Dilated Choonz: rock-guitars-indie

In Honour of the Passing of Mrs T...

Hal Berstram — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 13:15:00 +0100

Morrissey – Margaret On The Guillotine

I think it’s fair to say that few musicians are as polarising as ex-Smiths lead singer and long time soloist Morrissey. There seems to be relatively little middle ground – people either love the guy or think he is a piece of shit. This is from his first solo LP “Viva Hate”, released in 1988 when Margaret Thatcher was still Prime Minister, and really sums up what a substantial part of the British population felt at the time. And probably still do. It’s not a great song, but then I get the feeling it wasn’t meant to be.

Interesting 25-year retrospective :: on "Viva Hate" at The Quietus
Original vinyl release :: at Discogs - something disconcerting about the idea of Morrissey on CD...

File Download (3:40 min / 5 MB)

Song for a man found in a car park

Hal Berstram — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 21:49:00 +0000

Billy Bragg – Richard
Following recent electronic explorations it’s Back to Basics with perhaps the best songwriter of the 1980s. Billy Bragg appeared in 1983 with the extraordinarily titled mini-LP Life’s A Riot With Spy vs Spy on ex-Pink Floyd manager Peter Jenner’s Utility records, repackaged with second album Brewing Up with Billy Bragg on the soon-to-be-ironically titled Back To Basics a couple of years later, in which form it remains available. Soon to be ironic because Bragg was – and is – partial to a left-wing song; whereas the phrase “Back To Basics” was taken up in the early 1990s by the UK’s Conservative Prime Minister John Major, with farcical results.

The first two Bragg albums feature just voice and electric guitar – with songs recorded just as he played them in his one-man live set of the time. With the sound stripped down that far, everything hinges on whether the songs are any good, and fortunately Billy had some of the best ones going: pretty much everything on the debut is a classic – “The Milkman Of Human Kindness”, “A New England” (covered soon after by Kirsty MacColl) and “The Man In the Iron Mask”. The next album went ever better IMHO with songs like “It Says Here” (an attack on the Murdoch-dominated right-wing UK press), “Love Gets Dangerous”, “From a Vauxhall Velox” and “This Guitar Says Sorry”.

So why “Richard”? Mainly because the skeleton found in a Leicester car park has been identified fairly conclusively as that of the infamous King Richard III of England, whose death brought to an end the Wars of the Roses and led to the formation of the Tudor dynasty. Richard was killed in the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485, but outrageously, historians never realised before that the battle was fought in a car park. But now we know better.

Buy "Life's A Riot With Spy vs Spy" :: excellently available in 2-CD remastered form from the Billy Bragg website

File Download (2:50 min / 4 MB)

Dave's First

Hal Berstram — Sun, 20 Jan 2013 20:34:00 +0000

David Bowie and the Lower Third – Can’t Help Thinking About Me

As a long-term David Bowie fan, the last few years have seen pretty lean pickings. Bowie had a hectic schedule in the early 2000s, with two pretty good albums in quick succession – Heathen and Reality, and a lot of touring. That era came to an end after he suffered a heart attack backstage after a gig in 2004, and since then he’s hardly been seen in public.

So it was a pleasant surprise, to say the least, when I heard that Bowie had released a new single, “Where Are We Now?” It’s a pleasant enough downtempo listen, very much in the mould of his 1999 LP “hours…”, but I wanted to take you back almost 50 years to Bowie’s first ever solo release under the Bowie moniker (previous to that he was recording under his real name David Jones but was suffering confusion with Davy Jones of the Monkees). For this release, inexplicably, he’s backed by “The Lower Third” – what kind of a name for a backing group is that? Sounds like a school class.

“Can’t Help Thinking About Me” is probably the best 1960s single not to become a hit, although there is stiff competition from the High Numbers (aka The Who)’s debut single “I’m The Face”. Classic mid-60s pop and very economical with it, clocking in at under 2-and-a-half minutes. He even namechecks himself, ferchrissakes… “my girl calls my name… Hi Dave!” and also “Question Time” is mentioned, 13 years before the programme actually started on the BBC. This is a bloody time traveller record, and a stunning debut. Sadly Bowie abandoned the mid-60s pop-mod sound soon afterwards, although he continued to be informed by the mid-60s all through the 70s (most obviously on Pin Ups, although arguably the whole Ziggy Stardust thing was just mid-60s beat group rock with the guitars turned up well loud. But then all the best early 70s glamrockers were in that zone (Bolan, Slade, etc.)

Not sure if this is currently available on CD but it’s pretty easy to get 2nd hand or with a Spotify search. My copy came with one of those free CDs that you get with Mojo magazine – this one was called “Maximum ‘65” and was just about the best CD that Mojo has ever put out, worth several times the cover price of the mag in my book. Probably appearing at a charity shop near you as we speak.

More unusual Bowie gems and related stuff over the next few weeks. Dust off the pinstripe suits…

2nd hand at Discogs :: is your best bet for a hard copy of this - the "1966" compilation seems most reasonable, although "I Dig Everything - the 1966 Pye Singles" is another option

File Download (2:26 min / 5 MB)

"Raucous, monotonous heavy metal..."

Hal Berstram — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 18:22:00 +0000

Paris – Religion

2012 saw far too many great musicians kick the bucket, and one of those was ex-Fleetwood Mac lead guitarist Bob Welch. Welch
held Mac together between its two most commercial periods – the late-60s blues-rock phase with Peter Green and the late-70s mega-successful California phase with Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. He was on 5 Mac LPs between 1971 and 1974 but then left because he felt the group wasn’t getting anywhere and he wanted to try something with a heavier sound – and promptly formed the hard-rock trio Paris with bassist Glenn Cornick (an early member of Jethro Tull) and drummer Thom Mooney.

Paris’s eponymous 1975 debut LP owes a huge debt chucks out the soft-rock stylings that Welch had spent 4 years cultivating with the Mac and instead presents a studio-slick approximation of the Led Zeppelin sound, although with less raucous vocals. It’s an all-time classic, which was not well received by the Rolling Stone Record Guide (1979 edition):

“Paris was raucous, monotonous heavy metal… self-righteous songs and noisy playing.”

But remember that this was the same publication that gave the first 4 AC/DC albums zero out of 5 stars and you’ll realise just how wildly off-beam these guys were.

Paris sadly only lasted 2 albums (and their 2nd LP, the bizarrely titled Big Towne, 2061 was a lot less heavy than the debut, although still good) but at their best they were up there with Zeppelin, Sabbath, The Groundhogs and UFO as fine practitioners of 70s metal. Pass the Flying V! And RIP Bob Welch – a sadly missed rocker.

Brilliantly available :: on 24-bit digital remaster for the first time, as befits an album of this quality
Nice tribute article ::

File Download (5:20 min / 7 MB)

New Order anticipate the Vickers Commission by 30 years

Hal Berstram — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 09:54:00 +0100

New Order – ICB

Apologies for such a long time since my previous posting… only just getting back into some semblance of normal work/life balance after working flat out for about 6 months.

It was this week’s publication of the interim report from the Independent Commission on Banking, chaired by Sir John Vickers, that spurred me into posting action after a long layoff. I realised that the acronym for the commission, “ICB”, was the same as a song off New Order’s first album Movement. I have posted before from Movement, which is a much underrated album, and insofar as I can understand the lyrics (which are mixed low) they don’t seem to have much to do with banking, but here it is nonetheless.

For many of us, New Order’s 1984 single “Thieves Like Us” is perhaps a more appropriate ode to the commercial banking sector… but that is perhaps more an argument for a political blog.

If they ain’t got ya one way, they’ve got ya the other.

Buy New Order's "Movement" :: brilliantly reissued on double CD (from the Rough Trade shop)
ICB interim report :: featuring a foreword by Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook (if only!)

Dilated Choonz: rock-guitars-indie

In Honour of the Passing of Mrs T...

Song for a man found in a car park

Dave's First

"Raucous, monotonous heavy metal..."

New Order anticipate the Vickers Commission by 30 years

Happy birthday!

Ode to Croissant Neuf

Campaign tracks (2)

Time for some slow blues (via John Peel)

If you're gonna be a bear...

Here's one for the Glasto kids

Movie Soundtrack Masterpieces (3)- Dead Man's Shoes

Fight! The powers that B. (N.P.)

It's April, so let's have the long lost rawk'n'roll

Rebecca Closure - Bonio Bonio Bonio

The even more interesting sub-genre of synthetic backing tracks

Tribute to the Losers of the 2008 US Election

Tak(ei) War, by William Shatner

Levi Stubbs R.I.P. Part Two

Black Friday (and Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday...)