Life sometimes throws up magic combinations like cheese and marmite or pineapple, coconut and Bacardi. Aurally speaking one such magic combination is a gentle female voice over often ludicrously overdriven guitars. Lots of bands we admire were making the most of this combination in the 80’s and 90’s. Personal favourites include My Bloody Valentine, Lush, Belly and The Breeders. Unlike your X-Factor winning divas the likes of Miki Berenyi, Bilinda Butcher and Tanya Donnelly were not great technical singers, instead they sounded real and were not only singing their own music, but singing music that was also special, breathtaking, ground breaking and very cool. Check out albums like Loveless, Gala, Star and Last Splash coming from labels like 4AD and Creation. Just thought I’d blog say how much we liked and miss bands like this.
We really enjoyed seeing the Solid Silver Sixties tour 2011 this week and briefly meeting some of the musicians afterwards. We saw the tour in Liverpool and Manchester and hope to go again to a few more soon. The bands included the legendary Merseybeats and the amazingly versatile Vanity Fare who backed Wayne Fontana, Chris Farlowe, Terry Sylvester and Dave Berry. They all still sound great and the music speaks for itself. It's mind blowing to think of the classic original records the various artists were on, including The Air That I Breathe and He Aint Heavy He's My Brother (Terry Sylvester), Handbags and Gladrags (Chris Farlowe), The Crying Game (Dave Berry), Game of Love (Wayne Fontana), Sorrow (The Merseybeats), etc. Music that has since inspired covers by the likes of Rod Stewart, Bowie, Boy George, Simply Red and Radiohead ;-).
From left to right Eddie Wheeler (Vanity Fare), Dave Berry, Mark Ellen (Vanity Fare), Billy Kinsley (The Merseybeats), Terry Sylvester, Tony Crane (The Merseybeats), Chris Farlowe, Wayne Fontana
The future might not be that rosy. Personal wrinkles aside, the bigger picture may bring with it dwindling resources, climate change, nuclear proliferation, natural disasters, super bugs, nanotech killer goo or just some kind of cultural malaise as information overload and the financial ‘bottom line’ decrease our attention spans.
However, it’s nice to day dream about a new technological utopia in which robots do all the hard work. A future where all our major energy, health and food problems are sussed and our abilities to create, explore and communicate are enhanced.
Here’s a youtube with a futurology timeline that includes some predictions taken from a number of authoritative sources. Though prediction is notoriously difficult. For example in the late sixties many people thought we’d be inhabiting other planets by now (it was a reasonable prediction given the success of the moon landings). Conversely, nobody really forecasted the rise and impact of the internet or the momentus changes it’s bringing about. The most interesting change right now being the way powerful interests have lost control of information, thus creating a world where, for example, dictators simply can’t exist.
Technology offers a longer and better life with less impact on the environment; whether that's going to work for everyone is ultimately a test of the human condition.
Anyway hope you like the video, please comment on the youtube and share it around on facebook, myspace, etc.
Here's some other future gazing stuff on youtube ...
As we humans become more aware of the forest habitats we deplete and the energy we burn, the smashing up of musical instruments has become rarer. The thought of destroying such hand crafted things of visual and sonic beauty is abhorrent. Even if instrument smashing is done on the cheap with plentiful plywood knock offs whose rapid disposal creates jobs and leads to the planting of more forests, it still looks hackneyed and wasteful … and a bit cheap.
It wasn’t always the case. Some of the greatest bands ever like The Who, The Yardbirds, Hendrix and Nirvana indulged in instrument smashing. For many of them it was an artistic statement inspired (in the case of Townsend and Hendrix) by Gustav Metzger who used the destruction of things to shock, effect emotions, provoke thought and make statements about the human condition. When great musicians went through their smashing routines it was usually as the spectacular finales to performances of great emotion, profundity, power and energy. It was just right … rock and roll ... though of its time.
Epiphone Casinos are electric guitars, but where most electrics are totally solid or have a solid centre block, the Casino is truly hollow like an acoustic guitar. The Casino has P90 pickups which are more edgy sounding than the humbuckers your see on most archtops, so although the sound is refined it also has a certain bite and mojo.
Epiphone Casinos have been prominent in some of the greatest music ever created and are especially synonymous with the Beatles. Paul McCartney was the first Beatle to own a Casino. It had a bigsby trem and, given McCartney was left handed, was played upside down. Although he was technically the bassist, the Beatles could, and did, swap roles regularly. It’s Paul McCartney playing Casino leads on songs like Drive my car, Taxman and Paperback writer.
IMO the guitar tone on these records is amazing, being in that utlra-cool, hard to find place between clean and over driven. It’s not surprising McCartney said his Casino was his favourite lead guitar.
George Harrison owned lots of guitars and pioneered the use of many like the Rickenbacker 360 12 string and the Gibson SG, though he did play a Casino on some of the greatest Beatles albums such as Revolver, Sergeant Pepper, Magical Mystery Tour and Abbey Road.
However, of all the Beatles the Casino was most used by John Lennon who after 1965 played little else. Originally it was sunburst but he later stripped the varnish for the pale yellow colour seen in loads of late Beatles footage. Maybe because the guitar could also be used as a hollow body acoustic, he found himself writing and practising with it in his hotel and living rooms all the time. So he became wedded to it, even though remarkably his Epiphone was a relatively cheap guitar and he could have owned anything.
Other sixties musicians loved their Casinos, notably Dave Davis and Keith Richards.
During the seventies strats, les pauls and expensive Gibson archtops become more popular with famous musicians. Though Epiphones made a comeback with the indie and Britpop scenes being a guitar that was free of associations with cheesy grin twiddlers and blues bores. It also wasn't a punk guitar, being way too elegant to be abused and spat at.
The 12 string version of the Casino (the Epiphone Riviera 12-string) creates the wonderful guitar backdrops to Lush's greatest records
And of course Epiphones are all over early Oasis (and NoWaySis) records...
Sally btw was a Manchester promoter - she even got our old band gigs sometimes.
The sixties was a time when popular music made quantum leaps from bubble gum pop to high art and experimentation. Sergeant Pepper gets rightly credited with putting popular music into space with its huge leap in redefining the role of the studio. But the credit for the musical moon landing goes to the far lesser known album The United States of America by the band of the same name.
Listening to the USofA you have to pinch yourself to remember it’s from the sixties and not the eighties or nineties. Forget all the stuff about Kraftwerk and Gary Numan pioneering synths – USofA were there first. They also spearheaded the idea that popular music could be a high art form that can be both intriguing and enlightening. Something the likes of the wonderful Yes and King Crimson took further, but only after the USofA.
Anyway, judge for yourself….
One of the great things about youtube is that stuff that gets overlooked or forgotten (even in its own time) finds new life and new fans as the curious stumble on old videos.
A fine example is the band ‘The Cake’ – I don’t quite know how I stumbled on this video but there’s something very cool and surprising about it. It begins with one of the girls stumbling and made dizzy by the carousel. She for a short while looks as though she refuses to join in as the others start to sing – though this is how they always performed. As they sing they hap hazardly improvise dances with a demeanour that’s very endearing and so opposite from the more usual slick performers of the time. And like the performance the music is not what you expect, being full of psychedelic strings and an amazing reverberant rhythm. It turns out they themselves were great songwriters and well connected to the emerging British progressive rock movement of the late sixties.
Simon Cowell would have hated them, which is why I and a lot of others on youtube think they're very cool.
