"William Burroughs, Ken Kesey, Jack Kerouac, Camus; all books were just as exciting to us as records, there wasn't much difference." - Richey Edwards, 1991
A treat for fans of early Primal Scream, a complete
live show from ULU around the time of their debut album, the marvellous Sonic Flower Groove. Showcasing most of
that record, plus a Shadows of Knight cover, Bobby Gillespie and co flippity-flop
behind their fringes in full-on Byrdsian mode complete with John Martin
employed to bash a tambourine large enough for a warbling young Boaby to use as a hula-hoop,
if he'd the strength.
1. Big Jay McNeely and his Band – ‘Psycho Serenade’ (1959)
On the appropriately named Swingin’ label, Little Sonny
Warner takes the lead vocal and battles against creaking doors, laughing
gibbons, general nuttiness and jittery rhythms on this madcap 45.
2. Little Ann – ‘Deep Shadows’ (1967)
Sounds like in was recorded in a Detroit tin shack but
Little Ann’s truly stunning vocal will stop you in your tracks and tear
straight to your heart. Phenomenal and rightly something of a belated classic.
3. Art Butler – ‘Soul Brother’ (1968)
The name might not be familiar but Artie Butler had a
hand in a humongous number of hits from ‘Leader Of The Pack’, ‘Chapel Of Love’,
‘Solitary Man’ to ‘What A Wonderful Life’ and beyond. Here he lets loose on the
Hammond for surely the funkiest, grooviest go-go few minutes of his career.
4. Slim Harpo – ‘The Hippy Song’ (1969)
“Let me tell you
something, long hair don’t make you bad”. Check out old Slim here rooting
for the hippies and sticking it to the high society moneymen shortly before he
died. “It’s wasn’t those long-haired hippies who killed the president”. Go
Slim!
5. Kim Fowley – ‘Animal Man’ (1968)
A white-knuckle magic carpet ride over a zoo of lunatics.
From Fowley’s Outrageous LP.
6. Lee Hazlewood – ‘Wait and See’ (1968)
The way Hazlewood sings “It’s gonna be all right, wait and see” must rank as one of the most
soothing examples of the recorded voice ever made.
7. Alice Clark – ‘Charms of the Arms of Love’ (1972)
“The pulse of time
makes a terrible noise”, unlike the noise Ms Clark makes on this
marvellous, strident slab of jazzy soul. (Note: if searching on Spotify it’s
marked up incorrectly, so you'll need the one tagged as ‘Hard Hard Promises’).
8. Julius Brockington – ‘Forty-Nine Reasons’ (1973)
Brockington was the hip organist but it’s Steve Turner’s
funky flute that steals the show on the spacey closing track on The United Chair.
9. Felt – ‘Ballad of the Band’ (1986)
Lawrence goes full-on ‘Positively 4th Street’ Dylan/Al
Kooper on this smash miss single from 1986.
10. The Greek Theatre – ‘Stray Dog Blues’ (2016)
From a new three-track 7-inch EP by Swedish combo who caused gentle ripples of delight from sensitive souls with Lost Out At Sea a couple of years ago. 'Paper Moon' is the lead track but it's this one which does it for me. Not so much stray dog blues but sleeping cat curled under the shade of the tree with a butterfly circling its head. Delicate, warm and beautiful. Available as part of Sunstone Records super-limited 150 Series. Get in quick.
The organ bursting into flames depicted on Paul Orwell Presents Organized Blues won’t
win any award for design but amply illustrates what’s inside the sleeve of
Orwell’s latest album; the dozen tracks baked to the heavy vinyl of his second
LP will singe the ears and limbs of unprepared listeners.
Last year’s spectacular debut Blowing Your Mind Away covered much ground – from Spectoresque pop
to freakbeat phantoms – but here Orwell, mindful of his claim to be an artist
rather than genre, takes a different approach and serves up a whole LP of fiery
instrumentals.
When creating an album of instrumentals there can be a
temptation to make it like an imaginary film soundtrack with different moods
conjuring open-top sports cars coasting around the alps, a love scene, a chase,
a fight and the obligatory club scene. Not so here as Orwell goes straight to
the club scene and keeps the dancefloor packed for the duration. It’s
breathless stuff, played at a frenetic pace, causing old studio engineers in
white lab coats to pull out what remains of their hair as Orwell records
everything into the red. More organ! Louder! More!
‘Don’t Do As I Do (Just Do As I Say)’ sets the pace, teetering
on the very edge of distortion until a guitar solo sears through the track; ‘The
Wild Walk’ is the sound of go-go dancers jiggling down the street; ‘Grave
Robber’ is ‘C.C. Rider’ rode on the fastest horse out of town; ‘Ten Pieces of
Ice’ could be the Prisoners playing ‘In The Midnight Hour’ after mainlining amphetamines;
‘Stiletto’ might’ve been how Booker T. & the MGs would’ve played with pointy
heels stamping on their toes; and ‘Action’ is Memphis Soul Stew brought to the
boil. And that’s simply half of it.
Like a budding Alan Hawkshaw, Paul Orwell has created the
soundtrack to the hottest, most swingin’ party imaginable. Warning: please
ensure all combustible material is stored in a safe place for the duration of
this record. Paul Orwell’s on fire.
Paul
Orwell Presents Organized Blues is out now on Heavy Soul Records. Vinyl only. Very few copies left so be quick!
In the introduction to Sick On You, Andrew Matheson’s account of the trials and tribulations
of The Hollywood Brats, his early 70s band who in poverty and cocktail dresses
flirted with success only for success to ungraciously slam the door on their
lipstick smeared faces, he outlines, on the very first page, the unbreakable
rules for a rock ‘n’ roll band.
In summary, (1) The band should have four or five
members; (2) The singer sings. “That’s it. If the singer can’t think what to do
with himself during a bandmate’s solo he should consider a career as a bank
teller”; (3) This is an important one. “Great hair, straight hair, is a must
and is non-negotiable. If a member starts going thin on top put an ad in Melody Maker immediately”; (4) No facial
hair. “Jerry Garcia is no sane, recently showered girl’s idea of a pin-up”; and
(5) No girlfriends. “Two words: Yoko and Ono”.
This was 1971 but those rules should still be adhered to.
I bristle with discomfort every time Shindig!
magazine feature a beard on their front cover, which is all too frequently. So,
naturally, I felt a huge sense of kinship with the Brats and Matheson’s ideals
which increased throughout the book when he envisaged the band thus: “The sound
we hear in our joint 45rpm cerebral cortex is a guitar with six Vietnamese
razor-wire strings played by a great-looking madman whipped on by a rhythm
section playing at blitzkrieg speed behind a mouthy vocal screeching the
gospel.” Sign these boys up!
Only no one did sign them up. Well, that’s not entirely
true, they were signed but not to a record company headed by their hero Andrew
Loog Oldham’s mate as they thought - contracts? Pah! Who reads those? – but to
a production company who although got the band recording an album at Olympic
Studios, following in the Stones’ snakeskin boot-steps with photographs by
Gered Mankowitz to match, were in fact a business run on behalf the Krays whose
incarceration was a mere inconvenience. A fact which scared any and every prospective
record label in the land to say no quicker than if they’d been asked if they’d
called Ronnie a fat poofter.
Not that the total lack of success (if you discount the
563 copies of their LP which belatedly limped out in Norway after the band had
disintegrated) makes Matheson’s book any less engaging. Far from it: the
disasters and mishaps; the eels and the rats; the broken teeth and broken locks;
the Detol and the dogs; and the shoulder rubbing with a motley crew of friends
and foes only adds to the frankly ludicrous story. Oh, I nearly forgot, The
Hollywood Brats’ music did, on occasion, like their anthem-that-never-was ‘Sick
On You’, deliver everything they dreamed about. Seething, searing, rock ‘n’
roll that grabs ya by the balls and gives them an almighty squeeze.
The Walthamstow Rock & Roll Book Club is a marvellous
thing. It’s not a traditional book club in the sense people read a nominated
work and then sit around in a knitting circle dissecting it, rather it’s run by
Mark Hart, a Fall fanatic and local music nut, who takes it upon himself to
lure authors to travel to the end of the tube network to talk about their creation.
Recent guests have included Stuart Cosgrove, Luke Haines, David Hepworth, Bob
Stanley and Kevin Cummins. It’s held upstairs in Waterstone’s bookshop but
bafflingly they do very little, if anything, to promote it. There’s not even a
chalkboard mention outside or felt-tip scrawled poster Sellotaped to the
window. By the time the events begin the shop is shut and those who haven’t
been previously are put through an initiation test whereby they have to peer
through the locked glass-door and give the last remaining member of staff,
Simon, a discreet raised eyebrow and slight nod of the head before he unlocks
the castle and escorts them up the stairs where chairs are set up, plastic cups
of wine issued, and badges freely distributed.
As well as being master of ceremonies and gregarious
interviewer Mark always asks for suggestions for who he should invite into the
fold. My brilliant idea, a few months back, was Andrew Matheson and despite
Mark, like the vast majority of the population, having heard of neither the
author or his band, read the book and was similarly convinced Andrew would make
an entertaining visitor. A spot of skulduggery and jiggery-pokery later and
with a deluxe two-CD edition of the Hollywood Brats recordings issued by Cherry
Red and a new edition of the paperback out on Ebury (both entitled Sick On You) needlessly cluttering shop
shelves, Andrew was back in the ‘Stow for the first time since the Brats
rehearsed here in ‘73 and watched the New York Dolls (“philosophical allies
aligned against all the dinosaurs of this world”) on the Old Grey Whistle Test
in a nearby tower block.
For over an hour Andrew chatted to Mark, who made a grand
job of keeping him more or less under control, and then answered audience
questions. Andrew was every bit as funny, opinionated, stylish, roguishly
charming and spotlight-hungry as readers of his book would expect. You can
watch for yourself below as the story of unfolds of working in the Canadian
mines, coming back to Britain, boshing Freddie Mercury in his knashers, and
linking the Andrew Loog Oldham Immediate Records period to the Malcolm McLaren
and Sex Pistols/Clash one. “Malcolm said ‘Sick On You’ and t-shirts were the
future. I underestimated him.” Andrew had little praise for any band other than
the Kinks and remains true to his original template. When asked what he thought
of the MC5 he shouted for security to remove the questioner. “The hair! The
perm! Remember the rules: straight hair!”
Afterwards Andrew signed some books, had photographs
taken - “let me put my sunglasses back on first” - and even joined most of the
audience over the pub (the pub the Krays firm hot-footed it to, eager to get
off their own manor, straight after the murder of George Cornell in
Whitechapel, there's no escape Andrew...) for a beer and natter about Shadows of Knight LPs and Vox teardrop
guitars before his driver, circling the mean streets of E17 in a two-year old
Merc, collected him and whisked him home. Quite what Matheson has been doing
for most of the in-between years, apart from carpentry, building a house and
writing the soundtrack for a trucking movie circa 1980, he kept close to his
chest.
A natural raconteur and utter gentleman throughout, it was noticeable how
Andrew made a point of personally introducing himself and saying goodbye to
everyone individually, and one obviously enjoying every second of this fresh,
unexpected wind of discovery. Rock and roll missed out on a great character in
the 70s but with a BBC documentary and major film to come (“It’ll be shit,” stated
Mark Hart to the general agreement of everybody present) the Hollywood Brats’
time is perhaps still to come. During discussion in the pub about a reformation
he was fairly non-committal, saying they’d turned down lucrative offers. It
would have to be good I suggested. “No, it’d have to be better than good. My
standards are up here…” said Andrew, raising an extravagantly lacy and over-sized
shirt cuff to the ceiling.
For details of the
Walthamstow Rock & Roll Book Club follow them on Twitter or find them on
Facebook.
See also this Andrew
Matheson interview by my good mate Long John McNally for Eye Plug.
Many thanks to Mark Hart and, of course, Andrew Matheson.
Just Like A Woman
was Robert Fuest’s debut as a film director, sandwiched between his work on The
Avengers where, as an employee of ABC, he worked as a production designer from
1961 before returning after his film to direct eight episodes starring Linda
Thorson as Steed’s latest partner to arrival seconds too late to prevent a string of bizarre murders.
Just Like A Woman - starring future Butterfly, Wendy Craig, and soon-to-be voice of Captain Scarlett, Francis Matthews, as a sparring television industry couple
whose marriage has broken down - with its art deco and pop art design, cutting
edge architecture, cusp of mod-into-swirly fashions, loopy characters and
directorial quirks it couldn’t be more height
of ‘66 if it tried; like the world didn’t exist before and wouldn’t after.
Fuest wrote the screenplay, directed it and even wrote song lyrics for the
film, released to minimum acclaim in early '67.
This recognisable style of Fuest’s was later apparent in The Abominable Dr Phibes (1971), with a
suitably over-the-top Vincent Price out for revenge on a string of doctors who
failed to save his wife’s life (very-Avengers storyline), but a better film
and one with even more Avengers-related credits (screenplay by Brian Clemens
and Terry Nation, produced by Albert Fennell and Terry Nation, music by Laurie
Johnson, directed by Fuest) is And Soon
The Darkness (1970). Stripped of garish sets and light-hearted fun, this
straight, minimalist thriller is set in rural France where two holidaying girls
on bicycles are followed by a mysterious French mod bloke on a Lambretta SX150,
when one girl (Frank Spencer’s Betty, Michelle Dotrice) disappears…
Back to Just Like A
Woman, it’s not the greatest film you’ll ever watch but visually it’s a
treat and packed with fab little scenes and details. See full film below.
