Finding it a bit hard to pay much attention to music beyond the new White Denim album these past couple of days (I’ll write about that next week). Nevertheless, it seems like a good time to flag up a few things I’ve neglected to blog on over the past few weeks.
I have a good few mysterious records in my collection, as you can probably imagine. Among the more obtuse are a bunch by a shadowy New York collective called The No-Neck Blues Band. It’s not always easy to read these albums, since the band have an apparent disdain for even the most fundamental marketing expediencies. Often, their name is nowhere to be found on the package, replaced by a kind of glyph that, decoded, reads NNCK.
The past few days I’ve been reading, on Rob Young’s recommendation, Alexandra Harris’ Romantic Moderns, an excellent survey of how British artists and writers in the mid-20th Century tried to reconcile a modernist impulse with the residual lure of English cultural traditions.
Fans of The Fall are, as a rule, hardy beasts. Complaint may come naturally to them, but then so does loyalty. John Peel’s famous encomium, “They are always different, they are always the same,” is the perpetual excuse for their favourite band, which disregards a certain erosion of Mark E Smith’s charms.
