Author: Craig McAllister

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Get This!, Gone but not forgotten

Homo Superior In My Interior

Craig McAllister

It’s 1981. Buzzcocks come together to begin working on their fourth album, Martin Rushent in the producer’s chair. The band is broke, both financially and creatively. Pete Shelley, stuck in a deep rut of writer’s block, brings a handful of half-finished songs left over from his pre-Buzzcocks days. The others bring nothing much at all.  With the sessions quickly collapsing, Rushent suggests to the group that Buzzcocks take a break. The producer and singer though, they alight in Rushent’s state-of-the-art studio to work on some of Pete’s tracks.

Pete Shelley’s resultant *debut album Homosapien might’ve spun with the same spiky frothiness as the act he’s most associated with, but it was glossed in a sheen of Rushent-powered machinery; synths, drum machines and programmed sequencers that were very much in keeping with the musical landscape of 1981. The cover tells the story – a careful placement of arcane artefacts and cutting edge technology that dates it somewhere in a near future where Kraftwerk might meet Blake’s Seven around the boardroom table for a healthy discussion on the merits of analogue vs digital. The result, if we’re being honest, was a bit of a mixed bag. The eponymous lead single though? That’s a stone cold cracker.

Homosapien judders and jars its way in on the same motorised rhythm as Buzzcocks’ Something’s Gone Wrong Again, all mid-paced bounce, effect-heavy 12 string acoustic guitars, their swirling chords slashed and stabbed. It makes for a great sound. It even finds space to add an undercurrent of I Wanna Be Your Dog-giness in the verses…verses that borrow heavily from the sequenced bassline that throbs its way through Abba’s Does Your Mother Know? Play them back to back yourself and tell me I’m wrong. I bet Rushent knew exactly what he was doing here. Why wouldn’t a producer keen for a hit want to borrow a hint of DNA from pop music’s greatest contemporary hit makers?!

For all the producer’s sprinkling of magic though, it’s the singer who’s the real star of the show here. Shelley’s delivery is, as ever, terrifically sneery and archly camp, double tracked at the end of lines and even more so all over the chorus, adlibbing up and up the scales as the record fades out. It’s once you focus on the words being sung that the gravity of the record becomes crystal clear.

‘Shy boy, coy boy, cruisers, losers’.

‘Homo superior in my interior‘

‘I don’t wanna classify you like an animal in the zoo‘.

‘I just hope and pray that the day of our love is at hand‘.

‘You and I, me and you, will be one from two, understand?‘

Adding such a transparent lyric was for sure a real, eh, ballsy move by Shelley, but once it had found the ear of a jobsworth radio researcher, the record was promptly banned by the BBC. The organisation who beamed Larry Grayson into millions of living rooms every Saturday night was aghast at the record’s ‘overt references to homosexuality‘.

Exhibit A, m’lud: ‘Homo superior in my interior‘.

What a zinger of a line but.

With the era of diversity and acceptance still just a formative if growing movement on the horizon, Homosapien is perhaps the first pop song to use non-coded lyrics to get its message across. It’s brave stuff to be writing, singing, recording and releasing in 1981.

No Homosapien, no Smalltown Boy perhaps. No Smalltown Boy, no open discussions around the living room telly during Top of the Pops as its video plays for the umpteenth time. In its own small way, Homosapien is a groundbreaking record. It’s almost a bonus that it sounds utterly fantastic, and more so 40+ years later.

 

 

*We’re not counting Pete’s pre-Buzzcocks 1974’s experimental, instrumental album Sky Yen, are we? Are we?

Get This!, Gone but not forgotten

This Ain’t Livin’

Craig McAllister

I was punishing myself on the cross-trainer of death the other morning, slick rivers of sweat pooling in my hair and under my double chin, a dark, damp South America-shaped land mass of perspiration creeping slowly down my t-shirt, the ear buds on my ancient iPod slippy with wetness and falling continually out of my ears, when this came on.

Marvin Gaye – Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)

Its perfectness stopped me dead in my tracks.

Resting, I listened through gulped breaths of fresh air as it spun its golden sound from those stupid wee plastic things in my earholes, into my brain and down into my hands and vocal chords, where wee finger snaps were joined by spontaneous, harmonised ‘daddle-ah-dah-dahs’ from my own fair voice. It’s just as well for all concerned that I was the sole occupant of the gym at the time.

As far as socially-conscious music goes – and such fury stretches the decades from Billie Holiday to Kneecap – nothing comes close to Marvin Gaye‘s flawless 1971 masterpiece What’s Going On. Perhaps its greatest moment is the album closer Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler).

Since that rare moment in the gym (and you can take that in more than one way), I’ve listened to the track on repeat – properly, as Marvin intended, continually dropping the needle on a record spinning on a loudly-amped turntable – swimming in its headspin of lyricism and musicality, soaking in its every nuance and never once tiring of it.

It begins with the original clanging chimes of doom, four reverberating E flat minor 7th piano chords, stately and symphonic and setting you up for what follows. Nigel from Spinal Tap once claimed that there’s no sadder key than E minor. Nige, mate, try E flat minor. Then pair it with Marvin’s finger pointing lyric of despair; beat poetry set to fantastic music, its message addressing the frivolousness of the space race, the pointlessness of young men dying in war, race riots, increasing taxes and decreasing standards of living. Half a decade earlier, its author was too busy thinking ’bout his baby. Suddenly, he’d grown a beard and grown up.

Rockets?!? Moon shots?!? he asks incredulously.

Spend it on the have-nots!

And we’re off, congas and ting-a-ling percussion adding light to the shade of those piano chords.

Money. We make it.

Before we see it, you take it.

Oh, make me wanna holler, the way they do my life. 

This ain’t livin’.

Question: D’you zoom in on the lyric first, or is your attention grabbed by the lush orchestration of funk that oozes from every note?

Answer: You take in both, simultaneously, (it’s called multi-tasking and even men can do this) but this requires repeated plays to allow the whole stew to sink properly in.

Inflation. No chance

to increase finance.

Bills pile up, sky high

Send that boy off to die

Oh, make me wanna holler, the way they do my life. 

It’s the bassline that does it for me. A looping, call and response five note exercise in restrained and understated funk, it’s the bedrock upon which the whole thing swings. By this point in the track, muted brass is punctuating Marvin’s key words, a shimmer of strings has subtly turned up the ante and a sashay of bah-bah-bah-backing vocals is smoothing the edge from the words that continue to rain down. Imagine being in the room when this was being created. Imagine!

Hang ups. Let downs.

Bad breaks. Set backs.

Natural fact is

I can’t pay my taxes

Oh, make me wanna holler, throw up both my hands. 

The way Marvin harmonises with himself, one voice rich and low, the other pure and high, his wee adlibbed yows delivering the requisite soul…it’s all tremendous stuff. (As if you need me to tell you that.)

Violence increasin’

Trigger-happy policin’

Panic is spreadin’

God knows where we’re headin’.

A key change. That’s where we’re headin’.

Perfectly-placed within the track, it’s heady stuff and it elevates the listener further still. Flutes waft their way in like Gil Scott-Heron’s groovy cousin and the track takes a turn into new, yet familiar territory, as it refrains the mother mother lines from the album’s title track, a jazz trumpet winding in the melody as it all fades out, the perfect bookend on the perfect album.

What’s Going On? Is it a question to the listener or is it a statement to the world, a marker of the times? In Marvin’s case, it was a definite statement piece, an artistic declaration that’s become a key document of the times in which it was made.

For a pop label like Motown to allow – or rather cede – to its artist’s wishes of producing a whole concept of socio-political funk when it would rather have been churning out two and a half minute pop/love songs, is amazing. That they let Marvin do this paved the way for Stevie Wonder to take auteurship of his catalogue from then on in…and we all know how fantastic that particular run of albums would be.

 

 

 

 

Cover Versions, demo, Get This!

Page-Turners

Craig McAllister

I’m re-reading Haruki Murakimi’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle just now. Along with Stephen King’s The Stand, it’s become something of a summer holiday tradition; long novels that require patience and time are best left for the days when you can neglect all other duties and fall freely into the pages. The weekend just gone was, as you know, pooled in fantastic sunshine and properly Mediterranean temperatures – perfect reading weather, as it goes. For reasons we’ll come to, no reading was done on Saturday, but I awoke early on Sunday – with more than a shade of a hangover – and plonked myself at a decent spot in the garden and, neglecting all household and husbandry duties, continued with where I’d left off in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. If you don’t know the story, it’s set in early ’90s Japan and follows the existential ups and downs of a lawyer’s assistant, Toru Okada. There are lost cats, missing wives, mysterious women, strange dreams and uber-violent flashbacks to the Japanese army in WWII. Told in 3 parts, I’m currently about a third of the way through, in the middle of Part 2, and although I know how the story goes, I’m enjoying re-reading Murakimi’s poetic and slow-paced way with words. Less than five minutes reading and you’ll find yourself sucked straight into the storyline – and that’s the secret to a good book.

At some point, my eyelids grew heavy and I put the Kindle to the side to ‘rest my eyes’, as my dad said before me. The toils of the previous day had caught up with me and I was soon in a deep and unflattering sleep, slouched awkwardly on the garden furniture by the back wall in full view of any neighbours who might have been looking. I’ve no idea how long I was out for (ten minutes? Half an hour? An hour or more, even?) but the only reason I woke up was because a fat dollop of rain had slapped me square on the forehead. Initially I thought it might’ve been a bird (gads), then maybe a drip from the leaf of a plant above my head, but no…it really had started raining. It was still warm, but in the time I’d fallen asleep, the sky had turned from spotless Azurian blue to dappled slate grey. Against the backdrop of the dulling sky, five midges hovered crazily at a forty-five degree angle from my resting head. I watched as they bashed wildly into one another, scattered rapidly then regrouped again, like a tiny (but no less deadly) squadron of Apocalypse Now helicopters. Just as I’m thinking that they’re sizing up both me and my alcohol sweats, from outta nowhere, a wasp streaked towards the midges. Zzzzeee-owww! Like a zip opening up the sky it flew rapidly to the centre of the five insects. Immediately they scattered, and when they regrouped there were just four of them, back in formation, hovering crazily and back to bashing into one another. Then! Zzzzeee-owww! The wasp again! Scatter…regroup…three midges left. It’s the circle of life, playing out right above my head. As I get up to begin packing away the cushions and things I don’t want getting wet, the three remaining midges scatter somewhere into a tree, a Mexican stand-off between wasp, human and midges temporarily averted.  I start to wonder – does this sort of stuff play out above our heads regularly? An insect Star Wars saga that can only be seen if you stop, look up and pay attention? Maybe it does. Maybe I have too much time to think. Or maybe I was still half-cut from the Saturday night.

Ah yes, the Saturday night.

Writer, bon vivant and quick-witted antagonist John Niven was back in his home town of Irvine. Booked as part of the town’s Tidelines Book Festival, it was to be the opening night of a book tour to promote his new novel, The Fathers and he’d asked me if I’d chair the event. “You’ll be great,” he said. “It’ll just be us, talking about my book and shit. S’easy.” A proof copy of the novel duly arrived and armed with a highlighter pen and a stack of post-it notes, I jumped right in.

The Fathers tells the story of two dads who meet outside the maternity hospital as their respective partners give birth to two sons. One dad (Dan) is affluent, socially-conscious and successful (if bored) in his job. The other (Jada) is a ned, a bam, a ne’er-do-well with one eye permanently scanning for opportunity, the other forever looking over his shoulder for trouble. The two protagonists’ paths cross, the story takes a (very) dark turn (we’re reading a John Niven novel, after all) and things begin unravelling from every direction for all concerned. It’s a real page turner, as it turns out. It’d be ideal material for a three or four part TV series, something that is already being discussed, John tells us.

Very quickly I was highlighting and bookmarking words and phrases, whole paragraphs, entire pages of perfectly-scribed text. It struck me immediately how brilliantly evocative the writing in it is.

The air so fresh and cold that all you could do was sip at it.

A mouthful of ruined dentistry, of mixed nuts and raisins wreathed in blue smoke. 

If you’re a parent you’ll recognise the terror Dan feels when first putting baby and car seat into the car for the drive home from the hospital, a moment in time perfectly captured in measured prose. Or the moment when Jada bonds with his son, ‘his wee rabbit heart‘ beating fast against his chest. When writing from the perspective of Jada, Niven’s writing is laced with acerbic Scottishness.

‘Hey, some cun-‘ he remembered the baby, ‘some bastard’s goat tae pay fur aw this!’

‘Still, wi’ a wee boy, you’ve only the wan cock tae worry aboot, eh?’

If you’re from these parts, you’ll absolutely recognise the people who deliver those zingers.

Given John’s background in the music business, you’ll maybe spot one or two hidden references to groups or songs. A Teenage Fanclub lyric leapt off the pages at me. Likewise a Grant McLennan line. There’s even a nod to Status Quo at one point. The proper, loud ‘n heavy ’70s Quo, of course. You wouldn’t clog up a brilliant piece of writing with a reference to Francis ‘n Rick’s parody years, would you?

And it’s all written from experience. Dan lives in an area of Glasgow familiar to both author and reader. He uses his Notes app on his phone whenever Jada says a line that Dan might be able to crowbar into the script of the TV show he works on. As John says on Saturday night, a writer is always writin’…the reason too why this piece you’re reading has seen the light of day. How can I write about that? I was thinking afterwards. And here it is.

John Niven is a very funny guy to have at an event. He can hold court unbroken for an hour, easily. I had planned to structure our chat around some of the points above, but, of course, when John Niven is in the room, there are no plans. My notes were left untouched as Niven rightly remained the centre of attention, reading aloud sections of rib-tickling prose from the book, the audience groaning and gasping at the appropriate parts. My mum – the same mum who’d complained about every second word in Bob Mortimer’s novel being the ‘f’ word (her copy is now in Irvine’s Cancer Resarch charity shop) – queued happily for a signed copy of The Fathers at the end. Quite what she’ll make of ‘gobble’ and ‘dung funnel’ is your guess as good as mine.

The Fathers is a terrific, contemporary – and very Scottish – novel. Like The Stand it too is long enough to fill out a week or more in the sun. And like The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, it too is set in three parts. I reckon I’ll be returning to The Fathers on an annual basis. I hope that hoped-for TV adaptation does it justice.

The Fathers is published this Thursday (17th July) by Canongate. You must read it.

Token Music:

Echo & the Bunnymen – Read It In Books

The Teardrop Explodes – Read It In Books

Two versions of the same song, co-written by Ian McCulloch and Julian Cope then recorded by their respective groups after the pair of them stopped working together. It’s like a post-punk Drifters. Which one’s the real deal?! They’re both great; the Bunnymen’s version is circular, nagging and insistent, an updated Dancing Barefoot for the switched-on, the Teardrops’ take swirly and Nuggetsy and garagey, an updated Iggy/Stooges for mushroom connoisseurs. Essential, obviously…just like The Fathers.

Check John Niven’s socials for details of his book tour, coming to a town near you right now!

 

Hard-to-find

Hopelessly Devoted

Craig McAllister

I was chatting to big Greg a couple of months ago about the lasting legacy of Paul Weller, the pair of us soft shoe shuffling to Shout To The Top as it blasted at ear-pleasing volume in Glasgow’s Buff Club. One of these shores’ greatest-ever songwriters, the shouted (to the top), garbled consensus we arrived at seemed to confirm that PW has undeniably earned his place at the top table with that other Paul (McCartney)…and possibly, contentiously, seated at a table set just for two. Drink had been taken in the lead-up to this conversation, but I ask you – who else has had the craft, the clout and, indeed, the cojones to form not one, but two celebrated – idolised – groups whilst ploughing a distinct and unique solo career with added sideways steps? Take a minute to ponder and add your silly suggestions in the comments below. You’ll be wrong though*.

Musical Magpie

The great thing about Paul Weller’s back catalogue is that, unless you’re a buy-everything-on-day-of-release fiend for his stuff (and that may well be you – I was up until a point), you’ll occasionally come across a previously unheard track the likes of which drives home that notion, that theory, of PW’s mega-greatness. Last summer I came into a small fortune and so naturally bought some new (ie not second hand) records, including Will Of The People, his 3-album companion set to Fly On The Wall (his triple-plattered gathering of assorted b-sides from the first few albums) and steeped myself in its heady pot pourri of odds and sods; Pet Shop Boys remixes, reworkings of album tracks, way-out excursions in African-inflected dub-laden psychedelia…it’s all there and available to slowly digest as an album (rather than a collection of b-sides) in its own right. It’s a right great listen.

It was the pastoral and sprightly Devotion that, for a long time, was my go-to Weller tune.

Paul Weller – Devotion

A planned co-write with Richard Hawley that never happened, Devotion seems to arrive and land in the time it takes its writer to put hand to chord, pen to paper. It skips its way across the verses sounding like the very thing McCartney might’ve written when he was recording Ram, just Weller and an acoustic guitar strummed brightly and with purpose…but augmented in the studio with oohing and aahing backing vocalists, unexpected whistling and synthesised strings that soar in direct correlation to the heart as you listen.

There’s some lovely, rootsy Ronnie Lane bass and enough going on in the background to suggest that, throwaway the track may be, its writer spent a bit of time arranging it into a perfect stand alone song. See those folk that only know Weller from You Do Something To Me and (uh) ‘Pebbles On A Beach‘… they’d love this song, so they would.

Songs are open to all sorts of interpretation, but Devotion could almost be a Weller pep-talk to himself where he outlines the reasons he’s still driven to produce great and interesting music.

Devotion is the key to the lock that holds your dreams…

Devotion gets you up on those mornings in the dark…

There you go, with your headful of ideas

It shows there’s a purpose in your feet 

And you know, that you better get it right

It shows there’s a purpose, day and night

It’s no Shout To The Top. It’s no Town Called Malice. It’s nowhere close to Hung Up‘s power and glory, but Devotion is another in a very long line of great Weller songs. If it’s a new one to you, I hope you get from it the same thrill and need to repeat that first enveloped these ears when they first heard it. I’ve listened to it a dozen times since beginning to write this piece. It never tires.

*Yeah, yeah. Bowie. I hear ya.

Gone but not forgotten

Jam Session

Craig McAllister

I’ve a songwriter friend who once found themselves at a songwriters’ retreat somewhere in Ireland. Above the room where the musicians shared their songs and swapped ideas, someone who was connected to Sinead O’Connor listened intently to the tunes as they filtered up and through the floorboards.

The next morning, this person sought out my pal. “Can you play that song for me?” he asked. “I think Sinead would really like it and I can help you get it to her.”

A few days later they were in Sinead’s house.

“She’s sleeping just now, but when she comes down, you can’t mention the song. It must be her idea to record it. If she thinks I or you had the idea, it’ll never happen. She knows who you are, so if you’re patient the talk will get around to song writing anyway.”

By all accounts Sinead was normal and homely and chatty, a partner and a mum who just happened to be dynamite at the job she was best-known for. She and my pal went bramble picking in the hedgerows around her house. When they returned, the songwriter watched as Sinead emptied their spoils from two Mace plastic bags, boiled the gathered fruits and made them into jam. There was, and never would be, any talk about Sinead recording a version of my pal’s (brilliant, as it happens) song. C’est la vie etc etc.

I’ve long-loved Sinead’s vocal contribution to Jah Wobble‘s Visions Of You.

Jah Wobble’s Invaders of the Heart – Visions Of You

It’s Wobble’s bass of course that captures the ear first. A tune within a tune, it’s an elasticated and twangy groovy rumble that plays high up the frets. Indeed, it sounds like it might’ve wafted itself straight offa the grooves of the Dub Symphony version of Higher Than The Sun on Screamadelica – y’know, the album that, with more than a little help from their friends, took Primal Scream from an Asda-priced Guns ‘n Roses tribute act to the lysergically-kissed Mercury-winning last gang in town. Need a dubby, ever-playing and never-ending bassline to expand the senses? Want it to unravel for at least eight mind-melting minutes? Would you like it lightly toasted and mantra-inducing, sir? Forged by punk and steeped in roots reggae, Jah Wobble’s yr man.

Sinead O’Connor’s vocals are ace. Crystalline, calming and as clear as her emerald green eyes, they’re wafty and ethereal, her adlibbing ‘ah-uhs’ throughout it taking the track further east and further out there.

Jah Wobble’s Invaders of the Heart – Visions Of You (The Secret Love Child Of Hank And Johnny mix)

Eastern sounding minor chords. Highly strung one chord strums. Snaking melodies. Tablas and twang. Sitars and psychedelics. Dub-inflected desert blues. Sinead adlibbing somewhere in the background as the melody unspools. A cat dancing willy nilly across the keys of a hot to trot hammond organ and then, with a military shuffle of the snare, the drop.

And the bass.

The lovely bass.

Noodling and hypnotic and utterly magic.

Oh yeah.

On the single cut, Wobble’s vocals are cowboy-like (hence that appropriately-named Weatherall remix above), a pub singer whose real talent lies between his fingers and those four thick strings, a voice out of place yet perfect for the track’s multi-cultural ethos and vibe. On the stretched out Weatherall reworking, Wobble’s vocals are almost non existent, replaced instead by all manner of instrumentation, random movie samples, ricocheting drum breaks and fancy augmentation. It’s a beauty, obviously.

I want visions of you…L-S-D.

Has there ever been a better misheard lyric?! I thought for years that Sinead O’Connor was singing about acid, about expanding the mind, opening up the possibilities of the cosmos and all that jazz. It’s a lyric that’s arguably more fitting and better than the one Sinead employed (she sings ‘end-less-ly‘). My misheard line would’ve slotted nicely into the track’s trippy, dubby ambience and stratospheric cosmicness.

A jam of a whole different kind, Visions Of You still has the power to thrill and surprise in equal measure.

 

Gone but not forgotten

Lines That Rhyme

Craig McAllister

I once found myself in deep conversation

With a songwriter who’s known not so much through the nation

But whose songs will be known to everyone here

And the more interesting parts of the world’s blogosphere

Sitting just chatting and shooting the breeze

Their setlist half-written, their guitar at my knees

“Tell me a story…drop me a name..

…give me an insight ‘to your wee world of fame

Spare me no details…spare me them none,

but what’s the most rock ‘n roll thing that you’ve done?“

 

They thought for an instant then immediately said,

“I can tell you this story because the subject is dead.

I was somewhere on tour, in a van, not a plane

And I found myself sitting beside Kurt Cobain

One thing led to another, there’s no-one to blame

But I found myself doing cocaine with Cobain

Yes, I found myself doing cocaine with Cobain.”


Nirvana – Dumb

I’ve always loved ‘Dumb‘ from In Utero. The full album is, for many, Nirvana’s masterpiece; raw, ragged, expertly captured on tape by the royalty-waiving Steve Albini. The band is on top form. Slabs of floor-shaking, earth-quaking bass guitar, anvil-heavy drumming that sounds live and in the room, shards of abrasive, metallic, blowtorch guitar surfing violently across the rhythm section, the band’s loud/quiet/loud template caustically Brillo Padded out of all recognition by Albini’s crucial touch.

Thirty years ago it * sounded quite brilliant. Now, I need to be in a particular mood to indulge myself in it…and I ain’t been in a stinking mood like that since about 1994. It’s too screamy, too raw for me nowadays. If I want screamy I’ll take Surfer Rosa‘s more visceral moments. Raw? Gimme Flip Your Wig, thanks very much. (* you can apply this take to the Manics’ Holy Bible album also).

But Dumb is still box-fresh magic, the polite wee brother of Nevermind‘s Lithium. Where Lithium roars, Dumb whispers. Where Lithium soars (and by God, it soars), Dumb remains grounded. Discipline is required for this. Any gang of itchy-fingered musicians will, given half a chance, thrash and roar their way to the finish line. Nirvana could do that in spades. On Dumb though, they applied a different approach.

Clean strummed electric guitar that’s a happy pill away from breaking into Shocking Blue’s Venus, a resigned and slowly sighing cello, Krist’s choppy and thunking bassline and Dave’s steady head-nodding beat carrying it forward. Great cymbals. No fuzz. No Big Muff. No pedals at all. The dynamics are all in the playing and arrangement and it kills. Kurt’s vocals crack in parts, but considering the issues he was going through at the time, he’s in remarkably fine voice. His vocal is fantastic, in fact; controlled, measured, tuneful. Really sensational. There’s a great double-tracked vocal (1 min 09s) where he harmonises with both himself and the cello in that eerie and strange way he does, creating a ghostly third note and elevating the track instantly to one of Nirvana’s best.

The lyric? You can interpret that how you like. Some folk will (naturally) say it’s about Cobain’s addictions. Me? I think it’s saying that if you could really see how messed up the world is, you’d never be happy. Only dumb people are happy because they don’t have the capacity for deep thought. It’s a lyric that, if interpreted this way, rings true to this day and quite possibly forever more.

I bet you’d forgotten how great Dumb was. And still is. The real deal.

 

 

Get This!, New! Now!

Warp Records

Craig McAllister

I love this. It’s been playing on the more discerning radio shows in recent days and has me hankering for the day when I can buy it – something that doesn’t tend to happen as much as I’d like.

It’s called Pharaoh, by Modern Nature.

Steady paced and understated, it’s a lovely unfolding slice of pastoral indie guitar music, the same sort of thing that Teenage Fanclub have politely gone about writing and recording in their Gerry-free autumnal years… only (sorry, Norman) better. Much better.

The vocals might lack TFC’s honeyed harmonic suss, but they’re equally as warm. Close-miked and musing philosophically, snippets of phrases leap out. ‘hedgerow…granite…leaves….mountains…coastal miles…heavy choices…‘ Andrew Weatherall, having played early Modern Nature material on his NTS radio show, was seemingly a big influence on the writing of the track, his ‘fail we may, sail we must’ mantra pushing group leader Jack Cooper to dizzy new heights. Cooper has said that the track is about the people who inspire us to think differently.

It’s the heady combination of voices and guitars that had me from the off.

The two guitar players on Pharaoh mesh and meld, knit and weave, never tying themselves in knots, always creating space for the other player to play in and around. With the combination of woody, humbuckered semi-acoustic and single-coiled Telecaster, there’s a hint of Television in the way the players freeform and switch between fret climbing and chord deconstructing. That’ll be the jazz influence, perhaps.

Pharaoh is, you gotta think, a reference to the spiritual, rule-breakin’/rule-makin’, free-jazz saxophonist Pharaoh Sanders. Inspirational people, remember. But where TV’s Lloyd and Verlaine – also undoubtedly inspirational – slash and tear at their machines like there’s no tomorrow, Modern Nature’s guitars bubble away like a mountain stream on a spring day. A choppy major chord here, an arpeggiated minor there, an insistent and unfaltering signature riff between them, everything clear and ringing like steel drums in the summer sunshine. If you’re like me, it’ll take just one play before the track wends and winds its way quietly into your subconscious.

Modern Nature is a new name to me. It’s always great to find a group that you can work backwards on before going forward with each subsequent record.

Pharaoh is from Modern Nature‘s new album The Heat Warps, released by Bella Union at the end of August. I’ll be ordering it via the band’s Bandcamp page here.  Some of you here will, I predict, do likewise.

Get This!, Gone but not forgotten

God Vibrations

Craig McAllister

There are by now tons of pages and hundreds of thousands of words out there in tribute to the just-passed Brian Wilson, leader of the Beach Boys and conduit of some of the greatest creative pop music we will ever be blessed with. Many of those words, having been written by people who are far more qualified than me, will carry gravitas and authenticity, grandiloquence and authority. I’m on hat-tipping terms with a couple of lucky folk who interviewed him at various points in time, both of whom have proper Wilson-related stories that they’ve shared in recent days. Me, I’m just a fan with a typewriter.

Wilson’s compositions have affected me since first hearing them; safe and politely rockin’ hot rod and surfing anthems, love songs to unattainable caramel-skinned girls on sandy beaches, the actual sound of a summer that’s strangely alien to any Ayrshireman, set out in giddy four-part harmony to a rock ‘n roll back beat. The Beach Boys could make California seem like the promised land, and in that formative era when the most exciting TV was American (Starsky & Hutch, the Six Million Dollar Man, Dallas even), it all fed into the idea of an ideal world.

At some point I alighted on Pet Sounds, the album which was painstakingly made by Wilson in the midst of a full-on marijuana and LSD awakening. Like many of you here, I went properly nuts for it. The box set, the original mono vinyl, multiple tickets for the various Pet Sounds tours in the early ’00s. There’s not a bad track on it and every play throws up – cliche alert – new things still. It’s the record that proves – to use another well-worn cliche – Brian Wilson’s genius.

Genius. It’s thrown around a lot these days. And here’s me doing it too. What does the word even mean? If you look at the dictionary, it defines it as ‘exceptional intellectual or creative power or other natural ability.’

So, yeah, with his natural grasp of melodic structure and chord progressions and multi-layered harmonies and interesting musicality and fantastic arranging abilities and creative production techniques and ability to carve a heart-stopping melody from outta nowhere, Brian Wilson is an undisputed genius. Was an undisputed genius. Man, he’s in the past tense now.

Pet Sounds is the critics’ choice, the easy pick in many ways, but to these ears it’s where the Beach Boys (or Brian Wilson really, as by now he was the undisputed architect of the group’s sound) broke free of traditional pop music structures (verse/chorus/verse) and conventions (electric guitars, four to the floor drums, sax breaks) and ushered in a brave new sound that was created as much to get one up on The Beatles as it was to challenge himself and his audience.

There’s a run of Beach Boys albums at the end of the ’60s into the ’70s that’s the equal of any of those ‘classic’ album runs you read about in the usual places. Wild Honey – Friends – 20/20 – Sunflower – Surf’s Up – Carl and the Passions – Holland (plus the long-delayed Smile project at the start of it all). There’s not a bad album amongst them. Sure, there are occasional clunkers within the tracklistings (Surf’s Up‘s absolutely honking Student Demonstration Time for one, Wild Honey‘s How She Boogalooed It, the sore thumb in an album that’s otherwise soulful and considered being another – both bog standard 12 bar blues tracks, as it goes), but there’s not a record collection on the planet that wouldn’t be enhanced by the addition of any one of these records.

Off the top of my head:

Surf’s Up‘s Feel Flows, Disney Girls and Til I Die. Oh, and Long Promised Road‘s mid-section. And the title track. It’s a work of art, that album.

Sunflower‘s All I Wanna Do and Forever.

Friends’ Little Bird

20/20’s Never Learn Not To Love

Holland’s Sail On Sailor and Funky Pretty

Wild Honey’s Darlin’ and Let The Wind Blow

Carl and the Passions’ Marcella and You Need A Mess Of Help To Stand Alone

The entirety of Smile (Heroes & Villains…Cabinessence…Vege-Tables…Child Is The Father Of The Man…Good Vibrations)

You get the drift.

Not everything was written by Brian. As the band fell into more comfortable clothes, grew out their hair and turned beardy and weirdy, all members stepped up a gear to keep pace with their leader’s unblinkered vision. But everything came stamped with Wilson’s kite mark of quality – the arrangements, the incidental music, the high floatin’, gravity-defyin’ harmonies; a singular vision achieved with the help of willing participants, even if his group members didn’t always immediately ‘get’ Brian’s grand ideas.

The Beach Boys – Til I Die

Til I Die‘s wafty and woozy vocal is perfect. Is it autobiographical?

‘I’m a cork on the ocean…how deep is the ocean…I lost my way…”

It most certainly is, Brian pondering his insignificance in an ever-evolving musical landscape, the musicians behind him tinkling tastefully and respectfully until the world catches up. The slowly unspooling and overlapping stacked vocals, the major 7ths, the glockenspiels and chimes, the Fender bass that roots it all… it’s the sound of complete contentment and the perfect summation of Brian Wilson as a composer.

Musical fashions change like the Scottish weather. Hair, clothes, guitars, synths, the in, the out. Brian Wilson cared for none of that. The world at large didn’t always appreciate his vast talents, but you and I and countless others did. What a loss.

Live!

Funny? Clever? Entertaining? Mozz Def

Craig McAllister

Them Smiths burned brightly. Five years in and out. 17 singles, 4 studio albums, a trio of compilations, a live album and then gone. One of our most influential groups over and out in the time it takes other bands to harvest the data on their Tik-Tok accounts. Morrissey as a solo artist initially followed the same blueprint; high watermark of quality on the singles’ b-sides, an early years grab-all Hatful-style compilation, fervent live shows, studio albums that were inventive and funny and unique and occasionally really rockin’ and then…the downward spiral. A musical shift in the nation’s listening tastes coincided with a poor album (Southpaw Grammar) and the decline of Morrissey was in full effect.

It’s not hard to see why Smiths fans might’ve eventually if reluctantly looked elsewhere for thrills; weak albums recorded by a curmudgeon in shitty parallel jeans, the ever-revolving cast of record companies (un)willing to work with him, the shelving of albums, the contempt he shows for his fans – the merch stands at the gigs with Patti ‘n Lou ‘n Bowie records – and more recently, his own – signed by yr man at eye watering prices (£250 for a signed Suedehead?!!), the sudden, abrupt halts to shows (hecklers, the smell of meat, the cold, anything really, all cited as reasons), the last minute cancellations of gigs when, very late in the day, he just can’t be bothered to play….and not least the increasingly right wing politics, the hanging out with Russell Brand, the Brexit-posturing, the For Britain schtick and the siding with Farage, the draping of himself in the flag of Israel, for fuck’s sake. How exactly did the voice of the marginalised, the disenfranchised and the downright downtrodden find himself on the right (ie, the wrong) side of the political spectrum, a venture capitalist with a narrow and bigoted view of the world? The boy with the house in the Hollywood hills has quietly gone about forgetting where he comes from. I gave up on him a long time ago. You maybe did too.

But…

That back catalogue. I stopped listening to any of his ‘new’ stuff after 1997’s Maladjusted. I’d long held the notion that Morrissey was something of a genius at creating song titles for songs that failed to live up to their expectation – Life Is A Pigsty, To Me You Are A Work Of Art, When You Open Your Legs, Something Is Squeezing My Skull, Munich Air Disaster 1958, Mama Lay Softly On The Riverbed, I Am Not A Dog On A Chain, The Edges Are No Longer Parallel (written about a new pair of skinny fit Levi’s, I’m told), I Have Forgiven Jesus, The World Is Full Of Crashing Bores, All The Lazy Dykes, Neal Cassady Drops Dead, The Bullfighter Dies, Kick The Bride Down The Aisle…. If they thought they could get away with it, there are writers out there who would give their eye teeth to come up with song titles as inventive and witty as some of those above.

As it turns out, some of these songs are the equal of their titles. That back catalogue that I’ve been stubbornly ignoring for nigh on 30 years? It has some properly stellar tracks just waiting to be plucked from obscurity, compiled into a Spotify playlist and re-evaluated – or evaluated, in my case. This is suddenly important.

Morrissey is back over here for a handful of shows. The tickets aren’t cheap and at the time of going on sale, I’m not that fussed. But I read the reviews from Dublin last weekend. Despite the setlist being heavy on late-era Moz, no-one has a bad word to say. A creeping fear of missing out – FOMO, as your kids might say – begins to linger and intensify. By Tuesday, I’m trawling Twickets looking for a bargain. And I find one for Thursday night’s show in Glasgow. That Spotify playlist of songs played on the unfolding 2025 tour becomes essential listening for two days. I soak in the brooding and majestic Life Is A Pigsty, the slow menace of Jack The Ripper, the me! me! me! egomania of All You Need Is Me. But I skip the Charming Man-lite Rebels Without Applause, the Charming Man-even lighter I Ex-Love You (another great title) and the mess that is the unappealing Scandinavia and hope for the best.

He’s been doing Speedway, one of the best tracks on his last truly great album (Vauxhall And I). And he’s been doing You’re The One For Me Fatty, a throwaway pop song, but one that, since the subject matter himself (Chas Smash) told me it was about him, has lasted well to these cynical ears. He’s teased audiences too with a handful of Smiths songs, of course, so the good song/bad song ratio  must be stacked in my favour, mustn’t it? I can’t legislate for any Israel-defending or England for the English-type posturing. I can’t do anything if he walks off at the first whiff of a Gregg’s sausage roll…or doesn’t turn up at all. I can’t deny that that thought hasn’t crossed my mind. Yet, in a shame-faced display of backtracking and wilful contradiction – but proudly wearing my ‘Morrissey Sucks’ t-shirt (a Billy Bragg one-off that my sister managed to come by for my birthday a few years ago) off I go. Sorry Johnny, if I’ve let you down.

I find a great spot in the VIP section. Easy. I wander into it and no-on asks me to leave, so there I am, directly facing centre stage, an uninterrupted sight line, finding myself deep in conversation with two guys from Brighton who’ve been following the tour. The Academy is quickly rammed. There’s that tangible feeling you get at certain gigs where you know before a note has even been played that you’re in the right place.

The pre-show film plays in lieu of a support band. It’s great. A jigsawing of Morrissey references, it throws out a feral Ramones at CBGBs, a trashy New York Dolls, a camp Bowie…but also Benny Hill, some trashy and campy early ’70s Eurovision, Divine, Sigue Sigue Sputnik, superb footage of cabaret singers in working men’s clubs…(there’s a theme developing here)…and, of course, black and white stills and clips from Hollywood’s golden era. There’s a handsome and moustache-free Burt Reynolds There’s Alain Delon, slowly unfolding himself from a chair and onto the floor where he dies a slow death as seen on the cover of The Queen Is Dead. There’s Billy Fury, cover star of The Smiths’ greatest single. Steven Patrick will have had great fun putting all of this together, a trainspotter’s reference guide to the mind of Morrissey.

And then we’re off.

It’s thrilling.

Morrissey is funny, quick witted, whip-smart with the crowd and in fine voice. He sings great. There’s a very strong opening; All You Need Is Me – You’re The One For Me Fatty – a mesmerising Speedway (yes!) into a juddering How Soon Is Now? (note: Johnny’s band plays this better). He has us where he wants us….and so dives deeper into that strange, unfamiliar back catalogue. I’m on board with it though, although the backdrop that changes with each song keeps the attention when sometimes the music finds it wandering.

Then, mid-set, salvation.

Without fanfare or introduction, Morrissey begins to sing I Know It’s Over. His band, for so long unable to cope with the delicacies and intricacies of the Smiths tunes, does a fantastic job. They are light of touch, sympathetic to the song’s heavy veil of pathos and regret and carry the singer like it’s 1986 at the London Palladium once more. Morrissey’s voice is superb, keening and aching those familiar words, stretching out one of the Smiths’ greatest torch songs into the here and now of 2025. It’s almost worth the admission price alone.

I Know It’s Over is followed by a thundering, joyful Every Day Is Like Sunday. Mass celebration, arms aloft in the chorus, arms around your partner’s shoulder – type stuff. Properly magic. At the part in the lyric where he sings, ‘A strange dust lands on your hand and on your face,’ the house lights go up on ‘face’ and I swear, I swear!, Morrissey sticks his tongue out at me. Right at me! Then the lights go down and I’m left to ponder it.

There’s more! Every Day Is Like Sunday gives way to a properly rockin’ and crashin’ Shoplifters Of The World, the elfin Italian guitar player stage left replicating perfectly Johnny’s harmonic solo.

It’s a proper wham! bam! slam! and I am spent.

But there’s more still! Life Is A Pigsty (my new favourite ‘new’ Morrissey tune)…a fantastically theatrical Jack The Ripper, Morrissey swinging his jacket and whipping his microphone lead through plumes of red smoke…the supreme gothic pop of Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me and, finally, a spitting Irish Blood, English Heart, the full stop on a quite brilliant 90-odd minutes.

My first Morrissey show since 1997 (?) I think, but on this form, maybe, possibly, probably not my last. Agh, the conflict. I feel a wee bit grubby. Elated, but grubby.(Go and see him if you can.)

 

Cover Versions, Hard-to-find, Studio master tapes

House Champion

Craig McAllister

There’s a decent case to be argued for Paul Weller being England’s equivalent to Neil Young. Both started young and both found instant success with their first real bands – Buffalo Springfield in Young’s case and The Jam in Weller’s (like you didn’t know already). Both these bands released era-defining tracks and tapped in to the consciousness of youth. And just as Young left Buffalo Springfield to forge a solo career packed full of instantly-regarded classic albums, side steps peppered with choice collaborations and sudden left turns towards new and unexpected musical directions (the ‘Ditch Trilogy‘, Trans), Weller too defiantly broke new ground, alienating some fans, richly rewarding others, side stepping his exquisitely-shod feet through the decades with interesting and quirky one-off collaborations and the odd soundtrack thrown in for good measure. Weller, like Young, lives, breathes and drinks music. He creates seemingly every day, tours regularly and (unlike Young nowadays) releases albums with a high quality control and impressive frequency that suggests if he doesn’t get them all out of his system as and when they’re ripe for recording, he’ll wither and die. Prolific? Paul Weller is the very definition of the word.

In 1989, the Style Council was coming to an end. The law of diminishing returns coupled with a changing musical climate saw to it that only Weller’s most enthusiastic fans were still with him. The pop charts may have been filled mainly with total rubbish (Jive Bunny, New Kids On The Block, Jason Donovan) but the underground was bubbling up nicely. Happy Mondays and Stone Roses were a Joe Bloggs flare flap away from ubiquity. Effect-heavy guitar bands were filling a post-Smiths void. Acid house and electronic dance music was soundtracking sweatboxes and switched-on clubs, yet still to be sanitised for the mainstream.

Weller, ever willing to embrace the new and the now, and with a perma-finger totally on the pulse of the zeitgeist, was heavily into Chicago house music. He’d heard and loved Joe Smooth’s Promised Land and recorded a faithful reworking of it before even Joe Smooth’s original had a UK release date (eventually releasing it on the same day). A song of unity and hope, it’s no different in sentiment to, say, Walls Come Tumbling Down, but whereas that was a Hammond heavy gatecrashing crie de guerre, Promised Land rode the crest of an E-kissed rolling and tumbling 808 wave. Blind loyalty pushed it to number 27 in the charts, but beyond that it failed to grasp the imagination. Hindsight of course has shown it to be a terrific mark in time.

Style Council – Promised Land

It was almost inevitable that when the Style Council presented Modernism: A New Decade to Polydor, the label would baulk at its hit-free content. There was no angry and spitting politico Weller, no Euro-continental jazz to soften the edges, none of the classic songwriting they’d come to expect from their talented young charge (Weller being just 30 at this point). Modernism: A New Decade was a pure house album, filtered through English notions and sensibilities, but a pure house album all the same. It favoured programmed rhythms and sequenced electro basslines over, y’know, actual bass and drums. It flung the guitars away and replaced them with weaving and shimmering synth lines. It was long and meandering with chants and shouts in place of a more traditional approach. Toundly rejected by Polydor, it would remain in the vaults for 20 years, only seeing the light of day when the all-encompassing, warts ‘n all Style Council Box Set was released at the end of the millennium.

And yet…

Modernism: A New Decade has its moments. Hindsight will show that its creator was frustratingly ahead of his time, that eventually Joe Public could and would groove to machine-driven, guitar-free music. Hindsight will show too that he really meant it, maaan. Just as he’d tackled the spiky Funeral Pyre with bile and aggression beforehand, and just as he’d go on to knock seven shades of shit from his guitar on Peacock Suit, Weller approached Modernism with nothing less than 100% of his cock-sure conviction.

Love Of The World‘s morse code intro and gospelish diva on backing duties…Sure Is Sure with its Italo house piano and Rotary Connection stacked vocals…a nascent That Spiritual Feeling, a track Weller would re-record as a solo artist – and a track that still finds a place in his live set to this day, usually as a refrain to the whacked-out and slightly psychedelic version of Into Tomorrow that normally closes his set, the proof – if it were needed – that its writer holds the material in high regard and that we, the listener, just need more time to appreciate it all.

The World Must Come Together is the perfect example.

Style Council – The World Must Come Together 

Its message of unity and hope could’ve been written specifically for the times we currently live in, and Weller’s high and soulful vocal goes a long way to conveying its idea. Channelling his inner Marvin Gaye, he chants the title in the chorus, slipping into falsetto in the verses. Synthesised strings sweep across its clattering and steam-powered rhythm. Electro hand claps punctuate the end of lines. Sampled spoken word pops up in the gaps. A jangling Roy Ayers-ish vibraphone provides the break, but we’re soon back to the titular refrain, a parping, recurring hookline coming and going as the textured cadence of the beat rolls ever forward. It’s a bit of a slow burner, but I’d suggest that, if this were to appear as a new track on a Weller solo album next week, it would be roundly applauded.