Wild swimming
If this is fool’s spring then I’m happy to be a fool. It’s been a long winter and now every flicker of warm breeze, and every minute that the sun sets a little later in the evening are desperately held bits of iconography that it’s nearly over. I have never been more keen to forego an hour of sleep.
This is a playlist for a a women’s-pond-prescription-sunglasses-flat-white-morning-walk-shoegaze-crossword-on-the-bus-bankrupting-yourself-on-ice-cream-Lloyd-Cole-pint-in-the-sun-[glass-of-wine-on-the-roof-]mayflies kind of spring. The kind of grey skies that are only teasing because you can see that they’ll burn off. To listen to when you’re the first one up and out, figuring out what kind of day it’s going to be, and when you’re turning your back on the Heath, sleepy with being in the sunshine and pretending that you didn’t underestimate how cold the evening can get. For both ends of longer days. It’s a lot of work for one little playlist to do, but I think it can.
Hi Chaos — Mogwai
The first two times I heard this on 6, walking down the hill next to Highgate wood, I nearly cried, which is when I figured I should investigate. This is from Mogwai’s latest album, Bad Fire, released this year. So far, that’s just about all I know, but I have a friend who raves about them, and they headlined the 6 music festival this weekend, so I’ve been doing some of my homework. People keep calling them an “international” or “global” band because so few of their songs rely on language to make the point, and that feels pretty intriguing — I’m keen to know more.
It’s Amazing To Be Young — Fontaines D.C.
Everything Fontaines D.C. are doing is excellent. There was a time when every song the Vaccines put out was like they’d anticipated what I, specifically, wanted to hear in a chronological discography and got together to work it out, and this is starting to feel a bit like that again.1
This one, they wrote “in the presence of” the guitarist Carlos O’Connell’s new baby. In a statement, they explained, “It sounded more like a lullaby or a music box then, but with the same lyric — ‘it’s amazing to be young’.”
I also love that they’re observing the important rituals of releasing music: the singles are brilliant, the radio campaigns are working, eventually a perfectly formed album follows, none of it has been sliced up or cut down to its thirty-second highlight, you just get one song and you enjoy it until you get another. The tour and summer of festival headlines follow, and all the while they’re just continuing to make great music — I think because of, and not around or in spite of, doing it by the old rituals.
This is Hardcore — Pulp
Read the Room — The Smile
Solar Power — Lorde
Come Over (Again) — Crawlers
The First Big Peel Thing — Arab Strap
I think this song is really fucking excellent and I feel almost unwell when I think about it being Arab Strap’s debut single. It revolves around a single weekend — and (apparently), this must be the weekend of June 15th and 16th, 1996, because the football score must (apparently) be the England vs Scotland match in the Euros that year — all of which is just right up my alley, time, space, moments of being, the whole nine yards, I doubt I’ll say it any better this time than any other time. As a programmatic statement, “The First Big Weekend” is a brilliant title, only made better by belonging to the album The Week Never Starts Around Here (days and weeks as well! A calendar!).
But then with this version you have a formula that Steve Lamacq called “the most perfect pop song ever”,2 but it can be bent and expanded and adapted to any important circumstances — this is “The First Big Peel Thing”, named for their session with John Peel. Lyrically it’s quite different — quite different weekends, no doubt — but equally strong. Against the John Peel context, though, the sound is richer, tighter — braver — and suddenly seems to blow their own outstanding debut single out of the water.
The Last Man on Earth — Wolf Alice
She’s Thunderstorms — Arctic Monkeys
Can’t edge towards summer without a bit of Suck It And See. With one exception, this album has this remarkable ability to be swaggering and tender all at once, and it totally bridges the gap between the streets of Sheffield and the dizzy heights of LA, a transition that it received very little credit for when everyone went a bit silly for AM. It manages this because the core of Suck It And See is actually the Submarine EP, which is some of Alex Turner’s most authentic work, nicely rolled up into “Piledriver Waltz”, which features on both.
“Love is a Laserquest”, the album’s tenth track, is so desperate, really, to be at the end of “everything will be ok in the end”. And there is a proper, effortless cool through “Reckless Serenade” (if, perhaps, a little confusing on its male gaze), and “Don’t Sit Down ‘Cause I’ve Moved Your Chair” and “That’s Where You’re Wrong” — a genuine cool, that necessarily had to exist in between the poles of polo shirts and trainers, and the the trying too hard air of AM. In fact, I am reminded by this research that this was Alex Turner’s quiffs and leather jackets era, which I was quite a fan of from the sidelines. But while almost the whole album earns its place, it’s the hazy, insistent call of “She’s Thunderstorms”’s opening guitar that evokes summer for me.
I wish they’d cut “Brick By Brick”, though.
Redbone — Childish Gambino
Life’s A Gas — T.Rex
Fairlies — Grian Chatten
Mayfly — Belle and Sebastian
The Scots are out in full force on this playlist, which probably gives quite a good idea of the kind of summer weather I anticipate these days.
Elephant — Jasmine 4.t
Are You Ready To Be Heartbroken? — Lloyd Cole and the Commotions
When I was seventeen and looking at universities, insisting to everyone that I would go to Edinburgh regardless of what I was offered, I first heard Lloyd Cole. His music is, therefore, inextricable from an anonymous vision of the future that is a living room with wooden floors and huge windows, sunlight pouring in, somewhere high above a city, all options, possibilities and timelines converging. This is presumably because Lloyd Cole and the Commotions formed at Glasgow University in 1982, and that’s precisely what they sound like (not dissimilar to the Belle and Sebastian thing, but less shy, fewer cardigans).
When I was seventeen and looking at universities, my mum and I flew Glasgow for the open day, stayed in an amazing hotel inside the train station and got the train across to Edinburgh for their open day the next day. One of my friends was doing exactly the same thing with her parents and we crossed paths at the University of Glasgow and then we had a fry-up somewhere near the University of Edinburgh the next day. Some time that weekend, or that year — near the event, as I remember it, all the same — she had discovered this song’s response, or its inverted reflection, perhaps: “Lloyd, I’m Ready To Be Heartbroken” by Camera Obscura. Whatever the timeline is, I remember it all feeling quite nicely circular, sort of like anything might happen for us, sort of like a Lloyd Cole song usually sounds.
Aw, Shoot — CMAT
Hard to put it better than this, but CMAT has embodied the “sad country song of a woman” genre dangerously well here, like she takes on everything with complete immersion. Her lyrics, and the concepts that drive them, are constantly witty. “Aw, Shoot” is wry and knowing, but in another sense it’s just about realising you’re totally apathetic, and bored, and out of ideas — “I put my jumper in the freezer just to find something to do”. I don’t know what her plans are for her upcoming album, Euro-Country, but fan speculation suggests that “Aw, Shoot” might not be on it, which would make the song that great and slightly rare thing: a standalone single, not put out as part of a larger idea but just because it was good and it deserved to be heard.
Song To The Siren — This Mortal Coil
Elizabeth Fraser is just ethereally wonderful, and everything she contributes to turns golden. Without getting my hopes up, I’d say that there’s a whiff of shoegaze in the air, demonstrated by the new releases across this playlist, and frankly, I think it would be nothing but respectful to call Fraser shoegaze’s First Lady.
This was recorded while she was still with the Cocteau Twins, because This Mortal Coil (which Wikipedia describes as the “4AD house band”, because it was put together by the label’s founder — I like that) is more like a revolving cast than a permanent fixture; there were only two official members. The whole This Mortal Coil concept is wonderfully intertwined with all sorts of different paths, references and intertexts, but perhaps this is its best fact: I don’t think it’s super common knowledge that “Song To The Siren” is a cover. Fraser lent her exceptional voice to the track in 1983. About a decade later, she had a relatively brief but intense relationship with Jeff Buckley. And it was none other than Buckley’s father, Tim, who wrote the original.
Quiet Heart — The Go-Betweens
American Teenager — Ethel Cain
I read somewhere that Ethel Cain regrets this song which makes a practical sense in the way that artists can get pigeonholed into one thing if they get very famous with one specific idea, and then it’s much harder to convince anyone when the next work is different. It’s safe to say that her follow up, Perverts, has been rather more divisive. But beyond this specific career problem, it’s hard to see what you could regret about pinning down a sort of state-of-the-nation-teenage-angst so clearly, even if you never intended to do it again. Thematically it reminds me a lot of American Pastoral which is hard not to love. To Cain’s surprise, this track, brimming with disillusionment for the current state of the American dream, made it on to one of Barack Obama’s regular cultural roundups.
There, There — Radiohead
Dandelion — Daughter
I’ll Try Anything Once (“You Only Live Once” demo) — The Strokes
I love demos, covers, b-sides, songs that aren’t quite songs, all of it. I suspect these are having a healthy existence at the moment, with the ways music is consumed on social media platforms, and I have definitely crossed paths with a lot of unreleased demos by the pop girls (I don’t know where fans are finding them, frankly). But all the same, I like it when they come packaged up in album form, something to do with finality of the finished product against the intimate scrappiness of its contents.
The Strokes have generously put a lot of them together on one album — this is, as it states, an early rendering of “You Only Live Once” from First Impressions of Earth. The same compilation also has several variants of “Last Nite” and some alternative recordings, at home and at Rough Trade. On Spotify it’s broken up into ten discs of two or three songs each, to demarcate A-side and B-side of the same single, for example — I don’t know if this exists physically, and if it does whether it comes with ten different CDs, but I’d like to think so.
While we’re in this territory, here’s another little bonus fragment from the Strokes, a tiny little thing — not even really a cover, it’s basically a tuning session. I don’t know if it was rehearsed although am happy to buy into the nonchalance of “we didn’t practice” if they’d like me to. I firmly believe that this ostensible disorganisation is all musicianship — recognising the comparable key of “Nothing Compares 2 U” and sliding into it for a second, slowing down one of the all time great pop songs until it’s almost, but not quite, too slow, to see how dark it can get — it’s the sort of thing you can only do if you really know your stuff. And I think it’s one of the best things the Strokes have ever done.
Brompton Oratory — Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
This is several layers less heavy than the average Nick Cave song, giving it a frankly sunny feeling as far as I’m concerned.
It’s lyrically beautiful, like, slightly blow you away beautiful, albeit more religious than I usually go for. Across the song, which can explain itself perfectly well, it doesn’t need me to do this for it, Cave crosses London to Brompton Oratory, a small church in South Kensington. He has an almost transcendental experience and then, in the song’s comparatively grounded final verse, he leaves the church — I always assume into the sunlight — and sits down on the stone steps out the front to come back down to earth.
According to the legendary Red Hand Files (which have not yet ruined any part of his process for me) it “marks the shift from the third-person narrative songwriting style of the first half of my career to the more personal, confessional approach that continues to this day”. I have this feeling that, even out of context of his own career, in a playlist or on the radio, you can hear the gravity of this shift, somehow every time. Without spoiling the song, I do feel like we should take one final line of context:
I wrote “Brompton Oratory” the morning after I had been unceremoniously defenestrated from what I thought was a rather special and groovy relationship, and in the high tragedy of the moment, I found myself seeking consolation in the Church of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, also known as Brompton Oratory.
Children of the Empire — Weyes Blood
Perfect Blue — Lloyd Cole and the Commotions
Industrial Love Song — These New Puritans, Caroline Polachek
Quite wonderfully, this song is about two cranes falling in love. That’s the machine of course, not the bird. It’s a duet between the two, one part attributed to Jack Barnett of These New Puritans, the other to Caroline Polachek, who has mastered everything from indie-sleaze to pastoral electronic to avant pop. According to Barnett, “they can’t touch (their movements are controlled by the operator), but when the sun rises they hope that their shadows will cross”, which is all a bit star-crossed lovers. He also declared that “as we exit the mechanical age, you realise how much we have in common with our machines, how human they are … Suddenly it didn’t feel so absurd to write a love song from their perspective”, setting some kind of playlist theme off in my own head, something that will no doubt contain a healthy portion of Public Service Broadcasting.
Coloratura — Coldplay
I’d like it on record that I’m cross to have found a Coldplay song that I don’t hate — not just that, but one that I’m going around recommending. I don’t really know what Coldplay are up to these days, but I fear if I wasn’t so stubborn3 I would actually like the swirly-whirly, colourful-eco-friendly-balloons vibe that I believe they’ve been cultivating. And indeed, I think “Coloratura” is a bit like being stuck inside a rainbow. It’s an almost unforgivable ten minutes long, but it passes in a series of musical phrases and arcs, like a good long song usually needs to (“I Am the Resurrection”, “Jesus of Suburbia”), and some of the best of it is about seven minutes in so you find the whole thing quite easy to sustain all of a sudden. I wonder if it would be best listened to while lying in a tall field — on a heath, perhaps — looking up at nothing but sky.
While we’re at here, you might like to know what I’ve been reading — in the TLS and the Literary Review
while I am the ideal Vaccines fan (love an indie disco and novelty sunglasses, fancy all of them), I am a bit nervous to see Fontaines live lol
you know, of course, that for John Peel the most perfect pop song ever was “Teenage Kicks”.
still holding a thirteen-year-long grudge against Mumford and Sons just for daring to do what they did