Coffee-Table Notes

It was 40 years ago not quite today when I first saw Edwyn Collins on a stage. That was with Orange Juice, the band who spearheaded Postcard Records of Scotland’s fleeting marriage between Velveteen cool and Glasgow cheek in some mythical pop paradise that arguably invented indie-pop as we know it. It was August 19 th  1981, and Orange Juice was headlining a short lived irregular Wednesday night Liverpool club called Plato’s Ballroom.Plato’s had set out its store in January of that year with its first event at the faded chicken-in-a-basket cabaret dive usually called Mr. Pickwick’s. With New Order playing their seventh or eighth gig ever as headliners, the arty-looking poster for the night also promised ‘film’, ‘performance’ and something called a ‘videoteque’.   This amounted to David Lynch’s film, Eraserhead, and assorted flicks by Kenneth Anger beamed onto the back wall of the stage while a soundtrack of The Pop Group’s She is Beyond Good and Evil, The Adventures of Grandmaster Flas

Welcome to the Bar…   If the past is another country, listening to The Nectarine No.9’s 9.9.99 album is like stepping, not just into last century, but into another world. Released on 2.2.22 on The Creeping Bent Organisation’s Patreon site, 9.9.99’s unearthed live recording captures Edinburgh’s  premiere voodoo beat seditionists (copyright whoever came up with that phrase) in full flight, but also in flux. Recorded at Edinburgh’s Bongo Club on the sort of date that might prompt all manner of numerologically inspired conspiracies, they weren’t alone.   As history tells it, the generation of tech heads and geeks who inherited the earth regarded 9.9.99 – September 9 th , 1999 - as a precursor to Y2K. This,  they prophesised, would be the day the machine stopped and the world went into collective meltdown. As it turned out, two years into New Labour and the Cool Britannia con trick, and the Scottish Parliament a mere four months old, the tech heads were wrong on all counts, and the century

Shadow of Fear   When Richard H. Kirk decided to reclaim the name of his old band Cabaret Voltaire forty years after he co-founded the original trio in Sheffield with Stephen Mallinder and Christopher R. Watson, things seemed to have come full circle. Here was a band whose mesh of multi-media electronic experiments had been sired in the midst of northern English inner city post-industrial decline. Taking their name from the Dadaists nightclub in Zurich, over their original twenty year existence, their cut-up sonic constructions fused dub-kosmiche propulsion and fuzzed-up punk garage moved from underground paranoia to clubland mind-melding for the techno age.   Six years since a now solo Kirk performed under the Cabaret Voltaire name for the first time since 1992, the release of the Shadow of Fear album this month seems to chime dangerously with the times. Arriving in the thick of the Covid-19 pandemic, the aftermath of the American election and the UK’s looming departure from the E