Fragments of The Universal Sun

I mentioned that one of my major projects over the last few years has been working on what I hesitantly call my own music. I’ve written about it once or twice in the past, although I try not to let it intrude too often here, as I’m sure this blog’s readers have better things to do than listen to it. Some of it is, I’m afraid, unavoidably awful. But making it makes me happy, and it’s pretty much the only place I spend time where it feels as though nobody wants to criticise me. Actually, I’m sure the few people who do listen to it want to criticise me, but they never have, and that’s the main thing.

It’s not without success, either. I’ve clawed back a small amount of money. Some of the material I collaborated on appeared on a compilation. And one track that I recorded a few years ago seems to have ended up on a TikTok (I barely know what that is), which got played 175,000 times and earned me the princely sum of 4 pence.

Most recently, I’ve been working on an album that completes about a decade of development and finally feels like the album I’ve always been trying to make. That’s The Universal Sun, and I’ll talk more about it here at some point in the future. The collection of b-sides, bonus tracks, and unreleased material that goes with it is Fragments of The Universal Sun, and that comes out today. There are some links below – please click and give it a listen, and then we’ll go back to pretending that none of that ever happened.

https://ditto.fm/fragments-of-the-universal-sun

Rewind

Before we really reboot things in earnest, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on where this blog has succeeded in the past. That’s a past which runs back to 2011, over 2,372 posts (some of which even had numbers) and more than 100,000 page views. This blog cited on several Wikipedia articles as an official source and it used to have a respectable Twitter following too, until I decided to cancel the account about a year ago.

Most popular by far are the obscurities, such as my post about Vince Clarke‘s Deeptronica album, Boris Blank‘s Avant Garden 1, 2, 3, and 4 and Pet Shop Boys‘ Bobby O Demos, or also their recently-reissued Relentless mini-album. Unfortunately, a lot of blogs offer illegal content for download (for the tape: this one does not), so it’s possible that a lot of these are short visits.

Then there are the fans of the British Rock and Pop Awards. This was a short series of posts which I wrote to help dispel a widespread opinion that this early ceremony was an initial version of the BRIT Awards (it wasn’t – it seems to have essentially been a readers’ poll for NEWSPAPER which got TV coverage). There’s next to no information elsewhere online, and so a small number of individuals have come to regard this blog as the place to store it. They have come to be some of the most popular posts here. While I’m surprised and confused by this, it’s nice to offer them a home, and I’m sure I’ll summarise the discussions here soon.

The most popular series of posts on here are the Beginner’s guides, which almost certainly need some updates. Depeche Mode were the most popular to date, followed by Kraftwerk and I Monster, perhaps surprisingly.

In terms of the things you click into the most, your most popular category is Awards and your most popular artist is Pet Shop Boys.

So, where am I going with all this? Well, it does give me some food for thought on what I should post about in this newly-regenerated blog. The Chart for stowaways, for example, seems to have long passed its peak, so let’s not bother with that any more. I’m sure there will be plenty of dull things coming up that I can slip in its place.

Hello

Well, that was a long break, wasn’t it?

While this blog was never really officially cancelled, it does seem to have been on hiatus for quite a long time. So it’s high time we brought it back! Hello!

What have I been up to since we last spoke? Well, mainly caught up with the real world, which has been very entertaining indeed, as I imagine everyone knows. I’ve had a lot less spare time in general, but in what little I’ve had, I’ve recorded two more albums (more on that to come in future posts) and done a lot of research about charts (which means that a lot of what I said about them previously can be proven completely wrong).

I know we’ve lost a lot of readers in the meantime, and I don’t just mean “David”, who, never having posted before, got very upset that one time I posted about Steps. (Sorry, David – I just did it again! Oops… Oh wait, that’s someone else, isn’t it?) I understand – I would have wandered off to pastures new in the meantime too.

Well, anyway, I do have one draft post that I started writing three years ago, as well. Exciting stuff. I definitely won’t be able to post quite as often as I used to, but I’ve got a few things that I want to say, so do stay tuned! Or become tuned, at least.

Decadence

Well, it’s been very quiet around here, recently, hasn’t it? My big secret is that I used to write most of the posts during my commute, and… well, thanks to the pandemic, I haven’t had one for a little over two years now, so it’s been harder and harder to keep up. I’m sure there will be a reboot one day, but for now, I’m sorry – we’ll stay in this holding pattern for a while longer.

I even managed to miss the tenth anniversary of this blog! Just by a few days, and it seems a slightly bitter milestone given that the ninth anniversary was only a few posts ago, but there you go. Time to celebrate a decade of, er, Decadence on this blog, with this lovely collaboration between Pet Shop Boys and Johnny Marr from 1994.

2022

Well, I’ve been away for a while. Obviously not really, but I haven’t been posting here, mainly because I’ve been busy with home life and other personal projects. I had intended that I would start posting again when my commute started once this whole pandemic thing died down a bit, but I still haven’t commuted for nearly two years, and while I’ve still got plenty to say for myself, I’ve run out of backlogged posts. So anyway, things will still remain pretty quiet, I’m afraid.

Did you miss me? No, I didn’t think so…

I thought I would pop my head around the door with a couple of recent discoveries. First up, thanks to Adam Buxton‘s podcast I discovered this beautiful work from Laurie Anderson, which most of you had probably heard before, but for some reason (maybe because I wasn’t entirely sentient when it came out) I never had.

It’s fascinating to listen to, because there’s obviously an element of this where Anderson is just messing around with a sampler and a vocoder. I’ve got tapes with these kinds of experiments too, but they’re nowhere near this evocative. Excuse the superlatives, but it’s rare these days that I hear something quite this exciting.

Then there’s this. Bad dance cover versions were all the rage in the nineties (that might be an unintentional pun actually, because it was Rage who recorded this passable cover of Bryan Adams‘s Run to You in 1992, complete with house piano (good) and unnecessary rap section (bad):

But then there’s this. The Connells‘ ’74-’75 is a decent pop-rock song, which apparently some people called Hands of Belli and a singer called Nanci Edwards decided needed turning into this monstrosity:

And that, I’m sure you’ll agree, is quite enough of that for now. Bye.

Pause

If you’re reading this, it means this blog is paused for some reason. Perhaps I fell under a bus on the way to the circus. Maybe I’m tied up rescuing evil old ladies from lovely little kittens. Or I could have just forgotten to write any more posts.

Whatever the reasons, Music for stowaways will be back with you as soon as possible. In the meantime, please enjoy the archives!

Nine years of stowaways

Firstly: happy ninth birthday to this blog!

Secondly: sorry that you find us in the middle of a quiet period! Trying to continue blogging through a pandemic and with a growing family turned out to be chaotic, to say the least. You’ve still seen about 140 posts since the first lockdown hit this part of the world, and some of those even have some interesting content, so we’ve done OK.

I’m working on a number of projects at the moment, and unfortunately the blog isn’t quite getting the attention it deserves. That will start to change over the next couple of months, so we’ll be back soon – with actual content, as well, such as reviews! But for now, please be patient, and continue to…

Greatest Hits 2021

It’s with sincere regret that I realize that I didn’t actually manage to bring you a single new review in 2020, thanks to personal commitments and the ongoing lockdown. For the time being, while I’m unable to bring you more, here are ten of the greatest hits from the history of this blog:

1. Garbage – Cherry Lips (Go Baby Go)
2. Jean-Michel Jarre – Chronologie
3. Kraftwerk – Aerodynamik
4. Moby – Ambient
5. Olive – Extra Virgin
6. Rex the Dog – The Rex the Dog Show
7. Sparks – In Outer Space
8. Sébastien Tellier – Politics
9. Way Out West – We Love Machine
10. The xx – xx

Dawn of a new era

I decided to pause regular service today just to pause and celebrate the death – however brief it ends up being – of fascism in the USA. Yes, Wonderbras aren’t American, but it’s still a good excuse for some Rammstein.

Looking back at 2020

This has not been, I think we can all agree, a year that we will look back upon particularly fondly. We finally saw a perfect storm of long-building problems with climate change, civil rights abuses, far-right politics, and more, and subsequently all spent most of the year locked up in our homes.

The world of music, meanwhile, has been an interesting one. I suspect revenues hit an all-time low, as pretty much nobody went out to any concerts for most of the year. Dance music in particular has taken some interesting side steps, as nobody had anywhere to go and dance, so the US and UK Club Charts have been on hold since March or April.

In spite of that, there have been many bright moments, with plenty of free concerts on YouTube (Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark‘s recordings and Jean-Michel Jarre‘s somewhat successful attempt at an immersive virtual reality experience spring to mind). My age-old favourite band The Beloved have forged ahead with reissues of their first two albums, and the brilliant Sophie Ellis-Bextor took the first UK lockdown as an excuse for a greatest hits album, which is very astute indeed.

There is, of course, plenty more that we could mention, but I’ll leave it to you to consider what. In spite of everything, there has been lots of creativity to celebrate in 2020, and while I think we all hope that 2021 will see some degree of return to normality, I hope the inventiveness continues.

Jean-Michel Jarre, by the way, is trying again tonight, with his Welcome to the Other Side virtual concert, which should be a suitable way to close out this disastrous year, in case you don’t have any other plans.