The Unthanks salute the magic of Robert Wyatt and Antony & the Johnsons

You may have heard of The Unthanks. They are Becky and Rachel Unthank and some musicians from an English region who made their names singing local folk tunes. They came to Dublin recently, not to sing their usual repertoire but to treat us to covers of songs by Antony & The Johnsons and Robert Wyatt. I went along. Because the helpful people who run Whelans gave the door opening time on the ticket, but not the concert start time, I missed the first number of songs. This turned out not matter too much as they began with the Mr Antony tunes, and I have adopted an anti-Antony position for no good reason other than a dislike of bald people. However, as I am not that familiar with the music of either Mr Antony or Robert Wyatt, for all that I officially wuv Mr Wyatt, it took me some time to realise that I had not missed the good stuff. And in fairness, the Mr Antony tunes I heard did not sound that dreadful, so maybe I should re-evaluate my animus towards that hipster-friendly artist.

The Robert Wyatt set was notable for the non-inclusion of any of the covers that for me are the most notable tunes by that man. So there was no 'Shipbuilding', 'Biko', or 'Stalin Wasn't Stalling'. But they did play 'Dondestan', which features the wonderful lyrics "Palestine's a country / or at least it used to be / Fellahin, refugee / Kurdistan similarly". To this the Unthank sisters added in a bit of clog dancing. Their performance of 'Sea Song' (an odd Robert Wyatt love song) was then rather affecting.

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Acid Mothers Temple and the Flying Butter Elephants of Doom

Yesterday I mentioned seeing the Sisters of Mercy. They were playing on the same night that Acid Mothers Temple were visiting Dublin for the first time in ages. Deciding which to see was something of a dilemma, but we resolved it by travelling down to Cork the next day and seeing them play an afternoon gig there. And it was a free gig, meaning that we easily recouped the cost of overnight accommodation, train travel, and a slap up feed in the wonderful Café Paradiso.

The Japanese sensations provided us with all kinds of astonishing guitar freakoutery that must be broadly familiar to anyone who has seen them before. As it has been quite some time since they last trod the boards in Ireland, I had almost forgotten how good 'La Novia' is. For younger readers, this is the one where they take an Occitanian folk tune from the south of France and start it off with throat singing vocal harmonies, before adding in loads of guitars for the traditional freakoutery. The start of the piece sends tingles down my spine every time, partly because their record links it to the unfortunate history of the Albigensian religious community in the south of France.

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The Sisters of Mercy

I went to see the Sisters of Mercy in the Olympia Theatre. Because I am useless, I left it really late to get tickets and ended up sitting in the gods. I was however not quite so useless as some of my former Goth friends, one of whom bought tickets but then forgot what day the concert was on, another of whom intended getting tickets but then forgot about it and arranged some inescapable family horror on the evening in question. This made me feel really brainy and together by comparison – result.

The Sisters of Mercy battled dreadful sound, the perennial Olympia problem. So it was that I thought they were incredibly daring, opening with an unrecognisable new song, until the chorus of "First and Last and Always!" came out through the undifferentiated sludgy sound. Fortunately things picked up a bit as the night went on, to such an extent that tracks became recognisable and started to sound somewhat appealing to the ear (for songs by Sisters of Mercy).

The concert maybe worked best as visual spectacle. Some artists like flashy stage shows and gaudy costumes, others go the high-tech route and play in front of screens showing all kinds of amazing images. The Sisters, on the other hand, simply filled the stage with dry ice, so that most of the time you could barely see the band. This was quite funny.

Pandas of Mercy

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Fish Tease Shakira Attacked By Sea Lion

Colombian pop star Shakira has been attacked by a sea lion. She was taking a picture of the wild animal when the beast "roared in fury". It is believed that the aquatic mammal mistook the camera for a fish and thought the popular singer of such songs as 'Suerte' and 'Hips Don't Lie' was teasing it.

Shakira's brother was on hand to carry her away from the giant beast, which seems not to have actually inflicted any injury on her or made any real attempt to do so. Shakira did however hurt her hand slightly.

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The True History of England

And we went to a performance of the North Sea Scrolls. Or a concert-lecture experience at which the contents of the North Sea Scrolls were discussed in words and song. These scrolls, discovered in the North Sea or thereabouts, reveal the true history of England in the recent past. They were revealed to us by Andrew Mueller (sometime music journalist, famous as the only one of his kind to like Toasted Heretic), Cathal Coughlan (formerly of Microdisney and the Fatima Mansions) and Luke Haines (formerly of the Auteurs, Baader Meinhof & Black Box Recorder), all clad in colonial garb and pith helmets. They also had a woman with them to play cello, but she wore normal clothes and may not have been a prophet in the same way they were.

The night went like this. Behind the musicians a photograph would be projected. These changed for each song. Examples of pictures featured included the following:
- Jimmy Saville introducing Frank Bruno to the Yorkshire Ripper.
- King Zog of the Albanians
- soldiers marching through a desert carrying a huge picture of some guy
- a Pearly King
- Emperor Jean Bedel Bokassa I
- many more (see my Flickr page for further details)

Andrew Mueller would then introduce each scroll, revealing the astonishing revelations it contained (who would have thought, for instance, that the last round of the Northern Ireland conflict had been kept since the early 1970s by Australian tribute acts? Or that Ireland conquered England in the 1950s, later installing Martin Cahill as proconsul?). One or other of Coughlan or Haines would then sing a song about the contents of said scroll. Our favourite tune was probably the one about how the occupiers of England recruited Morris dancers as a feared collaborationist militia, the song being called 'The Morris Men Cometh'.

For the encore Coughlan and Haines sang two of their own songs each. I found myself wondering if maybe I should investigate the work of Cathal Coughlan, as he has an attractive crooner's voice and an ironic yet heartfelt approach to lyrics. Haines himself did 'Leeds United', which made me happy, and one from his recent concept album on British wrestlers of the 1970s.

Someone at work asked me whether it all worked. I would have to say it did. The evening featured all new songs and lots of poncey spoken word stuff*, but there was a distinct lack of awkward audience shuffling and muttering or people shouting "Play 'Town to Town', you cunt". This suggests that people were enjoying the challenging nature of the evening, thought the fact that Coughlan and Haines have reputations as hard men may have put people off getting lippy.

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*with an amusing and somewhat self-referential joke about the Captain Lockheed and the Starfighters record, too complicated to explain here.

Favourite Albums of 2011 #12: T---'s Ween TOAD

Ween
T---'s Ween TOAD [CD-R]

[What is a TOAD? Why, it is what we in Frank's APA call CD-Rs or other forms of music that we give to each other. It is an acronym from the days of the cassette tape. And what is this Frank's APA? For now that is a mystery that must remain unresolved.]

This is the CD-R with which T--- introduced Ween to the members of Frank's APA. Here in Panda Mansions we have been playing it to death, becoming great admirers of how Ween manage to jump from one genre to another with great mastery. It is also interesting how the band can be such rofflers, without at any time sinking into the world of novelty bollocks. Many of the funny songs transcend mere humour and become things of wonder in their own right (though there is maybe something rockist about the idea of "mere humour", as though real art has to be serious). The deadpan delivery and general musicianship help a lot.

Looking at the tracklisting here again, I am left thinking that with most of the best songs, humour is largely incidental to their appeal. So even if you feel that humour died in Auschwitz, you probably would still find something to enjoy about this collection of tunes. Even without humour, though, most of the tracks here have something of the weird about them.

The collection also features the song 'Your Party', with guest saxophone from David Sanborn, a tune whose lyrics will condition how I think of parties for the rest of my life.

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Favourite Albums of 2011 #11: "Rajasthani Street Music"

v/a Rajasthani Street Music [CD-R]

Seb Bassleer, one of my Frank's APA pals, recorded this on a portable tape deck while travelling around in India. Some of these tracks and others recorded by Seb are due to be released commercially later this year by Sublime Frequencies. The music here is a selection of pieces performed by street musicians in Rajasthan, which you could probably guess from the record's name. It is very engaging gives a great sense of being there. My favourite tracks would probably be the ones with the beautiful-voiced woman of the Dewara family.

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Favourite Albums of 2011 #10: "Níl Sé Anseo"

v/a nlgbbbblth CD 11.14: Níl sé anseo [CD-R]

And this is a CD-R compiled by one of my colleagues in Frank's APA. It collects music, advertisements and spoken word pieces from Ireland in the 1970s and early 1980s. The compilation is an evocative vision of a time and place that seems somewhat like our own and yet oddly different. The priests talking about the best way for people to enjoy their holidays in Ballybunion sound particularly like something from another planet. In all my years in Frank's APA, this is the first compilation by a member that really sounded like it deserved a commercial release (or to be widely bootlegged).

I can imagine a great many people of my age enjoying it for its Proustian qualities. The young people or people from outside Ireland would like the anthropological window it opens. But sadly, I do not think this is available from anywhere anymore.

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Favourite Albums of 2011 #9: "The Wicker Man"

Magnet & Paul Giovanni
The Wicker Man OST [1973]

This soundtrack album to the much loved film splits broadly into two – firstly we have a selection of songs, composed by one Paul Giovanni (who appears in the film – he is one of the singers in the pub) and played by a group of musicians formed for the film who called themselves Magnet. Although they are original compositions and although Mr Giovanni is from somewhere in the United States, the tunes conjure up a British folkie ambience. The second half comprises the incidental music from the film, itself often arrangements of olde folk tunes (one of which appears on Richard Thompson's 1000 Years of Popular Music record). These feature snippets of dialogue – just enough to remind you of the darkness that lurks behind the pagan idyll of Summerisle.

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Favourite Albums of 2011 #8: "Black Goat of the Woods"

Black Mountain Transmitter
Black Goat of the Woods [2009]

This is that album set up to sound like the soundtrack to some low budget 1980s horror film. And it is all figured as one track so you will probably not get to hear any of it on the favourite tunes of 2011 CD-R I have still to compile.

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