NEW DAWN FADES
music + culture + random odd stuff from the mind of a fortysomething
25.6.05
Snore

Snore
Originally uploaded by IanMac1.

Lady Marfa having a rest from the heatwave of the last few days. How adorable??

Die Mensch Maschine

Kraftwerk
Originally uploaded by IanMac1.
It's been a while since I posted. I promise it's going to be more regular now though. I'm starting with this purely as it's on my desktop right now. It means I can mention two things in one post. Firstly, the Kraftwerk live CD Minimum-Maximum. The very idea of a Kraftwerk live CD seems ludicrous. Though their recent tour shows were probably the highlights of my concert-going life, they were not exactly Cheap Trick Live At The Budokan. But this CD rocks - the sound is extraordinary, and close listening does reveal some of the sound manipulation they're obviously doing live on those laptops on stage.
The image here comes from a series by the amazingly talented Craig Robinson - another devotee of the Werk. His site Flip Flop Flyin has been a source of amusement for years, but he now has a very regular blog where he is much more sardonic and makes light, often quite catty, observations on human life. Read it immediately here.
12.6.05
Conceptual Cheezit

WOW Posted by Hello
Marfa, Texas

How much do I love you? Famous as the town where JamesDean appeared in the film Giant and the home of uber-minimalist Donald Judd, the greatest artist of the second half of the 20th century (and if you want to pick a fight with me about that then go ahead). So good I named the world's most pampered dog after you. I'm in the mood for a long eulogy to the Pride of Texas, but sadly I don't have the time right now. This is a temporary posting. Do come back for much, much more. Posted by Hello
George Digweed

Is one of the world's champion Clay Pigeon shooters. He lives near us in Sussex and sometimes drinks in our local pub. He seems like a very affable chap, and because I've been looking for an excuse to add something country-ish on the site he's the first, principally as he has a site which tells you more about his achievements. Regular readers should feel free to speculate on any other reasons for this post ... Posted by Hello
Wow, that Sigur Ros album is really plangent..!

Gather round all you music nerds. The Vanity Fair writers David Kamp and Steven Daly have finally got round to compiling several years' worth of their annual Rock Snob column into a book. If you've never read the annual Vanity Fair music issue you'll have missed out on their pin-point summaries of the various cult figures, genres, and ridiculous descriptive terms used by the sort of people who write for Mojo or work in the Rough Trade shop. People much like myself in fact. The great thing about their writing is that it's sarcastic and affectionate in equal measure - as befits someone like Daly, who was in his youth the original drummer for the seminal Glasgow band Orange Juice before becoming a big cheese Stateside journalist. Boadwee prompted me to mention this, but anyone who enjoys reading the nonsense I write on here will be shocked to see how close it comes to some of the Rock Snob entries, which you can access right here.Posted by Hello
10.6.05
Make Poverty History ...

... forget the pathetic wristband - send the money you would waste on Coldplay's pisspoor new album directly to Oxfam. Posted by Hello
9.6.05
California Dreaming

Woke up this morning and read a plethora of posts on my friend Boadwee's site - one of which is a tribute to me. Terribly charming it is too. Which made me realise that I've not waxed lyrical about Keith myself too much yet. Keith and I met in 1994 - specifically, on the day Kurt Cobain shot himself. I saw him at a bar in New York called Tom & Jerry's, which was a bit of an artworld hang out in thise days. (One distracting side thought before I continue is that T&J's cute Irish barman had previously worked at the Rock Garden bar in Glasgow, where I spent most of my student days - it truly is a small world.)
I digress. Keith was - how can I put it - performing with the juke box, something between dancing with it and humping it. I thought he looked like a freak. Our mutual friend Bill introduced us. Turned out Keith was an artist, who made paintings via the distinctly unique process of enema. As I say, a freak. But over the next few days, and more appropriately a series of drunken evenings, I totally fell for his charms. Even then there was something about him that was a bit like looking at a version of myself, so similar were we in tastes about almost everything. (Specifically, large ginger bearded men and the then phenomenon of Britpop.) Keith and I caught up with each other as often as possible, usually in L.A. where he was living. And then we lost touch - largely because I'd had a hard time with family problems, and subsequently the letters I sent him never reached him.
And that was because he'd moved to San Francisco. Two years after our lack of contact I went to SF for a week's holiday - my first time in the city in fact. And on the Friday night, on my way to the Lone Star we walked into each other on the street. Just like that. And only a matter of oceans, distance and the cost of long haul travel has kept us apart ever since.
Keith has not really changed that much in that ten year span. He's a little calmer, his art is now largely photographic, and above all that he is happily patrnered to the adorable Kenny (above) but he's still madly enthusiastic and a bit perpetually teenage. We are so similar that sometimes it shocks me. But sometimes you meet someone and just know that you'll know each other forever, and that's the way I feel about Keith. I don't know if I believe in fate, but how uncanny was it for us to just pass eack other on the street like that, without knowing we were even in the same city at the same time? This is a bit of a lame tribute to him, due to time pressures, but he will feature regularly on this site, that's for sure. There's always a little bit of every day when I imagine what it would be like to be with him in California, usually the times when I could do with a laugh and a bit of cheering up. This posting is today's such moment.Posted by Hello
The Oddest Record of 2005 is ...

... without a doubt this one. The work of legend-in-his-own-mind musician Lawrence (no surname necessary), formerly of the 80s band Felt and the 90s band Denim. For more on Felt go here immediately. Lawrence is one of the last true great pop mavericks. Felt were studious, gentle, symphonic, guitar-based melodic genius and one of my all time favourite acts. Lawrence had a plan in mind when he started them in 1980 - ten albums and ten singles over ten years, disband in December 1989 - and he stuck to it. He re-emerged with members of Gary Glitter's former backing band in the 90s with Denim, a sort of concept art rock band writing songs about the 1970s, false teeth, the pathos of Christmas and, most notably on their masterpiece album Denim On Ice, Glue and Smack. For Lawrence this was not just a snazzy song title, though, but a reality. Like many in the heady rush of mid-90s Britpop, he became a serious heroin user. Unlike most of them, though, it lasted, and he now looks like a rather damaged soul. When I worked at the BBC during this period, one of my highlights was persuading the producer of the then fledgling Jools Holland Later... programme to book Denim on a very early edition of the show. Sadly, live, they were terrible, and in retrospect he may well have been rather out of it.
Lawrence now only makes music intermittently. Go Kart Mozart (a line, Andy revealed last night, from Springsteen's track Blinded By The Light) is like a cheaper, tinny version of Denim. The aesthetic is elevator music, novelty records, early experiments at adapting electronics into pop (a la Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep by Middle Of The Road) and 70s TV theme tunes. The subjects range from Birmingham's notorious BullRing complex to the plastic pop diva Wendy James to non-existent nostalgic made up pop. The truth about this record is that it's so totally in its own bubble it is night on impossible to commit any critical faculty to it. I both truly can't stand it and find it fascinating. Anyone else writing a song whose entire lyric is a repeated yobbo chant over something resembling a Yamaha keyboard demonstration disc would find their record heading right to the Record & Tape Exchange but this being Lawrence, somehow it seems only fair to make the effort.
For further proof of the genius - or is that insanity - of Lawrence I offer the following three anecdotes:
1. He once refused to share a hotel room with another band member on tour because said other person had already removed the paper sanitary seat cover from the toilet.
2. He gave an interview to the NME in the late 1980s purely on the basis that it was going to appear on an issue whose cover story was an essay about the tragedy of youth suicide
3. When a variety of musicians were invited by Select magazine in the late 90s to review and comment on the grossly unlistenable folly that was Be Here Now by Oasis, Lawrence tried to grill the CD before putting it in his microwave.Posted by Hello
6.6.05
Feeling The Hate

I found a link to the article I was talking about on the Harper's website. It's an edited version of the piece, but well worth reading, nay - essential reading, anyway - right here. Posted by Hello
On The Mark!

Having said what I said below, what's wrong with a gratuitous picture of a bearded guy - particularly when it's baseball's hottest player, the venerable Mark McGwire? For a good period at the end of the 90s, and maybe a little later, I was really quite obsessed with Mark. And he was, in that time, the game's hottest property - for his playing, that is, not his visual appeal. This page welcomes Mr McGwire to its breast, so to speak. Posted by Hello
Behind The Mask

I've been gone over a week now. I could have come back with news of the new Kraftwerk live CD, which appeared today, or perhaps some pictures of bearded guys or a lengthy appraisal of the article I read in last month's Harpers about the Religious Fundementalist Broadcasters convention, which was a seriously brilliant and also frightening read and highly recommended.
Instead, I'm coming back with this - a photo of the rather brilliant band Clinic.
What is wrong with the world? Why do I appear to be the only person outside their immediate families who really cares about these guys? An acquaintance of mine who works at their record company even went to far as to point out that they can sell out decent sized venues in the US but had to cancel their last London show because of lacklustre ticket sales. I don't get it. They have a really unique sound - kind of 60s garage crossed with woozy-sttyle Velvets and a smattering of Devo. Yes, the masks are gimmicky, but so what? Razorlight are gimmicky too - in a way less interesting way. Their live shows (Clinic, that is) are superb - crisp, tight, less than an hour, no encores. When I saw them in L.A. Nancy Sinatra was sitting next to me. If it's good enough for Nancy it's good enough for the masses. When the time comes for me to programme a festival, Clinic are way up on the bill.
In case you're wondering, this was all prompted by a track of theirs appearing on shuffle on the iPod this morning. It fair made a cracking start to my week.Posted by Hello
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