Wishing I was in London (again)

More specifically, wishing I was able to be in London next weekend (August 24th) for what promises to be a great afternoon and evening’s entertainment at the Notting Hill Arts Centre courtesy of Matinee/Fortuna Pop recording artistes The Windmills, Would-Be-Goods, Pipas and Lovejoy. With DJing exploits from Tim Hopkins and Pam Berry into the bargain, it promises to be well worth attending if you can make it. And did I ever tell you all how wonderful that last Windmills single was? I didn’t? Oh gee, I really meant to… so, um, to put matters right right now, um, the Windmills ‘Walking Around the World’ EP was/is another delight with three more tracks of minor chord genius alternately flitting and frolicking across the landscape like a waltzing tormented ghost looking for love in a hall of mirrors, or in the stars of a desert night sky, at the very least. Much as one would expect really.


posted by duke harringay at 8:44 PM

(I'm looking for) Cracks In The Pavement

Well, a fine weekend nears its conclusion. Ferrari domination once again in Hungary, a veritable trouncing of Marino in our now traditional pool tournament in the Bowling Green, and a couple of choice purchases at the record fare and charity shops. Plus the sun shone a bit. What more could one ask for?

The record fair was weird. Lots of over-priced stuff and a whole load of Heavy Metal tour programmes. I admit though that I always do find record fairs to be weird experiences, partly because I get like a stunned bunny in the face of so many records and partly because really I’m not a record collector. I’ve never wanted to buy bootleg recordings of live shows, for example, because I’ve never really been all that taken by the idea of Pop as a live experience. I prefer the thrills of sitting alone to sweating in a room full of people. Also, the live experience, when it has been great, has always been about the fleeting moment. It doesn’t do to have it encased in amber. Besides which the simple aural aspect of the show is only a tiny part of the experience. I have recordings of some live shows I’ve been to and enjoyed immensely, but I almost never play those recordings. If I do, they sound pale. There’s so much missing. They feel so much more tied to time and place and space than studio recordings, of which you can take complete ownership and which will transcend space and time. But maybe that’s just me.

So I’ve never been interested in buying live bootlegs at record fairs. I’m also resistant to picking up old ‘60s 45’s for a couple of songs when as often as not there’s a retrospective CD reissue available for the same price or cheaper. Which leaves what exactly? Well, not much. I inevitably end up going for cheap(ish) singles I regret not picking up back in the ‘80s, and this weekends’ basket held just such things: ‘Candyskin’/’Meat Whiplash’ by Fire Engines in that great fold-out sleeve, ‘Don’t Slip Up’ by the band Meat Whiplash and the classic ‘Someone Stole My Wheels’ by J.C. Brouchard and Biff Bang Pow!, a 1986 single I note with amusement is ‘dedicated to Madonna with love.’ Oh, and I also got the Delgado’s ‘Monica Webster’ 7” for a couple of quid, which seemed like a bit of a bargain. Certainly it was more of a bargain than the troughs of shit ‘80s and ‘90s ‘indie’ that was marked up at ridiculous prices.

The real treat of the day, however, was discovered in one of the charity shops that pepper Sidwell Street. I used to frequent those stores a lot back in the mid to late ‘90s. In those days I was putting together loads of collages and clipping up stuff from old comic book annuals for booklets to give away at the Living Room. The sleeves of 10” 78 records were always particularly prized for their colour, texture and cover texts. In recent years the stock of those records and old comic book annuals has run dry, however, and I seldom visit them now. So blame it all on Marino, who dives into almost every charity and second hand store in sight, clearly spoilt by the standard of these stores in Cambridge and London, and clearly still resistant to the overwhelming evidence that Exeter charity shops just aren’t going to throw up any gems of great interest. Except: one copy of Duran Duran’s 1983 opus Seven and ragged Tiger for a quid, which naturally I snap up much to Marino’s amazement and amusement.

Marino and I were discussing earlier in the day about embarrassing musical dalliances in our past. After much thought I decided that there is no longer anything from my past that I am embarrassed about. At least not in terms of records I have owned. I’m no longer embarrassed about having been into Simple Minds. I’m no longer about to blush when I think that I once had ‘Wham!’ penned on my high school book covers alongside ‘Scritti Politti’ and ‘Depeche Mode’. I’m not ashamed to say that I was in fact a ludicrously un-hip teen. I had loads of chart pop in my record collection up until the end of my teenage years, and maybe that’s really as it ought to be. I certainly used to own Duran Duran, Rio and even Seven and The Ragged Tiger, although (sadly?) all were expunged from my collection in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s.

Of course listening now, Seven and The Ragged Tiger (what the hell did that mean anyway?) is all about missed faces and kissed beery lips. Or missed kissed beery lips. Full of imagined, remembered fantasy, anyway. So songs like ‘The Reflex’ (this was the one with the ludicrously expensive video where Simon almost drowned whilst strapped to that big windmill sail wasn’t it? I had a 12” picture disc of this one, as I recall), ‘New Moon On Monday’, ‘Union Of The Snake’ and ‘Shadows On Your Side’ are all now shot through with thoughts of sinking suns beyond the castle, running headlong through the grass clutching flagons of scrumpy and eyes filled with visions of a name calling, reverberating again and again against the walls of a croaking heart and a sky too close for comfort. They’re just fragments of time throwing strange shadows on the walls of my memory, nothing to do with music at all. Which is at it ought to be, surely? And as this album finishes with ‘The Seventh Stranger’, those lines going ‘I must be chasing after rainbows / one thing for sure you never answer when I call / and I wipe away the water from my face’ it suddenly seems to me as my eyes fill up that maybe we never lose those scars from our adolescence, that they are always sitting there, lurking, waiting to pounce at the strangest of moments, tearing at our hearts with scalpel blades of regret.


posted by duke harringay at 4:14 PM