LTW Newsletter 55

Welcome warriors!

As we await summer’s nervous return and navigate the thunderous great clouds of the apocalypse that hover endlessly over this green and flooded land as the most biblical summers is upon us. The only thing we have not thrust upon us yet is a plague of locusts but you can bet that they are already whirring and clicking over the horizon with their huge hungry eyes and slavering mandibles ready to champ away at any foliage left on our craggy isle. In these wild weather times when biblical preachers rant at the sky we need some sort of apocalyptic soundtrack for this heavy manners weather and the wettest of summers on record and whilst we cannot promise that - it's been a hectic week on the music front.

UK readers may not be aware of Beatle Bob who died this week but it turns out he was a legend in the USA. One of those super fans who went to every gig and danced like a maniac. In the UK we used to have a character like that called Jesus who turned up everywhere in the seventies, lost in the music and doing his crazy ‘idiot’ dance - in the USA Beatle Bob was his equivalent. It seems like he was more than a cult figure, though, and his obituary is one of the most read things on the site ever.

Still very much alive, The Who have been rampaging around the UK backed by a full orchestra. The timeless band somehow still deliver those incendiary intense shows just like they did in their heyday nearly 60 years ago but keep tweaking and changing their classic template. Touching 80, there is nothing slack about the band, and their energy and range of ambition and musicality is as top gun as ever.

The Specials, of course, were one of the classic British band bands and their influence is undeniable. After they initially imploded Terry Hall, Lynval Golding, Horace Panter and put together the Fun Boy Three whose off-kilter pop with sparse tribal rhythms made for some great singles - a deeper dive into their work, though, underlines just how great, ground-breaking and imaginative they were. This box set pulls it all together and an added embrace of their debut album also underlines their often overlooked genius.

Fast upcoming London alt-pop duo Jockstrap made a big impression at Glastonbury and their ambitious genre-defying modern pop enthralled a sold out Music Hall of Williamsburg, NYC with their 21st century alt-pop that is a hyper-kinetic, genre-splicing musical sensibility that is perfectly in sync with our fractious and overstimulated times

Over in Portland in the USA where the frontier spirit is still very much alive, attracting all kind of hipsters pushing on deep into the wild west of pop culture, Non Binary Girlfriend do what they say on the tin but with a Smiths meets The Cure post-punk melded with a pop nous. It’s very good.

When Andy Partridge from XTC announced that he had finally returned to the fray as part of The 3 Clubmen we, of course, celebrated but we didn't know it was going to be this good! The new single accompanied by a great lysergic video makes a magic out of the mundane.

Bingley Festival is back under new ownership and has announced a very northern bill for  this weekend’s shenanigans in Bradford.

Belle and Sebastian remain one of the UK's best-loved indie bands still defying the mainstream and creating magic by stealth. We love the way they just get on with creating the magical melodic world defying the narrative and the machine. This makes them as punk rock as any noisier cousins and great example of how to exist on your own terms far away from the temptations and baubles of the mainstream culture behemoth.

In the helter skelter of Madchester many bands made themselves into household names. Just beneath the radar there were the inevitable near miss bands. Perhaps the finest of these was New Fast Automatic Daffodils. The band’s unique sound made them stand out and it really did feel like they were heading for the breakthrough before they imploded. It was great to hear that they have finally released their first demo which I wrote about in 1989 when I discovered the band on the next road along from where I lived in Manchester! Can we coax them into reforming? It’s never too late!

In the never ending flood of music we all tend to slip into that routine of partially listening before it slips away across the universe. Yet sometimes, there is a piece of music that is so captivating that you just have to put it on again and again. Ged Babey sums this up with ‘Songs you can't listen to just once’

The late Jeffrey Lee Pierce is one of the great songwriters. His band The Gun Club were much loved on the cult undergound and yet the spotlight was never on them long enough. This new project corals together the likes of Nick Cave and David Gahan in a album of covers of his songs in an attempt to right this wrong.

If rock n roll is littered with tragic casualties there are also some unlikely survivors. Pete Doherty once seemed like a shoe in for an early demise but somehow has got to the other side and may even end up being recognised for his talent instead of his lifestyle. A recent in conversation in Manchester showed another side to him.

Oh and thanks to Chris Packham for this heartfelt review of my best selling ‘The Art Of Darkness - the History Of Goth’ book…