It’s the last Friday on wordpress.com before the move on Monday to tenpercent.org.uk and just in the nick of time the decision as to the theme of the blog has been reached. It was not easy, there were some long nights, vinyl rummaging and acts of terror. It’s been a hard fought battle and the path here is littered with the very excellent choices that didn’t quite make it, maybe next year. The decision invigilated by an international committee of Nobel laureates and also people who aren’t war criminals, was made infinitely harder by the fact that the blog has two theme tunes…at least. First, it has made a Friday before but it endures, it abides, as I said then-
It forms some of the parameters of my soul.
Karl Hyde’s poetry is so evocative yet pleasingly playful with ambiguity yet you know just what he means, you identify with the experience that is both recounted in the track and is the track itself, the shards of memory, images, thoughts, feelings, flashing through the track resonate (pun!) with my own long memories of eternal summers on Welsh beaches and more contemporary sensations.
walking in the wind at the water’s edge
come closer covering my rubber feet
listening to the barbed wire, hanging
The rhythm and mantra like revelations within the lyric enriching your own understanding of even everyday speech and meaning, the need and frustration to communicate that is both aided and hindered by language.
sugarbox sugarboy handheld candle sugarboy
your rails your thin your thin paper wings
And the reason why wandered-in-from-the-wild-as-a-kitten Mogwai’s middle name is Juanita.
homeless strays gathering outside your window
bootleg babies call to you
lying amongst the mosquitoes
this summer fever’s coming
The music’s a twisting turning epic under the genius of Rick (excellent name, obviously) Smith and grooves wrestled (at the time) by Darren Emerson. At times muscular, then quiet, loud, large having and transcendent, it’s a love song -sometimes- for people, places and feelings as its final movement in the original triptych suggests –Juanita/Kiteless/To Dream of Love, it is music made of the mysterious matter that makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts. There are many versions, this is a live one from the Everything Everything release, each have their differences and all continually reveal new aspects, new collisions of rhythm, melody and language.
resonator resonator resonator resonator
Juanita/Kiteless
And, Everybody Knows by Leonard Cohen, perhaps a controversial choice in light of his non boycotting by playing in Israel, but I can disagree with the decision yet admire the art and after all it is a tactic not an ideology, plus it’s a corking song. Perhaps a theme of ennui for the world weary cynicism of the thwarted romantic and idealist and also maybe holds a special place for those of a certain age when Pump Up The Volume came out. It gets covered quite often and the conceit of the lyric does lend itself to newer iterations as every age finds new lies, hypocrisies and crises that are lied about, which of course is all over now…
OK, now I’ve got it to those two I find that intolerable and want to add loads more, dammit!
Ten Percent 