Shelf Life: Sadie Jones - The Snakes (2019)

Just as I love music that challenges its audience, I love books that do it too. While Snakes is not my favourite Sadie Jones novel - that still has to be The Outcast - but it's the one that, like Dylan at Newport, is her most transformative. Like the snakes of the title - who are essentially metaphoric - Sadie Jones has already shed a skin or two in an 18-year career and it's this novel that the suggests she has the potential to continue doing so.

I hate those 'ending explained' posts generated by certain novels and never look at them until I'm finished. If you can't make your own decisions about an ending, you're missing a vital facet of the reading experience. Without giving any spoilers, Jones takes us down a path that might bear resemblance to a thriller, but there enough clues to its artifice to mean a conventional thriller ending would be a huge disappointing. Thankfully, we get something else.

At least, that was my feeling. A quick look at comments on the internet revealed a number of readers who were disappointed by the way the novel ends, even betrayed by it. It seems they've not picked up on what, for me, this novel is really about: Snakes is about the impossibility of finding closure: an ending offering us precisely that would be the real betrayal.

Vert:x/VX

Following yesterday's foray into the world of The Chasms, it seems appropriate to follow that with a journey into another fascinating world, that of their sometime collaborators Vert:x.Vert:x recorded four sessions for my show in 2010, 2018, 2019 and 2021 and VX, the solo offshoot of main man Neil Whitehead, have recorded two more and there was also a joint session with The Chasms in 2012.

Basically, listening to the show means Vert:x beoome difficult to avoid, and why would you want to? Like The Chasms, there's a krautrock foundation to what they do, sprinkled with lashings of psychedelic guitar and electronica, the latter very much the focus of the VX project. If you have somehow managed to miss them, their fascinating series of albums, including a couple of great collaborations with Pete Hope, can be found here. 

A couple of those sessions are available there too. 

If that's not enough - and why would it be? - you can get all the VX material on their bandcamp site.

In my Dandelion show this month, I'm featuring the extraordinary Full Fathom Five, from the 1947 album that was released on my Unwashed Territories label back in 2018. I only had time to play the radio edit in the show but you can still get hold of the full release here or at the Vert:x site, including the full 15.56 version which made the Festive Fifty that year.

The Chasms

This Isle of Man three piece remain, for me, the band against whom all others in the current millennium must be measured.

Their existence spanned a mere three years and, in that time, they produced four stunning albums and became a mainstay of both my show and the wider Dandelion Radio landscape. They didn't misstep once, producing a glorious motorik-driven drone around which Mike Seed's loosely weave.

Reviewing their Alchemical Postcards album in 2011, I called it in my now defunct Unwashed Territories blog 'the latest in a series of mesmerising releases by what we must now surely label the world's best band.'

Their appeal hasn't waned with time. Assisted by Neil Whitehead of Vert:x, they released one final album - Winter Arcade - in 2012 before disappearing from our lives. Mike Seed and Richard Quirk have released some fine solo material since then but it's no disservice to their solo output to say that nothing - either by them or anyone else - has matched the chemistry that this band conjured up together during that period.

In this month's Dandelion show, I'm playing a track from their first Dandelion Radio session, recorded for Pete Jackson's show in September 2009. You can get it at the band's bandcamp site, which also has all four albums available for download:

Advance Paranoia, Advance (2009)

Index of Spirits (2010)

Alchemical Postcards (2011)

Winter Arcade (2012)

Also available on the site are the two Pete Jackson sessions, a session they recorded for my show in collaboration with Vert:x and a Christmas tune specially recorded for my show in 2009.

The Sinatra Test

The Sinatra Test, aka Phil South, were a mainstay of my show for several years and probably will become so again when they release some more material. In this month's retrospective show, I'm playing the wonderful Wodehouse Whippet Bingo from the session they did for the show way back in 2011. You can get the whole session as NYP here. 

Like most of Phil's output, it's an artistic collage built around samples and underpinned by an electronic pulse. Unlike many of the collage-based tracks I've encountered, however, The Sinatra Test never steer into inaccessibility: if this is art, it's art with a lowercase a: it's rooted in life, not Art, if you get my meaning.

If you don't - and I wouldn't blame you - you'd be better off simply trying all the material that's on bandcamp, including the recent 15th anniversary remastering of the Do Be Do album, also available as NYP. 

The Ale Trail: The Dog & Bone, Lincoln

The Batemans Brewery website declares, with some pride, that their Dog & Bone is in the top 15 pubs in Lincoln, as reported here. It's hard to imagine there are another 15 as good as this one. I did visit another boozer in this top 15 - The Cardinal's Hat - which was also well worth its place, but it can't match this one on at least three counts: the sheet warmth of a backstreet alehouse, six Batemans ales on handpump and a friendly pub dog.

The six ales would have been enough on their own. Batemans has long been one of my favourite breweries so to find a place with half a dozen of them - including the masterful XXXB - had me close to beer heaven. Wandering outside with a Dark Fruits Porter had me in it: it's a small beer garden to the rear of the pub, beautifully manicured, the hot Lincolnshire sun beaming down, the pub dog sitting on the seat next for me hoping for a crisp. Or was it the beer?

The Dark Fruits Porter was sumptuous: purple/black with cherries, blackcurrants and blackberries that fortify a mildly sweet aftertaste. I stayed for another - the more familiar Dark M Mild - before stroking the dog and leaving, telling the landlady I'll be back next time I'm in the area. Now I've got to figure out a good reason to be in Lincoln again.

Diane Marie Kloba

Among the many artists featured in my 20 years of Dandelion Radio retrospective a few stand out as regulars of my show over a long period of time. Among them is Diane Marie Kloba. From Chicago, Diane's music and vocal style sound unlike anything else. I love artists whose style is so distinctive it's hard to guess at the influences behind them. There aren't many such artists but Diane's music has passed this stringest test with every album she's made.

Not only that, but each album tends to contain some element that manages to surpass its predecessor in terms of its framing of Diane's distinctive vocal style. Her tenth, Red Sun, came out last year. 'These songs take on a serious tone but I am seeking to convey a spirit of optimism and forward thinking outlook,' comments Diane in the album notes. It's a defiant album created by an artist standing for humanity, vulnerability and perception amid the chaos of an America that's not just lost its way, but has found another, very dangerous one. But beneath the fragility of Diane's songs lies a profoundly human strength and that's exactly what we need right now.

The track I'm playing in my show this week is one that featured in a session Diane did for us in 2018, featuring three acoustic versions of her songs, including the one I feature, an acoustic version of her wonderfully evocative Took the Train Alone. The songs were released on an EP called Deep Heart Acoustic, which is available for NYP here.

The Ale Trail: Adnams Broadside Premium Ale

When it comes to bottled ales, I normally stick to cask conditioned but my son got me this for Father's Day and I immediately grabbed a bottle and headed outside with a pile of strong cheese. Why? Because I'm familiar with Broadside as a sturdy 4.7% ABV tipple and this mf is a powerful 6.

Even the usual Broadside packs a punch: coming out of the pumps, it's probably my favourite among cask ales that are widely available. I'd love to see this baby in a hand-pull: even out of a bottle its rich raisin-y textures came through and zazzed my head as I sat in the back garden on an unusually hot day in the grim north of England. 

I was reading Hemingway, who I believe said once that drinking from a bottle was fine but when you open a new one you know you've got a problem. But he was talking about whiskey so I figure however much of a wallop this ale delivers, I ain't gonna go the way of Hemingway. Just yet anyway.