OPPOSITES: LIGHT/HEAVY

Hmm, a third week, a third challenge. Silly? Serious? Low-brow? High-brow? Light-weight? That’s it! Avoirdupois! Weight. Of course, as a nominally music appreciation site, it can also be your difference twixt Sabbath and Sweet Thursday, so, well, just so. 

Traces (Light and Weight)/Enigma

Me, I am going for weight, going for the compare and contrast between a ton of feathers and a ton of lead. (And, believe me, I toyed with what you’re thinking, feeling it a tad obvious…..) So, for the sake of the songs, light and heavy. And if you fancy a drink with that, be my guest, whether it be a light and bitter or a pint of heavy. More anon.

Lighter Than Air/Christine Collister

It is the glorious voice of Christine Collister that kicks us off, she possibly better known as half of Clive Gregson and...., it being in that duo she made her name.I recall I had heard about the cassette only debut by Clive and Christine, persuading my wife to get me a copy for Christmas. Clive Gregson I already knew of, from his band, Any Trouble, featured here. Anyhow, shortly before that Christmas, we toddled off to see the Richard Thompson Band, playing at Birmingham Odeon. Imagine my glee as, not only were Gregson and Collister the opening act, they were also in Thompson's line-up as well, a state of affairs that lasted a few years. As a duo they were also regulars at the Red Lion Folk Club, also in Birmingham, and we caught them a number of times. A couple in life as well as art, differences arose and they split, with there also developing some sort of rift between Gregson and Richard Thompson, with a snarky RT review, penned by the former, appearing in Mojo, after he was no longer in the band. Legend suggests the Thompson song, 'Put It There, Pal', was the riposte. 

Both Collister and Gregson went onto solo careers, each continuing to this day, if never quite attaining the accolades of their joint work. This song, a rare co-write by Collister, appears on her 2005 outing, 'Love', which actually had origins in showing off the capabilities of the then wilting format of vinyl, and is designed as a showpiece for her vocals, actually better in her earlier solo output, or, at least, with more sympathetic arrangements. But it is still a powerful instrument, irrespective.

Light and bitter, the drink, is, or was, the popular combination of a half of bitter, draft english ale, the kind best served at room temperature, for any philistine readers from afar, and a small bottle of light ale, which was, I guess, slightly lighter, both in colour and volume, bottled variant of the same. (Here's the science.)

He Ain't Heavy (He's My Brother)/Rufus Wainwright

Apologies for posting the Rufus rather than the better known 'original', which of course it wasn't. It was a cover version. Ahead of the Hollies having their 1969 smash with it, something they were in sore need of, Graham Nash having jumped ship a year or so before, it had earlier failed to set the charts alive in versions by Kelly Gordon (no, me, neither), or, Lord help us, Neil Diamond. Written by a pair of jobbing songwriters Bobby Scott and Bob Russell, I bet you want to hear the Diamond version, don't you? My sole reason for posting this version is that I have always liked the timbre of Rufus's voice, something I gather many don't, and he has a quite a decent way with covers. This strays little from the original, and I have half an idea that the producers of 'Zoolander', the film in which it features, did not have the rights for the Hollies version. 

Two interesting things I learnt about the song for this piece. Firstly referring to the lyric, I had previously assumed heavy was as in heavy, man, thus a description of seriousness, or sternness, and that brother was meant as in a friend or colleague in dudedom. The original phrase comes from a sermon delivered by the Moderator of the Church of Scotland, in the 1890s, wherein a young peasant girl was being asked how she could be possibly be managing to carry a young man on her back. Her response, maybe minus the ain't, was the basis of his Sabbath message and, latterly, of the song. And secondly, the session pianist on the Hollies' version was one Elton John!

Returning to this version, surely nobody can be unaware of the fact that Rufus is the son of acerbic singer -songwriter, Loudon Wainwright and of the late Kate McGarrigle, but here's the back story if you are not. Somewhat of a theatrical talent, shall we say, drawn a little to musicals and the like, it is his simpler and less exotic fare I enjoy the better.

Heavy is what the Scots drink, or order, in preference to bitter, and, by and large, it is a slightly heavier and darker brew than the English style, although the two terms mean more or less the same. It can get confusing. Mind you, ordering a beer in Glasgow has always been confusing and not for the timid. Lagers are as popular, strangely, here as much as south of the border, and if you were to hear someone asking for a pint of Mick, it would be that they were after, an example of best Weegie* rhyming slang, where lager rhymes with the be-lipped Stones frontman.

*Weegie = Glaswegian.

Light

Heavy

Aliens: Reach Out

Purchase: Heavy Metal Soundtrack

Aliens, UFOs, little green men in carbon zoot suits, come down to Earth to collect rocks, or kidnap people and probe them for info. Maybe probe our livestock, too...

What comes to my mind when the topic of aliens arises stems from the movies. I've never been much of a sci-fi reader, but I do love a good, ol' fashioned flying saucer flick.  There's the old standbys, like Sigourney Weaver in her underwear and vicious little creatures pulsing out of chest cavities in a shower of gore. But, what else? What other little green men walk through the halls of my imagining? Invaders destroying everything they encounter with death rays, ala Mars Attacks!; strange, long fingered and round-eyed curiosity seekers, peeking through windows, like ET: The Extraterrestrial; or Donald Sutherland recognizing Veronica Cartwright upon exiting his pod and becoming part of the Invasion of the Body Snatchers...

And, my personal favorite, and original encounter with the wonders of R-Rated films, the spaced out aliens on their way to Earth via a blissed out Venice Beach, California, in a giant, smiley faced orb, from 1981's Heavy Metal...

Heavy Metal, with its excessive cartoon gore and oversized, lampoon nudity, it's oddly-shaped plot and disconnected framing devices, devil's cabinet of bizarre characters, and overall bizarrely full blown technicolor beauty, was my first R-rated film. I saw it for the first time as one half of a double-feature on a sleep over, in a dark basement, under the snoring, un-watchful (probably snoring) noses of a friend's mom and dad (the other film was John Carpenter's The Thing). 

And not to understate things, but at the first sign of cartoon boobs, zombie tail gunners, and the glowing green menace called the Loc-nar, among many, many more glorious oddities, I was pretty much hooked, for good. On comic books, nudie mags, and most of all rock n roll, and maybe heavy metal--the magazine and the sound. And, while the only real metal on the soundtrack was a cut from the Ronnie James Dio led Black Sabbath, the movie was a pulsing, stereo blast of day-glo guitar fever, a romp through the wildest kind of imaginings.

My memory of the film is tied directly to the sound: the imagery is forever tied to the music in the film that played over the scenes, a roving scoped-out freak show of atmospherics. Slashing guitars, thrumming, angry keys, phasing drums, Sammy Hagar's howling vox, Don Felder's space trip title track, a dobblering car horn from a UFO speeding past, and the strange incantations of Blue Oyster Cult's "Veterans of the Psychic Wars." But, by far the standout cut from the soundtrack is Cheap Trick's "Reach Out". The song is driven by a purely 80's inspired keyboard march, one that sounds like a bank of spaceship computers pumping out data and coordinates. It's powerpop at its finest, with soaring vocals and churning guitar, but the song is also a spaced out symphony of great early Cheap Trick, with ethereal melodies from a galactic orchestra, laying layers of sound over a staticky transmission.

Aural association is a potent force for me, and just a few seconds of a sound byte will send my imagination and my memory tumbling end over end to not only a movie, but the entire span of an era. The sounds of a song pulled from a memory come with all sorts of weight. And I love the impact, the immediate and and total sensation of nostalgia, when you hear a song from your past.

As I grow older, to continue the metaphor, I often feel alienated from my past--not the places or the people, but the emotional aspects of who I was. My sense of wonder, my curiosity, my willingness to be expansive and expanded by what I saw and heard, and the avenues of discovery I could wander so easily--this all before my psyche began to feel bent and worn down from taking on the weight of too many daily burdens. Hearing old music will especially take me back to being a less complicated, more easily awed kid, bowled over and blown away by all the oddness of the universe, rather than buried beneath the weight of it all.

I still scan the sky for UFOs, eager to catch a lift to places unknown. I signal with a flashlight, I signal with a lighter (Incubus), I dream of concerts on Mars, and I know that aliens can get Pearl Jam tickets a lot more easily than me (The Simpsons), and while I have many more alien references, I feel like I'm beating this metaphor into stardust...Sail on, space cowboys. I'll see you on the dark side of the moon...

EXTRA-CURRICULAR READING: A great write up on the soundtrack from Crave

My First Album (s): Beatles 'n Stones

This is a great topic: first album. Cassette, CD, 45…

I wrote a lot for this, dividing my firsts up into multiple categories that involved the traditional first purchase, but extended to some stranger places: my mom’s record collection; the first record store I ever went to (Viva Kemp Mill Records!);  my earliest memories of flipping though records in the Kmart and being a little scared of the KISS, Ozzy and Sabbath stuff; all the way to the pawn shop that was right next to the comic shop I used to frequent every day after middle school, where I bought a then almost 10 year old copy of AC/DC’s Back in Black, for a quarter…the first tape I bought, my first 45... I thought I remembered more specifically, but it's hard to put a finger on the actual first of whatever category I actually money down on. I do remember some purchases: the vinyl pressing of USA for Africa, which was...whatever, in retrospect, but did have a blistering live version of Springsteen doing Jimmy Cliff's "Trapped", which to this day gives me the shivers when I hear it.

I realized, though, my musical memory is endless, each recollection better than the one before, so many stories that spring up from hearing even a two second scrap of a tune. Music, for those who love it, resides in what the soul must be. And the knowledge that one possesses of their musical past and how it has built towards their ever-living, always sound-tracked present, has to reside somewhere deep in the physiology, someplace close to the DNA, the stuff that makes us who we are.

After considering the many, many options I could qualify for “first”, I decided to go with this: My friend’s older brother’s LP collection.

David S. was a fourth grade rock god to me. He knew more about the Stones and the Beatles than anyone I knew. Which is to say, he was the first one to tell me about those two bands, and therefore was the ultimate authority. All his facts and tidbits and knowledge, especially of lyrical content and album cover art must have to come to him from a much older, very educated older brother  (I remember thinking his parents were his grandparents when I met them—grey and old; David was a ‘mistake’ baby).

He came over to my house for a playmate (though we didn’t call it that back then) and we spent much of the afternoon pouring over the covers of the stack of albums he brought and listening to the music. Tattoo You was really fascinating to me, with the tribal images of Mick and Keith looking like Maori warriors. Beggars Banquet was somehow a little scary looking, a place I shouldn’t be; Sticky Fingers was titillating dirty because we could pull on the zipper in the pants. Some Girls was fun in a more innocent way: the die-cut, movable features was a lot like the pop-up books I still liked at that age. He also had a copy the Beatle’s Yesterday and Today with the infamous butcher scene, though it must have been a reprint. Sgt. Pepper’s was what really grabbed me, and we poured over that famous cover scene for what seemed like hours. Abbey Road was awesome, too, due to the fact that he explained the legend that Paul was dead and this was representative of his funeral and that each Beatle was a member of the funeral party. Mind you, all of this intense scrutiny of the art work and the head-spinning tales David was telling me—the stories beyond the songs—was done to a soundtrack of what could arguably be considered the greatest rock music ever recorded. Like so many, The Beatles and the Stones hold exalted status for me in the pantheon of rock, and regardless of how far afield I stray, sometimes for good, often for worse (I went to see Quiet Riot in the 8^th grade, Bon Jovi and Cinderella in 9^th), I always go back to the Beatles and Stones. It doesn’t make me unique; it just means I have a pure rock pedigree, good genes, if you will. 

We eventually got around to the White Album and then, because I wasn’t really as singularly obsessed with music as David, I took us out to play war in the construction site nearby and David eventually, incensed and bored, stalked off and went back to my house. My mother had to take him home. It was a great day, one that sparked my musical journey, despite David not wanting to be my friend anymore (he was really offended at the joy I took rolling around in the dirt, shooting a fake machine gun and running myself through freshly hung drywall in effort to emulate fabulous special effects like in the movies). A great day, but one that in retrospect shows me that perhaps even at that age, I was already lacking any kind of particular, obsessive focus that if I had may have led me down a very different path in life. David might have become a rock star for all I know—he had the singularity of mind to do what it took to make great music. He had the pedigree; he knew the legends and the stories and the myths; he knew what the songs were about, especially the dirty ones, even if we didn’t really know what was going on—Jagger’s penchant for “make sweet love” as a lyric, while ubiquitous, didn’t mean much to me then, other than I knew I should giggle when I heard it. He had the moves and the ability to mimic, especially Mick Jagger. Have you ever seen a 4^th grader strut and prance and mime the vocals of Mick Jagger? No? You should—it’s a lot less creepy and whole lot more entertaining than those little kids who always seem to be part of any Elvis Presley impersonation festival.

What is amazing, though, is how certain sounds, and in this case, album sleeves, certain images, especially the visual and aural beauty of rock music, can work to blow open your understanding or perception of the world around you. Up until then, I’d been grooving to things like the AM radio, or stuff that my dad would sing around the house. I had a few soundtracks to movies I loved (Star Wars, The Muppets), but otherwise, like a typical nine-year-old kid, my musical sensibility was scattered at best, influenced by what was accessible to me. I didn’t have that ever-important older sibling to act as my musical sage, guru and guide. So, I made do with what was available to me and, given the passion music stirred in me, I worked pretty hard at finding sounds after that fateful day when David S. brought over all those records. It’s been a good journey, one that gets better the longer it goes on. In terms of the metaphorical quest, this is one that needs no end, as the longer the way, the greater and more abundant the rewards.

Roads/Streets:Tenemos Roads

National Health: Tenemos Roads
[purchase]

There was a time and place when the idea of a “supergroup” combining the members of Hatfield and the North and Gilgamesh would have been a big deal. That time was the late 1970s, and the place was England, particularly Canterbury. I’ve written in the past about the so-called “Canterbury Scene,” focusing mostly on the bands Gong and Soft Machine, but there were many other groups, often with overlapping membership, that created interesting music at that time and in that place. These musicians were, for the most part, profoundly talented, extremely adventurous, and mostly forgotten, certainly on this side of the Atlantic.

Hatfield and the North was one of the best regarded bands from this scene. After the usual musical chairs, its membership essentially solidified as vocalist/bassist Richard Sinclair (formerly of Caravan, later of Camel), guitarist Phil Miller (formerly of Matching Mole), drummer Pip Pyle (formerly, and later, of Gong), and keyboardist Dave Stewart (formerly of Egg and not the guy from the Eurythmics, but later of Bruford), and a trio of female singers known as the Northettes, Barbara Gaskin, Amanda Parsons and Ann Rosenthal. Gilgamesh was somewhat lesser known, was organized around keyboard player Alan Gowen, and included, among others, guitarist Phil Lee and bassist Neil Murray (later of Whitesnake and Black Sabbath). Both bands played music that was a fusion of rock, jazz and classical influences.

The new band, which came to be called “National Health,” was to include most members of both, but, of course, that was unlikely to work out.  Initially, Bill Bruford was the drummer, but he was replaced by Pyle, Murray replaced Mont Campbell as bassist, and by the time the self-titled debut album was released, Gowan was credited only as a guest, along with Parsons, the only Northette to participate. Nevertheless, they created a great album, if maybe not quite a masterpiece. Mostly instrumental, it is complex, interesting prog rock without much of the pompousness that has given the genre a bad name.

Leadoff track, “Tenemos Roads,” a 14 and a half minute piece written by Stewart, has a catchy opening theme and a long instrumental section before Parsons’ ethereal vocals enter. Prog rock songs often have spacy lyrics, and “Tenemos Roads” is part of that tradition. Something about a place in the stars, and history and men making war and fish living in the sea. Whatever. After a bit of spacy noodling, the song picks up again, and almost rocks out to the end.

I know that may not sound all that enticing, but trust me, it is really good, so give it a listen.

National Health released a maybe even better album the next year, Of Queues And Cures, and then went into hibernation, reuniting in 1982 for D.S. Al Coda, a tribute to Gowen, who had died the previous year of leukemia. And that was pretty much it from this particular combination of musicians, except for some live releases and Missing Piece, a collection of early songs featuring Bruford, Steve Hillage and others.

It's Elemental--A Mixtape of Sorts

What is most elemental about summer? For me, it’s getting out on the road and being gone gone gone.

Like one of our other bloggers, I make my life as an expat teacher, so travel is a pretty...well, elemental part of life. and I'm gone as much as can be.

Which doesn’t leave a lot of time for writing—at least for me. I’m a creature of habit when it comes to getting the words down, and I often lament that I’m not taking advantage of new environments to inspire my work into new directions. Great writers would scoff at that notion--that it's hard to write when you're on the road. Maybe I spend too much time seeking out and imbibing the local booze...

  

When I do travel, though, I love listening to music, especially music inspired by the places I am. When I went to Philadelphia a few years back for a ball game and a night of boozing it up at one of my favorite bars, 12 Steps Down  I listened to Marah’s brilliant rock epic Kids In Philly the entire weekend, and the music made more sense when backed up by the visual vibe of the streets it spoke about.

 (an aside: Marah? One of the greatest f@#king bands you've never heard--The LAST Rock 'n Roll band!)

Meeting your music this way—viscerally, tactically, by-hand—is the best way to hear what it means.

Same goes for this batch of tunes I’ve picked out for our theme this month: elements. Each of these are songs I’ve dug into deeply in their proper places, by inspiration, by the fact that the song was written in or is about the place I heard it, or…just because it made sense to associate the place with the song. And speaking of, that is another great way to connect to a tune: loving it because of the time and place you first heard it, and forever associating it with the place. For example, I can not hear OutKast’s “Hey Ya!”  without going back to Spoleto, Italy 2003, when I was falling in love with the Umbrian hills and “Hey Ya!” was coming out of every radio I passed. It was the soundtrack to a great time. Always will be. And even if I don't particualrly like the song, the association has the magical, unnameable resonance forever attached to it, so, I will always listen when it comes on the radio.

That being said, here is a small selection, culled from a much longer list, from the strange soundtrack of my life with a brief explanation of how each song came to achieve its own unique significance.  (Making sure I could satisfy the ‘elements’ requirement made this all the more interesting…)

Iron Man by Black Sabbath—The Pawnshop, Woodbridge, Virginia.

There was a pawnshop right next to the Music and Arts Center where I first took guitar lessons. I was in 7^th grade at the time, and while the guitar lessons were great, the pawn shop was it’s own wonderful treasure chest. Among the usual pawnshop fare—guns, jewelry, power tools—the place had a huge section of vinyl for sale. This is where I bought AC/DC’s Backin Black and Dirty Deeds; LedZeppelin Four; and Black Sabbath’s Paranoid, which featured Iron Man, a strange little exercise in sci-fi headbanging. And the main riff , the one everyone knows, was pretty much the first thing any nascent guitar student learned. When I hear Iron Man, I always think back to rushing headlong across Rt.1 with my pocket full of saved up quarters, wondering musical gem I was about to find.

 Mercury by Counting Crows—Outerbanks, North Carolina

This gem from Recovering the Satellites is a ghost walking in a blues funeral suit. Recovering the Satellites was my constant soundtrack after graduating from college. Released in October of 1996, this disc was a perfect accompaniment to a quiet winter of near-total solitude when I lived in Nag’s Head, North Carolina, trying to figure out what to do with my life. The album, soaring and contemplative, full of affirmation and dark, whispery sadness, was the perfect turbulent collection of songs I needed to get from one ending to a new beginning. It was also a different, sometimes harder and much more complex sound than their debut, August And Everything After. And where that album spun gold out a feeling of nostalgia for American solitude and Van Morrison-esque lyricism, Recovering nearly roared to life at moments, and for this listener, cemented Counting Crows’ reputation as one of America’s finest bands. Mercury , one of the quieter tracks on Recovering, is a song about a girl who is unstable, and whose changes of mind and heart put the speaker through that special hell known as ‘love’, and though she changes like mercury, ‘she’s alright with me…’ Multilayered slide and whisper guitars and a rhythm like a creaking ship on the water, Mercury showed the band was capable of brilliant musical chameleonism, and they made a brilliant career out of exploring and expanding rock n roll soundscapes. And Mercury will forever remind me of sitting on a cold, windy beach at night, with my guitar, trying to capture not only that sound, but also a clue.

Silver and Gold, U2—Cape Town, SA

Another bluesy stomp, with the politically charged lyrics that are now almost an afterthought when it comes to the definition of U2’s sound and themes. Originally released on a compilation called Artists United Against Apartheid, with Keith Richards and Ron Wood, the better-known version appeared on Rattle and Hum. Both versions smoke—but it is Bono’s lyrical reaction to apartheid politics, the boom drop drums and the Edge’s lightning sweep guitars make this a loud and strident statement. When I was in South Africa, I kept hearing Bono’s famous refrain, “Am I bugging you? I don’t mean to bug you—OK, Edge, play the blues!” After listing a imagistic litany of grievances and abuses that dwelled in black and white on subjects like rich versus poor and freedom versus slavery, Bono’s question to the listener is hard to ignore. The song is literally on fire, taking about fevers burning white hot, and doing its best to explain to those who might not understand, why it is the oppressed is ready to take up arms against an oppressor.

One doesn’t need to study too long to know that sad tale that is modern South African history. The sense of wrong doing is palpable when you go there and

It’s hard not to shake your head in terrible wonder at what happened in South Africa for so long. Ghost stories about troubled times that seem like they might never really go away—but Bono’s take—that money and greed will always trump good will and morality—rings particularly true and rang in my head the entire trip.

Iron Lion Zion- Bob Marley—St. Anne’s Parish, Jamaica

Honestly, I never paid attention to Marley until I went to Jamaica and stayed off-reservation, so to speak. Bob Marley’s Legend was a prerequisite requirement for college admissions and honestly, every tool I knew that wore frat letters could sing Redemption Song by heart, and thought Get Up, Stand Up was all they needed to know to get a poli-sci degree. Marley was realpolitik to most of the kids I partied with and I thought I might crack if I had to dance another slow groove with some girl to Waiting In Vain. So, I never listened. Ever. Unless I was at…oh, any party ever.  Fast forward a few years later, my misspent college days far behind me, I got the opportunity to in a private seaside mansion in a pretty remote part of Jamaica, on the shore in Saint Anne’s Parish, where Marley was born. It was a pretty amazing trip—far away from the resorts and the pale, never- smoked-a-jay-tourists lounging it up in Montego Bay and really, just kind of out there. No Internet, no phone—just the vibe of solitude and the sound of the surf. Honestly, with what I know about the place now, I probably would never stay that far away from any kind of security, but at the time, it was pretty cool just to be in the middle of the island, walking to the villages, snorkeling in the open water and fishing for our dinner every night. Someone in our group was a big Marley fan, well beyond the greatest hits, and when I said I didn’t dig the music, he told me to put Rastaman Vibration, “dig into the stuff that doesn’t get played all the time.” By the end of the week, I’d gone deep, devoured all the LPs, and heard the songs that never got played on the college radio station.  By pure stroke of luck, he’d brought all his CDs with him—this was pre-ipod and mp3 days. So, in fitting with our theme, I pick Iron, Lion Zion as my representation of this time and the amazing memories I have of Jamaica. The track comes from the Songs of Freedom box set, which is where anyone not interested in hearing Legend for the billionth time needs to start. And the song itself is a good primer for the complicated political and religious belief system that mark so much of Marley’s music. Rastaman Vibration remains my favorite album by Marley, and even though, I don’t listen to Legend on principal no matter what song happens to come up by the man, I will always be reminded of good times on a strange, quiet part of the island of Jamaica.

...As I write this, I am waiting to get on a plane to head back to America. While I’m excited to see home, see my family, drink amazing IPAs and eat Mexican, I wonder excitedly at what new music I will discover on this trip and hope to find yet another perfect song that will define this summer and all the strange places I will be…

(Hint—I’ve been digging hard on the Dead this summer, so….and the new Wilco…hmmm….? What's next?)

IT'S ELEMENTAL: Part 2

What fun! Against sense or justification I find myself with time to continue a trawl through some more of the elements. I am intrigued by still how potent a source of lyrical stimulation the periodic table is proving, even as we leave the everyday names behind. Naturally the temptation to use some of the more arcane names of elements for band names, especially if ‘heavy metals’, is too much to resist, for example the well-known(?) bands Nobium, Cobalt, Xenon, C(a)esium 137 and even Barium, hoping the latter haven’t made too much of a meal of it. Sorry to any of them, hoping for a tag to their latest, but I am sticking to the words in songs.

Buy Titanium
First off is dancemaster David Guetta, who, in 2011, produced this little number, featuring go-to girl in this genre, Sia. I find it fascinating that the video seems to display a girl with supernatural forces running from the Police, not least as the opening bars of the tune seem a lift from Sting’s finest? All a bit generic and by numbers for me. Understandably not in the Greatest Hits that crept onto my shelves last year.

Buy Vanadium, but you will need i-tunes
Unbelievable! Vanadium I had never even heard of, yet clearly a part of the essentials for this gloomy and never more industrial gothic sounding outfit, from their 1983 album "Zeichnungen des Patienten O.T.", or Drawing of Patient O.T., which isn’t a huge help. The name of the group I knew, but this was my very first earburst of them, reading that their thing is the use of non-musical machinery as part of their instrumentation. Resisting the obvious cynical riposte, I am minded of the more recent Fuck Buttons, who similarly invoke noise as music. Oddly I can see an appeal, but maybe I have had too many MRI scans. Erstwhile member Blixa Bargold, guitar/vocals, later became a member of Nick Cave band The Birthday Party and then a Bad Seed.

Buy Chromium (electric)

The Church are, of course, world famous in Australia, with a lineage stretching back decades up into the present day: they have recently performed a few bijou gigs in the U.K. I think they should and could have been better known, tending towards a tuneful jangliness, reminiscent of Teenage Fanclub.This is the 2^nd version of the song, appearing on a 2005 acoustic rehash of back-catalogue, ‘El Momento Descuidado, an LP I picked up cheap in Melbourne, whilst visiting my daughter, a couple of years back. I prefer it to the electric version here.

Buy Iron
Who could resist and who does not know this song? An astonishing 45 years old, or will be in a month, astonishingly simple and astonishingly effective. I forgive them for the successive waves of noisy tosh produced within their invented genre, if only for the joy of air-guitar aged 13. And all still alive and squabbling. Wonderful.

Buy Nickel
So, as stated, no room for Nickelback, thank the Lord, or Nickel Creek, mores the pity, here, so it’s the marmite man himself, Tom Waits. Fabulous songwriter, of which I have no doubt, it’s just his unusual corncrake grate of a voice. Sometimes, just sometimes, it works for me, and, by jingo, this is one of those times, the contrast with the strings imparting a pathos I didn’t know he had in him. OK the odd guttural hawk as it continues, making me wince and the front row of any audience duck. Nearly as good as Over the Rainbow.

Buy Copper
Confess I only know the W.O.L.D.(ee ee ee) song for this lauded writer, deceased many a long year. Not my proverbial, I fear, being too M.O.R. (ah ah ah). Cheap gag, move on.

Buy Zinc
I wanted, I really wanted to give this a chance, trying to forget the years of horror when T. Rex were a fixture on UK TV chartshow 'Top of the Pops', my mother unfailingly asking me who he, Bolan,  was, with my stock answer being that I didn’t know. In case she though it indicative of my taste. Best thing, as ever, is the Taylor/Volman backing vocals, fresh from their stint with the Mothers of Invention, with me never understanding quite why. Shame the Turtles never sang a song about, o, I don’t know, Tungsten. (Is tungsten even an element?)

Buy Arsenic
Unfamiliar with these guys, and, at my first wiki I was pleasantly surprised, preparing to give this formulaic pop-punk a second chance, mistaking the noughties Philadephia “punks”, the Loved Ones, with the Australian garage band of the same name, 40 years earlier. What is yawn now would be somewhatground-breaking in ’65. But it wasn’t to be. File under old lace.

Buy Molybdenum, sorry, Nobelium
Mindful of 3 spiteful comments in a row, I really need one to like, and this, I thought, was definitely the one. The sheer unlikeliness of a song called Molybdenum automatically excused any need to consider its value. But, frustratingly, not on the youtube……. But, they did do one called Nobelium, which is, even if straying from the order I had been seeking. In fact they have more, with songs Iodine, Uranium, two Oxygens, another Titanium, Selenium and Nitrogen, all on a 2000 LP called, with little surprise, elements. Who they? Noxious Emotion is the name. I applaud the idea more than its fruition, but it’s OK. Clearly a leader in what amazon call EBM. (No, me neither, so back to wiki….) Whatever. It's OK. Really.

Buy Iodine
Now I can imagine Leonard Cohen stumbling down a track on some obscure greek island, knees smeared with iodine, having fallen from a scooter after a liason with his latest olive hued muse. Which seems actually to fit the gist of the lyric. Maybe not his pinnacle. Produced, doncha know, by Phil Spector, giving some down time fun imagining the same song sung by the Ronettes. (Works for me!)

I think we are both tiring……