Gorky's Zygotic Mynci live at The Room, 1997

In my wasted youth at University of Hull, I penned the odd review for Hullfire, the student newspaper. For the sake of completeness and comedy value, I'm adding them to this blog. Here's a strangely beard-fixated Gorky's gig review from 1997 from which my main recollection these days is terrible indigestion.

The beard has gone! Whether by accident or design, Richard James, guitarist in the worst-named band in rock... EVER, has finally done us a favour and picked up a razor. Thankfully, the rest of their appeal remains unchanged; their elegant newly-shorn pyschedelic pop is still hurled in unpredictable glam, lo-fi and punk directions, with added folk flavour courtesy of violinist Megan Childs.

Similarly, Gorky's bilingual (Welsh and English) lyrics retain a healthy preoccupation with the surreal, populating their corner of Wales with sleeping giants, jealous violin teachers, fiery patios and seaside voyeurs. While their set consequently teeters on the edge of 'Still we are young / We like elves / Have Lord Of The Rings / On our shelves' cliche, they are far too good to simply recycle Uncle Syd Barrett ad nauseum.

If pop logic ran in straight lines, then Kula Shaker, who plunder the same period and emerge sounding like The Charlatans, would be the best band on the planet. Thank goodness for a band who, facial hair or no facial hair, think in curves.

The Doors - catharsis in tight leather trousers

Over this holiday period, I've been listening to The Doors, as I realised I've never given them serious consideration before (possibly because I skipped the intense black-clad teenage phase). Having made it as far as album #3 (Waiting For The Sun) here are my thoughts.

The main difficulty with The Doors is listening past the legend. Even if you haven't seen the 1991 biopic, the status of Jim Morrison threatens to overshadow their actual music. After all, this is the man who helped to create the rock hero archetype others have sought to fill since then.

But you can't review stars while they're standing on their pedestal. You can worship them, as any One Direction fan will demonstrate, but to properly appreciate them you need to bring them back to earth. This is doubly difficult when, as Jim Morrison did as a lyricist and performer, musicians help create their own mythology.

So let's start by naming those demons to tame them: 

Rock 'n' Roll Shaman. 

American Poet. 

(Ahem) Lizard King. 

If you think this is all rather ridiculous, you'd be spot on. Ridiculousness is a big part of listening to The Doors in the twenty-first century. Their best-known (and generally best) songs - Light My Fire, Break On Through, Riders On The Storm, particularly The End, are pyrrhic victories for musical deftness over lyrical daftness. 

"We chased our pleasures here 
Dug our treasures there 
But can you still recall 
The time we cried 
Break on through to the other side"

Break On Through

"Can you picture what will be, so limitless and free 
Desperately in need, of some, stranger's hand 

In a, desperate land" 

The End

But you can't have the earnest hedonism and striving towards transcendence that powers those tunes without the willingness to also appear ridiculous. The two are sides of the same coin, and a hipster dismissal of Morrison and Co is as limiting a position as an unquestioning acceptance of their beatnik shtick.  

Remember also that the self-titled debut by The Doors came out in January 1967, five months after Revolver and five months before Sergeant Pepper. If ever there was a time to unironically preach love, drugs and emotional catharsis in tight leather trousers and sell a lot of records in the process, it was probably around that sea-change in music and society

Shorn of its contemporary context and resonance, The Doors is for me still half a good album. Side A in old money is where all the gems are, including Light My Fire (Ray Manzarek = organ hero), Break On Through and their Brecht/Weill cover, Alabama Song. The references points are as much jazz and blues as rock and roll, like the lyrics and the attitude anticipating the progressive years to follow.

Side B is filler, plus The End, a sprawling eleven-minute eastern blues full of Morrison's terrible end/friend, old/cold, snake/lake ad libs. It might have inspired other bands to surpass the three and a half minute mark, but hopefully only because they felt they could do better. It's no Patti Smith killing it on Birdland, believe me.

But the key musical weakness of early Doors is that it's really easy to imagine Austin Powers frugging away to them at the Electric Psychedelic Pussycat Swingers Club. And no track epitomises that better than the fun, harmless but unintentionally hilarious Twentieth Century Fox, a song which is about what you think it's about. 

But for all that the first album is of its time, it grabs your attention and offers at least one track up for the ages in Light My Fire. The next two can make no such claims.

Strange Days and Waiting For The Sun are each merely alright psychedelic albums with one good pop single each (People Are Strange and Hello, I Love You). After Waiting For The Sun, I had to go listen to Riders On The Storm a few times to remind myself of the critical wisdom that The Doors get their act together again a few albums later.

But .. even on Waiting For The Sun, comfortably the more ordinary of the two, there are still flashes of the vitality, focus and risk-taking ridiculousness of the debut. As evidence, let's leave you this chanted spoken-word blues, My Wild Love - it's as great as any song with the lyric 'My wild love is crazy / She screams like a bird / She moans like a cat / When she wants to be heard' can possibly be. 

The Stone Roses - Britain's last punk band?

The Stone Roses: War and Peace by Simon Spence is a good rock history (as opposed to criticism) meticulously researched, fair minded, narrative-driven. And even someone like me - not the biggest admirer of the Roses bar Fools Gold  and Waterfall - can see that he's got compelling subject matter.

Spence's book did make realize just how much punk was a formative experience for the Roses. They idolized the Sex Pistols, followed The Clash on tour, roadied for The Angelic Upstarts. They formed their own musical imitations. And reading War and Peace, it's all-too possible to imagine an alternate history where the Roses were a footnote in third-wave early 80's punk rather than the slow-burning spearhead of the Second Summer of Love.

Viewing the Roses as essentially late-blossoming Jubilee flowers rather than a return to classic rock, the perceived 'flaws' in what they became - Ian Brown's vocals, the overly self-mythologizing lyrics, the occasionally jarring melange of beats and guitars - all start to make a lot more sense. A punk reading doesn't just flatter the band - it places them in the right context.

This punk heritage was not just musical - but ideological too. The Roses' populism and finely tuned sense of spectacle, their anti-monarchism, their deliberate, contemptuous naivete towards the music industry, their readiness for confrontation - all hark back to '77. And John Squire's flag-adapting cover art stands as much in the tradition of Sex Pistols' collager-in-chief Jamie Reid as it does Jackson Pollock.

The Roses even had their own Malcolm McClaren in the shape of Gareth Evans, arguably both the best and the worst thing to happen to their career. Like McClaren and the Pistols, their partnership too dissolved in an acrimonious court case and disputes about money. Spence is particularly good on this tragic, scarcely believable relationship.

But what about the 60's influences? The chiming guitars?  Well, yes. But punk inherited more from the unrealized radical impulses of the previous decade that it cared to admit when it was busy hating on Pink Floyd. And the lemons on the cover of The Stone Roses harked back to the hippies' most punk rock moment, serving as home-made protection from tear-gas in the demonstrations of Paris 1968.

We're used to looking at the Roses as 'Madchester' incarnate or as John the Baptists for the Gallagher brothers. Maybe we should be thinking of them as Britain's last punk band instead?