A Musical Interlude

The marking mountain isn't getting much lower, so obviously I'm looking for distraction and procrastination activities. One of those is looking up the hidden pasts of my musician friends The Nightingales (you've just missed their UK and Ireland tour, but there's a European one planned for later in the year).

Browsing for dodgy BBC live session bootlegs, I came across Robert Lloyd and the Four Seasons: the 'Gales lead singer's attempt at pop stardom in the halcyon pre-Britpop days of indie. One of the guitarists on the album is Craig Gannon, the 'Fifth Smith'. The purists reckon RL+TNFS were a bit poppy and the album was over-produced, but I like it. The lyrics still have the bike-chain viciousness of the Nightingales, but coated in sugary hooks.







By way of comparison, here's the Nightingales' Dumb and Drummer - after thirty years, they've made a video!



Last night rather than carry on marking, I went to the local arts centre for an Non-English open music night. Everyone got 10 minutes on the decks (some losers had MP3s, ugh) to play whatever we wanted. This suited me perfectly: I have over 20,000 LPs, 10"s and 7" in my flat, two minutes walk from the venue. My friends brought along some Dutch riot girl, German pop and various other delights, but I went for an all-Welsh lineup:

First: some Y Cyrff, a couple of whom became Catatonia later on.



Then some electro by a recent discovery, Dau Cefn:



(better recording here). After that, some krautrock-psychedelia by my old friends Ectogram. The track I played isn't available online, but here's a representative sample:



and finally some symphonic pop by Rheinallt H Rowlands, whom I never saw live sadly:



I shall definitely be going back. Obviously such a night is designed for obscurantist one-upmanship. I'll be bringing along Ectogram's 'Spitsbergen' single, which was indeed No. 1 in Spitzbergen, some Georgian folk music and some Chechen rebel songs. That'll show them. It's just a shame that the Angry Samoans aren't actually, well, Samoans.

Finally, for giggles, here's Rocking With Rita, the Fuzzbox/Robert Lloyd/Ted Chippington non-hit single.

A marker's cry for help.

The relentless searing heat is not conducive to the calm, dispassionate and rational state of mind required to fairly mark (screw you, split infinitive weirdos) re-submitted essays by students who failed the first time round.

And yet here we are and it's not going well. Some have actually managed to perform worse. Others have replaced poor but original work with plagiarised stuff.

For instance: if you're going to plonk in a beautifully modulated, sophisticated sentence amidst standard-to-poor first year work, expect me to Google it. What do you think I'm going to do if I find that the source is Plagiarist.com? What should you have learned from that site's title? For Christ's sake, students, try a little bit harder even at cheating. And while we're at it, if you continuously get the books' titles and protagonists' names wrong, you're not going to thrive.

Oh dear. I am getting a little tetchy. It's either time for a little lie-down or time for another meeting, the second of the day. And some calming music. Here's some Klaus Wunderlich.



I have quite a lot of Wunderlich albums on vinyl. Not in any spirit of postmodern irony. I just like Hammond organs and Klaus Wunderlich. They all cost about 10p in charity shops.

In other music news, I've just bought the 80s Indie compilation Scared To Get Happy. I've already got about half the tracks on the 5 CDs, and I'm quite surprised at the absence of certain bands, like The Field Mice, but it's good fun. It's weird looking across the office to see one of the featured musicians working away: I share a room with The Nightingales' guitarist. Some of the liner notes describe other bands as 'like The Nightingales crossed with X' and I laugh and ask Alan what he reckons. He usually laughs scornfully but it must be weird to be a critical influence on people. Especially a critical influence who gets no royalties!

The other intriguing LP I bought this week is Unreal, by Hebronix, and produced by Neil Hagerty of much-missed Royal Trux, whom Allmusic describe as a 'dissonant junkie nightmare'. It turns out that Hebronix is actually Daniel Blumberg of defunct indie-popsters Yuck. Which surprised me because I saw Hebronix peform recently, supporting Low. As I said at the time, it felt like watching someone having a nervous breakdown with gentle musical accompaniment. I'd have bet serious money that the man on stage had never performed to anyone other than his hamster before, so painfully withdrawn was he. And now it turns out he's a professional musician and the album's been reviewed in all the hip mags.

Is it any good? Yes. It's shoegaze with a bit of laudanum-infused pop. It's interior without being self-regarding or solipsistic, and really rather lovely.



OK. I'm in a slightly more serene state of mind now. Time to get back to the marking.

The Nightingales - live on stage!

A few more shots of the Gales performing at the Slade Rooms. Rest here. Click these ones to enlarge. I'm getting the hang of gig photography, I think. I haven't got great big wide-aperture long lenses, so I stick my 50mm f/1.8 on, go up to about ISO 1000 and take multiple shots whenever the light changes. I don't use flash, but then I almost never do under any circumstances, though I must try some rear-curtain photography at some point. I'd like to exchange my 1.8 for a 1.4 at some point, then add the Tokina 11-16 and (when I win life's lottery), an f/2.8 400mm lens (about £6000). And a native bearer to carry it.

The Nightingales Sang In Berkeley Square

Well, not quite in Berkeley Square. More like a subway and then The Dark Place's finest small venue, The Slade Rooms. Named in honour of the town's greatest artists. The Gales sound is a monstrous mix of lacerating Black Country dry wit, krautrock and kosmische - glorious.

Here are some of the photos I took for them before and during the gig. I wanted to do a few more, and use my 1915 Kodak too, but time ran out. Hopefully the band like them. The rest are here.

I'm sorry for beggaring you all with my insatiable demands

Over in the US, the Republicans are doing the same as the Tories: claiming that people like me are ruining the country, and not the bankers and media moguls at all. Doonesbury has a very apt cartoon today:

Meanwhile, congratulations to my friends The Nightingales: newly signed to a very cool record label I can't yet reveal.

My friends… national treasures!

This is what Mojo (I know it's about the dead, read by the nearly dead, but bear with me) had to say about The Nightingales' London gig on Monday:

…the astonishing revelation of Rob Lloyd's Nightingales. Formed out of the ashes of blackly-comic Birmingham punk upsetters The Prefects, Nightingales Mk. 1 existed from 1979 to '86, Black Country Magic Banders spinning Daedalian indie skronk around Lloyd's slashing gnomic utterances. Since reforming in 2004, Nightingales Mk 2 have survived - like post-punk fellow-travellers The Fall - as an ever-shifting cast of players, a tightly schooled all-ages boot-camp in the employ of one man's absurdist poetic invective.

Recently retrained at Jochen Irmler's Faust Studio, tonight Lloyd and founder Prefects guitarist Alan Apperley field a side barely three weeks old. Bassist Andreas Schmid, a Faust Studio apprentice, is suitably young and severe, the possible leader of some Marxist-Leninist '70s student cell, in academic black suit and socialist haircut. Skinny in black jeans and black western shirt, hair like squid-ink candy floss, rhythm guitarist Matt Wood resembles a teenage Horrors offcast, while from behind her own heavy witch-black fringe ex-Violet Violet drummer Fliss Kitson pounds out the glam-kosmische bin rhythms. As Lloyd takes the stage - stout, bespectacled, wily smile flickering between joy and contempt - the image is complete; it is the embittered Marxist history teacher fronting the school band, the academy in peril.

With no time for nostalgia, tonight The Nightingales ignore any notion of greatest hits in favour of joyous reinvention. Feeding off the hard-drilled energy of these junior initiates, Apperley spins frayed Bo Diddley riffs around Lloyd's tumbling psychedelic eavesdroppings, allowing the singer to recycle, reinvent and repurpose thirty years of vituperative notebook aphorisms, constructing an intense, breathless narrative from the recycled past to the scorched present. And, like some Christ-like curmudgeon, newly risen to grouse again, Lloyd feeds off the audience fervour, growing stronger, yet ever wary; grinning broadly, flicking the Vs, and mouthing "What the f---?!"

With every repurposed song - plus a combative cover of Gary Glitter's I Didn't Know I Loved You (Till I Saw You Rock & Roll) - the band become yet more powerful, Apperley and the kids locked in a heavy zig-zag groove as Lloyd bellows out caustic images from his mordant world-view, like some Black Country Stuart Staples, holidaying in the window of an Arndale Pound Shop. The cumulative effect is one of euphoric delight, of old knowledge in the hands of new disciples. "Dig the depth of the furrow of mirth that I can plough," sings Lloyd on The Overreactor. Tonight The Nightingales hit an epic new low. Catch them when they're at it again.

The Scotsman has this to say:

The combination of youthful fire and Lloyd's grouchy old geezer persona made for a set with real personality. Suited, bespectacled and with the air of the teacher everyone knew not to mess with at school, Lloyd wasn't as cantankerous as the Fall's Mark E Smith, although his insistence that one chatterbox "****ing shut the **** up" was the kind of thing most singers probably wish they had the guts to do.

Although often lost amidst the wash of jazz-shaped discord, battering beat group stomps, primal new wave and psychedelic interludes during tracks like Wot No Blog? and Workshy Wunderkind, Lloyd's lyrics were the highlight of this set. They painted bleak but vivid pictures alongside a drumbeat battering down like rain during Born Again in Birmingham, their anger and humour the main argument for this band claiming the credit they're long overdue.

They (and Ted Chippington) went down well in Bristol. Even the Shropshire Star's getting in on the act!

Flashback time

Does anyone remember when Channel 4 was a politically and artistically radical station: Czech animations, French filth, hard-hitting investigative journalism, weird comedy? If so, you're clearly quite old, because now it just shows tat for brain-damaged 13-year olds at the behest of advertisers.

I liked Nightingales - a wonderful, odd sit-com. It's set in an office block (filmed in Birmingham), at night, and the characters are all security guards, so it's got all the ingredients for success: an enclosed space, an enclosed community and a degree of oddity, not least in the characterisation: losers, poseurs and a dead man. And Robert Lindsay, when he was famous for quality acting (like the landmark political thriller GBH, which you can watch here), not My Family.

Here's a clip: