Sinister: i use the same suit for everything

[Kieran Devaney]

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 
they’re 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 what’s 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, 
don’t 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, people’s whose records I had never seen in the shops, wouldn’t 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 
it’s 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 wasn’t ‘Rawhide’ though, 
in fact the site didn’t know which song it was, there was just a question 
mark next to the band’s 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 you’re not familiar with the song, and I guess there’s all sorts of 
reasons why you wouldn’t 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, it’s a neat, upbeat 
surf guitar number, I suppose that’s how you’d describe it, simple stuff, 
the guitars build and then there’s a spate of gunfire percussion, a pause 
and the tune starts up again. About halfway through there’s some more 
elaborate soloing on the lead guitar, and the percussion gets a bit more 
frenetic towards the end, but that’s more or less it really. I like the DJ 
on this station, Capitol Gold, my dad’s choice – “Something like that 
probably wouldn’t get into the charts these days.” He reckons, but he says 
it in a way that doesn’t make it sound like a dismissal of the stuff that is 
in the charts, which isn’t easy, let me tell you.

As the record plays in the car I’m 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 can’t 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 
don’t 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 today’s 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 I’m sure you’re 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 haven’t had a revival 
for yet, but it has all been snapped up by collectors. It’s a pity. Rare 
Moriconne records can fetch thousands nowadays, or so I’m 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 didn’t 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 I’ve 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 there’s 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 shan’t list them. I believe the mixes are still online, 
if you’re 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 it’s 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 I’ve 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 wouldn’t get into the charts these days.” he 
will say. But today it sounds flat and uninspiring as we pass through 
Birmingham’s 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 doesn’t sound up to much, doesn’t sound half so 
exotic as it did before – it could be an entirely different record. 
Certainly if this would’ve been my first hearing then I wouldn’t 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 
he’s just heard it enough times on Capitol Gold while he’s driving, they 
don’t have a huge playlist really, but that’s 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 isn’t to say I’m 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 Plone’s list, but not the most 
straightforward either. I enjoyed hearing it again this time anyway. And I 
know I’ve 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










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