Oblique Saturdays

A series for Saturdays in 2026 inspired by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's set of cards, Oblique Strategies (Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas). Eno and Schmidt created them to be used to unblock creative impasses and approach problems from unexpected angles. Each week I'll turn over an Oblique Strategy card and post a song or songs inspired by the suggestion. 

Last week's Oblique Strategy suggestion was Look closely at the most embarrassing details and amplify them. 

This took me to the Beastie Boys and their embarrassment at Fight For your Right, a song which defined them in a way they did not like. It led us to Paul's Boutique and the 90s Beastie Boys so it all turned out OK in the end. The Bagging Area OS squad played a blinder with the following- Johnny Cash and A Boy Named Sue (Ernie), Are We Not Men? by Devo (Anonliz), Slade's How Does It Feel (Jake Sniper), Elvis laughing his way through a performance of Are You Lonesome Tonight? at Vegas (C)...

... Magazine's A Song From Under The Floorboards and Radiohead's Creep (Trail Of Bread), The Animals' Story of Bo Diddley (Al G), Half Man Half Biscuit's Petty Sessions (Rol), and Feel Good Hit Of The Summer by Queens Of The Stone Age, Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana and Prefab Sprout's From Langley Park To Memphis (Chris ZenArcade).

There was an interview with David Byrne this week at The Guardian where he was asked if they used the Oblique Strategy cards in the studio when Talking Heads worked with Eno. Byrne said 'The box of cards were present. I don’t know if they were ever really used, but they contain clever ideas, to help you break out of any ruts or ingrained thinking.' 

Avoiding ruts and ingrained thinking, this week's Oblique Strategy suggestion is this- You can only make one dot at a time. 

As a massive fan of One Dove and Dot Allison, one Dot is all we need.

Fallen

Fallen originally came out on Soma, a Glasgow based record label. One Dove were a trio, Dot Allison, Ian Carmichael and Jim McKinven. When the group signed to Junior Boys Own, an enconter with Andrew Weatherall on a boat party in Rimini led to him producing their album, fresh from his successes  with Screamadelica. Weatherall's version of Fallen lifted it to new heights, Dot's voice over the fractured intro, gasps and timbales, 'I don't know why I'm telling you any of this, one thing is don't ever tell anyone I told you this, don't save me, forgive me, I was only thinking of you... just you'... and just like that anyone hearing it was hooked.

After One Dove folded Dot released a solo album that was trailed y this gorgeous piece of mid- 90s soul/ pop... 

Mo' Pop

The same album, Afterglow, had this song on it, Message Personnel which was remixed by Arab Strap, who slow it down and take the blissed out pop of the original and make it typically something a bit darker...

Message Personnel (Arab Strap Remix)

I think Kevin Shields is on guitar on that one too. I could go on posting Dot Allison tracks all day but I'll stop there.

Wire's 1978 debut had the song Dot Dash on it, two and a half minutes of post- punk brilliance and there's a guitar band from Washington D.C. named after that song who put out this in 2018 on an album called  Proto Retro...

World's Last Payphone

Dots also make me think of the printing process for comic books, the four colour process, using small dots of colour to create shades. Roy Lichtenstein took comic book imagery and dot printing and blew them up for his version of Pop Art, most famously with Whaam!

Paul Weller had a Whaam! Rickenbacker guitar which he used in The Jam and which I've seen in an exhibition but can't find my photo of it. Here's Paul with it...

Pete Wylie, a Bagging Area hero, had a Pow! guitar...

That guitar made a prime time Top Of The Pops appearance in 1986 when Pete's single Sinful hit the charts and his friend Josie Jones had the privilege of playing it (special mention for the dancing nuns, The Sisters of The Anfield Road)

Sinful is an all timer for me, one of those songs that I can always go back to and if forced to make a list of my X number of favourite songs, would absolutely be on it. 

Sinful (Tribal Mix)

Recently I was sent an EP by Ariadne's Labyrinth which is on my list of releases to write about at greater length but Eno's card and this track, Terminal Dot, came together at the right time- Terminal Dot fuses classical violins, a lovely string arrangement, with some thumping beats and distorted bass, a collision or rave and classical that works really well. 

The portrait of the woman at the top of this post was above the fireplace in a pub we were drinking in, after the Protex Blue gig in Sheffield last weekend. I don't know who she is but she's definitely had enough of the person painting her or boring her with their constant banging on. Withering disdain. 

Anyway, feel free to drop you own suggestions to You can only make one dot at a time in the comment box. 

Forty Minutes Of My Bloody Valentine

The other night I was about to go upstairs. Lou was halfway down, a quizzical look on her face.  

Her: 'There's a horrible, whining, drilling sound coming out of the computer... what is it?'

Me: 'Dunno'.

I rushed upstairs to see what was happening. I'd left my mp3 player plugged in to the USB slot to charge it. When it's fully charged it switches itself on and starts playing random songs, through it's own tiny, tinny speaker. The 'horrible, whining, drilling sound' was You Made Me Realise by My Bloody Valentine. 

Me: 'That's not a horrible, whining, drilling sound. That's You Made Me Realise by My Bloody Valentine.'

A My Bloody Valentine Sunday mix had occurred to me a while back and this seemed like an ideal opportunity to put it together. They are an acquired taste I think it's fair to say and there are times when if the mp3 player is in shuffle mode in the car, they can jar and disrupt a good flow of songs like few other groups. The string bending, feedback, tremelo, full on assault of Kevin Shields and Belinda Butcher against the sometimes raging rhythms of Colm O' Ciosoig's drums and Debbie Googe's river dredging bass can be a heavy jolt to the senses. Equally, the same noise can be uplifting and life affirming in a way all of their own. They also do a beautiful line in a sort of head- spinning, post- coital comedown wooze, something Sofia Coppola knew when she put the soundtrack for Lost In Translation together. 

The music below is almost entirely from their 1988- 1991 heyday. There's nothing from the 2013 mbv album- not deliberately as such, I just didn't have it to hand and couldn't remember anything about it, so if nothing else I will go back to that record and see what it sounds like now. When it came out in 2013 it was their first album since Loveless in '91 and was recorded in bursts up between 1991 and 1997, then resumed by Shields in 2006 and then again in 2011. Instead I've gone for songs from Isn't Anything, Loveless and the EP releases around those albums apart from a cover version they recorded in 1996. 

Forty Minutes Of My Bloody Valentine

• Don't Ask Why
• Slow
• Feed Me With Your Kiss
• Loomer
• Drive It All Over Me
• Map Ref 41°N 93°W
• You Made Me Realise
• Soon 
• Soon (Andy Weatherall Mix)

Don't Ask Why is my favourite MBV song, a gorgeous, swooning tripped out song, gently strummed, chiming, slightly off kilter guitar and Kevin's voice, very clear and upfront. Belinda coos in the background and a shimmering reverb covers everything until the moment at three minutes six seconds where a second guitar comes in like a weather system. It was on the Glider EP released in 1990 in the run up to Loveless, which kept getting pushed back. In his book on Creation Records David Cavanagh speculates that many of the song titles from this period were coded messages to Alan McGee- Soon, Don't Ask Why, Off Your Face. 

Slow was a B-side from the You Made Me Realise 12" in 1988, an indie rock (with the emphasis on weird, disorientating rock) about oral sex. You Made Me Realise is from a point in time when indie guitar music, as made by this band and a handful of others, was going somewhere it hadn't been before. Drive It All over Me is from the same EP, effortless, late 80s brilliance. 

Feed Me With Your Kiss was a single in 1988 and appeared on Isn't Anything. A friend of mine bought Isn't Anything on cassette, played it and took it back, assuming there was something wrong with it. 'The guitars keep slipping out of tune and time, the tape must be too slack or stretched or something', was the gist of his complaint. 'That's what they sound like', he was told.

Loomer and Soon are both from Loveless, released in 1991, a year not sure of groundbreaking, high quality albums. It sounds as breathtaking now as it did then. Soon is Brian Eno's favourite MBV song, the song which sounds like the six minutes where everything Shields was searching for came together- it is both very vague and sharply in focus, guitars hinted at and right in your ears, a blur of memories and feelings worked into something approaching a song. Belinda's vocals sighs and Colm's drums provide the top and the bottom. Everything in between is like the ghost of indie guitar rock, recorded onto tape and then faded, blurred, bleached. Loveless is according to legend the record that nearly bankrupted Creation and McGee's relationship with Shields and the group broke down as a result. He went from My Bloody Valentine to Oasis (you can probably insert your own sentence here depending on your point of view).

Andrew Weatherall's remix is a groundbreaking record too, the acid house dancefloor dynamics and samples taking Soon into another place. Hugo Nicolson, Weatherall's production partner at the time, was presented with the records Andrew wanted to sample and the pair (with the band in the studio wanting to check what was happening to their music and apparently wanting also to see what remix culture was all about and what the process was) went about inventing indie dance and then destroying it at the same time. I wrote about this remix here and the various samples Weatherall and Nicolson used- West Bam, Gang Of Four, Claire Hamill, The Dynamic Corvettes, Rich Nice and as Hugo told us, the voices from a Volvic television advert. 

Map Ref 41°N 93°W is a cover of a Wire song, recorded for an album of Wire covers that came out in 1996 called Whore- Various Artists Play Wire. Lush, Band Of Susans, Bark Psychosis. Lee Ranaldo, Mike Watt and Godflesh are among the other contributors.

Wired

My Bloody Valentine cover Wire's Map Ref 41N 93W for a Wire tribute album released in 1996. Wire's original has an instantly recognisable guitar part, and a sing-song vocal. Kevin Shield's noisy bunch manage to keep the essence of the Wire tune while drenching it in their own distinctive noise, adding the boy-girl MBV vocal.

My Bloody Valentine - Map Ref 41N 93W.mp3

The Fly In The Ointment

One of my several brothers has spent the last, ooh, twenty five years listening to nothing but hip-hop. Occasionally he's bought records by say Bob Marley or Egyptian Lover or Funkadelic, but it's been pretty much a one course diet. So I was a little surprised by the phonecall I got the other day.

Him: Adam, you'll know this, what's that song that goes '1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 is working overtime?
Me: It's 'senses' working overtime not 6. It's XTC.
Him: Who?
Me: The letter X, the letter T, the letter C
Him: Sounds like a rave band
Me: Yeah it does, post-punk/new wave band though.
Him: I just heard it somewhere. Love it. Ordered the 12" on ebay. What else they done? Hey, you could do me a mix cd of stuff like this couldn't you? For christmas?
Me: Yep.

Coincidentally, two days later in a second hand record shop I found a copy of the 7" of XTC's Senses Working Overtime for 99p.

So, hip hop obsessive brother wants a post-punk new wave mix cd. I think this song should go on it- Wire's I Am The Fly, catchy like flu, spikey like , erm, spikes and great in every way.


09 I Am the Fly.wma

RVNG of the NRDS Mock and Toof 'Digit 1'

From the RVNG of the NRDS series of remixes and re-edits this is London duo Mock and Toof getting to grips with post-punk heroes Wire, and their 1978 song Three Girl Rhumba. Not too dissimilar from the original but making the most of that killer riff that 'inspired' Justine Frischman in Elastica's early days, and led to an out-of-court settlement. This re-edit is good stuff.

01 - Digit 1.mp3