That Music List: LIST 263

(The entrance to Pontins, Camber Sands 26/09/2017, a great many years after the venue bore witness to - among other things - The Lonesome Organist playing four instruments at once during an All Tomorrow's Parties festival. Picture is author's own)

Hello again,

I'm habitually a bit wary of new releases by musical acts being billed as "events".

Call it perhaps a hangover of having endured so many Britpop and post-Britpop bands' (frequently underwhelming) new singles being aggressively, extensively promoted as "events" back in the day. You'd have been forgiven for thinking the release of D'You Know What I Mean? by Oasis was the single most significant event of 1997, musical or otherwise, such was its trailing.

I also have memories of a period in the 2000s when Channel 4 would show world premieres of singles by prominent acts du jour such as Muse, five or so minutes before one of their flagship shows (I want to say on Friday nights, but I do need to check) and often with similarly hyperbolic billing.

These invariably struck me as potential hidings to nothing for the acts concerned, giving them no place to hide if these new wares were exposed as mediocre compared to previous offerings. Lucky for some of them that hubris didn't let them worry about that.

As far as I'm concerned, "events" in a musical context are strictly either gigs/concerts or commissions (and in the case of some famous examples over the centuries, such as Handel's Music for the Royal Fireworks, both at the same time). All of which brings us, eventually and circuitously, to a new single from PJ Harvey.

Voyager doesn't owe its creation entirely to Professor Brian Cox, as Polly Harvey had already sketched out the idea of it as a potential future album track. That draft, however, leapt out at everyone's favourite particle physicist Oldhammer as the perfect vehicle for an event of his own, the live scientific musical stage show Emergence. In effect, a commission of completed song for completed show was then initiated.

Sonically evoking the signals of the 1977 NASA Voyager space probe, and lyrically surely one of very few songs ever written from the point of view of a spacecraft rather than that of space or of an astronaut (Major Tom it is not), the finally realised version features synth contributions from Cox himself, marking this out as an increasingly rare foray back into making or performing music for the one-time Dare and D:Ream key prodder (a single-song guest appearance for D:Ream at Glastonbury in 2024 is just about all else there's been in recent memory).

For Harvey, it's a further welcome, engaging release in what's been a particularly productive past few years. Work on the intended parent album of Voyager already appears at least some way on, not yet much more than three years since the release of I Inside The Old Year Dying and its substantial tour, and with late 2024's twin salvo of the London Tide cast recording and the Bad Sisters season #2 soundtrack having been added to the CV in the interim also.

Putting together an anywhere remotely representative A Session of Sorts for her this week was always going to be an impossible ask, all the more so having already surrendered eleven strong candidates to other Lists before now. I couldn't not include something from Let England Shake (for me still a career high), however, nor 2004's The Desperate Kingdom of Love, having been reminded of the latter's quiet power at Polly's 2024 Halifax Piece Hall concert (another actual event, you'll note).

Finishing off this List with compilation semi-rarity Other Galaxies by The Field Mice wasn't an attempt to uphold the space theme of Voyager yet further, by the way - I'd already had this one inked in for The Long Goodbye this week a long time before Polly's newie.

I can't remember whether this was an outtake from the Sarah Records mainstays' final album For Keeps, but it bears many of the stylistic traits and comparative muscle of much else from that period of the band's evolution. I'm as certain as I can be that it's the longest track The Field Mice ever let see the light of day, too.

***

Elsewhere this week, the inclusion of a track by Rheingold in the Germanophone feature gives us chance to consider briefly their late frontperson Bodo Staiger, arguably the closest the Neue Deutsche Welle (German New Wave) movement came to anointing any heartthrobs - certainly any cross-disciplinary ones, at least.

That status was consolidated by Staiger's appearance in the 1982 German cult horror movie Der Fan, wherein he starred as a super-famous new-wave singer who, upon rejecting the advances of an obsessive female fan, is killed, frozen and systematically eaten by her.

(The eponymous fan, by the way? A then seventeen year-old Désirée Nosbusch, just two years before she'd host the Eurovision Song Contest in her native Luxembourg. Bet they didn't play any clips of Der Fan on the night).

When not being bumped off by usually wholesome entertainers from miniscule European countries, Staiger could be found at the helm of precise yet insistent, irresistible synthpop tracks such as Dreiklangsdimensionen. That both Staiger and bandmate Lothar Manteuffel would later undertake separate projects with offloaded members of Kraftwerk makes sense.

I never worked out whether Rheingold's naming themselves after a Wagner opera was ironic - there's certainly none of the histrionics of such as the Ring Cycle here. Less open for debate, meanwhile, is whether German darkwave synthpoppers Wolfsheim took their name from a character from F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby entirely sincerely - they admitted as much.

Lovers of the genre likely still mourn to this day the duo's spectacularly ugly implosion in the mid-late 2000s when at their commercial peak (a platinum album and appearances on the German iteration of Top of the Pops, no less), amid a welter of trials, ceases and desists, and a reconciliation appears no likelier two decades on.

The inclusion of The Sparrows and the Nightingales in our occasional darkwave feature this week rights a longstanding historic wrong. Of all of the recent selections I have noted I could have sworn had been included on a List years ago but hadn't, this longstanding member of my all-time top ten favourite songs is by some way the most astonishing omission.

I can't even claim I was saving it for a special occasion, though more through pure dumb luck than skill it does appear here almost exactly 35 years since it was first released (15/07/1991).

A word here for Wolfsheim's longest serving backers, Strange Ways Records of first Bremen and later Hamburg. So synonymous with one another were band and label, it's easy to misremember Sparrows... as being the first ever Strange Ways release.

It wasn't, not by at least a couple of years; but in terms of putting a label on the map with an early release, this haunting, sad meditation on The Great Gatsby's themes of security and predators represented as much of a statement of intent as, say, Pristine Christine did for Sarah Records right from the word go.

Hopefully there's plenty else to entertain you as usual this week, including:

more new or recent material from Special Friend, Les Big Byrd, Alison Cotton, Slippers, Penelope Isles and an absolute jackhammer from L'Rain (how have I managed to miss her up to now?).

a second selection since That Music List resumed from Language of Flowers, but the first since learning of their gigs in London, Paris and Hamburg this coming September - their first for nigh on eleven years. A new album in a more dreampop direction is anticipated, though with the proceeds from last year's reissued Songs About You having funded its recording it seems unlikely that the old favourites will be lost from their set entirely.

a personal favourite from that little period in 1995-6 when there appeared to be a brand new Baby Bird album out every other week. These comparatively simple, largely homespun recordings endure as my preferred Stephen Jones output to this day.

a reminder of the talents of the almost literally many tentacled Chicago musician Jeremy Jacobsen, aka The Lonesome Organist. Any others present with me at the Camber Sands 2002 renewal of All Tomorrow's Parties will remember seeing this singularly dexterous performer occasionally operating as many as four pianos, keyboards or percussion instruments at once; I'm sure I didn't dream up him playing two keyboards with his feet at one stage.

some Italian horror soundtrack fun from Goblin, not just because it's characteristically great stuff, but also by way of a little get well soon to Sheffield indiepop performer, DJ and gig promoter (and dedicated horror fan) Daniel Hartley. Thinking of you, mate - you've got this.

J xx

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EUROTASTIC
RADIORAMA - Vampires (1986)