Sunday Song #4: "Nausea" by X

Ever seen The Decline of Western Civilisation? Most likely not, as Penelope Spheeris' 1980 documentary about the nascent LA punk scene has not been easily available to all and sundry since it hit a few select screens back in those grisly early days of gobbing and slam-dancing (the Americans being, as ever, a little late to this).

Anyways, the film focused on such unpleasant coves as The Germs, Circle Jerks, an embryonic Black Flag and easily the finest band on the scene, X.

Like all the greatest punk bands, the members of X had cool made-up or altered names like John Doe, Exene Cervenka and Billy Zoom; they could also actually play a bit, with proper songs and at least two classic albums in their debut Los Angeles and its follow-up Wild Gift.

This song, "Nausea", is from that aforementioned debut, and it's a live performance of the song that fittingly opens Spheeris' documentary.

"Nausea" has a Black Sabbath-like guitar riff that stops and starts in all the right places and a sneering punk chorus featuring the band's trademark almost vocal harmonising between Cervenka and Doe alongside a thrilling march-to-the-guillotine bit of tub pounding from drummer DJ Bonebreak. It also has some organ fills from The Doors' Ray Manzarek, whom was the band's first, and for some time, regular producer.

It sounds raw, threatening, exciting and sexy as hell.

X - "Nausea" mp3

Still the finest album of 2007 thus far

Perhaps Damon Albarn was the new Lennon all along and we just never gave him his dues. Scathing, insightful, dreamy and melodically skillful; Albarn is easily one of the greatest writers of popular music of the last fifteen years.

Something of a complicated man, Albarn has managed to convey his wide range of moods successfully to a large audience through numerous recordings by both Blur and Gorillaz, and, the odd lapse of taste and judgment aside, he's built up a rather formidable body of work.

This, his latest adventure, sees the man in collaboration with former Clash bassist Paul Simonon, Afrobeat rhythmic legend Tony Allen and Simon Tong who previously played in The Verve and toured with the Coxon-less Blur on their round of dates for last album Think Tank.

The Good, the Bad and the Queen is Albarn's most adult collection of songs in his career so far. Reflective, resigned, troubled, world-weary, cynical and old-fashioned, this is an album about London atmospherically redolent of those strangely comforting old Christmas cards depicting a foggy, melancholic Victorian city where people have all but shut themselves away for the night to escape the howling wind and the brass monkeys outside. The songs are affecting, haunting, tuneful and perfect for an autumnal 7 O' clock gloom. It's bloody miserable, and I bloody love it.

Amongst Simonon's dubby basslines, Allen's percussive virtuosity and Tong's eerie string plucking, Albarn's voice is the ghost of our past and future singing over a piano in an old man's pub in a part of town that still has air raid shelters in many of its back gardens.

Each member brings his own element to the sound. Together they sound like a great band. I hope this is not the beginning and the end of their union (the reliable word says it isn't).

In case my language was misleading, I'm not trying to say this isn't a thoroughly contemporary piece of work too; produced by Danger Mouse there's much in this recording that's benefited from the modern studio environment and a cross-cultural influence. It just has a more traditional kind of old school dust sitting upon the desks.

Placebo

Is illness mostly in the mind? Certainly it's interesting that once a fellow has found the courage to go to his GP and been handed that lovely crisp green bit of paper marked 'prescription' he immediately experiences a greater feeling of wellbeing - some time before the pills are actually even in the bag and then down the hatch.

It's a feeling like reinforcements arriving at Helm's Deep, or maybe the Blitz spirit returning on a much smaller, more personal scale. Help is here; you're not alone; we will overcome, now stick the kettle on for a nice cuppa char.

I have been given Metoclopramide in 10mg doses to be taken three times a day. It's like the 25th of December in short bursts.

Doctors and pharmacists are wonderful people. They bring comfort to millions by not actually doing much other than chucking some tablets at you and taking your £6.85 NHS charge.

Now that's magic.

Banksy

It needs just one man to take something previously considered an anti-social nuisance and raise it to a level of respectability; that is, if that one man has something a wee bit special. Call it street art or call it graffiti, but thanks to Banksy daubing on walls is all the rage.

Artistically gifted and with a great eye for the satirical punch of word and image, our man now has something very close to international fame, even though no one has any idea who the hell he really is, let alone what he looks like. Banksy's witty paintings/stencils have been popping up particularly in more central eastern districts of London such as hip Hoxton/Shoreditch, Bethnal Green and the City itself for a few years now as well as occasionally in Soho and Camden, earning a cult following that has subsequently grown into the mainstream consciousness. So admired and celebrated have they become that once sniffy councils have taken steps to protect and preserve these illegal guerilla art masterworks. In fact a Banksy work near Chalk Farm tube in NW1 that was itself vandalised was then cleaned up at the behest of the suits in high places. Hold on a second, do I smell burning?












I've taken to the street myself, of course, not with a can of spray paint, but through a desire to see the Banksy works in their natural urban environments. The photos you see are this blog author's own; taken whilst wandering around the East End of London fairly early on a Saturday or Sunday morning while everyone's either too sleepy or too wasted to try and nick your camera.

Many of the best-known earlier works are sadly no longer there to be seen at all, while others are barely visible having seen and weathered too much of the metropolitan hurly-burly before people decided to look after them properly. Some recent new additions have appeared in the Old Street area that I'm yet to see for myself, as well as two variations on the same drawing that have turned up in East London and the West London Ladbroke Grove areas.













There are still many of Banky's trademark rats alive and kicking; somehow mirroring the actual species' highly successful and dreaded instinct for survival. Gangsta rat, parachute rat, protest rat, toxic rat, bling rat, umbrella rat, giant car park rat with knife and fork, paparazzi rat, rats fixing and welding; rats of every persuasion. The man's affinity for one of the world's most detested creatures is explained rather beautifully in his own rather strangely profound words in this excerpt from his Wall & Piece book:

"They exist without permission. They are hated, hunted and persecuted. They live in quiet desperation amongst the filth. And yet they are capable of bringing entire civilisations to their knees. If you are dirty, insignificant and unloved, then rats are the ultimate role model."

















Of course Banksy is not strictly a street artist these days as his work has been shown in proper West End galleries and stuff, but it's nice to think he's now firmly set on subverting things from the inside too.

There's been a street art explosion in recent times following the Banksy lead where wit, social comment and actual artistic ability has come to the fore ahead of the typically moronic graffiti tagging of any wall or train going with the dumb scrawl of brain-dead youth keen to mark their territory, as if anyone gives a monkey's.













I like it when Oscar the Grouch from Sesame Street suddenly appears amongst a row of bins in Shoreditch, or when the street artist known as Eine decides to sum the scene up in one big ironic word on a wall somewhere.













Banksy

'Head Music

It all began to make sense when I listened to it alone, and in the dark. This is Radiohead’s most low-key, lights out or dimmed, quiet, intimate candlelit dinner of an album; the songs sad, wistful and with only occasional raucous bursts. The mood it creates in a room is most akin to Lou Reed’s Berlin, or perhaps Portishead’s Dummy, if a little warmer and less grim than both of those. At times I’m also reminded of Blind Faith’s eponymous and only album, for some reason.

Disturbingly, I’m sure I heard one or two conventional love songs in there too, though I comfort myself with the enormous likelihood of there being some kind of twisted pay-off I just haven’t understood yet.

Initially I was underwhelmed by the idea of a download-only collection from such a significant band at only 160kbs. I mean, I’ve illegally downloaded tons of music in the past but most of this stuff still had to usually meet an 192kbs minimum requirement. Also the context bugged me, as playing this track-by-track through computer speakers for the first time had the shabby feel of hearing leaked demo versions complete with background coughing and the clunking of tea mugs whether I was imagining it or not. However, as I mentioned, once given the time and respect it deserved (after sticking it on the iPod, then connecting that to the proper stereo system with one of those leads you can buy, and then pressing ‘play’ late at night) I found everything near enough in its right place.

Of course, In Rainbows is only Radiohead’s best album since Hail to the Thief. I’m not saying this to be droll; I don't think form ever left them for there to be hopeful talk of a return. My favourite album by this band is easily Kid A; take my opinion of this and that as you will.

Radiohead are never going to release something like Def Leppard’s Hysteria, so stop expecting them to. Why the constant criticism of the group’s consistently high quality output since 2000? It’s as if when a band becomes as big as Radiohead did with OK Computer the more casually interested member of the public expects them to consolidate this success by producing a big radio-friendly unit-shifter of a stadium filler that sits snugly on the shelves at Tesco and Woolies, and simply can’t comprehend the idea of such a commercially successful band instead releasing a few albums' worth of mildly esoteric material that actually suits their individual artistic leanings rather than what FM playlists would prefer them to do. That Radiohead have never been a commercial commercially-successful band seems to have been lost in some quarters.

All these songs have been knocking around for a good while. Good as they are, is this even a proper Radiohead album or a taster for something more extravagant they‘re putting together for December? The songs sit together well without an ‘odds and sods’ randomness to them, and though here’s no obvious (and conceptually unnecessary these days) singles here - the lovely, and rather ancient “Nude” aside - this isn’t the sound of a band merely clearing out the cupboards.

I'd like to point out that the above isn't an actual record review to my mind as I'd like a little more time to slip into something more comfortable and get to know In Rainbows better before I do that sort of thing.

The Krautrock revival begins in my speakers

West Germany in the late '60s and most of the '70s was full of turbulence. Imagine reaching the full sentient awareness of adulthood in this period having grown up with the shame of your country's recent past haunting your every thought regardless of yourself having played no part in its actions. It produced anger, reactionary leftist politics, Kommune 1 and wide-scale student demonstrations. It also produced the Red Army Faction and the SPK, while in artistic fields the energy fed the emergence of the New German Cinema and left-field music groups like Faust, Neu!, Kraftwerk, Amon Düül and Can.

Can are the greatest motherhumping 'difficult' underground art-rock combo to ever walk the planet. The reason there hasn’t been much innovation in rock music since Can is because Can did pretty much everything with rock music that can be done, and inspired nearly everything interesting that followed. All those rock groups that have taken the experimental route at some point in their careers since 1977 have merely been doing variations on the Can sense of weirdness, adventure and rhythmic crunch. Of course the fact that this involves so much of the most thrilling music of the past 30 years from Joy Division, The Fall, early PiL, Berlin-era Bowie and Pere Ubu to Sonic Youth, Tortoise, Radiohead and Stereolab is testament to the strength of light emitted from the mighty mothership.

The core musicians of Can were titans and pioneers; multi-limbed rhythm machine Jaki Liebezeit is still officially the funkiest German of all time and the man with the greatest grudge against his snare drum; bassist Holger Czukay and keyboardist Irmin Schmidt were both pupils of Karlheinz Stockhausen and appropriately weaved any kind of patterns they damn well liked around Liebezeit's lead pounding brilliance. Michael Karoli played the guitar like a violin and the violin like a guitar to equally scintillating effect.

I put a Can CD on whilst driving and I take the long route home just so my listening experience takes in all 20 minutes of “Bel Air” or all 18 minutes of “Halleluwah”. Can are perfect for motoring around cities alone when your senses are alive to everything hitting you. They're also great through your iPod while walking to the supermarket for a loaf and a couple of pints of milk. They aren't good for parties, unless it's a really, really weird party.

1971's landmark double-album Tago Mago will always bend any head exposed to it; 1973's Future Days album will still sound contemporary in 100 years' time. These are probably Can's finest collections of recordings, made when Japanese vocalist Damo Suzuki completed the 'classic' line-up and sang, whispered and shouted in a mixture of language and gibberish that Sigur Ros haven't quite mastered yet. If you're at all taken by my spiel, then start with those two titles.

Of course there is hyperbole in the words above, but this just comes from being stupidly enthusiastic about something.

Can - "Mushroom" mp3

Was Ist Das?

Sunday Song #2: "Sunspots" by Julian Cope

I cherish dearly the existence of a piece of music such as Julian Cope's "Sunspots", for as it weaves its 5 minutes and roughly 15 seconds of magic I experience that rare feeling of a joy of living where every nerve tingles and the brain glows with abstract positive thoughts. We might just call it 'a high'.

Anyways, if you have a love for that slightly left of the dial psychedelic sound that was knocking around in the early-to-mid '80s where men (and women too) sang mysteriously in deep voices over melodious guitar and keyboards, then this track may be as perfect for you as it is for me.

I can barely think of anything I like more than this; it is glorious.

From Copey's 1984 album Fried, in which our man took to the cover wearing nothing but a tortoise shell.

Julian Cope - "Sunspots" mp3

Control

A portrait of the post-punk singer as a young man; Anton Corbijn, famous for his moody black and white photos of rock musicians, was a suprising yet natural choice to direct this study of Ian Curtis and the downward spiral of his short life, through marriage, infidelity, illness, a seemingly unwanted growing success as front man of that moodiest and black and white of bands, Joy Division, then ultimately to his suicide in May 1980 at 23 years of age.

As well as straight photography, Corbijn has also cut his teeth making memorable videos, not only for Joy Division’s posthumous “Atmosphere” single but also for the likes of such demanding clients as Depeche Mode, Nirvana and Metallica. He also made the blinding promo for Front 242’s “Headhunter”. which is something really worth looking for on good old YouTube. Anyways, this much we know: Corbijn has a way with an image, moving or otherwise.

Joy Division are very much a band where imagery is essential to the myth. In 1978/79/80 the lenses of Corbijn and local photographer Kevin Cummins presented the band as a very serious matter indeed, capturing them within, and as the product of, a grim, austere environment not so much resembling the Manchester as we might know it today but rather somewhere akin to a 1970s East Germany where the Stasi are checking your papers and taking notes on your telephone conversations.

Control offers nothing quite so harsh. A rather muted affair filmed in suitable monochrome, its setting and working-class distinctiveness carries strong echoes of 1960s British kitchen-sink social dramas, only without so much in the way of the larger-than-life characters we’d find propping up a bar or scrapping outside at closing time in Saturday Night & Sunday Morning and the like. Band manager Rob Gretton (Toby Kebbell) aside, most of the characters in Control don’t have an awful lot to say for themselves or to each other; my major criticism of the film must be that the dialogue too often feels flat and underwritten with minimal conversational spark amongst individuals, whom for some reason, feel the need to keep the company of people with whom they have little in common to discuss.

Sam Riley is on the surface a little too pretty to be playing Curtis, but he does a remarkable job in recreating the singer’s mannerisms on stage - albeit without quite the same intensity as the real thing’s man-fighting-to-get-out-of-his-own-skin frantic energy we’ve seen on old TV footage - as well as the downbeat, rather lonely body language conveyed through those iconic photos. Aloof, angry, guilt-stricken; Riley does Curtis pretty much as well as we could expect. The character’s epileptic seizures are rightly played unflinchingly and disturbingly to all. Also, as ever, striking a chord, is Samantha Morton as Ian’s girlfriend, wife and then widow, Debbie, upon whose biography of her late husband this film is based.

Admirers of Downfall will be pleased to find that film’s Traudl Junge (the delectable Alexander Maria Lara), appearing here as Curtis’ empathetic Belgian mistress, Annik; his almost understandable affair with whom helped sow the seeds of his ruin.

Like Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People, Joy Division members Hook, Sumner and Morris are peripheral figures here, but unlike that film, so here is Factory label boss and Granada TV personality Tony Wilson. The late Wilson is portrayed curiously as a rather toadying, diffident figure whose charges afford little respect - an image at odds with that of the confident, verbose and occasionally belligerent smartarse familiar through countless interviews.

Control isn’t about music, though there’s plenty on the soundtrack - some of which is performed by the cast themselves. Producer Martin Hannett, who was so crucial in creating the Joy Division sound is only nodded to here in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it portrayal highlighting, for some light relief, the man's alleged obnoxiousness. Curtis’ lyrics are recited by Riley a number of times but there’s little sense of the evolution of his or the band’s creative ideas, which are something perhaps considered best left to documentaries to explore.

Corbijn’s eye for an iconic shot is present throughout; Control could be paused at almost any point and the viewer would find an image captured in a rule of thirds (and other) photographic compositional style. The director and cinematographer manage to make the grey industrial side of Manchester, as well as Macclesfield with its terraced houses and hills, look beautiful.

Though without truly, I feel, getting to the heart of this story, Control is a worthy piece of work; though maybe best enjoyed by those who aren’t particularly fans of Joy Division.