Just Played - On The Record #20
Some sort of milestone?
Regular readers will be aware of my fondness for Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s unique approach to pop music. Her first four albums (beautifully rendered for vinyl recently by Plastic Pop) mostly had the dancier end of the hit parade in mind, despite being far from predictable as they developed, but then she began working with Ed Harcourt. I’ve written about 2014 classic ‘Wanderlust’ before, but I honestly think that record is ludicrously underrated. 2016’s ‘Familia’ continued to explore a broader range of textures and now we have ‘Hana’, released last Friday. These twelve new tracks continue the restless, genre-shirking that has made her collaborative writing so satisfying and I’d recommend listening to it all as one. Opening pair ‘A Thousand Orchids’ and ‘Breaking The Circle’ are quite the one-two but, if you need immediate melodic thrills, then try recent single ‘Lost In The Sunshine’. The hook is obviously tremendous, but listen to that arrangement. Glorious.
I’m always intrigued to see how Qobuz goes about arranging the new releases. They invariably skew the selection towards a demographic that might best be described as somewhere between audiophile and 6 Music Dad. At the front of the list I was presented with this weekend was an album about which I knew literally nothing. ‘Further Out Than The Edge’ is the debut by the house band from a London open mic night for hip-hop MCs, Speakers Corner Quartet. A variety of guest artists pepper this fascinating record, but this instrumental piece neatly demonstrates their chops. Be sure to try the whole album.
Misc-Cogs
Shake your phone when in the Discogs app for a random selection from your collection. That’s what I do each week for this bit.
In the early Noughties, I won a hi-fi with a built-in minidisc recorder via a Father’s Day competition during Pete & Geoff’s then Sunday morning show on (the old) Virgin Radio. I should say, my dad got the telly, DVD player and surround system that was the bulk of the prize, he just had no use for the hi-fi. As well as allowing me to copy CDs in digital quality and make endless compilations, it also enabled a weekly recording of Gilles Peterson’s superb ‘Worldwide’ show, which aired on Wednesdays at midnight on Radio 1. Whenever I had the pleasure, I knew I was listening to something special, but these were barely the days of the BBC using RealPlayer for listen again and the quality was some way short of audiophile. In other words - if you missed it, you missed it.
I would make a special effort to stay up for a Brownswood Basement session, whereby Peterson went strictly vinyl and played two hours of vintage tracks from his vast collection. These were dependably sensational listening, even if you rarely stood a chance of being able to source copies of the magical things he selected. The minidisc option suddenly made it an easily programmable convenience and I could even edit around the songs I especially loved and keep them. I soon picked up the ‘INCredible Sound Of Gilles Peterson’ 2CD compilation, but it was the ‘Impressed with’ compilations that quickly became cherished. Exploring phenomenally rare British jazz, they breathed new life into sensational tunes from Tubby Hayes, Mike Westbrook, Harry Beckett, Don Rendell and Ian Carr. A number of the albums from which these songs came were reissued too, though only on CD as was the taste of the zeitgeist, and it was seen as the start of a series that could run and run. Volume 1 seemed to be everywhere, and I remember prominent displays in Fopp, but a second volume in 2004 brought things to a halt. A third instalment was prepared but never manufactured, Peterson working Tony Higgins to deliver the goods throughout. While Higgins has recently been doing very fine work for the British Jazz Explosion! series, those two compilations still endure.
I have a not insignificant amount of jazz these days and most of that interest can be traced back to those radio shows and the ‘Impressed’ albums. After this came up on the Discogs app, I was genuinely excited to get it on the turntable again. Thrill to Harold McNair’s sublime ‘The Hipster’ from his self-titled record and bask in the majesty of The Stan Tracey Quartet’s ‘Starless And Bible Black’, from ‘Jazz Suite’ - which has just had a reissue cut at Gearbox. There’s Tubby, Amancio D’Silva and ‘Will You Walk A Little Faster’ by Neil Ardley, which I distinctly remember hearing Gilles play on the radio on a number of occasions. The discs sound pretty great, but aren’t so easy to find two decades on. That said, a number of the albums from which these pieces were cherry-picked have returned to the racks, the BJE! series doing much of the heavy-lifting.
Peterson is still delivering three hours of remarkable national broadcasting every Saturday afternoon on 6 Music and does a weekly Brownswood Basement of sorts on Thursday mornings via the otherwise dormant Worldwide.fm. He remains a remarkable force for good in the world of music discovery.
First Look
Jim Bob’s twelfth solo studio album will be released by Cherry Red Records at the end of the month. You may have noticed him having a little legal chat with a prominent Brexit-loving, double-breasted GBeebies host and clear man of the people as a result of the video for ‘Sebastian’s Gone On A Ridealong’. The album picks up where that leaves off and includes a 12x12” 2024 calendar, for those keen to plan ahead. You can have an advance glance at ‘Thanks For Reaching Out’ below.
On the same day - June 30th - London Records are affording The Durutti Column’s 1998 album ‘Time Was GIGANTIC… When We Were Kids’ a first vinyl edition. Remastered and expanded for this outing, the double LP set has been pressed by MPO in France and you can see some of the artwork below. There’s an excellent essay by James Nice, but you can stump up the cost of entry if you want to read that!
Something for the ‘read all the way to the end’ folk
‘69 Love Songs’ is great, but it’s no ‘i’. I swear I’m not being a deliberate contrarian when I express this preference. And, let’s be clear, there’s plenty of gold in The Magnetic Fields’ majestic back-catalogue. A combination of Neil Hannon covering several of Stephin Merritt’s songs as Divine Comedy b-sides and frequenting a lively music forum entitled Black Cat Bone in the early Noughties nudged me towards the fabled concept triple-album. It was a lot to absorb, yet it was immediately clear what was appealing about the idiosyncratic but outrageously melodic music found within.
However, it was the follow-up, ‘i’, containing fourteen tracks all starting with the letter ‘i’ and arranged in alphabetical order, that rapidly became an all-time favourite. Reining in some of the excesses and tightening up the fidelity - not to mention boldly ditching the synths - seemed to pull Merritt’s obvious talents into dazzling focus. Somewhere between songs and short stories, ‘I Wish I Had An Evil Twin’ (sample lyric: “I wish I had an evil twin, running ‘round doing people in”) and ‘I Thought You Were My Boyfriend’ head off in very different directions but are united by their meticulous construction.
And what about ‘If There’s Such A Thing As Love’? A strident string section somehow melds perfectly to an acoustic, percussive chug before a distant harpsichord solo draws out its fragile undercurrent. All of which has been said without mentioning Merritt’s voice, noirish but smooth like a hazelnut latte. While wry might be the default setting, he can do aching, wistful and effusive just as well. Ornate but still robust, the tracks on’i’ have endured, an array of earworms that would feel like a collection of highlights but for the very evident alphabetical conceit. I was overjoyed when a vinyl release was finally revealed for RSD23, but quickly deflated when it was confirmed as US only. Thankfully, an incredibly kind Twitter follower was happy to help me out and I received a copy several weeks ago. It’s on gold (brown) vinyl and plays with only very occasional surface noise. But, more importantly, it’s got me head over heels about this fabulous album once more. In the unlikely event you’re not familiar, I *cough* recommend you seek it out.
I really look forward to this column.
Stuff I know and stuff I don't (yet) make for an excellent read.
The Magnetic Fields are blissful and your writing makes me want to listen to them again right now.
Ah! Minidisc recording from the radio memories. Mine had a 6 second buffer, so you could decide after the first 6 seconds whether to record a track or wait for the next one!