RECORD COLLECTION
Gazing into a cuppa, she sees a 21st Century Schizoid Man, while Kate Bush, Slint and Fairport Convention also float the imaginative banana of this Ideal/My Mad Fat Diary actress-comedian-artist.
Comedian, writer and actress Jo Neary has been called the Joyce Grenfell of her age. She also loves prog rock.
It was my dad who set me off. He came from Coventry and he knew some of Fairport Convention, Kevin Dempsey and people in the more experimental folk scene. He’d play my little brother and me these records, and Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Cream and John Cooper-Clark. When were 10 and 11 he gave us our first records; mine was the sampler Nice Enough To Eat. Samplers are a beautiful, democratic idea and the modern equivalent is Now That’s What I Call Music. This is the prog version of that, and it’s got loads of classics on it. I got to know every crackle and grew to love every track. Dad was an English teacher and he’d play things like Electric Ladyland to his class, get them to close their eyes while listening, then write what had come into their mind. At home, he’d play us records in the dark. He had a ceremony to playing vinyl, dusting it off, putting it on this beautiful stereo then sitting back in an armchair with his eyes closed. There’s something wonderful about that reverence. Consequently I never have music playing in the background, it gets my full attention.
He played us Frank Zappa’s Hot Rats. I remember asking him ‘What are hot rats?’ and he said, ‘Listen to it and you decide.’
I never did quite work it out! My dad had been quite a psychedelic drug taker. I used to ask him: ‘Do you think that affected me?’ [Laughs] I found this copy at a car boot for £1.50 so had to have it. Other Zappa stuff tends to be a bit knowingly weird – I prefer people who worked with him such as John Zorn – but this is melodic and inventive and you can dance to Peaches En Regalia.
Fairport Convention’s What We Did On Our Holidays is the only folk album I can listen to without feeling seasick [laughs]. Hard folk can be hard work. This, and Nic Jones’ Penguin Eggs, take old songs and give them new spins. Things like [Fairport Convention’s] Mr Lacey celebrates the eccentricity of [avant-garde performance artist] Bruce Lacey and his Kissing Machine. At 17 I went to art school in Falmouth and started learning guitar. A few of us would jam together; we had a one-stringed guitar called Excalibur. I ended up being able to play this note-for-note, as well as getting into alternative American artists such as Daniel Johnson, Bongwater and NoMeansNo. That was when my music world exploded and you could be whoever you wanted to be, and be as odd as you liked.
At art school my friends went away and left me their flat. The Kick Inside by Kate Bush was in it. I had it on rotation for 10 days and I fell in love with her. The whole thing was stomach-punchingly brilliant. This is an album for outsiders, and it fit my life at the time. That was the start of a long history with her music and after I saw her on the Before The Dawn tour [2014], I couldn’t listen to Hounds Of Love without crying and crying. It was her depiction of The Ninth Wave. How did this woman put herself in the mind of what it would be like to drown and die and be thinking of your loved ones? When I was little and we’d moved to Cornwall we’d go to Portreath, a surfy beach with big waves. Me and my brother would jump over the waves, and one day one hit me in the face. I swallowed a lot of water and went under. I remember churning about, thinking: ‘I wonder what mum’s going to say when I don’t go home.’ I thought that was it, I was gone. Then I crawled onto the beach, to see my dad running to get me. The way Kate tackles this subject is scarily accurate.
Listening to The Dukes Of Stratosphear takes me back to a Reading rock festival and hearing 25 O’Clock in a field, thinking, ‘What is this?’ Years later I went out with a huge XTC fan and I mentioned this song and he immediately knew who it was. I got it for a fiver at Wax Factor in Brighton – where I was studying Visual Performing Arts at uni – and it’s wonderful to hear it so many decades later. Obviously this is Beatlesy. My dad reckoned that in the 60s you either liked The Beatles or the Stones. He liked The Beatles but my mum liked the Stones, so he should have smelt trouble then [laughs]. The Dukes did an amazing spoof that’s also beautiful to listen to and holds its own as a prog album. I do comedy, and sometimes in order to send up something, if it comes from love it works. I did a spoof of an XTC song myself, called Human Farm. Mark Fisher, who ran the XTC fanzine Limelight, came to see me and brought along some issues. I was so excited to see them – and so were people like [former Record Collection subject] Paul Putner – that it encouraged Mark to reissue them as the XTC Bumper Book Of Fun anthology [in 2017] and we all contributed to it. I found Slint’s Spiderland through the alternative American artists I liked such as Meat Puppets and Minutemen. I was in bands in Brighton such as Blood Sausage, and this had a big impact on us. I used to think this about progressive rock: it has a great riff and it’s 15 minutes long, it would’ve been great to be that guitarist who wrote the riff that people said: ‘That is so good, just keep on playing it.’ I’m thinking mainly Santana and Yes albums. In a way, Slint are similar in that they have these most beautiful, catchy, slow, hypnotic riffs that slowly turn into something else with this weird spoken poetry over it. I think this was the first band to sound like this. It was post-rock and what became ‘melancountry’. They’re not just being gentle, though, there’s a punch to it, too.
With my eye out for samplers still, I found the Island records compilation El Pea. This was a pound. It’s a fantastic album that kicks off with Traffic’s Empty Pages and then you have Sandy Denny’s Late November, which is just beautiful. It was my first introduction to Nick Drake with Northern Sky [mistitled on the compilation as One Of These Things First], MacDonald And
Giles with Extract From Tomorrow’s People and Mother Goose by Jethro Tull. I love Tull. My favourite ever Christmas song is Ring Out, Solstice Bells. Proper folkiness, but again with a great twist and characterisation.
My dad used to play me King Crimson’s In The Court Of The Crimson King when I was a kid. I found this for 50p at a car boot sale in Brighton. 21st Century Schizoid Man is on Nice Enough To
Eat and it’s the emotional association that brings me back to it. I like that it sounds like he’s singing through a megaphone, and there’s elements of Captain Beefheart there, too. Think of being 10 and hearing the lyrics; it’s whatever you want it to be. It’s so imaginative and exciting, and a great place to start for all art, like that brilliant sleeve. I totally ripped this off at art school. We had to do some sculptures called Reflections. And when you look in a cup of tea, this is what you see. Ugliness is always much more interesting than beauty.”
Find Jo’s art shows, comedy, radio and more at www.joneary.com.
“I NEARLY DROWNED AS A KID. KATE’S DEPICTION ON THE NINTH WAVE IS SCARILY ACCURATE.”