Julian Cope is one of pop music’s outsiders, a singer and author who began his career in the post-punk pop band The Teardrop Exolodes but whose solo career has drifted gleefully off-radar, more recently releasing albums that blend psych, Gaelic music, blues and prog rock at the rate of about one a year.
Temples’ debut album, 2014’s Sun Structures, was an instant and surprise success. Within weeks of its release, the Brit-psych outfit were headlining major venues for the first time. Sun Structures went UK Top 10. Tame Impala had opened the door and Temples stepped through. As if to stress this, Volcano’s fourth track, “Oh the Saviour”, rhymes “lava” with “impala” and, three tracks on, “Open Air” could pass for a Tame Impala stomp-along.
Christmas came, and brought with it the usual silly-season headlines. "Vinyl outsells digital downloads" came the cries, bringing with them a vision of a plastic phoenix rising from the ashes. The truth was, of course, much more prosaic – digital downloads are falling faster than Icarus as more people take to streaming services and abandon even the most ethereal physical things for an internet full of stuff.
Meanwhile, in the real world, a rather wonderful release by Laurie Shaw, a ludicrously prolific 22-year-old, Ireland-based singer songwriter, passed by with barely a mention. That’s the reality of vinyl releases; many of the most interesting are limited editions put out for love rather than money on shoestring budgets by labels who appear to conjure magic out of thin air.
The beautifully presented, two-record package from Sunstone records is the first release proper by the multi-instrumentalist. It comes on the back of slew of CD-R releases (57 albums to date if his bandcamp site is to be believed) and is a work that reaches far beyond Shaw’s tender years.
The collection of 30 songs certainly doesn’t short change, but there’s much more here than simple value for money. While Shaw’s recording methods could most accurately be described as raw, marked by distorted guitar, sudden stops and occasionally chaotic percussion, they're never out of place with his bursts of vital, energetic psych.
Many will hear (correctly) shades of The Fall, the muscular musicality of The Coral and the energy of punk behind these songs, but there’s also an unashamed sense of American classicism on show here, from Elvis Presley to Don Fleming’s criminally underrated Gumball via Captain Beefheart's straighter moments.
The songs themselves are noisy, spiky and often fun (not least an inspiring cover of Tom Jones’s 1971 hit “She’s a Lady”) and so consistent in their resolute determination to lodge themselves in the listener's subconcious that picking out highlights is an almost impossible task. Having said that, the pummelling powerhouse of “Rights for the Native” segueing into the delightfully introspective “Double Denim” with its opening line, “Decade number two, Still in love with you, I wonder if the future will have boots that zip themselves,” is a moment I could happily revisit a thousand times.
Had I heard this last year, it would have undoubtedly made my end-of-year list, and I suspect that many would agree. It’s a solid argument for buying a turntable, but if you’re not for turning, you can buy the files on bandcamp. Think of it as a late Christmas present to yourself.
In 1996, the NME ranked Super Furry Animals’ debut album Fuzzy Logic as the year’s fourth best. It sat between Orbital’s In Sides (number three) and DJ Shadow’s Entroducing. Beck’s Odelay took the top spot and Manic Street Preachers’ Everything Must Go was at two. Fuzzy Logic was on Creation Records and the Oasis-bolstered label’s only other album in the run down-was The Boo Radleys’ C’Mon Kids (15).
At 15 seconds in, it becomes obvious Ruins means business. A brief snatch of acoustic guitar lays the table for a hard-edged, groove-driven slab of melodic guitar psych immediately bringing to mind the heavier moments of Sun Dial’s classic 1990 album Other Way Out. Dungen (and their flute) are in there too. As are Kak’s “Trieulogy” and a hefty dose of vintage Swedish progg.
It was 2008 when The Early Years went into the studio to begin work on the follow-up to their impressive self-titled debut. Having pretty much set out the blueprint for many, if not all, of the kraut-esque bands who followed in their wake, there was disagreement on where to go next: further down the same path or sideways onto softer, more experimental ground? Songs or structures? Klaus Dinger or Michael Rother?
There's an eeriness about this record that comes of it being so very perfectly anachronistic. TOY have formerly mined various parts of experimental rock history, notably Krautrock, and on their collaboration with Natasha “Bat For Lashes” Khan, some wild psychedelic rock from all corners of the planet. And certainly you can hear the chug of 1970s Dusseldorf sublimated into the grooves here on their third album – but the overwhelming sense is that this record exists somewhere around 1988 or 1989, back when indie truly meant indie.
In 1969, the Australian band Tamam Shud improvised as a film was projected onto the wall of a recording studio. The results were heard on the Evolution album. Playing original music live to accompany a film screening isn’t commonplace these days but eyebrows are no longer raised when it happens. Pere Ubu have played along with Carnival of Souls and It Came From Outer Space. Mogwai have done the same for the documentary Atomic.
In 1969, a tranche of American musicians looked back to the country’s past for inspiration. Bob Dylan followed John Wesley Harding with Nashville Skyline. The Band’s eponymous second album hit the shops. The Flying Burrito Brothers debuted with The Gilded Palace of Sin. The rootsy was a default. But choosing to draw on country and Appalachian traditions did not have to mean playing it straight. On the amazing Farewell Aldebaren, Judy Henske and Jerry Yester used banjo and hammered dulcimer.
In 1966, David Warner assumed the title role in Karel Reisz’s satire Morgan – A Suitable Case for Treatment. The film’s Morgan Delt was a fantasist with a communist family background married to the posh Leonie, played by Vanessa Redgrave. When she seeks a divorce, he campaigns to win her back but ends up in an asylum where she reveals she is pregnant with his child. As a depiction of class clashes, thwarted aspirations and unmediated behaviour, it was a very Sixties confection.