The Field Mice - music to walk alone by

Wrote this in January. For various reasons, didn't have the courage to post it until now. Ho hum...

Things changed. Things got harder. Someone who had become important to me was leaving the city. Leaving the country, even. I got into the habit of walking around the city by myself, sifting my thoughts. Before, we had walked together. At the same time I was trying to write a story about a man and a woman who have a disagreement on a London street and she walks off and they never see each other again. The story would be named after the particular street on which it was set. I needed to walk down that street a lot to be able to write the story. And these days I have that modern disability where I can no longer walk down a street without personal, piped music. Only one act could soundtrack this particular mood and moment: the Field Mice. After a while, I became convinced they must have written a song about this same street at the some point, for they did things like this, but if they did, I never found it.

I hadn’t listened to the Field Mice for exactly one year, when I was trying and failing to write a story about a different couple who see each other for the last time in a London park. Clearly, it’s a January thing. Again, I would walk around the park trying to think of the words the people in the story would say, and when doing so listened only to the Field Mice. Which tells me that in my head the Field Mice must be all about wintry melancholy, about leavings and frustrations and things you wish had worked out differently and things you imagined saying better in your head and things you never quite managed to say. They’re a band about that ache in your throat when you’re trying to say ‘I love you’ but end up saying ‘see you later’.

There have, I suppose, been other bands quite like the Field Mice, but they have never been exactly the Field Mice. There have been any number of sensitive types not averse to wearing both hearts and learning on their corduroy sleeves, bemoaning their repeat failures to sustain a relationship against a backdrop of guitar either acoustic or jangling. I've liked most of those bands too. But like Field Mice successor bands, such as the Trembling Blue Stars, who despite the odd moment, have never reached those same heights, those bands just aren't quite up to the same mark.

My love for those mid to late 80s jangling and shambling guitar bands, and their formative influence on me, is a matter of record. I doubt that any music will ever mean as much to me as that made by Razorcuts, McCarthy, the Bachelor Pad and Biff, Bang, Pow! when I was a shaky sixteen year old suspecting there was more to life than what was then this in a distant corner of the north west of England. That fey, anorak or amateruish music clustered around Sarah Records, now bracketed dismissively under the banner of twee, will always unlock something adolescent in me. But even amongst labelmates of that era, there was something of the outlier about the Field Mice. They were different. They were somewhat outside their time, outside fashion, resistant of labels. And they were songwriters.

It doesn't always work for me. There were too many Field Mice songs. There were all those slow, acoustic ones, fine enough, but which blur together. And of course the songs that did it for me then aren’t necessarily the ones that do so now. An alternate, basic version of ‘Everything About You’, that most simple of songs which offered a plausible substitute for the romance I hadn't then experienced at first hand, appearing on that favourite of formats, the flexi disc stuck to the front of a fanzine, issued by Caff Records, now seems to me a bit too simple. I loved 'Missing The Moon', their genre-defying leap, built around keyboards and repetition years before pale white boys started doing that sort of thing, but now when I hear it, it’s like I’ve used it up and it can yield no more, possibly because so many things now sound like that these days. But others have stepped up to take its place.

'Missing the Moon’s' b side, 'A Wrong Turn and Raindrops', now seems to me to offer the perfect soundtrack to present big city loneliness, the Thames tide ebbing in time to that harmonica lament as you cross a bridge alone. 'Sensitive' comes across as perfect credit roll music for the end of a film as the camera crane-shots up and we see a single and increasingly distant figure condemned to trudge forever across the snow. 'Emma’s House' is a gem that lay neglected for years, patiently saving its gleam. 'Let's Kiss And Make Up' and 'End Of The Affair' are two, six month apart chapters from the same sad story. And of course we will always, always, have 'So Said Kay'.

Argh, 'So Said Kay', surely one of the great songs of loss, longing, lust and departure? Ever known that feeling of not being able to give someone up, even when you know they're bad for you? Of knowing something can only fail but wanting every additional second of it any? Of being scared about how much it turns out you can care about someone and what that does to your insides? Of course you do. You’re human. And that's 'So Said Kay'.

With some reluctance, because the imagined words in my head are always different and sometimes better than the writer's intended lyrics, I googled the words of So Said Kay, finding them on a curious site. Just read them. Oh my god.

'I cannot leave you alone. Honestly I cannot.'

'Never seeing you again. I am scared to death.'

'Ride with me to the next station. I want to spend another half hour with you.'

They're raw and bare. They're the essence. Missing someone, wishing someone was here, they are how I feel. They're particular, and they're universal. Oh christ, this is just so fucking sad. This is a song that, sometimes, would be impossible to listen to.

The opening line of 'So Said Kay' of course provides the name of the definitive, two CD Field Mice collection, 'Where'd You Learn To Kiss That Way?', which might be all the Field Mice you'll need for your portable music player as you walk alone and lonely down cold streets, but it will be the gift that keeps on giving, year upon year. Astonishing, indeed, to realise that even this compilation has been around for more than a decade now. Doubtless the miracle of the internet ensures it remains an essential part of the fabric of our shared humanity. That there are fresh people out there still to cherish this fills me with hope in dark days.

A Sunny Day In Glasgow - 'Ashes Grammar'

How to describe this music? Shards, yes, definitely: shards of glass, crystal fractures. And those fractal pictures that were popular in the nineties. Things that jangle, like bells on cats. Ghosts and shadows. And sun shining on sheeted rain on recently-washed pavements: oiled rainbows that you tread through. Stars collapsing, that sort of thing. And obviously, a sonic cathedral, but an unfinished one: the Sagrada Familia, perhaps? In fact, this is music I’d like to hear in a church. On the right day, with this playing and sun pouring through a stained glass window and maybe just a hint of incense in the air, there’s a danger that through finding magic I might also find god.

Wow, this lot. Last year 'Scribble Mural Comic Journal' swept me away. Live, in some dingy West End hole, they overcame their drab surroundings to endear. It was magical even in the tight corridor full of chatting wankers that is most small London music venues. And now this record transfixes and continues to do so long past the point of novelty.

Layers, clouds, smiles, tears, the soundtrack of dreams: this is a record I want to fall asleep to. I want it messing with my head as I drift off, colouring night visions. I want it still playing when I awake, informing my lucid morning insights.

There's no point dwelling on individual songs, many of them short. ‘Too short to scrobble’, last.fm will tell me when I play some of them, but what do they know? The technology’s wrong then. It's all of piece, and divisions are arbitrary. One fragment folds into another. Voices come and go, just like tides do.

Of course this is all very post-My Bloody Valentine, and there are any number of shoegaze revivalists out there, and bands like Animal Collective and Grizzly Bear at the tip of this particular iceberg are in danger of leaving us slightly bored now, but dammit: no one is doing it better than these people, right now.

Girls - 'Hellhole Ratrace'

So by now, it having taken an age to write this, a fuller than average sequence of life events having passed since that initial 10” single – and what a beautiful format that remains – first snared my attention, we have all absorbed the coverage in the quality press; have noted the amusing photos, wherein the two gentlemen of the band are invariably surrounded by a bevy of diversely beautiful girls; have become intrigued by the back story of cults and abuse and loss and redemption; and have therefore been tempted to make the foray into internet or Rough Trade to buy the LP. We are, in short, already most of the way over Girls, our initial enthusiasm having been dampened by the fact that there’s really nothing that new on this LP, and god yes, now we’re being honest, it does sound a bit like Glasvegas, who themselves sounded a bit like...

We’re moving on. Girls was so last Friday. We’re even tired of this trend for reductive band names. Women, Girls.... now this really has to stop, before there’s just a band called Stuff. (I know, inevitably, you’re going to tell me, there is a band called Stuff, most likely attached to one of the lesser Suffolk higher education colleges.) And back in those innocent days of July when this first demanded our attention, this website could have looked cutting edge by banging on about how fabulous this single was, crucial days before printed media, whereas now we wheeze, limping last over the finish line in this particular music hype marathon.

We know, now, that this is the best thing on an LP where limp rock clichés too often abound. But dammit, this remains fabulous, and will still be so even in a couple of days when some other bunch of lo-fi Americans appear to offer the world’s new finest hopes.

This tune’s triumph is surely that it lasts for almost seven minutes yet consists mainly of the same thing repeated again and again. And as a long term passport holder of the Wonderful and Frightening World of The Fall, you can hazard a guess at how much I love the three Rs of repetition. It is already a matter of record in these very unviewed pages how much I care for a tune that only changes gear in one direction and builds up an ever more relentless head of steam.
Which is what we have here. It starts. It develops a chorus. And then the chorus repeats. And repeats. Every time you think it’s going to end, it doesn’t. Bagpipey guitars crash in at one point. They keep going. Then the chorus again. And again. And what should lose in effectiveness – isn’t it a shame that on the latest Art Brut record all the best lines are repeated eight times instead of thrown away with casualness for you to pick up on and pick over? – in fact gains. It is a tragedy, is it not, that some of us ever lost that childlike glee in one more, one more?

So for this, they can get our hopes up, let us down, and after that do their best never to bother us again. For these near seven minutes, I’ll remain grateful.

Fever Fever ' 'Keys In The Bowl'

Perhaps in an ideal world we would only ever listen to any piece of music once. We would have to form a fleeting impression and then be forced to fall back on our own unreliable memories to reconstruct any given tune, which would warp and morph as we went along. Imagine, we could all hear the same thing at the same time and then reconvene a year later with our own startingly diverged, personalised versions.

Although I've never managed to get along to one of their rare performances, I'm sympathetic to the idea of The Bays, who are only about playing live and doing something different each time, and reject the idea of release and recording. I admire most ideas taken to extremes.

Naturally I only embrace the theory. As someone who can no longer recall the colour of his carpet, lost as it is under the laval advance of vinyl and CDs, I demand the physical object. I buy records as a compulsion; I have this particular specialised form of the male illness. And overwhelmed as I am by a continuing, unfavourable distortion of that equation between quantity of records purchased versus time in which to play them, I now approach, albeit accidentally, the puritan position I toy with. I buy many seven inches, much of them not already heard, because I was struck by something I read, or some connection with something else I sort of like, or some record label with an above average strike rate. Many of them get played just the once. They travel the short physical distance from the pile of unplayed to a pile of played. Others take their place in the stack and they quickly become buried. In busy times, only the ones that stick out on first listen demand exhumation. Many, nothing wrong with them, simply good or okay, will be forgotten and moved to another pile.

There's always another pile.

So here was one - Fever Fever - that stood out on first listen and demanded repeat play. There was enough to suggest a smart purchase: from Norwich, which has of late compensated for the decline of its football team by becoming a niche provider of quirky, noisy Peel pop, and on our friends Cherryade records, which have offered us many seven inch shaped packages of joy these past few years. Sufficient there to pluck it from the racks. And on that first listen, socks were duly blown off. I'm always pre-programmed to love something like this: short, shouty, female fronted rock, keeps changing direction, crams ideas in. I loved it. Ever since I took time our from stealing furtive glances at my sister's Jackie magazines to develop a 70s crush on Suzi Quattro, I've always been a sucker for anything that combines racuous guitar with don't-give-a-fuck female vocals, I suppose.

So it's great, and all should own this, and here's a band to take an interest in, but it's just... well now I've played it again and again, in vinyl and in download, and repeat listens don't offer the same magic as that first blast. Whereas the version I'd have in my head if I had only heard this once: that would surely be the greatest tune ever.

Toddla T - 'Rice and Peas'

Hey it’s not all fey indie that harks back to that golden year 1986, time of anoraks and bowl haircuts, around here you know…

I am a great loser of objects. First I lost my leading brand of MP3 player. Then in short order I lost my mobile phone. Now, as a result of an expensive need to replace lost items, they are neatly combined into one, even easier and less convenient to lose package.

For the first time, I have taken out insurance.

Getting to grips with the new technology this presents, sort of akin to going straight from steam power to nuclear fusion, without any of the intervening stages, turns out to be fun. I’m no technophobe, me, I just don’t believe in upgrading for upgrade’s sake. But even in these ominous years where I totter towards the first digit of my age clicking over in a fairly significant way, I am finding new things I can do. For example, I’ve reactivated a dormant Twitter account, because now I can update it from the pub, which surely seems the point, and there in case you did not notice was the gentle invitation for you to sign up and ‘follow’, dreadful verb though that is. You may find the quality of your life improved by one or even two per cent by access to low-grade random observation if you do so.

One of things I’ve found fun is that on this new phone-cum-music-player thing I can play tunes direct, through tinny but quite loud speakers, unmediated by headphones. For someone who prefers his music from mostly ambient sources rather than pumped straight into his brain – I enjoy the interaction with found sound – this has been an intriguing development. Of course, it works with some music better than others. Fortunately I’ve never really been a symphonies kind of person. And there are limits. This stays in my kitchen. I’m not about to become a feral, blade-wielding 14 year-old deliberately annoying people with a shuffled playlist at a bus stop. I caught a train the other day and there was almost a whole blissful hour before someone saw fit to generously share with us all the dubious contents of his MP3 folder. Unprecedented.

Of course there are some things that work better out of tinny phone speakers than others. I was intrigued to hear that Wavves, who I adore, who is as important to me as anything else in music right now, deliberately encompasses and has fun with the distortion and degradation you get from MP3 compression. I’ve always loved lo-fi, never understood audio snobbery. (I download these massive flac files of Fall live bootlegs and instantly do the thing I’m not supposed to do and convert them into MP3s. It’s The Fall, for god’s sake.) Wavves sounds magnificent coming out of my phone speaker, by the way. And Toddla T sounds great, and this tune Rice and Peas has insistently burrowed its way into my brain.

I seem to recall this coming out last year in multiple versions on a couple of 7”s, which I bought and felt pretty cool about myself for, as the next person at the Sister Ray counter was asking after them but I had the last copies. They’ll be somewhere in the pile that has successfully mounted a campaign of occupation against my living room, and if I had a spare day and a student archeologist to hand I could probably unearth them. Now it resurfaces as obviously the best thing on a CD that’s been out for ages that I forgot I wanted and only found when I was looking through the racks for something else they didn’t have, and I decided just to buy everything I wanted beginning with T. Tinariwen it was I was looking for. Such is life.

Haven’t listened to the whole LP yet, to be honest, and find the linking bits of dialogue, presumably aimed at establishing Toddla’s street geezerness, annoying to say the least (I edit them out for the version of this that will underwhelm people on imminent CDs) but this paean to the urgent need to consume bad for you street food is just silly, uncomplicated fun of the sort that simply needs to be encouraged.

Even in the midst of a currently largely theoretical diet, I vibrate around the kitchen to this, phone in hand, immensely irritating my partner.