Some songs just fit on car journeys. Queens Of The Stone Age’s No One Knows and a midnight stretch of the relatively new ring road that by-passes the south side of Glasgow sounds awesome at 70 mph. Hall And Oates I Can’t Go For That goes nicely with cruise control on the Sunshine State’s Interstate 4. Radiohead’s There There at national speed limit-defying pace on the M4 north in an unseasonally quiet mid-July heatwave. Tindersticks’ Tiny Tears on a rain-soaked October Isle of Arran. Underworld’s Dark And Long… Stevie Wonder’s Boogie On Reggae Woman… freakin’ Band On The Run….Orbital’s Chime and the badly-needing-an-upgrade Barrhead – Irvine road fit together like hand in glove. Talking of which, the giddy acoustic rush of Bigmouth Strikes Again sounds just right driving up a deserted Dumbarton Road at two in the morning. Favourite car soundtracks. We’ve all got them.
Which takes me to the Highlands, 1993. We’re on some sort of road trip, the wee Ford Fiesta packed to the gunnels with waterproofs and Goretex and umbrellas and cagoules and all the usual things you’d take to the north of Scotland at the height of summer. We’ve a radio that simply refuses to tune to anything either side of Radio 1 and half a dozen tapes, carefully curated home-made jobs that the temperamental in-car tape player has already tried to devour before breaking north of Dunbartonshire.
At one point deep in the Highlands, heading somewhere towards the standing stones at Clava Cairns, Radio 1 drops out to intermittent static. We need to gamble on the willingness of the tape machine to play ball…and play tapes. Thankfully on this occasion it does…and it leaves me with a memory burned to the hard drive of the music section in my brain.
World Party‘s All I Gave is sandwiched mid-side, placed somewhere between Somewhere In My Heart and Groove Is In The Heart and it provides the ideal soundtrack for a jaw-dropping run through Scotland’s rich countryside. There are purple/grey peaks on the horizon, snow-flecked even in summer, with clear winding rivers far below that shimmer like chrome, old guys waist deep and fly-fishing them dry, surrounded by patchworks of untouched green fields bordered by stately pines and firs… an entire shortbread tin image of Scotland in real life, right in front of us in widescreen technicolour.
World Party – All I Gave
We like World Party. Their Bang! album is a current constant in our lives and All I Gave is our favourite song on it. Karl Wallinger has clearly been kissed on both cheeks by the Beatles’ gene, his George Harrisonisms never more to the fore than on this track. His vocals, joyful and soaring and full of his toothy sunshine smile do the sha-la-la in all the right places and tug at the strings of the heart whenever the minor chords come round. Woozy mellotronish psychedelia shares a bed with wheezing, asthmatic slide guitar, playing on top of unexpected chord changes and a melodic bassline that you really hope is played on an attention-to-detail Hohner violin bass. We rewind the track plenty and often and we never tire of it.
“I will always love you,” we sing aloud, unselfconsciously and out of tune, and the wee car with its questionable suspension bounces us up and over the brow of another single track hill. A stag – “A stag!!” – watches nonplussed as we clatter past. An eagle – “An eagle!!” – spirals in the sky to our left. The fisherman casts his fly one more time. We don’t see if the river has given up any more of its load as we’re now heading through the pines and onto Clava Cairns and its Bronze Age standing stones where, spookily, Radio 1 crackles back into life and ruins everything.
That moment with All I Gave though. That’ll last forever.
Sail on, Karl Wallinger. You were great.
Plain Or Pan 
Thanks for this and thank you, Karl. Listened to Goodbye Jumbo on the way up the 77 tonight to see Bill Ryder Jones at Room 2 hoping there might be some nod to him, however fleeting. But alas not. But I’ve hopefully yet got some days credit in the bank to tell Take That fans that R@bbie’s hit was only a cover, and that Karl’s craft was (I think) dedicated to his own mother and not some teenage squeeze.
Lovely memory, and a beautiful tribute. Thanks for the words to help soothe another sad loss.