Andrew R. Hill
Over the last couple of years, Magazine’s debut Real Life has gradually crept from the fringes of my consciousness to become one of my favourite albums. I’ve owned it for three or four years (or maybe even longer) but other than ever-brilliant Shot By Both Sides, early listens failed to pierce my heart, mind or sou
Read MoreIn 1981, a young Nicholas Currie handed a home-recorded demo cassette to Malcolm Ross at what would transpire to be Josef K's final Edinburgh gig. Ross was impressed enough to put a band together with Currie including Davy Weddell from Ross's former group. Ronnie Torrance, also late of Josef K, would eventually join on drums and so, although Ross left to join Orange Juice prior to any official recordings, comparisons to the Postcard band were and are inevitable. Their solitary album The Man on Your Street is a bit of a lost classic and the song above marks the point where the album really takes off. There's no denying the scratch and shuffle of Josef K is present, but there's a brightness of tone that renders The Happy Family somewhat less gloomy, despite a rather grand 'plot' centring around the son of an evangelical detergent salesman and the daughter of a fascist dictator set in Switzerland and the north of Italy. It wasn't to last long in any case and the band would split up shortly after 'in a spirit of apathy and aversion to the force of habit'.
Currie recommenced his university studies and would later transform into Momus. He will release a second collaborative album with former Orange Juice bass player David McClymont in the next few weeks and will also perform at Neu Reekie at Summerhall on 28 February.
Weekend - Red Planes (Demo)
So, a new regular Blasted feature for the New Year. As you might gather from the (possibly occasionally inaccurate) name, we will be endeavouring to bring you obscure (or at least obscure versions) of songs that we stumble across. The name of course comes from James Young’s rather excellent snapshot of six years in the life of the ever-inimitable chanteuse Nico.
The first pick isn’t entirely a coincidence. Firstly, because it was a track discovered on the week that we conceived of this new feature, and secondly because it bears a passing resemblance to what could’ve been a lost (possibly slightly more upbeat) outtake from one of Christa Päffgen’s John Cale-produced albums.
The song we’ve chosen for this inaugural bulletin is by Welsh band Weekend. No, not that Weekend, the other one. Fronted by former Young Marble Giants singer Alison Statton, Weekend were a shinier affair than the minimalist, monochromatic and mesmerising abstractions of YMGs and definitely weren’t as special or, as…well…good. Not by a long chalk. Presumably recorded in the direct aftermath of Statton’s former band’s breakup, this is a strange piece of music, swirls of ambient strings hypnotising over a minimal and (actually very YMGs-like) electronic beat, Statton’s vocals deeper than normal and bordering on Nico-esque.
Credit for our discovery has to go to the continually intriguing Mr Kiran Sande of Blackest Ever Black, one of the most consistently interesting and exciting record labels in the world. His excellent mix (of which there are many) in which we found this song was Dream Theory in Haltemprice
Last year Glasgow’s own Volcanic Tongue, specialists in the most underground music going, run by The Wire contributor David Keenan and experimental musician Heather Leigh Murray. This year, it’s gone global, albeit without consultation with the original proponents. Original or not, as Blasted readers will no doubt agree, anything that gets people into real record shops and buying music that you can – kinda, sorta – actually touch is definitely a good thing.
So, the first worldwide Cassette Store Day is happening tomorrow in shops across the UK, Europe, the USA and even at one phonographic emporium in Argentina. There are releases by such Blasted favourites as The Proper Ornaments, Molly Nilsson, Efterklang, and many others. A particular highlight is bound to be The Pastels’ Summer Rain retrospective of “Some of [their] favourite music [they’ve] made for Domino, starting around 1995 with Mobile Safari and ending with songs from the Slow Summits sessions”, the title track can be heard below.
We're really pleased to announce The Pastels participation in the inaugural Cassette Store Day, this Saturday, 7 September. They've compiled a unique C60 cassette of some of their favourite Pastels music, and it's called Summer Rain after the track of the same name taken from current album Slow Summits.
Image courtesy of Criterion.
Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962) is both one of the simplest and one of the strangest science fiction films you are ever likely to see, but to pigeonhole the film with such a generic marker is arbitrary and simplistic – while time travel is central to the story, it serves as a narrative device to explore the natures of memory and obsession.
The form of La Jetée is extraordinary even now, over fifty years on: a sequence of black and white stills narrated in a brooding Gallic third person monologue (augmented by minimal diegetic sound effects) over the course of twenty-seven minutes. This can seem pretentious or just downright dull on initial approach but one settles into it fairly quickly. The film opens with a scene that haunts and obsesses our protagonist from its occurrence in his childhood through to the post-apocalyptic Parisian ‘present’. The man at the story’s centre is used by the victors of the Third World War as the subject of an experiment in time-travel – humanity’s spatial options have expired, only temporal ones remain.
Image courtesy of the BFI.
The man has to travel to the past by using his memory – it is surely for this reason that the film’s imagery is presented as it is, for what is a photo if not a memory? This film is a photobook in which the man returns to the time of the film’s opening sequence, the event that has obsessed him his whole life. Through the experiment the man enacts a strange courtship with a young woman that was there on the day seared into his memory, albeit then a stranger.
On one of their meetings (separated by gaps in her time, as well as his, as they are) they visit a cross-section of a giant redwood with historical events pinpointed on its rings, just as in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 masterpiece Vertigo; this explicit reference unveils other key notions at the centre of the film, the sometimes traumatic nature of memory, male obsessiveness and the dangerous effects both can have, particularly when they coincide. The idea of being ‘haunted’ or of ‘haunting’ are unavoidably applicable in analyses of Vertigo and so it should be for La Jetée; James Stewart’s Scottie is haunted by his ‘lost’ Madeleine (in itself a reference to Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu) just as La Jetée’s protagonist is haunted by the day from his childhood, and just as he haunts the young woman through their unusual courtship, appearing and disappearing as if an apparition. As with Vertigo, the film concludes with a fatality that could have been avoided were it not for the protagonist’s selfish single-mindedness. La Jetée’s images haunt the viewer too, lingering on to unveil their truth in the memory.
Glasgow's rarely short of excellent bands and now is no exception. At the forefront of the current scene are Casual Sex (featuring Sam Smith, previously of the much missed Mother & The Addicts) who bring to mind David Bowie, Magazine, Josef K and the Monochrome Set - in other words, they're bloody (s)excellent. They launch their new single Stroh "80" this Friday (5 April) at Nice'N'Sleazy, playing alongside The Amazing Snakeheads and Asian Babes, and costing an arousing £5 on the door, or an irresistible £3 in advance from Monorail Music or Tickets Scotland.
If you can't make that (or even if you can) then you can do far worse than to listen to their recent BBC 6Music session for Marc Riley, or to stream the single's erotic A-side below. A sexy 7" (or a download, if you so prefer) is available now on the Moshi Moshi Singles Club and can be bought directly from the band, the label, or any record shop worth its salt... The grooves on our copy are practically worn out already. See you at Sleazy's.
The debut single from Glasgow's Casual Sex. Released on the Moshi Moshi Singles Club on 1st April on limited edition 7" vinyl and download. www.facebook.com/casualsexmusic
