Monday, March 18, 2024

More than a feeling

The short stories that make up Ghost Pains, Jessi Jezewska Stevens' first collection, are engagingly enigmatic, the deeper significance of the often awkward encounters they describe seeming to be just beyond the reach of the reader and the characters themselves. Buzz review here.

In this interview with Regan Mies for the Chicago Review Of Books, Stevens talks about the stories' relation to her two novels and to her non-fiction writing, her use of the surreal/absurd and her preoccupation with the themes of debt and waste.

Saturday, March 16, 2024

Point of principle

My respect and admiration for Gruff Rhys went up another notch this week - not only for the fact that he's pulled out of performing at SXSW over its sponsorship by the US Army and RTX Corporation (formerly Raytheon), which has been helping to arm Israel, but for the manner in which he's done so.

First, the social media statements announcing his withdrawal are unequivocal in expressing horror at "the hyper violence inflicted on civilians in Gaza and beyond", but rightly recognise that blame should also be apportioned closer to home, to "the utter collapse of coherent diplomacy in the West that has helped facilitate unimaginable violence".

Second, he's sensitive to his own positionality as "a musician not a politician", someone with "what I'm sure is a limited understanding of a complex situation", and is honest enough to acknowledge feeling "somewhat hypocritical as I'm no doubt tied in to other numerous imperfect capitalist constructs in my active and enthusiastic participation in the music industry" - but, critically, he still insists that none of this detracts from the fact that pulling out is the right thing to do.

Third, he remains acutely aware that withdrawing has been an easier decision for him that it might be for others who don't have US tour dates planned to supplement the festival or who are early-career musicians whose future financial viability and prospects hinge on turning up to avoid letting down funding bodies. (Lambrini Girls, for instance, were the recipients of money from the PRS Foundation, which made their dilemma more fraught: "We were trying to find a way out of the situation whilst keeping our moral integrity intact and not having to repay thousands of pounds at the same time. That really just isn't possible.")

Chwarae teg, Gruff. Symbolic gesture though withdrawing might be, it's one that many artists have now made - so here's hoping there's a significant cumulative effect.

Friday, March 15, 2024

Out of this world

What better way to spend a Sunday night than on a voyage into outer and inner space with prog/psych legends Gong and Ozric Tentacles as tour guides? Whether, by the end of the evening, we were all reborn as the best versions of ourselves, as Kavus Torabi speculated/hoped, is uncertain - but it was a wonderful trip all the same.

Buzz review here.

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Church chat and fox tales

RICHARD HERRING'S LEICESTER SQUARE THEATRE PODCAST, 5TH MARCH 2024, CARDIFF SHERMAN THEATRE

Over the course of more than 500 episodes going back to May 2012, Richard Herring’s Leicester Square Theatre Podcast (RHLSTP to nerdy devotees like me) has cemented its status as one of the most consistently engaging, entertaining and occasionally even illuminating shows around. Each installment pitches the comedian into conversation with a guest – much less a formal, structured interview than an unpredictable, freeform ramble for the benefit of a live audience. In recent years, Herring has started taking the podcast on tour around the country, booking guests with a connection to each specific venue – and tonight it’s Cardiff’s turn.

The secret to the show’s success lies largely in its host’s unorthodox questions, fondness for gentle irreverence and verbal jousting, and penchant for making shameless personal confessions – the latter in particular inducing those sat in the opposing seat to drop their guard and reciprocate with equal candour (most famously Stephen Fry).

In many ways, then, Charlotte Church is a perfect first guest – open about her past, honest in her opinions and more than willing to indulge Herring’s silliness with a joyful cackle. She immediately makes herself comfortable, taking off her shoes and socks and curling up on the armchair with her glass of red wine like she’s settling in for an evening in front of the TV. Herring, briefly taken aback, says that he won’t follow suit for fear of offending people with his “horrible Hobbit feet” and recounting how he recently stood on a drawing pin but felt nothing – and suddenly we’re barely two minutes in and the former child superstar is talking about “necrotic flesh”. This is RHLSTP all over.

The ensuing chat charts the Llandaff lass’ fairytale discovery, stratospheric rise and extraordinary career travelling the world performing for popes, presidents and royals, among others. At times, the conversation is heavy, covering topics such as the hoarding of obscene wealth, sexualisation in the media, and Church’s struggle to escape expectations and pigeonholing and find her own voice.

But there are plenty of laughs along the way – at her declaration that, having sung at Rupert Murdoch’s wedding as a teen, she’d now happily pay to sing at his funeral; at her cautionary tale about meeting your heroes (the disillusioning experience of Kelsey Grammer talking about his young girlfriend’s diarrhoea on a Republican Party bus); at the fact that the yardstick by which her family measured her success was when adverts for her album appeared on the side of Cardiff buses.

The encounter would be most memorable for the pair’s attempt to perform Pie Jesu as a duet, were it not for Church, late on, uttering the immortal line “The Woodland Trust are cunts”. Spoken with the voice of an angel, it’s quite a statement.

Herring’s second guest of the evening is unlikely to have his face emblazoned on local public transport any time soon. Benjamin Partridge immediately acknowledges that he’s hardly a household name even in Cardiff, and speculates that Superted and Maureen from Driving School must have had prior engagements. But he’s appearing fresh from winning what the host insists on calling “the Richard Herring Award” – Best Podcast at this year’s Chortle Awards – for Three Bean Salad, created in conjunction with Henry Paker and Mike Wozniak (whose appeal, he claims, is predominantly to “horny mothers”), and hits the ground running by riffing on the idea that the onstage rug might be a magic carpet.

What follows is an hour of near-constant hilarity (aside from an interlude when the pair justifiably bemoan the dearth of creativity and unfulfilled potential of the podcast medium). Host and guest are very much on the same wavelength when it comes to comedy, with Partridge admitting that he finds humour in the relentless repetition of a stupid idea, namechecking Herring’s notorious Someone LikesYoghurt stand-up show and explaining that this is the principle behind his long-running spoof industry podcast The Beef and Dairy Network.

One of Herring’s patented Emergency Questions – “What’s the largest creature you’ve had to try to get out of your house?” – elicits not one but two fox-related anecdotes that are so funny as to cause physical pain, and another leads to the duo debating whether a self-pleasuring Russian prisoner of war might be able to escape via his own arsehole. By the time Herring has managed to hold himself together long enough to bring the evening to an end, Partridge has won himself a legion of new fans.

(An edited version of this review appeared on the Buzz website.)

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

Joint effort

Kim Gordon's second solo album takes a little getting used to - it's not ear-friendly banger after ear-friendly banger, for sure - but The Collective stands as evidence of an artist who remains full of fresh, challenging ideas, even in her 70s.

With hindsight, in my review for Buzz I may perhaps have overstated its distance from the music of the band for which she is most famous. As Jeff Terich has astutely pointed out in his own assessment of the record for Treble, there are indeed echoes of "early Sonic Youth noise nightmares like 'Flower' or 'Pacific Coast Highway'", albeit refracted through the brain and studio trickery of Gordon's producer/partner in crime Justin Raisen.

Sunday, March 10, 2024

All the feels

"Why does music make us emotional?" Good question, and one that Luke Turner has regularly pondered, as a lifelong music fan, music writer and founder of the Quietus. He set out to find some answers in a recent episode of the Why? podcast, by talking to Catherine Loveday, Professor of Neuropsychology at the University of Westminster.

Over the course of a fascinating half hour, the pair discussed everything from music's visible impact on the brain to its role in communication and the similarities and differences in how different people and different cultures hear, process and value certain forms of music and varieties of sound.

Particularly interesting to me was the pair's talk of the "reminiscence bump" and the fact that our emotional attachment to music is especially strong during our teenage years - which partly accounts for our tendency to return to the familiar and its more extreme manifestation, the depressingly closed-minded complaint that there's "no good music" anymore. Loveday attributed this intense youthful attachment to psychological/existential insecurity and the process of identity formation, which explains why someone rubbishing your favourite teenage artists smarts so much. I vividly recall mocking a good friend's love of Britpop and it being received like a savagely personal attack.

Loveday was recommended to Turner as an expert interviewee by Jude Rogers, who spoke to her for The Sound Of Being Human. The episode felt like a taster for Rogers' book, and (personally speaking) served as another reminder to pick up a copy.

Saturday, March 09, 2024

Superunknown pleasures

Can it really be 30 years since the release of one of my first and fiercest musical loves, Soundgarden's Superunknown? The sort of expansive, all-encompassing record you could live inside for a month, emerging briefly to draw air into your lungs and be blinded by the dazzling daylight, only to be sucked back in once again.

At various times over the past three decades, pretty much every single one of the album's 15 tracks (16, if you count bonus 'She Likes Surprises') has been my favourite. Today? Maybe 'Head Down'. Maybe 'My Wave'. Maybe the title track. Ask me tomorrow and it'll be different.

Ten years ago, I linked to Stuart Berman's piece for Pitchfork. Here's another appraisal, from the Quietus' Val Siebert, which - though briefly dunking on the album's unfairly maligned successor Down On The Upside - pinpoints the curious chemistry between the band members that set them apart from the grunge herd and rightly cites the "sublimely dissonant crunch" of '4th Of July' as evidence that they hadn't come close to selling their souls to the mainstream.

Friday, March 08, 2024

"A pervasive and deeply ingrained systemic issue"

On International Women's Day, the mainstream media and social networks are invariably awash with platitudinous guff. So credit to the Independent for choosing to mark the occasion by publishing this expose of sexism and misogyny in music featuring contributions from Katy J Pearson, Rebecca Lucy Taylor (Self Esteem), Rakel Mjoll (Dream Wife), Lily Fontaine (English Teacher) and Laura Mary Carter (Blood Red Shoes), among others.

What is abundantly clear is that this is not a case of rogue individuals, a handful of bad apples, but of endemic sexism, and of a boys' club culture that both facilitates and normalises abuse.

EMI marketing manager Daisy Carberry argues that "[i]t is the subtlety of misogyny that makes today's industry more dangerous than ever before", echoing a point made by Charlotte Church in conversation with Richard Herring in Cardiff on Tuesday night. Things may have improved outwardly, but, in the words of Pale Waves' Heather Baron Gracie, misogyny remains an "insidious presence". 

The hope is that the piece "encourages more women to speak out, and that the British music industry will wake up and start holding those who abuse their power and influence to account". The second half of that sentence is important - while women should of course feel able to talk about their experiences, the burden should not be on them to speak out but on the industry to change.

Thursday, March 07, 2024

Sister act

Engelchen, the new LP from Alison Cotton, is a tribute to Sunderland-born sisters Ida and Louise Cook, whose courage and ingenuity saved the lives of Jews trapped in Nazi Germany. She'll be performing the material in the splendid setting of Gregynog Hall, near Newtown in Powys, on 23rd March.

Here's my preview of the show for Buzz, and here she is talking to the Quietus' Alex Rigotti about the remarkable story behind the record.

Wednesday, March 06, 2024

Cover story

It's often said that everyone who attended the Sex Pistols' 1976 gig at Manchester's Lesser Free Trade Hall formed a band. An apocryphal tale - but perhaps there was something in the Mancunian water, as it seems as though a few years earlier everyone who studied photography at Manchester Art School went on to become a star of the medium: Martin Parr, Daniel Meadows, Brian Griffin.

As Greg Whitmore's obituary for the Guardian underlines, Griffin came to straddle the worlds of photography and music, responsible for iconic album covers for Depeche Mode and Echo & The Bunnymen (among others) and striking portraits of numerous musicians, having branched out from his work in the corporate world. 

This selection of his images published by the BBC is astonishing, illustrating his aptitude for composition and lighting - and a reminder of how good it would have been at the Northern Eye Festival three years ago to hear the man named by the Guardian in 1989 as the photographer of the decade talk about his practice in person.

Tuesday, March 05, 2024

Hall or nothing

Bush Hall might not be a regular haunt - I've only been once, for the Baba Yaga's Hut bill headed by Big Brave in September. But what a venue it is, as impressive in its own way as the Forum in Bath (where I saw Angel Olsen in October 2022) and a very different kind of space to the Moon, where I'd seen Big Brave only a few days earlier (much as I love the Cardiff venue's impeccably dank vibes).

And now it's the latest venue forced to beg for urgent financial help in the form of a crowdfunder. The objective is to raise £42,000, without which it would struggle to survive. I recently noted that cash injections aren't the long-term solution to the myriad challenges facing grassroots music venues - but of course in the short term they can at least keep the wolf from the door of spaces that find themselves in dire straits.

I'll admit to being slightly uneasy about businesses identifying the forthcoming increase in the minimum wage as part of the problem. After all, everyone's feeling the squeeze and wages really do need to rise in the face of significant inflation - plus it will leave people with marginally more money in their pockets each month, which may help ticket sales. But it's nevertheless true that the increase will also push up costs, both directly at venues themselves and indirectly at their suppliers, and thereby ramp up the pressure on already beleaguered institutions.

Friday, March 01, 2024

"The undeniable whiff of rejuvenation"

Neil Kulkarni may sadly no longer be with us, but his words live on - most recently, in this review of the new Liam Gallagher and John Squire record by the Quietus' JR Moores.

As Moores rightly observes, Kulkarni was "one of Britpop's fiercest, funniest and most doggedly unforgiving critics", savaging the supposedly Golden Age of the mid-90s as well as its malignant legacy. Moores quotes his fellow scribe liberally and to good effect, and evidently relishes the task of serving up more shoe pie in a similar fashion.

Take this zinger, for example: "One of the best things about this album is that Ian Brown isn't singing on it. It's unlikely Squire will ever work again with that tone-deaf, nunchaku-wielding prannock who occasionally emerges from his conspiracy rabbit hole to charge £40-a-ticket for karaoke routines less tuneful than Jim Royle's anal wind."

But Moores is evidently not only smitten with Kulkarni's style - he's also taken on board the late writer's dictum to never lie (one of several principles he set out in a 2009 article for Drowned In Sound). And that strict adherence to honesty means conceding that the lovechild born of the Gallagher/Squire union is actually not quite as ugly as feared.

At the end of a week when I've seen yet more people asking (apparently earnestly) on Twitter what the point of music criticism is in 2024, this makes for a perfect answer. A good review entertains, provokes, enlightens, intrigues and perhaps even influences. Before reading Moores' assessment, I had less than zero interest in listening to the record; now, there's a (small) part of me that feels like perhaps I should.

Sadly, such reviews are few and far between these days. As Moores notes of Kulkarni, "Nobody writes like that anymore. Why not? Because market forces won't allow it and too few people care enough to challenge the tsunami of copy that's blander than Gregg Wallace's Harvester breakfast." Let's be thankful, then, that the Quietus continues to publish work by the likes of Moores in a valiant effort to buck that miserable trend.

Thursday, February 29, 2024

Access denied

No sooner has Pitchfork gone down the pan than another blow has been dealt to online media, with the powers-that-be pulling the plug on the Vice website and laying off hundreds of staffers.

Had this happened in the site's early days, it would hardly have been cause for lamentation. Back then, Vice was like Jackass' marginally more literate cousin, full of fratboy "humour" and motivated by a misguided belief that it was the modern standard bearer for gonzo journalism.

But there was an improbable seachange, and the site mutated into a go-to place for quality, long-form, online journalism - sometimes deadly serious, sometimes uproariously funny (Joel Golby and Oobah Butler, I'm looking at you).

In a piece for the Guardian, former Vice writer Sirin Kale pulls few punches about the toxic culture that she first walked into, and even fewer about the gross mismanagement of the "bloviating fools" in charge, culminating in this latest decision.

But she also points out that Vice became a breeding ground for young talent - and not just any old talent: "My colleagues were racially diverse, gender non-conforming, queer and from working-class and non-London backgrounds. What united them all is that they were clever, informal, funny and cunning. Vice gave a start to people who would otherwise never have got into the media. Pick up a newspaper or turn on the TV today and you will see ex-Vice staffers everywhere: they are Orwell- and Emmy-winning journalists, novelists, critics, TV personalities and hosts."

At a time when the media (like so much else) seems ever more elitist, nepotistic and closed-off, increasingly the preserve of the privileged, sites like Vice can make a genuine difference. Its demise is likely to accelerate the negative trend.

Tuesday, February 27, 2024

Old dogs, old tricks

"I can't shake the feeling that I've seen this dream before", sings Jim Reid on 'jamcod', the first single to be released from The Jesus & Mary Chain's forthcoming album Glasgow Eyes. Well, Jim, I can't shake the feeling that I've heard this song before. To the surprise of no one, it sounds exactly like The Jesus & Mary Chain.

Not that that's a bad thing, mind - not at all. And certainly not in the light of the latest trailer for the LP, 'Girl 71', which - with its rock 'n' roll swagger and handclaps - is somewhat less typical but also akin to a rather lame Primal Scream knock-off. Hopefully the album as a whole will be more 'jamcod' than 'Girl 71', then.

Here are the brothers Reid - previously spectacularly combustible, now happy to claim to being "tea and toast guys" - answering fan questions about gig riots, Alan McGee's hyperbole, recording and performing with Shane MacGowan, Lost In Translation and being roped into contributing backing vocals on an Erasure single.

Monday, February 26, 2024

On the level

Growing up somewhere in the proximity of hills, if not that hilly itself, I find totally flat places somewhat unnerving. I'm not sure I could ever get used to living in rural Lincolnshire or the Fens, for instance.

However, this piece by Noreen Masud not only does a decent job of explaining that feeling of being unnerved - it's to do with vulnerability and exposure, she suggests, because such places "trouble our sense of our own importance, and our confidence about how we interact with our environments" - but also makes a poetic case for their understated beauty and seductive appeal.

I might not be totally convinced, but consider me sufficiently swayed to conclude that Masud's book A Flat Place may well be worthy of further investigation.

Sunday, February 25, 2024

Pressing pause

It's not just gig venues that are feeling the squeeze - it's festivals too. As the Guardian's Lanre Bakare has reported, nine festivals have been pulled for this summer already, and that number is only likely to rise as we move into spring.

Some are (hopefully) only going into temporary hibernation - Stanton Calling and, more disappointingly, Bluedot, no doubt still licking their wounds after the weather-induced carnage on site last year - but others won't be returning.

The article underlines the staggering increase in costs - up by around 30 to 40 per cent from pre-pandemic levels. The options for organisers are stark: put prices up to avoid shouldering the full burden of the increases, pre-emptively postpone or fold, or run the risk of racking up enormous losses.

Some will say that there are too many festivals anyway, and too many that are practically indistinguishable, so we could easily afford for a few to fall by the wayside. But when those include the likes of Bluedot - whose organisers have been assembling better line-ups year on year - then it's a real cause for concern.

Saturday, February 24, 2024

"The lifeblood of the music industry"

Tonight sees Swansea Arena host its House Party - a special event not only in terms of being a showcase for the South Wales music scene but also because it's part of a commendable strategy to support and work with smaller spaces in the local area.

Both the event and the strategy inspired this article for Buzz, which, in a similarly bullish and positive spirit, avoids dwelling only on the difficulties facing grassroots music venues (GMVs), and instead looks at some of the solutions that are being proposed and implemented.

Having pitched the piece, I found myself going into it with a sense of dread and despair at how bad the situation might be - and, sure enough, the current climate is hugely challenging in a number of ways. But it's testament to those who gave their time and thoughts that I emerged on the other side with a renewed optimism, as well as a reaffirmed conviction in the importance of GMVs within the cultural ecosystem.

To borrow an appropriate Welsh slogan: together stronger.

Friday, February 23, 2024

Labour of love

"This is the manifesto of the album. It's like a spell being cast. It's the conjuring, the manifestation, the drawing-down of Delphi from the ether. This is me calling on her soul. It's about going up into the stars and down into the underworld simultaneously, how celestials and deep guttural sounds can come together, how that reflects the journey I went on. It's about what happens when you're stretched physically, mentally, even vaginally! I think it's just humbled me, too, becoming a mother. It's made me feel more vulnerable than I've ever felt before. But I feel more human, more embodied. I can't escape my life by making beautiful things as much as I did. But there's a sort of beauty to my mortality now."

Suffice to say that Natasha Khan's description of the new Bat For Lashes single 'The Dream Of Delphi' - the title track from her forthcoming album - is so on brand as to be practically self-parody.

Scoff all you like (and there's admittedly a part of me inclined to do so), but I do have a soft spot for artists with idiosyncratic vision who are sufficiently self-assured to leave themselves totally exposed to ridicule. And, as those of us lucky enough to be at her Llais show at the Millennium Centre last autumn will recall, the song is a cracker and served as the perfect opener to her set. The album promises much.

Wednesday, February 21, 2024

Eternal flame

There is, admittedly, an irony in hailing William Doyle as a unique voice (artistically as well as literally) and at the same time feeling a strange compulsion to tentatively draw parallels with someone else: Julia Holter, who - on Have You In My Wilderness, at least - seemed to be driven by a similar urge to rein in her more abstract, avant garde tendencies and dip a toe in poppy waters.

That said, Doyle's latest album Springs Eternal is far further along the pop spectrum than Holter's work has ever been, and indeed than his previous LP Great Spans Of Muddy Time was - but it still boasts plenty of arty eccentricity, as well as a certain Brian Eno as a contributor.

Buzz review here.

Monday, February 19, 2024

Survival instinct

"Is this too personal? Is this giving away too much? But I lost my mystery as an artist a long time ago. I'm not gonna get that back, so I might as well just make brutally honest work." So says Nadine Shah in what is itself a brutally honest interview with the Guardian's Kate Hutchinson, ahead of the release of her new album Filthy Underneath.

It's heartening to read how Shah is escaping the shadow of addiction, depression and marriage breakdown. She's one of the most singular talents in British rock/pop, after all, as well as one of the most righteously outspoken musicians on everything from sexism and mental health to the injustices of streaming and the value of independent music criticism ("We're losing all our best writers because no one's getting paid for it").

Shah couldn't have staged a much more high-profile re-emergence than tour dates supporting Depeche Mode around Europe, and she's also on the bill for the inaugural Big City festival in Glasgow. It's curated by Mogwai (who evidently enjoyed the experience of putting together ATP line-ups), and as such features some fairly predictable names - Slowdive, bdrmm, Elisabeth Elektra and Sacred Paws - alongside Shah, Beak> and Michael Rother.

Saturday, February 17, 2024

No Tangk you very much

Rightly feted though his work with Radiohead is, Nigel Godrich does have form for forming head-scratching alliances (see Pavement's recorded swansong Terror Twilight). Hooking up with IDLES for Tangk very much falls into the same category.

The Bristolians' desire to look forwards and reinvent themselves is commendable enough, but this attempt to do so is largely painful - not least when they rope in LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy and Nancy Whang on the godawful 'Dancer'.

Buzz review here.

Tuesday, February 13, 2024

"The most indie thing ever to have existed"


So said music journalist Andrew Collins of C86, the legendary NME tape bookended by Primal Scream and the Wedding Present that became synonymous with indie pop. Much like the first Velvet Underground album and the Sex Pistols' 1976 gig at Manchester's Lesser Free Trade Hall (if perhaps on a slightly lesser scale), the mail-order cassette has had an outsized cultural impact and influence.

Confession time: until recently, I wasn't that familiar with the compilation, having had an arguably unfairly jaundiced view of it, and I'm still not that much of a fan. But I'm a sucker for a good music book, and when Nige Tassell came to town to talk about Whatever Happened To The C86 Kids? (recounting his quest to track down members of all 22 featured bands), I knew I had to be there.

As I discovered, it's little wonder that the book has been well received - you don't need to particularly like or even know the featured artists to be able to enjoy the very human stories that Tassell tells about bands forming and falling apart and what came after.

Buzz report here.

As someone used to glancing enviously at the line-up for the Walthamstow Rock 'n' Roll Book Club, I'm very much hoping that this marks the start of a series of similar events at Pop 'n' Hops.

Sunday, February 11, 2024

"The minute I went off the grid and tried to do something peculiar, it seemed to work for me"

Stock, Aitken & Waterman (among others) might have something to say about the suggestion that Trevor Horn "defined 80s music", but you can certainly make a strong case for it - as indeed Vulture's Jim Farber does in this interview piece. Even if you left Horn's hitlist at 'Relax', 'Left To My Own Devices' and 'Slave To The Rhythm', he'd probably still come out on top in a royal rumble of the decade's finest and most prolific pop producers.

Prompted by his forthcoming memoir Adventures In Modern Recording, the interview finds Horn talking about everything from the distinction between a song and a record ("A song is just a blueprint. A record is the final product you're going to use to sell that song") and his love of exploring the musical possibilities of new technology, to working with Seal, the unexpected success of The Buggles, his improbable stint as frontman of Yes and incurring the wrath of Paul McCartney.

Friday, February 09, 2024

Dirty old town


For a slight novel (perhaps betraying its author Andrew McMillan's capacity for being succinct, as a poet), Pity contains volumes - on mining, memory, masculinity, sexuality and the post-industrial geographical, political and economic landscape of the North. It's quite a debut.

Buzz review here.

Thursday, February 08, 2024

"A downward spiral looks likely"

This Wales Online article makes for painful reading - and not just because of the characteristic lack of competent sub-editing. The news that Welsh Government funding for arts and culture has been cut by over 10 per cent in the draft budget for 2024/2025 is extremely worrying for the nation's arts organisations.

And it's not as though the situation isn't already desperate. The head of Amgueddfa Cymru has confessed that some works of art have to be moved for their own protection when it rains heavily, because the buildings that house them are in such a dire state. What's more, this month's issue of long-running magazine Planet is set to be the last due to the loss of Books Council of Wales (BCW) funding, and Wales Arts Review is in a similar predicament, with Gary Raymond having vowed to stop going cap in hand to the BCW.

Raymond's broadside back in October was understandable, but in fairness to the BCW and others, their hands are effectively tied in that they themselves are dependent on what they receive from the Welsh Government. In light of the draft budget cut, the Arts Council Wales is having to reassess its own recently announced five-year funding plan and may have to renege on some of the commitments made. Sadly, cuts, job losses and the enforced closure of certain organisations seem inevitable.

Various chief executives are quoted in the Wales Online piece expressing their dismay and concern. They make the case for the value of the arts in language that usually makes politicians' ears prick up - the contribution to the economy, the importance in terms of Wales' stature on the world stage - but also underline the multiple smaller-scale impacts that cuts will have on communities, the young and the disadvantaged. Amgueddfa Cymru are contemplating starting to charge for entry; if this is a measure they're forced by circumstances to adopt, it'll be another nail in the coffin for equality of access and opportunity.

Tuesday, February 06, 2024

Neighbourhood watch

Back at the start of December, I ended an article about Paul Sng's superb documentary Tish with the hope that "its message resonates far beyond cinema auditoriums". Whether it has or will remains to be seen, but the film has certainly had a significant impact - and not only in terms of eliciting both rave reviews and anger at the way the odds remain stacked against marginalised working-class artists like Tish.

Established jointly by Modern Films and the British Culture Archive, the Documenting Your Community project explicitly sought to solicit submissions from anyone who felt inspired by the film and Tish's work to capture their immediate surroundings, regardless of their level of technical expertise or professionalism as a photographer. All that was required was an image posted on Instagram, accompanied by a short description and the hashtag #tishmurthafilm. The project officially closed at the end of January, and a selection of the best submissions have been posted on the British Culture Archive's site and in this Guardian article by Daniel Dylan Wray.

A devout believer in documenting the everyday world around her, Tish would, I'm sure, have been delighted to have been a catalyst for these images. Hopefully, seeing their pictures given greater visibility will convince some of the less self-confident participants in the project of the joy and inherent value in image making, and encourage them to consider following in her footsteps.

Saturday, February 03, 2024

"The definition of magic"

When I bemoaned Conde Nast's evisceration of Pitchfork and the sorry plight/demise of other music publications/sites recently, in conversation with a bunch of music-loving friends, the predominant reaction was a shrug of the shoulders (though one person went as far as saying that they were glad to see Pitchfork go for selling out to pop and peddling pretentious nonsense). I'll admit I was dumbfounded. Clearly, while the case for the importance of music journalism is self-evident to the likes of me, it needs to be made cogently for the benefit of others.

Thankfully, Quietus founder John Doran is just the man for the job. In this Guardian article, he argues that music criticism - or at least music criticism at its best - isn't merely an adjunct of the industry, a shallow PR exercise: "We do need a music press independent of streaming platforms to help us sift through the mountains of crap, but we need people to see that we are far more than just a glorified Argos catalogue ... [T]o assume that record reviews only exist to help you buy music is a fundamental category error. Criticism is never, ever, just about the music. When we talk about the music we're often talking about everything else in life that is important besides."

He's spot on. Yes, music writing often/usually serves a practical purpose, enabling readers to sort the wheat from the chaff - but it's also much more than that: (in the right hands) an artform in its own right, something that can be savoured as its own thing independently of the actual music that prompted it.

To use Doran's term, music criticism can create its own "magic". And that is why, he concludes, "[w]e mustn't let such a beautiful thing be broken and cast aside".

Thursday, February 01, 2024

"Completely unacceptable"

The Women and Equalities Committee's Misogyny in Music report was never destined to be anything other than utterly damning - and so it's proven.

Not only are sexual harassment and objectification still endemic - #MeToo evidently yet to have any kind of impact here - but women also routinely experience discrimination in terms of opportunities, support and pay. The problems are, inevitably, only compounded by "intersectional barriers".

The report goes beyond merely identifying the various issues, however, and also proposes some potential ways in which the deplorable situation could be improved. These include granting freelancers the same protection from discrimination as employees and putting an end to the reprehensible practice of preventing women from voicing complaints with non-disclosure agreements.

Deborah Annetts of the Independent Society of Musicians was unequivocal in her response: "We hope the publication of the Misogyny in Music report is the moment of real and lasting change in the music industry. It's what women desperately need because, as the report correctly identifies, women in music have had their lives ruined and careers destroyed - this must stop."

For this to happen, the industry needs to start taking the situation much more seriously - but, as Annetts pointed out, the government should also take far more responsibility. It hardly helps matters when you have someone nominally filling the position of Minister for Women and Equalities, Kemi Badenoch, who has been made aware of the scale of the problem and yet who fails/refuses to act. That too is "completely unacceptable".

Sunday, January 28, 2024

Heads above water

Amid all of the awful news that 2024 has already brought in terms of music media - the corporate disembowelling of Pitchfork and the horribly premature death of Neil Kulkarni - there is a flicker of hope in the form of the "slow return" (in founder Sean Adams' words) of Drowned In Sound.

The plan is for the newsletter, podcast and online forum to continue, and also the resurrected record label, but also for new essays to be commissioned weekly and ultimately for a print magazine to be produced.

Ambitious? In the current climate, probably yes. But in desperate times like these we need people like Sean - people with both vision and an unwavering belief in the value of independent music journalism - and we need multi-headed operations like Drowned In Sound.

Saturday, January 27, 2024

Feeling down, looking up

I didn't get to Gruff Rhys' album launch gig at the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama last night - a very special evening, by all accounts - but can at least console myself with the fact that I've known for a couple of months that the record in question, Sadness Sets Me Free, is a belter, having been granted review access back in November. Buzz review here.

As its title suggests, the vibe is (in its creator's words) "euphoric melancholy". There's a pleasure to be gleaned from wallowing in your feelings, but despite the frequently heavy subject matter, the album ultimately has a positive outlook - which makes it very much comparable to his pal Bill Ryder-Jones' latest, the similarly loveable Iechyd Da.

Thursday, January 25, 2024

The late show

Musicians often demand respect from audiences in terms of not talking and not throwing things onstage, for instance - and justifiably so. But respect is a two-way street, which is something that some artists don't always seem to appreciate.

Lana Del Rey hit the headlines last summer for her tardiness at Glastonbury, and now Madonna is being sued by a couple of fans for turning up two hours late for a show in Brooklyn (far from her first offence on this score), prompting this Guardian article by Simon Price.

While I'll confess to being one of those who rolled their eyes at "those crazy litigious Americans", we should call out bad gig etiquette by artists just as we would do for audience members - and, as Price points out, gig culture has changed to the extent that tardiness is probably less tolerated now than in the past.

I waited for more than half an hour for Yeah Yeah Yeahs to pitch up and blast through Fever To Tell at ATP in 2009, and four times as long for Axl Rose and crew to deign to appear onstage at Leeds in 2002. In truth, in both instances the relaxed attitude towards timekeeping was soon forgiven thanks to the performances that unfolded - but Price makes a fair point that paying punters have every right to expect something approaching punctuality.

(As an aside, it's a pleasure to see the Stone Roses' headline set at Reading in 1996 branded "The Worst Gig Of All Time", thanks to "Ian Brown honking tunelessly - even by his foghorn standards". I too am "weirdly glad that I saw it".)

Wednesday, January 24, 2024

"You're here to set people's heads on fire"

As a music writer, Neil Kulkarni - who has died at the shockingly early age of just 51 - was many things: fiercely opinionated, insightful, passionate. But above all, the most valuable quality of his writing is that it left you in absolutely no doubt whatsoever that music - and culture more generally - genuinely matters.

Kulkarni could of course be righteously scathing - and hilariously so, even when savaging your favourite artist or band. Take, for instance, his assault on Oasis as "grisly, half-formed necrophilia" and "toxic mediocrity". The Brothers Grim also featured in his list of the "ten most overrated albums in pop history", which included (among other things) eviscerations of Bobby Gillespie ("an aggregator unable to inject any persona/anything unique into these endless displays of his immaculate taste because he genuinely only exists in the spaces between the things he owns") and Frank Zappa's entire musical output ("the most contemptible plank-wankery, devoid of joy, dedicated only to an endlessly egotistic proof of technical ability"). For an acerbic turn of phrase, he was your go-to guy. 

But music didn't only arouse Kulkarni's ire - it also evidently fired his soul. As such, it's only right to also signpost some of his most positively effusive pieces, such as this wonderful and very personal tribute to fellow Coventrian Terry Hall.

Prior to his passing, I must admit I wasn't aware of his A New Nineties series for the Quietus - what a pleasure to discover it, albeit belatedly and in such sad circumstances. His feature on Come and their "hard-boiled, poignant tightrope walk 'tween realism and romance" instantly had me revisiting Near Death Experience.

But the Codeine piece that preceded it is even better. That band are so special, and in Kulkarni they found someone who could actually come close to putting into words what it is they do: "They weren't exactly a way of life. But they were a whole new way of getting used to dying." Live, he wrote, the trio focus "with almost supernatural, painstaking concentration on giving every single moment its maximal impact" (though the same is true on record), while rightly assessing The White Birch as "perhaps their most coherent, cataclysmic, perfect statement". Seeing them perform 'Sea' at Primavera in 2012 - a couple of months before Kulkarni spoke to the band's Stephen Immerwahr and Chris Brokaw - was as close to a religious experience as this atheist will ever get.

As well as writing for a living, Kulkarni also taught the art of doing so. Perhaps the best place to wrap up is with his brilliant Drowned In Sound guide to record reviewing, which instantly makes me feel the need to raise my game tenfold. The advice? Love language, relish having the freedom to say what you want (safe in the knowledge that its impact within the industry is inevitably going to be negligible) - and "[i]f you don't regret what you've written after you've written it, or find in revisiting past work an occasional INTENSE embarrassment (and equally intense pride) you're probably not doing your job properly".

Ultimately, Kulkarni argued, "[a]ccept that everything you say will be forgotten and ignored but write as if you and your words are immortal". Suffice to say that his own words are a fitting memorial to a singular talent.

Tuesday, January 23, 2024

Good trip

Saddle up and hold on tight: Ilion, the third record from Gallic trio Slift, is a wild and frequently exhilarating ride. In my review of the album for Buzz, I grasped at a number of reference points but none of them really nail it.

Further indication of where they're coming from can be gleaned from this article on French site Mowno, in which they pick an assortment of artists currently inspiring their work: Part Chimp, Hey Colossus, King Crimson, Gnod, Maserati...

Sunday, January 21, 2024

Leader of the pack

RIP Mary Weiss of the incredible Shangri-Las - the toughest, most bad-ass girl group around - whose vocals often resonated with vulnerability and anguish as much as strength, sass and lust. Like so much great pop, their songs managed to convey a remarkable depth of emotion - most often, a sense of sadness.

It was the likes of the Jesus & Mary Chain and the Ramones that first alerted me to the Shangri-Las. This piece for Please Kill Me by Louis Jordan recounts the perhaps surprising intersections and mutual love and respect between Weiss' gang, as well as fellow outsider girl group the Ronettes, and some of the bands in the first wave of US punk.

But the Shangri-Las should be celebrated not only for the extent of their subsequent influence on others, but as a superlative force in their own right. The quality of their Best Of album is as consistently high as any other I can think of - and it'll be getting a lot of play round these parts over the next few days.

Friday, January 19, 2024

Forked off

Say what you like about Pitchfork - that it has an overinflated sense of its own importance, that the reviews it carries are pointlessly spiteful or pretentiously incomprehensible. Those charges are occasionally valid. But however you feel, its being "folded" into GQ by the corporate overlords at Conde Nast - a process that has apparently necessitated the abrupt dismissal of scores of experienced staff members - is cause not for gloating celebration but for serious concern.

Like the Guardian's Laura Snapes, I could be accused of being a member of the critics' union - but in this piece she makes what should be recognised by any music fan as a powerful case for the website's merits: the fact that the editors are "extraordinarily committed to investing in new critical talent"; the breadth of its coverage, with up to four new album reviews a day; the employment of a whole host of talented female journalists to help to change the male music nerd narrative both at the site itself and in the industry more widely; the opportunities/pleasures it affords to writers and readers in terms of deep dives on obscure records and artists; the ability of its reviewers to frame or reframe an album in a new and insightful way; its vital importance for musicians (whether they acknowledge it or not): "exposing their work to a wider audience, mythologising and storytelling in a way that leaves more of a lasting impression on listeners than marketing has ever managed ... and paying them the respect of a close and fair critical read, even if that assessment is negative".

Declarations of Pitchfork's demise may be premature - as Snapes says, how the new business arrangement will impact on the site is yet to be seen - but we're surely justified in fearing the worst given the lay-offs of so many great writers and editors.

Conde Nast bought the site in 2015, so this sort of manoeuvre - which has the dirty fingerprints of the bean counters all over it - has been on the cards for some time. But the fact that it follows so soon after another pivotal component of the music ecosystem, Bandcamp, fell prey to the corporate vultures makes the news particularly hard to take.

Snapes acknowledges that there are several other broadly comparable sites such as the Quietus, Stereogum and Consequence Of Sound, but, "as the biggest fish, its looming dissolution is comparable to HMV disappearing from the high street: without a leading example to coalesce around, define yourself against, fight about, the notion that specialist music journalism can viably exist at all starts to fade into the margins".

Wednesday, January 17, 2024

Climate change

At this most dismal time of year, Bill Ryder-Jones' splendid new album Iechyd Da is, if not quite a ray of sunshine, at very least temporary respite from the rain. Buzz review here.

The record's positivity is deliberate, after the downbeat vibes of its predecessors West Kirby County Primary and Yawn. In a candid interview with Patrick Clarke for the Quietus, Ryder-Jones spoke about the turbulent personal circumstances behind its creation (excessive drinking and substance abuse, agoraphobia exacerbated by lockdown, relationship breakdown), and how he now thankfully seems to be leaving those troubled times behind.

He's notably dismissive about Yawn, and outright scathing about West Kirby County Primary. Much as artists claiming to love everything they've ever done seems fake, I'm always a bit uncomfortable when they savage their own past work - especially if it's something I've very much enjoyed (as is the case with Yawn in particular). But in Ryder-Jones' mind, at least, Iechyd Da very much stands apart, as an album he can truly love and be proud of - and I'd suggest that its status as his best record to date seems assured.

Appropriately enough given the Welsh-language title of the album, he's a regular visitor to this part of the world. After a set at Swn last year and what I gather was a spellbinding solo in-store show at Spillers on Saturday, he's back in Cardiff in March, at Clwb. I won't be missing out for a third time.

Saturday, January 13, 2024

Home truths

If there's one single blatant lesson to be learned (or relearned) from ITV's Mr Bates Vs The Post Office, it's that art has the capacity to make a difference. The truth about the Post Office/Fujitsu scandal has been in the open for some time, and widely reported (not only in the pages of Private Eye and Computer Weekly, as some have suggested), but nothing had happened. Then the drama aired, the public response has been huge and the government have belatedly capitulated, pressured into hurried action while shamelessly claiming to be warriors of justice.

It's similarly encouraging to see the impact that the recent pop-up exhibition of photographer Marc Davenant's Outsiders series seems to have had.

The photos expose the horrors of homelessness - importantly, not only for those sleeping rough on the streets, but also for those trapped in "temporary" accommodation that often turns out to be long term as well as inadequate. The images have been published in a Bluecoat book and displayed in various galleries (most recently in Birkenhead, I think) - but surely nowhere as significant as in the Houses of Parliament. After all, MPs actually have the power to do something about the situation, so confronting them with the reality of life for thousands of people might prove to be a vital catalyst for change. It's harder to ignore what's right underneath your nose.

Davenant has been disappointed by the photography establishment's response to Outsiders and irritated by the suggestion that the work lacks artistic merit - a suggestion that is at very least debatable. However, he continues to insist that the focus should not fall on him or the images themselves, but on the people in them - and the bigger picture.

The success of Outsiders, like that of Mr Bates Vs The Post Office, will be measured in terms of whether it shames politicians into committing to address the scourge of homelessness genuinely and ideally structurally too - that is, through prevention rather than cure. Here's hoping.

Friday, January 12, 2024

Petal to the metal

It's becoming something of an annual tradition: a new Big Brave album and a Bristol date in April or May. I went over to the Crofters Rights in 2022 and to Dareshack last year, and the Canadians are back at the latter this spring.

Whether I'll make the pilgrimage again is a bit up in the air - I'm not totally taken with the first taster of A Chaos Of Flowers, 'i felt a funeral' (though it does suggest they might be trying something a little different this time around), and it'll be hard to top the two other gigs I witnessed last year, at the Moon here in Cardiff and then at the Bush Hall in London a few days later. We'll see, though...

Thursday, January 11, 2024

Beetle juiced

No sooner had I reported on the recent spate of closure announcements in Cardiff than there was another one to record: the Brass Beetle on Whitchurch Road. The decision to shut at the end of this month was described as "almost impossible", but once again "the challenging issues facing the hospitality industry" are cited as the cause.

The Brass Beetle was one of the first restaurants I ever reviewed for Buzz, back in September 2017. Cardiff isn't exactly short of pizza joints, but it's always stood out from the crowd thanks to the creativity and imagination of chef Cai Groves' topping combinations (and his laudable willingness to risk upsetting uptight purists in the process). As recently as last month, Jake Heckles of Blogiwr Bwyta was singing the restaurant's praises, so it's a real shame to see the Brass Beetle bow out of the game.

Thankfully, there's also some good news, and on the pizza front too: the official opening of 591 by Anatoni's, the new venture from Tony Frawley (veteran of Anatoni's, Da Mara and Scaramantica), in the Victoria Park premises formerly occupied by Dough Thrower.

Ed Gilbert aka Gourmet Gorro has already been and delivered a glowing report. It's clearly an extremely difficult climate in which to be operating a restaurant, let alone opening up a new place, so here's hoping 591 is a success.

Wednesday, January 10, 2024

Laughter in the dark

Two decades on from its first screening, Julia Davis' sitcom Nighty Night remains a benchmark in cringe comedy, embracing (in the words of the Guardian's Daniel Dylan Wray) "the skin-crawling awkwardness that comes from allowing brazen insolence to run amok in a polite, pent-up world". 

To mark the anniversary, Wray spoke to Davis, who revealed that playing Jill Tyrell - and permitting herself to say the unsayable - was "definitely some sort of therapy". The downside, however, is that she's often confused with her comic creation: "People think I'm going to be scary or horrible. I don't like that because I feel like I have to overprove myself in the other direction. I don't like upsetting people. In real life I really want to be liked, but in art I don't care."

Also quoted in the article are other members of the show's all-star cast, including Mark Gatiss and Kevin Eldon (who claims to have been glad to be made to wear a nappy all day). Gatiss insists that describing the show as "so dark, terrible, offensive" is "just ludicrous", but it's a telling detail that "some cast members, such as Felicity Montagu and [Angus] Deayton, never told their parents they were in it".

The unscrupulous awfulness of Davis' character still resonates today - most recently, in the figure of the mum in Kat Sadler's excellent Such Brave Girls. Highly recommended.

Tuesday, January 09, 2024

Closing time

The new year is only a few days old and in Cardiff the indie food and drink casualties are already mounting up.

Latest to go are two branches of Alex Gooch's bakery chain, in Radyr and in Canton's Laundry Quarter - the latter having only opened in March last year. Stratospheric increases in energy prices are to blame, with the monthly cost rising from around £2,000 to nearer £10,000. That would have put the cafes under acute pressure in any circumstances, but the footfall was simply not enough to sustain them. Of the Laundry Quarter branch, Gooch explained that it's just too far from the centre of Canton and was not benefitting from sufficient passing trade - a warning that won't make it any easier for the site owner to find a replacement tenant.

The news comes hot on the heels of the closure of the Conway pub in Pontcanna, the demise of which has been blamed on "[t]he much publicised financial difficulties which have plagued the hospitality industry". Not so long ago, this turn of events would have been unthinkable, given the pub's popularity and location at the heart of one of Cardiff's most affluent areas - so either something has gone badly awry or the climate is even more challenging than previously feared.

Also waving "a very sad and difficult goodbye" is Kindle, the self-styled "fire food" restaurant at the entrance to Bute Park. Kindle's loss may not be widely mourned - reports I've received of its fare have been mixed, and it was always a gamble to rely on what is basically an al fresco dining set-up in Wales. But the demise of any independent - especially when the grounds cited are strains on the industry as a whole - should give serious cause for concern.

Tuesday, January 02, 2024

Feast of football

Not so very long ago, the very idea of going to a football ground in expectation of treats for the tastebuds would have seemed ludicrous. And, in truth, the catering facilities at many stadia still serve up dreadful chips and burgers that look like they've got botulism written all over them. (On my first visit to the Cardiff City Stadium with my son, he was perversely delighted by his half-time delicacy: a dried-out oversized pig-in-blanket in a cheap hotdog roll that appeared to have been on a sunbed for hours rather than merely beneath a heat lamp.)

But the times they are a-changin', as Pete Brooksbank reported for When Saturday Comes in an article subsequently republished by the Guardian. The variety of food on offer is increasing, as is the quality - thanks in part to technological advances but also demand. The broadening palate of those who attend matches is probably a reflection of the shifting demographics of football fandom. While those shifts might provoke mixed feelings, as more supporters are priced out of going to games, it's nevertheless a positive that clubs are having to up their game and provide tastier tucker.

The Twitter account Footy Scran, mentioned by Brooksbank, showcases the good, the bad and the ugly, but it often has me salivating. If there's one lesson to be learned from the pictures they post, though, it's that other countries generally still do football grub better (or at least more interestingly), and cheaper too - so there's more work to be done.

Sunday, December 31, 2023

Cardiff's class of '23

There's nothing like someone taking the pulse of Cardiff's music scene to make me realise quite how out of touch I currently am.

Truth be told, on the evidence of the samples provided, I'm not wild about any of the acts selected by fellow Buzz writer Tom Morgan for this Clash article (though Shlug are probably the pick of the bunch), and indeed I actively disliked Monet live. Nevertheless, it's always welcome when out-of-town publication/website shines a spotlight on the city, giving wider exposure to what's going on - not least because it makes it less likely that local heroes will go unacknowledged and undiscovered beyond the city limits.

Tom makes a good point about the contemporary proliferation of diverse styles and genre fluidity (even if the Super Furries influence remains strong in bands like Buzzard Buzzard Buzzard, Melin Melyn and CVC). He's also right in flagging up the importance of arts funding provided through the devolved government, which helps to support individual artists all around the country (rather than just in Cardiff) as well as major industry showcase events such as the annual Focus Wales festival in Wrexham.

Friday, December 29, 2023

Thinking outside the box?

Much as I'm loath to comment on anything that might be construed as promoting Spotify, this article by the BBC's Christian Brooks - which takes the announcement of the annual Spotify Wrapped results as a prompt to look into the contemporary meaning of genre in music - is a thought-provoking read.

On the one hand, tribalism seems to be on the wane, with listeners more inclined to broadmindedness, open to investigating and enjoying a wider variety of different types of music. Of course, musicians are themselves listeners, so, as Spotify's Sara Sesardic tells Brooks, "artists are becoming a lot more fluid with the kind of music they make, and ... genre, too, is becoming more fluid".

Just as listeners flit easily between radically different genres, then, artists like Young Fathers tear down barriers, blending styles without constraint in their own idiosyncratic fashion. The insane mash-ups of hyperpop are the consequence of having the history and spectrum of music available at the end of your fingertips via streaming services.

On the other hand, even though genres have fragmented and spawned a bewildering proliferation of micro-genres (just look at Spotify or read a Pitchfork article for evidence), genre is arguably even more important now than ever. As Sonic Cathedral boss Nathaniel Cramp points out, "[i]n the past, genre was something that was applied to an artist's music by external forces - be that the music press, or whoever - whereas now, you have to choose your genre yourself in order to describe and release music. That is a weird twist." Weird indeed, given the degree to which musicians generally used to protest - and often still do - about being pigeon-holed.

Brooks concludes: "As the lines between traditional music genres have blurred, they no longer define a listener's taste quite like they did pre-streaming era." True enough - but it's clearly also true that genre labels remain useful as forms of shorthand description and marketing tools.

Wednesday, December 27, 2023

Decentred

It was disappointing to learn that the Centre for British Photography will in all likelihood be homeless on its first birthday. It's closing in its current location in January after just a year, following the landlord's decision to halve its two-year lease.

The venue was always going to be temporary, and negotiations to secure a new base are underway, thankfully - but nothing is yet resolved. And the bigger problem is that the support and goodwill of the photographic community can only take the CBP so far; it desperately needs a funder or patron to relieve founder James Hyman of the financial burden and ensure long-term sustainability, wherever it ends up calling home.

The recent critical and indeed popular success of Paul Sng's documentary about Tish Murtha has helped to draw attention to British photography and hints at its potential audience and the scale of public interest. The CBP seems to have been doing sterling work to promote it, with a laudable commitment to diversity. So here's hoping that the required funding is forthcoming and the CBP's future can be secured.

Monday, December 25, 2023

Sonic signposts

Finally, in the year of our Lord 2023, I think I'm past the age of seeing end-of-year best album lists as a source of bafflement, or as something to piss and moan about. (How DARE they overlook Big Brave, bdrmm and Richard Dawson? Why are the latest Slowdive and Sleaford Mods records so highly rated?)

Instead, I'd rather celebrate the recurrent inclusion of artists whose albums have made my year: Yo La Tengo, first and foremost, but also Beach Fossils, Young Fathers, Lankum, PJ Harvey, Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter and Mandy, Indiana.

And I'd also now rather look at the lists as reminders of records I've been meaning to investigate - and as alerts about albums I haven't even heard of. Doing so has already reaped significant rewards.

Take Blondshell's self-titled debut, for instance, which turns out to be stuffed with the sort of indie-rock-par-excellence twentysomething mini-melodramas that more than scratch the itch for fans of Snail Mail, Courtney Barnett and Best Coast. It was love at first listen. And then there's Sweeping Promises, whose Good Living Is Coming For You hits the new wave sweet spot between Sleater-Kinney and Le Tigre.

So far, so in my comfort zone. But I've also ventured further afield, sampling (and, more importantly, enjoying) the fractured electronic pop of Fever Ray's Radical Romantics and the thrillingly proggy (yes, really) death metal of Tomb Mold's The Enduring Spirit.

Namechecks in Harry Sword's mighty tome Monolithic Undertow had piqued my interest in Surgeon, and sure enough the brutally unforgiving techno thump of latest LP Crash Recoil hit home hard. It sounds like music precision engineered for late night in a dingy beneath-a-railway-arch Digbeth club.

Most remarkable, though, is Sprain's The Lamb As Effigy. If ever an album deserved to be called a magnum opus, it's this Black-Country-New-Road-meets-Swans beast. OK, so you have to be in the right frame of mind to take it on, and it perhaps pushes things a little too far at times (especially the final track) - but it's an immense creation. Little wonder the band were driven to breaking point.

Of course, the best release of the year was Angel Olsen's Forever Means EP - but then you knew that already...

Saturday, December 23, 2023

Local heroes

Every scene and every city has them: artists and bands that command a cult following but for whatever reason seem unable to break out and make an impact further afield. For this Guardian feature, Michael Hann asked a (fairly random) selection of musicians including Nabihah Iqbal, Courtney Marie Andrews, Cornershop's Tjinder Singh and Metric's Emily Haines to name the local acts they feel should have been massive.

Mogwai's Stuart Braithwaite, perhaps predictably, picked The Yummy Fur for their "very funny songs, very witty and acerbic" and "almost cartoonish music, influenced by early Roxy Music and The Fall - quite angular and wonky". It's true that they never made it big outside Glasgow, but the talent of Alex Kapranos and Paul Thomson has at least been subsequently recognised by the wider world in the success rightfully afforded to Franz Ferdinand.

Of course, this naturally led me to contemplate who I'd mention if asked about the various cities I've lived in. In Cardiff, I've had the privilege of being on hand to see Los Campesinos! blow up, and Buzzard Buzzard Buzzard have had plenty of exposure beyond the city limits through TV and touring, so it'd probably be Truckers Of Husk, whose mathy yet danceable Physical Education EP should have made them as big as Foals.

Which brings me neatly to Oxford, which, for a relatively small city, has a remarkable track record of producing bands and artists that take off - Radiohead, Supergrass, Ride, Young Knives and the aforementioned Foals, of course, but most recently Glass Animals and Willie J. Healey. But what of those who didn't make it? I'm going to say Maiians, the fucking incredible double-drummer analogue dance band whose flame burned briefly but brightly until three of them left, one (allegedly, in true Oxford style) to further his buttling career in the US. Try 'Lemon' on for size.

I'd also put in a word for The August List - but given they're still a going concern, there's still time for the world to belatedly wake up to their brilliance. Wax Cat is a fantastic album by any standards (and certainly mine).

Thursday, December 21, 2023

Principles and picket lines


Don’t judge a book by its cover, the saying goes – an apposite warning when it comes to Women And The Miners’ Strike, 1984–1985. Martin Shakeshaft’s image of singing protesters marching down a Valleys street beneath a banner for Maerdy Women’s Support Group syncs with what has become the prevailing narrative: that many women became vociferously involved in and politicised by the strike – just one aspect of its significant transformation of British society.

But Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite and Natalie Thomlinson’s book is in fact a sobering corrective to that story in many ways, suggesting that the seismic political, social and cultural impact of the strike in the popular imagination has been overstated – including (and perhaps especially) with respect to women. The reality, the researchers reveal, was much more complex.

They do so not by synthesising previous studies, published memoirs and partisan literature but by refracting them through the lens of interviews that they have themselves conducted with a diverse array of women around the country, including some who actively opposed the strike. The primacy afforded to these oral histories is a distinguishing feature of the book; the researchers’ scholarly predecessors have often relied heavily only on the views of left-wing women activists and feminist propagandists who had a vested interest in promoting the now predominant narrative, or (remarkably) even neglected to consider women’s own personal accounts at all.

Sutcliffe-Braithwaite and Thomlinson begin by arguing that the overstatement of the strike’s effects for women has arisen in part because of an understatement of social and economic shifts that had taken place over the post-war decades before strike action started. For instance, by 1984, many miners’ wives already enjoyed the relative independence that came through paid labour and productive activity outside the home.

Throughout the book, the authors adopt a scepticism towards accounts of the strike that paint it in black and white, emphasising instead the grey areas. Just as the extent of strike action varied not only inter-regionally but intra-regionally (including in South Wales, generally regarded as a hotbed of radicalism), so too did the level of women’s political engagement. Communities and commitments were divided to differing degrees, and women’s stances were largely more motivated by loyalty to their husbands than by loftier political or ideological goals.

Sutcliffe-Braithwaite and Thomlinson uncover the stories of women belonging to an offshoot of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) who were employed in a colliery canteen but who continued to work because their wages were supporting their striking husbands. Only a minority of women joined support groups like the one featured on the book’s cover, and incredibly those groups sometimes experienced friction and hostility from the very people they were set up to help; some miners and union reps, the authors argue, felt emasculated by women’s presence on the picket line and their work to put food on the table in makeshift soup kitchens.

Even those who did engage in such activities often saw themselves as “ordinary” women rather than as activists whose interest in politics had been sparked by the strike. Similarly, most did not subscribe to feminists’ framing of the support groups as empowering, regarding the women’s liberation movement ambivalently and warily as a middle-class phenomenon. If a form of feminist heroism does emerge from the book’s pages, it is quiet rather than triumphant. The focus on women’s lived experiences draws attention to the realities of everyday domestic life and to the resilience, ingenuity and thrift they needed to keep their families afloat in the face of increasing hardship.

As time wore on, the stress and strain grew, solidarities splintered and defiance waned. When the strike ended, a year after it had begun, some women continued their political or community activism – but most support groups disbanded and the entrenched gendered division of labour within households and communities largely re-emerged. Sutcliffe-Braithwaite and Thomlinson note that, far from being grateful for or desirous of change, most women simply wanted a return to “normal”.

Women And The Miners’ Strike 1984–1985 is a carefully constructed social history of how the strike was actually experienced, as well as a critical analysis of how it has been remembered. Avoiding the pitfalls of sweeping generalisations or grand narratives, the authors instead offer a clear-sighted and fascinating insight into the “messy reality”.

(An edited version of this review appeared on the Buzz website.)

Thursday, December 14, 2023

Faded glory


Watching paint dry is idiomatically tedious, but what about watching it peel? Pembrokeshire-based photographer David Wilson has been doing just that, and implies otherwise.

Peeling Paint And Rust might have the ring of a guest publication on Have I Got News For You, but the book is a visual feast - and indeed something that's poignant rather than ruin porn. As he says, "I felt that I was documenting a dislocation in the rural communities of Wales - a dying way of life".

Buzz review here.

Tuesday, December 12, 2023

Top of the pops

In some ways, the Now compilation albums seem like a relic from a bygone era - and yet, as Ian Wade recently reported for the Quietus, at the ripe old age of 40 the brand seems stronger than ever, continuing to "snapshot the best of what's been happening in pop from the last three months". What's more, physical sales remain healthy, indicating that, "while streaming is great and all that, there's still a hunger for a curated two-disc round-up".

The only regular Now album I can remember owning, Now 10, is a classic example of what they're all about. Opener 'Barcelona' by Freddie Mercury & Montserrat Caballe and seminal dance track 'Pump Up The Volume' sandwich two solid-gold pop gems in Pet Shop Boys' 'Rent' and the Communards' 'Never Can Say Goodbye'. It was my introduction to Kiss and Nina Simone (the latter's 'My Baby Just Cares For Me' having been re-released after cropping up on an advert). And, poignantly, it concluded with 'Fairytale Of New York', still possibly the best Christmas song there is. For the wet-behind-the-ears pop fan, at least, it was a treasure trove.

(Wade's right, though, that the first installment of the rival Hits compilation, released in 1984, was even better - an absolute staple of family car journeys, more collectively popular than my dad's Queen, Dire Straits and Phil Collins albums.)