The Heavens

The Heavens are a band from Leeds in the UK. That's about all I know about them. According to their bio on their MySpace page,...

Best described as a blend of British & American Psychedelia, Rock & Roll and 90's Brit-Rock, The Heavens are Richard Green (vocals and guitar), Davey Fairbrother (drums and vocals), James Heggie (bass guitar) and Mark Drury (organ and guitar). 

A bit puzzling because in some shots of the band, there appear to be five members; one a young woman, whose name we're left to guess at from everything I've seen, which isn't much.

Now if it sounds like I'm complaining, it's because I am. I stumbled across a song by the band in a YouTube video utterly unrelated to them... their song was being used as theme music for a guy demonstrating a graphics program. Tried the program; didn't think much of it. But the song stayed with me...

The song above is called If You're Lost For Somewhere Else To Be, and it's one of four songs I've been able to find by The Heavens. I was at a site of theirs, which I'm not able to find, or which might have changed, where they were all available as a download.

The songs are varied, textured, and so professionally done that I can't understand why they haven't been signed and sent on tour. These are guys who've done their homework and gained the skills to apply what they've learned. I say, fully and forcefully as a compliment, that these fellahs have got the chops to fit into just about any band I've ever heard and liked. A long time ago on this blog I praised a rum for its subtle hints of other flavours. This band is like that rum. The works are completely unique and their own, but they're so good and have such studied touches of the history of their medium that you could easily have convinced me that these are songs I've overlooked by Oasis, The Clash, Smash Mouth, The Smiths... even touches of Schoolhouse Rock, though that's probably more a matter of my musical history than theirs.

But seriously, these guys are great, and I'm really disappointed that's all there is. There should be more. At least an album, if not two or three! When I think of all the shitty albums I've been obliged to buy over the years just to squeeze out the one or two good songs a band has, it really seems unfair that this group, with four extremely listenable songs all of which I like, haven't got more. Go have a listen; see what you think. I find Echo Serena to be particularly impressive. In Second Day Blues, enjoy the opening homage to O Lucky Man! with Malcolm McDowell.

Echo Serena:

Second Day Blues:

Fall On Me

This is one of my favourite songs ever. I don't know what inspired me to look it up this evening but I did. I remember seeing this video years ago, back when I was in high school, I think, and running out to buy the album on the basis of hearing it just that once (couldn't get the song on a 45).

The song has a new poignancy just lately; the lines "buy the sky and sell the sky and bleed the sky" bring to mind my ongoing purchase of a condo apartment several hundred feet up in the air. In a way, it does seem like a rather unnatural, highly presumptuous thing to do.

Ostalgie

When I was a kid, partway through high school, there was a song on the radio that has always, for me, summed up the whole us-and-them thing of the Cold War. It was a song written by British songwriter Tom Robinson, but made famous where I live by a Toronto band called Pukka Orchestra. The song was called Listen to the Radio (Atmospherics).

I must be getting old now because I've reached a point in my life where it's possible for me to say, I guess there people now who don't remember what that was like. Countries I grew up thinking of as, essentially, enemies (or at least, potential enemies) of mine are now in the European Union and, more incredible, NATO. But when I listen to Listen to the Radio, I'm right back there in my mid-teens, with the Iron Curtain and the ever-present threat of World War III.

I realize now that most of the references are to West German culture (remember when there were still two Germanys, kids?), but in my mind, the song was always about the stale struggle to get by behind the Iron Curtain; the little joys you held onto in getting through life. For me, the meat of the song comes towards the end, with the music growing heavy and oppressive, and the singer intoning...

Atmospherics after dark

Noise and voices from the past

Across the dial from Moscow to Cologne:

Interference in the night

Thousand miles on either side

Stations fading into the unknown

...That part still gives me goosebumps. I would picture someone like me, just a few years older, huddled in his dimly-lit kitchen somewhere beyond the Elbe, winter just outside his window, trying to tune into the West to rekindle his hope for a better future. It was a romantic notion. Given that my political bent is mostly leftist, there was also a certain envy... I admit it; one of the things I always found warming about the East bloc – and never once forgetting the limits on personal liberty or the tribulations of the thousands who managed (or didn't) to escape westward over the decades – was the idea that the state existed to serve the people, belonged to the people, was the people. I know we have words like that here but it never seemed as real to me as the unrealized ideal of communism on the other side. I always wanted some sort of synthesis of the two... our freedoms, their securities. Some countries in Europe come close.

Whenever I listen to the song now, it brings back so many things... my youth, idealism; that lost world of commies and "good" guys; that sense that the world was on the brink, today, now, always... And that small, homey, struggling-but-it'll-be-alright feeling the lyrics and the tune embodied for me.

Things could have been worse. We never blew the world up (though, of course, it's still possible). But I have this sense it could have been better, too. The West seems to have grown more callous and uncaring since then; it's almost like, as little as we wanted to live like them, the communists set some kind of standard for us, at least in principle, that we had to live up to too... and now that they're gone, we can just let ourselves go and be swept away by the corporations and the ever-increasing excesses of plutocracy. I can't help feeling we lost something vital in "winning" the Cold War.

P.S. Pukka Orchestra's video of the song, which I feel treats the theme far, far too lightly. Close your eyes, please, when you listen...

Sopranos Toronto

"sappletown" on YouTube has put up a Toronto version of the opening from the Sopranos. It's fun to watch, especially if you're familiar with the geography of the city. :)

Artsy-fartsy video time

This is the kind of college-crap project I would have LIKED to have done... if the technology had existed when I was in college 15 years ago. :) Photos by me; music by a friend of mine tapping a marble pillar in the lobby of my building (yes... I'm serious).

Open-air Baroque concert on the lake shore

In mid-August 2006, P-Doug suggested going down to the lake shore to take in a free, open-air concert of Baroque music by a quartet of players from across North America. It was a pleasant hour or two, and I captured a few minutes of it with my camera. Some of what I thought were the highlights I stitched together here... this runs about eight minutes. Hope you enjoy. :)

Squared to it, faced to it, it was not there

This is what I think of as a "Bill Cosby" story. It's one of those stories you tell by first telling something else to set it up.

I got my first credit card before I started working. Walked into a hardware store one day and they asked me if I wanted one. I was out of school but still unemployed at the time and I said so. They didn't care. Filled out the form, bang, got the card. At first, it was only good at that particular store, so no big deal. But they pretty quickly slapped a MasterCard logo in one corner and I was officially on the big time credit grid. Been there ever since.

I amassed a fair amount of debt over the years. It was never an amount I couldn't keep up the payments on, or had to sell of my car to manage, or lost sleep over, but it was still an anchor on me, taking a share of my earnings every month. So, about a year ago, I got rid of the last of my credit cards. I have a loan that will be paid off over three years, a little at a time. Effectively, at the moment, I don't really have any credit immediately available to me. It's weird living this way, but if I can learn to do this long term, I'll probably be the better for it.

One of the down sides, though, is how hard it is to do any shopping online, where a lot of the real savings and bargains are. So for a long time I've been looking for one of those prepaid credit cards... one that's on either the MC or Visa system, but the money you're spending is your own... it's already earned and in your pocket. You're simply paying to join a system to facilitate payments. I finally found one that I like, which is the MuchMusic MasterCard they're flogging mostly to teenagers.

Okay, as Bill Cosby would say, "I told you that story to tell you this one."

One of the perks of getting this card is ten free MP3 downloads from MuchMusic. I wasn't expecting much, but when I went there to check it out, I was surprised by what was available to me. An awful lot of songs are available for downloading at $1.19 (plus tax). I started thinking. It took me back to my early teen years when I didn't buy whole albums; I just bought the popular songs on the radio on 45s... for about what they're selling MP3s for here. Okay, you also got a B side song, but usually, it wasn't anything you wanted. Something had to be there. But after 20 or 25 years, it's nice to see it still so affordable.

This represents a real shift in the way music's distributed. One of the things that drove people to things like Napster and BitTorrent was that you couldn't just go and get the song you wanted. Generally speaking, the days of the 45 were well and truly over. No, you had to buy the whole album, usually sure of only one or two songs, for whatever they wanted to stick you for. I think people resented that. Some people will never buy if they can get it for free, true. But I think most of us will. $1.19 seems like just about a perfect price to me. And where I might have found another way to get a song if it was going to cost me $15-20 before, and they'd get nothing out of me, now they'll at least make something. And since they let you listen to samples of other tracks, potentially even more sales. This strikes me as an eminently good idea, and one of the best uses for the net so far.

Of course, this is bad news for the retailers. SAM the Record Man, iconic in my youth and known across Canada, faltered in recent years, and pretty much folded. Its flagship store on Yonge Street, which had been in business for around fifty years, closed for good last summer. Sunrise is in the process of shutting down. That will leave HMV and department stores. I'm not sure how to feel about this. It represents something very different from the way things were done all my life so far, and there was a real charm to wandering a record store and flipping through the colourful album covers and finding new things. I once bought an expensive import, 154 by Wire, in a record store on the basis of one haunting track they were playing while I was there. It would appear, then, that such experiences are to become a thing of the past, and end with my generation.