Category: Get This!

Get This!

It’s Not Important Now

Craig McAllister

It’s 1981. By now, my record collection is taking shape. I’ve got a great wee collection of crucial 7″ singles, not yet donated in shame because of a haranguing Bob Geldof. I’ve begun to dip a toe into the adult world of albums. The first non-compilation album I’d buy would be Kings Of The Wild Frontier. Actually, the first album I bought full stop was Kings Of The Wild Frontier. Albums, being pricier, are more of a risk. They require investment, both financially and emotionally and this 11-year old didn’t have the capacity for that. Three singles, one track that could’ve been a single and a bunch of filler. Ouch, £3.99 is a big deal. You expect payback. So now, I’ve gone for playing it safe. I’ve bought the Best Of Blondie. And Queen’s Greatest Hits. And The Beatles A Collection Of Oldies. There’s an old Rock ‘N Roll hits compilation in there too – which, if my maths is correct is no different to an 11-year old today running out to buy a compilation of hits from the early 2000s. Who on earth would want to do that?

As it turned out, Kings Of The World Frontier is far greater than the sum of the singles released from it. I suspect you knew that already though. The same can also be said for Architecture And Morality, Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark‘s breakthrough album, although it took me right until today to work that one out too.

I loved those singles that came from it so much that I took the leap to ploughing my collection of coppers and silver into the album. There were two completely different songs that both referenced Joan Of Arc, which may have been some sort of band in-joke, but to Radio Clyde DJs and pre-teens like me was just plain confusing. And there was Souvenir.

Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark – Souvenir

Souvenir is masterful. Hooky, poppy and bathed in sorrow and melancholy, it drapes its wistful and hangdog, almost feminine vocal across a signature keyboard motif. Synth drums beat softly, a choir of overdubbed voices add depth to the refrain – my feelings still re-main – and it plays out for three and a half dejected yet uplifting minutes. This is the sound of sadness, to misquote Paul Simon. “Is this the Cocteau Twins?” asked the boy tonight as it was playing. Dream pop before such a term was conceived, you can kinda hear what he means too.

Built on a bed of slowed down looped choral vocals, Souvenir is so evocative – a great example of a pioneering synth band breaking new ground. Hindsight shows OMD to be a great, great singles band but it’s possibly fair to say that OMD never got the kudos they deserved at the time. Too arty for pop yet too pop for the arty crowd, they straddled this weird limbo ground, and Souvenir‘s parent album is a great example of this.

Housed in a die-cut Peter Saville sleeve, all dull industrial tones and brutalist architecture, the record’s grooves fizz and hiss and clank and clunk with the sound of machines whirring into action, ambient found sound and musique concrète. Amongst all of this sat the pop singles. It’s a strange thing to remember, but straight after buying it, I ran not to my room to play it, but instead put it on my dad’s record player downstairs. As I sat back to get into it, my mum came in and sat down and listened with me. (Go away mum. This is a personal ritual that can’t be shared).

Hisssss. Sccccratcchhh. Sccccrraaaape. Thud thud thud. Rattle rattle rattle. Echoey voices. Biscuit tin snare drums. Wonky production. It’s a sound that I now recognise to be that of an experimental synth band embracing the anything-goes spirit of post-punk and running with it in their own idiosyncratic direction.

“Did you waste your money on this rubbish?” my mum tutted, getting up and leaving. Instant shame.

I struggled into the second song. £3.99 for this!? Where were the singles? Ah….here comes Souvenir. And here comes my mum. “Dah dah dah-dah-dah-dah dah dah!” she sings, mimicking (wrongly) the keyboard refrain. Man! She’s ruined the hard to like stuff AND NOW she’s ruining the single too.

I can’t say I played the record more than once ever again.

Fast forward a couple of years. Alex Aitken has a new turntable, hi-spec and booming, and he has designs on my long-forgotten OMD record. And I, with hormones pinging, have designs on the cover of a Sheena Easton album that he’s been playing. Not the music. That’s extremely pish. Just the cover. Sheena is covered in some sort of robe, sitting with one leg up, a bit too much caramelled thigh on display, her full-bodied lips smack in the centre of the image, her eyes boring into my teenage boy’s overloaded head. “I’ll swap you the Sheena cover,” Alex says conspiratorially, “Just the cover – not the record – I’m keeping that, for your copy of Architecture And Morality.”

Don’t speak to me about morality, Aitken, ya chancer.

Done deal, of course. OMD? OMG more like. What was I thinking?!

Architecture And Morality disappeared from my collection for the next 40 years, until a few months ago when a kindly neighbour had a loft clear out and turned up at my door with a handful of records; some old 12″ singles, an ace Ace Records soul compilation and OMD’s Architecture And Morality. It was like welcoming back a child I had abandoned at birth…before I filed it cruelly away to sit amongst my own stuff – Orange Juice – Orb – Orbital – Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark – The Other Two, a shelf padder; a good looking and possibly hip shelf padder, but a padder nonetheless.

Last week I was rearranging some records and pulled it out. I stuck it on, instantly transported to our living room in 1981. Couldn’t handle it. I lifted the needle from the first track and dropped it onto Souvenir. Ah. That’s better. I’d heard it fairly recently, in Irvine’s Harbour Arts Centre before a BMX Bandits show. Duglas had curated a pre-gig mix ‘tape’ and between the Dana Gillespies and Jigsaws and Peter Skellerns and what have you, Souvenir came rolling out. It sounded great in the HAC. It sounded great in 1981. And it still sounded pretty fantastic coming from my own decent set up in the here and now.

This morning I reached for the album again and this time I played it from start to finish. Dared myself not to get up and move it on. This time, it made sense. It was, yep, the sound of an experimental synth band embracing the anything-goes spirit of post-punk and running with it in their own idiosyncratic direction. But it’s not half as weird as I’d convinced myself it was. Arty, but supremely poppy too. A couple more listens this coming week and I reckon I’ll be fully converted. It’s never too late, as it turns out.

I wonder if Alex still has my copy…still plays my copy? His Sheena sleeve has long gone of course, but I still have the internet should I be inclined to look it up. Of course, if I’d had the internet back then, I’d never have needed to swap a cool and arty record for the over-styled sleeve – sleeve! – of an overproduced slice of 80s slop-pop. Unlike my faded attraction to oor Sheena, for Souvenir my feelings still remain.

Cover Versions, Get This!

I Put A Spell On You

Craig McAllister

I know nothing about Chappell Roan. I doubt I’m slap bang in the middle of her? their? demographic anyway…but I do know the one big song. It was ubiquitous for a bit there and there’s no way you haven’t heard it and fallen for its hooky charm either. Pure pop and catchier than that flu that’s been doing the rounds recently, it hangs its hookline on its spelt out titular refrain. ‘Aitch Oh Tee-Tee Oh Gee Oh-oh, You can take me Hot To Go-oh!’ It was the first great example of spelling in a pop song since Gwen Stefani Hollabacked to tell us that, indeed, that shit was bananas, Bee-Ee-En-Ae-En-Ae-Ess, back in 2025.

It’s nothing new, spelling in songs. Otis and Aretha, of course. And The Kinks. And plenty of others. From Van’s gruff Northern Irish burr wrapping its way around Gloria (“Gee-Ell-Oh-Are-Aye-Ae“) to Patti’s wired and speeding East Village take on it; From Weller’s angry young punk spitting of “Ae-Pee-Oh-Cee-Ae-El-Wy-Pee-Ess-Ee-APOCALYPSE!” at the end of ‘A’ Bomb On Wardour Street to Faith No More’s long-shorted and muscular ‘Be Aggressive! Bee-Ee! Aggressive! Bee-Eee-Ae-Gee-Gee, Are-Ee-Ess-Ess-Eye-Vee-Ee!‘; from Al (then Edwyn) serenading us with ‘Ell-Oh-Vee-Ee Love‘ via little Johnny Thunders’ drawling nod to The Shangri-Las, ‘When I say I’m in love you best believe I’m in love, Ell-Yoo-Vee!” to Hall ‘n Oates’ blue-eyed ‘M-E-T-H-O-D-O-F-L-O-V-E‘, a bit of spelling goes a long way to providing the hook. Hot Chip employed the technique on Over And Over. Len’s Steal My Sunshine includes the line, ‘L-A-T-E-R that week.’  None other than the cryptic and idiosyncratic Mark E Smith sang about a ‘C-R-E-E-P’ when the song demanded it. Even our greatest writers are under the, eh, spell.

Which brings us to Warpaint.

The oil-on-water, slow dissolve approach they take to their own Billie Holiday is supreme.

“Bee-Eye-Ell-Ell-Eye-Eeh-Aitch-Oh-Ell-Eye-Dee-Ae-Wah-ay.“

It’s a sparse track. Cleanly picked guitars, some ambient, soft-touch bass, understated keyboards, a gentle snowfall of toms and cymbals, the overlapping vocals stirring the dusky, twilight air around it. That’s the work of a moonlighting John Frusciante, manning the desk and capturing the band exactly as they’d hoped. 

When the singing starts on the verses proper, you – as a pop scholar with an A+ in every one of your pop scholarly exams – will have immediately noticed they’re singing the verses to Mary Wells’ My Guy. But whereas Mary’s original is all frothing teenage effervescence, rattling along on excitable handclaps and giddy, upwardly climbing girl group vocals, Warpaint take the opposite approach. Theirs is languid and soporific, breathy and downbeat. Nothing you can say can tear me away from my guy, they exhale, with all the enthusiasm of the downtrodden and disenfranchised. If someone were to tell you this was a thinly disguised plea for help in a domestically abusive situation, you wouldn’t be that surprised. Nothin’ you could do cos I’m stuck like glue to my guy. Jeez.

Surely not.

“Bee-Eye-Ell-Ell-Eye-Eeh-Aitch-Oh-Ell-Eye-Dee-Ae-Wah-ay.“

In comes the refrain again, four voices melded as one, the group inching the song ever forward. Unspooling and unwinding in slo-mo, it stretches for over six sleepy and bleary-eyed minutes, voices drowning in reverb, guitars swimming in chorus and phase, the percussion being tackled with a little more muscle but no less finesse. Disciplined and majestic to the false ending and beyond.

Why Billie Holiday?

Apparently, the lyric was a place holder, the five syllable phrase borrowed from a poster in the band’s rehearsal space and utilised in song until a better set of words was arrived at. Couple that with the appropriation of My Guy and you have the notion of a fledgling band landing on their sound and trying quickly to find their feet. Great record, eh?

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Lists Schmists. Missed.

Craig McAllister

Lists are everywhere at this time of year. I’m never that fussed by the music ones. They mainly serve to remind me just how out of touch I’ve become with the musical landscape of the day, or how underwhelming I find the best albums of the year to be. Beyoncé one of the best five albums of the year? Really, NME? Really, Guardian? Sabrina Carpenter? Gimme a break. Where’s Making Tapes for Girls by The Pearlfishers? Where’s A Dream Is All We Know by The Lemon Twigs? Where, even, is Paul Weller’s 66? This definitely says more about me than them. I’ll freely admit to never knowingly have heard so much as a note of Charli XCX’s Brat. It’s been universally lauded as the very best album of the year in almost every list going, so I can only be missing out. Watch me rave about it in 2027…

Very occasionally the lists confirm that, despite my advancing years and stubborn ears, I’ve still got a lukewarm finger on the pulse of whatever beats the nation’s collective heart.

Bill Ryder-Jones Iechyd Da was in amongst it in all the lists that matter. Released way back in January, it announced itself as an early contender for Album of the Year and hung on in there, month after month until the close of the year. With its sad melodies and wraparound blanket of melancholy, it was, despite the heaviness of its subject matter, a thrilling listen; well played, well produced, little pocket symphonies of sorrow and grief that hit you right where Ryder-Jones wanted them to land. It’s a terrific album.

It’s a terrific album, yes, but it’s second only to Cutouts by The Smile.

Scanning the lists, I was amazed to see little love for it. It’s a pretty fantastic record and, if this blog carried any clout at all, all forthcoming issues of the record would come with a hype sticker letting the world know that it’s Plain Or Pan’s album of 2024. “Album of 2024!” (Plain Or Pan) It’s pretty fantastic! Love it or your money back! 

Cutouts was, after Wall Of Eyes (also notable by its absence from many lists), The Smile’s second album of the year. It is to that album what Radiohead’s Amnesiac is to Kid A – the leftovers, the cutouts if you will, from the sessions that spawned the earlier album, reorganised and whipped into a genre defying ten track cracker. It’s orchestral and rockin’, claustrophobic yet dizzy, propulsive and loud, slow and stately and quiet; super-textured, in other words, with each play revealing new layers of unspooling melodies and dazzling musicianship.

Jonny Greenwood dresses his guitars in sheets of Andy Summers chorus. Thom Yorke plays finger-bothering groovy bass. Tom Skinner rattles and rolls crazy time signatures from his polyrhythmic kit. Strings scratch and scrape and shimmer their sheen on nearly every track. Vintage synths parp and fizz their minor chords across the top, archaic and arcane, phantasmal and utterly fantastic.

The Smile – Zero Sum

It’s those unspooling melodies that dazzle most, though. It’s only after the third? Twenty-third? play that you truly begin to hear them for what they are. Zero Sum, with its jerky “Windows 95” vocal and frantic, skittering morse code guitar lines. Instant Psalm‘s funereal, majestic splendour. No Word‘s bullet train propulsion. The creeping spy theme of Don’t Get Me Started… If this record had ‘Radiohead’ printed prominently on the cover rather than ‘The Smile’, the list makers and taste shapers would’ve been falling over themselves to make it album of the year.

Plain Or Pan knows though.

“Album of 2024!” (Plain Or Pan) It’s pretty fantastic! Love it or your money back! 

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Only With The Falling Of Dusk

Craig McAllister

I was out the back door a few nights ago. We’d given the shrubbery a festive, twinkly make-over and the remote control to turn the lights off had stopped working from the lazy comfort of inside the house, meaning I had to move closer to them and, y’know, actually go outside to turn them off…half cut…at 2am…wearing pink Crocs (not mine). As I moved closer to the lights, a sudden and loud flapping noise – total Attenborough nature documentary in sound – broke the still Ayrshire silence. I froze. Almost immediately, from the big tree behind my fence, an owl began hooting.

How great!

We’re not country dwellers by any means, the Glasgow train line runs behind us, down the hill behind that big tree, but we’re right on the fringes of the town where it meets its ever-shrinking green belt and we’re clearly close enough for unexpected wildlife. It’s not been back since, but I’ll be listening out for that owl any time I happen to be awake in the small hours. Or wee hours, given how regularly I make the broken sleep stagger to the bathroom these nights.

The one owl I can I hear any time I like is this – the most interesting, most unique and unarguably the greatest track that’s graced these ears this past year.

The Tenementals – The Owl of Minerva:

Early in the 19th century, the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel wrote that “The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk.” It’s a line that suggests that true historical understanding only comes with hindsight – a phrase that could very much apply to Glasgow’s foundations in slavery and clashing religious intolerance; a reawakened city, perhaps, but one that’s still in conflict with itself.

Both inspirational and educational, The Owl of Minerva is delivered in a rich, actorly, Glaswegian brogue atop a clatter of guitars, like an electric shocked Public Service Broadcasting riding on the sort of sludgy, serrated, repetitive riff that Iggy Pop might be inclined to drop his trousers for. A fly-past of Glasgow’s streets and their history, it’s terrific. And immediate. And supremely poetic.

Mungo’s children lie in slumber, in ballrooms of pleasure and Bars of L, silent forges of production… The cantilevered roost of the Finnieston Cran(e)…  Red Road in ruin…  Broken bricks of Utopia…  Carnivals in Castlemilk conjuring a constellation…  Hills of Hag…  The rapids of revolution…  The highway of historical time…  Beyond the Black Hills…  Proddy John…  Commie John…  Bible John…  Poppers John…  Bengal/Donegal…  Gorbals teens/Glasgow Greens…  New futures/New presents/New pasts…  And still the river flows.

This is not the soft focused, rain-soaked Glasgow of the Blue Nile. Nor is it Simple Minds’ idea of the Clyde’s majestic past writ large in Waterfront‘s filling-loosening bassline. Nor is it Alex Harvey’s sense of menace and theatre. Or Hue and Cry’s shoulder padded and reverential Mother Glasgow. It’s all of this and more, a Glasgow song that’s scuffed at the knees yet literate and informative and vital for the 21st century. And it’s seemingly arrived straight outta the blue, an unexpected blazing comet for our times.

The Tenementals crept onto my social media feeds at some point late October/early November and the by the time I’d wandered off piste and hauf pissed to properly check them out, I had, typically, missed their Oran Mor album launch show by one night – a free entry gig too, where you had the chance to buy the album and it’s thrilling lead track.

If they don’t look like yr average group of skinny jeaned, facially haired, too cool for school gang of guitar stranglers, that’s because The Tenementals aren’t really any of this. Lead vocalist David Archibald is Professor of Political Cinema at Glasgow University. They’ve collaborated with Union man and political agitator Mick Lynch. Their record label is called Strength In Numbers. Socialists to the core, their self-given job is to enlighten their listeners to the plight of the suffragettes, the beauty of La Pasionaria and the warped, cruel and beautiful history that forged the place from where they sprung.

The rest of the album is equally as thrilling, by the way. See them become more prominent in 2025.

Get This!, Gone but not forgotten

The Story Is Old, I Know

Craig McAllister

But it goes on.

It begins, most unSmiths-like, with a near-two minute piano prologue; a doom-laden, melodramatic affair of dark, clanging minor chords and suspenseful apprehension, Johnny’s delicately elfin fingers stretching out for notes he hasn’t yet found and ghostly, wafty sighs from a far-off Morrissey with one keen eye already on a solo career, the intro’s violent and disconcerting soundbed – striking miners clashing with police – creating the perfect tension before the release of that crashing E minor and the new dawn shining light on what would be the group’s swan song. All great bands need to go out in style and grandeur, and with Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me, The Smiths constructed the finest curtain closer and epilogue on a recording career that lasted barely five years.

The Smiths – Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me

From its title in, Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me is nothing other than sensational.  It’s a very Morrissey title and the singer delivers a terrific, detractor-baiting vocal line; he gives in to no hysterics that such a title might demand, but instead delivers a slow and measured soul baring over Johnny’s repeating chord sequence before, as the strings rise and swell, he eases himself into a howl at the moon falsetto. The Smiths never ever played this in concert, but had they, a sated and spent Morrissey would’ve been bent backwards over the stage monitors as the front row tore strips from his shirt, you can guarantee that.

Just about the last track recorded for Strangeways, the song originated in the back of the band’s tour van after a show five months previously in Carlisle. Johnny arrived on the song’s chord sequence, “ecstatic…I couldn’t work out how my fingers were playing it…holding my breath in case I lost it,” and by the following Thursday evening, the three instrument-playing Smiths had forged it into a dark and brooding Gothic masterpiece. Johnny, a hundred and seventeen guitar overdubs later, shifted his attention to the Emulator, last used on There Is A Light, and gave birth to the song’s sweeping string motif. Nowadays, any indie band with a bit of clout will call in a symphony orchestra to do the heavy lifting for them. The Smiths, being both insular and skint, chose to do it themselves.

The track’s heaviness is due, in no small part, to the rhythm section. Mike Joyce attacks it from start to finish, punctuating the end of each measure with scattergun abandon, playing the verses with solidity yet swing. In  keeping with the track and its status, this may well be Joyce’s finest performance across The Smiths’ canon.

Dependable Andy weighs in with a trademark wandering yet low-key and rumbling bass line, filling any gaps in the proceedings with little octave jumping runs, always anchoring the song with root notes. Just before the second verse, he plays a lovely and subtle bass line that hints at Morrissey’s melody to come, minutae the likes of which many of you here will know of already or appreciate all the more once you spot it.

Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me is perfect Smiths. From Johnny’s not forgotten chord sequence in the back of a van to Morrissey’s one-take vocal in Somerset’s Wool Hall Studios a few months later, the stars aligned…and then some. Mike Joyce himself said on these very pages a few years ago, with some understatement, that it was ‘pretty good‘. Both Morrissey and Marr are on record as saying it’s their favourite Smiths track. Even recording stars as disparate as David Bowie and Andre 3000 held/still hold it in equally high esteem.

Not so the record-buying public. Despite it being billed as ‘The Last Single’, it fell into the charts at number 34, limped its way to number 30 the following week and, seven days later dropped straight back out of existence. What the fuck were people buying instead? If you can’t have drama and existential angst in early December, when can you have it?

Get This!, Hard-to-find

D Lux

Craig McAllister

You’ll love this. You might be familiar with it already, but I’d be surprised. It’s not new, it’s not that old either, and the chances are that if you missed it when it first peeked out from behind 2021’s curtain of noise (100,000 Spotify uploads a day and rising) then it’ll have completely passed you by.

It’s called Duty Of Care by the impressively posh-sounding David Luximon-Herbert. Dropping the second half of his double barrelled surname has done little to shoot David’s name into the collective conscience of the music listening public…and that’s a real pity.

Crashing waves cede to crashing chords. Orchestral strings fight for ear space with cacophonous timpani. An earwormy woo-oo-ooh vocal centres the attention, fuzz guitar climbs the frets…then the drop out. The vocal comes in. Something about arrival and survival. More woo-oo-oohs and then a lovely spoken word section, Luximon’s properly Scottish burr well to the fore. “It’s not a manifesto or a benediction,” he goes, and, in a wave of bah-bah-bahs, the guitar takes us skywards again. The track rises and falls for five spellbinding, world-stopping minutes and you find yourself diving back in, time and time again, to bathe in its golden magic.

Luximon clearly put this all together with meticulous care, the way you or I might if we’ve a head full of radical ideas and been offered only one recording session in our entire lives in which to capture it. Duty Of Care is lush, full and perfectly realised, in the same way McAlmont & Butler’s Yes and Pet Shop Boys/Dusty Springfield’s What Have I Done To Deserve This? are lush, full and perfectly realised.

It’s no fluke.

Duty Of Care‘s parent album ebbs and flows beautifully, a wholly (holy) realised amalgam of fantastic orchestration melded to stinging electric guitars, rippling jazz piano and terrifically skittering and booming Axelrod-ish drums. Shimmering Hammond gives way to proggy synths, which drop out to allow slide guitar solos to wheeze themselves out into the thin air. Tremelo-heavy tracks weave their way into one another, no beginnings and no endings. Was that some bird song appearing in the gap there? Burbling water between the finger scrapes on acoustic strings? It’s so all that, this record.

The album in full is stunning. Part Virgin Prunes, part pastoral folk, totally immersive, Duty Of Care‘s tracklist reads like the titles of projected Coen Brothers’ films still to be made; Nothing Ever Good Happened Down By The River, The Town That Dreaded Sundown, Datsun Cherry. It’s super-produced by Olly Betts, long-time drummer in melodic noise-smiths The Duke Spirit and requires a proper listening session. No telly on in the background. No inane social media scrolling. No household chores while it spins. Just you, an armchair and a receptive pair of ears. Play it once and you’ll find yourself returning to it daily until you’re familiar with every nook and cranny of its perfectly nuanced sound. I think you’ll like it. A lot.

Listening to Luximon may well have you reassessing the boundaries of what good music actually is. This is great – like What’s Going On and Pet Sounds levels of great. How many other artists amongst those 100,000 other noise makers are making music as considered and vital as this? We’ll never know.

David Luximon‘s Duty Of Care is easily one of the finest records to grace the Last Night From Glasgow imprint. You can buy it here.

Bonus Track

There’s also a pretty great Max Harris Project/Ashley Lockdown remix of Care Of Duty out there. Track 2 above, it features added helicopter noises, stripped back Orb-y ambience and, quite possibly, the quiet sound of Richard Ashcroft weeping at where it all went wrong. Ol’ twiggy Ricky, he of the Axelrod pretensions and delusions of grandeur, would quite gladly forego his comfy Oasis support slots for an ounce of Luximon’s skill and gravitas. A bittersweet symphony indeed.

The remix was released as a ‘pay-what-you-want’ single, all proceeds going to Age UK/Age Scotland during the Covid crisis. Remember that?

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With Or Without ‘U’

Craig McAllister

Around the turn of the year, I bought a pair of white Puma trainers. I’m not, nor ever have been, a white trainers kinda guy, but I spotted a pair online that were reduced to a price point commensurate with my budget and spontaneously bought them. Just the thing, I thought, to complete my (cough) look for Spring/Summer ’24.

When I put them on, my kids slagged me mercilessly. My wife looked affronted, mumbled something about golf shoes then pretended not to have noticed them. These things were white. White. Like, absolutely spotless and Persil white. Crease-free and box-fresh, they were almost mirror-like in their pure patina. Even Kanye might have thought twice about styling an outfit around them. There was no suede trim to soften the harshness, no flash of colour other than a tiny gold Puma logo on the side and a khaki green tab on the heel. The uppers were white. The laces were white. The Puma stripe was white. They were the whitest trainers of all time.

I wear them, of course. A guy like me can easily carry them off.

Much more appealing than white Pumas ’round here is Black Pumas. Or Black Pyoomaz, as we’d say in the west of Scotland. Or Black Poomas, as they themselves say.

2019’s self-titled debut should be your first port of call if you’re in any way unfamiliar or curious about them. Self-styled Texan psychedelic soul, Black Pumas crackles with all the ingredients needed in a recipe for soul; vibrato-heavy guitar, watertight pistol-crack drums, flab-free horns, free-form Hammond, oohing and cooing female backing singers and an easy-going vocalist who, you’ll understand from the first line sung, has a honey-coated voice the equal of any of the greats who nestle snugly in that decent record collection of yours.

Black Pumas – Colors

Snaking in on a skeletal and ever-looping acoustic guitar riff, Colors is Black Pumas in microcosm. A ripple of barroom piano undercuts the earworm riff. Super-tight snare and air-spray hi-hat rimshot and hiss between the spaces. Electric guitar chords ripple outwards as we near the chorus. A suitably low-key yet funk-inflected bass line joins in. A sashay of females replicate the vocal lines and we’re properly off and running.

Oh yeah, the vocals. Head Puma Eric Burton honed his voice in the church, and you’ll hear that in his phrasing and adlibbing pleasantries – Yes, sir… yes, ma’am – as easy-going and soulful a delivery as you could possibly want to hear. He can do gritty and he can do tear-soaked, but what he really enjoys is letting loose and soaring off into a far-flung falsetto in the choruses. Colors is peppered with great, voice-cracking upper register spontaneity… yeah, he’s got it all.

He’s joined by slow-elbowed strings, a jazzy and unscripted electric piano solo that could’ve danced itself off of any of those old Billy Preston recordings of the ’70s and an arrangement that quietens and stirs, ebbs and flows like a golden hour Al Green. That wee ‘wooh-hoo, wooh-hoo, ooh-hoo, hoo‘ call and response section in the middle, where Burton’s vocals bounce off some plucked strings and the girls’ voices behind him is the sweetest of sweet spots.

I’ve listened to Colors many times in the last 5 years and always presumed it was a metaphorical reference to skin colour and racism. Last week I stumbled across a Song Exploder podcast episode where Black Pumas described the process behind the song and its meaning. It turns out it was written by Burton on his guitar as he sat on a rooftop watching the New Mexico sunrise alight on a brand new day. No metaphor, no hidden meaning, just a great, simplistic song about God’s creation of the natural world.

“It’s a good day to be,” suggests Burton, and with records like this on repeat, and trainers (trainurz) as funky as the ones on my not-in-the-least-affronted feet, it sure is. Black Pumas would refer to them as sneakers though. Not that I’m able to do much sneaking in a pair of shoes that look like a pair of Russian oligarch’s yachts moored proudly in an exclusive Mediterranean coastal resort.

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Rhythm ‘n Wooze

Craig McAllister

Clever band, Blur. They hit the zeitgeist with Parklife, followed it up with The Great Escape (more of the same, but written to prescription) then, when the wheels started coming loose on the Britpop bus, aimed for the ditch last navigated by Neil Young and released an album that couldn’t be further in sound from the ones that put them in the charts, on the evening news and onto teenagers’ bedroom walls. This approach – wilful and stubborn and intent on freshening things up – means that they continue to release records well into this century, playing massive, celebratory shows while remaining arty and interesting at the same time. They have, as Depeche Mode once advised, got the balance right.

Gone are the fresh faces and considered haircuts. Gone are the forced grins. Gone is the joy of popstardom. Five albums in and Blur look slightly less box-fresh than The Beatles do on that great, bleary-eyed sleeve that houses Beatles For Sale. Blur, the group’s lazily/eponymously-titled offering to their fans made little sense to many of them at the time, but as history has proven, it’s just one in a long list of albums in a year which seemed to have a properly great, must have album released every other week.

Had those queuing at midnight for the latest, bloated Oasis release (Be Here Now) swatted the grease from their shitty mod cuts and looked elsewhere, they might’ve seen what they were missing out on; Mogwai Young Team, Elliott Smith’s Either Or, Homework by Daft Punk, In It For The Money by Supergrass, Portishead’s self-titled second, Homogenic by Bjork, Tellin’ Stories by The Charlatans, Super Furry Animals’ Radiator, Primal Scream’s Vanishing Point, Dylan’s Time Out Of Mind…OK Computer… Urban Hymns… Heavy Soul…Dig Your Own Hole…The Fat Of The Land…Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space…. Ladies and gentlemen, we were spoiled for choice.

Blur tips its cocked and wonky hat to America. Graham Coxon breathes a welcome sigh of relief and dusts down his pair of Rat distortion pedals, for the most part mothballed for the last couple of albums. They’re all over Song 2‘s hairdryer-in-a-cement-mixer ramalama, and sports stadiums Stateside subsequently went apeshit for it. Netted a 3-pointer? Woo-hoo! Smacked a home run? Woo-hoo! Steamrollered an opponent on the gridiron? Woo-hoo! Oh yeah. Gone are the rinky dink Kinksisms and cor blimey guvnor knees ups. Blur is scuffed and scarred, and listeners who’ve stuck by its insular ambience will know how terrific it sounds even to this day.

The lead single, Beetlebum, was – in a nod to the heroin of its subject matter, a heavy-eyed and down-tempo slow-burner. Hard drugs had entered the orbit of the band and their periphery – Elastica, mainly – and it seems that Blur’s lead singer wasn’t immune to their temptation. Beetlebum is intentionally woozy, the come up from heroin’s knock down and drifts in, enveloped in pathos, regret and cotton-woolled vocals.

Get nothing done, Beetlebum. Just get numb, Beetlebum

And when she lets me slip away, she turns me on then all my violence is gone,

I just slip away and I am gone

Blur – Beetlebum

Some reviewer at the time said that Blur had taken all of what made the White Album so great and boiled it down (or cooked it up) into a four minute pop song, and, man, whoever said it was kinda right. The vocals in the chorus waft in on a breath of Beatlesish harmonies, overlapping and intermingled, Damon sounding like Graham and Graham sounding like Damon, the whole band sounding pleasantly horizontal. Happiness Is A Warm Gun sung to Revolution‘s fuzzed guitars and Birthday‘s compressed drums – that smart-arsed critic was astute.

The record’s real beauty lies in the chunky rhythm fired up by Coxon’s guitar playing in the verses. His opening riff sounds like a zip tearing through sandpaper – derr dur-dur-dur, derr dur-dur-dur – before opening up on a properly clanging, open-chorded chorus. The trick to Coxon’s playing here is in not just one, but both of his hands. His left plays an unexpected chord sequence while his right intentionally scuffs it up with discordant, ringing open strings and idiosyncratic flashy parts. If it’s unique and interesting guitar players yr after, look no further.

Blur could have easily fallen into the trap marked ‘formulaic’, but with Coxon continually doing his damndest to put a metaphorical hole in the knee of their collective strides, you have the perfect push and pull that makes all the great bands tick.

Poster for a show that I’m fairly certain never happened.

Get This!

No Way To Control It

Craig McAllister

Automatic by the Pointer Sisters is primo ’80s skeletal synth-funk; as slinky as Prince at his grubbiest but as pop as it comes at the same time. Built around pitter-pattering drum machines and a gulping, rubberised bassline that bulges and bounces in all the right places, it hinges itself on its 5 note synth refrain, an instant earworm from the 5th bar and regularly ever after.

Pointer Sisters – Automatic

That repetition of the hook-line in the intro is a much-borrowed idea, an old Motown trick that Berry Gordy would always insist on. By the first chorus, he noticed, listeners knew the tune and could sing it. And that, as his bank manager would point out, is yr instant hit single appeal right there.

The writers of Automatic weren’t shy in their appropriation of a great idea. They were by no means alone. Stock, Aitken and Waterman would come to rip the arse out of the idea in the short years afterwards. Whitney Houston’s writers would too. Even the Human League were partial to a bit of it. Listen out for the chorus-melody-as-intro the next time you find yourself landing on Heart 80s when you finally acknowledge 6 Music is losing its daily appeal. Automatic, like all great pop music, makes sure you know the chorus the minute it’s slapped you firmly between the ears. Take that, Mary Anne Hobbs.

Google tells me that lead Pointer Ruth’s coffee and caramel vocal is a contralto. The lowest of all female singing voices, it starts somewhere south of her ankles and snakes its way up her body as the verses make way for the familiar chorus. Sisters Anita and June add the high parts, harmonising like a puzzled Supremes relocated to some terrible mid ’80s chrome and neon video bar. You don’t need to see the video to know the trio sashay in tight dresses and back-lit hard-lacquered hair in time to the song’s sheath-like melody. Big ol’ vintage synths fizz and spark behind them, futuristic and space age even now. A rinky-dink guitar plays the melody high up the frets, like James Brown (but easier chords), Prince (again) with less flash ‘n sass, the briefest of six-string interludes in what is primarily machine-based funk music.

“Au!-Toe!-Mah!-Rhic!” go Anita and June, stretching out in simpatico, harmonies locked tighter than those dresses they’ll pour themselves into for the video.

“Automatic,” goes Ruth, sullenly dragging the words up from her solar plexus to put the full stop on things.

It’s a great record, Automatic. One that could easily have sloped off the first side of the new Janelle Monae record forty minutes ago, let alone the Pointer Sisters’ 10th album, all of forty years ago.

 

Get This!

Everything’s Gone Green

Craig McAllister

This is late night music. Not upbeat, party starting music, but post-midnight meditation, meant for those wee hours that fall somewhere in the slither of space that exists just before the crack of dawn. Spun finely from ether-borne gold and slowly spooled into seamless being, the singer’s voice aches and breaks and cracks, his hot-shot band playing slow and steady, majestically understated so that the song is best served. It’s not, perhaps, the first track you’ll think of when Al Green is mentioned, but it may well come to be one of your favourites. A random shuffling of it on the iPod yesterday had me scrambling about for my battered old copy of I’m Still In Love With You, the Al album it appears on, and since then, he’s been soundtracking the weekend. Everything’s gone Green, you might say.

Al Green – Simply Beautiful

It isn’t, by any standard of imagination, what you’d call an in-your-face soul track. There’s no stomping beat, no rasping brass section, no hysterical lead vocalist hollering tears of pain down the microphone. A lot of that has to do with Green’s controlled delivery – close-miked and delivered straight from the heart – but much of the track’s introspective feel is due to Al Green’s secret weapon; the Hodges brothers.

Stax had that crack in-house band with Steve Cropper, Duck Dunn and co driving the label’s sound. Motown grooved to the four to the floor beat of the Funk Brothers. Hi Records had the Hodges Brothers. Never doubt that they’re just as influential, just as essential to the development of soul music.

The record’s producer Willie Mitchell could’ve been forgiven for flying in a female gospel trio to flesh out the song’s hook lines. He may even have thought to employ a tenor sax and a couple of trumpets to replicate that descending four note signature riff that helps anchor the song, but with the Hodges brothers on board, none of that was necessary.

Teenie Hodges

I’ve written about Teenie Hodges before. The guitarists’ guitarist and then some, Teenie is an integral part of the Al Green sound. Never brash or flashy, Teenie’s range of finely-picked arpeggios and jazz chords are the perfect foil for his vocalist’s voice. Hodges doesn’t ever get in the road of things. On Simply Beautiful, he plays very little, but what he plays – Robert Johnson-ish acoustic blues licks, cascading nylon-stringed ripples of melody and gently sliding chords – is supremely considered and tasteful and, as is the way of his playing across Al Green’s catalogue, damn-near perfect.

His brother Leroy on bass is equally economical here. Shaking himself into thudding a doe-eyed root note that lands on the same beat as the kick drum, his playing is languid to the point of being horizontally laid back. Brother Charlie on drums and/or keys (the album credits aren’t too clear) is no different. The drum pattern begins with some metronomic hi-hat and kick drum…and stays there for the duration of the track. There’s no doubt at all that Charlie (and Leroy, for that matter) could play the absolute shit out of their instruments should it be called for, but Simply Beautiful is all about The Song and they masterfully serve it.

Behind Green’s exquisitely lithe delivery you’ll hear some lovely warm Hammond, underscoring the sort of shimmering string section that made Portishead’s Dummy such a unique listen. On Simply Beautiful, the strings are equally as subtle, perfectly-placed in the background and a gazillion miles away from any of those string-driven soul stompers that you might routinely shake yr tailfeather to. This’ll allow you to listen closely between the song’s plentiful spaces where you’ll hear the overdubs of Al interjecting with himself; a spoken word here, a gravelly moan there, a high sliding falsetto to complement the main vocal. The whole thing is a masterclass in understatement, the trio of Hodges playing in simpatico to let the song breathe naturally. Simply Beautiful indeed.

Listen on repeat for maximum effect, of course.