Tough Love is proud to announce the release of the second in their series of Young & Research samplers. A free to download 13 track compilation, it features a gamut of friends, family, old flames and future lovers. As per the first sampler, some of these artists we are incredibly close to, others we know only via the hyper-connectivity of the internet. And some are positioned rather ambiguously between the two. Regardless, we love their music equally.
Released on 30th March, Young & Research II is available to download direct from the Tough Love Bandcamp and Soundcloud. However, you are encouraged to share the music in whatever ways you deem fit.
As always, artwork for the sampler was designed by Sinead Evans.
Donald was the prettiest kid in school. And I couldn’t stand it. Not the toughest or even smartest, yet the girls seemed to revere him as some sort of genius, and the teachers the same.
His blonde hair and floppy fringe seemed to encourage an irrational hatred in me that was lost on near everyone else. I can barely remember him opening his mouth, at least not to me. There was just a look. A knowing look of someone with whom the secrets of the world had been exclusively shared. He was on the inside looking out on us all. I didn’t even know what he was on the inside of, except I wasn’t a part of it. You’re struggling growing up and getting by, and here’s this kid that has everything but a care in the world. It was enough to make you ugly with rage.
I was as ugly as he was pretty, until one day he stopped showing up to classes. His father had found him hanging in a potting shed at the back of their garden. Maybe some secrets just weren’t worth knowing?
Tracing the story of punk usually runs down paths littered with references to anarchy, nihilism, three chords and the truth. I can accept a few of those things, but the truth? I find that hard to stomach. For all their disheveled allure, the poster boys of punk mainly smacked of posture and artifice. Punk in its populist form was theatre in a way that its canonised status as a rebellious subculture doesn’t always acknowledge. Since ideology often lags behind reality, it’s not that surprising, but if punk’s ideal were to be truly realised, I often think that Vic Godard would represent the quintessential embodiment of what its UK derivation promised.
“Make Me Sad”, recorded by a newly assembled Subway Sect line-up in 1980, is a few steps removed from the accepted punk form, but it reeks of its singularity, feels unruly in its cutting ramshackle charm. Tenderly poised, unlike so much of punk’s scrawl, it’s built around the autodidactic charm of its author, who recalls a down-home Lou Reed sans the louche king’s reptilian demeanour. Despite the similarities, Godard never comes off as anything other than himself. I believe that’s what all postcard punks futilely dreamed of.
The transgressive qualities of “Make Me Sad” lay not so much in Godard’s speak-sing delivery or the jangle of those proto-indiepop guitars, but in its distinctive poetry. Godard understood language expertly enough to reach through conventional form and pull out that rarest of things: a hidden truth. And it’s in the oblique phrasing of “Make Me Sad” that he signals the real failure of punk, acting as an allegory for failing love: “you need a change from chasing this chimera of content”.
By 1980, punk was long dead and gone, and Britain was about to get a whole lot worse. Godard told us why, while pointing towards a fractured and wobbly future coming out of the rubble. Yes, there was a future, even if it was way more fucked than anyone saw coming. And doesn’t that feel highly relevant right now?
“Summer Escaping” is taken from CYMBALS debut album, Unlearn, released on 9th May. Directed by Ollie Evans, the video is to be viewed as one of a pair, echoing the same themes explored in Ollie’s previous work with TEETH. See that video here.
Unlearn is limited to just 300 copies and can be exclusively purchased from our online shop now.
We journeyed west as the sun began to slip behind the world and everything turned to one shadow. Colder, we intuitively moved closer together and our skin tightened at the thought of the next few desperate hours. It would be some time before we felt comfortable again.
All eyes shot ahead on the road moving under us. There was silence but for the night ushering us into its throat and the collective gulp that it accompanied.
The future, so to speak, is standing on their feet (and May 9th is looming large), but it’s worth one final look back to the best to date.
Tyler is the face and brains, but on “Blade”, Earl is the voice. And what does he have to say? Through the shock horror joke/not joke of dubious gender politics and fiery rebellion, he spins the machismo of hip hop so not to claim “I’m tougher than you”, but rather “you can’t hurt me because I can’t feel a thing”. Like Eminem in 8 Mile, he’s the ultimate antiseptic youth, under the knife of this cold world.
And that cold world of Odd Future’s is Bret Easton Ellis’ LA, but charged on the vociferous cannibalism of web 2.0 instead of MTV’s drone. They’ll never disappear here.
At the age of perhaps ten or eleven, a friend and I sneaked into my parents’ garage with a box of Ship Household matches, a plastic bin and some duplicate Panini stickers. Hidden in the back behind the partly assembled M.G. my dad had never got around to fully restoring, we began setting fire to the footballers’ heads and watched their faces distort into nothingness. We first placed them in the bin, but when that started to melt, we burned them between our fingers, dropping them to the floor only when they became too hot to hold. We did this secretly and for no reason other than to explore the limits of what we already knew. I can’t help but think of Flying Nun in the same way.
I don’t know if the internet makes the world smaller or bigger, or both, but secrets don’t last long anymore. Secrets almost don’t exist. In the 80s, things were different. In Matthew Bannister’s book about indiepop music, he speaks of his experiences fronting Flying Nun band Sneaky Feelings, noting the wait involved in getting hold of new music not from New Zealand. Copies of the NME took months to reach Auckland; Joy Division and Stooges albums took longer. The consequence is that music could exist in isolation and independent of whatever else was going on in the world. More excitingly still, these remote scenes also belied a common psychic network that transcended borders. How did people miles apart and with no knowledge of the other come up with the same idea simultaneously? There was something in the cosmic ether.
Based in Dunedin and a central component of Flying Nun, The Verlaines channelled the same wound-up tight power pop The Feelies were forging about the same time in New Jersey. Did they even know about each other? Maybe. Maybe not. Whereas the latter were seemingly gripped by the same Cold War concerns as fellow countrymen Devo and Talking head, The Verlaines looked inside. Hyper-literate, they name checked Edvard Munch paintings, Rimbaud and, of course, thefin de siècle poet from whom they took their name. There are perhaps more well known songs in The Verlaines modest canon, not least “Death and The Maiden”, recently covered by antipodean fetishist, Steve Malkmus. “Angela” though, taken from the watershed Dunedin Double EP, is an idea ossifying, something on its way to becoming something else. They hadn’t quite found their feet with “Angela”, but those tentative first steps left big imprints.
While Flying Nun has received more recognition in recent years, it’s still likely the case that more people claim to like The Chills, The Clean and The Bats than actually listen to them. The Verlaines perhaps fair even worse. As such, “Angela” still sounds like lighting matches in a garage.
Did thousands of punks die only so that future generations could disrespectfully dance on their graves, as they brazenly without shame fetishise the very thing their forefathers put their bodies on the line in order to eradicate? Did they? Huh?
I shake my head in disbelief and wonder: “Whatever happened to real music?”
The Victory has a basement that is open until 3am. We will be there until the end, playing: This Heat, Pere Ubu, Outsiders, Nation of Ulysses, Mars, The Trojans, The Black Dice, Todd Terry, the Germs, Section 25, Althea and Donna, Sexual Harrassment, a-ha, Pere Ubu, Dorothy Ashby, PIL, the Fania All-Stars, the Bar-Kays, the Human League, the Normal, Lou Reed, Scott Walker, Monks, Niagra, Joy Division, Lower 48, the Association, Sun Ra, Scientists, Royal Trux, 10cc, Eric B. and Rakim, Index, Basic Channel, Soulsonic Force (“just hit me”!), Juan Atkins, David Axelrod, Electric Prunes, Gil! Scott! Heron!, the Slits, Faust, Mantronix, Pharaoh Sanders and the Fire Engines, the Swans, the Soft Cell, the Sonics.
