Wow! ...that is quite a review

Yes. Needed a cup of tea and a sit down after reading this - Mick Middles writing in the printed Fall Edition of Rock at Night which has the theme of 'Revolution'... Here we go:

"Of all the angles, colours, shades, clouts clangs and dances that have given life to Manchester music since the advent of punk, none have felt or tasted quite the same as The Speed Of Sound. With a history over 30 years deep and a smattering of musicians adding up to - and beyond - 18, Speed Of Sound have remained a vibrant scream from the Manchester shadows.

It HAS to be a scream, too, at times literally so, for this perennial Manchester outsider band. Now deep into middle age, the lovely intelligent and softly spoken people who take refuge within this band explode into life when their feet hit the stage.

I recall a gig three years ago at Manchester's funky-if-not-downbeat Thirsty Scholar. Sitting chatting within the wicker-lined interior, we chatted as they unpacked their gear, carefully lying their guitars to rest before studiously replying to my measured questions.

As the set began, they instantly transformed into some kind of weird raging torrent. John Armstrong slashing an arm viciously across his guitar while Ann-Marie Crowley vocals howled as an untamed banshee. I swear that a gaggle of attendees, seasoned punks to man and woman took two steps back in disbelief. In that modest arena, it became one of the most spectacular gigs I had witnessed for decades.

Around that time, I received a copy of their sumptuous double album, Everything Changes. It proved to be  a gorgeous product, this, especially in vinyl format, where the main affair was accompanied by an additional 10 song CD.Essentially therefore, that rare beast, the 'double album' and a most intriguing one at that. Fear not, this is no Frampton Comes Alive where the entire career hinges on a gimmick-laden, video friendly head bug of a song. Although bugs do abound and kind of twist your brain with repeated plays, offering visions of, I guess, Whalley Range or thereabouts.

The beautiful cover features four photographic tints of what looks like a Manchester park and a stunning marble statue on the reverse. There is more: A lyric-heavy inner-sleeve neatly overlays undoctored images of the band who also appear cartoon-esque on a separate sheet and - more, more again - a neat A4 glossy poster insert. I do apologise if this initial talk of packaging might seem rather crass,  as I mean no disrespect. What is important here is that the parade of artwork and extraordinary care built into it reflects the equal care embedded in the music.

What I particularly adored about this album is the unlikely relationship between the languid New York style vocals of songwriter John. Armstrong and the infectious evocative bass of Kevin Roache. It is a marriage that governs the album recalling - for me at least - a rather bizarre cocktail of Television / The Only Ones, Henry Crow and, when Ann-Marie Crowley's vocals kick in, touches of 'Meet On The Ledge' circa Fairport. The comparisons might seem lazy, but this is precisely where the album sits...oh, perhaps with elements of off-kilter John Marty. Maybe...maybe, definitely.

In 2018, there followed a further extraordinary slap of vinyl. A single this time, in support of Manchester Women's Aid. A double-A-side of two songs "I'm Real" and " I Don't Want Your Attentions", both ferociously exploding with feministic intent... and both written by John Armstrong. While the song titles may seem self explanatory, the jagged edges of the lyric certainly snagged on unexpected territory. "I won't put up with this anymore you've pushed me near the edge, every time I see you I want to get away, I just wish you were dead."

John Armstrong is an enigma; Perhaps Manchester's greatest, squealing form under the floorboards. Interviewing him is, itself, a curiously beguiling task.

I ask him about his writing... he replies: "There's a literary approach in my writing, partly because of writing about actual things rather than generic stuff. There are enough people writing predictable pop songs already. We need more songs about a ship full of toxic waste or a mannequin tied to a pub roof or the ring road in Rio de Janeiro. I am trying to find something that interests me. Something that won't be boring in ten years". As carefully posed question...are Speed Of Sound comfortable with being tagged 'outsiders'? "Very much Outsiders." He replies. "We are not interested in the music business, labels fashions and trends and didn't start making music to end up of the cover of Smash Hits or being a major label signing. All this people who have played with The Speed Of Sound over the decades make music because this is what they do. The industry is about 'product'. The sound, the textures is irrelevant to record companies. Whereas we are simply doing it for the music which is the other way around to the mainstream. Doing it our way gives us a level of artistic control that is impossible in the major label world. I am happy with that."

A new album edges towards completion. Themes will edge towards sci-fi in a typically off-kilter manner. Shots will emerge before the album release, in Spring 2021, in the form of planned singles. But of course, this being 2020, nothing is ever going to be nailed onto anything. This is the uncertain world in which we live.

Bu Speed Of Sound remain elegantly adrift, from anything and everything."

Mick Middles

Song By Song - The Wargame

The darkness and silence of the ocean depths fill the Wargame with salt and stay; it dates from 1989. There was a series of trawlers being dragged and or sunk by submarines in the late 1980's the introduction of quick release mechanisms for nets has changed that but the the silent and invisible 'ungentlemanly weapon' still remains a menace to fishermen.
I had just read Edgar Allen Poe's short stories and their recurring themes of live burial and claustrophobia resonated with the disappearing trawlers and submarines in the news headlines.
Submarine exercise areas surround the British coast and there are also visiting (and not always invited) submarines present.
There are several recorded versions of The Wargame; the 2010 version on the 'At Tree Level' album, a live studio recording from late 2013, an 'unplugged' version from also from 2013 and the 'Everything Changes' album version of 2016.
Regularly in the live et, The Wargame has multiple different live recordings also existing from 1989 and 1990. The 2010 version has a video filmed in North Brewick, which has submarine exercise areas clearly marked just off shore on the standard ordnance survey map.

song by song: I See You Everywhere That I Go

Kevin is the only one of us whose voice isn't on the Everything Changes album; 'I See You Everywhere That I Go' feature's Paul's vocal contribution: 

"Ya right?" Just before counting us in. It seemed wrong to edit it out.

Written a week before the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, 'I See You Everywhere That I Go' (or ICU as is was abbreviated on set lists in ’89-‘91) was a regular in the live list from immediately after writing, the format has changed little since then, it still opens with the single minor chord and hurls itself straight into a chorus before diving into the first instrumental passage which has shrunk considerably and is less John Coltrane/Eight Miles High/far-out than it used to be 28 years ago.The verses still all come together, a sideways shift and then its choruses all the way out. The live popularity is echoed by the number of recordings - live versions exist from ’89 and ’90 as well as the 'At Tree Level' and 'Everything Changes' album takes, plus an as yet unreleased remix from the EC recording. Currently - thanks to it briefly being on the NME website in 2011 - it is also our most watched video.

Although not deliberately obscure, it is open to interpretation in several different ways. The ever present security cameras of the 21st century were relatively uncommon in 1989, but in East Germany one in six people was a Stasi informant, at various times spying on each other often without ever knowing their target was also an informant and reporting back too. 

Lyrically there is a parallel element of paranoia and obsession - it could be a love song or even a stalker song. It''s unclear if the point of view is the watched, or the watcher, or both. This slightly dusty miniature of the paparazzi statue in Bratislava stands next to the CD player in the kitchen,. He Is a reminder that you are always being watched. You are always on camera. So best look sharp.

song by song - Checkpoint Charlie

Imagined as the soundtrack of a dark and bleak unmade cold war spy film, Checkpoint Charlie crunched and kicked its way to be the opening track of the bonus CD of the Everything Changes LP. The Berlin Wall lurked in the background of my childhood, through the teenage years and half of my 20's. It was a stark symbol of the the ever present threat of nuclear winter and of course a physical

barrier and a significant cultural reference point, through the writing of Len Deighton (and the Michale Caine films) plus Quiller, John Le Carre and the binary appearance of 'western' freedom with David Bowie and Iggy Pop creating art and expression, while just over the border an average of one in any six people was a Stasi informant, while the cities of opposites competed with each other to be best; if one built a TV tower the other built a taller one with a restaurant in it; if one had a zoo the other had to have more spectacular animals in theirs.

An insular self-contained city deep inside a separate country, divided into four different administrative zones and split from itself by a wall would be the stuff off science fiction if it wasn't real.

The first EP was released in September 1989, and one of the first places it was broadcast was on Kentucky Fried Royalty alternative radio in Berlin, just before the wall came down on 9th November. The following month the Romanian regime collapsed and the Soviet Bloc was crumbling, and with it the cold war. There was a sense that the world had come to it's senses and nuclear war receded into the background... little did we know.
The former site of Checkpoint Charlie - the transit point between the US Zone and East Berlin - now has a recreation of the border crossing booth and a MacDonalds, it is a Grade One listed tourist trap. If you are ever in Berlin try Checkpoint Charlie in the late evening, when the tourists have all gone and the streets are deserted, there is at least a whiff

of the atmosphere of menace as you walk across the street that was an open tract of land between the East and West checkpoints of the wall.

The tune for Checkpoint Charlie was born on a visit to Berlin in 2012, I met up with Lord Litter (the DJ who had played us there 23 years earlier) did an extended interview for his show on Radio Marabu and left a guitar riff on his hard drive. We both recorded very different versions (you can hear them on Soundcloud), mine became the demo-version for the recording for Everything Changes. It evolved and the final LP version has Lord Litter provided the voice of an East German border guard on the introduction, speaking the phrases he had heard so many times before as a native Berlin resident, sometimes while he was smuggling

East German bands master-tapes into the west... I can't think of anyone better qualified to have on the recording.
The closing moments of the album version of Checkpoint Charlie are JFK addressing the people of Berlin and the world's media on 26 June '63, many thanks to the Miller Centre University Of Virginia for providing and allowing use of the audio. Ich bin ein Berliner.

Checkpoint Charlie also appears on this Detour Records compilation album 

If you want to know more about life in former East Berlin try Anna Funder's Stasiland

blink and you miss it

Time slips away alarmingly fast. It might have been a two month gap in posts but it has not been an empty chasm of nothingness; our Everything Changes album is now stocked in Clampdown Records and Vinyl Revival (filed under Manchester of course). We're working on some good looking gigs for later in the year and the next one is Sunday 26th February, an early evening hour long 7pm set, its free entry and followed by Ska Sunday, if you're in Manchester come down and say hello.

Between the feasts

The dark nights are already shortening and eyes turn to the coming year. Thanks for your support over the last twelve months, we've got moving and achieved a lot; finally releasing the Everything Changes album and receiving a 9.5/10 review for it in Sounds Magazine has been a fulfilling experience. 2017 looks pretty exciting from here too, with more video planned and a bunch of gigs waiting for the dates to be nailed down, plus a huge triple-header gig in July, and as always new songs in the pipe. The album is available on bandcamp here We hope to see you out there in '17.

Wrapping up the years live appearances were gig numbers 52 and 53
December 18th at the Thirsty Scholar set list:

I'm Real
Only Everything
The  Moment Is Now
I Can't Say
Uhrwerk
Love
Shut All The Clubs
Seen It All Before
I Don't Want Your Attentions
Checkered Land
There's No One There

and...

10th December Moor Rugby Union Club set list:

Whatcha Gonna Do About It
Checkered Land
Substitute
Girl On The Roof
Nothing But A Heartache
Only Everything
The Moment Is Now
Seen It All Before
Walk On By
Karin B
Shut All The Clubs
Poison Ivy
There's No One There
Brand New Cadillac
Crash
Venus

Sounds on The Speed Of Sound

Everything Changes is a big album, so it's quite a big review...
Mick Middles writing in Sounds :

Gorgeous product this, especially in vinyl format, where the main affair is accompanied by an additional 10 song CD. Essentially therefore, that rare beast, the ‘double’ album and a most intriguing one at that. Fear not, this is no ‘Frampton Comes Alive’ where the entire career hinges on a gimmick-laden, video friendly head-bug of a song. Although bugs do abound and kind of twist your brain with repeated plays, offering visions of, I guess, Whalley Range or thereabouts. The beautiful cover features four photographic tints of what looks like a Manchester Park with a stunning marble sculpture on the reverse. There is more, a lyric heavy inner-sleeve neatly overlays un-doctored images of the band who also appear cartoon-esque on a separate sheet and – more more, again – a neat A4 glossy poster. I doapologise if this initial talk of packaging might seem rather crass, but I mean no disrespect. What is important here is that the parade of artwork and extraordinary care that is built into it reflects the equal care embedded in the music.

And there IS care there, too. This is a band fully deserving of the term ‘underground’ in the ancient sense. For the entire affair dips below any conceivable radar and apparently, they are a band assembled from numerous others – including the equally extraordinary Poppycock – and have punched their weight down and through the decades. The main focus of their recording ethos is ‘first-take effect’, where initial magic is captured in favour of superior polish. Not that you would notice, for this is far from Lo-Fi.

What I particularly like about this album is the unlikely relationship between the languid New York style vocals of songwriter John Armstrong and the infectious evocative bass of Kevin Roache. It's a marriage that governs the album, recalling - for me at least - a rather bizarre cocktail of Television/Only Ones /Henry Cow and, when when Ann-Marie Crowley's vocals kick in, touches of 'Meet On The Ledge' circa Fairport. The Comparisons might seem lazy but, from this is precisely where the album sits -, oh perhaps elements of off-kilter John Martyn. Maybe—maybe, definitely.

I mention the latter for a curious and possibly ironic reason. For John Martyn, as ungainly and openly macho as any musician could be, provides the haunting of this exceptional album—from start to finish. I am not suggesting that ‘Solid Air’ sits so effortlessly in the background—but. With ‘Everything Changes’, some kind of ghost is born.

Despite all this background, this is a contemporary urban album. Through and through, really and – although I have no idea where the individual musicians reside, there are elements of Chorlton Bohemia here. Again, this may appear derogative, but it isn’t, really. Track one, ‘Shut All The Clubs’ is a sincere response against the blanket regeneration of Manchester and, beyond that, the obvious close-down of lifestyles without consultation or consideration. We are left, adrift, in deadening satellite towns, bereft of the bonhomie of

pubs and, in the city centre, the club culture that made the city thereat music extends from a stalwart socialistic heart. Rightly so and this filters defiantly through every song here. Indeed—of loss—loss and more loss, in social rather than romantic sense. This stuff flutters on local news every every evening of every week. Some of it PR puff. Some of it heartfelt. It doesn’t matter. It settles here and is openly recognisable, But there is more..much more—again and again. You can ignore and even disagree with all this background and simply groove. That is the true nature here. Kick-back and groove. Ignore the lyric sheet if you wish – it IS difficult to read, in truth and languish on the sofa, not unlike one of those advertising sloths from the DFS advert. Because, simply put, the music flows and soaks with delightful effect And boy does it!

Speaking as one who has spent the most part of 2016 hunting for actual songs on albums, famous and otherwise, it comes as an unexpected pleasure to something so effortlessly tune-heavy. Please don’t be paranoid, exotic bands of Manchester and beyond—I don’t mean you. Well possibly not. But here the songs carry more melodic twists than I have encountered in many years. All of them, if the sleeve is to be believed, scratched by the quill of John Armstrong although deftly augmented by a band who have been shuffling under the surface since 1989. An therein lies the key. It is now a long-term existence of a band lying so beyond the weakening tentacles of record companies, able to produce quality music and present it as a beautiful artifact without the need to tap into hazardous investment. This is how you do it.

So what do we get? The band’s website refers to the music as ‘atmospheric independent’ although that’s far too vague a tag and one that hints at the kind of psyche punched across by the skillful Gnod. But this is a truly different kettle— there lies a maturity within that – I may be wrong, they might bicker like a pack full of Scotties – seems to seep sweetly beyond he curt snap of musicianly ego. This reflects in the aforementioned member of Poppycock,

Ann Marie Crowley – a busy professional person shunting through a frenetic life – juggling life in two bands. This she achieves with a palpable sense of serenity. Poppycock live always remind me of distant grainy films of Pentangle, a band so lost to heavenly musicality. Well this is the atmosphere on ‘Everything Changes’ (The title being the least effective aspect of the entire package).

20 songs is a lot to take. More than most bands manage in a lifetime and yet, even deep into the extra disc – this being a multi-media affair, the atmosphere continues to push through. I don’t know quite how the sleeve is intended to relate to the music—.although it does. These are Autumnal strolls in Manchester park songs, spiced by that Television or Only Ones drawl. I admit, I am a pure sucker for such vocals and, somehow, the distance from ‘Speed of Sound ‘from any kind or record company or showbiz unreality serves to heighten the effect. Hype is peeled away. The youthful illusion of stardom is not allowed to feature. These are mature people who do not feel the need to exist in the minds of people they don’t know. I scan through the lyrics provided on

the inner sheet. There is an element, perhaps, of the blissful existentialism of ageing. Of moving away from the pulse-beat, of drifting thoughtfully. One thinks, maybe, of Dylan’s ‘Not Dark Yet’, of a fully thirty years of Cohen or, more locally, the ‘End of the Pier’ outpourings of The Distractions. This is the punk reflective. This is a valuable album for that, and more. For I know, I am parallel age, parallel feelings. How this might filter down to youth, I have no idea. The point is. Let the songs flow and enjoy them in the most uncomplicated manner and, to drag up seventies terminology, uncommercial way. Nothing matters. Look to the inner sleeve and scan the faces of this extraordinary band. Ghostly as they are. Even this is a shape-shifting moment. Ann Marie, dark and distant. John Armstrong, looking like the jazz musician of your dreams, glancing to the left—his left. Paul Worthington and Kevin Roache, somewhat shifty. It all combines to form a wry parody of the presentable pop persona. Times have changed and here, now it feels all the better for it.

The link is here:
http://soundsmagazine.co.uk/the-speed-of-sound-everything-changes-double-cd/

Everything Changes

No fanfare or overblown hype, just a simple statement: the album is released today.
You can get the digital version everywhere you would expect to find it and the physical version at https://thespeedofsound.bandcamp.com/album/everything-changes and at gigs.
No separate label, no corporate control, just real music made by real people.
Radio play has been racking up with multiple plays in Berlin, California, Florida, Gothenburg, Liverpool, Manchester, Salford, Seattle, Stockport, Stoke-on-Trent and more to come
Support the independents and buy some real music.

Following the epic 26th November gig, on Friday 2nd December we played a loud and immensely enjoyable birthday party supported by Kill Pretty and Elevator Lady, we're back live with Kill Pretty again on 10th in Warrington, then on 18th at the Thirsty Scholar with support from Weimar and 22nd we're in Blackburn seeing in the New Solar Year.

Set list from 2nd December:
I'm Real
Sit By The River
Maid Of The Grey
Day In Day Out
The Moment Is Now
Seen It All Before
Girl On The Roof
I Can't Say
Only Everything
Love
Shut All The Clubs

and... we're RockAtNight.com's Band of the Month with an interview feature to go with it

Launching

'Everything Changes' is here, the first of the album launch gigs was on Saturday at The Klondyke Club

With a mammoth high energy hour and a half twenty two sing set, including all the ten tracks on the vinyl LP together for the first time:
set list:
Checkpoint Charlie
Keep It Quiet
Uhrwerk
See You Everywhere That I Go
I'm Real
Love
I Don't Want Your Attentions
Charlotte
Checkered Land
Nothing But A Heartache
Shut All The Clubs
I Can't Say

Only Everything
Little Miss Restless
The Moment Is Now
Girl On The Roof
Seen It All Before
Karin B
Always Seems To Fall
Venus
There's No One There

Thanks to everyone that helped make this such a bloody ace evening and for buying our stuff too.

independent music for independent minds

The Moment Is Now

The video for The Moment Is Now, track one side two on the Everything Changes LP:

It was massive fun to film and so it should be for a song about astrophysics and lust.

The album is released on Dec 6th and preorder copies will go in the post to arrive early.
https://thespeedofsound.bandcamp.com/album/everything-changes

When we were three

This would have been the LP sleeve; now we need a complete rethink because we are not three, we are four. AnnMarie has added the fourth dimension to the sound, so everything changes yet again and this becomes the sleeve that never was. 

Huge thanks to Shay Rowan photographing the shoot this one came from.