In this house at least, it’s very probably I Am Kurious Orange, but This Nation’s Saving Grace is often universally acknowledged as The Fall‘s greatest album. It is simultaneously accessible yet acutely obtuse in its weirdness; the concrete bass slam that drives Bombast into yr skull and the bone-shaking shouty skitter of Spoilt Victorian Child (surely the greatest Fall song title of all)…Couldn’t Get Ahead‘s skewed rockabilly and Gut Of The Quantifier‘s proto rap…My New House’s off-kilter poppish sheen…Paintwork‘s wonky balladeering…I Am Damo Suzuki‘s claustrophobic and descending head music…something for all tastes, you might say.
Released in 1985, it is, in a year of Brothers In Arms‘ (and even Psychocandy‘s and Meat Is Murder‘s) ubiquity, very much an outlier. Much like a decent measure of ancient malt, the first taste might leave you unsure, the residual after taste unpleasant even, but the ability to stick with it will slowly but surely establish it as a go-to when the moment calls. It is very much a rich and varied listen.
The Fall – L.A.
I’ve been playing L.A. a lot recently. From its helicoptering bass riff in, it’s a bruising and repetitive soundscape that defies you not to listen more than once. Listen and repeat…listen and repeat. That’s been me the past week.
The Fall rhythm section, earthquake-proof and chiseled from the same bedrock as the track’s titular city, keeps everything solidly four to the floor. Mark barks, yelps and sing-speaks the song’s title in the background. Brix oohs and coos, the Californian Cher to his Salford Sunny, the additional leverage that comes from being the boss’s missus affording her the space to dust the whole thing in the abrasive yet hooky circular guitar riff that settles in your brain from first bar to last. The pop fly in the group’s gritty ointment, Brix was ably supported by producer John Leckie, mixing desk manipulator who rode that fine line between art and accessibility and helped make This Nation’s Saving Grace one of The Fall’s very best.
Perhaps even better is the session version The Fall recorded for John Peel, worth it especially for the added dose of Mark’s uncalled for abrasion in the intro where he declares that “Lloyd Cole’s brain and face is made out of cowpat…we all know that!“
Are you ready to be heartbroken, Lloyd? Listen on:
I scanned this totally preposterous list on Substack over the festive period, where Thurston Moore lists his 350 Best Records of 2025. Yeah! – there’s no typo in there – that really does say 350, and Thurston really did list ’em all.
A totally pretentious concept, he goes, of course, for the willfully obscure and impossible to track down; cassette-only releases, band-made CDRs of live shows that 23 people were at, a Lana Del Rey (hey! I known her!) CDR single (ie promo-only release), a Sun Ra lathe-cut 10″, a Lou Barlow lathe-cut 7″, and so on and so on…
That coveted number one slot of Thurston’s was occupied by Laura De Jongh‘s Fundus. De Jongh is a harpist from Antwerp with a lovely, textured, ambient feel for soundscaping, great late night/early morning chill out stuff if that’s your kinda thing, but by the time of the list’s publication, her record – another 10″ (2025’s undisputed underground format of choice) was already long out of print.
Who has time to listen to – and properly critique – that much new stuff…and then whittle it down to a shortlist of three and a half hundred?!? The album buyer for Rough Trade East won’t have managed that. Not even the counter staff at Mono in Glasgow will have managed that combined. I get that Thurston has used the opportunity to shed light on some of his lesser-known friends’ essential, if outre, work, but c’mon, man! Three hundred and fifty records! What nonsense!
Now, had this been 1997, Thurston might’ve opted for a more mainstream approach. Possibly the last great year for album releases, it seemed the year threw up a now-considered classic every other week. OK Computer and The Fat Of The Land, In It For The Money and Radiator, Dig Your Own Hole, Homogenic and Urban Hymns, Homework, Earthling, Blur and Tellin’ Stories, Heavy Soul, Vanishing Point, Maverick A Strike, Songs From Northern Britain, Mogwai Young Team, Brighten The Corners, Being There…Ladies And Gentlemen, We Are Floating In Space…ladies and gentlemen, we were spoiled for choice.
It’s quite possible too that a Tokyo collective of long-fringed shoegaze revivalists had cooked up quite the Jazzmastered storm on a limited to 50 copies CDR, wrapped in rice paper and designed to erase itself after half a dozen plays, but y’know, who knows? Maybe Thurston does. He probably has 2 copies.
Even further back, 1991 was a similarly stellar year. Spin Magazine, the US equivalent to the UK’s NME (ie, it focused on metal-free, guitar-based music plus the odd slab of interesting hip-hop) went as far as declaring Teenage Fanclub’s Bandwagonesque its Album of the Year. Considering 1991 also threw up Nevermind and Loveless, Out Of Time and Screamadelica, Trompe le Monde, Blue Lines and De La Soul Is Dead, Weld, Achtung Baby, OG Original Gangster, Peggy Suicide and Foxbase Alpha, that’s quite the feat. Maybe it had something to do with ex-Orange Juice drummer Steven Daly being Spin’s contributing editor at the time…or maybe it was just the simple fact that Bandwagonesque was (and still undeniably is) a great record.
I listened to Out Of Time today, start to finish, twice. I can confirm that it’s lost none of its buzz – indeed, time has been very kind to it, and a record I’d heard a dozen times a day from the counter of Our Price is, in 2026, possibly even more appealing. REM’s real crossover album (Green may have brought them peeking from the margins, but Out Of Time went overground in a totally unprecedented way), even tracks like the much overplayed Losing My Religion and the much maligned Shiny Happy People sparkled boxfresh and urgent.
The high points, of which there are many, go some way to explaining why people despair at the drop-off in quality of REM’s output in the years that followed. Low, with Michael Stipe’s voice in a, eh, low register is a slow-boiling beauty, possibly the second-best track on the record. The none-more Beach Boys-y Endgame is still sublime. I could play this at one point, learned by ear and note-perfect on an acoustic guitar. (I must get my chops back.) Belong‘s soaring wordless chorus, first heard and sung three years previously during 1989’s Green tour at the Barrowlands. Half A World Away…Texarkana‘s choppy riffing, Me In Honey‘s soaring and sparring dual vocals… Out Of Time is a properly fantastic album. You should make a point of playing it this week.
The pinnacle though? That’s easy. The gothic, country blues of Country Feedback is, quite clearly, the greatest song on the record, and quite clearly the greatest song Neil Young never wrote. Michael takes centrestage, the band slow and stately, totally in control of the song’s unwavering steadiness with Stipe’s unspooling vocal throwing in the odd, unexpected sweary word amongst its gorgeous melody. I could listen to this all day long and never tire of it. If I’m making a Thurston-type list for the end of ’26, Country Feedback may well be at the upper echelons of it. The 10″, lathe-cut, US promo-only white label, of course.
Here’s REM doing a grand version on Jools Holland’s Later in 1998.
REM – Country Feedback (Live on Later)
It’s quite easy to imagine a Neil Young version on Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, his ramshackle and feedbacking guitar replacing the weeping pedal steel. If only.
REM and Neil Young – Country Feedback (Shoreline Amphitheatre, October 1998)
The closest yet is from 1998, when ol’ Nel himself grabbed an acoustic guitar and joined REM for an encore at the Shoreline Amphitheater in California. Michael says at the start that it’s his favourite REM song, and who can blame him?
Plain Or Pan turns 19 today. One blink, and already, it’s into its final year of being a teenager, somehow mid-way through second year at University and making its own considered path in life. It’s very much its own thing these days, with its own mind and opinions and world view. Unlike its curator, gone is the need to be on it all weekend…unless by ‘on it’ you mean gym equipment. It’s protein, not pints for this one, and it looks good for it. Will it wish it had done more reckless things in its late teenage years? I doubt it. So far, it seems quite happy in its own skin. Let’s see how it fares in its 20th year – all things considered, it’s not bad going for a wee music blog steadfastly stuck mainly in the past.
Talking of which…
I’ve been reading Colin MacInnes’s Absolute Beginners the past week. On Paul Weller’s say-so, I’d tried it years ago, more than once, but couldn’t get with it so sat it aside and let it gather decades of dust. I’m glad the urge took me to pick it up again. Something clicked. It hooked me and I read it in three nights flat. It is, as it turns out, a terrific book; fast of pace, meaty in subject matter and, when the protagonists are in scene, written in a sort of secretive teen-speak that could give Anthony Burgess’s nadsat argot in A Clockwork Orange a decent run for its money. I suspect you knew this already though.
Set in 1958 (and published hot off the press in 1959), it tells the story of a 19-year old west London teen, moved out already and living in a run down yet vibrant multi-cultural area. His neighbours are prostitutes…druggies…violent Teddy boys…beautiful people of all sexualities; it all makes for an obscene melting pot of edgy living. A hustling freelance photographer, we never find out his name – as he comes in and out of contact with the other key characters, he is referred to as ‘Blitz Baby’, ‘the kid’, ‘teen’, and so on – and we follow him as he falls out with his mother, takes a trip with his dying father and tries to convince his once girlfriend – ‘Crepe Suzette’ – not to settle for a marriage of convenience with a much older gay man. Race issues boil over – a result of a campaign of hate by the Daily Mail (or Mrs Dale, as the young folk refer to it) and our photographer is caught up in the melee of the Notting Hill riot, his head clobbered, his Vespa stolen, an easy target on account of his friendship with the Indian and Jamaican communities.
Jazz speak falls from every page, in-the-know references made to late-night Soho establishments where modern jazz is the new thing, where style-obsessed teens pop pills and seek thrills, the first generation post-war to grow up in a technicolour world where hope, ambition and aspiration are the key factors in eking out a life as far removed from your parents’ as possible. Nineteen, with a bit of cash in your pocket? And an attitude? And a way of speaking that is alien to the generation that came before you? You’re an absolute beginner.
The 1986 film adaptation of the novel has, since its release, come in for a fair bit of well-deserved and sometimes misguided stick. Even David Bowie’s majestic theme song – and one of his very best – can’t quite save it entirely, nor the sight of him turning up as slick advertising exec Vendice Partners in the sort of suit (if not accent) he might’ve adopted as stage wear towards the end of the decade. Like most adaptations, the book is far better (the film feels the need to name our absolute beginner ‘Colin’ – in memory of the novel’s deceased author, you have to think) but in the montage below there’s some great film-only dialogue, between the vibraphones and shuffling snares, brightly-coloured sets and hammy accents, that’s worth bending your ear towards.
*One point for every cast member you can name in the clip.
‘Aren’t you a little too old for her?’
‘I’m only thirty-seven…’
‘Thir’y seven?! Arahnd the waist, maybe..!’
(Also – doesn’t the Bowie track that plays at the end owe more than a little to Madonna’s Material Girl? A tongue-in-cheek reference maybe, given the subject matter of the scene being soundtracked?)
Paul Weller called Absolute Beginners ‘a book of inspiration’, so much so that he ‘took’ it with him as his only source of reading material when he was banished by Kirsty Young on Desert Island Discs. If you are an impressionable teenager looking to find yourself and choose a path in life, the novel, with its themes of socialism and left-wing politics married to a decent soundtrack is a fine place to start. Weller would, of course, name a Jam track after the novel and later in the Style Council would create a tune called Mr Cool’s Dream, a reference, I’m assuming, to the character of the same name in MacInnes’s novel.
Weller was called upon to provide music for the film and so, drawing on his love of Blue Note and off-kilter time signatures, he came up with the bossanova boogaloo of Have You Ever Had It Blue?, a track that still has a comfy place in his setlist even to this day. And why not?
The Style Council – Have You Ever Had It Blue?
And here’s Our Favourite Shop‘s With Everything To Lose, the, eh, *blueprint for the above track.
Footnote:
Have You Ever Had It Blue?, as groovy and finger clickin’ as it undeniably is, *owes more than a passing resemblance to the horizontally laid-back sunshine soft pop of Harper & Rowe‘s 1967 non-charting (and therefore obscurish) The Dweller. It’s certainly the best Style Council track that Paul Weller didn’t write. Perhaps, for this track, Weller should’ve renamed his group The Steal Council and come clean about it.
Harper & Rowe – The Dweller
*in the clip:
As well as the obvious; Ray Davies, Alan Fluff Freeman, Patsy Kensit, Ed Tudor Pole, Lionel Blair, Edward ‘father of Lawrence’ Fox, Sade, Stephen Berkoff, Slim Gaillard, Smiley Culture, Bruno ‘Strictly’ Tonioli, Robbie Coltrane, Sandie Shaw, Mandy Rice-Davies…quite the cast, eh?
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?
It seems that Radiohead is back, to be spoken of in the present tense once again. Since their last shows a million years ago in 2017, there have been solo albums, side projects, film scores, even, thanks to The Bear‘s use of Let Down in a key scene, tunes trending for the millennials on Tik Tok. Significantly though, there has been no new Radiohead music since A Moon Shaped Pool. But out of the blue, they’re here again. The fanfare-free announcement a week or so ago of a series of live shows across selected European capital cities created high excitement and mild panic amongst their army of fans, and a scurrying for tickets – or for the right to queue for tickets (sheesh) – began, a sort of Oasis-lite feeding frenzy for the No Logo generation…and, as it turns out, their children.
My two made us all sign up for the presale registration, desperate as they were to see the band that their old dad regularly has playing around the house. I was ambivalent about it all. I despise, I mean totally hate, the trend for any and all pre-registration schemes that let the lucky ones elbow others out of the road and out of the queue so that they can maybe, maybe, buy a ticket for a show. I appreciate it’s to minimise touting and all of that, but still. Get back to the days of lining up outside Virgin Argyle Street in the pouring autumn rain, that’s what I say.
And of all the shows they are playing, and that includes Berlin and Copenhagen and what have ye, there’s only one date that I can fit in around work – the Saturday night in London, which is surely the most popular date in the run of shows. So the chances of securing a ticket, let alone 3 or 4, is gotta be slim you’d think.
And I’ve seen Radiohead a handful of times before anyway.
Besides, they’re bound to pencil in more shows for next year, maybe to support a new record that has very possibly been recorded already. Y’never know with Radiohead. It’s quite something in the rumour milling scrolling news feed of the modern age for a band to maintain an element of mystique, yet Radiohead has consistently done so.
But the boy, already coasting through 2025 like a king, gets The Code (of course he does) and so, come the pre-sale date, he and his sister log on while I’m at work, muttering quietly to myself about dynamic pricing and the percentage likelihood of snagging the briefs. They don’t get them, of course. They had them. Four of the little gold dust blighters. They were in the basket, £85 seated tickets inexplicably ramped up to £125 a pop (there’s yr dynamic pricing) and in the split second it took the kids to press ‘Buy’, the website had kicked them out on account of them being bots. This happened three, four, eighteen times until they gave up and admitted defeat. A quick trawl through the Radiohead forums later on unearthed dozens and hundreds of stories exactly the same. It seems the touts and dynamic pricing won the day after all, and now I’m pissed off that I won’t be going to a show that a) I didn’t expect to be at in the first place and 2) would grudge paying over the odds for anyway and 3) would’ve meant me paying Saturday night in London hotel prices for a family of four (2 rooms, thanks) the month before Christmas.
Let Down or Lucky? I dunno.
I’ll wait in keen anticipation for further, and more local, dates in 2026.
Present Tense is one of A Moon Shaped Pool‘s highlights. Ghostly and spectral, it carries itself on a deftly-picked minor key guitar pattern and unusual time signature.
Radiohead – Present Tense
There’s some lovely shuffling percussion in the background, a sandpaper rubbed against guitar strings and looped kinda effect and Thom’s voice harmonises against itself spectacularly. It’s all so intense and pretty, the climbing strings, wordless backing vocals and understated synthetic symphony carrying it gently to its pseudo bossa nova conclusion.
Sandwiched between the sprawling Talk Talk-isms of The Numbers and Tinker Tailor Soldier Sailor etc etc‘s glitchy ambient techno (all the tracks on A Moon Shaped Pool are sequenced alphabetically – but you knew that already), Present Tense might have benefited from being closer to the front of the album. Shoulda called it Aardvark, Radiohead. An opportunity missed, I think. But then, all the best bands have, to use modern parlance, deep cuts that require digging out to be held up like prize root vegetables for an unsuspecting public, and Present Tense is one of Radiohead’s very best.
The late-dusk, campfire version that Thom and Johnny filmed in the Californian desert a few years back is The One. Two men, one in a vest, two guitars, both played with the lightest of touch, a pitter-pattering drum machine and a host of fantastic interplay makes for a great listen, the outcome far greater than the sum of its parts. Treat yr ears to this:
Speed freak. Triumph motorcycle. And speed freak. In shades. Daytime, night time, anytime. Suede. Corduroy. Button down shirts. Striped pants. Boots of Spanish leather. That hair.
Triumph on record. A surrealist and a cynic with added sneer. Beat group intense. Irk the purists. Fender. Electricity. Volume. A cavalcade of words. A trip and a rush, cascading forth. Get set. Get well. Try hard. Get fired. Coded. Cryptic. Crucial. Maggie, fleet foot. Face full o’ black soot. Plants in the bed. Phone tapped. Look out kid! Candles, sandals, vandals, handles.
Ol’ Bob has many faces and many aces up his sleeve, but right now, this week, after seeing A Complete Unknown, it’s mid ’60s Bob that’s doin’ it…and doin’ it good. The garage band backing, all thunking bass and rattling snare and white hot, screaming blues licks on Telecaster that ride the coattails of Bob’s scuffed acoustic and sandpapery vocal is possibly the most thrilling sound in rock ‘n roll. Sixty years will pass this year since Bob thwacked us with the insane one-two of Bringing It All Back Home (April) and Highway 61 Revisited (August – 4 months later); a pair of records that most other acts would be happy to hang an entire career on. Don’t look back, instructed Bob around then, but, man, LOOK BACK! Stop and listen to what’s on these records.
Bringing It All Back Home is my favourite of the two. Gun to my head, it’s probably my favourite Bob album of the lot, tied up as it is in childhood memories and time and place. I now own my dad’s copy, given to him by my mum not long after they met, stolen by me about 20 years later, then handed over after my dad asked me straight out of the blue one day, sometime around 2006, where it was, before it made its way back to me after my dad died. If I count it up, I think I’ve probably had it in my possession more than my dad ever did.
Bob Dylan –Subterranean Homesick Blues Take 3
It’s a record of two distinct sides. Side one is the irk the purists side: Bob’s Chuck Berry by way of Dada schtick, nonsensical and bubble gum and extremely thrilling. Subterranean Homesick Blues’ machine gunned outpouring of alliteration, rhyme and imagery; Maggie’s Farm and its gutterpunk two-step blues; the sneering and caustic head bop that is Outlaw Blues; the unexpected thrill of Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream‘s false start, hearing Dylan’s maniacal laugh as the engineer counts in Take 2… absolutely knocked me sideways as a 15 year old, that did. The Smiths and Lloyd Cole didn’t goof around on their records. Theirs were serious mood pieces. This Dylan guy? He’s off his head. He was funny though…a proper comedian. It still thrills me no less as a 55 year old too. Even the slow songs on side 1 had a backing band. She Belongs To Me‘s delicate electric runs; Love Minus Zero‘s four to the floor tambourine and woody bass.
Side 1 is Dylan’s fuck you to the folk scene and all who gate kept it, but it was the (mainly) acoustic songs on side 2 that pulled supporters like Pete Seeger back from the brink. Mr Tambourine Man, a thread-pulling and unravelling 6 minute masterpiece. Gates Of Eden, Dylan sneering about war and peace, finger pointing long into the night air, his acoustic guitar bashed into submission, his harmonica wheezing to a conclusion. It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding), with its descending drop D blues riff and complex, fantastical imagery; Money doesn’t talk, it swears…He not busy being born is busy dying…Even the President of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked. Until fairly recently, Bob was still playing this in his set and, surprise surprise, every one of his audience recognised it immediately. Don’t listen to those lazy reviewers who tell you they only found out what songs Bob played by checking online afterwards. He’s slowed down and kept things fairly standard in setlists in recent times, but it wasn’t that long ago that a night with Bob would include three or four Bringing It All Back Home gems in his set. And a couple of Highway 61 Revisited highlights. And a trio of Blonde On Blonde essentials. But stop. We’re ahead of ourselves.
Bringing It All Back Home ends, perfectly, on It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue. Just Bob, his harmonica and a gooseberrying bass guitar. It’s a song of sentiment, of a chapter closing, of the need to look to the future. The perfect metaphor, in other words, for Dylan’s continual forward propulsion, the lightning rod and conduit for songs – long, cerebral, tied in imagery and intelligence – that he couldn’t get out from inside his head quickly enough.
Two albums and one world tour in ’65. A world tour and a double album in ’66. He not busy being born is busy dying, after all.
I don’t quite know how I feel about this. It’d be interesting to hear your thoughts and opinions. The creative in me says it’s the worst thing ever; anodyne and beige, a wee bit dead behind the eyes. The luddite in me goes wow! How on earth is this even possible?!
My pal Supersonic Mark works in marketing – Supersonic Marketing – and is deeply involved in the world of podcasting. He chats all things food and drink to all sorts of interesting people – Roger Daltrey, Fatboy Slim and, this week, Michel Roux – and his podcasts regularly make the lists of the best things to listen to that week. He’s long said I should do a podcast version of Plain Or Pan, but, y’know… time, desirability, the fact that I definitely don’t sound like Richard Burton whenever I bark the nonsense that passes for pop trivia from my gub. I’ve been on the radio. I’ve guested on other people’s podcasts. I know exactly how unpodcast-like I sound. Clearly, these are all good enough reasons to maintain the typing over talking approach that has served this place well for 17 and a half years.
Recently, Mark was shown how a fairly basic version of AI can turn text into spoken word, and he trialled the approach on one of my blog posts. I woke up last week to a version of the Crowded House post I’d written, presented as a podcast between two chummy American chat show hosts. It was, frankly, mindblowing in the way it’d taken my original post, summed up the gist of it and spat it back at me as a two-way conversation in third person. By the time I’d arrived at work, I’d listened to it half a dozen times, my mind racing with the good, the bad and the ugly of it all. Would this replace the blog as I currently present it? Would it write long-winded pieces on old music for me? Could I monetise it?
Plain Or Pan – AI version of the Crowded House post.
Hey, AI, make me a picture of Neil Finn from Crowded House checking out the Plain Or Pan review of his Glasgow show whilst he strums his guitar in his living room.
Weird, eh?
Interesting? Annoying? The future of everthing or just plain wrong?
The things I like about it: it’s novel, it’s quirky and it’s a nice, concise, five minute snapshot of my 1000+ words.
The things I don’t like about it: The voices. I’m sure that can be changed. I’d rather have Scarlett Johansson read my words to you (and me), thanks very much. And it presents some of my opinion (the Paul Weller section, for example) as fact. For anyone listening who hasn’t read the article first, they’d leave being mis-informed.
Overall though, I kinda like it, I think, but in answer to those three questions from earlier:
No, it won’t replace Plain Or Pan in its current form. I might follow-up future blog posts with the odd ‘podcast’ though, if I can convince an AI Scarlett Johansson to take the mic.
I could never use it to do the writing for me. That’s the bit I enjoy. I like to think I have a style that no amount of fancy pants AI could recreate. I’m probably wrong about that though.
Can I monetise it? I’m an artist, baby. Money is so crass.
I’ve got a strained relationship with The Cure. They are, unarguably, one of our greatest singles bands; poppy, hooky and melodic yet strange and idiosyncratic, a band out of step with everything around them, stubbornly unique and brilliant because of it. Just Like Heaven…Hot Hot Hot!!!…Caterpillar…Close To Me…Lovecats…In Between Days…Lullaby…Why Can’t I Be You?… Friday I’m In Love…The Walk…Pictures Of You…A Forest…there’s a perfect playlist right there.
It’s the albums I struggle with. If the singles are 10 second hundred metre sprints, the albums are triathlon levels of endurance by comparison. Meandering, dark, twisty, self-indulgent – all the things I like, as it goes – I find it’s too much of an effort to properly enjoy a Cure album. There’s nothing light and airy about them, and I say that as someone who’ll listen to Radiohead until the day I die. I just slowly detach and find myself drifting off. ‘Is this nearly finished?’ I’ll ask myself as Robert and co sleepwalk their way, treacle-like, into into only the third track. It makes the thought of a live show almost too much. Even Springsteen, I bet, would find himself yawning at the two hour mid-point. My loss, I dare say.
Primary though. There’s a great track. The sole single release from 1981’s Faith album, Primary starts with a rattling, ear-splitting snare drum, played with all the finesse of a ham-fisted one-armed man. Bash! Bash! Bash! Bash! Bash! Bash! Bash! Ker-bash! If you can separate the individual instruments and voices on the record, you’ll hear that from first bash to last, the drummer never wavers from his incessant 8-bar beat.
The Cure – Primary
Backing firmly in place, Robert makes excellent use of his chorus and phase pedals, coating the track in a thick metallic swamp of rapid, scraping downstrokes and swirling chunky notes. It might sound just like his National guitar set to stun, but on this track Smith actually plays bass. As does Simon Gallup. Being unique and idiosyncratic sorts, two bass guitars on the one record is perfectly normal. While Smith maintains the song’s rhythm and muscle, Gallup wanders up and down the frets like Peter Hook in eyeliner. Perhaps surprisingly, there are no guitars on Primary at all.
It’s an intense sound, Primary. Shouty, swirly and relentlessly clattering, it finds The Cure out of step with their peers, and not for the last time. 1981 was the year when the synth became the de facto pop instrument of choice. End of year lists were populated by the Human League and Soft Cell. OMD were making inroads towards household name status. Ultravox’s Vienna was ubiquitous. Kim Wilde was doing her English version of Blondie while Clem Burke jumped drum stool to moonlight with Eurythmics. Esoteric and different, The Cure stick out as stubbornly as the Dennis the Menace haircuts they employed at the time.
The Cure – Primary (Peel Session)
Two bass guitars, one snare drum, a double-tracked voice and a whole load of imagination across three minutes – or six if you can track down the elusive 12″-only mix. Primary is a weird wee single, not afforded the status of anything in that stellar list in the opening paragraph above, but something that’s just as deserving of a place at The Cure’s top table.
In the UK, we meekly accept whatever our masters think is best for us. Rising cost of living? Fair enuff, guv. Can’t heat your house? I’ll just nip down to the local Warm Space, shall I? Dragged out of Europe? That’s democracy, mate. We’ll just need to get on wiv it. The French though – they know the score. Any time they feel hard done by, any time their world appears unjust, boom!, out come the Molotovs. Over a million French citizens took to les rues recently to protest the government’s planned raising of the pension age from 62 to 64. Pffft. Work-shy slacquers. It’s 66 in England, mate. 66! Bobby Moore, Nobby Stiles, Sir Geoffrey ‘Urst. Anyway, where woz I?
Decided without a vote and pushed through by the will of a persistent Macron, it was firmly decided. The workers were suitably enraged. In Paris, fireworks were thrown indiscriminately at hastily drawn police lines. In Bordeaux, the town hall was set ablaze. Tear gas was fired, hundreds were arrested, everyone lost their Gallic cool. The pension age would still be raised, but not without Macron and his ministers knowing exactly what their citizens thought of them. The one plus point to come from the dissenters’ actions was that the city of Paris would not now play host to the first state visit by the new King George, whose aides quickly kyboshed the idea. Parisienne republicans sniffed the air and shrugged with typical je ne sais quoi.
55 years ago, in May 1968, rioting in Paris became so severe there was a real threat of civil war. The city’s student population, liberal and left-leaning by definition, occupied the universities in protest at fellow students’ arrests following an anti Vietnam demonstration. The authorities were quick to react and a heavy-handed police operation resulted in skirmishes, baton-wielding beatings and more mass arrests. The conflict between the Parisienne students and police intensified. Barricades were put up and knocked down. Civil order descended into disorder. Police used batons. Students threw torn-up paving stones and Molotov cocktails. Two nights of stand-off on the Left Bank ended after police set fire to cars and they themselves used Molotovs to disperse crowds.
The trade unions, no fans of President de Gaulle or his policies, were moved to declare sympathy action. At the height of this action, most of France ground to a halt as 11 million French workers (almost a quarter of the working population) went on general strike. Despite talks between both sides, the strikes and the riots continued. The President ran off to Germany, worried that rioters would attack him in Elysee Palace. He would return at the end of the month, bolstered by a notion to dissolve his cabinet and reform his government in a way that would appease the strikers. But anyway…
In the early days of the Stone Roses, Ian Brown had hitch-hiked his way around Europe. On his travels, he’d met someone who’d been in Paris in 1968 and this man’s tale became the lyric to Bye Bye Badman. He told the story of how, during the riots, the activists learned to combat the effects of the tear gas being used to control their movements by sucking on lemons.
It’s no concidence at all that the artwork on Stone Roses’ debut album cover features an unobtrusive, brush-daubed tricolour and a couple of lemons (albeit added after John Squire had ‘completed’ his painting)… a piece of art he called Bye Bye Badman.
Smoke me, choke the air. In this citrus-sucking sunshine I don’t care.
Here he comes, got no question, got no love
I’m throwing stones at you, I want you black and blue
I’m gonna make you bleed, gonna bring you down to your knees…
It’s all in there.
Stone Roses – Bye Bye Badman
It’s a tune that belies it’s appearance. Lightweight and breezy, with skiffly, shuffling drums and a rich tapestry of interwoven guitars, it could well have floated off the grooves of a Mamas and Papas or 5th Dimension record.
The guitar runs throughout though, they mark it as something a bit special, a bit unique; the phased and chugging electric backing that allows the sun-dappled acoustic splashes to shimmer, the cleanly picked counter-riffs, the fluid and chattering fret runs at the end that bring to mind Michael Jackson’s Human Nature, all of it underpinned by expansive and expressive bass playing. It’s no real surprise that Stone Roses became the touchstone for enthusiastic amateur guitarists and wannabe hit bands everywhere.
And the melody. It’s sing-song and nursery rhyme-like…until you begin to decode the lyric. The title itself is seemingly a veiled reference to President de Gaulle and, as the song unfurls line by line, it’s apparent that this seemingly insignificant track (song 4, side 1) is in fact a pop art statement of political intent, revolution disguised as art. That it’s done so with lovely doubletracked Ian Brown vocals makes it all the sweeter. In the live arena, Brown can’t sing for toffee. Thank goodness John Leckie had the golden touch when it came to coaxing a tune from his vocal chords.
Here’s the demo that Stone Roses presented to Leckie. As you’ll hear, never underestimate the role of the producer in helping a group to realise their ambitions.
Stone Roses – Bye Bye Badman demo
I listened to Stone Roses’ debut album the other day and it still causes as many little rushes of uncontainable excitement as it did on first hearing it 34 years ago. Let it sink in that more time has passed since the day I bought it from Walker’s at Irvine Cross than the time between the riots in Paris ’68 and the Stone Roses writing a song about it.
Ian Brown famously pumped an arm aloft and bellowed, “This is ‘ist’ry!” from the Alexandra Palace stage in November 1989. No, Ian, your band, their album, THIS is history. D’you feel old yet?
Niche Ian Brown reference in this graffiti for all of you trainspotters out there,
If ever there was a short-lived group with an ego overload as wide as the Mersey, it’d be The Crucial Three. Birthed in Liverpool, the not ironically-named at all trio was the fertile product of Julian Cope, Ian McCulloch and Pete Wylie, students in the city and punk rock foot soldiers with the battle scars from Eric’s and Probe Records to prove it. Destined to meet and create and disband in a whirl of uncontainable ideas, The Crucial Three lasted no longer than six weeks, burnt out on a combined love of New York punk and the inevitability that each group member couldn’t be boxed and compromised within its confines.
In his book Head On – essential reading, if y’didn’t know – Cope is both catty and complimentary towards McCulloch. He’s already been nicknamed Duke after Bowie’s Thin White persona by the time they meet, and the nickname provides Cope with much bitchy ammunition, but St Julian has nothing but praise for McCulloch once he dares to peek beyond the fringe and start to sing. Cope bands about McCulloch’s name in the same breath as Lou ‘n Iggy and he genuinely means it.
Amongst the nonsensical jams and Velvets rip-offs that constituted The Crucial Three’s flimsy ouvre –Â one song about zits and one about drugs that was a great Cope-y title in need of an actual song (I’m Bloody Sure You’re On Dope), Cope and McCulloch (or ‘Duke McCool‘, as Julian has now christened him after mishearing the shortened McCull) dragged out an actual, bona fide post-punk classic.
Read It In Books surfs along on a cyclical riff very reminiscent of Patti Smith’s Dancing Barefoot, the product of one of the trio’s living room sessions where someone would stumble on a set of chords and the others would fall in and see if something stuck. If you’ve ever played in a shambling and under-rehearsed band, you’ll recognise this scenario immediately. In this instance something did indeed stick. Cope claims McCulloch was playing the chords to The Fall’s Stepping Out (it also has, in the main, two chords and is a bit shouty, but these ears can’t really find the similarity – which is good, I suppose), but by the time the band had reconvened for their next session, McCulloch had a set of lyrics to go with it – including a cheap steal from The Impressions – and before they knew it, The Crucial Three had a song of their own. People get ready, there’s a train a-comin’… and it’s a beauty.
Read It In Books was credited as a Cope/McCulloch co-write, and both artists would go on to record versions with the bands with whom they found success.
Echo & The Bunnymen‘s version appeared as the b-side to their debut single The Pictures On My Wall (credited to McCulloch, Cope, of course).
Echo & The Bunnymen – Read It In Books
Cope’s Teardrop Explodes would record it for the b-side of their third single Treason.
You don’t need to dig too deep below the surface of the internet to find multiple versions of the song but, for me, the best version of all of them is the Bunnymen’s imperial take that they recorded for the John Peel show in 1979, watery guitar solos, incessant drum machine rhythm, McCulloch’s restrained croon ‘n all. Within a few years their sound would evolve, with skyscraping, effect-rich guitars and a towering symphonic backing adding gravitas and state to the McCulloch vocal, but that early Bunnymen sound – man, I’ll never tire of this.
Echo & The Bunnymen – Read It In Books (Peel Session 15th August 1979)
The Teardrops’ version is fairly similar, acknowledging that both writers created the structure and arrangement. Guitars clang, drums are pummelled, a stabbing organ shimmers in and out like the ghost of Ray Manzarek moonlighting in The Seeds and the whole thing rattles its way to garage band heaven. Add some sleigh bells to its nagging piano background and it could almost be The Stooges’ I Wanna Be Your Dog. Perhaps an obvious, leather-trousered step too far for the Iggy-headed Julian.
Teardrop Explodes – Read It In Books
This one is credited, naturally, to Cope, McCulloch.
Plain Or Pan 