Greatest Hits
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1. Heaven's Knot
This laboured for a long time under the title “Git”, after the desiccated guitar sample from which its exoskeleton was constructed. Readers my age and beyond will immediately understand why the layers of descending “tube guitar” at the end remind me of the music from that bit in Mary, Mungo and Midge where the intrepid trio take the lift to the ground floor of their tower block. Younger readers will bemoan the poverty of their modern lives.
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2. Shoes download
In the late eighties, Duncan and I were both massive Pet Shop Boys fans who harboured a perverse and in hindsight reprehensible wish to hear bad PSB-wannabe music with noisy guitars and a man shouting. Unfortunately, a not very good band from London called Carter the unstoppable Sex Machine had had the idea before us. Not only that, they had had the additional idea of inserting at every opportunity puns that would make a ten year-old hide behind a cushion. Nobody ever went broke, etc. We were beaten from the off.
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3. A Scan For Life download
I love the Roxy-addled coda Lazonby appended to this album version. The feller likes to pretend he can’t really play the saxophone, but he’ll drop this pretence when it suits him.
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4. Sunrise from Lhotse download
I had a brief but enjoyable correspondence in 1998-99 with a man called Simon who lived in the darkest New Forest and did a fanzine called dddd that looked like a typewritten cut’n’pasted throwback to the 1980s, although its content was incalculably less worthy and dull. Both of us were chronic alcoholics and armchair mountaineers. So, like you do, I wrote a song about us making an attempt on Lhotse (that’s the second highest mountain in the world and the south peak of the Everest massif, as you know) armed with nothing but some roll-ups and Netto carrier bags full of Yeti brand 8% lager. I don’t think we make it. (Partly inspired by the extraordinary tale of Maurice Wilson.)
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5. Gas Electric download
The influence of Neu! is a strange beast. They must be the only band since the invention of radio – i.e. ever – whose first and second generation copyists were working more from something they’d read than from something they’d heard. It’s hard to imagine now that pop music journalism was once a potent force for something other than helping people sell records. Not sure what any of this has to do with Gas Electric, except that the latter motors away happily on just the one chord for as long as it sees fit.
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6. Strongest Arms download
Jay Wolfsbane, whose viola and violin parts on Disneytime are integral, excels herself here with a tremulous Bartokian tightrope act that comfortably outweeps the mawky vocal.
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7. Flyblown/Weakling download
In 1993, the closest I’d come to having either children or a day job was voluntary work at the local paedophile drop-in centre, so I was no fan of Christmas (I’m still not, really, but it’s not going anywhere for the time being so we’ve learned to co-exist). Imagine my joy, then, gentle reader, when on December 24th Duncan gave me the keys to his studio and left town for a few days. This bottom-heavy pantomime horse of a thing and Xmas Piano were two of the better fruits of the resulting sleepless holiday from the rest of the human race. The obsessive detail of the arrangements can deliver its own verdict on the benefits of this kind of behaviour. Anyway, when I’d finally picked the last nit from the horse and wearied of my diet of instant coffee, warm bottled Pils and low-grade hashish, a light dusting of festive snow covered the backstreets of what is now known as the Cultural Industries Quarter (the site of Duncan’s studio is now a small car park, but on the plus side a Spearmint Rhino outlet opened a couple of blocks down, so although it’s impossible to record any pop music one can obtain an overpriced hand job from a bored Latvian Ph.D student at any time of day or night). Fleetingly, I was degrinched.
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8. Annabelle download
If it’s not the Byrds it’s the Furs. Can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em. I’ll get my kayak.
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9. Good Times On My Mind download
The greatest guitarist who ever lived was Alan Rankine of Associates. You’ll have to forgive me stating a matter of opinion as a matter of fact here, because I am right. If you don’t believe me, get hold of any 1981 live recording of the group, listen to it, then be prepared to state (a) who was better and (b) why. Oh, and send us a copy of the live recording, please. Anyway, the best compliment my hit-and-miss guitar playing ever received was when Jerry the Jew, who confusingly is neither a Jew nor a Jerry, largely on account of his being a French Catholic, described the squalling on this as “channelling Rankine”. He was being nice: it’s a man who has little clue chucking fists full of gunk at the canvas in the hope that some of it will stick. On this occasion the man gets lucky. But the man is no Alan Rankine, who single-handedly updated guitar-bass-drums in much the same way as Pythagoras updated triangles. And, almost defying belief, played midwife to Tigermilk as a casually tossed-off encore.
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10. Boys In Zinc
It’s probably a reflection of the conservative and parochial UK education system that most literate people –of any age – you’ll meet in this country have a soft spot for the poetry of Wilfred Owen. Ian added the vocal for this very late in the process, and I was blown away. Still am. Wilfred Owen is both good and OK, although 10,000 Maniacs’ cod-reggae version of Dulce Et Decorum Est is neither.
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11. Basslizard download
One of those rare occasions where an attempt to re-create the atmosphere of the original version doesn’t abjectly fail. Entirely down to the revolutionary use of syndogs in the second verse, obv. For a How Not To, see the version from the Bad Puddings EP, of which an excited reviewer on Alternative Press kindly declared “sounds like Joy Division smashed into Big Black”. I’d love to have seen the expression on the face of anybody who bought it on the strength of that. It actually sounds like a paper bag blew gently past somebody who used to be in the Cure.
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12. Half-Angel download
From the final AC Temple album Belinda Backwards. That’s the one that enabled the UK music press to exercise its imagination to the full by comparing us to Jefferson Airplane, presumably because we’d foregrounded pushy female vocals, where previously they’d compared us to Sonic Youth because we’d foregrounded interlocking detuned guitars. Jefferson Airplane? I despair. At least the SY allegations bore some relation to reality. BB’s predecessor had after all been made in 1989, at which time to not have been at least a little bit in thrall to the Youth would have evidenced nothing but a failure to keep up. Jefferson fucking Airplane. Where do they find these people?
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13. Never Die download
There’s a tiny bit of the guitar on this that is an inept steal from Red House Painters’ Grace Cathedral Park. The trouble – one of them – with Mark Kozelek is that his songs are so good people routinely forget what a versatile and sometimes incandescent guitar player he is.
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14. I Don't Like This House download
Ace. A man spitting bile through a distortion box while the guitar makes a noise like a dentist’s drill all over a bass like Hooky giving it his best shot at an eightsome reel, none of them entirely sure what’s going to happen next. I approve.
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15. Amateur Cops download
It’s always good to hear your own record on the radio. Of course it is. Only a complete wanker would deny the joys of wanking. But to hear yourself wafting from a radio on some faraway beach while you’re basking stupid on a gently bobbing pedalo is very good indeed. These are the riches of the poor.
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16. Baby Seals download
It was easy and fun to write stuff for Jane to sing because she is blessed with a melodramatic, stentorian singing voice almost as ridiculous as my own. Here, you get the pair of us hammering out the non-melody of the vocal, an unharmonic octave separating us, for the five-minute duration. Probably it’s neither easy nor fun to listen to. But relentless is good. Relentless rocks.
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17. Drag The Lake download
All my Lazer Boy choices here have been Alaric Neville’s recordings of the full band in flagrante from the last album, which presents a very skewed picture of what LB actually sounded like, even just within the context of that album. Soz. But they’re my favourites.
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18. No Sex In Rock'N'Roll download
It’s mad that this should still have needed to be said a full twenty years after punk began to seriously disrupt gender codes in pop music, and madder still that what inspired this rant was neither the “girl power” of finger puppets like Shampoo and the Spice Girls, nor the ascendancy of the Loaded mentality, but the casual sexism of certain boys within Leeds’ ultra right-on post-hardcore scene. As often, Karren leavens the political browbeating with just enough humour to keep us on side. “Because I’m a feminist, you think I’m on a mission to cut off your dick?” perfectly nails (sorry) our – men’s – self-importance.
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19. Scary Verlaine download
Call me iSpan, but I find that a bit of visual accompaniment helps with this kind of ponderous “post-rock” instrumental flounce. There is no way on Earth I would subject myself to an entire Mogwai album, for example, but Mogwai have some great videos, and their derivative and personality-free but competent and occasionally stirring music works well as the soundtrack for these. Justine Wolfmother always said she saw Scary Verlaine – whose title comes from the fact that it’s based on a drum sample from one of Tom Verlaine’s solo albums – as the soundtrack to a film of Stealth bombers cruising high over the Amazon rainforest. It does sound kind of dark green.
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20. P2 download
There must have been forty or fifty voices on this by the time Kramer had finished tracking us up. That’s the ticket. It lacked a children’s choir. Few things don’t.
