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13
Jun
10

Still, The Kill, and other words that rhyme with Fill(er)

By Great Southern Steve 2 Comments
Categories: Minipod, Mp3s - Other Artists and post punk

J0y Division: The Kill, Walked in Line (1978), Walked in Line (Still), Ice Age, (1978), Ice Age (Still)

No-one really likes Joy Division’s third album Still, do they? It’s never listed as a favourite, and often panned as a botch-job which probably shouldn’t have been released, as though somehow it’s very existence sullies the purity of the other two records.

I returned to it recently to see if there was anything there worth including on a Joy Division / New Order compilation I’m making for a friend, and while I was there, I tried to put my finger on exactly what the problems are. And there are three pretty big problems.

  • Curtis sounds bored. Don’t argue, he does.
  • Hannett’s production. What was beautiful on Unknown Pleasures and challenging in Closer is downright annoying on Still. It’s almost as though Hannett was bored by the songs and tried to use trickery to turn them into something they’re not.
  • The song selection. And this is really they key thing. Most of those songs on Still are old ones. I do not believe Curtis had written anything new.

To be specific:

- They Walked in Line and Ice Age are both on the unreleased Warsaw album  from 1978 and probably date from 1977 or earlier.

- Exercise One and The Sound of Music are both on the 1979 Peel Sessions.

- Glass, Dead Souls, The Only Mistake and Something Must Break all exist on studio recordings from earlier in 1979 made during demo sessions in various places (and recently released as disc 3 of Heart and Soul).

Basically, this leaves most of Still looking a lot like a bunch of filler tracks that weren’t good enough to make it onto the first two records, and which the band only recorded because they didn’t have any good new songs.

‘The Kill’ is the main exception. It’s a good song, and it’s going on my compilation. I do wish I could go back in time and turn up the vocals up while Hannett wasn’t looking, though.

Also: just for the sake of comparison, listen to the different versions of Ice age and They Walked in Line from Warsaw and Still . The earlier versions are just much better.

Mp3: J0y Division: The Kill, Walked in Line (1978), Walked in Line (Still), Ice Age, (1978), Ice Age (Still)

(This was made using a program called mp3 merge which I kinda like…)

STILL (1981)

Side one
  1. “Exercise One” – 3:06
  2. “Ice Age” – 2:24
  3. “The Sound of Music” – 3:55
  4. “Glass” – 3:56
  5. “The Only Mistake” – 4:17
Side two
  1. “Walked in Line” – 2:47
  2. “The Kill” – 2:15
  3. “Something Must Break” – 2:48
  4. “Dead Souls” – 4:53
  5. “Sister Ray (7.36)
17
May
10

Uh, this is, uh, Radio 2XX, uh, yeah…

By Great Southern Steve 1 Comment
Categories: Double Take and Mp3s - Other Artists

The Particles: Truth About You

The Particles: Bits of Wood

Canberra circa 1985. I am a dorky teenager who likes punk rock and goofing off. The local university / public radio station is called 2xx, a place now indelibly etched on my musical psyche.

Me and sundry dork mates hang around there in the afternoons waiting for a studio slot to open up (often because the presenter didn’t bother turning up), so we could sneak in and record our bullshit songs on the 8-tracks. One time we actually get on air doing this.

Also, much time is spent ringing up the afternoon presenters requesting songs so we can record them on to tape, and putting on funny voices so they don’t work out it it’s just us over and over again. Looking back I think they knew anyway, they were all older than us(like, 18!) and half of them were friends with my sister.

The 2xx presentation style was incredibly lackadaisical. I still listen to public radio now, and I can’t believe now how slack the 2xx presenters used to be in comparison.

“Oh wait…uh…it’s the wrong side…no, wait…it’s actually the wrong record…uh..hang on…uh…”

This would go on for minutes. Then they’d put five songs on in a row so they wouldn’t have to talk and could just sit there stoned.

But the music was good and the music was loud… well, actually it wasn’t loud, the signal was rubbish, but it was kinda bassy and muffled and comforting. I revisited a tape I had made off that station about ten years ago and the sound of it nearly made me cry.

A sample playlist (I just made this up from memory) for a 2xx afternoon or nightime presenter went like this:

  • Simple Minds: The American
  • The Cure: A Forest
  • Joy Division: Love Will Tear Us Apart
  • Psychedelic Furs: India
  • The Clash: Straight to Hell
  • Devo – Mongoloid
  • The Buzzcocks: Fast Cars
  • XTC: Generals and Majors
  • X-Ray Spex: Germ Free Adolescent
  • The Jam: That’s Entertainment
  • New Order: Blue Monday
  • The Fall: Totally Wired
  • The Cramps: Goo Goo Muck
  • B52s – 52 Girls
  • The Saints – Know Your Product

etc, etc, etc. All the good shit.

Some fun local bands were around, too, getting airplay because they were darlings of the scene. These mp3s are from a Sydney-ish band called The Particles (members of whom went on to become the Lighthouse Keepers / Widdershins / whatever else they ended up being called).

This shit used to get played on that station all the time.  Listening to it now brings back incredibly strong memories of that sound. I probably would never have heard of them otherwise. And I don’t even like it that much but it is so nostalgic to me now, I just wanted to put it on here…

The Particles: Truth About You

The Particles: Bits of Wood

04
May
10

The Suburban Lawns

By Great Southern Steve 2 Comments
Categories: Double Take, Mp3s - Other Artists and post punk

The correct answer The Suburban Lawns kicked ass.

Here’s some mp3s from their only album (s/t, 1981).

Suburban Lawns: Flying Saucer Safari

Suburban Lawns: Anything

And here’s some YouTube fun.

Enjoy.

Steve.

16
Aug
09

Soundcloud Testing = Buzzcocks “Why Can’t I Touch It”

By Great Southern Steve Leave a Comment
Categories: Mp3s - Other Artists and Site News
Tags: ,

Http://www.soundcloud.com.

About as easy to imbed as Youtube videos are.

27
Jul
09

Patrik Fitzgerald – Grubby Stories

By Great Southern Steve 6 Comments
Categories: clunky folk, Minipod, Mp3s - Other Artists and post punk
Tags: , , , ,
patrik_fitzgerald

Come and get yer punk in Woolworfs...

Really, you’d have thought a guy who was like a cross between Johnny Rotten and Bob Dylan would have been more famous. Or, maybe, way less famous. But I don’t think anyone could possibly have predicted that Patrik Fitzgerald (born ‘Patrick’ Fitzgerald) would have been exactly as famous as he was, no more and no less.

Mp3 file: Patrik Fitzgerald – 10 Songs from Grubby Stories (1979)

This guy has been making a right  nuisance of himself since 1975; knocking on managers’ doors, painting his name on people’s cars, crashing parties, stalking people, busking outside funerals,  and playing so many solo acoustic shows in front of punk punters that eventually Polydor went “Oh, alright Patrik, you can have your bloody record contract if you’ll just shut-up!’”And so Grubby Stories was born.

(Disclaimer: story not actually true. I just wanted to make it sound exciting and I didn’t want to copy the Wikipedia entry).

The truth is, my sister came home with a copy of this record one day (after borrowing it off this jerk called Nathan (who I once saw in his underwear (which was red))) and we decided it was just as good as all the other music we liked, and never gave it back.

I’ve spent the last twenty-five years vaguely wondering why no-one else ever seems to have heard of it, except for all the people who have (and they all seem to be wondering why no-one else has heard of it either).

Apparently Patrik moved from Polydor after a few records, and continued to make records which apparently sound increasingly like David Bowie on a bad day. He now lives in New Zealand where he has a Myspace and does solo shows and stuff, and maybe walks on the same bits of dirt that Chris Knox sometimes walks on. But I wouldn’t really know about any of that. I’ve only heard this record.

The story behind this mp3 is that a few years ago I dug this old bit of vinyl out of my cupboard, recorded it onto my computer (before I realised what the earthing wire on the stereo was for) and then sold it for ten dollars just before moving to the tropics.

(Nathan: I lost your record, I’m very sorry.)

Anyway, here is Patrik Fitzgerald, the forlorn pioneer of folk punk, in all his two chord acoustic wonderness. Well, most of it is acoustic, but some of it is played by a band featuring members of The Buzzcocks and Penetration, whom Patrik somehow managed to get to sound a fair bit like early U.K. Squeeze. But the lyrics are the main thing, really; alternately weird and very strightforward, and all delivered with a cockney nasal despair which is truly beautiful.

If you like your punk music strange and offbeat, I strongly advise that you listen to these tunes, at once.

Mp3 file: Patrik Fitzgerald – 10 Songs from Grubby Stories (1979)

The Ten Songs:

  • As Ugly As You
  • Nothing to Do Around Here (with evil children)
  • All My Friends Are Dead Now
  • Adopted Girl
  • When I Get Famous
  • Little Fishes (brilliant song, my favourite)
  • But Not Any More
  • Conventions of Life
  • They Make It Safe
  • Your Hero
25
Apr
09

Live Wire: Best of the Bon Scott Era

By Great Southern Steve 2 Comments
Categories: Best of..., Mp3s - Other Artists and Single Track

well if you're looking for trouble...

Like all good Aussie boys, I love me some Bon and Co. especially when I’ve had a few, but when I think about it, there are some paradoxes in my attitude to AC/DC, viz:

  • Even though I think all their songs sound the same, I love some to death, while others bore me (to death), and I find the “good track to filler” ratio pretty intolerable on the majority of their records. So, something stands out about some songs but I don’t know what it is.
  • I don’t normally think of them as a singles band, yet my “best of” track list has lots of singles.
  • I think I can only stand them in “small doses”, but I will happily listen to selected songs (“Live Wire” and a few others) about ten times in a row, getting increasingly louder each time.
  • I think of them as a mood band, yet some of their songs just get me no matter what mood I’m in. In fact, they put me in the mood to listen to them more.

I’ll probably never figure them out. But anyway, here’s my Bon Scott era, reduced to the 12-song “best of” LP – incidentally, something the band themselves haven’t ever really released.

  1. Jailbreak
  2. Long Way to the Top
  3. Rock and Roll Singer
  4. Live Wire
  5. TNT
  6. High Voltage
  7. Dirty Deeds
  8. Let There Be Rock
  9. Riff Raff
  10. Whole Lotta Rosie
  11. Kicked in the Teeth
  12. Highway to Hell

I’ve included ‘Live Wire’ as an mp3, just so that in case you are a novice AC/DC listener, you can hear what plain rock music should sound like. I I fucking love the intro to this song. It’s just such an obvious piece of rock, someone just had to do it, and AC/DC decided that someone was them, and did a great job of it, too; it’s simple, solid, stirring, ballsy, and really well recorded.

Enjoy,

Steve.

I'm the man to see...

07
Feb
09

March of the Stickmen

By Great Southern Steve 2 Comments
Categories: Double Take, Mp3s - Other Artists and post punk
Tags: , , , ,

Here’s a double-take of one of my favourite discoveries of the last few years – Philadelphia band The Stickmen, who emerged in the post-punk chaos of the late 70s, made a few albums, had white vans that broke down, got given pretentious labels by critics, drank milkshakes, broke up, got mortgages, died tragically, reformed, had children, gained PhDs, got cynical, moved to the tropics, put out compilation albums, all the usual things.

Actually, some of that was me rather than the Stickmen. Sorry.

Anyway, what can you expect to hear? Imagine what the B52s would have sounded like if only their mothers had stopped drinking when they got pregnant, and then if their rhythm section got kidnappped and somehow replaced by some of the guys from the Birthday Party without anyone noticing, and then the resulting ensemble tried to play two different songs at the same time.

Or just listen to the tracks. Whichever you prefer….

I got these tracks a while back over on one of the usual post-punk haunts, PPJ I think, but they aren’t there now so I’m putting them back up for you. They are both from the Instiable compilation CD, and they both rawk. Frenetic dum-drums, bonky bass, twisty geetar, krazee v-v-v-vocals, squonky saxophone and gosh-darn weird clavinet! Go!

GSS

24
Jan
09

Antenna for your Love

By Great Southern Steve Leave a Comment
Categories: Collaborations, GSS Home Studio, Mp3s - Other Artists, post punk and Single Tracks
Tags: , , ,

Mp3 – SSB and the Stobie Pole Band – Antenna for your Love

Soursob Bob has told me he likes his recordings clean and simple, no frills, just raw country, folk and rock and roll.

Let’s see if I can’t dissuade him from that path of purity with this heavily reverbed, messy, overdubbed country punk version of one of his new songs, Antenna. It’s still just a test mix but this is, roughly, what I would have done with this tune.

  • SSB – Guitar, vox
  • Emma Luker -violin
  • ‘Southern’ Steve McKenzie, bass, midi drums, backing vox, midi SOS signals, production

By the way, a Stobie Pole is a South Australian specialty – a telegraph pole made of metal and cement.

The Wiki page claims they were necessary because of the arid treeless nature of South Australia but the truth it there were trees aplenty until they cut them all down to make way for sheep. Then they started asking themselves what they were going to do about the pole situation. Pure Aussie genius.

19
Jan
09

Look What They Done to My Song, Ma!

By Great Southern Steve Leave a Comment
Categories: clunky folk, GSS Covers, GSS Home Studio, Mp3s - Other Artists, Simple Classical and Single Tracks
Tags: , , ,

Looks like Emma Luker of The Fiddle Chicks has been getting her hands on my music and doing her own thing with it again!!!

The first such incident occurred a few years back when she got hold of an old demo tape that Bill Greenwoood and I made for his Honours cello audition in about 1990, featuring an instrumental tune of mine called simply The Third Waltz. When Emma was putting together a demo CD with her beau Soursob Bob, they made a recording of the tune with violin, guitar, bass and some percussion. Here it be. I can’t give you the original to compare. I think it was pretty basic. (The tune went on to become part of a full song called Never Come Close, a maudlin epic about love and loss that is best forgotten).

Mp3 – Emma Luker and Soursob Bob – The Third Waltz.

About six months later Emma e-mailed to ask if she could cover another tune, Goldfish at the Laundromat, this time from the Live at Home CD I made last year and have been banging on about on here. It’s a melancholy folk tune about love and loss etc, but it doesn’t annoy me at the moment.

Sure, I said. Why not?

At this point I had only met this person once, briefly, at the Wheaty last Christmas, completely by accident, and was kinda wondering who she was. Well, we’ve hooked up twice now, and had a trial recording session just yesterday, and I am pleased to report she is a fine musician who also seems to make a fair living out of being that, which I had previously thought to be a myth, like Craig MacLachlan’s music career. But this photograph proves her to be quite real.

 

Her version of the song is on her forthcoming debut solo CD. It’s all her, except apparently that the producer snuck in and did the snare drum while she wasn’t looking.

MP3 – Emma Luker – Goldfish at the Laundromat

I think I like it better than the original version, which was kind of patched together out of several different files with the home recording equivalent of sticky tape. You might not pick that but I hear it every time I listen to it…

Mp3 – Great Southern Steve – Goldfish at the Laundromat

Anyway there’s more where this all came from. I’ll be putting up a few mixes from the trial session, maybe including one of Bob’s tunes too, and hopefully we’ll do more folk together later in the year.

GSS.

07
Jan
09

GSS vs George Thorogood

By Great Southern Steve 2 Comments
Categories: blues, clunky folk, Double Take, GSS Home Studio, Mp3s - Other Artists, Music Genres and Single Tracks

monopolyGeorge Thorogood? You mean the toad-like guy with the bad hair who made a fortune out of cheese?

Yes, I do. Now, I wonder how much of the sentence “some of his early stuff is actually quite good” I can get out before you hit the back button on your browser. You seem to be still reading, so…

George and his band the Poppets (later the Destroyers) went into the studio to record what would have been their debut album, Better than the Rest, in 1974. It’s an album of blues covers from the likes of John Lee Hooker and Willie Dixon, and while it certainly isn’t better than the rest, or even some of the rest, it’s alright.

I guess that’s why MCA decided not to release it until 1979 after he had two solid albums of cheese under his belt from the previous two years. “We don’t want to confuse people with this quality music, George,” said his R and A man, Les Befriends. “You want to win over the musical heartland of America, you gotta play real crap.” So, the album was shelved for five years.

Tucked away on side 2 are two tracks featuring George solo, playing slide guitar and singing. These are, I must say, really quite fine. I’ve posted them both here as well as my own version of Huckle Up Baby, which I make sound kind of folksy because I just can’t play blues very well. Miss Me When I’m Gone also features me on the bass. I don’t know whether it adds anything but it was fun to do.

Whose version of Huckle Up do you like more?

And more importantly, who do you think would win in a fight?

My money is on me. He’s quite old now…

(Satire impairment warning: “Les Befriends” does not exist, nor did he ever say either of those things. And lots of people probably really like George’s first two albums. I’m just not one of them.)

george_thorogood2

steve-thorogood


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Southern Steve is…

...the online alter ego of S.J. (Steve) McKenzie.

I am an Australian guy who likes and plays lots of different styles of music, mostly for kicks.

There's samples of my own stuff here as well as lots of mp3 goodies from other bands I love; folk, punk, jazz and just whatever sounds like it has its own thing going on.

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