Nightmare 2009: Slight Return

MBV KFR #1: About half an hour into one of their sets, one of the band addressed the crowd for the first time. "Thanks", she said, acknowledging applause. "Shut up and play more music", someone shouted from the crowd.

MBV KFR #2: A FOAF was travelling back from an Irish music festival at which MBV were headlining. Stopping in a pub for a bite to eat, they saw none other than Kevin Shields of MBV having lunch with his parents, who had been down to see their son play. They were apparently berating him for being so uncommunicative onstage. "All those people had travelled a long way to see you, the least you could have done was say thanks to them".

More Nightmare Before Xmo pictures

Nightmare 2009: The Lure of the Chalet

I went to the MBV-curated Nightmare Before Christmas in December – shortly before Christmas. When I was talking to people at work about it afterwards, I explained that it was a music festival and it took place in a Butlins Holiday Camp. "Oh", said one of my colleagues, "Was it one of those '80s revival things?". "No", I replied, but then I considered the line-up. For it was all a bit 80s (or early 90s) revivalist, except maybe it was more like a revival of underground music that people have semi-forgotten.

I did pretty badly for seeing actual bands this time round. Irene and I were sharing chalets with two home-birds, which made domestic loafing always seem that bit appealing, but also we felt strongly the lure of real ale pubs of Minehead. This meant we were doing a lot of quaffing hearty ales when we should have been discovering new bands. We also went on the Minehead Meander. Ah well, the new bands were probably shite, so no loss.


So, whom did I see? Well, one somewhat well-known band were the Television Personalities. You may know these fellows from their novelty punk classic 'Part Time Punks', though I am sure that hipster elitists out there will say that they have a great many other wonderful songs. As a live band, they had a certain idiot-savant quality. What I mean by this is that they were not really that great, but they were heroically not great. The music chugged along, but what was particularly striking was the tuneless warblings from their "singer". What made all this all the more bizarre was the way so many of their songs seemed, compositionally, to be reliant on having a vocalist of much greater ability than him. It was all rather strange, a compelling experience from which it was impossible to avert one's eyes and ears.

Of the other old bands, from the tail ends of their sets caught it appeared that Swervedriver and That Petrol Emotion still have it. That said, with the Swervies it was suggested that they only really have a couple of stand-out songs, and the shoegaze sensations waited till the end of their short set to play them. Maybe so, but their stand-out songs are really very striking, and the band had an air of tightness to them that you would not expect from a band so long retired (and after not that much success in the first place).

The Petrols, meanwhile, were a band I was a bit wary of going to see again. I remember liking them when, back in the day, I caught them live at a couple of Trinity Balls, but this was back when my musical tastes were a bit less advanced. I was particularly afraid of bigging them up and bringing Irene to see them, only for it to be apparent once they started from where Har Mar Superstar got his stage act. But actually no, their was a persistent groove to their music, and even without hearing their big hit I heard enough to wish I had come down and caught the whole of their set. Some of their appeal comes from their singer. Aside from his non-wanky charisma, he fulfils the important role of interpreting the incomprehensible patois of the other band members; unlike them, he is not from darkest Derry. But yeah, I left this thinking that I might have to go and look for one of their classic albums or something.

Nightmare 2009: I'm The Daddy Now

ATP TV showed some fascinating films. I could only take so much of Scum, featuring a young Ray Winstone. This is the one set in a borstal or young offenders' prison. It is a very impressive film, but maybe not what you want to see just before going to bed. I think it was the "I'm no poof – but from now on, you're my missus" bit that made me turn in while I could still sleep without having to scrub out my brain. More disturbing, though, was the whole thing about whoever was the boss prisoner (a position earned and retained by beating the shite out of anyone who even looks at you funny) calling himself the "daddy". So a daddy is not someone who sits you on their knee and reads you bedtime stories, but rather someone who slaps you around and tells you to shut the fuck up – you can guess what kind of happy upbringing these fellows must have had.

Spongebob Squarepants seemed to be completely deranged. OK so we were watching it with the sound turned down, but it really did seem like something aimed more at drøg casualties rather than children. Also bizarre was Scorpio Rising, a film by some famous guy which seemed to intercut footage of gay Nazi bikers with random other bits and bobs. It was not great, but it did keep you occupied. More impressive was Lucifer Rising, by the same guy. This seemed a bit more thought through, and featured filmed footage of Egyptological and occult themed stuff over a brooding prog rock musical accompaniment. It just was.

We also derived some enjoyment from Ed Wood's Glen Or Glenda, the great director's no budget plea for understanding for men who like to dress up in women's clothes. As you probably know from having seen the Tim Burton Ed Wood film, Wood was able to get an aging Bela Lugosi to appear in this, but he seems to have no real idea what to do with him, so rather than having him appear in the main story, the film instead keeps cutting off to Lugosi sitting in a room on his own declaiming stream of consciousness gibberish. They do not make them like this anymore. On actual TV, meanwhile, that programme about UK government spin doctors definitively disproved that old cliché about swearing being a sign of a poor vocabulary.

Nightmare 2009: My Boring Valentine?

And I suppose I should say a little bit about the curators, My Bloody Valentine. They were playing three sets, with people being allocated a night to see them but being able to bunk into see them on others. So I saw the whole of their set once, on the last night, and the trail end (from the back) on the Saturday. And they were… alright. Once you got over how ear-splittingly loud they were, it was hard not to think that they are actually a bit dull as a live band. Don't get me wrong, I still love them on record, but they are too static and uncharismatic on stage to really work in that context. The whole loudness thing – it really is just a gimmick. Why play so loud that you have to give earplugs to the audience? Why not just play more quietly? Because then, perhaps, people would notice how dull you are? Maybe so.

Even the Holocaust – the extended section from the middle of 'You Made Me Realise' where they all play one note over and over and over as loudly as possible – seemed a bit less than totally exciting. It did have a certain power to it, but it also seemed a bit formulaic. There may well have been a time when audiences were shocked by the Holocaust, but now it is all a bit expected.

One final thing to mention about this ATP is the plague of flatulence that seemed to have descended on the festival. This was particularly noticeable when we were packed into the throng up the front waiting for MBV to come on, but it was a general feature of the whole weekend. I think this might be one the downsides of having so much real ale available.

This ends my discussion of this festival. One interesting thing I note from the pages of Frank's APA and elsewhere is that a lot of people really loved the MBV live performances, so maybe their sonic attack did not quite penetrate my ears of cloth.

Nightmare 2009: Honey You Want Me

The really storming olde band at Christmas ATP was Spectrum. As you will recall, Spectrum were the band Sonic Boom formed after the Spacemen 3 split up. Here I think they were basically Mr Boom and a bunch of new musicians, and they treated us to a greatest hits set of the Spacemen and early solo music of Sonic Boom. It took a while, though, for it to be apparent what they were up to. 'How You Satisfy Me', from Sonic's first solo record, started the band on the path of escalation. When that was followed shortly afterwards by a cover of Mudhoney's 'When Tomorrow Hits', it was no surprise when the next track was… 'Revolution' (itself covered by Mudhoney; seek out their version, if you like funny things). After that we had 'Suicide' and maybe one or two other Spacemen classics. The band even accentuated their Spacemen 3 revivalist shtick by having the other guitarist play sitting down, just like Jason used to.

I must say, however, that 'Revolution' was the teensiest bit disappointing. At the time, I thought maybe that the drummer had fluffed it, but he played a stormer on later tracks. Listening to the recorded version, I think maybe the problem was that the drums were mixed too loud. Everything else they did was so impressive that this was easily the set of the weekend. Sonic finished off by doing his little salute thing, god bless him.

Let me return for a second to 'When Tomorrow Hits'. It was a good track for the Spacemen 3 to cover, as it deals with heroin addiction, and not in the kind of jokey way you would expect from Mudhoney. It is a dark and brooding tune, qualities well brought out in the version played by Spectrum. I must seek out the Spacemen 3 record on which it appears (Recurring, isn't it?), to see how it compares to the original version.

Nightmare 2009: Minehead Is The Place

Serena Maneesh were my token new band of the weekend. They hail from Norway or Sweden or somewhere. They had a kind of neo-Goth thing going.

Bands seen before who did the job included the Sun Ra Arkestra and The Horrors, both of whom managed to transcend the duff sound of the big downstairs stage. Also impressive were The Dirty Three and Sonic Youth. Warren Ellis and Jim White of The Dirty Three did a lot of seeing other bands during the festival, their full-on beards making them look like escapees from an American Civil War re-enactment society. I wonder what has made the other guy from the band remain so lacking in facial hair. It would be an astonishing coincidence if his name turned out to be Bruce Beard.

Live favourites Yo La Tengo played a slightly odd set – they more or less completely skipped out the audience interaction I tend to associate with the Tengo, and they opened with a long, driving instrumental that for a brief moment raised the prospect of their doing a repetition of that time Sonic Youth played free improv to a festival crowd; but then they launched into what was apparently a greatest hits set. It is a while since I saw them, and it was noticeable that James McNew seems a bit less like a man treading the thin line between shyness and total rock abandonment.

Primal Scream were piss poor, though they were not helped by the main stage's dire acoustics. My special friend described them as being like a parody of a rock band. Maybe they always were.

Nightmare 2009: Last Night A DJ Shagged My Wife

I did not engage too much with the DJs – being old, I had to do a lot of going to bed relatively early. Ian Svenonius played some crazy stuff, while Justin Spear played what I always think of as classic ATP disco stuff – tunes like The Slits' awesome version of 'I Heard It Through The Grapevine' and Kim Fowley's 'Bubblegum'. Deadly stuff. That was that, really, though I suppose I should mention the time we were walking past the dreadful Irish bar and heard some equally dreadful music emanating from it, like the kind of thing you would hear at some Irish wedding for munters. It turned out, of course, to be legendary Irish music industry figure B.P. Fallon himself on the decks. I feel a bit mean accusing him of playing rubbish music, but I did not like it.

Comics Roundup 23/3/2009

Air #7, by G. Willow Wilson & M.K. Perker

This one bills itself as a perfect jumping on point for new readers, and lines up a load of Vertigo (and other) creators to affirm this as one of the best comics they have seen in their puff. For me, though, it has proved a perfect jumping off point, as reading this issue has confirmed my suspicion that this title is nicely drawn but is going nowhere. I reckon this title had promise initially when it was about the weirdness of long haul air travel, but it seems to have rapidly lost any kind of narrative coherence.

Air was the only comic I bought this week. Nightmare. Is there good stuff out there I am missing, or has the supply of quality monthly comics dried up? One thing I am excited by is the sudden appearance of American Flagg collections. This early 80s title was Howard Chaykin's big comic, and I am curious as to whether it is any good or not. Skimming it in the shop reveals a lot of women in their underwear, which is basically what you expect from Mr Chaykin, but the rest of the art also looks rather impressive. I may yet give this a go. I think back in the day it was seen as one of the big serious comics of the early 1980s. Interestingly, unlike Watchmen or The Dark Knight Returns (both of which I think it precedes*), American Flagg is not a superhero title. I have read that back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the supers did not have the stranglehold on mainstream comics they have now, with many people thinking that the long-underwear brigade was on the way out. I have started wondering if, perversely, the critiques of the form by Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns actually breathed new life into superhero comics, by making them all edgy and kewl. What do you think?

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*or does it?