Currently Listening to

Started by Steve, April 08, 2007, 08:56:52

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SueC

I think Don't Go was one of their better radio songs, as was their cover of I Can See Clearly Now - didn't like Hardstone City or Give It Up or I'm Sorry particularly - the sentiments were OK but I didn't like the sound.  Movies was OK but lightweight.  So that gave me no sense of a lot of the other stuff they do hidden away on their albums, or of just how fabulous they were as a live proposition.  (Sort of like the problem I had with The Cure last century, although with Hothouse Flowers it didn't take me over 20 years to figure it out - probably because they never wrote particularly offputting lyrics and because they didn't at any point look like they were auditioning for Playschool.)

This was lovely...


One of many songs to get under my skin.  They also did an amazing track called Strange Feeling on an EP of really "different" stuff - but I can't find that on YT.  However, here's a live take of one off the songs off that EP:



Now a song I'm posting for our new person, @Oneiroman - from a more recent Perth band, what I think is far and above their best song (having heard two albums), and really worth a listen but that's just me.  It's wonderfully apocalyptic - great words and atmosphere.

SueC is time travelling

Ulrich

Quote from: SueC on April 22, 2021, 12:33:03I've always liked this one, but it seems to be a one-off...

Around the same time I first heard The Clash, B.A.D. came up and I was pleased to hear Mick's voice, I think this was a hit at the time (allegedly co-written with Einstein, ha ha):

But I guess you've heard that one before (?). Many years later, Mick Jones teamed up with Tony James in Carbon/Silicon, I bought a cd in 2007 and it includes this gem (sorry I couldn't find the studio version):

On a sidenote, The Waterboys released their tribute song to him in 2019: "London Mick".
The holy city breathed like a dying man...

Oneiroman

I enjoyed The Kill Devil Hills song - the band were unknown to me.

The band Kuckles from Broome were big when I was in northern Australia in 1982-'83.  I think I might well have seen them in a pub in Broome in '82 when this single came out, but it was a very heavy night!:

https://youtu.be/UICsb6f1CDY

For something slightly more Cure related, Michael Dempsey who was in the band when I saw them in '79 later joined The Associates, a band who had previously toured with The Cure and had their first records out on Fiction.  I did see them once, at the Hacienda in Manchester in '85, but Dempsey had left by then as had Alan Rankine.

Their 1985 album Perhaps was panned by the critics when it came out but I bought the recent reissue and there is some good stuff on there:

https://youtu.be/tZ_4f4gVof4

Sadly they hardly played any gigs after 1985.


SueC

@Ulrich, thank you for that suggestion from BAD - I'd not heard it before and I liked it enough to get it from iTunes. So now I have two BAD songs I can listen to!   :cool   (Oh yeah, and that TV Smith acoustic CD made it to our mailbox yesterday - the audience on the inside cover looks just like my kind of audience actually - interested, involved, smiling, and not yelling or hysterical... :angel)

Don't mind the second song either.  Funny though, that particular London accent I find as grating as the "ocker" Aussie or the American - search me, because we've got people from Manchester/Yorkshire staying with us at the moment and I think their accents are really cute - as are various Scottish and Irish accents, to me!

(And by the way, one of the things I've hated the most in music is when people not from the US have put on fake American accents when singing - something a few Aussies did, sadly including The Church when they went to America to record an album; suddenly Steve Kilbey was singing with a US accent  :1f629: - which I think is such a form of selling out to appease the US market... 🤮)

@Oneiroman (and are you One-"I"-Roman or "Oneiro-man"?), thankyou for the Kuckles song - had never heard of these (but have heard of Bran Nue Dae of course); just a bit early for me which was sort of how it was with The Triffids - they'd broken up when I really got interested in music, which doesn't mean I can't listen to them now of course.  ...if you were Up North did you ever get to see The Warumpi Band?  It seems to me that there's some kind of reggae influence in a lot of music from those parts of Australia - and here's one I really love (this particular one not reggae-ish but quite a few of theirs are):


In case there's a region access problem, it's Animal Song by The Warumpi Band...

...and re critics, most of them you can't listen to - I think you just like what you like and those people just get paid for their opinions for some God-unknown reason...




Here's something else from Australia other people may not have heard - an outfit with an actual American lead singer (not a fake accent, just how he is and that's OK in my book) and Australian instrumentalists, who specialise in really outrageous over-the-top lyrics and make pretty decent music.  We think they're fun and good to put on in your car if you have to do a long drive...


Talk about how not to do it!   :beaming-face  :evil:
SueC is time travelling

Ulrich

"Living in a world where the flesh is cheap
Body touches body but it's only skin deep
I can hold you in my arms every time that you weep
But we've lost that emotional flow

Living on a planet full of emptiness
With maximum exposure, full of sleaziness
But the make up on your face can't disguise loneliness
Where designer feelings are in vogue, what do they know?

Darlin', darlin' how do I get close to you
When I'm trying, trying my heart is reaching out to you
How do I get close to you?"


Quote from: SueC on April 24, 2021, 04:15:14Here's something else from Australia other people may not have heard

Oh yes I did, as mentioned here before (quite some time ago now), even saw them live.
The holy city breathed like a dying man...

SueC

Quote from: Ulrich on April 24, 2021, 13:35:02Oh yes I did, as mentioned here before (quite some time ago now), even saw them live.

Yes, @Ulrich, but "other people" is a plural and there's apparently "silent people" on this thread, as well as a new member actually talking to us!  :P

But it's very cool that you knew them and you've seen them live!   :cool


Today it was this album we listened to - and here's an interesting track off it:

SueC is time travelling

Oneiroman

The name isn't really important but as I was reading something about superheroes when I first used it a year or two back as a cloak of anonymity I suppose it's Oneiro-man.  One-i-roman sounds slightly cabalistic.

I don't remember being familiar with The Warumpi Band at the time of my visit to Australia, but they are obviously one of the best known acts the country has produced.  Funnily enough I did make a brief visit to Galiwinku (Elcho Island) off the north coast of Arnhem Land which is the subject of their song 'My Island Home' (the lead singer was from there).  Two Aboriginal bands that were big at the time were No Fixed Address and Us Mob, both of whom featured in the film 'Wrong Side of the Road' which I saw in a small cinema in Fremantle (think I was on my own in the place!)

Certainly all these had a reggae influence but most of the Aboriginal people I met were into country music.

Since I am here I will give a couple more selections.

The Durutti Column 'Experiment in Fifth':

https://youtu.be/Mf8Py8rZeNE

I once sat in front of Vini Reilly on a bus when I lived in Manchester in the '80s.  I love his guitar playing.

From my hometown of Bristol something a little more bracing.

Mark Stewart and The Maffia 'Hypnotised':

https://youtu.be/FLvMRLhLcu0

I saw the group at Manchester Poly in January '86 just after the release of their 2nd album, which included this track and was shouting for 'Hypnotised'.  Fortunately they played it for me.  The Maffia were at that time the guys in the band who had backed The Sugarhill Gang and Grandmaster Flash on their records, including 'The Message'.  They also had their own band, Tackhead.


Oneiroman

One more from me.  Another Bristol band, with a Cure connection.  The Glaxo Babies supported The Cure in Brockworth, Gloucestershire on 2 June '79, exactly two weeks before I saw them in Canterbury.

https://youtu.be/-ZrazDoxlW0

The above TV appearance featuring the song 'Who Killed Bruce Lee?' is from a local show, RPM.

The lead singer at the time Rob Chapman remembered The Cure gig, as recounted for the Bristol Archive Records website.

"Hanging out in Geoff Nichols Music one day, I answered the phone. It was some agent guy. 'God, you people are hard to get hold of. I've been trying to track you down for ages' said this exasperated voice. 'Would you like to play some gigs with the bands I represent?' 'Maybe. Who you got?' I replied.
'The Leighton Buzzards?'
'Er, no thanks.'
'The Cure?'
Cups phone.
'What do we think about the Cure?'
Agreeable nods all round. Killing An Arab had just come out. We were partial to a bit of rock and roll Camus.
'Yeah, we'll play with the Cure'.

So we played with the Cure in Cheltenham. It turned out to be our penultimate gig. Me and Tom [Nichols] argued in the back of the van all the way there. We played a stonker of a set though and as we sat in our dressing room afterwards two unassuming young guys dressed in black hesitantly hung around the door and told us they thought we were great before nervously melting away into the throng. We assumed they were fans.

Having never seen the Cure we went out to watch the main act. The two unassuming guys in black were Robert Smith and Lol Tolhurst."

The Cure sure did play some odd venues on the 3IB tour.  It kicked off in Northwich - Northwich - on 17 May.  They then played the likes of those well-known cosmopolitan centres Newport (Shropshire), Totnes, Yeovil and Chesterfield before ending the first leg in Canterbury.  After 12 days the tour resumed in Port Talbot - Port Talbot - before the big showcase gig at The Lyceum, London on 1 July.  It ended in Nottingham on 8 July, a few weeks before their first trip abroad to the Netherlands.

SueC

That's a great story, @Oneiroman!  That Glaxo Babies track you put on sounded a bit like a male, UK B-52s to me, perhaps with a bit of Talking Heads in it.  Brett was saying, "Ah, Bristol, home of Portishead and Massive Attack!" - to which he's quite partial.  He won't suggest anything by them because you probably already know it.

Durutti Column, that was interesting - sometimes you don't know if something is electric guitar or contemporary synth - since the latter are pretty good at imitating lots of things these days, and since electric guitars have multitudes of possible effects.  Reminds me slightly of Jean-Michel Jarre, who comes at it from a keyboard.  The Maffia are all over the shop - like a patchwork quilt made from bits of leather, polyester, wool, shagpile, silk, etc.

I'm going to post an old favourite instrumental from The Church's debut album, mid-80, just because if people already know it, it's the kind of thing that can be listened to over and over.


I'm slightly envious of yourself, @Ulrich and my husband for going out to lots of gigs from young.  I grew up in a family that liked to hypercontrol me and lock me away.  I was consequently a bookworm (alternative travel to other universes than the one imposed), and this got me to uni at 16 and finally out of my family of origin, but then I didn't even have enough money to feed myself properly until after I graduated, and was very short of time, so very few gigs attended through university - although I did finally go to some, and of course all of that was previously prohibited for me.

I catch the odd folk band I like down in my regional area these days, the odd bit of jazz, acoustic stuff, even a blues gig recently which I reviewed for this forum here, but we don't live in town and since we've moved into the hinterland we spend more time watching concert films at home than going out.  What we do get to see is really nice; the Perth International Arts Festival brings down good international things every summer when we don't have a pandemic too - but it's really interesting to hear the stories of European residents who've been to see various artists since way back, that we only rarely see here but hear the records of.  Brett saw The Cure once, touring Bloodflowers, in Perth (but then we both missed them in 2016 when we were building our house :1f62d:); and since he lived in the city most of his life he's seen more international acts than me (incl. Live, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Dresden Dolls, and tons of local gigs like the Kill Devil Hills, Moriarty, Audio Response Group, Cloud Collective etc, but bemoans not being able to see his favourite alternative overseas bands because they rarely come to WA - and says he deliberately avoided seeing Tool because on CD is enough!).

Here's a folk singer I saw several times down here in Albany through PIAF and once I accidentally met her (in the toilet of all places  :-D) and had to make polite conversation - amazing how tiny she is, comes up only to my shoulder but has the biggest voice and is one of my favourite singers ever...and yes she really sings like this, not just in the studio with the benefit of multiple takes etc.

SueC is time travelling

SueC

I've had my first two listens through TV Smith's Acoustic Sessions Volume 1, which is the album @Ulrich recommended when I asked, "Where do I start with TV Smith?"

First of all, I don't recommend you first listen to this in the car going somewhere, because you won't be able to hear the lyrics properly and I think this music is not meant to be background music.  When we tried that, it was frustrating straining to hear every word, and the overwhelming impression of the sound was fairly homogenous angry singing set to fast, frantic acoustic guitar, and the first handful of songs sounded very much the same (which can be a problem when certain types of music are done as acoustic versions).

How much better when I put it on headphones while working in the garden - my hands could do stuff and my brain could fully engage with what was being said, and that way it's very good.  The lyrics are central to this artist's music and the words are well considered, both in terms of arguments being made and in terms of choice of words.  This to me is protest poetry, set to music - very like many of the poems in one of the main high school poetry anthologies we studied in senior English class back in the 80s, full of Roger McGough numbers like Mother The Wardrobe Is Full Of Infantrymen which I very much enjoyed for the same reason I'm now enjoying TV Smith's words - because surely someone has to mention the herd of elephants in the room.

Here's a slightly different number, just storytelling, tragedy at sea.  I'm trying to decide whether there was an actual big fish that caused them to sink, or if that was a metaphor for death itself.  Either way, the whole thing to me is also a metaphor for something else:  It all works OK until it gets too big - but that's just my reading.

And isn't it funny how TV Smith and Mike Scott could stand in to sing each other's songs without too much trouble - they sound remarkably similar.

SueC is time travelling

Ulrich

Quote from: SueC on April 26, 2021, 07:35:45Here's a slightly different number, just storytelling, tragedy at sea.  I'm trying to decide whether there was an actual big fish that caused them to sink

Actually it was a submarine (something that did happen for real, sadly).
The holy city breathed like a dying man...

MeltingMan

En cette nation [Russie] qui n'a pas eu de théoriciens et de démagogues,
les pires ferments de destruction ont apparu. (J. Péladan)

MeltingMan

En cette nation [Russie] qui n'a pas eu de théoriciens et de démagogues,
les pires ferments de destruction ont apparu. (J. Péladan)

SueC

Quote from: Ulrich on April 26, 2021, 09:34:44
Quote from: SueC on April 26, 2021, 07:35:45Here's a slightly different number, just storytelling, tragedy at sea.  I'm trying to decide whether there was an actual big fish that caused them to sink

Actually it was a submarine (something that did happen for real, sadly).

Oh, wow, a submarine caused a fishing boat to sink?  Wasn't their periscope working - or was the fishing boat target practice?  We were speculating whether they hit a whale - which isn't a fish of course, but that never stopped anyone before - or whether this was some sort of fairytale where the fishermen netted such a huge amazing fish that they didn't want to let it go and capsized trying to land it...and the moral of the story is, etc...

This is another well-put one:

SueC is time travelling

Ulrich

Quote from: SueC on April 26, 2021, 07:35:45TV Smith's Acoustic Sessions Volume 1, which is the album Ulrich recommended when I asked, "Where do I start with TV Smith?"

Yeah, because it features many of his best songs (from his beginnings with The Adverts up to "Not a bad day" from 2003) in all-new acoustic versions (i.e. it sounds like he's playing in your living room). The title suggests that a Vol. 2 might be coming one day.

There is also "Useless - the very best of TV Smith" album, which as well is a collection of old songs in newly recorded versions, with famous German punkrockers Die Toten Hosen serving as his "backing band". (As you can imagine, this sounds different to "Acoustic" or even TV's studio albums!)
It was released 20 years ago (!) and this was the new song/single:

(On a sidenote, TV wrote some English lyrics for his friends DTH, most notably for "Pushed again" (1998), a song he also likes to perform himself.)

About the submarine: apparently when they were fishing with strong nets in deep sea, it was possible that a submarine did get caught in it and sunk them...  :1f62a:
The holy city breathed like a dying man...