The Counterforce No. 1
Sami Yaffa, Hanoi Rocks, James Montague, Thus Love, Zero le Crêche, Sam Barton, Sans Souci, 7 Songs
Welcome
Hi Everyone. Thank you for subscribing. It’s about time I started one of these. I loved doing my podcasts, taking the name for this from my 2018 show The Counterforce, for which one of my favourite artists Roman Muradov did this awesome logo, as well as doing First Kiss Lips, which kicked off my writing career. I had long been wanting to start a blog, and when I finally did, sites started asking me to write for them, and I’ve ended up talking to, meeting, and reviewing a lot of great musicians, writers, artists, some of whom I’ve been a fan of for a very long time. I never expected any of this. It’s been pretty great. The Counterforce name is taken from Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow.
For Christmas 1989, I asked for and received the Uzi Suicide reissues of the first four Hanoi Rocks albums. I had never heard the band before but I would often see their Two Steps From The Move in the cheap cassette bin at my local record store, Graf Wadman. And I’d been reading a lot about them in the months leading up to the re-releases. It’s easy to see now, even just by looking at their pictures, how much influence they had on the LA scene at the time, especially on Guns N’ Roses, down to Razzle’s top hat. The covers of the four albums – Bangkok Rocks Saigon Shakes Hanoi Rocks, Oriental Beat, Back To Mystery City, and Self Destruction Blues – really intrigued me. I loved the use of a dominant colour added to the original artwork – yellow, red, green, and blue. And as I was always attached at the hip to my Walkman at the time, I recall vividly listening to the debut album that night as my family drove over to my grandmother’s house for her holiday party. And loving it. Hanoi are just great rock n roll. ‘11th Street Kids’ really resonated with me on every level – the insanely catchy, harmonized guitar intro, lyrics about being a punk – a genre my 13 year old self had just discovered and was loving all of it – as well as talking about friendship as my own friend group was shifting into the unknown. Plus it mentions a ‘Suzy’, which is one of the great rock n roll names. And having grown up with my mom playing all the awesome 60s songs around the house, I was particularly fond of their cover of ‘Walkin’ With My Angel’. Those albums have stuck with me over the years, even though it would be decades before I met anyone else who had ever heard of the band. Back To Mystery City remains one of my favourite records of all-time, definitely Top 20. The killer pop of ‘Sailing Down On Tears’, ‘Ice Cream Summer’, and the title track. The frantic rock of ‘Tooting Bec Wreck’, and the minor key splendor of ‘Until I Get You’.
All this is by way of coming to the fact that I’m listening to bassist Sami Yaffa’s autobiography, The Road Bends, at the moment and loving it. It’s one of those books that you don’t want to end. So many great stories, including Nasty Suicide once taking so many pills that his legs stopped working, so they duct-taped him to a pole at the side of the stage and draped his guitar over his neck so he could do the show. Sami reads the book himself, which is always great. He did so much more than just play with Hanoi, that was only the beginning of a long and varied career. There were only a couple other projects I was aware of – Jetboy, and him later joining The New York Dolls and Joan Jett. Now I’m getting into his Mad Juana and work with Pelle Almgren. I highly recommend The Road Bends. As well as Ari Väntänen’s beautiful Hanoi biography that Cleopatra Records put out a few years back, my review of it for Under The Radar here.
Another audiobook I recently finished and really recommend if you like football (soccer) is James Montague’s When Friday Comes: Football Revolution in The Middle East and the Road to Qatar. A fascinating look at everything that goes into the sport in the region – the trouble players face moving between countries, the political and religious influences on and obstructions to the game, especially the plight of Iranian woman attending matches, the insane amounts of money the owners weild, the khat epidemic in Yemen, and the sheer love of the game that keeps so many going through difficult times. The ‘Egypt and the Revolution’ chapter is very moving, showing what can be accomplished when people come together, and how soccer is one of, perhaps the greatest uniting force on the planet. The book is updated from its original release, the events of which were mostly from the noughties, to include what went into the last, very problematic, World Cup. But, oh man, thinking back to the tournament itself, it was really everything you wanted. The lifeforce of Morocco, getting the whole world on their side, Messi finally getting his, and that final, oh man. It had everything. Thinking Argentina had it until the 74th minute, and then after that, edge of my seat the whole way. I was on the phone calling in late to work when Messi scored his second goal. Still feeling the comedown from those 29 days.
I doubt I’ll write too much about sport in this newsletter, after all, I intend it to be mostly about that other great unifying force – music – but I do want to mention Montague’s book Thirty One Nil: On The Road With Football’s Outsiders: A World Cup Odyssey. One of the best books I’ve ever read. Montague travels to remote corners of the globe and other territories, some war-torn and particularly dangerous, to report on these teams and players’ hopes for football glory. What I love about Montague’s writing is how much of life he takes in, presenting such a full and vivid picture - one that you really feel - of all the passions and conditions that make up, well, existence.
So back to music. A band I have been loving these past few weeks is Thus Love. A queer post-punk trio from Vermont. And wow do they embody the spirit of melodic post-punk! Not the sort of sound you usually associate with the Green Mountain State but their video for ‘In Tandem’, my favourite song off their very strong debut, evokes Vermont very well. And it’s a lot of fun – masks, diners, graveyards. All their videos so far are works to behold.
I love when you can’t quite spot what something reminds you of and it’s all the more wonderful for it. There’s an obvious Joy Division-esque bassline here, but as for the rest of it, it’s harder to pin down. Echoes of The Church, Iggy Pop, The Psychedelic Furs, The Long Blondes. And Zero le Crêche. Does anyone know them? I discovered this obscure band on the Cleopatra comp In Goth Daze in the 90s. ‘Last Year’s Wife’ is wonderful pop, reminiscent of Echo & The Bunnymen and The Psych Furs. Only later, around 2011, did I learn anything more about them, and that there’s a complete collection that’s worth a listen.
Sam Barton from Teeth Of The Sea and Hirvikolari has a new album, Kinetic Vacancy, out on February 3rd. Lead-off track ‘Wavertree’ sounds promising. Sam’s ‘We painted our faces and gave false names’ is one of the most gorgeous instrumentals I know. I’ve listened to it on repeat on dozens of occasions. Evokes feelings for me that I get from The Cure’s ‘Disintegration’ and Aphex Twin’s ‘4’ and ‘Blue Calx’, as well as some of the more stretched-out pieces on James’ Wah-Wah (that trumpet), and a mix of these might not be too sonically dissimilar.
Sans Soucis has released a pretty good electro-pop single this week in ‘Merchants’. I’ve been following their career since the beginning, they have such a lovely voice. There’s a very cool breeziness to it while retaining a strong sense of melody.
I’ve got a new book coming out on February 9th. The Ballad Of Buttery Cake Ass is my ode to obsessive record collecting and what it’s like to be in your first band. When we were 15, my best friend and I used to make up fake bands to ask for at record stores, and the day I heard him ask the clerk at Cutler’s in New Haven, CT if they had anything by Buttery Cake Ass was a moment of euphoric glee that I will never forget. Something I always try to get back to in my comedy. Dave Hill says the book is “like being taken on a rock n roll road trip by Holden Caulfield with a head injury in the best of ways.” First review came from Louder Than War last week - “humour of the absurdist school pitched somewhere between Monty Python and Spinal Tap” – which thrilled me. Going on a book reading tour for it starting February 7th so if you’re in or near any of the below cities please come and say hello.
And to close things out, here’s something I started with The Counterforce podcast:
Seven Songs
New Order - ‘Temptation’ My favourite song of all-time. Perfection.
Furniture – ‘Brilliant Mind’ A brilliant 80s pop lost gem
Hanoi Rocks – ‘Motorvatin’’ A great rock song. That incredibly melodic bassline. All of it evoking youthful thrills on a night out in the big city.
Captain Beefheart & The Magic Band – ‘One Red Rose That I Mean’ In my talk for the tour, I’ve been discussing what a big event buying Lick My Decals Off, Baby was, the oddity of some of those songs. But also this is another of my all-time favourite instrumentals. Zoot Horn Rollo sounds like he’s trying to yank the strings off the guitar with his right hand, while simultaneously fingering beautiful melodies and chord shapes with his left.
Poly Styrene – ‘Dreaming’ The opening track on her 1980 Translucence solo album. Lovely.
Mad Juana – ‘Mad Love’ One of Sami Yaffa’s projects that I just recently discovered. Shadowy-jaunty and so nice when the melody goes over that major chord
Eric Dolphy – ‘God Bless The Child’ Another of my favourite all-time instrumentals. I was blown away when I heard this as a teenager. Still am. Couldn’t believe someone could play like that. Wild, out there, and yet always capable of reigning it back in to the refrain on a dime. And that tone he gets on the bass clarinet!