Justin Robertson took his Five Green Moons on the road last week for a trio of gigs, in Liverpool, Manchester and Todmorden. On Thursday night he was at Rainy Heart in Stretford, a new South Manchester venue with some fearsome speaker stacks, in a retail unit in what used to be Stretford Mall.
Five Green Moons may not be the most unlikely thing to have ever happened in the former Stretford Mall- that would probably be Muhammad Ali's visit in 1971. The three time heavyweight champion of the world was on a visit to the Stretford branch of Tesco (when it was Stretford Arndale) on a promotional tour for Ovaltine, a visit that had to be closed down by police due to the sheer number of people that arrived hoping to see the world's most famous sportsman. Ali was backed into a corner by an ecstatic mob and had to be rescued by the police. But, Five Green Moons may well be a close second to that.
Justin stands behind a bank of equipment- laptop, drum machine, synth, theremin, FX pedals- dressed in ceremonial robes, horned headgear and hood with guitar and e- bow. What follows is as much ritual as gig, a slew of influences fused into one- pagan poetry, the bass and drums of dub, weird folk horror, post- punk, gnomic lyrics about ritual, repetition, sense, form and beauty, fuzz and sci fi. It's a fully realised hour of music, no gaps between the songs, a one man excursion into rite and the occult via music, everything drenched in the space of dub- 'everything's a song in the sound world', he chants at one point, his right hand wafted round the theremin and the bass kicking around the concrete walls.
Towards the end he plays Boudicca, a track from last year's Moon 2 album (Brix Smith is on vocals on the recorded version, a presence from 1980s Manchester, The Fall being one of the main reasons Justin arrived in Manchester to study in the mid- 80s). Boudicca is a trippy collision of post- punk and dub, a celebration of the Queen of the Iceni, sung by Brix. After an hour of Five Green Moons ritual, of Justin's spoken word vocals, the rubbery bass, the skittering/ thudding drum sounds and Space Echo, the distorted guitar and FX, come to end. Justin holds his arms forwards bringing the invocation to a close.
This Chant Is God Voice is one of the prime cuts from Moon 2 and was a highlight on Thursday night at Rainy Heart. 'Repetition is ritual/ Form is beauty/ This chant is beauty'.
A series for Saturdays in 2026 inspired by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt's set of cards, Oblique Strategies (Over One Hundred Worthwhile Dilemmas). Eno and Schmidt created them to be used to unblock creative impasses and approach problems from unexpected angles. Each week I'll turn over an Oblique Strategy card and post a song or songs inspired by the suggestion.
Last week's card said Into the impossible. I went with an instant response, The Drum by The Impossibles (the Andrew Weatherall remix from 1991). Ernie agreed and mentioned his 7" copy of the original by Slapp Happy from 1974. Ernie also had Peter O'Toole singing in The Impossible Dream in the 1972 film Man Of La Mancha. Walter went with Medicine Head in 1973 with a mathematical impossibility, One Plus One Is One. Anonymous consulted a search engine and got Into The Impossible by Saint Profane and another Anonymous (or possibly the same one) suggested Impossible by The Charlatans. Khayem came up with Kylie's Impossible Princess and Bon Iver's cover of Talk Talk's I Believe.
Spendid commented that there were several ways to take the suggestion Into the impossible and settled on Jessica Curry's So Let Us Melt, a computer game score that captures the 'impossible wonder of childhood... but comes closer to describing the aching loss of adulthood'. Indeed. Jessica's album is here- it's well worth your time.
I did wonder, as a response to Spendid's comments, if I should be resisting the temptation to go with gut instinct when turning over the card, not just go for a song or artist name that the card suggests, but be a little less literal and a little more more lateral- surely what Eno and Schmidt intended.
Today's Oblique Saturday card is this...
Go to an extreme, move back to a more comfortable place
I slept on this. Extreme music is an interesting one. Artists that go to extremes are often admirable and worthy of our respect but they don't always make for fun listening experiences. I'm sure you can think of your own examples.
I often think of Gnod as an extreme band- a Manchester collective with a rotating cast of players, born from a scene in the 00s around Islington Mill in Salford. They work with sound and light artists to create fully immersive experiences. They have played at a night called Gesantkunstwerk (German word, translates as 'whole arts work'). They cite Kurt Vonnegut as being as important to their music as any musical influences. So it goes.
In 2017 they released an album called Just Say No To The Psycho Right- Wing Capitalist Fascist Industrial Death Machine (as statement even truer now than it was then- the psycho right- wing capitalist fascist industrial death machine is out of control in the USA right now). Gnod's music is loud, everything into the red, sludge powered psyche- rock. Maybe it's difficult to be extreme while making guitar music in the 2010s/ 20s but Gnod do it and do it well.
Early Husker Du- the Land Speed Record Husker Du- are extreme too, a live album from 1982 that flies through seventeen songs in half an hour, breakneck, amphetamine hardcore punk. By the time they hit 1984 and their double album concept opus Zen Arcade, they had an album that ended with the fourteen minute long jazz- hardcore punk instrumental Reoccurring Dreams. In between the two they opened 1984's New Day Rising with the title track, a coruscating wall of buzzsaw guitars,, breaking glass and thumping tinny drums, just three words repeated over and over...
I then thought about going into the industrial techno area, the 'full on panel beaters from Prague' (quoth Andrew Weatherall) of the 90s, the sound of a metal bin being kicked, or Belgian hardcore and Dutch gabba, dance music taken to its extremities. Weatherall himself visited this area with Dave Hedger as Lords Of Afford, gratuitously hardcore techno as heard on this 1994 remix of Steve Bicknell...
Taking the word Extreme literally threw up Extreme Noise Terror, the extreme noise band from Ipswich. In 1992 they appeared on stage with The KLF (a duo who definitely took things to extremes) at the Brits, a noise metal version of 3am Eternal that ended with Bill Drummond firing a machine gun (firing blanks) at the assembled Brits audience. Then they dumped a dead sheep outside the venue.
It occurred to me that extreme music can sometimes become a competition, a band racing to take their sound to the nth degree, the furthest point it can go. In 1989 Napalm Death recorded You Suffer, their speed metal/ grindcore reduced to a song that is 0.03 seconds long, released on 7". The lyrics apparently are, 'You suffer/ But why?'
The first half of the Oblique Strategy card is Go to an extreme... The second half is ...move back to a more comfortable place. I'm not sure I like the idea of music being comfortable- comfortable sounds dull and easy, like a sofa or a pair of elastic waist trousers. I've nothing against either, trousers and sofas are important parts of life, but I'm not sure art and music should be seen as such.
There's a fairly well known phrase, 'art should disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed'. Banksy has used it but it's attributed to Cesar A. Cruz and a 1997 poem with the same title, a poem about the horrors humans inflict on each other- imperialism, war, capitalism, bigotry- and suddenly we're back at Gnod again.
But comforting the disturbed is important, music as medicine and as a means of relief, as transportation. I know that music can do this- it's been incredibly important to me in the time since Isaac died in November 2021 and I've written before about a long Saturday afternoon, a week after his death, an afternoon where it seemed like it never got light and that it might go on forever. My physical symptoms were appalling, not least raging tinnitus. I hadn't been able to listen to any music since he died, nothing seemed to be what I wanted to hear. But I needed something that afternoon, if nothing else just to mark the passing of time and drown out the noise in my ears. I put on one of Richard Norris' Music For Healing EPs, probably the December 2021 release, two twenty minute ambient tracks and they did the trick, some aural balm, just enough to make an impact on me. I followed it with some ambient Americana by SUSS and somehow the music helped. A few weeks ago, to mark Martin Luther King Day, Richard released The Corn Is Coming, a four minute ambient track, made in an hour as part of the Mutual Defiance/ In Place Of War campaign. It's here.
Feel free to make your own Oblique Saturday suggestions in the comment box.
More from the archives of Snub TV, the BBC 2 early evening magazine programme that delved into the world of alternative and independent music between 1988 and 1991. In 1988 Dinosaur Jr pitched up in the UK touring their third album, Bug. Their 1987 album, You're Living All Over Me, is the purist's choice- punk, metal, folk rock, indie, alternative, guitar rock, full on distorted guitar solos courtesy of J Mascis coupled with his drawled vocals- a winning sound. Bug may not be as good an album but it does contain Freak Scene.
When Snub TV caught up with J, Lou and Murph it was miming to Freak Scene in the back garden of John Robb's house in West Didsbury, south Manchester, complete with a life size fibreglass fisherman and various plastic toys. Freak Scene was a song that seemed to cross the borders in 1988, a mini- anthem for those into all the different kinds of alternative music.
Like John Robb, Dub Sex were part of late 80s Manchester, if not widely known elsewhere. The members lived in the infamous Hulme Crescents, a 1960s housing scheme on the outskirts of town that by the 80s had been abandoned by the people it was intended for and had become another world inhabited by those who wanted to live outside the conventional world. Flats, walkways in the sky, flat roof pubs, open spaces, abandoned cars, a vaguely post- apocalyptic feel. I visited a friend who lived there a couple of times and walked past it often as a teenager heading up Wilmslow Road into town. It was not suburbia.
Dub Sex sounded a bit like Hulme looked- raw, concrete, intense. Vocalist Mark Hoyle was a northern version of Mark Stewart or Billy Bragg, 100% commitment. Industrial basslines, wire guitars, pummeling drums. In 1989 they appeared on Snub playing live at The Boardwalk, doing Swerve.
Probably the best song you've not heard before that you're going to hear today.
A post bringing together two artists from the recent past, who both released songs into the world of 2015/ 2016, a decade ago now, and who seem to have flitted in and out ever since.
First, Kid Wave, a four piece indie/ shoegaze band centred around singer/ guitarist Lea Emmery. Lea left her home town of Norkopping, Swden and headed for London, wrote some songs and sent them to Heavenly (who signed her). Under some pressure to do something or return home and pick up her studies Lea recruited a band with guitarist Matthias Bhatt (from Norkopping), bassist Harry Deacon and drummer Serra Petale. The sole Kid Wave album, released by Heavenly, came out in 2015 and was titled Wanderlust. Eleven songs, slow burning, fuzzed up psyche/ indie guitar with vocals by Lea, who sounds magnificently bored at times. For some reason Wanderlust was recorded in Stockport.
All I Want is a beauty, the sort of song that makes you feel like you're twenty one again, unencumbered, Ray Bans and a faded Levis denim jacket, Silk Cut and cassettes, you haven't been home for days.
Lea moved to Los Angeles and recruited a new band and not much happened until an EP in 2023 called Gloom (it looks like Lea and Kid Wave are London based again- or at least were in 2023).
In 2016 Paprika Kinsky,a singer/ musician from Lille, France, released a single Kids Of Your Crime. Driving synth/ guitar pop, slightly psyche, slightly motorik, sugar glazed indie disco, a tinny drum machine and chuggy bass with some sun dappled twinkly melodies on top. Slightly stoned on a sunny afternoon vibes- again Ray Bans and Levis and nothing much to do but loll about, listening to music, waiting for something to happen.
Paprika is an art school graduate and as well as music has made leather harnesses for FKA Twigs and Grimes. She seems to have dipped in and out of music, various electro- pop/ indie- pop one offs and singles, most recently Diamond Queen and Steady Lover, both out on Bandcamp in 2022, and then a five song EP also in 2022 called Young Broke And Fabulous. We're back to Levis, sunglasses, cigarettes and youth again aren't we.
At some point in the next couple of months Jason Boardman's Before I Die label is going to release an album by Hawksmoor called Am I Conscious Now? and I feel fairly confident in saying it will still be around at the end of the year and beyond. There's one track from it available to listen to, Ti Kallisti, at Bandcamp- a gorgeous, low key four minutes of piano, synth, space and echo. There were ten copies of a super limited vinyl version of the album but they've all gone (obvs) but don't worry, it'll be getting a full release soon- ish.
Exploring Hawksmoor's back catalogue is a joy. In October last year a two track single originally recorded in 2012 appeared on Bandcamp. The A-side is titled Life Aboard The International Space Station, an instrumental that drifts weightlessly for four minutes, acoustic guitar and electric guitar, keys, Mellotron, some bass and a Moog pedal called the Moogerfooger. Some patterns, sequences and refrains, orbiting gently. It's lovely and in dealing with the ISS, constantly circling above us at a speed of 17, 500 mph, revolving round the earth once every ninety minutes and giving the occupants sixteen sunrises and sunsets a day, its somewhat existential too.
The B- side has a title borrowed from J.G. Ballard, Storm Bird- Storm Dreamer, more finger picked acoustic guitar, more cyclical guitar patterns- there's something quite pastoral about it. It's a bit shy of three minutes long and I'd happily listen to a much longer version.
Ballard's story is taken from a compendium of science fiction short stories called The Disaster Area, first published in 1967. In Storm Bird- Storm Dreamer giant birds accidentally fed on new hormone fertilisers used in industrial agriculture have started attacking large animals and people. The story's main character Crispin survives a bird attack and then joins a volunteer force to defend the country against the giant birds. He develops a fascination with a woman living in a remote cottage whose husband was killed by a bird, ripped into pieces, which then flew off with their infant son. There's plenty more as you can probably imagine. What this dystopic story has to do with the tranquil, lilting Hawksmoor instrumental of the same name I'm not entirely sure.
One of my favourite cover versions- I Heard It Through The Grapevine by The Slits. In 1979 The Slits released their debut single, the exhilarating, spiky, punky Typical Girls. The Slits were original punks, London living waifs and strays who found themselves energised and then unleashed by punk. Dennis Bovell produced them, bringing some heavyweight reggae skills to their untutored, learning- on- the- job sound.
Their cover of I Heard It Through The Grapevine is a blast, off kilter dub punk, a version with entirely its own spirit and energy. Singer Ari completely re- imagines Marvin Gaye's impassioned vocal, turning it into something very different- the infidelity that Ari has heard about has empowered her, transforming the song.
Budgie played drums on their album and on Typical Girls but here the drums by Max Edwards (who played with Zap Pow and Soul Syndicate as well as on a slew of recordings with The Heptones, The Ethiopians and Augustus Pablo). The Slits version of I Heard It Through The Grapevine never quite does what you expect it to, it's got a life of its own, the hmmm hmmmm backing vocals are loose and the wayward rhythm keeps the listener on their toes, the bass and drums almost sliding around.
The number 23 carries some significance for me. Many of you will know that my son Isaac's birthday was the 23rd November and he died in 2021 aged 23. In the year following his death the number 23 started appearing in front of us frequently (I'm aware of confirmation bias and understand this was more liekly coincidence than cosmic but even so...). Eventually the three of us, me, Lou and Isaac's sister Eliza, decided in a fairly spur of the moment decision to all get a 23 tattooed on us. My 23 is on my left forearm and I see it all the time.
23 has a pop culture significance too- William Burroughs highlighted the 23 enigma in the 1970s, it's central in Discordianism, has a significance in KLF mythology and to Throbbing Gristle and it occurs elsewhere- 23 Skidoo. If you've been keeping up with recent celebrity news you might be aware of the controversy around David and Victoria Beckham and their now estranged son Brooklyn. David wore number 23 when he left Manchester United, possibly in connection to Michael Jordan. When Isaac was very young, a baby, we were at the fairly recently opened Trafford Centre, an enormous shopping centre on the outskirts of Manchester and a ten minute drive from our house. As we pushed Isaac in his pram along the upper deck a couple with a pram passed us heading in the opposite direction- David, Victoria and Brooklyn.
Four 23s have presented themselves to me in the last couple of weeks. Recently we found ourselves near the Trafford Centre again and called in at a popular fast food chain (don't judge me, we don't go there often but every now and then it fulfills a weird need)...
In the week either side of that a pair of musical 23s cropped up, the first was sent by my friend Ian, a nineteen minute long piece of soulful, minimal house music from the middle of last year titled Spirit Of 23 by Melchior Productions Ltd. It was new to me and very nice, a chilled and hypnotic way to spend twenty minutes.
The week after Ian sent that to me this came up via a friend on social media, a track from August last year by Auntie Flo (Brian D'Souza), Paradise 23, from his Birds Of Paradise album- Roland drum machines, vintage synths, birdsong, tropical ambient with grooves.
Then, to turn a 23 trio into a quartet, Jesse sent me the photo at the top of this post just a few days ago. Four 23s so far in January 2026- and having noted all these coincidences this post then mainly came together in my head while driving home from work last Friday... 23rd January.
