Blog

The National Pep are delighted to announce that we have our new line-up in place, but being the teases we are we are going to release this information to you in drips and drops over the coming weeks. To start with, we would like to announce the return to the fold of Lullington Garth (The Master Bluesman) on steel guitar, who was a founder of the band along with Olsen, Mazeppa and the now-departed Tilt, but had to leave due to 'the incident' with 'the things'. He is now firmly ensconsed in the bosom of the Pep, and we shall never again even *mention* celery.

Also returning is Sweet Josie Miller, chanteuse extraordinaire, who will be gracing the stages of the Southernmost parts of the country only, as her inability to cross moving bodies of water makes her unable to travel far north. Sweet Josie, however, will only be rejoining the troupe later in the year, as she first has to fulfill her commitment to a three-month tour of the Antipodean penal colonies.

And finally (for now at least) we are proud to announce that drummer Martin Braun will be sitting in for a handful of performances (or 'gigs' to use the young persons' parlance of the day).

We will shortly be announcing further members of the orchestra, including vocalists, keyboard players and flautists.

The National Pep Touring Company will be making its debut performance at Lark In The Park in London on March 1. As this is a provincial performance, rather than a performance by our full repertory company, you may expect a rather scaled-down version of the full grandeur that would await you if you ventured to Manchester, but the touring company will do their best to present to you the full delights of Pep Sounds as adjusted for live performance. We will be performing with Daniel Land And The Modern Painters, and hope to see you there.The National Pep Touring Company In London

My own band, The National Pep, are finally on Emusic - our second EP, Love Punks Want To Make You Cry, can be downloaded from here.

Also, while playing around on Emusic I've found a couple of things that look really interesting for people who like the kind of oddities I do. & by Kristian Hoffman is an album of collaborations with people including Russel Mael of Sparks, Stew, Rufus Wainwright, Van Dyke Parks, Darian Sahanaja (of the Wondermints and El Vez, among many others. You can't go wrong with a guest list like that.

The other thing I'm excited about having downloaded this week is a band called The Stool Pigeons, who have two albums on Emusic - Gerry Cross the Mersey and Rule, Hermania!. As you can tell from the titles, these are essentially Merseybeat tribute albums, but punked-up, and the band features the wonderful Lisa Jenio, of Candypants and The Negro Problem.

The most recent EP by The National Pep, Love Punks Want To Make You Cry is now available from http://cdbaby.com/group/thenationalpep at the ludicrously low price of $5 for the CD or just $1 for the MP3s. While there, you can also buy our previous EP, Citizen Gomez, as well as Pop Songs and Kyries by our good friend Blake Jones. So please do.

I was just playing with one of those meme generator thingys, and through it discovered that Jake Thackray has only 717 listeners. The National Pep have 244!

How can one of the greatest songwriters of all time, with a box set available on a major label, who had TV documentaries about him last year, have only three times as many listeners as my band with our two self-released EPs?
Anyone reading this, go and listen to Jake Thackray now!
(Listen to the National Pep too of course. But Jake Thackray!)

Mon 10 Sep – Brian Wilson

(Crossposted from http://olsenbloom.blogspot.com )


Wow.

Everyone at last night's (woefully under-promoted) Brian Wilson gig went in hoping for the best but expecting the worst. The word was that the new piece, That Lucky Old Sun, had Brian more excited than he had been in years. That it was the most ambitious thing he'd ever done. That he'd put it together almost in secret, not even letting many of the band members, or his closest advisers, hear it until the last minute.

If it was good, that would be OK. But no-one had any idea if Brian Wilson was capable of 'good'. While his last proper album, Gettin' in Over My Head, was excellent, it was mostly songs from 10-25 years earlier. And if it was a failure... well... Brian Wilson fans care a lot about the notoriously-fragile songwriter, and it could be very bad for him.

The first set was promising, at least. Brian was in great (for him) voice, playing with the lower end of his range, going into comical bass parts. The setlist was unusual. While the Smile shows in 2004 had concentrated on pre-Pet Sounds material, as opposed to the late-60s and 70s material Wilson had played on his earlier tours, this set took that to a ridiculous extreme - other than a few hits, the setlist concentrated entirely on the Today! and Summer Days... And Summer Nights! albums, covering obscure tracks like Salt Lake City, Girl Don't Tell Me and She Knows Me Too Well. The one exception was the Wild Honey oddity I'd Love Just Once to See You - one of Wilson's little tossed-off jokey songs, but one I've always loved.

However, we were all there to hear That Lucky Old Sun.

The suite starts with a slow, soulful arrangement of the title song, with contrapuntal vocals somewhere between the old Beach Boys song He Come Down and Brian's arrangement of Ol' Man River, before bursting into the Shortenin' Bread riff Brian has based so much of his music on. The band start singing "Ooh mow mama mama holy hallelujah" - a vocal line that Brian first mentioned in an interview thirty years ago - and the piece proper begins.

Is That Lucky Old Sun any good? I truly have no idea. It's too complex a piece, and too multi-layered, and the performance of it too bound up in personal expectations, for any kind of judgement to be made on one hearing. But in a sense, the question doesn't matter. That Lucky Old Sun is exciting - in a way that no-one could have expected. This is the work of a 65-year-old man. 65 year old men don't make exciting music. Paul McCartney's new album might be quite pleasant, but he knows no-one's going to remember him as 'the man who made Memory Almost Full', and it shows.

Brian Wilson appears not to have given up hope that he'll be remembered as 'the man who made That Lucky Old Sun', and it's just about possible that he might. While in some ways this new work bears comparison to the McCartney album, at heart it couldn't be more different. While both have lyrics looking back from the end of a life and recapping themes of old songs, in the case of That Lucky Old Sun they're working in tension against the music, which is overwhelmingly energetic, inspired, throwing off ideas like there's a million more out there to get to in a hurry.

Like I said earlier, this may well be a failure - I'm just not willing to trust my own judgement based on one emotionally-charged live performance - but if it is it's a glorious, fantastic mess of a failure, the kind of failure one might expect from an artist a third of Wilson's age. And I suspect it isn't.

Part of this may be due to Wilson's band. While he's been working with essentially the same band for nearly a decade, they've been performing old material - sometimes in new forms, but always conceived before they started working with him. But for the first time Wilson is able to work with them as collaborators. Keyboardist Scott Bennett wrote many of the lyrics, bandleader Darian Sahanaja (of the Wondermints), the Billy Strayhorn to Wilson's Duke Ellington, helped Wilson structure the piece and teach it to the band, and woodwind player Paul Mertens arranged the strings and horns. Van Dyke Parks, Wilson's most sympathetic collaborator, wrote the linking narrative and at least some of the lyrics.

But while Wilson may need help realising his vision, it's his vision - this could not be the work of anyone other than Brian Wilson. Little touches creep in from previous works - a vocal part from the unfinished 60s song Can't Wait Too Long, a full song ( Going Home ) from his mid-90s sessions with Andy Paley - and Wilson's musical signatures are all over the piece. But at the same time, it's not just Wilson staying within his comfort zone - the mariachi-flavoured Mexican Girl, for example, is utterly unlike anything he's done before.

The narrative, such as it is, is rather abstract as far as I could tell (I couldn't make out many of the lyrics). It deals with love, California, the sea - themes Wilson has touched on before on occasion, as you may know - but through the eyes of a man in his sixties rather than his twenties, drawing on the loss of his brothers. There is also a very strong religious theme throughout the material. Given that Wilson and Parks' previous collaboration, Smile, was practically an invocation of the sun-god, I wish I could have heard more of the lyrics to make out how important this was. The spoken narrative, written by Parks, is in rhyming couplets over musical pads, and reminiscent of the Beaks of Eagles section of California Saga, if that track had been infinitely less pretentious and infinitely more interesting.

There were definitely flaws in the piece as performed last night, but it remains to be seen how much of that is the piece and how much the first-night performance. At times in the earlier sections of the piece, the whole band vamps on two-chord riffs, similarly to the sections of Smile where they play the Heroes & Villains riff (That Lucky Old Sun is to Shortenin' Bread as Smile is to the Bicycle Rider chorus), with the various instruments playing different variations at the same time. These sections seemed to me overlong and lacking in dynamic range, but there may well be subtleties in there I couldn't hear - the mix seemed at times to be murky, and the sound engineer seemed unprepared for how loudly Wilson was singing (a couple of times the vocals distorted). If this is more to do with the night than the material, it could possibly be Wilson's best album ever. If not, then at least he tried.

And there are some pointers to it being a success. I was extremely wary about the piece from the demos of two songs ( Midnight's Another Day and Forever My Surfer Girl) posted on Wilson's website, which are frankly fairly poor. However, in context, and with the additional orchestration, both are much stronger than those recordings suggest. Midnight's Another Day, in particular, had me in tears - and this is a song I'd dismissed as tedious.

I have no idea how I'll modify my initial impression of this piece when I listen dispassionately to the finished recording, but the sheer invention, joy, energy and vigour of the piece has to be heard to be believed.

After his normal hits encore, Wilson performed She's Leaving Home, in an absolutely audacious rearrangement that has to be heard to be believed - he's turned the verses into a 4/4 uptempo piece of sunshine pop owing equally to the Beatles' Getting Better and his own Let Him Run Wild, while keeping the waltz time chorus identical to the original. It turns the song upside down and inside out, and I've been unable to stop humming it since. It's the work of a musician at the height of his powers and confidence.

For the last ten years, fans have been expecting Brian Wilson to (at best) retire and (at worst) drop dead. From the release of his album Imagination, which re-established him as a solo performer, time and again he's done things (touring, performing Pet Sounds in its entirety, facing the legacy of Smile, completing Smile) that we've said would have to be the peak, the ultimate. Time and again we've said "there's no way he can follow that. It'll all be downhill from here - but that's OK, he's given us more than we could hope already." Time and again he's not only followed it, but done something exponentially, unimaginably better. Even if That Lucky Old Sun proves in the cold light of day a lesser work than Smile, it's a work that can be compared to it, and he wrote it in a matter of months rather than over a period of forty years. For a man people were writing off as having lost it before I was born, that's an astonishing comeback.

For the first time, I feel confident in not saying "he can't top that" but instead saying "how's he going to top that?"

I can't wait to find out.

Couple of things. Firstly, I've got a new music blog, http://olsenbloom.blogspot.com. I'll try to crosspost here, but I'm more likely to check comments there.

Secondly, the new The National Pep EP, Love Punks Want To Make You Cry, is now available for $5/£2 from myself, paypal to andrew@thenationalpep.co.uk - it will shortly be available through CDBaby, where our first EP is still on sale as both CD and MP3s.

I'll be updating my music blog later about the Brian Wilson gig, which we went to yesterday, not today...

Here's a sneak preview of The National Pep's forthcoming EP "Love Punks Want To Make You Cry". A very, very rough mix (you are warned) of a little number called "Jaded (Very Rough mix)", fresh from the mixing desk. We'd like to point out that parts of this performance are very loose (try to guess which part was recorded five minutes before chucking out time with Tilt visibly wilting in the heat of the drum booth), but it should give you an idea why Olsen exclaimed "I've never heard a song like this before...and I wrote it!"

We'll be taking this down after a week in anticipation of the finished product.

Since the making of this recording, Tilt's Frankie Valli and Bee Gees records have been confiscated by the other members of the band.

And you can hear it here!
Tilt and Olsen return again for the first time, in the only podcast this week where you'll hear the nephew of the co-author of the book on which an acclaimed BBC3 prestige drama has been based. Guaranteed.

Featuring:
The Tubes
The Lovers
Dylan Hears a Who
The Flames
Blake Jones & The Trike Shop
Davy Jones
Santa Dog
Wilful Missing
The National Pep
Children of the Mushroom
Rudy Vallee
George Grossmith
The Psychotic Reaction