In keeping with my current listening tastes and my effort to take myself back 8 years minimum I have discovered an amazing band I feel I need to tell you about.

They were called Nirvana.

They were a punk rock band from Aberdeen in Washington and were sort of wrapped up in the K/Kill Rock Stars thing. If you like Unwound then you’ll have no problems with Nirvana who are, if anything, slightly more polished at times than their big brothers from Olympia.

Their debut album Bleach is quite sludgy in sound and lyrically a little immature but still contains some great moments. It came out on the Sub Pop label and shouldn’t be too difficult to track down on EBay but ultimately it’s a little less satisfying than their contemporaries of the time like The Melvins and Karp.

Their next album Nevermind is a real cracker. I urge you to track this one down and give it a spin. Essentially a concept album about singer Kurt Cobains break up with Tobi Vail of Bikini Kill, this is a fantastic bittersweet pop record albeit with thundering drums (courtesy of David Grohl who’s work you’re probably aware of from his time in Dischord band Scream) and lascerating guitar.

The genius part of this record is the decision to polish the production in a lot of respects. Like The Pixies Doolittle it really adds to the quality of the songs. There’s not a duff track on it, it’s a real pop winner. I’m not sure which label put this out but it shouldn’t be too tricky to get hold of.

After this came a split 7″ with heavyweights The Jesus Lizard. Obviously, nothing was going to quite live up to the might of Puss from the seminal Liar LP but Nirvana did their best with a raucous “Oh The Guilt”. This is fairly rare though, maybe someone should put together a Nirvana box set style compilation?

Their 3rd album was recorded, like most underground US music, by Steve Albini and was called In Utero. This saw Nirvana go in new directions on some of the tracks but not succeed quite as well on others. Milk It and Scentless Apprentice are warzone barrages of noise with Grohls drums taking prominence alongside Cobains screamed vocals. Songs like Dumb and Rape Me are a little too rooted in their older material and don’t sit well on the record. But still, this is close to being a masterpiece. Heart Shaped Box especially melds the pop and noise worlds that Nirvana straddled. It seems to be a tribute in sorts to Cobains partner who I believe was Courtney Love, singer in the LA “riot grrl” band Hole who you might have heard of as Kim Gordon from Sonic Youth recorded their first album. Heart Shaped Box is quite beyond compare and special mention must go to the saucy bassline provided by Krist Novoselic (now a politician). Despite its inconsistencies, In Utero demands to be played loud and is for the most part very dark and compelling listening.

Then they just disappeared sometime in 1994. Whereas fellow bands from their locale like Mudhoney or The Melvins have gone on to something of a resurgence, Nirvana is a name not often mentioned anymore in hardcore or punk rock circles. So yeah, great stuff, well worth a listen.

Recently I have found my listening tastes have moved back to pretty much what I liked in about 1996. Jesus Lizard, Blues Explosion and Frank Black are getting regular spins. I was at a party last night and we were enjoying Girls Against Boys and “Washing Machine” by Sonik Yoot. Perhaps I am subconciously longing for a return to a period of my life when I didn’t have a shit job and I was getting laid regularly?

Anyway.

In this 1996 revival I feel a sudden need to bring to all of your attentions a severely overlooked and utterly amazing album.

“The Architect” by Elevate.

And they were British. There’s not a duff track on it. It does sound a bit like GVSB. Or The Fall. Who GVSB sound like anyway. But if it was GVSB it would be their best album. Cheers!

Thanks for the nice comments about the Sonic Youth piece. I think everyone should email them and suggest they reply or I get to properly interview them.

Last weeks Brixton gig perfectly illustrated my problems. The songs rocked, the improv noise was bollocks. Not because I don’t like improvised noise, just that it wasn’t any good.

Talking of improvised noise on Tuesday this week I’m playing with Damo Suzuki from Can. This weekend I spent 4 hours in a very smelly room in Leeds jamming my brain into the ground with the other people playing this show. By the end of it we were cooking, this should be a really good one. Thats kind of a plug so sorry.

In the last week we continued our policy of “weird gigs or seaside towns” with Lords and played 2 very strange gigs. On Thursday we played Club NME at the Stealth club in Nottingham which is kind of like the set of Tron. It was most un-Lordy but yet the gig was a great laugh even if we did have to wait till 11.30 to play. On a school night too. I made a first class ass out of myself by standing on the monitor and it falling over and me ending up on my face. Oops.

Then last night we played a pub on a river outside of Leeds. It was weird. It rained in Biblical proportions and we were outside under a tarpauling kind of affair so rain was lashing the electrics. Very harsh. But fun. I suggest everyone in bands follows the Lordy policy.

I nearly sent this email earlier to my boss. I still may.

COMPANY POLICY REMINDER

In view of the number of layabout student types across the Company, I would like to take this opportunity to remind all Finance staff of the ‘Acting like a student’ policy. I have attached a copy of the policy below and would request that you all familiarise yourselves with the specific detail, and I would draw your attention to some key areas:

1. Dress

All temporary workers should be aware that the business expects you to spend all available monies (and also a large percentage of “non available” monies; for example any loans or overdrafts that are in place or could be put in place) on suitable business attire.

You should all be aware that monitoring of dress takes place and dressing in a suit with a tie and posh little cufflinks avoids any doubt and misunderstanding. Please note as well that hairstyle is considered a part of “dress”. “Dreadlocks” are not acceptable and though we cannot suspend a member of temporary staff for having them we will make snidey comments and generally behave with a level of prejudice that if it were racial would see us at an industrial tribunal until said member of temporary staff reverts to something less “studenty”. Beards and the subtle beginning of a beard are also seen as being representative of a lack of drive, direction and work ethic within temporary employees.

Please note these rules do not apply to permanent members of staff whose only dress regulation is that their parts are covered up in the working day and any sacks that are worn are of hessian rather than paper for environmental reasons. This is because their commitment to the company is under no suspicion whereas the temporary worker is always being shifty, not doing work, smoking and stealing Tipp Ex from the stationary cupboard.

2. Use of e-mail and internet

The same principles apply. Personal e-mails are permitted before and after your working day and during lunch breaks. In addition to others contained in the policy, sending or forwarding any non-business e-mails that you create during work time either internally or externally is specifically prohibited. The terms “personal”and “non-business” are kept deliberately vague so as to be allowed to be used if we ever give you a permanent contract and then decide to fire you for fun and can’t find any other grounds to do so.

Temporary workers are not allowed to access the internet at all. Again, these rules do not apply to permanent members of staff who can send jokey little quips to their hearts content and even check out what certain aeroplane dashboards look like online instead of doing anything resembling work.

3. Timekeeping

It has been brought to the managements attention that a few members of staff are abusing the length of the working day by shifting it anything up to 12 minutes in one direction. This was acceptable but now is no longer so. We understand that temporary employees signed a contract allowing them a certain degree of flexibility in their start and finish times within a window of an hour between 8am and 9am.

We are ignoring this.

We feel that this freedom has led to an increase in a “student type attitude”. We define this as a general feeling of being quite relaxed about coming to a job you utterly detest. This is not acceptable. In every aspect this job must and will grind you down.

Again, permanent members of staff can wing in when they feel like it, take an extended lunch to buy shoes in town or leave early to watch the football at whim.

It has been asked whether (COMPANY NAME WITHHELD) expects its temporary members of staff to behave like permanent members of staff with no incentive, less pay and no job security. The answer to this is “yes”.

4. Chatting at work and generally having a laugh (includes phones)

Temporary employees are not allowed to use the telephones for personal calls. We understand the very nature of being a temp is that you have other conflicting demands on your time and that in some cases you will be looking for work outside of the company and so communication via telephone, mobile phone and email is of paramount importance.

We are ignoring this.

This extends to chatting while at work. We do allow the temporary member of staff to engage in conversation but only with full time members of staff and only about football.

We feel chatting or generally holding on to any sliver of personality you may have come into the job with is wholly unacceptable. At (COMPANY NAME WITHHELD) you will only discuss (COMPANY NAME WITHHELD) as though you have any job prospects and security which, may we remind you, you do not.

5. Kicking stones around near the smoking shed

Just don’t. We haven’t worked out what’s bad about it yet but we saw 2 of you smiling out there and smiling is what students do. So forget it.

6. Having ideas that may benefit the company (“Creative thinking”)

This is a complex issue. While we like to cultivate the feeling that your views are valued and that you could have an influence on the way things work we don’t actually want you to do this.

You are a temporary worker, or a “student” as we prefer to call you and therefore you are unintelligent (this means you are not clever). Because you still allow your brain to be open to stimuli outside of the company you are weak and therefore your ideas are null and void.

Permanent members of staff are more intelligent because they know more about (COMPANY NAME WITHHELD) . They know less about everything else but because (COMPANY NAME WITHHELD) is the world, there is nothing else. Therefore you are more knowledgable about nothing.

Please bear in mind because of the nature of the temporary worker we can terminate a contract with no notice and no reason. We see no conflict in this situation and us asking you to act like permanent employees.

NB. The term “student” can be applied to anyone, even those out of full time education for 6 years and over

I would like to apologise to Jonny Metgod and his family as my Matthew Newnham pointed out he’s

“He’s more Dutch than a room full of tall men with long faces shouting “shhhhee looovessss iiittt”

He’s Dutch. But he has got a foot like a traction engine.

Well, they don’t actually. Ron Woods in rehab and the reason he gave was “tour withdrawal”. The very nature of playing gigs means you’re hyped up and you’re excited. Monday is the fucking shittest if you spent the weekend playing music. This weekend we went and played in London and Brighton with Lords. And every previous weekend in recent memory we’ve played. This band was started for fun and we decided we would only play gigs a) in seaside locations, b) in places we hadn’t been to before and c) with bands we love.

Last weekend we played the majestic Munkyfest somewhere on the border of North Wales. It was massively Led Zeppelin. People dancing in fields, hills, mountains, sunshine, playing in a huge pig shed. It was hard to force the rock from us at 6pm but mincing around Helsby village in cowboy hats avoiding the rock hard locals was a laugh. Phil decided to go the whole hog and camp to maximise his festival experience too.

So anyway we played the 50th Silver Rocket at the Garage on Friday. Felt a little like people should have held up scorecards after every song and MAN what IS it with the comparisons to Shellac? Yeah, OK if you own 2 records and one is Shellac and the other is Simon & Garfunkel then Lords sound like Shellac but people – buy a fucking ZZ Top album sometime. The Garage was extra extra sweaty and minging. Joeyfat ruled as headliner. The SR people have a 2xCD set out to commemorate 50 gigs. It has great stuff from Part Chimp and Joeyfat that makes it a worthwhile purchase alone. It has a slinky Lords track, a very very lo-fi Wolves Of Greece track and a Reynolds live track from 2002 with a hideous bass drum sound made better by the sound of David Crofts yelling throughout it. Ian Scanlon is all over it like a rash as well with an Econoline gay emo live song, a crushing version of Silver Rocket by Hey Colossus and a demo of Ian in his bedroom singing about girls from his days as Drop Bear. Be warned there is also some of the most aggravating bullshit math rock on the CD known to man – REJECT THE MATH!

Anyway, we bombed to Brighton on Saturday and got to Shoreham On Sea nice and early for a swim in the sea. Well, Phil did. I got in to my knees and pussied out. We had fish and chips on the beach. We went and saw Hey Colossus who murdered my ears.

Our gig was super weird. A lady kept slapping my ass as hard as she could everytime I stepped out towards the crowd. I thought I got the weird end of the deal until a young lady who may have been Peaches stepped forward and kissed Phil. Bizarre.

So then it’s back to work today. Stinks.

Hi

Just to add to the post about Audioscope with some info about the whole Damo Suzuki thing. The band with Damo for that gig is going to be Phil Welding (Wolves Of Greece/Lords) on the bass, Neil Turpin (Bilge Pump, HiM, Polaris) on drums, Elvis Beetham Wallace (Twinkie/Lords) also on drums, Neil Johnson (Wolves Of Greece/Bob Tilton) on guitar and synth and me on guitar. Fuck knows how this happened but we’re doing a Nottingham show at the Rescue Rooms with him on Sept 14 and then Audioscope. It’s all improvised stuff and we’re aiming for the upper end of the volume scale. So get the car/bus/train/walk/hitch and come along and watch us shit ourselves.

In my job it is possible to “raise a pink stub” in order to “get the disco going”.

Here are some other lovely comments from the people who work in the call centre (spelling is straight from the comments):

“Cust called when she was down on electric and someone advised customer that she should go to a hotel or eat cold beans”

“spoke to Miss K but she was not able to speak”

“reading seemed a bit out of sink”

“cust requested to speek to someone higher than myself”

“it’s been a catogory of mistakes”

“house hit by lightening”

“house hit by lighting”

(person is looking for a property) “there is a big hole in the ground where something once stood and is possibly that”

“confirmed property is demolised”

“exoplained”

“expolained”

“occuopier”

“acocunt”

“garunted”

“garentee”

“customer has been reduced to near teers”

“customer is with daughter having belly button pierced. will call back later”

“cust qurin if mops gona be out obn wed conformed this, but relised scot power mat they are only avail on tues + thurs dairyed to contact cust” (translated – The customer is querying if meter operations are going to be out on wednesday and I confirmed this but then realised meter operations are only available on tuesday and thursday so I have placed this in my diary so I can contact the customer to tell them)

“property empty for a while. is a shabby council house”

“the night reate follows on from perv reads”

“queen of puddings, £1.49”

“customer deceased (apr 03) so should not be chased for debt”

“I apologised to customer and luckily he finds the situation quite funny”

“there is a gas leek at the property”

“passed call to meter changes to orangise”

“miis F custclaled thatshe has n ow moved out, of proert nbut dosner hand over the keys ofd proerty untill 16th feb I aidvseed to clal nearer thattime andf I iwll geta key swnet out ofr m enter alsoa refiund of gas accoutt has been done a bill is up to date reading”

“tried to call…no one was responsing”

“customer called back again regarding her ill father as she is not happy with us, stated that we have pressurised him into coming to us. I stated that we do not have a list of ill people in Britain”

“told her she can go to the post office and INSERT IT”

“the customer hunged up”

I am convinced the DESIGNER BABIES are on the verge of something. I don’t mean a commercial breakthrough or anything like that. I mean they are close to arriving at a new sound. They used to take two opposing styles and spot-weld them together. The results were always interesting but the joins were always visible.

But last night I saw them play and a couple of points in the set were just above and beyond. If you’ve not heard them before the basic premise is playing heavy, disjointed rock using sounds not usually associated with that. So structurally its Fantomas – blast beats, twists and turns – but sonically it’s all over the shop. Kate employs a theramin, laptop and a turntable with pre-damaged and prepared vinyl. Mark plays a Tele tuned down to A through a bass amp and Nick could play in Napalm Death if he wanted but chances are they’d turn him down for being too damn joyous when he plays. And thats before considering Kushs vocal talents that range from wailing eastern scales to put Percy Plant to shame to ferocious growls and grunts. It’s a strange setup but somehow they are getting some wonderful pop music from it. Serious!

2 new songs in particular are just incredible, instantly memorable and amazing. One is a weird shifting single note riff built on a dancehall rhythm with tons of twists but never for the sake of it. The second takes the kind of Son House slide guitar thing that Beefheart stole for I Feel Like Ahcid and just pounds it out really ferociously while Kush makes melody of the whole thing.

Rather than mash it all together but keep the bits distinct it’s like they’ve finally found a way of being all the things they are at the same time. I can’t fucking believe it.

I’m running the risk of self promotion with this one but hear me out. I watched the BBC documentary about John Coltrane last week and was really stoked. The docu itself was hippy dippy rubbish but it inspired me to try and work even harder. But I left the program wondering how I was going to do that exactly. I turned my PC on and there was something that was at least part way to answering my question. I got asked to play guitar for Damo Suzuki. Crumbs. Damo was in Can for the uninitiated. He’s on an endless tour right now playing with “sound carriers” of his or the promoters choosing and we got put forward to back him in Nottingham (we being Neil and Phil from wolves and Elvis from Twinkie and Lords). We have to improvise with him for an hour. It’s going to rule. September 14th.

Tomorrow also sees the first steps towards my own record label of a kind. No name as yet (so the first release helpfully has no record label on it) for the label but me and my bud Gareth are just doing small run CDRs of things that might be better served with a cheap price tag but some nice packaging and a little care. The first CDRs we’ve done are for our ambient-ish project EOM and thats a live to cassette album (36 mins or so). There is a also a CDR of a record I made on my own which is coming out in 10″ on Lone Hand (ltd to 77 copies!) and another solo CDR audio travel diary of Australia. All kind of throwaway stuff but hopefully relatively devoid of commerce and hopefully therefore fun.

Been investigating modern composition too and the work of Gavin Bryars who has further convinced me that I am not pushing hard enough.

I move house on Monday too.

xx