Paperjam

In a life full of glittering achievement (highlights including my cycling proficiency test, sitting through all of Revolver and the evening I spent with that foxy Iranian waitress who fortunately turned out to not be a bloke after all) one feat towers above the rest: If you whack “Animals That Swim” into Google then an article I wrote ages ago appears quite near the top. I realise this isn’t on the scale of solving the energy crisis or isolating the Higgs Boson, but it does make me happy.

In the five years or so since I posted that article a small but select group have left comments in support of my theory that ATS are indeed the most underrated band of all time. We even heard from the band too, which is almost certainly the most showbiz thing that had ever happened to me until I had occasion to enquire “You alright mate?” of a thoroughly bemused Henry Rollins a couple of months ago.

Relatively speaking the last eighteen months has seen a whirlwind of Animals That Swim related activity, so in dragging my lazy arse to the keyboard to actually write something, I thought what better way than to provide a bit of an update for any ATS acolytes that find their way here. Remember; they haven’t actually split up – they just haven’t recorded anything for ages.

- Hank Starrs appeared on the Art Brut single Direct Hit in a duet with Eddie Argos.

- Hugh Barker published a book called Faking It about authenticity in popular music, theres also an associated blog right here.

- A chap called Alex set up an actual proper ATS website with decent writing, a discography and everything - hasn’t been updated in a while, but dead good.

- Someone updated the band’s wikipedia entry to state that they had asked to play gigs in London in 2008 but, tantalisingly, “They declined, for the time being.”

- Hank Starrs made mention of a possible MySpace page while also mentioning that former bassist Terry De Castro had a page with a really very cool cover version of East St O’Neill on it.

- Someone known as Craydee75 actually slapped the video for Faded Glamour on youtube:

I went to see a load of art by the Chapman brothers a few years ago, the upshot being that it ended up annoying me quite a lot. However, I was definitely nowhere near that warehouse when it went up.

Jake Chapman has now partially redeemed himself in my eyes (yes, I imagine it will be quite a weight off his mind) with the video for You Lie You Cheat by Spiritualized. It seems to combine the attempted suicide from A Clockwork Orange with that Polanski film The Tenant. It also calls to mind that sketch in Jam about the man jumping out of a low window repeatedly rather than throwing himself from the top of the building - in case he changed his mind halfway through.

Whatever the antecedence of this camera-abusing short film, I really like it. See what you think. Great song too.

I only ever saw Spiritualized in 1997, or possibly 1998 at the Que Club in brum (before it got shut down - it's back now). They were touring at what was probably their absolute apex following the release of the amazing, seminal, landmark and played repeatedly in my bedroom Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space.

I went with my mate Clare who was really, really, really into the single Electricity at the time. The gig was great, but the three things I remember most clearly are:

- The support band, Acetone, who I really wanted to see hadn't been let into the country

- The whole place was full of a dense smog of spliff smoke

- Clare dragged me out to get the last train as Cop shoot Cop was hitting the twenty minute mark.

Skipping forward at least 10 years, J Spaceman has recently cheated death, toured acoustically, helped out the lovely Samantha Morton and got a new album together.

The first thing off it is Soul On Fire which you may have heard via the acoustic mainlines tour, the recorded version was played on Zane Lowe's show the other night and helpfully copied onto the internet by all sorts of people.

If pushed for a proper description I would say that it mixes some of the drone guitar noise of early Spiritualized over some of the epic song-writing of Let It Come Down with a huge grand-standing chorus that Noel Gallagher would sell his cock to have come up with.

Otherwise I would just say: It's ace. The following album "Songs In A&E" is out late May. I've got tickets for the gig at Koko, the whereabouts of which I am starting to get very concerned about, secure mail - oh fucking yes.

Morrissey (or perhaps his record label) has a fairly poor record when it comes to choosing the singles off each album. Hence the rather eccentric (bizarre) line-up for the new greatest hits offering, although you get a couple of classics the rest of it is pretty average (shonky) when you compare it to the rest of his back catalogue.

In a rather Paint A Vulgar Picture way there are a couple of extra tracks tacked on to encourage the bedroom-dwelling Moz-loving completist to part with the reddies. That’s How People Grow Up is a bit of a MOR plodder albeit with some shrieking and some wry stuff about how you might be a sad lonely bastard, but at least you haven’t got spinal injuries. The other new track is a storming gem called All You need Is Me: pounding, catchy, funny and with the memorable closing refrain “You don’t like me but you love me – either way you’re wrong. You gonna miss me when I’m gone”. Total genius.

So guess which one he’s put out as a single? Sigh. I give up.

Still you can get hold of All You Need Is Me on its own from iTunes I suppose or alternatively via this possibly naughty link here – which is what I did. Bedroom-dweller I may be, but even I’m not shelling out to own two copies of the dreary In The Future When All’s Well.

Actually, while I’m at it if you really do want to get hold of the fifteen best Morrissey songs I suggest that you could do worse than scouring your favourite (legal, obviously) MP3 source for the following:

1. Black Eyed Susan
2. Why Don’t You Find Out For Yourself?
3. Jack The Ripper (live version off Beethoven Was Deaf)
4. Angel Angel Down We Go Together
5. Reader Meet Author
6. Our Frank
7. Suedehead
8. Teenage Dad On His Estate
9. The Loop
10. The World is Full Of Crashing Bores
11. The National Front Disco
12. Everyday Is Like Sunday
13. Friday Mourning
14. Billy Budd
15. Margaret On A Guillotine

You might think I need a better camera, and some actual camera skills might be nice too, but Zombie-Zombie don't actually show up very well on (digital) film you see.

I'm blaming the fact that they are undead, and this knowledge of the Other Place enables them to draw on terrifying experiences and shoot that out all over the equally zombie like audience (bless you all, of course) at Taylor John's House. I'll include myself there, I'd driven over and I was terribly sober, and like most English people I need two pints inside me before I get rhythmic.

And they were great - a disco-horror soundtrack, clearly influenced by John Carpenter and Giorgio Moroder and Goblin. Plenty of throbbing bass, furious drumming and dubbed-out shrieks through the ancient Space Echo, and a stone-cold tune in the form of "Psychic Harmonia", much rougher than their recorded version.

There's a single out right now, "Driving this road until death sets you free", which you hear on ze Myspace, and they're off around the rest of the UK this month, and they did a horror-y mix for Allez-Allez. Oddly the first track of the mix, Spectrum & Silver Apples, was recorded at the Cabin Studios in Coventry.

Our man Jim Bogue, the musical visionary, barbers nightmare and iron-hard ruler of Coventry's Invitation to Love, went to All Tomorrows Parties at Minehead last weekend. I got a text on Sunday saying proclaiming verily: it was good, and by the looks of these Youtube videos, I'd say too.

• Mystic
• Machine Gun
• Peaches

And there's a bunch more over at the usual place.

Black Box Recorder seemed to have packed things up as far as I could tell, Luke Haines has put out a suitably misanthropic solo record fairly recently. While Sarah Nixey has also been making a solo go of it, cue a bundle of reviews and articles with the inevitable strict headmistress fantasy overtones.

Was alerted earlier to the following written on the Wikipedia entry for BBR:

"There are rumours that Black Box Recorder have been working on new material, prompted by the 35th anniversary of the Black September massacre at the 1972 Munich Olympics"

...which, to be honest, does sound sort of feasible. A new album would be an exciting, if troubling prospect. Especially if it has anything on it approaching the genuinely unsettling nature of their cover of Uptown Top Ranking off England Made Me. Lets hope they tour so that we can all go and feel a bit err, funny again.

Also mentioned in despatches is some kind of Christmassy collaboration with the mighty Art Brut. After this and the Hank Starrs collaboration on Direct Hit I'm now fairly convinced that Eddie Argos will be summoning up the Vessel/Mr Solo, formerly of David Devant and His Spirit Wife for some kind of spectaular hat-trick. Let's hope so.

Found this via Tom Coates - the idea is that if you've set yourself up with Last.fm recording your listening habits through their iTunes plugin, you can graph your listening habits over a period of time.

Predictably mine is lots of AFX, Scientist and Broadcast, and also an awful lot of tiny lines which are just one track. I listen to iTunes on shuffle an awful lot. If you want to check out the rest of my graph, for some unearthly reason, go over here.

A Storm in Heaven by Verve (before they added the The) was a really cool record; Epic, spacey, messed up and a bit shoe-gazey. It was just the sort of thing for moody 18 year olds to sulk in their bedrooms to.

A Northern Soul was a fucking amazing record; Huge, angry and soulful. Born out of what was reported as being a particularly “difficult” recording process involving drugs, mental illness, a number of fights and some wrecked cars. It was just the sort of thing for cynical, lovelorn students to play too loudly in their bedrooms.

A Northern Soul scraped the charts, the next single, the superb History stated on the cover “All farewells should be sudden”. That was that, The Verve had broken up.

They re-surfaced a while later with the soon to be ubiquitous Bitter Sweet Symphony, followed by the album Urban Hymns. It was ok and had a couple of good tracks on but generally was a diluted version of what had come before. It was just the thing for middle managers to play at dinner parties and inspire a whole generation of deeply insipid bands.

The Verve disintegrated nastily once more and Richard Ashcroft went his own way to produce a load of fairly listenable but fairly bland music much in the same vein as the mellower parts of Urban Hymns. On the plus side, he did inspire one of the greatest albums ever made by nicking one J Spaceman’s girlfriend.

Now it appears that The Verve are back at it in their original line up, stuff is being recorded, an album is planned for release and some dates are going on sale this week. I’ll definitely go and see them, but if new developments follow the trajectory described above it might all end up a bit close to Snow Patrol territory. Lets hope not, although the last-minute decision I made to not get “Too busy staying alive” tattooed on my arm will look even wiser.