Repeat Until Funny

A year ago I posted Planet Sunflower’s The Escarpment EP here. It gathered the songs we had put together at odd times over the previous few years, whenever there was a family meet-up with a guitar handy. We weren’t really trying to make an EP, it was a continuation of what we’d always done, since the point in the mid ’90s when we found that chucking together an Elastica drum beat with some Barry Adamson bass and topping the whole thing off with Catriona’s voice drenched in reverb made Kylie Minogue’s ‘Turn It Into Love’ into this whole other thing. Was that really the first song we did? Or just the first worth remembering? The Elastica connection always makes me think of her coming back from a gig of theirs in Stoke, mega excited that their new bassist had spoken to her, and that David Bowie had stood next to her in the crowd. ‘Are you sure? In Stoke?’ ‘It was!’ Absolutely no way.

The more recent songs were supposed to be us continuing work on the Planet Sunflower album, which when it reached the mythical length of 40 minutes would be finished, and that would be that. The reason it had to be 40 minutes was that any shorter and it would look ridiculous on a C90 cassette. By 2008 this wasn’t really a concern any more, and the five songs which made up the EP made sense as a set. So here is the rest: everything else by Planet Sunflower that is any good at all (including, incidentally, three songs which also appear on Long Vacation albums).

Planet Sunflower – Repeat Until Funny

1. Turn It Into Love
2. Welcome In
3. The Black Hole
4. An Affair
5. No Frills
6. You Say You Don’t Love Me
7. Self
8. In My Eyes
9. Wind Sand And Stars

Recorded 1996 – 1999. Songs by Catriona and Chris except for ‘Turn It Into Love’ (Stock, Aitken & Waterman), ‘You Say You Don’t Love Me’ (Pete Shelley) and ‘Self’ (Fuzzbox). Thanks to Dad for having a home PC so ridiculously in advance of everyone else, and for very kindly equipping it with a sound card.

Listen below, or download it here (go for the vbr zip).

When You Disappear (Encore)

Anne Bacheley says: ‘Ma décision est prise, j’arrête ce blog’, and her blog is gone. Bang goes my plan to get to the point where I could read Proust in French by reading there in the meantime about comics, indie rock and knitting, though to be fair this might have taken several hundred years. I started reading it because of her songs, and continued because it was a nice place to be: the book and music recommendations, the excited updates on how her album Headquarters was doing (the recent ‘“Headquarters” dans les tops!!!’ being my favourite of these – I was so proud to have had something to do with letting her know how good it is in my end of year list). There weren’t as many drawings as you might expect (hopefully there will be more now?), but there was plenty of superior uncategorisable blog fluff: there was a post about ghosts in different rooms of her house, which struck me as a) hilarious and b) oddly comprehensible, for someone who couldn’t read French. Here are ‘Les fantômes de la cuisine’:

All gone. And so the January blues get hiked again. This has the advantage of making the Tenniscoats and Eddie Marcon records Chris just gave me seem ten times more beautiful, but all the same, I’d rather have her blog back. Thank you, Anne, for lots of things, and I hope you don’t mind if I salvage the Planet Sunflower review you wrote. There aren’t too many of those around. Come back soon.

Planet Sunflower

Dans ma boîte aux lettres puis sur ma platine, le Escarpment EP de Planet Sunflower. Il s’agit d’enregistrements maison d’un duo constitué de Chris de The Long Vacation et du blog La Terrasse, et de sa soeur Catriona. Si j’ai du mal à décrire leurs morceaux, c’est que j’aurais l’impression de ne ré-utiliser que des mots que j’ai lus à propos de ma propre musique (genre “charmant”, “frais”, “lo-fi”, “mélodique”…). Ceci dit, le 2e morceau, une reprise de Kate Bush très réussie (je connais mal l’original mais ça sonne pas du tout pareil) joue plutôt la carte sombre et psychédélique. Allez donc écouter et/ou télécharger tout ça ici.

25 octobre 2008

Places from which Anne hasn’t disappeared: Main site, MySpace.

Cheap Cigs & Beer

A little while after I posted the Planet Sunflower EP last month, Catriona reminded me of another song we’d done, wondering why it hadn’t been included. Of course, I’d forgotten all about it, but rooting through some old CDs yesterday I found one labelled ‘CIGS’. From September 2005, according to the dates on the files. It’s not bad either – a bit of a lopsided rhythm, her voice absolutely smothered in reverb (this is what we do when she sings too quietly), but with a flute on it and everything. I’ve added it to the end of the EP.

Down an August Path

Walking home late on Wednesday I noticed some sunflowers in a front garden, growing up against a wall, nearly reaching the first storey. Now I’m wondering whether to nip out and photograph them, lit by street lights, sunflowers in the dark. Ungainly things, out of their element. It would make a good back cover, I reckon, in contrast to the sunlight on the front – but it’s half an hour’s walk away, I’ve no bus change and it’s nearly bedtime as it is. So it’s too late, ’cause this is getting posted tomorrow morning, this EP by my sister and I. Planet Sunflower are our band, or duo anyway, and years ago we used to make songs by looping bits of Nick Cave records and writing down the names of things in the room to use for lyrics. ‘In My Eyes’ from Loss Angeles is a Planet Sunflower song (no Cave there – The Seahorses, Stevie Wonder and Beatrix Potter were our, uh, inspirations). Another, the best one, was called ‘Wind Sand and Stars’ for no better reason than that Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s book of that name was on a shelf nearby when we wrote it. Random choices can be good ones. Though lately when we’ve done stuff it’s been less random, more song-like. Catriona (AKA Janet Sunflower) says, ‘The first two songs are old Planet Sunflower-style (complicated) & the latter two are new PS-style (simple / only got an acoustic guitar on us).’* ‘The Escarpment’ is our first single.

Planet Sunflower – ‘The Escarpment E.P.’

1. The Escarpment
2. Big Stripey Lie
3. Where is the Now?
4. My Planet Sunflower
5. Cheap Cigs & Beer
   

Songs by Catriona and Chris except ‘Big Stripey Lie’ which is by Kate Bush. The first two were recorded in August 2008, and the rest between 2004 – 2006.

Download it here, or listen below.

* She said this before we found the fifth song, so it made sense at the time.