People tire so quickly of the glamorous

(Photo by Iona Bateman)

I have to confess to being a SoulSeeker when I can't find the tracks I need. That's right, I illegally download music. Now, I consider that I do more to promote than to steal, all told, and I only do it when I have to, and that happened yesterday finding a Wildhearts B-side.

Because I was a fan of the Wildhearts sort of before my record-buying days. Or rather, during them, but when my good pal Nathan would sort me out with bundles of recorded tapes. One of these was a Wildhearts B-Sides, from whence came the rather wonderful Two Way Idiot Mirror (don't be deceived by the rather lacking-in-finesse title, it's a pretty song from a specifically ugly band). Another was Fishing For Luckies, and were it not for my misplacement of said tape, that album could still be on my All Time Top Five. It's generally recognised that the Wildhearts' wonderful thrash-punk debut, Earth Vs. The Wildhearts was their finest hour, with its blistering paeans to the seedy sides of everyday life, its inventive but monumental riffing, and it's overall Rawkness. But ace though it is, Fishing For Luckies - the band's third album, after the wider-scoped PHUQ - pips it for me. For a record which is essentially mid-nineties Britrock, at home with the Terrorvisions, the Ashs of this world, Fishing has such a grand vision, and although on first glance it has typical Wildhearts songs on there, wild, barrelling numbers like Red Light, Green Light or Moodswings & Roundabouts, they're slotted neatly and purposefully amongst the more far-reaching numbers like Soul Searching or Sky Babies.

The record kicks off with a song called Inglorious. In many ways, this one title sums up the whole band. While the Wildhearts put out at least three albums of an exceptionally high Rock quality, their internal affairs were, shall we say, complex at the least. When I was in sixth-form, I spent my free periods making an Angelfire website called the Wildhearts family tree, which taught me the basics of html and gave me an insight into the wacky world of Ginger and his cohorts. It got out of control. They say about The Fall that it could be Mark E Smith and his grandmother, it's still The Fall, and similarly the Wildhearts could have any line-up you like - if they've got David 'Ginger' Walls in the midst, that's the Wildhearts. A manic, hard-talking, hard-living frontman, he was the heart and soul of the group and although without Danny McCormack they'd be struggling, Ginger was the driving force. The songs were sleazy - dirty, grimy anthems about the squalor, the spit and drivel of everyday life forced through a Dogs D'Amour blender. By the band's final (pre-first-major-breakup) album, Endless Nameless, the sleaze had got to their heads and the record was an overdriven mess of speedballs and crack cocaine with nary a melody in site. But just before that, when the band dared to look over the garden wall into the wider world outside, when their breath was taken away by just how grand everything could be... that was Fishing For Luckies.

Inglorious. This week's Contrast Podcast is about songs which start off albums (I chose Bob Marley, mon), and Inglorious is maybe the least likely opening track you can imagine. A 9 minute assault on the senses and the sensibilities, it starts off like GnR fighting Metallica at their peaks, a picked riff slowly building the tense before the chugging drop-D makes itself known. Then comes maybe the definitive Wildhearts riff, rollicking and rolling, with juddering halts and frenetic startups, the syncopated Hendrix chords - all tastefully smothered by a battered distortion stompbox.

Ginger starts off, "someone out there really likes me," but it's sarcastic, it's grunted and snarled. The almost Pantera-like verse comes to an end with a disorientating "stop me, stop me" before the (now) glorious, melodic pre-chorus: "We could be anywhere, but you choose up there." The oi's, the punk heys, the epic harmonies. Then the chorus, "inglorious!" a chorus which isn't so much the climax of the verse as the means to get to the next verse, and the next.
It's a monster of a song, full of shifts and changes, dynamic, resourceful. It's starting to sound like a CV... Take the "middle eight," if you will... a phased, sweeping start degenerates into spat venom and curses before Ginger's guttural roar takes and the whole thing explodes.

"People tire so quickly of the glamorous," he says. It's true. And although in their own minds the Wildhearts were real rockstars, this is a day when real rockstars have to deal with the spectre of the anti-hero - Billy Corgan and Kurt Cobain have a lot to answer for, you know. But people don't tire, or at least I don't tire of something this grandiose, carried out with such conviction. Yeah it's nostalgic but it's also great.

The Music
The Wildhearts - Inglorious

The 'fo
Artist: The Wildhearts
Website: thewildhearts.com
Recommended: Fishing For Luckies (Japanese edition)
Label: Warner
Buy: Amazon
More: Hype Machine; elbo.ws
If you like this you might like: Yo-Yo's - Uppers & Downers
Tags: Wildhearts; Ginger; rock; prog; Fishing For Luckies

Hey Mister, You've Got The Best Answerphone Machine Message I Ever Heard

I received literally the best promo item I've ever got today. It was worth going to answer the door in my dressing gown for, it was that pretty. I've got albums I was more excited about before; I've got better music (although obviously, I haven't had a chance to acquaint myself with this one fully yet, it may take some time).

It's black. Not none more black, given the rust red spattered across the front. It's large and beautifully presented. Being a 4AD release, the artwork is a v23 special, created by the very nice Vaughan and Chris (I've met them, I think they were afraid of my friend Leah. You would be). It's pristine.

It's also on vinyl, and therefore trickier to put on here as an mp3. Given my general apathy towards the very thing I slaved towards as a student, I'm not going to bother recording the tracks and putting them up, sorry. Too much work.

It's Scott Walker. You may be thinking what, that Scott Walker? Yes, that Scott Walker. You know, 'The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore'; the Scott 1-4 albums; Tilt... He's still around and appears to be completely barking: if you were expecting admittedly gut-wrenchingly heartfelt, broken-heart pop songs, then you've come to the wrong place. Think more Nick Cave's more boundary-pushing moments, a voice of almost operatic quality touching just that place which makes it uncomfortable to listen. Think songs about the execution of Mussolini ('Clara'), Elvis' stillborn twin ('Jesse'), Slobodan Milosevic ('Buzzers'). Although rumoured, I can't find credited the expected contributions from Liz Fraser and Jarvis Cocker, but it gives you an idea that this man wants to create cerebal, seminal music that doesn't pander to any expectations at all.

On first listen, it's pretty tough going, and makes me think I'm going to have to make myself listen to it. What's not great is that the vinyl format means it can't go on my mp3 player and thusly has eradicated a lot of the listening time it could get (chances are, this'll go to the ace new Adem album).

It also means that I can't give you a preview, so I'm going with a bunch of random stuff I've listened to today.

The Wildhearts - Suckerpunch - toted on release in 1993(!) as the spiritual successor to Ace Of Spades, it really fits the bill. You'll know I love the Wildhearts; I haven't listened to them in far too long.
Buy the album/band

Two versions of the Partridge Family's finest hour:
Clam Abuse - I Think I Love You - Clam Abuse were a Wildhearts spin-off, and if you thought Scott Walker was mental... Great cover though.
Download half the album free/buy
Paul Westerberg & The Painkillers - I Think I Love You - the Paul Westerberg in question being of course the legendary frontperson of the Replacements, one of the finest pop-punk bands there's ever been.
Buy Replacements/buy Westerberg

Repetunitis

Earworm (n.): a loan translation of the German Ohrwurm, is a term for a song stuck in one's head, particularly an annoying one. Use of the English translation was introduced by James Kellaris, an associate professor of marketing at the University of Cincinnati. His studies appeared to demonstrate that different people have varying susceptibilities to earworms, but that almost everybody has been afflicted with one at some time or another.
Some sufferers from earworm prefer the term "repetunitis" or, if sufficiently acute, "melodymania."

Sometimes there's literally no basis for a song getting stuck in your head. Or so it seems. Yesterday I wound up humming 'Sunshine Girl' by The Yo-Yo's, a track I had mild affection for sometime around the summer of 2000. In fact, it was the summer of 2000: I purchased this record in HMV on Princes Street, Edinburgh in a respite from the rain that was to dampen (get it?) my enthusiasm for what's undoubtedly a beautiful city. I was a big Wildhearts fan; I've admitted more embarrassing things, I'm not ashamed of this. The Wildhearts were the best rock group of the nineties and it since transpires that due to my skinflint, C90 hoarding approach to music at the time, I only have one Wildhearts CD, a copy of the Sick Of Drugs single complete with growable grass mat (I never have), and so I can't really post any of the tracks I'd like to.

Anyway, The Yo-Yo's were Danny McCormack's offshoot band. Neither as glam as Silver Ginger 5, nor as plain bonkers as Clam Abuse (I had that too, and was at the linked gig), without the glossy sheen of Honeycrack or the Top Of The Pops-featuring Senseless Things, and certainly without the critical success of brother Chris' 3 Colours Red, the band were nonetheless probably the best spinoff after the inevitable implosion of the Wildhearts circa 1998. As far as I'm aware (my attention slipped towards NoFX and their Fat Wreck styled buddies shortly after this), Uppers & Downers, on SubPop no less, was the Yo-Yo's only album, and much neglected it is too (as I just discovered, it's not, but this fact passed me by). McCormack was to soon return to the Wildhearts fold (this was one of the most rigidly enforced stipulations from Ginger precluding the reformation), once he'd been certified clear of said uppers and downers - as a band, the Wildhearts were not exactly shy of requiring outside influences to function fully, although the ever elegantly wasted McCormack was tentatively clean by this record.

As befits a band pictured on the cover resplendent in leather jackets and brylcreemed pompadours, only twice do the songs broach three minutes thirty, and each is laced with not only a street-punk bruiser of a riff, but a tremendous pop sensibility that keeps the backing vocals more of a hey! than an oi!; one that creates said earworms without even trying. Sunshine Girl is probably the pinnacle of pop on this album, all do-do's and "you're my sunshine girl"s, a summery burst to go not with Edinburgh's grey skies but with the blue that followed up until a storming show at Portsmouth's Wedgewood Rooms, co-headlining with the awesome Groop Dogdrill, in the autumn of that year. I was there with Nathan and B., two tatto-and-leopard-skin wannabes if ever I saw them, but at least one of them being my bestest mate. The Hives were the opening act, if you want an 'I Was There' moment, and yep: as good a live band as you'll see, even before a disinterested crowd. Howlin' Pelle leapt across the stage to ask me where we were, I had to say pardon; when the answer finally came, I instantly regretted it - Cleveland would've been so much cooler to say than Portsmouth. We chatted with Nicholas Arson, since revealed to be the mysterious svengali Randy Fitgerald.

I rued the day where I forewent a Yo-Yo's gig supporting Therapy?, I put it down to the foolishness of youth.

None of which explains why I had Sunshine Girl in my head yesterday, chances are the fact that there was actual sunshine outside caught me unawares.

In addition to the aforementioned Sunshine Girl, which isn't really the best track on Uppers & Downers, I present 'Rumbled(d)', a dirty, lowslung riff if ever there was one, and 'Head Over Heels', a breezy paean to falling in love which, given it was summer at the time, I probably related to a lot at the time. You can still buy Uppers & Downers, no doubt, should you want to: if you need an incentive, Pitchfork slated it which to me is a mark of quality that only an ambassador's party can usually provide.

The Epitome Of The Rock

Metallica are like, the best band ever dude. So much hair in one place at one time, more riffs per square inch than mortal man can take, more of everything. But ask the common man in the street (for that, read 'fool') and he'll probably say, the Beatles are the best band ever.

So, who's to say which is better?

Answer: Beatallica. You'll never hear another band this good, so git yo'self down to Camden's finest Underworld on April 26th (unless you're at the Scala...) for some metal-munchin', Beatle-crunchin', tub-thumpin', amp-humpin' action.

Beatallica - The Thing That Should Not Let It Be (live)
Beatallica - Blackened The USSR
Beatallica - Everybody's Got A Ticket To Ride Except For Me And My Lightning

The Day Doncaster Fought Back

I wasn't going to go into a long spiel like I expected I might, merely to offer up a couple more tracks by the mighty Dogdrill.
They did one of the two gigs that I consider the finest I've ever seen. All wife-beaters and overdriven amps, they rocked Southampton's Joiners Arms to it's very core. Hug Kelly hit the drums harder than I've ever seen anyone else do it. Damo Fowkes plays a massive bass but actually has a kind of squeaky voice. And Pete Spiby... who doesn't love a man who'll happily gaffa-tape a voicebox to his face to get the right sound? He works in the publishing game now, as far as I know - last seen working for Everett True's 'Careless Talk Costs Lives' (or was it 'Loose Lips Sink ships'? I forget).

The only other contender, by the way, was Tanya Donelly at the Bush Hall, Shepherd's Bush, summer 2004. Right the opposite end of the spectrum, a hushed acoustic set, but just what I was looking for at the time.

Anyway: I have two tracks tonight.
Personal, again from 'Half Nelson'; and
The Best Sex In Texas, my introduction to the band and the meanest, heaviest riff the band produced. It's from 'Every Six Seconds'. Both the albums were released on Mantra.

[insert monkey-based pun here]

Usually, once I've made up my mind about a band, I'm pretty firm in my support for them. Through thick-ish, and thin-ish, I'll stand by my decision because I know I have the best music taste in the world. It's a burden that, at times, but I get by. But, occasionally I have to learn a lesson.

LESSON #1: Don't Judge A Band Based On One Song.

Ah, a chestnut. Say, for example, a band come out of seemingly nowhere into mass public consciousness. Say, for example, they go straight to number one. Normally, this is when my cynic sensors would be ringing (it's a cut little warbler deal like you'd find in a call centre, if you're wondering), and I'd be thinking, nah... There's something not right about this.
But say said sensors are drowned out by what is in fact a really good song, one that's danceable and fun, with a sense of humour and a wry take on life.

Alright, fairly obviously we're talking about those lovable Arctic Monkeys here. When 'I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor' hit number one, I was pleased for them, and especially for Domino, their label - this was their first number one, and well done them, they're a label that have provided us with some awesome bands over the years.
But now I've listened to the album, I'm less enthusiastic, less... less impressed, to be honest. 'Whatever They Say I Am, That's What I'm Not' is the name of the album (they don't specialise in the concise - and it's out on Monday, on Domino. It's OK, let me clarify this, it's OK. My major issues are that there's no development in songs, they're all pretty much the same thing: a tight, muscular guitar riff; some very Northern vocals (probably over-exaggerated); clever clever word play and rhymes; a slightly patronising, let's see, down-with-the-commoners approach to the documenting of life in Sheffield...

The Arctic Monkeys have an average age of approximately eleven, which loses the irony of a song about a policeman asking them if they're old enough to drink. It's also kind of depressing that a band so young feel that they have to resort to such cynicism and tales of ribaldry to be noticed. It's depressing, because in effect, they're doing alternate words to a karaoke Libertines, and nobody, but nobody, wants to be doing that.

There's some fun moments on the album, but to summarise, they've taken a pretty tired sound and added absolutely nothing to it. In fact, what little of their own style they have begins to grate once you're past '... Dancefloor'. This is track 2.

Without wanting to sound obtuse, I'd categorise this as Fionda Music, which if you know what I mean, you know what I mean.

As an alternative, I'll proffer another South Yorkshire band, this from an album released in 1998. It's more powerful, it's more unique (a tautology? I mean, it's less like other bands than t' Monkeys), it's reference points belong to an era where Duane Eddy, the Jesus Lizard and the Melvins are an acceptable triple-bill.
History will record Groop Dogdrill as the greatest band ever from Doncaster, and most likely the world. This is from 'Half Nelson', released in 1998, and is just amazing. You have to get the album and it's follow-up 'Every Six Seconds'.
Jackie O