It's 5 pm and I Want a Daiquiri

Paul Nova - You Could Be Good

Judging by this one song, Paul Nova’s 1984 album Trees Without Leaves is one of those great under the bed finds that deserves its high ticket price, and / or reissue. I’d add reputation as well, but I don’t gather it’s well-known enough to even have a reputation outside of the miniscule orb of people for whom well-known music in any form will hardly suffice, what naysayers call hipster circles. Hipster is really the laziest slag on a person, but I’d agree with Poison Idea that Record Collectors Are Pretentious Assholes.

I’ve heard the rest of the album, and I can’t say that it actually deserves the £200 price tag for an original. The songs are rudimentary and unsophisticated, but big on mood. Which is a really welcome mood right now.

You Could Be Good has a bit of Peter Hook and a splash of Martin Newell, and feels like a West Coast breeze by way of Northern England. It also screams 1984. All of which sounds like something a pretentious asshole record collector would say.

A guy I know, whose tastes travel deep into the obscure, but who I’ve learned to always trust, pointed this song out, which is where I first heard it. Fun story, and the main reason I trust him always:

On a night of drinking, the bars had just closed when one of the entourage I was with got word of a group gathering at someone’s studio space (this is also sounding like something a pretentious asshole would say). It was a big warehouse, probably one of the last times any artists in Vancouver could get that kind of space, as I think about it. I didn’t know many of the people there, so I grabbed a beer and a chair and observed. At a certain point, the guy closest to me mentioned Austin in a story he was telling, and as soon as there was a pause, I seized on it. For the first year or so in Vancouver, this was always my entry point: Texas / music. I soon discovered we’d both been living there in the 90s, and that he’d played with the band Jackie O Motherfucker, a band whose name I always loved. Life is weird like that. He also used to host this psych record night in Vancouver that I’d heard about but never been able to attend. Things ended in the wee hours with another one of my friends naked behind a tarp, and some other totally normal things.

Back to Paul Nova. This song has been a welcome ohrwurm the past few weeks, and helps me imagine a summer existing on an entirely different timeline inverted from the dimension we’re currently in, at least here in the US.