Bams and List

I’ve been reading everyone’s end of year lists and the one thing that strikes me – as it has done for the past half dozen years or so – is my out-of-touchness with new artists and releases. While all and any release is but a couple of clicks away from the very space I’m sitting at, I’m staunchly anti-Spotify…and it’s clearly to my listening detriment. I much prefer physical over digital any day of the week, but inevitably finance – or the lack of – has dictated that my consumption of new music is on a clear downward trend and gathering momentum with each passing month. It’ll likely be sometime around September 2024 when I stumble across a record from 2023 that’s had everyone raving for months beforehand, but I’m not that bothered to be honest.

I’ve really enjoyed the tracks that The Smile have used to promote their upcoming second album. Bending Hectic, all woozy electric guitar and close-miked Thom Yorke, was supposed to be a stand-alone single but I notice it’s on the tracklisting for the record, so clearly someone talked sense into them. To have thrown away a stone cold 21st century classic to the digital ether would have been stupid of them.

More recently, the album’s title track Wall Of Eyes has found its way onto the radio playlists. It’s a beauty; a bossa nova-ish acoustic groove with far-off layered strings that sound like thunder peals and a melody that takes repeated plays to fully unwind, but when it does…wow! I know folk go on and on and on about Radiohead – and this ain’t Radiohead – but it’s really great. Their debut album was a beauty and its follow-up already sounds like it might be too.

My favourite track of the year, for what it’s worth, was a one-sided promo 12″ that came out via Last Night From Glasgow. The label continues to go from strength to strength, and whilst providing a home to disparate but talented, long in the tooth and (mainly) Scottish acts, they also offer a platform to the new and inexperienced. Quad 90 was one such act and their track Le Blank will no doubt ring with a lot of this readership.

Quad 90 – Le Blank

It’s nothing you’ve never heard before. Forward-thinking with a knowing nod to the past, it could be ESG or ACR or even a Franz Ferdinand remix, but all necessary ingredients are present; post-punk chicken-scratch guitar, a ghosting, earwormy, Tom Tom Club-ish keyboard motif in the chorus, thumping Bernard Edwards bass and a sashaying double female vocal that falls somewhere between sultry and sulky. It played long and often round here before finding favour amongst the more discerrning radio shows across 6 Music and Radio Scotland (as did its follow-up Unequal Division) and is a good signifier of what might come next.

Gig-wise, I’m heavily involved with Freckfest in promoting shows in Irvine’s Harbour Arts Centre, a proper hidden gem of a music venue with just 100 seats and immeasurable vibes. Some of my favourite shows this year have been in here.

The Bug Club turned up on the last Tuesday in January – surely the hardest night of the year in which to sell tickets – and supported themselves by sneaking on unannounced and playing a whole half-hour of new material before coming back out to slay a hardy 80-strong audience with their Velvets x Modern Lovers rattle meets Osees x Stooges roll. For three folk, they make a quite marvellous racket. If they’re playing in a town near you (and they most likely will be at some point), you know what to do. Review here.

My favourite gig of the year was quite possibly around the same time, when the Hungry Beat collective pulled out all the stops in a marathon show that fused together like a scratchy Pete Frame family tree of Scottish alt. pop reimagined as The Band’s Last Waltz. Review here.

Other notable shows were The Waterboys epic and sprawling but razor-sharp show at the Barrowlands. Yer actual Mike Scott sent his foot messengers my way to express his personal thanks for this review, which was unexpected, and The Bluebells roof-raising homecoming album launch show in St Lukes. Yer actual Bobby Bluebell immediately re-Tweeted this review, accompanied by 3 love hearts, apparently the highest Bluebell accolade in the land.

Books are the new rock ‘n roll, dontchaknow? There were some really great book events this year that were the equal and more of any live music show. Andrew O’Hagan‘s Mayflies – already a modern classic and no mistake – had a bit of a reprise in Irvine over the late summer when a Nicola Sturgeon-chaired event saw Andrew chat about growing up in Irvine and the cultural influences that seeped their way into his autobiographical tale of life-long friendship. The former First Minister, a confirmed bookworm, asked me to sign one of my Perfect Reminder books for her and then re-Tweeted my follow-up review of the evening. Unsurprisingly, my stats went a wee bit stratospheric on the back of it, so I’m delighted (and relieved) that my writing in that review is up there with some of the best stuff I’ve ever written.

Not to be outdone, John Niven popped up in the HAC as part of the promotional tour for his powerful/excellent O Brother novel, a real autobiographical darkness and light page-turner that deals with the despair of family suicide and (the despair of) growing up in Irvine. If you’re of a similar age to me, there’ll be enough memory joggers contained within its pages to have you reading frantically to the end. It’s easily the best, most emotionally-charged book of 2023 and you really must read it. I’ve now read it twice, its pages forever smudged with the dampness of sad and happy tears.

On a personal level, I got to do more writing of worth (sleevenotes for the Trashcan Sinatras) and actual, real book stuff. A second publication bearing my name – The Full Pocket – came out at the start of the year and sold out just a few weeks ago. Of course, no sooner had it sold out than the Americans were asking for boxes of it and that man Niven was pointing out a badly-phrased and grammatically-poor sentence that might benefit from a rewrite. Should a reprint be in order, it’ll need a swift edit first.

The Full Pocket took me to another music ‘n literature event, this time in May at Frets in Strathaven, alongside James Yorkston and Vic Galloway. While James did his set, Vic and I made full use of the green room’s facilities and availed many of its bottles of their contents. Imagine my surprise the next morning when I saw photos of Vic, his quiff immaculate, accompanying James for a couple of numbers at the end of his set. I wonder just who it was I was talking to back stage all that time? I could swear Vic never moved from that green room the entire length of James Yorkston’s set.

Vic, by now a close pal, obviously, turned up trumps in November when he got me backstage to say hello again to Johnny Marr. Vic was hosting an event where Johnny was talking about his 10 years as a solo artist and, with his last words said to me in May – “Keep in touch!” – ringing in my ears, I did just that and suggested he might be able to help me get a book to Johnny. After the show, Johnny greeted me like a long-lost friend – “Hey! It’s Craig from the Ballroom Blitz!” (a reference to his gig in Kilmarnock’s Grand Hall that Freckfest put on) and both myself and that other music writer-about-town Billy Sloan gave Johnny our respective books, much to the bemusement of the random guy who’d breached security and followed us quickly in. “Are youse guys famous?” he asked me with a worried look as he watched first Billy and then me chat easily and familiarly with Johnny. “They’ll fling me oot when they suss ahm jist a bam.”

Finally, I don’t know exactly what 2024 will bring, but I do know I’m likely to have my name on the front of another book. More on that when there’s more to tell…