Midweek Update #50: The Moving Edition
The Clash, The Joy, The Chameleons, The Kilt, The Euros, The Dear Boys and more...
A moving column
I am in the middle of moving this week, which if nothing else, should guarantee that I stay on track with this Midweek Update. I would love to write poetically about the joy and heartbreak of packing boxes, but a) I don’t find it literarily inspiring, and b) I couldn’t do it better than Amy Rigby, who has long documented the minutia of her life across song, memoir, and now, on ‘Diary of Amy Rigby’ Substack posts and accompanying audio podcast, and has done so especially well these last few weeks, presumably to distract her from the real work on hand… For she and husband Wreckless Eric have just packed up the last of their own belongings from the nearby town of Catskill and are heading for a new life in merry old Norfolk, England. I will miss them. But fortunately I won’t have to miss Amy’s writing, as I know it’s what she does.
Podcast
Dealer’s choice on this one. If you haven’t yet listened to the latest episode of Crossed Channels, the show I co-host with Dan Epstein in which we alternate acts from ‘across the pond’ and discuss their reaction and perception from each side of that Atlantic, do yourself a favor and at least check out the preview.
We are on to something good here, though the fact that we make the full episode only available to our paid subscribers denies us the audience I feel the show would otherwise receive. But we do want to reward those who support us financially, and we know that those who get to hear the whole show genuinely love it. Discussing Sandinista! was especially enjoyable, as Dan and I thoroughly disagreed on our choice of songs to make it to a theoretical single LP. And if you are on board with listening the whole way through – free of the annoying cheapskate ads that render many podcasts as annoying as YouTube - you still have until Friday 28th June to win one of the last remaining circulating copies of my book The Clash: The Music That Matters, which discusses every single song The Clash ever released, plus all the solo material up to the point of publication. You just have to tell us what song we should also have included in our Sandinista! single LP, and why. Happy listening, and writing.
A personal welcome to all the new subscribers who came on board after the last two weekend’s posts about Spotify, Qobuz and the whole streaming music discussion. Great to have you here! At the weekend, I write long, During the week, I try to keep it short, with a Midweek Update when I’m not publishing podcasts. If you have not done so already, please subscribe so you don't miss out on any of these posts.
Album
Let me credit Qobuz for already introducing me to one stellar act and album I might have otherwise missed had I not switched subscription services. ‘You Complete Me’ by The Joy showed up early on, as song #5, in the streaming platform’s 81-track cross-genre New Releases playlist (it did not appear in my 30-song Spotify Release Radar, which I still have until my last month’s subscription runs out) and immediately floored me. Hailing from South Africa, all five singers in The Joy have beautiful voices, and on their eponymous album The Joy, their meticulous intonation and harmonization has been recorded to perfection (live, in real time, without overdubs or instruments, in a North London church, it turns out)… but the lead vocal in particular, has an additional frailty to it than only serves to highlight the loving message of this lyric.
Turns out I’m late to the party; with a couple of successful EP’s and the backing of the UK’s Transgressive label behind them, The Joy have already appeared on British TV and with Doja Cat at Coachella. Never mind, the important thing is that you hear them too. You can see them as well, given that the recording session in the sunny climes of Crouch End appears to have been filmed, per this clip below:
Guitar rock song
Despite the fact that they named an EP for me, I have never been a great aficionado of, let alone obsessed with The Chameleons, which would indicate incredible ingratitude except that ‘Tony Fletcher Walks on Water’ was named for their former agent and manager, who passed away around that time, not yours truly. But, back as they are from an extra-long hiatus, I am very taken by new single ‘Where Are You?’ which has one of those ultra-obvious guitar riffs you can’t believe hasn’t been used before, and which immediately draws you in even as the song digs deeper and harder and harkens back to that late 70/early 80s psychedelic post-punk that was all the rage but left The Chameleons behind when Echo & The Bunnymen perfected it, bottled it and sold it to the world.
Reminder: ‘(They Say) Don’t Waste Your Vote.’
Give me someone who genuinely cares… and I won’t. I voted this week in the US, for someone who genuinely cares. (And who win.) I have a vote next week in the UK too, thanks to changes in the regulations for expats. Who says you can’t vote twice? Just give me someone who genuinely cares in Beckenham and Penge… and by that, I mean as a prospective MP, not about Crystal Palace FC, which should be a given ring there!
Clothing
Unlike my band mate in The Dear Boys, Tony Page, I’ve never been a big one for kilts – and this despite the fact that, unlike him, I am actually half-Scottish. Nonetheless, I purchased a utility kilt for my last visit to Burning Man, and on a whim wore it for performance show nights for my last Rock Academy show, somehow thinking it would show at least an attempt to fashion a Prog Rock costume. Once my cast convinced me to take off the black tights I wore underneath and just, you know, let it all hang, I realized how comfy it felt beyond just the Nevada desert, and in last week’s heatwave – or, to be more accurate, trapped under a heat dome exasperated by global boiling in a 90F/32C apartment with malfunctioning AC - there was simply no way I could have functioned had I not resorted to wearing it around the house. And then outside the house, and now, you’ll be more likely to find me with the kilt on than without it. Next up: I need to commission a Campbell of Cawdor kilt, given that Pagey helped me fine my true clan. As noted, I actually have roots there.
Mixtape Radio Playlist
One good back-scratch deserves a return favor. I mean, how could I not love the latest weekly episode of Matt Pape’s Mixtape on The Face Radio. Entitled ‘Even Boys About Town Vote’ it sandwiches Hudson Palace’s version of ‘I’m A Boy’ in-between Pete Townshend and The Jam, and the latest by The Dear Boys (per above) in-between The Damned and James’ superb recent earth-loving, greed-denying, capitalist-baiting single ‘Our World.’ Along with the Mexican Institute of Sound as joined by Graham Coxon, Luna, plus new music from Pixies, Dehed, and others, it’s an audio feast personally designed for my liking in a way that only human algorithms can manage. Cheers Matt!
Substack column:
Chris Della Riva is “a musician from New Jersey who works on analytics and personalization at Audiomack, a popular music streaming service,” which means, assuming he can write the written word too – and he can – he’s a reliable source for the intersection of music and data. His article on why our obsession with Spotify and Ticketmaster comes at the expense of other important issues is a valuable pointer to all of us who care about music – and the money that it generates for some. Which is not to say that the monopolistic tactics of Ticketmaster and the problematic attitude of market leader Spotify do not warrant attention themselves, but that we need to retain a broad horizon.
Distraction from packing
One of the downers of living in the States when you’re European is that the football matches are at really inconvenient times of day, especially the international tournaments. I’m sure I’d have more to my productivity list if I didn’t get caught up in the various international tournaments – not for England, but for the whole buzz of seeing whether the world’s best players can deliver for their country like they do for their club teams. I have been incredibly good about not turning on the TV during the day and pretending to pack (or write, or make music or podcasts) while in fact staring at the screen, and if I was a passionate England or Scotland fan, you’d be entitled to taunt “just as well.” But now we also have the Copa América, being played in the US this time round, where the host nation is now ranked 11th in the world by FIFA, a rejoinder to those who still think my American brethren neither “get” nor can “play” the game. Then again, England are ranked 5th in the world, so I guess take those rankings with the proverbial Best Of Lists.
Either way, I’ve never been so glad of very short highlights, of the kind that Fox Soccer has been putting out on YouTube, which appear to have been edited by an intern on speed at the local pub, but whatever… Beggars can’t be choosers, and I can’t choose to watch whole matches, because, talking of distractions…
Time machine:
A reader by the name of John Harrington linked to the platform Radiooooo as part of our excellent comments section following my ‘Why I Left Spotify for Qobuz’ column. Half of me is grateful and half of me wishes he hadn’t because… seriously, do not follow this link if you want your life back. Do not! Do! Not! Technology can be a beautiful thing…
Now back to the boxes!
Thanks for the kind shout-out Tony, and hope all goes well with the move!
Moving is always a traumatic experience, hope it goes well for you. We hate moving and will avoid if at all possible. Our last move (9 years ago) was to a place abroad so our packing had to be worthwhile and our discarding ruthless. We made the journey more bearable by using a cruise ship for the purpose, it just happened to be going our way and at the right time, very relaxing ! After all, why waste 12 hours on a long-haul flight when you can do much the same in 70 days !