The coolest band in the world

The coolest band in the world
By Guy Blackman
July 31, 2005

http://www.theage.com.au/news/music/icelandic-cool/2005/07/28/1122143956416.html

They sing in a made-up language, their songs don't really have titles, their videos are designed to confront. Guy Blackman speaks with Iceland's Sigur Ros.

The success of Icelandic quartet Sigur Ros seems a very 21st century phenomenon. Their music is epic, sprawling and experimental, much of it sung in an invented language called Hopelandic, but major labels in America practically fell over each other trying to sign Sigur Ros when they emerged into the English-speaking world five years ago. Their third and most recent album was named ( ), comprised entirely of untitled tracks, yet the band have sold more than one million CDs worldwide. They make music videos featuring mentally handicapped dancers, gay adolescent soccer players and post-nuclear fallout children, but nonetheless rub shoulders with Hollywood A-list celebrities and chart-topping rock stars.

It's hard to imagine these insular, boyish men - vocalist Jonsi Birgisson, keyboardist Kjartan Sveinson, bassist Georg Holm and drummer Orri Dyrason - enjoying the same popularity in a pre-internet (or pre-Radiohead) world. But that's not to take anything away from Sigur Ros.

The band share a deep, almost telepathic bond based on more than a decade of playing together, and their unclassifiable music reflects this, with echoing guitars, glacial strings and Birgisson's high, plaintive vocals evocatively conjuring up the long dark winters and treeless plains of their homeland.

It also makes for perfect soundtrack fodder. Much of Sigur Ros' international profile has come from the inclusion of their music in such high-profile films as the 2001 Tom Cruise vehicle Vanilla Sky and Wes Anderson's recent quirky comedy The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.
"I remember one guy coming up to us at a party in Hollywood," says bemused bassist Holm, who speaks better English than his bandmates and so handles the bulk of their interviews. "We were having a drink and he asked us, 'Who are you?' and when we told him, 'We're a band and we had this song in this one film', he didn't even say goodbye, he just left. He was probably a scriptwriter and he wanted to find a producer, or something like that."

In their own recording studio, a converted indoor swimming pool in a village just outside of Reykjavik, the band have a wall that they call their Wall of Shame. On it are photos of themselves with various celebrities, such as Tom Cruise and Courtney Love, and a framed letter from Metallica's Lars Ulrich, written after he came to a Sigur Ros show in 2001, which reads: "Thank you, thank you, thank you! We are in the studio right now struggling to make some sort of album. I'm going to go back after this completely inspired." Holm says the wall's name is just a joke, and there's really no shame attached, but he's not entirely convincing.

Other celebrity Sigur Ros admirers include the X-Files' Gillian Anderson, who wrote glowingly about them in her online journal after attending a concert, and Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin, who chose Sigur Ros as the soundtrack for the birth of their daughter Apple.

Pretty good work for a band who began in high school in 1994 as little other than a harmless distraction from their studies. They named themselves in honour of Birgisson's baby sister Sigurros (meaning "victory rose" in Icelandic), born just a few days before the schoolmates made their first recording in a cheap studio and cemented their future as a band.

Excited about capturing their first ever song on tape, the teenage band went straight from the studio to the house of Thor Eldon, former guitarist for Bjork's old band the Sugarcubes, and owner of a record label called Smekkleysa (Bad Taste). "He called us back a few days later and said, 'I'd really like to make an album with you, or at least I'd like to put this song on a compilation I'm producing'," says Holm. "So we jumped up and down for joy, and thought, 'We've made it!' Especially because we had no expectations, we just liked making the music."

The band released an album on Smekkleysa in 1997, but the first anyone outside of Iceland heard of Sigur Ros was when their second album, Agtis Byrjun (translation: a good beginning), was released in the UK in 2000. But the storm of critical praise and listener adulation following its release on influential independent Fat Cat Records travelled so quickly across the Atlantic that by the end of the year Sigur Ros were the subject of a fierce bidding war in the US, with major labels promising untold riches and fame to the shy foursome.

In the end they signed a deal with MCA (now absorbed into Geffen Records) because their deal offered the band the most artistic freedom. According to Holm, Sigur Ros are determined to answer to no one - within reason. "Musically and artistically we have 100 per cent freedom to do what we want," he says. "The only thing, which is basically what every record contract has, is that there has to be a certain quality to it. We can't just fart in a microphone and give that to them as a record. That's not the right thing to do."

In a world where record companies seem more and more to own, and even create, their artists, Sigur Ros' self-mastery might seem a remarkable achievement. But Holm sees it as nothing more than a reward for persistence, and for knowing what you want and being prepared to fight for it. "I don't think bands really try hard enough to have it," he says. "I think they give up to a certain degree, and I also think that a lot of people just don't care, they just want to become a famous star or something, they'll just sign whatever crap deal they get and become property of a record company. I think anything you want is achievable, even in the music industry."

He hopes that Sigur Ros can act as a kind of role model for aspiring unsigned artists, showing them that it is possible to make music within the major-label industry without having to compromise, although he admits that a certain amount of flexibility is necessary. "We try to make as few big compromises on our side as we can," he says. "Sometimes we make a small compromise to be able to get the big things we want from the record company."

Despite their singular creative focus and intensity, Sigur Ros are not entirely po-faced artists. Holm reveals that singer Birgisson (who came out to his bandmates after they had been playing together for about a year, although Holm says he had already suspected he was gay) is a big fan of Savage Garden, and the band have previously admitted that their favourite part of winning an MTV Award for "Artistic Achievement In Music" in 2001 was getting to meet Beyonce.

But Holm himself is not completely at ease with some aspects of popular culture. He does not understand modern R'n'B, and gets unexpectedly heated on the subject of popular music videos. "I think they are an underestimated medium," he says. "Most music channels will just play R'n'B or hip-hop videos, and they're almost all the same. It's always some guy in a baseball cap in a club trying to pick up a girl! They don't tell you anything. They are a waste of your time, basically, a waste of everybody's time. I think music videos should tell a story."

Sigur Ros' three videos to date have all had fairly carefully constructed narratives, in contrast to the free-form music they accompany. The first, for the 1999 single Svefn-G-Englar, featured Perlan, a dance troupe of young men and women with Down Syndrome, dressed as angels dancing across a field. The second, Virar Vel Til Loftarasa from Agtis Byrjun, was the tale of two boys finding the flower of romance during a soccer match, much to the horror of the assembled onlookers. The most recent video, for Untitled #1, from ( ), presents a group of school children playing in gas masks in a bleak, radioactive landscape.

Each video has generated a degree of controversy, which can't help but suggest a deliberate intent to shock on Sigur Ros' part. Holm isn't so sure. "Yes and no," he says. "I guess the last two videos shocked people - well, actually, all of them did - but they were never really meant to shock. They were just meant to be short, beautiful stories."

Sigur Ros are definitely hoping their new album will shock, or at least surprise, their listeners. Self-professed perfectionists, they have been holed up in their studio for the better part of two years working on the follow up to 2002's ( ), and conjecture about a possible new direction has dominated fan forums web-wide. The album is now finished and scheduled for a September release, under the name Takk ... (Icelandic for "thanks").

Holm is wary of giving away too much about the upcoming release, but does reveal that the vocals are in proper Icelandic this time, and the tracks have titles. "We're really excited about this record, and we want other people to feel as excited about it," he says. "So we sort of want it to be a surprise. It's really good, though, better than anything we've done before."

Sigur Ros play Hamer Hall on Wednesday. All tickets are sold.

One of a kind

One of a kind

http://www.theage.com.au/news/music/one-of-a-kind/2005/07/27/1122143909900.html

July 29, 2005

It's the unremarkable things that often make a live concert legendary, writes Patrick Donovan.

Standing stage-side as wild man Iggy Pop brought in the new year of 1998 at the Falls Festival in the hills at the back of Lorne was the best show I have experienced.

Part of that thrill came from having co-managed the tour for Iggy, his family and band for the preceding week, and seeing him transform from mellow elder statesman of rock, thrilled at discovering old-timers rolling their arms under on the lawn-bowls green adjacent to his hotel room, to primal party animal inviting dozens of rabid fans to invade his stage.

But I would be prepared to instantly age another 20 years and forgo my Australian citizenship to have been in the audience at the Cincinnati Pop Festival in 1970, when the young and buffed Iggy stepped off the stage and rode across the assembled throng on to a sea of hands, having first covered himself in peanut butter, while his band the Stooges cranked out a gnarly metallic rhythm reminiscent of cars being eaten by a Detroit car-processing plant.

What factors go into making a legendary gig? In Iggy's case, it was power, danger spontaneity, and a sense of occasion. Other factors include the venue, the quality of the sound mix, your expectations plus those of the mates you're with, your (and the band's) state of sobriety (or otherwise), and retrospective feelings of nostalgia.

For some, nothing beats securing good seats with an uninhibited view of the stage. But often the most memorable gigs are not seen, but experienced, flailing about or grooving along with loved ones or strangers. The best sets I saw the Stones and Bob Dylan play were at the Rod Laver Arena with a great view of the performance, but they didn't make my top 10 gigs.

The Stones at the Enmore Theatre (10 rows from the front, on the dance floor, when AC/DC's Angus and Malcolm Young joined them on stage for a blues jam), and Dylan at the Mercury Lounge, were crowded and uncomfortable and most people queued for hours to get in, but they were once-in-a-lifetime experiences. It's certainly sexier dancing to the Stones' R&B romp Midnight Rambler in a mosh pit, but they'll throw you out for doing that at the Rod Laver Arena.

Even better still, I imagine, would have been to see the Stones in their prime with an awesome support: at Royal Albert Hall with the Beatles in 1964; the Rock 'n' Roll Circus extravaganza; when they supported Little Richard in 1963, or perhaps the ultimate - when Stevie Wonder supported the Stones on their Exile on Main Street tour.

But there's no doubt some gigs look better on paper than in reality.

The Bob Marley and the Wailers/Sly and the Family Stone US tour sounds like a groover's dream, but reports suggest there was tension in the air as coked-up funk fans heckled the Jamaicans to speed up the tempo.

On paper, the recent Nick Cave/Cat Power tour looked like it might make my Top 10 gig list, but the venues weren't quite right, Cave's gospel singers didn't sound as good live as they did on the album, and Cat Power, who has an aversion to crowds and lights, was not the right choice for support.

I still rate the Seeds show at the Collingwood Town Hall, around Henry's Dream time, as their best gig that I have seen.

Australian rock traditionally lends itself to wild, dangerous, passionate performances - often in a crowded, sweaty pub with the possibility that deranged singers could throw themselves at you at any moment.

Midnight Oil, the Beasts of Bourbon, Cold Chisel, the Powdermonkeys, the Eastern Dark, and X have all played such shows, while the Drones and the Darling Downs are two bands on the circuit that provide regular, thrilling moments of transcendence.

Some of the best shows are enhanced by the relaxed vibe of a festival. The cumulative effect of catching Soundgarden, the Ramones, Bjork, Smashing Pumpkins, Teenage Fanclub and the Breeders at the 1994 Big Day Out; or James Brown, Dr John, Steve Earle, Solomon Burke, Pharoah Sanders, the Black Keys, Toots and the Maytals and Burning Spear at last year's Bluesfest, is almost overwhelming.

But nostalgia can be a dangerous thing. It's easy to assume that gen Xers and Ys have missed the boat. But were the 1960s and '70s really that good? Or are they just recalled through smudged, rose-coloured glasses?

Our generation certainly adds to the mystique as we pass on stories we have heard about AC/DC playing at your uncle's Glen Waverley school dance, Led Zeppelin at Kooyong or crazed shows by Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band and Frank Zappa and the Mothers.
There are few contemporary acts in my wish list, but it's because most of them have toured Australia recently.

And there have been a handful of gigs in the past few years - Nick Cave, Gillian Welch, Neil Young, George Clinton - that people swear changed their lives.

Of the current crop, Outkast would have been a mind-blowing experience, and the longer Lucinda Williams puts off touring Australia again, and the more I listen to her wild live album recorded at San Francisco's Fillmore Theatre, the more I long to see her perform.

It would have been thrilling to see train-wreck acts such as New Order when they were young and reckless, but reports suggest they are playing the best gigs of their lives into their 40s and 50s, now they are sober, can remember their songs and can stand up for more than 45 minutes at a time.

Considering the tyranny of distance, it's amazing that Australia can attract so many big names on tour. But sometimes Australia's geographical isolation can have a negative impact on a show.
At 2003's bluesfest, Buddy Guy refused to play his recent songs, assuming that a blues-ignorant Australian crowd would prefer hearing his impressions of Hendrix and B.B. King. (But blues fans still talk about Guy's show at Richmond's Old Greek Theatre in 1987, when his scintillating, other-worldly guitar playing sounded like what you imagine Jimi Hendrix would have sounded like were he alive today.)

We will never have the chance to see the types of shows that happen when musicians come together in musical hubs such as London or New York.

Several weeks ago I was in London when Patti Smith curated the Meltdown Festival, which culminated in a re-creation of her classic album Horses with the Velvet Underground's John Cale, plus a tribute to Jimi Hendrix and William Blake with Jeff Beck, Flea and Joanna Newsom.
I also saw Television, who have never played in Australia. But watch out for expectations - my fear before the gig was of having to ask for my money back if they didn't play their 10-minute epic Marquee Moon.

Sticky's top 10 gigs:

1. Iggy Pop at the Falls Festival, 1998
2. The Rolling Stones at the Enmore Theatre, Sydney, 2003
3. Bob Dylan at the Mercury Lounge, 1998
4. Gillian Welch and David Rawlins at the Forum, 2004
5. Neil Young at Myer Music Bowl, 2003
6. Funkadelic at the Metro, 2002
7. Beastie Boys and Helmet at Festival Hall, 1994
8. Ministry at Big Day Out, 1995
9. Dirty Three at Meredith Music Festival, 2004.
10. Dead Moon and the Powdermonkeys at the Corner, 2003

Sticky's gig wish list:

· Iggy and the Stooges at the Cincinnati Pop Festival, 1970
· Rock'n'Roll Circus, 1968· The Beatles and the Rolling Stones, 1964
· James Brown at the Apollo Theatre, 1962
· Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison, 1968
· Elvis comeback tour, 1968
· Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock, 1969
· Nina Simone at Freddie Jett's Pied Piper club, 1969
· Houndog Taylor at Florence's Lounge, Chicago, 1970
· John Lee Hooker, Stevie Ray and Jimmie Vaughan, Austin, Texas, 1972
· Led Zeppelin at Kooyong, 1972
· Black Sabbath - Sabbath Bloody Sabbath tour, 1973
· The Clash supporting the Sex Pistols, 1976
· Bob Marley and the Wailers and Sly and the Family Stone US tour, 1975
· Sex Pistols last show, Winterland, 1978
· The Clash's first US show, Berkeley Community Theatre, 1979, with Bo Diddley opening
· Black Flag at Mabuhay Gardens, 1980
· AC/DC, Myer Music Bowl, 1981
· Cold Chisel at Mawson, near Swansea.
· Toots and the Maytals with the Ramones, plus Michael Winslow from Police Academy as MC, doing Led Zep and reggae impressions in New York, circa 1980
· Nirvana supporting Sonic Youth in 1991
· Outkast, Atlanta, 2004· Lucinda Williams at the Fillmore, 2004.

Homesick with The Waifs

Hello again,

I had another homesick moment last week. I went to see an Aussie band at The Commodore Ballroom called The Waifs, from Perth. (www.thewaifs.com) They're a five-piece, and have been around for about 12 years now, their music a rootsy-folky-country and mainly acoustic brand of music, with sweet, sentimental songs about life, love and being on the road. They've been slogging it out on the road in Australia and around the world solidly almost non-stop in that time, for a long time playing to small pubs and hippy folk festivals, slowly but surely gaining a reputation for giving amazing shows and building a loyal, if small following. Only in the last 2-3 years or so, with the release of 'Up All Night' have they been making serious inroads into the national Aussie psyche and gaining popularity overseas.

I saw them once before in 2003 at the Womadelaide World Music and Dance Festival in Adelaide and was blown away. They then came across my path again in Dublin last year, and now here in Vancouver. They get around.

Anyway, a funny little story about this band. They had released a single from "Up All Night" called "London Still", a song about living in London and being homesick for Australia - a song that thousands of Aussies can relate to no doubt! I first heard this song at Womad, and hundreds of times on the radio in the ensuing months right up until I left on this trip in July 2003. It's such a sweet, melancholy song, that while still living in Melbourne, it made me want to be in London so that I could be homesick for Australia. And every time I heard the song it literally sent a chill up my spine, and nearly brought a tear to my eye. Every time. Strange huh?
Then in Dublin I came across the album again (thanks Kita!), and proceeded to be homesick, substituting London for Dublin in the lyrics.

So, when I saw the gig announced in the street press back in April, I snapped up tickets immediately. Australian patriotism is rife, everywhere you go if there is an Aussie band or Aussie-related event happening, we come out in droves. Arriving at The Commodore, you'd swear to God you were in Sydney, what with 95% of the accents you heard being the distinct twang typical of Aussies. It was great, but it did make me feel homesick.

Since I've been away from Melbourne, the following of The Waifs seemed to have grown manifestly in size - apparently they're HUGE now, thanks to the success of "Up All Night" and high-rotation of that album on youth radio network Triple J. So, when they came on stage, the noise and cheering was fever pitch and deafening. The show opened on a sombre note tho, happening on the same day as the London Bombings, and so the band began with a slow, sad and reflective version of London Still. No speech or comment, just the song and a quiet 'thank-you' afterwards. That was all that was needed to be said on the matter. On with the show. the show must go on, as those in London stoically proved.

Needless to say, despite the two girls, Vicki and Donna, both being heavily pregnant, they put on a huge and awesome performance, throwing in a lot of old crowd favourites, mixing up the slow songs with the faster finger-picking guitar tunes, road testing some new songs and whipping the crowd into a lather with a barnstorming version of their classic "Crazy Train". The crowd response was loud and long, and the band seemed genuinely overwhelmed and touched by the energy feeding back at them..."Oh gee, thanks guys!". No, Thank You. Awesome.

Cheers, Tony

Vanishing act - Paul Kelly

Vanishing act

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2005/07/13/1120934299541.html

By Michael Dwyer
July 15, 2005

Paul Kelly

Why Paul Kelly thinks the music of his youth has plenty in common with punk.
Paul Kelly slips the double vinyl album from its plastic sleeve and opens the gatefold cover. He smiles a distant smile. "There's Woody (Guthrie)," he says after a while. "There's Hank (Williams), Buddy Holly ..."

He doesn't remark on his younger self in the collage of faces adorning his classic album of '86, Gossip. It's almost like he isn't there. He drinks in heroes, friends and memories for a minute, closes the cover, writes the fan's name at the top and hesitates. "Good luck," he writes at last, "Paul Kelly."

Thanks. Anyone proposing to retrace the great Australian songwriter's journey so far probably needs it. Never an open book, Kelly has been slowly disappearing between the lines of his songs for years, a vanishing act that reaches another misty peak with Foggy Highway.

It's his second bluegrass album, following his '99 collaboration with Uncle Bill, Smoke, and it's no accident the two titles share an allusion to the veils that sometimes obscure reality from perception. "I was gonna call this one Fog," he says with a grin.

A compact figure in a big, black leather coat, Kelly is an affable if concise conversationalist who generally prefers not to meet the press. For years, he's expressed himself better through open letters to fans and media.

In his latest letter, he's expansive about what attracted him to bluegrass as a teenager. He was struck by the keening voices and strange melancholy of the Stanley Brothers and Dock Boggs, he writes, but moreover by the apparent distance between singer and song. These people "sang in voices distinctly their own but often from fantastical points of view," he writes. "Dick Justice sang from inside the head of a little bird that had witnessed a murder.

"Twentieth century singers sang as doomed 18th-century ship captains, 19th-century outlaws, ghosts or moles in the ground. Rock and pop music, a more self-expressive form where the song was usually about the singer, seemed quite limited to me in comparison."

When Kelly made his first Countdown appearance with the Dots 25 years ago, it was with pop's unambiguous first-person pronoun to the fore - even if his first Top 40 title, (I Wanna Be Like) Billy Baxter, offers an amusing indication of his escapist tendencies in hindsight.

Then as now, he held dear the more mysterious music he'd heard in the folk clubs of Adelaide and the country pubs in the foothills above Perth. Or, as he notes more poetically in his letter, "the country of pop was where I took up residence, but like an immigrant I always held onto those first songs, the dark, unruly hymns of home".

"When I was 19, 20, learning guitar, I was mainly learning folk songs and country songs," he recollects today. "Bluegrass songs would often prick my ears 'cause they seemed to come from somewhere so alien.

"I don't go to a lot of bluegrass festivals but I know it sees itself as being a bit outside of mainstream country. From what I know about the way it was born and developed, there seems to be a lot of parallels to punk music. When bluegrass first hit, jaws were dropping because they played so fast. Punk was like that too. I find it fascinating 'cause it's very raw but it takes a lot of skill to play."

Hence the Stormwater Boys, the band of sharp-pickers Kelly assembled for Foggy Highway. Their harmonies and musicianship are striking from the off, but the album's unique atmosphere is due at least as much to the author's stories. He acknowledges he selected his old songs and tailored his new ones to fit a certain mood, roughly in keeping with the album's title.

"The thing that really struck me when I saw (Joel and Ethan Coen's bluegrass-soaked movie) O Brother Where Art Thou? was that nearly all the songs had a yearning for another place," he says.

"Religion is big part of it but it's not always couched in religious terms. Big Rock Candy Mountain is a fantasy about a place where the cops have wooden legs; 'I'm weary, let me rest'; I'll Fly Away ... so much of that music springs from this longing for another place apart from this hardscrabble life."

It's tempting to conclude that Kelly uses the bluegrass tradition to pursue a similar yearning, the better to leave behind his own somewhat reticent persona for the attitudes and identities of fictitious characters. He recalls the first time he successfully shed his own skin to sing from a woman's point of view as a turning point in his work.

"When I wrote Sweet Guy, I was doing it with the Coloured Girls but I was trying to give it away to female singers I knew. It was (that band's late guitarist) Steve Connolly who convinced me to sing it myself, 'cause he had a lot of folk music in his background, too. It felt a bit odd at first, but once I'd done that song I knew I could do it again."

Everything's Turning to White, sung from the point of view of a shell-shocked wife in a short story by Raymond Carver, was easier by virtue of its more folky structure, Kelly says. Soon his audience was accustomed to the range of disguises that make his songs so much larger than his own slight and grizzled form.

Think of the prison inmate writing home for Christmas in How To Make Gravy, for example, or the bereft refugee in detention in Emotional.

The Billy Leach tent boxer in Rally Round the Drum is one of several old characters who reappear on Foggy Highway. Perhaps the most spellbinding is They Thought I Was Asleep, told from the point of view of a child in the back of a car, deeply shaken by the sound of his parents sobbing.

"I don't know what mum's crying about," the writer shrugs, "and I don't know if everything was all right in the end. Mick Albeck, the fiddle player, was funny 'cause he was asking, 'What did happen?' I had to say, 'I'm sorry, I don't know'."

With its roots in Bible Belt American folk and its occasional southern gothic overtones, Foggy Highway shares some common ground with another great Australian storyteller. Nick Cave, though, for all his brilliant dramatic devices, still has trouble extricating his songs from accusations of autobiography.

He openly lamented as much in the wake of his No More Shall We Part album of '01: "I find it a failure in my songwriting," he said, "that the songs can't exist without people immediately thinking, 'Oh shit, what's happened here? The Sorrowful Wife? Things are going wrong in his marriage!'"

Cave added: "The songs that I like of other people's, that really touch me, they're usually ones that sound as if they're about something that's true; a truth that reveals something about the artist."

Kelly thinks about this for a moment.

"You can tell a story that resonates with you, even though it's not your story," he says.
"That way you sing it with truth, perhaps. People don't tell the truth about themselves anyway, so who's to say when they write a song about breaking up with their wife that you're hearing the truth?"

As for his own vanishing act, Kelly thinks it may be due to a smaller stage presence to begin with. "I think Nick's much more of a performer and I don't think I am," he says. "He's fervent and he's passionate when he sings, so people will think 'Oh, it must be about him'.

"I tend to be a bit more detached, maybe. I'm not a natural performer. I've got better at it just through doing it a lot and gaining confidence, but I only became a performer because I'd written things and the best way of getting them out there was to sing them myself."

For the first time, his elusive streak extends to abdicating all instruments to his band on Foggy Highway, but rest assured he'll emerge from the mist when he hits home state stages next week.

"I still don't have very good technique for bluegrass," he insists, "'cause on a guitar you've really got to nail those alternating bass lines and stuff like that, so that's why I didn't play on the record.

"I'll play live, though, 'cause I can get away with that."

Hi, lonesome!
A lightning-fast history of bluegrass:

1939 - High-harmonising hillbilly Bill Monroe names his Blue Grass Boys after his "bluegrass state" of Kentucky. Mandolin, fiddle, banjo, guitar and bass soon to be reclassified as lethal instruments.

1946 - North Carolina banjo player Earl Scruggs ups the pace with a new, triple-fingered picking style.

1948 - Old Boys Scruggs and Lester Flatt form the Foggy Mountain Boys.

1954 - Elvis Presley cuts Monroe's Blue Moon of Kentucky as first Sun Records B-side.

1962 - Flatt and Scruggs' Ballad of Jed Clampett graces US TV comedy The Beverly Hillbillies.

1967 - Flatt and Scruggs' Foggy Mountain Breakdown makes bank-robbing fun in Bonnie & Clyde.

1972 - Eric Weissberg's and Steve Mandel's Dueling Banjos appears in Deliverance; becomes international shorthand for "Uh-oh, inbred yokels".

1980s - Former Scruggs and Ralph Stanley sideman Ricky Scaggs spearheads new Nashville traditionalist movement.

2001 - O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack shifts millions worldwide, great news for old timers (including the Stanley Brothers) and alleged "newgrass" players (including Alison Krauss).

2004 - Gillian Welch almost sparks mob lynching when a hapless Melbourne fan makes a floorboard creak during a performance.

Paul Kelly and the Stormwater Boys play the Palais in Hepburn Springs on Wednesday and the Athenaeum on Thursday and Friday. Foggy Highway is out through EMI.

Nooooooooo!!!!

Heaven or Las Vegas?

www.guardian.co.uk
Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited

Laura Barton on what the closure of the world's most famous punk-rock club, CBGB's, says about the state of New York's live music scene.

Friday July 08 2005

The walls used to drip. The crowd used to jostle and sweat.

On stage, Joey Ramone would strut and swagger through the barest of sets. This was CBGB's, mid-1970s, in its lean and thrusting prime, when punk rock was music's indigestible gristle, igniting the dirty backstreets and underground clubs of New York and London. Now CBGB's, the most famous punk club in history, is set to close.

The crude-sounding abbreviations of CBGB/OMFUG have long intrigued the masses. The wholesome explanation is: Country Bluegrass Blues/Other Music for Uplifting Gormandisers. Though Hilly Kristal, founder of the club, intended CBGB's to be a home for bluegrass and folk - indeed, its initial performances boasted acts such as the Con Fullum Band, Elly Greenberg and the Wretched Refuse String Band - it soon became the habitat of the squally experimental bands of the hour. Television, Patti Smith, Talking Heads and, most famously, the Ramones formed an almost umbilical link with the club.

CBGB's opened in December 1973. In a decade grown fat on Jethro Tull, it offered a cadaverous, alley-cat cool, its bands playing sets that weighed in at a skinny 15 minutes. The club skulked on the edge of New York's seamiest side, an area of the city that is only now beginning to buckle under the forces of regeneration and fashion. Visit today in daylight hours and you'll find the usual row of bar-proppers hunched over early beers, shelves of CBGB-branded merchandise and walls thick with graffiti, stickers and dirt. Outside, patrons of the homeless shelter next door clutter about on the pavement.

It is the homeless shelter that has perhaps been the undoing of CBGB's. The Bowery Residents' Committee runs the building and is CBGB's landlord, and the relationship between the two has been tempestuous, largely owing to the club's flagrant contravention of health and safety regulations and a somewhat blase attitude to rent payment. Next month, the club's lease is up, and the BRC wants to raise the rent to something more appropriate for a district in the pink of regeneration - a sum rumoured to be double the current amount, and certainly enough to make Kristal splutter.

So, now that all the Save CBGB's campaigns have been waged and the club's threats to up sticks to Las Vegas shrugged off, it looks as though CBGB's role in the New York live scene is finally over. It has been some while, however, since CBGB's was right at the throb of the New York scene, and its closure comes amid wider suspicion that the city's - or, more particularly, Manhattan's - live music scene is dwindling away. Indeed, much of it has relocated to the more fashionable and remote quarters of Williamsburg, leaving the city to the fat cats and the tourists. Some even argue that the nation's West Coast scene is today more vibrant than that of New York.

Some claim the end of CBGB's is overdue, and that its continued existence has been symptomatic of a current flabbiness in punk rock; that punk, once the great exhorter of annihilation, of ripping up and starting again, has reached an age where it can grow attached to its family heirlooms. Would it really be fitting to shift CBGB's to Vegas, to pickle and preserve it as one of America's great cultural artefacts, as a place where tourists can take time out from the casinos and Celine Dion concerts to visit this freakshow museum of sorts and buy their branded punk-rock memorabilia?

Far better, perhaps, to hope CBGB's dies before it gets old.

The Go-Betweens

Hi,

I'm not sure if i can put my finger on it exactly, nor into words exactly, to describe the kind of pop sensibility that's flowing thru the airwaves at the moment, but there seems to a particular, select group of bands getting phenomenal amounts of airplay on Seattle college radio.

There is one particular thread that spins thru a number, but not all, of the bands, and I strongly hesitate to use the phrase because it seems to mean so many different things, both good and bad these days, but I think an 'alternative country' feel, or at the very least, influence, pervades in this sound, with a heavy focus on tightly written, sung and performed story-based songs with a laid-back and mellow feel. They also have some sort of emotion behind them. I know that's a very loose and rambling description, but as a KEXP DJ wrote to me when I asked her opinion for this piece, "It's like asking someone to describe sex. Sure you can try, but until you feel it or with music, hear it, it's almost impossible".

Anyway, among bands that I've recently discovered, recently re-discovered or have been a fan of for years, which fall into this particular strong song-writing pop sensibilty, and am I'm liking at the moment include The Mountain Goats, Okkervil River, The Flaming Lips, The Decemberists, The Lucksmiths, The Postal Service, Mike Doughty (formerly of Soul Coughing), Devin Davis, My Morning Jacket, The Eels, Death Cab For Cutie, Wilco, The Sleepy Jackson, The Wedding Present, The Dears, and Elliott Smith. In any event, nearly all of these bands tend to operate on fairly independant level, either releasing work on thier own labels, or on very low-key, low budget small record labels.

I don't think any of them are contracted to a major label or get much, if any airplay on yer standard generic commercial radio station. This is also another common thread - it seems that any kind of band with any level of integrity and credibility, that follows this particular path, well, that seems to flow thru to their music, they write songs that have strength, character, and a real feeling of warmth in them. They write songs that have some purpose and meaning, the plaintive singing, intelligent lyrics, and sparse instrumentation with a good narrative in an understated manner really strive to get a message of some sort across. They also most definitely have a less 'throwaway or disposable' feel about them, like these songs will stand up to the tests of time, the stories being told emoting more to the listener than any of the vacuous crap being dished out on commercial radio.

Among these is Melbourne band The Go-Betweens.

This band had a reasonable level of success in Australia in the 80's and i think early 90's before calling it a day, and have reformed in recent times, releasing a new album on which they are promoting on tour thru the States. I never really paid much attention to them way back then, but I most certainly as now. This band have a sound that's, how do I put it, more along the adult-oriented rock scope (but that makes it sound like a bad thing, whereas they're actually not). They're also getting a truckload of airplay on KEXP, which is what basically prompted this blog entry. They were always kinda sorta on my musical radar growing up as a kid, but were probably (definitely, actually) a bit mature for my teenage ears to wrap around at the time, And this time round, they've kinda come in from left field in my musical awareness, but very much in a positive way.

The way the DJ's rap about them made me realise just how much respect and adoration they've gained in this part of the world that I was totally was never aware of in the past. . And, to be honest, I think it goes back to that style of song writing i ranted on about that has enabled them to come back and reform and be as successful as they have second time around. The American market is so fickle, and for them to be able to pick up where they left off is a testament to them as a band.

So, after discovering them on their second go on the musical merry-go-round myself, I highly encourage you to check 'em out for yourself. (www.go-betweens.net)

...But Seriously

Hi,

My flatmate Ceri has this funny habit of getting up at 4am-ish in the morning to have a cup of tea, check/write his emails, and read the English papers online for an hour or so, and then going back to bed. Something about having cacked up sleeping patterns...

When I get up in the morning, I quickly do a check of my emails before work, but always get sidetracked by the articles that he has left open. Ceri is a pretty intelligent guy, Oxford Uni graduate, and always has something thoughtful to say on the issues of the world, which I quite enjoy - it's nice to have a bit of intellectual brain stimulation, especially when the bulk of my day, work, involves virtually no use of that organ whatsoever!

Anyway, this is reflected in the papers and articles he reads, usually from The Guardian, an English, slightly left-leaning editorial style newspaper. The topics and issues are wide ranging and varied, both in style and content, and the ones I come across in the morning are always of this ilk, but this one in particular I felt somewhat close to.

It raises the issue of what happens to a persons taste in music once they hit the age of 30. I like to think I've got a pretty good, up-to-the-minute, and, crucially, credible taste in music. If you've been following my journal even remotely closely you'll have figured out that i'm not yer average Top-40 joe, sticking more closely to the fringes, most recently picking up on cool, new, and local bands from Seattle college radio - KEXP FM (www.KEXP.org) which I can't rate highly enough.

Anyway, the link to the article in question is just below - click on it and come back to me with your thoughts and comments (if you can be bothered).

Cheers,

Tony

http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,3605,1476908,00.html