Yurt16

The Cardigans – Long Gone Before Daylight

Around the start of this century, I was asked by Robert Duffy to write a column about British music for his nascent website, donewaiting.com. Obviously I was flattered to be asked, and despite my lack of suitability for the role, I eagerly accepted.

I was sill working shifts at this point, monitoring mainframes. Unless things went horribly pear shaped, you had a lot of time on your hands on a twelve hour nightshift. I figured that this was time that I could spend writing about all of the new music that I was listening to.

By the end of 2003, my end of year roundup said that the album of the year was by The Cardigans, a band that had been releasing records for ten years and that hailed from Sweden. So much for new British music.

At the time I said that it “If I was asked to boil this year down and save one album for posterity, it would be this one, a hundred times out of a hundred.” As you can see, I used to have more time to think about what I was writing. I used to listen to a lot more music than I do now. And I quite obviously knew what music I liked, and was determined to stick with it.

I’d been a fan of the Cardigans for years. Although I still adore their earlier music I know that it’s a slightly more intelligent version of the catchy pap cluttering the pop charts but that it’s still essentially disposable. I did find their appeal diminishing as they got sucked into the mainstream.

Which is why I still find it fascinating that a band known for their superficial pop sheen can come up with a record as substantial and organic sounding as this one. I don’t tend to always go on about lyrics but listening to this album again recently, I’m reminded that beneath the pop hooks, this album was all about the words. I don’t think that Nina had ever written such acute and personal lyrics as the ones on this album, and I know that at the time, they resonated very strongly with my confused state of mind.

I think it also helped that the album ended with a track called ’03:45 No Sleep’, an ode to insomniacs all over, and a song that I spent a lot of time with in those early hours.

There’s a shy acoustic guitar, and some delicately brushed drums before Nina gently sings of roaches, and of champagne from last New Year, and the comfort of fireflies.

As I’d wander around the Stockley Park parking lot, illuminated by the bulbous lamps dotted around the estate, I’d have this song on my headphones, and find myself nodding in agreement as Nina closed the album.

“If I had one wish fulfilled tonight,
I’d ask for the sun to never rise.
If God gave the mic to me to speak,
I’d say, stay in bed world.
Sleep in peace.”

Lets go back in time, to the late 80s. A small town in West Sussex. A Friday night. Late. Town Centre. It’s wet & dark: relatively quiet compared to town centres now. Town belonged to teenagers back then too, but in different ways to how it is today…but I digress…by a Church (now partly demolished to make way for an insurance office block) is a group of drunk teenagers. Tomfoolery, high jinxs and Woodpecker cider. A low wall lies innocently nearby. That low wall no longer exists but I can still feel that wall to this day. That night I stumbled & fell face first onto that wall and smashed the side of my mouth, two teeth took the brunt of the impact.

I can’t remember much detail about what the Dentist said I had done to my teeth, other than one day they will go black and die. I was 17 or so; this news was extremely distressing. In the twenty years since, I’ve had 4 abscesses and 2 root canals and nothing has yet gone black.

A few days ago, as I was eating, I caught the side of one of the teeth and felt a sharp pain in the root. Last night I felt the familiar throb of an abscess. Today, with a sinking heart I took myself off to see the Dentist.

I was slightly cheered by my Dentist being a Swedish Jewish Anthony Sher look-a-like.

He probed and questioned, tapped & x-rayed.

‘I think you should prepare yourself for bad news. We may have to extract the tooth’.

To be honest, I’ve been prepared for years. I was prepared a nanosecond after my face bounced off that wall, I was prepared to get up & spit my teeth out.

The previous root canal work is no longer in place. The root looks fractured and there is a small black mass (the abscess). The front tooth next to it still holds firm, it’s root canal looking good, that at least is small comfort.

The Swedish Jewish Anthony Sher-alike Dentist frowned ‘to be honest, I’m suprised the root canal held that long in that tooth, it looked extremely tricky to do in the first place’.

I shuddered at the memory of just how difficult it was. ‘I had hoped to make it to 40 with all my own teeth’. Not the greatest of ambitions, but consider I’ve been waiting for this to happen for a long time.

I have been despatched from Swe/Jew/Sher Dentist with antibiotics to hopefully rid the abscess, with the knowledge that should/when the infection comes back it means a tooth extraction.

‘Will you still love me if I’m Gappy McMiller?’

‘Yeah…but I’ll buy you a new tooth’.

‘Cool’.

I feel sad but, and if you too have a troublesome tooth, you will understand that I also feel somewhat relieved.

Queen – Greatest Hits

I used to watch a lot of cricket back in 1983. A ‘Schoolboy’ season ticket to watch Northamptonshire cost around £11. We would cycle to the ground, lock our bikes to the crash barriers in the football terraces, and spend the day there watching the game and hanging out with your mates. It was an early freedom.

Of course, we were much younger then. We didn’t really watch the cricket. We ate our lunch. We played cricket ourselves behind the stands. We bought Gallones ice creams, and we collected autographs.

All of the kids had an autograph book. Most of us would have an A4 ring binder. We’d cut pictures out of cricket magazines, stick them into a page of our ring binder, and then whenever the County would be playing that team, we’d try and get players’ autographs in the relevant section.

The teams would come off for lunch or tea, and the kids would hover at the edge of the field, book and pen in hand, hoping to get a signature or two. The braver kids would risk the wrath of the groundsman, run onto the field and try and get to the players first.

If you didn’t get the autographs as the players left the field, you’d have to hang about afterwards trying to get them to sign before they left for the evening. Most players would be more likely to sign at this point because they were no longer on a lunch break, but the downside was you might have to wait until 7:30, or later.

Luckily for the autograph hunter, most of the players had courtesy cars with their names on the side, so it was easy to work out if they’d already left or not. It must be nice to be able to drive in a car that said ‘Brian Close’s car provided by Somerset Motors’. Well, if you were Brian Close.

Obviously, the more famous the player, the more demands on their time and the more prestigious the autograph. Ian Botham made everybody line up in an orderly fashion and told us we could only have one autograph each. Geoffrey Boycott trod on a friends shoe, putting a hole in them with his cricket spikes.

We took great pride in our autograph books. I remember early on in the season spending the evening at my best friends house. We had a tower of magazines and a copy of the ‘Playfair Cricket Annual’ (It was like a budget Wisden) and we’d make pages for each of the County teams using the player listings in the book.

In the background, Queen’s Greatest Hits echoed out of the cassette deck. It was the first time I came across tracks like ‘Killer Queen’ and ‘Bicycle Race’. I’ve never owned a Queen album, but I know that if I were to hear that album again, I’d remember myself aged 12, in Balfour Road, chopping up cricket magazines and getting unintentionally high on the smell of Bostik. Happy times.

At some point in the past few months, I came home to find E shaking at the bottom of the stairs, telling me there were loads of wasps upstairs. I went up to take a look and found probably a dozen of the buggers wriggling about. They were quite obviously not happy, and they were less happy after I sorted them out. But it confirmed what we thought, the plumber had been up in the loft to do something with the boiler, and they’d probably got out through the open hatch. At some point in the winter, we were going to have to find the nest and remove it.

Which we did yesterday. Naturally, it was precariously placed in the part of the loft with no boards, so getting over to it was a delicate balancing act. Wasps nests are apparently made of paper pulp, so although it was huge, it just started to collapse into dust whenever I tried to pick it up. So I got a bag, wrapped it around the nest and passed it down.

E took some photos before chucking it into the bin. We’re a little bit amazed by the patterns and the glory and the sheer size of the thing. And, truth be told, a little terrified. Now, all we have to do is make sure that there’s no chance a wasp can ever get back into our roofspace. Do you think I could just put up a sign saying ‘No wasps’?

Mercury Rev – Yerself Is Steam

This was another of those albums that I read because of a review in a magazine – this time around it was Album of the Month in an issue of Select, with a full page review by Graham Linehan (pre Father Ted).

It was like nothing I’d ever listened to before – it had 8 minute tracks with waves and waves of guitar and half murmured vocals yelping in the background. I was still working shifts, and I would listen to it on my headphones on my days off, volume as loud as it could go, punishing my ears but not wanting to miss any of the music.

Naturally, I loved the stories around the band. Lime Lizard had a full page review of a gig where they supported Bob Dylan, hardly a match made in heaven. Other interviews of the time made great play of the friction between the various members of the band, which eventually led to the departure of (then) lead vocalist Dave Baker. That was still all in the future.

In the autumn of 1991, they released a single, Carwash Hair. This was the comedown after the frenzy of the album, a 5 minute track gradually building in intensity with a fantastic hook, “Can I run my hands through your carwash hair?” The CD Single featured a 30 minute bonus track, which was allegedly made up of tapes from a session with one of the band and a psychiatrist.

Around this time, their record company obviously found themselves with an advertising budget. I used to walk past a garage on my way to the paper shop, which had a couple of those poster frames for adverts. One day, I was walking past, and there was a Mercury Rev poster. This thing was a huge yellow poster with a picture of a bee, and at the side, it had a picture of each of their two releases so far. This poster was so out of place – I can’t imagine that anybody else really noticed it, and I used to walk past it every day knowing that one day soon it would be gone.

I showed it to my sister. “Don’t you think that would look better on my wall?” I said to her. She agreed, and started to tug at the corners of the poster.

“What are you doing?” I said.

“Taking it down,” she said. “Help me.”

So I tried to help her, but it had been up for a couple of weeks, and the glue that had been used had been necessarily strong. Which is to say the poster didn’t want to come down, and in fact, rather than taking it down, we proceeded to rip it to bits.

I’ve felt bad about that ever since – as I said, I was probably the only person who’d noticed the poster, but my actions stopped anybody else from seeing it. If I felt the need to do this again, I’d make sure I had glue remover.

Mr M is currently eggshelling a skirting board and so has asked me to “quickly bang out 500 words on the Danielson Famile” for him.

<tumbleweed>

It was late 2003 (possibly) and our relationship was in its early few weeks: Mr M & I engaged in the rituals of early courtship, revelling in each other company, sharing, revealing, indulging. Guards were being dropped and inhibitions relaxed.

“I’d like to take you somewhere special”, Mr M confided (over text probably). Giddy with the prospect of another crazy (alphabet themed?) date, I met him on the South Bank. I was wearing a green skirt with a bustle and black boots, that much I do remember. Also, being questioned closely about my intentions towards Mr M by Mrs Danny Noir (honourable, at that point). Mr M put a vodka tonic in my hand and smiled fetchingly, ‘tonight is going to be very special’. Nervously I followed him into the auditorium…what was going to happen?

The flipping Danielson Famile, that’s what happened. 2 hours of a small man screeching and hiccupping tunelessly into a microphone while 3 terrifying looking women dressed as nurses accompanied him in ways that defy description There was a support act, precise details of which escape me other than some very big hair and (possibly) a fox.

Apparently he once played the Islington Chapel dressed as a Tree. Mr M seems to think this is a good thing.

But since this tenuous early date, I’ve come to regard The Danielson Famile with affection. Not for their music/art, but more for the place it occupies between myself & Mr M. I’ll never understand why he likes some of his bands, but I’ll always enjoy the wide and eclectic range of music he brings. The Danielson Family is a running gag between us, Mr M trying to re-engage me with their music at opportune and inopportune occasions, suggesting them as music for our wedding, trying to slip it onto the ‘labour playlist’ and fruitlessly searching for a Danielson Famile cot mobile. There was a Danielson Famile film, I refused to go to see it. He put it on his Christmas list, I refused to have it in the house & when he told me that really it was his house, I immediately married him, had his baby and remortgaged in our joint names: and then I repeated my ‘not in my house’ with a firm nod. I hold onto The Danielson Famile as continuous proof as to why Mr M should never be given any responsibility for choosing music for any event ever. Except perhaps as a soundtrack to an Am Dram production of ‘One Flew Over The Cuckoo Nest’.

So, this is my 500 words on The Danielson Famile, I probably won’t be invited to write another entry so I shall finish with an apology to Thing Danielson, his 3 terrifying backing singers/dancers/nurses and the support band with the big hair (and possible fox): I’m sorry – for you.DaniDanielson

The Housemartins – The People Who Grinned Themselves To Death

The understanding in the Sixth Form was that we would apply for Higher Education. University Prospectuses were suddenly everywhere, and our tutor group classes started to focus on how to complete UCCA and PCAS forms.

The Sixth Form was my first (and only) chance to exercise options. I went with (what I thought was) the practical option. Maths, Physics and Chemistry.

There were a few problems with this – Our Physics teacher was a no-nonsense dictator, the only teacher I’ve ever known who really did have the white lab coat with the row of pens in the top pocket. I didn’t get on with his lessons and responded by not paying enough attention. For two years.

Our chemistry teacher wanted to be one of the lads. He was renowned for propping up the bar of the pub opposite the school, and wanted to be everybody’s mate. Naturally, I told him I didn’t like him, and dropped Chemistry at the end of the first year.

I replaced it with Computer Science. I joined that course in the last term of the Lower Sixth and somehow managed to get up to speed quickly enough that I was allowed to stay on. Magically, it was the only one of my A Levels that I really passed. Possibly this was a pointer to me having made the wrong choices at the beginning.

I went to one University Open Day at UCL in Gower Street. I popped into the Uni for about half an hour, just enough that I could tell people I’d been, and I spent the rest of the day going round the comic shops.

So I was doing rubbish. I was starting to rebel. I remember one of my teachers asking me which universities I was going to apply to, and I said that I wasn’t going to because it was a waste of a tenner. I didn’t have a Plan B but I knew that I couldn’t spend another three years in education.

Just as I was starting the Upper Sixth, the Housemartins released their second, and some might say, final, album. With hindsight, I think they played an important part in shaping my musical tastes. I still listened to the Top 40 and watched TOTP. They were an indie band that crossed over, and helped me to make the leap in the opposite direction.

When I was meant to be knuckling down and making choices about my future, I was shutting the door to my bedroom and listening to cynical numbers such as ‘The People Who Grinned Themselves To Death’ and ‘Me and The Farmer’. It was a gentle introduction to the notion that music could be political.

Surely the highlight of the St Winifred’s School Choir’s glittering music career was singing backing vocals on ‘Bow Down’. This song wasn’t the reason why I didn’t apply to Uni, but it did help me to realise that I had a choice. At the time, I wasn’t hearing that from anybody else.

Lush – Scar

I’m not sure where my 4AD obsession crept in. It was probably linked to the Pixies. It was probably linked to Lush.

In 1989 they were an the archetypal 4AD band. They combined the wishy washy vocals of the Cocteaus with the crushing guitars of the Pixies. And they let v23 have creative reign over their album sleeves, resulting in all of their early work coming in bright abstract objects d’art. This is why I bought their first release, a mini–album called Scar. I saw it on the shelves, it looked awesome, I reckoned the 4AD logo was a quality guarantee. So I bought it, and I adored it.

Partly it would have been the music, partly it would have been because I fancied the singers, and naturally, the writers of Melody Maker would wax lyrical about them every time they deigned to burp on record.

I first saw them play live in Norwich in March 1990. They were good but had the misfortune to be followed by the Pale Saints, who blew them away. Years later, I saw them play at the Northampton Irish Centre where they were fantastic and completely blew away Gallon Drunk.

In August 1990, I sort of saw them supporting the Cure at the Crystal Palace Bowl.

It was the first big gig I ever went to. I worked with a colleague who was a huge fan of the Cure. She was going to go to the gig with her boyfriend, and asked me if I wanted to go. I didn’t know an awful lot about the Cure but it seemed like a good idea, so I asked her to get me a ticket. As the date drew closer, the rest of the bill was announced. All About Eve, James, and Lush.

This was exciting. I had records by all of these bands, but I was most excited about Lush. I had a Lush t-shirt from the earlier gig, and I made sure to wear it to the gig. We got to Crystal Palace in good time and parked up. The tickets said that the doors would open at 2:30, so we decided we had plenty of time for food, so we went to a dodgy café and had a fry-up, before making our way back to the park.

It was a baking hot day. We found some beer and a comfy spot on the slope so that we could enjoy the bands before the park filled up for The Cure.

And I waited for Lush to come on.

But James came on instead.

I assumed they’d just tweaked the running order.

James finished.

Forty minutes later, All About Eve came on.

I started to realise that we’d missed Lush because we were in the dodgy café.
The Cure were brilliant, but, in my head, I always remember this as the gig where I didn’t see Lush. As E pointed out earlier today, this may explain my pathological fear of being late to gigs.

Gene – Drawn To The Deep End

After years of fighting the inevitable, my job got outsourced by default. My company merged with another one that was 1 year into a 10 year outsourcing contract with IBM – it stood to reason that the merged IT functions would all be within IBM.

My manager told me that some of the chaps from the other company would be coming to work alongside us for a while, and that he wanted me to start training them up. I couldn’t really argue, so I didn’t, but at the same time I took a week off and booked a flight to New York.

I’d not been on holiday for years and had never been abroad alone before. But I knew that things were going to change and I would have to decide whether to stay in Northampton or move to Portsmouth with the job. I needed a break from work, and I’d always wanted to go to New York. I’d worry about work when I got back.

I’ve always been a bit of a fool for American culture so I did all of the obvious tourist things. I went to comic shops. I went to the Empire State Building. I took photos from the top of the World Trade Center, and I filled my suitcase up with American music and Star Wars action figures.

At the time, there was a huge Virgin Megastore in Times Square – it was noisier and busier than the corresponding stores in the UK, and was split across a couple of levels. And on one of their listening posts, they had the new Gene CD – Drawn To The Deep End.

Gene were getting a big promotional push from Polydor who expected great things of them. This second album had arty Rankin photography, a big production job from Chris Hughes and a tour that was to take in the Royal Albert Hall. Unfortunately this push didn’t see their singles reaching the Top 20. The record company lost confidence in the band, and, despite valiant efforts and a solid fanbase, their trajectory after this album was definitely downwards.

I’m still bemused by their lack of success. Yes, its always comforting when a band that you love remains a well kept secret, but this was the Britpop era where it seemed any bunch of chancers with guitars and bowl haircuts could reach the Top 10. This album was packed full of anthems that cried out to be sung by huge audiences – ‘Where Are They Now?’, ‘We Could Be Kings’. Although they would constitute a large chunk of the live set for the rest of their career, the songs remain underexposed and the band underappreciated.

Back to New York – I didn’t know anybody, and I couldn’t work out how to operate a payphone to speak to anybody back home. I was far too busy to actually be lonely, but, listening to Gene on that listening post did, for a few minutes, make me feel a little less remote.

The Breeders – Title Tk

By 2002 I was working shifts again, this time for a Computer Services Company. With 12 hour shifts, an 80 mile (each way) commute, and a job that I could have done with my eyes shut, I wasn’t getting a whole lot of job satisfaction. We had a 17 page ticklist to go through nightly. I’d clear off as many of the tasks as I could as quickly as possible. This gave me more time to read, or to listen to my headphones, or to surf the net.

Having not released an album since 1993, I was tremendously excited by the upcoming Breeders album. They were due to play their first UK gig in years at the ATP Festival in Camber Sands, and I saw somebody post on an online forum that they needed somebody to make up the numbers for a chalet.

So I said I’d go. Sspend three days in a chalet with people that I’d never met before. It seemed completely unlike anything I would do, which was the best reason to do it.

I met my new chalet mates at Rye and the four of us drove to Camber Sands in my 106. Over the next few days, we drank a prodigous amount of booze and saw a shedload of new bands. And I became solid friends with a chap called Nagl, a friendship that continues to this day (although it’s been far too long) And somehow, I ended up in the front row for the Breeders gig. (This is also completely out of character)

I don’t remember who the previous band were – I’d been watching them from a safe distance and when they finished, I decided to move forward a bit, and just as I did, a gap opened up on the front rail. So I took it. A pissed bloke told me that his mate was going to be annoyed that I’d taken her space but his friend said it was ok and so I stayed there and got chatting with the people around me, all of whom were just as excited about the return of The Breeders; even the photographers in the pit.

They came on and the crowd went wild. They opened with No Aloha and the gig was sublime. They played a mix of new stuff and old stuff and as much as the crowd were delighted to see Kim back and in such good form, it seemed reciprocated and she didn’t want to leave the stage. Instead of going offstage before the encore, she hung around, smoking a cigarette. We all knew they were going to play some more.

At the end of the set, she stayed onstage for some time, soaking up the adulation. Then she climbed down from the stage and started to mix with the crowd. She got a big hug from a girl just to my left, and then she got to me.

I reached out my hand and shook hers. “You rock”, I said