“Bill! BILL!!! Stop! STOP!!! The bassline, man… What you playin’ at? Disco’s been over for six whole months. Get your mind off the 13-year olds in Tramp and focus on the task in hand, man!”
“Mick…Mick! It ain’t disco…it’s John Taylor, innit?”
1983 was a strange year for your chart-friendly heritage rock acts.
Paul McCartney was zigzagging between writing duets with Michael Jackson and rewriting his own songbook for 1984’s roundly-battered Give My Regards To Broad Street project.
Rod Stewart was delighted that the musical world had finally caught on to his mullety, spiky, teased and coiffured bonce, but was dressing in the same sort of shiny red leather ‘n shoulder padded blouson-with-matching-pants outfit that Eddie Murphy was garnering all those laughs in. And only some of those laughs were for the jokes, let me tell ya. It’s been scientifically proven that Rod’s musical output of the era – the synth-laden Body Wishes – is absolutely no-one’s favourite Rod record at all.
The Rolling Stones were in a similar position. They hadn’t been relevant for a decade. Not really since 1972’s Exile On Main Street had they been at the forefront of things. The musical world they lorded over – they were the self-confessed Greatest Rock ‘N Roll Band In The World, lest we forget – had since birthed glam and disco and punk and post-punk (or New Wave as Jagger would call it) and the Stones had wilfully ploughed on, with a nod to punk here (Some Girls‘ Respectable) and a tasteful tip of the trilby to disco on the same album (Miss You) and a feeble gesture to post-punky new wave there (at a push, Emotional Rescue‘s She’s So Cold) and now they were in the middle of a synth revolution.
Where exactly did a group of has-been rock ‘n rollers continually out of step with the musical fashions of the era fit in in 1983?
Keith was happy to remain a blues-rocker. Mick though wanted to look outwards. He looked to his left. ‘Indie’ was about to go overground, blown in on a breeze of harmonica wheeze with The Smiths’ Hand In Glove. Pffft. This tinny, wimpy music was an irrelevance to the Stones, a bug on the sole of their stack-heeled shoe that they could squish at will. Mick looked to his right, to the pop charts and the new wave (not New Wave) of British acts currently whipping it up in the States. And right at the forefront of that invasion, in their blousy powder blue and pastel pink suits, their Lady Di haircuts and cocaine-powered self-importance was Duran Duran.
Perhaps, with their penchant for models and yachts and sunnier climes and front page splashes, Duran Duran were the natural successors to the Rolling Stones. Perhaps not, though. Park that thought. Let’s not get too silly and carried away.
Either way, the 1983 model of the Stones was a barely-functioning shadow of its former multinational corporate-self. That age-old cliche musical differences meant that Mick ‘n Keef, its two managing directors weren’t speaking. Mick recorded during the day. Night owl Keith worked under cover of darkness. If they found themselves together, they were nasty, spiteful and downright hostile to one another. “Jagger started to become unbearable,” said Keith in his autobiography, Life.
Sly and Robbie, the great Jamaican rhythm section, were brought in as de facto mediators, massaging the egos of both leaders whilst softening the need to include the other’s work on the record. The resultant album – Undercover (Of the Night) – was a largely forgettable and irrelevant record of the times…but its eponymous lead single was an absolute triumph. Pompous? Yes. Over-produced? Very likely. But essential and terrific? Indeed it was. I should know – I played the copy I bought in Irvine Library’s sale of old records for 25p over and over and over again. I had no idea what was cool and what was not…only that Undercover was such a great track from a band well past their sell-by date.
Rolling Stones – Undercover (Of the Night)
It’s the drums that hit you first. Great production. Live, reverby, in the room. Charlie – I’m really hoping it’s Charlie and not Sly Dunbar – sounds awesome; loud, metronomic, tribal…the bedrock upon which the Stones’ aural madness is allowed to unspool.
It’s the bass that gets you next. Bill – and I’m really hoping it’s Bill and not Robbie Shakespeare – pulls of a juggernauting rubberised riff that thumps and pops in the spaces left by Charlie (or Sly). It’s disco, but it’s not disco. It’s funky but it’s not funk. It’s straight-up pinched from John Taylor, that’s what it is. Listen to Planet Earth and tell me Bill Wyman wasn’t impressed enough to spot something worth stealing. Either way, between them the rhythm section maintain their position as the driving force in the Stones as an R ‘n B dance band. Charlie and Bill really cook on Undercover.
Which leaves Mick ‘n Ronnie ‘n Keith. The guitars come in; metallic and to the fore, phased, flanged and boomeranging around the room with absolutely no subtlety or finesse at all. Reverberating, disappearing, returning twice as loud, a knuckle-dragging twin axe attack of stiletto-edged slashed riffing, it’s fantastic. This ain’t linear, twelve bar rock ‘n roll like Brown Sugar or Tumbling Dice, this is Keith the Human Riff going Godzilla for four and a half zany minutes.
Mick camps it up in the vocals, going pseudo-political about the hundred disparus lost in the jails of South America. C’mon Mick! Lighten up! You’re no Billy Bragg. You’re a silly, double-jointed, hand-on-hip, rubber-lipped rock ‘n roll song ‘n dance man in a purple silk suit and yellow sweatbands. Let’s dance, you fool. Little Mick needs no encouragement. Listen out for the bit when he double tracks himself with Keith’s ‘do do-do do-do-do’ guitar refrain and try not to see him wiggling his 26″ waist to Bill ‘n Charlie’s unstoppable groove. Great track, isn’t it?
If it’s extended pops ‘n bangs ‘n whooshes ‘n ech-ech-echoing guitars yr after, look no further than the extended and absolutely epoch-defining 12″ version.
Rolling Stones – Undercover (Of the Night) Extended Cheeky Mix
Like all the acts of the time, it was absolutely de riguer to produce an extended, adult-themed and ultimately banned video to promote the single. Guns…masks…kidnappings…casual misogyny…violence in the streets…shoot-outs in the chapel… Proof, if it were needed, that bands with too much money love to flaunt their wealth in the silliest of ways.
The full 15-minute Undercover promo made it to the cinema for a brief run, opening as the supporting film for Scarface, believe it or not. Whoever thought that a gangster film about white-suit wearing cocaine fiends was a good fit with a gun-totin’ Rolling Stones promo was absolutely right on the mark. Well done that man.
This piece was originally written a month, maybe even six weeks ago, but I was waiting on permission from various sides to post it. In the interim, the Trashcans suddenly, unexpectedly and shockingly lost John Douglas, their glue and calming balm, and so any queries for permission to use it were quite rightly forgotten. Lest I’m accused of saturation, It’ll very likely be the last TCS-related piece on here for a while, but with permission now granted, it’s a fine way to draw a line under the most intense period in the Trashcans’ forty years’ history. Read on or scroll on, I’m not offended.
There’s a new Trashcan Sinatras record out just now. Released on Friday 31st July, Ever The Optimist is the group’s first in ten years. If you were a lazy, cliched critic, you might call it a return to form, but that would suggest they had somehow lost their golden touch at some point. To their dedicated listenership, it zings and sings – like their six other albums – with unravelling melodies and subtly brilliant musicianship; a million, kaleidoscopic ideas packed into its 11 songs. Initial response has been very encouraging to the point of fevered hyperbole. ‘Their best album ever‘, sort of stuff. It’s certainly, without question, one of their best. But you knew that already.
I’ve been working most of the first half of this year on a project that’ll see the story of the new record being told in print. A couple of months ago, in a deadline-looming fit of panic, the group asked if I could pull some of our interview quotes and create a short song-by-song commentary on the album specifically for press in foreign territories. Cool! Over a midnight shift and crossed fingers, I pulled together an article that, I hoped, would cut the mustard.
Reading back again the whole article that I’d written, the record spinning in the background, it seemed too good, too informative, too important even, not to share more parochially, so with the go-ahead from all concerned, I’ve put it below. Think of it as a very, very, very abridged version of what will be published at some point down the line. An amuse-bouche, if y’like.
Trashcan Sinatras – ‘Ever The Optimist’
It’s been over a decade since the last Trashcan Sinatras album, but the group has been anything but idle. In the intervening years, the Trashcans have been quietly going about their business of writing and refining and finding ‘the ‘hing’ that will, as ever, make your heart swell and swoon like it did when you first heard Cake or I’ve Seen Everything or Weightlifting or any of their half dozen previous classic albums.
‘Ever The Optimist’ is a record that hums and thrums with the Trashcans’ signature melodic touch and unmatched gift for lyrical punch. It’s a collection of eleven songs (or a round dozen if you’re lucky to be in Japan), all of which will thrill the group’s dedicated, pan-global fanbase and should, if those algorithms play the game properly, garner a new set of devotees into the bargain.
‘Ever The Optimist’ is, as is the TCS way, a record comprised of songs stewed slowly and over time before being reshaped by the constituent members of the group and Trashcanified into the sort of ear-friendly shapes that have garnered critical acclaim for the entirety of the group’s thirty-five year career as recording artists. Songs that began life as woozy mountain cabin sketches. Songs that have their roots in late-night poker sessions. Songs that are born from walking the dog. They all coalesce into one ebbing and flowing labour of love that may just be one of 2026’s very best albums.
SIDE ONE
Ever The Optimist
Less careerist and more careering, the Trashcans find themselves contemplating their position in the world. ‘We’re all gambling, trying to hold it together,’ sings Francis, a reference to both the smoky poker nights of yore and life’s cruel optimism:loss ratio. Beginning life as a breezy acoustic tune, it was reworked into a stomping, piano-driven thumper and is a real clarion call to listeners of the long-player. Listen out for the Pop Art Poem-aping ‘mmmmaybee’ and ‘fii-iire!’ in the first verse and the great nagging guitar part around the 1.46 mark. Like its title itself, this song hints at a great set of songs to follow.
John: We used to go to poker nights, smoking and drinking. I wrote a song about it called ‘Gambling’ and the finished version of ‘Ever The Optimist’ came from that. Some of the characters that sat around the poker table ended up in the song.
Paul: The finished song arrived easily. It all came together, this sophisticated pop song, in no time at all. Nothing was over rehearsed, so it all sounds fresh.
Games For the ZX Spectrum
‘It doesn’t matter what I did before, I don’t know what I’m doing anymore.’
With its see-sawing melody and call and response chorus, this will be, we predict, an immediate favourite. Written right at the tail end of the album sessions – ‘contrary to appearances, we move pretty fast,’ points out Francis – it owes its idiosyncratic title to the small group of retrophiles who continue, even in 2026, to write games for the unfashionable ZX Spectrum, the Trashcans drawing clear parallels between those dedicated furrow-ploughers and themselves.
Paul: You know how you get these retrophile guys nowadays who write games for the outmoded ZX Spectrum because it reminds them of their youth?
I was trying to draw a line between those guys and us making a Trashcans album. You know, we’re also making a thing that’s just for kicks, and it’s filtered through the eyes of the past – it was fun when we were young, but nobody’s really interested anymore, except for maybe a very small group of dedicated people.
Francis: I like this a lot. We had the album finished, and I’d promised Paul Savage (producer) that that was all the songs, there’d be no more on the record, then Paul Livingston said, ‘Oh, here’s a tape.’
He’d called it Games For the ZX Spectrum but he could just as easily have called it ‘Chocolate Teapot’. What’s the relevance of my songwriting? Why am I doing this? For what reason? It was a really great song, so it made it onto the album.
Bad Husband
Featuring Camera Obscura’s Tracyanne Campbell on co-vocals, Bad Husband is an upbeat and fresh duet that belies the song’s subject matter, with two unique voices from Scot-pop’s outer fringes melding together quite beautifully. Tracyanne’s vocal dips and swoops around the melody as Frank sings about poor judgements, bad feelings and storms coming. ‘Hey! This isn’t working!’ they both admit far too joyfully. Never has separation sounded so upbeat – ‘like the best party in a 1970’s Castlepark living room,’ to quote fellow Irvine alumnus John Niven.
John: Bad Husband had been brewing for a while. Some of the rhythm was from an old musical vignette created by Simon Dine. He’s always sending us his musical collages; the same thing over and over for five minutes. It’s a sonic thing…a feel…a groove… and sometimes, like with Bad Husband, the little collage inspires something really great.
Francis: I had this idea that Tracyanne Campbell should duet on it. This would be our very own Islands In The Stream! Tracyanne’s vocal was instantly magic, you know. I sent it to the rest of the group; ‘Guys! What d’you think of THIS?!?’
Stephen: Tracyanne’s vocals are terrific. The track worked well before we had her on there, but her singing just elevated it above and beyond. Her and Frank’s vocals really blend and hit off one another. I like that she’s almost speaking at points and at other times she’s swooping around the melody. Terrific stuff.
The Bitter End
‘When you’re lost and lonely, you can phone me on the way home.’
Already a radio staple thanks to Billy Sloan’s enthusiastic rotation and curation on his late-night Radio Scotland show, The Bitter End is a proper foot-down-and-drive rush. From its first metallic guitar K.O. to the final cymbal splash, The Bitter End leaps from the speakers like a box-fresh band jam. It may surprise listeners to note that the track began life 20 years ago, the product of a fuggy and foggy wee hours recording session on an eight-track machine that Frank had somehow rehomed in his Glasgow flat. ‘Did I really get up in the middle of the night and record something?’ wondered Paul in the morning. ‘I pressed play and heard this Rockpile-ish rocker.’ With Frank finishing off most of the words, The Bitter End sat patiently in the drawer marked ‘someday’ and waited for its time to shine. Its time, evidently, is now.
Paul: In the run up to choosing songs to record for this album, we put together a playlist of about 40 demos, including things we’d written from years ago that we didn’t care about, everything we had really, and Davy put The Bitter End on it. And everybody was like, ‘Hey! Bitter End sounds great!’
Davy: With Paul Savage in Chem 19, we gave it a bash, pretty much replicating the original demo – even the lyrics stayed as they were, which is unusual for us – and it all kinda clicked. Everyone was into it, so we worked it up into the recorded version that became the taster for the record.
Stephen: There’s, like, ten million guitars on this track, loud and brash, it’s got a great bouncing riff, and it all sounds instant and fantastic.
A View From Nowhere
Long-time Trashcans fans will be delighted to hear the return of the major 7ths on this track, a Davy-birthed strumalong that tips its jaunty hat to the unspooling melodies of Bacharach and David as arranged by John Douglas. Davy returned with its completed lyric after an inspirational walk with the dog. A View From Nowhere features terrific vapour-trailing harmonies from Frank atop a fuzzy, sustained guitar/synth break midway through. Many lesser bands will simply throw in the towel when it dawns on them that they won’t ever be able to write a song as lush and poppy as this.
John: This was one of Davy’s that had a charm, a real nice mood about it. Everyone straight away said this should be in the frame for the record.
Davy: I can’t remember when I wrote this. It wasn’t that long ago, maybe five years ago. It was written fairly quickly, a wee three chord thing that I’d recorded on my phone.
Stephen: Paul Savage is a great producer and arranger. He helped shape this track. ‘Try the bass like this, Davy,’ ‘Play that instead, Stephen.’
I love the sleepy quality that Paul got from the bridge. The whole thing is almost soft rock, no harsh sounds. It’s all just muted and soft. It’s a great wee mellow pop song.
Hold On To Today
The evergreen Green Gartside, a septuagenarian, you may be surprised to learn, heard enough promise in our rough and crappy-sounding demo and was ‘keen to try some singing on your lovely, little song.’ The result is fairly astonishing. The centrepiece of the album, Hold On To Today is subtle and lightly pulsing, a ballad with the beating heart of Fleetwood Mac’s Albatross recast as a gentle Brian Wilson tearjerker. Tinkling music boxes, lightly picked acoustics, ping-ponging electrics, stacked harmonies, sudden stops, unexpected changes and an exquisite outro … Hold On To Today closes side one of the album and will leave you breathless, frozen in wonder and momentarily unable to flip the record. Music is a powerful thing.
John: When Davy initially played us this, it was far less arranged than it ended up. The structure of it was really different to how it now sounds. But it had something. Davy wasn’t quite yet there with it, but the rest of us knew there was enough there to persevere with.
Francis: I changed the key a wee bit, we all played around with the arrangement, John made it a bit spacier…and then Davy somehow got Green Gartside to sing on it.
Davy: We gave Green the freedom to sing what he wanted, and what he gave us was fantastic.
Paul: It’s a beauty, It’s a good wee song, that. And it has a false ending. It’s the perfect song to close side one of the record.
TCS June 2026 by Stephanie Gibson
SIDE TWO
The Associated Funk
A post-punk thrash that brings to mind, in feeling rather if not sonics, A Happy Pocket’s ‘The Genius I Was’. The Associated Funk is linear, propulsive and purposeful, the soundtrack of a life unravelling messily to the regimented sound of sequencers and a motorik disco beat. TCS fans will immediately spot the lyrical lift from Wild Pendulum’s ‘Let Me Inside (Or Let Me Out)’, Paul recycling an old line to furnish his new song. ‘It was written in a mountain cabin and filmed for a Patreon vlog,’ explains the writer. ‘I was expecting something bucolic, folky and mountain cabin-y, not this A-ha/Tubeway Army stramash!’
Paul: ‘Okay, I’m gonnae book a cabin for three days, and I’m gonnae buy a bunch of weed, I’m gonnae take all my stuff up there and see if I can write and record a song from scratch.’
Davy: I liked Paul’s demo straightway. It was a total stramash, very chaotic and thrashy, but I got a New Order-y vibe from it. I knew it would work. In the group’s hands it didn’t really change much. The album version is pretty much a carbon copy of the demo that Paul had made.
Francis: Paul’s really good at finding new and interesting ways to write. And on The Associated Funk, with its synths and clangs and the electronic-ness of it all, there’s a great tune in there. It has a really bright melody.
Stephen: The riff is very good, it’s very metronomic.
Rome
Reggae James Bond. A dubby trip. A scraping, jangling, sixties TV theme with John Barry harpsichords, descending, twirling strings, bone-rattling percussion and the sticky, sonic fingerprints of Simon Dine all over its claustrophobic and eerie arrangement. John and Francis duet in the verses, double dare one another in the choruses and soar in the post guitar break, a wheezing and sliding, Gilmourish, Frippish racket. For clarity, it’s a song about friends who really shouldn’t hang out with each other. Also for clarity, it’s a beauty.
Paul: From Simon’s sound snippet, this one was instantly great. What the fuck was it? Weird-sounding reggae, in 3 / 4 time, that’s what it was. The descending strings were already there, the reggae bassline too, so I put chords on it. And made a chorus and a verse. And then I put some words to it.
Stephen: Frank and John do a great job, trading lines, coming in and out. It’s got a very good vocal on it. I love the chorus and the way it soars out of the verses.
John: It’s moody noir. I think the bass is brilliant on it. I think it’s got a vibe. And it’s kind of dictated by the bass and the kit. The star of the show here is the rhythm section.
Melodramatic
‘If you don’t leave it alone, it will never get better.’
With the band having just laid down The Bitter End and with the studio still set up for maximum guitars, bass and drums, Melodramatic was thrashed out in the time it takes to listen to. ‘Maybe it’s mind over matter’ goes the chorus, its stack of overlapping vocals and driving rhythm clearly on more than nodding terms with any number of those melody and tune-obsessed west of Scotland guitar bands you might mention in passing.
Paul: This is from about the same time as The Bitter End. I was playing about with this 4-track thing in my bedroom, and Frank was like, ‘I don’t know what you’re doing in there, but it sounds great!’ So I finished it off.
Davy: I like that, once the singing starts, it doesn’t really stop. Frank just keeps going verse after verse, chorus after chorus, from beginning to end.
Birds I Couldn’t Identify
‘If there’s one thing The White Album has taught me, it’s that you can write a song about anything!’
A great title with an allegorical aptness, Birds I Couldn’t Identify tells the story of Paul’s trip to Rishikesh, where he spent time meditating in the foothills of the Himalayas. ‘It was all quite beautiful and bizarre,’ recalls Paul. ‘We chanted a mantra for two hours every night and meditated in different places during the day, ate amazing food. I felt wonderful!Of course I went to the Beatles Ashram (in awe), then wrote this a couple of days later.’
Trashcans fans of old will delight in the climbing chord sequence and ad-libbed, high and breathy ‘yeahs’ that Francis does at the beginning. The melody that he wrings from Paul’s words is really quite something, long and floaty and, I suppose, meditative in its own way. It’d be interesting to poll listeners after they’ve lived with this album for a few months – I reckon Birds I Couldn’t Identify will be one of the favourites.
Paul: This song’s got a really natural melody that’s very good, a bit weird, but very good. I wrote the lyrics and stuff in India, in Rishikesh.
John: Straight away, when Paul played it to us, I was thinking, ‘This is a really good one.’ It was an instant hit. I fell in love with it straight away.
Stephen: This is a cracker. It’s fantastic.
Learning To Love Your Ghost
A shimmering, slow and stately album closer that builds to a tasteful crescendo of rifling drums and long-noted synths, Learning To Love Your Ghost is, as that old cliché goes, a bit of a grower. A handful of plays will have you fully appreciating its windswept drama and the way it’s carried along on the same sort of major to minor chord changes that make Wild Pendulum’s ‘Autumn’ so enduring. Learning To Love Your Ghost is, as the group cryptically puts it, about ‘inner orbits and outer space.’ As a welcome bonus, once it’s finished, it’ll have you reaching for the record to turn it over and start from side one again.
Davy: There’s an old demo I did years ago, just ideas really, not a song. And it had this bit and this bit and that bit, y’know, parts that the others might take inspiration from, maybe turn it into something, and I had the ‘Death Star split the atom’ line in there, and Paul jumped on that.
Paul: It was this two-minute epic that Davy had written that didn’t really make any sense musically or lyrically, and I just loved it. But it needed a verse.
John: I’d been through my illness, and I just wrote about that. My central station, my inner thing was invaded. We got a great song from a difficult situation.
‘Ever The Optimist’ is an album by the Trashcan Sinatras. Play it once, you’ll play it often.
The boy always had bikes. From the moment he spied his big sister’s, he wanted one of his own. He had a wee yellow Halfords-made thing, a Stinger, all go-faster stripes and cartoon wasps with helmet to match, and it wasn’t long before he was cycling death-defying circles on the front grass, the stabilisers dispensed with almost as soon as I’d fitted them. D’you remember the rushing sense of freedom that accompanied those first stabiliser-free pedals of your own? Yeah! Great, innit! Once you’ve shaken the rickety wobbles free, you’re truly off and running, one of life’s first lessons in the sheer thrill of singular independence.
He had a blue Cube bike next. High spec and well built. The pair of us, sometimes three if his big sister was feeling adventurous, would cycle from Kilwinning to Irvine to visit my parents, their grandparents, a one-way trip of seven or so miles. He’d have been five or six years old at the time, but he was determined that wherever I cycled, he should cycle too. I’d lead the way on the stretch of National Cycle Network bike path that serves this part of the west of Scotland so well, the boy just behind me, his wee legs going like the clappers while I freewheeled most of the way. I’d ring my bell. He’d answer by ringing his back. I’d do two short pings and one long one and he’d answer in the same way. Daft games to make the journey interesting. I’d have a stash of chocolate in my pocket and if he was flagging, we’d pull to the side and I’d produce the energy-giver at the right moment. By no means was it the fastest way to visit gran and papa, but it was the best. For the return journey, my dad would often put the boy’s bike in the back of the car and run him home, but he was never happy about that. Big sister, generally, was delighted. But if I was cycling home, then so should he, whether he was six years old or home was another seven miles away or whether it was raining or not.
After he’d outgrown the Cube, we got him an orange bike, the make of which escapes me. It had great tyres, if I remember correctly. Solid when pumped. Proper road grippers, but narrow enough for speed. Being bigger and more gallus, he’d think nothing of encouraging me to take him further afield. We’d go all the way through Irvine Beach Park and past the myriad of links golf courses to Barassie, and maybe even Troon if the weather was favourable. We’d cycle into the hilly countryside, wheezing our way up and wheeing our way down north Ayrshire’s undulating landscape, still playing that daft bell game, still stopping for sugar.
In the school holidays, the three of us would cycle to Kilwinning train station, wrestle our bikes onto the train to Largs (no easy task during the Glasgow Fair when all and sundry head doon the watter for the day), hop on the ferry for the short crossing to Millport, then cycle the island’s pancake-flat ten-mile distance, stopping off first at the famous Ritz Cafe and then at Fintry Bay with its crabbit ice cream seller before getting the ferry and then the train back home in time to make tea. Happy days.
The best bike he had was a Bradley Wiggins-branded hybrid bike. Great build. Properly good spec. A high quality bike. Even in the depths of winter, the pair of us would be off and out. Sometimes ‘just’ to Irvine, but these days we’d take the longer and more scenic route, up to and over the standing stones at the top of Eglinton Park, a thigh-burning exercise in positive mental attitude, its long, fast and slightly treacherous snaking downhill the reward for the hard yards on the up-climb. We ferried not just to Millport but to Arran now. He never quite made it round the island’s 56 mile circumference (I thought he was still too young, a concept lost on him, with inevitably stroppy arguments as a consequence) but we conquered many of the Sleeping Warrior’s hills and winding bends like a father/son tag team of red polka dotted Kings of the Mountain. By now, he’d be faster than me much of the time. Bigger, stronger and less apprehensive of the fast and winding downward runs, more gung-ho at tackling the horribly steep climbs. And now, he’d be the one at the top of the hill, pulling chocolate from a hidden pocket, teasing me slowly upwards the way Hanna-Barbera might’ve teased a donkey with a carrot.
Then his football really took over. It was always there, but now he trained twice a week and played at the weekend too. Bike time was no longer part of the agenda. To accommodate his growing stature, the seat on the Wiggins bike had been adjusted as high as it would go. ‘We’re gonnae need another bike,’ I remember thinking. ‘…but he doesn’t cycle any more,’ I answered myself almost straight away.
We sold the Wiggins bike on Facebook marketplace yesterday. A nice guy bought it. His young son will be in Scotland for four weeks during the English school holidays and they hope he’ll want to cycle around Millport on it. The bike’ll be happy to see familiar roads again. It’s gone to a good home.
I went upstairs to tell my wife that the bike had been sold. “It’s gone.” I burst into tears.
That wasn’t expected at all.
Here’s Long Hot Summer. Lazy, languid, meandering and unforgettable, all the while taking its time to get to the end of the road; the perfect metaphor for cycling with your kids, as it turns out.
Odd band, The Strokes. They’ve got – or maybe nowadays since they’ve made some real money – they had something of a classic rock ‘n roll look; battered Levi’s and even more battered leather, tiny t-shirts and tight, tight pants, in their dirty Converse and winkle pickers and moneyed Manhattan sidewalk sneakers an array of de rigeur footgear, not to mention the sixteen different haircuts crowning each angular and chiselled face.
Line them up in a police identity parade though and, on closer inspection, they are indeed an odd bunch.
There’s a singer, all doe eyed boredom with the personality of dry toast who hangs from his mic stand when not having to sing. Which, given The Strokes are all about the guitars (sorry, were all about the guitars) is quite often. There’s a bass player who holds his instrument the way a big game poacher might tote his rifle if he’s on the lookout for a stray elephant. There’s a pair of guitar players, one low slung and coaxing lightning bolts of electric thrills from his six strings, the other playing his white Strat at chest-height, like Dylan in the ’60s, you might note, with the hair to match, but frantically rattling out rapid fire open chords high up the neck, his face a twisted gurn of concentration, his corkscrew curls bouncing in time to the four to the floor beat. Join the two players together and you’ve have pretty much the complete guitarist. The guitar would be at the right height for a start. And, yes, that beat. At the back, the quiet Stroke, the coolest Stroke, a Stroke so handsome he got to step out with Drew Barrymore for years, The Strokes have the greatest New York City drummer since Clem Burke.
And their individual names. Exotic. Storied. A mini cosmosis of the East Village’s multi-cultured diversity. Julian Casablancas. Albert Hammond Jr. Nick Valensi. Nikolai Fraiture. Greek. Italian. Greek-Italian. And, in Fab Moretti, a drummer who sounds like an advertising statement, a nothing more and nothing less, good, honest testament to Italian beer itself.
Is This It? turned 25 yesterday. Or, at least, BBC Radio 6 Music, by pumping out a Strokes-themed playlist across the entire schedule could tell me so. Strokes-themed. That phrase was doing quite a bit of heavy lifting, I tell you. I’ve always had it as a defining memory that I bought Is This It? on its day of release on the Monday of 27th August, 2001. Same day I bought the Zim’s Love And Theft, if I’m not mistaken. Which, Mr BBC, I’m not. I know this because our daughter was born the day before. And I know my dates. The Strokes album and the Bob album are both cultural milestones, maybe, but the birth of your children remains the highest of life’s high points. 29th July, 6 Music? I think you’re about a month too early.
I happened to catch a terrifically insightful interview with the album’s producer Gordon Raphael while out and about in the car late in the afternoon. He emphasised just how much work it took The Strokes to appear nonchalant and cool and raggedly spontaneous. Yeah, they had the look, but the real hours were put in in the rehearsal room. It takes a lot of hard work to look like you’re not working hard. 18 hour days were not uncommon in their search for the rickety rock ‘n roll sound that would come to define them. They played over and over and over, tweaking a riff here, dropping unnecessary flab there. Casablancas at this point wasn’t really their singer. A pal, he hung around in the rehearsal room’s corner until one day he went full-on Noel and pointed out what they needed to do to make the songs better. From then on in he was the band’s vocalist and musical director. Hanging freely from microphone stands during guitar breaks is, apparently, when his best ideas appear.
Listening to The Strokes then and now, it’s clear where the influences lie. A bit Velvet-y here, a bit Iggy there, a whole lotta Television interplay everywhere else. It was interesting then to hear Raphael say how the band brought three records to him in their pursuit of their sound. You could probably name them…except you’d probably be wrong.
The drum sound. It had to have the crisp compression of John Lennon’s Watching The Wheels.
The guitar rhythm. It had to have the unique and clean separateness of The Wailers on Bob Marley’s Uprising album.
The overall feel. It had to have the messy chaos of Guided By Voices’ Game Of Pricks.
That was it.
If you listen to Is This It? you’ll hear all of this. Not hard to explain at all.
Jimmy Smith is the bridge between jazz and soul, a colossus of his chosen instrument who had one well-tailored foot firmly planted in the camp marked ‘strictly no sell out’ and the other in the camp marked ‘unfortunately I’ve got bills to pay.’ A master of the Hammond B-3 organ, his playing was a deep influence on Deep Purple’s Jon Lord, The Charlatans’ Rob Collins and Mick Talbot in The Style Council (et al), to name but three great players who understood the value of the B3’s flavour to their particular sonic stew.
Sampled by all manner of switched-on creatives from the Beastie Boys to DJ Shadow to The Orb, Smith’s indelible organ grind appears in the least likeliest of places at the most unexpected times. Would the Beasties’ Root Down be quite as funky without that requisite sample? Could Andrew Weatherall have borrowed from anyone other than Smith when twisting The Orb’s Perpetual Dawn inside out and upside down? Ask yr average music fan to compile a list of the ten most influential players in music and it’s unlikely that Jimmy Smith’s name would make that short list, but his influence lives long and large.
A few years ago, in the midst of a particularly heavy jazz phase, I noticed on leaving a Glasgow record shop a Japanese import of Jimmy Smith’s Back At The Chicken Shack album. A Blue Note original. A super duper Japanese pressing. And, given the pressing and its particular desirability, one that was relatively affordable. It was up high, so I couldn’t lift it down to look at it, but I wanted it. Problem was, I was properly spent out, and if I’d asked the guy at the counter to get it down for me, I’d have felt compelled to buy it with money I didn’t have. I hummed. I hawed. I left without it…but ten minutes later I’d done a U-turn down Argyle Street, flames burning from the heels of my desert boots as I hot-footed it back to the shop with the sole intention of bringing that record home with me. Of course, by the time I’d returned, some other unbelievably lucky jazz head had got there before me. We all know what buyer’s remorse is. This was not-buying remorse. Which, as you know full well, is very often worse. It’s undoubtedly good to be impulsive sometimes.
Back At The Chicken Shack is a terrific album, a proper heads-down, chin stroking melding of walking basslines, lazy drum shuffles and Smith’s smoky, croaky Hammond sound.
Jimmy Smith – Back At The Chicken Shack
The title track is a heady amalgamation of early ’60s cool, finger-clickin’ jazz. There are just four musicians on board, and the quartet contributes to a positively swingin’ affair that, if possible, is even greater than the sum of its groovy parts. Chicken Shack is brought in on a ringing, trembling bed of Smith’s organ, but no sooner have you settled in than Blue Note’s tenor sax for hire Stanley Turrentine wafts his signature rasp across the top line. Kenny Burrell’s guitar vamps quietly in the background, biding it’s time, waiting for the opportunity to break free, the swinging cymbal splash of Donald Bailey’s drums keeping everything in place and orientating the listener.
As the track meanders, unwinds and eventually pulls itself back together over the course of eight heady minutes, Smith takes centre stage; he ripples here, hits heavy chords there, goes low and bassy in this part, flies high and reedy in that. He walks his fingers up, off and out into orbit before eventually stepping aside to allow Kenny Burrell the opportunity to showcase his exquisite guitar skills; bends, double stops, soulful scales up, down and (crucially) between the frets, playing on pure instinct with his fingers going to places in the merest of nanoseconds before his brain has thought of doing likewise. Turrentine blows a cool breeze in the catch-a-breath gaps left behind, freeform yet within the structure of the track – playing riffs really, as the rock fraternity would recognise them. There’s nothing too skronky or head-melting here, just good, honest music cooked up by good, honest jazz cats playing for no-one but themselves and anyone else with an ounce of rhythm and blues in their soul.
If it’s single-button, tonic suited mod jazz yr after, look no further than Back At The Chicken Shack, daddy-o.
Brian Epstein, in possibly one of the first genius music marketing moves, had The Beatles record a couple of vocal tracks in German, the idea being that the fans in the country where the group had served their musical apprenticeship would be rewarded with a Beatles hit or two in their native language. Abba did likewise, but in reverse. They opted to sing in the international pop language of English but re-recorded many of their vocals in Swedish. And Spanish. And German. And French. Ah-ha – la question c-est voulez-vous. Blur? They’ve had a go at French. Blondie? They did a verse of Sunday Girl in French too. Bowie? You’ll find his German version of ‘Heroes’ on these very pages. In more recent times, Charli XCX has seen the commercial value in dropping tracks recorded in Japanese. I’m pretty sure the K-Pop acts will be similarly bi/multi-lingual. It may be slightly novel, but it’s also very much cash-grab savvy.
And then there’s Billy Idol.
Yeah. Billy Idol. Fight me.
Billy Idol – Hot In The City
Billy’s Hot In The City has long-been something of a guilty pleasure to these refined ears. For years I’d assumed it was a cover version; it’s got that three/four chord, major/minor thing going on, it’s got a melody that’s instantly whistleable, it’s got a chorus of Spector-ish, Supreme-ish girls singing and sashaying behind him – it’s simply just a bit of a banger, as they say. And something as timeless and upbeat and catchy couldn’t possibly be an Idol original.
Yet it was, as it turns out, written wholly by Idol. Nice one, Billy!
Producer Keith Forsey, the man with the golden touch when it comes to 1980s FM-friendly unit-shifters, helped realise oor Billy’s grand notions for his song. In comes a see-sawing, woozy and wheezing keyboard riff. a rubber band bass line with a hummable, nagging full stop after the first chorus, jarring and stabbing pianos, LA rock guitars and those fantastic swooning backing vocals. All Billy needs to do, really, is sing it in his tough guy goes transatlantic voice and wait for the money to roll in.
Billy Idol, one of the original Bromley punks, whose pals went on Bill Grundy and famously wound the host up, who found initial fame as the snarly, punked-up retro rocker fronting Generation X, upped and left for California and, ridin’ in on the considerable surf created by MTV, projected himself as a Hollywood version of a punk rocker and ended up selling enough records to keep him in bleach and strong-hold gel forever. Imagine that.
Gone were the scuzzy, scratchy Gen X guitar solos. In were rapid and slick hair-metal lightning blasts of shiny, hedge fund rock. Gone was the London drizzle, the British greyness. In came a perma tan and spanking new rock star teeth. Gone too were the t-shirts and unnecessary top half clothing. New look Bill loved a bare chest and he got it out at every opportunity. Sensibly, Bill kept a hold of the hair. He could’ve chosen to grown it out, rock star long, maybe mullety or even semi-permed. That must’ve been tempting in the days when he was competing with Motley Crue for airtime. But, no. In reverence to those punk roots (and punk, eh, roots) there it still was; platinum white, stiff and spiky, that just out of bed look that now took a team of studio stylists hours to get just-so. Still there too was the studded leather jacket. And the perma-Elvis lip curl. And the chains and rings and crucifixes and things dangling from the ear lobes, shinier and longer and more plentiful than before, a subtle symbol of his new-found status at the forefront of faux dangerous, highly scripted pop rock. There goes Billy Idol – the original punk who’d eventually become as plastic as the work on his face. White Wedding and Rebel Yell were his big two tickets to a house in the Hollywood hills and a decent retirement plan. But Hot In The City was the real ace in his deck.
In a move as calculated as a Beatles/Epstein masterstroke, Hot In The City features a line that was re-recorded for all the major US territories:
I’m a-walkin’ ’til my brain pops I will move with the beat now I’m a chain ’round an 8-ball I’m gonna really fell the heat now… …Noo York!
(or L.A.!)
(or Bos-ton!)
(or Cleve-land!)
(or Phi-lly!)
(or Sioux Falls!)
or any other non two syllable Hot 100 town where Billy had a bit of traction:
(Minneapolis!)
(New Haven!)
(Chattanooga!)
DJs in those cities would play the relevant version and the locals would go nuts for it, record stores would be queued out the door as they lined up to buy the thing and the record would chart higher than the Saturday night clientele in the Viper Rooms.
The result? A number, er, 23, ‘smash’. What was wrong with those people?!
I know what was wrong. Hot In The City wasn’t pseudo-metal enough. In an era of long-form videos packed full of long-legged beauties with big hair and bigger bosoms, Hot In The City was just too polite, a Tiffany in a world of Madonnas. Too pop. Not enough metal. And the alternative/John Hughes-y scene of OMD and Flock Of Seagulls and Echo and the Bunnymen and so on was still far too edgy and credible compared to Billy soddin’ Idol. Even the Americans knew he was naff…even if they were deaf when it comes to the undeniability of Hot In The City.
Next week – why Eyes Without A Face is overdue for reappraisal. Don’t fight it, feel it.
To paraphrase a well-worn old cliché, there are two types of people; those who love the Trashcan Sinatras and those who haven’t yet heard them.
The Trashcans are the epitome of the cult band. Look up the meaning and see for yourself:
A niche appeal that doesn’t conform to mainstream trends. In the late ’80s, their tight, studied Caledonian jangle was at odds with the more loose-limbed approach that seeped its way outwards from Manchester’s Oldham Street like a pair of Joe Bloggs bell bottoms. In the ’90s, their now-considered classic second album I’ve Seen Everything was lost to the blustery winds of grunge. Their third, 1996’s A Happy Pocket – an album packed full of tunes and melody and inventiveness – failed to make an impact in a musical landscape dominated by two mega-selling and zeitgeist-surfing guitar groups. And so it went on.
Longevity and influence, maintaining relevance over decades. The Trashcans have been making records for over 35 years. Rightly so, I’ve Seen Everything regularly crops up in lists of ‘Best Scottish Albums Ever’ – as should their fourth album Weightlifting, if yr askin’. A young Fran Healy popped up as a support act at one point, his demo tape making its way via the supportive headliners to the label which would sign him and the group that eventually became Travis. That’s longevity and influence right there.
A dedicated fanbase, with intensely loyal supporters. Fans of the Trashcans are well used to playing the long game. By the time their magnificent seventh album arrives at the end of July, it’ll be over a decade since their last album, 2016’s Wild Pendulum. A brief reissue period of their Go! Discs albums and a couple of stand alone singles aside, Ever The Optimist is a record that is eagerly anticipated. The group’s intensely loyal support has, for a few years now, subscribed monthly to the group’s Patreon page. Their subscription fees have gone a long way to financing the upcoming record and patrons of the group have been rewarded with a drip-feed of brand new material that suggests the Trashcans have lost none of their way with a melodic twist and a hooky guitar line (they haven’t – I’ve been lucky enough to have been living with the new record since October last year and it is indeed every bit as good as the released tracks suggest it will be.)
I’ve been doing a bit of writing around the new album too. As with previous publications The Perfect Reminder and The Full Pocket, this new book (?) will dig deep to uncover the inspirations and perspiration around the 11 songs that make up the new record. It’s about 80% finished and, even if I do say so myself, it’s a worthy companion to one of the records of the year. So, you can look out for that when it makes it into print.
It was during an interview with Francis around March when it was suggested that the Trashcans might want to film a video for the title track of the new album. Could I find availability in Irvine’s Harbour Arts Centre around the middle of June? The Trashcans had a small window of opportunity – both Francis and Paul would be home to visit relatives around the 18th of the month and if possible, they’d be looking to film the video then. They were keeping their options open though – a Glasgow pub was also pencilled in as a possible location, the pros and cos of both venues a fiercely debated conversation between band and manager and video production team and – batting for the home team – myself. Eventually, Irvine won out; the right decision as everyone agreed.
It was suggested in conversation that perhaps, maybe, possibly, the group might entertain the notion of playing a few songs after they’d filmed the video shoot. “Like a gig.” There. It was out. The five group members hadn’t been in the same room for eight years. A rehearsal would be necessary. Or rehearsals, plural. When would they fit that in? A gig was unlikely then. Or was it? Yes. It was definitely unlikely. Really though…was it?
Somehow, come Thursday there, the group was into both the video shoot and a small, low-key gig on the same night. With the Harbour Arts Centre’s 100 capacity audience, it was immediately clear that demand for such a show would far outstrip supply, and so, in lieu of selling tickets, the group took the decision to invite family as well as close friends and allies to the performance. It would need to be top secret. Silence Is Golden. The Sound Of Silence. Enjoy The Silence. Enjoy the silence?!? It’s agony knowing about something that’s guaranteed to be totally magic, yet being forbidden to mention it. Word gets out about this and Irvine harbourside would be awash with collapsing quiffs and foggy spectacled, ticketless fans. Silence should indeed be golden.
A guest list was drawn up. Whittled down. Re-drawn. Re-whittled. Augmented and amended. Replies were immediate and almost all in the affirmative. ‘Yes! We’ll be there! Yes! We won’t tell a soul!’ And d’you know what? No one told a soul. I was amazed that nothing as much as a squeak got out. If you were on that list, well done you. The gravity of the occasion – the classic line-up of the Trashcan Sinatras, live and in the same room for the first time in eight years – was clearly not lost on any of the invited audience.
Thursday 18th June eventually arrived…and there they were! All five Trashcans, packed onto the small ‘stage’ of the HAC, standing on yr actual Paolo Nutini’s Persian rugs for a mid-afternoon soundcheck doubling as a second rehearsal (they’d rehearsed in Glasgow the day before) where they greased the rusty cogs of guitar-based melodic pop back into action. They sounded brilliant; a bit scuffed at the edges, and with not as much of the polished sheen that helps make the records so timeless and essential, but playing with vigour and a studied dedication to the cause.
They looked great too. A crack New York video team had been flown in especially and the tiny theatre had been transformed into a proper video set. Greens and aquas and scarlets and cyans swept and swooped above…behind…below the group, throwing long shadows on the walls, throwing those in attendance into a bit of a tizz. A pop video! Being made right in front of us! (And this was just the afternoon too; the only folk there were those essential to the running of the show – just wait until later, when 100 eager fans are in attendance.) They run through the video playback five or six times and then, with relevant footage in the can, everyone stops for food and braces themselves for the evening ahead.
There’s a queue longer than Irvine Mall come doors open time and once in, the lucky hundred make straight for a seat. There’s not a bad seat in the house though – indeed, ‘house’ is being generous to this small and intimate room – and once they realise, half the audience makes their way to the merch stand instead. There are bespoke ‘Trashcan Sinatras HAC Irvine’ t-shirts for sale. By the end of the night, none remain. A momentous occasion requires a momentous t-shirt.
The performance? It’s their first hometown show for 39 years – that’s thirty-nine, Archie, and it’s dazzling…melancholic…life-affirming…tear-jerking…unbelievable…funny…pinch me…all of that and more. The Trashcans did two sets of career-spanning fan favourites (Hayfever! Got Carried Away! How Can I Apply?! Easy Read! Orange Fell! Weightlifting!) as well as live debuts of new material (Games For The ZX Spectrum! The Bitter End!), a couple of kinda live, kinda mimed filmed video performances the meat in the musical sandwich. A set that closes with Send For Henny and Earlies would be exquisite in anyone’s repertoire, and in the hands of the Trashcans, the entire room melts just a little. An unplanned encore of Obscurity Knocks was outrageously brilliant, the scrubbed acoustic guitars that little bit faster, the lightning flash of guitar solo that little bit slicker, the ‘turned 21, twist, bust, wrong again‘ line delivered like Johnny Rotten in ’76. Old Irvine punks never die, apparently. Pound for pound, this was breathtaking stuff.
Will the group tour to promote the album? With Francis and Paul both living on the west coast of America, and what with the cost of touring these days, it all makes for a logistical headache. I’m not so sure they will. Will they play bespoke live shows here and there when the stars and travel arrangements align? I certainly hope so. Everyone in Irvine – band, crew and especially audience – were enraptured. If it can’t be bottled and sold along with the t-shirts, it needs to be brought to the people, however that may be.
While you’re waiting for the end of July, here’s the visualiser for Games for The ZX Spectrum…or Zee Ex Spectrum, if you happen to find yourself talking about great music when you’re Stateside with the Tartan Army.
There’s a La’s story I was party to a few years ago. It concerned the recording of their album – I mean, it would, wouldn’t it? The gist of the story involved a conversation between Lee Mavers and a producer – Mike Hedges, maybe, Steve Lillywhite, perhaps (whichever one they’d been encouraged to work with on this particular session, it doesn’t really matter), with Mavers getting hot under his Evertonian collar at the producer’s inability to capture the sound in his head.
‘But it sounds great, Lee!‘ said the producer, with genuine reason.
‘Nah. It’s shit, mate.’
‘It’s brilliant, Lee. Honestly!‘
Mavers looks him directly in the eye.
‘D’you know when yer mam makes soup and she takes all the ingredients; the lentils and the beans and the pulses and the onions and the stock and she mixes it all together and what it tastes of isn’t only the lentils and the beans and the pulses and the onions and the stock…but she’s somehow created another flavour? That’s what I want from our music. You,’ said Mavers pointing accusingly at his patient producer, ‘are incapable of bringing out that magic flavour.’
Lee Mavers. Souperstar.
It’s more fact than argument these days, but when Gerry Love left Teenage Fanclub, the magic ingredient that elevated that group’s music above and beyond their peers also left with him. A musician with a supreme pop nous derived from the left of centre and the more obscurish corners of music fandom, Love is a master at wringing a melody from simple words and chords. Hindsight shows that, while in Teenage Fanclub, the Love-penned tracks were often the best. Slower to hit the spot in some cases, immediately ace in others, a song written by G. Love comes with an 18 carat gold certificate of excellence.
I sat in on a soundcheck a couple of years ago while the now-solo Gerry and his backing band worked up dazzling versions of Don’t Look Back and Star Sign and Sparky’s Dream and December and Sweet Days Waiting and Thin Air and…(you get my drift, surely)…this – one of his greatest compositions.
Teenage Fanclub – Going Places
Nestling innocuously in the middle of side two of 1995’s Grand Prix – the thinking man’s favourite TFC album (or is that Songs From Northern Britain?) – Going Places show cases not only Gerry’s way with a melodic twist, but also Norman’s divine harmonies and Raymond’s tasteful use of fuzz guitar. It’s Teenage Fanclub in microcosm – a beauty, in other words.
Ringing in on a riff born from Roger McGuinn tackling Maggie May, Going Places is classic mid-paced, mid-era Fanclub. It’s Gerry’s song, so he takes the lead, singing against his trademark frugging bass, his bandmates clearing a space around him. ‘Look at this,’ they go in the playground of pop. ‘Ain’t Gerry’s song sumthin’ special?!‘ The group picks it up for a chorus which arrives on the coat tails of hammered-on and hanging on chords, replete with some sweet, sweet Norman harmonies, Raymond and his fuzz box roughing it up just so. ‘Just kick my feet off the ground, I’ll embrace the sky,’ goes Gerry, Norman joining in on honeyed harmonies as the group behind them aims for the stars and overshoots to the sun.
They know, the Teenage Fanclub, that sometimes less is more, so they immediately pull back. Is that a banjo after the first chorus? I think it is, y’know. A gentle clatter of milk bottle percussion amongst the down-home brouhaha? Sounds like it. There’s some reverberating, vamping organ, some mild tremolo action from Raymond in the second verse, a subtle hint of polite feedback and then the next chorus is upon us, guitars zipping freely as the clouds part, the sun-scorched melody sounding both melancholic and uplifting – a rare trick that not many writers can pull of successfully. The whole thing chimes and clangs and rings and zings in a giddy union of interplay, the McGuinn-does-Maggie-May signature riff echoing forever and we’re – yes! – into another chorus, Gerry kicking his feet off the ground, a falsetto’d Norman momentarily letting himself go and woo-hoo-hooing like Al Jardine in 1966. If y’don’t like this song, the saying goes, you must be deaf or dead, or both.
Gerry Love is, like me, an alumnus of Our Price. While I was manning the counters in Irvine and Kilmarnock, Gerry was doing likewise in Hamilton. Within the identikit shopping centres of Hamilton, Irvine and Kilmarnock you’d find branches of a chain of travel agents called Going Places. I like to think that the shop name stuck somewhere in Love’s head, waiting for the right song to come along. We might not have Our Price and Going Places anymore, but we’ll always have Going Places.
A couple of years ago, to generally positive reviews, the reformed?/reawakened?/reimagined? Blur released the horrendously-titled The Ballad Of Darren album. In this part of the world it was welcomed with keen interest, not necessarily for the music, but because the cover art showed the outdoor pool at Gourock, a seaside town a short 20 miles drive up the west coast from where I’m typing this.
Gourock, like so many of the seaside towns in Inverclyde and Ayrshire, suffered hard at the advent of the package holiday. Why shiver yr bollocks off in the Firth Of Clyde when you can gently bathe them in the mildly tepid aqua blue of the Mediterranean? Why shove a roll ‘n slice down yr gub quicker than you can bat off the local divebombing seagulls when you can sit lazily under an umbrella while drop dead gorgeous Alejandro brings you fresh tapas on request? Why suffer the slops and sticky carpet of the Kings Arms when you can be supping San Miguel in short sleeves until sunset? Tennent’s or tapas? For most Scottish sunseekers there was only one choice.
At some point a decade or so ago, someone decided Gourock’s outdoor pool needed bringing back to life. With wild swimming now being a thing, Gourock’s fresh, salt water pool would be just the ticket for any locals for whom the smell of industrial strength chlorine and echoing kids as they shot out of flumes was too much. And they were proved right. The Gourock outdoor pool is extremely popular, despite the Blur cover showing one lone swimmer getting the lengths in under a slate grey west of Scotland sky, the island of Rothesay a forlorn-looking headland over the water.
And now…
Graham Coxon, chief guitar mangler in Blur is due to release a solo album called Castle Park.
So what, you say. Written down it doesn’t have the same effect, but told to any Irvinite, Castle Park – or the singular Castlepark, as we have it – will have you instantly thinking of the large housing scheme on the outskirts of the town. Built to house Glasgow’s overspill when the city was going through a regeneration programme in the late ’60s, Castlepark subsequently spawned a whole raft of rockers and writers, many of whom eked out a living in the creative arts, and continue to do so.
First Blur and the Gourock pool. Now Coxon and his album named after an Irvine housing estate *. Sometimes your interest is piqued in the most unexpected of ways.
* not really
Recorded in 2011 and swiftly shelved due to Blur re-activity, Castle Park rattles and rolls like all the best Coxon tunes do. Lead single Billy Says is terrific, a mod pop slice of Who/Diddley maracas, off kilter harmonies, na-na-nagging hooklines and a ripper of a wonky solo – something of a Coxon trademark whenever he’s given free reign at the controls. If it’s thunking great beat music you’re after, Billy Says and Castle Park is where you need to turn to.
Back in Thatcher’s 1980s, the Irvine Music Club was housed inside a converted school prefab at Castlepark Community Centre. In the name of rock ‘n roll, lots of us cut our teeth (and fingers) strangling the life out of the classics as bands were formed and augmented and chopped and changed, some of them even savouring the sweet taste of radio airplay and mild success beyond the KA12 postcode.
If it was still going today, I’d like to think the bands in the Irvine Music Club would be creating effervescent guitar-based music like Billy Says. It’s exactly the sort of manic, groove-based guitar record that would’ve had me scrambling to rip it off had I been a cocksure teenage guitar slinger with dreams of the charts and beyond.
We’d spent our formative drunken teenage years falling out of lofts, falling through hedges and falling out and in with each other through a holy triumvate of sounds; New Order’s Blue Monday, Simple Minds’ I Travel and the entirety of Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense album, so when Alex Aitken one day thrust a copy of Talking Heads‘ Speaking In Tongues into my hands and said, ‘Remember when you said if I ever saw this record, I was to buy it for you? Well, here it is. That’s £3.99 you owe me,’ I was a wee bit perplexed. He might also have said, ‘Make it a fiver to account for the petrol money,’ but to be honest, I can’t be sure I’m not making that part up. Either way, I fell into ownership of Speaking In Tongues only because Alex shook me down for the money.
His story had more holes in it than his Ford Capri. I’d never asked him to buy it for me. I love record shopping; I could easily have bought it myself if I wasn’t chasing other essential records, like It’s Alive and The Head On The Door. He hadn’t gone to Ayr and thought, ‘Oh, Craig would like that…must get him it…‘. He’d bought it fairly and squarely for himself and clearly hadn’t taken to the record’s rather sterile sound, so the sneaky bazza thought he’d offload it to me instead. And it worked.
Me? Despite feeling mugged, used even, I’ve loved it from first listen to last (yesterday morning, if yr curious). True, Speaking In Tongues is clinical and awkward where the same songs on Stop Making Sense are organic and flowing and groovier, but I fell for it all the same. It struck me yesterday that, after Remain In Light, it might’ve crept into the second-top slot of my internal Talking Heads Top 5 albums.
It’s that heady combination of sunshine and rhythm that does it – the chattering and day-glo synth lines, the bubbling bass, the rinky dink guitars and lightness of percussive touch that also gave birth to the Tom Tom Club record.
It’s that inescapable notion that here is a band totally in simpatico with one another. Bass lines suggest guitar lines, synth lines ape the bass lines, percussive tumbles punctuate the gaps between David Byrne’s idiosyncratic vocal lines; the group is one living and breathing funky organism.
It’s the realisation that those stoopid Talking Heads failed to put This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody) on the original record. It’s there now, of course, reissue programmes being a by-word for fan-fleecing, but back in the day – until I’d seen the Stop Making Sense concert film at least – I only knew This Must Be The Place from the Speaking In Tongues album. And, what with it instantly being my favourite Talking Heads song ‘n all meant that its parent album had permanent residence in the softest spot of my heart.
I’ve also got a room next door to it for Swamp.
Talking Heads – Swamp
It’s one of those tracks that is instantly familiar the moment you first hear it. It’s stompy. It’s incessant. And it features that caveman-ish, neanderthal hi-hi-hi-hi-hi chant that you – yeah, you! – have chanted at least once in your life. Once heard, instantly memorised.
A bendy keyboard motif. A four to the floor groove. A rinky dink guitar. David Byrne chatting gibberish and nonsense through the intro. Let me tell you a story, he eventually says, his voice slipping and sliding like your sleazy uncle on a boys’ night out, unfolding a lyric addressing existential dread and goodness really knows what else. Rarely has abstract art sounded so goddammed groovy.
Wha’sat? who’s drivin’…where we goin’?…who knows?…a medical chart on the wall…soft violins, hands touch your throat…how many people d’ya think I am?…we’ve come to take you home…woo-hoo!
It’s a head-noddin’, butt-shakin’ monster of a groove. Immensely fun.
Here’s the perennially fab-u-lous version from Stop Making Sense. Byrne’s twitches. Tina’s shoulder shrugs. The band, silhouetted and back-lit in orange. Era-defining stuff. I can’t imagine you’ve never seen this before, but you’re probably long-overdue another viewing,
I was chatting to Jim from the Vinyl Villain recently and we were discussing rock biographies. He was telling me that he’d gone off Talking Heads a wee bit after reading Chris Frantz’s Remain In Love autobiography and discovering that they were a fairly privileged and well-off group, with access to good universities and yachts and country clubs and a whole plethora of things that were well out of the reach of yr average Bowery punk rocker, and it got me thinking about it on the drive home.
There’s no denying that Talking Heads were from a fairly comfortable background, but I’m glad they chose to put their efforts into creating vital and essential art-rock for all, rather than choose to live it up anonymously in a world most of us know little about. Or maybe they’ve managed to straddle the two worlds, and we just don’t realise it…which is waaay more punk in any case.
Plain Or Pan 