Caution Magnetic - Fairground In My Head (2024)

 

It always feels a bit weird writing about the work of someone you know, though I try to limit myself to just that which actively inspires me to write something, as does this. I've known Eddy, the man behind Caution Magnetic for at least three decades and have always enjoyed his music to a greater or lesser extent, and there's a possibility that this may be his best work - at least that I've heard - so here we are. That said, I had an initial problem in being more familiar with Eddy honking away on the sousaphone somewhere to the left of a vocalist, so it took me about a week to hear beyond a voice to which I'm mostly accustomed as a vehicle for raucous observations from the other side of a pub table.

Anyway, having realised Fairground needs to be heard over speakers rather than headphones, I got there. Fairground comprises twelve songs, possibly recorded on a computer but not sounding like it, and with influences so broad that it's difficult to really pin it down to a style beyond that it reminds me of living in London. The opening track, In Heaven, starts on a sort of Belgian New Beat footing before turning Duane Eddy, and each track brings something new to the table, soulful horns and all sorts, before rallying around a general sound - bits of twang, driving beats, and even touches of dub, meaning the kind you used to hear all the time in the eighties. Once the bass takes to doing that thing against a backdrop of guitars echoing away into a distant noise, I suddenly realise I'm thinking of Jah Wobble more than anyone else, although Fairground is rockier than most of his stuff; which in turn gives me a handle on Eddy's voice which, if not quite in the Roger Daltrey mode, is perhaps comparable to Wobble with a bit more oomph, and certainly more range.

I'm not going to take a guess as to what any of the songs are about as it would feel a bit cheeky, but it's a ponderous blend of happy, sad, breezy, and all those other emotions, often at the same time which, backed by music recorded with proper welly (if that's what I mean) leaves one with an impression amounting to The The if they spent more time in the pub, less in the library. I think that's what I meant to say. It's honestly fucking good anyway, beautifully crafted and without anything obliging me to wear a smile that hurts in the name of diplomacy.

Pierre Schaeffer & Pierre Henry - Symphonie pour un Homme Seul (1950)

 

If the names are unfamilar, then you'd probably do better to get the background details from someone other than me; but briefly, Schaeffer was an early pioneer of electronic music, meaning mainly electronically reproduced music, working with natural musical and non-musical sounds treated or otherwise altered during playback on either turntable or magnetic tape - a format still very much in its infancy when he was working. This has subsequently defined him as heir to the noise experiments of Luigi Russolo and ancestral to the likes of Nurse With Wound, along with others with whom the common factors are so tenuous as to hardly be worth mentioning*; which is mostly just pattern recognition given that Schaeffer himself was firmly in the classical tradition. His interest lay in the abstraction of natural sounds from their sources, and his experiments in orchestrating these sounds as pieces of music were working towards a new way of hearing. Ultimately he regarded much of his life's work as a failure, from which I presume he imagined musique concrète might, through the agency of improvised juxtaposition, spontaneously arrange itself into something with the depth and resonance of Bach, albeit on its own terms. Consequently, he was scathing of many of those following in his footsteps, including Stockhausen whose work he presumably regarded as expanding on that which he himself had dismissed as a dead end.

Symphonie pour un Homme Seul is a concerto performed on turntables and mixers by Schaeffer and his student, Pierre Henry, with sounds derived from records, I assume including one-off acetates of prepared sounds - treated musical notes, vocalisation, snatches of song, metallic clangs slowed down, played in reverse or by manual rotation; and yes, it does indeed sound like early Nurse With Wound, if you were waiting for that particular reference. It's hard to see how he hoped to get towards Bach from here, but that isn't a problem for me. As is often the case with music of such inscrutable structure, its preservation is possibly essential to its appreciation in that it makes more sense with each playback, eventually accruing a familiarity which might even be interpreted as purpose. At the risk of becoming Alan Partridge weighing in on what Sir John Geilgud should have done instead, I'd suggest Schaeffer's dissatisfaction came from overthinking both his methodology and his expectations regarding outcome through himself being too deeply attached to the classical tradition. He was waiting for music which never arrived and heard only noise, but I'd argue that the minimum requirement for sound to warrant classification as music is that it has a repeatable psychological or emotional effect on the listener, which Symphonie pour un Homme Seul does, particularly once familiarity has reduced the initial novelty of what you're hearing.

Nevertheless, not even repetition or the knowledge of this having been recorded seventy-five years ago can fully dim the unpredictable succession of clipped and amplified sounds, not even as they seem to form relationships and associations with one another, so Symphonie still sounds startling in all respects that matter, and greatly rewards immersive listening. As for weirdy music in general, this is arguably where it really got started and I honestly don't know that this particular failed experiment has been bettered.

*: Fat Boy Slim? Oh just fuck off.

Wreckless Eric & the Hitsville House Band - 12 O'Clock Stereo (2014)

 

I seem to remember having formed the impression of AmERICa representing some kind of comeback, which is patently rubbish because this one came out the previous year. Anyway, I'm all caught up now and am duly embarrassed by previous misunderstandings derived from not bothering with the homework. Talking of homework this, as with others, comes with extensive sleeve notes detailing its recording and how it all came about. Ordinarily this might be surplus to requirements but Eric's testimony is always interesting, usually surprising, and a different business to reading about how Puff Daddy came to choose that particular sound. Here we read of his drive to get a live band together and subsequently finding a drummer and a bassist with dispiriting day jobs playing in a rockabilly themed exhibit at Euro-Disney, and the saga of buying an eight-track recorder the BBC were getting rid of, a behemoth weighing as much as a Mini Cooper - it says here - and the subsequent difficulties of getting it across the channel, into France, and into his home with the help of the village schoolteacher necessitating the removal of a couple of doors and a bannister. The point of my paraphrasing all this is that there was clearly a lot of hard labour went into this album, and hard labour of the sweaty kind. You can kind of hear it in the sound. It's not a record that just casually popped into existence when the wind happened to blow a certain way through a rainbow.

Eric, these days reputedly ambivalent to the Wreckless prefix, has endured long enough to have become unique by some definition, definitely not just another pub rock bloke who won't go home. He's never had the voice of someone who should be in a band, as your school pals might once have told you, but it hits the notes and swings effortless from rage to pathos to caustic wit to wrist-slashing heartbreak without pausing for breath, sometimes in the space of a single line, and all without trying to resell itself as poetry. It's the contrast of light and dark that always gets me, and his range spans a greater width than most. Witness the jaunty chug of Kilburn Lane at odds with its own lyrics wherein a man kicks his wife in the kidneys and life is but piss, rain and misery, with the music only tuning into the current of grinding reality as the chords terminate each verse. It feels as life often feels because of the conflict, moods thrown into sharp contrast by their opposites, those opposites themselves given form in the earthy acrobatic wit of lyrics often so extreme as to seem like parody but always firmly rooted in something which feels like it could have happened to you.

The contrast works across the full span of the album from one song to the next with one number chucking up in the gutter after a kicking followed by odes to women who may or may not have married extraterrestrials: The Guitar-Shaped Swimming Pool; the opening bars of The Marginal promising that the circus is in town; and breezy open-top Cadillac cruising tunes about wanting to kill people you don't like - which might have worked better for Morrissey if he didn't always sound like Morrissey. 12 O'Clock Stereo is not any one thing as a record. It's everything, and all life is here.

Despite having shelled out for a fancy eight-track, technical issues led to the album being mixed in mono, or rather two mono tracks, one left and one right - each at twelve o'clock on the dials in mixing terms; but it suits the music perfectly, decanting each song into a timelessly direct and beat driven sound. It was good enough for the Beatles, and if this doesn't sound like the Beatles it has that same presence of songs carved from the ether, grounded and fundamental, like music that was always waiting to happen.

Some times I feel I write something which gets to the essence of a record, and sometimes it comes out as something which I'm aware is probably bollocks, because the best music is for listening more than it's for writing about, and 12 O'Clock Stereo fits this bill. So in summary: just fucking listen, because he may honestly be our greatest living songwriter and we should appreciate the guy's work while he's still bashing them out.

Led Zeppelin - Physical Graffiti (1975)

 

Excepting David Bowie and four Beatles albums inherited from childhood, my first broad appreciation of music was punk rock and the weirdy electronic noise which seemed to share its general spirit. I came to Led Zeppelin late, never having heard them on the radio and being naturally suspicious of anything embraced by the hairies with which I shared a school and a rural hometown, assuming it was probably all pretty much the same deal as Whitesnake; although I actually enjoyed Iron Maiden on the quiet, for whatever that may be worth. I finally popped my Led Zeppelin cherry, so to speak, in 1988, prior to which I hadn't knowingly heard so much as a note of their music. My friend and (at the time) downstairs neighbour Martin gave me this double album, having found a ratty looking copy in Oxfam or somewhere and taken it upon himself to repair the sleeve and clean up the two discs. He already owned the album but didn't like the idea of there being an unloved copy somewhere in the world.

'Thanks,' I probably said without obvious sincerity while not wishing to appear ungrateful, then listened to it mainly so I could at least tell him I'd done so before tactfully explaining that it really wasn't the sort of thing I enjoyed.

The first massive surprise was that it didn't sound anything like I'd expected. It sounded so raw and loud, yet without mere volume being a consideration, that it seemed like the band were hammering away right there in the corner of my damp bedsit. The second massive surprise was that I really, really liked what I was hearing. The emphasis was on the music and the interaction of those playing it. It had some of the raw energy of punk with bluesy touches, but not the sort of blues I'd come to associate with late night dullards, and while there was instrumental noodling aplenty, it all seemed to have a point - none of that widdly-widdly histrionic bollocks which always sounded like some twat trying hard to impress his mates. It didn't sound like anyone was wearing a cut off denim jacket with Judas Preist or Angle Witch tattooed on the back in leaky ballpoint; and above all, it didn't sound old, like a relic of times been and gone. Somehow it seemed marginally closer to David Bowie than all that other stuff.

More than three decades later, it still sounds fresh to me, still with that early morning sparkle of a clear blue sky, no fat, no stodge, no blubbery indulgence or congratulating ourselves at what bad boys we are; and for a group who pointedly stuck to albums in the expectation of you giving it your most serious attention, they're kind of populist with big, big tunes cranked out in heavy, heavy chords, and yet nothing which quite sounds like a run through of whatever anyone else had been doing. For something which was, at the very best, merely adjacent to prog rock, few of the songs truly follow any established structure, each going its own direction and taking whichever path seems to work.  So instead of fifteen grunting anthems to shagging while drunk in charge of a motorcycle, we have songs as soundtracks with instruments unheard on rock records of the time, the pensive neoclassical grandeur of Kashmir, blues for standing stones, the Biblical epic of In My Time of Dying, and even a spot of country. For one of those bands routinely described as the fathers of this, that and the other, they were almost entirely their own unique entity.

Severed Heads - Come Visit the Big Bigot (1986)

 

...or just The Big Bigot as was its initial Australian release. One thing I've taken from conversations with Glenn Wallis of Konstruktivists, and which has stayed with me, is the importance of layering when mixing a record. Glenn had strong opinions on mixing, often insisting greater effect was to be had with certain sounds or instruments some way down in the mix, half heard and not always obvious on first listen. This, as I've found, gives the ear more to work with, achieving effects and juxtapositions which you just don't get with the bog standard mix which strives to leave everything on more or less equal footing in the overall sound, and which is usually the mix for which everyone else will settle. Part of this is simply paying attention to the treatment of the original sounds so as to avoid music from which you can identify the exact synth, drum machine or whatever within the first minute of listening - which is how Depeche Mode have always sounded to me, at least before the leather trousers.

Anyway, whatever the fuck it is I'm referring to has one of the most powerful demonstrations of its validity in the back catalogue of the Severed Heads, and particularly on this record, possibly their greatest to my ears, although it's a tough choice between this, Haul Ass, Rotund For Success, and er… probably seven or eight others.

The Big Bigot is, I suppose, synthpop by virtue of tunes, song structure, lyrics and so on, and these are songs which really tear your fucking heart out; yet it's often difficult to tell what the Severed Heads were doing that apparently no-one else has considered. Beyond the bass, the rhythm, the pensive yet arrestingly cheery melody, there's all sorts of sampled or looped clutter in the mix gurgling away, and yet none of it sounds arbitrary. Somehow the whole always blends into something so beautifully arranged as to suggest old masters more than abstract expressionism, as it probably should. It's that deal with a tornado blowing through a scrap yard to assemble a jumbo jet, and I can only assume that an approach similar to that described by Glenn Wallis must be responsible. It feels as though random elements have worked together to carve out songs equivalent to Plato's perfect solids, compositions existing in the subatomic underpinnings of the universe channelled and brought into being by Tom Ellard and occasional pals. There's nothing here to remind you of anyone else or how anyone else works, nor anything that anyone else has been able to duplicate. I've been listening to this record for more than thirty years and I didn't even realise there's a Clapton cover on side two.

So what does it sound like, given that the above is probably less than helpful as descriptions go. Confidence! sounds like being trapped in the head of a terminally lovesick teenager with a near death experience for a chorus. Harold & Cindy Hospital begins as big band for malicious elephants and ends up getting Raptured in the evangelical sense. Legion is the most terrifying song you've ever heard that doesn't involve either distorted guitars or metal types pulling faces - it really feels like it's coming for you. I don't know, and I'm not even sure what the songs are about, but there's something Biblical going on in this unnerving euphoria threaded through with something weird and dark, almost old testament, without having delivered any of the cues which might usually lead to such conclusions. It shouldn't work, but it does, and it's genuinely glorious. If Legion doesn't bring a lump to your throat at the very least, are you even alive?

Nitzer Ebb - Showtime (1990)

 

The further we travel, the stranger they seem with the accumulation of hindsight; or if not strange - at least not how the Residents were strange - then not very much like what they seemed to be at the time. Beyond the sounds coming from boxes with plugs rather than boxes with strings, I suppose it comes down to mostly haircuts and graphics which kept Nitzer Ebb in the same corner of the record store as Borghesia and all those other marching up and down bands. Maybe there's a certain shared attitude expressed as a love of frowning, but such characteristics arguably extend the arbitrary field to everyone else from here to Led Zeppelin - although Showtime shares more common ground with Physical Graffiti than with whatever the hell Borghesia did, for what that may be worth.

They've freely admitted to starting out with sequencers because they couldn't be arsed learning guitar, and so inevitably first took to the stage as a sort of council estate version of DAF, more violent than hypnotic. As their sound developed, the mania remained the constant, and so the second album moved away from music sounding quite so obviously like the machinery from which it had been generated, bass deepening to a subsonic pseudo-organic rumble contrasting with the factory noise. Showtime went a step further, bringing in sounds and rhythms which seemed more in keeping with jazz and blues records, still stomping away but as a hybrid, like a sound trying to escape its own limitations. The reason none of this struck anyone as peculiar is, I presume, because the smoky menace and basement grind were there all along, but initially limited to Doug's harrowing vocal forever on the point of losing control.

Showtime seemed to slip past the post without much notice at the time, but you can tell it was the album before the one that sounded like Queen and the progression makes perfect sense. It lurches and growls with rockabilly intensity as the music fights itself, the swing and the drunken sway straining against electronics as precise and deadly as ECT; and the crazy thing is this wasn't even their best album, not by some way.

I actually wrote this about a month ago. The timing is just tragic coincidence.

Ringo Starr - Ringo the 4th (1977)

 

While did the reviewer even listen to the record customarily serves as the feeble defense of those who wouldn't recognise good music without the application of some sort of response conditioned by electrodes and positive reinforcement, no cliché is ever entirely without some moment at which it briefly applies with thermonuclear conviction, and that's what the fuck we have here. Google searches for this album will summon the same shitty review rephrased over and over and over amounting to another hilariously terrible failure by the guy who made tea for John, Paul, and George, even more worthless than the previous album, and that was bollocks…

I don't know what people really ever expected from Ringo given that he wasn't actually John, Paul, or George disguised with sunglasses and a fake hooter, so the routine criticism of his having  yet again failed to record either Band on the Run or Mind Games seems extraordinarily redundant and even unfair. This one is alternately either a dinosaur-rock artefact or Ringo climbing aboard the booty-shaking bandwagon with all the grace of a rhinoceros mounting a swan, and I'm sure there are others out there if you can be arsed to look.

Anyway, as the title implies, it's Starr's fourth solo album, excluding two covers collections released while he was still a Beatle, and honestly a significant improvement on Ringo's Rotogravure which had followed the warmed over Beatlisms just a little too far down the trail into easy listening territory, possibly hoping guest spots from famous friends might compensate for any shortfall. Ringo the 4th, once you're able to hear past its failure to chart - which I realise doubtless spoils it for many - is accordingly more upfront and strident, borrowing from both Motown and disco, most likely because that was what was happening at clubs and parties, and our man was spending a lot of time at clubs and parties due to his being Ringo. It's not hard to understand.

Without calling in favours from McCartney, Clapton, or any of the usual suspects, the record at least doesn't feel like an ex-Beatle holding on for dear life, and if it fails to work as the greatest album ever recorded, it fails on its own terms. It's mainstream, but not really MOR, and efficiently rather than over-produced. You already know what Ringo sounds like, and that's how he sounds here, so unless you were expecting Bauhaus then there shouldn't be a problem. It rocks in the right places and features a good quota of cracking tunes; it chugs in the right places; as Ringo's disco album I'm not convinced it isn't actually better than Bowie's disco album; and there's something genuinely warm and soulful in these songs, if you can just make the effort to get the fuck over yourself.

Andy Bolus of Evil Moisture told me about visiting his friend Roro Perrot Vomir. They were listening to this record and Andy asked why Ringo had a woman sat on his shoulders on the cover.

Because he's Ringo, Roro replied. He can do what the fuck he likes. This album was Ringo doing what the fuck he likes, and whatever you hear probably says more about you than it does about himself.