The new Pogues Box Set "Just Look Them In The Eye and Say Pogue Mahone" is released on the 2nd June and you can pre-order it from Amazon.
This is a five CD box set compiled by Phil Chevron (who happily seems to be over his illness), there are 111 tracks three quarters of which have not been officially released anywhere else and it covers their career from the earliest sessions to recordings from the recent Brixton Academy gigs.
I'm as excited as a giddy kid before christmas.
Monday, 28 April 2008
Monday, 14 April 2008
Renegade. Mark E. Smith's new Biography
Mark E. Smith's biography "Renegade: The Lives and Tales of Mark E. Smith" is available from Amazon at £12.48 which is a 34% reduction.
..and you can also order the new LP "Imperial Wax Solvent" from the same place.
I get the Fall more now in my forties than I did in my teens and twenties. One fairly straight forward reason is because every time I saw them in the eighties and nineties Smith was playing the full on curmudgeon (back to the audience, fiddling with the knobs on the amps, harranging his band members and so on), and it just irritated me. However I saw them last year at the last ever gig to be played at the Hammersmith Palais and they played a short, brilliant set. They finished with the song "Reformation" from the Fall's last LP and I couldn't get the song's bass riff type thing out of my head. I went home that night in an almost autistic reverie, a slightly drunk 40 year old bloke, on the last train to leave Kings X back to Cambridge listening to that same song over and over again on my ipod. Almost deafened myself. From then I developed a major obsession with the Fall.
But I'm not sure this obsession with a band was the right sort of thing for a middle aged dad to be having. As a teen I would get obsessed by a band or an LP or a song - but almost all teens are idiots (and I certainly was) - but now I don't have youth as an excuse. Of course the Fall are sort of cool - (on the front of today's Guardian no less) so perhaps this adolescent obsession in a 40 year old does not seem so bad. But what if you replace the Fall with Jethro Tull or AC/DC - both bands with whom I have developed an odd obsession with since turning 40. Clearly an unhealthy descent into an I r idiot world.
(Here's an odd fact. The bass type riff thing in "Reformation" is very similar to the bass type riff thing in AC/DC's "Hail Caeser")
The new book is co-authored (or co-ghost authored) by Austin Collins who is a friend. I got the impression the process was fairly torturous for him. The point of writing a biography (or auto biography) is, in some ways, to explain and clarify but Smith's instinct is that of the obscurant. "Whatever people say I am that's what I'm not" - may be a quote from a fictional character from Nottingham (and an LP title by a Sheffield band) but in Manchester that outlook becomes a world view and becomes the basis of some people's entire personalities, and in a city where being contrary is like a religion Smith is the Godhead (along with those Man City fans who support City just because they are not MUFC).
So Austin was working with one of the most contrary men on earth, which made the process of co-writing the book difficult, but he was also working with a man whose innate inability to be straightforward takes this book, much like the best Fall LPs, in all sorts of odd, compelling and brilliantly entertaining directions.
..and you can also order the new LP "Imperial Wax Solvent" from the same place.
I get the Fall more now in my forties than I did in my teens and twenties. One fairly straight forward reason is because every time I saw them in the eighties and nineties Smith was playing the full on curmudgeon (back to the audience, fiddling with the knobs on the amps, harranging his band members and so on), and it just irritated me. However I saw them last year at the last ever gig to be played at the Hammersmith Palais and they played a short, brilliant set. They finished with the song "Reformation" from the Fall's last LP and I couldn't get the song's bass riff type thing out of my head. I went home that night in an almost autistic reverie, a slightly drunk 40 year old bloke, on the last train to leave Kings X back to Cambridge listening to that same song over and over again on my ipod. Almost deafened myself. From then I developed a major obsession with the Fall.
But I'm not sure this obsession with a band was the right sort of thing for a middle aged dad to be having. As a teen I would get obsessed by a band or an LP or a song - but almost all teens are idiots (and I certainly was) - but now I don't have youth as an excuse. Of course the Fall are sort of cool - (on the front of today's Guardian no less) so perhaps this adolescent obsession in a 40 year old does not seem so bad. But what if you replace the Fall with Jethro Tull or AC/DC - both bands with whom I have developed an odd obsession with since turning 40. Clearly an unhealthy descent into an I r idiot world.
(Here's an odd fact. The bass type riff thing in "Reformation" is very similar to the bass type riff thing in AC/DC's "Hail Caeser")
The new book is co-authored (or co-ghost authored) by Austin Collins who is a friend. I got the impression the process was fairly torturous for him. The point of writing a biography (or auto biography) is, in some ways, to explain and clarify but Smith's instinct is that of the obscurant. "Whatever people say I am that's what I'm not" - may be a quote from a fictional character from Nottingham (and an LP title by a Sheffield band) but in Manchester that outlook becomes a world view and becomes the basis of some people's entire personalities, and in a city where being contrary is like a religion Smith is the Godhead (along with those Man City fans who support City just because they are not MUFC).
So Austin was working with one of the most contrary men on earth, which made the process of co-writing the book difficult, but he was also working with a man whose innate inability to be straightforward takes this book, much like the best Fall LPs, in all sorts of odd, compelling and brilliantly entertaining directions.
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