Wednesday, July 18, 2007
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=4LZ7TCZ2
Dramatisation of the correspondence between Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis.
These two men wrote to one another over decades and they speak for their own literary generation; boozy, reactionary, anarchic. It's also very fucking funny. Alan Bennett's dead-on, eeyore delivery in particular does justice to the wit and sadness in Larkin's writing.
Thursday, July 12, 2007
Elastica seemed to last for just a couple of summers, so here's something to take home afterwards.
Both of their albums are represented on this sessions disc, as well as some Christmas songs which can come in handy for festive mix CD's.
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
The movie itself is now on DVD, so you've no excuse not to see it, people. You'll fall in love.
1. Rock Hard - Suzi Quatro
2. Talk of the Town - The Pretenders
6. Life During Wartime - Talking Heads
7. Pretty Boys - Joe Jackson
8. Take This Town - XTC
9. I Wanna Be Sedated - The Ramones
10. Damn Dog - Robin Johnson
11. Your Daughter Is One - Robin Johnson & Trini Alvarado
12.
13. You Can't Hurry Love - D.L. Byron
14. Walk On the Wild Side - Lou Reed
15. The Night Was Not - Desmond Child & Rouge
16. Innocent, Not Guilty -
17. Grinding Halt - The Cure
18. Pissing In the River - Patti Smith Group
19. Flowers In the City - David Johansen & Robin Johnson
20. Damn Dog (Reprise - The Cleo Club) - Robin Johnson
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Riffy, lit-glam rock and roll.
http://myspace.com/harlot
1. Drown Me
2. Do We Like the Avant Garde?
3. The Last Interview
4. Client
5. Long Way Down
6. Utter
7. Lost at Sea
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=4VUX3R8N
Opens with high-pitched feedback and a John Hurt sample from 1984, before exploding into something that sounds like a very pissed off Steve Jones covering Wire. Ends with a live version of New Art Riot. Somewhere between these two things are the lines -
Standing over the sodomised body of their mother/
Would make a beautiful poster in Athena”
So you need to own this.
1. Faster
2. PCP
3. Sculpture of Man
4. New Art Riot (live)
Monday, July 9, 2007
Fantastic bootleg of Nirvana's BBC radio sessions. Poppier and more anarchic than In Utero, but without the airless gloss of Nevermind, these are some of the best takes they ever recorded.
Some of these tracks ended up on Incesticide, but as well as this material, there's a doom-laden downer electric version of 'Something in the Way, two Bleach-era songs (this time without the sludgy production), and a live version of Lithium where Krist taunts Axl Rose over a wailing feedback outro. And there's something about the idea of Nirvana holed up in a studio in my home country, blasting these songs out ten-to-a-penny, that just makes me smile.
1 | Love Buzz (3:16) | |
2 | About A Girl (2:39) | |
3 | Polly (2:36) | |
4 | Spank Thru (3:15) | |
5 | Son Of A Gun (2:46) | |
6 | Molly's Lips (1:49) | |
7 | D7 (3:44) | |
8 | Turnaround (2:16) | |
9 | Dumb (2:34) | |
10 | Drain You (4:01) | |
11 | Endless Nameless (8:43) | |
12 | Been A Son (1:53) | |
13 | Polly (1:45) | |
14 | Aneurysm (4:34) | |
15 | Something In The Way (3:19) | |
16 | Here She Comes Now (4:38) | |
17 | Where Did You Sleep Last Night (4:54) | |
18 | Drain You (3:35) | |
19 | Polly (2:29) | |
20 | Territorial Pissings (2:08) | |
21 | Lithium (5:04) |
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=KQB7QK06
I've got the 'Private Party' recording from 1948 on back-order, and when I have it, so will you, but in the meantime, here's a nice little Leadbelly primer.
'Bourgeois Blues' is on here, a perfect mix of melody and politics, intelligence and bile. Presumably this song has been covered to death, although I'm all the happier for never having heard a version by anyone else.
Another interesting song is 'In the Pines'. A lot of people interpret this as a song about infidelity. But in it's abbreviated form, as sung by Leadbelly and later Kurt Cobain, it seems to be a wife's story, sat up through dawn waiting for her husband, unaware that he lays dead on the rail tracks. Interesting to see how ommission is part of growth in the oral tradition.