Bastard Foreign Holidays

 At the risk of putting something on the internet with an anachronistic title like "Bastard Foreign Holidays", which might well get me cancelled for 70's-style parochial xenophobia and labelled a UKIP-voting gammon, can I just say from the outset that I don't give a toss.  I'm not about to pour scorn on foreigners, foreign countries or foreign cultures.  And there, I used the word 'foreign' so many times in one short sentence that I've probably triggered the sort of awkward discomfort that might send the easily offended to seek solace in their safe space or send a protest tweet  So, please rest assured, that all I am about to write are a few amusing things that went wrong on holidays that just happened to be in a different country to the one in which I reside and which were otherwise hugely enjoyable experiences.

Sicily

One of the most appealing aspects of holidaying in Sicily was the opportunity to visit the villages where 'The Godfather' was filmed - Savorca and Forza d'Agro.  Having looked at photos of these unspoilt  tourist attractions, I agreed with my wife to go ahead and book us a week in a beautifully remote area, with a plan to hire a car and visit the Godfather villages on the journey from the airport.

Soon after booking, I became aware that Sicily is somewhat hilly.  To call it mountainous might be an exaggeration, but it's certainly far from flat.  Let's call them 'big hills'.  There isn't anywhere flat in Sicily.  Now, I have a real trouser-soiling fear of driving (or being driven) up steep, winding roads, especially those with a bit of a drop.  Not just sheer drops, that any logically minded person can sense some risk with.  But even slightly steep drops, which send my brain into panic mode, as I expect to hit a car coming too fast down a blind bend, or to find myself forced to reverse around such a hellishly designed chicane and end up careering to a horrendous death below.  I thought I should best check the location of the Godfather villages to make sure the car journey to reach them wasn't going to involve any such teasing with mortality.  

It was difficult to be sure from the maps that I looked at.  The villages were each perched high on a hill.  So, I searched on You Tube to see if anyone had ever filmed a car journey up or down the routes.  They had.  "Driving down from Forza d'Agro, Sicily".  It's a horror show.  The hills were so steep, they seemed unnatural, like giant mounds of rock plonked on the island, as if large meteors had fallen to earth and the locals in their madness had decided to climb them and build houses and a church on top.  I watched the filmed view from a car as it drove down and down and down and round and round and round from the summit of this ludicrously high village, and the temperature in my toes fell below zero, leaving them frozen in a tightly curled position and at risk of dropping off from frostbite.

Needless to say, despite my wife's huge disappointment, we did not visit either Godfather village.  The chance to do so was an offer I COULD refuse.  When we got to Sicily, the winding, steep route over a hill to the vineyard-located B&B that we'd booked was relatively bearable compared to Forza d'Agro.  A more moderate level of fear, but one that I was keen to avoid for most of the week.  Therefore, on the first day, we went for a walk rather than a drive.  Just to check out the local area.

We followed a track heading north towards the coast and part of this ran alongside a field of goats, guarded by 3 aggressive dogs.  They stalked us from behind a fence, barking like those Rottweiler devil dogs that guard the grave to Damien's jackal mother in 'The Omen'.  The fence was the only thing preventing the fear that had built up inside me from flowing out of my back end.  Just as I remarked that it was lucky the dogs couldn't get out, the fucking dogs got out.  There was a hole in the fence.  They came towards us, in my mind ready for the kill.  My wife's ability to contain her fear whilst mine disabled me, led to her assertively shouting to the dogs to go 'AWAY' and this unnerved them long enough for us to get past them.

The problem then was how to get back.  My wife failed to reassure me that the dogs wouldn't attack, should we return that way, so I suggested we keep walking and visit the 'Sanctuary of the Black Madonna' in Tindari and the Roman remains next to it.  Roughly a 90 minute walk.  And from there we expected to get a cab back.  The long walk in the hot Sicilian sun was definitely worth it, as the church and the Roman site and the view from the coastal hill on which they were both perched was amazing.  However, this was a remote part of Sicily on a religious feast day, as we found out, and there was no taxi, no bus, no way to get back to the B&B except to walk.  Either 90 minutes back past the dogs or a longer route by road that would follow the way we'd driven in on the previous day.  I estimated 2 hours of walking along the dog-free (and death-free) road route.  It turned out to be 3 and a half hours.  In the heat.  Up and down hills.  Like a fucking death march.  My wife cursed my fear of dogs and incompetence in calculating time from speed and distance.

Cyprus

Because the first villa holiday we'd had in Cyprus was the most perfect of weeks, we booked a fortnight a few years later.  In many ways, this was just as wonderful.  Many, but not all ways.  There was a spell halfway through the holiday, when the pool went green and was out of action for several days until that problem was sorted, the filters cleaned, something like that.  This problem may have been the cause of my daughter getting an ear infection.  This led to visit number one to the local village doctor's surgery.  She was prescribed anti-biotics and told not to swim for a number of days.  Visit number two to the doctor was for my son, whose wisdom teeth decided to give him hell, so he was on painkillers.

But these challenges proved surmountable, because I have very resilient children.  Which means I feel ashamed to admit that my own experience on the holiday highlighted my relative lack of resilience.  On one of the first nights, as I crossed a rooftop terrace from the main part of the house to our bedroom, I caught site of something alive on the inside of the door.  Without showing any curiosity to examine what it was, it was too dark to properly see anyway, I dashed inside to grab the thickest book I could swiftly find and I returned to throw it at the moving shape on the door.

It turned out to be a spider, the size of a child's hand, thick and hairy and bloody scary.  Fortunately it was now dead.  I made sure with a few more whacks with the book.  And yes, I know, you shouldn't kill animals, but there is a statute of limitations on that rule, to do with size, situation and how much you're shitting yourself with terror.  The next morning, I investigated the rest of the rooftop terrace to see if there were any more spiders.  I found two others.  Both dead, but clearly, this suggested an infestation.  I could better examine the spider corpses in the daylight and looked them up on the internet.  They were European tarantulas.  European tarantulas like to come inside houses, the internet told me.  And so every day for rest of the fortnight, without sharing any information of the tarantula attack with my family, I restlessly and nervously stayed circumspect, especially at night, expecting more spiders everywhere I looked.  Fortunately, none arrived, so gradually my fears subsided, until the very last day when I spotted one inside the house.  I have never been so pleased to leave such a beautiful villa in such a beautiful part of such a beautiful country.  From that point onwards, holidays have been in cold countries, tarantula-free.

Other minor mishaps

I never went on a foreign holiday whilst growing up, not unless you count Ireland.  And at 17 and 18, I visited New York, which isn't exactly culturally alien.  So, I became an adult without the necessary experience of wild dogs or wild spiders to prepare me for the dangers of hot environments abroad.  For that reason, I was ill-prepared for our first villa holiday as a family.  This was Portugal.  By this point, we had (before having children) holidayed in both Tunisia and Turkey and got lucky in terms of insects, dysentery or other potential disasters.  So, I didn't think to prepare for a mosquito raid on my first night in Portugal.  I counted over 40 bites by the morning, most of them on my face, many of them so large and disfiguring that I looked like the Elephant Man.

Another year, we booked late and had less money, so we opted for a cheap house rental in northern France.  This was the only time that I wanted to turn back and head home immediately on arrival.  We'd been spoiled by villa holidays to Portugal and Majorca.  Now we were in a rain-sodden copse off a main road, in a damp and uncomfortable house that looked like an old couple had just died in it.  And to cap it all, there was a hornet's nest right outside our bedroom window.  On balance, I would take killer dogs or hand-sized tarantulas over hornets any day.  In the end we stayed, but it turned out to be the only holiday we've had where there just weren't enough positives to outweigh the crap aspects.

So, there you go.  Not exactly 'bastard foreign holidays', more like 'bastard bits of foreign holidays', because outside of these experiences, we have been very lucky indeed.  But you know me, why would I write about the good times, when the bad times are so much funnier?

Gigs that didn't go as expected

I don't particularly like going to gigs.  For many people, music is a shared experience, something to sing along with, dance to, lose yourself in.  They talk about how great the atmosphere is and they revel in being part of a crowd, everyone loving the music.  Bollocks to all that.  Give me a record player and an empty room in my own house over a gig any day.

However, my admiration for certain musical artists has led me to attend a great many gigs since my first one in 1987, most of which I have thoroughly loved.  But that's because the opportunity to see in person a performer that I love listening to in my lounge usually outweighs the trauma of having to do so alongside other human beings.  So much so, that as time goes on and bands split up and people die, I am able to reflect on who I've been able to see in concert and I feel hugely privileged.  Years after they've all gone, I'll revel in the memories of seeing Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Neil Young, Pink Floyd, Madness, Jethro Tull, Bruce Springsteen, Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, Blondie, REM, The Stone Roses, Oasis, Morrissey, Ian Dury and Prince, to name the most iconic.

But obviously, from time to time, things don't turn out as expected.  Here are five times:

1. Bob's curls

My long-time adoration of Bob Dylan has led me to see him at his worst and at his relatively better than worst.  The first time I saw him was at Wembley Arena in 1987.  I had a seat next to the first exit on stage right.  During the support act, his backing band of Tom Petty and Heartbreakers, I looked over the ledge to that exit to see, within arm's reach, Dylan himself.  Clearly he wanted to catch a view from the stands.  And with hood up, iconic sunglasses on and everyone focussed on the stage, he was managing to retain enough anonymity to get away with this for a while.  Given the fact that the curls of his hair, which fell out over his forehead from below the hood, were close enough for me to ruffle, for a while, only I knew he was there.  I pointlessly wasted that precious time by asking the couple next to me if they had a pen, so I could get him to sign my programme (which in retrospect, I surmised, he was never going to do).  By the time the dozy sods found a pen, someone on the way to the loo had passed Bob and recognised him, prompting a swift retreat backstage.  The chase proved futile and undignified.  I've seen him 5 times since, but never again able to pose a molestation risk.

Four years later, I saw him for the second time, persuading my future wife (in only our second month of going out together) to come along.  That month, he played, according to what I have since read in a book, his worse series of gigs ever. I made my wife pay for her own ticket.  She hates Bob Dylan.

2. Mick'sd Emotions

The only times I've ever given a crap about the fortunes of the England football team were at Italia '90 and Euro '96. In 1990, I was at university, out drinking too much whilst watching every England and Ireland game, supporting both, caring too much.  But when it transpired that England's semi-final showdown with West Germany would be played on the same night that I had a ticket for The Rolling Stones in concert, a dilemma emerged.  Do I forego the drunken atmosphere of watching England in a pub as they potentially secure a place in their first World Cup Final since their sole appearance in '66?  Or do I go to the Stones gig?  I decided that I had to be at Wembley Stadium that night.  Of course, England were playing West Germany in Italy - it was The Rolling Stones who were playing Wembley.  With the Stones far too old in 1990 to seem likely to ever play live again (!), I couldn't waste this opportunity.

In the days before mobile phones, I relied on a transistor radio to keep me updated on the score-line.  The game went to penalties during 'Paint it Black', somewhat prophetically.  At this point, I tuned out of the Stones' performance, as did a small crowd around me, eager for updates.  Soon after I broke the bad news about Pearce's and Waddle's penalty misses, someone must have told Mick Jagger.  "We've all got mixed emotions tonight" he said by way of an introduction to their song 'Mixed Emotions'.

England weren't the only ones to crap (only ever so slightly though) on my experience of the gig.  I bought some Rolling Stones Bermuda shorts that night as a momento.  £25 they cost,  a small fortune in 1990.  Some time later, my brother nicked them to wear below his jeans on a night out, to make himself look less skinny.  He shit himself on the dancefloor of a club that evening and disposed of the heavily soiled shorts in the toilet.

£25.  Twenty.  Five. My fucking shorts.  Still, despite that and the England result, it was a great gig.

3. Prince - a few years too late

I saw Prince at Wembley Arena in 1990.  There were two things wrong with this concert experience.  Firstly, I went with a mate from university called Ziggy.  A close mate, until his erratic, attention-seeking and aggressive behaviour evolved from being infrequent, moderate and annoying to frequent, extreme and unacceptable.  At this point in his journey towards becoming a complete arsehole, he brought along his 16 year old girlfriend.  He was 21 and I was 20.  The baby-sitting didn't enhance the experience.

Secondly, my wish to see Prince live was based on liking his output from several years prior to this gig - 'Purple Rain', 'Around the World in a Day' and to a extent 'Parade'.  By 1990, he had undergone his own journey, one from rock/psychedelic/arty pop to dance music.  Let me make this clear.  I like music you can dance to, but I really fucking hate 'dance music'.  Prince kept punctuating his songs with calls to the crowd to dance and wave our hands in the air and "say yeah".  I drew the line after the compromise of standing up from my seat, I wasn't going to do what Prince told me, Prince wasn't the boss of me.  I spent the night mostly irritated with the dance music, the fun fascism and my mate's girlfriend looking like she needed to go home early on a school night.

4. Too old for a new scene

Another occasion on which 16 year olds made me feel generationally removed, despite being only a few years older, was at the 1989 Stone Roses Alexandra Palace gig.  We turned up with ageist complacency and a presumption that the crowd would be our own peers, university students excited by this new music that was cleverly marrying melodic 60s pop with 80s Indie sensibilities.  It turned out that The Stone Roses were also appealing to school kids, as much for the fashion as the music.  We were witnessing a 'scene' for the first time.  Youths in flares and baggy t-shirts.  We'd spent the last ten years taking the piss out of the whole concept of flared trousers, laughing at kids at school whose trousers were a centimetre or more wider than drainpipes, shouting 'ding dong' at them as the wind caused the superfluous material around their ankles to flap with unfashionable absurdity.  And now, here we were, the potential objects of ridicule for being adults with bootcut jeans, gate-crashing into this alien world.

We were undeterred though.  The Stone Roses' debut album was the coolest thing to happen to music since The Smiths.  Once they came on stage, it wouldn't matter what we were wearing or how old we were.  As it turned it, Ian Brown's voice outside of the studio was weaker than a mouse's fart and Ally Pally's sound system was so rubbish, it sounded like someone was just playing the CD over a Tannoy.  A depressingly bad gig.

5. Leave you to fall asleep

I'd been a fan of Natalie Merchant during her 10,000 Maniacs and solo careers, and convinced my brother-in-law and sister-in-law to come and see her in concert in 2010.  I'd seen her live before and the venue (Hammersmith) was a good one, so what could go wrong?

What can go wrong, musical history teaches us, is when a performer completely disassociates themselves from their audience and disappears up their own backside in a self-indulgent artistic 'project'.  Unfortunately for her audience, Natalie Merchant's 'project' had been to put to music a double album's worth of 19th and 20th century poetry about childhood.  Slightly boring.  And she'd spent 5 years on this album, entitled "Leave Your Sleep", so was determined to fully focus on it, prefacing every song with a commentary about the poet and a power point slide to illustrate.  It was like watching the world's most boring English teacher.

Having zealously ignored all calls from the crowd to "play some of your old stuff" until she had reached the end of the double album and 20 slide power point, she apologetically claimed that they had not rehearsed anything other than this new tediously soul-sapping new material, but would "give a few old numbers a go".  At last!  And of course it would be rehearsed and of course it would be amazing!  But it WAS unrehearsed.  So much so, that she forgot the lyrics or gave up trying mid-song.   Sometimes something very beautiful can be both boring and bollocks. 

Half-amusing musings on my music collection - Part 14: The 2010s

In 2017, Willie Nelson released "God's Problem Child" (7/10) on which he sang, "I woke up still not dead again today."  He was one of several artists who still hadn't died by the end of this decade, artists who had been making great music since the 60s or 70s, defying expectations.  Willie was still paying off the taxman by giving us an album a year, and quality was in no way compromised by quantity, as validated by "Last Man Standing" (7/10 2018) and "Ride me Back Home" (7/10 2019).  Dylan was still not dead and started his 70s with "Tempest"  (8/10 2012), then did a lot of painting and Frank Sinatra covers and just when you thought he'd given up writing his own songs, he snuck up and put out "Rough and Rowdy Ways" (8/10) in 2020.  Similarly, Springsteen, Neil Young and Richard Thompson farted in the face of death with a good few decent albums between them.

This wasn't enough to make this a good decade for music though.

There were some highlights.  I discovered 'Hurray for the Riff Raff' on Jools Holland's "Later..." TV show, on which he consistently manages to showcase a great band every so often in between all the tedious world music, musically competent but unappealing dross and inane interviews with 'legends' whom he blackmails into letting him play boogie woogie piano alongside.  Hurray for the Riff Raff are my band of the decade, although in effect they is a she, not in a pronoun fluid sort of way, but in terms of the fact that Alynda Lee Segarra is the singer-songwriter and the rest of the band are a rotation of session musicians. Hurray for the Riff Raff help to provide the bulk of the 8/10 and 9/10 albums of the era - the eponymous debut in 2011 (8/10), "Look out Mama" in 2012 (9/10), a covers album "My Dearest, Darkest Neighbour" in 2013 (8/10) with amazingly beautiful versions of My Sweet Lord and Jealous Guy, "Small Town Heroes" in 2014 (9/10) and "The Navigator" in 2017 (9/10).

The few other top albums of the decade come from the previous decade's favourites, I am Kloot ("Let it all In" 10/10 2013) and  The Decemberists ("The King is Dead" 9/10 2011, "What a terrible world, what a beautiful world" 8/10 2015 and "I'll be your Girl" 9/10 2018).  My other discovery of the decade, albeit with a back catalogue to the early 80s, was Robyn Hitchcock.  My first gig after this discovery was the intimate Betsy Trotwood pub near Farringdon, where I bought "Tromso, Kaptein" (8/10 2011) from the merch stand and asked the man himself to sign it "about bloody time" when I admitted it had taken me nearly 40 years to get into his music.  His current LP at this time was as good as any he'd done in a prolific, but slightly obscure career, a self-titled record (8/10 2017).  Who waits nearly 40 years to release a self-titled album?  Did he just run out of ideas for titles? And in between he gave us "The Man Upstairs" (8/10 2014).

Finally, a special mention to the last few remaining albums to score 8+.  David Bowie's hugely tragic death in 2017 coincided with a pretty intriguing and enjoyable album "Black Star" (7/10) and followed his unexpectedly brilliant comeback album in 2013, "The Next Day" (8/10).  Noel Gallagher proved that he could reach the same heights as Oasis without Oasis on "Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds" (8/10 2011).  Neil Young, relentlessly creative, was closest to his best on "Peace Trail" (8/10 2016) and "Hitch Hiker" (8/10 2017).  And Belly's 20 year hiatus ended with a superb comeback album "Dove" (8/10 2018).

Below these are albums by country stars Jason and Margo Price - two consistently good artists on my list of who to see in concert.

But overall, I've struggled to fill the top ten lists in this decade.  Sometimes, I have to drop down to the 5/10 level LPs and occasionally I can't even fill ten spaces.  Music has very definitely been on a downward trajectory over the decades.  But gradually.  And I still discover old stuff that I'd previously overlooked.  And I have enough in my collection to keep me happy anyway (not that I ever go a month without buying a few more records.)

If you've been reading these blog posts, then thank you for indulging my nerdy need to write about something that I care passionately about.  Hopefully, it's made you consider checking out something I have praised and sometimes prompted some interest in my rating of an album  that you may love.

Half-amusing musings on my music collection - Part 13: The Noughties

You know how, when you ask someone who their favourite bands are, and they reel off names that you've never heard of, and you think to yourself, "Music wanker"...?

That's probably me now.  It wasn't me until the mid-noughties.  Up until that point, as you've maybe noticed from previous posts, nearly all of my favourite albums are from well-known artists, names familiar to people who aren't even that much into music.  But the new millennium brought with it a fundamental change in popular music: the most popular mainstream bands were not longer the best bands around, the obscure ones were. I mean just look at the barrel-load of dog shit that has been picking up Brit awards in the last 20 years and compare your Coldplays, Ed Sheerans, Killers and Arctic Monkeys to The Police, Madness, Blondie, The Jam, etc... etc...

Heading this list of obscurities are my favourite band, more so even than The Beatles and Madness, and they go by the name of 'I am Kloot'.  Easily the most incomprehensible name you couldn't imagine.  There's no explanation for its origins, but one theory is linked to the fact that 'kloot' is Dutch for 'bollock'.  Their first album, "Natural History", is one of 3 I have rated 10/10 in 2001 - the first year since 1978 that can boast that many with a perfect score.  Their second, self-titled, from 2003, breezes to a 10/10 and rivals Bob's "Highway 61 Revisited" for my favourite album of all time.  I'm equally and obsessively generous in awarding top scores to their third album, "Gods and Monsters" (2005), their 4th, "Play Moolah Rouge" (2007), their 5th, "Sky at Night" (2010) and, guess what, their 6th and final studio album, "Let it All In" (2013).  I am Kloot's incomprehensible avoidance of commercial success was a blessing for the cult of Kloot followers like myself, who consequently got to see them in small intimate venues, as I did on 8 out of 10 occasions, and more often than not, also got a chance to meet their lead singer and songwriter at the merch stand afterwards.  John Bramwell is self-deprecating, a hilarious raconteur and instantly likeable.  So you can imagine how awestruck, gobsmacked and privileged I felt, when, at a recent solo gig of his, I was chatting with him afterwards, and this happened:  He spotted and admired the screen saver on my phone, which was of a painting I had recently done of Coronation Street's Elsie Tanner, played by actress Pat Phoenix.  (He's a Mancunian, that must have been the reason for his interest.)  He said, "What's that?  That's great!" and when I told him he asked me to send it to him and gave me his mobile number.  We've even had a couple of text exchanges since. Non-stalkery too.  A surreal experience.

The problem with lesser known bands is that you don't always know about them.  I didn't know about The Decemberists until after that decade had finished.  Here was a folk-rock band with the ability to tread a path between Nick Drake and Led Zeppelin with Beatles style melodies, spinning wry tales of rogues, murderers, queens, cranes and infanticidal fathers from unspecific historical times.  Their discography from the Noughties consists of "Castaways and Cut-outs" (8/10 2002), "Her Majesty, the Decemberists"  (8/10 2003), "Picaresque" (10/10 2005), "The Crane Wife" (9/10 2006) and "The Hazards of Love" (8/10 2009).

The Decemberists, like I am Kloot, have the added benefit of a very likeable and witty songwriter and lead singer, Colin Meloy.  I don't feel a need to really like the people I listen to, or to get a sense that they harbour personality traits and values that I look for in friends.  It's just nice when they do.  In stark contrast to Bramwell and Meloy, is Ryan Adams.  Again, he's not well known.  When I mention him to anyone, I feel the need to say, "Ryan Adams, not Bryan Adams, Ryan not Bryan, very different."  But Ryan has turned out to be a bit of a ****.  In 2019, it came out that he had been using manipulative behaviour against younger female artists, promising them help in their careers and then sexually harassing them in texts and via social media.  This included an under-age girl.  Adams made a public apology, but undermined it with a disclaimer, suggesting it was unintentional, denied the allegations and confessed that he had made mistakes in life.  Wanker.  Now this put me in a difficult position in regard to enjoying his music.  He had a hugely prolific decade, releasing ten studio LPs in that time, including one of my absolute favourites, "Gold" (10/10 2001) and also "Heartbreaker" (8/10 2000) and "Cold Roses" (9/10 2005).  I certainly didn't feel like listening to him after that news broke.  And the first album he (eventually) released afterwards, I just couldn't stomach listening to, especially as he sounded mawkishly and self-indulgently apologetic, with the pathetic whine of the sort of self-obsessed, malignant little bastard that he obviously is.  But, I came to realise that if we allowed our moral evaluation of the personal lives of artists whose work we admire to lead us into a refusal to experience it, then we'd end up listening to very little music, reading very few books and watching very few films.  That moral evaluation may well colour my enjoyment, but I find myself able to disassociate the person from their art.  If I can do that for Chuck Berry, then I can for Ryan not Bryan Adams.  (But definitely NOT Gary Glitter!  You have to draw a line somewhere)

Listening to songs which are so explicitly about the singer's depression is nearly always pretty depressive.  The song-writing tends to be either too earnestly confessional or resignedly woeful.  But Malcolm Middleton is a Scottish folk singer who sugars his tales of depression with a gentle upbeat, an almost jaunty wistfulness.  Lacing his self-deprecation with just enough wit to make it palatable, songs like "Fuck it, I love You" and "Blue Plastic Bags" (in reference to bringing bottles home from the off licence for a Friday night in), make him another favourite obscure artist of the decade.  His debut is graced by the impossible to accurately recall, stream of consciousness title of "5:14 Fluoxytine Seagull Alcohol John Nicotine" (7/10 2002).  Later in the decade he had a string of 3 great albums in 3 years: "A Brighter Beat" (9/10 2007), "Sleight of Heart" (8/10 2008) which includes a heartstring-pulling cover of Madonna's 'Stay', and "Waxing Gibbous" (7/10 2009).

And my final music wanker mention of a lesser known act, is eels.  Not Eels.  Not The Eels. And in fact not even a band, but instead a band name for an individual called Mark Oliver Everett.  Following a strong start in the 90s, eels score highly in the Noughties with the LPs "Daisies of the Galaxy" (8/10 2000), "Souljacker" (7/10 2001), "Shootenanny" (8/10 2003) and "Hombre Lobo" (6/10 2009)

Returning now to those more well-known artists who have appeared on my lists in previous decades - with generally less unsavoury reputations than Ryan Adams, albeit perhaps not as warm and cuddly as Bramwell and Meloy - the Noughties proved an unexpectedly fertile period for many of these old favourites.  

Bob Dylan had his most consistent series of albums since the 70s, starting with "Love and Theft" (10/10 2001) which grew on me slowly over about 15 years before I decided it was one of his best, followed 5 years later by "Modern Times" (9/10) and "Together Through Life" (9/10) in 2009.  He never fails to surprise.  

Neil Young had a similarly consistent spell, though with far fewer gaps between albums.  Young released "Are you Passionate?" (8/10 2002), "Greendale" (7/10 2003), "Prairie Wind" (7/10 2005), "Living with War" (8/10 2006) and "Chrome Dreams II" (7/10 2007).  Five great albums in five years?  Bloody hell, you'd think it was the 70s again.  

Madness, who took 14 years after their first split to release one new studio album, then waited another ten to make a stunning return to form with "The Liberty of Norton Folgate" (10/10 2009).  

Robert Plant's solo career reached a higher level in the Noughties, but his best effort was actually in collaboration with Alison Klauss - "Raising Sand" (8/10 2007).  

Bruce Springsteen had a much better decade than the previous one.  He makes the lists with "The Rising" (8/10 2002), "Magic" (7/10 2007) and "Working on a Dream" (6/10 2009).  

Johnny Cash, in his final days, continued his "American Recordings" series, which covered a plethora of wonderful songs from the likes of Springsteen, U2, Tom Petty, Neil Diamond, Depeche Mode, Nick Cave and most famously Nine Inch Nails ('Hurt'), in such a way as to make many of them his own, but with so much emotional poignancy that the originals occasionally became instantly diminished.  "American III: Solitary Man" (9/10 2000) is his best, with "American IV: The Man Comes Around" (9/10 2002) not far behind and "American V: A Hundred Highways" (8/10 2006) a worthy posthumous addition to the series.  

And finally, David Bowie rose to his greatest heights since 1980 with "Heathen" (7/10 2002) and "Reality" (8/10 2003) before having ten years off as well.  These old boys were clearly on some kind of musical equivalent of Viagra.

Not a decade that has anything strong to characterise it in the wider music loving public's consciousness, but for me it was a time of new people making old man music, while old men made new music.

Half-amusing musings on my music collection - Part 12: Side B of the 90s

Side B of the 90s (the second half of the decade, that is) is not very different to side A .  Much like an album.  More of the same, only not quite as good. 

I blame Britpop.  As much as it was probably the last great movement in British pop music culture, it spawned a glut of bands who struggled to extend their cheeky lad and ladette guitar-based indie sing-alongs across a whole album.  Blur are the epitome of this flattering to deceive summation.  Had downloads and then streaming usurped CDs before "Parklife" was released, then far fewer people would have bought the whole album.  As it was, everyone who "loved a bit" of it, had to put up with all of it, fairground jingles and irritating moments of musical dicking about included.  

Blur, then, were not one of the Britpop lot to trouble my geeky top ten lists of albums from each year of the mid to late 90s.  Nor were Sleeper, despite my efforts to love them more - efforts prompted partly by their propensity for a catchy single and mostly by my infatuation with lead singer, Louise Wener.

The best albums by bands who could be said to at least loosely fall under this same umbrella would include the following:

"The Sound of McAlmont and Butler" (8/10 1995), which was purchased not just out of loyalty, but because it turned out to be a great album assembled from a series of original EPs; and because it might just kick off with the most explosively celebratory expression of joy ever unleashed in a pop song - "Yes".

Pulp's "Different Class" (8/10 1995) pre-dated the TV series 'Shameless' by a few years, but it managed to put the essence of that show to (extraordinarily catchy) music in its endearing portrayal of council estate romance, dry wit and perversion.

Demonstrating a far more middle-class, culturally intellectual obsession for sex - a classical music and literary tinged Beatlesesque pop version of the 'Carry On...' films - was Neil Hammond, aka The Divine Comedy. "Casanova" (7/10 1996) introduced us to 'Something for the Weekend' with its references to Stella Gibbons' 'Cold Comfort Farm' (something in the woodshed); "A Short Album about Love" (8/10 1997) contained the ultimate declaration of love with 'If you were a horse, I'd clean the crap out of your stable'; and "Fin de Siecle" (7/10 1998) painted images of journeys on National Express coaches with huge bottomed women.

Not quite fitting the sunny side of the Britpop template was Radiohead.  Before sinking into an abyss of experimental, morose dirge, they weren't quite too pretentious enough to forego a memorable guitar hook or ten within the bars of "The Bends" (8/10 1995) and "OK Computer" (8/10 1997).  And Oasis and Supergrass squeeze themselves onto the lists as well, to complete what on reflection is actually a fairly healthy representation for Britpop.

Not Britpop, but sitting comfortably alongside them are these CDs from indie/alternative artists: "Bring it On" (9/10 1998) by Gomez, "Beautiful Freak" (9/10 1996) by eels, "White Ladder" (8/10 1998) by David Gray,  "I'm with Stupid" (6/10 1995) by Aimee Mann and "Big Calm" (6/10 1998) by Morcheeba.  James also continued to plough a furrow through the 90s of half decent albums sprinkled with some great songs, the best being "Millionaires" (7/10) in 1999.

Less likely to find themselves featured in between topless photo-shoots on the pages of 90s lads' magazine, "Loaded" or invited to be interviewed on "The Word" by one of the decade's most iconic arseholes, Terry Christian, would be the inevitable folk and country rock performers sitting on my CD and record racks.  This includes Natalie Merchant, who moved on from 10,000 Maniacs, to produce several beautiful solo albums.  Beautiful AND interesting that is.  I stress that, because people often use that ubiquitous adjective to describe soft, gentle and VERY dull and bland ballads, which is not what Natalie Merchant did, not at first anyway. She did, later on, spend a few years on a self-indulgent project to put a double album's worth of Edwardian poetry for children to music, which I also witnessed in performance in probably the most tediously fucking boring concert I have ever attended.  At her best she can be heard on "Tigerlily" (8/10 1995), "Ophelia" (7/10 1998) and "Motherland" (8/10 2001).

Willie Nelson, Sheryl Crow, Robyn Hitchcock, Lucinda Williams and Gillian Welch get on the scoreboards, but standing out is another folky favourite of mine, bearded this time, as you'd expect,  Richard Thompson.  "You? Me? Us?" (7/10 1996) pulls off the experiment of one disc of acoustic tracks and one disc of electric versions without it seeming like a gimmick.  In 1999, he unleashed a classic in my mind, one of only two perfect scores in this half of the decade, "Mock Tudor" (10/10).  The other ten is "Time Out of Mind" (1997), Dylan's resurrection #3, that proved to be a turning point rather than a blip, a return to form that he continued to build on for the next 14 years.

An even more unexpected comeback at this time (1999), given that their last studio album was 14 years previously, was Madness.  The LP title "Wonderful" (6/10) described some of the tracks on that album, not all, but its the odd song that stacks up against their classics that showed they could still write great pop tunes; and they went on to do this again, irregularly, over the time since.

Finally, also proving that they weren't washed up either, were David Bowie ("Earthling" 6/10 1997 and "Hours" 5/10 1999) and Paul McCartney ("Flaming Pie" 7/10 1997).

So, lots of great albums, but a downward trajectory.  You'd expect this would continue in the 2000s, as clearly I was getting older, more set in my ways, more narrow minded and rose tinted in my view of the good old days.  But you'd be wrong.  Strangely.

Half-amusing musings on my music collection - Part 11: Side A of the 90s

"Side A" of the 90s will focus on the years in the first half of a decade in which CDs fully replaced vinyl records, thus making the concept of a side A or B completely redundant, and adding just enough irony to my blog post title to compensate for the lacklustre humour hereafter.

Unfulfilled Promise

The best album of the decade came from The Sundays - 1990's "Reading, Writing and Arithmetic" (10/10).  Imagine The Smiths, but with a lead singer that you want to snog and marry rather than kill, because she sings about her finest hour "finding a pound on the underground" and elsewhere confesses to getting sick on her cardigan.  Although it happens quite regularly in music, it always seems implausible that an artist capable of creating one amazing album should be incapable of doing it again.  I love Harriet Wheeler's voice and the distinctiveness of the band's sound, so I enjoy their two follow-ups, but neither 1992's "Blind" (6/10) nor 1997's "Static and Silence" (7/10) contains a song you'd swap for anything on their faultless debut LP.

Much more notable in their fall from precocious perfection was The Stone Roses, who spent the early 90s not following up their iconic debut due to a record contract dispute and thus building up an unassuaged level of expectation and suspense over their 1994 sophomore LP, named with suitable irony, "The Second Coming" (7/10).

The House of Love were a third band from this era, who teasingly released an LP (9/10) that (to steal one of their own lyrics) "sucked the marrow out of bones" and then failed to follow it up.  Like The Stone Roses and The Sundays, they are emblematic of halcyon university days, when I constantly listened to them, saw each in concert and anticipated subsequent albums with all the relish of a fox who'd snuck into a battery farm full of hens.  Unlike The Stone Roses and The Sundays, the House of Love's follow up was more than just relatively disappointing, it was as shockingly stark a contrast as being served a dog poo for dessert in a Michelin star restaurant.  It remained the worst CD in my collection until I finally recovered from the shock, gained closure on the death of any vain hopes of being eventually persuaded of its worth and threw the bloody thing in the bin.

Bob Dylan's inclusion in this 'unfulfilled promise' section might seem crazy, 30 years into his career, but he's here on the back of ending an artistic and commercial slump in the 80s with a promising return to top form, only to follow it with slump number 2.  This starts with 1990's "Under the Red Sky" (6/10), an over-produced LP packed with average tracks and star names like George Harrison, Elton John, Slash and Stevie Ray Vaughan sitting in as musicians, all responding to Bob's genius as you might the Emperor's new clothes, while he sings "Wiggle wiggle wiggle like a swarm of bees, wiggle on your hands and knees."  Bob learned from this experience never again to allow a producer (Don Was in this case) to roll his songs in glitter, but he then forgot how to write songs at all.  His next albums are stripped back, solo acoustic, containing only covers of traditional folk blues songs.  "Good as I been to You" (1992 6/10) is the harder listen.  "World Gone Wrong" (1993 7/10) is better, but neither did anything to suggest that Dylan's song-writing days weren't well behind him.  Or so I thought in the mid-90s.

One band managed to do a similar trick halfway through their album.  Crash Test Dummies frontloaded "God shuffled his feet" (1993 7/10) with enough great songs to earn a 10/10; but what would have been side 2 if it wasn't the CD age pulled the average down and yet again the follow up album was a million miles off that early promise.

The early 90s were awash with bands destined not to sustain their early promise.  The Cranberries' first two albums (both 7/10) are a case in point.  Suede, whose self-titled debut (9/10) in 1993 proved difficult to match on LP #2 and even harder after co-song-writer and guitarist Bernard Butler left the band. Portishead's "Dummy" (1994 8/10) led to nothing of interest thereafter.  And "Mama Said" (8/10) saw Lenny Kravitz reach a creative peak that proved an anomaly.

Meanwhile, U2 turned a corner in their career.  They followed their last good album, 1993's "Achtung, Baby!" with the average "Zooropa" and then transformed themselves into a blueprint for tediously self-satisfying, terminally dull purveyors of smug, over-earnest elevator music, like fucking Coldplay.  Paul Weller pulled off a similar trick, but without stirring up such passionate hatred as Bono and co.  He seemed to have found his groove as a solo artist on "Wild Wood" (7/10 1993) and "Stanley Road" (7/10 1995), but thereafter he's manged to stir up nothing passionate or emotion-inducing at all, just charmlessly competent Ocean Colour Scene copies.

So, did anyone maintain any momentum in the early 90's like bands used to years before?

Yes.  Fulfilling their promise, one album after another, was The Beautiful South.  No band has pulled off such an ironic juxtaposition  (there's that poncey word again) between upbeat melodies and dark, twisted lyrics, as if they'd based their whole career on Maxwell's Silver Hammer by The Beatles.  Songs with titles like "I Love You but you're boring" that take a wry look at relationships and romance for some reason appeal very much to the cynic in me.  From 1990's "Choke"(9/10) to "0898 Beautiful South" (7/10) in '92 and "Miaow" (7/10) in '94, Paul Heaton and co proved possibly the most consistently great pop band of the decade.  

Fulfilling their promise from the late 80s, at least commercially (as I prefer those earlier albums) are REM.  "Out of Time" (8/10 1991), "Automatic for the People" (8/10 1992) and "Monster" (7/10 1994) are perhaps only flawed or inconsistent, because they contain some classic songs that shine a bit too brightly for anything else to keep with. Reaching their commercial AND artistic zenith were Crowded House, who released "Woodface" (9/10 1991) and "Together Alone" (10/10 1993) and then disbanded for a decade rather than inevitably let us all down trying to follow such inimitable work.

Neil Young has spent decades alternating between between sumptuousness folk or country LPs and heavy grunge outings, and he pairs two of his best since the early 70s here.  1990's "Ragged Glory" (7/10) and 1992's "Harvest Moon" (10/10).  At the time of writing and at the age of 75, he's about to release his 20th studio album in the 29 years since then, most of which score even better than "Ragged Glory" in my mind. Having released 40 studio albums in total (of which I have 30 and rate them on average 7.5), it's fair to say that he HAS fulfilled his promise.

Hellos and Goodbyes

1994 gave us the start of Oasis's career, which was to deliver many, many fine songs, but no LP as consistently great as their debut, "Definitely Maybe" (9/10).  It gave us a new 2nd career for Johnny Cash, whose first in the "American Recordings" (8/10) series was released this year.  It gave us the complete career (until a recent equally accomplished comeback) of Belly, with the superb "Star" (7/10) in '93 and easily loveable "King" (9/10) two years later.

And it was goodbye to Jethro Tull, after 91's "Catfish Rising" (7/10) and '95's "Roots to Branches" (6/10) - a strong finish to a consistently great 30 year career, which they then spoilt with one album too many, their worst of all time, "J-Tull dot com" (which doesn't make the top ten, even in a year as bad as 1999, given its rating of 2/10).  It has a shit title and album cover too, so Tull's ship had well and truly sailed by this point.

And the saddest of goodbyes, of course, was to Freddie Mercury in 1991, marked fittingly with a final Queen album, "Innuendo" (7/10), which along with "The Works" in '83 was their best since the 70's.

Half-amusing musings on my music collection - Part 10: The mid to late 80s

Up until this point in musical history, the best rock/pop songs and albums being produced were also in the mainstream and consequently the artists responsible would appear ubiquitously on shows like 'Top of the Pops'. But the mid-80s proved a turning point, and 'Top of the Pops' went the same way that 'Doctor Who' did at that time (in the era of Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy), and that's straight down the shitter.  Nonetheless, there were plenty of great albums in the second half of the decade.

10/10 albums from 1984-9

The best LP of the decade comes from Kate Bush.  I'm sure I wasn't the only 15 year old in love with her when she released "Hounds of Love" in 1985.  My obsession was such that my mum, in an effort to help me find a girlfriend, once claimed that her friend's daughter looked like Kate Bush.  She didn't.  She was much more like Alison Moyet.  No disrespect to Alison Moyet, but she wasn't really competing with Kate Bush for a turn on my turntable or a space on my wall.

'Dawn escapes from moon-washed college halls' was still 3 years off for me when Marillion's Fish sang this favourite lyric of mine on "Misplaced Childhood's" 'Kayleigh' (1985).  There is no better album for songs that segue into each other and it's easy to be forgiving of his heart-on-sleeve self-pity, because his use of language is unique:  He somehow manages to sound like an English Literature post-grad with a thesaurus fixation without coming across as a right bleeding ponce.

On the subject of lyrical masterpieces with complementary melodic dressing, I'll add to this list of near-perfect albums, The Smiths' 1986 classic, "The Queen is Dead".  Another light that never goes out.  And I'll throw in REM's "Green" and The Waterboys' "Fisherman's Blues", my soundtracks to the summer of '88 and a first year at university, where I strived to become as equally poetic, tragic and Cinderella-obsessed as Marillion's Fish.

Bob Dylan's mid-to-late 80s period is his most maligned and appeared to have finally signalled the death throes of his career, but he pulled off yet another resurrection, probably the most incredible for ...oh, about, the best part of 2,000 years.... when he allowed Daniel Lanois to soundscape a collection of great songs that became the beautifully atmospheric "Oh Mercy".  And as Bob ended the decade having a resurrection, The Stone Roses were born, claiming to actually be the resurrection and sounding like the lovechildren of the 60s and the 90s on their self-titled, lemon and paint-splat adorned debut LP.

9/10 albums from 1984-89

Lanois (alongside Brian Eno) can also take credit for a similar sound on U2's "The Unforgettable Fire" (1984), adding timeless sophistication to the more raw sound of their early LPs.  So much so, that you can even forgive Bono's gurning smugness and ridiculous attire of a ten-gallon Teletubby hat, sex worker boots and Kentucky trailer park mullet as he gave himself a hernia singing about Martin Luther King.  He refined this look when U2 pulled off pretending to be an American country-blues rock band on "The Joshua Tree" in 1987.  I found myself easily able to overlook their affectations while the music was so great - but once they started to wade through a mire of tedious mundanity from the late '90s onwards, those affectations made me want to punch Bono every time he flicked his fingers and caused a child to die of poverty.

Two 9/10 albums of the time really challenged me.  Springsteen's "Born in the USA" and Dire Straits's "Brothers in Arms" proved to be my gateway LPs into their older, less 80s sounding-music; and consequently these albums then became, for a long time, disregarded in my mind as weaker, overly commercialised, too-radio-friendly, digital, hyped CD flagships.  Recently, they've grown on me again, enormously so, as the songs are all strong on each and the 80's production has dated better than much from that that era.

REM were riding an artistic wave in the late 80s as a run up towards becoming A-listers in the early 90s.  The prequels to "Green" were "Life's Rich Pageant" (1986) and "Document" (1987) and together this forms a trilogy of their best and most consistent LPs throughout a long career.  Anything else might come close and might include classic songs, but always had a couple of weaker tracks to detract.

Other 9/10 LPs from this era are:  Marillion "Fugazi" (1984) and "Clutching at Straws" (1987), Madness "Keep Moving" (1984), Sting "The Dream of the Blue Turtles" (1985), The Smiths "Meat is Murder" (1985) and "Strangeways, Here we Come" (1987), 10,000 Maniacs "In My Tribe" (1987) and "Element of Light" (1986) by Robyn Hitchcock and The Egyptians.  A real mix of fashionable and unfashionable and all of which, except the latter, I had procured and started to love by the end of that decade.

The rest, year by year

1984 was marginally weaker and the remaining ranks of my top ten are taken up with 7/10 scoring LPs from Prince, Madonna and even Frankie Goes to Hollywood.  Much more typical 80s pop than the choices above.

1985 was - coincidentally, much like 1975 - a mid-decade peak year, helped by many 8/10 albums, from Suzanne Vega, Madness, Richard Thompson and The Pogues.

1986 has a range with some great albums by The Bangles, The Fall, Crowded House and Peter Gabriel, towering above some very average efforts from Queen and Dylan.

1987 was similar in that respect, with the top ten ranks scrapping the barrel a bit, courtesy of a 5/10 from Springsteen and some good but unexciting records by John Mellencamp and Aztec Camera.

1988 proved to be better and full of 7/10 LPs from The Fall, The Pogues, Crowded House, The Travelling Wilburys.

1989 scores even better with Kate Bush, 10,000 Maniacs, Tom Petty and Neil Young.