Today being International Women’s Day, here are three very different versions of the song “Women Of The World.”
A moving paen to female empowerment, “Women Of The World” was originally written and recorded by the legendary Scots poet, singer and raconteur Ivor Cutler with Linda Hirst in 1983. However “Women Of The World” is most closely associated with alt-rock scion Jim O’Rourke, who extended Cutler’s rousing folk ditty into a 9-minute epic of shimmering beauty for 1999 album Eureka. By stark contrast, the DFA-signed future-punks Yacht turned in a noisy, electronic thrash-out for their 2007 long player I Believe In You, Your Magic Is Real.
In any of these forms, the power of the song and its sentiment still shines through.
Here’s Ivor Culter and Linda Hirst’s original, and after the jump you will find the Jim O’Rourke and Yacht versions.
Ivor Cutler & Linda Hirst “Women Of The World” (1983)
Happy Women’s Day!
After the jump, versions by Yacht and Jim O’Rourke…
Ah, it’s getting near that time of year again, when the very best of European culture, as represented by bad songs, interpretative dance, fake tans, hair extensions and political in-fighting battle, battle it out, in front of a world-wide television audience, to win the 2012 Eurovision Song Contest.
As always, there is a host of strange, unlikely and bizarre entries, most notably this year are the pensioners who will be representing the U.K. and Russia.
The legendary Englebert Humperdinck will be carrying the weight of Britain’s hopes on his velvet-suited, 75-year-old shoulders, and he may well end up winning it for the U.K., which would be the first time that has happened since Katrina and The Waves back in 1997.
But for those with a betting streak, the interesting outsider is a group of 6 grandmothers representing Russia with their unlikely Euro Pop song “Party for Everyone”. The “Buranovo Grannies” beat 24 other acts to win the honor of singing for their country, reports the BBC:
Buranovskiye Babushki, from the Udmurt Republic, say they will use any cash raised to build a church in Buranovo.
“Grandmothers do not need glory and wealth,” a member told Vesti news.
The singer, named only as “Grandmother Olga”, said building the village church was their “only goal”.
Their winning song, which begins as a traditional folk tune before a modern dance beat kicks in, features the refrain, “party for everybody, come on and dance”.
The lyrics to the song, which feature a mixture of English and Udmurt - a language related to Finnish - were written by the grandmothers.
Buranovskiye Babushki became known in Russia with covers - sung in Udmurt - of classics including the Beatles’ Yesterday and the Eagles’ Hotel California.
For novelty value alone, the Grannies are well in with a chance. Qualifying heats for the Eurovision Song Contest take place between 22-26 May, so let’s see how far these gallus Grannies can go.
Frustrated by the lack of activity in Public Image Ltd., the group’s original bassist Jah Wobble (apparently his stage name comes from a drunken pronunciation of his real name, John Wardle) decided to go into the studio that the band was paying for anyway and record a solo album. Re-purposing some rhythm tracks from the Metal Box sessions, Wobble made a trippy, dubby concoction out of the material—a common thing to do in reggae and PiL were all reggae fanatics—released in 1980 as The Legend Lives On…Jah Wobble in Betrayal!, and a 38-minute EP called Blueberry Hill. John Lydon and Keith Levene were thoroughly pissed off and Wobble was ejected from the group.
Betrayal provides as much insight into what Wobble creatively brought to the PiL sound, as the lack of his basslines would on PiL’s next album, the skeletal sounding Flowers of Romance. Listen to “Blueberry Hill” below, a cheerfully insane cover of the Fats Domino song, buoyed by Wobble’s ebullient bassline, the same one heard on Metal Box’s “The Suit.”
As the old adage goes, the Nineties were just like the 60s but inverted (I think it was on Beavis & Butthead that I first heard that one?) If that was indeed true, then could it be said that the drug culture of the 90s was like that of the 60s only inverted?
Mike Doughty is a singer-songwriter and blogger who is perhaps best-known for fronting the moderately successful 90s alt-rock band Soul Coughing. Doughty’s The Book Of Drugs is a memoir looking back on his time in the band, but moreso (as the title suggests) his addictive relationship with various drugs over the years. From the relatively mild (weed, e) to the more serious (smack, later substituted by alcohol), we’re with him all the way to rehab and the sobering power of the 12-step program (here reffered to mostly as ‘the rooms.’)
This isn’t a book about the insane highs and lows of drug culture, glamorous peaks and perilous troughs - all that sort of thing has been covered in countless other books from the 60s. The Book Of Drugs is rather about the slow, persistent grind of addiction and how it wears the user down over a long period of time, a fitting tone for a book about a period when drug use was seen less as a cutting-edge activity and more a normal part of day-to-day life.
Sure, there are some celebrity cameo drug buddies here, like spliff-caning Redman and the smack-snorting Jeff Buckley (thankfully presented as a regular, fucked up human being rather than some kind of tragic demi-god), but Doughty is still tight-lipped when spilling the real beans. One of the most interesting figures in the book is the unnamed, aging rock star Doughty meets in the New York rooms and who imparts some sage advice. Doughty describes the rock star’s band as basically inventing both punk rock and glam. Hmm, who could he mean? There’s a shortlist of suitable candidates buzzing in my mind…
Doughty does go into lavish detail on the holidays he spent in the far East where his greatest ambition was to stay in his room and nod out. Well, he lavishes upon the reader the bits he can remember, which are scant. Even then, he says, he was pretty crappy at being a good junkie:
I went to the tiny (Khmer] pharmacy to clean them out. I piled box upon box of Valium onto the floor, then noticed—morepreposterous luck!—boxes of codeine. I started flipping those out of the case as well.
I heard a French-accented voice behind me. “What are you looking for?” I turned around and saw a manly, unshaven guy in mirrored shades. I said something half-assed and dismissive.
“Maybe I can help you find what you are looking for?” he said.
I snarled and kept rummaging. He shrugged and went away.
Maybe he was trying to help me in the way I wanted to be helped. who knows what that guy knew how to get—heroin? opium? Here we are in the immediate vicinity of the Golden Triangle. there were a number of basic drug-addict skills that I never got together.
Doughty’s experience of “the rooms,” and especially his squaring of an atheist’s lack of belief with the 12-step program’s insistence upon deferring to a higher power, make for some of the books highlights. In fact, towards the end of the book I was totally sold on the rooms as a potential lifestyle-choice, and had developed an almost Marla Singer-esque desire to go and hang out at my local AA meeting.
However, for all the damage being a drug addict, smack-head and alcoholic has done to Doughty, he saves his real ire not for the drugs, or his various addictions, but for the other members of his former band (who all remain nameless to the bitter end). Some of these passages are bitterly entertaining, and again go to show that like drug consumption itself, by the time the 90s rolled around being in a band was less a glamorous calling than a slog-like routine. One just hopes that, like the drugs he has so successfully kicked, at some point in the future Doughty will be able to let go of all the pain and sadness Soul Coughing has brought him:
I’m full-bore batshit crazy with regards to Soul Coughing. If somebody says they love Soul Coughing I hear fuck you. Somebody yells out for a Soul Coughing tune during a show, I hear fuck you. If I play a Soul Coughing song and somebody whoops - just one guy - I hear fuck you. people email my own lyrics at me—“Let the man go through” or “You are listening”—oddly often (how weird is that, to blurt somebody’s own lyrics at them?), and I type back “Don’t put that one me, I’m not that guy any more, that guy is dead.”
If somebody comes up and says, I’ve been listening to you since 1996, it means I had a definitive youthful drug experience to an old CD, and now you’ll never escape that band that you loathe, and you are forever incomplete without those three hateful faces.
Mike Doughty “Na Na Nothing” (and to be fair, his solo stuff IS better!)
My word, this is something. “Wuthering Heights” by Kate Bush slowed down to a 36-minute symphony of gorgeous spookiness and thrills by Looking At Blue from the Kate Bush News and Information forum.
…or flip that headline around and it could read Purple Naked Ladies is the soul of Odd Future.
Purple Naked Ladies is the first album by The Internet, nom-de-artiste of Matt Martians and Syd Tha Kid. Syd is best known as dj and beat-maker for Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All and Tyler The Creator. And those guys are controversial, right? Notorious for their misogyny and homophobia, it’s hard to make those ideals square with an album that is co-written, performed and produced by an out-lesbian who sings songs that are explicity about relationships with other women.
OFWGKTA’s music is complex, bizarre, and most definitely not pop in any way. In contrast, The Internet is not so much a rap group as a modern soul outfit, one that lies closer to the breathy vocal sensuality of Erykah Badu and Aaliyah than the melismatic histrionics of Alicia Keys, but which shares with Tyler et al a kind of dizzy modern psychedelia that’s utterly divorced from the pastorailsm of the hippies and weened on a diet of Cribs and animal tranquillizers. It’s also the most musically-accomplished release from the OFWGKTA camp to date - dare I say it’s accessible, even?
There are two videos taken from the album that can be watched sequentially. Both are directed by Matt Alonzo and featuring Syd and her girlfriend/accomplice as they alternately rob diners á la Pulp Fiction or snort drugs at the fairground. The first is called “Fastlane” and is featured below. The second is “Cocaine” which is after the jump, where you will also find a 20-minute documentary/interview with The Internet. You can buy Purple Naked Ladieshere.
The Internet “Fastlane”
After the jump, “Cocaine” and The Internet interviewed…
Steven Severin has always been cool as fuck. From when he first appeared on TV, looking edgy at the back of the infamous Bill Grundy interview that launched The Sex Pistols’ “filth and the fury” onto the nation, through Siouxsie and The Banshees, to his position now as one of our leading film composers. Just take a look at Mr. Severin in this interview for Music Box, from 1987, with his blonde crop and silk waistcoat, and compare him to the mullet haired interviewer, who looks like he’s come off the set of Miami Vice, or failed the audition for Conan the Barbarian, again. Mr. Severin has always been ahead of the pack, and that’s what makes him so interesting musically, creatively, intellectually, and in his sense of style.
In this brief, rare interview, Steven discusses how he first met Siouxsie (at a Roxy Music concert in 1975); why the band’s line-up has changed for the better; his thoughts on being the first band to tour Argentina since the Falklands war; why The Banshees recorded “Dear Prudence” in Stockholm; and how tax problems affected The Glove, his band with Robert Smith.
Steven Severin is touring with his superb score for Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr in May and June this year, details here, where you can also buy a copy of his Vampyr CD.
Justin Hawkins, Dan Hawkins , Frankie Poullain and Ed Graham with Brian May at the Hammersmith Apollo on November 2011.
Fellow Austinites, The Darkness will be at Stubb’s on May 25. This, for me, is a must-see show. Just when rock and roll seems to have been taken over by bands that are smaller than life and waaaay too serious, The Darkness returns to crush the twee brigade into fine dust.
Here’s something for you folks with a taste for the bizarre: a video mix of Indonesian horror films and garage/psyche rock from Southeast Asia.
Look Back In Angkor featuring music by Srei Sothear, Sin Sisamouth, Prum Manh, Meas Samon, The Gang Of Harry Roesli, Aka, and lots of tracks by artists unknown that appeared on rare homemade audio cassettes.
[I’ve got the flu today, so I’m retooling an older post from 2010 with a different video while I go feel sorry for myself!]
In 2010, The Quietus blog ran a feature where they asked musical luminaries like Nick Cave, John Lydon, Iggy Pop, Mike Patton, Wayne Coyne and Ennio Morricone what their favorite Miles Davis album is. Unsurprisingly, asking these iconoclastic fellas, the majority of the nods go to Miles’ incredibly far out 70s album (from Bitches Brew to Dark Magus basically), the ones that most jazz fans, and even staunch Miles Davis fans used to absolutely hate, but that have been reconsidered critically in recent years as the public caught up to them
For me, I started to get into this “difficult” spot of the Miles Davis catalog about ten-twelve years ago. I already owned Bitches Brew and Get Up With It (which features a incredible sidelong elegy to Duke Ellington titled “He Loved Him Madly” improvised in the studio after Miles heard Ellington had died. The piece was cited by Brian Eno as the beginnings of ambient music) but it was A) getting a really good stereo system in 2002 and B) reading this amazing rant by Julian Cope about this period of Miles’ output that saw me really investigate the “horrible” racket Miles was making then. Wanting new music to listen to on my new toy, I bought Dark Magus first, Pangaea and Agharta in the space of three consecutive days. Once I started, I fell into a musical rabbit hole that I didn’t get out of for about a year or two later. I was not a very popular guy with the neighbors back then, I don’t think.
Not that I am saying anything here that hasn’t been expressed already in quarters like The Wire magazine, but if you ask me, the material that Miles Davis produced between 1970 and 1975 (when ill health and drug dependency forced him to retire for several years) is the absolute apex of his vast recorded output. Don’t get me wrong, I love Kind of Blue, In a Silent Way, Sketches of Spain, and many other earlier Miles Davis albums, but the ones I play loudest, most often and that I pay the most attention to, are the coke-out live albums, Dark Magus, Agharta, Pangaea. These albums are… fucking unique and that’s putting it mildly. There is nothing else to compare them to, even remotely, in the history of modern music (Maybe Can meets Fela Kuti?)
With up to three electric guitarists (Reggie Lucas, Pete Cosey and Dominique Gaumont), Miles on organ and electrified trumpet (run through a wah-wah pedal) and a rhythm section consisting of the insane, propulsive drumming of Al Foster, Mtume on percussion and the most amazing Michael Henderson on bass holding the whole thing together, holy shit, these performances are AGGRESSIVE. Julian Cope wrote about notion of continental plates shifting to get across the power of the Pangaea set (recorded live in Osaka, Japan in 1975 on the evening of the day that Aghartha was recorded) and I’d say that’s about right. Every instrument which isn’t soloing is placed in service of THE GROOVE—even the guitars can be seen as adding a percussive element to the overall wall of noise-funk effect.
At the proper volume, it can plow you down like a Mack truck. Interestingly, from the midst of this dank, swirling sonic maelstrom, every time one of the musicians steps forward for a solo, it reminds me of the odd noises and “squiggly” sounds that seem to come out of nowhere in certain Stockhausen or Xenakis compositions, cutting through the soupy din (At one point on Dark Magus, a primitive drum machine is pulled out and used like a machine gun!).
This 1973 performance from the Montreux Jazz Festival is a pretty scorching example of what Miles and his band (Davis’ sidemen here are Dave Liebman, Reggie Lucas, Pete Cosey, Michael Henderson, Al Foster, Mtume) was doing live at the time. It MUST be turned up loud for the proper effect:
, and a 38-minute EP called Blueberry Hill. John Lydon and Keith Levene were thoroughly pissed off and Wobble was ejected from the group. 
.
to Dark Magus basically), the ones that most jazz fans, and even staunch Miles Davis fans used to absolutely hate, but that have been reconsidered critically in recent years as the public caught up to them
(which features a incredible sidelong elegy to Duke Ellington titled “He Loved Him Madly” improvised in the studio after Miles heard Ellington had died. The piece was cited by Brian Eno as the beginnings of ambient music) but it was A) getting a really good stereo system in 2002 and B) reading 
first, 
and 
in the space of three consecutive days. Once I started, I fell into a musical rabbit hole that I didn’t get out of for about a year or two later. I was not a very popular guy with the neighbors back then, I don’t think.