Stuff I've Enjoyed This Week 2

Also at The Drop the fab Boonaraaas!!! Mr Hutton came all the way down from Scotland to see 'em.

Stuff I've Enjoyed This Week 1

Los Explosivos from Mexico played at cracking set at The Drop on Saturday

Advertise in Bucketfull Of Brains #76

#76 is only a short time away from publication. Featuring Chuck Prophet, Terry Edwards, The Posies, and a bunch of others it’ll be the usual fascinating mix.

As ever we could do with a bit more advertising. And just to point out it’s very cheap – starts at £20, and if you have the bits and pieces Terry will knock your advert into shape.

If you’re interested you know where to find us.

OBFUSCATE REINDEER! Bonfire Evening At Bull & Gate

My old Turning Worm pal and collaborator Piers Miller presents as STUNTFOX

A crazy Guy Fawkes Night hoedown featuring an international smorgasboard of alt.country talent.


CELILO



Over from Portland, Oregon on a whirlwind tour of our beautiful isles with their beautiful songs.

CASE HARDIN

Homegrown country talent play us songs from their latest album Some Tunes For Charlie Spencer.

BELLA ECHOES


Great new band featuring some very familiar faces!

JAMES WALBOURNE

Pretenders / Pogues / Son Volt guitarist previews songs from his forthcoming solo release on Heavenly.

OBFUSCATE REINDEER!

I am contractually bound not to tell you who this lot are! Psychedelic indie icons have a run through ahead of their American tour.

Doors 7pm
Entry £6

The Bull And Gate

Redlands Palomino Company at Honky Tonkin' this Sunday - Nov 7th

OK folks hold your noses and bring your smelling salts and hip flasks we're off to The Golden Lion. The Redlands are on this Sunday:

HONKY TONKIN SUNDAY at THE GOLDEN LION, 88 ROYAL COLLEGE STREET, CAMDEN.

Headlining we have the always winning and ever popular REDLANDS PALOMINO COMPANY. Luckily, they got their rehearsal out of the way at a small South London pub last weekend and very good it was too.

In support we have the excellent old time sound of THE ELY PLAINS who have always impressed and have free singles to give away to anyone who'd like to sign up to their website.

Our DJ is THE NINESTONE COWBOY, the small package that never disappoints.

Now does this sound like something you'd want to miss? No, I didn't think so.

Tunes from 4.30pm, support around 5.45pm, main band 7pm.


Here's an interview with Alex Elton-Wall that was published in the final print issue of Pop Culture Press in 2008


THE YOUNG TURKS OF ENGLISH COUNTRY

A conversation with Alex Elton-Wall of the Redlands Palomino Company

“We’re doin’ it for the country, we’re doin’ it for GP,
We’re doin’ it for Neil Young and Crazy Horse ‘cos God knows they do it for me!”

In these rousing, crowd-pleasing lines from “Doin’ It For The Country” the English country rockers the Redlands Palomino Company enshrine the curious affinity that UK fans, all the way back to the Zigzag kids in the 70s with their import copies of The Gilded Palace Of Sin, have with American country tunes. That the Redlands can sing this in complete earnest yet with tongue firmly in cheek goes much of the way to explaining their pre-eminence in the circles of English alt.country.

This remains a relatively small world centred on a network of clubs and venues run by faithful promoters and fans. It’s a world that doesn’t always appreciate its homegrown jewels, especially when the opportunity arises to genuflect before an American, even of middling talent. It speaks volumes that the Redlands’ record label is based in Sydney rather than Acton. Yet they thrive precisely by working in the genre they love while not trying to be what they’re not.

“It would be daft for us with our backgrounds and our nationality to write straight country songs, so we just write about personal experiences.
We love the instrumentation, the sounds, of classic country rock music, but we’ve got to be serious about who we are and where we’re from. If we suddenly start writing songs about American highways and Tennessee we might look like buffoons. You can’t sing about what goes on in Portsmouth ‘cos it would sound silly. If you drove for three days straight here you’d be in the Irish Sea.“

Thus Alex Elton-Wall tells it like it is; frontman Alex, his wife Hannah, pedal steel player David Rothon, and Bassist Rain have been Redlands from the start. Last year they lost drummer Jamie Langham, replaced by the subtle and nuanced Dan Tilbury, and added another guitarist in the multi-talented Tom Bowen. Bowen, who back in the day played in lost Camden band Goldwing, had been searching for a home since the ‘Wing crashed and burned. Everyone knew it was the Redlands but it took a long time for him to get there.

“In hindsight we should have asked him to join the band years ago; it was pretty stupid that we didn’t. We were doing a gig at the 100 Club and we asked him along to the rehearsal to play a few songs and he came and played along to everything. He was able to play all the bits from both of the albums that we couldn’t play live. It took about one rehearsal for us to say come and play the rest of the tour. I think we’ve never sounded better. We’re so used to hearing him play his Telecaster and fantastic lead guitar but he’s a really great acoustic guitarist as well. He’s recently been playing a bit of dobro and when we did some recording, though he’d never picked one up before, he’s playing a banjo parts”.

The Redlands came together nearly eight years ago though they’d begun as indie kids in the mid-90s: “I started playing with a guitarist called Mike Gant and Rain came on board and then Jamie. I was listening to a lot of bog-standard indie music, shoegazing stuff, then Mike started introducing me to Gram, the Byrds, Big Star. He played me record after record. We weren’t really a country band but we played jingly-jangly music and then Rain mentioned he knew a pedal steel player and Mike and I got very excited. Dave came down and played ‘Teach Your Children’ and we were hooked. Dave and we played a few gigs as a five piece and then a four piece and then I met Hannah in 2000 and she came along and did some backing vocals on a couple of tracks live. We quickly realised that she was actually the star of the show and should be asked to join the band on a permanent basis.”

Mike Gant had gone by then, having played his pivotal role. But in Hannah they’d found a voice, a songwriter, and a foil to Alex. Like him she had the instinct to write about what she knew, and the songs that they, separately and together, provided for 2004’s By The Time You Hear This… spoke of real life. Songs about a girl wanting a horse, and a favourite car breaking down, and the joys and pains of love. That record was recorded as and when in 2002 and 2003. The 2002 sessions with ex-Rockingbird Alan Tyler producing. They stuck with Rockingbirds, this time Chris Clarke and Sean Read, for 2007’s Take Me Home, and took the view that if it ain’t broke don’t fix it. Though noticeably Alex has grown into an accommodation with the roughness in his voice, and allows a natural contrast with his wife’s purity.

Always an excellent live band they have the knack of pulling a crowd that probably doesn’t think it likes country music, and then getting them to come back again. Now they stand on the point of starting their third record:

“It’s going to be the same kind of songs, though we’ll probably do some more acoustic and live sounding material. We won’t necessarily think every song has to be guitar, bass, drums, pedal steel. If a song doesn’t need drums, it won’t have drums. Before Tom it had been the same for so long; it was, ‘I do this. You do that’. I think we’ll be a bit more open about what a particular song needs. Whether it needs to be a full-on country song or a more mellow traditional sounding song, though I say this and it’ll probably all sound the same with screaming guitar solos.”

All photos from The Tapestry Festival 2007

Song By Song Notes from Steve Wynn on Northern Aggression

NORTHERN AGGRESSION--STEVE WYNN & THE MIRACLE 3

Song By Song--What's It All About

It seems somehow appropriate to be here in Heilbronn, the home of Edgar Heckmann and my longtime label Blue Rose Records, on the day my latest record is being released in Europe. I’m spending a week here (and being very well fed by his ver...y kind wife Beate) doing interviews for the record and enjoying the active Heilbronn nightlife. Don’t laugh—I can recommend the Tropicana bar the next time you’re in town. Seems like something Warren Zevon would have liked. I hear they make a mean mai tai although I have chosen to stick to the beer. Even with the protective shield that is a heaping bowl of spaetzle (and they do it right in this town), you just can’t be too safe especially when getting into fighting shape for a 4 week tour.

But enough about tropical drinks, doughy treats and even the upcoming tour.-- more about that soon and I do hope that you’ll join us if you’re in the neighborhood or in the mood for a road trip. Let’s talk about Northern Aggression:

The bio/press release/back story is up on the website so let’s cut to the chase and talk about the songs:

RESOLUTION—The first track, the first single, the opening gambit. I had forgotten about this particular tune in the palette of ditties that I brought down to Richmond, Virginia until late one night in the studio when Dave put his foot down and said, “Okay, here’s the thing. We gotta do that song in D, you know the one.” And I did. One take later we had the version that you’ve hopefully already heard. It’s a mission statement, a zen koan. Time is the great equalizer—as is a good droning D chord, of course.




WE DON’T TALK ABOUT IT—The Southern tip of the Northern Aggression. Tony Joe White filtered through the Lower East Side, Captain Beefheart strolling through the Bowery. Linda said she tried to deny the funk but, as you can hear, that was impossible. What’s it all about, Alfie? Well, shine a light deep into the dark recesses, the cracks that nobody can see and the most interesting things arise. And then? Shut off the light and don’t tell anyone what you saw.


NO ONE EVER DROWNS—I wrote this when I was 20 years old (one year before forming the Dream Syndicate) for a band a band called Goat Deity, which was me and two sisters who went on to form Wednesday Week. We played it at our only gig, which took place in their mother’s living room. The song was never recorded in any way but somehow I remembered the music and lyrics 30 years later and it just seemed like this was the time, place and record in which it was time for some dusting and preening. A statement of defiance and bruised optimism from a precocious kid, barely out of his teens


CONSIDER THE SOURCE—Had this bit of music floating around since around the time of “Static Transmission.” Never could find the right words or story to tell. But in the laboratory that was the recording of my third album with the Miracle 3 I decided to give it a shot. I sat down at a Wurlitzer electric piano and just started playing. The band caught all of the changes on the fly, I made up the lyrics on the spot (it’s a live vocal, thank you) and amazingly enough my fingers never flubbed on the 88’s. That’s Jason on organ (the guitar solo was overdubbed). Yep, so much for Guitar Rock, although Jason says this is his favorite recorded solo.


COLORED LIGHTS—More on topic, this is us doing that Miracle 3 thing. Hazy psychedelia, riffs galore and a rave-up at the end. It’s what we do, man! Van Morrison said something about not pulling punches or pulling a river. But he said it more quietly. Oh, and I have always loved colored lights. I guess it’s some kind of visual Ritalin.

THE DEATH OF DONNY B—Okay, here’s the deal. I didn’t write this. But I don’t know who DID write it either. Jason discovered it as the soundtrack of a short, early 70s film on YouTube not long before we went into the studio and it became our mutual obsession for weeks. What a great film! What a great song. And late one night in Richmond we decided to record it just for kicks. Once again, a live performance, a live vocal, one take bit of magic. And, best yet, it was all documented on film by our friend Ford Loving. Go ahead, type in the title on YouTube. You might get the original film or you might get our version and they’re both worth your internet time over a cup or two of strong coffee.



THE OTHER SIDE—My bandmates don’t understand—nay, are somewhat repelled by my not so guilty pleasure enthusiasm for the occasional endless live jam bootleg documentation of the Allman Brothers and/or Grateful Dead. More about that at another time but I knew that I had to sneak this one by them by wrapping it up in Television wrapping paper and it does feel like the improbably link between Jerry Garcia and Tom Verlaine. Can you imagine the band they might have had together? The song was inspired by a duo show that Jason and I played in Austin at South By Southwest a few years ago. The rains nearly washed the show away before giving way to bright sunlight and some kind of low-grade epiphany that became this song. It’s all about transcendence; it’s all about breaking on through. It’s all about the other side.


CLOUD SPLITTER—I was going to call this “Jihadist Dream” but knew that was just looking for trouble. But it also might give some clue to this opaque pop tune. Animals tell us all kinds of things but they’re also sometimes an unreliable narrator, practical jokers, not always concerned with our best interests. Can we touch the sky? Maybe, just maybe—go ahead and give it a shot.


ST. MILLWOOD—Another song with an alternate title, “I Brought My Own Sorrow” which tells you all you need to know. Or maybe if I tell you that I had considered “Grief Tourism” as an album title, well you might get the idea. Or how about Emotional Ambulance Chasers? I’ve got a million of ‘em. Stephen McCarthy’s pedal steel work on this one brings me to tears every time.


ON THE MEND—Wrote this one in a Ljubljana hotel room, singing all of the various jam rock riffs into my tape recorder (a cassette, no less!) I think this song could have gone on for another 20 minutes and might do just that when we bring it to a stage near you. It’s a story I’ve told many times before—the dark side of recovery and rehabilitation but I’ve never set it to something that could have been a Dennis Coffey out-take. I’ve never played it live (which is true for almost every song on this record, actually) but if I was a betting man, I would bet on this being one of the highlights of the upcoming tour.


RIBBONS AND CHAINS—And ending it all on a happy note, the unexpected Hollywood Ending. It turns out that everything that rises really truly absolutely must resolve and it’s not necessarily a bad thing. For all of the desire to shape, mold, move, steer, deny and dissolve, you usually just end up where you started. With more miles, a few weathered cracks, a couple of jokes and the path and directions to begin the next circle or two.

Lifted from Steve's Facebook page

A Most Sunshiny Day

A truly magical and fascinating evening at Cecil Sharp House. Shirley Collins with Pip Barnes gave the multi-media presentation A Most Sunshiny Day. An exploration and survey of the folk movement from the end of the 19th Century to the present day. Photos of the old singers, the collectors, the classical composers who based works on traditional songs. Reflections on change and war and loss.

Poignant moments as Shirley sat in reverie listening to her younger voice and the accompaniment of her late sister Dolly on 'Gilderoy'. The beautiful The Banks Of Green Willows by George Butterworth, a great lost talent dead at 31 on the Somme.

Butterworth was a friend of Cecil Sharp and along with Maud and Karpeles sisters the four appear in this clip from 1912

Bookending the talk were performances from The Trembling Bells and Alasdair Roberts. The Bells on fine form played the so-far unreleased 'Just As The Rainbow' and 'Otley Rock Oracle' along with the still spine-chilling 'Adieu England' and an unaccompanied 'Seven Years A Teardrop' (just Alex and Lavinia). They were also joined by Mike Heron and his daughter for 'Feast Of Stephen'.

Alasdair Roberts was his usual marvellously lugubrious self. An intriguing new song, possibly called 'Song Composed In December' plus 'Golden Vanity', 'Waxwing', and 'Bonnie Susie Cleland. A fantastic performance of the last, though not a song designed to show the Scottish in a good light.

There's no discoverable version (by me) of 'Gilderay' by Shirley and Dolly Collins  (it's on 1978's For As Many As Will) but here's a version from Jim Moray.

Also present were The Belles Of London dancing the conclusion to Shirley's talk (seen below celebrating Shirley's birthday)