Rolling Stone Top 500 Challenge VIII

"Cool Santa" by peter_h_hammond_1953

End of the line, folks. This’ll be the last one of these, at least for here and now. I didn’t make it to the peak, where Sgt Peppers resides in all his predictable pomp. I failed. I am a failure.

Enjoy!

The Rules: Try and listen to all the albums on the Rolling Stone top 500 albums of all time. No vetoes. I’m not even allowed to veto things on the grounds that they contain Ian Brown.

My Progress: 325-301

325　Eric Clapton – Slowhand: It still baffles me that someone can go from being in The Yardbirds and Cream, both incredibly vital, urgent, excellent bands… to this. Meandering, plodding and pedestrian, this is utterly dull. How anyone can make a song about doing too much cocaine sound like an overdose of cocoa is beyond me.

324　David Bowie – Station to Station: This is full on 80s Bowie, and veers from unlistenable flirtations with disco, to fairly dull Bowie-by-numbers, to a couple of excellent guitar-led numbers. It whistled past me quickly enough.

323　The Police – Ghost in the Machine: Seriously though, fuck off Sting.

“Stewart Copeland of The Police was so fed up with Sting that he wrote “FUCK OFF YOU CUNT” on his drum heads, so he could take out his frustrations.”

322　Randy Newman – Sail Away: I’m beginning to wonder if the rest of this challenge is going to revolve around me having to listen to Sting, then Randy Newman, then Sting again, then maybe some Jackson Browne. Lather, rinse, repeat. This is my third Randy Newman album, and I’ve become increasingly less tolerant of his bullshit with each one. Awful.

321　Nick Drake – Pink Moon: Ahhh, that’s better. Lustrous folk that’s dripping with sadness; after the previous four albums this is like a warm shower after a strenuous workout. I’d imagine, anyway, I don’t do exercise as a rule, because why on earth would you choose to do that?

320　Radiohead – Amnesiac: More loveliness, courtesy of Oxford’s finest. You could argue that an album of offcuts from the Kid A recording sessions shouldn’t warrant inclusion here, but then we would have to stop talking to each other, and we wouldn’t want that, would we?

319　Bob Marley & The Wailers – Burnin’: I’m trying to recall if this is the first reggae album we’ve had on the list so far, but my brain is still a bit burnt out from that Randy Newman album. It all starts to haunts you, eventually. Anyway, this is pretty decent really. Not hugely my cup of tea but it’s got some great songs, good earfeel etc.

318　The O’Jays – Back Stabbers: This is 70s soul at its dullest. It starts brightly enough, with a political protest song, but then gives way to endless generic love songs. When the best song on the album is ‘Love Train’ then you know you have problems.

Soulfunk 80’s

317　Pixies – Surfer Rosa: It’s amazing how fresh The Pixies sound, even now, when every rock man and his alt dog has spent the subsequent decades copying their blueprint so shamelessly. Anyway, this is brilliant, and has Where Is My Mind on it, which is my favourite Pixies song (wow, controversial choice, not).

316　The Velvet Underground – The Velvet Underground: This is Velvet Underground at their most relaxed, with a distinct lack of the avant-garde oddness that made them so famous—apart from a head meltingly atonal nine-minute song at the end. Other than that it’s rather pleasant.

315　Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers – Damn The Torpedoes: This is unashamedly American blue collar rawwwk, straight from the heartlands of wherever. You can imagine all of the songs being played by a blond haired boy on a tractor in Iowa, but for all that it’s very likeable, the epic hooks and anthemic choruses tempered by downtrodden working class lyrics with their feet in Steinbeck’s America.

314　Lauryn Hill – The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill: This is pretty near perfect. Blending together the best of soul, hip hop, reggae and funk with intelligent, brash and militant lyrics and a strong, powerful woman at the centre of it all. Brilliant.

You want to give that up mate, it’ll kill you.

313　Nirvana – MTV Unplugged in New York: You have to wonder if this album would be quite so revered if it didn’t serve as a kind of epitaph for Kurt, but that’s how it’s ended up so you can’t really separate the two anymore. I remember very clearly seeing this for the first time on the day he died, when MTV UK went into Kurt overload, as I was doing myself. Listening back now you wonder if the scarcity of his own songs reflected his lack of faith in his own repertoire or his boredom with it. Either way, it’s a flawed and compelling album, and the finale of Leadbelly’s Where Did You Sleep Last Night still sends shivers down my spine.

312　Jane’s Addiction – Nothing’s Shocking: I’ve never quite understood the reverence towards Jane’s, they’re a passably good 90s alternative band whose influence was more to do with their involvement in Lollapalooza than their musical output. This is okay, but nothing more, and Perry Farrell’s voice is one of the more irritating things in this life.

311　Various Artists – The Sun Records Collection: This is the sort of thing that reminds me what I’m doing this challenge for. Three discs of blues, r’n’b, country and rockabilly from the archives of one of the most important studios in history. At three hours it never drags, the more obvious acts like Elvis, Johnny Cash and Jerry Lee Lewis sitting alongside people I’ve never heard of on a fascinating look at the very birth of popular music. Absolutely brilliant.

310　Red Hot Chili Peppers – Blood Sugar Sex Magik: I loved this album when I was thirteen because it’s exactly the sort of album that appeals to a thirteen-year-old boys, with lyrics straight out of the letters page of a wank mag. But listening back now it’s interesting how much better this sounds than the Chili’s subsequent works, with Flea’s bass much more prominently mixed than Frusciante’s weedy guitar probably being the main reason. It’s infantile whiteboy faux-funk certainly, but it’s a lot more fun than anything else they’ve done.

Fuck off, would you lads?

309　Creedence Clearwater Revival – Willy And The Poor Boys: Late 60s politically charged swamp rock from Creedence, another band on the list of bands I’ve always meant to listen to. I don’t know why I like things that are tinged with down-home country music when I hate country so much, but this is excellent, especially Fortunate Son. In fact, I love this so much I’ve already made a playlist of their other albums to listen to after I’m done with this. Yes I am a fucking idiot, what of it?

308　Frank Sinatra – Songs for Swingin’ Lovers: This is actually my dad’s favourite album of all time, so you could say I’m fairly well acquainted with it. There’s been a serious deficit of swing on this list, but this more than makes up for it. It’s really all you’d ever need when it comes to Ol’ Blue Eyes; it has endlessly opulent big band arrangements and Sinatra’s voice is sublime here. An effortless cool envelops the whole thing. Forget the ruinations visited upon this genre by Bublé and his ilk, this is marvellous.

307　The Beatles – A Hard Day’s Night: If there’s one thing I’m really starting to appreciate in an album the further I get into this endeavour, it’s brevity. This mop-top era album by the Fab Four is pretty dull really, lacking any really great songs, but it’s only 30 minutes long, so that’s just fine by me.

306　Beck – Odelay: This album is more like a time capsule now, a reminder of a time when you could do some pretty out there stuff and still score a major worldwide smash, so long as you had a handful of good tunes in there and you were ’cool’ enough. It’s not quite as good as I remember it being, but it’s still a good listen.

305　Lucinda Williams – Car Wheels On A Gravel Road: This is very odd. Williams has a very distinctive voice; think Sheryl Crow with an added dash of huskiness. But this album has a very glossy sheen to it which does not suit the oddness of her voice. The few songs where the production does get stripped back work a lot better, but then they aren’t great songs in and of themselves. A very frustrating listen.

~forever young forever in are hearts~

304　Jeff Buckley – Grace: I adore this album. Buckley’s voice is simply extraordinary, exceeding the gymnastic dexterity of your general X factor warbling automata and combining it with soul, passion and—ironically—a certain ‘X’ factor, then backing it up with an album of brilliant songs. Not many people could get away with a cover of Corpus Christi Carol on a rock album, but Jeff could. In the pantheon of sad rock stories, the fact that we’ll never hear Grace’s follow up is probably the saddest.

303　Bob Dylan – John Wesley Harding: This was Dylan returning to his roots after three electric albums, incorporating a country vibe. It’s fantastic, Dylan’s voice is very strong, with some great songs and some of his better lyrics.

302　Public Enemy – Fear Of A Black Planet: Angry, confrontational, noisy as hell, funny as shit and smarter than you or I. Who in their right mind wouldn’t love this? There are times when their soundclash production gets a bit much, but they are few and far between.

And fanfare please…

301　Dolly Parton – Coat Of Many Colors: Here we are then, the 200th album on this list that I’ve listened to, and the last one I’ll be writing about here. After two solid weeks of listening to nothing else I’m looking forward to choosing my own music for a while, but I’ll get round to finishing the other 300 at some point. I may even write about it if any of you lot seem remotely interested in reading it, who knows! As for this album, well it’s quite good really. I really like Dolly Parton, I think she’s an awesome woman, and while she’s far too straight ahead country for me normally, there’s something very charming about her delivery and lyrics here that win me over.

So that’s that. Bye!

Pigeon Playlists: Geoff’s Prison Break-A-Thon

Well it had to happen at some point. On the way back from LA after meeting Open Mike Eagle, the Rap Bus was chased and brutally shunted by some Nazis driving a jeep, and exploded. Geoff has asked us to post the following reconstruction in the hope that some witnesses will come forward.

Geoff escaped from the bus and fought off the Nazis with bold bravery, but the local Sheriff wasn’t too impressed with his antics so until we can fix the bus again and stage an elaborate prison break, he’s stuck.

Fortunately, being so hard and northern, Geoff has managed to become “Top Dog” almost immediately and has used his computer privileges to send us a hip hop Pigeon Playlist featuring all the rappers he’s visited in the bus and lots more.

He’s also managed to hack Spotify to divert the royalty payments from each stream into our prison break fund and away from the cash-loaded underground rappers. This can’t fail.

Rolling Stone Top 500 Challenge VII

By now news of this webzine’s impending demise may have reached your fragile, birdlike ears, which does raise the question: What the fuck was this whole Rolling Stone thing for, anyway? We’re nowhere near finished with it, and now we never will be. What gives? Well, I can’t answer that, I’m too busy burying my head in the sand, carrying on listening to the bloody things in a futile attempt to reach some kind of closure in the next few days that will render the enterprise as anything other than a complete and utter waste of time.

Here’s how I’ve been getting on:

The Rules: Try and listen to all the albums on the Rolling Stone top 500 albums of all time. No vetoes. I’m not even allowed to veto things on the grounds that they contain Ian Brown.

My Progress: 350-326

350　The Yardbirds – Roger the Engineer: More Yardbirds fun, it’s pretty basic rock and roll really, but done with panache, verve and humour. It’s good fun, even if it’s over quicker than George Osborne masturbating to pictures of a Victorian poor house.

349　Jay-Z – The Black Album: Jay Z is everything that is wrong with hip-hop, or at least that was what I thought for a while, but this is pretty good, once you get past that slightly annoying delivery method that he has. It’s all bombast and big pop hooks, and sometimes that’s okay.

348　Muddy Waters – At Newport 1960: This album is so damn cool, and benefits greatly from not being a four-disc career retrospective, therefore ending well before I got bored of it.

347　Pink Floyd – The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn: Speaking of boredom, from an intellectual standpoint this represented a huge leap forward in what was possible within the confines of ‘pop’ music, but on the other hand, it’s about as enjoyable as being in the next room to George Osborne masturbating to pictures of a Victorian poor house. That’s right, I’m introducing a running gag. Don’t worry, I won’t use it again.

George Osborne, pictured “piping” at the gates of Downing Street

346　De La Soul – 3 Feet High and Rising: This is a delightful ray of sunshine that has utterly rescued my day. I loved this album as a kid, the first hip-hop album I heard that wasn’t ‘gangsta’; it reminds me of carefree afternoons in the parks, sunny days and happiness, so I presume it must be someone else’s childhood I’m remembering.

345　Talking Heads – Stop Making Sense: Live albums are, as a rule, a bit pish, but I’d like to hereby amend that rule to allow for live albums whose original songs were generally destroyed by hideous 80s production. This is beefier, more organic and just plain urgent than Talking Heads’ albums, and therefore utterly allowable.

344　Lou Reed – Berlin: This often gets billed as the most depressing album ever, which certainly piqued my interest. While I think most of my record collection has it beat for gloominess, there’s certainly no denying the crushing misery in Reed’s lyrics here, and the overall album is a startling mix of bombast and ennui. Excellent.

343　Meat Loaf – Bat Out Of Hell: This list throws up some interesting juxtapositions at times, and going from the ultra-gloom of Lou Reed to Meat Loaf’s vaudevillian mix of Jerry Lee Lewis, Queen and rock opera makes for quite the change. This is, of course, completely ridiculous, but I can’t help but love it just a little bit.

342　Depeche Mode – Violator: My brother went to school with Dave Gahan, which may go some way to explaining why Dave Gahan is so bloody miserable. This album, which is like a gloomy British Pretty Hate Machine, is phenomenal. Cheers bro!

341　Moby – Play: In which the white man finally killed the blues. This is just awful. Imagine you took DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing….., removed everything vital, interesting or good about it, and replaced it with the white noise from inside an advertising executive’s head. This is what you get. Oh, for reference, Endtroducing….. didn’t make this list. So there’s that.

340　Black Flag – Damaged: This may sound like it was recorded inside a tiny wooden box at the top of a flight of stairs on the summit of a cliff, but the sheer force of personality contained within it still shines through. It’s also bloody nice to finally hear some proper distortion and angry teenagers after the bleepy-bloopy-cultural-appropriatey nonsense of Moby.

339　Tom Waits – The Heart of Saturday Night: More bar-soaked blues from Mr Waits, this time dating from an era when he could ostensibly ‘carry a tune’, which almost ruins it somehow. At times it strays into lounge act cheese, but manages to pull it back most of the time.

“We’re monkeys with money and guns.” — Tom Waits

338　Big Brother & The Holding Company – Cheap Thrills: I’d never heard of this, but it’s the major label debut of Janis Joplin. The production is dreadful, it sounds like a bad live recording, and the band aren’t exactly The Experience. But for all that, the power of Janis’ voice mixed with the bluesy rock and some good songwriting make this a pretty decent album.

337　Jethro Tull – Aqualung: Poppy proggy stuff from The Tull. I can imagine at least one Demon Pigeon writer who probably worships this album and has it in seventeen formats, including one composed entirely from crystallised baby tears but while I enjoyed it well enough, it faded from my memory almost instantly.

336　Radiohead – In Rainbows: When you look around at the bands that came out of England in the mid-90s and compare them with Radiohead’s nigh on 25-year career, you realise just how unique a band they were and continue to be. This album, even if you strip away the hype around its release method, is as excellent as you’d expect, which is to say they continue to hit a bar that only they can even see from the ground.

335　Soundgarden – Superunknown: I loved this when I was a fresh faced teen in a flannel shirt and cherry red DMs, but over time the shine has come off the Soundgarden train, perhaps as a result of their god awful reunion album. Anyway, this has some great tracks on it, but it misses the dirty feel of its predecessor and is probably five or six songs too long.

334　Graham Parker – Squeezing Out Sparks: This represented my toughest ordeal yet in terms of tracking it down, with not even your more piratey of bays having a copy. I managed to cobble together a playlist on Spotify of all but one track, although with a fair few live versions. Anyway, this is basically 70s British pub rock of the Elvis Costello variety, pleasant enough, with a few jaunty catchy tunes. Not bad, if hardly earth-shattering.

333　X – Wild Gift: X were apparently LA’s answer to the punk rock ‘revolution’ and this is pretty much what you’d expect, fairly basic punk crossed with a dash of Ramones-style pop nous. Not bad but nothing to write home about. Or indeed, write an article on a music blog about, even though that’s exactly what I’m doing.

332　Richard and Linda Thompson – Shoot Out the Lights: I dimly recall an album by these two earlier on in the challenge, but I couldn’t tell you a thing about it. Sure, I could look at what I wrote last time, but I’m not going to. This is perfectly pleasant for the most part, Linda’s songs in particular are nice little folk numbers, while Richard’s are less enticing. But it passes the time well enough.

331　The Beatles – Help!: I was going to write the standard ‘blah blah blueprint for pop music, blah blah amazing songwriting, blah blah pop perfection’ thing, and it’d all be true, but then I got to You Like Me Too Much, a song I’ve heard many times before without really listening to, and if you think Blurred Lines was a bit on the creepy side, then get a load of this. Here’s a game: Pick an actor who creeps you out. Read the lyrics in your head, but in his voice. Terrified yet? Of course it’s delivered with all the cheeky pop charm you’d expect, but it struck me as a bit odd. Great album though.

330　Neil Young – Tonight’s the Night: Written in the aftermath of the deaths of some of Young’s close friends to drugs, this is absolutely gripping, An at times literal howl of grief, this has some of Young’s strongest songs delivered in a shambolic drunken stupor. It’s not an easy listen. Young’s already ‘interesting’ vocal delivery style doesn’t even find anything close to the melody at times, but it’s incredibly moving, engrossing and brilliant.

329　James Brown – In the Jungle Groove: Set the misogyny ray to full blast! The opening track of this album is somewhat ruined by lyrics that play like an earnest version of Harry Enfield’s ‘women, know your place’ routine. But after that the godfather of soul decides to shut the hell up and essentially do nothing more than play the hype man to his own band as they storm through endless funk workouts, chipping in occasionally with a ‘hit me’, ‘ooh,’ or ‘waaaaa’. This drastically improves the album, although by its end I’m bored to tears of funk.

328　Sonic Youth – Daydream Nation: This is absolutely brilliant. I don’t really know what more to say about it than that. If you like alternative rock, or art rock, or anything even remotely offbeat, and you don’t like Sonic Youth, well then shit. I can’t help you I’m afraid.

327　Liz Phair – Exile in Guyville: There’s an awful lot of stuff on this list I’ve never heard before, obviously, but very few occasions where I have never even heard of the artist at all. But strike me down, I’d never heard of Liz Phair before, despite her being an alt rock feminist star from the 90s. The 90s are my thing! Or so I thought. I could only assume this was an undiscovered gem in waiting. The lyrics are funny, confrontational and full of feminist ire (the album is a riposte to the sexual braggadocio of the Stones’ Exile on Main Street, from a woman’s perspective) and the songs are easily good enough to back it up, all laid-back guitar and minimal production. A great find. Hooray for the 90s!

326　The Cure – Disintegration: This is definitely the high water mark for The Cure and their foppish goth, although it’s all a bit too wishy washy to truly win me over. It’s alright though.

So there you go. Over a third of the way through. That counts as a milestone, right? Tune in to see if I can manage to get another load done before THE END.

Goya – 777

(Opoponax Records)

Bold statement time: This is the album Sabbath fans were hoping for from the abomination that was 13. Have I piqued your interest? Good.

I’ve been meaning to review this for ages but put simply, I have been too busy listening to it. If you like riffs and groove-laden laid-back awesomeness then this is probably your cup of tea or (stagnant bong water).

With just six songs, clocking in at just over 50 mins, this very much has the feeling of an LP. You remember, those spinning black things with grooves? But even though this is tipping a very large brimmed and flouncy hat to the 70s, it sounds really fresh without being a sound-a-like for fans of whoever. This is no Homme and Friends or Truckfighters.

The album opens with The Rights Of Hashage and straight away you can’t help but nod along in the way only an intoxicating monster riff can induce. In fact it’s such a great opening track that you barely notice that nine minutes have passed while you nodded. As soon as the double layered guitar solos kicked in I was in an air guitar frenzy. I think I may be in love with three guys that play ‘the doom’.

Let’s slow things down a bit though, because I’m not the kind of girl that puts out on the first date. Goya have got me gushing at the gusset, but they’re going to have to work hard to finish me off. Necromance ups the tempo but still—the riffs. THE RIFFS! Ok boys, I’m ears-akimbo. Impregnate me with your doomy-stonery seed. Yes, right there. Right in my weeping ear holes.

Night Creeps follows and the guitars are just all of the awesome. If you aren’t pulling a silly face while bending that imaginary guitar string you have no soul. That voice has all of the desolate brilliance that Ozzy’s had circa Black Sabbath. Did I mention this is a bit Sabbathy? I like Sabbath. I think Goya do too. This delivers Iommi-loving riffs and guitar freakouts in spades.

Never over-complicated or sounding deliberately clichéd (*cough* Uncle Acid *cough* Ghost *cough*) this has a timeless feeling in the same way Sabbath, the Doors, or Crimson did in their prime; none of whom do now for various death, infirmity and being-shit related reasons.

Have I convinced you yet?

Death’s Approaching Lullaby is another 12-minute plus riffsplosion and is utterly relentless. Blackfire has such a bouncy riff that it envelops your body and forces your standard head nod into a full-body strut. Closer Bad Vibes starts out all doomy gloomy, and soon drags you under its hypnotic power. As it draws to a close I’m left dirty, alone and wanting more. I leaf through our old love letters and have a little cry to myself about all the good times we had.

Look, you should really stop reading this and get 777 plugged directly into your brain. This is not just a collection of songs pasted together. It seems to my uneducated ears that thought has been put into making an actual album. If this had been released in the mid-70s it would be described as genre defining. It’s that good. Do I really need to say more?

marijuana.bandcamp.com

Rolling Stone Top 500 Challenge VI

I’m rattling through these albums lickety-bloody-split at the moment, to take advantage of the fact that nobody’s bothered to release any good records yet this year, and I’m bored of all the stuff from last year. We’re definitely not running out of steam, honest. Like all our manifold serialised ‘articles’, we will one day get this finished. 

Without further ado:

The Rules: Try and listen to all the albums on the Rolling Stone top 500 albums of all time. No vetoes. I’m not even allowed to veto things on the grounds that they contain Ian Brown.

My Progress: 375-351

375　Jackson Browne – Late For The Sky: I’m beginning to wonder whether Jackson Browne was on the panel that decided this list, and his sole contribution was to give them a list of all his own records copied off of Wikipedia. Yet more bland 70s AOR. You could make an argument for this being better than his two records further back in the list, but you’ll notice that I’m not.

374　Roxy Music – Siren: If the last Roxy Music album on the list failed to win me over, then this one does a much better job. 1970s post-punk art-pop, but with some excellent songs, and a dark, menacing vibe throughout.

373　Jefferson Airplane – Volunteers: Given the cultural significance of the so called hippie movement, there’s been precious little hippie music on this list so far, but Jefferson Airplane change all that. This is folk rock twisted through a pharmaceutical haze, and it’s bloody brilliant. Also, they later got on cocaine and changed their name to STARSHIP, and we heartily approve of that.

372　The Police – Reggatta De Blanc: Fuck off, Sting.

And not tantrically, either.

371　Arctic Monkeys – Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not: This veers between brilliantly catchy working class British rock with inventive lyrics, and meandering dull indie fare. The fact that it can even claim the first part at all probably makes it the best British indie album in a decade.

370　Mott the Hoople – Mott: Looking at the next run of four albums set this whole ridiculous enterprise back by a few days, filling me as it did with a deep ladle-full of dread. I mean, forgotten glam rockers, the most boring band on the planet, a washed up pop star and The Fucking Smiths. You try looking at that list and pressing play. Urgh. But this took me by surprise; less the Bowie-aping glam stomp of their earlier work, more bluesy, biting and only a bit glam rock.

369　The Smiths – Louder Than Bombs: I must be feeling charitable after being delighted by Mott, because despite my utter hatred for ‘meat eaters are paedophiles’ Morrissey and his whingy, awful band of tossers, this double-disc retrospective (*sigh*) is actually not as objectionable as it might be. It even has a bona fide ‘quite good’ song, London, which I hadn’t heard before. My world is upturned.

368　Eagles – Eagles: My sense of lost equilibrium is not helped at all by this, the first album by American snooze merchants the Eagles also being much better than I thought it was going to be. For fuck’s sake. Laid back without being dull, this is marginally rougher round the edges than their later stuff and really rather good.

367　Madonna – Ray of Light. Ah, there you go. Expectations well and truly met. I grew up quite liking Madonna, but I notice that the one really great album she made (Erotica) doesn’t make this list, so instead we have to put up with this thoroughly dull pop/dance hybrid which could have done with being twinned with some personality.

366　Johnny Cash – American Recordings: I absolutely adore this album, the richness of Cash’s voice is like butter but really sad butter, the production is probably the best thing Rick Rubin has ever done and the songs are heart-wrenching, dark and bleakly comic. Brilliant.

365　Rage Against the Machine – Rage Against the Machine: It turns out I remember every single lyric on this album, which I think makes me a semi-qualified rapper. I might try and find a ‘battle’ somewhere and test this theory. This is, of course, brilliant, but then you knew that already.

364　The Doors – L.A. Woman: From the opening riff of The Changeling to the closing bars of Riders on the Storm this is The Doors at their flawless, bluesiest best. Brilliant. Wait! Once again, that’s three brilliant albums in a row, and that can mean only one thing…

363　New Order – Substance: …nooooo, it’s another two-disc retrospective! Of a British electro-pop band from the 80s that I utterly despise! If anyone ever wanted to know what was so bad about the 1980s, point them at New Order. When the drum machine heralding the start of Blue Monday comes in I want to end all of the world and its contents. This sounds like the band you formed when you were seven and there were two of you with keyboards and you just hit the demo buttons and sang mumbled tuneless bullshit about the girl down the street who you fancied over the top of it. By you, I mean me, obviously. That this stuff gets played on BBC Radio Two to this very fucking day completely breaks my mind.

362　The Smashing Pumpkins – Siamese Dream: If you’d have asked me my favourite album of all time throughout most of my teens and early 20s I’d have told you this was it; and it hasn’t slipped all that far down the list in the intervening decades. Not a note wasted, and the richest guitar tones known to mankind, this is deliriously good. Fuck sake, why’d you fucking ruin it Billy?

361　Outkast – Stankonia: You can see how this launched Outkast into the astrosphere sales-wise; brilliantly offbeat lyrics and massive pop melodies. It’s a fairly enjoyable ride throughout.

360　Buzzcocks – Singles Going Steady: Again, I fail to see how a greatest hits compilation qualifies as an album. If those are the rules, we might as well start letting Jeremy Clarkson decide what’s cool. But it seems that at least half this list of greatest albums is comprised of not-actually-albums-except-in-contractual-terms. Hey ho. This is exactly what you’d expect from a Buzzcocks best-of, concise pop-punk with occasional moments of brilliance and a fair amount of ballast.

Elton John pictured in 1983.

359　Elton John – Honky Chateau: One of the last albums in Elton’s period of absolute brilliance, when he could swirl Americana, blues, soul and British pop into a big old pot and come out with something majestic. Then the 80s (ie, cocaine) came along and turned him into a cartoon pop buffoon wearing wacky Timmy Mallett glasses. This is excellent, though.

358　Miles Davis – Sketches Of Spain: As smooth as a highly-polished thing being buffed to a sheen in Smoothsville, USA, this mixture of Davis’ more laid-back jazz and flamenco rhythms is quite lovely, if perhaps not quite as memorable as works Davis would produce elsewhere.

357　The Rolling Stones – Between the Buttons:  This is the first of ten Rolling Stones albums on this list, and in our opinion, the tenth best album on anyone’s back catalogue—even that of Jesus Christ himself—doesn’t deserve a place anywhere near a list of the greatest albums of all time. And so it proves here, with this utterly bland collection of songs from the Stones.

356　Randy Newman – 12 Songs: Again, I can’t listen to this without hearing the Toy Story theme, mainly because all this is is Newman’s ‘say what you see’ whimsy over 12 nauseating tracks. It’s just so dull.

355　The Yardbirds – Having A Rave Up With The Yardbirds: There’s an argument to be made that The Yardbirds are the most important British rock band of the 60s, seeing as they variously had Clapton, Beck and Page as their ‘axemen’, but that would clearly be a stupid argument so I don’t know why I mentioned it. This album features all three at various points and is brilliantly excitable blues and soul-inflected rock ‘n’ roll. I bet they were incredible live.

354　Billy Joel – 52nd Street: It’s clear on this how much Joel wants to be Elton John. It’s also clear that Joel is utterly deluded. This is inoffensive 70s radio-friendly AOR, and as such, actually contrives to be as offensive as possible.

353　Kanye West – My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy: This flits between brilliant and inventive, and bland and worryingly misogynistic; and the longer it goes on the more it drifts towards the latter, especially the song that apes Iron Man by Sabbath as Kanye indulges his woman-hating douchebaggery. An odd mix. Also the title sounds like one of those weird Facebook groups full of inspiring confidence-boosting quotes that the mentally subnormal subscribe to.

352　Dire Straits – Brothers In Arms: I probably don’t need to review this as I’d be surprised if anyone reading hadn’t heard it. Some great songs ruined by terrible production, and some boring songs made worse by terrible production. Bit of a snoozeathon, all told.

351　Neil Young & Crazy Horse – Rust Never Sleeps: This album is so good that it effectively sapped Young’s creative powers to the extent that he would be unable to release another good album for an entire decade. From the acoustic folk of the first side—all wistful and brooding—to the raucous and belligerent rock of the second, this is fantastic. Good old Uncle Neil.

His name is Young but he is old. That’s the joke.

And there you have it, another 25 classic records evaluated, devoured and pummelled to the ground. My educational musical odyssey will return… in The Critic Who Loved To Hate.

Tune in next time if you can be bothered. BYE!

On Rap Music: Open Mike Eagle

Editors’ Note: It’s been a while since we last took a journey on Geoff’s Rap Bus. After a talking vegetable pasty ordered our massive wanker intrepid reporter to spend an inordinate amount of time filling in tiny boxes on pretend trading cards, the Rap Bus had a mini-breakdown, grew a stupendous beard, and has since been SORNed up on a driveway in Sheffield. While applying for SORN status, though, our thoughts drifted to imagining just how terrible a human you would have to be to buy a product like this.

 It is also worth spending a few moments exploring the variety of emotions conjured by this customer review:

“The whole point of buying this holder was to have to slogan so it could be read by the council jobsworths – except they cant as the holder is designed so that faces into your car.”

Incredible.

Anyway, we decided it was time for Geoff to start earning the huge salary his agent demanded when we signed him, so we paid for the Rap Bus to be made roadworthy again, bought him a new hilarious tax disc holder (top bantz) and sent him off into the world of underground rap once again, this time to visit Open Mike Eagle.  

A licence for this picture costs $15, so we just stole it instead.

While the Rap Bus was out of action, I spent the time perfecting my transitions from third to first person. If you get good enough at it then readers won’t even notice that you write your own intros. If I doesn’t practices enough though he get quite messy.

After a few weeks of talking to myself, and a few more weeks of Arthur Fowler style rocking I was pleased to find a plane ticket to Los Angeles on my doormat courtesy of the very generous and mysterious Demon Pigeon patrons. The Rap Bus was on the road again! (It folds up and fits into a suitcase or something so it can go on planes. Shut up.)

When I found out I was going to Los Angeles I knew straight away that I’d be going to see Open Mike Eagle because Open Mike Eagle is the best. Also I’m pretty sure he’s seriously undercharged me for shipping on that Rappers Will Die Of Natural Causes vinyl so I probably needed to buy him a couple of pints.

Open Mike Eagle is the best because he has the best rapping skills, the best lyrics, the best humour and the best song about time travelling helicopters.

He also has the best song that riffs on Frank Black’s Thalassocracy and is about being amazing at rapping but not having enough time to do it because you’re working a 9-5 job.

(I learned about the Frank Black thing from a YouTube comment. It’s amazing what you can learn from YouTube comments. I also learned that “megadeth turn to megaclown band”.)

Some of the other things that Open Mike Eagle is the best at are:

1. Having the best song about changing your password.

“Half afro and half jew-fro / I sneak around like I’m Clouseau / Got the password to your Netflix / I’m watching every Naruto”

2. Having the best song about grammatical modifiers performed live in a Laundromat

“We the best mostly / sometimes the livest rhymers / we the tightest kinda / respect my qualifiers”

3. Having the best song about being the smartest broke dude ever.

“They taught me all about metaphors / And other shit to make me smart but extra poor / Like which rivers flow through Ecuador / I got a high IQ and low credit score”

4. And of course, the best song about washing dishes.

“I’m just washing dishes / I got wet sleeves / don’t make dishes when I’m scrubbing that’s a pet peeve”

“If 50 is a millionaire / I wonder if he ever runs out of silverware / big acts fade away like Silverchair”

If you like your rap music to be both intelligent and humorous with multi-layered lyrics delivered by a rapper who is at the absolute top of his craft then Open Mike Eagle is your man. If you don’t like those things, then I don’t really know what to tell you. As I sit in the Los Angeles branch of Greggs waiting for the Rap Bus to refuel I wonder if Open Mike Eagle will one day make it over to the UK to perform. I also wonder, if he were to somehow read this article, whether he would vow never to set foot in such a creepy, weird place. Anyway Mike, I probably owe you about $15 or something. Email me.

Thanks to Demon Pigeon for fixing the Rap Bus and sorting out the tickets to LA. Here are some pictures of the trip.

Me and Mike hanging out.

Me visiting Hollywood

Me about to land at LAX

Pretty excited to see where the guys send me next time.

Buy Open Mike Eagle music from openmikeeagle.bandcamp.com Do it.

Indian – From All Purity

(Relapse Records)

I’m a big fan of just kind of saying what you mean, out there in what we so laughably call ‘the real world’. Bands like Indian appeal pretty strongly to that part of my psyche, as handily evidenced by them wanging a track called Rape front and centre of their latest release (note: I had a wee chat about this with our esteemed editor and all-around ruddy bloody nice bloke Paul shortly before I submitted this review. Interesting, it was. No, it was a private chat. No, YOU shut up and get on with it.) 

Erm, anyway. Yeah. Indian and their new record. Sorry. It’s really, really horrible. Like, properly awful. In the best possible way, of course. Their last one, Guiltless? That was fucking terrifying too, but in a mildly more acceptable manner than this.

From All Purity essentially takes a look at all the things that usually make for a popular record and chucks all of them right in the bin. It then takes a dirty great dump in the bin, covers the plops in newspaper, sets fire to the paper and rolls the bin straight into the part of your mind that deals with melody and hooks. FUCK YOU MELODY! UP YOURS, EASY-TO-GRASP STRUCTURES! POKE IT UP YOUR HOOP, SINGALONG CHORUSES! RAAAGH! YEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRGH!

A bit like that, anyway. I’m not sure why everything has to be categorised as ‘blackened x’ these days, but that’s where other people are going with this, so I might as well roll with it in a desperate, futile attempt to sound contemporary and knowledgeable. I dunno, we used to just call this stuff ‘doom’ and get back to playing on our Amigas and Megadrives. Tch.

Anyway, the ‘describing’ bit: It lumbers along, staggering from hideous riff to clattering fill to grief-laden shriek like a stabbed mammoth, all loaded up on sadness, opiates of suspect origin and a furious, clamouring depression. Did I mention it’s really, really horrible? Like, properly awful?

Yep, I love it. For fans of Burning Witch, if such a creature really exists and I didn’t invent it.

www.indiandoom.com

Rolling Stone Top 500 Challenge V

We’re now a quarter-way through this list of the supposed greatest albums of all time, as decided by whoever Rolling Stone magazine thought was important enough to ask at the time. Now that we’re clear of the bottom hundred, you’d expect the oddities and scratch-your-head moments to be less frequent; for the list to become a nailed-on cavalcade of brilliance. Right?

Haha. Let’s find out.

The Rules: Try and listen to all the albums on the Rolling Stone top 500 albums of all time. No vetoes. I’m not even allowed to veto things on the grounds that they contain Ian Brown.

My Progress: 399-376

399　Tom Waits – Rain Dogs: Not a bad way to start the fifth leg of this ridiculous enterprise, bar-soaked off-kilter blues-jazz-rock hyphenated-stuff from the man with a voice like a stabbed bear. Brilliant.

398　ZZ Top – Eliminator: Every time I was starting to enjoy this slice of prime ‘Dad Rock’, I was transfixed by a mental image of Jeremy ‘Jeremy’ Clarkson rocking out in his finest shiny leather blouson and tight blue jeans, the lights of an empty dance floor rebounding off his bald spot and his moccasins, and when he turned round to smile at me, it was my face he was wearing.

397　Massive Attack – Blue Lines: For some reason this is preferred over the infinitely better Mezzanine. I understand this lay down the blueprint for all the trip-hop that would follow, but anyone who would argue that it has anything more than a handful of good tunes and one classic scattered across its running time would be lying. To your face.

396　Roxy Music – For Your Pleasure: I fully expected to hate this due to my own shady memories identifying them as some kind of 80s yuppie nonsense, but it’s actually a lot more like sophisticated experimental glam punk than I was expecting. I still don’t particularly like it, though.

395　LCD Soundsystem – Sound of Silver: As someone who lived most of his formative years above various nightclubs around London and Essex, I have a utter hatred for anything that has a traditional dance beat, soundtracking as it did countless endless nights of broken sleep and tears. As this starts I start finding myself banging my head against the wall in a sudden attack of muscle and sense memory, but across its running time I find myself being quite won over by this album’s charms. What is happening to me?

394　Randy Newman – Good Old Boys: As someone who only really knows Newman from the Toy Story films and that Family Guy skit, I wasn’t really expecting savagely cutting satire, but that’s what this album delivers in spades. Unfortunately it couples this lyrical excellence with a songwriting style that is basically ‘every song sounds like the song from Toy Story.’ Every. Single. Song. What a weird album.

393　M.I.A. – Kala: I don’t really understand what this is, but I think I quite like it. Either that or I utterly detest it. I can’t tell any more. I think it might be the latter. Yes, it’s awful. Unless it’s not. It is though.

392　The Beatles – Let It Be: And so we get to the first of ten Beatles albums on the list. One of their more relaxed efforts, there’s as you would expect some great songs in here, and some overrated self-indulgent dross. Nestled in amongst the other shit on this list it’s a bright little ray of sunshine, even if it’s really not good enough to warrant inclusion on any sane person’s list.

391　Jackson Browne – The Pretender: I’d already done a Jackson Browne album on this list, but couldn’t remember it at all. Now I know why. This is the blandest, most generic dreadfulness. Urgh. There’s another one of his albums in the next leg, and I’ll have probably forgotten what he sounds like again before I get to it.

390　The White Stripes – Elephant: I’m actually rather fond or The White Stripes, who seem to be the only people to have become mainstream rock acts without particularly compromising their integrity in recent years. I love Jack White’s guitar tone, and Meg’s ability to keep the rhythm completely loose. It’s not my favourite album of theirs, but I’d take this over your Kings of Leons and your Killers from here until, well, the end of time.

389　Don Henley – The End of the Innocence: Well now this is just awful. It doesn’t even have American Pie on it. I hate American Pie, but it’d still be preferable to all the other songs on offer on this excremental 80s AOR fare.

388　Various Artists – The Indestructible Beat of Soweto: Listen, if you feel that owning some world music somehow alleviates your white guilt and middle class privilege then go right ahead, but please don’t try and convince me that it’s good, because it’s just not. In fact I think this might be the worst album I’ve heard on this list so far, an unlistenable melange of bad 80s production, weak melodies repeated ad infinitum and absolutely nothing whatsoever to redeem it, save for the aforementioned middle class guilt avoidance hippie bullshit aesthetic. It’s like nails on a blackboard for an hour.

387　Wu-Tang Clan – Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers): This is more like it. Sublimely ridiculous cartoon gangsta hip hop. I’ve heard this album christ knows how many times and it still makes me giggle every single time.

386　Steely Dan – Pretzel Logic: I’m starting to think that this is Rolling Stone’s top 500 generic AOR albums from the 70s and 80s when its writers were actually young, with a few modern additions to make them seem vaguely hip. This is dull, and I can’t think of anything else to say about it than that.

385　Bob Dylan – Love And Theft: On the one hand it’s great that an artist like Dylan can find the drive to keep going well into his dotage, on the other hand it’s not so good that we actually have to listen to it. This is fairly generic folk rock, delivered with all the grace and poise of a tramp pissing into your mouth.

384　The Who – A Quick One: The Who are one of the bands that I was hoping to get to know a bit better over this exercise, a band I always meant to get around to. On the strength of this, their second album, maybe I should not be so hasty. Mop top brit pop from the 60s, it’s all perfectly fine, but I can’t find anything in this to justify the hype I’ve heard about this band throughout my life. It’s the first of seven Who albums on the list, however, so I’ll have plenty of opportunities to change my mind. *loads shotgun*

383　Talking Heads – More Songs About Buildings and Food:  There’s a strange disco vibe on this second album by oddball post-punks Talking Heads, which is possibly why I didn’t enjoy it as much as I was expecting to. The lyrics and vocals of David Byrne are as enjoyable as you’d expect, but the music just feels flat and tinny and overly repetitive, and the music just feels flat and tinny and overly repetitive.

382　Modern Lovers – Modern Lovers: This is interesting, somewhere between the Velvet Underground and punk, I’d never heard of this before. Hey look, this list accomplished something!

381　The Beach Boys – Smile: This list predates Brian Wilson finishing Smile properly I assume, which is why I have to listen to this mish mash instead, a completely half-baked clump of ideas, occasional moments of genius nestled amongst the detritus of the rest of it. Frustrating.

380　Toots and The Maytals – Funky Kingston: Now this is delightful. Proper Jamaican reggae, this is like swallowing sunshine or taking a bath in happiness. Lovely.

379　TLC – Crazysexycool: Jesus. This is the worst kind of generic 90s R’n’B pop, but it’s sold loads of millions of copies despite it only having a couple of catchy tunes on it and a production so tepid that it would make Michael Bolton weep, so that must make it worthy of inclusion on a list of the so-called greatest albums of all time, right? RIGHT?

378　Oasis – (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?: This was less of a listening experience, more a traumatic dip into the murky backwater swamp of my own wretched past, an unwelcome reminder of bad times and things best forgotten. Cheers Rolling Stone.

377　John Lee Hooker – The Ultimate Collection (1948-1990): I got the ‘I-really-like-John-Lee-Hooker-but-I-don’t-think-anyone-really-needs-to-ever-sit-through-three-straight-CDs-of-his-back-catalogue-what-with-his-songs-all-being-really-similar-and-that’ blues

376　Björk – Post: You can take your Lady Gagas and your M.I.As and shove them, quite frankly. If you want incredibly innovative, brilliantly written and completely nuts art-pop, then Bjork has been doing it a hell of a lot longer and better than anyone else. This album is dripping with menace, beauty, fragility, power, sexuality and brilliance. And she’s never ruined the Muppets.

Hooray! That’s another 25 albums gobbled up in short order, and to ensure complete digestion I must now sleep them off, otherwise I’ll be bringing them all back up again in a minute. With another leg done, that’s only… 15 to go! 

 oh god

On Om

I took the vibrationary enlightenment path on the Northern line in November in search of sonic benediction. Here is what I found after that fateful trip on the underground.

Photo by Nina Saeidi

I wondered in the Shoreditch Vales and found a mighty sound-hall filled

With sweeping hair and riffs that curled

Around each brick and beam of light

To fill each heart with sweet delight.

 

And for each person in that room enlightenment did bloom

Upon their faces like a bruise,

A fractal sea of blood clots stared in wonder at the three up there, exhuming ancient eastern myth entwined around each pungent riff.

 

Al Cisneros’ voice rang deep,

Deeper than the mystery of Sleep.

Lichens grew in height and power

Until a wordless bursting song

Of distorted ecstasies was flung from his great tangled thunderous lungs.

His table full of wires hung from santoors, tamboors and guitars

Each felt his fingers drum the beat

That met with Amos’ pounding feet.

 

Each cymbal crash was met with peals of sweetest steel and

Falsettos clashed in harmony with Cisneros’ Rickenbacker rumble,

 

In ecstasies to Sinai’s tip climbed bass and drum and samples hit

The core of every pulsing heart until we were back at the start.

The end of Addis shuddered down with calls of sadness,

Darkness frowned upon the stage

And a single note more was not made

 

That fateful night,

Om had played.

Hellfest Day 3: Sunday

It’s Sunday, and we realise that our day of taking things somewhat easier has left us no more able to rouse ourselves from our collective slumbers than previously. We are now broken men, staring forlornly at our pastried breakfasts and wondering exactly how we’re going to get to the end of the day, where looms the prospect of Swans coming onstage at midnight to terrify the living hell out of us.

Again, decisions must be made, and with a heavy heart, in the interests of our own sanity, Swans are summarily jettisoned from our daily agenda. I really wanted to see them, but with 18 hours of travel back to Blighty pencilled in at stupid o’ clock the next morning, I just can’t face two hours of metronomic space doom starting at the stroke of midnight.

What we can handle, however, is a big dose of Truckfighters, aka the happiest stone rock band on the whole damn planet. As we are becoming accustomed to here at Pigeon Towers, half an hour in the company of these happy Swedes is like a revitalising tonic, a cure for what ails you. Taking Kyuss’ sound and making it bouncier is what they do, and they do it very well. We imbibe, we inhale and we feel better. Onwards!

For these reporters, the main draw of the day is not the giant main stage headlining power of Volbeat, but the triple threat drum assault being served up over at the Altar. Cryptopsy are first up, and they set the intensity bar ridiculously high. This is technical death metal served with a side order of extra tech. We watched in awe as their drummer pulled off speeds that would leave the Roadrunner agog; extra dazzling when we found out this wasn’t even their normal drummer. There are two of these fuckers? Someone should plug their spasming limbs into the national grid to generate free, limitless electricity, instead of powerful, deafening rhythms.

Pig Destroyer are up next, and if it is intensity you’re looking for, there’s enough here to fuel the power grids of 10 cities. Adam Jarvis pulls off another display of rhythmic whatthefuckery, the first in a double bill of Jarvis action; but the star of the show is J. R. Hayes, whose snarling, unhinged, and borderline feral performance is beyond captivating.

Misery Index round off the technicality triumvirate, meaning a second set for Adam Jarvis who again delivers an astounding performance on the drums, and while his band are equally dazzling in a technical sense, after the brutality of Cryptopsy and the derangement of Pig Destroyer, they fall a little flat, having less balls-out originality to make them stand out. Much fun was had though, and we stumble out of the Altar feeling like we’d spent all night smooching with a ball-peen hammer (no tongues).

Clutch were supposed to be the afternoon delight to bring us floating down from our death metal overdose, but unfortunately they had to pull out, leaving the prospect of Down Does Covers, which we reason could provide either an interesting anecdote or a genuine highlight. What we got was one of those rare moments that you imagine will one day pass into rock folklore, a where-were-you-when urban myth—or it would have done if any proper music journalists had been there to write about it. Instead you’ve got us.

Sorry.

The tent is rammed before the band come on stage, and even though it’s mostly French chatter around me it’s clear that one word is being spoken above all others; Pantera. In amongst the anticipation, there was also a real sense of danger, little scuffles breaking out here and there between crowd-members, as most of the festival tries to cram itself into the big top. When the band appear, they are clearly fairly well lubricated, and slightly sheepish. Phil tells us to expect something a bit different, then the band launch into two of Down’s better back catalogue moments. Then Phil introduces his wife to the stage, and suddenly you have a female fronted Eyehategod slugging their way through Sisterfucker and Blank. Then there’s a slight rearrangement of the personnel and we’re watching Crowbar for two songs.

This is all rather exciting, of course. After the Crowbar mini-set Pepper grabs the microphone and bursts into Clean My Wounds and holy shit we’re seeing CoC, and Jason Newsted is playing bass for some reason (???) and the crowd are going suitably bonkers. A fight breaks out next to us and we’re privileged to witness one of the best mandatory exits from a concert I’ve ever seen. One guy starts picking on a much smaller guy and from nowhere, a massive bloke picks up the aggressor and sprints him bodily through the crowd, before chucking him through the tent wall in a move I can only imagine he learned by watching Loony Tunes cartoons. For his efforts, he gets a round of applause as big as any enjoyed by the band. I was just about to step in, honest.

The Corrosion of Conformity mini-set comes to an end, then there are some songs I don’t recognise, with a man I don’t recognise, and then it all ends up with Phil re-joining the band for Walk. I’m sure you can imagine how the crowd reacted. Then the band departs, or all the bands depart, or all the bands break up and go and find something better to do, or something. It was all sloppy as hell but magical; one of those pinch-yourself moments you don’t get all that often.

At this point, our dear leader feels the need to slump in a tent, so it falls to the marginally younger and substantially sprightlier Will Downes to see one more band. Over to Will:

“My final act of Hellfest was to drag my battered and bruised body to see Hypocrisy, a band that in a world of melodic death metal clones have managed to create a sound uniquely theirs. Such head banging, many harmonies, wow, in the parlance of twenty-fucking-fourteen. If there was one sour note it was that I was distracted a little by an attractive lady. I don’t mean in a pervy way, you sickos; I just couldn’t work out what she was doing there, lost in a knot of sweaty virgins. Other than that, they were flawless and I got to scream along to Roswell 47, making me the conclusive winner of the evening.”

Festival review ends. Finally.

Now, to rejoin the tenuous narrative arc we began several months ago when we first began this review, after one full day of travelling, followed by three entire days at one of the best festivals I’ve ever attended, I really needed to spend a palliative day or two sleeping in luxuriant surroundings, eating green things and drinking nothing stronger than water. But no, unbeknownst to me, I had signed up for the soon-to-be patented ‘Demon Pigeon’s Ultimate One Week Weight-Loss Programme’ also known as the ‘make an absolute balls-up of planning your festival’ plan. There was no choice but to commit to it.

You’d think that packing up a tent and all your miscellaneous camping crap, legging it to a bus and riding serenely to a train station would be an easy, even trivial thing to do—and you would be right. We got up with plenty of time, packed, got the bus, and got on the first train. Except it was only at this last point that we bothered checking our itinerary properly, and discovered that our train from Nantes to Paris would leave in 34 minutes, and our present train would get into Nantes in 32 minutes. It was like a terrifying GCSE maths exam question brought to hideous life. We would need our connecting train to be at the very next platform if we were to have any chance of making our first major connection.

Obviously, it wasn’t. So we got off the train and sprinted for it with our hilarious old man gaits, made even more simian since our backs were laden with tents and waterproof trousers. We saw the train pull out just as we made the next platform. This was the start of a rather unpleasant pattern.

We got to Paris and sprinted to the taxi rank, then sprinted to the Eurostar. We missed that too. We got the next one and sprinted through the underground, then sprinted from Victoria station to Victoria coach station. Confusingly, Victoria coach station is a really really long way from Victoria underground, and we missed our coach. Each time we ran our legs started to cave, our lungs felt like they would pop, and our rucksack straps cut ever-deeper grooves into our protesting appendages.

Of course, because we spent all our time sprinting around and missing trains, we went nearly 18 hours without eating anything until 10pm that evening, when we stumbled into Leeds station as broken men and inhaled the entire contents of a Burger King franchise as fast as they could dish it up. I can honestly say I’ve never had a more wretched day in my life, and it was only my very real actual literal tears when talking to staff at every leg of our fucked up journey that meant we managed to get onto subsequent trains, coaches and taxis without incurring hundreds of pounds of additional cost.

So Hellfest. Amazing festival, slightly spoiled by absolutely terrible planning on our part. Because we’ve taken months to trickle out our review, they’ve already gone and announced the line-up for next year and it’s arguably even better than this one—and if you plan it right you can get a ticket and transport for roughly the same price as Download who, as usual, have got the same five fucking bands they had on last year.

So you should probably do that.

www.hellfest.fr