Greetings from inevitable Gdansk/Danzig. Inevitable, because it turns out to be precisely what one would expect from a Polish port on the Baltic - grey, seemingly lifeless [just a vibe - I'm aware that i'm not exactly a qualified expert after two days here], littered with revolting soulsucking stalinist architecture, fish smelling, but enveloped by this remarkable sense of history. These seem to be a people very aware of their history - and mostly celebrate it, even the shitty parts [i.e. most of it]. Case in point, yesterday went to visit Marlebourg Castle - which was originally built by the Teutonic [German] Knights - a crusading order of the same ilk as the Knights of St. John or the Hospitallers [AKA Templars] that got lost on the way to the holy land and carved themselves out a nice little fiefdom up here in the Baltic with a papal mandate (bloody papists!). They built a chain of not-very-understated castles just to really ram home to the natives who was in charge - of which Marlebourg was the principal. This was partially destroyed by the Germans in the first war and then essentially pounded into rubble by Soviet bombs in the second. The Poles have rebuilt it completely. While this reconstruction is quite obvious when you're inside the thing, the irony of the situation struck me - the poles painstakingly reconstructing the hulking symbol of subjugation they must surely have once viewed with loathing and dread and in the process converting the castle into an avatar of Polish pride. Sort of a 'Bridge over the river kwai' situation but with stronger unions and no rice. The second irony, of course, is that the place is now swarming with German tourists.
Speaking of Germans, the Poles that I've spoken with seem to have no problem with them. Fine - they have the Russians on the other side, so they're sort of spoilt for choice when it comes to neighbours they can hate. They go with hating the Russians. Haven't heard a single nice word about them and while they haven't exactly been fulsome in their praises of the sausage-eaters, they don't really have anything negative to say about them. Now if I was a Pole, which so far as I can tell means being born with a bumfluff 'tache and an encyclopaedic knowledge of Polish history and the wrongs contained therein, I'd choose Germans as my objets de hate. Germany [or before there actually was a Germany, the German race] has been treating Poland as it's own personal kitty litter for well over a millennium - every time some German statelet or princeling felt like taking a geopolitical crap, the Polish sky would turn swiftly pink then brown - and the krauts weren't so handy with the pooper-skooper neither. So the Russians/Soviets were the most recent oppressors of the Polish people - but let's not forget that the Poles actually elected a commie government post-second world war - essentially laying out the 'Welcome Ivan' mat for the Russians and inviting them all over for afternoon perogi. So the elections took place in a country already occupied by the Soviets! So what? I fail to see any significance in this fact. The truth is the Russians were strictly amateur-hour in the country-oppression stakes. Hell, they even let the Poles have their own government! You'd never find the Germans doing that! They knew how to properly oppress a country! Sorry, sorry, snarky British irony is slowly displacing the point here. There is a point? Yeah, there is... i just can't remember what it is anymore.
Gdansk has a beautiful old town - 1000 years old they tell me. Not sure about that. While the town itself may be 1000 years old I haven't seen any buildings that looked older that 17th century. Plenty old enough. As soon as I finish this and, y'know, do some of the work that they're paying me the big bucks for, I fully intend to go out and explore a little, unencumbered by my hosts.
My hosts, who speak very little English, have employed a rather cute interpreter for the occasion of my visit. She definitely fancies me. This really is a curse - everywhere I go - all these women dying to jump my bones - a real nuisance! Through a combination of hand signals and carefully targeted bad breath I seem to have managed to get the message across to the interpreter that 'tis not to be. She seemed disappointed but recovered quickly enough to announce to me the next day that she was getting married to her boyfriend of five years. It's just possible that I may have misread some signals along the way... unlikely, but possible.
My host is quite a cool guy. Classic rebel-turned-suit [aren't we all... well, probably not you]. He started an underground newspaper in 1982 using a tiny home-made printing press and is now looking for x million dollars to beef up his 'Media Group'. Probably some sort of metaphor for the last twenty years of polish history. Feeling a bit stupid with the combination of my hair in its current state and suit-type environment. Luckily, I seem to be in the land of bad coifs and dodgy facial hair - so i'm blending a little.
Going back to Poland in a couple of weeks, so expect more of this sort of insightful, hard-hitting reportage. You're all giddy at the thought, aren't you.
Monday 27th March, 4.34 pm - Frankfurt Airport, Concourse C
Sitting at a German computer in a German city waiting for a German 'plane, trying to figure out the fucking ´at sign´ key. I´ve found it, but modifier keys won´t work. There it is - brazenly taunting me from the 'q' key, but it's beneath the ´q´ on the key! Not above, like on a normal god-fearing keyboard! BENEATH! What modifier key do I need to use. Shift doesn´t do it, Alt ignores me, ´strg´, whatever the fuck that is, doesn´t appear to be interested. What the fuck do I have to do? Invade Poland before I can address a fucking email?! I hate this fucking keyboard, I hate my life, I hate this miserable wet hasslehof-loving dungpile of a country with its efficient airports and helpful, obliging people, well maintained transport infrastructure, stable political system and STUPID FUCKING KEYBOARDS WITH IRRITATINGLY LOCATED KEYS. But I kinda like you. Little bit bored right now.
MONDAY 21ST MARCH
Busy night last Friday. Firstly, off to Tango for the Francophone minifestival. I had sworn to myself that I would never set foot in Tango again after a particularly unamusing hour spent there this past New Year's Eve [which did nonetheless prompt party organisers Yen to paste my photo up on their site - the first one, no less - presumably as some sort of epitome of clubkid coolness], but what the hey! It was free and Stereo Totale were playing. I'm afraid this is going to be rather spotty reportage since I can't for the life of me remember the names of most of the band. Anyway...
Having accidentally managed to get ourselves onto the VIP balcony, Kagler and I were presented with some sort of Francophone Afrobeat band complete with child dancer who, as Kagler noticed, seemed to have cribbed all his robotic-monkey moves from the Ian Brown playbook. The band, according to some hasty googling just performed, may well have been called Nogabe. They acquitted themselves pretty well - albeit fairly generically. Next up, i believe, were the Delfes. I remember very little about these guys - at this point our primary occupation was beer drinking. I do remember reading that they 'updated the traditional French musical form of'Chanson' music'. Now, I have to admit that one of the many large blank spots in my musical brain covers precisely the point where information about the French 'Chanson' tradition would be stored if I had any idea what it was. Maybe this is why I didn't pay too much attention. Honestly, after a certain age the brain ossifies - just stops accepting new information, indeed starts rejecting information long-stored [important factoids like who played bass on Van Morrison's 'His Band and the Street Choir' or exactly which mix of Spiritualized's 'Lay Back in the Sun'' is the best are being evicted by my brain on an hourly basis]. So I've no memory whatsoever of Delfes, presumably because my brain is no longer 'at home' for new musical forms - but I'm sure they did a spiffing job.
Next up were Stereo Totale - a known quantity who i'd never seen live. Kagler, who leads a superfabulous international gig-going kind of life, had seen them several times and, to say the least, was bigging them up. Kagler also spends a lot of time singing the praises of John Frusicante, whose work, to me, sounds like a smackhead gargling for half an hour and then being violently sick on his guitar. In light of this, I was reserving the right to be underwhelmed by Stereo Totale. Well, Kagler spoke truth on this evening.
[really am going to have to do something about my photographic skills]
Although good, you wouldn't really want to listen to any of Stereo Totale's records alone at home. This is music that requires company, atmosphere, booze - music, I now discover, that needs to be heard live. It doesn't really make sense outside of a live context....
I'm not sure if this is an allusion that will work with Americans, but imagine a rural pub in deepest, erm... Hampshire. You know, the kind of depressing old-school pub frequented by old men spot-welded to stools at the bar, maybe the odd shaggy dog or two, a couple of faded bottle blondes past their prime who abuse the old men in a vaguely flirtatious manner. There's a dart board. There's a threadbare, chipped pool table accessorized with strategically placed beer stains on the baize. There is a large-ish would-be-menacing group of local youths monopolizing the pool table, bored out of their brains by their environment, but too numb to realise it - just hanging around waiting for the next consignment of dope to hit the village. There's an air of impending heroin meltdown about them. Over in a dark corner is a tiny stage. Every now and then the mobile disco will pull into the gravel car park outside the pub and the pub's punters will attempt to generate some vivacity by dancing to Abba and the Birdy Song. However, life really picks up for the village when the pub has 'live entertainment'. This will consist, probably, of a woman in her forties, spine permanently warped by the weight of all the makeup she wears in the thoroughly misguided belief that she's still attractive. She'll be wearing something inappropriately low-cut and 'slinky' [that's the word the nice helpful assistant at Woolworth's used] - all plastic sequins and manmade fibres. Her accompanist will be a tall man. Armed with an electric keyboard - not a synth, a keyboard - some sort of cheap Casiotone number. The man, who during daylight hours is a dental technician in the air force, will be balding, which he will attempt to hide with a cowboy hat. Always a cowboy hat, no other kind of headgear will suffice when one is 'rocking' the village pub. Maybe it’s a union thing. These two will perform more or less exactly the same songs that the mobile disco guy plays, only 'LIVE'. Every tune will be programmed into the keyboard in advance, along with the beats - all vaguely bossa nova-ish. The woman will gyrate vulgarly and strain in vain to hit those high notes, while the man [who will inevitably introduce himself as 'Cowboy Dan' or some such] stands behind his keyboard pushing a key between tunes...
So, what the fuck does any of the above have to do with Stereo Totale? Well, Stereo Totale are sort of like that pub band - only good. We have a man/woman combo. Woman sings. Man stands behind beat box. But that's pretty much where the similarities end. For a start, everything was fast. Yes - the tunes were preprogrammed so far as I could see, but they performed with such energy that it didn't matter. This is art rock, people! Imagine if early Bis had been good and interesting. The woman rapped in French and German. The man ran around the stage, shaking his arse and generally having no shame. And it was loud. Sorry, I know I haven't really begun to describe the actual music here. Erm... Electropunkabilly? That'll have to do. The audience, mostly French, loved it - and so did I.
[French people. Mixing with non-French people. Holy Crap!]
Immediately after Stereo Total had come to a manic comedy finish, it was off to 2 Kolegas for a Lonely China Day gig. I swear to god, these guys have the worst sense of timing. Every time they play - and they always play blinding, visceral shows - there's something bigger and better-known happening somewhere else across town. This would be my slightly inebriated way off announcing that once again - ONCE A-FUCKING -GAIN - LCD played a brilliant, brilliant show to a criminally small house, all because someone hadn't bothered to check and see if there was going to be French bands playing that same evening. Seriously, I enjoy LCD gigs immensely, but I need to see them play to a heaving house from a larger stage. The acoustics at 2 Kollegas are excellent - nice, tight, and dynamic - excellent for a band like Rebuilding the rights of Statues whose music is simple and pummeling, but Lonely China Day's music is expansive music, bigger - more evocative. It needs a much bigger stage. Deng Pei is a guitar hero in the making, and he needs a stage upon which he can grimace. I don't know who's doing the booking for LCD, but they really need to pull their finger out. And, for god's sake, think about scheduling! Get them on at Nameless Highland or Yugong Yishan [although I do have a sneaky feeling in the back of my mind that they ARE playing a gig there next month with Arrows Made of Desire and Car Sick Cars]. I know 2 Kollegas is a fairly easy option for LCD and other Tag Team Bands - established relationships etc, etc - but it's not always necessarily the right place.
Anyway, photos: Lonely China Day
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Deng Pei [having a porn-break].
Since my words have already beguiled you - whoever you are - and my descriptions of fellow Tag Team foot soldiers intrigued you, it's time to truly stoke up the fires of lust and unnamed urges to do something nasty involving nakedness and jars of Japanese marmalade with pictorial evidence of our general fabulousness and unavailability to the proletarian likes of you. Eye candy...
Future key Tag Teamer Jim Everybody and some skanky rock-chick [or Bekka, who really is quite well socially adjusted].
Imagine 20 years from now. The whole Tag Team roster has been taking part in one of those all-star benefit thingies, right? Let's call it Marmalade-ade. It's the end of the night. Arrows Made of Desire have played the best set of their lives - although Joewi's refusal to face the audience [for political reasons] threatened to upset shit every now and then. The night is over, as i've already just said - but wait! There's time for one last song. Arrows stay on, but are joined -in a very well prepared and rehearsed surprise - by the rest of the Tag Team Work Unit assigned to this particular event - there's Kagler, greying, Nordic, permanently on the verge of apoplectic immolation, mulleted. Look - There's Deng Pei, looking at a laptop and frowning. Kelso, sober for nineteen and a half minutes and already considering jacking in all this music crap and joining the clergy. There's some anonymous old fuck with grey hair, bad teeth and a 'Van Morrison is God' t-shirt lurking in the background and pretending to be interesting, you don't know who he is and you don't really want to. A whole bunch of other people as well, people I'm too lazy to make up right now - but a whole bunch of them - think of them as extras in a Star Trek episode, the merest outlines of characters. 'Cos Tag Team's big now! Hell Yeah! Big! It was the 123rd most profitable imprint of Warner BMG [Independent division -China] last year. So there's lots of people and there's also Jim. At this hypothetical all-Tag Team Jam session Jim would be the one at the back hiding behind the amp making the LARGEST musical contribution to the entire ensemble. I suppose I could have skipped the first hundred words of this paragraph and just gone with the previous sentence, but where would the fun be in that.
Heike - Mrs Tag Team.
Tech Guru/Renegade Hillbilly Dirtbag/Dragonslayer-tamer/Bad Archer Kyle. Got the same surname as Clint in Where Eagles Dare. Cool. Oh, he's with some superannuated wanker.
March 12th 2006
To Nameless Highland last night for the Joyside/Rebuilding/New Pants gig. This was obviously the gig to be at this week - wall to wall hipsters and scenesters, all for Rebuilding the Rights of Statues, presumably. Haven't been to Nameless Highland since I saw "Rebuilding" there sometime over the Christmas period. Bloody hell! What a change in atmosphere. Last time there were about twenty people in the place, this time round there was barely room to inflate your lungs. I went to one of the punk all-nighters N.H. put on during the Midi Festival about a year and a half ago and that was the only time I've seen the place fuller than last night. Still, it's much more fun to go to a crowded gig than an empty one.
Got there about half-way through Joyside's set.
These guys are as traditional as Beijing punk bands get, but with a sort of louche twist. The band's guitars channeled the usual pistols/ramones riffs with well-practiced sloppiness, whilst the singer desperately waited for the audience to adore him, which we duly did. Who gives a fuck what he's singing about [in mangled english] or that he spends hours in front of the mirror everyday perfecting his oh-so-fucked-up-sprawl? What we [certainly I] adored him for was his shameless appropriation of Iggy's stumble, Jim Morrison's leather kecks and bogus air of misunderstood genius and perhaps even an attempt to steal Johnny Thunder's smackhead chic. So shameless was the singer that at one stage he got up on to a chair and stuck his fingers out of the fly of his kecks. This is China, no one'll get the reference - a home grown rock god in the making [at least in his own head].
Next up were the main draw for the evening - Rebuilding the Rights of Statues. Last time I saw Rebuilding was at 2 Kolegas sometime after Christmas. Then they played an amazing driving set to a, ahem... select audience of 10. Last night they played more or less the same set to a slightly less select audience of several hundred. The lyrics remain nonsensical, the music remains fully immersed in the late 70s - think Joy Division with a huge dollop of the B52s [back when they were good] - but it's all performed with such earnestness and - here's that word again - drive.
[apologies for the crappy photo]
These guys still remain, in my ever so humble opinion, the best live act gigging in Beijing. There's not a whole lot of stage presence [aside from one of the foxiest bass players this side of Charlotte Heatherley out of Ash] but they fucking go for it. Their EP, frankly, sucks just a little - not for want of tunes, but because of the slavish, leaden production. On stage, freed from all that reverb, the same tunes are clear and vicious, and, my god, do they generate a lot of sound. It'll be interesting to hear what the album [when its released] sounds like - if they can manage to get some of that live energy and clarity on to disc. And a little more diversity wouldn't go astray.
Final band of the evening - New Pants - were something of a surprise. Just before they came on, pretty much everyone left, which was a shame. Their name is perfect. These guys are the Chinese Scissor Sisters. Synth driven pop, front man who changed costumes every couple of songs and can't sing to save his life yet somehow managed to carry these tunes. All intensely stoopid fun. The perfect antithesis of Rebuilding's earnest postpunk - sort of a retarded, drunken child of the Flaming Lips [synth years] and Erasure, brought up by proud godparents Junior Senior and Donna Summer. Sheer meaningless messy brilliance.
March 6th 2006
So, its that time again. On an aeroplane, a little drunk... let's talk about someone
So I was thinking about writing something about the Heartless Bastards. I had it in my head that they were Dutch. In my defense they do have a quintessentially Dutch sound to them. So I started to write a very potted history of Dutch/Belgian bands which would eventually have led up to the Bastards and their primordial epic 'Running'. However, I've just, unusually, done a spot of fact checking and discovered that the Heartless Bastards are actually from Dayton, Ohio, theoretically rendering my whole bit on Low Countries rock even more pointless than it would have been originally. Those of you who have read any of this particular site before should know by now that pointlessness and irrelevancy are the guiding principles in my life. So fuck it, here's the Benelux stuff. I'll get to the Bastards later.
Belgium and Holland rocks!
...This is the region that has given us the near-immortal-all-but-forgotten Bettie Serveert, who provided those of us old enough to remember some of THE classic student albums of the mid 90's with their double whammy of 'palomine' and 'lamprey' - both sublime pieces of Neil Young worship combined with the [then] ubiquitous Velvet Underground obsession. They released some fairly awful records afterwards, but these two really represent the high-point of a certain kind of mid-nineties NME-endorsed student gothic. Imagine a hungover Sunday morning in 1996 - you're trying to find the perfect soundtrack to your misery - you pause at Massive Attack, moving on because you're not suicidal or, conversely, in the mood to dance [although 'Protection' might do in a pinch]. No, you need consistent gloom - something with guitars... Mazzy Star? Too empty and reverby. This is where Palomine comes in. Forty minutes of wailing guitars and morose vocals sung by a woman who doesn't really sound like she means it but does it for the kids anyway. Perfect. Follow up 'lamprey' is somehow perkier and more resigned at the same time - the Velvet Underground is given the push in favour of full-on 'Zuma'-style guitar heroics. For these two albums, Bettie Serveert essentially sum up the sound of Dutch rock as it should be.
So who else have the Dutch, Flems, Walloons and whatever the ethnic name for Luxemburgers is, provided the listening world with. Well... certainly Golden Earring, an horrendously unfashionable Dutch band from the seventies - one hit single 'radar love' - who just happen to be behind my favourite live album of all time - which i really should go and listen to again, now I think of it. Mine's a bootleg, but if intrigued you should probably check out the imaginatively titled 'Live' from 1977. Belgium provided us with Deus, who were/are a fucking amazing band that should be as big as U2 but aren't, for unfathomable reasons. They were briefly championed by the press towards the end of the nineties, but eventually their slight inclination to art-rock wankery put paid to that. Check out 'In a bar, under the sea'. The first album by Soulwax [also Belgians] - 'Leave the story untold' - was produced by sludge rock maestro/Masters of Reality guitarist/Kyuss producer Chris Goss, however second album - 'Much against everyones advice' - is far superior and well worth a listen - heavily indebted to Deus, it still manages to form its own seperate identity. Shame about their third album - 'Any Minute Now' - released last year, which, if forced to be crude, sucks cock.
In 1994 I bought a CD single by a band called Daryll-Ann. At the time I was a student, living in a seaside town in Northern Ireland, and you quickly learned not to be picky when it came to purchasing music. Pot luck was the name of the game. Anyway, this CD by Daryll-Ann, who turned out to be Dutch. Can't even remember the name of the tune, but it was long - six, seven minutes of the purest indie-rock bliss, with the obligatory track change about half way through leading up to the equally inevitable 3 minutes of Neil Young guitar bliss. This single [long since lost, unfortunately] has left an indelible memory [of a memory, perhaps]. I've just checked Allmusic to see if I could figure out what the name of the single was. I couldn't - but it'll be on their album - 'Seaborne West' - released in '95 on Hut. I shall certainly be obtaining this album, now I know it exists and I think you probably should too.
I Should really talk about some of the great great garage-punk-psych music that came out of the netherlands between '64 and '67, but at the moment sitting here on this 'plane, their names escape me.
So that was all pretty pointless, wasn't it? Happy to be of service.
Heartless Bastards - 'Running'
This is scuzz-rock genius, no question. But seriously, they should be Dutch. Listen to Bettie Serveert and then listen to the Bastards' album - 'Stairs and elevators'. Their are obvious stylistic similarities, this is where Bettie Serveert should have gone, instead of VU covers albums and silly Byrds-influenced pop. However, this unified theory is not to be, they're from Dayton, Ohio. Nothing wrong with that - they're in good company, viz. the Breeders, Guided by Voices, etc. But whereas the Deal sisters trade in shouty randomness, and Pollard slings irritatingly thrown away 60's pop hooks like their going out of fashion [which i guess they have, now i think about it], the Bastards [I have no idea if anyone calls them that] deal in primordial guitar grind stripped down to it's bluesy testicle-grabbing basics. It should be noted that the Bastards are signed to Fat Possum Records - more or less the home of scuzzy swamp blues.
So the song. Constructed around a repeating eight-bar distorted guitar riff of ridiculous simplicity and heaviness and amazingly impassioned vocals, both provided by Erika Wennerstrom. The rhythm section kicks in after a minute or so and away we go. The only real dynamics in the tune are provided by some rather funky bass shit going on underneath the march of the guitar. Drums are slow and steady. This could almost be a White Stripes song, if Jack White wasn't a pretentious git and his songs weren't such soulless exercises in artifice and surface. We'll get back to slagging off the White Stripes at a later date. Meanwhile... back at the song. I don't know what Erika is singing about - I don't care, really. This song is all about the tension between the grinding riff and the increasingly impassioned vocals. One can feel the instruments just itching to fly - improvise, add a fill here a, middle eight there, a bridge - but they're constrained, wonderfully constrained by the angst of the vocals. It must have taken quite an iron will to resist the urge to solo on this masterpiece. Possibly, sixteen bars of guitar wankery in the middle wouldn't have fucked too much up, but why chance it. I know I'm repeating myself here, but this is brilliantly caged simplicity. Like a raw wound that you can't help picking at.
I actually have another take of this tune - they've added a vaguely honky-tonk piano track and a little high-end fuzz rythym guitar noodling around. Overall the effect is rather like they'd drafted Ian Stewart [of Stone's fame] in on keys and dug Jimmy Miller up to produce. Frankly it's a tough call, but I'd go with the original version, which I will post here for your musical education;
Heartless Bastards - Running [apologies for all the RapidShare crap you have to go through to get it, but it's well worth the effort. For some reason known only to the powers that be we're unable to open the Heartless Bastards' website from China, but since I originally got this tune from an mp3 Blog, it's more than possible that it will be available there]
AND FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, LISTEN ON YOUR HEADPHONES! LOUD!
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