Finders Keepers Fail

Dracula's Music Cabinet The Vampires of Dartmoore
Do you remember my saying that my record player had not been reconnected so that I was unable to listen to this Finders Keepers record I bought a while ago? Well, the record player is now working again, so I can listen to it… and it's not very good. It is in fact the weakest Finders Keepers record I have yet heard. The sleeve makes some kind of comparison between this and the Vampiros Lesbos soundtrack record*, I suppose because they are both vampire associated sound-tracky records originally from the 70s.

Unfortunately, while the Vampiros Lesbos has a certain pizzazz and swagger, The Vampires of Dartmoore sounds very much like a bunch of session musos dicking around in a studio. I fear this is destined to find its way onto Oxfam's shelves in the near future. And by breaking the Finders Keepers run of consistently good records it has made me wary of picking up anything else by them, lest it too be "not great".

an Inuit Panda production.

das ist kein Pandabär

*from the guy who also did the soundtrack to classic film Schülmädchen Report.

My Favourite Tunes of 2008

It is once more that time of year, when I find myself compiling a CD of the music from the past year I most enjoyed listening to. I am listing the tracks here for your delectation. As with previous years, a copy of this disc is available to anyone who wants it, though you will have to join a queue that has people ahead of you who are still waiting for their world psych* disc.

One thing to bear in mind – these are all tunes that were new to me over the last year. Some of them are from 2008 or late 2007, but many of them are from much earlier.

Here are the tracks:


1. Chrome Hoof 'Circus 9000'
This is from their 2007 album Pre-emptive False Rapture. Chrome Hoof wear shiny capes and play space rocky music, giving good spectacle live. I suspect that this might not be too everyone's taste, but putting them on first is a good way of separating the sheep from the goats.


2. Tinariwen 'Chet Boghassa'
This is from an album called Amassakoul that came out a couple of years ago. As you know, Tinariwen are these fellows who combine the music of their Tuareg heritage with more modern instrumentation, with their frontman being particularly adept in the use of the electrical guitar. They present quite a sight live, carrying guitars and wearing Tuareg robes, but I think they still do the job on record. You may agree.


3. Moondog 'Enough About Human Rights'
This is quite old; iTunes thinks the record it comes from (The Viking of Sixth Avenue) was released in 1978. Moondog is an odd character. He was blinded at an early age but, if I recall the sleevenotes to the album correctly, he took up music while undergoing rehabiliation and then carved out a singular career for himself. He seems also to have spent time dressing as a Viking and busking on the streets of New York, but there is a focus to his music that makes it impossible to think of him as some kind of weirdo outsider artist. The music itself is very percussive, and sounds like it uses a load of that multi-layering stuff that artists like Fursaxa go for. This track is one of the few on the album that has a vocal.

A while ago I was listening to my iPod on shuffle, and what I thought was a Moondog song started playing. But it turned out to be the opening shuffle of a Fun Boy Three / Bananarama tune. So that, maybe, gives an idea what the Viking of Sixth Avenue might sound like. I recommend him highly, and once more salute Lisa & Brian for giving it to me as a birthday present.


4. Nurse With Wound 'Black Teeth'
This is from Huffin' Rag Blues, an ablum iTunes says unconvincingly was released in 2008. I bought the record after NWW's performance at the Dublin Electronic Arts Festival, and remember this tune well from the concert. Love it or hate it, I can see this having to be surgically removed from people's consciousness. It you have not registered this yet, let me just say that this has a very high What Is This Shite? score. I must listen to it closely enough sometime to see what the lyrics are about.


5. Duncan Browne 'Cherry Blossom Fool'
This is from Early Morning Hush, a recent CD reissue of a compilation of British folk music from the late 60s or early 70s. Early Morning Hush has been on heavy rotation since it came into Panda Mansions. I could easily have burned half the album onto my end of year CD, so Duncan Browne's track here should be taken as standing in for all the others.


6. Selda 'Yaz Gazeteci Yaz'
Selda is a Turkish folk singer. Finders Keepers (a kewl English record label) have reissued Selda's untitled debut album (with a few tracks from her second thrown in as a bonus) as part of their Anatolian Invasion series of Turkish psych releases. This record was originally released in 1976, by which point Selda had been on the musical scene for some time (the accompanying pictures reveal her to be a somewhat dumpy mature lady). On the album her folkie tunes (usually protesting against some of the many things in Turkey there are to protest about) are backed by the leading lights of the Turkish rock scene, with some of the tracks (notably this one) even getting a bit of early electronics stuff thrown in. This should make Selda's album a bit of a dog's dinner, but it all works.

I have acquired a lot of Finders Keepers material on vinyl this year, but I love Selda so much that I bought this on CD as well so that I could put it on my end of year compilation. In some respects, she is standing in here for all the weirdo music I have heard through Finders Keepers – Welsh language psych-folk, the big voiced sounds of Sarolta Zalatnay, Ersen (an actual Turkish psych band), and so on. With Finders Keepers you can be pretty certain that anything they release will be worth listening to.


7. Dee Dee Young 'You Haven't Seen Nothing'
This is from Playin' Hard to Get – West Coast Girls, a compilation of music by less well known girl groups from the USA in the 1960s. In this one, Dee Dee Young sings about how you haven't seen nothing till you've seen her new boyfriend. He is really something, unlike that loser she used to go out with.


8. Mahmoud Ahmed 'Mar tèb yelal kafesh'
And this of course comes from Swinging Addis, volume 8 of the Éthiopiques series of music from Ethiopia. I seem to have acquired a lot of discs from that series in 2008, so Mahmoud Ahmed is here standing in for all his fellows. As you know, Addis Ababa had a thriving musical scene in the dying years of the imperial period, largely based on an unusual local iteration of jazz ideas. The scene was shut down by the communist Derg regime that took power in thet mid-1970s, but thanks largely to the efforts of the guy who compiles the Éthiopiques series this music has been rediscovered by a new generation of hipsters.


9. The Kinks 'This Time Tomorrow'
I may be cheating here, in that this tune sounds too good not to have come my way on a compilation previously. This time it came my way on the soundtrack to The Darjeeling Limited, a Wes Anderson film I saw almost exactly a year ago. This song is great, but a lot of its appeal to me is based on its association with that wonderful film.


10. Dengue Fever 'Tiger Phone Card'
This is on Dengue Fever's third album, Venus on Earth, from 2007, the first I managed to track down. Dengue Fever were formed by these two American brothers (one of whom has an incredible beard) who became fascinated by the flourishing pop scene in Cambodia that flourished before the communists took over that country. Deciding to form a band to play this music, they recruited a Cambodian woman who had already made a name for herself on the karaoke circuit and then started recording Khmer pop classics and their own compositions. This track, one of the band's first in English, had a certain resonance for me in the period I spent here in Ireland while my beloved was off in Ethiopia.


11. Caribou 'Melody Day'
The (2007) album this comes from is called Andorra, and it would never have come into my awareness had KevLol not dragged me off to see Caribou play live here in Dublin. I think maybe they are better live than on record, but you do get something of a sense of their drum-led sound from this, the album's opener.


12. The Fiery Furnaces 'Ex-Guru'
This surprisingly straightforward tune from the brother-sister combo appears on their (2007) album Widow City. I salute the Furnaces for allowing people like me who buy their album on vinyl to then download a free copy of it.


13. The Auteurs 'Lenny Valentino'
This is the opening track from the Auteurs' second album, 1994's Now I'm A Cowboy. I never need an excuse to listen to the Auteurs (or any other Luke Haines related band), but I have been on a particular Haines/Auteurs kick lately thanks to my reading of Haineser's excellent memoir of the Britpop years. This song is apparently about Lenny Bruce dying of an overdose but briefly going back in time to find himself inhabiting the corpse of Rudolph Valentino at his funeral. Or something. I do not think you need to know this to enjoy this most excellent tune.


14. The Gresham Flyers 'Shiftwork'
Wow, a track by people I know! This is from Sex With Strangers, the 2008 debut album from this exciting band. I find it difficult to judge the artistic endeavours of people I know, but I have become rather fond of the Flyers' album in general and this song in particular. Hence its inclusion here.


15 David Vorhaus, Igor Stravinsky, & the Fairlight 'ORCH5'
I downloaded this from the Internet. ORCH5 is the VOMP! sound you heard on every record released during a certain period of the 1980s. It is a one second pre-set sample supplied with the Fairlight synthesiser, and people from hip hoppers to Kate Bush used it all over the place. David Vorhaus (himself an electronic music pioneer in the 1960s) recorded what became ORCH5 in the late 1970s. The sound is the transitional bit of Igor Stravinsky's Firebird, the moment when the full orchestra come in and do their stuff.


16. SCOOTER 'Jump That Rock!'
Yeah. This is from Jumping All Over The World, Scooter's number one album from 2008. It is easy to laugh at Scooter's nosebleed rave, shameless appropriation of other people's music, and fuckwitted rapping, but that would be rather missing the point. Yeah.


17. Portishead 'Half Day Closing'
This is not from the album Portishead released in 2008 but their largely overlooked and untitled second album from ten or more years back. I originally had that record down as being a bit disappointing, but this track has really grown on me. I am now starting to re-evaluate the band's second album, wondering if it represents a successful attempt to do something new as opposed to a less than successful iteration of what made the first record so good.


18. Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds 'The Singer'
This appears on the excellent covers album Kicking Against The Pricks originally released back in 1986. This track seems to have originally been a Johnny Cash composition.


19. Oneida 'Preteen Weaponry Part 2'
This long brooding tune is from Preteen Weaponry, a 2008 album by Oneida.


20. Sajuro 'Sakura: Cherry Blossoms'
This is from a record called Lullaby for the Moon. iTunes thinks it was released in 1997, though it would not surprise me if actually it is earlier. It combines that funny stringed instrument the Japanese have with that flutey thing of theirs. So it is nice, contemplative and restful music.


21. Some random load of Ethiopian clergymen, possibly accompanied by a congregation of worshippers '[Liturgical music from a religious service of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church]'
This comes from the album Music From Ethiopia, which came into Panda Mansions from Claddagh on the same day as the previously mentioned Lullaby for the Moon and Early Morning Hush. iTunes has this as having been released in 1970. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church is big into the liturgical chanting, and it is not big on musical instruments. The only ones allowed in church services are a strange rattle thing and a big porker of a drum – not the kind of bongo drum people lazily associate with all African music but something that in sound is more like the big drums our friends in the North like to play (see picture).

I find this recording to be quite evocative of the kind of other worldly states of mind the religious like to aspire too. Ethiopian church services reputedly go on for hours at a time, so I reckon you could get really tripped out by listening to that much of this music. I also reckon that some racist people might not be down with the music of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, so I put it here at the end where it can be easily skipped.


Panda image source

*I have been calling this my world psych disc even though, as has been helpfully pointed out, some of the songs are more like beat music than proper psychedelia.

v/a "Welsh Rare Beat"

This is a Finders Keepers compilation of eclectic weirdo stuff released on some Welsh language record label, Sain or something like that. Yet again I have to marvel at the high quality and varied styles of music with Welsh-language lyrics. I reckon that of all the Finders Keepers records knocking around Heyte Mansions these days, this is probably my favourite, just for the total quality of what it features.

See also The Crazy Sounds of Finders Keepers

Sometimes I wonder why the Irish-speaker scene in Ireland has never produced anything other than tradders.

Finders Pandas

Graeme Miller and Steve Shill "The Moomins" (2016/1982)

This is music from the soundtrack of the British television version of the Polish animation of the Tove Jansson books (the fuzzy felt stop motion Moomins, as opposed to the cell animations of the more recent Japanese cartoon adaptation). The Polish studio worked closely with Tove Jansson and produced visual material faithful to the vision of the books. When the programme was licensed for British television the producers went down the Magic Roundabout route, junking the original audio and creating their own. Richard Murdoch narrated and voiced all the characters while Graeme Miller and Steve Shill somehow got the gig of providing music to the series. With roots in the Leeds post-punk scene they produced music on synthesisers that sill manages to echo the strange folky origins of the Moomins, with the main theme in particular being a classic of hurdy gurdy and flute sounds.

People who have heard of the Moomins but are unfamiliar with them might think of them as just a cute story for kids, with main Moomins looking distinctly like cuddly hippopotamuses. The Moomins themselves are pretty cute but their world can be surprisingly dark, with stories featuring the existential dread of the Groke, the bleakness of separation from loved ones or the prospect of the world's annihilation. The music is good at capturing the juxtaposition, being at times cheerful and folky and then edgy and suggestive of things lurking at the edge of consciousness. This Finders Keepers record might not be for everyone but I think those of more advanced tastes will find it to be at the very least a fascinating curio.

The record just has the music, with none of Richard Murdoch's vocals. This is perhaps a shame, as apart from a couple of videos on YouTube the 1980s Moomin cartoon is completely unavailable. The accompanying booklet with the Finders Keepers release is a good reminder of what the programme looked like.

image source:

The Moomins (Finders Keepers)

Finders Keepers Korrner

Now let me talk about a two Finders Keepers records recently acquired. First up there is their release of Selda's first album (with a couple of tracks from her second thrown in as a bonus). Selda is this Turkish folk singer, known as a voice of leftist protest against the suckass powers that be in that country. She had been on the go for a while before she made her debut record; from the accompanying photographs she looks like she was no spring chicken. Apparently she had been a well-known figure on the country's live circuit, but has never made it into the studio until 1976.

Live, Selda played with just her own acoustic guitar for accompaniment, but in the studio she was joined by a load of Turkish prog-rockers and electronic experimentalists. This should surely have smothered her sound and made her debut a piece of sludgy awfulness, but the combination works really well. You still get her strong voice and guitar pickings, but the accompaniment makes this a record to kill for. I suppose you could, in a very roundabout way, compare it to Nick Drake's Bryter Layter, in that like it the folkie base has a load of ornament added on that actually improves things greatly rather than making it shite.

I recommend this album highly, and not just for 'Yaz Gaztecti Yaz' (or the bop doody doo doo de de doo de de doo track as some might know it), the one you hear a lot at Andy Votel Djing events or on Scott Watkins TOADs. I like it so much that I ended up buying a second copy on CD (so I can rip it to iPod and eventually pass on the love by donating it to Oxfam).

Meanwhile, on my recent food trip to Cork* I decided to buy another Finders Keepers record from the nice record shop down there. This time it was the soundtrack to Valerie & Her Week of Wonders. This is a Czechoslovakian film from the early 1970s, a kind of last gasp of the avant-garde scene that the 1968 invasion crushed. I have not seen the film myself, but I gether that it is kind like Alice in Wonderland meets Emmanuelle, only with more weirdo European stuff thrown in. The music is very evocative, but in retrosepect it might have been better if I had bought this on CD, as it is the kind of thing that would be nice to listen to in one go without having to change the record over. It would also be nice to listen to on the iPod while lying in bed.

Selda image source

Valerie image source

* Another trip to Ireland's greatest restaurant, where I ate more stuff I now cannot remember.

Rioters v. Music

There have been a load of riots in England, starting in London. As well as throwing things at policemen, the rioters have done a fair bit of breaking into premises and stealing things. And burning places down. One place that was burned down was a warehouse holding the stock of PIAS, the UK's largest distributor of independent music. Many record labels will have seen their stock completely destroyed, leaving them in a legal quagmire as to where liability lies and whether anyone is going to stump up cash to cover the cost.

There is a list of the record labels affected here.

On Facebook, someone asked for recommendations of stuff from these various labels that someone might want to buy as a way of helping them out – or panic buy now because they may not be available again for some time when shop stocks run out. I seem to have acquired a load of records from the Finders Keepers label. Looking at their website, these are ones I recommend highly to discerning music aficionados:

Jane Weaver – The Fallen By Watch Bird (amazing contemporary avant folk)
v/a – The Sound of Wonder (Pakistani pop music. Like classic Bollywood tunes, only from Pakistan)
Ersen – Ersen (Turkish psych rock)
v/a – Welsh Rare Beat vol.2 (delightful Welsh eclectica, mostly of the psych rock and avant folk bent)
Selda – Selda (awesome Turkish folk electronic rock)
Lubos Fisher – Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (fascinating soundtrack to obscure Czech film)
v/a – B-Music Cross Continental Record Raid Road Trip (beat music and stuff from around the world)
Jean-Claude Vannier – L'Enfant Assassin des Mouches (weirdo French music from the guy who did Melody Nelson with Serge Gainsbourg)
v/a – Bearded Ladies vol. 1 (eclectic folk ladies old and new selection)
v/a - Welsh Rare Beat (see vol. 2)

Just in case you think I am one of those people who likes everything I hear, I do actually have several other Finders Keepers records that I feel are somewhat less than essential. I am not going to list them here, because for all that I am a bit underwhelmed by them they may well be other people's cup of tea.

More on that PIAS fire, including things you can do to help keep independent music alive

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Jane Weaver "The Fallen By Watch Bird"

This is another Bowlie 2 purchase. Jane Weaver was playing but due to a scheduling clash or a visit to the pub or something I ended up missing her but took a punt on her record anyway. It is co-production with the Finders Keepers label and we already have a track by her on their Bearded Ladies compilation, so she has form. Anyway, this record is amazing, living as it does on the boundaries of Sixties weirdo music, modern folk revivalism, and an almost occult level of doom. The latter is particularly apparent on the title track, itself part of a mini-suite with the two songs before it (which feature Finders Keepers favourite Susan Christie on vocal rambling).

In some respects I find myself lumping this record together with the wonderful Me Oh My by Cate Le Bon (who also appears on Bearded Ladies). That is just me being lazy, however, for all that they are both neo-folk records by women. Jane Weaver's voice is a bit more understated than Cate Le Bon's, while The Fallen By Watch Bird has a more avant-garde feel to it. However, if you liked one you would probably like the other, and this is the only serious rival to Cate Le Bon for my favourite album of 2010.

suitably deranged video:


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Favourite Albums of 2011 #1: "The Fallen By Watch Bird"

I decided to compile a list of my favourite records of 2011 – the albums that came my way in 2011 that I most liked, regardless of the year in which the music was recorded. I also decided to reject base-ten numbering and have ended up listing 12 records – nine albums and three CD-Rs. Over the next two weeks my end of year reconsiderations of these records will appear, starting with this one:

Jane Weaver
The Fallen By Watch Bird [2010]

In late 2010 I went to the Belle & Sebastian curated Nightmare Before Christmas. Jane Weaver was on the bill, but I did not go and see her, largely because I had never heard of her (and she might also have been on at an inconvenient time). I did later see a copy of her album being sold at the merchandise stall and noticed that it was a co-release between Bird Records and the interesting Finders Keepers label. Thinking that it looked intriguing I took a punt on it. Thus it was that I acquired what became my favourite album of the 2011.

In broad outline terms one might class this as belonging to the world of the singer-songwriter. That summons up the image of some insipid character strumming away on an acoustic guitar, inflicting adolescent poetry on the listener. This record is not like that.

The first couple of tracks segue into each other, presenting us with an almost psychedelic piece complete with semi-occult stream of consciousness narration from Susan Christie (one of those people who keep guest-starring on Finders Keepers records), before leading into the record's title track, a piece relying on a variety of instruments with nary an acoustic guitar in sight. I gather this is meant to tell some kind of story about loved ones across the sea and birds flying back to bring good tidings, but frankly it is a bit oblique and I treasure more the strange sense of longing it communicates. This is all helped by Jane Weaver's voice, somewhat understated but capable of communicating real emotional depth in a subtle manner. After those tracks we are in acoustic guitar territory, but the sound stays away from the bland singer-songwriter clichés and draws more from a neo-folk spring of creativity. It is all very beautiful and I am still listening to this record over and over.

my original review

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Another DEAF event

Along with a number of people we went to this DEAF event at which The White Noise were going to be playing, together with DJing from Broadcast and the lads from the Finders Keepers record label (or maybe it was the lads from the B-Music club; these are the same lads). What we were not expecting was a performance by some ladies called Pollyfibre. Wearing very tight silver spandex costumes and robot masks, they came onstage and did things to bits of fabric with scissors, irons, and stuff. All of this made unusual noises as they seemed to be heavily miked up. Their performance tended more in the direction of electronic art rather than music, making it all one of the most bizarre things I have ever seen. Deadly stuff, I hope they play again sometime.

The White Noise were billed as going to play their 1969 album An Electrical Storm... but they confounded explanations by doing no such thing and serving up instead some electronic music that owed more than nothing to contemporary dance music. I think a lot of people were a bit pissed off by them, but I found them rather enjoyable. I was rather amused by the way they performed 'Firebird', An Electrical Storm's standout track. They just played the original recording off a laptop while David Vorhaus sang over it. Awesome.

As you know, David Vorhaus is the man who recorded the ORCH5 sample for the Fairlight Synthesiser, this being that VOMP! noise you get on a lot of hip hop records and Kate Bush albums. He took it from the bit in Stravinsky's Firebird where the full orchestra comes in, and tonight he got his money's worth out of it by throwing it into a few of the tunes.

I can't remember what tunes the Broadcast people played, but I remember liking them; Stereolab music may have been involved. Andy Votel of B-Music / Finders Keepers played loads of that Turkish psych loved by all right thinking people. One track in particular had me saying to Irene "Wow, this one is brilliant" and she said "It's Selda, Scott put it on one of his compilations". I resolved to track down a copy of music by this woman. For a backdrop they had some Japanese erotic horror film; it looked amazing.

This concert was all on in The Sugar Club. Annoyingly, they no longer serve Brandy Alexanders, but we were able to relax back in plush seats and watch the action. Sadly, this meant that getting up to dance to the DJs was not an option, as the seats were too comfortable to leave.

Electronic Pandas

Selda [Untitled Finders Keepers album]

This was a Christmas present. As you know, Selda is this Turkish protest singer from whom Finders Keepers have brought us this record as part of their Anatolian Invasion series. I will not lie to you, I already had this on vinyl, but it is great getting a copy of it on CD so that I can blast it onto Mr iPod. Just a reminder of how this record works – Selda herself sings and plays guitar (or maybe a Turkish guitar-like instrument more akin to a bouzouki or some such), but here she is joined by the cream of the 1976 Turkish musical scene. They play a variety of electric instruments and electronically treated versions of Turkish traditional instruments. The result should perhaps be an awkward mish-mash of styles, neither satisfyingly one thing nor the other, but it somehow all works creating a wonderful folk-psych hybrid all driven by Selda's powerful voice. My Turkish is non-existent, so I have no idea what she is protesting against, but I feel like I have been persuaded to join her in opposing it.

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more Selda image action

The Crazy Sounds of Finders Keepers

v/a Welsh Rare Beat Vol.2, v/a B-Music Cross Continental Record Raid Road Trip

These are both compilations of weirdo music on the Finders Keepers records label. The first is a collection of olde psych-folk music, from the Dyfed Triangle in Wales, all with Welsh language lyrics. This Dyfed Triangle area is one where people smoke lots of dope and eat lots of wild mushrooms; it is also well known as a location for visits by UFOs and interplanetary craft. The other record is to be grab-bag of crazy tunes from around the world. I particularly like the tune where the foreign guy goes on about "Heepees!" The first record was compiled by Andy Votel, Dom Thomas, and Gruff Rhys; in compiling the second, those three seem to have been joined by every psych scenesters in these islands. All of this music is great.

Two CDrs

v/a nlgbbbblth CD 09.04: Lamb to the Slaughter
v/a nlgbbbblth CD 09.03: Fruit of the Forest

These are two CD-Rs, both of exceptional quality.

The first one is a collection of British and Irish folk tunes, very enjoyable. The second is a bit more of a mix. Generally speaking I suppose one could class this as exotica, the kind of thing that would appear on a Finders Keepers compilation called something like A Curate's Egg. There are quite a few tunes here where light entertainment stars of yesteryear cover well-known tunes. I was rather struck by Pat Boone singing 'Song To The Siren'. With this song, one typically thinks of the famous versions sung by Tim Buckley or Liz Fraser (or even Brendan Perry). I therefore have assumed that this is someone where only a singer of the most incredible skill can even bother to try singing it. Boone is however a rather average singer, yet his version is very impressive. This is a good thing, it shows the song as having its own transcendent power. There is also an impressive tune by Cilla Black; it's easy to forget she started her career as a singer.

One odd thing here is the inclusion of 'Dancing In The Moonlight', by someone called Young Generation. So, not a Toploader original then?

image source

The Olympics: I was there

In an unlikely sequence of events, I found myself in London during the Olympic games. But I was not there for them, but rather for a number of cultural events. First up, I went to the Globe Theatre for a performance of Richard III, with Mark Rylance as the titular king. He played him as an evil version of Derek Jacobi in I, Claudius, the harmless differently abled person that everyone writes off until he is having you carted off to be executed. Richard is one of the great Shakespeare villains and it was impressive of Rylance to make him something other than a scenery-chewing monster.

Later that same day, I met some other people (who included my beloved) and went to see Selda playing in the Meltdown festival. The Turkish sensation was the reason we had come to London. If you are not Turkish then if you know Selda at all it will be from the reissue of her first album by Finders Keepers, or because people like me keep putting tracks by her onto CD-Rs. Her first album is an interesting record, in that it manages to effectively combine Selda's folkie-protest songs with an accompaniment that mixes Anatolian psych, early electronics and some traditional Turkish instruments. As previously noted, this kind of thing should not work but in that case it does.

The live concert repeats the same format, more or less. Selda sings, other musicians play keyboards, guitar, drums, and a saz, a Turkish instrument similar to the bouzouki or suchlike. Selda's voice still has it, she has not gone all softy rock or smooth jazz, her band are great, so it was all good.

What was funny, though, was how Turkish it all was. Particularly in London, when you are at some ethnic music show, there is always the question of whether the audience will primarily be Western hipsters or members of the particular ethnicity. At this one there were a lot of Turks present and if they were not the majority the event certainly felt like it was being primarily run for them. Selda yapped away onstage in Turkish between songs, cracking jokes that had her compatriots chortling and leaving us befuddled. And she played the songs so that they featured a lot of call and response stuff, which I and my fellow round-eyed devils found a bit confusing. They also waved Turkish flags from the stage, which some people may have found a bit disconcerting.

That all sounds like a moan, not at all, it was a big bag of fun for this cultural tourist.

We did quite like that the concert started and finished early, meaning that we were then able to go for pints to a divey spot called The Hole In The Wall with which our friend "Dave" had a certain familiarity. It is near Waterloo and serves troglodytes.

The next day my beloved and I saw Henry V in the Globe, in which King Henry V invades France and stuffs the French out of it. It seemed like a jolly business. At the end of the play they did what they always do in the Globe - the cast do a big dance number in lieu of the more normal kind of bowing actors are famous for. The actor who was playing the French princess Henry V marries seemed to step out of character and be really enjoying the dancing - and then I remembered, she is an actor, it is her job to project emotions that she may or may not be feeling.

We also visited the British Museum and, in the company of one Mad King Ken went for lunch in the famous Gaby's Deli. Their falafel sandwich proved to be as nice as promised.
Mark Rylance in Richard III image source

Henry V image source


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Dracula's Music Cabinet "The Vampires of Dartmoore"

This is a Finders Keepers record. And I have not listened to it yet, because it is on vinyl and the Panda Mansions record player has not been reconnected since we moved to our new abode. From looking at the sleeve, this seems to be a piece of German horror-erotica exploitation music by some library music session musos, a soundtrack to a non-existent film. The sleevenotes suggest that it might belong to the same universe as the wonderful Vampiros Lesbos/Sexadelic Dance Party record by Manfred Hubler, so I am hoping for good things here. The opening track is called 'The Torture Chamber of Dr. Sex*', draw your own conclusions.

*Or, as the Germans say, 'Die Folterkammer des Dr. Sex'

Live Music: White Hills / Twinkranes

I mentioned that I went to see the popular film Good Vibrations. When I left the cinema, I found myself brimming over with fondness for the world of live music, so I decided to go and see the a concert that night by White Hills and Twinkranes. This was in the Grand Social. And I went alone - that's how crazy for rock and roll I am.

Twinkranes are a local band. They used to comprise two members of a previous band called The Transformers, who may have been made up by advertisers to sell some kind of product and were most famous for having funny haircuts. This time round they had lost one of the funny haircut people and now were a two piece, comprising the blond haired guy who I kind of think of as Mr Twinkranes and another guy who lacked a distinctive coiffure. The blond guy played drums and did vocals while the other fellow did stuff with what looked like pretty old-school synthesisers. The music they make is interesting, treading a strange line between avant garde nonsense and impressive musoiness. By the end of their set I found myself thinking I should make the effort to see them again sometime and perhaps even check out their album on Finders Keepers.

White Hills are a three piece - a guy on drums, another guy on guitar and lead vocals and a woman on bass. The bassist has a slightly "hello sailor!" quality to her attire, wearing a fetching red suit with a rather short skirt and high red boots, while the guitarist looks like he might have wandered in from the set of a Tolkien adaptation. Their music is of the "yeow!" variety, so they serve up lots of psych-rocky stuff to us. They are pretty good and they do rock hard (particularly the lady bassist) but I ended up thinking that maybe they are only pretty good and not the truly amazing live band they aspire to be.

White Panda

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Glasgow records

So here are the records my beloved and I picked up in Glasgow. All purchased on CD, unless otherwise stated.

Monorail:
Es A Love Cycle
v/a La Belle Epoque: EMI's French Girls, 1965-1968
Shop Assistants Will Anything Happen
v/a Gather in the Mushrooms: The British Acid Folk Underground 1968-1974**
Mary Weiss (with the Reigning Sound) Dangerous Game** (vinyl)
v/a La Belle Epoque: EMI's French Girls, 1965-1968
Crystal Antlers Tentacles (vinyl, with free download)
v/a Planet Lollywood: The first wave of plugged-in pop at the Pakistani picture house (a Finders Keepers production)** (vinyl)
v/a Waking Up Scheherazade: Arabian Garage Psych Nuggets from the 60's and Early 70's** (vinyl)

Fopp:
Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan Sunday at Devil Dirt
Broadcast Tender Buttons

Oxfam:
U2 The Joshua Tree
U2 War
The Breeders Pod

Mysterious:
v/a Smalltown Superupersound On Fire (free with some magazine)

Further discussion of these records to follow in due course.

**My beloved bought this one

Haunted Landscapes: a Season of Folk Horror: part 2

I continue my account of trips to the Irish Film Institute, to see Folk Horror themed films being shown as part of their Haunted Landscapes season. Folk horror is a term coined by Mark Gatiss. You can read my account of the first set of these films here.

The second day of the season saw us in the IFI's smaller screen for a showing of Quatermass And The Pit (1967), a Hammer film version of the late 1950s TV series, both scripted by Nigel Kneale. Kim Newman introduced the film, about which he has written a book. Quatermass (a rocket scientist) finds himself investigating strange goings on when workers on an extension to the London Underground discover an unexploded bomb that turns out to be a spaceship older than humanity. There are shocking revelations and the release of long dormant powers.

When things come together in Hammer films they are the best things in the world: not schlocky or camp but genuinely unnerving. Everything comes together in this one, with the design, acting, scripting and direction all making this one of their greatest works. But is it folk horror? One might say no, arguing instead that this is horror science fiction in the Lovecraft mould, yet it still has a folk feel to it. The horror is very much located in a physical place, with the sense that the buried ship has had a malign influence on its surroundings since time immemorial (a trip to the library reveals that the area above it has been regarded as haunted and unhallowed as far back as there are records).

With this film I must particularly sing the praises of Barbara Shelley, a Hammer stalwart, who in this plays one of the archaeologists. She appears in a succession of amazing outfits that appear to have driven the colour coordination of the sets and astutely plays a role a world away from the screaming victim more commonly seen in Hammer films (often played by Ms Shelley). Hers is not the lead role but I did watch this wishing she had been given a fairer crack of the whip by film history.


The next film was the first I had not seen before, it being Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, a Czechoslovak film from 1970. Its Luboš Fišer soundtrack was re-released some years ago by Finders Keepers and became quite popular with people who like that kind of thing. Having listened to the record a good bit made for a strange experience finally seeing the film. It is a somewhat avant-garde work, described by Kim Newman as being exactly like Company of Wolves, except with vampires instead of werewolves. As such it falls into the world of films about teenage girls and their sexual awakenings. Valerie is menaced by shifty characters who try it on with her and who may or may not also be her close blood relatives. A sinister Nosferatu-like figure directs proceedings. Her grandmother may also be one of the vampires. Things happen, but it is not a plotty film. Instead it is a work of great beauty, with a wonderful combination of visual images and music.

But is Valerie and Her Week of Wonders folk horror? I fear not, but it would be churlish to complain about this rare opportunity to see this classic of obscure cinema.

Following that we found ourselves watching the third of the films that Mark Gatiss used to define the folk horror genre. It was The Blood on Satan's Claw, a 1970 film directed by Piers Haggard, made by the same production company as Witchfinder General, seen on the season's first day. This one is also set in days of yore (the 18th century or some such) and begins with a young yokel finding a strange looking hairy skull in a field while ploughing. He brings a grumpy old judge to investigate, but the skull has vanished, yet it soon transpires that Evil has descended upon the locality.

This one was introduced by Donald Clarke, Irish film critic. One of his interesting points was that the film is like a hippy dream gone bad. The servants of Satan in the film are the beautiful flower children, while it is ultimately The Man (the grumpy judge) who puts a stop to their shenanigans. For all that the cultists are murderers and rapists, they look far more like the good guys than Judge Establishment. There is a disturbing brutality to the judge defeating the cultists by laying into them with a big sword at the head of a mob of irate villagers.

This is a great film, managing a more straightforwardly disturbing tone than Witchfinder General and entirely lacking its sense of schlock. For all that the film features a Satanic monster gradually becoming more powerful, the real sense of menace is more psychological, either in the way that the young people are somehow turned by the Dark One or else appear to have their minds destroyed by exposure to the purity of evil. There is also an arbitrariness to the Dark One's ways: why does the lad who finds the skull in the first place remain unaffected by its power?

And is it folk horror? Well, there is not so much about folk practices but it is set in the English countryside and does feature folk, so I suppose it must be. Its eerie soundtrack is also reminiscent of music on the Mount Vernon Art Lab album The Séance at Hobs Lane.


The next film was Hammer classic The Devil Rides Out (1968), a black magic film adapted from the novel by Dennis Wheatley (with Richard Matheson writing the script). It has Christopher Lee playing the Duc de Richelieu, who discovers that a young friend has got mixed up with Satanism. Richelieu turns out to have made an extensive study of the Black Arts (while fortunately remaining resolutely on the side of righteousness), so he and another more square-jawed hero friend battle to save the impressionable young lad before it is too late. It is a film I have seen before and they showed the trailer before everything in the IFI recently, so it felt very familiar when I watched it. It is schlock but it is great schlock, with Lee delivering classic lines like "It's the Goat of Mendes - the Devil Himself!" as though he means them.

It is also striking how the film is pretty much about a battle of poshos against satanists, with most of the satanists also being poshos. Everyone seems to live in mansions and have armies of servants at their disposal. From having read the book the film is based on, this reflects well Wheatley's snobbish world view. Overall the film is an enjoyable romp: a good Hammer film but not necessarily the kind of thing enjoyed by someone not wedded to the Hammer aesthetic.

It is not particularly folk horror; in fact I fear that it is what members of the Folk Horror Revival community on Facebook refer to as "not strictly folk horror". There is nothing really about folk practices or traditional ways, with the film being more straightforwardly an example of gothic horror. So how did it make it into the season? Well, maybe there was a good print available, or maybe it makes for an interesting counterpoint with Blood on Satan's Claw in terms of how satanic forces are represented.


My account of the last films I saw in the Haunted Landscapes season can be read here.

For more on folk horror, see my account of A Fiend in the Furrows here and here.

image sources:

Kim Newman's Quatermass and the Pit book cover (Palgrave Higher Education)

Barbara Shelley (Magazines and Monsters)

Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (Wikipedia)

The Blood on Satan's Claw (Ferdy on Films)

The Goat of Mendes (21st Century Wire)

Jeff Mangum ATP Part 1: Executive Summary

I went to the recent All Tomorrow's Parties in Minehead, curated by Jeff Mangum. For the benefit of busy people I present these very brief accounts (23 words or less) of the artists I saw.

Matana Roberts & Sebastian Rochford: A jazz saxophonist roffler playing with winner of the ATP White Afro Competition 2012. Skronk-tastic and a great opener.

Young Marble Giants: Austere music from the post punk legends coupled with the guitarist's endearingly lame attempts at humour.

The Raincoats: The wrong kind of ramshackle. Songs too formless and tuneless even for the Under Fives Tin Drum Improv Orchestra. 'Lola' the only highpoint.

The Fall: An enjoyable performance, with the band now used to Mark E. Smith and his ways; but what did he say about Joanne Newsom?

Thurston Moore: Thurston solo is a bit Sonic Youth-lite. I wonder what or who that 'Queen Bee' song was about?

A Hawk And A Hacksaw: Faux folkies accompany a strange Soviet-era film about funny Ukrainians in a darkened room with invisible subtitles. Spectral.

Boredoms: Ten drummers and twenty guitarists, but are they really all that?

The Apples In Stereo: They play songs that sound like other people's songs.

Feathers: Art project all woman synth band fronted by Anastasia Dimou. Fascinating and worth further investigation.

Joanna Newsom: Impressive technique from the elfin sensation who is clearly not the idiot savant some might see her as. A slow burn.

Low: More sublime miserabilism from the Carter Family of our times. The only band to mention Syria. They invited everyone for a morning run.

Blanck Mass: I am not certain that I actually saw this band.

Mount Eerie: Quirky singer songwriter fellow with odd songs that sounded almost like works in progress and which ended very abruptly, whereupon he would curtsey.

Scratch Acid: The hardest rocking band to ever play ATP but not as interesting as that sounds.

Demdike Stare: Vaguely hauntological electronic music from Finders Keepers associates, combined with fascinating Apollo Rising type visuals.

American Contemporary Music Ensemble: By playing classical music at midday on Sunday they transported me back to the Hugh Lane Gallery. 'Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet'.

Boredoms: OK so maybe they are all that but still have not surrendered to them in the way my friends have.

Roscoe Mitchell: Old jazzer still has it.

Sun Ra Arkestra: More old (and some young) jazzers, this time space jazzers, who still have it.


Rafael Toral: Possibly analogue electronic post-free jazz improvisation or something unwisely scheduled at same time as the Arkestra. Interesting.

Tall Firs: Two rofflers who play guitars and sing songs. And whose fanzine talks about how Thucydides is freaking awesome.

Group Doueh: Desert guitars. Less trippy than on record, but Mr Doueh still awesome. Nice to see modestly dressed not thin women strutting their stuff.

All Star Jam: Various bands of the festival appear on stage together and serve up some crazy Arkestra-style space jazz. The right kind of ramshackle.

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Stereolab Live: in Tripod

I found myself facing a bit of a conundrum regarding the night Stereolab were playing, as there were two concerts by bands who have arguably seen better days on that night, with Electric 6 being the other one. I know that Electric 6 are not so kewl with the trend people these days, but they have made some of my most favourite tunes ever (as proven by science (or iTunes play counts)), so I felt like I owed them and was curious as to whether they still had it live or not. Stereolab, in contrast, are a band that I had grown a bit tired of, finding their recent live performances a bit dull and turgid. So – how did I find myself going to see Stereolab rather than Electric 6? Basically, I am a sociable fellow, and a good few of my pals were heading off to the Lab while no one was off to the Six (for my friends too are slaves to the kewl). So I joined them.

And actually, the Lab were great. Like really great. For a band I think of myself as following closely enough over the years, I was struck by how little of the stuff played I recognised, but this was not a problem – the motorik sounds of the Lab washed over me, and it was almost better that the tunes were largely anonymous.

This was my first time seeing the band since poor May Hansen was mashed by a truck. I had heard from some people that they had previously sounded a bit thin without her backing vocals, but this time round they just got one of the other musicians to replicate all her la la la las. Problem solved.

Another great thing about this gig was that Laetitia Sadier seems to have had some kind of personality transplant and is no longer annoying (or maybe the passage of time has made me more tolerant of other people's foibles). She has also become smokin' hot, with separation from Tim Gane obviously bringing out the saucy divorcee in her. For all that, she seems to have acquired an almost endearingly lame style of dancing from the Your Dad School of Boogie, though she did rock out in an amusing manner to 'French Disko'. One of my friends reckoned, meanwhile, that Tim Gane will shortly be appearing in ads for Tony Quinn's patent weight loss programme.

One thing that occurred to me in the course of the concert was that maybe their previously no-fun live appearances were a product of Tim Gane and Laeititia Sadier's relationship sliding into shite. I mean, it must be no fun being in a band with someone you are separating from.

Anyway, that's about the size of it. The concert was so great that I have dug up my old Stereolab CDs and listened to them again. And ripped them to the computer (apart from their best one, Transient Random Noise Bursts (With Announcements), which seems to not like computers). I have also considered posting on the interweb the review I wrote in form of a play many years ago when I first saw them play; it could be my tribute to the late Mary Hansen.

Audiencewatch: there were a lot of stinky people at this concert. Like, really stinky. I remember going to the bar at one point, only to be faced with a reek reminiscent of a meeting of the A.R.E. Weapons fan club. I wonder why this would be so. Stereolab do not strike me as the kind of band that soap dodgers would be drawn to, but the facts cannot be denied. Maybe the then cold weather (the gig was in the middle of an extreme cold snap) meant that a lot of people were not washing as much as usual, and then in the warm environment of the Tripod they were having to remove outer layers of clothing and release their musk to the world.

There was some kind of Finders-Keepers/B-Music night on upstairs after the concert, so we hung around for that and got all excited when Andy Votel played the Selda song. We also watched some plonkers try to balance beer glasses on their heads (with predictable consequences) and waited in vain for the DJs to play the "heepies" song from the Cross Continental Road Trip record. And so to bed.

The next day I listened to the Stereolab tour single I bought after the concert. It sounds like Stereolab.

image source

Bowlie 2: Sunday

I am writing about the recent(-ish) Bowlie 2 festival in Minehead, curated by Belle & Sebastian, the people who brought us the original Bowlie Weekender back in 1998. I have italicised the names of artists who played at the original festival.

On Sunday morning I dragged myself out of bed at some ungodly hour in order to catch some of Stevie Jackson's set. Steve "Action" Jackson is the guitarist, co-front man, and shy sex god from B&S, though we could not but notice that (like the rest of us) he has chubbed out a bit over the years. His solo stuff was amusingly whimsical – enjoyable to listen to but possibly not something you would ever bother spending money on, unlike some of the underappreciated classics he has written for B&S. However, I was unimpressed by the song he finished with, a song about popular artist Vincent Van Gogh that built up to a lamer pun that only works if you use the incorrect American pronunciation of the artist's name.

Folk sensation Vashti Bunyan was playing upstairs. As you know, she recorded one album back in the 1960s, no one bought it, and she dropped out of the music business to bring up children and stuff before being rediscovered and having a second career. She sings a bit shyly but is nevertheless an endearing stage performer with many attractive songs. She was also saying that this would be her last concert with her current band line-up, which I hope does not mean that she is going back into retirement.

After that we went into Minehead to meet people in a pub for lunch. Originally this was going to be a mini-Frank's APA meetup, but then someone who shall remain nameless remembered that his chalet mates were doing a hog roast for him, so he made his excuses and did not show up. The rest of us went to not to the nice pub in the CAMRA guide but the easy to find one in the harbour. However, we were informed that due to a spike in demand it would be an over an hour before we got any food, so we left too – much to the delight of the inbred yokels drinking there. We had a nice cream tea in a nearby tearoom, but this had the odd feature of not having toilet facilities available for customer use, which seemed like some kind of breach of health and safety regulations.

One anti-Minehead rant out of the way and we were back in the Butlins for more concert action. This time round we were in the swish upstairs venue for a concert by Ethio-jazz sensation Mulatu Astatqé. This was a considerably more satisfying concert than when we saw him playing with some other Ethiopian jazzers and the Either Orchestra in London. The Either Orchestra guy was slightly annoying, but tonight we had what seemed very much like Mulatu leading his own band. The upstairs venue was the perfect place for this, as we were able to sit at tables and sip cocktails while listening to that sophisticated Addis Ababa sound. For me this was very much one of the festival highlights.

And then The Vaselines. These were a band from back in the late 1980s fronted by a man (Eugene Kelly) and woman (Frances McKee) who used to make sexy time with each other. They recorded one album and then they split up, both musically and sexually. But now they are back together, at least for the music. In their first run The Vaselines were a pretty obscure outfit, but the passage of time means that they are now very well known as key players on the Glasgow indie scene, so they were playing at the festival on the largest stage and to a lot of people. I am not sure the change suits them, as they are very much a small venue kind of band, but they still managed to do the job.

Now, if you know the band on record you will know that some of the songs are a bit rude (e.g. 'Rory Ride Me Raw', various lyrics to other songs). Some of this works particularly because Frances McKee has the kind of voice you expect to hear singing nice folk tunes. They really played up to their saucy rep with their between song yap, with a great many allusions to their former sex lives with each other. It was all a bit much, frankly – these people are in their forties, so they have no business to be talking about bunga bunga. Small wonder that I saw several aghast and blushing sailors fleeing from the venue.

Laetitia Sadier probably did not go on about her sex life, although she was often singing in French so it is hard to be sure. The sometime Stereolab singer was playing solo, accompanying herself on guitar. I liked this a lot more than I thought I would – she seemed to have less of the hauteur that sometimes marred her appearance with her old band. Her guitar playing seemed a bit basic, but the uncomplicated lines seemed like a good minimalist accompaniment to her impressive voice.

And that, dear readers, was the last musical performance I saw at Bowlie 2. We have inexplicably turned against indie-pop stalwarts Camera Obscura so we did not stay to watch their set. There were other bands playing later (notably Them Beatles, a Beatles tribute act who were, I suspect, friends of people in the other bands or else people in the other bands moonlighting), but sitting in the chalet playing a train building game with my chalet-mates seemed a bit more appealing.

I did venture back to the venues to hear a bit of the Finders Keepers / B-Music DJs, playing where How Does It Feel? had been packing them out the night before. Their tunes were excellent, but sadly they were playing to almost nobody. There was another disco on in one of the other bars, playing tunes that could only be described as lamer faux alternative wankerboy music, but this one was completely rammed in a not particularly pleasant way, so we called it a night.

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