The New Cue #240 November 25: Wilko Johnson, Gorillaz, Model Man, Guy Hamper Trio, Richard Dawson, Bob Dylan, LOWLIFE, Gold Panda
25 November, 2022
Hello,
Today’s TNC is a Recommender edition as per every Friday, but more than that it’s a tribute to guitar trailblazer and punk pioneer Wilko Johnson, who sadly died this week. Niall revisits a trip to a Southend record shop where Wilko picked out the albums that changed his life before they decamped to a nearby pub to talk them through. We’re lifting the paywall today so everyone can read. RIP Wilko, you were one of a kind.
We’ll see you on Monday, when Rick Buckler talks Chris through his new book and looks back on the emotional highs and lows of the year that The Jam split up.
Enjoy the edition, here’s this week’s playlist:
Ted, Niall and Chris
The Albums That Changed My Life, by Wilko Johnson
It was an emotional moment when Wilko Johnson picked up his Icon award at the Q Awards 2014 and revealed that he’d been cured of the cancer that, up until that point, he and everyone else thought to be terminal. It was a new lease of life that Wilko embraced right up until his death earlier this week, continuing to tour, both nationwide and at a variety of local pub gigs in Southend. I’d moved down here in March 2014 and within 24 hours of living here, I was pulling out of Leigh-on-sea tip and saw Wilko embarking on a stroll along the estuary. I took it as a good sign. In 2018, I met Wilko at Southend’s South Records shop for Q’s Albums That Changed My Life feature and afterwards we walked round to his regular haunt the Railway Hotel, where the pub sign featured his own famous face, and talked through his picks. He was brilliant company, animated and wired talking about the music that had lit a spark in him that had never gone out. These were the records that shaped him.
Fancy listening to the chat between Niall and Wilko instead of reading? Then here you go:
Bo Diddley
Bo Diddley’s 16 All-Time Greatest Hits
(1966, Chess)
“This record was bought for me for my 17th birthday by my girlfriend Irene. I love everything about Bo Diddley. His music is so wild, he doesn’t follow any conventions and the songs are so mad. This record must have got autochanged at a thousand teenage parties. It really summed up those people who were getting into the rhythm and blues thing, blowing out the pop music that had gone before. I’ve got Bo Diddley’s autograph on the back of mine, which happened when we backed him up at a gig at [London venue] Dingwalls. What can I say but, don’t meet your heroes.”
Neil Young
Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere
(1969, Reprise)
“I first encountered this record when I was a hippy out in India in 1970 or something. Goa then wasn’t like the rave place it turned into, it was just a kind of beach with fisherman’s huts. This Dutch guy had been on a trip to Amsterdam and came back and had a cassette, which was quite rare, of this album. Neil Young has just got a fantastic voice, he’s such a brilliant guitarist and the songs are just so good on it and it really used to tug at my heart. Another thing that was rare was batteries, and this cassette would constantly be going slower and slower as we’re all zonked looking at the sunset.”
Sir Douglas Quintet
Mendocino
(1969, Smash)
“The songs on this are strange but good and the production is chaotic. It’s about being a Texas hippie and going to San Francisco. The last track on it is called It Just Don’t Matter, and it’s just like you’re saying it to a woman: “you’re doing me wrong but it just don’t matter”. It sums up a whole life idea. When I first bought it, I played that song again and again. It got to about three o’clock in the morning and I was actually on the point of phoning up my friends and saying “you gotta come over here now and listen to this!”. I left them in peace but it’s always a favourite.”
Bob Dylan
Highway 61 Revisited
(1964, Columbia)
“This is done at the time when Bob Dylan was the hippest guy in the world. The sound and those songs, the inventiveness of his lyrics… oh man, this guy is a towering figure. I got into Bob Dylan at the beginning. I realised I’d been one of the witnesses of an early appearance by Dylan on British television that is now like the Holy Grail. I must have been 15 and I’d started learning to play the guitar and he was in a play on the BBC called Madhouse On Castle Street. He sings a song called Ballad Of The Gliding Swan, and I went running into my bedroom to try and play it, but of course I couldn’t play yet.”
Van Morrison
St Dominic’s Preview
(1972, Warner Bros)
“When this album was released, I was a school teacher. One night I’m in bed and I’m marking books. I had Radio Luxembourg on, the only thing that played pop music in the night-time. There was this regular late night rock show with Kid Jensen and he comes in and says, “tonight we’ve got the new Van Morrison album. I’m just gonna play this album from start to finish.’ So I’m marking my books and as the record gets more and more intense, I stopped marking. It’s brilliant, Van is really on top of his game. The next day I immediately went and bought it, one of the only times I’ve ever done that.”
The Doors
L.A. Woman
(1971, Elektra)
“It’s a great record, I think I first really started to get into it in the 80’s, Henry, who used to be my tour manager, had a really good stereo in his bus and we used to play this a lot going along. It’s brilliant. I watched a documentary about the making of the album, and they were talking about Riders on the Storm and explained how when they started to do this they were playing the song called (Ghost) Riders In The Sky. They were doing that and gradually they changed it from (Ghost) Riders In The Sky to Riders On The Storm. It’s inspiring stuff and a great record to listen to.”
Mickey Jupp’s Legend
Legend (aka Red Boot)
(1970, Vertigo)
“Mickey Jupp was a local hero. In the ‘60s he was the top round Southend in rhythm and blues. What a fantastic voice and he also wrote the songs. When he released this album, Mickey Jupp’s Legend were my favourite band. When I went to university, Procol Harum played our Freshers’ Ball and of course they were from Southend, but I remember saying to the people up there, “oh yeah, they come from Southend but you wait - there’s gonna be something even bigger.” Mickey Jupp never achieved what could have been expected of him but you could play this album to someone to explain why he’s good. He could sing like Elmore James.”
The Rolling Stones
The Rolling Stones
(1964, Decca)
“When this came out, me and a couple mates took a day off school to go and buy it, because they were just so exciting. There’s a photo of them on the front and it doesn’t say Rolling Stones or anything, it’s just the picture and that’s enough. That was such a brilliant thing to do. No-one had thought of that before. It was cool to be walking along with this record under your arm. It was so intense compared to any pop records, it’s just got the edge on it. You knew your parents would not approve of them, they would like The Beatles and all that but not the Rolling Stones, that was another big appeal.”
Recommender
Niall Doherty
I’m going to keep it Essex on this week’s Recommender because that’s what Wilko would have wanted. I mean, he’d actually probably go, “I don’t care where it’s from, man, as long as it’s good,” and then rattle off an entertaining anecdote. But I’m keeping it Essex, it feels right. First up is the new single from Chelmsford’s Model Man, aka electronic producer Mark Brandon. Body Positive picks up where last year’s excellent debut record left off, all Balearic house grooves and warm, hypnotic piano sequences.
On a similar vibe and from the same town, there’s also the recent record by Chelmsford’s Gold Panda. I sung its praises a few weeks ago, honing in on the looped beats and soulful hooks of standout track The Corner but now the whole album is out too. It’s called The Work, Derwin Dicker’s first record as Gold Panda in six years, and it’s great, ambient, sample-heavy dance music to get lost in.
Mmm, I appear to have made this more Chelmsford-centric than I intended. The debut album by LOWLIFE is also out now. The trio are a spin-off from Rat Boy, the indie-punk-hip-hop project led by Jordan Cardy, with his live band/college mates brought in as equals, sharing songwriting duties and swapping rapped vocals that nod to their favourite Beastie Boys songs. Early in his career, Cardy was taken under the wing of another Essex hero in Damon Albarn and there’s a strong whiff of Gorillaz’s pop adventurism going on too, albeit a version of Gorillaz where they are bunking off school and trying to shake off a whitey.
Did somebody mention Gorillaz? Yes, it was me, at the end of the last paragraph. The animated anarchists had released two excellent guest-y singles from their forthcoming Cracker Island album but Baby Queen, which came out earlier this month, is just them (which I guess in Gorillaz land means just Damon these days, right?) and it’s the best of the lot, in the lineage of Gorillaz classics like Melancholy Hill in the way it pairs a bittersweet, solemn vocal from Damon with an uplifting synth-pop glide.
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Ted Kessler
I’ve been toiling under intolerable work restrictions this week: four World Cup group games scheduled throughout the day, starting at 10:00 am. How are we meant to get any writing done when Argentina are having their arses handed to them by plucky Saudi Arabia twenty feet away in the front room? Yes, this is an excuse. Yes, I’ve done sweet fuck all this week. Two long lists of things I need to get to. Couple of dozen emails. Made some excuses on the phone. Picked the kids up, cooked them some meals…It’s not going to make ends meet, is it Ted? It’s a life, but it’s not a living. Especially if I’m not listening to new music, but I am watching Japan beating Germany instead. Sweet melody in its own way, but not a paying gig.
However, one new record I have carved time for between kick-offs is All The Poisons In The Mud by The Guy Hamper Trio, which is released today. The Guy Hamper Trio are not a trio, nor do they feature anyone called Guy Hamper. Instead, they’re a swinging and long-overdue collaboration between handsome Medway man of rock and roll, punk rock, blues, poetry, memoir, wood cut, moustache and huge oil painting ‘Wild’ Billy Childish and James Taylor, the fabled emperor of Hammond Organ renowned for his work with his own Quartet and before that as a member of The Prisoners (who coincidentally are reuniting for three anniversary gigs in Rochester next week). Joined by Billy’s wife Julie on bass and Wolf Howard on drums, the quartet who make up The Trio cook up a fantastically groovy and heavy Hammond soundtrack for an imagined 1960s thriller, probably adapted from a Len Deighton novel. Long-time Taylor watchers will note some similarity in delivery to his first couple of post-Prisoners albums in 1987 – a formative, pre-Jazz and funk line-up of the JTQ which also featured Wolf Howard on drums.
The guitars are meaner and much heavier here though, the sound crunchier, more menacing. This is less early-60s Herbie Hancock and more Booker T & The Long Distance Lorry Drivers. Billy Childish – whose real name is Stephen Hamper: who is Guy? - has released at least ten albums already this year and none of them sound remotely like this, so it’s also a pleasant surprise to hear James Taylor deployed alongside him once again as polo-necked, leather-jacketed organ commando rather than floral-shirted, twinkle-toed groover. Apparently, they’ve already got a follow-up recorded. Billy Childish never rests; he does not snooze.
The record isn’t up on streaming platforms yet but you can buy it here.
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Chris Catchpole
I like Richard Dawson, but I have to admit the Newcastle songwriter was something of an acquired taste for me. Much as I now love 2017’s Peasant (which sounded like a set of Medieval madrigals played by indie art rock boffins Everything Everything) his music is still a thicket I step into with a little trepidation. After seeing that the opening track of Dawson’s new album, The Ruby Cord, ran to a whopping 41 minutes, then, my finger did hover over the play button before I took the plunge. I needn’t have been such a scaredy cat, though, The Hermit is magnificent. A slow-moving scrape of guitars and plucked strings winds a path somewhere between Mogwai and The Incredible String Band for almost 12 minutes before Dawson himself enters the scene, warbling about a chiff chaff over some shimmering harp and setting the song on its epic journey.
The Ruby Cord is the third instalment of Dawson time-travelling trilogy and is meant to be set 50 years into a post-apocalyptic future. However, references to a “linen smock” and “the innkeeper’s lad” suggest Dawson’s head is still in the olde worlde school. I like it that way. The Hermit is a dense tapestry of imagery, each detail ripe with its own story, that fully merits its running time. He’s even made an accompanying film to go with it which is being shown in cinemas. Here’s a trailer (don’t worry, it’s only a minute long):
The other songs don’t have quite as much of a Beowulfian scope to them, but they’re no less involving. Thicker Than Water is a moving collision of dancing melody, guitar curlicues and a village choir, The Fool clanks and skips like a jester in the court of prog oddballs King Crimson, while closer Horse And Rider balances the doom within its lyrics with the glorious heart-swelling optimism of the music as Dawson, choir and his band of musicians gallop off into an uncertain future. It's a remarkable record, and like looking at one of those really big Hieronymous Bosch paintings, I could fixate on any number of songs, details or couplets for hours...
If you like good lyrics, you know who else you should check out? Bob Dylan. The guy really has a way with words. Last week Dylan announced the latest installment of The Bootleg Series, which have been a steady source of priceless Bob quarry for nearly thirty years. Fragments: Time Out Of Mind Sessions (1996-1997) covers the period around Dylan’s Grammy-winning mid-90s renaissance, Time Out Of Mind, and promises a wealth of unheard tracks, studio outtakes and alternative versions. Released as a teaser, Love Sick Version 2 strips away the vocal effects and haunted fairground organs from the album’s opening track but if anything, it’s even more atmospheric pared back to its dry bones; Dylan’s wizened, love-weary protagonist hitchhiking along life’s lonely highway with a smoldering mix of despondence and menace…
The new album by Pulse Emitter might be short on Dylan/Dawson-esque lyrical prowess, but to be fair to Daryl Groetsch that’s because - much like the 90 plus records he’s put out over the past 20 years - it’s entirely instrumental. Earlier this year I discovered this six hour playlist of 70s ambient music:
It provided a wellspring of artists and records to explore, in particular 1977’s chakra-aligning New Age Of Earth by Ashra, aka German composer Manuel Göttsching…
Although it’s come out 40 years too late, Dusk would fit into those beatific surroundings like a mung bean in a salad. It’s a proper hippified fantasia of twinkling synthscapes and beautifully sculptured sonic textures whose song titles (Cloudside Dwellings, Temple In The Mountains, Darkening Forest) give you a fairly good indicator of the sort of headspace they put you in. Admittedly, it sometimes sounds like music you’d hear on a yoga retreat, but it’s gorgeous stuff nevertheless:
And Finally…
Wilko Johnson on how he dealt with the news he had cancer back in 2012, as told to our friend and sometime TNC contributor Paul Stokes:
“My way of dealing with it was to accept the situation. I didn’t go seeking cures or anything like that. I looked at my life and went, “I’ve done pretty much everything I wanted to do and other things, too.” I didn’t need to go and climb Everest or anything.”