Avert your eyes, kids, it's a record review

Circumstances conspired against my catching any of the reformation gigs by the most important of eighties Australian bands, The Laughing Clowns. The offer of a ticket to the Mount Buller leg of All Tomorrow's Parties couldn't be taken up on account of my having to be back in Canberra at the very time when my proposed lift would have been driving back down the Hume towards Melbourne. Plans to attend the Basement gig in Sydney a couple of months later (which morphed into a Bad Seeds with Ed Kuepper gig, with Laughing Clowns supporting, to add insult to injury) had to be abandoned on account of a secondary school open day in Canberra that same weekend (and our application was rejected anyway, thank you very much).

So it is a genuine consolation, albeit laced with bitter disappointment at what I could have witnessed first hand, to be able to listen to "Laughing Clowns Live", the latest in the ongoing Prince Melon Bootleg Series (the shades of Dylan in that title not, presumably, being accidental). I have no idea which gig it is taken from, or if it is a hybrid, or even if an entire concert is here (set lists I have seen suggest there are a few songs missing - insert sad-face emoticon here). The editing is extremely sloppy, the sound is serviceable (I would like to be able to hear more of Jeffery Wegener working his magic), and there are a number of fluffed notes. But it's Laughing Clowns Live, circa 2009, and you can't put a price on that.

One listens to this, with one's knowledge of how the Clowns ended so acrimoniously first time around, of Ed's peripatetic but patchy (but, lest this be seen as faint praise, frequently inspired) subsequent solo career, of his ceaseless revisiting and reinventing of his songbook, and of Wegener's addiction and gradual re-emergence, and gets the sense that this is the music that Ed Kuepper was put on this planet to make, and that he has been honing his own skills this past 25 years in the hope that somehow, some day, he, Louise Elliott, and Wegener would once more command the stage.

Which, remarkably but on the other hand unsurprisingly, they do. The set opens with something called "Everything Is Not The Fault Of Minorities" (a very Laughing Clowns title, that), which comprises six minutes of Necks-style abstraction (don't forget that Chris Abrahams plays on their penultimate album, "Law Of Nature"), finally resolving into the briefest fragment of an actual song before abruptly stopping (shades of The Field, and in particular "A Paw In My Face", which turns out, after five or so minutes, to have been a heavily disguised "Hello", by, ahem, Lionel Ritchie).

Then come three shorter numbers, all cornerstones of the Clowns' back catalogue: "Come One, Come All", "Everything That Flies Is Not A Bird" and "Theme From 'Mad Flies Mad Flies'" (and with all three also appearing on "Live To Air 1982", which may yet turn out to be a recording of the only Laughing Clowns gig I ever saw, anyone with a more intimate knowledge of these songs than my own will be in trainspotter heaven). Ed's guitar seems to have thickened up considerably since the early 80s: perhaps that is just a product of technology, but the two live performances, side by side, would seem to confirm that his playing has changed. Single notes have become big chords, and that sinewy, metallic sound is gone. It suits the music. (His voice has thickened quite a bit, too, across the years.) Elliott, of course, is magisterial throughout. Wegener may not be playing quite as frenetically as before (to the extent that you can hear him) but his singular sense of rhythm and texture has lost nothing.

Not to suggest that these three songs are mere potatoes, but what follows is the real meat of the performance: a harrowing, stretched-out rendering of the most desolate, and most emotionally intense, song of the post-punk era, "Collapse Board", and yet another re-working of "Eternally Yours". ("Eternally Yours" appears on each of the Prince Melon Bootleg releases to date: one, in fact, comprises just that song, strung out over 17 minutes, with (I think) just Ed, Elliott and Wegener, somewhere in the UK in 2007, and the way Elliott is introduced makes me suspect that this may have been the first time they shared a stage since the Clowns initially fell apart, and that her appearance was possibly unexpected and/or unrehearsed: in which case, you can only think that those 17 minutes were the fuse that led to the full-blown Clowns rebirth, if that's what it is. You couldn't do what they did there and not be compelled to see what could happen next.)

"Collapse Board" has been pulled in two directions: the already slow instrumental passages are slowed down almost to the point of stasis, while the, for want of a better word, verses have been augmented by some sterling piano work. Kuepper does something almost twangy with the guitar, too, possibly recalling the unlikely but wonderful surf-rock re-working of the song ("Diving Board") that turns up on one of his instrumental albums. The crowd mistakenly thinks it is over after six minutes (Ed very politely tells them, "Wait for us, wait for us"), but Ed knows better, and it would be less than half the song if he had ended it there. Elliott proceeds to blow the living shit out of everybody in the room. Alister Spence, on piano, is clearly thinking, at least tangentially, of Chris Abrahams here, too, while in the quieter moments Wegener can be heard playing all around the song, just like the old days. The song doesn't so much end as run out of places to go.

And then there's "Eternally Yours". If anything on this record is going to run a shiver up your spine, it is this. The song doesn't reveal itself at all until a couple of mostly expressionistic minutes have passed. That sax line kicks in. Does Ed's voice almost break? I find myself welling up, whether just from the thrill of hearing this song being played by this band after this many years, or from a sense of how emotional this moment must surely have been for Ed - assuming, contrary to most impressions, that he is really just an old softy. It lasts for 13 glorious minutes. Elliott, again, leaves one speechless (and herself breathless). Unlike "Collapse Board", it gets faster as it goes on: it ends in what is more like a train wreck than the end of a song. When it ends, and Ed semi-legibly introduces the band and says "Thank you, you've been really fuckin' great", one is left wondering whether he is speaking to the audience or the band. I suspect the latter.

As an encore they do "New Bully In The Town" (one of my favourite late-period Clowns songs), in a spirit of elation. It's that kind of song. Ed's guitar and Wegener's drumming are everything, although the flute solo (!) makes me want to listen to some Jethro Tull (!), and the electric piano builds huge rectangular blocks of sound. I smile. What else can you do? It's only a record, not a physical experience, but still I am emotionally drained at the end. You can't ask for much more than that.

Salivating

I am.

Song of the day - or is it?

"Mr Roboto", by Styx. Adrienne claims to remember this. I have no knowledge of it whatsoever, aside from its brief appearance in "Faraway Idol", at the end of "Shrek 2", where Pinocchio sings the "domo arigato, Mr Roboto" bit. (Interesting, but irrelevant, question: will I still go to the cinema to watch children's animated movies when the boys are too old to want to go with me? This may be put to an early test with "Coraline": I think that I would want to see it, but the short has sufficiently scared the crap out of both boys that they aren't going to be going anywhere near it.)

Anyway, the Pinocchio fragment (and there, Mr Dan Brown, is your next novel, "The Pinocchio Fragment": it's all yours, and I claim only a very modest 15 per cent) comprises a brief section roughly two-thirds of the way through the song, and bearing little connection to what is around it. Bizarrely, "Roboto" is pronounced "Robarto", presumably in the interests of rhyme (over reason).

I have no knowledge if the song was a big hit. I "found" it as part of something called "80's [sic] Giga Hits Collection" so I can only assume that it was (although my sources suggest it never got into the UK top 40 - a rare exercise of good taste by the British pop punters if true). But as a song, precisely what the fuck is it? It has no hook to speak of (outside of the "domo arigato" bit, and even that is somewhat less than catchy), no chorus, no particularly notable instrumentation. Big hair? Undoubtedly. Big eighties keyboards? Check. Trouser-hugging high male vocals? Ouch, yes. Big concept? Well, that is the nub of the problem: it is all concept. Here was a band so wrapped up with the perceived importance of what they were doing that they lost sight of what it was that they were meant to be doing. And what is with that "Kilroy" bit at the end?

It's all rather puzzling, really. A futurist manifesto masquerading as a song. And it's not even a proper song! What it puts me in mind of more than anything else is "Robots", from the first series of "Flight of the Conchords" ("Binary solo!"), except that was comedy, whereas "Mr Roboto", well, that may be comedy as well, but, judging by the earnestness on display, it would be unintentional.

Happiness is ...

... when you are having a day off work, and listening to Kraftwerk's "Minimum-Maximum" live double-CD, and at the end of "The Model" two little voices from the other end of the house shout, in unison, "Play that song again!".

Continuity error

Oh no! We have written about two songs from Darren's list before writing about the previous song on that list. As the sequencing of the list was generated at random, anyway, it hardly matters, but we are sticklers about that sort of thing, so it hurts nevertheless. What follows should go before what came before.

"Louie, Louie", by The Kingsmen, is the wellspring from which a thousand garage bands bloomed. It is the sine qua non of the three-chord wonder. It is the "Smoke On The Water" of the lank-haired slacker set. If I had ever owned a cheesy organ, those opening chords are the ones I would have been desperate to learn. It has been covered so many times that if you played them end to end you would probably die of old age before they finished. (But not of boredom: somebody on Melbourne's Three Triple-R, many years ago, devoted an entire show to this song, and it ended all too soon.) Like many of the perfect things in this world, it thrives on its simplicity. And on the fact that it was the first.

Two more from Darren

Number 18: "Pyjamarama", by Roxy Music. The day I paid a ridiculous amount of money for Brian Eno's "Seven Deadly Finns" seven-inch single (without a picture sleeve), I was also on the hunt for "Pyjamarama". Same label, same format, same non-album-single aura, which, back in those pre-Internet days, more or less meant you would never get to hear it unless you had your own copy. And, obviously, the common element to both records: Eno. Anyway, I didn't find "Pyjamarama", or I would have had a difficult decision to make. The Eno song, if I am being entirely honest with myself, is not entirely indispensable, more "clever" than clever, but as an artefact the single is enhanced by its b-side, "Later On", which I have never seen mentioned anywhere, and which reduces his early work with Robert Fripp into a digestible, stars-on-45-style medley (but without the handclaps). This entirely defeats the point of the music, which depends in large part on repetition and length, but is pretty funny in its own way. "Pyjamarama", on the other hand, is a great song, perfect single material, as well as being the one Roxy Music song that actually does help to explain why Magazine got so many Roxy comparisons: if you cut it a fraction of a second before Ferry enters the song, it could easily pass for something from "Secondhand Daylight". (As, I now notice, does the hugely atmospheric b-side, "The Pride And The Pain", also a non-album track.) And, thanks to Darren's diligent fossicking, I didn't have to pick it out from the singles wall upstairs at Au Go Go Records in order to hear it.

Number 19: Elvis Costello's "Pump It Up". Which is better known amongst the younger members of our household as the source of the riff that drives "Voodoo Child", by Rogue Traders, a song that will appear later on if we persevere for long enough with this list, although its appearance may well be over Carl's dead body. Carl has a problem with "Voodoo Child". We can't exactly figure out what that problem is, except that it seems to involve the perceived appearance of a "swear". I don't think the song does contain a swear, and I suspect we are in Misheard Lyrics territory, but I can't extract from him what he thinks they are saying (I guess that is a good sign; he's a good boy). Hence, by association, he also has a problem with "Pump It Up" itself, which is a shame because, whatever your view of latter-day Elvis Costello, back in those distant days he was unsurpassable, and its parent album, "This Year's Model", is one that I would quite possibly be playing right now if only Carl would let me.

Song of the day

"Boobs A Lot", by The Fugs. From "The Fugs First Album". Not all mid-sixties post-Beat "performance art" falls into the category of "You had to be there".

"They're big and round / They're all around."

Song of the day

"You Never Know", by Wilco. On the weekend I bought the new Wilco album, "Wilco (the album)" (thanks for that). I have only just begun giving it a good listen. It hasn't grabbed me as strongly, or as early, as "Sky Blue Sky", but then the new one seems more a collection of songs as such, and so will quite possibly reveal its real strengths, the way songs do, through repetition. But I can say a couple of things. The first is that this album is, I think, the first Wilco album (at least since the first two, which I don't really know so can't really comment on) in which they don't so much change direction as consolidate recent gains. It could, on that basis, be considered as something of a let-down, but that would be unfair, and would amount to criticising Jeff Tweedy for being, for the first time in a long while, in what they call a "good place".

The second thing I could say is that I am picking up a lot of influences and/or references. As these are to a few of my favourite things, I am of necessity going to be predisposed to like what they do. The opening knees-up, "Wilco (the song)" (thanks again for that), kicks with a 70s-era platform boot. "Deeper Down" is permeated by a distinctly REM turn. Early favourite "Bull Black Nova" is almost, in its first half, an unexpected convergence between my two favourite albums of 2007, "Sky Blue Sky" and Spoon's "Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga". But today I want to give a shout-out to "You Never Know". There is, I suspect, a nod to Talking Heads buried in here somewhere, but more significantly this song contains so much George Harrison that you'll believe in life after death. Coming at a time when, by way of Marcello Carlin's having reached, in his run-down of UK number one albums, the Beatle Years, I have been reabsorbing myself in what made the Fab Four so marvellous and Important, a song like "You Never Know" is exactly what the doctor, unexpectedly, ordered. And I know that last sentence is a bit convoluted but, trust me, it works.

Balls

I'm glad that there exists in this world a band called The Duckworth Lewis Method. It's a pity, though, that the name doesn't belong to some ramshackle bunch of young upstarts, but just a few Old Farts At Play. Still, it's a great name, redolent as it is (when shorn of its cricketing context) of Carnaby Street circa 1966 (like I would know).

Song of the day

"Inspiration Information (Kaoru Inoue Remix Beatless)", by Spikewave. You know how it is, you wake up a bit fragile, you get to work and everything rapidly goes to hell in a handbasket, and you find yourself desperate to listen to some Manuel Gottsching. Well, I wasn't able to get my hands on any Gottsching, but this proves to be a more than adequate substitute. It floats along on its own pillow of breathless air, you can entirely lose yourself in it, and all pain is taken away, as if you had swallowed a giant, fluffy Disprin Forte. It may not extend towards infinity like, say, "E2-E4", but you can put it on repeat and bask in its golden glow for just as long as you need to.

Song of the day

"Mystery Train", by Elvis Presley. Are you meaning to tell me that this never got into the UK top 40? A remarkable failure of record company savvy, if true. Or were there copyright issues?

So, if the lineage of music-related megastardom goes, Frank Sinatra -> Elvis Presley -> Michael Jackson, and we are living in a megastar-devoid moment, who, assuming nature's usual abhorrence of vacuums, could possibly fill that hole? (And, on the evidence of the latter two, (why) would anyone want to?)

Song of the day

"The Minotaur", by The Drones. Let's big up some Australian content. We don't get to do that very often. (Not because there's nothing that's any good, only, and sadly, that we don't get to hear very much of it.) There is something very physical about this song. Brutal, perhaps, but it's a vulnerable brutality: there is life, hope and optimism sitting somewhere within the several walls of guitars. (And I love those guitars. There is something thrilling about them that I haven't been getting from "guitar rock" in many a long year.)

R.I.P. x 3

Three in one day. Blimey. In relation to the third of them, in particular, the world actually does feel a little emptier today.

1. Sky "Sunlight" Saxon, erstwhile singer of The Seeds, one of the better of the "Nuggets"-era bands, responsible in particular for "Can't Seem To Make You Mine", one of the best songs of that or any other age. Saxon, like many others of a similar time and place (that place being, of course, a garage somewhere), underwent a second moment in the spotlight during the garage-rock revival of the latter half of the eighties, but it was not to last.

2. Steven Wells. I always read whatever Wellsy wrote. I didn't always, or perhaps almost ever, find myself in agreement with its content, but Wells had a style all his own, and he was an integral part of the coarsely (very coarsely in Wells's case) woven fabric that was the Golden Age of the New Musical Express.

3. Which leaves the big one, the genuinely unfillable hole. The King of Pop is dead. Long live the King of Pop. I can't believe how churned up I am about Michael Jackson's death. (In fact I am writing this through an unexpected veil of tears.) It's not that it was a shock (c.f. Grant McLennan) so much as that it feels so appallingly inevitable. It is as if, from the moment he was born, Michael Jackson's life was going to end this way - fundamentally alone, lost, his life controlled by people other than himself, and yet he has continued to be a part of the lives of so many people, from the media, who kept falling over themselves to portray him as crazy, wacko, a figure of fun, to people like our own eleven-year-old, who self-evidently has only discovered Michael Jackson long after Jackson's best musical days were behind him, but who will undoubtedly have been devastated upon hearing the news (I think a part of my own devastation is about feeling his pain). The parallels between Michael Jackson and Elvis Presley can now be accurately measured. I suspect they are many. Now that Michael has left the building, all we have is his legacy. And that, as we all now know, is greater than any one man could bear.

Crumbwatch, a continuing series

Further to our recent mention of Crumb's latest New Yorker outing, we have discovered this remarkable pair of photographs. We have been moving our eyes rapidly from one Crumb to the other for so long that we've made ourself dizzy, and we swear that we are unable to categorically say, in either photo, which one is R and which one is his cousin. It is, frankly, weird. (But then, we are talking about the Crumb family.) Matching caps, shirts, beards, sandals. Trousers of the same style, albeit different colours. It's like those stories you hear of identical twins who meet up after having been separated for 30 years, and they've both married girls called Cheryl. That Crumb gene must be mighty strong.

Song of the day

"Cotton Crown", by Sonic Youth. After a rather fraught and difficult weekend (we seem to be having a few of those) the iPod comes to the rescue with "Cotton Crown". Is this my favourite Sonic Youth song? It might be. It is more honest, open and sincere than Sonic Youth have ever allowed themselves to be. Heck, they don't even spell it "Kotton Krown". My only caveat is that the song isn't spun out towards infinity (and beyond!) like so many Sonic Youth songs. But most likely that is the point.

The World's Got Everything In It

Perhaps that's not an entirely true statement, but certainly over time the New Yorker has had pretty much everything in it. But even they have exceeded themselves with this year's Summer Fiction issue, which includes not one, not two, but eleven pages from the forthcoming R Crumb edition of the Book of Genesis. The first eleven pages, at that. You wouldn't buy it just for that, because you will, of course, be buying the book itself when it comes out. (Although it also has a Dan Clowes cover, the second in a month (!), and fiction by Jonathan Franzen, to further lure you in.) But you should at least sneak into a newsagents to flip through the Crumb pages (you will find them towards the back). The most surprising thing is how closely it resembles pretty much any of Crumb's work from the last 40 years. (Adam and Eve, particularly, come across as archetypal Crumb characters, both in the way they look and the way they are.) In fact, it will be an interesting exercise, after reading the R Crumb Book of Genesis, to go back to his other work and see if, perhaps, one could argue that Crumb has been a "biblical" writer all along. (I see a thesis coming on.)

And while we are on the subject of modern interpretations of classic works, it is worth clicking through to beck.com, where the Beckmeister is showing off his latest project: getting a bunch of friends together to record their own take on a classic album. In a day. Unrehearsed. The first album to be tackled is "The Velvet Underground & Nico". At the time of this writing you can watch Beck and his friends running through a gorgeous version of "Sunday Morning", complete with upright bass and marimba. Beck is perhaps under-recognised as a singer: over time he has convincingly tackled everything from Prince to Hank Williams to front-porch southern blues. So it should be no surprise that he sings the lead part here really well, but what makes the song work is the hauntingly gentle backing vocals.

You might assume that an exercise like this is in aid of helping a musician to find, or in Beck's case rediscover, his or her own voice, or to figure out which direction to go in next. It might also amount to airing one's undergarments in public. But with Beck what you see has always been what you get, and every album has been, in some way, a step towards somewhere else, and anyway "Modern Guilt", although I suspect I have neglected to mention it here, is one of my favourite albums of last year. The songs are simple and, for Beck, tightly focussed and arranged, and the whole thing is wrapped in a dense layer of pastoral psychedelia, which is almost always a good thing. So my advice is just to enjoy this latest little venture on its own terms, and with a healthy degree of curiosity as to where it might lead.

(I am also interested in the fact that, of all the music that I have exposed the boys to over the years, the artists who have stuck fastest are Abba, The Beatles and Beck. Fortunately, there is usually enough going on in Beck songs that it is possible to listen to them over and over again without getting tired of them. I don't know how many times I have heard "Midnite Vultures", and yet I still love it. Possibly more than ever. But I can't figure its appeal to pre-teens; exponentially so something as diffuse as "The Information". Carl's level of knowledge of Beck has extended to lyrical minutiae. Which can be a challenge for a parent. I have a feeling Beck is making it up as he goes along. "We've got warheads stacked in the kitchen" was today's example. Dad, what are warheads? Well, they're the explosive pointy end of a missile. Why would you have them stacked in the kitchen? Except, "Warheads" are also an incredibly sour lolly that Jules occasionally and somewhat masochistically buys at the shop. Which it makes sense to have stacked in the kitchen. So who knows? Another time we were stuck on: "Word up to the man-thing / She's always cold lamping." Dad, what's cold lamping? Like I have any idea. (Except for a sneaking suspicion that I am better off not knowing.) (I see another thesis coming on. Beck studies. Carl and I could do for Beck what Christopher Ricks did for Dylan. Except we're not, you know, professors of literature. Or of anything else for that matter.))

Hello Cruel World

Our best thoughts & wishes go out to Chris Knox, mainstay of the NZ music scene for too many years to think about, who, according to Pitchfork, is recovering from a stroke with, at this stage, unknown permanent consequences. We hope for the best. Speaking for ourself, we never really latched onto Tall Dwarfs, but "Not Given Lightly" is and remains one of the great late-20th-century songs - and not appended with the words "from New Zealand", either. And nobody can deny.

The Ellen Willis Dictionary (contd)

Further to my previous post, I have continued reading my way through Ellen Willis's New Yorker "Rock, Etc" columns. In 1972 she used the term "punkiness". Which, while not as surprising as the appearance of "post-rock", is still curious. I know that "punk" was used, at least in the sense of "hoodlum", earlier than this. But at what point it was transposed to the world of music I have no idea. Pre-"punk", undoubtedly. Did McLaren call the Pistols "punk rock" or did the media give them that tag? I should probably know this.

Also, dig the following ad copy from 1974:

Head brings out the best in Julie Heldman.

Let Head bring out the best in you.

Well, I suppose it wouldn't hurt to give it a try.

Rip it up and start again?

The opening sentence of Ellen Willis's second "Rock, Etc" column for the New Yorker, in the issue of 6 July 1968, reads as follows:

The sociology of rock and post-rock has been based on three concepts: the star, the sound, and the scene.

So, Simon, remind me again who coined the phrase "post-rock"? "You can run, but you can't hide" etc etc, heh heh.

What's interesting is that someone in 1968, practically at the birth of the thing called "rock", could already have been thinking in terms of what had already come next, and just goes to show that the seemingly instantaneous fracturing/fragmenting of musical genres isn't confined to South London and/or the Aughties.

(I am, as you have gathered, making it my business to read, or re-read, all of Ellen's New Yorker columns. They are uniformly excellent. Period pieces, sure, but from an unusual source - not the usual hippie-centric pot-driven reveries/ranting of Rolling Stone, nor the POV of "The Man" a la, say, Time Magazine, but, rather, appearing in a curious place inside of the establishment with an editor who had enough nous to have someone writing about a particular artform who actually knows something about that artform As It Is Happening, and not merely observing from the comfort of their glass box. Or whatever. (See also Pauline Kael, the magazine's film critic at that time.))

Kuepperfest

Adrienne has, at various times and accurately, accused me of constructing the following shrines around myself: one to the New Yorker; one to Brian Eno; one to Bob Dylan; one to The Necks; and one to Ed Kuepper. And the Ed Kuepper shrine just got a bit bigger, with the discovery on eMusic (funny how often what you really want to download from eMusic is not the stuff they are trying to sell you) of five volumes of what Ed has rather cheekily entitled the Prince Melon Bootleg Series, comprising four sets of live recordings under Ed's own name (including "Honey Steel's Gold" done for that series of Original Artists Play The Original Albums concerts), and one by the Laughing Clowns comprising the 17-minute "Eternally Yours" recorded at Dingwalls (now there's a name from my late-1970s NME-reading past) and featuring the unexpected reappearance of Louise Elliott into the fold.

I propose writing at some greater length about these recordings in particular, and Ed in general, because I don't think Ed gets anywhere near the credit he deserves. But for now I just wanted to mention a couple of songs that came up sequentially a couple of nights ago on the iPod, both of which were heavy on the Kuepper. First was "Over The Hill", by John Martyn, from "Solid Air", which features, coming at you from the left speaker, a furiously strummed mandolin, something that Ed must surely have heard around the latter years of the Laughing Clowns, given its appearance on songs like "Master of Two Servants" and, later, "When The Sweet Turns Sour". Then came someone even lesser sung than Ed Kuepper, at least in this country, namely Peter Milton Walsh, and his long-running band The Apartments. "End of Some Fear", which hails from the glorious "A Life Full of Farewells", draws on the Laughing Clowns in its structure and instrumentation, and is also notable for the appearance of the word "Fear" in the title, a word that appears once or twice in the Ed Kuepper vernacular.

You Make Me Dizzy

Spent a night in hospital. Feel like shit warmed up. But enough about me. Watch this; it will do you a power of good.

The heck. Watch this as well. It's Good Haircut Week.

Song of the day

"Sun Gonna Shine In My Back Door Someday Blues", by John Fahey. Dig, if you will, the title of this solo guitar piece. It is saying, Things aren't going so well at the moment, but one day in the future I am sure that they will be better. Which is a neat way of summing up the way things are at our house at the moment.

The guitar is an instrument the complexities of which I was not able to understand, or even imagine, until I had a fascinating conversation one day with my good friend Rob. Rob knows his guitars. I always thought you played a note and got a sound, and that was about it. Oh, no it isn't. Playing the acoustic guitar in particular, and especially the way John Fahey plays it, involves exponential levels of complexity, almost of a Man Against Nature magnitude. Okay, you have to be able to play the notes. Which Fahey could undoubtedly do, no matter how complicated and/or rapidfire those notes may have been. But on top of that you have the resonating effects of the body of the guitar, the resonating effects of the strings, the type of wood, the mic-ing up, the sound of the room, and who knows what else, to grapple with. There are live recordings of Fahey that sound like a man riding a precision-made billy cart down a steep hill without brakes or steering wheel, and somehow managing to wind up at the designated finishing point with an air of "all in a day's work". I would love to have seen him play. The existence of a recording entitled "Live in Tasmania" suggests the chance may have been closer than I thought.

You need to hear Fahey's playing. There is a lot of it out there. "The Great Santa Barbara Oil Slick" is a particularly good live recording. It may be the one I was thinking of in the previous paragraph. It's a personal thing, obviously, but I'm not sure that the later, experimental Fahey, mucking about with electronics, electricity and the like, is actually all that rewarding. Many will disagree. Whatever. But I think it is at least arguable that all you really need is the 1996 collection "The Legend of Blind Joe Death", which combines the 1964 and 1967 "Blind Joe Death" recordings of the same set of tunes (there is supposedly a 1959 recording, too, but the provenance of Fahey's recordings, particularly for his own Takoma label, can get a bit murky), with a couple of extras thrown in for good but unnecessary measure. That is where "Sun Gonna Shine" comes from, and I am particularly feeling, today, the 1967 recording. It is a bit longer. It ups the degree of difficulty and the corresponding payoff. The recording is crisp and clear. The guitar behaves itself, even if there are moments when it threatens not to. I love it.

Bible stories

Go here. Read the story, which gives a little insight into what went into the making of R Crumb's forthcoming take on the Book of Genesis. Then click on the picture. When it opens on its own page, click on it again. Look closely. Seems like Crumb has been doing his Best Quality Work, to use a Hughes Primary School benchmark.

For the girl who has everything

Therapy?

Or, Write a two thousand word essay on how my thinking got so screwed up.

Here goes.

Many years ago there was a young man called Stan. He grew up an only child on a small family farm at Fish Creek. The farm was run by his parents and two of his dad's brothers. When Stan was growing up, his world was a narrow one. It revolved around his parents, his uncles, and various other relatives, mostly on his dad's side, who would visit from time to time. Those visits were always very exciting for Stan. Of course he also had childhood friends, but they don't enter into this story.

The two uncles never married. Hence, Stan was the only child not just of his parents but also of the entire farming operation. So the world of the farm, it seemed to Stan, revolved around him. And perhaps it did. It was more than just a home to him. It was his life. Even when he wasn't actually working on the farm, it formed the background to his playing, his study, and anything else that was going on. When he wasn't at school, he was at the farm. To him, that was just the way things were.

He grew to understand that the farm would one day be his. In his small world, he had no reason to think otherwise, anyway, and he thought no more about it.

Eventually young Stan finished high school and moved to Melbourne to go to university. Even then, though, he continued to go back to the farm on holidays and many weekends, and when he had finished university he found a job at a law firm 20 miles from the farm. He began forming plans, with his father, for what they might do together on the farm as his parents started to get older.

Around this time a number of things happened. His mother fell into poor health. He met a girl called Adrienne. And his father, after a very short illness, died of leukemia. Into his truncated and sheltered world entered a number of forces that were beyond his understanding and outside of his control. The result of this combination of outside forces was that the farm was lost. And a fundamental part of the young Stan was lost with it.

Looking back now, after many years, Stan finds himself applying his more mature and sophisticated brain to the exercise of dwelling on what happened, what could have been done differently, and, specifically, whether the farm could have been kept going and if, in fact, it was because of his actions that it was not. The problem with an exercise like that is that Stan now is not the same person as young Stan, and applying his current standards and abilities to the Stan that existed 20 years ago is an exercise in futility. But it is not just an exercise in futility; it is also stopping him from being able to luxuriate in his limitless store of fond memories of life on the farm, and life with his parents, because those memories are constantly being intruded upon by the equally limitless re-living of all that he went through.

And he went through quite a lot, for a young and inexperienced man. Even as he was coming to terms with the idea that his father was going to die, and with the burden of having to break that news to his mother, who was too unwell to be in Melbourne with her husband, he had to also try to make sense of what was happening around him: namely, that his dad's two brothers, and other members of the family, whom he had nothing but fondness for, appeared to be keeping him and his mother at some distance from their dying husband and father.

His mother would always, he had thought, be welcome to stay with the Melbourne branch of the family, as they often had as a family. But for some reason, that was going to be too much trouble for them. She was going to have to find accommodation elsewhere. Which was impossible. So Stan had to ferry his mother to the hospital on the second-last day of his father's life, and sit in at what was a terrible, terrible reunion. And then, the following day, having driven his mother back to the country and then driven, without her, back to Melbourne, in the knowledge that his father would die that day, he found himself waiting in line with other grieving relatives for a chance to be alone with his dad. At least he was able to be there, with Adrienne by his side, when his father died.

To re-tell that story now is difficult enough. But it is hard to imagine how this young man called Stan could have navigated his way through it. What skills did he have? The dynamic between him and the other members of the family was always, in essence, that he stood one step behind and to the side of his father. And that all of them, his parents and his two uncles, essentially stood together. Could he have confronted his Melbourne relatives and insisted that they give his mother a bed for a few nights? Of course not. Did they deny her this so as to keep Stan and his mother at one remove from his father, knowing that Stan would have to divide his time between the hospital and where his mother was staying, two hours away, and that she was too unwell to be able to spend any length of time at the hospital? The thought would never have entered his head. He was not an active participant in whatever was going on, but a young man trying to deal with events that he could not understand. Were they trying to send a message to him, and his mother, that his mother was not "real" family? Well, he would have had no idea about anything like that.

He also didn't understand what was happening when, in the days after his father died and before the funeral, he watched another older brother of his father's, visiting the farmhouse to pay his respects, and wandering around looking at things as if taking an inventory, and making no secret of it.

What young Stan gradually figured out for himself was that, unbeknownst to him, the older of his two uncles had never accepted his mother, and that uncle called the shots throughout the family. So Stan never stood a chance, really, because from a very young age he had worshipped that uncle. There was nobody there to explain to Stan that he would have to choose between the family and his mother. But choose is what he was forced to do, and what he did, and of course his loyalty was to his mother. In making that choice, though, the fate of the farm was sealed. His uncle ruled out the idea of any kind of partnership in the absence of his father, and his mother was not prepared to put her own financial security in the hands of his uncle, so the relationship had to end.

His role, really, was to watch the relationship, and the farm, fall apart, and in a practical sense to facilitate that happening. He had the skills, and the legal knowledge, to know the mechanics of what had to be done and to be able to make that happen. What he didn't have was the ability, or the worldliness or maturity, perhaps, to intervene, or to try and wrest control of things from his uncle and the extended family.

One particular task that fell to him, because his uncle had sent them to see him rather than doing it himself, was to tell the sharefarmers that the farm wouldn't be continuing on beyond the end of the season and that they had better look for work elsewhere. He didn't understand why it came to him to do that, because the business of the farm was nothing to do with him. But he did it anyway.

Is it any wonder, then, that as time has passed he has come to place himself at the centre of the story, as an active player, rather than as the inexperienced, well, not victim exactly, but participant in the collapse of everything that had been most important to him? And, of course, all of these things were compounded on top of his own grieving, and coming to terms with his own changed world, and the family history he hadn't known, and hadn't been prepared for, and taking the necessary steps to ensure that his mother was able to be looked after and cared for (itself an unexpected role reversal for which he was ill prepared). And, let us not forget, young Stan had no brothers or sisters to turn to for advice, and his mother was in no condition to take any of the pressure off him. In fact, at the same time as Stan was at the centre of this cyclone, hanging on just enough to make sure that her interests were looked after, his mother was dealing with her own grief and poor health, and taking out her own frustrations on him. So he had, really, nowhere to turn, no one making sure he was alright. Well, he had Adrienne, but she wasn't part of this particular history. It wasn't her approbation he was looking for.

In the wash-up, his mother kept a small part of the farm. As for the family, he walked away. He couldn't really do otherwise. He didn't burn bridges, he just left them behind. There was too much hurt, too much doubt and confusion, for him to be able to just turn back into the arms of the people who had done this to him. For a few years, his mother's part of the farm was leased out to neighbours as a turn-out paddock. But it wasn't viable on its own, wasn't as well looked after as if it had been owner-operated, and, especially after he moved to Canberra with his own family, was too far away to be enjoyed for recreational purposes. So, long after his mother herself had died, he made the final decision to sell what was left of it. But that decision, which was his own, was really only the full stop at the end of the chapter that had written itself when he was only 25 years old.

So, if the Stan of 2009 wants to ask the questions, What did he do wrong? and What could he have done differently?, which, anyway, are questions that are unfair to the Stan of 1989, the least you can say is, he did what he had to do. You should, though, go on to say that in the circumstances he also did the "right" thing, when those whom he understood to be his elders and betters were putting pressure on him to do otherwise, pressure he was in no position to resist, and at a time when, on so many levels, he was trying to get his bearings in a world that had so quickly and so unexpectedly become so different from the one he thought he knew. So the fact that he did resist that pressure, that he supported his mother, when he could see what he thought would always belong to him slipping away from him as a direct result of those decisions, says something, and perhaps it says rather a lot, about how well he performed, at the age that he was, and with the skills that he had, and with the maturity that he didn't yet have. And perhaps it also says that he went through things that very few young adults would ever be asked to navigate, essentially on his own.

When he is able to think back to those times, and what he had to do, and what he did, and in particular when he is able to remind himself that he was not then the person that he is now, well, then he will have untied the knot that has been snarling his thoughts for a long, long time, and he will be as free as a bird, free to soar over the childhood that still exists, in brilliant technicolour inside of his head, and the view will no longer be obscured by clouds.

Song of the day

"Put Down The Ducky", I suppose I should say "by Sesame Street", but that doesn't look right. And yet it is a Sesame Street song. For some reason the boys, in their later primary school years, are having a SS revival, so we are hearing many old favourites (and the occasional clanger) in the car. Sesame Street was responsible for a great many songs that have stood the test of time. Which is something you can't say for, say, Hi-5. "Put Down The Ducky", Carl tells me, is sung by Hoots the Owl. If so, Tom Waits should be instructing his lawyers. This is, in essence, the pre-"Swordfishtrombones" Waits, accompanied by a rubber duck where the saxophone should be. I can't hear it too many times. (Though if you ask me again in a fortnight I may have a different view on that.)

Good Cover Version

I write about Beach House more than is probably good for me. But I like what they do. And I like their version of Queen's "Play The Game", which strips out all of the pomp and bombast of the original and turns it into, well, into a Beach House song. As I understand it, this was recorded for the "Dark Was The Night" charity compilation, a record which was just too pick-and-miss for my liking, but which I would have been more likely to pony up for if this had been included on it. Fortunately the Internet reveals all, sooner or later.

Traffic

What follows is the text of an email I sent today to the person in charge of pedestrian crossings in the ACT. If you are driving in this area, please take care. I would like to watch my children grow up.

Good afternoon.

I work at the High Court. I travel most days by public transport. To catch the bus home of an evening, I have to use the pedestrian crossing opposite the Court on King Edward Terrace. Each of the last three evenings, I have had to take evasive action when using the crossing, in order to avoid being run over.

Twice I have been half way or more across the crossing when cars travelling west have failed to see me or stop (each time they have slowed down after having gone past me, but then kept going). Last night I had stepped out onto the crossing when a car travelling east failed to see me in time and had to swerve into the oncoming traffic to avoid hitting me. (Then, while I was waiting at the bus stop, I observed a man crossing the other way, i.e. from Finance towards the Court, have to stop in the middle of the crossing as two cars in a row failed to either see or stop for him.)

This is not the only time I have had to take evasive action using this crossing, but the fact of it happening three nights in a row prompted me to put my concerns in writing. It is only a matter of time before somebody is killed using this crossing. That person may or may not be me. I don't know what the problem is, the crossing appears to be well lit. Perhaps it is not being noticed because it is in the middle of a sequence of closely placed T intersections, so drivers have a lot to look out for.

Perhaps it needs flashing lights or something else that would attract drivers' attention.

Thank you

(This reminds me of the famous Pauline Hanson "If you are watching this message" tape. "If this is the last entry on this weblog, I was killed this evening on my way home from work." Let's hope not.)

Song of the day

"Remember Me", by Tame Impala. It starts off like you could be listening to an early recording from The Chills or The Clean. But after a couple of bars we're headed straight for the garage. What is it with Australia and garage rock revivals? We can't seem to get enough of them. (And of course we were in on the ground floor, with the likes of The Loved Ones, amongst others.) But when the quality is this good, who's complaining? This particular iteration pushes things a bit further: just before the three minute mark they "take it right down"; then they slowly and tantalisingly "bring it right back up again", culminating in a bit of almost-metal riff-o-rama that one (well, "I") cannot resist. Curiously, the vocals, particularly around that point, sound like nothing as much as the strained warble of Eno on his early sequence of "pop" records. Which, of course, only serves to make it more appealing to some of us.

Link of the day

I don't know why this makes me feel all gooey inside. Well, gooey and just a little bit queasy, to be precise.

(And a welcome return to Mr Ingram, too.)

Song of the day

"The Carny", by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. It is with mixed feelings that I announce that I can no longer listen to this song without thinking of John Ratzenberger's travelling flea circus in "A Bug's Life". Curse you, Pixar.

By the way, the new remasters of the first four Bad Seeds albums do sound nice. I'm not sure whether it is the remastering or the passage of time that has revealed the importance of Blixa Bargeld to the enterprise.

Song of the day

"You Are The Worst Thing In The World", by Telefon Tel Aviv. A fine song from a fine album, an album with such intense depths of emotion locked into the very sound of it that one is inclined to think that it is little wonder that one of their number didn't survive its completion. When I am listening to this album while walking, there are moments when I stagger. Is it just that I am programmed to respond to certain analog synth sounds, whereas you might not be? Or is there something inherently devastating in those sounds?

In any event, the (rhetorical) question must be asked: Why is it that when, in this song, the synth goes out of tune, it is art, whereas when the same thing happens during the live portion of Joy Division's "Still", it is just the synth going out of tune?

Nightmare scenario of the day

Somehow, watching the Battle of Helm's Deep segment of the second "Lord of the Rings" movie (a sequence which I always find inexplicably distressing; it's only a story and I know how it ends, and yet ...) got me thinking about the Taliban in Pakistan. My brain "likes" to play What If. (Sometimes I don't like my brain.) What if the Taliban, with or without the backing of al Qaeda (if that organisation still exists, or in fact if it ever did), did manage to overrun Pakistan, or sufficient of it to get control of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal? What then? The only silver lining that could come out of that would be to relegate my concerns about climate change to a distant second place. (As I have said before, global warming would be counter-balanced by a nuclear winter.) Rogue weaponry is never a good idea, and especially on this scale.

My knowledge of areas, populations, relative strengths, and other relevant factors is insufficient to tell me whether it is even a remote possibility. But assuming, for the sake of argument, that it could happen, that the Taliban are the rampaging horde of Orcs* and the rest of us are cowering in our own Helm's Deep, can we look to the coming of Gandalf on the morning of the fifth day? (Look to the east.) Could Gandalf, in the guise of Barack Obama, spirit away Pakistan's nuclear arsenal to a safe place for the duration? Presumably even the Americans couldn't consider doing so by force, but would Pakistan's generals agree? And what about India? Theirs would need to go, as well, in order to placate Pakistan.

And while we're at it, should we perhaps go one step further and get rid of everybody else's? (I don't know where you could put them. How safe is Fort Knox really?) Yes, I know, now I'm just being silly. And yet it may turn out that the battlements of Helm's Deep would have been a safer bet.

* Here, the eleven-year-old corrects me: they are not mere Orcs, they are Uruk-Hai. It's important to get these things right.

Everybody's Talkin'

... about Sonic Youth. Now it's my turn.

If "Murray Street" was your only Sonic Youth album you would be pretty happy with it. It does all the things Sonic Youth albums do, and it does them quite well. But a band like Sonic Youth is not designed to be treated like a comfortable old pair of slippers, and that is what they seem to have become. If you treat "Murray Street" as one of however many post-"Daydream Nation" albums, it is just another inessential footnote. (I do have a particular soft spot for the sprawling "A Thousand Leaves", but aside from that I have to agree with Marcello, it's what he calls the "solid 95th album" thing of too many, too similar, none really hitting a fresh nerve.)

Speaking only for myself, the time when Sonic Youth really mattered was actually quite brief. Everything before "Sister" was too lacking in any recognisable "structure" for me to be able to grab hold of it. Everything after "Daydream Nation", well, see the previous paragraph. (And they moved to Geffen when I was at an age, and of an attitude, when a band doing something like moving to Geffen seemed like an uneraseable Black Mark, so that it wouldn't really have mattered how good "Goo" and "Dirty" were, I wouldn't have been listening. (Which, yes, might well have been my loss, but really, aside from having been put to good use in a couple of Hal Hartley films, I still don't think, even in my "mature" phase, that either album saw the group trying very hard.))

But "Sister" is where they started to figure something out about what they could do with the things they were doing, and "Daydream Nation", which, from the Gerhard Richter cover art to the final fadeout, is sublimely perfect in every way, is why Sonic Youth matter. I cannot praise any album higher than "Daydream Nation", but nor can I write about it because my response to it is outside of language. (And let us also acknowledge "Into The Groove(y)", where the group briefly emerge from their own cocoon and observe, albeit from an "ironic" distance, the world around them.)

They may be a convenient target for those who need targets (and Kim and Thurston may in many ways come across as A Little Bit Too Cool, A Little Bit Too Perfect), but they have their place in history and I don't think anybody can say they haven't earned it.

Song of the day

"Sad Robot", by Pornophonique. The subject matter is what got me interested. The Flight of the Conchords-style guitar strum made me tune in. The computer-game bleeps and vocoder were the icing on the cake. There is something very distressing about sad robots. Can they even cry?

Song of the day

"Ritz", by Cockney Rebel. If you leave out the accepted wisdom of how Steve Harley had enormous tickets on himself and was all but impossible to work with, all of which may or may not be true, what you have left is the music. The dramatic reach and musical depth of this song, from 1974's second and final Cockney Rebel album (as such), "The Psychomodo", manages to out-Bowie what Bowie was doing at the same time. It also serves to highlight all that was lacking in Harley's soon-to-follow UK Number One single, "Come Up And See Me (Make Me Smile)", which to these antipodean ears has always sounded like a second-rate parody of what an actual Cockney rebel would sound like. (Which is not, really, to say that the latter is not perfectly enjoyable on its own terms (it is), just that those terms didn't contain much in the way of ambition.)

Song of the day

"Something You've Got (Isn't Good)", by Barbara Manning. Barbara Manning would have a right to be a little, shall we say, bemused by the excitement that has been generated by Vivian Girls. Listen to this song; then listen to, say, the latter's "Where Do You Run To". I think you will see what I mean. If we really have gone nowhere since the late 80s, at least it's in a good way.

Fanboy thrill of the day

If you click here you will be taken to a page wherein you can (a) admire the latest addition to Daniel Gillespie Clowes's growing collection of New Yorker covers, and (b) scroll through some work-in-progress sketches for his next book, which is something you can't do every day.

Hypothetical mixtape: January 2009

Welcome to the first 2009 hypothetical mixtape. Sure, it's five months old, but you should be used to that by now. No thought has gone into the sequencing. Build your own.

"Taken Too Young", by TTA. A song from Sweden that echoes both Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark and "Sorrow", and features vocals, by Victoria Bergsman of The Concretes, that are from the school of Tracy Thorn. In other words, a lot of personal buttons are being pressed (surely not "cynically manipulated"?) in the course of this drifting, melancholy pop song.

"What Did He Say", by Nite Jewel. I fell in love with this song when I first heard it. If my ardour has cooled somewhat in the interim, that is only because what I have heard of Ms Jewel's subsequent work suggests that perhaps this song's blend of minimalist glamour and cheap electronics wasn't the direction that she intended to go in. Which would be a shame. I can't put a finger on any particular forebears (although the song hasn't just fallen from outer space). So I won't. (Okay, you win: Kathy Diamond if you replaced Maurice Fulton with a very young Boyd Rice.) But its charms, icy, frosty and/or steely as they may be, are all its own.

Pacifika, "Sweet (Quiet Village Remix)". It's hard to tell what's organic and what's electronic here. The acoustic guitar sounds too real to be really real. There's no actual song here, just the impression of one. Ooh look, they're Canadian.

Ducktails, "Beach Point Pleasant". Some kind of otherworldly, disembodied pop music. You could use it as the soundtrack to a children's television programme if you were in the mood to watch kids running away from the screen and hiding under their parents' bed. It reminds me a bit of the non-vocal aspects of the first Broadcast single (thanks, Bart).

I-Robots, "Frau (Kid Alex Minimal to Disco Mix)". It is perhaps strange that I have been attracted to German techno music, as I have long studiously shunned both of its selling points: drugs and dancefloors. But this song has all of the elements that I am drawn to. You can tap your feet to it. You can hear the connections to one particular strand of my beloved post-punk records in the flat German vocals. You can marvel, nay thrill, to the sheer breadth and depth of the electronic sounds that are continually being thrown at you and then shifting, almost surreptitiously, as you try to grasp them. You can allow yourself to be absorbed into the tension-and-release dynamics that are so expertly set up by the music. This particular example also sets itself apart from the seamless one-song-into-another aspect of much of this music by allowing itself to fall apart at the finish.

Jeremy Jay, "Love Everlasting". Rudimentary synths, electric guitar lines, bass playing and drumming conjures something much, much more than the sum of the parts. This is a gloriously expansive bedroom pop number, and the first release on K Records that we can remember getting excited about since, oh, about 1989? Dude looks like he just walked out of a 1979 New Wave Time Warp. We won't hold that against him.

Peter Dundov, "Oasis (Gavin Russom Remix)". Gavin Russom has been quiet since his and Delia Gonzalez's "The Days of Mars" analogue space synth extravaganza. (And whither Black Leotard Front?) Happily, this 12-inch b-side takes up where that record left off. It sounds much like what "Days of Mars" might have if they had pressed it on top of a sheet of vinyl containing modern electronic dance music rather than on a clean piece of acetate.

Cotton Jones, "Gotta Cheer Up". This song wants to be your friend. Not in a needy, clinging-to-your-leg kind of way, but in a gentle, sweet kind of way. It doesn't have any tickets on itself, it just wanders in, does what it does, and wanders out again. Its roots are clearly enough in sixties garage pop, but it also draws on the kind of dreamy driftwood that Beach House have made their own. Also, it takes the organ used on Nick Cave's "Your Funeral ... My Trial" and conjures a gorgeous melody from it.

Emiliana Torrini, "Jungle Drum". Worth it just to hear her sing "doonga doonga googadooga doong goong" (approximate translation). This may be only place in the whole wide Internet where you can see Emiliana Torrini referred to without a corresponding reference to Bjork. Oh, blast.

Ofege, "Gbe Mi Lo". Psych rock funk guitar as it was done in Nigeria circa 1973. We can't get enough of that fuzzy wukka-wukka sound.

Shinichi Osawa, "Star Guitar". Big, fat drum and guitar sounds from the "rock" end of electronica, with some sweeping MBV (or, for a more recent example, M83) style chord changes to knock you off your feet. Leavened, gorgeously, by the voices of those Au Revoir Simone girls.

Coralie Clément, "Samba De Mon Coeur Qui Bat". And I melt. The album cover has her looking stunning in the manner of sixties French film stars. That's enough for me. Or so I thought. But she also sings like an angel. Where have you been all my life?

Muslims, "Walking With Jesus". Yes, it is *that* "Walking With Jesus". What I particularly like about this version, aside from the fact that it picks up the song and frogmarches it promptly back into the garage, is that the whole enterprise, from the sound quality to the cover art, is pure late-80s seven-inch-single heaven.

Real Estate, "Black Lake". Almost Google-proof, Real Estate refuse to reveal any secrets to me aside from this song. It's a quiet gem. The influence of Beach House is turning up in a lot of places these days. One day we will be sick of the sight of them, but today is not that day.

John Carpenter, "Assault on Precinct 13 (Main Theme)". It just seemed right to end a list that relies rather a lot on old and creaky analogue (and, in the case of the Gavin Russom remix, home-made) synths with the real thing. A film director who does his own soundtracks. No, it's not Hal Hartley. (Where did he get to anyway?) According to Wikipedia this was partly inspired by "Immigrant Song". The word "loosely" might be well employed here.

Song of the day

"Gail Loves Me", by Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers. Following on from a pretty crap weekend, this song is just what was needed to put a little bit of autumnal bounce back into one's step.

Song of the day

"Paper Tiger", by Spoon. Question: how much can you strip out of a song before it ceases to be a "song"? This is a question that Spoon appear intent on finding the answer to. The answer seems to be: quite a lot. I went second-hand-CD shopping a couple of weekends ago (thanks to Uncle Kevin) and one of the things I came home with was Spoon's 2002 album "Kill The Moonlight". You get the impression, if you listen closely, that Spoon work hard figuring out what goes into each corner of each song, and, even more crucially, what gets left out. "Paper Tiger" stands out for being so minimal as to be almost an abstraction, but it is in fact as strong a pop song as you could wish for.

The more Spoon I listen to, the more impressed I am with what it is that they do. And with what it is that they don't do. It's the "fish John West reject" methodology applied to the pop song.

Song of the day

"The More That I Do", by The Field. This is the first taste of The Field's "Yesterday & Today", the forthcoming follow-up to 2007's "From Here We Go Sublime". (Or not, if you count his "Sound of Light", a collaboration with a Swedish hotel - n.b. not a typo.) As such it is, in and of itself, a cause for excitement. On the evidence of this track, we are in for more of the same, which is not yet a cause for concern, although there must be some danger that Mr Willner could, if he isn't careful, work himself into some sort of a corner. The steel drums at the end are a nice touch. And I swear the vocal sample this time around is taken from somewhere deep within the Cocteau Twins' "Treasure".

Song of the day

"Steinlager", by The Chills. "Mmmmm. Beer."



Elsewhere, today's headline of the day:

"Woman sees Jesus in toast".

Obviously.

Song of the day

"Keeping Us Together", by Keith Hudson. Perhaps as surprising a connection as the one discovered (or "invented"?) on yesterday's Song of the Day, today we bring you Keith Hudson, emerging from the deepest darkest dub jungle with - believe it ... or not - the first line of the chorus of "Macho Man", by The Village People. Although, given those Jamaicans' tendency to borrow liberally from other sources, and given also that Hudson's "Nuh Skin Up" was originally released in 1979, the year after "Macho Man" appeared, you might well think that it is not surprising at all.

Song of the day

"Seerosengiessen", by Thomas Fehlmann. In which German techno channels Snakefinger. Who'da thunk it? (With, I think, a little bit of "My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts" thrown in for good measure.)

We Were Rwong

Yesterday we said, having foolishly trusted the sequence of songs as they appeared on our iPod, that "Point That Thing Somewhere Else" was the first song on The Clean's "Mashed". In fact, it sits somewhere in the middle. Which shoots our point about sequencing down in flames, but doesn't weaken the almighty power of the song itself, wherever it might appear.

Also, we did, as promised, listen to The Bats' "Couchmaster" last night, and were horrified to discover that it came into our life FOURTEEN years ago. Wow, where did that go? The good news is the record itself, unlike us, hasn't aged a bit. "For The Ride" I think I have mentioned here before, a very Clean-like propulsive vehicle of the type you would like to see go on forever. And as Adrienne said, "Afternoon in Bed" is the kind of song that really gets you where you live. My response, "What? Canberra?", was neither funny nor wanted.

Song of the day

"Point That Thing Somewhere Else", by The Clean. I try to resist this song. I can escape its clutches for the first two bars, but I always trip on the next note and tumble headlong into its endless corridors and its many rooms. There is something primally thrilling about "Point That Thing Somewhere Else". I can't say exactly what it is. Perhaps it is not so much a song as a template. Certainly, that is how The Clean treat it. There are several live versions floating around, and they all take on lives of their own. The most recent, and the one that prompted this post, is the opening song on "Mashed", a live recording of a recent Clean tour, and presumably the opening song of the set from which it is taken. How a band that gets together briefly once every few years, perhaps plays a few gigs, perhaps makes a record, can instantly hit such peaks of creative intensity is a credit to the Dunedin drinking water, I guess. There are not that many live recordings that genuinely make you wish you had been there.

Meanwhile the influence of The Clean continues to show up in surprising places, e.g. the forthcoming second album from Wooden Shjips, whom I had previously nailed as acolytes of Crazy Horse (itself no bad thing) but who seem to also be drawing from "Point That Thing", or perhaps more accurately "Point That Thing" filtered through a prism of early Suicide.

And another meanwhile: word is getting around that there will be a new album by The Bats (the "other" band of Robert Scott, when he is not playing bass with The Clean) in June. If their last two albums are anything to go by, this should be worth waiting for. "Couchmaster", in particular, which must by now be ten years old, is a key Dunedin recording. In fact, I think I know what I will be listening to tonight.

No More Heroes

Disappointing to have to return from our Easter hiatus with a Death Notice, but such it is, as we mark the passing of J G Ballard, literary titan of the twentieth century and probably the first writer I was able to think of as more than just The Person Whose Name Is On The Book.

I am inclined to remember where I was when I read a book more readily than what was in the book itself. Thus, "The Drowned World" to me will always be inseparable from the Echuca Caravan Park. Which, taking that thought one step further, given the current plight of the no longer Mighty Murray River, it would have been more appropriate for me to have been reading "The Drought" there. (Whereas "The Drought" was actually read at 166 Nicholson Street, Fitzroy, where its title was also borrowed for the name of a band of which I was briefly a member, but which had a longer and richer history without me.)

Reynolds, meanwhile, has posted a collection of dated but evocative (is that what you-all mean by "hauntological"?) covers of Ballard paperbacks. How does he do that?

Regrets

At the start of the Butthole Surfers song "Sweat Loaf", Gibson Jerome ("Gibby") Haynes says (and this, I should point out, is followed by one of the great moments in rock and roll), "It's better to regret something you have done than to regret something that you haven't done". Which may generally hold true, but I can safely say that I have never regretted anything as much as I regret ever having heard "Y Viva Suspenders", by Judge Dread.

We're going to take a short break now, but we'll be back in a while. Happy Easter.

The Biggest Number

Back when oi were a wee young feller-me-lad (well actually it was much later than I thought, 1990 in fact, the year in which I moved to Melbourne and got married) Mad Love Publishing put out the first two issues of what was to be a 12-issue comic book called "Big Numbers", written by Alan Moore and drawn by Bill Sienkiewicz. There was no Internet then, and no real way to find out what was going on. But we waited for the third issue to appear. And waited. And waited. Until eventually we got interested in other things and gradually forgot all about it. Except we didn't quite forget all about it: we held those first two issues tightly to our chest, and maintained a foolish hope, year after year, that perhaps we would one day wake up as if from a dream and find out what happens next.

The story of the story, as far as we can piece it together:

"Big Numbers" seems to have been something of the equivalent of Terry Gilliam's attempt to film "Don Quixote". Moore wanted, typically, to produce something bigger in every way than anybody else could ever have imagined or conceived, let alone pulled off. A 360-page comic book, chronicling the attempt by an American corporation to build an enormous shopping mall in the middle of middle England (Northampton, to be precise, Moore's own tramping ground). And the locals' attempts to fight against it (shades of "Local Hero"?), come to terms with it, live their own lives, and more or less everything else he could get into it, possibly including the kitchen sink. He was also thinking, as we all were then, about chaos theory, and the idea to build this mall may have been Moore's proverbial butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon basin or whatever. I seem to recall reading that he was planning on calling it "The Mandelbrot Set". The first issue was all black and white. The second had one splash of colour. By the end of the series, it was going to be all colour. Moore had an entire wall of his house covered with the various plot lines and intersections, and how it might all come together.

Something happened to Bill Sienkiewicz's eyesight somewhere around the making of issue 3. He had to walk away from the project. Mad Love Publishing, which was a by-product of the untold riches made by the creators of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, may have run out of money. The replacement illustrator, which may or may not have been Al Columbia, left the project in "mysterious" circumstances while either working on, or having finished, issue 3, or issue 4, or not, and having destroyed, or not, the entirety of issue 3, or 4, or both, or neither. Moore's hyperactive brain moved onto other things. In short, "Big Numbers" stalled at issue 2 and was never going to progress any further.

Until:

The Freaky Trigger side bar, which has long been the source of most of the best unknown (by us) Internet marginalia and wonder, was updated some time last week with the cryptic words "Big Numbers #3". Those words scratched an itch in our brain. No, we thought, surely not, it's a coincidence, it's something else entirely. It must be. A giant number 3 or something. Somewhat tentatively, we clicked, thinking we would probably wish we hadn't. But as a result of that click we have been able to print out, and savour, and marvel over, and scratch our head in wonder about the provenance of, issue 3 of "Big Numbers". Only 18 and a half years after the appearance of issue 2.

It seems that somebody else with a long memory found on eBay a package deal with issues 1 and 2 together with "rare unpublished xerox Alan Moore". This person took a punt, was the only bidder, and presumably fell off their chair upon opening the package. After apparently seeking Moore's permission, they had it scanned and uploaded. (For which we say, Thank you.)

But what is it? To our amateur forensic eye, it is, clearly enough, "Big Numbers 3". The page count is right, the page dimensions are right, the story follows on, or would appear to, from issue 2, and crucially, it matches panel for panel Moore's own detailed instructions for the first eight pages, which have been floating around cyberspace for a while now. It is only in black and white, so there are no clues about the further use of colour. It doesn't have a cover. The artwork appears to be something more than a rough draft, but something less than the finished article. I would venture that some of it is Sienkiewizc, some of it not. But in the end it doesn't really matter. It is the comic book equivalent of somebody finding manuscript pages in J D Salinger's rubbish bin: the fact of its existence is at least as significant as what it actually says. Sure, it continues the story, but we are still only a quarter of the way through, and presumably that is as far as we are ever going to go, so it doesn't exactly add much to the sum of human understanding.

Unless.

Unless the groundswell of excitement that the past few days have seen on message boards etc. sparks something in Moore, or Columbia, or whoever, to move things along. The story is a time capsule, sure, but the nature of the story is that that would be what it became anyway, Moore would have known and most likely intended this, and its completion 20 years later would really be neither here nor there. And Moore is so notorious for providing novel-length storyboards for his comics that, if they exist for the rest of "Big Numbers" (another mystery), well, any exceptionally talented artist could turn them into comic books if somebody could pay for the printing.

Sigh.

Song of the day

"Exposure", by Robert Fripp. What a remarkable song this is. I am coming at it from a distance of 25 years, possibly more, but I remember it very well from evenings listening to static-y AM signals from Sydney's 2JJ (who knew radio waves could travel so far?). If I had recognised Eno's voice reading out the letters of the song's title I would have been more excited than would have been good for me. (I got way too excited when I picked Eno's voice out of the backing vocals in U2's "Pride (In The Name Of Love)" a few years later, and had to have a lie down.) If I had known it was co-written by Peter Gabriel I would have been a bit surprised (still am). If I had recognised how much, musically, it anticipated Byrne and Eno's "My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts" I would have been able to see the future (not, however, as in "I have seen the future of rock'n'roll and..."). Musically, also, of course, it echoes the kinds of sounds Fripp and Eno were coaxing out of the humble electric guitar on songs like "Wind On Water" a few years before. I have never been entirely comfortable with Terre Roche's screamings, but then I have never been comfortable with screaming in general (I think I worry for people who are able to let themselves go to that degree) and Terre Roche, in most other contexts, is to be unconditionally loved, so on that basis she, and they, get away with it.

The more things change ...

This, from an uncredited 1959 New Yorker review of a book called "Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression", by Harris Gaylord Warren (and I'm sorry, but the name Gaylord will forever remind me of "Meet The Parents"):

Enough time has passed to allow us to think about the depression, that fascinating and not yet entirely comprehensible catastrophe, with some objectivity. ... [Hoover] did not cause the depression ... but he did not do much to end it, partly because he did not comprehend its magnitude. The irresponsibility, chicanery, and stupidity that helped bring it about were common on the upper levels of American finance and industry all during the twenties ... When the depression came, Hoover met it with a consistently inadequate set of principles. ... [Warren] suggests that Hoover was not a bad man but that, since he was unwilling to use the powers of the federal government to intervene decisively in an economic crisis, he was a poor President.

Well, hello, what have we here?

Summer camp

The recent spate of extreme hot weather put me in mind of my second experience of spending an extended period of time away from home and away from my parents. It was the end of form 1, I was 12 years old, and Weary and I found ourselves at a church camp in the wilds of East Gippsland, a sparsely populated, isolated part of Victoria that gets very hot in summer, which it then was, and which carries, in the popular imagination, intimations of hillbillies and in-breeding.

The camp was run by two people who, unlikely as this may sound, were both called Robert Luff (leading to much humorous banter along the lines of "which one?" and "will the real Robert Luff please stand up?"). For the first few days we stayed at a shearing shed somewhere outside an off-the-map town called Ensay. The shearing shed sat on the side of a bare hill, with no other sign of humanity visible in any direction. It was infested with huntsman spiders, and rumours quickly took hold as to how, in previous years, girls had run screaming (although I knew, but kept to myself, that it wouldn't just be the girls if it happened to me) from the shed on the discovery of a huntsman in a sleeping bag. Fortunately this didn't happen on our camp, but their lurking presence created a Hitchcockian sense of tension nevertheless.

The toilet, not itself devoid of spiders, was a wooden shed a hundred yards downhill (and, mercifully, downwind) containing a box with a hole in it, resting atop a pit containing about 20 million blowflies. I can only remember making one trip to that toilet in all the time I was there. Is there such a thing as fear-induced constipation?

And have I mentioned the snakes?

It's funny the things you don't remember. I have no idea how we got all the way from Fish Creek to Ensay, even though it is a trip that would have taken a few hours. In fact, I have very little recollection of anything that we did while at the shearing shed, or what we ate. I do remember the heat.

One day we drove to Swift's Creek, where I was able to briefly nurture my addiction to newsagencies, and where there was a much-needed swimming pool. One evening we took a long walk down the hill and along a heavily shaded gravel road beside a creek. It was a lovely spot. I imagine we had a picnic there, but I can't be sure. We did have a swim in the creek, its stony bottom perfectly visible, a bridge just upstream for running along, and jumping off. It would have been close to perfect, except for the fact that at some point along that walk something unpleasant happened.

I suppose I was at an age where hormones start to kick in, and bodies and temperaments do mysterious and inexplicable things. Weary and I had been best buddies since, well, since kindergarten really, and we were practically inseparable. For the second half of primary school Weary was one of a number of kids to be transferred by their parents to Foster Consolidated, on account of the experimental nature of teaching at Fish Creek under a principal and his cohort of teachers who had taken over our school in Grade 3 (a story that remains to be told). So his reappearance in my life when we both found ourselves at Foster High was like a dream come true. Thus, what happened while we were out on this walk was somewhat unexpected. I do know that it happened only inside my own head. Weary may not have even noticed anything amiss, and even if he did, he would probably have taken no notice of it.

I have, and this was only remarkable for being the first time it happened, this thing where something will trigger a sudden withdrawal from whatever is going on around me, and I fall into a dark place of frustration, confusion, anger: if you called it Extreme Sulking you might not be far off. It can happen at any time, and be caused by anyone or anything (or maybe even nothing), and there is nothing to do but wait it out and try not to burn any bridges in the process.

So, there we all were, walking along in this beautiful landscape. Weary was mixing and having fun with the others, in a way that I couldn't. Before long it seemed to me that I was alone in the world. I knew that I didn't need to be, that I was among friends, but I felt trapped, and helpless to do anything about it. I got really, really angry, muttered terrible things to myself in response to what the others, particularly Weary, were saying, and physically withdrew from the group. Swimming in the river shook me out of it, but the feeling resonated, and confused me, for some time. I had discovered something about myself that I hadn't known before, and that I would rather not have found out. And I knew, too, that this longstanding friendship had suffered a unilateral, debilitating blow from which it would stagger along for some time but never really recover.

The camp went on. The last couple of nights we stayed at a church hall in Omeo. There was a swimming hole at a bend in the creek in the centre of town, where we spent a long afternoon and where I managed to lose my glasses. I had gotten used to swimming around without them on, and I simply failed to realise that I wasn't wearing them. They fell out of the towel and onto the ground. The next morning, we went exploring a warren of caves on the side of a hill. I could barely see a thing without my glasses, which made scaling the hill difficult, and it didn't really help with my fear of heights, as I had no real idea of where I was in relation to the ground except for the fact that it was some indeterminate distance below where I was. Later on that day, we went back to the swimming hole, where my glasses were waiting for me, intact but in bad need of a clean.

We went for a midnight walk to the local cemetery, where we scared the bejesus out of ourselves, mucking about with torches, making scary noises, and telling ghost stories and other tales of mystery (such as the one where the girl is sitting in the car on a deserted road while the fellow goes out to investigate some movement over in the trees at the side of the road, and then, hearing a banging noise on the roof of the car, she gets out to investigate, only to discover that the banging is, well, I don't think I should go any further actually, there may be children watching).

We also listened, many times, to a Rolling Stones cassette that was in someone's possession. "Sympathy for the Devil", in hindsight, seems a bit out of place in a church hall.

The camp ended. So, eventually, did my friendship with Weary, although not for a little while longer, and even then perhaps not forever. I never heard from any of the other participants again, nor have I ever met another person called Robert Luff. Two is probably enough for one lifetime.

This Goes With This (junior edition)

Carl has pointed out that the Little Jimmy Osmond of "Long Haired Lover From Liverpool" sounds more or less exactly like the Brenda Lee who sang "I'm Gonna Lasso Santa Claus". I wonder if they were ever seen in the same place at the same time.

Song(s) of the day

First there's

"Wings", by The Fall. "Wings" has long been one of my favourite Fall songs. Its lack of availability is a puzzle. For a long time it existed only as the b-side to the first disc of the "Kicker Conspiracy" double-seven-inch, and on "Palace of Swords Reversed", one of a number of otherwise superfluous and/or dubious compilations that sprang up, and continue to do so, in the cracks of The Fall's peripatetic label-hopping existence. It appears on the Rough Trade "Totally Wired" set, but not on "50,000 Fall Fans Can't Be Wrong", which is otherwise probably the best jumping-off point for youngsters.

But its relative obscurity cannot hide the fact that it is a great song (and, unlike a lot of Mark E Smith's seemingly free-associated, top-of-the-head ranting, it has some kind of structural and even - gasp - poetic lyrical integrity). It immediately hits upon a grinding riff and refuses (or forgets?) to let go. There is also a fine video clip that exists on a VHS tape called, and I could be wrong here, "Perverted By Language BIS", wherein MES intones the words while sitting stony-faced in a pub somewhere in (presumably) northern England, the wallpaper of which clashes spectacularly with the knitted pattern on his jumper. At least that's how I remember it.

And then there's

"Tighten Up", by Yellow Magic Orchestra. I cannot believe I had no idea that this remarkable cover version existed. But a little research set me straight. It is no wonder, actually, that its existence has been buried (or at least kept hidden from me). The original, Japanese version of "X∞Multiplies" is a funny sort of record, a few songs interspersed with lengthy extracts from something called "Snakeman Show", some in Japanese and some in English but all making no sense whatsoever to your average Westerner. Thus, unbeknownst to me, the Australian version of "Multiplies", which is the one I knew back in those golden days, was actually made up of a large part of "Solid State Survivor", together with three of the actual songs from the Japanese "Multiplies". But not, strangely, "Tighten Up". (Possibly the fact that it is divided into two parts (three, arguably, given that Part One itself fades out and comes back in again), much as was the Archie Bell & The Drells original, didn't help the decision makers know what to do with it.) Discogs says it exists independently as a single, but I can't imagine this would have dodged my radar if copies had reached Australia, given that I was [possible understatement alert] a bit of a fan.

Anyway, it is a gloriously faithful ("ersatz"?) and fearsomely infectious rendition of the original, right down to the "Hi everybody, we are YMO" introduction, but they have the good sense to throw in some Vocoder just when you start to get too comfortable.

You read it here first

But now you can read it here, in the New Yorker, with facts and figures, greater detail, and an elegance with language that I can only dream of. Oh, and a more negative prognosis than my own: I am naive enough to believe (actually it is more "hope") that the economic collapse that is now upon us can be turned to advantage by investing in infrastructure that will actually further reduce the world's carbon emissions when the economy hots up again. More fool me.

Song of the day

"Ain't No Sunshine", by Michael Jackson.

There are some storming versions of "Ain't No Sunshine" out there. I had no idea that Michael Jackson had turned his hand to it. And yet there it is, his fourth single, a minor UK hit in 1972, which means he must have been only 13 or 14 when it was recorded. (And the song itself would only have been a year old.)

It starts of with a nearly whispered spoken word intro, which is underpinned by some snaking, "Maggot Brain"-style lead guitar. The song proper is an exquisitely arranged combination of Motown rhythm section, funky drumming,strings and vocal harmonies. It oozes confidence and maturity. And then there's Michael's voice. Professional coaching alone, even if coupled with a tyrannical father leaning over one's shoulder, could not conjure a vocal performance of this level. Michael -- and remember, he is only a boy -- owns this song. He sings it from the inside out, even though he is singing about emotions and concepts he can only have been starting to become aware of.

It is moments like this that force me to re-think my own attitude to the sorry tale of Michael Jackson. We have been very hard on him. Here is one of the most exceptionally gifted singers, and performers, that we have ever seen or heard. He was on the stage at 11, and was never allowed to have a childhood of his own. His life has never been his own to live. No wonder he is so fucked up. Is it so wrong to suggest that we should be grateful for all that he has given us, rather than gaze, slack-jawed and full of tut-tutting disapproval, as his slow unravelling is paraded across the front page?

Our own 11-year-old has been a big Michael Jackson fan for some years. He either doesn't know, or doesn't comprehend, the story of Michael's latter years of tragic fall and public laughing stock. He is lucky enough to be able to appreciate the entirety of "Thriller", and assorted hit singles, at their magnificent face value. I played him "Ain't No Sunshine" this morning, and he instantly took to it.

We are, truly, not worthy.

Song of the day

"Kidney Bingos", by Wire. If Wire were ever going to have a tilt at megastardom, this gorgeous song was it. (Clearly, they failed. I suspect its name may not have helped.) Sure, it suffers today from an unwanted eighties sheen (especially that (un)classic mid-80s bass sound, what do you call that anyway, "flanged"? "phased"? just plain old "overproduced"?), but in the actual mid-80s that would only have helped their cause. If you close your eyes, you might be listening to a good U2 song [ahem - ed], well, if you were able to imagine U2 without the stadium-targeted bombast, and if you were able to scale down the size of Bono's ego to something like the size of a normal person's (and lose those stoopid glasses).

A couple of interviews with Mr Alan Moore

Here

and

here.

It's always fun to immerse yourself in a few Alan Moore interviews. It is something of an Energizer Bunny experience: switch him on and watch him go. (I once heard him interviewing Brian Eno for a BBC radio series. He may have allowed Eno to get a word in edgeways.) The Wired interview, in particular, is a good example of Moore in full flight, because of its length as well as its breadth and depth.

The thing I like about hearing (well, reading) Alan Moore go off is that he is, for someone who operates so far outside of the mainstream of society that his closest contemporary might be the Unabomber, remarkably rational and sensible in the way he sees the world and in the things he says. Why not reject Hollywood's overtures, if to do so is a principled objection and not a publicity stunt? Also, he seems to be simultaneously aware of his own stature (and justifiably proud of his work) while acknowledging that the medium he works in is predominantly (historically and in a post-"Watchmen" world) entertainment for (male) juveniles and misfits.

I saw the short for the "Watchmen" movie. (It ran before "Slumdog Millionaire". I reckon Danny Boyle has read a comic book or two in his time.) I have no intention of seeing it. But I did want to get a feel for how the film makers would make the world of the Watchmen look, and I can't say I was disappointed on that score. Still, I would much rather read the series for the, what, fourth time than watch a movie of it. And I didn't need to read Alan Moore's views to reach that conclusion.

The Motorcade Sped On

Next on the Darren Hit Parade is "Happy Together", by The Turtles. There are a bunch of sixties beat groups that I have never been able to tell apart. Okay, I can separate The Beatles from The Stones, and I have a reasonable handle on The Kinks and The Zombies, but when it comes to the likes of The Turtles, The Troggs, The Small Faces, Herman's Hermits, and a swathe of others, I can't actually put a name, or a face, to any of them. Which is not the same as not liking the music they made. Take "Happy Together": it is simply too joyful, too welcoming, too, um, brilliant, not to strike a chord. And the chorus makes me want to pick flowers and ride bicycles - specifically, an old bicycle, with a basket, and slightly rusted tin mud guards. Maybe yellow, but an old, faded yellow. The sun will, of course, be shining.

"Happy Together" is followed, incongruously, by ZZ Top's "Legs", one of the most ridiculous hit singles. Ever. It starts off like Motorhead, but only for the first few seconds, until the disco backbeat kicks in and you instantly sense that what you are listening to is a money-making exercise. In truth, without the silly beards and souped-up hot rods they would be not much different from, and no more likeable than, Foreigner, except maybe for "rocking" a bit "harder". I always liked the fact that the one without the beard was called Beard, but that's probably just me. Actually, I thought I liked this song more than I do.

And one more, to put a bit more distance between where we are now and the start of this very long list. It's Phil Spector but with a few bricks removed from the wall of sound. It's "Sugar Baby Love", by The Rubettes (a name which I assumed signified that they were a girl group, how wrong I was), a song I never thought I would want to hear again, whereas in fact I would rather listen to this than "Legs" any day. There is something endearing in the earnestness of this song. It is, in its own way, a time capsule, but it is dealing with, and in, feelings that have been felt by teenagers of any place and time. Whatever next? Am I going to discover a long-suppressed love for The Bay City Rollers?

Oh, what the heck, let's also throw in "It's A Heartache", by the female Tom Waits, Bonnie Tyler, a song that was so unavoidable during its heyday that it is hard to listen to it with open ears now. So I won't.

New Morning

A few conflicting emotions tossed themselves around when I heard the one-two news punch that (a) Mick Harvey had left the Bad Seeds and (b) one Edmund Kuepper had been recruited as replacement, at least for a forthcoming tour of Europe.

First, I had to take stock of my own response. If this had been the mid-80s, and those twin pillars of Oz Rock Royalty Nick Cave and Ed Kuepper had been thrust together onto the same stage at the same time, I would have been wetting my pants with excitement, and running up to total strangers on the street to tell them about it. So I have found it curious to observe my sardonic eye-rolling reaction in 2009. It's not as if my affections for either of them have cooled in the ensuing 25 years. In fact, if anything the opposite has happened: of all the old guard, Cave and Kuepper have been the ones to have continued to work hard, develop their craft, and surprise. I suppose my thoughts, if I can pin them down, go like this:

(a) when am I ever going to Europe? Hence, the Cave-Kuepper thing is of theoretical interest only;

and, (b) to borrow from well-known music critic John Wayne, could any stage be big enough for the two of them? Unless my memory has failed me, Kuepper hasn't played second fiddle to anyone since The Saints, and look how that turned out. Cave? Well, I can't think of any name that more conjures the expression "front man". So what, or who, is going to give? Which makes it an interesting proposition, but not, I expect, a lasting one. One can only assume they shared one too many beers up on Mount Buller.

You also have to spare a thought for Mick Harvey, unsung hero of Australian music. I suppose his departure from the Bad Seeds was written on the wall with, in particular, the Grinderman project and, in general, the growing dominance within the Bad Seeds of that fiddlin' bushranger, Warren Ellis. But it is a sad thing, nevertheless, to contemplate the bald fact that "it's over".

It is easy, I suppose, to romanticise, in a tortured-artist sense, the life lived (if that is the right word) by Nick Cave in Berlin in the early 1980s. But I have always believed that if it wasn't for Mick Harvey Cave wouldn't have survived those days. Surely he cut it pretty fine as it was. Even hip cats only have nine lives. But Mick Harvey, at least on my reading of it, was the fulcrum around which Cave wildly spun: solid, dependable, able to withstand all the pressures that swirled around them. (Of course I could be wrong, but I've seen nothing in Harvey's subsequent appearance of unshakeable calm to make me doubt it.)

Also, Harvey was in large part responsible for the sound of the Bad Seeds, and the way that band developed. Or, in a sense, didn't. The Bad Seeds have always given new meaning to the word "ramshackle", and yet to see them play, in any of their many permutations, or to listen to "Live Seeds", is to understand that they are, when all is said and done, one of the great rock bands. They evolved over the space of the first four Bad Seeds albums, and Harvey's hands can be found all over each of them. In fact, for me the Bad Seeds, as a band, were never better than on "The Firstborn Is Dead", in which they comprised just (but not, he hastens to add, "merely") Barry Adamson on bass, Blixa Bargeld doing whatever it is that Blixa Bargeld does, and Harvey.

And yet Harvey has never sought the spotlight. Whether that is the result of his close-quarter observations of what that spotlight did, and what it might have done, to Cave is a question that even Harvey himself probably couldn't answer. But it's not for want of talent. "Intoxicated Man", his first solo record, was many people's (and my own hand is up) first introduction to Serge Gainsbourg, and it is a fine album, understated like Harvey himself, typically perfectly played and arranged, and (if I remember right) he even did the translations himself. His subsequent "pop" records (I haven't heard his soundtrack work) may not quite reach that gold standard, but any of them would serve, and frequently do, as perfect Sunday-afternoon listening.

In short, Mick Harvey has long been one of our honest-to-goodness heroes. We wish him well.

Boing boing

Another dead cat bounced off the Wall Street pavement overnight. Quite a large one this time (five per cent), but one can only assume that gravity will take effect, if not tonight then one night in the near future.

Meanwhile, the page count in the New Yorker continues to shrink, as the biggest economic contraction since the last one proceeds apace. The magazine survived the [First] Great Depression and we can only hope it has the reserves, and stamina, to survive whatever this one winds up being called. Of special interest in the recent "Anniversary" issue is George Packer's report from the real-estate wastelands of Florida, in which he gives both an insight into the human face of the collapse, and how Florida seems to have been its Ground Zero. (I still have trouble fathoming how a fall in real estate prices in one State of the Union could have such far-reaching international effects, but what do I know?)

What I do know, or at least what it looks like, is that the United States economy is so fucked they are going to have to find a new word for "fucked".

Song of the day

"Born on a Train", by The Magnetic Fields. Even if this was the only song Stephin Merritt ever wrote, he would have earned his place. It is our extraordinary good fortune that it is, in fact, only one of many (including sixty-nine on one (triple) album, a fact which continues to leave me staggered each time I think of it).

Emergency of the day

Here.

Magazine advertisement of the day

Look at this ad, from the New Yorker magazine circa February 1959. (If you click on it, you can see it at full size. How good is that?)

Looking at this photo today, it is easy to overlook the fact that it was taken fifty years ago. The Seagram Building hasn't changed a bit, in either appearance or stature, since it was completed, not long before the photo was taken. The building site across the road is, presumably, long gone, but there is little difference between the building site of today and that of mid-century. The furniture being carried into the building, well, our vantage point is a bit too far away to be certain, but it looks from this distance to be a little bit 2009 itself.

In fact, it is maybe just the cars in the bottom left-hand corner that provide unequivocal period detail. Those, and the font used at the very bottom of the ad to list all the places that Dunbar Furniture Corporation calls home.