#musicdiaryproject – Friday

Standard

Jo was on Marge duty this morning, so just Head Music for me until lunchtime.

I had ‘Send in the Clowns’ for a few minutes. No idea why, but it brought a brief gust of Friday ennui.

Then came one of those lovely moments of connection between people and eras that music can conjure in a flash. Walking down the corridor I passed our Press Office where I heard a very old favourite song being played, presumably via YouTube. Dan, Press Officer, was clearly struggling to convince his colleagues that this was a song they certainly must be familiar with. They were laughing at him and he was having difficulty defending his position. I took this in as I walked by, but after going past it struck me that I really ought to step in and help out. I took a couple of backwards strides, popped my head around the door and asked “‘Camouflage’? by Stan Ridgway?” I think I made Dan’s day, to the hysterical dismay of the others. We were able to exchange quips about him being an “awfully big marine” before he revealed that the reason this has come up in the first place was that he had snuck some of the lyrics, a brief snatch of the tale of that heroic soldier, into a newly published press release. Excellent work.

Yuck – ‘Holing Out’

I read a tweet from Pete Paphides a couple of weeks ago raving about Yuck, then a less than convincing review from Pitchfork. Spotted a link on that site today which led me to this song via Soundcloud. Thought it sounded okay, and pretty much as all the references to early 90s Pavement etc had given me to expect.

#fridaymix

I try to join the Friday Mix whenever I can, even if I can’t listen in. Every Friday at 12.30pm, the Friday Mix overlord creates a new Spotify playlist based on a theme which has been voted for by the waiting participants, who then get to add two songs of their choosing to the playlist. The tracks are sorted and ordered by whoever wants to drag them around then at 2pm the playlist is locked, everyone presses ‘Play’ at the same time, and several dozen people, dotted who knows where, all listen along to the same songs, alone but together.

It’s an interesting way to collaborate, challenge and mingle with other music listeners, and one which just wouldn’t have been possible even two years ago. Today’s theme was ‘sunshine’ and I added ‘Sunrise’ by Lambchop and ‘I Am The Sun’ by Swans. Most weeks most participants seem to want to add in happy songs, so I do take a certain childish pleasure in choosing something more bruising whenever I can. It’s often Swans, to be honest.

I thought ‘Sunrise’ would be a good opener and tried to boost it to the top, but Eric and Ernie kept being bumped even higher until the last moment when, inexplicably, Finley Quaye appeared in the number 1 spot.

As the playlist ticks through there’s a parallel discussion on twitter, using the #fridaymix hashtag. Unfortunately this is usually pretty perfunctory and polite. It’s rare to see frank opinions exchanged, even though part of the pleasure is both cooing and sniffing and other people’s choices.

You can see today’s playlist above. After the Bob Marley track, my office-mate came back from a meeting, so I muted my PC. According to the Twitter feed, Swans drifted by without a mention once more.

PJ Harvey – ‘Let England Shake’

Whilst writing this, I sat upstairs and listened to the second side of ‘Let England Shake’. Not really concentrating.

Pavement – ‘Perfect Sound Forever’

Haven’t listened to this for 15 years or so. Sounded great. 10″ vinyl is still weirdly cool.

Swell – ‘Swell’

Picked off the shelf after 5 minutes of aimless gawping. I don’t know anything about them. My friend Ben and I used to like them in the days before you could find out everything about a band in 10 seconds. I remember it was their second album we really liked. One of the first I remember having that slightly broken down country sound that would come to inflect so much of the alternative music I liked from the US. It has something intruguing and seductive about the sound of it, rather than the songs of it. This is their first album. I think Ben had the second. I might go and google them now…

Goodnight.

#musicdiaryproject – Thursday

Standard

PJ Harvey – ‘Let England Shake’

We listened to this at the second meeting of Devon Record Club, and shortly afterwards a digital copy fell into my inbox, put there by someone who shall remain unconvincingly anonymous, but sits somewhere near the top of this whole #musicdiaryproject operation.

I didn’t want to listen again until I’d bought the record. I sent an emissary to London Town to buy it for me yesterday, so listened to it on my dog walk this morning. Sounded really great. Enhanced by wandering through misty-soon-sunny country lanes, past hundred year oaks and even older graveyards.

Head Music

Dominated today by the music bed for the trail currently running on Radio 4 for a documentary about Tony Hancock. It’s some sort of Elbow-lite, piano led confection, quite nice and I think I might even own it. Couldn’t place it at all however and still can’t. When I tried all I could squeeze out was ‘Stop Breathin” by Pavement, which morphed each time into the latter stages of ‘No Rm. 9 Kentucky’ by Shudder To Think. Answers on a postcard please.

I had a quick blast of ‘Dreamer’ by Supertramp in the afternoon, but it soon passed.

Devon Record Club

So, as I write this we’re at Devon Record Club, which has been covered in some detail previously. This time Tom has set a precondition, which is that we must bring along a record that we haven’t heard before. This has rather put the kibosh on my usual bi-weekly pattern of listening which, unusually for Record Club members who by-and-large just grab something super-cool from their shelves as they’re dashing out of the door, consists of obsessively listening and sifting through possible choices and then going over and over the record I’m going to bring.

Can’t do that this week.

However, it has given me a chance, finally, to bring ‘Zaireeka’ and associated additional equipment to make listening to it possible. Tom and Nick don’t know that yet and, in fact, Nick has already told me that he’s going to choose it for the next meeting, which he now can’t, and Tom has tried to impose a secondary rule which is that we must listen to each of tonight’s records at least 6 times before writing about them. I’ve told them that won’t be possible.

Kurt Vile – ‘Smoke Ring For My Halo’

Tom’s choice. This sounds nothing like I think his last record sounded like, which I recall being scabrous electric blues. It’s really quite nice. Sounds like J Mascis covering, fairly faithfully, ‘Workbook’ by Bob Mould. He doesn’t really sound like Mascis, but something in his slightly bleary voice recalls the great long-hair. It’s got that balance between swagger and restraint that American singer-guitarists seem to do so easily. Maybe the cultural gap swallows the bits that might grate if he was a Brit.

Bill Callahan – ‘Apocalypse’

This is great and strange. I love Smog/Bill Callahan. He has one of my two or three favourite voices, one I could happily lie down and go to sleep in forever. Great, great lyricist too. Like, so good you think most others should pack up in shame and admit they are just footling children. Whereas his last record was immediate and gorgeous, this sounds like his strangest to date. Structurally and instrumentally he’s pushing into quietly challenging places. Really looking forward to buying and hearing this properly.

Now Nick is waxing lyrical about how great the ‘Zaireeka’ experience is. I think he’s going to be disappointed when I finally reveal my choice. A bunch of cobbled together equipment seems like just the right thing to me, but perhaps not to him.

The Flaming Lips – ‘Zaireeka’

I’ve had this 4cd set for 14 years and never listened to it. Not surprising. Not that many friends within 200 miles who like the same music as I do, and this one needs them all in the same room along with their stereos.

I’ll write more when I can, but for now can I say it sounds much much better than I ever thought it could, and those social and performance aspects work so well it’s almost spine-tingling. I’m already sad that it’s going to finish soon and I won’t be able to hear it again for 14 years.

#musicdiaryproject – Wednesday

Standard

Head and ear music mingled pretty well so far today.

The Bugle and Low

This morning’s dog walk, at 6.45am, was to the sound of The Bugle podcast, which is a weekly fixture. The latest edition is a filler featuring 20 minutes of Andy Zaltzman doing stand-up in Dhakar, Bangladesh.

This left 10 minutes or so, and with Pretty Goes With Pretty‘s comments about Low’s ‘Drums and Guns’ lodged somewhere in my head, I skipped to the last three tracks of that album. I’m not sure I agree that they are the best, and with my new half-decent headphones on, I noticed some weird stereo-panning effect that stuffed Alan Sparhawk straight into my right ear and made me feel like I was going to fall over. Not ideal really, so I was glad to get home vertical.

I love Low and i’m excited about ‘C’mon’ as I am about ‘Tomboy’. Both are streaming this week, but for artists I’m interested in, or besotted with, that first listen still has a ritual importance. I’ll wait for the physical artifact in both cases.

The Pains of Being Pure At Heart

I was in the office on my own today, so listened to the new Pains of Being Pure At Heart album on Spotify, playingf through the internal speakers of a closed laptop. Didn’t concentrate at all, but I did get a feel for how it sounds, which is something.

Head music

I saw a Facebook page this morning which was full of comments by one Terence Ng. So I ended up with this jerking around my head for much of the afternoon.

‘Ana Ng’ is everything you could want from 3 minutes of a pop song. It reads like a David Lynch mood board, has stabbing, slicing guitars, a beautifully complex and addictive chorus and a bonkers video. Take a moment to consider a chorus that has the nerve to go “Ana Ng and I are getting old/And we still haven’t walked in the glow of each other’s majestic presence” in the space of about 3 seconds. It’s like a multi-barbed fish-hook. Once you’ve got it in you, you’ll worry at it until one of you is shredded.

They Might Be Giants

Following my head instead of my heart for once, when I had 15 minutes of my car journey home to spare after P.M. finished on Radio 4, I put ‘A Users Guide To They Might Be Giants’ on shuffle, from my iPhone via a Belkin FM transmitter. I started with ‘Ana Ng’ and then got ‘We’re the Replacements’, ‘John Lee Supertaster’, ‘The Statue Got Me High’, ‘She’s an Angel’, ‘No!’, ‘Istanbul (Not Constantinople)’ and ‘Cyclops Rock’.

Put another way, I got transglobal invisible romance, childish rock and roll, freakish culinary weirdness, a haunted killer stone, celestial love at a dog show, a pre-school anti-rape tract, post-empire revisionist geo-politics and, well, i’ve no idea what ‘Cyclops Rock’ is about, but it’s great.

That’s a pretty fine use of 15 minutes if you ask me. I don’t know why They Might Be Giants don’t get more respect. Cramming ideas into song lyrics is not a crime, and sounding quirky is okay if you make it worthwhile. I don’t know them inside out, but their best stuff is some of my favourite stuff.

Howlin’ silence

I came home, had a floor to mop, some food to prepare and a wife to spend time with. I also had to prepare for tomorrow’s Devon Record Club, and as part of this, I listened to approximately 0.5seconds of  ‘Moanin’ at Midnight’ by Howlin’ Wolf.

#musicdiaryproject – Tuesday

Standard

I’ll put you out of your suspense: I listened to some music today. I know, I know. We’re all relieved.

I managed, as it happens, to hold out until gone 6pm, and before that had to make do with yet more…

Head music

1. ‘Barbra Streisand’ by Duck Sauce. Think I caught this in the office and couldn’t shake it for the whole morning. It infected the room surreptitiously and as only a couple of us knew the name of the funny woo-woo song, there was much confusion as other members of the team thought it was an actual Streisand number. Ho ho.

2. ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ by Joy Division. We were talking about headphones at lunchtime, and when I bought some new ones recently I was alarmed by how different this precious song sounded. So it lodged for a few minutes

3. ‘You Make Me Feel Like Dancing’ by Leo Sayer. Because I saw a chap on campus walking in an odd way, putting one foot very carefully directly in front of the other. As I marvelled, I found myself warbling “You’ve got a cute way of walking…”. Initially I had this misplaced as, and indeed warped with, ‘Jive Talking’.

4. ‘Freefalling’ by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. No idea.

Deerhunter – ‘Halcyon Digest’

Marge, our dog, has been on her own for most of the day, so I took her for a long walk up the hill behind our house. Deerhunter, and especially ‘Halcyon Digest’, seems like perfect walking music to me. It’s motive but not driving. It’s bucolic, which makes it perfect. When it came to the strangely amusing near-closing line “I lived on a farm/I never lived on a farm” I was here:http://bit.ly/gpIVK7

Nirvana – ‘Nirvana’

Twitter informed be that today is the anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s death. Once Deerhunter had gone, it seemed appropriate to listen to Nirvana, and this compilation is the only thing of theirs I own on CD, and thus the only thing on my iPod. That’s not a problem. I haven’t listened to them for some time, and hearing off-album winners like ‘Been a Son’ and ‘Sliver’ – my favourite Nirvana song – beats mining ‘Nevermind’ for fresh kicks. Boy do they sound good though. How strange to reflect that at the time he killed himself, his was the biggest young rock band on the planet. They married melody and power pretty uniquely. I was visiting Leeds when I heard they’d found a body at his home. I didn’t sleep too well, and then I cried when his death was announced. I remember John Peel saying that he always wondered if he should have taken him in and shown him a little Ravenscroft family love, and whether that might have saved him.

Back home, I came upstairs to make some notes and listened to:

Mudhoney – ‘Hate the Police’/Dicks – ‘Dicks Hate the Police’

Mudhoney brought to mind by Nirvana, and this is the track of theirs that most readily comes to me. I love it. Mark Arm’s vocal is ripping and the whole song is a blast. I had to buy it from iTunes to hear it. I’d never heard the original, so I bought that too.

Hole/Babes in Toyland – ‘Sugar and Spice’

Seemed to follow naturally. This split record has Hole’s 1992 Peel Session, which knocked me out at the time and still sounds great, plus some dodgy live tracks. I listened to the session for the first time in a decade. ‘Violet’ and ‘Doll Parts’ are still terrific. Then I flipped it over and got through two of the Babes in Toyland tracks. I loved Kat Bjelland’s band then and they sound raw and raucous now. Better than Hole by some considerable stretch. It’s no great surprise that the two women couldn’t get on in the same band. It must have been like trying to hold an atomic bomb together.

My wife came home at this stage, so I switched off the stereo to avoid having to explain what this noise was.

After dinner, upstairs to finish this off. I played

Earth – ‘Seven Angels’ from ‘Earth 2’

Which seemed appropriate in a macabre way. Dylan Carlson bought the gun that Cobain shot himself with, and later went on to record some of the most influential drone/doom music of the last 20 years. It’s strange music to listen to. It seems to be happening just below the normal range of hearing, but it’s affecting and intruiging.

Fugazi – ‘Cassavetes’ from ‘In On the Killtaker’

It struck me that with Cobain, Courtney Love and Dylan Carlson, we had all the necessary characters and circumstances for a decent murder mystery. Which led me to imagine Columbo arriving on the scene. Which made me think of John Cassavetes, via Peter Falk, and so this is what i’m listening to now. I’m sorry, my head just works that way. I never knew from the song whether Fugazi wanted me to like the film maker or not. Still don’t. ‘Great Cop’ comes straight after it, and that’s one of my favourite Fugazi tracks, so that’s good.

Update: I went right through ‘In On The Killtaker’ from ‘Cassavetes’ back around. I’m a MacKaye man at heart but I just wanted to say that Piccioto is amazing on ‘Smallpox Champion’ where he sounds like a crazed genocidal computer death lord from the future. In a good way. Fugazi sort of turned me into a music writer. When I had to submit a sample piece for the Leeds Student newspaper, I wrote a review of ‘Steady Diet of Nothing’. I interviewed Ian MacKaye once for the Big Issue. He was lovely.

#musicdiaryproject – Monday

Standard

It’s the first day of Nick‘s Music Diary Project. Since he first suggested the idea, i’ve been concerned as to my ability to listen honestly. How could my choices fail to be influenced by the sure knowledge that I would be sharing them. We’re all swayed by the need to gain acceptance and admiration. Even those hipsters apparently so relaxed about their lack of concern for other’s views that they will happily document and publish their time spent boogying to Bieber or apathetically accepting Adele are just finding another way to say ‘look at me! i’m cooler than you cos i’m crap and I don’t fucking care!’

I think I can safely say that at least on Day One of the project, I have resisted the temptation to force through my ears the most geek-pleasing sounds I can squeeze into them. Today I have listened to 1.5 seconds of music.

I’ll get to that shortly.

Firstly, one of the things I did instead of listening to music. At 6.30am I walked Marge, our dog, for half an hour. Instead of listening to music, I took in last week’s ‘Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo’s Film Reviews’ podcast from BBC Five Live, on my iPhone.

It’s counter-intuitive, perhaps, but often I feel like I can’t handle listening to music, so I drift through a podcast instead. Odd, as sense would dictate that listening to a lively discussion about the week’s new cinema releases, including an unexpectedly amusing interview with Werner Herzog, would require greater concentration than simply allowing a few songs to drift through my lug-holes. I never feel this way. When I got back home, I switched the radio on to Five Live Breakfast, which wafted around the house from 7.00-7.50am.

Then I got into the car, turned the key in the ignition, and before I reached to hit the AM/FM button and cue the Today programme on Radio 4, the CD player kicked in with approximately a second and a half of ‘The Birds’, the opening track from the new Elbow album.

And so my listening was done.

To be fair, it was a good bit. The part just after the squeeky arpeggios kick in, reminiscent of The Knife’s ‘Silent Shout’ played through a herniated pipe organ.

No music at work. No music on the way home. The rest of the Kermode podcast as I made dinner, this time on my laptop. I’ve waited until almost 10.00pm, and still nothing. Oh well, at least i’m not forcing it.

To fill the void, i’ll tell you about two other types of music I did hear today.

1. Head music.

Single phrases from several songs have been echoing around my head all day, as they do every day. If you ever meet me you are most welcome to ask what’s playing on my cranial radio station, and i’ll always have an answer for you. It’s a blessing and a curse. Right now it’s ‘Motor Away’ by Guided By Voices. Earlier on it was ‘Bengali in Platforms’ by Morrissey. I’m more than slightly ashamed to admit that this was brought on, as it has reliably been for about three weeks now, by a news report mentioning the Libyan rebel stronghold of Benghazi. For much of the morning I had ‘Dance Music’ by the Mountain Goats on rotation.

Later on, when considering what I might listen to if I walked the dog again this evening, I alighted upon ’03/07-09/07′ by High Places. For a while around 6.00pm I had “Banana banana banana slugs” squirming around in my head, but this soon morphed into ‘I Know What Boys Want’ by The Waitresses, essentially because the two bands have soundalike vocals. Which brings me to:

2. Incidental music

Glee was on in the next room as I was unpacking my bags from last week’s holiday. At approximately 9.30pm some kid ended up singing ‘I Know What Boys Want’ by The Waitresses, which struck me as a coincidence.

And that’s it. Roll on the rest of the week. Monday has been too quiet.

Why Sickmouthy Loves Devon Record Club

Standard

As a founder member of Devon Record Club, I read with interest the comments by one Nick Southall. I felt they deserved a response so that, and indeed this, is what they’re getting.

I too love Devon Record Club, and I too worry whether its format is liberating or problematic, or both. I think there are problems with it, but not the ones that Nick is stroking his chin over.

Every record has a first listening, and the ones we grow to love reveal something, or prehaps fail to hide something, that brings us back again. Several of the records I love the most have repelled me at first listen, at least one to the extent that I put it away for about 9 months, actually scared of it. Devon Record Club has given me a start with at least 3 or 4 records and artists which I never would have taken the time to otherwise. Why check out Alexander Spence when three quarters of the records on your shelf haven’t really had the time they deserve? As for Patrick Wolf! He’s that theatrical Elton meets St Julian chap, isn’t he? What’s that? He sounds completely different? Balderdash.

As Nick rightly says, records change their contours as the years wash over them. But that’s fine for the Record Club too. At the moment we’re trying to surprise and delight each other with our choices, but it would be rather wonderful to be brought established ‘classics’ to listen to properly and discuss all over again. There are always new lights to be cast and new caves to find.

Assigning homework would take much of the spontaneity out of the evenings, and instead of listening to four or five albums and worrying about which one to take along for the others, we’d be listening over and over again the same two and worrying that we weren’t going to have the correct opinion about them. What’s more, if Nick had set me British Sea Power as homework, I wouldn’t have turned up. I’ve tried it Nick, it’s boring.

The other wonderful thing about the Club is that we’ve each found ourselves listening back through our collections with greater intensity. The idea of getting together was to set aside some time just to listen properly to music. In fact i’m listening to much more than I was before we stated meeting. Having to think about why I want to introduce a particular album has been worrisome and delicious and has energised my listening once again. In this respect it’s like Fight Club, but far less punchy and far, far, far less sexy.

There are problems though, for me at least. Both Tom and Nick claim that lyrics are relatively unimportant to them. They are to me, and I realise how many of my favourite records need to be listened to carefully. Strip away the words and you’ve got another bunch of boys with guitars, another snarling M.C. just like all the others. In this sense, of course, we’re back worrying away at whether one can get a record at a single listen. It turned out you couldn’t when it came to McCarthy. I reckon the same will happen if I rock up with most of the records on my current list.

Secondly, i’m not sure it’ll cope well with noise. At some stage i’ll be bringing Big Black along, and I have no idea whether chatting over Steve Albini is possible, let alone acceptable.  Even tougher is how to bring a record that you think might well cause offence? I’ve been listening to Tyler, The Creator and various bits of OFWGKTA and whilst there’s enough in there for a whole symposium of debate, I can’t begin to think how to introduce it to two people who may well order it switched off once dark stuff starts coming. How do you play records which you don’t yet know how to justify?

I love Devon Record Club.

Death and the dilettante or ‘Why I Hate Ultimate Frisbee, Which I Love’

Standard

I think I may have wasted my life.

Let me put that another way. I have realised that I will only ever be good at one thing, and now that one thing is pretty much over.

When I was a teenager, I did what many teenagers do. I moped about feeling sorry for myself, wondering why the world had it in for me, and when things were going to start happening. Of course, whilst I sulked about nothing ever coming my way, things started to come my way. I discovered the transformative power of wonderful music. I read hundreds of books. I found myself in relationships. I began to write.

Each of these things could have taken my life off in any number of directions. I could have been a novelist, a musician or a Casanova. [Just a note here to prevent those who know me from spraying coffee all over their laptops: I realise that I never could have been any of these things. I claim little or no natural aptitude for them. And yes, i’m really talking specifically about the Casanova one here].

I tried to combine writing and music when I was a teenager, scurrying home from gigs to spend the early hours sweating over a typewriter before posting off my reviews into the void – or the Live Editor’s desk at the NME as I knew it. When I got to University I wrote music reviews for the Leeds Student newspaper, and loved it. When I left I took a binder of those reviews around to the fledgling Big Issue In The North and spent the next 10 or more years writing music, film and TV pieces for them, which again, I loved. And then, in 2005, that stopped.

Rewind to 1993 and Ultimate Frisbee saved my life. Enthused, almost randomly, my best friend and I started Manchester’s first team and, taking ourselves by surprise, started learning how to be good at it. The sport brought me almost all of the dearest friends I have today, it forced upon me a physical fitness which I would almost certainly have avoided otherwise, it took me to places I never would have visited both at home (Leicester!) and overseas. It brought me success within the sphere. I played for Great Britain for the first time in 1997 and for the last in 2008. And finally, in 2009, the team that my friend and I started back in Manchester, became European champions.

You may be familiar with Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘10,000 hour rule’ which contends that the key to success in any given field is, to a great extent, a matter of practising a specific task for 10,000 hours. I think I may just about have reached my 10,000 hours when it comes to Ultimate and, within the confines of an obscure sport played by only a few thousand people in the UK, i’ve been successful. In fact I was pretty good at it. Now, as I approach my 40th birthday, what use is that? I gave my years of focus and concentration to a sport which I became an expert in, and which I cannot play for much longer at all.

Recently, reading fascinating books by or about Stewart Lee and Chris Morris, I recognised the sheer devotion they have given to their crafts, Lee on stage learning to read the swells and riptides of a live audience, Morris in the editing room, taking the scalpel to anything he could get his hands, ears or eyes on. Both are deeply talented and rather frighteningly intelligent, but still in their stories you’ll feel the rough grain of the 10,000 hours of practice.

I realise that I will never again practice anything for 10,000 hours. Of all the things that I could have worked at, I chose one which could not sustain me forever. Now, as its tide begins to ebb, I’m left high and dry.

Baby it’s cold inside

Standard

It’s been cold in our house for a few days now. More than a week in fact. Our boiler broke down the weekend before last. We live in a cob house which is bad news when you’re trying to put up shelves, but pretty good if your heating decides to take the night off. It took a day or so before we realised anything had was wrong, and five full days for the house to lose its heat completely. This from the same walls which create a cool indoor oasis during the summer heat. Our house is over 300 years old, and those mud slingers sure knew what they were doing back then.

But once it got cold, it stayed cold. Left with just one big log burner, an electric shower and a kettle, the house became a different place to live in. Soon the only places we were spending time were in the front room feeding the fire, or in bed, more or less fully clothed. Those of you with a more fruity imagination might suggest at this point that a little vigorous physical exercise might have been just the ticket, but one of the most unexpected and gloomy realisations was how quickly we forgot about doing anything other than trying to stay warm. Stuff started to pile up in the other rooms which were too cold to spend time in. Drifts of clothes lay unsorted, almost unseen. The kitchen floor gained a crunchy coating of grit and sand, too bleak and chilly to sweep. The tradition of spring cleaning now began to make perfect sense. In a cold house, nothing gets done that isn’t vital to survival. Sweeping the floor can wait until the sun starts to creep back in through the windows.

My mum told me that when she was a girl they would wake up on Winter mornings and run downstairs to get to the coal fire, leaving glasses of frozen water beside their beds. That seems hard to believe, but for our family it’s one generation away.

It sounds almost laughable, and i’m certainly being over dramatic, but for us, in small ways, even physical well-being was relegated to non-essential status. Medications lay untouched for days. Dry skin began to crack and bleed. I began to get a sense of how the cold, or at least the prolonged inability to get warm, can kill. Maybe not directly, but slowly, by shutting down our ability to cope, to care, even just for ourselves.

For millions of people in the UK, this cold is a reality right now, a reality which poses a direct threat.  One in six families live in fuel poverty, having to spend more than 10% of their household income on heating to stay warm. These latest figures, note, are from 2008, since when fuel prices have risen, a recession has bitten, and unemployment has begun to rise. How many families are out there now, feeling just a little colder than is comfortable? Meanwhile, the Prime Minister had to intervene to stop the annual Cold Weather Payment to pensioners and poorer families being cut from £25 a week to just £8.50 during the recent spending review. Good for him, but it’s sad to reflect that whilst this decision will help some of the most vulnerable in our society to stay a little warmer this year, it was likely made for political reasons.

Our boiler has been replaced now, and the cost to us will be a Summer holiday this year and a little belt-tightening. Our little stay-at-home winter break is over, but for lots of other people on our street and in our village, the cold is here to stay.

What 2010 sounded like – my records of the year

Standard

This is late, I know. I’m sorry. Most end of year lists were chip paper three weeks ago. I can’t say that i’ve spent the time mulling over my choices, honing every comment. It’s 10pm on 2 Jan, and I still don’t know what i’m going to write, even though I’ve been thinking about writing it for a month or so. That’s also long enough for any final saving claims to spontaneity to have withered away. Perhaps i’ll just get on with it.

I kept a list this year, and the list tells me that I bought just 32 new records. I can’t say that i’ve listened much more widely than those. Looking back, my 2010 collection seems both conservative, with few risky punts on unheard outfits, and strong, with no huge disappointments, just a few records I didn’t go back to as often as I might have hoped. If the list below seems of a type, well, perhaps it is. I’m surprised.

It’s been another year of fractured listening. Time spent listening to music on car journeys, or whilst walking the dog, has again outweighed the hours sat before the turntable, focusing intently, listening closely. Nonetheless, there are records which have stood out, stayed around and moved me during the year, and here are some of them, listed in the order in which I bought them.

The Antlers – ‘Hospice’
The Mountain Goats – ‘The Sunset Tree’

Two of my favourites of the year were released in 2009 and 2005 respectively. ‘Hospice’ suddenly sounded different on long, dark walks, when Peter Silberman’s emotional string-tugging proved irresistible. This quiet, surging soundtrack to heartbreak and decay has stayed in the memory longer than anything else this year.

I finally got around to John Darnielle and The Mountain Goats, and ‘The Sunset Tree’ is pretty much everything I want from an album. Sharp and funny, with tunes both affecting and catchy, delivered in a deliciously nasal west coast voice. The sound of the Summer’s ups and downs.

Joanna Newsom – ‘Have One On Me’

Joanna Newsom’s third album, spread across three records and two hours, is the towering achievement of the last twelve months, a trove of treasure which will take years to explore and catalogue. We can gasp at the audacity of her ambition, marvel at the scale of her achievement, welcome her maturing voice and songwriting, even, when the mood takes us, hear the whole history of the United States in a song like ‘Good Intentions Paving Co.’ but ultimately ‘Have One On Me’ is a triumph of exploratory melody, and a thumb in the eye for those who have proclaimed the death of the album.

The National – ‘High Violet’

I’m not sure how The National got so big between albums, but the confidence with which they toured ‘Boxer’ a couple of years ago was parlayed into ‘High Violet’, a perfectly realised and recorded album from a band who, whilst living only a short stumble from the mainstream, have managed to build a sound that could only be theirs, and then build and build upon it further. The National are doing things their own way, and have become beautifully self-contained and self-fulfilling in a way that recalls REM at their mid-80s best. ‘Bloodbuzz Ohio’ is the best 4-minute single of the year.

Liars – ‘Sisterworld’

In which the mogadon nightmare of ‘Drums Not Dead’ smashes face-first into the scathing rock of their eponymous fourth album. It’s almost impossible to divine this band’s intentions. Like the good Captain Beefheart, lost this last month, you can never be quite sure whether Liars are jokers or geniuses and the tension between the two is just one of the things that make them so compelling.

The Arcade Fire – ‘The Suburbs’

I thought ‘The Suburbs’ was a convincing next move the the Arcade Fire, taking the lost children of ‘Funeral’ and spinning them forward to become lost parents. Some fine songs, but it makes my list mainly for ‘The Wilderness Downtown‘ a short online film by Chris Milk which is a sparse, almost unavoidably moving piece, and the first time in years i’ve seen a song so completely transformed by an accompanying promo.

Emeralds – ‘Does It Look Like I’m Here?’

Looking up and down this list, it does seem more conservative than the year actually felt. A few weeks ago this record, by a kosmische electronic trio from Cleveland, Ohio, looked like at least a partially left-field choice, but it seems to have struck many commentators in the same light and has found its way onto several end-of-year rundowns. For me its music box pointillism has been the sound i’ve reached for this year when I didn’t know quite what I wanted. Sometimes i’ve listened intently, drawn into its dissolving structures, and sometimes it’s served as a warm and bubbling background wash. It works beautifully as both, and has proved as satisfying and well-played as any other record this year.  

Crystal Castles – ‘Doe Deer’

This scathing 98 seconds is the hit and run of the year and the song i’ve scrolled to most. Insistent, belligerent and un-sit-downable, it rushes by in the context of the album, but taken straight it’s an unstoppable shock of distressingly contaminated adrenaline. The way Ethan sets up a lapel-grabbing track which Alice’s caustic vocals mercilessly destroy makes me want to stand an applaud every time. That they manage to both create such a compelling sound and then brutally wreck it within the space of a minute-and-a-half seems almost as fine an achievement as Joanna Newsom’s two hours of virtuosity.

Swans – ‘My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky’

It’s just great to have them back, managing to take their rich, deep noise and bring to it a raw, live band feel. As savage and unflinching as ever, M. Gira will turn 60 this decade, but his gaze remains steely and unwavering.

Browne is yellow and blue all over

Standard

The coalition government have voted to remove the cap on University tuition fees. As I write, students and others are protesting in Westminster, the streets are being torn apart and police are hitting people with batons.

Let’s be clear about why this is happening. The government decided to make huge cuts in public spending to reduce the budget deficit, and furthermore to make these cuts within the lifetime of the parliament. From that decision extends an inexorable logic. What would you cut? Defence? Police? Health provision? Or Universities which, in the popular imagination, churn out graduates who walk into well paid jobs?

The Comprehensive Spending Review included a 79% cut in the teaching grant to universities. Again, the logic is unavoidable: universities cannot teach if to do so costs them losses of thousands of pounds per student per year. Either funding must be found from elsewhere, or dozens of the more than 130 universities in the country must close.

If I had my way – I don’t and I never will – we’d be saying goodbye to Trident, taxing the corporations, bankers and anyone else earning over 10 times the minimum wage until their pips squeak, and re-establishing fully-funded education for all. The benefits are unarguable, for graduates and for the country. Why not recoup the cost of higher education from those who have benefitted so fully from free degrees (not to say low taxes, booming property, free universal healthcare). In short, raise taxes for every generation from the post-war baby-boomers up to and including my own. We had it all given to us on a plate, why not make us give some of it back?

But the cuts have been made. Fees are the only game in town. The logic, crushing and unavoidable, is clear. The effects will be felt over a generation. Browne has a strong progressive safety net. Poor students will not repay fees, reasonably well-off graduates will. Nonetheless, it’s impossible to imagine that the poorest in society – those who do relatively better through attending university  than the middle-class entitled, by the way – will not turn away from education in their thousands. Read Sickmouthy’s recent post to understand how universities have become engines for social mobility over the last decades.

The rest is politics, and what’s left is the shredded corpse of the Liberal Democrats. Are they cheats, or liars? Did they make pledges they had no intention of keeping? Or did they fail to stand up to their Conservative overlords and choose to break their promises and betray their beliefs instead? Perhaps this is coalition politics. Perhaps we would have done the same thing, with heavy hearts and twitching sphincters.

What’s clear is that come the next election their pledges will be worthless and their promises will fall on deaf ears. All that remains for them is to make the most of their time in front of the cameras, squirming as they try to justify policies they used to denounce. They won’t be around for much longer and in the meantime the Conservatives have a whole load more shit for them to carry.