Read on for the bullshit:
Hey there!
So last time, I said sometimes there’d be a theme, sometimes there wouldn’t be. This time, there’s a theme, but it wasn’t on purpose. Somehow, infuriatingly, the majority of these songs have a nostalgic bent to them. And that’s weird, because I’ve not really been stuck in the past lately. Stuck, yes, but nowhen specific.
I was going to go on a tear about nostalgia, but there’s probably enough about memory (of my own, and within the songs) scattered through the blurbs. This is my first regular writing joint in a while, so I should probably pace myself. But considering we’ve had the Beatles and the Stones loitering around the upper end of the charts, and Britney and Robbie are telling their sides of the story, it feels like living in the past isn’t something that requires so much effort these days.
Plus, considering my listening diet at the moment is longform jazz and various strains of hip hop, putting this together felt a little more like going back to the well, harvesting a field I don’t actually that much time digging around in these days. And that’s always fun.
As I said last time, if there’s something you want to hear/read in a future edition, drop me a line. Otherwise, I hope you enjoyed the bullshit. Now enjoy the radio.
Alex
The songs:
Theme from Radio Bullshit: Yo La Tengo – Esportes Casual (There’s a Riot Going On, 2018)This won’t preclude me from playing other YLT songs. I’m just wating for the right song and the right moment.
The B-52's - Deadbeat Club (Cosmic Thing, 1989)Sometimes I wonder what it says me as a fan of The B-52’s - Athens, GA’s preeminent party queerdos - that my favourite song of theirs is their most (ugh) accessible. Never mind that it starts with damn near the same drum loop as “Love Shack”; “Deadbeat Club” is something else entirely. It’s a band reminiscing about their primordial origins, from bars serving unthinkably cheap beer as ? And The Mysterians play on the jukebox, to crashing parties in a suburb literally called Normaltown, jangling away as if R.E.M. needed any further props at that point. I probably just dig the fact that for just this once, the B’s opted to flip the ratio of kitsch to sincerity.
Robyn Hitchcock & The Egyptians - Oceanside (Perspex Island, 1991)Over the last few years, I’ve realised I’ve got a real yin for music that moves slowly. This week, I just saw The Necks, the Australian experimental jazz trio who play the room as much as they play their instruments, and got to luxuriate in two 45-minute improvisations (the first took thirty minutes to coalesce into something truly overwhelming, the second seeming to take joy in being ominously pointillist and unsettled) that telepathically rose and fell, despite the band members never once exchanging a single glance.
“Oceanside”, the charging drone of an opener to one of Robyn Hitchcock’s slickest albums, isn’t even 4 minutes long. But in a way, there’s some shared DNA. The instruments barely change up what they’re doing, but each successive verse throws something into the arrangement to give the illusion of movement - a swell of backing vocals, a little curlicue from Andy Metcalfe’s fretless(!) bass. Once you notice those little details, you want to hear them again, but half the fun is knowing you’ve got to get through each verse to get what you really want.
Dump - Everlasting Love (A Plea for Tenderness, 1997)The easiest way for a band to win my heart is to cover a throwaway pop classic on some cheap home recording gear. Not because it brings out some kind of hidden integrity in the song. I will simply never not find it charming.
Saint Etienne - Over the Border (Words and Music by Saint Etienne, 2012)No one gets (British) cultural nostalgia like Saint Etienne - less a band than a curation collective. The old Earl Brutus line about pop music being wasted on the young has never applied to anything better than Saint Et’s later albums, and while the reference points are decidedly Before My Time, the wide-eyed wonder of those early moments of what I call Pop Consciousness is universal. “Over the Border” gets that better than almost any other song.
“A few weeks and music wouldn't have to be so private.It would be there for me.It would be there for me.”
Sloan - Deeper Than Beauty (Twice Removed, 1994)So on Friday night, my band Fightmilk played a show supporting Belfast’s righteous, instrument-swapping, four-frontpersoned Problem Patterns. Somehow, despite knowing one of their number was Canadian, I didn’t expect to get into a major fanfest with their guitarist about Nova Scotia’s righteous, instrument-swapping four-frontpersoned Sloan. So this is just a friendly reminder to everyone else to listen to Sloan. Being the best power pop band in Canada should qualify them for being considered one of the best power pop bands in the world.
Håkan Hellström - Atombomb (Känn ingen sorg för mig Göteborg, 1999)If you know me, you know where the nostalgia lies here. Not many songs hit me this hard while being sung in a language I don’t understand - let alone ones which quote two separate M*rrissey lyrics (“Kom, kom Armageddon…”). This one’s for K, always.
Karen Dalton - Katie Cruel (In My Own Time, 1971)When Fightmilk played the Indiefjord festival in Norway last year, our singer Lily also got booked for a rare solo slot under her Captain Handsome moniker. She wrote an almost entirely new set of songs for the occasion, because she has balls of steel, and then covered this, because those steel balls are ginormous. Lil, if you make it this far, when are we gonna get a version of “King of Karaoke” to listen to at home, eh?
Robbie Williams - Radio (Greatest Hits, 2004)Speaking of karaoke kings…
Robbie was My Guy when I was a kid, so the four-part documentary that just landed on Netflix has been pure catnip for me. It leaves plenty of stones unturned when it comes to his career, but takes a harrowing, forensic look at what that career did to his psyche. “Radio”, which gets zero discussion in the doc, marks the end of his imperial phase - Robbie’s forgotten, pub-quiz-answer of a number 1 hit. But it was a turning point - his first major hit without Guy Chambers, his first major hit with Stephen Duffy, and the first inkling that what he really wanted to do was write songs that were a lot stranger than the public wanted from him. If we hadn’t collectively let this song slip from our memory within two years, Rudebox might have come as less of a shock. Well, slightly less.
The Lilac Time - The Family Coach (Looking for a Day in the Night, 1999)One of the most interesting and frustrating bits of the Robbie documentary was a five minute stretch of footage of him and Geri Halliwell on holiday together. He says it was the happiest week of his life (I believe him), but I can’t help wondering what people who are that famous have to say to each other in that kind of environment. You see him writing a song about how he “wants to be a nobody someday,” and the sentiment seems to trouble Geri for the rest of their trip.
But on a lighter note, you also see him cue this song up while they’re on a yacht - nifty Stephen Duffy foreshadowing, there - and Geri singing along. There’s something to the thought that he’d played this song often enough in her presence that it stuck with her. So now it’s stuck with me. And maybe you.
Maggie & Terre Roche - Down the Dream (Seductive Reasoning, 1975)New Jersey sister trio The Roches have slowly become one of my favourite bands over the last few year. This comes from their pre-debut, recorded as a duo while Suzzy Roche was living what would become “Hammond Song” - a record I didn’t know existed until I spoke to Drive-By Truckers’ Patterson Hood for a rambling, gregarious interview about his favourite songs. It didn’t take long into my first play of it for it to become one of mine.
Donna Summer - Dim All the Lights (12" remix, Bad Girls,1979)For my sins, I have little to say about this song. I do, however, have a lot to say about “The Old Victrola”, a 36-minute collage by experimental American guitarist Alan Licht. You know when you read about a piece of music and it sounds so absurd on paper you have to hear it to make sure? Yeah, it’s one of those.
The piece is a mash-up three different live sets: the first sees him riffing on a sample of Captain Beefheart’s “Well” on a rattling, distorted guitar. After five minutes, we smash cut to a shattering loop of glitter, trailing a sparkling evolution out of the speakers in duet with droning feedback. Licht refuses to let the loop reveal itself for a almost fifteen minutes, dragging out each phrase like it was the number one song in Hell. And then, just as you and the loop reach breaking point, he lets it go, and the full 12” remix “Dim All the Lights” plays out, in its entirety. The audience applauds. I hope they remembered to dance. Before he reburied the song under loops and noise, I really hope Licht joined them too.
Problem Patterns - Advertising Services (Blouse Club, 2023)So like I said, my band supported Problem Patterns last week, and I was blown away. Flailing, thrashing and funny, and somehow holding it down on another band’s gear. Blouse Club is one of the year’s best debuts, a mix of virulent grunge and spiky pop, and this serves as its mega-pissed thesis statement. They really do mean business.
Chia Pet - Hey Baby (Hey Baby EP, 1992)Imagine living in an economy where a magazine like Sassy could exist, and its entire staff could still form a band and release a grim all-timer of an anthem as their first and only single (“Why don’t you smile, baby? Don’t you like it?”), all while still comfortably on the payroll. Ah the nineties.
Tugboat Captain - Like Caroline (single, 2023)There’s no one in our little scene like Tugboat Captain, which somehow lets them fit in with every bill I’ve ever seen them on. It’s inspiring to see frontman Sox create a scene, turn the Cavendish Arms into a veritable clubhouse, all while leading a band of exceptionally talented misfits through some of the catchiest, most unpredictable, songs anyone I know is writing at the moment. The closest thing South East London has to Jellyfish, which means we should hold them dear forever.
Mikal Cronin - Weight (MCII, 2013)I only changed upon Mikal Cronin’s second album after hearing a track on the Best Show, but a cursory spin had me instantly sold. This is the kind of lo-fi epic I dream about coming out of the speakers the second I drop the needle on a record, heartfelt and hummable, constantly building to a riotous, fist-pumping climax. I’m feeling groggy as heck on a Thursday morning as I type this, and giving that finale another spin has made me feel like I could punch God.
Martin Vogel - Tough (Perseo Edits, 2010)Sometimes, you just need to hear through the grapevine that someone did an Italo disco remix of a cut from your favourite Springsteen album to feel like things might be OK after all.
Fred Thomas - Misremembered (Changer, 2017)…and sometimes you need an icon of DIY pop to tell you that actually, you should be freaking out because you sure as hell aren’t getting any younger. Learning that the erstwhile Saturday Looks Good To Me frontman had turned from formalist sixties pop to stream-of-consciousness crisis rock wasn’t on my 2017 bingo card, but with lines this cutting, the shock mattered a lot less than the message.
All together now - “When the controlled burn that you call your 20’s is finallyextinguished, you KNOW…you’ll still need someplace to go.”
Daniel Romano's Outfit - The Motions (Cobra Poems, 2021)Another Best Show discovery of another hyperprolific rocker. “The Motions” comes from Romano’s god-knows-how-manyth album (he dropped ten in 2020…), and might well be my favourite thing the Canadian troubadour has ever penned. It’s road-weary ballad sung by Outfit member (and righteous solo artist in her own right) Julianna Riolino, who sticks to the smoky lower end of her expansive range to carry Romano’s post-lockdown update of “Tiny Dancer” into orbit.
Lou Reed - Big Sky (Ecstasy, 2000)I listened to Ecstasy, the last album proper that Lou Reed released under his own name, after one of those hazy, delayed, near-psychedelic return flights, and its grinding guitars and relentlessly broiling word stew definitely put me in…some kind of headspace as I navigated my way back south from Heathrow. I wasn’t far from home when “Big Sky”, its closer, kicked in, and it all but blew any flight fog out of my brain from the first snare thwack. It’s retrofitting to say that Reed knew this song would be any kind of definitive final statement, but there’s a lot to be said for his decision to close such a sprawling, dark epic with one of his most optimistic, hopeful and defiant songs. It’s the sound of a man enjoying some hard-earned peace, and those wide open guitar lines suggest Reed was wishing that peace on anyone who listens.