The Cedar Lounge Revolution

This Weekend I’ll Mostly Be Listening to … what links The Golden Horde, Buffy Sainte Marie, Donovan, Janis Joplin, Gram Parsons and Hole together… January 8, 2022

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Thanks for a very welcome guest post from Joe Mooney.

Last month a friend of mine hosted a radio show featuring Irish bands and played two from The Golden Horde – ‘The Curse’ from the 1984 EP ‘Dig that crazy grave’ and a live version of ‘Codeine’. Here it is, broadcast on  the RTE TV show ‘Check it out’  in 1989, recorded live at the Olympic Ballroom (now sadly no more): 

The Golden Horde always included cover versions in their repertoire , ranging from the Rolling Stones “I’d much rather be with the boys” to the live crowd favourite “Knock on wood”. I knew ‘Codeine’ was a cover, but never knew much about it, though Des did tell me it was “by some old folk band” . A few years after I’d first heard the Horde version, a friend in London played me a version on cassette . Unhelpfully , she  didn’t know who it was performing, but it certainly sounded like “some old folk band” to me. Eventually, years later (and after the internet became a thing) I was surprised to find out it was originally written by Buffy Sainte-Marie , based on her own experiences after becoming  addicted following its legal prescription for an illness and not advised of its properties. Her biographer notes that “Cod’ine‘ was written in despair but also in anger …” as she believed the prescribing doctor was deliberately addicting patients to exploit them. 

Appearing on her debut album, the sleeve notes include this accurate and vivid assessment of the song :
“The foreknowledge of death and the recapitulation of the life which made that death inevitable; a tale of drug addiction told within the mind but in the voice of the ancient (or prematurely aged) addict desperately seeking some justification for her existence; the pathetic repetition that she has avoided the additional sin of alcohol, thus keeping faith with the creed of her parents; a characterization so extraordinary and many-levelled that all consciousness of its having been “created” is lost; a macabre waltz which teeters on the edge of the grave”
And here she is performing at the Newport Festival in 196 , as featured in the documentary film “Festival” :

A very early cover version was from Scottish folk star Donovan, who also had one his early hits with “Universal Soldier” (also penned by Sainte-Marie and appearing on her debut album). 

Another sixties vocalist who was no stranger to drugs and addiction issues was Janis Joplin , who didn’t simply cover the song but added some of her own powerful lyrics. Her grim version is somewhat prophetic as five years later she died as a result of heroin use. 

Another mid 60’s version came from Gram Parsons,  again somewhat prophetic as in 1973 he would die from a massive morphine overdose.

And also in a long line of female vocalists delivering powerful versions :

And so back to the Golden Horde. There are regular remarks that their recording will be getting re-released , which would be great. There is also a huge catalogue of unreleased material which I’d love to see released , and there were plenty of live recordings which I’d love to see digitalized  and added to my small collection (of cassettes). I recall on at least one occasion they played “Codeine” and went straight into “The Pusher” , which I’d love to hear again. As good as they were, none of the studio material ever matched the energy and excitement of the seeing the band live, so here’s another great one recorded and broadcast by RTE. 

And finally, live in Paris, for Daniele who inspired this post with her radio show:

This Weekend I’ll Mostly Be Listening to… The Radiators from Space July 22, 2023

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Funny what a difference a few years makes for fans of music. When I started listening seriously to rock and punk and pop – and I do like a good pop song, particularly the more left-field ones – I was fourteen or fifteen.

I don’t recall The Radiators as having a very high profile. In fact I can’t recall anyone I knew talking about them. And I think the reason for that was that it was 1980 and a year is a long long time in music particularly when one is in one’s mid-teens. The Radiators, punk in general, was something that had happened to people that bit older than us. It might only be a year older or perhaps two or three. But that gap was enough to mean that an immediate musical experience was lost to those a little younger. Interesting that that didn’t function with Deep Purple or Pink Floyd. But then perhaps those groups had already found a niche in the then relatively informal ‘canon’ (a canon now congealed by numerous retrospectives in magazines and so on). 

Anyhow the upshot of this is that despite the Radiators releasing album number two in 1979, a year later the musical space I was in was occupied by the Blades or whoever. And of course music moved fast then. New movements springing up. Punk was gone. Mostly. New wave or post-punk as it became known later (though I’m not convinced they are synonymous) was there. And not just new wave but two-tone, new romantic/futurist and the NWOBHM, and so on. The charts were ever-present and music, playing that brilliant trick it has for well over half a century and longer now, was in thrall both to those charts and to the concept of the ‘new’. Indeed one could argue that punk’s determinedly ‘year zero’ approach was in some ways profoundly destructive to itself. I think for many, though not all, it meant that people were left waiting for the next musical explosion. When (they) came years later in the form of hip-hop and then while on from that with electronica/dance, they were arguably too late for most of those for whom punk was their alpha and omega, but they were as ground-breaking, if not more so. Anyhow the centrality of punk to the mythos of music of a certain sort is another day’s discussion. 

Because punk was supremely important for those who lived through it and for those who came after. The last post I did in the This Weekend slot – on Huggy Bear, references a band whose approach is inexplicable outside that brief eruption in 1976-1978. 

There was The Boomtown Rats. But while punk adjacent and certainly were regarded as punk had other things going on – as someone in a YouTube comment noted great one song, terrible the next. Though perhaps tellingly their footprint still loomed large in 1980. Yet arguably, on the island for the purest forms of punk one either looked north to Ulster or to The Radiators. 

Truthfully I prefer this to the second album. I think that’s because the second album fits more neatly into Irish music of this broad type – listen to very slightly later The Atrix, Gavin Friday and others and their subsequent work and one can see the commonalities. This isn’t to take away from it, but it’s not unexpected that an album released in 1979 is going to cleave to the broader palettes available in post-punk. Whereas – the first album, well, I don’t think those who claim it as the first Irish punk album are entirely wide of the mark. This is effectively first wave, there or thereabouts. And that can’t be taken away from them. 

The vocals are great, the lyrics far better than one might expect, better too than most of their English rivals. The arrangements short, snappy and melodic and everyone in the group seems to have had a chance to shine in terms of writing songs pointing to a very cohesive unit. The sound is tinny, no doubt, and could have done with some serious beefing up – even remastered it sounds a little on the soft side. But this seems as authentic a document of its time as the first Damned album, or Wire (which it has some similarities with, wonder if they ever thought of taking that route). There’s a remarkably knowing quality to this – indeed listening to it again in the weeks the RTÉ controversy landed the awareness of mass media hits an oddly contemporary note.

 Not Too Late reminds me, I’m sure coincidentally, of Ramones Planet Earth 1988, but Ramones wrote the latter years later. In some ways the sheer energy of this is unmatched by Irish groups until The Golden Horde. But whereas the GH were unashamedly revivalist, how could they be otherwise with their mix of garage and punk, The Radiators were there at the start. 

If you’ve never heard it do yourself a favour and listen to a great group of musicians playing around with the newest form of music available to them. If you have, remind yourself of a great Irish group.

Blitzin’ At the Ritz

Television Screen – two versions!

Great Expectations

Press Gang

Electric Shares

Enemies

Not Too Late

Party Line

Jordan, 1955-2022 April 9, 2022

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This week saw the passing of a central icon of punk Jordan (Pamela Rooke).

Many thanks to Bernie Furlong, of the Golden Horde, for penning these thoughts:

I never met Jordan but during the summer of 1977, which I spent in London in pursuit of Punk Rock, I used to see her often. She was an arresting presence at many of the gigs I attended. At this point she was managing the newly-formed Adam and the Ants and would often join them on stage, singing, dancing shouting and generally stealing the limelight from Adam, and even from Siouxsie and the Banshees whom they often played support to.

She was still working in what was then Seditionaries, Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren’s Kings Road Punk Boutique. I haunted the place most Saturdays, too broke to afford the clothes, too intimidated to speak to anyone, least of all Jordan, who to me was the most terrifying of everyone working there.

It is hard to square what to me was her intimidating and quite shocking appearance (even by the standards of outlandish and provocative dress of the core group of London Punks at the time she stood out as genuinely a one-off), with what I learned later, from other friends who knew her, was her introverted and diffident personality.

What I admired most was that, despite her shyness, she was fearless in her determination to provoke and challenge using just her clothes and appearance. She made me see that the way you styled yourself, particularly as a woman, was as powerful as what one said. She taught me that I did not have to passively accept the male gaze but that I could use my appearance to deflect, challenge and fuck with it, which is about as Punk Rock as you can get.

There’s an article here from the Guardian which adds to Bernie’s thoughts. 

One key point it notes is her work with and for Derek Jarman and her role in the film Jubilee. But there’s also this:

She will be portrayed by Game of Thrones actor Maisie Williams in Danny Boyle’s Sex Pistols drama Pistol, airing in May. Rooke recently described how she advised Williams on her performance: “What I said to her was, ‘You’re in a position of playing a role that is very strong, a strong woman, and a woman set apart, really.’ I decided that I wanted to be me, like a walking work of art, if you like, and I was totally and utterly unshakable. So she had to bring that to the role.”

And more, here she is in interview and it’s notable how she frames her life and work in the context of feminism and art.

This weekend I’ll Mostly Be Listening to… Blue Öyster Cult February 6, 2021

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Funny that Blue Öyster Cult were mentioned last weekend in comments. This Christmas I had a little bit of money over from a job I did during the year – so, I thought, I’ll do something I’ve never done before and get a box set of albums, those being the ones released by US rock band Blue Öyster Cult in the 1970s and 1980s. Now I actually had a two-disc greatest hits CD of theirs but had always found it maddeningly inconsistent to listen to to the point that I’d never managed to get all the way through. There were some great songs cheek by jowl with some really clunky numbers. Something about the album put me off listening closely enough to fillet it down to a playlist. But a general interest in them remained – in part because I’d heard they had had some similarity thematically to Hawkwind, and that author Michael Moorcock who had worked with the latter had also worked with them too. 

So, since the box set arrived just after Stephen’s Day I’ve been listening fairly assiduously to their albums (I do this so you don’t have to). It’s been an odd experience, in some respects a bit too much like work, though also quite enjoyable. And while I’m not sure I’d repeat the exercise any time soon (for example over the past three years I’ve been slowly acquiring Yes and Zeppelin’s remastered discographies for gifts and one album at a time is a lot more palatable – particularly given I am very familiar with Zeppelin’s catalogue and not at all with most of that of Yes).

But Blue Öyster Cult. Hmmm… a strange band. To put it mildly. They do demand a lot of a listener. There’s a jarring clunkiness to a lot of their output. Clumsy riffs, curious juxtapositions, a certain tendency to an American (as in US American) sense of the baroque or sinister that can come across as a little leaden. At times they sound like KISS,  but weirdly less sophisticated, which is saying something. And yet, there’s also some extremely well written and thoughtful tracks which are sophisticated and listenable. On the same album. Often on the same side of the album – as we used to call them. Here and there one will find proto-punk. There garage or photo-metal. In other places pop and so on. It’s a puzzle. 

Though no more than the question as to why Patti Smith (who was in a long term relationship with Allen Lanier, the keyboardist) was co-writing songs and vocals? Or the generally terrible 1970s outfits that can be seen in some videos from that period. And what about that AOR period, though in fairness that’s better than their earlier more mainstream period from Agents of Fortune on which saw them lose the bite of their first three albums and move to something that might be pop, but wasn’t. Actually one can divide up their career (I could make a BÖC song title related pun there, but I won’t) into three or four phases. An initial one where they had a roughness and hard rock aspect that was very listenable. To some extent they were a construct. Sandy Pearlman, then a newly minted music journalist and critic recruited musicians to play songs based around lyrics he had met. He would go on to manage, co-write and in many respects shape their output. If this sounds very Year of Zonk, very Robert Anton Wilson and the Illuminatus Trilogy, well, yes, so it is, though I always loved his lash-up with the Golden Horde. Whether that is a good thing is another matter entirely. Entertainingly he went on to produce the Clash’s second album and managed the likes of Black Sabbath, Romeo Void, the Dictators and various others. But one can argue that BÖC is where it had all started. 

And in truth, the first album is brilliant – in a proto-metal sort of a way. And there’s a lot more than proto-metal. Folk (Then Came the Last Days of May), psychedelia and an eclectic mix of sounds. Where it falters is oddly, given they were once positioned as the US answer to Black Sabbath, is on tracks like Cities on Flame With Rock and Roll with a non-more Sabb riff but a jokey lyrical content. Thing is the secret to Sabbath was their utter seriousness and sincerity in their adherence to what they sung about – sure, it was all Grand Guignol stuff about nuclear war and alienation and so on but they meant it. Whereas BÖC don’t. There’s a tongue lodged securely in their cheek and that undercuts the songs. I find the group’s sensibility a puzzle. I read about ‘biker’ aspects and I guess maybe there’s something of that in there. The occult too, and a sort of Velvet Underground S&M darkness, are meant to be influences, but somehow the tone is off for me. And while I like the songs, it sort of points to problems further down the line. But that’s a minor quibble. The first three albums are broadly excellent. This I like (Tyranny And Mutations excellent O.D’d On Life Itself, a song which Endless Boogie appear to have based whole albums on).

Then, there’s that aforementioned three or four albums where they went more mainstream – their biggest hit, Don’t Fear the Reaper was on Agents of Fortune. They opened up the musical palette but not necessarily to great effect. Agents was followed by a sequence of two or three more albums of a similar sort of sound – characterised by an eclecticism that doesn’t work for me. 

Then there was a period where they seemed to reconsider and for about three or four albums they moved from a harder edged output (as on 1980s Cultosaurus Erectus which is pretty great) more akin to their early career (I’m still resisting making that pun) through to those more explicitly AOR songs. Actually, and here I feel all my punk and post-punk inclinations kind of giving up in disbelief, I actually find the period from 1980 to 1985 where they dabbled and more than dabbled in AOR actually remarkably palatable. I’m not sure why but musically and in terms of their overall sound albums like The Revolution By Night and Club Ninja (an album with one of the worst album covers of all time) to be better than they have any right to be. Notably Patti Smith is still collaborating into that phase (see Shooting Shark below). After that their record company clearly lost interest though they’ve been very intermittently releasing albums subsequently.

One could applaud their willingness to share song-writing amongst (all?) the band members. One can also applaud their ability to turn out pretty great songs. None of their albums is lacking that – though some of the albums are a bit of a slog. But one thing that I find fascinating is that if one maps their albums to a broader chronology they don’t seem to particularly follow any developments taking place elsewhere. I find it hard to hear much influence of punk or new wave on their songs post 1976, indeed arguably the first three albums are much more proto-punk and hard rock than that which was to come after (Did I mention the live covers of Kick Out the Jams – full marks for the selection of same, some marks deducted for changing the key spoken lines to “Kick Out the Jams Brothers and Sisters!”.). Then again when they’re good they’re very good indeed. That two CD compilation I had wasn’t sufficiently representative of them as a band, at least to my ears. Whether all the individual albums are necessary to listen to is a different matter again. I actually went out and bought their most recent album which is actually very strong, somewhat of a return to their harder rocking sound, though there’s a couple of songs that have a curiously They Might Be Giants vibe. 

So, not what I expected at all, but in its oddly contrarian fashion more enjoyable than if it had indeed simply been the US equivalent of Hawkwind.

There’s far too many tracks by them to do any justice to their output but here’s a range from across the years.

Take Me Away (1983)

Then Came the Last Days of May

O.D’d on Life Itself 1973

Subhuman 1974

Don’t Fear the Reaper

Godzilla (1977)

Black Blade, 1980

Veteran of the Psychic Wars

Shooting Shark 1983

Perfect Water 1985

That Was Me – 2020.

Ireland and punk… December 9, 2017

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I’ve been thinking about how bar the Undertones and SLF Ireland didn’t have a front rank punk band. At least not one that managed to step into the international arena. Obviously there were The Radiators from Space and other groups, but the one group from the South with an international profile, the Boomtown Rats always seemed to me to be only partly punk and their star never shone perhaps quite as brightly in memory as that of The Undertones.

Looking back now from this remove what seems so striking is how short the time period was. We’re talking very few years in a way. I had the opportunity to discuss this with someone involved in the Dublin scene, albeit not as a musician, recently. Their take was that the paucity of international acts visiting Ireland and the sense of distance both physical and psychological from the UK meant that when punk arrived it engendered a sense of ‘we can do this ourselves’ and that 1977 − 1981 was the high point of that. They also had some interesting thoughts on how initially it was remarkably cross-class and cross-age groups.

Would people think it fair to say that much of the action was in the North when it came to punk and that Dublin was less vibrant?

Or is it that The Undertones overshadowed everyone else in relation to the North and perhaps Irish punk, and that then U2 stormed in and did much the same trick with post-punk?

I was too young for punk and while friends of mine were well into the post punk scene down at the Dandelion Market etc I was at the time more interested in the UK groups like New Order, Echo and the Bunnymen and so on. Indeed it wasn’t until the third wave of groups, that being those that came on foot of post-punk, Blue in Heaven, The Golden Horde, etc that I started to see the Irish groups live. And by then whatever Irish punk was had splintered.

I’m always sorry I missed seeing the Virgin Prunes live.

A musical publication for the New Year… December 27, 2016

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It’s been over 12 months in the making but we have finally released In Concert, Favourite Gigs of Ireland’s Music Community.
When we first saw the heartbreaking pictures from Aleppo we reached out to those people we know best, our friends in the music community. Six months ago Hope *2 came out and this featured those in the punk community in an effort to raise money for pikpa lesvos centre. We held back on many contributions from the Irish music scene as we felt it would be nice for this group to extend their support. The results are In Concert and whilst there are many more who could and deserve to be included we feel this can help form part of a ‘secret history’ of the irish music scene. People like Ted Carroll who founded Chiswick Records, Pete Holidai from Radiators, Cáit O’Riordan from the Pogues, Pat Clafferty of Mexican Pets, Deko Dachau from Paranoid Visions to more recent luminaries like Constance Keane from M(h)aol or Rob Flynn from Winter Passing. 105 contributors altogether speaking of showbands, leonard cohen, the clash, theatre of hate, golden horde, therapy? and so many more including U2.

The book is a benefit for Irish Red Cross specifically in their efforts to assist people forced to flee their homes in Syria.

Irish Nuggets from 1979 onwards… May 15, 2016

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Not sure if this has been linked to on the site but it’s great, a series of mixcloud compilations of alternative Irish groups from 1977 on. So far there are three compilations you can listen to – 1977-79, 1980-81, 1982-84. Katmandu’s ‘I can Make the Future’ – mentioned here before and a good slice of futurist/new romantic/alternative isn’t there but that’s a minor point. What is there is exhaustive.

Funny listening to Pop Mecanics after a good thirty five years or so. 1980/1981 was a crucial year in my musical development when I started listening to the radio intensely in that near forensic way one does at 15 (or did when the chances of a song being repeated were low and the number of stations was very limited). And yet because I had no money a lot of the songs I heard then were one’s I never got and so they faded away.

But Tony Koklin’s Claude Monet (how did I ever forget that one?) or Five Honours and a 175 from the Alsatians… or The Shade 6.05 (erm… intriguing keyboard work towards the end of that track) or… the Teen Commandments or whatever bring it back big time.

Band names? Some bad bad choices there. Tango Brigade isn’t good. The Sussed likewise – no one likes a boaster. Chant! Chant! Chant! And yet… these were mostly kids (and with some weird hang ups on age – both Protea and Berlin complain about those over…er… 21. Yeah, I hate those over 21s. Old men and women!). Remarkable how much mannered singing there was at the time. And btw is that the Doors I hear in the intro to The New Versions rollicking (I can think of no other word) ‘Tango of Nerves’?

That said… The Atrix, Blades, Tokyo Olympics, Virgin Prunes, Blue in Heaven and Microdisney still sound great, but then some of the less well known groups sound pretty damn good too. No Golden Horde? Perhaps that’s coming in the 1985 onwards section. What’s funny is how bloody awful the production is on so much. What’s also intriguing is how the ghost of post-punk was still hanging around, well into the decade. And not just post-punk, some of the stuff sounds positively gothy. But what’s evident are some good groups who never made it further than an album or two.

This next track isn’t on the compilations (but it’s another incredibly evocative track for me which the Tokyo Olympics song on the compilation sent me looking for).

The person behind the project deserves great praise. Memories (I’d forgotten were there) are made of this.