Episode 60 - Dub and its post-punk influence

As a young lad I tended to operate within defined guard rails. I know you might find that hard to believe listening to the exquisitely well-rounded middle-aged version, but it’s true. Just released and uncommercial? Immediately interested. Four white boys playing bass, guitar, drums with one on vocals who might also play the guitar, a good start. Keyboards were maybe OK in the right hands. Brass was immediately suspect and saxophones were right out.

(Could I just stress at this point that my tastes have broadened considerably over the last forty years, with the broad exceptions of thrash metal, opera and opportunistic formula. You’re meant to narrow your horizons as time goes on but I’ve found the opposite to be true. I can now handle cauliflower if it’s smothered in cheese, though sprouts are still a struggle).

So when John Peel played Lee Perry or Augustus Pablo, I didn’t hate their music but I invested little interest. Others paid much more attention – Peel used to get hate mail, even death threats, when he started playing reggae. You’d like to think the world has moved on but, to quote Paul McCartney on Silly Love Songs, “I look around me and I see it isn’t so. Oh no.”. (Were those last two words a little dig at Yoko there? Probably not).

I wonder what was wrong with my ears. Dub, emerging as a reggae sub-genre in the early ‘70s sounds fresh, brooding and timelessly magnificent now. Take a listen to the Sex Pistols album, then consider how much more intriguing and diverse Johnny Rotten’s next project, PIL, with Jah Wobble on dub bass, turned out. Dub’s influenced hip hop, trip hop, electronica and inveigled itself into the grand old lady of rock’n’roll.

But one of its first influences was on those white boys with their guitars back in the late ‘70s. One track we didn’t have room for on this episode was 5.45 by The Gang of Four. Listen to that mellotron at the start – a direct borrow from Augustus Pablo, as Andy Gill was only too happy to acknowledge. He described dub music as the most innovative music of that time. And though I can’t play The Fall on every show, more’s the pity, listener David Hughes has reminded me of their great dub track, Tempo House, off Perverted by Language.

But symbolically as well, dub is important. It’s a common language that helped dissolve borders and alert the world to what Jamaican music was all about. I hope you feel equally stirred by this episode. 

Tracklist: 

Black panta, Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry

Armagideon time, The Clash

Michael Talbot Affair, Keith Hudson

Searching for Mr Right, Young Marble Giants

All night party, A Certain Ratio

Spying glass, Horace Andy

Graveyard, PIL

Cool, Pylon

Zion gate dub, King Tubby and the Aggrovators

Launderette, Vivien Goldman

Claps like thunder, Jah Shaka and The Mad Professor

The eternal, Joy Division

Lichtenstein painting, Television Personalities

Episode 59 - 20th century synths

I well recall at school walking past the sixth form centre and hearing a completely new sound (to me) from the other side of the netball court. It was ‘Are Friends Electric?’ and I was entranced by the vibe. Chilly, yet compelling. Hypnotic, yet unsettling. Alienating, yet enticing.

I enthused about this odd sound to my friend, Stuart. He was a year older than me, more confident ordering drinks and talking to women. He also gave me lifts to the pub in his own car. So I respected his opinion on musical matters. His view was that this was cartoony, gimmicky stuff and nothing Bowie hadn’t covered off more authentically on ‘Low’.

Now, I liked ‘Low’ (I had it on a TDK C90 tape) but distrusted this hagiographical view. In short order, I was further drawn to early OMD, early Human League and the odd synth bands that started cropping up on John Peel, like The Normal.

Fast forward to today and to some degree this distrust of synthesiser authenticity hasn’t gone away. That it’s not real in some way – perhaps ‘testcard’ music as my friend Adrian might put it. It rather depends on how much authenticity you demand from musicians. For me, not much. In some ways, I suppose, I distrust musical proficiency, but then I’m a child of the original DIY post-punk spirit.

So, here’s a short tour round some, possibly inauthentic, synth sounds of the 21st century. As ever, we’ve taken some stopovers round the globe in places such as Belgium and Canada. There’s a debt of influence to the past, of course, with a splendid brand new track from Working Men’s Club genuflecting towards New Order.

But we also stop off in Russia, Yekaterinberg to be precise, where we get to hear what Sovietwave sounds like in the shape of Elektrodepo’s ‘Sequence’. Sovietwave is a movement concerned with “dreams for space and progress, which have disappeared with the USSR, together with positive childhood reminiscences and utopic philanthropy hopes”. Problematic, possibly. Intriguing, nonetheless. And the synthesiser is the perfect tool for the transmission of this paradox.

Tracklist:

Valleys, Working Men’s Club

Look like that, Sneaks

Drugs in my body, Thieves Like Us

Missing wires, Soulwax

The look, Metronomy

Feral love, Chelsea Wolfe

Birthday, Junior Boys (Caribou Mix)

Sequence, Elektrodepo

Boy from school, Hot Chip

Chimeras, Tim Hecker

Under the sun, Spellling

Episode 58 - Songs called 'Love Song'

Here’s what The Gang of Four had to say on their song (Love like) Anthrax, in answer to the question as to why they didn’t write love songs:-

"Love crops up quite a lot as something to sing about, ‘cos most groups make most of their songs about falling in love or how happy they are to be in love. You occasionally wonder why these groups do sing about it all the time - it's because these groups think there's something very special about it; either that or else it's because everybody else sings about it and always has. You know to burst into song you have to be inspired and nothing inspires quite like love. These groups and singers think that they appeal to everyone by singing about love because apparently everyone has or can love or so they would have you believe. Anyway these groups seem to go along with what, the belief that love is deep in everyone's personality. I don't think we're saying there's anything wrong with love, we just don't think that what goes on between two people should be shrouded with mystery."

Stephen Merrett wrote an entire album of 69 love songs, none of which, he claimed were love songs at all, but songs about love.

And talking of meta, Twelfth Night by Shakespeare is a play about the concept of love rather than actual love. Yet it’s got one of the great melancholy love songs at the heart of it:

Mistress mine where are you roaming? O stay and hear, your true love's coming,

That can sing both high and low. Trip no further pretty sweeting. Journeys end in lovers' meeting,

Every wise man's son doth know.

What is love, 'tis not hereafter,

Present mirth, hath present laughter:

What's to come, is still unsure.

In delay there lies no plenty,

Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty:

Youth's a stuff will not endure.

Unlike The Gang of Four, I really like a good love song. Only a handful have actually been called ‘Love Song’ and a smaller proportion still are any good (God knows, I listened to enough of them constructing this podcast). So, here’s the final selection.

Tracklist:-

Love song, The Damned

Love song, The Cure

Love song, Simple Minds

Love song, The Au Pairs

Love song, Lana Del Rey

Another love song, Queens of the Stone Age

Love song, Lesley Duncan

This is not a love song, PIL

All my little words, The Magnetic Fields (from ‘69 Love Songs’)

Love song, The Dandy Warhols

Love song, Utah Saints

Episode 57 - Nick Drake and his legacy

Interest in Nick Drake began to bubble up a few years after his death with the release of a compilation album of his work. In 1978 Arthur Lubow wrote the sleeve notes for ‘Fruit Tree’ and, unlike many commissioned to write such pieces, he did a good job. Rather than attempting to recreate his work, I’ve taken the liberty of quoting some passages from his essay in this post. Arthur, if you’re reading this, thank you for your moving words.

Arthur on Nick Drake’s authenticity:

“If he won any battles in his short life, Nick Drake mastered the challenge of authenticity. He was of one piece. His songs, like his clothes, were melancholy to the point of morbidity. Yet somehow he escaped self-indulgence. Elton John, who as a young studio musician cut a demo tape of Drake’s songs, recalls their “beautiful haunting quality.” There is something disturbingly pure and unspoiled about those songs. Musically, they have the chilling loveliness of a boy’s choir singing Fauré’s Requiem. Culturally, they resonate with the fragile innocence of the Sixties counter-culture. Although it is not in the nature of flowers to leave monuments, the music of Nick Drake is the hippie vision made permanent on plastic. Listening to music so beautiful, you are shamed by the ugliness of the world.”

On Nick’s transformation at university:

“He became the poet in black, … his songs were of moons and seas, landscapes borrowed from French Symbolists. Sometimes he would drive a friend to the Suffolk coast at night. In the blackness they would hear the sound of the pounding waves. At eighteen he thought the world was leaving him behind. Refusing to buy new clothes or brush his hair, he behaved like a visitor in his own body: why settle in if you’re moving on?”

On Nick’s place in the English romantic tradition:

“Drake’s songs are sad even in celebration, for what they celebrate is lost or fading. Repelled by the imposition of petty, commercial structures on unspoiled natural landscapes. Nick took as his mission William Blake’s challenge: "To see a World in a Grain of Sand/And a Heaven in a Wild Flower/Hold infinity in the palm of your hand/And Eternity in an hour.” The vision makes ‘Bryter Layter’ magical, childlike. “I’ve never felt magic crazy as this,” Nick sings in his most beautiful song, “Northern Sky.” We feel it: it is the magic of innocence. The songs are so sad because we know their spell must be broken.”

On Nick at the end:

“No one will ever know if Nick meant to take his life. He left no note. When he returned the last time from Paris, he brought his mother a copy of Camus’ ‘Le Mythe de Sisyphe’. It still lies on a small table in her living room. After Nick died she tried to read it. "I thought he might have been trying to tell me something,” she says. The book is about suicide. But it is hardly a suicide note: it is the existentialist argument against taking one’s life in an absurd world. For Camus, the myth of Sisyphus was a parable for life: the endless pushing of a boulder up a hill, only to have the rock fall to the bottom just as you approach the top. It wasn’t the top that mattered, Camus said. It was the pushing.”

Let us all push on in honour of Nick - “ … beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Tracklist:-

Fruit tree, Nick Drake

Between the bars, Elliott Smith

Ringing in my ear, Adem

Way to blue, Nick Drake

The fox in the snow, Belle and Sebastian

If you need someone, The Field Mice

River man, Nick Drake

Round the bend, Beck

Do you ever remember, Molly Drake

Guiding light, Television

Which will, Nick Drake

Which will, Lucinda Williams

Homesick, Kings of Convenience

Northern Sky, Nick Drake

Episode 56 - Let's all meet up in the year 2000

The ’90s seem so far away, don’t they?

There are ‘‘90s nostalgia shows now. Of course there are. I listen to one regularly called Quickly Kevin. It’s about football where the ’90s were a bridge between a long ball hoofed to the big man upfront followed by a night on the town downing lagers … and the continental sophistication that came with diets, sports psychology and Italians sipping citron presse on the Kings Road. 

What happened in the ’90s again? The O J Simpson trial. Yes, that definitely occurred. Princess Di died. Australia had a “recession it had to have”. Britain got Tony Blair before he turned evil. “Things can only get better”, the Labour Party song in 1997. Yeah, no.

The music had a few cranks of the handle – trip hop, grunge, Britpop. Girl power!! Noel Gallagher in Downing Street. Jarvis waving his arse in front of Michael Jackson. Briefly British music was on the front pages again – it’s the Blur versus Oasis Battle!! A bit like but not quite the same as The Times writing earnest editorials about The Beatles and the Stones thirty years before.

The 21st century has not gone great so far. Can we agree on that? So I thought it’d be nice, talking of Jarvis, to meet up again in the year 2000. The year after the 90s, the year before 9/11. The last innocent year, or so it seems in retrospect. A great year for music, in fact. See whether you agree. 

Tracklist:

Accused of stealing, The Delgados

Ballad of Cable Hogue, Calexico

Two seconds, Laura Cantrell

How I long to feel that summer in my heart, Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci

The model, Belle and Sebastian

Kid A, Radiohead

Echo’s answer, Broadcast

Distortions, Clinic

You said something, P J Harvey

Mistakes and regrets, …And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Our Dead

Two Librans, The Fall

Come back from San Francisco, The Magnetic Fields

Stone on the water, Badly Drawn Boy

Episode 55 - Readers recommend

From time to time, I receive a recommendation via Friends of Sombrero Fallout, or simply when meeting a friend for a walk. With the latter, I usually forget instantaneously what someone just told me because I’m cleaning up Toby’s poop. (Toby is my dog.)

So, I’ve gone back over various posts from the last few months to remind myself of people’s ideas, to have a listen, and a good old curate. I sometimes wonder why should I impose my tastes on everyone else, so this is a good opportunity to reverse the normal process.

I’ve also had several delightful letters recently, and I’d encourage you to get in touch if you feel like it. I (think I) always reply. It’s great meeting new friends, isn’t it? As I said to Knight Berman, Jr, my dream is to one day have a world tour and visit all my Fallout Friends. Of course, first I’ll need to be permitted travel beyond 5km from my home for more than one hour a day, so that ambition’s a little way off being realised.

Talking of Knight Berman, Jr, he sent me a delightful email mentioning he’d started following the podcast a few months ago, initially because of the title, being a big Richard Brautigan fan. Knight makes music under the moniker The Marble Tea, named after a long-forgotten Brautigan poetry collection. He thought I might find it interesting as we had both named our projects after the same writer.  

More than that, Knight, I love the music and ‘I’m Batman’ is included on this episode.

The other band of particular interest on this pod is The Convenience Store. They’re a bunch of young Melbourne lads, friends of my sons, but also FOSF-ers. ‘Time to enjoy’ is an early cut by them and you can find more of their interesting material on Bandcamp. 

A very enjoyable episode to assemble.

Tracklist:-

Signal, Automatic

I’m Batman, The Marble Tea

Alv Bye, Melted Ice Cream

Oh Canada, Nadia Reid

The Dial, Squid

Safari Disco Club, Yelle

Lost and found, Taken By Trees

Itsuko got married, Bearsuit

Don’t cling to life, The Murder Capital

Time to enjoy, The Convenience Store

Subways, The Avalanches

James, MGMT

Mystery, The Caretaker

The Waitress Song, Seth Sentry

Episode 54 - Tribute songs to musicians

It’s hard to pull off a tribute song well. Probably the best approach is the one favoured by the artists on this podcast: don’t try to sound anything like the objects of your affection.

Said objects would form a formidable festival line up. Who wouldn’t sleep in a $20 tent from Ray’s Outdoors and suffer the slings and arrows of festival toilets for this line up:

2pm. The Beach Boys

3pm. The Carpenters 

4pm. Nick Drake

5pm. Billie Holliday 

6pm. Amy Winehouse 

7pm. Can 

8pm. Jay Reatard

9pm. The Meat Puppets

10pm. Nirvana

12am. The Fall

2am. The Velvet Underground  

There’ll be plenty who’d like to see the Beach Boys headlining, but as I said on the show there’s something about their harmonising that makes me feel queasy. And everyone would need to stay very quiet for Nick Drake, only occasional shouts of “We love you, Nick” and “Now’s your time!” would be permitted.

On another note, and also as mentioned on the programme, this is the debut of a few bands, not least the Jazz Butcher. They remain the only significant band that the Gloom Brothers in their brief glorious incarnation, supported. And The Gloom Brothers, to pre-empt your query, being the band of which I was the ‘singer’ from 1982-84. 

All I can say is we were better than Tony Blair’s Ugly Rumours. I mean I haven’t heard Ugly Rumours, nobody has, but we were certainly better.

Tracklist:

Velvet Underground, Jonathan Richman

Under the influence of Meat Puppets, fIREHOSE

Let me in, REM

I saw Nick Drake, Robin Hitchcock

Ladykillers, Lush

My only friend, The Magnetic Fields

Southern Mark Smith, The Jazz Butcher

Mr Wilson, John Cale

I am Damo Suzuki, The Fall

Amy aka Spent Gladiator, The Mountain Goats

Tunic (Song for Karen), Sonic Youth

He would have laughed, Deerhunter

Episode 53 - Ordinary people

Every year is getting shorter, never seem to find the time.

Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines

Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way (Time, Pink Floyd)

The gas bills and the water rates, and payments on the car

Too scared to think about how insecure you are

Life ain't so happy in your little Shangri-la (Shangri-La, The Kinks)

All over the city we arise, arise

For a job we despise, despise, despise (Civil Servant, Richard Dawson)

The centre of my so called being is

The space between your bed and wardrobe with the louvre doors (My wandering days are over, Belle and Sebastian)

This episode was recorded during Stage 4 in Melbourne, August 2020. Our world view narrowing to the bedroom, the bathroom, the kitchen. So I thought a good idea for an episode would be celebrating everyday existence. Ordinary Lives. The bits that get written out of the history books of the past. And, really, why listen to me when the lyrics from these artists do it so much better? Here’s a selection:-

I am the man who stays home and does the dishes

And how was your day? Is that woman still trying to do your head in? (Dishes, Pulp)

In the staff room, lost in a daze, shovelling crisps into my face after an unspeakably awful call with a grieving mother

In Wetherspoons on the fruit machines, sinking my umpteenth Peroni, cackling like a hyena at the nasty jokes of my colleagues, none of whom I can stand (Civil servant, Richard Dawson)

Where have I put my keys? I've looked in my pocket, behind the newspaper and underneath the remote control, and I cannot find where I put them, again (Domestica, Bjork)

I thought she'd be back in three weeks and we'd go wandering the Peaks, sojourn in my Uncle Joe's ashram

For when you're in Matlock Bath you don't need Sylvia Plath, not while they've got Mrs. Gibson's Jam (The light at the end of the tunnel (is the light of the coming train), Half Man Half Biscuit)

The spare room is fine, though a little haunted by Mr. Reagan who hung himself at number 13

Be great when it's decorated (My new house, The Fall)

I got a job with Stanley, he said I’d come in handy

He started me on Monday, so I had a bath on Sunday (Up the junction, Squeeze)

I like the Starbucks here, it’s better than the other one, ‘cause the other one's not as good

They really need to put a light there cause it's hard to turn, it's hard to make a left turn

And when it's time to go to bed I'm still awake inside my head

I'm floating up above the house and looking down

I guess I gotta go back there; I guess there never was any other answer (Shop Vac, Jonathan Coulton Coulton).

Tracklist:-

Shop vac, Jonathan Coulton

Dishes, Pulp

Depreston, Courtney Barnett

My new house, The Fall

Let’s move to the country, Smog

Civil servant, Richard Dawson

Whyteleafe, Saint Etienne

Shangri-la, The Kinks

Smithers-Jones, The Jam

Up the junction, Squeeze

Domestica, Bjork

The light at the of the tunnel (is the light of an oncoming train), Half Man Half Biscuit

Episode 52 - A Kiwi special! The Flying Nun label and the Dunedin Sound

This episode has its roots in a conversation that broke out online on the Friends of Sombrero Fallout site.

Chris Johnston - who used to write an excellent column in The Age newspaper called “From The Crate” - is a Kiwi journalist who had just composed an Age article remembering Joy Division’s Closer 40 years on. In the comments he mentioned that “all the music from Christchurch back then sounded like Joy Division.” This led me to ask why.

Chris gave a full response:-

“A good radio station, isolation, that landscape. Also, there was a decent band scene - which was very commercial - but also a contrasting underground scene at Christchurch pubs willing to let post-punks play, supported by radio and press, and street press. There was also the small fact of the Flying Nun label, which had just started, and enabled weird bands to record. NZ was an easy country to distribute records through; it's small. In ‘81 Flying Nun released ‘Tally Ho’ by The Clean, and it went Top 20 in the charts, the actual charts. ‘Closer’ itself went to number 3. So there was a real appetite for non-mainstream music, and the infrastructure to support it, in a small country.”

From there I did some more digging and Martin Brown was kind enough to send me an old Guardian article showcasing classic ‘Dunedin Sound’ songs, mostly on the Flying Nun label. David Pisker also sent through his valuable suggestions.

For whatever reason, most of these bands didn’t permeate my consciousness at all up in England back then. But some people were listening. Pavement owe a substantial debt to The Clean for their embryonic sound, as you’ll hear. Early Wedding Present sounded like they had their ears tuned in. And the iconic C86 cassette, which gave birth to ‘indie’ more or less as we know it, can trace a thick strand of its lineage back to the Kiwi music of that time (take, for example, Celestial City by McCarthy, not featured here).

I hope you either bask in the memories or, like me, enjoy sampling this sound for the first time.

Tracklist:-

Made up in blue, The Bats

Cactus cat, Look Blue Go Purple

Destroy the heart, The House of Love

Death and the maiden, The Verlaines

Anything could happen, The Clean

Box elder, Pavement

Down in splendour, Straitjacket Fits

Nothing’s going to happen, The Tall Dwarfs

Nothing comes easy, The Wedding Present

Kaleidoscope world, The Chills

Beautiful things, 3Ds

Ambivalence, Pin Group

Komakino, Joy Division

Money is so sad, Alastair Galbraith

Episode 51 - First album, first track

Sexual intercourse began

(which was rather late for me)

Between the end of the “Chatterley” ban

And the Beatles’ first LP.

Up to then there’d only been

A sort of bargaining,

A wrangle for the ring,

A shame that started at sixteen

And spread to everything.

Then all at once the quarrel sank:

Everyone felt the same,

And every life became

A brilliant breaking of the bank,

A quite unlosable game.

So life was never better than

In nineteen sixty-three

(Though just too late for me) –

Between the end of the “Chatterley” ban

And the Beatles’ first LP.

—Annus Mirabilis by Philip Larkin (1922-1985)

“I saw her standing there” by The Beatles: the first track on their debut album, ‘Please please me’ and a statement of intent. Paul’s original lyric had been “She was just seventeen, never been a beauty queen.” John changed it to “She was just seventeen, if you know what I mean” and the world was never quite the same again.

Our 51st episode feels like starting over. A re-set and an opportunity for our own statement of intent. 50 episodes in the back pocket, a wave of the bat to the crowd, but no running up and down the wicket kissing the badge - that’s not the Sombrero Fallout way. No, a brisk word with my batting partner, a retaking of guard, and a few deep breaths. Then on with the game.

During the last episode I played “Neighbourhood #1 (Tunnels)” by Arcade Fire, the first track on their debut album, ‘Funeral’. I made the comment that there were few groups about which I could say the initial track on their first LP remained my favourite. Which sparked the thought that I should assemble an episode out of debut album, first cuts.

And when better than for our 51st episode? (Our first is the correct answer, but that bird has flown).

It would have been easy to choose Disorder, Is this it?, Janie Jones and some other show favourites. But then I thought, no, let’s have an episode of virgin artists. As it happens that’s included some established ones as well. I hope you find something new you enjoy.

Tracklist:-

Adult diversion, Alvvays

Panther dash, The Go! Team

Your ace from space, U-Roy

Over the ice, The Field

Holidays in the sun, The Sex Pistols

Sure ‘nuff ‘n’ yes I do, Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band

Fear, The Passage

Do it again, Steely Dan

Kevin is gay, Giant Drag

I wanna be adored, The Stone Roses

Learning, Perfume Genius