All posts tagged Martin Hannett

The Pitchfork 500 Missing List – Part One

When anyone looks through the Pitchfork 500 list, they are bound to go “Yeah, but what about xxx?”, where xxx = the name of favourite band, song, or horrible personal favourite.

Of course, choosing 500 songs and calling them the “best 500 songs” is bound to cause trouble. Of course, people are going to disagree. There’s some personal favourites of mine missing from the list, but I’m not going to start complaining that The Kingsbury Manx’s “Piss Diaries” is missing, because it’s quite obscure, and I’m not really sure that it’s everyone’s cup of tea. So I’m fine with that. But what this series of articles will do is highlight certain songs and artists that I think really should have been on there, because they really are something special, and (importantly) are more influential than certain songs that do appear on the list. I’ll be doing one of these every few months, usually just after I’ve completed a chapter of the Pitchfork 500. By the way, instances where the right artist is in the list with the wrong song are covered in the normal articles.

Today’s list features three bands, all from the UK; two from Manchester, on Factory Records, and one from the London. Those bands are A Certain Ratio, Durutti Column, and Ian Dury and the Blockheads.

Durutti Column – Sketch For Summer (1977)
A Certain Ratio – Flight (1979)
Ian Dury and the Blockheads – Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick (1979)

First off, from 1977, is Durutti Column’s “Sketch For Summer”. Durutti Column was Vini Reilly’s band, hailing from Manchester. A painfully thin, fairly reclusive chap, Vini learnt electric guitar at the age of 10 and played with masses of delay, to produce a chiming sound that would go on to influence people as diverse as U2’s The Edge and Cocteau Twins Robin Guthrie. His songs were characterised by his trademark echoey, hollowed-out Strat sound, backed up with a drum machine on his earlier songs, and jazz drumming in his later work, and occasional vocals (he sampled Otis Redding to marvellous effect on the song “Otis”).

Vini With His Strat

If you only ever hear one Durutti Column song, it really should be “Sketch For Summer”. Opening his first LP, “The Return Of The Durutti Column”, it kicks off with synthesised birdsong and a doleful drum machine, before starting on the trademark delayed guitar lines. What makes the song such a thing of sheer beauty is the way the arpeggios create a gorgeous choral noise, which disappear almost before you register them, overlain by syncopated, almost harp-like chords.

A Sandpaper Cassette Box

One of Factory Record’s earliest releases, it featured a sandpaper sleeve, to scratch the records next to them in the shelves of the record store. Lovely. If you’ve seen the Michael Winterbottom film, “24 Hour Party People”, Durutti Column are the band that always play to about 3 people in the Hacienda.

So why should this be on the list? Because it’s influential. Because it sounded like nothing else at the time. Because it showed that punk meant you could do what you damn well pleased, be it three-chord thrashes or creating a huge orchestral sound from the six strings of your Strat. But most of all, because it’s one of the most beautiful songs you will ever hear. Words, who needs them?

Another Factory band, A Certain Ratio were the second to release a record on that label, after the Factory Sampler (featuring Durutti Column). Funny now to think that everyone’s heard of Joy Division now and ACR are largely unknown, but at the time, ACR were just as big¹, and tipped by some to be huge. Whilst Joy Division were four skinny white guys from Manchester (or thereabouts) who took the music of Iggy Pop, Television and the Velvet Underground and gave it a special Northern twist, A Certain Ratio were four skinny white guys from Manchester (or thereabouts) who took the music of Funkadelic, Stevie Wonder, and Northern Soul and gave it a special Northern twist.

The 1979 Abercrombie And Fitch Catalogue Was Not A Success

Joining up with superb drummer Donald Johnson made them. Forcing them to actually learn their instruments properly, they mixed jazz, funk, soul, and Latin with a dour Northern sensibility and created something quite unique. “Flight” is an early example of this. At first, you might almost be mistaken into thinking it’s an odd Joy Division offcut, but then you notice the drumming. Then the fact that the bassline is far too slinky for Peter Hook. The harsh guitar chords have something of disco about them. And the falsetto singing. We’re not in Kansas anymore.

A Certain Ratio showed that with the right attitude, and a seriously talented drummer, you really could mix dark Northern rock up with Salsoul, and Disco, and whatever you fancied. After some early success with “Shack Up”, the band decamped to New York to record the album “To Each”, whereupon they went clubbing and expanded their horizons further. Indeed, they were instrumental in getting ESG to record the classic “Moody” (amongst other tracks) when they found they still had three days of studio time remaining after they’d finished recording.

So, A Certain Ratio deserve to be on here for fully integrating dance sounds into a post-rock framework, far more effectively than the punk-funk by the likes of James Chance and The Pop Group. And being scrawny white-boy funksters, well ahead of the likes of Spandau Ballet. They also feature in 24 Hour Party People, memorably being covered in fake tan by Anthony Wilson. Oh, and Donald Johnson was the drummer famously told by Martin Hannett to “Play that drum bit again, faster but slower”.

Ian Dury was an old hand on the London pub-rock scene, first with his band Kilburn and the High Roads, and then with The Blockheads. They were one of the bands for whom punk was an opportunity to reach audiences that wouldn’t previously have heard them. They, and their record label, Stiff, grabbed it with both hands.

Dury himself was a product of the grammar school system, with something of a mixed upbringing, crippled on one side of his body from childhood polio². He was a devastatingly good lyricist, as you can tell just from his song titles: “Sex And Drugs And Rock And Roll” (“\are very good indeed”, goes the song), “There Ain’t Half Been Some Clever Bastards”, with the immortal couplet: “Einstein can’t be classed as witless\He claimed atoms were the littlest\When you did a bit of splitt-li-ness\Frightened everybody shitless”. He spoke, rather than sang, the lines, in a droll, broad Cockney accent, with his band playing mean pub-rock, influenced by ska and everything else going on at the time. Plus, having been around for a while, they could actually play, which usually helps.

“Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick” was their first number one, and manages to be rather naughty without being absolutely clear about it. And it simultaneously teaches us about the commonality of humanity – that no matter who you are, or where you’re from, we all want the same thing. “Je t’adore, ich liebe dich”, indeed. Plus, the backing is just great, from Norman Watt-Roy’s liquid, dextrous bass, to Davey Paynes two-sax onslaught.

All in all a worthy UK number 1, and a song that’ll still get Brits of a certain age cackling with laughter. And, as well as being a great song, it showed that whilst you might be an old geezer playing pub-rock, you could still have a hit. Punk wiped away the old snobbery and let some real talent through. Ian, we miss you.

So that’s three songs. I can’t explain why Pitchfork missed them – though in the case of Ian Dury, I can imagine that not many Americans have ever heard of them. For Durutti Column and A Certain Ratio, who knows? Maybe they’d already filled their quota of Factory acts. Still, three out of 50 or so isn’t bad, I suppose.

¹ Admittedly, neither band were actually that successful in any way, shape, or form, at the time.

² If anyone’s ever in doubt about the efficacy of vaccinations, they really should speak to anyone aged 35 or above – I’ll bet you they know someone who suffered from polio. It’s difficult for people to realise now just how prevalent it was.

MP3: Sketch For Summer by Durutti Column

MP3: Flight by A Certain Ratio

Buy “The Best of the Durutti Column” (CD)

Buy A Certain Ratio’s “Early” (CD)

Buy “Reasons to Be Cheerful: The Very Best of Ian Dury & the Blockheads” (CD)

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by loftandlost on April 15, 2009 • Permalink

Posted in Music, The Pitchfork 500

Tagged Martin Hannett, Music, Pitchfork, The Pitchfork 500, The World Is A Duller Place Without Them

Posted by loftandlost on April 15, 2009

https://loftandlost.wordpress.com/2009/04/15/the-pitchfork-500-missing-list-part-one/

The Pitchfork 500 Oddness Hour – Branca to The Fall

Glenn Branca – Lesson No. 1 for Electric Guitar
Laurie Anderson – O Superman (For Massenet)
Joy Division – Atmosphere
The Fall – Totally Wired

A veteran of New York No Wave band Theoretical Girls, Glenn Branca wanted to merge classical music with rock. Rather than taking the ELO route and laying strings over Beethoven-inspired prog rock, he took ten guitarists, including Lee Ranaldo and Thurston Moore (who’d go on to form Sonic Youth) plus assorted other musicians, and formed a kind of orchestra. “Lesson No. 1 For Electric Guitar” was the first song he released with this new band.

Starting simply, layer upon layer of guitar gradually build up until it becomes an epic sound, withouth ever descending into sheer noise (as Sonic Youth have a tendency to do). The control used by the players adds to the beauty of the song; there’s no huge wig-out at the end, just a natural climax. You can hear Sonic Youth and Swans, Slint and Mogwai, Godspeed You Black Emperor! and Russian Circles. Considering I love all those bands, this is the first time I’ve ever really heard this track properly. What a great track it is too.

Funnily enough, you can pretty much do the same thing yourself, in the comfort of your own home, using something like this¹. I did see someone supporting Smog back in 2003, in Strasbourg², who did something along those lines all by himself, but can’t for the life of me remember his name.

The first time I heard Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman (For Massenet)”, I was watching Top of the Pops with my brother. It’s fair to say we burst out laughing. Ok, so I was only 10, but the sight of Laurie dressed in a white gown intoning “Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!” robotically was, to my pre-teen sensibilities, pretty damn funny. For weeks after we’d go up to each other and start going “Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!” then roll around on the floor laughing like idiots. It was very, very funny.

Of course, it’s a bit more of a serious record than that. Laurie Anderson was a New York performance artist and musician, and this track was a meditation on America’s military-industrial complex. Possibly. Possibly not.

But frankly, it sounds like a batty lady with a vocoder going “Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!”. How on earth did this get to No.2 in the UK charts? Annoyingly, I can’t find the original ToTP performance (if indeed it was a performance, rather than a video – I was only 10 you know), but did find this:

Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Very odd to listen to it again, nearly thirty years later. I still find it stupidly funny though.

Joy Division’s “Atmosphere” was recorded only a few months before Ian Curtis’ suicide. With Martin Hannett playing keyboards as well as producing (by this point, he was pretty much the fifth member of the band), the song is soaked in synthetic strings cut through with Barnie Albrecht’s acidic guitar chords, and underpinned by Peter “Hooky” Hook’s doleful bass lines. Not really my favorite Joy Division song, it veers a little bit too far onto the mopy teenager side of the street for my liking. It’s no “Dead Souls”. Or “Love Will Tear Us Apart”. But it’s still a grand old song and well worth listening to again.

Alongside the obvious tragedy of Curtis’s death, there’s the other tragedy of what Joy Division could have become if he’d had better treatment for his depression (and a resolution to his dreadful, if self-made, personal situation). This lot could have filled stadiums. Mind you, they did turn into New Order and become the first band to successfully marry dance and rock (frankly, one of the few bands who’ve done that). And if I was stuck in a lift I’d much rather have New Order piped in than Joy Division, wouldn’t you?

The Fall were the other great Manchester band coming to the fore at the start of the ’80’s (The Smiths were a few years away yet). “Totally Wired”, released in 1980, is a paean to speed (amphetamines), which Mark E Smith was consuming at a quite heroic rate, along with magic mushrooms. And lots of alcohol. Guitar was, in part, provided by Marc “Lard” Riley, he of the genius DJ twosome Mark and Lard. In fact, when I first heard them on the radio I thought “Surely not *that* Marc Riley?”, but yes, it was him. Let’s just say he’s a much better at DJ-ing than playing guitar. Mind you, I think he’s a great DJ and a lovely bloke as well. Their morning shows were superb – there’s nothing better for your morning commute than listening to two pissed off Mancunians struggling to string coherent sentences together, with the occasional great record. After they moved to their afternoon show, they started really getting on the nerves of their bosses at Radio 1, especially after making comments like this:
“That was the new single by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. And here’s an old record by The Pastels. We play some good stuff on here sometimes, don’t we?” The record started, before being stopped about ten seconds later with a contrite “We’ve been told to say that all the records we play are good”.

Anyway, back to The Fall. Now, The Fall have been around for longer than the Bible, and have had about as many people in. So picking only one or two songs (“The Classical” is coming up later) for this list must have been a nightmare. Because each album from “Grotesque” onwards, right through to “Bend Sinister”, is full of cracking tunes. Me, I’d have picked “Spoilt Victorian Child”, just because it’s the pure distillation of The Fall, in a nice, easily digestible 4 minutes. But then, “Totally Wired” gives you a good, early example of what The Fall are. Jumpy, shambolic rockabilly-lite guitars, thumping drums, with enough catchiness in the tune to keep you coming back for more, all with Mark E Smith’s irascible yelping of stream-of-conciousness, often indistinct lyrics.

And for once, “Totally Wired” is actually about something fairly simple – taking drugs. And though while MES would bring in (slightly) more competant musicians for later records, this has got a simple. poppy charm which most of his other songs lack. My aunt and I agree, indeed.

So that’s that for this post, next up a short post covering Elvis Costello and a couple of US bands you won’t have heard of.

¹ I’m actually trying it, in a slightly more folky and less post-rocky way. If I manage anything listenable, I’ll post it on here.

² I am probably the only person in history to have arranged a business trip to Luxembourg so I could then drive to Strasburg later in the day to watch Smog live. He was very grumpy, I’d like to add.

MP3: Lesson No 1 For Electric Guitar by Glenn Branca

MP3: Totally Wired by The Fall

Buy Glenn Branca’s “Lesson No. 1” (CD)

Buy Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman” (MP3)

Buy “The Best Of Joy Division” (CD)

Buy The Fall’s “Grotesque (After The Gramme)” (CD or MP3) (And a right bargain too)

The whole list is available here.

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(Note: sorry for anyone using the buttons above in the last two days, they didn’t work properly. They are now fixed, on 6/4/09)

The Pitchfork 500 Noo Yawk – The Clash to ESG

The Clash – The Magnificent Seven
Talking Heads – Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On)
Yoko Ono – Walking on Thin Ice
Klein + MBO – Dirty Talk
ESG – Moody

This part of the Pitchfork 500 concentrates on New York bands, or bands who’d come to New York to record. And the sound of New York in 1980/81 was hip-hop and disco.

I’ll start off by saying that “The Magnificent Seven” by The Clash still doesn’t change my mind about them. I really don’t see how them taking reggae and putting it into rock is still seen as somewhat revolutionary, when 10cc had done it two years early, to quite tooth-grindingly awful effect, on “Dreadlock Holiday”. Personally, I find Clash’s reggae just as bad. Maybe that’s just me. In any case, this track kicked off that quite terrifying sound of white English and American bands trying to rap. So there you go, The Clash are solely responsible for Limp Bizkit and Bloodhound Gang.

Ok, that’s being a little harsh. The Clash did at least really try to get involved in the genres of music that influenced them. This track, from 1980, was recorded in Jimi Hendrix’s old studio in Greenwich Village, where the band had decamped to record the sprawling 3xLP Sandinista. Mick Jones had been turned on by the rap music that had exploded onto the New York scene in the previous year (as I talked about in my last Pitchfork post)and wanted to incorporate elements of it into their new songs.

“The Magnificent Seven” is The Clash doing hip-hop, kind of. Rapping in an English voice just sounds wrong¹ and posh-boy Strummers’ monotone delivery sounds stilted. The music itself isn’t too bad, I suppose. That’s me being nice.

I really still don’t know what gets my goat about The Clash though. Partly it’s that they just make huge pronouncements yet don’t follow them up. Like not using songs for advertising then selling themselves to Levis, or not wanting to sound like “The Beatles or Rolling Stones”, yet sounding like a not particularly competant version of the Stones on some songs. But, many, many bands I like adore The Clash – from Manic Street Preachers to The Hold Steady – so maybe I’m just odd.

“Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On)” is Talking Heads’ third appearance in the Pitchfork 500 (out of four!)². The song is a deeply odd mix of a kind of warped Afrobeat and uptight New Wave, with David Byrne doing his strange half singing/half talking thang over the top. Just as it can’t get any odder, there’s quite possibly the strangest guitar solo in history, from Adrian Belew (who’d later go on to play with King Crimson). Only Talking Heads could make dance music as uncomfortable as this:

Yoko Ono’s “Walking on Thin Ice” came as a real shock to me. For years, like most people, I only know Yoko Ono for her marriage to John Lennon³, with all the attendant baggage that holds, including her, errr, experimental music. And frankly I don’t know about you, but I can’t think of Yoko Ono now without thinking of this:

But this is a great track. Over a funky bass, noisy guitars (played by Lennon himself) and non-more-Italo Disco piano chords, Yoko sings about having to suffer the pains of life, and how we forget what has been said and done. And then she sings that “I may cry some day\But the tears will dry whichever way\And when our hearts return to ashes\It’ll be just a story”.

After mixing this track with her husband, they left the studio with the final mix in John’s hands. It was then that they met Mark Chapman, who shot John dead.

Klien + MBO’s “Dirty Talk” is one of those influential tracks you may never have heard before. Along with ESG, they made proto-electro, heavily influenced by Kraftwerk, mixed with the disco- and funk-based rap then exploding out of the Bronx. And it was this music heard by visiting Mancunians New Order and A Certain Ratio, who saw the beauty in interlocking bass and lead lines on the synthesiser mixed with dance beats. New Order took it back to Manchester and made Blue Monday.

“Dirty Talk” itself is an early example of the mix of disco and electro that would become House music. It can best be described as the Kraftwerk you can actually dance to, with some additional smuttiness on top that would later be built on by the likes of Lil Louis’s “French Kiss”. Let’s face it – if you can get glum Mancunians dancing, then you’re really onto something.

ESG are one of music’s great enigmas. Massively influential, they have been sampled by everyone from TLC, through Tricky to the Wu Tang Clan – so much so that they released an EP in 1995 called “Sample Credits Don’t Pay Our Bills”. Pitchfork themselves reckon that “If you like hip-hop…you have a 95% chance of owning a track that samples their 1981 song “UFO””.

Yet, if you went up to a man in the street, I’d bet you £1000 you’d need to speak to 100 people before you found one who’d heard of them. I only heard of them a few years back when my brother – who loves anything produced by Martin Hannett and living in New York at the time – played me some of their songs off Soul Jazz’s marvellous compilation “A South Bronx Story”. Right eye-opener it was too – ESG have that unusual ability to sound like loads of other people, yet totally unique. And of course, that familiarity is down to having their sound stolen/borrowed (delete as applicable depending on your moral stance toward sampling) by Man & Dog.

Produced by legendary genius, and total nutcase Martin Hannett, the song mixes jittery Post-punk with hip-hop and electro, with a fluid fretless bass making things funky at the bottom end. It’s a heady mix, and just as it’s building through the layers of echo that Hannett put everything through, it…..stops. You kind of expect it to restart, but you realise that’s it. It’s an audacious end to a stunning track.

So, go and enjoy ESG’s “Moody” and Yoko Ono’s “Walking On Thin Ice”.

¹ And indeed has only recently been rescued by the likes of Roots Manuva and various Grime folk; sadly the great MC Buzz B appears to have been completely lost to music historians.

² Four Talking Heads tracks but no room for Grandaddy? Say it ain’t so.

³ It won’t come as much of a shock to you to discover I’m not a big fan of The Beatles either.

MP3: Walking on Thin Ice by Yoko Ono

MP3: Moody by ESG

The whole list is available here.

Buy “The Magnificent Seven” by The Clash (MP3)

Buy Talking Heads “Remain in Light” (CD)

Buy Yoko Ono’s “Walking On Thin Ice” (MP3)

Buy Klien and MBO’s “Dirty Talk” (12″ Vinyl Is The Only Version I Found!)

Buy ESG’s “A South Bronx Story” (CD)

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by loftandlost on April 1, 2009 • Permalink

Posted in Music, The Pitchfork 500

Tagged ESG, Martin Hannett, Music, Pitchfork, The Pitchfork 500, Yoko Ono

Posted by loftandlost on April 1, 2009

https://loftandlost.wordpress.com/2009/04/01/the-pitchfork-500-noo-yawk-the-clash-to-esg/

Martin Hannett and Lego Skating

A nice little video of Tony Wilson talking to Martin Hannett about production techniques in 1980. Why do I get the feeling that Martin Hannett thinks that Tony Wilson is an idiot?