The Claude Mono Blog

Siamese Dream – Indie – Mixtape Five

Claude Mono guest curates Siamese Dream

The guitar riffs will rise like steam from the wet mud of the mosh-pits of Glastonbury only to evaporate into dubbed out bass acid-squelched indie dance beats from Manchester…

LISTEN

Listen to the RTRFM show re-stream here

Listen to the HQ Mixtape – just the music here

PLAYLIST

Siamese Dream intro (Mono Edit)

The Clash – The Magnificent Seven

The Clash – The Magnificent Dance

Primal Scream – Shine Like Stars (Live intro)

Primal Scream – Shine Like Stars Eden Studio Demo

Primal Scream – Shine Like Stars (Andrew Weatherall)

The Happy Mondays – Kilamenjaro (aka ‘Rave On’) – Bummed (Deluxe)

Crispy Ambulance – Step Up – Scissorgun

Chapterhouse – Mesmerise

Chapterhouse – Pearl

My Bloody Valentine – Map Ref. 41N 93W Whore – Various Artists Play Wire

Stereolab – John Cage Bubblegum – Refried Ectoplasm Switched On Volume 2

Stereolab – Doubt (Peel Session – 30-07-91)

The Pastels – Yoga – Mobile Safari

Lush – Burnham Beeches – Blind Spot – Blind Spot EP

Stockholm Monsters – Miss Moonlight

The Telescopes – Celeste – Celeste EP

The Telescopes – Celestial – Celeste EP

The Sunflowers – Twenty Fifteen – Cherry Red C90

Ride – Seagull – Nowhere

Lush – Undertow (Spooky Remix) – Hypocrite EP

Bowery Electric – Beat – Beat

Pulp – Space (BBC Hit The North Session Soundcheck)

MORE Siamese Dream Mixtapes

Siamese Dream Mixtape Number Four here

Siamese Dream Third Excursion here

Siamese Dream Second Excursion here

Siamese Dream First Excursion here

SLEEVE NOTES

THE CLASH

“Ring, ring, it’s 7:00am move yourself to go again”

On the cover of “The Magnificent Seven” (the record) is a clock showing seven. The song’s title is about time and about work – about  The Clash track The Magnificent Seven is about work – about  daily life, and its class struggle but instead of sounding punk its framed by the sound of funk and the emerging hip-hop of New York, which Joe Strummer later said “changed everything for us”. Read more on The Clash’s 1981 punk rock take on the cycle of consumption and work here

PRIMAL SCREAM

“I watch you dance / You look so happy… May you always / Shine like stars.”

2021 marks 30 years since the release of Screamadelica, As well as a set or demos Primal Scream have shared a previously unreleased Andrew Weatherall remix of “Shine Like Stars.” The late, great Weatherall transforms the record’s hazy and (comparatively low-key) closing track into a stadium-ready ballad. Bold guitar riffs replace the muted tones and eerie bleeps of the original, as Weatherall packs in warmth and feeling with rich choral harmonies. Delivering characteristic chug and pizzazz like only the Guv’nor could, the lyrics on this posthumous release hit hard.

LUSH

“I’m so shy, I never speak a word till were on our own“

Crispy Ambulance: “Joy Division stumbled upon us in July 1978 at a gig we played in Manchester, and they liked our approach, even if the material was a little weak, to say the least. They dragged Rob Gretton, their new manager, down to see us some months later, and as a result we did a gig with them at The Factory club in Hulme on 13 July, around the time that Unknown Pleasures was released.”

After years of relative obscurity and against the odds, in 1999 all four original members reconvened for a one-off live show at the Band On the Wall in Manchester. Intended to mark the reissue of Fin and The Plateau Phase on CD, the weeks of intensive rehearsal prepared the ground for a fine live performance, and also an album of new material, Scissorgun which includes the track Step Up

Full biography here

THE PASTELS

“It might not last /So were gonna record everything”

Excerpt from Diffuser interview with Stephen Pastel of the Pastels (by Kenneth Partridge) full article here

Quite a few younger bands have picked up on one aspect of your music, this early jangly pop thing. If you had to give someone a starting point for the Pastels, what would it be?
“In terms of music that we make [now], in some ways, [1995’s] ‘Mobile Safari’ was important. That was when Katrina joined the group. I think that lineup, with Katrina and Annabel [Wright] and myself, that was the beginning of a lot of the things we do now, and it probably has more elements from earlier Pastels music. It’s probably closer to the 1980s independent noisy-pop thing. It’s hard to say there’s one record. Different records represent different points in the group, and not one record would represent them all. ‘Mobile Safari’ was a really important record for us to make, because we almost didn’t know if we would be able to carry on. Annabel and I split from the people in the original group, and it was just really important for us to make an album. The other records were important, too. [1987’s] ‘Up for a Bit With the Pastels’ is really important. It was different from the early singles, and it slightly took people by surprise in terms of what it was”.

THE SUNFLOWERS

While selecting tunes I discovered this great track from 1990 called Twenty Fifteen by The Sunflowers. It was comped on Cherry Red’s C90 – Well it turns out the band is pretty obscure – I did some research to confirm the obscurity which was verified at the essential and encyclopedic indie resource Cloudberry Cake Proselytism V.3 here (The Sunflowers are about half way down)

I did find the cover for the 1990 Daydream 45 on which Twenty Fifteen was the B-side. And also loved the photo of their Scottish producer Jamie Watson – he looks like an Edinburgh gangster and ran the Chamber Studio which put out some pretty crazy and legendary stuff over three decades – the studio was located in an old pool hall and Jamie played in 80s bands The Solo/Monos and The Persian Rugs.

…and here is some rare live footage – how young are they – I mean seriously

STOCKHOLM MONSTERS

From promotional flyer:

Fri Jul 8 ” Percussive popular dance music… “Factory Records recording act. Songs are carefully constructed, layer upon layer, with unnecessary indulgence left out, producing a clean full sound that’s immediately attractive. Two sets at 10pm and 11:45pm.

‘Miss Moonlight’ by Stockholm Monsters was released in 1983 on the Factory Records offshoot Factory Benelux in Belgium. A neglected part of the Factory Records scene, the Stockholm Monsters are a key link between the bristly art-funk of A Certain Ratio and the good-foot indie dance vibe of Happy Mondays and the other Manchester bands of the late ’80s. Often seen merely as New Order proteges (Peter Hook produced all but one of their records) and victims of both record company indifference and unnecessary potshots by the cynical British music press, the Stockholm Monsters deserved better treatment than they usually got.

From the biography at LTM Recordings here and even more here

In April 1982 the band supported New Order on a European tour which took in France, Belgium and Holland, followed in August by a second single (Fac 58), coupling busy pop nugget Happy Ever After with Soft Babies. Produced by Peter Hook. In September the band performed at the Futurama IV festival at Deeside, where Melody Maker praised their ‘big sound and big tunes’, though Sounds condemned the group unkindly as ‘Factory failures.’…The arrival of the Happy Mondays on the scene also hastened the demise of the Stockholm Monsters. Initially sponsored by Rob Gretton, the Mondays were an older group and had also became Tony Wilson’s blue-eyed boys, in part due to a moderately hard, streetwise image which saw them variously labelled as Scallies and Perry Boys. By 1984 Stockholm Monsters were showing real promise with Alma Mater, yet the album was indifferently received by the critics, and failed to break out commercially. The group never made it to the States and would eventually find themselves overtaken by the Mondays, who quickly became press darlings and edged the Monsters from their niche at Palatine Road. Nor did it help that a somewhat emotional John Rhodes of the band threw a punch at Tony Wilson at The Hacienda in December 1986.

BOWERY ELECTRIC

Somewhere between Post Rock, Shoegaze and Trip Hop…

Simon Reynolds’ seminal post-Rock article in the November 1995 issue of The Wire placed Bowery Electric in the forefront of “a distinctively American post-rock.” The band returned to Studio .45 to work on the second full length release with engineer Rich Costley. With the acquisition of samplers, the band’s song writing process (which had always started with the bass track and drum beats) expanded. The resulting album, Beat, featured a drummer on four out of ten tracks, with plenty of subtly sampled beats and bass tones anchoring the bottom end. Lawrence Chandler told Alternative Press that “technologically Beat is the beginning of us learning our way around a proper sampler and software which allows us to work with samples on the computer. We can sample ourselves, manipulate sounds, create our own beats and basically work with fewer restrictions.” Beat was praised by The Wire as “genre-defining”.