Hard-to-find

Hats Off, Swift

Craig McAllister

At midnight on Thursday going into Friday there, Taylor Swift released – or dropped, as they say nowadays – a new album (or albums, plural, given the cash-grab of multiple formats that is becoming more the norm these days too) and the internet this side of the border went into a bit of a mild frenzy over the inclusion of – as you will be sick of hearing by now – a Blue Nile-referencing lyric.

‘Drowning in the Blue Nile, he sent me Downtown Lights, I hadn’t heard it in a while…‘ are lines that bookend the mid-paced and breathy Guilty As Sin?, a synthy, processed track with a building chorus that doesn’t instantly hit – and why would it, I’m a 54 year-old man – but one which I suspect I’ll hear multiple times around the house and in the car until I know every word and nuance back to front. Such is the appeal of Swift round these parts. And around the globe a trillion times over. What a talent, undoubtedly.

The Blue Nile, on the other hand, I get, I understand, I fit the demographic. I love everything about them; the tectonic pace at which they work(ed), the shroud of mystery and intrigue around them, Paul Buchanan’s languid and resigned voice, the songs.

The songs! I must confess, they took a while (like Taylor Swift might) to work their magic on me. When the Blue Nile first appeared from out of the Glasgow rain, all chinos and swept back curls and faint sophistication, their stylised and expertly-produced coffee table symphonies were not to my palate. I liked my singers to bark and shout. Off mic and even off key was fine to these ears. Close-miked, enunciated crooning was for old folk over 30. I liked my guitars scuzzy and fuzzed up or jangling away at a window-rattlin’ volume for two, three minutes at a push. Politely played guitars that crept slowly beyond the five, six minute mark belonged on Dire Straits records and not in my record collection. Keyboards and drum machines? That was strictly Level 42 territory, man.

But one day, I got it. A Walk Across The Rooftops reeled me in with its slow-burning, twisting, turning and unspooling melodies and I was hooked. Then the group found hats. And then, I found Hats.

The Downtown Lights, the track that gets Taylor all a-teary, appears second song in. Taking many of its cues from the signifiers on that first album, it glides on a bed of politely pattering electronic Linn drums and long-breathing keyboards, gently pulsing electro bass and stabbing strings. Cascading percussion permeates in all the right places as Buchanan’s voice lets loose a gorgeous tumbling melody that forms the centre piece of the track.

“Nobody loves you this way!” he emotes, artificial strings swelling in time to the break of hearts, even Taylor’s. Paul Buchanan’s voice, his phrasing, his controlled delivery… it wouldn’t sound out of place at all on Station To Station or any number of those Bowie studio records from the era.

The Blue Nile – The Downtown Lights

The Downtown Lights forms part of a record that is required to be listened to as a whole, something that in the scroll, like, delete, swipe world we now live in seems almost archaic. It’s pretty much the perfect record, a record that is initially so somnolent and atmospheric that it might make more sense listening to it in deep space, or, if it’s more practical, a flotation tank.

I can totally see why Taylor Swift might dig The Blue Nile. And I totally expect The Blue Nile to chart at some point in the next week. Taylor has enough followers that, if even half a percent took a curious interest in the track and played it on Spotify, The Downtown Lights could yet end up The Blue Nile’s best-known song. Move over Tinseltown, there’s a new kid in town. Who saw that coming?

Hard-to-find

Rhythm And Wooze

Craig McAllister

It begins with a rat-a-tat of rattling, ricocheting far-off processed beats then melts itself into a woozy, hazy, two chord guitar riff. A nagging, incessant keyboard riff (or is it effect-heavy flute? Or another guitar track filtered through a dozen stomp boxes?) follows. A proper headnodder of a groove builds around the disparate tracks. A bassline, rubbery and dependable nails the whole thing to 4/4 time and then…lurch! A divebombing tremelo wobbles six strings wonkily downwards, seasick and stoned, and suddenly you’re disorientated. Only momentarily, mind, as here come the vocals. A girl? A boy? A duet? And what are they singing? They’re more vocalising than singing really, as any number of Netflix subtitles will tell you these days, the voice(s) trippy and overlaid and harmonising in an out-of-body way that’ll have you humming along from this point on. Here’s that flute again. And the rat-a-tat. And the shape-shifting lurch. And those inter-woven harmonies. And the flute again. And the monster bassline. And another lurch, just as you’re getting the hang of the discombobulation of it all. And so it goes, for nearly 7 minutes, My Bloody Valentine‘s greatest studio moment – Soon.

My Bloody Valentine – Soon

My 7″, signed by McGee no less.

It has actual lyrics. You can look them up if you don’t believe me. They’re not what Kevin Shields wrote though. The stubborn artist – and with Soon and the rest of the Glider EP (and the Tremelo EP and Loveless), he is far more of an artist – studio auteur, even, than mere musician – wouldn’t give them to the label. He’d present Creation with the completed recordings and their titles and some poor office girl would have to sit and decipher everything through the fuggy haze on record and, very possibly, within the office itself. Naturally, many of the real lyrics are lost forever, the ‘official’ words actually the work of the Creation intern. That’s pop art for ye.

Soon isn’t necessarily a word you’d associate with My Bloody Valentine. A band so determined – so bloody-minded, even –  it took them 21 years between records and then nothing since, it remains my favourite piece of music by them. It’s an astonishing piece of art still, even after 34 years. The product of hours and hours and breakdowns and missteps in the recording studio, it was painstakingly created by Kevin Shields, hunched over spooling tapes and faders and offset Fender Jazzmasters, tremelo arm nestled in his fingers and ready to glide. Just as Johnny has the jangle and Jimi has the fuzz, Shields has glide guitar as his signature. Detune your guitar to some far-out open tuning, hold a chord shape with the left hand and, as you strum, lean gently but firmly onto and into that tremelo arm. The floating bridge will reduce the tension on the strings, leaving you with that trademark sighing, tone bending, shape-shifting guitar sound. Just add a mission control-sized pedal board and a decent vintage amp or two to the chain for maximum push and pull effect.

I bet he went through a gazillion strings perfecting it.

Soon was released at an interesting intersection in indie music. My Bloody Valentine, a group synonymous with guitars and Docs and shapeless black jumpers found themselves influenced, knowingly or otherwise, by the rhythm-focused music comin’ atcha from Manchester.

That ‘Funky Drummer’ beat that propelled Fools Gold? The military two step that implored a million bucket-hatted eejits to twist their melons? Here it all was – the mellower cousin of Public Enemy’s fierce sampled beats – chopped, cut and pasted and stuck together again to provide the back beat for a track that no band, not even MBV themselves, could replicate live. Those repetitive Italo house hooklines that ear wormed their way from Happy Mondays’ back catalogue and caused van drivers to whistle while they worked? The same hooklines that had been born from Detroit techno and adopted as their own by the magpie-like Ryder clan? Here they were too, in flute form, but still there, popping up regularly enough to provide both hook and anchor for a track that might’ve been lost at sea without it.

It’s that little motif that plants Soon firmly into the future – even still in 2024 – and maintains the group’s legacy as forward-thinking studio pioneers. They’ve released other material since, of course. Not much though…and nothing with the heart and soul and (despite what I’ve just said above) originality of Soon. It’s a weird, warped beauty. Nocturnal. Otherworldly. Perfect. And peerless.

Great Weatherall remix too, of course.

Hard-to-find

Alice Faye

Craig McAllister

As a new artist, how hard is it to get your music heard? Rhetorical question perhaps, but “with great difficulty” would be the resounding answer. Current stats show that over 60,000 new tracks are uploaded to Spotify every day. That’s around half a million a week…two million a month….twenty four million a year. For a new artist, the impact they can expect to make is zilch. Comparable to a shed tear of realisation plopping into the Atlantic Ocean and hoping that enough ripples cause it to somehow stand out, only the foolhardy would believe that they could make it – whatever ‘make it’ is these days – and sustain a career in music.

The keen-for-success artist might also bombard the in boxes of the taste makers and influential movers and shakers on the internet in the vain/vague hope that someone will maybe feature them and their music. Even I, with my ‘outdated music for outdated people‘ tagline get dozens of weekly emails from hopefuls across the globe, all eager for me to feature them here. Sometimes I do, but as you know, mostly I don’t.

If you, the artist, wants to go the more traditional route of trying to woo a record company, the executives will no longer hot-foot it en masse to your headline show in a grimy London sweat-box. Instead, they’ll tap into your socials, check out how many followers you have, how many monthly listeners you can pull and what sort of merch you are selling via Bandcamp or wherever. Can I make money from them? is their first thought. Is the music any good? might be their second. And yet, and yet, great talent is out there…

I’m involved in putting on gigs and in recent weeks I’ve been lucky enough to witness some artists who, with a whole lot of luck, could and should be far more well-known than they currently are. A couple of weeks ago we had BMX Bandits play our wee venue (the Harbour Arts Centre) in Irvine. Duglas Bandit suggested Alice Faye as a support act. He’s such a fan of her that when it came to show time, he asked if he could introduce her to the audience…then walked across the stage to take a seat in one of the front rows to watch her. By this point in the evening, I knew why; during the soundcheck, it was just Alice, Danny the sound engineer and myself in the room, and when Alice started singing…oh man! I looked at the normally stoic and hard to impress Danny, who, lost in faders and reverb and noise gates, raised one eyebrow high and smiled knowingly to himself. He was experiencing exactly what I was; a phenomenon.

Alice’s voice was pure and clear with a tone and depth and unique personality that singled her out immediately as one of the greats. I really mean that. I was thinking Nina Simone, Joni Mitchell, Nico… unique and individual voices, and voices that Alice could sit alongside without being one iota out of place. As Alice sang her heart out shyly to an empty room, even the motes of swirling dust being picked up by the heat rays below the ancient HAC spotlights stopped what they were doing to listen. “This must’ve been what it was like when Amy Winehouse sang in front of someone for the first time,” I caught myself thinking at one point. Preposterous, yet not really. It was both jaw dropping and heart-warming in equal measure – here’s a new artist who can really, really sing. Lovely and astonishing. The song she was singing at the time was, I’m sure, Exact Same Thing, the fourth track on the playlist below.

She apparently has it all, Alice. In her vocal stylings there are clear nods not only to the past but the present. It’d be easy to imagine any of her songs sitting perfectly well amongst the ’60s shimmer and melodrama of Lana De Ray or the downbeat pop stylings of Billie Eilish. What it takes to get noticed then elevated to their sort of status is the golden prize. What’s that quote again about success being 10% talent and 90% luck? Alice Faye isn’t lacking anything on the talent front, that’s for sure. All she needs is the luck. And a lot of it.

Thrillingly, that luck might be happening. Alice has been picked up by the people behind Rufus Wainwright and she’ll support him on a couple of upcoming dates. Rufus’s audience, you would think, should appreciate a quirky voice and floating melody, so I’d hope Alice’s name is slightly better-known come the summer. Talent like Alice is so hard to find. Let’s treasure it when it lands in your lap.

Hard-to-find

Shining Bright

Craig McAllister

In the summer of ’22, Ross Wilson assembled a 7-piece band to accompany him on Blue Rose Code‘s various festival stages. Ross, as you may well know, is more than comfortable performing as a solo performer, or as part of a stripped-back duo or trio, but the opportunity to flesh out his sound with guitar, keys, drums and a brass section proved too great to pass up…and his band and their input stretched him in great, fantastical directions as a result. Anyone who has caught him live with the full-fat Blue Rose Code will have witnessed shows akin to euphoria and religious experience. Going full-on Dexys, the band would go running – actual running – and then do press-ups backstage, right up until the point they were due on, so that by the time they’d begun their first number they were literally hitting the ground running. No easing into a set, no feeling their way with an unknown audience, it was bam! Bam! BAM! We are Blue Rose Code and this is what we do; off-mike hollers and whoops, loud boot stomps to emphasise big moments in the songs, a hand on heart as a key lyric is sung…you couldn’t help but get caught up in it all.

What Blue Rose Code did on those festival dates is very much apparent on the new album, Bright Circumstance. Building on that Dexys by way of Style Council approach honed through communal exercise and live shows, brass stabs as sharp as a stiletto puncture the Walls Come Tumbling Down stomp of opener Jericho. A fat and thumping four to the floor beat keeps it moving forward, shimmers of Hammond easing quietly into the gaps between brass and vocal and its call and response section. There’s a drop out in the middle, the spot where eager audiences were (and will be) invited to join in with enthusiastic hand claps, before the band revs up again and drives the song home in a brassy rush of Stax proportions. That’ll be yr album opener, and no mistake.

Blue Rose Code – Jericho

If you’ve seen Blue Rose Code live, in whichever guise, you’ll know that Ross touches on the big subjects; life, love, social issues and our unfair society, and they’re all here on Bright Circumstances. Most of the recent live set is present, and if you only know it from a stripped back show, the breadth of musicianship and colour afforded by the assembled musicians might leave you momentarily breathless. Sadie is carried by quietly brushed acoustic guitars, swelling, weeping pedal steel and more of that glorious Hammond shimmer; exactly the sort of track the still-switched-on Rod Stewart of the ’70s might have done to great effect.

A scraping, violin – think Neil Young’s Running Dry – scratches its way across the socio-political bite of Thirteen Years and its ‘are they heating or are they eating?‘ refrain. The bold Ross found himself in trouble last year when he managed to sneak this into a live performance being broadcast to the nation on BBC Radio 4. Inspiration is infiltration. A loose and jazzy Amazing Grace rounds off side one, Wilson taking liberties with his phrasing to great effect, the band showcasing their talents as their leader directs them in the ebb and flow of the melody.

Side two is the softer of the two sides, and it’s bookended wonderfully by two great tracks. The opener, Peace In Your Heart, will be familiar to audiences on any of the more recent BRC dates. A slow acoustic builder, it unravels into the sort of gospel folk that John Martyn and Van Morrison once did with great effect and, on this evidence, should see Ross Wilson considered an equal. You can dress your songs up in brass and electricity if you want to, but what it really comes down to, Jim, is a universal message played simply and sung well. There are no frills on Peace In Your Heart, and it’s the perfect comedown from the kitchen sink approach on side one.

Blue Rose Code – Peace In Your Heart

Midway through, you’ll find Don’t Be Afraid, its moody ambience and close-miked minor key atmospherics revealing fantastic harmonies and off-kilter counter melodies with each repeated listen. Funereal horns lead the song upwards to its heavenly conclusion, the vocal refrain namechecking God with all the gravitas and straightforwardness of Nick Cave.

The religious theme continues on Now The Big Man Has Gone, a lament for a pal no longer here. Lyle Watt, Ross’s long-standing foil on guitar and finder of the bluest of blue notes in any situation leads us in with a quietly strummed mandolin before the song opens up with more female harmonies, a mournful accordion and tinkling piano. And then it’s over.

It’s a great album, Bright Circumstance. It finds Ross in good spirits, in a good place in life and surrounded by sympathetic musicians and guests (Eddi Reader, Donald Shaw, Naomi Stirrat). He’s found peace and contentment, faith and spirituality and we are the benefactors of this. A decade into a music career that has seen him reach new heights and gather new fans with each subsequent release, it would be great if Bright Circumstance was the album that saw Ross finally lose the label of ‘best kept secret’ and brought him into the collective consciousness of music listeners with a fondness for great songs played and sung outrageously well. He deserves it. And so do we.

Bright Circumstance is released on the 10th May. You can get it everywhere, including Blue Rose Code‘s Bandcamp page (although the pre-order link isn’t quite live yet).

Hard-to-find

GяEaT MiИdS

Craig McAllister

Before the bombast and bluster of Waterfront and its parent album Sparkle In The Rain, before Don’t You Forget About Me‘s omnipresence in top tens the world over, before they looked to the tiered arenas of the American midwest and long before they’d even thought about possibly considering property investments in Tuscany, Simple Minds made sonically-interesting and stubbornly European music; cold, glacial and filmic, music that suggested movement and travel by Eastern European train rather than by air conditioned limo the length of the Eastern Seaboard. Even their pseudo Cyrillic logo at the time, all thin and sparse and fat-fee, was a nudge-nudge wink-wink to the twin influences of the Iron Curtain and the Cold War. Those reversed Rs. The backwards Ns. Ask James Dean Bradfield about it the next time you see him.

As much as Simple Minds became a great Scottish export around the mid ’80s, it’s those earlier records where, for me, the magic really happens. Indeed, as the switched-on amongst us know, early Simple Minds was where it was truly at. That band, that line-up, that creative vision, not to mention the inspired choice of producers – John Leckie! Steve Hillage! –  has a rare essence about it that makes those great, danceable post-punk records sound futuristic still, even 40 years on.

Simple Minds – Theme For Great Cities

The eerie keyboard motif that signifies Theme For Great Cities’ start is all over those Minds’ records from the era. Part Eno and part Magazine’s Dave Formula, it’s the singular instrument that hints at melody and song form in the band. Married to a punchy rhythm section, it made for a spatial and atmospheric sound, a sound that was unmistakeably Simple Minds.

Theme For Great Cities is the perfect example of the group, the juddering bassline and whip-smart electro backing conjuring images of speeding landscapes as you rattle through foreign lands. The band is precision-perfect in timing, metronomic and pinpoint in accuracy. Even Charlie Burchill is in on the act. He plays almost not one chord, almost not one sustained note. The disciplined post-punker that he is plays the track’s scratchy rhythm almost the entire time without so much as a tendon-resting break. Nile Rodgers in eye liner, he breaks free at one point to simply crash a minor chord with all the charm of a glass bottle being smashed against a wall, then slips into a little effect-heavy sustained glissando before once again taking up the chicken scratch. Arty? Yep. European? Yep. Roxy Music if played by Glaswegian tenement kids? Yep. It’s a beauty. That well-worn cliche about an old record sounding like it could’ve been recorded yesterday rings true with Theme For Great Cities.

Likewise This Earth That You Walk Upon.

Simple Minds – This Earth That You Walk Upon

It’s so disciplined, so ethereal, it might’ve launched itself straight from The Orb’s mixing desk in 1993. Its pitter-pattering drum machine springs to mind Sly Stone, but where Sly would close-mike himself and drawl coolly about baybees makin’ baybees, Simple Minds smother the pitter-patter in a soundscape of treated electric guitar and thumping slapped bass, synth washes and echo-laden keyboards. Spacey and flotation tank-light, This Earth That You Walk Upon is a bit of a year zero for the electro acts that would follow.

In movie making terms, the trajectory of Simple Minds is a bit like your favourite art house director foregoing the grit and grain of monochrome and throwing their lot in with the surround sound and widescreen epicness of the Hollywood blockbuster studio set. There’ll still be good bits in the movies, but as a whole, they’re too crowd pleasing and calculated. In the old days, the creatives at the helm knew the cost of nothing and the value of everything. When they make that move into the big leagues, the bottom line becomes the single most important factor, and undoubtedly the music suffers as a consequence. Thankfully, we can go back any time we like. Outdated music for outdated people? You bet it is.

Get This!, Live!

I Lost My Sharpie To A BMX Bandit

Craig McAllister

 

We’ve a book for gigs and in it bands sign

It’s falling apart and it’s split at the spine

Every show we do it’s filled with a scribble

And plectrums and set lists and other such drivel

It was BMX Bandits on Saturday there

With Duglas T Stewart and coordinated stage wear

Their set filled with favourites and new ones just out

And bananas and grapes and kazoo solos throughout.

 

At the end of the night we’re tittling and tattling

As the stage crew get on with the art of dismantling

“Will you sign the book?” I ask to Duglas reclining

And turn to a new page in prep for its signing.

 

My sharpie’s deployed and after Duglas I hand it

To guitar, drums and bass, the three other Bandits

They think and they scribble, add kisses at the bottom

Then pass the book back…but someone’s forgotten

To return back my pen, my only black sharpie

And I eyeball all four of the band hierarchy.

 

The pen’s gone for good, I’m pissed off but accept it

But it irks me, it bothers me and I can’t quite forget it

It’s only a sharpie but you’ve gotta hand it

To the nominative determinism of that BMX Bandit

Yes, it’s only a sharpie but you’ve gotta hand it

To the nominative determinism of that BMX Bandit

I said it’s only a sharpie and it’s not how I planned it

To forego a pen to the BMX Bandits

 

(As I wrote this I heard the voice of John Cooper Clarke. Maybe you won’t.)

 

Here’s Serious Drugs. Electric guitars weeping the tiny tears of George Harrison in ’68. Acoustic 12 strings jangling away like the rain-soaked ghost of Alex Chilton in ’72. Sighing backing vocals that do uplifting melancholy like no-one since Teenage Fanclub took that particular idea and ran with it in their desert boots all the way to the charts. Excellent Joe McAlinden sax solo too. Serious Drugs has got the lot. Quite possibly the group’s finest moment.

BMX Bandits – Serious Drugs

 

 

 

Get This!

Coxon At The Controls

Craig McAllister

Blur. Four musicians. Four mindsets. Four sets of influences pushing and pulling the band in four different directions. Part of the appeal, you might say, and part of the reason they sound as they do (sounded as they did?), but only one of the four is responsible for putting the undisputed art into their uncouth rock.

It’s not Damon Albarn, a mega-talented writer for sure who can turn his hand to Chinese opera as quickly as he can rattle off some pseudo G-funk with Snoop Dogg. It’s not Dave the drummer either. Low-key Dave is more than happy in his old Teenage Fanclub t-shirt and standing for the right sort of politics, ready to be called upon for the pension-topping reunion shows when the public demands. And it’s not you, cheesemaking Alex. Sorry, but your pout and your cheekbones and your studied posturing, not to mention your aching mid-90s desire to be John Taylor for teenage girls in Adidas shell toes makes you just about the most punchable man there’s ever been in music. When people say they don’t like Blur, you’re the reason.

Step forward Graham Coxon. The other half of the band’s unassuming, ego-free side, Coxon quietly gets on with his job of being an arty lead guitar player in one of the nation’s greatest singles bands; hunched and studied, inventive and unique, angry and noisy but restrained and bluesy when required. Always interesting though. Especially when doing backwards rolls, Tele in hand, riffage ringing out from a 4 x 12 cabinet at ear-splitting volume. Oh yeah.

The guitar-as-siren on Popscene. The off-beat grind of the guitar against the fluid groove of Girls And Boys. The Beatlesy clang of Beetlebum‘s chorus. Coxon made them all. Lifted them, elevated the songs from promising to pretty much indispensable.

He’s tight ‘n taught, all wandering XTC by way of Remain In Light Afro-menace across forgotten single Music Is My Radar, before cutting free with an almighty wasp stuck in a food blender guitar break. Remind yrself of its greatness below.

Blur – Music Is My Radar

He’s all over Song 2‘s silly double drummer ‘n double Rat distortion blowout, its noisy jet engine take-off chorus following a clanging intro that he strived to play as horribly and sloppily as possibly. Why? He was fed up with the screaming teenage girls and pin-up appeal of his band. A bit of unexpected guitar Frippery and freakery kept him entertained and the audience on their toes. Woo-hoo.

The tension and release in M.O.R.’s gutbucket punk is magic. An arty use of fuck ’em up effect pedals welded to the band’s call and response vocals, some of them shouted through a far-away megaphone, and open chorded let-go in the chorus is the sound of the guitar player pulling against the grain of the rest of the band. Add in a clanging, out of tune piano right at the end and you have a pop single that made number 15 surely only on the back of the band’s name. Can’t imagine the shell toes and Fila tracksuits lapping this little Britpop ditty up very easily.

Blur – M.O.R.

Coxon is possibly most at home on Coffee And TV, its weird descending chords adding wooze to the vocal’s melody – his vocal, as it goes – before the all-out sonic freak attack of the ‘solo’, a worked-up in the studio affair where he stomped on and off his pedal board with all the enthusiasm of Gripper Stebson pogoing on poor Ro-land Browning’s head. You knew that already though.

Uniqueness. That’s the secret. What makes Blur so great? Graham Coxon, of course. In a lineage of great English singles bands, Blur may well be, for now, the last in that line. From The Beatles, The Kinks and The Who through to The Jam, Madness and The Smiths, an ability to amalgamate melody and electric guitars to an undeniable signature sound is a trick that all guitar bands strive for, yet few manage. Coxon at the controls of his array of effect pedals ensured Blur found their place in this exclusive club.

Gone but not forgotten

Sound Track

Craig McAllister

Some songs just fit on car journeys. Queens Of The Stone Age’s No One Knows and a midnight stretch of the relatively new ring road that by-passes the south side of Glasgow sounds awesome at 70 mph. Hall And Oates I Can’t Go For That goes nicely with cruise control on the Sunshine State’s Interstate 4. Radiohead’s There There at national speed limit-defying pace on the M4 north in an unseasonally quiet mid-July heatwave. Tindersticks’ Tiny Tears on a rain-soaked October Isle of Arran. Underworld’s Dark And Long… Stevie Wonder’s Boogie On Reggae Woman… freakin’ Band On The Run….Orbital’s Chime and the badly-needing-an-upgrade Barrhead – Irvine road fit together like hand in glove. Talking of which, the giddy acoustic rush of Bigmouth Strikes Again sounds just right driving up a deserted Dumbarton Road at two in the morning. Favourite car soundtracks. We’ve all got them.

Which takes me to the Highlands, 1993. We’re on some sort of road trip, the wee Ford Fiesta packed to the gunnels with waterproofs and Goretex and umbrellas and cagoules and all the usual things you’d take to the north of Scotland at the height of summer. We’ve a radio that simply refuses to tune to anything either side of Radio 1 and half a dozen tapes, carefully curated home-made jobs that the temperamental in-car tape player has already tried to devour before breaking north of Dunbartonshire.

At one point deep in the Highlands, heading somewhere towards the standing stones at Clava Cairns, Radio 1 drops out to intermittent static. We need to gamble on the willingness of the tape machine to play ball…and play tapes. Thankfully on this occasion it does…and it leaves me with a memory burned to the hard drive of the music section in my brain.

World Party‘s All I Gave is sandwiched mid-side, placed somewhere between Somewhere In My Heart and Groove Is In The Heart and it provides the ideal soundtrack for a jaw-dropping run through Scotland’s rich countryside. There are purple/grey peaks on the horizon, snow-flecked even in summer, with clear winding rivers far below that shimmer like chrome, old guys waist deep and fly-fishing them dry, surrounded by patchworks of untouched green fields bordered by stately pines and firs… an entire shortbread tin image of Scotland in real life, right in front of us in widescreen technicolour.

World Party – All I Gave

We like World Party. Their Bang! album is a current constant in our lives and All I Gave is our favourite song on it. Karl Wallinger has clearly been kissed on both cheeks by the Beatles’ gene, his George Harrisonisms never more to the fore than on this track. His vocals, joyful and soaring and full of his toothy sunshine smile do the sha-la-la in all the right places and tug at the strings of the heart whenever the minor chords come round. Woozy mellotronish psychedelia shares a bed with wheezing, asthmatic slide guitar, playing on top of unexpected chord changes and a melodic bassline that you really hope is played on an attention-to-detail Hohner violin bass. We rewind the track plenty and often and we never tire of it.

“I will always love you,” we sing aloud, unselfconsciously and out of tune, and the wee car with its questionable suspension bounces us up and over the brow of another single track hill. A stag – “A stag!!” – watches nonplussed as we clatter past. An eagle – “An eagle!!” – spirals in the sky to our left. The fisherman casts his fly one more time. We don’t see if the river has given up any more of its load as we’re now heading through the pines and onto Clava Cairns and its Bronze Age standing stones where, spookily, Radio 1 crackles back into life and ruins everything.

That moment with All I Gave though. That’ll last forever.

Sail on, Karl Wallinger. You were great.

Get This!, Gone but not forgotten

In The Buff

Craig McAllister

My old pal Derek was mad on coffee, in both senses of the phrase. He drank it the way a fish might presumably drink water, or the way Shane MacGowan evaporated his pints of gin, y’know; one regularly after the other, repeated non stop until bedtime. One too many and he’d be a gibbering, gum rattling freak, speeding away quite happily on a perfectly legal drug. In this state he could carpenter an intricate dado rail around your hall in the time it took the kettle to boil. A solid wood floor could routinely be laid in under an hour. The 60 Minute Make-Over? Our Derek was doing that while Claire Sweeney was still Lindsey Corkhill, mate.

Way back around 1997 Derek bought a satisfyingly chunky Italian percolator and would enjoy the ritual of preparing an espresso for you. Then another. And another. And one more before leaving. We’d be playing guitars and with each passing espresso the strumming got that little bit more ragged and loose-threaded at the ends until we were murdering the classics with Java and Illy and Lavazza running rampant through our systems. I remember rattling like a Scotrail diesel train on the walks back from his house, jerking from heel to toe at a hundred miles an hour, shaky and ill and continually needing to pee, then unable to sleep way past the midnight hour. Have you ever watched an Alex Higgins 100+ break? That. Can you miss the feeling of being totally wired? When your pals are no longer here to share it with you, of course you can.

We were at Songs Ya Bass in Glasgow’s Buff Club at the weekend. An idea that grew out of music nights in Rik and Nell’s house, for 11 strong years SYB has filled a quarterly slot in one of the city’s mankiest upstairs clubs. The premise is simple. Message Rik and Nell with 3 songs you’d want to dance/jump around to and they’ll create a playlist from everyone’s requests then play them at a decent volume until 11pm, when the Buff Club proper opens its doors and the oldies and goldies and grey hairs and nae hairs retreat down the sticky carpeted stairs and make their way to Glasgow Central for the last train home.

It was midway through Dog Eat Dog, or maybe Voodoo Ray on Saturday night, when I realised the Red Stripe was taking me well on my way to pished. The video screen slideshow that never repeats itself all night – a labour of love for Rik – had rotated from Joe Strummer to Run DMC to One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest‘s Nurse Ratched and the upstairs balcony and mobbed dancefloor were both a blurry haze of arms aloft folk not giving two hoots about what any onlooker might’ve thought of their dancing styles. Faces loomed in, grinning. The legs loosened to elastic. The sprung wooden floor (sacrilegiously laid on top of a Jim Lambie work of art, they say) became bouncy castle like. The slideshow faded from Lee Perry to Peter Cook and Dudley Moore to Muhammed Ali to The Cramps to Pele to Wilko Johnson to all the other greats. The music jarred unexpectedly from Gerald’s ‘hey oh, a-ha, a, uh-oh-ah‘ to Wham’s Young Guns to The Clash to New Order to…! Hey!…

thump-thump-thumpa-thump… ‘I’m Totally Wired! I’m Totally Wired!…I drank a jar of coffee and then I took some of these…. and I’m TOTALLY WIRED!‘ Magic!

The Fall – Totally Wired

The guitars, cheesegrater thin, cut through like tinfoil to a filling. Clang…scree…tcchhhskkkk…; relentless, repetitive and rickety, but really, really great! Steve Hanley, Mark E Smith’s long-time lieutenant plays looping, thumping bass. It worms its way into yr skull and stays there, uninvited but very welcome, the empathetic drums pounding away in the background and hammering you into submission. On top of it all, Mark Smith yelps and barks and screeches like the nails down the blackboard of popular music that he was, abrasive ADHD in the form of verse and chorus.

This – Totally Wired – is the exact jittery, nerve-shredding, anxiety-inducing sound of too much coffee (and other things, if that’s yr bag). It’s also, as it happens, the unofficial soundtrack to those frantic and fidgety walks home from Derek’s, senses jangling into the wee small hours. T-T-T-Totally Wired!!!

Gone but not forgotten

Limping On

Craig McAllister

Late era New Order, where the quality control diminishes with each passing year but the golden era reissues get pumped out at increasingly inflated prices are still a living, breathing entity only because of the music that’s gone before. The live shows nowadays – great as I’m told they are – are in vast, soulless places, sometimes even outdoors, with tickets sold at premium prices and no more than three quarters of the original band on show. The fall-outs have been well-documented on both sides and neither looks good for it. Hook continues to stubbornly tour his Peter Hook & The Light project while the rest of New Order and a sundry supporting cast limp on. Name me an essential New Order record released this century and I’ll show you a grasping optimist.

And yet…and yet…Music Complete, released in 2015 has a couple of shining moments. Not, let’s get this clear, the hideous and plodding Iggy Pop-‘enhanced’ Stray Dog…or Now I Wanna Be Your Dog’s Dinner, as I’d have named my remix if I’d been one of the 427 remixers involved across the album’s lifespan. Nor the washed-out synth wash of Superheated with (ha!) Brandon Flowers throwing vocal shapes across its poppy, autotuned, a-ha without a heartbeat chorus. Eugh. They might as well have called the album ‘Music? Completed It.‘ because they’d clearly run out of ideas by this point. This is the band that released Power, Corruption & Lies and Low-Life and Technique and a handful of magic stand-alone singles. Except, well, it’s clearly not, is it Bernard?

New Order was always an impenetrable, mysterious force. An enigma that conjured up propulsive and forward-thinking magic from the thin Mancunian air. And here they are in 2015, giving cameos to the era’s spotlight-hoggers. Ah! Maybe that’s it. Maybe in reality it’s New Order that needs the spotlight. Maybe that’s why, besides Iggy and Brandon, they also aligned themselves with minor hit maker La Roux (or Elly Jackson, as she’s known on other folk’s records).

She sings on Tutti Frutti and it’s pretty good. Not Bizarre Love Triangle good. Or The Perfect Kiss good. Not even Shellshock good. But comparatively pretty good. It’s the one chink of light in a dark era for a band that a sympathetic vet might’ve put down by now.

New Order – Tutti Frutti

Yeah, so it’s Smalltown Boy filtered through a thumping dance/pop prism, a mid-paced pulse of Bernard melancholy and uplifting chorus, but what makes it great are those Hook-ish Too-tee-Froo-tee growling vocals at the start and end. Remember ‘You got luuurve technique?’ That. It has you almost misty-eyed for an era not long gone by, yet seeming centuries away, where the four key members of New Order were pals and creatives and untouchable.

The best New Orderish, non New Order single of recent years? That’d be Gorillaz Aries, with Hook’s fluid signature bassline lapping its way up and down the neck as Albarn’s sad vocal surfs atop a jolting, crashing rhythm. There’s even another growly vocal at the start. ‘Ayr-eaze‘ goes Hooky, and you’re instantly pining for a band that’ll never be in the same room again.

Gorillaz – Aries

*Next year, Music Complete will be 10 years old. Look out for the triple vinyl anniversary box set with added Iggy ‘n Brandon ‘n Elly for extra cash-grabbing effect.