Original Soundtrack - Chicken Little (EMI)

I'm off reviews at the moment while I concentrate on my book, but the sight of Chicken Little and his three-eyed puffball friends on the sleeve is difficult to resist. Besides, this new Disney soundtrack is also probably the oddest placement of an early REM track ever…

The song in question is It’s The End Of The World As We Know It. The second REM track I've done this week after a drought of quite a few years. The first was Trout - Michael Stipe's duet on Neneh Cherry's Homebrew, when I reliased (admittedly rather belatedly) that it was built around a massive sample from the Easy Rider soundtrack.

And there’s also a nice dose of the long-missed Barenaked Ladies. But it’s got electric guitars on it unfortunately. Barenaked acoustic is best.

There’s a track from Joss Stone here - the first time I’ve knowingly put her through my hi-fi. It’s a duet with Patti Labelle of Stir It Up which leads me to think Joss should do a full-on disco album next. That would be far more palatable than her current blues throwback style.

ABC - Beauty Stab/How To Be A… Zillionaire!/Alphabet City/Up (Universal)

We all know that The Lexicon Of Love was pop perfection. Why else would it have been reissued and remastered so many times in the last few years? But it’s the flawed masterpieces – where beauty meets brutality – that make ABC excel. Like 1983’s Beauty Stab - which replaced strings with guitars and romance with political angst - a masterpiece black and white documentary of Sheffield life. Stark contrast to Lexicon’s Technicolor fantasy.

In hindsight its songs stand up better than ever, the remastering is strong and it’s only the sleeve notes - and several barrel-scraping bonus tracks - that stop this reissue getting a full five stars. 1985’s How To Be A Zillionaire, though, has everything. A proper set of bonus tracks – there were just so many studio experiments in this period. Ocean Blue’s hitherto unavailable Single Mix is amazing, despite remaining bizarrely absent from Martin Fry’s on-going live work.

Alphabet City - Martin Fry and Mark White’s 1987 attempt to remake Lexicon - showed increasing prowess as producers. In fact if the ABC catalogue is to be truly marketed, the next reissue needs to be a compilation of their work as a production unit, for the likes of Paul Rutherford and Lizzie Tear.

By 1989’s Up, Keith Breeden’s glorious sleeve art was being downplayed and ABC would have shuffled into banality were it not for Fry and White’s spirit of adventure –which pulled them into rave culture, fusing Strings of Life with UK pop. Like all the others in this set, the bonus tracks seem to have been bolted on in a completely random order. So you might need some finger work to on your CD player’s programme function to get the most out of them.

Madonna - Confessions on a Dance Floor (WEA)

In a 1998 edition of DJ I referred to ‘Ray Of Light’ as “a great William Orbit album that just happens to have Madonna signing on it.” The same could almost be said of this new one, in which Stuart Price a/k/a Les Rhythmes Digitales packs a big, throbbing, non-stop punch disco while Madonna surfs the wave and interrupts the occasionally genius house with tales of New York city freaks and, ahem, domestic bliss in Wiltshire. Aside from the lead single ‘Hung Up’, the Chicane-esque ‘Get Together’ and the Mirwais reunion for a Moroder-sampling ‘Future Lovers’ are the main highlights.

Eyeless In Gaza - No Noise, The Very Best Of… (Cherry Red)

A 22-track, 25-year anniversary compilation is a fitting consolation prize for a band that were for so long ‘almost… but not quite’. As pure target market for eighties experimental pop I saw them on the fringes all the time (Smash Hits was great in those days, all you needed was an interesting idea or picture to get in their pages). But they never went one stage further into radio play territory – which is where the disappointment lies. If only they had they would – and I am 99% certain of this – been huge.

All the right elements were there but, before you think I’m labelling them as a sort of B-division Talk Talk, it’s worth remembering that Eyeless In Gaza weren’t copyists or chasing after other people’s glories. They had a unique sound, of which Martyn Bates’ Joe Strummer-esque howl was the centre point. “Martyn is one of the great white soul singer voices,” Alan McGee says on the sleeve notes, “by soul I mean Ian Curtis, not Jamiroquai…”

If the E’s in your collection include Eno, 808 State, Einstürzende Neubauten and Echo and the Bunnymen then there’s a place for this alongside them. It’s just a pity that a compilation subtitled The Very Best Of comes with such a measly eight-page booklet!

Various - This Is Not Retro, This Is The Eighties Up To Date (TINR)

The best website for eighties music is by far remembertheeighties.com, which has been a labour of love for Richard Evans for several years. It remembers the decade from a British perspective for a start, and has tracked down many singers and bands that time might have otherwise forgotten.

So it’s only right that he gives a platform for some of them and the new material they’re working on today. So where are they now? Well Howard Jones is in euro trance territory. Kajagoogoo have bought a drum machine and headed a long way off from Ellis Beggs and Howard. Peter Cox is sitting firmly in the middle of the road. The Alarm, though, are exactly where you last saw them, and haven’t dropped any quality control. Perhaps most impressive is a delicate and melodic new one from Pete Coyle of the Lotus Eaters.

You can’t help but skip on with a sense of browsing a ‘Friends Reunited’ for your record collection - and find out what everyone else is up to these days. My only worry about this album is commercial – would a Sigue Sigue Sputnik fan really be interested in something with Modern Romance on it? Either way, if you want to catch up with everyone from Nik Kewshaw to Heaven 17 to Toyah, this is the place.

Various – GRLZ, Women Ahead of Their Time (Crippled Dick Hot Wax)

It’s the stories behind the songwriters that makes this album an artefact. As Vivien Goldman says in the liner notes, “Most of the voices here blossomed, bloomed, then flared out into free-fall like bright fireworks.” Which makes hearing stuff like The Slits’ I Heard It Through The Grapevine and Anna Domino’s Zanna even more important.

There really were a lot of breakthrough female artists in the early eighties, writing and presenting pop music in truly new ways. But have things really changed if you’re new and exciting and female? Or are we stuck in a compromise where the path to success – and we should ask Jem – is just to be the new Dido? “There was a high turnover among these girl groovers who,” Goldman writes as if ’83 was ’06, “found touring a hard combo with motherhood, or the pressures of eternal infancy thrust upon female pop performers just too much of a pain.”


This review also published in: Record Collector

Madonna - Confessions On A Dancefloor (WEA)

Travel late on the Paris metro. Lay flat out in the sweatiest, glammest club you can find. Take a sharp blade and carve out the biggest chunk of the dancefloor you can and hold it to your ear. That’s the sound of the new Madonna album.

Mostly co-written with Les Rhythms Digitales’ Stuart Price, Madonna’s ninth album doesn’t deviate from the in-your-face experimentation of Music and American Life. But what is new is a return to the disco era, from the mirror ball front cover to the Abba sample that underpins debut single Hung Up. It’s the first track in a continuous mix: over an hour with no silence, no breaks and certainly no ballads.

Get Together is a standout for me. Throbbing, filtered disco, it’s Madonna doing the Ibiza beach party thing at long last. The sound of Chicane covering Burning Up. Sorry, on the other hand, is a low light - the first in a string of cod confessionals, lyrically trite memos to Guy Ritchie where the more real-life the lyrics get the more I cringe.

Madonna teams up again with Music collaborator Mirwais for Future Lovers, one of the most pulsating tracks on the whole album. They deliver something they must have dreamt of since the start. A whole track built on Giorgio Moroder’s bass sequence from Donna Summer’s I Feel Love. You’ll be pleased to know they’ve treated it kindly – adding nothing but a delicious ever-ascending vocal hook.

There’s just one thing missing from all of these pulse-driven tracks and that’s the killer chorus. Sure, there are plenty of pop references, more than any previous album in fact. Like running a “let it be” refrain into the return of Papa Don’t Preach’s string quartet for Let It Will Be. But you do get the killer chorus in track eight – Jump – which combines all of this album’s good points with a hook the strength of Deeper And Deeper.

Push - first track to run at a slower, lower BPM – is an interesting mix. More domestic boredom lyrically but saved by another killer chorus. How High is a missed opportunity though. A shame because for this one Madonna actually begins to deliver an actual confession on the dancefloor - “Should I carry on? Will it matter when I’m gone?” - and ponder something more deeper.

I Love New York is Ray Of Light revisited. Where William Orbit sci-fi’d up a country track for his urban soundtrack, Stuart Price uses sirens and FM radio power trance. And by this track you would have either binned this album (disappointed that Madonna hadn’t grown up into that guitar-strumming activist from American Life) or you wouldn’t have paused for breath for a solid chuck of 120BPM disco. Personally I think Madonna’s back there where Music album had her. But she’s dispensed with the fake bling and accepted the fact that disco in 2005 is about atmosphere more than attitude.


This review also published in: Record Collector

Can – Future Days/Landed/Soon Over Babaluma/Unlimited Edition (Mute)

For many readers who have never explored Can before, myself included, listening to these new remastered editions will be like meeting a long-lost relative. Someone from generations back who you’ve heard so much about but never actually met.

Their influence is massive. In Can’s case they represent the exact moment that the avant-garde and classical experimentalism head-butted the rock world. They formed in 1968 as a five piece, the most recognisable names being Holger Czukay and Jaki Leibzit. The two musical styles they brought with them – one a former student of Karlheinz Stockhaisen, the other an exponent of freeform jazz – set the tone for the band.

It’s a tone that has resonated for almost forty years. Mutant industrial, pop-progressive and electronic glitch-tech have all emerged from their ever-curious sound-lab. Which makes meeting these oddball relatives on CD for the first time all the more intriguing…

Future Days, the band’s fifth album, originally appeared in 1973 and came at moment of change. Vocalist Damo Suzuki was about to leave to become a Jehovah’s Witness and it was the start of the end for Can’s trademark two-track approach to recording. That’s one track for a live performance and one for overdubs, which gives this whole album an energy and vitality that’s lacking on their later work.

But then on the later work in question, their multi-track approach lead them for the first time into true ambient territory. Eno may have coined the term, but Can were recorded the first ever excursions into ambient music with Quantum Physics from Soon Over Babaluma (1974).

It doesn’t seem to have dated at all, which is more than can be said for the Bowie-like glam rock of Landed (1975). It has its moments, like the 13-minute rock-out and the sequel to Quantum Physics, Red Hot Indians, both of which sound delightfully alien, but the rest of it has aged terribly.

With Unlimited Edition (1976), Can were anything but glam. Here they started on a new path of prog-leaning, dark and dangerous avant-garde noodling. Back to their freeform roots and at its best on the funky shuffling of LH 7o2 and EFS No. 27 and EFS No. 7 which sound like the band are attempting to recreate Brion Gysin’s 1950’s Moroccan field recordings (Can did say EFS stood for Ethnological Forgery Series, after all).

These albums only scratch the surface of Can – there are scores of others in the catalogue and hundreds of hours of unreleased recordings. But they are still exactly like meeting long, lost that distant relative. At times inspiring, at others embarrassing. Some moments are bang up to date and timeless, then others make you realise just how geriatric they are. But for all their failings, they help you join up the dots and find out how you got to where you are today…

Ray Charles - Ray Charles in Concert (BMG)

This DVD Video was recorded back in 1999 at a benefit concert in Florida for the Miami Lighthouse for the Blind. While there are no extras, the first number is the background to some intriguing black and white warm-up and rehearsal footage and jamming. From there it’s straight into a great colour TV-shot concert with full big band.

There are some prime examples of the man and his magic here – and strong evidence that even at the end of the 90s he was still capable of delivering. I Got A Woman is the classic gospel opener. I Hurts To Be Loved draws emotion from the assembled orchestra and songs like Georgia On My Mind and Your Cheatin’ Heart (which gets a special ripple from an audience that adds little atmosphere to proceedings) are even more compelling, in light of Jamie Foxx’s Academy Award-hoovering portrayal of the man and his life.

The best moments of jazziness come when Ray leaves the keyboards to deliver a sax solo on Al I Ever Need Is You, and a couple of duets (including the I Had To Be You) with Diane Schuur, who gets a classic Ray Charles intro in “I’m going to introduce a little femininity to the stage. Hallelujah. Can I get an Amen on that?” Amen!

Jimmy Ramsay - Tower Blocks & Top Tens (Independent Music Press)

Any book that's 100% unofficial and with a low, 123-pages-to-£8.99 price ratio is never going to go in anything other than the cash-in category. Which is a shame because the story of Mike Skinner and The Streets is one that's well worth telling. In fact it was worth telling right from the moment Skinner started coming out with lyrics like “You say that everything sounds the same, then you go buy them. There's no excuses my friend, lets push things forward…”

Whether or not lines like that make him “the new Alan Bennett” (a claim dissected in this book) is another matter. But author Jimmy Ramsay tells Skinner’s story well, right from the moment he couldn’t believe his mum was singing along to Dry Your Eyes Mate via comparisons with Ken Loach and, really, Yes’ Tales From Topographic Oceans.

Of course it's never going to be the longest book because Skinner has only released two albums so far, 2002’s Original Pirate Material and last year’s A Grand Don’t Come For Free. But this is a world where Geri Halliwell and Robbie Williams are both on their second autobiographies, despite making about as much creative impact in their entire careers as Mike Skinner utters in a single outro.

Jennifer McKnight-Trontz - This Ain’t No Disco (Thames & Hudson)

Perfect coffee-table browsing, this 255-page encyclopaedia of sleeves from the post-punk era harks back to those classic The Album Cover Album books from that very period. If you’ve been reading Simon Reynold’s much talked about biog of the era, Rip It Up And Start Again lately then this is the perfect accompaniment, depicting the sleeves of most all of the records he examines.

It does have a slight US-bent, though but that’s not my only criticisms. My main gripe is the captions that accompany some of the sleeves. Firstly, only a small minority get captioned. If you’re going to tell a story why not tell it? Why the fragments? Also, the captions that are there offer little narrative, only recycling facts you’d probably already know.

So in a book celebrating the last great, golden era of the record sleeve, you don’t come away knowing anything about the people that made it happen –Peter Saville, XL, Accident, Keith Breeden, Town & Country Planning and the like all remain queuing up for good books to be written about them.

But you do come away with an instant coffee-table conversation piece. And an unputdownlable trip down memory lane.

Hazel O’Connor - Hidden Heart (Invisible Hands)

Anyone that spots this album in light of Hazel O’Connor’s recent ITV appearance on the 80s throwback-a-thon Hit Me Baby One More Time will be sorely disappointed. Disappointed because there’s nothing remotely cheesy or Saturday night about it.

In fact there’s nothing particularly retro about Hidden Heart either. It begins as a fresh, understated combination of electro beats and Celtic atmospheres which – combined with Hazel’s voice that has aged well – makes for an almost psychedelic/acid folk vibe. It then moves onto a lilting if perfunctionary set of blues originals.

This is an album that takes its time - it doesn’t rush to impress, and is clearly a labour of love both for the singer, her producer Martin Rushent, long term collaborator Cormac De Barra and his “trusty harp Matilda”. There are also some new collaborators, like Clannad’s Moya Brennan and Tony Dangerfield whose Subterraneans played with Hazel at Glastonbury last year.

Aside from the collab with Moya Brennan, standout songs include I’ll See You Again, Strong and Lovable, the latter of which explore this blues territory, where Hazel is now digging a real niche. All of which throws Hit Me Baby One More Time to the wayside. Forget the ITV cheese and give it a try.

The Beach Boys – The Platinum Collection

The Beach Boys had a precarious time throughout the 80s. But it’s testament to their longevity that they even existed in that decade. They had written one of the soundtracks to the 60s. Blasted and blown their way through the 70s. So what could happen for them in 80s?

The decade started impressively enough. The Beach Boys played mammoth shows in the UK (Knebworth) and the US (The Mall in Washington DC). And they were awarded a star on the Hollywood walk of fame. But at the same time as these great heights, drummer Dennis Wilson was beginning to go AWOL through continued drug abuse and their 26th album, Keeping The Summer Alive, limped out…

In ’81, the drugs were visibly taking their toll. Of the three founding brothers, Dennis and Brian are were most inept at what is considered to be the bands worst ever gig (the nationally televised Long Beach concert) while Carl Wilson split from the group and released an eponymous debut, telling press that he wouldn’t rejoin the band until “1981 means as much as 1961”…

Things just got silly in 1982. Dennis had a baby by Shawn Love, band-mate Mike Love’s (alleged) illegitimate daughter. And later that year the band ‘fired’ Brian Wilson in the hope of straightening him out. Having just turned 39, Dennis tragically drowned the next year. His lasting memory is the classic – and criminally overlooked – Pacific Ocean Blue solo album.

By the mid-80s, things were picking up. Brian Wilson appeared to be winning his long battles with drugs, the band delivered a very well received Live Aid performance in ’85 and released The Beach Boys album, with Ringo Starr and Stevie Winder guesting. The next year Brian took his first tentative steps back into a recording studio, and the band hit their 25th anniversary.

It took until 1987 for The Beach Boys to get to grips with the 80s. But that’s when - musically speaking – it all started to go wrong. From ethereal beach classics and hippy experimentation, The Beach Boys (presumably with Brian Wilson safely under lock and key) released Wipe Out, with comedy rap act The Fat Boys. As if that wasn’t enough, in ’88 the band – again without Brian (who was busy releasing his critically acclaimed solo debut) – released Kokomo from the Tom Cruise film Cocktail. Like sad caricatures of themselves, they had officially become their own, budget tribute act.

It’s these travesties that close The Platinum Collection. So thank goodness for programmable CD players. Just take the 60-track 3 CD set and play it backwards. Start where it all went wrong and freewheel in reverse back to where it all went right. Midway, out of your rear-view mirror, you’ll see classics like Help Me Rhonda and Good Vibrations coming towards you. And by the time you end up at the beginning you’ll be in 1962 listening to I Get Around and Surfin’ USA and the future will be but a distant memory…

Various - Produced By Trevor Horn (ZTT)

We all know about Phil Spector’s ‘wall of sound’, to say nothing of Brian Wilson’s dreams of sound and even Pete Waterman’s mouth of sound. This box set makes the case for what Trevor Horn – now celebrating his 25th year of hits – has created. A “whole room of sound,” as Paul Morley once said, “the walls, floors, ceilings, doors, windows, decorated with absolute flourish.”

The stats are compelling - 30 tracks, seven No. 1’s and a further 11 Top 10 hit singles spanning four decades. MOR work with the likes of Paul McCartney and Rod Stewart is omitted in favour of what the Pet Shop Boys (represented here with the disco-Debussy It’s Alright) would term ‘pop art’.

The best tracks are the experimental pop (Malcolm McLaren, Grace Jones, Propaganda) and the 80s classics (ABC, Godley & Creme). There are passable recent hits too, ranging from Lisa Stansfield to Shane MacGowan. tATu and Frankie are sonically the most impressive, and the album is worth collecting alone for a resplendent remaster of Buggles’s Video Killed The Radio Star.

So who escaped? There’s certainly enough material to make a volume two of this release. It would make room for the FGTH and Seal singles onerous in their absence and provide a platform for tracks from The Trevor Horn Orchestra and The Musical Cast of Toys, his soundtrack session teams from Toys and Mona Lisa.

Some of the one-off singles that collectors love are also missing. Not the hack jobs like Barry Manilow (Horn produced a Take That cash-in remake of Could It Be Magic) but the lush curios of Lomax, Betsy Cook and the sublime Inge. But to dwell on these omissions would be beside the point - this compilation is as overdue as it is essential.

Produced By Trevor Horn - Wembley Arena, 11/11/04

The numbers are impressive: 25 years of hits, 6,500 in the audience, 13 acts and one royal. Add to that the pomp of a full orchestra and the personal touch of song-by-song commentary by Horn himself and you have a unique night.

Trevor Horn’s anniversary testimonial for the Princes Trust was presented more or less in chronological order. Which meant that Buggles opened the show, followed by Dollar, ABC, Yes, Propaganda and then Belle & Sebastian. After the interval (presumably for a royal toilet break), Pet Shop Boys, Lisa Stansfield, Seal and tATu brought the story up to date, before Frankie Goes To Hollywood closed the show with a bang.

The house band were a key element of this concert. Lol Creme, various members of Yes, Art of Noise and Buggles’ Geoff Downes were the ones that allowed such a variety of performers to work together seamlessly. The crowd didn’t work together half as well. Disappointed Simple Minds fans (Jim Kerr pulling out after an ear complaint) sat alongside 80s enthusiasts there for partially reformed and, it has to be said, butt-kicking ABC and Frankie, who in turn sat alongside long-haired Yes-sers and shaven-haired Pet Shoppers

So it was the artists with true charisma that got everyone in the arena on their feet and dancing together. Grace Jones did it first, dominating the stage for a stunning Slave To The Rhythm. And Seal followed through, jumping off to deliver most of Killer from within the crowd.

Horn hardly left the stage for the whole evening – singing back-up or playing bass, or darting around playing host. “I’m going to vanish back into the studio for the next 25 years,” he said at the end. But I’m not sure I believe him.

Fila Brazilia – Dicks (Twentythree)

Fila Brazilia have always been a class name to drop by fans of jazzy electronica. But aside from listing founder Steve Cobby’s Heights of Abraham offshoot as a “gem” in RC 301, I’ve never properly checked the band out. So with the release of Dicks, the Hull-based duo’s tenth album released on their fifteenth anniversary, I felt the time was long overdue.

By track five I can say that I’m a Fila convert. It’s much more melodic than I expected (and than electronic experimentalism often is) and also more daring production- and instrumentation-wise than anything equally as jazzy.

Dicks (and the band have made sure they’ve used every pun on the title you could imagine) has 29 tracks across 59 minutes. Some of which comprise random found sounds (An Impossible Place, VD and Curveball for the 21st Century). Others (like The Great Atracrtor, The Giggle Box, and Heil Mickey) are the deepest funkiest grooves, like a cross between Crosstown Traffic, Bullet, early Egg, late Biting Tongues and so on. Personally I’m quite taken with the upbeat, melodic and mellow tracks like Shellac and We’ve Almost Surprised Me – both arriving at the wrong end of the year to be summer chill out classics.

If, like me, you’re well overdue to check out Fila Brazilia then make this your first taster. I’m off to check their A Certain Ratio remix EP…