Outdated Music For Outdated People since 2007
Deid.
Poor Lou.
In the vein of “I’m Hank Marvin” = “I’m Starvin‘”, so a new rock rhyming slang is born.
“Shane MacGowan? Is he no’ Lou Reed?”
We used to indulge in Lou Reed before our nights out at The Attic in Irvine. Set you up nicely for the night ahead. Best wee disco on the planet, it was.
Poor Lou.
Here’s Lou featuring his drug buddy Bowie on those ping pong backing vocals. Not Perfect Day. Just perfect.
Keeping It Peel is the brainchild of Webbie, who writes the excellent and informative Football And Music blog. An annual celebration of all things Peel, it’s purpose is to remind everyone just how crucial John Peel was to expanding and informing listening tastes up and down the country. Be it demo, flexi, 7″, 10″, 12″, EP, LP, 8 track cartridge, wax cylinder or reel to reel field recording, the great man famously listened to everything ever sent his way, and if it was in anyway decent he played it on his show. Sometimes, he played the more obscure records at the correct speed. Sometimes he didn’t. And sometimes, no-one noticed. John Peel is the reason my musical tastes expanded beyond the left-field avant-garde edginess of Hipsway and Love And Money and the reason why my mum stopped singing her own version of whatever it was I was playing (“Take a ri-ide on the Suga Trayne!”) and started asking me to “turn that racket down” whenever she passed my teenage bedroom door. Thank you, John.
This year’s Peel Session selection features Roxy Music from February 1972. It’s a cracker……..
But first, a history lesson.
1972 was a pivotal year in music. The number of influential/classic albums released in those 12 months is nothing short of staggering (I’d like to say “off the top of my head“, but Google is a handy wee tool now and again).
Take a deep breath and off we go; Neil Young‘s Harvest (and the unreleased Journey Through The Past), Nick Drake‘s Pink Moon, Pink Floyd‘s Dark Side Of The Moon (hey – I’d never spotted that before – Pink and Moon…anyway…), The Spotlight Kid and Clear Spot, both by Captain Beefheart (2 albums in one year, nae bother), Todd Rundgren‘s Something/Anything, Talking Book AND Music Of My Mind by Stevie Wonder (2 albums in one year, nae bother), T Rex‘s Bolan Boogie and The Slider (2 albums, one year…), Big Star‘s #1 Record, The Stones’ Exile On Main Street, Bowie‘s Ziggy Stardust, the soundtracks to Superfly and The Harder They Come (Curtis Mayfield and Jimmy Cliff), Black Sabbath 4, Steely Dan‘s Can’t Buy a Thrill, Greetings from LA by Tim Buckley, Can‘s Ege Bamyasi, Transformer by Lou Reed, Marvin Gaye‘s Trouble Man, and the debut eponymously titled LP from Roxy Music. Crikey! That’s almost a classic album a fortnight! And there’s a ton more I haven’t even mentioned! Oh to have been a teenager with a disposable income in the early 70s……
Roxy Music looked as if they’d been beamed down from the first spaceship from Mars and sounded just as other-worldly. Dressed in a clash of tiger print and tinfoil, faux fur and flares, and with a sound giving as much space to the clarinet and oboe as to yer more traditional rock instruments (and we haven’t even mentioned Brian Eno’s synthesiser), they were so out of step with the fashion of the day (compare them to the list above), it’s easy to see why John Peel would champion them. Between January 1972 and March 1973, they recorded 5 thrilling John Peel sessions. Their session recorded in February 1972 (although not broadcast until 1st August – anyone know why?) is particularly brilliant, featuring the yin and the yang of Roxy Music in two tracks.
The Yin
A full six months (a light year in 1972 musical terms) before being released as their debut single, Virginia Plain was recorded as part of that February session. Over a minute longer than the released version, the Peel version is a proto-punk glam slam, overloaded with fizzbomb guitars and a seemingly improvised solo, all whammy bar and feedback sturm und drang. Hogging the limelight, Phil Manzanera made sure there was no room for the single’s twangy bass solo here.
Virginia Plain Peel Session, 18 Feb 72
Years later he would indeed be flying down to Rio! but, when he wasn’t purloining other bands’ equipment, I’m sure sticky-fingered street urchin and future Sex Pistol Steve Jones was cribbing notes on Manzanera’s guitar sound during this transmission. A verse sung over 2 open chords….. stray wafts of controlled feedback….. a fantastic, fluid and free-form guitar solo….. a four-to-the-floor jackboot stomp. A full 4 years before UK punk was ‘invented’, Roxy Music were doing it, maaaaan. If this version of Virginia Plain doesn’t make you want to go and learn a couple of chords and start a band in a desperate middle-aged attempt at hipster cool, nothing will.
The Yang
On the debut album you’ll find If There Is Something, a countryish clip-clopping slide guitar and piano-led song in (prog alert!!!) three distinct parts. According to that bastion of trusted information Wikipedia, it ‘s been said that the first part of the song is a youth wondering about love, the second part adults in the heat of passion and the third part the singer in old age thinking about their past love. Gads. Whatever you think, in length and libido it manages to invent both prog rock and Pulp. Heavily-effected saxophones waft in and out, guitars get fuzzier and quieter as the track progresses and the ending is bathed in synthesised melancholic heaven, Ferry crooning in his collapsed quiff like a pub singer after half a dozen Guinesses.
If There Is Something Peel Session, 18 Feb 72
The Peel Session version is free from slide guitar and twice as long as the released version, clocking in at over 12 meandering minutes, the track ebbing and flowing like the champagne at one of Bryan Ferry’s socialite soirees. A few short years later they’d be making syrupy cocktail dross like Avalon. Remember Roxy from 72; weird, wonky and wonderful, unparalleled and untouchable.
*Bonus Track!
No Roxy Music feature is complete without the funniest bit of telly ever. Johnny Vegas as Eno? Oh aye!
Och, John!
I haven’t ever quite got Bruce Springsteen. I can appreciate the appeal, and I can rattle off a list of his tunes I quite like, but that’s just it – tunes I quite like. There’s nothing there I love. Not even Tenth Avenue Freeze Out. Or Hungry Heart. Or Cadillac Ranch. Or Born To Run. I like ’em. But I don’t love ’em. I don’t feel the need to re-spin them as soon as they’ve faded out in the same way I do with many other musical sacred cows. What’s the difference between Born To Run and most of Meat Loaf’s outpourings over the last 30 years? Very little, if y’ask me. And Meat Loaf is a pantomime figure to be laughed at and poked with a big shitty stick. So why not Bruce?
Bruce’s schtick is all just a wee bit forced, I think. Everything’s done through gritted teeth and clenched fist, his furrowed brow and earnest intentions dressed up in last year’s Levis for maximum ‘man of the people’ effect. Four hour live shows? Come on! Even if Paul McCartney turned up in my back garden and ask me to accompany him on fat-fingered guitar to play a four hour greatest hits show, that would still be about two hours too long. Possibly. And all that huffing and puffing and biker-booted blue collar bluster – pffft! – even his ballads sound as if they’re wrapped in layers of testosterone, desperate to escape their confines, but bundled up as tightly as his upper arms underneath the sweat-stained cut-off denim shirt. Look at him! He can’t even play that famous Tele of his properly due to the constrictions. That, in part, explains the gritted teeth I suppose.
Here’s the crux though – Bruce writes a good song. I know he does. But his versions just don’t hit the spot the way the cover versions do.
Because The Night – Bruce version
Written during the Darkness On The Edge Of Town album sessions, he dashed off Because The Night, discarded it almost immediately and gave it to Patti Smith, who was in the studio next door recording what would become the Easter LP. She got herself a writing credit as she changed some of the words and added her own. But you knew that already. Her version is better. In fact, hers is the definitive of the 18 covers (and counting) to date. PJ Harvey certainly thinks so……..she based much of her mid-career on it. But you knew that already too.
Because The Night – Patti version
Along with Gerry Rafferty’s Baker Street, Patti’s Because The Night reminds me of French toast. I have a vivid memory of listening to the ‘Hit Parade’ countdown one sunny Summer night on a wee portable radio in the back garden and hearing both records while my dad made French toast in the kitchen, the sizzle and smell making its way back to me sitting with my back against the roughcast on the garage wall. Patti’s record eventually got to number 5, though I’m too scared to Google the rest of this fact as it’s very likely both records didn’t ever appear in the same chart. Don’t check. Or if you do, don’t tell me if I’m wrong. It’ll ruin what has been a 35+ years memory.
Huff….pufff…wheeze….
Inspired by a lyric in Elvis’ Let’s Play House (“You may have a pink Cadillac but don’t you be nobody’s fool”), Bruce wrote Pink Cadillac as a car-as-sexual-metaphor bluesy gruntalong. Written at the turn of the 80s but kept it in his vaults until 1984, Bruce stuck it on the b-side of Dancing In The Dark.
Pink Cadillac – Bruce version
The year previously, Bette Midler had asked to record it, presumably to add her own high camp gloss to an already suggestive lyric.
“I love you for your Pink Cadillac….crushed velvet seats….riding in the back…oozing down the street.”
‘Pink Cadillac is not a girls’ song‘, vetoed Bruce.
And that was that, until Natalie Cole somehow got the go ahead to record her version and take it all the way to number 5 (just like Patti) in March 1988. Bruce calling it Pink Cadillac was a bit more glamorous and rock ‘n roll sounding than, say, Pink Camel Toe, that’s for sure. But we all know what he was getting at, eh? Nudge, nudge, wink wink and all that. It’s quite spectacular that someone so straight-laced as Natalie ‘daughter of Nat King’ Cole should be allowed to record it. Maybe she thought she was singing about a car.
Pink Cadillac – Natalie version.
Barring the none-more-80s glossy feel (or, to be more accurate, because of the none-more-80s glossy feel) it could almost be Aretha Franklin as recorded by Prince, couldn’t it?
*Bonus Track!
Ever one for spotting a trend and putting an arty spin on it, here’s David Bowie doing It’s Hard To Be A Saint In The City. Recorded in 1974 in the middle of his white-powdered Young Americans phase, it’s a tune that divides Bowie fans. For what it’s worth, I think it’s a brilliant version. I bet those check-shirted good ol’ boys over the Atlantic hate it though.
Nothing at all like the Brooce original. Poor man’s Dylan, no?
By now, of course, there’ll be people I know, friends even, who are rattling off tut-tut-tut emails to me, pointing out the errors of my ways. Waaaaaghh! Here….have a Bruce face in reply….
Paul Weller at the Barrowlands on Monday night was terrific. The opening night of his ‘One Night Only‘ tour, this was Weller’s way of gathering up the best bits of his back catalogue and playing them with a renewed effervescence and vigour that could shame a band with a combined age less than half his 55 or so years.
Paul Wellblurred
Not that we knew it at the start. A Paul Weller gig without an album to promote always puts the needle into the red on the old apprehensionometer – this might’ve meant a set of brand new material to endure, with a couple of greatest hits flung in at select moments to appease a restless crowd. Not a bad night out maybe, but not really what you want on a Monday night. From the off, though, when a free from fanfare and flashing lights Weller strolled on at the unfashionably early time of 8.30pm, all perma-tan and tight, tight trousers, and fired into Sunflower, it was clear he was here to entertain. Earlier on, the DJ had played a not entirely inspired selection of 60s and 70s 45s. You won’t need me to list them for you. Stuck somewhere in the middle was Bowie’s Golden Years – a wee clue to how the night would proceed. Not for PW a cosy pipe ‘n slippers run through of his earlier past triumphs, this was going to be a back catalogue cherry pick through his own golden years, played for us like the Angry Young Man from Woking he once was.
The set was given a modernist (no pun intended) twist thanks to the liberal sprinklings of sonic stereo swooshes and panning vocal effects that were in equal parts druggy and dubby, but especially due to the use of a piercing Telecaster for half the songs. This gave the band an angular, angry, post-punk sound; aggressive yet arty, taut yet trippy.
Third song in was From The Floorboards Up, and even more so than the recorded version, it was total Wilko Johnson. From the opening slashed chords onwards, Weller channeled his inner Dr Feelgood. Not many would’ve noticed, but for this track PW ditched the plectrum (just like Wilko!) strummed with open hand (just like Wilko!) and perfected that thousand yard stare (just like Wilko!) Between a couple of verses he even had the nerve to do that spasmic, wired-to-the-mains electrified stagger across the stage – aye, just like Wilko! Tonight Matthew, for the next three minutes, I’m going to be Wilko Johnson. And he was. Never before have I seen such an obvious ‘we’re not worthy’ episode of hero worship. Did anyone else spot it?
The set thereon in was inspired. The Style Council’s My Ever Changing Moods was a surprise early addition, fuelling an unspoken frenzy amongst 1800 souls that he might dare to play a couple of (whisper it) Jam songs. He did. A punchy, punky Start! received almost the biggest cheer of the night, and even the inability of Weller to hit the high notes of his youth couldn’t dampen things. I don’t know what Weller thinks of this – he’s clearly comfortable playing these old songs that mean so much to so many, but his own, more recent back catalogue is sounding sensational in its current form – Dragonfly, Andromeda, Sea Spray, Wake Up The Nation, Come On Let’s Go, 7&3 Is The Striker’s Name. They are equally as deserving of that same roof-raising cheer – a roof-raising cheer that reached delirious levels of excitement when the group walked out for the second encore and the bass player thudded into the opening Motownisms of A Town Called Malice. Weller, on joint tambourine and Telecaster duties looked like the happiest man on the planet. And given that 1800 people had just spontaneously combusted in total delight, that’s really saying something.
Disappointments? None really. The above set list shows He’s The Keeper and Out Of The Sinking, neither of which he played, for whatever reason. I did think, early on, when it was clear he was here to entertain, that we might get Into Tomorrow. But no. And it’s possible to create your own brilliant set from the obvious tracks he didn’t play – Brushed would’ve sounded great in this set for example (as would Out Of The Sinking for that matter), and I’d have liked to hear Starlite, the forgotten single released between the last two LPs, but really, you can’t complain. A just-short-of two hours set with tracks from all eras fizzing off the stage like welders’ sparks is a good night out, is it not?
This is, I’m certain, the most fired-up and relevant Weller I’ve ever seen in concert. If you have a ticket for one of the shows, you’re going to really enjoy it. If you don’t have one, do everything you can to get one.
My ears are still ringing, by the way…..
Slightly recycled from Plain Or Pan’s back pages, this article is adapted from one that first appeared 5 years ago…
Autumn. The nights are drawing in and the curtains are drawing shut. The heating comes on a bit earlier than normal and stays on that wee bit longer. You can smell winter coming in the air. The leaves are turning red and yellow. Conkers are on the ground and in the playground. Kids are off to the medical room for a good dose of TCP and a telling off.
It’s round about now that I like to dig out ‘Autumn Almanac’ by The Kinks, a song that so perfectly sums up this time of year. You don’t even have to be quintessentially English to appreciate lines such as, “I like my football on a Saturday, roast beef on Sundays, alright! I go to Blackpool for my holidays, sit in the open sunlight.”
No doubt about it, it’s one of my all-time top 5 favourite songs ever. Just ahead of ‘Ally’s Tartan Army’ by Scotland’s 1978 World Cup Squad, though just behind ‘There She Goes’ by The La’s.
Lee Mavers once lectured me on the brilliance of Autumn Almanac for a good 10 minutes. “From the dew-soaked hedge creeps a crawly caterpill-ah!” he offered, in his sing-song Mersey twang. “How good a line is that, La!?! ‘Friday evening, people get together…hiding from the weather…’ The chords, the feel, the melancholy…….it’s not as good as Waterloo Sunset, though, is it?”
The single version of Autumn Almanac was recorded in September 67 and released 3 weeks later. No great strategic marketing campaign with focus groups, target audiences and avoidance of any other big act’s single being released at the same time. Get in the studio, cut the record, release the record. Times being simpler then, Autumn Almanac climbed to either number 3 or number 5 on the charts, depending on which music paper you were reading.
Recorded for Top Gear just a few weeks after, on October 25th 1967 at the BBC’s Maida Vale Studio 4 and broadcast 4 days later, the above track is taken from a well-known Kinks bootleg* called ‘The Songs We Sang For Auntie’, a 3 CD set that compiles most of (or all?) the unreleased BBC session stuff from 1964-1994. A must-have for any fan of a band who were matched surely only by The Beatles in terms of high quality output.
Ask anyone to name 3 Kinks singles and they’ll give you all the usual suspects, but I bet it’d be unlikely Autumn Almanac would feature in too many lists. It’s an under appreciated classic, that’s for certain. Just ask Lee Mavers.
*Since writing this article, there’s been an official Kinks BBC release. But you probably knew that already.
Yes, yes, yes! It’s my Autumn Almanyac!
Plain Or Pan 