Disappears hail from Chicago and are part of the Windy City’s ever-reliable Kranky stable. They were formed by Brian Case, formerly guitarist with The Ponys, who played a memorable Sonic Cathedral show way back in 2007. His new band made their debut with 2010′s excellent ‘Lux’ and followed it up with last year’s ‘Guider’, a record which for some reason completely passed me by. (This has since been rectified.)

They got themselves a whole lot more attention when, last year, seemingly out of the blue, they announced the name of their new drummer as none other than Steve Shelley from Sonic Youth. ‘Pre Language’ – their third album in three years – was recorded at the Youth’s Echo Canyon West studio in Hoboken and everything about it sounds bigger and better than before. Opening track ‘Replicate’ is like The Stooges backed by a more muscular Neu!; ‘Minor Patterns’ is like Television on steroids; ‘Love Drug’ is like The Cramps amplified to 11.

There’s not a wasted moment on this record – it’s just nine tracks of magnificently malevolent garage drone magic.

The original version of the M83 track you may well have heard before, but Team Ghost’s mix (which sees Nicolas Fromageau reunited with Anthony Gonzalez for the first time since 2003′s classic M83 album ‘Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts’) is something else. The flip is a version of the song from Fairewell’s debut album ‘Poor, Poor Grendel’. To coincide, the CD is now only £5 in the Sonic Cathedral Shop.

The Fairewell remix will be one of several to feature on the ‘Poor, Poor Grendel Remix EP’, which will be released digitally in April. Team Ghost’s debut album follows – finally! – later this year. More details to follow.

Mainman Johnny White (joined onstage by bassist Joe Daniel and drummer Josh Alexander) will be playing, despite claiming in an interview in last week’s NME that he hates playing live. “It’s basically an unpleasant experience,” he explained. “Being onstage is fun, but the rest of it is pretty appalling.”

The evening will be completed with films specially selected by Johnny, including Michael Mann’s classic serial killer thriller ‘Manhunter’ and Alan Clarke’s disturbingly bleak ‘Elephant’.

If those two weren’t enough, right after that came Primal Scream’s classic ‘Dixie-Narco’ EP. Even The Wedding Present were riding high in the upper echelons of the charts. Here is the full rundown of the Top 20:

1. Wet Wet Wet – ‘Goodnight Girl’
2. Shakespear’s Sister – ‘Stay’
3. 2 Unlimited – ‘Twilight Zone’
4. Pasadenas – ‘I’m Doing Fine Now’
5. Curtis Stigers – ‘I Wonder Why’
6. Michael Jackson – ‘Remember The Time’
7. Kylie Minogue – ‘Give Me Just A Little More Time’
8. Kicks Like A Mule – ‘The Bouncer’
9. Ride – ‘Leave Them All Behind’
10. The Jesus And Mary Chain – ‘Reverence’
11. Primal Scream – ‘Dixie-Narco’ EP
12. Simply Red – ‘For Your Babies’
13. Temptations – ‘My Girl’
14. Kiss – ‘God Gave Rock And Roll To You II’
15. Genesis – ‘I Can’t Dance’
16. Queen – ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’/'These Are The Days Of Our Lives’
17. Pearl Jam – ‘Alive’
18. James – ‘Born Of Frustration’
19. Cicero – ‘Love Is Everywhere’
20. The Wedding Present – ‘Go Go Dancer’

Here is the original piece I wrote, and below are the full interviews with Neil and Ian. There are some really interesting revelations in there…

SLOWDIVE ‘PYGMALION’ (CREATION, 1995)

Talk about wrong place, wrong time. When Slowdive’s third and final album snuck out on February 6, 1995, it was in the midst of Britpop – their Creation Records labelmates Oasis were working on ‘(What’s The Story) Morning Glory?’, and Pulp and Blur were in the ascendancy. Hardly the perfect time for an oblique (and often bleak) album of ambient experimentation; Slowdive were quietly dropped a few weeks later.

But Slowdive had always been swimming against the tide. After the euphoria that greeted their first three EPs, their debut album, 1991’s ‘Just For A Day’, came just as the backlash against the shoegaze scene had begun and the focus had shifted from the Thames Valley to the Pacific Northwest. By 1993’s ‘Souvlaki’, despite sharing a producer/mixer with Suede, they were already a band out of time.

‘Pygmalion’ was mainly conceived by guitarist and songwriter Neil Halstead in his west London flat. He had become obsessed with electronic and ambient music and had started experimenting with sequencers and samplers on 1993’s ‘5 EP’. By the time of ‘Pygmalion’, this process had been refined. Instruments are looped into infinity, while Halstead and Rachel Goswell’s vocals float in and out of the ether. Had it been released on Warp rather than the label that had just served up ‘Digsy’s Dinner’ it would have been hailed as a classic, but it was savaged in the press; “‘Trellisaze’, ‘Rutti’ – what do these titles say to you, other than ‘Slap me’,” sneered Melody Maker.

But hindsight is a wonderful thing. The fact that you can hear so much of the best music of the last 20 years in this album – from Sigur Rós to Radiohead and any number of electronica artists – is proof that the critics were wrong.

NEIL HALSTEAD ON ‘PYGMALION’

“I moved into a house in New Cross with an old friend from Reading, Darren Seymour, in late ’92. I was 21. At the time he was playing bass for Seefeel.

“Perhaps if a label like Warp would have put it out we might have had more success, certainly context is important and it might have helped with the press. I felt like the traditional music press at the time didn’t ‘get’ the record and consequently sort of buried the band. I don’t think they understood where it was coming from or indeed where music in general was headed; there was a strong ‘post-rock’ scene before they thought to call it that and I still feel that if we had put the record out a few years later they might have been able to place it a little easier.”

IAN MCCUTCHEON ON ‘PYGMALION’

“I remember the ‘Pygmalion’ sessions being really hazy, there was a lot of smoking going on! That’s probably why it’s such a mellow trip, we were in slow motion!

“With ‘Pygmalion’ It felt like we were working on something unparalleled. It was 1994 and there was this explosion of Britpop and we were signed to Creation Records. We could have delivered a record of neatly produced indie-pop songs and ridden the wave with our labelmates, but instead we gave Alan McGee ‘Pygmalion’ which was met with bewilderment! Our Creation days were very short-lived…”

Broad Church Mix Twenty Nine by Sonic Cathedral on Mixcloud

Here’s the latest Broad Church mix, as broadcast on Strangeways Radio but minus the inane waffle at the start. It’s a little sonic celebration to mark 20 years – 20 years! – since the release of Ride’s ‘Leave Them All Behind’.

Aside from the single itself, and its 11-minute B-side ‘Grasshopper’, there are many more class on ’92 classics from Lush, Sugar, Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr and The Jesus And Mary Chain, plus some old stagers – Sonic Youth’s Steve Shelley on the skins for Disappears and Mark Lanegan – who are still doing the business in 2012.

The entrance to KRAAK – it’s not a million miles away from the ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ video, is it?


Dave finds time to file his online tax return. Rock’n'roll dies just a little bit more.


Guitarist Roger Mackin stars in a neon-lit remake of Ultravox’s ‘Vienna’ set in Media City, Salford.

(L-R) Road mangler John Lynch, Brendan Kersey, Phil Raines, Roger Mackin, Dave Malkinson

Here’s a scan of the story in all its glory, including a full transcript of an email from Johnny explaining exactly why he hates playing gigs. Much as we want him to carry on playing live, it’s actually quite hard to argue with his logic…

“It was 20 years ago today that I played my first show with Lush in Dublin. The first of over 120 that year. What are my memories of it you ask? Rather fragmentary, I reply. I remember a radio interview with an ex-member of Horslips, feeling rather conspicuous in the back of a limo (our label was a major in Ireland and could afford it – it was all going on our bill anyway), a correspondent from Melody Maker asking me if I was nervous playing my first show with Lush (I wasn’t), a support group who were in the midst of an A&R bidding war (one of them had been in box-office smash The Commitments), a post-gig drink in a private members’ club popular with Irish politicians where our manager ordered the most expensive bottle of champagne possible (over £100) and then hid it under the table, loath to share it with anyone else. I remember us all rising early the next morning very hungover for a photo session for Melody Maker down near the banks of the Liffey and then having lunch at our hotel where we found out that our album ‘Spooky’, released four days earlier, had gone not quite toppermost of the poppermost, but definitely Top 10. ‘Not a bad start to the year,’ I thought.

“The photo above is my first with the band. It was taken in December 1991 in Kentish Town. I was still working at NME at the time and had to take a few hours off work to do it!”

The show is The Early Years’ first appearance outside London for nearly five years and features support from Advances In Mathematics. It’s a co-promotion with the good people at Grey Lantern.

BUY TICKETS HERE

We’ve still got a handful of orange vinyl 7″s of the ‘Complicity’/'Fallen Star’ single that was released to coincide with the comeback show left in the Sonic Cathedral Shop. There will be news of further releases soon.

In the meantime, here’s mix of influences, inspirations and personal favourites that The Early Years put together for our Broad Church show on Strangeways Radio late last year…