Haven't heard this for about, oh.... 20 years, still sounds awesome. Question is, is that little spike of white noise a sample from Q Quarters by the Associates???!!

Crazy-legged Electro-Dad Culla pulls an Epic out of his 80's underpants! right....i'm going to sleep now...three in the morning here y'know...

Cheers Simon.

Cheers Sam.

Well, there's a surprise. Apparently The Legendary Pink Dots are playing as part of Ray Davies' Meltdown this year.

The Ledge are one of my all-time favourite bands, but I generally keep this quiet. Edward Ka-Spel is in fact a bit of a hero of mine. So I'm gutted that I'll be in Japan when they play, but also kind of excited that they're getting a degree of exposure after about thirty years of being overlooked.

Yeah, LOVE the Legendary Pink Dots.

wonderful post by alex over here!

Badouvian studmuffin Foxy Dom waxes Poetix over at the 70's blog

The Pop Group - Where there's a will

right...I'm going to bugger off for a while to concentrate on Japanese and writing a novel I seem to have started that predictably is now morphing wildly out of control.

Need I say we want people to contribute to those blogs? They're a bit Anglo/American aren't they....even if English isn't your first language feel free to get stuck in..... even if you want to post in another language, that's fine...even if you don't agree with much of what the other bloggers say....great....

It's my birthday tomorrow...I'll be forty one...ridiculous! what a fearfully accelerating tangle of fantasy and confusion life is, eh?

quick bit on eraserhead/lynch by me at the 70's blog

some guy was saying exactly the same on bbc news three days ago. so, what, are the tabloids in the uk ramping up the doomsday scenario then?

I'm a bit tuckered out after all that soloing. back soon with a defense of Meatloaf among others, first I'm off to write that Lynch post...

Last post from me in the great Spring Solo clash, slightly anti-climatic as my favourite bit of lead/solo isn’t on YouTube…

Anyway that unavailable piece is Collision by Mark Stewart and the Mafia, which manages to sound primordially unholy and scorchingly futuristic at the same time as it rears up, phases, flanges, pinwheels, screams and vaporizes like a malfunctioning Destructobot!

Course that then opens up the question of the work of Skip McDonald…


Which I’ll sidestep for the moment and pay tribute to a somewhat more minor but still underrated guitarist, East Bay Ray from the Dead Kennedys.

Now I hadn’t listened to The Dead Kennedys for about twenty years up to two or three years ago when I bought Fresh Fruit For Rotting Veg for Ping (she doesn’t like them, it turns out) and I was struck by how, really, the best thing about the record is East Bay Ray.

The single Holiday in Cambodia would seem to showcase all his best moves, from the moody patch of opening dissonance through those long, scything, intensely dramatic, phosphorescent arcs he carves out, on into the solo and the slide guitar rupturing into the frazzled fretboard scribble at the end.






But there is also the floating, luminous solo that suddenly balloons up out of nowhere on Let’s Lynch the Landlord.



A lot of the time, even when he gets co-opted into mundane thrash-a-longs (probably by Biafra he says, with no real justification whatsoever. The Spleen has an excellent Biafra anecdote which kind of confirms all your worst expectations though) like the version of Viva Las Vegas , he manages to poke his head above the trenches with some cheeky, staccato guitar lines, or the gothic surf rock irruption in When You Get Drafted.

The other great early tracks for EBR are Police Truck’s trebly spaghetti-western Wipeout and the way Too Drunk to Fuck’s Fiftie’s cop show riff explodes into bursts of klaxoning shrapnel. There’s obvious elements of pastiche in his sound but he’s also smart, strange, unexpected and keen to experiment.






It’s kind of a shame that East Bay Ray wasn’t in a better band really.*




*I’m sure there’s good stuff on both Plastic Surgery Disasters and Frankenchrist too, but I just haven’t got round to relistening to them.

Superlative bit of work from Wayne over at Faces!

I shall respond/extend in due course and FINALLY get that Lynch post out of my system.

Here we go again. Penultimate post from me and another selectic eclection of Sitar go lows.

I might be a redundant and embittered 41 year old penniless and pensionless, purblind, bald, impotent TEFL teacher with five unpublished novels mouldering in a bin bag in his parent’s garage whose resentful Leftist ranting serves merely to further reaffirm his myopia and flailing cluelessness, however!! there is one thing that you, the young, with your tangy, Zeitgeisty nowness and your shiny new bodies, in all their cock and cunt sure glory can never deny me….

I have seen World Domination Enterprises live and you haven’t.




LORD A' MERCY!!!!


The Impostume’s regular reader will know that I’m a fairly recent convert to Deep Purple but my love is no less fervent for its recency. This track would be fair contender for best everything. Drum break, riff, weirdest non/anti solos for guitar and organ, general space-age hyperkinetic souped-up rustbucket boogie thrust and metronomic momentum. I can do without Gillan’s vocals generally but they’re reasonably restrained her. Call me a tedious middle-aged contrarian with a comb-over in an ill fitting Asda suit at an Okinawan family wedding, BUT I don’t rate Smoke on the Water much, I think it's a bit dull, lightweight and grooveless, it’s a bit solemn and self important,the riff equivalent of a celebrity charity dinner.




RAM A LLAMA'S KING DONG!!!!!


Is this a transgressive taste move any more? Who knows? What I certainly know is that not only do I rather like Pink Floyd esp The Wall, I love Bat out of Hell. Bit of a Steinman fan in general actually, well.. .I can do without that Pandora’s Box stuff, but……

Bat Out of Hell is what it is, a wonderfully moving, witty and uproarious bit of epic musical theatre . I have a long post on Bat out Hell and Heartland rock’s appeal to the English working class to write at some point so I’ll save any further reflection for that, let’s just say it’s so good I had to post it twice, firstly so you can marvel at Mr Rundgren’s spectacularly disciplined production, secondly‘cos that’s an awesomely powerful live version.

Also Rundgren’s stuff on the track is some of the most moving, charged and dramatic guitar playing on record, a great emotional and narrative commentary on the tracks unfolding drama, a kind of mini-soundtrack within the song itself, adding ballast to its celebration/distillation of the rock myth. It’s miles better than anything he managed himself, innit? A Wizard a True Star’s got great tracks on it but it’s way too intent on being a showcase for Todd as apotheosis and culmination, bringing together all that ever was and shall be in one multi-instrumental, virtuosic bit of vainglory. But precisely because of the restrictions imposed on him here he does wonders, it condense his playing by putting him in a supporting role, forces it to articulate something more compelling than its own range and proficiency.





DAT IZ SUM PHATT SHITT!!

Don't worry about the dead, the yen should rapidly recover

New Zero book out, great cover, an essential purchase.

and while we've got some site traffic, I humbly remind you of this.

Honestly, you go off for a few days and it goes ballistic: ah yes all that repressed air-guitaring, rockist, phallocratic and masturbatory nonsense rearing its throbbingly empurpled head from behind even the most demure of facades. Luckily I still have a few gems left in my arsenal. Like the mixed metaphor and the oh-so-telling use of military terminology?! That’s right, my love of guitar solos is just one more sad example of my hateful apolitical misogyny/ pitiful homosocial blokishness/ lack of solidarity with progressive social movements! Wish evil upon me in your boiling mind!

Good to see some Steely Dan love out there. Good to see some Fripp/Belew Crimson stuff and plenty of Run DMC.

I have one, possibly two more posts left in me after this (note the idea of posts somehow being ejaculatory? Cultural nutsack symbolically shrivelled and ransacked testes squeaking in hamsterish dismay as I heroically try to semi-flaccidly batter up one last “mosquito’s tear” worth of inspiration?) although my favourite guitar bit EVA isn’t available online.. shame.. I’ll see if I can wrangle some way of uploading it or something…

I’m now going to go slightly beyond the pale, (call it perhaps, the Knopflereffect). That’s right it’s the (Brian) May Day (Guitar) Wank Holiday.



CHOOOOOOON!!!!!!!!!!

I’d like to pretend that I don’t like Queen. Or rather that I appreciate the artistry of the ArchDeacon on bass (Rapper’s Delight and all that) and find the rest deeply naff and embarrassing. Yep I know they’re all Tories. Yep, Sun City and all that…Yep One Vison and stuff….but I bet you’re still listening to Beyonce despite her playing in Lybia… or Whitehouse, despite them being Nazi scum, because ahh…. I see …. they’re not formally conservative....

And I really like the spinsterish Victorian whimsy to the playing on this fine fellow.



Yes, that’s right. Spinsterish Victorian whimsy! There’s something oddly pursed-lipped, prudish and anally puckered in May’s solos, no matter how long they are. He’s a kind of sober, slightly prissy and ascetic player. That’s right, I don’t find Queen bombastic. Now I know that’s a bit like suggesting that the sky is not blue, nor water wet, but still they seem to me to have an essential English reserve at their core which means that yes, they charm me…

Surprised this hasn’t cropped up yet. Too obvious? Maybe, but there you go. Scary Monsters is another one of those albums where you’re spoiled for choice really. Fripp’s solo album from around the time was alright wasn’t it? I used to have it. He was slagged off for wearing a skinny tie and trying to cop some of that oh-so-cool new wave and post punk action, but you’d have to ask yourself what the punks or even the post-punks were doing that Fripp wasn’t, except somehow not being “dinosaurs”.



And while we’re at it I suppose another track from the embarrassment of riches that is King Crimson’s Discipline is kind of inevitable: this one I now know, due to my highly developed Japanese language skills, much in evidence at the weekend there! means “please wait”. The fact that Belew gets no love whatsoever from anyone seems downright wrong to me (though he is a kind of musician’s musician innee?) Great voice too!






Best PIL Album? Metal Box? Not round Impostume towers, it’s the really rather rockist Album. What’s that, the one with the repugnant Steve Vai solos all over it and Ginger Baker on drums? Yep! I actually know nothing about Vai’s work elsewhere.. I did once see a video of him dressed as a native American Indian playing his axe atop a towering crag as eagles circled above and that kind of….. put me off, y’know, but his stuff on Album is awesome. Album must be one of the greatest rock albums of all time, right? No doubt it was all chopped up and refitted in the studio by Laswell (another pariah figure to right-thinkers though personally I have no idea why.) It’s kind of pick a track, any track time…






Richard Thompson is as we all surely know, a ginger and spryly capering god among men, like the lyrics, like the voice, LOVE the kangol hat, can’t get enough of the guitar on Hard On Me, which at some point he appears to be playing backwards and inside out simultaneously while wearing magically lambent mittens of purest mercury bequethen unto him by the High Priests of planet Fretboard.



One last bit of Steely Dan? It’d be wrong not to wouldn’t it? When oh when are they going to get that Terrorizer cover?

Frederick Bove launches his blog with a defense of NMH here

Right.

I’m off to Miyako Island for three days of drinking Awamori, eating mountains of Sushi and Oden and dazzling the in-laws with my new found Japanese language skills.

So I’m going to do an epic solo post now to tide me over.

I’m going to go for tracks that are ALL solo i.e the even less palatable category of the workout/jam. Before you start moaning just be thankful that I haven’t blogged any Steve Hillage. Yet.

Well, let’s start reasonably gently. Actually I dedicate this particular post to my Bro-In-Law, who’s a big lover of the epic jam* so…

I nominate this as Rother’s best solo outing. Starts off a bit like The Shadows then builds and builds. There’s a trembling slightly lachrymose quality to Rother’s guitar that always reminds me of Roy Orbison’s vocal, just on the point of spilling over…



And taking a slight leap folkward but staying with the cosmic/epic theme there’s this by John Martyn, in its eight minute version, ridiculously lovely, sheer echoplextasy. One World is a great album, as good as Solid Air or Inside Out, I reckon.

.


Actually while we’re in a folky place I also like this. Not Richard Thompson, I’m sure we’ll get round to him later but (adopts Partridgean cadence) Pentangle! What I like about Pentangle is the way they deploy the electric guitar for decidedly non-maximal effect. Both here, and in the long Jack Orion it’s used to add colour and supplement and augment the song, not to overwhelm it or kick off cheap dynamics. It actually sounds physically tiny the guitar in this track, I imagine Bert Jansch or whoever’s playing it holding a bright red shiny toy guitar, which adds to the poignancy.

I was going to post Jack Orion originally but relented as it’s so long.

.


All of which is mere prelude to this: Eddie Hazel doing the seemingly impossible.





Making life seem alright.







If anyone’s listening to this secretly in work first thing on a Monday morning, I salute you!



*cue comment's box pun

new post by me over at "and what..."

back soon with some more solos

Alex gives it some solo action at Up Close...only just falling the wrong side of Seb's 25 yr old cut off point.

actually though there must be loads of metal kids who LOVE solos...

If we’re talking guitar work we can only really be talking about one band right? That’s right MOFO forget The Butthole Surfers, forget Blue Oyster Cult.

I’m saying……











STEELY DAN!


Choosing the best bits of lead and solo from their body of work is nigh on impossible, there’s just so much great stuff in there. Though Countdown to Ecstasy is probably their most guitar-y album (or at least the rockiest) there is scintillating stuff like this (the below) on nearly every record.





No doubt if I hunted around a bit I could find out the various session musicians on the tracks, but
….I can’t be arsed! LOL!

Can I repost a track? I feel I must!





And what about this languid, cheeky little number!




Actually there are several other tracks I could just as well have posted. Holy Modder of Jahsus I love Steely Dan.


When oh when are they going to get a Wire front cover?

Just as an extension of the post below and the comments thusfar, and without having formulated any really coherent response let me at least say that I’m kind of deeply suspicious of the agenda around and the attachment to “outsider” art esp where this relates to/ impinges on mental health issues. I well recall listening to Daniel Johnson’s 1990 way back when and hearing him apparently weeping during a song and yelling SATAN, SATAN,SATAN in a harrowed and harrowing fashion and feeling that it was basically prurient, exploitative, not much of a step up from the days of Bedlam. Interestingly one of the people I knew who really like d the album was a real indie-kid, a lover of twee pop and shambling bands, among other things. Actually that’s a side issue, which I’ll return to…

What bugs me is the sense that somehow the mentally ill are a reserve of “authenticity”: he really is a tortured soul, look he self harms, he hears voices, he’s had ECT, he’s liberated from our bourgeoisie capitalist subjectivity, he represents the figure of the true artist. True “artists” are (in Artaud’s phrase) people on their way to being ”suicided by society”, souls and psyches too bountiful and fragile to tolerate the barbarism all around them, it’s precisely their inability to come to terms with life and the breakdown of their life world that authenticates them. They are 4 Real, whatever they say or do must be a humbling and amazing expression of some true innocence/primal and primary insight lost to those whose souls have been calloused and calcified in the process of accommodating life. You get this authenticating boosterism around a lot of “rediscovered” pretty minor artists , Jackson C Frank or whoever…

Even better if this person can be seen to have had a marginal life filled with abuse. Surely I can’t be the only person appalled by the 90s and 00’s trend for cynical and hyperbolic confessional literature (everything f rom J.T.LeRoy to Dave Pelzer) in which very often tales of dreadful abuse , poverty and neglect are mixed in with a kind of Forever Friends sentimentality or (in the case of invented stuff like Leroy and Frey) a kind of hollow, fucked up one up-manship. Even better if this person has had some personal tragedy:, dead kids, dead spouse, cancer which they have bravely battled with. This kind of pain is something no-one can sneer at or deny to you and the horror of grief and loss often get exploited for social reasons, I have truly suffered now sympathize with me and admire my depth. If you think I’m being ungenerous then scout around the web, disingenuous, self-aggrandizing references to personal loss are everywhere: check out online “shrines” to victims of stabbings or accidents, filled with messages which seem intended to do nothing but narcissistically express the message writers quality of soul. Any criticism can be immediately suppressed by the ultimate authenticating authority of death. How can you start being critical of the way another person grieves? How dare you! What right do you as someone cosseted by your normativity have to criticize the art of someone who has really suffered? Hence a part of its appeal: it puts you beyond critical reach. The two moves that are designed to negate criticism and leave you free to say whatever shit you want are A) Opinionism Let’s relativise it away B) Suffering: rendering your expression sacrosanct.

The quest for authenticity, or for some titillating authenticating element, guarantees that you, the angsty and guilty, coddled consumer are in touch with the really dynamic, productive, libidinal and artistically charged “outside”: not just the place where people really live but the place where people really feel. The mad really feel, because they are tormented, the abused really feel, the poor really live. A few years ago I saw a website that promised Baillie Funk not just from Rio’s worst Favella, but from the very heart of the worst slum, this is the real shit, these people are the poorest of the poor, the elect! And yet of course all this hankering after the outside in all its truth and reality is just one more attempt to position yourself as he/she who knows in the great game of consumer cool. Nothing faintly sick-making in all that?

There is also a tendency to what I like to call “sadistic naturalism” which is this angry attack on artifice in the name of the real and the natural. Sadistic naturalist are usually of an avowedly liberal-humanist political persuasion but are also deeply antipathetic to artifice insisting on a kind of unperfumed, unadorned engagement with the real to which it is morally incumbent on us to succumb and will be remorselessly, soul-crushing insistent on this. Sadistic naturalists will try and force you to be “what you really are” and will forever be lecturing you on how you need “to be yourself”, there’s an
irony in that their perception of your childish attachment to artifice and performance must be destroyed in the name of another kind of childishness: that of the real, emotionally true and natural “child within”. They are trying to save you from your bad (capitalist, bourgeoisie, patriarchal etc) attachments in order to bring you into the true alignment with the real that they, for all their rage and zealous tub-thumping, are presumably enjoying.

great post on the 70's blog from Giovanni...

they're still open to all-comers those blogs y'know...

sorry, nothing to do with anything else, i just have to get this off my chest...

neutral milk hotel are fucking horrible, aren't they? That fey, quirky, outsider-polymath, geeky-oblique yet somehow deep, mildly experimental leftfield wide-eyed innocent-abroad grassroots smug collegiate whimsy of which NMH are pretty solid representatives has been one of the worst genre strands of the past ten years. I blame Pavement and the Flaming Lips. Sufjan Stevens! Gag!

This indy strand in film and literature needs to be stamped out. Dave Eggers and all that gee-whizz liberal-humanist false modesty and off the cuff pop cultural smartarsery.

yeah.

cheers for that.

Reynolds attacks from an oblique angle by posting Tears for Fears, leaving me momentarily wrong-footed. The swine! Do I now try to respond to his surprising left-of-centre selection in kind or plunge on with my own agenda….hmmm….

Well…

I think to be honest I have a lot of Acid Rock to get off my chest before I start getting more nuanced about things! Posting the Buttholes below and Sam’s comment reminded me of a guitarist and a band I really love who to some extent were disciples of the Buttholes (they were on Trance Syndicate, Leary’s label), The Painteens, whose guitarist Scott Ayers had a similar abject/elevated aspirant soiled/silvery scrape to his guitar sound.

Now I guess we’re not basing this little soundclash on technical excellence right, so the Joe Satriani and technical death metal heads will doubtless be appalled, I guess that as per last year it’s just simply stuff we like…





So yeah, the Painteens were a great band, and the album Born in Blood is probably the best of them all, there are better showcases for Ayers guitar work than the track above (ie the track below!) but again, in keeping with the Buttholes’ stuff, i like the way it slowly flickers into life as the track fades and brings in a kind of cold dazzle to an already pretty frosty song. I think it’s a lot better than Bowie’s stodgy and histrionic original which it sort of fillets out and soften and abstracts, taking an unsexy song and adding a certain…. well, wintery Sapphic ethereality.

Mostly the Painteen’s focus was on sexual and psychological abuse, S and M, self harm, serial killers, extreme behaviour etc. A pretty well-worn furrow of transgressive subject matter that even in the late eighties /early nineties seemed a little… dated… but they were still, sonically at least one of the more inventive of the post-Blast First wave of guitar bands (Dinosaur, Buttholes, Sonic Youth etc) and Scott Ayers (who did later stuff with/as Sub Arachnoid Space and the Walking Time Bombs,) seems to be a typically “overlooked” figure. Like the Buttholes they seem to be able to attain moments of unexpectedly piercing beauty and uncanny, otherworldly allure.

To be honest with you “22 going on 23” is pretty uncomfortable to listen to, exploitative in its use of real life pain and trauma from a radio phone-in, but somehow transformed by a lovely, pealing and swelling guitar solo, in a sense the solo redeems the song, it’s moving and unexpected.

Paul Leary did a lot of great work with the Butthole Surfers, my other favourite bit of his is the way that from about 1:50 onward in “I saw an X-Ray of a girl passing gas” he slowly unfurls a long undulating solo that carries the song off into the cosmos.

Is it that time of year again*? Ho-ho!


Blue Oyster Cult? I love 'em but I have to say that their live albums seem better than the studio stuff to me and of the live albums the one below is best.

Where to start with this irrepressible bad boy? My favourite bit is, in best youtube LOL fashion, the part that starst at 00:00 and ends at 5:17, though around about the four minute mark I find myself yelling "muthaFUKAH!!!"

Disconcerting if you're in the Post Office at the time.

A pretty comprehensive showcase for Mr Dharma's charms....













*and just when I was revealing my sensitive side!

I haven’t cried in my adult life.

I came quite close on a train back to Barrow-In-Furness in February 1996 when I finally split up with the girl I’d been with for the previous five years but that particular remarkable and humbling day isn’t what I want to talk about now, though if we ever bump into each other feel free to ask me. No-one I love has died, I haven’t become a father, I’ve had the usual slew of minor triumphs and disappointments, none of which have seemed exceptional enough in the general tragic way of the world to justify crying.

That doesn’t mean that on the other hand I’m not an abysmal sentimentalist, that I don’t often find myself on the verge of tears. Songs do it to me, so do films, often things which aren’t very ”progressive” at all. To some extent sentiment lies at the base of all our judgements: show me an example of working class resistance/solidarity and I’ll have lump in my throat, exactly the same way some people dab their eyes when they hear the National Anthem or watch a military parade. Their tears, my sneers.

You’ll know all that stuff that gets to me from your own life.

People being brave in the face of crushing disappointment, self-awareness coming too late in the day, defiance in the face of manifest injustice, yearning for an impossible love, all the contradictory needs that pull your life out of shape, the transience of things, the awful sharp surprise of finding that people are not what they seem.

But also the consolations of laughter, love, small acts of consideration and kindness that suddenly overwhelm all your cynicism and doubt, the seemingly impossible, dream like elevation of loving and being loved, how the success of those you love is so much purer and more fulfilling than your own.

The fear that all that incremental inching forward toward happiness that you’ve made in your life will be swept away from you, the fear that you can’t control your own recklessness enough to hold your life together.

Your miserable childhood, your awkward adolescence, your confused adulthood, the way your resignation weighs on you, the secret selves you nurtured but never had the nerve to give birth to, the secret fixations and obsessions, the sudden purging bursts of confession and honesty, the astonishment that any two people can be so different or similar. The consolations and the torments of fantasy. The fear that you should have had a different life and now it’s all too late. The gratitude for having a home to return to.

You know these things, they’re not complicated, they’re basic,fundamental, the fabric of daily experience. Some people hate talking about all that, it makes them feel vulnerable I suppose, or like a failure or that it should all be dismissed in the name of higher, more esoteric concerns. As for me, I need the catharsis of a good sentimental song, a shoulder to cry on, a sympathetic ear, I need the sense of connection and identification it brings.

In this sense lyrics are important (though not essential, those exquisite peaks in Trans Europe Express will get me blubbing) as is a certain amount of storytelling in the song. Storytelling allows songs to break out of the self- pitying, whiny mode that I have to be honest leaves me cold, too much about my-tragic-life as opposed to our tragic-comic condition is likely to provoke in me nothing more than Spartan disdain (Radiohead, Keane, Coldplay). Richard Thompson is absolutely the master here, I listen to Mock Tudor or Rumour and Sigh and kind of stagger round the room, eyebrows raised clutching my chest and nodding along sympathetically: yes, yes, this man understands the human heart! Springsteen will do it to me too, the holy trinity of Darkness, Nebraska, The River, also last year’s The Promise. Pere Ubu and David Thomas and the Two Pale Boys.

But, unhip as all that is, it gets worse, there’s a ton of commercial rock and pop stuff that slays me, often just because there’s a certain condensed poetry and insight in a line or a chorus. Do I need to invoke Pope again to justify myself here: well I will. “True wit is nature to advantage dressed/what oft were thought but ne’er s o well expressed”. Often the direct, unadorned immediacy required of a pop lyric captures and expresses the keen edge of experience in a way that floridity would soften or disguise. A few examples off the top of my head…

the brilliantly aphoristic

“ Oh yeah life goes on, long after the thrill of living has gone.”

The painfully acute mini-marrative: these are probably some of the most wrenching words ever written down by a human being!!!!*

“There’s no welcome look in your eyes when I reach for you/and girl you're starting to criticize little things I do.”

The fantastically subtle modulation in narrative voice that reveals the limits of the speakers understanding about his own plight

“I got a job working construction/ for the Jonestown company/ But lately there aint been much work/ On account of the economy” (italics mine)

Now don’t get me wrong I love the ludic, wild, poetic, uncanny, modernist, cerebral and all that but I can’t live without this stuff any more than I could live without having someone to love, without being touched, encouraged, listened to, consoled, advised, helped, taught. Any more than I could live without trying to offer as much as I have of insight or generosity to others who I love and admire. We all need a bit of soothing, a bit of healing, or at least I do. I find no contradiction between loving both Springsteen and Kraftwerk, or Scarface and Galaxie 500. I wouldn’t be bold enough to claim I was vast and contained multitudes, but I am at least fairly large and contain a smallish community of selves whose gradual harmonization seems to be one of life’s fundamental tasks, and who are spoken to differently and who speak differently through me.

You just met one of them. Don’t worry, the shouty, wordy one will be back soon.

Meanwhile here’s a song that always gets to me.** And this line is a marvel. Eight words that capture an unequivocal truth, that move from the mundane and the particular, to the cosmically conciliatory, that implies a narrator whose sense of failure and injustice has been bound up in impossible aspirations, whose ego and desire for status has handicapped him, eight words that are freighted with a whole sense of a personality and a perspective, an entire life.

“An ordinary girl/ Will make the world alright.”
















*It's unforgivable how Top Gun debased this towering song, innit. Then again what about Ghost and "Unchained Melody". Was there some kind of campaign to destroy the Righteous Brothers in the 80s?

**expect some horrific posts over the next few days an imagine me sitting blubbing on a Futon to all kinds of M.O.R, A.O.R and F.M. freindly abominations.