» Listings for 2024

1. 2023/4 Albums Thing 386 - Frank Turner “Love, Ire & Song”

   Posted on 9:00am Thursday 25th Jul 2024

   Beautiful Days Festival, Ottery St. Mary, Devon, Sunday, 23rd August 2009. My time in the music business affords me some perks. A great friend of Deb’s had never been to a festival and wanted to go to one for her birthday. So I managed to swing weekend passes and camping (in the backstage camping area I might add, far more civilised !) for The Levellers Beautiful Days Festival. In a working capacity I hate festivals, you get to do what normally takes you a whole day in 45 minutes and it’s generally raining. Beautiful Days is one of the better UK festivals so it was a good weekend, not working, seeing friends and wall to wall live music.

   We’d planned to leave early on the Sunday (The Levellers always close the main stage and I’m really not a fan) but on the afternoon it was sunny and warm and all very convivial. If you’ve ever been to Beautiful Days you’ll know that the Main Stage arena is a natural amphitheatre and we were sat at the back at the top of a hill, in the sunshine with a group of friends talking and drinking. I had my back to the stage but whoever the fella was on stage at the time kept singing something or playing something that caught my ear and eventually caused me to turn around and pay him the attention he deserved. I asked if anyone had a running order for the day and that’s when I first came across the name Frank Turner. As soon as he’d finished I paid a visit to the onsite CD shop and purchased copies of “Sleep Is For The Week” and “Love, Ire & Song” making a mental note to play them in the car on the way home that evening (this was back in the mists of time when cars had CD players). What I heard on the way home confirmed what I’d seen at the festival and on getting home I was happy to find Frank was due to release a new album (“Poetry Of The Deed”) just a week or so later.

   Now I know I have a lot of friends who are big, big Frank Turner fans so I’ll start with something less controversial to them than what will follow. “Love, Ire & Song” is a truly superb record, one of my very favourite albums of the 21st century, the songwriting and lyrics are seriously, seriously good and it’s a record I play regularly to this day. At the time I really thought I’d found me someone who could rival Damien Dempsey in my musical affections. The controversial bit ? In the 16 years since its release Frank hasn’t produced anything that even approaches the greatness of “Love, Ire & Song”.

   The album starts with a song that I will happily argue is one the greatest I’ve ever heard. “I Knew Prufrock Before He Got Famous” (I have no idea what that means) is stunning in every way that you can think of. It starts quietly with just Frank and his acoustic guitar “Let’s begin at the beginning, We’re lovers and we’re losers…” and from that point, nothing different really happens, the chord structure remains exactly the same all the way through, there is no middle eight or instrumental break but it builds, and it builds and it builds in the same way that The Waterboys “A Pagan Place” does until it reaches a shattering crescendo and Frank leaves you with the final lines and a single guitar chord

   “After all the loving and the losing, For the heroes and the pioneers

   The only thing that's left to do… Is get another round in at the bar…” <chord>

   The album then proceeds through another 11 songs and there’s not a dud on here, every single one is a stunner. If at first the songs title was enough to draw me in the second song “Reasons Not To Be An Idiot” sealed the deal. Frank sings songs about his ill friends (“Long Live The Queen”…”She said "I know I'm dying, but I'm not finished just yet, I’m dying for a drink and for a cigarette”), long lost girlfriends (“Better Half”…”I know what she looks like, her face and skin, her smell and the rest, I know the feel of her soul, but God help me I just cannot find her address”), getting old before your time (“Photosynthesis”…”And if all you ever do with your life is photosynthesise, Then you deserve every hour of these sleepless nights that you waste wondering when you're gonna die”) and the hateful environment that is the airport departure lounge (“Jet Lag”…”Airports make me sad, I’m sure they shouldn't all be the same, But they're just landing pads, Boring tourist shopping chains” OK the song is really about travelling the world as a musician but I’ve always hated airports so I’m gonna highlight that bit).

   I really have always wanted to like Frank Turner much more than I do but hey, most people don’t manage to make an album this good and I’m glad Frank walked into my life when he did and that I got to fall for this bloody wonderful record.

   I Knew Prufrock Before He Got Famous - https://youtu.be/NcQ2XmNvjk4?si=wIZrabt-D5pKBTaI

2. 2023/4 Albums Thing 385 - Tubeway Army “Replicas”

   Posted on 9:45am Wednesday 24th Jul 2024

   Hearing “Are Friends Electric ?” in early 1979 was something of a revelation. We knew about Ultravox! so electronic music wasn’t totally new to us. But Gary Numan’s (for let’s face it, Tubeway Army was purely his baby) way of doing things, mixing Punk guitars with Kraftwerk like synthesizers was a big deal. I hadn’t been seduced yet by Kraftwerk or Bowie’s Berlin period, this was 1979 and most of us were still happily leaping about to the the Pistols, The Jam and The Clash. The Human League were making records already but we weren’t really aware of them for another year. Ultravox’s “Systems Of Romance” was the only yardstick we had to measure this by and although Numan was obviously a big Ultravox(!) fan this was good enough to stand up to any comparisons.

   Tubeway Army had made a couple of Punk sounding singles (“That’s Too Bad” and “Bombers” with Numan going under the moniker Valeriun) and an album for Beggars Banquet in 1978. The synthesizers and vocal stylings were in evidence on the album but this was a guitar band album with added keyboard colouring rather than being an electronic record, there’s acoustics all over it particularly on the rather fine “Jo The Waiter”.  The final song “Zero Bars (Mr Smith)” is as close as this Tubeway Army gets to “Replicas”.

   So the sound was already fermenting even though we later get the story of Numan intending to record a Punk album until he chanced upon a Minimoog synth that had been left set up in he studio, and the rest as they say (listen to “You Are In My Vision”, much more like that first Tubeway Army album and barely a synthesizer in evidence”)…Whatever, he mashed up all those childhood sci-fi stories he read with his Bowie and Ultravox! influences and released a 4th single for Beggars which sold a million. “Are ‘Friends’ Electric ?” (the quote marks around Friends in the title was to denote that the particular robot in question in the song was supplying services of a personal nature, as Numan later confessed “I had a No 1 single with a song about a robot prostitute and no one knew”) caused quite the stir in our little world from the first time we heard it. The cold atmosphere of it, dominated by that repetitive synth riff but with real drums, bass and growling guitars to give it some life had us all hooked.

   “Replicas” is loosely a concept album set in the future where machines have taken over. They supply services to the humans via “friends” while human looking androids (the Mach-men) keep the humans in control, under the orders of anonymous officials (the Grey Men). Take the Ultravox song “Slow Motion”, Bowie’s “Low” and Kraftwerk’s “The Man Machine” and you basically have the sound Numan achieved on “Replicas”. I’m not running the album down by saying that, but it’s undeniable. Numan however was the only one to put all that together and make something of it.

   “Replicas” and this period of Numan’s music (what he calls his Robot period including follow up album “The Pleasure Principle” and then “Telekon”) have become quietly influential. You can definitely hear their influence on later Depeche Mode, Nine Inch Nails and Rammstein to name just a handful. We already covered a couple of Numan’s more recent albums and honestly, his sound hasn’t changed all that much since “Replicas”, maybe, like for Kraftwerk before him, the technology improved. He also seems a really decent fella. This was a groundbreaker back in ’79 and helped open a lot of eyes to electronic music.

   Down In The Park -  https://youtu.be/9GQS-iFCzus?si=DgiJJ5I40HBKCdmY

3. 2023/4 Albums Thing 384 - The Troggs “Trogglodynamite”

   Posted on 9:30am Tuesday 23rd Jul 2024

   Another one I rescued from a life in the £1 bin at the shop. This copy is warped but it plays OK. It’s quite a sought after record, I have a couple of guys who regularly come to the shop and ask for it. It also has a blinding version of “I Can Only Give You Everything” included which is much better known performed by Them, Van Morrison’s 60’s R&B outfit. It’s the only reason I have this one, I have listened to the rest of it but it’s no great shakes. But this…ooh…

   I Can Only Give You Everything - https://youtu.be/4Lvjd0jrt2A?si=za6T4w5PPF6cre0K