Category: General

Funfair For The Common Man: “(but don’t get me started or i’ll veer off into my stock rant about how Pop Will Eat Itself invented breakbeat and they’d be taken a lot more seriously if only they’d taken themselves seriously. and trust me, we don’t need that) “

I think we do actually. This is a position I’ve argued for many times. Never forget that PWEI played with Public Enemy and are namechecked / credited by them on “Millions”. Can U Dig It was about as good as dance music made by white people who weren’t New Order or Adrian Sherwood got in those days. But as you say, no-one took them seriously cos they didn’t. That was an enormous strength IMO.

Funfair For The Common Man: “also i’d wonder how nobody seems (i may have missed it) to have mentioned Meat Beat Manifesto yet. certainly, my initial exposure to that end of dance music came from hearing stuff like Storm The Studio from my more industrialist friends”

Absolutely right Dubversion. Of course they went on to do a fantastic double-header single with Orbital — Edge of No Control. Bit of a central linkage to dance music there…

Right, a serious point for a minute. Matt Ingram’s comics are really excellent. I think Luka might be right. For a long while I didn’t twig that they were his comics — I thought he was scanning in really cool stuff from some underground genius. And so he was — for it was him. They’re so delightfully artful with such wry humour, the pace of them is so well judged, the characters so deftly formed with such economy. They’re great, they really work, not quite as art, not quite as a comic strip, but as great stories. And I’m not much of a fan of comics.

Derek Bailey biography: “Derek Bailey”

According to the Wire this is the guy we’re all supposed to be mad keen on.

Eh?

I know (now) he’s from Sheffield, so obviously is a cut above the hoi polloi, but I’d never heard of him before. Still don’t get it. As Matt (self-deprecatingly) puts it, The Wire is “just a jazz mag” (a neat double-entendre). It’s actually done a really good job of extending itself to cover other musics but for me its undoing is that it’s just too formalist in its outlook.

Or in other words, I read it, and I can see the reviews are well written, but page after page goes by without me recognising a single name, or indeed wanting to listen to many of the records. Steve Barker’s page (not Steve Barrow’s! cheers John) doesn’t count, of course. The Wire is at its best when it forgoes the artschool musique and does high brow reinterpretations of the underground but it doesn’t do that all that often. I wonder how much of their core audience is composed of jazz / modern classical fans who’d be turned off by too much “pop” stuff.

blissblogLone White Guy Strikes Again. Never noticed it before but there is a classic one in the R. Kelly ‘Ignition (remix)’ video (one of the very few Kelly songs I’ve liked actually)

yeah I spotted this and assumed it had already been noted.

Ignition is fantastic, probably my favourite record of the year, you really want to sing along to those “boop boop, beep beep” bits in the car to get the full effect! I wonder if you can get it on vinyl. I wonder if there’s an accapella so I can do a suitably braindead jungle remix. The way some of the choruses double up to build the tension is fabulous. Wonder who wrote it?

Oh, while we’re on the subject: Timberlake. Asking if the man himself is any good as anything other than a dancer seems to me to be kind of redundant. The fact is he appears on some very good records. Rock Your Body is great. It’s all about the producer, innit?

blissblog: “come to think of it, a lot of industrial pierced-dick types ended up making techno-ravey stuff, didn’t they, so maybe it’s not so odd (remember psykick warriors of gaia?”

Very funny characterisation Simon! FWIW I think the link from industrial to acid house is seminal, as much because of the crowd as the musicians. My memory is that much of the industrial scene formed part of initial audience for acid. If you think of the milieu being more important than the leadership, which of course it is, then the industrial scene had a fair bit to do with the emergence ofdance music, a especially the Clink Street end of things — so maybe there is a conventional link to hardcore and jungle that way. Certainly the industrial / Some Bizarre crew were among the very first to get heavily into ecstasy, particularly therough Sleazy’s connections. And of course Soft Cell and Matt Johnson were making records on E long before most.

PWOG made some ace records (especially — oh the irony! the drum club remix of Exit 23) and were pretty fantastic live in a minimal techno nothing-happens-and-it’s-really-exciting-tweaking-with-their-atari sort of way.

tHAT wAS a nAUGHTY bIT oF cRAP: “In the meantime Coil are EVERYWHERE. Everyone who’s anyone is giving them the nod and the wink.”

Oh, and while I’m here: I get the impression that Coil are The Industrial Band You Can Listen To Between Meals. Not surprising cos in many ways their records are a lot more accessible, and probably better overall, than most of those by their peers. Mind you, I was a teenage “Coil Boy”. I read Penman’s piece on them in the Wire which was admirably fan-tastic though I’m not sure whether he could get away with all those puns outside of a Coil review. It’s great that he gets the whole English Romantic thing.

BTW a good track to check out is their remix of Nine Inch Nails’ Gave Up, which is kind of industrial jungle-hardkore with power chords. I like it a lot, but then I like Led Zeppelin. And Nine Inch Nails, for that matter (oh yes, an On-U connection means I can forgive almost anything!).

The Coil video for Windowpane was once on a late eighties TV pop show but for the life of me I can’t remember which one, anyone care to remind me?

tHAT wAS a nAUGHTY bIT oF cRAP: “Had to bite my lip when this LP came up in conversation at Uncarved recently. Put the record on the deck and switch it on. Look closely for one minute at the swirling pattern. Then look at something else. SCARY! This bit of Flash performs the same task perfectly, and will spare you a few bob on a really ropey record.”

Hey, I thought you were saying that “Veneer” was better than “Cowardice” but I probably wasn’t paying enough attention.

Don’t believe a word of it kids, it’s a frighteningly good record, and Matt’s opinion is a (very rare) lapse in taste IMO. Mind you, I don’t know how old Matt is, but for us old 8Ts duffers Tackhead / On-U were so crucial to our well-being that it is almost impossible to describe what an oasis they were, and that undoubtedly colours my view of them.

Still, top bit of Flash. Shame more of the blogerati don’t have Matt’s visual flair.

On a vaguely related note:
Eden has been filing a spotter-ish 10 Best LPs of the Industrial Scene series (which I understand is to be printed on gold leaf and buried at Stonehenge when he completes it in 2117),

… which is ace, but of course it won’t be buried at Stonehenge, that’s for johnny-come-latelies and druids, I think he’s planning a concrete bunker in the middle Arbor Low or possibly Boscowen-Un That should wind me up!

tHAT wAS a nAUGHTY bIT oF cRAP: “Wiley: Igloo Remix and Blue Rizla.
I think, no exaggerating here, that he’s probably more important than George Clinton, Miles Davis, Jimi Hendrix, Sun Ra and Derrick May rolled into one.”

Yeah man, like totally. Like, you know when those guys use echoes, it’s like they’re bouncing their thoughts off the inside of your brain?

Actually, I’d love to hear this record, but bear in mind he’s talking about JUST ANOTHER RIDDIM RECORD. It’ll probably sound tired next week when we’re onto another microgenre. Even so – forward!

blissblog: “That’s one of the oddest things about A Clockwork Orange–the idea that the USSR would have this huge influence on Western pop culture such that the youth would speak pidgin Russian slang. But then nobody ever accused Anthony Burgess of being in touch with pop music”

No Burgess was spot on, just 180 degrees in the wrong direction. Think how many British youth use Jamaican patois. Punjabi is coming. You could say that Burgess was parodying the idea of Russian Communist ideology infiltrating Western youth culture, but the reality is that it’s been a return of the repressed, of the descendents of slavery, and its ideology of resistance.

Or something.