Griff Says; Botched Fairytale, unleashed at last!

Last July, The Streetlamp team, led on by a dangerously over-excited Griff, got very, very enthusiastic indeed about a handful of tracks released onto Soundcloud by two young Irish musicians, Marie O Hara and Mariel McCormack from Co Longford, Ireland (see 'here'). At that time I declared that;

"When I first heard them I immediately knew that they were exactly what I'd been waiting to hear for the last ten years. If I hear a better song this year than the duo's The Flats then I'll quite happily lie down and die."

And of course that song duly found its way into our 2010 Streetlamp festive Thirty. After gushing on for some time about the unique, aggressive, experimental, folk-punk sound that these two precocious young musicians had conjured up I went on to state that; "The album will be available soon. Keep an eye on 'Streetlamp' for the details".

Well, Summer rolled into Autumn, and then Autumn into Winter, and still no album. We got in touch with the girls (specifically Mariel) around Christmas time to ask about the album's progress and could immediately feel the frustration and disillusionment in her reply;

"I dunno we hope to have it finished soon. I took a break because I got really pissed off with it for a while, I hated it, then I got back into it and now we only have 3 more songs to go and then she's finished".

We were disappointed, of course, but anticipation only sharpened our appetites. Indeed, in January of this year Gordon wrote in the blog;

"It must go without saying, and must be obvious to anyone who reads our meanderings, that the one recording that shook us to the core in the first year of our Blog was 'The Flats' by Mariel McCormack and Marie O'Hara a.k.a. Botched Fairytale. Like the greatest records we've heard in our lifetime, it didn't just entertain us, it moved us, it motivated us, it reinvigorated us, and it awoken within us a political passion that we hadn't felt in a long time".

Boy, were we hanging a lot on the release of this album. Honestly, the suspense was killing us. So, that is why The Streetlamp is pleased, no delighted, to announce that (fanfare, roll of drums, release the balloons) Botched Fairytale the album is finally with us, my own copy having arrived in the post at the beginning of last week.



And now, I guess, the all important question is hanging in the air. Has the wait been worth it?
You bet it has. This album is a prodigious and singular work of art which should make every minute of its prolonged gestation time worthwhile. To me, the album has the feel of a 'state of the nation' address. It's dozen uncompromising songs seem to be about right here, right now and when I look back on 2011 I know that this album is going to be my soundtrack. Hopefully, it will be yours too and it can be, starting right now, as the album is available as a free download on Mariel and Marie's bandcamp page.

As the album is so unusual, both subtle and substantial, I wanted to place it into some sort of context for you, the prospective listener, and so I fired off a set of questions to the girls, prompted by my own early listens. My questions were, as anyone who is plodding through this dense and ponderous prose can confirm, well, yeah, dense and ponderous and fairly pretentious. But the girls (mainly Mariel), to their great credit have attempted to answer them as fairly as they can and I think that the whole interplay between my over-analytical, psuedo-intellectualism and their own feral, intuitive and instinctive artistry is both entertaining and even mildly illuminating.

Griff: Firstly, the music itself is quite experimental and the lyrics are literate and thoughtful (The Law of Gravity). This combination immediately brings to mind Patti Smith who combined dense, complex lyrics with ostensibly simple, three-chord songs that would veer off into free-form experimentalism. This gave her music the appearance of being simultaneously, and paradoxically, high-art and amateur. Is Patti Smith any sort of influence?


M&M: We both say no to Patti Smith. She's definitely not an influence. In fairness some of her songs sound catchy but I've no idea what she's scuttering on about most of the time.


Griff: Is the experimentalism simply born out of necessity, i.e. your seeming lack of formal musicianship? I know that you share lyric writing, how then do you manage to achieve one, single and effective poetic voice? Does one of you take the lead in the lyric writing or music?


M&M: The "experimentalism" is born out of necessity, it's not meant to be experimental at all, it's just us making the most of our limitations! This album isn't about the music, though. It's kinda just there in the background. We know it's not up to scratch in a "formal musicianship" type of way. As for who does what, it's hard to say exactly. Basically, we go into a room and dont come out 'til there's a song. I'm not sure what happens but, whatever it is, its so horrific that we block it from memory immediately.

Griff: Many of the lyrics seem to be atmospheric portrayals of grotesque, often seedy characters and places (None of Your Money, The Flats, Chasers). The music too, particularly the percussion, tends at times towards the cacophonous and is evocative of industrial music. This combination is reminiscent of the ragged, junkyard poetry and music of Tom Waits. Is he an influence, or does that style come from your literary influences, i.e. Bukowski? Waits often writes songs in the style of a 'short story'. This is something that you also seem to have done. You say:
"It is a collection of 12 uncompromising songs about Ireland and the people in it.
These songs are full of stories, written with unflinching honesty and set in a landscape of wild and decrepit music, excess and failure, personal and political lunacy, tourist attractions, broken bottles, shattered people and battered dreams."
That milieu is the stamping ground for Waits too, but your songs have a much harder edge, an unflinching brutality. Do you recognise that quality yourself in the music? Was it deliberate? How much of the anger or resentment portrayed is auto-biographical? In other words, how much of it comes from disappointment at your own life experiences?

M&M: Tom Waits is an influence. Musicwise, I think the cacophonic thing would be more closley related to the "born out of necessity" thing than an industrial music influence, but I couldn't say for sure we'd have known it was alright to use a piece of steel as the main instrument in a song if it wasn't for Tom.
As it says in the spiel you quoted from, we were "sick of sitting around complaining about the lack of lyrical content...", that's a very simplistic and blurby version of things but, in essence, it's true. I remember this was around the time Glen Hansard won an Oscar with some really vague love song which had an over-sincerity of tone. It wasn't that specifically, but I just remember being really annoyed at the way no-one seems to question anything, and it's like we're all being brainwashed into thinking it's normal to write and listen to songs that don't mean a whole lot. We were saying surely there must be more that people could be doing. You hear that shit (and a lot of shit like it) and then compare it to something like Tom Waits or Cave, whose albums mean something because they really put in the work. We wanted to do an album like them, to find an honest way of writing properly and thoughtfully like that; not trying to sound like them or write like them, I mean finding a way of almost translating those types of songs into our own lives.

We're aware of the brutality (if that's what it is) and it is a bit scary that people might listen to this and think we're a pair of mad miserable bitches but I think it's really important to put that aside and just go for it, which is what we did. (We decided to call the album Botched Fairytale early on, so it was never going to be pretty anyway.) It's not autobiographical.

So we started out with a kind of fuck you to that kind of sugar coating things mentalitity, we're going to talk about real things and be totally in your face and honest, and we don't give a flying fuck that it won't get on the radio or if it's not very palatable, because that's not the point. And we're not going to let the fact that we've no idea what we're doing get in the way! Because we'd nobody to answer to and nothing was expected of us, that made us totally free to do whatever we wanted. And because the (initial) driving force behind us was "the lack of lyrical content" thing, we went quite extreme on it. So I think that's where the brutality (again, if that's what it is) started and that's why the whole thing is so cluttered with words as well.

I don't know if it is that brutal though, it might be. This could well be a really terrible album but im pretty sure it's original at least. So I don't know how to look at it in context because I don't know what to compare it to . There's some very harsh Nick Cave songs for example, maybe ours seem more brutal 'cause twenty-something Irish girls don't usually do songs like that? We seem to be mainly influenced by really well-established, middle-aged men, and nothing to do with anything that's going on in music now or even our own generation, so maybe it sounds more extreme than it is because there's nothing around it to compare it to/cushion it (that I know of anyway)?... Then again maybe it is brutal, I don't know. But yes we were aware of the "brutality" and it was deliberate".


At this point I began to witter on about Joyce and the Irish psyche and started to sound like someone giving a lecture called something like 'The Textural Trajectories of Modern Irish Literature; A verbiose man explains'. Thankfully, the girls wisely side-stepped this line of questioning and Mariel finally pinned things down with the following statement/war-cry:

"It took us an awful lot of effort to write these songs. Three years spent on something that's under an hour is very extreme, it's a lot of attention to detail. The way we see everything is going to be nothing like how anyone else sees it.

For me the whole point of songs is because they're about something that there isn't a word for. Like, otherwise, our album would just be 11 words that we could have written in a few minutes... and we could have spent the rest of the three years learning to play instruments properly! We wrote them to try and explain something, so people either get them or they don't. If it were possible to concisely explain (I dont mean that we can't explain, I mean it would take a very long time) what these are about then there wouldn't have been any reason to write them. Basically we write about the same things that our "influences" write about, we just tried to put these things into our own words and senarios".


Reading through this interchange of thoughts and ideas I'm reminded of the great dancer Isadora Duncan and her famous response to a questioner persistently demanding to know, after having seen one of her dances, "What it meant".
"If I could tell you that, I wouldn't have to dance it."
replied Ms. Duncan, and that is perhaps the artist's only correct response to any prying into the nature and meaning of art. Perhaps art, like religion, requires its mysteries. So, here we have an album which is complicated, intricate and refined, yet, at the same time, ferocious and uncouth. And here we have a duo who present themselves as naive, uncultivated and unrefined, yet can make music which is so complicated, elaborate and subtle. Mystery within mystery!
I sometimes wonder if the Marie and Mariel personas aren't even real but are instead part of an elaborate hoax played out by a Nobel prize-winning poet and a world-renowned experimental composer and musician intent on a critic-confounding Meisterwerk. Can you believe it? I'm imagining Seamus Heaney and Laurie Anderson getting together to make an album of rare and precious beauty just to fuck with me. Lord, these girls are confusing me! Still, I do love it.

Below are my three favourite tracks from the album. I won't try to explain what I think they're about!











I hope you loved those as much as I do.

Griff
xx

~Nippy Sweeties~#9: No Milk Today

Okay, here's the script:
There's this band from Manchester who decide to go against the grain of the times and ditch any phoney American accents, and choose to sing in their own Mancunian voice, mixing lyrics that deal with everyday English life with the fabric of Rock'n'Roll. They're fronted by a lead singer who looks NOTHING like a conventional rock frontman but who exudes a strange charm, coupling an immediate charisma with the trappings of the dork or the nerd. Their music is a blend of pure Pop/Rock mixed with some old time English Music Hall; kind of Keef Richards backing George Formby. So who am I talking about?
Well, given that I've already written a fairly lengthy eulogy to The Smiths, we can safely conclude it's not them. No, we're going back two decades prior to the glory days of The Smiths to the mid 60s, and to the time of Herman's Hermits.
Now, these Nippy Sweeties affairs are written for two purposes; to shine a light on obscure or forgotten gems from the 1960s, or to re-assess and re-evaluate the careers of some of the more maligned bands from that era. And just as I banged the drum for the brilliance of The Monkees, it's time to don the whistles and bells and sing out the praises of another fine and under-appreciated band.
The history books are rather harsh on Herman's Hermits. The first book I ever read on the phenomenon of the 1960s, back in 1984, really tore them to shreds; mocking their cheeriness, lambasting their 'goofy' lead singer Peter Noone and, as with The Monkees, viewing them as an embarrassment not fit to stand along side The Beatles, The Stones, The Kinks or The Who. Tish and pish to you Sir; what exactly is wrong with some good old fashioned pure Pop music? Something the Hermits delivered in spades.
While the Hermits were often viewed rather incredulously in Britain, they were absolutely MASSIVE in America. They arrived in the States just as America's love affair with The Beatles was starting to sour, following John Lennon's 'bigger than Jesus' remarks. Watch any footage of disgruntled teens angry at Lennon from the time, and when they are asked who they now favour, Herman's Hermits are the favourite answer. Another reason for the disdain!

But the music is quite wonderful.
After the toothachingly chirpy 'I'm Into Something Good' which broke them and gave them their only UK Number 1, they followed with a fine run of superb singles, all of which had that little bit of Britishness that the Yanks really went for in a big way.
The wistful 'Silhouettes' is a case in point. Like many of The Smiths' songs that had meant so much to me in my teenage years, here we have another song about being out and about on the streets at night. The protagonist is walking to his girlfriend's house when he sees her shadow embracing another boy, silhouetted against the blinds. Mad with heartbroken rage he pounds on the front door demanding answers, only to be confronted by two strangers! It turns out he's on the wrong street. If you live in Bannockburn (or any small town) you'll know that many streets all look the same.
The song is interesting because, as was the case with many records of the time, the producer had called in session musicians to ensure the playing was up to snuff, but the guitarist they had hired just couldn't cut the fiddly guitar intro, so the band's lead guitarist Derek 'Lek' Leckenby caught it in one take:


Next major single, 'A Must To Avoid'(now there's a Smiths-esque title!!) was another splendid slice of early 60s Beatpop, with a some nice descending minor chords on the chorus. The fact that the song deals with a girl who isn't all sweetness and light is another thing which set the Hermits apart from the others a little:


Detractors of Herman's Hermits often point to the asinine Musical Hall efforts that seem to blight their catalogue. In a recent interview, former members of the band pointed out that the massive Stateside success of their song 'Mrs. Brown, You've Got A Lovely Daughter' was responsible for the band's permanent 'Chirpy Cheeky Chappie' persona, yet the phenomenal success of the song guaranteed them a level of American support second only to The Beatles.
I think it's fair to say that the world didn't really need a Pop version of Kiddie's nonsense 'I'm 'Enry The Eighth, I Am', but the exaggerated English accents ensured another huge American hit:



One of the Hermits best songs, maybe even their finest of all, was the fantastic 'No Milk Today'. When I first got a decent computer and an MP3 player, this was the third song I ever downloaded, after Althea & Donna's 'Uptown Top Ranking' and Duran Duran's 'Save A Prayer'. It was a song that I had heard often on Simon Bate's Golden Hour radio show in the 1980s but had never really worked out what the sing was about. Again, over some melancholic minor chords, we learn that Peter's love has left him and the house that once rocked with laughter and wild times now stands quiet and forlorn. There's no need for the milkman to leave any milk as SHE was the only one who drank it.
Quite, quite splendid:


1967 was a weird old year for Pop music, as it was the year that even the most Conservative of our Pop Stars decided to release Acid soaked Psychedelic explorations of their inner mind. Most of this nonsense resulted in many bands releasing their worst records including The Beatles ('Sgt Pepper' and 'Magical Mystery Tour'....both stinkers compared to the rest of their oeuvre), and The Rolling Stones (whose 'Their Satanic Majesties Request' is considered by almost all their following as the real dog in their 60s output!)
Herman's Hermits were no different, releasing the little heard 'Blaze' album. I say 'little heard', it wasn't even released in the UK, securing only an American release. But it does stand up as a fine document of the times.


The Hermits had a couple of Movie projects in the 60s; they appeared in a couple of Various Artists showcase movies such as 'Pop Gear' and 'When The Boys Meet The Girls', before securing their own movie with 'Hold On!' in which the band are sent of into space(!?!). The film was made by the team who made the Beach Party movies and was a moderate hit.
Their next and last project, 'Mrs. Brown, You've Got A Lovely Daughter' wasn't a hit, but was a far better film. More gritty than their previous effort, the film is shot in authentic Mancunian backstreets with the titular 'Mrs. Brown' being a greyhound which the band somehow adopt. The film is notable for it's fine opening song 'It's Nice To Be Out In The Morning' (one of their best), and for a rather poignant scene in which all the grown-up characters in the film; parents etc, start singing a song called 'The World Is For The Young' in which they admit they've had their chance at life at blown it, and it's the young kids of the *cough* Swinging Sixties who run the world now. A rather strange and beautiful moment in a rather odd film.



Herman's Hermits never really survived beyond 1969. Again, in a recent interview, Peter Noone said he felt the band's name hampered them a great deal; "Nobody expects 12 minute guitar solos, or free-form Psychedelic Jazz workouts from a band called Herman's Hermits" he claims.
But they did give some of the finest Pure Pop from that decade.

Hermans Hermits personnel: Peter Noone - vocals, Keith Hopwood - guitar, Lek Leckenby - guitar, Karl Green - bass, Barry Whitwam - drums

In 1989, at his most 'English', Morrissey recorded a cover of the Hermit's most cynical song 'East West', a song which deals with being on tour but wanting to be back in the arms of your love; check and contrast:



~Gordon~

You can download all of Herman's Hermits original American released Mono albums at this fine Blog

Griff says; Dive right in with Swimming Elephants

I'm amazed, and a little ashamed, to say that it has been a year (see 'here') since I've featured any of the music from the brilliant SEA Indie netlabel. SEA Indie, the brainchild of founder Isarapan Boonyaso, has been bringing the best of South East Asian indie-pop to the rest of the world since 2008, and all for free too.
SEA Indie focuses on the twee and cutesy end of the indie-pop market and has a refreshingly simple mission statement;
"To unite and promote the great indie scenes in the Southeast Asian Region; Philippines, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand."


Their latest release is a two-song net-single from Swimming Elephants (pictured) who hail from Jakarta, Indonesia. Swimming Elephants originally started as a weekend musical workshop where a group of old friends, all non-musicians with no musical background at all, got together to play-around with music and unfamiliar instruments in a fun and experimental way. The outcome was pop songs with simple and beautiful arrangements, naively composed and arranged without falling back on pop/rock cliches. The band/collective hope that;
"Their songs might evoke some fond memories and repaint a long-forgotten picture in your mind."
Sounds good to us, Proustian even (as Gordon might say)!

The full line up for the session was:

Rizki Yogaswara (vocals, guitars, keyboards)
Gilar Di Aria (keyboards, guitars, percussions)
Wisnu Anditta (drums, percussions, vocals)
Saras Juwono (vocals, keyboard, recorder)
Aprilia DH (keyboards,glockenspiels, percussions)
Ranggi Mukti (Bass)

The songs on this release are 'At The Zoo' and 'Sarah' and I'm embedding the former below. However, I do stress that you go on to download the release, which you can do 'here', as 'Sarah' is just as lovely, plus, as always with SEA Indie, the download comes with a beautifully prepared accompanying booklet containing art, photos and information.

SEA 008 : Swimming Elephants - At The Zoo by SEA INDIE | The Singles



The wonderful cover art (below)for this release, another essential and distinctive SEA Indie element, is by Sudarat Chuphuakphong.



If you want to hear more, then check out the other songs on the band's Facebook page.

Enjoy!

Griff
xx

I Misplaced It At The Movies: Rita Pavone

If you are under 50 and you know who Rita Pavone is then you are probably either a)Italian, or b)a Morrissey fan.
The reason I make this assumption is that Rita Pavone scored two minor British chart hits in the mid 1960s (with 'Heart' and 'You Only You' reaching numbers 27 and 21 respectively); and, in 1984, when Morrissey appeared on Radio 1's 'My Top 10', he chose 'Heart' as one of his favourite records, claiming it to possess 'the most incredible vocal performance ever recorded'. You can judge for yourself below:


And here's the original Italian language version of 'You Only You':



Rita Pavone emerged in 1963, winning an Italian talent show called 'Festival degli Sconosciuti' (literally 'Festival Of The Unknowns') and was hugely popular in her home country, but became even more popular in Spain where her blend of Pop Ballads and Rock earned her a huge fan base.
In Europe, though strangely not Britain, she constantly appeared on TV, and even made a couple of appearances on the Ed Sullivan show in the States.

Rita also carved out an interesting film career in the 1960s.
She starred in a couple of movies as 'Rita La Zanzara', which roughly translates as 'Rita The Mosqueeta', in which she plays a feisty college student who develops a crush and then falls in love with her music teacher. Her films weren't massively popular at the time, to be honest, but over the years a cult following has developed for them.



Perhaps her biggest Cult Movie was the one of hers which I own; her one and only venture in the murky world of the Spaghetti Western.
Last week I spoke of my passion for the Kaiju Eiga Japanese Monster movies, but even they pale next to my obsession with Spaghetti Westerns. I mean, you are talking to someone who has actually seen 'Lemonade Joe', the only Eastern European Spaghetti Western.

Spaghetti Westerns tend to fall into 4 categories; The Stylish: anything by Sergio Leone or Sergio Corbucci; The Political: many Italian Leftist film makers used the format of the Western to get anti-Fascist messages across, and check out 'Il Prezzo del Potere(1969)' which reconstructs the Kennedy assassination long before Oliver Stone got his hands on it; The Awful: there are so many cheap tawdry Spaghetti Westerns out there, that you really need a guide map to avoid the dross, but beware any movie that stars Italian Chuckle Brother lookalikes Franco and Ciccio....watching their films is like eating your own eyes; and The Weird: some Spaghetti Westerns are just downright bizarre. Take 'Death Walks In Laredo' in which a gunman joins forces with; his long lost brothers, a French hypnotist, and a Japanese Martial Arts expert, to take on a villain who thinks he's Julius Caesar.


Or 'Three Supermen In The West', a completely nonsensical affair in which some 'Three Stooges' style Superheroes end up back in time in the Old West. Not the Old West of John Ford and Howard Hawks, of course, but the Old West of the Spaghetti Western.
I defy you to watch this excruciating trailer all the way through:


And then there's 'Little Rita Of The West', starring the heroine of tonight's Blog.
The Spaghetti Western fan's Bible, 'The Good, The Bad and The Violent' by Thomas Weisser really gives this movie a hard time, even voting it one of the Top 10 Worst Spaghetti Westerns Of All Time (No.9 to be exact)...but that's all a little too harsh. Compared to the Franco and Ciccio efforts, or any movie by Demofilo Fidani (excepting the fabulously titled 'One Damned Day At Dawn, Django Meets Sartana' - see Hollywood, that's how you title a picture!) , or indeed any of the cheap, shoddy Sartana cash-ins; this is quite a solid little movie.


And it's good for a laugh.

Weisser and his cohorts even admit that the sequences in the movie featuring Django are quite droll. As are the scenes with Johnny Ringo and Black Star (called Black 'Stand' in the subtitles of the version I watched). Indeed, the scenes which parody the Spaghetti Western cliches are extremely stylish and very well done.
The song and dance numbers, often cut from American prints, are quite bizarre and I feel that this movie would be better served on a double-bill with 'Head', the Monkees movie.


A word of warning though, if you see this movie on the Japanese DVD then you'd be as well turning the English Subtitles OFF if you want to follow the plot as they make no sense whatsoever...especially in the lyrics to the songs. Or keep them on and get an extra few laughs for your money.

All in all this is quite a fun little movie and it's certainly an alternative to, say, the vile misogyny of something like 'Cut-Throats Nine'.

After a quiet 70s in which Rita married and started a family, she returned to movies in the 1980s, appearing in a couple of comedy films, none of which played much outside Italy.
In 1992 she appeared in the United States at a concert which featured Frank Sinatra and the Bloshoi Ballet, and then took to acting in the theatre, appearing in several Shakespeare productions.
She now lives in Switzerland with her husband and family, and as recently as 2006 was actively partaking in Italian politics.
She may be fairly unknown outside Central Europe, but thanks to Morrissey she's one of my favourite Euro-pop stars, and the star of one of my favourite Spaghetti Westerns.

And better than the New York Dolls any day!



Ciao,
~Gordon~

And if you are interested you can download Rita's eponymous debut album here