Did you see that terrific BBC4 Squeeze documentary, Take Me I’m Yours, on Friday night? I was more than a little taken aback by the currently be-whiskered Glenn Tilbrook, but I’m sure there’s a plausible explanation for wanting to look like that and otherwise the programme was a timely reminder of the many great songs he and Chris Difford have written over the years. It also put me in mind of an eventful few days I spent with the band in 1980, when they were rather unhappily touring Australia, where I caught up with them in inhospitable Brisbane before we headed for the sunny beaches of Surfer’s Paradise. Here’s a piece I wrote for my old Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One Before column in Uncut.
50 years is a long time to wait for a book. In September 1956, Alan Garner started writing his debut novel, a children’s book set among the landscape and folklore he’d known all his life – Alderley Edge in Cheshire, 12 miles south of Manchester. First published in 1960, The Weirdstone Of Brisingamen followed the adventures of 12 year-old twins, Colin and Susan, on the Edge – “a long-backed hill… high and sombre and black.”
Following music on Twitter, it sometimes feels as if a hyped album or a track is listened to for, at best, six hours now before it becomes in some way obsolete: if it’s not trending, it must be passé.
A lot of amazing reissues in the mix this week: alongside that big Laurie Spiegel I mentioned last week, there are fine records from Don Cherry, Nick Cave, ZZ Top and of course GZA, whose extraordinary solo debut now appears to be coming complete with a chess set.
The announcement came at the very end of last week that the novelist Alan Garner has written the third instalment of a story he began in 1960 with The Weirdstone Of Brisingamen. To anyone raised in the Seventies like me, the news might have prompted a sudden, sharp reconnection with their childhood; The Weirdstone, and its 1963 sequel The Moon Of Gomrath, were touchstones of my adolescent reading.
Pricktease time here, I’m afraid. A truly amazing album arrived this week which I’m absolutely certain will be among my favourites of 2010, but due to various covert record company operations and so on, I’m not at liberty to reveal what it is just yet. Negotiations continue: I’ll write more – lots more – as soon as I can. Hold off on trying to post speculation, if you can, so I can keep this under wraps for a few more days.
As is pretty obvious, the arrival of the Kraftwerk remasters has been a significant distraction at Uncut this week - though as should be equally obvious, there are one or two other interesting new releases amidst this lot.
