The first guest blog in a while with John Linnett breaking his WIS duck with a selection of six great tunes all the way from Frankfurt am Main. Enjoy!
First Word
I’d like to start by thanking Alan for accepting my offer to fill in for him this week. As this was prepared a couple of weeks in advance, it wasn’t possible to choose songs based on some very recent event; and as this is probably a one-off anyway, I decided to just go with the theme ‘songs that John likes’. To narrow it down a bit, I added a couple of constraints – firstly, to pick tracks that are probably not familiar to everyone as I like the fact that I often learn new music through reading WIS. Secondly, to avoid anything which is too much of an acquired taste because – at least in my experience – I will only listen to many of the songs once.
I also promised Alan not to pick only Nick Cave songs, but it will be no surprise to see who made it onto the list in first position…
Palaces of Montezuma – Grinderman (2010)
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds have featured on the blog a few times, but Grinderman haven’t made it yet. Time for that to change. The band are one of Nick Cave’s side projects involving a sub-set of the Bad Seeds (Warren Ellis, Jim Sclavunos, Martyn P. Casey). And while this track might be the obvious Grinderman choice, I couldn’t resist choosing a song whose lyrics include “the spinal cord of JFK, wrapped in Marilyn Monroe’s negligee”. These, and many other improbable things, are offered in return for precious love; or even “just the softest little breathless word”. This contrasts starkly to Nick’s frustration in another Grinderman song No Pussy Blues, but that is best left further unexplored here.
The first time I saw Nick Cave was (I think) at the Trinity Hall in Bristol in 1984, so he has been a part of my life for 40 years now. The last time was outdoors in Rastatt in 2022, on a beautiful summer evening. Two very different experiences, but both seemingly appropriate for the stages of his career in music. I’d like to think that we have both reached late middle age gracefully, though I am sure that sex, drugs and rock & roll played a much greater role in the life of one of us. Nick is currently on tour with the new album Wild God, but I am not a big enough fan-boy to travel 250+kms to the closest venue. I can still live in hope that Grinderman make a comeback in the next few years.
Strychnine – The Sonics (1965)
I was going to follow the Bad Seeds with a track by The Cramps (specifically Bikini Girls with Machine Guns), the link being Kid Congo Powers, who spent time with both the Cramps and the Bad Seeds. However, I decided that this song (and indeed pretty much everything by The Cramps) is too shallow and primitive. So when Spotify started playing the original version of Strychnine which The Cramps covered on their Songs the Lord Taught Us LP, I decided to go for that instead.
While the original recording is also a bit primitive, I think it’s old enough for that to be forgiven. In fact, I learned that it is almost exactly as old as me, having been originally released in March 1965 (as I was). I’m pretty sure that this isn’t the kind of music my parents were listening to back then – who knows how I would have turned out if they had! The Sonics are credited as being pioneers of (garage) punk and had a major influence on many bands who were part of the broader punk/garage-revival scene in the 70s and early 80s. I got to know three of the songs from their debut album Here Are The Sonics as cover versions included on compilations I listened to when a student.
I didn’t know much about the band but have now learned that they formed in 1963 and had been establishing themselves in the Tacoma, Washington area for a couple of years before the release of this album. They even had some local success with their first single The Witch (one of those much-covered songs). After their debut, they released two more albums – Boom in 1966 and Introducing the Sonics in 1967 – before splitting, apparently uncomfortable with having made a transformation to a more professional sound. There were a couple of reunions in the 70s and 80s, and I’ve recently found recordings of performances from earlier this century where they were evidently back to their original raw sound. There is a film called Boom telling their story, but as I haven’t seen it I’ll just have to let you decide for yourselves whether to go and see it if you get the chance. For the time being, just give this great song a listen.
When I Win The Lottery – Camper Van Beethoven (1989)
When I first started to think of the six songs to include in this blog, Camper van Beethoven were nowhere near featuring. However, taking a line from this song out of context: “we stumble and fall on right and wrong”, eventually including a track from them seemed right. Nothing to do with Alan’s camper van, and apparently nothing to do with any of the other songs in this week’s listing, it’s just another tune where some of the great lyrics have just stuck in my head for decades. For example: “When the end comes to this old world…God won’t take the time to sort your ashes from mine”. Never mind that I don’t believe any God will be sorting anything, or that I ever really thought about this when making life decisions.
I just like the way they fantasise about how to use a lottery win to irritate those who they have some kind of grudge against – “gonna donate half my money to the city so they have to name a street or a school or a park after me”. And pointing out that, unlike“Mr Red White and Blue”, the narrator “never killed someone I don’t know, just cause someone told me to”, making the righteous shake their heads and wonder what is going on.
All of this lyrical interplay is drawled out to a laid-back tune with a violin (or fiddle) – well, there’s almost a theme there, but I seem to have lost the thread. Time to move to something a bit more recent…
My Love For Evermore – The Hillbilly Moon Explosion (2011)
This is the worst band name of any of my picks and maybe of any artist featuring on the WeekInSound Master Playlist. The Hillbilly Moon Explosion are a bunch of middle-aged Swiss-British musicians with a penchant for good old rock’n’roll. They also have the courage to have Mark “Sparky” Phillips of Welsh psychobilly band Demented Are Go as an occasional guest vocalist, grittily complementing Emmanuela Hutter’s melodic vocals. I don’t know much about Sparky, except that he probably doesn’t deserve to be alive after decades of exploring the depths of the psychobilly lifestyle; he may not even know himself that he is alive. I won’t spend much time on the rest of the Hillbilly Moon Explosion, because I couldn’t; I’m well aware that they aren’t a great band, but I do return regularly to this song for the vocals, romanticism and doom. Speaking of which…
War – Brutus (2019)
With this track, we stay in continental Europe, but move north to Belgium. I don’t feel great about including a song called War which is about a personal conflict, while real wars are making the news in many places around the world. However, it dates from a time when wars were not as omnipresent in the news (at least here) as they are now. This is the longest song on my list, and probably the shortest on lyrics. Still, “Your hate will always be my guide” is perhaps enough. Generally, I have a weakness for songs that start quietly and then become more dramatic, and this one fits that bill quite well.
Brutus are a three-piece, featuring ex-members of a Refused tribute band. Until I stumbled across Brutus – another band I have seen live a couple of times in the last few years – I had no idea that Refused tribute bands were a thing. In fact, I didn’t even know that Refused was a thing! It wouldn’t have been a reason for me to listen to them, but after hearing this song for the first time it has been one of my most-played in recent years. Somewhat unusually, Stefanie Mannaerts is not only the singer in Brutus but also the drummer, a kind of female Phil Collins. Kind of. Or Joseph Porter of Blyth Power, but that is another story. Even though the song title is War, no-one actually dies, in contrast to one or two of the other happy tunes I have brought to the lucky readers of WIS this week.
Suspicion – Katy, Daisy & Lewis (2018)
Again, I had never heard of Kitty, Daisy & Lewis before they came to play at the Zoom Club in Frankfurt last year, and I got encouraged by modern algorithms to buy tickets. A bit of investigation revealed that Kitty, Daisy and Lewis’s mother, Ingrid Weiss, was a one-time drummer (female drummers, another theme?) of the Raincoats back in the early 80s. I know only one Raincoats song, In Love, which was on the Rough Trade Compilation Wanna Buy a Bridge. I like that song a lot, but it wouldn’t pass the ‘easy listening’ test so was never on the shortlist for my blog.
Kitty, Daisy & Lewis (a wholesome family band, who record and tour with their father Graeme Durham and the aforementioned Ingrid Weiss) are the ‘real’ musicians in my selection, regularly exchanging instruments and doing vocal duties, both on record and on stage. At least to my eyes and ears, it appears that they know how to play their instruments (though the drumming could perhaps do with a bit more refinement?). It’s not the most modern music, but is contemporary. I found it difficult to pick a particular song of theirs, but wanted to avoid the most popular one as it is a cover version (of Canned Heat’s Going up the Country). I hope that no one reads too much into the fact that I chose this, which features only Lewis’s vocals, and where the subject is femicide. For consolation, as with all of the other music here, it’s about what could happen in a fantasized world, and not the reality of daily life.
Last Word
Well. I knew when John stepped up to the laptop that we’d get a bunch of unusual tunes with a commentary full of niche references. And he has delivered! From that irresistible Grinderman lyric to the slick swing of the Durham family group, it’s been a joy. And as for that brilliant Sonics track – wow! I’ve inserted a link to the trailer of the Boom documentary in John’s text – it looks fantastic.
And with that, the Master Playlist reaches a whopping 500 tunes – five hundred and four, to be precise. Next week the blog will come with some insightful analysis of these tracks and six more fab waxings for your delictation.
AR
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