In The Greenhouse with The Cool Greenhouse

The Shadow Ring are hands down my favourite band. To my mind, if the best of the entirety of human accomplishment, including things like the whole of the Renaissance (yawn) or the invention of the wheel (“it was easy, it’s just a wheel”—to nick a great line from another favourite band, Uranium Club) comes up to somewhere around your knees, then the opus of the Shadow Ring comes up to at least your shoulders. It sometimes irritates me that almost every Cool Greenhouse review makes reference to the Fall rather than to the Shadow Ring, since actually the motoric repetition, lengthy songs, minimalism, humour, choruslessness, out-of-tuneness, crappy production and above all the strange and phenomenal lyrics of the Shadow Ring have been our central musical inspiration and the band we nicked all our ideas from. In these respects they are even more Fallish than the Fall, and even more Cool Greenhousey than the Cool Greenhouse. The trouble is no one knows who the fuck they are, even though they are the best band in the world and the band that finally “put the music in its coffin”. So here is a small attempt to rectify this grand historic injustice. In this creepy song they offer some vital advice to all greenhouse users. If you don’t follow it you will find yourself eating caterpillars, spiders, worm shits and soil, for sure.

This one’s a bit of a reddish herring, since I’m pretty sure you generally plant radishes straight into the ground, bypassing greenhouses. Still, greenhouses exist in the World, don’t they? Generally I tend to mark songs down a bit if they sound exactly like they’re from the era that’s inspired them.

And it’s hard to believe that this belter isn’t from 1978. But occasionally a song is so good that that sort of concern is knocked for six, and I count this one among them. I don’t usually like saxophones either—so what do I know? Including it also allows me to sing the praises of Lumpy Records (US) and Upset! The Rhythm (UK), both of whom have released music by The World and are to my mind the finest proprietors of DIY post-punk on either side of the Atlantic. Post-punk and the DIY label scene seem pretty healthy at the minute, don’t they? With people like Black Midi, Fontaines D.C. and Squid skirting the mainstream post-punk is almost the go-to mode right now. But these two labels have been doing it for years and, like this band, remain resolutely DIY in the original spirit of the genre. Here’re a handful of other proper DIY labels in a similar vain that deserve some praise: Sorry State, Drunken Sailor, Neck Chop, Goaty Tapes, Market Square & Hidden Bay.

This horticulturally-entitled track is the brilliant Country Teaser’s “pop hit”, which is especially impressive since it has no chorus and no changes and yet remains incredibly catchy. In my view, you should do away with all that stuff if you can get away with it, like the Country Teasers have done here. I have a tremendous admiration for Ben Wallers, mastermind behind this outfit and the more sonically experimental and perhaps slightly preferable ‘The Rebel’, not only because he’s another one-of-a-kind wordsmith not galaxies removed from The Shadow Ring’s Graham Lambkin, but also because somehow he’s managed to gain a widespread cult following while seemingly never giving two shits about self-promotion or even releasing his music properly. Nonetheless, the first Rebel show I ever went to, couples were snogging sentimentally at the front whilst a rabble of teenagers sang every word from the back. I’m not quite sure how he manages it. Perhaps music can just speak for itself (yeah right). The greenhouse connexion here is elevated by the fact that Wallers also works a day job in a garden centre, which I’m sure he could have left years ago if he’d decided to exploit his talents in a less dignified direction. Hats off to you, Ben.

It’s a good thing that all my very favourite bands of all time seem to love to write about greenhouse-related ephemera, innit? One exception to the rule that you should try and cull your choruses if you can get away with it, is that it’s fine if your song is one long chorus and you’ve sacked off the verses instead. Here The Clean sing a song that is one long chorus, with the words “Don’t ever change or rearrange your mind” repeated throughout over an unchanging four chord progression (FOUR!? Tut tut…) for three minutes (could’ve doubled that lads, if you ask me…). And they’ve called it ‘Slug Song’. I can’t decide whether this is advice from slugs, or to slugs. For sure, if you’re a slug and you set off somewhere and then change your mind midway you’re a bit screwed. You’ve got to firm up your travel plans well in advance. And I think that’s pretty good advice for all of us. The Clean are of course the beacons of the Flying Nun imprint, initially a little label from a small university town in New Zealand called Dunedin who’ve gone on to be one of the most influential labels in indie pop. I like this story a lot. And I also like that apparently you can still, more than thirty years on, catch the Clean playing in Dunedin on the regs on the weekends. This kind of locational fidelity is the reason I follow the tennis rather than the football (go figure).

Oh go on then, here’s a Fall track. I was contemplating Can’s “I’m so Green”, Beat Happening’s “Bad Seeds” or Ivor Cutler’s “I believe in bugs” for this last selection instead, but I’m forced to admit that this is the cream of that crop. Two sloppy, bludgeoning chords hammering away for nearing seven minutes under some of Smith’s most hilarious incantations. It’s not that I don’t like the Fall that I resent comparisons to them, it’s not even that we’re not heavily indebted to them, it’s more that I object to the Fall’s incumbent journalistic stranglehold on all talky repetitive guitar music. I mean, imagine if every journo felt compelled to reference Grandmaster Flash every time a new rap record came out, thirty years on. The early Fall’s bread-and-butter motifs are comparable to the feeding of the five thousand. But let’s not forget that even Jesus himself didn’t invent fish. And, not to get too sentimental, every fish is unique. But Grandmaster Flash did invent the slipmat. So fuck you Mark E Smith!