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

 "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)

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Explore C&CM Podcasts 1-75 here

More about Consequential Lyrics

"It's the imperfections - the faintly out of tune guitar, the voice, the rasp that creeps in, the garbled lyric, the sigh, the unexpected drum fill played by human hand, these are the things I gravitate to in my favourite music... the humanness of it." - Susanna Hoffs

This line reminded me of a mix I had put together called Dancing on the Night Wire. It features copious amounts of Per Gessle demos and sketchy Kino recordings, all reminiscent of a bedroom recording from 1984. It features human imperfections, but I seek out another kind of clumsiness. It's in the thin production, the super gawky synths, the tinny drums and the double tracked oohs in the background.

The dream would be to analyse each of these songs, to take them apart in order to figure what kinds of instruments they use and what kinds of hooks they employ. I'd even bask in the lyrical themes and dramatic lexicon. I'd slavishly strive toward a perfect kind of imperfect, all while being mindful that at some point, I would need to stop replicating these other artists and accept my own unique brand of mediocrity.

I store these songs in some imagined dream space in my mind, somewhere between Sweden and the USSR in the 1980s. It only just occurred to me that the midpoint between these two countries is Finland. Perhaps that's one reason that I came back with C&CM Finnish Podcast #65. The country exists as another kind of dream space, one where the days never really got dark, back when it was still possible to go outside and cackle together for hours.

To some listeners, some demos would be too shabby to exist, but for me, so many of these rough sketches reveal a modest kind of beauty. The recording is created when the artist is in a state of flow, yet the imperfection of the recording betrays an uncomfortable creative midpoint. I wonder how these demos came into existence. I wonder how is it possible to press record when the inner-perfectionist never leaves you alone?

Dancing on the night wire, Turku

Cassettes & Chocolate Milk: Finnish Podcast #65
Leevi and the Leavings - Pohjois-Karjala
Kaseva - Mari
Jukka Nousiainen - Jukan tehdas
Litku Klemetti - Sinä tiedät sen
Digital Dance - Cairo C
Dingo - Autiotalo
Eppu Normaali - Joka päivä ja jokaikinen yö
Leevi and the Leavings - En tahdo sinua enää

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Explore Podcasts 1-64 here

The Milk Diaries: Oblique Strategies

I remember it was in the great musical text, Isle of Noises: Conversations with Great British Songwriters where Ray Davies encouraged the use of unfamiliar instruments during pop composition. I think about this a lot, that when you are adept at playing an instrument, whether that be piano, guitar or violin, your fingers tend to fall back in the same places.

The idea that Ray Davies presents offers hope to those who are not particularly dexterous on their pop instrument of choice. It relies upon that theory that creative acts can actually result from technical or physical limitations. On a personal level, it warms me to think that ridiculous contortions to avoid barre chords could ultimately result in something interesting and unique.

I recall Brian May saying something similar, that he preferred to make up melodies away from the guitar as he had shared a similar tendency to return to the same, comfortable places. The concept led me to think that perhaps what is pivotal is not what you can play, but what you can imagine. It reinforced a theory I developed when I jammed with vocalist Marcella back at Casa Hawksburn.

What impressed me most was her incredible ability to instantly invent and vocalise a melody over any given loop or chord progression. It was akin to a stream of consciousness practice, where all expression is experimental, yet still thoroughly valid. The process was be inspired yet straightforward, where the memorable melodies were later developed into full tracks with synths and lush string arrangements.

On some level, these songwriters might not have a scientific understanding of their own creative process. These musicians might just be offering oblique strategies for the pop curious. Perhaps it is a naive thing to suggest such things, particularly when pop can be broken down into its most formulaic components. For me, however, there is some comfort in the idea that regardless of your musical skill, it is the trust in your first thought which might be the most inspired thing.

The proposition for the RPM Challenge seemed simple enough: for the month of February, you are to write and record ten songs and/or 35 minutes of music. In other words, your album. The creators likened the challenge to a kind of musical NaNoWriMo, where participants are required to write a 50,000+ word novel in the space of 30 days. In both scenarios, the idea is daunting but doable. Even if you failed to accomplish the task at hand, you would still hopefully emerge with some creative work that you wouldn't have attempted otherwise. This positive reasoning does little to beat the ongoing sense of resistance and confusion as to why they had to choose the shortest month of the year to do this.

I'm no stranger to the idea of establishing creative parameters. Paul Weller discussed it himself during his episode of The Mastertapes, locking himself up in an office, attempting to churn out tracks for the 1982 Jam album, The Gift. Perhaps the idea of working to a deadline diminishes from the romance of the creative process, but it's intriguing how quickly the mind can generate ideas with such firmly set limitations. It needn't be time restrictions either, you might only need a single word that resonates with you and if you allow yourself to take a few moments to explore the concept, something will invariably emerge. Using the methodology of Julia Cameron and Natalie Goldberg, it's necessary to write fast, write without thinking and block out the voice that says you cannot do this.

Both these challenges draw upon this compounded appeal of not only being creative, but also being prolific. It carries this implicit hope that you've managed to sort out your doubts, motivations and work in an almost mechanised fashion. It's entirely possible, you need only to listen to the impressive claim of Severo Lombardoni, the producer of the iconic Italo Disco label, Discomagic: "My setup allowed me to produce 50-60 albums a month. I even did 5-6 albums a day!" We're talking about pop music that was manufactured on the largest scale imaginable, but the sheer breadth of its catalogue does little to detract from its creative merit. It's much like an archaeological dig, where people are still searching and uncovering this music, they're making mixes and dance tracks. Their love of it is ultimately inspiring a new musical culture.

I'm drawn to analysing the nature of creativity, but I know for some that understanding creativity spoils the magic somehow. I'm often reminded of Joe Strummer's remark to Melody Maker's Caroline Coon: "If I told you how I write, when I next do it, my words will haunt me and destroy me completely..." There was a process, there must have been, yet the artist's reluctance to discuss it makes the music-making process even more mystical than it probably should be. I'm also wary of the fact that a lengthy dissection of the music-making process can be an act of procrastination. After all, it is much easier to get fired up by a TED Talk than to go through the grief of picking up a guitar and actually working out a new song.

If anyone else were to ask me whether they should take part in the RPM Challenge, I would say "Do it, create, because it's the most important thing." I'd be sure to add the words of a fellow singer who recently said to me, "Your work only exists because of you." I'm yet to fully appreciate why those words reassured me as they did, but it somehow goes to the heart of what it means to honour your ideas and will them to existence. Sure, there may be some vain component in the whole creative process, there may exist some hope that someone else will connect with your work, free of obligation or personal association. Yet, I maintain that it's the most important thing because you can never truly appreciate the breadth of your influence. Create, because you will ultimately inspire others to create.

Behind the scenes of Ratcat's That Ain't Band videoclip (via)
Cassettes & Chocolate Milk: Mod Podcast #62
Au Pairs - You
Screaming Tribesmen - Ice
Ratcat - Skin
Spivs - Boys of Desillusion
Rotjoch - Too Many Weirdos
Ricky and the Teendreams - Alison, Please
Mood Six - Memories
Uncanny X-Men - I Wanna Be Your Baby
Gyllene Tider - Tuff Tuff Tuff (Som Ett Lokomotiv)
Various Artists - She's a Machine

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Consequential Lyrics #5: The Smiths

There was a time when I enthusiastically advertised my adoration for The Smiths song, Rubber Ring. I always sure to provide that auspicious caveat that I would never outgrow the Smiths. I rebuffed those introductory lyrics: A sad fact widely known, the most impassionate song to a lonely soul is so easily outgrown. I'm certain that there were many others like me who were determined to reassure themselves that The Smiths were not just a phase, a fascination stemming from teen loneliness. Now, I can't help but view Rubber Ring as Morrissey's provocative statement, trolling the reverence of the faithful Smiths fan. To me, it's almost akin to a highly cherished (yet extremely insecure) lover baiting you in a snarl: "You'll get over me, you'll forget me when I'm gone."

Yet, in returning to The Smiths in this episode of Consequential Lyrics, I can't help but feel like there is a kernel of truth in Morrissey's prediction. It's a struggle to define exactly what I mean by that, because it is not as if I don't still love them. Their music and lyrics continue to be very important, but somehow it seems to lack that closeness it once had. I think back to when the lyrics was distressingly relevant: when loneliness, yearning and affinity seemed to be a central concern, when disastrous nights out seemed to be more prevalent. I assumed that its resonance had diminished because I don't live like that anymore. I don't think like that anymore. It's strange and it all makes me wonder whether lyrics really need to have that contemporary relevance in order to be truly consequential.

It's been suggested to me that it's not really a matter of relevance, more an issue of personal acknowledgement. For some, it can be especially difficult to acknowledge painful memories, those feelings that are recalled when we listen to songs like I Know It's Over and Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want. The intimacy of Morrissey's lyricism can be distressing at times and the fact that these songs often take place within the adolescent bedroom serves to intensify that intimacy. It's important to have that idea of Morrissey as the adolescent fan and loner, it's important because it clearly demonstrates that he's been where "you" are now. He adores Sparks and The New York Dolls as you adore The Smiths and he gets it, he genuinely understands what it is to identify and obsess.

More than anything, it's important to preserve that idea of Morrissey as the adolescent fan and loner because eventually, he found someone that cured him: he met Johnny Marr. For my friends and I, The Smiths represented this prospect of an intensely brilliant creative partnership. We would analyse Morrissey and Marr: their oddly non-confrontational collaborative methods involving Johnny pushing a cassette tape through Morrissey's postbox, Marr's evident annoyance when he said he wrote this beautiful, rambling guitar line and then Morrissey called it Some Girls are Bigger Than Others. It was hardly an ideal partnership but you could see the love, you could see the affection in all those photographs of them together, draped over one another. We looked to them because it was the kind of connection we had always yearned for. We had always yearned for something as precious and as rare as their love for one another.

The Smiths lack that contemporary relevance because I no longer have that desire to have a Marr to my Morrissey (or a Morrissey to my Marr). I suppose that stings a little, because it was something that I had always wanted, something that I felt like I had always needed in order to be successful. I now see that intensely brilliant creative partnership is a kind of luxury, a myth that suggests a Marr could just rock up on your doorstep and fill the cracks in your head and your heart. But maybe that shift in attitude means that The Smiths are more probably relevant than they ever were, in all my years of loving them. It hurts to listen to them because they remind me of the hope I had and the hope I lost.

For we cannot cling to those old dreams anymore...
Consequential Lyrics #5: The Smiths
Rubber Ring
Pretty Girls Make Graves
How Soon is Now?
Girl Afraid
There is a Light That Never Goes Out
Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want
Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me
I Won't Share You

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I've only encountered it a few times, the songwriter's peculiar insistence that this song does not belong to me. It happened a couple of times during The Beatles Anthology, I particularly remember Paul's memory of conceiving Let It Be (1970). The story goes that came to him in a dream and the melody was so familiar, he insisted that it must've been someone else's song. George said something alarmingly similar in regards to Something (1969). He was so sure that it belonged to someone else that he left it for a couple of days, just to be sure.

I've been thinking of this idea a lot, ever since I heard Joe Meek's first hit for John Leyton, Johnny Remember Me (1961). From the galloping rhythm section to the wailing backing vocals, the song creeps me out something shocking. If it wasn't disquieting enough, songwriter Geoff Goddard also carried this disclaimer that this song did not actually belong to him. Like Paul and George, he woke up one night and sang Johnny Remember Me into his portable tape recorder, however, but he always insisted that he did not write that song. Apparently, Buddy Holly did, beyond the grave.

Ghosts and the supernatural are a little outside of the scope of C&CM and I can't even say that I necessarily believe any of those stories. Yet it's captivating to have a musician say, I am the conduit, I am the means by which the dead can express their music. It's the most incredible fantasy if it were true, if someone could practically harness the creativity of the late Freddie Mercury, Jeff Buckley, Karen Carpenter and any number of impossibly talented deceased musicians. However, I think I might need a bit more than a dream, an assurance and a familiar song to convince me that it is really the case.

Waylon and Buddy, 1959.

Cassettes & Chocolate Milk: Mod Podcast #52
The Chob - We're Pretty Quick
The Messengers - We Can't Get Along
The Buckett City Distortion Racket - I Lied
Heinz - Just Like Eddie
John Leyton - Johnny Remember Me
Buddy Holly - I'm Gonna Love You Too
The Beatles - Anna (Go To Him)
The Love Society - Let's Pretend (We're Making Love)
Herman's Hermits - No Milk Today
Michael and the Messengers - That's the Way a Woman Is

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