Coffee-Table Notes

The Lost Plot   As The Nightingales limber up for their biggest tour in the band’s forty-year existence, it’s nice to see them becoming hottish property. This has arguably come partly on the back of the success of King Rocker, Michael Cumming and Stewart Lee’s film based around the life and work of Nightingales frontman, Robert Lloyd. It’s especially heartening to see The Nightingales 2022 UK trek being overseen by a proper professional promoter, rather than some of the ad hoc DIY fly-by-nights that have put them on over the last decade.    As one of those happy amateurs over seven Nightingales shows, I’m obviously delighted that Lloyd and co are receiving the attention they deserve. While for now at least, the band are no longer dependent on the kindness of strangers, I’m going to miss the annual round of adrenalin-charged stresses putting on a Nightingales show brought with it. Anyone who has ever put on a gig anywhere despite not having a clue how to do it will be full...

I’m So Green – Do It Better   The first time I heard Can was when their extended wigout, Mother Sky, soundtracked a pivotal scene in Jerzy Skolimowski’s 1970 film, Deep End. As John Moulder Brown’s infatuated adolescent Mike stalks Jane Asher’s swinging swimming pool attendant Susan to a Soho nightclub, clips from the track by the German purveyors of inner space give the increasing desperation of Mike’s obsession its pulse.    As Mother Sky plays, Mike moves from the foyer of the club to a hot dog stand to a prostitute’s flat before doing a runner onto the underground with a life-size cut-out of a Susan looky-likey lifted from outside a strip club under his arm. This is accompanied by the track’s screeching guitar frenzy that lends the scene even more urgency, driven even more by the pummelling insistence of bass and drums that go with it.   I was twelve when I first saw and heard all this in Skolimowski’s now cult classic, staying up late one Sunday night in the sum...