The Counterforce No. 72

It was the summer of 1992 and I didn’t have my license yet, but with watching 120 Minutes and reading rock mags religiously, there was plenty I needed to hear. My friend Jim had just started working in Bridgeport, CT, the town over from ours, and told me there was this cool new record shop he’d found, Secret Sounds. The shop would later prove to be one of CT’s all-time best and made (somewhat) famous by Dave Grohl wearing the t-shirt on the cover of Nirvana’s From The Muddy Banks Of The Wishkah (top center)

Since the age of 10, I’d always had a running handwritten list of records I wanted and now some of these were proving hard to find, so I asked Jim if he could pick three up for me if they had them. Daisy Chainsaw’s Love Sick Pleasure EP, Manic Street Preachers Generation Terrorists, and Chainsaw Kittens’ Flipped Out In Singapore. I hadn’t heard the Manics yet but the press were raving about what a huge album this was, they were just going to release the one and then split up was the rumor, though I expected something more punky from all their sloganeering than the 80s hard rock we got (this is no slight on the Manics). But very late at night, somewhere between 12-2AM on Sundays when 120 Minutes was shown, I had caught the videos for the Kittens’ Connie, I’ve Found The Door and Daisy Chainsaw’s Love Your Money. And both blew me away. I’m pleased too at the Daisy Chainsaw Kittens name connection. These songs have stayed with me and I can still remember that day in July 1992 when Jim delivered them. Soon, I would make my own way to Secret Sounds, get to know its owner, the mighty Chris Razz, and discover all sorts of wonderful things within its walls.

Love Your Money, wow. I still can’t think of anything else it sounds like. And it took me ages to arrive at a satisfactory description, finally settling on ‘amphetamine glam’. It’s punk af too, with an homage to the Pistols at the very end. And the video! Instead of Alice going down the rabbithole she’s ascending through a surreal madhouse

I came to QueenAdreena quite late, but Pretty Like Drugs bowled me over the first time I heard it and hasn’t stopped since. It is one of the all-time great ROCK songs, a perfect encapsulation of a particular strain of Rock’s DNA. They really captured something there. I’ve listened to a bunch of KatieJane Garside interviews and her soft-spoken voice and ethereal manner seem so at odds with the wild persona she inhabits when performing these songs. But, make no mistake, she deserves her place in Rock’s Pantheon, rivalling any other Rock god you might name

At least once a year I go through a huge phase with this song and KatieJane in general. I’ve long thought she is one of the most interesting artists alive, and highly recommend you getting to know her work if you don’t already. I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts with her too, which are all fascinating. I loved hearing about her creative process, how she’ll do automatic writing straight after coming out of meditation and then use these typewritten pages to find lines while her and partner Chris Whittingham improvise for extended periods of time before refining what comes out into songs. Alex Green’s Stereo Embers podcast with her is fantastic, as is Conan Neutron’s episode. I also really enjoyed her take on Nico’s The Marble Index, discussing the album in detail on That Record Got Me High.

Ruby Throat is such a great name for a band, her and Whittingham’s first project, much more laid back than what had come before. And of course I’m going to love a song called Stone Dress

Then liar, flower gets more Rock again. New album coming very soon. Their first, Geiger Counter, is a force to be reckoned with. “My brain is lit like an airport, so the angels will find me” is such a wonderful phrase

One of my favourite things that I’ve seen this year is Irma Vep, both the original 1998 film and the recent mini-series with Alicia Vikander. Which piqued my interest about Clean, the second film Olivier Assayas and Maggie Cheung made together. Of special note as this was after their divorce and was to be Cheung’s last movie. In it, she plays a heroin addict whose musician boyfriend has just overdosed and she needs to get clean in order to win custody of their son. There’s a lot going on and what kinda blew my mind were the musical presences in the movie. It starts at a Metric concert, later there’s an attempted meeting with Tricky after a show of his in Paris, and Dave Roback from Opal/Mazzy Star is in it as well. In fact, he writes two songs that Maggie Cheung sings on. She Can’t Tell You and Down In The Light. They’re very, well, Maggie Star

She also collaborated with Dean Wareham (Galaxie 500, Luna) for another two on the soundtrack, Strawberry Stain and Wait For Me:

Given my love of both Roback, Wareham, and Cheung’s other work, I find these fascinating. Link to watch the film here, on ok.ru where I’ve recently found a ton of films I haven’t been able to see otherwise

I’ve been really kicking ass on my next book, an oral history of the band Clown Damage. It’s almost as long now as The Ballad Of Buttery Cake Ass, and I’m only about halfway done. As usual I’m working in references to stuff that might not be widely known about and I was overjoyed to remember the phenomenon of ‘Bone Music’ or ‘music on the ribs’, where post-WW2 in the Soviet Union recordings would be bootlegged onto x-rays stolen from hospitals, this being the only way one could have access to a lot of the music that was banned. My friend Stephen Coates from the excellent The Real Tuesday Weld is responsible for shedding more light on this practice, having years ago discovered an x-ray recording of Rock Around The Clock one day at a flea market in St. Petersburg

Along with all the wonderful music The Real Tuesday Weld make, Stephen curates a number of interesting projects including The London Month Of The Dead and, what I want to hype up here, The Bureau Of Lost Culture. The podcast is an investigation into counterculture, and the episodes I’ve listened to so far have been excellent. There’s two with Alan Moore, who I can listen to talk about pretty much anything, ‘Post-Punk Druidry with Youth’ was also great, and I loved hearing Stephen and Robert Kingham discuss Arthur Machen.

Admittedly I am not a big horror guy, so it took me a while to get to Machen. With all my occult explorations of about a dozen years ago he kept coming up and one day I decided to give The Great God Pan a go. I guess having grown up in the 1980s, when people say ‘horror’ my first associations are slasher films, but even knowing how much wider it goes I only found The Great God Pan to be horror in the loosest definition of the word. It was very psychological, yes, but what really struck me was how excellent and evocative the writing is. And hearing Kingham read excerpts from more of Machen’s work during the podcast, especially how beautifully he writes about London, I have resolved to read more. Kingham reads Machen’s (abridged) short story N here, which has some really lovely passages

This all got me thinking about London and missing it even more than I usually do. Wondering if I should write of some of my own psychogeographical experiences there. Not least of which were when each night before an H Bird show in 2006 I would trek from Queen’s Park NW6 down to All Saints Road in Portobello to mentally prepare myself for the gig. Fascinated as I was by a mysterious housefront in a row of such, this one painted white but with CLUB BARRY in all black block capitals stretched across the entire façade. There was no way this premises could’ve contained any sort of musical club, and as for any other type there were no clues. It certainly didn’t seem like a sordid sex den. And then years later at the end of this same street Alex Sarll loaning me a copy of The Illuminatus! Trilogy, a book I thought might, like its contents deal with, be an actual hoax itself. Finally having a physical copy in my hands as a ragtag crew of us descended upon The Pelican pub and learned that at that particular Happy Hour one could roll the dice against the barstaff. If you won, your round was free. If you lost, your drinks were simply regular price. We, or at least I, pushed this well past any reasonable limit. The thrill of the die having me ordering rounds for others when I could not physically imbibe any more liquid. I woke up the next day with a personally legendary hangover. So bad that my teeth hurt and the only thing that would stop them from aching was hours of hanging upside down from my bed. I eventually got out of this around 4PM, ambled down Holloway Road to a caff for ‘breakfast’, and began Illuminatus!, a truly life-changing book for me

Come December 8th it will be 13 years since my visa expired. Which is a long time to be in exile. After listening to the Machen episode I had the thought ‘is London my greatest unrequited love?’ A nice poetic notion but I quickly realized it wasn’t true. For I have never not felt London’s love, and was able to live within her for many years. The situation, with the laws now in place for foreigners, is more like the strict parents who go to great lengths to keep their daughter away from unsuitable suitors. Which is a crying shame, as its the only place I’ve ever felt accepted, the only place I’ve ever felt is home

Sad news about Mani and Jimmy Cliff this week. My relationship with The Stone Roses is a long one and more than I can write about here right now. But I saw Mani play with Primal Scream at Irving Plaza in 2003. Rick Webb was driving down from Boston, picked me up in Connecticut, and we headed down to New York. I miss those days of multiple state car trips to go see a show. Anyway, Mani had just joined the Scream and there was one dude in the audience who kept shouting ‘Maaaannnniiii! Maaaaannniii!’ Eventually Mani just strolled to the front of the stage and with a huge playful smile on his face yelled back ‘What?’ Which shut the guy up. It was a special moment. All the tributes I’ve been reading paint him as a lovely guy

And Jimmy Cliff. Oh man. I remember when I first started to get really into underground music when I was 14 and one thing I’d hear the most disparate groups of people speak highly of was The Harder They Come soundtrack. It stretched across so many boundaries. I love my beat-up vinyl copy I bought a few years later in Boston. What a soundtrack. The title track is so good, and there have been so many times over the years I have listened to You Can Get It If You Really Want for inspiration and spiritual edification. Life is hard, ya know?