The New Pornographers
Expanded radio and TV sessions bring the cult R&B heroes’ story up to date. By Lois Wilson.
★★★★ Mass Romantic MATADOR. LP
Murderously catchy Canadian powerpop debut turns 21. With bonus 7-inch.
Having advanced with Superconducter and Zumpano, Carl ‘AC’ Newman upped the ante with The New Pornographers, a septet of friends including fellow ‘name’ talents Neko Case and Dan ’Destroyer’ Bejar, though The NPs were ostensibly a benevolent dictatorship. There is some common ground between them and The Shins, (check 2002 B-side The End Of Medicine, included here), full of short, sharp trickery (likewise, the lyrics), but Newman’s Zombies/Beach Boys influences shine through, even when Case and Bejar’s songs dilute the effect. Mass Romantic is a hyperventilating marvel, even when its energy levels threaten to overwhelm; it’s clear from the Case-fronted gem, Letter From An Occupant, that there were seven members elbowing their way into the mix. It’s surely only due to their divisive name that The NPs – now on their eighth album – have never achieved Shins levels of popularity.
Martin Aston
The Pretty Things ★★★★
Live At The BBC REPERTOIRE. CD/LP
WITH THEIR radical-for-the-times long hair and insurrection-invoking approach to performance, The Pretty Things were the band Andrew Loog Oldham made The Rolling Stones out to be. It’s rumoured Mick Jagger wanted them banned from appearing on ’60s TV show Ready Steady Go!, fearing they would steal the Stones’ thunder. Guitarist Dick Taylor had of course played with Mick and Keith in an early incarnation of that group, but it was in ’63 along with Phil May, a graphic design student at Sidcup Art College in south-east London who played a mean maraca, that he formed The Pretty Things and made sparks fly. Their live shows crackled with an electricity and raw, visceral intensity from the get-go. With the classic line-up completed by bassist John Stax, rhythm guitarist Brian Pendleton and drummer Viv Prince, a proto-Keith Moon in attitude and antics, by rights The Pretty Things should have burned out with the beat boom, such was their wild, youthful abandon. Instead, they presaged musical trends: after early blues and R&B experiments, they captured psychedelia’s dawning on
1968’s SF Sorrow, now widely acknowledged as the first rock opera. Via hard rock through the ’70s, from the late ’90s onwards they plied back-to-basics rock’n’roll, chiming with the 2000s garage revival. Their musical conviction was halted only by May’s ill health in 2018. He sadly died in 2020 from complications following hip surgery after a cycling collision.
Live At The BBC tells The Pretty Things’ story through radio and TV sessions. Greatly expanded from previous editions of the set, its 110 tracks spanning six discs begin in October ’64 with five tracks from Saturday Club. “Watch out for fireworks,” show host Brian Matthew announces as cymbals crash and clash and clang. Meanwhile, irreverent acts of homage to Bo Diddley and Jimmy Reed, plus a blistering rendition of their then current single Don’t Bring Me Down, become articulations for adolescent sexual desire and a re-gendered aesthetic.
A newly unearthed, complete unabridged version of freakbeat classic Defecting Grey from ’67 puts them on a par with The Beatles in terms of kaleidoscopic vision, while an elongated rendition of Cries From The Midnight Circus from 1970’s Sounds Of The ’70s demonstrates there was still plenty of roll to their rock, and even when the material dips (see this writer’s particular bête noire, Singapore Silk Torpedo, from a 1974 John Peel Show), their delivery is always instinctive, never procedural. By 2018’s tracks recorded for Marc Riley’s BBC 6 Music show, the most recent session collected here, the group have come full circle, still in thrall to the Bo Diddley beat, and despite May and Taylor being in
their seventies, still knocking it out the park.