Diary Of A Nobody
Words: Alistair Fitchett
I've been making lots of tapes recently. Old stuff mainly, like The Chills,
Sneaky Feelings and Biff Bang Pow! My friend Hye Min, for whom the tapes
are made, tells me she has been playing "She Paints" on endless repeat
for NINE hours. She says non-stop. Which is scary for anyone, but especially
for a 16-year-old in 2002. Naturally I think this makes her an angel.
A weird scary angel, sure, but the wings are there nonetheless. You just
need to know how to squint in the sunlight. Also on the tapes is the first
Del Amitri album, which still sounds magnificent, and Friends Again, my
favourite Scottish post-Postcard group even though I knew it was deeply
unfashionable to say so. I remember the night I heard them, it was "Honey
At The Core" on Radio Clyde, and the DJ whose name I forget - I want to
say Billy Sloan but am pretty sure it wasn't - was caught out by the false
ending and said it sounded like David Bowie in the vocal department. I
was a fan from that moment on. The band's crowning glory appeared much
later, on the B-side of their swansong single "South Of Love", "Why Don't
You Ask Someone", with those lines about suede jackets being too old to
keep out the cold.
When Friends Again split, one singer, Chris Thompson, went on to form
The Bathers, whose debut "Unusual Places To Die" is a minor classic. It
features the line "She plays guitar like Tom Verlaine" (Verlaine produced
"Swallows In The Rain" on the only Friends Again album "Trapped And Unwrapped").
The other singer, James Grant, formed Love And Money who were largely
forgettable, although in the split second before lesser lights like Hue
And Cry, Wet Wet Wet and Deacon Blue made Glasgow famous for soulless
white boy funk, Love And Money and Hipsway made fragments of hard flamboyant
pop. Hipsway's "The Broken Years", in particular, was a hallucinatory
dance sensation of sweet guitar slashes, although I listened to it again
now maybe I'd think differently. That's the beauty of memory. It plays
magnificent tricks.
Other, more real, magnificent tricks have been performed by The Orchids who made records for the Bristol-based Sarah Records and were sadly stigmatised as being fey indiepop janglers by a music press that lusted after Rock with a capital "R". It was a great shame. Live, The Orchids could be laughably chaotic and pretty shambolic, or mind-blowingly sublime. I saw them in both lights, but of course the latter sticks. I remember dancing wildly to a punk rock "Caveman" and losing myself in a deliciously delirious "Something For The Longing".
All of The Orchids' records were magnificent. They still sound that way, especially on the second and third (and final) albums, "Unholy Soul" and "Striving For The Lazy Perfection", the latter being a stunning confection of beats and dance-inflected keyboards and sequencers that if it had been on a trendy label would have blown the charts apart, just like One Dove did a year before.
In 1995, The Orchids pretty much disappeared. Sarah label co-owner Matt Hayes rightly suggests that was a wonderful thing to do, in so far as we have not had to see them resurface in any embarrassing post-Britpop bands sullying reputations and memories in the process. Still, it's a minor tragedy that no one has reissued any Orchids material.
In the pipeline, however, are three CDs, very exciting news, from one of my favourite Factory bands - one of my favourite bands ever - Stockholm Monsters. I was once woken at three am one April morning in 1994 by a phone call from the USA from someone who'd read my fanzine and wanted to rave about the Monsters. The enthusiast was John Darnielle and I was thrilled because John's band Mountain Goats were favourites back then, so much so that I'd played a track from their "Beautiful Rat Sunset" 10-inch record in a school assembly a few months earlier. I don't remember the context now. I just wanted to play Mountain Goats in a high school assembly.
Mountain Goats are another band I've been revisiting, although I'd lost track of them for a while. I play a couple of old seven-inch singles, the "Zoopolite Machine" album and that wonderful 10-inch. Mountain Goats are essentially a single sound; the sound of great guitar battering and oddly magical melodies, recorded in what sounds like haste, recorded in what some used to call lo-fi and what Darnielle likes to call bi-fi. There are plenty of live Mountain Goats recordings available on the web. They're wonderful. Imagine listening to some odd academic singing songs about Roman governors, accompanied just by acoustic guitar and maybe a cheap electric organ and someone hitting cardboard boxes in an old coffee shop down in the old East Village; kind of like the ghost of Dave Van Ronk if he came from California and didn't have a deep growl, but a higher pitched stabbing whine instead. Think purity of mountain streams married to punk rock sensibility and maybe you're close. Or maybe you're a million miles off target.
Also filling me with rabid curiosity is the question of whether The White Stripes will storm the charts and enable Jack and Meg to become the bonafide pop sensation everyone has been predicting. Pop hasn't sounded this sharply, perfectly (de)formed since the Buzzcocks' and Ramones' two minute epiphanies, and that's some mighty recommendation.
Maybe next issue I'll listen to more "new releases". I wouldn't bank on it.