The song on the radio was Rawhide by The Ventures. I knew it well, and so, it seemed, did my dad and he hummed along with the gentle lilt of the tune as he drove. I had first come across this song a couple of years ago, downloading it during a period of wilful and quite deliberate quote unquote broadening of my horizons. If you go to the warp records website which I believe can be found at http://www.warprecords.com then you can listen to streams of old radio mixes from a variety of their artists. A great deal of them are well worth hearing I think, I might even guardedly venture that theyre more often than not better than the output of whoever put the sets together the whole being significantly less than the sum of its parts, as it were. A fair few of them provide tracklistings to go with the stream, and if your computer is anything like mine then if you connect up to the stream and get it playing then the sound will constantly stop and wait and then start up again because of something called buffering. Buffering is most annoying, and not at all conducive to hearing whats going on properly, and I expect you will, I certainly did. One way to remedy this would be to download the tracks from the mix and then listen to them separately. The added bonus being of course that you could then do that again and again if you liked them enough, whether online or off. From my truncated, bitty hearings, the aptly titled Discomix by Plone sounded particularly worthy, containing bits of dub, obscure psych nuggets (they always get called those, dont they?), some lounge music, some soundtrack stuff, etc, you get the idea My fledgling knowledge at the time could only find one real reference point to the sounds that I heard from that stream and that was, er, Plone themselves. So I set about downloading, and indeed it introduced me to such luminaries as Ennio Moriconne, Delia Derbyshire, Martin Denny and the curiously named Dick Hyman. This was unfamiliar music made by unfamiliar people, peoples whose records I had never seen in the shops, wouldnt know where to start looking if I had wanted them. Of course, this is one of the many beauties of filesharing, especially the now tragically defunct Audiogalaxy and whatever the various setbacks and arguments against it its hard to imagine finding music like this and being able to listen to it properly without such programmes. I mention all this because, as you might possibly have guessed, a song by The Ventures it wasnt Rawhide though, in fact the site didnt know which song it was, there was just a question mark next to the bands name, so without a proper title I decided to download a couple of Ventures tunes, just to get a rough idea. One of these was indeed Rawhide. If youre not familiar with the song, and I guess theres all sorts of reasons why you wouldnt be (it's a cover too, so perhaps you've heard other versions), then it goes like this: First, there are a few plucked notes on a twangy guitar, then another guitar and a bass join in, along with some percussion and they play together for a few seconds, its a neat, upbeat surf guitar number, I suppose thats how youd describe it, simple stuff, the guitars build and then theres a spate of gunfire percussion, a pause and the tune starts up again. About halfway through theres some more elaborate soloing on the lead guitar, and the percussion gets a bit more frenetic towards the end, but thats more or less it really. I like the DJ on this station, Capitol Gold, my dads choice Something like that probably wouldnt get into the charts these days. He reckons, but he says it in a way that doesnt make it sound like a dismissal of the stuff that is in the charts, which isnt easy, let me tell you. As the record plays in the car Im reminded of first listening to it, along with a whole bunch of other stuff laboriously downloaded on my 56k connection (I like to think that the waiting makes us value songs that little bit more when they finally arrive), on my tinny in-ear headphones, or through equally tinny computer speakers, I cant recall which, though it was probably the former. Imagine me sat there, then, little earphones plugged in, the noise from the telly in the background as my brother watches, I dont know, something offensive, in front of the computer, listening to this new music. And thinking at first how alien it seemed from the digital clunks of the Warp Records site, and how divorced it all seemed, both from the stuff in the charts and the quote unquote indie stuff that my friends were listening to. This music seemed entirely out of that equation, and all the better for it, it spoke of a big open world bright with the fizz of a fun, dynamic future, away from streets bunged up with cluttered houses, litter, graffiti, boarded up shop windows and drab suburban Sunday evenings. It sounded at turns naggingly familiar and delightfully foreign, with the kind of open-handed optimism and innocence so absent from much of todays music. I generalise of course. But with that innocence came a harsher, more fraught edge beyond the kitschy otherness, a genuine palpable dread of a future that this music might not be the soundtrack for. No wonder there has been a revival of sorts, posited by groups like Stereolab, most notably and various others who Im sure youre aware of. Apparently you used to be able to pick up these records in charity shops and at car boot sales, amongst all the other junk that we havent had a revival for yet, but it has all been snapped up by collectors. Its a pity. Rare Moriconne records can fetch thousands nowadays, or so Im told. A fistful of dollars indeed. So it might be worth having another flight through the racks at your local Age Concern, because you never know do you? But I didnt learn this until much later and at the time of those first listens this music sounded like nothing else and I was instantly hooked. But, as Ive said, the records themselves are difficult to come across, there are a few decent compilations knocking around, but mostly my collection has had to stick to mp3s, but theres nothing wrong with that. From there it lead me down various avenues to free jazz, bits of world music and all sorts of other things besides I shant list them. I believe the mixes are still online, if youre interested the ones to go for are the Plone and Broadcast ones I think. Even the mp3s are more difficult to find now, since the death of Audiogalaxy everything seems to have decentralised, and its probably nigh on impossible to find some of the songs, not without a lengthy trawl through the various filesharing networks anyway. Alas. My dad is humming along and at first I think Ive mistakenly identified the song or am not hearing it properly through the car speakers. But it is The Ventures, the DJ will confirm this for me after the song finishes Something like that probably wouldnt get into the charts these days. he will say. But today it sounds flat and uninspiring as we pass through Birminghams hollowed out building site district, on the way to the station, dusk just settling on a tepid sky, punctuated by the smoke trails of long-past aeroplanes. Today, sandwiched awkwardly between The Kinks Sunny Afternoon and that record that was bastardised for the Vitalite adverts, with my dad humming along it doesnt sound up to much, doesnt sound half so exotic as it did before it could be an entirely different record. Certainly if this wouldve been my first hearing then I wouldnt have given it a seconds notice, would probably have forgotten it as soon as the record ended, another record consigned to irrelevance. But here it was, a record that had seemed to me part of a gateway to new musical experience one that *had* in fact been part that gateway, now suddenly grounded. I think a big Part of what attracted me to the music in the first place, and what made me like it so much was that there were no faces attached, no familiar names, so little in the way of context, beyond the fact that Plone, or Broadcast, or whoever liked them and who are Plone anyway? Two blokes from the same city as me, but beyond that? Nothing. And now my dad is humming along to one of those records suddenly it has become part of his history too. Chances are hes just heard it enough times on Capitol Gold while hes driving, they dont have a huge playlist really, but thats enough to tie it to something less than exotic. Enough to pull it out of this big abstract past of glamour and transgression Some research on The Ventures reveals that they are, according to their fan websites, the most successful instrumental rock act of all time, they have recorded more than three thousand songs and in Japan in the sixties they outsold The Beatles by two to one. They are also still together, and touring regularly. Which isnt to say Im disappointed in any way, I listened to the song a couple of times while I was writing this and it still sounds pretty great, not nearly the most unconventional thing on Plones list, but not the most straightforward either. I enjoyed hearing it again this time anyway. And I know Ive written about my dad probably too much, just check the archives, about how he tries to articulate the fact that he sometimes feels trapped by work and his family but the thought of him driving his car, humming along to that crackly surf guitar record from 1961, some two years before he was born, as it goes, is one that I can't help but let bother me. Insert your own superlative here. Sinister, I shall be seeing you on Saturday in London. - Kieran _________________________________________________________________ +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to majordomo@missprint.org. 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