Category: Music

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Acting the goat

 

 

When I was a teenager in the United Kingdom, I recall people of my parents’ generation rolling their eyes in disgust when the radio or TV played music made by and aimed at young people. They regarded the musicians as ‘uncouth’ and ‘disrespectful’ – the Sex Pistols, for example, fronted by a young Johnny Rotten, sneering their way through God Save the Queen, or Motörhead, fronted by a young Lemmy, growling their way through Ace of Spades – and the music itself as ‘just a racket’.  There was, these members of the older generation agreed, only one way to cure the malaise of delinquency and degeneracy that’d afflicted younger folk and turned them into noisy spiky-haired louts and noisy long-haired hooligans…

 

“National service!” they’d agree.  “Bring back national service!  That’d teach these young whippersnappers some manners!  That’d sort them out!”

 

Well, the existence of the Singaporean band Wormrot nullifies that argument.  They are evidence that national service may not be the antidote some think it is for curing society’s younger members of their urge to make loud, unruly and unholy music. For the band formed in the late 2000s immediately after its founding members, vocalist Arif Suhaimi, guitarist Rasyid Juraimi and drummer Fitri completed the two years of national service that Singapore requires of its young male citizens.   Having hung up their uniforms and become Wormrot, the trio dedicated themselves to the noisy subgenre of grindcore, which Juraimi once described in an interview as “a bastard child of punk and metal with less limitation.”

 

Wormrot have achieved some notable things.  They were the first Singaporean act to play at Britain’s Glastonbury Festival, in 2017, though they had to perform in unusually cramped conditions – their stage was inside a train carriage, with its seats removed, which’d been dubbed the ‘Earache Express’.  And they’ve supported the legendary Napalm Death.  Even people who’ve never listened to grindcore, and have no idea what it is, know the name ‘Naplam Death’.

 

And fabulously, it was at one of their French concerts in 2012 that pictures of ‘Biquette the Grindcore Goat’ first went viral.  Biquette was, yes, a goat.  She was rescued from a milking factory and adopted by a communal farm, and she famously enjoyed being at the front of the crowd at heavy metal and punk concerts.

 

From disciplinemag.com

 

Yet things looked slightly bleak for Wormrot in recent years.  Fitri departed from the band in 2015, with Vijesh Ghariwala taking over the drumkit for the next nine years.  However, the band was less able to absorb the blow of losing vocalist Suhaimi in 2022.  They had to embark on a world tour using Gabriel Dubko (of the German band Implore) as a temporary, stand-in singer.  As a result, they arrived back in Singapore lacking the services of a full-time vocalist.

 

Happily, both Suhaimi and Fitri rejoined Wormrot in 2024, meaning the band has now reverted to its original line-up. The middle of this month saw them appear at an event with the self-explanatory title SG Metal Mayhem V, held at the Singaporean venue Phil Studio. Though Wormrot were the third of four bands on the bill, and thus weren’t the headliners, I suspect it was their presence that attracted the bulk of the local crowd – this was a chance to see the rejuvenated band back in business.

 

I couldn’t leave work until after SG Metal Mayhem V had started and unfortunately I missed the opening act, Microchip Terror, an artist who specialises in ‘electronic body horror music’.  I’ve listened to some of his stuff online and, to me, it seems an intriguing blend of Nine Inch Nails, synthy old John-Carpenter movie scores and death metal vocals.  I made it there in time to catch the second band, the Japanese outfit Kruelty who, their website claims, “find that sweet spot… of heavy beatdown hardcore and 90s American / Scandinavian death / doom metal…”  Kruelty’s vocalist Zuma (Kohei Azuma) was in fine growly form and their set was well-received.

 

 

Also growly and well-received were the evening’s headliners, the veteran – on the go since 1990 – Brazilian death metal band Krisiun.  This outfit’s line-up consists of three brothers: vocalist and bassist Alex Camargo, guitarist Moyses Kolesne and drummer Max Kolesne.  When I think of bands containing three or more siblings, the Bee Gees, the Osmonds, the Jackson 5, Hanson and the Corrs spring to mind, but Krisiun are a wee bit less… genteel than that lot.  With their beards, long hair, denims and tattoos, they have an outlaw-ish / biker-ish vibe.  If Lemmy had ever played a warlord in a post-apocalyptic sci-fi movie – he was in one such movie once, but in a minor role – I could imagine this trio playing his phalanx of bodyguards.  Anyway, Krisiun delivered the goods at SG Metal Mayhem V, their aggressive vocals and brutal sound offset by some impressively virtuoso guitar-playing.

 

But before that, the crowd got to see – and certainly got to hear – local heroes Wormrot.  The cacophony they produced, and its pleasures, are best summed up by a comment about them I read on Reddit.  After attending a Wormrot gig, the writer “couldn’t hear the whole way home” and a ringing in his ears “didn’t go away for a couple days,” but… “It was fantastic.”  Yes, by standing within earshot of Juraimi’s manic guitarwork, and Fitri’s frenzied drumming, and Suhaimi’s inhuman screeching, you’re subjecting yourself to a massive sonic assault.  But the experience is strangely wonderful.

 

The delighted crowd showed their appreciation by forming a mosh-pit – though this being Singapore, it was a slightly less bone-juddering mosh-pit than in other metal gigs in other parts of the world.  It more resembled a demented conga-line.  There were also attempts at crowd-surfing, though these threatened to end up like Jack Black’s famously disastrous attempt to crowd-surf in School of Rock (2003).

 

And sweetly, I think I saw someone wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words Grindcore Goat.  Rest in Peace, Biquette.

 

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Return to Ozz

 

From youtube.com / © BBC

 

My previous post was about the much-loved Ozzy Osbourne, singer with groundbreaking heavy metal band Black Sabbath in the 1970s, and an ultra-successful solo artist from the 1980s onwards, who died on July 22nd.  Here are my favourite dozen songs featuring Ozzy’s vocals.

 

Black Sabbath (from 1970’s Black Sabbath)

The eponymous first song on Black Sabbath’s eponymous first album, this sets the tone for everything to follow.  It immediately establishes a horror-movie vibe, opening with rumbling thunder, sluicing rain and clanging altar bells.  Then the doomy chug of heavy guitars and the sepulchral wails of Ozzy’s voice kick in: “What is this that stands before me?  Figure in black which points at me-e-ee?”  Things eventually speed up for a tumultuous but still menacing climax.  (Unsurprisingly, guitarist Tony Iommi and bassist Geezer Butler were horror movie fans and their band’s name comes from a scary film, 1963’s Black Sabbath, directed by the legendary Mario Bava and starring the equally legendary Boris Karloff.)

 

Incidentally, I like how Ice T uses Black Sabbath for his 1989 track Shut Up, Be Happy.  He retains the song’s ominous music but replaces Ozzy’s vocals with the voice of Jello Biafra from the Dead Kennedys, intoning about how America has just been put under martial law: “All constitutional rights have been suspended.  Stay in your homes.  Do not attempt to contact loved ones, insurance agents or attorneys.  Shut up!”  Depressingly, Shut Up, Be Happy is more relevant than ever in 2025.

 

Meanwhile, for a proper cover version of Black Sabbath, I’d recommend the one by goth-metal band Type O Negative on 1994’s Nativity in Black: A Tribute to Black Sabbath, a collection of Sabbath covers whose other contributors include White Zombie, Therapy?, Corrosion of Conformity and Faith No More.  It’s not the most the adventurous of covers, but the late Peter Steele’s vocals are suitably foreboding.

 

© Vertigo / Warner Bros.

 

Iron Man (from 1970’s Paranoid)

Much loved by Beavis and Butthead, this is the most remorseless and skull-crushing of Sabbath songs.  It’s about a man who travels into the future, witnesses the apocalypse, gets turned to steel, then returns to the present to warn humanity but is ridiculed and shunned because he’s now a metallic freak: “Is he alive or dead? Has he thoughts within his head?  We’ll just pass him there…  Why should we even care?”  So, what does he do?  He engineers the apocalypse he foresaw: “Heavy boots of lead, fills his victims full of dread…”

 

I’ll make a confession here.  Back in my drunken-asshole student days, I arrived home from the pub one Saturday night and, with one of my flatmates, also a drunken-asshole student, we made a bet while we played the album Paranoid on the flat’s stereo.  If we played it at full volume, during which song would another flatmate, a clean-living, go-to-bed-early type, finally lose it, jump out of bed, fling open the door of his room and scream at us to turn it down?  You guessed it.  While Ozzy was hollering about Iron Man being turned to steel in the great magnetic field, the door of that flatmate’s room swung back and a voice bellowed: “WOULD YOU TURN THAT DREADFUL RACKET DOWN?”

 

War Pigs (from Paranoid)

A lamentation against war and those who orchestrate it, War Pigs is a reminder that Black Sabbath’s members were youths during the late 1960s when the pacifistic hippy movement was on the go.  This being Sabbath, though, War Pigs dwells bitterly on war’s violence and hatred rather than try to counter it with calls for peace and love.  It’s a long song, just under eight minutes, yet short on lyrics – the word-count is less than 150.  But oh, what words: “Generals gathered in their masses, just like witches at black masses…  In the fields, the bodies burning, as the war machine keeps turning…”

 

This song has seen several notable cover versions.  Judas Priest did an impeccably metallic rendition of it – I also like the accompanying video, wherein Priest-frontman Rob Halford stomps about the stage like a farmer in wellies trying to negotiate a boggy field.  A funked-up version of it impressively closes the 2023 album On Top of the Covers from singer / rapper T-Pain.  But for a reworking of War Pigs that’s splendidly ‘out there’, yet retains the original’s drive and power, you can’t beat what the ‘Ethiopian Crunch Music’ band Ukandanz did to it.  They replaced Tony Iommi’s guitar with a saxophone and sang it in Amharic.

 

© Vertigo / Warner Bros.

 

Planet Caravan (from Paranoid)

The sublimely dreamy and trippy Planet Caravan has been described as ‘the ultimate coming-down song’.  Well, if the stories about how Ozzy and the rest of Black Sabbath were behaving at the time are true, they certainly needed a good coming-down song.  To augment the faraway sound, Ozzy sang through a Leslie speaker during the recording, which gave the impression he was warbling the lyrics underwater.

 

There’s a mellow cover of Planet Caravan at the end of Pantera’s less-than-mellow 1994 album Far Beyond Driven.  Indeed, Pantera performed Planet Caravan at the Back to the Beginning concert, Ozzy’s farewell show staged in Birmingham just two-and-a-half weeks before he died.

 

Children of the Grave (from Master of Reality)

Master of Reality is possibly Black Sabbath’s heaviest and doomiest-sounding album.  Its best track, Children of the Grave, has an urgent, unsettling sound that suggests creepy, occult-flavoured goings-on.  That feeling is increased by the song’s horror-movie-like title and the way it’s whispered sinisterly during the coda.  But if you listen properly to the lyrics, you discover it’s not about the supernatural at all.  It’s really another anti-war song, like War Pigs: “Must the world live in the shadow of atomic fear?  Can they win the fight for peace, or will they disappear?”

 

Supernaut (from 1972’s Vol. 4)

The exuberant Supernaut might be, as the lyrics suggest, about a man trying to find “the dish that ran away with the spoon” or “the crossing near the golden rainbow’s end”.  Or it might be about, you know, substances.  Of which, by then, the band were taking a lot.

 

For a cracking (and funny) cover version of this song, look no further than the one by 1000 Homo DJs (actually a side-project of the industrial rock band Ministry) which retains the original’s insane jauntiness while spicing it up with a solemn 1960s voice intoning about the dangers of taking acid.  For my money, this is the best track on Nativity in Black: A Tribute to Black Sabbath, basically because it’s not afraid to try something different.

 

© Vertigo

 

Sabbath Bloody Sabbath (from 1973’s Sabbath Bloody Sabbath)

What can I say?  This is my all-time favourite Black Sabbath song – ever, ever, ever.

 

Symptom of the Universe (from 1974’s Sabotage)

It could be argued that the hectic, exhilarating Symptom of the Universe is a track that helped invent punk rock.  And if it didn’t, it surely helped invent thrash metal.  Fittingly, the Brazilian thrash metallers Sepultura do a nifty version of this song, which again can be found on Nativity in Black: A Tribute to Black Sabbath.

 

Never Say Die (from 1978’s Never Say Die)

By 1978 the writing was on the wall for Ozzy Osbourne’s association with Black Sabbath.  He’d already quit the band briefly (and been replaced, equally briefly, by singer Dave Walker) and Never Say Die would be the final Ozzy-fronted Black Sabbath album until 2013’s 13.  Thus, it was recorded under strained circumstances.  Never Say Die was badly received at the time, and nowadays it’s fashionable to write it off as Ozzy-era Sabbath’s last, perfunctory gasp.  But, if you can handle the ‘jazz inflections’, it’s not a bad album – just different.  As the Guardian once said of it, “it’s a quirky and enjoyable record, as long as you don’t expect Sabbath Even Bloodier Sabbath.”

 

And the title track is a stormer.  Ozzy delivers it so directly and defiantly he could be fronting a garage band.

 

Crazy Train (from 1980’s Blizzard of Ozz)

The second track off Ozzy’s first solo album, this has a cleaner, nimbler guitar sound – courtesy of tragically short-lived guitarist Randy Rhoads – that’s in keeping with the mainstream American glam-metal aesthetic that, for a while, dominated heavy metal in the 1980s.   The lyrics begin wholesomely – “Maybe it’s not too late to learn how to love and forget how to hate” – but by the chorus we’re getting a probable summation of Ozzy’s mental state at the time: “Mental wounds not healing, life’s a bitter shame, I’m going off the rails on a crazy train!”  (It wasn’t until 1982 that he’d marry the formidable Sharon Arden, the woman who’d, eventually, clean him up, sort him out and reinvent him as an amiable, reality-TV dad.)

 

© Jet Records

 

That same year, the now Ozzy-less Black Sabbath released Heaven and Hell, their first album with Ronnie James Dio on vocals.  1980 was also when I entered the ‘senior school’ – fifth and sixth year – at my high school.  One of the perks of this was that the senior pupils had their own common room in the school basement, with a record player and loudspeakers.  For a few, ear-bleeding months, Blizzard of Ozz and Heaven and Hell were never off that record player.

 

Mr Crowley (from Blizzard of Ozz)

I don’t think Ozzy had acquired the moniker the ‘Prince of Darkness’ yet.  However, aware that darkness was part of his schtick, he included this song on Blizzard of Ozz – a paeon to the English occultist Aleister Crowley.  Depending on your point of view, Crowley was truly the Wickedest Man Alive or was a piss-taking libertine who enjoyed terrorising genteel, respectable British society with exaggerated tales of his diabolism.  The song is launched in melodramatic fashion by the organ-tones of keyboardist Don Airey, but Ozzy sings it with agreeable wistfulness: “Your lifestyle to me seemed so tragic with the thrill of it all.  You fooled all the people with magic.  Yeah, you waited on Satan’s call…”  

 

For a really over-the-top version of Mr Crowley, check out this effort by Cradle of Filth.

 

Thereafter, Ozzy would put out a dozen more solo albums.  The best that can be said about them is that they’re variable in quality.  But their highlights are certainly better than anything on the seven albums Black Sabbath released during the same period that had neither Ozzy nor Ronnie James Dio singing on them.

 

And obviously…  Paranoid (from Paranoid)

Yes, I’m glad this was what Ozzy sang at the very end of his farewell concert earlier this month.  There was no better way to bow out.

 

© Vertigo

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Adi-Ozz amigo

 

From wikipedia.org / © Ted Van Pelt

 

The Prince of Darkness has gone dark.  I was saddened to hear of the passing of Ozzy Osbourne, singer with legendary heavy metal band Black Sabbath, on July 22nd for two reasons.

 

Firstly, Ozzy’s eerie, high-pitched, alien-sounding vocals were the perfect accompaniment for the crunching, doom-laden guitars and drums of his Black Sabbath compadres, guitarist Tony Iommi, bassist Geezer Butler and drummer Bill Ward.  Their rumbling, abrasive sound evoked the heavy machinery in the factories where the working-class quartet found employment as youths and where they would have spent their lives had they not hit the bigtime with their music.  Indeed, Iommi’s time in a steelworks ended with an accident that sheared off two of his fingertips and nearly ruined his budding career as a guitarist.  Ozzy didn’t fare much better, beginning work as a toolmaker’s apprentice and cutting off the top of his thumb on his first day on the job.

 

It was also a sound that was massively influential.  As I wrote on this blog a couple of years ago, Sabbath’s influence is “all over musical movements like grunge and hardcore punk.  And they’re clearly major influences on such metallic sub-genres as black metal, doom metal, goth metal, power metal, sludge metal, speed metal and stoner metal.  Indeed, they’re responsible for more metal than the Brummie steelworks where the young Tony Iommi lost his fingertips and almost lost his future in music.”

 

From wikipedia.org / © Warner Bros. Records

 

Secondly, when I heard of Ozzy’s death, I felt like I’d lost a crazy, shambolic but lovable uncle.  Yes, he styled himself as the Prince of Darkness – or at least, his manager-wife Sharon Osbourne did, realising how lucrative his mad-bad-and-dangerous-to-know brand was.  And in the 1980s he was a bête noir among Christian American parents and there were unsuccessful attempts to sue him for, it was alleged, causing two young men to kill themselves after they’d listened to his song Suicide Solution from his first solo album Blizzard of Ozz (1980).  And during his young, hellraising years, it certainly sounded like the drink and drugs turned him into a psycho at times.  But once he reached middle-age, he became an amiable, if hapless, teddy bear of a man.  He was also a superstar devoid of airs and graces.  No doubt the tough, unpretentious start to life he’d had in Birmingham helped keep his feet on the ground.

 

And, fabulously, he never lost his Brum accent.  “Oi’m the Prince of Dawkness!” drunkards would cry in pubs the world over, whenever his name came up in conversations.

 

His everyman image received a further boost when he, wife Sharon and kids Jack and Kelly featured in Emmy-winning reality show The Osbournes (2002-05).  While I have to say I found the other members of his family an acquired taste, Ozzy was wonderful just for being himself.  Millions of men like me, watching the show as they entered both middle-age and the 21st century, surely sighed wistfully as they recognised themselves in Ozzy’s failing efforts to control the environment around him.  Failing to control his offspring.  Failing to control his pets – I remember him accusing one recalcitrant dog of being “worse than Bin Laden.”  Failing to control the technological gadgets in his house.  “I’m a very simple man,” he ranted at one point. “You’ve got to have, like, computer knowledge to turn the f**king TV on and off… I press this one button and the shower starts going off…”

 

No doubt it was Ozzy’s lack of guile that led him, in his younger days, to being an absolute disaster in terms of boozing and drug-taking.  His behaviour resulted in him being sacked from Black Sabbath at the end of the 1970s, though Ozzy claimed he was no worse a state than the other three band-members were at the time.  Still, it must have been difficult working with a man given to such antics as snorting a line of ants in the mistaken belief they were a line of cocaine, or getting arrested for urinating over the Alamo whilst wearing a frock.  “Son,” a member of the San Antonio police force told him gravely, “when you piss on the Alamo, you piss on the state of Texas.”

 

My favourite story from Ozzy’s wild years was one that happened after he’d returned to England from America, where he’d been making the 1972 Black Sabbath album Vol. 4 and where he’d also developed a taste for LSD.  “I took 10 tabs of acid, then went for a walk in a field.  I ended up standing there talking to this horse for about an hour.  In the end the horse turned round and told me to f**k off.  That was it for me.”

 

A lifetime of drugs, alcohol, excess and idiocy did nothing for Ozzy’s health and, more recently, he was beset by health issues: Parkinson’s disease, neck and spine surgery, depression, blood clots, nerve pain.  At Christmas 2016, after the news that George Michael and Status Quo’s Rick Parfitt had died within the space of 24 hours, a friend emailed me worriedly and said, “At this rate Ozzy’s not going to make it to the Bells.”

 

Happily, Ozzy made through nine more Bells.  He also made it to Back to the Beginning, his farewell concert held at Birmingham’s Villa Park on July 5th this summer.  The bulk of this consisted of performances by a dazzling range of heavy metal bands who might never have seen the light of day if Black Sabbath hadn’t set the ball rolling for their genre in 1970 – Mastodon, Anthrax, Lamb of God, Alice in Chains, Gojira, Pantera, Tool, Guns N’ Roses, Slayer, Metallica and others, plus two guest-ridden ‘superstar’ bands assembled by the event’s musical director, Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello.  The event climaxed with a five-song solo set by Ozzy and then a four-song set by the original Black Sabbath line-up of him, Iommi, Butler and Ward, playing together for the first time since 2005.

 

Back to the Beginning’s 45,000 tickets sold out in 16 minutes.  It also raised 140 million pounds for charity.  Rather prophetically, Ozzy said of the concert a couple of months before it happened: “I’m going to make this f**king gig if it’s the last thing I do.  Well, it will be…”

 

He died just 17 days afterwards.  His life was chaotic but, at the very end, his timing was impeccable.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Jet Records

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Happy World Goth Day 2025

 

From unsplash.com / © Maryam Sicard

 

It’s May 22nd, which a quick check on Google informs me is Sherlock Holmes Day, Harvey Milk Day, International Day for Biological Diversity, Buy a Musical Instrument Day, and, thirst-quenchingly, both Chardonnay Day and National Craft Distillery Day.  But most interestingly for me, in honour of the planet’s spookiest and blackest-clad musical sub-culture, it’s World Goth Day.

 

With that in mind, here are YouTube links to a dozen Goth tunes that I’ve been listening to recently.  Be prepared, though, for a few annoying YouTube ads for fast-food outlets, perfumes and designer footwear before you get to the delights of the music itself.

 

First off… I knew nothing about Sidewalks and Skeletons before I stumbled across this number, Born to Die, on YouTube a little while ago.  According to a Google search, “Sidewalks and Skeletons is the solo project of UK artist of Jake Lee, who grew up in Bradford, England”.  Lee was at one time a deathcore guitarist but during the past two decades has been attracted more by ‘dark electronic music.’  Anyway, as well as being an impressive (if rather intense) listening experience, Born to Die comes with a video that’s a memorable amalgamation of epileptic-seizure-inducing lighting effects and quaint-but-creepy clips from some old, black-and-white silent movies.

 

Here’s a song called Edison’s Medicine by the San Francisco band In Letter Form.  A track on their 2016 album Fracture Repair Repeat, it manages the tricky feat of sounding a bit like late 1970s legends Joy Division, whilst having enough personality of its own to also sound like something other than a song by Joy Division.  (There’s a whole sub-genre of bands out there who sound like Joy Division and nothing else – I’m looking at you, Editors – a sub-genre I like to call ‘Joy Revision’.)  Anyway, it’s great  The only thing to sour the experience of hearing its melancholy gorgeousness is knowing that, tragically, the band’s singer Eric Miranda passed away the same year it was released.

 

© Sacred Bones Records

 

And there’s a pleasant (but again not too derivative) Joy Division vibe running through my next choice, Cyaho, by the Belarussian band Molchat Doma.  It appears on their 2018 album Etazhi.  Popular belief has it that Goth music evolved in wintry, out-of-way cities in northern England in the Margaret Thatcher-dominated 1980s.  So perhaps it’s unsurprising that a similar sound emerged from Minsk, the wintry (during the coldest months its temperature drops to minus seven degrees) out-of-the-way capital of Alexander Lukashenka-dominated Belarus.  Though apparently, they’re now based in Los Angeles.

 

If all this Joy Division-influenced music is making you feel glum, here’s the cure.  I mean it.  Here’s the Cure.  In 2000 Robert Smith and co. released their eleventh studio album Bloodflowers, which was greeted by some snotty reviews in the music press.  “Goth-awful!” exclaimed the now-defunct Melody Maker, hilariously.  What a lot of nonsense.  Bloodflowers is a great Cure record.  Incidentally, it’s currently the album I listen to most on my elderly iPod while I subject my equally elderly bones and joints to a workout in my local gym.  And the very best thing on it is the second track, Watching Me Fall, a mighty, majestic thing indeed.  It’s like listening to a Gothicised version of a relentless Led Zeppelin stomper such as When the Levee Breaks (1971) or Kashmir (1975).

 

My next song is Troops by London-based singer Grace Solero and her eponymous band.  It originally appeared on their first album, New Moon, in 2009.  I don’t know if Ms. Solero would be pleased to be described as a purveyor of Goth music, but there’s an amount of witchy darkness here, though mixed with some radiant, soaring moments too.  In fact, it’s the song’s polarities – its rawness and tenderness – that appeal to me.

 

There was a time when Australian singer-songwriter Nick Cave, famous for performing with his band the Bad Seeds and for once fronting the raucous punk-Goth outfit the Birthday Party, seemed a Jekyll and Hyde character.  Sometimes you’d get Nice Nick, singing gentle, pretty songs like Into My Arms (1997) that you ‘d happily let your granny listen to.  Yet you’d also get Nasty Nick, responsible for such sonic assaults as Stagger Lee (1996) where Cave hollered about slobbering on people’s heads and filling them full of lead while Blixa Bargeld shrieked apocalyptically in the background, which you’d only let your granny listen to if you wanted her to die so you could inherit her money.

 

© Mute Records

 

Some have lamented the fact that as he’s grown older, Nice Nick has come to dominate Cave’s musical output while Nasty Nick has mostly disappeared.  But I just go with the flow…  Here’s an example of what I consider Nice Nick at his best, the ballad Sweetheart Come from 2001’s No More Shall We Part.  I can’t understand why it hasn’t received more attention, praise and love as I think it’s a marvellous song.  Though the lyric “And if he touches you again with his stupid hands / His life won’t be worth living” suggests a smidgeon of Nasty Nick lurking in the mix.

 

As someone who’s also a fan of heavy metal, I should enjoy the crossover of it and Goth music known as ‘gothic metal’.  But with a few exceptions, such as County Suffolk’s awesome Cradle of Filth, the bands don’t appeal to me.  HIM, the Rasmus, Nightwish, Charon, Unshine…  Their music seems all a bit too tasteful and pretty for my tastes, and the ones with female singers appear to be doing their best to sound like Evanescence, a very successful band who never floated my boat.  Plus they all seem to come from Finland – is being a member of a gothic-metal band a prerequisite for getting Finnish citizenship?

 

However, here’s one Finnish gothic-metal outfit I do like, the melodramatically-named Eternal Tears of Sorrow.  This song, Sweet Lilith of My Dreams, the opening track on their 2006 album Before the Bleeding Sun, begins daintily enough, before gathering speed and volume.  It’s just a shame that Eternal Tears of Sorrow announced their disbandment three months ago.

 

And just to show there are gothic-metal bands with female singers whom I like too, here’s Lacuna Coil, from Italy (not Finland).  Two years ago, Lacuna Coil played a gig in my current city of residence, Singapore, and I’m still annoyed at myself for missing the opportunity to see them then.  This song, Blood, Tears, Dust, from their 2016 album Delirium, nicely combines the operatic vocals of their singer Christina Scabbia with the growlier and more traditionally-metallic tones of their other singer, Andrea Ferro.  And musically, it rattles along.

 

That’s enough about gothic metal.  Now it’s time for another hybrid – Goth music blended with twangy surf music.  The song in question is from the 2022 EP Surf-Goth by Melbourne artist Desmond Doom and its called Get Me Out.  Actually, the dark sounds and dark sensibilities mixed with springy surf guitars put me in mind of some earlier efforts by feedback-loving alternative rockers the Jesus and Mary Chain.  (If Jim and William Reid knew I had mentioned the Jesus and Mary Chain in a piece about Goth music, they would probably come around to my house and kill me.  So don’t tell them I did that.)

 

© Desmond Doom Music

 

Come to think of it, though, back in 1998 I bought a Goth compilation album called Nocturnal, which had two Jesus and Mary Chain tracks on it…  And also on that album, near the end, was my next choice, Big Hollow Man by the singer, producer and artist Danielle Dax.  I thought the song  was charming, even though it seemed lighter and poppier than most other stuff on the record.  But should anyone doubt Ms. Dax’s credentials for appearing in a list of Goth tunes, I’ll point them to the fact that in 1984 she played the wolf-girl in Neil Jordan’s masterly film adaptation of Angela Carter’s short story The Company of Wolves (1979).  There’s nothing Gothier than that.

 

I’ve described the veteran band Killing Joke in the past as a ‘Goth / industrial juggernaut’ with a ‘crunching, thunderous urgency’.  The next song, I am the Virus, from Killing Joke’s 2015 album Pylon, does nothing to make me change my opinion of them.  With its Beatles-baiting title, it takes retrospective aim at George Bush Jr, Tony Blair, the War on Terror, the second Iraq War et al: “There’s a darkness in the West,” roars singer Jaz Coleman, “oil swilling guzzling corporate central banking mind-f**king omnipotence.”  I suppose in 2015 Bush and Blair’s catastrophic intervention in the Middle East seemed the worst thing that could ever happen.  Mind you, since then…  According to their Wikipedia entry, the band have been ‘inactive’ since the death of guitarist Geordie Walker in 2023.  But now, in this dire era of Trump II, I feel we need them more than ever.

 

Finally, here’s Dead Can Dance, another band who combine Goth music with something else – in their case, ‘world music’, the patronising catch-all term Westerners use to describe traditional music from non-Western countries.  Dead Can Dance have been mixing genres enthusiastically since 1996’s Spiritchaser, although on this song, Amnesia, from the band’s 2012 album Anastasis, the world-music elements are less in evidence.  Well, apart from the insistent chime of band-member Lisa Gerrard’s yangqin, which Wikipedia describes as a ‘Chinese hammered dulcimer’.  Whatever, Amnesia is both a stirring and a wonderfully-mellow composition and it makes a good item with which to end this list.

 

Happy World Goth Day 2025!

 

© Procreate

Posted on

The Boss versus the dross

 

From wikipedia.org / © Ralph_PH

 

I have another reason to loathe Donald Trump, the 45th and also, alas, 47th president of the United States of America.  He’s made me like Bruce Springsteen.

 

On May 14th, at Manchester’s Co-op Live Arena, on the opening night of his Land of Hope and Dreams tour, Springsteen – the famously sideburned, famously plaid-shirt-wearing singer-songwriter-guitarist from New Jersey – kicked off proceedings by making a speech.  He declared: “…my home, the America I love, the America I’ve written about, that has been a beacon of hope and liberty for 250 years, is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration.  Tonight, we ask all who believe in democracy and the best of our American experiment to rise with us, raise your voices against authoritarianism and let freedom ring!”  Later on, he described the head of that ‘corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration’, i.e., Trump, as an ‘unfit president’ and proclaimed, “The America l’ve sung to you about for 50 years is real and regardless of its faults is a great country with a great people.  So we’ll survive this moment.”

 

Needless to say, it wasn’t long before Trump’s overworked posting-thumb was busy knocking out a retort on his Truth Social platform.  He called Springsteen ‘as dumb as a rock’ and added: “This dried out ‘prune’ of a rocker (his skin is all atrophied!) ought to KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT until he gets back into the Country, that’s just ‘standard fare’. Then we’ll all see how it goes for him!”

 

Also joining in was Trump’s number-one music-industry sycophant Kid Rock, now a not-so-kiddish 54 years old.  It’s telling that the only song I’ve heard by him was the 2008 hit All Summer Long – a Kid Rock number whose best bits weren’t actually written by Kid Rock.  They come from Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Sweet Home Alabama (1974) and Warren Zevon’s Werewolves of London (1978).  “Just another person with TDS (Trump derangement syndrome) at the highest levels,” Kid Rock said of Springsteen.  “To be in Europe talking junk about our president who gets up and works his ass off for this country, every day, and his administration is doing such great things…  Thank God for him.  But to do that in Europe… what a punk move.”  Kid Rock, please note.  To me and many folk my age, calling Bruce Springsteen a ‘punk’ is amusing.  But it’s not the insult you think it is.

 

Since Kid Rock believes Trump’s administration is ‘doing such great things’ for the USA, he’s surely a big fan of Trump’s vicious anti-immigrant policies.  Incidentally, the restaurant he’s licensed in Nashville, the not-at-all-stupidly-titled Kid Rock’s Big Ass Honky Tonk Rock N’ Roll Steakhouse, lately and mysteriously sent kitchen-staff home during a weekend when Trump’s brutal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency were conducting operations in the city.  I’m sure the reason for this wasn’t anything dodgy.  Not because, say, the restaurant was employing people who were immigrants lacking permanent legal status and might get dragged off and incarcerated.

 

I first encountered the musical oeuvre of Bruce Springsteen, or ‘Loose Windscreen’ as I liked to call him, while I was a fifth-year pupil at Peebles High School in the early 1980s.  Fifth and sixth-years pupils, the senior members of the student body known as the ‘Upper School’, were entitled to their own common room, where there was an elderly record-player and speakers you could play music on during the morning, lunchtime and afternoon breaks.  This was normally monopolised by the Upper School’s sizeable heavy-metal contingent and it blasted out a lot of AC/DC, Deep Purple, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, Led Zeppelin, Motorhead, Rainbow, the Scorpions, Thin Lizzy and Whitesnake.

 

© Columbia Records

 

However, once in a while, somebody would manage to get past the phalanx of heavy-metal fans surrounding the record player and slap something a little different on it.  One such record was Springsteen’s 1975 breakthrough album, Born to Run.  Hearing it, I thought it was all right and, at the time, the title track seemed a stormer.  (Nowadays,  having heard it a zillion times, I’m less keen on it.)  So, Mr Windscreen’s, sorry, Mr Springsteen’s music seemed perfectly fine to me.  But it wasn’t anything I’d go out of my way to listen to.

 

Incidentally, a few years earlier, my favourite band had been the Boomtown Rats, the new wave outfit fronted by Bob Geldof.  Last week, I listened to Rat Trap, the Boomtown Rats song that topped the UK charts in 1978, for the first time in decades.  And I was surprised by how, well, Springsteen-esque it sounds now.

 

By the mid-1980s I was a student at Aberdeen University.  I quickly discovered that a number of my fellow-students were seriously into Bruce Springsteen.  They were so into him they apparently knew everything about every second of music he’d ever committed to vinyl – that, say, if you played the third of the nine tracks on the Belgian version of the 1973 LP Greetings from Ashbury Park N.J. backwards, you’d hear him break wind in the studio.  Yes, stuff like that.

 

These Bruce-fans – whom some unkindly referred to as ‘Bruce-bores’ – were, without exception, male.  Actually, a good proportion of them seemed to be engineering students and had names like ‘Morris’.  Also, they never called their hero ‘Bruce’, but used the annoying moniker ‘The Boss’.  This struck me as paradoxical since they were always going on about what a man of the people he was.  Surely, then, a blue-collar, working-class guy like him would be against the bosses?

 

© Columbia Records

 

This was a bad time if, like me, you were surrounded by Bruce-bores, sorry, Bruce-fans, and you didn’t believe as they did that Springsteen was the greatest thing to have happened to music since Mrs Beethoven gave birth to little Ludwig van.  For, in 1984, he released Born in the USA, an album that sold over 30 million copies worldwide and spawned no fewer than seven singles.  As with most of Springsteen’s output, it struck me as perfectly decent, but not remarkable, journeyman rock music.  But it subsequently became annoying because people around me never seemed to stop playing it.

 

The Born in the USA singles received heavy rotation in the place where I worked part-time during my second year as a student, Ritzy’s Nightclub.  At Ritzy’s I was a member of the floor-staff – meaning I spent most of my time collecting empty glasses and loaded ashtrays from the punters’ tables, cleaning them, and returning the glasses to the bar-shelves and the ashtrays to the tables.

 

I’ve said before on this blog that of the many jobs I’ve had in my life, I hated the Ritzy’s one most.  I had to work until 2.00 AM every Friday and Saturday night while my mates were out partying.  The glasses I collected were often phenomenally grotty with cigarette ends and even puke floating around in them.  Many of the punters were workers in Aberdeen’s then-flourishing oil industry, who made tons of money and believed their hefty earnings allowed them to behave like knob-heads at all times, especially towards serfs like myself.  And the music spewing out of the nightclub’s speakers was gruesome – all the vacuous New Romantic stuff like Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet and Wham that dominated the UK charts during 1984-85.  In that company, Springsteen’s songs didn’t seem so bad.  But having to hear them repeatedly in that environment quickly made me sick of them too.

 

The first Born in the USA single out of the blocks was Dancing in the Dark, which I came to associate with a mid-week gig I had at Ritzy’s.  This was a regular evening the nightclub held for the over-30s, which was known in local parlance as ‘Grab-a-Granny Night’.  It featured a live band who performed cover versions of songs currently in the charts and Dancing in the Dark seemed a particular favourite of the band’s frontman, a bloke called Stan.  The sound of Stan warbling his way through the song, and the sight of him simultaneously attempting some Boss-like dancing onstage whilst apparently in possession of two left feet, are burned into my memory.

 

In the summer of 1985, I developed a fully-fledged aversion to Bruce Windscreen, sorry, Springsteen.  The summer was going badly for me for various financial, personal and health reasons, and my mood wasn’t helped by the fact that every single day that July and August saw rain piss down relentlessly on Aberdeen, turning the grey granite the city was built with oppressively black.  At one point I found myself sharing a flat with a good friend, one Andrew J. MacRury, who was also having a bad summer.  And yes, Andy was an avid Bruce-bore, sorry, Bruce-fan.  I worked night-shifts and, a dozen times each day, while I was in bed trying to snatch some sleep, I’d be rudely awoken by my friend playing the title track of Born in the USA in the next room, at full blast, in a desperate attempt to cheer himself up.  Repeatedly, every day, I was practically blasted out of bed by the sideburned one hollering: “Booooorn… in the US-Aaaa!  I wuz booooorn… in the US-Aaaa!”

 

Thereafter, if anyone show signs of talking enthusiastically about Bruce Springsteen, let alone play some music by him, I’d run for the hills.  In March 1992, when to great fanfare he released two albums on the same day (Human Touch and Lucky Town), I think I went into hiding.

 

© Columbia Records

 

Now any Bruce-bores, sorry, Bruce-fans reading this will no doubt be shocked by my attitude towards their hero and accuse me of being deficient in musical taste.  To that I would reply I wasn’t the only person on the planet unswayed by the charms of Mr Springsteen.  The legendary radio DJ John Peel, for example, once said of Springsteen’s appeal: “It utterly mystifies me.  I can’t see it at all.  I mean, when he first started out… it sounded to me like sub-Dylan stuff.  And it just doesn’t ring true.”  Indeed, the John Peel Wiki notes that Peel “almost never played any of Springsteen’s material on his show and scarcely missed an opportunity to compare him unfavourably with other artists such as Half Man Half Biscuit.”

 

Certain musicians have been less than enthralled by him too.  The Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards, while describing Springsteen as ‘a nice guy, a sweet guy’, has been scathing about his musical ability.  He wrote in his 2010 biography Life, “If there was anything better around, he’d still be working the bars of New Jersey.”  Meanwhile, Irish folk-rock troubadour Van Morrison once grumped about what he saw as Springsteen’s lack of originality.  As far as Van Morrison was concerned, he’d nicked all his ideas from, er, Van Morrison.  “For years people have been saying to me, ‘Have heard this guy Springsteen?  You should really check him out!’  I just ignored it.  Then four or five months ago I was in Amsterdam, and a friend of mine put on a video.  Springsteen came on the video, and that was the first time I ever saw him, and he’s definitely ripped me off.”

 

However, in times of great adversity, you have to take sides – even the sides of folk whom, until now, you’ve regarded as your enemies.  For instance, the cops had to join forces with the prisoners in John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) when faced with an onslaught by the murderous gang Street Thunder.  And James Bond (Roger Moore) had to team up with Jaws (Richard Kiel) in Lewis Gilbert’s Moonraker (1979) to overcome the genocidal plans of Hugo Drax (Michael Lonsdale).  I feel the same way about Bruce Springsteen.  I’ve found much of his music stodgy, and at times his fans have driven me up the walls, but I’ll back him all the way in his struggle against Trump, who’s busy turning Springsteen’s homeland into an authoritarian state run by white supremacists, loopy evangelical Christians, billionaire tech-bros and environment-wrecking oil barons.

 

Indeed, if Springsteen can do anything to get Trump out of office – arrange, say, for a million Bruce-bores, sorry, Bruce-fans to storm the White House – I’ll happily grow sideburns, and wear a plaid shirt for the rest of my life, and listen to Born in the USA a dozen times a day.  Hail to the Boss!

 

Also, while I don’t have much regard for Springsteen’s music, I still think it’s light-years better than that Big Ass Honky Tonk Rock N’ Roll shite peddled by Kid Rock.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Carl Lender

Posted on

Even bloodsuckers get the blues

 

© Warner Bros / Proximity Media

 

A few days ago my partner and I went to see Sinners, the new horror-cum-gangster film directed, written and co-produced by Ryan Coogler.  Here are my thoughts on it.  And before I go any further, a word of warning: there will be spoilers.

 

To be honest, I wasn’t expecting a great deal, as I’d heard something about its plot and it sounded horribly like 1996’s Robert Rodriguez-directed, Quentin Tarantino-scripted From Dusk till Dawn.  Although a few misguided souls nowadays look back on that film as a neglected and misunderstood classic, I have to say I f**king hated it.  In part, this was because From Dusk till Dawn began so well, as a nastily-effective little crime thriller wherein two fleeing bank-robbing brothers (Tarantino and George Clooney) kidnap a pastor (Harvey Keitel) and his family and force them to smuggle them over the US / Mexico border.  Disappointingly, things then go south in all senses of the phrase.  The group arrives at a mysterious Mexican bar called the Titty Twister where the staff and many of the patrons prove to be – surprise! – vampires.  The rest of the film is a ludicrous, tongue-in-cheek splatterfest where the humans battle against waves of bloodsucking undead.  While From Dusk Till Dawn’s sudden change of tone has been praised in some quarters for its audacity, I found it a vertiginous plunge into cheesy bollocks.

 

Anyway, the structure of Sinners is not dissimilar.  Its first half plays out as a period gangster story, then vampires show up and its latter half becomes an exercise in horror.  Set in the Mississippi Delta in 1932, it’s about the homecoming of black gangster twin brothers Stack and Smoke (both played by Michael B. Jordan) who’ve recently left Chicago where, it’s suggested, they worked for Al Capone.  On their home turf, they embark on a new project – purchasing a disused sawmill and turning it into a juke joint, i.e.. a place for live music, dancing, drinking and gambling whose customers are from the local African American community.

 

To ensure the juke joint’s opening night is a success, they staff it with trusted friends, family members and associates: Smoke’s ex-wife, the occult-dabbling Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), and Chinese shopkeepers Grace (Li Jun Li) and Bo (Yao) to handle the catering; hulking buddy Cornbread (Omar Miller) to man the door; and boozy old bluesman Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo), slinky singer Pearline (Jayme Lawson) and young, startlingly-talented guitarist Sammie (Miles Caton) to provide the music.

 

© Warner Bros / Proximity Media

 

Despite a few obstacles – two thieves who soon regret tangling with the take-no-prisoners Stack, the fact that the sawmill’s former owner is head of the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, and the disapproval of Sammie’s dad, a preacher who believes music is only virtuous if it’s used to further the word of the Lord – the juke joint opens, pulls in the crowds and is soon swinging.  And then the vampires arrive.

 

Yes, I was dreading this moment – because I had really enjoyed the non-fantastical part of the film.  Coogler did a great job depicting the minutiae of the 1932 Mississippi Delta.  This was a world where the black population was just a couple of generations removed from the official slavery of the Confederacy and most of them now toiled in the racket that was sharecropping, a form of unofficial slavery.  At the same time, they were crafting a musical culture, the blues, that would ultimately revolutionise American and global music through its influence on rock and roll.  One touch among many that I liked here was the portrayal of the Chinese shopkeepers, Grace and Bo, who thanks to their ethnicity are able to run stores in both districts of the Mississippi town of Clarksdale, the black one and the white one.

 

Anyway, when the vampires show up, does the film turn to shite as From Dusk till Dawn did?  Thankfully, no.  Coogler provides some foreshadowing to prepare us for the twist, so it doesn’t come as a credibility-straining bolt from the blue.  During the opening sequence, a voice-over talks about certain types of music being “so pure it can pierce the veil between life and death, past and future” and attract supernatural creatures – an idea that’s echoed later when the vampires admit Sammie’s miraculous guitar-playing has drawn them to the juke joint.  (Even before the vampires arrive, Coogler treats us to a phantasmagorical sequence where Sammie’s playing seems to conjure up among the dancing crowd the spectres of music past and future – West African shamans, Chinese Xiqu performers, hip-hop DJs and an electric guitarist who looks like he’s a member of George Clinton’s P-Funk collective.)

 

Also preparing viewers for the tonal switch is an earlier sequence where a white man, Remmick (Jack O’Connell), flees from a squad of Choctaw Native Americans and takes refuge in a cabin inhabited by a hard-up white couple.  The pursuing Native Americans politely warn the couple that they’re sheltering something evil.  But as KKK robes are visible inside the cabin, it’s no surprise that the couple believe the story of their white visitor rather than that of the ‘Injuns’.  Noticing the sun is setting, and with a shotgun pointed at them, the Choctaw decide discretion is the better part of valour and retreat.  Which leaves Remmick to reveal himself as a vampire and infect his two saviours.

 

Coogler leaves this bit of world-building unexplored – which makes it wonderfully intriguing.  Why are the Choctaw acting as vampire hunters?  It also reminds me of the start of John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), where a dog – actually the titular thing in canine form – is chased by a pair of wrathful Norwegians in a helicopter.  Compared to the Norwegians, though, the Native Americans are more pragmatic and level-headed.

 

© Warner Bros / Proximity Media

 

Later, Remmick and the vampirised Klan couple appear on the threshold of Smoke and Stack’s new juke joint, bearing musical instruments and pleading to be let in (“We heard tell of a party”) so that they can have a jamming session with Sammie.  Sinners makes much of the belief that to get onto a premises, a vampire has to be invited – and Smoke and Stack, suspicious of white folks, are in no hurry to invite this trio inside.  So they bide their time outside, biting and vampirising anyone who goes home early or nips out of the building for a pee.  While they wait for their opportunity to get inside, their numbers grow…

 

In a smart move, Coogler makes Remmick Irish and gives him a taste for music as strong as his taste for blood.  So, lurking outside, the vampires knock out a few tunes themselves – a charming version of the Irish / Scottish folk number Wild Mountain Thyme, for instance, and when there’s enough of them to stage a full-scale vampire hooley, a raucous rendition of Rocky Road to Dublin, during which Remmick indulges in some step-dancing.  This makes being a vampire look like fun and Remmick, entreating the folks in the juke joint to surrender to him and his horde, makes a persuasive-sounding case for being vampirised.  Once you’re a vampire, it doesn’t matter what skin-tone you have.  Black vampires are treated no worse than white ones: “This world already left you for dead.  I can save you from your fate.  I am your way out.”

 

There’s a snag, of course.  Remmick, as the Count Dracula / Mr. Barlow-style lead vampire, calls the shots and his minions have to do his bidding.  Indeed, they seem parts of a giant hive-mind – evidenced by their chorused singing of Rocky Road to Dublin, which contrasts with the individuality Sammie expresses with his guitar.  And Remmick’s interest in Sammie and his music isn’t motivated by an impulse of sharing but by a desire to assimilate them.

 

It’s fun to speculate who or what Remmick symbolizes.  When he makes his first pitch at the juke joint’s door, begging to be let inside while Sammie, Delta Slim and Pearline perform, I was reminded of those white British rock-and-roll bands of the 1960s, like the Rolling Stones, the Animals and the Yardbirds.  Influenced by the likes of Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters, they started their careers desperate to play blues music and become known as bluesmen themselves.  Which prompted Sonny Boy Williamson II to quip caustically: “These English boys want to play the blues real bad… And they do, real bad.”

 

But maybe it makes more sense to compare Remmick to the white-owned American music industry.  His hunger for Sammie parallels how that industry gobbled up black artists, of blues, jazz, gospel, soul, funk, whatever, and made a fortune off their music whilst giving them as little credit, money and control over their work as possible.  Often, their songs ended up being sung by someone else, someone white – see Pat Boone singing a version of Little Richard’s Tutti Frutti just five months after its release in 1955 – with precious few royalties making it their way.

 

Incidentally, late on, Remmick comes out with a sob story about how he was persecuted and deprived of his land in Ireland – presumably at the hands of the British and presumably back in the days when he was still human.  That a victim of oppression has become a supernatural killing machine, one with a fascistic disregard for the lives of the people he feeds on, is Coogler’s way of reminding us that many poor white people, treated like dirt in their home countries, emigrated to other parts of the world where they treated indigenous people and black people like dirt too.  It’s a sad reflection on human nature that people near the bottom of the pile have a psychological need to believe there are people even further down the pile whom they can mistreat and regard as inferior.  Though this observation would no doubt delight Elon Musk, who recently grumbled that the “fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy”.

 

I’ve spent a lot of time analysing Sinners but I should also say it’s a supremely entertaining movie.  It’s exciting, scary, funny and atmospheric.  Furthermore, it proves a point that many filmmakers overlook – if you want a horror film to grip an audience, give them likeable and sympathetic characters to identify with.  That way, they have an investment in those characters and things feel much more tense when bad stuff starts happening.

 

© Cedric Burnside Project

© Silvertone Records

 

It goes without saying that the soundtrack is great too.  I’m particularly pleased to see that Cedric Burnside had a hand in performing some of the blues tunes – I attended a cool gig by Burnside at the Edinburgh Jazz and Blues Festival in 2015 and afterwards got his signature on a CD as a present for one of my mates.  Also, don’t rush off when the credits start rolling at the end.  There’s still a scene to come, one set in the early 1990s and featuring the venerable bluesman Buddy Guy.  (By a coincidence I saw Guy perform in the early 1990s, though obviously the early-1990s Guy in Sinners is a good bit older than the one I witnessed.)  It’s a coda that’s both sinister and affecting.

 

And the acting is excellent.  Michael B. Jordan is impressive in the twin roles of Smoke and Stack.  I soon forgot that both characters were being played by the same person.  It’s a pleasure seeing Delroy Lindo again, whom I fondly remember as the villain in the 1995 adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s Get Shorty and from numerous Spike Lee movies.  And as Sammie, Michael Caton is a revelation.  He’s young and naïve, as the script demands, but he’s blessed with a deep, prematurely-old voice that totally persuades you this lad can sing and play the blues.

 

One thing about the casting, though.  Jack O’Connell is perfectly fine as Remmick.  But since the character is a scary old monster who’s Irish and musical, I don’t know why they didn’t cast the obvious candidate for the role: Van Morrison.

 

© Warner Bros / Proximity Media

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Buck Rogers in the 21st century

 

 

After the rock band Feeder – consisting of Welsh vocalist and guitarist Grant Nicholas, Welsh drummer Jon Lee and Japanese bassist Taka Hirose – appeared in the 1990s, I bought their first few albums: Polythene (1997), Yesterday Went Too Soon (1999) and Echo Park (2001).  I enjoyed them at the time, but don’t remember much about them now – just a few songs like High (1997) and their biggest hit, Buck Rogers (2001).

 

After Echo Park, I stopped listening to Feeder.  This wasn’t because of a decline in their musical quality.  I moved around a lot in the 2000s and 2010s and lost touch with many of the bands I’d been into during the previous decade.  Often I was living in countries where it was impossible to hear about and buy new music by Western rock bands.  And YouTube isn’t much help if you’re somewhere with little or zero Internet connectivity.

 

Also – in an echo of the tragedy that befell fellow Welsh rockers the Manic Street Preachers – Feeder lost their drummer Jon Lee when he committed suicide in 2002.  I actually suspected the band had called it a day after that.  However, now I’ve done some research, I see that Nicholas and Hirose have soldiered on and produced nine further albums to date.

 

Anyway, it was recently announced that, as part of their current Black / Red tour, Feeder would perform at Singapore’s Hard Rock Café on April 2nd.  Though the band are now officially a two-man outfit, Nicholas and Hirose are accompanied by rhythm guitarist and backing vocalist Tommy Gleason and drummer Geoff Holroyde.  So, I purchased a ticket and, come April 2nd, got myself along to the Hard Rock Café.

 

 

This was the second gig I’ve attended at that venue.  With uncanny symmetry, the previous band I saw there was another Celtic one who came to prominence during the Britpop era playing indie / punky rock music, Northern Ireland’s Ash.  Consequently, I couldn’t help but compare this Feeder gig with the Ash one… and it seemed slightly inferior.

 

For one thing, it was shorter.  Feeder played for 80 minutes.  I think they could have chucked in a couple of extra songs to get the gig to the hour-and-a-half mark.  A more important issue, though, was the crowd.  Ash had attracted a good mixture of Western expatriates and Singaporeans, who’d bopped to the band’s songs with great enthusiasm.  The Feeder audience, however, consisted mostly of expats in their thirties and forties and they were, frankly, a bit lame.  Stuck at the back of the crowd, I found myself staring across a sea of sensible T-shirts, slightly-greying hair, bald-spots, baseball caps (strategically placed to conceal bald-spots) and shaven scalps (strategically shaven to camouflage bald-spots).  When they were at their most enthusiastic, they reacted to the music by, well, jiggling a bit.  (Admittedly, that’s what I did – I jiggled a bit.  But I have an excuse.  I’m a frail old man now.)  I felt sorry for Grant Nicholas when he suggested, “Let’s get a 1990s mosh-pit going…”, and nothing happened.

 

My mood was also dampened by the fact that the gig took place in the Hard Rock Café – surrounded by such holy rock-and-roll artefacts as J.J. Cale’s guitar, Michael Jackson’s cymbals and, er, the drumkit of Rob Blotzer from RATT.  Yes, with the café’s tables and chairs removed for the evening, you get the feeling you’re in a small, sweaty, standing-room-only venue where the band are just a few yards away.  That intimacy is great (and uncommon in Singapore).  However, the Hard Rock Café doesn’t have a stage – or, if it does, it has no stage to speak of.  It looks like the bands play on a strip of floor at one end of the main room.  Thus, even if you aren’t far from the performers, you won’t see much of them over the heads of the spectators at the very front.

 

 

There’s the matter too of having to pay Hard Rock Café prices for your drinks.  A pint of Carlsberg set me back a blood-curdling 28 Singaporean dollars, which is 16 British pounds sterling.

 

Still, despite the subdued crowd and the problems with the venue, once I relaxed and focused only on the show, I did enjoy it.  Bravely, Feeder didn’t go down the easy route of pandering to 1990s nostalgia, which is currently modish thanks to the hype over this summer’s reunion tour by the Gallagher siblings, and they played just four songs off those first three albums I mentioned earlier – though the songs were well-received and Buck Rogers inevitably got a good reception late on in the set.  On the other hand, they devoted more than half their set to material off their three most recent albums, Tallulah (2019), Torpedo (2022) and Black / Red (2024) and it was absolutely fine.  The standout for me was their 2024 song Playing with Fire – I definitely prefer Feeder when they’re being heavier and Playing with Fire was a good essay in heaviness.

 

Kudos, by the way, to drummer Geoff Holroyde (who looks like a slightly-better-groomed Alan Moore) for wearing a Flying V Bar T-shirt and thus giving a plug to Singapore’s premier heavy metal pub.  Mind you, I was in the Flying V a week earlier and they had a big banner up promoting tonight’s gig, so perhaps he was just returning the compliment.

 

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My safe space

 

 

The world is in a terrible state at the moment.  It’s apparently morphing into a real-life version of the scenario imagined by George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), wherein the planet is divided into three authoritarian superstates, Eurasia, Eastasia and Oceania.  We now have Russia run by Vladimir Putin, China run by Xi Jinping, and the USA run by the grotesque triumvirate of orange gobshite Donald Trump, viper-in-hillbilly-form J.D. Vance, and the chainsaw-wielding, ketamine-popping, Seig Heiling, superrich super-dickhead Elon Musk.  All three countries have been open about their territorial ambitions, about their wish to expand and become real-life, continent-engulfing equivalents of Eurasia, Eastasia and Oceania.  Very bad news if you live in Ukraine, Poland, the Baltic states, Taiwan, Panama, Greenland or Canada.  Pretty bad news for the rest of us.

 

Thus, in these troubled times, it’s a relief to have a safe space: a little cubby hole you can retreat to, and hide in, and where your brain can function removed from all the awfulness happening outside for a while.  For me, that space is provided by the Flying V bar, Singapore’s self-styled ‘heavy metal headquarters’, which is hidden away in a back corridor in the basement of the Adelphi Shopping Centre on the city’s Colman Street.  Actually, the shopping centre is next door to the National Gallery, which makes the Flying V an ideal spot to sit with a beer after a visit to the gallery and ruminate on all the artwork you’ve just experienced.

 

 

A Singaporean shopping centre may seem an incongruous place to find a heavy metal bar.  However, it isn’t the only music or metal-related business in the Adelphi.  On your way there, you pass a few units containing shops that sell vinyl records, many of the heavy-metal variety.

 

 

Inside, the walls of the Flying V are slathered with old posters and flyers advertising heavy-metal bands, concerts and festivals.  Even if you don’t touch a drop of alcohol, you can spend a pleasant hour in the place just reading the items crammed over the walls and enjoying the little glows of nostalgia they kindle in you.  On my part, for example, I gave happy sighs when I discovered an Art Nouveau-inspired poster for the mighty space-rock band Hawkwind, designed by the graphic artist Barney Bubbles; a picture of the late, great Ronnie James Dio tricked out in sword-and-sorcery gear, as was Ronnie’s wont to wear; and a poster for the much-missed Motörhead on their 1980 world tour, promoting their greatest-ever album Ace of Spades.

 

 

On the other hand, when I took my cat-loving partner there, she was delighted to find this proclamation about the feline species emblazoned on the wall behind our table.

 

 

The Flying V’s drinks menu includes a beverage called Trooper Premium British Beer.  Trooper’s vivid label-design gives you a clue as to who produces it.  Yes, it’s the result of a project involving veteran heavy-metal band Iron Maiden, singers of such anthems as Number of the Beast (1982) and Bring Your Daughter to the Slaughter (1990).  The latter song will always be close to my heart because of the fact it knocked Cliff Richard’s sanctimonious Saviour’s Day (1990) off the coveted Christmas Number One slot in the 1990 British singles chart.  The band produce Trooper in partnership with England’s Robinson’s Brewery.  So, if you spend an afternoon getting sloshed on the stuff in the Flying V, you’re not being wasteful or unproductive.  You’re actually helping to fund Iron Maiden.

 

As I’ve said, the world is in a dire state just now and it sometimes feels tempting to retreat into the Flying V and hole up there for good.  However, the place does contain a warning against staying on the premises for too long.  You might end up like this guy.

 

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Thom is da bomb

 

 

I don’t know when I became a fan of the band Radiohead.  They seemed to creep up on me by stealth.  I’d been aware of them for years before suddenly, one day, I realised: “Hey! I really like them!”

 

Appropriately for a band who crept up on me, the first song by them I heard was Creep from their debut album Pablo Honey (1993).  Though a massive hit, I didn’t actually like Creep, finding it dull and plodding.  My disdain for it was shared by Radiohead themselves, with guitarist Ed O’Brien saying of their performances of the song during the early 1990s: “We seemed to be living out the same four and a half minutes of our lives over and over again.  It was incredibly stultifying.”

 

At this time I worked as a university lecturer in the northern Japanese city of Sapporo.  One day  in 1995 I received a gift from a cool indie-kid in one of my classes, Yoko Koyama, who’d discovered that despite my outward veneer of grumpiness and grouchiness I was, underneath, a sensitive soul who was heavily into music.  The gift was a cassette recording of Radiohead’s newly-released second album, The Bends.  I diplomatically accepted it, not expecting to like it much on the basis that I hadn’t been impressed by Creep.  But when I listened to it, I thought, “This is actually pretty good.”  Not brilliantly good, but definitely good.

 

Around then, Radiohead visited Sapporo and played a gig, but the night of their concert was one when I had to teach a couple of evening classes at the university.  So I missed the chance to see them.  The next day, I went into one of my regular Sapporo drinking hangouts, the Beifu-tei Bar, and got talking to a mate of mine, a Scotsman from St Andrews called Stevie Malcolm.  Stevie informed me, “Aye, thon English rock band were in here last night after their gig.  What dae ye call them?  Thingmie-heid.”

 

“You mean, Radiohead?”

 

“Aye, Radio-heid!”

 

I got the impression Stevie had chatted away to Radiohead barely knowing who they were.  Though from the band’s unconventional approach to the music industry and their discomfort with the trappings of superstardom, they probably liked chatting to strangers in bars with barely any idea of who they were.

 

In 1997 Radiohead released their third album OK Computer, which even my snobbiest, most purist music-loving friends, who’d dismissed Pablo Honey and The Bends with a contemptuous flick of the hand, had to admit was an awesome record.  It still figures prominently when music publications list the best rock albums of all time and retrospective reviews frequently award it a full five stars.  And though subsequent albums – Kid A (2000), Amnesiac (2001), Hail to the Thief (2003), In Rainbows (2007), The King of Limbs (2011) and A Moon Shaped Pool (2016) – never created quite the same stir, and often made demands on the listener by veering off into the avantgarde, experimental and left-field, I’ve found all of them laudable.

 

It helped that, unlike other bands who at various times were massively loved by audiences and hailed by critics as world-straddling musical colossi, Radiohead never seemed in your face that much.  So you didn’t grow sick of them.  Whereas for a few years U2 or Oasis, or even REM, seemed to be everywhere in the media, with the result that their ubiquity led to a backlash – the public losing interest, the critics getting disenchanted, familiarity generally breeding contempt – Radiohead were more subtle, less intrusive and lower profile.  Perhaps their credibility endured because of that.

 

Even their appearances in popular culture tended to be wry and quirky and happened in unexpected, and cool, places.  For example, I remember the very last episode of Father Ted (1995-98) when the suicidal priest Father Kevin (Tommy Tiernan) gets cured of his depression by Ted playing to him Isaac Hayes’ joyous Theme from Shaft (1971) – only to lapse back into suicidal depression when he hears Radiohead’s Exit Music (For a Film) (1997) playing on the radio in a bus.  Or when they turned up in a 2001 episode of South Park called Scott Tenorman Must Die and added a final layer of torment to the unfortunate Scott Tenorman of the title.  Scott is a kid who’s been tricked by Eric Cartman into eating the minced bodies of his dead parents.  When he discovers what he’s done, he understandably bursts into tears.  Just then, his favourite band, Radiohead, happen to stroll past, see him and cruelly mock him for being a ‘cry-baby’.

 

From x.com / © Hat Trick Productions

© South Park Studios

 

Anyway, last week on November 5th, Radiohead’s vocalist and main songwriter Thom Yorke rolled up here in Singapore to play a solo concert as part of his Everything tour.  Yorke has a long history of making music on his own, from his 2006 album The Eraser, through 2014’s Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes, to 2019’s ANIMA, and he’s also been involved in a couple of side-bands like Atoms for Peace and The Smile, so it’s not a surprise to find him performing without the rest of Radiohead.  I attended the gig accompanied by my better half, Mrs Blood and Porridge, who wouldn’t have missed this occasion for the world.  She’s such a dyed-in-the-wool Radiohead fan that the other day she even made our cat watch the video for 2016’s Burn the Witch on YouTube.

 

Yorke played at the Star Theatre, which I’ve visited a couple of times in the past.  At previous gigs there, I was not greatly impressed by the crowd, many of whom seemed more interested in filming the event on their phones than getting into the excitement and vibe of the music itself.  As I wrote a while ago about a Deep Purple concert: “Why remove yourself from the occasion and gaze zombie-like at tiny figures moving about a tiny stage on a tiny screen…?  It’s also, needless to say, disrespectful of the performers onstage…  Honestly, there were times when the auditorium was so densely flecked with glowing phone-screens you felt you were flying over Las Vegas at night.”  But tonight’s audience, Singaporeans and foreigners alike, seemed to be genuine Radiohead fans and Thom Yorke-lovers who knew the great man wasn’t going to appreciate having a thousand phones pointed at him by a thousand glaikit dimwits.  So, thankfully, phone-usage was at a minimum.

 

It wasn’t the most physical of performances.  Yorke spent most of his time on a patch of stage encircled by musical equipment, including several keyboards, and looked like a cross between Rick Wakeman of Yes and Captain Nemo tinkling out Sebastian Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor on his organ.  He did, occasionally, venture towards the audience to play guitar or indulge in some shuffling dancing.  The latter drew affectionate cheers.  I have to say seeing Thom make his funky moves brought a smile to my face, as it seemed to prove there was at least one person on the planet whose dancing is even worse than mine is.

 

 

But what of the music?  I’d read a worrying review of a gig from earlier in the tour, in Sydney, where the writer observed, “Each Radiohead song that’s played – they make up just under half the setlist – is met with a hushed reverence, while loud chatter is heard every time something else gets an airing.”  Maybe that means modern-day Sydney concertgoers are disrespectful bozos, for that certainly wasn’t my impression of the Singapore crowd.  Yes, the ten Radiohead numbers he played during the set – coming from a range of the band’s albums, though nothing featured from Pablo Honey, Hail to the Thief or The King of Limbs – were enthusiastically received.  But the audience showed their appreciation of the non-Radiohead stuff as well.  This included material from all three of Yorke’s solo albums, two new songs (Back in the Game and Hearing Damage), and two he’d composed for the 2018 soundtrack for Luca Guadagnino’s remake of the Dario Argento 1977 horror classic Suspiria.

 

It all meshed together nicely.  The solo material evoked at different times the sounds of the Aphex Twin, Depeche Mode and Nine Inch Nails and I even wondered if Yorke was getting a bit disco-y at one or two points.  Naturally, electronica-rooted Radiohead numbers like Idioteque, Everything in its Right Place or Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box (off Kid A) slotted in seamlessly among that lot.  Surprisingly, though, the band’s more conventional – dare I say more tuneful – songs, like How to Disappear Completely (Kid A again) Fake Plastic Trees (off The Bends), and All I Need (off In Rainbows) fitted in smoothly too, making it an impressively cohesive set.  Maybe it was because Yorke’s falsetto – often mocked, but inimitable, haunting and gorgeous – provided the aural thread that stitched together all these disparate pieces of musical cloth.

 

 

Praise is due too for the accompanying light show, with several tall screens treating the audience to dazzling and dizzying displays that, during the evening, seemed to range from daubs of luminous green graffiti to blizzards of multicoloured confetti, from drizzles of Matrix-style code to what looked like, frankly, masses of glowing spaghetti.  Occasionally, these gave way to stark white light, and darkness, where, at his consoles, Yorke looked like a torturer operating his torture-machines in a gothic dungeon.  Occasionally too, the chaotic patterns coalesced into the ghostly features of the man himself.  Thus, the show was an impressively visual as well as aural experience.  I have to say it was easier on the eyes than the screens at the previous gig I’d been to at the Star Theatre, which’d subjected me to regular, unflinching close-ups of the 78-year-old visage of Deep Purple’s Ian Gillan.

 

By the concert’s end it seemed the many diehard fans in the crowd had got their money’s worth.  Their frequent cries of “I love you, Thom!” had never lessened in enthusiasm while the 22-song set wound on.  And presumably the guy who shouted, before the gig and behind us on the escalator while we rode up to the theatre’s entrance, “Please, Thom, don’t play Creep tonight!”, went home happy too.

 

A good evening, then.  It certainly took our minds off the horror that was happening elsewhere on November 5th.

 

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A bash with Ash

 

 

The passage of time is a strange and frightening thing.  When they first got airplay on Britain’s Radio 1, the three members of the indie-pop-punk-rock band Ash were still at school in Downpatrick, Northern Ireland.  At that point the combined ages of their three members, vocalist and guitarist Tim Wheeler, bassist Mark Hamilton and drummer Rick McMurray, must have added up to a number in the low 50s, similar to (perhaps less than) the average age of a member of the Rolling Stones back then.  In other words, they seemed stupendously young to me.

 

So, it was a shock when I went to see Ash perform at Singapore’s Hard Rock Café last Friday night and discovered that suddenly all three are now well into their 40s.  How did that happen?  Surely, it was only a few months ago that I bought their first album after reading a good review of it in Q magazine?

 

But actually, that was back in 1996.  Where does the time go?

 

I think it was also in the now-defunct Q magazine, in the 1990s, that I read how Ash were rumoured to be the favourite band of a young Prince William.  Well, it has to be said that Ash in 2024 have weathered the years rather better than their royal fan, who these days is first in line to the throne.  Unlike the follicly-challenged Prince William, Wheeler and Hamilton still have full heads of hair – although, suspiciously, McMurray sported a baseball cap throughout the gig.

 

 

The many Western expats present in tonight’s audience looked of a similar vintage to Ash and Prince William — teenagers back in the 1990s but now middle-aged.  Incidentally, the crowd also contained a fair sprinkling of Singaporeans.  From what I can gather, this was Ash’s fourth visit to the city-state, so they’d evidently acquired a few local fans too.

 

Tonight was the first time I’d attended a gig in the Hard Rock Café.  I’m not a fan of this particular dining franchise, though I have to admit they did a good job of transforming it from a restaurant to a concert venue – a venue with an old-fashioned ‘small, sweaty club’ vibe, which was especially welcome in Singapore, where too often you have to watch bands in sedate, sit-down establishments, stuck among endless rows of seats, unable to move about and shake a leg.  The café could have done with a higher stage, however.  I felt sorry for the shorter Ash fans.  Jammed behind taller folk, probably all they could see of the band were the tops of Wheeler and Hamilton’s still-hirsute heads.

 

One other feature of the Hard Rock Café I wasn’t thrilled by was its bar prices.  A small glass of Carlsberg beer cost 14 dollars, which meant you’d be paying in the region of 30 dollars for something approximating a pint, a costly sum even by Singapore’s standards.  Presumably because the café wanted to do some normal Friday-evening business beforehand, Ash didn’t come onstage until ten o’clock, with the doors opening for the gig at nine.  I arrived shortly after nine, saw the prices, popped out again and headed along the street to the craft-brewery bar-and-restaurant Brewerkz, where a pint cost me a slightly less eye-watering 23 dollars.

 

When I returned to the café just before ten, it was mobbed.  Since I wouldn’t see much of the band from the back, where the bar was, I decided to forego further boozing, burrowed my way through the crowd, secured myself a spot about two yards from the barrier before the stage, and stayed there for the show’s duration.  Even there, my view wasn’t perfect – I saw Wheeler and Hamilton’s upper halves, though they often vanished when excitable people in front of me waved their arms in the air, and I needed to stand on tiptoe to see McMurray at his drumkit.

 

 

And mounted on the wall above my head was an example of the rock-and-roll memorabilia that famously decorates the Hard Rock Café franchise all over the world.  This was the drumkit of Rob Blotzer, drummer with the 1980s hair metal band RATT.   I’d completely forgotten about the dreadful, poodle-headed RATT until I saw that drumkit.  But now I remember them again.  Thanks for that, Hard Rock Café.

 

The omens were not good when Ash began the gig.  Firstly, a forest of hands shot up around me, clutching smartphones, all filming, and I had a sickening premonition of being surrounded by dozens of tiny glowing screens, each showing a tiny glowing image of the band, for the next hour-and-a-half.  Secondly, it quickly became obvious that there were sound problems, with Wheeler’s vocals almost buried by the noise of Hamilton’s bass.  Thankfully, most of the phones were soon lowered again – the crowd had just wanted some footage of their heroes coming onstage – and, a few songs in, the sound-mix became more balanced.

 

And what followed was very enjoyable.  The crowd, at least where I was, had fun and Ash looked like they were having a good time too.  Unlike a number of bands I’ve seen at gigs in various parts of the world, this band gave the impression that they knew, and appreciated, where they were.  For example, at one point, McMurray told the audience a funny anecdote from the previous time they’d played Singapore.

 

Also, due to the fact that I was standing near one of the main speakers, I was left partially deaf for the next 24 hours.  Which was a pain in the arse at work the next day, but surely a sign that I’d been to a good gig.

 

 

The 40-something Ash fans in attendance must have found it a nostalgic treat, because half of the 18-song setlist came off the two hit albums of their early years, 1977 (1996) and Free All Angels (2001).  These songs included Angel Interceptor, Goldfinger and Girl from Mars from the former and Shining Light, Burn Baby Burn and Sometimes from the latter.  Oh, and the famously Jackie Chan-referencing Kung Fu from 1977 got an airing too.  (I’m sure Ash were delighted when Kung Fu actually got used in a Jackie Chan movie, playing during the bloopers reel at the end of 1995’s Rumble in the Bronx.)  To give proceedings a slightly more up-to-date feel, they also played three tracks from their most recent album, 2023’s Race the Night.  When, between songs, Wheeler mentioned the album they’d ‘recorded last year’, an Ash fan behind me remarked in a loud and serious voice: “Surprisingly good!”  So maybe I should check it out.

 

Alas, the Ash album I like best – the guitar-heavy Nu-clear Sounds (1998), which was released between 1977 and Free All Angels, got a mixed reception from the critics and had disappointing sales – was represented by just one song tonight, Wildsurf.  I would have loved to hear them play more songs off it, especially the singles Jesus Says and Numbskull, which I think are cracking tunes.  The same thing happened last November when I went to see the Manic Street Preachers (they played only one song from my favourite Manics album, 1993’s Gold Against the Soul) and Suede (ditto for my favourite Suede album, 1994’s Dog Man Star).  Maybe this is a quaint Singaporean curse I’ve fallen victim to.