Beacon Street Union - South End Incident/ Speed Kills

Label: MGM
Year of Release: 1967

The Boston-based Beacon Street Union were a psychedelic rock band who achieved some moderate and very culty success in America in the late sixties, and pop up on compilations rather less frequently than you'd expect for some baffling reason. They weren't half bad in their arty, hippy-ish ways, as the "Speed Kills" side of this single proves, whose 1:45 two chord rush actually predates some of Wire's more interesting miniatures by a whole decade.

According to other online sources, the band used to enjoy throwing bags of flour around on stage to create a low budget "fog" effect (is this what Fields of the Nephilim were also trying to do, then?) and messed with the audience's ears where expectations of volume were concerned, blasting eardrums out frequently without warning. They had enough of a following to get a few albums out in their career, and they certainly had their fans, but ultimately never achieved much in the USA apart from some very low-rung Top 75 placings.

In Britain it's safe to say they achieved even less, although somebody clearly cared enough to get this single imported - the hole through the middle of the label indicates that this was shipped over rather than purchased on holiday. Perhaps they were a Southend-on-Sea resident who had their own interpretation of the "South End Incident" side, which is drenched in sheer paranoia and foreboding, very much like the Honeycombs "Eyes" track I placed on this blog not too long ago.

http://sharebee.com/def04e01

Second Hand Record Store Dip Part 17 - Marshall Hain - Coming Home

Who: Marshall Hain
What: Coming Home
Label: Harvest
Found: Wood Street Market, Walthamstow
Year of Release: 1978
Cost: One pound

Marshall Hain are often quoted as being "one hit wonders", their stupendous single "Dancing in the City" being the alleged 'hit'. Really though, it's entirely up to you where you draw the line - if you think that anything which worked its way into the Top 40 was technically a hit single, then this follow-up "Coming Home" did indeed burrow its way in, spending a mere week at Number 39 before waving goodbye to the Sunday afternoon Radio One countdown forever.

A quick listen to this reveals why they failed to capitalise on their promising start. "Coming Home" is a pretty but undistinguished ballad which completely lacks all of the sultry heat of its predecessor. I used to own a K-Tel compilation called "Night Moves" filled with late seventies MOR ballads, and "Coming Home" would have sat quite nicely on there next to Judy Tzuke, Randy Vanwarmer and Sad Cafe, waiting to be played by couples on their Ford Cortina stereos as they came home from late nights on the town. The point is, where "City" was a very distinctive piece of work, "Coming Home" sounds like it could have been recorded by just about any MOR artist in that period, whereas the B-side "Different Point" flags up how they ended up on the predominantly hard rock/ art rock Harvest label, being full of over-enthusiastic jazzy workouts. And at the risk of exposing my ignorance, was this the first ever use of the "Bvvvvwwwaawwwwow" Paul Young bass guitar noise?

http://sharebee.com/b6a8b226

Going back to the subject of "Dancing In The City" - a topic I'm sure both Marshall and Hain are utterly sick of, wherever they are - it has to be said that it was one of my favourite records ever as a child, and it still hasn't shifted from my iPod playlist as an adult. It cropped up on a "Guilty Pleasures" compilation recently, which baffled me completely - I had no idea I was ever supposed to feel guilty about liking it. What's not to like, after all? Besides sounding quite unique even now, it's one of the few tracks I can think of that sounds strangely sexual despite not referencing the dirty deed once across its four minutes. The soft-porn keyboard sound and subtle saxophone halfway through might be doing that, as well as the slightly hushed vocals and thunder effects. It stinks of a hot sticky night at the local discotheque and suggestive dancing - it's no surprise to me at all that a few YouTube commenters are saying that they either lost their virginity or had their first kiss to the record.

The video is noteworthy as well for giving us so many early music vid cliches in one unexpected hit. Smashing lightbulbs in slow motion? Check. Sinister looking black cat? Check. Neon signs denoting a "city"? Check. Members of the band prowling around "enigmatically"? Check. Whether this was a video that created the cliches or simply followed them I couldn't tell you, but it's a pleasing little retro-nugget.

Bark Psychosis - Blue

Label: Circa/ 3rd Stone
Year of Release: 1994

Given that the genre "Post Rock" was first coined in a review for a Bark Psychosis record in 1994, it seems somewhat disgraceful that I should even find myself in a position of typing up a L&TB entry for them at all. After all, if they are such pioneers that they kickstarted an entire movement, surely the general public should be singing their praises as much as they do for My Bloody Valentine?

As ever, the truth is a tiny bit more complicated than that. Bristol's Bark Psychosis are a truly wonderful band, but their career veered all over the great musical motorway, mashing up techno, shoegazing, post-punk, trip-hop and even jazz and avant garde into the tyres of their juggernaut as if they were mere hedgehogs (Is this a ludicrous image? Of course it is). Unlike Mogwai or GYBE, they were also pernickity souls who would never settle for repetition of ideas where variation was possible. An eight minute Bark Psychosis track will meander so much that it will frequently finish bearing little relation to what you, the listener, heard at the point of entry, but will seem somehow intrinsically linked to the concept in ways which seem inexplicable. "Hex" on the B-side of this single, for example, begins with an uncomfortable and fierce three minutes of harsh, repetitive noise, which stops suddenly to expose the undercurrent to the track, which progresses slowly towards the conclusion, sounding ambient and soothing, but retaining a slight air of menace. It somehow manages to be as uncomfortable as "Metal Machine Music" but as beautiful as Eno's "Another Green World" simultaneously.

The A-side "Blue" is probably one of the poppier tracks the band ever released, but still shows imagination which was light years ahead of their peers at the time, and a keen ear for the exploration of all the possibilities. It manages to be interesting pop, electronic music and indie simultaneously.

That the band sold sod all in the way of records should come as absolutely no surprise to anyone, and that they signed to Circa (a subsidiary of Virgin) is more baffling still. Surely nobody thought this, great though it was, would ever shift units? I managed to interview them around the point "Blue" was released, and whilst I've since lost the transcript, I remember a very intelligent but polite band who were keen to gently correct me about everything I thought was good in the present music scene. At one point a member admitted that he quite liked These Animal Men, and was promptly rounded on by songwriter and singer Graham Sutton. An uncomfortable few seconds followed - but what was interesting about the minor outburst was that most other bands I met around the same time would take the opposite approach, and pretend to like These Animal Men just to seem in some way in tune with the zeitgeist. Bark Psychosis seemed much keener to set themselves outside of all the trends of the time and focus on their own particular ideas.

They went on to play a gig which was astounding, and still seems fresh in my memory even now. It wasn't as if they were especially charismatic on stage, and they even fell back on the old Pink Floyd trick of projecting Super 8 footage to give the audience some other visual image to hang on to - but it often seemed as if they were performing on a tightrope by throwing too much into the mix at once, and I stood rooted to the spot to see if they would ever come a cropper. They didn't, obviously, and they even got themselves an encore, which their tour manager said was "The first one they've had so far".

Perhaps I shouldn't have been so surprised at their low strike rate. I can't imagine a bunch of skinny indie kids circa 94 really going for some of this stuff around the provinces of Great Britain, and it must have confused the hell out of a lot of people - but through a lot of their output, material which was actually eventually massively influential to both the trip-hop and post rock movements can be heard, and even though that's starting to become acknowledged now, I still don't think it's trumpeted enough.

Oh, and talking of trumpets, that's Del Crabtree from Animals That Swim playing on all their records as well. Being in one brilliant unsung band is unfortunate, but being in two seems somewhat careless... perhaps I should start a poll for the best band featuring Del Crabtree. Although he played trumpet on Erasure's "Sometimes" as well, so it would be a rather varied poll in terms of musical genres, much like Bark Psychosis themselves.

Tracklisting:
1. Blue
2. Hex
3. Big Shot (Alice's Cheshire Cat Mix)

http://sharebee.com/83580de9

Murry The Hump - Cracking Up

Label: Too Pure
Year of Release: 2001

Another defunct noughties act I'm afraid, retro fans - although that doesn't mean to say that you shouldn't download the single and listen to it anyway.

Aberystwyth's Murry The Hump were earmarked by some critics in the alternative music press as being "ones to watch" at a time when, quite honestly, nobody was very sure what was or wasn't going to sell anymore. In the post-Britpop, pre-New Rock Revolution days, the NME in particular gave coverage to acts who have now almost completely been written out of overground history, from post-rock bands to "skunk rock" artists and even "intelligent techno" (whatever happened to that phrase? And what was so stupid about techno in the first place?) In The Hump's case, however, they also had other bands on their side who seemed completely convinced they were the next big thing. Alex James out of Blur referred to them as being "the best new band in Britain" at a time when they actually weren't very new and had already paid their dues on the unforgiving pub circuit, and they were offered endless support slots from key bands of the period.

If the singles "Cracking Up" and "Colouring Book" had been issued in the mid-nineties, there's little doubt in my mind they would at least have nudged their way into the charts. Timing is everything, though, and by 2001 there may have been something slightly passe about their lyrically wry, upbeat indie rock. Whilst Travis and Coldplay were bothering the world's airwaves like a bothersome spell of particularly fine drizzle, the humorous, frivolous touches in Murry the Hump's songs didn't have a hope. Low tempo emotional intensity wasn't really their thing, man, as the lyrics "You're like a ten foot wall, I can't get over you" on this single prove.

Almost immediately after their rather good album "Songs of Ignorance" was issued, the band decided to call it a day. According to the lead singer Matt Evans, there was bickering amongst the members and it had "stopped being fun". There were even rumours about court action being taken by ex-members of the band, which seems somewhat unbelievable for an act who never charted - who in their right minds would spend money fighting over 25% of nothing? After all this hoo-ha, the band The Key were formed from the remaining members, who were considerably more Rock in their outlook and nothing like the outfit they all originated from.

Murry The Hump seem destined to be one of those bands who came and went in the blink of an eye, failed to fully realise their potential, and left a lot of fans cursing in their wake. They barely even merit a mention on music sites dedicated to Welsh bands these days, which is a shame for an act who actually produced two of my favourite singles of 2001.

To make matters even sadder, even their host label Too Pure (which has at various points been home to Stereolab, Jack, Pram, Moonshake and PJ Harvey) closed down in July of this year... but whilst the slate may be completely scrubbed clean in most respects, the good old Interweb still has Murry-ish traces around and about, and their official website is still active here: http://www.murrythehump.co.uk/

And you can download the single (plus flip side "No Girl, No Sex") here: http://sharebee.com/0f5875ab

The album also still seems to be available from a few online outlets, which is more than can be said for most of the pre-21st Century Acts featured here on L&TB. One wonders if it will ever be truly possible to wipe out the history of any post-nineties act in the digital age, or if most of them will have material available somewhere forever.

Circus Days Volumes One and Two

Label: Bam Caruso
Year of Release: 1998

Compilation time again, folks... although when it's a compilation like this one, I need not feel guilty about the slight lack of personal effort on my part.

You see, Circus Days was a project by the editors of the sixties fanzine "Strange Things Are Happening", and they dug up for everybody's pleasure obscure acetates, some of which had apparently never seen the light of day anywhere before. For the most part, these "popsike" tracks explore the moments when psychedelia bled into rather Denmark Street sounding tunes with one eye on the charts - there are no equivalents to "See Emily Play" on the CD, then, and certainly no examples of freaked-out improv numbers, but plenty of peppy tracks with frequently faintly absurd lyrical content. Some of the inclusions like Steve Hillage and The Wire Machine don't quite fit their plans, but on the whole it's a thematically coherent effort.

Among the best on offer here are Blonde on Blonde's fantastic, blissed out version of the Simon Dupree and The Big Sound cast-off "Castles in the Sky", Head West's deeply lethargic and moody "Someday" (which Blur's comeback single "Out of Time" always faintly reminded me of, despite the fact that tune-wise the two have little in common), Nimrod's proto-glam "The Bird", a fairly early Vashti Bunyan appearance before her whole career underwent a giant resurrection, and The Fingers slightly skewed pop. I'm not even going to bother to add how fantastic Cook and Moore's "Bedazzled" is - but it looks as if I just did.

Rather unfortunately, the "Circus Days" series of compilations appeared to waste most of their good material on the first two volumes, and subsequent issues declined in quality to the extent that Volume Six is hardly worth owning. Additionally, the series lost credibility amongst many sixties buffs when it transpired that a lot of the sleeve credits were just plain wrong. For example, the original compilers credited an unknown sixties act known as Clover for "Ice Cream Man" and another act known as Stars for "Auntie Annies Place". In reality, both recordings were by a studio-bound project called Kidrock*, and the purpose of their work was not to create psychedelic pop but make records which appealed to the pre-secondary school market. It's an easy mistake to make, certainly - a lot of psychedelic inspired stuff is decidedly childlike - but when you add the fact that they didn't even record the tracks until well into the seventies, a lot of red faces occurred. Perhaps it should be more shameful to admit that even though as a grown man I'm not supposed to enjoy either tune, I'm afraid I actually like both...

Additionally, the Pure Pop blog (link in the left hand menu) recently revealed that Johnny Burton's "Polevault Man" was a 1972 release rather than a 1969 one as stated on the sleeve of "Circus Days". There's a distinct sense that the compilers were scrabbling around a bunch of scratchy old unlabelled acetates and indulging in an enormous amount of guesswork about the artists and eras, then printing their guesses on the sleeves rather than admit to their ignorance. This is a shame, as ultimately it wouldn't have detracted from the quality of the material offered one iota, and it's doubtful anyone would have cared much about a few more "Mystery Artist" credits. After all, who could argue with a record which features a song about somebody falling to their death at a funfair in Great Yarmouth (Nick Garrie's "Wheel of Fortune")? Not I for one - take "New York Mining Disaster" and shove it up your collective arses, Gibb brothers.

Track listing:
1. Kidrock - Ice Cream Man
2. Los Brincos - Nobody Wants You Now
3. Rhubarb Rhubarb - Moneylender
4. Peter Cook and Dudley Moore - Bedazzled
5. Lomax All Stars - Honey Machine
6. Kidrock - Auntie Annie's Place
7. Head West - Someday
8. Waterloo - Why May I Not Know
9. Johnny Burton - Polevault Man
10. Tandem - Shapes and Shadows
11. Penny Peeps - I See The Morning
12. Jon Plum - Alice
13. Nick Garrie - Wheel of Fortune
14. Dry Ice - Running to the Convent
15. Arzachel (aka Steve Hillage and Friends) - Garden of Earthly Delights
16. Vashti - I'd Like To Walk Around In Your Mind**
17. Mystery Track
18. Green Scarab - Psychedelic Wilderness
19. Fruit Machine - Follow Me
20. Orange Peel - I Got No Time
21. Smoke - Dreams of Dreams
22. Nimrod - The Bird
23. Fingers - Circus With A Female Clown
24. Blonde on Blonde - Castles in the Sky
25. The Wire Machine - Doves (1944)
26. The Eggy - You're Still Mine
27. Blonde on Blonde - Circles

Part One:

http://sharebee.com/2e75aa64

Part Two:

http://sharebee.com/fc21159e

* Whilst I had a Soulseek account, Kidrock would regularly get download after download from fans of the American star. They never did respond to tell me precisely what they thought of the song, but I do hope they enjoyed it.

** Vashti Bunyan has gone on record as saying that she doesn't know how anybody obtained this acetate, since only one copy was ever pressed and then given to an elderly lady Vashti stayed with on her travels. One can only assume that it then worked its way back into the public domain after the old dear shuffled off this mortal coil - or perhaps it was an unwanted gift. Neither option is a particularly pleasant thought.

For more information about the compilations and "Strange Things", go here:
http://www.marmalade-skies.co.uk/strange.htm