The Smiths Singles Box...

"Kiss my shades". "Talent borrows, genius steals". "Beware the wrath to come". "Our souls, our souls, our souls, our souls..." There was more wit and wisdom engraved into the run-off grooves of a Smiths record than in the entire recorded output of most of their contemporaries. And now thanks to the wonderful Rhino records those of us who weren't able to enjoy the first 10 Smiths 7 inch singles first time around* can feel the hairs stand up on the back of our necks and the whole of our being sizzle with adolescent joy (...slight return in the case your humble scribe) as we nurse these glorious and lovingly produced facsimiles of the original Rough Trade singles.

OK, there are a few minor quibbles - the sleeves on the RT originals had the tabs showing at the back rather than glued under the rear cover. And the Jean Marais pic looks a bit cheap and p/copied compared with the original. But they're minor cavils when set against the love and care and attention to detail that Rhino have so evidently put into this re-issue. Let's hope they've been let loose on the original LPs and CDs too - I'm sure they'll sound as good if not better than our lovingly nurtured but inevitably slightly torn and frayed eighties copies. As well as those cryptic run-off messages, there's another lovely touch in the silent area. The original Rough Trade RTN part of the serial numbers has been crossed through and replaced with an RHN prefix. But it's the sound of the things that's really been shown the most respect. As Johnny Marr himself said to critics of the band's decision to sign for EMI; it's what's in the grooves that counts, not what's on the label.

If the sticker on the box is to be believed, the contents of the box have been mastered directly from the original tapes. Whatever the source, boy do they sound good. It really is like slipping one of the original singles out of its wrapper for the first time when you go to play one of the Rhino reproductions; quite uncanny. And they've maintained that slightly boxy, brash indie single sound on the earlier songs like 'Hand in Glove' and 'This Charming Man'. But listen to 'That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore' and it actually sounds even clearer and more detailed than my lovely first pressing Rough Trade original album version of the song on 'Meat is Murder'. You can see why RCA (who invented the format) were so keen to persist with the faster speed of the 45 rpm platter - singles sounded so *sharp*, didn't they? So my copy of 'The Boy With the Thorn in his Side' is slightly wonky (it still sounds OK - amazing how you get used to stuff like that) - that's the deal with vinyl; you're prepared to put up with the rough, because when it's smooth.... well, it's like most of this Singles Box; a very deep joy. Or, perhaps more astonishingly, like travelling in time. Yes, that'll do. When vinyl is good, it's like time travel.




So, a very big thank you to Ma Swipe, for queuing up outside the shop for three days. You've made an old man very happy. (And when I find him, I'll *murder* the old bastard...)

[These may or may not sound any good as MP3s; but what the heck: it's Christmas! (Well, it *was* Christmas...)]


The Headmaster Ritual MP3



Still Ill MP3



That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore MP3




* I tended to buy the 12 inch versions. They sounded fantastic *and* you got an extra track - often of exceptionally high quality: think 'Girl Afraid', 'Rubber Ring', 'Unloveable' and, of course, the full version of 'How Soon is Now'.

L.U.V. on y'all,

Bob

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Bobcast #58...

...T.V. Theme Special...

...with Eisner award winning cartoonist, Mr. Nick Abadzis....

Live long and prosper!





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Bob

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A Few Words in Defence of Randy Newman...

Performing the Traditional Festive Tidying up of the Hard Disc Recorder ahead of the forthcoming Christmas telly binge (that's right, I'm going to tape 30 or so hours of useless festive programming that will once again remain unwatched and clog up the hard disc recorder until next Christmas in order that I have a full library for *next* year's Traditional Festive Tidying up of the Hard Disc Recorder), I happened upon a previously unwatched BBC session featuring the wonderful Randy Newman performing with the LSO at St. Luke's in London.

I could happily have sat and watched him just talking for the whole hour. "This next song is the word of God", he says of 'God's Song'. "Why he chose me as his instrument and not McCartney or Simon or Dylan....or the Arctic Monkeys...." Or returning home from a particularly successful recording session, he's filled with a rare sense of pride, only to turn on MTV and watch part of a 'making of the classics' documentary on Stevie Wonder's 'Songs in the Key of Life'. "There's Stevie, playing his synthesizer. Then they play back what he's just played and he overdubs another layer. It was like *Bach* playing. [Perfectly weighted pause...] I wanted to *shoot* myself...

Maybe I'm particularly dense, but I find that the full impact of his songs takes a while to sink in; it's so easy even when you've been listening to him for a while still to miss the wafer thin irony and take him at face value. The example above is a wonderful one. You're encouraged to go along hook line and sinker with his seemingly unapologetic pronouncement upon the inherent decency of the good old U.S. of A. But this is, it slowly begins to dawn on you, such feint praise, is it not? So the U.S. is not as bad as Hitler's Germany or Russia under Stalin?

Whoopie-do.

There's usually a subtle demonstration of musical genius to match the peerless lyrical brilliance - the majestic strings and the rigid shouldered gospel piano chords on the chorus of 'Sail Away' or the little Brian Wilson pedal underpinning the "they got surfing too..." in 'Political Science' - the little filligree touches of the master of the self contained piano accompaniment. Here, it's those lovely baroque trills after the names of those evil dictators 'who need no introduction'. Someone should, if they haven't already, anthologise some of his early hack work. I say hack work in the same way that you'd call one of those finger-warmer-upper Bach piano inventions hack work. He wrote one of the best songs of the Sixties ('I've been wrong before') for a Cilla Black single and his 'I don't wanna hear it anymore' is a standout of Dusty Springfield's classic 'Dusty in Memphis' platter. You just can't imagine anyone emerging again capable of reworking the dominant tropes of the canon of American popular song with such wit and potency as Randy Newman does. Or an audience for them if they did.

Sadly, you tube doesn't seem to have any of the show I saw (I was hoping to share the spoken links with you all). But I hope you'll enjoy the clip I was able to find of one of his most recent (not to mention resonant and timely) songs.

L.U.V. on y'all,

Bob

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Strictly C***s Dancing...

Well, that's what we've always called it in our house, anyroad. Until this series, which has been superb. Apart from the final, obviously, which was the biggest travesty this side of the 2006 European Cup Final. Lisa Snowdon (she of the legs that go all the way up .... and *then* some) danced like an angel, scoring perfect marks for both her first and second routines. Such a divine figure of feminine grace did she present that even died in the wool, take-it-up-the-jacksy-from-a-burly-foul-mouthed-Stevedore pooves as Graig Brevile-Toasted-Sandwich-Maker and Bruno Tortellini appeared to be attempting to contain erectile swellings of desk-lifting proportions. And Rachel Stevens was almost as good.

So, come the vote to see which two contestants would grace the final dance off, and despite the pair having a seemingly insurmountable lead after the scores from last week's cocked up viewers' vote had been added to the finalists' scores, you just knew that it would be one of these floating goddesses of the terpsichore who would be ditched by the sofa-ridden, intravenous carb-guzzling rump of the good old British public. And so it came to pass. With whatever herculean effort of their walrus like personages they could manage without contravening the myriad of restraining and anti-social behaviour orders that keep them penned into their sink estates and safely out of sight of the middle classes, sufficient numbers of viewers managed to beat at the BBC hotline auto dial function on their mobile phones with an Iceland party snack jammed flipper for long enough to make the call and register a vote for two flat- left-footed, Robbie Keane lookalikey starched stiff showroom dummy doing a shit 80s style robotic dance wanker, Tom Chambers. It would be going a tad too far to say that grown men cried. An Henry-esque, bottom lip protruding boud in the attic listening to early John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers-era Eric Clapton very, very loud seemed sufficient. I won't even *start* on the footy...

He'll be the next Doctor Who - just you watch...*



L.U.V. on y'all,

Bob


* Robbie Keane, obviously...

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Bobcast #57...

...Happy Crimble everydobby....





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Bob

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Thatcher...

I don't want to sound like one of those "Is it just me, or is everything shit now and weren't things much better in the 1970s" Stuart Maconie/Danny Baker types, but...well, it's kind of true isn't it? Up to a point at any rate. It can surely be no accident that things started to take a severe turn for the worse around 1979. Just when things had been looking up too - children, don't believe all you hear about The Winter of Discontent. It wasn't *so* bad. And there weren't *really* rats - and anyway, even if there had been, they'd have been *much* better than horrible, synthetic, antibiotic-resistant *modern* rats...

Yes, 1979 was pretty much the fulcrum year, really. The best of the post-punk stuff had pretty much been done by then. We still had Concorde. Arsenal beat Manchester United in the Cup Final. You still needed to be vaguely literate in order to be able to read the NME. And then Thatcher came along and ruined *everything*.

Perhaps I've missed somthing and have been doing the woman (she was, I've been assured, a woman after all it seems...) a great disservice, but without overstating the case too much, she is surely the most repellent creature ever to have stalked the planet and has been exclusively responsible for *every* *single* *evil* in the world. *Ever*. Has she not? And Pinochet. And if you don't believe me, compare the world as it is now with the way it was then. For instance, had you been foolish (or drunk enough) to want to experience the England cricket team spinelessly capitulating to India (or indeed any other former colony without the good manners to remember that we taught them the bloody game in the first place, didn't we?), you'd have had to do so by tuning your crude (probably Pifco-made) transistor radio to Short Wave and hearing the dulcet tones of John Arlott ebbing and flowing like a Lee Scratch Perry dub effect all the way from the subcontinent. At three o'clock in the morning. And if you turned the volume right up and pressed your ears vigorously into the speaker grille, you might even be able to make out the occasional word he was saying. Of course, *nowadays* the whole humiliation is beamed out in deafening quadrophonic sound with high definition and stats and reverse camera angles/slo-mo fan zone alternative commentary at the delicate impress of a digit. That's why they call it digital, you see. So there you are - if you wanted to follow the cricket nowadays, you wouldn't have been able to miss a thing. Some improvement.

In constructing this argument, I'm trying to think of areas where I might have to concede that, yes, love or loathe her, in all fairness I have to hold my hands up and admit that, yes, much as it pains me to say so, she did at least... I dunno....make the trains run on time or something. But no, she didn't even manage that. Trains were shit then, for sure. But they're shittier now. And more expensive. And Richard Branson's involved somewhere along the (excuse the pun) line, isn't he? I rest my case. Radio 1 is rubbish - so much so that even Radio *2* is *much* *much* better now. Now that would never have happened in the seventies, would it? John Peel's gone (killed whilst on an innocent walking holiday in South America, by Thatch, obviously. And Pinochet - did you not know that? I told you she was evil. And him.) Arlott? Gone. The mines? Long gone the way of those endless Laurel & Hardy and Norman Wisdom re-runs. One off talent and exemplary professional Chippy Brady has made way for Samir Nasri - a player as erratic as he is overpaid and a man with so much class he saw fit to trip up Newcastle's Joey Barton for no apparent reason, off the ball and in a manner that can only be described as 'like a lickle gurl'. The most challenging aspect of the modern day NME is distinguishing between the adverts and the advertorials. Gone are the Special A.K.A. to be replaced by some gurning, brushed-down-by-your-mum-bog-brush-hair-styled young simpletons whose idea of radical pop engagement is fondling their charity labrador puppy stuffed toys and stuttering over their autocued monosyllabes. And all the while, that sleek, white arrow stands proud but disused, on permanent display outside the service hangar.

And don't get me started on Blair...


L.U.V. on y'all,

Bob

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If Early English Poets Had Soul...

...Little Milton...

...Donne Covay...

...Thomas Dekker & the Aces...

...Sly Dunbar & Robbie Shakespeare...

...The Edmund Spenser Davis Group...

...The Marvell-ettes...


It's food for thought, mobsters...


L.U.V. on y'all,

Bob

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Woolies...

Perhaps the saddest of the scenes of 'thirties-style depression beginning to afflict our high streets as the economy goes kapputt is that of the mile long queues for half price tat outside, in and around your local branch of Woolworths. Woolies will have a place in the heart of anyone who has at any point in their life, in however fleeting and hamfisted a way, toyed briefly with a life of crime. For who hasn't, ensconced in those august halls of a wintery early evening, not been tempted by the vast array of easily purloinable products never further than a lifted jumper away from being one's own? Happy days they were, sadly long gone, back then when one could while away hours - whole days, indeed - cramming armfuls of red vinyl Dickies singles and such like punder into a badly torn Tesco carrier bag, one's VERY presence in the store barely so much as flickering on the drowsy consciousness of the slumbering security guard. Innocent times, sadly gone forever with the ever deeper incursion into our privacy of the ubiquitous Orwellian surveillance cameras and those pesky paparazzi. It barely bears repeating to the poor, denuded youth of today, weened as they are on freezer bags of deep-fried Mars bar and WAP-enabled palm-top sonic digit crunchers, that they shall never know such times as those...Like those other joys of a seventies childhood - the three day week, power cuts and only three channels of unwatchable tripe to choose from on the goggle box (and 'Who Do You Do?), they'll just never understand, will they?

But perhaps there's a barely detectable silver-lining peeping through the dark clouds of economic downturn. If *Woolies* is going under, things *must* be bad - and that can only be good. Those vast warehouses where you could shoplift anything imaginable (so long as it was made of plastic. And by Pifco) - from barely fit for purpose picture hooks, to Lionel Ritchie embossed thermos flasks to the common or garden nut or bolt engineered with Soviet-style comic inefficiency not to fit with any other common or garden nut or bolt on the planet - have to be of use to *someone*, don't they? And, in the absence of an unlikely return to pre-eminence of Ratners or *yet* another Subway opening up, perhaps the Rotary Clubs Associations of the land could do worse than implement my own humble plan to turn the High Street round. It's a simple scheme and one that will not only give the retail sector a much needed shot in the arm, but also restore some sense of civic pride to our binge-drunk youth's vomit encrusted thoroughfares. Ladies and gentleman, I give you: the Charity Shop Mall!

That's right; glide in comfort through air conditioned splendour, from War on Want!, Saunter past the British Heart Foundation before swinging into the opulence that is the Princess Alice Hospice Megastore! Marvel (coo!) at the unspeakably bad tramp busker squeaking way interminably on his violin; now no longer a sodden figure of pathos beneath the dripping awning outside McDonalds but now transformed into a Christmas card image of joie de vivre and beaming like a retard as he saws away like a palsied hyena in the *comfort* and warmth* of the new arcade! Drool over those well stacked shelves of Jack Jones and James Last LPs! Choose your 3 for the price of two Alice Sebold novels at your salubrious leisure (you've got *two* *whole* *weeks* yet before you need to sign on!!!) Come on folks, you know it makes sense - dig deep friends, dig deep....FOR BRITAIN!!!

L.U.V. on y'all,

Bob

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Bobcast #56...

"I'm a roadrunner hunnay!!!!!!!!!!!!"

Bob's Rock 'n Roll Special is now available at all good retailers for the discerning listener..."


L.U.V. on y'all,

Bob

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Bobcast #55

...oh yes...





L.U.V. on y'all,

Bob

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Bobcast #54...

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Bob

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Modern Lovers Live...

Side one:

I'm a little airplane

Hey there little insect

Egyptian reggae

Ice cream man















More on Beserkley Records.



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Bob

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"You're a Swine, Norm..."[not!]: Philip Norman's 'John Lennon - the life...

Aunt Mimi: Misha - her part in my downfall...











Aunt Mimi: Charro - his paw in my downturn...









Aunt Mimi: Tiddles - his turn in my downpour...



L.U.V. on y'all,

Bob

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Girlfriend in a 'Comber...

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Once was Bob


Download/listen to Bobcast #53 here...

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