Ashtray Navigations - Greatest Imaginary Hits
VHF Records. 4 x CD + LP
All our lives have changed since the middle of March and mine is no different. Not all of it has been detrimental though. With Mrs Fisher now being furloughed and staring redundancy in the face my evening routine has changed and its all for the better. Pre covid my evenings would have consisted of a couple of hours on the computer with an aim towards writing a few words about whichever release it was that just happened to tickle my fancy that week. In reality this meant buying shit I didn't really need on eBay, including books I'd never get around to reading for two years and shirts that would get worn once before admitting to myself that they didn't really fit before shoving them in a drawer where they'd become quickly forgotten only to re-emerge at a much later date as a reminder to how wasteful I was with both my time and money. Then there's the sirens lure that is YouTube and its promise of unseen videos lurking around every corner and oh doesn't that look interesting a man on a train in Belarus drinking vodka with the locals. In other words a mass of distractions from the main aim of the evening which was listening to music and writing about it. I totally get why Will Self still writes on a typewriter.
To disappear and leave Mrs Fisher bereft of company for the evening, after she'd spent all day in the house alone, would be an act of selfishness to which I could never bring myself. So now we spend our evenings sitting together, reading, talking and listening to music and isn't this how it should have been all along? My music of course. And If there's no lyrics there's no distraction for Mrs Fisher and the writing and reading of her books. This means that six hours of Ashtray Navigations can be listened to in total comfort over the course of a few weekday evenings as I catch up with the weekend papers and bat back mumbled replies to questions such as 'did they really say, 'for you Tommy the war is over' in old films about the war? Because there are no words or lyrics with Ashtray Navigations only hours of the most wonderful, blissful, out there droning sonic churn you could ever wish to become acquainted with.
Whilst playing Greatest Imaginary Hits I had a dig about in various boxes just to see how many Ashtray Navigations releases I’d amassed over the years. There must be quite a few, thirty or forty maybe. I don’t know exactly because I have a lot of boxes and I’m not very organised. I know for sure that I don’t have every Ashtray Navigations release because there are more Ashtray Navigations releases than there are holes in the road in Stoke-on Trent or stars in the firmament. Once upon a time, somewhere around the mid 90’s a new Ashtray Navigations release appeared about once a week, or at least thats what it seemed like. When the Toddmeister was doing his bit for supplying us with all manner of weirdo, experimental, noise and drone joy via his Betley Welcomes Careful Drivers label/distro outfit they came out with unnerving regularity. I still miss those A5 Betley booklets full of wonder and pithy Phil descriptions, a true labour of love. Betleys was one of the great early Noise labels too, remembered fondly as much for its sometimes ridiculous packaging as the actual contents with Todd raiding many a pound shop for take-away cartons and sponges with which to furnish his releases.
When Phil and Mel gave up Stoke for Leeds Betley became Memoirs of an Aesthete which was soon joined by Mel’s Smokers Gifts label. They gave the dead on its feet Termite Club a final boot up the arse before breathing life in to new venues and ventures. This they did by turning up at virtually every gig of a noisy nature in Leeds and if not playing then stood in the crowd be it as Ashtray Navigations or with Mel’s solo project Ocelecelot or the Target Shoppers or Green Monkey or Dogliveroil or Chunga Canaries or … the list is very long, I swear blind I once saw Phil play a noise set at The Fenton under the Czech Nymphs moniker though my memory isn’t what it used to be. I saw the Target Shoppers at the Wharf play a set that was shorter than this sentence, it might have been even shorter. I dare say that the walls in Phil and Mel’s house has seen many a memorable jam session too, witnessed only by those sitting down and grooving along. They’ve been an integral Leeds cog since arrival and without them there’d be a big silent hole and lots of people wandering around in shock. If they upped sticks and decided to move back to Stoke I dare say that several individuals in Leeds would probably move with them. In other words; indispensable, creative beyond measure, influential and as much a part of Leeds as Alan Bennett, owls and Harvey Nicks.
Ashtray Navigations is now solidly Phil and Mel but it wasn’t always so. For a long time it was Phil’s solo project dotted along the way with several like minded souls. At times a loose collaborative affair that sometimes morphed in to actual band territory with actual drums, at times noisy, at times celestial, droney because drones are good for hanging things on and beautiful, dreamy, gutsy, filled with soaring guitar solos because Phil is a very good guitarist, sometimes with gentle piano chords because its not always noisy, sometimes with a raspy harmonica, sometimes with washing-over-you gorgeous synths. Trying to nail Ashtray Navigations to a genre mast is futile, don’t waste your time. File it between Noise and Drone and everything in-between. You still wont be near.
A few years back they appeared on the cover of Wire magazine and found themselves appearing on Radio 3’s premier out there experimental showcase programme Late Junction with a live set from the South Bank. A recognition of sorts for the body of work that Ashtray Navigations have been building for the last twenty six years. I doubt it brought them offers of soundtrack work for Spielberg or envelopes stuffed with tenners but it did put them on the map.
As does Greatest Imaginary Hits with four Ashtray Navigations superfans/close friends/aficionados being asked to submit their favourite tracks for a best of sort of thing. These people being Neil Campbell, Rob Hayler, Pete Coward and your man Henry Rollins. These are the four ‘Imagined’ CD’s with the LP given over to new material. Thats about 50 tracks and nearly six hours worth of music and is as far as I know the first time such a thing as happened. Not a tombstone as feared in the sleevenotes by Phil, not a 10LP box set from Vinyl On Demand with hardback book, hand signed reprints of gig flyers and artwork on archival paper all ready for framing, not a 100 CD box set either because thats what you’d probably need, just a taster in a gatefold sleeve of why people appreciate Ashtray Navigations.
Which has me digging around like I said, which has me reassessing Ashtray Navigations and being more appreciative of them, which has me grooving once more to Phil’s orgasmic guitar, a guitar that will forever have its neck wrung, shoved and pulled as it drips, spills and sprays lava notes and chugging riffs, as it’s replaced by keyboard, by noise boxes, by weird looking synths of which only ten were made in 1975 and tablas and Alex Neilson’s skittery drums as seen on A Monument to British Rock a double CDR that morphed into a full blown triple LP on Smokers Gifts and a tongue in cheek title lifted from a late 70’s various artist comp and Ashtray Weeks, a collection of unreleased tracks which you could only get with the single that came in a film can. Its to Ashtray Navigations credit that none of those chosen to select tracks picked the same ones and that of the first three CD’s I listened to only several tracks were familiar to me. Theres still so much more to explore.
Campbell goes back to the mid 90’s where all is drone and murk, Rob Hayler picks ‘The Final Hit’ from ‘Cloud Come Cadaver’ which is eleven minutes of boiling guitar and Popol Vuh-ey keyboards. From the same era Pete Coward picks ‘The Jewel Backlash’ from ‘Spray’ with its laid back riffs and searing guitar notes. Rollins picks nothing later than 2010 and goes even further back than Campbell with a track taken from 1994’s ‘Bicycle Glue Blues’ which is all subterranean tape wobble and spacey echo and theres me thinking he’d go for the all out droney guitar stuff when its his CD thats full of ultra-murk tape wobble.
Todays Ashtray Navigations is solidly Phil Todd and the newly crowned Melanie O’Dubhslaine with a beefed up synth/guitar heavy monster rock sound thats somewhere between the muscular beef of a 2020 Mountain’s ‘Nantucket Sleighride’ as played by Neil Young backed by Emeralds, except when it sounds like a stoner version of Zappa’s The Illinois Enema Bandit with some serious heavy head nod throb as laid down by a whacked out Ryuichi Sakamoto trying on his new rig. Third track ‘What Next?’ opens with some rapid tabla before those shimmering golden guitar notes come raining on down once again.
I’m still trying to get my head around the fact that Henry Rollins is an Ashtray Navigations fan. I mean I shouldn’t be that surprised, theres no earthly reason why Rollins shouldn’t be an Ashtray Navigations fan, no more than maybe he’s a fan of light opera, Leo Sayer and Wham but still, Ashtray Navigations. It takes some getting your ahead around. Imagine being Phil and Mel and waking up to that email; ‘Hi there Henry Rollins here, just dropping you a line to say that I’ve been digging your sounds for a few years now and have slowly been filling some gaps in my Ash Nav collection, I wondered if you still had any copies of Four Raga Moods kicking about? I really need that one, keep up the good work HR. p.s. is paypal OK?’ Like what the actual buggering fuck. More head warp to contend with.
I fear I might have taken Ashtray Navigations too lightly in the past. After all, they've been around for over a quarter of a century now, as much a part of the family as pets and peeling wall paper, but this most magnificent release has changed all that. Far from being a tombstone this is a celebration. Please feel free to join in.
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