Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, Going Places
This is one of the records I bought last summer when Jack and I went on a bit of a cheap vinyl binge. We discovered (Ok, I’m fairly sure Jack knew it existed long before I did, and certainly patronised it before I did) a shop called Plastic Wax in Bristol that sells second-hand CDs, tapes, DVDs etc. But the joy of joys has to be found in the vinyl section, which ranges all the way from Jesus-Christ-you-know-about-labels-and-types-and-makes-and-everything section to the eight for a pound section. We chose the eight for a pound section and delighted ourselves with amusing album covers, silly names and sheer out-and-out wanky artwork. Many good things have been found this way. We ran into Chris Heppell was we went to the pub for a gloat over our greedily-collected crap, and he went straight over himself to find similar things. Then that night they both came over and we drank much wine and listened to as much as we could.

Therese had this album in the house when I was growing up. The second side opens with a song called Walk Don’t Run, which her school orchestra used to play. Chris (brother) and I played it on guitar and trumpet for our one-and-only-so-far gig at the Folk House in Bristol.

It’s quite a silly record already. Silly but very good. I grew up with two trumpeters/brass players (since they both play cornet too and I’m pretty damn sure Therese teaches tenor horn as well) so I can appreciate a good tone from all the players. It’s that very frantic and determinedly Technicolor Bacharach-style cha-cha-cha feel from the very beginning.

Everything is very neat in this world, phrases are tied together, instruments are tightly wired. Even the cheers and whoops have been organised. The first side’s over very quickly, what’s that all about?

Then Walk Don’t run. I have to fight the urge to want to play it again and again even before the second theme has appeared. I was going to start organising my Social Work folder into different sections of critical thinking; anti-oppressive practice etc, but as soon as I lowered the needle onto the second side I had to rush over and start typing about this song.

That’s the problem with no skips no shuffles, you have to ration the enjoyment, no more greedily playing a song over and over and over again as I am guilty of doing with a number of things. However it’s that methodology that’s led me here…I’ve never listened to about half of my music collection if I’m honest, and doesn’t the lack of repetition make glory more glorious?

I was talking about vinyl with Kez in the pub I work in last night. She’s a reggae fan and told me that she prefers vinyl, and will only buy vinyl, even if she likes the music and it’s available on CD. That kind of purism, though admirable and admittedly related to my current project, is a bit weird, no?

The last piece on the album is that Zorba’s dance thing, used so well in many a gangster movie and family wedding. The introduction is so bizarre, stripped away hihat and bass drum opening, so different from the rest of the album, if I had the technology I’d thinking long and hard about using it for something. There must be some way. What is it about the slow and inevitable speeding up of this piece that is comic? Why is that a comic musical technique? Growing frenzy…I remember swimming at Easton pool ages ago now…there was a mother and baby group in the little pool and each mother was dangling a child (each one resplendent in armbands) in the water, all going round and round in a circle while the pool assistant sang “The Wheels on the bus”. The penultimate verse to this undisputed classic is sung very slowly, with the final verse increasing in speed. The mother’s actions reacted to the speed of the song, and as each child was wobbled around in the water faster and faster, they all laughed and gurgled etc exactly as you’d expect them to. Is it something like that? A physical notion of going faster and faster as music does, and if so, why is it comic? A weird juxtaposition of suddenly speed when there was none before? Humour and music are funny things.

Air, Talkie Walkie
Listening on headphones is always interesting; you become much more aware of the stereo mixing. Why the guitar in the left and the handclaps in the right? Was music designed to be listened to in dialogue? I’ve heard really interesting effects done with this, Kirstie MacColl’s Brazilian album (which I was shamed and ridiculed into giving away by an ex boyfriend. I miss it) did something really amazing with a small repeated guitar riff in the left, then the right, then the left…getting closer and closer to the centre with each repetition. Here, the guitar and the handclaps in the first track of this album are unified by strings in the centre, which dodge and disappear, giving shadow and shade where there could have been none.

There is something of the easiness of Moon Safari here, less of the angst and pain, maybe the adolescent jaw at an angle of 10,000Hz Legend. Cheery blossom girl – love is easier to be blasé, cool and Gallic about than loneliness and genuine desperation. Not love even, a kind of lingering thought. Cherry blossom which blooms and is blown away by a robust and decaying Autumn. Try to be true.

Those tiny record bumps Bjork has used so well…a very computer noise. Singing in megabytes. At once chilled and twitchy. Fear in repetition. Full of sex, but with no tone involved. We should be grateful – this is modern.

The next song reminds me of Corn Rigs and Barley Rigs from The Wickerman (my favourite musical). Like Moon Safari, there’s something 70s and Sunday afternoon about this. Bach now wakes up and shakes a finger at electro music. Mathematics made audible, architecture being frozen music, it’s all here now. Robotically generated – if the Baroque artists could have done it they would. Wasn’t there a vogue for mechanical this and that during the baroque? A time of artifice and gold has a lot in common with the virtual world. If all those strings and pianos were served up in a concert hall, or on a CD with unnamed musicians, or without the little beats behind it, which add very very little to the mix, would all the groovy 20 and 30-somethings dig it in the same coffee-table laidback way they do? Those beats are short-hand for “This is cool – do not worry”.

I went to a blues gig last week for my friend Iffi’s birthday – although I don’t really dig the blues or similar at all, I rather like the way it follows the same structure in song after song after song and still manages to come out with discrete, separate units of (almost) individual song. However, the singer kept doing those annoying call and response type things: “Say yeah if you like the blooooooz!!” and the like. Irritated the fuck out of me after a while, watching everyone whoop and holler in that choreographed way, all wearing the same blue jeans and easy T-shirts, knowing that they belonged and the musical code being given allowed them entrance into the club of people who like the blues because it’s laid-back and cool and authentic and unpretentious and allows them to go “Woo-hoo!” and “Yeah!” and “Alright!” like seasoned hillbillies before smiling it all off as kitsch or whatever and donning suits or similar to go to similar jobs on similar days where all the music and the electric lights are a little bit…similar.

I’m not saying I’m above all that, I’m guilty of belonging to the eclectic club who identify each other by having wildly diverse record collections (and doing things as geeky and self-absorbed as this blog for instance), but I do like to think I’m aware of musical code within the culture. How much do those beats on that Air track denote knowingness and distrust of classical music? It would be so interesting to play some-one that track without the bleepy beats, and then play it with. But to that without one listening being influenced by the other, you’d need a time machine of some sort. As I realised during my ill and panicky days, once you know or see or hear something, there’s no un-knowing it, no un-seeing, no un-hearing. You’re marked.

A seashore closes the album and I’m done with French electro-pop for the time being. Some of theses albums I own, I truly haven’t sat down and listened to as one would watch a film, since I acquired them, if at all. I wonder how my writing and thoughts will change when I get to an album I know intimately, rather than assessing these albums as if I was at a party and they were offering me canapés. I have enjoyed listening to Air.

Air, 10,000Hz legend
That’s unusual;, that I can hear two albums by the same artist in the one day. Rain and a shower before getting ready for the big night out put me in a sitting still and listening mode. This is heavier, darker already. At the time I think this was said to be a more techno-type album, as opposed to the candyfloss and lounge fudge of Moon Safari.

The lyrics I’m hearing can’t be real…I want to bash my soul on your brain, put hands on both your heartbeats…I think I’m hearing it wrong, I hope I’m not. That bloody C64 robot voice got everywhere didn’t it? Radiohead, Air, 2 many DJs…I’m sure it was used in other places. It sounds hoarse and desperate here, although whether that’s the pleading text and angelic choir behind I don’t know. God, this is gorgeous. Rather wish the female robot voice hadn’t chided about giving up smoking at the end, made the whole lovely song into a cheap joke.

There’s something a bit glam rock about this, what is it, the harmonies? The sense that you’re in some kind of opera? Now a complaint about the politics of Radio One. This is a very different Air from that of Moon Safari. You become slightly more aware of their personalities in this (I say “they”, not even knowing the names of the two musicians), whether this has anything to do with the fact that Moon Safari was their first album (was it?) and we’ve gotten more used to the notion of Air-as-a-group, or if they seem to be singing more on this. Voices and singing denote personality in a way that instrumental music doesn’t. Is this part of the rise of popular culture and celebrity/? I’m pretty damn sure that in terms of distribution and audience, vocal music now wildly outnumbers that of instrumental, is that really the case or is it how I perceive it? And what about sampled voices? Is it still vocal music? Does presence of voice alone denote “vocal”? This is part of my idea for an eventual postgraduate study in music, about the relationship between “live” and “recorded” and the cultural currency and value awarded to both. Talking Heads interrogated the listener of Stop Making Sense (and also the reader, the record cover screams as much text as the average magazine) “Why a live album?” How can an album of plastic, shiny or otherwise, held in mortal hands or stacked in rows in shelves be “live” like a spider or a baby? Lots more to play with, but back to vocal music - am I using filters of the West in terms of amount recorded vs. amount given for free in fields, backyards, huts and riverbanks? A recording studio or a mother’s arms? What are the statistics here? At what point did the scales tip? I’ve heard that Mozart and Purcell in particular were the equivalents of Elton John or Neil Young in their time, did people listen to The Marriage of Figaro in the same way I can listen to My life in the bush of ghosts?

The album ends twitchy and foreboding. I need to eat soup.

Air, Moon Safari
Today is a cleaning up and partying day. I’m not entirely sure that Air are going to make the best cleanup soundtrack in the world, but if I’m following the rules I have to listen to them next, and while I am working on some new songs, I’ve listened to them so much as a thinking exercise or as a default from the alphabetical list that I’m a bit sick of them, even though they are clearly works of genius (wink wink).

It really is getting things done music though, albeit in a calm and measured manner – there’s an expectancy that of course you’ll do what you need to and all in good time.

This was kind of ubiquitous in 1999 or thereabouts, wasn’t it? I became aware of “Kelly Watch the Stars” on a Brits 97 compilation though, a boyfriend at the time said it was rubbish, boring, just went round and round and round without doing anything. It’s only in the last couple of years I’ve started to realise how much I like that kind of music, and while I’m not holding up Air to Steve Reich, Terry Riley or even the great and glorious Donna Summer, I can see a link here. That’s what happened to the avant-garde, it put on some glitter heels and had some fun and came back to us as disco and dance. I’m sure I’ll go more into that on another entry though; enough of Air is “traditional” soul song writing that it wouldn’t support too deep an explanation of that particular point of view here.

I know that Air is comprised of two French blokes, who are the singers in-between? What do Air do? Are they the orchestrators? Something happens halfway through the album to lead you into that lovely song Ce matin la, with its really filmic strings and that rather fussy trombone solo. I remember hearing this song somewhere when I was a student, what in it was to convince you that you were living in the 1990s? It seemed instead like something from Glen Campbell, or some theme from a terribly old soap that a grandmother would watch, something on at three in the afternoon featuring lots of blonde dependable women she still wished herself among the ranks of. Probably set in the rolling countryside, where sexual relationships amounted to an understanding look or nod as children ran in long grass. The wah-wah guitar does pull you out of all that rather…

The album’s over, all of a sudden. It lulls you into a calm, this sense of all-in-good-time and yes as the album finishes, I finish vacuuming, dusting, putting things in their proper place and am almost ready for another coffee. You are held in a security then woken up. Quite a cruel trick really.

I read recently an article about Mark Titchner, who did those great Orwellian posters I saw at the Arnolfini a while ago, and heard him refer to his earlier works as “ambient paintings”; in that, as he explained, you didn’t’ really notice the painting, it just lent something to the room. There’ll be more room to go into this when I reach the Brian Eno end of the CD collection currently controlling me. Perhaps that’s what happened with listening to Moon Safari, except Kelly Watch the Stars and Ce matin la have wormed they way into my head by dint of repetition and beauty and envelope me in their ambience. My room is clean now anyway.

Adam and the ants, Prince Charming
These guys are so damn weird. This is a fancy repackaged version I bought to accompany a fancy dress party for my 27th birthday. We all dressed up and looked fabulous – the visual “comedy” of this era can often override the music. Although the ants look bloody uncomfortable, like B&Q operatives who wandered into a fancy dress trunk by mistake – it’s obvious that “Adam”, as the front man is in his element. I suppose he is value for money – I only put the photos in for developing today, I have no idea if I lived up to it (clearly I was the queen of the birthday…)

The track listing on the CD is bracketed into what must have originally been side A and side B of the record (exactly five songs per side. Nicely symmetrical). There are bonus tracks of early demos and unreleased songs. This is the interesting point of bonus tracks, to see the workings out of what was finally given.

The lyrics are thoughtfully reproduced. They’re bloody odd, a lot of surrealism and campy references. Diana Dors, Picasso and the Planet of the Apes all jostle for attention. Although postmodernism is a very over-worked word, there has to be something of it here…what else was the weird appropriation of all the regency-style wear that typified the average New Romantic? Now a country idiom, now aboriginal pomp and splendour (seriously – what IS the structure to Prince Charming all about? It must have been a novelty hit even then, like O Superman, Ernie the fastest milk cart in the west and the Mike Flowers pops version of Wonderwall. Some novelty songs remain incredible).

I remember reading somewhere that 80s pop icons were far more interesting than the icons of the 60s…I’m sure I’ll go into this even more when encountered with Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell, Talking Heads and The Buggles. The 80s is such weird era – the cold war, hyper technology (microchips tasting both sweet and sour in the economy of the time) – people wanting to become robots or robotic in their working/living habits, bowing down in fear and worship of the machine, going against the visceral ugliness of the punk era, regaining elegance but keeping the democracy of it all going. Obviously there are crests to ride with every new generation of musicians and artists who appear; and having grown up in this era and not the 60s (the 90s were my era of being a teenager, which was again subject to fears, changes and notions political, economic, cultural and personal which will have filtered the way I see/saw music from the time, at the time and now), I’ll view them differently from some-one who saw the 60s when they were new and not old hat. None of that coffee-shops and “inner truth” crap they put about then – it’s all fairy-tale highwaymen in deadly earnest.

It’s all very multi-layered all this stuff, lots of different lines falling in and out of each other. Odd to hear in the Ant Rap that they might have coined the phrase “Naughty North and Sexy South” – that seems to be so much of a Heat magazine style utterance I can’t quite equate it with Prince Charming…that’s the difficulty with postmodernism, you can’t tell who appropriated what first.

God I really like the last song. Bit of a soundscape going on. Vocalised the ownership of sex. Nothing coy or lascivious. Height of the AIDS epidemic and all. Never tells you what sharing your body should be like though.