25 years on – Yo La Tengo's I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One

I recently listened to a Radio 4 programme about Radiohead's album OK Computer, which came out 25 years ago now. It was excellent, and it's an excellent album, although I couldn't help feeling that it laid it on a bit thick. Radiohead weren't the only ones dealing with such subject matter then, and their restless musical experimentalism, while utterly praiseworthy, is hardly unique. It just stood out rather starkly against the monochrome mediocrity of much of Britpop.

It reminded me that it's also 25 years since the release of Yo La Tengo's classic I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One. I'd just got into the band at the time, and bought the album as soon as it came out, and it remains a great summer album for me because it's so linked to the memory of that particular May and June. 

Fans would probably argue as to whether it's their best album (I'd say yes), but it's certainly the best single distillation of their restless experimentalism, ranging as it does from simple bossanova love songs like Center Of Gravity to full-on, 10-minute-plus feedback freakouts like Spec Bebop. In between there are spacious instrumentals such as Green Arrow, grungey blasts like Sugarcube (which boasted this superb video), trip-hop pop songs like Autumn Sweater, and harmony-drenched beauty such as The Lie And How We Told It. And of course, being YLT, there are two excellent covers, a foot to the floor charge through the Beach Boys' Little Honda, and an utterly unironic, straight take on My Little Corner Of The World, originally recorded by Marie Osmond, among others.

You can read YLT bassist James McNew talking about the making of the album here, and there's a 25th anniversary reissue out now, with some bonus tracks.

Happy Birthday, Bob

All this week I've been hearing stuff on Radio 4 building up to the 80th birthday of Bob Dylan on May 24th.* Now, and I'm sure I've said this on here before, I love a lot of Dylan songs, but I'm not always that keen on his own versions of them.

So, I started trying to come up with my Top 10 Dylan covers. And here they are, in no particular order, although I suspect I'll remember loads of stuff that should have made it in there over the next few days. 

1 Mama You Been On My Mind - Rod Stewart

2 When I Paint My Masterpiece - The Band

3 Absolutely Sweet Marie - Jason and the Scorchers

4 You Ain't Goin Nowhere - The Byrds

5 I'll Keep It With Mine - Bettie Serveert

6 All Along The Watchtower - Jimi Hendrix

7 Fourth Time Around - Yo La Tengo

8 Wanted Man - Johnny Cash

9 A Hard Rain's A Gonna Fall - Bryan Ferry

10 Si Tu Dois Partir - Fairport Convention

I'll have to see if I come up with my 10 favourite originals, too. 

* His name also came up yesterday because His Royal Bobness is the honorary patron of a prostate cancer charity set up in memory of England cricket great Bob Willis. Rather strange, on the face of it, but as any England fan from 1970 to 1990 can tell you, Willis was such a Dylan fan that his full name was Robert George Dylan Willis. 

The Las

I stumbled across this article on the BBC website last week sometime, and it set me thinking. I can remember, back in 1988, all the fuss in the music press about The Las, when the original single version of There She Goes came out. It was hugely tuneful and jangly (but then, so were a lot of things back then), and seemed to promise a great deal. 

I can remember the eager wait for their debut album, the constant delays, and then finally hearing it on a friend's record player. And I can remember being disappointed.

I know. I know you're supposed to buy into the whole lost genius story, but I can't.

I remember at the time thinking that it all sounded just too desperate to nod in the direction of classic British 1960s guitar pop. The review on AllMusic says that it avoids that, and compares it favourably with work by Oasis and Blur in that respect, but I can't agree. I wasn't a big fan of either of those bands, but I'd say that both at least steered clear of straightforward pastiche. The Las, to me, didn't, or at least not always.

I saw them live, on my 21st birthday, in fact, and got the same impression from the gig. It was good. They were good. But they didn't blow me away. It all felt a bit contrived.

And that's it, really. There are plenty of you who will disagree with me, and I'd be delighted to be persuaded of the report of my ways. But for now, at least, the legend feels a lot more interesting than the music. 

Changing The Face Of Poetry

Lockdown has been something of a mixed blessing for writing poetry. On the one hand, there's been a lot more time to do so. On the other, there's been less inspiration, for me at least, because the days have been so same.

So here's something a bit different. And there's the same here. Singer and songwriter Tally Koren is looking at ways of turning poetry into songs, as has been done here.

Take a look, and think about submitting something.

The Lucksmiths

Wikipedia, and the Internet generally, are dangerous things. Yesterday, I heard the end of Tess of the D'Urbervilles on Radio 4, and looked it up online, never having read it. 

Wikipedia told me that its ending was inspired by Thomas Hardy having witnessed the execution of a woman called Elizabeth Martha Brown, for the murder of her abusive husband, in 1856, and that an Australian band, called The Lucksmiths, had recorded a song about it on their 1995 album The Green Bicycle Case.

Now, that immediately rang a bell, because years ago I read a book about the Green Bicycle Murder, which took place just outside Leicester in 1919. But the album also contains a song called The Tichborne Claimant, which sent me off reading about that particularly long and convoluted affair. Among the interesting things I picked up was that it involved the same Tichborne family as that of the poet Chidiock Tichborne, executed for his part in The Babington Plot against Elizabeth I, although not before he had written the famous elegy you can see on that page.

All of which is a very long way of getting to the point. If you've followed this blog over the years, you'll know that I have a very big soft spot for Australian bands. Two in particular, The Triffids and The Go-Betweens, but there are others. And I think The Lucksmiths will be joining them as favourites. The album mentioned above is excellent, both musically and lyrically, and is more than a little reminiscent of The Go-Betweens, and I'm looking forward to listening to the rest of their work. The follow-up album, I notice, is called What Bird Is That, which has to be a good omen.

Richard Thompson at 70

I'm not going to entirely rehash the old debate about whether song lyrics are poetry (yes, I'd say, although not the same sort of poetry you generally see on the page), but Richard Thompson is probably my favourite lyricist of all time. I hadn't realised that he was playing a 70th birthday gig at the Albert Hall, but there's an excellent interview about it and a host of other things here.

Daniel Johnston, 1961-2019

Sad news overnight of another death, that of US lo-fi indie icon Daniel Johnston, who suffered a heart attack at his home in Austin, Texas.

I first came across him back in 1996. Stewart Lee, the comedian, in his other guise as a record reviewer for the Sunday Times, raved about the double album Genius + Love = Yo La Tengo, a collection of out-takes, alternative versions, covers and other assorted oddities.

Although in truth it's fairly patchy (as such records always are) it started my long love affair with Yo La Tengo, and in no time at all I was working my way through their back catalogue. One of the tracks that did catch my attention was a cover version of Daniel Johnston's Speeding Motorcycle, being performed live on a radio show (YLT had already covered it on their album Fakebook). Johnston himself phones in and provides the vocals. Like everything else Johnston did, it's very rough-edged, but also full of passion and feeling.

I gradually collected a few of Johnston's earlier records, and found a lot there in the same vein. His music's always very affecting, although sometimes that's in the sense of being disturbing. It's always worth listening to, though – it's no wonder his songs have been much covered by other artists.

David Berman dies, aged 52

Sad news this morning of the death of David Berman, US poet and the frontman and driving force behind indie band Silver Jews. I bought his collection Actual Air, way back when, and enjoyed it a lot, and I've got a couple of the band's later albums.

I think Berman's death was misreported several years ago, but sadly, this report seems to be all too true.

Have Moicy!

I've been a huge fan of American indie stalwarts Yo La Tengo for a long time now, and one of their most consistently enjoyable albums is Fakebook, from way back in 1990.  It's far from typical of their output, being made up of semi-acoustic cover versions of various obscurities (as well as retreads of a few of their own songs), but it's got a lovely, laid-back vibe.

Anyway, one of the songs on there, Griselda, comes from an album called Have Moicy!, by Michael Hurley, The Unholy Modal Rounders, Jeffery Frederick, and The Clamtones. A couple of weeks ago, I finally got round to looking it up on Spotify and having a listen, and it's great. It's folk music, but not as we know it. Robbin' Banks is a particular favourite of mine on there.

Springsteen albums, ranked

The other day, ahead of the release of his new album Western Stars, The Guardian ran this piece ranking all Springsteen's albums.

First thing to say is that, much as I love Springsteen, I think there are absolute stinkers on pretty much all his albums. Great as Darkness On The Edge Of Town is, for example, it contains the almost unlistenable Streets Of Fire, and the not much better Something In The Night.

I'd have Devils and Dust and Magic higher on my list, Born To Run would be ahead of Born In The USA on the strength of Thunder Road and the title track alone, and I'd have The Wild, The Innocent and the E Street Shuffle at No1, even though it's hardly one of his more typical albums. But yes, I'd have to have Darkness... very high on the list too.

But I'm glad the writer put Tunnel Of Love well up there. Springsteen rarely seems to play much from it these days, presumably because it was born out of the break-up of his first marriage, but I love it. Subtle country and Orbison influences, and some great songs, not least Brilliant Disguise.

I haven't listened to it much for a few years, mainly because I went on a press trip to Croatia during which the driver of the minibus played it on a continuous loop for five days. You can have too much of a good thing, as it turns out.

From the notebooks of David McComb

I know I've banged on before about my love of The Triffids, but I've only recently come across the official Triffids Facebook page. Just recently it's been featuring pics of David McComb's notebooks, with the original lyrics and ideas for all the songs on Born Sandy Devotional, the album that (I suspect) most fans would regard as their masterpiece. If you don't know it, go and have a listen now.

Even if it wasn't one of my favourite albums, it would be fascinating – McComb seems to have had a very clear idea of exactly how he wanted the album to sound, right from the earliest stages, as well as a vision of lyrically coherent selection of songs. But it's interesting that, reading the most recent post, he wasn't keen on including Personal Things, which for me is one of the highlights of the album, with absolutely great lyrics.

Incidentally, there's also a Facebook page for Love In Bright Landscapes, a proposed film about David McComb and The Triffids that is seeking funding support.

Blinded By The Light review

This looks interesting – I've read articles by Sarfraz Manzoor about his love of Springsteen in the past, and they've always struck a chord, if you'll excuse the pun. I'll look forward to seeing it.

Conversations with Nick Cave

I am, I would have to say, a bit ambivalent about Nick Cave and his music. There was a time, around Let Love In, when I listened to him quite a bit. Looking it up, I've just noticed that not only was ex-Triffid Martyn Casey a member of the Bad Seeds by then, but Triffid head honcho David McComb also contributed backing vocals. But I can't say I've ever wholly gone along with the 'genius' tag he gets so often.

Still, that's irrelevant. This article in The Guardian is what I really wanted to talk about. Cave's responses to his fans feel genuine and generous, and I found this open letter to a grieving fan particularly moving.

I will have to go back and dip into Cave's back catalogue a bit, though. Given how prolific he's been, I've probably missed a lot.

Nebraska

Pitchfork publish regular reviews of what they consider significant albums of the past, and last week it was the turn of Springsteen's Nebraska.

At the time it came out in 1982, I would have been absolutely oblivious to it, but I did buy it not long after I got into Springsteen, around 1987. By that time, the muted initial response it had received had begun to dissipate, and various other artists had started to imitate its ultra-stripped-down approach. To be honest, that became a bit annoying – recording everything acoustically on a cassette player doesn't automatically confer integrity, depth and meaning on an album.

But for Nebraska, it was undoubtedly the right decision. Even though the recordings are so homepsun that at times you can hear Springsteen's chair creaking, the effect isn't to create an intimacy with the listener, but rather, as the article says, to isolate the artist from his subjects, allowing him to observe and report dispassionately.

Songs such as Highway Patrolman and Atlantic City are like short stories (the former was the inspiration for the film The Indian Runner), but in many of the songs here, what's not said is as important as what is. You don't know exactly what it is that the protagonist of Atlantic City has agreed to do, just that he's desperate and willing to try anything.

I like the more obviously personal Used Cars a lot, as well as the yin and yang of State Trooper and Open All Night, with the latter offering one of the album's few glimmers of light. The article highlights the echoey, early rockabilly sound, and they're right – it's far closer to that in spirit than to folk music, for all that it's acoustic.

I go back and listen to it every now and then, and there's no doubt that it's one of Springsteen's most important albums.

Adrian Slatcher on The Fall

I don't know enough of The Fall's work to write anything remotely coherent about them – I've dipped in and out over the years and found stuff I've loved and stuff I've hated. But Adrian Slatcher has written an excellent blog about them here. I enjoyed reading it then started to explore some of the tracks and albums mentioned.

The Blue Aeroplanes take off again

Just came across this article by Stewart Lee in which he mentions that the Blue Aeroplanes have a new album coming out. I'm not sure about his description of them as being like "Philip Larkin fronting Television" – Gerard Langley's lyrics were much closer to the beat poets, I'd have thought – but otherwise he's spot-on.

They were great, a real beacon of invention and individuality in the late 80s. I've got very fond memories of seeing them supporting REM on their 1989 Green tour, and they even managed a minor hit with a remix of And Stones, when Madchester was at its height.

Favourite song of theirs? Maybe Colour Me, which was a bit later, I think (maybe 1992), but those early albums are all worth seeking out.

The best Christmas songs ever

Come on then, what are they? I saw half an hour of a programme last night in which they were doing a rundown of the 100 best Christmas songs ever, and it set me thinking.

In no particular order, here's a few of my favourites...

2000 Miles – The Pretenders
It's not actually that Christmassy, but it's great, despite the rather bizarre video (which featured on the programme)

Fairytale Of New York – The Pogues and Kirsty McColl
Hardly original, I know, but I still love it, even if these days I have to make sure that I don't hear it too often.

Christmas Must Be Tonight – The Band
Never gets played (but then The Band rarely get played in the UK), but it's a typically richly textured track with lyrics from the viewpoint of a shepherd at Jesus's birth.

Sweet Bells – Kate Rusby
Wonderful. That voice. Nothing else to say.

Long Way Around The Sea – Low
Credible lo-fi indie Christmas song? Yep. This is it, from a rather lovely mini-album of festive tunes.

In Dulci Jubilo – Mike Oldfield
I've always had a soft spot for this, even if the rest of the time I'd avoid Oldfield like the plague. Oh, except Hergest Ridge. That's endearingly strange.

I Believe In Father Christmas – Greg Lake
Sadly, Lake died just a few days ago. A song complaining about the commercialisation of Christmas (slightly odd way to do so), it's become a festive staple.

Bruce Springsteen - Ricoh Arena, Coventry, 3.6.16

It's been 28 years since I last saw Springsteen live. I'm a fan, although I've not been that keen on some of his more recent albums, and far too often I've seen that he's touring and thought "there'll be plenty of time to catch up with him". This year, I decided time might be running out.

Coventry's appalling traffic meant that, although the start of the show had been delayed 20 minutes, we missed the first song, For You, performed solo. Eccentric choice, really, an album track from his debut way back in 1973, but then that's what you get with Bruce - shows tend to wander whichever way the fancy takes him, with the help of a few requests from the audience. He doesn't avoid crowd-pleasers for the sake of it, it's just that, for a superstar, he's had few actual hits, so there’s less commercial indication of what those crowd-pleasers might be. When I saw him in Sheffield all those years ago, I don’t remember being too disappointed that he left out Thunder Road and Rosalita, and slowed Born To Run down to an acoustic ramble, because there was always something else you didn’t expect just around the corner.

This jaunt had been billed, in the States, as The River Tour, with the entirety of that 1980 double album being performed. I can't say it's a favourite of mine, but here things were scaled back. It, along with Darkness On The Edge Of Town and Born In The USA, were well represented, but he left enough room to pull plenty of surprises.

One of the things I love is that he's so good at investing new meaning and spirit into songs that, on record, you're really not that bothered about. So, Sherry Darling became the perfect party singalong on a balmy night, and Crush On You, the slightest song on the original album, was a thoroughly raucous, garage-band stomp. No Surrender, all shiny 80s production on record, rose above its sometimes corny lyrics (the last verse is great, though) to become genuinely moving, and Drive All Night sounded better than it ever has before. Hungry Heart and Two Hearts were in there too, of course, with Steve Van Zandt joining Bruce on vocals for the latter, as ever – hard not to picture him with Silvio Dante’s alarming bouffant hair, if you’re a Sopranos fan like me, but he remains a great sideman, as does Nils Lofrgen.

It wasn’t all good-time rock n’ roll, either – Murder Incorporated, Death To My Hometown and Youngstown (from the underrated Ghost of Tom Joad album), crackled with as much anger as energy, and The River itself, perhaps his best song of broken and misplaced dreams, was delivered with a heartbreaking intensity.

That carried over into the second half of the evening. The Promised Land, Badlands and Born In The USA (not played that often these days) were positively spat out, and there was a searing version of Because The Night, with Lofgren’s guitar work outstanding. The lengthy between-song chats seem to be a thing of the past, although there was as much bonhomie and good-natured showmanship as ever, and there were fewer cover versions, too, just the Isley Brothers’ Shout, mid-50s rockabilly number Seven Nights To Rock, and Creedence’s Travelin’ Band (a fixture on the original River tour, I seem to remember from my old Teardrops On The City bootleg).

He saved his anthem, Born To Run, and his best pop song, Dancing In The Dark, for the encores, plus Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out, as a tribute to the late Clarence Clemons. Jake Clemons, given the near-impossible task of replacing the Big Man on saxophone, managed to do just that throughout the evening.

That, all three hours and more of it, would have been enough on its own, for all that some personal favourites were missing – I can’t think of anyone else who I’d put up with the vagaries of stadium acoustics and visuals for. But then he was back, centre stage, on his own, with guitar and harmonica and the song that, for me, remains his finest moment. Thunder Road was delivered with the same fragility and uncertainty that marks the version on the live box set, and I don't mind admitting choking back a few tears. Next time he's over here, I'll be there.

Cars and Girls

I've got a confession to make. I don't like Prefab Sprout. An awful lot of poets do, it seems, but I was never a fan. The only song of theirs that I do always enjoy hearing is Cars and Girls, which is a little odd in that it takes a bit of a pop at the (perceived) worldview of Bruce Springsteen, of whom I am a big fan. But still, I like it. Good tune, and good lyrics, which actually end by conceding that there's room for Springsteen's seemingly hopelessly romantic view of things too.

But this article, which I came across last week, makes some excellent points about Bruce's 'cars and girls' songs. Perhaps, in his first three albums, they were at times simplistic, but certainly from Darkness At The Edge Of Town onwards, they're anything but. Far from conferring freedom on the protagonist of the song, they often end up trapping them ever more hopelessly in their circumstances.

Anyway, it's got me listening to Springsteen's albums from the beginning again, and that's never a bad thing.

For or after

I've been writing a poem that takes as its inspiration, or at least its point of departure, an album by a favourite songwriter of mine. He's not exactly a household name worldwide, but he's still pretty well-known.

Thing is, I don't want to use his name in the poem's title (because I already have a good title), but I think I do need to give the reader a pointer as to who it's about, because as I've said, he's not so famous that they automatically know.

So how do you do it? Making it "for..." doesn't seem right, given that I've never met the bloke or had any sort of contact with him. I'm not sure, though, that "after..." does either, because although a few words of his lyrics appear in the poem, it isn't really that closely connected to any of his songs. So is there another way? Advice very welcome.