Five Doctor Who stories that have inspired us

It's fair to say Doctor Who is the Keshcologist's time-travel anthology show of choice. Yes, yes, we remember Crime Traveller (which, I'm guessing, came about once the Beeb realised the 1996 TV pilot with Paul McGann wasn't being taken forward); we long for a DVD release of Ken Campbell as Erasmus Microman (which, I'm guessing, came about after he nearly got chosen as the Seventh Doctor, and decided to do his own take on it anyway for ITV); we have undimmed fondness for The Magician's House (which was based on a series of children's books but, I'm guessing, was taken forward by the promise of Ian Richardson being uncannily Doctor-ish on a Sunday teatime). But it's the longevity and endless elasticity of Who that weaved itself into the mindcloth of our woolly little heads. Here are a few stories you may wish to check up on, for context.

The Mind Robber (1969)
The Doctor's time-machine, the TARDIS makes a sudden emergency detour and gets sucked into an alternative universe, the Land of Fiction. The hastily cobbled-together first episode takes place in a white void, and ends with a spooky and iconic shot of the Police Box exploding, and (the very saucy) Wendy Padbury clinging onto the central console as it spins off into darkness. The costumes and props were mainly made up of whatever was available from other shows, and daft plot points included Patrick Troughton having to put Frazer Hines's face back together - he does so wrongly, and a different actor plays Jamie for the next episode!
Further listening: I Almost Died

The Daemons (1971)
Swishy style icon Jon Pertwee arrives in a stuffy English village where the vicar, a Reverend Magister, is revealed to be his arch-nemesis the Master, attempting to summon up evil hairy god Azal from the dawn of time. Maypoles, morris men, sacrifices, "chap with wings - five rounds rapid", it's ludicrous and archetypal and a rollicking good yarn in the Hammer vein.
Further listening: Village of Death

Enlightenment (1983)
Sailing ships in space, can you imagine? A race around the solar system, the crews plucked out of Earth history to traverse the solar winds and compete for the ultimate prize - enlightenment. Delightful whimsical concept well executed with neat model shots of the racing vessels. Plus - it's deliciously camp; I direct you to Turlough's troubles in the lower decks, and the fearsome space pirate played by... Nurse Gladys Emanuelle?!
Further listening: Enlightenment

Vengeance On Varos (1985)
The clown-coated Doctor arrives in a seedy world of trial by television, live executions, gunrunners, drugs... oh and there are evil interplanetary commodity traders who are talking molluscs. It pushes the concept of how dark you can make kids' entertainment, and lo and behold a couple of weeks later Michael Grade announced the show was being put on hiatus.
Further listening: Weapons Expo

The Happiness Patrol (1988)
An anti-Thatcher fable with forced jollity the way of life - the TARDIS gets painted pink so as not to depress the people - but don't worry, the trickster-like Doctor will defy the system. (Script editor Andrew Cartmel's job interview: "What would you most like to achieve during your time on Doctor Who?" "I'd like to overthrow the government.") Features a hilarious executioner who looked like Bertie Bassett, and who killed people by drowning them in hot sweets. This is one a lot of people our age seem to remember.
Further listening: Climate Dance

Five bands who have influenced us

The question of influences is particularly thorny in this band, particularly for those listeners who (believe they) like their bands to stick to the same style. We tend to confuse the majority. If Depeche Mode are on our list, then you can be sure the DM fan will hear a folk song and switch off. If Billy Bragg is on our list, then by God the first song had better be a solo electric guitar and bald lyrics about the miners, or they'll switch off. If the Bonzos are on our list, the Doo-Dah fan will find two songs in a row that aren't humorous, and then switch off. Et cetera. It's like the ZX Spectrum tunnel-visioners who follow our Twitter feed when we mention the computer, only to run away as soon as we mention anything not computer-related. I like to think of this process as sifting through the general mass of people to find only the really free and open ones (and congratulations on your excessively eclectic taste if you do consider yourself a fan of ours), but how can you tell when people are so quiet? And which influences really are the most important?

Over the years, our conception of who we want to sound like, and who we actually sound like, has mutated constantly. I'm going to list five of the bands who I think make good lines of fit across the scatterplot of Kesh.

The Cure
Here's a band who started off down a particular lo-fi path and, as their tastes and ability broadened, so the music went through a series of Wild Mood Swings, not only the happysad that encompasses the rushing highs and crushing lows, but a teetering between sunny anthropomorphic fantasy and harsh hooded-wept reality, and a gamut of instrumental styles, about the only unifying features being heavy use of chorus/delay pedals, and Robert Smith's vocals, which themselves skitter between anguished howls and playful hoop-las. They were a big influence on our live goth-pop sound circa 2000. It seems since around that time they've reined in and settled into a downbeat rockier mode. I get a little sad at the contempt Robert Smith seems to have for some of his own pop tunes, as if he feels he has to write stupid in order to get a chart hit - whilst many bands know that feeling, it doesn't make the songs pointless - you have to just try and get better at making what you want to play and say become irresistible to the masses. Of course if someone sings an upbeat song with contempt, what are the audience supposed to feel? We've felt this on stage when performing certain songs that have lost their lustre for us - better to sing a sad song with relish than an obligatory happy number.

Sparks
Super chamber-pop duo Russell Mael (the one with the mass of curly hair) and Ron Mael (the one with the moustache) have spent 40 years searing through styles (glam, disco, indie dance) and often left their fans trailing behind, a major upswing in their fortunes coinciding with 2002's Li'l Beethoven, which instead of beats features masses of vocals keeping up the rhythm. Their live setup with its sampled beats and comedy moments was inspiring to us when looking for ways of performing 2-man gigs around 2004/5. Their waspish wit and effervescent melodies are always something to aspire towards.

Stereo Total
The live inspiration around that time also came from Stereo Total (e.g. the Musique Automatique album), although whilst Sparks are precise, Stereo Total value the happy accidents of scuffed chords, malfunctioning electronics and strained vocal leaps. The duo of Francoise Cactus and Brezel Goring play high-tempo garage-electro-rockabilly-chanson-punk with playful lyrics in several languages, which lead to their own happy lyrical accidents. Watching the obvious fun they were having reminded us that music made fast can have a great compulsive energy.

Os Mutantes
This choice perhaps says more about where we are headed; but the free and easy collaged sounds of Os Mutantes (the Brazilian Beatles?) have excited and subliminally influenced us for many years, their homemade guitar pedals distinctly pushing us towards the circuit-bent route, and I note how they keep their scathing satires uptempo and fun, with those fresh bossa nova chords and infectious melodies. Make 'em dance, make 'em think, make 'em resist. I can only imagine how much better it might sound if I understood Portuguese rather than relying on translations.

Duran Duran
Seriously, work with me on this. Four or five immensely fashionable young men with a line in innovative electronics, sci-fi dystopian lyrics, great rhythms... catalogue model good looks, champagne lifestyle... vocals that crack during important gigs... a couple of people leave and we get our own Nile Rodgers super-counter-melodist to compensate... a name taken from Barbarella (now you're just making it up. Ed). Oh have it your own way.

Colony collapse disorder

Suck, baby, suck!

The latest release by Keshco is a three-track EP entitled "Bees". It's available through Australian netlabel 4-4-2 Music (at this link); alternatively you can buy a physical copy direct from us, or in a couple of record shops.

So, for the second year running, we've put together a release for Record Store Day (Saturday 21 April), which this year was followed on the Sunday by the 42nd anniversary of Earth Day. A double header of good causes. But how did these three songs come about?

A couple of years ago, erstwhile Queen drummer Roger Taylor released a single, "The Unblinking Eye (Everything Is Broken)". It's a lengthy broadside at many ills of the modern world, and Roger was quoted as saying he wanted people to take the track as a starting point for their own protest lyrics. With that in mind, his B-side was an instrumental mix of the same track.

Now, our Robert being an incorrigible Queen addict (and, at one point, the youngest member of their Fan Club!), he got hold of the single, and we decided to take Roger up on his challenge. I went away to write some new lyrics...

...and months passed. One story that had got me fired up was of the mysterious fall in bee populations across the globe, with in many cases entire colonies vanishing from their hives overnight. It's been baffling an increasingly concerned scientific community, with the suspects including intense agricultural practices, where monoculture and chemicals have deliberately removed the usual wildlife from around crops, meaning there's no natural pollination so they have to truck bees in to do the job. Schedules mean they're often driven back and forth across the country (or shipped overseas) with barely time to rest. As these fields are monocultures, there's not the varied diet that you'd expect in nature; so the bees are overworked, uprooted, have poor nutrition, and are thus increasingly falling prey to parasites like the varroa mite. On top of this it's suspected that pesticides may be damaging their navigation systems.

These protest lyrics take a while though. It's very hard not to just sound pompous. Anyway, in February we checked online. It still appeared as if nobody else had done a cover. Hmm. I sat down again to write.

In the end, we started the backing track (at Robert's in Streatham) before finishing the lyric. With Mr Taylor's instrumental in tracks 1-2 of our 8-track, we started overdubbing, feeling for our own style to emerge. Down went rhythm guitars, drums, keyboards, a guide vocal. Due to time constraints, the drums were Robert's first take - boom! Now we had the pulse, we were able to take out the original recording.

So, I had a couple of goes at finishing this lyric. It lacked a certain something, a chance element. Hmm... then in through the door walked Mark E Smith of The Fall. "Hi-uh!" said Mark. "What the hell are you making-uh? I'll sing all over that-uh." So he did! Verse three was ready. What next? An article in the New Internationalist had a lengthy quote from John Muir, 19th century naturalist, about his experiences walking through California in the days before it got spoilt. That sounded pretty evocative, and seemed to fit with the song's bridge, a detour from the home key...

Taking the 8-track to Oxford, I caught up with Luke and we overdubbed extra guitars, then a sweet flute duet. His girlfriend Melanie was coaxed into laying down some skronky saxophone, a bit at a time; then we got a touch of lapsteel for added buzzy swarminess and a late countermelody. If you notice any extra odd noises, they're probably down to our audio editor, which aptly enough is called Jeskola's Buzz.

I hope the song is taken in the spirit it's intended. It's not ironic, there's a genuine problem in our food chain, and it's a slight relief to see how the plight of the bee is now being highlighted, e.g. by Friends of the Earth with their current Bee Cause campaign. Why not plant a few bee-friendly wildflowers in your garden or window box?

Swarm, baby, swarm!

Of course, whilst we had a main song in mind, we also needed some companion pieces, and first to mind was a psychedelic piece, "Porcine", named after a quote from a near-apopleptic David Starkey. It was just a bare instrumental, tremolo guitar and rumbly drums, for months until we pulled it out again one teatime and attempted to add overdubs. The original wasn't quite in (ahem) fixed time, but for the usual Keshco reasons we ploughed on anyway and I think the lurching effect suits the piece. The lyrics came out overnight before and after sleep, the first verse calm whilst pondering the rich trader, the Teflon man; the second hurried whilst pondering those trying hard to scrape a living under the Government's hypocritical evil eye.

Robert's using one of his stripped-down live kits here; Arbiter Flats snare, pound shop tom, two cymbals screwed onto the same arm, and various percussive bits. There's a metal block (from Wickes?) which has a particularly sweet sound when struck right. Into the mix we throw a couple of Dynamikes, feeding back like crazy, and a clarinet from my girlfriend Caroline, stuck through a ton of reverb and distortion. The whole track has an anti-climactic air, from the way the first languid verse instead of building, falls into the hurried spoken second verse, then into abstract instrumental; also the way the last chord of the pattern, Bb, never feels quite right coming back to the first chord, C#m; and also the way the final verse never quite makes it up to the rock-out that seems necessitated, instead sinking to a series of staccato sighs.

The last track is "Worm Cafe", all a chattering, clanging mass of sound, assembled by Robert using the freeware audio editor Goldwave. Are we in the middle of a bustling North African market square? Are the massive reverse-echo piano clangs passing traffic? See if you can count all the various instruments. I particularly like the drums flipping into 7/8 time every two or three measures. Well worth two and a half minutes of your time.

I'd like to thank the Brain Art Foundation (Moira, Matthew, Jasmin and Barbara) for helping the back cover collage along (more of that in the video); and Robert for his fluorescent front cover.

So, there we are. Keshco's latest release, offered with love. Here's that all-important link again: Bees.