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Music is attached to memory. Whether it’s the first album you bought with your own money, the first band you saw live, first festival you attended or the songs attached to different relationships; music and musicians are tied to memories in a Proustian manner. People can tell you the exact place of the tree Marc Bolan crashed into, but they can’t tell you where or when Gandhi was shot.
But not every great musician and band gets this treatment. For every Bolan and Bowie, there is a hundred great musicians and artists who are quickly and quietly being lost in the annals of time. Part of this is down to personal preference and interests, but the other part is mostly due to the sheer scale and volume of the music world. You can’t remember everyone because ultimately, you can’t listen to and love everyone. That would defeat the entire purpose of music and life.
That being said, there are many, many acts out there who are being unceremoniously erased from people’s memories like that machine from Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind. They are discarded to make room for other important information like passwords, the names of primary school teachers and the day you need to put the bins out.
But if all bands are created equal, then these are ten of the unlucky few who managed to slip through the memory cracks and slowly begin to fade from people’s long term recollections.
10. mclusky
Straight out of the Welsh valleys via Newcastle, loud mouth outfit mclusky played so hard and tight that they’d smash their instruments to smithereens, when they weren’t all being stolen in Arizona that is. Led by witty, snarky frontman Andrew ‘Falco’ Falkous, mclusky have an unpolished, utterly brazen sound that’s the sort of music you’d go up to your room and play when your parents got on your nerves. They also possess some of the best titled tracks of all time, with the likes of ‘To Hell With Good Intentions’, ‘Icarus Smicarus’ and ‘Falco v The Young Canoeist’ as some notable examples.
Often hilarious, perpetually scathing, mclusky try to bite you with their giddy lyricism and frenetic, almost spastic way of playing as they just exploded out of nowhere in the early hours of the twenty first century and were more than happy to have a go at any who thought they were hard enough. With only three full length albums and one compilation edition to their name, mclusky didn’t hang around too long but boy the ride was fun while it lasted. Falco went on to form the brilliant Future of the Left which in recent years seems to have overshadowed the work done as part of mclusky which, along with limited airplay during their existence, is probably one of the reasons that people are slowly forgetting about them. But if have a section of your record collection labelled ‘Music To Throw Yourself Around To’, then mclusky will fit in no problem.
9. The Raincoats
Stamped for ever with the tag of being one of Kurt Cobain’s favourite bands, The Raincoats were a scrappy, all female post punk band from England in late seventies, early eighties. The Raincoats were raw and spunky. They had slightly ragged harmonies that were just a little off kilter and completely endearing. The Raincoats played melodies that were frayed and being pulled apart at the seams and in Vicky Aspinall they had a woman who committed straight up violence on a violin. And it was fantastic. They were being vulnerable without being feminine.
When The Raincoats played, your head filled with colour and bubbles, a mix of giddy elation and slight pain like you get when you drink champagne to quickly. And in ‘Lola’, they have one of the single greatest cover songs ever recorded. It’s almost impossible to think of a song that has been covered more successfully than their jangly, gender twisting take on a bona fide classic from The Kinks. In recent times, The Raincoats have performed at a couple of All Tomorrow’s Parties festival, but their memory will always be linked to being loved by Kurt Cobain, as opposed to just being a really stellar band. Which without any shadow of a doubt they were.
8. cLOUDDEAD
cLOUDDEAD are in danger of disappearing mostly due to their own layers of mystique and eccentricity. There isn’t anything or anyone who has ever sounded like this three piece. You’d probably put them in the experimental hip hop category but they sort of just float on the fringes of everything in a mad collage of love, life and everything that’s in between. Full of wildly obscure and woozy beats watermarked by whiny, almost surrealist verses; cLOUDDEAD make music that throbs and pulsates like an electrical generator one moment and glides along next to God the next.
This is a group that can easily annoy you. They’ll dangle a sliver of information and clarity in front of you only to whip it away immediately and leave you hanging in a state of Pavlovian confusion. Fragmented and seemingly unfinished, cLOUDDEAD have left their audience in anticipated limbo, hankering for any sign that this group might return from the realms of the forgotten lands.
While this group may not be remembered for their own albums, they may instead be remembered for other peoples as they founded the brilliant independent label Anticon; a recording company dedicated to signing original and experimental artists. Over the years, names such as Deep Puddle Dynamics, Buck 65 and Mercury award winning Young Fathers have all been signed to Anticon. While they may be remembered most for their work as a record label, cLOUDDEAD should never be forgotten for their captivating take on the hip hop world.
7. Breakwater
You may not have heard of or be aware of the powerful Philadelphia funk outfit that is Breakwater, but you’ve almost certainly heard some of their stuff. The reason people might not necessarily know about this band is nothing to do with either themselves or their record label. Instead, it is due to one of their songs being sampled by a modern group and from then on being associated with them rather than Breakwater.
Daft Punk’s ‘Robot Rock’. We all know it. We’ve all heard it. That driving rhythm and melody that sounds like an android falling down the stairs was in fact taken from a track called ‘Release The Beast’ and was sampled, almost in its entirety by the French electro pop megastars back in 2005 as part of their Human After All album.
But Breakwater were so much more than just another band from the seventies to be sample bait for modern day musicians. They were a damn fine funk band. Seriously cool even by the illustrious heights set in that decade, Breakwater melted jazz and soul sounds together to form something that never seemed cheesy or clichéd as a lot of funk bands can tend to be. With only two full albums to their name, Breakwater are in the musically equivalent position of having the Extinct in the Wild tag slapped on them by musical rights groups.
6. The Books
The Books made difficult music that’s easy to listen to. Made up of Nick Zammuto and Paul de Jong, their sound was densely packed together with intricate and brittle melodies with hundreds upon hundreds of obscure samples that will shatter if you get too close to them. These samples include soundbites of everyday background conversation, golf commentary and just plain random noises. You could probably even list space and silence as instruments in the album notes because The Books use them better than just about anyone. Their stuff is bleak yet brimming with content.
The Books worked almost exclusively without a drum kit or machine, choosing instead to use filing cabinets, pots, pans and whatever else was close to hand to build a beat from and just loop it to infinity. It’s subtle and absurd, whimsical and heart aching all at once. They made albums that you put on in April and the next thing you know it’s the end of summer. The Books seemingly operated within their own cosmos throughout the noughties and if feels like their collection of incredible albums have been filed away, deep in the recesses of the music industry to gather dust. That being said, it’s probably what The Books would’ve wanted anyway.
5. Donny Hathaway
Another incredible talent possibly being forgotten due to his early passing is Donny Hathaway. He had a voice that doesn’t come along every day of the week, tender and full of angst. It flowed like honey and was built for singing in dark, smoky rooms in the fashionable districts of a city to a wide eyed audience.
Perhaps more famous for his duets with Roberta Flack than his own languid solo albums, Hathaway’s individual songs were full of different tones and rhythms, little soft screeches that explode gently like whale song and smooth melodies that are as soft as silk. Hathaway had a style that essentially perfected the rhythm and blues, unfortunately it seems that the easiest way to do that is to have genuine pain in your life.
Hathaway suffered greatly from severe depression, was crippled by paranoid schizophrenia and took copious amounts of medication to deal with it all. As time went on he began to behave more and more irrationally and it came to a point when Hathaway could take no more and jumped from the balcony of his hotel room in New York. Hathaway left behind a sumptuous body of work that most of the world is seemingly allowing to gently fade away into the ether.
4. Red House Painters
This is cheating a little bit, as Mark Kozelek and several members of Red House Painters have reformed and been releasing astonishingly brilliant music under the moniker Sun Kil Moon, but still, Red House Painters deserve to never be forgotten.
Red House Painters in many ways embody the notion of the sublime, making music that’s so staggering and overwhelming it could crush you under the weight of its own beauty. Every song is a perfectly formed crystal, full of sweeping lines and drifting vocals. Listening to them is mesmeric, it’s like watching a beautiful woman dance in a crowded room. They made the sort of albums where the world dissolves around you, time gets lost and you realise you’ve missed your tube stop a few stations back. It’s music you see you see yourself reflected back in.
Red House Painters albums are packed with personal lyrics, heartfelt messages and a folky warmness that bubbles up out of every track while everything about their work has a slight mystical edge to it. Something intangible that you can’t quite explain why you love it, or why they are slowly being forgotten.
3. Isaac Hayes
Forget the whole Scientologist thing for a moment and everything else that may have punctuated his career, Isaac Hayes was a great musician. This is the man who gave the world Shaft for goodness sake, you know Shaft, the sex machine to all the chicks. The man who’d risk his neck for his brother man. Even in the world of soul music, Hayes was just the coolest cat you ever did see.
But that voice though, one of the most booming baritones of all time, it was as if his vocal chords had been lathered in treacle. Isaac Hayes could give Barry White a run for his money from Monday to Sunday with his laid-back, creamy soul music with those classically styled bass lines and running high hats that ticked away in the background like a stylish pocket watch. Truly phenomenal soul music that is now largely ignored.
The problem with Isaac Hayes is that most people don’t remember him as a musician. He’s either Chef from South Park or he’s that Scientologist who quit South Park amidst a sea of religious controversy. All of this overshadows his exploits as one of the kingpins of soul music in the seventies and it seems that following his death in 2008, people will only remember him as that sexually charged, chocolate ball singing Scientologist from a controversial cartoon; rather than one of the great male voices to come out of the Deep South in twentieth century.
2. Sparklehorse
Sparklehorse were technically a band, but really it was Mark Linkous. Despite never having the biggest following or ever selling the most records, it always seems as if Sparklehorse are every musician’s favourite musician. A theory emphasised by the people willing to contribute to Linkous’ work, a list that includes: Tom Waits, PJ Harvey, James Mercer, Iggy Pop, Danger Mouse and Black Francis to name just a few.
Sparklehorse were a fuzzy dream, one that you don’t want to wake up from because it’s better spending time with them than having to deal with the real world of death and taxes. Across their entire body of work, they have a collection of songs that flicker between being furious and fragile; its music to play when it’s raining heavily outside until your remember that he’s dead. And that you miss him.
Linkous lived a life full of struggle and misfortune that permeated into every chord he ever wrote. Whilst touring with Radiohead in the nineties he passed out after taking a combination of alcohol, heroin and Valium and lay unconscious with his legs trapped beneath his body. This caused his heart to stop and required Linkous to have surgery, dialysis and almost made him to lose both his legs. Linkous’ pain unfortunately wouldn’t end there and in 2010 he committed suicide by shooting himself in the heart.
In a way that seems fitting because that’s what he sang with. Not his brain or his vocal chords but his beating heart. Linkous’ music had that shadowy quality that you can’t explain, that resonance that lingers long after a song has finished. Unfortunately it seems that these lingering qualities are waning, as Sparklehorse seem to be slowly fading ever so gently from people’s memories.
1. The Sound
Like a large number of high quality footballers who played for Brazil in the sixties, The Sound had the bad luck to come into existence at the same time as one of the greatest, most emphatically loved and respected bands of all time. The Sound were overshadowed by Joy Division. They aren’t just forgotten now, they were forgotten in their heyday. They are an amazing band from the early eighties who are criminally underrated and under listened to.
Possessing the same type of desperation but a bit more of the punk ethos and feel, The Sound were every bit as good as their contemporaries like Joy Division or Echo and the Bunnymen. In Adrian Borland, they had a frontman and singer who sang with every ounce of heart and soul that Ian Curtis did. You only need to see them on the Old Grey Whistle Test to see this.
Much like Curtis, Borland too struggled with his inner demons. Severely depressed for the majority of his life and diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, these emotions made their way into his song writing and singing voice, a deep howl as if something was trying to force its way out of his chest. After years of being continually screwed over by their record label and never receiving the support and love from the public that they did from the critics, The Sound disbanded and several years later Borland took his own life by jumping in front of a train. The Sound were a band people were willing to forget before even giving them the chance to be remembered.
What do you think of this list? Is there anyone we missed? Let us know in the comments below.
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