music

Spirit

Most of the time, I can’t remember where or when I first heard an artist, regardless of how important they later become to me. There are a few exceptions, and Talk Talk are one of them. It was not an auspicious occasion. The night before my first encounter with them, I was out at my friend Simon’s then-girlfriend’s birthday drinks (I didn’t drink much there), and from there I went to another friend’s flat where I stayed until the wee small hours. This was about twelve or thirteen years ago. I had bought a bottle of Lidl own-brand vodka (at his bidding, I must add) which we polished off over the course of about three hours, mixed with supermarket brand orangeade.

The next day was not fun. Simon was coming over to visit me at my parents’ house (I still lived at home then) mid-afternoon and I managed to get myself out of bed about half an hour before he was due to arrive. I nearly renounced atheism when he texted me to say he was running late. I think I threw up about ten minutes before he turned up. So he was beckoned by my mum into my shamefully cluttered bedroom, and I lay on the bed, trying to entertain while feeling distinctly green.

We did what we’ve done ever since, albeit with less and less frequency; playing each other music, listening intensely to some songs, disappearing into conversational tangents over others. One of the things he played me was a song from Talk Talk’s Spirit of Eden. If I remember correctly, it was the first track, ‘The Rainbow’, as he couldn’t choose between the songs. I wasn’t expecting anything at all, really, as I knew next-to-nothing about the band. We did not speak over the song. I can’t remember anything else he played that day. If it weren’t for Talk Talk, I’m doubtful that I’d remember any of the day or the preceding evening at all.

It didn’t take long to pick up a copy of Spirit of Eden of my own, and after the first full listen to the album, some part of me belonged to it forever. Alongside Laughing Stock and Mark Hollis’ self-titled solo album, that record was, is, the apotheosis of what popular music, rock, whatever you want to call it, can be. Those albums are emotionally potent, utterly bizarre, somehow dense and minimal, endlessly re-playable, endlessly mysterious.

Hearing yesterday evening that Mark Hollis had died caught me off-guard. I had never quite given up hope that he’d make another record, but it wasn’t that that made me find myself far more affected than I ever could have anticipated. It made me think about a former bandmate’s own story of hearing Talk Talk for the first time, taking acid down the park one night with a friend who played him Laughing Stock on cassette (beforehand he had thought they were still a sub-Duran rip-off group, and was an ardent convert after). It made me think of listening to Spirit of Eden while lying on the bed with the love of my life in her tiny attic room, six-and-a-half years ago, mere weeks after we first got together. And of doing the same thing in our own flat a couple of Sundays ago, our adored cats curled up next to us. I realised just how much Mark Hollis and Talk Talk’s music had meant and still means to me. And once again, I remembered the quiet magic of a friend passing on something amazing to you, the way that you carry music around inside you through life, and of just how precious that is.

Mark David Hollis, 4 January 1955 – 25 February 2019

Andrew R. Hill

Dispatch: Field Music, Glasgow School of Art

Since 2004, Field Music have been busy lads - the core of the brothers Brewis (David and Peter) has produced five albums, a soundtrack, a covers album, a dozen singles and two albums with side projects apiece. As soon as you hear a new Field Music song, you know it's them, but that doesn't mean they've become stale or dull - far from it, in fact, as Sunday's gig at the Art School proved. Purveyors of complexly structured artpop they may be but this was no chin-stroking, egg-headed exercise in pomposity. This was funky and sweaty, if taut and intelligent with it. The brothers and their assembled touring band played a broad selection from their back catalogue, numerous cuts from their excellent new album Commontime included, and exuded a quiet confidence looking like they were having a lot of fun - almost as much as the (rather vocal) audience. The band is doing the rounds now, miss them at your peril.

Photos by Erika Sella. Words by Andrew R. Hill.

Come To My World: Sarah Records Reappraised

Come To My World: Sarah Records Reappraised

Sarah Records was a Bristol-based independent label run by Clare Wadd and Matt Haynes between 1987 and 1995. Committed to socialism and feminism and influenced by the fanzine culture and the DIY attitude of earlier UK music scenes, Sarah was as much about politics as it was about music. Equally revered and loathed, the label came to define a certain kind of wistful, melancholic indie pop (the kind that detractors - usually male rockist music journalist - often called 'twee', 'insipid' and 'sexless') whilst making agit-prop statements through their fanzines, written communiqués and objet d'art (their 50th release was a board game). 

Read More

Dispatch: Ultimate Painting, The Bellybuttons and Vital Idles at Mono

Mono is barely at half capacity when Vital Idles take to the stage at Mono on Friday night, and more's the pity - they steal the show. Featuring former Golden Grrrl Ruari MacLean on bass, Vital Idles have a scratchy, garage-y vibe (some kind of loose triangulation of Flying Nun, Slumberland and 53 & 3rd), a droll coolness, an understated intensity.

 Not many bands can pull off a Smiths cover, but they make 'Jeane' their own and it isn't even the best song in the set, not by a long shot. They're into the music, and they don't give a fuck if you're even listening - you should, of course, because 'vital' is an entirely apposite descriptor.

DSC_0276.JPG

The Bellybuttons have a tough act to follow, but they have a certain free-and easy swagger about them that makes them easy to like (they also appear to have the happiest bass player in the world). They sound a lot like Pavement, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but a relatively long set renders proceedings more samey than they ought to be.

DSC_0624.JPG

By the time Ultimate Painting take to the stage, the venue is rammed. They are the obvious professionals of the night, everything is very together, and that's understandable given Jack Cooper and James Hoare have toured so much over the last few years with their different bands (Mazes and Veronica Falls/Proper Ornaments respectively). It's frustrating to listen to a set where all the songs are the same speed (mid-tempo), especially when they have so much potential. They have a great sound and melodies in spades - how couldn't they given their pedigree? - but there's a lack of dynamic variation and a certain spark, an energy, that they could do with carrying across from their other bands. Their potential is massive, but they need to remember to shift gear every now and then.

Photos by Erika Sella. Words by Andrew R. Hill.

Songs They Never Play on the Radio: Arthur Russell

Songs They Never Play on the Radio: Arthur Russell

It’s questionable now that you would in actuality never hear this Arthur Russell song on the radio. Not so long ago many an eyebrow would have been raised at the notion that you might, but in the time since I first knowingly heard him on 2008’s superlative Optimo (Espacio) mix Sleepwalk (never mind his death in 1992) his popularity seems to have grown exponentially. The song on the Optimo mix was ‘This Is How We Walk On The Moon’, and even on that strange, nocturnal, hypnagogic record (a record that I would happily call one of my favourites) it stood out as particularly otherworldly

Read More

Songs They Never Play on the Radio: Dadamah

Songs They Never Play on the Radio: Dadamah

...aaaaand we’re back. And with the least conventional Songs They Never Play on the Radio yet, at that. Like many bands from the NZ ‘scene’ teetering on the fringes of the famous (yet still inadequately documented) Flying Nun, there isn’t much information on Dadamah, even in the sometimes seemingly comprehensive expanse of the internet. 

Read More

Songs They Never Play on the Radio: Fall of Saigon

Songs They Never Play on the Radio: Fall of Saigon

So, after a bit of a break, another Song They Never Play on the Radio. This may be the most obscure entry yet, although there is some competition - a band formed in Montpellier that only released one EP on Atem in 1983 (although further tracks appeared on a CD compilation in 2011). Only six songs long, Untitled (as it's titled, or, er, not) is a fleeting but absorbing listen. 

Read More