The name she gave, was Caroline. One assumes she was telling the truth. She’d come down from Spencer, looking for work. That’s fair enough. By the end of some months of gruelling labour tending bar for Gypsy Sally it appears she’s finally saved enough to get back to Spencer, (thus raising the question, why didn’t she just stay there in the first place?) only to find out, via word come down, that her Paw had died.

Of course, it wasn’t going to be a tune about work in the depression era dustbowl, or how folk will do what they need to do to make ends meet, even if that requires leaving Paw in Spencer to come work in the buzzing metropolis that is Tecumseh Valley. It’s not about the tired pride one finds in one self at the end of another day of backbreaking labour. No, it’s a Townes Van Zandt song, so what happens next is pretty standard. She turns to drinking, and whoring, until she finds her own, dissolute demise amid the detritus of a local gutter. In Townes-land the simplest premise must all ways end with prison, addiction, disease or death. That’s the moral here, try as you might you’re railing against the inevitable, relentless brutality of life. The best laid plans of mice and men, etc. Townes himself railed against it all for a while, before checking out aged a mere 52, after years of alcohol abuse and heroin addiction, depression, unfulfilled potential and the rest. It’s clear that Caroline didn’t stand a chance from the second her name was uttered.

Willow’s Song – Britt Ekland – Chosen by Dara Higgins

It’s May on Summer Isle, and nobody is getting any sleep. Sultry, languid air outside the innhouse, and inside Willow, a local nymph has poor old goody-two-shoes Sergeant Edward Woodward is in a right old lather, a-tapping on wall and beguiling him with song (and he can’t even see her accompanying dance, the traditional “naked-wall-slap” beloved of nubile islanders). Willow’s voice couldn’t really do opera, but whoever is singing (it’s not Britt, who’s dubbed throughout the film) she keeps the lines vague and ephemeral, almost somnambulant, carrying the lilting, haunting melody in a way Enya, lets say, just couldn’t.

Ekland was horrified to find out that the director had used a body double for some of the shots in this scene, no doubt feeling that as she couldn’t really act, and wasn’t a real natural when it came to singing, and doesn’t even really speak in the entire movie, he could have at least relied on some of her natural abilities. Despite the retro, innocent charm the video isn’t really safe for work, , if you work in one of those place where they find the human form abhorrent, so save it for later.
And if you’ve never seen the Wicker Man, do so immediately, just be careful you don’t accidentally get the remake. Shudder.

The Stranglers – Golden Brown _ Chosen by Dara Higgins

Cher Loyd is number one and the kids riot. Popular culture is further diminished by the callous science of the hit record. Everyone is told that they should like this chaff week after week on soulless, vampirical tv. We’re told that she, and all the others in a long line of vacuous, mono-celled, shiny fleshed imbeciles plucked from well deserved obscurity, are “stars”. We’re given a package, so scrubbed that the sheen has gone. We can’t see ourselves reflected in this over-produced, auto-tuned, overloud excreta. We can’t see ourselves because humans did not make this music. Smug, asexual cashregisters-for-mouths shit-bots did.

It was very different in the eighties. There was no information superhighway. There was Supertramp and Steve Heighway, and that’s about it. Real music had no choice but to attempt the treacherous terrain of the “traditional route” in order to get their product (we used to call them songs) out there. You know: practice, write songs, do gigs, get signed, record music. Record good music, or bad, depending on your oeuvre. Get it on the radio and cross your fingers. Back in the eighties, anything was possible, and Golden Brown is my go to track to remind me that real songs, and real humans, could and can connect with the charts. A paean to heroin and/or sex performed by reprobates, not unfamiliar with the odd riot themselves, on an obsolete instrument, the harpsichord, and without a discernable chorus got to number 2! (Real eighties fans know that number 2 was always a lot cooler than number 1. Number 1 is for Rod Stewart, number 2 is for the Pistols.) Golden Brown, with it’s louche and dishevelled video, an effortless cool a legion of marketing gonks couldn’t replicate, is full of hubris, grubbiness, resignation, Hugh Cornwall’s wonderfully monotonous drawl invokes the so-so highs and rapturous lows of being a human. It’s pretty much everything the modern, text message and shit-bot decided charts isn’t.

www.thejimmycake.com

and soon we’ll have news about upcoming shows and the like, which will be all over the new site. yes. yes they will. the little newses.

This is from the Irsko tour, back in the day. The Warsaw gig was a particular highlight. The crowd were great and the hangovers were taking on an epic, mythical quality. recently I inherited the film of the tour, some twelve tapes of this kind of stuff, interspersed with revelry and the like. But the performances were good, and that’s why we were there, I recall. Wasn’t it?

Here, for no reason other than my own munificence, is Deathfall Priest, recorded in RTE studios for Dave Fanning’s Fanning Sessions, once the home of all that was happening in musick around Ireland. Not no more. Fanning packed it in to work for Bono or something more rewarding than doing this kind of slog. Well, we had fun. It served as a kind of demo session for Dublin Gone, Everybody Dead, which we went to record a couple of months later.

Duran Duran – ‘The Chauffeur’ (chosen by Dara Higgins)

It’s with heavy hearts that Duran Duran have had to cancel their upcoming tour of Europe, including, most poignantly for me, the opening night in Dublin. It’s because of Simon Le Bon’s ongoing trouble with his voice, they say. Some of you might wonder why it’s taken Duran 30+ years to finally realise that there is actually a problem, but that’s just being churlish. Sure, they’ve been shit for fives times longer than when they were actually good, but for a while they ruled the earth, like satin clad dinosaurs, gobbling low hanging cocktail olives and devouring fleshless bimbos with voracious aplomb. They even have value as a post-ironic hipster reference point now, name checked by the Artic Monkeys and covered by the Deftones and so far beyond the realms of good taste that they can’t help but be cool. Ultimately, the music, when it was good, was pretty freaking good, the musicianship always pristine, the production always synapse twanging, the hair always solid. Here’s ‘The Chauffuer’, and it’s odd little monochrome video, featuring, you’ll be pleased to hear, no blue silk suits or pet lizards, just some kind of mini homage to Charlotte Rampling and a plethora of eighties visual clichés. All it’s missing is the swinging lightbulb.

Also, Brains was initially going to be called Dublin Gone, Everybody dead. Or The Jimmy Cake Ignite the Doom Carriage. We sat around Jurgen’s place one night, getting slowly, or quickly, it’s hard to remember, drunk, while Jurgen had a tape running, passing a microphone around and saying random things into it, hoping that this would in some way trigger a moment of genius, and break the mindlock we had when it came to not only naming the album, but the songs. It’s a pain that never goes away, what with the current work-in-progress records song going by the names 1, 452 and 3. S’funny, I think it’s something we did quite well, coming up with names for stuff, and yet when they’re out there on record, they look shite. Well, except the Brains ones. Axilla is, apparently, latin for armpit. It’s a terrific word.

Anyway, Jurgen never played us that tape. I wonder where it is? hidden with all the other Jimmy Cake contraband somewhere. Probably just as well.

it’ll come….

right?

No Wobble, no Levene, No Walker or Atkins, definitely no Jeanette Lee. But neither is there any of the Lydon revisionism we’ve had to get used ever since the Pistols got back together all those years ago. Instead there’s a faithfulness to the original songs, particularly the older ones. A reverence, even. Their power has not dulled in the intervening 30 years. Not for Lydon at least, if his acerbic, almost acrobatic, rendition of Religion ii is anything to go by, not for the audience either, if their frantic tumbling is representative.

The band he has assembled to be this incarnation of PiL straddle the spectrum of the work more than ably. Lu Edmonds, who toured with PiL briefly in the 80’s and has here all manner of stringed instruments with which to make noise, has the visceral, anti-guitar sound of early Levene and all the virtuosity of a Vai or McGough. Old hand Bruce Smith and new hands Scott Firth add the muscle, and the thrum, and the grooves with aplomb. For a while it seems as if it’s hits out for the lads, as Lydon tries to represent every dark corner of the PiL catalogue. Later albums are showcased through the singles, This is Not a Love Song, Acid Drop, Warrior, the far-better-than-remembered Disappointed, the somewhat flat Rise, (and, for good measure, Open Up, Lydon’s collaboration with Leftfield, which isn’t strictly speaking a PiL song, but is some number to close with) but it’s in the early work that they excel. From the opening rumble of Public Image, through the murder ballad, Poptones, Chant, Memories, the afore mentioned Religion ii, (which sounds far better than the recorded version ever did, dissolving into a bass heavy, soul cleanising groove) and, the stand out for me, Swan Lake (Death Disco), delivered with the same cathartic verve you could imagine Lydon giving it in 1980, the later work seems to pale by comparison to their potency.

All through the gig Lydon gives it his all, master of his craft, that craft being his voice. He has always surrounded himself with musicians, either of the highest calibre as players, or players with the wiggiest ideas, but it’s clear that in the flesh PiL is more than the sum of it’s various parts, that the music can survive being shorn of Wobbles trenchant, chunky licks, or Atkins hyper-concious drumming, Levene’s excoriating work. Initial misgiving that the soul of band may be missing when they attempt to reign in the power of early PiL are utterly unfounded. PiL IS Lydon, and he lets us know that he owns all of these numbers, and that frankly, he owns the audience too.

But what of punk rock? Well, the flickering sea of tiny blue screens that was a hundred camera phones experiencing the gig for their owners disappears quicksmart once the beer throwing commences. However, it’s not cheap beer. 6 euro for a facile, punk statement? That’s not punk, punk, as I recall it was NEVER about wasting alcohol. Neither, you feel, is the middle-aged man being shunted out of the door by bouncers half his age, a half apologetic grimace on their faces, as if it were their own da they were turfing out. But Lydon, he still spits. Sure, it’s into a strategically placed onstage spittoon rather than the face of a hippie or a conformist or Nick Kent, and his plume of rheum is expensive brandy rather than anger-masticated gob, but there he is, these many years later, on stage, as the crowd attempt bad pogos and someone crowdsurfs face first into the floor, swigging Martel, ignoring the occasional missile that lands on the stage and being, ultimately, the consummate professional. And somehow, that cool, knowing detachment of the man, with his statuesque peroxide hair and air of satisfaction is, of course, the most punk rock thing in the room.

This IS what I wanted, and this is what I got. A legend delivers.