Currently listening to Archibold, Lummock and Parker's Tripe-ology.... I mean Emerson, Lake and Palmer's Trilogy. It was the third album I ever owned and over the last thirty odd years pretty much came to symbolize everything that went wrong with early to late 70s rock music before punk rescued it from itself. However, I thought I'd give it a chance today, for reasons I'm still not entirely sure of. And to be honest it's not as bad as I remember. At least the bits that don't involve Greg Lake aren't, particularly the first two and a half minutes of the album, on the unfortunately entitled "The Endless Enigma (Part One)", where Emerson actually pulls off a brief Cecil Taylor impersonation that makes you wonder what he might have done if he'd followed that path and hadn't kept straying into the gawd blimey cockney knees up rahnd the ol' johanna nonsense that led, tragically, to him doing the theme music to a Jim Davidson sitcom. Emerson had his lapses, and couldn't do rock and roll to save his life, but on this album he kept to what he did best, that moody-adolescent-pleasing mix of Keith Jarrettesque "look, I'm using all ten fingers!" piano noodling and full-on bombastic organ walloping. And Carl Palmer was a fairly solid drummer when he was kept away from his truckload of giant gongs and tinkly stuff. Unfortunately Greg Lake keeps popping up with his appalling lyrics and nasal schoolboy singing, slathering the whole thing in smug, self-regarding pomposity. However, his obligatory guitar showcase on this album, "From the Beginning" is probably his least awful song ever, mainly because it's a string of feelgood cliches (rather than the usual labored and rather dim attempts at profundity) delivered liltingly over a lazy, Latinesque strummed guitar instead of convoluted cod-romanticism and God knows what. And there's nothing as ear-gouging awful as Tarkus's "Infinite Space" which I haven't heard for 35 years but still makes me want to put a pillowcase over my head and jump off a bridge. I only meant to play this once, for research purposes, but I think I've listened to it half a dozen times over the last two days. And I don't feel quite so dismissive of my teenage self for falling for this stuff all those years ago. Although I am happy to say I eventually traded it for a cassette of Roxy Music's For Your Pleasure and moved on to the headier delights of Captain Beefheart, Faust and Henry Cow.

RIP Amy Camus Yma Sumac (September 13, 1922 – November 1, 2008). Actually the claim that she was really called Amy Sumac was pretty silly, particularly when her real name was Zoila Augusta Emperatriz Chávarri del Castillo. Sumac was probably the only singer whose range was often given in Hertz rather than octaves - 123 to 2270 Hz, apparently. Some are featured here:



I prefer her campy mambo recordings to the supposedly more ethnic (but no dubt equally inauthentic) stuff (which can sometimes be a bit of a slog), but the real weird item of hers to track down is Miracles, the "rock" album she recorded with Les Baxter in 1972.

's obvious, really, but all "freak" folk - even the stuff I like, maybe especially the stuff I like - is "Willow's Song" from The Wicker Man soundtrack, only with beards instead of a naked Britt Ekland.

(Not suitable for work, in a 70s sort of way.)



I was not aware that a sequel to the original Wicker Man (entitled Cowboys for Christ) had been planned and was only abandoned earlier this year. Since the plot seemed to be the same - earnest, annoying evangelist get sacrificed by Scottish pagans - I'm not sure we've missed much.

In 1969 the Command label put out three albums of what it called "electronic pop music". Two were by Dick Hyman who I've mentioned before and will do again shortly. The third was by Richard Hayman. This confuses many people, especially on eBay. They were not the same person, however. Hayman started out playing in Borrah Minevitch's Harmonica Rascals, worked as an arranger on films like Meet Me in St. Louis, and has held many positions as music director and conductor, recorded dozens of albums and composed hundreds of tunes including the lovely "Dansero". None of which will concern you hipsters, folkies, jazz-funk fiends and Kate Perry worshippers.

But that album he did for Command...


The Genuine Electric Latin Love Machine was one of the first albums that tried to bring the moog into popular music. Hayman chose a mix of Latin American tunes and current pop standards and did some very odd things to them. Some are the farty, jaunty, cheese-enriched interpretations you might expect. It's quite collectible, mainly because of the cover and also because DJs have sampled just about every squelch, beep and beat of it. But nothing will prepare you for this, his heavy, heavy version of Noel Harrison's "Windmills of Your Mind".

Windmills of Your Mind - Richard Hayman

And as a bonus, here's his moogy version of "Dansero".

These will be up for seven days so don't hang around, kids.

Now where was I? Oh, the economy had just gone into free fall and I started my paternity leave and suddenly had no time to post even the most piddling LJ entry. Also, while noodling around with the TV remote in one hand and His Majesty The Baby in the other I caught the truly eldritch spectacle of Glenn Beck and Jonah Goldberg on the screen at the same time - a sort of two wingnuts, one bucket thing, I suspect - and that sight, even with the sound mercifully muted caused my eyes and brain to shut down for a couple of days. Beck has come to replace Sean Hannity as the nadir of American culture for me, a pasty, freakshow creep who was probably grown in a vat rather than born, molded from a foul sediment of festering bits that fell of John Stossel, Bill O'Reily and Hugh Hewitt. Nasty.

+ + +

Meanwhile, I had a stroke of luck and won the grail as far as my record collecting goes on eBay: Dick Hyman and Mary Mayo's 1963 album, Moon Gas.


The only other stereo copy of this to show up on Popsike recently went for $165 last November. Fortunately I didn't need to go anywhere near that price seeing how the seller's listing read "Lot of 4 Rare Dick Hyman LPs", which I'm guessing didn't show up on lazy collector's saved searches. And it wasn't entirely accurate as one of them was actually Richard Hayman's Genuine Electric Latin Love Machine, a collectible record in its own right in the "late 60s pop hits played on a Moog the size of Houston with robots on the cover" genre. I thought I'd gone over the top when I won as I haven't paid double figures for a record in years but it still works out cheaper than buying those silver, plasticky, ugly things, you know.... CDs.

+ + + +

Visited Blue Hanger last week, which I'd been looking forward to, but found not just disappointing but profoundly depressing. It's where trash goes to die, being a Goodwill outlet store, where truckloads of stuff that's too wretched for even the crappiest of thrift store ends up prior to becoming landfill. The place has its fans and my wife loves it as she's made some good scores there: somehow things slip in that shouldn't be in a normal Goodwill let alone this place, like a Burberry scarf for $1.50 which retails for about one hundred times that, crates of Playmobile toys that just need scouring and disinfecting and in one case an envelope of real, honest-to-goodness money, but for me the sight of hundreds of people, delving through troughs of broken electronics, fast food giveaways, ancient sewing patterns, self-help books, parts of toys, unrecognizable beige plastic stuff, timeshare video tapes, bent cutlery, things that would be worth even if they weren't missing a vital component... everything smashed, grimy and unwanted not just by their original owners but the usual thrift store vultures too, was just too much and I could barely bring myself to sift through a few troughs before despair set in. Fork lift trucks brought in more and more of this stuff, detritus, junk and people would stand back with their already overloaded trolleys of crap and gawp as new layers of almost identical stuff piled up in the troughs. Given the economic news last week it all took on a grim and apocalyptic air, a vision of a world of trash, sifted through a million times. I'm glad I wore rubber gloves.... (OH, and no decent books and no records at all.)

+ + + +

More late. I have a salad to eat. And toilets to clean. In that order.

Chrome, or an incarnation of the band, caught last year playing "March of the Chrome Police" from their 1979 album Half Machine Lip Moves.

Thirty years on the music on that album and its 1978 precursor Alien Soundtracks still sounds raw and strange -- and this performance captures or at least recreates the fucked-up analog overload of the original. There was something mutated, messed up and dirty about these albums at the time I first heard them back in '79. Punk had devolved into New Wave at the time and although I still liked a lot of what was coming out everyone else seemed to like it too, so I was looking for something suitably off the map and noisy and Chrome met those requirements. Those two albums still sound like nothing else before or afterward.

I don't know much about the music Chrome produced after Half Machine Lip Moves. The follow-up got a lukewarm reception from whatever music rags I was reading at the time and I remember John Peel commenting after playing a track from it that he couldn't tell if it was any good or not. This sounds okay now but it seemed too clean and linear at the time.



Like Pere Ubu after Dub Housing (whose music headed into another direction entirely) they just didn't seem to fit in anywhere, especially when American punk made a resurgence soon after with bands like Black Flag, Minutemen and Husker Du, whose music was fast, blunt and to-the-point rather than fast, hallucinogenic and freaky. Years went by without me playing the albums or thinking about them. Maybe it was finally noticing there's a local Austin band called ST-37 who've been playing a rather familiar kind of stoner spacerock for a decade or two that reminded me...

Week one, down five pounds. Woo woo, as they say. And mostly this week I have been eating salad, the best being the Red Chili and Mango Steak Salad at Z-Tejas, although the Pecan-crusted Pork Tenderloin and Spinach at Kerby Lane doesn't disappoint. The South Beach diet frowns on crappy, wilting supermarket salads with watery, processed ham and turkey and crap. A proper salad needs real meat with maybe a little bit of greenery poking out beneath the bacon and blue cheese.

Stocks Fall on Objections to Rescue Plan. Oh my. Suggest that the "bail out" might have a few regulations and conditions attached and Wall Street goes into a sulk. It, like Paulson and Bush, wants a "clean rescue plan" where they can sell off all their old crappy "illiquid" assets for a nice price. Anything else and they'll be muttering darkly about socialism and nationalization, as if the bail out itself is just another dispassionate action of the invisible hand of the free market, dipping into some sucker's invisible pocket.

This week's reason to feel nostalgic for vinyl: slotmusic - none of your favorite music in a format that's easy to lose!

So dad, what are you listening to lately? What have you downloaded from eMusic this month? More of that crazy Finnish stuff?

Not this month, kids. Let's see, almost all stuff I heard first on Stuart Maconie's Freak Zone:
Minotaur Shock (Amateur Dramatics and Maritime), The Chap, the Long Blondes, Champion Kickboxer and:

Kurr - Amiina (2007)
Frail Icelandic sighs, curlicues and tintinnabulation, rather like finding an antique musical box that plays the more affecting passages of Sigur Rós. Which isn't surprising as Amiina played on a couple of their albums. Possibly too lovely for words, particularly if you're the sort of sap who can be transported to strange places by the crepuscular sound of tiny bells, wordless female ululation and a musical saw.

And what are you reading?

A gripping fantasy trilogy about a swashbucking princess and a talking bear.... I kid! Thomas Frank's The Wrecking Crew, obviously.

An update on my Stereo Action collection. I'm not a very methodical collector of anything, at least not to the point of being a completist. Collecting something is fine but the thought of actually completing a collection or completing it as far as my finances will allow tends to kill my enthusiasm. And I seem to have reached that point. I'm not sure whether I want/need to get the remaining ten albums. After Bernie Green Futura, the Leo Addeo album, The Music Goes Round and Round was the last one I felt I really needed. It's the most bonkers of the set, even more so than the Esquivel album that was recorded in two studios simultaneously to get maximum stereo separation and the Three Suns album that features a tap dancer. If you've ever heard a piece of music featuring four ocarinas, bass accordion and several glissando electric guitars you can be pretty certain it comes from this album. I don't think anyone else in the history of music ever considered this combination, which is understandable, but it does make for one of the most ridiculously upbeat records ever made, any track from which could make the most curmudgeonly fellow grin like a loon.

However, now that I am exactly half way through the collection, and those remaining are providing either rather hard to find, don't look very promising or both, I find myself losing interest and looking for something new to concentrate on....

Talking of Bernie Green, I thought I'd collect his œuvre. It's not hard to be a completist when someone doesn't make many records though....



This only leaves two to go, and since one of those carries the unappealing title of National Football League Marching Band (RCA Victor LSP-2292), I may declare this collection done too.

(The entry written while waiting, waiting, waiting....)

Currently very fond of The Chap's two singles "Fun and Interesting" and "Proper Rock", although their album tracks don't really do it for me yet. They really don't look like they sound - they have an arch, studied awkwardness that I normally steer clear of and which recalls the likes of Split Enz, Deaf School and the Cardiacs (albeit updated by Stereolab and Vampire Weekend, who I like a lot better) but they look like an ordinary jeans and t-shirt rock band. I expected robots, Victorian garb and beekeeper costumes at the least.

I do like "Daddy's Gone" by Glasvegas a lot, both as a song and as a three minute encapsulation of Scottish rock music's infatuation with classic American Rock 'n' Roll since the Jesus and Mary Chain discovered it sounded even better if you put a melody behind the feedback. I do however wonder if the lyrics would work in any other accent and if what sounds truly epic and heartbreaking would come across as mawkish and over-sentimental if the singer had a more middle-class accent. If it was Chris Martin, for example, I'd be shouting abuse at the radio....

And I also wonder about my susceptibility, seeing how this song can almost reduce me to tears whereas the couple-with-a-2-year-old-daughter I know who are presently going through a divorce simply fill me with irritation and mild dismay at best. I guess in real life we expect people to suck it up and get on with their lives whether in art, be it the novel, opera or even a rock song, we give them the leeway to really wallow and let it screw up their lives as long as they do it in rich and evocative way.

The Jim Bowen rap.

Super. Smashing.

But this is what I was looking for, Hughie Green's "Stand Up and Be Counted".

The As on my office PC:

Achim Reichel & Machines, the Advisory Circle, Alan Parker, Alessandra Belloni, Alphataurus, Altered Images*, Amon Duul, Amon Duul II, Andre Kostelanetz and his Orcestra*, Andrew Vinter (Vintage TV and Radio Classics), Animotion*, Anne Briggs, Annexus Quam, Anthony Braxton, Antoine*, Area, Art of Noise, Arvo Part, Ash Ra Tempel, Associates, Augustus Pablo, Aztec Camera* and American Primitive, Vol 1 - Raw Pre-War Gospel 1926 - 36.

Updated to include non-album tracks and other bits and pieces.

* Single tracks only by these.

And you have?

There are bargains to be had on eBay. I picked up a VG++ copy of Bernie Green's Futura for $2.99 plus postage last week. The seller had not mentioned that it was a Stereo Action release and the photograph he used was of the inner sleeve, so I was a bit doubtful of what I was actually getting - but at $2.99 it wouldn't have mattered if it had been a reissue or missing the outer sleeve. But it was the real thing. I've seen similar copies listed at $50 dollars. Not the sort of deal that I can retire early on, but a nice surprise.

And the record is even better than I imagined. I've mentioned Futura before and got the concept slightly wrong. It was Green's imagining, in 1960, of how music would sound in 1970. He was a little optimistic - I don't seem to remember hearing many electric vibraphone quartets in the early 70s or songs like "I Love Paris" arranged for seven electric guitars and "animated tape," a sort of magnet tape and scalpel version of the melotron requiring over 700 splices for the trumpet part on a two minute track, didn't catch on. Green was somewhere between Raymond Scott and Esquivel, adding electronics to unusual arrangements, using stereo panning as part of the rhythm as well as for effect. Most of his ideas were so unusual for the time they had to be packaged as "comedy" records, but Futura was his serious album, without having to hide behind funny titles or mad artwork. I think it was also his last album, which suggests even RCA's Stereo Action division wasn't ready for innovations like the "tonalizer".

I also caught the fleshy part of my thumb in a rat trap on Saturday afternoon, which wasn't half as much fun.

...or not so random as WinAmp seems to have a thing about blind blues singers and Sarah Nixey (currently adding not much to a Francoise Hardy classic here) right now....

living in the sunshine - caedmon
julian h. cope - julian cope
because - the bird and the bee
love you - the free design
french rock 'n' roll - black box recorder
moments in love - art of noise
night bus - burial
been listening all the day - blind joe taggart
asforteri - caravan
the school song - black box recorder
honey in the rock - blind mamie forehand
songs for europe - half man half biscuit

Dannish rock was once very, very cool. Can't find any videos of Parson Sound or Baby Grandmothers, but here is Savage Rose during the time they went from pop to something else.

Savage Rose are still going today I think, although only the first three LPs are my idea of fun. They became deeply political and the music became totally weedy and horrible as if the Jefferson Airplane meets MC5 explosion (keep listening if the first couple of songs seem a bit tame) they threatened to become wasn't in keeping with their cause.

Not quite so taken by subsequent stuff I've heard on her myspace page but this particular track is gorgeous - for most non-corporeal values of gorgeous. The missing link between Joanna Newsom and Carla Bruni?

1. Working from home today as I await the washing machine* repairman to come and do what washing machine repair men have done since the dawn of time. I've actually got a bunch of stuff done. And been able to pop out for lunch. Being able to walk to Taco Shack and back in five minutes with the soft taco combo is why houses on this street cost up to two million dollars, you know. Not that there aren't better tacos around, of course, even within walking distance. Changos, for example, where the corn tortillas are made and cooked as you wait rather than taken from a bag and you can grab a watermelon, honeydew or cantaloupe agua fresca while you watch. But sometimes you need a quick hit of carne guisada.

2. I don't miss English food at all.

3. Leo Addeo - there's a name to conjure with. A low scoring Scrabble hand and arranger/conductor of some fine early 60s platters than go for nothing plus postage on eBay. Most of his albums are of Hawaiian music, or what passed as Hawaiian music in the early 60s and not my cup of tea, but he did some more interesting stuff that is worth getting. He had two releases on the Stereo Action label, including The Music Goes Round and Round, which is one of the few records in existence to feature an ocarina trio on every track.** On 1963's The Sunny Side of the Street, which cost me 99c plus shipping, the same sort of obsessiveness is on display - each track contains the word "Sun" (or "Sunny" or "Sunshine") in its title. So it's probably the most compulsively upbeat record I own. No ocarinas though.***

4. The cat is being very needy. She seems to think my instep is some kind of chew toy. And she's taken to licking the inside of espresso cups.

5. Another copy of Moon Gas I failed to win. And I placed a two figure bid ($10.05) which is the highest I've ever gone. If I'd just bid another two hundred dollars it might have been mine! But I guess I'm more at home with the 99c albums.

6. I'm glad I'm working at home and didn't take the day off. 1.28pm is not early in the morning in anyone's book.
___

* I wonder if anyone who owns Kate Bush's last album can read those two words without singing them in a peculiarly affected manner?

** The album's reputation was soiled by association when Chris Evans used "Love is Just Around the Corner" as lead in to some vile segment on his execrable TFI Friday show but Addeo had been dead for a couple of decades by this point so he wasn't to know.

*** Another albums of his, Far Away Places, seems to be popular with civil aviation fans as much as with spaceage pop lovers like me. What a gloriously retro-naff cover!

An obvious one to start with...

I've been goading
D-List Paul Ross for a laugh
By unloading
outside what he'd call his 'gaff'
old fridge-freezers
doors removed as we are told
his face at the window on waking
something to behold

I'm not sure what filled the obvious gap in my life before I started listening to Half Man Half Biscuit again recently. That I went over 20 years without hearing them and didn't even know they had released anything after 1983's Back in the DHSS is a shameful thing for an Englishman to have to admit. It's like going decades without reading Robert Aickman or Aladair Grey or watching any Powell and Pressburger movies. Now, having downloaded most of their albums from eMusic it feels as if there was never a time when I wasn't a fan. Where did I nick my LiveJournal titles from before?


What I suppose I like so much about the band is that they tap into elements of English culture that no band since the Bonzo's Keynsham has touched, things than can be ridiculed and celebrated simultaniously. Like "CAMRA Man," which is affectionate in its mockery - I suspect any HMHB fan can see himself (and they're usually male) in those lyrics. (CAMRA = Campaign for Real Ale, Belstaff = old school motorbike outfitters). AnsWhat other band could combine unrequited love, a fondness for sleepy English villages and rhyme "pheasants" with "quintessence"?

Like a game-bird reserve short on pheasants
weavers cottages devoid of tenants
a market town that lacks quintessence
that's Chatteris without your presence
Three good butchers, two fine chandlers
an indoor pool, a first class cake shop
OFSTED plaudits, envy of the fens
prick barriers at both ends
But what's Chatteris if you're not there?

Of course the lyrics will mean little or nothing outside of the UK and can be as oblique and maddeningly obscure in their references as anything by the Fall, which is part of their appeal, I suppose. They're not simple comedy songs, more like surreal juxtapositions of Nigel Blackwell's obsessions and observations, from the most degraded pop cultural tat to snippets of Thomas Hardy with eulogies for the English countryside and the small pleasures of life. A random example, "I Went To A Wedding," which manages to mention the "Shoop Shoop Song", Thomas Tallis's "Lamentations of Jeremiah, William Pitt the Younger and Elder and Brad Friedel... the last three within the context of a Shania Twain reference.

And they write some belting tunes too, even when the lyrics are near dada-ist torrents of celebrity abuse and overextended gripes, their blend of punk, folk and joyous pastiche hit the spot nearly every time. A day without "Tyrolean Knockabout" is a day wasted.

(Still disappointed by 2000's Trouble Over Bridgewater, however, despite the luscious "Bottleneck at Capel Curig" which is what the early Beach Boys might have sounded like if they'd taken their roadsters on the A5 between Bangor and Caernarfon.)