Episode 10 - Regrets, I’ve heard a few (songs on the subject)

They say you only regret the things you never did. Apart from incest and Morris Dancing (laughter). That’s obviously untrue and these songs are here to prove it. What manner of regrets do alternative songs like to dwell on?

Infidelity: A little bit of what you fancy doesn’t do you any good at all. (Anyone Can Make a Mistake). And thus began The Wedding Present’s endless analysis of relationship regret.

Past glories: Nothing seems as pretty as the past though, that Bloody Mary's lacking in Tabasco. (Fluorescent Adolescent). The Arctic Monkeys’ examination of the bride for whom the freedom years have metamorphosed into a sad pastiche of young love. Shades of Too Much, Too Young by The Specials.

Married in haste: Short love, with a long divorce; and a couple of kids, of course. (Trailer Trash). A peak for 90s U.S. indie was Modest Mouse’s Lonesome Crowded West album, and this may very well be the best track on it. A sad, clear-eyed elegy for all the trailer park unions that end with the mumbled apology - “sorry if I dissed you”.

The lost love: Deep down I’m lonely and I miss my friend. (Dive For Your Memory). Bands are not conducive to long term relationships, whether you’re in the same group, as Robert Forster and Linda Morrison of The Go Betweens were, or always on the road when your partner’s at home - see nearly everyone else.

Stupid male pride: I tried to laugh about it, hiding the tears in my eyes. (Boys Don’t Cry). Though Robert Smith of The Cure also acknowledges that it’s too late anyway - “thought that you needed me more”.

The passage of time: I can’t believe how long it’s been. I don’t know what to do about it. (Too Much In Between). The answer’s probably easy if you’ve lost touch. Get back in touch. But wonderful, delicate song from Nina Nastassia with just a hint of dissonance in the guitar work to represent the sad dilemma.

A national error: The Great British mistake was looking for a way out. When will it be over? How can they avoid it? (The Great British Mistake). The Adverts are not often recognised as a band ahead of their time, but this does seem like a clear case of pre-cognition.

Tracklist:

Anyone can make a mistake, The Wedding Present

Fluorescent adolescent, The Arctic Monkeys

Trailer trash, Modest Mouse

These days, Nico

Dive for your memory, Go Betweens

Boys don’t cry, The Cure

Every little gesture, Hefner

Today is the day, Yo La Tengo

Lonesome tears, Beck

Weeknights, Kenickie

Great British mistake, The Adverts

Title and registration, Death Cab for Cutie

Too much in between, Nina Nastassia

All my life, Evan Dando

Episode 9 - Brothers and sisters

Brothers and sisters. Most of us have them. We all know people who've got them. It's not a very popular subject for songs, perhaps because the writer knows they'll have to play the song to their brother or sister at some point, and realises how hard that will be.

I hate my sister, she's such a bitch. She acts as if she doesn't even know that I exist.

Which is why many writers tend to aim off in their sibling songs. Juliana Hatfield in her classic 'My Sister' starts by proclaiming how much she hates her non-existent sister, before, on reflection, commenting...

I love my sister, she's the best. She's cooler than any other girl I have ever met.

...adding a sad little addendum: Where'd she go? She's the one who would have taken me to my first All Ages show. Ray Davies was the shyer of the two brothers in The Kinks, and clearly envied Dave his confidence and gregariousness (the two were renowned for their fist fights). But in writing about it, Ray chose to hide behind the deflection of two suburban sisters.

St Etienne and Neko Case also deal with sororal jealousy with Sylvie, and Margaret and Pauline. Dessa and Kim Deal of This Mortal Coil are more even handed in their treatment of the complex sister-sister stand off.

Songs about brothers are slightly harder to come by, but Fleet Foxes have two songs on their eponymous debut LP that deal with the subject of a difficult brother-brother relationship. There's Blue Ridge Mountains, but possibly in He Doesn't Know Why Robin Pecknold is channeling the tale of Christopher McCandless, and imagining him returning from his stay in Alaska (see the book and Sean Penn film Into The Wild).

Penniless and tired, let your hair grow long

I was looking at you there and your face looked wrong

Memory is a fickle siren song I didn't understand

In that last line he's managed to capture an important component of our ever changing off-on, love-hate sibling relationship. And the song's wonderful too, which helps. Also check out My Sister by Tindersticks, which was a bit too long for inclusion, but which also would not have been out of place on the Short Stories episode.

One of the very best songs on one of the very best albums is Holland, 1945 by Neutral Milk Hotel. In part (it's somewhat abstract), it deals with Anne Frank's family who had to pack up every piece of the life we used to love. And finally Anne dies with just her sister by her side, and only weeks before the guns all came and rained on everyone. It's good to remember Anne's sister Margot, and the song reminds us to read the Diary of a Young Girl again, charting the difficult journey every young teenage girl travels with her older sister.

Tracklist:-

My sister, Juliana Hatfield

My brother’s a basehead, De La Soul

Two sisters, The Kinks

Sylvie, St Etienne

Holland 1945, Neutral Milk Hotel

Children’s work, Dessa

You and your sister, This Mortal Coil

Babies, Pulp

Margaret vs Pauline, Neko Case

Father to a sister of thought, Pavement

My sister says the saddest things, Grimes

He doesn’t know why, Fleet Foxes

Idiot brother, The Auteurs

Neighbourhood #2 (Laika), Arcade Fire

Episode 8 - Politics and protest

This topic was suggested to me by Con Franzestkos, an active political figure here in Melbourne. When my wife first got wind I was planning it though, she was sceptical. She imagined a rather strident, one dimensional episode, I think. Funnily enough it’s turned out to be the most varied programme, musically at least. There’s punk, funk, bossanova, pop, chamber pieces, ballads, indie and sampling.

I’ve avoided the usual suspects - Give Peace A Chance, This Land Is Your Land, What’s Goin’ On, Bob Marley, The Sex Pistols. Nothing wrong with any of these as such, but they’re not alternatives. You might argue that The Clash and Neil Young are hardly unknown, but I choose where to draw the line, thank you. Tempted to include Taxman by little known group The Beatles, as the locus classicus for a right wing protest song, but in the end there were plenty of other great options that squeezed it out.

Marxism and music are not traditional bedfellows. But the Gang of Four, parodically named in tribute to a ruling junta in China, delivered a radical punk-funk masterpiece in Entertainment!, while Stereolab, who started as McCarthy with songs like Use A Bank? I’d Rather Die, treat us to a Marxist interpretation of economics in Ping Pong which doubles as a retro-futuristic pop song:-

It's alright recovery always comes 'round again

There's nothing to worry about if things can only get better

There's only millions that lose their jobs and homes and sometimes accents

There's only millions that die in their bloody wars, it's alright

It's only their lives and the lives of their next of kin that they are losing

California Uber Alles imagines a hippy-fascist state, run by a ‘suede denim secret police’. But hang around long enough and reality mirrors art. Benignly, The Dead Kennedies scoff at a world where ‘your kids will meditate in school’, but that’s exactly what some kids are taught these days. But they also smile “Close your eyes, can’t happen here”. Which is exactly what most of us said all through 2016. And how does ‘America First’ almost translate into German? “USA Uber Alles”, that’s what.

Fiona Apple’s ‘Tiny Hands’ is one minute of feminist fun, while Mac McCaughan summed up the world at the end of 2016 as well as anyone:-

"Happy New Year, everything ends; Happy New Year, the South won't rise again"

"No, Happy New Year, gotta work to make that arc bend; yeah, Happy New Year, away from these old white men"

"Yeah, Happy New Year, at least Prince can't die again; Happy New Year, it can't be this one again"

Tracklist:-

Gil Scott Heron / The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

The Specials / Ghost Town

Manic Street Preachers / A Design For Life

The Clash / Straight to Hell

MIA / Paper Planes

Stereolab / Ping Pong

Dead Kennedies / California Uber Alles

Shipbuilding / Robert Wyatt

Billy Bragg / Between the Wars

Steel Pulse / Handsworth Revolution

Gang of Four / At Home He’s A Tourist

McCarthy / Frans Hals

Mac McCaughan / Happy 2016 (Prince Can't Die Again)

Fiona Apple / Tiny Hands

Neil Young/ Campaigner

Episode 7 - 1978: The year post-punk broke

I’d never felt at home with punk. Went down the Youth Club Disco, and it was all very pleasant, was chatting to a girl called Trudy, making a tiny bit of headway, arm furtively creeping around her shoulder when on came God Save The Queen by The Pistols. From nowhere the quiet kids from the back of the history class were transformed into whirling dervishes, pogoing across the highly varnished floorboards. I think one of them may have even spat.

Hard to know how to react. Join in? My heart wasn’t into ripping up my clothes. It was the middle of a typical English winter and I was susceptible to the cold. Anyway, what would my mother say? But what were the alternative listening options in 1977? Bowie, yes, can’t go wrong there. Art rock I liked - 10cc, Sparks. Hadn’t heard of Krautrock, and was not yet tuned into what was happening in CBGBs. Not much going on.

So post punk (with or without the hyphen) was a godsend to a bookish 16 year old in 1978. If I’m completely honest I didn’t really get into post punk proper that year. The Jam, Blondie, yes, but still chart-friendly rebellion. It was only in 1979 that it all started making sense and I became a devotee of John Peel’s 10-12 slot on Radio One.

But let’s pretend I was the first kid at school to get into the Swell Maps and Wire. That it was me who held forth in the sixth form centre that autumn about how The Buzzcocks would never be the same now Howard Devoto had left, and what did you think about the Gang of Four EP. That I was the first to buy a Factory Sampler on its Christmas Eve release, and play Cabaret Voltaire, Joy Division and the Durutti Column in my room the next night instead of watching The Morecambe and Wise Christmas Special.

So we all know about 1977: The Year Punk Broke. The safety pins, the swearing, the outraged tabloid headlines. Let’s hear it instead for an avant-garde movement, inspired by punk's energy and DIY ethic but diversifying into electronics, jazz, funk, disco and dub, experimenting with novel recording and production techniques, and taking in ideas from art and politics, including critical theory, modernist art and literature.

Let’s hear it for 1978: The Year Post Punk Broke.

Tracklist:-

Buzzcocks / Ever fallen in love

Gang of Four / Damaged goods

Magazine / Shot from both sides

Wire / Outdoor miner

Blondie / Picture this

Talking Heads / Stay hungry

Keith Hudson / Felt we felt the strain

The Clash / White man in Hammersmith Palais

PIL / Public image

Subway Sect / Ambition

Swell Maps / Read About Seymour

The Cure / 10.15 Saturday Night

The Only Ones / The whole of the law

The Mekons / Where were you?

Joy Division / Digital

Episode 6 - The sound of young Glasgow

It wouldn’t take a genius to deduce that Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka and H P Lovecraft were deeply troubled men. And that Manchester groups The Fall and Joy Division did not hail from California. Nor did Morrissey.

And yet, and yet. Listening to Orange Juice and Aztec Camera, they seem to be making a conscious effort to overcome what one can only imagine was a fairly grim urban setting of Glasgow and surrounds. Roddy Frame (actually from East Kilbride) of Aztec Camera loved The Fall and Joy Division. His clothes came from the Co-Op like Mark E Smith. He listened to Joy Division a lot. But when he sang the sound was more Venice Beach than Salford Docks.

On ‘Rip It Up’ by Orange Juice, Edwyn Collins sang that his ‘favourite song was Boredom’ by Manchester’s Buzzcocks. But the song is in fact inspired by Chic and disco synths. Stuart Murdoch’s Belle and Sebastian got Trevor Horn from the Buggles to produce them. Camera Obscura wrote an album in tribute to Lloyd Cole and the Commotions and draw their sound in part from the great girl groups of the early 60s.

This is still great music, but it’s not perhaps what you’d expect from an industrial city. It’s not dour, it’s upbeat for the most part. The Jesus and Mary Chain sweetened their early obsession with feedback by lacing it with a laid back west coast sensibility.

Perhaps this is just a theory in search of a home. Mogwai sounds quintessentially Glaswegian, to my ears anyway. Batcat from The Hawk Is Howling is as unnerving as it gets: a horror movie set to music. Don’t watch the video as I once did, late at night on your own. There is no one monolithic Glaswegian sound, as it turns out - there’s no Madchester here.

What cannot be denied is that the city has produced an unbroken line of wonderful alternative groups, perhaps only rivalled by Manchester and Sheffield. So, please do enjoy a short history of alternative Glasgow tunes.

Tracklist:-

Falling and Laughing, Orange Juice

Oblivious, Aztec Camera

In trance as mission, Simple Minds

Just like honey, Jesus and Mary Chain

Downtown lights, The Blue Nile

The boy with the Arab Strap, Belle and Sebastian

Pull the wires from the wall, The Delgados

Eighties fan, Camera Obscura

Eleanor, put your boots back on, Franz Ferdinand

Friend of the night, Mogwai

Pest, De Rosa

Check my heart, The Pastels

Episode 5 - A short history of paranoia

Paranoia may not seem like the most obvious starting point for a relaxing hour of tunes, and it isn’t. Most of these songs are unnerving, in one way or another, but that doesn’t stop them being essential listening. There is a thread here, of paranoid characters having trouble with that most basic of functions: looking at other humans.

Paranoid Man Number One

You oughta know not to stand by the window; somebody see you up there

The revolutionary in Talking Heads’ Life During Wartime is hiding out in a cemetery, surviving on peanut butter, with “two passports, a couple of visas.” He doesn’t even know his real name. The character was not so much a comic caricature (like Woody Harrelson in 2012), more an acerbic comment at the end of the decade that had thrown up Watergate and Baader Meinhof (like Gene Hackman in The Conversation).

Paranoid Man Number Two

I was lookin' back to see if you were lookin' back at me to see me lookin' back at you

It’s a bad idea in in English cities to look at people for too long on the street. Or on public transport. Or late at night. It’s a function of too many people in too small a space. Massive Attack’s Safe From Harm is partly about this.

Paranoid Man Number Three

Puts his head down when girls pass in the street; shakes in the chemist

Mark E Smith of The Fall is by some margin the most paranoid man in rock’n’roll and on Paranoia Man in Cheap Shit Room (1993) he completed a psychotic trilogy. In Flat of Angles (1979) we get to inhabit the world of the man who’s killed his wife and is hiding up: trapped in flat of angles … soap operas all day .. rooms of dirty laundry …the streets are full of mercenary eyes. His father-in-law is holding up a picture of his dead wife in the papers. Then, a year later: A prickly line of sweat covers enthusiast's forehead as the realization hits him that the same government him and his now dead neighbor voted for and backed and talked of on cream porches have tricked him into their war against the people who enthusiast and dead hunter would have wished torture on, he sang on New Face in Hell (1980). That, right there, is the voice of paranoia.

Paranoid Man Number Four

I can’t make eye contact with anyone I see; this place has taken all my self esteem

Yep, high school can be a drag. On Self Esteem, Andrew Jackson brings it all back.

Tracklist:

Life During Wartime, Talking Heads

A song from under the floorboards, Magazine

Passover, Joy Division

Yashar, Cabaret Voltaire

Kundalini, 23 Skidoo

Schizophrenia, Sonic Youth

Where is my mind?, Pixies

Safe from harm, Massive Attack

Paranoia man in cheap shit room, The Fall

Paper thin walls, Modest Mouse

Afraid of everyone, The National

Self esteem, Andrew Jackson Jihad

Paranoid, Hellsongs

Episode 4 - Short stories

Way back, the words and the music could not be divided. These were the days before the actors arrived on stage. This episode is a tribute to that Athenian world of the 6th century B.C.: where lyrics and music were, quite literally, in perfect harmony. Only without the masks and olives.

Short stories don’t sell, publishers will tell you. Short stories in songs aren’t much in vogue these days either, but when were they? The 1970s, perhaps, when Seasons in the Sun by Terry Jacks got to number one - not only a short story in a song, but also a sentimental one in which the protagonist is about to die. Or maybe he’s emigrating, which might be a relief for those he’s left behind, by the sound of it.

No Seasons in the Sun for us; it fails to hurdle the demanding quality bar Sombrero Fallout demands of all successful candidates. What we’re looking for is a great song, of course, but one that could work as a piece of literature as well. And a way with words, as Chris Difford’s sustained deployment of the half-rhyme delivers in Squeeze’s Up the Junction.

I got a job with Stanley; he said I’d come in handy

And started me on Monday; so I had a bath on Sunday

Sometimes the little details give away a song’s age, such as making an event out of watching The Simpsons in The First Big Weekend by The Arab Strap. But low culture can invoke strong emotion, and that in turn renders the song universal.

Sunday afternoon we go up to John's with a lot of beer in time to watch the Simpsons. It was a really good episode about love always ending in tragedy except, of course, for Marge and Homer. It was quite moving at the end and, to tell you the truth, my eyes were a bit damp.

Dry Your Eyes by The Streets was, amazingly for a short story song, a number one hit. What works here is the fumbling attempt by the dumpee’s pal to cheer him up, with his inarticulate homespun wisdom, complete with clumsy passive voice and ready cliche.

Dry your eyes mate, I know it's hard to take but her mind has been made up

There's plenty more fish in the sea

Sometimes the songwriter is intent on memorialising a peripheral character with whom nobody would ordinarily bother. This is how Mark Kozelek begins his great album Benji: penning a tribute to his distant trailer trash cousin; and this is is what Conor Oberst is aiming for in Light Pollution.

John A. Hobson was a good man; he used to loan me books and mic standsHe even got me a subscription to the Socialist Review

It’s no surprise John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats is turning his hand to novel-writing these days. Though most Goats songs would work as well, here we have the two minute masterpiece, The Fall of the High School Running Back, who blew his knee out in an out of town game and now there is nothing but the ground left for you to fall to.

But selling acid was a bad idea; and selling it to a cop was a worse one

And the new law said that seventeen year olds could do federal time; you were the first one

So I sing this song for you, William Staniforth Donahue

Your grandfather rode the boat over from Ireland; but you made a bad decision or two

The pop lyric can mean everything and nothing, and is, naturally, dependent on the music that accompanies the words. I wanna hold your hand - a sentiment bland beyond belief, but in the right context with the right music and the right attitude, a commercial goldmine. These songs aim higher. Listening, you can, just for a moment, hold life in the palm of your hand, the noble aim of Carver and Chekhov and Mansfield. And these bands have something the master short story writers lacked. The music inherited from Aeschylus and Sophocles and Euripides.

Tracklist:-

Up the junction, Squeeze

Down in the tube station at midnight, The Jam

The first big weekend, The Arab Strap

Jonathan David, Belle and Sebastian

Ellen and Ben, The Dismemberment Plan

Dry Your eyes, The Streets

On the bus mall, The Decemberists

Light pollution, Bright Eyes

My dog was lost, The Fiery Furnaces

Papa was a rodeo, The Magnetic Fields

Fall of the High School Running Back, The Mountain Goats

Jim Wise, Sun Kil Moon

Cat’s in the cradle, Harry Chapin

Frank’s wild years, Tom Waits

Episode 3 - The Kraftwerk legacy

“Forgive and forget, Major. Or at least pretend that we do.” (Basil Fawlty)

My mother never quite forgave the Germans after “they” killed her cat in the Blitz. That sad event occurred in November 1940, but growing up in ‘70s Britain felt like the war had just ended. My uncle meanwhile was taught in a playground after the obliteration of his school in the same raid, which made him rather resentful towards Germany as well. Comedy goose-stepping on ‘Fawlty Towers’, ‘Colditz’ on Monday nights, ‘The Great Escape’ on Boxing Day. Annoyingly Bayern Munich and West Germany had mastered the game “we” had introduced to the world, which only deepened our misgivings towards “them”.

So, as a kid, a vague mistrust of Germans was in all us kids’ DNA.

Which might explain why the Krautrock of Can, New and Faust rather passed us by. The arty kids swapped Genesis and Yes albums, the angry ones wore jackets with Deep Purple written on the back. Those crypto-communists who sat at the back in Biology meanwhile had started getting into punk rock; they wore torn t-shirts and ripped jeans to the Youth Club disco. No love for any Germans anywhere here. Certainly not for a bunch of keyboard players from Dusseldorf.

You might say that the Beatles were unique but that someone else would have invented the “machine music” of Kraftwerk. In a way, that’s true. The motorik beat which Ralf Hutter and Florian Schneider established is instantly recognisable, like the Bo Diddley riff. But it’s not impossible to imagine a world which would have found out about the potential for electronically driven beat-rock through other means. Like the theory of evolution, Wallace and Darwin were getting there at the same time.

However one thing that does get sometimes missed in tributes to the group is how they harnessed the rhythm of automation to the melody which sat on top. Kraftwerk in fact gave us great tunes. But they also invented a new language in which to hear them, the language of technology (analogue back then). When samplers and synthesisers and other production aids became affordable and more widely available a little while later, the template Kraftwerk had established proved endlessly fertile, through to the present day. Then came computers for all.

New wave and post-punk kids got into them early. Simple Minds, The Associates, The Human League, Joy Division/New Order, and onwards. Bowie had got there first, naturally, writing V2-Schneider in ‘77. White men with machines. But the law of unintended consequences had an amusing trick up its sleeve. Those haughty Germans who we all thought we knew, with their dubious beliefs and Aryan arrogance, turned out to be far more ethnically malleable than Emerson Lake and Palmer, Black Sabbath or even The Ramones.

Hip hop and house music owe a major debt to Kraftwerk: all the way back in 1986, Africa Bambataa’s ‘Planet Rock’ sampled Numbers and Trans Europe Express. I guess it’s quite a neat little reversal that the whites finally gave black people something back, musically. And then it got passed back to the white people again - Aphex Twin, Boards of Canada, LCD Soundsystem, and on it goes.

I’ve just done some online fossicking and unearthed a rather startling - to my mind - statistic. In a recent survey, citizens of various countries were invited to give their views on Germany’s influence, whether positive or negative. The U.K. has a net positive score of 77%, trailing only South Korea and Australia! Not something my mother would have predicted when she was burying Tibby.

Tracklist:-

Trans Europe Express, Kraftwerk

I travel, Simple Minds

Cars, Gary Numan

Tell me Easter’s on a Friday, The Associates

Incubation, Joy Division

Seconds, The Human League

The model, Kraftwerk

Your silent face, New Order

Planet rock, Afrika Bamabataa

Xtal, Aphex Twin

Roygbiv, Boards of Canada

Harder better faster stronger, Daft Punk

Losing my edge, LCD Soundsystem

Episode 2 - Sci fi

“He taught me to play a song. If you’d like to hear it, I will play it for you.”

Too much information about to unfold. That little excerpt of HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey was on the turntable when I lurched at my wife-to-be for the first time, having plied her liberally with premium malt whisky left over from some focus groups I’d been conducting. It was sampled by A R Kane on A Love From Outer Space, (it will feature on a future podcast episode, whose theme is also science fiction). She’s still my wife now, many many years later, from which we can conclude it was a lurch that yielded an excellent return on investment.

Up until the psychedelic era science fiction was treated almost entirely as a joke. The Ran-dells, for example, had a hit with The Martian Hop in 1963, a one-off novelty record, if ever there was one. Since then comedy is a theme that’s never entirely gone away. In the late ‘80s, The Firm had a number one with Star Trekkin’, while The Timelords found success with Doctorin’ the Tardis. Spizz Energi’s Where’s Captain Kirk? and Area 52 by Yeah Yeah Yeahs provide our own quota of knockabout interplanetary japes. 

In the psychedelic era, space became a Serious Subject for the first time, especially when handled by Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd: Astronomy Domine, Interstellar Overdrive and Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun - all the way through to The Dark Side of the Moon itself. Then there was Bowie, of course. The seminal space songs are his: Ziggy Stardust, Starman, Space Oddity.  It helps that he looked like an alien, I suppose, a coincidence he put to excellent effect in The Man Who Fell to Earth.

When I initially thought about this theme I worried that it might prove limiting, but such is not the case. There are genuinely moving tracks here - especially Teenage Spaceship by Smog, Sufjan Stevens’ Concerning the UFO Sighting Near Highland, and Modest Mouse’s Space Travel is Boring in the Sun Kil Moon version. Meanwhile you’d have to have a heart of stone not to feel sympathy for the Roswell alien who ended up in army crates and photographs in files, when all he wanted was a holiday on some friendly star in Pixies’ Motorway to Roswell.

Space travel, UFOs, aliens can all lead to epic artistic statements in the hands of great film directors. There is some wonderful science fiction in literature - I well remember the effect John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids had on me as an eleven year old, though I never penetrated much further into the genre. I’m quietly impressed by my own efforts with this podcast (which is just as well) that could have been either throwaway or portentous, but I hope has managed to be neither. Please enjoy the result.

Tracklist:-

Motorway to Roswell, Pixies

Area 51, Yeah Yeah Yeahs

Where’s Captain Kirk?, Spizz Energi

3rd Planet, Modest Mouse

Every Planet We Reach Is Dead, Gorillaz

Calling Occupants Of Interplanetary Craft, The Carpenters

Concerning the UFO Incident Near Highland, Sufjan Stevens

Space Travel Is Boring, Sun Kil Moon

Teenage Spaceship, Smog

Girl from Mars, Ash

Wings, The Fall

Dr Who Theme, Ron Granger

Ashes to Ashes, David Bowie

Episode 1 - British female post-punk icons

Don't create, don't rebel. Have intuition. Don't drive well.

It's been said (by who?, as wikipedia would say - answer: can't remember) that the last three years of the 1970s produced more great music than the average decade. Post punk is central to the Sombrero Fallout agenda, and is the main reason for the fertile seam of that period. But this episode double filters the data. First, female artists. Then, British. What sort of sample does that leave us?

Typical girls get upset too quickly. Typical girls can't control themselves.

One that is 'highly robust', in market research terminology. The anger of punk paradoxically liberated women to create a new voice within alternative music. That voice was not monolithic or proscribed. There was no canonical template, no Jessie J on The Voice, to explain what would sell. It was a brief moment in time when everyone had license to do their own thing and women to go their own way.

Typical girls don't think too clearly. Typical girls are unpredictable.

Of course, not much of this music did sell, which was a problem. The groups featured in the British Female Post Punk Icons came together for a few singles, an album or two, and then generally faded from view. Not all of them. Siouxsie and the Banshees had a long and varied career. But what wouldn't we give for a ten-album box set from Young Marble Giants or X Ray Spex? Imagine that.

Typical girls feel like hell. Typical girls worry about spots, fat and natural smells.

In these diverse times, its easy to forget how patronised women must have felt in the late 1970s, in a Britain where it was OK to joke about rape on sitcoms. On this podcast you can hear groups like The Raincoats and The Slits slyly, amusedly fighting back against the male orthodoxies of the day.

Can't decide what clothes to wear...typical girls are cruel and bewitching.

It must have taken some chutzpah to inhabit this new identity. Their fellow male punk travellers were generally supportive, but in this version of Britain men didn't change nappies, couldn't cook, prevented their daughters from attending university. A Britain closer to The Handmaid's Tale than The Female Eunuch.

And there's another marketing ploy. Typical girls gets the typical boy.

It would be a mistake to think nothing has changed in the last forty years. And some of that is down to the influence of the female bands in this podcast episode, raising feminist consciousness via their novel take on what punk rock could mean to the disenfranchised women of Britain.

"(The Raincoats) seemed like ordinary people playing extraordinary music. They had enough confidence to be vulnerable and to be themselves without having to take on the mantle of male rock/punk rock aggression...or the typical female as sex symbol avec irony or sensationalism." (Kim Gordon, Sonic Youth).

Tracklist:-

Hong Kong Garden, Siouxsie and the Banshees

C30, C60, C90, Go, Bow Wow Wow

Getting nowhere fast, Girls At Our Best

Germ free adolescents, X-Ray Spex

It's obvious, The Au Pairs

Typical girls, The Slits

I’m in love with a German film star, The Passions

Anticipation, Delta 5

On my radio, The Selecter

No Side To Fall In, The Raincoats

NITA, Young Marble Giants

Song to the Siren, This Mortal Coil

Knife slits water, A Certain Ratio

Dead pop stars, Altered Images