Musings on the byways of popular culture
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Sad to hear that Mike Westbrook, one of the UK’s greatest contemporary composers, has died aged 90.
I suspect that his work will be well known here, though In a better world he would be a household name.
He leaves a remarkable body of music, in a range of formats from big band to solo piano. Hopefully people will leave examples in the comments.
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2026/apr/12/mike-westbrook-obituary
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I’ve been a long time reader/occasional poster on twitter. However it has become increasingly unpleasant, reflecting its increasingly unpleasant owner. So, like many others, I’m heading over to BlueSky, which is, on first look, pleasingly free of pornbots and Russian meme farms.
Is anyone else doing the same? Do say hello: @landocakes.bsky.social
Other social media platforms are available and feel free to punt them here.
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Hello, hive mind.
I would like – largely for my own enjoyment – to play around with creating some electonic-y music.
What I’m looking for is software that will allow me to add sounds recorded elsewhere – probably on a phone to begin with, so low tech. Could be bits of instrumental, found sounds, spoken word etc.
I’d like to be able to: take sounds and loop them so that they repeat. easily drop bits in to specific parts ideally distort the sounds in various ways build up layers of sound make different layers more/less prominent
Any recommendations for software that can do the above (and is simple enough for a novice to use)?
Thanks in advance.
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Venue:
Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh
Date: 20/01/2024
Erland Cooper’s music is hard to categorise. A mixture of classical, electronica, spoken word and found sounds. This particular performance was a (slightly delayed) celebration of the Queen’s Halll’s 200th anniversary.
On stage we had: Erland Cooper on piano, analogue synthesisers and tapes; a string quartet; a poet, Ellen Renton (for one piece). For one particular piece there was also some audience participation. I’ll describe this in some detail because it will help to give a flavour of the music.
We were asked to use our phones to go to his website, to a sound clip of gannets (I have, hopefully, included the url here so that you can try this at home.) The hall was filled with the echoing cries of gannets and Cooper conducted us to raise or lower the volume in line with the music; strings, ambient piano, tapes, designed to evoke the landscapes of Orkney, where he grew up. It was really effective, I thought. Fun, yet atmospheric.
For a man with serious points to make eg on climate change and making serious music, Cooper’s stage stage presence, while slightly awkward, is disarmingly funny and self-deprecating. Probably not a » Continue Reading.
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According to Jon Savage on Twitter, former Sounds journalist Jane Suck has died. She later wrote for the NME as Jane Solanas and later under her real name of Jane Jackman.
I was an avid Sounds reader from 1977-1980 or so and she was the best thing in it. Absolutely gripping, possibly speed-fuelled – dispatches from the front line that seemed to have her whole self in them. She seemed to capture the spirit of the times in both what she wrote and how she wrote it. I always liked her writing wherever it appeared and was sad when she seemed to just disappear off the radar.
I often wondered what had happened to her but was never able to find anything online. And now this.
So I’m sitting feeling sad about someone who I know very little about but whose work is embedded in a particular time of my life. What else to do but write about here and see if it has resonance with anyone else.
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Venue:
The Playhouse, Edinburgh
Date: 25/09/2021
Some context is in order, I think. Seconds Out, by Genesis (a live double album, as was the fashion), was my first proper album (I’m excluding Follow, Follow Rangers). I was given it – at my own request – for Christmas 1977, when I was 15. I’m not entirely sure why – I was mildly obsessed with hifi equipment at the time (we had none) and I’d read a review in a hifi magazine that had caught my interest, I think. I was astonished by the music; it was like nothing else I’d ever heard. My previous experience of music was either Top of the Pops, Radio1 or what my parents listened to (The Clancy Brothers, mainly). But this was something else entirely. It was at turns melancholy and exhilarating, constantly twisting and changing. And the lyrics! Creatures that dissolved in their own tears, urban lambs, angels standing in the sun. It was a world about as far away from a council estate in central Scotland as could be imagined. And maybe that was why I fell for it quite so hard. I pieced my experience of music backwards and forwards from there » Continue Reading.
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This might interest a few folk. Zavvi (yes, they’re still going) are doing 10 jazz LPs for £30. £3 for a new vinyl album is a bit of a bargain these days.
There’s a catch though – it’s a lucky dip; you don’t get to chose the 10 LPs you will receive.
Personally, I’m in. I like jazz and I’m willing to take a punt. YMMV.
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We’re all fed up with the whole lockdown business. However, here’s something that is lessening the pain for me. Every Tuesday, at 8pm, piano wunderkind Fergus McCreadie is streaming an hour an a half of piano improvisation from his Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/fergusmccreadiepianist/). It has become my one of my favourite points in the week – I’m already looking forward to tomorrow’s.
Will *you* like it? A fair question. The attached video should give you some idea. And if you like Keith Jarrett’s Koln album… well, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed. On the other hand, if the words ‘jazz’ and ‘improvisation’ give you the heebeegeebies, then I’m guessing you won’t.
This has been a public service announcement – with piano.
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If you’re wondering how you’re going to fill in your time for the next few months of lockdown, wonder no longer! Infinite Jest is an astonishing 99p on the kindle today.
Seriously, if you’ve ever wanted to tackle David Foster Wallace’s magnum opus, now is the time.
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After a 10-year hiatus, it looks like The Aliens are re-entering Earth’s atmosphere with some new music. Announcement on 20th Feb., according to this video. I don’t mind admitting that I’m excited at the prospect.
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Like music? Like geeky data? Of course you do – it’s The Afterword! So I can safely predict you will like this video of “Timeline history of most popular music artists from 1969 to 2019 ranked by yearly certified record sales. Numbers are worldwide and adjusted to twelve months trailing average.”
And there’s much more from the same person, in the same mesmerising style. Enjoy.
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Venue:
Norwegian Pearl, Mediterranean Sea
Date: 08/08/2019
This will either be your idea of heaven or hell. Four days on a cruise ship in the Med., with Belle and Sebastian, Mogwai, Camera Obscura, Teenage Fanclub, Buzzcocks, The Vaselines and a host of others. Spoiler alert: for me, it was the former.
This was essentially a floating festival. The ship had several different venues, with different bands playing concurrently around the ship. The major bands played more than once, giving people the chance to plan to see everyone at least once.
I’m a huge Belle & Sebastian fan and I was well catered for with 3 gigs over the 4 days, with 3 completely different setlists (including a complete performance of Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant.) Other headliners opted to repeat the same set, on the basis that people would probably see them once.
Other highlights for me were The Vaselines – I’d never seen them before and fell in love. Been singing “Monsterpuss, Monsterpuss miaow!” to myself all day. Saw them twice and would cheerfully have done so again. Moving return of Camera Obscura. French Navy on the main (pool) deck in the sunshine was » Continue Reading.
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I’ve stumbled upon the fact that Wuthering Heights Day exists. A day when people – mainly, but not entirely, women – gather together and re-enact Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights video moves, in costume.
From youtube, it seems that it happens all over the world.
What a wonderful, life-affirming, albeit slightly bonkers thing. A bit like the woman herself. Its existence cheered up my day and perhaps it will cheer up yours too. So here’s the Sydney event.
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I’m remembering – or half-remembering – something from a book and am now demented trying to identify the book. You know the drill.
The passage is about death and is to the effect that the date of our death is unknown, yet we pass it every year. A date that passes by unrecognised, despite its eventual significance.
Ring any bells with any of you?
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Venue:
Glasgow O2 Academy
Date: 05/11/2018
To the Weedge, to see Portland’s top popsters. I was slightly apprehensive, as this was the longest I’ve driven since some spinal cord jiggery pokery earlier in the year, but The Decemberists seem reluctant to play in Embra, so it was that or nothing. Glad I made the trip through – accompanied by @ralph of this parish – because The Decemberists turned in a brilliant performance.
While their setlist had the usual Decemberists role call of tragedy, murders, drownings by river spirits, whale swallowing etc. it was an overwhelmingly jolly occasion. Colin Meloy makes for an effective ringmaster and the band give every impression of enjoying themselves and being glad to be there. Always helps, I find.
Meloy’s voice is, I concede, a sticking point for many. It sounds like a fragile thing yet is revealed in concert to be rather strong too. It sounds as it does not because of vocal frailty but because it is exactly how he wants it to sound. I like it.
The setlist featured latest album I’ll Be Your Girl fairly heavily, which suited me – and indeed the audience, who contributed » Continue Reading.
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Author:Joel Selvin with Pamela Turvey
Subtitled “The Final Chapter of the Grateful Dead’s Long, Strange Trip” this book deals with the history of the Grateful Dead after the death of Jerry Garcia in 1995. That’s right, after the band had effectively finished. My first thought was that it was likely to be a bit dull – a duty read – not one bit! This is, somewhat unexpectedly, one of those music books that transcends the subject. What we get is a compelling, well-paced saga of grief, friendships lost, back-stabbing and, ultimately, redemption (of a sort). You don’t actually need to know or like the Grateful Dead to enjoy this book (though it certainly helps).
Garcia was central to the band to the extent that, when he died, each of the remaining 4* members thought that they alone had been his best friend. It was not, as Selvin points out, an illusion that they held about each other. There then follows an account of the vicious wrangling over Garcia’s will and estate, taking in a tragi-comic account of a boat trip to scatter his ashes.
The band members are left with an income-generating business but don’t know what to do with » Continue Reading.
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I have become, as happens to us all, slightly obsessed by a song. That song – already familiar to some of you, I know – is Michael Nesmith’s Laugh Kills Lonesome, which appears on his excellent 1992 “…tropical campfires…” album. A link to a nice live version should be below. And now I’m going to try to explain my obsession.
The title caught my attention. In fact, it’s the title of a painting which is the subject of the song. The painting is by Charles Russell and if there isn’t a link to it here, I’ll add one in the comments. It’s a nocturnal painting of some cowboys around a campfire. To be honest, it’s the kind of thing I would ordinarily have dismissed as kitsch and not given much attention. I would have been wrong to do so. Russell was the real deal, a genuine cowboy and artist, who painted Laugh Kills Lonesome in 1925, towards the end of his life.
Nesmith’s song opened up my eyes to this work of art – it depicts something wonderful and human. The grins of a shared joke shine out in the darkness, literal and metaphorical.
But here’s the really » Continue Reading.
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It’s a rainy Sunday and, searching for suitable musical accompaniment, my hand fell on a compilation I picked up cheap as chips in a sale, many years ago: Folk Heritage II. It’s been on repeat play ever since -I’d forgotten how brilliant it is.
There’s the obligatory Richard Thompson (the otherwise hard-to-get Time to Ring Some Changes) of course but the rest is a string of absorbing gems. For example, Dick Gaughan’s stirring rendition of English rebel song, World Turned Upside-Down, the fragile beauty of June Tabor’s solo vocal The Band Played Waltzing Matilda, Nic Jones’ Canadee-i-o and a marvellous folk version of Music for Found Harmonium. That’s a few examples – it’s *all* delightful. And available for 9p from an online emporium near you.
My favourite though – and the real point of this post – is the attached (if I’ve done this right) the Albion Band’s Rambleaway. I’m not really familiar with the Albion’s output but I do love this song. One of the reasons, I think, is that it uses a device that few songs do – it changes the perspective from which it is sung (I make it two first person perspectives and a third » Continue Reading.
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Venue:
The Hydro, Glasgow
Date: 29/06/2018
Roger Waters is, in large part, his own tribute act. The setlist consisted mainly of Pink Floyd numbers from 1971 – 1977, along with a few songs from his latest solo album. Is there any difference then, between this and, say, The Australian Pink Floyd, who can be seen playing much the same songs, in this very same venue? Other than the absence of Rog’s solo numbers, which some may not be too upset by? I do believe there is.
This is, of course, a spectacular, with jaw-dropping lighting and effects. And it needed to be – the Hydro is huge. Happily this is a show designed for large arenas, with Rog prowling the stage conducting band and audience. Part 1 consisted of some Dark Side of the Moon (props to the backing vocalists for Great Gig in the Sky), a menacing One of These Days and Welcome to the Machine, crowd-pleasing Wish You Were Here and solo stuff. An unexpected highlight came at the end of the first half with Another Brick in the Wall.
It’s a song I didn’t care if I ever heard again, to be honest, so » Continue Reading.
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What does it sound like?:
I approached this 10-disc box set with some caution – cheapo re-issues being a bit hit and miss, not least as regards information about the recordings. However I need not have worried. While these recordings have been around in some form or another for a while, French label Le Chant Du Monde have done an excellent job of collating and annotating what they say are all the known recordings of the 1962 European tour by Coltrane’s quartet (McCoy Tyner, piano; Jimmy Garrison, bass;Elvin Jones, drums; John Coltrane, soprano & tenor sax). They are presented in a (cd-sized) hardback book, with the discs in fan-out paper sleeves and the comprehensive booklet in the middle. Nice.
There are 8 shows (not all complete) and the long tracks means that they aren’t always presented linearly – however all the information is in the sleeve notes.
The sound quality is variable – there are a couple of boxy, splashy gigs in there – but generally very listenable. The odd drop-out and truncated number.
And the music? Feck me, it’s marvellous. The whole quartet get a chance to solo and do so to great effect – and to » Continue Reading.
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While the deaths of MES and Hugh Masekala have, not surprisingly, been mentioned here, I’ve seen nothing on that of Ursula K Le Guin, which had a more profound affect on me. Let me put that right now.
Her SF novels such as The Dispossessed and Left Hand of Darkness (which I suspect were a strong influence on Iain M Banks) brought something new and thoughtful to a testosterone- dominated genre. Her Earthsea books are probably the best known and those stories of a young child going off to a school for wizards may have been an influence on … ah, you’re ahead of me.
However, it’s her short stories that I love the most. My absolute favourite is The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas (if i’ve Done this right, there should be a link to it included). I first read this in my teens and it had a very strong affect on me. To this day, it’s a yardstick that I measure my life by: am I walking away from Omelas? If you’ve never read it, please do – it’s 4 pages of brilliant writing that will more than repay the time it takes.
And, as always when » Continue Reading.
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Venue:
Oran Mor, Glasgow
Date: 19/11/2017
I do like Jim White, so much so that I body-served the option of Chuck Prophet at home in sunny Edinburgh, to travel out to the weedge to see JW instead. I have to say: good choice. He was ably backed by his support band, Cicada Rhythm and took us on an extended tour of his back catalogue and new album (Waffles, Triangles and Jesus). However it wasn’t just the material, strong though it is, that made this a top gig. It was Jim White’s stage presence, hilarious yarns and general bonhomie that made it a special occasion. For all I know, he says the same stuff every night but it didn’t feel like that. It felt like the spontaneity and associated risk that makes going to a gig worthwhile. JW made several mentions of his history of mental illness, which I’d not been aware of. Good for him. Special mention for his nightly ”shirt off my back’ auction, which has enabled him to make significant donations to Doctors Without Borders (“They think I’m a millionaire!”) No Tornadoes or Still Waters though *sad face*.
The audience:
Varied but, well, I didn’t feel out » Continue Reading.
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Venue:
Kings Theatre, Edinburgh
Date: 25/08/2017
I’ve been looking forward to this for months and I was not disappointed.
This was part 1 of the 50-Song Memoir (part 2 tomorrow – yay!), consisting of the first 25 songs, no encore. Presiding genius Stephin Merritt sat in his own intricate set (see picture) made up like his own childhood room , with toys etc. and a selection of instruments to hand. Beyond that were 6 musicians, who together delivered pretty good adaptations of the sometimes intricate arrangements on the record.
They were aided by a selection of videos designed to accompany the songs. Merritt dominated proceedings, of course. He did this largely by sitting still and using expressive body language (in a low-key way – he is an eye-roll ninja) and droll between song asides.
I absolutely loved it. Can’t wait for part 2 tomorrow.
The audience:
Mixed! A surprising amount of laughter – to me anyway; it’s seldom laugh-out-loud funny to me. During the interval, found that I was sitting 2 seats down from @ralph of this parish, which was nice.
It made me think..
The Kings is a lovely venue, ideal for this » Continue Reading.
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What does it sound like?:
The obvious point of comparison for 50 Song Memoir is The Magentic Fields’ previous multi-song masterwork, 69 Love Songs. And, Indeed, fans of that popular work will not be disappointed here. There is the same eclectic mix of styles, hummable tunes and droll turns of phrase. There’s a lot to like. The standard of songwriting is pretty high – they were compiled over a long period of time, which probably helped. The hit rate is higher than 69 Love Songs, I’d say even if there’s nothing that quite hits the highs of that album (though, ahem, give me time – this is growing on me with each listen). The difference is that Stephin Merritt, Magnetic Fields songwriter etc., has composed avowedly autobiographical songs (for the first time, allegedly) – one for each year of his life up to age 50, covering the years 1966 to 2015.
What does it all *mean*?
We get a potted history of Mr Merritt’s life through the medium of song. Luckily, it has been quite an interesting one. His bohemian mother gets a few appearances. Memorably, Merritt – aged 5 – is taken to see the Jefferson Airplane and » Continue Reading.
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London Can Take It, from Public Service Broadcasting.
As so often, music expresses the things I cannot find the words to say myself.
