All The UK Christmas Number 1s: 2008

Smug? Moi?

This was the year of Obama, the Irish pork crisis, and talks on North Korea’s nuclear programme (again). Come the twelfth month, we said our goodbyes to Woolworths, Eartha Kitt and Oliver Postgate. Muntadhar al Zaidi threw his shoes at George Bush, and the year was rounded out by the discovery of a huge cache of dinosaur fossils in China (and an even bigger one in the UK charts).

It was also the last year that bloody X-Factor enjoyed an unchallenged reign at the top, and predictably it was with a cover version. Alexander Burke came from Islington, and her mother had been the lead singer for Soul II Soul, so she had an impressive pedigree, and had been trying to win the programme for four years. Her choice of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah was a canny one, as this appealed to believers and agnostics alike, but got under the nose of those (me included) who were already royally pissed off with talent shows and their domination of the festive top spot.

As a result, there was the first (I think) concerted attempt to prevent Cowell’s juggernaut from pulling into the loading bay. Fans of Jeff Buckley’s considerably less overstated (and per se more effective) version attempted to propel it to pole position and very nearly succeeded (it got to number two). The following year was a coup d’etat, but for now we had to eat our porridge lukewarm.

TV highlights for Christmas Day 2008:

Wallace & Gromit: The Curse Of The Were-Rabbit / Shrek The Halls / The Royle Family: The New Sofa

By now there was so much choice on our screens that a feature like this seems redundant.

Alexandra Burke, Hallelujah

The Spirit Of Christmas Present: Part Eight

Christmas Eve came, slowly and thickly on the tails of a freezing wet December. Sarah awoke early in the morning to see the dream of so many children: a thin veil of snow covered the land, and more was falling in a robe-like swathe. She ran on cold, bare feet to Giles’ room and they both went downstairs to a breakfast of sausages and eggs, which were the last things left in the cupboards. The meager amount of money left by the departing Ashers had not been supplemented by their weekly shop, and the children had merely one £20 note, which is not much use when there is nowhere from which to buy food. Their isolation was total and complete, and they had no idea in the world what was going to happen to them next.

“Who on earth decided to build a cottage this far out in the wilderness?” said Sarah. “We’re going to have to walk a very long way if we want to get anywhere…you realize that, don’t you?” Giles stared at her in blank recognition, then merely shrugged. “What if the snow cuts us off?”, he said. “We’ll have to take that risk,” Sarah replied, “because I simply have nothing else to make us to eat. Come on, wrap up as much as you can, and we’ll make tracks.” “I just hope we can make tracks back as well,”  the ever-optimistic Giles grumbled disconsolately.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7

The Drum Is Everything

(The) Panacea gives an indication as to what bloggers who dislike his music can do.

BPM. Where would we be without it? It first came to my attention when, as an avid reader of Smash Hits during the mid 80s, all the new dance releases had to have this information appended, although what anybody except DJs would have done with these dubious nuggets was beyond me. Moreover, we were treated to risible descriptions of the tracks, usually a collection of adjectives in front of a made-up noun: “shuffling joggling 120bpm mashler,” or something similar.

These days, it’s become more of a technical yardstick to determine the genre your music falls into: if it’s 130-140 BPM, it’s Nu School Breaks, 150-170 is Jungle, if it’s over 200 it’s Cybergrind, and 160-170 is Drum and Bass. Now this is a gross oversimplification of course, and those of you wishing for a more erudite and informed description would be advised to look elsewhere. However, it’s a facile and tendentious way to introduce Panacea (or Mathias Mootz to his parents), a classically trained German producer and musician who goes under a variety of pseudonyms, including M squared, Problem Child and so on. He unites the frantic tempo of drum and bass with dark undertones and speech samples to produce occasionally quite compelling soundscapes, with vocals put on the back burner.

John Peel’s show was going through a period of frantic redevelopment in the mid 1990s and this ridiculously fast tempo stuff was catnip to his exploration of the new and exciting. Panacea’s first and only session used on the fly remixes of tracks put out on the Chrome (subsequently Position Chrome) label (the source of a bewildering variety of 12 inches) and given hefty boots of tambourine and throbbing, visceral bass sounds. John was sufficiently impressed to have Mathias perform at his 60th birthday party in 1999, where a continuous 26 minute aural assault was one of the highlights of the evening.

Panacea, Peel Session

Panacea, Peel’s 60th birthday gig

The 1997 Festive Fifty was a problem child in itself, being reduced to 31 places for reasons which have never been fathomed (and will be discussed here at a later date). There are those that claim the other records played in the show before the chart are actually numbers 32-50 in disguise, and lists can be found on the Net touting them as such. Well, that’s a conspiracy theory I’m not getting drawn into now: but if you believe it, Panacea’s Stormbringer, chosen by John’s son William, would be number 37.

To be perfectly honest, D&B would not be a natural choice for my mp3 player, since it all begins to sound very samey after a while and the ear numbs rapidly, and what John saw in it I have yet to fathom, but it has a massive following, to such an extent that criticism seems irrelevant. But I’m just the postman (as Bob Dylan once said). And Mathias did name Tallis’ Spem In Alium as one of his favourite tracks, so he can’t be a bad lad (said he condescendingly). Many thanks to Stuart and Andrew for the source material.

Re: Master

“More to come in the not too distant future, I hope.” John, you overestimate my work rate.

The term “remastering” crept unbidden into our consciousness sometime in the early 1990s, if my memory serves me right. Lazy and  greedy record companies, who had rushed to get their albums onto the new CD format from the mid 80s onwards, found that the results in many cases were well below standard, and for more than a few folk the old LPs seemed preferable. It involved in the first instance beefing up the sound on the original recordings, making them sound louder and brighter, and in recent years has necessitated going back to the master tapes to obtain the best possible sound.

It’s all a desperate attempt to continue lining their pockets in order to  bolster the dying art of the physical format of course. We now have a separate category in which the term can be used where original first generation tapes of radio shows have these bright, sparkling digital versions spliced between DJ chat in order to re-create the original programmes in as near to an approximation of the first broadcast as possible. I have performed this procedure on a couple of Peel shows from 1979, where the original tapes were lacking treble, were at the wrong speed (although I suspect this would not have been alien to our John), or had tracks edited out, and I present one of them for your enjoyment (and hopefully approval) today.

Peel Show 1979-04-30 (Sessions: Shake, Neon Hearts)

Three separate files were used here, the first speed-corrected to +7%. I couldn’t find some of the songs (the Shake session has never been released), so I left them as they were. The full track listing is here. It’s a dip into a warm bath of nostalgia for the majority of readers (if there are still any around) of this blog. If the reaction is favourable, I could be persuaded to do some more, but I have yet another new PC on the way (sound familiar?) in a couple of weeks to replace my 9 year-old X-Note. So, if the flood of congratulatory and positive feedback that I’m neither expecting nor that I deserve arrives, we could be travelling this road again together.

Follow The Leader

Time for you all to listen to a voice far more productive than mine. Click to be entertained. Great job, Stuart!

Let’s Hope It’s A Good One

"Nowhere on earth is safe again from my attentions." Let's hope that doesn't include Juliette's house, buddy......

A merry Christmas to all, and a brief reminder of a classic return to form from Peel alumni Andy Kershaw.  After his well-publicised public meltdown and brushes with his ex-partner and restraining orders, he found a new home on Radio 3, co-hosting Music Planet with Lucy Duran. As is commonplace with Kershaw, he took any risks necessary in order to bring world music to the masses, including nearly being burned alive at a rocket festival in Thailand. So, if your idea of an ideal accompaniment to mince pies and turkey (and turkey….and turkey….and turkey, “a loaf of bread with wings”, as John Walters memorably described it) is listening to the Bat People of Papua New Guinea or shaman in Mongolia, here’s your chance to download all eight radio episodes.

Oceans /Deserts / The Arctic / Jungles / Mountains /Grasslands / Rivers / Cities  

You Get Orange

The band Read Yellow (Jesse Vuona, guitar; Paul Koelle, drums; Evan Kenney, guitar; and Micheller Freivald, bass, with vocals shared between the three guitarists) recorded one Peel session, and they were noisy sods.  They formed in 2001 in a basement in Amherst, Massachusetts. and in the six years of their existence played gigs to anything between 2 and 10,000 kids. Extreme-Music Blogspot has this to say about a gig he went to:

When Read Yellow started playing, the vocalist/guitarist began screaming and getting right into the audience. During the show, the other guitarist gave his guitar to the audience, and the audience began playing it and making noise on it. They also gave a microphone to the audience, along with a drumstick and a cymbal, to which the audience began making noise with that as well. Near the end of the show, the vocalist/guitarist began throwing his guitar around, and attempting to play it behind his head. Eventually he began jumping around the stage so much that he jumped into the drum kit. The drum kit fell apart, but the drummer attempted to play what was left standing.
I had never been to a live show with that much audience interaction, or that many crazy things happening on stage. I left that show saying “I don’t know if those guy in Read Yellow know how to play, but that was the best live show I’ve seen in my life!”. I’ve been to some great live shows (Suffocation is always fun to see), but nothing quite ever topped that.

We're still waiting for the last part of your Christmas story, asshiole.

Sounds just like my kind of band. Personal recommendation among the four songs on offer below: the single, ‘Model America.’ And they made a lot of people sad when they broke up after releasing the CD Gang Violins, which I’ve never heard but on the basis of this would very much like to. One may feel that this kind of sound has been done elsewhere, but the band have a dedication to intense squalls of sound that still never sacrifice melody or coherence entirely, with a touch of Julian Cope in the vocals to boot.

Read Yellow, Peel Session (2004-02-12)
A Love Supreme/Model America/The Art/The Easiest Part Of Surveillance