Former Miss France and repopulariser of the ukelele… and other potential cover artistes

Now the world’s greatest DJ has played Pastel Collision, the S is surely the L.

As regular readers know, I am convinced that some of our brilliant songs (old and, yes, future) really should be covered by people who can actually play and sing and have a budget that extends beyond the pennies previously afforded us in the world of micro-indie.

Here are the candidates:

1. Susanna Hoffs. Listen to this version of Different Drum. This song – by the Monkees’ Mike Nesmith, but you knew that – is virtually bombpoof I think, but even so this is a brilliant version. It’s afrom a covers album Hoffs did with Matthew Sweet (as Sid’n'Susie) of 60s songs, all sounding sunshiney and full of harmonies and mostly really good; an album that sounds slightly like it was recorded at home for fun – but in a good way. They’ve done one of 70s songs now. So when they come up to needing an obscure-but-ace song to complete their 90s covers album… all they’ve got to do is Google and here we are. Stop Look and Listen, maybe. ‘Back’ ‘in’ ‘the’ ‘day’ the indie police would have you beaten to death with flowers for mentioning this but… SH is 50 and, let’s just say, she looks pretty good on it. Pretty, pretty good. It would be perverse not to mention this

2. Claire Denamur. French pop fox whose debut album came out this year. I hear her doing Last Minute Miracle. For so many reasons that you would need a lot more time to explain, there’s something quite pure and unselfconscious about French pop. And even a hilarious (ish) spoof of its carefree, cliche-flirting touchstones – like this one – is still a cool thing, even as it rips into that entire notion of Gallic cool. Splish-splash!

(btw thanks to Ms Aliyah Keshani for the spoofy clip. Is she north-west London’s finest so-far-unsung songer-songwriter? Listen to her new song, ‘Running Out’ at www.myspace.com/aliyahk and judge for yourselves. I MAY have written the backing vocals for this song. Another story.)

3. Mareva Galanter. Former Miss France and repopulariser of the ukelele. Seriously. Who knew this stuff was going on? A Eurodisco take on classic 60s pop. There are no English language equivalents of all this, are there? Hmmm. BTW if you do love all that Francoise Hardy, Charlotte Gainsbourg, French-girls-whispering-in-your-ear stuff (and if you don’t, what’s wrong with you?), have a look at this blog, Filles Sourires which is a massive, ongoing tribute to all that stuff. And there’s a lot of it going on. Mainly in France. Obviously.

4. Mary Wyer. Voice of the brilliant but virtually unknown 90s Australian band Even as We Speak. Still singing on youtube, from her house somewhere in the UaE (I think). Here she is doing The Outdoor Type, the brilliant (too much hyperbole here? Well play it and see if I’m wrong) song made famous by The Lemonheads. What is it about her voice?

Best DJ in world plays Pastel Collision

Not my words, readers, but those of the people on this forum, who rate the “wonderful Jörg Winzer” as such and list Young by Pastel Collision on his set list.

How about that?

 

 

Possibly the most feelgood song I’ve heard this afternoon…

So I haven’t written anything for six months and now I come back on for, what, five lines, simply to urge you to listen to a song by the Siddeleys.

Yep.

Because I’m not certain that this – their version of Edison Lighthouse’s Love Grows Where My Rosemary Goes – isn’t the best, most feelgood song ever recorded, you know, certainly now that we can;t listen to the Mamas and the Papas ‘Make Your Own Kind of Music’ with such carefree lightheartedness again…

So do yourself a favour, crank up the old speakers/headphones to 11 and dance round your bedroom/living room* (depending on age and accommodation arrangements) until your feet are sore.

John Peel, my birthday and me

So here’s a thing. I always knew that John Peel played the B-side of our single Trouble with a Capital T – a song called Forward – on April 28 1995. I never heard it becuase
a) you don’t stay in listening to the radio all day just in case and
b) it was my birthday and so I was in the Neel Akash on Charlotte Street, eating curry.
But here is something that is amazing to me. The whole show is available as a selection of MP3s. I only found this ten minutes ago and of course waited through all the buffering and that and fast-forwarded to the point where Peel says: “This is Pastel Collision”.
What a moment!
It made me feel very strange sitting here listening to that, 13 years after the event.
It’s a bit like being told you won the Cup final 13 years ago, but you didn’t realise.
How many people have heard Peel say that about their band?
Okay, about 12,000.
But even so.
I must say that all the songs on that record came out very disappointingly thin-sounding. We have demos of the same songs that sound loads better. Demos we effectively produced ourselves at West Orange studios in Preston. Demos with big guitars and trumpets.
The record was made at Peter Hook’s Suite 16 Studio in Rochdale. We didn’t see Hook but we did see a postcard he’d sent to the ‘fellas’ at the studio from a holiday with his wife, the brilliant Caroline Aherne.
Anyways, we paid £250 a day and the total cost was £700-plus, so you’d expect it not to sound like it had been recorded on a dictaphone from the other side of the room.
Wouldn’t you?
Playing the Peel show, Forward fits right in. He was always playing lo-fi stuff, of course, or wilfully amateur-sounding stuff. Proper indie.
Obviously, we were proper indie but not in the way that record sounds ie as if we – or at least the sound engineer – haven’t got a clue.
We wanted our records to sound wilfully pop, not wilfully recorded from inside a can of baked beans.
It breaks possibly the No 1 rule of pop, I’m afraid. Al lthe instruments – and there are many – are playing all the way through.
(That may be the most important thing I learned from doing music with producers who actually had a clue.)
Still, it’s got a good tune. And lyrics. It’s coverable.
Anyway it was, I always thought, a shame that the only song of ours played by Peel was one of our worst-produced ones.
Then I also learned, via the power of Google, that he had played our first single, Young, on July 15 1994 (are you still with me here?).
And that song really is a corker. Trust me. A record with trumpets and big guitars.
Proper indie.
The way we wanted it to sound.
Maybe I’ll even upload it sometime.

Lily/Keith Allen, Morrissey at Finsbury Park and Luke Haines’ book…

If you haven’t been here before, this is a kind-of split-screen blog in which I talk about
a) the handful of (somesay) brilliant indie summer pop records me and my pals made as Pastel Collision and Kaleida in the 90s. This is kind of
i) a doomed attempt to get an American indie film-maker to use Wherever You Go Take Me With You (or stop-look-and-listen-1) over the opening or closing credits of a feelgood yet slightly dark indie rom com
ii) a doomed attempt to get someone to cover said songs – or even Here Comes The Summer.
b) (are you following?) pop issues and moans of my own choosing.

Today, it’s all about b.
Okay.
1) Lily Allen and Keith Allen
I quite like Lily Allen. What with the hopeless Oxbridge quota (see Radio 4 comedy for full details), there’s not much room for spontaneously funny, bright and opinionated people in the media, so hats off to her, the more so since the single from her new album is like some kind of tribute to Dubstar.
I got her first album but am not that drawn to getting her second. That’s how it is sometimes.
BUT if I read another blog comment attributing her success to being the daughter of Keith Allen, I’ll smash my computer.
Let’s get this clear: being the daughter of Keith Allen is surely more of a HINDRANCE to her being a pop star than if she were, actually, mute.
I don’t know what Keith Allen does, really. He always seems grumpy and rather pleased with himself, while projecting some kind of sense of geezerish ‘edginess’ and associating with Hoxton/Groucho Club no marks
Nobody likes that sort of thing
Surely.
And surely not one single member of Lily Allen’s audience would have been encouraged to buy her music because of her grumpy old dad, who they’ve probably never heard of anyway.
Or am I wrong?

2) Stuart Maconie and Morrissey in Finsbury Park
I like Stuart Maconie. He shouldn’t have done all those ‘I Love 2007′ Channel 4 clips shows; and he shouldn;t wear those flowery shirts because they make him look like his auntie. But I like him, his radio shows and his books.
However. For a fellow who claims to be a big Morrissey fan, he’s prone to some basic errors.
1) In his recent Radio Times column, he claimed Mozzer had never had a No 1, when everybody knows that he’s had at least two: Meat is murder and Vauxhall and I.
2) In his book, Cider with Roadies, Maconie recounts his near-guilt at his then-employers, the NME, trying to finish off his hero by daubing him as a racist. Maconie tells the tale of Morrissey’s doomed gig at Finsbury Park, supporting Madness in 1992 and gets it as wrong wrong wrong as everyone else has down the years.
I was there, near the front, so let me explain.
Morrissey was on the same bill as Ian Dury, Flowered Up, Gallon Drunk and, of course, Madness.
What kind of audience do you think those bands had?
Maconie’s account (and the usual old cobblers recorded in music press annals) is that Mozzer was bottled off by a liberal crowd who disapproved of him waving the Union Jack and singing a song about the National Front. In this version, the Finsbury Park crowd turn their back on our hero because he is ‘flirting’ with ‘racism’ etc etc.
Actually, Madness’ crowd – who knew? – had a very rough and tumble skinhead element who despised Morrissey for his perceived gayness. There he was in his gold lame shirt, prancing around playing his B-sides, when the first 50 rows of the crowd would have preferred someone more suitable to slot into the none-more-geezerish bill.
Chas and Dave, maybe.
There were chants and heckles that these days would be called homophobic and eventually he was bottled off.
I got a punch in the face too. There were loads of fights all over the place and no security. The summer of love it wasn’t.
Mozzer was NOT bottled off for being too right wing.
He was bottled off for not being right wing enough.
For being too gay.
Of course you could blame Mozzer himself for his still-ongoing attempts to ally and ingratiate himself with the Big-Lads-With-Tattoos-Who-Don’t-Like-Poetry faction. You might say he was asking for it, starting the set with a load of B-sides.
But I am sure if any of the other acts on that stage that Saturday had waved the flag, much of the crowd would have been only too happy to fall in line and prepare to invade France.
So.

3) Luke Haines’ newish book
I’ve been reading it. It’s called ‘Bad Vibes: Britpop and my part in its downfall.’ You know Haines – Auteurs, Black Box Recorder, acclaimed a pop genius by about 15 in-the-know journalists, record sales disappointing.
Course I love Black Box Recorder and I do kind of like the idea of Haines and his sour misanthropy, dismissing all his peers as idiots.
Throughout, Haines’ self-image is that of a misunderstood genius, one step ahead of the record-buying public.
He doesn’t have a good word to say about anyone.
He is very very very pleased (three verys) with himself when he proposes naming a side project after 70s terrorists Baarder-Meinhof gang, rather in the way of a naughty boy showing his bottom in assembly.
And after a while, you begin to wonder whether, as Haines insists, he is the genius and everyone else is an idiot or b) whether it’s the other way round.
I’m afraid to say that you might be a great football coach but if your team never wins a game, you can’t blame people for under-rating you.
And if you’re in pop and you say you’re a genius and you only have a hit every five years… well, you get the picture.

4) Johnny Dangerously – another genius song
My putting a song of his up the other week has excited a lot of visitors from a Man Utd forum, begging (well, asking) for the whole album to go up. (New readers: ‘Dangerously’ was the fella from indiepop-stadium-folksters I Am Kloot; his album ‘ You Me and the Alarm Clock’ is six songs of brilliant, unrequited-love acoustic guitar wordplay on a drizzly day under the pier, like Roddy Frame if he’d come from Blackpool). Anyway, here’s another song – this-town-and-mary1. I will do the whole album at some point.

Next time: It suddenly feels a bit like summer in the UK, so, predictably, I’ll be back on my specialist subject: the Best Summer Pop Songs you’ve never heard.
That’ll be good, eh?

Stop, Look and Listen

In response to my last entry, about early Primal Scream, correspondent Mr Patrick Hall has been in touch and is forwarding me even more obscure and unreleased early PS songs the prospect of which – only 23 years too late – is still pretty mouth-watering.

I’d like to add that I’m no fan of Primal Scream being called ‘The Primals’ or any other such shortening of band names. The other day, I heard Jo Whiley say she was going to have Ricky Wilson of ‘The Kaisers’ on her show. I’m afraid to say, it made her sound more like Smashie and Nicey than DLT ever did.

Anyway, in the absence of any more interview requests for me from South (or, indeed, north) America, here’s an MP3 of Stop, Look and Listen which was one of the best songs we ever recorded.

The title (and close variants on it) is one of the most used in pop history, I think. But never mind that. We first recorded it in our living room during Euro 96 and it eventually appeared on our Kaleida album, Knowing Who Your Friends Are.

No-one’s ever said much about it, not even the small band of Collision and Kaleida supporters on the web. But I really like it and think it’s pitched somewhere between a Rezillos-y New Wave sound and a 60s Girl Group feel.

Of course, most people who claim this kind of thing about their own songs are tuneless idiots. But, you know, trust me. Alongside Wherever You Go, I think it’s also one of the most coverable of our songs and I await the day that its potential is spotted and I get the call from… well, you tell me. Any girl band could cover this. And everyone would like it and love them.

What, I ask yet again, are the chances?

stop-look-and-listen-1.mp3

I get interviewed by Peru’s Mr Indie Pop

It was, I guess, a headline waiting to happen.

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that a chap called Roque from Plasticina Records (from Peru) got in touch asking if I’d do an interview for his blog.

I’ve interviewed many people over the years but this is, I think, only the third or fourth time I’ve been on the receiving end, talking about our bands.

Anyway, Roque has published the interview here, with a nice picture of me, Gaynor and Jim in Madrid.

In other news, I’ve been remembering how much I loved early early Primal Scream and have been downloading their, yes, early Peel sessions and some bootleg live stuff.

(I interviewed Bobby Gillespie once, you know. Maybe I could have used that as a link here?)

This was around 1985/86 and I just thought the Scream were possibly the greatest band in the world. All their songs were two minutes long and sounded like genuine classics: even if you didn’t love the jangly guitars and Gillespie’s erratic singing (and I did), you could see they were great songs.

Surely.

I also quite liked that they had a full-time tambourine player.

They didn’t sound like anything I’d ever heard. I guess the guitar sound was ripped off of the Byrds but to my teenage ears the Byrds sounded very MOR.

I might argue that these Primal Scream sessions achieved everything that Sarah Records and loads and loads of other little indie labels were later trying to do.

That Gillespie would go on to be come the nation’s foremost light entertainer, chemical experimenter and Mick Jagger impersonator would obviously stick in the craw of real indie-ists.

But, you know, get over it.

(Of course, when you read a Gillespie interview you often get the idea that he believes he is a black man, fronting a reggae/funk band. This irritates some people, but I find it quite entertaining.)

Anyway, given the whole wistful, unrequited vibe of this early stuff, before the Scream donned the collective leather trouser and went all rawk, it’s entirely appropriate that possibly their best songs (like Subterranean and Aftermath) only exist on BBC sessions and live bootlegs. Even though many of those early songs appear on their first album, Sonic Flower Groove, there’s something a bit glossy and unsatisfactory about that record. For one thing, all the two-minute songs have been stretched out in length with strings and gloss, kind of defeating the point. It’s still worth a listen, though.

So: here’s a surprisingly good live (bootleg) recording of an early Scream song that I just got hold of on the web – Sonic Sister Love – from Middlesbrough Town Hall in September 1986. Enjoy!

ps-crypt02-sonic-sister-love1

Johnny Dangerously, found at last

In the time since I last updated the site, I’ve had 1) loads of visitors come here through Googling Lewis Collins and 2) a very friendly request to do an interview re: the band, from Peru. Or rather from someone from Peru who’s connected with a record label based in Florida. Have a look at the artwork on their records – it’s ace.

While we’re here, here’s the link to Peru’s No 1 indie label (possibly), which has the brilliant strap line, ‘We like indiepop in Peru too.’

In case you were wondering.

There is actually a fan site for the Professionals – the 1970s cop drama – that rounds up every reference to the show on the web in a neat little list, including my own suggestion that our video director Mike H was a dead ringer for Collins.

I expect people from those sites will write and tell me it wasn’t a cop drama.

I was always an Eddie Shoestring man myself, of course. A private detective with his own radio show. Is that the dream job – or what?

Anyway, my new Peruvian pal is even talking about re-releasing the Collision singles on a CD. That’s good, isn’t it?  More on this and my ace interview as and when.

Meantime, check this out. John Bramwell of I Am Kloot made a record about 1989-1990, “You Me and the Alarm Clock”, under the name Johnny Dangerously. Just him and an acoustic guitar and a massive reverb effect that made it sound like he was singing sad songs under the pier on a drizzly day ie absolutely fantastic. Brilliant wordplay in the lyrics – “you nearly got applause when I first clapped eyes on you”; “She said all those qualifications never met me at the station”; “Are you really happy or just easy to please?” – and a none-more-wistful vibe about the whole thing.

Anyway, you can’t get the Dangerously record now and I haven’t heard it for years and years. I’d say it was a a real lost classic – ie one that doesn’t ever appear in all the lazy music press list features of lost classics. Then I Googled around a found a download – and, so many years on, it really is as great as I remember. Listen to this song – the title track - and tell me if I’m wrong.

BTW: current position on Japanese Amazon of our album: 781,277.

Still in the top million. Still on the radar.

The very very big radar.

Pastel Collision & Kaleida MP3s, videos etc

You can listen to Wherever you go, take me with you by Kaleida (MP3), our 1996 single produced by Mike Jones of Voice of the Beehive here.

Or you can watch the video, directed by Mike Hodgkinson, here.

You can listen to or download two of our songs at this link:
1) Like Water, the B-side of the first Pastel Collision single from 1994, Young, produced by Steve Mack of That Petrol Emotion and
2) Here Comes the Summer, the A-side of our third single, from 1995. Not produced by anyone who’d been in the charts or even near them.

Unreleased-but-actually-rather-good song: Underachiever
This is a song we recorded in the autumn of 1992, as a demo, called Underachiever. People who heard all our early stuff said it was our best song, but it was never released as a record. It’s very fast, very jangly, very trumpet-led, very full-on-kitchen-sink, so if you liked Young and Like Water then you will probably like this. The quality of this MP3 is a bit tape-of-a-tape but, hey, you’re getting it for free. Recorded at West Orange in Preston, this has brilliant, brilliant drumming from a fella called Rob who only played on this one session for us, with trumpets and very nice piano by Karen Lumb from Timperley (yes, Timperley). It’s two minutes and 10 seconds long, like all the best songs are.
Anyway, enjoy Underachiever here.

If I was making you a compilation tape for you right now…

… and I’m not (unless your name is Sheila Sherer), then it would include the following songs, which I have helpfully linked to their youtube videos. (Obviously, I know no-one makes compilation tapes anymore, readers. It’s an editorial device!)

1 Flipper’s Guitar
So imagine if some Japanese teenagers had been marooned on an indie island with only access to early 80s uber-English uber-indie English indie pop (or – possibly – uber-Scottish uber-indie etc etc)? I can see ITV queuing up to make that series. Anyway, Flipper’s Guitar sound like they went thru this experience and, as a consequence, make music that sounds like it’s from a parallel universe where Edwyn Collins and Nick Heyward are treated as Gods. One of my Japanese associates put them on a comp tape for me back in the day, now you can see a video of theirs on youtube. It’s ace and involves trains.

2 Emma Pollock
She was in the Delgados. Don’t know anything about them but I can’t stop playing this. Listen to it and tell me if I’m wrong.

3 Jonathan Richman
If you don’t know JR’s stuff and you’re on this site – well, you’re in for a big treat. It took me about 15 years between being recommended his stuff and getting hold of it in bulk. Don’t make the same mistake. I urge you. It’s slightly hit-and-miss but the best of it is heartfelt, whimsical, wisely childlike, instantly catchy and the absolute template for about a million indie bands, even if they don’t know it.

4 Lucky Soul
South London’s answer to Blondie/Dusty. Still waiting for the great leap forwards. Very good live. Go and see them if you get the chance.

5 Twinkle
Schoolgirl pop genius, covering the heart-breakingly-bleak-yet-somehow-uplifting song made famous by the Toys. No, pedants: pop genius doesn’t require the ability, as conventionally defined, to sing in tune. Keep up. Someone should revive her career in a Smiths/Sandie Shaw-type way. Surely. But who? (She did make some kind of comeback in the early 80s with some records that absolutely no-one bought but that sound to me a lot like some kind of concept album by Kirsty MacColl.)

6 The Pipettes
Our sort of stuff. And Terry Wogan plays it. So that’s good. You don’t want to be indie-obscure forever. Do you? (I wonder if they have ever heard the Poni Tails – brilliant, definitive, late-50s US girl-harmony group. We stumbled across a Poni Tails LP in Levenshulme in about 1993 and we liked it very much. Not apparently available on youtube or itunes, sadly).

7 Lorraine Silver
The comments section, normally the repository of highbrow debate between professors with limited available time, includes some buffoon saying this can’t be a northern soul classic because it’s too pop. His poor wife.

8 Pastel Collision
Because it really was our dream to be put as the obscure-but-brilliant-what’s-this-song track on people’s compilation tapes. Course I know you can do compilations of your recommended songs on itunes these days. But who would trust my taste so completely as to spend £15.60 on downloading some random mp3s?