From: owner-alloy-digest@smoe.org (alloy-digest) To: alloy-digest@smoe.org Subject: alloy-digest V6 #184 Reply-To: alloy@smoe.org Sender: owner-alloy-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-alloy-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk X-To-Unsubscribe: Send mail to "alloy-digest-request@smoe.org" X-To-Unsubscribe: with "unsubscribe" as the body. alloy-digest Tuesday, July 17 2001 Volume 06 : Number 184 Today's Subjects: ----------------- Alloy: Sole, Lundy, Fastnet, Irish Sea... [jonathan.chiddick@nokia.com] Alloy: The Alloy Q&A discussion Part V [jonathan.chiddick@nokia.com] Re: Alloy: Records currently playing [Robin Thurlow 1. Marseilles > 2. Therapy Growth > 3. Googooplexus/Cube Creature Caviar > 4. Jungle Line > 5. Airhead Dub > 6. Radio Silence (guitar version) > 7. New Toy > 8. Urban Tribal > 9. Magic's Wand > 10. The Wreck of The Fairchild > 11. Don't Turn Away (TMDR Vocal) > 12. Samson & Delilah > 13. Howard the Duck. Nothing to add me-lud. At least nothing comes immediatley to mind. Oh! 14. Sale of the Century Marsielles is definitely a new one for me too. Does anyone know any more? Want! Want! What have I been listening to recently then? Well right now I'm listening to the fabulous Dido. (no angel) I love her voice. For several days I have had 'Don't turn away' indelibly fixed in my head and it was switched to repeat. I love that song but I really couldn't get it out of my head. The CD's currently in my daily circulation are: 1) Roland Orzabal: Tomcats Screaming Outside 2) Dido: No angel 3) The Fixx: Walkabout 4) Elvis Costello: My Aim Is True 5) Alpha Blondy and the Wailers: Jerusalem 6) Bjvrk: Post 7) Sgt Pepper's Lonely Heats Club Band 8) ABC: Alphabet City 9) Soft Cell: The 12" Singles 10) Tears for Fears: Elemental 11) Miles Davis: Doo Bop I had a couple of conversations recently, real and e-mail, about building a PC-based server and encoding all my CD collection into MP3's so I could get out of sight the ton of plastic that lines the living room. Well after some research I have found the most wonderful piece of kit ever to grace this earth. Imagine a hand held device about double the size of the Nokia Communicator that can store up to 800 CD albums encoded at 128kB/s. Amazing. #800 for the 40GB version, yes, 4 0 G B ! that's about 1600 songs! Take everywhere. Want! Want! http://www.pjbox.co.uk/ It will be mine; oh yes, it will be mine... (which movie was that from then?) Until the next time. Northerly 4 to 6, Locally 7, decreasing 3 or 4, locally 5. Showers at first. Good. Jon ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 16 Jul 2001 09:12:00 +0300 From: jonathan.chiddick@nokia.com Subject: Alloy: The Alloy Q&A discussion Part V Morning all, back to business then. This weekend I became the proud owner of my very own chainsaw! This is without a doubt the most dangerous item I have ever held in my hands... (not counting items with a pulse ;-)) I fear the final installments of the Q&A may never make it to the internet if I cut something important off by mistake. Yikes! Roll-up, roll-up! Find out why The Golden Age Of Wireless went through so myriad-many incarnations during its prolific life. So where were we then? Aha, the releasing of the 'rare' compilation. Head up Bluemeitz@cs.com here comes the answer to one of your recent questions. read on... Part IV. Jon Would it be possible to get some kind of compilation together with some of the stuff that has never been released on CD before? There are a number of songs that have only ever appeared on vinyl. I don't know whether there would be a big market for it but if it was sold direct - even as a CDR - then you would get 100% of the profits. Thomas: Well, unfortunately I don't own the recordings... that's the record company. They might let me do it and I do still have the tapes... (beginning to laugh) I would have to spend a lot of time in the kitchen! Yes, that is not inconceivable; a sort of rarities CD... Jon: The rarities CD singles like, 'I Love You Goodbye', 'Silk Pyjamas', 'Close But No Cigar', they had some of them on there... Thomas: ...with different mixes. Jon: ...but there are still a number which are only available on vinyl. Maybe keep it in mind for the future because I will certainly buy one and I know that I'm not alone. Phil Louie mentioned in '97 that he's always thought that Puppet Theatre sounded like it could have been a Thompson Twins song and at that time, around the period of 'In The Name Of Love' when they were a seven piece band you were working with them so he put two and two together and made five and a quarter and so on. Is there any fabric behind that? Thomas: Actually I wrote 'One Of Our Submarines' for the Thompson Twins... Jon: REALLY! Thomas: Yep, what happened was that quite often I would do something with somebody in mind and then very quickly I would realise that I had put so much of myself into them that I couldn't give them away. I started off writing 'One Of Our Submarines' for the Thompson Twins, I started off writing 'Hyperactive' for Michael Jackson... there are maybe others that I haven't thought about. Actually these new songs that I've got, there's a couple that I've written for other people. There is one that I wrote for Eddie Reader and I get to a certain point where obviously they're Thomas-songs and not anybody else's. Jon: You once said in one of 'The Flat Earth' tour dates in an article that I read that you wrote 'Airwaves' as the consequence of being woken up by artillery fire... I'm quoting a newspaper here...(Thomas starts laughing) is there any truth behind that bearing in mind the lyric 'no it was nothing, some car backfiring, please don't ask questions' and so on. Is there anything there? This is something that I read from a review so... Thomas: The instance in this case was a time when I was in Greece one time and I was staying in the ground of [archaeological institute] the British School of Athens jetlagged, sleeping in a VW bus in their gardens, and there was some kind of military exercise going on next door. That is what I was referring to in the interview. That may or may not have influenced that piece of the song, but that song is sort of like a trailer from a movie, where you don't try and tell the whole story but give random snatches of something that invokes something larger. I think a lot of my songs are like that. Dissidents is a bit like that. That is one reason that when people are trying to interpret something and trying to make this, if you like, expository process where they are trying to fill in all the blanks and tell a whole story based upon all the snippets in the song. There is no right or wrong because there isn't a whole story. It's just a trailer. Jon: That's often the beauty of it. There are some bands who really do tell a story from start to finish in their songs. Take Squeeze for example, virtually all their songs are complete with a start a middle and an end but when a song is made up of snatches of thought I feel that they are often more evocative, more effective because they force you to try and find your own way through the song and prompts you so that some of it comes from within your own thought. Thomas: Also some of the best imagery comes from real life experience, but I tend to piece them together in a new way: for example, 'I Love You Goodbye' is loosely based on a road trip that I made, but it's a fiction. It's not a documentary. Jon: Ah, that exactly answers a question from Elaine Linstruth. Keith Stansell asked a question way back about the sheriff with the hare-lip because he is from a place called Tensas Parish Louisiana where the sheriff does, or did, really have a hare-lip! Have you ever been stopped for speeding there? Thomas: (laughing heartily) No! Jon: OK! It would have been great if you would have said yes! Thomas: Only in the video. I got into a lot of trouble once, I did an interview there at a radio station in Louisiana very early in the morning. The guy was really friendly and it was live on the air and they had been playing 'I Love You Goodbye' a lot, it was very popular. A lot of people had been phoning in to the station and oddly enough they were asking for the 'Bayou Rain' song - which is kind of interesting. I wonder why they picked-up on that? The DJ, live on the air, started with these questions... "Thomas, did you know that we don't have counties down here, we have parishes?" And I said, "Oh, no I didn't know that." And then he said, "did you know that the Everglades are actually in FLORIDA not in Louisiana..." I said, "well...er.." and he just sort of started having a go at me. I was quite light-hearted, he wasn't trying to rip me to shreds or anything but there were a half dozen little inaccuracies in there. I ended joking, "well how come it is so popular if I have committed all of these mortal sins!" Jon: ... well sometimes it just works. Thomas: Yeah, sometimes it just works, exactly. Jon: Lem Bingley made a comment, another from 1997, about the 'Golden Age Of Wireless' cover. Like many people, he considers it to be quite a piece of pop-art. I have a strong connection to both of them actually. He asked is it you in the background with the nurse in the wheelchair because you can't really tell? What's the story behind that cover? Thomas: The idea for the album cover initially was that we would originally just set up some lab equipment and shoot that, and we then decided that we would abstract it one more layer by turning it into to a sort of comic-book. Then in the process of having an artist hand colour the print we were going to have to re-photograph it; and in the studio it was set up on a rostrum, and we were trying different lighting effects, seeing whether we wanted to have a frame around it or have some kind of context to it. Then we decided that we wanted to have a sort of reflection in it, and it just got more elaborate as time went on and the reflection... I think the photographer had the idea of me sort of watching. I said that if it is me in the same timeframe then it won't make any sense, but if it was me looking back from much later, then that would make sense; so the concept was me as an old man being pushed by a nurse, and the nurse was his assistant. Interestingly enough there is a tie-in with a later song there as 'I Live In A Suitcase' when I do the voice in the middle section... 'going over the falls in a barrel...' that is the same character. That is me aged eighty-nine... Jon: ...when Lene Lovich is coming round! Thomas: Right! So that is a similar thing. Kind of looking back from then. Jon: The 'Golden Age Of Wireless' has got so many different versions... What happened? Thomas: Oh God... I completely lost track...other people are much more familiar than I am, Lazlo Nibble for example. Here's a sort of potted history of it. All of that album I recorded in a basement studio in South London. We went somewhere else to mix it, to a different studio in North London, and by then I had written a couple of new songs including 'Windpower' but all of the things with the band on, like 'Commercial Breakup', the guitar version of 'Radio Silence' and so on, that were played live with a three piece band were originally done in this South London studio. The more sequenced ones like 'Flying North' and 'Windpower' were done at the time of mixing so I kept adding new songs in; I finished the album with 'Urges' and 'Leipzig' on it and released it in the UK where there were a couple of singles off it; 'Europa' and 'Radio Silence' then 'Airwaves', which were the three singles that came out and they each had a video. The US company, Capitol, picked it up and released it over here as well and it got some fairly good reviews; it had the same running order etc. but had a different cover which was the 'Europa' cover from the Galileo set, but aside from that the running order was the same. So they released it over here and it sold about ten copies but got a couple of quite good reviews in important places. While this was going on the record company in the UK, after three singles didn't want to release any more singles from the album so they said they I should start to do some more stuff; so I went into the studio and recorded 'Science' and 'Submarines' and in the UK they released ['She Blinded Me With Science'] as a single. The American company heard those two songs and saw the video for 'Science' and felt that this was a lot more commercial than anything on the album so they put together a mini-LP, 'Blinded By Science' which had 12" versions instead of the other versions of five songs. At the time a mini-LP was eligible for the Billboard Charts but it was a promotional thing with rock-bottom prices. They paid me a royalty and basically gave it away to get a chart position and more radio-play. It was actually the most successful mini-LP of all time because shortly after it this format was deemed not eligible for the album charts anymore and they stopped making them. The mini-LP had done very well and by this time the video ['She Blinded Me With Science'] was getting played a lot on MTV and it was getting a lot of dance-club play and radio-play... they didn't want to just give away this mini-LP and not make any money on it so what they did was take 'Science' and 'Submarines' and repackage 'Golden Age Of Wireless' taking off 'Urges' and 'Leipzig', which were the oldest and replacing then with the new songs. Meanwhile, back in the UK, after 'Science' did really well decided to go back to the album and release 'Radio Silence' by which time I was getting into programming and sampling stuff and I felt that the guitar version was way too "rockist" as we say... Jon: There are many people who love it! Thomas: ...it didn't seem right for me to be releasing something like that at this stage in my career because I was so much more into programming and I just couldn't relate to it. So I decided to go back into the studio and do a sequenced version of 'Radio Silence'. I think between that it accounts for most of the mish-mash but frankly I lost track of what version were released where. A global record company like EMI don't always ask your permission or even fill you in; they have their own agenda. One of their regional companies will say, "we could sell this album if we... changed the order around or if we used a different version" and so on and so I completely lost track. Jon: It really has got quite a history. To change the subject again. Barbara Cohen amongst others wondered about the 'heavy water line from 'One Of Our Submarines', what does it mean? Thomas: I have a vague vague recollection from one of those post WWII English war films like 'Operation Crossbow' or one of those post war era things about heavy-water factories in Norway. I have no idea what heavy-water is... Jon: Someone did explain at Alloy once. So it was something that you had heard about and you used it in the song? Thomas: You know--it evokes lots of things. I didn't know what heavy-water was apart that it had a wartime connotation. Also the idea of water being anything other than water... It's like distilled water, I don't really know what distilled water is... I always thought it would be a bad idea to drink distilled water, maybe not, maybe distilled water is very pure but water that appears to be water but is not is a hard thing to imagine so the idea of heavy water... looks like water but is actually heavier than water... it was an odd idea and somehow evokes the idea of drowning. What really happens when you... what's drowning really physically like? I guess mixing the metaphor of water from a stone in with that gives an expression of futility. Jon: On the inner of 'Golden Age Of Wireless' there is a photograph of a WWII submarine crew... Is it a family photograph because I know that your uncle Stephen was in a submarine crew... Thomas: No. it's not a family photograph. I think it was a stock photograph. Jon: In 'Windpower', the Morse... Is it Morse or is it just random stuff? Thomas: I don't do Morse, it was just me bleeping on a keyboard! Jon: OK. I was wondering because I had tried to work it out but could never make anything of it. In the 'Radio Silence' video there was Lene Lovich in the car... is that your car. Thomas: Yeah! The Daimler. We screwed up though because when you lock-off the camera in order to make people appear and disappear everything has to be completely still and what we forgot about was getting in and out and the suspension... so it actually jumps a bit in the video. We should have put it up on bricks.. That car incidentally I bought from the man that did the radio commentary in 'Wreck Of The Fairchild'. Jon: Suzanne. a.k.a. Ms Sakamoto from Alloy asked a question about wondering whether Ms Sakamoto from 'She Blinded Me With Science' actually referred to an actual person or not. Thomas: No. It was the first Japanese name that I could think of. It was before I knew Ryuichi. I guess I was aware of Yellow Magic Orchestra but it didn't occur to me particularly that that was a name. I actually in some ways wished that I hadn't picked that name. Jon: It was funny because she wrote that Akiko Yano, Ryuichi Sakamoto's wife, she did some back up work for you... Thomas: She did yeah, but that was the first time I ever met Ryuichi. Jon ...right, OK because two and two was put together here that maybe it was a reference because you were working together and the name developed from that. So it was actually developed before you met, the first name that came into your head? Thomas: Yeah it was the first name that came into my head but it sort of got me off the hook because as we did end up working together and people would might end up start putting two and two together... Akiko or Akko for short, was involved during a time when there was a surge of interest in Japanese pop-music; partly triggered by the band Japan. She was fairly well known so I hired her for the part. I didn't know she was married to Ryuichi and she came into the studio and introduced a friend of hers called 'Luigi'. I thought it unusual to find a Japanese guy with an Italian name. He hung-out in the control room while we were out sitting at the piano when I was going to show her this part and it's a fairly complex set of harmonies because it is based on the keyboard chords of... [Thomas turns around and plays the opening sequence of Radio Silence that Akiko Yano sings to demonstrate his point on the Yamaha electric piano behind him] ...which is something that I would play on a keyboard right? But if you break that down and take any one of those individual parts some of those are staying on the same note; some are just moving a semi-tone or whatever, she was going to have to sing them all individually. If I was to do it now I would just sample and play it on the keyboard but I had to sit there are show her all the different parts and I don't write music... so I said, "what order would you like to do them in?" and she replied, "I think it would be a good idea if 'Luigi' writes it down for me." He had been in the other room and had been listening over the speaker. He came in and sat down at the piano and went...[Thomas plays the 'Radio Silence' sequence again] and then wrote the whole thing down! He played it once through and wrote the whole thing down without listening to it again. He had done the whole thing completely by ear. Jon: That must be a pretty useful skill to have! Thomas: That was when I realised that that 'Luigi' was just how they pronounced that name in Japanese! We became friends after that. Jon: On the 'Golden Age Of Wireless' in the Flat Earth Society pages there is a scribbling of your budget for doing the album and there is a figure of #1750 to Wally [Thomas Laughs] Is it the Wally whose name is scratched into all the Capitol masters from EMI? Thomas: No. I think that they were all done at Abbey Road and Wally was the mastering engineer at Abbey Road so anything that came out of Abbey Road in that period... Actually that is an interesting thing for people to do. Go get an album from Kate Bush or Duran Duran or any artist that was on EMI at that period and go see if you can find Wally' on the record. "Wally" on that studio bill was actually a guy called Wally Brill, a producer/engineer who spent some time working on that album with me. Jon: On 'The Flat Earth'; the spoken part in 'White City...' where did that come from? Thomas: At the end? That was Robin Hitchcock. Jon: What was the idea behind it? To be continued... So at least technically I have finally heard Thomas play live and I was the only person in the audience! Interesting stuff eh? More next week. Cheers all, Jon ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 16 Jul 2001 10:40:45 -0400 From: Robin Thurlow Subject: Re: Alloy: Records currently playing in films I've seen recently while working on stuff at home, I forgot to mention "Company of Wolves" which is one of my all-time favorites :) It's interesting hearing what everyone's been listening to, reading, & watching... xxx Robin T ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 16 Jul 2001 10:56:24 -0400 From: Robin Thurlow Subject: Re: Alloy: The Alloy Q&A discussion Part V jonathan.chiddick@nokia.com wrote: > This weekend I became the proud owner of my very > own chainsaw! I'm so scared of those. I've seen some horrific injuries to people's hands, feet, limbs, faces and heads (when the blade hits a knot and kicks back for instance) Are you taking a tree down? be careful...! xxx ~R ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 16 Jul 2001 14:06:31 -0400 From: "Chris & Beena Cracknell" Subject: Alloy: Alloy on stage. Hey gang. Ian Gifford was in town this weekend and actually dropped by one of my shows to check me out live with my friend Steve Didemus. Lot's o' fun and beer to be had. Since he's in town for a wee while (he has a girlfriend here, y'know) we're going to hit the stage tonight at LaLuna and do a couple of songs together. Hmmmm... maybe I should do Nuvogue. Haven't played that one live in some time. If I can find my wee tape recorder I'll bring it along and record us to share with you fine alloy folk. Crackers (Now if only I could get over this damn cold from hell!!!) CrAB - http://www.hwcn.org/~ad329/crab.html The Official Bira Bira Webpage - http://birabira.chaosmagic.com Ghastly's Ghastly Comic - http://ghastly.keenspace.com ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 16 Jul 2001 18:00:40 -0400 From: Robin Thurlow Subject: Re: Alloy: The Alloy Q&A discussion Part V Jon, thanks for another great installment of your interview with Thomas! Thomas said (about the cover art for "Golden Age of Wireless"): :: The idea for the album cover initially was that we would originally just set up some lab equipment and shoot that, and we then decided that we would abstract it one more layer by turning it into to a sort of comic-book. Then in the process of having an artist hand colour the print we were going to have to re-photograph it; and in the studio it was set up on a rostrum, and we were trying different lighting effects, seeing whether we wanted to have a frame around it or have some kind of context to it. Then we decided that we wanted to have a sort of reflection in it, and it just got more elaborate as time went on and the reflection... I think the photographer had the idea of me sort of watching. I said that if it is me in the same timeframe then it won't make any sense, but if it was me looking back from much later, then that would make sense; so the concept was me as an old man being pushed by a nurse, and the nurse was his assistant. :: ...I'm very glad this topic was touched on. I love hearing what went in to this! I have the poster of the GAOW artwork framed & hanging on the wall over my computer at home. It's the first thing anyone sees when they come to our house... needless to say I'm very proud to have this piece & it's one of my all-time favorite images. Thomas said about the "guitar version" of 'Radio Silence': :: ...it didn't seem right for me to be releasing something like that at this stage in my career because I was so much more into programming and I just couldn't relate to it. So I decided to go back into the studio and do a sequenced version of 'Radio Silence'. :: I hope Thomas won't mind that the costume portrait I'm doing of Caroline will be the 'guitar version' of her! Thomas said about 'One of our Submarines' "heavy water" reference: :: You know--it evokes lots of things. I didn't know what heavy-water was apart that it had a wartime connotation. Also the idea of water being anything other than water... It's like distilled water, I don't really know what distilled water is... I always thought it would be a bad idea to drink distilled water, maybe not, maybe distilled water is very pure but water that appears to be water but is not is a hard thing to imagine so the idea of heavy water... looks like water but is actually heavier than water... it was an odd idea and somehow evokes the idea of drowning. What really happens when you... what's drowning really physically like? I guess mixing the metaphor of water from a stone in with that gives an expression of futility. :: ...it certainly gives the feeling of this. The trapped sensation where there's nothing you can do, and even the most natural of things has gone monsterously wrong. (if Thomas doesn't write music again, I hope he will at least continue to write words.. some of these things he has placed together are really very powerful) xxx Robin T ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 16 Jul 2001 23:15:24 EDT From: Bluemeitz@cs.com Subject: Alloy: Rare Dolby songs It was recently mentioned that there exists a cache of rare Dolby songs that were never released on cd or anywhere else. I just wanted to say that when Napster was in full swing I managed to download Dont Turn Away, Leipzig/Therapy Growth, (sequened together), and Puppet Theatre ( buying this from ebay - hyperactive single cd from Britain). I dont recognize the other ones that were mentioned ( heard Wreck of Fairchild - excellent track like the way it leads into Airwaves at the end). What else is out there and what are the chances of a rare tracks lp or new material or a cd audio release of Live Wireless? Let's all create a list of what was never released on cd and petition TMDR to release this archive material before it is lost. Any thoughts? ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 16 Jul 2001 22:30:33 -0600 From: "Keith Stansell" Subject: Re: Alloy: The Alloy Q&A discussion Part V Thanks Jon for asking this with such detail. At last I can sleep without wondering if former sheriff Fred Scott ("Fned Snot" as we cruelly mimicked as teen agers - but not to his face - he was the sheriff after all.) was the source of inspiration for the line in the song. I knew it was highly unlikely that Thomas ever met our sheriff or found himself in Tensas (pronounced TEN-SAW) Parish.. No one just drives through Tensas Parish without having a reason to drive through Tensas Parish. It is not on the way to anywhere really. But if you do drive thought there with out-of-state plates (in a dirty Datsan) do keep your speed down. I always there was a strange coincidence there though. He was sheriff from 1984 to 1992, so the time frame was right. But the rest of the song doesn't fit because Tensas is not in the Cajun area of the state or near the er- everglades. I'm glad Thomas got a big laugh out of this question. Ah, but now what do I ask Thomas if we were to ever meet? Jon, thanks again for doing this Q&A. You really did your research and are hitting all the right questions - so far... I'm still waiting to hear the answer to a certain question that Crackers has repeated on occasion. - -Keith - ----- Original Message ----- From: > Keith Stansell asked a question way back about the sheriff with the > hare-lip because he is from a place called Tensas Parish Louisiana where > the sheriff does, or did, really have a hare-lip! Have you ever been > stopped for speeding there? > > Thomas: (laughing heartily) > No! > > Jon: > OK! It would have been great if you would have said yes! ------------------------------ End of alloy-digest V6 #184 ***************************