What’s So Amazing? What Keeps Us Stargazing?

September 7, 2016 Craig McAllister

The perennially-evergreen Teenage Fanclub are currently burning up small venues the length and breadth of the country in a short tour to promote their new album ‘Here‘ which will be, eh, here this coming Friday. The reviews are rave-like in their generosity for the band, perhaps as much an indicator of how much Teenage Fanclub still mean to folk after all these years as much as the gigs are great. Certainly the set-lists have been mouthwatering; a cherry picking of all the best parts of their 26 year history with select new tracks sandwiched in-between where they fit best.

I used to take great pride in telling folk I’d seen Teenage Fanclub live at least once (and often half a dozen times) a year since 1990 (true, by the way), but since Norman decamped to Canada a few years ago, appearances have been more sporadic. Still, I have a ticket for the big homecoming show at the Barrowlands in December, which, after reading the reviews from Edinburgh last night, I’m impatiently excited about. Like most folk nowadays I’ve had a few listens to the new stuff via an illicit download, something I was keen not to do, preferring to wait for the LP to drop through my door (or more likely a Post office postcard telling me my parcel was at the depot as I’d been out when they delivered) but a link was practically thrust into my hand and, well, what’re you gonna do? It’s terrific stuff, of course, perhaps even ‘Album Of The Year‘ material, but I’m in self-imposed listening exile, waiting until I can stick the record on at full bung in the living room. Only then will I decide on my favourite tracks.

Another band who could easily slip into that ‘Album Of The Year‘ list are the Trashcan Sinatras, but, if you’ve been a regular on here, you’ll be well aware of that by now. The Trashcans and Teenage Fanclub are for me inextricably linked; both from the west of Scotland, of similar age to myself, purveyors of melody-led songs (Songs! Remember them?), long innings with a relaxed approach to releasing new material and both on the edge of cultdom. TFC may be slightly more well-known and, dare I say it, cooler – well, as cool as 5 guys who look like the school prom band made up of moonlighting musicians from the Geography Department can look – but the Trashcans, with their melancholy-tinged pocket symphonies never let me down.

A few Christmases ago, they made available a free download of The Rainbow Connection, a song that first appeared in 1979 in The Muppets Movie, sung by Kermit the Frog. If you don’t know the Trashcans, this is a very Trashcans thing to do. The song itself is lushly orchestrated, offset by Kermit’s comical croak and creaky front porch banjo.

The original version may have been Oscar-nominated, but the Trashcans make it soar. There’s not much to it really, just a close-miked, crooning Frank accompanied by a couple of guitars, one rich acoustic and one electric, seemingly still playing those bluesy bends that made such a great thing of the band’s Syd Barrett tribute ‘Oranges & Apples’. There’s some synthesised orchestration for good measure and a girl’s voice appears now and again in the chorus in perfect harmony. By the end, the whole things swings and waltzes like a soft shoe shuffle as the ‘oooh-oohs’ fade into the distance. It’s perfect.

Trashcan Sinatras – The Rainbow Connection

It’s a track that wouldn’t be out of place on current LP ‘Wild Pendulum‘. With it’s rich sonic decoration and loose themes of celestial dreaming it could sit right there at the end of Side 1, the perfect closer for a perfect side of music. Wish they’d thought of that…

I doubt the band would have a problem with you having your own version of their track, so feel free to download it here.

Now go and buy Wild Pendulum from here or here or here. Go! Go! Go!

Everybody’s favourite pot-smokin’ pig-tailed-sportin’ outlaw cowboy Willie Nelson opened his 2001 Rainbow Connection album with unique arrangement of the title track. Opening with birdsong, mountain streams, a clip-clopping rhythm and a down-home harmonica ‘n sax duet, it’s great. Not Trashcans’ great, but close enough.

Willie Nelson – The Rainbow Connection

*Bonus Track!

Here’s that Muppets version…

The Muppets – The Rainbow Connection

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

The Great British Take-Off

September 1, 2016February 7, 2017 Craig McAllister

Augustus Pablo is perhaps to the melodica what Les Paul was to the electric guitar. Until Augustus, reggae was all about the boom of the bass and the pistol crack of the snare. Pablo took his melodica and made it central to the dub reggae records he played on, fighting for ear space amongst the booms and the pistol cracks, the bringer of other-worldly melody in an already expansive soundscape. Dub reggae is proper long-form music. It’s widescreen, epic and simply massive to listen to. But you knew that already.

When Augustus Pablo teamed up with dub pioneer King Tubby, the results were dynamite. Their ‘King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown’ takes the easy flowing lovers’ rock of Jacob Miller‘s ‘Baby I Love You So‘…..

Jacob Miller – Baby I Love You So

…..and sends it into outer space with a heady treatment of clatters, bangs, melodi-ka-ka-ka-echos and all manner of sonic enhancements…..

Augustus Pablo/King Tubby – King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown

It‘s a very influential record. If you know your musical onions, you’ll spot traces of the production in all manner of records, from Massive Attack and St Etienne to New Order and Primal Scream. Would New Order’s ‘In A Lonely Place’ be the record it was if Martin Hannett hadn’t turned to his inner King Tubby for inspiration; Other-worldly? Yep. Claustrophobic and menacing? Yep. Liberal sprinklings of melodica? Yep, yep and yep. It’s dub, man! A rainy, grey, 80s Mancunian, British take on dub, but dub nonetheless.

New Order – In A Lonely Place

Primal Scream currently have a very good (and very limited) 12″ on release featuring a dark ‘n dubby remixed take on their own 100% Or Nothing which stretches towards the 10 minute mark, cramming in as many booms, bleeps, skank-filled echoing guitars and, yes, melodica as possible. Somewhere between New Order’s In A Lonely Place and King Tubby’s dub-in-a-cave production, with half-inched vocal refrains from Funkadelic’s One Nation Under A Groove, it’s very good. Echo Dek part II, even. Forever with his finger on the pulse of what’s hot and what’s not, Adam over at the ever-wonderful Bagging Area featured it last week.

In the early-mid 90s, Paul Weller was fond of adding tripped-out, elongated versions of the a-side or even his lesser-known album tracks to his singles. Remixed and re-tweaked almost exclusively by Brendan Lynch, they could usually be relied upon to be the best thing on the single. The Lynch Mob version of debut album track Kosmos is fantastic. Clearly influenced by King Tubby, Lee Perry and all those other progressive-thinking sonic architects, it’s waaaay out there. We have lift off!, to borrow the sample at the start.

Paul Weller – Kosmos (Lynch Mob Bonus Beats version)

I’ve probably mentioned this before, but it’s best listened to whilst you drive on the M8 on a hazy summer’s evening, just as the sun is setting and an aeroplane is taking off from Glasgow Airport, vapour trails shimmering in the mid-July heat, a stroke of luck that befell me once after dropping folk off at the airport.

Anyway, back to Baby I Love You So. Back in 1986, when alternative acts were trying to keep up with the rockist jangle of The Smiths or creating their own heavy, heavy monster sound of goth, 4AD act Colourbox released a very good version.

Colourbox – Baby I Love You So

Replacing the melodica with electric guitars may have ‘indied’ it up a bit, but it loses none of its heavy dub or pulsing groove as a result. It’s a genuinely faithful version, replete with sonic wizardry and skanking galore. It’s also a tricky one to track down online, but here‘s the 7″ version, above, and the extended 12″ version below.

Colourbox – Baby I Love You So (12″ version)

Get This!

Rizzla Kicks

May 9, 2016 Craig McAllister

Or, if you prefer, Crosby’s Still Hash ‘n Guns

If I Could Only Remember My Name is the title of David Crosby‘s first solo LP. I like to think it’s so-titled because Crosby always seemed to be lightly toasted; a joker, smoker and midnight toker who always appeared just on the wrong side of frazzled. With his impish grin and walrus moustache, he’s always been a cartoonish figure, a happy hippy, a furry freak brother for real. His police mugshot from 1980 certainly adds fuel to the fire. This is the man of course who wrote ‘Almost Cut My Hair‘.

Despite – or perhaps as a direct result of this – If I Could Only Remember My Name just so happens to be a spectacular album.

Recorded at the beginning of the 70s, it’s the sound of Laurel Canyon looking inwards for inspiration. The personnel reads like a who’s who of all who were responsible for creating music in cosmic Ca-li-for-ni-aay; Joni and Neil, Jerry Garcia, half of Jefferson Airplane, the odd waif and stray moonlighting from Santana, they all combined talents over the course of the album, creating a super-stoned marker for the future of singer/songwriters everywhere.

The album is full of peaks and troughs, with fragile, Nick Drakeisms one moment making way for soaraway CSNY-ish harmonising vocals the next and delicately plucked acoustics that take a bell-bottomed step aside in favour of tastefully amped-up electrics. Wordless vocal passages, Gregorian Chants as sponsored by Rizzla, weave in and out like lightly-blown butterflies in a summer field. It’s a distilled microcosm of late 60s/early 70s, a fine balance of carefree troubadour tormented by inter-band tension.

With it’s sandpaper-smooth acoustic guitars and a hot-wired electric guitar forever on the point of teetering over the edge, second song in, Cowboy Movie, is the lo-fi scratchy half cousin of Neil Young‘s Down By the River. It’s over 8 minutes long, and not a second of the story, a metaphor for the in-band fighting that was going on at the time, is wasted.

David Crosby – Cowboy Movie

David Crosby – Traction In the Rain

Traction In The Rain rings with brightly strung, wonkily-tuned acoustic guitars, a close-miked, half-asleep vocal and tumbling harps. Very 70s hippy-shit. And very nice, man.

If this has whetted your appetite, the album is well worth buying. I think you’d like it.

Get This!, Hard-to-find

Why You Wanna Leave Me, Baby?

March 23, 2016 Craig McAllister

If you’re a fan of soul music, in particular the sweet, high falsetto’d restrained soul of Curtis Mayfield or Prince when he’s in a wooin’-the-laydeez kinda mood, you could do worse than discover Didn’t I by Darondo.

Darondo – Didn’t I

It‘s quite possibly the finest slice of underground soul that ever was; a sparse minor chord-led groove, all frugging bass, doo-wop intro and call and response vocals, with a gutteral grunt one line followed by that high! high!! high!!! falsetto the next. There’s a subtle string section shimmering its way through the background, the odd flute and oodles of proper soul.

It first came to my attention a few years ago when Teenage Fanclub’s Gerry Love selected it as one of his Six Of The Best for this very blog. It was very likely a record that in its own small way influenced Gerry’s only solo LP, the terrific Lightships album. It too has a fair sprinkling of flute and plenty of pastoral strings while spinning at a relaxed pace. Ever since Gerry mentioned it, it’s lain in that dark corner of the blog, discovered only occasionally by a few very specific Googlers or in-depth readers each month. The time is long overdue to give the record its rightful place in the spotlight.

Born William Daron Pulliam jnr, the teenage William ran the streets, where he went by the name of Daron, a name soon augmented to Daron-do on account of him always having a pocketful of dough. Quite where that dough came from is anyone’s guess. There are rumours a-plenty that he was a pimp before he was a musician, and judging by the pictures above and below, you could well believe that. He certainly dressed like one, and the white Rolls Royce Silver Shadow (personal license plate not shown) adds to the notion. He gigged sparingly, was classically ripped off by his label and disappeared almost as quickly as he’d arrived. In-between having a nervous breakdown, travelling the world by cruise ship and being mistaken for Little Richard, he studied and qualified as a physiotherapist, a job he does to this day. In my house, though, he’ll always be known as the one that got away. On the evidence of Didn’t I and Legs, below, he coulda been another Sly.

Dig it, brothers and sisters. I told you you’d like it. Didn’t I?

*Bonus Track!

Darondo – Legs

Get This!, Hard-to-find

Giant Steps For Mankind

March 8, 2016March 9, 2016 Craig McAllister

Riding a bike at top speed and slightly out of control was the greatest thrill as a youngster, the first truly independent feeling you could experience. In 1977, the Sillars Meadow speedway was where you’d mostly find me, gripping the handlebars of my Puch Mini Sprint with white knuckles, hayfevered eyes focused on the snaking path ahead, tearing into the blind corners with carefree abandon, hoping to avoid Mrs Robertson, her Thatcher do and her yappy dog on the tightest part where the path narrowed into one ‘lane’ – a particularly tricky bit. There was always a bit of a competition to see who could get round the speedway the fastest. Three things helped; Mrs Robertson not being there, having absolutely no fear and sticking half a fag packet into the spokes. Ratta-ratta-ratta! it went, adding at least 0.5 mph to the top speed of your bike. That ratta-ratta-ratta sound was something that would make a continual, welcome and comforting appearance throughout my life.

This June (16th, to be exact) sees the 30th (30th!!!) anniversary of The Queen Is Dead. There will no doubt be many reappraisals and celebrations for TQID nearer the time. I for one will no doubt change my Facebook profile pic to that of the LP cover signed by Johnny Marr. Did I ever tell you I met Johnny? I’m sure I mentioned it in passing somewhere. Hovering over the Salford Lads Club picture with my sharpie he tutted and said, “I never liked myself in that picture…I look better now than I did then…“, flipped the cover shut and signed across the iconic image of the horizontal Alain Delon. It looks as beautiful as the album sounds.

Anyway, on that very same day (16th June 1986) another landmark LP was released. It’s likely little fanfare will be blasted in its honour, but in my house at least, a wee portion of the day will be given over to it.

The Woodentops‘ Giant was, and still is, a terrific-sounding album. Played expertly with loose limbs and rubber wrists, it’s a giddy 100mph rush from start to finish, a downhill-without-the-brakes-on blur of ferociously-scrubbed acoustic guitars, proto dance rhythms and hypnotic, skittering drums. Ratta-ratta-ratta they go. Except for on the really fast ones, when they sound like someone’s dropped a box of steel marbles across a kitchen floor. These days I cycle to the metronomic rhythms of Underworld and their ilk, soundtracking my journeys as I pedal along the highways and byways of the west of Scotland’s cycle paths, but had the technology been available in the 1970’s, I’d have been soundtracking and breaking world records on the Sillars Meadow speedway to the frantic clatter of The Woodentops.

The Woodentops – Get It On

The Woodentops – Shout

The Woodentops – Everything Breaks

Loved by Morrissey, and ergo by the indie crowd, their tunes were later adopted by the Ibiza faithful, where DJs with eclectic taste would seamlessly mix them into their playlists with carefree abandon. A few short years later, every band within half a mile of a wah-wah pedal and a 2nd hand copy of James Brown’s ‘Funky Drummer‘ were claiming they’d always had a dance element to their music, but for The pioneering Woodentops, there was no pretence.

Their music is marvellous stuff and none of it has aged in the slightest. Giant is an album I always come back to. Maybe not that regularly any more, but at least once a year it’ll come out and get stuck on. And while it plays I do that rarest of things. I sit and listen. I don’t get the iron out or watch a soundless telly. I don’t flick through Mojo with half an ear on the music and half an eye on the crossword. I sit in the stripey chair and listen. It’s an extremely hard thing to do. ~~Half~~ All the tracks are super-percussive, highly danceable and totally singalongable. If you’ve never had the pleasure of the album, or any of the rest of the band’s stellar back catalogue, it’s never too late to get on board. You can find most of it in all the usual places, I’m sure.

The Woodentops are playing a few celebratory gigs around the date to mark the occasion. Having never seen the band perform, I’m keen to get to one. If they’re near you, I urge you to go too. You can check here.

Get This!

“Sslaaa…”

February 7, 2016February 7, 2016 Craig McAllister

Not everything goes better with (a) coke. “I swiched from coke to pep and I’m a connoisseur,” drawls Sly Stone on In Time, the opening track on Fresh.

It‘s a terrfic track from a terrific album. A one-chord groove, darkly claustrophobic with pitter-pattering proto drum machines fighting for space with highly-regarded sessioneer Andy Newark’s loose-limbed paradiddles and shuffle, it features the Family Stone in full-on funk effect; horns blasting between the lines, brother Freddie riffing out a nagging counter melody amongst the electric keys and triple-part harmony backing vocals, while Rusty Allen’s bass is a-poppin’ throughout. Miles Davis loved the discipline and groove of the track so much he’d make his band listen to it over and over again to get them in the zone before performing. “Sslaaa iz whey iz at,” he’d tell anyone listening at the time.

Sly & The Family Stone – In Time

Carrying on where he left off with the previous year’s There’s A Riot Goin’ On, Fresh gets its slightly murky sound from Sly’s over-recorded master tapes. Sly by name and sly by nature, he would regularly invite young ladies back to his studio and promise them a slot on the up-coming album in exchange for some good ol’-fashioned lovin’. Once gone, their vocals would be erased from the tape to make space for the next eager hopeful. A shameful practice, you’ll agree, but one that adds to the legend of Sly.

Fresh features no high octane danceable r’n’b. Although one or two of the tracks fared well on 7″, there are no instant hits on it. It’s best listened to in a darkened room, late at night, with your choice of libation close at hand. It’s a creeping, crawling, fevered itch of a record and without a doubt my favourite in Sly’s ouvre.

Here’s If You Want Me To Stay, the 2nd track in on Fresh, ruined spectacularly 20 years later by those soul-free fornicators of funk, Red Hot Chili Peppers. Don’t ruin it by seeking their version out. The original is whey iz at. But you knew that already.

Sly & The Family Stone – If You Want Me To Stay

Get This!

PJ Tips

January 25, 2016January 25, 2016 Craig McAllister

PJ Harvey‘s The Wind (from her excellent Is This Desire? LP) has been, to use a pun, blowing the cobwebs off my speakers for the past few days. For such a slight ‘n skinny woman, PJ’s tune packs more muscle than it has any right to. It‘s her Barry Adamson moment; filmic, bass-heavy and full of brooding menace.

PJ Harvey – The Wind

It fades in on a ripple of marimba and a stutter of just-plugged-in guitar, with PJ’s vocal quickly taking centrestage. Whisper-in-your-ear sultriness one moment, understated falsetto the next, it tells the story of St Catherine of Abbotsbury who built a chapel high on a hill.

It’s a real chapel, still there to this day and located in the village of Abbotsbury where PJ lives, or indeed lived at the time of writing the song (as much as I’m a fan, it wouldn’t be the done thing to go around the more rural parts of Dorset in the hope of bumping into her in the dairy aisle of the local Waitrose. Really, I have no idea where she lives. A fancy flat in London with a weekend retreat in the Cotswolds? I dunno.)

Anyway, The Wind tells a straightforward story. No coded lyrics, no double meaning. Just a good, honest folk song about religion and singing.

Catherine liked high places
High up, high up on the hills
A place for making noises
Like whales
Noises like the whales
Here she built a chapel
With her image
An image on the wall
A place where she could rest and rest
And a place where she could wash
And listen to the wind blowing

The whole track is carried along by the bassline. When it comes in, after that second ‘noises like the whales’ line, it brings to mind some New York street punk, hands deep in the pockets of his leather bomber jacket, docker’s hat pulled hard and low over his forehead, eyes shifting from left to right and back again, looking to start trouble, looking to avoid trouble, but, looking for trouble.

It’s produced masterfully by Flood who brings an electro wash to the finished result. In fact, it wouldn’t sound out of place on any given recording by Harvey’s fellow West Country contemporaries Tricky and Massive Attack. There’s subtle tingaling percussion, quietly scraping cello and layers of synthetic noise. When the vocals begin their counter-melodies in the chorus, it’s pure Bjork.

As a single, The Wind barely bothered the charts (number 29) before dropping off the face of the planet forever. In fact, without the aid of that there Wikipedia, I’d never have known it was ever a single to begin with. When it was released (1999), I don’t ever recall Our Price stocking it, and I was the singles buyer for my branch at the time. I ain’t no expert, but I thought I’d have known about it.

It does though live on forever on Is This Desire?, a high point in a back catalogue packed full of outstanding highs. It’s incredible to think that PJ Harvey has been making records for nigh on a quarter of a century. From the lo-fi scuz of Dry via the Patti Smith-isms of Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea and the stark, piano-only White Chalk right up to her most recent collection of WW1-themed songs on Let England Shake (not forgettting the one-off single in support of Guantanamo Bay prisoner Shaker Aamer), she’s one of our most consistent musicians. Daring, unpredictable and true to herself, she’s right up there with the best of ’em.

Excitingly, she has a new LP in the offing. April, I believe. The first fruits are spinning heavily on BBC 6Music every day just now, and they’re sounding terrific. But you knew that already.

Dylanish, Get This!

Put On Your Red Shoes And Dance The Blues

January 5, 2016January 5, 2016 Craig McAllister

I lost track of Rufus Wainwright a wee bit after he started scoring operas and high-fallutin’ it in a dinner jacket. Including a couple of live efforts and a ‘Best Of‘ LP, his album discography is now into double figures, but for me the high water mark is the first volume of ‘Want‘. Initially sold as two separate albums, Want 1 and Want 2 were later repackaged as a double album and, as an introduction to all things Rufus, you could get no better. If you can bottle the sound of pathos, the odd high camp moment and great hair, Want 1 is the result.

Halfway through Want 1 is the incredible Go Or Go Ahead. Go Or Go Ahead is a drug song, but not a scuzzy, junkie-confessional, claustrophobic itch-fest that has you running for the shower before the last note has faded. Go Or Go Ahead drips in melody and is wrapped in harmonies sent from the heavens, ridiculously uplifting and bathed in enough arms-wide-open melodrama to make even Mount Rushmore shed a tiny tear.

Rufus Wainwright – Go Or Go Ahead

The way the songs builds and builds, from major to minor acoustic strum and brilliant tumbling “do-dn-do-be-doos”, via the middle section with a pitch-shifting guitar break courtesy of Charlie Sexton (moonlighting from his duties in Bob Dylan’s Never Ending Tour band) to the BIG “look in her eyes!” section where Rufus and his sister Martha are overdubbed a gazillion times to create that incredible Spector in stereo wall of sound is absolutely spectacular. By comparison, it makes other ‘big’ songs (McAlmont & Butler’s ‘Yes‘, The Smiths’ ‘Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me‘, Jeff Buckley’s ‘Lover, You Should’ve Come Over‘, for example) seem almost trite and insignificant. In the grand scheme of things, Go Or Go Ahead is the daddy of them all.

Written (“you got me writing lyrics on postcards“) while Rufus walked the streets in a less than salubrious area of San Francisco during the middle of an addiction to crystal meth, it’s lyric is full of self-loathing, celebrating the vacuousness and vanity of hollow celebrity. Or something like that. More scholarly people than myself could write pages and pages on the metaphors within each line. Sure, there are references to Judy Garland, gin and Mars, the God of War, but I suppose you take your own meanings from them. Me? I just dig the tune. It’s a belter, isn’t it?

*Bonus Track!

Another ‘street’ song, 14th Street from the same LP is another high, Rufus’ voice on top form, his band sounding Spector-huge once more. During our one visit to New York I found myself subconsciously singing this as we crossed yer actual 14th Street on my way into Chinatown. I can see it in my head as I type right now.

Rufus Wainwright – 14th Street

Now. If you do one thing this week, fill that gaping hole in your collection with Want. You’ll wonder how you ever lived without it.

Alternative Version, Cover Versions, demo, Double Nugget, Dylanish, Get This!, Gone but not forgotten, Hard-to-find, Kraut-y, Most downloaded tracks, Sampled, Six Of The Best

We Are 9

December 30, 2015December 30, 2015 Craig McAllister

Somehow, some way, Plain Or Pan has turned 9. Or, to be more accurate, is just about to turn 9. But at this time of year, when you can never be entirely sure if it’s Sunday morning or Thursday night and inspiration goes out the window along with routine and work ethic, it’s tradition that I fill the gap between Christmas and Hogmany with a potted ‘Best Of‘ the year compilation, so I’ve always made this period in time the unofficial birthday for the blog.

Not that anyone but myself should care really; blogs come and go with alarming regularity and I’ve steadfastly refused to move with the times (no new acts here, no cutting edge hep cats who’ll be tomorrow’s chip paper, just tried ‘n tested old stuff that you may or may not have heard before – Outdated Music For Outdated People, as the tagline goes.) But it’s something of a personal achievement that I continue to fire my wee articles of trivia and metaphorical mirth out into the ether, and even more remarkable that people from all corners of the globe take the time out to visit the blog and read them. From the bottom of my heart, I thank you, one and all.

Since starting Plain Or Pan in January 2007, the articles have become less frequent but more wordy – I may have fired out a million alliterative paragraphs in the first year, whereas nowadays I have less time to write stuff and when I do, it takes me three times as long to write it. To use an analogy, I used to be The Ramones, (1! 2! 3! 4! Go!) but I’ve gradually turned into Radiohead; (Hmmm, ehmm, scratch my arse…) Without intending it, there are longer gaps between ‘albums’ and I’ve become more serious about my ‘art’. Maybe it’s time to get back to writing the short, sharp stuff again. Maybe I’ll find the time. Probably I won’t.

The past 9 years have allowed me the chance to interview people who I never would’ve got close to without the flimsy excuse that I was writing a blog that attracted in excess of 1000 visitors a day (at one time it was, but I suspect Google’s analytics may well have been a bit iffy.) Nowadays, it’s nowhere near that, but I still enthusiastically trot out the same old line when trying to land a big name to feature. Through Plain Or Pan I’ve met (physically, electronically or both) all manner of interesting musical and literary favourites; Sandie Shaw, Johnny Marr, Ian Rankin, Gerry Love, the odd Super Furry Animal. Quite amazing when I stop to think about it. You should see the list of those who’ve said they’ll contribute then haven’t. I won’t name them, but there are one or two who would’ve made great Six Of the Best articles. I’m not Mojo, though, so what can I expect?

A quick trawl through my own analytics spat out the Top 24 downloaded/played tracks on the blog this year, two for each month:

Michael Marra – Green Grow the Rashes
Wallace Collection – Daydream
Jacqueline Taieb – Sept Heures du Matin
The Temptations – Message From A Black Man
New Order – True Faith
Bobby Parker – Watch Your Step
Jim Ford – I’m Gonna Make Her Love Me
Doris – You Never Come Closer
Ela Orleans – Dead Floor
Mac De Marco – Ode To Viceroy
Teenage Fanclub – God Knows It’s True
Iggy Pop – Nightclubbing
George Harrison – Wah Wah
Magazine –Thank You Falletinme Be Mice Elf Again
Future Sound Of London – Papua New Guinea
Bob Dylan – Sad Eyed Lady Of the Lowlands (mono version)
Richard Berry – Louie Louie
REM – Radio Free Europe (HibTone version)
The Cribs – We Share The Same Skies
Johnny Marr – The Messenger
McAlmont & Butler – Speed
Talking Heads – I Zimbra (12″ version)
Style Council – Speak Like A Child
Darlene Love – Johnny (Please Come Home)

And there you have it – the regular mix of covers, curios and forgotten influential classics, the perfect potted version of what Plain Or Pan is all about. A good producer would’ve made the tracklist flow a bit better. I just took it as I came to them; two from January followed by two from February followed by two from etc etc blah blah blah. You can download it from here.

See you in the new year. First up, Rufus Wainwright. Cheers!

Alternative Version, Get This!, Hard-to-find

Mono-Lithic

December 21, 2015December 22, 2015 Craig McAllister

mono

[mon-oh]

Adjective

monophonic sound; monophony, the favoured recording method pioneered in the 1960s by Phil Spector.

monolithic

[mon-uh–lith-ik]

Adjective

characterised by massiveness, total uniformity, rigidity, invulnerability, etc.

Darlene Love‘s Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) is massiveness incarnate. Invulnerable, invincible and right at the top of the Christmas tree when it comes to the best musical festive fare ever recorded. The only original track to appear on Phil Spector‘s A Christmas Gift For You LP, it’s a thumping major to minor rock ‘n roll tearjerker about lost love. Phil Spector originally put it together with the intention of having his wife Ronnie along with the other Ronettes record it. But after a few false starts and failed takes, he quickly realised she wasn’t singing it with the requisite oomph and instead drafted in Darlene Love.

Ronnie recalls her time in the studio with Specctor:

“Phil worked everybody so hard on the album and the days kind of blurred into each other, thinking about it now. But there was a real Christmas party atmosphere in the studio, even though it was the height of summer, and a lot of great musicians were involved. They weren’t that well-known at the time but so many of them went on to become famous in their own right, like Leon Russell. Sonny Bono and Cher were involved in a lot of the stuff too, so was Glen Campbell. We worked hard, though, some days we’d be in the studio for eight or nine hours just doing one verse of one song.”

Darlene was way down the pecking order with Spector. She’d sang lead on He’s A Rebel for The Crystals and had applied her Noo Yoik drawl to umpteen of Spector’s kitchen sink productions, but Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) was one of the first times she’d been allowed to fly solo and, as you’ll know if you’ve heard the record, she soars gloriously.

The song was released with high hopes ahead of Christmas 1963, but in a bizarre twist of fate found itself released on the very day JFK was assassinated in Dallas. Holiday spirit instantly ruined, the record failed to find airplay amongst the bulletins lamenting the President’s death and was quickly withdrawn from sale. What could’ve been the greatest Christmas number 1 of all time never came to be.

Darlene Love – Christmas (Please Come Home)

Spector loved the finished version. So much in fact, (and no doubt stung by the record’s withdrawal), he felt the record had year-round appeal. Such a brilliant cacophony of sound shouldn’t be kept under lock and key and only let out for one month in twelve, so he asked Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich to re-write it as a ‘boyfriend song’. Minus a few sleigh bells but not much else, it still sounds brilliant, yet somehow not quite right. Years of associating it with Christmas makes it a bit of a strange one.

Darlene Love – Johnny (Please Come Home)

This version was hidden away on an obscure b-side and failed to live up to Spector’s wish. Indeed, not a lot of people know it even exists. There you have it.

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