What are you listening to right now? Pt VI

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It is 40 years to the day that Liddle Towers died after being assaulted in police custody. According to one report, his injuries were consistent with someone who had been in a head on car accident at 70 mph.

Unbelievably the first inquest into his death came back with a verdict of justifiable homicide – ie the police intended to kill him and were justified in doing so.

The officers who beat him in the cells have never faced justice.

Consequently I have been listening to two iconic songs of the British Oi! scene that were inspired by his death:


 

mianfei

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Another one from Joe S. Harrington’s fifteen-year-old but unrivalled list of the Top 100 Albums. There is in Harrington’s review a strange quote about Australian music that does not fit in with the exceedingly conservative tastes of people in suburban Australia, who it seems to me had even in 1995 never heard of (1980s) Metallica, Pantera, Public Enemy and N.W.A. at the time those four (and other) groups were revolutionising not just music but all of “Western” culture in manners I was totally ill-equipped to understand upon leaving the cloister that outer suburban Melbourne is – essentially no better than North Adelaide proved in the 1989 SANFL Grand Final, when their forward line, under much more pressure than they were used to, could not get a single clean set shot within fifty metres!
Joe S. Harrington said:
19. I’m Stranded – the Saints (Sire, 1977):

In the wake of the Ramones, first the singles started coming (“Solitary Confinement” by the Weirdos etc.). I’m Stranded was one of the first complete recordings to adopt the nonstop punk formula. In fact, like the Ramones, the Saints even included a couple of fifties covers (“Wild About You,” “Kissing Cousins”). The Saints had actually been around in their native Australia as long as the Ramones and had been slowly honing their Stooges formula. It did not take the Ramones to teach them how to play, but admittedly the fast bracing stuff, and the simplicity, was reinforced by the appearance of the first two Ramones albums. The Sire seal gives it away – released around the same time as such other Seymour Stein-sponsored classics like Blank Generation and Talking Heads ’77, this album was among the front-line of definitive punk texts. It’s one of the things that made us realise, long before there was ever a Sex Pistols album, that this phenomenon was not a single-band crusade (thanks Ramones). Guitarist Ed Kuepper was among the most able-bodied of the post-Williamson guitarists (a school that also included Cheetah Chrome, the guy in the Weirdos, Ross the Boss etc. etc.) and the searing leads were a touch that the still-leadless Ramones could’ve used. Of course the fretboards would flay with even more fierce abandon on the subsequent album, Eternally Yours (see #30, – obviously I think these guys are among the greatest ever). Then they would add horns.

They were never like the Ramones since they were also Australians, and the Continent’s most worthy exports that were not prefabricated by Harry Vanda and George Young. Goddamn, all the real grit of punk, what made it really EXPLODE in the minds and hearts of millions, can be summed up by the bridge in “One Way Street” when Bailey, a GREAT singer, sneers “if you don’t like it honey that’s too bad.” It is as good as Iggy at his best, and these guys were doing it strictly straight out of the shoot. “Story of Love,” with its metallic riff and declaration-of-independence lyrics, is downright hypnotic in its simplistic forcefulness. “Messing with the Kid,” a clanky-but-brilliant “ballad” based partially on the Stones’ “Sway,” would evidence that they were already looking ahead to the slow stuff on the second album (along with the Ramones and Motörhead they were the ONLY group from punk’s first wave who dared still sport long hair). It’s just a great album all around. Along with Bollocks and Ramones Leave Home it is the DEFINITIVE sound-of-1977 LP. Just say Yes!
In contrast to Metallica and Pantera, people even in the most cloistered suburbs had certainly heard of AC/DC although I do not recall the dominant classic rock radio format of the early 1990s playing them much. Harrington makes another comment relevant to I’m Stranded in his review of Highway to Hell, which he rated the seventh greatest album of all time in 2002:
Joe S. Harrington said:
It took a bunch of Aussies to pull it off. With two Saints albums in the Top 40 and this one in the Top Ten you gotta scratch your head and wonder what is it about those Aussies that makes them such swifties in these pure-rock stakes? Maybe it is all that beer! Speaking of alcohol, of course singer Bon Scott DIED from an overdose of booze just as this album was getting ready to move AC/DC into the front rank among America’s hard-rock hordes. Moreover, these hordes WERE muttonheads after all, which is partially the reason punk fans have never forgiven this kind of music. The FANS are to blame, and I can relate to that, because back in the day, I didn’t want to know anything about heavy metal either and even to this day my gridiron friends and Andrew Colston don’t wish to know about metal guitar heroes.
 

mianfei

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Mimi Goese has the most melodic and beautiful of voices, one that reminds me a bit of Sky Cries Mary’s Anisa Romero, whom she predated but I discovered earlier. The sound is unique – two basses and a violin, with a feel a little like the weightless, free-flowing sound of the inimitable Hejira – but the songs are short yet very powerful and full during their length.
This is Hugo Largo performing live in 1988, sounding just as gorgeous as ever.
 
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