The Afterword

Musings on the byways of popular culture

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Mogwai

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Venue:

The Institute Birmingham

Date: 19/02/2023

Can we say that Mogwai are now entering their Elder Statesmen of Rock period? Ten albums and nearly as many soundtracks in they have a vast catalogue to choose from on a tour that feels like a victory lap for twenty years of brilliant music. The Institute is packed on a Sunday night with people singing along with every word…no not really, but it’s testament to the connection they make that virtually every song receives a cheer of recognition within a couple of seconds of the unfolding riff.

In terms of stage antics there is not much going on. Guitar, keyboards, bass, drums and guitar from left to right. Occasionally the keyboard player adds a third guitar, and Stuart, the nearest they have to a frontman, adds a ‘thanks’. What they do have to look at is a beautiful light show, with eleven all-singing all-dancing lights on tall towers providing visual equivalents to the sonic cathedrals of sound being thrown around the venue.

A set of two halves for me, the first part dominated by the more melodic and synth-driven tracks from the last few albums: Jim Morrison, Dry Fantasy and Boltfor being » Continue Reading.

Stars

by 4 Comments

Venue:

Deaf Institute, Manchester

Date: 10/02/2023

Can there be a less unalloyed pleasure then finally seeing live a band who you’re listened to for many years but, partly because they’re from another country, partly because they’re not that big, you never thought they’d tour over here again. So it is with Stars, the Canadian indie poppers now well into their third decade as a band. No Birmingham date on their short current tour, so a quick train and an Ibis Styles later I’m at the Deaf Institute. It’s tiny! There are probably sixty souls when I arrive, and by the time Stars are on that number has doubled. But even so, 120 tickets at €20 a pop does not leave much to go between six band members, two roadies, sound engineer and so on. Other dates I hope are in bigger venues, otherwise I am guessing someone is losing their shirt on this. Support is an eccentric but endearing solo act from Murray Lightburn, frontman for fellow Montealers The Dears, Stars are on just after eight – just about fitting bass, guitar, drums, keyboards and two singers onto the tiny stage. But before Stars start, a brief digression. As » Continue Reading.

Gigs I was banned from going to… settle the score here

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@freddy-steady is no doubt still boiling after 40 years at not being allowed to go to Monsters of Rock inn 1981. More details please! Excellent idea for a thread, the gigs you were not allowed to attend, probably by parents but maybe also by partners putting their foot down etc. etc. Me: on a French exchange aged 15 in France in 1980, and already a veteran of at least 3 or 4 gigs at home. During my stay in Nantes the Police, XTC and UB40 are playing at the Parc des Expositions. Would my French hosts have any of it? They would not. I think I’d even bought a ticket and was forced to go back to the record shop and ask for a refund. In French. Worst Exchange Ever. Your tails of thwarted trips here please.

Your Most Played Non-Artist

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What with Spotify wrapped, itunes playcounts and lastfm scrobbles the answer to who is your most played artist (The Fall followed by David Bowie) is safely stored in the cloud. But who’s your most played non-artist? To explain. I was out running with John Digweed live in Miami on the headphones. Earlier on I’d listened to CD6 of Last Night at Output, another stellar Digweed set and great working music. I must have listened to many thousands of tracks mixed by him. Yet on many lastfm he crops up a mere 93 times, placing him hundreds of places down. I must have 20 odd-CDs, plus as many again on mp3. No question he’s my most played non-artist. Conductors, producers, DJs, compilers (thinking my great Norman Jay Good Times comps) – so who’s your most played who won’t feature on any Spotify wrapped? Not that Digweed or Simon Rattle aren’t supreme artists at their trades of course, but they tend to thwart the categorisers.

RIP the Music Magpie wishlist

by 25 Comments

I can’t be the only person who managed their addictions via the Stockport-based secondhand dealers. One of their best website features was the Wishlist, which had all your wants in one handy place. Frequent conversations with myself occurred along the lines of ‘I should get that Pavement album but no more than 2.99’. ‘Oh the Messien double cd is now only 3.69’. It was a carefully crafted thing of small joys, none more than trying to find a fourth cd to make up the ‘4 for £8’ bundle. ‘Only going to check it once I’ve finished this budget’ and so on. And now it’s gone – possibly linked to their expanding in the US – and I feel suprisingly bereft. The Amazon wishlist feels like a list of shame in comparison. I had 80 or so entries, am I really going to recreated them for Bezos’ benefit? Post your elegies, enconiums and healing suggestions here.

Stars Klaxon!

by 15 Comments

It’s been a day of discovery as not only did Canadian alt-poppers Stars have a new album out in May, they are touring these fair isles next Feb. I must admit I had them on a list of ‘they’ll never tour over here ever’ – but no they are in Cork, Glasgow Leeds, Manchester and London but sadly not Birmingham. Never mind, one ticket to the Deaf Institute purchased for Fri Feb 10. Can’t tell you how genuinely exciting this is. New album, From Capelton Hill, on first listen is a return to core values and will be floating around the top of my top 20 of the year. Ms Moles listened to two tracks ‘Sounds a bit Arcade Firey’. No i think you’ll find Arcade Fire sound a bit Starsy…so solo mission. Never mind.

Plaid

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Venue:

Hare and Hounds Birmingham

Date: 23/11/2022

It seems bonkers that a group who have been going thirty years could be classified as challenging new music. But Plaid, part of that brilliant Warp Records roster of the early 90s, are still putting their grindy textures and jumpy time signatures out there. Having heard both Squarepusher and Plaid at this venue recently, Plaid have mellowed rather beautifully. Their tracks, many I am guessing from new album Feorm Falorx, blend into one another live to create a continuous soundscape. Chief elements are the classic Warp sub-bass frequencies and the klassic metallic klang keyboard sound of early techno. Live guitar over the top provides extra texture and if you’re in any way interested by beats and electronica (most stuff a chugging mid-tempo) it’s all pleasant rather than challeinging. Stage left two blokes pecking away on laptops. They may be Plaid. Stage right two blokes pecking away on keyboard and guitar. They may also be Plaid. probably them really. Not much visually going on is there? Well actually they give us something to occupy the eyes in the form of a continuous evolving set of trippy visuals. Not quite a feature film, but » Continue Reading.

Sault Public Service Announcement

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The enigmatic Sault have decided as an offering to God to release all their albums on free download for five days. A gift indeed as much of their stuff is not available on streaming platforms. Just head to their website and enter a password that is for Brummies the banner held up by that nice man outside Edgbaston or St Andrews on many many days over the past decade. Just google it or search on twitter if you’re not au fait with this.

https://www.sault.global/

A New Song For A New Day

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Author:Sarah Pinsker

How many sci-fi novels about the music industry can you name? Not many, which is why I thought you’d be interested to hear about A New Song for A New Day. Published in 2019, the set-up of this novel is eerie prophetic as one half of the historic shift in American society is a new highly transmissable, and in some cases fatal, virus. The other half imagines a 9/11 style terror campaign targeting sports and concert venues. Put the two together and Pinsker imagines a US in 2030 in which fear of congregation and strangers are the most powerful forces in a new social structure. Who could profit from this you ask? A thinly veiled A****n who can drone virtually everything to your door meaning you never need to leave the house. Almost all education, socialising and work now takes place online after a huge flight from cities to small communities, and a generation has grown up at the start of the novel for whom living virtually is normal. One of our two protagonists, Rosemary, is a young woman working in customer services for the above mentioned corporate behemoth, called Superwally in the novel.

Where’s the music » Continue Reading.

The Snowflake Generation pt. 94

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The article itself makes one universal point: that in your thirties you have less free time with careers, young children etc. than when you were 18. Twas ever thus.

And he’s a bit sad that he’s not got as many friends to go and see the Libertines with as 20 years ago.

But the BTL comments are great, including a prog-loving poster that must almost certainly be an Afterworder by another name.

But really…I’d almost call him a c#######n except he’s got an article on music published in the Guardian and I haven’t. Pull your socks up man!

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/aug/16/bring-that-beat-back-why-are-people-in-their-30s-giving-up-on-music

Baby it’s cold out there…on ticket sales at the grassroots

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A fair few of us here are in some way ‘involved’ with the grassroots live music scene – whether folk or jazz clubs, grassroots venues or a bit of promoting that artist we know and love in our hometown. In the dynamic tickets thread there was a comment about ticketmaster pricing for yer big gigs impacting on sales lower down the food chain. From the things I’m involved in….

1. Artists and agents are still cautious. There’s both a lot of acts wanting to tour, and not enough of the acts that you’d jump to put in the programme.

2. For events with a pre-COVID comparator we are on average 25-33% down on pre-COVID levels. This is not uniform, and gigs with an appeal to the under-thirties are doing fine…

3. Conversely, gigs where the core audience was over fifty are really suffering. With several very high-calibre artists we’ve said we’ve been slightly disappointed at the audience we’ve got, only to hear it’s the best attendance of the tour.

So this is a bit of rant/therapy session thread. I’d love to hear from others what it’s like out there – good, bad or ugly No need for names, musings on » Continue Reading.

Your long and varied Spotify playlists that you can put on just like the radio

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Whatever you think of Paul Morley, there’s no question he has listened to a lot of music and loves a list. I’m currently rereading his 2003ish history of pop, Words and Music, which spins out many a theory from Can’t Get You Out of My Head and the seminal electronic track I’m Sitting In A Room by Alvin Lucier. The latter is truly amazing, just go listen. Luckily some kind soul called Gary James on Spotify has put all 2000 tracks referenced in the book into one playlist (just search for Paul Morley Words and Music). I’m 200 tracks in and have already discovered as well as Lucier great tracks by Tweet, Roy Harper, Autechre and Laurie Spiegel. It’s so long and varied that you can put it on just like…radio. There’s tracks you know, tracks you don’t but no between song chat. So… (continued in comments)

Phoebe Bridgers

by 7 Comments

Venue:

Academy, Birmingham

Date: 26/06/2022

If this gig is anything to go by, Phoebe Bridgers is coming up fast on the rails as a spokesperson for a generation. Second album Punisher was everywhere during lockdown, and her hushed acoustic tales of twenty-something depression, therapy and relationship breakdown resonated mightily.

Three thousand souls gathered at the Academy, hugely excited to be part of the much-postponed Punisher victory lap tour. Fronting a full band kitted out in her trademark skeleton tops, we got a focused 90 minute set that saw almost all of Punisher played together with the highlight half of debut Stranger In The Alps.

The Punisher songs, on the whole, were beefier and filled the venue out impressively. Some of the delicacy and poise of the absolute best of …Alps however I felt got lost in the transition from headphones to stage. Opener Motion Sickness fared best, prompting a huge singalong from the get-go, while my personal favourite Scott Street (has anyone recorded a better single song in the past five years?) fell a bit awkwardly between acoustic and electric, solo and band. If you record a song that good, expectations will be high. Predictably but effectively the » Continue Reading.

Films To Stop Watching Half-Way Through

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We chuckled our way through Alexander Payne’s Downsizing yesterday. Well, to be exact, we chuckled our way through the first half. Taking a bonkers premise – Norwegian scientist invents a process for shrinking people to four inches high – the first half is a riot. Endorsed by governments as a solution to overpopulation and resource depletion, downsizing is a pretty sharp hour of gags following this premise. Sort of ‘Honey I Shrunk The Kids but think of the Lifestyle’ it plays well on the idea that if by being downsized with our current purchasing power, we can afford all the material possessions and lifestyle ‘Big Life’ denies us, then lots of people would. So you can have a Mcmansion, live in a fabulous gated community, drink champagne and never work again. But then, half-way through, it pivots in the space of fifteen minutes into a super-serious end-of-the-world ecoplyse now. Out go almost all the gags, in come scientists now saying ‘We’ve done the modelling and the outcome is extinction for humanity’. This second half works less well, let’s say.

So, when exactly should you stop watching a particular film?

Wolf Alice vs Chvrches – some musings while standing around in the Academy

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Seeing two bands at the Birmingham Academy in just over a week has inevitably prompted comparisons and contrasts in the brain space between the support and the headliner – so here is a double-header review. Wolf Alice are perhaps the current holders of the ‘Hottest Guitar Band In Britain’ cup. We got some returns (one thing Ticketmaster has sorted) as the gig sold out in about a minute. Chvrches tickets still on sale a few days before but felt just as busy on the night.

Audiences for both were completely invested – singing along to all the lyrics, filming it all on their phones and generally having the absolute time of their lives. While not the sound of 18-year old Britain, both bands have a pretty firm grip on the playlists and aspirations of twenty-somethings around the country.

Both cleave at first glance to the Sleeperbloke format, WA being three blokes plus the insanely charismatic Ellie Roswell, Chvrches two faceless musos plus the insanely charismatic Lauren Mayberry. It’s not quite that simple with Roswell: she’s at times content to fade into the background, and has a somewhat diffident stage persona, unlike the bass player who throws rock shapes for the » Continue Reading.

Let’s spouge!

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An extraordinary article in The Guardian describing the (to me anyway) completely forgotten genre of spouge which was huge in Barbados and the Caribbean from the mid-sixties for a decade then disappeared. No, it’s not April 1st yet. The Draytons Two album referred to is on Spotify, though the other stuff isn’t and I’ve been playing it for the last thirty minutes and it’s great.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/feb/28/spouge-forgotten-music-genre-jackie-opel-barbados

Great arrangements – a dying art?

by 19 Comments

If artists get paid once their song hits 30 seconds on Spotify then no wonder they are tempted to put all the musical goodies upfront. Hooks, choruses, riffs they all need to hit the ground running. And while lots of great pop works like this – Motown anyone – I can’t help but feel that the producers and arrangers arts are narrowing somewhat. So here’s a couple of examples where not everything is put on the table right at the start.

Firstly, The Long white Dress by Tracey Thorn. For 2 mins 13 the arrangement sets Tracey’s voice against acoustic guitar and keyboards as she muses on marriage. Then in a glorious moment the whole band comes in as the song’s line ‘Or is it all in my head ‘questions the last two minutes, the Chorus melody kicks in, and the whole song lifts into another level. I cannot tell you how satistying this moment is, for me at least, and when I heard it recently I had to stop walking and rewind my Fiio to hear it again. All the more so for being held back. Exhibit B, a bit more conventional, is From the Night by Stars. The » Continue Reading.

Kindle monthly deals for December – scifi special

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I think the monthly all-in 99p sweep may have run its course, but you’ll still get occasional updates. This month the estimable imprint S.F. Masterworks has a big chunk of classics on at 99p.

A Scanner Darkly – Philip K Dick Inverted World – Christopher Priest Doomsday Book – Connie Willis Roadside Picnic – Arkady Strugatsky Mockingbird – Walter Tevis The Forever War – Joe Haldeman Rendezvous With Rama – Arthur C. Clarke The Dispossessed – Ursula K LeGuin

plus in other editions Neuromancer – William S Gibson Altered Carbon – Richard Morgan Revelation Space – Alistair Reynolds

Bicep

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Venue:

Forum

Date: 03/12/2021

The Hummingbird, no the Carling Academy, no the 02 Academy, no the Forum lives again. Its latest incarnation is heavily skewed to club culture. There are club nights, and after Mike Skinner opened the thing the jewel in their autumn lineup is surely Bicep. I’ve written about their first album here, and their second album Isles is on my list of albums of the year. Support was from an excellent DJ, whose name I cannot trace anywhere. But after perhaps one of the longer openers,as he was on for about an hour and a half, it was Bicep time. Their stage presence was in the great tradition of all electronic duos: walk on, stand behind keyboards, walk off. No rockin the decks or working the crowd. Just a couple of dancefloor engineers at work here. Visuals were shapes and colours, all very abstract and geometrical. They gave the eye something to focus on besides two men in t-shirts. But it was really all about the music: an hour of seamless mix followed by an encore featuring two tracks (Glue and Apricots) played in a more conventional manner. And what a great hour it was. Their » Continue Reading.

Beyond The Hallowed Sky

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Author:Ken Macleod

Every since his debut The Star Fraction Ken Macleod has made it his mission to write the future of Scotland into his work, and so it is here in what is one of the first overtly post-Brexit works of sci-fi. In 2070 the world is split between the Union ( Europe including Scotland), the Alliance (England, the US, India) and the Co-ord (Russia and China). Macleod sets three plots in motion: in Scotland a mathematician proves that faster than light travel is possible; on colonised exoplanet Apis the authorities struggle with a first contact scenario; and on Venus a scientific outpost is infiltrated by a spy determined to keep a lid on new discoveries on the surface.All these events are happening at the same time – and the cleverness of this novel’s construction is the working out of the contradictions between the three. If an FTL drive is being now developed in Scotland, how can a colonised planet have been already reached using it? If aliens are already talking to humanity on Apis, then what is the point of trying to cover up evidence of their existence on Venus?

His strengths of well-drawn characters – from a Clyde » Continue Reading.

That Adele eh? Making you listen to tracks in the right order. Whatever next?

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So Adele’s outed as a secret Afterworder, raging on the great unwashed on Spotify shuffling her album, possibly even putting the best tracks on a playlist called ‘sad bangers’. This I think is the most Afterwordy article yet and the BTL comments are split between ‘chill out, I’ll do what I want’ to Screamadelica/OK Computer/Hounds of Love MUST be listened as sequenced.

My favourite comment is about being able to skip the tracks you don’t like. How on earth can we appreciate the gems (Love Spreads for example) without suffering through well quite a bit of the album.

Skippers or sequence fascists? Playlist ripper?

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/nov/22/adele-is-right-an-unshuffled-album-is-the-proper-way-to-listen

Dune

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Year: 2021 Director: Dennis Villeneuve

I am surprised that no-one has yet reviewed Dune, so here we go. We saw it at the IMAX in Birmingham and would certainly recommend that you see it on the biggest screen possible. It’s an utterly immersive visual and sound experience. It will be no surprise, and has been much noted, that Villeneuve can craft a visual world like no-one else currently in film. Whatever you thought of the plot of Bladerunner 2049, it looked amazing from start to finish, as did Arrival in turn before it. There’s very little actual outer space , and the visuals of the movies are dominated by the vast open sand and rock scapes of Arrakis, appearing even dryer by contrast with the lush Northern European grasslands of the Atriedes homeworld, and the murky storm and rain of the Harkonnens. Moving through these three worlds are armies, medieval in feel, transported by enormous spaceships whose weight is so oppressive they appear to be sculpted from stone rather than metal. By contrast the ornithopthers hop, buzz and flit around the world.

In terms of plot Dune is so well known that there’s perhaps not much to add here. I » Continue Reading.

Kindle monthly deals for October

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Here we are, with a whole fortnight before the roster changes. As ever 99p the bar.

Novels Offshore – penelope Fitzgerald The Lamplighters – Emma Stonex. This got great reviews, one of my 3 purchases this month. Another lighthouse mystery.

Scifi Hold Up the Sky by Cixin Liu – short stories by the Three Body Problem author, thoroughly recommended having read that. Semiosis – Sue Burke. Not an easy read especially at the start, but this ‘lost colony’ novel is a great spin on how humans and plants might co-evolve. Prince Charles a big fan I hear. Winter’s Orbit – Evarina Maxwell. Big stir as self-published, taken up by proper publishers. LGBTQ+ scifi is having a moment. The Kraken Wakes – John Wyndham. I reread this recently, not up there with Triffids and Midwich Cuckoos but very entertaining. The Memory Police – Yogo Ogawa. The Ocean at the End of the Lane – Neil Gaiman

Non-fiction I’ll Never write my memoirs – Grace Jones Life and Times – Benjamin Zephaniah Postcards from the edge – Carrie Fisher The Guns of August – Barbera Tuchman. Classic history of the outbreak of WW1.

Thrillers/Detective The Long Goodbye – Raymond Chandler The Black » Continue Reading.