Back on the Horse! Sorry for the unintentional protracted break but life has been unusually busy since coming back.In a good way. Here’s to new friends – you know who you are.
It felt all wrong to carry on with that old issue and besides there’s been an important request from Alex who wrote to ask, “Do you have anything about Reading 1994? It was one of the happiest weekends of my life. I learnt to pogo!”
Speak and ye shall be sated!
Tipping my hat to ET who has a new blog at http://everetttrue.blogspot.com/
And how’s about this. John Peel’s Festive 50: 1976-2000 as Spotify playlists (some tracks missing but still)
Intermission & Announcement
April 11, 2009
I’ll be taking a little break over Easter so I’ve scanned in the whole Reading Review to tide you over. Normal service will resume around 20th April.
Now, I’ve deliberately kept this blog strictly about the scans and topic in hand up to this point but I’m organising a small event soon and I wonder if you (whoever you are out there) would be interested in being part of what I’m planning?
Do you Twitter? I do. Since 2007 in fact so, y’know, I’ve been a Twitter twat longer than most. However my use of it has changed and increased since the beginning of the year, and really, it’s all down to this blog. I didn’t use Twitter much to begin with, I followed a few mates but mostly it just lay dormant for months on end. But then, at the beginning of this year, all that started to change. I started being followed, and in return following, people who had found me via my blog, despite not publicising myself on the blog.
All of which leads me to my point. There’s a little Twitter experiment/event planned soon in central London. To be part of what I’m organising you’ll need to be able to be available for an hour or two in Kings Cross, on the evening of Wednesday 22nd April . You’ll also need to consent to being filmed.
If you’d like to know more, then follow me on Twitter and say hello [http://twitter.com/thehomme]
Thanks
The 1992 Reading Festival Review, 12th September 1992
April 10, 2009
The 1992 Reading Festival review, 12th September 1992.
Writers: Everett True, Jim Arundel, Shane Danielsen, Andrew Smith, Simon Price, Sharon O’Connell
Photographers: Kevin Westenberg, Stephen Sweet, Matt Bright, Steve Gullick
Those who also turned up to get drunk: Allan Jones, Steve Sutherland, Andrew Mueller, Ben Turner, Sally Margret Joy, Ben Stud, Ngaire, Black Mat Smith, Clint Poppie
Apart from the mud this was the infamous Reading Festival where ET pushed Kurt onto the stage in a wheelchair. Has the story of how and why that came about been told already? If so please post a link and if not then can I tempt the story from the horse’s mouth?
And if you’re looking for a timeline of Reading Festival from inception to present day then this site if worth a look
Reading Festival Review: Cover, 12th September 1992
April 9, 2009
Here comes the rain again…falling on my head like a memory
Clearly it’s less of an investigation and more of an excuse to let Moose promote their new single by distancing themselves from their past, but that aside, I feel a bit of a rant coming on.
It’s a funny thing how occasionally this blog stirs passions and personal recollections about things I’d long since forgotten. I’m aware that there are some (most) people that read this blog who know a lot more about the history of these things and can express them a lot better than I can, however, I was there and this is my personal take on shoegaze.
Back in the day…way back 1988 or so, it was the early ‘proto-shoegaze’ bands that really got their hooks in me. Sure we’d all grown up with The Smiths and The Fall and other Peel favourites but these weren’t new bands, they weren’t undiscovered bands and crucially, a lot of them I didn’t really like them that much. However with burgeoning maturity [cough], a growing confidence and money from summer/Saturday jobs I found myself blowing meagre wages on more and more of the latest music press raves.
These days it’s hard to try and impress how difficult it was to find out about, let alone hear, ‘indie’ music, if you lived in a small market town like I did. Even if you knew what you wanted, and you had the money to afford it, you still had to order it out of a tiny Our Price stacked to the gills with CD’s of Dire Straights, U2, Sting etc… There was no flicking through heaps of tantalizing vinyl, no studying the artwork and turning your fingers lustily across the records cardboard stock. Buying records in those days was just an alternative form of gambling.
You’d walk into Our Price on Saturday. You’d endure the withering stare of some fool, a few years older than you, who thought they were fucking cool because they worked in a record shop. You’d write down your order on a little bit of paper, say thank you and leave. You’d go back after about a week, be intimidated all over again but with luck, you’d pick up a copy of a record which you’d never even seen the cover of before. You’d take it home with mounting anticipation. You’d put it on, close your eyes and wait. You’d wait for the sound of “1,000 volcano’s erupting over 10,000 vestal virgins” that you’d read about; the sound of “skipping naked through cornfields on the first day of summer” that you’d been promised. You’d hear the needle crackling, here it comes…and you’d think… “God that sounds shit”.
Yeah…nine times out of ten the record would be total shit. But you played it to death anyway because you only had a few records and it had just cost you £6.99. Sometimes you grew to like it but you never quite loved it. But then, just occasionally, you did. Sometimes what came back through the speakers made up for every single dud you’d bought up to that point. And as depressing and uncool as it sounds today, for me, some of those records were Ride’s first EP’s.
There had been others before Ride obviously. Some have stood the test of time, some haven’t, The Stone Roses & The Eight Legged Groove Machine. But it was that trilogy of EP’s Ride released in 1990 that really got under my skin. For a while nothing could touch Ride. I knew the lineage. The Mary Chain to My Bloody Valentine to Ride. Each band aping the one before it but in some intangible way, moving things forward, being original. Many scoffed but the fact is Ride made ‘noise’ palatable to me where JAMC and MBV had failed. Sure I’d kinda liked those other ‘cooler’ bands but I hadn’t loved them. Ride I loved and I wasn’t the only one. They had better tunes, better cheekbones and perfect hair. They were everything I wanted to be and Taste almost broke the Top 10, which back then was quite extraordinary. And while we were still inthrall to Ride, Slowdive overlapped these releases with a clutch of similar yet different EP’s which were just as engaging. Then, Chaperhouse – then, as I remember it – all hell broke loose and there were 1,000’s of bands all trying to do what Ride/Slowdive did but successively diluting the quality.
I hate ‘scenes’. I don’t mind broad genres of music, they’re helpful, but scenes serve no one in the long run. The bands that really stand out, who are doing something original, attract imitators. Very quickly there’s a whole bunch of bands that all seem to be doing the same thing. It feels exciting at the beginning. It feels like someone’s bottled youth. The bandwagon begins. Journalists scrabble to cover the new movement. New bands align themselves to this new exciting scene in a brazen attempt to get noticed and kick start their career. The more ferocious the scene becomes, the uncooler it gets. The original bands distance themselves from the sound that’s brought them their success then typically struggle to sell as many records as they used to. The third, fourth and fifth generation imitators can no longer look to anyone to copy and their records have all the substance of the froth from the top of a milkshake. The scene has imploded. The snide bitching begins. That once cool scene moniker becomes a term of abuse. You’ve passed from teenager to twenty something. You feel let down, disappointed. It’s a new feeling. Odd. Strange. You still love those records that were once so cool yet are now so derided. Future cynicism germinates.
So it was the summer of 1991 that Melody Maker invented the The Scene That Celebrates Itself – their own version, which never really caught on – of NME’s Shoegaze, which did. Originally a term of celebration, by the end of 1992 it was all over. And the mud remains slung to this day.
All of which is a flabby, over long preamble to try and justify why I hate the fact that Ride get called Shoegaze. To me Shoegaze is a term of abuse for all those shit also-ran bands. Catherine Wheel? Yeah sure. Chapterhouse? Definitely. Ocean Colour Scene before they jumped on the next bandwagon, abso-fucking-lutely! But My Bloody Valentine, The House of Love, Lush, Ride? FUCK NO! Apparently I’m wrong. Ride were definitely Shoegaze. Simon Price has told me so and well…that’s that isn’t it? Thing is I can’t see how you retrospectively apply a scene to bands who were around a long time before the scene existed. I know, I know…I’m *so* naive.
So what did happen to Shoegazing? Well the truth is it didn’t die but became [yawn] nu-gaze. I’m not sure when the revival – jokingly predicted to start in 1995 – did start exactly but it’s been mutating and evolving in its own quiet way for years now, as this 2005-present Last.Fm list of forum post attests.
This morning, quite unrelated to this I was sent a link to a youtube video. I couldn’t quite believe my eyes. Or ears. It’s like the last 19 years didn’t happen. This was released in February 2009 – and in case there’s any doubt – this IS Shoegaze. If you like this go buy those first 3 Ride EP’s kids. Or failing that, Ecstasy & Wine by My Bloody Valentine.
Update 13th April: Thanks to comment left by David M who highlighted this modern day article by Paul Lester on the same topic. Still don’t agree with much of it but at least Moose aren’t plugging a single.
Right then, I wanna find at least one of these ‘Mud Honeys’ and get them to tell their story of Reading and this photo. Send out the clarion call please folks. Post to Facebook accounts. Email your mates. They must be out there somewhere. Seriously, I wanna hear from at least one of them in the comments.
Talk Talk Talk featuring Mr. Agreeable, 19th February 1994.
What would Mr. Agreeable have made of Twitter I wonder?
Madder Rose live at the LA2 and Suede live at The Pavillion Theatre, Worthing, 19th February 1994
April 4, 2009
Sarah Kestle reviews Madder Rose live at the LA2 and Taylor Parkes reviews Suede live at The Pavillion Theatre, Worthing, 19th February 1994
Orbit – Steve Bicknell and Andrew Weatherall discuss the evolution of techno, 19th February 1994
April 3, 2009
The photo does rather give the impression of (a very clean cut) Weatherall as the victor. Not so much “Head to Head” but more “Head and shoulders above the rest”. Shame the actual piece is so thin and short. Hope that Shelley Boswell’s past doesn’t embarrass her too much, not the nakedness, the staggering resemblance to Pete Burns.
Ben Turner interviews Darren Emerson and Charlie Hall, 19th February 1994. Photo Steve Gullick, club pics Pat Pope
It’s been a busy week as the lack of regular posts attests so I’ve not read through this, however I suspect it is very much of its time.
Regular readers might notice I’ve got a cute little indie ‘amp’ button badge up. My friend littlepixel has kindly worked it up for me. Please do visit his blog where he’s currently in the middle of ‘reimaginitizing’ a series of classic record covers in the mode of 1950/60’s Pelican book covers. Here’s just one of them. Leave him comments and love and I’m sure he’ll pixel more for you. G’wan he lives for this sort of thing.
Oh and Simon from the most excellent Sweeping the Nation has added the 432 available tracks from Garry Mulholland’s splendid “500 Greatest Singles Since Punk And Disco”, as a Spotify playlist here: http://www.sharemyplaylists.com/this-is-uncool-the-500-greatest-singles-since-punk-and-disco/
The Boiler by Special AKA is just finishing up. Harrowing and still shocking. Listen if you’ve not heard it before.
Right I’m off to stick my new badge on to my charity shop cardy now so I can do some of my famed, doomed Morrissey dancing this weekend.
Archived Music Press 