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Thursday night just gone saw the Manchester leg of Cardiacs’ emotional and triumphant return, with erstwhile Oceansizer Mike Vennart permanently installed in the live set-up now as well as on record.
The Albert Hall’s variable sound quality – partly the consequence, I’m given to understand, of its many windows, beautiful as they are – couldn’t prevent the magic of this strange, beautiful, sometimes manic music shining through, and it’s worth stressing that compiling and executing this near two-hour set so perfectly was no small undertaking, even for those who’d performed some of its contents for decades previously.
These are still earlyish days for longstanding drummer Bob Leith performing without any of the backing tracks which the late Tim Smith had introduced upon the band’s early-1990s conversion to a power quartet, and had kept in place as the live ensemble expanded and right up until the tragic events of 2008. Live keyboards hadn’t featured in Cardiacs’ live offer for at least 35 years, either, until Rhodri Marsden was brought on board; something else for Bob, Kavus Torabi and Jim Smith to all get used to.
Inevitably, though, it was Vennart who has carried the greatest responsibility to make things work on stage as the band’s de facto frontperson now, to all intents and purposes the Tim of the piece however much he has striven to play down that perception.
Has he succeeded? Kavus’s succinct summary on Facebook yesterday morning that, “Mike has excelled, taking on the almost impossible task of inhabiting these songs with authenticity and passion, not to mention extraordinary ability and talent”, tells you enough.
This was not the Mike Vennart show, neither was it Mike doing Tim Smith cabaret – no replication of any of Tim’s eccentric outbursts, nor any of the theatrical onstage humiliating of Jim (indeed, Jim got a cuddle or two from Mike and Kavus). Instead, generous tributes to his fellow players and audience during the set, culminating in the outro of The Whole World Window, which rounded off the main set. Flowers thrown from the stage (a nod to the Consultant, one assumes – IYKYK), and a respectful hug of a picture of Tim Smith himself.
The octet on stage looked absolutely spent by the time Is This The Life? drew the second and final encore to a close, Mike and Jim especially. The latter had, some will remember, been unable to complete the final Sing to Tim gig in late 2024 due to illness, but it was emotional investment rather than physical frailty at play here.
By the end of this week Cardiacs will have played four equally long gigs within five nights, and the time required to rest, recover and reflect will be well earned.
Jim has often mentioned that it felt as if Cardiacs were on the cusp of something approaching a crossover, relatively speaking, back in 2007 judged on the size and increasingly varying age profile of their audiences; and the evidence of the rapturous responses to these sell-out dates is that those people have not only waited and returned, but been appreciably added to in number.
The question for Jim Smith to consider, at leisure, will be what happens next.
There are supposedly further remnants of music and lyrics from Tim’s archives which could yet be spun into gold in the same way as the LSD album and ultimately performed live.
Equally, and even factoring in the performances of all three tracks on the Ditzy Scene single this week and/or in 2007-8, exactly half of LSD will have remained unplayed to a live audience by the end of this current tour. That includes such audacious tracks as Busty Beez and Skating – taking these on the road some day must have its appeal.
And, of course, there is a back catalogue of such depth that a staggering number of setlist permutations could still be drawn up for years to come, with or without contributions from LSD, and the faithful would likely still be more than satisfied with that.
All in good time.
More immediately, I know that Thursday night’s concert definitely finds a place among my all-time favourites.
I just need to decide where.
Here’s a phone recording of the concert in full. Not mine, but I’m delighted someone took the trouble. You might want to skip past the first three minutes of grinding noises, another one of the band’s little idiosyncracies from decades prior.
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Jeremy Grayson. Son of immigrant. Adoptive father of two. Metadata librarian. Freelance point-to-point / horse racing writer, analyst and commentator wonk. Loves music, buses, cats, the BBC Micro, ale. Advocate of CBT, PACE and therapeutic parenting. Aspergers.
Hello Drone,
The Family in question here would be a Basque duo, active from 1989 to 1994 and seen as an influential act within the wider context of Spanish indiepop. Certainly it was them who first absorbed the musical influence of New Order into that particular idiom, as particularly evident in the track I shared the weekend before last.
No reason at all for the earlier Family not to appear in a future List if I can find a track I’m sufficiently enamoured with. There have been dips into that era of prog on occasion, and doubtless there will be more. I know I’ve got some Aphrodite’s Child cued up for inclusion at some point.
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Jeremy Grayson. Son of immigrant. Adoptive father of two. Metadata librarian. Freelance point-to-point / horse racing writer, analyst and commentator wonk. Loves music, buses, cats, the BBC Micro, ale. Advocate of CBT, PACE and therapeutic parenting. Aspergers.
Salty,
It’s an absolute pleasure! Feedback such as yours makes the whole exercise of doing the blog so very worthwhile.
So much of my musical pleasure over the decades has been owed to the gift of serendipitous discovery, both of the music itself and of resources and services highlighting that music. It’s lovely to be able to give that gift as well as receive it.
Most of the names you’ve referenced would suggest a fellow Sarah Records fan. As such, are you likely to catch the also recently reactivated Heavenly on their current UK tour, or have you already? Assuming no hold-ups in picking up my wife from Manchester airport that afternoon, I’ll be at their Sheffield gig this Saturday.
The latest List, as released on Saturday morning just gone, features one more Sarah act of yore in the shape of The Sugargliders. It’s not a given that every List contains some Sarah or Sarah-adjacent act – it just keeps working out that way
Once again, many many thanks for your interest!
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Jeremy Grayson. Son of immigrant. Adoptive father of two. Metadata librarian. Freelance point-to-point / horse racing writer, analyst and commentator wonk. Loves music, buses, cats, the BBC Micro, ale. Advocate of CBT, PACE and therapeutic parenting. Aspergers.
That Music List continues. Edition #244 includes music from Blueboy, Shampoo, Deary, Family, Cornelius, Alt Blk Era, T99, Even As We Speak, William D Drake, Loop, Stuart Moxham, Belbury Poly, The Company She Keeps, Juana Molina, Antony Szmierek and more.
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Jeremy Grayson. Son of immigrant. Adoptive father of two. Metadata librarian. Freelance point-to-point / horse racing writer, analyst and commentator wonk. Loves music, buses, cats, the BBC Micro, ale. Advocate of CBT, PACE and therapeutic parenting. Aspergers.
That Music List continues. Edition #243 includes music from Ben Castle ft Matt Berry, The Lovely Eggs, David Westlake, Senser, Fosca, Would-Be-Goods, Mason Wheatley, Host Family, Gabrielles Wish, Four Tet, White Town, Gruff Rhys, Adventures In Stereo and more.
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Jeremy Grayson. Son of immigrant. Adoptive father of two. Metadata librarian. Freelance point-to-point / horse racing writer, analyst and commentator wonk. Loves music, buses, cats, the BBC Micro, ale. Advocate of CBT, PACE and therapeutic parenting. Aspergers.
Bless you, Joe. Other people increasingly think all of the important thoughts before I get chance to these days, so it’s nice when an opportunity to contribute does still crop up.
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Jeremy Grayson. Son of immigrant. Adoptive father of two. Metadata librarian. Freelance point-to-point / horse racing writer, analyst and commentator wonk. Loves music, buses, cats, the BBC Micro, ale. Advocate of CBT, PACE and therapeutic parenting. Aspergers.
An interesting detail about Anglers Crag is that he has never not been owned by his breeder Derrick Mossop, even when starting out in Irish points in the care of Terence O’Brien.
Stints with David Pipe and Brian Ellison followed that with O’Brien, and in each of those three tenures his form had dipped from its peak with the respective trainer by the time he’d left them, markedly so in the case of the two English trainers.
It reads to me as if Mr Mossop knows his horse sours if left in the one place for too long, and it’s notable that he lasted no more and no less than two seasons with every one of those three previous operations. To what extent the switching round of tactics that Joe refers to in the second half of the gelding’s Ellison career was Mossop’s decision is, I suspect, something known only to connections, but it did nothing to delay the inevitable decline in his fortunes for that handler.
Things have got very good again very quickly for Anglers Crag, but a rise to a new career-high mark at 11 years of age likely awaits, and it’ll be some feat if Nicky Richards can keep him competitive off it for the remainder of the presumed two seasons he’ll get with him.
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Jeremy Grayson. Son of immigrant. Adoptive father of two. Metadata librarian. Freelance point-to-point / horse racing writer, analyst and commentator wonk. Loves music, buses, cats, the BBC Micro, ale. Advocate of CBT, PACE and therapeutic parenting. Aspergers.
Assuming a mark that hasn’t already been elevated wildly above the 120 which Trueshan defied in the same race not so long ago, and given effectiveness on Tapeta is clearly not in doubt, taking in the Northumberland Plate with Constitution Hill makes a degree of appeal.
It would render irrelevant those concerns not unjustifiably already raised as regards campaigning him on potentially quick summer ground. Indeed, isn’t a dry, clement summer likelier to make the Tapeta ride standard to slow, such are the way these things work?
It was certainly the target we were gravitating towards when discussing the matter in the Duncombe Park ptp commentary box at the weekend. There may well be plenty of easy/soft-ground Group races on the continent that would take little winning, but these will pass by unnoticed by a trainer who largely eschews mainland European targets. Taking the same Compiegne Listed hurdle twice, albeit eight years apart, and only because of some historical familial links to the race, does not make Nicky Henderson a student of the European race programme.
You might rightly theorise that a Plate shouldn’t rate the sum total of connections’ ambitions. I’m admittedly not wholly unsympathetic to that argument. At the same time, however, I’m sure they’ll have their own quality threshold below which they wouldn’t want Constitution Hill to dip, either at the risk of humiliating him or (going back to the social contract point) leaving them open to criticism if he picked up a terminal injury in pursuit of a smallish purse.
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Jeremy Grayson. Son of immigrant. Adoptive father of two. Metadata librarian. Freelance point-to-point / horse racing writer, analyst and commentator wonk. Loves music, buses, cats, the BBC Micro, ale. Advocate of CBT, PACE and therapeutic parenting. Aspergers.
That Music List continues. Edition #242 includes music from Pigeon, Craven Faults, Mylène Farmer, Sugar, Zig Zag Band, La Casa Azul, Knitting Circle, Low, Landscape, Moon Duo, Bogshed, Lynks, Jimmy Cliff, Kraftwerk, Mitski, Beat Happening, K.I.D. and more.
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Jeremy Grayson. Son of immigrant. Adoptive father of two. Metadata librarian. Freelance point-to-point / horse racing writer, analyst and commentator wonk. Loves music, buses, cats, the BBC Micro, ale. Advocate of CBT, PACE and therapeutic parenting. Aspergers.
That Music List continues. Edition #241 includes music from Kim Gordon, Flowchart, Hatchie, ABBA, OMD, Katie Alice Greer, Alan Cook, Field Music, Language of Flowers, Jetstream Pony, Sparks, Nico, Star Tropics, Sun O))), Frank Black, The Shirts and more.
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Jeremy Grayson. Son of immigrant. Adoptive father of two. Metadata librarian. Freelance point-to-point / horse racing writer, analyst and commentator wonk. Loves music, buses, cats, the BBC Micro, ale. Advocate of CBT, PACE and therapeutic parenting. Aspergers.
That Music List continues. Edition #240 includes music from Angine De Poitrine, Kefaya and Elaha Soroor, Heavenly, Julian Cope, Pink Opaque, Greentea Peng, Gavin Osborn, The Supremes, Hubert Kah, Kavus Torabi, The Melons, Rose City Band, The Cure and more.
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Jeremy Grayson. Son of immigrant. Adoptive father of two. Metadata librarian. Freelance point-to-point / horse racing writer, analyst and commentator wonk. Loves music, buses, cats, the BBC Micro, ale. Advocate of CBT, PACE and therapeutic parenting. Aspergers.
That Music List continues. Edition #239 includes music from Ladytron, Shopping, Chris Sievey, Underground Resistance, All Ashore!, Righeira, Kurtis Rush, Waxahatchee, Cab Calloway, Olan Monk, Acid House Kings, Geowulf, The White Stripes, Harmonia and more.
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Jeremy Grayson. Son of immigrant. Adoptive father of two. Metadata librarian. Freelance point-to-point / horse racing writer, analyst and commentator wonk. Loves music, buses, cats, the BBC Micro, ale. Advocate of CBT, PACE and therapeutic parenting. Aspergers.
I’ve always meant to listen to more classical music, if only to enable me to answer more questions on University Challenge
FWIW Moe, I’ve been on a mission these past few years to see how well I could do in a typical episode of Radio 4’s Counterpoint despite getting almost none of the classical questions right. And I’ll say this much; I haven’t finished last very often.
I passed Grade 8 theory easily enough in my early teens, but always by scoring the maximum number of points available on notation, musical terms, etc. to compensate for the inevitable haemorrhaging of points when asked to name X number of symphonies from old white dead geezer Y.
My relationship with classical music as a whole is… complicated. It was always in the house growing up, and my folks switched to Classic FM from Radio 2 at the earliest opportunity upon launch. You might as well have superglued the dial in place there for all subsequent radios owned.
There was always an element of snob value to it being played quite as much as it was, however, and that also manifested itself in the piano lessons I was obliged to sit for north of a decade. Practising the same three pieces for months on end at the whim of the Associated Board drew all the fun out of the genre and by extension the playing of the instrument.
For all that, I still prefer piano-based classical, or better still solo classical piano pieces, as much to hear how it ought to have been done. I loves me some Satie, some Bach’s Preludes and Fugues and some Baroque (especially any of those madrigals by the likes of Monteverdi which appear to consist of not much more than the same motif on a harpsichord throughout).
Decades of relative neglect, however, have reduced my playing technique to an ugly, uncoordinated stab, not even pub standard. As my perfect pitch has conversely remained intact, I’m essentially a musician who can no longer play music, which is frustrating beyond belief.
I tend to steer clear of full symphony orchestra thingies, especially those with bombastic, dominant, inescapable string sections, which ramp up my tinnitus far worse than the loudest gigs I could possibly attend.
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Jeremy Grayson. Son of immigrant. Adoptive father of two. Metadata librarian. Freelance point-to-point / horse racing writer, analyst and commentator wonk. Loves music, buses, cats, the BBC Micro, ale. Advocate of CBT, PACE and therapeutic parenting. Aspergers.
I fear there’d be ways of circumventing such a stipulation. Say, for argument’s sake, Elliott runners moving to the likes of Sneezy Foster on paper ahead of a predetermined deadline, without actually moving very far if at all. Better brains than mine would know how to police this.
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Jeremy Grayson. Son of immigrant. Adoptive father of two. Metadata librarian. Freelance point-to-point / horse racing writer, analyst and commentator wonk. Loves music, buses, cats, the BBC Micro, ale. Advocate of CBT, PACE and therapeutic parenting. Aspergers.
Steeplechasing – I can well believe that germ theory. It’s one perhaps exacerbated further by the near-total absence so far this winter of a cold snap sustained for sufficiently long to kill off plenty of the blighters.
There are some trainers who talk about the germ line, and of how training at hilly locations sufficiently highly above it grants automatic protection against most, if not all, infections of their respective strings. Norman Mason and Richard Guest referred to it repeatedly with regard to their Brancepeth base, and I’m fairly certain Joel Parkinson did in an interview not so long ago too.
Brancepeth is approximately 141 metres above sea level. High Eldwick, home of Parkinson’s joint operation with Sue and Harvey Smith, is about 167 above. Kings Caple, where Venetia Williams is based, is only 66. Significant?
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Jeremy Grayson. Son of immigrant. Adoptive father of two. Metadata librarian. Freelance point-to-point / horse racing writer, analyst and commentator wonk. Loves music, buses, cats, the BBC Micro, ale. Advocate of CBT, PACE and therapeutic parenting. Aspergers.
AP – yep, that’s the same Clive Boultbee-Brooks as has given training a go himself most recently.
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Jeremy Grayson. Son of immigrant. Adoptive father of two. Metadata librarian. Freelance point-to-point / horse racing writer, analyst and commentator wonk. Loves music, buses, cats, the BBC Micro, ale. Advocate of CBT, PACE and therapeutic parenting. Aspergers.
A human rather than equine retirement, this, but William Easterby has hung up his boots today after 102 pointing winners and 45 under Rules.
He’s just got too much on now to fit in raceriding, being variously heavily involved in the running of Charm Park point-to-point course in Scarborough (a venue which would be one of the best in the country at present, as exemplified by the calibre of present and future stars it’s attracting now); in the Point-to-Point Authority (has just been appointed as an independent board member thereto); in the riding career of younger brother Tom; and of course in the “family firm” with father Tim.
I expect the retirement will be marked in an appropriate manner at his home hunt’s point-to-point, the Sinnington at Duncombe Park this weekend.
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Jeremy Grayson. Son of immigrant. Adoptive father of two. Metadata librarian. Freelance point-to-point / horse racing writer, analyst and commentator wonk. Loves music, buses, cats, the BBC Micro, ale. Advocate of CBT, PACE and therapeutic parenting. Aspergers.
