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.

Chillin' With Charles Addams

I've been an Addams Family fan ever since I was a kid. It's a franchise which, over 50 years, has rarely put a foot wrong; wonderful original cartoons by the mighty (and mighty spooky) Charles Addams, a brilliant TV show with a Top 5 All Time theme song, an ok-ish Hannah-Barbera adaptation, a couple of genuinely great family movies, some well-loved video games, and The Best Selling Pinball Machine Of All Time. They used to show the live action TV series 'round 6-ish during the week when I was in my teens, in that time slot which was home during the nineties to so many great cult US imports on BBC2 (Def2) & Channel 4; Mission:Impossible, Star Trek, Buck Rogers, Fresh Prince Of Bel Air, Eerie Indiana, the Waynes World sketches from SNL, Daria, Blossom, Boy Meets World, Ren & Stimpy, cartoon showcase Liquid Television etc etc. During the Summer Holidays in my late teens they'd sometimes show it mid-morning-ish on BBC2, 'round the same time they'd show re-runs of The Fugitive. I'm quite sure much of this stuff was regarded solely as cheap filler by the British networks running them, but the chance to watch classic US television shows or weird new cartoons (from that nineties Golden Age first-wave of postmodern cartoonery - you remember how good The Animaniacs was? Or The Tick?) was one I treasured greatly as a kid.

And I always thought The Addams Family were particularly cool. I've been reading alot about Charles Addams recently. Mostly his work appeared in the New Yorker (the first in 1932), occasionally in TV Guide and a couple of other publications. The creator of the the all-together ooky family was quite a character himself, living a life fogged with bizarre myth and legend. Certainly the 'wyrd', macabre Addams persona was partly an affection, but even so there enough freaky facts to satisfy a dirt-digger like myself. Addams had a tombstone for a coffee table and collected crossbows. He was known to dress for dinner in a knight's suit of armour. His last house was nicknamed The Swamp, and he used to shoot at rats from his bedroom window. He dated Greta Garbo, Joan Fontaine and Jackie Kennedy. (How crazy is that?) He got married to his third wife in a pet cemetery and wore sunglasses throughout the service. Brilliantly, he was known to his friends as 'Chill'.

The image at the top of the post is of an album packaged in Addam's artwork, a supernaturally-themed folk LP from 1957, by Dean Gitter. I have no idea whether the album is any great shakes, but a Charles Addams sleeve makes it a must-have piece of Americana. The haunted house depicted is a typical Addams image. It seems that as a kid growing up in New Jersey, Charles had a bit of a thing for sneaking into old abandoned houses, and was infact once arrested, aged 9, for doing so. The creepy, broke-down, boarded-up suburban spook-house remains a resonant image in US pop culture, from Psycho to (one of my faves) The 'Burbs...the idea that some awful darkness might be lurking behind the white picket fences and sunny Sunday bake sales of Elm Street resonates within our society still. Addams tapped into this troubled fascination, and 80 years after his first New Yorker illustration, the durability of his work suggests we remain suckers for the creepy and kooky side of the American dream.

"We're off to see The RZA..."

So I just booked my tickets to see RZA...at The Duchess in York. That's right. RZA. From the Wu Tang. Playing at The Duchess. In York. I guess you could say I'm pretty psyched. To put this in context, The RZA isn't a regular Duchess booking. A regular Duchess booking would be, say, 'The ELO Experience: A Tribute To ELO' or 'Henry Priestman (Ex-Christians)'. It's that kinda place. RZA playing The Duchess is just nuts. This is a musician, a rapper, a producer, an author, a soundtrack composer, a...thinker... whose weight of influence on hip-hop culture - and by extension all pop culture - is second to none. The Wu Tang introduced a whole new vocabulary to rap music; Eastern philosophies, chess, Kung Fu movies and martial arts...they just came to the game with tons of new, interesting ideas, and The Kids & The Critics both loved 'em for it. This man produced every significant Wu Tang release, from the Clan's mind-wigging debut to solo joints like GZA's untouchable 'Liquid Swords'. He produced the soundtracks for Tarantino's Kill Bill double-feature, and Ghostdog: Way Of The Samurai, maybe my favourite movie of the Noughties, and a film totally indebted in style, tone and subject matter to the world created by RZA and the Wu Tang. He starred in Coffee & Cigarettes alongside Bill Murray. He's still putting out dope material - the recent (and strangely under-promoted) Chamber Music LP (most of which is performed live by New York soul group The Revelations) features some of this years very finest old-skool flavoured hip-hop. Few individuals have contributed more to my musical and cultural education than RZA, and I can't wait to be in the same room with him. Wu Tang Forever.

RZA's 'Tao Of Wu Tang' tour lands at the York Duchess on the 5th of October.

Jeff Simmons: Naked Angels OST

So I picked this LP up a couple of weeks ago from Borderline in Brighton. It's the score to some old Roger Corman biker flick from 1969. Jeff Simmons played bass with Zappa's Mothers Of Invention at some point. Whatever. The album, it probably won't surprise you to learn, largely consists of heavily fuzzed funk-rock, in the contemporary style. Sorta sits somewhere between Dennis Coffey and Dave Allen & The Arrows. It's pretty good. Actually its really good in places. It just isn't gonna change your life. I'm a sucker for this sorta thing and happy to get suckered outta some bucks for it, but I guess you might not be. 'Naked Angels Theme' is the standout track, a full-on buzz-saw attack with a killer break. If you wanna invest in a really great biker movie soundtrack album, I'd recommend you go with Les Baxter's 1970 'Hells Belles' OST, which I already wrote about here. So I guess if you already read the 'Hells Belles' post, you didn't really need to waste your time reading this review of a less impressive album. I mean, that's two minutes of your life you're never getting back. Look, I'm sorry. If I were you, I wouldn't buy either album. You've already spent a buncha time reading about them - now you're gonna spend money on 'em and sit listening to them as well? Fergeddaboudit. Treat yourself to a nice meal or something instead. Go for a walk. Anything. Just don't sit around reading about pretty good but totally inessential biker movie soundtracks. This whole thing is my fault, really.

El Michels Affair: 'Enter The 37th Chamber'

It goes without saying that hip-hop is fundamentally a postmodern experiment. It is engaged in a dialogue with all pop music which has preceded it. Hip-hop is not just pop music - it is a commentary on pop music. It exists within it, but also beyond it, outside of it. For hip-hop, the vinyl record represents not the end of the creative process, but the beginning. Hip-hop's relationship with musical history is hands-on. Hip-hop re-arranges and re-contextualizes the past. It manipulates, cuts and pastes. It deconstructs. Hip-hop is irreverent, does not recognise does accepted 'high' & 'low' categorisations of musical forms - any and every record, from every imaginable genre, is approached as a legitimate source of sampleable material. It is the end of history, and everything is up for grabs.

So dig this. New York funk outfit El Michels Affair have produced an LP which consists almost exclusively of instrumental cover versions of Wu Tang Clan tracks, tracks which themselves consist almost exclusively of samples lifted from old funk & soul LPs...and it is produced to sound largely like authentic 70s soul. Postmodern enough for ya? Theoretically this could mean that the Affair's version of 'C.R.E.A.M' (an album highlight) just sounds exactly like an instrumental version of The Charmel's majestic Stax/Volt single 'As Long As I've Got You', from which the main 'C.R.E.A.M' loop is lifted. Infact, the Affair have wisely chosen to use the specific samples lifted for the Wu Tang tracks covered here more as jumping-off points for their own experiments and jams...therefore the Affair's 'C.R.E.A.M' sounds neither exactly like the Wu's original version, or the song it samples, but references both.

More important than any of this high-brow nonsense is that 'Enter The 37th Chamber' is a super-funky LP in its own right (perfect late-night listening) and could be enjoyed by any funk fan, regardless of how much or how little interest they have in the Wu Tang - in some respects, maybe a lack of interest in the 'concept' would benefit the listener. The concept is so mind-bogglingly genius that it's quite hard for a nerd like me to judge the album objectively...the idea of a cookin' funk combo doing wild, live versions of old Wu Tang joints is so ace that the album itself inevitably struggles to live up to it's own hype. The Affair have produced what is undoubtedly a fine 'cinematic soul' (their phrase) LP, peppered with some excellent moments ('Shimmy Shimmy Ya', featuring a children's choir, is guaranteed floor-filling club madness)...but personally I've found myself too caught up in the IDEA to enjoy it on its own terms. This probably says more about me than it does about the album....which, like I say, it really pretty great...but maybe not as great as the IDEA promised it could be....you can see how I'm having trouble with this.

Look: this album's really cool, it's a cool idea, and if you're home with your feet up and a bottle of cheap red, you'll be well into it. Shoulda covered '4th Chamber' though.

Attic Records, York: A Righteous Venture In Straight Up Old Schoolness Powered By Mammoth Titanium Balls

I've been totally hyped about this place opening ever since the York grapvine started buzzing 'bout it a couple of months back. This is Attic Records, a brand new vinyl emporium operating out of a third floor bedroom above a Barbers in the Ancient Cathedral City Of York. And it's just as cool as it sounds. You gotta hand it to the cats (a couple of local faces called Gaz & Foxy) who run the place - opening up a record store in the Current Economic Climate takes mammoth titanium balls. But somehow you can actually see the store really working, surviving and thriving, 'cos Attic Records has got something about it which is undeniable and un-buyable - it's got a great vibe.

The Attic ain't just a place for record junkies to score a pile of the black stuff. Attic Records is simply an exceptionally hip place to hang out. A place to rap with good folks about good music, and generally make the scene. Y'know - like a Real Record Store. Attic Records is an exercise in straight-up record store old schoolness. The suits told ya this sorta place just couldn't make it no more, not with everybody hooked on free downloads and cheap-fix mp3s. But everybody knows that this analysis is baloney - there'll always be a market for funky downhome vinyl shacks, just as long as the stock is right, the price is right, and the vibe is right. People still like going to quirky, interesting little places where they can Buy Records. With LPs displayed on the mantle piece of a cast iron victorian fireplace and the walls plastered with posters, Attic Records is literally like somebody opened a record store in their bedroom. How great is that?

Most record stores have the stench of death about 'em these days. Attic Records feels fresh, psyched, and ready to Take Care of Business. But they can't make it on their own. A righteous venture like this like this needs support. Your support. Yeah: YOU! Luckily supporting a place like this don't take no effort at all - all you gotta do is go in, shoot the breeze with the guys behind the counter, pick a couple of records, and buy the damn things. Then you can feel good about yourself all day 'cos you've contributed to A Totally Positive Thing, and have landed some new tunes to boot. I'm tellin' you, dude, I laid down some greenbacks for a pile of rekkids in there at the weekend and I feel great. Dig what I dug outta the crates!

So I was pretty knocked-out to find a top-drawer copy of Alice Cooper's 'Billion Dollar Babies'. I'm on a massive Alice Cooper kick at the moment. 2009 has been the year of my personal Glam revival. Mr Cooper was pulling his freaky guy-liner shtick back in late 60s Detroit, and his early stuff is a whole lotta wacked-out oddball Zaapa-fied wonkiness. It's OK, but when he got pop, he got better. Billion Dollar Babies is Cooper's number one all-time pop-shlock horror-show multi-million sellin' stadium slaying gatefold-sleeve concept monster, the tunes are sweet and the riffs are rockin...it's The Best Non-Stop 70s Death-Jams And Doom Rock Album In The World...Ever! S'all pantomime, of course, buy whadda performance.

Maybe even better still is the mondo-bizzaro super-heavy Glam-Psycheness of Wizzard's 'Wizzard Brew'. The whole album is like this dark, acid-fried glitter nitemare, cosmic-weirdness of a genuinely unsettling and creepy kind. Anybody expecting 'I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday' is gonna be mighty freaked by the pure hallucinogenic dirge offered here. Roy Wood made some kick-ass records in his time, from his garage-fuzz experiments with The Move to the shiny orch-pop classicism of ELO. But 'Wizzard Brew' is some whole other thang. Check out LP centre-piece 'Meet Me At The Jailhouse.' 13 minutes of buzzing, squarking, megaton-funky prog rock heaviosity. With a ridiculous backwards sax interlude. Bonkers stuff. Attic Records has my eternal gratitude for stocking this cult masterpiece of distorted scuzzadelia.

And to round out my purchases, I picked up a copy of Kylie's first LP - a definitive SAW pop album no home should be without, a nice Nutbush City Limits-era Ike & Tina collection, the deathless 'Return Of The Mack' by Mark Morrison on 12", and some budget Miracles best of. (I didn't even get a chance to look at the 45s.) Like I say - I'm just doing my bit to support a righteous venture. I invite y'all to do the same.

Check the Attic Records facebook, here.

SLAM Magazine: The NBA's Greatest 50 Players

Ever since I was a kid I've had a distant, but on-going, sorta fascination with basketball. The only sports team I've ever followed in any regular way was the long-forgotten Doncaster Panthers, who played out of the Doncaster Dome in the mid '90s before disbanding in 1996 due to financial difficulties. I have hazy recollections of watching the Harlem Globetrotters on TV in my formative years, I guess on variety shows or Blue Peter or whatever, and being utterly entranced by them. These guys could fly. And they looked Bad. Ass. I even owned a 3/4 size Harlem Globetrotters basketball. And like many my age, me & my friends spent endless hours playing NBA Jam on the Megadrive - "He's on fire!" "The nail in the coffin!" "Puts up a brick!" - perfecting skills with our thumbs that in real-life looked positively super-human.

When the 1992 Barcelona Olympics came around, I had the opportunity to dig on The Dream Team...to watch the sport played at it's absolute best, by the best international team ever assembled. The Dream Team were simply off-the-hook. Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Charles Barkley, Patrick Ewing...Coach Chuck Daly described being with the Dream Team as like "travelling with a rock band, like Elvis & The Beatles put together." It's often said that watching great basketball is like watching a great jazz concert - the improvisation, the opportunity for individual flair and moments of off-the-wall genius, the back-and-forth dialogue between the players - and sure 'nuff, watching the Dream Team play was as mesmerising as a night at Newport with Miles Davis' first Quintet.

Anyway, in the spirit of educating myself further in the ways of shooting hoops, I bought my first ever copy of SLAM magazine yesterday, which features a perfect So You Want To Get Into Basketball-type feature listing the NBA's 'Top 50 Players'. The guy pictured above left here is Julius Erving, aka Dr J, who ranks 15th. He was a spectacular slam-dunk artist, maybe the finest ever seen. He was ruthless, used the ball like deadly weapon. He defined basketball in the '70s, and ushered in the modern 'above-the-rim' era of the game. He was a stone-killer on the court, and a gentleman off it. He had a cool afro. He's my new hero.

Taxi, Season 2: The Golden Age Of US TV Comedy

So I was watching the 1978 second season of Taxi this weekend with my folks. This is real Golden Age of US Comedy stuff. The quality of the cast is just mind-boggling. If this is your bag, watching Judd Hirsch, Andy Kaufman, Christopher Lloyd & Danny DeVito riff off one another in Taxi is no less than the equivalent of watching the Rat Pack swaggering on stage at the Sands or CSN&Y harmonising at Woodstock.* By all accounts relations amongst the Taxi cast were not always easy, which is hardly surprising given the highly volatile mixture of clashing creative egos on set. Kaufman alone was about as erratic and unmanageable as they come, and it's amazing he survived within the button-down constraints of Sit-Com land for as long as he did. The 'Taxi' of this era is simply magical, peerless popular art. Treat yourself to a copy of Season 2, here.

*I'm not kidding about this era being a spectacular time for US comedy. While the '78 season of Taxi aired, the Saturday Night Live cast counted Bill Murray, Dan Ackroyd and John Belushi amongst it's number, Steve Martin was at the very height of his success, and Richard Pryor recorded his magnificant 'Live In Concert' concert film. In-sane.

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.