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.
There’s been a good wee buzz in the more discreet corners of the world wide web surrounding the imminent release of the TrashcanSinatras‘ (magnificent) seventh album, Ever The Optimist.
Around the turn of the year, Billy Sloan’s BBC Radio Scotland show had the first play of The Bitter End, the irony of the track’s title only slightly lost on the evergreen presenter who was at the helm for his second-to-last late-night radio show. A sparkling and thumping three chord guitar anthem, The Bitter End was, in the absence of an actual physical single release, the ideal track with which to announce the return of a group which had been low-key to the point of invisibility over the past decade. Save a couple of largely ignored (yet indispensable) 7″ and 12″ releases and a back catalogue reissue campaign through the Last Night From Glasgow label, the group had been apparently inactive. Their previous album, Wild Pendulum, was now ten years old and there was an uneasy air that maybe, as far as cult groups go, that was that.
Little did anyone outwith the group’s close-knit inner circle know, but ideas and rhyming couplets and chord progressions and guitary hooklines and actual songs were percolating, whizzing around the planet between the principal Trashcans in the form of digital demos, the bedrock upon which Ever The Optimist was taking shape.
If The Bitter End was the perfect ‘we’re back! back! back!’ lead ‘single’, then its follow-up would further whet the appetite of a collective fanbase desperate for more few material. Bad Husband was ushered confidently into the world a month or so ago, a duet with Camera Obscura’s Traceyanne Campbell with a cyclical chord progression and weaving melody to die for; the Trashcans of old, but viewed through an Islands In The Stream filter. I must’ve heard – and really listened to – this song a couple of hundred times by now and it’s yet to sound anything less than fresh and urgent.
I’ve been very lucky, y’see, to have had the entire record on repeat for six months or so. I’ve grown to love its perfect mix of bombast and brittleness, the way it flits from loud to quiet, from foot-down-and-drive anthemic to heartstring-tugging introspection and insularity. Without spoiling anything further, I’d say with a fair amount of confidence that Trashcan Sinatras fans will really take to it and love it. I might even suggest, debatable as that will prove to be, that it’s the band’s greatest album.
I was actually a wee bit surprised at the choice of third ‘single’.
Melodramatic and its accompanying video was released mid-week there, again to high praise and an outpouring of superlatives. Within the context of the album, Melodramatic might be my least favourite track (yes, really!) – which might say something to anyone here who’s reading this and now can’t wait for the album – but taken as a stand alone track…and with the benefit of a video behind it, (especially the video) I’ve been appreciating it all the more.
Much of the studio footage in the video was captured four years ago in Glasgow’s Gloworm Studios by Stephanie Gibson. Stephanie, as some readers here will know, was responsible for the portraits and abstract images that helped elevate The Perfect Reminder (my book on the making of the second TCS album) from mere reportage to definitive biography. Stephanie’s video footage was sympathetically edited and knitted together by Chris Dooley. Chris, as some readers here will also know, was responsible for the design, look and feel of The Perfect Reminder, elevating it from definitive biography to luxury item. And why am I telling you this?
I’m telling you this because four years ago, just after our book was given the Saturday night headline slot at the Aye Write book festival in Glasgow, Stephanie and myself were invited to Gloworm for an afternoon. So while Stephanie was filming the band at work, I was sat on a couch in the studio taking it all in; John as he played a chord sequence – warming up, I thought – until Davy leaned over and slid the faders on the desk to bathe the room in a sound of liquid gold – a brand new Trashcans’ track in the process of being born! I could see Stephen in the drum room, working his kit with a tender touch. I could hear Paul’s guitar(s), flown in digitally from the west coast of America and playing fantastically and loudly through the studio’s speaker system. And although I couldn’t yet see Frank, I could hear him and his unmistakable pitch-perfect voice. He was singing slowly – crooning even – about ‘the likes of Cincinnati‘. Wow, I thought. They’re channelling Scott Walker, but twisting his words through trademark TCS wordplay and turning out a slow-burning beauty…and right before my eyes and ears. If this is the demo, I’m thinking, I can’t wait to hear the finished version.
“Yeah,” said Frank to me a month or so ago. “We binned that one.”
It’s not on the upcoming record at all. Which, again, should give TCS fans a glimpse into the high watermark of quality they demand before they’ll attach their name to a song.
If you watch the video carefully – and don’t blink at the wrong moment – around the 37 seconds mark, you’ll catch a glimpse of my surprised face as Stephanie’s camera swoops down on the sofa I was sitting in while that glorious Trashcans sound filled the room. Look ma! It’s me! In a pop video! What a thrill!
You can pre-order the new Trashcan Sinatras album Ever The Optimist from all the usual places, including here. Whatchawaitin’ for?
When you first attacked that plank of wood you had the cheek to call an electric guitar, if you were like me you were in immediate need of something with which to amplify your clunky chord changes and morse code ‘solos’. If you were in luck, you might’ve found yourself in possession of a wee Marshall 20W job, with all-important parent-bothering distortion on tap at the turn of its golden dial. You might, if you had an elder sibling who’d already been through this formative stage in life, have access to a Roland Jazz Chorus, its syrupy-thick chorus effect giving you the ideal angle to your jangle. You might even, if you had a dad who’d once dabbled with being a weekend rocker or roller, have access to a Fender or a Vox or similar – a proper amp that required far more volume than was house-friendly in order to sound good.
Me? I had a shitty wee Badger Piccolo. A tiny, tinny 15W affair that only came to life when plugged into a Rocktek distortion pedal. But it was enough to stir enough conviction in my hacked and calloused fingers to stick with this thing called playing guitar.
At one point I graduated to a 30W Peavey. It had a chorus setting. It had a spring reverb that wobbled and vibrated like a violent Hanna-Barbera sound effect if you banged or moved the amp while it was switched on. And it had a push/pull dial that changed the tone from fizz to fffffiiiizzzzz and back again. Coupled with the ever-present Rocktek pedal, this became my (coughs) signature sound.
The young guitar player in me was delighted to see three of my favourite groups employing the Peavey as a means to sculpt their sound. Paul Ryder of the Happy Mondays used one on Tony Wilson’s ‘Other Side Of Midnight’ as the solid foundation upon which the group rattled out their rickety street urchin funk.
Inspiral Carpets had two – two! – on stage at Glasgow Tech, one for the bass and one for a guitarist playing open chords through a fuzz box – just like me!
Most thrillingly of all, Ride – who had just released the ‘yellow daffodils’ 12” had one just like mine (not the one in the picture above – which means – amp detectives – that Ride had more than one too), propped up on a beer crate beside the drum riser on Glasgow Mayfair’s stage.
Ride? Ride! They make that glorious racket with a Peavey?!
And here was me thinking they’d be standing awkwardly and staring through lank fringes at their desert boots in front of a solid wall of Marshall stacks.
Between Ride and Inspiral Carpets and Happy Mondays, there was, it seemed, hope for bedroom guitarists everywhere. And sometimes, as it turned out, hope is all you have.
This popped up on Instagram recently.
It’s Pixies’ Joey Santiago with a Telecaster and a Peavey.
Wait! What?
Joey used a Peavey too?!
On Surfer Rosa?!?
On SURFER ROSA?!?!?
That ear-destroying surf punk mix of siren guitars and riffage heavier than a shower of blacksmiths’ anvils was created with a Peavey too?! Who knew?!
This is akin to winning the Le Mans 24hr on a pushbike. Mr Bean knocking out Mike Tyson in the first round. Hearts winning the Scottish Premiership…you get the idea. As unlikely as it seems, it’s quite possible to make thunderous alt rock through a humble Peavey amplifier. Rock me sideways, Joe.
Pixies – Vamos
‘Estabo pensando sobreviviendo con mi sister en New Jersey!’ goes Frank Black, all menace and snarl. ‘We’ll go to California!’ he screams.
Screeeeeeeee! goes Joey’s Peavey-powered guitar. The rhythm section pummels out a breathless and steady backbeat. Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump! Joey attacks those six strings like the Boston Strangler himself, bending them, twisting them, grappling the life out of them until ear splitting feedback saws its way through the stew.
At several points there are clangs – instantly recognisbale clangs to any Peavey owner (but who knew at the time?!?) – of Joey hitting, banging, thumping the side of his amp until the reverb spring rattles like a cartoon explosion – that self-same cartoon Hanna-Barbera sound effect first heard at home and in smelly rehearsal rooms, now magnetised to tape forever.
I don’t listen to Pixies that much these days, but Joey’s social media post has had me scurrying back particularly to Surfer Rosa recently. A powerful reminder that the best things are often created in the most simple of ways.
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.
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, FromTo 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!
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.
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!
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?
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.
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.
Plain Or Pan 