Currently on tour in Ohio and heading to Michigan on Sunday so just a quick little anecdote that brought a smile to my face. And some songs. Of course. Come out if you’re in the area. This is the last run of talks for The Ballad Of Buttery Cake Ass.
I’m a huge fan of What We Do In The Shadows. Not only is it hilarious but somehow each season they manage to up the absurdity. And the songs played at the end are always fantastic, spanning a wide variety of musical genres. I’ve discovered some very cool music from those closing titles. And at the end of the last episode of the current season they play The Dickies’ ‘Infidel Zombie’. Now to my shame, I’ve never really listened to The Dickies. But hearing this fantastic tune, I decided to rectify this pronto. Blasting them on the drive out through those long stretches of Pennsylvania mountains. Great fun energy, killer hooks. Took me a while to get to all of Dawn Of The Dickies because, as is my wont, I kept hitting the back button to hear ‘Infidel Zombie’ again and again. Such an incredibly catchy chorus. And I LOVE the melody in the second half for ‘I don’t believe it, there’s a bullet with my name on it now’
The melody of those two lines sounded very familiar to me, and it wasn’t long before I realized that Martin Newell has a song with a similar awesome chorus. But I couldn’t remember the words he was singing. I started running through the tunes it might be. Starting with ‘Little French Blue’ (I spoke with Martin for The Quietus about this tune years ago here).
Now that wasn’t it but reminded me how much I love this song. Especially his delivery on ‘and you stared at me once again’ in the second chorus.
Then I thought I had it with ‘Mrs. Killer’ from his The Stray Trolleys album. And it’s kinda like the post-chorus ‘shout, get out, I had my doubts about you’. Oh man, discovering The Stray Trolleys cassette before all the reissues came out was quite the exciting thing. And on this long lonely drive, killer indeed on my back after four hours in the car, was great to be reacquainted with this one.
But then I thought the melody might be more like that outro line in ‘The Girls In the Flat Upstairs’ from the excellently titled The Off White Album.
And yeah, kinda. And by this time I was just happy to be revisiting Cleaners songs. Eventually getting to the Return To Bohemia album, full of fond memories of, after having interviewed Martin a few times, on trip out to Wivenhoe to do so again in 2014, he gave me an advance copy of that record and then walking around Cardiff listening to it that weekend, with it being my first ever time in that city and having a great time of it.
I’ve written much about Martin over the years and his music is definitely worthy of a full Counterforce post that I’ll get to when I have more time. It’s great seeing the long-due recognition he’s been getting these past few years. That said, he’s still not a household name. So that’s what made what happened the next day all the more cool. I pulled up next to Skeleton Dust Records in Dayton, Ohio to say hello to Luke before my reading at Omega and I hear a song I both love and am shocked is blaring out onto the street, from the sandwich shop next door no less. I started singing along instantly to the Cleaners soulful ‘Stay On’ and had to ask the man cleaning the windows if this was his doing and if he was in fact a Cleaners fan. He very much was. How wonderfully strange. Hearing this fantastic song and the circumstances put me in a great mood.
The readings have been going well. Of course I’d love it if more than two people would show up at each one. But when you have Fred from Elite Terrorism Modulus and Art ‘Dr. J’ Jipson who are both hugely knowledgeable and enthusiastic about music and both having loved the book, well, you can’t really ask for more awesome energy than that and a great time was had. It was one of the best readings/talks of the year, and we could very well have chatted about music for many, many more hours. Check out Art’s radio show on WUDR.
And tonight at the very cool curated indie bookshop/publisher/vegan café in Columbus, Two Dollar Radio HQ, I met and had a great chat with Bela Koe-Krompecher whose Love, Death + Photosynthesis I can’t recommend enough. Bela read tonight too which was cool. Also Jonathan Russell Clark, who wrote a great piece for Esquire earlier this year about Gravity’s Rainbow turning 50, came out tonight and was good to meet him. And a stranger named Jenny was the other, second person in the audience tonight. Strange coincidences abound around this book, tonight being me mentioning Agawam, MA in my talk and that’s where she was from.
Hope to see some more of you in Toledo, Ann Arbor and Ferndale
SEVEN SONGS
Tony Allen - ‘Nite Owl’. Great 50s tune I discovered thru What We Do In The Shadows
Ramones – ‘SLUG’. Speaking of incredibly catchy punk rock, one of my faves
The Boo Radleys - ‘Stuck On Amber’. Always loved this song and it’s been getting stuck in my head lately. The line ‘I make it hard to get along with me’ resonating particularly. Sometimes it seems I do, without particularly meaning to
The Breeders – ‘So Sad About Us’. I can’t reference The Who’s A Quick One and not include a song from it. I’ve always loved The Breeders’ cover of this Townshend song. I know Mercury is in Retrograde and you can never plan anything ideally anyway, but with this tour, if things had been shifted ever so slightly, I could’ve caught The Breeders tonight at the Rock Hall and of course the GBV 40th anniversary shows last week.
Guided By Voices - ‘Everyone Thinks I’m A Raincloud (When I’m Not Looking)’. I did get a bootleg of the GBV shows though, and WOW, killer stuff. This is one of my favourite GBV songs and I’d never heard them do it live before. Half Smiles has some great stuff on it, a really underrated record. The lyrics on this often hit home and Pollard’s melodic twists especially towards always bring a big smile while I’m rocking along
The Cleaners From Venus – ‘He’s Going Out With Marilyn’. Another Cleaners one that’s been stuck in my head. Big melodies from Martin, and that lovely guitar run from the iv to the IV chord
Tommie Young - ‘Do You Still Feel The Same Way’. Johnnie Johnstone tweeted about this album recently and, intrigued by the cover, I gave it a listen. Very glad I did. Great soul singer.
I’m also collecting all these Seven Songs lists here on a monster Apple playlist