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After the Klaus & Kinski gig, I wandered up the road to the Dalston Superstore, where my friend Richard D. Clouston had a new club night in conjunction with Nathan Gregory Wilkins, called “Zone“. Richard and Nathan were inspired by a recent DJ set there by Blake Baxter and Abe Duque to start an Acid House, Detroit Techno, Chicago Trax and Electronic Body Music night, with an emphasis on music to make you sweat. As you might have noticed from all the jangly indie pop and Spanish bands on this page, not really my specialist subjects, but who’s to say I won’t spend the next 6 months obsessively becoming an expert in them? All I can tell you is that it was bloody fantastic, and if you happen to be in the region when they do another one, I would definitely pop in. The club is downstairs, a tiny wood panelled and mirrored room with a DJ booth the size of a urinal, crammed full of happy creatures of the night sweating away like it was 1995. The atmosphere is amazing, and even an aging old fatty like me couldn’t help but get carried away. Here’s the final song of the evening, Slam’s “Positive Education”.

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Slam – Positive Education

Yes, I know this blog bears less and less resemblance to what it set out to be, and now serves as a platform where I just bang on and on about my various obsessions. I could offer a justification, but I don’t have one. Last night my beloved Klaus & Kinski came to London for the first time, and I was lucky enough to be there. For all that was imperfect about the gig – the cack-handed promoters, the plodding self-obsessed limelight-stealing equipment-filtching support, the twattish photographer firing repeated flash photographs at mates & girls in the crowd, the plug being pulled half way through because the operator wanted the space to sell overpriced drinks to a collection of coke-addled hipster pant wearing dudes and Amy Winehouse wannabe chicas – I loved it. It’s the fourth time I’ve seen K&K in the last couple of years, and a lot of firsts for me. They were LOUD (previous gigs had been acoustic or low-fi). They are gelling together and grow in confidence. The new album is packed with great, new material. And, I think most importantly here live, the addition of La Pili on electric violin, which gives a very pleasing lush organic feel to Alejandro Martínez Moya’s orchestral soundscapes. So hurrah for La Pili! And for Klaus & Kinski, who notwithstanding the irritations foisted on them at last night’s gig, conducted themselves with typical charm, grace and good humour.

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Klaus & Kinski – La mano de Santa Teresa de Jesús

A friend posted this live performance of Fun Boy Three’s “Our Lips are Sealed” on Bookface this morning. I love the hypnotic drone of cello and backing vocals, and, weirdly, the point at 2.42 when they stop and we’re left with the drums and the guitar. Stone-faced Terry Hall can’t resist a smile at 2.52, no doubt because he realises how amazing it all is.

Jointly written by Hall and Jane Wiedlin (the subject of a long obsession) following a secret tour-bus romance, and a hit for both their respective bands, Fun Boy Three’s David Byrne produced version is less pop-perfect than that of The Go-Go’s, but Hall’s flatter delivery is perhaps more appropriate to the lyrical subject, the wounded defensiveness of secret-keepers. And of the two Fun Boy Three versions, the live one pips it for me.

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Fun Boy Three – Our Lips are Sealed

Today there’s a story about how a police marksman giving evidence at the inquiry into the fatal shooting of barrister Mark Saunders is under investigation for planting song titles into his evidence. My immediate reaction was one of repulsion, but then I saw the list of song titles. Ones like “Enough is enough“; “Line of Fire“; “Quiet Moments“. Aren’t these just ordinary English phrases that happened to have been used at one point or another as song titles? It’s not as if he managed to slip in “I’m the Urban Spaceman“.

As the author of a blog that makes tenuous connections between song titles and the 12 step recovery programme, I know what I’m talking about – you can find a song title in almost any passage of English prose – it’s just more difficult finding relevant, good songs and the time to write about them. By way of a totally random example, I excerpt below the final 5 paragraphs of David Cameron’s speech to the most recent Conservative Party Conference.

It takes two to build that big society. We’ll reform public services, we’ll devolve power, but you step forward to seize the opportunity.

Don’t let the cynics say this is some unachievable, impossible dream that won’t work in the selfish 21st century – tell them people are hungry for it.

I know the British people and they are not passengers – they are drivers. I’ve seen the courage of our soldiers, the spirit of our entrepreneurs, the patience of our teachers, the dedication of our doctors, the compassion of our care workers, the wisdom of our elderly, the love of our parents, the hopes of our children.

So come on – let’s pull together. Let’s come together.

Let’s work, together, in the national interest.

Obviously, the full facts are not yet available, but I do hope that this story turns out to be the guff that the mundanity of the “hidden” song titles suggest. Given the dignity that Mark Saunders’ widow showed throughout the enquiry it would be stomach-turning to discover that a police witness had used it as an opportunity to be a juvenile cock. And of course, rather damaging for his and possibly other police witnesses’ evidence. I have my own views on whether it was necessary for the police to shoot and kill Mr Saunders on that day, but given Mrs Saunders’ commendable stance of accepting the verdict of the inquiry, it’s hardly for me to weigh in with my far less well informed views. It’s very sad that Mark Saunders had found AA, had found love, had success and intelligence galore, but just hadn’t got recovery.

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Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark – Messages

One of my favourite songs of 2008, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart’s “This Love is Fucking Right!” caused a consternation in irony- and metaphor-free zones due to its lyric “You’re my sister/and this love is fucking right”. Yes, people declared, it’s about incest, POBPAH daringly exploring the “last taboo”, except of course there’s then an argument about whether the last taboo wasn’t already explored by My Bloody Valentine’s allegedly necrophiliac “Paint a Rainbow“.

Peggy Wang @ Primavera Sound 2009 - pic by higherpowermoment.com

All good fun, but utter, and obvious bollocks.  The title alone tells the story – it’s about those (alas, all too fleeting) moments when you absolutely and assuredly know that your lover is the one for you, so bound up in each other you become.

Kip Berman @ Primavera Sound 2009 - pic by higherpowermoment.com

Whilst hacking around on YouTube, I found what was described on that site as an “official” video, starring a pair of gay, female and obviously unrelated lovers scampering around north London.  At first I hated to think that the subjects might have been chosen just to put a line under the is-it-about-incest debate – to pander, in short, to the idiots.  In researching (yes, I do!) this post, I found the same video on Vimeo where it is described, as of course should have been obvious to me in the first place, as an “unofficial” video, and all my ridiculous snobbery and fears were for naught.  It just is what it is, the stars just happen to be gay, female and unrelated, it’s great, and I love, completely love, the opening words spoken by Kip Berman.

As a special treat, as well as the video, we have the original version of the song from the POBPAH EP and the more polished version from the eponymous album.

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Pains of Being Pure at Heart – This Love is Fucking Right! (EP version)

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Pains of Being Pure at Heart – This Love is Fucking Right (Album version)

A massive benefit of not using my drug of choice is the absence of hangovers. A psychiatrist in a rehab once told me he had a pet theory that the worse the hangovers, the quicker the arrival in recovery, as the earlier and more frequent the negative consequences for the user. Certainly mine were of the long, drawn out, self-loathing variety, and that vague feeling of wanting this never, ever to happen again (followed a few days later by the inevitable relapse) may well have harried me into trying to sort my life out earlier than might otherwise have happened.

I can however repeat a few of the effects of a hangover by simple sleep deprivation (see the last post), and there have been lazy times today as I’ve snoozed, nattered on the phone and headed off on a pointless time-wasting odyssey around the internet. Hearing The Blue Nile’s “Tinseltown in the Rain” for the first time in years last night led me to post it on Bookface, and a comment on that post lead me to the seminal Valencia club of the 80′s & 90′s Spook Factory, and the tracklisting of a Spook Factory mix CD lead me to this extraordinary cover of The The’s “Uncertain Smile” (as to which, see below) by Belgian goths Poésie Noire, which I feel has a great deal of charm hiding behind those fat stomping electronic slabs of noise, perhaps best exemplified by the tinny, understandably half-hearted pastiche of the original flamboyant Jools Holland piano solo. Good stuff.

Yep, it’s been a productive day…

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Poésie Noire – Uncertain Smile

Berating a friend over tea this afternoon for not reading this blog, she retorted that I never updated it.  Which is true. And nearly every post I do get round to writing typically begins like this, with an apology of sorts for being sporadic and apathetic and shambolic. So, I either write this up regularly or I take it offline. OK? Deal.

Well, it’s 3.40 am and I’m wired, a trip out with some friends and too many Diet Cokes, followed by a YouTube / Last.FM / Facebook / Spotify orgy of songs that seem to be working for me tonight. It’s been a good day, the anxieties of the morning began to fade once I did the right thing for a change and went to a meeting. Living Sober, and the chapter on sponsorship was the topic. So I thought I’d take that as a springboard for posting something, anything, here. A song popped into my head. A completely uncool song by a band whose then vocalist/drummer has become a byword for uttter, gopping, naffness. But what the fuck? It’s actually an amazing song, or so it seems at 3.40 am when I smell of someone else’s perfume and I’m not ready to sleep yet. Availing yourself of a sponsor is emphatically not about following someone blindly and taking instructions (notwithstanding what some of the more cultish elements in my fellowship would have you believe). But here we have “Follow You Follow Me” – what stuck in my mind today was how sponsorship is not a selfless act, it’s a selfish act. The sponsor sponsors not out of altruism, but because the sponsoring helps him. I liked that. Here’s, er, Genesis.

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Genesis – Follow You Follow Me

For some reason I’m a sucker for songs with a sound effect of a fast-rewinded cassette tape. It brings back memories of when listening to songs on repeat was interspersed with listening to the song backwards at triple speed, waiting for the gap to come.

So there was Sambassadeur’s cover of “Small Parade” and, here, Klaus & Kinski‘s “Eres un sinvergüenza” (which, according to my friends at Google Translate, means something to do with being a scoundrel). From the excellent and typically eclectic new album Tierra, Trágalos, it picks up a triple word bonus for quoting the intro from Yo La Tengo’s “Sugarcube” (which of course features a tape effect at the close). Whizzing tape, the garagey guitar riff, Marina’s floating vocal, and a button I can click which replays it over and over again. What’s not to love?

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Klaus & Kinski – Eres un sinvergüenza

Well, I’ve always got one, and at the moment it’s Boiro, Coruña’s Triángulo de Amor Bizarro. I’ve been trying to see this amazing Spanish band all year, but have so far been cruelly denied at the hands of striking French air traffic controllers, so fingers crossed next weekend I’ll be drooling in the crowd in Bilbao and then Donostia-San Sebastián (where my beloved Klaus & Kinski are also appearing). On the Sunday, Guns N’ Roses hit town, but, because they are now shit, I think I’ll hit Bar Nestor for steak and tortilla instead.

Back to TAB. Back to me, Clive. Mad, thrashy, urgent, feedback drenched, glorious indie anthems with sledgehammer beats, peppered with religious imagery and weird Spanish cathlo-pagan nonsense. Just wonderful. The new album, Año Santo is a dark, crazed, tender, orgiastic slab of a bloodstreaked dusty land of ham, goats and human sacrifice. I love it. Here’s the quite awe-inspiring video for “De la monarquía a la criptocracia”.

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Triángulo de Amor Bizarro – De la monarquía a la criptocracia