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

I really liked the Pet Sounds story in the (I think) Decem­ber issue of Mojo mag­a­zine. Mojo is like a warm cud­dly blan­ket for me at times. It has lots of rather well writ­ten sto­ries about artists that I used to like a lot (and many I didn’t, and for that mat­ter, some I still do) and usu­ally does lit­tle more than refresh things in my mind that I’ve already read before over the years. I truly believe there is noth­ing more of any real inter­est to me that can really be said about (or by, in some cases) The Bea­t­les, or indeed Jimi Hen­drix, or, you might think, The Beach Boys.

Its con­tem­po­rary cov­er­age bores the hell out of me. Like it’s clas­sic cov­er­age is over­whelm­ingly white rock­ist (and those black artists it cov­ers are the “accept­able” vari­ety like Aretha…it’s as if hip hop exists in a par­al­lel uni­verse and the musi­cal rev­o­lu­tions of the last twenty years didn’t hap­pen). The sort of com­fort­able, vaguely rootsy acts that it praises, with­out excep­tion I think, put me to sleep. I still like to be chal­lenged by a new record and I cer­tainly don’t get that from the likes of The Magic Num­bers or Rufus Wain­wright, who, to be hon­est, I find tedious. They’re just not me….each to their own…..but I have trou­ble con­vinc­ing myself that the suc­ces­sor to this mag­a­zine will be fea­tur­ing some­one like that in 2027. Chances are of course, I’m wrong, and it might be that gen­er­a­tion gap hik­ing up on me again. But I don’t think so…the kids don’t want to hear a bunch of acts that sedate older folks like because they sound like some­thing they might’ve liked 25 years ago…without any notice­able edge.

But the Beach Boys story was, to use a com­fort­able word, nice. I’d read most of what was revealed in it a dozen times or more (my favourite Brian Wil­son story still remains the one Nick Kent, per­haps Britain’s great­est music writer, included in his col­lec­tion, The Dark Stuff), and the story of the album, its record­ing and its after­math, is now the stuff of rock’n’roll folk law, but it was pleas­antly put with the odd rather quirky quote. I liked it a lot. What I espe­cially related to was the contemporary-ness of Brian, with Al Jar­dine, the only other remain­ing Beach Boy worth think­ing about (I was think­ing the other day I’d not heard Mike Love’s name used with­out the adjec­tive odi­ous pre­ced­ing it for some years now), per­form­ing Pet Sounds live for the last time.

The very last time, or at least that’s the story, but, as we know, with all things rock’n’roll, never say never.

I love Brian Wil­son. I’ve never met him, but was within a breath of doing so a few years back. A friend, a mutual Wil­son fanatic had the man bang­ing on his door want­ing to come in…but was out. He said he’d have called me on the quiet to drop by……that’s sadly beside the point though, although I’ve thought about it often.…you would wouldn’t you.…

But, lis­ten to the pound­ing beat (very Wreck­ing Crew) slid­ing into and under the vocal ahhhs of Don’t Worry Baby’s open­ing moments; or the lay­ered har­monies of ‘till I Die, which float on top of, and drift away from each other like a soft swell, and if you can hon­estly tell me that this man wasn’t sent by some higher force to create…its almost enough to give an old cynic some reli­gion.

What really moved me in Mojo was the pho­to­graph of Brian (which I can’t find online so the above will suf­fice), and the thought of this grand old man (who really isn’t that old of course, I’m talk­ing in white rock terms), a sur­vivor, who in all rea­son should not have sur­vived, play­ing his grand opus one more time before he leaves it for­ever. And I started think­ing about the pass­ing of a guard. Two really…..the icons of the six­ties are slowly begin­ning to shuf­fle away, if not pass­ing on, at least wind­ing down their activ­i­ties or at least find­ing them­selves in a place when such is being rea­son­ably con­sid­ered. And the rock icons of the sev­en­ties, the young rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies, are not pass­ing as such (although we lost Joe), but, unlike the six­ties icons, becom­ing less and less rel­e­vant to the mod­ern world. The sev­en­ties heroes never really ful­filled their poten­tial, and, per­haps the excep­tion of Elvis Costello & Paul Weller, nobody else from that era really man­aged to extend their sell by date. I mean, look at Robert Smith or Siouxsie Sioux, both ade­quately described as par­o­dies of them­selves twenty five years on. Sad but true.

And just to clar­ify before some­one screams Kraftwerk or Al Green at me, I’m talk­ing gui­tar, bass, drum, rock’n’roll.

For those of my gen­er­a­tion it’s a strange place to be. I’ve lived with names like Jag­ger, Dylan, Town­shend, Page, Won­der and McCart­ney all my life. That’s not to say I’ve liked every­thing they done, not at all, quite the oppo­site in fact. And, I’d be glad if all of the above didn’t make another record (with the excep­tion McCart­ney who redeemed him­self totally with his last album), or at least one I didn’t have to hear. The same goes for David Bowie, once one of my heroes…still actually…but I’d be hap­pier if there wasn’t yet another hailed-as-returning-to-form album…its been twenty six years since Scary Mon­sters, his last long­player to get excited about. To be hon­est there is vir­tu­ally noth­ing from any of the above I’ve liked since about 1980. But the point is, they still held their iconic sta­tus largely intact…and the fact that there are few heirs to that sta­tus might have a lit­tle bit to do with col­laps­ing CD sales.

So no, its not about the fact that these peo­ple will not, for much longer, be mak­ing records, I guess its more about me, and what the pass­ing off the scene of these, still in my mind, youth icons actu­ally means to me, and my life. The Wil­son story as much as any­thing was a whoa moment for me…

And I sup­pose it’s also a great deal of dis­be­lief as to how long these peo­ple have retained some sort of rel­e­vance. The Bea­t­les wiped just about every icon out of the pub­lic con­scious­ness in 64, but, and a it’s a mea­sure of how lit­tle the punk icons I men­tioned ear­lier actu­ally achieved, the big bang of 76 was barely noticed by the six­ties rock giants.

I don’t really know what this post has to do with anything…it just hit me….I think I’m rambling…

Ten songs for today, old, new, and not quite so new…this is the way it flowed on the iPod at the gym today…hard to fault really and noth­ing to do with me….blame prov­i­dence or some­thing like that…

1. Claude Von­stroke – Who’s Afraid of Detroit (Paul Wool­ford mix)…I have to admit I’ve had this for a month or three but not really lis­tened to it as it really got lost in a rush of new things around that time….which is sur­pris­ing because the orig­i­nal is such a big record for me. Dirty, punky, wob­bly, lay­ered techno that drags you around for over twelve min­utes tak­ing you on quite a jour­ney, espe­cially when the tread­mill is seem­ingly drag­ging you for­ward ever faster…which goes absolutely per­fectly with…
2. Siouxsie & The Ban­shees – The Stair­case (mys­tery) (Poly­dor 1979)….an almost pro­to­typ­i­cal techno record in my ever so hum­ble opinion…the way the almost unreal elec­tric gui­tar slith­ers vio­lently from speaker to speaker, with the dou­ble hand­claps accen­tu­at­ing the col­li­sion is pure rave. It just needed a siren….
3. The Ronettes – Par­adise (recorded 1965, released 1975)…one of a bunch of lost Spec­tor / Ronettes tunes that have turned up over the decades on var­i­ous col­lec­tions, this was orig­i­nally an unre­leased acetate, and fits squarely into the River Deep era PS sound (it was recorded shortly before that epic). Ronnie’s plain­tiff, entranc­ing I’ll wait for a day when he takes me to Par­adise is unfor­tu­nately ironic con­sid­er­ing the pain she was expe­ri­enc­ing in her mar­riage to Spec­tor, but nev­er­the­less absolutely dev­as­tat­ing (isn’t she always). What is less ironic is the later repeated phrase I’ll Die for Him…by all accounts she was lucky not to do so; luck­ier it seems than that poor girl forty odd years later. A genius Spec­tor might well be, and I absolutely crave his pro­duc­tions, but if it wasn’t for the lib­eral in me, I’d say fry the bastard….
4. Metro Area – Soft Hoop (Env­i­ron 2002)…a record that evokes, more than any­thing else, the ghost of the late, very, very great Nu Groove label…a sim­ple groove; a very tight but tough snare; a sub­tle blue, under­stated per­cus­sive lead; a live bass player and the vague aura of NYC circa 1990…
5. Iggy & The Stooges – Gimme Dan­ger (CBS 1973)…and that is noth­ing like this…I think Raw Power is Iggy’s least dan­ger­ous sound­ing record, at least until the bad Arista, and A&M ones a few years later. The snarls are all car­toon­ish, the threat so obvi­ously contrived…but, hell I love it, and my signed copy is a trea­sure. The cow­bells that open it are funky as phuck and I love the way it explodes half a minute later, although, unlike, say any­thing on Fun­house, it’s a per­fectly con­trolled explo­sion. This was Main­man after all…
6. The Jam – Ghosts (Poly­dor 1980)….perhaps the pret­ti­est song ever recorded by Weller with The Jam, and from the won­der­ful, and under­rated The Gift, when it was scream­ingly obvi­ous that Weller had out­grown the band. Sadly, to my mind, despite an extended series of killer Style Coun­cil sin­gles, and a few tracks as a solo act, he never ful­filled the promise he showed on those last four Jam albums, and on tracks like this.
7. Eddie Kendricks — Body Talk (Motown 1975)…not the Imag­i­na­tion song of the same name, although I love that, but the even bet­ter track from the ex–Temp­ta­tion’s album The Hit Man. I used to have this song going around in my head, not know­ing who it was, until my friend, Mur­ray Cam­mick put me right. Absolutely per­fect in both arrange­ment and performance…..I weaken at the part where Eddie’s voice rises to a falsetto on the third cho­rus, and falls into a loose scat…vocal genius…and then…
8. Bobby Wom­ack — An Amer­i­can Dream (Bev­er­ley Glen 1984)….the first song to sam­ple MLK’s Dream speech..slow, sul­try and utterly gor­geous, with that tow­er­ing Wom­ack voice express­ing what is both a dis­arm­ing love song, and a work of pure opti­mism that never comes close to cloy­ing patri­o­tism. The Poets, both Vol­ume I & II were, and still are, huge records for me.
   
9. Roxy Music -Three and Nine (Island 1974)…what per­plexes me about Roxy Music is how quickly and badly it all went wrong. The first four albums (this comes from the 4^th) have vary­ing degrees of bril­liance about them. The cru­cial input they had in what was to dom­i­nate the rock’n’roll planet for the next two decades is indis­putable. From album six (the fifth had its moments, albeit few) it all turned increas­ingly to MOR mush. Three and Nine, on the other hand, is dis­arm­ingly charm­ing with­out the slight­ness of their lat­ter catalogue…it still car­ries the hint of deca­dence that their best records still evoke…..damn that sounds pre­ten­tious, but I don’t know another way to put it…
10. Magik John­son – Scan­ning For Viruses (Claude Von­stroke mix) (Made to Play 2006)…and so we go full circle….I really like the low down grunty bits on this..pure, sim­ple but effec­tive dance­floor, but works well on a tread­mill, as I dis­cov­ered (now that sounds sad). Oh, and I really like Dick John­son’s radio show on George FM, on the rare occa­sions I get to hear it…