Another old pic from another old camera phone (Sony Ericsson C510).
EXIF metadata suggests this was taken in December 2011, which seems possible. I seem to recall it was from some exhibition or another on the Southbank. but if you're going to ask me where exactly or who the artist was, I'm going to come up short.
Sorry about that.
Three years ago, I started another blog. Let me explain why.
During the 1990s, BBC Radio 1 ran an annual mini-festival called Sound City (not to be confused with Liverpool Sound City or the Dave Grohl movie – if it wasn’t branded “Radio 1” then it’s not relevant here). The idea was that every year they would occupy a series of venues in the city of choice, and broadcast gigs live every evening. I used to tape (look it up, kids) some of these gigs off the radio, despite the fact that home taping was killing music. And occasionally tracks from various Sound City gigs would make their way onto magazine cover-mounted CDs or tapes.
Anyway, the purpose of the new blog was to pull together various recordings and other memorabilia from those gigs, highlighting the quality and, if truth be told, ignoring any dross. I only started doing this after trying to find a track from Sound City 1993 online and being unable to – it was twenty years ago, after all, and how many people were digitising live radio broadcasts back then?
The trouble was, I featured a Manics track, and got DMCA'ed. Thinking I was smart, I moved the whole shebang from Blogger to Wordpress ... and promptly got DMCA'ed again, for the same live Manics track. Realising corporate behemoths have the resources to be smarter than me, I mothballed the whole lot.
Except I don't want to deprive the Internet of that one track I couldn't find anywhere else online (The Frank And Walters doing an acoustic cover of The Vapors' Turning Japanese - I eventually found my old taped recording and ripped it), or any of the other gems I found. So, for now at least, The Sound City Sessions is back up, minus that Manics track and the songs I'd sourced from Grooveshark, which has since ceased operations (a shame, as I had found some Pulp, Oasis and, er, Jamiroquai live tracks on there).
I won't be adding anything new (unless something exceptional turns up) but for now, assuming the DMCA police don't get upset again, the Sound City Sessions blog is back up for your listening pleasure at:
https://soundcitysessions.wordpress.com/
Here's a sneak preview of the sort of thing you'll find there:
And the limited time only bit? I'm thinking of re-mothballing it all again this time next week. So hurry, hurry, hurry...
We've gone from The Cardigans and James Brown, to singing this together in the car. I don't need an excuse to play it but if I did, today's the day.
Now I should counter these criticisms by saying that I am a massive fan, and have been since buying their World View Blue e.p. as an undergrad in 1990. I own an unhealthy number of their records, some now quite valuable if the resale values on Amazon are to be believed. I've been to Aeroplanes gigs where the stage has groaned under the weight of guitarists (sometimes co-opted from the supports acts) and the manic dance moves of Wojtek Dmochowski (the pre-Bez Bez, if you like, but much more energetic). This is a band I have loved. And they're still, I'm happy to report, plugging away, as the picture of their latest album, Welcome, Stranger!, illustrates above. Not only that, they've just recently completed a tour in support of the album that was anything but a nostalgia exercise.
So how does a band that is knocking on 36 years old keep going and stay fresh? That is the question.
The latest round of churn has also introduced a bit of youth into the mix, in the shape of Bec Jevons. In a band comprising lots of men of a certain age, she stands out, being in her mid twenties. She brings youth, vitality, energy and, most importantly, a real rock presence to live performance. Clearly honed in her other band, all-woman trio IDestroy, Bec has a stagecraft that belies her relative youth. Crucially, she also brings a bit of power to The Blue Aeroplanes, moving them back towards the "rock" end of the art-rock spectrum - personally, I think it is no coincidence that her involvement has coincided with The Blue Aeroplanes making their most accessible album in many a moon.
Chatting to Bec after a recent Aeroplanes gig, she's clearly loving her involvement with the band, and can't wait to start on the next album. She seemed very enthusiastic, genuinely lovely and happy to talk to fans. She signed my IDestroy CD too, which was nice. But I digress. What I should be saying is this: check out Welcome, Stranger! - it's excellent - have a listen to IDestroy, and keep an eye on Bec Jevons - the music business is a capricious world but if there's any justice, she'll go very far indeed.
I had half an idea for, well, at least a blog post, maybe something longer. The idea was essentially "these are all the reasons the human race is screwed." I know, cheery. I was going to group my theories and supporting evidence into five broad categories: climate change (cause and effects); extreme politics (plenty of that going round at the moment); the Earth as a closed system; conflicting belief systems; and the daddy of them all, the theme that underpins all others, spiralling global over-population.
I've been marshalling my thoughts on this for a while, which in part explains why there have been fewer blog posts in general lately, here and elsewhere. However, the more prep I've done on this the more three things have become evident: firstly, it will be a grim old read; secondly, very few people will read it all, or even at all; and third, it will have no effect - not a blind bit of difference
So I've put it on hold. But I did have an alternative thought. Let's just say I believe the comfortable, modern, point-and-click world of convenience and plenty that we currently have will be gone soon, for one reason or another. And when I say soon, maybe I don't mean in my lifetime or that of the next generation, but maybe the one after that. It's another grim thought ...
... so an alternate perspective might be to grasp the nettle, do that thing you always wanted to do. Take a chance. Have a go. That boy/girl* you've loved from afar for years? (* delete as applicable) Tell him/her how you feel. That instrument you've always wished you could play? Take lessons. That novel you've had kicking around on a USB stick for years? Submit it to agents and competitions.
Have a go. Go on. Try. Try to be that version of yourself you wish you were, that best version of yourself. Strive to be your best. We're in humanity's geriatric phase right NOW - dementia will follow soon enough. So if not now, when?
If their primary aim is really to increase UK consumption of leafy salads, they're up against it though as we all know ... you don't win friends with salad ...
Another corker, courtesy of BBC Business news:
Here's the story to go with it which, whilst good, can never quite live up to that headline. I also feel compelled to say "No bacon shortage - denied!" because I am old and still think Wayne's World is a comedy classic.
Not too long ago, JC over at the excellent New Vinyl Villain wrote about Product 2378, a Telstar Records indie complilation album from 1990. It was a typically good post about a truly excellent compilation, but JC rightly asked a lot of questions about it, notably how Telstar managed to assemble such an excellent selection of tracks in the first place, how they managed to release it given the paucity of their normal output and, most of all, what the hell was going on with the sleeve art?
Now I had a copy of Product 2378 on cassette, inevitably plucked from the Woolworths bargain bin for 99p. If you've read the track listing on JC's blog post you'll know that was quite a bargain. But still, about that sleeve art. It's always bothered me too.
And then, last week, it all came together for me. Someone, somewhere at Telstar, was a real indie kid. Take the sleeve art from The Chesterfield's 1987 debut album, Kettle:
...add the polychromatic effects (and palette) briefly fashionable following the success of New Order's 1989 album Technique:
...and you get the sleeve for Product 2378.
c + no = p (perhaps) or t(k)=2378 (perhaps not). Feel sorry for me, because this is the sort of thing that pushes my buttons.
Still none the wiser on that title though. Unless "PRODUCT 2378" was supposed to evoke the FAC and FACT numbers of Factory Records output. FACT 250 was Joy Division's Substance, for example. I know, it's not much of a theory but it's the best I've got, and in my mind, at least, fits nicely with the idea of that lone indie kid at Telstar being told to go away and come up with something...
Last time I did a Clandestine Classic, I bemoaned the fact that the series had fallen into something of a rut, along the lines of always asking, "What do you think about when I say <insert band name here> to you?", after which I'll rattle through the obvious choices for that band and then pull a rabbit out of the hat. I bemoaned it, and then I went ahead and did it again. Shame on me. So it's back to basics, this time, as I try to wrap some personal narrative around the chosen song. Here goes.
We have to dial the clock back for this one, to the latter half of 1988 and the beginning of 1989. I was in the upper sixth of a selective boys' grammar school, and worked at weekends in the lighting department of a now-defunct high street department store. Surprisingly, for someone who had, two years earlier, described the concept of having a girlfriend as "a hypothetical situation" (much to the amusement of my mates), I had not only discovered girls but they too had discovered me. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying I was any kind of gigolo, quite the opposite, I was still painfully shy and socially awkward. But I'd had a couple of girlfriends of varying durations and seriousness. The situation was no longer hypothetical.
And then... then, there was Jay. That's not her real name, by the way; even though only one person who knew me back then reads this blog, I still think it's important to preserve anonymity. Jay was in the lower sixth at the neighbouring (and affiliated) selective girls' grammar school, and worked in the restaurant at the same high street department store. She was also painfully shy but, crucially for bringing us together, she was friends with the girls my mates were going out with. She was also ferociously intelligent, funny and, most attractive of all, just a bit different. For context, this was the age of peak Neighbours, when boys tried to look like Scott and Mike whilst girls tried to look like Charlene and (not so) Plain Jane Super Brain. Jay didn't try to look like anybody. She stood out from her classmates by not trying to emulate fashion, not overdoing the make-up in a horrible 80s way, not slavishly imitating the fashions of the day. She was a fully fledged individual at the age of seventeen which, looking back, was quite something.
Jay also had terrific taste in music. When most of her classmates were interested in standard chart fare, if interested at all, the only chart Jay was interested in was the indie chart. And so it was that, as friends tried to get us together and we edged around actually going out, she introduced me to a band she adored, The Chesterfields. I somehow hadn't heard of them at all at the time and, even now, had to fall back on Wikipedia to remind myself that they came from Somerset and that, although often referred to as a C86 band, they weren't actually on the landmark NME cassette. They were, if memory serves, part of the short-lived "twee" sound; with hindsight, they sounded like a lo-fi hybrid of The Housemartins, The Smiths and early REM, with a West Country accent. Today's Classic is their fourth single and indie chart highpoint (number four!), Ask Johnny Dee, from 1987. It also appeared on their debut album, the splendidly titled Kettle.
You can probably tell from the way I've written this post that there wasn't a happy ending to the story of Jay and I. She really liked me, and I liked her too but, for whatever reason, I didn't appreciate her enough. Actually, "for whatever reason" is not strictly true. I think I was just a typical eighteen year old, one whose mates all had conventionally pretty girlfriends, and I didn't want to commit to Jay in case someone else came along. That's pretty terrible, I know. But not nearly as bad as how I treated Jay at, and immediately after, one particular party - I'll spare you the details (by which I mean I'll spare my own shame) but I was a royal git to her, heartless. She deserved much, much better.
Ten-plus years later, we were once again both working for the same company, this time a US-owned corporate behemoth. We worked at the same (huge) site, but in different divisions - our paths would never normally cross, though I did see her once, from a distance across a large atrium. She looked great, of course, still a bit quirky, a little different to everyone else, but generally great. I don't know whether she saw me or not. Probably not. But she was in the company email address book, so I penned a carefully worded message to gently say hello (our first communication since that party, pretty much) and to start to suggest that I knew I had been a git, and to say sorry. She read the email, I know that much (I put a read receipt on it) but she didn't reply. A year or so later, she left the company, and that was that.
Except last year I spotted her again, in the social media timeline of a mate's wife. Jay's married now, it seems, with kids, and looks the picture of happiness. Still a little quirky, a little different from the crowd, as far as you can tell from a timeline. I thought, very briefly, of sending another message but didn't when I realised that I was in danger of turning into Rob from High Fidelity. I also asked myself whose benefit I would be apologising for, hers or mine? The answer, dear reader, does not reflect well on me. I stepped away for the keyboard.
You can pick up today's Classic on The Chesterfield's exhaustive best of compilation Electric Guitars In Their Heart, if lo-fi 80s twee is your bag. It was my bag too, for a short while a long time ago.
In the meantime, and with all apologies, this one's for Jay.
