Vinyl Reckoning

Demand for new music on vinyl is on the increase: it has been steadily rising over recent years and sales are now back to their 1997 level, helped in part by April’s annual Record Store Day, when special vinyl releases by bands are much sought after. There may have been over a million vinyl sales last year but it still only accounts for 2% of the music market. Whoever the buyers are, it is still a niche area: I am sure there are some diehards who have never stopped buying vinyl and others who have returned to it; and there are undoubtedly younger music fans, raised on digital and not having known music in a physical form, who are responding to the retro appeal of records and turntables.

Even though I still listen to vinyl, I am not part of this new revolution. The sad pedant in me likes to keep my music collection compartmentalised: I have a strict line in the sand for when vinyl ended. I resisted the CD revolution of the mid-1980s and persisted with records until the early 90s when they became an increasingly marginalised format. The difficulty of finding new releases on vinyl made me finally relent. The last two vinyl albums in my chronologically arranged collection are The End of the Surrey People by Vic Godard and Sabresonic by the Sabres of Paradise. This dates my vinyl surrender to 1993 - when I made the switch to cassettes. This was just bloody-mindedness on my part and clearly did not last long as the first CD I bought was Dummy by Portishead, released in 1994. And it didn’t help that I had most of the cassettes stolen when my car got nicked. So, I have a strict format divide when buying music: anything released in 1993, or earlier, I have to buy on vinyl; anything released in 1994, or later has to be on CD.

Having been very briefly tempted by the digital age, I have chosen to shun iTunes and Spotify and I buy all my new music on CD from the wonderful Music's Not Dead shop in Bexhill; but I have never stopped trawling through the racks of charity shops and - increasingly rarely - second-hand record establishments to fill in those pre-94 gaps. Whether through sentimentality or regret, I have spent a reasonable amount of time over the last fifteen years hunting down a mental list of vinyl albums that I never bought at the time or, more usually, that I had but they fell from my clutches - either stolen, lost or sold.

When I was a young person, albums were a fluid currency, a commodity to be pawned: if you needed a few quid quickly, second-hand record shops, where you could sell a couple of albums, were legion. There were many gigs that I attended in the 70s and 80s that were funded by the proceeds of hastily sold albums. More often than not, I would pick up another second-hand copy a few weeks later; but some slipped through the net and over recent years I rectified this when I stumbled across copies of albums such as Raw Power, The Image Has Cracked and Soul Mining. The list is a lot shorter now but it still contains the first Roxy Music album, the New York Doll's Too Much Too Soon, Two Sevens Clash by Culture (how many levels of idiocy was I operating on the day I sold that one?) and The Pogues' Rum, Sodomy and the Lash. I am sure I could buy these over the internet at a click but that's not the point. It would deprive me of going to places like The Vinyl Frontier in Eastbourne.

Recently relocated from the Old Town area to the Little Chelsea quarter of Eastbourne, The Vinyl Frontier specialises in new, used and rare vinyl. In spacious and light-filled premises with a cafe area at the back, the shop boasts a large stock of used vinyl for the dedicated browswer. With rare time to spare before collecting the kids from sporting activities, I spent a glorious half an hour on Saturday morning rack-flicking. There was nothing from my mental list but I was tempted by Elvis Costello's My Aim is True, an LP I never bought at the time on the grounds that he wasn't "punk enough". That was until I saw a copy of Eden, Everything But The Girl's sumptuous debut album. I recalled playing that LP to death in a grotty South London flat throughout 1984 but didn't seem to possess it anymore. Then I remembered: I lost custody of all the Everything But The Girl albums at the closing of a former life, along with many others. Now, there's a whole new excuse to search for old vinyl...

The Vinyl Frontier is at 35, Grove Road, Eastbourne, East Sussex BN21 4TT.

Soul Music

I bought my tickets to see Sleaford Mods months before their gig in Brighton on Friday night: I was so excited and intrigued to see the Nottingham band whose most recent two albums I had been endlessly playing since I started to hear about them last year. Words seem to experience a rare inadequacy when it comes to describing their music but I’ll give it a go: sparse, frantic punk/hip-hop beats overlaid with splenetic, socially observant, potty-mouthed lyrics delivered in a rapid-fire East Midlands accent. Vocalist Jason Williamson has produced half a dozen albums since he became disillusioned with guitar music in 2007, the last three – Wank, Austerity Dogs and Divide and Exit - with sampler/musician Andrew Fearn. And at Concorde 2, their stripped-down sound is reflected in their stage set-up: laptop on a flight case; mike and stand.

When they take the stage and launch into their set, the atmosphere is electric and the pace relentless. For each song, Fearn presses ‘go’ on the laptop and then stands back swaying to the rhythm, swigging a beer and grinning as Williamson sprays machine-gun lyrics at the audience. And what lyrics: to say that Jason Williamson thinks modern life is rubbish, and that everyone and everything is a target, is an understatement; he writes from his own experiences, disappointments and frustrations. This on middle management: “middle men/the metropolis of discontent and broken dreams/red and orange lights and old men”; and on the acceptance of dead-end work, “I got a job/I rot away in the aisles of the Co-op, mate, no prob”. But it is not just the more prosaic aspects of life that Williamson rages against. There is more pointedly political social commentary: “Cameron’s hairdresser got an MBE/ I said to my wife you better shoot me/It’s all gone wrong”. If the self-importance of jumped-up jobsworths make daily life a trial, the managers at the top are just as self-serving.

Most of the set is taken from the last two albums but there are a few tracks from new album, Key Markets. After one, Bronx In A Six, that ends in a stream of profanities, Williamson observes, “a bit intense that, not much of a party tune, not like this one”, before launching into Tiswas. And it strikes me at that point, coming in the middle of a run of stand-out tracks – A Little Ditty, McFlurry, Fizzy, Tied Up In Nottz – how uplifting these songs can be. The audience is certainly lifted: there is a lot of singing along and a frantic moshpit down the front. At one point, Williamson berates someone in the audience for swearing; “just because we swear don’t mean you have to; this is our job”. When Williamson jokingly mistakes which city they are in, it’s a sign of how hard they work at this job: they have been gigging non-stop for pretty much a year now. When the final number, Tweet Tweet Tweet, opens with, “I get a shaky start to Tuesday/sweat stains on bus windows/I don't want to ruin my coat/But that’s just the way it goes”, it is a reminder of the banality of the nine to five daily grind.

Sleaford Mods’ music is innate, visceral, it comes from the gut, the heart, the soul and it is tremendous. And occasionally, you get a glimpse of Williamson’s belting, soulful voice from his days in more traditional bands. But this is now; it’s like Picasso doing all those orthodox figurative drawings and then saying, “hold on; this is how I see people and the world” (I am conscious that I have just referenced Picasso and I am in danger of disappearing down the rabbit hole or up my own…). Nothing can prepare you for how good these blokes are: I had read recommendations, listened to the albums, watched footage. But seeing them live is altogether different; they are breath-taking. There is something perversely pure about their sound and performance. There is nobody like Sleaford Mods. No comparisons suffice but, if pushed, I would say it is like Crass smashing into Kraftwerk on an A road between Derby and Detroit.

Inevitably, Sleaford Mods have their critics but for any detractors there are many more admirers. Anyway, I would rather take Iggy Pop’s word than Noel Gallagher’s. Sleaford Mods remind you what music can be like when you’re young (oh, the irony: the pair are in their early forties), when you have original ideas, when everything doesn’t get bent to fit someone else’s template, someone else’s formula, someone else’s set of rules. Fuck that.

Key Markets, Sleaford Mods' new album, is released on 10th July.

Grassroots

So, there I was, two weeks before the general election, getting excited about the opinion polls for the eight East Sussex seats. Set to buck the south-east Tory trend, the county was on-course to be a multi-coloured ribbon of red, yellow, blue and green. The reality, of course, was different: the Lib Dems lost Lewes and Eastbourne - curiously the electorate rewarded the Tories for downgrading maternity services and closing A & E in this town - and Labour failed to take Hastings and Brighton Kemptown. The only bright spots were Labour winning Hove and the Greens holding on to Brighton Pavilion. Otherwise, East Sussex is as blue as the rest of southern England.

It’s not all bad, though. Labour came second in the seat of Mid Sussex, Nicholas Soames' fiefdom covering the West Sussex area around Haywards Heath and East Grinstead. This may seem like the sound of straws being clutched at, but Labour has been a distant third in every general election since the seat’s creation in 1974; this result is seismic. It has made me realise that, for any left-leaning person, if Cameron’s lazy Thatcherism is to be truly opposed, only Labour can do it. It is a broad church, other anti-Tory parties are not: the Green Party has barely broken out of single issue politics and, whilst smaller parties on the left are excellent at local campaigning, their electoral performance is a token. A friend in Gloucestershire told me he realised, as he campaigned unsuccessfully for Labour to re-take the seat of Stroud that was lost in 2010, that any anti-Tory position other than Labour is a luxury: we cannot afford to argue the purity of our political positions whilst people are victims of the bedroom tax, cuts in council services and the tearing apart of the hard-fought-for social safety net.

However, it wasn’t the hope of the Mid Sussex result that made me finally re-join Labour, the party I have always voted for, was active in in London during the 1980s but was last a member of in the 1990s: I filled out my application before the recent elections. I had been questioning the terms of my political engagement for a while - thinking of not voting, having faith only in trade unions, flirting with the Greens – but when the notice of candidates for the local district council elections was posted in my area, it became apparent that in a large number of the 35 wards there was little democracy on offer. In my own ward there was a choice between the existing Tory councillor and a UKIP challenger; there were similarly limited options elsewhere and, in a few wards, sitting councillors were standing for re-election unopposed. Labour fielded candidates in only 15 wards, mostly in towns, and the Greens only 7. How can this be allowed to happen, we cried, throwing up our hands? Well, we had allowed it to happen. If there is no alternative political activism at the grassroots in the countryside, there can be no alternative in the democratic process. Two quotations were running through my mind when I went to the polling station to spoil my district council ballot paper: the writer David Runciman’s aphorism, “only politics can save you from bad politics” and Podemos' leader Pablo Inglesias’ observation that, “if the citizens don’t get involved in politics, others will”. It was time to stop pontificating and get active.

We are now trying to build a Labour Party branch in my village – seven members and counting – with the modest aim of making sure there is always a Labour candidate on ballot papers. More importantly, it is vital that other views are always heard, even in these conservative rural areas, and that people are reminded there is only one political party wedded to the founding principles of our fair and modern society: the NHS, comprehensive state education, affordable homes and employment rights.

Tender is the Day

The night after the General Election, only strong drink and loud, angry music was going to help me. After a diet of The Cramps, Crass and Public Image’s spectacular Theme on heavy rotation, I think I lapsed into a coma in the wee hours having finally forgotten that it was the start of, in Ken Livingstone’s words, “five more years of pure evil”.

Despite waking to the Sleaford Mods’ image of "the Prime Minister's face hanging in the clouds like Gary Oldman's Dracula", Saturday had a silver lining in the prospect of an in-store performance by Rozi Plain at the greatest record shop on the south coast, Music’s Not Dead.

Fresh from a Marc Riley session, a 6 Music Album of the Day accolade and a full band tour, Rozi had arrived solo in Bexhill on her way to a supporting Anna Calvi at Brighton Dome. Specialising in modern folk songs of reflective acceptance, her tender guitar playing and delicate vocals were the perfect balm for the soul after a night of discordant rage.

In a five song set that included three – Actually, Best Team, Jogalong - from her new album, Friend, Rozi demonstrated the versatility that enables her to be an incredibly confident solo performer and a member of close friend Kate Stables’ band, This Is The Kit. And with both acts performing at my festival of choice this summer - Green Man – I think that, come August, I might have got over the election result.

Drinking and Disaster

When John Bramwell introduces two songs in a row as being about “drinking…and disaster” it raises a big laugh from the audience at Concorde 2 in Brighton on Friday night; but it occurs to me that it would be the perfect title for the next I Am Kloot album. Drinking is important in the Kloot world - either in songs, on stage or off it - but there is nothing disastrous about it from the point of view of those of us who appreciate the brilliance of this band.

The opening lines of To The Brink are a dark joy: “Do you fancy a drink?/I know a place called the brink/Do you want to go there?” And despite running the risk of getting too serious, the lyrics stand up to close analysis: “They’ve got no rule of thumb/So on the counter I strum/With my fingers”. The rhyme and consonance of “thumb” and “strum” is purely poetic, and the close proximity of “thumb” and “fingers” is sublime. He further evokes the experience of the solitary drinker in the crowd with the lines, “I would like to stay with you/But I leave alone”; and when he repeats the refrain, but exchanges “stay” and “leave”, the effect is heart-breaking. It is for this reason that I Am Kloot are more highly rated by their peers than music consumers: Pete Doherty has said that Bramwell is one of the most talented songwriters in the country and Guy Garvey has proclaimed the band to be the most underrated in Britain.

The last time I saw I am Kloot in Brighton, they had just released their sixth studio album, Let It All In, and the songs on the night were largely taken from that and, previous album, Sky at Night. But Friday night’s set was drawn from all six studio albums and even included 1999’s debut single, To You, and This House Is Haunted, from the John Peel Sessions LP. Bramwell tells a Peelesque personal anecdote about having to pull over to the side of the road in his car because he was so overcome by the song he was listening to – which was, of course, his own This House Is Haunted. If this sounds egotistical, it is not; Bramwell‘s self-deprecating humour about his own immodesty is charming.

The first part of the set, with Bramwell on electric guitar, displays the rockier side of the band: Cuckoo and Life In A Day, from their eponymously-titled second album, are followed by the title track from the follow-up, Gods and Monsters. But then electric is swapped for acoustic and, after the customary solo spot to allow for no-longer-sedentary bassist Pete Jobson and drummer Andy Hargreaves to have a fag break, we are in to middle-period I Am Kloot with Someone Like You and Ferris Wheels from the Play Moolah Rouge album. Ferris Wheels strikes me as the consummate Kloot song, with all their favourite motifs present: shooting stars, satellites, stars at night and, of course, the sky.

When I last saw the band live, they were augmented to a six-piece; but tonight it is just the core trio and the audience are called upon to help with some of the arrangements. We are rubbish at being accordions earlier in the set but by the time the evening is nearing its close, we are great at being trumpets on Northern Skies. And when they encore with Twist - possibly my favourite - and Proof, we are fully committed to shared vocal duties.

'Hold Back the Night: I Am Kloot Live', has just been released on Walk Tall Recordings.

The Changing Landscape

Look at the political map of south-east England, outside of London, and it is a sea of blue. There have been times when there were splodges of other colours, but currently you would have to squint to pick out the tiny dots where there is anything other than Conservative representation in the House of Commons. Of the eight constituencies in East Sussex, five are currently held by the Tories but, in an outcome that will probably mirror our fractured national electoral picture, this is set to change in two weeks' time.

There are two constituencies that cover large, mainly rural areas – Wealden and Bexhill & Battle –and these are typical Tory territory. They have returned Conservative MPs since the dawn of time and that is unlikely to change this year. The odious UKIP polled well in these areas in local and European elections last year but, with large majorities, the Tories should see off any challenge even if UKIP make a sizeable dent in their vote. The Liberal Democrats came second in both seats last time but may see the rise in popularity of the Greens in these areas translate into votes at their expense.

Two of those tiny dots on the map are yellow and represent the neighbouring seats of Lewes and Eastbourne. Lewes was won narrowly by Liberal Democrat Norman Baker in 1997, ending a long line of Tory MPs, and he has held it since with a reasonable majority. Baker is a popular MP locally and has always benefitted from a massive anti-Tory tactical vote; but the radical spirit of many Lewesians view his participation as a minister in the Tory-led coalition government as heresy; the Green Party is hoping to capitalise.

Eastbourne became a Liberal Democrat seat more recently. In 2010, Stephen Lloyd defeated the Tory incumbent by a majority of over 3,000 in a constituency the Conservatives are desperate to win back next month. When there was a major fire on Eastbourne pier last summer, Cameron and Osbourne were helicoptered in the next day with a bag of cash for refurbishment.

Of the four urban seats in East Sussex – three in Brighton and Hove, one for Hastings & Rye – all bar one are currently held by the Tories. Caroline Lucas is the only Green dot on the political map: she represents Brighton Pavilion with a slim majority but may feel some fallout from the unpopularity – transport policies, 2013’s bin strike – of the Green-run city council. I have always been impressed by Lucas: she has been the only MP to appear at local teachers’ strike rallies and has spoken eloquently and passionately against the Tories’ ideological assault on comprehensive education. All four of these constituencies are held with majorities of under 2,000 and are in the top 30 of Labour’s target seats.

With an excellent local candidate in Sarah Owen, opinion polls suggest that Labour will take Hastings and win two of the three Brighton seats: Lucas will survive but the Conservatives will lose Brighton Kemptown and Hove. Hove is something of a bellwether seat: since 1979, whichever party has won there has formed the government. In 1997, on hearing that Labour had taken Hove, Tony Blair became convinced that the Tories had finally been defeated.

Current polling also suggests that Lewes and Eastbourne will re-elect their current MPs and, if this is correct, come 7th May, East Sussex will have one of the most politically diverse landscapes in the south-east: 3 Labour MPs, 2 Conservative, 2 Liberal Democrat and 1 Green.

This may still not represent everyone: speaking recently of his “emotional attachment to a Labour Party that no longer exists”, the writer Irvine Welsh reminded me of my own dilemma. The Trade Union and Socialist Coalition (TUSC), an alliance launched by the late Bob Crow, most reflect my views but are fielding a candidate in only one East Sussex seat and that is, sadly, not where I live. Thanks to Nick Clegg not holding out for a referendum on proportional representation as his thirty pieces of silver, my vote in one of those large rural constituencies will be irrelevant. But I still don’t know whether to follow my emotional attachment or support those who most resemble what Labour used to be, the only anti-austerity party I can vote for: The Green Party.

Vive le Rock!

Thanks to the wonder of the world wide web, it is possible to carbon date the events and context of your earlier life with precision. Popular culture of the past is catalogued by a legion of obsessives who have documented the detail and minutiae of any niche area you care to investigate. Punk gigs are particularly well-served: enter the words “The Slits” and “Croydon” into a search engine and it reminds me that I saw them support Siouxsie and the Banshees on 9th October 1977 at the Greyhound; google “Buzzcocks Woolwich” and I realise that I was at Thames Poly on a Saturday night in March 1978; search “The Ruts Nashville Rooms” and I know that it was on 6th November 1978 that fighting between punks and skinheads made it one of the most terrifying gigs I have been to. Trying to pin down exactly when I saw Adam and the Ants at the Marquee in Soho’s Wardour Street proved a little difficult, however. I know it was either late 1977 or early 1978, but the Adam Ant website informs me that the band played the Marquee fourteen times in 12 months during those two years.

If I cannot remember or pin down the date of the gig, what I can recall is how theatrical and electrifying the performance was. The slow bass-heavy start of opening song Plastic Surgery was sung by Adam Ant from the dressing room behind the stage, his snow-white tanned face only emerging as the song burst into life. And with Sex Pistol acolyte Jordan as part of the set-up, and songs such as Deutscher Girls, Whip in My Valise and Beat My Guest sung by a leather-trousered and bare-chested Adam, the sense of a band pushing the boundaries of punk even further was inescapable. Along with Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Ants were unsigned to a record label at the time and they both eschewed the ram-a-lam-a sound that punk was quickly developing into in favour of doomy bass, icy guitars and a pop sensibility. This made them the two most exciting bands around at the tail end of ’77. The writer Stuart Maconie identifies Joy Division as being the first band about which the term ‘gothic’ was used in the music press; but he acknowledges that 80s' Goth undoubtedly began with the Banshees. I would say that Adam and the Ants, with their heavy S&M image, contributed just as much.

Whereas the Banshees signed a long-term deal with Polydor and immediately began a chart career with top ten hit Hong Kong Garden in the summer of 1978, Adam and the Ants released an unsuccessful one-off single on Decca, the puzzling and twee, Young Parisians. Although some of the live favourites were recorded for John Peel sessions, and Whip In My Valise cropped up on the B side of 1979 single Zerox, by the time I saw them play the Lyceum Ballroom that year there were new favourites: Car Trouble, Physical, Kick. But when the band released their debut album on independent label Do It in November 1979, only one of these songs was included and none of the early songs had survived. One number from the set of the Marquee gigs - Dirk Wears White Sox – was present as the title of the LP but absent as a song. The album received a lukewarm critical response and there was certainly a sense amongst many that Adam Ant had missed his moment. Although this was to be proven wrong (the events of the following year – the discovery of Burundi drumming, theft of the band by Malcom McLaren and Bow Wow Wow, reinvention as native American dandy pirate highwayman, world domination - are legendary) there has always been a sense that the wider world has been deprived of the pre-Prince Charming Adam and the Ants.

Which is why the first date, in Brighton last night, of a dozen gigs billed as ‘Performing Dirk Wears White Sox’ was such a joy. Sandwiched between a faithful run-through of that album and a closing version of Kings of the Wild Frontier (“this song means more to me than any other”), Adam and his current Ants treated us to an extensive selection of those punk era numbers. Plastic Surgery (“don’t go sitting in the sun/your face might start to run”) sounded fantastic and the two-minute tango (brevity was always the watchword) of Deutscher Girls reminded how unafraid they were to take musical risks back then. It would be a cliché to say that these songs never sounded better but in all likelihood, with a very accomplished band made-up of a bassist and a brace each of drummers and guitarists, they have probably never been played better: for all their originality, the Ants were a punk band.

Although he joked about his bouts of mental illness (“I talk a lot of rubbish, sometimes”), Adam himself looked in good shape. And with a nod to the sartorial side of punk, he was resplendent in Seditionaries' Karl Marx shirt to go with his, now customary, Stetson hat. And he was supported by some luminaries from those heady times: Seaford resident Jordan was in the house and when I was being bored in the bar by a drunk, he mentioned Theatre of Hate but took some convincing when I pointed out that Kirk Brandon was standing right behind him. The rest of the audience was pretty stylish, too, with a smattering of those tell-tale signs of a punk past: Kohl-eyes, Vive le Rock! t-shirts, leather and tartan. Some, however, got the era wrong: there were a couple of white-striped faces and one poor soul in a Stand and Deliver tunic.

The band were on-stage for an energetic 90 minutes and, of the eleven songs on Dirk Wears White Sox, Tabletalk, the saucy Cleopatra, and the humour of Never Trust A Man (With Egg On His Face) stood out as being the most remarkable. But finishing the set with the title track from the next album – the one that launched the Ants’ pop supremacy - I thought that when the band returned to the stage it would be to perform more of those chart hits; but with further proof of the quality of those earlier songs, they encored with deafening versions – Ant was now a third guitarist - of Zerox and Physical, two more numbers that never made it onto that debut album.