Live!

Bella Bell(e)a

Craig McAllister

“I’m beginning to think,” says a hot ‘n sweaty Stuart Murdoch, mid-way through ‘Side 1’ of If You’re Feeling Sinister, “that velour maybe wasn’t such a good idea after all.” Belle And Sebastian are in Troon, playing the second of two warm-up nights for an extensive pan-global tour to celebrate 30 years of recording activity as a group. The night before, they’d delivered (all reports say) a note-perfect rendition of debut album Tigermilk. Tonight, that same attention to detail is focused on the faithful delivery of their second album, plus an extended encore of Belles’ back cat classics. Troon Concert Hall is rammed. Murdoch is from Ayr, a short pitch ‘n putt down the South Ayrshire coast and much is being made of his local roots and these, his group’s first ever gigs on Ayrshire soil.

There was a time when I couldn’t get enough of Belle And Sebastian. I came to them just after Tigermilk and while that record was almost instantly unobtainable, nascent dial-up internet access provided me with my very first illegal download. By the time it had landed, the album had just about been reissued on CD, but still…

I loved all of those early singles and EPs; Dog On Wheels, 3…6…9…Seconds Of Light, This Is Just A Modern Rock Song, Lazy Line Painter Jane plus their associated b-sides. Here was a group with, via their sleeve art, an instant identity and, via their records, an instant sound – ‘We’re four boys in corduroy, we’re not terrific but we’re com-pe-tent,’ as they warble on …Modern Rock Song.

They seemed to be the sort of band that split listeners into two camps. Either you were nonplussed by their considered and non-threatening ways and quickly turned your attentions to other groups, or you bought into them, hook, line and sinker. Me, I was into them. Belle And Sebastian. Le Pastie de la Bourgeoise? Hooklines for thinkers.

The music fell into two camps as well. Either the tune was gossamer-light; fragile to the point of falling apart with vocals that were whispered and wobbly and fey, lightly strummed acoustic guitars playing against a backdrop of recorders and tambourines and the sort of pitched percussion that you might find at the back of an old cupboard in your local primary school, or they were reverb ‘n twang-soaked, hand-clapped ‘n beat-driven garage groovers, covered in a sheen of Dylan’s thin wild mercury keyboard sound and an ambitious but Asda-priced Brian Wilson approach to arrangement and production. Either way, they were ace.

If it’s been a while, give Dog On Wheels another listen.

Belle And Sebastian – Dog On Wheels

Dog On Wheels was the first song in the second half of the set last week and it motored along on, yes, a bed of reverb ‘n twang ‘n thin wild mercury keyboard. Stealing more then a melody from Lee ‘n Nancy’s Summer Wine and a key change from Scott 3 while copping Forever Changes‘ mariachi fanfare, Dog On Wheels has lost none of its ability to thrill, even twenty-nine years later.

My favourite period of Belle And Sebastian is around that second album. The perfect antithesis to Liam ‘n Noel ‘n Damon ‘n all of that, If You’re Feeling Sinister sounded out of step, positively arcane even back then, but with fresh ears, it’s held its own very well.

It’s a terrific record. There’s no knuckle-dragging wham/bam thunderslam with it. The opening track, The Stars Of Track And Field unspools slowly, gracefully, majestically and sets the mood for all that follows. Seeing Other People… Me And The Major… Fox In The Snow… Mayfly, Judy And The Dream Of Horses… all little mini symphonies of well-crafted songs. I always find myself going back to Dylan In The Movies. Maybe it’s because I got the ‘Don’t Look Back‘ reference immediately, or maybe it’s simply because it’s a brilliant wee song.

Belle And Sebastian – Like Dylan In The Movies

Boy With The Arab Strap stage invasion. Standard but fun.

Not for the Belles a power chord and squall of feedback, or a barreling drum roll and phlegmy, throaty, shouty vocal. Theirs is a considered noise, not a ‘that’ll do’ approach at all. Save for the frugging bassline, the band stops when Stuart sings ‘when the music stops!’ at the in the opening verse. The guitars that follow are clipped and conservative. No one is itching to fire off a blooze solo or anything flashy. The musicians are there to serve the song, as they were on that stage in Troon. Two of the nine piece group are on recorders. Stevie Jackson, falling somewhere between Elvis Costello and Buddy Holly plays a tasteful fuzz solo. Bob Kildea plays that frugging baseline with all the elan of a prime time James Jamerson. Chris Geddes coaxes subtle backing from his keyboard and the whole thing opens up in a technicolour riot of percussive milk float tinkles and stately horns, male/female vocals and a tastefully worked out ending…’If they follow you, don’t look back‘: the finest song about the threat of getting a kicking since Down In The Tube Station At Midnight, only more tastefully delivered (and without the actual kicking).

Amongst many dates, the Belle And Sebastian roadshow has already taken in Paris and Berlin, before a couple of Albert Hall shows in London and Manchester…and then Mexico and Canada and the States, where a friend of mine will see them in Los Angeles – From Fullarton Woods to Hollywood, to paraphrase East Kilbride’s Boy Wonder.

They’re back at Kelvingrove Bandstand in June. A balmy summer’s night under the open skies in Glasgow…where else would you rather be? Get there!

Alternative Version, Gone but not forgotten, Sampled

I. Am. Somebody.

Craig McAllister

‘Busboy’…’bellboy’… ‘waterboy’ …’shoeshine boy’…the reason African Americans began using ‘man’ as a full stop in conversation is there for all to see. Fed up of being treated as subordinates by their white bosses, jazz musicians and those in the service industry which enabled their scene to thrive called one another ‘man’, the inference – the point being – that you are very much the equal of the guy ordering you around. Damn right you are. Never forget it, man.

Jesse Jackson, the U.S, politician and activist who died last week, took this notion one step further. At his rallying speeches across a divided and tense States, he would punctuate his measured, proto-rap with a simple but powerful statement; “Never forget; ‘I am somebody. Respect me. Protect me. Never neglect me. I. Am. Somebody.’”

Born after his mother was raped by a neighbour, Jackson grew up living next door to half-siblings who would never know exactly who their young neighbour really was. Shunned by his natural father, Jesse Jackson more than anyone else entered adulthood understanding precisely the true meaning of ‘I am somebody’.

He worked tirelessly within the black communities of Chicago, fighting for desegregated schools, social housing and, working alongside Martin Luther King jr (he was with King in Memphis when he was assassinated), organised boycotts of whites-only shops/stores until the owners were forced not only to open their doors to all, but to actively employ people of colour. Jackson galvanised entire communities to stand up for equality, demand justice, fight for change.

Delivered in a blur of denim and suede and more than a casual approach to the use of shirt buttons, his early speeches were full of clenched fists, bared teeth, wild eyes …and absolute clarity. Go and watch them on YouTube. They were electrifying and rousing. It’s hard to relate them to the same person, the smart senior dressed in a navy blue suit and campaigning his way towards the White House a couple of decades later, but there’s Jesse; angry, fired-up and fighting for his people.

If you didn’t know, you might be forgiven for thinking these sort of speeches all occurred at some arcane point in history, around the time of Henry Ford’s Model T and Charlie Chaplin and southern state lynchings, y’know, before we knew any better, so it’s sobering to consider that the speech below was delivered in 1972, years beyond the advent of the automobile and hooded ‘Christians’ with arson habits…and very much in my lifetime. Probably yours too.

It’s all the more sobering – shocking even – to contemplate that the words spoken above still, in an oppressed, Trumpian, ICE-driven American society, ring with righteous anger and rage, a hundred years and more since the Model T Ford and silent movies and burning crosses first permeated American life. What’s really changed?

The speech above is – as you well know – the same speech that’s sampled on Andrew Weatherall’s remix of Primal Scream’s Come Together. Taken from the 1973 soundtrack release of the Wattstax benefit concert in L.A., it samples Jackson as he addresses 112,00 people in the Memorial Coliseum one balmy August day. Ensuring affordability and access for all, your $1 ticket got you a day’s music in the company of The Staple Singers, Carla and Rufus Thomas, The Bar-Kays, Isaac Hayes, Albert King – or as Jackson stated, ‘gospel and rhythm and blues and jazz…all just labels…we know that music is music…’

Primal Scream – Come Together

Weatherall’s sample is inspired, turning Primal Scream’s original (and very good) version of a gospel tinged, southern-fried heartbreaker – all heavenly trumpets and guitars dripping with the salty tears of Suspicious Minds – into a brewing and bubbling, long-form epic that very much imbues the spirit of 1990’s anything-goes/togetherness house music scene.

Even yr local indie disco was prone to dipping their Doc Martened toes into the world of repetitive beats. It wasn’t that unusual even then to have Voodoo Ray pop uo between Voodoo Chile and It’s A Shame About Ray. Three disparate records, one cutting edge dance music, one classic rock and one indie rock…but all just labels. Music is music is music, after all.

Baptist minister, two runs for President, agitator, organiser, educator: the world needs more Jesse Jacksons.

Gone but not forgotten

Snow Way Ahm Daein That

Craig McAllister

I found myself watching the Olympics the other night there. Men and women dressed head to (camel) toe in the sort of tight-fitting get up that yr average Marvel superhero might reject on grounds of it being ‘a bit revealing’ were throwing themselves down a glassy, serpentine ice track for around a minute at a time, lantern jaws and sculpted chins millimetres from the concrete ice, perfectly toned bodies rigid as arrows yet flexible enough to negotiate sudden, high banking turns, lying front-down and head-first on a plastic tray no larger than a restaurant-standard chopping block, and all at average speeds approaching 80mph. The ‘skeleton’ they call it. Probably because half the competitors become one before too long. When they finish their run, helmets are removed, hoods are peeled back and suddenly, the super-fit international youth of today is staring straight back at you with their perfect teeth and sparkling eyes and unyielding desire to give it just one more go; shave a hundredth of a second or more off your best time and you just might find yourself up there on the podium, one of the three fastest skeleton riders on the planet. Failure to do so – take the wrong line into a corner, leave your left ankle trailing for three tenths of a nanosecond as you straighten out of it, can see you languish down in 18th place at best. Or, at worst, become an actual skeleton. Four years’ training for that? It’s a tough sport.

So too the snowboarding, although that all looks a bit more loose ‘n rad ‘n rock ‘n roll. The BBC presenters, normally the last bastion of received pronunciation and standards in grammar have, quite rightly, eschewed with yr Baldings ‘n Irvines ‘n Crams – he’s got the curling to attend to – and drafted in a couple of young dudes in John Jackson and Jenny Jones, both snowboarding Olympic medalists, and both of whom are enthusiastically well-versed in the vernacular of the sport.

Halfpipes, lips, goofy stances, corks, grabs, 1440s, switches and kickers…all are explained and shouted excitedly down the microphone whenever one of the boarders becomes airborne against the inky-black Milanese sky and pulls off the unthinkable across a series of daring, freestyling manoeuevres. They zoom off the curled end of the jump, twist like Festive-time corkscrews in a blur of baggy, puffy salopettes, day-glo hip-hop graphics and sponsors’ logos on the base of their boards, winding and spiraling through the Italian night sky like it’s the most natural thing in the world. It’s a brilliant watch, especially as the camera footage is now so good. Slo-mo camera angles show the crowd reflected upside down in the visor of the boarder, capture the shavings of snow as they spray up and out from the edges of the board and let you count exactly the number of rotations the competitors have managed to squeeze into the vacuum of time between landing and launching again. You would see the fillings in their teeth as they ballet-danced their way across the skies, if only these supreme specimens of human life had fillings in their teeth.

The commentators ooh and aah or groan when either they land perfectly or crash and burn. As a spectator sport, it’s the crashes you really want to see…until they de-helmet and you realise the boarder who’s been entertaining you for the past few seconds is not yet 17 years old. Unreal. Truly. The gung-ho attitude of youth will take them further and higher and freer than before, especially if you’re one of those sneaky ski jumping cheats who’ve added extra weight to the groin area in order to gain extra in-air distance at the point of take-off. Maybe if they’d laid off the free condoms that reportedly have run dry throughout the Olympic village, nature would have seen to it that the abstaining man competing in the sport might have a natural advantage over his free-lovin’ adversary. Think about it for next time, lads. Marginal gains ‘n all that.

Anyway.

I can’t watch snowboarding without hearing an internal soundtrack of Beastie Boys. This probably comes from reading Beastie Boys Book, where Adam Yauch’s best friends/bandmates admit that they had no idea what he got up to in his spare time. At one point, they discover that Yauch has fallen so deep for snowboarding that he’s taken to flying to the top of mountains in helicopters, then jumping out, board attached, to cork, grab and switch all the way to the bottom again. I was thinking about this as I watched those young maniacs twirl their way from top to bottom in Milan, pretty sure that Yauch could’ve given them a run for their money…before breaking into a freestyling rap…or sitting down for tea with the Dalai Lama…or popping round with his plumbing gear to fix the dodgy pipe in your Brooklyn apartment. We all have friends with hidden depths, but Adam Yauch was seemingly peerless.

Here’s Something’s Got To Give, one of Check Your Head‘s more laidback moments, all ambient bass textures, loose-limbed drum action, dubby atmospherics and terrific Wurlitzer (or is it Rhodes?) playing. Next time the snowboarding is on, mute the TV commentary and instead play this. Tension is rebuilding…somethin’s got to give. It works perfectly.

Yauch takes flight

 

The Beasties, no strangers to sportswear or over-sized sunglasses or a baggy pair of pants would’ve looked great in snowboarding gear. Did they ever make a video of such? If so, I can’t find it. If not…wasted opportunity, lads.

Get This!, New! Now!

Lily Rae Grant

Craig McAllister

I was, for years, a 6 Music devotee in the morning. From the fill of the kettle in the kitchen to the resigned opening of the car door at work, there wasn’t a day between a Monday and a Friday when I didn’t tune in. The music played was almost incidental. It was the chat, the wit, the wisdom that you came for. In (first) Lauren Laveren and (then) Shaun Keaveny – two totally different broadcasters, one serene, the other madcap and unpredictable, but both with the golden touch when it came to breakfast/commuting radio – the BBC had a particular market sewn up. As with everything though, someone somewhere decided things needed freshening up and brought in younger talent.

I suspect, Nick Grimshaw, ex Radio 1 rent-a-gob and the current incumbent in the hot show hot seat is aimed at a listenership in a demographic I no longer occupy, and I’ve happily made peace with this. These days, I use the daily commute to and from work to catch up on Guy Garvey’s Sunday show. The mix of the old and the new, intercut with abstract archive interview clips and Garvey’s laconic northern brogue makes for great in-car listening. When he goes on holiday and a replacement is brought in, that becomes dead annoying. There’s really no substitute for gentle Guy and his loosely themed concept programming.

 

Speaking of younger talent…

Last weekend, Guy Garvey played Lily Rae Grant‘s Forget About and it fairly floored me. I was stuck at temporary lights, one eye on the clock, foot poised impatiently on the accelerator, but within half a minute, I’d put on the brake and any anxieties I had about getting to work later than normal had vanished, wrapped instead in Grant’s unwinding melody.

I turned it up. Like, right up. Can I suggest you skip to the second track in the player above and do likewise. Why it’s not the lead track is beyond me, tbh. Maybe it’s the six minutes-plus that makes it less likely to get airplay? I dunno – but try telling that to Guy bleedin’ Garvey.

It was the tinkling, descending Riders On The Storm electric piano refrain that reeled me in. I’m a sucker for that sound. That and the Midlake by way of mid ’70s Fleetwood Mac arrangement. The gossamer-light vocals are soaked in delay. They overlap to create counter melodies before wafting off to the outer fringes of the atmosphere. The band behind remain solidly slow and steady. No one is rushing to the finish. Everything is precise and considered. The bass wanders up the frets occasionally, always returning back to the root. A skirl of acoustic guitars briefly colours the palette then steps into the background. The keys are loose and, dare I say it, funky, centering the whole thing, but it’s Grant’s vocals that float around the whole thing like a Stevie Nicks’ lacy stage costume which give the track its air of adult mystery.

Forget About has all the elan and high production of an ABBA deep cut (Eagle, for example) and is all the more amazing when you learn its writer and performer is just 18 years of age. It’ll be interesting to see how Lily Ray Grant develops – I much prefer Forget About to the acoustic introspection of the release’s other track Poison Ivy, so if the budget allows, I’d be hoping to see her on the road with a seasoned gang of Fender bass-wearing, Fender Rhodes-tinkling musos, replicating as much as possible the self-assured storm Grant cooks up on Forget About.

Rather frustratingly, had I heard it ‘live’ at the time, I may well have managed to secure a copy of the 7″ single, but by the time I’d caught up with this segment of the show on Wednesday evening, physical copies had sold out. That’s the power of national airplay right there. You can stick your wares in Spotify’s overflowing cesspit of noise. You can hawk them at 60-capacity gigs. But secure airplay on a radio show with decent coverage and there’s a wee chance you might just make it…whatever ‘making it’ constitutes these days.

You might want to petition Red Licorice Records to do a second run of 7″s. Any more airplay and they’d need to relent, right?

Lily Rae Grant can be found on Bandcamp.

Alternative Version, Sampled

The Higher You Fly, The Harder You Fall

Craig McAllister

If Screamadelica was the result of Andrew Weatherall pointing a rudderless Primal Scream (shambling, jangling Byrds copyists? Long-haired, leather-breeked faux rockers?) towards the boundary-free possibilities of club culture, his work with One Dove a year later was the result of artist and producer coming at the music from the same angle to create the Sunday morning soundtrack that would be the perfect antidote to Screamadelica‘s Saturday night high.

Is it coincidence that Movin’ On Up kick starts Screamadelica while Morning White Dove’s solipsistic groove eases in with Fallen? Most probably…but it’s a fortuitous one.

The ‘Scream album is something of a considered classic, and rightly so. It made wallflowers dance. It opened minds to the possibilities of music beyond three chords and the truth. It crossed over and brought the dance crowd, Osh Kosh b’gosh n’all, to the places where guitars reigned supreme. Watch any episode of The Word and you’ll see young folk in baggy, white, long-sleeved t-shirts and Kickers throwing shapes to Throwing Muses and Nirvana and Pop Will Eat Itself. Look closely at footage from inside any suburban nightclub of the era and, amongst the gurners and groovers, you’ll see wee floppy fringed and denim jacketed guys losing their once-closed minds to 808 State and A Guy Called Gerald.

Gospel and rhythm ‘n blues and jazz? All those are just labels. We know that music is music, to quote the sampled preacher on Come Together. It was a genuinely thrilling time to be into live music and gigs and clubs and records and the whole overflowing stew of it all, it really was.

While Screamadelica is a sprawling, overground behemoth of an album, as much a feature of suburban record collections as wall-mounted TVs are in suburban living rooms, Morning Dove White is, by comparison, something of an outlier. You need to know about it somehow. Its constituent tracks get next to zero airplay. It’s rarely mentioned in ‘Classic Albums’ lists. Had you not been there at the time, it’s unlikely you’ll have an affinity with it, and yet it’s an album very much ripe for rediscovery by some switched-on in-crowd or other. It has the songs. It has the beats. It has the timeless production. And it certainly has the cool halo of detachment, aloofness even, that has seen it standing alone for the thirty plus years since it was released.

Band and producer found their worlds colliding after One Dove’s Fallen single was released on white label and, taken with its cavernous and spacey production, Weatherall agreed to remix it. A terrific, slowly unspooling and whacked-out come down of a remix, it found itself on the wrong end of the law after no-one thought to clear the sample of a bothersome Supertramp harmonica refrain.

One Dove – Fallen (Weatherall’s Nancy & Lee mix)

Hastily deleted, it allowed One Dove and Andrew Weatherall to work on the tracks that would end up becoming the album. The group would record demos in their Glasgow studio then dispatch them to Weatherall in London where he’d break them into their constituent parts, throw Lee Perry’s ricocheting kitchen sink at it, rope in the odd uncredited muso pal (Jah Wobble and his juddering, wandering bass is on there somewhere, a feedbacking Andrew Innes too) and the much reformed tracks would make their way back to Glasgow for instant approval.

One Dove – White Love (Weatherall’s Meet The Professionals dub)

The finished results are magnificent, the equal of any of those stand alone remixes that Weatherall conjured together. As an album, Morning Dove White flows like all the greatest ones should, with peaks and troughs and refrains and reprises, the individual tracks ooh-ing and aah-ing and rattling and rolling like the best club-infused music; ethereral and sighing vocals, massive basslines and ting-a-ling percussion, but with enough hooks and melodies and pop suss – ‘I remember the night you left me‘, ‘don’t save me, just forgive me‘, ‘the skies cry with me now that I’m alone‘ – that it has chart-bothering potential. That One Dove looked great – two guys flanking a coquettish yet bookish female – went some way to the group finding favour with a demographic beyond trainspottery Weatherall geeks…but not much further really.

For all its marginal appeal, never lose sight of the fact that Morning Dove White remains a brilliant cross fertilisation of the old and the new; the blues and heavy pathos of a Roy Orbison record, say, given a sly dose of MDMA then melded to the boom and hedonistic power of dance music. Like Screamadelica, it deserves a place in everyone’s collection.

One Dove – White Love (radio mix)

Perhaps understandably, the folk bothered the most by the record’s low sales were, pfffft, the people at the record label. They (London Records) wanted crossover, ‘Scream-like success. Club hits are one thing, baby, but it’s high up in the charts that really matters. Not for nothing were they once called the ‘Cashbox Charts’ in America. And, as it turned out, One Dove couldn’t deliver proper mainstream chart success. Not really.

To their dismay, sympathetic ‘name’ remixers were brought in. Stephen Hague did what I’d consider a fine job (above) on White Love. One Dove hated it. William Orbit, foreshadowing the bloopy and ambient textures that he’d employ on All Saints’ Pure Shores a few years later worked Breakdown into a longform pop masterpiece, but again, this wasn’t enough to provide real chart success. Eventually, inevitably, the group was dropped, their second (Weatherall-free) album shelved forever…and Morning Dove White left to percolate in the ears and minds of the more sussed of listeners.

Get down on it, as someone once sang. (And reissue it on vinyl, someone, eh?)

 

Cover Versions, Gone but not forgotten

Sly Dunbar

Craig McAllister

It’s a long way from Scotland to Jamaica – about four and a half thousand miles at the last Google search – but the two small nations are inextricably linked. Thanks to mercenary tobacco merchants who set sale from Scotland’s second city a couple and more centuries ago, Glasgow has visual reminders of its links to the tobacco and slave trade slap bang in the middle of the city centre.

Road users enter and circumnavigate the city via the Kingston Bridge. The Sub Club, the world’s longest-running underground dance club, can be found on Jamaica Street. The streets that surround the city centre form an area known as the Merchants City, the street signs hung in long-standing tribute to the men who brought tobacco, wealth and dubious social values (and lung cancer) to the west of Scotland; Buchanan, Ingram and Glassford, to name but three, made fortunes trading in people and tobacco, using their dirty gains to build impressive townhouses that still stand today. One of them, William Cunninghame’s majestic Roman-columned mansion – Saturday afternoon hang-out for every subculture since the teddy boys – has operated for almost 30 years as the Gallery of Modern Art. You might recognise it as the building behind the statue of the guy on horseback with a traffic cone permanently skewed on his head. I dunno what a complex man such as the Duke of Wellington would make of Glasgow’s involvement in slavery, but there he stands, a traffic-coned and shat on guardian of one of the city’s finest architectural triumphs.

Go to Jamaica and you’ll be surrounded by signs of Scottish influence. The Scotch Bonnet pepper is a national delicacy, for goodness sake. Travel the island and you’ll drive through Culloden, Dundee, Aberdeen, Elgin, Kilmarnoch (with an ‘h’), even Glasgow again…albeit in undeniably better weather. There are, believe it or not, around 300 towns in Jamaica with names rooted in Scotland.

The planters, merchants and even enslaved people who worked the tobacco fields adopted – or were forced to adopt – Scottish surnames. A quick flick through Kingston’s telephone book will throw up all sorts of unlikely yet true surnames; McKenzie, McIntosh, Anderson, Campbell, Archibald. Sounds like the warmers who littered the Partick Thistle bench last weekend, doesn’t it? Every one is a common Jamaican surname. FACT: the most common surname in Jamaica is Campbell. Even Usain Bolt is named in relation to the Scots word for running extremely quickly. Or maybe he isn’t.

Anyway. This brings us to Sly Dunbar.

That surname has always intrigued me. How did a right-on roots rocker from Kingston end up with a random east of Scotland town for a surname?

The answer might be found in the history books. I may be adding two and two together here and getting five, but give this some thought.

We need to go back to 1650 and Oliver Cromwell’s march on Scotland to rid Charles II from the Scottish throne. Seen as a direct threat to his plans for an English Commonwealth, Cromwell and his army marched on Edinburgh. Forced back from there, they fought and quickly defeated the Scots in the nearby town of Dunbar. Around 3000 Scots were killed in the battle, with a further 10,000 marched as prisoners of war to Durham in the north of England. Of these 10,000, many died through disease and malnutrition. The survivors were thrown on a boat and sent to the colonies to work as tobacco plantation labourers. Eventually, they settled, formed relationships with the locals and had families. Which is where, I’d think, Sly Dunbar’s roots lie. It’s certainly a plausible theory.

Sly Dunbar played drums on literally thousands of tracks. A quick flick through your own collection, or even a random lucky dip, will quite possibly reveal something he drove the rhythm on. From Bob Marley to Bob Dylan, Serge Gainsbourg to Britney Spears, Sinead O’Connor to Yoko Ono, nothing was off-limits for him. Often in partnership with his bass playing sidekick Robbie Shakespeare (now, there’s another interesting surname), Dunbar provided nothing less than a killer rhythm. He could be thunderous, as he was when laying down the echoing patterns that ricocheted around Lee Perry’s many productions. He could be metronomically rickity-tickity, as he was when rattling out a hi-hat pattern on a roots reggae deep dive. He could be subtle and feather-like when required, like he was on the slow and steady Roots Train from Junior Murvin’s Police And Thieves album. Dylan’s Jokerman. Dury’s Girls Watching. Herbie Hancock’s Future Shock. Sympathetic to the song and what was required of him, he was never the star, but he was never not noticed.

His work with Grace Jones remains a high point. Their high, skanking take on The Pretenders’ Private Life is a proper room shaker that requires, undoubtedly, immediate attention if previously unheard. The tripped out and dubby atsmosphere he and Robbie cook up on Jones’ version of Joy Division’s She’s Lost Control is insanely great, Manchester’s greyest of rainy day anthems transported bouncily to the sunny climes of the Caribbean. The nudge-nudge innuendo they play to in Pull Up To The Bumper‘s reggae disco groove, long black limousines ‘n all, is fantastic.

Grace Jones – Warm Leatherette (long version)

I’m a sucker for the long version of Warm Leatherette, Grace’s take on Daniel Miller’s debut release for Mute Records, in itself an interesting and skronky piece of early electro experimentalism, but with Sly on the drum stool, a track that’s now drawn out into a cold and detached slice of post-punk. You know those scenes in 1980s American movies, when a shoulder-padded cop stakes out the leather blouson’d bad guy in a neon-lit multi-tiered club? This track would’ve been perfect for the soundtrack.

“Waaarrrmmm!” Grace purrs. “Leather-ette!” Keyboards tooting like traffic jams, bass prowling and popping like Jones herself in a roomful of young guys, the car and its features a metaphor for the singer’s carnal desires.

Rock(steady) on, Sly.

Get This!, Sampled

Damn The ‘Dan

Craig McAllister

There’s a well-worn meme that does the rounds, a life truth centred on the idea that the music you listened to between teens and twenties is the stuff that comes to define you in your later years. I don’t disagree with this notion at all; the same old guitar-based shit that once rattled my bedroom windows now rattles the wine glasses hanging upside down in the area at the back end of the living room that we only half-jokingly refer to as ‘the bar’ (and clogs up many of the pages in this here influential and on-point blog), but I dispute the idea that you can’t allow for a little flexibility when it comes to making way for ‘new’ old music that you’d previously have sneered at.

Which brings us to Steely Dan.

They’re there, they exist, surely, purely, to be sneered at; the sunglasses after dark, the feathered shags, the totally superior halo of recreational cocaine abuse that hovers around them like the glow in a Ready Brek advert. The flares, the platforms, the shirts unbuttoned two buttons too many, the creeping facial foliage as sculpted and considered as the tasteful sax solos they weave between the augmented chords and tickled Rhodes keys. If only for the state of the hair alone, furchrissakes! They’re a cynic’s dream they are.

Grown up on a diet of punkish three chord bluster? Do four chords in the one song make that act, in your misanthropic view, far more prog than punk? Is your favourite group’s debut album comfortably under thirty minutes long? You’ll maybe struggle somewhat with Becker and Fagen. The duo behind the ‘Dan are the very definition of the word ‘muso’. Carefully placed background vocals? Check. Subtle drum fills and percussive fancies? You betcha! Soft focus vocals, half sung, half spoken, but always in tune, and with a range that would terrify both Hall AND Oates (remind me to return to them at some point), Steely Dan records are meticulously arranged; intricate and cerebral and clever, and often, it would seem, just for the hell of it. A group that can write? And arrange? And really play? Gabba Gabba Hey, No Way!

Even on De La Soul’s say-so, I tried and failed. And tried. And failed again. They were just too clinical and clean-sounding. Later on, Super Furry Animals had me returning to Showbiz Kids on the home-made and illegally downloaded version of the ‘Dan’s Ultimate Collection that sat unloved in a folder deep in my iTunes. But ultimately, collectively, they were just (yaawwwn) too boring, baby.

But yet.

One day, some misplaced presenter on 6 Music who was clearly on the wind-up played Reelin’ In The Years. And I found myself tapping out the drums’ tasteful rhythm on the steering wheel straight from the off. As the verse (“Is this Thin Lizzy?) gave way to the super-soft vocal harmonies in the chorus (“Ah, shit, this is Steely Dan!”), I had to admit it had me. There’s a guitar break that sounds (again) like polite Thin Lizzy, another verse where Becker? Fagen? trips over his sing/talk tongue as he fits all those carefully-considered lyrics into the length of the bar before it’s too late. And – again – a Lizzy-like guitar break then (tastefully) a fade-out before the five minute mark. Steely Dan! Who knew they could be so compact and poppy and politely rockin’? Had I been driving a Mondeo, I might’ve broken out in a rash of Partridge proportions, but no. I drove on, now unsure of my stance on this old thing called Steely Dan.

And then – get this – you go home and, when you have the house to yourself, you reassess their old, familiar standard Do It Again at wine glass-rattling volume and you have to admit to yourself that it is in fact a bit of a banger, as the kids hopefully have never said.

Steely Dan – Do It Again

It’s got it all. The lazy, sun-kissed backbeat, the shimmering Fender Rhodes, some sort of sitar freakoutery, the heat haze guitars that play both fancy chords and lightning-quick solos that spark like welders’ torches in a blue collar mid-west industrial one horse town. Drop outs and build ups, a G-funk key break a good twenty years early, a gentle beast of a song snaking its way into the sunset on a bed of smug, half-paced and energy-free vocals.

Damn the ‘Dan. Are you supposed to like them? Sometimes it’s really hard not to.

Alternative Version, Peel Sessions

Acutely Obtuse

Craig McAllister

In this house at least, it’s very probably I Am Kurious Orange, but This Nation’s Saving Grace is often universally acknowledged as The Fall‘s greatest album. It is simultaneously accessible yet acutely obtuse in its weirdness; the concrete bass slam that drives Bombast into yr skull and the bone-shaking shouty skitter of Spoilt Victorian Child (surely the greatest Fall song title of all)…Couldn’t Get Ahead‘s skewed rockabilly and Gut Of The Quantifier‘s proto rap…My New House’s off-kilter poppish sheen…Paintwork‘s wonky balladeering…I Am Damo Suzuki‘s claustrophobic and descending head music…something for all tastes, you might say.

Released in 1985, it is, in a year of Brothers In Arms‘ (and even Psychocandy‘s and Meat Is Murder‘s) ubiquity, very much an outlier. Much like a decent measure of ancient malt, the first taste might leave you unsure, the residual after taste unpleasant even, but the ability to stick with it will slowly but surely establish it as a go-to when the moment calls. It is very much a rich and varied listen.

The Fall – L.A.

I’ve been playing L.A. a lot recently. From its helicoptering bass riff in, it’s a bruising and repetitive soundscape that defies you not to listen more than once. Listen and repeat…listen and repeat. That’s been me the past week.

The Fall rhythm section, earthquake-proof and chiseled from the same bedrock as the track’s titular city, keeps everything solidly four to the floor. Mark barks, yelps and sing-speaks the song’s title in the background. Brix oohs and coos, the Californian Cher to his Salford Sunny, the additional leverage that comes from being the boss’s missus affording her the space to dust the whole thing in the abrasive yet hooky circular guitar riff that settles in your brain from first bar to last. The pop fly in the group’s gritty ointment, Brix was ably supported by producer John Leckie, mixing desk manipulator who rode that fine line between art and accessibility and helped make This Nation’s Saving Grace one of The Fall’s very best.

Perhaps even better is the session version The Fall recorded for John Peel, worth it especially for the added dose of Mark’s uncalled for abrasion in the intro where he declares that “Lloyd Cole’s brain and face is made out of cowpat…we all know that!“

Are you ready to be heartbroken, Lloyd? Listen on:

The Fall – L.A. (Peel Session)

Alternative Version, Live!

Out Of Step/Out Of Time

Craig McAllister

I scanned this totally preposterous list on Substack over the festive period, where Thurston Moore lists his 350 Best Records of 2025. Yeah! – there’s no typo in there – that really does say 350, and Thurston really did list ’em all.

A totally pretentious concept, he goes, of course, for the willfully obscure and impossible to track down; cassette-only releases, band-made CDRs of live shows that 23 people were at, a Lana Del Rey (hey! I known her!) CDR single (ie promo-only release), a Sun Ra lathe-cut 10″, a Lou Barlow lathe-cut 7″, and so on and so on…

That coveted number one slot of Thurston’s was occupied by Laura De Jongh‘s Fundus. De Jongh is a harpist from Antwerp with a lovely, textured, ambient feel for soundscaping, great late night/early morning chill out stuff if that’s your kinda thing, but by the time of the list’s publication, her record – another 10″ (2025’s undisputed underground format of choice) was already long out of print.

Who has time to listen to – and properly critique – that much new stuff…and then whittle it down to a shortlist of three and a half hundred?!? The album buyer for Rough Trade East won’t have managed that. Not even the counter staff at Mono in Glasgow will have managed that combined. I get that Thurston has used the opportunity to shed light on some of his lesser-known friends’ essential, if outre, work, but c’mon, man! Three hundred and fifty records! What nonsense!

Now, had this been 1997, Thurston might’ve opted for a more mainstream approach. Possibly the last great year for album releases, it seemed the year threw up a now-considered classic every other week. OK Computer and The Fat Of The Land, In It For The Money and Radiator, Dig Your Own Hole, Homogenic and Urban Hymns, Homework, Earthling, Blur and Tellin’ Stories, Heavy Soul, Vanishing Point, Maverick A Strike, Songs From Northern Britain, Mogwai Young Team, Brighten The Corners, Being There…Ladies And Gentlemen, We Are Floating In Space…ladies and gentlemen, we were spoiled for choice.

It’s quite possible too that a Tokyo collective of long-fringed shoegaze revivalists had cooked up quite the Jazzmastered storm on a limited to 50 copies CDR, wrapped in rice paper and designed to erase itself after half a dozen plays, but y’know, who knows? Maybe Thurston does. He probably has 2 copies.

Even further back, 1991 was a similarly stellar year. Spin Magazine, the US equivalent to the UK’s NME (ie, it focused on metal-free, guitar-based music plus the odd slab of interesting hip-hop) went as far as declaring Teenage Fanclub’s Bandwagonesque its Album of the Year. Considering 1991 also threw up Nevermind and Loveless, Out Of Time and Screamadelica, Trompe le Monde, Blue Lines and De La Soul Is Dead, Weld, Achtung Baby, OG Original Gangster, Peggy Suicide and Foxbase Alpha, that’s quite the feat. Maybe it had something to do with ex-Orange Juice drummer Steven Daly being Spin’s contributing editor at the time…or maybe it was just the simple fact that Bandwagonesque was (and still undeniably is) a great record.

I listened to Out Of Time today, start to finish, twice. I can confirm that it’s lost none of its buzz – indeed, time has been very kind to it, and a record I’d heard a dozen times a day from the counter of Our Price is, in 2026, possibly even more appealing. REM’s real crossover album (Green may have brought them peeking from the margins, but Out Of Time went overground in a totally unprecedented way), even tracks like the much overplayed Losing My Religion and the much maligned Shiny Happy People sparkled boxfresh and urgent.

The high points, of which there are many, go some way to explaining why people despair at the drop-off in quality of REM’s output in the years that followed. Low, with Michael Stipe’s voice in a, eh, low register is a slow-boiling beauty, possibly the second-best track on the record. The none-more Beach Boys-y Endgame is still sublime. I could play this at one point, learned by ear and note-perfect on an acoustic guitar. (I must get my chops back.) Belong‘s soaring wordless chorus, first heard and sung three years previously during 1989’s Green tour at the Barrowlands. Half A World Away…Texarkana‘s choppy riffing, Me In Honey‘s soaring and sparring dual vocals… Out Of Time is a properly fantastic album. You should make a point of playing it this week.

The pinnacle though? That’s easy. The gothic, country blues of Country Feedback is, quite clearly, the greatest song on the record, and quite clearly the greatest song Neil Young never wrote. Michael takes centrestage, the band slow and stately, totally in control of the song’s unwavering steadiness with Stipe’s unspooling vocal throwing in the odd, unexpected sweary word amongst its gorgeous melody. I could listen to this all day long and never tire of it. If I’m making a Thurston-type list for the end of ’26, Country Feedback may well be at the upper echelons of it. The 10″, lathe-cut, US promo-only white label, of course.

Here’s REM doing a grand version on Jools Holland’s Later in 1998.

REM – Country Feedback (Live on Later)

It’s quite easy to imagine a Neil Young version on Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, his ramshackle and feedbacking guitar replacing the weeping pedal steel. If only.

REM and Neil Young – Country Feedback (Shoreline Amphitheatre, October 1998)

The closest yet is from 1998, when ol’ Nel himself grabbed an acoustic guitar and joined REM for an encore at the Shoreline Amphitheater in California. Michael says at the start that it’s his favourite REM song, and who can blame him?

Alternative Version, Cover Versions, Gone but not forgotten, Hard-to-find

Nineteen

Craig McAllister

Plain Or Pan turns 19 today. One blink, and already, it’s into its final year of being a teenager, somehow mid-way through second year at University and making its own considered path in life. It’s very much its own thing these days, with its own mind and opinions and world view. Unlike its curator, gone is the need to be on it all weekend…unless by ‘on it’ you mean gym equipment. It’s protein, not pints for this one, and it looks good for it. Will it wish it had done more reckless things in its late teenage years? I doubt it. So far, it seems quite happy in its own skin. Let’s see how it fares in its 20th year – all things considered, it’s not bad going for a wee music blog steadfastly stuck mainly in the past.

Talking of which…

I’ve been reading Colin MacInnes’s Absolute Beginners the past week. On Paul Weller’s say-so, I’d tried it years ago, more than once, but couldn’t get with it so sat it aside and let it gather decades of dust. I’m glad the urge took me to pick it up again. Something clicked. It hooked me and I read it in three nights flat. It is, as it turns out, a terrific book; fast of pace, meaty in subject matter and, when the protagonists are in scene, written in a sort of secretive teen-speak that could give Anthony Burgess’s nadsat argot in A Clockwork Orange a decent run for its money. I suspect you knew this already though.

Set in 1958 (and published hot off the press in 1959), it tells the story of a 19-year old west London teen, moved out already and living in a run down yet vibrant multi-cultural area. His neighbours are prostitutes…druggies…violent Teddy boys…beautiful people of all sexualities; it all makes for an obscene melting pot of edgy living. A hustling freelance photographer, we never find out his name – as he comes in and out of contact with the other key characters, he is referred to as ‘Blitz Baby’, ‘the kid’, ‘teen’, and so on – and we follow him as he falls out with his mother, takes a trip with his dying father and tries to convince his once girlfriend – ‘Crepe Suzette’ – not to settle for a marriage of convenience with a much older gay man. Race issues boil over – a result of a campaign of hate by the Daily Mail (or Mrs Dale, as the young folk refer to it) and our photographer is caught up in the melee of the Notting Hill riot, his head clobbered, his Vespa stolen, an easy target on account of his friendship with the Indian and Jamaican communities.

Jazz speak falls from every page, in-the-know references made to late-night Soho establishments where modern jazz is the new thing, where style-obsessed teens pop pills and seek thrills, the first generation post-war to grow up in a technicolour world where hope, ambition and aspiration are the key factors in eking out a life as far removed from your parents’ as possible. Nineteen, with a bit of cash in your pocket? And an attitude? And a way of speaking that is alien to the generation that came before you? You’re an absolute beginner.

The 1986 film adaptation of the novel has, since its release, come in for a fair bit of well-deserved and sometimes misguided stick. Even David Bowie’s majestic theme song – and one of his very best – can’t quite save it entirely, nor the sight of him turning up as slick advertising exec Vendice Partners in the sort of suit (if not accent) he might’ve adopted as stage wear towards the end of the decade. Like most adaptations, the book is far better (the film feels the need to name our absolute beginner ‘Colin’ – in memory of the novel’s deceased author, you have to think) but in the montage below there’s some great film-only dialogue, between the vibraphones and shuffling snares, brightly-coloured sets and hammy accents, that’s worth bending your ear towards.

*One point for every cast member you can name in the clip.

 

‘Aren’t you a little too old for her?’

‘I’m only thirty-seven…’

‘Thir’y seven?! Arahnd the waist, maybe..!’

(Also – doesn’t the Bowie track that plays at the end owe more than a little to Madonna’s Material Girl? A tongue-in-cheek reference maybe, given the subject matter of the scene being soundtracked?)

Paul Weller called Absolute Beginners ‘a book of inspiration’, so much so that he ‘took’ it with him as his only source of reading material when he was banished by Kirsty Young on Desert Island Discs. If you are an impressionable teenager looking to find yourself and choose a path in life, the novel, with its themes of socialism and left-wing politics married to a decent soundtrack is a fine place to start. Weller would, of course, name a Jam track after the novel and later in the Style Council would create a tune called Mr Cool’s Dream, a reference, I’m assuming, to the character of the same name in MacInnes’s novel.

Weller was called upon to provide music for the film and so, drawing on his love of Blue Note and off-kilter time signatures, he came up with the bossanova boogaloo of Have You Ever Had It Blue?, a track that still has a comfy place in his setlist even to this day. And why not?

The Style Council – Have You Ever Had It Blue?

And here’s Our Favourite Shop‘s With Everything To Lose, the, eh, *blueprint for the above track.

 

Footnote:

Have You Ever Had It Blue?, as groovy and finger clickin’ as it undeniably is, *owes more than a passing resemblance to the horizontally laid-back sunshine soft pop of Harper & Rowe‘s 1967 non-charting (and therefore obscurish) The Dweller. It’s certainly the best Style Council track that Paul Weller didn’t write. Perhaps, for this track, Weller should’ve renamed his group The Steal Council and come clean about it.

Harper & Rowe – The Dweller

 

*in the clip:

As well as the obvious; Ray Davies, Alan Fluff Freeman, Patsy Kensit, Ed Tudor Pole, Lionel Blair, Edward ‘father of Lawrence’ Fox, Sade, Stephen Berkoff, Slim Gaillard, Smiley Culture, Bruno ‘Strictly’ Tonioli, Robbie Coltrane, Sandie Shaw, Mandy Rice-Davies…quite the cast, eh?

**maybe not all in the clip (!)