What's With The Flowers In My Door? What The Hell Would I Want Those For?!

Looking for something a little more upbeat to get me through the latter part of the week, I stumbled across Sharam Jey's 2018 single and video, Dangerous Game.

Sharam is easily found in my music collection, as one half of beat behemoths Deep Dish, though I have considerably less of his solo releases.

Dangerous Game features the voice of Kat Frankie, a Sydney-born, Berlin-based artist with 20-odd years in the business. It's also the fourth and final single from the album Invisible, released in September 2018.

The other three singles also spotlight guest musicians: :Little Boots on Fridaycity, Dirty Vegas on Ready Or Not and KLP on Lost.

All good stuff, with enjoyable, linked-theme videos (below), and enough to make me want to track down the album. But how do you find something that is Invisible?

My go-to, Bandcamp, didn't come up with the goods, though I did find another Sharam Jey 'bootleg' of interest, which you can find at the bottom of this post.

My fall back is Juno Download, a vast virtual warehouse of older releases and deep cuts with good prices and decent discounts. Except I should have typed 'was' not 'is' as Juno recently pulled the shutters on their digital branch, focusing instead solely on physical releases.

I avoid the other big streaming and download providers, but it's difficult to navigate the others to strike a balance between availability of downloads to buy and a decent return for the artists.

So, I finally found Invisible, and it's remix companion, available as two separate volumes, on Beatport at a penny under 12 quid a pop. I'm going to stick with the former and skip the latter (two) for now.

 

 

One of the cited influences and inspirations for Invisible is Depeche Mode, especially circa the 1980s. My search for Sharam Jey on Bandcamp threw up Hot Stuff, one of his 'bootleg' PImp My Booty releases. 

Included within the mammoth 36 tracks are two mid-80s DM classics, one (surprisingly) an uptempo take on downtempo ballad A Question Of Lust. The other a standalone single to promote the first DM 'best of' and one of the songs that caused my friend Jayne to rechristen the band 'Depress Mode'.

With 36 songs, not everything is going to hit the spot but at two Euro for the whole thing (five and a half cents per track), it would be rude not to buy before you try.

Decayed V: 2009

Side 2 of an imaginary time travel tape, taking in the 2000s and terminating today.

Wow, how did I get here so quickly? The past five weekends have been a bit of a blur which ironically is how the whole of the Noughties feels in retrospect. 

2009 saw me at the end of my thirties, married, a home owner, a dad and ending the year leaving the job I'd been doing for the past eleven years. I was the same person, but so much had changed. 

My passion for music was undimmed but i realise with some regret that I went to zero, zilch, no gigs whatsoever in 2009. At least half of the artists featured in today's selection performed in Bristol during 2009 and I missed every single one of them. There was definitely a work/life imbalance that year...!

Lots of great music to listen to, though, whether it was beats, guitars, retro or refreshing sounds I was after. This is reflected in my dozen picks for 2009, spanning comeback kings The Prodigy to new artists like La Roux and Little Boots. 

Again, UK chart placings have been unexpected; Bulletproof by La Roux and Walking On A Dream by Empire Of The Sun both seemed to me to be everywhere that screened or played music. Yet, whilst the former scored a #1, the latter peaked at #64. 

It was no surprise that Bonkers by Dizzee Rascal and Armand Van Helden got to #1, but where's the justice in Method Of Modern Love by Saint Etienne and produced by Richard X, only getting to #56? Sacre bleu!

And whilst it's great that Noisettes reached #2 with Don't Upset The `Rhythm, how come that Zero by Yeah Yeah Yeahs scraped into the Top 50 at #49? It's a mad world, as Curt Smith once sang.

This Rhythm by Filthy Dukes was a grower and I really enjoyed their album Nonsense In The Dark. Au Revoir Simone came to my notice when they guested on the song Paris by Friendly Fires a couple of years before, leading me to their album Still Night, Still Light. 

Dominos by The Big Pink delivered a heavy percussion that evoked the spirit of the 1980s, although I've always assumed that their name was inspired by The Band's 1968 album. And for me, Editors were like Simple Minds fronted by Ian Curtis, another mash-up of 1980s influences that worked brilliantly.

So, as end of decades often seem to, 2009 wasn't unusual in that there was a fairly even mix of looking forward and reaching back. The 2010s were waiting for us, whether we were ready or not...

Thanks for sticking with me these past few weeks, I've had a lot of fun creating this series. I hope the selections have either reminded you that there were some really good songs or introduced you to music and artists that you may have missed first time around.

I've provided links for each year and each series below, covering the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, so there are 31 selections and 370 songs to enjoy for the rest of December.

Today is also a landmark in that, incredibly, the Dubhed blog celebrates it's 5th birthday. 

I never thought I'd be writing those words! 

When I uploaded my first blog post on Monday 7th December 2020, I remarked that "[as] I rapidly approach five decades of clinging to this crazy, spinning planet, it seemed like a good time to start a blog."

Five years, 1,703 posts and over 800 Dubhed 'mixtape' selections later, I'm enjoying it even more than I did when I started. 

Doing this "just for fun" has achieved that, but so much more. I've connected with so many wonderful people as a result, including artists and fellow bloggers, who continue to be a constant inspiration. 

I've also managed to see unforgettable gigs, my vinyl record collection has started growing again, and I still get a thrill when I hear new music. 

There'll be some reflective posts over the coming weeks, as it's also that time to remember what has made 2025 so good - musically, at least, it's been a shitshow in many other respects. And I've a backlog of gig reviews to post.

Thanks to you all for stopping by here, whether it's your first time or a regular stop. Your comments mean a lot and whilst I try and often fail to respond to each one individually, I do read and value every single one. Thank you!

Now, let's see how far I can take this thing...!

1) Bonkers (Radio Edit): Dizzee Rascal & Armand Van Helden

2) Omen (Album Version): The Prodigy

3) This Rhythm (Radio Edit): Filthy Dukes ft. Samuel Dust

4) Don't Upset The Rhythm (Album Version): Noisettes

5) Remedy (Buffetlibre vs. Sidechains Remix By Alex Ferrer): Little Boots

6) Method Of Modern Love (Single Version): Saint Etienne

7) Bulletproof (Album Version): La Roux

8) Walking On A Dream (Album Version): Empire Of The Sun

9) Shadows (Album Version): Au Revoir Simone

10) Dominos (Album Version): The Big Pink

11) Papillon (Album Version): Editors

12) Zero (Album Version): Yeah Yeah Yeahs

15th February 2009: Method Of Modern Love EP (#56): 6

22nd February 2009: Invaders Must Die (#4): 2

1st March 2009: Walking On A Dream (#64): 8

15th March 2009: Nonsense In The Dark (#39): 3

29th March 2009: Wild Young Hearts (#2): 4 

19th April 2009: It's Blitz! (#49): 12 

24th May 2009: Still Night, Still Light (#71): 9 

28th June 2009: La Roux (#1): 7 

23rd August 2009: Hands (#6): 5

24th September 2009: Tongue N'Cheek (#1): 1

18th October 2009: In This Light And On This Evening (#23): 11

25th October 2009: A Brief History Of Love (#27): 10 

Side Two (46:39) (GD) (M)

If you've missed any of the previous posts in the Decayed series, you can jump straight to them here

Prelude   2000   2001   2002   2003   2004   2005   2006   2007   2008

And here are all ten Decadance posts

1990   1991   1992   1993   1994   1995   1996   1997   1998  1999

Finally, Decade, the mistapes that I recorded in 1990 that started this whole thing off

1980   1981   1982   1983   1984   1985   1986   1987   1988  1989

Party Like It's 2009

Back to the tail end of the Noughties with a bunch of beats to bring in the weekend. Some of the artists and DJs/remixers seem to have been dormant or relatively quiet in the past decade: US punk/indie/dance act Gossip, Japanese trio Lalory, Norwegian DJ and producer diskJokke. Others such as Burns, CFCF, The Field, Richard Sen and Daniel Avery have been prolific, the latter two transcending their early work. And Little Boots has been busy in the past year as a member of ABBA's live band on the Voyage tour.

 

A sign of the times that many of the featured artists's profiles on Discogs include links to MySpace, a reminder of how quickly the world moved on and away to other platforms. Says the man who resolutely clings to Blogger and mostly avoids other social media...!

 

1) Heavy Cross (Burns Remix): Gossip

2) Little Secrets (Lalory Remix By Tom Iwami, Kazunari Kadowaki & Kazuya Tamura): Passion Pit

3) The More That I Do (Foals XIII Remix): The Field

4) Compulsion (Padded Cell Remix By Neil Higgins & Richard Sen): Doves

5) Earthquake (Stopmakingme Mix By Daniel Avery): Little Boots

6) Tropics (CFCF Remix): Apache Beat

7) IRM (diskJokke Remix): Charlotte Gainsbourg

Party Like It's 2009 (44:52)