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Archive: sheffield

Pulp reforming

5 December 2010 17:24

Categories: DVD, Entertainment, Music

I was pretty excited when it was announced a few weeks ago that Pulp are getting back together to play some concerts next year. Pulp have been one of my favourite bands since I was nine years old. Yet I have never seen them live.

Many times my friends and I have discussed going to see one of Jarvis Cocker’s solo shows. But somehow it has never quite come together.

I’m keeping my fingers crossed that they will play in Scotland. Only three dates have been announced so far, all at pretty far-flung festivals.

Mind you, I’m not too sure about the way it is being marketed as being “all the original members of the band”. It might be the “classic” line-up that propelled the band to the height of its mid-1990s fame. But it is by no means the “original” line-up.

The band had several incarnations throughout the 1980s until success was reached. Jarvis Cocker is the only common element of them all, although the majority of the band was in place by the mid-1980s.

I was listening to some Pulp from this period the other day. It reminded me of this footage from a 1980s documentary about the Sheffield music scene. The footage is pretty grotty-looking, but it’s great to have this rather rare peek into the band’s early days. This is available on the ‘Hits’ DVD.

Clearly, they weren’t quite the finished product. Masses of loo roll is an interesting choice of stage decoration, and Jarvis Cocker himself does not yet have the commanding stage presence that made him famous.

The band themselves always warn against listening to their earlier material, preferring to think of the 1992 release of ‘OU’ as their year zero. However, I like all of their earlier albums.

Even though their earlier material rough around the edges, there is still a lot of great songwriting and the potential can be heard. Fascinating to listen to with the knowledge of how they turned out to become one of the biggest groups of the 1990s.

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20 Warp albums — part 4

31 October 2009 00:16

Categories: Entertainment, Music

Warp20

A series of posts

  1. 20 years of Warp Records
  2. 20 Warp albums — part 1
  3. 20 Warp albums — part 2
  4. 20 Warp albums — part 3
  5. 20 Warp albums — part 4
  6. 20 Warp albums — part 5
  7. Warp20 (Box Set)

This is the fourth group Warp albums that I am looking at, celebrating 20 years of the seminal record label. To read the other parts of this series, check out the table of contents on the right.

Pulp — Intro

Intro coverSurprised? Not many people know that Pulp were given a substantial leg-up by the people behind Warp Records. In fairness, Intro technically isn’t a Warp album. It was released by Island, but is a compilation of the EPs and singles that were released on Gift Records, a spin-off of Warp.

Today, Warp would have no qualms about releasing music by a band like Pulp. But this was way back in 1992, before the “sacrilege” of releasing guitar bands was ever considered by Warp. It didn’t fit, but they wanted to help out their fellow Sheffielders.

Jarvis Cocker had already directed a couple of videos for Warp, and Pulp were stuck in a record deal that wouldn’t work for them. So Gift Records was set up to help Pulp on their way to becoming household names. Gift did release music by other indie bands, but none nearly as notable as Pulp. In the words of Steve Beckett, once Pulp signed to Island, “there really wasn’t any reason to keep [Gift] going.”

Intro is of rather variable quality — not as good as their later albums, but clearly much more accomplished than their previous albums. Indeed, the reason the album was called Intro was to obfuscate the existence of the earlier material.

Signing Pulp was a masterstroke on the part of Warp. Given the band’s past record, as a patchy art school-style rock band which had been around for far too long without notable success, other record companies wouldn’t touch Pulp with a bargepole. But Warp / Gift caught them when they were on the upturn, ready to become one of the best bands of the 1990s.

While parts of Intro lack polish, it also contains some of the band’s strongest material including ‘Babies’, arguably their best song.

Autechre — Confield

Confield coverElectronic music peaked here. Everything since has been a disappointment. I think this album an extraordinary achievement.

In one sense, Confield may look like a natural progression of Autechre’s sound. They had spent the late 1990s gradually moving away from the ambient and more club-friendly sound of their early days, choosing to become increasingly esoteric and experimental. But even against that backdrop, Confield was a massive leap. It also stands out from their subsequent material, which has been slightly more accessible.

For this reason Confield was, and in many ways still is, a controversial album. When people talk about Warp artists being wilfully difficult, they probably have a album precisely like Confield in mind. I won’t pretend that I found this an easy album to get into. Anything but.

However, I am mighty glad I persevered with it. What at first sounds like an overly complex, jumbled mess eventually starts to make perfect sense after a few listens. Moreover, the music is so full of intricacy and detail, ensuring that the album is a fascinating listen. Even today I will spot new little details that I had never heard before.

Autechre’s music is highly unconventional, yet it somehow all makes perfect sense. For this reason, Autechre have probably done more than almost anything else to change the way I think about music.

At first glance, Confield is a very serious-sounding album; quite chin-strokey. The opening track ‘VI Scose Poise’ is particularly detatched-sounding. But this album is not without its fun moments.

Autechre’s heavy hip-hop influence is fully in evidence in ‘Pen Expers’. This track which begins with a very dense rhythmic cacophony, which gradually — almost invisibly, as though it is the audio equivalent of a Magic Eye puzzle — makes way for an intense, triumphant melody.

My highlight, though, is ‘Cfern’. It sounds like a fantasy jazz piece from 200 years in the future. I think I particularly like this track because it almost sounds like it could be performed live. I was delighted to find out recently that the avant-garde ensemble Alarm Will Sound has recently released a live version of the piece. It sounds absolutely remarkable. I have embedded the original version below.

Plaid — Double Figure

Double Figure coverFor me, Plaid have a tendency to be formulaic. That is not in the sense that their music is similar to other people’s, but that they seem to have a set template which they work around. They sort of get away with it though, because even though their music often sounds strangely similar to older tracks of theirs, it is still good.

But Double Figure doesn’t have that sense around it. I don’t think to myself, “hmm, I’ve heard that before.” In fairness, maybe it’s because this was the first Plaid album I bought.

But I continue to get immense pleasure from listening to it. It starts off with the poignant track ‘Eyen’, which is arguably their best (and was featured in the Warp20 compilation). It sets a high bar for the rest of the album to reach, but it manages it. Plaid’s style — ambient-techno with a rather natural, almost tropical vibe — is unique and engaging, and it has never sounded stronger than on Double Figure.

It was during this period that they began collaborating with visual artist Bob Jaroc, with whom they later made the DVD release Greedy Baby. This is the video for the Double Figure track ‘New Family’:

LFO — Frequencies

Frequencies coverI am slightly too young to remember Frequencies and the hit single ‘LFO’ when they were originally released. But it has gone down in history, and is frequently listed among the highlights of Warp’s 20 years, making it impossible for me to ignore.

Electronic music usually dates extraordinarily badly. But even though ‘LFO’ was released in 1990, it is still immensely exciting to listen to today, as is the rest of the album. It’s great to think that, once upon a time, this sort of music could be a massive hit. When it reached number 12 in the UK singles chart, Steve Wright declared it to be “the worst record ever”.

In that case you might say, mission accomplished. But LFO’s Mark Bell, while not being particularly prolific under the LFO moniker (there have only been two LFO albums since Frequencies), has gone on to become a well-regarded producer, regularly working with Björk.

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20 years of Warp Records

15 September 2009 21:59

Categories: *, Entertainment, General, Music, Personal

Warp20

A series of posts

  1. 20 years of Warp Records
  2. 20 Warp albums — part 1
  3. 20 Warp albums — part 2
  4. 20 Warp albums — part 3
  5. 20 Warp albums — part 4
  6. 20 Warp albums — part 5
  7. Warp20 (Box Set)

This month the seminal Warp Records label is celebrating its 20th anniversary. There is a heap of festivities planned, and I am expectantly waiting for the very awesome looking Warp20 box set to arrive in the next week or so.

They have a lot to celebrate. The label has personified the cutting-edge of electronic music for most of its existence. Few labels can claim to have been so seminal, and remain so strong for so long.

I discovered Warp at the beginning of this decade. I had already been developing a taste for experimental and electronic music, but before getting internet access I had no way to explore it. I had heard bits and bobs about Warp, but my first real exposure was when I saw the band Broadcast on one of those late-night music programmes on Channel 4. I remember very little about it, but I think the song that mesmerised me so much must have been ‘Illumination’. Here is a video of the band performing it live in 2005.

Once we got the internet, I was able to explore further. When I visited the Warp Records website, ‘Eros’ by Tortoise was playing on its front page. It was one of the most amazing and unique things I had ever heard.

The mixture of soaring sci-fi electronic sounds, intricate multi-layered drumming and funky guitar playing transformed my expectations of what music could achieve. Compared to the standardised indie-rock I had previously been listening to, hearing something as distinctive as this was an utter revelation.

I knew I had to continue on the path of discovery. Given that Tortoise shared the same label as Broadcast, there could be no starting point other than Warp. I was also quickly. attracted by Warp’s striking visual identity, which was largely shaped by The Designers Republic.

As I investigated the artists of Warp on the label’s website, I was surprised and delighted to discover a huge variety of new (to me) and exciting music. It is no surprise that today many of my favourite albums are ones released by Warp in 2001, when I was 14 and discovering all this amazing, diverse music.

But the Warp I discovered was already very different to the Warp that began in 1989. Back then, the promise of label founders Steve Beckett and Rob Mitchell was for the Sheffield-based Warp to be a “recognised, credible, uncompromising dance label”. Inevitably though, a label cannot survive 20 years without evolving.

Between 1992 and 1994 the label released the seminal series of albums including the eponymous compilation Artificial Intelligence. The idea behind the series was to showcase “electronic listening music” which designed more for home listening than the dancefloor, or more for your head than your body. This series contained music by musicians that were later to become huge: Richard D James (best known as Aphex Twin), Autechre, Black Dog Productions (containing the members of Plaid), Alex Paterson (from The Orb), Richie Hawtin among others.

The cover of Artificial Intelligence depicts a robot reclining in an armchair with copies of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and Kraftwerk’s Autobahn lying on the floor — an indication of Warp’s ambitions. The label became the most famous outlet of what is known as Intelligent Dance Music or IDM.

The IDM moniker makes everyone cringe. Few of the best IDM artists think of themselves as IDM, and the artists that describe themselves as IDM are usually not worth listening to. Musically, it might be fair to describe it as dance music’s equivalent of progressive rock. It was the necessary next step, but is denigrated by those who think it is too pretentious and impossible to enjoy.

Like prog rock, IDM had a limited shelf-life and it peaked around the turn of the decade. Electronic music as a whole is not the money-maker it once was. So Warp have further diversified. In the words of Steve Beckett, “probably the first sacrilegious move” was to sign Seefeel in the mid-1990s. They are a more conventional band with guitars and drums, associated with shoegaze as much as techno.

More non-techno artists followed, including the jazzy trip-hop act Red Snapper, 1960s-influenced Broadcast and, er, the downright odd Jimi Tenor (I never really got that one). There was also an increased focus on hip-hop with the likes of Prefuse 73 and the Antipop Consortium. Later, there was a distinctive move towards more conventional rock. This was most notable, controversial and successful with the chart-friendly indie-rock band Maxïmo Park.

Today Warp has artists as diverse as its history suggests. It probably remains best-known for electronic music leaders such as Aphex Twin, Autechre, Boards of Canada and Squarepusher. But on the same roster you can find electro-rock shape-shifters Battles, folk-rock bands like Grizzly Bear, the increasingly soul-oriented Jamie Liddell, hip-hopper Prefuse 73, indie band Maxïmo Park and even the satirist Chris Morris. Oh, and in addition to music they also now make films.

This diversity has been good and bad. Undoubtedly Warp lost its way a bit a few years ago as it struggled to find its feet after electronic music waned in popularity. But even after twenty years, Warp remains a path-finding label that anyone interested in experimental pop music should keep an eye on.

When I discovered Warp in 2001, the range of styles on offer was already massive. But each artist was notable for being interesting and innovative. It was easy to view the Warp label as a mark of quality, no matter what the genre was.

Long may it continue. There is absolutely no question that Warp Records transformed my outlook on music more than anything else. I am looking forward to the next 20 years of innovative music.

Over the next week or so I will write about 20 of the most interesting Warp albums from its 20 year history.

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The Designers Republic

31 January 2009 20:15

Categories: Entertainment, Games, Music

The other day I learnt from my brother that the graphic design company The Designers Republic went out of business earlier this month.

My interest in graphic design is not particularly heavy. But the interest I do have in it has all stemmed from my exposure to the work of The Designers Republic. Their work was usually bold and eye-catching; unconventional and experimental. It is exactly the sort of thing I appreciate in all forms of art. They were sometimes uncompromisingly experimental, yet they made it make sense. Their designs were often beautiful and pleasing.

Pulp logo My first exposure to the work of The Designers Republic was probably the elements of Pulp’s visual identity, which tDR produced when the band was at the height of its powers. Like Pulp, The Designers Republic was proud of its Sheffield roots and would often reference the area in its work.

Later, I would come across The Designers Republic again when it created the visual atmosphere for the wipEout series of futuristic racing games. wip3out in particular was exquisitely presented. Even though “futuristic” design typically dates horrendously, ten years on I think wip3out stands the test of time fairly well. To this day it remains my favourite video game ever.

This video below contains the intro sequence to wip3out, introducing the player to the industrial urban world of 2116 and the (anti-gravity) F7200 Race League. There are also striking corporate identities for each of the fictitious teams. There follows a spot of gameplay — a short eliminator round at the Mega Mall circuit — which shows just how important The Designers Republic’s influence was to the game.

An archived version of the wip3out website, also designed by tDR, is still available to browse.

The earlier wipEout games do not stand the test of time quite so well. Perhaps because it used very similar designs throughout the early-to-mid 1990s, most notably for the band Pop Will Eat Itself, the style seems firmly rooted in the 1990s.

My exposure to tDR’s work increased when became interested in electronic music, particularly the output of Warp Records. Warp’s striking visual identity was one of the things that attracted me to the label, and it was a perfect fit for the experimental, forward-looking techno music that Warp used to specialise in.

Like tDR, Warp has its roots in Sheffield, so the original relationship was one of expediency. But the fit was so good that in a lot of ways Warp and tDR are inseparably intertwined in the eyes of some. But in later years, tDR designed very few record sleeves for Warp at all.

Autechre - Quaristice In fact, the only one from recent years that I can think of is the artwork for Autechre’s Quaristice, which was recently featured in the excellent music artwork blog Sleevage. The extravagant brushed steel limited edition of Quaristice was probably the last tDR-designed product that I bought. It is a truly exquisite piece of work. I have my own photos of it, but the photographs on Sleevage give a much better idea of the stunning quality of it.

But it was difficult to escape the fact that tDR was producing less and less for one of its most iconic clients. In fact, I had knowingly seen hardly any tDR work at all over the past few years, and a lot of people came to see tDR as lazy. Sometimes their work was a bit too minimalist, to a cheeky extent (see, for instance, the track-by-track artwork for Quaristice).

But a number of their designs were very striking, and I own a lot of t-shirts that were designed by tDR. Since being exposed to their work I have made a conscious effort to make anything I design (like this blog) look good. For a brief period of my life, I even seriously considered going into graphic design as a career (before concluding that I probably wouldn’t be any good at it).

Even though The Designers Republic closed down this month, its influence will always be felt. tDR spawned a million copycats, and the course of artwork related to electronic music in particular has been changed forever by tDR.

Anyway, many of tDR’s best designers over the years have moved on (see, for instance, Universal Everything or Build). And tDR’s founder, Ian Anderson, has pledged that it will return in some form or another. The Designers Republic is dead, long live The Designers Republic indeed.

Over the years, tDR has produced some of my favourite album artwork. I’ve gathered some of them below the fold.

Click for more »

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To my shame, I own Feeder CDs

21 June 2006 02:46

Categories: Entertainment, General, Music, Nostalgia, Personal, Television

I have a confession to make. Last week there was a programme on Channel 4 about Feeder. I found it interesting. Because, whilst today I wouldn’t buy a CD unless it sounded like somebody shoving their laptop through a cheesegrater, back in the day (I can’t remember precisely which day, but it was during 2000) I was a fan of the mundane rock band.

The folly of youth? I don’t know about that. I can’t remember what my first album was, but I think it might have been ‘Octopus’ by The Human League, which in retrospect seems like an odd choice for a boy yet to hit double figures. But anybody who knows me today might think that being interested in electronic music from Sheffield from that early age was amazingly prescient. The first band I truly loved — at the age of nine — was Pulp, a band which I still very much approve of.

Then hair started growing in funny places and I had to go through the process of being a teenager. My taste in music took a bit of a dip as I entered the phase which seems to be mandatory for anybody sitting their Standard Grades (or GCSEs): the GCSE rawk phase. GCSE rawk is the sort of music which kids think will make them the coolest in the playground because it is supposed to be very alternative and underground. But this is a delusion as it is actually pretty banal and mediocre, as the regular airplay on early evening Radio 1 shows.

Most of us have probably been through this phase. And because the GCSE rawk phase hits you at a cruical stage of your development, you can’t ditch it in the same way as I forgot about The Human League. So even though many people my age may have moved on to pastures new in terms of our taste in music, we all have a band that we still follow as a hangover from the GCSE rawk phase. For some people it is Placebo. For others it’s Muse. For me it is Feeder.

And which of those bands have gone on to be the tossiest? Of course it would have to be the one that I liked. This is slightly embarassing for me because many people at school knew I was into Feeder before they had actually become well-known. Feeder weren’t actually bad (honest!) back in the late 1990s. But the moment they started half-heartedly churning out radio-friendly bilge they became pretty big. Most people probably think of Feeder as that pants-wetting band with the awful lyrics. And years after their breakthrough in 2001 I still had people asking me if I still liked Feeder.

One person who I didn’t know at school castigated me when she found Feeder tracks on my MP3 player. She complained: “You like all this weird shit, so why have you got Feeder on there?!” I had difficulty explaining, especially as just minutes ago she found MP3s of the BBC News 24 countdown! My reputation was in tatters.

I found out recently that I still have a soft spot for Feeder though. ‘Polythene’ is not actually a bad album. I was never too keen on heavy rock so at the time I actually preferred their second album, ‘Yesterday Went Too Soon’. In retrospect, it seems more like a stepping stone to the weak style that made them popular.

I look at both albums quite fondly. ‘Yesterday…’ in particular always used to cheer me up if I felt down. The music was fairly good, so you could forgive Grant Nicholas’ sometimes laughable cat-sat-on-the-hat lyrics.

Tangerine
Turning green
Cellophane
Window pane

I swear I did not make that up. Those are the genuine opening lyrics of early fan favourite ‘Tangerine’. Granted, that is a particularly cringeworthy example. But it’s safe to say that Nicholas would not have made it as a poet.

At the time of release, rumour had it that ‘Echo Park’ had to be a success, or Feeder would have lost their record deal. So even though it was quite a weak album with a radio-friendly sheen (yes, you might say that they sold out), some people thought it was just a blip and they would soon be back to their old ways.

Fat chance! That never happens. Feeder are one of those bands where, in the lull between albums, they always claim to be returning to a rockier sound for their next album. They never do. In fact, they are becoming ever more insipid.

Despite the change in direction that their breakthrough single, ‘Buck Rogers’, represents, I actually think it is one of their best songs. I was quite excited when I first heard it, and the video was cool aswell! The album proved to be a disappointment to me, but it brought Feeder commercial success. They had reached a certain status: the sort of band that was popular enough to get invited on to T4, but not popular enough to even think about turning down T4.

A cloud hung over Feeder’s fourth album, ‘Comfort in Sound’. Earlier in the year, drummer Jon Lee had rather mysteriously committed suicide.

Last week’s Channel 4 programme somewhat glossed over this. His death was mentioned, but the fact that it was suicide wasn’t. Instead, they said, “Like fellow Welsh rockers the Manic Street Preachers, they lost a band member to a young age.” I thought the comparison was a bit off. It seemed like a desperate attempt to make Feeder look as good as the Manics. Somehow I get the feeling that rock history will judge Feeder pretty harshly in comparison with the Manics.

Apparently most of ‘Comfort in Sound’ was written before Lee’s death, but it was inevitably going to be viewed in the context of Lee’s death, particularly given the reflective feel of the album. The album confirmed that ‘Echo Park’ was anything but a blip. Feeder had changed musical direction for good, and cemented themselves as one of Britain’s biggest bands in the process, in the medium-term at least.

I was in 6th year at school at the time, and Feeder was on in the common room a lot, be it on radio or CD. By the end of the year I never even noticed when Feeder was on. I had heard the singles so much it was like white noise. Nevertheless, I still think ‘Comfort in Sound’ is a fine album. Okay, it is over-produced and sickeningly radio-friendly. But although I am thoroughly sick of the singles, a lot of the album tracks are really quite good.

Any of their material after that, though, is just unforgivable. Luckily my brother is now a bigger Feeder fan than I am, so I can hear the music without having to shell out for it. Almost without exception, Feeder’s recent material has been real guff of the highest order. It really has been a bittersweet experience to watch the rise in popularity and decline in quality of this band. Six or seven years ago I would have wished them all the recognition in the world. Now I am an old cynic who thinks there is no justice in the world.

I was in HMV last week, and I realised that I recognised the voice that coming through the speakers. I had listened to too much Feeder not to realise that I was listening to Grant Nicholas, yet most people probably wouldn’t notice — the song was so bland.

These days, most of Feeder’s songs sound much the same, and the bad lyrics can’t even be laughed off now. Somewhere along the line Nicholas must have realised that it doesn’t matter how bad the lyrics are — you can still shift records. So his style went in a more cliched and repetitive direction. I’m sure he has had to “cut the ropes around him” at least three different times in his songs. For their latest album, ‘Pushing the Senses’, the lyrics have become plain gibberish at times:

Forever will be
Tumble and fall

What on earth does that mean?

The music is far too polished as well. It might as well be performed by robots. On the Channel 4 programme Grant Nicholas said, “We didn’t use any tape on our last album, which I felt sad about. But you can do so much on Pro Tools these days!” That just sums it up.

Despite the immense length of this post, I have little interest in Feeder now. I haven’t properly been following them for three or four years now, and it will take something big to get me to take notice again. As my friend said to me in HMV, “At least they’re making lots of money.”

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