Author: Craig McAllister

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Alternative Version, Gone but not forgotten, Hard-to-find, Live!, Sampled

Introducing The Band

Craig McAllister

A few months ago I posted about the burst of classical music that The Smiths used to signify they were taking the stage. Walk-on music, when used as effectively as The Smiths did it, is an integral part of the live experience. Those in front of the stage have their senses heightened…quicksilver adrenaline courses through the collective mass… eagerness is fit to burst and, as one, they peak when their heroes take the stage. In the article linked above, Mike Joyce talks about the prickling of the hairs on his arms as Sergei Prokofiev’s music reaches its climax and the group emerge from the shadows and onto the stage. Intro music is pure theatre and high drama, powerful in its effect for audience and band alike.

The recent death of Mani had me revisiting the Stone Roses catalogue and reminiscing about the Stone Roses gigs I’d been at. I say gigs, but Stone Roses shows were more of an event than a mere gig. The minute the group began to pick up traction, they eschewed the usual circuit of venues and instead put on ambitious landmark concerts.

In the space of five rapid months in 1989, Stone Roses went from Glasgow Rooftops (above) – part of the touring circuit for bands of a certain size – to the Blackpool Tower Ballroom to a November show for 7000 rockers and ravers in London’s Alexandra Palace, at the time known as the broadcasting birthplace of the BBC and scene of some of those trippy 24-hour Pink Floyd and Soft Machine ‘happenings’ of the late ’60s, but certainly not the usual venue any bands might think to try and fill. Nowadays of course, any two-bit act with a bit of a following can add a date or two in the airy north London glasshouse, but in 1989 the Stone Roses’ choice of venue was genuinely inspired.

Fast forward another six months and the group would set up stall on Spike Island, a windswept and chemically-polluted estuary of the Mersey. Two months later they’d play their final show (for then, anyway) in a huge tent on Glasgow Green, 10,000 rockers, ravers and by now bucket-hatted bampots witnessing the band at the peak of their powers. The travelling tent idea is also now fairly standard practice for bands of a certain size these days. (Spike Island less so.)

As the band’s popularity grew, they went from the standard idea of support act plus half an hour of playlisted music to an actual rave culture-inspired show, the group just one element of a spectacle that would involve guest DJs dropping crashing house beats and hip hop on the P.A., lasers and strobes on the lighting rig, mass E communion in the audience and generally good vibes all round. These shows were a million miles from watching Gaye Bykers On Acid from a cider-soaked corner of Glasgow Tech or the Wedding Present at the QMU or any other touring guitar band of the era you care to mention. Yes, even you, Primal Scream. In 1989, Bobby was still looking for the key that would start up their particular bandwagon. (It was somewhere down the back of his Guns ‘n Roses leather trousers, I’m led to believe.)

All of those shows mentioned above (I was at three of them) began with I Wanna Be Adored. Since writing the song, or at least since the release of that debut album, has there ever been a Stone Roses show that didn’t start with it? I don’t think so. I Wanna Be Adored is, in its own way, a senses-heightener, a quicksilver surge of electricity, an early peak in a set full of peaks, but in the live arena, it too would come rumbling from out of the corners, fading in as an intro tape heralded the group’s imminent arrival.

Stone Roses intro music:

I’ve spent 35 years convinced that this music was made by the Stone Roses themselves, an abstract piece of art thrown away in the same vein as those backwards experiments they put onto b-sides, played for fun, recorded then used sparingly but appropriately. Certainly, the thunking, woody bassline is pure Mani. The hip-hop beat pure Reni. The sirens a clear extension of John Squire’s clarion call at the start of Elephant Stone.

Hearing this from Ally Pally’s carpeted floor minutes after Sympathy For The Devil is still strong in the memory. Hearing it again in the sweat-raining big top on Glasgow Green, many there unaware that this was not mere incidental rave music but Stone Roses’ call to arms (but we knew, oh yes, we knew, and excitement was immediately at fever pitch) still provokes a conditioned response in 2025.

It wasn’t made by Stone Roses though. Turns out it’s a piece of obscure-ish hip hop from 1987, looped, tweaked and added to by the Stone Roses team. The original – Small Time Hustler by The Dismasters – is immediately recognisable from that Stone Roses intro. Really, all the Stone Roses did was stick a few sirens on top of it…but combine that with Ally Pally’s echoing rave whistles and Glasgow Green’s surge of euphoria and it makes for high drama.

I wonder how many folk knew – truly knew – the source of that Stone Roses intro tape back in 1989?

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

A Good Start!

Craig McAllister

There’s a story that Adam Horowitz tells – kinda preposterous, but totally believable (it’s the Beastie Boys, right?) – where waaaay back in the early days of the Beastie Boys he’s hanging out at a friend’s rather than be at school that afternoon when, from the TV, comes the unmistakable slow ‘n low DIY beats of his group’s own ‘Beastie Revolution‘, the flip side of their debut single Cooky Puss. Somehow, some way, British Airways had picked up on the track and used it to soundtrack a TV advert. Quite what the ad executives were thinking (or were on) by adding the Beasties’ track – lo-fi-Pass-The-Dutchie-as-recorded-by-Lee-Perry – to go hand in hand with an advert for global business travel is anyone’s guess, but there it was. Ad Rock couldn’t believe it. They had to ask for permission, didn’t they?

It so happened that Mike D’s mum had a friend of a friend of a friend who worked for a Manhattan law firm, and so, a young lawyer fresh out of law school and with the bit between his teeth was assigned to take on the Beastie Boys v British Airways in his first case. The four Beastie Boys (Kate Schellenbach was still a part of the group at this point) were subsequently awarded $10,000 each, an astronomical amount for a young person in 1983. Adjusted for inflation, it’s the equivalent of over $32,000 (£30,000) in today’s money. The money would go some way to helping the group establish themselves with decent equipment, accomodation and rehearsal space.

Ad Rock did what any music-obsessed teenager would do: he took himself straight to Rogue, Midtown Manhattan’s music store. He had his eye on a black Rickenbacker, ‘the same one that Paul Weller from The Jam played‘ and had the $250 out to pay for it when, from the corner of his eye, he spied the new-to-market Roland TR-808 drum machine. Dilemma! He rationalised – he had a perfectly good guitar already…all the best, freshest records of the day were built on processed beats…here was his chance to own a real guitar…here was his chance to be cutting edge and adopt the brand new technology of the day…guitar?…beats?…guitar?…beats?… The 808 won out. Serendipitously, it would end up providing much of the backbeat for that first million-selling Beastie Boys album, after which Ad Rock could buy as many Rickenbackers as he fancied. A good decision, as it turned out.

It’s no secret that Beastie Boys have a hardcore punk thing at their roots, but when I first read the story above, I was suprprised that they were fans of The Jam. Of all the guitar-based bands to be into, they’d seem to be the most quintessentially English. The lyrical content, the suits, Weller’s undeniable accent…maybe that was the appeal.

In 2000, Fire And Skill, a tribue album to The Jam was released. It’s an eclectic (ie ropey) album and alongside the names you’d expect to be there (Liam Gallagher, Steve Cradock) were outliers such as Garbage, Buffalo Tom…and the Beastie Boys.

Beastie Boys – Start!

Beastie Boys

Their version of Start! is terrific. It’s cut from the same lightly toasted cloth that many of those groovy Beastie Boys instrumentals are cut from. There’s no immediate Taxman-aping thumping bass. There’s no frazzled, trebly guitar solo. There are hardly any vocals. Instead, it’s built on a bed of bubbling Jimmy Smith organ, a woozy melodica playing Paul Weller’s vocal melody, with skittery, hip-hoppish drums and splashing cymbals nailing the groove to the floor. Miho Hatori of Grand Royal labelmates Cibo Matto pops up to sing the ‘if I never, ever see you/what you give is what you get‘ refrain, but other than that, this is Beastie Boys doing what they do best – grooving on a soul jazz soft shoe shuffle for fun and out of sheer respect for the music.

In Dancing Through The Fire, Dan Jennings’ excellent re-telling of the Weller story from pre-Jam to the present day, there’s a story of the aeroplane-averse Weller travelling six hours by car between shows, playing the Beasties’ version of Start! over and over and over again. I hope Adam Horowitz gets to read about that.

Cover Versions, Get This!, studio outtakes

So You’re Gonna Be A Singer, Well I’ll Be Goddamned

Craig McAllister

Buddy’s Rendezvous is the name of a diner, the place where the character in Father John Misty‘s song meets up with his estranged daughter after a spell in jail.

It’s an entire movie in song, FJM proud at how pretty his daughter has turned out, lying to the old soaks in the bars about what a great job he did bringing her up, she noticing that he’s wearing the same coat he had on when he was sent down and telling him she’s going to be a singer, he telling her not to try and please everyone all the time and to ‘forget that leftie shit your mom drilled in your mind…whatever happened to the girl I knew?‘ It’s a brilliant song, evocative and filmic, that in its arrangement alone stirs up notions of Hollywood’s golden age of Art Deco and smooth-rolling, shiny-spoked Lincoln Continentals.

It begins with a film noiresque saxophone bleating out the bluest of notes, climbing out of a smoky nightclub fug into the dark L.A. night, a loose, doo-wopish backing track accompanying it, the strings rising like smoke from a disgarded cigarette holder at a cocktail table. If Misty and producer Jonathan Wilson were aiming for ‘atmosphere’, you might say they nailed it.

Buddy’s Rendezvous and its parent album, Chloë and the Next 20th Century is a bit of an outlier in the FJM catalogue. For the most part, gone are the songs of syphilis and sexual proclivities, in are big sweeping Hollywood ballads, deft and ambitious in arrangement and played with an entirely straight face by a guy who’s normally happy to come across like a southern-fried Nick Cave. It wasn’t an album I immediately took to, but like much of FJM’s output, repeated plays reward the listener. Think of it as A Little Touch Of Schmilsson In The Night for Gen-Xrs and you’ll get on just fine with it too.

Released on Sub Pop, the record was presented to look like the sort of old time jazz record you might routinely shuffle past in your search for charity shop gold. The gatefold sleeve is thick and shiny, the labels on the records feature a fictitious label name and, occasionally annoyingly, fictitious song titles (and song times too). Even the publishing credits are made up. It’s a concept as grand as Misty’s musical vision and has, over time, become a real favourite.

It stands to reason then that Lana Del Rey should do a cover of Buddy’s Rendezvous. Stately Hollywood glamour? Small hours and noirish? Slo-motion melodies unravelling like shook-free curls at midnight? Her version, of course, totally flips the perspective and that’s a big part of the appeal. Released as a one-off 7″ as part of the deluxe version of Chloë, it remains a sought after element of Del Rey’s expansive and exquisite catalogue.

I’m not sure of the officialness of the track below, but some enterprising and technically-minded public servant has produced a version with both Misty and Del Rey duetting on it. It seems to take FJM’s original backing track, leads off with Lana’s breathy vocal and by the end of the first verse has brought two idiosyncratic vocalists onto the one record. It’s clever and smart-arsed, but more than anything, just sounds terrific.

Buddy’s Rendezvous – Lana Del Rey and Father John Misty

*For the record, as much as I love the quirkiness of this ‘duet’, I think FJM’s original is the superior version. You should check it – him – out forthwith.

New! Now!

Wynderful

Craig McAllister

I’ve been following Nia Wyn on the various social media platforms for most of this year and just last week she’s gone and released the track that I can confidently predict will sit unchallenged at the top of the pile of my favourite singles of 2025. Given that this blog, and by association me, myself and I, is supremely influential on a global scale, you can expect that everyone and their talc-dusted granny will have joined the bandwagon before the middle of January, proclaiming the greatness of the track to anyone who’ll listen. For the record: you read it here first.

Nia Wyn – I Wish It Would Rain

The cynical here (and I know who you are) might point to the obvious reference points – Amy, Duffy, (Alabama Shakes, even) – on a record that’s a perfectly pitched amalgam of old gold and nu soul… and they wouldn’t be wrong – but that’s not the point.

I Wish It Would Rain is flawless in its quest for authenticity, and if you have even an ounce of soul in that tired and flabby middle-aged body of yours (yeah, I know my readership), then you’ll know that it’s simply undeniable. A warm record for cold nights, I Wish It Would Rain will be played long and often on repeat in the more perceptive households up and down the country….maybe even yours.

Rasping brass stabs, shuffling pistol crack snare, shimmering Hammond, tasteful guitar licks…and the ghostly vamping of a certain P. Weller esq will ensure this record reaches a far wider audience than it might otherwise have done, Plain Or Pan endorsement notwithstanding.

With a brilliant sandpapery voice that falls somewhere between Macy Gray and Marge Simpson, Nia Wyn has spent the past couple of years refining a style that is ripe for crossover success. In moving from Llandudno to London, Nia has left behind the anarcho-punk, shaved-at-the-sides and centre-parted hair. Gone too is the angular fringe that was part suedehead and part Bananarama. In is a shortish new blow-dried crop, as sharp and smart as the tailoring she presents herself in. In too is a welcome friendship with Paul Weller, which can’t do any harm at all you’d have to think. What has remained – and is now stronger than ever – is a commitment to mining the best ideas from soul music, be that Motown, Philly, Stax or northern, and re-presenting them for these genre-blurring modern times.

Nia Wyn has the look to go with the tunes (seek out Can’t Get No Love Round Here for further evidence) and is poised, I dare say, for real commercial success in 2026. Don’t miss the boat.

*If anyone close to Nia is reading – I Wish It Would Rain would really benefit from having its own 7″ release. Go on! You’d be daft not to.

 

Get This!, New! Now!

Down On The West Side, Away From Sunlight

Craig McAllister

As autumn snaps itself sharply into winter and the early curtains of dusk draw their way across the gun metal grey skies on the commute home, the music being listened to in the car becomes equally as insular, wrapped tightly around itself for protection from the cold being blasted in by the westerly winds. As the windscreen wipers bump and squeak to the scraping of a Nick Drake cello or a Talk Talk bass glissando, as the indicators’ gentle ticking matches Sufjan Stevens’ gentle picking, as the sudden splash of a puddle matches the subtle crash of a jazz/folk paradiddle, it dawns on me that my music taste is seasonal.

Ska is for that first hint of summer, when it’s still technically early spring but folk are already waist deep in the filthy Firth of Clyde at Irvine beach. The reggae is reserved for the summer proper, although occasionally they clash by happy accident as playlists collide mid-barbecue. Dub? It sounds best on those rare days when even the sun can’t be arsed doing anything other than sit there and sweat. The twin colossuses (colossusi?) of Teenage Fanclub and Trashcan Sinatras work best in autumn, two groups who’ve travelled more than a few miles around the sun and, while being still recording and infrequently gigging concerns, are themselves in their autumnal years, with more miles in the rear-view mirror than what may still stretch ahead of them. Now there’s a sobering thought.

The new artists? They’re best kept for January when you can kid yourself on that this year will be the year when you embrace the new and unheard, before cracking mid-March for your annual Beatles/Clash/Smiths/Dylan/Bowie/Radiohead intake and the inevitable ‘why even bother with anyone else?’ thoughts. The yearly rotation of groups and songs and favourite albums is, to paraphrase Elton, the (song) circle of life. And I’m just fine with that, by the way.

I’m getting serious late-autumn Elliott Smith vibes from this – When The Sky Darkens Down by White Magic For Lovers. I think you’ll really like it.

White Magic For Lovers – When The Sky Darkens Down

It’s windswept, mystical, close-miked and deftly picked. The finger scrapes on metal, the tumbling and ringing arpeggios that fall from six strings, the creeping chord changes and the whispered, late night vocal delivery all point to the church of Elliott. It’s uber melodic, steeped in melancholy and, with those low-in-the-mix syncopated bleeps and bloops that caterpillar their way through the background, something you’ll want to stick on repeat until the long, dark nights begin stretching free again. Lovely stuff.

Listeners of Guy Garvey’s BBC 6 Music show will be no strangers to White Magic For Lovers. He’s played them frequently for the past year or so, when tracks from When The Sky Darkens‘ parent album ‘Book Of Lies‘ first crept out. With musical roots stretching as far back as the Electric Soft Parade, the duo have decent pedigree…and a lovely way with an unravelling melody. You could do worse than investigate them. Start with Book Of Lies and its looping and somnolent lead track Axelrod, maybe, and work your way back from there. It’s a rewarding journey.

Get This!, Gone but not forgotten, Six Of The Best

Phone Scrolls, Drum Rolls

Craig McAllister

I’m a sucker for a music biography (heck, I’ve written at least one) and so found myself at the Mike Joyce book event in Glasgow last week. The most bizarre thing happened before it had even started.

A couple of guys came in and sat in the empty seats beside me. With nothing happening on the stage as yet, they did as we all do – they took out their phones and began scrolling through social media. Five minutes later, the guy next to me started Googling ‘Mike Joyce’ (I wasn’t really being nosy; being of a certain vintage, the text on his screen was massive – there’s a guy who sits about three rows in front of me at the football and half the crowd can read the texts his wife sends at full-time too – it’s clearly a common thing if you fall within a certain demographic.)

Very soon my neighbour alighted on the interview I did with Mike eight or so years ago, where I asked him to chat about his favourite Smiths tracks. I watched side-eye as the stranger beside me read the lot, desperate to say something to him, but too timid to acknowledge it. I then did as any self-respecting ‘like’-hungry social media user would do, and stealthily updated my Facebook status with my phone held very close to my still-thumping chest as I typed. Weird and strange, but pretty cool.

Held in the Glee Club, the event was, as it turned out, the perfect fit for a venue more in tune with comedy events than music or literature. Interviewed onstage by Scottish radio legend Billy Sloan, Mike Joyce was funny, engaging and extremely lucid, singing drum parts and guitar riffs and offering up tasty morsels of Smithsian trivia – direct despatches from a constituent part who’d fought the good fight from those unique and idiosyncratic trenches.

With a mixture of significant and less consequential events from the pop landscape of 40 and more years ago pouring rapidly and freely from the affable drummer, many being told for the first time, he offered a unique insight into the deft workings of the Morrissey and Marr song-machine. Over two halves of a night, he had a quietly rapt audience, and even when the questions from the floor at the end turned serious – he weeps softly when talking about Andy Rourke – and then tediously obvious – ‘Will The Smiths ever reform?‘ (puh-lease?) – he answered them all with gracious dignity and a sense of humour that stopped it all getting a bit silly.

Mike, as it turns out, is the biggest Smiths fan of them all. ‘What’s it like selling out the Albert Hall?’ he asks himself in the intro to his story. ‘It’s unfathomable’, he answers simply. He can’t quite believe the things that happened to him, from hearing the first mind-blowing Smiths recordings, to playing Top of the Pops, to having Mick Jagger dancing side-stage in New York, he and Johnny mid-song and gape-mouthed at the ridiculousness of it all. Mike’s Smiths years were a blur of ‘pinch me’ moments that, even nowadays, he can scarcely fathom. He spent little more than half a decade in The Smiths, yet Mike’s entire life since has been defined by those years. And now, it seems, is the time to tell his story.

Joyce, as you may know, divides opinion in the Smiths community. On the one hand, he’s a quarter of one of our most individual and exciting groups. On the other, he’s the bandmate who refused to settle for ten percent, the traitor who took the group’s principal members to court for a greater share of what he felt he was owed. It’s all a bit murky and eugh, really.

But yet, while he briefly/bravely refers to this, Mike prefers instead to focus on what made The Smiths so great; the ridiculously high watermark of consistent quality across their catalogue, the riotous gigs, the in-band humour and the tight-knit ‘us v them’ stance that got them through it all. The Drums, he says, should be approached as a celebration of the times rather than a warts ‘n all story. It is. I’m halfway through and it’s a very easy and rapid read. I think you’d like it.

To bookend the show, something else happens.

At the show’s mid-point, Billy Sloan had spotted me from the side of the stage and had come over. ‘Don’t leave at the end,’ he implored. ‘Wait here.’ (I know Billy a wee bit, it’s not as if he has a habit of picking random strangers out of a healthy crowd). At the end, he’s back over. ‘Did you buy a book? D’you want it signed? You’re not waiting in that queue – look at the length of it…‘ and he points to a couple of hundred folk snaking their way up the side of the venue and up to the mezzanine where the signing table is set up. ‘Follow me. Quick!‘

We’re backstage, Billy fussing over my bag. ‘Get your book ready, take the record out of its sleeve, d’you have a pen?‘ And then… a classic Sloanism. ‘Mike! This is my good personal friend, Craig, He’s a great writer and you should meet him.’ And Mike Joyce is there. He’s easy to chat to, but all the things you might want to say, he’s heard them all a thousand times. I don’t even think to mention I’d interviewed him in the past (and I actually think that interview played a small part in this book being birthed.) Instead, I play it cool.

“Thanks for the music, Mike. It’ll play forever.”

“I know it will,” he winks.

He signs my book, he signs my 7″ of Hand In Glove, drawing a wee snare drum above the place where Johnny signed it a decade ago and we chat, of all things, about how shite it is to lose musical allies and friends to cruel and unforgiving illnesses.

Not yr average Wednesday night.

The Smiths – This Night Has Opened My Eyes (demo)

Mike Joyce ‘The Drums‘ is published by New Modern and is out now.

Gone but not forgotten

Rickety Lou

Craig McAllister

It begins with a riff as rickety as the Coney Island Cyclone, a clattering, knuckle-dusted, steel-wound nickel on wood bone-shaking rattle. Lou Reed sounds like he’s just about made it to the mic on time for those first coupla words, like he’s been so transfixed by his own instantaneous riffing that he’s momentarily tuned out of anything else and hastily ran up to it marginally late for his cue. Most other bands would clatter to a sudden halt, shout ‘Take Two!’ and fall into action again. This though, being the Velvet Underground, can be passed off as art; you noticed, yeah? Yeah! It’s deliberate and obtuse and deliberately obtuse, so what, huh? To Lou, mistakes are for lesser groups who worry too much about what their audience thinks of them. ‘You know it’ll be alright,’ as he sings in the chorus

The Velvet Underground – What Goes On

An organ drone wheezily fades its way in at the start of the second verse, subtle to begin with, vamping the simple chord changes, then a bit more prominent in the mix as the angle of Lou ‘n Sterling’s highly-strummed agit-jangle takes proper hold.

There’s a fab! u! lous! feedbacking twin guitar break – of course there is, this is the Velvet Underground – that rises from the beat group clatter like Scotch mist and surfs its way across the continuing stramash below, landing itself like a set of bagpipes being trampled to death in a crowded Turkish souq bazaar. I’m sure that’s exactly the sound the Velvets were chasing, as they say.

Elongated mid notes meld between high and low counter notes, Lou ‘n Sterling’s floating frequencies weaving as one for longer than most groups of the time would dare, but still not nearly long enough here. It’s a trippy and hypnotic garage band tour de force, What Goes On. It really is.

Then we’re back to the chorus, the easy, woozy harmonies adding late era Beatlish warmth to the ice-cool New York art rock. From then on in, it’s a no nonsense, heads down boogie between guitars and organ drone. The twin guitars are high in the mix, trebly and piercing, rattling away like a Warhol hopeful behind the bins at the Factory. The organ is simple and slo-mo, a relaxing counterpoint and very much the antithesis to the manic, never-ending jangle out front.

VU outtake pic by Billy Name

Somewhere, amongst all of this heady art-rock splendour, must be bass and drums. They must be there, right? If you listen closely – really closely – you might hear them, but you’ll need to tune out of that other strange noise in the background – that’ll be the frantically scratching pencils, as Collins ‘n Kirk and a handful of other magpie-minded guitar stranglers make sense of this motherlode of all blueprints and run with it all the way to 1980 and the land known as indie.

Influential…and then some.

Post-Script

Interesting Point 1: There’s an internet theory that the organ on Talking Heads’ Once In A Lifetime is directly lifted, if not actually sampled, from What Goes On. When you listen to both songs, there’s a compelling case for it, but I’ll leave it to you to play them back to back.)

Interesting Point 2: PopSpots, that essential guide to placing your old band shots of yesterday onto the NYC streets of today has a whole section on Lou/Andy/VU’s New York. That couch that appears on the sleeve of What Goes On‘s parent album, the self-titled VU’s third, was seemingly a feature of Warhol’s factory as much as the Velvets themselves.

Get This!

There’s Not A Hope

Craig McAllister

It’s an accepted truth that Electronic was very much a bit-part project, an occasional coming-together of alternative music royalty in the gaps of downtime between their respective day jobs; Bernard and New Order, Johnny and The The…and The Healers…and The Cribs… and whoever else was looking for a six-string gunslinger for hire. The reality is much different.

Although conceived by the duo of Sumner and Marr as a collaborative and ever-shifting line-up of guest musicians and vocalists, Electronic was an active and going concern for almost every year of the ’90s. The self-titled debut album was worked on quietly in the background for months at a time before seeing the light of day in 1991. The follow-up, Raise The Pressure, took two years to put together. 1999’s Twisted Tenderness, the third and presumably final album in Electronic’s discography took a similar time to conceive. Johnny has oft-debunked the notion that he and his pals reconvened for a couple of weeks now and again to throw an album together; a studio head since the earliest days of The Smiths, to him, being part of a group is a 24-hour thing. Bernard, with his patience and dedication to programming and getting the most out of ever-changing technology, is cut from a similarly dedicated cloth.

1996’s Raise The Pressure was written during interesting times. Conceived in 1994, it began life just as Noel Gallagher was borrowing guitars from Johnny to use on the first Oasis recordings (look on the cover of Supersonic and you’ll spot Johnny’s famous black and white Rickenbacker) and was released just as Noel’s band (and Johnny’s Les Paul) were getting ready to headline Knebworth. For one of these acts (and it ain’t Electronic), that’s quite a trajectory.

Raise The Pressure was a product of the last great fertile period for UK guitar bands, yet it never quite made its mark. Here’s an album recorded by two of music’s leading lights, one of whom at least, with his moddish hair and Clarks shoes – and uncanny ability to wring seven shades of melody from six strings – could be considered the uber-cool uncle of the entire movement…and no-one is all that bothered about it.

Lead single Forbidden City is a much under-appreciated track. Despite coming gift-wrapped in New Order melancholy and ever-evolving Marr riffage, it clunked its way to number 14 before vanishing for good. Just what was wrong with the record-buying public?!

Electronic – Forbidden City

The track runs the whole range of Johnny’s guitar styles; layers of sparkling electrics sprinkled across a bed of ringing acoustics…open chorded majors in the verse…barre chorded minors in the refrain…lovely complementary run downs between vocal lines in the third verse…the up the frets dazzling stuff during the choruses…the groaning, multi-layered (and sometimes backwards) feedback solo in the middle… Forbidden City really has it all. In an era of retro bores who were happily rehashing their way into the charts and getting folk to part with their money in Our Price seven days a week, thanks to their Who and Stones and freakin’ Herman’s Hermits rip-offs, (Hello Power! Hello Ashcroft! Hello Fowler ‘n Cradock!) Forbidden City deserved so much more.

Even an appearance on prime time telly couldn’t really help it.

On TFI Friday, Bernard ‘n Johnny are backed by Doves’ Jimi Goodwin on bass, with Black Grape’s Ged Lynch keeping Karl Bartos’ drum stool warm. Bernard is a ball of on the spot sprung energy, punching the air between lines, doing his trademark whoops when he needs to take a breath, gurning indiscriminately at an audience equally hopped up on the good vibes of the times. By the looks of it, Johnny hasn’t yet discovered running and is in the midst of his fat Elvis phase. Unruly hair, jawline as loose as the jeans he’s wearing and dressed in some sort of fleece/fur overcoat, he chews gum while stomping on and off his pedal board, giving, as he always does, good camera. There’s more than a whiff of chemical enhancement to the whole thing – it is the mid 90s after all – and it’s all rather fantastic.

A chart smash though? A definitive track of its era? A firm favourite amongst the masses? There’s not a hope, as the song goes.

Get This!

Different-Sized Cogs In The Same Machine

Craig McAllister

Almost a couple of years ago I met with a publisher with a view to getting the best of Plain Or Pan onto the printed page, which is, as you well know, the only print that really matters. You don’t need to ask a musician if they prefer mp3 to vinyl. It’s no different for folk who spend time agonising over words and rhythm and metre. There’s vindication in seeing your words in physical print. It means someone else has thought them worthy of sharing with others. Anyone can pick them up, flick through them, go back and forth, even highlight parts if they happen to be some sort of book masochist, but until they’re printed, the digital word lacks gravitas and acceptance. Any idiot with a keyboard and access to the internet can do this – the idiot writing this, for example – so, for me, the printed word is king.

Our meeting went well, I thought, and at the end it was agreed that I’d select the best of Plain Or Pan’s hundreds of articles and compile them into a book with a cohesively-running theme. I’d do some fact checking, tweak a few words here and there, have it proofread and have it all ready for publication. I set to work immediately.

I trawled the blog from the early days to the most recent, discounting articles on account of being too short, too similar, not good enough, just plain embarrassing – as a writer it’s really not hard to find fault in your choice of words. But a good many of the articles still held up. I’d tell you I was surprised at this, if only not to sound like a raving egomaniac, but I knew I had a way with words and phrases, so when long-forgotten articles were re-read in the cold light of a decade and more later, it was thrilling to find many of them were genuinely still exciting. “I’d forgotten about that!” “What a turn of phrase!” “An unexpectedly perfect metaphor!” Shucks, reader, I positively glowed with pride!

I knew I had a decent book in the making. It’d be split into three distinct sections; Life, Death and Music and could be read from page 1 to the end or dipped in and out of as the reader saw fit.

I secured permission from Roddy Doyle and Happy Mondays to use their words/lyrics in a couple of articles. Wayne Coyne from yr actual Flaming Lips, when asked if I could use Do You Realize? as the central theme to an article, took one read of it and said, “Go right ahead, brother!” It was game on. All the best articles would be in there.

After much detective work, I secured permission from a German exchange student to use an image they’d shot in my hometown of Irvine some 40 years previously for the book’s cover. I had everything I needed; it really was game on.

Once compiled, I used slightly hooky ‘found’ software to transfer the whole thing to my Kindle and I read chunks of it every night, making notes where changes had to be made. There weren’t many changes, in all honesty; everything that I’d selected flowed with a rhythm and pace that would make the whole book a page-turner and unputdownable object of desire.

The final job was the proofreading, a thankless task, and something my sister gamefully tackled with eagle-eyed enthusiasm. After tidying up a few stray words, lost commas and the occasional typo, it was ‘bound’ together in Word; the German exchange student’s eye-catching and very apt cover, an actual (and beautiful) foreword from a well-known writer pal of mine, a contents page and the three big sections. Watch out world, ‘POP Record‘ is coming.

It was sent to the publisher.

‘Yeah…I’m having second thoughts here…sales potential…publishing is struggling at the moment…I’ve other books ahead of yours in the queue…‘

It was one muttered and mumbled excuse after another.

It was not to be.

The whole thing currently rests in a folder on my computer. It just needs a publisher who’ll take a chance on it. Believe me, I’ve tried. And tried. And tried. It’s good to go, man. Just press print and it’ll be ready. You think it’d be easy, huh? I mean, I could go the whole self-publishing route, but that strikes me as kinda phoney. I’ve not totally dismissed the idea, but, a bit like musicians, anyone can release a home-grown CD…it’s another thing entirely to have someone release it for you. There’s that vindication word again.

I was telling this to author Andrew O’Hagan last night. He was in Glasgow promoting ‘On Friendship’, a collection of his essays on, eh, friendship and he’d asked me afterwards if I was working on any writing at the moment. *Two things, I said, and opened with the Plain Or Pan story above.

“Fuck ’em,” came Andrew’s succinct reply. “It deserves to be out there and you deserve a publisher that’ll treat it accordingly. I wonder if I can help?”

It turns out though that he needs some help of his own.

Andrew O’Hagan, the writer who at the age of 24 received a letter from Norman Mailer praising his writing style, the writer who spent time with William Burroughs, who travelled Ireland and Scotland with Seamus Heaney, who sat on the steps of the building opposite Fred and Rose West’s house and documented the whole grisly tale, who was editor-in-chief at the London Review of Books, who worked closely with Julian Assange and the WikiLeaks team to expose a corrupt world, the ambassador for UNICEF who wrote the modern classic Mayflies and watched on as it made the leap from page to screen must also, it appears, kick against the pricks.

Currently, he’s locked in discussion with Netflix over the $50 million production of his most-recent novel Caledonian Road. Should it be three seasons or five? Should he be involved in adapting his novel for the screen, or is that the job of Netflix’s screenwriting team?  Not for Andrew the goal of having his wee blog posts published on recycled paper for posterity, but – here’s the thing! – writers at every level still face opposition, friction and rejection.

You can be a blogger firing out pop-culture missives to a few thousand folk a week or a best-selling and highly respected author, but we’re both just well-oiled yet different-sized cogs in the same gritty machine. And I can draw some sort of comfort from that.

Here’s Fairport Convention‘s suitably melancholic and sepia-tinted Book Song. Waltz time and folky, it’s a song about what might have beens and features a terrific electric guitar part (Richard Thompson, I’m assuming) and a lovely duetting male/female vocal (Iain Matthews/Sandy Denny). It’s from What We Did On Our Holidays which is very much an album you should strive to hear if you never have.

Fairport Convention – Book Song

*The other thing I’m working on?

“I’d LOVE to read that!” enthused O’Hagan. Vindication, again. So while ‘POP Record‘ languishes in the ‘what mighta been’ pile, my attentions will turn to something entirely different.

Drop in again in a year or so when I’ll be back to bemoan the difficulties I face in securing that particular sure-fire Sunday Times best seller.

Get This!

Into The Fall

Craig McAllister

What is it with bands who need to look across the Atlantic for belonging and acceptance? That clattering Velvety/Stoogey feedback ‘n twang racket that the Jesus And Mary Chain committed to tape in 1988 wasn’t called Sidewalking for nuthin’.  The out of step and forever out of tune Californian slacker rock collective formed by Stephen Malkmus a year later wasn’t called Pavement for nuthin’ either. A Scottish band in thrall to the United States…an American band who held their Anglophile obsession sky high for all to see (especially with regards to The Fall – themselves a northern English group named after the American term for Autumn (maybe if Mark had named them The Autumn purely for the American market, The Fall would’ve been huge…). The other side of the world always seems more glamorous, I guess.

Loads of great songs and lines have been written about this time of year. There’s something about summer’s long and warm days shrinking in the rear-view mirror while the slow-creeping twilight and morning frost arrives head-on that prompts a melancholic pastoral and reflective creativity in our favourite songwriters. Ray Davies’ Autumn Almanac may well be the pinnacle of this, but discount Steve Marriott’s Autumn Stone and the Trashcan Sinatras’ widescreen and windswept Autumn at your peril. Add in Bill Evan’s highly evocative Autumn Leaves and Nick Drake’s Pink Moon and you have yourself a playlist to listen to as you stack your newly-chopped logs beside the woodburning stove that is soon to be the bane of your neighbours’ lives.

History may yet prove that Man Made, Teenage Fanclub’s 9th album, ushered in the group’s autumnal years. One of the last to feature the holy triumvirate of Blake, McGinley and Love on writing duties, it’s an album that comes dusted in reflective lyrics (Cells, Flowing), uplifting melancholy (Time Stops) and at least one blazing Love-authored and Love (the band)-inspired stomper (Born Under A Good Sign). It also features this slow-cooking, Gerry-created Fanclub classic:

Teenage Fanclub – Fallen Leaves

Although written in the biting cold of a Chicago winter (Chicago L Train-inspired artwork above), Fallen Leaves’ imagery of ‘empty train carriages, sinking suns, sparks and flames, useless dust‘ makes it a perfect addition to that canon of autumnal songs that sound perfect when the trees begin to shed their clothes and settle in for the winter. Play it repeatedly through a pair of headphones as you crunch and kick the leaves across Kelvingrove Park in this week’s October break and it’ll make more sense than it ever did before.

It’s a wistful, Love-only vocal. Gerry sighs and longs in the verses, and although he double tracks himself for a bit here and there, there’s none of that throw open the windows wide aural sunshine you’d get if the others joined in on the chorus harmonies. Stubbornly autumnal from title down, the song is something of a Fanclub outlier, and possibly better for it.

Gerry has a brilliant way with an arrangement – the fizzing guitars that repeat the song’s hooky refrain, the echoing and churchy ’60s-flavoured keyboard, the whammy bar action on the high chords, the froth of vintage synth that accompanies it all…it’s a really well put together pop song; simple and hooky and interesting…and something that the Love-free TFC has struggled to do since. But we’ll leave that there.