Monday, June 26, 2006  4:47 pm 

Love Bloody Love

We aren’t always playing gnarly stuff at 20 jazz funk greats villa, no, it’s not always no wave and no rave and no ise and schyzoid electro-techno beats from hell, we know robots have a heart, but it beats to a different drummer. No, have you ever tried to think about that erm, significant one while listening to
Wolf Eyes? Hold on, bet you have. I don’t mean in that way. Hold on, anyway, you’re all a bunch of nerds and nerdettes and your significant one is a promo exclusive of the new Chromatics 12”or an original pressing of Future Days or something like that…

Well, 20 jazz funk greats has a human heart (at least for a few minutes each full moon) and sometimes we play music about love and all that weird stuff, interactions between people that are difficult because it’s not like when you type goto whatever in your pooter and it does it, no, there are ‘nuances’ and things that enter into the equation so it stops being an equation and becomes a game in Von Neumann’s sense, and with uncertainty, all fucked up, yeah. You could try and take an informed decision by devising a multi-criteria table and undertaking some sensitivity analysis but your judgement will probably be clouded and everything will go wrong, standard.

Anyhow, here you have two songs about feelings and things which despite our ‘Yeah I find it easier to devise abstract conceptual frameworks and process significant amounts of trivia than interact with my fellow human beings especially in the context of romance and the like’ hit us hard or soft in that hard way and makes us go ouch yeah, thank god I am not a robot, it’s a sweet pain this one.

For example, you can get all cheesy and stuff and roll up the sleeves of your white jacket, slip in your shoes (no socks), drive the red corvette into the beach as the sun sets, put on your rayban wayfarers because you don’t want the ladies in rollerskates to see you cry, and stare into the sea looking really troubled, maybe the shapes of the waves will meld to form the face of your beloved one, suitably airbrushed. Yeah, Sally Shapiro is the perfect soundtrack for this heartache, I’m not 20JFG’s italo expert so I can’t really name names, only thing I can say is that the sweet neon caress of her voice, laid over a smooth pink cushion of 80s reminiscence (produced by genius Johan Agebjorn and released by Diskokaine) makes me feel strangely, erm, pastel.

Sally Shapiro- I’ll be by your side

While you’re at the whole love tunes thing you could do worse than checking out the heartbreaking rendition of By Your Side by Sade that Beachwood Sparks did back in the day.

You can also cry your pain and your doubts out like that heck of a lady Ludella Black in this white eyed soul cover of the (pah…) Beatles, tear your hair and run up and down rough muddy roads following the proud shadows of Dusty and Dolly with a rusty revolver hidden inside an oil soaked piece of cloth, you’ll never shoot it, maybe against your reflection in the mirror, aiming at a heart that’s already broken, when everything else is distorted you might believe that two wrongs will make a right.

Ludella Black- I’ve Just Seen a face

This track is from the best compilation I bought this year, Alright this Time Just the Girls vol. 2 gloriously released by Sympathy for the Record Industry.

And to close today, and just because it’s all about love, here you have what our beloved Lord Nuneaton Savage has to say about what he loves, Black Sabbath, there you go, sometimes love will tear us apart, others it brings us together.

Black Sabbath- Sabbath Bloody Sabbath

Fuck the Smiths.

Fuck the whining, the swaying, the flowers.

Fuck the jangling, the moping, the arching.

Fuck the sighs and fuck the bicycles; there is only one band you can hear when you’ve spent all day being smashed around the playground like a pinata donkey.

When you’re recovering from a week spent having your skull pushed into a wheel.

When you realise you’ve been sitting, clinging to the same spot on the floor for an hour now, because you cannot move, because the tiniest shift would take you from the only place in the universe that doesn’t want to make you crawl on all fours pulling an iron sled for eternity.

That band, that healing light, that thunderous creature of pure love is Black Sabbath.

Black Sabbath are less a band, more a permenant state of existential crisis, with Ozzy as tormented protagonist.

The fact is, he is the greatest rock singer ever.

That fact is melted into a black jewel and burned into my forehead. Ozzy’s voice can make you feel like you’ve lost a child and are too numb to care (Christ, even that duet with his daughter had me welling up). It’s a question of scale; the pistoning riffs make Ozzy’s voice sound tiny by comparison, like a Lovecraft protagonist dwarfed by the incomprehendible cosmic horrors surrounding him. Like a ‘to scale’ drawing of a man next to a dinosaur in a kids picture book. Except it isn’t a dinosaur, it’s a fucking nebula.

His cry of ‘You Bastards!’ in Sabbath Bloody Sabbath can make a soul capsize. It’s tiny; insignificant compared to the mountain of riffage surrounding it, the band bounding like Spring-heeled Jack into a waiting furnace, Ozzy clutched in giant hands, unable to escape, but screaming because all he has left, in that last second of freedom, is that scream. It’s where his salvation lies. He hopes with that scream that his soul can tear itself from his frame and fly away, like a flag from a pole. A man trying to scorch his way out of the flesh cage.

Rest assured; if Ozzy were forced to dig his own grave, he would DIG.

Common misconception about Black Sabbath: They are depressing.

The truth is so, so far from that.

Whereas with other metal architects the riffs are designed to hold you in- to cage you- Sabbath (a hippy band, in the good sense of the word) have an instinctive, very human, lack of understanding of how the world grinds you to powder. Where Led Zep/Deep Purple etc. played at viking raiders; steaming from the waters with rape and murder on their minds, crawling King-snakes with post-acid speed horn, Sabbath are essentially nurturing. They hold you and whisper ‘It’s OK, we don’t understand either’, and, sometimes, that’s all you want, because sometimes the last things you want are truths or answers. Sabbath tell you what you need, not what you need to hear.

I’m sitting here listening to them, nearly 15 years after buying my first Sabbath cassette (80p from Woolies bargain bin. A real resource for the cash strapped metaller back then).

15 years after curling foetal against my floor, wishing ‘War Pigs’ would crush me and spirit me away, and realising that a lot of me hasn’t changed and, I dare say, a lot of you hasn’t either.

We all still get those moments; of fantasising about natural disasters, sinking into mud-dark seas, going back to our old schools and torching them to the ground. Black Sabbath exist for those moments. Never changing, never judging, they squat on their black throne and offer a hand up. And you take it and feel lighter and cry, not because you’re afraid, but because you’ve just found a friend to whom you don’t have to tell a thing. And then you hear a clap of thunder and a peeling of bells and the rain falling down; and you’re ready to run again.

Yeah, fuck the Smiths.

*******

I’d like to point out that this last piece might well be the best written shit we ever posted so say thanks to Lord Nuneaton people.

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