The New Cue #379 May 10: The Prisoners, Alfie Templeman, Villagers, youbet, Hinds, CMAT, Gurriers, Humanist, Black Fondu

"I had spent the previous couple of years learning how to play the flugelhorn"

Good morning,

Welcome to all-singing, all-dancing Recommender edition of The New Cue, which for the benefit of fair trading is actually no-singing and no-dancing but it does contain a lot of musical recommendation, two Album To Blow Your Mind nominations courtesy of Villagers and youbet and the inside story of the night Jarvis Cocker wiggled his arse at Michael Jackson, so back off yeah, you’ve made this paragraph really long with all your trading standard questions!

Please be advised this edition is for paying subscribers only, who pay £5 a month for the privilege. In a month of 31 days like the one you currently experiencing, that works out at 16p a day. Come on, wise up, join the crew, be a hero, give us some money for this nonsense. How about a playlist to sweeten the deal?

And here’s the playlist for the Apple Music crew.

Also, a reminder that we’re doing this event tonight in London and there are still some tickets left: we’ll be discussing David Bowie and Britain in 1974 with noted writer and sage Simon Goddard next Friday at The Social to celebrate the publication of his brilliant latest instalment of Bowie’s year-by-year journey through the 1970s, Bowie Odyssey 1974. We look forward to welcoming you with open arms and a fruity cocktail to the Theatre of Dreams. Tickets are here and you can also pay on the door.

Enjoy the edition,

Ted, Niall and Chris

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An Album To Blow Your Mind #1

Villagers’ Conor O’Brien shares his new favourite flugelhorn-playing electronic composer.

Today, Conor O’Brien releases the sixth Villagers album, That Golden Time.  Following the joyous soul-leaning sounds of 2021’s Fever Dreams, it’s a more fragile and sombre affair. It also might be his best record yet. You can read more about it below in our rundown of the week’s best new music. As Conor explains here, though, it could have been a very different sounding record had he not taken a seven euro punt on flugelhorn-playing electronic maestro, Mark Isham…

Mark Isham
Vapor Drawings (1983)

“Once or twice a year my friends and I make a pilgrimage to Beat That Records in Arklow where all the best second-hand vinyl in Ireland seems to land and everything is, inexplicably, seven euros. Approximately two or three trips ago I was rummaging through the records when this strange, minimal, eighties-airbrushed artwork caught my eye. I was intrigued, so I took out my little black mirror and searched Mark Isham; it seems I had discovered a flugelhorn-playing electronic composer who makes film soundtracks and has worked with, among many others, Pharoah Sanders, Van Morrison and Joni Mitchell. Also, somewhat ironically, he had recently created the score to Black Mirror: Arkangel. Holy shit!

When I got home I put aside the jazz and soul finds and dove straight into the world of Vapor Drawings. My mind was blown. I had spent the previous couple of years learning how to play the flugelhorn and trumpet and had started to imagine a horn-laden instrumental ambient album with electronic flourishes. Suddenly I was listening to this hypothetical album of my dreams, but it was hypothetical no longer; it was right there in front of me! I closed my eyes and invested in a deep listening experience…

This is curious, searching music. Delicate piano intertwines with distant horns and marching drums whilst a general sensation of musical focus-pulling comes to the fore. Ominous soundscapes give way to jubilant, ecstatic passages and lush analogue synthesisers envelope symphonic flights of fancy. I don’t know the origins of any of the song titles but I am slightly obsessed with them: Sympathy and Acknowledgment, Raffles in Rio, Mr. Moto’s Penguin (who’d be an Eskimo’s wife?), the prescient Men Before the Mirro’ and one of the many highlights, Something Nice For My Dog. 

Every couple of months I return to Vapor Drawings as a kind of palette-cleanser. There’s an enticing, emotional purity at its heart. It may have saved the world from having to endure a future Villagers album of ambient instrumental flugelhorn experiments. I no longer feel the need to inflict you all with this proposition; Mark Isham has done it better than I ever could. Every time the needle comes off the record, I feel like I have been transported to another world, rinsed out, and dropped back to my sofa in time for dinner. And all for seven euros - what a deal!”

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Recommender

Chris Catchpole

Villagers’ last album, Fever Dreams, found Conor O’Brien rolling around like a puppy within his most blissfully happy sounding set of songs to date, colourful blooms of David Axelrod-like psychedelic soul bursting around his audibly loved-up tunes. The intervening three years might have not been the easiest ride for O’Brien, as That Golden Time finds the summery optimism of its predecessor receding into winter. A theme of romantic idealism crashing into the harsh realities of life runs throughout, but while opener Truly Alone’s icy cold blast of absolute loneliness suggests a difficult journey ahead, the tenderness and rueful honesty of O’Brien’s songs provide comfort during the storm.