That Music List: LIST 269

Hello again,

"Unable to get to any of the remaining gigs on their farewell tour, so, in common with likely many present tonight, for me The Spook School's Indietracks valedictory performance really was a goodbye.

A heartfelt thank you to one of the most important bands our little world has ever unearthed, tackling all matters transgender, gender binary, toxic masculinity, homophobia and so on unflinchingly, yet with a hugely relatable vulnerability".

The words I shared on Facebook back on July 27th, 2019, for what to this day remains tied equal as one of my favourite four or five gigs of all time. An emotionally charged, hopeful, angry, defiant, poignant, funny, life-affirming, vital set from a band which lived and breathed all of those attributes every day of its existence.

A few further gigs followed up to the first week of September that year, and that - save for the briefest of returns in 2023 to mark the tenth anniversary of their Dress Up debut - appeared to be that.

Until, with little to no warning, a quick "We're back" message appeared on their Facebook presence on Tuesday morning of this week.

It's stating the obvious that all of the issues which most exercised the Glasgow four-piece first time around are very much still prominent in the public discourse seven and a bit years on, if not more so.

In particular, interviews for Clashmusic and God is in the TV since the announced return have devoted attention to the ever more depressing trend to talk about trans rights around rather than with transgender people, and usually in pejorative, ignorant and judgmental terms.

With the hopes that the content of their older material would have become quaint and outdated by now clearly dashed, but acknowledging that they didn't especially want to play just the back catalogue if returning, the time was right for the band to take once more to the studio, and to come out swinging.

Hence Falling, the blast of energy also released into the wild on Tuesday just gone. As a statement of intent musically and lyrically, it does its job with rare aplomb, and the January release date of the parent album Like A Heartbeat already feels like the first genuine highlight of 2027 to which to look forward.

(The Spook School, The Red House, Sheffield 09/11/2013. Picture is author's own)

Some of you out there will have greeted the news of fresh Queens of the Stone Age product as rabidly enthusiastically as I that of The Spook School. I couldn't confess to that same level of fandom of the former, but the highs in a now thirty-year career under that name have been very high, and on a human interest level it's pleasing to read that frontperson Josh Homme's health issues - not limited to this decade's cancer diagnosis - appear to be past tense now.

Easy Street makes for a fascinating lead from forthcoming ninth studio album Perfecth [SIC], in so far as repeated listens to it still wouldn't necessarily pin it down stylistically as a QOTSA track.

I needed to hear it a fair few times on the radio before ceasing to misidentify it as something from among David Byrne's recent output, whereas that instrumental outro bears such a stark resemblance to the title track from Brian Eno's 1975 masterpiece Another Green World (also familiar to many of a certain age as the theme tune to BBC2's erstwhile arts strand Arena) that I couldn't not also include the last-named this week by way of a compare and contrast exercise.

***

On a sadder note, the number of artists requiring an In Loving Memory feature in a forthcoming List has gone through the roof in the past couple of weeks, with of course one very high profile candidate - perhaps the most high profile of all - newly added to the list of qualifiers mere days ago.

I'm not in the habit of rearranging the order in which I come to them according to fame, as we're all equals once we've passed away, so it'll be a few weeks before a Dolly Parton tribute appears. I think that's how this most selfless, saintly of human beings might have preferred it anyway.

As such, chronologically it's the turn of William Orbit to be commemorated this week. One of my two choices is an admittedly very, very obvious choice of an Orbit-helmed mega single from Madonna, and I make no apologies for that.

I'd argue that it's hard to overstate just how significant a creative fug Madonna had entered by the mid-1990s, certainly where her studio albums were concerned at least - anodyne, charmless ballads; dance-pop tracks often suffocated by floury production (some of the Nellee Hooper and Shep Pettibone examples have dated horribly); and writing collaborations with the likes of Björk which painted neither party in their absolute best light.

In terms of helping a high-profile but water-treading performer turn themselves inside out, Ray of Light - the album and the single - is right up there among the most successfully transformative examples of all time. I wouldn't be certain that all of Madonna's success which has followed for nigh on three decades since would have been guaranteed without this turning of the proverbial corner.

My other selection from Orbit's back catalogue was always going to be In the Realm of the Senses, the first track I'd ever heard by him and by extension by Bassomatic. I'm as certain as I can be that I have the late Annie Nightingale to thank for playing this.

I like its playfulness; a description of S-Express without any of the 70s/disco trappings but with more 90s smarts might be doing it a colossal disservice, but it was what came to mind at the time and largely still does now.

A few months later, the follow-up Fascinating Rhythm would go big commercially, and a hitherto promising but commercially relatively unrewarded career would start to gain traction.

***

Heading the other way critically and commercially - and at speed - as Orbit's star started to rise were former post-punk seven-piece turned chart-topping trio (and later duo) Thompson Twins.

The wrong side of albums in 1987 and 1989 which had both tanked utterly, such was the antipathy towards their output by the time of 1991's eighth and final studio album Queer (a title inspired by an Edith Sitwell ode rather than any grab for attention) that the white label club remixes of lead track Come Inside which preceded its release were issued under an alias - Feedback Max - instead.

Although those mixes - of which the longest of the House variants is included in this week's List - were highly acclaimed by club DJs, this move afforded them only the briefest of respite, most radio programmers immediately dropping all manifestations of the track (including the poppier single mix) like a bad penny upon Feedback Max's exposition as Thompson Twins.

Note "most". Bigger of heart than many, and still seemingly kindly disposed towards the band with his chart music hat on, Mark Goodier continued to play not only both the single and club versions of Come Inside on Radio 1's Evening Session, but also the two follow-ups (wherein the dance stylings of the Feedback Max experiment were pushed more to the fore on the actual radio singles).

It did little for Tom Bailey and Alannah Currie's fortunes, all three singles peaking between #53 at best and #85 at worst, and the only significant territory in which the Queer album charted at all was Australia, with the British release cancelled outright.

All of which is far less than the project deserved; Come Inside in all of its incarnations is at the very least a perfectly serviceable track, and in its Feedback Max House form an absolute corker which I return to over and over even 35 years on.

I need hardly add; I don't believe there's a cat in hell's chance that any of the cooler, more cynical subsequent custodians of the Evening Session would ever have given it the time of day.

***

In what's been one of my favourite Lists to compile since the return at the start of the year (can you tell?), I'm also particularly pleased to include:

A Then and Now appearance by enduring eccentric and singer-songwriter's singer-songwriter Robyn Hitchcock. An "unmarketable" artist, to use in his own words during an interview with the New York Tribune's Evan Smith a few years back, he's nevertheless affording current album The Confuser a seemingly higher visual profile than has sometimes been the case, Yesterday's Rain clocking in as already the fourth track taken from it to gain an official video.

As promised and threatened a few weeks ago, a mid-1980s appearance by Michael Cretu in his own right, rather than as the producer of the likes of Hubert Kah or Inker & Hamilton.

The story of the pensioner I'd quite like to grow up to be in a decade and a half's time, as told with humour, beauty and dignity by the ceaselessly wonderful Gavin Osborn.

A promo by The Scaramanga Six which I must only have half-watched back in the day, as I'd never realised just how much it featured their then producer, the late and of course much-missed Tim Smith. In virtually the same week as members of the reactivated Cardiacs - specifically Mike Vennart on stage, Kavus Torabi on Facebook - made comments that could be interpreted as implying the recent live appearance at the ArcTanGent festival in Bristol might just be the band's last ever, it doesn't seem unreasonable to show their leader of the starry skies still in his prime. God, I miss him.

Something Tim may well have enjoyed, or at least directly or indirectly inspired, by Crush Fund. There's certainly the wide-eyed, skittish inventiveness and feel of 1980s Cardiacs about it. Another fine find courtesy of Sheffield Live's The Breakdown, or more accurately in this instance friend of the show Ralph Clay.

New releases from Beijing-via-Glasgow one man and a puppet punk entity The Burgers and Precious Recordings' Franco-Belgian indie pop and yé-yé purveyors Coup Dur, this ahead of their respective appearances in Sheffield on the 6th and 11th of September. I'd say I'm including them to help inform your decision on whether to go to see either, but in truth I already know that you should see both...

J xx

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xPROPAGANDA - Don’t (You Mess with Me) (2022)