Versailles Chorus Versailles

And here's the final instalment in my latest batch of LFTWY reviews. Warning: contains Eurovision.

SÉBASTIEN TELLIER – POLITICS (Record Makers) 

There have been plenty of great art statements in 21st-century Eurovision. From Verka Serduchka’s reductive grinning singalong which dared you to take something about as complex as ‘The Birdy Song’ seriously in 2007, to Käärijä’s somewhat petrifying Poddington Peas bovver-boy stomp in 2023 (which Bambie Thug presumably saw and thought “you call that unnerving industrial electro, do you? Wait till my song next year...which is also sometimes a jazz ballad”). There’s even the stone cold genius of Rambo Amadeus in 2012, who brought the most low-key funky groove ever to the big stage in Baku, but turned off most people by stumbling about like a greasy bewildered wino, and got a special rule instigated after the random draw put him first in the first semifinal, thereby confusing vast swathes of the viewing audience from the outset, so from now on the producer crafts the running order. Oh, and of course there’s Konstrakta’s ‘In Corpore Sano’ from 2022, which is pretty much the greatest song of the millennium with a stage show giving Matthew Barney and Peter Greenaway. 

But amongst this feted/hated group of tricksters there is one excellent piece of pop art playfulness which didn’t really ignite the voters or the pundits, for some reason. In 2008 Sébastien Tellier rode onto the stage very slowly in a little golf buggy to deliver a strange breathy, wide-eyed little tune, half-scruffy, half-dapper, like a melange of Dennis Wilson and Jarvis Cocker. A third of the way through he sucked helium from a beach ball and made his voice go all squeaky. His backing singers were women with beards stuck on (Conchita Wurst precog!). It must be one of the Frenchest things ever seen, despite being the only time a French Eurovision entry has been in English. 

A few years before that, his second album Politics came out, though it wasn’t a big hit, reaching number 123 in his home charts, and achieving bugger all anywhere else. But it’s really quite good fun, and here are some highlights. 

• The fact that the opening track is called ‘Bye Bye’ and is like a 70s Paul Simon song gone awry, with nice warm brass that just splurgily collapses halfway through like someone took the Spanx off
• The fact that ‘Wonderafrica’ does indeed sound like a funkier cousin of the precipitation-blessing 80s classic 
• The fact that ‘Broadway’ is not brassy and stagey as the name suggests, but is soft and burnished and honeyed in a hammock of strings 
• The fact that ‘Ritournelle’ has Tony Allen on drums dropping a light, flighty groove for nearly 8 minutes which sounds like the funky drummer went on a Ryvita diet, and has no vocals but some almost Bruce Hornsby piano chords 
• The fact that ‘Benny’, immediately afterwards, has the silliest, hammiest vocals possible to make up for it - you have to love the way he delivers “human rih-soar-zees" 
• The fact that ‘Mauer’ has a stoned maggot of a synth wending all the way through 
• The fact that ‘Ketchup Vs. Genocide’ is called ‘Ketchup Vs. Genocide’ 
• The fact that the album finishes with ‘Zombi’, which sounds like music from a game in Fun House or something and is quite preposterous 

 

 

Logo Technics

 Another from LFTWY, and my first article about an Oxford act. Trademark were so good live.

TRADEMARK – FEAR: DISCONNECTION (self-release) 

The first review I ever wrote for publication was in November 2002, for BBC Oxford’s website, having started to get involved with Oxford’s music scene a little earlier, so with this issue we enter the era where I can talk about local records I bought direct from the creators. I promise I’ll steer an evasionary course away from old war stories and anecdotes about people you’ve never met, though. 

Trademark were a live favourite of mine, a trio of lab-coated geeks when who wrote wonderful techno-pop tunes, played them live brilliantly, threw in incongruous one-off covers, sometimes had a giant perspex plug, and were not unknown for tripping over their own gear onstage. This is their 2003 release, although some of the songs got a lick of paint and turned up again on their debut proper, Want More, released a year or two later by Truck Records. The base sauce for their concoctions was simple, consisting of crunchy, intricate rhythms in the style of contemporaneous Warp acts such as Black Dog, big bold 1982 synth lines, and surprisingly emotional, if far from histrionic, vocal melodies. Oli Horton’s voice was never perfect, and he tended to get a bit pitchy, but as with Marc Almond this often worked in the songs’ favour. Sometimes when he sang in a lower register, as with ‘All Too Late’, a clomping Depeche-a-Sketch joint on this album, the notes are more reliably hit, though perhaps a tiny fraction of the character is lost by this. 

It’s still a great tune, though, and this CD if full of them. Interestingly, on revisiting this album, the lighter tracks sound the best: whilst they were never an industrial or EBM band, some songs are bigger than others, whether that’s from a fatter bass drum kick or a more impassioned vocal (‘My Life In Stereo’ has a blasted cabaret feeling which made it perfect for opening gigs). The pick of the chunkier tunes is ‘Sawtooth Lust’, which is something like an abrasive mechanoid take on Bowie’s ‘Breaking Glass’, and is interesting for the joint vocal by usually mute member Paul Soulsby. The lyrics on this one feel forced and awkward, though the line “I saw an eyesore” is amusing, something a goth Giles Brandreth might come out with. 

Of the less aggressive songs, ‘Helpless’ is the softest, in sound and outlook, a song of attraction 100% free of priapic desire, simply about how a certain lass can make the singer go a bit wibbly, featuring the ultimate nice-boy lyric “Don’t let me fail her as a friend”. It sounds wonderful, with a Broadway ballad melody delivered in a delicate falsetto, and a warm bassline that’s purest Pet Shop Boys. ‘Sine Love’ is also lilting and beautiful, using the sine wave as a metaphor for purity in love (no big prize for guessing how the lead synths sound on this and ‘Sawtooth Lust’). The hissing digital percussion sounds like Aphex Twin whispering in your ear. But even this work of beauty is beaten by ‘Stay Professional’, an understated British romantic tragedy with SNES harp and staccato synth stabs. It has the natural-artificial simplicity of a zen garden, and sounds like an Erasure song melancholically gazing at a moonlit lake. 

Self-released albums like this are fascinating. It’s a proper statement rather than a cheap demo, but it’s still half-lost to posterity: the Trademark Wikipedia page acknowledges it, but intriguingly replicates the typo that appears on the printed disc which isn’t on any of the packaging. I have no idea how many copies were sold, and whether they were retained by the purchasers, so my CD may be one of only a handful in the wild (though I have just discovered they made an album in 1999, which ran to 25 copies). Although anyone intrigued by this review should definitely seek out Want More instead, Fear: Disconnection has a nascent charm, and if nothing else it shows how much graft goes into honing a band before its professional debut release – but maybe that statement barely even means anything in 2025. 

 

No Nose Is Good Nose?

I saw Lunchtime For The Wild Youth editor Russell Barker last night at a gig, and fine company he was. He also passed me the last 3 issues, so here's my thought on an album from 2002, with '03 and '04 to follow soon.

SPARKS – LIL' BEETHOVEN (BMG) 

Two things sprang to mind as I turned over this record sleeve, prior to spinning it for the first time after purchase. 

Firstly, that’s a weird place to put the apostrophe. It’s an abbreviation of “little” so “li’l” would make more sense, and there’s precedent, such as the US comic strip Li’l Abner. Lewis Carroll would probably favour “li’l’”, judging from the way he wrote words like “sha’n’t”, and in a pure sense that fits the best, but I’ve never seen it in the wild. Later, in the mumble rap era the apostrophe was tossed out altogether as too old-fashioned, and we got Lil Wayne and Lil Yachty (and how overjoyed was I when an American rapper finally came up with the name Lil Savage). 

Secondly, I was reminded of an article in a long-ago Fall fanzine, which drew parallels between the gruppe and Hancock’s Half Hour episodes: just as we could imagine Tony moping in shows called ‘Fit And Working Again’ or ‘Bournemouth Runner’, we could imagine MES ranting about blood donors in songs named ‘The East Cheam Centenary’ or ‘Lord Byron Lived Here’...and that’s before we get into CB radio. Similarly, the names of tracks on this album just perfectly sum up comical fragments of life, like sketches where you don’t actually need to write the dialogue: ‘What Are All These Band So Angry About?’, ‘I Married Myself’, and ‘Ugly Guys With Beautiful Girls’ are just too immaculate. 

If the songs barely need more than a title to conjure images, it’s lucky, because in lots of cases that’s about the sum of the lyrics. ‘How Do I Get To Carnegie Hall?’ is just an old gag split into bits and repeated – a Brit would have to imagine someone singing “My dog’s got no nose” over and over – whilst ‘Your Call’s Very Important To Us, Please Hold’ describes the experience of listing to the robotic corporate phone voice at great repetetive length, like a Warhol diary extract.  

Musically this record was odd at the time, but makes perfect sense now. Sparks’ previous records had been wry glam rock enigmas or sunshine-smiling digital pop bangers (which were still wry), but this album has hardly any drums, as alluded to by opener ‘The Rhythm Thief’, and the music is mostly little cellular ersatz orchestral motifs shuffled and stacked. Sparks seem to have got into the likes of Glass and Adams, whilst their twentieth-century composition influence bag held fragments from Stravinsky and Bernstein (whilst their dog’s got Nono’s (I apologise unreservedly for that joke (I don’t really))). This is not the sophisticated chamber tunage of Van Dyke Parks, but neither is it the joky half-formed zombie-pop of Denim – perhaps the best contemporaneous analogue is The Magnetic Fields.  

‘My Baby’s Taking Me Home’ is possibly the album’s high point, pretty much just the title repeated forever.  It’s small and huge at the same time, like a stadium anthem written by Morph. The album ends with ‘Suburban Homeboys’ a single which must not have inspired much faith of a hit from any stakeholder, full of witty sketches of the titular middle-class scallywags and cheeky parping synth tuba playing pseudo-techno riffs – shouting schlager, schlager, schlager! It sort of sounds like a Broadway book number crossed with a US college song, which no actual homeboy would ever be seen dead nodding along to (“My posse repping this track? Nah, my dogs got no-nos!"). “Props to our peeps and please keep your receipts” might be one of the best couplets in the last 40 years of pop...and doesn’t it sound a tiny little bit like a modern-day Tony Hancock?