Category: Get This!

Get This!

Foresight Isn’t Anything At All

Craig McAllister

That episode of The Simpsons with R.E.M. in it never tires. For whatever reason, the group are playing live in Homer’s garage – spoken to rhyme with Farage, Scottish readers – and tearing through a rockin’ version of It’s The End Of The World As We Know It… until they realise that they’re not actually in the private bar of some tech-bro millionaire like they thought they were, but in a hastily converted addendum to the Simpson family’s house. Momentarily enraged, Michael Stipe smashes a beer bottle, ready to attack poor Homer, until he is held back by Mike Mills and Peter Buck.

“No, Michael! That’s not the R.E.M. way!”

“You’re right. Let’s recycle the shards and get out of here,” says a remorseful Stipe, already on his knees and sweeping up the broken glass.

By 2001, when this Simpsons episode aired, R.E.M., despite their global ubiquity and mass appeal without creating mass market music, had something of a sniggered-at image. They were vocal and active in environmental conservation and recycling issues. Their CD sleeves (no vinyl in ’01!) came printed on recycled card. They played Adam Yauch’s Tibetan Freedom concerts. They donated to the World Wildlife Trust. They aligned themselves to any cause that promoted peace, equality and the non-destruction of the only planet we have to live on… which are all totally admirable and worthy causes, as you know, but causes nonetheless that musicians hadn’t really got behind before.

You’ve gotta kick against what’s gone before in music, so while no act was entertaining the notion of Led Zeppelin’s ‘Starship’ as a means of travel between shows, no-one other than R.E.M. (and maybe Neil Yong) was giving the issue much thought. Nowadays, they’re all at it. Radiohead are extremely vocal on environmental viability. Thom Yorke has played benefit concerts for the Green Party. Coldplay are advocates for sustainable touring, keen to reduce their carbon footprint wherever possible. You won’t find any single-use plastics or meat products at a Billy Eilish show. The 1975 – The 1975!! –  teamed up with Greta Thunberg to release a track, with all profits going to Extinction Rebellion. A cynical marketing opportunity? Possibly, maybe, (definitely!), but one that causes a small ripple of positive effect across the planet.

For all things eco, you can go back to 1989 with R.E.M. Not for nothing is that year’s album called Green. No-one was green in 1989 except R.E.M. and, among a handful of barely-heard – and barely heard of – organisations, Greenpeace, the grandaddy of them all, who themselves only really brought these issues to the mass market once they started sponsoring Glastonbury in 1991.

In fact – and yeah, you were about to point this out – you can go even further back with R.E.M. all the way to 1986 and Life’s Rich Pageant. On this album – R.E.M.’s greatest (fight me, unless that’s not really the R.E.M. fans’ way either) you’ll find Fall On Me, a song which has its lyrical roots in the effects of acid rain. What is it up in the air for indeed.

R.E.M. – Fall On Me

UNITED STATES – CIRCA 1986: Photo of REM (Photo by Stephanie Chernikowski/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

I’ve been hammering Life’s Rich Pageant this past week. I’d guess everyone’s favourite R.E.M. record is tied up with memory from the first time you heard it – the people and places and things that were going on in your life as it soundtracked it – and so just as Hunky Dory is my favourite Bowie album and Bringing It All Back Home is my favourite Bob Dylan album, My Aim Is True my favourite Elvis Costello record and A Hard Day’s Night my favourite Beatles album – not their best, but my favourite, Life’s Rich Pageant will always be R.E.M. record numero uno. It’s the first album I heard by them and it’s their best record too. Easily. It just is.

On LRP, the group is heading from the underground to the overground. In fact, by now they’ve probably done so, but there’s still enough mystery and obfuscation in their sound, still enough angle in their jangle to keep them independent, or college rock, as they’d say in Athens, GA, that the weirdos haven’t deserted them and the man in the street isn’t quite sure yet of what to make of them. On Life’s Rich Pageant, R.E.M. are flying. They’re tight and muscular (Begin The Begin), they’re esoteric (Underneath The Bunker), they’re heads-down and rockin’ (These Days) and they have a keen ear for a pop super-hook within a murky melody (I Believe).

On Fall On Me, Michael Stipe’s vocal is stately and focused, lending gravitas to a song about the effect of gravity. Mike Mills’ backing vocals soar with a Wilsonesque melancholy, and Peter Buck’s Rickenbacker jangles like the Stateside cousin of Johnny Marr on those early Smiths records, all sad-eyed minors and widescreen major 7ths. As a song, it’s perfect. As a recording, it’s a major tour de force. And, just like the issues it addresses, it’ll never get old.

Get This!, New! Now!, Peel Sessions

To Hell With Poverty!

Craig McAllister

I came to Gang Of Four via the Wedding Present. I was in thrall to Madness and Adam and the Ants and clearly far too young for this thing called post-punk, but I was however just the right age for David Gedge’s gnarly yet faithful reworking of GO4’s I Found That Essence Rare; one group from Leeds being reverentially covered by another, which was somehow, to these ears, a symbiotic moment of baton-passing. I did what most of us do when we discover a new band – I worked backwards to find the source. I’d eventually find …Essence Rare on Gang Of Four’s debut album Entertainment!, an aptly-titled, bone-shaking, nerve-jangling amalgamation of tight ‘n taut basslines, fuss-free drumming and scorching guitar; all pristinely jagged lines and trebly, ear-splitting attack. Jerky music for twitchy people, the sta-cca-cca-cca-ccato guitar stylings belonged to Andy Gill, but the colour on GO4’s razor sharp cheekbones came courtesy of vocalist and lyricist Jon King. Socially-conscious, anti-capitalist and anti-military, King’s words cut just as cleanly, just as sharply as the six strings that rang from Gill’s electric Ibanez.

As it turns out, Jon King writes exactly the way Gang Of Four sounds.

In his autobiography, From To Hell With Poverty! (published for the first time in paperback on 16th April 2026) there’s nary a flabby line nor bloated opinion. Clean, lean and free of fat, his words are economical and considered, yet shining with individual style and an ear-ringing clarity. If literate and bullshit-free music biographies are your kinda thing, you’ll probably want to read it.

Thrillingly, Jon and his team have asked if Plain Or Pan will run a feature ahead of the book’s publication, so here we are, one aborted Zoom session (hands up – my fault) and a scrambled phone call later.

Me: This music thing, then. What are your earliest memories of music? When did you start playing in bands? Was there a point when you thought, ‘hang on – I could maybe make some sort of a living from this?’

JK: At the risk of saying it’s all in the book…

There was no music at home. We had no record player. We had a wind-up 78 which my mum had picked up at a jumble sale, along with a pile of shellac records. No delta blues classics, unfortunately. Just stuff like The Teddy Bears’ Picnic. On a Sunday we’d listen to Two-Way Family Favourites on the radio, broadcasting from the real fag-end of the British Empire. Light entertainment parlour music  – Max Bygraves and the likes.

I heard music properly for the first time only after I’d passed the 11+ and found myself at Sevenoaks School. The boys in the art room, who’d have been 17 and 18 at the time, played Highway 61 Revisited. Baaam! This totally thrilled me. I’d never heard anything like it. It was anti-authority, driven purely by creative artistic integrity…it was immediately my kind of thing. From that moment on, all my money earned from fruit picking and potato picking went on records. I’d heard Hey Joe and Space Oddity during lessons and these became the first two 7″ singles in my collection. I’d pick lots of records up at jumble sales. Clearly, a lot of parents were emptying out their children’s bedrooms after they’d moved out, and I became the welcome recipient of their abandoned record collections.

I gained a total love of music from those art room listening sessions, but I never really wanted to be in a band. I wanted to be an artist. I went to study Fine Art at Leeds University and a bunch of boys from Sevenoaks followed me. These fellow art room boys – Mark White, Tom Greenhalgh and Kevin Lycett would end up in The Mekons. Adam Curtis would become a documentarian. Paul Greengrass went to Hollywood and directed all those Bourne Supremacy films. Andy Gill would become the guitar player in Gang Of Four. We were a creative, competitive group of friends, pushing one another towards artistic endeavours.

I wanted to write my dissertation on Jasper Johns, the American painter and sculptor and, amazingly, I was given a research grant to go to New York to learn all about him. Andy thought, ‘If he can get to New York, I can too,’ and he got himself a grant as well. I can’t emphasise how extremely lucky I’ve been in life. Sometimes, things happen to me that have had positive outcomes on my situation. This New York trip was one such thing.

We were put up by a woman called Mary Harron. She was a journalist with New York Punk Magazine, just about the definitive word on this new thing. She’d recently broken up with the drummer from the Patti Smith Group. Mary lived in St Marks’s Place, the hippest, most happening area of Manhattan at the time, with jazz clubs around the corner where Coltrane and Davis had played. Debbie Harry lived nearby. Richard Hell too. And she let Andy and I crash on her floor for the duration of our stay. We’d be out all the time, regulars in CBGB’s, getting in for nothing simply by being with Mary, and we’d see all the bands; Television, Blondie, Ramones, Talking Heads.

Because we were always there with Mary, people would ask us, ‘What band are you in?’ Andy would always reply, ‘The Mudlarks’, and they’d all nod knowingly, even although this was entirely fictitious and we had no intentions of becoming musicians. But when we returned to the UK, punk had made its way there and we started thinking about its possibilities. I saw punk as an art project. Music wouldn’t interfere with my painting…it would contribute to it.

Before we knew it, Andy and I had formed not The Mudlarks but Gang Of Four and in no time we’d toured with Buzzcocks. They were great friends and sponsors to us. They still are, actually. It was Steve Diggle’s suggestion that I write this book and I’m so glad I let him inspire me.

We toured the States with Buzzcocks. We’d often play two shows a day; we’d open up for them and then play one of our own shows in a small club elsewhere in the city. At one point, we did something like 40 gigs in 30 days. This is where we really learned to play.

Gang Of Four – I Found That Essence Rare (Peel Session, 9.1.79)

We paid it back when it was our turn to do headline tours. Over those tours, we had great support acts; REM, Mission of Burma, Pylon, The Specials, The Smiths. U2 opened for us once. We were inspired by Dylan, Television and the likes, and Gang Of Four became inspirations for Red Hot Chili Peppers, Nirvana and REM. We all stand on the shoulders of giants, don’t we? Gang Of Four have a brilliant track record in bringing along groups who would subsequently eclipse us!

I’m still friends with lots of these people. Last year in the States, Mike Mills jammed with us. Peter Buck has too. We never made Entertainment! in order to make loads of money – that was just not in our thoughts when we started the group. My ambition was simply to change the world. At the end of the ’70s we had facism. We had war. We had poverty. We had social issues. I don’t think (Jon sighs in resignation) that I managed to realise that ambition.

I compliment Jon on his book; the writing style, the pace, the unputdownability of it all.

‘Avoid adjectives and adverbs,’ says Jon from down the phone. ‘Avoid cliche. Avoid metaphors and similes.’

This is the writer who, on Entertainment!‘s Glass wrote, ‘I’m so restless, I’m bored as a cat.’

‘Yeah,’ he laughs with a wry grin. ‘It’s a stupid simile too. And cats are anything but bored, aren’t they? They’ve nine lives to live for a start. They’re always up to something. I’m really annoyed with myself for writing a lyric like that.’

Find out what else irks and annoys Jon King in To Hell With Poverty! 

To Hell With Poverty! is published in paperback by Constable on April 16th 2026.

Its launch will be officially marked north of the border by two events in Glasgow and Edinburgh on the 23rd and 24th April. The Glasgow event, at the 1 of 100 premises is sold out. There are a handful of tickets left for the 24th at the Voodoo Rooms. Asking the difficult questions in Edinburgh will be Phill Jupitus.

You’ll probably want to be there. And you’ll definitely want to read it.

Get This!, Gone but not forgotten, Hard-to-find

She’s Got A Brassiere!

Craig McAllister

Bill Forsyth’s Gregory’s Girl is the greatest film to come out of Scotland no, the UK  no, the world bar none. Any one random, washed-out coloured still from the film will instantly stir more emotion, more melancholy, more longing for simpler times than any other memorial device in existence. It will also have the uncanny knack of pulling the entire script verbatim from some well-accessed cerebral filing cabinet from under my greying (but definitely not thinning) hair, the film’s never-ending treasure trove of rich one liners and cultural reference points shared and appreciated by whoever I’m with at the time. 

Maybe it’s because I grew up in a new town (in my case, Irvine) which was the architectural mirror image of Cumbernauld’s jutting white symmetry and undulating green spaces. Maybe it’s because I too played terrible football on an unforgiving orange blaize pitch with a merciless Mitre 5 that stung like six of Fowler’s belt if it caught you on the back of the thigh on a February morning.

Maybe it’s because every modern school in the New Town area looked exactly like Gregory’s (the real-life Abronhill High School in Cumbernauld) and everyone I knew at my school looked like an exact clone of Gregory or any of his hapless pals; flares, skinny school blazers that were either too short or too long in the arm, shapeless grey jumpers, shirt collars as long as the nose on Concorde, gap-toothed, awkward boys with haircuts that fell somewhere between Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks abomination and your mum’s rapid-fire Sunday night handiwork, attempted with one eye on That’s Life and the other on the smouldering inch and a half of ash teetering from the Benson & Hedges wedged in her mouth.

If you’re of a certain age, I daresay Gregory’s Girl will have had the same effect on you.

From first minute to last I could identify with just about everything in it. The mazy pathways that led around exotic corners of the bright, white housing estates. The chip shop wrapping their 15p wares in brown paper and newspaper. The head teacher wafting stealthily through the corridors, his bat-winged cloak following him like dark trouble itself. The P.E. teacher’s caterpillar moustache and whistle. That row of hopefuls he has lined up at the trial where Dorothy arrives? We’ve all stood in that row, willing someone to pick us not last. “You all know what I’m looking for,” he says with a serious face, “A goalscorer. And that requires two basic skills: ball control, shooting accuracy and the ability to read the game.” 

The entirety of Gregorys’ Girl was like my life on film. Everything, that is, except the true subject matter at its core. Aged 11 when Gregory’s Girl first made it to the big screen – the supporting feature, believe it or not, to the far-less interesting but far more decorated Chariots Of Fire –  I was a good four or five years younger than the characters in the film and nowhere near as interested in the fairer sex as Gregory and his hormonally-rampant friends. It wouldn’t be long, but for now, girls were mainly just insignificant. Strange and alien. Not really annoying, just gang-like and giggling. Certainly not to be talked to. Not to be looked at, even. We had Subbuteo and bikes and Madness and Adam and The Ants. That was more than enough. 

The music of Gregory’s Girl collected – Colin Tully

Arguably, the most iconic thing about Gregory’s Girl is its soundtrack. Composed by Scotsman Colin Tully, who was given a VHS of the soundtrack-free film by Forsyth and asked to come up with something suitable, its meandering jazz-funk and light soprano saxophone stylings are so out of step for the times it was made, yet heard nowadays they provide an instant passport back to 1981 far more than Grey Day or Stand And Deliver might.

All it takes is a crack of compressed snare, or a tinkle of Fender Rhodes, or the slap of bubbling bass, or one of Tully’s own freewheeling sax solos and I’m right back on that blaize pitch, or in that dinner hall, or in that boring class – Gregory and his pals had the welcome distraction of early leaver Steve cleaning the classroom windows one day, I had an excitable, long-tongued dog running wildly around the playground during a particularly tedious slot of double French with which to while away the long minutes.

Bella, and indeed bella. Or should that be joli, joli, Mme McGlone? 

  • * The music embedded above comes from a digitised tape made available by its composer to a friend and subsequently shared when Tully passed away from cancer. For a soundtrack that has never been commercially available, 45 years on, this might be as good as it gets. Enjoy listening to it!
Colin Tully, 1954 -2021

 

 

 

 

Get This!, New! Now!

Lily Rae Grant

Craig McAllister

I was, for years, a 6 Music devotee in the morning. From the fill of the kettle in the kitchen to the resigned opening of the car door at work, there wasn’t a day between a Monday and a Friday when I didn’t tune in. The music played was almost incidental. It was the chat, the wit, the wisdom that you came for. In (first) Lauren Laveren and (then) Shaun Keaveny – two totally different broadcasters, one serene, the other madcap and unpredictable, but both with the golden touch when it came to breakfast/commuting radio – the BBC had a particular market sewn up. As with everything though, someone somewhere decided things needed freshening up and brought in younger talent.

I suspect, Nick Grimshaw, ex Radio 1 rent-a-gob and the current incumbent in the hot show hot seat is aimed at a listenership in a demographic I no longer occupy, and I’ve happily made peace with this. These days, I use the daily commute to and from work to catch up on Guy Garvey’s Sunday show. The mix of the old and the new, intercut with abstract archive interview clips and Garvey’s laconic northern brogue makes for great in-car listening. When he goes on holiday and a replacement is brought in, that becomes dead annoying. There’s really no substitute for gentle Guy and his loosely themed concept programming.

 

Speaking of younger talent…

Last weekend, Guy Garvey played Lily Rae Grant‘s Forget About and it fairly floored me. I was stuck at temporary lights, one eye on the clock, foot poised impatiently on the accelerator, but within half a minute, I’d put on the brake and any anxieties I had about getting to work later than normal had vanished, wrapped instead in Grant’s unwinding melody.

I turned it up. Like, right up. Can I suggest you skip to the second track in the player above and do likewise. Why it’s not the lead track is beyond me, tbh. Maybe it’s the six minutes-plus that makes it less likely to get airplay? I dunno – but try telling that to Guy bleedin’ Garvey.

It was the tinkling, descending Riders On The Storm electric piano refrain that reeled me in. I’m a sucker for that sound. That and the Midlake by way of mid ’70s Fleetwood Mac arrangement. The gossamer-light vocals are soaked in delay. They overlap to create counter melodies before wafting off to the outer fringes of the atmosphere. The band behind remain solidly slow and steady. No one is rushing to the finish. Everything is precise and considered. The bass wanders up the frets occasionally, always returning back to the root. A skirl of acoustic guitars briefly colours the palette then steps into the background. The keys are loose and, dare I say it, funky, centering the whole thing, but it’s Grant’s vocals that float around the whole thing like a Stevie Nicks’ lacy stage costume which give the track its air of adult mystery.

Forget About has all the elan and high production of an ABBA deep cut (Eagle, for example) and is all the more amazing when you learn its writer and performer is just 18 years of age. It’ll be interesting to see how Lily Ray Grant develops – I much prefer Forget About to the acoustic introspection of the release’s other track Poison Ivy, so if the budget allows, I’d be hoping to see her on the road with a seasoned gang of Fender bass-wearing, Fender Rhodes-tinkling musos, replicating as much as possible the self-assured storm Grant cooks up on Forget About.

Rather frustratingly, had I heard it ‘live’ at the time, I may well have managed to secure a copy of the 7″ single, but by the time I’d caught up with this segment of the show on Wednesday evening, physical copies had sold out. That’s the power of national airplay right there. You can stick your wares in Spotify’s overflowing cesspit of noise. You can hawk them at 60-capacity gigs. But secure airplay on a radio show with decent coverage and there’s a wee chance you might just make it…whatever ‘making it’ constitutes these days.

You might want to petition Red Licorice Records to do a second run of 7″s. Any more airplay and they’d need to relent, right?

Lily Rae Grant can be found on Bandcamp.

Get This!, Sampled

Damn The ‘Dan

Craig McAllister

There’s a well-worn meme that does the rounds, a life truth centred on the idea that the music you listened to between teens and twenties is the stuff that comes to define you in your later years. I don’t disagree with this notion at all; the same old guitar-based shit that once rattled my bedroom windows now rattles the wine glasses hanging upside down in the area at the back end of the living room that we only half-jokingly refer to as ‘the bar’ (and clogs up many of the pages in this here influential and on-point blog), but I dispute the idea that you can’t allow for a little flexibility when it comes to making way for ‘new’ old music that you’d previously have sneered at.

Which brings us to Steely Dan.

They’re there, they exist, surely, purely, to be sneered at; the sunglasses after dark, the feathered shags, the totally superior halo of recreational cocaine abuse that hovers around them like the glow in a Ready Brek advert. The flares, the platforms, the shirts unbuttoned two buttons too many, the creeping facial foliage as sculpted and considered as the tasteful sax solos they weave between the augmented chords and tickled Rhodes keys. If only for the state of the hair alone, furchrissakes! They’re a cynic’s dream they are.

Grown up on a diet of punkish three chord bluster? Do four chords in the one song make that act, in your misanthropic view, far more prog than punk? Is your favourite group’s debut album comfortably under thirty minutes long? You’ll maybe struggle somewhat with Becker and Fagen. The duo behind the ‘Dan are the very definition of the word ‘muso’. Carefully placed background vocals? Check. Subtle drum fills and percussive fancies? You betcha! Soft focus vocals, half sung, half spoken, but always in tune, and with a range that would terrify both Hall AND Oates (remind me to return to them at some point), Steely Dan records are meticulously arranged; intricate and cerebral and clever, and often, it would seem, just for the hell of it. A group that can write? And arrange? And really play? Gabba Gabba Hey, No Way!

Even on De La Soul’s say-so, I tried and failed. And tried. And failed again. They were just too clinical and clean-sounding. Later on, Super Furry Animals had me returning to Showbiz Kids on the home-made and illegally downloaded version of the ‘Dan’s Ultimate Collection that sat unloved in a folder deep in my iTunes. But ultimately, collectively, they were just (yaawwwn) too boring, baby.

But yet.

One day, some misplaced presenter on 6 Music who was clearly on the wind-up played Reelin’ In The Years. And I found myself tapping out the drums’ tasteful rhythm on the steering wheel straight from the off. As the verse (“Is this Thin Lizzy?) gave way to the super-soft vocal harmonies in the chorus (“Ah, shit, this is Steely Dan!”), I had to admit it had me. There’s a guitar break that sounds (again) like polite Thin Lizzy, another verse where Becker? Fagen? trips over his sing/talk tongue as he fits all those carefully-considered lyrics into the length of the bar before it’s too late. And – again – a Lizzy-like guitar break then (tastefully) a fade-out before the five minute mark. Steely Dan! Who knew they could be so compact and poppy and politely rockin’? Had I been driving a Mondeo, I might’ve broken out in a rash of Partridge proportions, but no. I drove on, now unsure of my stance on this old thing called Steely Dan.

And then – get this – you go home and, when you have the house to yourself, you reassess their old, familiar standard Do It Again at wine glass-rattling volume and you have to admit to yourself that it is in fact a bit of a banger, as the kids hopefully have never said.

Steely Dan – Do It Again

It’s got it all. The lazy, sun-kissed backbeat, the shimmering Fender Rhodes, some sort of sitar freakoutery, the heat haze guitars that play both fancy chords and lightning-quick solos that spark like welders’ torches in a blue collar mid-west industrial one horse town. Drop outs and build ups, a G-funk key break a good twenty years early, a gentle beast of a song snaking its way into the sunset on a bed of smug, half-paced and energy-free vocals.

Damn the ‘Dan. Are you supposed to like them? Sometimes it’s really hard not to.

Cover Versions, Get This!, studio outtakes

So You’re Gonna Be A Singer, Well I’ll Be Goddamned

Craig McAllister

Buddy’s Rendezvous is the name of a diner, the place where the character in Father John Misty‘s song meets up with his estranged daughter after a spell in jail.

It’s an entire movie in song, FJM proud at how pretty his daughter has turned out, lying to the old soaks in the bars about what a great job he did bringing her up, she noticing that he’s wearing the same coat he had on when he was sent down and telling him she’s going to be a singer, he telling her not to try and please everyone all the time and to ‘forget that leftie shit your mom drilled in your mind…whatever happened to the girl I knew?‘ It’s a brilliant song, evocative and filmic, that in its arrangement alone stirs up notions of Hollywood’s golden age of Art Deco and smooth-rolling, shiny-spoked Lincoln Continentals.

It begins with a film noiresque saxophone bleating out the bluest of notes, climbing out of a smoky nightclub fug into the dark L.A. night, a loose, doo-wopish backing track accompanying it, the strings rising like smoke from a disgarded cigarette holder at a cocktail table. If Misty and producer Jonathan Wilson were aiming for ‘atmosphere’, you might say they nailed it.

Buddy’s Rendezvous and its parent album, Chloë and the Next 20th Century is a bit of an outlier in the FJM catalogue. For the most part, gone are the songs of syphilis and sexual proclivities, in are big sweeping Hollywood ballads, deft and ambitious in arrangement and played with an entirely straight face by a guy who’s normally happy to come across like a southern-fried Nick Cave. It wasn’t an album I immediately took to, but like much of FJM’s output, repeated plays reward the listener. Think of it as A Little Touch Of Schmilsson In The Night for Gen-Xrs and you’ll get on just fine with it too.

Released on Sub Pop, the record was presented to look like the sort of old time jazz record you might routinely shuffle past in your search for charity shop gold. The gatefold sleeve is thick and shiny, the labels on the records feature a fictitious label name and, occasionally annoyingly, fictitious song titles (and song times too). Even the publishing credits are made up. It’s a concept as grand as Misty’s musical vision and has, over time, become a real favourite.

It stands to reason then that Lana Del Rey should do a cover of Buddy’s Rendezvous. Stately Hollywood glamour? Small hours and noirish? Slo-motion melodies unravelling like shook-free curls at midnight? Her version, of course, totally flips the perspective and that’s a big part of the appeal. Released as a one-off 7″ as part of the deluxe version of Chloë, it remains a sought after element of Del Rey’s expansive and exquisite catalogue.

I’m not sure of the officialness of the track below, but some enterprising and technically-minded public servant has produced a version with both Misty and Del Rey duetting on it. It seems to take FJM’s original backing track, leads off with Lana’s breathy vocal and by the end of the first verse has brought two idiosyncratic vocalists onto the one record. It’s clever and smart-arsed, but more than anything, just sounds terrific.

Buddy’s Rendezvous – Lana Del Rey and Father John Misty

*For the record, as much as I love the quirkiness of this ‘duet’, I think FJM’s original is the superior version. You should check it – him – out forthwith.

Get This!, New! Now!

Down On The West Side, Away From Sunlight

Craig McAllister

As autumn snaps itself sharply into winter and the early curtains of dusk draw their way across the gun metal grey skies on the commute home, the music being listened to in the car becomes equally as insular, wrapped tightly around itself for protection from the cold being blasted in by the westerly winds. As the windscreen wipers bump and squeak to the scraping of a Nick Drake cello or a Talk Talk bass glissando, as the indicators’ gentle ticking matches Sufjan Stevens’ gentle picking, as the sudden splash of a puddle matches the subtle crash of a jazz/folk paradiddle, it dawns on me that my music taste is seasonal.

Ska is for that first hint of summer, when it’s still technically early spring but folk are already waist deep in the filthy Firth of Clyde at Irvine beach. The reggae is reserved for the summer proper, although occasionally they clash by happy accident as playlists collide mid-barbecue. Dub? It sounds best on those rare days when even the sun can’t be arsed doing anything other than sit there and sweat. The twin colossuses (colossusi?) of Teenage Fanclub and Trashcan Sinatras work best in autumn, two groups who’ve travelled more than a few miles around the sun and, while being still recording and infrequently gigging concerns, are themselves in their autumnal years, with more miles in the rear-view mirror than what may still stretch ahead of them. Now there’s a sobering thought.

The new artists? They’re best kept for January when you can kid yourself on that this year will be the year when you embrace the new and unheard, before cracking mid-March for your annual Beatles/Clash/Smiths/Dylan/Bowie/Radiohead intake and the inevitable ‘why even bother with anyone else?’ thoughts. The yearly rotation of groups and songs and favourite albums is, to paraphrase Elton, the (song) circle of life. And I’m just fine with that, by the way.

I’m getting serious late-autumn Elliott Smith vibes from this – When The Sky Darkens Down by White Magic For Lovers. I think you’ll really like it.

White Magic For Lovers – When The Sky Darkens Down

It’s windswept, mystical, close-miked and deftly picked. The finger scrapes on metal, the tumbling and ringing arpeggios that fall from six strings, the creeping chord changes and the whispered, late night vocal delivery all point to the church of Elliott. It’s uber melodic, steeped in melancholy and, with those low-in-the-mix syncopated bleeps and bloops that caterpillar their way through the background, something you’ll want to stick on repeat until the long, dark nights begin stretching free again. Lovely stuff.

Listeners of Guy Garvey’s BBC 6 Music show will be no strangers to White Magic For Lovers. He’s played them frequently for the past year or so, when tracks from When The Sky Darkens‘ parent album ‘Book Of Lies‘ first crept out. With musical roots stretching as far back as the Electric Soft Parade, the duo have decent pedigree…and a lovely way with an unravelling melody. You could do worse than investigate them. Start with Book Of Lies and its looping and somnolent lead track Axelrod, maybe, and work your way back from there. It’s a rewarding journey.

Get This!, Gone but not forgotten, Six Of The Best

Phone Scrolls, Drum Rolls

Craig McAllister

I’m a sucker for a music biography (heck, I’ve written at least one) and so found myself at the Mike Joyce book event in Glasgow last week. The most bizarre thing happened before it had even started.

A couple of guys came in and sat in the empty seats beside me. With nothing happening on the stage as yet, they did as we all do – they took out their phones and began scrolling through social media. Five minutes later, the guy next to me started Googling ‘Mike Joyce’ (I wasn’t really being nosy; being of a certain vintage, the text on his screen was massive – there’s a guy who sits about three rows in front of me at the football and half the crowd can read the texts his wife sends at full-time too – it’s clearly a common thing if you fall within a certain demographic.)

Very soon my neighbour alighted on the interview I did with Mike eight or so years ago, where I asked him to chat about his favourite Smiths tracks. I watched side-eye as the stranger beside me read the lot, desperate to say something to him, but too timid to acknowledge it. I then did as any self-respecting ‘like’-hungry social media user would do, and stealthily updated my Facebook status with my phone held very close to my still-thumping chest as I typed. Weird and strange, but pretty cool.

Held in the Glee Club, the event was, as it turned out, the perfect fit for a venue more in tune with comedy events than music or literature. Interviewed onstage by Scottish radio legend Billy Sloan, Mike Joyce was funny, engaging and extremely lucid, singing drum parts and guitar riffs and offering up tasty morsels of Smithsian trivia – direct despatches from a constituent part who’d fought the good fight from those unique and idiosyncratic trenches.

With a mixture of significant and less consequential events from the pop landscape of 40 and more years ago pouring rapidly and freely from the affable drummer, many being told for the first time, he offered a unique insight into the deft workings of the Morrissey and Marr song-machine. Over two halves of a night, he had a quietly rapt audience, and even when the questions from the floor at the end turned serious – he weeps softly when talking about Andy Rourke – and then tediously obvious – ‘Will The Smiths ever reform?‘ (puh-lease?) – he answered them all with gracious dignity and a sense of humour that stopped it all getting a bit silly.

Mike, as it turns out, is the biggest Smiths fan of them all. ‘What’s it like selling out the Albert Hall?’ he asks himself in the intro to his story. ‘It’s unfathomable’, he answers simply. He can’t quite believe the things that happened to him, from hearing the first mind-blowing Smiths recordings, to playing Top of the Pops, to having Mick Jagger dancing side-stage in New York, he and Johnny mid-song and gape-mouthed at the ridiculousness of it all. Mike’s Smiths years were a blur of ‘pinch me’ moments that, even nowadays, he can scarcely fathom. He spent little more than half a decade in The Smiths, yet Mike’s entire life since has been defined by those years. And now, it seems, is the time to tell his story.

Joyce, as you may know, divides opinion in the Smiths community. On the one hand, he’s a quarter of one of our most individual and exciting groups. On the other, he’s the bandmate who refused to settle for ten percent, the traitor who took the group’s principal members to court for a greater share of what he felt he was owed. It’s all a bit murky and eugh, really.

But yet, while he briefly/bravely refers to this, Mike prefers instead to focus on what made The Smiths so great; the ridiculously high watermark of consistent quality across their catalogue, the riotous gigs, the in-band humour and the tight-knit ‘us v them’ stance that got them through it all. The Drums, he says, should be approached as a celebration of the times rather than a warts ‘n all story. It is. I’m halfway through and it’s a very easy and rapid read. I think you’d like it.

To bookend the show, something else happens.

At the show’s mid-point, Billy Sloan had spotted me from the side of the stage and had come over. ‘Don’t leave at the end,’ he implored. ‘Wait here.’ (I know Billy a wee bit, it’s not as if he has a habit of picking random strangers out of a healthy crowd). At the end, he’s back over. ‘Did you buy a book? D’you want it signed? You’re not waiting in that queue – look at the length of it…‘ and he points to a couple of hundred folk snaking their way up the side of the venue and up to the mezzanine where the signing table is set up. ‘Follow me. Quick!‘

We’re backstage, Billy fussing over my bag. ‘Get your book ready, take the record out of its sleeve, d’you have a pen?‘ And then… a classic Sloanism. ‘Mike! This is my good personal friend, Craig, He’s a great writer and you should meet him.’ And Mike Joyce is there. He’s easy to chat to, but all the things you might want to say, he’s heard them all a thousand times. I don’t even think to mention I’d interviewed him in the past (and I actually think that interview played a small part in this book being birthed.) Instead, I play it cool.

“Thanks for the music, Mike. It’ll play forever.”

“I know it will,” he winks.

He signs my book, he signs my 7″ of Hand In Glove, drawing a wee snare drum above the place where Johnny signed it a decade ago and we chat, of all things, about how shite it is to lose musical allies and friends to cruel and unforgiving illnesses.

Not yr average Wednesday night.

The Smiths – This Night Has Opened My Eyes (demo)

Mike Joyce ‘The Drums‘ is published by New Modern and is out now.

Get This!

There’s Not A Hope

Craig McAllister

It’s an accepted truth that Electronic was very much a bit-part project, an occasional coming-together of alternative music royalty in the gaps of downtime between their respective day jobs; Bernard and New Order, Johnny and The The…and The Healers…and The Cribs… and whoever else was looking for a six-string gunslinger for hire. The reality is much different.

Although conceived by the duo of Sumner and Marr as a collaborative and ever-shifting line-up of guest musicians and vocalists, Electronic was an active and going concern for almost every year of the ’90s. The self-titled debut album was worked on quietly in the background for months at a time before seeing the light of day in 1991. The follow-up, Raise The Pressure, took two years to put together. 1999’s Twisted Tenderness, the third and presumably final album in Electronic’s discography took a similar time to conceive. Johnny has oft-debunked the notion that he and his pals reconvened for a couple of weeks now and again to throw an album together; a studio head since the earliest days of The Smiths, to him, being part of a group is a 24-hour thing. Bernard, with his patience and dedication to programming and getting the most out of ever-changing technology, is cut from a similarly dedicated cloth.

1996’s Raise The Pressure was written during interesting times. Conceived in 1994, it began life just as Noel Gallagher was borrowing guitars from Johnny to use on the first Oasis recordings (look on the cover of Supersonic and you’ll spot Johnny’s famous black and white Rickenbacker) and was released just as Noel’s band (and Johnny’s Les Paul) were getting ready to headline Knebworth. For one of these acts (and it ain’t Electronic), that’s quite a trajectory.

Raise The Pressure was a product of the last great fertile period for UK guitar bands, yet it never quite made its mark. Here’s an album recorded by two of music’s leading lights, one of whom at least, with his moddish hair and Clarks shoes – and uncanny ability to wring seven shades of melody from six strings – could be considered the uber-cool uncle of the entire movement…and no-one is all that bothered about it.

Lead single Forbidden City is a much under-appreciated track. Despite coming gift-wrapped in New Order melancholy and ever-evolving Marr riffage, it clunked its way to number 14 before vanishing for good. Just what was wrong with the record-buying public?!

Electronic – Forbidden City

The track runs the whole range of Johnny’s guitar styles; layers of sparkling electrics sprinkled across a bed of ringing acoustics…open chorded majors in the verse…barre chorded minors in the refrain…lovely complementary run downs between vocal lines in the third verse…the up the frets dazzling stuff during the choruses…the groaning, multi-layered (and sometimes backwards) feedback solo in the middle… Forbidden City really has it all. In an era of retro bores who were happily rehashing their way into the charts and getting folk to part with their money in Our Price seven days a week, thanks to their Who and Stones and freakin’ Herman’s Hermits rip-offs, (Hello Power! Hello Ashcroft! Hello Fowler ‘n Cradock!) Forbidden City deserved so much more.

Even an appearance on prime time telly couldn’t really help it.

On TFI Friday, Bernard ‘n Johnny are backed by Doves’ Jimi Goodwin on bass, with Black Grape’s Ged Lynch keeping Karl Bartos’ drum stool warm. Bernard is a ball of on the spot sprung energy, punching the air between lines, doing his trademark whoops when he needs to take a breath, gurning indiscriminately at an audience equally hopped up on the good vibes of the times. By the looks of it, Johnny hasn’t yet discovered running and is in the midst of his fat Elvis phase. Unruly hair, jawline as loose as the jeans he’s wearing and dressed in some sort of fleece/fur overcoat, he chews gum while stomping on and off his pedal board, giving, as he always does, good camera. There’s more than a whiff of chemical enhancement to the whole thing – it is the mid 90s after all – and it’s all rather fantastic.

A chart smash though? A definitive track of its era? A firm favourite amongst the masses? There’s not a hope, as the song goes.

Get This!

Different-Sized Cogs In The Same Machine

Craig McAllister

Almost a couple of years ago I met with a publisher with a view to getting the best of Plain Or Pan onto the printed page, which is, as you well know, the only print that really matters. You don’t need to ask a musician if they prefer mp3 to vinyl. It’s no different for folk who spend time agonising over words and rhythm and metre. There’s vindication in seeing your words in physical print. It means someone else has thought them worthy of sharing with others. Anyone can pick them up, flick through them, go back and forth, even highlight parts if they happen to be some sort of book masochist, but until they’re printed, the digital word lacks gravitas and acceptance. Any idiot with a keyboard and access to the internet can do this – the idiot writing this, for example – so, for me, the printed word is king.

Our meeting went well, I thought, and at the end it was agreed that I’d select the best of Plain Or Pan’s hundreds of articles and compile them into a book with a cohesively-running theme. I’d do some fact checking, tweak a few words here and there, have it proofread and have it all ready for publication. I set to work immediately.

I trawled the blog from the early days to the most recent, discounting articles on account of being too short, too similar, not good enough, just plain embarrassing – as a writer it’s really not hard to find fault in your choice of words. But a good many of the articles still held up. I’d tell you I was surprised at this, if only not to sound like a raving egomaniac, but I knew I had a way with words and phrases, so when long-forgotten articles were re-read in the cold light of a decade and more later, it was thrilling to find many of them were genuinely still exciting. “I’d forgotten about that!” “What a turn of phrase!” “An unexpectedly perfect metaphor!” Shucks, reader, I positively glowed with pride!

I knew I had a decent book in the making. It’d be split into three distinct sections; Life, Death and Music and could be read from page 1 to the end or dipped in and out of as the reader saw fit.

I secured permission from Roddy Doyle and Happy Mondays to use their words/lyrics in a couple of articles. Wayne Coyne from yr actual Flaming Lips, when asked if I could use Do You Realize? as the central theme to an article, took one read of it and said, “Go right ahead, brother!” It was game on. All the best articles would be in there.

After much detective work, I secured permission from a German exchange student to use an image they’d shot in my hometown of Irvine some 40 years previously for the book’s cover. I had everything I needed; it really was game on.

Once compiled, I used slightly hooky ‘found’ software to transfer the whole thing to my Kindle and I read chunks of it every night, making notes where changes had to be made. There weren’t many changes, in all honesty; everything that I’d selected flowed with a rhythm and pace that would make the whole book a page-turner and unputdownable object of desire.

The final job was the proofreading, a thankless task, and something my sister gamefully tackled with eagle-eyed enthusiasm. After tidying up a few stray words, lost commas and the occasional typo, it was ‘bound’ together in Word; the German exchange student’s eye-catching and very apt cover, an actual (and beautiful) foreword from a well-known writer pal of mine, a contents page and the three big sections. Watch out world, ‘POP Record‘ is coming.

It was sent to the publisher.

‘Yeah…I’m having second thoughts here…sales potential…publishing is struggling at the moment…I’ve other books ahead of yours in the queue…‘

It was one muttered and mumbled excuse after another.

It was not to be.

The whole thing currently rests in a folder on my computer. It just needs a publisher who’ll take a chance on it. Believe me, I’ve tried. And tried. And tried. It’s good to go, man. Just press print and it’ll be ready. You think it’d be easy, huh? I mean, I could go the whole self-publishing route, but that strikes me as kinda phoney. I’ve not totally dismissed the idea, but, a bit like musicians, anyone can release a home-grown CD…it’s another thing entirely to have someone release it for you. There’s that vindication word again.

I was telling this to author Andrew O’Hagan last night. He was in Glasgow promoting ‘On Friendship’, a collection of his essays on, eh, friendship and he’d asked me afterwards if I was working on any writing at the moment. *Two things, I said, and opened with the Plain Or Pan story above.

“Fuck ’em,” came Andrew’s succinct reply. “It deserves to be out there and you deserve a publisher that’ll treat it accordingly. I wonder if I can help?”

It turns out though that he needs some help of his own.

Andrew O’Hagan, the writer who at the age of 24 received a letter from Norman Mailer praising his writing style, the writer who spent time with William Burroughs, who travelled Ireland and Scotland with Seamus Heaney, who sat on the steps of the building opposite Fred and Rose West’s house and documented the whole grisly tale, who was editor-in-chief at the London Review of Books, who worked closely with Julian Assange and the WikiLeaks team to expose a corrupt world, the ambassador for UNICEF who wrote the modern classic Mayflies and watched on as it made the leap from page to screen must also, it appears, kick against the pricks.

Currently, he’s locked in discussion with Netflix over the $50 million production of his most-recent novel Caledonian Road. Should it be three seasons or five? Should he be involved in adapting his novel for the screen, or is that the job of Netflix’s screenwriting team?  Not for Andrew the goal of having his wee blog posts published on recycled paper for posterity, but – here’s the thing! – writers at every level still face opposition, friction and rejection.

You can be a blogger firing out pop-culture missives to a few thousand folk a week or a best-selling and highly respected author, but we’re both just well-oiled yet different-sized cogs in the same gritty machine. And I can draw some sort of comfort from that.

Here’s Fairport Convention‘s suitably melancholic and sepia-tinted Book Song. Waltz time and folky, it’s a song about what might have beens and features a terrific electric guitar part (Richard Thompson, I’m assuming) and a lovely duetting male/female vocal (Iain Matthews/Sandy Denny). It’s from What We Did On Our Holidays which is very much an album you should strive to hear if you never have.

Fairport Convention – Book Song

*The other thing I’m working on?

“I’d LOVE to read that!” enthused O’Hagan. Vindication, again. So while ‘POP Record‘ languishes in the ‘what mighta been’ pile, my attentions will turn to something entirely different.

Drop in again in a year or so when I’ll be back to bemoan the difficulties I face in securing that particular sure-fire Sunday Times best seller.