There's a lot to disagree with in the 2nd last para but otherwise this was quite interesting. I didn't know The Bones of All Men. That band is tight af playing those old dance rhythms.
Don't feel so down about the short life of the innovative phase of the scene. It's always like that when truly creative things happen in or in the borders of commercial music. Either it fizzles out from lack of support or it is co-opted.
I am just over halfway through Everybody Loves Our Town - Mark Yarm's terrifically entraining oral history of the 1990s Seattle scene, which produced music that is very dear to my heart. You can draw a line where the creative lights when out, the gold rush commenced, and the bodies started literally piling up.
If you think about the period of history in which commercial distribution and sales of recordings was driving the development of the art, so I guess from when households got record players up to obsolescence of CDs due to the internet, that's how it went. Short intense bursts of creative progress, usually in specific locations. If you were involved in one (I was) or particularly identify with one then you may romanticize it and mourn the loss and feel bitter about what replaced it. Alternatively you can take the broader view and notice that all these bursts of creative progress combine to get us where we got and each of them changed the culture.
Hi Aurelien. I I really like this piece, but I think you are only partly right that it failed. It did get subsumed, but later people, like David Tibet in Current 93 brought people back to the British folk revival, by turning on a new generation of listeners to people like Shirley Collins (who learned a bulk of her material at the Cecil Sharpe house) and the Incredible String Band. Likewise the American freak-folkist Davendra Banhart helped revive the career of Brit folk revivalist Vashti Bunyan. From there, it went on to inform a new generation of musicians. That mini re-revival only lasted a little while but its own influence is still felt in the world of independent music. It remains a chain that is worth linking back up to.
Shirley Collins finally started singing again and has released three great new albums since 2016. It's fantastic stuff.
Also, if you get a chance, check out the book "England's Hidden Reverse" by David Keenan. It traces an underground river of music within your country (I'm a bloody yank who just happens to love this music) that was much informed by the stuff you are writing about in this piece, among other things... but it was an underground river. It would be good to see it surface more often.
The first track on "Bright Lights" is, "When I Get to the Border". There is something about it that stops people intheir tracks. People who might not be moved by anything else in TGRT's repertoire are... mesmerized.
I have somewhere a pure acoustic "alt take" version of "I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight" that I probably got off LimeWire. I've never found it since. It is heartbreaking. The various versions released tried to present Linda as brassy and sexy and confident, which she is not. This one just has a sad lonely girl, wishing a night out. "Take me to the dance and hold me tight."
'Farewell, Farewell' is still one of my favourite songs - almost could be taken for a traditional song. When you say "awful . . . girls with beehive hairdos" I hope you're not including Dusty Springfield, who had an amazing voice, and issued some of the best 'pop' of the time.
”punk rock, itself technically unsophisticated and within the capability of anyone who could play two and a half chords and spit.”
Really? I did know it was that easy to play punk music. And I’ve been a part of the scene for more than 40 years.
Could you do me a favour? Could you record the vocals and the lead guitar on Dead Kennedys ‘Holliday in Cambodia’?
The song is a little over four minutes long, so if you listen carefully you’ll probably have it done in an hour. And you can use it as next week’s post. Just to prove your point.
(Working with some of the leading neurological researchers in the world I coined the phrase ‘there’s no mach to the stupidity of an expert out of his field’. I see it still holds sway.)
[update: I’ve listened to the song now. It’s a country/folkrock thing with trumpets and a trombone. Strange, not very enjoyable but odd and interesting in a very punk sort of way.]
Ahhh, The Sex Pistols. I still remember. I was ten years old, and my friend Micke had been given a cassette by an older cousin. He didn’t like the music. Thought I might though.
When I got home I put it in the slot, pressed play, there was the sound of marching soldiers, then drums, then a guitar… 20 seconds and I was stuck! 42 years ago now.
A few things about the Sex Pistols. The most important is that they weren’t really a punk band, they were an art project, put together by Malcolm McLaren. Kinda ‘Andy Warhol meets the Spice Girls’.
Or maybe an early punk super group. Jonny Rottens texts are fairly advanced literature, and even more impressive if you realise he improvised them.
The rest of the band were skilled musicians, with one catastrophic exception: Sid Vicious. He really couldn’t play the bass. He was added to the band for image reasons. Which means that the record sounds like s””t, and once you get to be seasoned and experienced teenager you can’t listen to it any more.
Mind you, he wasn’t the original bassist, Glen Matlock was. And the remastered songs on spotify has his bass tracks. Have a listen, I think you will agree it’s a high quality rock album, regardless if you like it or not.
As for three chord songs, yes there was a lot of that around, and there still is. But it’s not a punk thing, it’s the classic pop format. And the first few recordings of your beloved bugs… As far as I can tell ‘love me do’ is a one chord song, and the bass, let me put it like this: I’ve never even touched the instrument, but I could probably master that in an hour. No dis, just saying…
Now, the bands you are thinking of are probably The Exploited, Sham 69, Cockney Rejects and the like. The part of the scene that evolved into Oi. They played (and still play) simple songs, close to football chants, that lose their charm fairly quickly. Unless they are simply perfect representations of a feeling. ‘If the kids are united’ by Sham 69 has more than four BILLION plays on spotty, I don’t think there’s any song by The Bugs that even comes close to that.
For the record: I have nothing against The Bugs, they made interesting music and my mother loved them. And as one of their of their lead singers, a certain mr Lennon, said in 1980: “I love all this punky stuff. It’s pure.”
Correction: the four billion plays was from a secondary source. After posting it struck me as a bit strange, so I checked. No, if you add up the plays of all versions it’s more like ten millions. Some journalists probably failed math…
Wow. A true tour de force. But a question. In one sense, what you seem to be describing is the evolution of ‘popular’ music driven by a rapid succession of paradigm changes — each new genre, or transition, brought into being by the staleness of the previous one. A kind of dialectical history of music in the Hegelian mode.
My question derives from the materialist in me: What is/was the connection, or what were the connection, if any, between the musical history of the period which you cover in such mind blowing detail and changes in the underlying economic conditions seen in post-WWII Britain and America, up to the crash in 1971 - and in the few decades thereafter. From an uninterrupted post-war boom lasting some twenty five years, to the intermittent booms and busts that followed? In your view, can one make such connections with any plausibility? And if so, are they determinative rather than random? Thanks once again for such a thought provoking and pleasurable read.
One of the things I recall from reading the Ralph Vaughan Williams bio written by his wife was how he caused uproar in Ireland, by stating that some of the most famous Irish folk songs had originated in England before becoming popular in the Pale. Fantasia on a theme by Thomas Tallis always takes me back to my Wiltshire childhood. I Flirted with English folk music over the years, but not to any great extent except for June Tabor & her one time allies the Oyster band, who I saw live one crazy packed night singing along to the likes of " Jam tomorrow, shit today ", which was a whole different experience than the couple of times during the 80's when. I attended a folk night in a pub, which to be honest for me was taken too seriously by people who had obviously never actually engaged in any serious experience of manual work. as was portrayed in many of the songs - perhaps it was down to my then & possibly still present working class inferiority complex. I will give Mr. Thompson a listen & thank you for that.
For a while, Richard Thompson's songs poked their way through the membrane of my own musical interests: Poison Years - an album compiling the early solo work of Bob Mould, after the messy implosion of his previous band, Hüsker Dü, includes a live cover of Thompson's 'Shoot Out The Lights.' A cover of 'I Misunderstood' turns up on the B-side of a Dinosaur Jr. single. It was telling that B. Mould and J. Mascis, both of whom are well-regarded guitar players, saw fit to pay tribute to Thompson. It looked like he might enjoy the kind of career elevation experienced by Neil Young, who was figuratively carried around on the slumped shoulders of the grunge generation when the genre was at its commercial peak. It wasn't to be. Thompson's fate, or perhaps his blessing, is to consistently fly just below the radar.
The album of his that I listen to most often could be regarded as a novelty record, albeit a very well thought-out one. 1000 Years of Popular Music was the result of him being asked by Playboy to nominate his favourite tracks of the millennium and providing a facetious literal response that wasn't published. The record covers a lot of ground beginning with Sumer is icumen in and winding up with Oops... I Did It Again.
Now, you are not really being fair about lack of classical music pedigree in Britain: George Frederic Handel was as British as King George II! ;).
1952 Vincent Black Lightning. Richard Thompson
Thank you Aurelien for this look into your background.
I very much appreciate your geopolitical insights.
Cheers,
OptikErik
There's a lot to disagree with in the 2nd last para but otherwise this was quite interesting. I didn't know The Bones of All Men. That band is tight af playing those old dance rhythms.
Don't feel so down about the short life of the innovative phase of the scene. It's always like that when truly creative things happen in or in the borders of commercial music. Either it fizzles out from lack of support or it is co-opted.
I am just over halfway through Everybody Loves Our Town - Mark Yarm's terrifically entraining oral history of the 1990s Seattle scene, which produced music that is very dear to my heart. You can draw a line where the creative lights when out, the gold rush commenced, and the bodies started literally piling up.
If you think about the period of history in which commercial distribution and sales of recordings was driving the development of the art, so I guess from when households got record players up to obsolescence of CDs due to the internet, that's how it went. Short intense bursts of creative progress, usually in specific locations. If you were involved in one (I was) or particularly identify with one then you may romanticize it and mourn the loss and feel bitter about what replaced it. Alternatively you can take the broader view and notice that all these bursts of creative progress combine to get us where we got and each of them changed the culture.
Hi Aurelien. I I really like this piece, but I think you are only partly right that it failed. It did get subsumed, but later people, like David Tibet in Current 93 brought people back to the British folk revival, by turning on a new generation of listeners to people like Shirley Collins (who learned a bulk of her material at the Cecil Sharpe house) and the Incredible String Band. Likewise the American freak-folkist Davendra Banhart helped revive the career of Brit folk revivalist Vashti Bunyan. From there, it went on to inform a new generation of musicians. That mini re-revival only lasted a little while but its own influence is still felt in the world of independent music. It remains a chain that is worth linking back up to.
Shirley Collins finally started singing again and has released three great new albums since 2016. It's fantastic stuff.
Also, if you get a chance, check out the book "England's Hidden Reverse" by David Keenan. It traces an underground river of music within your country (I'm a bloody yank who just happens to love this music) that was much informed by the stuff you are writing about in this piece, among other things... but it was an underground river. It would be good to see it surface more often.
The first track on "Bright Lights" is, "When I Get to the Border". There is something about it that stops people intheir tracks. People who might not be moved by anything else in TGRT's repertoire are... mesmerized.
I have somewhere a pure acoustic "alt take" version of "I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight" that I probably got off LimeWire. I've never found it since. It is heartbreaking. The various versions released tried to present Linda as brassy and sexy and confident, which she is not. This one just has a sad lonely girl, wishing a night out. "Take me to the dance and hold me tight."
And Joe Boyd…
'Farewell, Farewell' is still one of my favourite songs - almost could be taken for a traditional song. When you say "awful . . . girls with beehive hairdos" I hope you're not including Dusty Springfield, who had an amazing voice, and issued some of the best 'pop' of the time.
I'm listening to the album now - first time through. Thank you for the suggestion and the agreeable tunes.
”punk rock, itself technically unsophisticated and within the capability of anyone who could play two and a half chords and spit.”
Really? I did know it was that easy to play punk music. And I’ve been a part of the scene for more than 40 years.
Could you do me a favour? Could you record the vocals and the lead guitar on Dead Kennedys ‘Holliday in Cambodia’?
The song is a little over four minutes long, so if you listen carefully you’ll probably have it done in an hour. And you can use it as next week’s post. Just to prove your point.
(Working with some of the leading neurological researchers in the world I coined the phrase ‘there’s no mach to the stupidity of an expert out of his field’. I see it still holds sway.)
[update: I’ve listened to the song now. It’s a country/folkrock thing with trumpets and a trombone. Strange, not very enjoyable but odd and interesting in a very punk sort of way.]
Well, I had in mind the first time I heard a Sex Pistols song in, I think, 1976. I remember thinking, ah, two chords, now was that a third?
Ahhh, The Sex Pistols. I still remember. I was ten years old, and my friend Micke had been given a cassette by an older cousin. He didn’t like the music. Thought I might though.
When I got home I put it in the slot, pressed play, there was the sound of marching soldiers, then drums, then a guitar… 20 seconds and I was stuck! 42 years ago now.
A few things about the Sex Pistols. The most important is that they weren’t really a punk band, they were an art project, put together by Malcolm McLaren. Kinda ‘Andy Warhol meets the Spice Girls’.
Or maybe an early punk super group. Jonny Rottens texts are fairly advanced literature, and even more impressive if you realise he improvised them.
The rest of the band were skilled musicians, with one catastrophic exception: Sid Vicious. He really couldn’t play the bass. He was added to the band for image reasons. Which means that the record sounds like s””t, and once you get to be seasoned and experienced teenager you can’t listen to it any more.
Mind you, he wasn’t the original bassist, Glen Matlock was. And the remastered songs on spotify has his bass tracks. Have a listen, I think you will agree it’s a high quality rock album, regardless if you like it or not.
As for three chord songs, yes there was a lot of that around, and there still is. But it’s not a punk thing, it’s the classic pop format. And the first few recordings of your beloved bugs… As far as I can tell ‘love me do’ is a one chord song, and the bass, let me put it like this: I’ve never even touched the instrument, but I could probably master that in an hour. No dis, just saying…
Now, the bands you are thinking of are probably The Exploited, Sham 69, Cockney Rejects and the like. The part of the scene that evolved into Oi. They played (and still play) simple songs, close to football chants, that lose their charm fairly quickly. Unless they are simply perfect representations of a feeling. ‘If the kids are united’ by Sham 69 has more than four BILLION plays on spotty, I don’t think there’s any song by The Bugs that even comes close to that.
For the record: I have nothing against The Bugs, they made interesting music and my mother loved them. And as one of their of their lead singers, a certain mr Lennon, said in 1980: “I love all this punky stuff. It’s pure.”
Correction: the four billion plays was from a secondary source. After posting it struck me as a bit strange, so I checked. No, if you add up the plays of all versions it’s more like ten millions. Some journalists probably failed math…
Two things. One, this great Folk on Foot podcast with Richard Thompson walking around London: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5zNtfnXWKg
Two: this piece I just wrote about Tradfest, a folksinging festival here in deepest darkest Aotearoa New Zealand. The tradition lives! https://rosiewhinray.substack.com/p/folk-songs-and-folk-singers
Give a listen to the second Trees' record, if you haven't, the one containing Streets of Derry, Sall Free and Easy, etc.
Unfortunately, that too withered soon after.
Thank you Aurelien🙏interesting and refreshing.
Wow. A true tour de force. But a question. In one sense, what you seem to be describing is the evolution of ‘popular’ music driven by a rapid succession of paradigm changes — each new genre, or transition, brought into being by the staleness of the previous one. A kind of dialectical history of music in the Hegelian mode.
My question derives from the materialist in me: What is/was the connection, or what were the connection, if any, between the musical history of the period which you cover in such mind blowing detail and changes in the underlying economic conditions seen in post-WWII Britain and America, up to the crash in 1971 - and in the few decades thereafter. From an uninterrupted post-war boom lasting some twenty five years, to the intermittent booms and busts that followed? In your view, can one make such connections with any plausibility? And if so, are they determinative rather than random? Thanks once again for such a thought provoking and pleasurable read.
One of the things I recall from reading the Ralph Vaughan Williams bio written by his wife was how he caused uproar in Ireland, by stating that some of the most famous Irish folk songs had originated in England before becoming popular in the Pale. Fantasia on a theme by Thomas Tallis always takes me back to my Wiltshire childhood. I Flirted with English folk music over the years, but not to any great extent except for June Tabor & her one time allies the Oyster band, who I saw live one crazy packed night singing along to the likes of " Jam tomorrow, shit today ", which was a whole different experience than the couple of times during the 80's when. I attended a folk night in a pub, which to be honest for me was taken too seriously by people who had obviously never actually engaged in any serious experience of manual work. as was portrayed in many of the songs - perhaps it was down to my then & possibly still present working class inferiority complex. I will give Mr. Thompson a listen & thank you for that.
She was a rare thing. Fine as a beeswing
For a while, Richard Thompson's songs poked their way through the membrane of my own musical interests: Poison Years - an album compiling the early solo work of Bob Mould, after the messy implosion of his previous band, Hüsker Dü, includes a live cover of Thompson's 'Shoot Out The Lights.' A cover of 'I Misunderstood' turns up on the B-side of a Dinosaur Jr. single. It was telling that B. Mould and J. Mascis, both of whom are well-regarded guitar players, saw fit to pay tribute to Thompson. It looked like he might enjoy the kind of career elevation experienced by Neil Young, who was figuratively carried around on the slumped shoulders of the grunge generation when the genre was at its commercial peak. It wasn't to be. Thompson's fate, or perhaps his blessing, is to consistently fly just below the radar.
The album of his that I listen to most often could be regarded as a novelty record, albeit a very well thought-out one. 1000 Years of Popular Music was the result of him being asked by Playboy to nominate his favourite tracks of the millennium and providing a facetious literal response that wasn't published. The record covers a lot of ground beginning with Sumer is icumen in and winding up with Oops... I Did It Again.