popartglory

The post this morning brought a package from Jim Shepherd. From the envelope tumbled a copy of popartglory, the first Jasmine Minks album for over eleven years…

Think of how much you have changed over the past eleven years; of how much you will change in the next eleven. Think of all the sounds you have heard and loved, of all the sights seen and scents smelled. Think of it all. Hasn’t it been a strange and wondrous journey? Well popartglory sounds as strange and wondrous as that journey.

Which of course means that at times popartglory sounds confused, confusing, bewildered and bewildering, but imagine the journey of your life without those moments, those feelings, and tell me you would have had it any other way. popartglory is a great, fantastically flawed Pop album, fuller of heady idealism and dynamic, mad guitars, beats and organs than anything any Young Guns currently seem to be producing; packing as much raw soul and energised passion as, say, the White Stripes at their visceral peak and as much downbeat, slow sad love song blues as that same Detroit duo at their barest best. Which is to say that popartglory sounds like heaven and hell rolled into one ball, rebounding insanely in your head, before finally rolling away and bobbing on the water, just out of reach, floating off into the midnight blue of the star-speckled loch. And really, that closing trilogy of ‘Angel’, ‘2001’ and ‘Redsky’ is as fine an album closing holy trinity as you’ll hear, and as ‘Redsky’ dissolves with the mantra of ‘nothing is sacred, nothing is real’ cascading in your head like the horse-tail of Canonteign Falls you know that it’s wrong, because this feeling, this sound is as real as you’ll ever need, and that maybe, just maybe, those Minks are sacred after all.

And of course some will say that I would say that and in other moments of doubt I suggest to myself that a finer record than popartglory would instead be the sounds of Jim Shepherd singing an album of magical ballads with only an acoustic guitar and a heart of je ne regret rien for company. Well, maybe one day. Maybe one day.

visit the jasmine minks website
posted by duke harringay at 2:26 PM

Chimp Rock Forever

Too many years ago to bear thinking about, I loved the Swirlies. I was never entirely sure why I loved the Swirlies because to all intents and purposes they sounded like some odd bunch of collegiate Americans hung up on My Bloody Valentine. Which sounds hurtful and nasty and that would never do at all because really I think I played my Swirlies records more often than I did My Bloody Valentine records, or at the very least, any MBV records after Isn’t Anything, or to be brutally honest, after the ‘You Made Me Realise’ EP. ‘You Made Me Realise’ and it’s attendant songs like ‘Drive All Over Me’ and the stunning erotic fantasy of ‘Slow’ were of course superb collisions between noise and melody that laser beamed their way to the heavens of your heart and My Bloody Valentine never approached their greatness again. Some would suggest that the Loveless album was their pinnacle, but such people of course would be considering a different MBV to the one I loved. Such people would be those who preferred the sonic experiments and ambient flotations of oh-too-perfectly-positioned-and-considered layers of noise to the band who considered injections of swooning melody to be so essential to their sculptures. And really if I’m truthful to myself I have to say my favourite MBV record is Ecstasy with it’s gorgeous cover and the mind-blowingly beautiful pop sensations that are songs like ‘She Loves You No Less’, ‘(Please) Lose Yourself In Me’ and ‘(You’re) Safe In Your Sleep (From this Girl)’. Those songs are all feathery kisses and mountains in the middle distance shrouded in the morning mists; they are slow spirals into deep chaotic around midnight somnambulist dreams; they are echoes of echoes of a past you never thought would end. And of course ‘Clair’ with its background noise the looped screams of Beatles fans, the best sound ever associated with that bunch of Scouse slackers; a song that plumbs the depths of the ocean and comes back smelling of pressed roses and heart shaped candies, a sweet torment that cascades forevermore.

But The Swirlies…

‘Sarah Sitting’ was a tremulous gem of a song and had me all of a quiver when I heard it, instantly recalling fourteen year old afternoons on stairs in house somewhere deep in leafy London suburbs, looking at hair bronzed and eyes reflecting sparks of moonbeams even at midday. Lying on back in room of boy I never knew or met even watching model spitfires twist gently in the breeze listening to the flip flop of tennis balls on Wimbledon courts from television below. And Sarah sitting.

The Swirlies made a dramatic, screwed up lush noise that oscillated and reverberated through the leaves of the ancient oaks in the hidden copse. The Swirlies recorded flashes of nonsensical dialogue and hurled it into the breaches of Pop; The Swirlies listed profoundly, and took in water that no-one seemed to want to bail, instead splashing and dancing in the puddles of impending desolation. The Swirlies had the ravishing good sense to record a song called ‘Her life of artistic freedom’ that was all lost vocals and guitar strums buried behind the sound of a record clicking its eternal end on run off grooves, and then to record a song called ‘His life of academic freedom’ which had a gorgeous melody buried by layers of what seemed to be found recordings, squealing electronics and, damn it, plain old oddness. The Swirlies threw curve balls every which way and sounded marvellously, cohesively unhinged as a result.

Someone called The Swirlies They Spent Their Wild Youthful Days In The Glittering World of the Salons album the best unheard album of the 1990’s and although that’s pushing it, if someone made a top ten of such albums, it would probably be in there. It’s the most coherent of all Swirlies albums, and makes for a seductive listening experience. ‘Sounds of Sebring’ is all sunlight and the heat haze of race-cars; ‘You Can’t Be Told It, You Must Behold It’ is the vocoder antidote to too many crass chart hits, the technology used as a marvellous rhythm device to provide the basis for a Pop Classic beamed in from Neptune. ‘Two Girls Kissing’ is the sounds of two girls kissing, oddly enough. In a car. In Cambridge. In case you were wondering… and really it is the beauty of watching a purple t-shirt flagging in the wind on the clothes line and considering nothing but empty headed hearts and days lost to the burns of yesterdays.

Which is the The Swirlies all over.

Perhaps.

posted by duke harringay at 2:14 PM

‘The Diary of a Nobody’. Indeed. The more astute readers will recognise this as being lifted from the satirical diary/novel of 1892 by George and Weedon Grossmith which I just finished reading yesterday, and, needless to say, greatly enjoyed. The jacket notes suggest the book to be a fore-runner to TV shows like the Rise and Fall of Reginald Perrin or One Foot in The Grave, but it would be just as valid to suggest it as the blueprint for the Secret Diary of Adrian Mole (at least the first two volumes, before it lost lustre and interest), the feel for which this book uncannily mirrors in its deadpan, flippant humour. And really those first two Adrian Mole books are classics of ‘80s literature that say more about what it was to be young and growing up under Thatcher than anything else with more literary ambition.

Really though I only bought the current re-issue of Diary of a Nobody because of the cover, which is a clear lift from the 1930 Solomon Telingater design for S.I. Kirsanov’s The World Belongs To Kirsanov. It’ll be a great resource for school to show how designers and artists don’t live in vacuums, and that particularly in these post-everything, pre-nothing times, the recycling of the past is as valid and important a part of the creative process as anything else. Perhaps too I bought the book because I used the very same Telingater design back in March this year when my Year 10 classes were doing their CD cover design project. I set myself the task of taking a CD cover design through from start to finish during a double lesson (that’s around an hour and a half of working time) and naturally to save time determined to use an existing work as my initial inspiration; hence the Telingater, me being a bit of a sucker for that Constructivist/Dada style and all, and really the collage idea fitted with the notion of constructed pop stars that the chosen title (The Byrds ‘So You Want t To Be A Rock and Roll Star’) suggested: I ended up with a rather fetching collage figure that married a pair of sexy stockinged legs with Tony Blair’s upper torso, and Thatcher’s head bedecked in a pair of chunky headphones. Anyway, it was a very interesting activity, and the next time your designer tells you it’ll take several weeks and several hundreds of pounds to design your record or book cover, tell them a High School teacher can do it in an hour and a half. Whilst teaching.

posted by duke harringay at 11:08 AM

Put your fingers in your ears. Close your eyes tight. Turn your back on the screen and empty your head of everything you ever thought. Focus on what’s left. Isn’t it beautiful?

I never used to write. I used to draw all the time instead. I drew lots of cars, and I drew lots of bicycles. I drew aeroplanes and made them blue. Sometimes. Other times they were red and yet others they were green, but mostly they were blue. Blue aeroplanes. Maybe that’s why so many years later, when I hadn’t drawn aeroplanes for so very long, I fell in love with a certain group so many people loved to hate. Of course I too loved to hate them not so long afterwards, but that’s another very long and very tedious story that I can’t help but feel I’ve told so many times before, in so many different guises. Maybe we all have only one story that we re-tell in a multitude of manners through our adult life, hoping one day that special someone will read it and understand. Perhaps not. Perhaps it’s just me.

I started drawing aeroplanes again at the end of the year 2000. I filled sketchbooks with scribbled ‘planes. I brushed over postcards of my favourite paintings with white acrylic and drew wings and aeroplane parts in black marker over the white. Snatches of the original paintings showed through windows in the mist. They were crap, but I liked them. I made dreadful paintings of aeroplanes in blue and orange, which have been deposited on the skip a long time ago. And I painted one solitary aeroplane on the end wall of my attic room, where it remains, now with just parts of the wings and fuselage visible through the shelves of CDs that have been screwed to the wall since. But this ‘plane was not blue, but red. And it wasn’t an aeroplane at all in fact but a glider. I don’t know why I started to draw gliders.

Maybe it was because, when I was 8 or 9, I stole a small balsa wood glider toy from a shop in my old home town.

Maybe not.

I don’t remember when I stopped drawing so much and started writing instead, but if I had to pick a moment it would be the ‘O’ Level English exam in 1982 when I sat in a Marr College school sports hall and wrote a tale about, well a tale about something or other that I don’t too clearly recall. All I do remember is that the story was based roughly on ‘Wasteland’, a song from The Jam’s Setting Sons album, and that when my exam results came through that year I found I had earned a higher grade A in English than in Art (your teachers used to tell you, if you cared to ask, what ‘level’ within the grade you got; I got the highest possible level in English and only the second highest in Art). And so for some reason I guess I started to think I could write better than I could draw, which was probably true, but hey… So maybe you can blame Paul Weller and the Scottish Exam Board for making me want to write. I mean, it’s always good to feel you can blame someone else other than yourself, right?

All of which, of course, is much more than you needed, or cared, to know. I expect you’ll find that to be one of the many flaws of this blog as it progresses through time, and it’s as well that you know as much now.

So why blog? I guess it’s the same as ‘why write?’, or ‘why draw?’ The answer is always going to be: ‘I don’t really know.’ At least that’s always the answer in part. In another part, I know exactly why I’m starting this blog: I wanted to break free on a tangent. Or from a tangent…

See once upon a time I told myself that I never ever wanted to be a music journalist. I just wanted to write, and if I wrote about music, well, that was just because listening to music was a big part of my life and really I was writing about my life and THAT’S not really music journalism at all. Is it? Music journalists write for music papers and magazines and tell you what the track listing on the album is; they tell you what songs they played at the shows; they throw in reference points to help you understand what the music sounds like (or sounds distinctly unlike, as the case may be); they make corny comments about the semiotics of lyrics and dress that they picked up from their cultural studies lectures; they largely (exceptions most assuredly excepted Mr Morley, Mr True, Mr McCullough, Mr Penman, Mr Savage, Mr Bangs… all the men… where are my favourite women writers? Maybe I really am a sexist boor) bore you to tears.

Somewhere down the line I turned into a music journalist.

I read the articles I wrote over the past two or three years and hated 90% of them for being everything I detested about music journalism: lifeless, listless, written more from a sense of duty than a sense of desperate, burning need. Worse than this, they were written out of a duty to write about the RECORDS rather than about how they touched my life, and I realised I didn’t want to do that anymore. So I’m not. I won’t.

Except obviously I still will.

posted by duke harringay at 10:24 AM