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- Readers recommend: hunting songs
Last week was all about bicycles. Now get back on the saddle, it's time to thin out their numbers ...
Attention please. Attention please. Welcome to another edition of Readers Recommend, the feature in which journalists and music lovers combine to select songs that conform to a particular topic. This week we will be hunting down 20 songs on the subject of, er, hunting. Last one out plays the fox.
With regards to last week's combustible thread, thanks to all those who are signed up members of the Coalition of the Considerate. To the Upsetters, I will endeavour once again to win you over. To all of you, well done on bringing some real quality music to the table. It may have been obscure (not a problem to my mind), but it was great and reminded me of the unsettling songs topic.
The A-list (and here's the column that explains it): Helvetia - Old New Bicycle, Yves Montand - A Bicyclette, Black Mountain – Bicycle Man, St Vincent – Bicycle, John Cale – Bicycle, Mark Olsen and Gary Lewis – Bicycle, King Creosote – Rims, Kath Bloom – Bicycle, The Faces – Had Me a Real Good Time, Fats Domino – Rocking Bicycle.
Now your B in full
Belle and Sebastian – Fox and the Snow
"It's not as if it's fun," sings Stuart Murdoch to the boy on the bike in the way of the fey indie kid. Fortunately, I can forgive him his condescension because he does say lovely things about the hungry fox.
Jonathan Richman – I Have Come Out to Play
Trust Jo-Jo to be a fan of the bicycle (well, as a kid at least). While in so many other American songs the bike is a symbol of failure or impoverishment, for Richman it's about freedom and fun. And quite right.
Hot Chip – I Ride, You Ride, We Ride
I think they're riding in a car and any mention of bicycles is limited to a flaming tyre that lights the way in the dark. But, speaking as someone who's gone off the Chip of late, this shows them at their lo-fi, melodic best.
Bela Fleck – Maura On a Bicycle, Stout and Mollasses, Way Back When
A concerto for banjo, fiddle and bottleneck guitar, this summons mental images of Paul Newman careening around New Mexico.
Kraftwerk – Tour de France etape 2
They had to get a nod somewhere and there's actually more bike (or race) talk in this than the original. A mellifluous ambient house number, while not entirely memorable, was way ahead of its time. (Oh, and @Catcher, I was at that Velodrome gig – got told off by wife for being too excited.)
Wild Billy Childish and the Buff Medways – Medway Wheelers
Jaunty garage punk from the man with the best Lord Kitchener moustache in the UK. Sounds Jam-ish in places but scores top points for its Hobbs Supreme reference.
Debbie Harry – Bike Boy
Could this be an, er, motorbike boy? He's riding hands free (which I can do on my push bike), but he's riding fast (which I can't do). Anyway, a spiky punky solo effort that, despite the vehicle references, is really about SEX.
Lightning Bolt – Bizarro Bike
This has the same attitude as Bike Boy, but with no lyrics and 25 times as much drumming.
Tomorrow – My White Bicycle
A cracking tune with some innovative, shuffling percussion, tape looks, squalling guitar lines – ie everything you might hope for in a piece of UK psych. What amuses me about this song is the distance between the freaky music, the anti-establishment lyrics and the prim tones of the vocalist.
Ruben Gonzalez – Prestame La Bicicleta
Another instrumental (I think that's four in all), but when the piano-playing is this good – full, rounded, vigorous, like a rioja viagra cocktail – it would be churlish to deny it.
No Spotify this week – it has too few of the tunes!
Now on to hunting. I'm interested in songs about actual hunting (fox, rabbit, lion, whale). But I'm also interested in manhunts and the pursuit of hidden objects (like the Red October). Basically, I'm encouraging lateral thinking, but there are provisos: the more lateral the suggestion the more incumbent it is on the nominator to justify why it's a hunt and not just, say an inquiry; both hunter and quarry must feature in the song.
I'll be around on Friday to "help".
The toolbox: Archive, the Marconium, the Spill, the Collabo.
DO post your nominations before midday on Monday if you wish them to be considered.
DO post justifications of your choices wherever possible.
DO NOT post more than one-third of the lyrics of any song.
DO NOT dump lists of nominations – if you must post more than two or three at once, please attempt to justify your choices.
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Переслать - 'Best Coast's greatest inspiration? My cats' | Bethany Cosentino
Snacks the cat has appeared on record sleeves, T-shirts and even gets a credit on the band's debut album. But did the Best Coast singer's beloved pet really pick the tracklist?
As a musician, maybe it's weird that I'm always getting asked to talk about my cats. But the truth is, I'd sooner talk about my cats than my music. In fact, the two things go hand in hand. For example, you can hear my cat Snacks meowing on our early demos – he appears on our album sleeve and he even gets a credit on the record. My mom pointed out that my other cat Chloe might feel left out, so I will have to put her on a merch T-shirt or something to say sorry.
Snacks is two-and-a-half years old – he's a Maine Coon and I adopted him from our neighbour. He has quickly become the Best Coast mascot. When I was on tour in Europe, my boyfriend sent me a picture of Snacks that he took on his iPhone. I knew when I received it that it had to be the cover of our album. It sums us up, I guess: goofy and nostalgic, and featuring a cat with California on its butt! I've noticed it becoming a trend as well. I kind of wish the Klaxons album sleeve had been ours. And then there's the Wavves cover, which also features Snacks! I leave Snacks with Nathan Wavves sometimes when we go away on tour. Do I worry about Snacks getting tinnitus? No! He just watches Nathan play video games, he doesn't really move around the place too much. And he hates electric guitars anyway. His ears go up and he makes a weird face, so I'm not sure he'd be a big Wavves fan. Besides, Nathan is away as much as we are these days so I leave the cats with a friend instead. Because I spend a lot of time on tour neurotically convinced that Snacks is dead, my friend has set up a Twitter page for Snacks so that I can keep in touch.
How do the rest of the band get on with my cat obsession? We've just got a new drummer, Ali, from the Vivian Girls, and she's allergic, but she'll get over it. Bobb (Bruno) likes cats but sadly his cat Runaway died recently. When we used to record, Runaway would always pee on Bobb's bed in protest and then leave the minute I started singing. I guess Runaway was more into metal.
There's a rumour that Snacks actually picked the tracklist for the record and that's why Sun Was High (So Was I) didn't appear on the album. It's true, he hates that song. But to be honest, I just wanted the record to consist of our brand new songs, rather than old singles. However, if you want to believe that Snacks picked the tracklist for the album then that's fine. Anything that helps Snacks reach the level of Garfield – the No 1 cat in pop culture – is good with me. He's basically the benchmark that Snacks aims for.
Bethany was speaking to Tim Jonze
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - The Stool Pigeon's King Canute-like stand against the digital tide
Maggoty Lamb applauds the Stool Pigeon's continued success and wonders if the telephone interview is due for an upgrade
Does anybody out there like the idea of a music paper that is equally comfortable pontificating about Nas, Roky Erickson, Marc Almond and Holy Fuck, has the reassuringly newsprint-y feel of Melody Maker in the late 70s, and doesn't actually cost any money to buy? Of course you do, and the fact that such a publication already exists in the form of the Stool Pigeon is a cause for general celebration.
With five issues a year, a print-run of 60,000, and even a functional nuts-and-bolts website for those unable or unwilling to leave their homes in search of the kind of aspiring hipster hangout that generally has a pile on the shelf by the door (if you run one of those establishments and would like to summon your own personal flock of papery Pigeons, contact info@thestoolpigeon.co.uk), excuses for not giving this title a go are running perilously short. The current issue has a lovely picture of Alan Moore on the cover and the graphic novel overlord's views on how Russell Brand should be punished for his insensitive attitude to victims of sexual crime in the Northampton area are just one of numerous worthwhile talking-points to be found inside.
As if this whole valiant endeavour weren't already counter-intuitive, the Stool Pigeon recently celebrated its fifth anniversary with the publication of two stylishly presented and authentically pocket-sized paperbacks. We Need You Lazzaro, You Lazy, Greasy Bastard – a selection of columns by honky bluesman Son of Dave – is probably for fans only, but the 19 stories from the paper's first five years gathered in Grace Under Pressure (Junko Partner, £6.99) make a strong case for the viability of the enterprise.
Editor Phil Hebblethwaite dedicates this ringing declaration of faith in the power of the printed word to: "The short-sighted dude I saw reading a copy of the paper two inches in front of his face while walking in Soho … He tripped on a bag of rubbish, went arse over tit, then got up and carried on reading as if nothing had happened." However, the musical selection policy is anything but myopic, with Omar Souleyman and Chavez-friendly Venezuelan pop jockeying for position with Marilyn Manson and Grace Jones.
Alex Marshall's spirited encounter with Deerhunter's Bradford Cox sets the tone. The latter claims his main sources of inspiration as "girl groups, Rauschenberg collages and Tiffany lamps" and when challenged to identify an echo of the first of those in his band's music, Cox replies: "I don't like ripping off my influences … music doesn't need to be digested a second time and re-shat out. You just lose bulk in the stool, you get diarrhoea." While the scatological metaphor may not be everybody's cup of camomile, anyone who has ever seen Duffy or the Zutons live will know what Cox means.
Inevitably – and as one would hope – areas of disputation also arise. Garry Mulholland's interview with Tricky makes the disingenuous suggestion that the ornery Bristolian's career has been somehow held back by the inability of other "middle-class" music journalists to get to grips with his straightforward proletarian essence. As a satellite of the perpetually orbiting death star that is Julie Burchill, Mulholland is contractually forbidden from accepting that anyone who earns anything like a living wage through theorising about pop music for national newspapers is by any meaningful definition a fully paid-up member of the bourgeoisie. But that's not even the real point here. The nub of the matter is that it's the reluctance of those same journalistic kulaks to call Tricky out on some of the bullshit he says and does that has helped his career last for as long as it has done. And I say that as a fan.
It's intriguing to note that rather than attempting to replicate the form of the traditional broadsheet or music-press feature (as Mulholland's Tricky article does), many of the Stool Pigeon's finest moments – for example, Cyrus Shahrad's informative and knowledgeable piece on MF Doom, and Daddy Bones's less serious brush with Snoop Dogg – are unapologetically presented phone interviews. The reason these work so well here – as they used to in Andy Warhol's Interview – is that so long as both journalist and artist can commit the requisite amount of energy to the conversation, each will emerge with their dignity and mystique enhanced in slightly different ways.
The subject won't have had a tiny fraction of their day-to-day behaviour – how they interact with PR people/waitresses/cab drivers etc – blown up into a generally (though not always) spurious representation of their entire personality. Meawhile the writer won't have been obliged to track down their quarry on three separate occasions in an environmentally destructive sequence of different time-zones, solely to fabricate the illusion that they have spent the last six months with their subject, when in fact they're probably looking at a total mutual engagement of a couple of hours tops.
It is probably not the dirtiest of the music journalist's professional secrets that at some point in his or her career even the most honest writers – however genuine their preference for the music of Albert Ayler over that of Free or Tiesto – will have felt obliged to misleadingly imply the existence of a face-to-face encounter when only a telephone conversation actually took place. If the Stool Pigeon's more rigorous and straightforward approach promotes greater accountability in this area, that would be one more reason to be grateful for its continued existence. And let's not forget that – as anyone who has recently house-trained a puppy will tell you – an iPad's no good for insulating your kitchen floor against the toxic depredations of dog piss.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать
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