21 Songs for John: 4 - Calvin Party

Calvin Party – Lies, Lies & Government

It was when hearing JD Meatyard perform this song at one of Jeff Grainger's Dandelion nights in Oldham this year that I had the idea for this compilation..  One of the finest politically inspired songs of any age from a band that emerged from the ashes of the much-loved Levellers 5 to cement their place among the giants of the Peel show.   As Calvin Party, the band recorded four sessions, the final one in August 2004, just weeks before John Peel's death.  'Lies, Lies & Government' appeared in 1996 and gave the band a festive fifty entry for the first time: here, we feature it in all its full two-part glory.

www.elirecords.co.uk/calvinparty.html

21 Songs for John can be downloaded for free here.

21 Songs for John: 3 - Solex

Solex – Solex vs Bolland & Bolland

Elisabeth Esselink, aka Solex, was a regular visitor to the Peel show during the years 1998-2002, recording six sessions during that period.  She also contributed a track to Dandelion's 'Peel Legends' month in 2009, which commemorated the fifth anniversary of John Peel's loss.  She continues to record prolifically and her most recent album Solex Ahoy! was a sonic document of journeys around the twelve provinces of the Netherlands.  This track was made available as an mp3 on the Matador website in 1999 but has never had an official release.

http://solex-solex.tumblr.com

Remember you can download 21 Songs for John for free here. 

21 Songs for John: 2. Cinerama

Cinerama – I Wake Up Screaming

The second of David Gedge's mighty musical vehicles began life in 1998; with The Wedding Present (more of whom later) suspended at that time, Cinerama continued where its mighty predecessor left off, generating thirteen festive fifty entries and recording ten Peel sessions.  Midway through the first decade of this century, The Wedding Present returned and Cinerama were discontinued, though they returned in late 2013 with this single, a limited edition 7" that has long since sold out.

http://www.scopitones.co.uk

Download 21 Songs for John here. 

21 Songs for John: 1 - Cuban Boys

This month marks the 10th anniversary of the death of the great John Peel.  21 of his favourite bands and artists have contributed tracks to a free Unwashed Territories compilation to celebrate his legacy.

Cuban Boys – The Nation Needs You (2014 Version)

Cuban Boys burst into the consciousness of Peel listeners in 1998 with the audacious 'Oh God They Killed Kenny' and into that of the rest of the universe in 1999, when 'Cognoscenti Vs Intelligentsia' threatened world domination, leading to this most idiosyncratic of bands engaging the temporary interest of EMI and generating a saga that illustrated the yawning gap between the conservative standards of the mainstream record industry and the true guardians of innovation and creativity.

Recorded entirely in the Cuban Boys' luxury bunker, this chart-bound sound has been expanded from its original form to provide a heartfelt tribute to John Peel.  As tradition dictates, the Cuban Boys have made it as anti-commercial as possible with the aim of providing a personal reflection on the friendship and amusement the band shared with John.  As the band suggest, 'It is like listening to a broadcast of a John Peel Roadshow in Clitheroe where the only act the BBC had the budget to hire were That Petrol Emotion but they broke down on the motorway and the Cuban Boys had to step in to pacify all the Mabels.'

www.thecubanboys.co.uk

Get your copy of 21 Songs for John for free from here.  

The Pukes - Too Drunk to Pluck

The Pukes are such a great idea you wonder why someone didn’t do it before.  It may be that someone did and I’m not aware of it: if so, please let me know so I can check them out because I can’t get enough of this band and if anything like them in the universe exists I want to know about it.

It’s a simple idea.  You take a bunch of ukuleles and a bunch of punk songs alongside some tunes you’re written yourself, play them in an unaffected and spirited manner and eventually put them out on an album called ‘Too Drunk To Pluck’.  But you add a twist, because many of the songs covered are not the most obvious choices and that’s part of what makes the collection such a delight.  Given the vast number of possibilities available, why would a ukulele band decide to approach such an apparently inaccessible number for their instruments as ‘Holiday in Cambodia’?  And why ignore the temptations of the Pistols, Buzzcocks and The Clash in favour of Discharge, Peter & The Test Tube Babies and Cock Sparrer?

I don’t know, but the selections are original enough to give this collection an off-kilter quality that sets it apart from any expectations with which you might have approached it, and they pull every one of them off brilliantly.  The original compositions stand up very well too: ‘Will I Learn’ is a punk classic that someone forgot to write first time round, while ‘The Ballad of Micky Fitz’ has a street charm that in itself is reflective of some of the aforementioned choices: this is not a band stylistically welded to a 1976/77 vintage – its inspiration comes just as much from the output of early eighties neu punk, whose place in the punk canon has too often been denied.

They do far more than just set the record straight, however.  The Pukes’ ukulele charge is a powerful and innovative musical statement in its own right: there is no sub-George Formby cheesiness here, but a stripped down assault that loses none of its forthright appeal through the lack of guitar riffage or punctuating snare attacks. The Pukes are a musical delight in their own right: treasure them, then pray for that ukulele-based homage to the Anti-Nowhere League the world has been waiting for.

I'm playing their version of Cock Sparrer's 'Because You're Young' in my Dandelion Radio show this month and you can get the album from their website at http://thepukes.co.uk.

Molokai - Rack Attack 2.0

There was a time, around the mid-nineties, when I was particularly enamoured of surf music.  Enamoured is putting it mildly, actually.  I was often seen emerging from independent records shops in various parts of the midlands and north-west of England with teetering piles of vinyl threatening to obscure the path in front of me as I ventured precariously into the traffic.

It was a bad habit to acquire because, too late, I realised that I’d got to the stage of buying things I didn’t actually like very much.  Belatedly, I eschewed my profligate ways, returned to the more varied musical diet that was my natural inclination and became, I admit, something of a surf music sceptic.  Whilst the likes of Man…or Astroman continued to form an important part of my listening experience, I grew wary of venturing too far into the surf waters lest I once again be indiscriminately consumed by whatever lay out there.

The consequence of this is that nowadays a surf band has to be pretty damn special to attract my attention.  Molokai are one such band.  Emerging not from southern California but from Bitola, Macedonia, they’ve released their second album despite all being a mere nineteen years of age.  It comes via their own Predisposed To Oppose label and it’s the best bit of surf guitar to assault my lugholes in many a long year.

Titles like ‘Creepy Heap From The Deep’ ought to grab your attention anyway and even born again surf cynics like me can acknowledge that what lays behind such surface charms more than delivers on its initial promise.  Molokai have exactly what a really top drawer instrumental surf band needs: a rhythm section keeping it tight and steady while the guitars let rip to deliver riffs that manage to stay faithful to the idiom yet – and this is what sets them apart – sound like nothing like anything other worthy practitioners of the art like M…oA, Sir Bald Diddley or the Tiki-Men ever unleashed on the world.

Thus, I can confidently play a track like ‘John Travolta in the Castle Revolta’ in my Dandelion Radio show this month secure in the knowledge that I’m not only doing it because I like saying the title.   If you want to hear more, and I suggest you do, find it at http://molokaiau.bandcamp.com.  Disturbingly, the fact they've put (2011-14) on there suggests this might be the end of their short existence - let's hope not.

Green Man 2014: Unsurprisingly Good

I've got a guy to the left of me in a Crass t-shirt and an elderly woman to my right doing some knitting.  In front of me is a young girl with multi-coloured hair and her bespectacled and be-anoraked boyfriend.  All are nodding away to the music while thirty or so people sway and occasionally groove as they queue good-naturedly at the Hippy Chippy van.  You couldn't be anywhere else but the Green Man festival.

There's another side to the Green Man, though, and one that was all too in evidence in the 2014 event which, let me be clear, was a triumph, though with some reservations.  The relaxed atmosphere that makes it possible for practically anyone to enjoy themselves at the festival may yet, I fear, turn out to be its undoing.  At times, those festival abominations camp chairs stretched out so far before the Mountain and Walled Garden stage those who wanted to do the decent thing and stand to watch the bands found it difficult to find a space in which to do so, and were occasionally clucked at when they occupied a position in front of someone's seat: not very often, though, because more often than not the person in it appeared not to be showing a blind bit of interest in the music and all too often was in the process of spending hours with his/her back to it, his or her interest far more engaged by the contents of a Green Man Growler, Goan Fish Curry or Pieminster pie.

If Green Man isn't careful it's in danger of becoming little more than somewhere the middle classes can spend an August weekend in a relaxed liberal arts atmosphere with fine ales, superb scenery and unchallenging music.  For many who come to the festival, you sense that's what it already is.  It needs shaking up and one way to do it is to get rid of the far too many bands filling out the schedule this year who offered little more than background music to this cosy scene.

  

Fortunately, you can create your own excellent Green Man schedule by picking your way around the stages and there was plenty on offer to challenge those who wished to be challenged, and occasionally upset those who didn't.  Neutral Milk Hotel (top) played a storming set to close the main stage on the Sunday night, for example, but it was telling how many picked up their chairs and vacated the scene early in the set: classy Americana they like; the kind that NMH trade in, with its sophisticated and disjointed wooziness, clearly demanded too much concentration for those who wished to be passive recipients rather than active participants in the Green Man, which was always a big part of its point.

Slint, in the more receptive environs of the Far Out stage, found themselves with an audience largely made up of Slint-ites and therefore their characteristic refusal to make concessions was warmly and eagerly received, though their remarkable ingenuity and deftness of touch was lost on a bunch of girls behind me who disappeared complaining that they'd expected something a little more like the Foo Fighters based on what the programme had said.  Dunno where they got that from.  The sound wasn't great for their set, but then this band must be a sound engineer's nightmare: the overall effect, though, was mesmerising.

Others in the Far Out marquee made highly memorable contributions: Plank's sledgehammer attack of a few years ago has developed some intricacies but is none the worse for it.  Jupiter C, whose single from earlier this year I've been playing in my August Dandelion Radio show, revealed a bewitching promise well beyond the evidence I'd encountered previously.  James Yorkston played one of those sets of his that are half serious and half arsing around but he and his band made it work.  The short set Tender Prey delivered in the Cinema tent was highly enjoyable, while Talisman's performance in my one visit to the Chai Wallah on the Sunday night was every bit as good as you'd expect from one of the finest reggae bands Britain has ever produced.

Despite the cosiness demanded by too much of its audience, the Mountain Stage offered more highlights than is often the case.  Angel Olsen, a woman who could easily cut an easier path through the facile music industry by trading on her looks, instead takes a more difficult and far more interesting path, her sulky on-stage persona brilliantly matching the Cohen-esque richness of her delivery; like Olsen, Samantha Crain brought to life one of the finest albums of recent times in an exquisitely crafted and engaging performance in the Walled Garden on Sunday night, while Neko Case also didn't disappoint, one of the most distinctive voices of our age showing no ill-effects in what was her last live appearance of a lengthy tour.  Also on the Mountain Stage, veteran Cornish troubadour Michael Chapman added his considerable weight to the proceedings, providing one of the early highlights of Green Man 2014 and one that was only occasionally bettered throughout the long weekend.

Only Jeffrey Lewis and the Jrams (right) managed it. I'll be surprised if most of the mainstream reviews tell me I ought to have been watching The War On Drugs at the time, but for me Lewis is as close to unmissable as music gets and he didn't disappoint, raking brilliantly over the content of several albums (and he's never released a bad one) and leaving us, among many highlights, with an astonishing rendition 'Williamsburg Will Oldham Horror', as perhaps this festival's greatest moment.  I wish some of the chair-carriers had been able to see it above the heads of the highly appreciative crowd that swarmed around the front of the stage - would have done them good, I reckon. 

I suppose the issue I have, however, is that all of the above were artists I anticipated delivering the goods before I set out on Thursday morning.  I'm pleased they didn't disappoint, but for me so much of the beauty of the Green Man lies in the discovery of great new stuff.  This year, for me, only the excellent Frank Fairfield (left), who blew an appreciative crowd away with his startling re-imagining of songs of the old west, really did the business on this score.  Others I went to see on the off-chance of something interesting happening ranged from the ordinary to the truly appalling.  I won't name them because I don't believe in wasting words on music that doesn't do anything for me, but, among all the great music on offer, there was a gaping, disappointing hole in the middle of this festival and it needs seeing to because I suspect it, and the apathy of too much of the crowd, are two sides of the same coin.

The Green Man Festival is something that usually manages to surprise and delight in equal measure.  This year I'm happy to report that there was plenty to delight, but we were sadly lacking in surprises.

Green Man 2014: A Personal Top Ten

1.  Jeffrey Lewis & The Jrams
2.  Michael Chapman
3.  Samantha Crain
4.  Angel Olsen
5.  Neutral Milk Hotel
6.  Frank Fairfield
7.  Slint
8.  Talisman
9.  Jupiter C
10. Tender Prey