Bookmarks: Bow Wow Wow

Louder Than Bombs has caught up with Annabella Lwin, who you'll recall as the thirteen year-old McLaren bounced to the front of Bow Wow Wow:

Well I tweet here and there…I don’t know if I’m an official tweeter. I’m excited to be part of a new generation. A lot has changed obviously. It’s a good thing. It just keeps evolving. There’s an old saying, I don’t know where it came from, but it’s “Don’t put your daughter on the stage Mrs. Worthington”, and that’s when i kind of realized what that meant, through all these years. going from being a novice, to being in a band, to doing what I do now actually.

It definitely is not what it used to be when I started out. I think it’s become more homogenized. I don’t know if music is going to get better or worse, let’s put it that way. Everybody’s doing music in their living room now. The Reality TV world, they tried to look behind the door like “The Wizard of Oz”, but it’s a bit of a disappointment, isn’t it?

Bookmarks: Simon Scott

Headphone Commute have caught up with sound artist (and Slowdive drummer) Simon Scott, and takes a peek at his kit:

Can you please share some aspects of sound design in your work?
I always begin by using a field recordings to compose and create. Since 2010 it’s been consistently The Fens in Cambridgeshire where I’m surrounded by a subterranean landscape that fascinates me, and I generally work with these audio segments in MaxMSP. It’s endless in terms of compositional possibility so I’ve stuck to The Fens as a sound source and I actually don’t want too many options so I haven’t started using some of my field recordings from further afield yet. Right now I like the framework I’ve built for myself in Max and the limitations of just using environmental recordings from my small corner of the world, but I sometimes do need to simply just compose if I am working on a score or other project that isn’t a solo record.

Bookmarks: Wolf Alice

There's an in-depth interview with the lovely Wolf Alice over on DIY:

“Everything else is practice, in a way,” agrees Ellie. “I think those early years are so important. When we look back to our first few tours, when it was playing to ten people in Warrington, that’s really special to me.” What’s led them here, though, is a sense of belief. Even when members were coming and going, when Theo wasn’t taking to his chosen instrument and when Joel was playing live drums for the first time, Wolf Alice only happened because every member realised it was going somewhere.

Bookmarks: Pins

Drowned In Sound meets Pins. Along with the excellent album, pronunciation is on the agenda:

DiS: You've had quite a lot of high-profile support slots. You've had The Fall and Sleater Kinney... or Slater Kinney as it's apparently pronounced... [the girls laugh] Yeah I didn't know that...

LM: Yeah I didn't know that either. Someone said "Slater" Kinney and it sounded weird.

FH: I kept hearing - what's he called on the radio on 6Music? Steve...

LM: Steve Lamacq.

FH: Yeah he kept saying "Slater" Kinney. I was like, what???

What the pop papers said: Big Hard Excellent Fish

You'll remember that we losy Josie Jones earlier this year.

Rummaging in a box of things, I found the Big Hard Excellent Fish interview from the NME...

Click to make readable...

Bookmarks: Lush

Under The Radar catches up with Miki & Emma from Lush. They talk about Chris' death, how horrific their management were, and - of course - about the music:

"I'm not going to say that we were trying to be Britpop," says Berenyi. "Because that's just horrendous. I think the world went Britpop, or certainly Britain went Britpop. I think we just carried on doing the same thing, actually. I don't think there's a huge amount of difference between songs like [Split track] 'Hypocrite' and 'Ladykillers' in terms of spirit."

"It was annoying," adds Anderson, "because people go, 'Oh, Lovelife, they've gone all pop.' But actually, we've always had pop songs. 'For Love' [from Spooky] was a pop song. And so was 'Sweetness and Light' [from 1990's singles compilation, Gala]. It wasn't obscure music. It was always really accessible, songs that were written in a very traditional manner. We were never an experimental sonic band."

Bono: Low tax will save us all

Our old friend Bono granted a lengthy interview to The Observer at the weekend. It appeared in the New Review section, but really should have gone on the business pages it appeared to be marking the point where Bono shifted from apologist, to spokesperson, for capitalism.

Most notably, Bono attempted to justify Ireland's low tax regime as providing a route to prosperity:

"Look, Ireland is not going to back down on this,” he says. “We are a tiny little country, we don’t have scale, and our version of scale is to be innovative and to be clever, and tax competitiveness has brought our country the only prosperity we’ve known. That’s how we got these [tech] companies here."

Trying to use the lure of tiny corporate tax rates to build a prosperous nation is a bit like hoping to find a lasting, loving relationship by sticking your cock through a glory hole.

The companies opening their headquarters aren't actually headquartering there - generally, these tax-efficient operations consist of a bored person on minimum wage answering the phone with "no, we're not expecting Mr Cook in today" and a really, really huge shredding machine. (Although to be fair, Apple also have a room where they've stored all the unsold U2 limited edition iPods.)

The only local businesses who experience an uplift as being part of a low tax economy are brass plate engravers as the multinationals arrive, followed by a similar boost for carpetbag manufacturers.

U2 themselves are a pretty good example themselves - Bono, busily defending the idea that low corporate taxes are brilliant for Ireland did, of course, shift huge chunks of his own money over to mainland Europe when a more eye-catching low corporate tax rate waved a come-hither finger.

On that point, Bono is amusingly slippery, as he ignores the central problem - that he's shafted the country that he professes to love in order to save himself a few quid - by pretending that what's really upsetting people is the secrecy:

It isn’t a clandestine offshore tax haven, Bono insists. “All of our stuff is out in the open. How did people find out about it? Because it’s published. The sneakiness is when you don’t even know what’s going on.”

No, Bono. If someone livestreams themselves pissing through your letterbox, so you can watch as they do it, it doesn't make it alright.

It raises the alarming idea that when Bono watches a movie where the villain tortures the hero, but the villain starts by detailing what that torture will involve, Bono isn't horrified but reaches for the popcorn going "well, the cutting off of the arm and beating around the head has been publicly declared so I don't see there's a problem here."

Apple might be comfortably at home in Cork now - although the most generous headcount is 4000 Apple people, less than one-in-four of all their European staff. But people with longer memories will recall the tremor that ran through the area in 1999 when the globally nimble business realised it was better off making iMacs in Wales, taking two-thirds of the jobs across the border.

And Apple are probably amongst the most generous of the companies who have headquartered in Ireland - the Financial Times visited Endo, a pharmaceutical company who are now based in Dublin:

The global headquarters of Endo International is so new that, apart from a few desktop computers, the most visible purchase to date is the Nespresso machine in the kitchen. Located in the basement of a Georgian house in central Dublin, the company, which makes branded and generic medicines, does not even have a brass plate on the door.

Not even the brass plate engraver got a call.

Maybe the glory hole metaphor is the wrong way round, as Ireland isn't the one shoving its cock through the wall. It's on the other side, providing the service. And, sure, it's getting something out of the arrangement as long as it lasts, but everything could be pulled out without warning, leaving Ireland with a mess to clean up. And never able to look into the eyes of the person making the decision.

Bookmarks: Lush

While the Manics busily rush to sneak in a 20th anniversary Holy Bible event before the 20th anniversary year passes by, there's some other albums turning 20 this year. Including Lush's Split. Marking the occasion, Ghost Life Ghost Life has spoken to the surviving members of the band. Yes, a Lush interview in 2014. I bloody love the internet. It's in depth:

MIKI ‘Split’ was a bit of a rite of passage, I suppose. The band’s three main supports – Howard Gough (manager), Ivo (head of 4AD) and Tim Carr (Warners A&R) – were each having their private crises, and we were left to navigate our way through choppy waters without their previously constant guidance. There were so many opinions and interferences, producers, mixers, UK record label, US record label, video directors, marketing strategies, etc. Expectations were high but every plan sounded as valid as the next and we didn’t know which direction to turn. I​ guess we survived, a bit battered and bruised, and ultimately became a much better band, both on record and live. It left its scars though, and we lost our innocence.

There's also praise for Loz, the drummer from Ride; a link with Nigella Lawson and some warm words for Steve.

Bookmarks: 4AD

This is a few months old now, and so you've probably already consumed it and moved on, but just in case...

BookD interviews Matt Johnson, Miki Berenyi and Simon Raymonde about their time on 4AD.

Jack White creates the worst plentyoffish profile ever

There was a big interview with Jack White in Sunday's Observer, which found a man struggling to balance the weight of his self-created mythos:

A lazaretto is a medical quarantine, traditionally occupied by contagious sea dogs returned from voyage. White is so busy these days that the idea of such a place has become almost exotic: "I fantasise about living in one-room apartments and being in a work camp somewhere, where there's absolutely nothing around me but a cot and a teapot and a sink."

Of course, it's not all as bad as that.

Lazaretto is dedicated to three feminist pioneers: Florence Green from Norfolk, the last surviving veteran of the first world war until her death in 2012 [actually, Tim Lewis, her death didn't stop her being the last surviving veteran]; the American anarchist and writer Voltairine de Cleyre; and "Amazing" Grace Hopper, a computer scientist and rear admiral in the US navy.

That actually sounds quite interesting. So, has this album been informed by those women's experiences?

Er, no:

White admits that he barely knows more than a paragraph's biography of each of them, but he jotted their names down at various points in the recording process. He says: "So, just another way to provoke thought, I guess."

If he'd picked up a different page of his notebook, the album might have been dedicated to 'set PVR for Game Of Thrones' or 'potatoes/washing up liquid/half pound of bananas'.

Maybe not the PVR, though:

White is doing his own bit to turn back the clock: at his gigs, he enforces a strict ban on the audience shooting pictures or video; at home, he only allows his children – Scarlett, eight, and Hank, six – to play with mechanical toys. "There's romance and beauty in that in a real physical way," he says, "and that's more important for them than to just quickly cop to video games and iPads."

Mechanical toys? Mechanical toys? Isn't clockwork a little too fast-pace-of-modern-life for you, Jack? What's wrong with a chunk of wood and a whittling stick?

I feel for his kids. Going to his house must be like when I had to visit a great aunt who only had powdered milk and one chair.

There's one bit, though, where I think the real Jack White peeps through:

"I'm incredibly complicated, incredibly full of energy, incredibly busy and I never stop thinking, I never stop creating. Sitting next to me in a room or laying next to me in a bed, it could be a lot of work. To be friends with me, have breakfast with me, have coffee, is a lot of work, too. It's like you're going to lunch with Larry David, Alan Partridge and Chris Rock all in one person – maybe with a little bit of Woody Allen mixed in there. And some people might not think it's funny!"

Basically, White is a chilled-out entertainer entertainer. I'll bet he does funny voices, too.

But, oh, what work to keep up with a man who channels so many sharp wits! No wonder poor Meg got so tired out.

When you get home, Johnny Borrell is waiting for you

It hasn't been a great twenty four hours for listening to the opinions of those with the initials JB. Joey Barton didn't exactly thrive on Question Time, while Tim Jonze in The Guardian struggles to shape Johnny Borrell's thoughts into some sort of shape.

What could you say as a solo artist that you couldn't with Razorlight?
Err … [long pause, repeats the question] I dunno, I always see more similarities than differences. Errrr … Shit. I dunno. I'm not sure I can answer that with any accuracy whatsoever. Erm, what was the question?

Borrell is a bit vague about the process that went into making his godawful solo album:

I got a group of musicians together and they turned up at my house in the Basque Country to record an album, expecting me to have a studio. But I didn't, I just had a house. We had this 17-year-old kid called João [Mello], who had just turned up from Brazil, playing saxophone.

Now, I might not know how things work in Borrell's world, but I'm pretty sure you don't find seventeen year-old musicians "just turning up" at your door by accident.

Still... Borrell's really pleased at this idea of just turning up, and doing it, in a house.

I didn't have a drum kit so we used buckets instead. Wherever we play – be it a street corner or a festival – there's something very real about it.

That's fair enough, right?

Except... here's Borrell feelings on the problem with modern music:

I think the art of recording is being lost.

That's a bit rich from someone who can't even been arsed to book a studio and find a set of drums.

Jonze then asks about the stupid song titles on the solo record. Borrell doesn't usually read the media, man, but he had read the piece in the Guardian about that:

Well, interestingly, my friend is in literature and she reads the Guardian. She read an article on your website and she said: "Wow, that's amazing, I've never read an article before where the first four sentences all end in an exclamation mark." Now, that's very poor writing. That's got to be bad journalism if your first four sentences have to end with an exclamation mark.

As Jonze points out in a footnote:

None of the first four sentences end with exclamation marks, although the last sentence of the article does end with four!!!!

"A friend in literature" who can't tell the difference between a dog's dick at the end of each sentence and - in a clear Harry Hill reference - an over-the-top four stick at the very end? Now, that's amazing.

He's clearly obsessed with the idea that The Guardian doesn't like him - a pop psychology read would suggest that Borrell is desperate that people consider him sharp, and worldly, and wise; that the Guardian spending a lot of time snickering at him must kill him.

In fact, while we're on the subject of the Guardian, there was somebody on the island, I don't know who, but they wrote a nice letter to the Guardian saying there was never a mention of Johnny Borrell without a mention of his arrogance. And they said that I'd been there for four months and they'd found me to be this and that. So who am I going to trust? The person I've engaged with in their community or the one who's written an article?

It's somewhat difficult to find this letter in the Guardian archive. Although it's amazing that Johnny "very, very rare that I read the press" Borrell managed to come across that piece as well.

Borrell seems convinced he's being asked "leading questions", like The Sun would ask. He's confused the idea of a difficult question with an awkward one.

If we're unlucky, he'll write a song about this. If we're really unlucky, a twelve year-old flautist will turn up at his yurt one day and we'll have to sit through a sodding concept album.

Bookmarks: Slowdive

Slowdive are back together. And giddy, to judge by the Penny Black Music interview:

We're not all better musicians. Neil and Simon are probably better musicians. Rachel is a better mother. Christian and Nick are just better human beings. Any new record that we create will probably follow the same pattern as the previous ones. Neil will have songs and ideas, and we will work around those. Sometimes Neil's ideas will be fully realised, sometimes they will take some work. We are considering branching out into dubstep, but only for $10. Or a pizza. Or failing that All You Can Eat BBQ Rib Night at the Sizzler.

Bookmarks: Kathleen Hanna

You might have enjoyed Everett True's interview with Kathleen Hanna in the Guardian last week; today he's posted the original transcript to Collapse Board:

When I was 13 me and my best friend Angela Cheever were out on a Friday night, hanging out at video arcades, playing Ms. Pac Man, flirting with boys from our school etc…While walking from this place called ‘Pins and Cues’ to ‘Jerry’s Sub Shop’ I noticed a man was following us. We were near the road but there were no cars and when I told Angie about the man we both started walking really fast and so did he, and then we ran and he started chasing us. Nothing was open but we saw a light on at a funeral home so we ran up the stairs and started pounding on the doors screaming. No one came, but the guy freaked out and backed off. I sometimes wonder what would’ve happened if we didn’t run and he would’ve caught up with us.

From puberty on, I felt like me and my friends were always running. From abusive Dads, men on the streets, or even running away from mean things people would say to us that got stuck in our heads. But running meant we thought we were worth saving. That’s why the record is called Run Fast.

Embed and breakfast man: Adam Ant

It's Saturday. That's all the excuse we need for Adam Ant on Swap Shop. Includes a segment of Adam and Noel talking about the recession:



Do not phone or write. This is a recording.

Listen with No Rock: Vini Reilly & Dave Haslam

At the start of last month, Dave Haslam interviewed Vini Reilly about his experiences of depression. The event was organised by CALM and the hope is that it'll persuade people to ask for help if they need it. You can find more about depression at the CALM website or can call the national helpline.

Bookmarks: Arthur Koestler

In Summer 1984, The Paris Review sent Duncan Followell to interview Arthur Koestler. Here's an extract:

KOESTLER

[Picks up a magazine clipping.] Look at this. Did you ever see a magazine called the New Musical Express? It turns out there is a pop group called The Police—I don’t know why they are called that, presumably to distinguish them from the punks—and they’ve made an album of my essay “The Ghost in the Machine.” I didn’t know anything about it until my clipping agency sent me a review of the record.

INTERVIEWER

It was in the hit parade.

KOESTLER

What’s that it was in?

INTERVIEWER

The best-seller list for pop records. Didn’t you get a copy of the record?

KOESTLER

No. I’ve had no contact with the group.

INTERVIEWER

But obviously you are pleased.

KOESTLER

A rather difficult book has become the inspiration for a pop group. It came as a great surprise to me. I’m slightly tickled by it.

[via @thewrongwriter]

Shane McGowan gets some help

The Quietus has a brilliant interview with Shane McGowan; one of the highlights is McGown revealing his unexpected collaborators. The dead:

"I actually see people dictating to me behind me through… they call it the third eye, but the Japs reckon you've got at least eight, apart from the two here. I've seen ghosts behind me in period costume dictating songs on a couple of occasions. 'A Rainy Night In Soho' was automatic writing. I had no idea what it was about. I had a vague idea by the time I got to the fourth verse but until then I hadn't got a clue what was going on."

("The Japs"? Really, Shane?)

It's not entirely unlikely that ghosts would want to work with Shane - if you died years ago, had no body to talk of and some people find your continued existence a befuddling scientific impossibility, wouldn't you look for someone similar to work with?

Paul McCartney absolves Yoko of split responsibility

Dammit, are they going to have rehsoot the Buffy Yoko Factor episode? Paul McCartney has said you can't blame Ono for The Beatles splitting. He says so in an interview with What Is Presumably Now Just David Frost's Head In A Jar:

"She certainly didn't break the group up, the group was breaking up. When Yoko came along, part of her attraction was her avant garde side, her view of things, so she showed him another way to be, which was very attractive to him. So it was time for John to leave, he was definitely going to leave one way or another."

Actually, that doesn't quite say it wasn't down to Ono - 'she showed him there were other things in the world and so it was time for him to leave'. Perhaps you should try again, Paul:

McCartney goes on to say that without the support of Yoko Ono, he believes Lennon would not have written songs such as 'Imagine', adding: "I don't think he would have done that without Yoko, so I don't think you can blame her for anything."

Actually, if - but for Yoko - Imagine would never have been written, it sounds to me like there's something fairly massive you can blame her for. The existence of Imagine.

Paul finally gets round to blaming Alan Klein for the split. Which makes more sense. And how noble of him to only take forty years to getting round to trying to stop fans blaming Yoko.

Bookmarks: The Raveonettes

The Raveonettes have had the bejesus interviewed out of them on NPR:

Foo: "I think people are under the impression that we are a very retro, vintage band — that we sort of stick to those decades of the '50s or '60s. But we've always been a band that really embraced technology. We've always had a lot of samples, and we don't stay true to [dated methods] of production as such, you know, to only play with vintage instruments. I think our music has always been combining all the decades, really."

Pet Shop Boys deny their Lady GaGa song is totally about Lady GaGa

The Pet Shop Boys Ego Pop isn't about Lady GaGa. Of course it isn't. They say it isn't, anyway:

When asked whether the song was inspired by Lady Gaga, Tennant told Attitude: "It's not specifically about Lady Gaga, it's about the modern pop star. Pop music is very ego-driven these days. The modern pop lyric is like a diary almost. In other words, people don't imagine, they just say what it is... A lot of lines [in the song] are direct quotes from what people say in interviews. 'I am my own demographic' is a direct quote."

Hmm. It is, is it? Challenge Accepted.

Obviously, Google is already starting to silt up with Pet Shop Boys lyrics if you go searching for that phrase; and it crops up in the odd dating site profile and - amusingly - in someone else's lyrics. But the first musician using those words who crops up is Jof Owen of The Boy Least Likely To:

I like most of our songs because I kind of wrote them so that someone like me would like them. I am my own demographic. But if I had to pick just one, then there’s a song called "The Boy With Two Hearts" that I’m really proud of on the new album. We recorded all the brass parts with the Grimethorpe Colliery Band. I remember the demo was quite mournful in a really sweet way and I ended up writing relatively simple words for it. It sounds quite sad and Christmassy, and it reminds me of the theme tune to The Flumps but I don’t expect anyone else will think that.

Surely anyone who works with the Grimethorpe Colliery Band to create something like The Flumps can't be the target of Neil's ire?

Begie Adair is a musician in her 60s making music for her generation. Or, as she puts it:

“I always tell people that when it comes to marketing, I am my own demographic,” Beegie laughingly explains. “All these are tunes that I loved when I was in high school and college.”

That seems to be a fair application of the phrase, and her work surely sits outside the remit of Ego Pop?

Perhaps it's not a direct quote at all - maybe the original was "I'm my own demographic". Could Ego Pop be taking aim at, erm, Oregon busker John "skeet" Gretzinger:

I made it my business to learn a few more songs each week from the radio and the rest is history. I'm back to busking pretty much full time again at 59 and having a ball. I'm kind of semi-retired. I don't play in bands or with other musicians at all anymore. I’m too old and grouchy for a band. Too many headaches! Yikes! I couldn't take all that now. And their girlfriends will drive you nuts! Nope! Just me, by myself. I do about 350 - what you might call, classic rock songs. All covers. I don't write. Never have. But it’s cool, because I'm my own demographic! The baby boomers love me. It’s a trick. I just play what they want to hear. But it works for me.

Again, it's hard to see Neil grumbling away over that.

It's possible that the quote doesn't exist online, of course - not all human knowledge has yet been squirted onto the wires (you can't find Hayley's Cake single You Do Voodoo online, for example) - but it seems odd that Tennant would be so certain about it being a direct quote if it wasn't citeable.

More to the point, as the quotes above show, claiming to be your own demographic doesn't have to reek of ego; it can just be a simple statement to the effect that you're part of the audience you're targeting - surely something of a relief compared with men nudging fifty playing to rooms full of teenagers, yes?

Still, all this is something of a sideshow, isn't it? It's about Lady GaGa. Or Madonna. Which is the same thing.