Accidental Prog

Sometimes JM just goes away and spends time on something and completely rescues it. Brandon and me had been working on an old idea of his but I don’t think we were completely in love with what we were making, it was a bit AOR. Maybe a little bit Christopher Cross, a little bit Doobies, a little bit -insert cool 70’s band- but not really the Earlies. That idea ended up surviving as the middle section of Enemy Chorus, all major chords and chiming bell Fender Rhodes, nestled in the darkest most evil tune. It starts out with a prime progressive trick, if I’d have done it it would’ve been a deliberate clever dick move but JM did it so I can only assume he was guided by his ear and his general good taste. The cello plays a repeated plucked low D in 3/4 time for 8 bars before Brandon comes in on the third beat of the last bar making that beat one in 4/4 time which is what we’re really in, although the cello carries on in 3/4 lining up on the one of the rhythm every three bars. It’s jarring and totally disorienting and well prog, it’s a detail that I love. I can’t quite remember the lineage of the verses but I think they might have started out over different chords, maybe even something similar to what’s in the middle section. Putting all these lines over a pedalled D puts them all in solid modal territory and gives everything an eerie darkness. It’s a feast of sound effects over a pure evil drum kit sound. When the middle section arrives it’s a pure ray of light through storm clouds, we had trouble making it sit there without feeling completely incongruous until we made the fantastic executive decision of putting the entire track through my brand new Moogerfooger 12 stage Phaser- Twice. There’s a separate phaser going off on the left side and the right side and it feels like the universe has melted before you’re snapped back out of your orgiastic reverie for the last verse.

On an interesting side note I bought the phaser a few weeks previously at a Moog demonstration evening at Sound Control. The evening was hosted by Brian Kehew, who last time I saw him was keyboard tech for the Who. In the 90s though he was part of a delightful duo, with Beck’s keyboard player and Jellyfish founder Roger Joseph Manning Jr., called the Moog Cookbook, I could listen to stuff like this all day. I sometimes do. Buddy Holly is a particular treat on this one.

Burn the Liars is like nothing I’ve heard anywhere else, I swore it would be a great single for the album but I don’t think anyone agreed. I’m sticking to my guns though, it’s 2 minutes 44 seconds long, it’s uptempo and it has a beautiful chorus. Also it has a commanding, call to action of a title, it says let’s find the liars and burn them so it sounds like it’s from some terrible future dystopia, 2027 for instance.

The piano parts came from me clowning around at home on Kate’s piano, the left hand keeps hinting at the flat second before the chorus lands squarely there, perhaps putting us in Phrygian turf, the cool mode these days. The drums were recorded one at a time initially, leading to its slightly bizarre marching band groove overlaid with piccolo snares. It’s littered with 2/4 bars too and moves at quite a trot. We had something of an instrumental going and I remember leaving Brandon in the house alone with it whilst I walked the dogs, telling him to hurry up and turn it into a pop masterpiece. I must’ve been out of the house for 45 minutes so I was genuinely taken aback when I returned to hear the glorious stacked harmonies he’d covered it in, he must’ve barely stopped to piss.

This tune features a double nod to Keith Emerson, firstly in the angular synth solo which I described previously on here, recorded on day one of owning a Voyager and using the “Aquatark” patch. The second nod is less obvious but a favourite moment on the album for me. On the outro, as I’m playing an ascending chromatic scale in rolling, chaotic octaves you can hear a recording of Nathan and me drunkenly singing The Only Way from side two of Tarkus, probably in the Talbot, pitched wildly up and down in order to sound even more sozzled. I won’t leave you without reference material, it is after all a masterpiece.

The Fire Doors

I ended up talking to a guy from the New York Times the other week, not about Oasis as you might reasonably expect but about Field Music. Actually, not even about Field Music but about the Fire Doors, their new tribute to the similarly named 60s band. He seemed to see me as some kind of authority on the whole business as I’d written about it on here previously, the whole business in this instance meaning the plight of the music business. Or at least the plight of musicians themselves, I hear the business continues to flourish independently of the people who feed it. I talked to him for a good while anyway, I think the main points I kept circling around were “fair play to them, I’m glad they’ve found a way to make some extra cash that’s still related to making music,” and “if paying to watch a Doors tribute means that I get more Field Music albums then count me in!”

So we put our money where our mouth was. Metaphorically you understand, in reality we just gave our money to them and watched the gig, in Pudsey no less. I’ve seen a few Doors tributes in my time and always hated them, I expected Field Music would do a better job but I can’t stress how amazing this show was. There was no gimmickry, no track with strings and horns on, no inane banter between songs, no desire to cross over into a theatre style “story of” show where Peter comes back fat with a beard or maybe does The End laid out in a spot lit bathtub. They just delivered an impeccable live show in the style the band themselves delivered at their live peak, four piece, left hand keyboard bass, dynamic and engaging. The arrangements were open with room for improvisation but it was always done very much in the idiom, they were soloing like the Doors did with the same harmonic choices and sounds. It was absolutely a “best of” set, no out and out surprises but I was glad to see Peace Frog included. You should go and see them, trust me. It seems they’re doing about one a month which must be about what they need to keep on ploughing on with the thankless task of making their own phenomenal music. If you don’t like tribute bands just buy some of that, you’ve got a nice choice there.

Man On The Run

I was lucky enough to see Man On The Run last Sunday. I say lucky because I’d tried booking tickets the previous Thursday and there wasn’t a single pew going, the Fab Four are still putting bums on seats in the Ribble Valley. It was great to see some of this footage, particularly on the back of having read the book recently. As in the book Linda comes off really well, I appreciate there’s editorial bias but I can’t help feeling she was a good sport and remarkably thick-skinned throughout, she was still the butt of everyone’s jokes well into the 90s. I remember the rumours of tapes of her isolated backing vocals and keyboards doing the rounds when I was at college, people saying how awful it sounded. Even then I remember thinking “Anyone would sound shit if you did that to them…”

When I watch this now I’m struck by how quickly the career of Wings comes and goes. There’s the opening couple of albums where the public thinks everything he’s doing is awful and uncool. There’s a short peak that encompasses Band On the Run, Venus and Mars and the Wings Over The World tour, a couple of years that lasts maybe as far as London Town. Then it all crashes down to earth with Back to the Egg and he’s looking for a way out. It’s a similar timeframe to his previous project, good things don’t last forever. Obviously Wings isn’t the Beatles but he achieved a remarkable amount and he was basically flying solo. The film is quite brutal about some of the decisions as he was finding his feet, Mary Had a Little Lamb comes in for a hiding and looks like quite the misfire when lined up next to Lennon’s work at the time which was so in touch with the political zeitgeist.

The 1973 James Paul McCartney TV special doesn’t look great either, it’s easy enough to cherry pick moments that make it look like an aspiring Morcambe and Wise knockoff. It comes off slightly better if you give the whole thing a go but that’s up to you, I’ll just leave it lying here…

The Wes Anderson Archive

We had a jaunt down to the Design Museum to see the Wes Anderson Archive and it’s well worth a look if you’re a southerner. Or if you’re a northerner who’s willing to travel to stuff, fanciful but possible. I came away thinking that the days of films being made in this way are probably numbered, Wes Anderson really cares about details and the world is steadily filling with people who don’t give a shit. He moved to Great Missenden to be where Roald Dahl had lived for the production of Fantastic Mr. Fox, populating Mr. Fox’s den with the same things lying around and filling the shelves of Dahl’s writing shed. He moved to India for The Darjeeling Limited, he travelled round collecting photos, packaging, items of clothing and cultural ephemera. He had covers designed for all the paperbacks Suzy packs to run away with in Moonrise Kingdom. He commissioned British artist Michael Taylor to actually paint the fictional renaissance painting “Boy with Apple” by the also fictional Johannes Van Hoytl the Younger as a prop in The Grand Budapest Hotel. I could go on all day, every item in every shot is something that’s been thought about, because he cares. People who churn out weekly Youtube content to stay ahead of the algorithm don’t have time to care. People gunning for a seven year Netflix deal don’t care about the same things. AI can’t care at all. Things made with this kind of love and obsession will soon be of the past so be sure to enjoy them while you can.

I love stop motion animation so whilst I found everything fascinating my favourite exhibit is obviously going to be a toss up between the above leads from Fantastic Mr. Fox or the fantastic gang at the centre of Isle of Dogs below. You’d be the same, we are children at heart.

Led Leppard

Speaking of the world gradually filling with people who don’t give a shit, Dave Rofe sent me this the other night. I couldn’t quite believe it was real but he assured me it was, Sound of Vinyl have removed it from their website now but it’s worth contemplating at least, perhaps even laughing and/or crying about. Dawn of the Idiots.