That there’s David Bowie, doing the wonky pogo and captured on Kodachrome for what would become the cover of 1979’s Lodger LP. A hit-or-miss LP by Bowie’s standards, it’s notable for being produced and augmented by Eno and for featuring a couple of tracks that used the exact same chord structure, sequence and setting as one another.
The opener, Fantastic Voyage was a mid-paced meandering crooner, exactly the sort of Bowie track that leaves you cold on first listen but after, oooh, 20 years or so reveals itself to be a stone cold Bowie belter. What took me so long?!?
David Bowie – Fantastic Voyage;
Encouraged by Eno’s Oblique Strategy cards to ‘Use Unqualified Musicians‘, Bowie made the assembled band swap to unfamiliar territory (although rumour has it that the bass was overdubbed because bass-playing drummer Dennis Davis was rubbish) , cranked things up to twice the original speed and created a metallic squall of post-punk brilliance. Forever on the edge of unravelling at the seams, Boys Keep Swinging is carried along with a nod and a wink and a raised and plucked eyebrow or two to the more flamboyant side of life.
David Bowie – Boys Keep Swinging;
“When you’re a boy, other boys check you out,” intones Bowie, all put-on machismo and high camp. That he dressed himself up as a trio of drag-queened tarts in the video only served to hammer the point home – Bowie liked boys who liked boys to be girls who liked girls to be boys….
Boys Keep Swinging is right up there amongst my very favourite Bowie tracks. Worth a listen if only for Adrain Belew’s Pere Ubu do the Isley Brothers guitar meltdown at the end, it sits head and shoulders above anything else the mainstream was releasing at the time.
A couple of chancers who liked Bowie’s new single were The Associates. Short of record deal but long on ambition and ideas, they somewhat illegally recorded their own version of Boys Keep Swinging a mere 6 weeks after Bowie’s had been released, and put it out on the tiny Double Hip record label.
Not surprisingly, the record’s existence brought them to the attention of eagle-eared music industry insiders but amazingly, on the back of it, The Associates landed themselves a record deal with Fiction Records. Would that ever happen nowadays? I doubt it.
The Associates – Boys Keep Swinging;
Billy MacKenzie of the band would a few years later be the titular subject of The Smiths’ William, It Was Really Nothing. Friends with Morrissey, the pair of them spent many an afternoon in the early 80s skirting around one another’s affections. But you knew that already.
*Bonus Track(s)!
Side project of The Cardigan’s Nina Persson, A Camp‘s version is fairly faithful to the original.
A Camp – Boys Keep Swinging;
Nothing ground shattering, but what a shallow excuse to stick a picture of a beautiful Swedish lassie on these pages.
Perhaps more interesting is the story of Blur and ‘their‘ track M.O.R.
Written a la Bowie and Eno with the exact same chord progression as Fantastic Voyage/Boys Keep Swinging, it originally escaped the notice of anyone who deals in these matters. Subsequent releases however credit the track to Blur/Bowie/Eno. Have a listen.
Blur – M.O.R.;
You can sing Boys Keep Swinging over the top of it, aye? And Coxon freely embraced the guitar freak out at the end with great gusto. Good, innit?
And any excuse to post Blur’s own tribute to 1979. Blurred Lines, anyone…?
Eddie Floyd was the big haired, big voiced vocalist of such soul nuggets as Knock On Wood, I’ve Got To Have Your Love and Big Bird. An ode to flight, Big Bird was reputedly written by Floyd in Heathrow Airport as he waited to board a plane to Memphis for Otis Redding’s funeral. That’s how the legend goes at any rate.
Floyd was also a staff writer at Stax, and co-penned all manner of lesser known gems recorded by the likes of William Bell, the Staples Singers and Carla Thomas. You could do worse than spend an evening digging deep to uncover his work. It’s all terrific stuff, but one Eddie Floyd song stands afro’d head and shoulders above all others.
Eddie’s masterpiece is 1968’s I’ve Never Found A Girl (To Love Me Like You Do).
A great little slice of call and response Southern soul, it see-saws between major and minor chords, swept along by brass and strings and carried from middle to end by the stolen melody of Percy Faith‘s Theme From A Summer Place;
Played by Floyd with the help of in-house Stax guns for hire Booker T. Jones (who played bass, guitar and keys (!)) and Al Bell, and produced by the MGs Steve Cropper, the song would eventually peak at #2 on the US R&B charts.
As a wee aside, you could do worse than spend another evening comparing Booker T’s guitar solo on this track with much of Edwyn Collin’s Memphis chording on some of those mid period Orange Juice records – the intro to I Can’t Help Myself for example.
Cult hero to the stars Alex Chilton has recorded a couple of versions of I’ve Never Found A Girl, most thrillingly in Glasgow backed by a Teenage Fanclub who gamely hold steady the backbeat and offer enthusiastic backing vocals whilst he chops out gritty little riffs of electrified southern soul atop it.
Recorded at the 13th Note in 1996, in this pre (for me) internet era, I walked into work the morning after the show to hear all about it for the first time. Nowadays of course, you’d never get a ticket for this kind of thing for sticky fingered touts. But back in the day it was good old fashioned lack of information that meant only the hippest of the hip, with a finger to the pulse and an ear to the ground, got to such events. The bastards.
“It’s The Mekons….It’s called Ghosts Of American Astronauts…”
Trash Can Sinatras – Ghosts Of American Astronauts (Radio Session)
And off they go, the Trash Can Sinatras jangling away with an easy fluidity that comes from years of playing together. I don’t like that word ‘jangling‘. It conjours up images of spotty boys with greasy fringes singing about the unattainability of girls called Emily or whoever. But this track is the essence of jangling. It’s a beauty.
When I first heard the Trashcans doing it, taped in the moment from (I think) a Johnny Walker BBC Radio 2 session, I thought it was the best thing they’d ever done. And it wasn’t even their song. I’d heard of The Mekons. A country-ish, new wave-ish band from somewhere in the north of England, but I’d never actually heard them. Country-ish didn’t register with me then, and to be honest, it still doesn’t register with me now. There are exceptions of course, but overall? Nah.
I played the TCS version endlessly. This was the Trashcans at their peak. Ghosts Of American Astronauts sounded great – the band perfectly captured forever. I could actually see the band in my head as it played, Paul, head bowed in his suit jacket, firing of the wee electric guitar riff. Stephen, bendy of neck and floppy of limbs, recreating the original’s tumbling drum rolls. Frank, voice coated in layers of echo, standing off-mike and taking a step forward every now and again to get the dynamics in his voice. John would be somewhere stage right, glancing now and again at Davy as they kept the rhythm rattling forwards.
Recorded around the time of A Happy Pocket (great songs written under greatly difficult circumstances), everything the Trashcans recorded at this point in time was solid gold. Every b-side that accompanied the Happy Pocket singles could’ve been an a-side in their own right. That they were displaced as b-sides is testimony to the band’s quiet belief that they were expert songwriters. A loudmouth like Noel Gallagher would’ve casually said “there’s plenty more where that came from“, but the Trashcans are not the sort of band that blow their own trumpet. At this point in time they were riding the crest of a wave. A wave that would test them somewhat for the next few years, but there and then the Trashcans were superior to anyone else putting out records. You knew that already, though.
Fast forward to 2004, and the band, label-less and a some-time 4 piece found themselves in New York recording what would become the follow-up to Weightlifting (the band’s high water mark) and supplementing the cost of living by playing the odd acoustic show. The ‘Fez‘ album, available here is an excellent document of the time. Recorded at one of the Fez shows (but not released) was another version of Ghosts Of American Astronauts.
Trash Can Sinatras – Ghosts Of American Astronauts (Live at Fez, New York December 2004)
You can tell a lot about a band from their choice of covers. The Trashcans have tackled a fair few in their time and they always like to add their own unique stamp to it. Imagine my surprise then, when years later I discovered The Mekons’ original version via the world wide web. The Trashcan’s version is something of a carbon copy. Why would you want to mess with anything as good as this though?
That’s Moondog, the blind composer, poet and inventor of all sorts of weird ‘n wacky instruments. For twenty or so years he lived on the streets of New York, sometimes dressed head to toe in full-on Viking garb, earning himself the title ‘The Viking of 6th Avenue‘. Moondog always composed his musique concrète from the street sounds of daily Big Apple life, turning honking traffic horns and street corner spats into snaking, rhythmic pieces of music. The most cult of cult figures, he makes Yoko Ono come across like Will.I.Am by comparison.
MoondogDo Your Thing:
1978’s H’art Songs featured Do Your Thing, a childish, reedy-vocalled, piano-led baroquish, sunshine piece of pop that wouldn’t have sounded out of place on The Kinks’ We Are The Village Green Preservation Society LP.
As a one-off curio, it’s a nice wee song. And while I can’t vouch for the rest of Moondog’s output, I suspect it’s perhaps not as accessible as Do Your Thing. One person who might know is Gerry Love, who’s Lightships project first brought Do Your Thing to my attention.
LightshipsDo Your Thing:
Lightships‘ version comes vibrating out of the haze towards you, shimmering softly in the July heat like a frisbee forever floating, edges morphing out of shape under the glare of the midday sun with three chords, double-tracked whispered vocals and a tinkling glockenspiel with its arm wrapped around a twanging guitar for comfort. It calls to mind the hissing of summer lawns, the far-off laughs of children and melted tarmac on the pavement. Your hayfevered eyes and nose might be flowing uncontrollably like a mountain stream but this record will surely cure you. I could listen to it forever.
One of the high points of a ridiculously brilliant project, Gerry Love’s transcendent cover of Do Your Thing first appeared a couple of years ago on the b-side (the b-side!!) of the Sweetness In Her Spark single, tucked away for the ears of only trainspotters and completists. The true sound of summer, now is the time to liberate it.
See this World Cup? It’s fairly playing havoc with my writing schedule. Anyway, watchin’ that Fellaini fella play for Belgium earlier on had me reaching for my Sly Stone *LPs.
Sly Stone‘s 4th album with the Family Stone was Stand!, an LP choc-full of call-and-response male/female vocals, fuzz bass, horn blasts and a swaggering pop funk that’s untouchable. When highlighting the genius of Sly, the critics will always go for the moody, lo-fi introspective paranoia of There’s A Riot Goin’ On, but if you want an album to soundtrack your summer, you need only reach for Stand!
As well as the title track, the LP hurtles along on a wave of prime-time Sly – Sing A Simple Song, Everyday People, Don’t Call Me Nigger Whitey, I Want To Take You Higher. All tracks I’m sure you’re familiar with. Tucked away in the middle of the first side is the album’s hidden masterpiece – Somebody’s Watching You.
Always missing from the various Sly ‘Best Ofs’ that clutter up the virtual racks of hyperspace, Somebody’s Watching You deserves your attention. It’s Sly in miniature – songbird-sweet female vocals filling the gaps between Sly’s bottom-of-a-well baritone, a horn section that parps away in happiness exelsius, a choppy, descending guitar riff, with a tasteful electric piano and organ fleshing the whole thing out. The fact that Sly had the genius to add the poetically rhythmic Shady As A Lady In A Moustache line makes it even better.
Sly & The Family Stone – Somebody’s Watching You
Those songbird-sweet vocals were provided by Sly’s little sister Vaetta and her 2 gospel-loving pals Mary and Elva. They were collectively known as Little Sister and provided backing vocals on much of the Family Stone’s output from Stand! onwards.
With a bit of commercial success under his belt, Sly brokered a deal with Atlantic Records that would allow him to write and produce (and occasionally feature on) tracks by other artists.
Between the release of 1969’s Stand! and it’s 1970/71 follow-up There’s A Riot Goin’ On, he recorded and released 2 Little Sister singles. The first, You’re The One, was Sly-lite r’nb funk by numbers, all popping bass and groovy bass runs.
The second was an astonishing version of Somebody’s Watching You. Often credited as being the first track to feature the rudimentary beat of the nascent drum machine, Little Sister’s Somebody’s Watching You is darker and moodier than the original but no less than 100% Sly. Sparse and skeletal, there’s nothing much to it at all. It starts as if half-way through, with the girls’ whispered vocals and murky instrumentation drawing you in. A guitar wah-wahs until then end of never and the Fender bass is set to ‘groovy’ once more. The whole thing is over and done with in less than 3 minutes. Hardly the perfect pop song, but highly influential – the girls’ falsettos coupled with the funk instrumentation and gentle pitter-patter of the drum machine could almost be a blueprint for Prince – you can practically hear him writing The Ballad Of Dorothy Parker as this record spins.
Little Sister – Somebody’s Watching You
Click here to read more about the recording of Sly’s There’s A Riot Going On. It’ll help you make sense of the advert below…
*Aye, OK. I stuck them on the trusty old iPod while I painted my knackered and faded garden furniture. Looks great now. If anyone would like to give me some Sly Stone vinyl, feel free to get on touch.
1967 was The Summer Of Love, although for the Rolling Stones it was anything but. By now, Brian was an extreme liability. Totally lost to drugs, puffy-eyed footage of the time shows him incapable of doing practically anything. His knack of being able to get a tune out of any exotic instrument hadn’t quite deserted him yet. Otherwise, he’d have been kicked out of his own band earlier than he eventually was. A trip to Tangier with doppelganger girlfriend Anita Pallenberg ended with Anita returning to Britain in the arms of Keith, who’d circled the troubled couple like a shark sniffing blood. Band dynamics, unsurprisingly, were irreparably damaged forever.
Amidst the chaos, the Stones found time to travel far and wide, not in the sense of a touring pop group, but as well-moneyed young tourists. Marrakesh became a favourite haunt. There, they’d met a dealer who introduced them to hashish, importing the drug back into Britain in the soles of custom-made shoes. At a party at Redlands, Keith’s very big house in the country, the Stones plus their girlfriends were subjected to a raid by police acting on a tip-off. The tabloids of the day set right into the Stones, with outlandish stories of a drug-taking, naked orgy. ‘Nude Girl At Stones’ Drugs Party‘ , ‘Why Girl Was Wearing Only Rug‘, ‘”Merry Nude” In Slipping Rug‘. Nothing much has changed, eh?
During the ensuing trial, prosecutors claimed that the only woman in the house, Marianne Faithful, was dressed in nothing but a fur rug that she let slip occasionally. They claimed that her lack of inhibition was a clear sign she was under the influence of drugs, specifically cannabis. Let’s face it, she probably was. By the end of the trial, the Stones were made examples of. Mick and Keith were subsequently sentenced to jail, Mick for 3 months for possession of amphetamines and Keith for 12, for allowing cannabis to be smoked in his home. Immediately they appealed against their sentence.
Pop fans and friends in high places voiced their opinions. Keith Moon and girlfriend Kim Kerrigan joined in the protests. William-Rees Mogg, the editor of The Times famously wrote an editorial that argued the Stones’ case, saying that if Mick and Keith were jailed they’d be seen as martyrs to a cause, and that would not help the anti-drugs movement in any way, shape or form. The Stones continued to craft out half-hearted tracks for their forthcoming Satanic Majesties Request LP, the shadow of the gaoler hanging grimly upon their shoulder. It wouldn’t be until the end of July that their appeal would be upheld.
Free men by August, Mick, Keith and the rest of the Stones gathered to create one of their most astonishing pieces of music.
Rolling Stones – We Love You
We Love You was recorded as a ‘thank you‘ to the fans who’d stood by them. Beginning with the clattering of a jail door and a nagging, repetitively hypnotic Nicky Hopkins piano line, it‘s a droning, paranoid anthem of defiance, a two-fingered salute to the establishment who’d tried and failed to squash them.
A barely functioning Brian hammers out a wonky mellotron riff that parps throughout like the wasted half-cousin of The Beatles’ All You Need Is Love and the backing vocals (featuring an uncredited Lennon and McCartney ‘conducted’ by a visiting Allen Ginsberg) slur and slide into oblivion.
“They looked like little angels,” Ginsberg wrote later of the Stones and Beatles, “like Botticelli Graces singing together for the first time.”
Bill Wyman’s bassline that plays just behind the piano riff is in equal parts terrifying and extraordinary, creating a level of helpless claustrophobia that’s not been matched since. Keys jangle menacingly, gaolers’ footsteps echo throughout and the whole thing swirls down the plughole with a Made In Marrakesh fuzz guitar overload.
The band even went so far as to make a promotional video to accompany it. Aping their recent trials and tribulations, no-one at the BBC dared show it. The least poppiest of Stones singles to date (their 13th), it peaked at a disappointing number 8 in the UK.
* Bonus Track!
For a brief moment in time between ’89 and ’90, my friends and I deserted the favoured local indie disco for the far more exotic charms of the Metro in Saltcoats, a sticky-carpeted former old cinema where I’d seen Star Wars in the first week of release. The Metro was packed full of brickies, bastards and jail bait but had an anything goes policy to what was loosely termed ‘dance music’. Two years later and it’d be a hell hole, but for a brief moment in time it shone as brightly as the summer sun. The Strangler’s Peaches bassline played out behind some generic four-to-the-floor dance beat one memorable night. One other time they played this…
4 For Money – It’s A Moment In Time
Sampling a sped-up We Love You piano riff and adding a gospelly male shouter on top was hardly groundbreaking (and these days it sounds fairly rubbish) but when first heard this track was everything we wanted. A dance beat. And the Stones. And we were sure that no-one else inside the Metro knew it was a Stones’ track. The snobs that we were.
She’s On It was the Beastie Boys’ third single. A big, dumb, frat-boy rock/rap crossover, it provided the Beastie Boys with an instantly identifiable sound.
Prior to She’s On It, the Beasties had played tinny, rattly 150mph thrash punk with all the melodic appeal of Courtney Love’s fingers being scraped down a blackboard. She’s On It transformed their outlook towards music and was essentially the blueprint for the Beastie’s early career from thereon in, setting the stall out for what would follow until the end of the 80s – a trio of shouty/whiny/immature white boys’ voices hot-wired to a primitive beat box with a lowest common denominator rock riff welded underneath. Utterly fantastic, of course.
With all the unspoken telepathy of a bickering old married couple finishing one another’s sentences, from She’s On It in ’85 all the way to the band’s 40th and final single, 2011′s Don’t Play No Games, what I really like about the Beastie Boys is that almost every couplet they ever wrote is SHOUTED! for added emphasis;
There’s no conFUSION in her conCLUSION!
She wants to waste my TIME and that’s no deLUSION!
She’s On It has the mercurial hand of Rick Rubin all over it. The guitar riff that underpins the whole thing, something I’d always thought to have been an unlicensed sample from some straight up 70s rock anthem or other, appears to have been written and played by Rubin himself. I’m happy to be corrected, but if you ch-ch-check the credits on the record, that’s what it looks like.
By the time the solo has kicked in, you could be forgiven for thinking you’re actually listening to Fight For Your Right. All that’s missing is a sticky-fingered Volkswagen badge around your neck and the ‘KIIIIIICCCCKKKKK IIIIITTT!’ at the start. Considered too low-brow even for the Licensed To Ill LP, She’s On It was only ever released as a stand-alone single, although it appeared on the soundtrack to pseudo Def Jam biography Krush Groove and subsequent Beastie’s Best Ofs. But if you want the real Best Of the Beastie Boys, you need to buy Check Your Head. The critics might say Paul’s Boutique, but the smarter among us know differently. Don’t we?
Around 1993 I saw the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion open for the Beastie Boys at the Barrowlands. I can’t say I remember too much about their show except that Spencer kept hollerin’ “Bloooze Explozhun!” through one of those distorting 1950s bullet mics like a hooch-soaked preacher from the deep south. That and the fact I ordered then waited about 2 months for the band’s Afro 7″, which, at that point in time was just about the most exciting thing I’d ever heard.
By some strange quirk of coincidence, the JSBX recorded a version of She’s On It for this year’s Record Shop Day.
A group playing sans bass can go one way or t’other, but the Blues Explosion nail She’s On It to the floor, staple it to r’n’b standard Jack the Ripper and give it a good Chelsea-booted, skinny-legged kicking, Big Muffs on overdrive, bullet mics in the red. All that’s missing is that “Bloooze Explozhun!” shout repeated more than once.
By another strange quirk of coincidence when I first heard this, I thought it was just about the most exciting thing I’d heard this year. Not now though. That honour goes to Frank Ocean’s Hero track. Hip hop doo wop with half the Clash on backing instrumentation. You should seek it out.
Bo Diddley. Doesn’t/didn’t get the credit he deserved when it comes to the foundations of rock and roll. Yer Chuck Berrys and Little Richards are undeniable founding fathers of the thing that brings us all here, but so too was Bo. It’s amazing how many bands/records have been influenced by his flat scrubbed approach to the blues. (Off the top of my head) without Bo no Not Fade Away. No Willie & the Hand Jive. No I Want Candy. No Magic Bus. No How Soon Is Now? The list is endless, and some proof at least that Bo was a giant among mortals.
Bo’s 2nd single Diddley Daddy had a track called She’s Fine She’s Mine on the b-side;
She’s Fine She’s Mine is all reverb, shimmer and twang, a three chord blues carried along by rudimentary maraca percussion and a wailing harp. Borrowing heavily from it, Willie Cobbs‘ cut his own hollerin’ dustbowl blues version, re-titling it You Don’t Love Me. The young Brian Jones was certainly listening closely by this point, as was Buddy Guy who re-wrote it as You Don’t Love Me Baby in 1965.
By the late 60s, with The Kinks, Beatles and Who reaching a creative peak, the sticky-fingered garage bands were listening closely enough to appropriate the best bits, with not one but two bands taking You Don’t Love Me and creating terrific slices of angst-wridden melodramatic teen pop, allowing their efforts to escape the confines of the dusty garage long enough in order to be commited to the confines of 7″s of dusty vinyl. Vinyl that would ultimately be unloved and for the main part vastly unheard by almost everyone.
Kim And Grim‘s swingin’ alley cat version of You Don’t Love Me adds Hannah Barbera-style backing vocals and replaces all brass riffs with the same melody played on scratchy twangin’ guitar. Richard Hawley must surely be a fan of this record. Great music to sweep floors to as well;
The Starlets‘ version is wee a bit rougher around the edges, and a whole lot more thrilling for it. A pre Glitter Band caveman stomp of handclaps and brainless tub thumping it adds some terrific ear-splitting guitar that would appear almost note-for-note one year later on The Other Half’s Mr Pharmacist (later done in almost note-for-note fashion by The Fall. But you knew that already).
Fast forward into the next decade and the song had grabbed the attention of the Stax recording studio. In 1971, Barbara & the Browns cut a fine southern soul version, incorporating both twanging guitar riffs and brass underpinned by electric keys and a backing section (The Browns) that shoo-be-doo and ad-lib like a low-rent end of the pier Supremes tribute act. Which is a compliment, obviously.
20 or so years later and the song hit the charts once again, this time as a dubby, skanking Jamaican reggae track. Dawn Penn took her version to the Top 10 of umpteen countries around the world, doing the decent thing by ensuring Willie Cobb received an equal writing credit (though not Diddley). As he should. Although, while the skeleton of Penn’s version is undoubtedly based on Bo’s original and Cobb’s arrangement, musically it is on another plain.
I wonder if, back in the 50s, Bo Diddley knew just how far his wee song would travel. I doubt it. That’s the power of music folks. And it just goes to show that nothing’s original, no matter how much you might believe it is.
Six Of The Best is a semi-regular feature that pokes, prods and persuades your favourite bands, bards and barometers of hip opinion to tell us six of the best tracks they’ve ever heard. The tracks could be mainstream million-sellers or they could be obfuscatingly obscure, it doesn’t matter. The only criteria set is that, aye, they must be Six of the Best. Think of it like a mini, groovier version of Desert Island Discs…
Paul Donoghue is the Clash-obsessed bass player with Glasvegas. No stranger to a large tub of Brylcreem and seemingly always dressed from slicked-back bequiffed head to pointy-booted toe in none-more-black, he looks like a big drip of a Simonon-silhouetted oil slick, all monochrome mood and menace. Don’t be deceived by the image though. Get talking to him and you’ll quickly discover an eloquent speaker, one who loves music just as much as you or I.
I’ve liked Glasvegas since the first LP. The raybans, the hair, the pillaging of rock ‘n roll sound and vision. ‘My name is Geraldine and I’m your social worker’, ‘Your da’, he’s gone’, ‘No sweeping exits, no Hollywood endings’. It’s modern folk music for retro-looking music fans.
Of course, Glasvegas kinda divide many people. “Derivative,” they say. “Nothing original“. It’s easy to play ‘name that tune’ with some of their records, their influences are wide and fairly obvious, but I think that familiarity is what makes them an enjoyable listen. The many people who like them might never have consciously listened to a Ronettes track or any random album from Creation Records back catalogue. Equally, the many people who like them could just as well own every album on the Creation label and the Phil Spector Back To Mono box set. There’s nothing wrong with familiarity in music. Throbbing Gristle are unlistenable. With Glasvegas, the listener doesn’t have to try too hard. You know when the solo is going to come in on early rock ‘n roll records. You know when that third chord is going to appear on a Ramones track. You know when Iggy will grunt ‘n growl between Stooges lines. Likewise, you know exactly when James Allan will ad lib ‘yea-ah, yeah!’ between Glasvegas lines. You know that their records will sound like a big bucket of Phil Spector has been flung over them. It’s familiar and it’s good. And who can argue with three albums and umpteen pan-global tours sharing stages with some of the biggest bands on the planet?
A tremendous raconteur, Paul has a wealth of totally unpublishable tales featuring Noel ‘n Liam ‘n Ian McCulloch. You’d like him. Just back from a successful tour of America’s far-flung places and looking ahead to the summer festivals, Paul took time out to tell Plain Or Pan six of his favourite tracks. They might not be obvious influences, but all make sense if you are familiar with the music Paul plays. The first track, for instance, has a bass line that Paul could have written. Maybe he nicked it…
Pink Glove by Pulp.
This is probably my favourite song, and has been for a while. I have loved Pulp for a long time. When I first started listening to music it was 1994 and Britpop was in full swing. Oasis were the best band in the world to me, as I’ll mention later, but Pulp were a band I liked, but didn’t listen to a lot. Looking back now, I think that Pulp have by far the best songs of that time. They tell stories of a side of Britain that not a lot of people talk about. A seedier, almost macabre side that lies beneath the stiff upper lip and suburban doors. This song is a great example of this, the lyrics telling a story of dressing up and the pitfalls that brings. At least, that’s what it says to me. Maybe that’s more a vision into my psyche than a view of the song!
Supersonic by Oasis.
This was the first song I ever learned to play on the bass. It’s a very simple bass line, but when I learned it, it made me realise that I could be a musician, that it wasn’t out of reach and for people who were maestros. I think Oasis did this for a lot of people who joined bands or picked up a guitar. When they first came out, they forced their way into almost everyone’s attention. I have friends who don’t listen to much music just now, but will always listen to Definitely Maybe and What’s The Story. This is a great testament to what this band meant to people.
Chelsea Hotel #2 by Leonard Cohen.
I never listened to Leonard Cohen until about a year ago, but since then he has become one of my favourite artists. The poetry in his lyrics is amazing, and the variation of the different styles he has made songs in is astounding. Listening to songs like “Hallelujah” and “First, We Take Manhattan” are like listening to two different artists. This is one of the very few songs that have almost made me cry. Especially the line “we are ugly but we have the music”. Another great love song.
I’m Going Slightly Mad by Queen.
Another band that I love. I remember watching live at Wembley and being blown away by how much energy they put into their live show. For the first twenty minutes they didn’t stop, and worked the audience up into a frenzied state. This song is a departure from that. The lyrics are perfect for the song too, they are out there enough to make you believe this is madness. I love the line “the kettle is boiling over ; I think I’m a banana tree”. Genius.
Perfect Day by Lou Reed.
This is a song that makes me very emotional every time I listen to it. Even before the great man died, every time I listened to it, it made me feel sad and happy at the same time. I also really connected to the lyric, “I thought I was someone else, someone good”, for reasons I won’t go into here. I think most people can relate that to their own life at some point. It’s such a simple song too, but to do that it takes true genius, like Lou Reed had in abundance.
Absolute Beginners by David Bowie.
When my wife and I decided to get married, one of the easiest things to organise was our first dance. We chose this song because it is one of the greatest love songs ever written. Bowie always impresses me with his lyrics, both the abstract and the objective. It tells you that if you love someone, then it makes the hard times that much easier.
BONUS TRACKS!
Here‘s Glasvegas (or rather, just James, an end-of-the-prom twangy guitar and minimal keyboard washes) doing Queen’s I’m Going Slightly Mad, from a 2011 session on Minnesota Public Radio.
Just an observation, but the vocal ad libs at the end recall Lee Mavers’ ad libs as The La’s Looking Glass collapses in on itself and swirls frantically down the plughole.
No mention of Glasvegas is possible without referring to their best track, I’ve written about The Prettiest Girl On Saltcoats Beachbefore. Here’s a snippet:
It begins with gentle waves crashing on the shore. Clearly a sample from some long-forgotten sound effects album, cos if you’ve ever been on Saltcoats beach you’ll know that the waves don’t break gently on the sand.
There are 2 kinds of waves in Saltcoats: 1. The big ones you get when it’s the middle of winter, blowing a gale, snowing and freezing and the TV cameras are there. And 2. The splashback from the Arran ferry as it comes into dock in Ardrossan, just up the beach.
So, sound effect waves.
The band provide the drama as the track unfolds in melancholy fashion, all vibraphone, reverb, shimmer and twang. It reminds me a lot of those early Trashcan Sinatras b-sides (like ‘Skindiving‘ – go seek it out). It ebbs and flows like the tide on the Firth of Clyde, crashing to a fade once again with those lapping waves on the Saltcoats shore. ‘The Prettiest Girl On Saltcoats Beach’ is truly bathed in melodrama and pathos.
It makes Saltcoats sound like the most (cough) romantic place on Earth.
Clearly it isn’t.
If you’ve ever been to Saltcoats during the Glasgow Fair Fortnight you’ll know what I’m talking about. Dressed head to toe in Rangers or Celtic regalia, they come down to our bit of the world armed with crappy-ringtoned mobiles and plastic footballs, to eat our ice cream and litter the beach with empty bottles of Buckfast. And that’s just the women. To be called the prettiest girl on Saltcoats beach is a bit of hollow praise. But Glasvegas must’ve been down on a good day.
‘The Prettiest Girl On Saltcoats Beach’ does for Glasvegas what ‘The Boys Of Summer’ does for Don Henley. It’s a Scottish love song of the highest order. Burns would’ve been proud. In fact, I’d say it’s right up there on a par with Morrissey’s best work. He’d do a great version of it. And that would be something, wouldn’t it?
And after that build up…if you’ve never heard it, here it is…
Green and Brown. My colour blindness wasn’t apparent until Primary 7 when, as you do in Ayrshire schools, the class created a Robert Burns Tam O’ Shanter frieze. My job was to do the tree next to the bridge where poor Tam’s horse has her tail yanked off by the pursuing witch. My tree had, yes, brown leaves and a green trunk and I had no idea why I was the laughing stock of the school for the next few weeks. An official colour blindness test proved this a few months later. Now I know.
Here I Am (Come And Take Me) was a top ten hit for Al Green in 1973. A brilliant piece of tight ‘n taut southern soul, producer Willie Mitchell has the uncanny knack of making it sound as if the drums are playing right there in the room with you. A warm Hammond vamps throughout, mixed in just behind the brass section while the Reverend’s vocals flit across the top, emotion squeezed out of his voice the way you or I might wring the last remaining drops of juice from a real lemon when following a Jamie Oliver pasta recipe to it’s fat-tongued conclusion. Got. To. Get. Every. Last. Drop. Out. Of. It. Cost. Me. Forty. Nine. Pee.
Green
Al Green’s track is terrific. Of course.
Here I Am Baby was a superb rocksteady version of Green’s track by his skankin’ namesake Al Brown. My version comes from one of those excellent Soul Jazz Records Dynamite compilations (300% Dynamite, I think) that really ought to be in everyone’s record collection. Many of the tracks featured are rubadub reggae versions of popular soul hits – the Jamaican musicians tuning into US radio would hear the originals, get the band together, roll a fat one, play it at half speed and claim it as their own. Al Brown was no different. Dubby bass, chukka-chukka backbeat and a Casio keyboard player with his (or her) own idea of what constitutes a meandering solo, it’s a rather spliffing made-in-the-shade perfect partner;
Brown
Ironically, Al Brown would go on to make a name for himself in The Paragons, whose The Tide Is High would somehow filter its way back across the airwaves to New York where Blondie were fortuitously tuning in. And that folks is how the music world goes around.
Plain Or Pan 