...An Easter Egg* and my turn for Sarah Millican's autobiography from the library**
* Which was very hard to track down on Easter Saturday. The great Easter Egg Withdrawal is already well underway in most supermarkets... This one was from Blue Corn in Heaton Moor. ** There is a queue for it. I've been waiting since January and I've got 3 weeks for my turn then it must go back for the next person, which is fair enough.
Kaleida are an Anglo/German duo comprised of Christina Wood and Cicely Goulder who have been making music since 2013. 'Convolution' is taken from their debut album Tear The Roots, which was released in September 2017. The vinyl edition has sold out but you can buy it as a CD, stream it or download as an mp3 on Bandcamp.
There's something very mysterious and hypnotic about the vocals on this track and the phrasing of the lyrics really reminds me of Eurythmics era Annie Lennox. This might seem incongruous in the context of the track itself, but it works really well I think.
This performance probably dates from late 2008 or early-mid 2009, but I'm not sure.
The intro to 'Bird Song' was resurrected on the How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful tour throughout 2015-2016 as the intro to 'Rabbit Heart', which worked really well.
Florence Welch still has a drum on stage but it's moved to the area at the back along with her water bottle. She does make use of it though as I can remember watching her beat the shit out of it at the end of 'What Kind Of Man' during either the Manchester date in 2015 or at Hyde Park in 2016.
Her book of lyrics and poetry, Useless Magic, is due to be published in July by Fig Tree, a subsidiary of Penguin Books.
The week before Christmas I had a particularly full on and hectic run of late nights, to the extent that I took a day off from my day job to recover. There's only so many meetings you can yawn through and I knew that my increasingly bog eyed state was likely to become increasingly apparent to colleagues as the week went on.
The first of those late nights was the show Hot Brown Honey at HOME in Manchester, a theatre show like no other.
Other shows have discussed racial stereotypes, colonialism and feminism, but not like this... It is at times hilarious, at other times moving and ultimately always thought provoking. A provocative and exciting piece of contemporary theatre that transcends genres as easily as it crosses boundaries.
The show had a fairly short run at HOME but I very much doubt that this is the last you will hear of the Honey's and, if you do get the chance to see the show, do. It is brilliant.
One of a number of collaborations with writer/musician Vivien Goldman. Years ahead of it's time, this song features on Goldman's best of compilation Resolutionary.
There was a really good retrospective of them in (I think) Electra fanzine in the late 1990s, which I devoured enthusiastically but never really followed up on.
Then, one night at the Cornerhouse in about 2011, I heard a slow but insistent, stripped back drum sound and slow but plaintive vocals coming over the PA system, and I turned to my friend David Wilkinson and asked "What's that?"
"That" he replied "Is the slinky sound of ESG"
Spotify did the rest basically, and I was downloading by then, so I bought the song ('You're No Good') as a download, then spent a few years streaming Dance To The Best of ESG, which my sister got me on CD for my birthday this year.
'Erase You' is stroppier than 'You're No Good', but both of them capture that post punk/funk moment in the early 80s in New York, parallel to early hip hop.
It began in 1999 when I was (appropriately) a Catering Assistant working at Stockport Co-Op. In the run up to Christmas, the department store CD, which used to go around in a sonic loop about eight times a day, was changed for a festive CD, which not only had less songs on it (meaning they came round more often and I was being slowly tortured by the Westlife version of 'Last Christmas') but which also only included one song that I actually liked. That song was the Waitresses 'Christmas Wrapping'.
I'd just dropped out of my degree at Bolton Institute and, as if that wasn't enough, started a new job the week before Christmas in Macclesfield, which required a horrible and extortionate commute by bus and train every morning. I remember coming home knackered after the commute from hell one night, not long afterwards collapsing into bed while the John Peel show was on, and then frantically throwing the bedcovers off and running across the bedroom to the tape deck, hitting record and play as the twinkly opening chords to that most realistic of festive songs rang out.
It was as I was running out of material to fuel my Martha and the Muffins obsession that I returned to the Waitresses and, still not downloading, even in 2008, I bought the Waitresses best of CD. And discovered what a bloody great post punk band they were.
People tend to know them mainly for either 'Christmas Wrapping' or 'I know what boys like', and if that's the case for you, 'No Guilt' should prove a pleasant surprise. It's a very arch, very funny tale of girl meets boy, girl loses boy, girl discovers the joys of independence, girl has a great time and gets on with her life. No apologies.
You can blame 'Echo Beach' (naturally) for kickstarting my Martha and the Muffins period. Possibly because they are a Canadian post punk band, and because the post punk revival didn't kick off until about 1998 (and then it was mostly UK post punk), I didn't hear 'Echo Beach' until 2005. On Radio 2 on a Bank Holiday Monday afternoon of all places/moments.
I wasn't downloading at that point, so the best way to buy 'Echo Beach' seemed to be to buy a 'Best of' CD of the band, and I'm really glad I did. Especially as it contained songs from LP's which have yet to be re-issued, specifically This Is The Ice Age, which is very expensive to buy second hand.
'Women Around The World At Work', which I featured during the F-Word's Song of the Day series in 2012, feels very timely today in a world of Equal Pay disputes, #MeToo and what feel like constant daily outrages and transgressions. Despite being concerned with gender inequality, it's a really upbeat, inspiring song with a long historical narrative sweep. Well worth hearing.
I think this one came courtesy of Andy Roberts and his punk women tape in 2003. I was intrigued by the name, and by the fact that their debut cassette was called Ballet Bag, which had a quaintly childlike, innocent feel to it for me.
Rubella Ballet were adopted and taken under the wing of Crass and the Poison Girls in 1979. They would later be associated with both Positive Punk and the early goth scene and, more aptly, with the early eighties anarcho punk scene. They continued into the 1990s before a hiatus and return in the 2000's.
Singer Zillah Minx is the director of the 1997 punk women documentary She's A Punk Rocker.
Lora Logic, famously X Ray Spex's first sax player, also made great post punk music as part of Red Krayola and with her own band, Essential Logic.
Sonically, what Essential Logic were doing would have fitted in well with what bands like Rip, Rig and Panic were doing around the same time, but much like Rip Rig and Panic, they have largely been lost to post punk history.
'Wake Up' appeared on tapes provided to me by both Julian Smith and Andy Roberts, to whom I remain grateful.
While, as a child of the 1980s, I was very familiar with Belinda Carlisle's solo work, I didn't actually hear the Go-Go's until their 1995 comeback single 'The Whole World Lost It's Head', and their accompanying appearance on Top Of The Pops. I'd long given up watching Top Of The Pops by then so there must have been a trailer or some hint that they were going to be on it or I really wouldn't have bothered. It basically goes without saying that they were the coolest thing on it.
While the Go-Go's are known less for their roots in the LA punk scene, more for their power pop double platinum debut album Beauty And The Beat, you can clearly hear their evolution from scrappy punk beginnings at the Canterbury to the slick power pop of 'We Got The Beat', 'Good For Gone' and 'Head Over Heels' if you listen to the double CD version of their best of compilation, Return To The Valley Of The Go-Go's.
I purchased Return To The Valley Of The Go-Go's in 2000, after hearing a bootleg of the 1CD UK version courtesy of fanzine pal Amanda Morgan of Splizz fanzine. HMV could only get it for me as a 2CD US import for £32 and, barely thinking twice, I paid up. I remember picking it up because I made the mistake of collecting it on the same day as Stockport Carnival and had to walk all the way to Heaviley in a heatwave in order to get to a point in the route where I could catch a bus home.
'Lust To Love', much like the fantastically titled 'Skidmarks on my heart', captures the missing links between post punk and power pop, as well as showcasing their great songwriting skills.
The New York end of things, with a blood curdling intro.
Snatch were Judy Nylon and Patti Palladin, New York expats living in London. Despite their UK residency, the sound feels like it has more in common with Television or the New York Dolls than with the Sex Pistols or the Clash.
According to the Punk77 site, the band had a fairly laid back approach to making music and to their careers, and largely seem to have recorded and gigged when the mood took them. The split single 'IRT/Stanley' was recorded in Patti's flat. Both women continue to make music.
I first heard 'Stanley' in the late 1990s or early 2000's on Peel, whereas 'IRT' was on the punk women tape Andy Roberts from Linus made me in 2003.
