Record #5: My Baby's Into Witchcraft by The Yell

I knew that this was going to happen eventually, but thought I might get further than number 5 before it did. The single I've chosen to pontificate upon doesn't have a video that I can conveniently link to on the youtubes, so I've sat the laptop in front of the record player and recorded it that way, as blogger seems to have a video upload option, but not an audio upload. Here it is then. I bought this a couple of years ago after hearing it on Marc Riley's show on 6music back in the days before George Lamb. I thought it sounded a bit like The mighty Fall so I bought it, probably over the internet. Relistening to it again now, it still sounds a bit like The Fall, and it's on a record label named after a Fall song but where Mark E. Smith's lyrics are hard to fathom sometimes, they do tend towards the enigmatically gnomic. "She's got a huge personality/ She keeps it on her mantelpiece" doesn't quite satisfy in the same way. Still I actually secretly really like this - my laptop's inbuilt microphone makes it sound quite flat, but actually it's got a pleasingly ragged bass kick and seems to be only just hanging together from verse to chorus. In this context, these are Good Things. Edition of 500, from memory, maybe less. Marquis Cha Cha are no longer with us, but Puregroove, the shop which birthed them, abides. The aim of the venture though was to "act as a step up for bands, giving new artists the chance to release their first single. According to labelmeister Tarik: "If we believe in it and the band think it's a good idea then we are off." (source). I don't know the reasons behind the cessation of the label, but putting out singles (and MCC was explicitly geared at 7 inchers) isn't a fantastic way to make money. The little quote above illustrates of course that that wasn't the primary motivation for the label and quite right too, I feel. As they already have a record shop both online and In Real Life one of the major problems - distribution- is made less of a battle before they even start. Finally, it's not that expensive to have a few hundred singles pressed up, if you're working closely with your bands and they have a strong local following with a prevailing wind you should shift most of them.
Thing is though, why bother?
I know, if they hadn't I'd have no blog entry today and I've made no secret of my approval of... well, bothering. If you think about it though, cdrs are cheap as proverbial chips. Get a box of a few hundred, burn them on your computer, sell them at shows, send a few out to reviewers or the radio or whoever you want really, and bung the tracks on iTunes and Spotify and the whatever the next big thing is. Total expenditure: about fifty quid.
Despite this though there are dozens of labels putting out black plastic disks (they also use the itunes and whatnot of course). So why?
If I may take the liberty of answering my own question, I think the answer lies in the little quote snippet a couple of paragraphs back. "The chance to release their first single" is what pretty much all bands (who haven't had it yet) want. I could record myself and flog cdrs bit it wouldn't be the same.
The Yell are, as far as I can reasonably ascertain, still going, with being played on 6Music about the highpoint of their career so far. Chances are they won't have a "hit" but who has hits nowadays anyway? the little record labels in back rooms all over the world aren't trying for hits, but for a little stab at immortality. A single like this cements your position of being a band in a way that a cdr just can't.

Record #4: Some things just Stick in Your Mind by Vashti Bunyan

This, the more observant among you will notice, appears in the stramash of singles I put as the header image on the blog. The picture is actually much bigger, but I can't get it to fit. Ho hum. I've been trying to trace the video clip that heads this entry but no luck I'm afraid. I was shocked when I found it - it's so unlikely. Vashti Bunyan's story is very well-known now and is covered in greater detail elsewhere, but I'll go over it here briefly, as some background knowledge is required for this. Bunyan is remembered today for her 1970 album Just Another Diamond Day which was ignored on release but feted this decade, leading to her eventual and welcome return to music about five years ago now. Before all this however, she attempted a career as a pop singer. A proper pop singer, managed by Andrew Loog Oldham with a single (as this one was) written by Jagger and Richards, of Stones infamy. They were essentially trying to recreate the success they'd had with Marianne Faithful (who, incidentally, also disappeared from the music business for a long time, but that is, as they say, another story for another time). Some Things Just Stick in Your Mind dates from this era of her career, 1965. Vashti, as she was abreviatedly known then was not a success at all, which is why I'm so surprised to find this clip, in which she looks petrified, poor lamb. It's not a surprise that she found (very) belated fame as a folk singer, her voice made the transition wholly and is in full evidence here on what is a very mid-sixties folk-pop arrangement (although, if you were being unkind, you could say that the thing that stuck in Jagger's and Richards' collective mind was the melody to Blowin' in The Wind, to which this owes some debt.
But to the record itself. It's a lovely thing, but only a couple of years old, put out by Fatcat Records to promote their double album of Vashti's 60's work, singles and demos, and very nice it is too. They pressed 500 of them, and they are beginning to be a bit sought after in their own right, although the £5-£10 you'd pay for one of them is nothing to what the original would fetch. It's been done to resemble an old acetate test pressing, with labels and sleeve lettered with typewritten text and pen and ink on the B-side. It highlights the "from the vaults" nature of the release well, but also says something about the nature of the 7 inch single. If you had the acetate and this reissue you could play them both on the same machine. The deck I'm currently using is older than both of them. If you have the acetate then please God don't play it, of course, but the point is that you could - flick the switch and drop the needle and watch it spinning . It's a direct link back to the mid-sixties and the methods of consumption of pop music then - and we don't have many of them.


Addendum: It is in fact, I noticed as I lifted the record from the platter to put in the scanner, a facsimile of the original demo, which luckily strengthens my conclusion about the durability of vinyl more than anything, and doesn't necessitate a rewrite. Phew.

Record #3: Brahms' Alto Rhapsody by Kathleen Ferrier

This disk comes from the early 60s, as far as I can tell, but the recording itself is from the 1940s. Kathleen Ferrier was a contralto opera singer who died of breast cancer aged 41 in 1953. She's remembered, if at all these days, for finishing a performance of Orpheo ed Euridice after a leg bone, affected by her cancer which was advanced, shattered and chipped on stage. She clung on to a pillar and finished the opera stationary. It's an incredible story, but it unfortunately overshadows her amazing voice. There still surrounds Ferrier an aura of the tragic heroine, one who died too young. It's true that she was incredibly brave, not only in the abovementioned performance but in the unrelentingly chipper way she faced dying. A few months before her death she wrote to an old schoolteacher of hers saying
"It broke the ligaments and a piece of bone of the hip in the middle of an Orpheus performance, so that is why I have stayed so long here, to give the leg a chance to get strong again. For the time being I must go round in a wheel chair, but I expect I shall soon become expert at steering a middle course and avoid scratching the paint on the doors!
"It was lovely to hear from you, and I do hope that if by any chance you are in St. John's Wood, you would call, and give me the great pleasure and privilege of welcoming you."
She's so winsome it's impossible not to like her. All this doesn't matter though. If she were still with us today at 97 she would still have produced some remarkable work. This is a setting of a few stanzas of Goethe composed in 1869 and although my copy of it is a little crackly (found in a charity shop, no doubt) her voice just cuts across that and is unearthly in its clarity. It's really beautiful.
Although I said earlier that it was a shame that the beauty of her voice has been overshadowed by the tragedy of her death, some great good has come indirectly out of it. Soon after her passing a number of people, including Ferrier's sister, Winifred, who wrote the biography I quote the letter above from, and Hamish Hamilton, who published it, established The Kathleen Ferrier Memorial Scholarship Fund which continues to assist young singers and The Kathleen Ferrier Fund for Breast Cancer Research, also ongoing. I feel it appropriate to plug both it and the Kathleen Ferrier Society here.
The fund required money and much of that came from the musical and theatrical world, she was, it seems, well-liked. Large amounts of money were also donated by members of the public, who were naturally endeared to Ferrier's story. My second-impression biography is signed by Winifred, suggesting promotion by appearances and signings even for the reprints. At the time she was pretty universally lauded as a singer, but as that renown has faded the fame that remains is in a large part due to those early memorialisers. Her memory has been helping people in mant different ways for over 50 years whih is a fantastic acheivement, but it would be a great shame if these bits of black plastic, which the charity shops are rife with, were forgotten.

Record #2: "Feel The Machine" by The Chalets

To start off with, maybe I was too harsh on yesterday's single. It's been going round my head since then. Above this block of text is the video, which they apparently made inside an old apple mac.* Above that, if I've got the formatting of this blogging stuff right, should be a scan of my single. I never noticed until I was digging in the singles box for a candidate but while the title and artist are printed on the card, the other writing is by hand. "Pony" and "Peepee" are the designated noms de guerre for the two ladies pictured and Chris is another band member. The other two had to make do with signing it on the back. Wowser, a rare find.
A break now for some history. Recent history. The Chalets were from Ireland, they're not together any more and I don't know what any of them are doing now, although I'll hazard a guess that Pony and Peepee don't sign their credit cards like that any more. If they ever did. I suppose if anyone questioned it they could just take the single out of their handbags and show the sceptical official. Not this one of course, this one my memory tells me I got in Avalanche Records on Cockburn Street for 99p, but I know I was only aware of their work, so to speak, because I saw them support Art Brut in about 2005, (I've still got a poster with the exact date on it, somewhere, but I don't have it to hand.) so I might have bought it directly from the band themselves, which would explain the signatures, but I don't think I did. It wasn't a hit and they didn't have any hits, none in Britain anyway and only managed one album. They were good live though, even if the single doesn't really stand up 4 years later.
What I really wanted to address though was value - it always flashes through your mind when you see a signature. There can't be many of these around - 2005 was still the era of the cd single, with vinyl typically given one pressing of say 500 copies and not kept in print, whereas the cd single in this case at least, is still available from the record label's website, and typically received as many repressings as demand warranted. Of those 7s pressed, we can assume that most of them are unautographed. My copy's in excellent condition, so maybe I've got a goldmine sitting in my scanner.
It's a tempting thought, but it doesn't translate to reality. Yes, it's rare, but noone cares about The Chalets, not even their webmaster, who had ensured that their website is a sort of shrine to 2007. Value is driven by demand, not supply. Ebay is a good, though unscientific, barometer and illustration of my point. At time of writing you can buy a mint, unplayed 7inch for £2.49 and you can get a signed one, just like mine, for £8.99-or-best-offer, which is clearly a figure the seller pulled out of his or her bottom. (Incidentally, the seller seems to have put the wrong blurb with the listing, unless Paul Weller has changed his name to Pony) The reality is that the signed one is worth the same as the unsigned one, because the "Chalets Collector" market doesn't exist, unless it's old mother Peepee filling up her daughter's old room. Noone cares that 5 people you've never heard of have written the names of their choice on it and unless one of them wins X-Factor noone will. It's the transitory nature of fame illustrated in black plastic.




*I suppose it's not so bad. At least they don't look like Andrew Collins sat next to a sex doll.

Record #1: "It TakesTwo to Tango" by Richard Myhil

The first record I'm tackling comes with a sticker on the front of it proclaiming "Beware - It's square! Do not adjust your turntable" which is almost certainly why I bought it. Square vinyl is a gimmick that doesn't turn up all that often but one still being used - a quick ebay search turn up singles by Morning Runner and Panic! At The Disco from recent years. It's probably pretty easy to do as well -it already fits into your standard sleeve, and all you have to do is change the shape of the cutter at the pressing plant. It's fairly low-rent in that respect and has the air of a cock-up passed off as collectable. That's why the lurid green warning on the front of this single is so ridiculous. The injunction "Do not adjust your turntable" suggests that you would, normally change to the square setting if confronted with this disk unprepped. I've got settings on my decks I never use, but I don't think any of them cover that. I can only assume that the "Beware!" is aimed at possessors of stackable multichangers for their vinyl, because this release wouldn't work well with them at all. The more prosaic of you may suggest it's because it rhymes with "square," but there's less comedic potential in such dry logic.
For all my mocking, it did enduce me to buy a copy, but not many others did, it seems. I'm not responsible for the youtube video I linked to above but it seems it's correct in asserting that this made number 17 in 1978, and the pop world was untroubled by Mr Myhill's prescence again. 1978 is remembered as being a year into the exciting punk years when all the worst pop excesses of the mid seventies were swept away but musically this belongs very much to the earlier era. Vaguely funky synths and drums and the ambience of an Italian restaurant c. 1975 collide awkwardly with a tortured metaphor about romance built on dancing, the title the building block of the chorus because Myhill's "mad affair" is "going nowhere" and his ladyfriend won't "dance" with him. Ahem. Thanks to top of the Pops, we find the reason. Have a look at this clip, hosted by Kid Jensen and some twins of indeterminate sex:


That's right, his amour is... um... a sex doll. Well, this obviously didn't endear him to the viewing public because he wasn't asked back. Keep in mind as well, while you watch the clip that at the same time this was recorded, somewhere in the north, The Fall were playing [i]Bingo Masters Break Out![/i] to general indifference. I said above the video that this single belongs in an earlier era, but watching that totp - it doesn't, not really. Listening to it with the other songs featured that week it doesn't sound out of place, it doesn't sounded dated or silly. 7 inch singles are very much alive in 2009, but are the province of hipsters, fundamentally. 98.6% of singles sales this year were digital. In 1978, it was 7 inch or nothing. That's why there's huge amounts of this stuff in charity shops today, because it was bought by the truckload. The image of the 7 inch in 2009 casts a distorting shadow over the past 60 years. The idea that the format is cool would've been bewildering to whoever bought sufficient copies of "Two to Tango" to book Richard his seat next to the inflatable lady.

I don't know to what extent the shape of the record contributed to its success, but I'm prepared to bet it didn't harm it none. This is a salutary lesson we'll return to again and again in this blog - stupit gimmicks sell records, as me owning this damned thing testifies.