Some­body quite recently referred to this blog some­where and called me a ‘tastemaker’. I was rather taken aback…for a few rea­sons. Firstly I think tucked away in the wilds of rather iso­lated Sanur, Bali, my days to being a tastemaker are long behind me (although I’m not unaware, and appre­cia­tive of the fairly ded­i­cated lis­ten­er­ship I had in my years on 95bFm and George FM.…I’m quite proud of 19 years on Auck­land radio, but that’s kinda ancient his­tory now); sec­ondly it puts a bur­den on my shoul­ders that I don’t nec­es­sar­ily want to have..hell I’ve just played the music I like..nothing more, noth­ing less; and finally, as you get older you do tend to find your­self reach­ing back­wards more and more, and it’s a tough call to be a tastemaker when you are look­ing back­ward.… but I see that as the luck, or joy of hav­ing had forty years of musi­cal explo­ration to delve back into.

With that thought, espe­cially the last bit, in the back of my mind I’m always wary of writ­ing too much about ‘old’ records, or ‘old’ artists.

That of course is stu­pid and the thought only crosses my mind for a brief inse­cure moment, but it was accen­tu­ated by a com­ment I read some­where about those aging Pub­lic Address com­men­ta­tors who try and pre­tend they are still hip!. Per­haps that is me, as I’ve been known to com­ment on PA from time to time…but once again com­mon sense rears it’s pro­tec­tive head and raises a big finger.

So with that in mind (or cast out of my mind) let me say some­thing about three records that I’m lik­ing quite a lot right now.

My friend Danielle emailed me and said she’d not really much liked the new-ish (we old folk remem­ber when a record was still new 6 months after release, now you have a week’s grace before it’s passé) Elvis Costello album, the oddly named Momo­fuku (some­thing to do with instant noo­dles I think). I replied and agreed, but noted that I really liked the first and last tracks, so that at least was some­thing. Then some­thing happened..at the gym of all places. Elvis clicked on the cross-trainer and I feel in love with Momofuku.

I’ve had a strange decade with Elvis Costello. I’ve always been a huge fan, ever since I’d heard Less Than Zero on a Stiff Records sam­pler many years ago, but since the mid nineties it’s not been easy as he careers around gen­res, some­times embar­rass­ingly pre­ten­tiously, and some­times with mixed, rather wooden results. Through­out all that I’ve been quite loyal and there have been moments, such as the alt-countryish The Deliv­ery Man, his last ‘proper’ album, from 2004. But the road for an Costello-phile has not been smooth.

Which is why this album is such a pleas­ant sur­prise and even more so when it hit me with­out warn­ing that morn­ing on that bloody cross-trainer.

As an aging punk, it’s a plea­sure to say Momo­fuku is his most punk album since…well since This Years Model, if you will. What does that mean?…not much to most I guess as the term ‘punk’ was usurped years ago and he was never totally accepted by the unwashed gob­bing masses, but to many of us he encap­su­lated the ethos of the times more than most lat­ter day three chord won­ders. Punk was sup­posed to raise a fin­ger and be smart at the same time and Elvis was just that.

So unpre­ten­tiously for the first time in many years, he snarls and vents his way around songs like the sear­ing Amer­i­can Gang­ster Time and the mighty opener No Hid­ing Place.

I’ll hand­ing some­body a box of matches / and car­ry­ing the can of kerosene

He hasn’t sounded this bru­tally con­vinc­ing or this ven­omously melodic for decades. And he tosses in cute lit­tle throw­aways like Harry Worth which work because they hold together the album as a whole

Unlike the Tou­s­saint col­lab­o­ra­tion or his last ‘rock’ out­ing, When I was Cruel. His vocals don’t sound strained, they don’t sound uncom­fort­ably placed in strange surroundings.

And unlike those ear­lier albums, this is the sound of a guy who has noth­ing to prove. On When I Was Cruel, and The Deliv­ery Man he felt like was des­per­ately try­ing to prove he still mat­tered, and on The River In Reverse he was try­ing to prove he could stand next to Allen Tou­s­saint (miss­ing the point: he can, but only on his own terms, as Elvis Costello, not Tou­s­saint, and he shouldn’t need to try but I guess part of what he is, is that he does).

More please.

And more Paul Weller not try­ing to sound like a work­man rocker and get­ting his sense of humour, & sense of adven­ture back again as he seems to have done with 22 Dreams. Whereas Elvis needs to be less pre­ten­tious, Paul needs more of it. He was always at his best when being an obnox­ious pre­ten­tious magpie..like the for­ever per­plex­ing but always engag­ing Style Coun­cil or the best Jam albums where his influ­ences were obvi­ous but mutated through Paul’s self obsessed lense.

Hap­pily the ever so slightly pre­ten­tious Paul Weller is back and the glum rocker of recent years cast aside, and even if he misses ever so often (God is a huge miss) at least he has some edge again.

No-one could ever accuse Den­nis Wil­son of not hav­ing edge but his prob­lem was, like brother Brian, he sim­ply walked too close to it. I bought Pacific Ocean Blue in 1977 when it was first issued. I think I was one of per­haps a dozen who both­ered in New Zealand as it sat on the shelf oppo­site the till in the shop I was work­ing in as i tried to sell it, with­out luck, to count­less folk. The Beach Boys had long since stopped sell­ing beyond the hits col­lec­tions (even the gig I attended on a sunny after­noon in Auckland’s West­ern Springs around the same time was only sparsely attended..although the day’s after­math is well doc­u­mented as a Den­nis Wil­son burn out, and Brian was so wasted he walked off the stage mid song and didn’t return). The last thing that was going to set New Zealand’s charts on fire was an intro­verted selec­tion of songs from the drum­mer, even if his name was Wilson.

I fell in love with POB on release. And even­tu­ally quite a few boys did…girls never warm to The Beach Boys post surf, and rarely before, they are mostly a male thing….enough to push it into the lower reaches of the US album chart and guar­an­tee its rep­u­ta­tion as a lost mas­ter­piece (since then it’s been largely unavail­able for decades with one brief CD issue in 1991, although plen­ti­ful bootlegs). But now it’s back, in a beau­ti­ful dou­ble pack­age (the sec­ond album is an unre­leased, and also much boot­legged, sec­ond solo album..it was unre­leased for a rea­son, so I’m gonna stick to CD1) and thirty years on it still sounds as dark, con­fused, ragged, hope­ful and beau­ti­ful as it did back then. And the mood of course is tinted fur­ther by the events of the years after and Den­nis Wilson’s death…but then The Beach Boys’ his­tory is one of the more tragic in the rock’n’roll story-book.

It’s not all wonderful…there are gri­mace moments, like the ‘save my rock’roll’-isms of What’s Wrong. How­ever that’s The Beach Boys..every album has those moments. But mostly Pacific Ocean Blue stands up as one of the few high­points in the post 1976 Beach Boys cat­a­logue (non of which appear under the BB name). And it’s rep­u­ta­tion is justified.…if you’re a boy.

I know a car­pen­ter who had a dream / Killed the man but you couldn’t kill the dream / Who said it was easy

Some­times I need a warm cosy record. Some­times I need a com­fort­ing old slab of plas­tic. All this new music is all very well, but now and again one needs to turn up the vol­ume and sing along to tunes that marked an era, or pro­vided the sound­track to a time in one’s life that may or may not have been as rosy as you now remem­ber it.

With that in mind.….

Item 1: Recently I redis­cov­ered Mas­sive Attack’s first album. When Blue Lines was first released I knew the band, mostly because of the sin­gle Any Love, which had been a minor anthem for us at The Siren over the sum­mer of 88/89, and par­tially because of the rep­u­ta­tion the Bris­tol move­ment had with the sim­i­larly dub infused cen­tral Auck­land scene of the time.

So in Lon­don I latched on to the album the day it hit the shops. I bought it from Blue­bird, in Berwick St and it came in an over­sized card­board sleeve, which I still have, under the name of just ‘Massive’…it was felt that the word ‘attack’ might be offen­sive to some dur­ing the gulf war (we’d just flown through LA which was fes­tooned in giant yel­low rib­bons). And I loved it imme­di­ately. But it was one of those records that I played intently for a year or two and have never really gone near it again since…until last week when I found a copy and it all flooded back. This record didn’t seem that rad­i­cal at the time..it came in the midst of a swag of mid tempo British records that began a few years ear­lier with Soul II Soul and Smith & Mighty. But it was Mas­sive Attack who took that uniquely Jamaican infused Anglo-Soul and ran with it.

Item 2:

Gra­hame Greene, Mex­ico, Catholi­cism, blah, blah. That, in the pop world, makes you lit­er­ary, because you’ve read a book and want peo­ple to know it by drop­ping all the names. In other peo­ple I would find it intol­er­a­ble. I let myself get away with it because the music and over­all effect is usu­ally OK

Paddy McAloon, 1985.

I’d almost for­got­ten Pre­fab Sprout’s lovely Steve McQueen. It sits in a shelf, on  vinyl, in a stor­age facil­ity in Auck­land. But, oh, how I loved that record at one time. Paddy McAloon’s swirling, just on the right side of twee, songs, could almost be described as slight but instead were sim­ply under­stat­edly lovely. I was reminded of the album by a thread in a recent forum and hunted down a dig­i­tal copy. And twenty five years later it still makes me swoon; it’s still as lovely as ever.

How does one for­get a record like this? One day I’ll get around to check­ing his other records, but around 1986 I found myself side­tracked from albums like this and it took me a decade or so to get back there again

Item 3: And the side­track­ing included the works of Nick Lowe as an artist (although not as a pro­ducer). Once upon I was a com­pletist, with all the Stiff and Radar releases, and pretty much all the Brins­ley Schwartz stuff. I loved his work and saw him live with Rock­pile at some god for­saken venue in Syd­ney. Then I lost track, only to be bought back to Nick by a glow­ing review of a mid noughties album. And so, with some plea­sure I acquired the recent remas­ter of his, obvi­ously classic-to-be even in 1978, debut Jesus of Cool (renamed, as was the Pre­fab Sprout, for sen­si­tive Amer­i­cans: Nick’s became Pure Pop For Now Peo­ple; Sprout’s became Two Wheels Good) a month or so ago.

Suf­fice to say, three decades on (god, it really has been that long), Jesus of Cool remains the mas­ter­piece it seemed at the time of its orig­i­nal release. It’s wry par­o­dies of then con­tem­po­rary pop which stand on their own unlike many such par­o­dies, and it’s often hilar­i­ous lyri­cal twists still work. And it remains a pro­duc­tion mas­ter­piece (with the addi­tion of an extra ten tracks, some of which accu­rately fore­cast Nick’s later move into a gen­tle­manly coun­tri­fied craftsman.

Iron­i­cally, despite the fact it was lost for years, Jesus of Cool remains one of the 70s great trea­sures from a decade that pro­duced quite a few.

Can we have Labour Of Lust next please?

In the interim, here are a cou­ple of videos. The first is the pro­ducer as pop star, com­plete with squeal­ing girls, with a track from that sec­ond album (in bouncy demo form on the JOC remas­ter), the sec­ond is per­haps the worst exam­ple of lip sync ever, albeit with one of JOC’s more sub­lime moments.

Item 4: I saw Miles live twice. Both were in the eight­ies and they were noisy, tough, abra­sive gigs. What I wouldn’t have given to see Miles in his space period.

Then, that’s a silly term as I guess his whole life defined space in music, even when he was at his most intense. But for me the term means one thing: In A Silent Way. How I came to this record is still a mys­tery to me but I’m guess­ing it was an out­growth of the likes of the Hen­drix I was lik­ing a lot circa 1972 (I was late to him but over 1970–72 I was addicted to Jimi mov­ing from the ear­lier UK stuff through to things like Band of Gyp­sies). I always think of Jimi and Miles together in a way. Jazz wasn’t a thing I’d been exposed to at all in my life, but this album sim­ply bewitched me and took me on a path which meant that by the punk era I’d as likely go home to Sketches of Spain as I would The Ramones.

But, despite the var­i­ous Colum­bia box sets and the mass of live sets I’d buy over the years, I didn’t ever find myself acquir­ing this in any dig­i­tal for­mat, instead I wore my orig­i­nal CBS NZ issue down until it prob­a­bly had a flat EQ register.

Then I found it again in Sin­ga­pore a few weeks back, lov­ingly remas­tered for a silly price, in a lit­tle store under­neath one of those soul­less malls which pop­u­late that island state.

So now I find myself rev­el­ling in the ten­sion and space that is the majesty of Miles, Wayne Shorter, Joe Zaw­inul, Chick Corea, Her­bie Han­cock, John McLaugh­lin, Dave Hol­land and Tony Williams.

This time it stays. They all do.