AUK’s Back Pages No.5

Featured image for AUK's Backpages column

Well, it’s 2006 and what do we find but a revamped website. A new logo/ banner/design is proudly unveiled as our editor Mark gently breaks the news to our readers on the first post of the year…

“Well, here it is, the all new revamped Americana UK site which we’ve been beavering away over for the months leading up to and over the holiday period and which we trust, once you’ve managed to find your way around your old favourite sections (and indeed those you despise if you’re unbalanced), you’ll find easier to use and an altogether more seamless and comprehensive americana experience… A great deal of thanks must go to Stu Olds who has been the developmental and technical backbone to the revamp and without whom the whole thing couldn’t have happened as the rest of us don’t have the technical savvy to put toast on. (Well we do, but only if you don’t mind it burnt to a crisp.)”

So, a brave new world then but behind the crisp revamp there’s still the usual news items, live listings and album and live reviews and of course the first tranche of monthly CDs, sent to our subscribers. They also have a facelift which reflects the new logo, albeit in an “arty” out of focus manner.

First order of business are two lists, our writers’ and our readers’ best albums of 2005. There are far too many to list here, suffice to say that Ryan Adams’ “Cold Roses” was the readers’ favourite while the writers’ list wasn’t ranked. For those who really want to delve into our historical innards, the readers’ list is here and the writers’ one is here. We’re still publishing a Top 10 Americana albums list via Maverick magazine and there’s the ongoing activist pleas.

On the live review front we have no less than three write-ups of the then reformed Green On Red, all from their gig at London’s Astoria on the 6^th January. Our three scribes (Patrick Wilkins, Jon Aird and Keith Hargreaves) all agree it was a great gig. However, we’re not always so kind. Mike Ritchie, while eventually enjoying the songs Ryan Adams played in Glasgow in February, seemed quite pissed off by Adams’ on-stage antics, “Les Dawson talking at his piano was funny, Ryan Adams is not. Woody Allen rambling on is desperately amusing, Ryan Adams is not… Truly, it was all very juvenile and eventually, some fans, in typical Glasgow fashion, shall we say, encouraged him to desist from the chit chat and “play, play (expletive) anything” to justify the £21 ticket price.” Meanwhile Keith Hargreaves was less amused when he attended Mark Olsen’s Creek Dippers in March, writing “This show needs to focus if it wants to avoid audiences feeling short-changed.” Going well above and beyond the call of duty Patrick Wilkins attends around 50 shows and reports on them in his review of the 2006 SXSW Festival

There’s a feature which this archivist has absolutely no memory of. It’s called Hell’s Ditch Dozen and consists of a set of questions posed to various luminaries. Reading it these days is somewhat embarrassing. You can see the questions in the screenshot to the left. Who knew that we could be so incisive and also be front runners in the clickbait tradition? Nevertheless we somehow cajoled the likes of Steve Wynn, Gina Villalobos, Josh Ritter and several others to participate in this. The award for the best answer goes to Steve Wynn who responds to the question, A track you would make love to? with this riposte… “My Favourite Things–John Coltrane from the Live In Japan CD. It’s almost 45 minutes long and I’m assuming that there’s really no hurry. I mean I AM stuck out in the middle of nowhere.”

Hell’s Ditch is mentioned again on the website with listings for Hell’s Ditch gigs held in Liverpool and some intrepid detective work reveals that this was the work of promoter Chris Stevens who ran a series of nights featuring Americana acts from 2004-2006. AUK contacted Chris who told us, “The Hell’s Ditch thing was partly inspired by the Pogues album but the clincher was seeing a poster for The Handsome Family that featured an NME quote that described them as, “Coming from Hell’s Ditch with love” just seemed perfect as I wanted the night to be one of friendship, sharing and safety while featuring some of the tougher, weirder elements of Americana.” Mystery solved and, as you can see in one of the pics here, entry to some of the gigs was only £3!

On then to the Friends Of Americana UK discs. As always, 20 tracks (plus a hidden extra) delivered to friends each month (although there is an anomaly as one of them actually has 21 tracks plus the hidden bonus, no idea why). We’re looking here at Volume 3, numbers 1-4, covering January to April 2006, all with a new cover design, a blurred image of the revamped website. It’s a somewhat muted start to the year as a quick scan of the artists reveals precious few big hitters. There’s Ryan Adams with his latest release “29″ (and apologies for mentioning him so often, this was before his fall but there’s no doubt that ‘Carolina Rain’ is quite impressive) along with Bonnie Prince Billy, Randy Newman, Silver Jews, Josh Rouse, Roseanne Cash, Eef Barzelay, Centro-Matic, Johnny Dowd, Jason McNiff, Teenage Fanclub and the Willard Grant Conspiracy. That said, there’s a wealth of great songs to be heard on the discs from familiar names and some who are pretty much forgotten these days. There’s a great song by a band called Lowry, ‘Fourth Of July’, delivered in a Smog-like manner on the January disc but, as far as your scribe can see, there’s no evidence of the song on the World Wide Web. We had better luck with Drew Nelson whose gritty ‘Wal-Mart V2.0′ is readily available as he railed against creeping commercialisation. February’s pick here is a fine cover of REM’s ‘South Central Rain’ by Hem while March reminded us of the V-Roys’ Scott Miller, at that point with a new band, Scott Miller & The Commonwealth who give us the fine storytelling of ‘The Only Road’. Moving into the April disc, we note the debut of The Wood Brothers with their first album release which came out on the jazz label Blue Note but our pick goes to The Tyde, a band which featured Beachwood Sparks’ Brent Rademaker along with his brother Darren. ‘Separate Cars’, unsurprisingly, is a fine shot of psychedelic pop. That leaves around 70 songs we don’t have the time to delve into or mention but, take my word for it, there are few clunkers.

As for the ongoing insight into our editor’s listening preferences at the time, we can reveal the hidden tracks were as follows. Jason McNiff (whose album “Another Man” is featured on the April disc) pops up at the end of the January one with ‘I Remember You’, February belongs to The Original Harmony Ridge Creek Dippers with Mark Olson singing give ‘My Heart To You’. March’s track was a bit of a mystery as it’s only listed on our tattered spreadsheet as “Edukators’ song” but some deep diving into Google discovered that it’s a song from the soundtrack to a German movie, “The Edukators”, released in 2004. The song ‘Where’s The Real Sky’ is credited to Jeff Cole on the soundtrack but Jeff Cole is a pseudonym for the score-writer, Andreas Wodraschke and it was sung by Sam Genders. Seems like our Mark did like his culture and was into anti capitalist German movies at some point. No such mystery come April as Glasgow’s Cosmic Rough Riders shine on ‘Now That You Know’.