I swear to Bangs, this is just about the most incredible piece of music I've ever been associated with!
It reminds me of, variously, ATV, loneliness, The Door And The Window, useless energy, Lindsay Cooper, fierce skills, The Red Crayola, that scary bloke who always seems to pin you down with his eyes when you get on the tube, the more avant-garde side of Half-Japanese... and way more besides. Stuart's trumpet is just fucking incredible. I was going to write that it's only the vocals that let this down but... fuck it, I really like my vocals on this. Starts off a little slow, but really fucking hits the mark around six minutes, and keeps going.
Here's your link. Don't say I never treat you.
P.S. I just got a correction from Sandra, crediting all the instruments properly. (Man, you'd think I'd know, being there and everything!) I really couldn't figure out at all who was playing what where on that track. I reckoned Leighton had to be playing the drums, but even I realised he had to be playing the clarinet... so it had to be Eugene on the delightfully loose, almost Turkish army drumming. But then I couldn't figure out who the hell was wandering around doing the live effects (it was all recorded live, on one microphone), if Stuart was playing trumpet and Sandra was playing sax somewhere...
Turns out the "incredible trumpet" I'm referring to above is actually Sandra's sax - so apologies, and major props for that. As Sandra explains, "Stuey is hardly playing trumpet at all in that one... part from right near the end. For most of it, he was mixing the effects on my sax. Anyway, doesn't matter, just thought maybe you were thinking of a different song or something?"
No, right song. I just have cloth ears sometimes!
"It reminds me of, variously, ATV, loneliness, The Door And The Window, useless energy, Lindsay Cooper, fierce skills, The Red Crayola, that scary bloke who always seems to pin you down with his eyes when you get on the tube, the more avant-garde side of Half-Japanese... "
ReplyDeleteSurely it's because such missives don't lend themselves to the music blogging format as well as they did longer, feature-style magazine pieces, but it seems that you don't write as many of these stream-of-consciousness missives as you once did - and I miss them. Luckily for us, such personal and sensory recollections can't help but find their way onto your computer screen whenever the music muse stirs within you
I learned from you that no matter critic or poet, the purest thing a writer can do is to inspire her readers to action, whether it be seeking out a band or re-thinking an assumption. And no one gets inspired by an insider, a stoic who has seen it all before, and is too cool too care; better to lay-it-on-the-line and say "I'm human and this music does this to me, how 'bout you?"