#8 Rough Trade Shops/Green Man Festival Psych Folk 10"

10" single featuring Doves, Pete Greenwood, Sam Amidon, and Sleepy Sun.

This 2010 Green Man festival tie-in (it came free with the Rough Trade Shops: Psych Folk 10 CD if you bought it at the festival) somehow made it home relatively unscathed after being bought in the inevitable pouring rain, and enduring a few days in a progressively muddy tent. As I write, this was the last festival I've been to after not managing to go to a single festival in the UK in over a decade where the heavens haven't opened. I somehow even managed to get utterly drenched at an indoor festival - while waiting for the doors to open at Supersonic a few years back, it pissed it down on the queue, with nobody wearing wet weather gear. Ramping up the price each year, way ahead of inflation in the style of the Royal Mail, railway & electricity companies has soured my relationship with British festivals in general too.

Onto the EP itself, the first thing you notice that the wacky tricksters have pressed one side at 33 and the other at 45. Cue mutterings of "oh, for fuck's sake" from 100% of people who spin this disc. On the 33 side, we have The Doves, who I've studiously avoided for their entire career purely on the basis of their name which sets new standards in blandness. Unfair, I know, but tough - they have plenty of fans already and don't need me. I noticed that they name checked Sebadoh at one point, but that wasn't enough to seek out a listen to their music. Now driven to listen to the Doves for the first time, I find they produce a sort of ambient background music, though this could be the result of the remixer (Chris Watson). Next time I make a film about people gazing across bleak marshlands at silhouettes of birds, I'll know who to call about making a soundtrack.

Pete Greenwood opens up the 45 side. I had to go back at listen to his song again, as I'd completely forgotten what the song sounded like by the time I came to write this, but was heartened to find it was a pleasant acoustic number that was actually quite catchy. Sam Amidon's track 'Way do, Lily' is next and I know it well as it's off his 'I See The Sign' LP, which was my favourite album of whatever year it came out in, so I actually would have preferred a rarer tune. Sleepy then comes along sounding like Hendrix's Star-Spangled Banner, goes all folky, and then cranks up the guitars again. It's really rather good. I shall seek more of them.

 

#7 Beach Boys - Pet Sounds LP

 

Oh boy, The Beach Boys Pet Sounds. Possibly the most discussed & loved album ever made. Just what I wanted to pull out at random and review...

 

I bought this for 50p at a charity shop a couple of years back. It's an original early pressing, but by the looks of things, it's been played an absurd number of times. Just check out how worn the label is near the central hole! The vinyl is worn and scratched, and I ended up playing just side one, as it sounded like the needle was being dragged along the pavement with the Beach Boys being faintly heard from a distant car radio.

 

This was owned by Sheila Holmes. Who she is, I don't know, but she must have absolutely loved this record, playing it hundreds of times. I've played a lot of records to death, but I've never worn through the label!

 

To tell you the truth, having it in my collection makes me a little sad. This record is the definition of 'much-loved' and it feels like it should be back with Sheila Holmes where she can take it out every once and a while and remember the days she lay by her dansette and listened to 'Pet Sounds' over and over again.

 

 

#6 Devo - Peek-a-Boo 12" single

 

Ah, Devo. They were my favourite band in my all-important 6th form years. My love for them really extended to their first two albums and their video compilations, bought at absurd cost in the days that VHS was still battling Betamax. Later albums were fun, but not world-changing.

 

I bought the 'Peek-A-Boo' 12" second-hand some time in the mid 80's for £2 and it used to get a lot of play for the b-side - 'Find Out'. The A-side 'Dance Velocity' & B-side 'Devo Dub' versions of 'Peek-A-Boo' added little to an already lightweight song. In fact in the' Devo Dub' version, it apparently just got rid of the vocal! This was back in the day when lazy record companys would apparently just pay a lacky to lean on a few buttons, extending a song by a few minutes and voila - a dance version for clubs.

 

Jerry Casale has described the album it comes from (Oh No, It's Devo!) as being what Devo imagined an album made by fascist clowns to sound like, and 'Peek-A-Boo' certainly fits the bill. Catchy & sinister in equal measures. I've never really enjoyed the song, and am always pretty eager for it to be over and for the next song to start, so the extended version just prolongs the agony. 'Find Out' makes up for it being an urgent tribal thumper with a darker feel, and much more lasting catchiness. It really should have been on the album, rather hidden on a b-side.

#5 Nirvana - In Bloom 12" Picture Disc

I'm doing a batch of 12" singles at the moment as I'd picked 16 records off the shelves at random and 3 turned out to be 12"ers and one was a 10". It seems quite a high proportion as I've never been overly keen on the 12" as a format. Sure, they sound a lot better than 7"ers, but they are often filled with remixed dross rather than the original song you wanted. Only rarely do they have an extra original song not found on the 7".

My Debut turntable also requires me to switch between 33/3 & 45 manually by switching the belt (essentially a rubber band) using a little tool they provided. To get at the belt, you've got to remove the 'platter', so the who production is sufficiently annoying to leave most 12" records unplayed for years. This wasn't the case with my old cheapo record player that was automatic, and I'd bought amost all these 12" records back then.

Anyway, that's enough whittering on about the annoyance of the 12" single and onto Nirvana. In Bloom is a weighty picture disc which was supposedly 'strictly limited'. Yeah, right. There's a bunch on eBay as I type, and not many bidders. The more I think about it, the more of a meaningless phrase 'strictly limited' becomes.

I bought 'In Bloom' at a short-lived record shop in Didcot, Oxfordshire. Suffice to say, I didn't pay much for it as local record shops were 'chart return shops' and record companies used to pile their new releases in them to be sold cheaply & therefore get them in the charts. Nevermind had already been out for over a year, and this release was just milking its success. Nirvana were still one of the very few bands that I liked that had got anywhere near the charts, though, so I snapped it up.

How often do I play it? Perhaps once before? What's the point - A-side just like the song on the album, so that's been heard enough times already. B-side - live versions of sliver (which I used to have on 7" before someone with light fingers filched it from my collection) and Polly. Live versions are almost wholly a waste of time unless they do something dramatic to the original song, and these two just rumble along, sticking closely to the original versions. They are pretty well recorded, but that's about it. So, a record that's more of an object than something to be played.

 

#1 Roger Miller - No Man is Hurting Me LP

So, the first LP picked at random from my collection. I say random, but my records are arranged by musical style, and this first record comes from the section where many of my favourite records lie, so I knew it was bound to be a decent start. Roger Miller plays guitar, sings, and writes songs for the unbelievably awesome Mission of Burma, but this LP was made near the start of their long hiatus, between 1984-86. As a fan of Burma, this album leapt at me when I spied it in a record shop just off Portobello Road. "US Mission of Burma Man £8" says the little sticker on the front, and I snapped it up, not even being aware of the albums existence before I happened upon it in this little shop. This was in a time before the internet, and discographies were the sort of thing you might happen upon in a fanzine if you were lucky. £8 was a little expensive for a second-hand record at the time, but still it was a no-brainer for me.

Anyway, this record is one that's very familier to me and gets played quite a lot. The new-wave look to the album cover is very of its time, but what's inside bears no relation to anything with a skinny tie & pleated chinos. Roger Miller seems to be bursting with ideas on this record, incorporating all manner of sounds and techniques to create an overall sound that really doesn't sound like anything else. His modified electric piano is at the core and blends dissonance and melody to great effect. You really get the impression that RM was having a great time making this record - the tinnitus which curtailed his playing with Burma was obviously no barrier to making music with oomph.

 

 

Reviews of 500 vinyl records selected relatively randomly from my record collection

I just moved all my records from one house to another. Not the most enjoyable tasks, as they weigh a lot and are easily damaged. It also meant taking down the IKEA Expedit shelves and putting them back together again (a factor in 6% of murders in Northern Europe). All in all, a ball-ache, but with a silver lining of actually getting to see some of my records for the first time in years.

The strange thing about having your records all stacked up nicely is that you hardly ever see the covers, just the spines. Those with a thin spine can go missing entirely. I realised that there were large numbers of records that I'd not played in years and got an overwhelmingly morbid thought that I'd probably never play a significant proportion of them again. It's far too easy just to play mp3's when using the computer or CDs when bobbing about the house.

Disturbed by my loved, but rarely used records languishing on the shelves, it struck me to make an effort to listen to a good proportion of them. In fact, not only that - to write out my thoughts on what they sound like, and what they meant to me when I bought them. Whether they ever got a fair hearing, or were they just a mistake, listened to the once and forever consigned to my shelves. Anyway, I randomly decided to try to check out 500 as that should keep me going for a couple of years and this blog will be the result.