The new Ariel Pink album, it’s sweeeeeet, with that many es. I’m sorry that I went, oh look, ANOTHER Ariel Pink album, upon first receiving it. I mean,yes, it is another Ariel Pink album, but hell, on the strength of this one, I’m quite happy to keep hearing what he has to offer. Still swimming in the sparkly murky waters of the piece I wrote about Martin Rev’s Strangeworld yesterday, and blissed out by the sudden almost-spring sunshine, I’m particularly partial this afternoon to impressionistic, woozy sound; ghost-pop, spirit-bubblegum, codeine-flavoured blanket-psych. S’lovely. Get some. You’ve probably already got some. Get some more. As well as the aforementioned seven-minute-long instant headfuck classic, ‘Getting High In The Morning’, which sounds exactly like what it says it sounds like, there’s a bonus track called ‘Netherlands’ that is super prog and dreamy and goes on for ages and features the Pink singing like a Jim Henson creature.

Posted by Frances May Morgan on Saturday, January 21st, 2006
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Name that single -

“I’ve got a rhyme that comes as a riddle/(o-hi-o)/What’s round on the ends and high in the middle”

Man. I’d forgotten how great this album is.

Posted by Everett True on Friday, January 20th, 2006
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Here’s what I’ve been listening to while trying to write my Nirvana book:

1. El Perro Del Mar - El Perro Del Mar (on constant repeat)
2. Buzzcocks - Love Bites (for those early morning blues)
3. Misty’s Big Adventure - The Black Hole (indubitably our favourite album of 2005)
4. Blondie - Greatest Hits: Sight And Sound (for when guests appear)
5. Dear Eskimo - Be Patient EP (witty and tricksy post-Outkast trip hop)
6. Betty Lavette - Souvenirs (even if this compilation is a little disappointing)
7. Wire - 154 (the one that turned my life around)
8. Lonnie Donegan - Lonesome Traveller (he’s NOT a novelty act!)
9. Nirvana - Nevermind (I still hate the production)
10. Bitter Springs - That Sentimental Slush (such depth of material)

Purchased a retro record player on Ideal Deal.com a couple of days ago, and excitedly waiting for its arrival. It’s red! I long ago passed along my four Dansettes to friends, and need something to play the 78rpms - Winifred Atwell, Spike Jones, Johnnie Ray, Lonnie Donegan, Alma Cogan, Nervous Norvus - I bought back up from my dad’s in Chelmsford last weekend.

Posted by Everett True on Thursday, January 19th, 2006
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Just been sent the excellent double-CD Cherry Red compilation of The June Brides and Phil Wilson - to celebrate, I thought I’d share my sleeve notes to the forthcoming June Brides tribute album, due out some time whenever.

(1985) It’s about time! In this current climate of depressed and depressing music, where the word “pop” has become synonymous with drab grey colourless tinsel-town glamour children making three-minute worthless video-exercises in how low modern music can sink, The June Brides produce an eight-track mini-album (produced by John O-Neill, ex-Undertones) to blast away the dullness. They sav(i)our pop for the side of COLOUR! LAUGHTER! JOY! with their spiky sublime intoxicating tunes; following that long and luminary lineage of Buzzcocks, Subway Sect, Fire Engines et al down the cottage way.

(2005) Mostly, I recall the walks home along dark, dismal, intimidating, intoxicating South London streets with the sound of Jon Hunter’s trumpet blaring in my ears. Mostly, I recall frantic dancing and gay abandon, pirouetting to the sound of Simon and Phil’s guitars, feeling that such euphoria should not go unnoticed. I’d queued outside the Rock Garden in ’81, waiting for Josef K and their chilled blue groove. Now it was ’84 and we suddenly were on first name terms with our pop stars. They were human, shy and painfully insecure…people like us. Did this make them any less special? Are you joking?

(1985) The first side starts off with a cracking, animated instrumental – which will make you wish you’d never dyed your hair black and started looking sullen – and SLAMS straight into “I Fall”, a tumultuous impetuous expression of joy; fragile, soaring, forever bewitching. The guitars rush headlong through a tumbling waterfall of viola and vocals: “I fall, and you drag me down, no one is listening, but let’s shout out loud to prove that we’re alive.”

(2005) I tried to recapture that feeling for years, the simple pleasure of shouting out loud to prove my own existence…I’d reference June Brides on the oddest occasions: in Melbourne 2000 trying to get to grips with grazed knees, in Pittsburgh 1993 in front of 20,000 people, none of whom knew my name…but such nostalgia is not part of my brief. My friend Ian instructed me never to call him up once our shared interests ceased – why would I? Should we talk about the past? Why? June Brides were a celebration of the present, with its endless waits in dole offices and miners’ rights being trampled into the ground. These songs are not made for these times.

(1985) (ASIDE: The production does seem a trifle wimpish in places, the cover’s not exactly riveting and the ghost of Young Scotland occasionally raises a bleary eyebrow, still…)

(2005) One time in 1996, I bumped into Phil Wilson in a pub around the corner from King’s Reach Tower: not only was he now a civil servant – and don’t you wish ALL pop stars would take a cue from his declaration to retire from making music past the age of 30 (or whatever it was) – but he now worked along the same corridor as my brother Mick, without knowing it. Odd, because both men clearly had shared bills at Alan’s Living Room in the dim mists of…

(1985) …the pace continues with “Sunday To Saturday”, that class(ic) first single of theirs, now impossible to find, and ends in an exhausting exhaustive exhorting extreme exhibition of (barely) un-extolled evocative exhilaration – “Sick, Tired And Drunk”, an anthemic paean to all those moments when you’re swaying sullenly sideways. Orgasmic! Ooh, I could lie here forever, but…

(2005) The NME compared them to Holden Caulfield. I can see their point now. Then, I never bothered reading music press interviews: too many imaginary barricades to man, too much dancing to partake in. The June Brides began with the perfectly understandable motivation of wanting to be a guitar band that didn’t sound like U2 or Echo & the bleedin’ Bunnymen and finished way before they had the chance to turn boring. Anyone worth their stripy pop socks in the early 80s loved Buzzcocks and Jonathan Richman. The Smiths were a momentary abhorrence that ruined everything.

(1985) Side two: rapture! Unfettered by any commercial restraints, The June Brides jangle straight for the jugular and BITE every time.
1! The heart! “Every Conversation” shining chiming ringing singing – a remix of their other single, more finely honed incisive streamlined – the chorus melting in your mouth like week-old Anchor.
2! The throat! “Comfort” – it’s those guitars again. Biting, bold, brash, harsh – nearly too cutting in their determination to shatter the nerves.
3! The neck! “Heard You Whisper” – enchanting, empathetically fresh, enraptured: guitars and voices and instruments weaving and interweaving around a passionate acquisition of an enchanting tune. Spicy, bright, wholesome.
4! The wrist! “Enemies” – jubilant massed ranks, invigorating vivid sparkling – a fitting climax for such a magnificent album. The legs finally give way as you find yourself swept along on a tide of exultation.
For its sense of vision alone this must be the most essential album released in the last two years. The choice is yours.

(2005) Never one to resort to barely constructed hyperbole, I only ever let myself be carried away by the tides of my enthusiasm…and if that’s a crime then I’m guilty, guilty of loving you.

The Legend! (NME) 1985
The Legend! (Plan B) 2005

Posted by Everett True on Wednesday, January 18th, 2006
(1 Comment)

We couldn’t get up this morning. A whole weekend of editorial work and no exercise stopped me sleeping. Last night it was 3am almost and I was still sitting up in bed watching The Prisoner DVDs. Eventually I slept, woke up twice with nightmares. One of them was too nasty to remember; the other was a kind of assassination vendetta plot type thing set in an attic in Bloomsbury. I woke up whimpering to my boyfriend, “They sent three of you out…with swords…AND ONLY THE OTHER TWO CAME BACK!AND THEY SAID YOU WERE…DEAD!!!“, like some British b-movie actress. Today coffee cups are piling up in the sink and everything takes on a sinister aspect: live cushions and pulsing lights. I go ebay to look at vintage Hornsea china. There is a lot of it, but none comes close to my ‘Springtime’ butter dish. Listen exclusively to delicate sounds: Linstrom and Prins Thomas; this latest Chicago Underground Duo, which is super arctic and tumbly and ace; Nathan Fake; anything that sounds like snow, stick it on. Steve Hanson sends me the latest Fold, which is real nice: PKD, Faust, Ashtray Navigations. Sign up. I’m going swimming.

Posted by Frances May Morgan on Monday, January 16th, 2006
(1 Comment)

Music journalist couple seeks third person to live in our house. We have a real fire, wireless internet, cat, endless supply of promo CDs, old records, dishwasher, small garden, loads of books, instruments, plants…you know…important stuff. We like drones, metal, cats, terror, singing and writing. It’s cheap and we are nice, clean, well-adjusted individuals. Even if we are a couple. Available end of Jan.

Posted by Frances May Morgan on Saturday, January 14th, 2006
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It’s like The Cope says. Exercise music. They tell you that ‘light DIY’ counts as exercise, right, and a look back to 2004 tells me that I did indeed once erect a fine set of industrial shelves – singlehanded - to the filthklang that is Alien Soundtracks! And they’re still standing! And that, my friends, is heavy DIY. So today I am using ‘Mondo Anthem’ as a kind of anger channel, the better to deal with the inefficiency of others, sick of half-measures, sick of just getting by, sick of procrastinators. Feel the burn. That is, til the titanium kazoo comes in, or the guitar that sounds like a titanium kazoo, whichever, and then you just got to laugh. Because either way you look at it - kazoo or kazoo-effect - Chrome are seriously wrongly right in every way and if Liars don’t own a copy of this album someone should maybe send them it.

Posted by Frances May Morgan on Friday, January 13th, 2006
(2 Comments)

Been going through some of my old school reports.
Most of the entries are annoyingly anonymous, if tending towards hectoring and noting my ‘mischievous’ tendencies - aside from a gem, class 3B, Michaelmas term 1973, Brentwood School, English (position, 28 out of 28): “An untidy worker, a deplorable writer. He really must be more thorough and imaginative.”

On the phone to brother Mick earlier today. We were discussing our dad’s tendency to not give books directly to us, but leave them in places we might stumble across them - like the Christian Guide to Sex Education, a short pamphlet published some time in the Seventies. Q: Masturbation - is it sinful? A: No - as long as you think pure thoughts.

Posted by Everett True on Monday, January 9th, 2006
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In Adelaide last month, I jumped up on stage to sing an encore with The Grates. The singer, flustered and radiant, fluffed her intro - and in desperation yelled, “Does anyone in Adelaide know who Everett True is?” To my astonishment, about a dozen people cheered. Who are these strange souls?

In Melbourne, I exchanged anedcdotes about Angus from the ‘dirty, stinking’ Liars with the dapper singer of The Devastations. Conrad’s shirt was open to the third button, but he was charming. I booked myself a support slot with his band in Northcote but sadly had to cancel when the news of my dad filtered through.

Back in England - Chelmsford, to be precise - I felt proud, and extremely humble, when a piece of music that I’d written with Verity Susman a few weeks earlier was played as the coffin departed behind the crematorium’s curtain.

Posted by Everett True on Thursday, January 5th, 2006
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