Started off the day by listening to the Greatest Song Ever, no questions broked, ‘Oh Happy Day’ by the Edwin Hawkins Singers (Nick Cave knows it: ‘Deanna’ is taken straight from the source)…a song that never fails to leave me tingling and shivering and tears prickling my eyes, pure inspiration.

Then, on the way back from the nursery (beautiful sunny day, as ever mourn all the sheep bleating along in the long line of motorik hum clogging up Dyke Rd), a Wedding Present song came onto my iPod - thought I’d listen to it, why not, I’m rather fond of Gedge, get more fond of him the older I become actually, song called ‘Shivers’ from their reccent album Search For Paradise, well knock me down and call me ragged but the song is gorgeous, beautiful, swamped in sumptious analogue keyboards, beautiful old organ sound, the kind of organs Steve Fisk cherishes and collects, exactly like his organs actually…hey, wait a minute, didn’t Steve produce the last Wedding Present album - these are his keyboards! Whoa.

And then straight into The Legend! (’I'm Not Like That’) and a wonderful Camera Obscura song (’If Looks Could Kill’) that I stood on the doorstep and listened to until those thunderous drums had faded into the distance.

Nice.

Posted by Everett True on Wednesday, June 28th, 2006
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Just finishing filing the 130 or so applications for the two Plan B jobs advertised a couple of weeks back…slightly overwhelmed by people’s enthusiasm and obvious passion for music and disgust at the way it’s treated within the media in this country.

One hundred and thirty! There are only two jobs going, y’know - which means 128 disappointed people. And some of these emails are just genius.

Posted by Everett True on Thursday, June 15th, 2006
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So we’re down the Marlborough, right - main support to Tim’s touching, lovelorn and understated guitar craftmanship - and we’re kicking up a fine storm, halfway between improvisation and jamming. There’s me: glasses, songs about the last days of Kurt Cobain, ‘where is my beautiful son?’, chance numbers, streetlife, counting down destruction and the odd burst of melody. There’s Chris (Crayola Lecturn) blowing up a dissonant squall on sax, ably complimented by Alistair from Hamilton Yarns on crooner’s trumpet. There’s Andrew Clare, biting back the urge to let rip with a sudden frenzy of sound. There’s Noah Taylor, tattooed and lean, folding back into his array of strange effects pedals. No one’s watching, not really - Jack Sargeant and partner, chortling occasionally, wondering if I’m reading from notes (no) - tables dimly-lit, when suddenly there’s a hen party walks in.

Whoa! The Legend! live in front of a hen party (they were on their way to a ‘house’ club). Nice work.

……and later, I’m sat next to Nick Cave…..

Posted by Everett True on Friday, June 2nd, 2006
(2 Comments)

Found this while cruising the web a few minutes ago. Thought I’d share it with you.

A REAL TURKEY
Some people like THE CRANBERRIES. EVERETT TRUE and TAYLOR PARKES don’t.

THE CRANBERRIES
TO THE FAITHFUL DEPARTED

Reasons to hate The Cranberries.

1) Dolores O’Riordan. Her arrogance. Her petty small-mindedness. Her redneck worldview. Her incessant preaching. The fact you can actually see the mean-spiritedness of her thoughts imprinted on her pinched little face. Those American flag jumpsuits. Her cold love of money. The way she’s Sinead O’Connor for people who can’t confront even elementary contradictions. Her anti-abortion stance. Her absolute lack of self-irony. The way she makes even the most fundamental and wonderful emotions sound trite. The way America loves her cliched, stereotypical take on Ireland. Her reduction of serious political issues to 10-second sound-nibbles. Her dress sense. The obscene way she made legions of students slow-dance to the most crushingly banal political lyric (“And their tanks and their bombs and their tanks and their guns…”) since Paul McCartney’s “Give Ireland Back To The Irish”. That wedding.

2) Dolores O’Riordan. Her smug conceit masquerading as concern for all mankind.

3) Dolores O’Riordan. Her lyrics. The fact that no one in her obviously highly technological camp has bothered to buy her anything more than a Second Year rhyming dictionary. The fact that she sees fit to write a song about John Lennon – a bigoted, misogynistic, self-loathing, tantrum-prone asshole who also happened to write some great songs – 15 years after the event, and gloss over all his faults. The fact that she does so by writing the infantile lines, “It was a fearful night of December 8th/He was returning home from the studio late/He had perceptively known that it wouldn’t be nice/Because in 1980 he paid the price…With a Smith & Wesson 38/John Lennon’s life was no longer a debate.” The fact that every person in her camp is clearly so in awe of her (temper? Power? Capacity for retribution? Fragile ego?) that they didn’t take her gently to one side and go, “Er, Dolores, perhaps it’d be better if someone else wrote the lyrics…”

4) Dolores O’Riordan. Her videos. You know how much Dolores hates to be typecast as a “thick Paddy”? Has she actually watched any of her own videos? The way they reinforce received notions of Ireland as a backwards country populated entirely by broken-toothed, bowl-headed, crying schoolkids in grey V-neck jumpers dancing around streets lit by the occasional Armalite flare? And the odd horse – y’know.

5) Dolores O’Riordan. Her lyrics. Guess whose only contact with “real life” has been MTV news and the occasional venture onto the street outside the Four Seasons? Check “War Child”: “I spent last winter in New York and came upon a man/He was sleeping in the streets and homeless, he said ‘I fought in Vietnam’…” You fucking patronising, prematurely middle-aged cow.

6) Dolores O’Riordan. Her music. The opening song here (“Hollywood”) starts like Stiltskin. Only not as good. Then we’re onto Foreigner territory. With the odd mandolin thrown in, for “local” colour.

7) Dolores O’Riordan. Her lyrics. Check “I’m Still Remembering”: “They say the cream will always rise to the top/They say that good people are always the first to drop/What of Kurt Cobain, will his presence still remain?/Remember JFK, ever saintly in a way….” (Yeah, and an adulterous ego-maniac who started the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Vietnam War, in another way.) Check: “Bosnia” (no, seriously, folks) – “Bosnia was so unkind, Sarajevo changed my mind…Rummmpatitum, rummmpatitum/Traboo, traboo, traboo…” (We’re quoting from the official lyric sheet.) The theremin and musical box used (spookily!) to spice up the music have the unfortunate effect of making the song sound like something from “The Twilight Zone”.
The situation in the former Yugoslavia seems to have particularly troubled Dolores while she was writing the songs for this album (what’s wrong, dearie? Nothing better on TV?). After all, as she helpfully points out in the heady, emotive (all right: we’re lying) “Free To Decide”, “You must have nothing more with your time to do/There’s a war in Russia and Sarajevo too.” This is, incidentally, the most perceptive insight she offers throughout. (Who are the people who take this woman seriously? Where do they live? Where do they go to at night? Please don’t invite us.)

8) Dolores O’Riordan. Her voice. The way she turned what was a dazzling, intoxicating gift into an atonal cornkrake skree by infusing it with her personality. Now it emparts no emotion of any kind, save for pettiness, bitterness, self-righteousness. She tries to suggest such broad sweeps of emotion with her songs but, somehow, they always end up sounding so fucking small.

Not that we’d want to belittle her.

-Melody Maker, April 27, 1996

Posted by Everett True on Friday, June 2nd, 2006
(3 Comments)

Here’s my first chart from lastfm (most played artists)

1 The Long Blondes
2 Dexys Midnight Runners
3 The Undertones
4 The Go-Betweens
5 Patrik Fitzgerald
6 Camera Obscura
7 M. Ward
8 Candi Staton
8 Timi Yuro
10 Au Pairs
11 Serge Gainsbourg
12 Lonnie Donegan
12 Grandmaster Gareth
14 Animals and Men
15 Desford Colliery Band
16 De La Soul
16 Jackie Wilson
16 Yeah Yeah Yeahs
16 The Dresden Dolls
16 Snowbirds
16 Willie Hightower
16 Tracy Thornton

Posted by Everett True on Tuesday, May 30th, 2006
(1 Comment)

(This was Isaac’s due date.) Listen up: there’s something I’ve been meaning to share with you for a while now. No, not talking about last Wednesday at St Andrew’s Church - although that was extraordinary enough itself - where I played a half-hour improvised set with Noah Taylor, Noah on violin and guitar and sax simultaneously. We gelled, and we played noise, and we hit a groove, and we talked, and man it felt so good. (There’s a repeat this coming Friday at the Marlborough Hotel in Brighton, if anyone’s interested, where we’ll be joined by Chris Anderson.) No, I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about something in cyberspace.

So. After reading Miss AMP’s article on lastfm which appears in the next Plan B - and having just acquired a new PC, and thus access to iTunes once more, finally - I decided to check the site out. I logged on, played the requisite 300 tunes or so needed to register neighbours (folk with remarkably similar to musical tastes to your own) and checked out my new community. The third one I looked at - Gud, a 19-year-old Swedish male - was the one where it happened.

First: his most played artists this week - Irma Thomas, Betty Lavette, all my soul ladies from the Sixties. Cool, I thought.

Next: his most played artists last month – Orange Juice, The Pastels, Dexys Midnight Runners, Razorcuts. Nice. Shows diversity, exactly where I like it. This lastfm ‘generate neighbours’ function really seems to be kicking in, I thought. Then, I scrolled down the page to where Gud listed his most played tracks, and there at the very top with 84 plays – a song from a totally obscure band from Cardiff (and Brighton), one that didn’t even feature on my own iTunes list at that point. ‘Impossible Dream’ by the Snowbirds.

I freaked out. Snowbirds were my wife’s college band.

Posted by Everett True on Monday, May 29th, 2006
(5 Comments)

Last night wasn’t so good - Isaac woke up screaming at 12.30 and it took two solid hours of me singing to him, and talking, and bringing him medicine and milk before he was comforted enough to sleep again. When you’re so asleep yourself it’s hard to think of variations on what food he’ll be able to bite at once his teeth come through - beans, kidney beans, broad beans, runner beans, baked beans, green beans, minestrone, pinto beans - repeated on what seems an endless loop. He seems well enough now, though.

I’m about a day away from finishing my book. Today should do it, actually. I need to read through the final ‘death’ chapter once more (and the epilogue), and finalise the acknowledgments. Man. Then it’s just a matter of waiting until the galleys are back and wincing at the numerous typos - and, yeah. That’ll be it. It’s odd. The feeling is almost anti-climatic. It’s been almost two years. And now I just feel immeasurably sad - partly like I’ve betrayed my old self and Kurt by seeing this project through its conclusion, and partly because it’s never nice looking back in such detail, not when it reduces your current life to such an insane, repetitive routine. I’m sure it’s also affected my ability to write.

I love this Kimya Dawson album so much.

It hasn’t really been possible to Kimya while I’ve been writing my book - it’s too intrusive, and she makes you want to catch every last wavering word - but it means a lot. My chosen music to play at 6.55am is Camera Obscura’s new album, more Concretes than the Concretes even, it’s such a delightful way to greet the morning. And for incidental music, played while I’m preparing food or Isaac’s down in the kitchen, The Jam (Extras, or live). And for writing the book itself during the final week; Mark Lanegan and Talking Heads. (There’s been a ton more, but I really don’t want to get into writing extended lists here.)

Watched Dig last night. Man, that final scene where Anton kicks someone in the head for no reason depressed me so much - it was all I could think about when I was woken suddenly in the night. Not sure if the film isn’t too close to reality for my own personal comfort.

Posted by Everett True on Tuesday, May 2nd, 2006
(3 Comments)

Last time I met Nikki was in New York.

He was playing an instore somewhere on the Lower East Side, and I went down with Kid Millions to see him perform. As usual, he was magical: his voice cracking and wavering with emotion, joking with the crowd, dressed like Johnny Thunders in his velvet sleeves and with his guitar held high. Someone offered him dope. “Sorry,” he laughed. “I only do hard drugs.” He spotted me sitting at the back, and waved his guitar in my direction, trying to entice me onstage to play a few numbers (Nikki promoted a handful of Legend! shows in the early Eighties). I shook my head. I was enjoying myself too much.

Time before, we were hanging with Mercury Rev, stealing their whiskey, reminiscing.

I was never into Swell Maps as much as some of my peers - although who could deny the exuberance of some of their more thrown-away moments of two-minute pop brilliance? - but there were a couple of Jacobites albums from the mid-Eighties that occupy a very special place in my heart.

Nikki was a true gent - too beholden to rock’n'roll mythology, for sure: too taken with the lace and frills of the early Seventies - but a true gent. He believed he was a star. It didn’t matter that only a handful of people agreed with him - he believed he was a star, and so he behaved like one, throughout his life.

You’ll be missed, Nikki.

Posted by Everett True on Tuesday, March 28th, 2006
(3 Comments)

Dagnabbit.

A couple of nights ago, got a text from my occasional music partner Careless Boy to say he was playing a gig with Noah Taylor (Flirting, It Happened One Summer, Shine) at the Marlborough. I blinked several times at it, decided Careless Boy had to be having me on, and promptly forgot to chase it up.

So anyhooo.

Yesterday met up with Careless Boy and he was telling me all about the show. Three people showed up to watch the band, when all of a sudden four men (and a woman) walk in…the Bad Seeds. Noah holds up his violin, gestures towards Warren Ellis. “Wanna play…?”

Warren jumps up on stage, plays a couple of songs.

Man. Fuck it. Yes, you could say I was mad with myself.

Posted by Everett True on Friday, March 3rd, 2006
(3 Comments)

Something that’s been bugging me constantly about Nirvana is the date of when Kurt first met Courtney.

The ‘official’ version is that the pair first met in Portland 1990 - as told by Azerrad, Cross et al. There’s no factual basis for this story at all, just Courtney and her concern at not appearing too much of a golddigger.

I happen to know that I actually introduced the couple in LA at a Butthole Surfers/L7 concert in May 1991 - but the ‘official’ biographers choose not to believe this version, even though I have many close mutual friends who back me up here. Trouble is, the only person who could really verify my story has been dead for over a decade now.

Today, while researching the book, found this tucked away in a joint Kurt + Courtney interview with Sassy magazine, January 1992: “I saw him play in Portland in 1988,” says Courtney. “I thought he was passionate and cute, but I couldn’t tell if he was smart, or had any integrity. And then I met him at a show about a year ago.” “Butthole Surfers,” says Kurt. “And L7,” adds Courtney, “I really pursued him…”

Ha! Take that crap revisionist historians.

Posted by Everett True on Wednesday, March 1st, 2006
(9 Comments)