Unauthorised item in the bagging area

Monday 18 March 2024

Monday's Long Song

Fluke's 1997 12" single Squirt came with a remix of Slid,  a track from 1993. The Modwheel Mix is ten minutes of late 90s progressive/ deep house, a track that has some of Underworld's DNA running through it. Modwheel is Tom Middleton of Global Communications, a man whose work is always worth listening to. This is a dancefloor number, easily slipped into any part of a late 90s DJ set, the vocal providing a slight contrast to the soaring, sunny day drums and synths. Never mind all that pre- millennial tension, this is infectious and optimistic dance music. 

Slid (Modwheel Remix)

Sunday 17 March 2024

Pete Wylie And Wah! Live At The Deaf Institute And A Forty Minute Mix

Pete Wylie is touring again, playing the hits and the misses of his and Wah!'s back catalogue with a full band, promoting along overdue Best Of album, Teach Yourself Wah! Pete may not have the biggest back catalogue and has had a few bumps in the road over the last four and half decades of making music, but his best songs are as good as anyone's and there are several which I hold very dearly. We arrived at The Deaf Institute last night before 8.30 to find Pete and the band on stage, Pete mid- anecdote (Pete Wylie is perpetually mid- anecdote, his stand up/ stories/ tales are as much part of the Wah! live experience as the songs and he is sharp, funny and candid). It was a bit frustrating to arrive late and it became clear we'd already missed Come Back (a favourite of mine and I was gutted not to hear it) and the room was packed, so we ended up crammed in by the door, unable to move much or get to the bar and constantly bumped into as people came and went including a bouncer who caught me off balance and sent me careering into the couple standing next to me. 

The first song Pete played after we arrived was the 1983 single Hope (I Wish You'd Believe Me), Pete in fringed cowboy shirt, leather kecks, top hat and green Telecaster, and in good voice. The songs are legendary, one after another, Pete prefacing each with the comment, 'the record company thought this would be a big hit... it wasn't' followed by laughter. There is much laughter at Wylie gigs, he's a natural raconteur and story teller- sometime sits difficult to tell if its songs separated by talk or talk separated by songs. The songs are full of love and heart, Pete mentioning friends who have gone before many of them- an emotive FourElevenFortyFour is dedicated to Josie Jones. The first song of the encore, Seven Minutes To Midnight is dedicated to John Peel and he speaks warmly and movingly about his friend Janice Long before singing for her. He tells a long and very funny story about Tony Wilson's funeral and the enormous bouquet that arrived with the message With Love From Liverpool accidentally ordered in two foot high letters, dominating every other floral tribute at the funeral, Peter Hook approaching him with the words, 'you wanker'. Disneyland Forever is done solo on acoustic guitar, a song written after meeting Gerry Conlan, one of the Guildford Four, backstage at a gig GMex in the early 90s. Gerry told Pete how much John Peel's radio show meant to them when they were in prison and how Pete's songs were part of that. When Pete asked Gerry what he was going to do after being unjustly imprisoned for sixteen years, Gerry replied he didn't know but it would be Disneyland forever. 

Pete launches into The Day Margaret Thatcher Died, the Prime Minister who was on record as saying she wanted the 'managed decline' of Liverpool, with as much venom as ever, ending it with Michael Gove, Jacob Rees Mogg and Esther McVeigh inserted into the song. Mid- set they play Sinful, my favourite Wylie song, guaranteed Bagging Area catnip, and trailed with the remark, 'the record company thought this would be a big hit... and it was!' Arms aloft, everyone cheers and amusingly they then mess the opening up, have to stop and start again. Behind him there are projections and loops of videos and clips from TV, young and beautiful Pete Wylie and Josie Jones from the 80s looped as 2024 Pete sings and plays. They play is hometown epic Heart As Big As Liverpool, a song that a room full of Mancunians (and a good number of scousers) respond to enthusiastically. 'It's a song about community and belonging', Pete says, 'and optimism and we need that today'. Free; Falling In Love With You from 2017's Pete Sounds is Pete and Wah! channeling Neil Young and Crazy Horse. Wah! do the encore without leaving the stage, Pete saying the steps to the backstage are too much for his knees. Seven Minutes To Midnight is electrifying, urgent, clanging 1980 Cold War dread repositioned for 2024 and we finish, with the curfew approaching, with The Story Of The Blues, Pete's biggest hit and the song he'll always be known for. If it was the only song he'd ever written it would be enough.

Today's Sunday mix was a fairly obvious choice. Pete solo, in various Wah! incarnations and with friends, songs of strength and heartbreak as one of his albums had it. 

Forty Minutes Of Pete Wylie And Wah!

  • Imperfect List (Version 1)
  • Hope (I Wish You'd Believe Me)
  • Don't Lose Your Dreams (Excerpt From A Teenage Opera Part 154)
  • Sinful (Tribal Mix)
  • Come Back
  • FourElevenFortyFour
  • Make Your Mind Up (Time For Love Today)
  • Talking Blue (The Story Of The Blues Part Two)

Imperfect List, a 1990 single, was a Wylie record done with Cocteau Twin Robin Guthrie and Josie Jones as Big Hard Excellent Fish. For the 12" it was remixed by Andy Weatherall , four mixes under the title Rimming Elvis The Andy Weatherall Way. Josie recites a list of hates, some universal, some very 1990, some very specifically Liverpudlian, all very relatable. Pete's story about Morrissey's usage of it as walk on music and his associated anecdotes about the singer are very funny and on point. 

Hope (I Wish You'd Believe Me) was a 1983 single, backed with a cover of Johnny Thunders' You Can't Put Your Arms Around A Memory. Wah! do pop soul.

Don't Lose Your Dreams was under the name Pete Wylie and Wah! The Mongrel, a 1991 single and hasn't made either the tracklist for the Best Of or the setlist for the gigs. Which is a shame as I love it, massive early 90s guitars and synths, Pete at his optimistic best, 'Don't you ever lose your dreams/ No matter how far you may tumble/ When people criticise your schemes/ Your wild extremes/ Don't ever lose your dreams'. Another Wylie song that mentions Jack Kerouac. Should have been a massive hit. 

Sinful was a 1986 single and a big hit. Pete promoted it on Top Of The Pops and on Wogan, memorably aided by Josie on Paul Weller's pop art guitar and three dancing nuns, the Sisters Of The Anfield Road. The Tribal Mix is even better, seven minutes of dancefloor gold, a thumping proto acid house drum track and Pete's vocal. The Tribal Mix was remixed by Zeus B. Held. 

Come Back is a magnificent and stirring love song to his city and a plea to those who have left to look for work elsewhere in the unemployment ravaged early 1980s, a 1984 single and the emotional centrepiece to the Word To The Wiseguy album from the same year. A massive if Springsteen was scouse sound and a hugely, defiantly northern record. 

FourElevenFortyFour was on the 1987 album Sinful, an overlooked album. This song has some very 80s production but gets away with it, a love song with a title and chorus that references the enigmatic 4- 11- 44 number. 

Make Your Mind Up (Time For Love Today) is the opening song on 2017's Pete Sounds, an album partly crowdfunded by fans- I was one of them- and recorded at Pete's Liverpool studio Disgracelands. A friend tells me Pete has a piece of carpet from the actual Gracelands. 

Talking Blues (The Story Of The Blues Part Two) is the second half of the 1983 smash hit The Story of The Blues, Pete talking over the looped Phil Spector sound, talking about people being thrown away, about those with power, about hope and pocketbook psychologists, class struggle, love and everyday life and 'something Sal Paradise said'. That's the story of the blues. 

Saturday 16 March 2024

V.A. Saturday


Soul Jazz started out in 1991 doing reissues of old albums, before switching to compiling various artists compilations. Their Nu Yorica album from 1996 complied 60s and 70s salsa, Latin and funk and sold a lot of copies. In the cross- pollinated, crate digging world of the 1990s, people were lapping up this kind of thing up, opening ears and minds. Soul Jazz cared about the music, the sleeves were always well put together, the music was always well chosen and of high quality. In 1998 they release 100% Dynamite, a double vinyl reggae compilation, which was the kick starter to series of Dynamite albums as well as a seemingly endless deluge of Studio One albums. Soul Jazz turned the reggae compilation into an artform, a university of reggae according to Chris Blackwell.  

200% Dynamite came out in March 1999, a quarter of a century ago. My copy is well thumbed and played, the soundtrack to many nights at home and out. It has a host of legendary names- Jackie Mittoo, Augustus Pablo, Dawn Penn, John Holt, Toots And The Maytals, Prince Buster, Tommy McCook, The Upsetters- all represented by lesser known but infectiously brilliant tracks. Soul Jazz spread the net wide too not confining themselves to the classic sounds of early 70s Jamaica but heading into the 80s. The second track on 200% Dynamite is Tenor Saw's Ring The Alarm, a 1985 dancehall smash...

Ring The Alarm

Herb Man Dub by The Skatalites, was recorded at Black Ark and mixed at King Tubby's, a decade earlier, 1975. You won't hear a better instrumental that this today.

Herb Man Dub

Friday 15 March 2024

Big Weekend Incoming

It's a big weekend of music related activity coming up, starting tonight and running though until Sunday evening by which point I will be in need of a lie down. We'll go in reverse order. As the flyer above shows on Sunday The Flightpath Estate DJs (on this occasion Martin, Dan and me) are returning to Blossom Street Social in Ancoats for our third mission there, playing records from 3pm until 8pm. We are joined by guest Rob Fletcher, the man responsible for legendary 90s Manchester techno and electronic music club night Herbal Tea Party. The four of us will be playing back to back, three tracks each and then switching and it will be a seamless showcase of our track selection and turntable skills. Obviously. 

If you're in Manchester on Sunday afternoon, please come down and say hello. Dan has a test pressing of our forthcoming double vinyl album Songs From The Flightpath Estate Volume 1, the album we're putting out with The Golden Lion featuring Two Lone Swordsmen, Justin Robertson, Andy Bell, The Light Brigade, Justin Robertson, Sons Of Slough, 10: 40, Richard Sen, Rude Audio and Hardway Bros, so some of those tracks, if not all, will get their first airing in public. 

On Saturday night I'm at Manchester's Albert Hall to see Echo And The Bunnymen who are touring to celebrate 1985's Songs To Learn And Sing, Mac, Will and the rest of the current line up playing two sets with a short gap in between. I've seen them a few times in the last ten years and when they're good, they're very good. 'Lay down thy raincoat and groove', was the advice of the Bunnymen back in 1983 on the release of Never Stop- decent advice still. 

Never Stop (Discotheque)

The night before the Bunnymen (tonight in other words) we're at Manchester's Deaf Institute to see a second member of The Crucial Three, Pete Wylie, on tour with a full band promoting Teach Yourself Wah!, a Pete Wylie and The Mighty Wah! best of. A small venue, Wylie's between song storytelling and patter, some of the best songs of the 1980s, good reviews coming in from other gigs on the tour.. . I'm really looking forward to it. 

Seven Minutes To Midnight

Seven Minutes To Midnight came out in 1980, the second/ final single of Wah! Heat, a clanging, clamorous post- punk single written in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the subsequent moving of the hands of the doomsday clock to 11.53. In the intervening forty three years the clock's hands have moved back and forth a little and were altered most recently in January 2023, now set at ninety seconds to midnight. That apocalypse just creeps closer. 

Thursday 14 March 2024

Endtroducing...

There were a lot of good albums released in 1996, a year that doesn't necessarily jump out in memory as being a vintage year. I'm not sure why this thought occurred to me recently but it did. There were a good number of well above average albums in 1996: Two Lone Swordsmen's The Fifth Mission (Return To The Flightpath Estate) was released, a double album that redefined where Andrew Weatherall's head was at; Everything Must Go by the Manics was a big guitar album, full of post- Richey songs about renewal and escape; Beck's Odelay, a pick 'n' mix record everybody loved; New Adventures In Hi Fi, the last R.E.M. album by the original line up and their last essential lp for me; Murder Ballads by Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds; Underworld's Second Toughest In The Infants; Richard D James by Aphex Twin; Millions Now Living Never Die by Tortoise; Belle And Sebastian's If You're Feeling Sinister; Stereolab's Emperor Tomato Ketchup. These are all albums that I can still pull out and listen to, none seem too dated or attached to that part of the mid- 90s as to be timebound and some of them have moments that could be contemporary. 

Of all the albums released that year few had the impact that DJ Shadow's Endtroducing... did, a record that broke new ground, crossed over, opened doors, and moved the music it originated from onto somewhere new. Created by Josh  Davis using a single AKAI MPC60 sampler, a Technics turntable and a tape recorder, Endtroducing.... is the result of years of crate digging, of finding drum breaks, strings stabs, basslines, guitar parts, organs and horns, snatches of vocals and voices from TV and film, of plundering bargain boxes for unusual records and avoiding the obvious sources, finding samples in funk, jazz, soundtracks, psychedelia, and from Bjork, Tangerine Dream and Metallica. DJ Shadow found the records, sampled them, chopped them up, looped them, layered them and made something new. It's ostensibly a hip hop album, that's the world Shadow was coming from, but it's as much sound collage as rap. Endtroducing... was released on Mo Wax in the UK, a label which was very cool and on a roll in 1996. It took longer for his native US to catch up. From the sleeve on in, a gatefold photo of Josh scouring the racks at Rare Records in Sacramento, to the four sides of vinyl it's a fully realised and self- contained world, the kind of album that should be listened to in a single sitting, from start to finish. Here are three slices of sound from it...

What Does Your Soul Look Like (Part 4)

What Does Your Soul Look Like (Part 4) starts out like a lounge- jazz instrumental interlude that becomes a slow paced trip hop track, built around a sample of The Vision by Flying Island. Josh drops in some scratching and flute, choral voices and a sax. 

Stem

Spooked out and on edge, a walk round the block in an unknown part of town after dark, Stem is constructed around a descending acoustic guitar part and contains a sample of Love Suite by Nirvana (not that Nirvana, the British 60s Nirvana). Strings and rapid fire drums eventually shatter the mood before it finishes with some screeches of violin. 

Midnight In A Perfect World

Midnight In A Perfect World was released as a single in September 1996, opening with a burst of vocal, and centred on some electric piano, sampled from a David Axelrod song from 1969, The Human Abstract. There's a slow paced hip hop drum break, various bits of vocal (one from Marlena Shaw), the word 'midnight' looped over and over, a bassline from Pekka Pohjola, creating a tense and mournful atmosphere, and ending in a stuttering conclusion. 

Wednesday 13 March 2024

Anzu

One of my favourite singles of last year came out in mid- December- it got a bit overlooked as a result but has grown and grown as 2024 has gone on, taking up more and more of my listening time. Anzu by C.A.R. is electro- pop perfection, throbbing acid house/ dance pop. It has wobbling synths, a smokey vocal telling tales of adventures in a pub now lost to market forces, singer Chloe weaving lines of personal history, hedonism and squalor into something quite moving. There's a darkness in the song, a yearning, and then the synths change, there are rippling toplines and chord changes and everything surges forwards. Drums thump in and Chloe picks up her theme, 'walls close in... guerrilla shadows, hopped on having fun'. Totally infectious and emotive dance music. 

When it was released back in December it came with a GLOK remix, Andy Bell stripping it down and building it around a two word phrase from the lyric, 'basement sounds'. Last week a pair of Hardway Bros remixes came out, pushing Anzu further on into the disco. The Hardway Bros Remix is crunchy and cosmic, a four four stomper for souls dancing under the mirror ball or in the kitchen, Chloe's vocal on top of Sean's shimmering synths and arpeggios. Seven and a half minutes and not a second too long. 

There's a second version too, the Hardway Bros Conqueror Dub, all wobbly oscillations, signature Sean synth sounds, funky drums, acid squiggles and heavy bottom end, Chloe still there singing of 'cigarette smoke' and giving half glimpses of the past. Buy them both here


Tuesday 12 March 2024

Wild God

A new Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds song was released last Wednesday. It took me a few listens to fully get it but now I can't stay away from it. Wild God starts out slowly with what sounds like the end of another song, then begins to gather pace and oomph, the musicians setting out slowly and quietly and swelling as the song moves onwards. Nick's words seem to tell of a man looking back from his life in a retirement home, a wild god, but there are plenty of obtuse and currently unexplained lines as well as a reference to Jubilee Street (from 2013's Push The Sky Away) and a girl who died in a bedsit in 1993. The explosion just after three minutes in as the choir kicks in and Nick sings, 'bring your spirit down', packs a powerful punch, lifting the song and the listener- well, this listener for one. The sound becomes big and orchestrated but it's clearly Bad Seeds too, with the drums shifting things away from the synth oriented music of his recent albums with Warren Ellis. Wild God's long ending is full of passion and joy, an ecstatic finale with Nick still singing, 'here we go', as it fades out, the song sounding like it could go on. 

A while ago, being interviewed for a film, Nick said that after several years of grieving the loss of their son Arthur in 2015 and all the awful trauma that came with it, Nick and Suzie made a conscious decision to be happy. 

'It's strange reading those scripts back, those lyrics from my son brought back. And, you know, they're ok, they're actually kind of beautiful, really. But at the time they never revealed themselves as such. I just thought that I was writing a lot of rubbish. 

That was one of the things I lost. That was one of the things I lost hard, a sense of belief in myself, like I'd fucked up bad, that me and Susie had looked away for a terrible moment, and this reflected savagely on everything else. A belief in the good in things, in the world, in ourselves evaporated. But you know, after a while, after a time, Susie and I decided to be happy.

This happiness seemed to be an act of revenge, an act of defiance. To care about each other and everyone else and to be careful, to be careful with each other and the ones around us.'

That's what Wild God sounds like to me- a conscious decision to be happy, to record the joy and euphoria that can be found in music. I'm sure the album will tell more. At the Red Hand Files this week he said that Wild God (also the title of the album) is  a 'series of complex and interlinking narratives' and that 'an acutely vulnerable and mysterious 'event' resides at the heart of the album's central song, Conversion'. Wild God is also a song that seems to reveal a little more each time I play it, something new seeping out with each play. The album isn't out until the end of August which seems a long way off from here.