Tiger - We Are Puppets

Label: Trade 2
Year of Release: 1996

I must admit I had really high hopes for Tiger, and judging by their earliest music press coverage (which was largely favourable) so did a great many other critics out there with a much greater knowledge of what was "going down" than I ever had access to. As an idea alone, the band were brilliant. The ex-art student frontman Dan Laidler was almost painted as being an idiot-savant by the music press, and he freely confessed that he didn't have much interest in music at all, owned about three albums and just formed the band based on some ideas he'd barked into a tape recorder in his bedroom.

If this sounds like a slightly underwhelming prospect, it's largely believed that the introduction of guitarist Julie Sims into the equation helped to smooth over the more extreme outsider edges, and created a concoction of tunes which sounded disjointed, scruffy, and slightly naive but still very appealing in a post-punk/ krautrock way. "Race" and "On The Rose" (both featured here) are actually stunning little singles with some of the more wonderful, buzzing guitar noises and primitive pulsating rhythms you'll hear, complete with absurd, scattergun lyrics, and quirky and sudden tugs in the arrangements - it's hard for me not to pull in comparisons to early Wire in places, only unlike Elastica or Menswear, Tiger were rougher and were closer to the devil-may-care spirit of the band (and, crucially, appeared to have more tunes of their own). The main guitar riff for "Race" alone sounds like a knackered car continually trying to rev its way out of deep mud, then ends with a primitive (and presumably guitar effects pedal driven) electronic engine noise. It's all very primal and punkish sounding, but I struggle to think of many bands of that ilk who would be willing to combine it with that kind of arty imagination now.

So what went wrong, then? Primarily I would argue that Tiger both looked and sounded too unorthodox for mainstream consumption. Dan Laidler's voice frequently sounds like a protesting sealion, and (with the exception of Julie Sims, who most definitely was attractive and sported lots of tight leather stagewear) the band made an enormous virtue out of their provincial ordinariness, having their hair "styled" into mullets amongst other fashion war-crimes. Obviously, I should make it clear at this point that I have absolutely nothing against such behaviour in the world of pop, but it seldom translates into mass public appreciation, and at a time when the so-called indie scene was having an obsession with cute cover stars, it was never going to come across very well when a band attempted to pride themselves in how average looking they were.

On top of that, this album was recorded a mere year after the band formed, and the lack of variation in its style probably alienated many listeners. In fact, confession time - as a whole, I do find that it drags a little, and sounds rushed in places. Equally, Laidler's naive slogan-orientated lyrics can be either charming or just plain attention-seeking whacko, and when tracks veer towards the latter writing style it can get faintly irritating. That doesn't stop some of the tracks on here being an absolute joy to listen to, but a "lost classic" it isn't, just a rather good piece of work which deserved better than its pathetic placing of number 108 in the British charts.

One other album followed - "Rosaria", which was issued in 1999 after their record label dropped them - and that seems to have been that. A shame, but we can perhaps take some comfort from the fact that "Race" just scraped the Top Forty, a feat I can't imagine a similar single achieving in the present day.

Tracklisting:
1. My Puppet Pal
2. Shamed All Over
3. Race
4. Bollinger Farm
5. Storm Injector
6. Depot
7. On The Rose
8. Sorry Monkeys
9. Cateader Reddle
10. She's OK
11. Ray Travez
12. Keep In Touch


Download it here

Second Hand Record Dip Part 32 - Voodoo Queens - Supermodel Superficial

Who: Voodoo Queens
What: Supermodel Superficial (b/w "Chocolate (Melt in Your Mouth)")
Label: Too Pure
When: 1993
Where: Music and Video Exchange, Camden High Street
Cost: 50p

"Whose role models do you really think you are?/ YOUNG GIRLS WHO MAKE THEMSELVES SICK!!!"

For the brief period of time that the Riot Grrrl movement in Britain hit the mainstream press (and it could probably be measured as being a matter of two or three months) it was really Huggy Bear and the Voodoo Queens who dominated most of the headlines. The former refused to talk to the press, and released radical feminist fanzines in order to get their points across. The latter, on the other hand, spoke to Smash Hits, seemed happy to be courted by the NME, and released songs about fancying Keanu Reeves. A slight difference of technique to get the message across then - I've sometimes contemplated whether or not they had some kind of running bet in operation with each other.

"Supermodel Superficial" is obviously a very aggressive, clattering swipe at the Kate Mosses of this world, and I've never been able to make up my mind whether it's particularly worthy lyrically or not. It's easy to blame the models themselves for creating a culture obsessed with leanness and trimness, but one can't help but wonder if the fashion industry itself, or even the editors of glamour and gossip magazines, would have been far better targets. Models don't really peddle propaganda, they just stand to one side pouting a bit whilst decisions are made behind their backs. In fact, given the overwhelming encouragement of diets and drug use amongst the fashion industry, it's almost tempting to argue that they are also unwilling victims in the entire mess, having usually been naive teenage girls placed in a preposterous and potentially damaging environment. The ones who go on to make huge money in the business may be worthy of the odd sideswipe, but - to coin a cliche - if Kate Moss didn't do it, another skinny blonde girl from Croydon almost certainly would.

That said, the Voodoo Queens apparently frequently complained that nobody ever focussed on the music whilst they were around, and it's safe to say that this is a mean little single in terms of punk riffage, filled with menacing guitar riffs, a brilliantly dischordant guitar solo, and an energy which sounds so spontaneous that I can only assume it was a one-take wonder. Therefore, I've always been prepared to overlook the slightly simplistic politics in order to bounce around merrily to the general hissiness of the entire thing.

The B-side "Chocolate (Melt in Your Mouth)" takes blissed out, almost shoegazey melodic turns, and is a quite unexpected yin to the A-side's yang. In all, then... worthy of a listen, I think, and by no means a waste of this week's fifty pence piece.

Download it here

Eurovision Song Contest

Ah, Eurovision. Or - eurgh, Eurovision, if you're a reader of this blog who abhors the very womb of the contest. Views of the contest have flipped all over the place since the fifties when it was launched. The nineties were largely deemed to be its nadir. Hardly anybody in the UK was watching at this point, and it was known for producing ballads and pop songs which sounded as if they belonged in some peculiar alternative universe where cute blonde babes of either gender wore bright primary colours, trilled about love and peace, and dressed like the worst aspects of the seventies and eighties never went away.

There's some truth in the above assessment, but a lot of nonsense as well - the contest has always had a few entrants going out on a limb, and dig hard enough, and you'll find some worthy appearances on Youtube. These days, of course, viewing figures are back up and the contest has become a hit again amongst lovers of the X Factor and other talent shows who have suddenly returned back to the source of the concept. Many blogs and forum posters last year bemoaned the fact that Eurovision was being "ironically" applauded in the present decade, ignoring the fact that a not disproportionate volume of entries in the 2008 contest would have happily found a home in most continental hit parades, and in fact did in the weeks that followed. If we strip away all the complaints about irony and novelty, the anti Eurovision argument for most appears to be that the contest attracts entries which are pure (and frequently flamboyant) pop, which sticks in the craw of fans of holier (or more underground) than thou indie kids and greased up rockers - party-killers to a man. And the more militant, sour-faced members of both camps usually are men too.

Let us consider also the fact that the rules of Eurovision - three minute max pop songs with immediate impact and innovation frequently being the most rewarded - bear very little relation to any other music form at the moment, and, rather like the novelty tracks I uploaded here a few months back, therefore become pure, undistilled pop noises, almost freakish in their potency over a limited run time. The three minute rule may seem conservative, but it gives the performers and songwriters a chance to show what they can actually craft in a limited time space, and stops them from over-indulging or boring the listener, which last year created the below pocket symphony:



Sebastian Tellier's "Divine", in a sane, rational world, would have walked the contest, been number one in all charts around Europe for three months, and been hailed as a modern classic. I have played no single mp3 more in the last two years, and I'm still not tired of it. It takes the freaked-out electronic elements of The Beach Boys "Love You" album, swirls in the frothier, smoother aspects of French techno, adds elements of blissed-out, gaga psychedelia, and still manages to be undeniably Pop. It was argued that the song fell into the bottom half of the scoreboard because of its "oddness", but in reality it flopped because Tellier was forced to get backing vocalists to recreate the sampled elements live, leading to this Top Of the Pops in the early nineties styled monstrosity:



For the record, apparently Tellier considered walking off the contest without even performing. He could hardly have been blamed if he had chosen that option. "Divine" is one of the greatest singles of the last decade, never mind one of the best Eurovision entries, and the conservative interpretation of Eurovision rules by the organisers should have lead to someone's arse being kicked. No synthesiser samples, unless they're other instruments? Thank God the Art of Noise never represented us in the eighties, otherwise we'd have had six men on stage all saying "Dum" a lot (probably all wearing Paul Morley masks, I shouldn't wonder). So clearly some of the rules do need a little bit of work to get up to speed with the modern world, but others work in the contest's favour. It is admittedly a paradox.

Nonetheless, spin back to 1983 to find an entry from Belgium which sounds both of its time and sufficiently absurd and warped to be the tinkering of East London retro-terrorists in the present day. Pas De Deux's "Rendevouz" is part Human League, part early evening cop show soundtrack, part oddball melodies:



It didn't win either, actually, but contributed to the fest as any unusual offering on the Euro-menu might - part of the contest's appeal is not just what seems like an outright, crowd-pleasing winner, but what each country has defiantly dared to put forward as its best effort.

And because any entry on Eurovision inevitably ends on me being unable to resist putting a politically incorrect shocker up, please allow me to present to you Germany's 1979 entry Dschinghis Khan, about the famous war-mongering dictator:



This will be the only Eurovision entry I do this year, I promise - so long as you promise to at least watch the final next Saturday, and perhaps the semi-finals on Tuesday and Thursday too. Some more uploads will follow soon, but technical difficulties in the 23 Daves household (and the death of my MacBook which had all my recent uploads stored on it) have meant that I've been scrabbling around a bit for alternative scraps to serve you all recently. Normal service will shortly be resumed.

Goliath - Port & Lemon Lady

Label: CBS
Year of Release: 1970

As the sixties waved goodbye and everyone wept - or so popular culture would have us believe, but it's safe to say that wasn't universally true - the old guard didn't so much change their stripes as gently mutate into other beasts. The bubblegum brigade largely turned their attentions to glam (Mud and The Sweet had both been around and been ignored during the sixties, lest we forget). The garage rock acts frequently morphed into full blown hard rock bands. And then the psychedelic hippies, seemingly for want of anything better to do, carried on exploring their pastoral and experimental influences until, in some cases, we got something rather like this lot.

Goliath were one of several prog-folk acts to emerge almost exactly at the same time as the sixties faded, and whilst as a genre it didn't really have any big-hitting names like Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin, it nonetheless ploughed its own particular furrow for a rather long period of time. Unlike many of their rivals (or perhaps we should say "fellow travellers") however, Goliath had a distinct blues influences to their work as well, and were probably one of the only acts of the era to combine raunchy vocals- courtesy of lead singer Linda Rothwell - with puffing flutes. As the various cultures clash and compete for your ear's attention across the grooves, it should be a tremendous mess, but amazingly it all hangs together very well.

"Port and Lemon Lady" was CBS's choice for the single off their sole eponymous album, and is a rather merry little number which I personally find close to irritating, but the B-side "I Heard About a Friend" is rather more serious and satisfying and displays the band's strengths much more successfully.

Some critics referred to them as being the British Jefferson Airplane - whether that's the case or not, they seemingly never had an opportunity to record another album, and petered out a few years later. Their sole long player has never been reissued, and is now extremely collectible - the single features nothing which isn't already on the album and is as such less desirable, but still pretty scarce. Enjoy, although I do feel that this is probably an acquired taste, more like gin in that respect than Port and lemon.

Download here

Foreheads in a Fishtank - Buttocks

Label: Stuf
Year of Release: 1992

When I uploaded Foreheads in a Fishtank's absurd and largely overlooked single "I Want to Masturbate at Castle Donnington", I really wasn't quite expecting the flurry of interest which emerged. You can read the original entry plus the subsequent comments here. One of the great things about keeping this blog is how unexpected some of the fanaticism for certain bands is. You can upload some really obscure cult sixties single which is much loved in clubs everywhere and get one nod of thanks, and then you upload a noisy, dischordant, awkward and nasty bunch of mothers like FIAFT who were famed during their careers for playing to two men and a dog in just about every provincial town, and suddenly its like a love-in. I'm really glad that some of these bands managed to gain some sort of cult status and that people have affectionate memories of them, but where were we all when they really needed us, eh?

In a sense, I perhaps shouldn't have been surprised by the response. The band cracked John Peel's Festive Fifty, always a sign of an act with a healthy following of people with a keen ear for the unique and beserk moments in music. On top of that, they signed to Some Bizarre not long after this self-issued album, and went on to receive mixed reviews for the follow up "Yeah Baby Wow", which nonetheless attracted some Radio One evening play.

I've just finished freshly listening to this (their debut album) whilst converting it to MP3 for the first time in at least ten years, and one thing that leaps out about it is the motorway pile-up of ideas in each track. Basslines wobble like the bingo wings of old ladies, the drums appear to be looping for a rival Manchester band at times, whilst guitars distort, clatter and clutter up the mix and the vocalist screeches slogans like a stuck and wounded parrot. "She blows smoke from her nose and says IT CURES KIPPERS DOESN'T IT?!" he seethes at one point, bafflingly and seemingly apropos of nothing. On top of all this, samples creep in relatively unobtrusively and in a way that doesn't once smack of gimmickry which, for an early nineties indie band, was a fairly serious achievement. Lest we forget, the likes of Pop Will Eat Itself frequently used samplers in the aggravating manner over-excited toddlers might press the audio buttons on interactive museum exhibits.

Nonetheless, the album isn't without flaws. The way each track seems to end suddenly and without any obvious conclusion gets irritating over a whole listen, as if their collective imaginations on this debut didn't quite extend to outros. Also, whilst the sheer aural assault has its definite charms, like four musicians from entirely different genres trying to cover Captain Beefheart out-takes, across 45 minutes its relentless noise and awkwardness starts to jangle on the nerves, particularly when the mid-LP sag of "Brains" and "Hospital" arrives. Those who are prepared to listen all the way through will discover a delight in the form of "Luxurious", though, the nine-and-a-half minute end epic which almost sounds as sorrowful as it is downright sadistic and aggressive. It gradually segues into a morose ambient outro (so they could write them sometimes, then) with distorted samples burbling away underneath, which is simultaneously depressing and tranquil in a way I can't begin to articulate. Its too cheap sounding for me to make a case for it pre-empting Boards of Canada, who would doubtless laugh at its roughness and simplicity, but the mood created is disquieting in a very similar way.

"Buttocks" hasn't particularly aged much, but then that's possibly because there aren't that many equivalent acts out there to compare FIAFT to in the first place. The fascination with sampling and oddly funky rhythms does datestamp this effort slightly, but whilst the likes of Jesus Jones and EMF were attempting something life-affirming and youthful with wild samples and beserko guitar riffs around this time, FIAFT were like their parallel universe comedown cousins. Whilst the former parties were youthful and pretty, FIAFT were like the pictures in their attics, with peculiar burns and bruises on their bodies, painful sexual diseases, a singer in trauma about the foulness of the decadence, and a drum machine which refused to consider anything too frantic. The sexual demands in "Luxurious" sound like men on their last legs in a desert begging for water, rather than making it sound in any way like a desirable state of affairs.

I'm not massively surprised that the majority of the British public gave them the elbow, but whilst its tempting to think of the band as a joke, ridiculous song titles and all, I'd be more inclined to regard them as overlooked artrockers with an unhealthy interest in the crude, the cheap and the revolting. This album isn't for everyone, then, but it should definitely be given a bit of time by anyone with a pair of patient ears.

Tracklisting:
1. British Telecom Suck
2. I Want to Masturbate at Castle Donnington
3. She Loves You Yeah
4. Happy Shopper
5. Sex and Drugs and
6. Trantula La
7. Brains
8. Hospital
9. Sylvester's Mother
10. Luxurious

(This album is shortly to be remastered and reissued, and the band have requested that any downloads to it should be removed from this site.)