That Music List: LIST 273

(The Piney Gir Country Roadshow - Tapestry Goes West festival, Margam Park, Port Talbot 10/08/2007. Pictures are author's own)

Hello again,

Heaven knows how the photos at the top of this week's List will turn out, taken as they were 19 years ago on a temperamental first generation digital camera.

However, including a contemporaneous track by The Piney Gir Country Roadshow this week was all the excuse I needed to include these snaps of Piney herself, and permit myself a bit of time reminiscing about the Tapestry Goes West festival in August 2007 at which they were taken.

This would have been a year before my first trips to either Latitude or Indietracks, so my first outdoor festival experience of any sort (indoor ones had been attended for up to twelve years prior). Unfamiliar with festival-going as I was up until then, I nevertheless knew sufficient to know that Tapestry's mixture of music, jousting, nettle ale, archery, walks around ruins and ostriches wasn't a strictly typical one. From 2003 to 2005, when this brainchild of club impresario Barry Stilwell had taken place in Cornwall, it had similarly juxtaposed live acts against a no less incompatible spaghetti western theme.

(Margam Castle, Margam House and Margam ostriches - Tapestry Goes West festival, Margam Park, Port Talbot 10/08/2007. Pictures are author's own)

Perhaps that's one of the reasons why Indietracks also appealed so much subsequently - indiepop, steam trains, owls and can crushing aren't always found on the same bill, either. I like variety. And the Tapestry bill offered that in abundance despite a relatively modest total of 30-odd acts across two stages on two days.

Here was my first sighting in the flesh of gnarly one-man band Seasick Steve, not yet a year since breaking out to a wider audience but still some time before the full exposition of his former life as the frontman of disco act Crystal Grass (as sampled by S-Express).

It would be a toss-up as to who drew the biggest crowd of the weekend, either he or mysterious, Bacofoil-clad proggers Chrome Hoof. The latter won the audience participation prize of the weekend, at least, leading all those present on a procession around the site - accompanied, with the singer chanting - at the conclusion of their set before burning an effigy in an oil drum. You don't get that everywhere.

My fellow travellers were particularly looking forward to seeing psychedelic Medieval revivalists Circulus, as - on the strength of such as My Body is Made of Sunlight, shared in the very first List - was I. We didn't quite get our wish, the band's autocratic founder Michael Tyack - think The League of Gentleman's Ollie Plimsolls with a greater predilection for a cape and pointy shoes - having recently fired almost all of the band and continuing here with just the crumhorn player still in tow.

Those fans intent on still throwing themselves about to Power to the Pixies et al, regardless of the lack of any percussive aid, duly did, but it wasn't quite what many of us had in mind. Buy the first three Circulus albums - and maybe Tom Cox's writings on Michael also - and remember them that way instead.

My own record shopping list increased incrementally following Tapestry weekend, notably to include the then new to me Threatmantics, a south Wales band at a south Wales festival. Once I'm finally sufficiently happy with my Welsh language special List to publish it on these pages, you can be certain their often keys/bass/viola-led fare will be making an appearance.

From memory Tapestry Goes West lasted for only one more renewal after our 2007 attendance, destined to become little more than another small chapter in the multifaceted story of boutique British music festivals from the late c20th onwards.

Nevertheless, I'm glad it afforded this greenhorn a nice enough experience so as not to have put me off open-air festivals forever. I would definitely not have coped with a Glastonbury (comfortably more than double the £60 weekend price of Tapestry in 2007) first time up; nor, I suspect, would I even now.

***

Other than overlong dribblings about a defunct Welsh music festival, what can I offer you this week?

1) New or recent things from a bunch of acts all making their first appearances on a List, namely Melanie A Davis & The Madness, Planette Automatic, Denzel Curry & Kenneth Blume, Inner Magic ft Ruth Radelet, Salt Water Criminals and Massachusetts-based mod-poppers The Chelsea Curve.

In the case of the last-named, this is very sadly a posthumous appearance, The Chelsea Curve's singer-bassist Linda Bean-Pardee (also briefly a member of Gang Of Four and a graphic designer of some repute) having been lost to cancer in mid-August.

A fierce, joyful spirit, by all accounts, and the Boston music scene is doubtless poorer for her passing.

2) Another posthumous release, albeit one that would have been harder to foresee, Cocoon is one of eight newly discovered tracks recorded by much-loved bass/sax/drums trio Morphine in 1999, shortly before singer Mark Sandman's fatal heart attack. Received wisdom was that 2009's At Your Service double CD of unreleased tracks completely cleared the vaults of Morphine recordings for ever after. Not so.

The familiarity of Mark's bass rumble and Dana Colley's tenor sax mark this out as unmistakably Morphine within seconds, and there's a comfort as well as a sadness in that.

3) Straight In At... returns this week, with a play of four of the new entries from the official UK top 100 singles chart on today's date 22 years ago. By 2004 we were still in the peak period of chart entry volatility, and the (count them) 29 tracks I had to choose from this time were far from a record high total.

I could have gone for some better known tracks by Groove Armada (I See You Baby, no less), Ian Brown or Muse, or the week's highest entry from one of Donny Osmond's occasional commercial rehabilitations. My four choices are my clear favourites of the lot, however, Brian Wilson and Devendra Banhart's having even both been bought on the week of release.

The offering by Zen is a representative example - and an excellent, addictive example - of a track from one of the dozens of house, hard house or drum 'n' bass double A-side 12 inches that were peppering the lower reaches of the top 100 by the mid-2000s, be they by the same artist or split between two.

Conundrum sounds for all the world like something I could have added to the Dance Hall at Peel Acres feature by now, and John Peel did indeed play plenty of Zen St George's bountiful output, but not this example if the Peel Wiki is (as it usually is) taken to be true. The great man would pass away just four weeks later.

(NB I've just realised how much mention of death there is this week - I do apologise to you if this has proven in any way triggering).

4) More Italo disco, this time from 1983 and featuring a performance here in front of what resembles the then set of popular teenagers' quiz show Blockbusters (also launched in 1983; a coincidence, surely...).

Happy Children was a curious beast, not from a musical perspective - the stabby keys and long intro were copybook Italo disco - but in being a lyrical call to 1980s Italian children to transcend their hard lives, as delivered by a posh kid whose life probably won't be nearly so hard either way.

Pietro Paolo Pelandi, the man who is P. Lion, is the son of the count of the Alzano Lombardo province in northern Italy, y'see. Doubtless he meant well, but less charitable observers may liken it to a minor British royal writing an anti-poverty track and dedicating it to the hundreds of thousands of kids on their uppers in such as England's historic Red Wall political constituencies. The reception may not be the most sympathetic.

5) Mid-1980s David Bowie as seldom heard before, given a minimal, almost whispered German language reinterpretation. It's a source of personal irritation to me how little of cerebral San Franciscan synth-prodders Helen Lundy Trio's output is available anywhere online, and adding some tracks from their eponymous debut album onto YouTube remains a rainy day to-do job. For now at least there's this, as taken from early c21st Bowie tribute album After Low.

6) A reminder of the briefish but lovely existence of Finnmark!, as the name implies an unashamedly Scandiphile indiepop act based around the talents of former Just Handshakes (We're British) bassist Edward Forth.

Owner of, by Pete Green's reckoning, the most lugubrious voice they'd ever heard in indiepop (a compliment, for the avoidance of doubt), Edward's tasteful choice of covers (Guided by Voices) and knowing references (Considering a Move to Sweden likely requires no further explanation) always made for an enjoyable set on the occasions our paths crossed; and Brännö, a paean to the Southern Göteborg island of the same name, endures as probably the act's most popular track on account of its appearance on the 2013 Indietracks companion compilation.

I wonder whether Edward remembers the aftermath of a Just Handshakes... gig at the Red House in Sheffield in autumn 2011, wherein he explained in compelling, convincing detail to several of us present how the business model of Sheffield staple Hendersons Relish is a thing of wonder. If only I'd known him twenty years earlier, I could have reproduced that in my Economics A-Level exam and maybe not failed it with a single digit percentage score...

J xx