33 at 45 pt 2

I went a little further into my 'collection' (I hate that word) and found a few more bits and pieces, some of which I had referred to in the previous post but I can't be fucked doing a rewrite for something so mundane and not worth reading. You read right, NOT WORTH READING. The weirdest thing about this text, on the back of Elvis Costello's (twenty, count 'em, twenty-track) Get Happy, is the insane smallness of it, which is appropriate but insanely appropriately insane. 

I don't quite get the bit about 'people who've never bought a record made before 1967' but I assume it's tech talk - was there a change in practice after 1967 or is it about the kind of records, conceptually speaking, that were being made after 1967? Should probably investigate, there's probably someone much more nerdy than I somewhere on the internet who has a theory. 

(* update: not exactly but there is this discussion from which I learnt apparently there is a double album version of Get Happy with all sides playing at 45rpm and that the Imperial Bedroom album which came a couple of LPs later is apparently longer than Get Happy ffs!). 

Here's an interesting thing re: Utopia (phase II - the pop Utopia not the prog Utopia). My copy of what I believe is actually the second Utopia album to be called Utopia has this sticker on the front:

Note firstly it is not a 5-track EP but a 5-track LP (looking at the Wikipedia page I gather it was described as an EP in most territories and indeed in the UK and Europe the five tracks were pressed on a 7" 33rpm disc - !!!). But it's weirder than that. It's actually, once you get inside the cover, Side 3 of the album: you'd have to assume, the five tracks that no-one thought were good enough to go on the real album, so they're 'bonus tracks' for a limited time only. But the inner sleeve designs suggest this is a legit side 3, if it wasn't for the sticker on the front, you'd just think, yeah this is how it always was and always will be.

BUT it is stranger than that. Because flip that baby over (as the maternal and child health nurse says) and:

All the same tracks, on Side 4 as well. So I guess if you particularly love Utopia and particularly love side 3, you're in luck because it will wear out half as fast as the main (side 1 & 2) part of the LP, as long as you assiduously flip the extra disc when you're playing that side. Maybe I should compare side 3 & 4, maybe they're whole different versions or completely different songs with the same title or something. I mean it's kind of a waste of space, isn't it, but then again, it's not a waste of vinyl to press something into the vinyl... personally if I was in charge I'd be like 'let's turn the kids on to other things Utopia have done, by sticking a half-LP 'best of' on there' but I think they'd actually just signed to a new label so there probably wasn't much of a back catalogue. They could have given Todd a day in the studio to make a Mr Partridge style dub album... but oh yeah, Todd hates mixing. Damn it!!!

OK so I've milked that one, let's get back to Rip Rig and Panic just to finish off. Here are some selected labels, just in case you were in slack-jawed awe at the notion that those discs went at 45:

Wow they totally do. As you can see (? actually maybe you can't, but it is) my copy of I am Cold is a Japanese pressing, and I did that near-impossible thing of using the google translate camera to try and get some sense out of the text on the insert. I was surprised to glean that there is a whole 'user's guide to understanding who the fuck Rip Rig and Panic are' in there, explaining the group members' origins and the scene they came from. There's something in there about David Bowie being 'chesterish' which is a bit exciting and I also love that 'ring music is ringing now'. Anyway, I didn't get too much from this and all it really did was confuse me, all I can say with reasonable certainty is that nowhere does anyone say 'the reason the group chose to release their albums as two 12" 45s is...'

But also there is an ad for the God album on the insert of I Am Cold which describes it, in translation obviously, as '30 cm 45 rotation two sheets', which I get more out of than I really should. Note that below, the track which is somehow translated as 'Knee Dive in Sit' is actually called 'Knee Deep in Shit'. 

Bye! See ya later

writing reviews

I'm amazed that, now there's no money in it, how few reviews get published of interesting things. I was seized briefly by the desire to revive my old fanzine ways of the 1980s-90s and write long interesting (?) (to me anyway) rambling reviews of new books and records which might perhaps be equal parts contribution to the promotion of 'the' culture, and in and of themselves a kind of solid statement: 'this stuff is of consequence, look, I wrote a completely extensive response to it'. Probably best if I did it under a range of different names though so it looked like a coterie of interested people were involved, some sort of Algonquinesque crew, they could even argue with each other 'I was interested to see Paleo Negstrom suggest last week in these pages that the Alien Nosejob album was the Something/Anything for our times...' etc.

Like a lot of idiots my age, my first real experience of a cultural bible was the NME, which I devoured greedily between 1978 and about 1983. I have probably told you this before: I was entranced by the NME in the late 70s when it was (almost) all about punk rock, so I read all about the people, and particularly loved the magazine's graphics, but at the same time I had no idea how to access the music at all (and wasn't even sure I'd like it if I did access it). To take on punk/new wave at the age of 13 would have been very, very out there, so/and/but I experienced it at arm's length and followed the comings and goings of whoever - people generally now cast out from the canon, for better or worse - Jimmy Pursey or the Pleasers (not the New Zealand band but the 'Thamesbeat' one) who modelled themselves on the 1964 (or earlier) Beatles, and whose wikipedia page is so fucking bizarre I can't let it stand as it, it's appalling - and others who are consolidated within it, Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe etc. I knew a lot about these acts (not that I've retained the information) without having any idea what they sounded like (I was just inspired then to actually listen to the Pleasers. It is what it is). It was like being obsessed by Middle Earth or something, a panoply of codes and tropes understood through one multi-faceted filter. Additionally, there was a comparable (in terms of 'scene', probably better in terms of music) music scene in Melbourne itself I would have loved, but which I had no way of accessing.

My brain was trained by the NME in the ways of How to Proselytise, not that I have always wanted to do so but I have often tried to. I think on reflection it's the platform rather than the work itself that matters. The people who wrote in the NME mattered not because of anything they knew or thought but because they were writing for the NME. The NME was, by the way, a thoroughly manipulated environment - I appreciate that now, and I realised eventually (probably by the end of the 80s) it missed out a lot of amazing things because its writers actually didn't know or understand half as much as they thought they did, and they were also captive to their own biases etc. I don't even know where I'm going with this now. Probably I said it. These days I mainly prefer to write reviews of animals, anyway.

This morning Nancy woke me up crying from the other room 6/10.