THE ARTICLE

The Article

The article stood on the hill outside the capital city of each member land. It was visited every year on the date of its creation by the great and the good, stood in serried ranks to salute the symbol of peace and prosperity. It had been there for fifty years, a testament to the modernity of the people of the lands and their superiority to those who had gone before with their wars and their destruction, their prejudices and their lack of fellow feeling.

At first the article had been universally popular. Those outside the lands had looked on with envy at those who lived under the article’s benign gaze, an invisible power to protect and nourish the people. Those allied to the lands, with their own articles and shared experience of the horrors of conflict had applauded the lands for their commitment to a better way of life. In the lands of the diktat, the naysayers who were imprisoned and disappeared had pointed to the article as a beacon of hope, as something to aspire to and fight for. The lands of the article had consistently supported these refuseniks. When the lands of the diktat collapsed under the falsity of their theory, the lands of the article had welcomed them with open arms, leaving only a bruised and distressed rump outside their new and improved community. It seemed that the lands of the article were destined to be the saviours of humanity. 

All were in favour of the article. Those who weren’t simply didn’t understand the power of the article. So great was the support for the article that those who insisted on publicly denying its power within the lands were called ‘shovers’ and laughed at for their crazy theories. Some compared them to the ‘smashers’ who had caused chaos in the time before the article. The article provided jobs and new technologies that made life better for all. No one was left behind. Those who seemed to be left behind were not there because of the article but because they were ‘idlers’. The ‘idlers’ were obviously that because people from the new lands of the article and those who escaped from lands beyond it (for there were still many places where the article was resisted) came to the lands and found work and contributed to the good of all. The ‘idlers’ only had themselves to blame. The ‘shovers’ hated the ‘idlers’ but they recognised that the ‘idlers’ hated those they called ‘pushers’; the believers in the article, the establishment, the experts and the people in control.  So the ‘shovers’ stared to whisper in the ears of the ‘idlers’, promising them great things if they helped overturn the article. 

As time past, the wars that created the article became a thing of first memory and then history. The towns and cities were rebuilt, the children and grandchildren of the people of the lands travelled throughout and learnt the language and customs of their fellow citizens and forgot the disagreements and distrust that, only decades before, could have seen them shooting each other rather than sharing conversation. Some began to wonder if the article was really all powerful. There seemed to be more and more ‘idlers’ wherever you looked. Some of the ‘pushers’ suggested that the article needed to be considered anew, that the ‘idlers’ were not to blame, that the article itself was creating them. But the majority of the ‘pushers’ were doing ok, they had their new things and their settled lives, they had forgotten what could happen, what had happened in the past and they ignored the pleas for the ‘idlers’, electing to pursue them further. They forced the ‘idlers’ to work for their bread and took their houses from them if they didn’t work. The ‘shovers’ saw this and they smiled. With each push the ‘idlers’ came closer to them and there were more and more ‘idlers’.

 So it came to past that as time went on the voices of the ‘idlers’ and the ‘shovers’ combined became so loud that the ‘pushers’ decided to shut them up for once and for all. In the lands of the article one by one the ‘pushers’ in charge decided to ask the people to say that the article was good for all. On that day in each of the lands the people spoke. And some of them said that the article was not good. Enough of them said that the article was not good for the article to be removed. The ‘pushers’ were aghast. How could the article not be good? It had kept them safe for five decades, made life better for all. The ‘pushers’ repeated that the ‘shovers’ were crazy. The ‘shovers’ said that they were now in charge. Some ‘pushers’ pretended to be ‘shovers’. The ‘idlers’ were the happiest. They had told the ‘pushers’ where to go and now their protectors, ‘the shovers’ would make it all ok.

Years of strife followed. The ‘shovers’ shoved and the ‘pushers’ pushed. The people of the diktat lands saw their chance and made their empire anew, the lands of the former article too busy fighting each other to stop them. The ‘ilders’ soon realised that the ‘shovers’ didn’t really care about them. Soon they became ‘smashers’ and the lands of the article were again ravaged by strife and war and misery.

After decades of ‘smashers’ smashing and ‘pushers’ pushing and  ‘shovers’ shoving whilst all around the people of the diktat lands gorged themselves on the weak and the defenceless a peace was declared. And on a hill outside each of the capital cities of the former article lands was erected the declaration. And the declaration promised peace and prosperity and all were happy to be people of the declaration. Except for those who weren’t but they were just crazy.

Powerless to the People

We were in one of those awful playbarn things over the weekend. You know the types, former warehouses that have been kitted out with caged play areas and soft landing sites surrounded by cafes and chairs for the adults to sit and try and block out the incessant noise of hundreds of kids going mad. I looked around at the parents and wondered why on earth we did this stuff. Here's what I came up with.

1. Making play pay
We have been told that our world is dangerous even though all studies tell us we live in the best time ever for homosapiens. We see paedophiles around very corner, stoked by the media frenzy at every case. We are conditioned to be risk averse. The paradox of our increased safety leading to a desire for more safety is well documented. So we don't allow our kids to play in natural environments free of parental oversight. My childhood of leaving home on my bike in the morning with my mates and returning for tea is long gone. Even the after school back alley kickarounds feel like something kids did in history books. Play must be supervised and safety certified. Which costs.

2. Always on adulthood
Plenty of my fellow parents were on their mobiles and laptops. This was a Saturday. Now, they may have been looking at Facebook or doing their Ocado order or whatever but my guess is at least some of them were working. Because so many of us now are, constantly, totally on all hours. Again, studies have shown that this is a stupid idea, the longer the hours, the less productive the work but we have all bought into (or been forced into) this idea that being 'busy' is a good thing. Those of us that can be 'busy' anyhow. The reflection of this is the layabouts of George Osborne's closed curtains in the daytime, a handy bogey man or woman that all us 'busy' people can tut about as we stand by and watch their welfare disappear and have them forced to work for Mike Ashley for a pittance. We are too busy to look after the kids or supervise the play so we outsource it. And then work extra hours to pay for it. Which is a bit mad when you think about it.

3. On Demand children
So you take your kids to the playbarn because its good for them to run around isn't it? It may be in an air conditioned hellhole but at least they're moving aren't they. And you can get some work done while they chuck themselves down slides. So all good yeah? But then they get hungry or see that they could be fed something. Everywhere kids were tucking into £7 pizza and chips. Sugary drinks galore. Because if you are halfway through that Powerpoint for Monday or trying to deal with all the admin that being alive in 2016 requires (changing electricity providers is my personal bugbear) you don't have the time or the patience to negotiate a better food option. Easier to cave in isn't it? After all, we're now in a generation who can access any information at a moment's notice, pick from a menu of televisual treats, pause the program while they pop to the fridge or the cupboard for something to snack on - you're not sure what because you're buried in a work thing that is 'urgent' on Sunday morning or that latest missive telling you to change this or switch that before the interest rate / standing charge / monthly sub jumps as your 'exclusive offer period' is at an end.

4. The Endless Guilt of Parenting
So whilst you are buried under all the 'life' stuff and the 'work' stuff our friends in advertising are bombarding you with images of how it should really be. 50 Things Children Should Do, 100 Places Your Kid Should See, read with your kid every night and so on ad infinitum, a slew of messaging that is designed to make you feel crap if you don't tick every box in the good parent menu; a menu designed by coporations and their marketing henchmen to part you from your money as fast as possible because, as car firms know, nothing works better than getting the kid to ask for something.

5. The easy way out
Perhaps it was the Iraq War, or the coalition, or just your life experience that things never got better but plenty of sensible, thinking people have clearly come to the conclusion that politics is a waste of time. All the above and more exhaust us, just keeping our heads above water, irrespective of whether we are living in a mortgage house or scraping rent together, don't have the time and the energy to really think through things anymore. Far easier to pick up our opinions second hand and borrow them, whether from Katie Hopkins or Owen Jones. Far easier to say that voting is a waste of time, far simpler to not think about why it isn't working, to seperate the good MPs from the bad. Just lump them all in together and spend that hour watching zombies on Netflix or killing them on the PS4.

Given that this seems to be the year of 'what the fuck' you have to hope that we might look at this and think a bit about what needs to change. That we might remember the mess we are in was caused by the international finance institutions that have spent our bailout money and delivered precisely fuck all for us, that this was all set in train by the very corporations and banks that now overlord us destroying the manufacturing base of the UK and USA for profit in the 80s under Thatcher and Reagan. (It's all there to read up on, if you can't be arsed to read it, watch Michael Moore's 'Capitalism, it's on Netflix and it's very funny / sad). That we are all in the same boat pretty much, some people's boats are bigger, some own their boats (or rent them from a bank rather than a landlord), that we and our kids are being herded into a segregated, marketed and compromised world where peril will stalk our every move and uncertainty will mean we spend less and less time caring about each other and more and more time just surviving. And we might say ENOUGH and do something about it. Stop believing the ads, stop buying the stuff you don't need, stop relying on 60 second news to tell you what is going on, stop thinking that other people are out to get what you should have and think about what you should have and how you might share more and grab less. And if that sounds like pie in the sky hippy nonsense then that only says to me we've come a long way down a particularly dark and dismal road. Time to turn around.

Generation Terrorists?

This blog follows on from a Facebook discussion which you can read here

Cliche it may be but when applied to the music industry it is fair to say that life used to be so much simpler. A world where subcultures were easily identifiable was a world in which marketing music to those subcultures could be based on a reasonable amount of certainty. Trying to sell the new Primitives single? Well, you can assume that a fair proportion of The Smiths fanbase will be interested, that NME and Melody Maker will be interested, that Peel and Kid Jensen will be interested. Given that the market is to an extent ring fenced you can gather your (no doubt meagre pre RCA deal) finances and aim in one direction.Your target market wears a fair amount of black, cardigans, brogues and is totally plugged in to all the above. Your live play will be University bars and the pub circuit built up through punk and early post punk. You are working with certainties. The results will vary of course, music has never been a given, but within parameters that you can aniticpate to some degree. You make a cheap video and can expect it to air once a month minimum on The Chart Show.

Contrast that with now. Irrespective of the genre you are working within, if indeed your artist actually could be said to fit into a genre, there are no obvious subcultures of any size that you can depend on with certainty. There is no given media that can access your anticipated fanbase. There are no norms.

In conversation with a good friend who runs a highly respected UK metal label I aired this opinion whilst suggesting to him that his world was the last bastion of the dependable market. He swiftly disabused me of this notion. Even metal, that hermetically sealed world, was now subject to the vagaries of modernity. He pointed to the fact that half the population under 30 now sport tattoos and nose rings, that the 'metal' scene is now confused by an influx of new bands that look metal but sound pop, and that, oppositely, bands that don't look metal have co-opted some of its sound and production into their music. Even in this world there was no conveniently definable subculture left to depend upon.

In one sense this is free market theory brought to bear in an environment that previously depended on an element of self induced protectionism. From punk through to Britpop, non pop  bands were to some extent immune to the cut throat dynamics of the music industry. The truism that so many previously moderately successful indie acts (I'm looking at you in particular The Mightly Lemon Drops) failed when placed outside of the comfort blanket world of the indie scene seems only to demonstrate further that the ring fenced subculture of the 80s and 90s was a halcyon time when alternative music colluded with alternative media to create a hermetically sealed bubble in which artists and small labels could sustain a business model that would, just about, keep everyone from starvation. Looking back through my vinyl there are numerous examples of purchases made on the basis of cultural solidarity as much as aural excitement, donations to the idea of music rather than the actual tune contained within.

The death of this is, to some extent, linked to my previous post; a cutural pinpoint that stands for a wider political and societal disease. For that delineated music world was based on the idea of communities, of finding fellow feeling and idenitification within a group, a non reality that has now been distilled into an expression of pure individualism.

From a business point of view this offers an incredibly complex new world to navigate for artists, managers, labels and media. We can no longer depend on anything beyond results and it is no great surprise that the previous collective collusion that saw all defined by their genre has been replaced by demographics and market testing, a new search for a certainty in a very uncertain market. Interestingly, this removal of the basis of cultural marketing has created the very generational dislocation that so many commentators have been demanding since the last great musical / cultural shift of acid house at the close of the 80s. New artists, managers and industry members think less in terms of marketable groups and far more in terms of individual track exploitation. Applied to bands like the 1975, who prompted the discussion that led to this blog, that offers a much wider target market, albeit one that is far shallower and less dependable than those which preceeded it. As a side issue, it has removed the other previously precious pillar of music marketing, the novelty of the 'new' and replaced it with a wholly different, complex and challenging environment in which all those concerned with helping artists to succeed need to rip up what we know and start again. The newness of an artist, even whether they are still in existence, is irrelevant, music is now a strand of entertainment in business terms, the song is another marketable commodity to be exploited across all income streams.

For new artists, primary to this new approach is not how many social media followers we have or where we can secure our video premiere or which (if any) playlist we can get our song one but rather the primacy of the tune. We are now not just in competition with all the other new tunes but all the tunes that have gone before. Witness a day on 6 Music, the obvious radio outlet for an 'alternative' band and see how a new artist has to compete with classics on a minute by minute basis for exposure. Those old desires to frame a coherent PR campaign around media coverage have been blown apart by the change in the opposite side of the dynamic; the public. The public still want to hear music but not join a gang. A generation raised on streaming make no distinction between old and new and have no affinity towards a given subculture nor, conversely, a desire to reject music on the same basis. There are no golden bullets, our approach now has to be predicated on an ultra joined up attack on all fronts and, more crucially, an acceptance from all concerned that in all likelihood this is not a way to make a living, if not forever then for a fair amount of time.

This shift is already well underway at the major labels; a shift from prioritising the new to a mixed market economy in which catalogue, reissues, streaming, synch, live income and merch all coalesce to transform the business of making and exploiting new music into someting wholly different, a curation of music and its assocaited by products over time. Getting your track on a Spotify playlist is now worth a hell of a lot more financially than getting it onto the B List at 6 Music. The steady drip has replaced the sudden deluge. A similar process is in play at the independents, see Cooking Vinyl's mixed market of heritage artists and small label affiliation, a balanced business model that allows the possibilty of new success without betting the house on the outcome and is only one of many initiatives across the independent sector under the umbrella terms 'label services'.

Ultimately this means a continued shrinkage for the idea of the traditional music industry and its replacement by a semi-professional second tier where once those ring fenced indie labels stood. The generational shift for which us old timers hoped for has happened without us noticing because it was outside our experience and, therefore, our understanding. Where we desired a homogenous, easily categorisable musical movement we find a fragmented, non linear musical generation; predicated on its rejection of genre and, whether through choice or circumstance, focused on the temporary nature of is existence; a pick and mix, build your own image solution for a highly individualistic and precarious age.

Where Moderates now fear to tread

I thought it began in the run up to the EU referendum. Talking to a friend who was minded to vote Leave I engaged with her reasoning and pointed to a few of the (many) untruths that she was basing her vote upon. Rather than a reasoned response I got an escalation. From the EU want to create their own army we quickly reached the EU was created by the Nazis after the Second World War, one of the very outlier conspiracies that permeated in the run up to the vote. Still I didn't bite, calmly talking of the Marshall plan, the great idea of a peaceful Europe, the links that debunked this idea that Nazi gold stolen from Jewish holocaust victims was at the heart of the forerunner of the EU. It was to no avail...the EU was a reimagining of Hitler's greater Europe and stole money from the UK to give to fatcats in Brussels. Coherence and fact had left the building. Did I mention my friend is a teacher?

But then I thought about it some more. It hadn't started then. It had been with us for a long time before. This belief in what you believe in regardless of fact and, in tandem, its opposite, the refusal to try and persuade or accept that opposing view. It was there when my Dawkins loving University friend laughed in the face of my other Church going friend about her belief in 'made up stories', sweepingly dimissing 2000 years of history, of positives and negatives as 'all bad'. It was there at University when some of our peer group tried to have The Sun banned from the university newsagents because the best way to deal with something you find objectionable is to pretend it doesn't exist rather than persuade others to reject it. It wasn't a right wing thing or a Brexit thing or an anything you could put a political badge on;  it was a modern world thing.

And so it goes on. On my timelines today there are calls for Gina Miller to be killed as a 'traitor' (albeit retweeted from other accounts I don't follow), there is a news front page more suited to Stalinist Russia calling three judges 'Enemies of the State', there are Remainers calling Leavers all manner of names and Leavers calling Remainers names back. There are politicians who should know better suggesting that we remove the independence of the judiciary and there is, always seemingly, Nigel Farage making veiled threats of civil disorder if he doesn't get what he wants, a Wetherspoons dictator who won the lottery having been given the numbers by a PM too weak to hold a principle and a political class too venal and self interested or too inept and disconnected to withstand a basic level pitch to the basest of our desires and fears.

Nowhere, it would seem amidst this, are voices of moderation and calm amongst our political class. Too quick to resort to Twitter, too shorn of any meaning to command opinion, we are in possession of a parliament of job servers and CV shifters and a commentariat (excluding their amplifiers on social media) of paid by and paid for writers, churning out their pre-ordained positions by rote to secure their slice of a market. The right say the most outrageous things in the bluntest way but across the spectrum there is scant analysis and maximum polemic.

And then I understood a little more.

We are now fully immersed in a fiction in which the roles of the players are preset. We ourselves are also players in this fiction. The freezing of ourselves into one dimensional brands is the main feature of our current paralysis, not The Sun or Corbyn or May. They sell ourselves back to us, not the other way around. We presume victimhood when we self-abuse. We refuse to understand or accept this so we play on. We remake our favourite TV shows and films, we return to watch our favourite bands reform, we dress as we did in our youth, we smother anything genuinely new and innovative by clinging on to ideas frozen in aspic and, most crucially, we retain the same political beliefs and the same engagement with them that we had in our first flush of youth. We are hamsters in a wheel. We reject any sign of compromise, the liberal left and the free market right share the same approach towards different ends, a punch and judy show that lines the coffers of all concerned and makes literally no difference to the vast majority of the population who, in theory, look to all concerned to guide the cause of the country towards a stable and better future.

My generation were arguably at the vanguard of the creation of this fiction. We grew up with the polarisation of Thatcher and the unions, alternatively the last great ideological struggle or the first fiction to be sold to the general public depending on where you stand on the left / right spectrum and were told that we were the arbiters of our own destiny. Possibly true for those of us who escaped the industrial towns in decline (again, Thatcher's fault or the first flush of globalisation depending on who you believe) but certainly not true for those left behind. We travelled through the cultural shocks of rave and acid house, a seeming blooming of cultural understanding across our generation, a moment where all classes of a certain age seemed unified in an escapism that correlated with the collapse of the great communist enemy and a feeling that we weren't actually all going to die in a nuclear inferno and peaked with the arrival of New Labour and a feeling that things genuinely were going to get better.

But in truth we weren't going anywhere.The things that would really change - attitudes to race and sexuality, immigrants and women; the great campaigns of the four preceeding decades, were built on shifting sands. We won nothing really accept a reprise. We thought it was all over. We were on the pitch. It wasn't. History is a bitch. Ask the Romans, you think you've done civlisation and then you get lazy and greedy and before you know it the barbarians turn up and its all gone.

But we do not have the skills to understand this. We are not able to accept that some people hold different views and will not accept our facts. We refuse to think that things could get worse because that isn't what we were told. We cannot engage with each other if we cannot agree nor can we change anything if we begin with a fictional worldview. It's no great surprise that now the E's have worn off the hooligans are creeping back into football. That great totem of the left, the battle of Cable Street, the coming together of an exclusively left wing proletariat to reject the fascists, forgot that there were working class lads in blackshirts that day. Thatcher wasn't all bad. Scargill wasn't all good (or vice-versa if you swing the other way). Tony Blair and New Labour were not Paradise Regained. Nor were they the end of British values. On the left, the people simply didn't understand what was good for them, on the right, too many of the people didn't understand that you had to struggle to get what you wanted. In the middle...well, we're still here.

The Brexit debate is this paralysis in microscosm. It's endlessly analysed result was a direct result of this paralysis. No member of the much derided establishment (and I use that term to include the thinking middle classes of which I am a member) truly expected the result because we were too involved in our individual fictions to gain insight into the likely response of a whole swathe of people with whom we have zero engagement. I firmly believe that most Leave voters simply did not believe that the economy would be destroyed by the vote because, as Michael Gove understood, 'the British people have had enough of experts'. Who could blame them? Who knows, they may be right yet? Nothing is fixed and nothing is a given, whatever we would like to believe. The truth is complicated but our view of the world is not and so we cannot move forward.

Real change; the struggle for enfranchisement, workers rights, safe streets, education, the eradication of poverty and the most recent and crucial one; climate change, take decades and require compromise, struggle, suffering and dissapointment. We are not in possession of the qualities necessary to achieve these aims at the moment. Moderation is an essential of democracy, keeping all of the people happy for any of the time is a fallacy. A plea for the return of moderation in social and political discourse is urgent and necessary.

Great Lost Songs - The Revolting Cocks - 'Beers, Steers and Queers'

YEEEHAWWWW

What a way to start a track.

At Leeds University there existed a sub culture (remember those) of ex goths whose tastes had turned towards hardcore. Ministry, Nine Inch Nails, Foetus, Big Black were their heroes and I hated them. All their music seemed so bereft of joy, listening to Nine Inch Nails was for me akin to a night in  with Heathcliff post Cathy's death. I just didn't get it. Why so glum? I'd had goth friends and they weren't this miserable, there was always some humour under the black.....

Then this.

Undoubtedly an unrecognised pointer to big beat, just listen to that rhythm pattern, funky, clever, sarcastic, political, it was everything that all the rest of the scene were not. It took me some time to accept that this was made by those glum types from Ministry and Front 242 (pre internet you couldn't just find something in seconds) yet it had the secondary affect of making me go back to those bands and reassees which is never a bad thing.

it also was a handy way out as a DJ when some black leather jacketed, parabooted, Lard T-shirt wearing type approached me on a Friday night demanding less Roses and more industrial. A rare track that could keep the serious music types happy but let the party kids carry on dancing. For that alone it derserves to be remembered and revered.

Great Lost Songs - ANDREAS DORAU - Girls In Love (Grungerman Mix I) 1996

Credit where its due, this would never have crossed my path were it not for Herb Legowitz of Gus Gus. This track, a minimalist tweaking of a more standard disco house track, was a mainstay of his DJ sets and a piece of music that blew my mind when I heard it.

Is it that rise and fall clipped drum track, the breakthrough of the original as a pseudo chorus, the control of the whole, always feeling like its about to explode, teasing for over 5 minutes without climaxing or the little hint of 70's disco style? I dunno but it was a major staging post on my final acceptance of disco having spent my indie 80s and some of my 90's being totally, impaccably opposed to any music that dared to flirt with that lost decade's dance craze.

A couple of years ago Martin Aston's 4AD book came out and I read Ivo referring to me as a soul boy. At the time I laughed out loud, this Smiths indie kid reborn as a London casual but maybe he had a point. Maybe this track was a major factor in me adding that cloak to my others.

Great Lost Album – Cardinal – ‘Cardinal’

I was going to choose one track from Cardinal's 1994 debut (and only until 2012's 'Hymns') release but the whole album is on Youtube and, to be honest, the whole works better than the parts. An album that will be forever associated in my mind with the summer of that year (it was released in March despite all the Christmas references and I recall getting it a month or so pre release) the entire record is an understated, baroque flecked masterpiece. Sure, it owes debts to early 70's Bowie, a host of mid 80's Fire Records and Shimmy Disc types, early Scott Walker and fits neatly alongside the likes of The Auteurs in that acoustically designed rock mode but its an album that is full formed, completely realised and so sure of itself that it never needs to reach for production dynamics to make its point.

At the time I recall it being one of those album, those of us in the know in the music biz, a seemingly more social, close knit and connected world than today's email driven 'business' would find kinship over a shared love of the record. It became the soundtrack to the post gig / club nights when we would all end up at someone's house until dawn broke. It's a perfect record to watch the sun rise to.
It felt like an album that was destined for the Best Of lists for time in memoriam but it seems to have slipped from collective memory.

Great Lost Songs - Asian Dub Foundation - 'Naxalite'

I seem to recall various badly thought out political covers of Melody Maker and NME over the years. Despite no doubt good intentions, something never quite fit with the way the bands involved were being presented or, in the case of a particularly ill fated Manics / Blaggers ITA front page, some of the participants turned out to be not quite as ethical as the copy suggested as Dave Simpson of the Maker could testify.

ADF always seemed, alongside Fun-Da-Mental to give the music press a particularly severe headache. Much like the first emergence of UK Asian footballers, now thankfully in no way an exception, the idea of an Asian band operating in the alternative music scene left them treading a line between pushing the novelty button and trying to engage seriously with the issues behind the music. To a degree not much has really changed, journalists outside their comfort zones have always had presentation problems in such circumstances but what is clear is that ADF were viewed as much as being Asian as being an exhilerating, thoughtful and provocative group. As with everything I am posting I genuinely can't remember when I last heard them on a radio or read anything about them which, given that the issues they were talking about are, if anything, more prevalent now than ever, seems a damn shame.

Great Lost Songs - Pop Will Eat Itself - 'Wise Up Sucker'

Now we all think that Clint Mansell is a genius don't we? Soundtrack king and all that but he's not always been critical flavour of the month.

For a good year or so at Leeds University in the late 80's a cultural battle raged between the music writers of Leeds Student and various members of the Ents organisation as to the value (or not) of the likes of PWEI, Carter and Neds Atomic Dustbin. In retrospect, the writers may have had a point on Neds but I remain steadfast in my defence of the former two. Leaving aside Carter (who I will come to at some point, was ever a clever band so underated?), PWEI now look like far sighted harbingers of the music world to come, even their name makes a valid point.

I could have picked anything really, 'Ich Bin Ein Auslander' rebuffs the 'stupid music' tag, 'Can U Dig It' still has a dancefloor punch, but this one is here because it's my favourite. a track that does heavy and rock and hip hop all in perfect balance. It stands for everything post 'Beaver Patrol' (possibly the reason alongisde the early stuff that they were so reviled by the critical mass, that whiff of sexism was purdah in the late 80's even if the defence of humour was deployed) a run of tunes that are clever and inventive and thoroughly modern -

Compare PWEI with The Beastie Boys without prejudice and the similarities are myriad. Unfortunately for the Poppies, being from the USA always gave you a free pass with UK critics, the Beasties deservedly remain icons of cool, the Poppies are all but forgotten.....

Great Lost Songs - King Of The Slums - 'Bear With Me'

To some extent a companion to A Witness, both bands being from Greater Manchester and demonstrating that love of dance syncpation minus the beads and jangles that is my memory of the city pre 1989, this is almost the sound of the original Afflacks Palace, that ragbag of goths, indie kids and hip hop heads that populated the second hand stalls and hairdressers over three floors before fire and Identity clothing corporatised the city's soul.

As with many of these tracks, its a head scratcher why KOTS aren't talked about more. Given that their music straddled the dancefloor and the mind, avoided the strict white jacket that strangled much of the indie scene in the mid 80s and, more importantly, that they could create music like this; the sound of the last party on earth as we all get blown to pieces by a Reagan / Thatcher axis, you would have thought that some critics may have revisited them and done one of those re-introduction jobs that seem to be all the rage at the moment.

Then again, there are Phil Collins Q & A's to arrange. Some things never change ;-)

Great Lost Songs - The Fatima Mansions - 'Blues For Ceauşescu'

I hate to come over all 'old git' here but why is no one making angry music like this anymore? This makes Slaves look and sound like Westworld (sonic boom boy, remember?) and knocks most 'angry, political music' into a cocked hat. That it isn't a repeated play on alternative stations leave me scratching my head.

Kicking against everyone, esp fond of the verse about Mountbatten, Cathal Coughlan took his chances to offend very seriously. Alongside this, arguably the best ever piece of political rock committed to audio, he used a support slot with U2 in Italy to stick a statue of the Madonna up his arse, nearly provoking a riot.

Can't see that happening now can you?

A Witness - 'Smelt Like A Pedestrian'

Once upon a time, Manchester's musis scene was not dominated by happy go lucky day glo baggies nor strident rock stars but itchy post punks with a nice line in social commentary and impeccable left wing politics. A Witness were a revelation when, age 15, I heard their debut Peel session and I was straight out to buy their first Ep and then their debut album, 'I am John's Pancreas'.

To my ears a UK answer to the machine anger of Big Black, tempered by a nice line in surrealism, their jaggedy sound owed a fair amount to Gang Of Four for sure but provided a perfect backdrop to a period of intense pessimism over the dog days of Thatcherism and the continued threat of both social collapse and nuclear violence. It also provided a nice balance to the other side of my record collection which went jingle jangle and refused to engage with the adult world.

Great Lost Songs - Birdland - 'Hollow Heart'

Yeah, if you remember, stupid hair, from the Midlands, Birdland didn't really stand a chance did they? Yet one listen to this in a modern context and you can't help but be taken aback by the power of it all. That sneery punk thing underpinned by a driving guitar melody, it's still got that raw excitement of youth somewhere in it. And somewhere underneath it all a feeling of soul, as far removed from Motown as you get but nonetheless with a heart at the centre.

At the time (1989) it was a big indie hit, the video sat in The Chart Show's indie chart for ages, we all owned a copy of the white 12" with the grafitti writing. Live they were chaotic and mesmerising, a tangle of Mary Chain black and attitude and pre grunge slackerdom, smashing instruments and giving out bad vibes from the stage, a potential UK riposte to the gathering tide starting to blow in from Seattle. They also did a mean cover of 'Rock n Roll Nigger' which hinted that the cartoon press version of the band may not be the whole story.

But it didn't happen that way....and now you'd be hard pushed to hear this on 6 Music....

Great Lost Songs - BOB 'Convenience'

There was a time when this track was a sign of indie knowledge, around my first year at Leeds in 1989 owning a copy of the 7" elevated you above the indie masses that were gathering around the Manchester scene and marked you out as an original indie kid as much as a stripey T-shirt or an anorak. These days I rarely meet anyone in the industry who knows what the fuck I am going on about if it comes up in conversation.

Indie snobbery aside this remains a fascinating track, echoes of which I hear now and again when the idea of senstive young men with guitars come back into vogue. Straddling that point between the jangles of The Byrds and the white soul of Aztec Camera, the chorus still has the power to make my heart sing. Being in love, likely unrequieted, never sounded so good.

Great Lost Songs - Pusherman - 'Chase It'

It says everything that there is not even a video on Youtibe for this, the first single release from Pusherman.
For a brief moment in 1996, this melding of The Verve's hypo-groove, Oasis' swagger and a stoner rock vibe that eventually come to prominence in alt circles with Queens Of The Stone Age via Kyuss, looked and felt like the end game of Britpop; a collision of the arrogance with the inevitable (and soon to come with 1997 and Be Here Now) end of the party.

Pusherman were not clean cut like The Bluetones, arch like Blur or Suede, 'fun' like Oasis, they were dark and disturbed and messy and troubled. They were the precursors of Pet Docherty's life style, the revenge of fans of Loop and Spacemen 3 on the happy, clappy Britpop gang and, sadly, everyone seems to have forgotten about them. No 6 Music rotation for this lot.
Still, at CMJ in October of (I think, memories of CMJ can get a bit hazy) they were awsome. In fact, every time I saw them live they were awesome.

A Story Of Indie

The history of music is like all other histories, it is written by the winners. In this case, surprisingly for a commercial entity but understandably given the involvement of the media, that history is not necessarily always factually correct.

This thought struck me on my second watch of ‘The Story Of Indie’ on BBC 4 over the weekend. As with many previous attempts to place a movement in context, it followed a now pre-agreed line that starts with The Sex Pistols and runs through their Manchester Free Trade Hall show and its audience through the holy triumvirate of Factory, Rough Trade and Creation in the 80’s to the 90’s evil takeover by the majors and on to the new pastures of a post indie world where the biggest bands are or aren’t on independent labels and no one really gives a monkeys any more. 

Along the way the usual honourable mentions are given to 4AD, Beggars Banquet and others but the lead actors remain Wilson, Travis and McGee. 

Granted to try and summarise 40 years of music history in three hours will require a certain amount of hard-nosed editing and the programme itself is not my major complaint here. Rather that the co-option of fact to suit narrative shown here is one that repeatedly plays out across the ‘intelligent music’ media and, further, plays out to the detriment of the progression of music and its attendant (non-major) industry. 

Such a view of the independent music sector at a stroke reduced dance music to a ten minute interlude via the KLF with no mention of a host of acts and labels that sprung up around that scene, most notably XL Recordings. There was no talk of Mo’Wax, trip hop, drum and bass and so on. The suspicion is that the narrative, ‘indie goes pop’, subsumed the facts; the dance music boom from 1989 not only created a host of independent labels, some of which are now elder statespeople of the scene, but further engaged a host of hitherto unrepresented communities in the music industry.  Whatever the reasoning, it was all very, very white and outstandingly middle class outside of everyone’s favourite Northern herberts as per the usual Roses, Mondays and Oasis drafted in to add grit.

This under representation of those voices within the industry is mirrored, if not overwhelmed by a parallel in the media. Therefore, the collusion between the guardians of the music industry’s independent flame and their like minds in the media is not that unexpected.

Having been around music for over two decades I am past being surprised that such things happen. Returning to the programme the narrative for 90’s indie into Britpop focused on the majors watering down of UK indie’s initial recapture of the scene from US Bands. No thought was given, or comment made, to the long standing licensing relationships enjoyed by many leading independent labels with major cousins outside of the UK prior to the 90s but plenty of comment was given to similar set ups for Nude and Food. The cultural death that was Britpop long since established in critical minds, a quick cut away to Sleeper, Shed Seven and Menswear, a trinity of easy targets for the thinking people’s press, sealed the deal. ‘Eurghh. Popular music liked by ordinary people’ would have been the tagline.

Music criticism is not the same as music history. A brief glance at sales figures for Sleeper’s ‘Smart’ and ‘The It Girl’ or Shed Seven’s ‘Change Giver’ or ‘A Maximum High’ would make it clear that, in purely factual terms, this ‘watered down’ indie was a contributor to the continued financial success of the UK music industry in that period. More to the point, the success of those bands (and others now dumped in the ‘indie-landfill’ hole so conveniently created by Andrew Harrison of Word magazine but rapidly adopted wholesale across the music media) was a straightforward sign of their popularity with real people.

Indie, or the people that create what we call ‘indie’, has always carried around with it the lingering suspicion that it would rather not be accessible to all of the people. As Bernard Butler rightly pointed out in interview, he had always believed that ‘his’ bands weren’t interested in success’. Anyone who has worked with bands on indie labels will know that all musicians at the very least want to make a living out of their work. It is a rough irony that those bands that can most afford not to make a living by their (privileged) attitude chime with their media counterparts thus garnering the coverage that creates that very success whilst those on the reverse find themselves forever at the mercy of the dread cry of ‘sellout’, that hackneyed punk slogan coined by those most able to afford not to care.

In one sense the programme was right. Britpop made a brief space for bands to say outright that they wanted to be successful. That allowed a host of voices that had previously been excluded from the party to gain some attention, the critical walls being smashed for a time by a combination of new media voices and a Radio One that took its moment and made things happen. In the main that flowering of success now seen as the ultimate departure from the high ‘indie’ ideals into the grubby commercialism of sales remains the last great British musical movement. It is a tragedy that we remain bolted to a critical view that such a movement was an irrevocably bad thing when, in truth, it was the very lifeblood of UK music.