Saturday 19th June 2010
O2 Academy 2, Liverpool
Support : TBC
Door time: 7.00pm
Show time: TBC
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Since January 2010
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Shack live at The Bluecoat Chambers, Liverpool 1. Intro (by Jayne Casey) Recording kindly donated by Geoff King.
*Yeah I know the photo isn’t actually of the Bluecoat gig but it is from 1988 and I’ve been looking for an excuse to use one of these photos.
Fri 5th Feb 2010
7.30pm – 2.00am
12.00am – John Head
John is confirmed to play The Friends of Manchester Festival on Saturday, 30th January 2010. The event takes place at Jabez Clegg at 2 Portsmouth Street, Manchester, M13 9GB from 2pm with John expected to take the stage at around 9.30pm.
It has been over two years since Shack’s last record and live performance. Despite this, the announcement of a solitary home-town show filled the O2 Academy on a cold, Tuesday night in December.
Setlist: I Know You Well, Miles Apart, Al’s Vacation, Sgt Major, Neighbours, Stranger, Streets of Kenny, Cornish Town, Meant to Be, Mr Appointment, Comedy, Time Machine (Encore: Daniella, Undecided, Full Moon)
Nobody is ever sure what Shack will do next and when: A new record? A tour? A solo album…or two? Whatever and whenever, it will be a thing of substance, great beauty and worth waiting for.
SHACK O2 Academy, Hotham Street, Liverpool, L3 5UF Tuesday 15th December 2009
Shacknet meet-up before the gig at The Ship & Mitre, 113 Dale Street, Liverpool L2 2JH ALL WELCOME
Michael Head & The Strands – The Magical World Of The Strands By: Nick Southall
The spectre of Jason Pierce haunts second-hand record shops on Berwick Street or in Oxford or Reading or Cambridge, 12 years ago, gaunt, wan, dishevelled, fucked-up, hawking copies of his own records in order to fund his habit, selling copies of Taking Drugs To Make Music To Take Drugs To so he can… buy more drugs to take to make music to take drugs to… Michael Head is worse. Michael Head sings, no, whimpers, “who can buy my lederhosen”, or something, not hawking his records but reduced to offering his dirty underclothes, begging Confucius for wisdom, his broken scouse burr faint and- no, not uneven, so low that it becomes even again. Didn’t you have potential, boy? Years ago? Weren’t you in a band once? Brought low by a woman… the most callous woman of all, the one with the soft brown hands, the mother superior, the womb-maker, the one who cradles grown men like children… Shack’s debut album was lost when the studio burnt down with the masters inside it. The head of the record label had a DAT, but where’d he put it? In the back of a taxi somewhere in the US. Michael Head had tried once before with The Pale Fountains and failed and he was doomed to fail again, not by his own mistakes but by fire and misplace and whisper it fate. For three short nights you get to play music, on stage, with Arthur Lee. Arthur Lee! Love! But nothing else. Nothing, nothing else. Until much later when the DAT has turned up, but the boat by now has surely sailed away and the moment, the chance, has gone, Arthur Lee is in jail and you should be too by rights. A German company, Marina, see fit to release the record, only four years after it was finished, presumed lost, and nobody cares about these two scouse brothers, Michael and John Head, and their two mates and their dozen songs. So what do you do? The band dissolves. A French fan with money and time offeres to fund a second record, but the band doesn’t exist anymore, so it can’t be a Shack record. Step forward Michael, it’s your songs he loves, your vision he’s bankrolling. And so, and so… “Hey what’s happened to all my clothes / what’s happened to all my furniture? / I know it can’t just disappear / and I could of sworn I left it there… / …and x hits the spot / when you’re not around / and you’ll find your way / when you’re not around…” The Magical World Of The Strands is the record that resulted from that French fan’s conviction and financial commitment. What did Michael Head do? Step up to the podium and construct a pure, forthright album of zeitgeist-grabbing Britpop optimism, four-square guitar pop with a side order of nostalgia? I mean, if Cast could have a piece of the glory, surely the former Shack could too? That long-lost debut, Waterpistol, had at least 12 more wonderful, uplifting slices of post-Beatles-Anthology-revivalist guitar bliss than Cast, Ocean Colour Scene and Northern Uproar added together and times two. And The Boo Radleys, scouse as they come and certainly guitar pop, were too caught up with trying to destroy the spectacle of being popular by deconstructing Lee Perry and Dinosaur Jr. at the same time to join in the fun properly. The door was firmly open… “I saw Connie / she is running free / I saw the ships / sail in to sea / and my queen looked at me… / I paint the sails / it’s the job for me / I made the whales / they’ll come with me ./ and my queen smiled at me / yeah Matilda looked at me… / Ah but you / you went away… / What would you do / if the sun hits the ground / and the trees poke through beneath the sea?” Mick Head recruited his brother on guitar, a drummer and a bassist, and augmented them with a flutist and a string quartet to record his songs, and the result is (excuse the hyperbole) one of the most precious albums ever recorded. The sound is strange and timeless, yet the complexity and space within the arrangements betray its modernity. Mick’s quiet, forlorn voice floats in the mid-ground, flanked on either side and underpinned by his own acoustic guitar and the bright but hushed figures of his brother’s lead playing. Bass guitar and kick-drum are felt rather than heard, characterised by depth and lack of form, active at an almost impossible distance beneath the melody lines while John Head’s backing vocals exist at one remove from his brother’s voice, the familial relationship unhindered by vocal legroom. The string quartet is used almost as a lead instrument, sometimes symbiotic and sometimes juxtaposed with the guitar, oceans of harmonic space between the two exploited by the almost imperceptible droning melodies acted out by the flute which becomes textural rather than linear. The unusualness of this production space allows the record to assume an identity of timeless chamber pop, “Queen Matilda” and “And Luna” more medieval than mid-nineties, at least until the latter dissolves in wave upon wave of distorted electric guitar and beautifully distanced strings and vocals. The reference points are plain to see, Love, Nick Drake, The Beatles, ageless British folk… If The La’s were half as good as people made them out to be they’d still only be a tenth as good as this… If The Stone Roses had pursued a thread of whimsical British pastoralism rather than aggressively masculine heavy metal Second Coming might have sounded like this… Oh, what is there to say? It’s wonderful; “Glynys And Jaqui” meanders like some country-fair folk standard before it melts the solos from Love’s “A House Is Not A Motel” and The Byrds “Eight Miles High” in an eruption of John Head’s spectacular acid-drenched guitar. But even that’s not an obvious climax, as The Magical World Of The Strands studiously avoids cliché and bombast, steering clear of lazy choruses and already-familiar hooks, the songwriting open and fluid and the instrumentation skilled but never extrovert, creating a subtlety and femininity that allows songs to unfurl over repeated listens, that places faith in the listener and asks the listener for faith in return. Like all great records The Magical World Of The Strands is equal parts light and darkness, joy and beauty shadowed by essential and human faculties of weakness, greed, bitterness and foolishness. Only Mick Head can sing the words “it’s harvest time” over acres of elliptical acoustic guitars and make it sound like some distant historical profundity rather than something you grow out of after autumn term at infant-school. The darkness is all too clear though. The reprise of ’s “Undecided” may be shorn of the lyrics (“gotta be like sticking a needle in your arm / when your dreaming / and then you can be / somebody…”) but there are plenty of other references, both oblique and clear, to the weakness of the Head brothers. Heroin hangs over this record like an unshakable spectre, the concentric circles of sadness and grief buried within the simple chords of John Head’s lone song, “Loaded Man”, almost too much to bear as his voice strings out a confession for seven long minutes; “do you think / do you feel? / Do you know / where you are / or where you’ve been? / Loaded man… / …Golden heart / hidden deep / raggedy skies / that you were / to deceive / I regret / every day / what I done / didn’t do / what I’d say / loaded man…” The maypole banjo twangs of “Hocken’s Hey” may toast cavaliers and Jericho during the verse, but the chorus is the insular daydream of an addict, “sometimes I think about the world / sometimes I think about the world outside…” These two brothers have struggled and succumbed and climbed out again and it’s written through the heart of this record. There isn’t a great deal left to say… After the critical (but not commercial – you try finding a copy now) success of The Magical World Of The Strands, Shack reformed and recorded the over-eager and disappointingly straightforward HMS Fable for London Records, which NME nearly made their ‘Album of the Year’ in 1999. London then promptly dropped Shack, and the merry-go-round of misfortune and misery continued. Mick and John are scheduled to release a new Shack album, titled Here’s Tom With the Weather in August this year, but to be honest I’m hardly on tenterhooks. The Head brothers have already made their classic. The Magical World Of The Strands is, to my ears at least, one of the greatest albums ever recorded. Here are the demos: 1996 : MICHAEL HEAD INTRODUCING THE STRANDS – Demo Tapes
1996 : MICHAEL HEAD INTRODUCING THE STRANDS – A Few More
“Here’s Tom With the Weather” was recorded in just six weeks in May and June 2003 at the Bryn Derwen Studios at Bethesda. Along with Mick, John and Iain, the record featured Guy Rigby on bass and backing vocals, Jez Francis on keyboards and Martin Smith on trumpet. The album was produced by Mick, John & Jay Reynolds. The following photographs were taken by Tony McGuinness during the time of recording :
The record was released two months later on 11th August 2003 featuring an album cover of a photograph taken by Harry Ainscough looking east up William Henry Street (towards Shaw Street) at its junction with Jenkinson Street. The high-rise blocks in the background (known as ‘the piggeries’) consisted of Crosbie, Canterbury and Haigh Heights. The record was released to widespread critical acclaim. Mark Davies pretty much sums up the album in his review from Tangents back in August 2003 : For the first time, Shack have returned from another lengthy absence with no hard luck stories of lost albums in cars and drug problems but just a new album of quite incredible beauty. Recorded in North Wales in a couple of months earlier this year, Here’s Tom With The Weather has none of the production sheen of HMS Fable, their last major label funded album but is closer to the organic sound of both their early ’90s lost classic Waterpistol and 1997’s Michael Head and the Strands. It’s the songs that matter here and each one strengthens the view held by many that Mick Head is one of this country’s most consistent and finest songwriters over the past 20 odd years. With brother John also contributing three songs to the pot and showing a greater variety of guitar playing than on previous records, this album is probably their most consistent and rewarding to date. Opening with the lazy acoustic, ‘As Long as I’ve Got You’, Mick sings of kitchen sink humdrum, and concludes, ‘morning papers soaking from the rain but as long as I’ve got you’. ‘Byrds Turns to Stone’ appears to be Mick’s open letter of love and thanks to his brother for sticking by him throughout all the troubles of the past. ‘How can you shine so bright and still you shine for me’. Continuing on to reference Byrds tracks, of learning to play the guitar together stuck in their ‘ma’s old back room’. Mick’s vocals have such depth and feeling, that one can’t help but be affected by the touching sentiments within. Perhaps it’s because the band has always skirted on the outskirts of full-on chart success and huge financial reward despite continuing critical acclaim, they have never resorted to the clichés of many so-called contemporaries like Gallagher, Weller, et al. In fact, Noel Gallagher has often spoken of his difficulty in writing songs born of his everyday working class upbringing since his fame and often seems disappointed that he can’t go back (even though he still tries) to the subjects of the songs which brought him his wealth. ‘On the Terrace’, a live staple since the HMS Fable dates of 1999 and which is the closest here to the outright pop sensibilities of ‘Natalies Party’ and ‘Pull Together’ of that album. ‘Meant to Be’ sits in the middle of the album and is possibly Mick’s finest hour. Full of characters and hard luck stories, ‘Jamies on the run, shooting stuff for fun’, Mick’s returning perhaps to his lost days and months of heroin use, previously used on ‘Streets of Kenny’ and much of the Strands album. But here, Mick now clean still talks of the feelings associated with the drug, telling the characters not to ‘lose control tonight because what it’s like is in a lullaby’. The song develops with a knowing nod to their hero, Arther Lee’s Love, introducing a stunning horn section taking the original melody of the track on to higher levels beyond Forever Changes, finishing in a crescendo of guitars, horns and drums. You won’t hear songwriting at this level anywhere else this year, certainly not by anyone already established. John’s songs range from the Byrdsian ‘Miles Apart’ to the pure baroque guitar pop of ‘Carousel’. Soaked in strings but not in the 90’s Britpop sense of using them to obscure the apparent lack of a melody or even a song, John’s voice adds warmth to this pretty love song. Surely, the ratio of Mick’s songs to John’s songs on future Shack albums will continue to become more equal. John’s third song, ‘Camden Road’ sounds like a track by a lost ’60’s west coast band, with beautiful harmonies, backwards guitar and based on funereal bass hum throughout. The album closes with the sublime ‘Happy Ever After’. Songs like this are just not written anymore, it’s reminiscent of an old Broadway showstopper with the closing lines, ‘New York, New York, it’s a wonderful town’. Mick sings lyrics of such optimism not in the blind sense but still with a certain melancholy. ‘One and one is tinged with laughter, we’ll be happy ever after’. Here’s Tom With The Weather is up there with Shack and Pale Fountains greatest work and whereas only a fool would predict world wide fame on the band after so many false starts, it has such quality that given some kind of airplay in addition to the expected glowing reviews and live shows could become something of a slowburner throughout the summer and autumn months. If the David Gray crowd could only get to hear songs like these they would wonder what they’d been missing all these years. It would be nice for the band to remain on a label such as the current North Country who obviously have such faith in the band’s work as to let them record on their own with no interference or the hiring of big name producers, which only served to dilute the songs on the still great HMS Fable. |
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Copyright © 2010 Shacknet - All Rights Reserved |
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29th April 1988
Gig For Haiti at The Masque, 90 Seel Street, Liverpool L1 4BH (0151 707 6171)
It’s difficult to argue with anybody who claims that this is one the best records ever recorded :
