I get territorial when I start thinking about Queen I. It's my album, and while it is so often overlooked by critics and fans alike, I tend to go back to it and hide out in its songs. The mood is so softly sepia to me, with lashings of impoverished glamour. It's Freddie's satins and furs, pillows and feathers, grapes and other ephemera in his Holland Park flat. It's the black and white photos of Freddie thrashing about on stage at Imperial College. There's this heady precociousness that I can get on board with: the vast contrasts moment-to-moment in Great King Rat, the hazy vision of friendship in The Night Comes Down, the adolescent rage of Son and Daughter. It all exists in a familiar place in my heart.

The Queen 1 boxset is enormous, and to traipse through it is to be overcome with awe with archives that didn't seem to exist before. Handwritten sketches of the Queen crest and its elements, delicately drawn by Freddie. There's lyric sheets for songs like Hangman or Mad the Swine, their existence seems to be positively folkloric. Then there's Roger's diary entries, Brian's handwritten tour notes, written on the back of a Queen poster, and then there's the photos that have been hidden for decades: Freddie singing All the Young Dudes on stage with Mott the Hoople, or else staring you down - poised as if he's about to impale you with a sword.

It's vast, complex and intricate, with everchanging meanings, in my heart, at least. The demos are filled with conversation and clattering, accusations that someone is out of tune or out of time. Freddie counting out loud. Things not coming in when you expect them to. Then there's the placeholder lyrics, poignant lines reduced to bits that need filling in later. It's like they're an ordinary band, but they're so far away from any ordinary band that's ever existed. I remember one random radio interview with Freddie in the mid-80s, where he talked about how he'd never like to release demos, because he'd never want to release anything imperfect.

Queen fans have always known Queen I was recorded under bad circumstances, in snatched pockets of night at Trident Studios in Soho. The narrative has been drummed into us: "the drums were all wrong! The Sheffield brothers were shonky charlatans!" The Queen 1 boxset reframes the first album entirely, ushering"the debut album that we always dreamed of bringing to you". The remastered mixes are markedly different: the drums are more expansive, the guitars more pronounced, Freddie's vocals seem other-wordly at times. Are these entirely different takes? Each listen brings about another startling nuance, and there are more pieces to uncover still.

I appreciate the discomfort in confronting the archive, particularly when a project didn't pan out the way you wanted it to. The artist insists repeatedly, "it's imperfect, it's imperfect, this isn't how I wanted it to be!" As a fan, I'd insist that there's beauty in the sketch, in the attempt, in the ambition. I'd insist that Queen I exists in a perfect original state, but if I can get beyond myself, it's more interesting to look at the evolving meaning of the mixes: what was wrong before, what has been pulled out of the archives, and why was this mix deemed to be so perfect?

Cassettes & Chocolate Milk: Electro Podcast #77
Stealing Sheep - Jokin' Me
Ariel Pink - Lipstick
Kauf - The Closest
Nation of Language - What Does the Normal Man Feel?
WhoMadeWho - Keep Me in My Plan (Modernaire Remix)
Amason - Marry Me Just For Fun
PNAU - Telegraph to the Afterlife
Neon Indian - Annie
Purple Disco Machine & Sophie and the Giants - Hypnotized
Graceorsomething - Short King Advocate (feat. Wyatt Delp)

Download (99.3 MB)

C&CM is returning to FOTW's Halloween Listening Party for 2024

C&CM is returning for the 10th birthday of FOTW's Halloween Listening Party! That means it's time to tune in live for an hour-long special of thematically-relevant Italo Disco, indie obscurities, and more. Listen in live year round (but especially during my show) at halloweenlisteningparty.com

For listeners in Sydney, London, New York and LA, you can listen in on Thursday 31st October at 9pm.

Find out what time to listen in your timezone.

Listen to the 2023 show here.

Listen to the 2022 show here.

Listen to the 2021 show here.

Listen to the 2020 shows here.

halloweenlisteningparty.com

Thank you and congratulations to the dear IJ Wilson for his endless encouragement and a decade of spooky seasonal programming! Here's to many decade(s) more of spookytimes.

[UPDATE] You can download the 2024 C&CM x Halloween Listening Party for FOTW show here:

Download (137 MB)

Analysing Anthology 1 on I Am The Eggpod

Listen to Vikki Reilly, Chris Shaw and Missy El analyse the Beatles' Anthology 1 on the Beatles' podcast, I Am The Eggpod.

Listen on iamtheeggpod.com

You can also listen to the C&CM Get Back episode of I Am The Eggpod here!

It's my third year of doing Jamuary, and it's the one occasion where I really throw myself into creating synthpop on Ableton for Brian Funk's Music Production Club. It's a big priority in my heart but I don't think about creating "real" songs, I think about the compatibilities of sound: is this too much? What am I expecting to hear? What happens if I hold back? What happens if I drop away?

I've uploaded this year's Jamuary sessions for download on C&CM. They're scrappy and DIY, and I tend to prefer the lo-fi versions on my socials. I love to detect an influence seeping in, accidentally working out how to do Italo Disco, Amiga demos, or even Bloc Party. There's a kind of thrill in creating music in such an instinctive way, working towards a sense of what "feels" right.

Hacked Playtron

My videos typically feature a Playtron, which I also call "the motherboard". It's a reworked midi controller used to trigger audio samples on Arcade's Output. The motherboard needs to be ground with a silver ring, attached by an alligator clip to my finger. Of course, this is not to be confused with the "acid harp", a lyre which overwhelms everyone with its resonance.

I might show you how the scrappy DIY jams are made one day, but perhaps that's a thing for another year (or decade)...

Watch the live jams on YouTube

Listen to the 2025 jams on Soundcloud

Announcing C&CM x FOTW's Halloween Listening Party 2023

It's time for C&CM's show for FOTW Radio's Halloween Listening Party for 2023! Tune in for an hour-long special of macabre synth-pop, indie obscurities, Italo Disco and much more! Tune in live at halloweenlisteningparty.com

For listeners in Sydney, you can listen in on Tuesday 31st October at 10pm.

For listeners in London, you can listen in on Tuesday 31st October at 10pm.

Find out what time to listen in your timezone.

You can listen to the 2022 show here.

You can listen to the 2021 show here.

You can listen to the 2020 shows here.

halloweenlisteningparty.com

[UPDATE] You can download the 2023 C&CM x Halloween Listening Party for FOTW show here:

Download (137 MB)

 "Now you're gone, there's nothing left to go on, to go on..."

In May 2017, I took a night bus to Ghent with the grand ambition of writing a song. I had written one just a few days before on my guitar. I had been keen to incorporate a term that we used at the hostel, so I called it Check Out. The lyrics cited the well-honed seduction techniques from our local Lothario: "Leave tonight with glow-sticks in your shoes, it's a sign you're just another conquest, just another conquest..." It only really meant something to those who were there.

The idea of songwriting tourism came about when I reflected upon one former colleague who locked herself up in an Amsterdam apartment to write an EP. I knew I couldn't do anything like that, I'm too much of a tourist to refrain from going to the castles and the op shops. I need to go to the record shops and hassle the record store owners about the local scene in the 1980s. I need to go to the clothing shops and Shazam every song. I talk to too many people. I make too many friends. No way could a song materialise from that...

I did try on that trip to Ghent though. Between the frantic tourism, I went from coffee shop to coffee shop, writing Pat Pattison-style boxes containing lyrical narratives in my flimsy cahier. Nothing materialised. It wasn't until I came upon Le Bal Infernal, a used book cafe, when something changed. I sat in the corridor, watching a silent film flicker on the creamy stone walls, probably creating a fire hazard. An inter-title flashed up and stung me: "My heart's broken. I must be alone with my thoughts." 

Making sense of your false concepts...

I ordered at the bar. I sat down with a mocha and Trust Accounts arrived.

I worked out the chords and keyed in a primitive melody on Caustic, a synthy app on my phone. I wrote lyrics down in pencil, fearing a mistake but it fell out intact. The people on the next table asked me, "What are you doing?!" I laughed. You would have thought I would feel embarrassed or annoyed but I felt totally elated. Randoms witnessed this outpouring of frantic MIDI coding and my god, I had never identified as a songwriter, but these strangers just saw me writing a song.

Certain lines of Trust Accounts felt like a Jessie Ware song to me: "Why must we act as if this is forever when love expires at the end of the night? Why must I care and hope and wish whenever you say that we can talk and share despite..." It wasn't about any one person, it was about a pattern that rolls on in perpetuity: men demanding trust in an intrusive way.

My version of Trust Accounts is not the definitive version. My friend, Marcella Wright of the synth duo Silent Income recorded a cover of it. She sends me videos of her singing it on stage in Melbourne: "Demand accounts, you can talk, you can trust me..." If it wasn't for her, Trust Accounts would have lived and died as an unheard scrappy demo, but she arranged it and transformed it, giving it this beauty and iridescence.

The lyrics still sting, but I love that. I love how it honoured, and still honours, my truth.

Cassettes & Chocolate Milk: Consequential Lyrics Fan Podcast #76
Bronski Beat - Smalltown Boy (David M. Green's VHS Revue)
Faunts - M4, Pt. 2 (Word Tweak's Substack)
Brand New - Seventy Times 7 (Jessa Stephens' My Girlfriend Dolly)
New Order - Subculture (IJ Wilson's Halloween Listening Party on FOTW Radio)
Echo and the Bunnymen - A Promise (Mark Silver's Twitter)
Sparks - Equator (Rebecca Sheedy's Mild Scribbling)
Paul Simon - The Obvious Child (Shot97's YouTube)
Belle and Sebastian - Desperation Made a Fool of Me (Teatles' Twitter)
Pink Floyd - Time (David M. Green's VHS Revue)
Bloc Party - Plans (Sharronswims' Instagram)

Download (154.2MB)

Explore C&CM Podcasts 1-75 here

More about Consequential Lyrics

I think if you were to describe the Budbrain Megademo to someone who had never seen it, you would sound a bit deranged: "there's this constipated man who flies off the toilet and these beatboxing baby chicks, and then there's this multi-part film about an intruder...?" You'd invariably trail off, but that doesn't detract from how rad it is. My older brother and I would watch it together and it was crucial he was there, because he had to turn off the Amiga before the dick jokes appeared.

I was six when I first saw Budbrain and I immediately fell in love with the KAOS sequence. It's like your own private nightclub, where the Dr Baker mashes with Technotronic and Coldcut, synthy stabs are synchronised with a seemingly infinite array of flashing images: a punk baby and a foot-tapping Elvis. It's cool in the most confident sense of the word... and although it may be difficult to faithfully describe it, anyone who knows it has the tendency to agree.

KAOS

Cassettes & Chocolate Milk: Amiga Podcast #75

Jester - Elysium

Karsten Obarski - Rallye Master

Frog - Angie S.

Mulperi - Crystal Hammer (Mulperi Remix)

Captain - Space Debris

Wobbler - DNA Dream (Vanilla Roachford Remix)

Piepie - STAG 2

daXX - BA1 (D4XX 2005 Remix)

Download (89.7 MB)

Explore C&CM Podcasts 1-74 here

Buy ZZAP! AMIGA Magazine

"Tonight you'll see how love can stay here forever, when all you want is just the one last time..."

I remember how I felt when I first realised that the Hurricanes' Only One Night beared a lyrical similarity to Hot Chip's I Feel Bonnie (House Mix). I realised there was something in these songs that could be made into something, a podcast discussing parallel lyrical themes: two songs that were musically unrelated, but they used the ephemeral nature of music to enhance the meaning of the lyrics.

Both songs look at the concept pleading for "one more night", using it as an anthem for temporary lovers: "I only want one night together, in our arms, this is the only night, we're meeting arms to arms..." The lines would loop over and over again and the repetition of it echoed its madness, suggesting that despite its insistent lyrics, that one night would never be enough.

Daydreams for such projects ring out while on walks, but they're rarely meaty enough to materialise into anything real. They faintly echo the preoccupations of Consequential Lyrics, a project I did actually complete in August 2013. It involved playfully pasting up lyrics and gushing about personal meanings in episodes about Queen, The Beatles, Depeche Mode, Pet Shop Boys, The Smiths, Erasure and Roxette. There was also a fan episode, made up of contributions from musicians, writers, broadcasters, and fans.

It had to constantly remind myself that there had to be some value or even charm in recording the way people find these poetic dimensions in pop lyrics. These stories would become a precursor to the life I would lead at the hostel, sharing songs and lyrical associations with guests, late into the night. I sometimes wonder whether these lyrics were meaningful because we didn't read enough poetry, or whether we were just incapable of admitting how we truly felt.

As the hostel life moves further away from me, I wonder about those daydreams for projects that ring out. It's much like child tugging on my leather jacket, pitching ideas in vain. I'm left asking whether it's really my responsibility to do all this, to reveal personal stories with nauseating levels of vulnerability. My confidence wavers. Did I faithfully remember those lines that stung? Did I just make it all up?

Consequential Lyrics artwork by Antonio Sanciolo

Cassettes & Chocolate Milk: Consequential Lyrics Podcast #74
Fleetwood Mac - Isn't it Midnight
England Dan & John Ford Coley - I'd Really Love to See You Tonight
Sam Cooke - Desire Me
Sohn - Artifice
Nils Bech - Glimpse of Hope
Alexandra Savior - Crying All the Time
Boy Jr - Are They Actually Attractive?
Emma Pollock - If Silence Means that Much to You
Jim Croce - A Long Time Ago

Download (81.5 MB)

Explore C&CM Podcasts 1-73 here

Submit your voice recording of your Consequential Lyrics - quote its lyrics and expand on its meaning - for a future fan episode of C&CM. Please include the song title, personal story and relevant lyrics in your voice recording: consequentiallyrics@gmail.com

"The pureness and simplicity must come across so people can hear the human part of the song. That is everything."

I came across that quote and I immediately thought of the bonus mini-zine that Teatles made called Beautiful Beatle Moments. It features contributions by tweet to the question: "Does anyone have a favourite moment in a Beatles song? A second or two where it all gets perfect?"

The quotes are abundant and anonymous: "The pause in the middle of She Came in Through the Bathroom Window, just before the "She said she'd always been a dancer." Each moment is spliced into a micromoment, conveyed in only a handful of words but it takes you straight to a heart-buzzing vocal take or an instrumental that makes you feel vast levels of love and gratitude. Intense emotions are cited, "John's high-pitched desperate 'pleeease' at the end of Don't Let Me Down."

In any Beatle-related conversation, it is common to bandy around the term "perfect". It's convenient for the hyperbolic gushy types like myself, but it's also helpful to convey a certain sense of gratitude that everything managed to transpire as it did. It's also helpful that to have community of people who can identify these "moving" micromoments of happiness, something barely detectable that somehow reveal the humanness, the laughter and mistakes of this band: "George fudging the solo in All You Need is Love - I know it was live. All these add to their greatness rather than detract from it."

Others run towards the raw expression and I can feel the beauty of these moments too: "Oh, how could I forget this? John baring his soul and almost sobbing the vocals, five years prior to the Plastic Ono Band album, "But it's my pride, yes it yes, yes it is, yes it is." It's beautiful to recognise something that could have been characterised as a therapeutic release, despite the evident levels of pain. We like to think we know what John had been going through and detecting these small dimensions of grief help us in some way. They help, because we miss him. It also provides a small hope that this music was cathartic for him too.

It's strange but that kind of vulnerability was mentioned only today, when I watched Paul analyse his photographs for the NPG's exhibition, Paul McCartney, Photographs 1963–64: Eyes of the Storm. Paul looked up at his photograph of John sitting in the back seat of a car, his hand folded to cover his mouth. "I forgot how he used to do that all the time..." I recognised that self-soothing gesture within myself, as a former thumb-sucker. You cover up on your month in moments of stress and you do so without even thinking about it, and then you realise you're doing it all the time.

Got to be good looking 'cause he's so hard to see

In Music and Imagination, Aaron Copland wrote about how difficult it was to seize the musical experience and hold it. "Unlike that moment in a film when a still shot suddenly immobilises a complete scene, a single musical moment immobilised makes audible only one chord, which in itself is comparatively meaningless." It might be easier to look at Paul's photograph of John and extrapolate the character of a man we feel like we know, but it's still fun to challenge Copland. We're each attempting attempt to seize the musical experience, as fleeting and granular as it is. The joy is in the attempt.

Cassettes & Chocolate Milk: Early 90s Pop Podcast #73
The Adventures of Stevie V - Dirty Cash (Money Talks) (Sold Out 7 Inch Mix)
Ace of Base - Happy Nation
Split Mirrors - The Right Time
Peter Gabriel - Digging in the Dirt
Oingo Boingo - Dream Somehow
Leevi and the Leavings - Turkmenialainen tyttöystävä
The Beloved - Time After Time
C+C Music Factory - Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)

Download (87.8 MB)

Explore C&CM Podcasts 1-72 here

 "What would you do if you got to him?"

I had just returned from a night out at the BFI Mediathque. I meet Glynne there from time to time and we generally watch a lot of 1970s television together. Weird stuff mostly, some puzzling game shows, some awkward children's television. We had recently been preoccupied with a show called London Bridge. It was a Saturday morning TV show, designed for teenagers, made between 1974 and 1975. It's hilarious and stilted, quite often, featuring a cavalcade of stars and heartthrobs that would have made the average 70s teenager wheeze.

Calm thyself...

The distinction between adult and teenager becomes increasingly apparent when watching this show. Every segment is a kind of heavy-handed suggestion of something kids can "do" with their lives, whether that's journalism, nursing, veterinary science or acrobatics. They have a team of teenagers, sitting on the set, politely waiting their turn to ask their carefully-crafted question in a soft cockney whisper. Occasionally they are forced to step up and volunteer themselves for garish haircuts and/or makeovers by overbearing adults, often pushing weird or problematic agendas.

The sacred clapperboard

One specific episode struck me and I promptly made notes about it as soon as I came home. It was an episode where the Bay City Rollers were guests in the studio. The girls on set were especially jittery, their cheeks glowed a purplish red as they pawed nervously at their tartan scarves. They were, after all, sitting thigh by thigh with their favourite pop stars. You would have thought it would have been like any other interview, but then the bodyguards of the Bay City Rollers were introduced to the show.

The host cut to clips of the Bay City Rollers stepping out onto the tarmac, being greeted by legions of hysterical fans, just as if it were ten years before with John, Paul, George and Ringo (or maybe six months before with Freddie, Brian, Roger and John?). You couldn't help but cackle at the sheer scale of it. No offence to any Bay City Rollers fans but the hysteria seemed disproportionate to the actual handsomeness of the musicians concerned, but then, I am especially shallow and hard to please.

Rubbish

Instead of asking any questions to the fans or the group, the host looked to the band's bodyguards, questioning them about how you become a bodyguard and what it is like to travel from city to city, protecting pop musicians. The discussion turned to the rabid behaviour of the fans, throwing themselves onto cars and crying. One of the bodyguards turned to one of the girls and said, "What would you do if you got to him?" She stuttered, almost tearfully, "I don't know, I just love him..."

It was a diabolical scenario, what maniac thought this up? What would it have been like to be seated with your favourite musicians, only to be confronted by thuggish henchmen? How could you possibly account for the rabid behaviour of other teenage fans, when you're containing your lust so calmly? "What would you do if you got to him?". I wouldn't dignify that question with a response, after all, such a prompt is worthy of scrutiny only among the closest of friends, lying in the darkness on the floor of a sleepover.

Such discussions would no doubt involve detailed scenarios, dreams of what it'd be like to be face to face, hip to hip, cheek to cheek. Such admissions featured in Fred Vermorel's sociological study, Starlust: The Secret Lives of Fans. Published in 1985, the anonymity of the admissions revealed the depth, the meaning and the clarity of those daydreams. Usually, but not always, that fangirlism provided solace against the backdrop of terrible grief and loneliness.

If I could go back and advise those girls on London Bridge, I would tell them not to be rattled by those bodyguards, not to fazed by their bullish interrogation tactics. I would give them permission to obliterate their calmness and scream, scream their lungs out, just like the girls on the tarmac. They had just met their favourite band! They had just sat alongside them! Knees touching knees! Feet touching feet! This will be a day they'll remember forever. 

Cassettes & Chocolate Milk: Baroque Pop Podcast #72
Jethro Tull - Bourée
Amazing Blondel - Highwayman
Cat Stevens - Moonstone
Carpenters - Mr Guder
Paul McCartney - Dear Boy
Andrew Bird - Roma Fade
Vashti Bunyan - Come Wind Come Rain
Enya - Caribbean Blue
Lindisfarne - Lady Eleanor
Jacqueline Taieb - Ce Soir Je M'en Vais

Download (87.2 MB)

Explore C&CM Podcasts 1-71 here

I was listening to the audio commentary of PG Roxette's latest album, Pop Dynamo and Per said something like, "I'm a melody guy..." and I agreed enthusiastically, "Yes, yes, I know what you mean, Per. I, too, am a melody girl."

I approached the prospect of making a 1980s Eurovision episode with the mindset of a "melody girl". I perpetually seek out catchy vocal lines and synthy hooks, but I also lack the patience to watch whole competitions. So scrubbing song after song, competition after competition, I realise that I am looking for something super specific. I want something upbeat in a minor key. Needless to say, my favoured entries came from Belgium, Finland and Turkey.

Turkey in Eurovision, 1989

A more naturalistic approach would be to watch the whole competition among my friends back home in Australia, and cackling heartily with a bucket of hummus on my lap. There'd be sarcastic comments, but it would never be mean. After all, we're on the same mission to find some perfect Europop. We'd have our phones out, making notes on our favourites, perpetually reminding everyone of who we liked until the voting process destroyed our pop hopes and dreams.

I did attend Eurovision one year, back in 2016. It was a surreal, awe-inspiring affair but nothing like the hummus-cackling. The smallest things transfixed me like the speedy changes between acts and the LED lanyards that illuminated in sequence with the rest of the stadium. The first semi-final, I found a perfect piece of pop: If Love was a Crime, Bulgaria's entry by Poli Genova. Since then it's been my go-to recommendation for any doubters.

Eurovision, 2016

I'll be going up to Liverpool for this year's competition soon. In typical ritualistic fashion, I haven't listen to this year's entries and perhaps that's a part of being a "melody girl". For me, Eurovision requires another kind of pop sensibility, "dethroning the serious" as Susan Sontag would say. "Camp taste is, above all, a mode of enjoyment, of appreciation - not judgment." The month of May is my time for just that, for the campness and the revelry, for friendship and that earnest search for perfect pop.

Cassettes & Chocolate Milk: 1980s Eurovision Podcast #71
Bucks Fizz - Making Your Mind Up (UK, 1981)
Ofra Haza - Hi (Israel, 1983)
Pas de Deux - Rendez-vous (Belgium, 1983)
MFÖ - Didai didai dai (Turkey, 1985)
Pan - Bana Bana (Turkey, 1989)
Sandra Kim - J'aime La Vie (Belgium, 1986)
Liliane Saint Pierre - Soldiers of Love (Belgium, 1987)
Sonja Lumme - Eläköön elämä (Finland, 1985)
Vicky Rosti & Boulevard - Sata salamaa (Finland, 1987)
Cadillac - Valentino (Spain, 1986)

Download (77.8 MB)

Listen to the C&CM Mixtape - Eurovision Favourites (2008-2014)

Explore C&CM Podcasts 1-70 here