Song of the day

"Smile", by The Fall.

Even though Mark E Smith went through so many Fall members that if they all turn up to his funeral they will need a bigger church.

And even though Fall albums have appeared on more record labels than you even knew existed.

And even though (not unrelated to the previous point) there is a ridiculous number of rarities collections and live recordings out there, most of which are of dubious provenance and even more dubious quality.

And even though there were more eras of The Fall than there have been of human evolution.

And even though no two Fall fans would ever be able to agree on what were the best of those eras.

And even though the sound quality of the band's John Peel sessions frequently trumped that of the actual records.

And even though, in recent years, Smith has sounded more like a drunk uncle crashing a 21st birthday party than the singer in a rock n roll band.

And even though, looking at recent photos of him, you find yourself wondering how he even made it to sixty.

And even though to be a fan of The Fall meant having the patience to sit through fallow periods, sometimes (depending, perhaps, on where you came in) lasting for a decade or more.

Despite all of these things, for those of us captured by their inexplicable brilliance there remained, to the very last, and, as often as not, contrary to all common sense, a genuine sense of excitement, a thrill, every time a new Fall album landed. Sometimes the thrill might have lasted only until the first three or four songs had been endured; but we never lost that feeling.

Like the singer who pulls the plug on the lead guitarist half way through a song, it feels as if the arc of The Fall has been suspended, suddenly but permanently, while it still had a long way to travel. All we can do now is look backwards; which is not a thing The Fall ever did.

So, "Smile". It beats crying.

(They say that John Peel was The Fall's number one fan and booster. Here is film of him being just that.)

Song of the day

“Holiday House”, by Peter Lillie And The Leisuremasters.

 

I first became aware of what might be called the “Carlton scene” when as a young boy I bought a copy of “Horror Movie”, a seven-inch single by a band called Skyhooks, who had captured the attention of some of the more adventurous boys at Fish Creek Primary School (a pretty small number), largely on account of their smutty lyrics, but, in my case, on account of the sound of the guitars. “Horror Movie” to this day gets my pulse racing, but it was the b-side, entitled “Carlton (Lygon Street Limbo)” that really captured the imagination of a farmboy dreaming of a life of adventure.

A few years later, when I had started to listen to Melbourne’s 3RRR-FM, I found myself drawn to unknown (to me) entities with names like Eric Gradman’s Man And Machine, Whirlywirld, and Tch Tch Tch (easy to pronounce, typographically fiendish to denote: see the embedded graphic below), 

 

under the direction of one Philip Brophy, who would, even later, be an important part of my weekend routine as co-presenter, with Au Go Go Records impresario Bruce Milne, of a wonderfully free-form afternoon radio show on 3RRR called “Eeek!”.

By the time I moved to Carlton, in 1982, direct from Fish Creek, the Carlton scene, if there ever really was one, had already fragmented into several of the many tiny shards that made up the Melbourne post-punk contingent (if Pete Frame was still around to do his Rock Family Trees, this would give him an enormous challenge), and in turn started joining hands with the above-ground.

(For example, at that time there was still a piece of graffiti on a wall in Carlton proclaiming the greatness of The Jetsonnes, who had by then reinvented themselves as Hunters & Collectors; and Ian Cox, who was our Nicholson Street neighbour a couple of years later, had moved away from bands like Essendon Airport (along with Robert Goodge) and Equal Local in order to provide saxophone support for Kate Ceberano in I’m Talking.) (Further research reveals how chock full of Venn diagrams the Melbourne music scene of these times was: Cox also appeared on one song on an album called "Skippy Knows", by Whadya Want?, which also featured, on another track, Michael Sheridan on guitar, thus demonstrating that there was one degree of separation between the pop music of Kate Ceberano and the noiseniks who were released by Dr Jim’s Records (the titular proprietor of which label once appeared on an episode of Rockwiz with, you guessed it, Kate Ceberano). (With one further degree of separation, we can even trace Ceberano to Sydney trio The Necks, as Sheridan also played with Necks drummer Tony Buck in multinational “underground industrial” (it says here) group Peril, another of Dr Jim’s stable of stars.) (Whadya Want? also included David Chesworth, part of the "Clifton Hill scene" and (yet) another member of Essendon Airport, and Philip Jackson, who was in Whirlywirld and Equal Local. I think I'm getting dizzy.) (It goes on: Adam Learner, of International Exiles, who shared a seven-inch single with The Jetsonnes, went on to play with Blue Ruin, one of my gig-going staples of the later 1980s.))

But before I disappear up my own bum entirely -- What? It's too late? Hey, you should see what I edited out -- I should probably get to the point.

Somehow, Peter Lillie And The Leisuremasters make up a disproportionate share of my seven-inch-single collection. (Admittedly, it’s not that much of a collection; it fills a shoe box.) But the two records of theirs that I own continue to get a regular spin at home. It gave me more of a thrill than I expected when I convinced Number One Son to play “Holiday House”, the b-side of one of them, on his own radio show on 2XX a couple of weeks ago. (It was like stumbling upon a photo on the Internet of the Henry Maas-era Black Cat Cafe. I have also done that.)

A little fossicking around reminded me that Peter Lillie, sans Leisuremasters, had already taken up space in the inner recesses of my brain with a song called “Samurai Star”, which, I recently discovered, featured everybody from The Birthday Party who wasn’t Nick Cave or The Paunchy Cowboy. It’s a curious song, sounding, unexpectedly, more like The Sports than like “Hanging Round The House” and “Holiday House” (or, for that matter, “Homicide/Division 4”, the other of their singles that I own). Looking a little further back, it turns out (surprise!) that Lillie was a part of the Carlton scene in his own right, being a member of The Autodrifters with Johnny Topper (another 3RRR lunimary), and, not only that, but being the author of a song that might also lay claim to being the quintessential 1970s Australian song: “The Birth Of The Ute”. And before that, he and Topper were in the Pelaco Brothers, one of the few groups I can think of named after a neon advertising sign, and which also included, amongst its members, one Joe Camilleri, and one Stephen Cummings. (And, while we are here, we should also mention the High Rise Bombers, a group that fragmented into, on the one hand, Paul Kelly and the Dots and, on the other, The Sports (with the aforementioned Cummings).) (A handy musical compendium of the Carlton scene was released a couple of years back under the title “(When The Sun Sets Over) Carlton”, which, over the space of two discs, manages to take you all the way from Daddy Cool to Eric Gradman.)

It wasn’t actually all that hard to convince the lad to play “Holiday House”. I mostly just needed to point out to him its use of the 1970s slang expression “it’s grouse”, meaning really good; and to note that this is the only song I can think of that uses the word, and that I can’t recall “grouse” ever having made a come-back. (It's long overdue.) That, I think, helped make it the type of marginal historical time capsule he seems to find fascinating. The cover design is also of its time; Melbourne’s arty types then were seemingly obsessed with a rose-tinted idea of pre-Whitlam Australian culture, all beach houses, EH Holdens, seashell ash trays and Laminex furniture: essentially, nostalgia for a time that may never have actually existed. (See also the paintings of Howard Arkley.) Musically, too, it harks back to a kind of pre-Beatles Eylsian Field of simpler and better times. But that, too, was the tenor of those times: a post-punk fairyland where former hippies were moving to Belgrave to make experimental music; rockabilly rebels and bluegrass throwbacks crawled out of the least expected corners; and a lanky and intimidating fellow from Caulfield Grammar sat on the steps of the Missing Link record store in Flinders Lane, scaring away potential customers.

Sorry. I’m drifting off again. 

You could have saved yourself a lot of time by just reading this Facebook tribute.

But you should listen to this song. It’s grouse.

Hypothetical Mixtape 2.04

To start this one off, we are jumping back in time to the second half of the 1990s, when Grumpy Warren's Record Paradise was the shopping destination of choice, a place where you might just, if Bruce Milne didn't get there before you, pick up some lovely vinyl specimens from the lounge and library music era. (You also learned that not every Martin Denny record was what you were expecting. So be it.) Those were good times.

"Alcoholic", by The Black Fire. "Cream" was one of a number of Italian library music albums released on, I believe, Flirt Records. The covers of these records (see below) contained some of the best font design this side of a Stereolab record. (It was also released by another Italian label at around the same time with a different cover, striking in its own way but with much more dodgy lettering. See the embedded Bandcamp player.) Whichever cover you prefer, I can't see anybody not fully embracing the sounds within. "Alcoholic", apparently, was used as the opening music for the kung fu film "Operation Cobra". Sounds about right.



"Time", by Ju-Par Universal Orchestra. "Time", as in, "Now is the time for love". How seventies is that? If you were wanting to soundtrack your next fondue party, you need go no further. No extra charge for the tastiest electric piano.



"Melting Pot", by Booker T And The MGs. Not as obscure as the previous two songs, and not exactly coming from the same place, but (a) it's not "Green Onions" and (b) you can surely dig it. "Melting Pot" also existed as a single, but I can't see why anyone wouldn't take the full eight minutes, seeing as how it's on offer. It has quality oozing out of every orifice. Sorry.



"Fly Away", by Hashish. And, to prove that the whole lounge/library flame is still burning to this day -- at least in Sweden -- we have this. 



"Play With Fire", by Takkhalha. What else we like is cover versions of Rolling Stones songs from unlikely locations. Such as Iran. Taken, in this case, from a 2010 Spanish compilation. We are very grateful for their efforts, although you should be aware, as Discogs points out, that "All releases are unofficial".



"Blind Man Can See It (Extended Version)", by James Brown. This is taken from the 2003 reissue of "In The Jungle Groove", itself a compilation of earlier James Brown tracks, put together in 1986 to capitalise, it says here, on JB's status amongst the students of the hip-hop groove. The original "Blind Man" appeared on the "Black Caesar" soundtrack, in 1973. However, at 2 minutes and a bit, it was never going to be enough. Now it is. Also note: the cover of "In The Jungle Groove" was, uh, borrowed for a compilation called "In The Christmas Groove". And with beats this thick it might be Christmas all year round.



"They Came For Us", by Zig Zags. Being a repetitive groove of a very different kind. If you have never found yourself thinking, I wish it was still 1974, then you can probably move to the next track. As for the rest of you: sweet dreams!



"I Only Bought It For The Bottle", by The Orielles. Hey, kids! Punk rock! It looks like a seven-inch single but it is actually a digital file. That's progress, I guess. But wouldn't you want to hold it in your hand, and watch it spinning around on your turntable? A word of warning, though: the chorus is so big it could actually kill you. And don't even get me started on the sound of the guitar. Song of the year? Whoops, too late.



"Desert Raven", by Jonathan Wilson. I guess it must have been around this point that the drugs kicked in. It won't surprise you to learn that Wilson is based in Laurel Canyon. I feel like we've been here before.



"アイレ可愛や", by Mari Hamada. From 1997. With musical accompaniment by Autechre. Yes, I'm as surprised as you are.



"Relax Your Body (Ricardo Villalobos Remix)", by DFX. To my ears, the original of "Relax Your Body", from 1989, sounds largely like something that The KLF did much better. Twenty-seven years later, it fell into the hands of Ricardo Villalobos, who worked his usual dark magic on it, so that, voice-over aside, it bears little or no resemblance to the original track (or to anything else, for that matter). What maintains one's (or, at least, my) interest across its 19 and a half minutes is the recurring, deathly slow sequence of piano notes, which threaten, but never quite manage, to coalesce into an actual melody. If the kind of creepy interior scenes done so well by Urasawa had a soundtrack, it could be that piano.

Song of the day

"California Dreaming", by Denial.

Enough time as passed since the "minimal/synth wave" revival that Veronica Vasicka can now make a dignified re-entry into the world of archival compilation. This she does, early in the new year, with "The Bedroom Tapes". "California Dreaming", by Denial, is the first offering from this new record to be released into the wild.

One thing I can never have enough of is cover versions of "California Dreaming". Still, I have never heard one quite like this. It's like an aural approximation of "The Day The Earth Stood Still", from someone who had never seen the movie but liked the title. Notably, it was originally released in 1982 on Sydney's M Squared label. But I can't say I was ever even aware of its existence. Until now.