Lost Classics

My final contribution to the NR10 feature was a collaborative piece on overlooked albums of the last ten years. For some reason, my three choices were all released in a two-year period. The last of these three short articles was not published on the site.

The Dears - No Cities Left
The Dears so nearly broke through in the UK in 2003. Critics fell for their swooning soundscapes reminiscent of the best bits of Blur and Morrissey and column inches were duly filled. But then it seems someone realised head Dear Murray Lightburn was black and from that point on, that’s all the Dears-related articles could talk about. It was the UK’s loss really, as No Cities Left is as close to perfect as a sprawling rock odyssey can get. The attention to detail in how every note is sung or played, the arrangements and production is simply astonishing. Twelve killer tunes treated with the love and care they deserve, but always willing to experiment and be innovative, whether it be the squall of jazz and feedback that opens Pinned Together, Falling Apart or the barked vocals that close Never Destroy Us. Ignore the fact that The Dears now have the kind of revolving door approach to band members that would shame Mark E Smith, No Cities Left is simply essential.

Kings of Convenience - Riot On an Empty Street
We’re well into 2009 now, yet my favourite album of the year so far is one that was released almost five years ago. Riot on an Empty Street bubbles with intrigue; something which is immediately obvious from the front cover where Erlend Øye is eyed-up by his bandmate’s girlfriend. This album is understated and sparse, yet utterly, utterly gorgeous. Comprised of mostly just acoustic guitar, piano and minimal percussion, it’s 45 minutes where you can get completely lost and just absorb the music. From the perky single I’d Rather Dance with You to the lingering The Build-Up, Kings of Convenience perfect the trick of keeping it simple whilst always remaining compelling.


Tindersticks - Waiting For the Moon
Tindersticks may have been the critics’ darlings in the early 90s, but by the time Waiting for the Moon was released in 2003 they’d largely slipped off the radar. It’s fair to say you know what you’re going to get with a Tindersticks album but that doesn’t mean Waiting for the Moon is any less stellar. Stuart A Staples’ trademark croon frames every track and they revisit the formula of their first three albums (two entitled Tindersticks, the other, Curtains) by including a spoken-word track (the harrowing and claustrophobic 4.48 Psychosis) and a male-female duet (the oddly uplifting Sometimes It Hurts). It may be slightly over-long – you wouldn’t miss the last two tracks if they weren’t there – but if you like your music melancholy, your bars smoky, your drinks served on the rocks in a tumbler and your relationships twisted and complicated, Waiting for the Moon is exactly what you need.

Rex Records

To celebrate Record Store Day, No Ripcord ran a piece where contributors wrote about their favourite indie record stores. I wrote about Ipswich's much-loved and much-missed Rex Records...

As a teenager at the turn of the century, there were only two oases of salvation amongst the cultural abyss of Ipswich: Vagabonds Café and Rex Records. Vagabonds was a relaxed haven and a perfect meeting place and happily, Rex was opposite. In those days when iTunes, Amazon and their ilk were still yet to make their mark, a store where you could discover new music and people had conversations about the latest Sparklehorse record seemed impossibly exotic. This shop was listed in the back of Mojo and everything!

The assistants occasionally strayed onto the arrogant side of hipster cool, but their knowledge of music and their shop could only be described as encyclopaedic. Take any empty album case to the till and the guy behind the till would turn to a wall consisting of a seemingly infinite number of - to the untrained eye - identical blank cardboard CD holders and find your chosen disc almost instantly.

They’d play obscure indie releases, spoken word albums, forgotten classics, local demos, anything. They sold older albums for £6 when you couldn’t buy anything in the high street chains for under a tenner. It was the kind of place in which you could lose an afternoon poring over racks and racks of discs, the kind of place every town centre would benefit from.

Vagabonds is now named Central Canteen and is run with a soulless, military efficiency and Rex Records is now Urban Vintage and sells derivative T-shirts for around £70 a pop. Ain’t that always the way though?

Top Ten UK #1 Singles of the Last Ten Years

This is the second of the two list articles to celebrate No Ripcord's tenth birthday...

When No Ripcord first launched in April 1999, sitting at the top of the pile in the singles chart was the début release by Westlife, Swear It Again. Well, here we are ten years later, No Ripcord is thriving and Westlife... well, unfortunately they’re still going too, and the talentless Irish chancers have in fact had 14 UK #1 singles to date. We all know that the singles charts aren’t what they used to be (especially since the demise of Top of the Pops) and that the best songs never make it to the summit. However, over the past decade, there have been enough diamonds in the rough to ensure that the charts are worth checking out of a Sunday evening. So, here are the best ten:

10. Michael Andrews feat. Gary Jules: Mad World (2003)

Haunting, ethereal, sparse; a song like this would barely get in the charts these days, let alone make it to number one. Taken from the soundtrack to the film Donnie Darko, this song was a complete word-of-mouth hit. It took the much-coveted Christmas Number One title in 2003 following various campaigns in the media. It also represented a sea change for the UK charts, as this was the last Christmas Number One not affiliated with a charity or television talent show. This was the last occurrence of when being at the head of the charts over the festive season still held some prestige. Since this hit, both Andrews and Jules have faded back into obscurity, with neither making it into the UK charts since.

9. Eminem feat. Dido: Stan (2000)

If we can conveniently forget the fact that this song lead directly to Dido’s brand of aural wallpaper being an enormous success, we can begin to appreciate this track. An obsessive fan who kills himself and his girlfriend in a car crash is not a typical subject for a hit single but then again, Eminem was never your typical pop star. His latter efforts may have simply been either cartoon hip-hop-lite or angry, bitter diatribes, but Stan is his masterpiece. A genuinely harrowing tale that was never intrusive, insensitive or sought to gain humour inappropriately from its dark subject matter, it’s a story more than a song and remains far and away his best work. It was deposed from top slot on the charts by Bob the Builder with Can We Fix It? It didn’t seem right, really.

8. Beyoncé: Crazy In Love (2003)

This isn’t really a song, it’s more of a riff – that riff. The pounding drums are the perfect foil for the brass hook that makes Crazy In Love so memorable. The riff in question isn’t even original; it’s taken from Are You My Woman (Tell Me So) by The Chi-Lites. Whoever spotted that and came up with the idea is a genius. It’s easy to forget that before this song, Beyoncé wasn’t quite the all-conquering star she is today and her first single (Work It Out) had under-performed. This transformed her and it’s easy to see why. We don’t care about the lyrics, the melody, the sentiment, hell, even Jay-Z’s rap is fairly lacklustre in comparison. You just need the “oh-oh oh-oh” part before each verse and the riff... that riff.

7. Robyn with Kleerup: With Every Heartbeat (2007)

Robyn was actually around making records in the 1990s, and she was rubbish. That may seem a tad harsh, but her songs were anodyne, ‘nothing’ songs that left your head as soon as they’d entered your ear. For those of us with long memories (and a slightly unhealthy interest in pop music), it was a surprise to have her back a couple of years ago. The real surprise though, was that she was capable of a shimmering pop classic such as this. It has electronic bleeps and exudes a certain cool that only the Scandinavians seem to be able to pull off. It appears restrained, but repeated listens reveal the yearning behind each word. With Every Heartbeat may have not been a worldwide smash, but it showed that the UK record-buying public do occasionally know what they’re doing.

6. The Streets: Dry Your Eyes (2004)

Before the release of Dry Your Eyes, Mike Skinner was just a Brummie chronicling the life of a geezer. The release of his second album, A Grand Don’t Come For Free, had garnered much critical acclaim but the masses remained resistant to his charms and he seemed destined to remain that bloke who talked over music. This all changed over the summer of 2004 – after England were dumped out of the European Football Championships, Dry Your Eyes played over the closing credits and gave football fans a soundtrack to their anguish. (For those of you reading outside the UK, this really happens. Twenty stone men with tattoos on their neck break down and weep when England lose at football). A poignant lament to a lost love, what really makes this track is the keen observation of the minutiae and the sense of loss and despair. It proved to be the tipping point for The Streets, as Skinner has struggled to repeat the success of his defining moment, but it could be worse... c’mon, dry your eyes, mate.

5. Gnarls Barkley: Crazy (2006)

Danger Mouse and Cee-Lo made chart history with Crazy, their début release and the biggest selling song of 2006 in the UK. It became the first single to reach the top of the charts on downloads alone and still remained number one even after having been physically deleted. However, such feats are no guarantee of quality, as the successes of singles by Bryan Adams and Wet Wet Wet prove. Luckily, Gnarls Barkley had produced a cracker. Cee-Lo had been a moderately successful solo artist and Danger Mouse was producer du jour but still, no-one could have predicted this. Built around a sample of Last Man Standing by Gian Franco and Gian Piero Reverberi, Crazy is everything a good pop song should be: direct, energetic, catchy and not too long. Simultaneously haunting and invigorating, Crazy was pretty much universally adored and like several others in this list, the authors have been victims of their own success, with Gnarls Barkley struggling to repeat the sales or levels of critical acclaim since.

4. Girls Aloud: The Promise (2008)

At the risk of alienating the entire readership of No Ripcord, this song fully deserves it place on the list. Girls Aloud have proved since their inception that their songs are a cut above other girl groups (who wrote the songs themselves is a moot point) and this is the best of the lot. Now, unless you grew up in a hippie household where your parents played Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica over Sunday lunch, the chances are the first music you loved as a child was what is known as manufactured pop. However much your tastes change and develop, there’s always a part of your brain susceptible to the pull of this sort of music. Admittedly, it’s normally more prevalent with the influence of alcohol, but there should be no shame in holding your hands up and proclaiming you like this song. And really, what’s not to like? There’s shimmering harmonies, shades of 60s girl-groups, touches of Spector and a chorus that sounds like the theme tune to Blankety Blank. Go on, treat yourself.

3. Dizzee Rascal featuring Calvin Harris and Chrome: Dance Wiv Me (2008)

It would appear that despite the flagging singles industry, last year was a pretty good one for chart-toppers. Like The Streets, Dizzee had always been more popular with the critics than the public, and had struggled to convert his Mercury win (for début Boy in Da Corner) into actual sales. This is his finest moment so far though, effortlessly providing a perfect mix of grime and laid-back dance that it’s hard to resist. Maybe Dizzee’s gritty rhymes about urban life were too unpalatable for the music-buying public at large, but on Dance Wiv Me, it’s fun-time Dizzee as he just focuses on having a good time. Trying to chat up a girl in front of her boyfriend has never seemed so attractive or enjoyable.

2. Manic Street Preachers: The Masses Against the Classes (2000)

Hey, remember when MSP were angry and overtly-political? Well, poster-boy of that era, Richey Edwards, may have disappeared in 1995 but The Masses Against the Classes proved that MSP still had the edge that made 1994’s The Holy Bible so brutal and compelling. The whole story behind the song is trademark Manics: no promotion and deletion of the single on the day of release, yet it was the first #1 single of the new millennium. As for the track itself, it starts with a quotation by Noam Chomsky and ends with one from Camus. It’s abrasive punk rock, it’s thrilling, it’s exciting and it reminds you of the sheer power and influence that popular music can have. In retrospect, this may have been simply a token gesture, as MSP have never released anything like this as a single since, and have slowly transformed into a fairly sedate AOR band. But these three and a half minutes are a clear indicator of how important the Manic Street Preachers have been over the last twenty years.

1. Arctic Monkeys: I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor (2005)

A cursory glance at the singles chart will tell you that – with a few notable exceptions – pop music is a young person’s game. Artists can never quite recapture that moment when they burst onto the scene, and that “shock of the new” is none more clear than on this single. Regardless of your age, this song can instantly transport you back to being 16 and full of hormones and let’s face it, regardless of your age, your memory will tell you that the best pop music was made when you were in your teens. This song is dripping with yearning and lust and beneath it all hides the promise of something more sinister. There hadn’t been regional accents in successful pop for a while, but Alex Turner’s rich Sheffield brogue changed all that. The sub-3 minutes of pop heaven is best described by the 21st Century’s most exciting lyricist himself: “There ain’t no love, no Montagues or Capulets/Just banging tunes and DJ sets and/Dirty dancefloors and dreams of naughtiness.” That is all that’s good about pop music encapsulated in just a few simple lines – will a number one single ever be as good as this again?

Top Ten Musical Fantasy Partnerships

The following is an article written as part of a series to celebrate the 10th birthday of No Ripcord magazine...

Here’s a game everyone can play. Take two bands or artists with a common word or syllable, mix the names together and hey presto! – you’ve made a brand new fantasy band. Think something along the lines of Faith No Doubt or perhaps, more ambitiously, Sly and the Family Stone Temple Pilots. Somewhere in a parallel universe, these collaborations could well exist. Here, in no particular order, is the No Ripcord Fantasy Musical Partnerships Top 10 (with thanks to Patrick Crowther at www.patrickcrowtherphotography.co.uk for the inspiration).

10. Death Cab for Q-Tip

Q-Tip released his album, The Renaissance, to widespread critical acclaim last year. Known for his versatility and ambition, working with one of the music scene’s most inventive pop groups could lead to a match made in heaven. Hot Chip and Wiley came together to make one of the singles of 2008 with Wearing My Rolex – probably the best indicator of what Death Cab for Q-Tip would sound like. Who wouldn’t want more tracks like that?

Runners-up:Death Cab for CuT.I., Q-Chicory-Tip

9. Tori Amos Def

Is there a precedent for this sort of thing? Bonkers singer-songwriter with fairy preoccupation and ground-breaking hip-hop star may not be the most obvious of bedfellows. Mind you, once you’ve breastfed a pig in the name of your art (Tori, not Mos Def), you can probably take anything else in your stride. It’s difficult to see the middle ground where these two would meet; would we get rhymes over Cornflake Girl or pianos and pixies over hip-hop beats?

Runners-up: A New Found Tori, Mos Def Leppard

8. Adele La Soul

Continuing the female vocalist/hip-hop theme comes this collaboration. Stage-school alumnus Adele has a touch of R&B and soul in her voice as it is, but tends to be more successful on slower tracks. An injection of female attitude could work wonders, assuming she didn’t tread on their laid-back, breezy toes. Let’s face it, a vast number of hip-hop tracks have ‘proper’ singers guesting in the chorus as it is, so maybe this isn’t a ridiculous idea.

Runners-up: Adele Amitri, De La Soul II Soul

7. Smogwai

Probably not too likely to trouble the charts this one. Bill Callahan and his band could benefit from some livening up at times and the Scottish rock troupe could provide that. Certainly, the Zinedine Zidane film would have a different mood if Smog had provided the soundtrack rather than Mogwai. Maybe Smogwai (it’s not a band name for a band, actually) could rope in Callahan’s better half, Joanna Newsom, as well. Fancy a bit of harp on top with child-like idiosyncratic vocals? No, thought not.

Runners-up: Bonzo Smog Doo-Dah Band, Mogwiley

6. Yo La TenGo! Team

Now this would be interesting. Brighton-based cut-and-paste merchants meet New York alt. rockers in a tantalising collision. Seeing as Yo La Tengo hop from genre to genre laughing in the face of those who can barely master one, a smattering of cartoon hip-hop and dance should be a walk in the park. A Yo La Tengo release is always something worth listening to, and adding a DJ and the rapping of Ninja would add an extra dollop of intrigue to the mix.

Runners-up: Yo La Tengotan Project, Go! Team Waterpolo

5. The Barry White Stripes

Again, two artistes who you wouldn’t traditionally expect to record together (due to mortality issues, if nothing else). The laid-back, soulful croon of The Walrus of Love may not sit too well on something like Seven Nation Army, but perhaps Jack and Meg could add some garage blues to Can’t Get Enough of Your Love, Babe. It wouldn’t be the first time Jack White’s worked with a soul star (though the theme from Quantum of Solace with Alicia Keys wasn’t exactly what you’d call a success), so perhaps this partnership is the dark horse of the lot and would produce the best work over time.

Runners-up: Barry White and the 2 Unlimited Orchestra, The Whitest Boy Alive Stripes

4. The Norah Jonestown Massacre

This could well be a disaster waiting to happen. Daughter of Ravi Shankar and creator of incredibly wistful and chilled-out music paired with Anton Newcombe’s motley crew of unpredictable, self-destructing rockers. While anybody who’s seen DiG! can testify that BJM could clearly do with a calming influence, a petite jazz pianist is probably not the best course of action. Mind you, with Newcombe’s revolving door band member policy, it’s debatable whether he’d actually notice some extra personnel.

Runners-up: Norah ‘Jones’ Jones and the Joneses, The Mick Jonestown Massacre

3. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah Yeah Yeahs

An all-New York affair and a clash of indie rock and sleek electro-pop. Some CYHSY tunes with Karen O’s frenetic yelp rather than Alec Ounsworth’s thin and reedy voice would certainly preferable, and YYYs would finally get round to having a bassist (not that they really miss having one in truth). In fact, this could be a step too far, as YYYs make enough of a racket for eight people already, without there actually being eight of them.

Runners-up: Clap Your Hands Say Air, Polar Bear Yeah Yeahs

2. The Last Shadow Pipettes

Alex Turner’s 60s revivalists get some much needed sass into their line-up with the addition of the Brighton pop-punks. This collision would quite possibly be too retro for its own good, and does bubblegum pop really need James Bond-style strings all over it? One thing’s for sure, it’d certainly be entertaining to hear Turner’s Sheffield burr telling stories of useless boys and school uniforms.

Runners-up: The Last Shadow Be Your Own PupPETs, The Pipet Shop Boys

1. TV On The Radiohead

Arguably the most popular alternative band in the world join forces with the young pretenders - who would be the lead vocalist is anyone’s guess. A mixture of OK Computer and Return to Cookie Mountain would certainly be intriguing; it really could go either way. It’s debatable what this band would sound like, but knowing how Thom Yorke runs the good ship Radiohead, it’s most likely the TVOTR guys would just end up learning new instruments and working on his vision for the follow-up to In Rainbows.

Runners-up: TV on the RadiOMD, Radiohead Automatica