Back in the 1980s it was tough to find a better live act than The Woodentops. Have a listen to the album Live Hypno Beat, from 1987 and recorded in Los Angeles a year earlier, with its energy, infectious pop and frantic drumming. It was indie music you could dance to; something almost every band from James, That Petrol Emotion to The Soup Dragons and Primal Scream were having a go at with mixed results as the decade came to a close. But while The Woodentops should have been at the vanguard of this indie dance cross over they gradually faded away in a familiar tale of unfulfilled potential.

Did they peak too soon? Arguably listening back to the difference in quality between their early singles and Live Hypno Beat tracks with their weaker later releases this is a plausible argument. Quite simply by the time Inspiral Carpets and James were headlining Reading Festival in the early 1990s The Woodentops best tracks were behind them and they were focusing more and more on whether someone could dance to their music rather than the quality of the songwriting.

First up this collection, with the strapline ‘remasters, remixes and rarities 1982 -1992′, is big, arguably a little too big, with its 52 tracks surely too much for any band in one go. But given that it is retailing for the price of  standard double album there’s no hint of being ripped off.

If there’s a genuine gripe though it’s the lack of live tracks on the album, especially those from Live Hypno Beat. It could be there were licensing issues, but with just two live tracks on the album, neither from Live Hypno Beat, it limits this collection’s ability to properly showcase the breadth of their talent.

What the collection does include though are the key tracks from their two albums 1986’s excellent Giant and 1988’s less interesting Wooden Foot Cops on the Highway,  their singles and a bucket load of remixes by the likes of Adrian Sherwood.

Of these it is Giant tracks and their early singles on CD 1 and CD 3 that really stand out and survive the decades that have passed since their initial releases on Rough Trade in the 1980s. The folky Good Thing, wistful Give It Time and the rockabilly Love Train are all as superb now as they were then. They also show that in singer Roly McGinty they had one of the great lead vocalists of the early 1980s indie music scene.

The rarities and other recorded version of Live Hypno Beat such as Move Me and the frantic Well,Well, Well are particular highpoints showing the band at their artistic peak.  CD3 also features a welcome Glastonbury 1987 recording of Get It On, offering a hint of the sort of live tracks that should have featured on this collection.

However, CD2 is the saddest of the collection,  as it focuses on The Wooden Foot Cops on the Highway tracks. I remember the disappointment of hearing this far more polished album at the time. The songs just weren’t as strong and the drum machine focus on production made it seemingly lacking in passion compared to Giant. Tracks such as Maybe It Won’t Last, They Can Say What They Want and Wheels Turning feel as empty now as they did then when compared to the live and Giant era The Woodentops.

The rest of the CD is littered with a variety of remixes that feel very dated. Adrian Sherwood’s version of Why Why Why just seems so tame by top quality dance music standards and the band’s live delivery of the track (see clip). The Baleric remix of the same track, on CD3, also does little for this song as the sands of time pass through the fingers of the ever aging club goers from 1991.

By the time they ceased altogether in the early 1990s they’d lost sight of what made them great. Tracks from their final release, the horribly dated 1992’s Woodentops v Bang the Party’s – Tainted World, show just how far they’d slipped from potential stadium headliners to sanguine dance act.

Reading back on this review it sounds like I’m being a little harsh on The Woodentops. That would be wrong I assure you. As a live act and for a chunk of the 1980s they were a superb band, but with their move further into dance culture they drifted further from their original identity and arguably lost their passion and fans along the way. Since 2006 they have reformed and played a series of live shows, which shows there is still unfinished business for McGinty and the band.

If you like tracks such as Love Train and Love Affair with Everyday Living then I urge you to invest in Live Hypno Beat, still their best ever release and a far better collection of one of the UK’s best acts from the 1980s.

7/10

by Joe Lepper

The next time you’re stuck outside Stoke-on-Trent in a train going nowhere – but nominally to Manchester – you can thank Flying Teapot. Yes Flying Teapot. For this is one of those seminal early 70s prog rock albums that made a name for Virgin Records, and eventually countless millions for Richard Branson.

Strange as it may seem, there was once a ‘Canterbury Scene’ and Gong were fundamental to it.  Even more bizarrely, Gong saxophonist Didier Malherbe was first encountered by band members in a cave in Mallorca (although his website is lamentably quiet on the subject).

If you’re thinking Flying Teapot is a silly name for a record, you’d be right. It’s a play on words of ‘flying saucer’. It’s not Shakespeare. But then it doesn’t pretend to be.

Gong’s raison d’etre appears to be surrealist nonsense. Indeed, if it is silliness you want then this LP delivers. As part one of the concept trilogy Radio Gnome Invisible it comprises a barely intelligible meandering narrative. Track one, helpfully also called Radio Gnome Invisible, starts with a whistly wibble and continues with a deliberate Franglais pronounciation of the hook line. Don’t be put off.

This is music that feels freshly silly even today. Although it’s a concept album of sorts, it’s a real antidote to the serious, poutingly sexual musicians of our era (and of their era too). This is funked-up, wigged-out shit replete with dirty basslines. This is from the dawn of prog rock. It is prog rock before it got wanky and self-indulgent (as all great musical genres do – yes, even dubstep). It is truly progressive in the way you might have once believed of the Lib Dems before they got any real power. This is the territory of Zappa or Beefheart.

Gong

At times, it feels as if it’s Jeff Wayne, inspired not by H.G. Wells, but by the Brothers Grimm. This is particularly true on the track Zero the Hero and the Witch’s Spell. As proto-blogger Piero Scaruffi off-puttingly put it in 1999, Flying Teapot is, ‘a demented collage of nursery-rhyme melodies, circus horns, jazz rhythms, galactic keyboards, sensual/celestial wails, sardonic mantras, mock-heroic electronics, caricatural anthems’.

Track two (of a mere six) – the titular Flying Teapot – is an eleven minute genre-voyage of a song. The length allows an exploration of themes, sounds, influences and musical juxtapositions to keep you on your mental toes. Zero the Hero and the Witch’s Spell is another nine-minute epic that fuses sounds into an essentially jazz drone rock triumph. Malherbe’s sax and flute really come to the fore against Hillage and Allen’s guitar riffs.

Witch’s Song, I Am Your Pussy is essentially The Wicker Man set to music. Vocalist Gilli Smyth gives a witchy shriek of laughter that starts girlish and turns ghoulish. Like a Hammer House Horror version of the chattering cackle of the fly in the Happiness Stan interludes from The Small Faces’ Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake.

It’s important to recognise the ongoing psychadelia of the age that this music came from. And the socio-political statement that this music was making (or perhaps deliberately not making). This is more than simply drop-out/drop-some music. This is an apolitical rejection of anything serious by a descent into fantasy. This is an album to read a Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers comic to. This is a band that appeared at the second Glastonbury in ’71. It is a rejection of the staid and of right-and-proper thinking.

This is not a comedy record though . It will make you laugh. In it, you can spot influences of The Goon Show, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Derek & Clive. The image of the Flying Teapot is a druggy subversion of a peculiarly British icon in the same vein as these

Of course, the jazz-swing fusion track Pot Head Pixies is the closest thing to a 3-minute pop song that Gong produced. Its lyrics may appear blinkeredly unnuanced today. But it’s not far from the storyland theme and wibbliness of the much-lauded Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake. Just a bit more flakey that’s all. I like to think that A.S. Byatt was listening to Gong when she penned her fairytale-infused Victorian gothic novel The Children’s Book.

Kevin Ayres

Flying Teapot came hot on the heels of Virginia Plain, which Roxy Music had debuted less than 12 months before. Virgina Plain is a song so sublime and ridiculous that it’s almost impossible to listen to without thinking of the Big Train pastiche. Again, 1973 was the year that The Wicker Man appeared in cinemas. Culture still had the ability to shake people to their cores if they cared to look and listen.

Why you should add Flying Teapot to your collection? It is now 40 years since Flying Teapot was first issued. The Gong generation are now in their 60s and 70s. Yet, the influences of Gong are far-reaching, if rarely acknowledged. Several tracks from the Aphex Twin’s Come to Daddy EP feel ripped from Flying Teapot only with the BPM turned up to the max.

Gong’s sound can be felt down the years to the ambient sound of the early 90s, through to the more experimental line of indie music such as Of Montreal. More overt coverage comes from Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci, whose 1994 track, Kevin Ayres, celebrates the sometime Gong collaborator and Canterbury scene stalwart of the same name, who died earlier this year.

New listeners to Gong’s Flying Teapot may wish for a consistent melody or a consistent feel or a sensible lyric. There are plenty of other artists that can give you less acid-fuelled phonics (although, with Gong, the comedown is mellow and you can always move onto harder stuff later on).

This record will make you rethink psychadelia, jazz, prog rock and space rock. It might make you rethink drug laws. Or it might just make you switch it off and go and listen to Mumford & Sons on your iPhone.

For more weirdness about Gong visit here.

by Rob Finch

When the likes of Joe Strummer and Paul Weller sung about police brutality and racism in their late 1970s and early 1980s heyday thousands took notice.

But when National Wake, a multi-racial punk band in Apartheid era South Africa, sung about these themes there is an extra resonance. Here was a band that was often banned from playing live, had first hand experience of police oppression and lived in one of the most brutal and unjust societies of the modern era.  Those that managed to see them were enthralled, but the wider world never even knew they existed.

National Wake were formed in 1978, two years after the Soweto uprising,  and at it’s core were Ivan Kadey, an architecture student with a protest singing and folk music background and brothers Gary and Punka Khoza, who played bass and drums respectively on the township soul and funk circuit.

Taking those protest folk and soul influences, combining them with rock and punk as well as reggae they created something that was wholly unique. At times its Bob Marley, at others Talking Heads with elements of The Clash and Funkadelic entering the mix. It was a superb combination that begs the question were they influenced by the music around them or were the likes of Talking Heads influenced by them?

Joined by additional members at various times: including percussionist ‘One Eyed’ Mike Lebisi; lead guitarist Paul Giraud; saxophonist Kelly Petland and slide guitarist Steve Moni, they were highly accomplished musicians and that shines through just as strongly as the protest lyrics on their only album, 1981’s National Wake.

I’ve only discovered them this year, through talk on the internet about the recent Punk in Africa documentary. This wonderful mixtape of the era was also enough convince me to buy the 2011 reissue of National Wake. It’s an album that has taken me by surprise. Not only is it surprising to someone brought up on UK and US punk bands to find out that South Africa had a punk scene at all during Apartheid, but its also a surprise at just how good this remastered version of this once forgotten album is.

Musically its as good if not better than many of UK and US new wave and punk bands we’ve already mentioned, opening with Wake Of The Nation, with prog rock guitar solo merging effortlessly into a soul funk rhythm that Weller would have welcomed with open arms to The Jam’s Gift album. The Saxophone and guitar solos are particularly effective but the lyrics shine brightest, “this is the wake of the nation as we smash it away.”

International News is another punk influenced track, combining the innovative world music view of Talking Heads with the social commentary of Strummer perfectly with its superb opening riff jerking among the percussion on a track about government censorship and the struggle of South Africans to tell the world and each other about their plight. The heavy South African accent on the “International News” chorus adds to the weight of this song. Even the fast pace of the song conveys the threat of government oppression.  In this Afro-pop interview with Kadey, he explains “there’s a sense of urgency to get this out before it gets shut down.”

The “Keep on moving, keep on fighting chorus” on Supaman, one of many Bob Marley influenced tracks, is the most emotional moment on the album. No matter what is being thrown at them the fight is worth it. There’s an added dignity to this song as Gary and Punka’s brother had been the victim of a brutal police attack. This track should have been played as Nelson Mendela took office when Apartheid was eventually dismantled.

The final track, a live version of Black Punk Rockers, is added to the reissue, and is the most overtly punk song on the album. But around half way through the band’s individualism comes through with one of the best drum and percussion solos in rock  brilliantly placed between the fierce major bar chords.

National Wake was originally released by WEA in South Africa. But following pressure from the South African government due to its overtly political lyrics it was effectively shelved.

Touring was also difficult for the band. Their Riot Rock tour with other South African new wave bands such as Safari Suits in 1979 was marred by venues refusing to allow a multi-racial band to play. They instead retreated out of the cities into township discos and small rural venues to find an audience. In the end they dissolved shortly after their album was shelved.

As for the band members they stayed within the South African music scene where they continued to influence other artists.  Kadey co-founded the record label Shifty Music and helped build its mobile studio using some of the National Wake’s sound equipment. Among those to use it was Warrick Sony of Kalahari Surfers. The Khoza brothers stayed within Johannesburg’s Rockey Street alternative scene, which featured a number of multi-racial bands, given confidence to play together by the trailblazing National Wake.

Apartheid may have ended but their lyrics of struggle and yearning for freedom are still pertinent globally and across South Africa. This is what makes the album far more than an historical artefact and we believe an essential item in any music collection.

National Wake is available direct from South African label  Fresh Music here  or to download from iTtunes or Amazon.

by Joe Lepper

I’m not going to lie to you. I have to admit to Julian Cope largely passing by off my musical radar. Forgive me, I appear to have been ignoring one of the holiest figures of indie music. Unfortunately, this lost religion seemingly manifests through a self-proclaiming David Icke character.

The Saint Julian collection feels bloated. The original material, and Cope’s vocal delivery, is insufferably bland to my ear. These tracks merge into one and I have trouble telling them apart. Even the more electronic flavoured pieces aren’t distinguishable enough from each other, or from music by other more familiar artists. There’s no denying that World Shut Your Mouth remains a great track. But to my mind this alone that isn’t enough to keep this collection of songs together.

The original material on this repackaged and expanded version is supplemented with a couple of note-perfect live versions, and that’s fair enough (but not why I go to gigs). The B-sides are actually quite good, but it’s the remixes I have a problem with. I can’t see what the “Trouble Funk Mix” adds to World Shut Your Mouth. Trampoline is certainly bouncy, with fragrances of A-ha, Bruce Springsteen and a hint even of New Order (admittedly these are the kinds of music I’ve always shied away from). My main problem is with “The Long Mix” of this track – nearly six minutes of my life I won’t get back. It’s just silly. On the plus side, the original version of Eve’s Volcano has a wonderfully Wonderstuffy organ wave and its remix is actually the freshest and most listenable of the lot.

Despite the remixes, CD 2 is better – pleasurable even. It at least shows diversity and I think that it really does go someway to making this release deserve the “deluxe” soubriquet. My favourite track here has to be the hymnal, Disaster, which is an uplifting escape-from-chaos. Maybe it’s the mandolin feel: I do love a bit of electric mandolin. Warwick the Kingmaker is also unique in that it’s spikily ego-rap dirge that hits you square between the eyes largely because it eschews the pop-rock feel of much of the rest of the album. I like its quirkiness. It’s what, say, Jamie T might have been doing if he’d been born 20 years earlier. Finally, the clanging and wailing sound of Non-Alignment Pact (how 80s is that name?), is poppy and punky and sufficiently stand-out to make it a quality tune.

At 24 tracks, there is something in this new version of Saint Julian for a zealous completist Copeite, and perhaps it’s a value-for-money starting place for impressionable initiates in the Copecult. But I am still no convert. It’s certainly rock n’ roll, but I’m not sure I like it. And I’m not alone. According to Wikipedia, Cope has described Saint Julian as ‘not being one of his favourite albums, although he acknowledges that “it has its moments”.’

5/10

by Rob Finch

When a rock star dies young, in sad and mysterious circumstances, their works often become mythologised. That’s particularly true of Dennis Wilson and the once-rare Pacific Ocean Blue. Yet, despite the bullshit surrounding it, this remains a fine album.

Even for those non-Beach Boys fans out there, it’s worth plunging into these azure shallows of 70s mellow rock. But the fans should be warned: this is no early classic rock n’ roll era Surfin’ Safari, nor is it anything like the awesome experimental Pet Sounds era. It really doesn’t sound like any Beach Boys album you’ll have heard (even the later ones).

Indeed, the purity of the Beach boys harmonies are a million miles from the haggard soulfulness of the boozefucked mid-70s Dennis Wilson. The middle Wilson brother’s inner struggle eventually outstripped the more famous Brian’s own mental and cognitive implosion – and his tale was sensitively portrayed in the recent BBC 4 documentary, Dennis Wilson: the real Beach Boy (available episodically on Youtube).

The ocean really is at the heart of this record. But unlike the overt faux surfy themes that created so many great earlier Wilson/Jardine/Love tunes, in Pacific Ocean Blue the sea appears as a meditiative theme of the record – not a concept or cheap gimmick. It’s actually cocktail of an album of love, loss and soul that is infused with warm salty liquid lushness. On paper it shouldn’t work. This is a washed-up 60s band drummer going solo in the glam rock/pop era at the dawn of punk. Now-unfashionable blues, gospel, synth and a host of other influences place this album squarely in the 1970s. Yet Pacific Ocean Blue has somehow achieved a timeless quality. And I think what makes it work so well is the over-riding feel of the record being made by a repentant bad boy with time to think. Dennis Wilson may have been the George Best of rock n’ roll, but his aimlessness, his rootlessness, his anchorlessness, actually meshes this album’s material.

Dennis – the surfer, the slacker, the boozer, the shagger – spent more than five years putting this together. Maybe it matured in whisky, but that time was well worth it. Nothing demonstrates this fact that two of the best tracks never made it to the original 12-track LP and remain as instrumentals on the reissued 16-track CD version. I have to admit to being deeply moved by the instrumental Holy Man. The opening piano chords make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. There’s a deja vu in it. I feel like I heard these synths on one of my dad’s old LPs (I almost certainly didn’t as it was never released). The only comparison I can find is a defunked sound of The Commodores classic instrumental, Machine Gun. The other fine instrumental, Mexico, is a simple hispanic piano/acoustic/trumpet combo. It updates flavours of Rodrigo’s Concerto D’Aranjeuz, that could easily – but never does – stray into Herb Alpert territory.

Although I initially had my reservations, Pacific Ocean Blue is one of those rare albums that grows incrementally more beautiful with each listen. The originally released tracks meld Wilson’s influences and suffuse them in balmy Californian currents. Tug of Love (Feel the Pull) is beautifully sad and is the most Beach Boys-like in it’s harmonics. As the track progresses it becomes a synthy spiritual that could just as easily have been among the late 90s efforts of J. Spaceman.  At other times – the start of the blues-y Friday Night for instance – there are hints of maybe The Doors, or perhaps even a foretelling of Dire Straits (shock! Horror!), while at the same time it evokes a thunderous oceanic tempest, as well as inner turmoil. Clever.

Sadness is truly available in bucketloads here, especially with Thoughts of You, a song that pulls the heartstrings. Ending with the line, “Silently you touch my face”, it could be a love poetry, a break-up line, but which just makes me want to burst into tears in the context of his subsequent untimely death.

The title track is definitely the most upbeat-sounding of the album. Yet, while the name superficially suggests a vivid seascape, the theme is heavily borrowed from the more overt Beach Boys track Don’t Go Near The Water. In fact, the line “It’s no wonder, the Pacific Ocean is blue” is one of the weakest on the album. Perhaps the upbeat feel was a sop to the record company to give them a  single from what is, very much, a selection of tracks designed to be an album.

That album feel is firmly established by the Side A opening track, River Song, an intensely soaring glam rock-spiritual. It’s another flaw of the album that there’s too little of this epic spiritual influence and too much mid-70s glam boogie-woogie zeitgeist-surfing influence at play. Conversely, Dreamer with its funkhorn, Isaac Hayes like interludes could have been recorded in no other decade than the 1970s. And that’s a very good thing.

While Pacific Ocean Blue is a child of its time, all the songs remain fresh and there’s something that’ll appeal to almost any music lover. The album comes complete with, not a wall of sound, but maybe a warming, embracing sonic air curtain. It’s many-layered quality has stylistic echoes down the decades to later artists. Time has an almost Radiohead-like clanging changeability, yet is still an orchestrated lovesong. The Flaming Lips may owe Dennis Wilson a good deal, while Playground Love, the first track of Air’s Virgin Suicides soundtrack is a near facsimile of the minor key intro of End of the Show.

On it’s 1977 release, Pacific Ocean Blue only flirted with the US Billboard Hot 100 for a few months and then disappeared into obscurity and deletion. This inevitably contributed to some of the hipsterish have-you-heard-ism. Ultimately, so did the fact that six years after Pacific Ocean Blue was released Dennis Wilson was found drowned – allegedly in the foetal position – in that self-same blue water at Marina del Ray, behind Venice Beach in Los Angeles. He was just 39.

Please don’t glibly believe the hype about this record. Just listen to it. Immerse yourself in the warm ocean and let yourself drift.

By Rob Finch

The thing is, define psychedelia. Ok, I think we we can all agree Hendrix is the master psychsman. Our recent top ten albums from the golden age of psychedelia came to the same conclusion. After Jimi though all bets are off, one man’s bongo and bass marathon in Marrakesh is another man’s annoying fey folk whimsy recorded on bad acid under a conker tree in Hyde Park in 1967.

In my definition, certain criteria have to be met, the resulting work should take your brain to the  planet  Hargapaphon in the Greater Mushroom Spiral arm, (turn left at San Francisco, go straight on for 867 light years, when you see God, you’ve arrived ) blatant recreational drug use is highly desirable, being darlings of the late Sixties, early Seventies counter culture is a good thing, the use of backwards guitar is a sure fire winner, a far out sleeve can work wonders, oh , and it must be met with critical bemusement, hostility or indifference. Ladbroke Grove based Pink Fairies and their debut 1971 album Never Never Land fulfills most of those criteria …with knobs on.

Theirs was a convoluted gestation (see Rich Deakins highly readable ‘Keep it together’ for further enlightenment) with their previous incarnation the Social Deviants with Mick Farren at the helm,  but by the time of Never Never Land the band was Paul Rudolph lead guitar, John Alder (also known as Twink) drums, Duncan Sanderson , bass, and Russell Hunter, more drums.

Polydor signed them up in 1970 and they recorded a non-album single, ‘The snake’ in January  71. The label was impressed enough to offer them a deal for a debut album which duly arrived a few months later, housed in an iconic sleeve portraying the band cartoon-like as fairies and pixies  sitting on a planet looking out into the universe, once seen never forgotten. Never Never Land  was raw, it was rock but not overtly so, it had  light and shade, it had elements of rebellion, nihilism and pure escapism, needless to say the band weren’t too happy with it. They felt they had failed to capture the wild freakoutness of their legendary live shows, but I disagree totally it’s an album that lights my fire every time I play it.

Let’s try and convey some of that magic to you dear reader. The album starts with Do It ( the b-side of The Snake single and features on this excellent compilation by Kris Needs), which  introduces itself with  a misleading  acoustic strum, then  suddenly erupts in your face  with a rush of freaked out rock n roll, inciting us all to ‘do it, don’t talk about it maaaaaaaaan if you ain’t gonna do it, do it, do it’ ….

‘Heavenly man’ on the other hand is a  gloriously sublime slice of slippery psych with Paul pulling out a repeated guitar effect that takes your breath away, is it about God ?, is about a gay relationship ?… who cares ?!…when the lovely lyric hits ‘ smiling down on me’ it is beyond brilliant.

‘Say that you love me’ is like a powered up mad Indian pow wow dance; crazy riff, crazy guys. Towards the end Paul pulls off effortless spiraling notes, Twink hits those skins hard as hell and lyrics seem secondary. ‘War girl’ is the most beautiful tune, a delightful rolling thread of bass and drums over Paul’s sustain laden guitar, and what a solo; restrained, yet disgorging emotion like you wouldn’t  believe. It is blues through the haze of a Hendrix soundtrack inspired acid vision.

The title track is a slowly building bonfire of  amazingly dexterous drum rolls and crashes. Paul then comes in with guitar, weaving and phasing,  and those drums, they jump out and take you to never never land, cue wah wah build up, higher and higher as it reaches a plateau, then blisses out with backward guitar overdubs and gentle  feedback.

‘Track 1 side 2′ Is actually track 1 track side 2 (who said hippies had no sense of humour ?). It has a mournful piano, drum and  vocal intro, most untypical of The Pinks, that is until the two minute mark when as if from nowhere the boogie arrives, the band mesh perfectly and hit meta psych riffola, my favourite solo of Paul’s ever, if it don’t move ya, you’re dead ….or a Tory. It’s mad, it’s far out, it’s  too bloody short.

‘Thor’ is a moments guitar FX respite before the onslaught recommences. ‘Teenage rebel’ is a playful rockin’ romp complete with a biting solo from Paul, at one point it tries to leave earth’s orbit before Twink throws in a solo for no apparent reason, then it’s banquet time , the centrepiece of the album rears its trippy head ‘Uncle Harry’s last freakout’,  an ode to rolling joints and ‘doing it’ for the people. It is ragged, it is lengthy and it is only rock ‘n’ roll but I love it as  Paul pulls out all the rabbits, lead, rhythm, riffs oh ! he’s all over it. Twink  and Russell keep  superhuman time, it is a planet sized monster of indulgence, but guess what? It works, with its closing  lament of  ‘you and me can be so very free’, it eases down only to build for the big crescendo, ‘scuse me while i  die. It is better than sex, it is the best drug ever, it is….the finale to Uncle Harry’s last freakout and it’s delirious !…..peace reigns. The closing track ‘The  dream is just beginning’ leaves us on an optimistic vision of the future, ‘we’re winning, we’re winning’.

So, all that’s left is for you to do is buy a copy.

by John Haylock

Vectoring in from Quadrant Nine, somewhere near Betelgeuse, there’s an echo, then banging over a bouncing rhythm made seemingly of skittering mice like creatures as Michael Karoli, Can’s multi-instrumentalist, goes surfbound. The mice like creatures run faster and a flute tries to take flight, before silence breaks out. What at first sounds like the bizarre soundtrack to a German sci fi film, filmed in Honolulu on a budget of mad drugs and squonkophone, turns out  to be a track  called ‘Millionenspiel’ which opens this magnificently confusing three CD box of madness by the influential krautrockers.

It’s the late sixties and Can are more madder than Stockhausen meets Gerry and the Pacemakers, they’ve only been together ten minutes and already they’ve changed the world. These studio, and occasional live recordings  have been extricated from the cobweb covered Can vaults and coated with love by keyboardist Irmin Schmidt. They are utterly astounding in their brutality, sense of exploration and magical musical experimentation.

Second track on disc two ‘Are you waiting for the streetcar’ is a jam in a cul de sac of temporal repetition, repeat ad infinitum, and a bit longer. You can go with it or skip with a migraine, I go with it and come out after ten minutes with new found understanding of mental illness. Third track ‘Evening all day’ is arsing about in the studio, as a horse breaks its tether, the band are looking at each other waiting for something to happen, clippety-clop clippety-clop follows, and nothing happens, apart that is from them inventing jazz reggae.

Next up is ‘Deadly Doris’, who turns out to be deadly for 3.09 minutes of  audio rocket fuel that attains orbit via vocalist Malcolm Mooney’s mantra and Jaki Liebezeit’s superhuman drumming. Doris is sexy, she’s also deadly, and the result? Can invent punk rock in 1968.

A more structured rock ‘n’ dirty roll, fuzzed up manna from Deutschland is a sixteen minute freak out called ‘Graublau’. It’s 1969 and men are on the moon, Can are well, not anywhere, in the world we know. In your head, perhaps? A figment of Sgt Pepper ? Who knows ? They seem to exist outside of time, Graublau’ begins to disintegrate at four minutes, then comes back as Dinosaur Jnr, 20 years before Dinosaur Jnr are born. Someone turns on a sonic splatter machine and we’re covered in love vibrations and Dalek guitar ago-go. There’s a tune in there Jim, but we’re not gonna let it out, as  the disembodied voices, all machine warped and crazy, interlude, shout, off into that dark night, again, but this time with added Aphex Twinisms and short wave radio flutter from an orbiting alien spacecraft offering sixteen minutes of pure Can. I can’t take any more.

This reviewer takes a drink, surfaces, into ‘When darkness comes’ (1969),  featuring mild feedback and conjuring images of when dinosaurs walk the earth. You can almost hear them in the background as Mooney free associates and frightens my cat.  I don’t know what is happening, I’m frightened, quick get me Gerry and the Pacemakers to calm me down. ‘Blind mirror surf’ and ‘Oscura Primavera’ date from 68, like soundtracks to Hungarian cartoons about demented woodcutters, all drone and WTF was that?

Shoot into 1972 with ‘Bubble rap’, proto grunge guitar riff and Damo Suziki taking the mic along with some seismic cosmic funk as Karolis’s guitar probes the wasted body of Sly Stone. Damo sounds like he’s surfing on a lava flow of great acid as he dissolves into the universal enfolding light of God.

The chemistry of Can has been written about, conjectured upon and dissected for years, I can’t possibly add anything to what has been said, (but  i’ll try anyway), even though all you need to know is all there in the music. Take ‘Your friendly local neighbourhood whore’, the shifting rhythmic structure is so ethereal with  Holgars Czukays bass meshing perfectly with Jakis’s busy drumming to form this seamless, cohesive pattern which is so hypnotic and is the sound that makes Can’s fourth studio album Ege Bamyasi so revered.

Ok, back to disc two, seat belts on and to ‘Midnight sky’ from 68, which is like The Doors but without the leather trousers. You’ll know ‘Spoon’ , but here is a 17 minute live version of very, very large proportions that grows and grows into a mushroom the size of Manhattan.

Two other pieces take pride of place here, ‘Dead pigeon suite’ and ‘Abra cada braxas’, both clocking in at the ten minute mark, the former contains very few dead pigeons, but plenty of strangely percussive serenity; no jarring of the senses on this one, just a gentle ride on a horse made of morphine and bass strings. ‘Braxas’ is a  swooping eagle about to die on the slopes of Mount Doom. It’s incredible, and it’s only 1973. ‘A swan is born’ is a mere snippet of what later became Swansong, ‘The loop’  sounds like Status Quo playing skiffle inside an Asda bag.

Disc three goes from 1970 to 77,  it’s got a nine minute live version of ‘Mushroom’ on it, there’s a jam that gave birth to ‘Mother sky’, a stupendous instrumental  workout ‘Midnight men’, that sounds like Joe Meek  channeling  a passing comet and ‘Networks of foam’ is the sound of an anal probe accidentally going into God’s eye.

As for ‘Barnacles’ (1977) it’s just the best thing I’ve heard this year, it goes plonk plonk plonk, but  in the most  beautiful way you can imagine. You’ll not be surprised that it’s also  got some drums on it. Basically, there’s more throbbing Krautrock here than you can shake a stick at.

What’s more you’ve got extensive liner notes and photos on top of three hours of unheard Can. You won’t like all of it, but tough, I do.

9/10

by John Haylock

John Howard was once the next big thing. Signed by CBS in 1973 he was part of a wave of major record label interest in English singer songwriters. But despite having the pop sensibility to rival the likes of Paul McCartney, CBS found it hard to market his witty, intelligent lyrics and eccentric demeanour. Looking a like a cross between Peter Cook and Pavement’s Stephen Malkmus record execs, who were used to handling the next Marc Bolan or David Bowie, just didn’t know how to promote him.

By the time his debut album Kid In A Big World was released in 1975, Howard found himself struggling to fit into any category as glam began its descent and punk was another year away from the wider public’s gaze.

He proved just too tough a sell to radio stations and the public, and after three years Howard left CBS; a  career stalled  before it had even began.

He meandered through the music industry for the next few years working with Trevor Horn and Culture Club among others but by the early 1980s he gave up recording and moved to a new career in music industry A&R. As his website says “feeling disillusioned with lack of success or recognition, John locked his piano lid and walked away from unrealised ambitions, only occasionally recording material when producer friends asked him to.”

He retired from the industry in 2000  and moved to Pembrokeshire with his partner Neil France, where it would have been all too easy to sit back grumpily in front of the TV muttering about “what a shit business it is” every time X-Factor came on. Instead though he started to write and perform again, first playing in local pubs, and even piano bars on cruise ships and in 2003, after decades of artistic obscurity, he found himself not just  a man in demand but actually cool.

Arguably it was the internet that saved him, with an online buzz among music fans, journalists and bloggers created after Kid In A Big World was featured in the book In Search of The Lost Record. Suddenly there was a new audience for his music, one not clouded by 1970s ideals of what a rock star should be and used to seeing a raft of musical square pegs in round holes from Jarvis Cocker to Malkmus.

With the album’s reissue in 2003 Howard’s rebirth was nearing completion. Further reissues followed including his unfinished CBS album Technicolour Biography. With each four and five star review Howard realised that the time was right to start releasing new material.

I’d never heard his music until he was name checked, along with Bill Fay (another singer songwriter snapped up and discarded during the 1970s) in a press release for The Gift EP, the 2012 release of piano ballads by Ralegh Long, one of the UK’s current crop of emerging singer-songwriters. I feel like something of a fool now for letting Howard’s stunning, pop savvy, clever songs pass me by until now.

Better late than never, though and I now find myself  working my way through his back catalogue. I’ve decided to start with one of Howard’s best comeback albums, As I was Saying, which shows just what the record industry has been missing all these years.

The song writing is just about perfect, full of McCartney-esque melodies and tongue in check lyrics as he ponders getting old, his career and the state of the modern music industry.

There are echoes of Billy Joel’s Piano Man and Elton John in his prime but all wrapped up in something wholly contemporary with enough of an edge to interest older music fans and young up and coming artists like Ralegh Long alike.

The lyrics “Time will heal things, so they say, but they lie” opens the track Taking It All To Heart, a beautiful, powerful ballad that sums up his reflections on the past perfectly. The Dilemma of a Homosapien then comes in with jaunty echoes of a raft of songwriters that emerged and disappeared from the public’s gaze during Howard’s hiatus, such as Robyn Hitchcock and Pete Shelley. Special mention goes to this track’s killer chorus; most songwriters can only dream of writing anything so catchy.

Among the most intriguing is Oh, Do Give It A Rest Love, coming in at over seven minutes it is the most obvious tale of his musical career, with almost everyone of importance over the last 40 years getting a name check from Jimi Hendrix to Simon Cowell. My favourite is the timelessly upbeat Life Is Never The Way We Want It To Be.

Next up for me as I explore Howard’s career is his latest release, You Shall Go To The Ball, sent to me out of the blue by Howard’s partner Neil from Spain, where the couple now live.

Although recorded recently the tracks are largely from Howard’s 1970s CBS days, including demos that failed to make it past the powers that be.  Howard explains: “The songs are those which thirty five to forty years ago were only ever demoed and which I wished I could have recorded properly with the backings I could hear in my head.”

It’s a less accessible listen than As I Was Saying, with Howard opting for the slightly maverick idea of interweaving new interpretations of his older piano ballads and pop songs with soundscapes. This gives the album a dream like, almost Brian Wilson produced feel,  with his forgotten songs  shining brightly throughout. Star Through My Window is particularly good. How this track failed to become a hit in the 1970s seems bizarre when listening to it now. It sounds like a track that’s been part of the musical ether  for decades rather than locked away beneath Howard’s piano lid.

Forthcoming acquisitions for me will be his 1970s reissues, with debut album Kid in a Big World and its English pop gems such as Family Man,  the one I’m particularly looking forward to hearing.

As well as his music, I love the story of Howard; of a talented musician who started his career as a square peg in the music industry but has now at last found the audience that the 1970s CBS record execs failed to discover for him. Perhaps his experience has shaped him for the better. Reading this interview with him from 2005 he displays a modesty and sense of joy in knowing he has an audience that may have been lacking if he’d have been a global star since the 1970s.

Howard’s story is a lesson to all those talented musicians out there struggling to get heard. Cream always rises, even if it takes a few decades.

by Joe Lepper

Wire was born in the crossfire phlegm hurricane of punk, but didn’t belong to the couldn’t give a shit brigade (The Sex Pistols, Chelsea, The Damned ) or the politically motivated, angry gang ( The Clash, The Adverts, Crass). Theirs was art school punk; not only could you pogo to it, you could think and paint at the same time, and probably do a thesis on Max Ernst while you’re at it.

Any of their first three albums are deserving of a classic album review, each magnificent and entirely lovable self-contained entities and all with the same line up of Bruce Gilbert (guitars, vocals), Robert Gotobed (drums), Graham Lewis (vocals, bass) and Colin Newman (vocals, guitar).

The debut ‘Pink Flag’  (1977) is a classic primordial three-chord, big-bang micro universe of short sharp shock guitar abuse, delivered at breath taking speed and  accompanied by intelligent, surrealist  poetic lyrics, the likes of which dazzle, confound and elate your soul. Rarely have three very loud chords and the English language been put to better use than by Wire.

The follow up, ‘Chairs Missing’ (1978) was not radically different, it still possessed the firepower but now they turn up with sonic atmospherics and apply the brakes on the speeding guitars, we were witnessing evolution before our very ears.

The inevitable conclusion was ’154′ released in 1979 containing a perfect balance of lyrical intrigue, haunting melodic evasive soundscapes and the trademark gravitational pull of their punk guitarisms. Thirteen mini strokes of genius, it’s like listening in to someone’s thoughts, fragmented snippets of internal dialogue, a schizophrenic drip-drip-drip of doubt and paranoia with the ever present long black raincoat of the wire sound, a sound of coiled anger, writhing slippery rhythms and sudden rays of insight and pop sunshine.

Everything you need to know about Wire is contained in track thirteen  ’40 versions’ and lyrics such as ‘I never know what version I’m going to be, I seem to have so many choices open to me’. This is typical wire, choices and options all clamouring  to be heard and on this occasion decorated with a heavenly minimalist  melody.

There’s room for almost a hit single with ‘Map ref 41 N 93 W’, the lyrics of which are total wordplay nirvana and  remains one of their finest confections. You want kick ass punk ? try ‘Two people in a room’, over in a flash but containing everything in an angry song that you require. ‘I should have known better’ is so utterly desolate in it’s glacial beauty it could be a Joy Division out take.

‘A touching display’ shows just how far they had come from the blitzkrieg  of Pink Flag, at six minutes plus, it’s the longest track on 154, and an object lesson in restrained aggression, beginning with a gentle torrent of noise, slow spoken words of desperate love ,’I’m fighting bravely, will she save me, from what or who, I do not know’, then a huge riff comes in from planet nowhere and begins to plough out  an increasingly strident motif, drums enter the fray and it all climaxes in a beautiful bass heavy maelstrom of seismic proportions. Wire had become The Pink Floyd of punk (this was a good thing).

Then there’s the almost playful ‘Blessed state’, so sleek and sexy it will make you horny just listening to it. There’s more, I’ll spare you.

When people talk of no filler, there’s usually one or two tracks that don’t cut the mustard, with 154 every second of its duration is there for a reason, it will do stuff to your head, your feet and your perceptions. I’ve been listening to it for longer than I dare to admit, in that time it has lost none of its inspired never to be repeated impact. I hate mustard.

by John Haylock

When we discuss music, invariably it seems all roads lead back to John Peel (peace be upon him). His legendary programmes introduced us all to that which was great and good, from P J Harvey to Polvo, The Lurkers to Loop, his beloved Fall to, well, The Beloved. He coaxed me gently away from the insidious evils of  prog rock   to the  Pistols, thrilled me with The Adverts, The Clash, Misty in Roots, Killing Joke, Joy Division, then latterly Nirvana, Sonic Youth, American music club, Dinosaur Jnr, blew my mind with Aphex twin, Boards of Canada, 70 Gwen Party, then The White Stripes, Nick Cave, the list is endless, his open minded attitude to music is something I aspire to even now.

Amongst all the fabulous sessions and tracks, I remember the shock of hearing The Comsat Angels in  about 1980, when they did a session featuring material from their debut album ‘Waiting for a miracle’. I still have that on cassette somewhere and together with hundreds of others they gather dust in the attic, awaiting the day when I’m lying in my hospital bed on my last day on earth, this is when i will summon my kids to the bedside, tell them to dig out a classic Hitachi boombox, plug it in next to my heart monitor and get them to play my favourite tapes, they’ll be the first New Order/Cure/P J Harvey, XTC  session, a smattering of Hendrix, ‘Totally wired’ by The Fall, some Can and that first Comsats session plus every Comsats recordings I have. Why? Because this is music that moves me to tears, makes my heart swell with love, it’s only Rock n Roll from Sheffield, but I like it, like it, yes I do.

‘Sleep no more’ came out in 1981, the initial punk rush was over, new wave was the thing, Duran Duran and the dreaded Spandau Ballet were on the horizon, I needed substance, depth, lyrical vagueness, passion, a band that no one had ever heard of.

The plebs opted for the slightly more popular U2, I on the other hand fell totally in love with the Comsats. If Waiting for a miracle had been foreplay, Sleep no more was the big fuck. The drums courtesy of Mik Glaisher, it was like John Bonham from the bottom of the sea. The guitars, economical but tracing beautiful arcs of melody. The bass thundered along like a herd of well behaved cattle and Stephen Fellows voice just cracked me up, sounding so vulnerable, so hurt, so jealous. I’d found my band at last.

The Comsat Angels

Opening with ‘Eyedance’, and Mik smacking the shit out of his drums, and with an anthemic chiming guitar riff, they do the quiet/ loud thing to devastating effect. Stephen intones mysteriously ‘was it my imagination, working overtime again, did we make a strange connection ? I did, immediately, this was going to be one of my top ten albums of my life and I’m only 20.

There’s the crunching intro to ‘Be brave’ , lyrical paranoia abounds. There’s Joy Division-esque brutality on ‘Gone’,  as ever, Stephen sounding hurt, wounded, disorientated, a little boy lost in a relationship beyond his understanding; his words are so vital to the overall impression, so loaded with questioning anxiety.

Then there’s ‘Dark parade’ full of smouldering atmospherics punctuated by explosions of guitar emphasising the portent. ‘No release, no release’ he sings, it’s love as a battlefield, a recurring theme. (see ‘Total War’ from ‘Waiting for a miracle’). ‘Diagram’, more of the same, jealousy and lust, ‘Restless’ a respite from the thunder but still threatening. A skeletal framework on which he hangs his doubts and fears. Lock up your house as  ‘Goat of the west’ comes along and kicks your door in, smashes up your furniture and pisses on  your budgie.

This is as nothing compared to the slow majestic unwinding shoegazing ten year before shoegazing is invented epicness of ‘Light Years’, I want this to go on for about four hours, unfortunately it’s faded at four minutes.

Sleep no more is an emotionally exhausting but satisfying listen, it’s the album I return to again and again. Subsequent albums ‘Land’, ‘Fiction’  ‘Chasing Shadows’ are all incredibly fine, all rather  expensive and somewhat rare but well worth hunting down. Also, try and get the CD reissue of Sleep No More with its five bonus tracks, all great as well.

 By John Haylock

For more information about The Comsat Angels click here.