Monday, December 15, 2003
END OF LISTS
It has occurred to me, considering what to write on the forthcoming book jacket blurb, that I could now adequately and accurately describe myself as a “writer and broadcaster.” Eh? How did that happen? From being a bereaved, drink and drug-addled nervous wreck, exiled from Oxford to Streatham, two years ago, to this? Well all right, you’ve been here all along, you know the story, you know that this was the plan…even so, the plan worked. I made it work. I ensured that it would work. Thus I am no longer grieving; even though grief cannot be entirely banished from my soul any more than Laura can be banished from my heart, it would be false to say that I am now feeling the same way or that music which was speaking to me even six months ago is speaking to me in the same way – if at all – now. This change may be usefully taken into account when looking at the following list; it’s the list of a man who has been made happy again.
As promised, there will be no rash statements about ceasing this blog – instead, here is a considered statement about ceasing this blog. I started Church of Me, among other things, as a means of fighting to get my life back. Now my life is back and I want to hold onto it. There is no need for me to go into an extended farewell; indeed Mike Atkinson at Troubled Diva has saved me the bother with his last post, and I can do little more than echo what he says, particularly taking into account the importance of my new relationship, the need to stop the blog when it’s still on a high and the necessity of stopping doing something when it becomes a chore rather than a pleasure. Added to that are the facts that the only writing for which I now have allotted time is paid writing – reviews, polishing up the first book and already having started writing a second – together with my all-clear following a recent cancer scare and the fact that next month I will turn 40.
There are therefore no plans to add anything else to The Naked Maja - nothing else really needs to be added – after this week. I will not rule out the occasional one-off special, or director’s cuts of long reviews which I may need to do for Uncut or The Wire, or a pressing need to inform you of important new music; but for all practical purposes this will be it. Like Mike, I end for positive rather than negative reasons. Perusal of CoM in May/June 2002 will remind you of what a negative end would have been like…and in any case The Naked Maja has really been a set of extended footnotes to CoM rather than a separate, stand-alone blog. Time, then, to bring the story to a proper end. I realise the vague moral obligation to keep publishing quality writing, given the continuing pitiful state of what is actually “published” as mainstream music journalism – observe, for instance, Garry Mulholland in this month’s Observer Music Monthly telling us that 2003 was the best year for singles since the late ‘80s, and then in his top ten of the year including singles originally released in 1979 and 1998 (“Are You Ready For Love” and “Mundian To Bach Ke”) not to mention another recorded in “1963” (“Seven Nation Army”), or indeed the characteristically pompous response to a letter in the current MOJO from a reader concerned that their Best Of 2003 compilation contained so many old songs – “The Best Of 2003 contained 18 tracks from some of this year’s best CDs. In MOJO’s world, that naturally included Best Ofs and Reissues.” In other words: our gaff, our rules. The words “as you have previously been told” were not included but might as well have been…the kind of welcoming relationship which has seen so many of MOJO’s writers and readers defect to Uncut this year. Then again, consider the unspoken subtext behind all “grown-up” British music radio – from 6 Music via Bob Harris to Sean Rowley on BBC Radio London – i.e. this is Real Music Not Plastic Cocktail Crap Like What My Kids Listen To. The Hornby manifesto for 45-year-olds still weeping crocodile tears for Joe Strummer when in 1977 they were still listening to Barclay James Harvest.
I say this now because some readers may detect a not dissimilar manifesto in my own end-of-year top 50 albums list. All I can say in my defence is that this list is not to be treated as a Sermon On The Mount. It is simply a list of the 50 albums which touched me most in 2003, which seemed to speak to me as an individual. In the course of the list I will comment on other current developments which may come across as somewhat Meldrew-esque, to which I respond that a wish for music to develop is not the same thing as cutting oneself off from all new music. Nonetheless, novelty never was a substitute for quality, even if it is usually easier to recognise. Caveat auditor has, as ever, to be the watchword. My love of and enthusiasm for music certainly has not diminished, and I want from it the same things I have always wanted – either to tell me something I didn’t already know, or to tell me something I did know, but in a new and interesting – let’s not mince words, stunning – way. But life has to come first.
NOTES ON THE LIST
The following 50 albums are the proverbial tip of the iceberg of a shortlist. Thus it is that plenty of excellent and entirely worthy records ended up excluded. Albums which I have heard but are not scheduled for release until 2004 have not been included; so Lambchop, Dani Siciliano and Vive La Fête – not to mention Air and The Scissor Sisters - will have to wait until next year’s list, assuming that there is one, although qualitatively all would have qualified for this year’s list. And for those who did not end up in the final 50, I can only extend my apologies to Autechre, the Bad Plus Trio, Bardo Pond, Bed, the Blood Brothers, Blur, the Cansecos, the Dandy Warhols, the Faint, the Gossip, Emmylou Harris, Joe Henry, the Kills, King of Woolworths, Jeffrey Lewis, the Majesticons (which would have been #51), Momus, the New Pornographers, Oi Va Voi, the Rapture, Relaxed Muscle (#52), Tahiti 80, tAtU, Tok Tok and Soffy O, Alan Tomlinson, Kenny Wheeler, Will Young and too many others – it doesn’t mean that your records weren’t excellent (yes I said Will Young – if the second half of his album had matched the standard of the first half, he would have been straight into the list).
50. AUDIO BULLYS Ego War
Well they didn’t turn out to be this year’s Streets, and as with so much great pop in 2003, didn’t actually sell that well; not to a mass audience who continue to prefer the “soul baring” and “sincerity” of the Stereophonics and Dido. And Bryn Terfel for that matter. Hooligan House broke no new windows; yet this remains a fantastic album. Rather the “(I Don’t Want To Go To) Chelsea” cut-ups of “Way Too Long” than anything on that ghastly new Costello record; and rather the gleefully grieving “Snow” than Primal Scream and Kate Moss reading flyshit on “Some Velvet Morning.” “Face In A Crowd” even drove me back to the second Joe Cocker album; what a bizarre pop record “Marjorine” is, from its title downwards (“I want you back/But YOU WILL NOT GIVE HIM THE SACK!”).
49. GILLIAN WELCH Soul Journey
Do not mistake this sound for conservatism or selling out. Welch is either alone or with a band, and while it doesn’t match Time (The Revelator) - few records do, even fewer save a life – the ghostly insistence of “One Monkey Don’t Stop No Show” and the thumping rage of “Wrecking Ball” take root in the soul’s laybys.
48. LIGHTNING BOLT Wonderful Rainbow
In a year when so many hack duos attempted to bring back Good Ole Rock ‘N’ Roll – unasked – without bothering to add anything new to it, and therefore subtracting everything worthwhile from it, how refreshing to hear the unapologetically harmolodic burnouts of this drum and bass duo – which, incidentally, managed to prod deeper and darker than most of this year’s drum ‘n’ bass. “Duel In The Deep” is like the closing sequence of Once Upon A Time In The West exhumed and sentenced to be repeated endlessly, as the decay takes hold.
47. KRAFTWERK Tour De France Soundtracks
It is as if we had to wait 20 years for this record to be completed, or perhaps Kraftwerk decided that it would take 20 years for us to catch up with them; either way, they came back to prove yet again that the blankest of music is always underscored by the most passionate of emotions. As with Matt Seaton’s book The Escape Artist, in which cycling did for him what music did for me in terms of bereavement counselling, Kraftwerk discover – if they hadn’t known all along – that the discipline of the bicycle and the road is sometimes what is required to keep the heart beating, with the accent on “heart.” Salvation through work – and never let them see the sweat. No thanks to the hapless/hopeless Petridish, who recently wasted three-and-a-half pages of the Guardian’s Friday Review failing to get an interview with Kraftwerk, whereas Gary Crowley managed to get Ralf Hutter into his radio studio in the same week without breaking a stride.
46. CAPPO Spaz The World
It may surprise the unwary reader that Cappo is not even the highest-ranking Nottingham-based rapper in this list, whereas nearly all other rappers have failed to register. But tracks like “Cirques des Clowns” and “Prevail” burst almost indecently with originality and mischief. And “Learn To Be Strong” is far more profound than anything recorded this week by that silly old Messiah (not) Jay-Z.
45. LONDON IMPROVISERS ORCHESTRA Freedom Of The City 2002
Worth buying just for the astonishing and demolishing seven-and-a-half minutes of Terry Day’s rant “Ruthless” which tells us exactly what John Lydon jamming with Sun Ra would have sounded like (“Look at MEEEEE!”) and flattened everybody in the Conway Hall audience. And yes, that is me you hear cackling in response to Day’s “A pile of fucking shit is poverty!” (I was agreeing with him!)
44. VENETIAN SNARES Winter In The Belly Of A Snake
The panoramic, slow-burning post-MBV/Slint guitar epic seemed to be on a dying fall this year - The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place, as the underwhelming Explosions In The Sky put it, and it was rather frustrating that M83’s Dead Cities was not an Exploited tribute album, or that the title of Mogwai’s Happy Songs For Happy People had no cause to be ironic. Ultimately one has to return to life, and what better way than to have death rubbed brutally and closely in your face, as the unapologetically hardcore post-electro/post-everything Venetian Snares did on this remarkable record. No easy GYBE/Naomi Klein crossovers here – indeed, no guitars – but “Stairs Song” and “Cashew” are perversely more life-affirming in their recognition of its transience, and therefore pave one way’s back to life. The kind of record which DHR should be releasing.
43. MIRA CALIX Skimskitta
Influenced greatly by her amazing South Bank performance – utilising, sampling and recycling the sounds of live insects – as with #44 above, this sounds as if it had been recorded from the inside of a coffin, and yet the music is so light and approachable in its radicalism. “I May Be Over There (But My Heart Is Over Here)” indeed. Achieved what the Matthew Herbert Big Band didn’t, and with far less fuss.
42. HYMIE’S BASEMENT Hymie’s Basement
America collapses; this cLOUDDEAD/Fog crossover, however, quickly subdues its protests and swims around uncertainly in moonlit piano ruminations as the casualties float by.
41. CHRIS T-T London Is Sinking
On 2001’s superb The 253, this splendid singer/songwriter reworked London’s psychogeography on the Euston-to-Hackney bus; here he takes to the water. Songs like “Battersea Bridge Baptism” and “The Tin Man” are quite startling in their poignant quietitude. Battersea Power Station on the front cover, Vauxhall MI5 on the rear. I doubt that anyone is currently making better Londoncentric music.
40. NINA NASTASIA Run To Ruin
One of two Steve Albini “recordings” in this year’s list, an extraordinary record which redefined Americana rather than facilely xeroxing it (hello, My Morning Jacket). Highlight: the sandblasted torch of “I Say That I Will Go.”
39. RADIOHEAD Hail To The Thief
It didn’t dominate its year as the two preceding albums had done; nevertheless, if we are going to push the envelope in terms of the mainstream, then we have to acknowledge that no one is doing it better than Radiohead. Guitars back again – in a way (but not in the way) – but the record isn’t going to lick your face as Coldplay do; you have to work at it. As we all used to do. To stay interested.
38. JOHN CALE HoboSapiens
Typically, I missed a very important point in my Uncut review, namely that in a year when everyone clutched their Warhol banana sleeves and scampered back to the safety of the garage, the original punctum of the Velvets (you dispute that? Listen to Lou Reed’s The Raven and then this, and tell me I’m wrong) turns his attention to ProTools and hooks up with half of Lemon Jelly to sing wise and erudite songs about The War, about the adulation of art, about, above everything, slow death – “Letter From Abroad” is as extreme as anything he’s done since Helen of Troy; the whole is his best record since Music For A New Society, and the moment when the band storms in at the climax of the closing “Over Her Head” gives rise to the illusion of the original Roxy Music being reborn.
37. LIMESCALE Limescale
This year’s obligatory Derek Bailey entry – but not the only entry to feature him - finds him even fresher and to an extent regenerated than his recent storming form. Alex Ward lays down his best clarinet playing on record and, on a “horn” basis, THF Drenching’s squawking dictaphone runs him a close second. Yet the five musicians work as an indissoluble whole, and “Charity Singles Ball” should be on XFM’s playlist.
36. SOLE Selling Live Water
My feeling is that Anticon is running out of steam in direct proportion to the steam deficit of mainstream hip-hop. So many words crammed into so little space can come across as off-putting, verbiage for its own sake, Frank Marino rather than Hendrix. So much whiteness, too…in some cases (hello, Themselves) one might be listening to mid-‘80s generic SST having a go at hip hop. Selling Live Water, good as it is, may well be the final apex of the Anticon operation; Sole sounds genuinely enraged on tracks like “Salt On Everything” and the music is sufficiently forward-looking to echo and develop the emotions it soundtracks. To this writer, however, Sage Francis’ Personal Journals, unaccountably omitted from last year’s list, remains the definitive Anticon statement.
35. ATHLETE Vehicles & Animals
The year’s big grower. Something is stirring underneath the benign surfaces of “Westside” and “You Got The Style” which elevates this Deptford quartet out of the “modern band it’s OK to like because Nick Hornby likes then” category. It’s all about how they’re playing it, not just what they’re playing.
34. GIRLS ALOUD Sound Of The Underground
The noughties seem to have echoed the ‘80s as far as New Pop, or Newer Pop, is concerned – first the breakthrough (1981/2001), then the year of masterpieces (1982./2002) and now the year of the comedown, the stolid sliding into cynical compromise (1983/2003). And so many – Kylie, Britney, Sugababes, Holly Valance, Rachel Stevens – have followed the latter course. Why? Over-eagerness to sell records to an American audience which (bar Britney, obviously) has little interest in their undisguisable Britishness (or Antipodean-transposed Britishness). “Seven coffees, Ricki Lake on play” just sounds unnatural - as if the Sugababes had been forced to sing it with that, when you think about it, frankly unattractive element of smugness in their voices (and “Hole In The Head” plays like a scaled-down Basement Jaxx). In LA they don’t give a shit about an S Club ex’s “LA Ex” and maybe would have preferred it if Stevens had been honest and just recorded a cover of “Empire State Human.” And so much of this pop’s burnished-in-your-brain “sexiness” is nauseatingly unsexy in the Friday night in doorways in Berwick Street sense. Witness Kylie on “Slow,” desperately trying to convince us that her blankness can be converted into sexuality, as if Waterman’s still waiting behind the door, like Clarke Peters’ pimp in Mona Lisa, ready to slap her around if she fails to deliver the goods. One never gets the feeling that these singers are actually in control of anything.
And it’s now clear that “No Good Advice” by Girls Aloud was the epitaph for Newer Pop. This is what it’s like to be blank, they sneer in our faces. Why should they care, as long as we do? Unfortunately for them, the public took them for their word and failed to buy their album in any great quantity. They missed out on the only worthwhile Newer Pop album this year. Perhaps they looked at those unattended microphones against the black background of the back cover and decided that such overt blankness wasn’t worth penetrating.
33. DURUTTI COLUMN Someone Else’s Party
Rebekah del Rio in Mulholland Drive. Vini Reilly understands. A heartbreaking tribute to the mother he recently lost, and his best record since L.C.. As with this year’s Arab Strap album – and indeed last year’s Lucky Pierre album, and what about both of those Ballboy albums, not to mention both albums by Meanwhile, Back In Communist Russia, and never mind Cinerama – well, these are all records which would have been high in Laura’s lists, had she been the sort of person who believed in lists, which she wasn’t.
32. DAVID JACK Without Vocabulary
Given the depressingly conservative product of electronica/turntabling misconstrued in so many end-of-year polls as “the future” – hello Matmos, stand up Four Tet, sit down again Manitoba – it’s no surprise that this Glasgow-based Mogwai associate did better and more exciting work than any of them. Highlights: “I Had My Chance And Lost It,” “The Uncontainable Smell Of Hades.”
31. JOHNNY CASH American IV: The Man Comes Around
I haven’t yet heard all of the Unearthed boxset, hence its non-appearance in my top 50 reissues/compilations list. Yet it’s hard to argue with the fact that with this album, Cash did something pretty well unprecedented in what we call “rock ‘n’ roll” or even “country,” namely record in the full knowledge of his imminent demise and bring us back dispatches from the edge of death. True, this year there was also Warren Zevon’s The Wind, but this needed little more than a few sympathetic musicians and well-chosen occasional vocal partners (e.g. Nick Cave) to underscore Cash’s stalwart minimalism. “Hurt” you already know about, yet poignancy also occurs in the most obvious places (listen to him singing the second line of the second verse of “Danny Boy” against Benmont Tench’s pipe organ and try not to cry) and less obvious (the closing “We’ll Meet Again,” sung by the entire family, June Carter Cash included). The video for “Hurt” is also, and rightly, included as a CD-ROM extra.
30. THE HIDDEN CAMERAS The Smell Of Our Own
“Golden showers/In this cold/It turns to ice/Runs down my knees in fright.” And set against the most blissful of post-Pet Sounds harmonics, shaming shysters like the Polyphonic Spree. Is this the greatest gay love album ever? I’d say so – invention cascades upon invention through tracks like “Boys Of Melody” and “Breathe On It.” A brilliant and important record. “The Man That I Am With My Man” is musically and emotionally worthy of Lambchop, and I cannot currently think of a higher compliment. Joel Gibb now better at pop than Robin Gibb shock!
29, PAUL THE GIRL Electro-Magnetic Blues
And this is something else. Perhaps the most searing and brutal record in its field since PJ Harvey’s Rid Of Me - and would it were that Harvey were now producing music this vital and, let’s face it, horny; and indeed it is the sort of record which Nick Cave, by the painful evidence of the closing 15 minutes of Nocturama, is no longer capable of producing. Accompanied by a crack team of jazzers/avantists – Seb Rochford’s drums and Pete Wareham’s saxes are particularly penetrating – Paul howls and sneers her grief and disdain, and not necessarily in that order, on songs like “Don’t You Know Yet Who I Am?” and “Thinking Song.” Hers is a potentially major talent, and my apologies for not hitherto acknowledging it at greater length.
28. THE SOFT PINK TRUTH Do You Party?
As opposed to Can You Party?, the great Royal House (Todd Terry) 1988 acieed album (why has no one covered “A Better Way”?), this in fact goes back and takes the Mutant Disco ethic further – sumptuous and compelling electropop, culminating in the fantastic worship/cover of Vanity 6’s “Make Up,” enough to encourage the more discerning listener to unearth the original. And electropop, also, that’s unafraid to change its mind halfway through a track (“Promofunk”).
27. RICHARD X Richard X Presents His X-Factor Volume One
There’s something quite endearing about the fact that, of this album’s numerous guest vocalists, Mark Goodier was the first to agree to participate. “The best album in the world…ever”? Not quite, but it’s not for want of trying. And at its best – Liberty X confirming that they are beings of no body, Deborah Flying Lizard redefining blankness on her literal reading of “Walk On By” (imagine it’s the ghost of Princess Diana talking) through Kelis’ “Finest Dreams” (the best TOTP performance this year; Richard X topping up pints in the background as girls rollerskate around him, and the centre – Kelis – is of course absent), Tiga’s “You (Better Let Me Love You x 4) Tonight,” and the Sugababes’ inevitable “Freak Like Me” – pop in 2003 didn’t get much better. An imagined number one for a cold and uncertain January 2004: Jarvis Cocker dreams of Hope Sandoval in the closing “Into You.”
26. DIZZEE RASCAL Boy In Da Corner
The coming down of David Blaine from his box on a dark, wet and freezing Sunday evening was perhaps undertaken by a different David Blaine – not in body, but in spirit – from the benign apparition which had watched over us at sunlit lunchtimes and made Bermondsey a little bit more imaginable. You could easily picnic underneath that David Blaine; the smiling sun in Teletubbies made concrete. For nearly two hours we had to wait until the cameras were all in place, and then we were obliged to watch an hour of minimalist documentarianism directed by Harmony Korine. It occurred to me that this was the optimum, or intended, venue for watching Korine’s films; upstanding, deprived of easy comfort, surrounded and sometimes overwhelmed by screeching kids from the nearby estates, increasing loss of bladder discipline. We stood and watched Korine’s film trying not to piss ourselves. Eventually you transcend the cold and instability, and even the crowds, and focus upon the question posed by this film: this is an exposition, this is telling us who and what David Blaine is, and if minimalism is the order of the day, do we really want to know who David Blaine really is? Wouldn’t that spoil the mirage, soil the pants of his godhood? Because if we are to receive an exposition on who David Blaine really is, such an exposition necessarily runs the risk of exposing the possibility that Blaine might be nothing, or no one. No body that special. It would incur additional damaging questions such as: why is he doing this? Is it for goodness or is it for transcendence or is he just another empty vessel of a showbiz shyster? It was hard to tell, even when he was sitting in the nude surrounded by a bevy of girls (the estate kids enjoyed that bit).
Eventually, though, he had to come down, in all senses. So they lowered the winches and the box started to descend unsteadily. Would it be empty when it landed? Would the cables break and Blaine plunge to his death? Would the double come out of the box while the real Blaine emerged from his Rolls Royce, tuxedo-clad?
And then all of a sudden it ceased to matter. What made David Blaine cease to matter was the fact that, as the box descended, a neighbouring boat on the Embankment immediately started to blast out “Jus’ A Rascal” by Dizzee Rascal. The people next to us started to laugh – as if the spell had truly been broken – and gyrate gleefully to the song. So a triangle, or trilogy, of minimalism was completed – Blaine/Korine/Dylan Mills; three different responses to blankness, three ways of asking the question What if you stare at me and realise that there’s nobody there?
And what place was there for minimalism in the music of 2003, the kind of minimalism which strips everything down to brutal basics, far more brutal or basic than the stripes of white or the keys of black, the sort of music which shoves in your face repeatedly the notion that THERE’S NOTHING MORE TO IT THAN THIS? Does brutal minimalism work if it only plays in the dark and you can never actually see it? Perhaps this is the motor of fear which powers all “critics” and even “musicians”; the dread of the possibility that, as with the Wizard of Oz or “Number One,” if we approach the centre of everything towards which we have been working – and for which/whom we have been working – there will be nothing at the centre of pop music except a bewildered old man, or a mirror, or a blank space?
The importance of Grime lies in the by-product that it’s a way of ending music, or at least ending the viewing of one angle of music, in order to pave the way for the societal/notational reconstruction which will follow? But what – and this is the same dilemma which has permeated pop since the onset of punk, and especially house music – if there is no reconstruction to follow; simply the continued reduction of monuments to buildings to foundations to bricks to clay to atoms? Can we find it in ourselves to love, or dance to or with, an atom? Especially if the reduction is done with such coldness replacing enthusiasm, or even humanity? It’s no coincidence that the key Grime track this year is Wiley’s “Ground Zero” – as with 9/11, it’s a means of demolishing constructions we took for granted, leaving – well, leaving what? A vast mausoleum of throbbing plains, of dead synthesiser squiggles, of beats which sound like abandoned pacemakers for deceased epileptics. One reconstitutes – Grime; Grim E. That’s it; the euphoric blankness of ’88, and this is what happens when we opt to reduce everything to a throb; the bleakest of blanknesses. Or perhaps the logical end product of what happens when we choose to view music as a branch of engineering, rather than an expression of what it means to be a human being. There is absolutely no room for uncertainty or vulnerability.
Except if you’re Dizzee Rascal. On the starkly primary yellow sleeve of Boy In Da Corner he looks as though he’s trapped in Blaine’s box as it is being set on fire; the resigned look of the unfortunate whose voice was never destined to be heard; no one ever asked to hear it. Grant that it is without doubt a sonically innovative record, grant that Dizzee Rascal’s voice might be the most individual voice in British pop since Morrissey – but grant also that in the last six months, since writing about it in CoM, I have not felt obliged to listen to it more than three or four times. And listening to it, through no fault of the artist, feels like an obligation, for no record has been admitted more swiftly to the canon. As with the Lord Of The Rings trilogy, so many words are expended on the art that one feels no great inclination to experience the art in repeated sittings, or even in one sitting. And what to make of “Jezebel” or for that matter “I Luv U”? Does one go all Wilheim Reich on the reader and talk about extreme poverty producing extreme attitudes to sexuality and to the woman/mother figure? Or, given the current fate of female joggers in East End parks, does one eventually run out of excuses? It was a problem with the first Schoolly-D album and it remains a problem here. Yet a considerably more lyrically misogynist record appears 21 places higher in this list. Sometimes Larkin’s law has to be applied internally within the art as well as to the artist’s life, if any art is to remain listenable or viewable.
Perhaps one has to experience Bow and Bethnal Green and Leyton on a daily and intimate basis. In Streatham, R&B continues to rule, while here in Hampstead, Dido rules, sadly and indefatigably. The album has yielded a few mid-chart singles but, despite the Mercury prize, has sold only respectably rather than spectacularly. Whatever else it’s doing, it isn’t becoming pop. And does Dizzee want anything else other than the “house on the hill” about which he enthuses on the Jaxx’s “Lucky Star”? As So Solid Crew have sadly if predictably proved this year – as Soul II Soul had found 13 years previously – an album of advertisements isn’t going to sell. Tell your listeners about dreams but don’t let on you’re selling them capitalism. The difference with Boy In Da Corner perhaps lies in the fact that it tries to explain to us that the only alternative to the house on the hill is the cemetery. Grime can, I feel, only transcend itself if it dares to suggest to us the possibility of a third way. Does it risk the potential side-effects of vulnerability?
25. JOSS STONE The Soul Sessions
I repeat; she is 16, she comes from Devon, she is everything Pop Idol could be but deliberately isn’t (for the same reason that Craig Douglas routinely scored big hits in the Britain of the late ‘50s and Sam Cooke didn’t) and this album is sensuous and passionate, precisely because she knows that one note will do where 36 do not need to do. Will she fare as well with original material? I repeat; the best British female singer since Dusty.
24. WHITEHOUSE Bird Seed
Whereas dear old Billy Childish continues to wind his entertaining way through Bad Ole Rock ‘N’ Roll – and rather one Billy Childish than a million Darknesses; it is no laughing matter - Whitehouse here propel a far more pointed attack on Tr*c*y *m *n in “Why You Never Became A Dancer,” the opening track of their seventeenth and best album. Chris Bohn disagrees that this music is profoundly moral, whereas William Bennett himself sent me a kind email saying that my view of the album was “very interesting.” But it’s the 15-minute Albini-co-assembled collage of a title track which, one might and will say, cuts the deepest.
23. ROBERT WYATT Cuckooland
One wishes that Wyatt had used a slightly harder character – an Alan Wilkinson, say, or a John Butcher – rather than the committed but polite Gilad Atzmon – to play on this album; still, the love and the regret remain touching, and Annie Whitehead is superb throughout. One – let’s not mince words, I – could view the mid-album 30-second interval between “Lullaby For Hamza” and the Ogun-meets-“Third Stone From The Sun” odyssey of “Trickle Down” as a transitional point between the closing of one life and the beginning of another. “Sweet dreams, old chap…sweet dreams.”
22. CLEARLAKE Cedars
Their second and better album; a record which dared to embrace the vulnerable and tell them that they’re loved and needed (“Treat Yourself With Kindness”). Dedicated to you, but you weren’t listening.
21. KELIS Tasty
Perhaps it just comes down to the Beatles/Stones, Blur/Oasis thing; you’re either a Timbaland person or a Neptunes person. This writer is definitely the latter. Whereas Timbaland has long since exhausted his handful of tricks (the diminishing returns of this year’s models of Bubba Sparxxx and Miss E) such that he is now reportedly sick of hip hop and plans to produce Coldplay instead, the Neptunes seem to continue finding newness in the narrowest of niches. While I suspect that Wanderland is probably a far better record than I initially gave it credit for, the new Kelis is a wonderful thing, and not just for the divine “Milkshake” (is that the year’s best middle eight or what?) or the Andre 3000 return match “Millionaire,” but because it succeeds with the same format which so bitterly failed Beyoncé on Dangerously In Love - and that album, first four tracks included, now sounds so much more hollow than it did six months ago – in that it sequences into a succession of ballads. “Stick Up” and “Sugar Honey Iced Tea,” however, are, even by their titles alone, much more forceful and emphatic – and adventurous. Unlike Ms Knowles, one can detect a heart beating in Kelis. And that really does make the difference. Her life is better than hers, as opposed to ours.
20. LUOMO The Present Lover
Apart from everything else, isn’t this also one of the great break-up albums in pop? “Visitor” and “What Good” are as good as anything on Blood On The Tracks. But worship the ineluctable way in which “To You” and “Tessio” approximate the half-a-step-ahead-of-itself forward motion of Kylie’s la-la-la rhythm and make it shine so lustrously. And the closing “Shelter” is everything Dido will never be.
19. THE POSTAL SERVICE Give Up
Actually this could be construed as another great break-up album. Recalling early New Order, as well as much else, this duo, drawn from Death Cab For Cutie and Dntel, transcended both their parent groups to provide endlessly listenable and intelligent pop such as “Recycled Air” and “Brand New Colony.” From the song “Clark Gable” the year’s best couplet: “I know you’re wise beyond your years, but do you ever get the fear/That your perfect verse is just a lie you tell yourself to help you get by?”
18. YO LA TENGO Summer Sun
Another one which would have been way up on Laura’s list, Hoboken’s finest move closer to the New Thing (assisted by William Parker and his mates) but go easy on the feedback. The result: a gorgeously slow burning album made with much love. Highlights: the ten-minute ecstatic stasis of “Let’s Be Still” and the heartbreakingly jaunty “Don’t Have To Be So Sad.” Not any more I don’t.
17. JOHN TILBURY AND KEITH ROWE Duos For Doris
The first of two appearances by Keith Rowe in this list. Recorded in France at the beginning of this year following the death of Tilbury’s mother at the age of 95, these two CDs express mourning and reconciliation in a profound and wise, not to mention emotionally cathartic, way. This list does not avoid those records of this year which dealt with death, or at least those which acknowledged that rebirth must inevitably and necessarily follow. The first CD “Cathnor” uses the same church staircase structure as Gorecki’s Third; slowly and patiently building up its expression of grief until EVERYTHING EXPLODES at the 44-minute mark. After two minutes of screaming, the music, dictated by Tilbury’s cyclical piano chords, gracefully descends again. There wasn’t much this year which was so unutterably moving.
16. BELLE AND SEBASTIAN Dear Catastrophe Waitress
Trevor Horn finally squares the post-C86 circle. So subtle, but he goes all the way through this, B&S’ finest album. Who else could reconstitute the Art of Noise so artfully as Horn does in the verses of “Roy Walker”?
15. PITMAN It Takes A Nation Of Tossers
Not a comedy record. It wouldn’t be here if it were. As an eloquently helpless diatribe against the wilful degeneration of 21st century Britain, this is every bit the equal of Boy In Da Corner. Consider the void at the centre of “Mr Pitiful” which, by making light of it, becomes so much darker. Did you cry when you saw the inhabitants of Camp Pop Idol crying when Elton John walked into the room? And how much did he really hate them?
14. DAVID SYLVIAN Blemish
Sylvian’s Tilt - Penman is right. In a year where all the electroclash bunnies scampered eagerly back to 1981, Sylvian teams up with Derek Bailey and Christian Fennesz and leaves all of that behind, another boy in a different corner. Highlight: the sun starts to shine again - “A Fire In The Forest.”
13. CAMERA OBSCURA Underachievers Please Try Harder
The record which should have come out of “1963.” So seemingly conservative, so quietly intelligent and radical a record, both musically and lyrically, and three places higher than their mentors because they could end up even higher. Does that make post-C86 the new post-prog? Highlight: the entrance of the Joe Meek soprano in “Teenager.”
12. LUNGE Strong Language
It is the Achilles’ heel of every critic. How do you fairly assess music which is made by people you know; moreover, by people who are your friends? And does a critic lose authority and credibility on the assumption that “he’s just voting for his mates”? Remember that I said earlier that this list is not a Sermon On The Mount. Remember also the absence of the Lollies and Tompaulin from last year’s list, both of which include friends of mine within their respective line-ups. This is a subjective list, as all lists of this kind can only be, of the records which have made most impact on me as an individual.
Let me also be accurate, and say that I only know one member of Lunge, and that she is only one of four musicians, all of whom are equal partners in the group. It is not the Gail Brand Quartet. Indeed, my view of this album is inevitably affected by witnessing the group in performance; onstage it seems to naturally organise itself as two sets of two – Gail and Mark Sanders (one of the great partnerships in improv) in the middle, Pat Thomas and Phil Durrant at their respective keyboards/laptops at either end, like Customs officers.
Nevertheless this is one of the great British improv records of the last 25 years, perhaps even the best since Isipingo’s Family Affair (if the latter qualifies as “improv”), certainly the one which reaches out to its audience most effectively and most passionately. From the knockabout glee of “Planarchy” to the bottomless grief of “Rothko” it is an overwhelming record. Is Gail still God? Well we are all human. What I do know is that she is a fantastic musician and a wonderful friend, and that’s all that needs to be said.
11. OUTKAST The Love Below/Speakerboxxx
The order is of course deliberate. Unsurprisingly, the American critics have gone for the Big Boi half (in the same way that they went for Christine McVie over Stevie Nicks) which is pretty good ’03 standard hip hop, if all you want is standard hip hop – and let’s face it, in 2003 pretty well all hip hop was standard. Missy Elliott chasing her own tail, Ludacris turning into Judge Dread (the “Big Six” one rather than the 2000AD one), Bubba Sparxxx ignoring the two interesting tracks on his album in favour of a succession of Guns N’ Roses B-sides, 50 Cent not really telling us anything – like the Darkness, his modest talent has been magnified and beaten down by the need of the media to have Something/Someone Moderately Interesting To Talk About – Obie Trice making 50 Cent seem like Amiri Baraka – so it was probably wise of Andre 3000 to move away from “hip hop” and instead take us into long-uncharted gardens of utopia etc etc blah blah you’ve read the review; in some places my review has even been posted on the front windows of record shops, which affords me rather more satisfaction than I can diplomatically display in public. Still, catch the aside in “Hey Ya!” – “Why are we so in denial” – silence – “when we know we’re not happy here?” Do you want to listen to him or do you just want to dance? It’s a bleak old song.
10. JUNIOR SENIOR D-D-Don’t Don’t Stop The Beat
Another duo, perhaps handicapped by the big hit “Move Your Feet,” as punters expecting more dance with a capital D were bemused when the album offered them a rip-roaring update of the B52s, overpowering Electric Six and outstripping the Stripes. One of the best rock albums of the year, really, and certainly the year’s daftest record. The fact that Prince does not, or cannot, write songs of the quality of “Boy Meets Girl” inspires feelings similar to “why didn’t Steve Martin stick to cat juggling?” Also, the year’s great party album; give “Dancing Queen” a rest at Xmas and try this instead.
9. BASEMENT JAXX Kish Kash
I still feel this seriously tapers off after track ten – Siouxsie finally goes mad – but tracks 1-10 constitute the year’s best pop album. What a shame that its marketing was so hamfisted; “Good Luck” should have gone ahead of the album as the first single with “Plug It In” as the second. Thus: a peak position of #17 and out of the entire album chart after three weeks. More consistent than Rooty, this demonstrates that Felix and Simon understand pop perfectly. It’s not their fault if you don’t.
8. ORIGINAL CAST RECORDING Buffy The Vampire Slayer: Once More With Feeling
This arrived too late to make it onto last year’s list, which it might have topped, and perhaps you really need to have the DVD for the full impact, but musically this is Escalator Over The Hill goes pop, a sequence of songs as profound as any I can remember which culminates in life being chosen over death, even though the uncertainty remains (“Understand, we go hand in hand/But we walk alone in fear”). And “Under Your Spell” should be number one for 19 weeks.
7. MASSIVE ATTACK 100th Window
How soon we forget, eh, readers? Their second unqualified masterpiece, a record more in tune with the pre-war anti-war mood of this year than any other. Now we file (it) away sadly, the war having been won, Saddam today (as at time of writing) captured. Was there a point? Did we remember that there was a point? The world turns and burns and nobody captured it better than Robert Del Naja did on this phenomenal and brilliant record. The Hyde Park crowd versus the Knightsbridge vacuum; two different worlds, while elsewhere the third one simmers towards destruction.
6. M WARD Transfiguration Of Vincent
It is not necessary to know who Vincent was, or how he died, or why he died; merely that he did die, was clearly and unbearably close to Mr Ward, and he chose this means of commemorating him and keeping him alive. The Church Of Vincent. The Church of Hilda. The Church Of Laura. As a record it sounds improvised, sounds as though he has the freedom (or been liberated) to make it up, to go on internal adventures, to sound like nothing else recorded this year, and…eventually to come up for air, to breathe, in his beyond-anything reconstruction/remattering of Bowie’s “Let’s Dance.” Goodbyes turn into embracing welcomes, life renews after life, the slowness, the slow patience, because when you consider it so much music is in a bloody rush YOU DON’T JUST GET OVER IT but sometimes you see the possibility of something/someone which will aid you towards a future, and that HAS to be more important than reminiscing about 1968 or 1979 or just turning into an oldies website LIFE IS A SERIES OF SIGNIFICANT DISCOVERIES OR IT IS NOT WORTH HAVING – and the challenge of life is to recognise and embrace the greatness of nowness.
5. CODY CHESNUtt The Headphone Masterpiece
Again, another record which strictly belongs in last year’s list, but I didn’t get to hear it until this year, and…well, it’s the black Wizard, and hey, its UK release was apparently down to me, and hey, you still didn’t buy it (well I know that you readers bought or downloaded it; I’m talking to the world of “you”s). 36 tracks over 2 CDs of destabilised, debauched, dainty soul-pop-electro-whateverthefuckyouwanttothrowatthewall and it all sticks. Remember that when it starts turning up in the all-time top 100 album lists in 2006 or thereabouts.
4. FLEETWOOD MAC Say You Will
Tell me about moving. Last Wednesday, backstage at Earls Court, watching Buckingham and Nicks performing “Landslide” and embracing each other at the end. 30 years of hurt never stopped us dreaming. Resolution. Reconciliation. So it is with Say You Will, the Mac’s greatest album, the distress of Rumours squared by the adventure of Tusk…and it has ended happily. 18 tracks of genius, Lindsey and Stevie never more important to/for pop.
3. CAT POWER You Are Free
I can’t listen to too much sad music now. There isn’t the need. But there is sad and there is consoling. Not that I have much need of consoling these days either, thankfully. Consider this shattering and beautiful record, then, as a reminder of how far I have come, and what I have run away from until the snake stopped crawling and found a new den. Chan Marshall…just knows. “Better make your mind up quick.” Sometimes (pace Morley vs. Wham!) you have to be reminded that you are capable of making it up.
2. THE FIERY FURNACES Gallowsbird’s Bark
And you have to understand that the entirety of CoM and Naked Maja could be easily described as running away from Cat Power and running towards the Fiery Furnaces. Where everyone ran to clutch the security blanket of the White Stripes, Eleanor and Matthew Friedburger made the real advances. This was the most sheerly enjoyable album I heard all year; 16 bang-bang-one-classic-after-another songs which run the emotional and stylistic gamut, although not so crassly as to underline it heavily – they sing about the Grand Union Canal and tropical Iceland, sing about desolation and delirium. Cat Power buries the past gracefully; the Fiery Furnaces open the door to the future and help to reintroduce concepts into this writer’s life such as “fun” and “laughter” and “mucking about” and “acting like a 12-year-old.”
But…
THE CHURCH OF ME/THE NAKED MAJA ALBUM OF THE YEAR 2003
1. PLURAMON Dreams Top Rock
This is the recycled future of everything. Julee Cruise returns to my world, and in a very obvious way the spirit of Loveless returns to my world. A great and passionate 39 minutes; disturbing but finally flying above the strings which tether us to the old world. Keith Rowe comes in at the exact point when he’s needed. And, as with my reissue of the year, it was a record which wasn’t just sent to me; I had to go out and get wet to find it. And, as in 1991, I find that actually I don’t want to spoil it by writing yet more words about it; I just want to listen to the music, to love to the music, to live with the music, to return to the way I used to experience music; playing to an audience of one. So, if you don’t mind, I plan to do that for a while.
If you need an explanation, Dreams Top Rock is my album of the year because listening to it is like having my entire life returned to me.
“‘Why, look,’ said Neville, ‘at the clock ticking on the mantelpiece? Time passes, yes. And we grow old. But to sit with you, alone with you, here in London, in this firelit room you there, I here, is all. The world ransacked to its uttermost ends, and all its heights stripped and gathered of their flowers, holds no more. Look at the firelight running up and down the gold thread in the curtain. The fruit it circles droops heavy. It falls on the toe of your boot, it gives your face a red rim – I think it is the firelight and not your face; I think those are books against the wall, and that a curtain, and that perhaps an arm-chair. But when you come everything changes. The cups and saucers changed when you came in this morning. There can be no doubt, I thought, pushing aside the newspaper, that our mean lives, unsightly as they are, put on splendour and have meaning only under the eyes of love.”
(Virginia Woolf, The Waves, The Hogarth Press, 1931)
It has occurred to me, considering what to write on the forthcoming book jacket blurb, that I could now adequately and accurately describe myself as a “writer and broadcaster.” Eh? How did that happen? From being a bereaved, drink and drug-addled nervous wreck, exiled from Oxford to Streatham, two years ago, to this? Well all right, you’ve been here all along, you know the story, you know that this was the plan…even so, the plan worked. I made it work. I ensured that it would work. Thus I am no longer grieving; even though grief cannot be entirely banished from my soul any more than Laura can be banished from my heart, it would be false to say that I am now feeling the same way or that music which was speaking to me even six months ago is speaking to me in the same way – if at all – now. This change may be usefully taken into account when looking at the following list; it’s the list of a man who has been made happy again.
As promised, there will be no rash statements about ceasing this blog – instead, here is a considered statement about ceasing this blog. I started Church of Me, among other things, as a means of fighting to get my life back. Now my life is back and I want to hold onto it. There is no need for me to go into an extended farewell; indeed Mike Atkinson at Troubled Diva has saved me the bother with his last post, and I can do little more than echo what he says, particularly taking into account the importance of my new relationship, the need to stop the blog when it’s still on a high and the necessity of stopping doing something when it becomes a chore rather than a pleasure. Added to that are the facts that the only writing for which I now have allotted time is paid writing – reviews, polishing up the first book and already having started writing a second – together with my all-clear following a recent cancer scare and the fact that next month I will turn 40.
There are therefore no plans to add anything else to The Naked Maja - nothing else really needs to be added – after this week. I will not rule out the occasional one-off special, or director’s cuts of long reviews which I may need to do for Uncut or The Wire, or a pressing need to inform you of important new music; but for all practical purposes this will be it. Like Mike, I end for positive rather than negative reasons. Perusal of CoM in May/June 2002 will remind you of what a negative end would have been like…and in any case The Naked Maja has really been a set of extended footnotes to CoM rather than a separate, stand-alone blog. Time, then, to bring the story to a proper end. I realise the vague moral obligation to keep publishing quality writing, given the continuing pitiful state of what is actually “published” as mainstream music journalism – observe, for instance, Garry Mulholland in this month’s Observer Music Monthly telling us that 2003 was the best year for singles since the late ‘80s, and then in his top ten of the year including singles originally released in 1979 and 1998 (“Are You Ready For Love” and “Mundian To Bach Ke”) not to mention another recorded in “1963” (“Seven Nation Army”), or indeed the characteristically pompous response to a letter in the current MOJO from a reader concerned that their Best Of 2003 compilation contained so many old songs – “The Best Of 2003 contained 18 tracks from some of this year’s best CDs. In MOJO’s world, that naturally included Best Ofs and Reissues.” In other words: our gaff, our rules. The words “as you have previously been told” were not included but might as well have been…the kind of welcoming relationship which has seen so many of MOJO’s writers and readers defect to Uncut this year. Then again, consider the unspoken subtext behind all “grown-up” British music radio – from 6 Music via Bob Harris to Sean Rowley on BBC Radio London – i.e. this is Real Music Not Plastic Cocktail Crap Like What My Kids Listen To. The Hornby manifesto for 45-year-olds still weeping crocodile tears for Joe Strummer when in 1977 they were still listening to Barclay James Harvest.
I say this now because some readers may detect a not dissimilar manifesto in my own end-of-year top 50 albums list. All I can say in my defence is that this list is not to be treated as a Sermon On The Mount. It is simply a list of the 50 albums which touched me most in 2003, which seemed to speak to me as an individual. In the course of the list I will comment on other current developments which may come across as somewhat Meldrew-esque, to which I respond that a wish for music to develop is not the same thing as cutting oneself off from all new music. Nonetheless, novelty never was a substitute for quality, even if it is usually easier to recognise. Caveat auditor has, as ever, to be the watchword. My love of and enthusiasm for music certainly has not diminished, and I want from it the same things I have always wanted – either to tell me something I didn’t already know, or to tell me something I did know, but in a new and interesting – let’s not mince words, stunning – way. But life has to come first.
NOTES ON THE LIST
The following 50 albums are the proverbial tip of the iceberg of a shortlist. Thus it is that plenty of excellent and entirely worthy records ended up excluded. Albums which I have heard but are not scheduled for release until 2004 have not been included; so Lambchop, Dani Siciliano and Vive La Fête – not to mention Air and The Scissor Sisters - will have to wait until next year’s list, assuming that there is one, although qualitatively all would have qualified for this year’s list. And for those who did not end up in the final 50, I can only extend my apologies to Autechre, the Bad Plus Trio, Bardo Pond, Bed, the Blood Brothers, Blur, the Cansecos, the Dandy Warhols, the Faint, the Gossip, Emmylou Harris, Joe Henry, the Kills, King of Woolworths, Jeffrey Lewis, the Majesticons (which would have been #51), Momus, the New Pornographers, Oi Va Voi, the Rapture, Relaxed Muscle (#52), Tahiti 80, tAtU, Tok Tok and Soffy O, Alan Tomlinson, Kenny Wheeler, Will Young and too many others – it doesn’t mean that your records weren’t excellent (yes I said Will Young – if the second half of his album had matched the standard of the first half, he would have been straight into the list).
50. AUDIO BULLYS Ego War
Well they didn’t turn out to be this year’s Streets, and as with so much great pop in 2003, didn’t actually sell that well; not to a mass audience who continue to prefer the “soul baring” and “sincerity” of the Stereophonics and Dido. And Bryn Terfel for that matter. Hooligan House broke no new windows; yet this remains a fantastic album. Rather the “(I Don’t Want To Go To) Chelsea” cut-ups of “Way Too Long” than anything on that ghastly new Costello record; and rather the gleefully grieving “Snow” than Primal Scream and Kate Moss reading flyshit on “Some Velvet Morning.” “Face In A Crowd” even drove me back to the second Joe Cocker album; what a bizarre pop record “Marjorine” is, from its title downwards (“I want you back/But YOU WILL NOT GIVE HIM THE SACK!”).
49. GILLIAN WELCH Soul Journey
Do not mistake this sound for conservatism or selling out. Welch is either alone or with a band, and while it doesn’t match Time (The Revelator) - few records do, even fewer save a life – the ghostly insistence of “One Monkey Don’t Stop No Show” and the thumping rage of “Wrecking Ball” take root in the soul’s laybys.
48. LIGHTNING BOLT Wonderful Rainbow
In a year when so many hack duos attempted to bring back Good Ole Rock ‘N’ Roll – unasked – without bothering to add anything new to it, and therefore subtracting everything worthwhile from it, how refreshing to hear the unapologetically harmolodic burnouts of this drum and bass duo – which, incidentally, managed to prod deeper and darker than most of this year’s drum ‘n’ bass. “Duel In The Deep” is like the closing sequence of Once Upon A Time In The West exhumed and sentenced to be repeated endlessly, as the decay takes hold.
47. KRAFTWERK Tour De France Soundtracks
It is as if we had to wait 20 years for this record to be completed, or perhaps Kraftwerk decided that it would take 20 years for us to catch up with them; either way, they came back to prove yet again that the blankest of music is always underscored by the most passionate of emotions. As with Matt Seaton’s book The Escape Artist, in which cycling did for him what music did for me in terms of bereavement counselling, Kraftwerk discover – if they hadn’t known all along – that the discipline of the bicycle and the road is sometimes what is required to keep the heart beating, with the accent on “heart.” Salvation through work – and never let them see the sweat. No thanks to the hapless/hopeless Petridish, who recently wasted three-and-a-half pages of the Guardian’s Friday Review failing to get an interview with Kraftwerk, whereas Gary Crowley managed to get Ralf Hutter into his radio studio in the same week without breaking a stride.
46. CAPPO Spaz The World
It may surprise the unwary reader that Cappo is not even the highest-ranking Nottingham-based rapper in this list, whereas nearly all other rappers have failed to register. But tracks like “Cirques des Clowns” and “Prevail” burst almost indecently with originality and mischief. And “Learn To Be Strong” is far more profound than anything recorded this week by that silly old Messiah (not) Jay-Z.
45. LONDON IMPROVISERS ORCHESTRA Freedom Of The City 2002
Worth buying just for the astonishing and demolishing seven-and-a-half minutes of Terry Day’s rant “Ruthless” which tells us exactly what John Lydon jamming with Sun Ra would have sounded like (“Look at MEEEEE!”) and flattened everybody in the Conway Hall audience. And yes, that is me you hear cackling in response to Day’s “A pile of fucking shit is poverty!” (I was agreeing with him!)
44. VENETIAN SNARES Winter In The Belly Of A Snake
The panoramic, slow-burning post-MBV/Slint guitar epic seemed to be on a dying fall this year - The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place, as the underwhelming Explosions In The Sky put it, and it was rather frustrating that M83’s Dead Cities was not an Exploited tribute album, or that the title of Mogwai’s Happy Songs For Happy People had no cause to be ironic. Ultimately one has to return to life, and what better way than to have death rubbed brutally and closely in your face, as the unapologetically hardcore post-electro/post-everything Venetian Snares did on this remarkable record. No easy GYBE/Naomi Klein crossovers here – indeed, no guitars – but “Stairs Song” and “Cashew” are perversely more life-affirming in their recognition of its transience, and therefore pave one way’s back to life. The kind of record which DHR should be releasing.
43. MIRA CALIX Skimskitta
Influenced greatly by her amazing South Bank performance – utilising, sampling and recycling the sounds of live insects – as with #44 above, this sounds as if it had been recorded from the inside of a coffin, and yet the music is so light and approachable in its radicalism. “I May Be Over There (But My Heart Is Over Here)” indeed. Achieved what the Matthew Herbert Big Band didn’t, and with far less fuss.
42. HYMIE’S BASEMENT Hymie’s Basement
America collapses; this cLOUDDEAD/Fog crossover, however, quickly subdues its protests and swims around uncertainly in moonlit piano ruminations as the casualties float by.
41. CHRIS T-T London Is Sinking
On 2001’s superb The 253, this splendid singer/songwriter reworked London’s psychogeography on the Euston-to-Hackney bus; here he takes to the water. Songs like “Battersea Bridge Baptism” and “The Tin Man” are quite startling in their poignant quietitude. Battersea Power Station on the front cover, Vauxhall MI5 on the rear. I doubt that anyone is currently making better Londoncentric music.
40. NINA NASTASIA Run To Ruin
One of two Steve Albini “recordings” in this year’s list, an extraordinary record which redefined Americana rather than facilely xeroxing it (hello, My Morning Jacket). Highlight: the sandblasted torch of “I Say That I Will Go.”
39. RADIOHEAD Hail To The Thief
It didn’t dominate its year as the two preceding albums had done; nevertheless, if we are going to push the envelope in terms of the mainstream, then we have to acknowledge that no one is doing it better than Radiohead. Guitars back again – in a way (but not in the way) – but the record isn’t going to lick your face as Coldplay do; you have to work at it. As we all used to do. To stay interested.
38. JOHN CALE HoboSapiens
Typically, I missed a very important point in my Uncut review, namely that in a year when everyone clutched their Warhol banana sleeves and scampered back to the safety of the garage, the original punctum of the Velvets (you dispute that? Listen to Lou Reed’s The Raven and then this, and tell me I’m wrong) turns his attention to ProTools and hooks up with half of Lemon Jelly to sing wise and erudite songs about The War, about the adulation of art, about, above everything, slow death – “Letter From Abroad” is as extreme as anything he’s done since Helen of Troy; the whole is his best record since Music For A New Society, and the moment when the band storms in at the climax of the closing “Over Her Head” gives rise to the illusion of the original Roxy Music being reborn.
37. LIMESCALE Limescale
This year’s obligatory Derek Bailey entry – but not the only entry to feature him - finds him even fresher and to an extent regenerated than his recent storming form. Alex Ward lays down his best clarinet playing on record and, on a “horn” basis, THF Drenching’s squawking dictaphone runs him a close second. Yet the five musicians work as an indissoluble whole, and “Charity Singles Ball” should be on XFM’s playlist.
36. SOLE Selling Live Water
My feeling is that Anticon is running out of steam in direct proportion to the steam deficit of mainstream hip-hop. So many words crammed into so little space can come across as off-putting, verbiage for its own sake, Frank Marino rather than Hendrix. So much whiteness, too…in some cases (hello, Themselves) one might be listening to mid-‘80s generic SST having a go at hip hop. Selling Live Water, good as it is, may well be the final apex of the Anticon operation; Sole sounds genuinely enraged on tracks like “Salt On Everything” and the music is sufficiently forward-looking to echo and develop the emotions it soundtracks. To this writer, however, Sage Francis’ Personal Journals, unaccountably omitted from last year’s list, remains the definitive Anticon statement.
35. ATHLETE Vehicles & Animals
The year’s big grower. Something is stirring underneath the benign surfaces of “Westside” and “You Got The Style” which elevates this Deptford quartet out of the “modern band it’s OK to like because Nick Hornby likes then” category. It’s all about how they’re playing it, not just what they’re playing.
34. GIRLS ALOUD Sound Of The Underground
The noughties seem to have echoed the ‘80s as far as New Pop, or Newer Pop, is concerned – first the breakthrough (1981/2001), then the year of masterpieces (1982./2002) and now the year of the comedown, the stolid sliding into cynical compromise (1983/2003). And so many – Kylie, Britney, Sugababes, Holly Valance, Rachel Stevens – have followed the latter course. Why? Over-eagerness to sell records to an American audience which (bar Britney, obviously) has little interest in their undisguisable Britishness (or Antipodean-transposed Britishness). “Seven coffees, Ricki Lake on play” just sounds unnatural - as if the Sugababes had been forced to sing it with that, when you think about it, frankly unattractive element of smugness in their voices (and “Hole In The Head” plays like a scaled-down Basement Jaxx). In LA they don’t give a shit about an S Club ex’s “LA Ex” and maybe would have preferred it if Stevens had been honest and just recorded a cover of “Empire State Human.” And so much of this pop’s burnished-in-your-brain “sexiness” is nauseatingly unsexy in the Friday night in doorways in Berwick Street sense. Witness Kylie on “Slow,” desperately trying to convince us that her blankness can be converted into sexuality, as if Waterman’s still waiting behind the door, like Clarke Peters’ pimp in Mona Lisa, ready to slap her around if she fails to deliver the goods. One never gets the feeling that these singers are actually in control of anything.
And it’s now clear that “No Good Advice” by Girls Aloud was the epitaph for Newer Pop. This is what it’s like to be blank, they sneer in our faces. Why should they care, as long as we do? Unfortunately for them, the public took them for their word and failed to buy their album in any great quantity. They missed out on the only worthwhile Newer Pop album this year. Perhaps they looked at those unattended microphones against the black background of the back cover and decided that such overt blankness wasn’t worth penetrating.
33. DURUTTI COLUMN Someone Else’s Party
Rebekah del Rio in Mulholland Drive. Vini Reilly understands. A heartbreaking tribute to the mother he recently lost, and his best record since L.C.. As with this year’s Arab Strap album – and indeed last year’s Lucky Pierre album, and what about both of those Ballboy albums, not to mention both albums by Meanwhile, Back In Communist Russia, and never mind Cinerama – well, these are all records which would have been high in Laura’s lists, had she been the sort of person who believed in lists, which she wasn’t.
32. DAVID JACK Without Vocabulary
Given the depressingly conservative product of electronica/turntabling misconstrued in so many end-of-year polls as “the future” – hello Matmos, stand up Four Tet, sit down again Manitoba – it’s no surprise that this Glasgow-based Mogwai associate did better and more exciting work than any of them. Highlights: “I Had My Chance And Lost It,” “The Uncontainable Smell Of Hades.”
31. JOHNNY CASH American IV: The Man Comes Around
I haven’t yet heard all of the Unearthed boxset, hence its non-appearance in my top 50 reissues/compilations list. Yet it’s hard to argue with the fact that with this album, Cash did something pretty well unprecedented in what we call “rock ‘n’ roll” or even “country,” namely record in the full knowledge of his imminent demise and bring us back dispatches from the edge of death. True, this year there was also Warren Zevon’s The Wind, but this needed little more than a few sympathetic musicians and well-chosen occasional vocal partners (e.g. Nick Cave) to underscore Cash’s stalwart minimalism. “Hurt” you already know about, yet poignancy also occurs in the most obvious places (listen to him singing the second line of the second verse of “Danny Boy” against Benmont Tench’s pipe organ and try not to cry) and less obvious (the closing “We’ll Meet Again,” sung by the entire family, June Carter Cash included). The video for “Hurt” is also, and rightly, included as a CD-ROM extra.
30. THE HIDDEN CAMERAS The Smell Of Our Own
“Golden showers/In this cold/It turns to ice/Runs down my knees in fright.” And set against the most blissful of post-Pet Sounds harmonics, shaming shysters like the Polyphonic Spree. Is this the greatest gay love album ever? I’d say so – invention cascades upon invention through tracks like “Boys Of Melody” and “Breathe On It.” A brilliant and important record. “The Man That I Am With My Man” is musically and emotionally worthy of Lambchop, and I cannot currently think of a higher compliment. Joel Gibb now better at pop than Robin Gibb shock!
29, PAUL THE GIRL Electro-Magnetic Blues
And this is something else. Perhaps the most searing and brutal record in its field since PJ Harvey’s Rid Of Me - and would it were that Harvey were now producing music this vital and, let’s face it, horny; and indeed it is the sort of record which Nick Cave, by the painful evidence of the closing 15 minutes of Nocturama, is no longer capable of producing. Accompanied by a crack team of jazzers/avantists – Seb Rochford’s drums and Pete Wareham’s saxes are particularly penetrating – Paul howls and sneers her grief and disdain, and not necessarily in that order, on songs like “Don’t You Know Yet Who I Am?” and “Thinking Song.” Hers is a potentially major talent, and my apologies for not hitherto acknowledging it at greater length.
28. THE SOFT PINK TRUTH Do You Party?
As opposed to Can You Party?, the great Royal House (Todd Terry) 1988 acieed album (why has no one covered “A Better Way”?), this in fact goes back and takes the Mutant Disco ethic further – sumptuous and compelling electropop, culminating in the fantastic worship/cover of Vanity 6’s “Make Up,” enough to encourage the more discerning listener to unearth the original. And electropop, also, that’s unafraid to change its mind halfway through a track (“Promofunk”).
27. RICHARD X Richard X Presents His X-Factor Volume One
There’s something quite endearing about the fact that, of this album’s numerous guest vocalists, Mark Goodier was the first to agree to participate. “The best album in the world…ever”? Not quite, but it’s not for want of trying. And at its best – Liberty X confirming that they are beings of no body, Deborah Flying Lizard redefining blankness on her literal reading of “Walk On By” (imagine it’s the ghost of Princess Diana talking) through Kelis’ “Finest Dreams” (the best TOTP performance this year; Richard X topping up pints in the background as girls rollerskate around him, and the centre – Kelis – is of course absent), Tiga’s “You (Better Let Me Love You x 4) Tonight,” and the Sugababes’ inevitable “Freak Like Me” – pop in 2003 didn’t get much better. An imagined number one for a cold and uncertain January 2004: Jarvis Cocker dreams of Hope Sandoval in the closing “Into You.”
26. DIZZEE RASCAL Boy In Da Corner
The coming down of David Blaine from his box on a dark, wet and freezing Sunday evening was perhaps undertaken by a different David Blaine – not in body, but in spirit – from the benign apparition which had watched over us at sunlit lunchtimes and made Bermondsey a little bit more imaginable. You could easily picnic underneath that David Blaine; the smiling sun in Teletubbies made concrete. For nearly two hours we had to wait until the cameras were all in place, and then we were obliged to watch an hour of minimalist documentarianism directed by Harmony Korine. It occurred to me that this was the optimum, or intended, venue for watching Korine’s films; upstanding, deprived of easy comfort, surrounded and sometimes overwhelmed by screeching kids from the nearby estates, increasing loss of bladder discipline. We stood and watched Korine’s film trying not to piss ourselves. Eventually you transcend the cold and instability, and even the crowds, and focus upon the question posed by this film: this is an exposition, this is telling us who and what David Blaine is, and if minimalism is the order of the day, do we really want to know who David Blaine really is? Wouldn’t that spoil the mirage, soil the pants of his godhood? Because if we are to receive an exposition on who David Blaine really is, such an exposition necessarily runs the risk of exposing the possibility that Blaine might be nothing, or no one. No body that special. It would incur additional damaging questions such as: why is he doing this? Is it for goodness or is it for transcendence or is he just another empty vessel of a showbiz shyster? It was hard to tell, even when he was sitting in the nude surrounded by a bevy of girls (the estate kids enjoyed that bit).
Eventually, though, he had to come down, in all senses. So they lowered the winches and the box started to descend unsteadily. Would it be empty when it landed? Would the cables break and Blaine plunge to his death? Would the double come out of the box while the real Blaine emerged from his Rolls Royce, tuxedo-clad?
And then all of a sudden it ceased to matter. What made David Blaine cease to matter was the fact that, as the box descended, a neighbouring boat on the Embankment immediately started to blast out “Jus’ A Rascal” by Dizzee Rascal. The people next to us started to laugh – as if the spell had truly been broken – and gyrate gleefully to the song. So a triangle, or trilogy, of minimalism was completed – Blaine/Korine/Dylan Mills; three different responses to blankness, three ways of asking the question What if you stare at me and realise that there’s nobody there?
And what place was there for minimalism in the music of 2003, the kind of minimalism which strips everything down to brutal basics, far more brutal or basic than the stripes of white or the keys of black, the sort of music which shoves in your face repeatedly the notion that THERE’S NOTHING MORE TO IT THAN THIS? Does brutal minimalism work if it only plays in the dark and you can never actually see it? Perhaps this is the motor of fear which powers all “critics” and even “musicians”; the dread of the possibility that, as with the Wizard of Oz or “Number One,” if we approach the centre of everything towards which we have been working – and for which/whom we have been working – there will be nothing at the centre of pop music except a bewildered old man, or a mirror, or a blank space?
The importance of Grime lies in the by-product that it’s a way of ending music, or at least ending the viewing of one angle of music, in order to pave the way for the societal/notational reconstruction which will follow? But what – and this is the same dilemma which has permeated pop since the onset of punk, and especially house music – if there is no reconstruction to follow; simply the continued reduction of monuments to buildings to foundations to bricks to clay to atoms? Can we find it in ourselves to love, or dance to or with, an atom? Especially if the reduction is done with such coldness replacing enthusiasm, or even humanity? It’s no coincidence that the key Grime track this year is Wiley’s “Ground Zero” – as with 9/11, it’s a means of demolishing constructions we took for granted, leaving – well, leaving what? A vast mausoleum of throbbing plains, of dead synthesiser squiggles, of beats which sound like abandoned pacemakers for deceased epileptics. One reconstitutes – Grime; Grim E. That’s it; the euphoric blankness of ’88, and this is what happens when we opt to reduce everything to a throb; the bleakest of blanknesses. Or perhaps the logical end product of what happens when we choose to view music as a branch of engineering, rather than an expression of what it means to be a human being. There is absolutely no room for uncertainty or vulnerability.
Except if you’re Dizzee Rascal. On the starkly primary yellow sleeve of Boy In Da Corner he looks as though he’s trapped in Blaine’s box as it is being set on fire; the resigned look of the unfortunate whose voice was never destined to be heard; no one ever asked to hear it. Grant that it is without doubt a sonically innovative record, grant that Dizzee Rascal’s voice might be the most individual voice in British pop since Morrissey – but grant also that in the last six months, since writing about it in CoM, I have not felt obliged to listen to it more than three or four times. And listening to it, through no fault of the artist, feels like an obligation, for no record has been admitted more swiftly to the canon. As with the Lord Of The Rings trilogy, so many words are expended on the art that one feels no great inclination to experience the art in repeated sittings, or even in one sitting. And what to make of “Jezebel” or for that matter “I Luv U”? Does one go all Wilheim Reich on the reader and talk about extreme poverty producing extreme attitudes to sexuality and to the woman/mother figure? Or, given the current fate of female joggers in East End parks, does one eventually run out of excuses? It was a problem with the first Schoolly-D album and it remains a problem here. Yet a considerably more lyrically misogynist record appears 21 places higher in this list. Sometimes Larkin’s law has to be applied internally within the art as well as to the artist’s life, if any art is to remain listenable or viewable.
Perhaps one has to experience Bow and Bethnal Green and Leyton on a daily and intimate basis. In Streatham, R&B continues to rule, while here in Hampstead, Dido rules, sadly and indefatigably. The album has yielded a few mid-chart singles but, despite the Mercury prize, has sold only respectably rather than spectacularly. Whatever else it’s doing, it isn’t becoming pop. And does Dizzee want anything else other than the “house on the hill” about which he enthuses on the Jaxx’s “Lucky Star”? As So Solid Crew have sadly if predictably proved this year – as Soul II Soul had found 13 years previously – an album of advertisements isn’t going to sell. Tell your listeners about dreams but don’t let on you’re selling them capitalism. The difference with Boy In Da Corner perhaps lies in the fact that it tries to explain to us that the only alternative to the house on the hill is the cemetery. Grime can, I feel, only transcend itself if it dares to suggest to us the possibility of a third way. Does it risk the potential side-effects of vulnerability?
25. JOSS STONE The Soul Sessions
I repeat; she is 16, she comes from Devon, she is everything Pop Idol could be but deliberately isn’t (for the same reason that Craig Douglas routinely scored big hits in the Britain of the late ‘50s and Sam Cooke didn’t) and this album is sensuous and passionate, precisely because she knows that one note will do where 36 do not need to do. Will she fare as well with original material? I repeat; the best British female singer since Dusty.
24. WHITEHOUSE Bird Seed
Whereas dear old Billy Childish continues to wind his entertaining way through Bad Ole Rock ‘N’ Roll – and rather one Billy Childish than a million Darknesses; it is no laughing matter - Whitehouse here propel a far more pointed attack on Tr*c*y *m *n in “Why You Never Became A Dancer,” the opening track of their seventeenth and best album. Chris Bohn disagrees that this music is profoundly moral, whereas William Bennett himself sent me a kind email saying that my view of the album was “very interesting.” But it’s the 15-minute Albini-co-assembled collage of a title track which, one might and will say, cuts the deepest.
23. ROBERT WYATT Cuckooland
One wishes that Wyatt had used a slightly harder character – an Alan Wilkinson, say, or a John Butcher – rather than the committed but polite Gilad Atzmon – to play on this album; still, the love and the regret remain touching, and Annie Whitehead is superb throughout. One – let’s not mince words, I – could view the mid-album 30-second interval between “Lullaby For Hamza” and the Ogun-meets-“Third Stone From The Sun” odyssey of “Trickle Down” as a transitional point between the closing of one life and the beginning of another. “Sweet dreams, old chap…sweet dreams.”
22. CLEARLAKE Cedars
Their second and better album; a record which dared to embrace the vulnerable and tell them that they’re loved and needed (“Treat Yourself With Kindness”). Dedicated to you, but you weren’t listening.
21. KELIS Tasty
Perhaps it just comes down to the Beatles/Stones, Blur/Oasis thing; you’re either a Timbaland person or a Neptunes person. This writer is definitely the latter. Whereas Timbaland has long since exhausted his handful of tricks (the diminishing returns of this year’s models of Bubba Sparxxx and Miss E) such that he is now reportedly sick of hip hop and plans to produce Coldplay instead, the Neptunes seem to continue finding newness in the narrowest of niches. While I suspect that Wanderland is probably a far better record than I initially gave it credit for, the new Kelis is a wonderful thing, and not just for the divine “Milkshake” (is that the year’s best middle eight or what?) or the Andre 3000 return match “Millionaire,” but because it succeeds with the same format which so bitterly failed Beyoncé on Dangerously In Love - and that album, first four tracks included, now sounds so much more hollow than it did six months ago – in that it sequences into a succession of ballads. “Stick Up” and “Sugar Honey Iced Tea,” however, are, even by their titles alone, much more forceful and emphatic – and adventurous. Unlike Ms Knowles, one can detect a heart beating in Kelis. And that really does make the difference. Her life is better than hers, as opposed to ours.
20. LUOMO The Present Lover
Apart from everything else, isn’t this also one of the great break-up albums in pop? “Visitor” and “What Good” are as good as anything on Blood On The Tracks. But worship the ineluctable way in which “To You” and “Tessio” approximate the half-a-step-ahead-of-itself forward motion of Kylie’s la-la-la rhythm and make it shine so lustrously. And the closing “Shelter” is everything Dido will never be.
19. THE POSTAL SERVICE Give Up
Actually this could be construed as another great break-up album. Recalling early New Order, as well as much else, this duo, drawn from Death Cab For Cutie and Dntel, transcended both their parent groups to provide endlessly listenable and intelligent pop such as “Recycled Air” and “Brand New Colony.” From the song “Clark Gable” the year’s best couplet: “I know you’re wise beyond your years, but do you ever get the fear/That your perfect verse is just a lie you tell yourself to help you get by?”
18. YO LA TENGO Summer Sun
Another one which would have been way up on Laura’s list, Hoboken’s finest move closer to the New Thing (assisted by William Parker and his mates) but go easy on the feedback. The result: a gorgeously slow burning album made with much love. Highlights: the ten-minute ecstatic stasis of “Let’s Be Still” and the heartbreakingly jaunty “Don’t Have To Be So Sad.” Not any more I don’t.
17. JOHN TILBURY AND KEITH ROWE Duos For Doris
The first of two appearances by Keith Rowe in this list. Recorded in France at the beginning of this year following the death of Tilbury’s mother at the age of 95, these two CDs express mourning and reconciliation in a profound and wise, not to mention emotionally cathartic, way. This list does not avoid those records of this year which dealt with death, or at least those which acknowledged that rebirth must inevitably and necessarily follow. The first CD “Cathnor” uses the same church staircase structure as Gorecki’s Third; slowly and patiently building up its expression of grief until EVERYTHING EXPLODES at the 44-minute mark. After two minutes of screaming, the music, dictated by Tilbury’s cyclical piano chords, gracefully descends again. There wasn’t much this year which was so unutterably moving.
16. BELLE AND SEBASTIAN Dear Catastrophe Waitress
Trevor Horn finally squares the post-C86 circle. So subtle, but he goes all the way through this, B&S’ finest album. Who else could reconstitute the Art of Noise so artfully as Horn does in the verses of “Roy Walker”?
15. PITMAN It Takes A Nation Of Tossers
Not a comedy record. It wouldn’t be here if it were. As an eloquently helpless diatribe against the wilful degeneration of 21st century Britain, this is every bit the equal of Boy In Da Corner. Consider the void at the centre of “Mr Pitiful” which, by making light of it, becomes so much darker. Did you cry when you saw the inhabitants of Camp Pop Idol crying when Elton John walked into the room? And how much did he really hate them?
14. DAVID SYLVIAN Blemish
Sylvian’s Tilt - Penman is right. In a year where all the electroclash bunnies scampered eagerly back to 1981, Sylvian teams up with Derek Bailey and Christian Fennesz and leaves all of that behind, another boy in a different corner. Highlight: the sun starts to shine again - “A Fire In The Forest.”
13. CAMERA OBSCURA Underachievers Please Try Harder
The record which should have come out of “1963.” So seemingly conservative, so quietly intelligent and radical a record, both musically and lyrically, and three places higher than their mentors because they could end up even higher. Does that make post-C86 the new post-prog? Highlight: the entrance of the Joe Meek soprano in “Teenager.”
12. LUNGE Strong Language
It is the Achilles’ heel of every critic. How do you fairly assess music which is made by people you know; moreover, by people who are your friends? And does a critic lose authority and credibility on the assumption that “he’s just voting for his mates”? Remember that I said earlier that this list is not a Sermon On The Mount. Remember also the absence of the Lollies and Tompaulin from last year’s list, both of which include friends of mine within their respective line-ups. This is a subjective list, as all lists of this kind can only be, of the records which have made most impact on me as an individual.
Let me also be accurate, and say that I only know one member of Lunge, and that she is only one of four musicians, all of whom are equal partners in the group. It is not the Gail Brand Quartet. Indeed, my view of this album is inevitably affected by witnessing the group in performance; onstage it seems to naturally organise itself as two sets of two – Gail and Mark Sanders (one of the great partnerships in improv) in the middle, Pat Thomas and Phil Durrant at their respective keyboards/laptops at either end, like Customs officers.
Nevertheless this is one of the great British improv records of the last 25 years, perhaps even the best since Isipingo’s Family Affair (if the latter qualifies as “improv”), certainly the one which reaches out to its audience most effectively and most passionately. From the knockabout glee of “Planarchy” to the bottomless grief of “Rothko” it is an overwhelming record. Is Gail still God? Well we are all human. What I do know is that she is a fantastic musician and a wonderful friend, and that’s all that needs to be said.
11. OUTKAST The Love Below/Speakerboxxx
The order is of course deliberate. Unsurprisingly, the American critics have gone for the Big Boi half (in the same way that they went for Christine McVie over Stevie Nicks) which is pretty good ’03 standard hip hop, if all you want is standard hip hop – and let’s face it, in 2003 pretty well all hip hop was standard. Missy Elliott chasing her own tail, Ludacris turning into Judge Dread (the “Big Six” one rather than the 2000AD one), Bubba Sparxxx ignoring the two interesting tracks on his album in favour of a succession of Guns N’ Roses B-sides, 50 Cent not really telling us anything – like the Darkness, his modest talent has been magnified and beaten down by the need of the media to have Something/Someone Moderately Interesting To Talk About – Obie Trice making 50 Cent seem like Amiri Baraka – so it was probably wise of Andre 3000 to move away from “hip hop” and instead take us into long-uncharted gardens of utopia etc etc blah blah you’ve read the review; in some places my review has even been posted on the front windows of record shops, which affords me rather more satisfaction than I can diplomatically display in public. Still, catch the aside in “Hey Ya!” – “Why are we so in denial” – silence – “when we know we’re not happy here?” Do you want to listen to him or do you just want to dance? It’s a bleak old song.
10. JUNIOR SENIOR D-D-Don’t Don’t Stop The Beat
Another duo, perhaps handicapped by the big hit “Move Your Feet,” as punters expecting more dance with a capital D were bemused when the album offered them a rip-roaring update of the B52s, overpowering Electric Six and outstripping the Stripes. One of the best rock albums of the year, really, and certainly the year’s daftest record. The fact that Prince does not, or cannot, write songs of the quality of “Boy Meets Girl” inspires feelings similar to “why didn’t Steve Martin stick to cat juggling?” Also, the year’s great party album; give “Dancing Queen” a rest at Xmas and try this instead.
9. BASEMENT JAXX Kish Kash
I still feel this seriously tapers off after track ten – Siouxsie finally goes mad – but tracks 1-10 constitute the year’s best pop album. What a shame that its marketing was so hamfisted; “Good Luck” should have gone ahead of the album as the first single with “Plug It In” as the second. Thus: a peak position of #17 and out of the entire album chart after three weeks. More consistent than Rooty, this demonstrates that Felix and Simon understand pop perfectly. It’s not their fault if you don’t.
8. ORIGINAL CAST RECORDING Buffy The Vampire Slayer: Once More With Feeling
This arrived too late to make it onto last year’s list, which it might have topped, and perhaps you really need to have the DVD for the full impact, but musically this is Escalator Over The Hill goes pop, a sequence of songs as profound as any I can remember which culminates in life being chosen over death, even though the uncertainty remains (“Understand, we go hand in hand/But we walk alone in fear”). And “Under Your Spell” should be number one for 19 weeks.
7. MASSIVE ATTACK 100th Window
How soon we forget, eh, readers? Their second unqualified masterpiece, a record more in tune with the pre-war anti-war mood of this year than any other. Now we file (it) away sadly, the war having been won, Saddam today (as at time of writing) captured. Was there a point? Did we remember that there was a point? The world turns and burns and nobody captured it better than Robert Del Naja did on this phenomenal and brilliant record. The Hyde Park crowd versus the Knightsbridge vacuum; two different worlds, while elsewhere the third one simmers towards destruction.
6. M WARD Transfiguration Of Vincent
It is not necessary to know who Vincent was, or how he died, or why he died; merely that he did die, was clearly and unbearably close to Mr Ward, and he chose this means of commemorating him and keeping him alive. The Church Of Vincent. The Church of Hilda. The Church Of Laura. As a record it sounds improvised, sounds as though he has the freedom (or been liberated) to make it up, to go on internal adventures, to sound like nothing else recorded this year, and…eventually to come up for air, to breathe, in his beyond-anything reconstruction/remattering of Bowie’s “Let’s Dance.” Goodbyes turn into embracing welcomes, life renews after life, the slowness, the slow patience, because when you consider it so much music is in a bloody rush YOU DON’T JUST GET OVER IT but sometimes you see the possibility of something/someone which will aid you towards a future, and that HAS to be more important than reminiscing about 1968 or 1979 or just turning into an oldies website LIFE IS A SERIES OF SIGNIFICANT DISCOVERIES OR IT IS NOT WORTH HAVING – and the challenge of life is to recognise and embrace the greatness of nowness.
5. CODY CHESNUtt The Headphone Masterpiece
Again, another record which strictly belongs in last year’s list, but I didn’t get to hear it until this year, and…well, it’s the black Wizard, and hey, its UK release was apparently down to me, and hey, you still didn’t buy it (well I know that you readers bought or downloaded it; I’m talking to the world of “you”s). 36 tracks over 2 CDs of destabilised, debauched, dainty soul-pop-electro-whateverthefuckyouwanttothrowatthewall and it all sticks. Remember that when it starts turning up in the all-time top 100 album lists in 2006 or thereabouts.
4. FLEETWOOD MAC Say You Will
Tell me about moving. Last Wednesday, backstage at Earls Court, watching Buckingham and Nicks performing “Landslide” and embracing each other at the end. 30 years of hurt never stopped us dreaming. Resolution. Reconciliation. So it is with Say You Will, the Mac’s greatest album, the distress of Rumours squared by the adventure of Tusk…and it has ended happily. 18 tracks of genius, Lindsey and Stevie never more important to/for pop.
3. CAT POWER You Are Free
I can’t listen to too much sad music now. There isn’t the need. But there is sad and there is consoling. Not that I have much need of consoling these days either, thankfully. Consider this shattering and beautiful record, then, as a reminder of how far I have come, and what I have run away from until the snake stopped crawling and found a new den. Chan Marshall…just knows. “Better make your mind up quick.” Sometimes (pace Morley vs. Wham!) you have to be reminded that you are capable of making it up.
2. THE FIERY FURNACES Gallowsbird’s Bark
And you have to understand that the entirety of CoM and Naked Maja could be easily described as running away from Cat Power and running towards the Fiery Furnaces. Where everyone ran to clutch the security blanket of the White Stripes, Eleanor and Matthew Friedburger made the real advances. This was the most sheerly enjoyable album I heard all year; 16 bang-bang-one-classic-after-another songs which run the emotional and stylistic gamut, although not so crassly as to underline it heavily – they sing about the Grand Union Canal and tropical Iceland, sing about desolation and delirium. Cat Power buries the past gracefully; the Fiery Furnaces open the door to the future and help to reintroduce concepts into this writer’s life such as “fun” and “laughter” and “mucking about” and “acting like a 12-year-old.”
But…
THE CHURCH OF ME/THE NAKED MAJA ALBUM OF THE YEAR 2003
1. PLURAMON Dreams Top Rock
This is the recycled future of everything. Julee Cruise returns to my world, and in a very obvious way the spirit of Loveless returns to my world. A great and passionate 39 minutes; disturbing but finally flying above the strings which tether us to the old world. Keith Rowe comes in at the exact point when he’s needed. And, as with my reissue of the year, it was a record which wasn’t just sent to me; I had to go out and get wet to find it. And, as in 1991, I find that actually I don’t want to spoil it by writing yet more words about it; I just want to listen to the music, to love to the music, to live with the music, to return to the way I used to experience music; playing to an audience of one. So, if you don’t mind, I plan to do that for a while.
If you need an explanation, Dreams Top Rock is my album of the year because listening to it is like having my entire life returned to me.
“‘Why, look,’ said Neville, ‘at the clock ticking on the mantelpiece? Time passes, yes. And we grow old. But to sit with you, alone with you, here in London, in this firelit room you there, I here, is all. The world ransacked to its uttermost ends, and all its heights stripped and gathered of their flowers, holds no more. Look at the firelight running up and down the gold thread in the curtain. The fruit it circles droops heavy. It falls on the toe of your boot, it gives your face a red rim – I think it is the firelight and not your face; I think those are books against the wall, and that a curtain, and that perhaps an arm-chair. But when you come everything changes. The cups and saucers changed when you came in this morning. There can be no doubt, I thought, pushing aside the newspaper, that our mean lives, unsightly as they are, put on splendour and have meaning only under the eyes of love.”
(Virginia Woolf, The Waves, The Hogarth Press, 1931)
Wednesday, December 10, 2003
LISTS THEN SOUNDS AT A DISTANCE LIKE LISTEN
But we have to move on, or more precisely I move on, or more specifically I have moved on, and while I have to be cautious not to issue rash statements about ceasing this weblog, there isn’t the time to write regularly for it any more, or more exactly the time currently available to me for writing is more or less fully taken up with writing for which I am getting, or am going to be, or have been, paid. Living my life has, at long last, taken priority over writing about my life.
But nonetheless it’s that time of year, or at least a time of year when we mostly feel the unaccountable need to sum everything up which, or more importantly who, contributed to the year, which as far as readers of this weblog are concerned means end of year best of lists, and indeed my writing hand is tired enough to be easily persuaded to post the lists alone, without comment, because the rest of the year has been occupied by commenting on the contents of the lists.
But then there are records in my end-of-year lists, in some cases very high up in these lists, about which I have not written at all in CoM or here, and sometimes I wonder whether I should have written about any of them, or at least written about any of them in the way in which I have written about most of them. For the intimately methodical analytical approach to records may well kill these records. Their contents and surprises are laid out in advance, and I feel this to be extremely unhealthy. The only immediate solution of which I can think is that you should go out and buy the records, listen to them, become familiar with them, and then read what I have to say about them. The more rational solution is that I don’t write about records in this kind of way, or maybe just not write about records. It all depends.
This week you can read my end-of-year Top 50 of reissues and compilations and miscellaneous not-made-in-2003 music, plus comments on the single, so far as it still exists. Next week my Top 50 albums of the year list will be published for someone’s pleasure; after which I will be disappearing for the holidays, away from most other people, certainly away from computers, hopefully away from music. What form or belief The Naked Maja takes upon my/its return is yet to be decided, or more accurately, experienced.
SINGLES
Singles of the year. Is there any point? I can no longer tell where a single begins or ends or how it manifests itself as a single. Songs have taken over, as Morley predicted; songs which may never have been singles, or might have been but you just can’t remember because the pains and joys of living overtook and overwhelmed you. In 1981 or 1982 I could probably have compiled singles of the year lists which would have extended into four figures. In 2003 it is a struggle to find ten, depending on my entirely subjective definition of a single, namely that it should distinctly be constructed as a single (as opposed to a 12” dubplate or a download; however worthy either of these is, I cannot view them as “singles” but as halfway houses until the things come out on CD, and indeed I am aware that CDs themselves are rapidly turning into halfway houses, slowly and surely to be swallowed by the IPod) with its own ineluctable boundaries which of course it is a marked advantage to break; and if that’s a contradiction then perhaps content yourself with the viewpoint that these were the first ten singles I could think of, except that I had thought of all of them in advance.
10. ELECTRIC SIX – Danger High Voltage
9. tAtU – All The Things She Said
8. BELLE AND SEBASTIAN – Step Into My Office, Baby
The juxtaposition of the two Horns is not accidental.
7. SCISSOR SISTERS – Comfortably Numb
Not strictly out as a Proper Single until the New Year, but available for most of this year as a white label 12” on City Rockers, so I’m counting it. Initially I wasn’t sure what to make of Pink Floyd as done in the style of “Stayin’ Alive” – it tended to come across as a Jonathan King-style jape. But it gradually gets under you, and you realise how apposite this song’s convenient alienation would have been in the 1979 which Larry Levan knew; not to mention the subtle nods to Mr Fingers and less subtle nods to “Relax.” The album I am as yet undecided about; give me a little longer.
6. GIRLS ALOUD – No Good Advice
5. HEADSHOPPE – How Did I Know?
The single which convinced me that Liam Watson might actually be on to something, and that he needs worthier clients than the White Stripes to rescue him from being simply Shoreditch’s Steve Albini. As The Caretaker recycles and remoulds ‘30s danceband ‘78s into a placid cyclone of ghosts, so does Watson and his Toerag Studios take a precisely-placed ghost – say, that of Pye Studios, October 1965 – and invoke the dark crevices within which it can breathe and disrupt again. Singer and guitarist Will Sweeney begins the song with a four-part 20-note dual descending guitar line, which are not quite close up and verging on the bitonal; James “Blood” Ulmer invades Dave Berry. The sweet defeat of the line “By 21 we were done.” The way in which it takes the uncaught thread from “Step Into My Office, Baby” over its graceful 3/4 brushes, before Sweeney’s progressively less nervous voice confesses “Nothing so rude as to not give a damn, as you know – but how did I know?” to which he provides the second question which also serves as an answer: “But if I’m half as bad as you think I am, then I’m twice as much to blame.” The music slightly speeds up and goes even more slightly electric towards its climax – but Sweeney’s too weary to climax and takes it back down to its closing question mark. I am thinking of the vivid ghosts Michael Head conjures up when he puts on his Strands hat as opposed to his Shack cap. We are going to have to keep an eye on these people; they may be on to something extremely important.
4. KELIS – Milkshake
In the worst year for R&B and hip hop this writer can remember, Kelis and the Neptunes can claim “Their life is better than yours” and actually have a point. Everything that Elliott and Timbaland no longer are; and the album (to be discussed next week) doesn’t disappoint, and more importantly surprises.
3. !!! – Me And Giuliani Down By The School Yard (A True Story)
2. JOHNNY CASH – Hurt
THE GREATEST SINGLE MADE AS OF, AND IN, THIS YEAR
1. VIVE LA FETE – Noir Desir
It was a close call. There is an eloquence and resilience in “Hurt” which no other “pop” single this year has equalled; but how much of either is dependent upon what you already know about Johnny Cash? Certainly it is not necessary to know of the Nine Inch Nails original to appreciate the quiet power of the performance, though it is helpful, particularly since, as the closing track of The Downward Spiral, the song represents a gigantic NO to death and YES to life. “I would keep myself/I would find a way.” But would someone listening to Cash’s performance, without knowing who Cash was, without even knowing the accompanying video, immediately discern the importance of the song to (the end of) Cash’s life? I would like to think that it is/he was strong enough to enable that to happen.
But the Belgian electro duo Vive La Fête triumphed in the end, because, as great and monumental a record as “Hurt” is, it represents the closure of something, whereas “Noir Desir” seems to me, despite its surface langour and petulance, to represent the opening of something else.
At present “Noir Desir” is only available as a not-particularly-easy-to-find 12” single, though its parent album Nuit Blanche is due for British release in mid-January 2004. And as great as the album is – unabashed electropop, yet another candidate for the title of Album Kylie Should Have Made – “Noir Desir” still stands out as their great moment. And “Noir Desir” is my single of the year partly and precisely because I knew nothing of singer Els Pynoo, and yet within the six minutes of this song’s duration I am dramatically pushed into the situation of knowing her. And I knew not that the other half of the duo was dEUS bassist Danny Mommens, nor that the forthcoming album is in fact their fourth. Like the Sugarcubes, they are careful to hide their long history beneath the veil of innocence.
An appropriate comparison, that last one. For “Noir Desir” is also my single of the year as Els Pynoo’s is the most extraordinary performance by a female vocalist on any pop record since “Birthday” by the Sugarcubes. Starting quietly and methodically over Mommen’s careful electro hums, she seems to be singing of longeur with languer which gradually sheds its world weary skin to reveal something more tragic – “Je suis etre seul…Je ne suis pas content/Furieux comme un enfant/Je ne suis pas jeune/J’ai un ésprit troublé.” And what is she singing in that chorus? “C’est la money” it sounds like; and yet in her immense despair Pynoo seems to be clawing her way back to life. Hear the punctum of the three-chord descending “I Wanna Be Your Dog” bass which leads us into the first chorus, as Pynoo’s voice gradually becomes more assertive, then more desperate, then more wracked, finally more ecstatic. When she cries over and over “Laissez-moi temps perdu!” she is exulting in her demand to be lazy, to opt out (cf. Penman’s “Laziness is GOOD!”) and the song reaches its crescendo as she unleashes, with the final “money” a bloodcurdling multiphonic scream worthy of Albert Ayler.
It could have ended then. But its genius lies in the fact that it doesn’t. Like Michael Myers in Hallowe’en, you just can’t kill her off. Three times the music descends into a life support electronic bleep and a heartbeat of a drum machine, daring itself to end, before the scimitar of a cymbal swings everything back into focus and the “monEYYYYYYY-OW-OW-OOO-AH!” scream is shoved repeatedly into your head, rubbing your face in its terrible ecstasy.
And finally, for the fourth and last time, the life support machine and cardiogram hang on, unaccompanied, for a little longer, as if clinging to an unsteady ledge. Just when you think it has DIED the cymbal comes inexorably back, the music cuts off and
Els Pynoo’s final screams seem to tunnel into your head, travel to the other and darker side of your soul, and scream back at you from inside yourself. It is the equivalent of Nina’s stare at the CCTV in the 24th episode of the first series of 24, as though she has seen through to the rotten thing occupying the dead centre of your heart. Looking at us, looking through us. Or Patrick McGoohan sneering, leering, at the camera, at Colin Gordon, at US, at the end of episode 3 of The Prisoner - “We mustn’t disappoint them” – swivel of eyes to the side, towards us – “the people who are watching.” Sudden forced swing of Number Two’s head in extreme close-up. McGoohan cackles at us: “Now…show THEM! SEE!!!???”
It is one of the greatest female vocal performances in the history of pop.
TOP 50 REISSUES AND COMPILATIONS OF 2003
The irony is that most of the old music which I have played most this year has not been, as such, reissued, as it were, or at least, as it is yet to be, is still awaiting that kind of reissue. So a non-reissued in 2003 tethered list would have to include things like David Crosby’s If I Could Only Remember My Name or Digable Planets’ Blowout Comb - nearly ten years old and still managing to shame virtually all hip and trip hop now being made.
Or, to steer away astutely and adroitly from incipient Hornbyism, those records from the spring and summer of 2001 which until the recent renovation/restoration of my life I found too painful to listen to – the Avalanches’ Since I Left You (and tell me, how exactly does The Sunday Times get away with employing an aged drudge like Robert Sandall who believes that Hornby citing “Frontier Psychiatrist” is “esoteric”? That’ll be “Frontier Psychiatrist” the international top 20 single from the multi-million selling album which even Tommy Boyd claims is his favourite single of all time, then. Rather broadsheets devoted 20 extra pages to the nail clippings of Cyril Connolly than waste space on this sort of 16 rpm-witted attempt to come to terms with music for the benefit of lapsed 45-year-old Stones fans who really do not want to come to anyone’s terms. Still, not as bad as the recent byline in the Independent on Sunday which claimed “Vietnam had one positive effect. It inspired some of soul’s greatest sounds.” Oh so it was ALL RIGHT THEN. Great! What will we expect next week in the Etc. of Life Etc.? “The Holocaust had TWO positive effects. Schoenberg wrote a cool cantata and David Axelrod did this weird concept album which gave birth to some awesome breakbeats. Pity it wasn’t TEN million, because then the Beatles might have done a triple boxset concept album about it, and then we wouldn’t have had to suffer Coldplay”)
or Endless Summer by Fennesz, an album of unapologetic beauty, perhaps only apologising for the foreknowledge that everything worthwhile must have an end; but a record which Laura and I loved, and a record to which we loved, in the same way as we had done with L.C. by the Durutti Column a decade previously. Life returns when you planned it most. And music indisputably sounds different, and demands a different perspective, when you are listening to it and enjoying it in the company of another, as is now the case with me. And it is brilliant.
But here are 50 old records which can be counted as new again, which returned to my world in 2003 as so much else has done.
50. HARRY BECKETT Flare Up
Blasting 1971 blowout with Surman, Osborne, Skidmore et al, which I didn’t even know had been reissued until I saw it in the rack at Farringdons Records in the Royal Festival Hall last Sunday. Hey jazz/improv reissue chaps, how about getting those review copies out to me? Look, I’ve managed to get Derek Bailey into Uncut two months running! I have, er, influence in certain places.
49. ORCHESTRAL MANOEUVRES IN THE DARK Architecture And Morality
All their first three albums came out again this year with bonus single/B-side/etc. tracks – a pity they couldn’t risk putting out the fourth – but this one remains their peak, and the bonus tracks almost outdo the album proper in their brilliance.
48. VARIOUS New York Noise
In the continuing absence of a legit reissue of No New York, this will more than do for now as it does return Mars’ immortal “Helen Fordsdale” to the browser racks and runs from Quando Quango to Dinosaur L without even blinking. There’s an Arthur Russell best of coming out on Soul Jazz early next year, too!
47. KIM FOWLEY Impossible But True: The Kim Fowley Story
All the important ‘50s/’60s stuff from “Alley Oop” via “Nut Rocker” and “Popsicles & Icicles” through Cat Stevens’ “Portobello Road,” the Soft Machine’s “Feelin’ Reelin’ Squealin’” and the nascent Slade (as the ‘N Betweens) to “The Trip” and the calamitous “The Comedown Song” sung by PJ Proby’s hairdresser. As with his British equivalent, Jonathan King, Fowley proved that any old shyster could get to number one (even a 20-year-old old shyster) and works hard but can never manage to disguise his essential and profound love of pop music. Instructive comparisons can be drawn with King’s own 1989 compilation The Butterfly That Stamped, available for a knockdown price at the MVE branch of your choice.
46. VARIOUS Magnum Opus 3
2 CDs containing lots and lots of divine disco which to some of us was more radical than “White Riot.” Includes the full 17-minute version of Donna Summer’s “Love To Love You Baby” and, unmissably, Machine’s astonishing August Darnell-penned epiphany of disco socialism “There But For The Grace Of God Go I.”
45. MISS KITTIN/VARIOUS Radio Caroline Volume 1
La Kitten drawls her links between this splendid assemblage of what some people still call electroclash. How can you resist a compilation which includes “Greyscale For Slow Building” by Conrad Black?
44. THE AEROVONS Resurrection
Never likely to be The Next Beatles, and the admittedly astonishing “World Of You” towers more than somewhat over the remainder of this 1969 Apple record that never was, but this is an excellent collection of songs by US Beatlephile Tom Hartman which stands up very well next to anything by Badfinger.
43. KOOL AND THE GANG Gangthology
2-CD comp for connoisseurs; all the MoR ‘80s sludge filtered out to leave us with an album of funk and an album of ambient balladry which sometimes (“Wild And Peaceful”) ends up closer to the Cocteau Twins than to James Brown.
42. MOTORBASS Pansoul
The claustrophobic empire of the record which kickstarted French disco in 1996 returns with bonus CD of first two EPs to remind you that it all came from somewhere. Darker than Daft Punk, less airier than Air, this is Norman Whitfield touched by the comb of Carl Craig (although really the record which kickstarted French disco was Space’s Magic Fly album from 1977; I can only assume that the reason why the latter has never been reissued on CD must have something to do with the penultimate track – which ironically sounds very much like Air – being entitled “Velvet Rape”).
41. BOW WOW WOW I Want Candy: The Anthology
Ah, Bow Wow Wow had the chops, McLaren had the attitude, Lwin had the vulnerability (“Prince Of Darkness” transplants the Shangri-Las into Burundi) but, alas, Adam had the pop, so Bow Wow Wow never became as big as they should have done. Still, everything interesting they ever did, first album notwithstanding, is included over these 2 CDs; had they decided not to pad out the second CD with a pointless live Japanese recording, we could have had the entire collected works.
40. BARRY BLUE Dancin’ On A Saturday Night: The Best Of
Yes, Barry Blue, the slightly fey, slightly overweight backroom boy who briefly became the unlikeliest of glam idols. 34 tracks over 2 CDs with sleevenotes by Bob Stanley – and incredibly he turns out to be an artist of some genius. Some of us knew that from his work as Lynsey De Paul’s co-conspirator, but marvel at the utterly berserk Red Army choir on 1974’s “Hot Shot” or indeed the moaned distorted vocals, the Brian Wilson harmonies, the sudden derailment of pop songs halfway through which mark tracks such as “Rosetta Stone,” “Mona” (“Give this dog a bone-a!”), the Steinmanesque reconstruction of Neil Sedaka’s “One Way Ticket” and the mindboggling two-part epic “Pay At The Gate/Queen Of Hearts.” But the real surprises lie in the excerpts from his beyond-obscure 1987 album, which turns out to be the great lost Britfunk record – one remembers that he was Heatwave’s producer, and tracks such as the Temperton co-penned “Change It Up” or “Behind My Eyes” or “Lifejacket Round My Heart” are quite incredible. By the time of 1993’s “Back To The Wall” he seemed to be auditioning for Rage In Eden-era Ultravox.
39. SUZANNE VEGA Retrospective – The Very Best Of
Less overwrought than Tori Amos (burning is so much more incendiary when it’s subtle), this is an immensely listenable compilation of all Vega’s interesting songs. “Caramel” (with Dave Douglas distantly on trumpet) is worthy of Wyatt. And there have been fewer profound meditations on bereavement than “Tom’s Diner” (accappella original or DNA remix, either will do, and both are present). The pause for breath after “the bells of the cathedral” – where the dead soul seems miraculously to return to life – is among the most moving silences in pop.
38. JOHN CAMERON Psychomania OST
The soundtrack to a frankly risible 1972 Brit horror flick (George Sanders, Beryl Reid, Nicky Henson et al) is actually a workably bleak matrix of distorted jazz-funk and ambient dying swan cries. Best track title: “Carnage In The Pub” which musically sounds like an outtake from Eno’s Music For Airports.
37. LIZZY MERCIER DESCLOUX Press Color
The Ze reissue programme continues; the angularity of this, LMD’s first album, has the edgiest of edges over her second, Mambo Nassau, which really is just as good (would that Kim Wilde had covered “It’s You Sort Of”).
36. LOOSE ENDS The Best Of
Not just “Hangin’ On A String” plus support acts; “When I’m lying in the ghetto, come and rescue me” (“Choose Me”) might be the greatest chorus ever. Also recommended: Central Line’s The Collection.
35. THE WEDDING PRESENT The Hit Parade
The group who did as much as Kim Fowley and Jonathan King to destabilise the concept of the singles chart inadvertently produced their best and most consistent album by putting all 12 singles from 1992 together. A useful manual on how to absorb and refocus American guitar pop influences in a British light. Good to have it back.
34. DAVID WHITAKER The David Whitaker Songbook
Worth getting alone for the long-awaited debut appearance on CD of Andrew Oldham’s extreme deceleration of “The Last Time” which influenced, and whups the ass of, “Bitter Sweet Symphony.” But also worth sticking with for the lovely wisps of early Nico, Marianne F, Lee Hazlewood, Air etc.
33. TELEVISION Marquee Moon
Now remastered and upgraded with the addition of five extra tracks including “Little Johnny Jewel Parts 1 & 2.” Trade your standard Elektra jewel box edition in now.
32. VARIOUS Zigzag
The defeated aftermath of post-flower power, early ‘70s power cut British singer-songwriter angst is evaluated on this fantastic compilation. From Clifford T Ward to Howard Werth via Brian Protheroe and Lesley Duncan, this album comes down, like the gavel of a stoned county court judge. In Maidenhead.
31. ART ENSEMBLE OF CHICAGO Reese And The Smooth Ones
One of the two unacknowledged masterpieces of AECO – and they were so much better before all the showbiz took over – makes a welcome reappearance as part of the ongoing BYG/Actuel reissue programme. Blossoming from a 13-note bop line into a 40-minute odyssey of junkyard percussion and trumpet lamentations, 1969 certainly was AECO’s peak year (Their other masterpiece, People In Sorrow, reappeared with no fanfare at all on CD last year as part of the dubiously packaged The Pathe Sessions compilation on EMI France, twinned with Les Stances A Sophie, the latter considerably less well remastered than the Soul Jazz reissue, but dammit you get “Theme De Yoyo”!).
30. ALTERED IMAGES Destiny
Agree that all three original albums need urgent remastering and upgrading to CD – particularly 1983’s divine yet undervalued Bite - and yet again there is no Peel session version of “Song Sung Blue” (“Hullo good evening we’re Altered Images”) but this compilation will do for now. Any means by which “Bring Me Closer” – one of the ten greatest singles of the ‘80s – returns to the marketplace is fine by me.
29. ELTON DEAN’S NINESENSE Live At The BBC
28. ASSOCIATES – The Radio 1 Sessions Volume 1
Both much worn out on ancient C90 tapes, both much needed on CD. Two Ninesense Jazz In Britain - one from 1975, relatively straightforward but still the only extant recording of the band with Mongezi Feza in the line-up; the other, from 1978, represents perhaps the most violent music you’re likely to hear this year; a frightening degree of intensity which perhaps only Ms Brand and Mr Wilkinson are now matching. Meanwhile I’m glad to have “A Severe Bout Of Career Insecurity” back in circulation, not to mention the superior Peel session take on “Love Hangover.”
27. DARYL HALL Sacred Songs
Part of Robert Fripp’s warped pop trilogy of albums along with Peter Gabriel 2 and Fripp’s own Exposure, it’s great to have this collection of ruptured avant-soul back in circulation. But, as with Belvaux’ Trilogy, you have to hear all three to get the full picture. So can EG Records please give Exposure a proper CD reissue?
26. ALEX HARVEY Considering The Situation
Fantastic 2CD compilation of Glasgow’s greatest pop star; CD1 concentrates on his mindbendingly diverse ‘60s apprenticeship, from the Joss Stone-like intensity of his Soul Band to the whacked-out R&B improv of Ray Russell’s Rock Workshop, while on CD2 you get all the SAHB’s finest moments. Why wasn’t “Sergeant Fury” a number one?
25. DAVID SYLVIAN Secrets Of The Beehive
All the Japan and Sylvian Virgin albums from the ‘80s got the remaster/reissue/repackaged treatment this year, and Tin Drum in particular is rendered doubly indispensable by the addition of the imperishable 12” mix of “The Art Of Parties.” However, Sylvian’s third solo album from 1987 was for me the real revelation; not having paid it much attention at the time of its original release, it’s astonishing how fresh it now sounds (as opposed to how stale so much of what was “happening” in 1987 now sounds), a kind of apprentice Climate Of Hunter to the Tilt of Blemish, as Penman put it. Sorry it took me so long to realise.
24. BITING TONGUES After The Clock: A Retrospective 1980-89
Last year ACR were brought back into contemporary consciousness; now it’s the turn of fellow Mancunian neurotic avant-funksters who eventually mutated into 808 State. And still they are not the highest ranking Mancunian act in this list.
23. VARIOUS The American Song-Poem Anthology
Send your $400 with your terrible if heartfelt lyrics; we pissed off sessionmen will turn them into music and never make you a star. Sublime accidental pop ensues. Instructive comparisons can be made with this and Kenny Everett’s 1978 World’s Worst Record Album compilation – on K-Tel’s seldom-utilised Yuk! subsidiary, pressed on vomit-coloured vinyl, so presumably we shall never see the latter reissued on CD.
22. DIANA ROSS Diana
2CD re-viewing of history. Includes both the original Chic mix and the final issued mix of the album, and the latter, unsurprisingly, is better. But the whole remains divine, not at all belittled by the second CD of late ‘70s disco obscurities, including the entire ten minutes of “Love Hangover,” said song making its second appearance in this list.
21. TEENA MARIE It Must Be Magic
Voted the NME’s 48th best album of 1981; Paisley Park starts here, Madonna perhaps should have stopped here.
20. VIRGINIA ASTLEY From Gardens Where We Feel Secure
“Thank you for coming back to me” (final line of Brief Encounter).
19. BASIL KIRCHIN Quantum
Cut-ups of exotic erratic folk music and childlike lullabies destabilised by D Bailey, E Parker and others. Worlds Within Worlds redux, essentially. Hear in sequence with Here Come The Warm Jets.
18. WEEKEND Archive
Reissued this year on the Vinyl Japan label (but on CD), the complete recorded works of the missing link between Young Marble Giants and Working Week. Complete 12” versions of all three singles plus B-sides plus Live At Ronnie Scott’s mini-LP with Keith Tippett plus Radio 1 sessions. The missing link between everything that made the charts in 1982 and everything that didn’t make the charts in 1982.
17. THE PASSAGE Degenerates
Their entire back catalogue reappeared this year, and this is my favourite; so near to a million-selling album, so full of pop, and now augmented by both sides of 1981’s awesome “Taboos/Taboodub” 12”, the missing link between “River Deep Mountain High” and “Common People,” which out-Spectors Spector. Almost.
16. NEIL YOUNG On The Beach
The record tells us to come back. But it cannot force us to do so unless we really want to do so.
15. VARIOUS Good Times 3
Compiled by Joey and Norman Jay MBE; delicious, deliciously fluorescent dance music from a remote age, worth the money alone for King Britt/Michelle Shaprow’s “If I Lost You” to which I have devoted not nearly enough words.
14. EVAN PARKER AND PAUL LYTTON Live At The Unity Theatre
One forgets how feral and raging Parker’s soprano and tenor were back in 1975; there’s a desperation to his multiphonic cries, sublimely echoed and overtaken by Lytton’s massed percussion, which makes one glad that he’s happier now, if disappointed that he doesn’t emit this level of blood any more. Dedicated to Paul Haines, who managed to find them in Acton.
13. ROY AYERS Destination Motherland: The Roy Ayers Anthology
Digable Planets’ Ayers-subverting Blowout Comb serves to remind me of how shimmeringly, stabbingly summerlike Ayers’ music was, with its heartbreaking rollercoaster chord changes. I say “was” because the first of these 2 CDs is by far the better, set in his ‘70s heyday. “Running Away”? If only we/they could.
12. KEVIN AYERS Whatevershebringswesing
All four of Ayers’ Harvest masterpieces resurfaced this year, and really you should get them all, but this one is simultaneously the most coherent and incoherent, and all the better for it. “Song From The Bottom Of A Well” – “it came from the bottom of my heart!” Having spoken with Mr Ayers and Lol Coxhill in the space of one week this summer, I regret not having been able to interview Mike Oldfield the following week – who knows, I could have got the Whole World together again. Or perhaps not.
11. VARIOUS Now That’s What I Call Music 56
Are you surprised? What happened in/to the Newer Pop this year? This is the ideal post mortem – so full of so nearly great pop singles (from Black Eyed Pies through Emma Bunton even on to Sugababes and Kylie) and thus as important a demolition ball as Now 1 was in 1983.
10. VARIOUS International Deejay Gigolo Vol 7
An alternate universe Now 56 of course: 30 extensions of 1982 to give you a possible future of pop (one of many). Ari Up returns to the land of the living via Terranova, Fischerspooner unexpectedly give us their finest four minutes on record, DJ Hell remixes P Diddy and Kelis into the realms of real sex, and above all, Linda Lamb’s phenomenal shotgun marriage of Cilla Black and Miss Kittin “King Meadowlands” – possibly the most eerie pop record of 2003.
9. SOUNDMURDERER & SK-1 Rewind Records
Compilation of 12-inchers from last year. Perhaps this strand of good ol’ drum ‘n’ bass is as retrogressive as anything done by the Bellrays or the Dirtbombs, but it’s a lot fresher to hear it, even if old jungleheads will be returned to the grand old days when the new waxings from SkyKicker and DustDevil were eagerly awaited. Particularly as it charms with its utter brutality and danceability, coming as near as anything I’ve heard to recapturing the dazed static of gabbled weekend pirate stations like Horra FM or Ice FM. Highlight: the moment at 1:13 on “Soundboy” when the music suddenly escalates to a hotter and more intense level, as if veering directly into and blocking your bland path. The dialogic exchanges are as good as any duets in pop since Derek and Clive. Hear also SoundMurderer’s deadly “Champion” on Tigerbeat’s Paws Across America 2003 compilation, as you stand in the desert sunshine in New Cross Gate, Wes Montgomery’s guitar floating from the nearby winebar, awaiting your inevitable assassination.
8. GLENN BRANCA The Ascension
The No Wave Tubular Bells - the large-scale work which justified the movement which begat it – this long-overdue legit CD reissue, complete with sleevenotes by participating guitarist Lee Ranaldo, is kind of what you would have got if Coltrane had hired Spector to produce his Ascension. Chimes of freedom? Overwhelming.
7. VARIOUS Velvet Tinmine
Or “20 Junk Shop Glam Rock Classics”: the realisation that the early ‘70s are as fertile a recycling ground as Nuggets/Pebbles-era garage punk or Northern Soul. And special thanks to Gordon Nicol from Edinburgh’s finest, Iron Virgin, for his kind words; if they were starting out now they’d be like the Darkness – they’d clean up. I perhaps might draw the line at Shane Richie doing a cover of the Sisters’ “Kick Your Boots Off,” however.
6. JAMES CHANCE/WHITE/CONTORTIONS/BLACKS/ETC. Irresistable Impulse
For cash-strapped readers, there’s a very useful two-in-one CD reissue of the crucial Buy and Off White albums, but for Chance takers this 4CD boxset stops just short of definitive, containing both aforementioned albums plus the live Soul Exorcism and numerous other sordid delights – but irritatingly not the original four Contortions tracks on No New York. Sax as sex, screams as salvation, harmolodics done better than Prime Time. For those who think that the fadeout of “Danger High Voltage” – great as it is – is unprecedentedly far out.
5. THE NEPTUNES PRESENT… Clones
Does this count as a compilation? The Official UK Chart Company seems to think so, thus does it appear in this list. Maligned in most quarters but beloved in mine, these 18 tracks have more ideas in each of their nanoseconds than (fill in underachieving hip hop/R&B artist/producer of your choice) has managed in the whole 70 flaccid minutes of (fill in underachieving 2003 album of your choice). Snoop Dogg in “It Blows My Mind” finally mutates into George Clinton. Would that the marching band hijacking Ludacris on “It Wasn’t Us” disrupted Ludacris’ entire album! Fam-Lay’s “Rock N’ Roll” carves a whole new furrow to plough. And ODB loses it for good (as Dirt McGirt) in “Pop Shit.”
4. VARIOUS Rough Trade Shops – Post Punk 01
Humanity evolves in baffling ways. Once Christians were a small persecuted minority and now there is Crockford’s Clerical Directory. Once post-punk and no wave were deliberately forgotten movements kept well to the rear of the music industry’s airing cupboard. One year ago you could buy virtually none of it on CD and now virtually all of it is available again, best summed up in this 44-track 2CD compilation, ranging from the Pop Group and Slits, even through XTC and UK Decay, via Bush Tetras, DNA and Blurt, through to contemporary attempts to find that essence, as it were, rare, as it is. Indispensable if only for the fact that it has reintroduced Scritti Politti’s divinely dada “Skank Bloc Bologna” into the racks (it really could go on forever) not to mention 23 Skidoo’s “Last Words,” Shockheaded Peters’ “I Bloodbrother Be” and the mindbending Bristol avant-funk of Maximum Joy’s epic “Stretch.” Inevitably, Erase Errata’s “Tongue Tied” sounds as if it was recorded quarter of a century ago, whereas the compilation’s highlight, PiL’s “Careering,” sounds as if it was recorded quarter of an hour ago.
3. VARIOUS Mutant Disco – A Subtle Discolation Of The Norm
And where there is punk, so must there be…Cole Porter? The original six-track LP loses one track (“Maladie D’Amour”) but gains 20 others. Cristina, Aural Exciters, Was (Not Was), those Contortion chaps once again, “Bustin’ Out”…back to offer a reinvention of pop now, the same one you should have accepted last time, except last time you opted for the Eurythmics and now you opt for Dido, thus does safety suffocate.
2. JIMMY SCOTT Falling In Love Is Wonderful
Withdrawn quickly for legal reasons 40 years ago when it was originally released, the man’s masterpiece now returns. Ten different ballad routes into your bedroom; vulnerability conquers confidence (“I Didn’t Know What Time It Was” – has there ever been such WONDER in the soul of orchestral seduction?). The androgyny is not altogether unintentional, the surrender complete. Forget Christmas with the Rat Pack – this beautiful record will protect you from the coldest cold.
1a. SCOTT WALKER – 5 Easy Pieces
Placed where it has been placed because I wasn’t sure whether to put it at the top of this list or not include it at all. Also because I am unsure of the boundary between providing a history of someone’s art or using the art to construct your own history. Five individually themed CDs – “five different routes into the heart of Scott Walker” – covering his entire career from the nocturnal side of the Walker Brothers to Tilt and Pola X, including much which is currently otherwise unavailable, constructed with the apparent cooperation of Walker himself. Thus CD1, In My Room - “the complete bedsit dramas, including the kitchen sink” – uses side one of ’Til The Band Comes In as a framing device for an extended study of alienation, bereavement, loneliness and uncertainty, as though it were the extended dream of a dying derelict. So why does “Always Coming Back To You,” which essentially summarises the collected plot of everything else on CD1, appear halfway through CD2 – Where’s The Girl? - and why, on CD2, has sex been entirely excised? No “Duchess” or “Get Behind Me” but there’s “Joanna.” CD3 finds him singing about Europe (mainly Brel) and America, but not “The Old Man’s Back Again.” Perhaps Walker felt that the latter’s politics were better and more profoundly explored on later songs such as “Rawhide” and “Patriot” (both of which happily do appear on CD3). Still this is evidently the story he wishes to tell us, and it may be churlish for this writer to suggest that the best way to explore Walker’s art is to listen to all the original albums, in sequence, in the structure in which they were originally assembled. But then that means spending absurd sums of money on second hand copies of ’Til The Band… and Climate Of Hunter, not to mention the contents of CD5 - Scott On Screen - which collates most of his otherwise completely unavailable soundtrack work. Or indeed CD4 - This Is How You Disappear - which assembles most of the hard stuff, including the four crucial songs from Nite Flights in sequence. Five different stories with the same end, Rashomon in pop. And the two tracks with Ute Lemper which conclude CD2 take female art pop to the edge of a new envelope which no one else has even bothered to push (beyond The Marble Index, even). Best, then, to treat this as a starter pack; but as you wouldn’t settle simply for reading David Thomson’s Rosebud without bothering to watch the Welles films which it describes and disassembles – indeed, Thomson warns throughout the book that it cannot be properly read without watching, or better, experiencing, the films – then I’m afraid that owning this boxset does not excuse you from additionally seeking out the source records. It certainly brings a new perspective to these records, and I feel less dubious about its construct than I did two months ago. But these are only five stories which still lead to the 20 or so which need to be told before you can penetrate Scott Walker’s heart.
1. LINDA PERHACS Parallelograms
Reissue of the year because it tells me something new; a record I had no idea had ever previously existed; a record, moreover, which I actively had to go out and find, to wear out shoe leather and catch a cold to obtain. One of many records made by sensitive female singer-songwriters in 1970 or thereabouts; but this record is so fresh it practically is a new record to soundtrack a new life. Make an extra effort to find the CD version, as it includes extra tracks including the astonishing and heartbreaking “If You Were My Man” (in both demo and finished form). Still, as far as the original record goes, the “now, now, NOW” shantih, shantih, shantih which concludes “Delicious” is the seductive trapdoor through which I escaped. And the best thing about it is that Ms Perhacs decided that this was all she had to say, and subsequently retired into a blameless and happy life. Knowing when you’ve said enough. I’m nearing that point as far as CoM and Naked Maja are concerned; and the announcement which will accompany next week’s Top 50 albums of the year list is unlikely to come as a surprise to any of you.
But we have to move on, or more precisely I move on, or more specifically I have moved on, and while I have to be cautious not to issue rash statements about ceasing this weblog, there isn’t the time to write regularly for it any more, or more exactly the time currently available to me for writing is more or less fully taken up with writing for which I am getting, or am going to be, or have been, paid. Living my life has, at long last, taken priority over writing about my life.
But nonetheless it’s that time of year, or at least a time of year when we mostly feel the unaccountable need to sum everything up which, or more importantly who, contributed to the year, which as far as readers of this weblog are concerned means end of year best of lists, and indeed my writing hand is tired enough to be easily persuaded to post the lists alone, without comment, because the rest of the year has been occupied by commenting on the contents of the lists.
But then there are records in my end-of-year lists, in some cases very high up in these lists, about which I have not written at all in CoM or here, and sometimes I wonder whether I should have written about any of them, or at least written about any of them in the way in which I have written about most of them. For the intimately methodical analytical approach to records may well kill these records. Their contents and surprises are laid out in advance, and I feel this to be extremely unhealthy. The only immediate solution of which I can think is that you should go out and buy the records, listen to them, become familiar with them, and then read what I have to say about them. The more rational solution is that I don’t write about records in this kind of way, or maybe just not write about records. It all depends.
This week you can read my end-of-year Top 50 of reissues and compilations and miscellaneous not-made-in-2003 music, plus comments on the single, so far as it still exists. Next week my Top 50 albums of the year list will be published for someone’s pleasure; after which I will be disappearing for the holidays, away from most other people, certainly away from computers, hopefully away from music. What form or belief The Naked Maja takes upon my/its return is yet to be decided, or more accurately, experienced.
SINGLES
Singles of the year. Is there any point? I can no longer tell where a single begins or ends or how it manifests itself as a single. Songs have taken over, as Morley predicted; songs which may never have been singles, or might have been but you just can’t remember because the pains and joys of living overtook and overwhelmed you. In 1981 or 1982 I could probably have compiled singles of the year lists which would have extended into four figures. In 2003 it is a struggle to find ten, depending on my entirely subjective definition of a single, namely that it should distinctly be constructed as a single (as opposed to a 12” dubplate or a download; however worthy either of these is, I cannot view them as “singles” but as halfway houses until the things come out on CD, and indeed I am aware that CDs themselves are rapidly turning into halfway houses, slowly and surely to be swallowed by the IPod) with its own ineluctable boundaries which of course it is a marked advantage to break; and if that’s a contradiction then perhaps content yourself with the viewpoint that these were the first ten singles I could think of, except that I had thought of all of them in advance.
10. ELECTRIC SIX – Danger High Voltage
9. tAtU – All The Things She Said
8. BELLE AND SEBASTIAN – Step Into My Office, Baby
The juxtaposition of the two Horns is not accidental.
7. SCISSOR SISTERS – Comfortably Numb
Not strictly out as a Proper Single until the New Year, but available for most of this year as a white label 12” on City Rockers, so I’m counting it. Initially I wasn’t sure what to make of Pink Floyd as done in the style of “Stayin’ Alive” – it tended to come across as a Jonathan King-style jape. But it gradually gets under you, and you realise how apposite this song’s convenient alienation would have been in the 1979 which Larry Levan knew; not to mention the subtle nods to Mr Fingers and less subtle nods to “Relax.” The album I am as yet undecided about; give me a little longer.
6. GIRLS ALOUD – No Good Advice
5. HEADSHOPPE – How Did I Know?
The single which convinced me that Liam Watson might actually be on to something, and that he needs worthier clients than the White Stripes to rescue him from being simply Shoreditch’s Steve Albini. As The Caretaker recycles and remoulds ‘30s danceband ‘78s into a placid cyclone of ghosts, so does Watson and his Toerag Studios take a precisely-placed ghost – say, that of Pye Studios, October 1965 – and invoke the dark crevices within which it can breathe and disrupt again. Singer and guitarist Will Sweeney begins the song with a four-part 20-note dual descending guitar line, which are not quite close up and verging on the bitonal; James “Blood” Ulmer invades Dave Berry. The sweet defeat of the line “By 21 we were done.” The way in which it takes the uncaught thread from “Step Into My Office, Baby” over its graceful 3/4 brushes, before Sweeney’s progressively less nervous voice confesses “Nothing so rude as to not give a damn, as you know – but how did I know?” to which he provides the second question which also serves as an answer: “But if I’m half as bad as you think I am, then I’m twice as much to blame.” The music slightly speeds up and goes even more slightly electric towards its climax – but Sweeney’s too weary to climax and takes it back down to its closing question mark. I am thinking of the vivid ghosts Michael Head conjures up when he puts on his Strands hat as opposed to his Shack cap. We are going to have to keep an eye on these people; they may be on to something extremely important.
4. KELIS – Milkshake
In the worst year for R&B and hip hop this writer can remember, Kelis and the Neptunes can claim “Their life is better than yours” and actually have a point. Everything that Elliott and Timbaland no longer are; and the album (to be discussed next week) doesn’t disappoint, and more importantly surprises.
3. !!! – Me And Giuliani Down By The School Yard (A True Story)
2. JOHNNY CASH – Hurt
THE GREATEST SINGLE MADE AS OF, AND IN, THIS YEAR
1. VIVE LA FETE – Noir Desir
It was a close call. There is an eloquence and resilience in “Hurt” which no other “pop” single this year has equalled; but how much of either is dependent upon what you already know about Johnny Cash? Certainly it is not necessary to know of the Nine Inch Nails original to appreciate the quiet power of the performance, though it is helpful, particularly since, as the closing track of The Downward Spiral, the song represents a gigantic NO to death and YES to life. “I would keep myself/I would find a way.” But would someone listening to Cash’s performance, without knowing who Cash was, without even knowing the accompanying video, immediately discern the importance of the song to (the end of) Cash’s life? I would like to think that it is/he was strong enough to enable that to happen.
But the Belgian electro duo Vive La Fête triumphed in the end, because, as great and monumental a record as “Hurt” is, it represents the closure of something, whereas “Noir Desir” seems to me, despite its surface langour and petulance, to represent the opening of something else.
At present “Noir Desir” is only available as a not-particularly-easy-to-find 12” single, though its parent album Nuit Blanche is due for British release in mid-January 2004. And as great as the album is – unabashed electropop, yet another candidate for the title of Album Kylie Should Have Made – “Noir Desir” still stands out as their great moment. And “Noir Desir” is my single of the year partly and precisely because I knew nothing of singer Els Pynoo, and yet within the six minutes of this song’s duration I am dramatically pushed into the situation of knowing her. And I knew not that the other half of the duo was dEUS bassist Danny Mommens, nor that the forthcoming album is in fact their fourth. Like the Sugarcubes, they are careful to hide their long history beneath the veil of innocence.
An appropriate comparison, that last one. For “Noir Desir” is also my single of the year as Els Pynoo’s is the most extraordinary performance by a female vocalist on any pop record since “Birthday” by the Sugarcubes. Starting quietly and methodically over Mommen’s careful electro hums, she seems to be singing of longeur with languer which gradually sheds its world weary skin to reveal something more tragic – “Je suis etre seul…Je ne suis pas content/Furieux comme un enfant/Je ne suis pas jeune/J’ai un ésprit troublé.” And what is she singing in that chorus? “C’est la money” it sounds like; and yet in her immense despair Pynoo seems to be clawing her way back to life. Hear the punctum of the three-chord descending “I Wanna Be Your Dog” bass which leads us into the first chorus, as Pynoo’s voice gradually becomes more assertive, then more desperate, then more wracked, finally more ecstatic. When she cries over and over “Laissez-moi temps perdu!” she is exulting in her demand to be lazy, to opt out (cf. Penman’s “Laziness is GOOD!”) and the song reaches its crescendo as she unleashes, with the final “money” a bloodcurdling multiphonic scream worthy of Albert Ayler.
It could have ended then. But its genius lies in the fact that it doesn’t. Like Michael Myers in Hallowe’en, you just can’t kill her off. Three times the music descends into a life support electronic bleep and a heartbeat of a drum machine, daring itself to end, before the scimitar of a cymbal swings everything back into focus and the “monEYYYYYYY-OW-OW-OOO-AH!” scream is shoved repeatedly into your head, rubbing your face in its terrible ecstasy.
And finally, for the fourth and last time, the life support machine and cardiogram hang on, unaccompanied, for a little longer, as if clinging to an unsteady ledge. Just when you think it has DIED the cymbal comes inexorably back, the music cuts off and
Els Pynoo’s final screams seem to tunnel into your head, travel to the other and darker side of your soul, and scream back at you from inside yourself. It is the equivalent of Nina’s stare at the CCTV in the 24th episode of the first series of 24, as though she has seen through to the rotten thing occupying the dead centre of your heart. Looking at us, looking through us. Or Patrick McGoohan sneering, leering, at the camera, at Colin Gordon, at US, at the end of episode 3 of The Prisoner - “We mustn’t disappoint them” – swivel of eyes to the side, towards us – “the people who are watching.” Sudden forced swing of Number Two’s head in extreme close-up. McGoohan cackles at us: “Now…show THEM! SEE!!!???”
It is one of the greatest female vocal performances in the history of pop.
TOP 50 REISSUES AND COMPILATIONS OF 2003
The irony is that most of the old music which I have played most this year has not been, as such, reissued, as it were, or at least, as it is yet to be, is still awaiting that kind of reissue. So a non-reissued in 2003 tethered list would have to include things like David Crosby’s If I Could Only Remember My Name or Digable Planets’ Blowout Comb - nearly ten years old and still managing to shame virtually all hip and trip hop now being made.
Or, to steer away astutely and adroitly from incipient Hornbyism, those records from the spring and summer of 2001 which until the recent renovation/restoration of my life I found too painful to listen to – the Avalanches’ Since I Left You (and tell me, how exactly does The Sunday Times get away with employing an aged drudge like Robert Sandall who believes that Hornby citing “Frontier Psychiatrist” is “esoteric”? That’ll be “Frontier Psychiatrist” the international top 20 single from the multi-million selling album which even Tommy Boyd claims is his favourite single of all time, then. Rather broadsheets devoted 20 extra pages to the nail clippings of Cyril Connolly than waste space on this sort of 16 rpm-witted attempt to come to terms with music for the benefit of lapsed 45-year-old Stones fans who really do not want to come to anyone’s terms. Still, not as bad as the recent byline in the Independent on Sunday which claimed “Vietnam had one positive effect. It inspired some of soul’s greatest sounds.” Oh so it was ALL RIGHT THEN. Great! What will we expect next week in the Etc. of Life Etc.? “The Holocaust had TWO positive effects. Schoenberg wrote a cool cantata and David Axelrod did this weird concept album which gave birth to some awesome breakbeats. Pity it wasn’t TEN million, because then the Beatles might have done a triple boxset concept album about it, and then we wouldn’t have had to suffer Coldplay”)
or Endless Summer by Fennesz, an album of unapologetic beauty, perhaps only apologising for the foreknowledge that everything worthwhile must have an end; but a record which Laura and I loved, and a record to which we loved, in the same way as we had done with L.C. by the Durutti Column a decade previously. Life returns when you planned it most. And music indisputably sounds different, and demands a different perspective, when you are listening to it and enjoying it in the company of another, as is now the case with me. And it is brilliant.
But here are 50 old records which can be counted as new again, which returned to my world in 2003 as so much else has done.
50. HARRY BECKETT Flare Up
Blasting 1971 blowout with Surman, Osborne, Skidmore et al, which I didn’t even know had been reissued until I saw it in the rack at Farringdons Records in the Royal Festival Hall last Sunday. Hey jazz/improv reissue chaps, how about getting those review copies out to me? Look, I’ve managed to get Derek Bailey into Uncut two months running! I have, er, influence in certain places.
49. ORCHESTRAL MANOEUVRES IN THE DARK Architecture And Morality
All their first three albums came out again this year with bonus single/B-side/etc. tracks – a pity they couldn’t risk putting out the fourth – but this one remains their peak, and the bonus tracks almost outdo the album proper in their brilliance.
48. VARIOUS New York Noise
In the continuing absence of a legit reissue of No New York, this will more than do for now as it does return Mars’ immortal “Helen Fordsdale” to the browser racks and runs from Quando Quango to Dinosaur L without even blinking. There’s an Arthur Russell best of coming out on Soul Jazz early next year, too!
47. KIM FOWLEY Impossible But True: The Kim Fowley Story
All the important ‘50s/’60s stuff from “Alley Oop” via “Nut Rocker” and “Popsicles & Icicles” through Cat Stevens’ “Portobello Road,” the Soft Machine’s “Feelin’ Reelin’ Squealin’” and the nascent Slade (as the ‘N Betweens) to “The Trip” and the calamitous “The Comedown Song” sung by PJ Proby’s hairdresser. As with his British equivalent, Jonathan King, Fowley proved that any old shyster could get to number one (even a 20-year-old old shyster) and works hard but can never manage to disguise his essential and profound love of pop music. Instructive comparisons can be drawn with King’s own 1989 compilation The Butterfly That Stamped, available for a knockdown price at the MVE branch of your choice.
46. VARIOUS Magnum Opus 3
2 CDs containing lots and lots of divine disco which to some of us was more radical than “White Riot.” Includes the full 17-minute version of Donna Summer’s “Love To Love You Baby” and, unmissably, Machine’s astonishing August Darnell-penned epiphany of disco socialism “There But For The Grace Of God Go I.”
45. MISS KITTIN/VARIOUS Radio Caroline Volume 1
La Kitten drawls her links between this splendid assemblage of what some people still call electroclash. How can you resist a compilation which includes “Greyscale For Slow Building” by Conrad Black?
44. THE AEROVONS Resurrection
Never likely to be The Next Beatles, and the admittedly astonishing “World Of You” towers more than somewhat over the remainder of this 1969 Apple record that never was, but this is an excellent collection of songs by US Beatlephile Tom Hartman which stands up very well next to anything by Badfinger.
43. KOOL AND THE GANG Gangthology
2-CD comp for connoisseurs; all the MoR ‘80s sludge filtered out to leave us with an album of funk and an album of ambient balladry which sometimes (“Wild And Peaceful”) ends up closer to the Cocteau Twins than to James Brown.
42. MOTORBASS Pansoul
The claustrophobic empire of the record which kickstarted French disco in 1996 returns with bonus CD of first two EPs to remind you that it all came from somewhere. Darker than Daft Punk, less airier than Air, this is Norman Whitfield touched by the comb of Carl Craig (although really the record which kickstarted French disco was Space’s Magic Fly album from 1977; I can only assume that the reason why the latter has never been reissued on CD must have something to do with the penultimate track – which ironically sounds very much like Air – being entitled “Velvet Rape”).
41. BOW WOW WOW I Want Candy: The Anthology
Ah, Bow Wow Wow had the chops, McLaren had the attitude, Lwin had the vulnerability (“Prince Of Darkness” transplants the Shangri-Las into Burundi) but, alas, Adam had the pop, so Bow Wow Wow never became as big as they should have done. Still, everything interesting they ever did, first album notwithstanding, is included over these 2 CDs; had they decided not to pad out the second CD with a pointless live Japanese recording, we could have had the entire collected works.
40. BARRY BLUE Dancin’ On A Saturday Night: The Best Of
Yes, Barry Blue, the slightly fey, slightly overweight backroom boy who briefly became the unlikeliest of glam idols. 34 tracks over 2 CDs with sleevenotes by Bob Stanley – and incredibly he turns out to be an artist of some genius. Some of us knew that from his work as Lynsey De Paul’s co-conspirator, but marvel at the utterly berserk Red Army choir on 1974’s “Hot Shot” or indeed the moaned distorted vocals, the Brian Wilson harmonies, the sudden derailment of pop songs halfway through which mark tracks such as “Rosetta Stone,” “Mona” (“Give this dog a bone-a!”), the Steinmanesque reconstruction of Neil Sedaka’s “One Way Ticket” and the mindboggling two-part epic “Pay At The Gate/Queen Of Hearts.” But the real surprises lie in the excerpts from his beyond-obscure 1987 album, which turns out to be the great lost Britfunk record – one remembers that he was Heatwave’s producer, and tracks such as the Temperton co-penned “Change It Up” or “Behind My Eyes” or “Lifejacket Round My Heart” are quite incredible. By the time of 1993’s “Back To The Wall” he seemed to be auditioning for Rage In Eden-era Ultravox.
39. SUZANNE VEGA Retrospective – The Very Best Of
Less overwrought than Tori Amos (burning is so much more incendiary when it’s subtle), this is an immensely listenable compilation of all Vega’s interesting songs. “Caramel” (with Dave Douglas distantly on trumpet) is worthy of Wyatt. And there have been fewer profound meditations on bereavement than “Tom’s Diner” (accappella original or DNA remix, either will do, and both are present). The pause for breath after “the bells of the cathedral” – where the dead soul seems miraculously to return to life – is among the most moving silences in pop.
38. JOHN CAMERON Psychomania OST
The soundtrack to a frankly risible 1972 Brit horror flick (George Sanders, Beryl Reid, Nicky Henson et al) is actually a workably bleak matrix of distorted jazz-funk and ambient dying swan cries. Best track title: “Carnage In The Pub” which musically sounds like an outtake from Eno’s Music For Airports.
37. LIZZY MERCIER DESCLOUX Press Color
The Ze reissue programme continues; the angularity of this, LMD’s first album, has the edgiest of edges over her second, Mambo Nassau, which really is just as good (would that Kim Wilde had covered “It’s You Sort Of”).
36. LOOSE ENDS The Best Of
Not just “Hangin’ On A String” plus support acts; “When I’m lying in the ghetto, come and rescue me” (“Choose Me”) might be the greatest chorus ever. Also recommended: Central Line’s The Collection.
35. THE WEDDING PRESENT The Hit Parade
The group who did as much as Kim Fowley and Jonathan King to destabilise the concept of the singles chart inadvertently produced their best and most consistent album by putting all 12 singles from 1992 together. A useful manual on how to absorb and refocus American guitar pop influences in a British light. Good to have it back.
34. DAVID WHITAKER The David Whitaker Songbook
Worth getting alone for the long-awaited debut appearance on CD of Andrew Oldham’s extreme deceleration of “The Last Time” which influenced, and whups the ass of, “Bitter Sweet Symphony.” But also worth sticking with for the lovely wisps of early Nico, Marianne F, Lee Hazlewood, Air etc.
33. TELEVISION Marquee Moon
Now remastered and upgraded with the addition of five extra tracks including “Little Johnny Jewel Parts 1 & 2.” Trade your standard Elektra jewel box edition in now.
32. VARIOUS Zigzag
The defeated aftermath of post-flower power, early ‘70s power cut British singer-songwriter angst is evaluated on this fantastic compilation. From Clifford T Ward to Howard Werth via Brian Protheroe and Lesley Duncan, this album comes down, like the gavel of a stoned county court judge. In Maidenhead.
31. ART ENSEMBLE OF CHICAGO Reese And The Smooth Ones
One of the two unacknowledged masterpieces of AECO – and they were so much better before all the showbiz took over – makes a welcome reappearance as part of the ongoing BYG/Actuel reissue programme. Blossoming from a 13-note bop line into a 40-minute odyssey of junkyard percussion and trumpet lamentations, 1969 certainly was AECO’s peak year (Their other masterpiece, People In Sorrow, reappeared with no fanfare at all on CD last year as part of the dubiously packaged The Pathe Sessions compilation on EMI France, twinned with Les Stances A Sophie, the latter considerably less well remastered than the Soul Jazz reissue, but dammit you get “Theme De Yoyo”!).
30. ALTERED IMAGES Destiny
Agree that all three original albums need urgent remastering and upgrading to CD – particularly 1983’s divine yet undervalued Bite - and yet again there is no Peel session version of “Song Sung Blue” (“Hullo good evening we’re Altered Images”) but this compilation will do for now. Any means by which “Bring Me Closer” – one of the ten greatest singles of the ‘80s – returns to the marketplace is fine by me.
29. ELTON DEAN’S NINESENSE Live At The BBC
28. ASSOCIATES – The Radio 1 Sessions Volume 1
Both much worn out on ancient C90 tapes, both much needed on CD. Two Ninesense Jazz In Britain - one from 1975, relatively straightforward but still the only extant recording of the band with Mongezi Feza in the line-up; the other, from 1978, represents perhaps the most violent music you’re likely to hear this year; a frightening degree of intensity which perhaps only Ms Brand and Mr Wilkinson are now matching. Meanwhile I’m glad to have “A Severe Bout Of Career Insecurity” back in circulation, not to mention the superior Peel session take on “Love Hangover.”
27. DARYL HALL Sacred Songs
Part of Robert Fripp’s warped pop trilogy of albums along with Peter Gabriel 2 and Fripp’s own Exposure, it’s great to have this collection of ruptured avant-soul back in circulation. But, as with Belvaux’ Trilogy, you have to hear all three to get the full picture. So can EG Records please give Exposure a proper CD reissue?
26. ALEX HARVEY Considering The Situation
Fantastic 2CD compilation of Glasgow’s greatest pop star; CD1 concentrates on his mindbendingly diverse ‘60s apprenticeship, from the Joss Stone-like intensity of his Soul Band to the whacked-out R&B improv of Ray Russell’s Rock Workshop, while on CD2 you get all the SAHB’s finest moments. Why wasn’t “Sergeant Fury” a number one?
25. DAVID SYLVIAN Secrets Of The Beehive
All the Japan and Sylvian Virgin albums from the ‘80s got the remaster/reissue/repackaged treatment this year, and Tin Drum in particular is rendered doubly indispensable by the addition of the imperishable 12” mix of “The Art Of Parties.” However, Sylvian’s third solo album from 1987 was for me the real revelation; not having paid it much attention at the time of its original release, it’s astonishing how fresh it now sounds (as opposed to how stale so much of what was “happening” in 1987 now sounds), a kind of apprentice Climate Of Hunter to the Tilt of Blemish, as Penman put it. Sorry it took me so long to realise.
24. BITING TONGUES After The Clock: A Retrospective 1980-89
Last year ACR were brought back into contemporary consciousness; now it’s the turn of fellow Mancunian neurotic avant-funksters who eventually mutated into 808 State. And still they are not the highest ranking Mancunian act in this list.
23. VARIOUS The American Song-Poem Anthology
Send your $400 with your terrible if heartfelt lyrics; we pissed off sessionmen will turn them into music and never make you a star. Sublime accidental pop ensues. Instructive comparisons can be made with this and Kenny Everett’s 1978 World’s Worst Record Album compilation – on K-Tel’s seldom-utilised Yuk! subsidiary, pressed on vomit-coloured vinyl, so presumably we shall never see the latter reissued on CD.
22. DIANA ROSS Diana
2CD re-viewing of history. Includes both the original Chic mix and the final issued mix of the album, and the latter, unsurprisingly, is better. But the whole remains divine, not at all belittled by the second CD of late ‘70s disco obscurities, including the entire ten minutes of “Love Hangover,” said song making its second appearance in this list.
21. TEENA MARIE It Must Be Magic
Voted the NME’s 48th best album of 1981; Paisley Park starts here, Madonna perhaps should have stopped here.
20. VIRGINIA ASTLEY From Gardens Where We Feel Secure
“Thank you for coming back to me” (final line of Brief Encounter).
19. BASIL KIRCHIN Quantum
Cut-ups of exotic erratic folk music and childlike lullabies destabilised by D Bailey, E Parker and others. Worlds Within Worlds redux, essentially. Hear in sequence with Here Come The Warm Jets.
18. WEEKEND Archive
Reissued this year on the Vinyl Japan label (but on CD), the complete recorded works of the missing link between Young Marble Giants and Working Week. Complete 12” versions of all three singles plus B-sides plus Live At Ronnie Scott’s mini-LP with Keith Tippett plus Radio 1 sessions. The missing link between everything that made the charts in 1982 and everything that didn’t make the charts in 1982.
17. THE PASSAGE Degenerates
Their entire back catalogue reappeared this year, and this is my favourite; so near to a million-selling album, so full of pop, and now augmented by both sides of 1981’s awesome “Taboos/Taboodub” 12”, the missing link between “River Deep Mountain High” and “Common People,” which out-Spectors Spector. Almost.
16. NEIL YOUNG On The Beach
The record tells us to come back. But it cannot force us to do so unless we really want to do so.
15. VARIOUS Good Times 3
Compiled by Joey and Norman Jay MBE; delicious, deliciously fluorescent dance music from a remote age, worth the money alone for King Britt/Michelle Shaprow’s “If I Lost You” to which I have devoted not nearly enough words.
14. EVAN PARKER AND PAUL LYTTON Live At The Unity Theatre
One forgets how feral and raging Parker’s soprano and tenor were back in 1975; there’s a desperation to his multiphonic cries, sublimely echoed and overtaken by Lytton’s massed percussion, which makes one glad that he’s happier now, if disappointed that he doesn’t emit this level of blood any more. Dedicated to Paul Haines, who managed to find them in Acton.
13. ROY AYERS Destination Motherland: The Roy Ayers Anthology
Digable Planets’ Ayers-subverting Blowout Comb serves to remind me of how shimmeringly, stabbingly summerlike Ayers’ music was, with its heartbreaking rollercoaster chord changes. I say “was” because the first of these 2 CDs is by far the better, set in his ‘70s heyday. “Running Away”? If only we/they could.
12. KEVIN AYERS Whatevershebringswesing
All four of Ayers’ Harvest masterpieces resurfaced this year, and really you should get them all, but this one is simultaneously the most coherent and incoherent, and all the better for it. “Song From The Bottom Of A Well” – “it came from the bottom of my heart!” Having spoken with Mr Ayers and Lol Coxhill in the space of one week this summer, I regret not having been able to interview Mike Oldfield the following week – who knows, I could have got the Whole World together again. Or perhaps not.
11. VARIOUS Now That’s What I Call Music 56
Are you surprised? What happened in/to the Newer Pop this year? This is the ideal post mortem – so full of so nearly great pop singles (from Black Eyed Pies through Emma Bunton even on to Sugababes and Kylie) and thus as important a demolition ball as Now 1 was in 1983.
10. VARIOUS International Deejay Gigolo Vol 7
An alternate universe Now 56 of course: 30 extensions of 1982 to give you a possible future of pop (one of many). Ari Up returns to the land of the living via Terranova, Fischerspooner unexpectedly give us their finest four minutes on record, DJ Hell remixes P Diddy and Kelis into the realms of real sex, and above all, Linda Lamb’s phenomenal shotgun marriage of Cilla Black and Miss Kittin “King Meadowlands” – possibly the most eerie pop record of 2003.
9. SOUNDMURDERER & SK-1 Rewind Records
Compilation of 12-inchers from last year. Perhaps this strand of good ol’ drum ‘n’ bass is as retrogressive as anything done by the Bellrays or the Dirtbombs, but it’s a lot fresher to hear it, even if old jungleheads will be returned to the grand old days when the new waxings from SkyKicker and DustDevil were eagerly awaited. Particularly as it charms with its utter brutality and danceability, coming as near as anything I’ve heard to recapturing the dazed static of gabbled weekend pirate stations like Horra FM or Ice FM. Highlight: the moment at 1:13 on “Soundboy” when the music suddenly escalates to a hotter and more intense level, as if veering directly into and blocking your bland path. The dialogic exchanges are as good as any duets in pop since Derek and Clive. Hear also SoundMurderer’s deadly “Champion” on Tigerbeat’s Paws Across America 2003 compilation, as you stand in the desert sunshine in New Cross Gate, Wes Montgomery’s guitar floating from the nearby winebar, awaiting your inevitable assassination.
8. GLENN BRANCA The Ascension
The No Wave Tubular Bells - the large-scale work which justified the movement which begat it – this long-overdue legit CD reissue, complete with sleevenotes by participating guitarist Lee Ranaldo, is kind of what you would have got if Coltrane had hired Spector to produce his Ascension. Chimes of freedom? Overwhelming.
7. VARIOUS Velvet Tinmine
Or “20 Junk Shop Glam Rock Classics”: the realisation that the early ‘70s are as fertile a recycling ground as Nuggets/Pebbles-era garage punk or Northern Soul. And special thanks to Gordon Nicol from Edinburgh’s finest, Iron Virgin, for his kind words; if they were starting out now they’d be like the Darkness – they’d clean up. I perhaps might draw the line at Shane Richie doing a cover of the Sisters’ “Kick Your Boots Off,” however.
6. JAMES CHANCE/WHITE/CONTORTIONS/BLACKS/ETC. Irresistable Impulse
For cash-strapped readers, there’s a very useful two-in-one CD reissue of the crucial Buy and Off White albums, but for Chance takers this 4CD boxset stops just short of definitive, containing both aforementioned albums plus the live Soul Exorcism and numerous other sordid delights – but irritatingly not the original four Contortions tracks on No New York. Sax as sex, screams as salvation, harmolodics done better than Prime Time. For those who think that the fadeout of “Danger High Voltage” – great as it is – is unprecedentedly far out.
5. THE NEPTUNES PRESENT… Clones
Does this count as a compilation? The Official UK Chart Company seems to think so, thus does it appear in this list. Maligned in most quarters but beloved in mine, these 18 tracks have more ideas in each of their nanoseconds than (fill in underachieving hip hop/R&B artist/producer of your choice) has managed in the whole 70 flaccid minutes of (fill in underachieving 2003 album of your choice). Snoop Dogg in “It Blows My Mind” finally mutates into George Clinton. Would that the marching band hijacking Ludacris on “It Wasn’t Us” disrupted Ludacris’ entire album! Fam-Lay’s “Rock N’ Roll” carves a whole new furrow to plough. And ODB loses it for good (as Dirt McGirt) in “Pop Shit.”
4. VARIOUS Rough Trade Shops – Post Punk 01
Humanity evolves in baffling ways. Once Christians were a small persecuted minority and now there is Crockford’s Clerical Directory. Once post-punk and no wave were deliberately forgotten movements kept well to the rear of the music industry’s airing cupboard. One year ago you could buy virtually none of it on CD and now virtually all of it is available again, best summed up in this 44-track 2CD compilation, ranging from the Pop Group and Slits, even through XTC and UK Decay, via Bush Tetras, DNA and Blurt, through to contemporary attempts to find that essence, as it were, rare, as it is. Indispensable if only for the fact that it has reintroduced Scritti Politti’s divinely dada “Skank Bloc Bologna” into the racks (it really could go on forever) not to mention 23 Skidoo’s “Last Words,” Shockheaded Peters’ “I Bloodbrother Be” and the mindbending Bristol avant-funk of Maximum Joy’s epic “Stretch.” Inevitably, Erase Errata’s “Tongue Tied” sounds as if it was recorded quarter of a century ago, whereas the compilation’s highlight, PiL’s “Careering,” sounds as if it was recorded quarter of an hour ago.
3. VARIOUS Mutant Disco – A Subtle Discolation Of The Norm
And where there is punk, so must there be…Cole Porter? The original six-track LP loses one track (“Maladie D’Amour”) but gains 20 others. Cristina, Aural Exciters, Was (Not Was), those Contortion chaps once again, “Bustin’ Out”…back to offer a reinvention of pop now, the same one you should have accepted last time, except last time you opted for the Eurythmics and now you opt for Dido, thus does safety suffocate.
2. JIMMY SCOTT Falling In Love Is Wonderful
Withdrawn quickly for legal reasons 40 years ago when it was originally released, the man’s masterpiece now returns. Ten different ballad routes into your bedroom; vulnerability conquers confidence (“I Didn’t Know What Time It Was” – has there ever been such WONDER in the soul of orchestral seduction?). The androgyny is not altogether unintentional, the surrender complete. Forget Christmas with the Rat Pack – this beautiful record will protect you from the coldest cold.
1a. SCOTT WALKER – 5 Easy Pieces
Placed where it has been placed because I wasn’t sure whether to put it at the top of this list or not include it at all. Also because I am unsure of the boundary between providing a history of someone’s art or using the art to construct your own history. Five individually themed CDs – “five different routes into the heart of Scott Walker” – covering his entire career from the nocturnal side of the Walker Brothers to Tilt and Pola X, including much which is currently otherwise unavailable, constructed with the apparent cooperation of Walker himself. Thus CD1, In My Room - “the complete bedsit dramas, including the kitchen sink” – uses side one of ’Til The Band Comes In as a framing device for an extended study of alienation, bereavement, loneliness and uncertainty, as though it were the extended dream of a dying derelict. So why does “Always Coming Back To You,” which essentially summarises the collected plot of everything else on CD1, appear halfway through CD2 – Where’s The Girl? - and why, on CD2, has sex been entirely excised? No “Duchess” or “Get Behind Me” but there’s “Joanna.” CD3 finds him singing about Europe (mainly Brel) and America, but not “The Old Man’s Back Again.” Perhaps Walker felt that the latter’s politics were better and more profoundly explored on later songs such as “Rawhide” and “Patriot” (both of which happily do appear on CD3). Still this is evidently the story he wishes to tell us, and it may be churlish for this writer to suggest that the best way to explore Walker’s art is to listen to all the original albums, in sequence, in the structure in which they were originally assembled. But then that means spending absurd sums of money on second hand copies of ’Til The Band… and Climate Of Hunter, not to mention the contents of CD5 - Scott On Screen - which collates most of his otherwise completely unavailable soundtrack work. Or indeed CD4 - This Is How You Disappear - which assembles most of the hard stuff, including the four crucial songs from Nite Flights in sequence. Five different stories with the same end, Rashomon in pop. And the two tracks with Ute Lemper which conclude CD2 take female art pop to the edge of a new envelope which no one else has even bothered to push (beyond The Marble Index, even). Best, then, to treat this as a starter pack; but as you wouldn’t settle simply for reading David Thomson’s Rosebud without bothering to watch the Welles films which it describes and disassembles – indeed, Thomson warns throughout the book that it cannot be properly read without watching, or better, experiencing, the films – then I’m afraid that owning this boxset does not excuse you from additionally seeking out the source records. It certainly brings a new perspective to these records, and I feel less dubious about its construct than I did two months ago. But these are only five stories which still lead to the 20 or so which need to be told before you can penetrate Scott Walker’s heart.
1. LINDA PERHACS Parallelograms
Reissue of the year because it tells me something new; a record I had no idea had ever previously existed; a record, moreover, which I actively had to go out and find, to wear out shoe leather and catch a cold to obtain. One of many records made by sensitive female singer-songwriters in 1970 or thereabouts; but this record is so fresh it practically is a new record to soundtrack a new life. Make an extra effort to find the CD version, as it includes extra tracks including the astonishing and heartbreaking “If You Were My Man” (in both demo and finished form). Still, as far as the original record goes, the “now, now, NOW” shantih, shantih, shantih which concludes “Delicious” is the seductive trapdoor through which I escaped. And the best thing about it is that Ms Perhacs decided that this was all she had to say, and subsequently retired into a blameless and happy life. Knowing when you’ve said enough. I’m nearing that point as far as CoM and Naked Maja are concerned; and the announcement which will accompany next week’s Top 50 albums of the year list is unlikely to come as a surprise to any of you.
Wednesday, December 03, 2003
She would have been 39 this coming Friday.
We move on but we can never, ever forget.
THE FORCE THAT THROUGH THE GREEN FUSE DRIVES THE FLOWER
by Dylan Thomas
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.
The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my shroud sail.
And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How of my clay is made the hangman's lime.
The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores.
And I am dumb to tell a weather's wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.
And I am dumb to tell the lover's tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.
We move on but we can never, ever forget.
THE FORCE THAT THROUGH THE GREEN FUSE DRIVES THE FLOWER
by Dylan Thomas
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.
The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my shroud sail.
And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How of my clay is made the hangman's lime.
The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores.
And I am dumb to tell a weather's wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.
And I am dumb to tell the lover's tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.
