Currently Listening to

[SueC]

[Oneiroman]

@SueC I didn't really go to many gigs when I was younger as for some reason I never saw the point.  I had lots of records and listened to the radio all the time and that was sufficient for me.  I'm just about old enough to remember the scene in the UK before Beatlemania.  I was four years old when 'Love Me Do' hit the charts and I'd already been asking for singles for birthdays/Christmas, my favourite groups being The Tornados and The Shadows.  Even though a teacher at school organised trips to see acts like Pink Floyd, Bowie and Lou Reed in the mid '70s I still didn't see the point.  When I went to university in 1976 a friend and I asked the Students' Union entertainments guy if he could get The Sex Pistols down but that never happened and I subsequently missed loads of gigs I wish I'd been at like The Ramones/Talking Heads, Siouxsie, Blondie and so on.  Because audiences in Canterbury were normally small we were often offered cheap or free tickets and I still didn't go.  I did see a handful of bands on campus but I don't know what possessed me to shell out £1.25 to see The Cure, even though I liked them.  Mind you as a 20 year old (my friend who I dragged along was a little older) I felt rather out of place amongst the schoolkids and teenyboppers who made up the rest of the tiny audience.

When I returned from my first trip to Australia I was living in Manchester and trying to make up for lost time so for four or five years I went to loads of gigs, and there was no better place to be in the world at the time.  So I will choose two songs from acts I saw during this period.

Nico - 'Frozen Warnings'.  I saw Nico, who was living in Manchester then, at a small venue and she was doing a solo concert.  After her performance a couple of friends and I were discussing the show in the bar area when we realised she was sitting right behind us!

https://youtu.be/5XJC0cZD6zg

A Guy Called Gerald 'Voodoo Ray'.  The only time I have ever seen a band's first ever gig was 808 State in March '88 when they were technically still known as Hit Squad M/cr and had A Guy Called Gerald in their ranks.  When the Madchester scene kicked off a year or so later Gerald's 'Voodoo Ray' was the Hacienda's "theme tune", but I had already left town.

https://youtu.be/j7vxHOCeiQ4 - CONTAINS FLASHING IMAGES

[SueC]

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:

Well, this is good, @Ulrich - I'd actually go to this kind of gig if I had a TARDIS.  I much prefer punk in the service of intelligent and constructive ideas to punk in the service of stupid ideas, or punk for rebelling against things just for the sake of rebellion alone but with no idea what we should do instead of what's being rebelled against; or just punk for the sake of being another us-vs-them club with in-group dress and vocabulary, in which "fvck" is used as punctuation and to piss people not in your in-group off and because you lack imagination and manners, rather than as a weighty curse.

And that's not a bad backing band or delivery.  No wonder you go see these people when you can. 

TV Smith in that clip bears an uncanny resemblance to the current Peter Capaldi:

(If you missed Neverwhere now is the time to remedy it...)

This song is like Gold Lion by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, where I enjoy the acoustic and electric versions equally:

Sadly the only acoustic version of this on YT is one where Karen O has a cold, but she still does pretty well.  However, the official recorded acoustic version is amazing (and not on YT).

[Ulrich]

I'd actually go to this kind of gig ...
And that's not a bad backing band or delivery.  No wonder you go see these people when you can. 

Well, they do play together occasionally (e.g. when TV is around, DTH ask him on stage for a version of "Gary Gilmore's Eyes", a song they first covered in 1991 for their "Learning English" album).
They were on hiatus due to an injury of their lead singer, when the idea came up for the "best of" album. However the tour was mostly TV on his own. He does tour with a band occasionally (named "The bored teenagers" after one of his early songs)!

TV was going to be support act on DTH's "acoustic tour", but it got cancelled due to Corona. 

He also plays the odd tour with DTH drummer Vom Ritchie, here's one from 2014:

[Ulrich]

Oh yes please, take me somewhere nice...

[MeltingMan]

[Ulrich]

I noticed I own an album by B.A.D. (released in '95, guess I bought it later as cheapo), it includes this nice song:

"I didn't like jazz, I didn't like funk
I turned out a punk"

[SueC]

Thank you, @Ulrich! I don't think that BAD song is musically amazing, but it's kind of cute lyrically and the clip is too.  I do notice one thing - maybe it's just me, but it seems to me that Mick Jones doesn't look happy - even when he's smiling it's kind of "surface happy" and doesn't quite reach the eyes...

I've been listening to folk...

[Ulrich]

[word_on_a_wing]

I've been listening to a lot of Sharon Van Etten over the last few months, especially the album Are We There.  This song is one of my favourites..

[SueC]

That's a lovely voice and feel, @word_on_a_wing. 

@Ulrich, I like TV Smith's audience interactions in that clip you posted.  Also, unless you know another place to get an actual CD, I'm going to get a downloadable version of Useless - because it's not on his website shop and because on an open internet search a used CD is $45 plus postage, and new over $100 plus postage!

@MeltingMan, we really do have very different tastes in music!        But at least we both listen to The Cure.

@Oneiroman, that's a really interesting voice in Nico - and haha about not realising she was sitting nearby when you were talking about her music!  (At least you didn't make Jehovah's Witnesses jokes to actual Jehovah's Witnesses and only realise when there's sudden silence... ...been there, done that!)

Got a question for you re your teacher who organised excursions to see Pink Floyd, Bowie and Lou Reed in the mid '70s - was his name by any chance Simon Fraser Macphail?  I know it's an enormously long shot but he was ex-UK, probably pushing 60 when taught me Year 11/12 English in the late 80s, and had a huge interest in music and teaching through music - those artists you mention were big favourites of his.  Also he chucked me out of class for a cool-off when I laughed unceasingly at a Cure pop song that was part of another student's presentation (if only she'd played the track right before it on the CD I'd have bought the album myself but it took several decades more before I'd hear If Only Tonight We Could Sleep... )...

Well, I've been listening to all of everyone else's stuff this morning, thanks everyone!      Like a private radio channel for doing stultifyingly dull tax paperwork to, which makes it more bearable.


OK, I like a lot of U2's early B-sides - here's one - completely different universe to their post-big-time, postmodernist stuff...

[Oneiroman]

@SueC  The teacher's name was Mr Williams.  Can't remember his first name, but at my school they weren't big on first names - you even called your friends by their surnames!

Whilst I'm here I may as well give a couple more selections.  Sticking with acts that have an association with places I've lived in my first choice is Matching Mole's 'O Caroline'.  The band were part of the "Canterbury scene" of the late '60s/early '70s that gave rise to the likes of Soft Machine, Caravan, Kevin Ayers etc, although not all the people involved had a connection to the city.  Robert Wyatt was pushed out of Soft Machine so he formed Matching Mole (a pun on the French "Machine Molle").  He was actually born in Bristol, but moved to Kent as a child.  The Caroline of the title was Caroline Coon, one of the first music journalists to write about punk in the UK:

https://youtu.be/RFx4od2Jalc

Funnily enough my landlord (and one of my lecturers) for two years when I lived in Canterbury looked just like Wyatt and like him used a wheelchair.  And while we're talking about punk I'm not sure I agree with your comment above about punk being more appealing if it is "in the service" of something.  In the UK the whole thing split into factions very quickly - Oi! type "yobbo" stuff, arty post-punk, new-wave pop and political punk, whether anarchist (Crass etc) or socialist (Clash etc).  Julian Cope made the point that "Uncle" Joe Strummer started to act like Stalin, dismissing anyone who didn't toe the part line whilst secretly dreaming about becoming a big star in the US.  Although of a leftist persuasion myself I just can't stomach the likes of Billy Bragg lecturing everybody whilst producing the most appalling racket.  Personally I prefer to think of punk as a liberating and exploratory force in the tradition of radical art/political movements such as Dada, Surrealism, Fluxus or Situationism.  Also I don't much care for the gentrification of pop music whereby earnest twenty/thirtysomethings inflict their trite and platitudinous sentiments on the listening public and old has-beens trot out the same old same old endlessly whilst expecting us to genuflect at their genius and magnanimity in continuing to benefit the world with their ever-decreasing creativity and ability to stand up for more than ten minutes.

I must admit I don't always listen very closely to the words of a pop song as I tend to get lost in the music, so my second choice is the very punk (via Fluxus) Yoko Ono who often in her early work used to scream one word repeatedly or even not bother with words at all.  This track 'Why' features John Lennon on guitar and Ringo Starr on drums.  Anyone who thinks The Beatles were just a boring pop group really hasn't listened to their more experimental tracks, either as a group or as solo artists:

https://youtu.be/GhdqZ2DJOPg

Yoko was a big influence on Kate and Cindy from the B-52's.

[Ulrich]

[Ulrich]

I've been listening to a lot of Sharon Van Etten over the last few months

Cool, I don't know many of her albums, but I listened to this not long ago:

[SueC]

I'm giving the TV Smith acoustic album Vol.1 quite a few spins at the moment - and here's a song I'd give an award.  I like a good protest song - well, this one is breathtaking; the words and the delivery.  It really takes the cake in that department - tells things straight and is almost brutal, but then you realise it's the reality that's brutal and we're just so used to whitewash.  Where was this in 2003 when I was marching in Sydney with so many fellow citizens?  ...ah, not released yet!   

...it's not quite as punchy as the version on the album I've got but that one isn't on YT.  @Ulrich, has he done this one with DTH?  I imagine this could be fantastic out loud and electric...