Temporary Secretary

In the last few years, I was working in a soulless corporate record store; it wasn't as bad as the one I was working in before but still, it was quite tight in terms of what we were allowed to do. There was none of the surliness you would expect from people working in record stores, they conducted 'mystery shops' where they would pay people to go into the store and secretly mark the employees performance as a person behind the till out of ten. they would describe the employee thus giving management just enough to hunt them down and fire them.

In a lot of ways it was a lot like East Germany... or even Stalinist Russia: show trials, executions and a faux sense that the needs of the people (or customer) was the managements main focus. (It wasn't; retaining budget and forecast to subsidise the ridiculous over expansion of the company at the hands of an overconfident and under-skilled board of directors was.)

Anyway, I digress, if you wanted to know my life story you would probably have brought my autobiography, which you didn't, you cunts. AND if you wanted an insight into late 90s early noughties music retail, you would probably have brought a book about the rise of Amazon.


BUT I was working in this shop on the day that Paul McCartney reissued several of his albums. Among them, 'II'. Nowhere near as good as Band on the Run, from the mighty Wings, (The band the Beatles could have become) or even anything as good as the Beatles (Paul McCartney's other band), with the exception of everything they did pre 1965 and Let It Be, which even the Beatles completest concedes is utter sentimental shite.

Not like his other stuff then.

Turns out Macca, in his quest to stay current, had started pissing about with synthesisers and not in a 'use them like a keyboard' way; he was really pushing it. He appregiated the fuck out of 'Temporary Secretary'. For a split second, I thought I was in Detroit in 1986 at a Juan Atkins gig... Then he started singing about needing a secretary to help him type things up. Really fucking spoiled it.



Anyways, After going into great detail about Temporary Secretary and even naming the post after the track, I'm going to throw you a bit of a curveball... Macca's most successful foray into dance music wasn't Temporary Secretary, or even 'Twin Freaks' The bizarre remix album of loads of his top songs which he released in an attempt to seem underground in the early Noughties (although Punk Funk enthusiasts might want to attempt a re-edit of his version of 'Baby I'm Amazed') but was actually when Shep Pettibone retouched his minor 80s hit, 'Ou Est Le Soleil'

Of course, Pettibone, veteran of studio 54 and those kind of places was a sucker for a vocal, so he popped a verse of the original in there... now other than this verse, the track is pretty fucking standout even amongst todays house and techno classics, I had no choice, I had to cut it to shreds.

Grandstand

The last 6 months have been pretty busy, I have been imprisoned, murdered, reincarnated and killed again. I suppose that all these things have kickstarted me into writing blogs about my feelings, which I am doing on another BlogSpot page, so in the meantime, I am going to be a little bit more forthcoming in the shit I am listening to, the tracks I am putting together in faux DJ mixes helped by a stupid computer program.

I never really Liked Ben Klock, the awesome resident of Legendary Berlin Superclub, Berghain. Never really knew why. Then I saw this amazing footage from the Boiler Room by him



Then I found out that this was a comedy Parody and that he never really played the Grandstand theme tune and a load of comedy minimal house to a crowd of chipmunks.

Still, I had to delve a little deeper and it turns out he remixed Chicago mainstay Kerri Chandler to great effect. To be fair, I would take it over the Grandstand theme tune in spite of its monster of a guitar solo which never got played on the TV because it always cut to an Oasis track.

Anyways. you can find Kerri Chandler and Klock embedded in this one...

http://www.mixcloud.com/manmachine201/miximatosis-13/

Mr Flagio. Take a Chance (Manmachine201's Death to the Vocoder edit.)

Take a chance by Mr. Flagio is a bit of a classic, not really sure if it needed a re-edit, but I did one anyways. Gave it a bit of reverb, a bit of flange, extended the intro so if there were a DJ brave enough to play it, they would be able to leave it in the mix for 2 minutes. What with Bicep dropping 'Ultimate Warlord' in their sets, I would say Italo is fair game for some of the Ibiza closing parties this summer, not that that would matter to me.






 

Summer Wine.

The musical relationship between Nancy Sinatra and become has become a blueprint for the male and female song, Mark Lanagen and Isobel Campbel have managed to get three albums out of basing their sound on them.



Campbell and Lanegan, enjoying breakfast after stealing Sinatra and Hazelwood's sound.


At their most moderate, Hazelwood and Sinatra cover the classic songs well; Their cover of 'Jackson' manages to walk the line of sounding a bit like the 'Only Fools and Horses' theme tune, while still being good; their version of 'You've Lost That Loving Feeling' is better than any version I've heard. Lee's gravelly world weary defeated yet defiant voice grumbling under Nancy's sweeter bird song voice.

But it is Hazelwood's own songs where they really shine. Hazelwood takes on the guise of the dark stranger attempting to seduce and deflower Sinatra. Some Velvet Morning' is a lolita-esque tale of a man's desire to take the virginity. In the song, Sinatra is called Phaedra, while she unlikely to be the same Phaedra that fell in love with her stepson, merely by invoking her the song places a darker twist on the song. Phaedra is best known in Greek Mythology for falling in love with her chaste stepson Hippolytus, when he rejected her advances she accused him of rape culminating in his death, after being cursed by his father Theseus. Overcome with guilt, Phaedra committed suicide, leaving Theseus without a son or a wife. In this context, the song takes takes on an incestuous undertone, with the generation gap already present in the track with Hazelwood, a slave to his own desire playing off against the innate beauty and innocence of Sinatra.



The relationship between Nancy and Lee was actually a professional one, although Sinatra admitted she was attracted to him; Hazelwood was recently married and had two young children when their relationship began. the sexual tension oozes through the songs they preformed together. Summer Wine is another highlight of the 'Nancy and Lee' album where this time, Nancy does the seducing, sharing her strawberry and cherry wine with a dark stranger before leaving him in the morning craving more of her 'summer wine' I reckon the song is all to do with metaphors, when artists talk about fruit, it's usually got something to do with fertility and sensuality (sweet tastes, ripeness etc)
Whereas Hazelwood is feels that he has found paradise, Sinatra looks at the encounter more casually, asking him to 'help her pass the time.' later in the song it becomes apparent that she saw the whole incident as a transaction, she gave him her 'summer wine' and in exchange she took his 'silver spurs a dollar and a dime.' Summer Wine is a nice twist on Some Velvet Morning.



Kate Moss and Primal Scream covered Some Velvet Morning.

Beyond the sexual tension and interesting juxtaposition between his and her voice, the orchestration is lush, large and effortlessly dances over the borders of easy listening, country and 60s psychedelia. Hazelwood was a disciple of Legendary gun totting porn actress murdering genius/all round good egg Phil Spector, and it shows. The reversed guitar solo on 'Sand' the cut and paste sound on Some Velvet Morning and the general big 'Wall of Sound' that litters the 'Lee and Nancy' album.

Lee died in 2007 but Nancy is still releasing music, although she has spent her career eclipsed by her father, ol' blue eyes. The best thing in my opinion to come from the Sinatra family musically wasn't the poncey skinny italian as well known for his suits and his mafia friends as his penchant for sleepwalking through songs. I would take Nancy and Lee's output over pretty much anything he ever did.




Listen for yourself.

Top 5 albums of the year.

Yup, I'm gonna be yet another one of them wankers who writes a list on a blog of the most obscure albums they can find just to try to look all 'down with the kids' and 'Hoxton' (because anyone who knows anything about being a hipster knows that you can't type the word 'Hoxton' without scare quotes or non italicized, its just one of them rules that the hipsters made up, which I am blindly following.)

The problem with that last bracketed ramble about hipsterism, is that I am not a hipster, and as such I am going to try not to just give you the XX, yes I liked it, but you are already going to know it. I am going to try to give you 5 classy albums that you might have missed that I most certainly didn't.



First up. Com Truise, one of those bands or artists where they swap the first letter from the first and last word, like Cunning Stunts or Meetwood Flac. Com Truise- or Seth Harley as he is known to his mother and father- spent the year riding high on a wave of praise from the hipster bloggers, music journo's and people like me, who think that everything should sound like the Tron soundtrack. And it does sound like Tron, or something from the Drive soundtrack but less Schmalzy. Put out on Matthew Dear's Ghostly International(more from him later) the album along with a lot of the labels other output this year has been the first time the label looks like it is going in a solid direction instead of just putting out anything that is a) Electronic and b) from Canada. In Decay is a shonky weirded out ket addled set of Don Henley instrumentals with Vangelis adding more than his fair share of synth lines. of course it isn't really, that's just me trying to be clever and do analogies, something I learned at school recently. Anyways. Com Truise, silly name for an artist. Great sound from a great label. Next up is 'World, you need a change' by The Kindness. You would expect 'The Kindness' to be a band that wears tight jeans, doing television style ditties about things that happened yesterday evening. Adam Bainbridge is in fact a UK born lover of New Wave, Post Punk, Talking Heads, Talk Talk and the longrunning BBC soap Eastenders.



That's right, he has done a cover of the Eastenders theme and plonked it right in the middle of his debut album, there is a part of me that thinks that this is brilliant, and totally iconoclastic, on the other hand, if I were in a nightclub or at a party and someone played the theme from Eastenders even as a joke, I would leave immediately, and never speak to anyone in the room again... unless they apologised by playing 'Swinging Party' by the Replacements, or even covering it. Good job that this is exactly what Adam Bainbridge did. It's as if he knows EXACTLY what to do to fix a very specific mistake. Anyways, it's the lads debut album so we can't be too hard on him.



The further I get into writing this top 5 the more I realize that all the musicians are white post 30 men with odd sudanims, and why should the next one be any different.

Daphni- JIAOLONG. (His capitalisation, not mine.)

Dan Snaith spent most of the noughties arguing with a band who had also claimed his original AKA 'Manitoba' before renaming himself Caribou, after the Pixies song. He wasn't only arguing with people and changing his name of course, he also prolifically smashed the underground with Psychadelic masterpieces which sounded as if they were taken from Laurel Canyon, sprayed with fairy dust, LSD mysticism and flutes before being played backwards and looped through some early 70s tape machine. Snaith is incredibly leftfield, and I would say that Milk of Human Kindness was one of the albums released in the between 2000 and 2009 that defines my taste in music. I can't really think of a better album released in that decade, at the moment. In recent years Snaith has had one eye on the dancefloor as 'Swim' took a much more house and techno orientation. his mix with Jamie XX in the BoilerRoom in August was an absolute carcrash, but I have been told his mixing skills have improved since then.



If Swim Saw one eye on the dancefloor, then his new sideproject Daphni, turns faces and shits on everything else keeping the dancefloor moving. It doesn't follow the rules, it isn't mastered properly, all the levels are wrong. These are complaints from DJ's who are at odds with the Sound of Daphni, to them, I say fuck off, this is what the kids should be listening to. I have been lucky enough to year 'Yeye' at a warehouse party this year, where I am sure I was the oldest person. it was good to be in a room with 3000 pogoing spastics all dressed up as zombies and not giving a shit about whether the Mastering is right. While I look forward to the next Caribou album, this is more than enough to keep me happy.

Matthew Dear- Beams.



What to say? I said Ghostly International were having a good year, and with releases from Com Truise, Tycho (who narrowly miss out on this completely subjective list) and This from label boss and legend Matthew Dear sums it up really. I know that 'This' from the last sentence has unnecassary capitalisation but when you listen to 'This' album then you will know why I am getting remarkably overexcited with the shift button. Dear, began his career on Plus 8, the nosebleed techno sister label to minus, which is the weirdy techno label run by Richie Hawtin. Both have a penchant for minimal techno, as you would know if you had ever listened to Dear's Alter Ego 'Audion.

He spent the majority of the noughties being on of the most in demand remixers/DJ's on the techno scene, slotting himself among the legends of the scene like Carl Craig and Laurent Garnier, but when he released his first album under his actual name, it had all songwriting and stuff in it. It turns out, Dear wasn't just someone who made weird squelchy noises, but he like melody and nice warm fuzzy sounds as well, and he even wrote lyrics. Asa Breed was a minor success with moments of bliss and a new Eno'esque direction, Whereas Dan Snaith's sound edges towards the dancefloor, Dear seems to be turning away from it.



Well, that might be a bit of a reach, you can still pretty much dance to anything on this album, but instead of simply bleeps and squeeks, Dear sings, and his lyrics are about feelings and emotions and things like that, and although its the bopps and beeps that keep me listening to the album, I appreciate Dear as a songwriter.

Had I had written this tomorrow or yesterday, this may well have been the number one album of the year, but...

BEAK  >> (my capitalisation.)

People have been refering to >> as two, or the second album. There is something so totally irresistable about this monster of an album, produced and performed by a band put together by Portishead's Geoff Barrow, it harks back to Neu! or Harmonium or Cluster or La Dusseldorf or any of those other bands that helped to completely rip up the rulebooks and start again in 70s Germany. Proggy? a little. Anonymous? yes, but would we have it any other way? With every note played you can hear the band losing their ego, surrounding themselves with the fuzz of the notes that they are making, or some other pretentious bullshit analogy. Truth is, its balls out, uncompromising, it can leave you feeling a little uneasy, like when you tune into those shortwave numbers stations, which might be spys broadcasting coded plans of a nuclear attack on your home. Yes your home!



The production is deliberately shoddy, the keyboards are all packing up, the bass guitar might be slightly out of tune, but I love this shit, I love this shit about 100 times more than I love the XX album. The BBC had this to say about beak: "Barrow, who founded Portishead over two decades ago, certainly has the widest recognition of BEAK>’s line-up, but previous projects by Billy Fuller (also of Fuzz Against Junk and a session bassist for Massive Attack among others) and Matt Williams (who’s released short-run experimental music under several names, Team Brick probably the best known) suggest they’re invaluable to the results."



Having never quite gotten over Krautrock, anything I hear with the slightest nod to them has me singing its praises. Trans Am's 2008 album Sex Change topped my list of that year, simply because it sounded like NEU! and perhaps that is why I love this album so much, because it is so far removed from James Arthur to make people who listen to it feel evolved and from the future, a future where the bass guitar tuners have been made obsolete and keyboards dont work properly, granted, but a future, nevertheless.

Unsung Heroes: Geoff Barrow

Geoff Barrow isn't instantly recognisable, but that is because he doesn't want to be. in the 90s he was the multi instrumentalist and creative force that drove 'Trip-Hop' icons Portishead (I put 'Trip-hop' in those little sarcastic scarequotes because 'Trip-Hop' is a terrible and lazy music journalist's attempt to pigeonhole a decent but unclassifiable band, and as such doesn't deserve to be mentioned without highlighting that it is some other twat's invention.)

Portishead, should be, by rights, superstars. Their first album went multi platinum, turns up in the 'best albums of all time' lists, 'Glory Box' and 'Sour Times' were both used in film soundtracks, the title tracks for TV series and Adverts. Between Barrow's Production and Beth Gibbons' unmistakable tones Portishead provided a unique, dark and haunting sound which spread out over three quality albums spanning 2 decades.





Picking a favourite from Portishead is not easy but I'll go with the rip because it merges analogue with electronic, emotion with the cold and man (and woman) with machine. This song is from the album 3, which was their third album, and although the album title could be a little more imaginative, the album itself is amazing.

When not with Portishead, Barrow is the producer and multi instrumentalist behind experimental band Beak>. Beak> are not a band that will ever win a brit award for best band, they would probably never be nominated for the Mercury Music Prize. They take their influence from 70s Krautrock bands like Neu! and Can. Their are rarely lyrics and when their are, they are faint and distant. The second Beak> album '>>' (see what they did there?) is pretty much in my top 5 albums this year after a mere week or so being out. It could be from Cologne or Berlin, and could equally sit side by side with any track on 'Unknown Pleasures' by Joy Division.



Have a listen for yourself.

As a producer he has recieved much praise people like Thom Yorke from Radiohead, who cite Portishead's third album as giving them the confidence to go through with the 'In Rainbows' release. Barrow repaid the compliment with this monster of a track released with yet another side project of his, the Quakers who are in essence about 28 rappers and three producers. This track is lifted from Kid A's 'National Anthem'.




As if juggling three bands isnt enough, Barrow has spent the last decade DJing at Fabric and creating the soundtrack to an imaginary Judge Dredd film 'Mega City One'.
He was also at the helm on Anika's haunting 2010 self titled album. You can listen to that here, a grimey collection of covers ranging from 50's pop to the Pretenders, it sounds a lot like Nico (of Velvet Underground and Nico fame) The spotify link for both albums are below



The thing that really makes me think of Geoff as an unsung hero, is his reinvention of one of my favourite bands of the past few years. Behind any good band is a great producer. Whether George Martin for the Beatles, Eno, for Talking Heads, Bowie or U2, Weatherall for Primal Scream, Godrich for Radiohead etc. Barrow oversaw the transformation of the Horror's from a Schlocky and tone deaf Cramps covers band, to probably the most exciting in the UK at the moment. As well as that, he inspired Tom Furse, from the Horrors to start producing, remixing and re-editing.  Anyone who wants to hear what difference Geoff Burrows made to the Horrors, listen to their first album and then have a listen to Primary Colours. Although Barrow didn't produce the third Horrors album (They opted to produce it themselves) His influence is heavily imprinted on their sound...



Sea Within a Sea: the final track from the classic 'Primary Colours'

Barrow is a legend but for all his skills as a producer and creative flair as a songwriter, he is pretty much unknown, if you want to know what he's listening to or you fancy telling him that he is a genius. Then it might be worth following him on Twitter @jetfury.



Barrow, attempting to hide his face. If you ever see it in a pub, buy the man a drink. He deserves one.

Touched by the hand of Todd

Todd Terje is an oddity, he has been around for what seems like ages and has carved out a niche for himself as the king of midtempo dance music. His productions are few and far between, there was the massive 'Snooze for Love', 'Ragysh' and 'Eurodans' which was so good it caught the attention of Take That's Robbie Williams, who borrowed it and changed it just enough not to get sued on his single 'Candy'






Terje benefitted from being friends with the Norwegian producer Erot, who produced Annies first album before tragically passing away. Norway became a bit vogue in the early Noughties thanks to acts like Royksopp and Annie, and Terje has always quietly been in the background, growing more and more obsessed with disco but not releasing many of his own tunes...

To have roughly 33% of your productions plagerised by Robbie Williams is a bit of a bizarre achievement for anyone to write gushy blogs about... so what is it about Todd Terje that makes him such hot property at the moment? It's his remixes and re-edits of course. while his own material is thin on the ground, he is one of the most proliffic re-editors in the game, most DJ's will re-edit tracks to make them more dance floor friendly, it is a trend that has declined among DJ's in the past few years mainly because if there is a track that needs a re-edit, the chances are it has already been done by Todd Terje.


Paul Simon has been done...


Stevie Wonders Superstition...



The Bangles, Walk like an Egyptian... is there no place he wont go?



...I think that by the time you've remixed Demis Roussos, its safe to say that is the case. The track that led me to write this was a track I'd heard on Ivan Smagghe's Walk in the Woods, for Tsugi, I rarely check tracklistings unless I have to and with this one song nesting towards the end of the mix, I simply had to. It was driving, synthy, freah and timeless. It turned out it was a Terje remix of the late 70s New Wave band The Units. Apparently 'High Pressure Days' was a reasonably big track in its time getting lost of airplay on the radio both in Britain and in the States upon its release in 1979, but I was but a twinkle in my papas nutsack at that point so I have had to backtrack to hear it... I'm so glad I did



Thankyou Todd.