MAX TUNDRA - Life in a Lift Shaft, Doggy Biscuits, Control It (Bistrotheque), Ampikaipakan (MP3s)

MAX TUNDRA - Life in a Lift Shaft, Doggy Biscuits, Control It (Bistrotheque), Ampikaipakan (MP3s)
I don’t know why I find myself listening so obsessively to Max Tundra’s skittering electro-jazz, since its air of aimlessness and slight self-satisfaction clash with my current aesthetic of self-promotion and self-belief. It has overtones of Nathan Barley-ism, true, but it’s saved by this uncontrollable rush, the way the sounds play with each other. Like all the best electronic jazz - and, indeed, all the best jazz full stop - it plays a game with excitement and indulgence, and just about saves itself.

I feel strangely assured by it, awful word I know, but it’s the best description for the mixed feelings of strangeness and security this music gives me (and it’s steering me through these unsettled weeks like nothing else). Something seems to be happening sonically in every one of these pieces, as well - the way “Control It (Bistrotheque)” hurtles along to what sounds like a frog on speed, the way “Life in a Lift Shaft” is powered throughout by a frenetic mad dash of concert piano. A large part of me will recall this as the backdrop to a cruel, unthinking summer.

I guess I must stake a claim as one of the nylpm curators

I guess I must stake a claim as one of the nylpm curators in Tom’s absence, though I suspect most know me anyway …

But I’m slightly embarrassed at my sporadic recent contributions here. There’s one coming in about 30 minutes, though.

BEULAH - If We Can Land A Man On The Moon Then Why Can’t I Win Your Heart?

BEULAH - If We Can Land A Man On The Moon Then Why Can’t I Win Your Heart?
ESSEX GREEN - Primrose
These two are about as good as indiepop gets these days, which naturally means they have to overcome an overriding sense of cosiness, jauntiness and retreat into formula to affect, let alone effect. “If We Can Land On The Moon …” gets away with it brilliantly, though, despite its slight late 70s powerpop overtones. Somehow the conscious eccentricity in the instrumentation is charming rather than irritating, the failed and down-at-heel cod-symphonic element moves, and it defines the indiepop variety of love song (utterly lacking in any confidence of your own abilities, I-am-weak-how-can-I-reach-you rather than I-am-strong-know-I-can-reach-you) better than pretty much anything else I’ve heard. And at least the nostalgia for past “innocence”, which Simon Reynolds was right to define as a key part of the indie mindset back in 1986 (since when very little has really changed, at least not for these purists), only affects the background of the song rather than its entire production and delivery.

“Primrose”, though, is pure unbridled pastiche, based around a Lovin’ Spoonful rhythm, guitar solo and organ, incredibly cliched girl backing vocals, gradually building itself up, sounding like every bright-as-a-button 60s song you’ve ever heard. Its intent is clearly to make the listener imagine the fabled swinging handbag. It’s the most enjoyable and likeable period pastiche I’ve heard for a long time, but I can’t help being pushed down by an incredible sense of shame at my pleasure, such is its conscious, exaggerated and, I suspect, cynical use of period stylings. What should concern the gatekeepers of the indiepop mentality is that it’s far better than most of the other music they are promoting at the moment.

MR LEN - Straight Up

MR LEN - Straight Up (MP3)
I was originally going to say that if you think turntablism is essentially modern fretwankery (Tom?) then you won’t like this, but I now realise that this is a simplistic argument - more than half of the track is taken up by the emceeing anyway (though it repeats itself needlessly towards the end) and though it does consciously avoid an instant hook, it’s the best kind of undie production values, not the earnest-jazzy variety, but the kind that imbues musique concrete with the funk. Company Flow have been the masters of this, of course (there are moments in “Funcrusher Plus”, their 1997 debut which seems more stimulating and influential the further you get from it, where you literally can’t believe what you’ve heard) and this doesn’t equal their best stuff, but the involvement of The Arsonists (at their best on last year’s stunning Tex Avery-sampling “Pyromaniax”, for me a kind of undie “My Name Is…”, but never dull) makes it consistently thrilling.

JAMES LUCAS - Christine

JAMES LUCAS - Christine (MP3)
The English psychedelic tradition I love isn’t the overdone bastardisation of the 70s, it’s the more simple, clear and expressive sound of the late 60s. Not really Nick Drake (something less deeply personal than his work), and certainly not Simon and Garfunkel (whose sound has been, essentially, the source for Belle & Sebastian), it’s been overlooked in recent years. But this could very easily be Syd Barrett - it has exactly the right echo and guitar sound, but it isn’t pastiche or revivalism, it sounds fresh, questing, forward-looking, Lucas woken up and dreaming of his idol, wanting her, driven to a kind of restrained insanity by her unapprochability. More to the point, James sounds positively in awe of the subject of the song, who is personified as the classic unreachable woman, somehow too perfect to grasp, but there’s no exaggeration or overt embellishment. Lucas’s vocal style is the combination of removed idolisation and desire for closeness that defines all the finest Romantic pop. One of his best moments yet.

Tom was, quite literally, amazed, on reading my last posting …

Please be aware that, while I genuinely like some Tull stuff, I certainly don’t rate them particularly highly in the great scheme of things (their version of “The Dambusters March” is literally unlistenable). I’m well aware that they’re the least fashionable band in the world and will probably remain so forever (I don’t think they’d benefit even from a major Prog revival should it happen, so erratic and wilful is Ian Anderson’s exaggerated troubadour shtick that was critically despised even then). But I do feel that the influence of punk so as to exclude virtually everything in the preceding few years has become overt, and it was partially a genuine expression of historical interest and partially an act of sheer, wilful subversion. At a time when Freaky Trigger is giving ample space to destructions of contemporary sacred cows, I thought I’d turn it round, to praise a band whose awfulness is now pretty much taken as read, to question the orthodoxy.

And I think it’s worked as such.

JETHRO TULL - “Hunting Girl”, “Jack in the Green”, “One Brown Mouse” and others

JETHRO TULL - “Hunting Girl”, “Jack in the Green”, “One Brown Mouse” and others (MP3s)
Jethro Tull. Simply writing the words here feels like entering some kind of permanently culturally forbidden territory, a hidden world that we are told permanently not to enter. It was punk that did it, of course. The conscious “Englishness” of this band and others like them fell from favour literally overnight, and they were consigned to years of lower-profile existence interrupted only by a typically clueless Grammy Award for the best *hard rock* album at some point in the 80s. They still record, but I doubt whether even Mojo magazine takes much notice these days, and from 1972 onwards they gradually became more successful in the US and Europe than the UK, which shouldn’t really have surprised anyone. As anyone from Johnny and the Hurricanes to And Also The Trees can tell you, a conscious appropriation of your national cultural past generally gives you a greater appreciation *outside* your home country. Pop audiences worldwide tend to turn to their music as an escape from their own national “roots”, while audiences in other countries will often find a certain escapism and exoticism in those images.

Listening to this music now is like going through an old album of dusty black-and-white family photos, a cultural diversion only *just* beginning to be re-evaluated. Much of it is deeply unmemorable - Tull were, on this evidence, a fucking atrocious band much of the time, with far too many extended rock workouts (the general rule is that the closest they get to heavy rock, the worse they are) and bear in mind that these are live recordings from 1978, the time and place where all the worst aspects of 70s rock were the most overplayed. Nothing matches the utter genius of “The Maypole Song” and other soundtrack music from The Wicker Man, which was written at roughly the same time. *But* … the best songs here (”Hunting Girl”, “Jack in the Green”, “One Brown Mouse” and the wonderful reflection on mortality and permanance “Skating Away On The Thin Ice Of A New Day”) are affecting, inspirational, evocative of a personal journey, and highly suggestive of Britain at a particularly fascinating stage of reconciling its past and future, trapped beautifully between the obsessive futurism of the Telstar era and the shameless immunisation-from-now of Poundbury et al. They’re also infinitely better than any more “purist” take on the same style I’ve ever heard.

In many ways, the whole rock-as-Englishness phase of 1968-76 was a repeat of the early 20th Century craze for collecting and archiving the past, which gave rise to cultural products as diverse as Thomas Hardy’s novels (chronicling a way of life already disappearing into the past) and the “hey-nonny-no” light operettas of Edward German. It’s not too difficult to see this music as the offshoot of a similar feeling, feeling pushed by the still relatively new influence of television to look back into its past, and to reconcile that history with the forces seen as its inevitable destroyers. While its utter domination in the early-mid 70s over the urban English dystopia of punk was a narrowing and restricting influence, its complete removal from most pop consciousnesses for the last 23 years is every bit as constricting.

I’m writing this the weekend BBC Radio 2, long Britain’s most reliably MOR network, airs a punk documentary - maybe Momus is right that this stuff, at its best (and you have to fight long and hard through the dross to find the good stuff, mind) is now more subversive than what seemed to utterly confine it to history. The fact that it relies upon the same English imagery that I’ve always tried desperately not to be defined by just makes it all the more intriguing.

XTC - “Playground”

XTC - “Playground” (MP3), “Stupidly Happy” (from Unconditionally Guaranteed 2000:5, free CD with Uncut magazine)
It is 1962. The town of Swindon. Not quite as modern as large parts of it have come to look (it didn’t receive ITV until April 1965, nearly a decade after London) but you can be instantly fooled otherwise, so aligned is the place to the new affluence of ITV rather than the timeless establishment culture of the BBC. A housing estate is filling up, largely with workers moved from London. The long-since-defunct ITV company TWW are there for filming purposes. The estate’s children are out in the early evening sunshine, dressed in that beautifully plain, casual and straightforward style that marked the transitional years between austerity and mass commercialisation. I want to believe that two great British pop dreamers were among them, laying the first seeds.

John Betjeman sneers, of course. What could he know? Better for him to discreetly turn the camera away, to the deserted Devon village of North Lew, to the old town of Swindon, to revel in his mental idyll, his lavish personal myth of an unchanging rural stasis. He could never see that, in the estates that he mocked as “not Swindon, not anywhere”, a dream was being created that would, 38 years later, hold for many of us all the romance his beloved ruralism held for him.

And now I hear “Playground” and “Stupidly Happy”. While these first two tracks on “Wasp Star” have a rockier and less quietly pastoral sound than most of last year’s “Apple Venus Volume 1″, they are both wonderful. The first is a reflection on the experience of school, our shared past, and an acknowledgement that the effects of those years, however much we may disdain them, never fully leave us. The second is impeccably joyous, a distillisation of how you feel when, after so long going wrong, everything’s going right for you and you couldn’t care less if you’re closing your eyes to the depressions of ther wider world. Their finest achievement is to make me love what I tend to find smug and self-satisfied (chiming guitars, gentle elation, deep personal nostalgia).

Those boys playing cricket and running towards the mobile shop 38 years ago, I think I know who two of you were. If I’m mistaken, well I probably am, but I think I deserve the illusion that I do. Andrew and Colin, there in your perfect open-plan primary school with your Aertex shirts and light grey exercise books, now I think I know where it began. And I feel happier for it.

EMINEM - “Kim” (MP3) Eminem is conceivably the most commercially lucrative purveyor of the consciously, proudly

EMINEM - “Kim” (MP3)
Eminem is conceivably the most commercially lucrative purveyor of the consciously, proudly ugly in pop music ever. This track could conceivably be to him what “Hippopotamomus” was to Nick Currie - the moment when even his defenders turn round and say “enough is enough”, when the NME turns into the Daily Mail. And this is on an album which will almost certainly displace Britney as US#1 after one week. These are extraordinary times.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard a more extreme track, at least in terms of its vocals - Em’s every word is a scream, a vicious, animalised cry, a bloodthirsty demand for his prey (the most telling moment is when he, literally, bites ), almost beyond any recognisable human speech. You know exactly, what the female screams in the background are. Nothing else has ever been such a convincing description of the experience of physical abuse, presented as a mock-opera with mournful classical sample, which strengthens the grotesquerie, presenting it as something important and meaningful, to be built up as a dramatic event for our entertainment. It is, quite literally, vile . It is capable of shocking the unshockable. Essentially I like it a lot, but I’ve never been more morally doubtful about anything I’ve liked. Beginning with the sound of a lullaby, the final sounds suggest nothing less than the destruction of a woman, her body left to rot in a countryside signified by outrageously out-of-place birdsong.

I don’t think I’ll play it for at least 48 more hours. I know I’ll return to it from time to time, aware that this is an important place for pop music to go and that censorship is evil, but also that visiting this particular place can make even the most confirmed liberal feel censorious.

THE BLUE MEN - “I Hear A New World” GEOFF GODDARD - “Sky Men” GLENDA COLLINS - “It’s Hard To Believe It”

THE BLUE MEN - “I Hear A New World”
GEOFF GODDARD - “Sky Men”
GLENDA COLLINS - “It’s Hard To Believe It” (all in RealAudio from here)
As I may have written somewhere else on Freaky Trigger, Joe Meek would never have been a fraction of the genius he was had he pretended that the British people in 1960 could understand Rockism. Even when his protege, Heinz, covered and imitated Eddie Cochran, it was in a uniquely airy, open, British style. His genius was to grasp the cosy, affluent optimism of the era and translate it into space - a kind of halfway meeting of Harold Macmillan and Bob Moog. If Stevenage wasn’t big enough for the dreams of 1960, then it had to be somewhere far beyond.

“I Hear A New World” is perhaps his definitive early statement, recorded in late 1959. With its “alien” vocals and impossibly appealing melody line, it’s one of the most promising and forward-looking songs ever recorded in Britain. It still invites you into an intoxicating utopia, perhaps simultaneously a New Town and another planet (it’s difficult to believe that this is from the era of Cliff Richard’s “Voice in the Wilderness”, let alone that the two songs have almost the same pace and guitar sound …). But this music could only work as everything gently flowed forward - when it was sped up by socialism and the Beatles, it would suddenly appear like a relic of a cancelled future, revised into the first incarnation of British Rockism. Geoff Goddard’s “Sky Men” - a sub-Telstar arrangement and melody line accompanied by an incredible, inspirational high vocal register, was already sounding dated in 1963, due to the malign influence of the exaggeratedly proletarian and “everyday” Merseybeat movement. You can sense the poignancy creeping in by this point, and apart from The Honeycombs’ “Have I The Right” (a 1964 Number 1, largely because of its sub-Dave Clark Five “stomping” rhythm rather than its mind-blowing production) Meek would fall into commercial obscurity from here on in. The fact that various regressive blues-rock troglodytes usurped Meek’s futurism caused an incredible personal sadness to creep into his life.

Recorded the year before Meek’s death, “It’s Hard To Believe It” is the man’s great lost single, a heartbreaking lament for the demise of the dreams that opened the decade, beginning with a nuclear explosion, a cry, and into a mournful elegy for Meek’s entire career, an utter inversion of his 1960-63 work, recorded in a style which was knowingly outdated and aware of its utter commercial unsuitability to 1966. This song (and the comparison is, I admit, bleeding obvious) can only be described as “Ashes to Ashes” to the “Space Oddity” of “I Hear A New World”. I never thought I’d say this (as someone who idolises Wilsonian social democracy) but if Harold Macmillan’s cosy futurism could (however accidentally) give us Joe Meek and Wilson gave us The Yardbirds, then I’d have chosen an extension of the early 60s into the middle years of the decade. And I know that “Sky Men” is infinitely more important than “She Loves You” in my personal history.