Bookmarks: Bow Wow Wow

Louder Than Bombs has caught up with Annabella Lwin, who you'll recall as the thirteen year-old McLaren bounced to the front of Bow Wow Wow:

Well I tweet here and there…I don’t know if I’m an official tweeter. I’m excited to be part of a new generation. A lot has changed obviously. It’s a good thing. It just keeps evolving. There’s an old saying, I don’t know where it came from, but it’s “Don’t put your daughter on the stage Mrs. Worthington”, and that’s when i kind of realized what that meant, through all these years. going from being a novice, to being in a band, to doing what I do now actually.

It definitely is not what it used to be when I started out. I think it’s become more homogenized. I don’t know if music is going to get better or worse, let’s put it that way. Everybody’s doing music in their living room now. The Reality TV world, they tried to look behind the door like “The Wizard of Oz”, but it’s a bit of a disappointment, isn’t it?

Bookmarks: Simon Scott

Headphone Commute have caught up with sound artist (and Slowdive drummer) Simon Scott, and takes a peek at his kit:

Can you please share some aspects of sound design in your work?
I always begin by using a field recordings to compose and create. Since 2010 it’s been consistently The Fens in Cambridgeshire where I’m surrounded by a subterranean landscape that fascinates me, and I generally work with these audio segments in MaxMSP. It’s endless in terms of compositional possibility so I’ve stuck to The Fens as a sound source and I actually don’t want too many options so I haven’t started using some of my field recordings from further afield yet. Right now I like the framework I’ve built for myself in Max and the limitations of just using environmental recordings from my small corner of the world, but I sometimes do need to simply just compose if I am working on a score or other project that isn’t a solo record.

Bookmarks: After Prince

The Open University's OpenLearn Live service has pulled together a collection of some of the more thoughtful responses to the sudden death of Prince.

Also worth your time: New York Mag on how Prince helped editors when he changed his name to the symbol:

Prince did the only thing you could do in that situation: He had a custom-designed font distributed to news outlets on a floppy disk.

The Prince font substituted his symbol for what would otherwise be a capital P. In addition, the font was also made available for download on CompuServe. It was accompanied by a stern letter featuring both usage and installation instructions.

You may have heard a lot of the tribute radio programmes that were broadcast on Friday night. But if you haven't caught Radio 4's The World Tonight, it's worth it for the interview with sound engineer Susan Rogers. You can listen to that here.

On the other hand... not everyone covered themselves in glory.

The Daily Mirror should be ashamed of its "Prince found dead in party mansion" headline on Thursday night online - nothing factually incorrect, but the inference was clear and unwelcome. Not as bad as Fox News, though, which spoke loudly about how the mansion was being treated "as a crime scene". The story, surely, was big enough to not need extra nudges and winks.

Bookmarks: Pop music

Jude Rogers has done a great piece for The Pool on why pop music is brilliant:

Pop music provides emotional links back to our earliest memories and experiences, for starters. Speaking personally, it takes me, The Mum, back to me as A Child, straightaway. (My first memory? Being allowed to wash the dishes with Grandma at two-and-a-half, singing along to ABBA's Super Trouper on the radio.) It also takes me back to my parents as parents, fitting my feet into their shoes. Oh, the times I'd tell my dad what was No 1 in the charts (like The Flying Pickets' cover of Yazoo's Only You in Christmas 1983 – probably the first Christmas I can blurrily remember). Oh, the times Mam would make car journeys better by playing her Sounds Of 1963 cassette (me wiggling my shoes to The Swinging Blue Jeans' Hippy Hippy Shake as we headed off on holiday). Music soundtracked my first impressions of these important people, and it's not a coincidence. It's the way we are wired.

Bookmarks: David Bowie

A brief and entertaining guide to David Bowie's adventures in gender transgression:

Alienation and gender fluidity also play out in Bowie’s music videos. A particularly enduring gestural act is performed in the music video for Boys Keep Swinging (1979), directed by David Mallet.

In the midst of his drag of Hollywood starlets, Bowie aggressively pulls his wig off and throws it off stage, then with the back of his hand, defiantly smears his lipstick across his face. Reappearing moments later as another drag persona, he repeats those gestures, as if to reinforce the gender subversion.

Bookmarks: Phish

There's a wonderful piece in Vogue about what it's like being married to someone who really, really, really likes Phish. Of course, it's called Confessions Of A Phish Wife:

Phish and its music are polarizing—either you get it or you don’t. Katie is one of the partners who don’t. “I am constantly like, ‘When are they retiring?’” she wondered aloud one afternoon over coffee. “It’s this constant hope of, Will this be the last one?” Katie was a Phish fan in high school and simply outgrew their music (“The lyrics are like Dr. Seuss, except not as clever”), and she finds the Phish stoner stigma a little embarrassing. “It took me a year into dating Will to tell my parents that he was a Phish-head,” she said. “We did it over dinner one night. I was like, ‘Guys, I have something to tell you . . .’”

It took me years to “find out”—I say “find out” with mock solemnity; after all, Phish fan is better than Ashley Madison member—the depths of my husband’s love for Phish. I knew he was a fan, but when we first met, the band was broken up. By the time they reunited in 2009, we were living together, and his secret was laid bare.

Bookmarks: Throwing Muses

If you're anything like me, you'll have been hoping for a comprehensive guide to Throwing Muses' discography to reveal itself. It looks like there's been a great one on the web for a while:

CAD 2013 _Red Heaven_ produced by Throwing Muses with Stuart Boyer
1992 furious / firepile / dio / dirty water / stroll / pearl //
summer st / vic / backroad / the visit / dovey / rosetta stone
/ carnival wig

Leslie Langston plays bass. Bob Mould (ex Husker Du) sings on
"Dio". A bit less stunning on the songwriting front, but at least
it still proved that the band were still alive. Initial UK CDs
(CAD D 2013) came with...

Bookmarks: vinyl

Kathy Iandoli contributes a piece on the lost art of cratedigging, which you can read over at Medium:

So what’s the point, right? Well, there is a utility for cratedigging that dates back decades to the earliest days of hip-hop production, because records were the raw materials for hip-hop tracks. The art of sampling was awesome albeit arduous. A producer would find a “breakbeat” (an instrumental section or drumbeat) or a snippet of sound from a record that they liked; play the vinyl on a turntable; and record that piece of music onto a sampler or a sampling-enabled drum machine where it could be replayed and layered in conjunction with other sounds in the beatmaking process.

To acquire the vinyl, they would hunt. They raided record stores and hit record fairs in the early morning hours to scour through crates and crates of wax. The Roosevelt Hotel Record Convention on E. 45th Street in New York City was a big one. Dealers would gather and legends of hip-hop’s Golden Age would arrive and peel through the layers of vinyl to find what they needed.

Bookmarks: Chvrches

I'm pleased that I've lived long enough to see Clive James write about Chrvches, but I'm delighted that he lived long enough to write about them:

Young pop stars now are born knowing how the web drives the cashflow. That, apparently, is why Chvrches spell their name with a “v” instead of a “u”: when you Google them, you won’t get anyone else. Originally they were two ordinary-looking young blokes, but they were lucky enough to be joined by an extraordinary-looking young lady who could sing. Lauren Mayberry has an enchanting voice with a face to fit, and millions of hormonally tormented young men all over the world think there has never been anything like her, while millions of envious young women think that this must be history’s first case of a rebel angel dressed as if she didn’t give a damn.

Bookmarks: Terence Trent D'Arby

There's an excellent piece about Terence Trent D'Arby at the New Statesman website. Interviewed by Kate Mossman, he's by turns self-aggrandising - claiming he was debated about in the House of Lords, something Hansard doesn't appear to record; charming; alarming; disarming and even - and this isn't something I've ever come across in a few decades of reading TTD interviews - like a human:

I press him about the lyrics to “Giraffe”, a likeable, child-friendly melody that contains the lines: “Giraffe/can I have your autograph?/Please sign it to Sananda”. When I suggest that it sounds like a song from Sesame Street he brightens. For the past five years he has been listening almost exclusively to children’s music with his two sons, aged three and five. Joe Raposo, who wrote many of the programme’s best-loved songs, including “It’s Not Easy Being Green”, is one of his favourite composers. His husky voice swells into a perfect, sparkly croon: Can you tell me how to get – how to get to Sesame Street! “You know,” he says, “I think Elvis Costello was also influenced by some of Raposo’s stuff. You’re not supposed to say that, as an angry young writer, ‘Oh yeah, I listen to Sesame Street,’ but I can hear certain devices of his that sound like that whole Electric Company style of songwriting.”

His boys love “Giraffe”, but he can’t be around while they are listening to it; his wife later tells me she has to wait until he’s out of the house to play it to them. He talks touchingly about love being “something you have to work on – it doesn’t just come to you”. As a young man, he scythed his way through women, partly because of his mother issues, he thinks: then one day he decided to stop, “because you’re only going to wind up looking for the same thing anyway”.

Bookmarks: Rocky Horror

There's a really splendid piece by Simon Price at The Quietus which considers Rocky Horror in the round. I'm not totally convinced - I think it's as much 'exotic package holiday in other people's identity' as 'first swim' - but Price's case is strong nevertheless:

Rocky Horror indubitably provides a 'safe space', an adult creche where transgressive behaviour and cross-dressing are accepted, nay, encouraged. Rocky Horror is a set of stabilisers on your sex bike, a pair of water wings for your first swim in the sea of depravity. But is that such a terrible thing?

Bookmarks: Cilla Black

Andy Medhurst's piece on Cilla Black concedes she was square, but suggests that was her superpower:

In many ways, her achievements were most notable for establishing continuities between different eras. Despite being vaulted into prominence by the earthquake of Merseybeat, which shook a nation out of post-war deference by insisting on the new, the now and the young, she was within a few years drawing on entertainment codes honed in earlier decades. This led some to lament her supposed co-option by conservatism but the shift now looks more shrewd: a fusion of novelty and tradition that fashioned her into the unlikeliest of hybrids, a pop art Gracie Fields.

Bookmarks: Protest songs

Oh, Edwyn Collins, you might believe there's not enough protest songs, but Tim Worthington is disproving you all over town with his guide to ten of most ineffectual protest songs of all time. It somehow misses off Back To The Planet's Please Don't Fight, but does corral everyone from Bill Oddie to Bros:

Matt and Luke attempt to reverse their Dumper-wards trajectory with an impassioned gospel-inflected ecological plea delivered to some bloke eating crisps, warning that there will be no birds up in the sky unless 'we' stop 'it' now. Presumably the minor landslide of vinyl, cassettes, 'Postermags', badges, t-shirts, leather jackets, pilfered bottle tops and Summer Specials containing bizarre text stories about kidnappers plotting to hold Matt to ransom in 'our 'oliday 'ome' that they had left in their wake did not constitute part of the 'it'.

Bookmarks: Wolf Alice

There's an in-depth interview with the lovely Wolf Alice over on DIY:

“Everything else is practice, in a way,” agrees Ellie. “I think those early years are so important. When we look back to our first few tours, when it was playing to ten people in Warrington, that’s really special to me.” What’s led them here, though, is a sense of belief. Even when members were coming and going, when Theo wasn’t taking to his chosen instrument and when Joel was playing live drums for the first time, Wolf Alice only happened because every member realised it was going somewhere.

Bookmarks: Cerys Matthews & Wham!

In a second slice of regional press/80s nostalgia for the morning, the South Wales Echo has been making Cerys Matthews relive the trauma of her first gig. Wham!, as it turns out:

“My sister was a bit older than me and I remember her saying, ‘You’ve got to come with me to the Top Rank in town or you’ll regret it for the rest of your life,” says the 46-year-old mum-of-three from Pembrokeshire, who's co-presenting the coverage of next weekend's Glastonbury festival for BBC6Music.

“It was in the early ’80s and I must have been about 12 or 13 at the time - it was during Wham’s first proper tour and they’d made a name for themselves by wearing tight white shorts and doing unconventional things with shuttlecocks.”

Bookmarks: Duran Duran

Superb work from the Newcastle Chronicle website, which has dug into its archives for the story of the time Andy Taylor opened a wine bar called Rio in Whitley Bay:

And the following year we reported on an even more bizarre problem.

“Panic broke out at the Tyneside wine bar owned by Duran Duran’s Andy Taylor when someone freed man-eating piranha fish from their tank,” we said.

“Bar staff at Rio rushed to rescue the fearsome fish, which eat human flesh, by scooping them into pint pots from between the feet of horrified customers.

“No one was bitten, but a few customers received an unwelcome soaking when 200 gallons of water in the tank gushed out.”

Bookmarks: Pins

Drowned In Sound meets Pins. Along with the excellent album, pronunciation is on the agenda:

DiS: You've had quite a lot of high-profile support slots. You've had The Fall and Sleater Kinney... or Slater Kinney as it's apparently pronounced... [the girls laugh] Yeah I didn't know that...

LM: Yeah I didn't know that either. Someone said "Slater" Kinney and it sounded weird.

FH: I kept hearing - what's he called on the radio on 6Music? Steve...

LM: Steve Lamacq.

FH: Yeah he kept saying "Slater" Kinney. I was like, what???

Bookmarks: Mikel Knight

Thanks to @pedro_dee for passing me the link to the alarming story of Mikel Knight and his street teams. It's a business model that appears to cut out all the normal music-related ways of building an audience, and just rushes up to people in the street, browbeating them into buying not very good CDs. It's like a cross between pyramid selling and chugging. The scary thing is, it brings in money - without necessarily worrying too much about paperwork. Or the people involved:

Ky Rodgers says that one night when riding in a street team van, the vehicle was in an accident in Utah, and the van fell off a three-story cliff. Ky was severely injured, and had to be care flighted to a hospital. He broke his L2, L3, and L4 vertebrae, his pelvis and sacrum, and was in the hospital for a week before he was discharged. He claims that Mikel Knight completely abandoned him and the rest of his street team crew, did not pay them, and would not return their personal possessions. Ky was stuck with $38,000 in medical bills, and couldn’t get Mikel Knight to even work with the auto insurance company to take out a claim, if the van was ever insured in the first place. “There was nothing we could do because we never signed anything saying ‘hey, you’re hired!’ He leaves no paper trail, no proof that anyone works for him, and he never withheld taxes from anyone’s pay.”

Knight's response to this, and other allegations, is to post things about "haters" to social media.

Bookmarks: Le Tigre

A photoset from Mike Evans of Le Tigre playing CBGB's in 2000

Bookmarks: Carol Decker

There's a lovely short piece in the Henley Standard that's partly about T'Pau, but really about how children don't really know what their parents do at work:

CAROL Decker’s daughter didn’t realise how famous her mum was until she saw her singing in front of 10,000 people.

Scarlett Coates was 10 when she and her brother Dylan watched T’Pau’s performance at the first Rewind festival in Henley.