Category: demo

Cover Versions, demo, Gone but not forgotten

Moz ‘n Rockers

Craig McAllister

The Hand The Rocks The Cradle was the first track Morrissey and Marr composed together, not long after Johnny “with my hair like a loaf of French bread” knocked on Morrissey’s door and suggested they try and write some songs. What the legend doesn’t say is that Johnny was accompanied by a pal to keep him company on his walk across Stretford, but three’s a crowd in romantic stories, and so Johnny’s pal was quickly written out of the fairy tale.

Anyway.

Johnny presented Morrissey with a looping instrumental motif with shaky origins in Patti Smith’s Kimberly and the singer surprised the guitarist by producing a set of fully formed lyrics and mumbling quietly to himself while the mercurial Marr sketched out the basis of what would become one of the key tracks on The Smiths’ debut album, still a twinkle in its fathers’ eyes and a good 17 months from its February ’84 release. Those words of Morrissey’s had been written a couple of years previously, biding their time until fate intervened and a delighted Morrissey twisted his initial melody to fit Johnny’s guitar part – a move that would prove to be something of a feature throughout The Smiths.

The version of the track which closes the first side of that debut album sparkles with woven multilayers of spring rain guitar and overdubbed acoustics, the track chrome-polished, light and airy and at odds with the heaviness of the lyric. The version you really want to hear though is this early John Porter mix from October 1983.

The Smiths – The Hand The Rocks The Cradle (John Porter monitor mix, 1983)

It’s dense and atmospheric, Marr’s 12 string Rickenbacker rarely straying from the 5th fret, his arpeggiated A chord and ringing open-strings splashing occasional light on the otherwise gothic ambience. Andy Rourke, playing foil on the bass guitar, has the space to move the root notes through the chords with typical melodic aplomb, playing his trademark hiccupping half notes between the beat yet keeping the groove steady and in time to Mike Joyce’s heavily reverbed snare drum. It takes real discipline to keep this up for nearly five minutes and resist the urge to break out a solo or rest for a bar to change the dynamics. On this track, the three musicians are locked in and playing tightly for one another, an early signpost of how great The Smiths would become.

The first thing you notice about the John Porter version above though is, unlike 99% of The Smiths’ catalogue, not the usual dazzling array of guitars but the voice. Lone and mournful yet confidently soulful, it’s the sound of Morrissey coming out of his shell with a sympathetic producer on coaxing duties. He’s great here, is Morrissey. There’s no chorus, no melodic hook, no repeated refrain, yet he draws you in, has you zooming in on those words he carefully sculpted as a teenage bedroom hermit, the group almost (almost) not mattering for the moment. Heavy on poetic cadence and alliteration – ‘a piano plays in an empty room‘, ‘ceiling shadows shimmy by‘, ‘tease, torment, tantalize‘ – the song’s title was the initial working name for the debut LP, dropped possibly only after the song’s message of protective fatherhood and adult/child relationship was open to skewed accusations of paedophilia. All nonsense of course. Much has been said of Morrissey in recent times, but not even he is capable of such horrific ideas.

*Bonus Track

Sinead O’Connor– The Hand The Rocks The Cradle (venue, date unknown)

As this piece went to (cough) press, the death of Sinead O’Connor began to filter through. In the aftermath of The Smiths, Rourke and Joyce provided Sinead with a rhythm section for a handful of shows, where they played a nice arrangement of The Hand The Rocks The Cradle in the encores, closing the show with Sinead’s favourite Smiths track. Typically, I can’t track down a version with Rourke and Joyce backing Sinead, but I did find this solo version, Sinead playing straightforward open chords to give the whole thing the feel of some ancient Irish folk song, something I imagine The Smiths, with strong familial roots in Ireland, would approve of.

demo, Get This!

Dress Rehearsal

Craig McAllister

PJ Harvey has a new album just out. Other than one or two tracks from the radio, I’ve not yet heard it, but as I have done with all her records to date, I’ll get to it properly at some point and listen to it from start to finish, uninterrupted by onion chopping or the taxiing of kids, just as PJ would hope for. Ten albums in and Harvey shows no sign of compromise or lack of ideas – the mark of a true original.

She has a whole catalogue worth diving into. From the Patti Smithish Stories From The City to the metallic blooze of Uh Huh Her and the jangling olde worlde and sepia-tinted Let England Shake, Harvey’s output is nothing short of spectacular. Not perhaps instant, not necessarily chart-friendly, not ever the sort of music that’s worried itself with the fads and fashions of the day…and all the more urgent for it.

I’ve always really liked Dry, her debut album. Now 31 years old, it still thrills, its low-slung channelling of the blues sounding primal and sultry, combative and self-assured. Biblical references rub shoulders with filthy thoughts, gothic and strange and unexpected. The whole record is life laid bare, PJ’s life laid bare, to be more accurate. Harvey flung herself into the recording of it, convinced that it would be her one chance at making an album, and man!, it shows. Her first single, Dress, is a foreshadow of what would come on Dry.

PJ Harvey – Dress

A lone creeping guitar scratches out a rhythm. A snare drum (or possibly a *biscuit tin) dictates the beat. A silvery tambourine rattles haphazardly and the instruments fall into line. A scraping viola tears itself straight outta the grooves of The Velvet Underground And Nico and rips a metre-wide hole in the melody.

PJ sings despairingly about the pitfalls of wearing too-tight dresses, of trying to please the object of her desire even though it’s clear he couldn’t give two hoots about what she’s wearing. A Fall-ish/Pixies-ish one string guitar solo leads us into PJ’s falsetto – there’s not many Harvey tracks where she doesn’t slide up the octaves for dramatic effect – and the whole track now sounds more pressing, more insistent, the viola sawing away at the edges, the jackhammer beat of the rudimentary drum kit pummelling away like Mo Tucker on steroids.

It sounds live, like 3 or 4 musicians playing right in front of you, no fancy Dan production, no vogueish effects, just PJ and her band letting rip before the game is up and she’s ushered out of the studio to make way for another more palatable and chart-friendly artist. Harvey’s longevity would suggest that, thankfully, they knew they were onto something when they let her loose in the studio.

*Bonus Track

Dress Rehearsal!

Here’s the demo of Dress. Just a close-miked Polly and her pheromones, an acoustic guitar for company, occasionally filled out by that same scraping viola and a rough-hewn electric guitar that quite clearly fell off the back of Kurt Cobain’s pick-up truck. Wonderful stuff.

PJ Harvey – Dress (demo)

* that ‘biscuit tin’ comment was a bit unfair. Rob Ellis, PJ’s drummer of choice at the time, is a fantastic polyrhythmic percussionist and his complex patterns belie the simple structures of those early tunes. There’s not a group who wouldn’t be better if Rob was driving them from the back and that’s the truth.

demo, Get This!

And Now, A Word From Our Sponsors

Craig McAllister

What follows is the result of a blatant and barefaced attempt at getting something cool for free…and succeeding.

I’d noticed on Instagram that one or two musicians I follow seemed to endorse G7th Capos (the finest capos around, dontchaknow) so I speculatively suggested to the good folks who make them that if I were perhaps to reveal the finer details of the capo trick I showed to yr actual Johnny Marr a few years ago, I too might be worthy of such endorsement. Johnny himself is a G7th Capo user – he favours the Gen 1 model – and was genuinely tickled with my capo trick, so it stands to reason that I should be in receipt of a spanking new G7th Performance 3 capo should I share the secret.

The good people at G7th Capos not only concurred with the idea, they went as far as personalising a sleek satin black capo, just for me.

Magic!

The capo itself is solid and chunky yet light enough that you won’t even notice its weight when you’ve attached it to your guitar (acoustic or electric, it will work on either). Due to its unique Adaptive Radius Technology, there’s none of the string buzz or muted notes you might get from your current capo. You’ll not need to fine tune any of the strings. It’s designed to ensure fidgeting with it is kept to an absolute minimum – there are no screws to turn and adjust at the back. Through research and wizardry, the rubber pad cleverly distributes even pressure across all strings. Basically, clip it on, play immediately and you’ll sound clean, clear and in tune. That tapping you might hear in the background is the sound of sexy people at your window wanting to see who’s playing this beautiful capo’d music. Really, every guitar player should have one.

The G7th Performance 3 features a super-cool mechanism that allows the capo to be slid single-handedly by the player, even mid-song should the need arise. If you’ve ever seen Teenage Fanclub perform I Don’t Want Control Of You in concert, you’ll notice that Norman Blake performs a similar sleight of hand with his capo when the song’s key change kicks in. Years of playing the song live has enabled Norman to do this smoothly and almost unnoticed, unless, like me, you’re a geek for this sort of thing. So, yeah, I’m sure after a couple of hours experimenting with it, a G7th Capo should let you do this effortlessly too.

I wish I’d had one all those years ago when I stumbled upon the move – my signature move, if I may be so bold – while I was playing around with different tunings and looking for interesting open notes and how they rung out.

Here’s the trick. Make sure your guitar is in standard tuning then grab yr capo – a G7th Capo is clearly the preferred capo of choice – and do as follows:

Attach the capo to the 4th fret, but…

…attach it only across the bottom 5 strings so that the top E (the thinnest string) is still open. If you’re not a lucky G7th Performance 3 owner, sorry, but you may need to put your old capo on upside down and fidget about with the screw to make it fit better.

Next, play a standard C chord, but also place your pinky on the relative 3rd fret of the top string. Practise between pinky on and pinky off. It’s got a nice ring to it, hasn’t it? That’ll be due to the open E string playing alongside the ‘C’ chord which, when played at the 4th fret is technically an E chord. But enough of the hokey theory…you knew that already;

Mastered the pinky on/off strumming pattern with the C shape? Course you have. Now replicate that pattern, 3rd fret pinky included, by playing an A minor instead of the C. Once you’ve got the hang of that, begin playing a pattern between the 2 chords. Sounding good so far?

Let’s change it up a bit. Go to a standard open G chord. Strum it, then intersperse those strums by moving your finger (possibly your pinky, maybe your ring finger, depending on how you play a G) from top string, 3rd fret to 2nd string, 3rd fret. That open top E you’ll get when you remove your pinky now rings out loud and clear, the finger on the 3rd fret of the 2nd string helping to add a previously hard to get pleasing harmonic chime to the riffage.

Resolve your chord sequence by going back to the C chord, still with pinky on top string, 3rd fret.

At this point in our telephone conversation, yr actual Johnny Marr said, “Oh! Right! Run that past me again…C chord with pinky? A minor? G plus open E? I’m off to try that. Bigmouth and There Is A Light are played in that position. That trick might add something to them. Cheers!”

I suggested to Johnny that he throw in the odd D minor or E minor for extra colour. “You’ll get a good tune out of all of that,” I ventured. He said he’d have a play around with it, and for the moment, that was the end of that.

You can imagine the thrill, then, when a month or so later, we’re standing side by side having a chat after a triumphant show at Kilmarnock’s Grand Hall. By this point, Johnny’s met the fans, heard the stories, signed whatever’s been put in front of him, packed the tour bus and is in the process of saying goodbye. “Bye guys! Great show!” And off he goes. Then he turns, looks at me and with a glint in his eye says, “Oh yeah – neat capo trick, by the way! I’m gonna use that on something!”

And now you should too. Get yourself a G7th Capo and change your playing for the better.

Here’s Johnny’s demo of Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others. No capo required, unless you’re playing along to the live version from Brixton Academy. Same picking pattern, only you’ll need your capo on  the 4th fret for that version.

The Smiths – Some Girls Are Bigger Then Others (demo)

 

G7th Capos can be found here.

The Performance 3 Capo can be found here.

Check out their socials in all the usual places.

Check out Hope For Justice, the charity supported by Gth Capos.

Cover Versions, demo, Hard-to-find

How Come I Love Them More?

Craig McAllister

Some songs are just there, like staircases and steering wheels and stainless steel sinks, as much a part of the fabric of life as to be ubiquitous and ever-present, unnoticed or unthought of and maybe even taken for granted. Blue Monday might be one. Come On Eileen certainly is. To this list I’d add The Bluebells’ Young At Heart.

The Bluebells  – Young At Heart

You’ve heard Young At Heart, what, a hundred and seventeen times? A thousand and twenty four times? Seventeen million times in your life already? It’s just always been there, playing on an endless 40 year loop across the airwaves, a ‘hits station’ producer’s golden gift from the musical gods. Show in a slump and needing a toe-tapping lift? Reach for Young At Heart and its melancholic countrified hoedown will retain the listenership and have them baking tin bashing or dashboard beating all the way to the news and travel.

Young At Heart might seem overplayed to you. Or even stale. And you, yeah you, ya cloth-eared weirdo, you might never have liked it in the first place. You might never want to hear it ever again. But trust me though. You do.

I’ve been floating since Sunday night when, at St Luke’s in Glasgow, The Bluebells encored their album launch show with it. Well, of course they did. We may all have been there to hear the bulk of The Bluebells In The 21st Century played out live, with an extended Bluebells featuring the cream of Scottish musicianship – Mick Slaven! Douglas McIntyre! Campbell Owens! John McCusker! – but there was no way Bobby or the McLuskey brothers were going to deny their audience an airing of Young At Heart. Or I’m Falling. Or Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool. Or a soul-stirring Cath. That ‘Cath/You led me up the garden path‘ line has thrilled me since it first leapt from the grooves of the well-thumbed copy of Sisters I borrowed from Irvine library sometime in the mid ’80s and I was waiting expectantly for it to be delivered on Sunday night. It didn’t disappoint.

Young At Heart though. Ken, David and Bobby acknowledge its place in their history. With the band’s name spoken on the airwaves with every passing play and still in the collective conscience of an increasingly attention-span ravaged nation, it’s perhaps the reason The Bluebells are even still making records.

Young At Heart is a song that’s been very kind to its writers. Maybe not ‘Sting owns a vineyard in Italy’-levels of kindness, but I’d wager that Bobby Bluebell and Bananarama’s Siobhan Fahey, London Records’ golden couple at the time of its writing (and latterly Bobby Valentino, the player who provides the song’s signature violin motif and whose session fee was substantially upgraded years later to a writing credit) have done fairly well from it’s continual presence.

Bananarama  – Young At Heart

Bananarama’s version was the first to be released, a deep cut in the parlance of nowadays, and one that you’ll find on their debut album Deep Sea Skiving. It follows the blueprint of the original Bluebells’ demo; slightly reserved chorus, one dimensional verse, a bit flatly produced even, but whereas Bananarama half-heartedly do their best Supremes’ impression and don’t really know where to go with it, The Bluebells original version is a totally realised slice of pop/soul – and, as it turns out, a bit of an undiscovered beauty.

The Bluebells  – Young At Heart (demo)

It’s got that talc-dusted northern backbeat. Soaking wet slapback funk guitars. There are squelches of Rip It Up electro-synth woven between the words. Live, it was sometimes performed (like many bands of the time) with a stabbing brassy rash of Jam Trans Global Express horns. The whole thing is speed-freak Dexys hacked into the Wigan Casino’s electrical circuit and spat out in Glasgow’s West End. Essential listening, it goes without saying, and almost as thrilling as the masterpiece they eventually released.

Imagine writing a song that still resonates with anyone who hears it over 40 years later. Imagine! There’s not a songwriter on the planet who wouldn’t kill for a song like Young At Heart. Cherish it.

 

 

 

Alternative Version, demo, Hard-to-find

Paris In The Spring

Craig McAllister

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,
Alternative Version, demo, Hard-to-find

Christmas Rapping

Craig McAllister

This was timed to go out a couple of days ago, then hastily postponed to make way for the Terry Hall stuff. By comparison it seems trivial now, but I can’t save it for the new year, so on with the show, as they say.

Yule dig this…

Remember Flexipop!? Back at the start of the ’80s, when the freshest of music was borne from a creative and punkish, DIY attitude, a couple of disillusioned Record Mirror writers started Flexipop! magazine. Adopting a maverick approach to publishing that was similar to the bands of the music it would feature, Flexipop! flouted the rules of their game and, in a blaze of cut ‘n paste ‘n Letraset ‘n day-glo fonts gave Smash Hits, Number 1 and even the hallowed trio of inkies a run for their money. Their star would burn briefly – 37 issues (one issue a month for three years) – but brightly.

Their USP? Every issue of Flexipop had a free 7″ flexidisc stuck to the cover. Sometimes single-sided, sometimes double, and sometimes even a 4-track EP, each flexi contained a unique, can’t-be-found anywhere else recording of that issue’s cover star; The Jam‘s Pop Art Poem on see-through yellow plastic, for example, or a luminous, Fanta-orange pressing of The Pretenders Stop Your Sobbin‘ (demo, of course), even a 23 second recording of Altered Images wishing you a happy new year, and this… Blondie and Fab 5 Freddy riffing and rapping, some of it loosely Christmas-related, across the top of the demo to Rapture.

Blondie & Fab 5 Freddy – Yuletide Throwdown

Ice-cool Debbie: Hey – you don’ look like Santa t’me. I never saw a Santa  Claus wearin’ sunglasses!

Freddy: Cool out, without a doubt!

Ice-cool Debbie: Merry Christmas, ho ho ho!

And off they go, Freddy telling the listener where he grew up, Debbie pre-empting Run DMC and the Beastie Boys by double tracking him on the line ends, referencing guns, disco and ‘the nicest snow’ – which is possibly not a reference to the inclement weather. 

Debbie Harry, Fab 5 Freddy, Grandmaster Flash, Tracy Wormworth (bass, The Waitresses), Chris Stein

Christmas duets come in all shapes and sizes; Bowie ‘n Bing, Shane ‘n Kirsty and now Debbie ‘n Freddy. Lost to the archives, Blondie re-discovered Yuletide Throwdown a year ago while pulling together the material that would make up their catch-all box set.

It’s an interesting peek into their creative process, the version here replete with those descending chimes and rinky-dink funk guitar, the horn motif and Debbie’s ‘Ra-ah-pt-yoor!‘ refrain, yet sluggish and sludgy…and pretty good as a result. I don’t know why they chose to speed it up before release.

“When we first recorded Rapture, it was slower. This was the first version,” Stein said. “We decided to make it faster. The slower tape was just bass, drums and guitar doubling the bass, I don’t think much else. I took the tape to my home studio and added stuff, then Debbie and Fred did their vocals.”

I’m a sucker for a demo or an alt. version, and this version of Rapture certainly falls into that category. Play once, and once only at this time of year, file it in the section of your brain that’ll serve you well come the toughest of music quizzes and then forget all about it until next December.

*Interestingly, the b-side of the Blondie/Fab 5 Freddy single sounds like it might be totally magic. Credited to mystery band The Brattles, it turns out they were a band of pre-pubescent punk rockers aged between 8 and 12: Werner, 12 (Guitar), Dagin, 8 (Drums), Jason, 9 (Vocals), Emerson, 9 (Bass) and Branch, 10 (keyboard). Makes Musical Youth look like the Grateful Dead.

The record shows that The Brattles opened for the Clash twice, shared a rehearsal room with the New York Dolls and we were produced by Chris Stein of Blondie. Ah, so there’s the connection. I suspect Bartholomew Carruthers, if he’s reading, will be able to give me the full rundown. Until then, must investigate…

 

 

Cover Versions, demo

Flow Motion

Craig McAllister

What’s not to like about this! It’s A Certain Ratio, covering Talking Heads, on a track intended for Grace Jones, that features a guide vocal from the band’s Jez Kerr that ended up being on the released version. Mined from the band’s archives a couple of years ago and represented in new light on their all-encompassing 40-year anniversary box set, Houses In Motion bears all the hallmarks of classic ACR.

A Certain Ratio – Houses In Motion

(Mute Records/Kevin Cummins)

It’s the bassline that hits you first. A fluid and chrome monster, it falls halfway between the mercurial slink of the O’Jays’ For The Love Of Money and an on-the-one makeover of the theme to Cheggers Plays Pop. The vocal, deadpan and spoken, apes David Byrne’s original, a hollowed-out shell of existential pondering and angst. Caught in the eye of his own storm, Kerr seems nonplussed as his band knock several shades of post-punk funk from the track.

(Mute Records/Kevin Cummins)

Rattling, metronomic, beatbox percussion keeps the beat slow and steady before the guitars, scratchy and metallic, creep their way into the mix, dropping out and in again at the end of the lines, filling in the vocal-free sections. Echoing trumpets, heavily filtered through the mixing desk help to date the track – think Pigbag and Teardrop Explodes, even the Jam… any band from the era that saw out the ’70s and saw in the ’80s with an ‘anything goes’ approach to instrumentation. Off it flies, the brass section heralding the intent to take the track upwards and skywards. I’m glad ACR discovered they had it during that archival archaeological dig of theirs.

Talking Heads‘ original is, of course, also a beauty.

Talking Heads – Houses In Motion

It’s total claustrophobic funk that, with its bubbling bass and car horn keyboards, brings to mind Prince’s ridiculously pervy Lady Cab Driver. It’s more out there in places than ACR’s cover – those scatter-gunning, free-flowing trumpets, for example – and Byrne’s call-and-response vocals that almost fall into Slippery People‘s ‘Whats a-matter witchu?‘ hook; no bad thing, clearly…like the rest of Remain In Light, the track’s parent album. But you knew that already.

Alternative Version, Cover Versions, demo, Hard-to-find

Double Dekker

Craig McAllister

‘It miek‘ is Jamaican patois for ‘told you so‘ or ‘serves you right‘. You get caught doing something you’ve been told not to do? It miek, man. It miek.

Desmond Dekker took the phrase and used it as both title and hook for his summer of ’69 smash hit. A proper slice of lilting rudeboy reggae, It Miek is aural sunshine for the start of September. Summer over? Not round here, mate.

Desmond Dekker & The Aces – It Miek

I’ve always wondered about the wee vocal precursor that opens the track. Stone me if it ain’t a sweet ‘n soulful, adlibbing vocal warm-up of Ave Maria, nudged gently aside when the skanking beat comes in, driven by rootsy bass and rocksteady drums. By the time Desmond has started his vocal proper, the guitars are doing the chicken scratch on the off-beat, a clanging bar-room piano is bashing out the chords and, most thrilling of all, honeyed horns from heaven burst their way in and herald the vocal refrain.

If y’listen carefully, you might notice the bit where it’s almost impossible to tell where the trombone slide ends and the vocal slide begins. If y’listen really carefully, you might hear a young Kevin Rowland scribbling notes and plotting his future. As I type, a little bit of bare wood floor has been worn away and polished as my feet do a soft shoe shuffle in time to the infectious rhythm. If y’don’t like this, y’don’t like anything.

Desmond Dekker was a clear influence on that late ’60s mod scene. The close crop, the three button mohair suits, the attention to detail in both sound and vision, he’s an embodiment of Mod’s ‘clean living under difficult circumstances’ mantra.

Over in mid ’80s Manchester, another gang of music obsessed clothes horses with an eye for the minutiae were doing their best to steal without anyone noticing. Shaun Ryder, magpie-eyed thief-in-chief of Happy Mondays liberally went about strangulating some of the melody from The Beatles’ Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da – itself a skanking reggae tune, as you know, where McCartney namechecks ‘Desmond’ – and, with the help of that clattering industrial funk that HM do so well, turned it into a new Happy Mondays’ tune called, unashamedly, Desmond.

Happy Mondays –Desmond

I mean, it’s not really Ob-La-Di… is it? Maybe if Shaun had sung the first couple of lines in tune it’d have been more apparent, but that lolloping, elastic band bassline and incessant, chirping guitar steers it far from the mouth of the Mersey and deeper towards a whole new sound that was brewing at the time.

Nonetheless, Michael Jackson, who at the time owned the rights to The Beatles’ catalogue, sent his lawyers straight round and quicker than you could yelp ‘Beat It!‘ the Mondays were forced to withdraw their debut album from sale, delete the offending Desmond and replace it with another tune. It miek, Shaun. It miek.

That other tune though would be Twenty Four Hour Party People and would propel Happy Mondays onto the more discerning turntables around the country, with fame and infamy not much further away than the width of a Joe Bloggs hem. A lucky break.

*Bonus Track!

Here’s a fantastic light and sparkling, piano-free run through of The Beatles doing Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da from one of those Anthology albums from yesteryear. Jigsawed together from a couple of takes, this joyful and carefree outfake gives the offically released version a decent run for its money, sprightly scrubbed acoustic guitars and lightly toasted ‘la-la-la-la-la-la‘ backing vocals vying for earspace between the skronking sax and occasional ‘chick-a-boom‘ interludes. McCartney’s woody, thunking bassline is a beauty too. Get on it!

The Beatles – Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da (Anthology version)

demo, Get This!, Live!, Sampled

Twin Reverb

Craig McAllister

Check…check…check!

A-woo-oo! A-woo-oo! A-woo-oo! A-woo-oo! A-woo-oo! A-woo-oo!

(Pause)

Trrrr-rat-at-a-tat a-tee-tee

Trrrr-rat-at-a-tat a-tee-tee

Bass. How low can you go? Actually, not that low for now. A tight ‘n taut bass guitar plays high up the frets, its woody thunk foreshadowing what will follow:

dur der-der-duh-der

dur der-der-duh-der

Nagging, inistent. Immediately earwormish. It moves through the gears a semitone and the drummer falls in with a loping, skipping, skittering beat that’s been rescued after falling from the back of a lorry last seen leaving Manchester in 1989.

A brief dropout from the bass brings another burst of rat-a-tat percussion, immediately followed by two short and teasing electric guitar riffs – bendy, wobbly, hypnotic – and then, on a surge of nagging, asthmatic guitar, the band is here. The second guitar player makes themselves known by triggering their distortion pedal and a viral squiggle of feedback bleeds from the speakers for a bar or two before plectrum meets nickle. It’s a cheap, punky trick and you love it. 

Spitting in a wishing well. Blown to hell. Crash. I’m the last splash.

As far as song intros go, Cannonball by The Breeders is so familiar, so engrained that even 29 years later, Pavlovian rushes make their way to the soles of the Doc Martens without you realising.

The Breeders – Cannonball

It might be the riff that moves the feet – a nagging, twanging, guitar player’s sore finger of a lick jigsawed to a monster, see-sawing tidal wave of fuzzed-out barre chords, but it’s the vocal that moves the mind.

Kim Deal, moonlighting from a by then fragmented Pixies, has the unequalled ability of sounding as if she’s constantly grinning as she sings. Not in a Marti Pellow, I-can’t-believe-I’m-getting-away-with-this dimple buster of a grin, but a proper mile-wide smile as expansive and welcoming as the Ohio of her birthplace. In the golden age of Hollywood, Kim and her cheekbones would’ve been filmed swinging carefreely around lamposts. “I’m in love…I’m in love with singing, and I want the wurld t’know!” Check the video below for proof.

Freed from the pressures of Pixies, Kim takes centrestage and ropes in her twin sister Kelley (replacing Tanya Donnelly who’d by now left and formed Belly) alongside English bass player Josephine Wiggs and Slint’s Britt Walford on drums; an alternative rock supergroup of sorts that occasionally – especially on Cannonball – surpasses much of what made them so revered in their respective day jobs.

Kim and Kelley mesh and meld and harmonise across the verses, an electrified Mamas and Papas (or should that be Mamas and Mamas?), surfing the wave where two voices become one yet sound like three. Clever stuff, you’d need to agree. A metallic clatter of muted six-strings amplified to dangerously exciting levels heralds the noisy bit and suddenly you can see why The Breeders were one of Nirvana’s tour supports of choice. Melody and mayhem – always key ingredients in a proper guitar band’s arsenal.

Cannonball rocks. From the static bursts of fuzz mic, to the spontaneous “Heys!” that appear with satisfying regularity, to the underlying breathy a-woo-oos that you’ll spot if you scratch below the surface, it’s a real beauty of a guitar track, punky yet, eh, funky too. Do they really sing, ‘I’ll be your whatever you want…the bong in this reggae song‘? Yes. Yes, they do.

*Bonus Tracks!

Here’s the demo of Cannonball, working title Grunggae. Very much a work in progress, you can hear the seeds being sown; that shuffling beat, the twin vocals, the a-woo-oos, the metallic k.o. and rattling clatter before the noisy bit. The DNA is all in place, even if the arrangement isn’t.

The Breeders  – Cannonball (demo)

Fantastically lo-fi live version here:

The Breeders  – Cannonball (Live in Stockholm, 1994)

Magpie DJs Radio Soulwax have oft incorporated Cannonball into their sets, mashed up occasionally (as was the parlance of the time) with Skee-Lo’s I Wish, intelligent rap and indie rock cross-pollinating into something wholly different.

Radio Soulwax part 0

 

Listen from 3 min 20, or download the whole thing and marvel at the psychedelic jigsawing of it all; Beastie Boys, Maceo & The Macks, EMF, God Only Knows, Elastica, Jack And Diane, Eye of the Tiger, Mr Oizo, Erik B & Rakim, What Have You Done For Me Lately?, Basement Jaxx, Funky Cold Medina, No Diggity…..all fed into the Radio Soulwax super-blender and served up as something brand new…. even 20+ years later. The soundtrack to every one of my barbecues for the past two decades, I can never get enough of 2 Many DJs mixes.

 

 

 

demo, Hard-to-find

Solid Gold

Craig McAllister

Paul Weller chose to bring the curtain down on The Jam – 6 studio albums and 18 singles in 5 era-defining years – with the anthemic yet wistful Beat Surrender, a piano-driven soul stomper that put a full stop on The Jam’s perfect discography and hinted at an unexpected new direction. It might have been different had their intended final released made it beyond demo form.

The Jam – A Solid Bond In Your Heart (demo 1)

A Solid Bond In Your Heart is the unstoppable yin to Beat Surrender‘s resigned yang. In demo form, it froths and rattles like a speed-driven floorfiller from the Wigan Casino, all floating vibraphone, four-to-the-floor incessant drums and tinny breathlessness, a talc-dusted homage to that most exclusive of subcultures. Employing the brass that served them well on The Gift and associated singles, Solid Bond flips and flaps its way to its giddy ending, Dee C. Lee’s tumbling vocal pushing Weller to the very limits of his white man does soul vocals as Bruce Foxton sprints the length of his fretboard like Duck Dunn on uppers. It’s a rush in every sense of the word.

There’s a second version from The Jam’s vaults that adds a middle eight which would ultimately disappear again by the time the track was ripe for release. Listening to it, you might spot the seeds of the dropdown in Beat Surrender. Weller certainly thought this little vignette was worthy of working on, even if it wasn’t right for Solid Bond. A bit of a rewrite and it would slot right into the epochal final release.

Extra points too go to whoever the assembled hand-clappers were on this version. Their palms would’ve been raw by the last note.

The Jam – A Solid Bond In Your Heart (demo 2)

Solid Bond is, though, far too upbeat and happy for such a milestone record. Paul Weller did the right thing by holding it back.

By the time A Solid Bond In Your Heart appeared for real, it would be as The Style Council‘s 4th single. Released in 1983 between the woozy haze of Long Hot Summer and the evergreen You’re The Best Thing, Solid Bond (and its accompanying video) would go some way to cementing The Style Council’s reputation as soul revivalists. In an age of synthetics – instruments… clothes… hair products… – The Style Council’s stance had to be admired, even if it was much maligned (or so they say) at the time.

Without the same attachment to The Jam that those boring older ‘mods’ (by it’s very definition, ‘mod’ should be forward thinking, no?) may have had, I found The Style Council nothing less than fantastic. Arty, pretentious and comical, yes, even to these young teenage eyes and ears, but with a mean streak in writing unforgettable hit singles. If you say you didn’t like them I don’t believe you.

The Style Council – A Solid Bond In Your Heart

Funnily enough, it starts in almost the same way as Beat Surrender. Where that track has a tension-building piano flourish before the crash and release, Solid Bond vamps in on a teasing combination of six note piano and saxophone then slides itself into the stratosphere.

“‘Feel’ is a word I can’t explain…” goes Weller from the very top, as the music proceeds to give you all the ‘feels’ you need; a wet slap of funk guitar, a skirl of strings and that same driving beat, muscled up through the addition of a moonlighting Zeke Manyika, no stranger to soul-inflected hit singles himself. The crowning glory is the brilliant duetting vocal that tops it off. All moves from The Big Book of Soul Tricks are duly cribbed; the ‘uh-huhs’, the ‘ooh-yeahs’ and the high high high falsetto; there aren’t enough ‘woo-hoo-hoos’ any more in music. I believe that’s because they were all used up on this record.

Solid Bond is handclappin’, finger-clickin’ ess oh you ell soul – Marvin and Tammi for Thatcher’s children, the joy of life preserved in seven inches of grooved vinyl. If I could do that gliding northern soul move that looks so blinkin’ effortless to those who have clearly kept more faith than myself, I’d be doing it right now while I contemplated getting myself a midlife-crisis inducing ’80s Weller wedge. Push it to the limit, as the man himself sings.