My new favourite blog

There's gotta be one, hasn't there?

This one is so good. I love the suppleness of the design, the force of the emotion, the taste in music, the righteousness of the anger and - wonders above! - the fact it's local, but mostly I love it for this one entry.

Every journalism student thinks that they’re special, that they’re going to ‘make it’ above all the others. They’re going to be a NEWS PRESENTER (big-haired girl who doesn’t know who the opposition leader is, wears heels to class) or a MUSIC JOURNALIST (pudgy guy in a Cure t-shirt, proclaims in every tute that he writes for Faster Louder, thinks that he’s ‘cutting edge’ because he has a file sharing blog). The exploding, colossal egos are just too sickening to have to put up with. The lecturers are all ex-journalists who can’t teach and can barely spell. They spend the majority of the time reminiscing about their days on the field. Also, there’s something really pathetic about having to explain to a 55 year-old man what a blog is and how twitter works. It’s like when you had to show your befuddled grandmother how to work her DVD player. Except you’re meant to respect these people and they’re meant to be teaching you.

I mean, she could be describing me here, couldn't she?

Fucking respect due.

I mean, she even likes Life Without Buildings.



(from Plan B #22)

Life Without Buildings
Live At The Annandale Hotel (Gargleblast)
I’ll hold my hands up. Admit it shamefaced. This band passed me by.

It wasn’t my fault. The timing was all wrong. They recorded their one album (Any Other City) and a handful of singles in 2001; split in 2002. A year earlier and I’d have been all over them in the mainstream press; a year later and I’d have insisted on a front cover for Careless Talk Costs Lives; man, they fit right in there – female-led, melodic, attitudinal, busy but not terse. Yes, they were that good, Erase Errata good.

Details are sketchy – Life Without Buildings formed in 1999 at the Glasgow School Of Arts with a teasing, childlike English singer skipping her way through a semi-sung, semi-spoken stream of words like Claire Grogan caught in the post-punk crossfire; they toured UK, Europe and Australia; there are numerous references to late Seventies bands like Essential Logic, Slits, Delta 5 et al, none of whom this abrasive four-piece particularly sound like (sure, I’m old, but I know). The music is fine: taut, functional, intricately patterned, left-of-centre indie – clattering drums, sweeps of circular, chiming guitars that often kick into noise overload – but it’s singer Sue Tompkins’ performance that lifts them into the realms of the extraordinary: babbling, cajoling, wide-eyed, questioning, startled at her own power and simultaneously revelling in it, never static, bubbling, challenging, painting a torrent of ideas and colours and situations. Often, she sounds as if she can barely repress her laughter at the crowd’s wonder.

There’s a grainy photograph of her on MySpace: a stray strand of hair plastered across her face, captured in the delirium of live performance. It’s perfect.

All of this is gained in retrospect, though – mostly through listening to this new release, a retrospective live album recorded in Sydney, December 2002. All I knew then was one track, ‘The Leanover’, a babble of gorgeous slipstreamed vocals and Josef K guitars that appeared on the exemplary Rough Trade Shops compilation Post Punk Vol 1 in 2003. It appears here, eight songs into an excellent set; and it’s a welcome rush of adrenalin a shock of the familiar juxtaposed among so many genial strangers, from the scattergun opening “If I lose ya/If I lose ya/If I lose ya…ah-ha, ah-ha”, guitars a wash of sound as beguiling forms take effect in the air, drawn from the mesmerising spoken drizzle.

There are other songs that match it for vivacity and imagination: notably ‘Young Offenders’ with its repeated spark of drum-fire; and final number ‘New Town’ (“This is our last song, really, really – I was lying before,” laughs Sue, before adding in wonderment, ”This is Australia!”), racing round in diminishing circles, early New Order fronted by someone brimful of the joy of being alive (Neneh Cherry, say). These, and ‘Love Trinity’, the previously unreleased ‘Liberty Feelup’; plus ‘Juno’, the overloaded ‘Is Is & The IRS’, poignant ‘Sorrow’…

Sure, I missed out then. But let’s not dwell on my oversight. Buy this and enjoy Life Without Buildings now; the finest early Noughties band I never wrote about.
Everett True