nixsight

After a couple of years of looking at the piece of software on my shelf and not being able to make it work through the power of sheer, focussed staring alone, I have managed to make Audio Cleaning Lab Deluxe work for me… it turns out that telekinesis is not one of my special powers. For those keeping count, that means that I’ve still only managed to identify “winning smile” and “innappropriate laughter” as my two sole super-powers. Never fear, though… I remain ever vigilant, and will continue to keep you updated as new skills are discovered…

Anyway, what my mastery of the secrets of audio electronisysis actually means is that I can finally start the process of ripping my vinyl to MP3, which means I might stand some chance of actually listening to it. I never thought I’d become this lazy, but it seems that technological advances have spoilt me to the extent that now, even just turning over an LP seems like too much effort.

(LPs, and Vinyl, for the younger among you, is what we used to use to listen to music. Before the audioelectro shamans discovered the alchemical magic of trapping the music inside the plastic, it used to live free on the surface of the plastic, settling gently in the tiny grooves which had been created as a natural part of several million year evolution of the 12″… it only caused the music minor discomfort when we used the tiny needle to scour it out of it’s place into the air. (7″ records were basically just 12″ ones that had been cut down to size… a random section of sound was lost in the process, but what you lost in cohesiveness of overall experience, you gained in portability)

One enormous plus to this is that I get to revisit emotional responses to music that I haven’t listened to properly since before I had a working CD player.

The main upside to this is that I get to listen to Smart, the 1995 album by Sleeper, all over again.

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Sleeper – Swallow

For the longest time I had an article half-written here in my drafts called “The Holy Church of Louise Wener”, which came out of an earlier, abortive attempt to get this recording shenanigan to work, and ended up with myself and my housemate barely restraining ourselves from dancing around to that same album, and both professing our total early-adoration of the lead-singer, the afore-mentioned Louise Wener…

Louise Wener is a writer now (although I haven’t read her yet, and there doesn’t appear to be an official place for her that I can link you to), and her way around a pop-song years back is a fair indication that her books will be insightful, funny, and sassy. She’s also now incredible looking, whereas back then she was the kind of cute that you could relate to: She didn’t look like a model, but she was a perfectly formed wee sexpot… more poppy than Miki Berenyi, more vivacious then Sonja from Echobelly. And there were many, many stories, sexy stories, stories of flings and jilted fellow band members, many of which I always suspected came directly from her own words in interviews… her apparent open appetites, to my still-forming sexual persona, made her seem all the more potent as a figure of sensual focus.

You have to bear in mind that I started late with all this stuff… I was thinking about sex at about the same age as young men are supposed to, from the age of six and then every five minutes till we die. But it was in the abstract for many years. I was too short and young looking to really experience pornography in any sort of visual, regularly available or private form until, well, until my first personal internet connection in the late nineties, and till then I’d been entirely reliant on literature for my erotica. Which is something I’m grateful for, honestly, but what I’m saying is, it meant my experience of sexually forthright women was almost entirely in the abstract…

I started late with the whole sex thing, too. Not for want of trying, but I didn’t really sort all that stuff out till I hit nineteen, so by 1994, I was two years into a proper sex-life, probably what, three partners in, and all of them had been as shy about things as I had.

So when I first saw Sleeper, before their first album hit, at the Joiners in Southampton, and heard (and saw) this incredibly sexual, effervescent and arrogant pop-pixie, completely owning her fellow band-members and everyone in the audience, besides, it was like I’d never seen anything like her before.

(Now, of course, I freely acknowledge that I was an idiot then. There were lots of musicians, female and male, from long before Sleeper, who were as primally aroused and arousing in their music, and I was even already listening to some of them… but I don’t think I was really as adept at spotting that hard seductive quality back then).

What I saw there, for the first time, was a woman who liked to fuck. Which wasn’t to say that she wasn’t capable of love and sensitivity and the rest of the range of physical emotional expression, but right there, in her voice and her lyrics, was this innate statement of intent or appetite that couldn’t be ignored. She made it clear that she knew that most relationships screw up; that most lovers either are, or will later become, liars… and as such, while all that cuddling stuff might be well and good, she wasn’t going to let it get in the way of the basic enjoyment of having a shag.

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Sleeper – Delicious

Male voices had been happy to admit a love of humping for decades, but the message from the other side of the gender line had normally been coded, in my experience.

And of course, up till that point, I’d always been a pretty sentimental guy when it came to sex, but what can I say… Louise Wener made me think about fucking. Not making love, or even having sex. Just pure and simple, lust for and of itself.

And now, of course, hearing those songs makes me feel the same damn way.

(I’ve since discovered that, if you ask the right questions, most women are just as horny and shag-motivated as Louise Wener was, and from as early an age, but the world has changed a lot in these last eleven years, lemmetellyou)

Mil Millington clearly has similar opinions on this matter to me, and so does my housemate. Well, frankly, any right thinking man of a certain age ought to. I just hope that if I ever meet Louise Wener, this piece of writing doesn’t precede me. But if it does, if in fact, you are Louise, and you are reading this, I take this opportunity, here and now, to pay you tribute:

Louise Wener, beautiful and (at least in our imaginations) vaguely dirty wonder of the Britpop scene, we salute you. May you long live in our hearts and libidos, and may all of our future loves be grateful for the sense of lustiness that you opened up within our young male brainpans.