Just a quick and shameless plug for The Shelf-Preservation Society, a blog about our kitchen activities written by myself and my long-suffering better half. It's in the links on the right, please check out the others there etc etc etc kisskiss
The Pipettes eh? Remember them? Of course you do. I thought this was great at the time, about 2005. Bizarrely, it sounds quite dated already to my jaded ears, more of which later. First though, in case you don't know, or have forgotten (and who, indeed, can blame you), The Pipettes were a retro-with-a-knowing-wink, polka-dot clad girl group. They had a few hits and a line-up to rival The Fall in its fluidity. They owe their existence, in a way, to the KLF. Their book The Manual was, well, a manual for how to get a number one hit without musical talent, following their experience with "Doctorin' The Tardis." (Normally I'd link to the video here, but you wouldn't thank me if I did.) Julia Clark-Lowes decided to construct a girl band (Pipettes = laboratory equipment = manufactured y'see) and the result was The Pipettes, except that by the time they had hits (Dirty Mind being the first) she'd left to form another band. (They're called The Indelicates. I( saw them live last year and thought they were pretty awful, although nothing like The Pip's) Her replacement and the others (Gwenno! Rosay! RiotBecki! as album-opener-cum-signature-tune We Are The Pipettes put it) had a run of singles, an album and then, mostly went their separate ways. (Gwenno is still in the band, with two others brought in at various times as replacements. Whether or not they still sing the song I mentioned in my previous parenthetical aside (I seem to have even more than usual, today), and what they do with the lyrics if they do, I don't know sadly) Anyway, this was their first hit. It seems to have peaked at #63 in the hit parade, but it felt like a hit - it was certainly played in indie discos and the like, and I should know, I was playing it. Memphis Industries, which was riding high at the time because of The Go! Team's success, was the record ;label, and in the packaging they've put in a lot of effort in mimicking the 1960s Columbia sleeve, an example of which illustrates Record #6 below, complete with exhortations to read the Record Mail and buy Record Tokens. The reverse of the sleeve also has a rather good advert for a "Memphis Industries Hairdryer" (reproduced below) with prices in LSD. The two follow-up singles used a variant on this, but in different colours with matching colour-coded vinyl inside, which was great, but less authentic - 60s singles were usually black. The vinyl's not the best quality, but I've had ropier, certainly sounds fine to me. It's retro, but knowing, affectionately tongue-in-cheek retro. That's the sort of thing that doesn't date very well at all, of course and listening to this alongside the Phil Spector stuff it owes most too it's paper-thin. I think we all knew that at the time secretly though, but allowed ourself to be carried along with it because they did the whole thing with aplomb. They looked great, you could pick a favourite (RiotBecki, if anyone's interested) and you could dance (The 7-inch of Pull Shapes had the dance moves on the back!) and they were always upfront about their manufactured origins. There was a time when their early, non-album singles were worth a bit of money (I've seen them go for £30-50) and this one was worth a wee bit more than the other ones from off the album. I imagined this had calmed down a bit but looking on ebay just now I found that Pull Shapes made £20 while a copy of the first recording of Judy (pre-album) numbered 28/1000 failed to sell at just under £19. I can only assume that a couple of people got carried away but it only serves to confirm my point from a few posts back that rare does not = valuable. There's a buy it now of this single at £8 which is the high side of about right.
(a scan of the record will appear here, but the scanner has been Put Away in the guest bedroom, and there's a guest in it, sleeping. I wanted to gt this up tonight though because I'm offline for the weekend. Apologies.)
Right, well, a little preamble. The thing about 7 inch singles is that they have 2 sides, A and B. I've made the decision in writing this blog to focus on side A and ignore B. There are some great songs on the b-sides of these singles, but I'm not currently concerned with them. Today's offering is an ep, of 6 tracks, 3 per side. I've put a video of the first 3 up, but my comments concern all of them. If you like the 3 in the video, you'll like the other 3. plus, it's still available and not terribly expensive - consider yourselves encouraged to purchase. Anyway this another one from my folky-nothing pile of records, and it's on Bird Records which seems to be another offshoot of the mighty Twisted Nerve-Finders Keepers collective. What I do know is that they specialise in whispy fey sounding folk, usually sung by pretty girls who like books and are usually shown in a pastoral idyll, or at least a back garden, in their publicity shots. This is very lovely wheezy lo-fi stuff, and therein lies the problem - I'm not sure how audible this is on the video, but there are a couple of cricks and pops on the record, and some distortion of her high notes. My equipment (record playing equipment, stop sniggering at the back there, you) is a bit cobbled together but I've played it on a few different systems and it's definitely on the record itsself. I've also not had it very long, and it was like that when I bought it new. In other words, it weren't me guv. I've no idea though if it's a problem with the pressing or if it's just that it was recorded onto a tape recorder made of whimsy through a microphone made of beard - it's very much a bedroom job and very charming it is too. What I should've done, clearly, is emailed the record label setting out my concerns in a slightly more professional manner and taken it from there. I didn't though, and now it's too late. I'm not unduly exercised about it though, because it's minor and has become part of the record for me. I'm not going to claim that distortion and pops make the record sound better, merely that they don't irritate the way a skipping cd, or indeed a skipping record do. The idea that noise in the quiet bits of vinyl is inevitable is nonsense within a realistic time-frame, so long as you look after them, just like a cd, or an ipod. After years you will start to get a bit of crackle in the run in and out grooves, but they'll withstand a hell of a lot and still play. It's not that they sound better, they just become part of your life, picking up noise along the way. This is what people are talking about when they talk about liking the crackle of vinyl, not losing all the subtleties in a blizzard of sonic snow. Noone likes that. Well, someone probably does, but he's an idiot.
No topicality this time, but a link to the last record I posted, as I bought them both in the same place at the same time, as it happens. This is one I've wanted to do for a while, but been unsure what to say about it. It's another example of the 7 inch single being the perfect form for greatness. Some of their other songs are quite good, but they're crucially not as good as this one. Good Girls Don't, their follow up single which was a hit in the US but not here in the uk, sadly falls into the latter category. That needn't concern us, however, for the brief span of time I am giving the band today. I love this song, and have loved it for a long time, but have never considered that it might be about someone before, I just thought it was about finding a pretty girl and being, well, generally excited.
Not only is it about a real girl, she's really called Sharona and you've already seen a picture of her where she's not wearing a bra. Sharona does seem the sort of name you'd make up because it's fun to sing (and, based on how long I've been singing along to this, I should know) but she seems to be reconciled to it, having the address www.mysharona.com for her personal website, from which we learn that "Sharona was only 17 when she was immortalized in the Knack's 1979 hit single "My Sharona". Sharona believes that "'My Sharona' has had an impact on my ability to understand the entertainer's mind, there's something simpatico. You've got to care to the n'th degree. You can't drop the ball for one minute." I sell "the most emotional product on the market, because a star's home is their only safe haven."
She now works, you see, as a high-end estate agent and does seem to be quite respected with it. Interestingly, the guitarist claims that he wrote the song for her when she was only sixteen, so either it was written some time before it became a hit, or he lied on her website to make herself sound a bit better. She was certainly a lot younger than Doug Fieger, the aforementioned guitarist who would have been 26 or 27 that year. This being 2010, some if you might be drawing unsavoury conclusions about him and her involving the words "jail" and "bait." I don't want to encourage or condone those thoughts, but it had occurred to me when reading up on this, that it might have been politic for him to at least disguise her name a little, or at least suggest that if she insisted on being on the cover, she should at least put some underwear on. Thing is, though, they didn't, it was a massive hit at it doesn't seem to have done her any harm, so let's say no more about it. I've been thinking for a while whether it's better to have a few smaller hits and fade away or have one huge hit that defines you. I went to the band's official website to see if I could glean any idea of their relationship with the song, whether it was an albatross around their necks or not. If you haven't clicked on that link yet, see if you can guess which song plays as their intro. No, it's not Baby Talks Dirty. That they even have a website as a going concern is due almost entirely to My Sharona, and hopefully they're accustomed to and comfortable with that. If you're in The Knack and can't bear to even think about this blasted song, then well done for reading this far, and please god get in touch and I'll rewrite the damn blog post.
I thought I'd have a stab at topicality with today's blog post, what with what's happening in Copenhagen, although a song covering the years 2525 to 9595 at roughly 1010 year intervals is probably a bit optimistic for the times we live in. 2525 isn't really about climate change of course, but a sister cause, that of over-reliance on technology and overexploitation of the world's resources. It's an extraordinary song, for several reasons. First of all, there's the bizarre Mariachi intro, which bears very little resemblance to the rest of the song, which has a driving rhythm and ascending chords (I think it's ascending chords with a dramatic key-change in the middle, but I'm not sure. I'm not terribly musical in that way) before ending in a terribly pessimistic way. It's a terribly pessimistic ending for a song recorded at any time, but this song is more remarkable in that it was number one in America from the 12th of July until the 16th of August, 1969. You may be thinking, "well, that's a good long run for such a gloomy song," so let me rephrase it. It was number one in America on the 20th of July, meaning this was number one when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. The Apollo programme is still seen by many as the apotheosis of American science and technology, with Apollo 11 its crowning achievement. It was, in a lot of senses, a golden age. There's a bewildering amount of precognition going on, because looking at it now, we recognise that Apollo 11 was the beginning of the end for all that - manned spaceflight, NASA and all the related industry and science have not, so far scaled such heights again. (Such metaphorical heights - the moon programme continued but the goal had been reached - America got a man on the moon first.) It was the end of the decade (the single charted in the Uk a little later, at the end of August) and just a couple of months before the Altamont Festival, with Hell's Angels security, brought what are traditionally known as "the sixties" in pop culture (which began in 1963. Confusing isn't it?) to an end. 11 years later the first test-tube baby was born and now genetic selection is a hot scientific issue. From our historical perspective, it at first glance it seems to fit the narrative perfectly. We have a lot more information now about the 70s than the record-buying public of 1969 though and know how it all turned out, Could they forsee what was coming?
Of course not, the question is absurd, but it is a salutary lesson in the dangers of painting history with broad brush strokes. Listen to the song again. It's an unpleasant future they're describing, so imagine how much closer it must have seemed in 1969. Men were walking on the moon and they hadn't even invented pocket calculators. You can forget 2525, what about when your children are 25? The song was written much earlier in the decade, around 1963 or 4 (accounts vary). It was issued as a single in 1967 and wasn't a hit, but was picked up by a radio station in 1969 and re-ished off the back of its popularity there. It struck a chord (no pun intended), I guess because the dawn of a new technological age might be magnificent but it must also be a bit frightening, considering we're not that far from cave-dwellers yet. References to future tech are fairly basic scifi fare, a genre of course that flourished with the coming of the space race. That they got some stuff right means they picked their innovations with some care but isn't supernaturally improbable. They never had another hit, but I'm not sure how you'd be expected to follow this one up. My copy is the German issue of the single, with an amusingly awkward definitive article on the sleeve. I bought it from the excellent Second Hand Records in Stuttgart when I was on my year abroad with university, despite my record players being at home and me not having one there, so I owned it for months without being able to play it. This was in 2006 or 7, I think it was January 2007, from memory, although the price in Deutschmarks above the Euros suggests it had been in the shop a while. I don't know why though - a bit corny it may be, but I've played it regularly since then.
Postscript Generally when I'm writing this I favour my memory over Wikipedia, because although they're both fallible I trust the former more than the latter, and supplement my memory with a couple of books and other websites. However, I notice that the wikipedia article on this song asserts ""Their followup single on RCA-Victor, "Mr. Turnkey" (a song about a rapist who nails his own wrist to the wall as punishment for his crime), failed to chart.[citation needed]"
Now I'm only human, I admit I was intrigued. The big fat citation needed on there gave me pause for thought though - if I just wrote it as gospel and it turned out not to be true I'd just be propagating a big lie, albeit a tempting one. I don't own the single in question, but I found someone on youtube who does, and in this instance, Wiki was right. Not being one I own it's ineligible for this blog, but I present it here for curiosity's sake:
It's become clear to me as I've been doing these that I've barely scratched the surface of what I have: I daren't count them for the same reason I daren't calculate how much money I've spent on records - I'm scared of the outcome. It seemed likely though that over the course of the 45 pieces the dominant trends of my record-buying would make themselves known. In an early post I talked about how in the seventies, seven inch singles weren't "special" the way that they are now, at least to a faction of the record-buying public. They sold in their thousands to a public to whom the words 'limited edition' aroused nary a flicker of interest. This record then, is the obverse of that. It's modern (2008), limited edition (number 194 of 300)and put together with extreme care. I've added a clip of side one's track, "Sun Without End," side 2's track is similarly ramshackle, but not quite so paranoid. It's a touch quiet, but the distortion you can here is on the record too - it's not a fault in reproduction or in my recording. That's a leaf on the edge of the picture, I sat the laptop in a plantpot to get a view of the deck with the webcam I mean ramshackle in a positive way, but for all that, there's not much here really, to love or hate. I like it, but without passion. The record-buying subset of mine that this falls into is what I call "airy nothing-folk-records." To me it's all about the packaging (in this instance.) I listen to the record, but what lingers is the experience of taking the record from the box, unwrapping it and putting it on the deck, which is a pleasure I get to experience again, but in reverse, once it's finished. Now, a quick break for credit, where credit's due. The label, The Great Pop Supplement spend their time putting out beautiful limited edition pieces, and this, at 300, is one of their larger editions. They're a tiny label run from somebody's back room and a good 90% of their releases are 7 inchers, each one handle and presented lovingly. Judging by how quickly their stuff goes, they must be doing something right, so hats off to them. Maybe you could argue that this fetishisation of vinyl is a bad thing for music, like those people who will frame your record sleeves - the ownership of the physical artefact becomes the important thing, rather than the music itself. If that were the case, then yes it would be, but, in the words of The Long Blondes, you could have both. I have a lot of singles. Some of them I really like, some of them I once really liked and some of them are and always were mistakes but I've never bought a record just to own it - everything gets played* There are numerous limited edition things for sale that I'm ignoring RIGHT NOW - this one, this one and this one for starters and that's jusrt from the labels that email me. (Although, actually I would like a couple of them...) Thing is though, the aim is for a fantastic-sounding record presented in a beautiful package that can easily be fawned over. I have a few examples of that and they may well make appearances at some point before we reach 45 #45. This one's here though, in part to illustrate that sometimes the zenith I described is missed. I'm very much into this sort of thing though, and Whysp's myspace cites obscure late-60s folk band Forest as a big influence, which is a winner in my book - I had to take a punt at it. This leads me on to my final point, something I've not touched upon - exclusivity. I had to have a punt on it right then and there because if I'd hung around it'd be gone. In this case, I'm lucky (in case it goes, there's one for sale here at £8 on Netsounds, 12/12/09) On one level, it's a marketing con/decision (delete as applicable) but on another level it makes sense - small labels don't have the space or the resources to make and stock thousands of the things, and I don't imagine that the market for them is that big. The secret I suppose is making your pressing number just a bit smaller than your market. I admit that I like numbered editions, they feel more personal somehow, unique (after all, I have the only number 194 of these in the world!) and indie. I feel I've rabbitted on rather overmuch though, so I'll leave that one hanging.
*well yes, the exception is my mispressed mono Revolver, but I was given that and I've got another copy of Revolver which I play, and that's 60s vintage, so nyerr
I've got record #8 written up and ready to go, but it's taking an awfully long time to process the video of the single going round, it being too obscure for the youtubes. Hopefully it'll be finished tomorrow, but I'm off to bed the now.
