Category: Cover Versions

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!

 

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.

 

 

Cover Versions

S’a Twin Axe Attack!

Craig McAllister

There’s a Trashcan Sinatras video clip from many years ago that at least one member of the group would like to make disappear, so in the interests of maintaining a healthy friendship I’ll refrain from uploading it here. Google and YouTube is your friend though. The video is filmed at Japan’s 2009 Fuji Rock festival and features Paul and John from the band being asked their ideal festival line-up. The pair of them have evidently been enjoying the relaxing qualities of every musicians’ favourite – the jazz cigarette – and, grinning pleasantly and enunciating in a subtitle-necessary Ayrshire brogue, they reel off a list of cool and not so cool bands that would make for the ideal festival. “We would have King Crimson. Super Furry Animals. Supertramp! Sex Pistols…Radiohead…The Fall. The Band! We would huv The Band! Bob Dylan! And us!” It’s a very funny minute or so and you should definitely go and seek it out. Your week will be better because of it.

Of all those bands listed, it was Supertramp who popped up in my social feed this week, bizarrely enough.

We’ve recently put on a gig with Nerina Pallot. You might remember Everybody’s Gone To War, her one bona fide Top 20 smash hit from 2006? Nerina regularly fills places like the London Palladium and certainly doesn’t need to be putting a band together to play one-off gigs for 100 people in Irvine, but there she was. Needless to say, she was devastatingly brilliant, switching from electric guitar to acoustic to keys and back again, the stories between the songs just as entertaining as the music she played. I watched one man in the audience sit gape-mouthed for the entirety of her show, pinching himself that he was 10 feet from his favourite-ever artist…in our living room-sized venue…in his home town. Quite a thrill for all of us.

But back to Supertramp.

Over the Easter weekend there, Nerina shared one of those multi-cam videos of her playing all the parts to Supertramp’s Take The Long Way Home. From first clanging gothic piano chord and tension-building strings via the sweeping, sighing melody and none-more-seventies FM rock guitar solo on the vintage SG to the whispered ending, it’s a terrific version of a song I’ve (shhhh!) long held affection for.

In a world of Smiths and Bunnymen (and even Hipsway and Love and Money), you just couldn’t admit to liking Supertramp. That Breakfast In America album, ubiquitous and airbrushed and gazillion-selling as it was was just far too polished for a quiff-topped bedroom guitar player who was far more concerned with the angle of the jangle than, y’know, the art of crafting a song. The singer’s helium-coated voice was plain weird and didn’t do much to convince anyone I knew to listen closely, and the proggy/AOR stylings of the group were the very antithesis if what it meant to be a teenager in the mid ’80s…yet there they were, hanging around the album charts, selling gazillions of records and getting globally successful. Though no one would admit to liking them.

You could take a chance on Supertramp via Irvine Library, and take a chance I did. I probably asked my mum to bring Breakfast In America home after work one night (she worked there) lest I be seen with something as unhip and middle of the road on the long walk home (long way home?) through Irvine Mall. Take The Long Way Home was the one that got me. Not The Logical Song. Not the title track. And not Dreamer or the irritating It’s Raining Again (not on the same album, I know, I know…) Take The Long Way Home just stuck. Swathed in melody and tuneage, it sounded like a heady marriage of solo Lennon and solo McCartney, getting together for one last hurrah, the song’s descending/ascending tour de force of melody and melancholy the equal of Abba at their peak. The verses are hopeful, the choruses resigned, the production supreme. To these ears, it is, like Gerry Rafferty’s Baker Street and Right Down The Line, a humbly accepted stone cold AOR/FM classic. (See also Rooms On Fire and Edge Of Seventeen by Stevie Nicks…Kim Carnes’ Bette Davis Eyes…Carly Simon’s You’re So Vain...AOR clearly has its moments.) The singer from Supertramp though. That voice just won’t do…

…which is why Nerina’s version is so goddam essential. She breathes new life into a song that’s lived inside of her since the days of mix tapes and spongey orange headphones attached to the Walkman and replicates the entire thing with the sort of elan that only she can muster; majestic piano, head-swirling Wurlitzer, mellifluous bass, gorgeous multi-stacked vocals…and a twin axe attack of sorts. I do believe you’ll like it.

Watch out too for Supertramp headlining when the Trashcans get to curate Meltdown.

Meltdown indeed.

Cover Versions

Something Good

Craig McAllister

Stevie Wonder’s trajectory is quite the thing. From Little Stevie Wonder to Motown hit machine, synth pioneer and auteur of funk to socio-political commentator, God-fearing introspective soulster and syrupy ’80s balladeering duetter to his undisputed status as one of the greats, his vast (and decidedly patchy) back catalogue has the lot.

Patchy it may be, but his run of albums in the early ’70s, from ’72’s Music Of My Mind to ’76’s Songs In the Key Of Life is a collection of hard-hitting, hit-packed and ideas-filled records matched only by David Bowie’s outpouring in the same spell. We tend not to say these sort of things while the artist is still with us but wait for the clamour when Stevie passes and that incredible run – five albums in four years – will be quickly elevated to Essential Album status.

What’s all the more amazing is that during this time, Stevie was writing not only for himself but for others too. He threw Superstition in Jeff Beck’s direction before immediately realising the error of his ways and (much to Beck’s annoyance) reclaiming it for himself. He produced an album for his ex wife, Syreeta Wright, worth seeking out if only for ‘Cause We’ve Ended As Lovers; heartbreak laid bare on record (and a track that Jeff Beck would go on to reinterpret to devastating effect).

And he wrote Tell Me Something Good for Rufus.

Have a watch at this smokin’ hot live version, from American TV.

Despite Wonder being nowhere near the record, it still bears all the hallmarks of prime time Stevie; whipsmart wakka-wakka clavinet, inventive and tuneful drumming, space between the notes for the funk to brew and on top of it all, a singer who packs a proper soulful punch.

The clip above is outrageously brilliant. For one, it’s played totally live and in the moment; no overdubs, no lip synching, not a bum note in earshot. Chaka Khan sits in the pocket, metaphorically and visually, occupying the space between the guitar players, a pocket dynamo in era-defining flared jeans, her sparkly top shooting laser beams of studio light straight outta the TV screen and into young and immediately hypnotised American minds. But don’t let the clothes and the hair and the looks detract from the fact that she tackles the vocal with everything she has; gritty and low, octave-jumping, quiet and sultry, skyscrapingly dramatic – the whole gamut of soul, in other words.

The players flanking either side of her swagger with a pure coked-up arrogance. The wild-eyed guy on voicebox is playing dripping wet funk on a Fender Musicman – Fender’s budget-friendly, entry-level electric guitar, his high-waisted trousers meeting the point where his shirt begins to button. The bass player, all bicep and lip curl and eye-catching crucifix (S’OK, mom and pop, I’ll have her back before midnight y’all) plays with pure instinctive feel. He knows he’s good too. The self-assured heavy breathing in the pre-chorus is, seemingly, right up his particular street. The bass face he pulls and those little self-satisfied gurns he does when he drops in a particularly funky line completes the look. His hands barely move, yet the groove thuds out in simpatico with the tight but loose drummer in dungarees. Either side of the drummer, the keys players drive it forward, clavinet morse-coding the melody, Fender Rhodes holding down the tune. And on top of it all, Chaka, delivering the sort of blistering vocal performance you’ve maybe only heard up until now on a Family Stone track, or perhaps that PP Arnold TV performance where she duets with Steve Marriott on that great ’68 performance of Tin Soldier. Seek it out…

So, yeah, it’s a great performance of a great song. A few months beyond this, Rufus would become Rufus and Chaka Khan, testimony, should it be needed, that the vocalist was perhaps the strongest piece of an extraordinarily soulful and funky jigsaw.

Cover Versions, Get This!

I Put A Spell On You

Craig McAllister

I know nothing about Chappell Roan. I doubt I’m slap bang in the middle of her? their? demographic anyway…but I do know the one big song. It was ubiquitous for a bit there and there’s no way you haven’t heard it and fallen for its hooky charm either. Pure pop and catchier than that flu that’s been doing the rounds recently, it hangs its hookline on its spelt out titular refrain. ‘Aitch Oh Tee-Tee Oh Gee Oh-oh, You can take me Hot To Go-oh!’ It was the first great example of spelling in a pop song since Gwen Stefani Hollabacked to tell us that, indeed, that shit was bananas, Bee-Ee-En-Ae-En-Ae-Ess, back in 2025.

It’s nothing new, spelling in songs. Otis and Aretha, of course. And The Kinks. And plenty of others. From Van’s gruff Northern Irish burr wrapping its way around Gloria (“Gee-Ell-Oh-Are-Aye-Ae“) to Patti’s wired and speeding East Village take on it; From Weller’s angry young punk spitting of “Ae-Pee-Oh-Cee-Ae-El-Wy-Pee-Ess-Ee-APOCALYPSE!” at the end of ‘A’ Bomb On Wardour Street to Faith No More’s long-shorted and muscular ‘Be Aggressive! Bee-Ee! Aggressive! Bee-Eee-Ae-Gee-Gee, Are-Ee-Ess-Ess-Eye-Vee-Ee!‘; from Al (then Edwyn) serenading us with ‘Ell-Oh-Vee-Ee Love‘ via little Johnny Thunders’ drawling nod to The Shangri-Las, ‘When I say I’m in love you best believe I’m in love, Ell-Yoo-Vee!” to Hall ‘n Oates’ blue-eyed ‘M-E-T-H-O-D-O-F-L-O-V-E‘, a bit of spelling goes a long way to providing the hook. Hot Chip employed the technique on Over And Over. Len’s Steal My Sunshine includes the line, ‘L-A-T-E-R that week.’  None other than the cryptic and idiosyncratic Mark E Smith sang about a ‘C-R-E-E-P’ when the song demanded it. Even our greatest writers are under the, eh, spell.

Which brings us to Warpaint.

The oil-on-water, slow dissolve approach they take to their own Billie Holiday is supreme.

“Bee-Eye-Ell-Ell-Eye-Eeh-Aitch-Oh-Ell-Eye-Dee-Ae-Wah-ay.“

It’s a sparse track. Cleanly picked guitars, some ambient, soft-touch bass, understated keyboards, a gentle snowfall of toms and cymbals, the overlapping vocals stirring the dusky, twilight air around it. That’s the work of a moonlighting John Frusciante, manning the desk and capturing the band exactly as they’d hoped. 

When the singing starts on the verses proper, you – as a pop scholar with an A+ in every one of your pop scholarly exams – will have immediately noticed they’re singing the verses to Mary Wells’ My Guy. But whereas Mary’s original is all frothing teenage effervescence, rattling along on excitable handclaps and giddy, upwardly climbing girl group vocals, Warpaint take the opposite approach. Theirs is languid and soporific, breathy and downbeat. Nothing you can say can tear me away from my guy, they exhale, with all the enthusiasm of the downtrodden and disenfranchised. If someone were to tell you this was a thinly disguised plea for help in a domestically abusive situation, you wouldn’t be that surprised. Nothin’ you could do cos I’m stuck like glue to my guy. Jeez.

Surely not.

“Bee-Eye-Ell-Ell-Eye-Eeh-Aitch-Oh-Ell-Eye-Dee-Ae-Wah-ay.“

In comes the refrain again, four voices melded as one, the group inching the song ever forward. Unspooling and unwinding in slo-mo, it stretches for over six sleepy and bleary-eyed minutes, voices drowning in reverb, guitars swimming in chorus and phase, the percussion being tackled with a little more muscle but no less finesse. Disciplined and majestic to the false ending and beyond.

Why Billie Holiday?

Apparently, the lyric was a place holder, the five syllable phrase borrowed from a poster in the band’s rehearsal space and utilised in song until a better set of words was arrived at. Couple that with the appropriation of My Guy and you have the notion of a fledgling band landing on their sound and trying quickly to find their feet. Great record, eh?

Cover Versions

Take It To The Bridge(rs)

Craig McAllister

At this time of year I feel kinda duty bound to uphold the seasonal theme of Christmas songs, but decent ones that remain underplayed and under appreciated are as thin on the ground as a field full of living turkeys two days before Santa arrives. Who needs the anxiety of trying to appear switched-on and smart-arsed enough in a barely-read blog post when there are floors still to wash, shops still to tackle and dining tables still to be extended?

Me, clearly.

Phoebe Bridgers has made it tradition since 2017 to release a cover of a Winter/Christmas-themed song in the run up to the big day. Released primarily for charitable causes, Bridgers does a neat line in shining a light on – yeah! – the underplayed and under appreciated songs that celebrate Christmas time (or the holiday season, as she more likely calls it.) Now, what I know about Phoebe Bridgers wouldn’t fit on the back of a £1.65 first class Christmas stamp (One pound sixty five!) but I do know that she is a member of Boygenius who played a terrific Beatles-inspired set on prime time US telly a year or so ago. I also know that she’s collaborated with artists as disparate as Taylor Swift and Ryan Adams. And I do know too that she has a voice that can melt even the coldest of hearts in wintertime; honeyed, pure, American. I should really investigate more.

Phoebe Bridgers  – Christmas Song

Bridgers’ Christmas 2018’s offering was this really great take on Christmas Song by McCarthy Trenching (a band from Omaha, not an implausibly named FBI agent who doubles as a front porch strummer from the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia). I know even less about McCarthy Trenching than I do about Phoebe Bridgers, but I do know Christmas Song is a cracking wee country heartbreaker, jerky and waltztime, with bar room piano and brushed snare, delicate female backing vocals and an undertow of regret running through it like an electric current. “It’s Christmas, and no-one can fix it,” goes the singer at the end as you sigh into your coffee. It’s a million miles (and several gazillion sales) from Slade and Wizzard…and all the better for it.

Bridgers adds steel drums – or a guitar that sounds like steel drums – to her version; gentle and pulsing and ringing, like a perfect Hollywood snowfall; subtly Christmassy, y’know? Her voice is tender and whispered in the verses, the way the world sounds when snow is falling outside and there’s no one in the street to spoil it. It’s skyscrapingly melodic and rich in the chorus, where she’s joined by a duetting Jackson Browne. Timpanis creep in, aided and abetted by gentle strings, almost apologetic sleigh bells and something approaching a multistacked choir, yet it never goes full blown Christmas. Like the original, it’s all the better for it. If you’re new to this song, I think you’ll like it.

 

Christmas bonus:

If you’ve never seen it, that Boygenius Saturday Night Live/Beatles-inspired performance is here:

Cover Versions

With My Mancheran

Craig McAllister

There was a smaller cousin of Raleigh’s Chopper bike called a Comanche. Being the cutting edge suburban youngster I was in the 1970s, I was sure I’d had one, but Googling a picture of it now, I’m not so sure I did. Maybe it belonged to my brother. Or Stuart Douglas. I dunno. There was also a third family member in the Raleigh clan; another native American-inspired bike called a Tomahawk. It too had all the features of its cousins – the long seat, the raised handlebars, big wheel at the back, smaller one at the front, a chain guarded sturdily against unwanted flare flappery, all welded to a frame heavier than Geoff Capes’ morning ablutions, the third bike in a trio of iconically-shaped ’70s must-haves.

Yeah.

The Stranglers – Golden Brown

I was always dazzled by The Stranglers‘ Golden Brown. It wasn’t just the zinging harpsichord rattling out at a weird time interval that did it. It wasn’t just that sudden and unexpected nylon stringed guitar solo, perfect in every way, with the singer adlibbing the melodic refrain as it played out like angels on a rare night off. It wasn’t just the song’s outro, with its closely knitted ‘ne-ver a…never a frown…‘ overlapping vocals – a neat trick that not many bands attempted back then or since.

And it wasn’t just the video, playing out on the Top of the Pops Christmas 1982 episode, where the band played in some exotic, ceiling-fanned, art deco-inspired place known as Radio Cairo, the harpsichord player stiff of back, his hands stabbing at the keys like a marionette puppet being worked from above, the bass player, louche and cool and leaning into his double bass like a dickie-bowed member of the Stray Cats, the drummer, as ancient as Egypt even then, his kick drum adorned with palm trees (I’m doing all this from memory, by the way, just in case the fact police are close by), or the singer, hands in pockets and bored, barely trying to sing, his Egyptian tan a handy shade of, eh, golden brown and lending his face the look of a kiss-curled Hollywood matinee idol while a caravan of camels mooches in silhouette past the Pyramids that did it.

Nope. The reason the song resonated then (and still) was due to its second line.

Golden Brown, texture like sun,

Lays me down, with my Mancheran

Mancheran. Mancheran? What were they singing about? Was this another bike –  the fourth – in the Chopper family? Another addition to Raleigh’s native-American inspired names for kids’ bikes? How didn’t I know? For 40+ years (count ’em) I’ve ran with the notion that Hugh Cornwell was singing about a fucking bike, until Sunday past when Guy Garvey played the song during his radio show. I turned it up. Loud and clear came the words:

Golden Brown, texture like sun,

Lays me down, with my mind she runs

Oh!

There’s never a frown when you finally grasp the lyric. With my mind she runs. Now it makes sense! Imagine spending most of your life thinking they’re singing about a bike. What do you mean it’s about heroin?

That’ll be the reason the song became a chart mainstay.

Keen to show a different side to their usual grizzled prog/punk output, The Stranglers convinced an uncooperative record company that Golden Brown should be the single that would prove their versatile chops to the world. Relenting, it was flung into existence amidst the rush of singles released for Christmas. A slow burner, by early January it was Radio 2’s Single of the Week and began steadily climbing the charts. As traction gained, JJ Burnel let slip that the song’s subject matter was perhaps darker than anyone thought and it swiftly disappeared from the playlists.

Banned records do what banned records will always do in this situation though, and Golden Brown continued to climb; Number 4 by the third week in January. Number 3 the week later, sandwiched awkwardly between Shakin’ Stevens’ Oh Julie and Bucks Fizz’s Land Of Make Believe. It would peak the following week, swapping places with Shaky but missing out on the top spot due to The Jam’s A Town Called Malice gatecrashing the party. It stayed at Number 2 for a second week. By the start of March it was still in the Top 30. Not bad for a quietly banned record.

A perennial cracker, it’s not a Christmas song by any stretch of the imagination, but plonk me in front of an old episode of Top of the Pops and I’ll always be reminded of that Christmas end of year appearance, marionette harpsichordists, ancient drummers, misheard lyrics ‘n all.

Here, made by clever folk on the internet, is Golden Brown cleverly mashed with that other popular wonky time-signatured chart hit Take Five. It’s quite the groove.

Dave Brubeck – Golden Brown

 

 

Cover Versions

Keep The Yuletide Gaye

Craig McAllister

’tis the season to flop on the sofa and self-loathe your way through a Hallmark film or three. Or four. You know the sort; good looking guy, jaw like a wedge of iron, neat hair perfectly shed and shined, turns up in small town America and falls for the attractive local schoolteacher, still living at home since her mum’s premature death, unable to leave her elderly and extremely rich father who just won’t cope without her. Somewhere in the storyline there’ll be charity work, siblings at war and log chopping in fake snow, our quiet yet self assured hero wearing a white t-shirt covered by a sleeveless body warmer, box fresh brand new Timberland boots on his manly feet, his soon-to-be love interest watching from the window as she hangs a particularly sentimental bauble on the perfectly-shaped Christmas tree (that the hunk-o-dude helped pick out and carry to his flat bed truck only yesterday). He flashes her a smile of dazzling white as his final chop splinters an exceptionally gnarly log clean in half and she sighs contentedly, knowing that her mother, dear mother, would have loved him too.

It’s something of a thing in our house to fly through the channels to the way high numbers until a Hallmark Christmas film is found. First to pick the plot apart and predict the outcome is the winner. It’s not difficult, and in the absence of anything better being on the telly, it’s good seasonal fun.

We were hanging our own tree at the weekend and I started ‘doing a Hallmark’ with each of the baubles, mid west American accent ‘n all;

“Aw, look! This is the one you made at nursery. How cute you were! And this is the one you painted at the dining room table when you were three. Remember you got green paint on it and it never came out?! Every bauble tells a story! And here’s the star! It’s still got the badly-printed picture of Dad blu-tacked to it – remember the Christmas he had Covid and couldn’t join us for dinner so we stuck him at the top of the tree to bring him closer to us? Aw! Every bauble tells a story! And look! Oh, look! Here’s the bauble we bought in Macy’s in New York a coupla years back…remember? How could you forget?! They were quite expensive but they had a 20% sale on, so we thought, what they hey, let’s get a bauble for everyone…and when we went to the counter the lady rang them up and when we queried the discount like the stoopid tourists we were she said they were priced at the discounted price already and the reason the amount was even higher than their combined price was because we had to pay tax on them – you gotsta pay tax on everything in America – and, oh how we laughed…except for your dad who was having convulsions at the total cost. Cute bauble, eh? Every bauble tells a story!”

If I was writing a Hallmark film, that’d be my plot; pick out the tree (they always pick out the tree), gather the family into the large, conservative living area and decorate it gaudily, each bauble picked causing the camera to fade to history, as the story of the bauble – and by association – the story of the film’s characters is told in flashback.

“And that’s how ma’ ended up with a broken back….and that’s why ol’ Gramps had ta sell the farm…and that’s why you were adopted, Michael. I was adopted?! etc etc.” It’s got legs, I tells ye.

Apropos of nothing connecting the music below to the words above, here’s Marvin Gaye doing Purple Snowflakes.

Marvin Gaye – Purple Snowflakes

A tinkling, light on its feet soul crooner, as delicate and gentle as a fresh Montana snow fall, Purple Snowflakes is Marvin’s own 1965 Tamla hit Pretty Little Baby, rewritten (some might say cynically) for the Christmas market. Nothing new in that, of course. Your favourite Christmas song and mine, Darlene Love’s Christmas (Please Come Home) was originally an anti-Vietnam r’n’b thumper called Johnny (Please Come Home). Lose the edgy war hero schtick, add some sleigh bells and a lyric about snow on the ground and voila! A holiday hit forever. You knew that already though.

Cover Versions, Hard-to-find

Skippery People

Craig McAllister

If y’know yr Bible, you’ll know that the ‘wheel inside a wheel’ idiom first appears in the book of Ezekiel. A phrase used to describe something that’s complex, maybe even over-complicated, it could well be applied to Slippery People, the Talking Heads track that hollers the words repeatedly in the song’s chorus. Not that Slippery People is over-complicated. It’s a straightforward groover of a pop song, but it’s certainly complex in arrangement, especially in its live incarnation.

The definitive version taken from Stop Making Sense was part of the holy trinity of 12″ records that soundtracked my mid-teens. Alongside Blue Monday and I Travel, it rattled on repeat from parents’ tinny living room stereos, its graphic equalisered grinding funk the foreground noise to teenage nonsense and Holsten-powered hijinks. My copy – an instant conduit to 40 years ago – has seen far better days. Low in gloss and sticky with fingerprints, it’s covered in Torvill and Dean-esque gouges of war, played to the point of death yet hanging on in there.

“…that gun, this part is simp…that gun, this part is simp…that gun, this part is simp…” (nudge) “try to recognise what is in your mind.”

“…What’s the matt…him…alright…..seven times five…come t..life…your eyes…” (and off it comes).

My Slippery People sticks and skips half a dozen times and has done for years, to the point that I should really take a Sharpie to its battered sleeve and rename it Skippery People. It’s unlistenable hell, truth be told. Any time it pops up anywhere other than on my own turntable, it really throws me when it plays through without interruption. Funny, that.

For clarity, let it to be said; that live version is a tremendous record.

Talking Heads – Slippery People (Stop Making Sense version)

The four principle Talking Heads are augmented here by bongos, bare-boned funk and minimal, morse-coding keyboards. Jerry Harrison on synth falls into a groove with David Byrne’s dirty funk guitar while Chris ‘n Tina, the husband and wife rhythm machine, play out a steady tune within the tune (wheel inside a wheel?).

On drums, Chris swings like Holger Czukay in a straightjacket, metronome-perfect, the solid bedrock that allows Tina to freestyle her bubbling offbeat notes up and down the frets as she sees fit. Clearly, there are grrreat bass players and then there’s Tina Weymouth. But you knew that already.

There’s ting-a-ling high notes on the keys, breakdowns that sound like faraway Coney Island ice cream vans in a July heat haze and Afrobeat levels of percussive flow from start to finish. The two backing singers who mirror Byrne’s spasmic jerks and respond to his “Whatsamattawithhim?” calls with enthusiastic “He’s alright!” shouts elevate the flatlining and linear studio version up, out and into the stratosphere.

Though these days he might have an ego matched only by the massive suit he wore on stage at the time, David Byrne’s gulping and hiccupping refrain remains the song’s key identifier. Magic stuff.

Compare and contrast with the science lab sterile studio version. I’ve warmed to its coldness in recent years, but having been spoiled by the live version first, it’s a clear second best to Stop Making Sense‘s polyryhthmic jamboree.

Talking Heads – Slippery People (12″ version)

The Staple Singers first had a go at Slippery People on a 1984 episode of Soul Train. Here, they emphasised the religious symbolism in the lyrics, pushed the girls’ gospel voices to the fore and turned it into a churchy song of high, high praise. Some switched on studio executive immediately had the quick thinking to frogmarch them straight into a studio where they then cut their own extended club version of the track.

Staple Singers – Slippery People (Club Version)

 

It’s fairly phenomenal, relying on Talking Heads’ studio original (and Burning Down The House‘s electro drum rolls) as its jumping off point, its overlapping synths and crashing drum machines set to maximum volume for ultimate ‘in the club’ effect. The guitars are, unusually for a Staples’ record, bereft of Pop’s usual wobbling tremelo but are instead suitably gritty and grindy. The bass line bends and bubbles in sympathetic harmony with the original. And the call and response refrains between the girls and their dad are joyful – listen to Pops deliver his lines and tell me he’s not having fun.

Backslidin’, how did we do? Pretty good, Pops. Pretty good.

Cover Versions, Get This!, Hard-to-find

Born Skanky

Craig McAllister

Them targetted ads, man. You don’t get nuthin’ for free. While you’re scrolling obliviously through social media, Zuckerberg’s and Musk’s analytics monkeys are harvesting your data; your likes and dislikes, the length of time you interact with something, the speed you scroll past, whether or not you click a follow-on link. It’s happening right now as you read – or don’t read – this. It’s all fed into the system and the next thing y’know, your timeline is full of desirables. You knew that already though. Mention car insurance to your significant other and sure as 4th gear follows 3rd, you’ll start to notice car insurance ads on your socials. I was tasked with booking Taylor Swift tickets a month or so ago and almost immediately I was being bombarded with ads for ‘the last remaining’ hotel rooms in Edinburgh. Turns out they were too.

I’m a sucker for well-placed social media marketing. In fact, the moment an eye-catching ad makes itself known, my PayPal account will be engaged before I’m fully aware of what I’m doing. The past couple of months has seen me buy a cord ‘shacket’, trainers, a sweat shirt, a 7″ EP with 4 reggaefied versions of James Brown’s Night Train and (imminently) this…

Sokabe Keiichi & Inokasira Rangers – Born Slippy

Yes! It’s a cover of Underworld’s relentless clattering techno thumper, used to great effect in Trainspotting and as such, the sound of 1996. You didn’t know you needed a cover of this, did you? Like all the best cover versions, it takes the original’s blueprint, throws it away and recasts the track in totally new light. This particular Born Slippy is slowed down, reworked and reborn as a laidback lilting rocksteady reggae cut from the sunbaked beaches of, eh, Tokyo-by-way-of-Kagawaken. It’s great, of course.

Off-beat organ, chicka-boom drums and scratch guitar, all reggae staples present and correct, but topped off with Keiichi Sokabe’s amazingly cod-Anglified vocals. “She was a lipstick boy, she was a beautiful boy…Let your feelings slip, boy, but never your mask, boy…Look at me, mum, squatting pissed in a tube hole on the Tottenham Court Road…Lager, lager, lager, shouting…” There’s a great wee slide guitar part that wheezes itself off and out in to the ether to introduce the “She smiled at you, booooy!” line, the Edge recast as a dreadlocked Japanese roots rocker. Listen out for it.

Turns out this was a track first released in 2017. The internet being the massive pool of never-ending music it is means that it may well have passed you by in the ensuing 6 years since. Luckily for all, Parktone Japan has just reissued it on 7″. It’s limited, so be quick.

In his day job, Keiichi Sokabe is vocalist in cult Japanese act Sunny Day Service, a band that’s never far from a 12 string jangle or well-worked harmony, and nothing like the track above. It turns out it’s the Inokasira Rangers who are the skank heads here. Back in 2016, the 4-piece ‘Rangers dispensed with a vocalist to play fantastic instrumental versions of the punk/new wave catalogue as authentic as The Upsetters at Black Ark with Lee Perry at the controls. The tracks coulda been straight out of 1972 or 2022, such is the Japanese approach to authenticity. A curio perhaps, but one worth further investigation. Want to hear Geno or Neat Neat Neat or What Do I Get? given similar treatment to Born Slippy above? Of course you do. The internet is your friend…