Custard Flux - I Feed The Fire

Gregory Curvey’s Custard Flux project sees him expanding the musical pallete he set in his group The Luck of Eden Hall. Jason Barnard speaks to Curvey about Custard Flux and his excellent new album Echo.

How has the sound of Custard Flux evolved over the past few years, culminating in Echo?

On Helium, last year’s release, I played every instrument, which wasn’t my initial intention but I wasn’t finding any local musicians that were interested in what I wanted to do, and I didn’t want to wait, so I dove in. Fortunately, this time I had the input of a couple of great musicians on Echo, and their individual styles have helped the sound expand. I’m very delighted.

Who’s in your current band and have you played with them before?

Just four of us so far. Timothy Prettyman on Double Bass, Vito Greco on Guitar, Walt Prettyman on Violin, and myself. Timothy and I played together in a project in the 80s that never got off the ground. Vito appeared on TLoEH’s version of Starship Trooper that was released on Fruits de Mer Records.

What was the writing and recording process for Echo?

I definitely wrote more songs on the guitar for this album. A lot of the Helium tracks were written while sitting at the Harmonium because it was a new acquisition and very inspiring. Extraordinary Man and Echo were the first couple tunes out of the gate, for this project. The basic structure of Extraordinary Man was written with my friend Tim Ferguson during a weekend of jamming in my studio, and later I added the lyrics. After those first two songs were written, I really tried to focus on more progressive melodies, and if a song sounded too typical I would scrap it, or deconstruct it and rearrange it, which was the case with Pink Indians. Most of the tracks started with a scratch guitar, which I’d play drums to, and then I’d add instrumentation to it from there. Timothy laid down his Bass parts after I’d played the drums. Vocal tracks were usually last. Sometimes I delete parts to let other instruments shine. For example, on Gold I totally removed the guitar track after the first chorus and let the piano take over. I also wasn’t sure if I was going to get Walt into my studio in time, but he came in at the last minute and nailed his solos superbly!

How much have you used the harmonium?

It’s on every song on the album.

America is one of my highlights. Were you making a statement about the double-sided nature of the US at the moment?

Yeah, I’m pretty disgusted with the current potus and his, I use the term loosely, administration. What a circus. Doing exactly the opposite of what desperately needs to be done. Appointing people to run departments that they’re publicly known to have despised. The people I know that actually like him and his policies have been brainwashed by decades of propaganda, and there doesn’t seem to be a way out of this rut. So, I tried to poetically write about American cultural faux pas, using Baseball and Apple Pie, two of the most American things I could think of, as metaphors.

Did you have a particular sound in mind for the album?

I’d developed a sound while recording Helium and wanted to stick to that formula. I record everything acoustically, with minimal studio effects, and then play an electric guitar solo if I felt like it. I really had to hold back from playing an electric solo on Supernatural, and I’m glad I left the space for Walt. His Violin parts remind me of Eddie Jobson’s work with Roxy Music. One of my all time favorites.

Who influences you – then and now?

I can remember being really little, before fm radio, listening to my Mom’s am radio and wishing for the DJ to play songs like Ain’t No Mountain High Enough and Temptation Eyes. Then changing stations and hearing Kick Out The Jams and Open My Eyes. So, Pop Set In at an early age. Sabbath and Jethro Tull were added to my mix of KISS and The Beatles in my Junior High years, then I discovered Prog on fm radio. Genesis, King Crimson, Yes had just released Relayer, Jeff Beck’s Wired album. I also went through a punk phase and just recently saw The Damned on tour. I draw inspiration from all of these genres but Psychedelic, Prog, and Pop are my true loves. Currently, I’ve been listening to White Denim and Tame Impala.

Is there any artists you’d like to collaborate with?

I’d love to work with Todd Rundgren. I’ve been fortunate to meet him a few times, and once my friend Patrice talked to his stage manager and he invited me backstage. TLoEH had just released Belladonna Marmalade, so I gave him a copy. We chatted while he and his family were eating dinner. I was shy as hell, but I did suggest my desire for him to produce my work. He laughed and said something like, “You’d be better off without me. I’m the kiss of death.” Rundgren just seems like he’d be a great person to work with, and I could learn so much.

The video and music for Supernatural perfectly complement each other. Did you give a brief to Shane Swank – how was it put together?

I pretty much let Shane do whatever he feels for the Custard Flux Music videos, because I love the aesthetic in his work, and have been an admirer for years. He’s an accomplished painter and visual artist and when I saw he’d started dabbling in animation, I asked and was ecstatic when he agreed to create a video for Innermission, one of the instrumental tracks on Helium. He also created a fantastic music video for The Hit Parade, complete with bouncing sing-a-long lyrics ala Charlie and The Chocolate Factory. Shane also did my portrait on the back cover of Helium.

Is there any lyrical themes across the album? What do you think ties them together – did you sequence them in a particular way?

I didn’t have any themes in mind when I was writing lyrics this time. Some are fantasy, some are about current or past life experiences. Cirque d’Enfant was written 12 or 13 years ago, just after my daughter was born. I’m not really sure if anything ties them together other than the music. As far as sequence goes, I always lay out the song order by feel. I didn’t know I was going to open the album with Supernatural until the song was finished, then it seemed a no-brainer.

What are your favourite Custard Flux tracks and why?

I like Sleepy. It’s fun to play on the piano and I was really happy with the song, although the piano part kind of got buried in the final mix. I like Forevermore because I discovered the piano/harmonium combination for the first time when recording it, which created a dreamy circus atmosphere. I’m proud of The Hit Parade. It started out as a little piano riff, and I liked the way it all came together. Supernatural is fun to play on the guitar, and I can’t wait to perform it live. I’m proud of Tiger because a musician from another country liked it enough to cover it and post his version on YouTube, which is pretty cool!

How would you say the Custard Flux material compares with The Luck of Eden Hall?

Most of the songs I write come to me the same way, so I could probably replace the Harmonium with Mellotron, plug in and make TLoEH versions of all these new songs, but the concept is to create the same type of music using only acoustic instruments. Electricity free, so to speak. The Harmonium really sparked the idea. It sounds almost like a Hammond Organ, and by playing it I can tell what they were trying to mimic when they created the first Hammond Organs. The keys don’t play as easy as a modern keyboard, so, much like the Mellotron, you need to learn how to play the Harmonium. There are two knee levers that allow you to change sounds while playing, along with the stops that you can push or pull to engage different sounds. It’s pretty cool. The other big difference would be my guitar playing. Playing electric guitar with pedals and an Echoplex is a blast, and I miss it, but I really had to practice a lot and focus on my ability to play acoustic guitar, so I’d be comfortable in a live setting. I wanted to be more accomplished at soloing, so I practice scales constantly. I’m very confident now.

You mentioned your increased confidence. I think that shows in the broader pallette you’re drawing from in this album with tracks like Gold and Cirque d’Enfant. Has that affected your writing style or does the wider range of sounds just come out when arranging and recording?

I think I’m getting more comfortable writing lyrics, which shows in the two songs you’ve mentioned, and focusing on a more progressive approach to the music definitely leads me down avenues I haven’t explored in the past. I’m not a technical composer. I’ve tried to learn about theory, but it doesn’t stick with me. I play by ear. I love Indian and Arabic music, Jazz and Hard Rock. Lately I’ve been trying to blend these sounds. Using alternative chords along with bar and power chords is really pleasing. Songs can go through a metamorphosis while I’m recording and radically change, but that keeps them fresh. If I just recorded everything the way it initially came to me out of the ether, the songs would be too typical. I almost always change the vocal melody. Sometimes the initial melody is in a register that can’t be sung powerfully enough, and things like that.

From: https://thestrangebrew.co.uk/interviews/curveys-custard-flux/

10,000 Maniacs - Stockton Gala Days

Natalie Merchant’s reasonably priced mega-box set is due out next month, though my pre-ordered copy is already in the UPS pipeline. I’ll have more to say about it after I receive it, no doubt, but one thing I can say is: I’m saddened that the same love and affection shown to Natalie’s solo career hasn’t been applied to her days with her old group, 10,000 Maniacs.
Don’t get me wrong: the 2004 2-CD collection Campfire Songs: The Popular, Obscure and Unknown Recordings of 10,000 Maniacs is an excellent compilation. But that early era of the Maniacs (who are still a working, and excellent, band) deserves more – at the least, a series of official concert recordings, given that they were such an incredible live band. (Unplugged, while a fine set, doesn’t do them justice.) I’d love nothing more than to relive their short set at WXPN’s Five-Star Night in 1992…and given that three of those songs turned up as bonus tracks the 1993 British “Candy Everybody Wants” CD single, one wonders why the entire show wasn’t released. The same goes for their 1988 set at Sadler Wells Theatre in London, which was recorded by BBC 6 Radio, plus others. Which is all beside the point of this “Essentials” plug, I suppose. Forgive the rant.
Anyway, from their first independent releases to their last CD, Unplugged, the Natalie-era 10K Maniacs never released a bum album. But – when it comes to stone-cold classics – two have more than stood the test of time: their 1987 breakthrough, In My Tribe, and their 1992 studio swan song, Our Time in Eden. At some to-be-determined time in the future, I’ll revisit the former; today, however, I’m spotlighting the latter. To my ears, it’s a perfect set. As I explained in my recap of 1992, it’s “everything I love about music: It’s poppy, rocky, bright, light and deep, with melodies that soar and lyrics that, if one listens to them, mean more than most. The juxtaposition of the jangly with the profound is something I adore.” I’d simply add that the addition of the horns and woodwinds from the J.B.’s (James Brown’s band) was a masterstroke, adding a depth to the proceedings. The Maniacs jumped into the deep end of the pool by adding the JB Horns, in other words, and swam with ease.
The album opens with the mesmerizing “Noah’s Dove,” which may well feature Natalie’s finest-ever vocal – or, more likely, one of her best. It also includes the once-upon-a-long-ago radio and MTV staples of “These Are Days” and “Candy Everybody Wants”. Other highlights include the fast-tempo “Few and Far Between” and sweeping “Stockton Gala Days”. One additional thought: The album should have a warning label affixed to it. One listen will beget two and, then, three, four and more – as just happened to me. So, be forewarned.  From: https://oldgreycat.blog/2017/06/24/the-essentials-10000-maniacs-our-time-in-eden/

Coil - It's In My Blood

My best friend reported a cataclysmic falling out with his girlfriend and told me he couldn’t come to watch Coil play live in London. I couldn’t have been more delighted. I didn’t want to be responsible for anyone else’s enjoyment or for having to check in on their needs. For this one night – just one show – all I wanted was to sink into Coil’s sound, to turn my mind off and live within the spectacle. I clung to the security barrier by the stage throughout and remember John Balance’s glorious attire – a straitjacket; the fabric funnels enclosing Peter Christopherson and Thighpaulsandra; the swaying lightbulbs; the songs, the screams and the stories. The pleasure was of communing with only the warmth of humans. The hearty rounds of applause were the only reminders I was sharing it with anyone else. No one knew the end would come so soon after.
For all the sorrows brought about by their demise, it has been beautiful to see Coil’s reputation endure and grow in their absence. I adore seeing motivated individuals – the Live Coil Archive’s tireless archival efforts or Cormac Pentecost’s Man Is The Animal zine, for instance – keep their art alive purely for love. It’s kept my own enthusiasm high. What I wanted to achieve in Everything Keeps Dissolving: Conversations With Coil for Strange Attractor was to produce a volume drawing together the most insightful interviews, rare or lost material, in which John Balance and Peter Christopherson told their own tale as it unfolded. Living inside someone’s work for a year to two years can be exhausting, so I always have to be careful of what I take on, but this was a pleasure. I called it the treasure hunt: two years of tapes appearing from closets, letters dropping out of attics, persuading a film company to find the rushes of a TV show buried in a warehouse, paying a film director to digitise unused footage and a radio company to surface an old broadcast.
What I appreciate in a world where so much energy is devoted to acceptability, is witnessing individuals, like Coil, choosing to build their own world and giving it meaning that others are unlikely to comprehend, let alone value; striving to create in spite of hard costs or intangible rewards. I don’t care so much about end-results as I do about people living their process: in short people who try. I admire what two guys and their amazing collaborators achieved from a house by the river in Chiswick, then from another on a hillside in Weston-Super-Mare.
While the piece below dwells on darker times, what made a difference to me while living inside Coil’s words and works for such a prolonged period, was their humanity. They weren’t putting forward a carefully tended and curated image, instead there’s this explosion of humour, intellect, kindness, thoughtfulness that made it feel the way one does with a close friend or loved one, that you know them at their worst, but it’s OK because you know their richness of character too. Their work was not just an exorcism or magickal working, it was something that gave them pleasure – a pleasure I could feel and that warmed a lot of long nights.
While John Balance’s childhood memories dwell on untethered physical relocation, astral connections, a sense of becoming ever more who he wished to be, Peter Christopherson’s early life – at least as he described it – was far more steady… But it’s hard to know. From the time he joined Throbbing Gristle through his time in Coil, Christopherson tended to shy away from interviews, often occupying himself elsewhere, or staying in the background. This discretion is visible in the way his collaboration with one natural possessor of the spotlight, Genesis P-Orridge, gave way to another in Balance. In many ways, Balance was his perfect emotional match: one helplessly exposed, the other firmly repressed. A focus on this gap between public and private faces is critical to Christopherson’s work which delighted in poking at society’s squeamishness. His nickname — Sleazy — resulted from what he described in Simon Ford’s Wreckers Of Civilisation as a youthful taste for “using the body as an object of fetishistic exploration…” His personal inclinations rubbed up against an ever more stifling cultural climate in which he witnessed P-Orridge charged for ‘obscene’ mail-art; the hysterical condemnation of Coum Transmissions’ Prostitution show; and police raids on Throbbing Gristle’s studio.
Hostile officialdom was a perturbing presence throughout Coil’s first decade. Balance spoke of being subject to police stop-and-search; of a friend’s flat searched for drug paraphernalia; of being arrested at a gay rights protest; of fear of the police leading to the cessation of Psychic TV and Coil’s exploration of cults. The 1987 Operation Spanner raids and prosecutions — for consensual sadomasochistic acts — heightened tension, then everything erupted in 1992 when a documentary made unfounded allegations of child abuse against P-Orridge. P-Orridge and family fled into exile as the police raided their home and confiscated their archives. Coil described being so scared they sanitised their home of anything that might arouse police suspicion and spent several years expecting the front door to be kicked in.
This was not the only existential threat to Balance and Christopherson. Both participated enthusiastically in the libertinage of London’s gay scene, only to be slammed brutally into the burgeoning devastation of AIDS. Personally escaping infection brought limited relief as they witnessed friends succumbing. Madonna’s tour manager, Martin Burgoyne, died on his 23rd birthday in 1986 with Balance musing: “you start to dwell on it, y’know? Especially if you’ve had sex with him.” Balance still sounded angry in 1995 over the death of Eddie Cairns, the cover artist for the ‘Tainted Love’ single: “I think it was Hammersmith Council who dealt with Eddie’s body… men in bloody Dalek suits, wrapped the body in numerous sheets of plastic and didn’t know how to deal with the body.” Their friend Leigh Bowery would die, aged 33, in December 1994. Meanwhile their long association with Derek Jarman was lived in the shadow of his HIV diagnosis in December 1986, until his death in February 1994.
Coil, and the wider gay community, reeled in shock with Scatology’s nod toward niche pleasures giving way to Horse Rotorvator’s explicit grappling with death as a lived experience. A U.K. resident in their 20s might experience an elderly relative’s demise, a further few an untimely loss from disease or misadventure… But to have so many young friends die, the terror of that time is underappreciated. In 1986, Balance was 24, Christopherson was 31: their peak years of sensual exploration were derailed by risk, sickness and death.
Beyond AIDS lay further trauma. ‘Ostia (The Death Of Pasolini)’ was a simultaneous tribute to the murdered film director; to a friend, Wayne, who jumped from the Dover cliffs; and to Leon, whose cause of death Coil left undisclosed. Again, in 1992, a voicemail recounting someone’s suicide, “…he threw himself off a cliff…” was the basis of the haunting ‘Who’ll Fall’. The recording was revisited for 1993’s ‘Is Suicide A Solution?’ with a cover image taken from the bedroom of a Coil fan who leapt from the window to his death. Their other 1993 single was ‘Themes For Derek Jarman’s Blue’, the film visually described blindness arising from AIDS.
Instead of relief from the numbing drumbeat of death, from emotional baggage, from the policeman’s shadow, the years around Coil’s third album proved a personal cataclysm. Described as their ‘dance’ album, Love’s Secret Domain was no testament to Second Summer of Love joyousness. In a vast release of tension, Coil spent much of 1988 – 1992 immersed in the hedonistic relief of Ecstasy and other drugs. The resulting album opened with ‘Disco Hospital’ — a metaphor as pointed as Coil’s ‘Tainted Love’ — then dwelt throughout on the intertwining of death and love, a soundtrack to desperation not delight. The chemically-induced fallout of these years was so severe it propelled Stephen Thrower from the group, while Balance collapsed on occasions both public and private, ultimately lapsing into alcoholism. Marking the seriousness of this moment, ‘Eskaton’ became a permanent Coil label imprint. Eschatology — the study of the world’s end — tied together Horse Rotorvator’s explicit theme, as well as being a wordplay on Scatology. This loop acknowledged that Coil were beginning anew, that their past was linked to, but distinct from, their future. They lived now in the ‘last days,’ somewhere amid or beyond the apocalypse.
Balance and Christopherson sought workable ways to continue, but Coil, for a time, was too bloodied an entity to be the vehicle. Practically speaking, the name Coil existed from 1994 to 1998 almost entirely as an archive, a host for alternate identities, or a remixer of others’ work. Instead, a tentative step forward was taken by standing in direct opposition to their former self: 1994’s Coil Vs. The Eskaton and Coil Vs. ELpH singles. This led to the even more radical idea of shedding Coil’s damaged husk and splintering into new, unsullied personas: Wormsine, Black Light District, Time Machines, ELpH, Eskaton. 1995 – 1999 was an escape attempt: seeking refuge in a ‘black light district,’ the opposite of a red light district’s carnality; channelling alien entities to extirpate their own voices; escaping time altogether; rejecting Mars and the sun in favour of the feminine moon; leaving the dense metropolis in the east for a seaside town to the far west.
A mooted album title Coil had rejected ten years prior, Funeral Music For Princess Diana, seemed eerily prescient in 1997. It’s real significance, however, was as a mirror. Across their first decade, Coil tried to find ways to live amid trauma, then spent its aftermath shedding their identity to try to find the renewal that self-definition had given Balance as a young man. The final phase of their existence felt like a surrender. Tales of Balance’s frightening battle with alcohol were not products of a scandal-hungry media: Coil were the source. Alongside their candid interviews and on-stage acknowledgement of issues, by 2000 they were selling a blood-smeared ‘Trauma’ edition of Musick To Play In The Dark 2, then Balance performed in a straightjacket in 2004. Coil were not virgins. They understood the public’s appetite for salacious consumption, that the media was a delivery mechanism for perusing human pain, and they colluded in the same symbiotic relationship that ended Diana. While Christopherson gave every appearance of being ready to settle into being a musical elder statesman, Balance seemed harrowed by the prospect that he had no way out of his role as public avatar of pain.  From: https://thequietus.com/culture/books/coil-everything-keeps-dissolving/

The Duhks - 30-Minute Music Hour PBS

 The Duhks - 30-Minute Music Hour PBS - Part 1

 

 The Duhks - 30-Minute Music Hour PBS - Part 2

 

Jessee Havey remembers the day she took the Duhk call like it was… well… 2011. Four years after leaving the Duhks, one of the Canadian neo-folk scene’s most influential roots acts, the stunning songbird was sitting in the backseat of a taxicab heading toward her day job as school administrator at the Manitoba Theatre for Young People in Winnipeg. Leonard Podolak, who had known Havey since she was a baby, was phoning with a proposition. The founder, frontman, and clawhammer banjo player of the Duhks (rhymes with shucks) had to know: Would she “be into” returning to the band she joined fresh out of high school? “And I immediately, before I could even say anything, tears started streaming down my face and I was, ‘Yes, I want my band back! Yes!’ ” Havey enthusiastically recalled over the phone last month from her home in Winnipeg. “And this cab driver must have thought I was a lunatic. It’s not the first time or the last that I cried hysterically in the back of a cab. But, yeah, that was a pretty amazing moment.” Calling it her second chance, Havey was reborn, along with the Duhks, who nearly became as extinct as the dodo. Now that there’s an intact quintet again, with three new members — Rosie Newton (fiddle), Kevin Garcia (drums/percussion), and Colin Savoie-Levac (guitar/bouzouki) — this tasty potpourri of cultural influences, styles and substance sounds as vital as ever on Beyond the Blue. The 12-song record produced by Mike + Ruthy, to be released June 24 (Compass Records), is the first Havey has done with the Duhks since Migrations in 2006, when they were still with Sugar Hill. A lot has transpired since Havey left in 2007. So much, in fact, that she stayed on the phone for 30 more minutes after sharing Duhk tales for an hour with Podolak, who had to run after joining this joint interview on Victoria Day from the North End St. John’s bungalow he and his wife own in Manitoba’s capital. The two self-proclaimed Winnipeg babies (born and raised) barely got around to promoting the album, which initially required going to crowd-funding website Indiegogo, where they raised $18,276. The band subsequently signed with Compass, the label co-founded by banjo virtuoso Alison Brown and her husband Garry West. That partnership almost happened much earlier, when, according to Podolak, a deal was “99 percent of the way there” shortly after the Duhks were hatched in 2001, the year Havey said, “Leonard and I had our first jam (and simultaneous ‘aha’ moment).” After self-releasing Your Daughters & Your Sons in 2003, three studio albums (including one without Havey) for Sugar Hill followed. Now that Beyond the Blue is almost upon us, Podolak has a simple plea for anyone with ears: “Gee whiz, just give it a listen.” Urging loyal fans who have been there from the beginning or jump-on-the-bandwagon aficionados with a sense of adventure, he added, “It’s new and it’s fresh, but in Duhks tradition, it spans a wide variety of styles and traditions and it’s new and it’s old at the same time. And if you want to listen to an experimental folk record, listen to the Duhks.” “Tradition” means a lot to Podolak, who also shares an extraordinary gift of gab with Havey. In what goes around/comes around fashion, the two original lucky Duhks like to say they have come full circle. But to see how they got here from there requires going back in time.

Learning to Fly

Before there were the Duhks, there was Scruj MacDuhk, pronounced just like the Disney cartoon character. A 19-year-old Podolak formed that group in 1995 after a jam session he now calls “the most amazing night of music that I had ever had up until that point.” The players that evening included Geoff Butler, an accordionist from Newfoundland group Figgy Duff, and Dan Baseley, who brought a tin whistle and, much to Podolak’s amazement, also could play Irish and Scottish tunes on the steel drum. They planned their first gig for St. Patrick’s Day. But before Scruj MacDuhk there was — honest to God — Duckworth Donald, whom Podolak called “a killer bluegrass mandolin player and tenor singer” from Winnipeg who often performed with Cathy Fink. “He was 4-foot-11 or something and he weighed like 100 pounds,” Podolak said. “He was just an amazing character, an amazing guy. So when we were coming up with a band name, my dad (local folk hero Mitch Podolak), who was sitting around the same table, said, ‘Yeah, it has to be something with Duck.’ “So then someone yelled, ‘Fuck a Duck.’ And then somehow Scrooge McDuck came up. And I didn’t even really realize that was a Disney character. I didn’t watch Disney. It just sounded funny. And then Dan ran out of the room and came up with the (alternate) spelling.” Podolak eventually recruited Kelvin High School acquaintances Ruth Moody, who went on to become the exquisite singer-songwriter of the Wailin’ Jennys, and fiddler Jeremy Penner. In my 2010 interview with Moody, she called the Wolseley neighborhood where Podolak also grew up “the granola belt of Winnipeg.” Podolak, who went to school with Moody from their kindergarten days and remembers singing with her in the 12th grade choir (“I needed an extra credit”), inserted an adjective (“hippie”), then added, “Now it’s become yuppie, hoity-toity. But when I was a kid, it was like [laughing], it was where all the artistes and all the freaks lived. And Ruth and my families couldn’t be more different. I come from hippie Communist Jews and she comes from Australian, classical music people.” When Scruj MacDuhk broke up in 2001 (“We had a falling out and this and that like the way bands do,” Podolak said), the Duhks were born.

Teenage Crush

“I was literally just graduating from high school,” said Havey, who also attended Kelvin, but, as she was thrilled to point out, “eight whole years” after Podolak. Havey was recommended by her Uncle Marshall, who then was living in the Podolak family’s basement. “Something my mom told me years later was that I wrote a letter to Scruj MacDuhk because I was obsessed with them when I was a teenager,” Havey said, thinking that might have happened when she was 14. “And they were my favorite band. And apparently I wrote them a letter professing my undying love for them and saying that I loved Ruth Moody’s singing but if she ever decided she wanted to do something else, I would like to be the singer in their band.” Though their families knew each other socially, Podolak wasn’t aware that Havey was a singer until her uncle told him. “I was already a rock star in town here, and she was a kid,” he said tongue-in-cheekily. “And so, I’m like, ‘Well, I’ve got absolutely nothing to lose.’ ” He invited Havey over to his parents’ new house in Wolseley, where they played a couple of old-timey tunes together in the kitchen, including “I’m Going to the West.” “I taught her the words, very simple, and we were like face to face singing harmonies together,” Podolak said. “You make this connection and it’s like you’ve been playing or knowing each other the whole time. The whole family connection just made sense in that one moment. It immediately felt right for both of us.” The Sugar Hill contract they signed on the advice of a lawyer, who Podolak recalls saying, “It looks like a record deal,” gave them incredible exposure (NPR’s All Things Considered, records produced by Bela Fleck and Tim O’Brien, spots at prestigious festivals like MerleFest and Telluride), but little spending money. Still, Podolak said, “We went for it. And in some ways, I’m sure it was really great. I know it was really great. We were there. We experienced it. We met some amazing people.”

From: https://www.nodepression.com/interview/welcoming-back-the-mighty-duhks-an-interview-with-leonard-podolak-and-jessee-havey/

 

Rush - Live Capitol Theatre 1976

 Rush - Live Capitol Theatre 1976 - Part 1

 

 Rush - Live Capitol Theatre 1976 - Part 2

 

Alex Lifeson is on the phone, calling from his Toronto home, thinking back to the time between Rush's third and fourth albums in the winter of 1975 and 1976. It's difficult to believe now, some 40-odd million albums sold later, but the Canadian rock trio was at a crossroads then. After a pair of decently received albums, 1974's Rush and 1975's Fly By Night, follow-up Caress of Steel floundered both commercially and critically. Morale between guitarist Lifeson, bassist/singer Geddy Lee and drummer Neil Peart was low, and the pressure was on from American label Mercury Records to put out something as "relatable" as early hits "Working Man" and "Finding My Way." The writing was on the wall: Album number four was either going to break the band, or, well, break the band. "I remember thinking," Lifeson says candidly, "'I had eight years of playing rock in a band, and it's awesome, I love it, and I don't want to compromise. If this will be the end, I dunno, I'll go back to working with my dad plumbing, or go back to school, or something else.' To me it was impossible to take a step backwards and do something we'd already done just to please a record company."
The story is the stuff of legend. Rush stubbornly stuck to their plan, following up an album that had an ambitious 20-minute conceptual piece with an album with an even more ambitious 20-minute conceptual piece. Structurally 2112 was very much similar to Caress of Steel, only the band's vision was clearer, their musical chops were stronger, the songwriting was more advanced. Best of all, they sounded grown up. "'What are we going to do next?'" Lifeson remembers thinking. "'Are we going to do what they want us to do, which is basically the first album again? Or are we just going to say, 'Screw you, we're going to do what we want to do?' This was us giving them the finger. That's the way we looked at it right from the beginning. And then of course it turned into something else, something grander. We just wanted to let them know that they couldn't push us around."
For the first time Rush sounded truly assertive on record, like a band ready to conquer the rock world. Forty years after its April 1, 1976 release, 2112 is widely regarded as a classic album, a major influence on hard rock, progressive rock and heavy metal. Featuring the spellbinding sci-fi storytelling of the masterpiece title track and its five eclectic deep cuts that range from fun to introspective to ferocious, it was also the breakthrough Rush was so desperately in need of. "My first reaction was, 'This is like a futuristic prog rock spaceship ride,'" says Timothy Tiernan, a shipyard worker in Newport, R.I. who was a pre-teen when he first heard 2112 in 1978. "It was like rock and roll storytelling. The more you listened, the more you tried to find hidden messages. The album tempo would be a roller coaster ride. One song would be mellow, and the next would blow your face off. Just the way they would tie three songs together was like nothing the fans had heard. I was hooked from the jump."
In late 1975, Rush was convinced it had struck paydirt with Caress of Steel; Lee, Lifeson and Peart emerging from the sessions with producer Terry Brown immensely proud of what they had done. In retrospect, the album has it's moments, such as the bracing heavy metal of "Bastille Day" and the more wistful tones of "Lakeside Park," but for all the admirable spirit of the 12-and-a-half-minute "The Necromancer" and the 20-minute "The Fountain of Lamneth," both tracks are bogged down by dense songwriting, not to mention some outrageously lofty fantasy lyrics courtesy of Peart. "For me it sounds like the early experimental time for us, which is exactly what it was," Lifeson says. "Neil had just joined the band, we wanted to do something with a little more substance to it after Fly By Night, how he was writing lyrics, his contribution to what Geddy and I felt naturally, and the whole idea of us doing a concept 'side.' 'The Necromancer' was kind of a mini concept too, we broke it down into parts. With 'The Fountain of Lamneth,' it was a much meatier project. I think for us it was very satisfying on an artistic level. Obviously it wasn't a great success."
Critics had agreed. "I played the latest (and admittedly rather derivative) Rush album Caress of Steel in the office the other day, and unfortunately it received howls of derision," wrote influential British critic Geoff Barton in his review Sounds magazine. To this day Caress of Steel remains one of the only Rush albums not to be certified platinum in America, having taken nearly 20 years to achieve gold status. "2112 was a response to the indifference that greeted Caress of Steel," Lifeson says. I think we were at a point where we were evolving. We were becoming better musicians, we were playing better, we were working towards having more of a signature Rush sound. When we got to 2112, we were all set for that.
As was the norm in the '70s, if a young band was energetic and willing to work, record companies had them crank out new music at an alarming rate by today's standards. The bulk of 2112, which required meticulous attention to detail, especially on the title track, was written during the fall and winter of 1975, while the band was touring. "I recall writing in arenas, in dressing rooms, in the car," Lifeson reminisces. "We were playing in between 220 and 250 shows a year. We didn't have the luxury we would have later on where we would go somewhere for a month and just concentrate on writing. It was all written on the fly. So it had quite a different feel to it in its construction and in the way we developed it. We already had all the pieces written, we'd rehearsed them at sound checks, we knew the album, we knew all the material."
The storyline is a simple one, refreshingly linear compared to such bloated rock operas as The Who's Tommy and Genesis's The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway: In the year 2112 the world is under totalitarian rule of the Solar Federation, and all art and culture is controlled by the priests from "The Temples of Syrinx." A young man discovers an ancient guitar, learns to play it and suggests to the priests that its music would greatly benefit humanity. Citing the guitar and the music it yielded as a reason the previous civilization failed, the priests destroy the guitar. Distraught, the young man kills himself as chaos reigns, an ominous booming overhead: "Attention all planets of the Solar Federation: We have assumed control."
"'2112' took you somewhere; you can see it all playing out in your mind's eye," writes Vancouver-based music writer Rob Hughes. "It's the stuff of a million bad student screenplays. I always interpreted the '2112' suite's ending as destruction preceding renewal. Sure, the hero has died, but his transgression has sparked anarchy, which in turn has signaled the elder race — the ones who escaped the planet to build an enlightened society — to return to claim their former home. The voice that announces, 'We have assumed control,' comes from neither the priests nor the hero. It's the voice of hope."
Essentially a seven-part suite comprised of song fragments and reprised musical themes, what sets "2112" apart from Rush's earlier epic-length experimentation like "The Fountain of Lamneth" and Fly By Night's "By-Tor and the Snow Dog" is its accessibility. The exploration of dynamics, atmospherics and program music was a huge creative breakthrough for Rush, and the ambition and synthesis of styles would help the album appeal to a wider audience, one that could appreciate both the technical chops and the pop hooks. "I love that Rush combines total prog-nerd wankery with music that's actually catchy," writes Amanda Falke, a musician and software engineer based in Portland, OR. "Rush may sound nerdy, but at heart they're pop musicians. There is a warmth and presence to their music that very few bands have."
In the title suite's third chapter, "Discovery," the listener hears the babbling sound of a stream, as well as the protagonist picking up the old guitar. Lifeson plucks and strums awkwardly, completely out of tune, and gradually tunes the acoustic guitar ("How does he tune the guitar and learn to play it so fast?" Lifeson jokes), ultimately working his way to a pretty chord sequence. "What can this strange device be?" Lee sings plaintively. "When I touch it, it gives forth a sound." "We wanted it to feel like we were in a cave," Lifeson explains. "It's not a rock delivery. Sonically there's lots of reverb, there's the water trickling down the creek that's inside the cave. It became more visual, cinematic in a way, and that stuck with us for a long time. Now we had a structure that was working for us, that we felt confident with and were interested in."
It has been stated of more than one young rock musician that the two essential attributes are ignorance and arrogance. At the age of 22, Lifeson and his bandmates had learned to ditch convention in favor of experimentation. Gone was the overt Cream worship of the first album. In its place on 2112 was supreme self-assurance as well as youthful bravado. Coupled with the restraint and discipline that comes with artistic maturation, it was a perfect combination. "We'd been touring so much, we really felt comfortable in our skin as a band," Lifeson recalls. "If I listen to '2112' now, playing it on the last number of tours, there are some really interesting musical parts. There's lots of bluesy stuff on that, and maybe because of that there's a purity about it that grabs you. It's not too heady. It's a little more from the gut. With that record as well, there was the economy of it. That was important. It's more approachable than Caress of Steel."
"When it comes to space-age nerdy prog rock with massive compositions, Rush did it first, and they did it best on 2112," Falke writes. But she insists there's something more to Rush than technical innovation and sci-fi concepts: "Rush also has something most heavy bands today lack: vulnerability. The ending of '2112' (the song) is incredibly triumphant, and you only get that with the dynamics that result from total vulnerability in your music. That's so inspiring."
Lifeson says the band pulled from many sources on the way to finding its own sound. "We were all fans of Genesis, Yes, King Crimson. Pink Floyd as well. But we really wanted to do our own thing. We've found a lot of inspiration in a lot of different areas, from reggae, to country, to pop, to heavy metal. And that's always been a cool thing about us. We haven't been truly an overly progressive metal type band. We mix things up there, lots of ups and downs, lots of dynamics. We don't always play balls to the wall. We don't always try to make everything super complicated."
For an album that's been embraced as a "classic," the flipside of 2112 never gets as much attention as the song "2112" itself. You have the proto-stoner rock of "A Passage to Bangkok," the surreal, startlingly refined "Twilight Zone," Lifeson's wistful "Lessons" and Lee's melancholy "Tears" and the raucous "Something For Nothing," which reprises the individualist sentiment of the title track. "'Twilight Zone' was a difficult one," Lifeson muses. "There are a lot of weird time changes in it. The positioning of the guitar was awkward and uncomfortable. It wasn't as easy to do as some of the other things. 'Bangkok' is a really fun song for us to do, it's our homage to smoking pot around the world, finding the best that you can."
Following its release, attention to 2112 grew slowly. Eventually it charted as high as No. 61 on Billboard's album chart. But although the momentum was slow initially, it started to snowball to the point where the band would be an upper-tier arena and stadium act for the rest of their career. Every Rush album released since has charted higher — after 1980, every studio album but one has peaked in the chart's top 20. "Everything was slow but steady," Lifeson says, but "2112 bought us our independence. Mercury never, ever bothered us with material or studio work. They just left it up to us. They figured, 'Okay, they know what they're doing, and it works for them. As long as we're popping the cash register open, we're happy.'"
The album has continued to win new fans. Drummer Taylor Hawkins of the band Foo Fighters, who played with Rush on stage when the band was finally inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2013, says he came to the band as an adolescent half a decade after 2112 was released, and began working his way backward through its discography. "The overture grabbed me," he says. "I liked the fact that it was really hard rock. I loved Yes and Genesis when I was 10 or 12, but most of those prog bands were not really heavy. Not like 2112, which mixed heavy metal with technical stuff. It's so clear that they were such a huge influence on Metallica, that kind of technical metal at the time. I just loved that. It was as hard as Sabbath or Zeppelin, but the technicality was on a whole other level. That was the first time they put it all together."
Canadian illustrator Danille Gauvin, who has made artwork for nearly two dozen metal albums since 2009, describes 2112, which she encountered in 2005, as "an enabling factor for a hungry mind fascinated by horror, science fiction or fantasy." The fact that the band was also a homegrown was a bonus. "I cannot stress enough how the Canadian midwest can be very isolating for anyone growing up admiring the visual masterpieces of designers Roger Dean, Rodney Matthews, Richard Corben," she writes. "It was a place that did not take seriously the pursuit of art and design as anything but a childish fancy. 2112 did what great rock, and indeed great art, continually does in an infectious quality. It persuades you from feeling alone in your strangeness, and to celebrate it by making your own work."
Looking back on the album 40 years after its release, Lifeson says, "I'm very happy with it. Of course, I want to re-do the whole thing, just like all our records. When I go back and listen to the original record, I feel really proud of it. I can still remember how I felt at the time we were making it, and how important it seemed, and how satisfied we all were when it came together. We felt we played really well on it, and the recording experience was fantastic. We were such a real team holed up in that studio of Terry's. "When other bands cite us as an inspiration or an influence, the theme of 2112 is what they're talking about, more than anything. I've often read when we're mentioned as an influence for a band they'll say, 'We're big Rush fans, because they did it on their own, they did it their own way, and that told me that I could do the same thing. If I stick with it, persevere, I can do things the way I want them to be.'"  From: https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2016/04/30/476268876/all-the-gifts-of-life-40-years-of-rushs-2112

 

PJ Harvey - Live at The Forum, London 1993

This article originally appeared in the August 1993 issue of SPIN.
Polly Harvey is standing in the rain, in the middle of a generic English small-town shopping street. The 23-year-old singer is wearing a plush fake leopard-skin coat, her usual Olive Oyl bun let loose into barely restrained curly waves. She is bone-tired, fed up with interviews and photo sessions, sick of being the latest fixation in the music press’s neurotic search for new blood. Although she leads me to a local tea house, Harvey looks like she’d rather be getting a tetanus shot. I’m deeply flattered.
Harvey and her band, PJ Harvey, released one of the most talked-about debuts of last year, Dry, and have just issued the ballyhooed follow-up, Rid of Me. Critics have wet themselves over her striking image and her “female” lyrics, and rock stars from Jon Bon Jovi to Steven Tyler to Tanya Donelly have professed their admiration. Harvey is emblematic of a new breed of female musicians: She’s articulate and angry; she’s reluctant to align herself with feminism, yet the female body constantly asserts itself in her music with scalding ferocity. She wants to buy into rock history—her heroes are nearly all men—but only on her own terms.
Harvey is the kind of charismatic, Garboesque character whose contradictions are endlessly fascinating; she strips herself bare in her music while steadfastly refusing to “reveal” herself in interviews. “I don’t think I give away much of me in any interview,” she explains, smiling ruefully the second time I meet her, in a luminously cozy pub in a seaside town. She has the sallow look of someone who doesn’t eat or sleep enough. Unlike our first, stilted encounter, though, she seems animated and friendly this time. But her attitude to strangers still stands. “I think I give the most to people when I say very little, and actually I don’t talk that much to people that are close to me. You don’t need to.”
She has no desire to be framed, to play the industry game. Because her music seems very personal, we think we know her. “The biggest protection you can have,” she says, “is if people think they’ve got you and they haven’t got you at all.” But what’s most affecting about PJ Harvey’s music are the unclassifiable moments that seep silently into our memories, like soft dark bruises we don’t remember receiving.
Though you wouldn’t know it from its press clips, PJ Harvey isn’t just a person but a band. Drummer Rob Ellis and bassist Steve Vaughan are an unassuming pair, seemingly unfazed by the media attention (not that they get much). The band’s publicist warns me, “This is the kind of band that leaves a hotel room cleaner than it was when they got there.” Not suited to the rock’n’roll lifestyle, both Harvey and Ellis tried living in London, but neither lasted more than six months. When the city brought Harvey to the verge of a breakdown, she returned home to her parents in rural Dorset. The band clearly thrives on the anonymity of country life. “The nice thing about living ’round here,” says Ellis, “is it really is way away from all the people who are interested in PJ Harvey. They’re more interested in sheep and cattle around here. And rightly so.”
1992’s Dry was a gawky but beautiful album, oscillating between pale fragility and sulphurous abandon. I say abandon, but actually, it never really let rip. “Go, go, go,” Harvey moans repeatedly on “O Stella,” feverish with longing and frustration, unable to take her head off, torn every which way in the battle between body and brain.  Rid of Me, however, is a truly savage record, full of torrid obsession and untethered rage. It has a dynamic range as wide as the Grand Canyon, clots of noise, and Harvey’s achy, hemorrhaging vocals. The title track is a Fatal Attraction scenario, with Harvey alternately begging, “Don’t leave me,” and taunting, “Don’t you wish you’d never met her?” “Rub ‘Till It Bleeds” starts with gentle acoustic guitar and dulcet vocals, then mutates into a hungry rock’n’roll beast as voracious and thunderous as Led Zeppelin. “Dry,” an early song that didn’t make it onto the first LP, is plaintive and parched, pivoting around the ultimate male ego-puncturing accusation: “You leave me dry.”
Harvey’s choice of producer—Steve Albini (Nirvana, Pixies), formerly of Big Black and Rapeman—surprised many. Albini, synonymous with an ultra-masculine doctrine, would seem to jar with Harvey’s intricate, intimate brand of music. Still, Rid of Me works—largely because so much of its subtext is Harvey’s grappling with masculinity: simultaneously repelled by and impressed with its swagger. The irony of songs about machismo sung by Harvey and filtered through Albini’s hardcore aesthetic seems to have escaped them both. In fact, they claim to be the closest of friends, soulmates. He calls Harvey a genius, and her face lights up with pure delight at the mention of his name. “What did he say about me?” she demands, only half-joking.
Originally, Albini was underwhelmed by PJ Harvey’s live sound (“I sort of felt they’d rather be having a bowl of soup than rocking”) but agreed to produce the LP because “I thought her guitar playing was cool.” He’s notorious for his hatred of the human voice, but she convinced him that vocals were important to her, and in turn he wowed her with his studio tricks (like filtering her voice through a guitar amp so that she sounds bound and gagged on songs such as “Hook” and “Yuri-G”). The result is wrenching. Albini’s production doesn’t efface the “feminine” side of Harvey, but it does make her gasp for air. “We were both equally offended by the way women are treated in the music industry,” says Albini, “coddled and treated as if they’re incapable of making their own decisions.” When I mention this to Harvey, she nods her head, then points out that Albini fell prey to the same syndrome. “It was funny because, in the studio, Steve found himself treating me like that and he got really angry with himself. I think that made him feel a bit uncomfortable.” Which is one explanation for why the Albini-Harvey relationship worked: Rid of Me feeds on discomfort.
“Cheer up, luv.” This is addressed not to Polly Harvey—who, in person, is sweet and nowhere as dour as she likes to look in photos—but to me. I’m sitting on a stool in that pub near Harvey’s secret beach hideaway, waiting for her to finish talking to her publicist. The conversation is getting increasingly heated as Harvey asserts control over her destiny. I begin to squirm, wondering how her mood will affect our interview, when a funny old geezer launches the patronizing line on me: “Why don’t you smile, luv?” Women exist only to prettify the world, so I grin weakly as he explains that only yesterday he’d been responsible for putting five dogs to sleep. “I had to do it, but they were living, breathing creatures, you know… Ah, everything’s always all right in the end.” Just as I’m beginning to lose hope, Harvey is magically ready to talk. I never find out why those dogs had to die.
When I suggest to Harvey that her songs seem to flit very easily between male and female personas, she says, matter-of-factly, “I hardly ever give a lot of thought—particularly when I’m involved in making music or writing—to whether I’m male or female. I feel neither one nor the other.” Harvey absolutely refuses to believe her sex has anything to do with her music, but I can’t help wondering if she’s in denial as she fills me in on her life story. Following in the footsteps of her beloved older brother, she became a true tomboy, wearing a crew cut and boys’ clothes up to the age of 14.
“I used to pee backwards, all the classic symptoms.” She smiles as church bells toll outside. “I was devastated when I started growing breasts, it was horrible. Didn’t want them at all. They’re still growing now, actually,” she giggles. “I think I’m a very late developer! I can remember when I was younger my mum really wanting me to wear dresses. And I’d wear them and I’d just sit in one position all day and look really sulky with my lip hanging out until I was allowed to put my trousers back on again.” Why did you give up? “I got older and I realized that if I didn’t, then people would carry on thinking I was a boy and I’d carry on getting told off for going in the ladies’ toilets!” When I compliment her on her gorgeous, unruly mane of inky-black hair, she blanches a little. “It’s too beautiful and pretty. I’m still a tomboy at heart. That’s why I hardly ever wear it down, ’cause I feel too…girly.”
The funny thing is, for a girl who spent her early life trying to pass for a boy, she seems driven to shove her female body in everyone’s face. She’s bared her breasts for the jacket of Dry and the cover of the U.K.’s NME. How did she ever manage to expose her body to public scrutiny?  “It’s something you get used to, like interviews…” she says, giving me the practiced reply. Then she scrunches her face up in a funny, awkward grin. “But I have a complex about my body! I don’t feel comfortable with how I look at all… I think that I like to turn it on myself and make myself feel more ridiculous as a way of dealing with it.” When the band goes on tour this summer, Harvey will be ditching the androgynous look and playing with a more “feminine” persona—letting her hair down literally and figuratively. The video for “50 Ft Queenie,” Rid of Me‘s first single, is the first hint of an image change: Harvey’s decked out as a larger-than-life glam queen with attitude to spare. 50 Ft Queenie “stomps around in platform gold sandals and shakes her hair around a lot,” says Harvey. “She’s big ’cause she feasts on men and that’s a good form of protein.”
Queenie is a great alter ego for Harvey, since what’s so striking about her music is its physicality. Her songs escalate from simmering tension to outright combat, and her guitar playing is startlingly aggressive. She seems to gouge out riffs, and hack at rhythm chords. Surprisingly, Harvey says she finds “singing much more directly physical than playing the guitar. It’s coming straight from you, you’ve got to use your whole body weight to do it.” She’s very earnest about improving her voice: She’s taking Italian opera classes at home, and is considering bringing another guitarist on board to free her to focus on singing. “There’s endless possibilities there, which I think Diamanda Galás is doing already. She turns everything upside down by the way she sings. She directly makes you feel nauseous or makes you feel horrified or ridiculous just by her voice. I think that’s an incredible power.”
Listening to Rid of Me the very first time made me think of something Galás once said: “Women need to think of themselves as predators rather than prey.” Harvey agrees completely. “I read something the other day about whether all women are prone to liking sado-masochism ’cause of being the penetrated and not the penetrator. Then again, you can look at it from the other point of view where the man might think he gets swallowed whole.” Such ambivalences—love-hate, attraction-repulsion, domination-submission—are Harvey’s prime terrain, as in the line from “Legs” that goes, “I might as well be dead / But I could kill you instead.” It’s pure impulse and adrenaline, like not knowing whether you want to kill your lover or fuck. “I like to feel uncomfortable and not in control because so much of the rest of the time I’m trying to be on top of everything. So when you’re at a loss like that, that’s really exciting.” Have you ever thought about killing someone? “Although I may have a head full of anger, I don’t think it’d be very easy to kill someone unless I had a large shotgun or a can of gasoline and a match,” she laughs. “I would love to be able to fire a gun, I’ve often thought that.”
Harvey consistently rejects any approach that smacks of gender, but when I mention the idea that men take out their anger on others, while women inflict it on themselves, a flicker of recognition lights up her eyes. “It’s very occasionally that I’ll let it out and then shout at someone else…That’s why you get ill, that’s why your shoulders hurt, that’s why you bite the skin off your nails, off your lips—because there’s all this aggression you just turn in on yourself all the time. I’m finding other ways of getting it out now like drumming. And singing…I was shouting and screaming at myself in the bath last night and it was wonderful. And then I could go to sleep, which I probably couldn’t have done otherwise.”
Courtney Love, frontwoman for Hole and last year’s winner of the “women in rock” sweepstakes, is a huge fan of Harvey’s. “I envy Harvey in a way,” she says. “She wears pants, keeps her hair off her face, wears a big guitar to gird herself, doesn’t ‘ask for it’ in any way.” Unlike Love, who is happy to articulate her place as a woman in rock, Harvey has no agenda. In fact, she doesn’t even believe in gender, let alone want to align herself with feminism. But Love is right: Harvey is making a quiet spectacle of herself, exposing the underbelly of femininity in a way that’s so subtle you can almost see how she’d miss it herself. “In her own way, she presents challenges,” Love suggests. “Maybe she can be a kind of crossroads, a bridge. Some women have an ideology of ‘I’m gonna be as good as a guy’—I understand that, and I wish I was smart enough to do that. I always open up my mouth. But I’ve watched the rock mantle being passed from one guy to another all my life; if she has the chance to change that, I think that’s amazing.”
Ironically, much of PJ Harvey’s aesthetic seems born of Harvey’s admiration for the bad-boy rebels of rock (Nick Cave, Tom Waits, Captain Beefheart), art (Andres Serrano), and literature (William S. Burroughs). They cover Bob Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited” on the LP and blues legend Willie Dixon’s “Wang Dang Doodle” on a session for John Peel’s show. I suggest to Harvey that a lot of male rebellion stems from the need to escape women and domesticity. “Yeah,” she nods, “it’s escape from claustrophobia, from suffocating, which you feel a lot in the country. Particularly if you’re very ambitious and know you’ve got a lot to get out—you do feel like you’re suffocating and being strangled by your parents.” But you seem so settled. Don’t you like your house and family? Harvey responds in clipped tones, stressing every syllable: “I love and hate my house and my family.” Masculinity is a dark thread running through Rid of Me—from the ironic “Me-Jane” (“Tarzan, I’m bleeding / Stop your fucking screaming”) and “50 Ft Queenie” (“Come and measure me / I’m 20 inches long”) to “Man-Size,” in which Harvey’s grandiose protagonist is “man-size…got my leather boots on.” A lot of her songs seem both to identify with and recoil from machismo.
“I’d say it’s more anger with myself—it’s not against any machismo operation. But it’s not just anger, it’s humiliation. I want to humiliate myself, which I think I do very well on those songs,” she explains primly. “I like to humiliate myself and make the listener feel uncomfortable. That would be the ideal package.” We laugh at this idea of mass marketing shame and horror. “I’m not satisfied with Rid of Me, it’s nowhere near achieving that…there’s a long way to go before it gets as direct as I would like. I think it’s very tame at the moment.” Wriggling in my seat, I try to imagine what a totally unleashed PJ Harvey would sound like. The mind reels.  From: https://www.spin.com/2021/11/pj-harvey-really-the-blues-1993-feature/

Wheel - Movement

Wheel is a 4-man progressive metal band from Finland. They’ve released two EPs and two albums since 2017, the most recent of which is ‘Resident Human’. One of their singles, ‘Hyperion’, caught my eye and subsequently put this album on my radar. ‘Resident Human’ was my first introduction to the band, and though it’s early into 2021, I must say this is one of my favourite releases of the year so far.
‘Resident Human’ starts right off with the nearly 12-minute track, ‘Dissipating’. The song begins and ends with the same sombre guitar riff that is simple but captivating. It has a cool, spacey feeling to it that is recurring throughout the album. This song builds slowly, but it never becomes uninteresting. There are some undeniable musical influences from Tool, from the song structure down to the guitar tones, and I mean that as a positive. Around eight minutes in, ‘Dissipating’ has its climactic moment, with chugging bass and guitar riffs. It’s a satisfying conclusion and sets the standard for the rest of the record. ‘Movement’ is the title of the next track, and it provides quite a tone shift. The song opens with an explosive bass riff and maintains that intensity from beginning to end. Aki Virta plays the bass on this album and does an excellent job of it. The track is held together with some dynamic drum work. Where ‘Dissipating’ was a slow build to a climactic moment, ‘Movement’ is simply a burst of energy.
That contrast continues throughout ‘Resident Human’, with two more ten-minute epics, and two more short, hard-hitting tracks. The balance between the two styles is an interesting dynamic for the record to lean on. Long songs are, of course, not something new to the world of prog. But I found the way they constructed the album to be fairly unique.
‘Hyperion’ is the second of the ten-minute tracks found on the album, and it shares many of the same praises as the first. One of the key differences, however, is the presence of a chorus. It’s both catchy and memorable, two things that are welcome in an album that often focuses on technicality. The song is groovy and atmospheric, dark and complex. It’s my favourite track on the record, and it’s easy to see why it was released as a single. ‘Fugue’ is a more melancholic track. Though the instrumentation remains rich, the vocals convey just the right amount of emotion for that sorrowfulness to come across well. It’s a positive break before the album’s grand finale.
That finale is the title track, ‘Resident Human’. The third ten-minute epic. Lengthy songs such as these can really drag an album down when done poorly. But I feel the band hits the nail on the head with each one of them and they are the strongest parts of the record. The song starts with a lone ominous guitar riff. Then the rest of the music kicks in and fills the song with catchy and interesting licks. The song builds into the last chorus, which explodes with intense and progressive instrumentation before closing with that same opening riff. I have very few complaints about this album. If I had to come up with something I’d say it shies away from the more melodic side of prog that I normally enjoy, but that’s more personal preference than it is criticism. ‘Resident Human’ is an album that combines atmosphere and groove, rhythm and technicality. And Wheel displays maturity in sound beyond what you’d expect from a band on their second LP. On the whole, I thoroughly enjoyed listening to this album. And I have no issues in saying that so far this year, Resident Human might just be my favourite progressive album of 2021.  From: https://proghurst.co.uk/2021/04/wheel-resident-human-review/

Richard & Linda Thompson - Pavanne

A long time ago, almost forty years, late one night on BBC2, I found myself watching a television performance of Richard and Linda Thompson. Other than idle curiosity, I don’t know what motivated me to put the programme on: I believe it had already started. No doubt I was just putting off going to bed. I knew very little of the Thompsons, though in a few years I would know much more. I knew of them mostly from the New Musical Express, my weekly music bible from 1972 to 1987, where Richard remained very much a favourite. And I definitely heard ‘I want To See The Bright Lights Tonight’, an unusual choice to be favoured by Piccadilly Radio 261, when commercial radio reached Manchester. If I knew any other songs even fleetingly, I can’t remember: my friends were all into prog and I didn’t develop friendships with those who were Richard Thompson fans until later that decade.
It might have been a Jake Thackeray programme on which they guested. I’d have watched that. The point was that I came into this cold, in silence and solitude, and the first song that hit me was ‘Pavanne’
Hit me was right. It stunned me into total fascination. Then, before and since I rarely gave a brand new song, by brand new artists, such undivided attention. For five minutes, as it unwound itself simply, an acoustic guitar and that amazing voice of Linda Thompson, slowly drawing out the image of a female assassin, a cold steel woman, infallible and implacable held me rigid, intent only on what this amazing song would do, where it would go to next. Enigma, impossible to feel as a corporeal woman, lethal in effect yet curiously neutral in impact, neither to be despised nor idolised, Pavanne was a woman whose name was taken from an old, slow, courtly dance, as referenced in the song’s lyrics. I was familiar with the term from my comics reading, for Pavanne was an assassin elsewhere, a foe of Shang-Chi, Master of Kung Fu.
It was an astonishing experience. By the time the song was over, I wanted it. In contrast, the other song they played that night (which was ‘Just the Motion’ if it was indeed that Jake Thackeray Show) didn’t affect me remotely as much. The track appeared on the Thompson’s album First Light. Good though it was, it was lacking. The intensity of the performance, the stripped down force, the aura around Linda’s voice just wasn’t there to be heard on vinyl. Other songs, yes. The title track, for example, was wonderful. And in time I would discover the full I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight which is awesome, and the alternate, electric version of ‘A Heart Needs A Home’, which always makes me wonder why on earth they released the original, acoustic version, on Hokey Pokey.
Truth to tell, I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight is the only wholly satisfying, front to back Richard and Linda album for me, though for near forty years the alternate ‘Heart’ has fought it out with ‘Pavanne’ for exclusive rights to be called the favourite. ‘Heart’ has an edge in that I know it only as the recorded track, and ‘Pavanne’s most pure and affecting form is locked in a memory from so far back.
There are different versions of the song on YouTube. The one I’ve chosen to highlight comes from the Thompsons’ last tour in 1981, which makes it contemporaneous with that five stunned and yearning minutes that television night. In some ways it’s almost better. Richard plays guitar, Linda sings, but from the moment she starts she is scary cold, ice and steel. She isn’t singing this song, she is inhabiting it. Every inflexion in her voice is simultaneously intimate and distant. She might be Pavanne herself. Eyes cold as the barrel of her gun. The woman who has never missed her mark. And this performance was part of the farewell tour in which the Thompsons’ marriage was a hollow thing of hatred on both sides but his guitar and her voice are meshed together without a gap between them that you could fit the blade of a knife into.  From: https://mbc1955.wordpress.com/2021/12/20/the-infinite-jukebox-richard-and-linda-thompsons-pavanne/

Gary Numan - Cars

What are prog musicians if not sonic pioneers? In which case, Gary Numan is definitely prog. In fact, he received an Innovator In Sound award to confirm his credentials: pushing the boundaries, experimenting with new technology, ploughing his own furrow – these are all in his DNA. As for those credentials, they have become weightier with the passage of time. When he emerged in the late 70s, he was dismissed as a synth-pop lightweight, a fraud in face paint. Since then, he and his peers – including his hero John Foxx – have improved their standing with the prog fraternity.
Numan has become something of a name to drop, if not among prog musicians then certainly for well-respected rock heavyweights: Marilyn Manson, Trent Reznor, Beck, Queens Of The Stone Age and Dave Grohl have all cited the importance of his work in left-field electronica with a menacing sci-fi edge, his lashings of noir and textured atmospherics conjuring up a dark, dystopian future world. “He was innovative and refreshing with his synth-driven music,” says Fish On Friday keyboard player Frank Van Bogaert. “He also has an attitude that’s almost like rock’n’roll, but without guitars. Numan sure has influenced my career!”
It doesn’t take long, in a conversation with the man himself, before the talk takes a turn for the prog. There was his team-up in 1983 with Bill Nelson, for instance, a collaboration he sought because he was a huge fan in his teens of Be-Bop Deluxe. “They were my first ever gig,” Numan recalls on the phone from his home in Los Angeles, where he has lived for the past few years with his wife and three young daughters. “They were brilliant – I loved every single song they played.” Unfortunately, the pairing didn’t work out – “We didn’t see eye to eye,” he says – but he remains a fan.
The same goes for Queen, whom Numan saw in concert as a teenager at the Rainbow in London. He remembers the band “rescuing” him a few years later during one of their gigs in Japan, where he was stranded after traveling there with the group Japan – another art-rock/synth-pop outfit from the early 80s with prog tendencies. “I was in Tokyo and things had got a bit weird,” he relates, his accent more cockney than Californian. “I got dumped so I went to see Queen at the Budokan. Anyway, I was sitting in the balcony and there was quite a lot of fuss around me and I couldn’t work out what it was until security came and got me – it was me causing the fuss! So they took me backstage and the band adopted me like this little waif and stray. It was really cute. I sat and had sushi with Freddie and the band. Problem was, I didn’t like sushi, so they went and ordered me McDonalds instead! They were amazing. I still think Freddie is the best frontman in the history of music.”
Numan subsequently worked with Roger Taylor (on the former’s 1981 album, Dance). More recently, he made a cameo on the new album by Jean-Michel Jarre. “It sounds like Jean-Michel Jarre with me singing,” he offers drily of his track on the second installment of the French keyboards whiz’s Electronica project. “I love him,” Numan adds of Jarre, whom he considers “one of the loveliest and most charming people I’ve ever met” – and not just because he’s been to his house several times, played with his kids and wrestled on the floor with his 200lb English Mastiff. “I get such a lot of lovely things said about me being a pioneer – but fuck me, Jean was doing it years before me. That’s a pioneer. He was out on his own for such a long time, creating his own sound.”
Numan could easily be talking about himself. He’s just delighted that after years of abuse – of being a so-called surrogate Bowie, a keyboard dilettante with a fetish for leather and android froideur – he’s now taken seriously, and across a wide variety of genres. He’s being interviewed today by Prog, but if such journals existed, it could easily be Goth, Electronica, New Wave, Post-Punk or Industrial magazines asking the questions. “Yeah,” he says, and you can hear his face forming a satisfied smile through the phone line. “One of the things that’s cool that’s happened to me over the last 20 years or so is not so much that I’m recognised as influential, which is lovely anyway, but the fact that it’s across so many genres. I get more actual satisfaction out of that than ever having been No.1 [with 1979’s Are “Friends” Electric? and Cars]. There’s a big element of luck and fortuitous timing with that. But other people covering your songs or acknowledging your music, that means a lot more to me.”
For so long, Numan rejected his back catalogue. Now, he is more accepting – proud, even – of his past. That explains why, a day after this interview, he’s coming to London to perform three of his key early albums live over three nights: Replicas (1979), The Pleasure Principle (1979) and Telekon (1980). “I didn’t realise they had such an impact,” he says. “I had this huge chip on my shoulder about the old stuff and I spent most of my life trying to distance myself from it so I could bring attention to my newer stuff. It’s only recently that I’ve become aware of their impact.”
Numan considers his 1992 album Machine + Soul his nadir – “It was rubbish,” he says bluntly – while 1994’s Sacrifice is widely regarded as the moment of his artistic rebirth. It has officially been okay to like Numan for over 20 years now, whereas his initial period of success – when he was arguably the biggest pop star in Britain – was relatively brief. “Yeah, I was massive for about a year, then it started to go downhill and carried on relentlessly until about 1992-93 when it bottomed out and everything was shit,” he says of his career trajectory. He shudders when he recalls that one of his singles from that time, Absolution, sold fewer copies than one of his early punk singles – 1978’s That’s Too Bad, with Tubeway Army – when he was, as he puts it, “a complete unknown”. Shifting 3,000 copies compared to That’s Too Bad’s 4,000, it’s miserable fare indeed compared to the million units Are Friends Electric? sold.
“I pretty much lost everything at that point – it had all gone,” he laments. “I couldn’t give away tickets, whereas before I’d done three or four nights at Wembley [Arena, 1981]. I was finished.” It was then – with no label and huge debts that he estimates at around £600,000 – that he decided to pursue music more “as a hobby”, without worrying about chart success and radio play. The music he began making – to please himself and no one else – was suddenly darker and heavier. He’d rediscovered his mojo. Every album of the last two decades has sold better than its predecessor, and critics – usually the bane of his life – have been glowing in their praise: 2013’s Splinter (Songs From A Broken Mind) was widely hailed as his best album to date. “I felt as though I’d finally come out of the shadow that my early success had created,” he says.
It’s ironic but true: there are early-80s outfits who were far more credible than Numan back then who have since succumbed to the cheesy retro/nostalgia circuit, whereas he has kept well away from anything that might posit him as a relic, even as the wolves were circling his door. He’s just happy that a photograph of him in a magazine these days would more likely be captioned ‘industrial legend’ than ‘80s icon’. “It said ‘80s icon’ for 15 years and that drove me mad,” he says of his dog days. “It painted me as someone from a bygone era and I didn’t feel like that.” The music he has made since 1994 – especially Sacrifice (1994), Pure (2000) and Splinter – has established Numan as a going, contemporary concern, reinvented as a sort of UK analogue to Reznor/Manson. His heavily textured atmospherica has even gained the approval of prog-heads.
“I’m lucky,” he admits, looking forward to going back into the studio. “I’ve had a very long career with a lot of ups and downs, and yet here I am at 57, just about to start my 21st album, and I’m probably in a stronger position that I’ve been almost since day one. So I have absolutely nothing to grumble about at all.” It hasn’t been a problem-free journey. He was diagnosed not long ago with Asperger’s Syndrome, and that brought with it a whole set of difficulties. Circa 2009, he began to suffer with terrible depression. And he has always been wracked with self-doubt.
“Look, I know I’m not a very good singer, I can’t play guitar very well, I’m not a virtuoso musician,” he says. “But I’m lucky in that I’ve got something about me that’s slightly different and some people like it. But as far as being better than anyone else, absolutely not. I’ve got a kind of mental dysmorphia,” he adds of his inability to believe the positive hype and only focus on the negative. It has, perversely, been his “driving force” over the years, pushing him on to prove his worth. So did his insecurity never allow him to enjoy fame and acclaim back in the day? “No – in fact, it was far worse then than it is now,” he winces, recalling the slings and arrows of outrageous critical opprobrium hurled his way when he was writing, performing and producing his own records, and even managing himself, while still in his early 20s.
“Everyone was pretty fucking horrible. I was aware the records were selling well, but I was also aware that pretty much everyone else seemed to hate me. I might have sold a million albums, but that meant 59 million people in the country didn’t buy them! People were incredibly hostile. My confidence was a mess.” How about now? Should Numan fans be concerned that living in sun-kissed Los Angeles in a nice big house, he’s going to get happy? Where will that leave the dark artist of lore? “Well, luckily I’m not actually that bothered by surroundings,” he replies. “The place in my head that I write from is uniquely dark. It sits in a little corner of my brain, festering away regardless of whether I’m living in sun-kissed paradise or wherever.”
He explains that Splinter was written largely in a period of depression, one that almost ended his marriage. “It didn’t matter that I’d been sitting in the sunshine when I wrote it,” he says. “It came out of my memory and my experiences.” It was his wife’s own postnatal depression that exacerbated his deteriorating mental state – that, and a sort of midlife crisis. “I started worrying about getting old, dying and illness and all sorts of shit. It built up and I went over the edge. I was like that for three or four years.” He was in “a zombie state” for a while as he took heavy medication, and even the threat of his wife leaving and an intervention by friends couldn’t snap him out of his ambition-free funk. Eventually, recording Splinter dragged him back to his regular state, which can perhaps be best summed up as ‘anhedonia’: a condition that means an inability to experience pleasure.
Numan is candid and forthright, not to mention brutally honest with himself about his feelings; strange things to say, perhaps, about someone once lampooned for being a shallow, hollow man-machine. “I remember [NME journalist] Paul Morley slagging me off because all my songs were ‘I’ and ‘Me’ – but they are!” he laughs. “That’s what I write about. Like Telekon, that was me talking almost exclusively about what it’s like to become famous: it made me paranoid as fuck! “I never thought my music was cold and unemotional,” he adds. “That seemed to me a slightly ignorant reaction to electronic music being regarded as cold and emotionless. Maybe because I didn’t smile much.”  From: https://www.loudersound.com/features/gary-numan-prog-credentials

Maria Ka - Ikh Bin Mid

Maria Ka (the singer’s full last name is Kawska) lives in Poland, and she discovered that her family had covered over its Jewish roots; there were Jews in her father’s genealogy. This revelation led Ka to pursue Jewish studies and psychology at University in Krakow. It also led to further realizations: that the Yiddish language deeply resonated with Ka, and that her University program did not provide much by way of women’s studies. This culminated in Ka’s thesis on Jewish women in Polish interwar cinema. A consistent theme in Ka’s work is restoring the centrality of women’s voices, as women have been marginalized in both society and by patriarchal religions. By the time that Maria Ka recorded these songs, women were in the streets protesting the Polish court decision that sought a ban on abortions. For a scholar-activist such as Ka, the stakes were clearly high.
Ka’s interests permeate Der Hemshekh, and she sings entirely in Yiddish. The soundworld of the album is resolutely contemporary, primarily built around electronics and loops, oboe, drums, and Maria Ka’s vocals. “Gikhe Trit (Fast Steps)” kicks off the album with some cold electro-new wave, and the song establishes an urgent tone. The song celebrates the regenerative power of Mother Earth, against which Ka declares that “it’s high time for your greed, black piousness to disappear.” More than that, the song points towards abandoning social structures that have kept women from achieving full equality in public life. “Ale Teg (Every Day)” continues the collision between modernism and Yiddish futurism by laying down a seriously fuzzy bass line for Maria Ka’s call to live authentically: “Every day I go another way/I create myself from the beginning.” The declaration arrives with liberatory swagger. Given Maria Ka’s feminism, it is not surprising to find songs that ‘flip the script’ in order to illuminate a woman’s perspective. Ka and her band perform “Di Mizinke,” a traditional song that is sung by a father to God upon marrying off his daughter. The tune speeds up as if it were a traditional klezmer romp, but it also sounds like hard cabaret. With the song re-focused on the daughter, rather than the father, the bride refuses to give her father a kiss by the end of the song.
Another track that offers subversion through the female gaze is ”Sheyn Vi Di Levone (Pretty Like The Moon),” a tender song usually sung by a man but here is enlightened by a woman taking the lead. The stunning, trance-inducing “Sha Shtil! (Shhh Quiet!)” takes a song that would ordinarily celebrate a rabbi and the pupils who follow him in the male study of Torah, and turns it into a celebration where we are encouraged to be “quiet, the woman is doing a dance for us/stamp feet when she sings.” It is women that we are to learn from, and women who are powerful when returned to the center of public life: “And when the Woman sings the holiest melody/Satan loses his wings – becomes a dead body.” Ka also takes a well-known Yiddish song, “Papirosn (Cigarettes),” which features a young boy attempting to sell cigarettes in the rain; here, a young girl is asking passersby to purchase her cigarettes. With its tango rhythm, the song highlights the intertwining of misery and poverty.
Casting off the social shackles that constrain women is addressed several times. In “Oyfn Veg Shteyt A Boym (By The Wayside),” the issue is the overprotective mother. The young daughter is likened to a bird about to fly away; but the mother stifles the daughter with her own worries, making it hard for the young woman to become an adult. “Ikh Bin Mid (I Am Tired)” can barely contain it’s outrage and the song is born along by what sounds like ‘industrial’ jazz. “I am tired/I’m to fury wired,/Want to beat all the walls/With my burning hands’ pall!” – Both these songs speak to the invisibility of women in public life, but again, can be easily seen to reflect the social context faced by women in Poland around their bodily autonomy and individuality. Of course, there can’t be a revolution if you can’t dance to it. The contrast between the electric sounds and acoustic instruments is often jarring and sexy, as when Maria Ka celebrates the Zodiac sign of Scorpio. And the album closes with an absolute goddamned banger, “Ven Ikh Kuk Oyf (When I Look At)” that brings Yiddish culture storming onto the dancefloor. It’s a thunderous dance tune that celebrates identity and remaining true to one’s culture. “I am more from the distant fields,” sings Ka, squaring the circle between that which the modern world left behind, but then embraces.
Maria Ka’s work is profoundly moving: this is avant-garde music by choice of language and daring musical settings. Yet, the album is also strangely accessible. It feels like outsider music moving towards center stage -- demanding it – and insisting on being accepted on its own terms without compromising an empowering political and feminist worldview. The fiercely independent and eccentric matriarchs of my family and yours are enfolded within this brilliant, starry, original work. Maria Ka’s work is also profound punk music, a resistant force arriving with a call to action. Der Hemshekh signals a paradigm shift for contemporary Yiddish music, highlighting that the language has much to offer our navigation of the modern world.  From: https://www.rootsworld.com/reviews/ka-23.shtml