Does there need to be a reason to post this?
Maybe this would have been the cut that changed it all, instead of ‘Smells like Teen Spirit.’
(though that still holds a place in my heart, too).
Hell, turn it up, very very loud, and sing along.
Mudhoney -‘Touch Me I’m Sick.’ mp3
…and you sure as heck should be…
1. I interviewed The Rosie Taylor Project earlier this evening. They were absolutely lovely and their debut LP This City Draws Maps will be out in two weeks’ time on Bad Sneakers.
This is a track from the said album, which they said themselves they were happy for me to put up:
Rosie Taylor Project -‘A Few Words Of Farewell.’ mp3
Track removed by polite request
2. Another 17 Seconds reader, Craig, emailed me an mp3, remixed in 1974 of the Pink Floyd/Syd Barrett song ‘Vegetable Man’ that was covered by the Jesus and Mary Chain. Thanks very much Craig, and indeed AJ for getting the whole shebang started, and ben and Graeme for sending me versions of the track. You all rule.
Pink Floyd -‘Vegetable Man.’ mp3
Bambi Get Over It a a Norwich based band who play folk infused indie-meets-rockabilly. A genuinely exciting and original band, they got in touch a little while ago. Matthew at Song, By Toad is already a fan, and I am happy to be added to the list. Amazingly, they only formed about six months ago but they sound like they’ve been together much longer than that.
The band comprises Sim Eldem (Guitar/Vocals), George Knights (Mandolin/Uh-huhs), Graham Parker (Bass), Patrick Butler (Accordion), Ling Luther (Guitar/Oompas), and Luke Gain (Drums). They made a five song demo tape, streaming on their mySpace page but George has graciously got in touch and sent me all five tracks for you to download here.
Bambi Get Over It -‘Badman.’ mp3
Bambi Get Over It -‘Boi.’ mp3
Bambi Get Over It -‘Jeanie.’ mp3
Bambi Get Over It -‘Redwood.’ mp3
Bambi Get over It – ‘That Girl.’ mp3
Enjoy -and let me know what you think!
17 Seconds is fortunate to have some very wonderful readers indeed.
Not only has one reader offered to send me a copy of Crawdaddy by the Darling Buds until I can get my mucky paws on a vinyl copy, but another reader, Graeme, has re-sent a copy of ‘Vegetable Man’ the Jesus and Mary Chain cover that I posted yesterday, only in m4a, which not everyone can access.
Jesus and Mary Chain -‘Vegetable Man (Syd Barrett cover).’ mp3
Bless you all. There will be more to follow (currently making my way through a mountain of marking…)
You may remember that a few months ago, I wrote about a band from Fife, Scotland called Dirty Summer. In my write-up, I commented that there were very few bands I could say for certain that John Peel would like, but this was one band I’d risk my neck on. They are fabulous. Download their free four track EP today!
Go here to set about downloading their EP for free
Or try this
meanwhile, 17 Seconds favourites The Black Kids‘ debut single proper ‘I’m Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How To Dance With You’ is out on Monday, but you can get it on iTunes now (in the UK at any rate). C’mon let’s get it into the charts.
This is the official video:
And in case any of you didn’t see this on the BBC the other day, this is Lenny Henry introducing them on the Jools Holland Show:
…Just what it says on the tin. So as to keep up the covers posts but make sure I was posting stuff I hadn’t posted before, these are tracks I’ve ripped from the b-sides of 7″s in my collection.
First up, Eddy Grant was in the Equals in the late sixties, a mixed-race British reggae band when this was quite a radical concept. They reached no.1 with the song ‘Baby Come Back’ later taken back to no.1 in 1994 by Pato Banton and and the Campbell Brothers from those ‘Kings’ of the reggae cover version, UB40. One of the Equals’ other well-known songs ‘Police On My Back’ was covered by The Clash in the 1970s. Last year Grime or Grindie (Grime and Indie, DO keep up) Lethal Bizzle (above) covered the song, including a sample of the Clash’s version.
Lethal Bizzle -‘Police On My Back (Equals cover).’ mp3
‘What A Waster’ was the world’s introduction to the talents of Pete Doherty and the Libertines. Moldy peach Adam Green covered it on the b-sides of one of his solo singles ‘Emily.’ Pete Doherty returned the compliment by covering the Moldy Peaches‘ ‘Who’s Got The Crack?’
Adam Green -‘What a Waster (Libertines cover).’ mp3
This song was originally by X-Ray Spex, and Scottish indie-poppers Bis covered it on the b-side of their 1998 7″ ‘Action And Drama.’
Bis -‘Germ-Free Adolescents (X-Ray Spex cover).’ mp3
Atomic Kitten were or are a fairly irritating all-girl band in the early part of the decade, but the Sick Anchors saw the potential of this Andy McLusky (Orchestral Manoeuvres In the Dark) number and turned it into something quite heartbreaking.
The Sick Anchors were Aidan Moffat (of Arab Strap), Stuart Braithwaite of Mogwai and Colin ‘Sheepy’ McPherson. This EP also included their version of The Fall’s Bill Is Dead.’
Sick Anchors -‘Whole Again (Atomic Kitten cover).’ mp3
In my humble opinion, Placebo‘s finest moment to date in their decade-plus long career is the single ‘The Bitter End.’ This was the b-side to the 7″ single , a cover of Boney M’s ‘Daddy Cool.’ Whatever that might sound like down on paper, it works really well, IMHO:
Placebo -‘Daddy Cool.’ mp3
The Wedding Present famously released 12 7″ singles, one a month in 1992. The August single was Boing! They all featured a cover version on the b-side, and that month’s was Isaac Hayes‘ Theme from Shaft.
Wedding Present – Theme From Shaft (Isaac Hayes cover).’ mp3
Ash have done some fine covers over the years, including their version of Abba’s ‘Does Your Mother Know?’ This song, a cover of John Lennon‘s ‘Give Me Some Truth’ was the third track on the 1995 7″ ‘Angel Interceptor.’
Ash -‘Give Me Some Truth (John Lennon cover).’ mp3
BONUS: Finally not an mp3 of any of the 7″s in my collection, but an m4a (will play in iTunes) of the Jesus and Mary Chain covering Syd Barrett’s Vegetable Man (THANK YOU, BEN!):
This post is dedicated to my Mum who is…(you don’t honestly think I’m going to say do you?) celebrating her birthday today. And no, that’s not her above, but one of my Mum’s favourite singers, the legendary Eartha Kitt. Eartha Kitt was the original Catwoman (literally, she played her in the 1960s TV series of Batman), who spoke out against the Vietnam War at a White House Lunch hosted by LBJ’s wife in 1968 which saw her blacklisted in the US(who said McCarthyism died in the 1950s?). As a child from a mixed race background in the deep American South of the 1920s, life must have been unimaginably hard, but she took her exotic looks and and is still using them to delight and terrify generations of people decades later.
For me, it’s the songs that she made in the 1950s which we would listen on car journeys (some of my contemporaries had to suffer the aural equivalent of Thatcherism in the likes of Dire Straits and other capitalist aesthetic monstrosities) such as ‘Old Fashioned Girl’ and ‘I Want To Be Evil.’ She’d horrified my maternal Grandmother, who took her songs at face value.
So Mum, here for you, is Eartha Kitt singing I want To Be Evil:
Listen to Eartha kitt here
Eartha Kitt’s official website
Another person that my Mum and Dad played to my brother and I when we were young was Tom Lehrer. This send-up of the Catholic Church and Vatican II is utterly hysterical. As far as I’m concerned, the likes of Tom Lehrer and Eartha Kitt were far more radical and anti-establishment than many artists could ever hope to be. Consider them the Jello Biafras and Madonnas of their day…except they’re still going. According to Wikipedia, ‘There is a misconception that Lehrer gave up political satire when the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Henry Kissinger in 1973. He did say that the awarding of the prize to Kissinger made political satire obsolete, but has denied that he stopped doing satire as a form of protest, and asserts that he had stopped doing satire several years earlier.’
Happy birthday Ma.
x
Album Review: Alabama 3 -‘Hits and Exit Wounds’ (One Little Indian)
We thought we had it all in the mid-nineties. Around 1994, 1995…Britpop ruled the world of us British indie kids. Exciting music while it might have owed a debt to the past (let’s face it, music is not made in a vacuum) and we felt we’d won, when our music was being played on daytime radio. Despite what some will tell you, Britpop was not just W.A.S.P.y boys, but people from all backgrounds making music – Elastica and Echobelly were radical in terms of their make-up. There was light at the end of the tunnel, or so we thought, with the hated Conservative regime looking like it would finally come to an end.
But in August 1997, when Tony Blair and Noel Gallagher were photographed at Downing Street we were being sold out politically and musically. Blair didn’t turn Britain into a socialist Utopia, and Oasis never regained what had made them so vital in their first three years. So what came into the void?
Well, in terms of UK music, as Britpop fell apart and Drum ‘n’ bass went back underground, it now appears that what the music press all too briefly focused on was far more important and it took place in South London. Two acts, Asian Dub Foundation and Alabama 3 provided the yin and yang of each other, and produced records that were deeply exciting that drew on music that came from all around the world. This forthcoming greatest hits set from Alabama 3 shows that the band famously describved by Irvine Welsh as the ‘first band he could dance to in the daytime hours without chemical assistance’ have amassed a wealth of material in the last decade or so that is shaming on the music press for forgetting about them.
Alabama 3 took parts of country and western, dance music, gospel, smaterring of hip hop and a hell of a lot of punk attitude and made fantastic songs. They called Brixton their spiritual home (their debut Exile On Coldharbour Lane is a reference to one of the main thoroughfares in Brixton). These men and women keep alive a true outlaw spirit, equal parts Johnny Cash and Joe Strummer, not least because Harmonica player Nick Reynolds is the son of Bruce Richard Reynolds of the Great Train Robbery of 1963.
Even if you only hold this CD in your hand and then listen to the songs knowing nothing of the above, this serves as a fine introduction (and a nagging reminder to this author that he needs to investigate even more too). ‘Woke Up This Morning’ is perhaps the band’s best known song, and is included here (The press release undrelines that it has not made the band as much money as people think. Larry Love is quoted as saying : ‘The only swimming pool in my back garden is made of plastic’). As is their fantastic cover version of ‘Speed Of the Sound Of Loneliness’. As is almost law for greatest hits sets, there are two new tracks, a collaboration with Orbital on ‘Ska’d for Life’ and an Arthur Baker mix of ‘Mansion On The Hill.’
This greatest hits set also, at eighteen tracks, does what can be a hard feat: namely, that the songs feel fresh and makes you feel that they have considerably mroe to offer us yet.
****
Hits and Exit Wounds is released on One Little Indian on April 21.
I’ve been meaning to do a post on the Darling Buds for a week or so, and in between marking school work have put together this wee feature.
The Darling Buds were formed in Wales in 1986 (different sources list the band as either being formed in Cardiff or Newport). Taking their name from H.E. Bates’ novel The Darling Buds Of May, the original lineup was: Andrea Lewis on vocals, Harley Farr on guitar (the Chart Show once said that his name was Harley davidson as his dad had been a hells angel!) Original bassist Simon was replaced after the first single ‘If I Said’ by Chris McDonagh. ‘If I Said’ featured a drum machine but from the second single onwards the drummer was Bloss, later replaced by ex-Black (‘Wonderful Life’) drummer Jimmy Hughes. (Reportedly Feeder’s Jon Lee guested on drums, and also Donna Matthews, later of Elastica played with the band on a tour). Though their sound is not dissimilar to many of the C86 bands, like The Primitives they were John Peel favourites but not on the tape itself. They were also lumped in with the so-called ‘Blonde’ movement…oh, you’re ahead of me. Basically indie bands that had a blonde female singer and the rest of the band made of blokes in black looking moody (from what I can see the three main Blonde bands were the Darling Buds, the Primitives and Transvision Vamp; who were fronted by Wendy James, enormously popular in the UK for a while but nowhere near as good as the other two and whose music sounds very dated in 2008).
This was the Darling Buds first single in 1987, available on the CD86 compilation, and originally a self-released single.
Darling Buds -‘If I Said.’ mp3
This was the first of three singles on Doncaster’s Native label
Darling Buds -‘Shame On You.’ mp3
(taken from Indie Top Twenty Volume V)
In 1988, they signed to Epic/Sony, who released three Darling Buds albums between 1989 and 1992. these tracks come from the time of …Pop Said
Darling Buds – ‘Burst.’ mp3
Darling Buds – ‘Hit The Ground.’ mp3
Darling Buds -‘You’ve Got To Choose (New Version).’ mp3 [NOT the album version but a re-recording of the single which was released in July 1989)
Darling Buds -‘Uptight.’ mp3
This was originally on the …Pop Said album as well as the Rough Trade Shops Indiepop 1 compilation
…Pop Said has been re-issued by Cherry Red and can be found at Amazon. The other two albums are unavailable at the present ime
I am still looking for a copy of second album Crawdaddy, preferably on vinyl (but might try here on Amazon). These three tracks have been picked up from the blogosphere:
Darling Buds -‘It makes No Difference.’ mp3
Darling Buds -‘So Close.’ mp3
Darling Buds -‘Tiny Machine.’ mp3
From the 12″ single, Crystal Clear:
Darling Buds -‘Crystal Clear (extended version).’ mp3
In 1992 the band released their third and final album, Erotica, which I found a couple of months ago in an Oxfam shop in Glasgow. This track Sure Thing was their final single, and this version is taken from the 12″ single.
Darling Buds -‘Sure Thing.’ mp3
Some Darling Buds websites are:
here (as part of the Elastica connection)
Another fanstite is here
Hope you enjoy this post
EdX
Girl on a motorcycle…
Ever heard a track that within a few weeks of never having even heard it you can’t imagine being without? Well, that track for me is by the band the Motorcycle Boy and it’s their debut single from 1987 (and no.21 in the 1987 Festive Fifty) ‘Big Rock Candy Mountain.’ If you like the stuff I’ve posted by Edinburgh Legends The Shop Assistants, this might well be of interest: it’s their former singer Alex Taylor who united with Meat Whiplash to form the band. This was posted by Steve over at Teenage Kicks a few weeks ago, but I managed to find a copy of the 7″ this afternoon, so am deliriously happy and want to share this with you. Their stuff has long been deleted, andthey have nothing to do with the American band of the same name, so if anyone can help by sending mp3s or whatever, please do.
Motorcycle Boy -‘Big Rock Candy Mountain.’ mp3
Meanwhile, very chuffed by all the feedback my post on the Jesus and Mary Chain generated. One reader, Ben, got in touch to send the mp3 of the JAMC on television in America last year performing a song called ‘All Things Must Pass.’ So I am posting that here, as well as re-posting a Sister Vanilla track from last year’s Little Pop Rock where the brothers Reid were reunited and joined up with their sister Linda to make some pretty fine things indeed:
Jesus And Mary Chain -‘All Things Must Pass.’ mp3
Sister Vanilla – ‘K To be Lost.’ mp3
Enjoy the sunshine…hell, we’ve even got some here in Scotland.