Thin Lizzy tea-leafing MOFO!

Right. If you’re going to throw down the Throwing Muses, I’m going to go a bit Indie myself, otherwise it's just geezers with beards, innit.

The urbane and erudite (urbudite? You suit yourself, I’m going to use it from now for the sake of compression and accuracy, or compraccuracy as we children of the digital revolution have it) Baron Hatherley is wont to tease me when I express my total lack of interest in all things Ravey circa 87/88 by suggesting ahh, yes you were no doubt drinking Special Brew in Barrow in Furness and listening to Bogshed. Out by a couple of years, but pretty close.

Equally, I used to work with the guy who ran Ron Johnson records, about ten years after it had gone tits up, who, you’ll recall had a goodly proportion of the tracks on NME C86. Given that I was a bit of fan of the label and that we were the only two people in the whole of Thanet who seemed to have remotely similar music-obsessive type attitudes we got on very well. The other label that was well represented on the compilation was of course Creation. Alan McGee is now deeply rich, Dave lives in Broadstairs. McGee’s revivalism was a return to the sweet and poppy sixties, Dave’s was a return to Beefheart, an attempt to forge some of that Trout Mask blues abstraction into a new, hyperkinetic white funk, i guess: James Chance and Lester Bowie were also in the mix. Actually Dave’s roster was probably the wonky of its day: how do you dance to this, where’s the tune, where are the dynamics? It seemed a bit cerebral and arch and not-very-goodtime compared to mooning around to Velocity Girl.

Ron Jonson had one absolutely superb and now totally neglected band on their roster : big Flame, a Militant trio from Manchester (the guitarist later formed one of Factory records more obscure signing's Meatmouth, a lumpen Manc hip-hop meets angle-grinder guitar thing that produced one E.P. I think. The bassist was in Peel fave's Great Leap Forward).

This is, I reckon bIG FLAMES best track, as terse as the title suggests, and these were I reckon the best Ron Johnson or roughly affiliated riffs I can find on youtube.

I should confess to another un-hairy Indy weak-spot here, which is the mid-paced, motorik, two-chord Bo Diddley driving tune. Roadrunner’s the archetype, and Sam is certainly right about the Feelies, but these have to be my two favourites. Shit, all this talk about hidden emotions welling up is making me want to confess to the awful truth.

I love Beat Happening!

Ladies and gentlemen, mount your flying Vs, here we are then, the final baton charge in the riff war.

We appear to have drifted into the early nineties and I have several riffs to offer you today. Warning: one of them comes from that most despised of all cross-genre pollinations Rap-metal. Oh yeah. The Judgement Night soundtrack? That’s a bit too arty for me, I mean it’s got Sonic Youth on and (horror of horrors) Teenage Fanclub. I like it a tad more basic.

I should also point out that two of these riffs will be derived from thrash/speed metal. Not a genre I like much on its own terms, but one which seems to have lent itself well to incorporation into other forms.

I was going to say that rap and rock hybridized fairly quickly, but I suppose they were just part of an ongoing dialogue, I mean, it is called Planet Rock, right? I assume there is an earlier example of rap/metal than Run D.M.C’s Rock Box (now that surely is an utter production masterpiece) but I don’t know what it is. I believe Kerry King from Slayer did the riff on this AND this. The killer riff/hook though is the use of the Knack’s My Sharona on this terminally infectious banger.

Run DMC how do I love THEE!

It should also be pointed out that Public Enemy, who still remain a kind of high-minded-high-modernist watermark for hip hop on the part of the musically right-thinking, LOVED a bit of guitar wank, didn’t they? My Uzi Weighs a Ton, Sophisticated Bitch, She Watch Channel Zero,. Oh, how we laughed when they chose to collaborate with Anthrax, of all people, on a souped-up Bring the Noise. They even let the little baldy fellow rap! Oh dear.

Perhaps it was all just a marriage of convenience to help boost record sales .

OK.

Here’s a riff from what appears to be my favourite album of all time, but in superior and slightly obscure remixed form. I suggest you turn it up…

..and keep it turned up for these two, from arguably my second favourite record of all time.

It would be unfair of me to leave you without a final grace-riff from the widely despised RATM, here not really covering Dylan.

Seb and Bonsai weigh in on the riffathon.

As to the tenor of the conversation, I would suppose it's primarily: enthusiastic.

This comes out on the 29th of October. Let's not bother with any false modesty, eh? It's FUCKING BRILLIANT!

Fuck me! Baron Mordant’s not wrong is he? Good of him to cough to it’s brilliance especially as we can now hear what may have in fact been a significant influence on his own recent work. I’ve been trying to get tickets for the next Groundhogs’ gig and can’t as I guess they’re not available yet and, all due respect to E.17 and that, but they appear to be playing at a pub in Walthamstow. This would mean they had a potentially smaller audience these days than say, Earthless, who cover Cherry Red as an encore. Groundhogs for this year’s Supersonic! (for which I have got tickets.)

The whole NWOBHM just bypasses me, I’m afraid. Iron Maiden’s appeal will forever remain a mystery. Same goes for their American descendents pretty much, with the honourable exception of Slayer. I guess it’s all about the return to Sabbath/Blooze for me!

That Ted Nugent track set me of thinking about genuinely weird tracks by major RAWK artists and the best I could come up with was this. I know virtually nothing by Alice Copper apart from this album (Killer) which I only checked out because the band Halo Of Flies (one of the best garage bands of the Eighties) took their name from the track. It’s notable for many reason, partly because it goes through so many “transitions”, a kind of super-hammy idiot prog. Lyrically it’s in "Sympathy for the devil territory" and contains possibly the worst line in the history of Language, I won’t spoil it by putting it down here, just let me say it arrives at 2:15 and ends at 2:19 leaving the listener wondering whether he can possibly have heard it correctly.

Nirvana do a killer version of Love Buzz of course. I assume it’s alright to prefer Bleach to Nevermind. Smells like... is undeniable, but the rest of it’s a bit forgettable for me.

I can’t decide which of these two riffs is better. But I would like to say that Adrian Belew is another one of those kind of consistently inventive, multi-talented (great voice, too), worked-with-everyone-important kind of guys who seems to get very little critical interest in his own right.

yep.... this riff-clash is turning into a right old attention/time absorber innit...

oh and re the Japanese, I now know how to say "I am drunk" and little more. Indiscipline indeed!

Haha! Reynolds pipped at the post with “Cherry Red”, but still setting an attack groundhog upon me. They are terrifying beasts, aren’t they. Are The Groudhogs a bit neglected? I know “Split” is regarded as their masterpiece and it is awesome (and lyrically brilliant too, especially 1-4’s tale of a night of paranoia slowly resolving itself into a disturbed sleep) but they had a pretty good album run there in the seventies.

Funnily enough I was listening to Beefheart the other night myself after realising that this sounds really nothing like the original. I’m a bit unorthodox on Beefheart, as in, Clearspot, The Spotlight Kid are immense records and I’m really fond of the soft and hazy (as opposed to Fast n Bulbous) stuff on Blue Jeans and Moon Beams and some of the stuff on Doc at the Radar Station, while the last one, Ice Cream for Crow, I think is a kind of late masterpiece. It could sound a wee bit vitiated I guess from one perspective but I always found it more “elegiac”, sparse and Wintery, the good Captain laying down in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart, plus it contains some really lovely stuff, especially this. What I can’t really get on with is Trout Mask, it just wears me out (I’ll confess, heretically, to having the exact same response to Metal Box, which, after two tracks has just kind of ground me down. Shoot me now, but my favourite PIL album is actually “Album”). I cant be the only person who listens up to Moonlight in Vermont and then thinks about the long, tortured, dry but wacky, dustily unvariegated stretch ahead. Hey Don, some of those guitar parts may have defied the human hand but they also defy the human ear. It’s a triumphant double -whammy of sorts, I suppose. Kind of the musical equivalent of Wilde’s line about foxhunting: the unplayable in pursuit of the unlistenable.

Yeah the good riffs probably did go to Hair Metal, it’s true. The New York Dolls were a big influence weren’t they, the rawer punkier end of the scene being Hanoi Rocks (this belter is one of Bonsai Silverback’s favourite songs ) and so were (I now realize) Cheap Trick. There is something strangely toothsome and moreish in those glossy Eighties singalong stadium glam confections. If I had to choose something from that era, riff-wise I’d have this and, brace yourself, this.

There’s also a bit of an inter-zone (well if you can call a band as huge as Guns and Roses an inter-zone) where hair-metal tried to reinvent itself with injections of thrash metal or by harking back to punk. Modifying the hair metal signifiers a bit and getting heavier. The group of small town punks I hung out with when I was eighteen or nineteen would, mystifyingly, listen to G n R even though everything else was a steady diet of Conflict, Subhumans, Discharge, Amebix, Saw Throat and the Alternative Tentacles back catalogue and stuff on SST was for hippies.

Out of respect to Reynold's trampled Groundhog, I'm not going to go anywhere near AC/DC.

Skipped through the early to late-eighties, have we? Alright then, lets get stuck into a bit of that!

ZZ TOP eh?

First you diss Ikonika then you post a Bruce Springsteen track and a ZZ Top track? I reckon the sheer, radical non-NUUM, mini-modernist newness of that epochal, powerfully emotive Ikonika album* so scrambled your sclerotic, literally Forty Year old brain in all its rigid and calcified synaptic sterility that you’ve been reduced to revealing what you really are, Grandad Woebot, a man so fetterd by the sad, outdated rockist orthodoxies he pathetically tries to wrest himself from that he should have the decency to just step aside and allow the brave children of the future, writhing and weeping in ecstatic communion with the NOW, loving, connecting, wanting, having in that shining temple to What Is To Come, Corsica Studios, to finally be freed from the yoke that is your mild scepticism.

And what’s more I’ll Rapeman you under the Covers right back!

*I for one wept openly in the street here in Japan, listening to it on my I-Pod for the first time, gasping down ragged breaths and clinging on to passers by, pressing the headphones on them, babbling over and over “listen, listen, for here speaks the very soul of my people. She is among us, we shall build Jerusalem!"

Lick.

Lovely term that, implying everything from a painterly, Fine Art flick of the wrist to the minimum possible unit in a cunnilingual encounter. At what point in a Riffs speed does it shade over into vibe either at the top or bottom end? Good question. I saw Sunn live for the first time last year. They were unspeakably loud, completely immersive, a mini-environment of their own. The only thing I’ve seen equivalently loud (never having seen MBV) was probably Merzbow, or possibly louder, Jah Shaka in Sheffield in about 1990. Actually, once you’ve seen Jah Shaka everything else bass-wise sounds a bit airy, dunnit? You certainly couldn’t suggest that Sunn riffed that night, or if they did the riffs were so slow and huge that it was impossible to compress them in the mind into any comprehensible form.

I suppose Seb’s question is kind of , what is the most torpid yet still somehow riffy riff ever? Instinctively I think the main contenders for that would have to be St Vitus or Electric Wizard.

re the tempo of the riff thing…I think it’s probably why speed and thrash metal are such boring genres….too fast on one level but not so fast that it blurs into ambience a la black or death metal. It's more akin to a series of rapid-fire quips, to maintain the witty remark analogy, that just leave you feeling slightly puzzled, there’s nothing to savour….actually, riff- wise the mid-eighties was a bit dull. I mean Anthrax, Metallica, Megadeth etc, they have their moments, but for me its not until it slows down a bit more with stoner and sports/nu metal/grunge that the riffs improve…. so expect some early nineties' hideousness…maybe even a bit of Stone Temple Pilots!!!

Momentarily we’re stuck in the 70’s. I see Reynold’s Nooj and attack him with a Groundhog…an unfortunate choice really, as it’s precisely loveable little beasts like these that Ted spends all his time putting arrows through.

Sorry? What?.....ah yes of course.. just call me Simon Cowbells!

Cowbells, eh? COWBELLS? I'll give you cowbells!!!!

Actually thinking about breaks, there is of course the magnificent 20-minute plus “Break song” by Vanilla Fudge, which I urge upon you, but which doesn’t seem to exist anywhere on the internet. Though this is pretty magnificent example of the Fudge doing there hysterical yet heavy, raucous and overwrought, Purple-soul thing, James Brown and Jimmy Hendrix in a cosmic blender. And that is of course, A Riff Of Note.

Equally, much as I love “In a Gadda…” it pales in comparison to the twenty minute “Butterfy Bleu”, surely one of the weirdest splices of hard rock, prog, ambient, Clangers-style slide guitar and musique concrete robo scat funk known to man (though I’ll be overjoyed if you can introduce me to some other contenders*) and which surely must have finished off their career. Insanely it's all

here

And still re surprising breaks, this, while it’s quite consciously the antithesis of the other two bands mentioned above (though there is certainly a shared love of Motown going on) has some wicked and unexpected drum work in the closing minutes.

*Cue list of forty three superior examples of exactly that from the compendious Unkle Woebot.

Nice to see Reynold’s joining in the Budgie loving. I’d publically challenge him to a youtube riff-clash, but challenging Reynolds on riffs would be a mug’s game. Whereas challenging him on dance would of course be a Joe Muggs’ game. Ho Ho.

A good riff should, I think, make you squint. Or wince. Either way it’s eye-narrowing. Good Pop seems to have the opposite effect, it's eyebrow-raising , eye-widening, head-lifting, literally helps you keep your chin up. A good riff is akin to a witty remark somehow, it’s partly in the anticipation of how it will resolve itself and then a kind of gratified appreciation of the rightness. I think that’s probably why lots of great riffs need to be fairly slow, timing is the essence of comedy, speed is essential to riffing, or at least the affect of the classic hard-rock/proto metal riff seems to be. Headbanging is natural response to the way it pulls you forward, demands your concentration and then rewards it. A kind of fervent nodding in approval.

This one’s even more obvious. But if it were rubbish, it wouldn’t be so famous would it?

Shit title, shit cover, absolutely SUPERB book!

I'd never heard of Matthew Sweet before I picked this up for a holiday read, which was almost certainly my loss. I hate that "worth the price for the X alone" bit, BUT, worth the price for its half-page on Richard Attenborough alone.

yeah...this guy can really write. Awesome.

Bastard!!!!!!!!

Ah yes, I was supposed to be doing a great lyrics thing, wasn’t I? But then unfortunately I got heinous sunburn and haven’t slept for four nights due to the empurpled, ravening discomfort of it all. Plus I started writing another book, or books. I seem to have started another Novel plus two on film, one on British films of the seventies, the other a kind of tracing of cinematic influences/echoes back and forth in time and across national cinemas via an appreciation of Michael Mann’s “Thief”.

Four nights of no sleep will allow you to do a lot of writing in your head, hence I’ve actually planned out the entire novel, for the first time ever: usually I just write into a void seeing what comes out that day an d wondering where it’ll all go. I start numerous things then abandon them but all three of these are going to get written. How do I know? Well it’s like love, or lust: you just know they’re exactly what you want right now.

Anyway, lying on the floor listening to the I-pod for eight hours also gave me time to cogitate on the eternal question of great riffs, so instead I present several riffs for your delectation, in no particular order of merit.

This one’s kind of obvious, but lets be honest it is a killer.

oh yeah!

Five years ago my father went missing in Spain.

I was on holiday with my parents. We were staying in a cheap hotel in Benalmadena and taking trips off to see various parts of Andalucia: Rhonda, Seville, Malaga.

It was in Malaga that he mysteriously disappeared. We had climbed up to the Alacazeba, one of the Moorish forts that can be found in most of the major cities in southern Spain. The ascent took half an hour or so, a series of moderately steep slopes snaking up to the summit. It was hot, very hot by our standards, mid-May and we paused half way up to get our breath back.

From the fort you could look down on all quarters of the city, the port, the Bullring, the coast line, the mountains. We strolled along the walls, climbed up narrow cool staircases to the highest point, climbed down again, drank something in the café. My mum and I decided to walk around the walls again, it was late afternoon by now and the quality of the light was shifting, a purplish dusk sifting through the sky, the shadows thickening, the air cooler. My dad had to “nip to the Gents”.

Wait for us here, we told him, then we set off, took a pleasant stroll around the walls and returned to the same spot . He wasn’t there. We waited for a few minutes then I went to check if he was in the toilet or the cafe. He wasn’t.

The security guard came around and told us that the fort was closing in half an hour. I asked her if shed passed anyone fitting my dad’s description on her rounds. She hadn’t. At this stage we were more irritated than anxious. Why can’t he just stay in one place? He must be waiting at the entrance.

He wasn’t there either.

I went back inside, looked around, came back out. The only conclusion we could come to was that he had gone back down the hill. We went down together, exasperated, only to discover that he wasn’t there either. There was a pleasant enough stretch of park at the foot of the alcazaba and we decided to wait there. He had obviously got distracted up in the fort, wandered off to some obscure nook and would soon be flushed out with the rest of the tourists when it closed. We sat dutifully waiting, heard and then saw small groups of people descending, hung on another five minutes or so expecting that doubtless he was straggling along behind even the slowest of them.

Still no sign of him.

It was growing dark now. Where is he? Where can he have gone, given that he speaks no Spanish and has no money on him? Given that he’s seventy -two years old and an inexperienced traveller? The only conclusion we can come to is that he has been kicked out of the fort but hasn’t come down and is, for some reason, waiting at the top for us.

I decide to go back up there. My mother, herself almost seventy, decides to stay in the park in case he turns up. Certain unvoiced fears are afflicting both us, he’s had a heart attack and is crumpled up somewhere, he’s stumbled, banged his head, and is jammed in some alcove. Otherwise, where can he be?

I can sense she’s anxious both about my dad and being left alone in the park which seems to be filling up with slightly disreputable characters. I imagine her handbag getting snatched while I’m halfway up. I ask some Spanish teenagers if they’ll be here for another ten minutes, can they make sure my Mum’s ok while I go and look for my dad. They look at me blankly, tell me that in two minutes they’re going somewhere else.

I reassure my mum I’ll be as quick as I can and jog all the way back up, arriving breathless and obviously worried just as the security guard is locking up. Can I go in to double check that my dad’s not inside, maybe he’s tripped and fallen, maybe he’s slipped off the castle walls. The security guard, Carmen, comes with me. We comb the fort, I look over the walls as I go, bracing myself for the possibility of seeing him face down on some buttress or snagged in some trees.

Nothing.

I jog back down again, hoping he’ll be standing there with my mum. Certain he will be. I rehearse what I’m going to say to him as I descend. She’s alone and looking pale. Perhaps he went back to the café we stopped off at earlier. He’s not there. We have a cup of tea, wracking our brains, trying not to panic. Perhaps he went back to the bus stop. But why would he when he’s got no money? And when he discovered we weren’t there? What then?

It has now been four or so hours since we last saw him. We decide to go to the police station to report him missing, ask the local police to keep an eye out for him wandering around Malaga town centre. It takes us another hour or so to find the station and by now it’s night. We stop at an internet café just before going into the station and I ring the Hotel back in Benalmadena to find out if they know anything.

He arrived back at the hotel about an hour ago by taxi they inform me.

We return by bus. He demands to know what we think we’re playing at: we have an almighty row.

This is what happened.

We’re going for a walk round the walls I tell him and set off. My dad looks at the route were taking and sees a short path that ends at the wall, but doesn’t see the steps that take us down on the left hand side and allow us to walk all the way around the perimeter of the fort, even though he himself has followed exactly this route an hour or so earlier. When he returns to this spot from the toilet we will either be back already or clearly visible, as we will be at the end of what he perceives to be a dead end. We are not there. He waits a few minutes, we don’t come back. He starts to get anxious. Where can we be? Though he would never admit to it he is easily made anxious, especially abroad.

We must be waiting for him at the entrance. We’re not there.

So we must be at the bottom of the hill.

He goes all the way down and discovers that we are not.

Therefore we must be at the bus stop.

He makes his way back there. We’re not there.

So we must be back at the hotel. We must have returned to Benalmedena without him.

He goes to a hotel across the road, asks the receptionist for a note in Spanish that says he will pay the taxi driver on arrival at his hotel, flags down a taxi and returns. He fumes on the way, utterly certain of the fact that we have abandoned him. There is no other explanation. He goes through it in his mind. We went down that little path while he went to the toilet, we reached the end, stood there for a minute admiring the view, having nowhere else to go returned to the meeting spot, saw he wasn’t there and then, for whatever mysterious reasons of our own, decided to go back to Benalmedena without him, leaving our septuagenarian, non-Spanish speaking father and husband penniless on top of a hill in a strange city.

It seems inconceivable, absurd that we would do so, but there is no other conclusion to be drawn. The path ends there.

Not part of the highly anticipated Good Lyrics mini-season, but certainly part of my Greatest Cover Versions season, and undoubtedly the winner of the Greatest Ever Fruity Looks to Camera competition.

Here.

The Karaoke adventure continues….

Yep. You can certainly find some unusual tunes in Karaoke boxes in Japan. Suddenly overwhelmed by the need to sing along to Glider by MBV after wandering the streets of Naha drinking cans of StrongZero Double Lemon 8% clad only in shorts and size thirteen flip-flops? You certainly can, in fact its just one of four good time party options from singalong classic Loveless available. I searched in vain for something by Belbury Poly or the Caretaker but alas Japan has yet to get its act together Ghost-Karaoke-box-wise. So perhaps inevitably I had no choice but to abreact my inner Disco-Queen with this.

And should you need to practice along at home.

You can imagine the kind of justice I meted out to those sustained high notes. I have to say that “Gloria” is one of my favourite songs of all time and lyrically it’s quite simply “the tits”. My voice broke with emotion on the “why isn’t anybody calling?” bit, easily the equal of The Smith’s “If you’re so funny..." sequence in “I know it’s over” and as for the whole, desperate, hyper-condensed narrative of …

Gloria, how's it gonna go down

Will you meet him on the main line

Or will you catch him on the rebound

Will you marry for the money

Take a lover in the afternoon

Feel your innocence slippin'away

Don't believe it's comin' back soon

In fact, when it comes to lyrics it’s often the case that the best lyrics are in the most commercial tunes. Singer-songwriters can get a bit self-important, can’t they, a bit desperate to impress with flashy wordsmithery. Springsteen circa “Born to run” (though “The River” is magnificent), Nick Cave, Elvis Costello, vast purple tracts of Dylan. Thompson and Cohen are of course peerless, Zevon, Thomas and Morrisey mixed, ABBA more miss than hit (ah but when they hit!) Lennon and McCartney dismal. I feel, lucky blogreader that I shall present you with a series of videoposts of songs that I think have good lyrics. I should warn you that the elliptical, the allusive, will feature but little. I like straightforward stuff that pithily and pointedly captures something truthful about the human heart and worst of all, I also like the singer as storyteller, especially if it’s all a bit social-realist! I have a shamefully deep streak of sentimentality.

Expect some truly awful music over the next few days, then.