful in the first place. After all, most people who buy music do not much care for anything beyond the fact that they like the tune and/or they fancy the singer(s). Which is fair enough. And anyway, selling millions of records does not necessarily make a group less worthy of artistic acknowledgement than one who suffers in obscurity. Just ask those journalists who continue to regurgitate cliched platitudes about The Beatles. And The Beatles could not hold a candle to ABBA. Or anyone. 

Looking back, I’m interested in why I should have denied the greatness of ABBA for so long. I blame Punk. Or rather, I blame my earnest reading of Punk and believing for so long in the myth of the scorched earth Year Zero attitude. Such folly. Yet as mentioned earlier, such folly is an essential element of youth. But knowing when to let go of some of those youthful ideas is every bit as crucial. After all, you may run the risk of missing out on so much, and that would never do.

The Punk intervention is interesting though, and retrospectively I am intrigued by the way in which mainstream and ‘counter’ culture clashed and blended in those times. Retrospectively too the absorption of Punk ‘rebellion’ into marketable mainstream product seems laughably inevitable. Ultimately could it ever have been otherwise? I mean, does it really seem so strange that a media corporation should take advantage of re-releasing The Sex Pistols’ ‘God Save The Queen’ in this new Jubilee year? John Lydon can complain all he wants, but after all, to what extent can any art form that enters the public domain retain even a fragment of its original context some 35 years after its inception? 



John Robb touches on this in his excellent piece about ‘Never Mind The Bollocks’ over on Louder Than War. One of the things I like most about the article is how Robb peels away the layers of endlessly re-written and re-interpreted readings of The Sex Pistols to get to the raw sores of the original context. In doing so he shines the spotlight not on those regurgitated cultural commentaries, but listens instead to the music with (almost) newly opened ears. As he writes, the experience is something of a revelation, with much of the record managing to still sound at once astonishingly alien and yet vigorously, robustly rooted in the rock’n’roll canon it makes such a effort to escape from.

I was struck by a similar feeling when I snuck ‘Anarchy In The UK’ in as the last track on my 1976 playlist (the original EMI pressing being withdrawn almost immediately after the single appeared in the NME chart in the Christmas week). For even alongside the likes of Be Bop Deluxe and Eddie & The Hot Rods (whose ‘Teenage Depression’ made an appearance on the NME charts just prior to The Pistols) ‘Anarchy In The UK’ sounds distinctly otherworldly. Having studiously avoided listening to The Sex Pistols for many years I admit it thrilled me in a way I had not expected. Shorn of the baggage of endless cultural commentary and ‘significance’ it sounded just as it ought to: an astonishingly exciting Pop single. And as such, was it so very different to ABBA’s ‘Dancing Queen’? For similarly stripped of decades of over-familiarisation and cultural insignificance, ‘Dancing Queen’ too sounds like the sensational Pop single it clearly always was. 

Benny, Björn, Frida, Agnetha, Johnny, Paul, Steve, Glen and Sid. God Bless ‘em all.

what he said...

Sunbeam Blood Shine

The Seed - Plum (on Vimeo)
Interference - Electrum (from an 'i wish i was unpopular' EP)
André Breton - Pandercakes (Bandcamp)
Steam Powered Submarine - Nordenfelt (Bandcamp)
Vanderbilt Cup - Empty Pools (Bandcamp)
Sunbeam Blood Shine - SEX DREAM (Bandcamp)
Seaman's Pledge - The Sorry Shop (Bandcamp)
Arboles de Navidad V3 - Medialunas (Soundcloud)
Tears Of A Landlord - Shrag (BBC Session courtesy of Kris Waaah)
A Night on Leather Mountain - The Pre New (from Music for People Who Hate Themselves)
Der Mussolini - Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft (YouTube)
Belinda - Eurythmics (YouTube)
Everywhere - Tigercats (from 'Full Moon Reggae Party)
A (long) road from earth to sky - Starfire Connective Sound (Bandcamp)
Holocaust - Rainy Day (YouTube)
There Was A Light - Chris Bell (from I Am the Cosmos)
The Way Of The Hand And The Foot - Hacia Dos Veranos (Bandcamp)
What Do We Do Now - The Just Joans (from 'Buckfast Bottles In The Rain')

I still think of you whenever I smell cider...

Anyone who rides a bike is a friend of mine

I don’t know, all these Johnny and Jenny-come-lately’s riding bicycles nowadays. There ought to be a law that says every bicycle sold should come with an ‘etiquette of the road’ booklet. And perhaps a test to prove people have read it and understood it. A highway code of bicycling etiquette, if you will.

It feels like on every ride I make these days I lose count of the number of cyclists who completely blank my nod, smile and wave of greeting as we pass each other on the road. I’m not picky about who I greet, either. If someone is riding a bicycle I will assume that they are a decent type - after all, most likely they have chosen a bicycle for their journey over a motor car, and that’s more than enough for me. Naturally this may not be true, but since we pass each other in the blink of an eye, what can it hurt to think positively about someone? Life is too short, and all that.

But no, time and again the rider on the other side of the road stares straight ahead, refusing to acknowledge the presence of another bicyclist. I would understand if I were talking about a city with enormous numbers of commuters buzzing along, but this is the Devon countryside we’re talking about here. And although the number of bicycles has grown exponentially in the past year or two it is still a long way from roads being an unbroken stream of pedalling frenzy.

The oldsters know the score of course. That chap on the immaculate steel Harry Hall? Always a hand fully off the bars and a cheery wave. Top man. The gaggle of grey haired tourers in fluorescent jackets and bar bags? Always a smile and a polite nod of acknowledgement. Marvellous. But the idiot on the new Pinarello and the Sky kit with his saddle too low and knees all over the place? He’s too busy thinking he’s Bradley Wiggins to deign to recognise your presence. Probably hasn’t even heard of The Action either. Git. Or the bloke on the time trial Cervelo, in short sleeves and shorts when the temperature is barely into double figures; in full aero position, going downhill, with a tailwind, like a snail? The effort it takes to nod a greeting is hardly going to upset the airflow over your helmet. Fool.

Not that I’m going to change my ways, you understand. And whilst I’ll continue to mutter ‘well f*** you too then, git’ under my breath every time some impolite newbie finds the tarmac in front of them more attractive than the sight of my spinning legs (actually put like that I can fully understand their decisions) I will remain devout in my belief that on a fundamental level anyone who rides a bicycle is worthy of my respect. Even when they’re not.