Every jiffy bag or, these days, new arrival in the mysterytour inbox precipitates a sense of expectation that is invariably and unfortunately dashed to pieces on rocks stacked by uninspired dullards.
To know one is to be one, before you get all angry and finger-pointy with me.
Every now and then, roughly [very roughly] once in about 1000 songs, you hear something that rewires your ears and changes your conception of what music can do. The piece of music is so great it weaves itself inextricably through your life. You never forget when you first heard it or the awe that flooded through you. I say "never" with no real knowledge of the afterlife, but you'll pardon me some small pieces of hyperbole, please: it makes for better reading than "You won't forget where you first heard it for sixteen years three months and a week."
We are all familiar with this sensation when it comes to 'proper' albums and singles what are played on radio that isn't graveyard-shaped on a Sunday night. I can remember when I first heard Revolver, Doolittle, Forever Changes, Giant Steps and a portable USB stick-ful of consensus-forming albums that crop up in Best Album Ever lists with the soul-sapping, predictable regularity of a tax demand.
Beyond that consensus is all of the great music that people rarely get to hear. In my case, that's unsigned music that sometimes, for reasons that beat my heart up and make me angry at the cultural powermongers, never gets signed and never gets heard by the average human being.
The thrill of hearing something great that no one else has heard, yet, is space dust in the head and the heart. It's a great privilege... and all part of the illusion that you [well, me -- sorry for all this blatant use of the plebian 'you'] are somehow connected to the magical talent contained therein.
I am the discoverer.
The Columbus of new Welsh music.
And, like Columbus, kind of hoping for some radical revisionism that ignores the brown people who already inhabit the country I have just discovered.
It is a peculiar egotism of some radio programmes & presenters that they tout themselves as being somehow responsible for the greatest newest coolest happening-est music in the world EVER that they have found just for you.
I think you may know who I'm talking about.
But it's a general malaise.
Like I said: an illusion.
It's the little handjob [or female equivalent... by crikey this is dodgy ground; like when I called Casey Hill a wanker in first form and all the boys laughed at me... "you dick, girls can't wank!" -- WHO IS LAUGHING NOW, EH, RICHARD WILLIAMS?] we get as payment for taking the trouble to listen to music that is sent to us [ooh! the effort!]
But I am sidetracking myself as if my heart was made of high grade steel and the bit away from the point was occupied by one of the fuck off electromagnets in the Cern Hadron Collider.
All attempted satirical cynicism pushed aside for a moment, I think that the true joy for a radio presenter who is lucky enough to play new music on the radio comes in sharing the great unknown stuff that turns up with a wider audience. When it comes to the great servants of new music: John Peel, Huw Stephens, Bethan, Steve Lamacq, you can *hear* that that is where the satisfaction comes from. Wow, listen to what I have for YOU! It's sharing, and it's beautiful.
Anyway, with this series of Facebook Notes! I'm going to try and chronicle the instances when I felt that 'Wow!' moment most keenly.
Don't be pissed off if you're not mentioned or if you don't agree with my choices.... they are unashamedly my choices. There is nothing democratic about subjectivity*, and nor should there be. I am a dictator when it comes to me and my tastes. It's the ultimate civil right.
Alternatively, you could view that last sentence through an 'opinions and arseholes' filter, it's entirely up to you.
First up, 'Goodnight Said Florence' and 'Blue'.
It's good to start off with 1) a band I hated and 2) a signed band. It makes it clear from the off that my criteria are looser than my mate Richard being forced to wear Ken-the-former-aeronautical-engineer's Y-Fronts. Okay, that one will take some explaining. My mate Richard was the bass player in the band I was in. He was rather skinny. So skinny, I called him Balsa Boy. We did a 'tour' [ha ha] in the South of France a million years ago. We stayed in a retired aeronautical engineer's caravan. His name was Ken. The first morning we woke up there, we threw open the curtain and were exposed to the site of Ken's unfeasibly massive [like frameless hang gliders] Y-Fronts drying on a rotary washing line. It's funny what you can remember. Well, my criteria for these unsigned bands is looser than those MASSIVE Y-Fronts would have been on Richard.
A good image, no?
We're going to have some fun, aren't we?
Goodnight Said Florence were acquaintances of the boy who called himself singer in our original line-up.
This was in 1989. Maybe 1990.
They went to Wrexham Art College together and, somehow, Daniel [our 'vocalist'] managed to inveigle us a gig supporting them at the Kings Arms in the town.
Also on the bill were Emily, the band Gruff Rhys used to drum with before he formed Ffa Coffi Pawb -- not that I can remember anything about them.
GSF were a right bunch of twats. I think that being twats was their modus operandi. I understand that using a euphemism for female genitalia as an insult for a bunch of people who were as irritating as itching powder in a wetsuit on a very hot day is inappropriate and un-PC. I'm using the word 'twats' in the general, man-on-the-street sense of the word and for factual accuracy. You see, wherever GSF went, a chorus of "what a bunch of twats" would inevitably follow in their wake.
There were a number of reasons for this:
1) they were twats.
2) they were popular -- this was enough to rile everybody involved in the burgeoning Mold-scene of the early 90's to levels of psychopathic hatred. On one infamous occasion, Goodnight played Sureways in Mold. This was *our* venue. They were booed and derided to the point that their singer, Nick, made the fatal mistake of saying, "if you think you can do any better, you get up". Of course, a dozen musicians got up and tried to seize their instruments. There was a bit of a rumpus that ended with GSF's van being chased up the road in a scene reminiscent of a baggy Blues Brothers.
By now, you will have realised, I hope, that Goodnight Said Florence were cut from the right mustard. They were more punk rock than all of the supposed punks who were heckling them by an exponential factor multiplied by pi to the power of the waist measurement of Ken's Y-Fronts [in cm], squared.
Still, 3) they were fucking hippies. They had long hair and a predilection for tie-dye and smelling like wet dogs infused with patchouli oil and dope smoke.
4) One of them was called Lloeb and another of them was, and still is, called Conrad.
5) They appeared on Tomorrow's World plugging the CD laser disc. There must be footage of that, somewhere.
6) They were good.
I don't think 'good' is over-stretching it.
The older and allegedly wiser I get, the more I come to recognise and appreciate the influences in their music. Whereas 18yr old me thought that James were a bit outré, Goodnight Said Florence's more mature members [the aforementioned LLoeb, LLoyb? He had a beard and 18 kids] clearly had an appreciation for early Floyd and Krautrock. How cool is that? Knocks my passion for baggy Soupdragons into a hat full of cocks, doesn't it?
So, the first piece of unsigned Welsh music that changed the way I thought was 'Blue' by Goodnight Said Florence. Now, technically, they were signed to Different Class records, but I heard Blue on a cassette demo before all of that happened and filled me full of rabid jealousy.
It's just a groove, really, but that is the beauty of it. Simple bass line, very simple keyboard line, but metronomic, assured and irresistible. I even like the lyrics. Goes on a bit, though.
black calling kettle the pot.
You can download 'Blue' here & find out a whole lot more about Florence, should they take your fancy.
http://www.conradscastle.co.uk/Flo/gsf.htm
*There is noting democratic about subjectivity -- but, admittedly, subjectivity is one of the luxuries of a democratic society. And Guinness turns poo black.
©Adam Walton
2010
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