Ex-boogie man, Bela Lugosi man

[venta]

It's Friday! It's three o'clock! It's time to Boogie At Your Desk!

Friday afternoons need a little something. I think they need a Top Tune. Something to make you shuffle in your seat and, if possible, Boogie At Your Desk. I'll be endeavouring to fill this gap on Fridays this year.

I'm not claiming that any track provided to enable At-Desk Boogying is one of the world's best or most profound pieces of music. It will, however, be a tune which makes me smile, and which has at some stage made me surreptitiously Boogie At My Desk.

Desks are not compulsory, of course. Feel free to boogie through your office, in your bedroom, round your lab, across your classroom, on the train - wherever you find yourself on a Friday afternoon.

If you like the track, go out and buy the album it belongs to - I'll try and recommend a suitable CD to purchase for any BAYD track.

This link will expire at some point in the future.

Today you were invited to Boogie At Your Desk to:

Luke Haines and the Auteurs - Lenny Valentino (Das Capital version)

Lenny Valentino is, I think, the opening track on my favourite tape - a compilation made for me seven or eight years ago. It also holds the distinction of the being the only Auteurs track I've ever found in a jukebox (what's more, it was the jukebox of the Scream pub on the Plane in Oxford, of all the unlikely places, though possibly that was still in its Hobgoblin days).

One of the Amazon reviews of Haines' recent retrospective Das Capital (modestly subtitled "The Songwriting Genius of Luke Haines"), begins by describing him as "a man whose reputation rests on a pathological lack of sentiment and loathing of hollow nostalgia". Comments about him tend to involve words like "sneering" and "vituperative" (I had to look that one up) and, occasionally, when talking about his Baader Meinhof project, "tasteless".

There's a great article I read ages back which talks about the music of the English suburbs. The almost gentle sounds of the likes of Frazier Chorus and Prefab Sprout, and set against that the scarifying with Mr Haines gives every aspect of England. His music isn't comfortable, but, way too often, it's right. Which, actually, is why Lenny Valentino is in many ways a bad introduction to the Auteurs - it's one of the few songs which isn't all about the lyrics. Maybe that's the nature of tunes chosen to BAYD to :)

Mr Haines' work, (variously solo, with The Auteurs, as Baader Meinhof and with Black Box Recorder) ranges in sound from the almost-poppy to straight-out rock. Lenny Valentino is at one end of the scale - though I fear that if Mr Haines even heard a suggestion that people had been boogying to it, there'd be trouble. Or at least the application of crushing epithets. Das Capital with its orchestral re-recordings of songs from across his career forms an interesting if uncharacteristic introduction. I think my favourite album is After Murder Park which is as wry and well-observed as it is witty and vicious.

In theory, you should be reading this on Friday afternoon, by which time I will have been to see Luke Haines last night. I, however, am writing this on Wednesday evening, and will not see Mr Haines til tomorrow.

Comments

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

I've not seen him live since Auteurs days at the Zodiac, when he was notable for playing an old Gibson guitar about the size of a dustbin lid. (And the band had a cutaway electric cello, which was the first time I'd seen such a thing.) Hope it was a good gig yesterday!

I too like After Murder Park best, I think it does the neatest job of conveying an intense claustrophobic theme and setting... but it's impressive how his rather unusual vision, and his songwriting skill, hold up across the whole range of projects / years.

[nja.livejournal.com]

I've been listening on my iPod to the Auteurs almost exclusively for the last few days, prompted by the recent 3-CD Luke Haines compilation. A lot of the versions on that are BBC sessions, almost all the B-sides and bonus tracks from various releases are there, and the whole thing's remastered. The songs from the first couple of albums sound much better. "Unsolved Child Murder" on the way to work, which I always want to sing along to. Fortunately the other pedestrians were spared the sound of me tunelessly singing "if I die before my parents die".

[phlebas.livejournal.com]

Oo, is that the version of UCM from Volume?

[nja.livejournal.com]

This was Das Capital. I've got most of the Volume CDs, but a quick google reveals that UCM was on one of the few I didn't buy, shortly before they went bust (cause and effect?).

[phlebas.livejournal.com]

Aww. I came late to the game and only have a few Volumes I've picked up second-hand, but 17 is definitely my favourite. Well worth looking out for - the second disc in particular has some wonderful things on.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Is Das Capital any good? I'm not really sure if I want or need orchestral versions of those songs... does it add much to the experience?

[nja.livejournal.com]

Frankly, no. Some of the songs are interesting (Lenny Valentino, Starstruck, and surely that's the setting Showgirl has always needed?), some are not improved at all (Future Generation, Unsolved Child Murder), and the three new songs (which are also on the 3-CD set) are so-so.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Oooh... Satan Wants Me is so not so-so :) and I'm quite fond of The Mitford Sisters. Admittedly, my world would not stop turning if you removed Bugger Bognor from it.

I'm not sure how much Das Capital is selling for these days, but if it's under a tenner I think I'd definitely consider it money well spent.

[nja.livejournal.com]

But The Mitford Sisters has the line "they're such a little tease" in the chorus, which makes me flinch every time I hear it. I don't think the new songs are bad, but I listened to the album yesterday without them making much impression, unlike any of the songs on After Murder Park, which I've listened to literally hundreds of millions of times. Luke Haines is Dead will give you the new songs and much more besides (including the Das Capital Overture which is only otherwise accessible by "rewinding" the Das Capital CD back past the start of the first track).

[venta.livejournal.com]

But The Mitford Sisters has the line "they're such a little tease" in the chorus, which makes me flinch every time I hear it.

I must admit I've managed never really to notice that line until I heard it delivered live the other day. And yes, it is a bit of a strangeness.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Is that a different version, then ? In what way ?

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

it's one of the few songs which isn't all about the lyrics

And all the better for it ! Hurrah !

[verlaine.livejournal.com]

I disagree that any of them are all about the lyrics, or that the lyrics of any of them are throwaway. Even the instrumentals on the Baader Meinhof CD have titles which tell a story!

The only songs which are "all about the lyrics" aren't songs at all, anyway - they're spoken word :P

[venta.livejournal.com]

well, if you can tell me what on earth the lyrics of Lenny Valentino are on about, I'll be grateful!

"All about" the lyrics was a bad phrase, though, I agree, because that does imply they'd be of equal merit as poems.