January in Review

Time to reflect...

January in Review

It’s the end of January and the end of the first month of my trying to post something new to my blog every day for a year. As if things weren’t narcissistic enough already, I thought it would be useful to look back on my output for the first month and see what can be learned for the coming months.

This project was conceived to get me off my backside and become acclimatised to the process of sitting down and writing every day. I tend to think of things I want to write about and then they get stuck in my head for three months, before I sit down at the computer and write the entire thing in twenty minutes. However, setting myself a task like this means that there is no time to become insular. The work just has to be done.

In general, things have gone well. I have blogged every day, even if some blogs have gone up at four the next morning (my body clock seems to be set to a twenty six hour schedule). There has been some minor cheating, blogging pieces that were written years ago, but as they hadn’t been posted previously, they still count. That’s meant that I could get on with other bits and pieces. At the beginning of the month I was barely keeping up. Here at the end, I’m a few days ahead.

A number of articles that have been knocking around my head for a while got written in January to varying degrees of success. There was the Best Things Article on Star Trek Deep Space 9, which I’m quite happy with. There was also a trilogy of pieces on Bob Dylan, one of which I wrote years ago, one which had tripped me up for years, but which was pretty much sewn together from the copious notes I had taken. Finally there was a short dialogue concerning the song, ‘Just Like A Women’ written from scratch from an idea I had years ago. ‘Her Ribbons and Her Bows’. was the most enjoyable thing I wrote all month.

On the down side, I don’t think the article, ‘Blue Metal Jazz’ ended up quite how I envisaged it, mainly because I focussed so much on the sections about jazz music, that I forgot to include half of what I wanted to say about heavy metal. The article was written at the beginning of the month, so it had to go up pretty much as soon as I wrote it. The good thing about getting ahead of myself is that I can write something, not touch it for a few days, then looked at it a fresh and do some editing before publication.

To redress the balance, I want to say here what I forgot to say about my love of heavy metal:

I think of all the styles of music, metal is the most literary and the most respectful and reverential to other artistic mediums. Half of what I’ve read, half of what I know comes from intellectual journeys that were begun in the heavy metal world. I first came to appreciate Coleridge and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner because of the Iron Maiden song by the same name (and length). It was the Coleridge poem that inspired Herman Melville to write Moby Dick and Moby Dick that inspired one of the best post-millennial metal albums, Mastodon’s Leviathan. Leviathan is like the soundtrack to Ahab’s inner monologue. If you want an album that reflects the man’s anger and his rage, Leviathan is that album.

Metal bands have always written songs based on novels. One only has to think of Metallica’s ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ based on the Hemingway novel or ‘One’ based on Dalton Trumbo’s terrifying anti-war book, ‘Johnny Got His Gun’. I read both books because of Metallica and went on to read more or less everything Hemingway wrote.

Anthrax wrote a couple of songs based on Stephen King novels, ‘Among the Living’ based on ‘The Stand’ and ‘Misery Loves Company’ based on ‘Misery’. I’ve yet to get into Stephen King, I must admit, but I read 2000ad religiously as a kid, so ‘I Am the Law’ about Judge Dredd was always a favourite Anthrax song. “DROKK IT!”

I have a lot to thank metal bands for. I became aware of Henry Miller’s ‘Tropic of Cancer’ when I saw it on the inner sleeve of Rage Against the Machine’s ‘Evil Empire’. Bruce Dickinson’s ‘The Chemical Wedding’ caused me to read everything by William Blake. Indeed, Wolfsbane frontman, Blaze Bailey, is probably most directly responsible for my becoming a writer. I was a member of the Wolfsbane fan club at 18 and  I can remember reading a piece he wrote shortly after David Icke made his now legendary appearance on ‘Wogan’. It was Bailey’s rant against the sneering media reaction that  inspired me to want to do the same. And now I do.

Metal led backwards towards the blues. To John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson and Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday and Nina Simone. From blues I eventually came to jazz. I was a late convert to the genius of Bob Dylan, but between Guns n’ Roses version of ‘Knockin On Heaven’s’ Door’, Hendrix’s blistering ‘All Along the Watchtower’ and Rage Against the Machine’s grinding interpretation of ‘Maggie’s Farm’, I was well versed in his oeuvre by the time I got there. And metal led through a dozen different crossovers to rap and hip hop, via Cypress Hill, Faith No More, The Beastie Boys, Anthrax and Public Enemy.

I use music as a mood elevator, a metronome for writing, a soundtrack to reading and as a relaxant. I need a wide range of musical genres because I have a wide range of moods and need a palette broad enough to match. Hard rock/heavy metal has the broadest spectrum of any style of music other than jazz. Alice in Chains soothe, Clutch cheer, Slayer get me energised and fired up for writing and Tool and A Perfect Circle drop me into a state halfway between relaxation and nervous tension. I don’t listen to a lot of new metal these days, but then I don’t listen to that much music at all. I have enough to work through as it is.

So there you go, that’s that imbalance restored and the karmic, thermodynamic forces are retuned to parity. To finish up, a selection of my favourite articles you may have missed from the month. I’m spectacularly bad at promoting myself, but I would ask that if you read something I’ve written that you like, please do share it. I only want to be read (and to be rich from being read, but you know, one step at a time).

Click on the links below to be whooshed away to genius.

Heaven, Heaven is a Place, A Place Where Nothing, Nothing Ever Happens 

Three Views Upon the Miraculous

The Community Strikes Back

In Appreciation of Captain Beefheart

Blue Metal Jazz

Her Ribbons and Her Bows

A Woman of Conviction

Youthful Angst

Best Things Ever #17 Star Trek Deep Space 9

Review: Shakespeare Beyond Doubt

So that’s January done with. To February and beyond!

Get it done.

Obsessions

Today, the history of obsessions.

Obsessions

Ever since I was a child I’ve always been obsessed with one thing or another. Always some person, some show or activity that I become consumed with and can’t shut up talking about. I’ve never been obsessively tidy or orderly, never wrote lists or spent hours pouring sweat over the best films of all time, best albums, etc. No, my obsession has always been with the things that my overactive imagination could feast upon. Physicality or simple intellectual pursuit simply aren’t good enough.

I probably started like most children of my generation, fascinated by toys, action men and the like, and the adventures upon which they took me in my fevered imagination. I collected Star Wars toys, with my parents assistance, but only the bad guys, the Empire and Jabba the Hut’s palace and the like and became obsessed with finding figures of even the most obscure characters.

The first thing I seem to remember being seriously obsessed with was the TV series, Fame. I must have been 9. As a 41 year old, I’m consumed with shame by my childhood self. It’s like being into Glee in the 21^st century. I was probably more into the music, I remember having a couple of tapes and rarely being able or allowed to watch the show. These days I hate musicals and the idea of watching people spontaneously break into song or perform complicated dance routines leaves me feeling embarrassed for everyone concerned. A good friend used to think that this kind of thing happened in real life, that people spontaneously broke into song on the streets. My only excuse is that being at a school of performing arts seemed grown up and something I would like to have done. That and I was 9 and like all 9 year olds I didn’t have any taste.

Mind you, two or three years later and things weren’t any better. When all my friends were into punk and post punk and listening to The Jam and The Specials and dressing up as Mods with the two-tone gangster spats, I was obsessed with Michael Jackson and Motown. Mainly Michael Jackson . I was becoming a precocious obsessive, able to turn any conversation around to my chosen specialist subject in a heartbeat. I had the albums, the videos, the books and magazines.

Looking back, my interests were probably more contemporary than most of my school friends. It was the early 80s and yet most of them were obsessed with breaking the music listening population down into Mods and Rockers, like it was 1964 or something. My obsessions may have been mainstream and shit, but at least they were current. Unlike today, where I’m obsessed with aged rock stars and long dead writers.

I guess I’m lucky to have been born when I was. We were the first generation to have home computers and the first to have mass produced home entertainment. The introduction of VHS recording meant I could get a lot of training in towards becoming a poly-obsessive or ubernerd. As soon as Star Wars was broadcast on network television, it was recorded and played and replayed over and over again. I must have seen Star Wars over a hundred times before I reached my teenage years. I was that annoying kid who knew every word and would correct any one who quoted it wrong, never mind how minor the mistake. I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark for the first time on VHS and then Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom at the cinema and became obsessed with Harrison Ford, covering my walls with movies posters and pages ripped out of magazines, consumed by the need to see everything he had been in, no matter how brief his appearance. I first saw Apocalypse Now because Harrison Ford had a minor part, though came to love the film for entirely different reasons. Blade Runner remains my favourite movies of all time, but again for reasons that transcend the original obsession with Harrison Ford. It’s the sci-fi/film noir/detective mix that most appeals to me now.

Eventually Michael Jackson and Harrison Ford gave way to two far more expansive obsessions: American Football and Fighting Fantasy novels. American Football first started to be shown on Channel Four in the early 80s. For a year or two at our primary school the gravel football pitch was used less for proper football and more and more for kids forming offensive and defensive lines across a line of scrimmage. I started watching in 1984, I know this because I randomly picked the Chicago Bears to support and the following season they won the Superbowl (and have done very little since). After that I was obsessed with American Football for years. I read countless books on the rules, the history of the Bears, even Jim McMahon’s autobiography, the Bears quarter back at the time. There was a time when I was rarely to be found without a Bears football shirt or polo shirt or even baseball shirt.

Today I wouldn’t be caught dead wearing a sports shirt of any kind, I’m too fiercely individual to submit to anything so tribal. When Blackburn Rovers won the Premier League a few years after I moved to the town and half the population started wearing Rovers shorts, I jokingly referred to them as the Borg, slowly assimilating the population and destroying individuality. To be honest, I probably thought the same back then and wearing the uniform of a team from a city 3,000 miles from where I lived made me feel unique in a sea of football strips and rugby jerseys. I still watch the occasional game if I’m up late enough, but the obsession has long since faded away.

Fighting Fantasy novels tweaked the same part of my brain as American Football. I wanted to be an American Footballer, I wanted to run away to America and live out the dream, but I had no athletic talent to speak of and so I lived out the fantasy in my head. Likewise the land of goblins and elves.

Fighting Fantasy was a series of chose-your-own-adventure books where you fought monsters and ghouls using dice. Sort of like Dungeons and Dragons, but for kids even too nerdy to have friends to play Dungeons and Dragons with. Fighting Fantasy are still around today, but in a post-ironic world where everyone is allowed to remain a child forever, you can find several of the old titles as phone apps, where you shake your device to roll the die.

I was obsessed with collecting every last Fighting Fantasy title, a much harder job in those pre-internet days. There were also guide books and a short lived magazine and titles like The Riddling Reaver, which pushed more into multi-player roleplaying territory. Fighting Fantasy books were usually traditional fantasy scenarios, with the occasional sci-fi or modern setting. I was obsessed with role playing and chose your own adventure books for years, adding the Lone Wolf series to my collection, which followed a narrative arc, unlike the standard alone titles of Fighting Fantasy.

There was also a three book sequence in which you were Theseus of Ancient Greece, sent to fight the Minotaur. I had all the books in a special bookcase with glass doors so I could just there in my room and admire my collection, longing for the days when the gaps in the collection would be filled, but I never quote got there. It was an escape. I’d go to school and hate being there. I’d come home and imagine a portal through my bedroom wall into another reality. To step through, all I had to do was reach for a book and start reading.

The boy I was then would be gobsmacked by World of Warcraft and Assassin’s Creed and the dozens of other modern games. I was never much of a gamer, my obsessions have always been about transporting me away from reality, whether to a performing arts academy or an American Football stadium or Deathtrap Dungeon. Video games are like films, they’re entertaining but like wheelchairs for the imagination. No match for books, where a symbiotic relationship is formed between author and reader to create an entirely unique experience. Reading is democratic. Video entertainment is more authoritarian.

That said, the Legend of Zelda series on the various Nintendo systems managed to convince to buy their latest consoles throughout my 20s. Ocarina of Time on the N64 was the best thing I ever played, it encapsulated everything I loved about the Fighting Fantasy novels. I’ve never had the hand to eye coordination for games though and I never did get through the final level. Like Fighting Fantasy. There’s still my copy of Fighting Fantasy  No. 10: House of Hell sitting on a bookshelf, waiting for the day when I actually finish the bloody thing. These days it’s an Android app.

In my mid-teens I started to listen to heavy metal, which I’ve written about on a number of occasions. Again I was obsessive. I read Kerrang magazine religiously every week, Metal Hammer and Raw less frequently, to the point where I knew what was happening to most heavy metal groups, whether I liked them or not. My fellow nebs called me Ceefax, after BBC’s teletext news service (the ITV version was called Oracle, but they chose to call me Ceefax ‘cause they were clever cunts). As well as obsessively collecting information, I went after the back catalogues of each of my favourite bands, Metallica, AC/DC, Anthrax, Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Slayer, Alice in Chains, Queensryche, Trouble, Wolfsbane etc. Again, in the days of vinyl and CDs, that was a lot harder, especially in our tiny backwater of the north west of England.

My mate would record Headbanger’s Ball on MTV every Sunday night and I would take the tape home and record my own copy by linking two VCRs together. I even re-re-recorded everything in alphabetical order, ‘cause that’s how much of a nerd I am. The quality was abysmal by the time I’d finished. Today, when we are used to HD quality, it would be unwatchable. Even amongst my fellow metallers, my tastes were as broad as they were eclectic.

Of all my early obsessions, heavy metal is the one that has stayed with me. I listen to many more genres these days and the t-shirts I wear are of clever film or literary references rather than AC/DC or The Almighty, but I still listen to a healthy dose of hard rock and metal (I have written this article to the tune of Tool’s Lateralus and Mastodon’s Crack the Skye). I’m sure that for most people the things they obsessed over when they were 15 or 16 are the ones that are most likely to stay with them. That’s the time in our lives when we are still young enough to feel immortal, but old enough to be first stepping out into the world on our own. Anything which illuminates that period remains sacred for all time.

I’ve always been a nerd, always into science fiction, always bright but lazy and, being dragged around from one part of the country to another for most of my formative years, I hated going to new schools and having to start over with a new set of friends and enemies all the time. I didn’t apply myself until many years after school, but in my early 20s I went to night school, did a foundation year in Physics and Maths and wangled my way on to an Astrophysics degree. I became so obsessed with studying during that foundation year that I’d wake up at 6am needing to differentiate something. I’d roll over, pick up a pad and pen, write down a algebraic equation and perform the calculation before rolling back over and sleeping through till 9.

I’m obsessive, but my obsessions don’t always last. Getting to university was as far ahead as I thought things through and once there I didn’t really have an idea what I wanted to do next. I did very little work in a degree that requires a lot of study and assessment, managed to scrape through, usually on a single night’s revision, but by the time I got to 2^nd year, I was even less interested in studying physics and instead smoking pot, playing Ocarina of Time and reading Ulysses.

Ulysses blew my mind. I doubt I understood more than 20%, especially through the cannabinoid haze, but reading Joyce for the first time was, for me at least, a mind altering experience that no mere narcotic could ever match. I dropped out and read more than I’d ever read before, knowing that writing was what I wanted to do with my life. Well I’ve got that far at least, so now I’m trying to make it my profession too. I’ve learnt one lesson at least. Always be thinking a couple of obsessions ahead.

I’m still obsessive. I have shelves full of books on James Joyce and Shakespeare and Bob Dylan. I own seven different versions of Moby Dick (a book about obsession told by an obsessed author via an obsessively descriptive narrator). I collect and hoard books the way some people hoard shoes. The completest who once longed for a complete set of Fighting Fantasy novels, the complete set of Slayer’s back-catalogue, now scours second-hand bookshops seeking out additions to Emile Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series, which runs to 20 volumes (and one short story). I’m still about 12 short (plus one short story).

Obsession is a lot easier than it used to be. A couple of years ago I became obsessed with completing my father’s Time-Life Seafarers series. Ten volumes had been lying around my mum’s house for fifteen years since he died. The series ran to 22 volumes. Without much effort, I completed and read the entire set in less than a year, picking up second hand copies from Abe Books and eBay, usually for a few pence. There’ no challenge if it’s too easy, so the Zola and Moby Dick versions I buy only if I find them under my own steam. It’s a sad life, but it’s one I enjoy.

My main obsessions are writing and trying to make sense of that impossible James Joyce novel, Finnegans Wake. Actually, the Wake isn’t a novel, it’s 20 year intensive Masters Degree in language, semiotics and mythology. It’s a challenge and I like a challenge. Finally I’ve found something worthy of my obsessive tendencies.

As for writing, I’m slowly getting to the point where I want to be. Like differentiation, I often find myself waking up in the early hours needing to write something down, an idea, a snatch of poetry or clever phrase. Trying to post something new to my blog every day for a year is certainly obsessive behaviour, but I’ve treated writing with less respect than it deserves over the years, going weeks or months without writing a word. I’m getting to the point of writing from start to finish two or three pieces a day and working on drafts of more complicated writing. It might sometimes be rushed, not to the highest standard, but that’s part of the learning process. Part of the obsession. Obsession is how you become an expert at something. Otherwise you would have no hope.

I’d rather be all consuming than all consumed. Obsession is life. I would feel lifeless without it.

Get it done.

See also (click links)

Bloomsday 2011

Bruce Dickinson: The Chemical Wedding

Time-Life Seafarers Series

(as well as everything else on this blog, for which I do an obsessive amount of research)

Blue Metal Jazz

Today we're thinking about the blues, metal and jazz. Mainly jazz though.

Blue Metal Jazz

These days whenever anyone asks me for my favourite genre of music I give this reply: Blues, because it is grandfather to my second and third favourites genres of music, heavy metal and jazz. Indeed, there can hardly be a style of music (outside of classical and opera) that has not been influenced by blues in the last century. I once saw on TV a Danish neo-Nazi heavy metal group singing white supremacist lyrics over 12 bar blues. Sometimes incredulity can only give way to hysterical laughter.

As previously written about in an article on Bruce Dickinson’s ‘The Chemical Wedding’, heavy metal was the first music scene I got into. If I’d been born a decade earlier, I’d have undoubtedly been a punk, but I was a teenager in the late 80s and it was heavy metal at this time that was in the ascendancy. In many ways, I’m glad. Punk is fine and sometimes, as with the first few Clash albums or that one vitriolic offering from the Sex Pistols, even brilliant. Punk though was very much of its time, visceral and immediate, it made no apologies and it acknowledged few debts to its roots. It also had, ultimately, a limited range.

The reasons that I grew to love metal are the same reasons that I have grown to love jazz. On the musical spectrum, both occupy an enormous range of styles. They also blur the boundaries between neighbouring genres. Are AC/DC a rock band or a heavy metal band? Is Nina Simone a blues singer or a jazz singer? The answer in each case is both.

With both metal and jazz there is a bewildering breadth of styles, from blues rock to hard rock to glam rock (thankfully a dying breed), speed metal to black metal to progressive and power metal . There’s modal jazz, cool jazz, free jazz, and jazz-fusion; bebop, hard bop and fast bop. They can even encroach upon each other’s style, as in The Bad Plus’s kick ass jazz version of Sabbath’s ‘Iron Man’. Or listen to any Iron Maiden album featuring Nico McBrain on drums, especially ‘Seventh Son of a Seventh Son’, to hear a jazz trained drummer at the top of his game.  Most of the best metal drummers list jazz legends like Chick Webb and Buddy Rich as major influences, in the same way that Tony Iommi credits gypsy jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt  as being instrumental to his playing style (see ‘Planet Caravan’ on ‘Paranoid’).

Of course, as similar as they may be in some respects, the two styles of music are vastly different in a great many more. Consequentially, I tend to listen to each under very different circumstances. Metal is my getting stuff done music. When I sit down at my desk to write of a morning (ok, afternoon), I usually need something rhythmic and plodding to shift me into writing mode, the bass drum propelling me forward, banishing any lethargy from my soul.

Jazz though is for reading. To settle down to the sofa with a volume of Alice Walker, Asimov or Melville, one needs a good jazz album. Most of the musicians I love are favourites because of their lyrical ability, but it’s difficult to listen to them when reading, because instead of concentrating on the words on the page, I’m lip synching to the words in the air. Jazz though wraps itself around the words, compliments them, soundtracks and illuminates them. Rock music kick-starts my day, jazz draws it to a close.

I came to jazz the way most people have come to jazz over the last fifty years, via Miles Davis and ‘Kind of Blue’. If you’re used to more regular or mainstream forms of music then listening to jazz is like learning to speak a new language. ‘Kind of Blue’ serves as Rosetta Stone to this arcane tongue. It’s also a fine indicator of how far your comprehension has progressed. There was a time when I hated jazz and even thirty seconds of any jazz album was enough to make me feel physically sick. First listening to ‘Kind of Blue’ was like hearing Beefheart’s ‘Trout Mask Replica’ for the first time. Or struggling through that first, tortuous reading of ‘Finnegans Wake’. It was jarring, strange and didn’t always make a whole lot of sense.

These days I speak jazz fluently and ‘Kind of Blue’ sounds to me as mainstream as anything else I listen to. To be honest, I prefer ‘Sketches of Spain’, but that’s solely because of Miles’s heavenly interpretation of Rodrigo’s ‘Concerto de Aranjuez’, one of my favourite pieces of classical music. That said, ‘Kind of Blue’ is in many ways the perfect jazz album, the musical equivalent of ‘Frankenstein’ or Rimbaud’s ‘Ma Boheme Fantaisie’ in the original. It’s musica universalis, the music of the spheres in which ancient philosophers and eighteenth century astronomers and composers believed. Miles Davis is to jazz what J. S. Bach is to the classical tradition.

As mentioned earlier, Nina Simone blurs the lines between blues and jazz, as well as pop and rock, from covers of Leonard Cohen, the Beatles and half a dozen Dylan tracks, to her own compositions, like ‘Mississippi Goddam’, written in response to myriad racist murders committed in the 1960s (she called it a show tune for a show that hadn’t been written), to the instrumentals that showed off her sheer virtuosity on the piano. The latter, in particular, are showcased on her 1958 debut album, ‘Little Girl Blue’. To hear songs like ‘Central Park Blues’, ‘Good Bait’, the opening to ‘Mood Indigo’ is to experience serenity. These are complimented by the fragile tenderness of her voice in ‘He Needs Me’, ‘I Loves You Porgy’ and the title track, ‘Little Girl Blue’.

‘Little Girl Blue’ also contains perhaps Nine Simone’s most famous track, ‘My Baby Just Cares For Me’, made famous when used in an advert in the 1980s, selling a product the name of which I care neither to name or even indeed recall.

Nina got screwed out of the royalties for her first few albums and was understandably belligerent in refusing to play any of their tracks live, making sure audiences comprehended her exact reasons. The albums still exist however and the world is a better place for their existence. She could be tough, demanding, insisting people refer to her as Dr Simone after she was awarded an honorary doctorate, but I guess she had to be. There isn’t an African-American musician in the last century who hasn’t experienced the kind of abuse that should fill any rational human being with revulsion. Slaves made America, north and south, what it is today and virtually every musical style to come out of the States in the last hundred years, good, bad and indifferent, is infused with the blues. A lot of the time I think the kinds of racism that is pointed towards the African American population is born out of jealousy and pure resentment.

I once knew a couple, she of Afro-Caribbean, he of eastern European Jewish decent. In Britain, few people looked at them twice, yet I was told that in the States, even in Manhattan, people on the street would regularly drop out of reality in seeing them together. My response upon hearing this was, what, has no one in New York ever heard of George Gershwin? The music of Gershwin embodies the artistic evolution that results in cultural cross fertilisation. ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ is often mislabelled a classical track, but it is as much jazz music as anything. For many, ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ is the theme song of New York, the soundtrack to Woody Allen’s Manhattan, one of the cultural crucibles of the world, an area of outstanding ethnic mixing. But then Gershwin’s all-black opera, ‘Porgy and Bess’, a work forged in the Manhattan melting pot by the son of east European Jewish immigrants was a flop at the time of its original production in the 30s, derided and sneered at by the usual subjects. It’s heartening to know that ‘Summertime’ from ‘Porgy and Bess’, with lyrics by DuBose Heyward, became, briefly, for a time, the most recorded song in history a couple of years ago, with everyone from Billie Holiday, Janis Joplin, Tom Waits and Louis Armstrong recording versions of the song. Nina Simone recorded her own version. Miles Davis too.

Jazz blurs not only into blues, but into classical music. Aside from Gershwin, some of the greatest American composers of the 20^th century came out of jazz. One has only to think of Count Basie and Duke Ellington, the two greatest composers, pianists and band leaders to come out of the era of swing and big band. “One more time.” Many of the most recorded jazz standards in recording history are Duke Ellington compositions, ‘It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)’, ‘ In A Sentimental Mood’ and ‘Mood Indigo’. “One more, once.” The high pitched horns of the Count Basie Orchestra almost define the sound of the 1940s. It somehow doesn’t sound right hearing them without the occasional doodlebug exploding outside.

Nina Simone I would characterise as my favourite female singer. Yet for all time jazz composer and performer, I can only pick one man and that is Charles Mingus. Much as I love ‘Little Girl Blue’ ‘Kind of Blue’, ‘Sketches of Spain’, I adore ‘Mingus Ah Um’ above all others. If the ‘Count Basie Orchestra’ are the sound of the 40s, ‘Mingus Ah Um’ defines the 1950s, even if it wasn’t recorded until the decade’s final year (I can be forgiven, as I wasn’t born at the time). Released in the same year as ‘Kind of Blue’ and the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s peerless ‘Time Out’, ‘Mingus Ah Um’ somehow encapsulates that time more than its contemporaries. ‘Kind of Blue’ is timeless and ‘Time Out’ mixed up with so many styles of world music as to almost escape the gravitational pull of jazz altogether.

‘Mingus Ah Um’, with its defining track, ‘Fables of Faubus’, written in mockery of Orval Faubus, the Governor of Arkansas who deployed the National Guard in order to prevent two African-American students from attending high school in Little Rock, stands out as an album of its time. It’s an album of outstanding tracks, ‘Better Git it in Your Soul’, ‘Goodbye Pork Pie Hat’, ‘Jelly Roll’ and ‘Self-Portrait in Three Colours’.

Like Ellington, Basie and Gershwin, Mingus is a genius composer. His meisterwerk, ‘Epitaph’, is so complicated that it was only successfully performed for the first time more than a decade after his death. Any fan of Radiohead will know Mingus’s work, if only by proxy, with both ‘Pyramid Song’ and ‘We suck Young Blood’ both heavily influenced by the Mingus track, ‘Freedom’ (from the album, ‘Mingus, Mingus, Mingus, Mingus, Mingus’, a title that inspired at least one ‘Jazz Club’ sketch on 90s programme, ‘The Fast Show’).

Indeed, it’s indicative of how far my comprehension of jazz music has come that there are so many jazz artists that I listen to these days that I have not yet even mentioned, including Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughn, Lee Morgan and Sonny Rollins, Charlie Parker, Dizzie Gillespie, Thelonius Monk, Cassandra Wilson and The Bad Plus.

I still listen to heavy metal, but much of it being the music of my youth and, strangely for a genre firmly rooted in the mid-twentieth century, the list of jazz artists I listen to is marginally more contemporary than that of the metal. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, what’s contemporary is what’s new to you in that instant. I read 102 books last year and only one of them was published within the year (Philip Hoare’s, ‘The Sea Inside’), so who needs contemporary? The past is another country. They may do things differently there, but it also means there’s a lot to discover for yourself, as if it had never been discovered before.

Get it done.

Playback

Since the Fall/Rupture/Event, Dave Keenan has been plummeting backwards through key moments in his life. It's not an uncommon phenomenon, given all the people that were living in the past when the rift opened.

For Dave, though, it's different. For Dave always loved music and always wanted to be a musician, but he lacked the dexterity or discipline required to learn an instrument. So instead he would listen alone and air guitar and picture himself performing for all the people who never took him seriously. How naive of him to think musicians would be held in any higher esteem than the rest of society.

Since the Rupture, though, this is exactly what Dave has done. Now a virtuoso guitarist, he jerks backwards through time, playing gigs to the people in his past, accompanied by a fleet of the finest musicians. The following are transcripts of his liner notes, including personnel and set lists.

Note on text: 'played spontaneously' indicates where a member of the audience stood up and played an instrument that appeared in their hands. The majority of those involved reported the experience as being a positive one and many went on to take up an instrument for real.

 ***

Dave - Vocals (but where stated) & Guitar

Ricardo - Vocals & Guitar

Sid (½ of SidLee) - Vocals & Bass

Andy - Drums

Dee - Vocals, Keyboards, Strings, Guitar & Banjo

Lee Mai (½ of SidLee) - Wind & Brass

Where I came in. Can't say when. Sam was there. Murray & Sarah too. Can only have been days before. Making peace.

Ever have that dream where you're caught jerking off in public? I felt like that, standing there, holding something in my hand, everyone looking at me. Instead of my dick, though, it was a guitar I was holding. Nylon strings. Rico asked if I was ok. He started to pound out the rhythm again and I somehow knew what to do. From there, we did a great gig and none of it seemed odd for an instant.

Dave and Ricardo

Diablo Rojo - Rodrigo y Gabriella

How Does it Feel? - Roy Harper

Tom Tiddler's Ground - Roy Harper - Lee Mai handing out recorders to some of the kids and showing them the melody to play along.

By the Riverside - Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee (Rico - vocals/guitar, Dave - harp)

Four Piece

Song for the Dead - Queens of the Stone Age (Sid - Vocals) - These first few songs are about us establishing our authority over the audience. Then we can start bringing people in with us.

No One Knows - Queens of the Stone Age

Machine Men - Bruce Dickinson

Down Payment Blues - AC/DC

Gone Shootin' - AC/DC

Bad Boy Boogie - AC/DC (Rico - Vocals: Dave - Lead Guitar)

Full Band

Great King Rat - Queen - Lisa spontaneously played acoustic guitar in the middle. We hugged at the end and she kissed me and said she'd forgiven me.

My Fairy King - Queen (Dee - Vocals) - Rico's out in the audience. Couple of guitars with people out in the crowd, hooked to up a short delay to play the middle section. Each sequence of notes are played forwards a couple of seconds before the reverse comes into effect through the speakers. He used to the same with the Beatles, 'I'm only Sleeping', though we don't play that one so much these days.

You Don't Understand Me - Raconteurs (Dee - Piano/Vocals) - Just the band here. Gives them a break and you find at this stage that they admire just watching you play.

Top Yourself - Raconteurs (Dee - Banjo) Sid's brother's mate spontaneously bashing away on piano at the end there. Not much of a trick to it, any chord in key will do.

You Know You're A Man - Captain Beefheart (Rico - Vocals) - All kinds of brass action and other spontaneous shit going on all over these Beefheart songs. We love playing Beefheart, the possibilities in his music are endless. With just about everything else we play, the instrument is played by the same person for the duration of their part. The Captain won't be restricted to such narrow roles though, and his music flies all over the place, three notes played by this person here, next four played at the end of the room. Not even the band play every note. The rest of the evening is almost in our complete control, but we throw these songs in to mix things up for ourselves, as much as anything. It's terrifying. Also exhilarating.

Bat Chain Puller - Captain Beefheart

Grow Fins - Captain Beefheart

Big Eyed Beans From Venus - Captain Beefheart

Big in Japan - Tom Waits - Waits songs are all about the journey into self. We don't have to do anything special here, just play, sing the words and watch everyone spacing out on the trip of their lives. Occasional spontaneous players emerge from their trance to play.

Clap Hands - Tom Waits

Tango Till They're Sore - Tom Waits

God's Away on Business - Tom Waits - This one goes all Beefheart. The brass is all over the audience. Have the 'Ha!' in the middle down pat, so that I can make it ripple through the crowd, like a wave.

Talking At the Same Time - Tom Waits

Bad As Me - Tom Waits

Satisfied - Tom Waits

Brown Sugar - Rolling Stones

One More Weekend - Bob Dylan

The Man in Me - Bob Dylan - Everyone singing, La-la-la etc. Piece of piss.

Sabotage - Beastie Boys (Sid - Vocals) - Everyone shouting, Listen all of y'all there's a sabotage etc. At this point, we're very much phoning it in.

2 + 2 = 5 - Radiohead - Rock out. No other reason.

Down is the New Up - Radiohead - We do this one with a double orchestra of audience members. Dee conducts, me on piano, Rico making other electronic noises. Brought the house down tonight.

Jigsaw Falling into Place - Radiohead - More rocking out for the hell of it.

Why Don't You Write Me - Simon & Garfunkel - Member of the audience spontaneously plays one half of the intertwining sax solos with Lee Mai. One of John's mates this time, I think.

Superman's Big Sister - Ian Dury & the Blockheads- Double orchestra again. Same setup.

Cleaning Windows - Van Morrison - Lee Mai and three specially picked brass players. Girls she was at college with.

Encore

Give Us Bubblewrap - HMHB

Depressed Beyond Tablets - HMHB

When the Evening Sun Goes Down - HMHB (Lee & Dee on penny whistles with the kids)

 ***

2013

Dave - Vocals (but where stated) & Guitar

Ricardo - Vocals & Guitar

Sid (½ of SidLee) - Bass

Andy - Drums

Dee - Keyboards, Strings, Guitar & Banjo

Lee Mai (½ of SidLee) - Wind & Brass

I was in a bad place right about now. Drinking too much. Not working. So lazy, I didn't even bother the stand up to go through my one man mime act. I spent most of the time slumped down in a bean bag on the Xbox, same playlist ringing in my ears hour after hour, half singing, half growling, breaking off from Gears of War now and then to take a solo, giving two fingers to the fuckers who got me sacked. Depressing, when you think back. To be honest, if the world hadn't ended, I'd probably have ended myself.

In the rerun, things played out much better.

Four Piece

Grind - Alice in Chains

Hollow - Alice in Chains

My God is the Sun - Queens of the Stone Age

Beanman (Camera Part One) - Apes, Pigs & Spacemen - For me it's always been about the lyrics. All about singing the words I love best and communicating them to new ears. These A, P & S songs are all off their second albums, Snapshot. It's virtually unknown, which is bullshit, 'cause it's one of the best collections of sustained lyrical brilliance that I know.

Monster - Apes, Pigs & Spacemen

Blood Simple - Apes, Pigs & Spacemen - 'I've always known ya stubborn and malicious and pathetic, but I didn't realise until know exactly how stupid'. Take that bitch!

Full Band

Hollow - Apes, Pigs & Spacemen - Violins spontaneously played by Lisa's mates

Trouble - Apes, Pigs & Spacemen - 'An innocent observer, rather like poor Joesph K, I find I'm implicated from a thousand miles away'. Come on! Got the audience doing all kinds during this one. My mate Mike did all the mournful moaning, spotlit, while Dee played the glockenspiel parts on the back of a T-Rex skeleton.

Sixteen Saltines - Jack White - This turned into a bit of Jack White mini-set. Blunderbuss hadn't been out that long.

Hypocritical Kiss - Jack White

Weep Themselves to Sleep - Jack White - Loved playing the duelling solos here, me and Rico fading reappearing in other parts of the hall with each distorted back and forth.

Old Enough - The Raconteurs (Dee - Violin)

Top Yourself - The Raconteurs (Dee - Banjo)

Carolina Dream - The Raconteurs - Another la-la-la singing crowd moment. Hard to get these wrong. Remembering all the lyrics is tricky. Just got through it.

Nadine - Chuck Berry (Rico - Vocals)

All Along the Watchtower - Jimi Hendrix (Rico - Vocals) - Weird shit

Twice As Hard - Black Crowes

Thick n Thin - Black Crowes

Duquesne Whistle - Bob Dylan- Song was a year of so old at the time, but no one in the band had actually played it before. Could we get it right first time? With a little help from the audience, yes.

You Know You're A Man - Captain Beefheart (Rico - Vocals) - Time for things to go all Beefheart. Love it.

Bat Chain Puller - Captain Beefheart

When I See Mommy, I Feel Like A Mummy - Captain Beefheart

Nowadays a Women's Gotta Hit A Man Captain Beefheart (Rico - Vocals)

Too Much Time - Captain Beefheart

Big Eyed Beans From Venus - Captain Beefheart

Sympathy For the Devil - Rolling Stones

Paint it Black - Rolling Stones

In the Dark Places - PJ Harvey (Dee - Vocals) - This gave me Goosebumps, I will confess.

Weird Fishes - Radiohead - Like Waits's songs, Radiohead is all about taking people into themselves, rewiring them and sending them on their way anew. No one leaves a worse person than when they arrived, and that's our guarantee.

Bodysnatchers - Radiohead

Jigsaw Falling Into Place - Radiohead

Down is the New Up - Radiohead - Same way we always play it, but with a new twist. We take them in to themselves with Radiohead and we bring them out, to find themselves sat in a horseshoe in tuxes and ball gowns, each tuning up an instrument. Dee steps forward, lifts her baton, and we're off.

New Shoes - Crazy Gods of Endless Noise - Sudden desire to play a couple of Crazy Gods songs. Wondered what would happen. Not as much as I'd hoped, though we did get very literal for a second there, every line triggering a vision in air that dissolved and reformed as the song moved on.

Trapped Water - Crazy Gods of Endless Noise - Ditto

Just A Man - Faith No More - Entire crowd coming in as chorus at the end here. Great way to end.

Encore

Enjoy Yourself - The Specials- Specials songs jump all over the crowd like a Beefheart song, but with a lot more predictability. Good fun just to watch it running through people.

A Message to You Rudy - The Specials

Gangsters - The Specials

Ghost Town - The Specials  

 ***

2011

Dave - Vocals & Guitar

Ricardo - Vocals & Guitar

Sid (½ of SidLee) - Vocals & Bass

Andy - Drums

Ah yes. This was the week '90 Bisodol (Crimond)' came out, I discovered Half Man, Half Biscuit (HMHB), and played little else for months. Little happened here of note, except for the simple joy of singing some great lyrics ('at the end of the day, just like I say, we'll take each Armageddon as it comes'). Everyone should know of the Biscuit.

4AD3DCD - HMHB

This Leaden Pall - HMHB

Numanoid Hang-glide - HMHB

Even Men With Steel Hearts - HMHB (a rare appearance tonight by Lee Mai on trombone)

For What is Chatteris... - HMHB

Shit Arm, Bad Tattoo - HMHB

Surging Out Of Convalescence - HMHB

Upon Westminster Bridge - HMHB

Joy Division Oven-Gloves - HMHB

Depressed Beyond Tablets - HMHB

Bogus Official - HMHB

We Built This Village On A Trad. Arr. Tune. - HMHB

Give Us Bubblewrap - HMHB

Evening of Swing (Has Been Cancelled) - HMHB

Bad Losers On Yahoo! Chess - HMHB

Took Problem Chimp To Ideal Home Show - HMHB

Totnes Bickering Fair - HMHB

On The 'Roids - HMHB

Tonight Matthew I'm Going To Be With Jesus - HMHB

Them's the Vagaries - HMHB

Thy Damnation Slumbereth Not - HMHB

When the Evening Sun Goes Down - HMHB (Lee Mai playing two penny whistles at once)

Left Lyrics in the Practice Room - HMHB

Rsvp - HMHB

Tommy Walsh's Eco House - HMHB

Joy in Leeuwarden (We Are Ready) - HMHB

Rock and Roll is Full of Bad Wools - HMHB

Paintball's Coming Home - HMHB

 ***

2007

Dave - Vocals (but where stated) & Guitar

Ricardo - Vocals & Guitar

Sid - Bass Sid (½ of SidLee) - Vocals & Bass

Andy - Drums

Dee - Keyboards, Strings, Guitar & Banjo

Lee Mai (½ of SidLee) - Wind & Brass

She was still on my mind, but there was a new love in my life, Lisa. Beautiful, beautiful Lisa. It all frittered away to nothing in the end, but I did end up using her as substitute for Sam, carrying on the same arguments that were still raging in my head.

By now I've come to see this experience as a journey into redemption, a chance to make amends and no excuses for leaving loose ends. Previously I arrived back a day or a few hours before each gig. Here it was a week. Just enough time to set things right and move on. If I had to pick, of all the gigs we've done down the years, this is the one I had the most fun performing. Big sloppy grin on my face all night.

Dave and Ricardo

Diablo Rojo - Rodrigo y Gabriella

Four Piece

Wynona's Big Brown Beaver - Primus (Sid - Vocals)

Song For the Dead - Queens of the Stone Age (Sid - Vocals)

No One Knows - Queens of the Stone Age

Careful With That Mic. - Clutch (Rico - Vocals)

Red Horse Rainbow - Clutch

Cypress Grove - Clutch

Promoter - Clutch

Snakecharmer - Rage Against the Machine (Rico - Vocals) - Lisa loved Rage and Dub War and Rico spent longer on the mike than usual tonight as a favour to me. In total command, he was, though. Made every womb within a half a mile radius flutter (as usual).

Tire Me - Rage Against the Machine (Rico - Vocals)

Down Rodeo - Rage Against the Machine (Rico - Vocals)

Enemy Maker - Dub War (Rico - Vocals)

Silencer - Dub War (Rico - Vocals)

Can't Stop - Dub War (Rico - Vocals)

Spiritual Warfare - Dub War (Rico - Vocals)

Fool's Gold - Dub War (Rico - Vocals)

Voodoo Child (Slight Return) - Jimi Hendrix (Rico - Vocals, Dave - Toilet)

Full Band

This Must Be the Place [Naive Melody] - Talking Heads - After a slow start with the spontaneous events, they now take a hold with a vengeance. All kinds of electronic action going on here, keyboards flying around all over the shop.

Psycho Killer - Talking Heads

Beanman (Camera Part One) - Apes, Pigs & Spacemen - I see this song as anticipating Simon Cowell by a good decade: 'He rubs his hands together on what's rightfully theirs, and tells the stars it's he who makes them shine'.

Blood Simple - Apes, Pigs & Spacemen

Hollow - Apes, Pigs & Spacemen

Trouble - Apes, Pigs & Spacemen

Three Changes - The Good, the Bad & the Queen - From Three Changes to I Want to Be Straight, the music wouldn't stay in the same place for ten seconds. Hard to keep a hold of the reigns with all that's going on. Thank heavens for Andy! Steady as a rock.

Gangsters - The Specials

Dance Little Ruddy - Ian Dury & the Blockheads (Rico - Vocals)

Mash It Up Harry - Ian Dury & the Blockheads (Rico - Vocals)

I Want to Be Straight - Ian Dury & the Blockheads

Superman's Big Sister - Ian Dury & the Blockheads - Double orchestra. Kick ass.

2 + 2 = 5 - Radiohead - Introspection time. Mind blowing.

You and Whose Army? - Radiohead

Knives Out - Radiohead

Stop Whispering - Radiohead

Mississippi - Bob Dylan

Summer Days - Bob Dylan - Here, we play the rhythm sections and let all the little guitar licks dart about the crowd.

Bye and Bye - Bob Dylan

Ain't Talking - Bob Dylan

Grow Fins - Captain Beefheart (Rico - Vocals)  - Beefheart time. Madness and we're gone.

When I See Mommy, I Feel Like a Mummy - Captain Beefheart

Nowadays a Woman's Got to Hit a Man - Captain Beefheart (Rico - Vocals)

Too Much Time - Captain Beefheart

Big Eyed Beans From Venus - Captain Beefheart

***

2002

This one happened a few days before I found out what she'd been up to. This time, of course, I already knew. I arrived forty eight hours before the gig and had it out with her, and I wasn't even a dick about it. It was still bitter, some things you can't change, but more amicable. Less hateful. They came to the gig, and I still wasn't a dick. They even joined in on a couple of numbers. I heard both learned to play after. Formed a band. Good luck to them. I'm not bitter. Not much.

Longest set we yet played, over three hours. Good night. Good to see the look on their  faces. I took some pleasure in that. But then, I still had them to deal with. Always there's another angry couple that I have to set things right with.

Dave - Vocals (but where stated) & Guitar

Ricardo - Vocals & Guitar

Sid (½ of SidLee) - Vocals & Bass

Andy - Drums

Dee - Keyboards, Strings, Guitar & Banjo

Lee Mai (½ of SidLee) - Wind & Brass

Dave only

Black Eyed Dog - Nick Drake

Working Class Hero - John Lennon

Dave & Ricardo

Going to California - Led Zeppelin

That's the Way - Led Zeppelin

Four Piece

Travelling Riverside Blues - Led Zeppelin (Rico - Vocals)

All Your Love - John Mayall & His Bluesbreakers (Rico - Vocals, Dave - Lead Guitar)

Safe As Milk - Captain Beefheart - Here comes the Captain Beefheart , Crazy Bonanza ][

You Know You're A Man - Captain Beefheart (Rico - Vocals)

Down Payment Blues - AC/DC - Full on rock out

Gone Shootin' - AC/DC

Riff Raff - AC/DC (Rico - Vocals, Dave - Lead Guitar)

Full Band

Fearless - Pink Floyd - Just for the mischievous pleasure of making the entire crowd, even the Mancs, sing 'You'll Never Walk Alone'.

San Tropez - Pink Floyd

Great King Rat - Queen - Got him playing the acoustic part. Got a nod of approval from her.

Stone Cold Crazy - Queen

New Feeling - Talking Heads

Harry Rag - The Kinks

Big Black Smoke - The Kinks

Sunny Afternoon - The Kinks - Entire front row taking the accordion part. Quite a sound.

Autumn Almanac - The Kinks

Big Sky - The Kinks - Roof opened to the heavens, hall bathed in blue, clouds drifting in, until we feel like we're performing on top of the world.

All of My Friends Were There - The Kinks

Five Years - David Bowie - For all of these Bowie songs, we got other people playing the acoustic part, while I ran about like a dick, singing with my arm draped over each new guitarist, clothes and make-up cycling through Bowie personas. The guitarist here is Len, a guy I used to share a pedestal with at work.

Queen Bitch - David Bowie - Guitarist, Sam.

Rock n' Roll Suicide - David Bowie - Guitarist, my brother, Tony.

Fixing a Hole - The Beatles - Ghost of Mozart on the harpsichord

Being For the Benefit of Mr Kite - The Beatles - Like what we do with 'Down is the New Up', only 60s, la. Psychedelic baby. Groovy.

I'm Looking Through You - The Beatles - I took a little pleasure directing this one straight at them, knowing their turn would be next. I know where this is all going now.

Strawberry Fields Forever - The Beatles - Imagine how crazy the next two songs could possibly get, multiply it by a hundred and you still won't get close to what happened here.

I Am the Walrus - The Beatles - Beyond words.

Paint it, Black - The Rolling Stones - Ditto

Gimme Shelter - The Rolling Stones - Mind blowing        

Brown Sugar - The Rolling Stones - Ditto

Captain Beefheart - The Floppy Boot Stomp - **??*?

Street Fighting Man - The Rolling Stones (RATM version)

Into the Mystic - Van Morrison - Lee Mai has got incredibly inventive with her brass arrangements by now and these Van Morrison songs get complicated, one section of the audience playing off against another, point and counter-point.

Cleaning Windows - Van Morrison

Subterranean Homesick Blues - Bob Dylan - We get so many people involved on this one, so many people playing bits of percussive kit, that it ends up sounding more Tom Waits than Dylan.

Outlaw Blues - Bob Dylan - Introspection time. Everyone experiences this differently.

Tombstone Blues - Bob Dylan

Just Like Tom Thumb Blues - Bob Dylan

Visions of Johanna - Bob Dylan

Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat - Bob Dylan

Most Likely You'll Go Your Way and I'll Go Mine - Bob Dylan

Obviously 5 Believers - Bob Dylan

I'm So Bored With the USA - The Clash (Rico - Vocals)

The Ain't Half Been Some Clever Bastards - Ian Dury and the Blockheads

Encore

Kick Out the Jams - MC5 (Rico - Vocals) - We hadn't planned on a encore, but everyone was so deep in trance this night, that we had to play MC5 to wake them all that. If that hadn't worked, it'd have been Slayer next.

 ***

1996

The Year of Her. I was there a couple of days before & glad to get out almost as soon as the gig finished. That was the night things came to a head. It had been coming a long time. I guess it was mostly my fault. My jealousy and maybe if I'd ended up with her instead of Murray, it would of been him and Colin walking and me and Sid forming a new band with her. As it was, me and Sid walked, bruises inflicted on both sides.

Half of which must be wrong. I mean, I wasn't in a band, was I? It was all in my head. Gets so hard to remember what used to be fantasy and what was real. All the same thing by now, I guess.

Nothing strange happened. Not that rerun. I made my peace with all three of them and we played a killer set and I moved on.

Dave Keenan - Vocals & Guitars

Murray Anderson - Vocals, Guitars, Keyboards

Sarah Dodd - Vocals, Guitars, Keyboards

Sid Taylor - Bass

Colin Anderson - Drums

Misery - Soul Asylum

Shut Down - Soul Asylum

Promise Broken - Soul Asylum

String of Pearls - Soul Asylum

Nothing to Write Home About - Soul Asylum

Runaway Train - Soul Asylum

New World - Soul Asylum

April Fool - Soul Asylum

Without A Trace - Soul Asylum

Richard III - Supergrass

Sorted For Es & Whizz - Pulp

Zero - Smashing Pumpkins

Bullet With Butterfly Wings - Smashing Pumpkins

Galopogos - Smashing Pumpkins

X.Y.Z. - Smashing Pumpkins

Sting Me - The Black Crowes

Remedy - The Black Crowes

Jailbird - Primal Scream

Rocks - Primal Scream

Would - Alice in Chains

The Bends - Radiohead

High & Dry - Radiohead

Fake Plastic Trees - Radiohead

Bones - Radiohead

Just - Radiohead

Sulk - Radiohead

Street Spirit (Fade Out) - Radiohead

Hold Me Now - Elastica (Sarah - Vocals)

Waking Up - Elastica (Sarah - Vocals)

Connection - Elastica (Sarah - Vocals)

Give the Anarchist a Cigarette - Chumbawamba (Sarah - Vocals)

Timebomb - Chumbawamba (Sarah - Vocals)

Mouthful of Shit - Chumbawamba

Bad Dog - Chumbawamba (Sarah - Vocals)

Enough is Enough - Chumbawamba

Stitch That - Chumbawamba (Murray - Vocals)

Alice What's the Matter? - Terrorvision

Oblivion - Terrorvision

Pretend Best Friend - Terrorvision

Encore

Take Our Sorrows Swimming - Apes, Pigs & Spacemen

Open Season - Apes, Pigs & Spacemen

Come Around the World With Me - Apes, Pigs & Spacemen

P.V.S. - Apes, Pigs & Spacemen

 ***

1991

The Cultural Fascists' first gig. We were all 17. Just the lads. One tight four piece, the way we liked it. No one else chipping in either. Arrived back a few days before the gig, in time for last rehearsals in Murray and Colin's dad's garage. Good times.

Again, nothing weird happened. We just played.

Gig was at our old Bell-end School. We were not what they were expecting. But we made them listen anyway. Mwohaha etc.

Dave Keenan - Vocals & Guitars

Murray Anderson - Vocals, Guitars & Keyboards

Sid Taylor - Bass

Colin Anderson - Drums

Prowler - Iron Maiden

Waking the Dead - Suicidal Tendencies

Sabbath Bloody Sabbath - Black Sabbath

Epic - Faith No More (Murray - keyboards)

No-One Came - Deep Purple (Murray - keyboards)

Stone Cold Crazy - Queen

For Whom the Bell Tolls - Metallica

Fade to Black - Metallica

One - Metallica

Sad But True - Metallica

South of Heaven - Slayer

Reign in Blood - Slayer

Souls of Black - Testament

In My Darkest Hour - Megadeth

Dawn Patrol - Megadeth

Got the Time - Anthrax

Anti-Social - Anthrax

Broken Doll - Wolfsbane

Twice As Mean - Wolfsbane

Crucify - The Almighty

Overkill - Motorhead

All Along the Watchtower - Jimi Hendrix

Crosstown Traffic - Jimi Hendrix

Paint It Black - The Rolling Stones

Mr Brownstone - Guns n Roses

Back in the Village - Iron Maiden

Still Life - Iron Maiden

The Phantom of the Opera - Iron Maiden

The Call of Ktulu - Metallica

Am I Evil? - Diamond Head

 ***

1984

Oh, right, this. If I tell you I was ten. It was our class's turn to put on a turn for assembly. Halloween was nearly upon us. Michael Jackson ruled the Earth. Thriller. Oh the horror.

I still sometimes have nightmare about that performance. Not because of the make-up (though I remember some of the kids had nightmares in the weeks after, the gimps). No, just the sheer, tacky, poorly co-ordinated horror of it. If anything, going through it a second time was worse than the first time, but at least I didn't really know what I was doing, which if anything, improved matters.

On the plus side, it was good to just be lads with Colin and Murray and Sid for a couple more days. Simpler times. Enough to make you remember all the mistakes you make. The mistakes you rectify.

The day of assembly and the whole school joined in, even the teachers. Even the parents. Think of that prison that did it in Indonesia, years from here, and then think bigger. Think, actually everyone becoming undead for nearly six minutes. Feeling what it's like to actually be a zombie. Not pleasant.

Then we heard the sound of Vincent Price's manic laughter echoing across the playgrounds and fields and, for me at least, the whole scene faded to black, and the next thing I knew, I was grown up again.

***

∞

Dave Keenan - Vocals, Guitars & Keyboards

Murray Anderson - Vocals, Guitars & Keyboards

Sarah Dodd-Anderson - Vocals, Guitars & Keyboards

Sid Taylor (½ of SidLee) - Bass & Vocals

Colin Anderson - Drums

Lee Mai (½ of SidLee) - Wind, Brass & Vocals

Murray and Dave - The Musical Slammer

Okay, so this mini set stemmed from when I met up with Dee and Rico. We got to talking about whether you could recreate the olfactory experience through music. Like, songs that represented different ingredients in a meal or on a plate. That led, inevitably, to the same conversation, only with alcohol instead of food, and we finally settled on the motif of the Tequila slammer. Three songs, performed or played in quick succession, each representing one ingredient. This is what me and Murray came up with:

Salt: Tonight Matthew I'm Going To Be With Jesus - HMHB

Shot of Tequila: Blue Valentines - Tom Waits

Slice of Latin Lime: Diablo Rojo - Rodrigo y Gabriella

Full Band

Really tight on these new songs now. Played them often enough.

Talking Post Apocalyptic, Time Travelling Blues (Keenan)

Hypatia (Dodd-Anderson: Sarah, Vocals)

Sabbath Bloody Sabbath - Black Sabbath

Epic - Faith No More (Sarah - Keyboards)

Operation Moorcroft (C Anderson/M Anderson/Dodd-Anderson/Keenan)

Centre: Level: Roar - Youngblood Brass Band - This is Lee Mai's baby, but we all join in, playing what instruments we please (Andy tonight guesting on drums), farming out the rest of the parts to members of the audience.

Neophyte (Sid/Lee: Sid -Vocals)

Interject (M Anderson/Dodd-Anderson)

Evolve - Ani DiFranco (Sarah solo)

My Fairy King - Queen (Sarah - Vocals) - An old favourite, done exactly the same way as always.

Promises Broken - Soul Asylum - Crowd broken down into sections for this one, me, Murray, Sarah & Sid each leading a section. Results are amazing.

Whither Be My Wonder? (C Anderson/M Anderson)

[think up title] (M Anderson/Keenan)

NO MAYO (Dodd-Anderson/Keenan)

28 minute, freeform jazz improv, utilising half the audience, playing everything from sax to vibraphone.

Bat Chain Puller - Captain Beefheart - Usual Beefheart craziness

Big Eyed Beans From Venus - Captain Beefheart

Time - Tom Waits - It's why we're all here.

The Changing of the Guard - Bob Dylan - A three song finale, packed with more brass than a meeting of three star generals.

Where are You Tonight? - Bob Dylan

N.F.Y. (Normal For You) (C Anderson/M Anderson/Dodd-Anderson/Keenan)

Spent. Couldn't play an encore if I tried.

Peace, I'm outta here.

***

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