Monthly Archives: January 2013

“The first records I ever owned were the Chipmunk Punk LP and a 45 of “Memory” from the musical Cats. I don’t remember acquiring these. They seemed to always exist – like my record player – amidst my other toys. My musical awareness, similarly, began almost pre-consciously.”

“My father played Blondie, Black Sabbath, and Fleetwood Mac records while I was in the crib, and my grandmother used to regularly arm the player piano with showtune and jazz standard piano rolls (she even had the “Star Wars Theme”). I didn’t like “Memory” much, but I loved Chipmunk Punk, which was composed of sped-up versions of Tom Petty, Blondie, and Cars songs (not exactly punk, but at three years old, I was yet to split such hairs).

My father, noticing my increasing interest in music, took me to the mall and told me to pick out some singles. I chose three – Mr. Mister’s “Broken Wings,” “Starship’s “We Built This City,” and Howard Jones’ “Things Can Only Get Better.” I acquired a Walkman for Christmas and began compiling tapes of these songs to play in the car on family trips. This is around the time I began to understand music’s great function for tuning things out.

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Altered Images are basically remembered today for being one part of the early-‘80s influx of the New Wave, one that never broke big in the States. Featuring the unique vocal talents of Clare Grogan, the group’s early material provides a very interesting collection of melodic yet appealingly edgy post-punk that should satisfy fans of the later-‘80s c86 movement, and by extension the partisans of ‘90s indie pop that was issued via labels like Slumberland. The best place to start with Altered Images is with their first effort “Dead Pop Stars” b/w “Sentimental,” a gem of a single that never got its just due.

A band’s debut record can serve a variety of different functions. At the time of release these documents will reliably stand as a tangible marker of achievement for the musicians involved, indicating that they’d transcended the realm of the practice space and low-to-no paying local live gigs to actually produce something permanent.

So many records have been issued over the years that the steady flow of bands announcing their existence with yet another 45, EP, or album can frankly not seem anything even remotely like a big deal, but the reality is that only a percentage of groups have what it takes to make it beyond the initial stages of formation to deliver something concrete, and only a portion of those actually possess the collective inspiration to deliver music that can withstand the test of time. Yes, the debut record delivers permanence (“We did it!”), but it’s far from a given that what’s contained in those grooves will cut through the haze of subsequent activity to attain the stature of the truly lasting.

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“I grew up in Belfast, Northern Ireland before moving to London where I met the rest of The Wolfnotes. My dad was amongst the first DJs in Belfast after the show band scene started to fizzle out, so I was surrounded by vinyl from a young age.”

“There was a record/tape combo deck in the living room and vinyl from floor to ceiling of everything from Abba to Zappa, so I was allowed to browse through the mountain of records (as long as the crayons were hidden) and pick a record to listen to. I had a fascination with The Clash song “Should I Stay Or Should I Go” and I would sing along to “Prince Charming” by Adam and the Ants, probably dancing around the room at the same time!

Fast forward to my early teens and by this time I was playing drums along to Nevermind and It’s A Shame About Ray in my parents’ garage after school. On Saturdays I would go into the city with my friends and visit a record store called Good Vibrations (Cathedral Records) owned by a guy called Terri Hooley. He discovered Irish punk band The Undertones (famous for “Teenage Kicks” – John Peel’s favourite song of all time) and there I picked up my first pocket money record, “Heart Shaped Box” 7” single by Nirvana. This was a place I dreamt of having a record store of my own in someday, and no matter what part of the city you were from, it was a place to appreciate new music.

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If you’re like me, perhaps you take to Facebook a wee too often some evenings sharing music. And perhaps this shared music strikes a chord with a friend who is equally as effusive with the “like button.” And perhaps the invitation arises that affords an opportunity to put said friend—Chad Clark of Washington, DC band Beauty Pill—in contact with the musician inspiring the evening’s muse, Paul Buchanan of The Blue Nile, whose brand new US release, Mid Air is in stores now. Well, perhaps you’re reading that conversation at present. —Ed.

Chad Clark: One of the things that attracted me (and many others, I’m sure) to The Blue Nile was the band’s daring and imaginative use of sonic texture. There was always a delicate, elegant, painterly quality to the records that seemed deeply felt, deeply considered. Some of the early sounds were almost non-musical: the sound of bicycles wheels spinning and such. Always at the center of it was your voice and your imagistic words.

This is something that influenced me greatly as a musician to experiment and explore textures in the studio. This “texturalism” (for lack of a better word) leads me to a few different questions. It seems to me that The Blue Nile was sort of is its own impossible-to name genre. Would you agree?

Paul Buchanan: I suppose we pursued our own shared imagination. What was important was the sense of the song, so recognisable licks were out. We tried to create the world in which the person in the song belonged.

I can’t really think of “peers” who worked in a similar terrain. Did you regard yourselves as having peers or did you feel like you were working in a field of your own? If so, was that lonely? Or did you enjoy the feeling of making your own world?

Yes, we were in our own world, and just doing the best we could to capture the idea. We had no money, no phone.

The Blue Nile’s sonic adventurousness proved to be subtly groundbreaking. Did you have conscious ambitions to break ground, to innovate? Or, were you just following your instincts? Did you just innocently happen upon those ideas or was there a sense of deliberate design to the path you chose?

Circumstance and limitations shape what you do as much as your imagination, don’t they? Marrying the two is a step forward. You’re right—we stumbled on ideas and followed our instincts. We played the way we could play.

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The Pyramids were a very interesting forward thinking jazz collective that unfortunately flew considerably under the radar during their original tenure in the 1970s. All three of their LPs from that decade have just been reissued by the Disko B label, and the best place to start is right at the beginning, with their still smoking 1972 debut, Lalibela.

The idea that jazz died in the ‘70s, a notion that’s largely caught up with the commercial motivations of fusion, is a faulty one that has thankfully been almost entirely laid to rest. The reality is that there were plenty of very good to downright exceptional jazz records issued during the period, particularly from bands that were seeking inspiration from the free jazz movement of the previous decade. It’s just that many of those records weren’t all that easy to find, partly due to the poor distribution that came in the wake of many major labels essentially electing to close their doors to new jazz in favor of more commercial pop prospects.

But it’s not true that all of the majors shunned serious jazz during the ‘70s. Both Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman had fruitful runs with Columbia, Keith Jarrett entered into a relationship with Impulse (then distributed by MCA) for a series of albums with arguably the greatest band he ever led, The Art Ensemble of Chicago issued a pair of classics for Atlantic, and the great saxophonist/composer Anthony Braxton had a series of amazing LPs released by Arista.

However, the reality is that most of the majors either seriously scaled back or completely ceased their jazz operation during the decade. Great jazz was indeed still happening, but it was increasingly waxed up for consumption by indie labels (some possessing business motives that weren’t exactly admirable) and fledgling artist-run imprints.

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