SONGS THEY NEVER PLAY ON THE RADIO

24. My Bloody Valentine : Dare, somewhere 

PART 1

I WAS going to big up an over researched book, Andrew Perer's Turn My Head into Sound: A History of Kevin Shields and My Bloody Valentine. However, reading it reminded me of how big a part they've played in my life and how little studios interest me.

Encapsulated by what would've been a far more engrossing chapter about Colm O'Ciosoig's misfortunes during the Loveless sessions being reduced to a short paragraph. It omits the human to make a point about Shields being superhuman and is obsessed with his studio gadgetry and not the fact he answered the door with a hammer when Belinda got threatened by an ex. The folk who lent an ear to his project weren't the main players, but were studio staff. 

MBV seemed adult compared to all my other fixations. Adult, as in sex. It's why their pre-Bilinda incarnation didn't work for me. Shields may well be the genius, but the overall image the band cultivated after 1987 was captivating. Coupled with music unique in its sensuousness, it simulating my idea of sex even. Something truly felt.

An idea for over a decade until finally cocooned under the covers in my good mate Jeff's cold back bedroom with a lovely, full-lipped woman whose supple voluptuous curves I had never encountered before. Experiencing one of my best Sundays, period. Cliche'd for sure, but Isn't Anything enraptured us, I guess. She gave me her number, but I was flying over to Rome to meet what I assumed to be my girlfriend, Joss, so tossed it away. When I got to Rome, Joss met me, two days later than planned, informing me she'd met someone new. I was as sad about tossing away that number as I was about receiving the news. Imagining how enraptured by Loveless we could've been. 

Sometime later in the same room I was spinning (Please) Lose Yourself In Me, the hypnotic closer on their Ecstacy LP to get it aired at an upcoming Doves gig, but Jeff inexplicably called it dated. Absolute bollocks! Only Spector and the Reid brothers have created a comparable wall of sound with nowhere near as much unsettling fizzy warmth. Their last Lazy masterpiece, the Strawberry Wine EP, contains three tracks, all different but all brilliant. It almost eclipses early Mary Chain with its immediacy. It's that good. I first played these retrospectively in 1988 after they signed to Creation. When they became everyone's favourite band.

I only ever recall hearing You Made Me Realize out in the Hangout that year. The interplay between the ethereal and the concrete is much subtler on Isn't Anything. Voices and instrumentation mesh, de-tune, and crystallize, creating something transcendental and unheard before. The bulk of this bedroom bound pre-shoe-gaze brilliance shone with an aforementioned sensuousness bordering on the abstract and all done on budget. Sleep deprivation was key to achieving these distinctive sounds, or what Shields calls a hypnagogic state. I could only achieve walking into walls and crying to strangers on buses in the same state. Hats off!

PART 2

FUMBLING HIS way in tranced out states to test out the studio like a low budget Brian Wilson is how Shields sold his experimentation to Mike McGonigal, but Perer attests to him being much braver than that. Irreversibly erasing what Dave Anderson describes in Perer's book as "all the guitars, the dry elements- to leave only the processed reverse signal." A process that was unique. To pick a favourite from this period is nigh on impossible, as the records all play like dreams. Yes, occasionally even wet ones. 

Uni gig 

After catching them at the dimly lit Uni and being surprised by their power and volume and by my intolerance to micro-dots, it devastated me missing them at the Reading Festival when my head was more together. They were on Friday afternoon and my coach was late.

Loveless, the fruits of Shield's labour and a test of everyone else's patience were one of those rare triumphs in life when the game changes. Ed Simons was in awe of it, as were other less renowned clubland faces. It's so groundbreaking a book has been written about it. Albeit, a pocketbook. 

Jeff (again) nipped out at lunch to declare boldly upon his return he'd claimed my ordered copy from Musicworld, leading to a proper Basil moment in the work canteen. Course he hadn't. These excessive, embarrassing outbursts punctuate my life. Exerting no great effort and resembling a sleepy bear Shields pissed far more people off, creating his magnum opus than I've ever managed in a lifetime. 

Still under the illusion of the band dynamic in my head, I felt gutted to discover it was all Shields. He undertook all duties; his infamous glide guitar technique (google it), reverse reverb, fuzz and distortion, sampling and layering rendered everyone other than the most trusted studio staff superfluous. Again, it's impossible to pick a favourite. His groundbreaking effects, sounding much more textural and organic and woozy than anyone else's records, put MBV at the very top of the tree.  

Obviously, I was over expectant at the Ritz in 91, expecting Loveless's elements to be at the fore with a fancy Dan light show, but what I got was another sensory assault minus the microdot. Unbeknownst, the band had only learned how to play the songs after their completion. I had probably gone to wave about and shuffle in a constricted, baggy manner but found the burning intensity, volume and sheer energy unsettling. Had I left the house expecting something akin to the Uni gig, I would probably have loved it, but with all Shields talk of hip-hop and samplers I was expecting a club feeling, so I merely enjoyed it. 

They made more sense to me at Spike Island when Weatherall's remix sounded subversive as it wafted through the air in distorted anticipation of the Roses. Or in clubs surrendering to Soon with a trainee nurse from Crumpsall, who I was smitten with for traversing the line between goth and indie brilliantly. Then later, in mid-nineties shindigs, when the remix was perfect accompaniment for spilling drinks to in revelry. 

I'm enjoying super cheap analog represses of masterpieces, and fallen in love with m b v, an album that was a tad disappointing when it first surfaced after a gargantuan wait. Again I was over expectant. The missus just doesn't dig my guitar based superheroes so curled up in a foetal position is how I like to listen to these now. They mesh well with my mirtazapine medicine and remind me why music is my life support and not sex.  

Despite Perer trying to convince me otherwise, I still see MBV as a four-piece. And still see them at the very top of the tree.

BEATS OF LOVE

165. Make No Mistake by Keith Richards 

MY MATE Jeff proclaimed after a few weeks of me moving in that he expected Keith Richards and got John Major.

I concur that I'm risk averse and I'm paying a heavy price for it. I met the missus in the first week in January in 2012 and had we married prior to August that year, we would've fallen outside hostile environment policies. As it was despite marrying in 2013, once I was sure a marriage could last, it subjected us to the full force of law changes in 2014. By full force, I mean full force. 

Finally, our MP helped resolve matters in 2016 and they placed the missus in writing on a ten-year partner route to settlement, not until I was three hours away from flying her out of the country. In 2018, she had one chance to switch routes to save time but was told the rules would have to be met in full on subsequent visas or face a reset. We decided it was safer to pay extra and wait longer for peace of mind. Now, knowing we met the rules to settle earlier, we're devastated to learn that the political party we supported and who supported us now proposes to reroute her. Reneging on their word.

Shabana Mahmood, being a barrister, amid real threats, has wider ambitions to safeguard the ECHR, new labour's crowning glory, the Good Friday Agreement and Indefinite Leave. But pulling the ECHR's teeth out is counterproductive, as is rendering ILR useless. Making nobody happy. Me and the missus were in our local when some unhappy prick was in Nazi saluting after siting us both. 

Mahmood's sorry Blue Labour rhetoric apologises for it. She understands why mixed race couples can make people feel so incensed; I guess. 

BEATS OF LOVE 

164. Up the Youth Club: Illuminating a Hidden History by Emma Warren

I LOVE Emma's optimistic viewpoint documenting this subject. Ending her revelatory turn pager abruptly before the 70% cut to youth services took effect. 

I only ever recall going to youth club discos aged 11, where I learned that my musical snobbery sat well with my more generalized snobbery. Too aloof for 2-Tone, which seemed to attract kids from the council houses and uniform dancing, the only records me and my mate Dave made any effort to dance to were New Romantic. 

We perfected a sneering disdain for most things because of this, even forming a nameless band. Inserting the lyrics 'Dance with the intercom, Speak into a plane' over a Landscape B side and some Casio keyboard action, intending to play it at the youth club in full garb. We never plucked up the courage to leave his mum's house.

As with her brilliant Dance your Way Home, sparingly but brilliantly, she prizes out history from a personal footprint. You learn lots without this cerebral approach, which again feels refreshing. Understanding that for many youth clubs were a lifeline and not simply some place to form an identity. 

It's by exploring these deeper connections with fertile ideas the book comes alive and you realize the importance of what was simply tossed away in the name of austerity. 

BEATS OF LOVE 

163. Biko by Robert Wyatt

AFTER WATCHING in awe and wonder, Beverly Glenn-Copeland spellbind his audience, by splashing colour and hope, it set me to wax lyrical about politics and the personal. 

Then I heard this whilst exploring some Afrobeat. The prolific Man Power turned me onto Robert Wyatt a few years ago. A voice I was once resistant to suddenly mesmerized me by its rough fragility. Paradoxically abrasive and tender at the same time. 

Whether it is simply the voice or the subtly penetrative Adrian Sherwood production that makes the stood back anti-apartheid anthem sound less tiring here than on Peter Gabriel's longer, more intense original, I can't say. Maybe it's not hearing bagpipes but a haunting, austere minimalism. Another case of less is more.  

The effect is more disarming as we get teased by the warmth of a simple electric organ before having to face some harsh truth about reality. Steve Biko's brutal torture and murder was as brazen as it was harrowing, with many arguing that South Africa's collective consciousness hasn't recovered. It's partly why the system of injustice and brutality survives at the end of apartheid.

That Wyatt can splash some colour, and hope is possibly down to his musical genius. Or just maybe Biko's spirit is still alive and well.

BEATS OF LOVE 

162. This Is What She's Like by Dexys Midnight Runners

THE CONFERENCE season finished with Theos think tank's annual lecture, delivered in compromising tones by Andy Burnham. Who lacked the conviction necessary to fully explain his third way of doing politics. 

Prophetically concluding his post lecture Q and A by saying we should 'prepare for a very dark road ahead.' Very defeatist, from someone with more than a modicum of power. Akin to losing at musical chairs by sitting down before the music even starts.

Luckily, here the music never stops. I'm reading Kevin Rowland's disturbingly candid autobiography and spinning Don't Stand Me Down a lot. Starting with a song of greatness. The Occasional Flicker exuding the uncompromising confidence that comes with having a great but muted style and the musical talent to outreach oneself. That this exhilarating even more original effort eclipses it epitomises the valiance at its heart.  

To start the greatest ever 12 minute song with a rich accented conversation about the elusive topic of love is absolute genius. To then weave said voices into a musically uncompromising vocally harmonic Pièce de résistance, whilst not forgetting the violinist or to mock the English upper classes, is as insane as inspired. It's both as catchy as hell and utterly opaque. Fully expressing a third way of doing popular music. 

If any song proclaims 'we should prepare for a very sunny road ahead', it is this.

BEATS OF LOVE 

161. Penetration by Iggy and the Stooges 

SORRY, BUT being pro-immigration is more a part of my Balearic being as Ibiza is. 

What's striking about Farage's polling is only a third of his own supporters think he's racist and will abolish our NHS. Predictably, his week started with a humongous lie about what we'll save addressing the Boriswave by attacking legal migrants and nothing about what we'll lose, namely our collective soul. 

His own vanity and fear of Boris Johnson has led to a flagship announcement that assumes we'll want a system that's no kinder to us Brits but far, far harsher to everybody else. So harsh that we'll just let folk die outside hospitals so we won't have to queue as long. So harsh that we'll happily work alongside folk who see no future, just the prospect of deportation. 

Farage shares some semblance of punk rock's ideology in that he seeks to destroy things, but where punk sought to expose truths, he seeks to conceal them. Seeking to destroy integration to conceal the truth that there is more that unites us than divides. Seeking to destroy our human rights to conceal the truth that they protect us more than threaten. And seeking to destroy our NHS to conceal the truth that it misdiagnosed his testicular cancer decades ago.  

I'm heartened that two-thirds of his own supporters don't think he's racist or trying to abolish our NHS, as they must now be having second thoughts. 

BEATS OF LOVE 

160. When Will it End by Honey Cone

LAYING OFF 500 people one day and inciting nearly 150,000 protesters to act in defence of their country, the next, takes a special psycho. A country not under attack and not even his. 

Elon Musk that special psycho loves choreographing the very folk his politics has laid to waste. The next logical step for these folk was to turn toward a party intent on redistributing wealth, but social media has schooled them. Social media doesn't challenge opinion, its algorithms create echo chambers which simply reinforce existing belief. 

Users are now adept at rebuking Corbyn whilst failing to explain what Thatcher ever did for the traditional working class. They're armed with quotes to defend the billionaires, but can't explain why less inequality creates happier societies. They've also adapted to deflect criticism, rebuking correlations with Nazi Germany, but cannot explain away their rising anger. 

An anger that divests folk of individuality which has its roots in aggressive violence and not victimhood. It's more pitiful still watching labour politicians too scared of losing votes to big up multi-racial, multi-faith Britain. Instead, giving legitimacy to no marks like Tommy Robinson. Instead, apologists for this huge, ever growing loveless grievance narrative that stokes this rising anger. 

A narrative manufactured and bankrolled by folk who think nothing of laying 500 people off. Absolutely nothing.