Where are all the hidden tracks hiding now?

 

Do you remember how excited you were the first time you discovered a hidden track on a CD? The anticipation you felt as the time-ticker kept counting even after the last song had ended? In the pre-internet desert that was 1996, it was a momentous day when my friend phoned me to tell me she’d just found Your House lurking un-listened on her CD copy of Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill (I only had it on tape) months after we’d played every other track to death.

 

When you couldn’t search for bonus tracks by your favourite artists on YouTube or Soundcloud, finding a secret song tucked away at the end of an album was a really big deal. You felt like a total boss that had discovered an insider secret, something the band had thrown in just for those clever and dedicated enough to spot the extra ring of music burned onto the outer edge of a CD, or painstakingly waited for the point when the end-of-album silence was broken with a surprise song. But nowadays, with every musical tidbit independent of an album’s main track-listing available on demand, the hidden tracks aren’t hiding any more. Could this mean they’ve lost their magic?

 

Indeed, when the rough and dirty jam session sneaks up at the end of Nirvana’s Nevermind, it acts as a surreptitious fuck you to the slickly produced, radio-friendly album they’d always expressed discomfort with, but streamed out of that context, it could just be an innocuous outtake from their earlier album, Bleach – good to listen to, but without much meaning. Similarly, the aforementioned Your House gives a raw and vulnerable context to the venom of the tracks that precede it, but on it’s own, it could just an awkward a capella about heartbreak.

 

In general, the CD hasn’t got much going for it. It’s not as grand as a vinyl, with its outré artwork and ceremonious playing process, and there’s no way a shiny, not-even-that-compact disk can rival the delight of being able to binge on an entire back-catalogue in a couple of clicks. But the illicit hidden track, that’s really the CD’s edge. BRB, skipping to the end of all my favourite albums.

Books I read in 2012

In 2012, a year of change, tumult, and reckless abandon for me, it is apt that my reading list consisted of odes to alcohol by Kingsley Amis and F. Scott Fitzgerald, tales of soul-searching, risk and fierce independence from Nora Ephron and Sheila Heti, and a little Nick Cave smut thrown in for good measure. If you could tell your own story using the stories you read, then the following list paints a blurry (thanks to the wine) picture of mine this year.

On Booze – F. Scott Fitzgerald

As famous for being pissed as he is for denouncing the American Dream, Fitzgerald has plenty to say on drink, from using it to solve a plethora of seasonal turkey woes (burn turkey, get drunk, don’t care), to tales of him and Zelda tearing up the twenties like nobody else had before or has since.

The Death of Bunny Munro – Nick Cave

Of course I read the Cave-man’s latest literary output, and of course I didn’t actually finish it because I drunkenly abandoned it somewhere between Camden and Hackney when I still had 50 pages to go. But what I did read, I enjoyed. With the same frank flaire that make the lyrics to his dark and dirty song, Stagger Lee, some of his best, in The Death of Bunny Munro, Nick Cave creates characters that are so intensely unlikeable, and scenes so jaw droppingly grotesque, that you couldn’t look away from its pages even if you wanted to. Does Bunny actually meet a gruesome end? I’ll have to finish it to find out.

How Should a Person Be? - Shelia Heti

The New Yorker called Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? ‘hideously narcissistic’, which is as much an accurate summing up of what the book is about as it is a criticism. Like Girls, Lena Dunham’s controversial sit-com, to which the book is often compared, it deals with the coming-of-age desire of creative women in their mid-twenties to make an impact and offer something new, clever and exciting to the world. This could indeed seem a narcissistic concern, but at the same time is the plight of many, and it’s this brutal honesty that makes Heti’s at times cringe-worthy, but always perfectly-crafted and original novel so wonderful. Even when you recognise your worst traits in her words, you realise that at least you’re not alone in brattishly thinking your life, is like, the hardest thing ever FML x 10.

I Remember Nothing, I Feel Bad About My Neck – Nora Ephron

It wasn’t until Nora Ephron died in the summer of 2012, and I read so much about her life, influence and surprise (to everyone she knew at least) death, most notably in pieces by Frank Rich and Lena Dunham, that I realised I hadn’t read any of her own work. A travesty considering her films, When Harry Met Sally, and Sleepless in Seattle are amongst my favourites. It never mattered to me that they’re sappy and mindlessly romantic, because as Ephron seemed to be the first to understand in her two works of non-fiction that I read this year, I Feel Bad About My Neck and I Remember Nothing, even the steeliest of people can be melted by a connection with a like-minded other, whether they be lovers, friends or family. Particularly in I Remember Nothing, which Ephron wrote when she knew she was dying, but also in parts of I Feel Bad About My Neck, a reflection on ageing, death looms, in tales of old friends, long-loved-and-lost apartments, and lists of everyday things she will miss (pie) and won’t miss (bras). But that’s not to say her books are bleak. Instead, her humour and warmth pleasantly urge that given your inevitable, and unpredictable expiration, you should have your hair expensively blow-dried, eat three desserts if you want, and enjoy spending time with, and having conversations with, the people you care about the most, because who knows when they, or you, will be gone.

Everyday Drinking – Kingsley Amis

Kingsley Amis’ encyclopedic exploration of every drink imaginable is as useful a reference on booze as it is a witty insight into its author’s drinking habits. Top tip: don’t waste leftover wine, simply throw it into an indiscriminate punch, and never attempt to read this book with a hangover.

The Electric Michelangelo – Sarah Hall

There’s something highly addictive about books set in New York, and Sarah Hall’s tale of a young English tattooist’s journey into the dark carnival underworld of turn-of-the-century Coney Island tells a part of the city’s story we don’t often hear. With its mixture of unusual characters, including a girl that keeps a horse in her apartment and a pair of Siamese twins who run a dive bar, The Electric Michelangelo is nothing short of eye-opening.

See books I read in 2011.

Playlist: A Winter’s Tale

I like winter. I like the cold, I’m cool with the dark, and perhaps more tellingly, I revel in the moment of stillness we’re offered as nature lays dormant. In winter you hibernate, reflect and procrastinate. After all, nobody really expects you to see through your wild schemes until at least spring. As such, the music that matches the year’s downtime is indulgently contemplative and calm, like the aural equivalent of snoozing.

Opening with the final track from Wild Beasts’ album, Smother, an album I’ve always found to evoke the first icy twilight hours of winter, and dotted with great gusts of Dirty Three and soothing waves of Richard Hawley, here is a collection of songs that were made for cold days with heavy grey skies.

 

#solutionising

 

It’s a tough life being a ~creative person~. You have to deal with people who get off on spreadsheets and say mad shit that makes you want to punch yourself in the face, like, all the time. Mad shit that Ireland’s creative community have captured in some swankily designed posters. It’s worrying how many of these things I have actually heard IRL. Here’s some of my favourites, and here’s the rest.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Via Buzzfeed

 

Miserable bastard music: top 10 sad songs

The NME recently compiled a lazy list of ’50 beautifully sad songs’ (a title in itself so crass that it deserves them a place in Stool Pigeon’s brilliant Achingly Beautiful column). Entry-level misery-memoir such as Sinead O’Connor’s Nothing Compares 2U, Radiohead’s Street Spirit or Johnny Cash doing Hurt, all of which appear on the list, are barely worth mentioning. And let’s not tar Portishead, Joni Mitchell, The Walker Brothers, Nick Cave, Nick Drake and Neil Young with the same brush as Kasabian’s Goodbye Kiss, or anything Damon Albarn has farted out after being dumped.

Since I consider myself something of an expert in sonic-downers (I’m not allowed near the playlist at parties), I’ve put together a list of my favourite miserable bastard music, which is sad, moving, and hopefully less predictable than the NME’s. Happy Monday!

Abigail Washburn – Dreams of Nectar

During her set at this year’s End of the Road festival, Abigail Washburn told a story of a Chinese friend in America who received a letter, which to quote Washburn, said ‘ you’ve already been in America for four years. I’m afraid you’re not ever going to come back to China. And I’m afraid your child and I are never going to be able to come to America to be with you. We’re going to start a new life without you. Consider this the end. And he cried and cried and I watched him. And I didn’t know what to do with that, until I started writing songs.’ Before she was even half-way through her song, with it’s overtones of hope, optimism, and disillusionment, she’d practically broken the hungover and emotionally weak audience. There were tears rolling down my companion Emily and Iso’s faces. Reducing a festival audience to tears on a sunny Saturday afternoon? Now that’s quite a feat.

William Shatner – What have I done

There is sparse instrumentation on this song, simply a cold, dark drone over which Shatner recalls the true story of when he was unable to rescue his drowning wife. If a listen to this doesn’t stop you in your tracks, you’ve got a heart of stone.

Jeffrey Lewis – Moving

There’s a certain mundanity to Jeffrey Lewis’ brand of melancholy that he captures especially well on Moving. Many of his songs juggle with the pointlessness of life in the face of the inevitability of death, alongside the need to capture and enjoy life in light of it’s impending end, and by paralleling the droll symbol of an empty flat with the grand drama of a body that’s shed its soul in the following lyric, he shows his knack for exploring existentialism through the playful medium of indie music perfectly:

‘The room looks the same but there’s no life left and you start thinking about death. When you die will it be the same? No more thoughts decorating your brain, an empty space for the world to reclaim? You’re on the verge of thinking something deep, and then you hear the van give a beep’.

Eels – Going to your Funeral Part I

Mark Everett experienced the death of his father and the suicide of his long-tormented sister before the release of Eels’ first album, and the death of his mother to cancer following that. Needless to say, a good portion of his songs leave the listener realising their own life’s not so bad after all. Going to your Funeral Part I may not include the minor-key piano of Everett’s more traditionally sad songs such as Manchester Girl, Selective Memory, or Beautiful Freak, but its dazed, almost frantic beats, common throughout Electroshock Blues on which it appears, play out a more bereft, desperate sadness, that is much harder to hear.

The Strawbs – Sail Away to the Sea

When Sandy Denny sings ‘the hands of the clock keep turning around, they point to the time of the day, but timing is nothing with you by my side, though some time I’ll be on my way’, you know she’s singing about death. Love may be lurking between the lyrics, and the classic ’60s folk guitar makes the song sound upbeat, but it becomes tinged with sadness when you realise that singer and listener alike will inevitably ‘take a boat down the river my love, and sail away to the sea’.

Nick Drake – Black Eyed Dog

Nick Drake’s rich and complex guitar playing can be hypnotic enough to distract from his fatal insularity, but the sparse picking, raspy voice and thinly disguised metaphors in the lyrics of Black Eyed Dog betray the desolate depression that ultimately took his life.

Nick Cave – I Do Dear, I Do

Nick Cave’s post PJ Harvey sulk, The Boatman’s Call, is by far one of the saddest (and most brilliant) albums in his downbeat opus, and any song from it could be the jewel in the crown of a misery-music list. NME chose the frank People Ain’t No Good, Black Hair demonstrates the creepy loneliness of the most severe heartbreak, and my mate Rachael hasn’t been able to listen to Into my Arms all the way through since Nick played it at Michael Hutchence’s funeral. But it’s I Do Dear, I Do, a one-man-Christmas song taken from The Boatman’s Call sessions, and presumably left off to prevent the rest of the album sounding like nursery rhymes, that is by far the most bleak, and most indicative that Cave got a stocking full of coal that festive season.

Luke Sital-Singh – Fail for You

This new release is a typical ‘I’ll do anything for love, but I won’t do that’ tale, but with breathy vocals and clean slow-rock electric guitar picking instead of a bombastic Beauty and the Beast themed video, romantic twist or any motorbikes. A future misery classic I’m sure.

Girls – Vomit

Unrequited love, a favourite theme of the more emotionally-attuned songwriter, dominates the mood of Vomit . It’s a great song, full of brooding lows and frustrated highs that would lend it nicely to a climatic scene in Dawson’s Creek or such-like. If that’s not qualification for a mood-song, I don’t know what is.

Joy Division – Atmosphere

I know I accused the NME of predictability, and the inclusion of Joy Division in this list is hardly telling you something you don’t know, but can you really create a list of sad songs without Joy Division? They simply belong. The well-known biography of Ian Curtis lends all of their albums an even deeper darkness than they might have out of context, and with that in mind, any grain of optimism in Curtis’ repeated plea ‘don’t walk away’ is rendered all the bleaker with the knowledge of how his story really ended. The fact that this song was used following the pivotal suicide scene in Anton Corbijn’s excellent Ian Curtis biopic Control further heightens its melancholia when you’ve seen the film.

Like what you see? Listen to the full Miserable Bastard Spotify playlist here. NB: I Do Dear, I Do is substituted with Black Hair, due to Spotify availability.

Corners of my room

When I saw Laura and Iso’s posts on ‘Corners of my Room’, it made me think that what makes a house a home is not so much the place you lay your hat, as the hat itself, hanging on whichever door your keys currently open.

Clockwise: vinyl and plastic, ancient beauty storage and obligatory teenage incense elephant, Laura, me and Borst in a rare dry moment at Glastonbury 2007, cat postcard bought in the ICA the day after Tina died.

City living can be a transient thing; between house-shares, indefinite lets and the tentative insecurity of living in a house that belongs to someone else, the likelihood that you’ll shift your belongings from one place to the next every couple of years is high.

L-R: Why I’ll never need a Kindle, Texas spoils, Mama Silver and the Ouzo man.

So, having just moved house for the millionth time, it’s the storied accoutrements pictured here, that have been boxed up and transported across countless postcodes, W to E, that are making me feel at (yet another) home right now.

Cause and effect.

Girls, girls, girls

I am in love with Girls, Lena Dunham’s New York-based sit-com, lauded and loathed in equal measure, for its portrayal of an arguably narrow group of twenty-somethings for whom the shit-sandwich of working for free, navigating difficult relationships, and spending 90% of their time making twats of themselves is tolerably digestible when coupled with the confident self-assurance that these FML-years are simply a trade-off for a life of creative success, spacious apartments and organic elderflower gin.

But have you been to Hackney, Dalston, Peckham, New Cross or Camberwell? Alongside a diverse demographic of city-dwellers, these places are full of ‘girls’ – dissatisfied, success-hungry, cash-starved but opportunity-rich young women just like Lena Dunham’s Greenpoint counterparts. They may be the niche rather than the norm, but isn’t it better that a show like Girls honestly portrays its minority rather than democratically try to represent everyone, and thus no one? People loved Sex and the City because it was aspirational, and Friends because it functioned as an escapist fantasy that made being young and broke seem like a white-teeth-baring laugh, not because anybody could truly relate to the catch-all characters.

While Girls’ glaring omission of racial diversity is inexcusably problematic, it does accurately nail the trials, tribulations and LOLs of a particular kind of girl, to whom it succeeds in being completely relevant. Girls might be obnoxious, and its characters potentially unlikeable, but that doesn’t mean its not punch-in-the-face relatable and refreshingly honest to a lot of people in a way no other show has been before.

So inevitably, people will hate Girls, just like they hate hipsters, raw food and ACNE. They probably live in Clapham.

Read also:

Hipster racism run-off and the search for the black Constanza – Gawker

It’s different for Girls – New York Magazine

American Editors, Eff Yeah!

It’s unlikely I’ll ever stop being the girl whose shampoo is more often dry than Fekkai, which would probably explain my growing fascination with the unfailingly immaculate style of America’s fashion editors; one can always dream, right? How could you not admire their slick looks and sleek hair to which split ends are as familiar as its owners are to full-fat dairy, not to mention some of the most enviable professional portfolios around, putting them a cut above the simple turn-up-and-look pretty set?

Here’s my favourite few to grace the mastheads and style blogs:

Senior Marketing Editor of Glamour Madeline Andrews Escudero is a master of over-sized bags and trousers.

Editor of beauty blog Into the Gloss, Emily Weiss, is not just a (religiously exfoliated and moisturised) pretty face; her effortless style frequently gets the street snappers going too.

Former accessories director for Marie Claire, and current Artistic Director at Moda Operandi, Taylor Tomasi Hill, is as omnipresent in the best dressed lists as some of the most seasoned walkers of the Red Carpet thanks to her ability to add a slick of NYC gloss to even the most off-the-wall outfits.

Accessories editor of Glamour Magazine Maria Dueñas Jacobs is an expert at preventing pretty separates look sugary or jeans look boring.

With her swishing curtain of blonde hair and always on-the-money outfits, Senior Fashion Market Editor of Harper’s Bazaar Joanna Hillman perfectly personifies tireless insider glamour.

And of course, The Orig.

Free exhibition: Bella Howard – Love Buzz

If you spend your internet time trawling the likes of Fashion Gone Rogue or scrapbooking your Tumblr feed on Pinterest, and are knocking around Covent Garden this week, head to St Martins Lane hotel for a squizz at fashion photographer Bella Howard’s exhibition, Love Buzz, there until Friday.

Featuring editorial photographs, plus customised and scribbled on polaroids of Alice Dellal, Alexa Chung, Lana Del Rey and other such scenesters (as well as a couple of Cher Lloyd and Nicole Scherzinger looking quite cool), the mini-exhibition is a nice reminder of the tactile pleasure of an IRL picture, a sentiment anchored by photocopied covers of Bella’s zines, which also feature in the exhibition.

Humming the following as you look around is highly recommended:

ps: it’s free.

Marina Garnier’s Ladies Who Lunch

I’ve noted more than once this week that I’d be better suited to the life of an aristo, spending my days sporting Chanel, a martini and a scowl in a swanky hotel bar somewhere. Like, er, these New York socialites, captured for Vanity Fair by Marina Garnier  as they gad about various lunchtime gatherings between the late ’80s and mid-’90s.

Perhaps it’s time I stopped watching so much Downton Abbey…

See the full series here.