2010 Review: A Year In Stuff I Liked

Album Of The Year
Enter The Magical Mystery Chambers - Wu Tang Vs The Beatles / Tom Caruana
Conceptually a weaker effort than Dangermouse's Beatles breakbeat benchmark 'Grey Album', but for my (admittedly Wu Tang fanatical) dollar this mash-up is a far more entertaining listen front-to-back. The tracks that work far outweigh those that don't, and a handful (the bludgeoning, 'I Am The Walrus' sampling "Run", a re-make of "C.R.E.A.M." almost as smooth as the original, & the centre-piece, show-stopping "Uzi (Pinky Ring)") have remained heavy rotation heavyweights on my ipod all year. Precisely the sort of post-modern irreverence that Lennon woulda loved.

Book Of The Year
Dino: Living High in the Dirty Business of Dreams - Nick Tosches
Everything you need to know about mid-20th Century US pop culture is here. A serious - but never remotely dry - book, packed with punchy, profane prose, placing the vacant, solitary anti-hero figure of Dean Martin at the centre of a wide ranging cultural discourse on pop music, film, showbiz, television, sex, money etc etc...and however black the oblivion of Dino's empty megastardom gets, you still wind up with the impression of Martin as the Rat Pack's true hipster - a dispassionate, untouchable, grade-A bad-ass - "the cool guy's cool guy".

Film Of The Year
Toy Story 3 - Dir. Lee Unkrich
In which everybody is forced to recognise the shocking frailty of thier own mortality via a fiery pit-hell incinerator scene where Woody, Buzz and the Toy Story Gang take one another's hands and accept their own imminent and certain doom with quiet, heart-breaking dignity. Peerless popular art, bursting with imagination, and with an emotional depth of resonance greater than any number of the "serious" middle-brow movies with which Pixar will compete - I suspect fruitlessly, mores the pity - for a Best Picture Oscar come February.

TV Show Of The Year
The Office (An American Workplace) / Curb Your Enthusiasm
I'm gonna have to chicken outta making a definitive call on this one. Overall, these are very different shows; the former has a warm, beating heart the size of a watermelon and gets slushier by the episode, happily embracing it's position as the closest any post-Friends sit-com has come to reconciling the briefly un-cool merits of A Bunch Of Likeable People Who Actually Like Each Other mainstream comedy with the edgier, taboo-trampling brinksmanship of Gervais / Merchant's British original, while the latter is characterised by a no-holes-barred barrage of mind-boggling "WTF" moments that re-invents the Seinfeld formula of jaw-dropping social awkwardness + astonishingly tight narrative structures + self-reflexivity + people who hate themselves and everyone the know, on an operatic scale, making Gervais / Merchant's efforts seem conservatively quaint by comparison. I admire and enjoy them both equally. A dead-heat, then - The Office, for the sheer number of hours of pleasure it has given me this year, and CYE, for those spectacular, fan-pleasing Seinfeld reunion episodes.

Songs Of The Year

.1. In Tha Park - Ghostface Killah Crunching, distorted, heavily fuzzed, block-party rockin', psyche-soul, old-skool flavoured hip-hop ticks every one of my boxes. With deliberate nods to P Diddy's "Bad Boy For Life" and MC Shan, In Tha Park stands proudly along side the strongest Wu releases from any era. This is how that BlakRoc LP shoulda sounded.

.2. Groove Is In The Heart - Crocodiles Pure, unadulterated nostalgic 90s kid indulgence - shoegazing indie-rock fetishists covering a 'contemporary' 1990 pop masterpiece. About as authentic an impresssion of an ealy 90s John Peel session by some B-list sub-Chapterhouse outfit as one could possibly imagine. Smart, funny, trippy, and undeniably groovy.

.3. Boyfriend - Best Coast I guess basically like a gazillion records sounded pretty much exactly like this in 2010, but for whatever reason Best Coast's particular take on the year's ubiquitous early 60s girl-group + slacker 90s indie formula lodged itself in my skull like no other.

Worst. Album. Ever. (And a few thoughts about the current state of youth radio)

I'd usually steer clear of attacking such obvious grist-to-the-liberal-blog-community mill - mocking Chris Moyles is like shooting angry, bullying, misogynistic fish in a barrel - but this particular dispatch from the front-line of stupidity is too awful to ignore. I mean: why?

Radio One is in a terrible state. The day-time schedule is a wasteland, a place where youth culture is institutionally treated with a lack of respect bordering on outright contempt. I have no complaint with the quality & variety of pop music pumped out by the station; I enjoy much of it and can easily ignore that which I don't. The problem is the presenters.

Chris Moyles and his gaggle of weaselly sycophants offer the laziest form of lowest common-denominator, dull shock-jockery. It's desperately sad, even insulting, that this is what the BBC think the young people of this country deserve. He isn't cool. He doesn't say anything about youth culture in the UK in 2009. He's just some boorish 36 year old bloke, chuntering away, knowing nothing about The Kids or what they want, or anything remotely zeitgeisty.

As spectacularly lame as Moyles is, he's got nothing on the presenter of the show which follows his. In Ferne Cotton we have the embodiment of everything that is wrong with mainstream pop music broadcasting today; she's been chosen as personality, clothes horse and serial dater of musicians, rather than being especially well-informed about, having a particular passion for or any sort of background in music broadcasting. Cotton is a generic 'Presenter', not a specialist music broadcaster. The BBC would not choose Ferne Cotton to present Formula One because she doesn't have an authoritative voice on the subject; it shows a lack of respect for pop music that they have not disqualified her from being a music presenter on the same basis. There appears to remain this idea across all networks with youth / music broadcasting that 'anyone can do it', and to some extent there's probably some truth to that - but it certainly isn't true to say that everyone can do it well. There must be hundreds of young people who have come through University radio etc who are (a) genuinely passionate about music in a way Cotton is not and (b) talented, intelligent, witty presenters. Give them a chance instead.

Maybe this is just a cranky rant by an out-of-touch 29 year old about a radio station whose output isn't aimed at him anyway...but I know tons of people in their late teens and early 20s -Radio One's key demographic - who feel exactly the same way I do, ie: insulted. Radio One reached a point in the Nineties when free-falling audience figures and general cultural irrelevance forced bosses to cull practically an entire generation of dinosaur DJs, and I'd suggest we've arrived at this point once more. I'm not saying we should hang all the DJs, but I can name a handful of 'em them who should be encouraged to hang up their headphones for good.

Forthcoming BlakRoc / Edan LPs

So this is really like a hastily scribbled Post-It note stuck to the fridge door reminding me to buy milk more than a post of any interest / use to my limited, but beloved, readership, so if you wanna skip this and wait for the next post about The Addams Family or The Harlem Globetotters, go right ahead, no hard feelings. A couple of cool looking LPs are being released before the end of the year and if I don't make a note of them somewhere permanent like I'll just forgeddabout 'em, so you'll just have to indulge / ignore me.

The first LP is by BlakRoc, a totally rad sounding collaborative project headed up by the marvellously incongruous pairing of Ohio scuzz-blues duo The Black Keys, & heavy duty hip-hop impresario Damon Dash, co-founder of Jay-Z's Roc-A-Fella empire. Basically the Black Keys are laying down the dirty fuzz RnB breaks, and a mind-bogglingly dope cast of rappers have lined up to spit knowledge all over them; Pharoahe Monch, Q-Tip, Mos Def, Ludacris, and most excitingly for a Wu nut like me, Rza, Raekwon, and - back from the grave! - ODB. I've always thought The Black Keys' sound had the necessary fat-bottomed funkiness, wide-open drum breaks & real deal geetar rawness to make perfect source material for great hip-hop (infact their very first LP had an almost hip-hop instrumental, '240 Years Before Your Time'), and I'm really looking forward to this LP (drops on 'Black Friday' 27/11). The link to the BlakRoc site is here, or you can just check out the video of RZA and the Black Keys in the studio to get a flavour of what it's all about. Can't wait.

The second LP is 'Echo Party', marking the return of DJ/MC/Producer/All Round Cool Kid Edan, aka Edan The Magnificant, the man responsible for what is possibly my very favourite LP of the past decade, 2005's 'Beauty & The Beat', an album that basically sounds like the Ultramagnetic MCs rapping over a badly warped copy of Nuggets, ie: very much my sort of thing. He hasn't put out an LP since, and I've sorta given up waiting, but in the meantime we now have this release, which is being described as a sorta psychedelicised old-skool rap mix tape, back-to-back late 70s hip-hop tracks with loadsa new stuff played by Edan himself thrown in for good measure... apparently including xylophones, moogs and kazoos...and early reports are all positive. Again, can't wait.

Them's The Breaks #2987 - Elvis Presley Edition!

So this looks like a pretty terrible record, right? Just another generic El Pres Is Dead cash-in LP from those erstwhile hawkers of A1 mondo trasho compilations over at Camden Records...awful sleeve design...rubbish photo...no hit songs yadda yadda yadda. However - and this would have been a pretty redundant post had there not been a 'however'...I mean even more redundant than it already is - I was actually really stoked to pick this up for a couple of quid the other weekend. Heresforwhy.

I've written about The Funk Of The Memphis Flash before a couple of times, most expansively here at Mof Gimmer's Electric Roulette. Elvis was essentially a synthesist; overt hoodlum sexuality aside, Presley's most significant contribution to pop music was his innate, entirely effortless ability to fuse various root forms of southern rock and roll; gospel, blues, country, soul etc. Elvis did it all, and continued to internalise and adapt contemporary styles as they developed during the course of his career, with 60s-70s funk/soul no exception. Crate diggers looking for breakbeats in unusual places have long known that there are a handful of super-funky Elvis tracks, nuggets of sampleable gold packed with clattering drums and fuzz bass lines, that would come as a surprise the casual Presley fan. David Holme's use of 'A Little Less Conversation' on the Oceans 11 soundtrack (and the subsequent JXL re-mix, exponentially lamer than the original Presley track) served to shine some light on this particularly dusty corner of the Elvis archives - a classic reminder that there's treasure everywhere.

And so it proves with the 'Please Don't Stop Loving' LP, which despite being generally as dismal as the sleeve suggests, manages to contain a couple of gen-u-inely brilliant RnB tracks (the up-tempo floorfilling smasher 'Rubberneckin' - also laterly subject to a diabolical dance re-mix, and the sizzling, southern-fried country soul of 'Clean Up Your Own Backyard'), and one kitschy movie theme song ('Change Of Habit'...from a movie about, yep, nuns) which begins with a phenomenal fuzz-bass & drums break, fat enough to be sampled by DJ Format. Enjoy!

Vic Mizzy: 1916 - 2009

Word to my man Vic Mizzy, who passed away at his home in Bel Air a few days ago, aged 93. Based in New York for most of his career, he wrote hit records for Doris Day & others during the 40s / 50s, before moving into TV & Movie scoring.

His most enduring piece of music, recorded over 40 years ago and revealed in the video clip below, has embedded itself more deeply and unmovably in the firmament of Western pop culture than the work of even our most revered songwriters. It is part of our DNA, it's opening riff illiciting an instinctive pavalov's dogs reaction amongst anybody who hears it, generating not just a vocal response, but two physical finger clicks. Try it today at work or college; go up to somebody and utter a"dur-dur-dur-duh". Nobody can resist the two-click answer. It's like casting a spell - mysterious and spooky, indeed.

Playlist: City Screen Basement, York, 17th October, 2009

The Muppet Show Theme
Public Enemy: Public Enemy #1
Les Baxter: Hogin' Machine
Wu Tang Clan: CREAM
NBC'S Saturday Night Live Cast Recording
Victor C Lewis: Bird Sounds In Close Up
Frank Sinatra: Moonlight In Vermont
Star Wars -The Empire Strikes Back: Main Title Theme
The Shangri-Las: Leader Of The Pack
Edan: Rock & Roll
Stereo Performance Evaluator Test Record
Theme From M*A*S*H* (Suicide Is Painless)
Big Daddy Kane: Ain't No Half Steppin'
Bob Doroughs: Three Is The Magic Number
Black Sabbath: The Wizard
Steve Martin: King Tut
Jimi Hendrix: Level
Gangstarr: Just To Get A Rep
El Michaels Affair: Shimmy Shimmy Ya

Adventures In Crate Digging - A Few Records I Picked Up This Weekend

Dennis Coffey - 'Gettin' It On' (45)
Typically freaked-out slice of heavily fuzzed, evil psyche-soul from the geetar supremo, as sampled on the very first track of...

Public Enemy - 'Yo! Bum Rush The Show' (LP)
Lo-fi, rough & raw, needles-in-the-red , drum-machine clattering 1987 hip-hop debut. Hits hard, relentlessly. By the time they came to record their next LP, PE's sound had become a bewilderingly complex collage of noise and layered samples, but the tough minimalism of their debut still impresses on its own uncompromising terms.

The Not Ready For Prime Time Players - NBC's Saturday Night Live (LP)
Sporadically great '76 compilation of sketches from SNL's debut season starring Dan Ackroyd, John Belushi, Chevy Chase, Jane Curtin and others. A fun document from the early days of US comedy's 70s - 80s golden age, characterised by the freewheeling, improvisational, irreverent, prepared-to-miss-as-often-as-you-hit attitude common to so much great live comedy. "Live from New York - It's Saturday Night!"

Frank Sinatra - Come Fly With Me (LP)
The Chairman of The Board's carefree, atomic-age, jet-set lifestyle concept LP. Peerless late 50s popular art. Almost ten years since I first bough this on CD, the impressionistic, pastel shaded Moonlight In Vermont ("telegraph cables, how they sing down the highway, as they travel each bend in the road") remains one of my very favourite pieces of music...

John F Kennedy - The Kennedy Wit (LP)
Probably not strictly accurate to describe this is being 'by' JFK, this is a collection of prize Kennedy-isms selected from 'speeches, press conferences and Off-The-Cuff Remarks', released the year after his assassination. An opportunistic cash-in, no doubt, but a fascinating and ultimately saddening artefact nevertheless.

Sgt Pepper's Lonely Star Wars Band

Pretty cool, huh?

Now! That's What I Call A Post About Pop Music

I basically believe that we close out the Noughties with chart Pop Music in an exceptionally healthy state, having emerged fully and finally from the spectacularly dire early to mid-Noughties Atomic Kitten / Westlife era. While my taste in old music has become ever wider and weirder and more esoteric as I've gotten older, my taste in contemporary music has solidified in recent years into an unashamed love of good mainstream pop music, and a general disinterest in, and suspicion of, middle-of-the-road 'alt' rock.

Maybe this is due to a greater sensitivity to (and distrust of) marketing & packaging, and a greater difficulty accepting the cynically disingenuous marketing of 'high art' rock product as 'authentic' or 'serious' or 'real' than the relatively accurate marketing of pop product as 'sexy' or 'fun' or 'new'. All (perhaps not all - certainly most) pop music is presented by its accompanying media in such a way that it appeals to a particular audience, playing on that audiences sense of identity, politics, sub-cultural allegiances etc. This is as true of The White Stripes as it is Cascada.

So I guess at some point you realise that the only real, worthwhile pleasure one can take from listening to a piece of pop music is via a willingness to go with an honest, gut-reaction to it, and that an honest reaction to a piece of music has nothing to do with style or politics (either personal or global) or what subculture you identify with, or who produced it, or what type of drums they used on it, but some impossible-to-fathom, incomprehensibly complex arrangement of experiences and your DNA that generates in your soul an undeniable sensation when presented with that sound. It's entirely arbitrary, and once you've accepted that it makes life much easier. "This person looks cool / sexy / exotic. Their song has a great melody / beat / sound. It makes me want to sing / dance / cry / fight." Is it really any more complicated than that? Madonna has spent huge swathes of her career trying to 'matter' in a variety of 'serious' arenas, but her instruction of 'And you can dance!' from the beginning of 'Into The Groove' is a more important statement than anything she's ever had to say about gender politics - it is a license to let go, permission to indulge unselfconsciously in the almighty power of pop music. Maybe even a timely reminder, a nudge to po-faced Mojo Magazine orthodoxy "...uh, you can dance, y'know. This is meant to be a party."

British pop music reached the millenium in a dire state, and wallowed in this depressed funk throughout the late 90s and early Noughties. Dudes on stools ruled, and it wasn't cool. Westlife remain the single most hateful pop group of my lifetime. Indeed, one cannot describe Westlife accurately as a pop band at all, lacking as they do any of the basic qualities common to that formula, ie: exciting songs, charisma, style, a sense of humour, relevance, ideas, etc etc. They just sucked, and continue to suck. They are anti-pop.

Elsewhere we suffered through endless hi-NRG Abba covers and tinny re-hashes of the Max Martin /Jive Records sound, so effective on Britney ('Oops I Did It Again', 'Crazy') The Backstreet Boys ('Backstreet's Back') & NSyncs ('Pop!') best records, but copied so weakly by British producers, and fronted by entirely talentless, pre-programmed popbots (Billie Piper's 'Day & Night' was one notable exception to this rule, being a pretty convincing British Britney rip-off.) Many of these boy/girl groups mighta had one or two acceptable records (S Club 7 had a couple of fine Motown pastiches, and 'Don't Stop Moving' is a pretty good disco track. All Saint's 'Never Ever' was a very effective 90s redux of that old girl-group sound. Rachel Stevens put out a couple of good Goldfrapp rip-offs), but overall they churned out vast amounts of garbage. The Spice Girls & Take That were genuinely powerful pop acts, vastly exceeding the limits of their formula through force of personality and the occasional great single, but the dozens of dozy Spice-Lites & Fake Thats that appeared in their wake were largely brainless, cynical business exercises exhibiting no love of pop music whatsoever. The top pre & post millennial US acts were hugely creative RnB / Hip-Hop performers like Missy Elliott, Eminem & Destiny's Child, undeniable talents, artists producing wildly original and exciting work. We had Steps & Atomic Kitten, non-singers dancing badly to cheap sounding music.

At some point in the last two - three years British pop has shook itself off and re-energised itself as a world-leading market force, back where it should be. The emergence of MOR Alt Rock - Foo Fighters, Green Day, the diabolical Red Hot Chilli Peppers - as the preeminent mega-selling unit shifting genre of choice gave pop a kick up the arse....it allowed room for pop to be the alternative choice, to be the place where the real creativity and excitement was happening. Enter Dizzee Rascal, Amy Winehouse, The Streets, Klaxons, artists making monumentally catchy, smart, NOW music. Acts ticking lots of boxes instead of one, or none, and existing on the fringes of the mainstream seemingly for a matter of minutes before being absorbed into the charts and the tabloids. After a shaky couple of years dominated by the horribly un-cool Pussycat Dolls, the US has produced Lady GaGa, whose shtick is more provocative off-Broadway drag-act than teen pop puppet. She's like a twisted, bizzzaro-world cartoon caricature version of the Blonde American Pop Princess, like if Britney Spears had missed out all the early cheerleader stuff and cut straight to the drugs and sex breakdown bit. GaGa is the perfect End Of The Noughties act, equally at home on the main stage of Glastonbury as she is performing at some LA hipster industry hang-out, a calculating, fame-obsessed suicide blonde train-wreck, lassooed to a thumping, buzzing electro-pop beat, whose career thus far is framed more like one of those semi-scripted Mtv reality TV shows than something approaching actual reality.

I'm not here to defend mainstream pop music, because it doesn't need defening, and anybody prepared to ignore or dismiss it on principle is a moron. There have been many, many great pop singles released in the past year, and it's simply worth noting that we appear to be in the middle of a genuine golden age for exciting, intelligent, fun mainstream music. These things go in cycles, and it won't last. A new Westlife / Atomic Kitten era will inevitably befall us within a couple of years. Maybe even a couple of months. So enjoy this pop era while you can...and remember: you can dance.

LL Cool J Performing 'Mama Said Knock You Out'. On Mtv Unplugged. In 1991. And it's really good.

So back in 1991 they did this MTV Unplugged Hip-Hop Special, featuring De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest and LL Cool J. I guess any hip-hop fan has a sorta wierd relationship with the Rapper + Live 'Rock' Band set-up. It smacks a little of making a concession to rock orthodoxy, like there's tacit admission that until a rapper ditches the DJ and gets a real band he still has something to prove to Mojo Magazine or whatever. I'm not a purist by any stretch, but I don't like seeing daft rock prejudices pandered to, plus live band-based hip-hop usually translates as terrible jazz-funk anyway.

This video, however, is undeniable. Forget the absence of two turnatbles. This is just a stone cold killer live performance. LL tears the roof off the suckah. And check out his insanely lame looking band...who absolutely nail the heavy Marley Marl funk of the original. With acoustic guitars. And not enough clothes. And stupid hair. And a guy at the piano who looks like a biophysics student. Apparently these guys were called Pop's Cool Love, and according to their Last FM bio had 'most in common with the short-lived 'funk metal' scene'. Of course they did. Anyway, whatever, they play the hell outta this so good luck to 'em. It's all so brilliant, and brilliantly unlikely. You can find videos of the other groups performances elsewhere on youtube, but none come close to matching this fearsome rap-rock throw-down.

Club Preview: Fuzz @ Dusk 07/08/09

So how's this for some shameless self-promotion, huh? Yessir. I'll be DJ-ing at a bar in York this Friday, from around 9 'til 2am, and I'm gonna be joined on the Wheels Of Moulded Plastic by Jack Jewers, bass-player with exceptionally hip local garage-rock combo The Federals. I'll be spinning tons of old breakbeat-heavy psyche rock, funk & old-skool hip-hop. Jewers will almost certainly be playing tons of Dee-troit garage rock and dirty ol' RnB. It'll be a double-live gonzo, intensity-in-ten-cities, live at Budakon type of affair. Please join us to drink, dance, and make requests that Recent Studies have shown to have at best a 23% chance of being granted.

Re-issue this! Frank Sinatra: Watertown (1970)

One time when I was working at HMV Oxford Circus some dude from Ace Records came in and pop-quizzed the staff about what out-of-print albums we would like to see re-issued. For what it's worth, I said 'Two Headed Freap', an OK-ish 70s jazz-funk album by Ronnie Foster I musta dug at the time but now seems like an utterly senseless choice. If that dude from Ace Records pop-quizzed me now, there's only one album I could possibly choose: Frank Sinatra's 'Watertown'.

I've been re-visiting 'Watertown' recently. About a year ago I wrote a a very long piece about this album for Mof Gimmer's Electric Roulette, a site which at it's best has more interesting and original things to say about pop music than most. For those who haven't got half an hour to read that article, 'Watertown' was a 1970 soft-rock / easy listening concept album, produced in the contemporary Carpenters / Glen Campbell style. The story, performed with almost method-actorly empathy by Frank Sinatra, traces the heartbreaking story of a small-town father struggling to cope with the breakdown of his marriage. 'Watertown' is not just my favourite Sinatra LP - and that's a tough call, dude-, but one of my Top Ten All Time LPs, period.

Lyrically, 'Watertown' is delightfully detailed, painting a rich portrait of life in the town and the man's life there, out-stripping almost any 'rock musical'-type concept LP of the era in terms of narrative structure and sheer quality of writing. Musically, it is as 'rock' as Sinatra ever got, with a palette of sounds including fuzz bass, RnB-lite drums, flute, electric guitar, vibraphone, scene-setting sound effects and ghostly children's choirs. The late 60s / early 70s pop music scene is littered with attempts by record companies to psychedelicise an established artist's sound in order to cash-in on the hippie dollar, sometimes with valuable musical returns, more often without - but this is not 'Electric Frank'. 'Watertown' is a serious, considered, heartfelt work, by an artist fully enagaged with the project.

I'm given to whims and obsessions, and those cultural artefacts which become totemic for me have done something special to stick around. 'Watertown' hasn't unlodged itself from my mental firmament since it crash landed there a year ago, and I don't expect it to shift any time soon. I credit the album with curing me of vertigo, which I was inexplicably struck down with last September. This post is simply another excuse to heartily recommend an album which doesn't get 10% of the recognition it should. 'Watertown' sold poorly at the time (despite Sinatra himself being very proud of the album), and remains a real cult concern. Logic dictates that one day somebody is gonna do a huge 'Watertown: Special Edition' double-disc re-issue, a la Dennis Wilson's 'Pacific Ocean Blue', and despite myself I'm probably gonna feel a little conflicted about it reaching a wider audience. At the moment I sorta feel like it's mine, and that's cool, but ultimately I guess I would really like to see it get the props it deserves. Once you visit 'Watertown', you never really leave. If you get a chance to hear this remarkable album, I guarantee you'll never want to.

The Empire Strikes Back: The Adventures Of Luke Skywalker (LP)

It's become such a cliche to say that 'Empire' is your favourite Star Wars movie that you almost feel obliged to express a preference for 'The Phantom Menace' just to break with orthodoxy...but goddammit, even I'm not that perverse. In all honesty it's a close call for me between 'Empire' and 'A New Hope', but that moment when the AT-ATs first lumber into view over the horizen of Hoth (seen initially through the grainy, shaky viewfinder of the rebel recon guy's electro-binoculars, just one robo-elephantine foot filling the whole screen, until the image zooms-out to take in the terrifying size of the thing...only to reveal there's actually three of the bastards!) and the subsequent arctic wasteland battle just about tips it in Empire's favour. And that's before we get to Boba Fett.

Anyways, I picked this LP up from a record stall on York market this weekend. I just liked the cover art, am a sucker for pretty much anything Star Wars related, and thought it'd be sweet to spin when I DJ. It's actually better than I hoped, 'cos in addition to John William's score it features full narration by some cat called Malachi Throne (including the introductory crawl - "It was a dark time for the rebellion...") and lots of dialogue from the movie. All-in-all, perfect DJ-nerd type stuff, I picked it up for a fiver and you can probably do the same if you hunt around. May the crate-digging force be with you.

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In Other Star Wars Record Collecting News, I've finally (after years of searching) landed myself a copy of 'Battle Of The Planets' by Fader Gladiator, which many folks will recognise as 'That Cool Hip-Hoppy Star Wars Instrumental From 'Spaced''. I found this video featuring the track on something called 'Youtube'.

The Plastiscines

Coming hot on the heels of Vivian Girls and Poppy & The Jezabels, The Plastiscines are the latest group to be inducted into my arbitrary and pointless cycle of Quite Liking And Supporting In Theory, But Not Investing Financially In, A Bunch Of Girls Who Make Potentially Very Commercial, But In All Likelihood Doomed To Second Division Status, Indie Pop Music. They're four boho-ish young women from France, and were part of that whole Parisian Libertines-scene from a couple of years back. Their first album was a raggle-taggle collection retro-ish guitar pop in the post-Libs syle, and had some nice moments. Their new song, Barcelona, is like three parts Girls Aloud to one part Go-Gos to two parts Blondie, and actually as good as that sounds. Apparently this is the lead single from a new LP which has been recorded in LA by some dude who has worked with Katy Perry, Pink & Avril Lavinge, which explains why it sounds so magnificantly POP. So thankyou for your all your embarrassingly desperate efforts Mr & Mrs Ting-Tings, but your time is up. The Plasticines will take it from here.

The Plastiscines myspace

Ennio Morricone -'The Ecstacy Of Gold'

I watched 'The Good, The Bad & The Ugly' a couple of weeks back. I've sorta half-watched it before a buncha times, but it's a long-ass movie and I've got a short attention span. This time I watched it for real, beginning-to-end, maximum attention, totally focused. I'm a sucker for quick-fix pop trash of all kinds, probably to an indulgent, unhealthy degree, I mean I can still shed a tear when I hear 'Rush Hour' by Jane Weidlin, so it's nice to be reminded now and again that I still have the ability to be emotionally and intellectually shaken by something which is just classically great...ART, something that demands of you some genuine investment of time and mental concentration, and was itself built as a labour of love and grand design. The pay-off for sticking with a movie of 'TGTB&TG's calibre is huge. The emotional weight just builds and builds. I just got a ton out of it.

It goes without saying that Ennio Morricone's score is worth the price of admission alone. I often spin the title theme when DJing. But maybe even greater than the title theme is 'Ecstasy of Gold', from the movie's climax. It's a total knock-out. In the course of Googling 'Ecstasy of Gold' I discovered that Metallica have covered it. I checked out their version on youtube, and good luck to them, but it really sucks. Jay-Z's 'The Blueprint 2' samples it pretty effectively I guess...but nothing can compare to the sweeping majesty of the original. Enjoy.

Allen Klein 1931-2009

"Though I walk in the shadow of the valley of evil, I have no fear, because I am the biggest bastard in the valley"

- Klein's personal adaption of the23rd Psalm

The Beatles story is populated by divisive figures, guest stars and bit-players whose role in the narrative splits the opinion of dedicated Fabs fanatics; Yoko, the Maharishi, even George Martin. But few characters were as divisive a force amongst the Beatles themselves as manager Allen Klein, who passed away aged 77 at the weekend.

By the time Klein officially entered the scene in '69 (having met Lennon informally two years earlier during the filming of the Stones' Rock & Roll Circus), the Beatles were already in meltdown. Having been essentially manger-less since Brian Epstein's passing in '67, the street-tough New Yorker, (and ex-Stones manager), was summoned to the struggling Apple Corps by Lennon as a possible replacement. Harrison & Starr supported the motion, but McCartney favoured showbiz attorney Lee Eastman - father of McCartney's wife, Linda. While Klein's ball-busting, cold-blooded methods in all likelihood saved Apple from bankruptcy, McCartney refused to sign with him, taking on Eastman as his personal manager in 1970. This split became the kernel around which the shocking bitterness and animosity of the Beatles post-breakup period formed.

No doubt about it, Klein revelled in his bad-ass status. He's up there with with Albert Grossman & Peter Grant in the premier division of heavy-duty rock managers. By all accounts he did a lot of good for The Beatles, and handled their business better, in many respects, than Epstein ever did. You can see why Lennon dug him - above all things, Lennon admired honesty, balls-out straight-forwardness, and Klein was about as straight a sharp-shooter as they came. Equally you can see why McCartney was wary; contemporary reports from New York regarding Klein's brutally 'unconventional' business methods would certainly have been enough to concern the most naturally cautious Beatle.

Like all Beatles cameo-players, Klein's legacy and reputation will be debated and re-evaluated by Fabs scholars for years to come. History may yet look kindly on the 'biggest bastard in the valley'.

Michael Jackson 1958-2009

It's like a planet dying. Michael Jackson, Indiana-born recording artist and entertainer, was undeniable. What you think of him is as irrelevant as what you think of the wind. Michael Jackson happened, and his influence on Western pop culture was a great as it is possible for any individuals to be. When he sailed a 32 foot statue of himself down the Thames many mocked the rampant egotism of the gesture. The reality is that if he had erected an edifice which truly reflected the scale of his achievements, he would have had to build a statue at least twice as tall.

I cannot claim, as so many millions can, that Jackson made a major impact on my conscious in my youth. I was aware of him, of course, because it was impossible to not be. I had 'Bad' on cassette, but it didn't get played nearly as much as the first Kylie album or my 'Collection Of Beatles Oldies' tape. I never practised moonwalking or sang Beat It into a hair brush. It seems to me, like so many things, that if you didn't get into MJ when you were a kid, you probably never really got into him. That sense of wonder, of magic...it puts a kink in your mindspace that never gets ironed out. If he got you, he got you early, and never let go.

So I can't honestly say that I've ever been a Jackson 'fan', much less a fanatic. There are elements of his career that I actively have a problem with, and his music - unlike the music of Elvis or John Lennon, whose careers are equally pot-holed with highly questionable behaviour - never held enough sway with me to temper those reservations. I am, in all instances, naturally allergic to reverence in pop culture, the deification of artists, and few artists have inspired more unquestioning, blind obsessives than Jackson, while even fewer did more to actively encourage this particular type of fanaticism, through iconography, symbols and signs, than Jackson. I find this difficult to excuse.

It is pointless, however, to judge Michael solely by the excesses of his adulthood. History shows that international fortune and fame on the scale experienced by Jackson is something which simply cannot be coped with entirely successfully by a child. Judy couldn't handle it, Michael couldn't handle it, and Britney is currently not handling it. The process damages people, and it is fair to say that it clearly damaged Michael, for various specific reasons I'm not going to rake over, more than most. One can only understand the excesses of his adulthood with reference to the excesses of his childhood. It doesn't make Earth Song acceptable, but it does mean many of his adult accesses were just sorta sad, pitiable, the product of a warped sense of reality and a shocking lack of self-awareness, rather than deliberate, manipulative megalomania. Look at what he did to his body, his skin, his face. These are not the actions of a well-balanced individual.

Michael Jackson was a fragile, unhappy man. He wasn't a criminal - no court ever convicted him-, and he wasn't a saint. He made some wonderful pop music. He made some awful pop music. He was a hell of a dancer, maybe the greatest ever within the pop arena. He was black, he was white. He made the biggest selling album of all time. He revolutionised music video, but made terrible movies. He was a beautiful young man, but paid surgeons to cut and slice away at his body until it became unrecognisably ugly. His band's first hit replaced the Beatles at Number One in America, and eventually he became so rich and powerful he was able to buy the Beatles. He was 50 when he died, but ageless by any regular standard. He altered the fabric of pop music at an elemental level. Where he went, millions followed. Michael Jackson was undeniable.

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Thanks to my fiance Rebecca and her sister Claire's childhood obsession with MJ, my indie-snob issues with Jackson have thawed in recent years, and I'm happy that when he passed away on Thursday, I had already made my peace with his place in pop history. I've always loved the Jackson 5's 'ABC', and a chance encounter with it on the radio last year ("Man. Does pop music get any better than this? Those voices. That fuzz-bass. That drum-break. This is awesome.") prompted me to start digging around his J5 material, and early solo work. I found lots to enjoy; Philly soul, pop-psyche soul, like a junior Al Green, or a mini-Temptations. They even cut some great straight soul stuff before joining Motown. For what it's worth, here are my...

Top 5 Old School MJ Fave Raves

.1. ABC (The Jackson 5, 'ABC' LP, 1970)
.2. Ain't No Sunshine (Michael Jackson, 'Got To Be There' LP, 1972)
.3. Big Boy (The Jackson 5, pre-Motown debut single, 1968)
.4. I'll Bet You (The Jackson 5, 'ABC' LP, 1970)
.5. Euphoria (Michael Jackson, 'Music And Me', 1973)

So here's the pre-Motown Jackson 5, with 'Big Boy', from 1968

Hard Rock Life: Jay-Z's 'Death Of Autotune'

Taking its place alongside 'The Takeover' and '99 Problems' in an unholy trinity of fist-pumping, steady-thumping, megaton-heavy rap-rock monsters, here's Jay-Z's forthcoming single, the utterly bezerkoid 'Death Of Autotune'. Apparently people are going pretty nuts for this record. I can sure see why. It sorta reminds me of that huge skull-crushing cyber-tank thing from the start of Terminator 2.

Them's The Breaks #189: Les Baxter - Hogin' Machine (1969)

Dig that break at 0.41. Makes me wanna rumble. This whole soundtrack is absolutely killer, coming fully loaded with bags of everything you want out of a 60s hammond/fuzz/breakbeat biker movie soundtrack LP. Which is basically loads of hammond, fuzz guitar and breakbeats. Check Jeff Simmon's 'Naked Angels' LP for similar fuzzy biker-flick kicks.

Kate Bush Is Stupidly Cool: A Stupid Tribute To The Coolness Of Kate Bush

There really ain't a whole lot of substance to this post, and the main thrust of my rather unnecessary, slender and broadly unchallenged argument has been made by many people, many times before. Still, it bares repeating - Kate Bush is stupidly cool. This post exists because I was reading an old copy of MOJO at around 2am this morning, stumbled across an interview conducted with Ms Bush from around the release of 'Ariel', and thought, like I have done every time I've read that interview - "yep. She really is stupidly cool."

One sunny morning whilst living in London's Trendy Crouch End I bought three very dog-eared records from a charity shop on the Broadway for 50p each. These records were 'Dark Side Of The Moon' by Pink Floyd, 'Parallel Lines' by Blondie, and 'Hounds Of Love' by Kate Bush. That musta been, like, 8 years ago, and I still consider it my favourite ever charity shopping experience. I've found weirder stuff in charity shops since, more nerd-friendly Record Collector-y stuff, but look at those three albums. A triumvirate of untouchable pop brilliance. They were right next to each other in the crate. It was like God had cleared out his loft and donated his record collection to the Crouch End Broadway branch of the British Heart Foundation.

I was 21 years old when I bought 'em, and people will baulk, but I'd never heard 'Dark Side Of The Moon' until I dropped the needle on it that morning. I'd heard Pink Floyd...lots of Pink Floyd, infact, including 'Echoes' and 'Relics', and treasured my VHS copy of the hilariously overblown 'Live At Pompeii', but for whatever reason had never come into direct contact with 'DSOTM'. It pretty much wigged my mind for the next couple of months. 'Parallel Lines' is practically a perfect package, as neat, vibrant and bright a summation of American pop music from the early 60s to the late 70s as one could hope for. And Bush's 'Hounds Of Love'...is simply as good as any record released during my lifetime. It's pop, but it isn't. It's oddball, I guess, but never alienatingly so. It exists in it's own parallel dimension. Some artists make music so individualistic, so beyond any reference points other than their own, that they become a genre unto themselves. Kate Bush is like that. There's music, and then there's Kate Bush music.

Kate Bush is stupidly cool.