Bloods vs. Crips vol. 1

1. Charlotte Hatherly - Behave

2. Lazlo Bane - Superman (Theme from Scrubs)

3. Rosie Thomas - Pretty Dress

4. Ike & Tina Turner - Nutbush City Limit

5. bis - Listen Up!

6. Puffy Ami Yumi - Asia No Junshin

7. King - Love & Pride

8. Charlotte Hatherly - Kim Wilde

9. Fall Out Boy - This Ain't A Scene, It's An Arms Race

10. A.R.E. Weapons - Street Gang

11. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club - Whatever Happened To My Rock N' Roll

12. The Music - You Might As Well Try To Fuck Me

13. Regina Spektor & The Strokes - Modern Girls & Old Fashioned Men

14. David Bowie - Oh! You Pretty Thing

15. Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Machine

16. Charlotte Hatherly - Bastardo

17. Sophie Ellis Bexter - Catch You

18. Massive Attack - The Hunter Gets Captured Buy The Game

Jolene Cherry made a mix in 1995 that put some truly diverse artists side by side. An Offspring song right before a Nick Cave one. Right after that there is a Method Man tune followed by everbody's favourite deceased auto-asphyxiato wanker; Michael Hutchence's weird interpretation of an Iggy Pop staple. The compilation opens with one of the few U2 songs that I like and closes with an alternate recording of a Flaming Lips number and in between we also take in Eddie Reader, Brandy, PJ Harvey, Mazzy Star and a multi-million selling Seal pop ballad. It is a profoundly bizarre grouping. Eclectic to say the least. Jolene Cherry in her role as Music Supervisor put all these artists together to create the soundtrack for the movie Batman Forever.

The film was not good. I'd been so excited for it all year too. I couldn't wait for its July 14th opening. And I'd managed to whip a lot of my friends into a fevered frenzy of excitement as well by hyping it up incessantly.  I remember a bunch of us booked tickets and were there opening day for one of the earliest screenings. It was a bright sunny day and we all got the bus out to the UCI cinema at New Craighall and I think at the time I really enjoyed it. I was a dumb kid who was a bit of a Jim Carrey superfan and didn't mind that Val Kilmer was horribly mis-cast as Bruce Wayne and somehow wasn't incredulously irritated by Tommy Lee Jones' frankly insane over the top performance as Two Face. After Tim Burton's two gothic but camp and highly enjoyable takes on the World's Greatest Detective I really thought Joel Schumacher was going to nail this installment. I was sure he was going to keep the established tone but go bigger and even more exciting. He missed the target. But not by quite as much as he would a few years later.

I haven't watched the film in a long while but I remember it quite well and am sure it does have its moments but mostly it is a garish, poorly written mess. It wandered even further from the source material than even Burton dared to. I guess Michael Keaton's refusal to return to the lead role should have been a sign that it wasn't going to work out. A large portion of it I'm sure I would find unbearable if I tried to watch it now. I believe there is a fan edit called The Red Book Edition that restores some deleted scenes that the studio had demanded be removed as they were too dark for young children, that improves the film but I haven't been able to track it down. Either way only three or four of the tracks selected by Jolene Cherry and presumably, Schumacher too (who specifically demanded Kiss From A Rose be included), actually appear in any form in the movie itself.

Around the midway point of OST for the summer blockbuster there is a collaborative cover version of a Smokey Robinson-penned The Marvelettes number by Massive Attack and Tracy Thorn from Everything But The Girl. It is lovely and years later I decided to close out one of my own mixes with it. I didn't know who Jolene was until I started researching who did the music for Batman Forever but I feel like she and I have a similar approach to creating mixes. Perhaps she was a subconscious, spiritual guide or influence on me as a compiler of music. Bloods Vs. Crips Vol. 1 (we will presumably get to Vol. 2 at some point) bears a very similar attitude to eclecticism in early '07 as Cherry did in '95.

The title of this mix probably comes from my brief obsession with L.A. gang culture probably piqued by my fandom of both Snoop Dogg and  Lil' Wayne, a Crip and a Blood respectively.  Neither of which appear on this assortment. For a mix made by myself in 2007, this one is surprisingly short on rap (somewhat ironically given that title) and RnB music, but a spectrum of genres are visited regardless. There is the poppy alt-country ditty Superman by Lazlo Bane that was used as the title music for medical sitcom Scrubs and pop-punk-emo gods Fall Out Boy appear later with J-Pop icons Puffy (renamed Puffy Ami Umi in the West so as not to be confused with Sean 'Puff Daddy' 'Puffy' 'P. Diddy' 'Diddy' 'Ciroc Obama' Combs) turning up in between. There is little thought to flow in the order of the tracks. I appear to be subscribing to the same 'every track should be completely different to the last track' approach that Cherry took with Batman.

There are three Charlotte Hatherley tracks interspersed throughout Bloods Vs. Crips. I had been a big fan of her first solo record Grey Will Fade back when she was still a member of Irish pop rock powerhouse band Ash and the release of the first single from her sophomore record The Deep Blue would have just been released. I chose to open this selection with the thumping drums of that single, Behave and then halfway through returned to Kim Wilde from the first LP. From that album too was the single Bastardo, the story of a one night stand resulting in the tradgedy of a stolen guitar. The video for which was directed by her then boyfriend Edgar Wright and starred David Walliams as the titular two-faced lothario and had a cameo by Simon Pegg.

Each of those tracks are delightful indie rock pop gems. The aforementioned Scrubs theme directly follows Behave at the top of the record and the excellent This Ain't A Scene, It's An Arms Race by Fall Out Boy comes after Kim Wilde in the middle and up the back Bastardo is succeeded by Catch You by Sophie Ellis-Bexter. 

Catch You was written by Cathy Dennis who is basically the female Max Martin, a sculptor of exquisitely perfect pop numbers from Toxic by Britney Spears to I Kissed A Girl by Katy Perry to the excellent Sensitized  by Kylie Minogue. Catch You is hard to place in terms of genre, it incorporates elements of dance music and rock music, it is dynamic and serious but also loads of fun. Sophie is still making music but her visibility has declined. She's apparently making folky orchestral music these days.

Elsewhere you will find stone cold David Bowie classic Oh! You Pretty Things sandwiched between Regina Spektor and The Strokes collaboration Modern Girls & Old Fashioned Men and their contemporary rock revivalists Yeah Yeah Yeahs with Machine. The former is a great pairing; Julian and Regina's voices harmonize beautifully and she sounds great on a Strokes instrumental, I really like the song. Machine is good too, it was technically Karen O and co.'s first single after their incredible self titled debut E.P. It never wound up being on their first album and so is a bit of a forgotten rare gem. It bears all the hallmarks of a really great Yeah Yeah Yeahs song, lo-fi charms, catchy chorus, aggressive guitars and drums and Karen's voice playfully dancing back and forth between yelpy shrieks, lovely melodies and attitude filled snarls.

Using a similar algorithm, (Ike &) Tina Turner's astounding leviathan Nutbush City Limits is wedged between a Rosie Thomas tune and a bis stomper. Now Nutbush will forever be tied in my brain to two things; second of those is Glasgow comedian Limmy's sketch that featured it, which is unquestionably perfect. The first though, is my hetro-lifemate Nick Lewis. Nick and I have known each other since we were 12 and have lived together frequently in the years since we finished school. Our relationship is about as close to a marriage as I'm ever likely to get. And the reason that he and Tina and Nutbush are so interlocked in my mind is because years and years ago in the early days of The Snatch Club, one night we were, as always, partying on a Thursday night when DJ Harry Ainswoth threw the song on, the timing was perfect, the crowd was lit and we were at peak-drunkenness/silliness and the moment those first few chugs of the guitar riff hit our ears suddenly Nick was like a man possessed, his fists went out at arms length in front of him and began moving up and down in time to the rhythm of the song. Simultaneously he started wrenching his torso in a similar motion. A spectacle that made everybody around giggle in delight. It was really quite a vision and inspires pretty much the same reaction from him if you play it now. I also recall one time it incited a moshpit in a pitch dark room at a New Year house party in Gilmore Heights. It was a savage 3 minutes.

Rosie Thomas is an American singer-songwritter who I know very little about or by but her 2005 single Pretty Dress is a lovely thing. Plinking piano, luscious vocals, delicate strings and then the drums come in and the chorus climbs. It's weird but I can't imagine that I'd enjoy an album by her but this one song has an enduring pleasantness for me. 

Listen Up! by Scottish indie ska pop band bis is an entirely different beast. The band was introduced to me, like many of my favourite bands from the age of about 16 to 19, by one of my best mates Luke. The artwork for all their early releases; E.P.'s, singles and the debut album, were Manga styled cartoons of the band drawn by band member Amanda 'Manda Rin' MacKinnon, had always intrigued me but it wasn't until Luke played me their Secret Vampire Soundtrack and Sweet Shop Avengers releases that I was hooked. They were the first ever unsigned act to appear on Top Of The Pops and were a wildly divisive act. They were three kids doing poppy, punky, ska-y lo-fi indie rock tunes, all shrill and shouted vocals, synths, stabbing guitars and a drum machine with lyrics about superheroes, monsters and candy. Many (in fact most) hated them. I fell in love. Listen Up! is from their more consistent and mature sophomore album Social Dancing and is a great big ole shouty anthem. They were huge in Japan.

As were the re-monikered Puffy Ami Yumi whose Asia No Junshin is like a slicker, poppier Listen Up! It's really great, loads of changes, bits with mad robot voices, strings, the lot. In the days before the internet made music globally more available my pal David 'Sod' Sodergren spent a great deal of his hard earned money importing music and movies and books from all over the world. J-Pop was a particular obsession of his and a compilation tape he made me of some of the best stuff that Japan's pop scene had to offer would have been the first place I'd have come across Puffy.

King's Love and Pride is an excellent bit of cheesy new wave eighties pop which I have no idea how it ended up being included in the this selection. I know literally nothing else by the band and have zero desire to find anymore out but am eternally grateful for this beaut.

Now the last three tracks that I have to speak on are by bands that like The Strokes and Yeah Yeah Yeah's can be loosely grouped together as part of the NME's so called New Rock Revolution. From Leeds were the baggy Stone Roses-pretenders The Music, who were awful but the song You Might As Well Try To Fuck Me (best song title of all time?) has some charm that still works for me. It's just a really nice riff. And similarly another good song by a terrible band is Whatever Happened To My Rock N' Roll (worst song title of all time?) by Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. With a title like that the song really needed to be as rocking as it is. They had exactly one other good song. The Music had none. 

A.R.E. Weapons were from New York and were the kind of band that were homeless but played gigs in art galleries and had model girlfriends. Douchebags, basically. Street Gang, the version included here is from the single version, is pretty good. Full of attitude and menace and lyrics like the opening couplet 'Standing on the sidewalk/sucking on a soda-pop/Nothing but a tough luck/Doo Wop' and 'Here comes the street gang/The beautiful killers/Aren't they gorgeous?/In their black leather jackets'. They totally messed it up when they re-recorded it for their (terrible) debut album. A real shame.

If this mix was to be the Original Soundtrack album for the major 2007 motion picture Bloods vs. Crips part 1 starring Vin Diesel and Johnny Depp and directed by Gus Van Sant, Street Gang would feature in the scene where the titular gangs are approaching each other for the climactic battle to run the streets of L.A. Dramatic stuff. Luckily Seth Rogen is there for comic relief as a lovable weed botanist who is developing a strain of marijuana that might bring about peace if only Shia LeBeouf's plucky young hero can get it to the gang leaders in time. Jessica Alba hams it right up as a violent chola meanwhile Scarlett Johansson seems to think she's in an entirely different film from everyone else, delivering a nuanced and subtle performance as the girl caught between these two warring gang leaders. The cast is absurdly white for a film set mostly in Compton. And the soundtrack is audaciously left field. But the opening scene fist fight set to Nutbush is so perfect it's a shame it doesn't really exist. My screenplay for this would've killed.