Rare or Unreleased 35: Womanneed!

PJ Harvey: To Bring You My Love outtakes [.zip]

Today's Saturday, which means you could probably use some music to prep you for tonight and get you all psyched for its inevitable excesses, but more importantly: get you oiled up and ready for next weekend's electro cabaret bash here in Oslo:

1995 saw the release of PJ Harvey's seminal To Bring You My Love, the breakthrough and arguably most accomplished record of her career, with its varied but assured arrangements and ballsy, uncompromising delivery. Upon release, both album singles and a limited edition bonus CD featured radio recordings, earlier demos and outtakes from the recording sessions. These are now out of print, but worry not: TG brings to you the four To Bring You My Love outtakes that aren't commercially available anymore. (Completists: A fifth song, «Naked Cousin», is still available on the soundtrack to The Crow—City of Angels.)

«Maniac» (with emphasis on «man»), «Harder» (with emphasis on «hard») and «Darling Be There» (with emphasis on «being there», frequently a requirement for the first, after he's been the second) are all
dripping with two kinds of womanneed. «Maniac» and «Harder» are demands to be dominated—to be obliterated by desire, the screaming plaything of passion at once in charge and submissive. «Darling Be There» names the price of the lunch. (As that adorably clueless socio Dexter registers, as he tries to make sense of the mess that are human emotions: «She wants something from me. Ever since the blow job she assumes we've taken it to the next level.») «One Time too Many» is Harvey at her most funky—and sassy, as she mocks a man who just cannot deliver. Hot.

Toilet Guppies-sponsored club night △ is only a week away today, and man are we psyched! It's mainly an electro night, with naughty cabaret thrown in for kicks, so don't expect to hear any PJ Harvey—although burlesque duo Femme Ferale are known to bounce, jiggle and writhe to raunchy rawk'n'roll. (And who knows? DJ Sheik Yerdix has a tendency to lapse back into R'n'R whenever he feels the proceedings need to be injected with a little soul.)

Whatever the music, it's just that attitude; some of Harvey's songs here are among the sexiest ever put to tape, and her sassy-lassie fire-down-below swagger seems perfectly in keeping with Femme Ferale's trashed-up burlesque. Brazenly, Harvey bypasses sultriness altogether, going straight for unbridled lust. As both PJ Harvey's music and Femme Ferale's tattooed punklesque(?!) prove, snarls and pouts will always be hotter than innocent smiles, however teasing or inviting.
Crawling, too—one of Femme Ferale's past-times—is sexier than even a long-legged strut down the catwalk.

So do yerself a favour and come on down to Sjokoladefabrikken next Saturday (28 November) for some satisfaction action to make your liver quiver. I certainly wouldn't miss the opportunity to witness firsthand a burlesque act that's a little less vanilla than the strictly retro (and mostly cute) performers of this town. You see the pictures. Free psychiatric assistance to anyone who feels they're able to resist…

Signing off now with a choice YuoTube moment. Guys, get ready to be reduced to a pathetic pulp of pulsing manneed:

Mp3 Killed the Vinyl DJ 5: Mae West & Other Feral Femmes

While many Feminists seem to believe that sexuality caters to men, not women (because being an object of desire is seen to have less to do with desire, and more to do with being an object), some women embrace sex not because they're victimised or weak—or even because they want to exploit men's weaknesses—but simply because they're randy. When Mae West wrote her play Sex, landing her in court on obscenity charges, she didn't do so because sex sells. She was just a sexpot. The girl couldn't help it, and damned if she'd let some boring old farts—fragile, male egos and jealous female egos, both intimidated by a woman's sexual freedom and demands—stop her. What they objected to, of course, was that she went from being an object of desire to being a subject of desire. Worse: both at the same time!

Nothing can be hotter, of course, and no rhetoric from insecure patriarchs or puritanical Feminists will ever change that.

Toilet Guppies is currently in on organising a sexedelic electro burlesque event in Oslo (the first night to be held on Saturday 28 November), and certain locals—clubbers, trendies, party youths, no less—have voiced their disapproval at the news that a burlesque duo will be performing, perhaps baring it all. The effortlessly titillating Chiquita Bonita and Lucrezia La Bomba of Femme Ferale, who won Best New Troupe at the 2008 London Burlesque Festival, have agreed to entice and tease us with their playful and modernised burlesque act. Apparently, even the innocent tease of vaudeville strip is too much for the fragile egos of many young Norwegians…

But Femme Ferale have embraced their beauty, flaunting it as they have it, and have chosen to cultivate their self-esteem and -possession. They don't rely on the scraps thrown their way by sexually frustrated businessmen whose wives don't understand them, nor are they in any way limited by the violent control of brute mafiosi. They're merely sizzling hot. Why hide behind false modesty? So that their «sisters» won't feel so unappealing, boring and sexless as Femme Ferale command the stage? It's high time the general population of Norway is not hemmed in by some people's neuroses…

As with burlesque acts, Mae West was full of humour. Sex was about fun, pleasure, life, not about politics—unless we're talking the politics of fun, pleasure, choice. And so it is that one of the club night's resident DJs, Sheik Yerdix, has provided Toilet Guppies with a selection of 1966
recordings made by a 74 year-old West, backed by a teenage garage sensation (the aptly named Somebody's Chyldren!). Femme Ferale aren't your average burlesque troupe, residing in a nostalgic fantasy-land of safe tease, soundtracked by the same old exotica or '30s jazz, yet there's something of Mae West's assured attitude present in their slightly punked-up burlesque, so here you go. These are the highlights from Mae West's rare Way Out West, an album full of Dylan, Beatles and John Lee Hooker covers, as well as various garage standards—an album considered so negligible that it's never been reissued. But as these four tracks—and the obscene price Sheik Yerdix had to shell out for an original vinyl copy—prove, the combination of a sexed-up septuagenerian bombshell and a band of hormonal teen boys is as good an idea on vinyl as it was on paper.

Lighten up, Oslo, and prepare yourself:

Mae West & Somebody's Chyldren: Selections from Way Out West [.zip]

1. Treat Him Right
2. Boom Boom
3. Shakin' All Over
4. Mae Day

@ Sjokoladefabrikken, Stockholmgata 12, Oslo,
on Saturday 28 November.
Doors open 22:10. Entrance kr. 100,-.
RSVP Facebook.