MEAM, Myself & I: Part One: the formative years

 

Where does your taste in music come from? Why do you like some things but not others? It’s mysterious, but to try and find out, I thought I’d look at the issue from the (my) beginning. So what is the first music you remember hearing? For me (and I imagine many people) it’s a hard question to answer. I know what music was around when I was little; but decades of nostalgic compilations have re-shaped the music of the 1980s into that modern idea; ’80s music’ and, along with TV shows, have blurred the line between what I know I should or could have heard and what I actually remember hearing. On the other hand, like most people whose parents listen to music, some of the first things I remember hearing (in my case things that were not contemporary pop music, mostly) can be pinpointed easily to them.

Thinking back to early childhood I can picture my parents’ stereo (a wooden 70s behemoth with built-in speakers which may have once had legs but which I remember sitting on the floor) very clearly. Often, LPs would be lying on top when the lid was closed and the covers are as evocative of childhood to me as the music. Although this was the early 80s, the majority of records being played were from earlier eras; the  albums that spring to mind being The Dark Side of the Moon, Joni Mitchell’s Blue and For the Roses, Frank Zappa’s Hot Rats, Lou Reed’s Transformer, a live LP by Donovan and various albums by Bobs Marley and Dylan. More up to date, but less frequently played (as I remember it) were Talking Heads’ Remain In Light and Bowie’s Low. As is only right and proper, when I got old enough to want to listen to music myself, I initially scorned all of these things, though I eventually came round to liking almost all of them.*

fidlerBut what did I hear first?  Who knows?  I remember my mother playing guitar and singing, but ridiculously, the actual song that stands out as the first identifiable thing I remember, can name and even know some of the words to is neither parent music, nor standard chart fare; it’s Day Trip To Bangor by Fiddler’s Dram, which sets the date I began to really absorb music at around 1979; which makes sense, as until around that point I had hearing problems. As earliest memories go it could be more significant – I didn’t like it (or dislike it, as far as I remember), I can’t picture the band, it isn’t the soundtrack to a specific event. I just remember it, like I remember Crown Court and Pebble Mill At One being on TV in the afternoon if I was ill at home instead of being at school. It’s also to the end of the 70s that the first 7” single actually owned by me belongs and it’s also a typical-of-its-era novelty record, by the already long-in-the-tooth comedy group The Barron Knights – ‘A Taste of Aggro’. It’s the kind of random thing that little kids like; it features parodies of ‘The Smurf Song’ and Boney M’s ‘Rivers of Babylon’ (‘there’s a dentist in Birmingham…’ ). In my first year or two at primary school I also remember liking at least one Adam and the Ants song, I liked Toyah and Hazel O’Connor when they were on TV, I liked the disco version of the Star Wars theme and ‘Cars’ by Gary Numan.  Other music-related memories of the time are pretty vague; I remember older kids who were punks and (more scary to small-child me) skinheads, but I don’t think I ever heard their music at the time.

gimpbeast
Number of the Beast with appropriately sinister chip in the title track

It’s surprising to me to find that the first music I liked that I stayed a fan of for any length of time arrived so quickly after these things. In 1982 while I was still at Primary School, I heard ‘Run To The Hills’ by Iron Maiden and loved it. Iron Maiden divided my classmates and my parents hated them, but when Number of the Beast came out I was able to borrow the LP from one of their friends. I promptly broke it (slipped out of the inner sleeve and a strangely fangs/horns-like shard broke off of it, ruining the first track on each side) and had to pay for it. The plus side is that I still have an original pressing of Number of the Beast, albeit one that doesn’t actually have the title track (or ‘Invaders’, less of a loss) on it. A slightly later memory I think, is my dad telling me if I liked Iron Maiden, I should listen to this – and showing me the Grateful Dead’s eponymous 1971 live album. I think he presumed that the passing resemblance between the skeleton on the cover and Eddie would make it appeal to me. It didn’t – but that is probably my favourite Grateful Dead album now. Iron Maiden were destined nominally to remain my favourite band for a good four or five years, but I don’t think I really listened to them – or anything really – much until I went to high school a few years later. I don’t remember buying any other records before ’86 or so and other musical memories from the Primary school-era are thin on the ground and mostly negative.  I hated ‘Come On Eileen’ (still do), Thriller came out; I liked the video but don’t think I cared much about the music one way or the other. A lot of musical likes were inevitably more to do with context (or videos) than anything else; I quite liked Huey Lewis and the News, because of Back To The Future, I hated ‘Money For Nothing’ by Dire Straits (still do) because of the video and the band’s appearance (and, naturally,  the song itself). I quite liked Peter Gabriel’s ‘Sledgehammer’ because of the video (especially the claymation bit), I hated ‘Relax’ and ‘Two Tribes’, I didn’t like ‘Take On Me’ or its video, I quite liked The Police. I didn’t mind Spandau Ballet too much but didn’t like the way Tony Hadley held his microphone(!), I thought Whitney Houston was pretty but didn’t like ’I Wanna Dance With Somebody’ very much,… Those kinds of things.  It wasn’t really until High school that I started liking (or hearing) things that weren’t in the charts or parent music.

*The intro to Pink Floyd’s ‘Money’ still has the power to make me feel simultaneously bored and tense, however.

Coming as soon as I get around to it; Part Two (btw, the stupid title pun refers to the neuropsychological term MEAMs – ‘music-evoked autobiographical memories’)

Just for fun: the ‘I know I heard it at the time’ playlist; in chronological order – which is not necessarily how they are in my memory – definitely not all recommendations or anything (to say the least!!), and absolutely not the songs I like best from that era – these are just the ones that most evoke my early and pre-teen childhood to me…

VOL 1: 1978 – 1986

  • Kate Bush – Wuthering Heights (1978)
  • Boney M – Brown Girl in the Ring (1978)
  • Blondie – Heart Of Glass (1978)
  • Fiddler’s Dram – Day Trip to Bangor (1979)
  • Pink Floyd – Another Brick In The Wall, Part 2 (1979)
  • Lipps Inc – Funkytown (1979)
  • The Boomtown Rats – I Don’t Like Mondays (1979)
  • Gary Numan – Cars (1979)
  • Martha & the Muffins – Echo Beach (1980)
  • The Goombay Dance Band – Seven Tears (1980)
  • The Buggles – Video Killed the Radio Star (1980)
  • The Nolans – I’m In The Mood For Dancing (1980)
  • Bad Manners – Special Brew (1980)
  • Dexy’s Midnight Runners – Geno (1980) & Come On Eileen (1982)
  • The Pretenders – Brass In Pocket (1980)
  • Talking Heads – Once In A Lifetime (1980)
  • Adam And The Ants – Antmusic (1980)
  • Stevie Wonder – Happy Birthday (1980)
  • The Piranhas – Tom Hark (1980)
  • Chas & Dave – Rabbit (1980)
  • Ottawan – D.I.S.C.O. (1980)
  • Blondie – The Tide is High (1980)
  • OMD – Enola Gay (1980)
  • Diana Ross – Upside Down (1980)
  • Tony Basil – Mickey (1981)
  • Joe Dolce Music Theatre – Shaddap You Face (1981)
  • Altered Images – Happy Birthday (1981)
  • Aneka – Japanese Boy (1981)
  • Christopher Cross – Arthur’s Theme (Best That You Can Do) (1981)
  • Shakin’ Stevens – Green Door (1981)
  • The J Geils Band – Centerfold (1981)
  • Musical Youth – Pass The Dutchie (1982)
  • Duran Duran – Hungry Like The Wolf (1982)
  • Thomas Dolby – She Blinded Me With Science (1982) and Hyperactive! (1984)
  • Kid Creole & The Coconuts – Annie I’m Not Your Daddy (1982)
  • The Belle Stars – Sign Of The Times (1982)
  • Michael Jackson – Beat It (1982)
  • Renee & Renato  – Save Your Love (1982)
  • New Edition – Candy Girl (1983)
  • David Bowie – Modern Love (1983)
  • Depeche Mode – Everything Counts (1983)
  • Mike Oldfield – Moonlight Shadow (1983)
  • Herbie Hancock – Rockit (1983)
  • Status Quo – Marguerita Time (1983)
  • Nena – 99 Red Balloons (1983)
  • Spandau Ballet – To Cut A Long Story Short (1981) & Gold (1983)
  • The Cure – The Love Cats (1983)
  • Deniece Williams – Let’s Hear It For The Boy (1984)
  • The Specials – Nelson Mandela (1984)
  • Madonna – Material Girl (1984)
  • Harold Faltermeyer – Axel F (1984)
  • Philip Bailey with Phil Collins – Easy Lover (1984)
  • Rockwell – Somebody’s Watching Me (1984)
  • Nik Kershaw – I Won’t Let the Sun Go Down On Me (1984)
  • Chaka Khan – I Feel For You (1984)
  • Murray Head – One Night In Bangkok (1984)
  • Ashford & Simpson – Solid As A Rock (1984)
  • Giorgio Moroder & Philip Oakey – Together in Electric Dreams (1984)
  • Russ Abbot – Atmosphere (1984)
  • Falco – Rock Me Amadeus (1985)
  • Cyndi Lauper – Goonies ‘R’ Good Enough (1985)
  • DeBarge – Rhythm Of The Night (1985)
  • Five Star – System Addict (1985)
  • Diana Ross – Chain Reaction (1985)
  • Peter Gabriel – Sledgehammer (1986)
  • Suzanne Vega – Left of Center (1986)
  • Farley ‘Jackmaster’ Funk – Love Can’t Turn Around (1986)
  • Steve Winwood – Higher Love (1986)
  • Jermaine Stewart – We Don’t have To Take Our Clothes Off (1986)
  • Psychedelic Furs – Pretty In Pink (1986 – re-release)

and so many more….

five-star-system-addict

 

Album Review: Rachel Mason – Das Ram

 Rachel Mason

‘Das Ram’

Matthew Spiegelman

Cleopatra Records (LP) / Practical Records (cassette)

Release date: 18 November 2016

Rachel Mason has done so much work in so many fields (performance art/non-performance art/filmmaking/music/etc/etc – check out her website for a cross-section) that it’s easy to immerse oneself in her work. In music alone she has amassed a vast and varied discography within just a few years.

Where her earlier albums like the couldn’t-be-more-my-cup-of-tea work of towering genius Gayley Manor Songs (2015) were simple, home-made, stark, and direct and the conceptual The Lives of Hamilton Fish (also a film) was sprawling and dramatic, Das Ram is a full-blown modern pop-rock album, full of catchy songs with a flamboyant, very New York flavour, reminiscent at times of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Talking Heads or even (at its most pop) Lady Gaga.

rachel-mason-1-credit-chris-carlone

photo by Chris Carlone

Opening track ‘Roses’ launches the album with a dramatic, lilting and atmospheric intro before kicking into gear with new wave-ish guitars and a rock/dance beat. It’s catchy and full of pop hooks, but Mason’s excellent vocal perfectly delivers the troubled, even mournful lyric (‘I sometimes think that life is evil/it’s just something that fills me with dread’) that uses the rose as a symbol not only of beauty and romance, but also of the pain and transience of life. As a lyric, it’s perfectly judged; as densely layered as poetry, while as simple and direct as the best pop music. ‘Heart Explodes’ by contrast feels less spontaneous, carrying on with the metaphysical preoccupations in a more theatrical, almost Kate Bush-like way, Mason’s expressive voice(s) bringing the song to a chorus that is a peculiar crescendo made from conventional romantic language, genuine wonder, exultation and distress.

Mason’s voice is again at its most powerful on the less-straightforwardly-satisfying ‘Sandstorm’ on which she winds together enigmatic images of miscommunication (‘I believe in lies about the world’) with escalating intensity  over a prowling skeletal electronic funk that wouldn’t be out of place on a Grace Jones record, building tension but never quite releasing it. For a sense of release, the strutting electro-pop/funk cabaret fantasy of single ‘Tigers In The Dark’ follows; a kind of Talking Heads/Franz Ferdinand/Lady Gaga hybrid that, unlike her earlier folk/acoustic work feels 100% the work of a performance artist; the song is great, but the delivery, the theatricality is everything. As with Bowie (among others), the artificiality expresses the soul of the performer/character far more than something more apparently earnest would.

https://youtu.be/-Uw4oC9iouc

By comparison, the pulsating electro-pop of ‘Marry Me’ feels more like a vehicle for its complicated, beautifully detailed lyric and less an embodiment of it, although the contrast between the long, passing-of-time-obsessed verses and the simple, plaintive chorus (‘marry me/carry me over the hearth where a lost soul can hide’) grows more poignant as the song wends towards its end. A highlight of the album, it makes up in naked vulnerability what it loses to ‘Tigers…’ in glitzy disco-ness. ‘Queen Bee’ is one of the more penetrable lyrics on the album, using the image of the queen bee as a straightforward metaphor for loneliness, alienation and dependency (‘those friends were never real friends’) and the music captures the lyric in its stolid, regimented plod, with some very effective buzzing textures to reinforce the central image and some folk-inflected singing from Mason.

For a few dissonant seconds, ‘Cancer’ seems set to be the album’s darkest track, but then it unexpectedly breaks into a kind of rockabilly trot, albeit one spattered with peculiar squelches, squeaks and sound effects. Although not as grim as expected, it’s not the easiest-on-the-ear song on the album, sounding at times like two or three songs being played at once, and its chant-like vocal and slightly atonal chorus make it one of the more nerve-jangling songs in her catalogue.

Das Ram ends on a relatively more harmonious, if abrupt note with the angular funk verse/sweeping chorus of ‘Heaven’, which has a kind of early 80s, Ippu-do feel, before ending suddenly after the somewhat expected hedonistic refrain of ‘you and I are getting high.’

rachel-mason-2-credit-kerwin-williamson

photo by Kerwin Williamson

Taken as a whole, Das Ram, is a bold, exciting and accessible album, utterly different from the acoustic/folk rock textures of Mason’s earlier works like Hamilton Fish…, Turtles or indeed the raw, homemade quality of Gayley Manor Songs.  In fact it’s not like any Rachel Mason album I’ve heard (though I haven’t heard them all). Only a handful of artists have convincingly made a gesamstkunstwerk in the idiom of popular music without falling into the trap of overblown pretension – and most of those have spread from the music world outwards. With the confident, powerful Das Ram, Rachel Mason has become one of an even more select group – an artist who has learned to express herself with equal authority in whatever medium she chooses – and who seems to have fun doing it.

Tea-table Books 1: Dust & Grooves by Eilon Paz

 

Tea-table* books is an occasional series devoted to the best books for casually enjoying while relaxing with a hot beverage. Usually large format and illustrated (yes, just like ‘coffee table books’), the best tea-table books are of course just as good when read from cover-to-cover, but their real charm is their ‘dip-into-able’ quality. But enough preamble: onto this particular example – 
*don’t like coffee

Dust & Grooves: Adventures in Record Collecting by Eilon Paz (Ten Speed Press, 2015)

As fans of the excellent website Dust & Grooves will know, photographer Eilon Paz is fascinated with record collectors and their collections. The site grows ever bigger, and is a home to some great journalism as well as hundreds of beautiful photographs, but there’s still something special about this book. Necessarily more focussed than the site, if not exactly more portable (enjoyably big and heavy) it’s pretty simple: Paz photographs collectors in their record rooms, surrounded by their vinyl and (along with various writers) talks to them about the music they love and how they collect it. In the second part of the book there are great in-depth interviews with some serious collectors, including Sheila Burgel, Rich Medina, Gilles Peterson, Questlove and Jonny Trunk, among others.

The photographs are beautiful in themselves and are both revealing and extremely tantalising to pore over; what are all those other records on the shelves?  What does a launeddas sound like? (the internet can help with that; pretty cool as it turns out.) The people and their stories are hugely interesting and it’s nice that, whatever one’s own musical interests are, the people collecting country or hi-life records (or indeed Sesame Street ones) are just as fascinating as those whose albums and 45s one covets. Record collectors are interesting because people are interesting and music is interesting; and there are always more records to hear and more people to meet, so it is (hopefully) a very repeatable formula. Taste is a strange, illogical thing (I have a vast, unfinished article for this very blog that has so far failed to illustrate that point adequately, but may appear here eventually) and as the stories in this book reveal, for most collectors music has been a journey from one particular passion or field of interest to many, often barely related ones.

Though not a serious collector myself (more an unfocussed accumulator) this is a book that makes me want to collect records. And listen to them of course; it’s heartening that of the collectors in this book,all are first and foremost fans of the music they collect and not collectors and cataloguers of mere (if they are mere) objects.  So yes, it’s a good book.

droove

 

The Slinky Vagabond: David Bowie 1947-2016

bowie

I was listening to David Bowie on the way to work today; I would have been doing that anyway. The fact that his death was reported on the news this morning did make the listening horribly poignant though. And even more, it made me notice just how unique and distinctive his talent was;

“They pulled in just behind the bridgebowkeat
He lays her down, he frowns
‘Gee my life’s a funny thing, am I still too young?’
He kissed her then and there She took his ring, took his babies
It took him minutes, took her nowhere
Heaven knows, she’d have taken anything…”

The montage-like flow of imagery in Young Americans builds up an incredibly vivid, familiar-yet-dislocated image of America as seen from the UK; and it’s poetry. Even better in fact, because Bowie was a singer and musician, it’s poetry that’s accessible and meaningful to people who don’t even understand it as words. Like all of Bowie’s best work it is, musically and lyrically ambiguous; it’s British, it’s American, it’s kind of latin, it’s pop, it’s soul but because it’s Bowie it’s always a different, alien version of all those things.

labyrinthI’ve been listening to David Bowie for more than half of my life, but like most people of my generation, I’ve been very aware of him for much longer than that.
A lot of the tributes that have been made to him have – understandably – been by his peers, or those who experienced his music as something new, exciting and different. For those growing up in the 80s though, his music was at the time more or less mainstream pop with an odd singing voice (Let’s Dance, the Bowie/Jagger atrocity etc) but he was always just there; in the charts, on TV, and maybe above all for my generation, starring in Labyrinth.

1971There were two (as I remember) more or less simultaneous but separate things that led me in my late teens to Bowie’s music; a book about Lou Reed (I was already a big Velvet Underground fan) which led me onto Queen Bitch and therefore Hunky Dory (for a long time my favourite album) and seeing The Man Who Fell To Earth  on TV and therefore listening to Low, which was in my mother’s record collection; and loving it.

manwho

From then on, whatever ways my taste has changed, it has never needed to abandon Bowie; I liked glam and Bowie was  glam (both the light, frothy kind – The Prettiest Star – and the dark, sleazy kind – Diamond Dogs).  I was interested in 1930s German Expressionism and Bowie had recorded Berthold Brecht’s Baal (one of his most underrated records actually). I was interested in Crowley and European culture and electronic music and he had recorded Station to Station. I liked soul and funk and he had made his own weird version of it. And so on, and on. He was interesting and interested in things and was able to turn his interests into his own art without losing either what made it interesting in the first place, or his own personality in the process. It’s also true that although he was often accused of pretentiousness, that means that even his most ‘difficult’ work is never less than interesting; it was only on the odd occasions that he followed fashion instead of leading (or ignoring) it that he was boring.

BowieBaal

I don’t love everything Bowie ever recorded, but there is no period of his career that doesn’t have something great in it, and right up to the last few days of his life (not that I knew that’s what it was) I always looked forward to hearing what he was going to come up with next; and there aren’t many stars with 40+ year careers I can say that about.

RIP David Bowie

A personal Bowie playlist:

  • Please Mr Gravedigger (1967)66
  • Janine (1969)
  • Memory of a Free Festival (1969)
  • Width of a Circle (1971)
  • All The Madmen (1971)
  • The Man Who Sold the World  (1971)
  • Changes (1971)
  • Oh! You Pretty Things (1971)
  • Eight Line Poem (1971)
  • Life On Mars? (1971)
  • Quicksand (1971)
  • Queen Bitch (1971)
  • The Bewlay Brothers (1971)
  • Five Years (1972)
  • Soul Love (1972)
  • Moonage Daydream (1972)
  • Lady Stardust (1972)
  • Star (1972)
  • Ziggy Stardust (1972)
  • Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide (1972)
  • My Death (live) (1972)
  • Velvet Goldmine (1972)
  • Watch That Man (1973)
  • Drive In Saturday (1973)
  • Panic In Detroit (1973)
  • Cracked Actor (1973)
  • Time (1973)
  • Lady Grinning Soul (1973)
  • Sorrow (1973)
  • Port of Amsterdam (1973)
  • Sweet Thing /Candidate/Sweet Thing (Reprise) (1974)1972
  • Rock ‘n’ Roll With Me (1974)
  • We Are The Dead (1974)
  • Big Brother (1974)
  • All The Young Dudes (live) (1974)
  • Young Americans (1975)
  • Win   (1975)
  • Fascination  (1975)
  • Somebody Up There Likes Me  (1975)
  • Can You Hear Me  (1975)
  • Who Can I Be Now?  (1975)
  • It’s Gonna Be Me  (1975)
  • Station To Station    (1976)
  • Word On A Wing (1976)
  • Stay (1976)
  • Wild Is The Wind (1976)
  • Speed of Life (1977)
  • Breaking Glass (1977)
  • Sound and Vision (1977)
  • Be My Wife (1977)
  • Warszawa (1977)
  • Art Decade (1977)
  • Weeping Wall (1977)
  • Some Are (1977)
  • All Saints (1977)
  • “Heroes” (1977)
  • Sons of the Silent Age (1977)
  • V-2 Schneider (1977)
  • Sense of Doubt (1977)
  • Moss Garden (1977)baal
  • Neukoln (1977)
  • Fantastic Voyage (1979)
  • African Night Flight (1979)
  • Move On (1979)
  • Yassassin (1979)
  • DJ (1979)
  • Repetition (1979)
  • It’s No Game (Pt 1)  (1980)
  • Baal’s Hymn (1982)
  • Remembering Marie A (1982)
  • Ballad of the Adventurers (1982)
  • The Drowned Girl (1982)
  • The Dirty Song (1982)
  • Alabama Song (1980)
  • Modern Love (1983)
  • Cat People (Putting Out Fire) (1982)
  • This Is Not America  (1985)
  • When the Wind Blows (1986)
  • Amazing (1989)
  • Goodbye Mr Ed (1991)
  • The Wedding (1993)
  • Pallas Athena (1993)
  • Looking For Lester (1993)
  • I Know It’s Gonna Happen Someday (1993)
  • Buddha of Suburbia (1993)
  • South Horizon (1993)
  • The Mysteries (1993)
  • Untitled No 1 (1993)
  • Ian Fish, UK Heir (1993)
  • Heart’s Filthy Lesson (1995)
  • The Motel (1995)
  • I Have Not Been To Oxford Town (1995)
  • —– nothing against the next few albums but haven’t heard them enough to have favourites —-
  • The Next Day (2013)
  • Dirty Boys (2013)
  • The Stars (Are Out Tonight) (2013)

and hopefully when I hear Blackstar some more songs will make it onto the list

gone