I'm Having Fun Now....

I started Saturday night bitterly cold in Glasgow's West End and finished the evening with a warm glow after spending the evening in the company of Jenny and Johnny at one of the Glasgow's finest venues, Oran Mor.

The set comprised mainly tracks from the lovebirds album I'm Having Fun Now which can be purchased here . To supplement the album they also played a few of each others solo tracks but sadly no Rilo Kiley songs were played.

They were joined onstage by a drummer and guitarist and just had a lot of fun playing to an almost sold out venue. This was an evening for top drawer melodies that just made you smile from cheek to cheek. The spirits of Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris permeated the venue whenever they harmonized together, with Jenny Lewis in particular sounding great throughout. From the album the standout songs were Big Wave, a track about the demise of Lewis' beloved California, and first track of the show, Committed.

There was not a huge amount of between song chat but with songs as good as these who needs idle chit chat. Even without much interaction Jenny Lewis had the crowd eating out of the palm of her hand from the off.

They finished the gig with the standout track of the evening, Lewis' Carpetbaggers which was the perfect track to end the show. This was the first time I had seen Jenny Lewis and certainly won't be the last.

Waiting For Mary..............

Hailing from Cleveland in the mid 70's Pere Ubu were never likely to achieve mass appeal. They have always been loved by critics and fellow performers and have in David Thomas a total one off. Eccentric does not come anywhere near the mark but he is always worth watching. Always ahead of their time you can hear their lasting influence in countless bands over the last 30 odd years. The debut album, The Modern Dance, is the album that they are most known for and has stood the test of time well. In the late 1980's MTV picked up on the single Waiting For Mary and they had a Number 6 hit  in the U.S. Modern Rock Chart. Somewhere in the loft I have a VHS tape of the band performing on the Roland Rat Show (!!!) from round about the same time that no-one else seems to have seen but is one of the strangest music performances I have ever seen - from memory there is no attempt to lip sync or play their instruments, they basically just sit there throwing bits of paper at each other. Essential viewing. For the following TV appearance they roped in a few friends.....

I Almost Prayed....

Formed by Pete Astor and Dave Morgan after the break up of The Loft, The Weather Prophets released a couple of singles on Creation Records before signing to a major with high expectations that they were going to be "the next big thing". As with so many of the bands I have posted about so far it did not come to be.

The debut single and the one they are best known for, Almost Prayed, was my own personal favourite single of 1986, along with Therese . Around that time there were a few of us who had started going to gigs who all liked the same kind of bands and who tried to initiate all the "non believers" into listening to the bands that we were championing to the effect that we had a radio cassette player set up in the common room with the lyrics to Almost Prayed pinned up on the wall and said track on rotation on the boogie box in the vain hope that we could get a few people to stop listening to the dross that was clogging up the charts and start listening to some clever jangly guitar pop music.

In retrospect it was quite a foolhardy venture but at that time we thought we could change the world, not just some people's dubious taste in music so even if one person caught on to the wonder of Almost Prayed it may have served some sort of purpose.....

The band only existed until 1988 but did leave behind a wonderful legacy....

All Art Is Quite Useless According To.....

Sticking with tonight's theme of Irish bands that should have been bigger than they were I present A House. Formed in the mid 80's A House honed their unique sound in various Dublin bars, coming to the attention over here of John Peel who they recorded a session for. In the early 1990's they released a couple of EP's, the latter Bingo EP featuring the track that most people remember them for Endless Art, which was also the first time they worked with our very own Edwyn Collins who produced the track.

I will now hand over to Wikipedia for the story behind Endless Art...............

With the sort of commercial luck that sometimes hit A House hard, in the week that "Endless Art" was the most played song on British radio, Setanta, which was only teething as a label, could not get enough copies into the shops to take advantage of the situation (Keith Cullen of Setanta had already had to borrow money from his father to fund the recording of the song). Parlophone Records tried to step in, redistributing 50,000 copies, but by the time these reached the shops it was too late and the re-released version of "Endless Art" (1992) did not get the same radio support, although it did reach the UK Top 50.^[6]

"Endless Art" had also benefitted from an accompanying video using clever stop motion animation which gained significant airplay on MTV in Europe, but again due to the bad timing with the song's distribution, the video seemed to be everywhere but the record was not selling. Nevertheless, "Endless Art" became A House's signature, replacing "Call Me Blue" as the song everyone associated with them. The video was memorable, and the song itself – somewhat unusual in its musical approach, and even more so in its lyrics, which led off with a quotation from Oscar Wilde and ran through an extensive roster of famous artists from various fields, all dead, with years of births and deaths specified – stabilized the band as a cult favorite among indie lovers, and is the paradigm of the surprisingly successful "list" style of song which Couse has frequently used (the first example of this style had been the title track on I Want Too Much).

At the time, however, the band had run into criticism because all the artists mentioned in the original "Bingo" release of the song were men. Despite the facetious excuse that they thought Joan Miró was a woman, they tried to make amends by making available a second version of the song, called "More Endless Art", which lists only women artists, as the B-Side of the single version. Controversy aside, "Endless Art" is frequently featured on representative compilations of Irish rock and pop music. The 12" single included two other tracks, "Freak Show" and "Charity" which had been recorded for the band's second John Peel Session very early in 1992.^[7]

The accompanying album I Am The Greatest is considered by many to be one of the finest albums made by any Irish band setting Dave Couse's unique lyrics to a much more expansive sound than previous albums but sadly major success eluded them.

A House broke up in 1997 playing their last gig at the Olympia Theatre in Dublin and in 2008 the Irish Times voted I Am The Greatest as the third best Irish album of all time. Personally I saw the band some time in the early 90's at King Tuts and it still remains one of the best night I have spent at King Tuts.

The following video is an updated version of the track recorded at Tower Records in Dublin in 2006 by former lead singer Dave Couse.

I'm Hardly Ever Wrong....

Together for little over a year The Would Be's only released three singles before they were no more. The debut single I'm Hardly Ever Wrong almost made it into the Top Ten of the Festive 50 in 1990, reaching Number 12. They reformed briefly in 2001 with a new lead singer and released a further 2 EP's but it will be the aforementioned debut single that they will be remembered for and quite right too for it is was one of the best tracks released in 1990.

Let's Dance....

While travelling to work today a certain song came on my mp3 player that reminded me of an under 18's disco that I used to go to back in the day. Back in the early 80's a group of us used to go each week usually dressed in the fashion of the day. At the start of the 80's we would go with our pork pie hats, sta-prest trousers, skinny ties et al thinking we were the coolest kids on the planet - and considering we were not even teenagers at the time I suppose we were quite cool in a strange sort of way. Then we discovered Adam Ant replica jackets in the Virgin Megastore in Union Street and all of a sudden we had white stripes across our collective faces and thought we were Prince Charming.

Now this was for its time a cool place to hang out. We were too young to be properly interested in girls, we were far too young to even think of drink so we settled for dancing instead. There was a weekly dancing competion to find the best dancers and there was a prize. Early 80' there was a fair amount of good music in the charts so every week we would get a chance to dance to the likes of The Jam, The Specials, Madness, Sheena Easton (!!!) and many more. Each week I would dance my socks off to try and impress the DJ hoping that one week I would win one of those much sought after prizes. I use the term "dance" in the loosest possible way as one of the constants in my life is an ability to throw myself about a dancefloor thinking that others are saying "what a great dancer he is" when in fact they are trying to get out my way and saying "doesn't get out too much that one." Usually after I have connected accidentally with my flailing arms and the side of their heads. I still think my best dancing days were in the mid 80's once I had discovered Morrissey. The best I can say is that I enjoy myself on the dancefloor and that's what its all about surely.

 

Anyway one week I eventually won the competition - more through pity I think - and was awarded three 7" singles, two of which I can't remember and the third I still have to this day, Ian Dury's "What A Waste" and this was the song I won the competition with.....

Not admittedly the easiest song to dance to but towards the end of the song it does get a bit manic and you can launch yourself about quite a bit so I have a sneaky feeling that the DJ awarded me the prize to avoid certain injury to either myself or anyone within a few metres of me that night....

Not A Sonnet, Not A Sound....

If you ask people to think of great indie guitar bands of the 80's most people rightly think of bands like The Smiths, The Mary Chain and The Wedding Present  Most people don't think instantly of The House Of Love. And why ever not, Guy Chadwick certainly knew how to pen a mean tune, and they also had one of the best guitarists of that era in Terry Bickers. I recently gave the first album a listen for the first time in years and surprisingly it still sounds bloody good. The album still sounds fresh and relevant . There's not a bad track on the album but the stand out would have to this wave of sound that transports me back to the heady days of 1988 and somehow was never a hit in the UK !!

We All Wear The Crown....

A few months back I was invited to a music evening with a few friends. The theme of the evening was based on the five series of  a famous TV show. What the five of us had to do was pick a song based on the theme of each series of The Wire, so we had to pick tunes on Drugs, Unions, City Hall, Education and Media. Part of the task was to try and pick some tracks that the others may not know which would prove to be quite a difficult feat considering that all five of us had all worked for a few years each in various record stores, in fact I think we worked out that between us we had worked for over 60 years in record stores. As you could imagine there was much debate after each track as we had to discuss each one, as you do, and there was 25 tracks in total throughout the evening. We started the evening at about 8 P.M. and finished roughly 9 hours later by which time most of us could barely string 2 words together never mind debate the merits or otherwise of any of the tracks. I think I managed to introduce the guys to a couple of tracks that they didn't know before the start of the evening and also discovered a couple of tracks that I was not aware of such as Minutemen's This Ain't No Picnic. But for me there were 2 tracks that that stood out that night, both tracks that we all knew well but personally I had not heard for years....

Sadly there appears to be no promo video for The Crown but for somebody who is not a huge fan of the rap music this is by anyone's standard a classic....

Anyone For A Bit Of Cowpunk ? ....

Anyone out there fancy a bit of Cow Punk? Cast your mind back to 1984 and The Boothill Foot Tappers joyous folkabilly sounds...the perfect antidote to the New Romantic music sweeping the nation. They only managed one album that can be purchased here. If you are feeling a bit blue at any time stick on a bit of The Boothills and cheer yourself up...it should do the trick. Below is a small taster...

Hey Ho Let's Go....

After a couple of years of reading other bloggers and always having one excuse or another for not doing my own, I finally thought "what the heck, give it a go". So here we are today....

There are some truly great blogs out there that I try to read as often as possible but none more so than the following five that are always worth viewing.... Across The Kitchen Table , The Ghost Of Electricity , Plain Or Pan ? , 17 Seconds and The Vinyl Villain. I have to give a special mention to J.C. at The Vinyl Villain as well as consistently producing one of the finest blogs out there he also gave me the opportunity a couple of times to post on his blog. All the blogs listed above have introduced me to music I may not otherwise of came across and also at varying times re-introduced me to music I had not heard for years and to me that is the whole point of doing this...to share great music with like minded souls and then if you like what you here go out and splash your hard earned cash on their wares - buy their music, go see them live....If you ever happen to stumble upon my little site please visit the above blogs and see what you've been missing out on.

Some Culture Some City...

Sunday June 3rd 1990, European City Of Culture, 4 open air stages around Glasgow, 50 artists, 11 hours of music including Nanci Griffith, Goodbye Mr Mckenzie, Big Country and of course the highlight of a very special day - Natalie Merchant, Michael Stipe and Billy Bragg on the Riverside stage. Beautiful song, exquisite vocal from the 10,000 Maniacs vocalist. This was a very special day for Glasgow attracting by some estimates almost half a million people to the city. It is a day I will never forgot. How often in a lifetime would you get the chance to see Merchant, Stipe and Bragg perform together on the banks of The Clyde. I have a feeling that all those at Customhouse Quay that day will remember it for a very long time yet....

Just Like Spring Rain....

There are many bands who should be household names that aren't but none more so perhaps than The Go Betweens. Formed in Brisbane in 1977 they were centred on the songwriting partnership of Robert Forster and Grant Mclennan. Two very different songwriters who complemented each other perfectly. Some of the early tracks may have been a bit left of centre to achieve chart success but why tracks like Right Here and Spring Rain were not Top 10 hits still perplexes fans of the band to this day. Every album has a quality about them that few bands ever reached and are all worth having. Sadly we will never get to see The Go Betweens perform live again after the death of Grant McLennan in 2006 but there is an incredible body of work out there that will last for many years to come. 

Agitate,Educate,Organise....

Once described by Rolling Stone magazine as "The Clash crossed with Creedence", That Petrol Emotion's star shone all too briefly in the late 80's when their second album Babble broke into the Top 40 and they almost had a chart hit on their hands with the track that most people know them for, Big Decision. As with the previous band of the O'Neill brothers they became an instant fave of John Peel. During the recording of the third album main songwriter John O'Neill left the band which by now were still making groundbreaking music but due to a lack of sales they split in 1994. The band reformed in 2008 to play some festival dates. Critically acclaimed, hugely influential....maybe, just maybe it's not too late to achieve the kind of success they deserved.

Beat Surrender....

Most music fans of a certain age would have been parked in front of the TV at 5.15 on a Friday night for their weekly dose of The Tube. Every Friday I would rush home from school, get the paper round done as quickly as possible and sit their eagerly in front of the box within easy reach of the VCR to record the bands that we would discuss on the Monday back at school. As most bloggers will know the first show saw a terrific half hour set by this beat combo, including this, their last ever single.

In the 80's you had a great choice of music shows on TV. As well as The Tube you had Whistle Test, Oxford Road Show, TOTP and latterly The White Room and Snub TV. Nowadays thank god we still have the BBC for Later and BBC4 as well as 6Music. It's a shame that most of the other channels largely ignore music shows. There is still a wealth of talent out there, you just have to dig a little deeper to find it. Happy hunting.