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My Five And A Bit Musical Highlights of 2009

by

Stephen Merchant

5. This Tornado Loves You - Neko Case

I always think Neko Case sounds like a small piece of carry-on luggage you might find for sale in Muji.

Oh, what a charming fool I am. Ms Case is of course the flame-haired alt-country siren and sometime vocalist with The New Pornographers.

This, the opening track from her fifth album Middle Cyclone, sees Neko as a destructive tornado rampaging across the States in search of some missing beau.

Lovely.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FhVbyeWFvo

4. Leeds United -  Amanda Palmer

On February 1^st, as The Steve Show limped towards it’s unmourned end, we played host to a live session from Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls.

Amanda is a wild, wonderful presence, full of the same energy and eccentricity that infuses her solo album Who Killed Amanda Palmer.

One of the highlights of the album is the song Leeds United, which she bashed out live on a keyboard in the studio and dazzled us all with her fiery performance.

On the album version, Amanda’s voice is frazzled by a long day in the recording studio, which injects a wild, ravaged passion to a song that feels like it’s lifted from some great gothic cabaret.

It’s on constant rotation round my way. Tremendous.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=i62UF7uROGU

3b. Say Please - Monsters of Folk

Bright Eyes’ Conor Oberst and Mike Mogis, Jim James from My Morning Jacket and sing/songwriter M. Ward have formed Monsters of Folk, an alt-country super-group with a terrible name but some cracking tunes, including this rollicking indie/folk/rock/pop nugget.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BgIUJpugr0

3a. Two Weeks - Grizzly Bear

My mate was like, “You should listen to Grizzly Bear’s new album” and I was like, “No, it’s not my thing” and he’s like, “No, I reckon it is” and I was like, “Yeah?” and he was like, “Yeah, totally” and I listened to it and I was like, “Yeah, it’s good, nice one” and he’s like, “Yeah, no problem”

www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjecYugTbIQ

2. The Breeze/My Baby Cries  -  Bill Callahan

As former listeners of The Steve Show will know, Tiny Dan believes we should all adore mindless pseudo-jazz electro-twaddle, Harry gets off on shouty American men and who knows what the heck Sammy is listening to in any given week.

They are all idiots, which is the reason I fired them all and quit the show.

The truth is there is nothing more affecting than a talented person, their voice, a guitar or piano, some quality lyrics and, if needs absolutely must, one or two session men. That’s why Bob Dylan’s Blood On The Tracks and Neil Young’s On The Beach are two albums I carry on my person at all times.

Sadly, in our age of retro 80s synths and R n B loudmouths, it’s increasingly hard to wheedle out the raw beauty of a talented singer/songwriter.

My vampiric bloodlust for fresh singer/songwriter meat is rarely sated, so imagine how thrilled I was to stumble across Loving Takes This Course: A Tribute to the Songs of Kath Bloom.

Kath Bloom was a folkie with many admirers but no great commercial success who retreated to Conneticut to raise kids sometime in the 1980s.

The seductive, six-minute stand-out track from this recent tribute album is by Smog main-man Bill Callahan.

Over simple guitar, keyboard and low-key percussion, Bill’s whispering growl of a voice and Bloom’s heartfelt lyrics hypnotise me on every listen. “I’d like to touch you, but I’ve forgotten how…And said I didn’t need you, but look at me now…”.

I promise it will melt even the coldest of hearts. (Harry, that means you)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBiEMPXDAXM

Start the video at 1.25, ignore someone falling over out of shot at 2.43…

1. Because The Night – Bruce Springsteen Live At Glastonbury, 2009.

I nearly missed Bruce Springsteen at Glastonbury.

The plan was simple : race down to the festival Saturday morning, worship The Boss when he headlined the main stage that night, then crash-out in a tent for a few hours and drive home again the next day.

I woke up Saturday morning as excited as an orphan on Christmas Day when he knows Noel Edmonds is on his way round with a camera crew and a trip to Legoland in his back pocket.

I leapt in the car – and the bastard wouldn’t start. It just spluttered and choked and did nothing. Bastard.

I began a frantic dash around local car-hire shops to find a replacement, all the while sweating at the thought of poor Bruce saying “Good evening Glass-ton-bury” and not seeing my beaming face staring back at him. How would he get through the show?

Finally I paid some crazy price for a tiny car my 6’7” frame could barely squeeze into, picked up a pal en route and drove south like a demon (a demon who obeyed all speed regulations, naturally).

I made it to Glasto mere hours before Bruce and the E Street Band took to the stage but I couldn’t relax as I needed to pitch the tent before darkness fell. From bitter past experience I knew you don’t want to be erecting a tent in the dark at Glastonbury.

My friend had promised to pack his tent but he’d let me down. Luckily I’d had a distant memory of a tent that I had bought years ago for a previous festival but never used.

I had found it, unopened, in the back of a cupboard and thrown in the car. Now, as the sun began to set, I unfurled the tent and out fell ground sheets and metal poles and rubber hoops – and everyone around me started laughing.

Apparently, tents have changed a lot since I last slept under canvas. Now they are all bendy and pop-up. Mine looked like a proper old school Carry On Camping tent minus bubbly Babs Windsor and her poorly fastened bikini top.

“Nick that off some Brownies?” chortled a passer-by.

“Fuck off!” I said, brilliantly.

As more pointing and laughing rippled around the field, I slipped off into the night and tramped my way over to the main stage.

The Boss divided opinion. He played an uncompromising set, which was a thrill for die-hard fans but probably featured too few sing-a-long hits to convert all the heathens.

Some of the strangers around me seemed suitably impressed by Bruce’s unparalleled showmanship; others said they found his hard-working rock ‘n’ roll schtick corny, which I didn’t understand.

Oh well. I wasn’t going to defend the man.

For me it was an electrifying performance.

At one point, the cool night air hit Bruce’s over-heating body and he began to steam. Actual steam rose up from him. Backlit by the stage lights he looked like some glorious rock ‘n’ roll demon/angel and for believers like myself he seemed even more Messianic than usual.

There is nothing quite like Saturday night in front of the main stage at Glasto.

That vast, seemingly never-ending sea of expectant faces, the homemade signs, the setting sun, the overpriced beer — it’s joyful.

And as I finished hollering along to the chorus of Because The Night I remember actually shouting “This is the greatest night of my life.”

And I believed it.

But it wasn’t the greatest night of my life because I had to sleep in a tent that was 25 years old. With people constantly unzipping the flaps and peering in and saying, “Look, I told you, it’s that bloke off the telly. He’s nicked this off some Girl Guides”, and then swaying off into the night to tell more drugged up knuckle-heads where they could laugh at me.

But as their jeers and taunts spoiled my sleep I thought back to Bruce’s performance :

“They can’t hurt you now / can’t hurt you now / Because the night belongs to lovers…”

And everything was okay.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDiS33rxSG0

MERRY CHRISTMAS ONE AND ALL…

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I wouldn’t want anyone to think that the demise of the Steve Show has quelled our almost pathological desire to hunt down new music.

Our New Music Quest (NMQ) was no affectation we adopted for the show. Me, Harry, Rufus and Sammy were NMQ-ing pigs, sniffing out fresh melodies like they were tune-based truffles.

For example, here’s one that, were the Show still on air, I’d be going Billy Mental for, The Phenomenal Handclap Band with 15 to 20…

Hubba. Those boys and girls are hot like fire, no doubt. But maybe one of the reasons I love that tune is because it’s got counting in it.

I love that in a song. Why? No idea (perhaps some cod psychologist steveshowposse.com lurker could reveal themselves and explain).

Vocally enunciating numbers in song form is on that list of things which just suck me in. When I hear a good melodic count, I freeze. I’m motionless and utterly absorbed, like a cat which has caught sight of a squirrel disappearing into a bush or a Jeremy Kyle guest who has just picked up the scent of a distant Greggs bakery.

In no particular order (rather ironically, seeing as I love a bit of counting) here are some things which enchant me when encountered in song:

• Counting (see, told you)
• A long note held by the singer while the music carries on. Bill Withers’ Lovely Day is an obvious one, although Thom Yorke does it in Radiohead’s The Tourist.
• Huge drums with fragile female vocals. Iceland’s Bjork does quite a bit of this, Lamb also.
• A crazy-ass bassline which is so funky it positively dares you not to grind. Try Aaron Neville’s Hercules. Irresistible.

There are obviously a gabillion other examples of all of these things – all suggestions welcome. But for now let’s stick with that numerical obsession. Not counting the Phenomenal HCB, here are Tiny Dan’s top five numbers with numbers:

5 – Isaac Hayes – By The Time I Get To Phoenix

A sure-fire contender for a future ‘Songs Steve never let me play’, this remarkable near 19-minute version of the Jimmy Webb classic doesn’t exactly hurry. The eight-minute 42 second intro consists of Isaac counting up seven failed attempts of our protagonist to leave some bad woman what done twisted his head up all ways – before a successful eighth attempt (albeit with three near U-turns) during which he starts wondering about what she’ll be up to when he gets to Phoenix. Then the real song starts. It’s a numbers dream. Thanks Isaac, you legend.

4 – The Orb – Perpetual Dawn

Yeah, I’m cheating a bit here, ‘cos the numbers element is only really a countdown from 10 to zero at the start of the track followed by nine minutes of awesome heavy ambient dub. But this scores plenty Tiny Dan nostalgia points, reminding me as it does of Saturday morning record fairs at the Bierkeller in Bristol in the early 1990s with Pauly Gay Eyes, going home to listen to records, then going to football, then going out in the evening to try to get served in a pub/meet pretty ladies.

3 – Boards of Canada – Aquarius

An elliptical but beautiful piece of music. The lyrics consist of a few kids saying “yeah, that’s right”, while a chap and foxy-ish sounding American lady alternately say the word “orange”. Three minutes in, the foxy-ish sounding one starts counting. When she gets to 36, she kind of gives up and starts chucking random numbers out there, some of which don’t even exist. Oddly peaceful, certainly groovy and definitely superb. I give it sixtyten out of ten.

2 – The Stranglers – School Mam

The almost-impossibly filthy closer to the No More Heroes album depicts some post-lesson activity which these days would certainly result in police action. The song, like the action described in the lyrics, builds to an insane climax in which Hugh Cornwell demonstrates rudimentary knowledge of the multiplication tables, gets foxed by dividing 128 by three then tries to count to 50 using decimals along the way. It’s as unsavoury yet nuts as it sounds.

1 – The Pointer Sisters – Pinball Number Song

Jeebus funking Christ. Is it any wonder that us kids who were kids in the 70s and 80s are so much better than our modern-day counterparts? Our children’s telly featured proper heavy duty badness, not least this extraordinary groove (regularly featured on Sesame Street) in which the sisters yelped random numbers over a backing track so tight it could injure a horse. I mean seriously, you wonder why today’s society is going to hell in a handcart? This is the answer, right here.

Got any more? Infuriated by my choice? Let me know right here and now! And email your friends with this link asking them for their suggestions for a top five of songs which in some way vaguely relate to counting (they’re desperate to contribute). Remember, you also cannot follow me on twitter and I’ve largely stopped accepting new facebook friends.

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When you’re writing a blog that’s predominantly about music, you’ve got to pay your dues.  Knowing your blog onions is essential.  You can’t just start typing any half-baked thought, as there’s always someone out there who has already baked a similar thought for slightly longer.

For a band who had the radar-avoiding qualities of a submarine shaped like a bloody big fish, the blogosphere is surprisingly awash with lovers of Moose.   So here is my three-quarter-baked Moose item, hopefully with a slightly different take on proceedings.

Moose were great.  I loved Moose.  They were guilty though, of a massive stylistic shift that alienated their original fanbase and bemused their record company.  Like when Dylan went electric or when Cheggers did that naked gameshow, the expectations of their audience were cast aside, however – like Dylan but unlike Cheggers – their abilities shone through.

Both the fans and the suits thought they were getting a woozy, shoegazey, effects-laden guitar band, as showcased on their opening three singles (Jack, Cool Breeze and Reprise).

But, bolstered no doubt by a decent recording budget and the inspired appointment of Mitch Easter as producer (responsible for REM’s debut EP and first two albums), the band had greater ambitions and made a record that attempted to emulate the influences they had absorbed during their day jobs at the Record & Tape Exchange. 

With echoes of Glen Campbell, the country-tinged pop of this record remains a huge joy, some 17 years after its release in 1992.

Lead single ‘Little Bird’ manages to couple an irrepressively jaunty tune to the sound of someone desperately trying and failing to extricate themselves from a doomed relationship

Oh I need so much more than you, but in your eyes it’s getting more wonderful

If you could see the things I do, you’d know that it’s all for me

I’d like to reach some distant shore, I won’t be looking over my shoulder,

Then maybe I’d have something more, something more than getting older,

Little bird, are you happy in your cage?

There’s a cover of Fred Neil’s ‘Everbody’s Talking’, done with far more grace and panache than the Beautiful South, who butchered it and left it panting on the floor, blood-soaked and barely clinging to life in 1994. 

A flick through the sleeve notes shows how far they’d come from their shoegazey beginnings (early aim – ‘Husker Du playing Tim Buckley’), with flute, trumpet, piano and a string quartet all filling out the rich sound.

Of course, with old fans cast aside, a befuddled record company and a nation that was swamped with hairy men from Seattle making loud noises, a record as precious as this was always doomed to fail.  

Moose were dropped by Hut almost instantaneously after the release of …xyz, but continued to plough their own interesting furrow across a further three albums.

One of the joys of the Steve Show was getting a response to records that you played that you thought other people had forgotten about.  I played The Whistling Song from …xyz in the early days of the show, and was amazed by the number of emails we got from people who loved the band, hadn’t heard them on the radio for over a decade and were trying to get hold of the old records.

At the time, odd copies of …xyz were changing hands for about £35 on eBay, but the album has been recently re-released on Cherry Red Records, including a selection of tracks from their early EPs.  You can buy it in shops, or on the internet.  You can probably download the songs electronically.  You should do at least one of those three things.

In the meantime, why not enjoy I Wanted To See You (To See If I Wanted You), the highlight from second album Honey Bee?