CAS Album of the Month Club: Nick Drake ‘Five Leaves Left’ with Joe Boyd

Our final ‘Album of the Month Club’ sees Colleen joined by producer Joe Boyd to discuss Nick Drake’s 1969 debut album Five Leaves Left on Sunday December 13th at 8 pm GMT. For those that haven’t joined us, it is like a book club get-together on Zoom but for….albums!

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Alongside Joe’s production the album features Richard Thompson (of Fairport Convention) and Danny Thompson (of Pentangle) as well as the beautiful string arrangements of Robert Kirby. Despite being championed by D.J. John Peel, the album initially sold less than 6,000 copies. Now, over four decades since Drake’s death, Five Leaves Left is seen as an iconic album in British Folk music and his songs are cited as an influence by Peter Buck of REM and Robert Smith of The Cure.

On Sunday morning, Colleen will send all participants a ‘Musical Lead-Up Playlist’ that sets the musical context for the album and will include Goldfrapp’s influences and contemporaries. This is to be listened to in your own time before the meeting takes place.

Doors open at 7:45 and after we all greet one another, Colleen tells the story behind the album. We then listen to the album in real time on whichever device or format that is available to you (vinyl, CD, streaming). Once the album finishes, we unmute ourselves and have a discussion about the album and our listening experience.

This is a great way to connect with people, especially for those of us who are in Lockdown and I truly hope you can join us. If you are a subscribed Supporter or Punter, you can always upgrade your subscription to Member status and you will not be charged twice. And if you are new to Classic Album Sundays and are considering signing up, do so this week as then you can come along to our Pub Quiz this Friday, the 11th December

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Our events really resonate with people and one of our newest members sent this testimonial after her first Album Club last month:

“I wanted to thank you for the warm welcome and the knowledge there are friendly like minded people across the world out there and you brought us all together through a shared love of music. That is awesome. I have been mostly alone through the pandemic (am single, live alone – and yes do have the requisite cats to complete the stereotype!😂) My 25 + year career has been in events, currently in the West End of London so in my “normal” life I would be out at least 3/4 times a week. That has all obviously completely stopped for me and it has been a somewhat of a struggle mentally, music has kept me sane and Sunday’s event really helped my sanity. I truly hope to meet you in real life at some point to say thank you in person and look forward to engaging in more events.” – Angela

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We look forward to seeing you all at The Album Club on the Sunday December 13th 8pm GMT! Thanks for listening.

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Peter Watts Music, Money, Madness… Jimi Hendrix Live In Maui

The trippy story of how Jimi Hendrix ended up playing a concert in front of a few hundred spectators at a windy cow farm next to a Hawaiian volcano features a cast of characters that could come from a Thomas Pynchon novel. There’s Chuck Wein, aka The Wizard, a Leary-lite Harvard graduate who dated Edie Sedgwick and made films with Warhol before dropping into the hippie world. There’s Michael Jeffery, Hendrix’s manager, a shady operator with a line in tall stories about his career in the British Army. And there’s Hendrix, who found himself committed to making a soundtrack for Wein and Jeffery’s Hawaii-set psychedelic sci-fi movie, Rainbow Bridge, and somehow ended up playing one of the last shows – performing with the Cox-Mitchell axis – on the tiny island of Maui.

Directed by John McDermott, Music, Money, Madness – Jimi Hendrix Experience Live In Maui attempts to unpick this wild tale with the help of a tremendous batch of interviewees. Billy Cox and Eddie Kramer are on hand from camp Hendrix, there’s cast and crew from Rainbow Bridge, a few still bewildered Warner Bros execs plus archive interviews with Mitch Mitchell and Chuck Wein.

Rainbow Bridge started as a celebration of Hawaii’s surfing subculture, but soon mutated into an experimental, unscripted Warhol-esque film inspired by hippie life, Wein’s impenetrable personal philosophy and Jack Nicholson’s stoned campfire monologue from Easy Rider. It’s the success of the latter that seemed to appeal to Jeffery, who thought a Hendrix score would turn a counterculture flick into a serious commercial offering. The promise of that soundtrack persuaded Warners to fund the film, and Hendrix was on board as he needed the money to complete Electric Lady Studio.

Filming was chaotic. “No script, a very loose idea and it shows,” says Colette Harron, who ran an East Village boutique and knew most of the principals. Wein shot 72 hours of footage and delivered a four-hour cut, which was turned into a 90-minute film that bewildered audiences and critics when, after Hendrix’s death, it was eventually released at a pot-fuelled premiere at the Aquarius in Hollywood in 1971.

Hendrix made a cameo in the film as an assassin but his biggest contribution was to perform an outdoor concert that was filmed. The gig was as unconventional as the film. “It was a colour/vibratory sound experience,” says Rainbow Bridge art director Melinda Merryweather. “The electricity went off, people swear they saw a spaceship go by, somebody fell of a tower.” The audience were asked to sit in astrological order and delivered a mass Buddhist chant as Hendrix took the stage. A gale was blowing and the small audience sat on the floor as if they were at a village fête. It must have been one of the most unusual set-ups Hendrix had ever faced but he seemed to thrive in the atmosphere – Cox describesit as one of the best the trio did.

The set included new songs like “Dolly Dagger”, “Hey Baby (New Rising Sun)”, “Ezy Rider” and “Freedom” alongside established classics. Seventeen minutes of scratchy footage – with drums overdubbed by Mitchell – appeared on the posthumous Rainbow Bridge film, eventually released along with a Hendrix LP of the same name that had nothing recorded in Maui. Much more restored footage features in this fun documentary, while the forthcoming Live In Maui triple contains all that was salvageable from the two 50-minute sets.

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CAS Safe & Sound Webinar: Andy Kerr from Bowers & Wilkins

Andy Kerr from Bowers & Wilkins joins Colleen for our latest ‘Safe & Sound’ webinar to discuss loudspeakers, headphones and Bowers & Wilkins’ iconic designs. Andy is a profoundly knowledgeable and fascinating person – this webinar is not to be missed!

Subscribe to our monthly Album Club, Classic Album Pub Quiz, Safe & Sound Hi-Fi webinar and receive rewards here.

We hope to see you at an online event soon!

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Watch: Safe & Sound: Tips to Improve Your Sound System with Loud & Clear’s John Carroll

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Alastair McKay Jeff Tweedy – Love Is The King

During the enforced idleness of the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, many people hatched ambitious plans: reading unreadable books, mastering a language, baking virtuous sourdough. For Jeff Tweedy, the global crisis truncated a Wilco tour, and he found himself at home with his family. His son Spencer lives at home anyway, and his other son, Sammy, returned from New York to do remote schooling.

Tweedy had tuned in to the discussion about creativity during times of quarantine, and had learned (the arguable fact) that Shakespeare wrote King Lear while sheltering from the plague. What to do? Well, in times of stress, as in all times, Tweedy’s habit is to visit his Chicago studio, The Loft. There, he planned to write a country album named after Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy, producing a song a day.

Love Is The King is not that record. Tantalisingly, Tweedy suggests that a number of straightforward country-style songs were recorded before his own instincts started to kick in. True, if Shakespeare had gone countrypolitan, he might have taken his sense of jeopardy, his troubled masculinity, his interest in tempests as an emotional metaphor and created something similar. “Ripeness is all,” says Edgar in King Lear. “Oh, tomatoes right off the vine,” croons Tweedy in “Guess Again”, “we used to eat them like that all the time.”

This album marries Tweedy’s mature emotional outlook (love is all, and is a dream worth dreaming) to the workaday manners of Uncle Tupelo or the Woody Guthrie project, Mermaid Avenue. There’s a home video lurking on YouTube of Tweedy sitting on his sofa, strumming his way through Talking Heads’ “Heaven”. The sound of Love Is The King is what you’d expect from the bar band in that song: briskly functional, with an enduring tension between Tweedy’s balmy vocals and the electric guitar, which arrives in these songs like a deluge.

“I always think that the electric guitar player, who’s me, is the guy who’s having the toughest time dealing with everything,” Tweedy tells Uncut. “He’s a little bit frayed. He showed up for a different type of session, his nerves are getting the better of him.”

Occasionally, broader influences seep through. The playful “Gwendolyn” has the wayward electricity of the Faces, and a heroine who sounds the sort of paramour the young Rod Stewart might have conquered and regretted. For Tweedy it acknowledges his habit of finding himself several steps behind a woman, emotionally. The title track has a languid rhythm that is almost obliterated by the guitar, and a lyric that marries the Lear-like outlook of the narrator (“At the edge/Of as bad as it gets”), to flashes of current affairs; tanks in the streets and violence.

That mood spills into “Opaline”, a honky-tonk lament that playfully blurs images of death, paranoia and dread. The inspiration for the song is more prosaic. The lyric is addressed to a golden orb-weaver spider that lived in Tweedy’s backyard through spring and summer before abruptly disappearing, presumed dead. The song’s most troubling image, of a hearse stuck at a toll gate, actually happened. Tweedy saw the funeral car, parked in its own metaphor, when escaping Chicago via the skyway to Michigan. “I kept looking in my rear-view mirror, thinking, ‘Holy shit, that’s one of the worst things I can think of,’” he says with a laugh. “A guy driving a hearse with no change for a toll.”

On paper, it sounds tormented. In reality, it doesn’t. As a singer, Tweedy patrols the trunk road between regret and resilience. Straight-legged sincerity, when he chooses to use it, is a good look: see the thankful love song “Even I Can See”. Tweedy is probably more instinctively comfortable undermining himself, as on the countrified “Natural Disaster”. That song’s image of “a lightning bolt punch a bird right out of the sky” may be a nod to the sudden death of a flamingo in Charles Portis’s book The Dog Of The South. On a further literary note, Tweedy’s pal, author George Saunders, provides a couple of lines to the sprightly “A Robin Or A Wren”, a song that manages to roll together romantic devotion, love of life, fear of death, and a playful suggestion of reincarnation. Saunders’ lines are about “the end of the end of this beautiful dream”. Tweedy, with his unerring ability to find himself while getting lost, ushers in a conclusion that is happy and sad, with hope kept aflame by his faith in the power of song.

Love Is The King by Jeff Tweedy

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Sam Richards Cat Stevens announces virtual CatSong Festival

To mark the 50th anniversary of his classic 1970 albums Tea For The Tillerman and Mona Bone Jakon, Yusuf / Cat Stevens will host a special YouTube broadcast on December 5.

CatSong Festival features the likes of Feist, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Haim, Ron Sexsmith, Imelda May and many more covering Cat Stevens songs.

You can watch it for free over at Cat Stevens’ YouTube channel from 8pm GMT on December 5.

Tea For The Tillerman and Mona Bone Jakon will be reissued in Super Deluxe formats on December 4.

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Madison Bloom Elvis Costello on the Music of His Life

The rock legend talks about discovering Joni Mitchell, learning guitar through Fleetwood Mac, and crying to Bob Dylan.

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Stian Vedoy Artist Of the Week – Vains

Hailing from Hull, Vains is our Artist Of The Week! Swimming in the melancholic end of the pool, the band crafts moody sonic textures from cavernous driving drums and lush, twangy guitars. The band’s lyrical content tends to focus around the unnerving doldrums that the weight and stress brought on by everyday life, but the way it’s presented with an almost spoken-word delivery is really brilliant, bolstering the feeling over underlying tension while avoiding angsty tropes and pitfalls.

Our current favourite track is the freshly released “24”, a brooding, beautiful piece about feeling left behind and not measuring up, with shimmery floating guitars that put it somewhere between Echo & the Bunnymen, The Chameleons, King Krule and early Interpol. Check out video below and we’re sure you’ll want to add Vains to all your grey weather playlists.

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