Almost one year ago to this day I posted on the auspicious news regarding the return of the early noughts Shelley-Devoto “Buzzkunst” album in its new guise as “Special Sauce” by the now re-branded Buzzkunst. The album had not been on LP prior during the Great Vinyl Drought™ so this normally would get only the slightest rise out of me since I greatly prefer CD to LP. However, they rejiggered the contents so that there were two new songs on it [with three removed]. That alone would not be enough for even Devoto-collecting me to buy a co$tly LP from the UK mail order these days.
So they salted the notion with Monk-bait® that was unmissable; a second album of Devoto solo efforts concurrent with the period of recording for the album called “Designoid” and credited to Devoto alone. There were 1000 LPs pressed up for £25/each plus shipping, and it was an exclusive from Cargo Records in the UK. I bought one and paid [with postage] £45.00 when all was said and done for the privilege. And I was happy to do it as I got hot fistfuls of Devoto music I could get no other way.
That the 2xLP has sat, unspun in my Record Cell for a full year, was down to a complete and utter lack of the half a day, minimum, of free time to digitize the new music to hard drive, denoise it, and cobble together sleeve art to accompany the gold archival CD I planned to burn of that puppy. That’s nothing unusual. I bought 6-7 LP only releases last year and all of them have sat unheard since their arrival in my home. It’s just the way it goes with me and records! It’s the primary [but not only] reason why I prefer the CD format…if I can buy it.
So it was with great annoyance that I received the email last week from Wire-Sound, the font of all things Devoto online, trumpeting that the website now was selling an exclusive repressing of the “Special Sauce” 2xLP in an edition of 300…with a CD of both LPs on a single disc in a card slipcase tucked in like an afterthought! Cost is now £30.00 for the package, but there’s a CD in it!!
The big question for me is…how much do I want to spend to get the CD I should have had the chance to buy in the first place!!?? I’m already in over $60.oo American for the first album. The new edition will now set me back $67.00 to have it chucked across the great divide. Thanks largely to the lobotomy scar playing with the US economy as if it were his own private toy right now. I will have the music on CD and can listen to it repeatedly, and immediately. Which is worth a lot in my lifestyle. But is it worth over $120.00? Even for Howard Devoto?
As I type these words there are roughly half of the 300 piece edition still available for sale. I have time to chew on this conundrum. Just not a lot of it. But I don’t immediately feel that this is a good use of my limited resources. I could possibly go to my grave not hearing that music but I would be dead and thus it wouldn’t bother me. Not even on my deathbed. So there’s a part of me; the larger part, it must be said, that wants to say “That’s it. Game over. I’ve bled enough for this cause.”
While there’s a smaller chunk of me that thinks, “Well, if I can sell off the unplayed “Special Sauce” 2xLP I already have for enough to cover its cost and maybe a part of the shipping fees, perhaps I can still re-order this CD enhanced version?” But from my aging music fan perspective, this doesn’t look too likely to happen. I think I’ve put enough skin into this game already and will just get on with my life as if I hadn’t heard of this highly annoying second pressing with the CD I wanted all along.
But if you’re a Devoto fan who maybe missed out on the whole shebang; the CD of “Buzzkunst” by Shelley-Devoto in the distant realm of 2002. Or even the 2024 issue of “Special Sauce,” by Buzzkunst with “Designoid” by Howard Devoto added as bait…then I’d urge anyone reading this to make like a DJ and hit that button!
Andrew Krivine: Reversing Into The Future – New Wave Graphics 1977-1990 – UK – hardcover [2021]
Andrew Krivine laid the cards on the table. He had intended for a New Wave section in the “Too Fast To Live, Too Young To Die” tome we looked at yesterday…but then the book would have been 700 pages long! Any one of these volumes is as much as you want to lift up to read. The heft actually makes my hands hurt when I do that! In the indicia Krivine revealed that from contract to delivery, the creation of this book took a mere 53 days to complete. That was down to the clean design framework by Barbra Doherty and Mal Peachey for the earlier book. That …and the notion that all of the images had already been processed for the earlier volume before the smart decision had been made to spin them off into a separate book! If I had to scan and retouch the 500+ images here we might still be waiting for the publication. I once designed an art book a fraction of this size that took many months.
The layout of the book is split between US and UK New Wave acts, with the few outliers from elsewhere included in with the UK grouping because, apart from New Zealand’s Split Enz, who were Art Rockers anticipating New Wave until that moment where they became one with it, there’s not a whole lot of material here from outside of the AngloAmerican sphere. The organization plows through the alphabet in band names from A-Z in both cases for a streamlined approach. Sensible. And I’m not invoking TheCaptain.
WHAT DOES ‘NEW WAVE’ MEAN TO ME?
In many ways, Blondie were the quintessential New Wave act and much of their design reflected this as well
Like the first book, it’s enlivened by essays that cut through the images to provide food for thought. Design icons like Malcolm Garret and Chris Morton [C. More Tone] dd their professional insights into the mix and philosophy academic Pete Groff does us all a favor by attempting to parse the meaning of the nebulous marketing term “New Wave” with some insights that manage to have some stickiness after the fact. I’ll just quote the last paragraph of the zesty text below since it’s perhaps the crux of the entire book.
“You could say that when Punk and New Wave went their separate ways in 1978, New Wave got the better end of the deal. Punk kept the hog’s share of the energy, anger, volume, and cathartic rush, but it grew increasingly brittle, earnest, ascetic, puritanical – obsessed with its own righteousness and authenticity. New Wave took the intelligence, the playfulness, the openness, the free spirited bricolage, the Apollonian irony, and yes, the fun. Don’t get me wrong; there’s a lot of amazing Punk that got made after 1977. But take the ten best slabs of Punk from 1978-1982 and put them up against your top ten New Wave songs: which makes you feel more alive? My money’s on New Wave.”
Pete Groff in “What Does ‘New Wave’ Mean?”
with her interdisciplinary approach to art, Laurie Anderson was perhaps unwittingly swept up in the perfect storm of New Wave
Laurie Anderson was a visual and performance artist who was poised to take the energy of New Wave and apply it to her conceptual work and really broaden her audience. She went from press coverage in Artforum to the NME in the space of months thanks to John Peel playing her self-released 7″ single on his BBC show. No one was probably more shocked than her to find that her Art Pop single “O Superman” became a triumphant #2 single in the UK in the holy year of 1981, where what I consider New Wave crested most impressively in the UK.
The sensibilities behind Ralph Records placed them among those who anticipated New Wave and then were in a position to ride that bus once it arrived
I was happy to see that the inventive minds at Ralph Records got a deep dive in this book as their entire oeuvre was Proto-New Wave in every sense of the word. From music to packaging. One gets the idea that their efforts helped to midwife the very movement itself from their decidedly outsider bearings.
Ze Records were duly covered as they embraced the hybrid vigor of New Wave more than most
Ze Records brought a NYC sensibility and a vision beyond neurotic white men to expand New Wave’s gene pool with AfroCuban influences and plenty of room for women. Disco was always raw material to be folded into the broad New Wave scene and the Ze vision gave artists like August Darnell, who was ultimately more idiosyncratic than a production medium like Disco had room for, a way out of Disco’s cul-de-sac. And critically, allowed the DNA of Disco to propagate after its sell-by date.
Be Bop Deluxe showed how they were aligned with Art Rock rather than Prog in their ability to pivot to adjacent New Wave by 1978’s “Drastic Plastic”
There was room in the New Wave pool for plenty of people to splash around in. We all thought that Bill Nelson was a Prog Rocker by virtue of his guitar playing prowess, but time revealed him as being an Art Rocker, and thus more adjacent to New Wave. By the time that Be Bop Deluxe had their last hurrah with 1978’s “Drastic Plastic,” the modernity of the band’s music and even image had nothing to do with their Glam Rock origin time. Though Glam Rock was always a useful antecedent to New Wave. Just ask David Bowie who never got rejection from the Punks, unlike so many other established stars.
Elvis Costello + The Attractions embodied not only the sound but also the look of New Wave. Eclectic. Multi-referential. Sophisticated.
The value of Stiff Records to New Wave cannot be underestimated. The ex-Hippie, Pub Rockers who started the label nevertheless had Post-Modern attitudes that were screaming for a venue that the New Wave they helped birth provided. With in house designers Chris Morton and Barney Bubbles, the label was well-poised to help midwife the burgeoning New Wave scene. With wiseguy graphic nous married to the equally pungent pen of Elvis Costello, soon we all had a sense of what this New Wave was all about.
I have all of these records, save for the rare Celia + The Mutations 45s
One can hardly scream “NEW WAVE!!!” louder than Joe Jackson’s “Beat Crazy” cover, even though the artist himself was probably done with “New Wave” by the time this album as evidenced by that album’s back cover photo and defensive liner notes. Jackson’s pivot to…40+ year old Swing music as his next move cemented his curmudgeon status a full decade too early for the 90s Swing trend that followed in his wake, but I’ll bet that suited Joe.
I was unaware of the Amsterdam Paradisio poster program until reading this book
Since I wasn’t trying to collect New Wave graphics at the time; I just wanted to hear the music, I didn’t know about the original posters for all of the New Wave acts playing at Amsterdam’s Paradisio made by serigrapher Martin Kaye. The largely hermetic work in most cases made no concessions to existing act iconography and took of frequently from a strictly typographical perspective owing to the high speed, high volume demands of concert poster art. I saw many of these in the art show I saw from this collection last February, and the split fountain color vignettes were highly distinctive.
Malcolm Garrett cited the 1977 Vertigo sampler “New Wave” as being his ground zero for the term
Malcolm Garrett began his essay in this book with a look at the 1977 Vertigo compilation simply called “New Wave” as his entry point to the term itself. Noting his suspicion of it as a Punk Rock fan, with the whole, tired “New Wave was a watering down of Punk” trope we’ve all heard. Yet acknowledging that it was with New Wave that he became most firmly entrenched. As he put it, “a member of the band” in the cases of The Buzzcocks but also Duran Duran, and Simple Minds. The latter band’s greatest visual triumphs, via Garrett himself ca. 1981, were conspicuously absent from the book. Strangely enough. Though a “Sparkle In the Rain” poster did figure in its pages. That album always struck me as an attempt to hybridize the approaches that Garrett first brought to “Sons + Fascination” followed by “New Gold Dream” into a synthesis that never quite fit the music inside in the way the preceding albums did.
Sigue Sigue Sputnik were rightly noted as late blooming shoots of New Wave by their mid 80s milieu
One provocative aspect of the book was that it carried the New Wave well past the mid-80s where I would mark its cut-off point, through to 1990. Significantly, this allowed for clearly New Wave leaning acts like Sigue Sigue Sputnik [whose provocative creator Tony James came from Punk’s Generation X] to have a berth for their increasingly out of sync with the zeitgeist vibe. Nobody was more Post-Modern than SSS in the increasingly drab late 80s.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 5 out of 5.
This second volume was more coherent than the sometimes sprawling first volume. There was no point like where the first book’s stretching to include American Hardcore didn’t quite work for me. Instead, this was a more flowing collection that captured the gist of its title more accurately. For a deep dive into all of the records and bands you might not have room for in your own Record Cells, the volumes are must-haves for any New Wave library. I’m so happy that my friend Tina gifted me with this book and that I was able to buy its companion volume under what were the best circumstances possible. Seeing much of their contents live in an art museum with good friends with me that day!
Andrew Krivine: Too Fast To Live, Too Young To Die – Punk And Post-Punk Graphics 1976-1986 – UK – hardcover [2020]
I had written about this book when I got wind of its imminent release in five years ago. While a lot has happened since that time, buying the book wasn’t one of them! Yet, when I found myself at the fourth museum show built around the Andrew Krivine collection of music design and ephemera, I went here with the thought that I could finally get this book! Sweetening the pot was the fact that a good friend had gifted me the follow up tome, “Reversing Into The Future – New Wave Graphics 1977-1990.” The second volume had appeared in 2021, shortly after the first volume’s publication while I was obviously not looking!
After that trip to the Orlando Museum of Art, I came home with the previously missing first volume, as well as several other music design volumes deemed must-haves for the Record Cell library. Today we begin reviewing the two Krivine books. The first volume was a large, heavy hardcover with hundreds of graphic design examples, both iconic and obscure. The book opened with the American Proto-Punk contingent so the beginning of the book featured The Velvet Underground, Reed + Cale solo, The New York Dolls, Patti Smith, Television, The Heartbreakers, and of course, Iggy Pop.
Design icon Malcolm Garrett has essay pages in the book
The book was more than well curated eye candy. There are also several essays accompanying various sections of the book where guest writers weigh in on their various areas of expertise in regards to the contents. None more cogent than that of designer Malcolm Garrett who was intrinsic to the field of graphic design itself and brought his very personal observations to the text he contributed.
The Flying Lizards were quintessentially New Wave in spite of their being steeped in Art
The Flying Lizards were drenched in Fine Art but gained a commercial foothold via their New Wave Novelty cover of “Money” which was surprisingly ubiquitous in the initial salvo of the New Wave scene in 1978. For a time, anyone could point to this music and design as being at the forefront of whatever New Wave was said to be.
The book is expansive enough to feature commonalities of reference in the work itself
One of the fascinations of the book was that it was large enough to feature discreet examples which though years apart, obviously featured the same artistic reference points. I’ve had the Theatre Of Hate’s 1981 album “Westworld” [as designed by C. More Tone] and the cover featured a doctored photo of a figure whose origins I never knew. That very same image was also the reference for the poster for the Japanese band Earthling in a poster where it was also used for a 1981 concert poster; albeit with a babyhead. Both used the classic red/black/white color palette.
Michael Wilde’s essay on The Cramps was filled with personal detail that no amount of research can top
While the book featured what felt like an equal complement of US/UK bands and images, I was heartened to see The Cramps figure prominently. Both as an influence on the lowbrow kitsch art referenced continually in this sphere, but also as a formative influence on the Batcave scene which birthed the Goth movement. The essay by Michael Wilds, wherein he met Bryan Gregory and Lux Interior of The Cramps on the late night streets of NYC with a mutual friend providing the social glue even before he saw them actually play a concert.
Jamie Reid’s pungent American Express ad parody was sadly [and obviously] not widely published in its time
Jamie Reid’s Situationist derived design for The Sex Pistols must surely have a coffee table book of its own by now, right? But since I don’t have it, seeing the brilliant “American Express” ad parody for “The Great Rock + Roll Swindle” was a real eye opener that this book provided.
A chapter on the Batcave’s, “Positive Punk” scene leaned heavily on Bauhaus, yet found room for The Birthday Party and…Black Flag?
The chapter on The Batcave scene heavily featured Bauhaus but the cultural divide was present on the copy under the Chicago Metro flyer for the band. The writer found the Japanese Kamikaze attack theme at odds with the band’s established imagery, but maybe they didn’t realize that the show date of December 7th was Pearl Harbor Day in America. Which is fair, since I couldn’t tell you when Guy Fawkes Day happens in the UK off the top of my head either.
The Clash had no qualms about using provocative imagery that today seems to be a little mild
Punk bands that followed close on the heels of the Sex Pistols, had the bar raised for graphic language sophistication and The Clash rose to the occasion with their own manager-slash-provocateur in Bernie Rhodes. Who oversaw the band’s marketing and creative directions.
Generation X were lucky enough to get Barney Bubbles to quote from El Lissitzky’s Constructivist toolbox
Even lower ranked Punk bands like Generation X could get the uplift that a Barney Bubbles designed sleeve or poster could afford such up-and-comers. The Constructivist style Bubbles favored here was a very fecund field for graphic appropriation. Ironic in that its ageless modernity went back over fifty years.
If this book has any weakness it might be this one. The editorial decision was made to include the US Hardcore scene. Maybe it’s my musical boas showing, but it always seemed to me like a very separate scene to my eyes and ears. The next generation. While I can see the parallels between Raymond Pettibon and Black Flag or Winston Smith and The Dead Kennedys to UK analogs like Malcolm McLaren and The Buzzcocks or Jamie Reid and The Sex Pistols, the Hardcore era is steeped in a low-rent aura that frankly the Punk and Post-Punk eras were trying their level best to avoid. First Wave Punk was confrontational, but slick.
Other than that concern, this was another great addition to the Graphic Design bookshelf in the Record Cell. Tomorrow we’ll be casting an eye at the even better sequel that delves heavily into the New Wave scene which was even more sprawling as we cock an eye at “Reversing Into The Future: New Wave Graphics 1977-1990.”
The 2025 Cabaret Voltaire lineup: [counterclockwise from top left]: Stephen Mallinder, Chris Watson [p. Gavin Thurston], Eric Random, Benge
Our eyeballs got an electric jolt first thing this morning at 4:35 as I woke and checked The Guardian’s home page to begin the day’s doomscrolling. I saw that Chris Watson and Stephen Mallinder were playing their first gig together as Cabaret Voltaire. Cab Volt was a band that I gravitated to enormously as the 80s dawned. I was intrigued by their crunchy mix of art and paranoia, leavened with Funk, as they deconstructed the Control Process over the course of their career.
Once vocalist Stephen Mallinder stopped being a presence on the material with voice and bass, the resultant material became too sterile for me. After 1991, it became largely the work of Richard H. Kirk, until he also abandoned the Cabaret Voltaire mane to leave that legacy behind. It was not until the very end of his life in 2020 that he considered picking up the mantle of CV once more to apply it to music that he felt resided in that zone one final time with the albums “Shadow Of Fear,” “Dekadrone,” and “BN9Drone.” and then Kirk died in 2021. Putting the Cabaret Voltaire name to rest.
But not before having interviews late in his life where he roundly roasted the notion of Cabaret Voltaire ever reforming for a series of valedictory gigs playing their greatest [non] hits! Which makes this event all the more ironically charged. In the interview in The Guardian today, even Stephen Mallinder said that “Richard would probably hate us doing this but it’s done with massive respect. I’m sad he’s not here but there’s such love for the Cabs that I want to give people the opportunity to acknowledge what we did. You can’t deny the music we made is important – and this is a way to celebrate that.”
The big news is that this is the first time that Mallinder has teamed with original member Chris Watson since his decision to leave Cabaret Voltaire in 1981. After which, he left the band to begin working for the BBC as a sound recordist and Field Recorder. His contribution to the world of Field Recordings have placed him at the forefront of the niche scene even as his work for commercial entities like the BBC have seen him earning awards at the BAFTAs.
1981’s “Live At The Lyceum” was the last album with Watson participating, but the next years’ duo formation “2×45″first featured another name who will figure in these upcoming Shows. Eric Random was a Manchester musician working along similar lines who got pulled into the Cabs wake early on and though period of collaboration was brief at the time. he was since crossed creative paths with Stephen Mallinder many times outside of the Cab Volt imprimatur. Having him involved was thoroughly right and proper.
Finally, the last cog in the CV machine will be frequent Mallinder partner Ben ‘Benge’ Edwards. The peripatetic synth wrangler who must sleep as little as Steven Wilson in the last 15 years. He has so many projects and groups beyond his vast solo body of work that it’s a challenge to keep up. It would behoove me to simply collect his entire output since much of it reflects what I would call Cab Volt values to begin with.
“Richard would probably hate us doing this but it’s done with massive respect. I’m sad he’s not here but there’s such love for the Cabs that I want to give people the opportunity to acknowledge what we did. You can’t deny the music we made is important – and this is a way to celebrate that.”
Stephen Mallinder
According to Mallinder, the quartet have a selection of sixteen songs, from the 1978 “Extended Play” EP through to “Groovy, Laidback, + Nasty.” Watson will also be re-working his “Inside The Circle Of Fire” project that saw him making a sonic portrait of Sheffield that attempted to break from the steel-era clichés of industrial sound that ironically informed CV. Mallinder has quashed all notions of new material recorded under the CV branding, but I really hope that at least this show will be commercially released as it is likely to be quite a re-imagining of the material.
The first date will be during the [what else?] Sensoria Festival at Forge Warehouse in Sheffield is already sold out. The show will be on the 25th of October, but there will be an additional brief series of dates in the UK to follow. From the 17th to the 21st of November. With the first known date being @Gorilla in Manchester on the 18th of November. Tickets for this date go on sale this Friday at 10:00 a.m. and I suppose by then we’ll be able to know where the rest of the dates will be at.
Cabaret Voltaire were very critical to my musical enjoyment. This is the first real “Organ Auction Live Event” in quite some time but I can’t really see traveling to the UK so soon after our last visit in 2024. But I hope that some of my friends and acquaintances on that side of the Atlantic will see fit to attend and to report back with their findings! As the Control Process has become more highly refined and ubiquitous, with surveillance being married to AI with no oversight, and as former Republics and Democracies are hurtling towards Fascism, now more than ever, is the time for the music of Cabaret Voltaire. At least for a final last time.
EXTC from L-R: Steve Hampton, Terry Chambers, Terry Lines
We’ve not posted much this week as I’ve been taking time off work since my old friend The RAHB trekked in from The Piedmont of North Carolina to see EXTC with me at The Grey Eagle last Tuesday evening. We were both XTC fans from the high school days. My first XTC album was “Black Sea” and I’d imagine he might have started his story there as well. I was initially ambivalent to the notion of seeing XTC’s original drummer perform a set of XTC songs but given the complete lack of XTC tours from 1982 until they ceased to exist in 2006, eventually the though that this might be a fun night of song’s I’ve never heard live began to take hold. That’s not unusual when a band you first like ceases touring within two years of them catching your ears; yet continuing to exist as a studio proposition for another quarter century.
We reached The Grey Eagle at a quarter after seven when were open for the 8 p.m. show. As I often see shows there with scant crowds in a “pearls before swine” situation far too often for my tastes, I wondered what this night would bring. Parking was a little dicey but I’ve had worse. We entered the club and scanned our tickets to see a light crowd but already far more than the tiny crowds I’ve seen shows with there. I did a ad hoc head count and there were about 80-90 there it seemed.
As I can’t help but scan merch tables, I was noting Terry Chambers autographed drum heads, as well as the usual T-shirts and, gloryoski… an EXTC “Live in the US” CD that was apparently recorded on their US tour in 2024. I made a mental note and we moved to enter the main room from the hallway. I shouldn’t buy any more CDs as I’ve currently got about 1000 discs culled from the Record Cell in boxes to eject from the collection. And I’ve so many tour shorts that the cabinet needs a culling as well!
The club had not listed an opening act for this show so I was not expecting one. The Grey Eagle don’t play that game with their clientele. The only seats were at the edge of the wall next to the restaurant/bar area and at the VIP area in the opposite corner. So we stood around until at the zero-minus-ten-minute lark, a staffer went to the storage closet and began removing stacks of heretofore unseen chairs for the show. I’m guessing that he “read the room” and saw only retirement-aged patrons ready to bust out the ibuprofen for the evening’s fun. So he set up about 30 seats at stage right.
Look! there’s a “kid” [<30] standing in this shot above! A rare sight at this gig full o’geezers – Maybe they call it “The Grey Eagle” for a good reason?
My companion, The RAHB, gravitated there but I was concerned that sitting right under the speakers would be too harsh for me. And then there’s that partial deafness in my left ear to consider. As I would be using high end attenuating earplugs for this and every other show I attend, I opted to my usual placement in front of the sound board. Eventually, my friend considered the notion and joined me at the back of the room as well. The show began right on the mark at 8:00 p.m. as the trio walked onstage.
I was happy to see that bassist Terry Lines, who favors sharp attire, didn’t let us down this evening with a nicely cut gray suit. The band got right into it with XTC’s very second 7″, the metasong that was “This Is Pop.” The lack of keys wasn’t a big issue, given how intrinsic Barry Andrews was to the early sound. Possibly the bigger issue was…how will these songs feel without Partridge and Moulding singing them? The RAHB pointed out [accurately, I felt] that primary vocalist Steve Hampton resembled The Basher himself; Mr. Nick Lowe vocally. I had to concur.
I’ve never seen a band where the original lead vocalist was not present in the primary performance, but this kept its distance from the slightly queasy ground surrounding “tribute acts” in that neither vocalist was trying to impersonate the original members at all. They were singing in their own voices, thank goodness. But it must be said that the drumming was positively ripped from the songs! Terry Chambers was the glue that held this proposition together.
To have an early single followed by an imperial period deep cut was pretty audacious, but they did just that by unleashing “No Language In Our Lungs” from my beloved album “Black Sea.” That was about as deep a left turn as musically possible so we were being warned up front that anything could happen. Next came the taut, clipped pop of Colin Moulding’s “Ball + Chain” from “English Settlement.” Terry Lines joined Steve Hampton to sing the song in powerful unison in the chorus while trading off on the verses. I was living it by this time as “Ball + Chain” was beginning to resonate with me of late. It was a late booming fave rave cut from that album and Mr. Hampton’s deft guitar work replicated the elegance that Dave Gregory had originally brought to that one!
Then, another deep cut – this time from “Drums + Wires” with “Reel By Reel” as sung solo by Terry Lines. I liked the Ska-Pop bounce of the tune and Terry had a natural timbre that was closer to what Colin Moulding brought to the mic, but again; this wasn’t impersonation. That would have made me break out in a cold sweat.
More goodness from “Black Sea” manifested with “Towers Of London.” Then we got the show stopping Pop of “Senses Working Overtime.” No matter what I think of the overly long “English Settlement,” this single clearly justified the whole album! It may be the best single that Partridge ever penned…no, it is the best one! By this point in the show we were all singing along with these fantastic songs.
Next came another “Black Sea” curveball with the breathlessly rapid “Burning With Optimism’s Flames.” Though the singers were mostly dividing up the Partridge/Moulding songs along guitarist/bassist lines, this time Mr. Lines took the lead on the extremely Partridge number. Much to Mr. Norman’s apparent relief.
The group next broke out to a mini set of Post-Chambers XTC material with the trio of “Ballad Of Peter Pumpkinhead,” “King For A Day,” and “Mayor Of Simpleton.” Until now they had been playing material that Terry Chambers had drummed on in the studio, but on these numbers the difference immediately stood out. One could divine the drum machine demo origins of the music quite apparently as the rhythms were much simpler and more perfunctory. Though the elegant “King For A Day” was the personal jewel in this crown. Had I not heard them juxtaposed against earlier material in a live setting I may have never noticed this crucial difference, yet there it was!
I was happy to hear another “English Settlement” fave next with the extroverted “No Thugs In Our House” with Steve Normal giving as powerful a bellow as Andy Partridge had done on the record. Then the show took a hard right turn into a “Black Sea” mini-set with four classics in a row. “Sgt. Rock Is Going To Help Me” was a single, so I got that, but following with”Rocket From A Bottle” and “Living In Another Cuba” was never even on my wish list. The latter segued into my fave rave “Generals + Majors” to cap off their dive into 1980’s XTC album.
They actually performed six of the ten tracks in this show and I was thrilled. If anyone had asked me what album I wanted represented the most this evening it would have been “Black Sea.” No contest! Then came the Dub Pop of “Making Plans For Nigel;” the first XTC cut I’d heard [inconclusively, at the time!] only by now it was a favorite track. After that one Steve said that they would normally leave the stage and we’d have to stamp our feet but that we’re all too old for that so they played the encore immediately afterward.
The last of the latter-day XTC tracks with “Stupidly Happy” from “Wasp Star.” The final XTC album. The it was time to take it home with “Life Begins At The Hop” and we were bounding along for the show’s climax. Then it ended at 9:30 as we were up from 4:00 that morning and appreciated the kindness. As did the reasonably full house which I’d call 250-300 happy XTC fans getting to hear this stuff live for the first time ever.
Another kindness that the show had was absolutely superb mixing at reasonable levels of volume! A rarity in these, the end times! I might have gotten by without earplugs, but as I’m attempting to preserve what’s left of my hearing, it’s a foregone conclusion that I’ll use my trusty Earasers™. They’re so good when I install them I can hear my body’s noises. But the show was free from bass frequencies shifting my organs and it was simply a wonderful night.
My friend and I left to go home and I looked at the CD beckoning me at the merch area, but the lack of Square® meant cash [or Paypal] only and I found the will power to resist then and there. We drove home and were in bed by 10:00 which was great because I had poor sleep the night before!
I now had two experiences with band members playing a set of their old material under my belt and even though “tribute acts” make me livid with rage these days [it’s most of what seems to fill the clubs where I live!] the experience of Jerry Harrison and Adrian Belew playing TVLKING HEVDS material two years ago and now Terry Chambers with EXTC had been happy-making events. If I can flex my biases enough to meet such things halfway, I’d better watch out! I may enjoy myself!
When we reviewed the 4th volume of Generation Blitz recently, I had my curiosity piqued by the French-Anglo duo Scenius. They not only took their name from a Brian Eno concept, but their finely etched Synthpop featured distinctive bilingual vocals courtesy of Fabrice Nau over a warm music bed that offered drama and methodical pacing that pulled me into the song and had me ready for more. As it turns out, we didn’t have to wait long! The duo’s new single is “Beat The Light” and will be released to streaming and Bandcamp tomorrow.
As I’ve looked into the band, I saw that they are kindred spirits to the PPM ethos. They prefer analog synths and physical drum machines instead of virtual instruments. They also eschew the nailed down quantization of assembling the track to “the grid” in their DAW. They take care to play some of their leads on their songs by hand to avoid that dead, airless sound of sheer digital perfection. Just because you can do something isn’t a reason why one should.
MMXX Records | EURO | DL | 2025
Scenius: Beat The Light – EU – DL [2025]
Beat The Light 4:36
A phased slow tempo Bossa Nova rhythm with a melancholy piano in dub playing over it sets the stage for the song. A lead synth laden with watery vibrato prepares us for the appearance of vocalist Fabrice Nau who sings in English here as his voice becomes the lead melody in the languid, dreamlike tune.
The clarity of the arrangement makes for a pleasing, subdued, late-night vibe. And the solo in the middle eight features a synth patch that effectively conjures up a vibrato electric organ from 1968 touched with a hint of dub and wah-wah. It makes for a very fluid, ethereal track that invites us into the warm, Mediterranean waters of sound that “Beat The Light” offers. As the player below reveals.
The release of “Beat The Light” happens tomorrow with sales on Bandcamp and streaming at the usual places. The Bandcamp DL is €1.50 and given that this is the second single from them in two months, perhaps it points to a full album of their introverted, electronic charm will be here soon. But why should we wait for pleasure? DJs hit that button!
The cover of the new Blow Monkeys single looks like a Monktone®…
It seems like we just got the latest Blow Monkeys album and we’ve not even managed to find the time to review it yet, and the next opus is prepping for launch. When we last spoke to Dr. Robert, the band had just signed with Last Night In Glasgow, the non-profit Glaswegian label releasing many a Monastic favorite these days [see also: China Crisis, Countess Of Fife, Twistettes, Skids, Armory Show, etc.]. That label had issued the “Together/Alone” album, as well as the Dr. Robert/Matt Deighton album, and the second Peter Capaldi album as produced by Dr. Robert. But the situation has changed since then.
In the 2023 PPM interview, Dr. Robert revealed that the band had just signed with the famous Alan McGee [Creation Records] in a management capacity, and in the time spent moving from then to now, McGee has started his own label. It’s a link-up with another Dr. Robert collaborator and well-known producer/bassist/icon, Martin ‘Youth’ Glover. What else could they call the label but Creation Youth Music, right? I guess if your manager’s label is putting your album out, they’ll have a vested interest in seeing to its widest possible success. It makes lots of sense. Alan McGee is no babe-in-the-woods. Dr. Robert also said how with McGee in charge, he was hopeful that Blow Monkeys might make it over to this side of the pond for the first time in way too long.
In the meantime, the album is ten tracks with the Blow Monkeys team playing the songs. Neville Henry on sax, Mick Anker on Bass, and Crispin Taylor on drums. Guests figuring on the disc include Mick Talbot on keys, Steve Sidelynk on percussion [a Blow Monkeys long-time veteran session player]. And Gina Foster who previously added her vocals to the stellar “Journey To You” album by Blow Monkeys. The release date if August 15th, and the title track has been released as a single already. Let’s sample below.
Wow! I cannot wait for this album! I just bought the single [even though it will be redundant after the CD ships] so I can hear the whole thing and report back with my findings. My finding say: call this one smoking hot! The synths were syncopating with Mick Anker’s bass and the horns were pushing hard with this one. It walks a fine line between SoulJazz and uncut Funk Strut. Real drums were hitting hard here, but not as hard as the horns and sax from Neville Henry were. It is brasher than brash and poised to heat up any Summer playlist. Once more Blow Monkeys manage to stun me with their significant musical powers.
So I need to pre-order because I don’t want to wait a hot second to get this one. Your choice of CD at £13.00 or light blue vinyl LP for £25.00. Don’t crowd. There’s room for everybody! DJ hit that button…NOW!
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Post-Punk Monk 