I'm not massively keen on these 'celebrity playlist' albums. In many cases I feel like I could do better myself with iTunes. But you have to hand it to Saint Etienne, and particularly Bob Stanley (it seems): they have a knack of lifting mundane things out of the ordinary and making them special. Some artists always rely on conjuring something (apparently) out of nothing; others make it clear that their borrowing/stealing from others. If you're going down the latter path, one of the areas where you have to convince is in your taste: an ability to be selective in a way that is both coherent and slightly unusual, and manages to suggest you know something that others don't.
All of which is a kind of restatement of what I said last time about Saint Etienne and the "transformation of the familiar". Though another thing that Stanley et al have pulled off here is to pull together a string of things that are decidedly unfamiliar, with chic outsiders like Gainsbourg, Morricone and, errr, Fairport Convention thrown in for seasoning. Well, that's part of knowing something we don't. They are mining what everyone and their dog now calls the Long Tail of obscure tracks, being nerdy and cool at the same time.
You can tell that the artists are obscure by playing the album with Last.fm's software 'scrobbling' in the background. Many artists on The Trip have been played fewer than a thousand times (by comparison, The Beatles have been played 42 million times, and nearly 700,000 times in the last week; even Albert Ayler has 65,000 plays to his name). And it seems the few people who have played these artists have mostly done so by listening to this album — you can tell that by looking at the 'similar artists' for, say, Brinkley and Parker: they are all other artists that appear on this compilation.
I'm no expert on Northern Soul, but the first disc of The Trip has several tracks that sound a bit like Northern Soul to me. No big surprise that I enjoy the second disc, which has at least one foot in the psychedelic folk of the late '60s and early '70s. Last Tuesday I was listening to Pete Paphides' Lost Albums programme about Robin Gibb's unreleased Sing Slowly Sisters, and I thought, "I bet Bob Stanley's got this". Barely had the idea flickered through my synapses than up crops Bob as interviewee, filling in a bit of background and explaining how he'd holidayed in Shipston-on-Stour just because it was mentioned on the album. Of course, Stanley occasionally writes for The Times where Paphides works, so he probably put him up to it in the first place.
He gets everywhere, does Bob Stanley — into all sorts of 'cross-media' happenings that could trip up a less sure-footed man. From film series at the Barbican to being artist in Residence at the South Bank Centre. The handful of these events that I've attended have all been quite good. But it's like Quentin Tarrantino: all you need is one Kill Bill misjudgement, and there'll be a whole horde of critics ready to swoop with their accusations of hubris.
Finally, what's going on with that cover. Very Ballardian.
 MusicBrainz entry for disc 1disc 2 |
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