Well fuck me this is brilliant.  Having been a fan of Down the Tiny Steps – Jonnie’s previous band – as well as Inspector Tapehead (of course!) I was both certain this would be good as well as entirely uncertain as to what it would actually sound like.

He’s a funny fucker, Jonnie Common, equally at home as a producer of glitchy electronica, whimsical pop or gently plucked acoustic music.  He slips so seamlessly between these incarnations that I found myself being confused by something which shouldn’t have been confusing, really.

The multi-faceted nature of his music made it hard to imagine what the record would sound like, but that was over-thinking things, because it sounds exactly like I just described it: a seamless blend of glitchy electronics, whimsical pop and gentle acoustica.

Master of None isn’t just a fucking brilliant album, it is also massively characteristic of the man himself.  Jonnie is a friend of mine* and it’s odd how much this music embodies his actual personality.  I may not be able to explain this to you in a way which will mean much to those who don’t know him, but the laid back charm, warmth, idiosyncrasy and sheer enjoyment of this record seem to spring straight from the heart of Jonnie’s odd wee soul.  He is the kind of guy it is pretty much impossible to dislike, and this album feels sort of like that too.

Even the white boy rapping moment of Bed Bugs, something which always makes me a little twitchy, seems to work well in the context of this album not because it’s a splendid example of rapping (I personally wouldn’t be able to tell the difference anyway, for reasons of ignorance) but because it is in no way contrived, and fits well within the overall atmosphere of a record which seems at all times entirely comfortable with itself.

The lyrics reinforce this effect, being a disarming combination of the candid and the surreal, including gems like: “I can’t skateboard to save my life, but I like to imagine what kind of bizarre scenario might involve me having to do so”. It seems less like Jonnie has written lyrics, and more like he has simply opened his brain and allowed every digression, distraction and musing to spill into the record. Some of it is touching and some downright peculiar but somehow, instead of seeming either banal or deliberately obscure, it simply reinforces the approachability and delight of the album.

It’s also a record which compels you to move – even me! I don’t mean get up and leap around like a loon, but there is – dare I use the expression – a genuinely infectious groove to the whole thing which just means I can’t sit still whilst listening to it. I may not dance, because I basically can’t, but I have to do something!

This unavoidable incitement to stop everything and respond to the music in whatever clumsily twitching way you have at your disposal is key to the main reason this is a great album.  Balls to the accessibility, the lovely contrast of sounds, the lush, warm production – these things are all true, but at heart this is a great album mostly because it is packed with absolutely immense tunes.  Quirky they may be, but many of these have the heart of massive pop hits.

Infinitea, Hand-Hand, Summer is For Going Places, Photosynth… these songs are absolute fucking gems which blow the tits off the cack which passes for popular music these days, and they should be massive.  Absolutely no disrespect to Red Deer Club, who are a great label and one I do my best to imitate with Song, by Toad Records, but when you release with smaller labels they of course don’t have the financial clout to force things into the public consciousness the way the big ‘uns do.  And with this album I can’t help but wistfully imagine a world where Jonnie Common is a massive, global pop star.  It would be a far better place than the one we currently inhabit.

Jonnie Common – Summer is for Going Places

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Jonnie Common – Photosynth

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Website | More mp3s | Buy from Red Deer Club

*Yes, I know, massive subjectivity alert, but show me a music reviewer who thinks they are objective and I will show you a fucking deluded idiot. At least I try my best to flag up my subjectivity so you can take it into account when you’re reading.

I may sound like I work for the BBC, but if anyone asks me, I do tend to tell them that I am not really all that English.  My mum was born and raised in Moss Side though, which is one of the scummier parts of Manchester, and I lived in the city myself for a year apiece at the ages of seventeen and twenty-four, so if I am actually from anywhere in England in any meaningful sense, then it is probably Manchester.

I’ve always harboured a sort of simmering resentment for the place though, in that unfair way you do when your life is shit for all sorts of reasons and it ends up rather unreasonable reflecting on where you are living at the time.  I’ve been through this all before on the Manchester Podcast, but I’ll rehash it here quickly, just to explain myself a little.

The first time around was my first year of university.  Compared to everyone around me in Vienna and Singapore, where I was raised, I was really quite English.  I liked English and American music, I supported Manchester United and I visited England quite regularly to see my family in Manchester.  When I actually moved to England for the first time, however, I found it didn’t really work like that, that I wasn’t very English at all, and promptly endured a year of pretty severe culture shock.

The second time around I had been distracted for a year after graduation by accidentally becoming a restaurant manager, had been offered a design internship in Milan, only for that to fall through and for me to find myself stranded in Manchester again, flat broke, working in a pub and having a very hard time of getting the job for which my degree had allegedly prepared me.  This led to a few too many conversation which went roughly like this:

“What do you do for a job then?”
[I look around myself in a confused manner, as if the fact that I am standing behind a bar, pouring drinks and then demanding money in exchange for those drinks should make the answer to that question somewhat obvious.]
“I’m a barman.”
“No, I mean as a real job.”
“I am a bar man.”
“But surely you’re far too well-spoken and intelligent to be just a barman!”
“Well, you’d think.”

It was shit, but I did listen to some fine music while I was there.  Here are a couple of songs, one from the first spell and one from the second:

James – One of the Three (buy here)

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Yo La Tengo – Last Days of Disco (buy here)

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Anyhow, after my shite experiences living there have tainted my memories of Manchester for the last seventeen years, things have slowly started to change.  A few years ago I discovered Red Deer Club and Humble Soul, two of my favourite independent record labels in the UK.  Why, I am not sure, but for the last year or two I have just been bumping into one cool Manchester music enterprise after another, and suddenly I find my negative associations with the place starting to evaporate.

Firstly, I came across Cloud Sounds, now my favourite podcast, and the blogs Folly of Youth, A New Band a Day and Pigeon Post.  As well as being good in their own right, all of these lovely people have been incredibly supportive of what we’re up to here as well.

Secondly, Ruth from Fat Northerner kindly invited me to take part in two Unconvention events, one in Macclesfield, where my dear friend Tom Smith is from, and one in Salford, where United and stabbings are from.  Around the same time I went to last year’s In the City as well, so I ended up spending a fair bit of time in Manchester last year and honestly, I had a blast.

So with my good relationship with the city almost entirely restored, I now also seem to be finding all sorts of interesting music stuff happening there too, and have ordered a pile of vinyl from small labels in Manchester recently.

The above picture is the vinyl starter pack from Sways Records, which just dropped through my letterbox this morning, and I can’t wait to get stuck into it tonight.  I bought this for the debut single by The Louche FC, which can be heard below.  I first heard these guys on a Cloud Sounds podcast, and am trying to get them up to Edinburgh for a live show sometime soon.

The Louche F.C – Motorcycle Au Pair Boy by sways

I’ve also just received Suffering Jukebox singles from Milk Maid and Manchester’s current A&R darlings Brown Brogues, and have been playing them loads recently.  Brown Brogues are playing SXSW this year, and because they make a right old racket I might actually be able to persuade Mrs. Toad to go and see them.

I Just Don’t Know by brown brogues

Also, Static Caravan sent me through a whole pile of awesome 7″ aural pleasure recently as well – help yourself here.  I found them by searching out the debut single by The Maladies of Bellafontaine, and ended up with a pile of other records as well.

And finally, Debt Records is the home to the likes of Red Tides (whose lead singer – I think – is absolutely lovely – I accidentally bumped into her upstairs at Fuel Cafe in Withington, while she was doing some embroidery or something, if I remember – this whole thing has been bit random) and Louis Barabbas & the Bedlam Six who are, of course, playing this week’s Ides of Toad gig at Henry’s.  Debt Records’ ethos is to embrace live performance, focussing on good gigs in interesting places, as a way of reacting to an environment where in order to become popular recorded music is becoming more and more boring.

So apart from all these interesting projects which I have happened across in the last year or so, what I’ve found really interesting has been the self-image of Manchester’s music scene.  A certain friend of mind has dismissed it as being ‘full of fucking sneering hipsters’, and given the city itself reminds me heavily of Glasgow, I think I always thought of Manchester as fashionable hipster haven.

But when I told one of my friends there that Edinburgh is good to work in because all the ambitious fashion whores tend to fuck off to Glasgow sharpish, which makes it hard to make progress here, but at least tends to mean that the people who remain are interesting and stubborn and not focussed on celebrity or stardom, their response was ‘Oh right, a bit like Manchester is with London then?’

And I suppose I’d never thought of it that way before. I’d always thought of Manchester as somewhere cool, somewhere to kind of envy, as a lot of other Edinburgh people think of Glasgow I suppose.  I do forget that no matter how much you achieve, especially in something as status-orientated as the music industry, there is always someone more successful to cast envious glances towards.  So next time we Edinburghers whinge about Glasgow, maybe we should just stop whining and be grateful we aren’t as isolated as Aberdeen.

< Day Two
<< Day One

Did I mention that my head hurt on the Saturday? Would you be surprised to know that it hurt on the Sunday as well? Didn’t think so. I skipped Beefball, to my shame, and only managed to pootle along to music-related shenanigans by about two in the afternoon. It was like being a student again.

In fact so severe was my hangover that the only thing you could really do with it was give the bastard a taste of its own medicine, so yes, more beer it was! I bumped into The Pictish Trail on the way down to the Hew Scott Hall, and he was nice about Mary Hampton that I decided to see what the lass was made of. She was a skinny lass and friendly of demeanour, and played her songs with an intense, otherworldy air to her. It was nice – lovely English folk in the modern hippy style, if you know what I mean. That and a couple of quick bottles of Becks made for a fine way to ease into the day.

I tried to get in to see James Yorkston, but by the time we made it up to the hall it would have involved climbing over half of Homegame, so there seemed no real point – grab a paper and head to the pub. There is little more pleasant than convivially drinking away your hangover in the pub on a Sunday, as Scotland’s weather never quite makes up its mind outside. It was almost a shame there was all this bloody music to intrude on matters.

Again, I found myself taking it kind of easy on the Sunday evening – relaxing in the Hew Scott Hall at the Red Deer Club night, and enjoying some bloody marvellous acts*, like George Thomas, Sara Lowes and Magic Arm. The latter two have released superb mini albums this year, and their performances here had all the wit and warmth of those records. I was a bit pished by this point, and had wandered over to Dunc le Chunk to ask about the re-jigged lineup and ended up pestering him, Sara and Marc from Magic Arm for most of the rest of the evening. The shame of it.

Anyhow, assuming I didn’t ruin their evening, I certainly didn’t ruin my own, which was brilliant. Again, folk wandered in and out from time to time, and I ended up chattering with all sorts of people I didn’t really know particularly, but who were unfailingly tolerant of my drunken enthusiasm. The gigs themselves were really excellent as well. It was such a relaxed, friendly atmosphere that it seemed to spread to the musicians themselves, as they all appeared to take it pretty easy, enjoy the evening and play with a kind of relaxed ease that made the evening such a pleasure. It really was like they’d just popped round your house to play some songs and have a laugh.

Magic Arm – Move Out
Sara Lowes – Down & Out

*Did you know that The Red Deer Club released the Moulettes EP earlier this year? No, me neither, first I’d heard about it.