The Counterforce No. 19

Charly Bliss, Skagboys, Rhinoceros, Mikey Georgeson, & more

Charly Bliss are back, and as poptastic as ever!

I LOVE Charly Bliss. I discovered them back in 2018, the very first time I stopped into Grimey’s in Nashville. I had heard lots about Grimey’s, being as it is one of the best record shops in the world (and now big supporters of my books), and so I had to stop in on my cross-country drive, then moving from LA to Florida. Will was behind the counter and gave me the lowdown when I asked who this great pop band was on the stereo. Fast-forward a year and I’m back in Connecticut and that same band is playing at The Space in Hamden. Now, I’ve had a truly miserable day and was feeling very low, but I reckoned ‘how often will this awesome band be playing a half hour from me?’ So I dragged myself to the show and it was one of those glorious times where you feel the full magic and majesty of music, with its power to completely turn one’s mood around. By the second song, all my troubles were behind me and I was caught up in the electricity of the room. Eva is a mesmerizing performer, one of the few I’ve ever witnessed in person, and I’ve been to hundreds if not thousands of shows. I found I could not take my eyes off her, such was the immense energy in which she flung herself about the stage. If you have the chance to see them live, go. I personally cannot wait to catch them again. And I love her outfit in their new press shot.

I finished Irvine Welsh’s Skagboys this week and, my god, was it excellent. As I mentioned last Counterforce, his writing bursts with Life. The book morally repulsed me on at least three occasions, one of which included physical revulsion as well, the likes of which I had not experienced with a novel since that Brigadier Pudding scene in Gravity’s Rainbow had me putting the book down to retch. Plus I’ve always been queasy around needles, so all the talk of finding veins and drawn-out sentences detailing shooting up had me squirming about my seat as I drove (Tam Dean Burn does a great job with the audiobook). But the characters, oh man, wonderful evocations of what it means to be human. I had read that Welsh’s use of Scottish dialect was because he always felt that people don’t really talk the way they read in novels, and this is largely true. There’s some great bits when Renton is experimenting with keeping a journal while he’s in rehab and he gets so into it, he’s correcting himself as he writes to portray the way he and his friends actually speak. And that final chapter, told in third person rather than interior monologues, I didn’t want it to end even as I had no idea what was going to happen down to that final page. Despite their incredible multitude of flaws, I’m jonesing to pick up The Blade Artist and Dead Men’s Trousers to get the rest of Renton, Sick Boy, Spud, & Begbie’s story.

The Lifestyle show went great and I had a blast, performing for the first time with a band onstage in many years. So much so, there will more of it to come. Thank you to everyone who came out. Prospects were dismal all that day, with the rain just pissing down as we loaded gear in and out. And me thinking I’ve driven the three hours to Boston the past couple weeks to rehearse for this and no one’s gonna show. This year has been full of tremendous efforts to little effect. But you gotta keep powering through, and the room ended up being full. We played with Count Zero (the guys from Think Tree), who have some good songs. Their name put me in mind of Zero Mostel and thus I recalled the 1974 film adaptation of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros he did with Gene Wilder and Karen Black. Worth a watch (on DailyMotion here). What I like most about the movie though is Galt MacDermot’s score

There’s something of The Persuaders theme in his one for Rhinoceros, with its Russian overtones

I was listening to the first Mr. Solo record, All Will Be Revealed, yesterday. The album which brought me to his tremendous body of work, actually, as I had never heard of David Devant & His Spirit Wife before I was living in London in 2006. You’ve probably heard me bang on about how Mikey Georgeson is one of our greatest living songwriters before. One thing I’ve always loved about his lyrics is how he’ll sometimes thwart the rhyme. There’s a line in the title track of the above that goes “next time I’m gonna spend my money on an old-fashioned girl who finds me amusing.” Or how Pimlico has “Sometimes London don’t seem that appealing, maybe your lover is living in Deptford”, when your ear really wants to hear ‘Ealing’. Or in ‘Contact’ with ‘there’s a hole in my bucket, and part of me wants to say oh well forget it’. Well, you know what would rhyme better with ‘bucket’… I asked Mikey about this once, in the early days of our acquaintance during an interview for Cheap & Plastique fanzine, and he made the damn good point that ‘well…that’s the lyric’. Unfortunately the other two songs aren’t on the internet, but here’s Pimlico:

A bit of a short one this week as I have to hand in the manuscript for next year’s book on July 1st so it’s full speed ahead on that.

SEVEN SONGS

The Beaches - ‘Sweet Life’. Still on my Beaches kick. This is currently my favourite song of theirs, stuck in my head most days as it’s been.

Charly Bliss - ‘Chatroom’. Plenty to choose from off their killer second album, Young Enough. Here it’s hook after hook

John Barry - ‘The Persuaders’. One of the all-time great TV themes, but oh so strange as well. I love it. The show is fantastic, one that’s begging to be remade

Johnny Marr & Noel Gallagher covering ‘Lust For Life’. Since I’ve been so caught up in the Trainspotting world, this has obviously been playing in my head. When Johnny Marr covered it at The Paradise in Boston back in 2014 it was such a wonderful surprise. That was a great show. The feeling in the room was unbelievable when the band stopped and everyone was just singing along to the Smiths tunes

The Dead Milkmen - ‘Punk Rock Girl’. concertarchives.org tells me I saw them 29 years ago this week at Toad’s Place in New Haven, CT. Rodney dove off the stage to crowd surf and one of the bouncers pulled him down and, thinking him an audience member, threw him out of the club. It was an awkward few minutes as everyone tried to convince them to let the singer back in. Great pop song, with one of my favourite guitar solos

Mr. Solo - ‘Home Sick Home’. My introduction to the wonderful world of Mikey Georgeson. Some definite Gary Numan vibes here. Summer of 2006, I went to The Windmill in Brixton to catch my faves Luxembourg. The Indelicates were scheduled to play too, and oh what a show that would’ve been. I was intrigued by the sounds coming from the stage so I brought my drink inside and got to witness this. By the time my last name flashed on the screen as the final word of the song, I was sold.

My Chemical Romance - ‘The Kids From Yesterday’. Is there a better song?

I’m also collecting all these Seven Songs lists here on a monster Apple playlist