Ahead of the 6 Music Festival, another chance to hear DJ Colleen 'Cosmo' Murphy turn her attention across the Peaks to one of the UK's most important musical cities; Liverpool. Focusing on the Teardrop Explodes Kilimanjaro album, we talk to Julian Cope about how he made the album, why he moved to Liverpool, and why he always travelled to the studio on an invisible horse. Colleen also looks at how Liverpool and Psych are inextricably linked, the importance of Soul Music to the area, how the nightclub Eric's and record shop Probe inspired a scene, and Liverpool's isolation from the rest of the country has helped create an outlook like no other.
Colleen speaks with Shack's Michael Head who grew up surrounded by the influence of the Teardrop Explodes: Holly Johnson, of Frankie Goes to Hollywood, discusses the role of Liverpool's flamboyant gay scene played in the burgeoning post-punk scene: DJ Greg Wilson casts his critical ear over an 80s Liverpool still living under the eclipse of The Beatles: author Mark Cooper shares his thoughts on the rivalry between Echo & the Bunnymen and the Teardrops. Colleen also meets Stealing Sheep's Emily Lansley, who is at the vanguard of a younger generation of musicians who embrace Liverpool's psychedelic sound. And if all of that wasn't enough, Zoo Records and KLF founder Bill Drummond shares two of his one minute presentations about the album.
First broadcast in 2015
The Teardrop Explodes - Ha Ha I'm Drowning [Mercury]
Jean-Jacques Burnel - Do The European [United Artists]
The Teardrop Explodes - Sleeping Gas [Mercury]
The Fall - C'n'C-S Mithering [Rough Trade]
Deaf School - All Queued Up [Warner Bros.?]
The Beatles - Tomorrow Never Knows [Parlophone]
The Doors - Strange Days [Elektra]
The Electric Prunes - I Had Too Much To Dream (Last Night) [Knight]
The Teardrop Explodes - Poppies In The Field [Mercury]
Dexys Midnight Runners - Geno [Mercury]
The Teardrop Explodes - Reward [Mercury]
Echo & The Bunnymen - Rescue [WEA]
The Teardrop Explodes - Books [Mercury]
Echo & The Bunnymen - Read It In Books [Korova]
Big In Japan - Suicide A Go Go [Retro]
The Teardrop Explodes - Bouncing Babies [Mercury]
The Cramps - Garbageman [I.R.S.]
Can - Yoo Doo Right
Captain Beefheart - Big Eyed Beans From Venus [Reprise]
This mix is by the incredibly talented Angel-Ho - a Vocalist, Producer and DJ based in Cape Town, South Africa. Afriqueen Diva and Connoisseur of the Arts she is on the Hyperdub Music Label. This mix accompanies Chapter 7 of Planet Divoc-91 comic, which is written by Bobby Joseph and illustrated by Zara Slattery, with cover by David Rubin
Photo by Mehdi Moradizadeh+
Here's video of a set recorded at the Melbourne Recital Centre late in 2020
Gelareh Pour (on the Kamancheh and vocals) and Brian O'Dwyer (on drums) are absolutely fascinating on stage and I don't think I have seen a performance that hasn't left me blissed out. Good luck in Warren Country guys and Gelareh I hope all the hospital shit is over soon
Finally here's Gelareh performing 'Into My Arms' in Farsi which wasquite a hit on BadSeedsTV
Recorded and mixed by Jonathan Gilmour
Gelareh Pour: Voice and Kamancheh
Mike Gallichio: Electric Guitar
Eshagh Pour: Translation
This is a rehearsal recording
A live version of this track is available on Gelareh Pour's Garden 'Live at Bakehouse' HERE
On-USound System Dubs/Mixes of Gary Clail's hit 'Human Nature'. Here with the original Billy Graham vocals that his Estate wouldn't authorise the release of. Hence the resulting Gary Clail version andhere's the Perfecto Billy Graham remixof which allegedly only a few were released
The theme for SnubTV also used David Harrow's keyboard skills and features the same riff as Human Nature
I feel it so profoundly that it comes through me as a sadness. But it is not a sadness; it's a beauty, a beauty so dramatic of all the sensations whipped upon me. It feels close to an insanity. Either the most perfect insanity or the most cur'sed. And I see it and feel it and smell it in all things, in every step and every breath and every shattered day or brilliant morning. It's in brick and concrete and metal and flaking paint, in leaves and bush and trees and plant. I come across it in the shade of hidden places, amongst the tiny European lizards that dart upon the walls and scurry down into the undergrowth. It is on the wet of dogs' noses and in the smell of their coats, sheen or soiled. It romances me in piss and beer-soaked telephone booths as I'm carried away on the whiff of metal and polished copper and coin. It's in the methadone clinics, the hospitals; in the cancer patients who stand outside, held up by IV drips, smoking and looking so wistfully at the dew dying in the grass. It's in the crunch underfoot and the chaffing of fabric on fabric; in gravel and snow and ice, in car tyres scrunching over grit. It's in the wild of overflowing gardens, in rose bushes in early autumn. It's in the long shadows of first summer days, in the haze of the distant roar and city spray where the Now feels like a memory and you smelled of fresh soap and water and it was something more than sex and skin and blood. I hear it in the sounds of builders and cries from up on high, in the afternoon drilling and the clink of scaffolding poles. It's in the dust and slop of freshly mixed cement and, way up high, in the isolation of great cranes stranded in the devastating blue of the sky. I smell it in the molten tar when the roads get relaid, in the uncovered bottles of tincture and ointment in Victorian dumps and Roman fares and paths. It's in rusted rakes and spiders' webs and sodden pines and cones and leaves; in the treated wood of garden fence and damp and dampened earth and mossy stones. I feel it in pine needle lawns in small southern Italian towns in the sand and ruins of Pompei and stretched out across the Bay of Naples. In the ghettos of Mermoz Pinel and Villerbaune and far into the distance yonda, Grenoble and then off to nowhere and early dreams of Europe and fiesta and dancing all around. In the scent of old books and printed ink the words themselves are blood in me and I've only ever looked at them in Georges Bataille and Dirty: gazing out at London we [almost] wept. In cherry blossom snow and terraced housing and fragrant streets, in parked cars exhausted under the beating sun, in sap and milk and milky grass as great days blow in and the city is a-bustle and the radio says it's clear skies across a beautiful London town. In the bushes in the thickets in the tramped and trodden porno mags on Hampstead Heath in bodies fucking through the trees and you wanted to swim in the lake while from the hill I watched the suburbs and we rolled in the glade and hooked ourselves on Scottish thistles while they screamed and splashed and played. In the alien nights in Soho, in the acrid smell of amphetamine, in the smoky bar of the Intrepid Fox in the broken bottles and indiscriminate violence in the faces gashed by jagged glass. In the spoon in the cook in the draw in the pin in the passion for life and desire for death in wide open eyes in your desperate climax in the soft of your breast in our myth and obsessions alone on the bridge in the black scorch of river which snakes through the heart of this murderful town past the point where I said "So leave if you can" in the "I'll walk you some more" in the "arrived all too soon", in the decision to sleep, holding each other, on the bench in the common in the freeze of the night in the healing of wounds and the beautiful trauma of young damaged lives. In the cafes in the coffee in the stir in the cup in the harsh bite of winter in the sulphuric night of millennium eve when the world came together and life was no good. It runs through me as a sadness. But it's not a sadness, it's a beauty. A beauty which clings on, stalked me around Europe and European towns and left me screaming for quit into polluted foreign air. It arrived one morning and stood standing five foot nine outside the Perrache railway Station. In the bare room of the St Michel hotel it was there. It lay with us in the carved wooden bed, lingered in the melancholy of deep night. It flickered outside the window in the blue neon gas of the vacancy sign, illuminated briefly her sexual fantasies of sirens and bullets, wept as she narrated the story of our failed heist, holed up suicidal awaiting the loudspeaker and armed police, two people dead and two more to follow. It drifted out those cheap black-market cigarettes, twirled like ribbon and dissipated in the dark. It sat warm in the earliest boulangeries and cafés, could be found in the fumes of the 6am pernod of the loneliest bars. It rang out from the church every hour and was in the funeral knell of Sunday afternoons. O My Love, let me ruin your life for just one more day. But she was gone, and it resided so terribly in the gone.
O it came and it pooled out of me as a sadness. It came through youth and I didn't know what it was. It was there in my sick bed during long fantastic days off school; came in on the drone of helicopters and the mid-afternoon screams and whistles from the schoolyard opposite. It passed by the window as a millipede of children, cruel and unruly, looking in and laughing as it made its way down to the local swimming baths. It was in the smell of chlorine, in pruned skin and warts and verrucas, in the hideous stench of changing rooms and sour milk, humid feet and prepubescence. It was in me and I don't remember a time when it was not. It roared by in the whoosh of freedom, expanded in my eardrums as I freewheeled downhill for life. Come each dusk I would feel it, would stare out as the sun collapsed and the city died, would want to cry over nothing I could fathom. It came in with history and it overwhelmed me and made me mute. And those were the first lashes from the whip and it was in the whip and in the lash and in the rhythm and the meter and the crack and the yelp of youth. It circled by overhead in the traumatic squawkings of seagulls, sounded in the high winds and arctic skies. It frothed out from my mother's mouth in the back of an ambulance and spread out in the bruises across her chest in intensive care. It comes through ugly and then turns beautiful, comes beautiful and ugly again. On a terrible night I wrote. It was the first time and it made me ill and she nursed me better. It was in me then and in the bright cold healthy morning. I woke up freshly damned and I wanted nothing more. X
Shane Levenetruly is one of the most gifted wordsmiths that I have ever come across. Docheck out his blogif you don't know of him. He has a seriously powerful way with words
