Live!

Horsin’ Around With Skerryvore

Craig McAllister

I see Del Amitri are in the States. Deacon Blue too. Funny how they’ve both managed to arrange a tour of America’s Eastern seaboard while the national football team is playing three (at least three – let’s be positive) games between Boston and Miami in exactly the same timeframe. Canny, those Scots.

Another canny Scottish group is Skerryvore. Runrig for ravers, Skerryvore have taken their enthusiastic whirlin’ and birlin’ bagpipe schtick to Canada and America and the multitudes of homesick ex-pats who’ve been missing a taste of tartan since first emigrating across the Atlantic. They were the star turn in the Boston fanzones ahead of Scotland’s game against Haiti at the weekend, soundtracking our peaceful kilted warriors as they set about systematically drinking Boston dry. Maybe beer makes them sound better, but with their blaw hard bagpipes and stadium-filling drums, sky-scraping electric guitars and impassioned vocals wrung dry, Skerryvore are – to these ears – every bit as excruciating as that description might suggest.

That said, I’ve appeared on stage with Skerryvore.

Three or so summers ago, my pal Danny was booked to do live sound for Horse at a small music festival. The organisation of the event seemed a bit scant. Danny had been promised a local crew to help do the heavy lifting while he got on with the job of mixing Horse’s live sound, but he wasn’t convinced he’d have any crew when he got there and was concerned about how exactly he’d do the job he’d been paid to do with only his own pair of hands for help. Before I knew what I’d signed up for, he’d coerced me into getting up early the next morning to accompany him plus Horse plus her band in his splitter van to the festival. After dropping the group at their near-site hotel, Danny and myself went on to the festival where we were met with no local crew, no-one checking our credentials and no idea of where to unload.

From a fog of exotic smoke, a pie-eyed stage manager emerged with a couple of laminate passes, instructing us to unload our gear – it was our gear now, not just Danny’s – into a small gazebo. Given music festivals and rain are close bed fellows in the Scottish summertime, this wasn’t such a bad idea. We spent a bit of time lifting all the heavy shit (flight cases and amps and stands and instruments and more flight cases and monitors and stuff of indeterminate use) from the van and into the safe harbour of our gazebo. I quickly learned I wasn’t cut out for life as a member of the road crew. D’you know how heavy a mixing desk is? Especially when it’s packed inside a sturdy flight case? Heavy as fuck is, I think, what they say in the industry.

Unloaded and with hours to spare before Horse was on stage, we took the chance to wheel Danny’s desk from back stage to inside the tent where Horse would later appear. There was a band on stage while we did this, don’t know who; skinny jeans, guitars, unruly hair and mild acne, and we had to navigate between jumping teenagers and unimpressed 30-somethings, wheeling the heavy flightcased mixing desk across the grass to its resting place next to the smaller sound desk currently being employed to make the band on stage sound not quite as bad as they really were. When that was done, we had free time. Danny immediately went to his van to crash out. I bought an overpriced burger and set off to scope the festival.

As it turned out, Horse was second top of the bill to Skerryvore. The tent we’d just placed Danny’s desk in was where the main stage was, so flashing my triple-A pass to no-one at all, I placed myself stage-side and watched the bands from there. They were all local-ish and unsigned and every bit as unappealing as that might suggest. Our stage manager friend sat nearby, puffing his way through an impressive amount of skunk, before grooving off, never to be seen again. Of course, the festival gods were waiting for exactly this moment and caused a power cut. Some loud no-mark band of guitar stranglers were silenced mid-song, to a mix of jeers and cheers, and forced to leave the stage, where they hung about uncertain of what to do. If only there was a stage manager present. Maybe ten minutes later, a PA blasting Tina Turner’s Simply The Best let everyone know that the power was back on – so the band went back on again and picked up where they’d left off. The band after them went on maybe 15 minutes later than billed; not a disaster, but that’s 15 minutes less for Skerryvore, who as it turned out, everyone was there to see.

During the next band’s set, there was another power cut. And later on, yet another. Before Horse was due to go on, there had been three power cuts. No-one in authority (there was no authority) had suggested to the no-mark acts that they cut their sets to accommodate, and with an 11pm curfew looming on the gloomy horizon, the genteel, introspective Horse was going to have to play her set at a Ramones pace if she wanted to fit it all in ahead of our crowd-pleasing headliners.

As Horse and her group began to appear stage-side, I was tasked with wiring her up to one of those radio mics that folk like Taylor Swift and Madonna employ for stadium-filling, dance-routine heavy spectacles. Naturally, I took ages to do so and naturally too, I made a right pig’s ear of it. I was tasked also with laying out setlists for the group. Cool, I thought. I’ve seen roadies do that. I can do that. There were three setlists printed for a six-piece band. One went directly where Horse’s feet would be. One went next to the snare drum. The last one went to Horse’s bass player Lorna, cos she’s dead cool and I bonded immediately with her. The others will find out from their bandmates what songs they’re playing in which order, I thought stupidly. Anyway, by this point, Skerryvore and their road crew had also turned up side-stage. Between band and crew there must’ve been 15 guys, many of them hairy and bikerish and tattooed and well-practised in the art of road-crewing. The largest, hairiest looked at me.

‘Is Horse gonnae cut ‘er set, wee man? We’re running awfy late and everyb’dy’s here tae see Skerryvore.’

Shit…he thinks I know what I’m doing…he thinks I’m Horse’s road crew. Jesus.

‘Well? Is she?‘

‘Eh…ah’ll ask her…’

And just then, Horse and her band start their first song. Or, some of them do. Her guitar player looks at me.

‘Where’s ma setlist, Craig?‘

Jeez.

Her keyboard player looks at me.

‘Where’s ma setlist, Craig?‘

Double Jeez.

Skerryvore’s road crew haven’t had an answer yet. Their head guy looks at me.

‘Is she cuttin’ her set or whit?‘

Triple Jeez.

The atmosphere side stage is positively hostile for a good half an hour until Horse, god bless her, signals me to go up…to go on the actual stage while she’s actually playing to a tent of 1000-odd people. She shouts in my ear above the din.

‘I’m cutting 4 songs. I’ll be off in five minutes.‘

I hot-foot it back off the stage.

‘She’s cutting four songs…she’ll be off in five minutes.‘

This is clearly the answer they were hoping for and begin unpacking amps and a massive Roger Taylor-sized gong. Their impressively scaffolded drumkit is wheeled on on a platform larger than the stage in your favourite local venue. The group starts to assemble, a riot of kilts and bagpipes and hairy guys and a good lookin’ guy wearing an acoustic guitar, who I take to be the singer. And then, to loud cheers and general good vibes, Horse is off.

But before I can get on the stage to unplug amps and pull gear to the side, Skerryvore’s well-drilled machine begins to pack the stage with their gear. This makes it impossible for me – for it is I alone who is Horse’s roadcrew, and Horse and her group are lapping up the attention as they make their way backstage – to deal with the situation I am in. I end up having to take the gear off bit by bit at the opposite side of the stage – unchartered waters as far as this tent goes. Luckily, Danny has by now unplugged his desk and swapped his space with Skerryvore’s live sound engineer, and he’s found me floundering around with Horse’s gear as Skerryvore tune-up, the start of their set imminent. Between the two of us, we wrangle all of Horse’s equipment off stage, just as a huge cheer rises and Skerryvore start their party.

We get everything bit by bit back to the gazebo. It’s started raining by now. In fact, by our third or fourth run, it’s properly chucking it down. I get my electric blue cagoule from Danny’s van and go from stage side to gazebo, the grass below my feet turning to mud. I get slapped on the face by a stray flap of gazebo canvas as I wheel the last of the gear in.

‘Right,’ says Danny. ‘Let’s get the desk.‘

We make our way inside the tent and jostle our way past a thousand leaping, dancing Skerryvore fans. We wheel the desk – heavy as fuck, remember – back towards the gazebo and Danny’s van, the crowd unwilling to part like the Red Sea, Danny and I (and his mixing desk) sinking slowly in the mud. Mercifully, one of Skerryvore’s crew spots us in distress and rustles up a couple of heavies and they push the desk to the gazebo as if it were a curling stone at the Winter Olympics. Heroes! Danny turns to me.

‘I don’t feel well.’

He’s got beads of sweat on top of the beads of rain. He’s milky white. His face is drawn. Shit, I think. He’s having an actual heart attack. I mean, this is a stressful situation we’ve found ourselves in.

‘Danny. Get to your van and sit down. I can take it from here.’

‘Everything needs to go in the van,’ he explains. ‘Doesn’t matter which order. It all goes in somehow. Van Jenga,’ he smiles. And heads, not to his van, but for the sanctuary of a wee backstage area we’ve not been allowed in.

I set about loading the van. It’s heavy, physical, unpleasant work. It’s raining heavily. It’s blowing a gale. I have no idea really what I’m doing. I am, at most, three flight cases from completion when Danny runs into the gazebo, looking flustered with a bottle of beer in hand.

‘We’ve left the bass bin on stage!! That needs to go in the van first!! Then you can pack everything in around it however you can. We’ll – you’ll – need to unpack the van. Sorry!‘

‘….?….!!!…?…’

I do as I’m told.

‘We’ll need to wait for Skerryvore to finish their set, Dan. We can’t pack the van until then.’

‘Nah,’ says the bold Danny. ‘We’ll take it off the stage just now…’ And with that, he’s off backstage and watching Skerryvore as they whip up their polite Highland storm. I watch as he boldly climbs the small set of stairs that leads to the stage. A bagpiper spots him and eyes him up, blowing up his teuchter storm as he does so. Danny stands right at the lip of the stage. The singer is leaning across the photographers’ pit to touch the outstretched arms of his faithful.

‘Hey, hoi-de-diddle!‘ he goes.

‘Hey, hoi-de-diddle!‘ they chant back.

I watch Danny clamber between bass player and bagpiper, who is still eyeing him suspiciously. Danny spots his piece of equipment. He turns and signals to me, waving me up. No fucking way am I going up there, I think. For one, the band is mid-set, clearly playing a crowd favourite. And two, I’m still wearing my stupid electric blue cagoule from earlier. Roadies wear black, right?

Fuck that!

I pretend not to notice Danny’s signal.

This annoys him. Danny gesticulates wildly towards me, which only brings further attention from the bagpiper who, by now is performing some sort of choreographed dance routine with another bagpiper, and a member of the Skerryvore crew who looks like he’s about to lamp Danny for invading his stage. I can see them shouting in one another’s ear as the band on stage whip up a wild dervish of a reel. The roadie though decides to help Danny – he wants him off his stage ASAP – and so he and Danny drag this huge hulk of equipment to the top of the stairs.

Danny signals to me again.

I can’t ignore him this time, so I get to the top of the stairs. God, I think. A full house, all jumping around to your music is a wonderful thing. It all looks quite brilliant from on-stage.

Danny though is blind to the audience, with eyes only for his bass bin. ‘Grab it!’ he shouts above the unholy Scottish din. ‘Like this…and we’ll take it slowly down the stairs.’

I, being neither strong nor a seasoned roadie, fail to comprehend the sheer weight of the thing. I drop my end. It clatters on the metal stairs. Can they hear it above Skerryvore? I think so. Danny lets rip a string of expletives; something about expensive equipment and taking care. Can they hear him above Skerryvore? Yeah, I think so too. I sook my hand where I’ve cut it. Some of the crowd are now watching us instead of their heroes. We are quickly becoming the entertainment on the main stage, a pair of idiots, one a whisker from a heart attack, the other not qualified to be anywhere near a backstage area, as we wrestle the thing finally off the stage and out to the wind and the rain and Danny’s van.

We pack it in first. The rest of the gear goes in. We are done, in every sense of the word.

‘Where did you get that beer, Danny?‘ I ask.

‘Hospitality tent,’ he replies. ‘Follow me!‘

We enter the hospitality tent. There’s not much in it. A battered couch. A couple of packets of cheese ‘n onion crisps. A six pack of Fanta. A fridge! With maybe eight bottles of beer! Result! A wee woman appears.

‘Can I help you?‘

‘I’m just grabbing a quick beer before we’re off,‘ I answer cheerfully.

‘I don’t think so, son. They beers are for Skerryvore and Skerryvore only. Off wi’ ye!‘

After all that, no beer.

‘We’ll get one back at the hotel,’ suggests Danny.

The hotel bar – the entire hotel, in fact – was in darkness by the time we got there.

And that was the time I appeared on stage with Skerryvore.

 

Get This!

Gerry Synonym

Craig McAllister

There’s a La’s story I was party to a few years ago. It concerned the recording of their album – I mean, it would, wouldn’t it? The gist of the story involved a conversation between Lee Mavers and a producer – Mike Hedges, maybe, Steve Lillywhite, perhaps (whichever one they’d been encouraged to work with on this particular session, it doesn’t really matter), with Mavers getting hot under his Evertonian collar at the producer’s inability to capture the sound in his head.

‘But it sounds great, Lee!‘ said the producer, with genuine reason.

‘Nah. It’s shit, mate.’

‘It’s brilliant, Lee. Honestly!‘

Mavers looks him directly in the eye.

‘D’you know when yer mam makes soup and she takes all the ingredients; the lentils and the beans and the pulses and the onions and the stock and she mixes it all together and what it tastes of isn’t only the lentils and the beans and the pulses and the onions and the stock…but she’s somehow created another flavour? That’s what I want from our music. You,’ said Mavers pointing accusingly at his patient producer, ‘are incapable of bringing out that magic flavour.’

Lee Mavers. Souperstar.

It’s more fact than argument these days, but when Gerry Love left Teenage Fanclub, the magic ingredient that elevated that group’s music above and beyond their peers also left with him. A musician with a supreme pop nous derived from the left of centre and the more obscurish corners of music fandom, Love is a master at wringing a melody from simple words and chords. Hindsight shows that, while in Teenage Fanclub, the Love-penned tracks were often the best. Slower to hit the spot in some cases, immediately ace in others, a song written by G. Love comes with an 18 carat gold certificate of excellence.

I sat in on a soundcheck a couple of years ago while the now-solo Gerry and his backing band worked up dazzling versions of Don’t Look Back and Star Sign and Sparky’s Dream and December and Sweet Days Waiting and Thin Air and…(you get my drift, surely)…this – one of his greatest compositions.

Teenage Fanclub – Going Places

Nestling innocuously in the middle of side two of 1995’s Grand Prix – the thinking man’s favourite TFC album (or is that Songs From Northern Britain?) – Going Places show cases not only Gerry’s way with a melodic twist, but also Norman’s divine harmonies and Raymond’s tasteful use of fuzz guitar. It’s Teenage Fanclub in microcosm – a beauty, in other words.

Ringing in on a riff born from Roger McGuinn tackling Maggie May, Going Places is classic mid-paced, mid-era Fanclub. It’s Gerry’s song, so he takes the lead, singing against his trademark frugging bass, his bandmates clearing a space around him. ‘Look at this,’ they go in the playground of pop. ‘Ain’t Gerry’s song sumthin’ special?!‘ The group picks it up for a chorus which arrives on the coat tails of hammered-on and hanging on chords, replete with some sweet, sweet Norman harmonies, Raymond and his fuzz box roughing it up just so. ‘Just kick my feet off the ground, I’ll embrace the sky,’ goes Gerry, Norman joining in on honeyed harmonies as the group behind them aims for the stars and overshoots to the sun.

They know, the Teenage Fanclub, that sometimes less is more, so they immediately pull back. Is that a banjo after the first chorus? I think it is, y’know. A gentle clatter of milk bottle percussion amongst the down-home brouhaha? Sounds like it. There’s some reverberating, vamping organ, some mild tremolo action from Raymond in the second verse, a subtle hint of polite feedback and then the next chorus is upon us, guitars zipping freely as the clouds part, the sun-scorched melody sounding both melancholic and uplifting – a rare trick that not many writers can pull of successfully. The whole thing chimes and clangs and rings and zings in a giddy union of interplay, the McGuinn-does-Maggie-May signature riff echoing forever and we’re – yes! – into another chorus, Gerry kicking his feet off the ground, a falsetto’d Norman momentarily letting himself go and woo-hoo-hooing like Al Jardine in 1966. If y’don’t like this song, the saying goes, you must be deaf or dead, or both.

Gerry Love is, like me, an alumnus of Our Price. While I was manning the counters in Irvine and Kilmarnock, Gerry was doing likewise in Hamilton. Within the identikit shopping centres of Hamilton, Irvine and Kilmarnock you’d find branches of a chain of travel agents called Going Places. I like to think that the shop name stuck somewhere in Love’s head, waiting for the right song to come along. We might not have Our Price and Going Places anymore, but we’ll always have Going Places.

Get This!, New! Now!

Coxon At The Controls

Craig McAllister

A couple of years ago, to generally positive reviews, the reformed?/reawakened?/reimagined? Blur released the horrendously-titled The Ballad Of Darren album. In this part of the world it was welcomed with keen interest, not necessarily for the music, but because the cover art showed the outdoor pool at Gourock, a seaside town a short 20 miles drive up the west coast from where I’m typing this.

Gourock, like so many of the seaside towns in Inverclyde and Ayrshire, suffered hard at the advent of the package holiday. Why shiver yr bollocks off in the Firth Of Clyde when you can gently bathe them in the mildly tepid aqua blue of the Mediterranean? Why shove a roll ‘n slice down yr gub quicker than you can bat off the local divebombing seagulls when you can sit lazily under an umbrella while drop dead gorgeous Alejandro brings you fresh tapas on request? Why suffer the slops and sticky carpet of the Kings Arms when you can be supping San Miguel in short sleeves until sunset? Tennent’s or tapas? For most Scottish sunseekers there was only one choice.

At some point a decade or so ago, someone decided Gourock’s outdoor pool needed bringing back to life. With wild swimming now being a thing, Gourock’s fresh, salt water pool would be just the ticket for any locals for whom the smell of industrial strength chlorine and echoing kids as they shot out of flumes was too much. And they were proved right. The Gourock outdoor pool is extremely popular, despite the Blur cover showing one lone swimmer getting the lengths in under a slate grey west of Scotland sky, the island of Rothesay a forlorn-looking headland over the water.

And now…

Graham Coxon, chief guitar mangler in Blur is due to release a solo album called Castle Park.

So what, you say. Written down it doesn’t have the same effect, but told to any Irvinite, Castle Park – or the singular Castlepark, as we have it – will have you instantly thinking of the large housing scheme on the outskirts of the town. Built to house Glasgow’s overspill when the city was going through a regeneration programme in the late ’60s, Castlepark subsequently spawned a whole raft of rockers and writers, many of whom eked out a living in the creative arts, and continue to do so.

First Blur and the Gourock pool. Now Coxon and his album named after an Irvine housing estate *. Sometimes your interest is piqued in the most unexpected of ways.

* not really

Recorded in 2011 and swiftly shelved due to Blur re-activity, Castle Park rattles and rolls like all the best Coxon tunes do. Lead single Billy Says is terrific, a mod pop slice of Who/Diddley maracas, off kilter harmonies, na-na-nagging hooklines and a ripper of a wonky solo – something of a Coxon trademark whenever he’s given free reign at the controls. If it’s thunking great beat music you’re after, Billy Says and Castle Park is where you need to turn to.

Back in Thatcher’s 1980s, the Irvine Music Club was housed inside a converted school prefab at Castlepark Community Centre. In the name of rock ‘n roll, lots of us cut our teeth (and fingers) strangling the life out of the classics as bands were formed and augmented and chopped and changed, some of them even savouring the sweet taste of radio airplay and mild success beyond the KA12 postcode.

If it was still going today, I’d like to think the bands in the Irvine Music Club would be creating effervescent guitar-based music like Billy Says. It’s exactly the sort of manic, groove-based guitar record that would’ve had me scrambling to rip it off had I been a cocksure teenage guitar slinger with dreams of the charts and beyond.

Get This!, Live!

Swamp Thing

Craig McAllister

We’d spent our formative drunken teenage years falling out of lofts, falling through hedges and falling out and in with each other through a holy triumvate of sounds; New Order’s Blue Monday, Simple Minds’ I Travel and the entirety of Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense album, so when Alex Aitken one day thrust a copy of Talking Heads‘ Speaking In Tongues into my hands and said, ‘Remember when you said if I ever saw this record, I was to buy it for you? Well, here it is. That’s £3.99 you owe me,’ I was a wee bit perplexed. He might also have said, ‘Make it a fiver to account for the petrol money,’ but to be honest, I can’t be sure I’m not making that part up. Either way, I fell into ownership of Speaking In Tongues only because Alex shook me down for the money.

His story had more holes in it than his Ford Capri. I’d never asked him to buy it for me. I love record shopping; I could easily have bought it myself if I wasn’t chasing other essential records, like It’s Alive and The Head On The Door. He hadn’t gone to Ayr and thought, ‘Oh, Craig would like that…must get him it…‘. He’d bought it fairly and squarely for himself and clearly hadn’t taken to the record’s rather sterile sound, so the sneaky bazza thought he’d offload it to me instead. And it worked.

Me? Despite feeling mugged, used even, I’ve loved it from first listen to last (yesterday morning, if yr curious). True, Speaking In Tongues is clinical and awkward where the same songs on Stop Making Sense are organic and flowing and groovier, but I fell for it all the same. It struck me yesterday that, after Remain In Light, it might’ve crept into the second-top slot of my internal Talking Heads Top 5 albums.

It’s that heady combination of sunshine and rhythm that does it – the chattering and day-glo synth lines, the bubbling bass, the rinky dink guitars and lightness of percussive touch that also gave birth to the Tom Tom Club record.

It’s that inescapable notion that here is a band totally in simpatico with one another. Bass lines suggest guitar lines, synth lines ape the bass lines, percussive tumbles punctuate the gaps between David Byrne’s idiosyncratic vocal lines; the group is one living and breathing funky organism.

It’s the realisation that those stoopid Talking Heads failed to put This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody) on the original record. It’s there now, of course, reissue programmes being a by-word for fan-fleecing, but back in the day – until I’d seen the Stop Making Sense concert film at least – I only knew This Must Be The Place from the Speaking In Tongues album. And, what with it instantly being my favourite Talking Heads song ‘n all meant that its parent album had permanent residence in the softest spot of my heart.

I’ve also got a room next door to it for Swamp.

Talking Heads – Swamp

It’s one of those tracks that is instantly familiar the moment you first hear it. It’s stompy. It’s incessant. And it features that caveman-ish, neanderthal hi-hi-hi-hi-hi chant that you – yeah, you! – have chanted at least once in your life. Once heard, instantly memorised.

A bendy keyboard motif. A four to the floor groove. A rinky dink guitar. David Byrne chatting gibberish and nonsense through the intro. Let me tell you a story, he eventually says, his voice slipping and sliding like your sleazy uncle on a boys’ night out, unfolding a lyric addressing existential dread and goodness really knows what else. Rarely has abstract art sounded so goddammed groovy.

Wha’sat? who’s drivin’…where we goin’?…who knows?…a medical chart on the wall…soft violins, hands touch your throat…how many people d’ya think I am?…we’ve come to take you home…woo-hoo!

It’s a head-noddin’, butt-shakin’ monster of a groove. Immensely fun.

Here’s the perennially fab-u-lous version from Stop Making Sense. Byrne’s twitches. Tina’s shoulder shrugs. The band, silhouetted and back-lit in orange. Era-defining stuff. I can’t imagine you’ve never seen this before, but you’re probably long-overdue another viewing,

I was chatting to Jim from the Vinyl Villain recently and we were discussing rock biographies. He was telling me that he’d gone off Talking Heads a wee bit after reading Chris Frantz’s Remain In Love autobiography and discovering that they were a fairly privileged and well-off group, with access to good universities and yachts and country clubs and a whole plethora of things that were well out of the reach of yr average Bowery punk rocker, and it got me thinking about it on the drive home.

There’s no denying that Talking Heads were from a fairly comfortable background, but I’m glad they chose to put their efforts into creating vital and essential art-rock for all, rather than choose to live it up anonymously in a world most of us know little about. Or maybe they’ve managed to straddle the two worlds, and we just don’t realise it…which is waaay more punk in any case.

Click click, see ya later.

Get This!, New! Now!

Maybe It’s Mind Over Matter

Craig McAllister

There’s been a good wee buzz in the more discreet corners of the world wide web surrounding the imminent release of the Trashcan Sinatras‘ (magnificent) seventh album, Ever The Optimist.

Around the turn of the year, Billy Sloan’s BBC Radio Scotland show had the first play of The Bitter End, the irony of the track’s title only slightly lost on the evergreen presenter who was at the helm for his second-to-last late-night radio show. A sparkling and thumping three chord guitar anthem, The Bitter End was, in the absence of an actual physical single release, the ideal track with which to announce the return of a group which had been low-key to the point of invisibility over the past decade. Save a couple of largely ignored (yet indispensable) 7″ and 12″ releases and a back catalogue reissue campaign through the Last Night From Glasgow label, the group had been apparently inactive. Their previous album, Wild Pendulum, was now ten years old and there was an uneasy air that maybe, as far as cult groups go, that was that.

Little did anyone outwith the group’s close-knit inner circle know, but ideas and rhyming couplets and chord progressions and guitary hooklines and actual songs were percolating, whizzing around the planet between the principal Trashcans in the form of digital demos, the bedrock upon which Ever The Optimist was taking shape.

If The Bitter End was the perfect ‘we’re back! back! back!’ lead ‘single’, then its follow-up would further whet the appetite of a collective fanbase desperate for more few material. Bad Husband was ushered confidently into the world a month or so ago, a duet with Camera Obscura’s Traceyanne Campbell with a cyclical chord progression and weaving melody to die for; the Trashcans of old, but viewed through an Islands In The Stream filter. I must’ve heard – and really listened to – this song a couple of hundred times by now and it’s yet to sound anything less than fresh and urgent.

I’ve been very lucky, y’see, to have had the entire record on repeat for six months or so. I’ve grown to love its perfect mix of bombast and brittleness, the way it flits from loud to quiet, from foot-down-and-drive anthemic to heartstring-tugging introspection and insularity. Without spoiling anything further, I’d say with a fair amount of confidence that Trashcan Sinatras fans will really take to it and love it. I might even suggest, debatable as that will prove to be, that it’s the band’s greatest album.

I was actually a wee bit surprised at the choice of third ‘single’.

Melodramatic and its accompanying video was released mid-week there, again to high praise and an outpouring of superlatives. Within the context of the album, Melodramatic might be my least favourite track (yes, really!) – which might say something to anyone here who’s reading this and now can’t wait for the album – but taken as a stand alone track…and with the benefit of a video behind it, (especially the video) I’ve been appreciating it all the more.

Much of the studio footage in the video was captured four years ago in Glasgow’s Gloworm Studios by Stephanie Gibson. Stephanie, as some readers here will know, was responsible for the portraits and abstract images that helped elevate The Perfect Reminder (my book on the making of the second TCS album) from mere reportage to definitive biography. Stephanie’s video footage was sympathetically edited and knitted together by Chris Dooley. Chris, as some readers here will also know, was responsible for the design, look and feel of The Perfect Reminder, elevating it from definitive biography to luxury item. And why am I telling you this?

I’m telling you this because four years ago, just after our book was given the Saturday night headline slot at the Aye Write book festival in Glasgow, Stephanie and myself were invited to Gloworm for an afternoon. So while Stephanie was filming the band at work, I was sat on a couch in the studio taking it all in; John as he played a chord sequence – warming up, I thought – until Davy leaned over and slid the faders on the desk to bathe the room in a sound of liquid gold – a brand new Trashcans’ track in the process of being born! I could see Stephen in the drum room, working his kit with a tender touch. I could hear Paul’s guitar(s), flown in digitally from the west coast of America and playing fantastically and loudly through the studio’s speaker system. And although I couldn’t yet see Frank, I could hear him and his unmistakable pitch-perfect voice. He was singing slowly – crooning even –  about ‘the likes of Cincinnati‘. Wow, I thought. They’re channelling Scott Walker, but twisting his words through trademark TCS wordplay and turning out a slow-burning beauty…and right before my eyes and ears. If this is the demo, I’m thinking, I can’t wait to hear the finished version.

“Yeah,” said Frank to me a month or so ago. “We binned that one.”

It’s not on the upcoming record at all. Which, again, should give TCS fans a glimpse into the high watermark of quality they demand before they’ll attach their name to a song.

If you watch the video carefully – and don’t blink at the wrong moment – around the 37 seconds mark, you’ll catch a glimpse of my surprised face as Stephanie’s camera swoops down on the sofa I was sitting in while that glorious Trashcans sound filled the room. Look ma! It’s me! In a pop video! What a thrill!

You can pre-order the new Trashcan Sinatras album Ever The Optimist from all the usual places, including here. Whatchawaitin’ for?

 

 

Get This!, Hard-to-find

Speakers Corner

Craig McAllister

When you first attacked that plank of wood you had the cheek to call an electric guitar, if you were like me you were in immediate need of something with which to amplify your clunky chord changes and morse code ‘solos’. If you were in luck, you might’ve found yourself in possession of a wee Marshall 20W job, with all-important parent-bothering distortion on tap at the turn of its golden dial. You might, if you had an elder sibling who’d already been through this formative stage in life, have access to a Roland Jazz Chorus, its syrupy-thick chorus effect giving you the ideal angle to your jangle. You might even, if you had a dad who’d once dabbled with being a weekend rocker or roller, have access to a Fender or a Vox or similar – a proper amp that required far more volume than was house-friendly in order to sound good.

Me? I had a shitty wee Badger Piccolo. A tiny, tinny 15W affair that only came to life when plugged into a Rocktek distortion pedal. But it was enough to stir enough conviction in my hacked and calloused fingers to stick with this thing called playing guitar.

At one point I graduated to a 30W Peavey. It had a chorus setting. It had a spring reverb that wobbled and vibrated like a violent Hanna-Barbera sound effect if you banged or moved the amp while it was switched on. And it had a push/pull dial that changed the tone from fizz to fffffiiiizzzzz and back again. Coupled with the ever-present Rocktek pedal, this became my (coughs) signature sound.

The young guitar player in me was delighted to see three of my favourite groups employing the Peavey as a means to sculpt their sound. Paul Ryder of the Happy Mondays used one on Tony Wilson’s ‘Other Side Of Midnight’ as the solid foundation upon which the group rattled out their rickety street urchin funk.

Inspiral Carpets had two – two! – on stage at Glasgow Tech, one for the bass and one for a guitarist playing open chords through a fuzz box – just like me!

Most thrillingly of all, Ride – who had just released the ‘yellow daffodils’ 12” had one just like mine (not the one in the picture above – which means – amp detectives – that Ride had more than one too), propped up on a beer crate beside the drum riser on Glasgow Mayfair’s stage.

Ride? Ride! They make that glorious racket with a Peavey?!

And here was me thinking they’d be standing awkwardly and staring through lank fringes at their desert boots in front of a solid wall of Marshall stacks.

Between Ride and Inspiral Carpets and Happy Mondays, there was, it seemed, hope for bedroom guitarists everywhere. And sometimes, as it turned out, hope is all you have.

This popped up on Instagram recently.

It’s Pixies’ Joey Santiago with a Telecaster and a Peavey.

Wait! What?

Joey used a Peavey too?!

On Surfer Rosa?!?

On SURFER ROSA?!?!?

That ear-destroying surf punk mix of siren guitars and riffage heavier than a shower of blacksmiths’ anvils was created with a Peavey too?! Who knew?!

This is akin to winning the Le Mans 24hr on a pushbike. Mr Bean knocking out Mike Tyson in the first round. Hearts winning the Scottish Premiership…you get the idea. As unlikely as it seems, it’s quite possible to make thunderous alt rock through a humble Peavey amplifier. Rock me sideways, Joe.

Pixies – Vamos

‘Estabo pensando sobreviviendo con mi sister en New Jersey!’ goes Frank Black, all menace and snarl. ‘We’ll go to California!’ he screams.

Screeeeeeeee! goes Joey’s Peavey-powered guitar. The rhythm section pummels out a breathless and steady backbeat. Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump! Joey attacks those six strings like the Boston Strangler himself, bending them, twisting them, grappling the life out of them until ear splitting feedback saws its way through the stew.

At several points there are clangs – instantly recognisbale clangs to any Peavey owner (but who knew at the time?!?) – of Joey hitting, banging, thumping the side of his amp until the reverb spring rattles like a cartoon explosion – that self-same cartoon Hanna-Barbera sound effect first heard at home and in smelly rehearsal rooms, now magnetised to tape forever.

I don’t listen to Pixies that much these days, but Joey’s social media post has had me scurrying back particularly to Surfer Rosa recently. A powerful reminder that the best things are often created in the most simple of ways.

Gone but not forgotten, Kraut-y

When I Put My Foot Down To The Floor

Craig McAllister

David Bowie‘s Low is an album with its own split personality. On side one you get the interesting guitar stuff, heavily treated and effected tracks that cut against the punkish musical landscape of the era. On side two you get the icy cool of Bowie’s (and Eno’s) mainly vocal-free take on Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream and the new sounds he’s been soaking up in Berlin.

Even the synths on the record have split personality. On side two, they glide with slow, peaceful majesty, their glazed, chromium sheen teleporting Bowie and his gang into a cocooned and shiny, space age-y future.

On side one though, they fizz and spark, adding a layer of Brunel-ish heavy industry to the tracks; Speed Of Life whooshes in on a rapid fade-in, immediately disorientating, as if you’ve walked in on a band already half way through their thing. Breaking Glass is over in a groovy flash, a Teutonic military two step that somehow gives birth to the sound of Franz Ferdinand amongst its sub-two minute robotic funk. Sound And Vision‘s steam-powered rhythm section hisses and pops its way into the top ten like a Clydeside shipbuilders’ yard in 1901.

The whole side is coated in interesting and forward-looking instrumentation.

At the heart of it though – and you’ve no doubt picked up on this – is that all of them feature fantastically-recorded drums; live, in the room – in your room – slap-heavy snare, reverberating toms, kick-like-a-mule bass…Dennis Davis sounds terrific across everything here. Low is considered a progressive, era-changing album (as it should), but little has been made of just how goddam in-your-face percussive it all is. Next time you listen to Low – properly, on a turntable or a CD (not a crappy mp3 like the one below) – hone in on the drums and rhythms and be dazzled

I’ve long-held a fascination for Always Crashing In the Same Car. I love the unfolding, slo-mo drama of it all. Verlaine-ish vapour trails of linear guitar, interesting chords, a bassline that would be played twice as fast and employed later on Heroes, Bowie’s voice close in your ear, low one moment, sky-high the next, his phrasing never less than immaculate. It occurred to me just there as I listened again that he even employs a sneaky wee strung out but nonetheless Beatleish ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah‘ vocal adlib midway through. Listen out for it – it’s unmistakable. The more you listen, it seems, the more you spot, even all this time later. Ask a random to make a list of their ten favourite Bowie tracks and it won’t be there…but it probably should be.

David Bowie – Always Crashing In the Same Car

Russian 7″ single sleeve for ‘Always Crashing…’

Is it a study in cocaine psychosis? Bowie was living on a diet of milk, red peppers and Grade A pop star-quality pharmaceuticals at this point, so it may well be. Or is it Bowie’s metaphorical confession of a life collapsing around him as he makes the same mistake time and again? It may well be both?

Or it may, as some biographers have claimed, be Bowie’s retelling of the time he and Iggy Pop were cruising the Berlin city street late at night when they happened upon a dealer who’d recently ripped Bowie off. Off his head on drugs, or just off is head in general, Bowie chose to repeatedly ram his Mercedes into his former dealer’s car, then made his escape to the underground car park of the hotel he was living in and drove around in circles until his ire had subsided.

That ‘Jas-amine…I saw you peeping….when I put my foot down to the floor,‘ line. Some say ‘Jesamine’ is an alias for Iggy Pop. Others say it’s an alias for Bowie himself, writing in third person as he watches is own behaviour from the sidelines.

That can’t be right, that story, can it? Can it?

As unlikely as it sounds, Bowie himself introduced the song during his 1999 VH1 Storytellers performance with a very similar preamble, so who knows. You’ll find clips of the song online, but search as I have, I can’t find the video evidence of the song’s introduction for absolute proof. Never let the truth get in the way of a good story, I say.

Gone but not forgotten

Andy Kershaw

Craig McAllister

I was sad to hear of Andy Kershaw’s death last week. We were away, and for the hours after the news had come through, I was a wee bit quiet and introspective, the way most of us go when a person in the public eye who you’ve admired from a distance passes.

I noticed an immediate spike in the stats for this page, with traffic making its way to a post I’d written about George Michael a few years ago. After George had died, Andy took to Facebook to say he couldn’t work out the level of public outpouring he was reading about a man who was essentially a pop singer and, in Andy’s words, not a ‘real’ singer, or a very good one at that.

No, no, no, Andy, I replied on his feed (to a flurry of thumbs up and further comment); when a popstar of your youth dies, a little bit of you dies too. It doesn’t matter if you liked the music, that’s almost secondary. It’s the records, tied to memories, people and places, that evokes happier, simpler times in your life, when mortgages and bills and adulting were unknown entities on some far-off and hazy horizon. That loss of childhood and innocence is what people are really upset about. And besides, Andy, George Michael was a fucking great writer and singer and, as it turned out, an even greater human being, so choose your pot-shot targets carefully, man.

In the George Michael article. I called him a twonk. Not something Kershaw would have got worked up about, but something that, since last week, has bothered me. People arriving at that article – titled, pointedly, Listen Without Prejudice – might think I had no time for Andy Kershaw, when that couldn’t be further from the truth.

I volunteer with an Ayrshire-based music promoter called Freckfest. Back in the old days of 2014, when Andy was far more active on social media – especially with a book to sell – I got in touch with him to suggest he bring his one-man ‘No Off Switch’ show to Irvine’s 100-seater Harbour Arts Centre. A date was agreed and the gig was go.

As the date of the gig loomed large, I got a daily text, every morning before 8 o’clock, to ask how sales were doing. In all honesty, they were slow. In fact, they’d stopped. A week out from showtime, we’d sold about half the HAC’s 100 capacity and it looked like we’d sell little more. He phoned me out of the blue one day while I was in the staff room at lunchtime, ‘Andy Kershaw’ appearing on my screen above a picture of him in his standard checked shirt.

‘Shite’, I thought, my heart missing several beats as I navigated my way out of the staffroom conversation I was embroiled in and made my way into the sanctity of the corridor.

‘Andy!’ I answered cheerfully whilst shitting myself. (At this point in my life, no-one mildly famous had ever called me on my phone, let alone unannounced and while I was at work). ‘What’re you saying to it?!’

‘Have we sold any more tickets, Craig? Even one? Because I’m thinking that maybe you ought to get around the town of Irvine with as many posters as you can print, like I told you to do, and pop them every chip shop, hairdressers, corner shop and bakers, like I told you to do, and demand that they display one prominently in each of their windows.’ The voice was exactly that of the radio broadcaster Andy Kershaw, which, obviously it would be, but one that nonetheless was ridiculous in the context of the call. ‘If you put posters all over the town, Craig, THEY WILL COME, mark my words.’

I was midway through suggesting it wasn’t too late to maybe postpone the show, re-evaluate our expectations and maybe put it on at a later date, when the school bell rang for the end of lunchtime.

‘Where the hell are you, Craig? In a blooody schoool?!?’

‘Eh, aye, actually, Andy. That’s exactly where I am.’

‘What the blooody hell are you doing in a schoool?’

‘I work in a school. I’m a teacher.’

‘A teacher!? A teacher?!’ said Andy, with the same incredulity that he’d normally reserve for someone who’d suggested he play Twistin’ By The Pool by Dire Straits on his radio show. ‘You’re a school teacher? You’re not a promoter?’

‘Well, I AM a promoter, but I do that in my spare time. Freckfest is a voluntary organisation. We all have real jobs to work. But we love music and if we weren’t doing this gig, no-one else would be putting it on. We grew up in a town that was soaked in music and culture and in our own way, we’re doing our wee bit to bring music and culture back to a town that’s been starved of it for too long.’

And at that, the ice melted.

Andy couldn’t do enough for us. Instead of texting me daily to ask about slow ticket sales, he got on his own social media feed and began aggressively selling the show – ‘Get down to Irvine, y’shower of cloth-eared bastards, etc, those Freckfest guys and girls do a brilliant job of bringing interesting things to Irvine – don’t let them – and me – down.’

For the record, we had stuck posters in shop windows throughout the town, like he’d told us to do, but it was Andy’s vociferous and plentiful social media posting that helped sales crawl to a respectable 80+.

Just as he was about to go on, Andy asked me to introduce him on stage. With a gulp, I very quickly put together a spontaneous version of the rolling commentary that announces Bob Dylan every time he takes the stage.

‘Ladies and gentlemen. Our guest tonight appeared wide-eyed and blagging it on Live Aid’s TV coverage. He’s stood above rivers of human bones reporting on the genocide in Rwanda. He was the first white man to shake Nelson Mandela’s hand on his release from prison. He’s worked with the Rolling Stones, Billy Bragg and the Bhundu Boys, to name just three disparate acts. He turned down ‘I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here’, but he couldn’t turn down Freckfest’s offer of a show in Irvine. Ladies and gentlemen, please show your wild appreciation for Andy Kershaw!’

And on he went.

And on and on he went.

The show was running way over time…and he still hadn’t got to the bit about his involvement in Live Aid.

Just as the Kershaw radio show packed in everything he could fit and more, it was clear we weren’t going to hear about every aspect of his quite frankly Forrest Gump-ish life before the venue’s 11 oclock curfew. He’d tell a story, shout ‘Hit it, Jim!’ to the engineer in the soundbox and a track would play loudly while Andy grinned and shuffled his way through it, his faithful dog Buster sat at his feet.

‘Route 66 is a crap way to see America,’ he extoled. ‘Unless you’re into grain stores and farming. Hit it, Jim!’
Cue: The Stones’ version of ‘Route 66‘.

‘I once tracked down James Carr to a bedsit in the deep south and let him hear some his own music for the first time. It brought both of us to tears. Hit it, Jim!’
Cue: James Carr’s ‘You’ve Got My Mind Messed Up‘.

‘The first time I heard African guitars, I was ecstatic…giddy with life! Hit it, Jim!’
Cue: Bhundu Boys‘ ‘Hupenyu Hwangu‘.

 

Suddenly, he writes in ‘No Off Switch’, it was as if the room was being sprayed with a fountain of jewelled guitar notes. Then the whole band kicked in. It bounced. It chimed. It popped. The melodies and harmonies instantly lifted and brightened the spirits. The guitars wound round each other, capturing and tossing back and forth the prettiest of tunes, yet always engaging with sublime simplicity. Peel and I looked at each other, frozen and open-mouthed. For the duration of the first song, neither of us said a word. By the end I was grinning.

That’s Kershaw’s famed and infectious joie de vivre right there.

Afterwards we went for a pint, where Buster farted violently in the corner and he told me stories of hanging out with Neil Young and the Rolling Stones, the sort of stuff that never fails to impress me. For a wee while in the months after, we corresponded. He sent me a BBC video of a WWII thing that I’d seen him present. ‘That’d be great for the kids I teach, Andy,’ I told him…and the next thing, he’d sent me the digital file for classroom use. He’d message unexpectedly, promising to return and finish the rest of his show. It never did happen. Probably, the thought of chastising me daily for not putting posters up in Gregg’s was less appealing to him this time around. I wish I’d held him to his promise though.

Andy Kershaw had a life well-travelled and his show, and the accompanying book, barely scratched the surface.

You’ll read all sorts of stuff about Andy Kershaw, and not all of it flattering, but I was really taken by him and his enthusiasm for life and music. If you haven’t, you should read ‘No Off Switch’. It’s a really great book. Trust me on that.

See ye later, Andy.

Hard-to-find

Copin’ In Copenhagen

Craig McAllister

This post comes live, direct and on the hoof from the departure lounge of Terminal 2 in Copenhagen Airport.

We’ve been clean(ish) living the past week in Copenhagen, a modern, sleek and stylish European city that puts what we have back home to shame; a cheap, regular/reliable and driverless 24hr train system, more bike lanes than Ayrshire has potholes, a myriad of safe public areas with no hint of bammery and an attitude towards equity and social inclusiveness that is to be admired.

In four days, we packed in a whole load of touristy stuff; a boat cruise through the city’s interlinking canals, a food market here, a food market there, a craft beer here, a fresh orange beer there, smorrebrods here, there and everywhere, always chased with magnificent pastries and washed down with energy-giving flat whites and the occasional cheap cocktail – just the fuel needed for upwards of 25,000 steps a day.

The olde fairy tale world of Copenhagen – the twisting spires, the marzipan towers, the marching soldiers – sits comfortably beside the glass and steel and ultra-modern architectural wonderplaces which jut and cut the city’s cobbled streets in two. Danish design is a real thing. The Bang And Olufsen shop in the city centre is proof of that alone, but from the buildings and boats to the pedestrian areas and its people, Copenhagen is one stylish place.

The Danes look great. Everyone is younger than us, healthier than us, better looking than us…even in their de-rigeur silver trainers they’re still better dressed than us. We were in Reffen Food Market on Friday night, the sun slowly setting over København Havn, and we realised that we were probably the oldest there, everyone around us cool and relaxed with pals or children, nodding casually to the beat of the conversation or the beat of the music – even if us oldies were the only two in the place who immediately recognised the easy soul of Curtis Mayfield’s Trippin’ Out as it wafted across the imported sand, imported beers and world foods.

Reffen is just one example of how the Danes are getting it right. A once heavily industrial seaport, Copenhagen is very much recast as a must-visit European destination, its many reclaimed dry docks and floating islands repurposed as timber and container-built food markets, clubs, gig venues and artist studios. If you’re reading this, I’d imagine you’d be dead impressed by it all.

Any visit to a new city always gives an excuse to sniff out a record shop or two and Copenhagen was no different. We visited 3 or 4 across the week. One sold exclusively K-Pop, so that was a waste of steps. Another specialised in Death Metal, the guy behind the counter an airport scanner’s nightmare, so that was another waste of steps. An old hippy in Christiania, a commune that sprung up in 1971 after the locals complained about the lack of affordable housing and refused to move, was eagerly trying to sell me his collection of European hard rock – “listened to once, to tape it, then returned to its sleeve,” he said, almost convincingly. He had a lovely, original numbered, mono copy of the Beatles’ white album for sale (the first of two copies I’d turn up) but he wanted £300 for it. Good luck to him.

Saturday (coincidentally Record Store Day) found me in Sound, flicking through boxes and boxes of Bowie and the likes, all of which UK record buyers had been sleeping out to ‘snag’. The fools. I left ’em and their silly inflated prices right where I found them and ended up in Accord, a bit of a jumble sale, but one that nonetheless afforded me two Elvis Costello albums and a Paul Haig 12″ for less than the price of a flat white and a Danish. A result!

Scott Walker – Copenhagen

I’ve always had a thing for Scott Walker’s Copenhagen. Found on Scott 3, it is, like almost all of those Scott releases on Phillips, the sound of drama married to poetry, distilled in a vat of melancholy and served up just on the right side of easy listening.

In Copenhagen, Scott sings metaphorically of snowdrops falling through the night before melting away, two lonely people in love on the streets of the city.

By the end, waltz time fairground rides that echo Tivoli Gardens’ olde-fashioned carousels waft their way earwards, the chimes of the city’s many clocks that tell the time for anyone not glued to their AirPods clanging softly in the background, as Scott and his pal disappear.

Lovely stuff.

Get This!

Foresight Isn’t Anything At All

Craig McAllister

That episode of The Simpsons with R.E.M. in it never tires. For whatever reason, the group are playing live in Homer’s garage – spoken to rhyme with Farage, Scottish readers – and tearing through a rockin’ version of It’s The End Of The World As We Know It… until they realise that they’re not actually in the private bar of some tech-bro millionaire like they thought they were, but in a hastily converted addendum to the Simpson family’s house. Momentarily enraged, Michael Stipe smashes a beer bottle, ready to attack poor Homer, until he is held back by Mike Mills and Peter Buck.

“No, Michael! That’s not the R.E.M. way!”

“You’re right. Let’s recycle the shards and get out of here,” says a remorseful Stipe, already on his knees and sweeping up the broken glass.

By 2001, when this Simpsons episode aired, R.E.M., despite their global ubiquity and mass appeal without creating mass market music, had something of a sniggered-at image. They were vocal and active in environmental conservation and recycling issues. Their CD sleeves (no vinyl in ’01!) came printed on recycled card. They played Adam Yauch’s Tibetan Freedom concerts. They donated to the World Wildlife Trust. They aligned themselves to any cause that promoted peace, equality and the non-destruction of the only planet we have to live on… which are all totally admirable and worthy causes, as you know, but causes nonetheless that musicians hadn’t really got behind before.

You’ve gotta kick against what’s gone before in music, so while no act was entertaining the notion of Led Zeppelin’s ‘Starship’ as a means of travel between shows, no-one other than R.E.M. (and maybe Neil Yong) was giving the issue much thought. Nowadays, they’re all at it. Radiohead are extremely vocal on environmental viability. Thom Yorke has played benefit concerts for the Green Party. Coldplay are advocates for sustainable touring, keen to reduce their carbon footprint wherever possible. You won’t find any single-use plastics or meat products at a Billy Eilish show. The 1975 – The 1975!! –  teamed up with Greta Thunberg to release a track, with all profits going to Extinction Rebellion. A cynical marketing opportunity? Possibly, maybe, (definitely!), but one that causes a small ripple of positive effect across the planet.

For all things eco, you can go back to 1989 with R.E.M. Not for nothing is that year’s album called Green. No-one was green in 1989 except R.E.M. and, among a handful of barely-heard – and barely heard of – organisations, Greenpeace, the grandaddy of them all, who themselves only really brought these issues to the mass market once they started sponsoring Glastonbury in 1991.

In fact – and yeah, you were about to point this out – you can go even further back with R.E.M. all the way to 1986 and Life’s Rich Pageant. On this album – R.E.M.’s greatest (fight me, unless that’s not really the R.E.M. fans’ way either) you’ll find Fall On Me, a song which has its lyrical roots in the effects of acid rain. What is it up in the air for indeed.

R.E.M. – Fall On Me

UNITED STATES – CIRCA 1986: Photo of REM (Photo by Stephanie Chernikowski/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

I’ve been hammering Life’s Rich Pageant this past week. I’d guess everyone’s favourite R.E.M. record is tied up with memory from the first time you heard it – the people and places and things that were going on in your life as it soundtracked it – and so just as Hunky Dory is my favourite Bowie album and Bringing It All Back Home is my favourite Bob Dylan album, My Aim Is True my favourite Elvis Costello record and A Hard Day’s Night my favourite Beatles album – not their best, but my favourite, Life’s Rich Pageant will always be R.E.M. record numero uno. It’s the first album I heard by them and it’s their best record too. Easily. It just is.

On LRP, the group is heading from the underground to the overground. In fact, by now they’ve probably done so, but there’s still enough mystery and obfuscation in their sound, still enough angle in their jangle to keep them independent, or college rock, as they’d say in Athens, GA, that the weirdos haven’t deserted them and the man in the street isn’t quite sure yet of what to make of them. On Life’s Rich Pageant, R.E.M. are flying. They’re tight and muscular (Begin The Begin), they’re esoteric (Underneath The Bunker), they’re heads-down and rockin’ (These Days) and they have a keen ear for a pop super-hook within a murky melody (I Believe).

On Fall On Me, Michael Stipe’s vocal is stately and focused, lending gravitas to a song about the effect of gravity. Mike Mills’ backing vocals soar with a Wilsonesque melancholy, and Peter Buck’s Rickenbacker jangles like the Stateside cousin of Johnny Marr on those early Smiths records, all sad-eyed minors and widescreen major 7ths. As a song, it’s perfect. As a recording, it’s a major tour de force. And, just like the issues it addresses, it’ll never get old.