Rosa Walton and Jenny Hollingworth were just 17 when Let’s Eat Grandma released their debut I, Gemini. Childhood friends who grew up writing songs that, over time, emerged into something quite magical. Call it experimental sludge pop, bubblegum-psych rock, it was a marriage of magnificence and makeshift, with synths, saxophones, clapping games, recorders, and secured them sold out shows, critical acclaim, a spellbinding turn on Jools Holland; their audience drawn to the strange beauty of their music, to something compelling and otherworldly.
Two years on, and I’m All Ears is an even greater revelation: the most startling, infectious, innovative and thrilling record you’ll hear this year — alive with furious pop, unapologetic grandeur, intimate ballads; with loops, Logic, outrageous 80s drum solos, as well as production from David Wrench (The xx/Frank Ocean/Caribou) and SOPHIE (famed for her own material, as well as work with Madonna, Charli XCX, and Vince Staples) with Faris Badwan (HMLTD, The Horrors); an album that cements Let’s Eat Grandma as one of the most creative and exciting bands in the world right now.
I’m All Ears is not only the sound of a band diverging and finding their own identities, it is also the sound of two young musicians united afresh, bringing with them their individual loves, passions, experiences. It is a record, too, that is musically exceptional, lyrically remarkable, charged with wit and joy and tenderness. It is the kind of record after which everything changes.
Speedy Ortiz is back, The Fabulous front woman Sadie Dupuis has mastered the balance of playing familiar material from her band’s early catalog while letting what’s on the horizon shine. Speedy Ortiz performed twice during SXSW during the week, and while the setlists were different, each was book ended with ear candy from the excellent albums Foil Deer and Major Arcana albums, both are filled with gems, Sadie has a penchant for writing great songs like the triumphant “Lucky 88”—from the band’s upcoming newest and upcoming album Twerp Verse (out April 27 on Carpark). Always eclectically dressed and with an array of ornate headpieces, Dupuis is so delightful to see and hear live. She frequently loses herself in the bombastic music played by her band, but always maintains her presence onstage, to the point that you can feel her cycling through the thoughts and emotions of her intriguing songwriting.
Wire‘s first three albums are stone-cold, classics and it’s pretty amazing to think how far the band progressed in just three short years, from their 1977 minimal punk debut Pink Flag, to 1978’s angular, perfect Chairs Missing, to 1979’s the synth-embracing and at times Eno-esque 154. All three album should be any collection, and now they’re being reissued and remastered in new deluxe editions that Wire are releasing themselves, due out May 22nd as CD box sets and then June 22nd as single-disc CDs and vinyl LPs.
Wire’s first three albums need no introduction. They are the three classic albums on which Wire’s reputation is based. Moreover, they are the recordings that minted the post-punk form. This was adopted by other bands, but Wire were there first.
These seminal albums are now getting the definitive re-release treatment, in a format owners of the Silver/Lead and Change Becomes Us special editions will already be familiar with. Each album is presented as an 80-page hardback book – the size of a 7-inch, but obviously much thicker.
The boxes contain demos, radio sessions, live recordings, b-sides, alternate versions and more, not to mentions booklets containing new liner notes from the band, introductions by Jon Savage and rare photos that haven’t been seen for 40 years.. Pink Flag is a two disc set while Chairs Missing and 154 are three-disc sets.The bonus tracks will be exclusive to physical editions
Meanwhile Wire are releasing a singles box set for Record Store Day titled Nine Sevens. It features Wire’s six singles that were originally released on the Harvest label, one released on Rough Trade (1981’s non-LP “Our Swimmer”), and one single recorded in 1980 that was never released on 7″. There’s also the rare EP that came with initial copies of 154.
Both the album reissues are the singles box are all remastered from the original analogue source tapes with replicas of the original artwork. Check out the remaster of Wire’s often-covered “Outdoor Miner” (a single and on ChairsMissing):
Nadia Reid, who released one my favourite albums of 2017 with Preservation and who we named one of the best new artists of 2017, Nadia has debuted a new song, “The Other Side of the Wheel,” in a live session for New Zealand’s RNZ Music. It was filmed on a park bench in Nadia’s hometown of Port Chalmers, and it includes gorgeous nature footage and you can hear the native birds chirping in the background. The song is just Nadia with an acoustic guitar, but it immediately registers as music just as strong as the more fleshed-out material on Preservation.
Watch Ty and The Freedom Band rip their cover of Hot Chocolate’s “Every 1’s a Winner” and their own weirdly funky “Despoiler Of Cadaver” on ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live.’ Both tracks from his just-released 10th album, Freedom’s Goblin. You don’t see a lot of crowd surfing on late night talk shows, but it happens here. Watch both performances below.
If you haven’t checked out Freedom’s Goblin yet, it’s easily Ty’s most ambitious album yet, and biggest, clocking in at 85 minutes over 19 tracks, which used to be enough for at least two of his albums if not three. Like a lot of double albums it’s a little all-over-the-place but there’s a lot to love as well.
Ty Segall performs Every1’s a Winner on Jimmy Kimmel Live
Jimmy Kimmel serves as host and executive producer of Emmy-winning “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” ABC’s late-night talk show. “Jimmy Kimmel Live” is well known for its huge viral video successes with 5.6 billion views on YouTube alone.
Ty Segall performs Despoiler of Cadaver on Jimmy Kimmel Live
On June 8th, Snail Mail—which is Lindsey Jordan’s brainchild but performs as a quartet—will release their debut album, Lush, via Matador Records. Now out of high school and pursuing music full time, Jordan still isn’t sure about all the attention, but she’s definitely sure of herself. In her recent interview , she spoke honestly about recording Lush, her identity as an openly gay woman, and how she’s changed her approach to making music now that so many people are listening. Despite the hype—which she admits has forced her to “grow up” and sometimes puts her in a “really weird place”—she is smart, capable and fully in control. “I didn’t care if anybody heard [my music] before,” she said. “Now I don’t really care how people take it, but I do care what I feel about the music that I’m putting out.”
At 18, most people are applying to colleges, falling in and out of first love, still figuring out how they see the world—and how they see themselves. Lindsey Jordan is doing all that, but she’s also playing in her band, Snail Mail.
After coming out of the Baltimore underground scene, where her allies included Washington, D.C. punk mainstays Priests and her guitar teacher, Mary Timony (of Helium and Ex Hex fame), Jordan released the first Snail Mail EP, Habit,
Arriving in the early months of 2017, Bonny Doon’s self-titled debut was a warm introduction to the Detroit quartet for many. Hazy and bright, the album’s woozy melodies and swirling webs of summery guitar textures were easily ingested as low-key slacker pop, blissfully awash in lo-fi sensibilities and dreamy ambiance. But the nonchalant breeziness belied a serious attention to songcraft that beckoned careful listening, and hinted at depths yet unexplored. Lo and behold, before the ink was even dry on the first record, work had already begun on its follow-up “Longwave,” a conscious about-face from the sonic experimentation of the first album, and a journey inward.
Opting for spontaneity and simplicity over the exploration of layers and textures that defined the first record, the band architected an incredibly intimate sound for these new songs. The album was tracked with minimal overdubs or production flourishes, constructing a frame that is spare and understated. The songs on Longwave amble through moonlit fields of melancholy guitar leads and self-reflection, the collection unfolding almost as one uninterrupted conversation with self. The session aimed to capture the band at their essence. With the superfluous stripped away, a gentle but steadfast spiritual core is revealed as the backbone of Bonny Doon’s cosmic American music
In December 2012, three members of Fleetwood Mac cried together, in public, at the memory of something that had happened all of 25 years previously. Singer Stevie Nicks, guitarist Lindsey Buckingham and drummer Mick Fleetwood were doing a round of media interviews to announce the band’s 2013 tour when they were asked about the events of 1987, when Buckingham quit the band following the release of the album “Tango In The Night.”
Tango In The Night was released on April 13th, 1987. The first single from the album, “Big Love“, was already a Top 10 hit on both sides of the Atlantic, It was their fourteenth studio album,
Buckingham did not respond directly to the interviewer. Instead he turned to Nicks and Fleetwood and reiterated his reasons for leaving the group at a critical stage of their career: foremost among them, his sense that Nicks and Fleetwood had lost their minds and souls to drugs.
“What Lindsey said in that interview was very moving,” Fleetwood says. “He told us: ‘I just couldn’t stand to see you doing what you were doing to yourselves. You were so out of control that it made me incredibly sad, and I couldn’t take it any more.’ It was really powerful stuff. This was someone saying: ‘I love you.’ It hit Stevie and me like a ton of bricks. And we all cried, right there in the interview.”
It was a moment that Mick Fleetwood still describes as “profound”. But even after all these years, his memories of that time in 1987 are still raw. For when Lindsey Buckingham walked out on Fleetwood Mac, he did not go quietly. When Buckingham told the band he was leaving, it led to a blazing argument that rapidly escalated into a physical altercation between him and former lover Nicks, in which she claimed she feared for her life.
“It is,” Fleetwood says, “a pretty wild story. It was a dangerous period, and not a happy time.” And yet, for all the drama that came with it, “Tango In The Night” was a hugely important album for Fleetwood Mac. It became the second biggest-selling album of their career, after 1977’s 45-million-selling “Rumours“.
In 1985, Lindsey Buckingham was writing and recording songs for what was planned as his third solo album. Fleetwood Mac had been on indefinite hiatus since 1982, following a world tour in support of their album “Mirage“. In that time there had been solo albums from all three singers: Nicks’ The Wild Heart sold a million copies; Christine McVie’s eponymous album yielded a US Top 10 hit with Got A Hold On Me; but, to Buckingham’s chagrin, his album Go Insane had not made the Top 40.
There had also been problems for them over these years. Nicks had been treated for drug addiction. More surprisingly, Mick Fleetwood had been declared bankrupt following a string of disastrous property investments. “At that time,” Buckingham later admitted, “the group had become a bit fragmented.”
By the end of ’85, Buckingham – working alone at his home studio in Los Angeles – had three songs finished: Big Love, Family Man and Caroline. But while he was busy making music, Mick Fleetwood was busy making plans to get the band back on track.
The wheels had been set in motion when Christine McVie recorded a version of the Elvis Presley hit Can’t Help Falling In Love for the filmA Fine Mess – backed by Mick Fleetwood and the band’s other remaining founding member, her ex-husband John McVie. She invited Buckingham to produce, alongside engineer Richard Dashut.
“It was the first time for nearly five years that we’d all been in a working environment together,” Christine said. “We had such a good time in the studio and realised that we still had something to give each other in musical terms after all.” Mick Fleetwood was more forthright. “The reality,” he says, “is that Fleetwood Mac were intending to make an album. And Lindsey was in many ways pressured into it. ‘Hey, we’re making an album – let’s go!’”
Buckingham relented, partly out of a sense of duty. “I had a choice,” he said, “of either continuing on to make the solo record, or to sort of surrender to the situation and try and make it more of a family thing. I chose the latter.” What Fleetwood didn’t know is that Buckingham’s agreement was conditional. “I had the idea,” Buckingham said, “that that was going to be the last work with the group.”
The biggest problem for Lindsey Buckingham was, of course, Stevie Nicks. “I’ve known Stevie since I was 16 years old,” he said. “I was completely devastated when she took off. And yet I had to make hits for her, So on one level I was a complete professional in rising above that, but there was a lot of pent-up frustration and anger towards Stevie in me for many years.”
“He got very angry with me,” Nicks has said. “He tossed a Les Paul across the stage at me once and I ducked and it missed me. A lot of things happened because he was so angry at me.” Buckingham’s frame of mind was not helped by the not inconsiderable success that Nicks enjoyed in her solo career. In 1981, her solo debut, “Bella Donna“, went to No.1 in US. Other hit albums and singles followed. Buckingham’s solo records sold next to nothing.
For all that, Buckingham threw himself into the album. He either wrote or co-wrote seven of the 12 tracks that made the finished album. He also acted as co-producer with Richard Dashut. And it was at his home studio that most of the recording was done.
What was unusual about the recording of Tango In The Night was the absence of Stevie Nicks for much of the process. Nicks actually contributed three songs to the album, but was in the studio for only two to three weeks.
One trick of Buckingham’s, in Big Love, was especially brilliant. For the song’s climax, he used variable speed oscillators on his voice to create the effect of a male and female in a state of sexual excitement – the “love grunts”, as he called them.
“It was odd that so many people wondered if it was Stevie on there with me,” he said, a little disingenuously. Although there were other great songs on the album – slick pop rock tunes in the classic Fleetwood Mac style, such as Christine’s “Little Lies” and “Everywhere”, and Stevie’s “Seven Wonders” Fleetwood calls Tango In The Night “Lindsey’s album”. But for Buckingham himself, there was a sense that in the transition from solo album to band album, something had been lost. A perfectionist, intensely analytical, he felt that Tango In The Night was too predictable, too safe.
“She was not hugely present,” Fleetwood says. “I don’t remember why. And I don’t think we would remember. Fleetwood says that he and Nicks were doing more cocaine during the making of “Tango” than when they were recording “Rumours” an album on which they seriously considered thanking their drug dealer in the credits.
“Certainly, I smoked a lot of pot. But I was never a big user of coke,” Buckingham adds.
“Actually,” he admits, “it was way worse on “Tango In The Night.” For sure.”
While Tango was being recorded at his home, he found a way of keeping the two cokeheads – plus assorted hangers-on – at a safe distance.
“Lindsey had a Winnebago put in his driveway,” Fleetwood says. “And that’s where Stevie and I would go with our wrecking crew. With me, the party never stopped. It wasn’t until years later that I asked him: ‘What was all that about?’ And he said: ‘I couldn’t stand having you punks in the house. You’d turn up at the studio with people that you’d met from the night before, and you’d start gooning around. You were too fucking crazy.’ Lindsey was never a drama queen, enjoying the 80s drug culture like Stevie and me. It wasn’t his scene.
The drug taking was only one part of the problem. There were other things eating away at Buckingham.
Just as Rumours had done in the 70s, so Tango In The Night defined the soft rock era of the 80s. Perhaps most significant of all, it marked the third coming of the Mac, following the successes of the Peter Green-led blues rock Mac of the late 60s and the Buckingham/Nicks-fronted AOR The the Mac of the 70s. And for Mick Fleetwood, it represented a personal triumph. Mick Fleetwood is not sure it is simple coincidence that Fleetwood’s two biggest-selling albums, “Rumours” and “Tango In The Night”, were made when the band was at its most dysfunctional. “Also,” he says, “I’m not sure I should be so proud of it.”
While he freely admits that his own drug-fuelled insanity was instrumental in Lindsey Buckingham’s exit, it was Fleetwood who kept the band together once Buckingham had gone. And this was key to the success of “Tango In The Night“. In the 90s, Buckingham re-joined Fleetwood Mac, and, more importantly, made his peace with Stevie Nicks. They have both come a long way since that dark day in 1987: Buckingham now married and a father of three, Nicks happily drug-free. All that remains between them is what Mick Fleetwood calls “the good stuff”.
“My motto” Fleetwood says, “was ‘the show must go on’. It was almost an obsessive-compulsive desire to not give up. And it worked.”
Beautiful Days 2018 line-up includes Manic Street Preachers, Shed Seven, Levellers, Suzanne Vega, Calexico, Vintage Trouble, Richard Thompson, Gogol Bordello, Feeder, The Wildhearts, Jazzie B and loads more!
Theme is ‘A Riot of Colour’
