Hemlocke Springs - The apple tree under the sea

For those of us used to the giddily energetic electro pop of Hemlocke Springs' debut EP, Going, Going, Going... gone!, opening track 'the red apple' comes as something of a surprise.

It signals, more than anything else on this album, that there are hidden depths at work and that her craft and ingenuity extend far beyond the ability to write memorable earworms such as the TikTok favourite 'Girlfriend' (not that there is anything wrong with 'Girlfriend' of course...)

'the red apple' marks the opening of what has been described as a 'concept album' reflecting on Isememe Udu's growing up in North Carolina and her cultural background as the child of "devoutly Christian Nigerian parents"  It is sparse and pared down, showcasing the simple purity of Springs' vocal. 

This sparse thoughtfulness soon gives way to slightly more familiar musical territory via 'the beginning of the end', which opens with the arresting line "Sometimes I think I should avoid the simpleness of filling holes with opioids" before going all in on the kind of inventive, restless, glitchy electro pop she's best known for. It then ratchets it up a notch into something altogether more muscular via the use of heavy guitars. The result is exhilarating to say the least. 

'hands, shoulders, knees and ankles' meanwhile bounces around like an early (but weirdly angry) Gwen Stefani trapped in a giddy Alice in Wonderland multicoloured world before seeming to crash in on itself and implode in a splintering of rainbow shards. It then picks itself up again, dusts itself off and re-starts itself as the kind of demure, highly mannered, orchestral pop you might find on the soundtrack to Bridgerton, albeit without the lyrics 'Hell we can break his arms together'. All in just over three minutes. 

'w-w-w-w-w' begins taut and Prince like before taking a hard swerve into unabashed glitchy electro pop with the kind of irresistible big chorus and hook that made 'Girlfriend' such a massive cult hit. As well as shades of Prince and the Revolution, it also nods briefly to Archandroid era Janelle Monet and Control era Janet Jackson before quickly casting aside all three and becoming resolutely its own thing. Tremendous. 

The fast and furious beats underpinning 'Moses' feel very 90s techno, giving a more muscular dance feel to what is essentially a high energy pop song. 'Sever the blight' meanwhile, as one of the older songs on the album, feels closer to the songs on Going, Going... gone, but it's at times ethereal at other times bouncy (Kate Bush vs Le Tigre if you like) pared down 80s electro pop fits perfectly here. 

There is further sonic experimentation on the textured mood setter 'sense is (prelude)' while 'sense (is)' goes big on 80s synth pop with the kind of dark mood and taut vocals that would pair well with Allie X's most recent album, Girl with no face. Now, that is a tour I would like to see...

'set me free' opens with a strangely satisfying, echoing call before heading into smoother r'n'b flavoured pop territory. It is gently anthemic while more restful than previous tracks.  

This all too brief album closes with the cathartic upbeat, unabashed electro pop of 'be the girl!' which sees Springs reflecting on her younger self while also acknowledging that she has come a long way and isn't that person anymore. It's a fitting end to an album of experimentation and exploration, one that demonstrates the sheer fearlessness of Springs as an artist. 

Further works will be very eagerly anticipated. 

 

Shouting Out Loud: Lives Of The Raincoats by Audrey Golden

It would be fair to say that I gorged on this book.

And I really do mean that as a compliment.

There are some music books that take weeks to read, regardless of how many pages they have, and then there are those that are so interesting and, ultimately, readable that they just get devoured in a matter of days.

This is one of those books. 

Golden's hymn to The Raincoats, their birth, death, rebirth, death, rebirth again lays bare not only how much there is still to say about punk, it's music, it's influences, its afterlife, but also how much there is still to say about The Raincoats, a band whose story has only ever been partially told at best. 

What I love about this book is that it does effectively, vividly and evocatively tell the story of The Raincoats but that it does so in a way that is neither straight, conventional biography nor straightforward polemical music book: It's not either, it's its own thing. The result is a passionate, enthusiastic, highly readable page turner of a book that just happens to tell the story of possibly the most exciting band to come out of the UK punk scene of the 1970s while also telling the story of their astonishing international cultural legacy, as well as their triumphant repeated return.  

Golden has been given a tremendous amount of access to The Raincoats, to their archives, diaries, and correspondence. She's also spoken to those around the band such as Rough Trade's Geoff Travis, writers and activists such as Vivian Goldman and Lucy Whitman, as well as fans who became friends such as Kim Gordon, Kathleen Hanna, Tobi Vail and Kathi Wilcox. She has used this impressive amount of access, long list of interviews and frankly impeccable research to weave a story that is as remarkable as it is compelling.

One of the contradictions of The Raincoats is that they are ordinary people making extraordinary music and, at times, I've often wondered if this is partly why they are so repeatedly downplayed in histories of punk and alternative music: Journalists and writers do love a 'Character' after all - it makes our lives so much easier when writing about a bands music, and it tends to be 'characters' who get remembered, albeit not always fondly. The Raincoats were more subtle and insidious than that, their music didn't so much scream in your face and hit you over the head head as gently worm it's way into your soul and bone marrow, changing you gradually and permanently. 

With this in mind, one of the books many strengths is its ability to demonstrate to an unarguable degree the extent to which The Raincoats had a long lasting impact on music fans around the world. Not only in the UK and US, where their influence is known if not always properly acknowledged, but with music starved fans in Cold War era Warsaw, with prisoners in the Maze prison in Belfast, German artists, and with fellow travellers Kleenex/LiLiPUT.

They were, and are, a remarkable cultural phenomenon. One that has touched many across multiple continents and multiple spheres from music to politics and activism to art.

Long may they continue. 

Sixteen Again by Paul Hanley

Paul Hanley’s Sixteen Again: How Pete Shelley & Buzzcocks Changed Manchester Music [and me] is a delightfully refreshing, passionate, poignant and frequently funny biography of  Buzzocks, and particularly Pete Shelley. It also includes some personal memoir and recollections from Hanley, which - if anything - enhance the book and add weight to the truth that Buzzcocks, and Shelley, matter.

It feels like this shouldn’t need saying really but, of all the first generation UK punk bands, Buzzcocks do seem to have been particularly neglected when it comes to books, films, and the general public acknowledgement of their genius and legacy.

What I particularly like about Hanley’s book is the tone, especially the way in which he isn’t afraid  to puncture a few egos and expel a few myths along the way. Yes, he is passionate about his subject, and yes he really loves Buzzcocks, but he’s also not afraid to demonstrate in unforgiving detail the moments when some members of the band, or those around them, were behaving like total arses. Similarly, when the band released a duff record, he acknowledges that.

Maybe it’s a Mancunian thing, maybe it’s a Paul Hanley thing, but, having been party to some of his in conversation events at successive Louder Than Words festivals, I can attest to his no nonsense writing tone being well matched by his skill as a seasoned racconteur.

Long may he continue

Lurid and ridiculous punk stories from the UK tabloid and broadsheet press, part 1: The singing hairdresser

Back in 2014, for reasons best known to myself, I conducted a number of durational studies of a series of UK press databases. The idea was to get more of an idea of how the UK tabloids and broadsheets were writing about punk between the years 1975 and 1995. Why? Firstly, I hadn’t lived through the 1976-1978 period and wanted to have more of an idea of social attitudes at the time. Secondly, and the reason I chose to do a 20 year period for the search, I wanted to look at how punk had been written about over a long period of time to see how attitudes had changed and how punk itself had changed and been perceived. 

The results, it’s fair to say, were not entirely as expected.

Oh, there were the usual tabloid yuck and bonk style journalism pieces, but there were also a number of pieces that were a) surprisingly sympathetic to punks from surprising quarters or b) just plain weird.

In what is going to be an ongoing series, I intend to talk about some of the weirder and more interesting stories I discovered on my travels through the databases.

Perhaps not unsurprisingly, the Daily Mail featured heavily in my search results. A fairly typical example of their coverage included a story from 30th December 1977, in which a teenage girl was arrested by police and fined at Liverpool Magistrates Court for wearing “an indecent badge with the name of a song by an American singer in a city centre railway station.” She was fined £10 under “the 18th century Vagrancy Act”. This story, while probably not untypical at the time, does raise a number of interesting questions about how the police were targeting punks as well as how punk was being covered by the tabloids. It gets more interesting when you read on and discover that the 17 year old girl who was charged claimed in court that the badge in question was being worn on her waist, under a jumper, but the police claimed that they could see it from about 10 yards away. Really? They could laser in on a badge from that distance? Incidentally, I like the way the description of the badge leads quite easily to the conclusion that it was probably for Jayne County’s ‘(If You Don’t Want To Fuck Me, Baby) Fuck Off’. Description of the defendants attire in court has her wearing “tight trousers, an old raincoat and a tartan bow tie” so it’s nice to think she made an effort for her day in court.

Perhaps my favourite bizarre story from this period - again, it was from the Daily Mail - was the one titled ‘Punk singing rocks a salon’, from 24th May 1978. Or, as I always remember it, the singing hairdresser one. This refers to a hairdresser who was sacked for allegedly returning from her lunch hour drunk and singing a punk song. As you’d expect, the management version of what happened varies somewhat to the hairdressers account. It says something about the social mores of the day that the Mail reports “The salon sacked her because they thought the scene was obscene and her behaviour was not ladylike.” Possibly fearing that this wasn’t sufficient grounds to get the readers onside, they add “And, they claimed, she spent the afternoon lounging in the staff room, which was later found littered with beer cans.”

The hairdresser herself claimed that she hadn’t been drunk and that she’d returned to work with a male colleague, who was singing Ian Dury and the Blockheads ‘Clever Trevor’, a song she happened to find funny. Something of a storm in a beer mug perhaps?

Photo by Adam Winger on Unsplash

Sonic Youth - Genetic

This was one of my favourite songs when I was 13 and I still have the 10" concentric groove EP it's on. It was effectively the B side to '100%', the lead single from the Dirty album. Coming as it did a year after Nirvana's Nevermind, it felt at the time as though Sonic Youth were being lined up (despite their longevity) as the next big band for grunge kids to latch onto.

I can't help but think that the band had this at the back of their minds when they released the wilfully perverse Experimental Jet Set Trash and No Star in 1994. 

It is basically their fault, and the fault of the BBC for broadcasting a documentary about the Peel Sessions that featured Siouxsie and the Banshees, that I first started listening to the John Peel Show in January 1993.

There was a live concert from Sonic Youth on that nights show, plus a Peel Session from the Voodoo Queens. The Voodoo Queens session turned out to be much more important in the long term. That and the album tracks Peel was playing from the split Bikini Kill/Huggy Bear album Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah/Our Troubled Youth on Catcall (Liz Naylor's label).

Living amongst the detritus of someone else's history

My introduction to punk came via the seventies revival in the early 1990s. Specifically, it owes a lot to the BBC's Sounds of the Seventies series as well as re-releases of records by the Clash and Sex Pistols in 1991 and 1992.

I could say that when I first heard 'Anarchy in the UK' in 1992 the world changed. But I would be lying.

In the summer of 1992 I was very into Sonic Youth, specifically the song 'Genetic' from their Dirty album: 'Anarchy in the UK' sounded terribly slow when set against 'Genetic'.

I had first heard Siouxsie and the Banshees in 1991 when they appeared on Top of the Pops to promote their new single, 'Kiss them for me'. I was very intrigued by the band, to the extent that I did, in early 1992, buy a copy of the Superstition album from a stall on Stockport Market.

I liked it at the time, but it would be a stretch to think it had anything to do with punk.

Later in 1992, when I was recovering from an aggressive chest infection, I listened to a documentary on Radio 1 about the Peel Sessions. It was on this documentary that I first properly heard songs by punk bands, specifically, the Slits, Damned, Adam and the Ants (the early version of the Ants, when Jordan was managing them) and Siouxsie and the Banshees. The Peel Session version of 'Hong Kong Garden' was played, and I was very taken with it.

A few weeks later me and my sister were out second hand record shopping in Double 4 in Stockport when we stumbled across the Banshees 1977-78 Peel Sessions LP.

We took it home and played it non stop for about a week, at which point it was cruelly taken away from me on the orders of my mum on the basis that it was an early Christmas present from my sister, and should be wrapped up and put away until the end of December. In retrospect, mum and dad were probably just sick of hearing it and fancied a break. They weren’t of the punk generation and, while we’d watched Sounds Of The Seventies together on TV as a family, they’d both made their excuses when the punk episode was on, returning to watch us sitting cross legged on the living room floor in front of the TV, singing along to Joy Division’s ‘Transmission’. It was a very long time before I found out that Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures album, not to mention the Pauline Murray and the Invisible Girls album, had been recorded at Strawberry Studios in Stockport. 

In retrospect, it perhaps isn’t surprising that Stockport wasn’t blowing its own trumpet, culturally speaking, in 1991. We still had a hung council (this tends to be Stockport Council’s default setting, politically) and it was probably skint so, the upshot was, even if there had been the political will to celebrate the cultural history of the town, there wouldn’t have been the money to do so. Strawberry, like Staircase Café and the old Stockport workhouse, was so much neglected, rotting history in the early 1990s.

This wasn’t to say that there were no pockets of alternative culture in the town. The area around Underbank and Hillgate (the area of the town centre where Strawberry Studios used to reside) while struggling, did contain Double 4 Records, which sold second hand vinyl and new vinyl at cheap prices, and was wallpapered with billboard posters, meaning it looked like an indie inclined student bedroom. There was also Cobwebs, at that point a one floor alternative clothes emporium with a piercing and tattoo studio out back. It sold tie dyed hippy, patchouli scented stuff alongside PVC and fetish gear and t-shirts with slogans such as ‘When I die, bury me face down so the world can kiss my ass’ and ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones but whips and chains excite me’. 

Stockport's premier alternative emporium circa 1993

The shop had existed, in one form or another, since either 1985 or 1986. In 1996 they moved to bigger premises across the road, meaning the hippy stuff was on the bottom floor, the goth and punk stuff upstairs, and the top floor had biker gear and t-shirts. The tattoo and piercing parlour, which became White Dragon, is still at the old site to this day, but Cobwebs closed in 2000. 

There was also The Stage Door, which sold fancy dress stuff alongside dance gear, including face glitter and deeley boppers, which were to come in handy during the Kenickie and bis years. There were also several charity shops and sex shops, including a branch of Harmony, the shop where Linder Sterling purchased the dildo she used in her infamous meat dress attired appearance at the Hacienda in the early 1980s. 

With a heavy dose of romanticised imagination, you could stroll up and down the tail end of Underbank and Lower Hillgate in the mid 1990s and imagine you were on the Kings Road in 1976. 

Image of Cobwebs from Pinterest 

New Year, New Book Pile