Too Much Too Soon

The New York Dolls.  I first heard them on some old TV compilation of 70's clips, lumped together with The Ramones, Blondie, Patti Smith, the old CBGBs NYC punk thing.  There's a famous clip of them lurching through Jet Boy on the Old Grey Whistle Test, after which Bob Harris sniggers 'Mock rock!', after a shambolic performance during which any of the band looked likely to trip over their high heels and crash into the camera man.

At face value, it's curious as to why the Dolls are held in such high regard compared to some of their contemporaries.  Their sound is not a million miles away from the glam rock of The Sweet, T Rex, Slade, or the Glitter Band; bands which shared their sartorial flamboyance and chant-a-long choruses.  David Johannson and Johnny Thunders came on like Mick and Keith let loose in a charity shop after emptying their big sister's make up box.  The cover of the debut LP is just brilliant, they look like a bunch of elderly pre-op transexuals after a night on the town...

There's a fantastic documentary about bass player Arthur Kane, and the reunion of the New York Dolls which was brought about by Morrissey's Meltdown festival in 2004, and Robyn Hitchcock's song NY Doll is a very affecting tribute.

The haircut kids on the indie rock underground

The Helster and I are back from a weekend in Cambridge, where we saw the Broken Family Band play a ridiculously intimate gig at the very friendly Portland Arms. The 'gig room' is a very small annexe of the pub which would make the Basement at Rock City seem like Wembley Stadium.  Support was from John Smith, who rose above his nondescript nomenclature to woo us with some John Martyn / Tim Buckley-esque acoustic stylings, including a cracking cover of No One Knows by Queens Of The Stone Age.

Anyway, the BFB's were bloody fantastic - plenty of new tracks from the as yet unrecorded new record, and the proximity of band and audience made it feel as the we were in their front room being treated to a few new tunes.  And I think it was a first for me to attend a gig where the lead guitarist left the stage for a pee, returned with beers for his colleagues, in time to join in with a solo at just the right beat.  Go and see them!

Life is very long, when you're lonely

By the time The Queen Is Dead came out, I'd cottoned on to the Smiths.  At first, I took a look at Morrissey on the Top Of The Tops and declared him a gawky twit who couldn't sing.

It was Johnny Marr who made it click for me, his guitars came from somewhere around Roger McGuinn and Keith Richards, but sounded so original.  It was easy to brand the Smiths as purveyors of miserable bedsit doom and gloom - this was to overlook the humour of tracks like Frankly Mr Shankly, and the lyrics of the title track of The Queen Is Dead.

Of all Morrissey's 'cover stars' from the Smiths records, this one is my favourite - Alain Delon from some French film or other, I'm sure you could look it up if you are that interested.  He looks about ready to feel 'the soil falling over my head'... 

Another lost pleasure of vinyl was those little messages which were sometimes etched into the run out grooves - my copy of The Queen Is Dead says 'Them was rotten days...'

There's kerosene around

I never owned the vinyl version of Atomizer by Big Black, but I've a got CD version which includes the most of LP plus a couple of 12" singles.  Great cover, a shame they didn't reproduce it on the CD, which is called Rich Man's Eight Track. The charming legend on the inside booklet reads something like 'you dumb pussies can all suck our cocks'.  I bought it in a second hand record shop on Newland Ave in Hull, where the proprietor would take advantage of a north facing shop front by placing seed trays in the window alongside the old Status Quo and Gillan albums.

Atomizer is in no way an easy listening record, but it contains at least three electrifying tracks which make it worth the price of admission: Jordan Minnesota, Kerosene, and Bazooka Joe. I would love to have seen them live, I don't know if they ever came to the UK, but a double bill of Big Black and Husker Du would have been terrific.