It’s fair to say the past week or so of my listening (and writing) has been derailed somewhat by the passing of David Bowie. There’s been (and is) so much online about the mawkishness/validity of feeling bereaved over the death of Bowie/famous people in general and there’s no need to add to that.
All I can say is I used to go on about Bowie almost as much as I do now, and, true to my obituary elsewhere on this site, whatever my mood since his passing, one or another of his songs has suited it perfectly.
Listening to Bowie now is inevitably sadder than it used to be. His work has always been notable for its artificial quality, the adoption of various personae etc, but, unless you don’t believe in being emotionally engaged/moved by works of fiction there’s no contradiction in being affected by his apparently non-personal songs, especially given his brilliantly written lyrics. Anyway, here’s the playlist for today and the past week or so…
The Gouster Sessions 1974 (fragment) – This is so frustrating, tantalising and great; the song fragments; Shilling the Rubes, I Am A Lazer, After Today and the rough version of Young Americans come from what is currently my favourite Bowie period and the recording has just a little more grit than the finished album. Bowie and his band sound on top form and the bits of studio banter sound amazingly relaxed and fun given Bowie’s apparent drug intake and exhaustion during that time. I wish the full sessions would turn up and be released.
We Are The Dead (from Diamond Dogs, 1974) – Not morbid humour on my part. I’ve loved this song 
(and Diamond Dogs in general) for years (its only fairly recently been supplanted as my favourite Bowie album by Young Americans) and I’m not sure that he ever sang a song better than this. The part in the first verse where he sings ‘I looked at you and wondered if you saw things my way’ over the ominous churchy organ part (so to speak) is to me one of the greatest moments in all Bowie-dom. Hugely atmospheric, perfectly articulated and chilling/moving/ominous. For years I thought the chorus (or semi-lack thereof) let the song down, but I’m not so sure now.
Big Brother (from Diamond Dogs, 1974) – Surely one of the most dodgy and creepy anthemic songs ever written, Bowie sings it like he really does want someone to fool us/shame us etc. What a great chorus, when he finally hits the high ‘oooh’s (no less lame way of putting it) in the last choruses it becomes uplifting like stadium music is supposed to be; even if the stadium he seems to be evoking is in Nuremberg.
Word on a Wing (from Station to Station, 1976) – Speaking of ideologically dubious Bowie material, Station to Station must be one of the creepiest albums ever recorded by a mainstream pop artist; not least because its melange of decadent European culture, emotional withdrawal and exhaustion and overtones of religious and magical yearning are imbued with a dark romanticism. Word on a Wing is just beautiful and weary though.
Sound & Vision (from Low 1977) Bowie at his most withdrawn and sombre still managed to be musically adventurous as well as writing a bona fide catchy pop song; not many people do that.
The Buddha of Suburbia (from the Buddha of Suburbia soundtrack, 1995) – On the whole, Bowie 
seems not to have been (in his music at least, but see below) an especially nostalgic person. But writing the music for the TV adaptation of Hanif Kureishi’s 70’s-set drama allowed him to look at his early work as others saw it, and this breezy yet yearning song is extremely moving, if you’re me.
Drive In Saturday (from Aladdin Sane, 1973) – Despite what I just wrote above, Bowie’s early work is often nostalgic, but not so much for his own past as for the recent past as seen from the future; the retro-futurism of songs like The Prettiest Star, Drive In Saturday was similar to the ’50s in space’ atmosphere projected by early Roxy Music and seems to have been the raison d’etre for the covers album Pin Ups (1973). Drive In Saturday has a really nice tune.
Lady Stardust (from Ziggy Stardust & the Spiders from Mars, 1972) – A beautiful, brilliantly produced and performed song that exemplifies everything glam-era Bowie stood for; sexy, glamorous, gender-ambiguous and an immaculate pop song too. Sigh.
much bigger public. And at the moment I’ve been thinking about, just for fun, working on a Beyoncé logo, because she is so much talked about. So there’s this whole series of pop culture logos, I did EastEnders, Coronation Street, Emmerdale, Shortland Street. So I had some real fun exploring the mainstream. But the metal public is always the most receptive to my work. It’s my public, it’s the one who collects my work. A lot of people who see my work who haven’t been acquainted with the metal scene say that it’s not something they would be going for. Or that it’s nice but it’s grim.
he new logos is a real travel through time and dimension. So there is a timeline, beginning with really primitive logos I have created. A band called Gau, which means ‘night’ in Basque, this logo is very prehistoric, almost as if it was drawn by dinosaurs. With these very prehistoric plants around, no crows, no wolves. Very prehistoric, almost reptilian, taken from a time there was no mammals, no birds, there were just reptiles and primitive insects; trilobites, and ammonites. And in fact I live in Exeter, by the Jurassic coast, so you can send yourself spinning on a time travel of 200 millions years. So we go from these very simplistic logos, like Undo Creation from Georgia, up to the most sophisticated logos; art deco, or futuristic logos, like I did for Outsider Industries. Or Haunted, an Italian project.
Car (1966), which perhaps surprisingly prefigures the genre with its funky soul influence. The Spencer Davis Group’s equally soulful Gimme Some Lovin’ (1966) also features possible cowbell* although to my ears it sounds more like a tambourine. *see note on Honky Tonk Woman below
and from then on the song establishes cowbell rock; a rocking, yet laidback beat that holds everything else together. It was to prove hugely influential on the rock of the 70s and every revival thereof up until the present day. Interestingly (this is the part alluded to in the introductory note; thanks anonymous person), it is most likely erstwhile Spencer Davis Group producer Jimmy Miller, rather than the undoubtedly brilliant Charlie Watts, who plays the cowbell.
Free – All Right Now (1970) – picks up where Honky Tonk Women left off, with even bigger gaps in the riff; more room for cowbell. Most of Free’s early work should really be in the ‘implied cowbell’ list below
any) is not very audible but this should be a cowbell classic based on the riff alone (more such nonsense below).
Slade – The Bangin’ Man (1974) – a tongue in cheek, slightly sad song, seemingly alluding to the memory problems the great Don Powell suffered when recovering from a horrendous car crash; but his drum/cowbell playing here is peerless.
perfect backdrop for some classic cowbell courtesy (I presume) of the great Aynsley Dunbar. Interestingly, Bowie’s flirtation with cowbell rock outlasted his glam period; check out the Young Americans-era outtake I’m Divine for some classic cowbell with more of a funk flavour.
Nazareth – Hair of the Dog (1975) – basically a compendium of everything cheesy-but-good about mid-70s hard rock; and they came from Dunfermline!
cowbell in 1975/6 because it’s all over the classic Rock & Roll Over album (released November 1976), giving it a looser, warmer feel than the also great but clinically orchestrated Destroyer (released March 1976, shockingly; When they were good, they were productive!)
but this slow & dirty-sounding masterpiece has the real thing.
War – Low Rider (1975) – somewhat out of genre being funk, but this song belongs in any discussion of the cowbell in popular music. I’m sure Funkadelic must have used it too, but nothing comes to mind so I’ll leave that for now…
This comparison really traces the advance of psychedelia from a mild distortion of perception to a neon-coloured hallucination over the two years 1965-67
Through the early/mid 80s, The Cocteau Twins were undeniably key in establishing a guitar based, semi-ambient sound and, simultaneously The Jesus and Mary Chain made feedback and sheer noise a part of the overground rock/pop scene. Some aspects of the sound that became shoegaze can be traced back further, to the post-punk scene (notably The Cure, still very much a vital part of the music scene in the late 80s/early 90s), but it is really the Cocteau Twins and JAMC that should be considered the real architects of shoegaze. In their wake came the 80s indie scene in general, with bands like The House of Love and The Smiths, who would influence pretty much all of UK indie one way or the other from around 1984 onwards.
guitars. But on Strawberry Wine, the guitar sound is the chiming, jangly, Byrds-influenced one then popular in the UK indie scene. On Thorn, the underlying track is not that different, but on top of the base layer of strummed guitars, the melody is formed, not by a 12-string Rickenbacker-ish sound, but by the highly peculiar vacuum cleaner-like mechanised howl of Kevin Shields’ heavily distorted guitar. Even if Thorn wasn’t a better song than Strawberry Wine (but it is), the guitar adds not only a unique sound to the song, but it also intensifies its stormy, melancholy atmosphere. This was a key feature of shoegaze that all of the best bands brought to their music; not only was the voice another instrument, the guitar was another voice.
With Scar, Lush not only established a distinct musical identity based around the opposing forces of Cocteau Twins-esque fragility (enhanced by the – typically – ‘ethereal’ vocal harmonies of Miki Berenyi and Emma Anderson) and prickly, punky bitterness, they also created an instantly recognisable aesthetic. 4AD – always the most coffee-table-book-friendly indie label – should have been a natural home for the shoegaze scene, but in fact Lush and Pale Saints were (I think) the only shoegaze bands aside from The Cocteau Twins (always somewhat aloof from the ‘scene’) to benefit from the label’s invariably evocative artwork and in the end Creation became the shoegaze label. The six songs on Scar were uniformly excellent, but the production (by John Fryer, with the band) was serviceable but lacked sparkle, something rectified on the band’s next (and best) release:
This EP exemplifies the best of the shoegaze scene; four excellent songs, no fillers (and it is surprising how many bands couldn’t record an EP without at least one lesser song), each song catchy and atmospheric but no two very alike.
Later that year, the band released Sweetness and Light, their most commercial, hook-laden record, the poppy a-side backed with two even more lighter-than-air songs, both pretty good. At the same time, it was becoming clear from interviews and TV appearances that the band were not quite the fey, angelic characters they mostly sounded like on record. By ’91 the shoegaze scene was, if not in decline, then at least on a plateau, and Lush’s singles Black Spring and For Love were far patchier than their previous work. There were still great songs, but what had been ethereal had started to become watery and unmemorable and the band’s tougher songs jettisoned the shoegaze idiom for something more proto-Britpop/mainstream indie-rock-ish. Which is not what I am writing about.
The month before Lush’s Mad Love went on sale, a young band from Oxford released their self-titled debut EP. Ride is not as perfect as Mad Love but it established a sound that was more pop-oriented than My Bloody Valentine, but with a heavier, noisier guitar sound than Lush. Ride balanced the unabashedly indie-pop sound of Chelsea Girl with three contrasting songs. These were the surprisingly heavy Drive Blind (with its psychedelic, flickering guitar part strangely reminiscent of the intro to Status Quo’s ludicrous 1967 psych-pop classic Pictures of Matchstick Men) and the more reflective All I Can See and the noisy Close My Eyes. The band’s sound was defined by the gentle harmony vocals of Mark Gardener and Andy Bell, whose voices bore a passing resemblance to that of MBV’s Kevin Shields, but where his voice often stayed buried, semi-coherently in the mix, Ride put their vocal harmonies in centre stage.
By the time Nowhere was released, ‘shoegaze’ was at its height, with critical reactions from the music press (in those days far more influential than now, especially on the UK indie scene) outweighed by support, especially from Melody Maker.
If Ride were more strident and rock than Lush, then Slowdive were everything shoegaze’s critics hated about the scene: mellow, melancholy, dreamy, slow (of course), fragile. But that’s not all they were: their self-titled debut, released at the end of the autumn in 1990, was a seriously noisy release, for all its snails-pace tempos. The beautiful foghorn guitar of the title track was closer to the sound of My Bloody Valentine’s (as yet unreleased) magnum opus Loveless than any of their peers, and the way the delicate 
female/male vocals of Rachel Goswell and Neil Halstead drift through the massive soundscapes of guitar noise was distinctly different from the other bands of the genre. 1991’s Morningrise EP was another near-perfect EP but Holding Our Breath, released not long before debut album Just For A Day suggested, despite the presence of one of their most popular songs, Catch the Breeze, that the band had painted themselves into a corner; the distorted noise and feedback of the first EP had been smoothed into something altogether cleaner and more melodic, but without the stormy 
atmospherics, the sound of Just for a Day sometimes veered uncomfortably towards a kind of ‘Shoegaze Moods’ new age muzak.
Less doomy than their previous work, the latest album by Finland’s foremost psychedelic rock band is certainly not less atmospheric and manages to be exhilarating even when at its most wandering & jazzy. Great songs, great production & the superbly charismatic Jess herself; brilliant.
Even by the standards of the mighty Sigh, Graveward is a highly peculiar album. Frank Zappa-meets-prog-meets-Yngwie Malmsteen-meets-power metal-meets-movie soundtracks-meets-black metal; it’s difficult to pigeonhole but easy to enjoy.
In a similar vein to Forteresse, but slightly more ambient and snow-shrouded and less folk-influenced, Sombres Forêts are one of the more melancholy bands in the scene. To my ears their best album to date is 2008’s Royaume de Glace, a despairing masterpiece with some of the best vocals of any Québec BM album, especially when Annatar shrieks hoarsely over relatively clean guitars on songs like the great The Forest.
