Can - Notes from Pig City

The Bats: same as it ever was

Music / January 22, 2017 / 4 minutes of reading

Robert Scott has just knocked off work, “down at the local kids’ school” in Port Chalmers just outside of Dunedin, the university town near the bottom of New Zealand’s South Island that, from the late 1970s, was the birthplace of punk across the Tasman. Now, he says, he’s home to do some interviews: a reflection of the permanent double life of a musician in his home country.

Scott was, and remains, one-third of the Clean, probably the most influential of all the bands to be released on the famed Flying Nun label. He is also the leader of the Bats, who have just released their seventh album, The Deep Set, in a career spanning over 30 years. Both bands have proven extremely influential, especially in American college rock circles, and still record and tour internationally.

But unless you’re a Finn brother, making a living off music in the Shaky Isles remains a near impossibility (another New Zealand band, the 3Ds, once turned down an offer to tour with Nirvana on the grounds that it would have cost them their day jobs).

The result for Scott is an ordinary, domestic life punctuated by bursts of artistic activity. “It’s a wee bit strange, because when you tell people you’ve got a day job, they can’t quite believe it – they figure I should be relaxing and living off royalties,” Scott says.… Read more..

The Bats: same as it ever was Read More »

I saw the real o-mind with Endless Boogie

If you’ve ever listened to any Stooges or Radio Birdman records, you’ll be familiar with the idea of the O-Mind. The concept came from a lyric in the Stooges’ Down In The Street: “floatin’ around on a real O-Mind”. In the literal sense, it meant the whacked-out bliss of a drug stupor. But musically, it meant something else: a state of transcendence where all earthly concerns fall away and you’re left focused on the only thing that matters, which is Right Now, the moment you’re in.

I’ve never seen it referred to as a kind of orgasm, but the effect is similar.

For the Stooges, the O-Mind was the musical holy grail. They were bent, as American critic Ann Powers once memorably put it, on touching rock’s molten core, and they did it again and again – on Down On The Street, on I Wanna Be Your Dog … Hell, the entire first two Stooges albums constitute a trip into the deepest recesses of the O-Mind. For the Stooges, pharmaceutical and personal psychosis was the inevitable result.

I saw the Real O-Mind last Thursday night. The band was New York City’s Endless Boogie, playing to a crowd of about 50 people at the Jubilee Hotel.… Read more..