As you cycled by, there began all my dreams

Is Holidays to Wales the least rock’n’roll song title ever? It might be but then again it has stiff opposition from Distant Showers Sweep Across Norfolk Schools. Both are songs on July Skies’ The Weather Clock.*

I remember reading an interview with The Jesus And Mary Chain where Jim Reid was asked why a band from Scotland would use the American term Sidewalking for a song title. Reid replied: “Well, pavement isn’t a very rock’n’roll word is it?” **

American place names are part of the mythology of rock music. Their adoption is always a deliberate act of homage. For The Jesus Mary Chain this homage was always somehow subverted, the borrowed classicism offset by their spotty angst and sullen attitude. But, Indie music, and specifically British Indie music, has also developed a counter tradition which celebrates the quotidian and the unglamorous. Think Orange Juice in their boy scout shorts and antiquated vocabulary, or Morrissey’s 1950’s imagery and John Betjeman allusions.

This replaces the "Cars and Girls" of American rock with cerebral pleasures and deeply uncool modes of transport (see Aztec Camera's: "There's a message for us, we can get there by bus." from Killermont Street). These are pre rock’n’roll reference points, a period where the non-literary sensibility of rock music (noise, rhythm, the grain of the voice) had yet to assert itself, when holidays to Wales were still the stuff of dreams.

July Skies, with their odes to pre-Beeching branch lines and the paintings of Paul Nash, fit into this lineage. Their music has some of the qualities of the shambling c86 era and the cuteness of bands like The Field Mice, but they are more abstract, less song based. The lyrics, if there are any, are virtually inaudible and the songs are more like delicate mood pieces, somewhere between Vaughn Williams and Boards of Canada.

About as far from the Mary Chain's Sidewalks as you can get, The July Skies are more likely to be found on a cycling holiday in Norfolk, ruddy cheeked and with copies of Pevsner in their satchels. The pictures of early New Town housing in the CD booklet of The Weather Clock sum up their refined nostalgic impulses. The late music critic Iain Macdonlad once wrote that listening to Saint Etienne was like driving around Milton Keynes with the windscreen wipers on. I don’t think he meant it positively but it’s probably exactly the feeling they were striving for.

The music of July Skies meanwhile feels like daydreaming during double geography in a secondary modern school room on the outskirts of Harlow. In a good way you understand. An obscure and esoteric sensation to evoke for sure. It’s saved from sentimentality perhaps by the oblique loveliness of the music and the gentle eccentricity of the reference points.

* An album I was alerted to here and which received further endorsement from here.

** I have a theory that Steven Malkmus read the same interview before he christened his own band Pavement. The choice of such a deliberately un rock’n’roll word with all its anglophile gawkyness fits perfectly with Pavement's own skewed literary sensibility.

All that is solid melts in the sun…….

Coppelia is a state owned ice cream parlour in Havana. It operates out of a beautiful expressionist concrete building, an elegant cylindrical structure with a central spiral stair on which is inscribed a suitably uplifting revolutionary slogan from Fidel Castro. A wigwam like bunch of concrete beams sprout from the top, reminiscent of Liverpool’s Frederick Gibberd designed Catholic Cathedral. Indeed the interior of Coppelia is like a secular church to ice cream. Semi-circular timber screens with coloured stain glass panels divide up the interior. A delicate lattice ceiling surrounds a central oculus window.

The process of buying ice cream is bizarre, and byzantine in its complexity. There are six entrances, each one of which leads through a palm fringed public plaza to its own semi autonomous restaurant area. To get in though you have to queue at one of the entrances, sometimes for up to an hour or so, until a uniformed guard leads you inside and shows you to your seat. When you finally get to sit down, the ice cream is brought to you in little plastic bowls accompanied by a glass of water. It is amazingly nice.

Coppelia is an incongruous mixture of rationing and luxury. State sanctified religion is replaced in Cuba by state sanctified fun. Perhaps this is why the forms of Coppelia are so reminiscent of contemporaneous modernist churches from Europe. It employs the same abstracted and non specific religious iconography. It's position, set back from the road and at a major junction, indicates its symbolic importance, just as a church might. And visiting it for most Cubans has, apparently, some of the same sense of social ritual and importance. The deferral of pleasure of the queuing system is slightly shorter than the deferral of pleasure in Christianity though.

7 Up

Funny how a few days off makes you lose all momentum. So I'm perversely grateful for Mr Impostume’s invitation to tell the world (well, you know…) my favourite seven songs of the moment. A bit off piste for me so I’ll try not to get too NME circa 1988 about it and go on about crystalline guitars and stalactites of sound. I won't tag anyone because I have used up my tagging goodwill the last time. So...

Concerning the UFO sighting near Highland, Illinois – Sufjan Stevens.

Stevens can be a bit too close to Paul Simon for my comfort but this is altogether stranger and more alien, more like something from the darker side of the 1970’s, the accompaniment to a Richard Prince painting of mid-western farmers staring up at strange lights in the sky, or the existential angst of Richard Dreyfus in Close Encounters. It manages to sound both awe struck and painfully slight, like it might be blown away at any moment and it stops long before you expect it to, which is always good. I believe it’s probably about God but that’s ok with me.

Ghosts – Japan.

From a time when pop was obsessed with exotic otherness and gloriously unafraid to be pretentious this is a masterpiece of grandly arch songwriting. It’s also oddly heartbreaking, David Silvian’s voice cracking with a mixture of emotion and affectation. A perfect balancing act caught between debonair croon and genuine despair. Good xylophone too.

Landslide - Fleetwood Mac.

I have something of a soft spot for Fleetwood Mac especially Stevie Nicks era Fleetwood Mac (well only Stevie Nicks era Fleetwood Mac to be fair) and this is beautiful, a barefoot gypsy skirted lament for lost innocence and a dawning sense of her own mortality sung when she must have been about 24, which only makes it sadder.

Push The Button - Sugababes/Orson.

Slightly sacrilegious I know, but I'm plumping for Orson's cover version for sentimental reasons although its not strictly as blindin' as The Sugababes' stroppily libidinous original. Incidentally, in a rare brush with glamour for me I once sat at the same table for dinner as Heidi from the Sugababes. She was very short.

Don’t Talk to Strangers - Ariel Pink.

Sounds like the whole of the 1980’s being played out the window of a car passing you on the freeway while the tape recorder melts in the sunshine onto the seats like an ice cream. I can’t get enough of that sort of thing. It was the same with The Avalanches’ Everyday, which sounds like being trapped in the broom cupboard of a villa in the South of France whilst outside an incredibly glamorous party is taking place.

Millionaire - Queens of the Stone Age.

Has the best pause in any rock song ever, like the the moment of calm as someone catches their breath before throwing you headfirst out of a window. Brings an utterly propulsive thrill every time it happens.

Automatically Sunshine - Diana Ross.

Absolutely, without a shadow of a doubt, the best song to accompany one's wife walking up the aisle.