Category: Gone but not forgotten

Cover Versions, Gone but not forgotten, Live!

Panto Dame

Craig McAllister

The Dick Institute is a library, museum and art gallery in Kilmarnock. In recent years it has featured exhibitions of Quentin Blake’s artwork, the models of Aardman Animations, the writing of Michael Morpurgo and an interactive Lego installation. It serves the town well, an important totem of culture in an area often at the back of the queue when things like this are being disseminated. But that’s not important at this moment.

Panto season is in full swing just now. If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen ’em all; following a storyline as old as the hills, a pretty girl and a bequiffed, square-jawed handsome dude, at least one of whom is royal, are destined to be together, but only after evil is defeated.

Be it Sleeping Beauty or Beauty and the Beast, Jack and the Beanstalk or Aladdin, the principal characters of the cast rarely change. Puffs of smoke and sudden, polite bangs greet the fairy godmother, the jester/flunky/funny guy skips on stage in a multi-coloured costume, camply shouting “Hiya pals!” every 15 minutes and evil is introduced through a combination of dramatic music/lightning flashes/menacing clothing and hammy and knowing eyeball contact with the audience. Always, al-ways, a larger than life man fully embracing the concept of drag will drop innuendo after innuendo with every second line they deliver. (‘Haud that fur a meenit…whit ur ye worried aboot? It’s no’ hard!‘ etc etc.) Panto season is in full swing just now (oh yes it is) and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I love it!

I get to go with the school and I think the kids are sometimes more entertained at my reactions than they are with what is being delivered on the stage in front of them. I’ll happily boo the baddy and cheer the goody, even if some of the kids in my charge are far too self-conscious and cool for that sort of carry on. Lighten up, kids, this is great fun.

Panto is a goldmine of gaggery; souped-up dad jokes, punny and funny geographical sideswipes at neighbouring towns (‘It’s as barren and empty as the Ayr Utd trophy cabinet!‘), topical digs with references to popstars and current fads (“Six, seven!“) and a sprinkling of near the knuckle rippers that fly over the heads of many (but not all) school kids. The writers must have a blast.

“Ah walked tae Prestwick Airport yesterday. Finally goat there an’ met a coupla Caramel Logs. Ah says, ‘How long huv youse been a wafer?‘”

“Ah went tae a bar last week. Asked fur a pint. Some guy felt ma bum. Asked fur anither pint. The guy felt ma bum again. Anither pint. Same hing happened. Ah hink it musta bin a tap-ass bar.”

“…so ah says…’Oany mair o’ that and you’ll be gettin’ a kick in the Dick Institute.'”

The houses are full each day – twice – once in the morning for school parties and once again in the evening for anyone – and run for around 60 shows across December, a pretty grueling and full-on month of work for the actors and crew. From empty page at the start to dress rehearsal, I’ve no idea how long a pantomime takes to pull together, but there’s clearly tons of work in it. More power to these people. May their jokes never change.

From one dame to another…

“Whit’s the difference between Bing Crosby and Walt Disney?”

“Bing sings…and Walt disnae.”

Yeah. Jokes as old as the hills.

At some point in the early ’80s, writers started to refer to David Bowie as ‘The Dame’, a reference, I imagine, to the fact Bowie was by then one of the elder statesmen of the music scene. Little did those writers know, there were still another 30+ years of Bowie records and releases to come, some of which, history decreed, would stand shoulder to shoulder with his imperial mid ’70s phase. Meant as a slur, I’m not sure Bowie took any notice of it.

In September 1977, between the releases of Low and ‘Heroes’, David Bowie recorded a slot for Bing Crosby‘s Christmas TV special. Arriving with Angie in matching flaming scarlet hair, the producers had something of a panic, delicately requesting that Bowie tone down his image to balance that of the Slazenger cardigan-sporting Crosby. Off came the earing. Off came the lipstick. On remained the crucifix and on went a hastily concocted brown rinse for his hair. From the corners of the wardrobe department, a silk shirt and suit jacket were found. Bowie acquiesced, and regardless of the dramatic changes to his appearance, he is very much still the epitome of cool.

It was hoped that Bowie would accompany Crosby on a straightforward rendition of Little Drummer Boy, but after Bowie had told the show’s producers how much he detested the song, the show’s musical supervisors retreated to the basement and, breaking the land speed record for songwriting, wrote Peace On Earth as a counterpoint for Bowie to sing.

With less than an hour’s worth of rehearsal, Bing ‘n Bowie delivered a supreme take; crooned, sensitive, homely and Christmassy…all the more phenomenal when you stop to consider the music Bowie was making, and the lifestyle he was leading, at this time. Bing Crosby would call Bowie ‘a clean cut kid’ afterwards, ‘…a real fine asset to the show.’. Bowie would later claim he only did the show because his mum was a fan of Bing Crosby.

The recording, shown at Christmas 1977, wouldn’t make it to record until 1982 when RCA, very much against Bowie’s wishes, issued it in time for the Christmas market. It would peak at number three with sales in excess of a quarter of a million. A few months later, Bowie would leave RCA and join EMI, Let’s Dance a knowing twinkle in the old dame’s mismatched eyes.

Alternative Version, Gone but not forgotten, Hard-to-find, Live!, Sampled

Introducing The Band

Craig McAllister

A few months ago I posted about the burst of classical music that The Smiths used to signify they were taking the stage. Walk-on music, when used as effectively as The Smiths did it, is an integral part of the live experience. Those in front of the stage have their senses heightened…quicksilver adrenaline courses through the collective mass… eagerness is fit to burst and, as one, they peak when their heroes take the stage. In the article linked above, Mike Joyce talks about the prickling of the hairs on his arms as Sergei Prokofiev’s music reaches its climax and the group emerge from the shadows and onto the stage. Intro music is pure theatre and high drama, powerful in its effect for audience and band alike.

The recent death of Mani had me revisiting the Stone Roses catalogue and reminiscing about the Stone Roses gigs I’d been at. I say gigs, but Stone Roses shows were more of an event than a mere gig. The minute the group began to pick up traction, they eschewed the usual circuit of venues and instead put on ambitious landmark concerts.

In the space of five rapid months in 1989, Stone Roses went from Glasgow Rooftops (above) – part of the touring circuit for bands of a certain size – to the Blackpool Tower Ballroom to a November show for 7000 rockers and ravers in London’s Alexandra Palace, at the time known as the broadcasting birthplace of the BBC and scene of some of those trippy 24-hour Pink Floyd and Soft Machine ‘happenings’ of the late ’60s, but certainly not the usual venue any bands might think to try and fill. Nowadays of course, any two-bit act with a bit of a following can add a date or two in the airy north London glasshouse, but in 1989 the Stone Roses’ choice of venue was genuinely inspired.

Fast forward another six months and the group would set up stall on Spike Island, a windswept and chemically-polluted estuary of the Mersey. Two months later they’d play their final show (for then, anyway) in a huge tent on Glasgow Green, 10,000 rockers, ravers and by now bucket-hatted bampots witnessing the band at the peak of their powers. The travelling tent idea is also now fairly standard practice for bands of a certain size these days. (Spike Island less so.)

As the band’s popularity grew, they went from the standard idea of support act plus half an hour of playlisted music to an actual rave culture-inspired show, the group just one element of a spectacle that would involve guest DJs dropping crashing house beats and hip hop on the P.A., lasers and strobes on the lighting rig, mass E communion in the audience and generally good vibes all round. These shows were a million miles from watching Gaye Bykers On Acid from a cider-soaked corner of Glasgow Tech or the Wedding Present at the QMU or any other touring guitar band of the era you care to mention. Yes, even you, Primal Scream. In 1989, Bobby was still looking for the key that would start up their particular bandwagon. (It was somewhere down the back of his Guns ‘n Roses leather trousers, I’m led to believe.)

All of those shows mentioned above (I was at three of them) began with I Wanna Be Adored. Since writing the song, or at least since the release of that debut album, has there ever been a Stone Roses show that didn’t start with it? I don’t think so. I Wanna Be Adored is, in its own way, a senses-heightener, a quicksilver surge of electricity, an early peak in a set full of peaks, but in the live arena, it too would come rumbling from out of the corners, fading in as an intro tape heralded the group’s imminent arrival.

Stone Roses intro music:

I’ve spent 35 years convinced that this music was made by the Stone Roses themselves, an abstract piece of art thrown away in the same vein as those backwards experiments they put onto b-sides, played for fun, recorded then used sparingly but appropriately. Certainly, the thunking, woody bassline is pure Mani. The hip-hop beat pure Reni. The sirens a clear extension of John Squire’s clarion call at the start of Elephant Stone.

Hearing this from Ally Pally’s carpeted floor minutes after Sympathy For The Devil is still strong in the memory. Hearing it again in the sweat-raining big top on Glasgow Green, many there unaware that this was not mere incidental rave music but Stone Roses’ call to arms (but we knew, oh yes, we knew, and excitement was immediately at fever pitch) still provokes a conditioned response in 2025.

It wasn’t made by Stone Roses though. Turns out it’s a piece of obscure-ish hip hop from 1987, looped, tweaked and added to by the Stone Roses team. The original – Small Time Hustler by The Dismasters – is immediately recognisable from that Stone Roses intro. Really, all the Stone Roses did was stick a few sirens on top of it…but combine that with Ally Pally’s echoing rave whistles and Glasgow Green’s surge of euphoria and it makes for high drama.

I wonder how many folk knew – truly knew – the source of that Stone Roses intro tape back in 1989?

Cover Versions, Gone but not forgotten, Hard-to-find

A Good Start!

Craig McAllister

There’s a story that Adam Horowitz tells – kinda preposterous, but totally believable (it’s the Beastie Boys, right?) – where waaaay back in the early days of the Beastie Boys he’s hanging out at a friend’s rather than be at school that afternoon when, from the TV, comes the unmistakable slow ‘n low DIY beats of his group’s own ‘Beastie Revolution‘, the flip side of their debut single Cooky Puss. Somehow, some way, British Airways had picked up on the track and used it to soundtrack a TV advert. Quite what the ad executives were thinking (or were on) by adding the Beasties’ track – lo-fi-Pass-The-Dutchie-as-recorded-by-Lee-Perry – to go hand in hand with an advert for global business travel is anyone’s guess, but there it was. Ad Rock couldn’t believe it. They had to ask for permission, didn’t they?

It so happened that Mike D’s mum had a friend of a friend of a friend who worked for a Manhattan law firm, and so, a young lawyer fresh out of law school and with the bit between his teeth was assigned to take on the Beastie Boys v British Airways in his first case. The four Beastie Boys (Kate Schellenbach was still a part of the group at this point) were subsequently awarded $10,000 each, an astronomical amount for a young person in 1983. Adjusted for inflation, it’s the equivalent of over $32,000 (£30,000) in today’s money. The money would go some way to helping the group establish themselves with decent equipment, accomodation and rehearsal space.

Ad Rock did what any music-obsessed teenager would do: he took himself straight to Rogue, Midtown Manhattan’s music store. He had his eye on a black Rickenbacker, ‘the same one that Paul Weller from The Jam played‘ and had the $250 out to pay for it when, from the corner of his eye, he spied the new-to-market Roland TR-808 drum machine. Dilemma! He rationalised – he had a perfectly good guitar already…all the best, freshest records of the day were built on processed beats…here was his chance to own a real guitar…here was his chance to be cutting edge and adopt the brand new technology of the day…guitar?…beats?…guitar?…beats?… The 808 won out. Serendipitously, it would end up providing much of the backbeat for that first million-selling Beastie Boys album, after which Ad Rock could buy as many Rickenbackers as he fancied. A good decision, as it turned out.

It’s no secret that Beastie Boys have a hardcore punk thing at their roots, but when I first read the story above, I was suprprised that they were fans of The Jam. Of all the guitar-based bands to be into, they’d seem to be the most quintessentially English. The lyrical content, the suits, Weller’s undeniable accent…maybe that was the appeal.

In 2000, Fire And Skill, a tribue album to The Jam was released. It’s an eclectic (ie ropey) album and alongside the names you’d expect to be there (Liam Gallagher, Steve Cradock) were outliers such as Garbage, Buffalo Tom…and the Beastie Boys.

Beastie Boys – Start!

Beastie Boys

Their version of Start! is terrific. It’s cut from the same lightly toasted cloth that many of those groovy Beastie Boys instrumentals are cut from. There’s no immediate Taxman-aping thumping bass. There’s no frazzled, trebly guitar solo. There are hardly any vocals. Instead, it’s built on a bed of bubbling Jimmy Smith organ, a woozy melodica playing Paul Weller’s vocal melody, with skittery, hip-hoppish drums and splashing cymbals nailing the groove to the floor. Miho Hatori of Grand Royal labelmates Cibo Matto pops up to sing the ‘if I never, ever see you/what you give is what you get‘ refrain, but other than that, this is Beastie Boys doing what they do best – grooving on a soul jazz soft shoe shuffle for fun and out of sheer respect for the music.

In Dancing Through The Fire, Dan Jennings’ excellent re-telling of the Weller story from pre-Jam to the present day, there’s a story of the aeroplane-averse Weller travelling six hours by car between shows, playing the Beasties’ version of Start! over and over and over again. I hope Adam Horowitz gets to read about that.

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

Phone Scrolls, Drum Rolls

Craig McAllister

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To bookend the show, something else happens.

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

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

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

“I know it will,” he winks.

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

Not yr average Wednesday night.

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

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

Gone but not forgotten

Rickety Lou

Craig McAllister

It begins with a riff as rickety as the Coney Island Cyclone, a clattering, knuckle-dusted, steel-wound nickel on wood bone-shaking rattle. Lou Reed sounds like he’s just about made it to the mic on time for those first coupla words, like he’s been so transfixed by his own instantaneous riffing that he’s momentarily tuned out of anything else and hastily ran up to it marginally late for his cue. Most other bands would clatter to a sudden halt, shout ‘Take Two!’ and fall into action again. This though, being the Velvet Underground, can be passed off as art; you noticed, yeah? Yeah! It’s deliberate and obtuse and deliberately obtuse, so what, huh? To Lou, mistakes are for lesser groups who worry too much about what their audience thinks of them. ‘You know it’ll be alright,’ as he sings in the chorus

The Velvet Underground – What Goes On

An organ drone wheezily fades its way in at the start of the second verse, subtle to begin with, vamping the simple chord changes, then a bit more prominent in the mix as the angle of Lou ‘n Sterling’s highly-strummed agit-jangle takes proper hold.

There’s a fab! u! lous! feedbacking twin guitar break – of course there is, this is the Velvet Underground – that rises from the beat group clatter like Scotch mist and surfs its way across the continuing stramash below, landing itself like a set of bagpipes being trampled to death in a crowded Turkish souq bazaar. I’m sure that’s exactly the sound the Velvets were chasing, as they say.

Elongated mid notes meld between high and low counter notes, Lou ‘n Sterling’s floating frequencies weaving as one for longer than most groups of the time would dare, but still not nearly long enough here. It’s a trippy and hypnotic garage band tour de force, What Goes On. It really is.

Then we’re back to the chorus, the easy, woozy harmonies adding late era Beatlish warmth to the ice-cool New York art rock. From then on in, it’s a no nonsense, heads down boogie between guitars and organ drone. The twin guitars are high in the mix, trebly and piercing, rattling away like a Warhol hopeful behind the bins at the Factory. The organ is simple and slo-mo, a relaxing counterpoint and very much the antithesis to the manic, never-ending jangle out front.

VU outtake pic by Billy Name

Somewhere, amongst all of this heady art-rock splendour, must be bass and drums. They must be there, right? If you listen closely – really closely – you might hear them, but you’ll need to tune out of that other strange noise in the background – that’ll be the frantically scratching pencils, as Collins ‘n Kirk and a handful of other magpie-minded guitar stranglers make sense of this motherlode of all blueprints and run with it all the way to 1980 and the land known as indie.

Influential…and then some.

Post-Script

Interesting Point 1: There’s an internet theory that the organ on Talking Heads’ Once In A Lifetime is directly lifted, if not actually sampled, from What Goes On. When you listen to both songs, there’s a compelling case for it, but I’ll leave it to you to play them back to back.)

Interesting Point 2: PopSpots, that essential guide to placing your old band shots of yesterday onto the NYC streets of today has a whole section on Lou/Andy/VU’s New York. That couch that appears on the sleeve of What Goes On‘s parent album, the self-titled VU’s third, was seemingly a feature of Warhol’s factory as much as the Velvets themselves.

Gone but not forgotten, Sampled

Trouble Funk

Craig McAllister

Isaac Hayes created plenty of great music. The Black Moses album…Ike’s Rap…his reinterpretations of By The Time I Get To Phoenix and Never Can Say Goodbye to name just some, but his signature tune is undeniably Theme From Shaft, 1971’s hi-hat ‘n high groove exercise in funk. Damn right it is.

It’s generally accepted too that Curtis Mayfield’s Superfly is one of his greatest albums. A groovy stew of stabbing brass, skulking street panther bass and wah-soaked guitar lines that add musicality and danceability to hard-hitting socio-political lyrics, it followed hot on the strutting cuban heels of Shaft and reset the bar for musicians soundtracking films.

And then came Marvin Gaye.

Emerging from the success of What’s Going On, with credit in the bank and a new Motown contract offering him complete editorial control over his work, he was offered the opportunity of scoring blaxploitation flick Trouble Man. The producers had been quick to spot the pros of hitching a movie’s soundtrack to a respected musician and Marvin was equally as excited at the prospect of making exactly the sort of record he wanted to make.

His score for Trouble Man not only builds on his contemporaries’ fantastical funk ‘n soul infused soundtrack work, it also has its own personality, veering left to take itself down interesting roads in jazz-inflected atmospherics. Gaye, with his new-found artistic control, hired the Funk Brothers, Motown’s in-house band and augmented them with the cream of L.A.’s jazz scene. The result was a jigsawing of slick soul guitar riffing and solid ‘n steady on-the-one basslines to whip-smart polyrhythmic drums, nerve jangling piano and rasping brass. Underscoring all of it is hotshot film score arranger Gene Page’s sublimely shimmering string lines. A soundtrack it may be, but it works well as an album in its own right.

Is it a soul album? A funk album? A jazz album? Yes, yes and yes. And, just as Isaac and Curtis had done before him, Marvin rewrites the rule book for scoring films in the 1970s. Would Bernard Herrmann’s exquisitely anxiety-inducing Taxi Driver score be just as jarring, just as dramatic without him having Trouble Man as a reference point? That’s debatable.

Trouble Man – movie trailer voiceover

Trouble Man (the title track) popped up on Guy Garvey’s 6 Music show a week or so ago and, like all the best music, had me replaying and reappraising it for more than a few days.

Marvin Gaye – Trouble Man

It’s a beauty, isn’t it?!

That drum sound! So crisp, so exact. That’s the sound of Stix Hooper (possibly not his real name). The whole track hangs on his airy dynamic clatter… that, and the ominous register of strings… and the clanging piano’s chords of doom…and the anticipatory brass…and ubiquitous vibraphone. And especially Marvin’s killer vocal. You know that cliche about singing the phonebook? Yeah, well Marvin could sing the entire contents of Berry Gordy’s Rolodex and you’d never tire of listening to him.

I come up hard, bay-bee, but now I’m cool
I didn’t make it, sugar, playin’ by the rules.

Marvin is double-tracked for much of the song, one vocal in low register, the other offering the high and floaty falsetto that adds lightness to the heaviness of the music. Coupled with the swing of the drums, it creates real finger clickin’ hipness in the verses and high drama in between.

The guitar – played by Ray Parker Jr – mirrors the piano line and grooves on a smooth and sliding repetitive E minor riff. Sure, young Ray could very probably break out a slick jazz break or an augmented chord progression without breaking so much as a bead of sweat, but he’s here to serve the song, not to kill it in unnecessary noodling fluff. He stays well within his lane and the song is better for it.

At the chord changes, muted trumpets get on board, creating tension and dissonance that mirror Marvin’s lyric.

There’s only three things, that’s for sure:
Taxes, death and trouble

The trumpets freeform through the heady stew. The strings ramp up the anticipation and the anxiety and then, just as release always follows tension, Marvin’s high and carefree ‘Ye-eah!‘ breaks the spell and we’re back to the groove.

The track swings on.

Marvin breaks into a proto rap:

I know some places
And I see some faces
I got good connections
They dig my directions
What people say, that’s okay
They don’t bother me.

Stix Hooper continues to do his own thing; a cymbal splash here, a snare fill there, a full kit paradiddle in the funky gaps. The strings and brass continue to induce anxiety. The vibes serve as an aural lightbulb moment, the ‘ah! everything’s ok again!’ moment. The bass playing slides up a notch. The whole thing grooves. Trouble never sounded so goddam danceable and airy and exciting.

And Marvin, cool, street-smart and determinedly ploughing his own unique furrow, brings it all back to a sweet-vocalised close. Astonishing music.

 

Cover Versions, Gone but not forgotten

Don’t Argue, Buster!

Craig McAllister

Gangsters by The Specials… (or Special A.K.A., to give them their full original name). It’s just about the most perfect distillation of its times. Punkish and idiosyncratic with a generous nod, in both sound and vision, to what had gone before, it served not only as a stall-setter but a rallying cry for 2-Tone and the many brilliant things that would shortly follow on the label. Specials’ release number one…2-Tone release number one…what an entrance.

The Special A.K.A. – Gangsters

I once asked Neville Staple to sign my copy of Gangsters. My copy isn’t one of those first few thousand hand-stamped ones – of course it’s not, I was only 10 when it was first released and I wasn’t yet in the habit of skanking at 2-Tone shows where I might’ve bought one, but my pocket money stretched to a 7″ single every now and again and in amongst the Madness and Beat releases that I did buy at the time, I somehow also ended up with a copy of Gangsters, housed in the iconic 2-Tone Walt Jabsco sleeve, which no doubt attracted my magpie eyes and fertile young mind when browsing the racks of John Menzies in Irvine Mall.

Anyway, Neville.

He was appearing at Seaside Ska, an annual festival I was involved in the promotion of. I’d asked him pre-show if he wouldn’t mind signing a couple of my Specials singles and he suggested I drop in to his dressing room for a chat at the end of his performance and he’d sign them then.

Post-show, I rapped on his dressing room door.

“Joost a minute, moyte,” came the shout from behind the cheap plywood exterior. And then, almost immediately, ‘S’all roight…joost coom in.”

Neville was standing in a pair of large white Y-fronts and, apart from the pork pie hat atop the dreads and the heavy gold chain around his neck, nothing else.

Where did you get that blank expression on your face, as someone once sang.

At least, I hope I managed to maintain a blank expression. I’ve walked in on musicians doing the pre-gig pray/huddle thing. I’ve walked in on smokers, tokers, sniffers and snorters. I’ve even walked in on tribute bands and their tribute groupies. Oh yes I have. But until Neville, I’d never met one of my favourites in their underwear. Not all heroes wear capes, they say, but I can reveal that some of them wear large, functional and very clean Y-fronts.

Anyway, he signed the records – ‘That’s moi fave,’ he says of Gangsters, then, looking worriedly over my shoulder, asks to the empty corridor behind me, “Where’s all me fans?” As he sauntered off to find them – still in his Y-fronts – I went off to pack my treasured singles safely into the back of my car.

You’ll need to root around for this – Facebook is your best bet – but there’s an absolutely dynamite video performance of Gangsters on American TV that catches The Specials in April 1980, just as they are hitting their stride. Broadcast by Saturday Night Live (hence the block on YouTube and here on WordPress) it shows The Specials in all their jerky elbowed, suedeheaded and suited up youthful glory. From the opening shot of Neville standing on a staircase, barking the ‘Bernie Rhodes’ intro while brandishing a Tommy gun – can you imagine that on the telly nowadays?! – to his train-track-toasting on the microphone and the rest of the group in total syncopation, it’s just about my favourite archive live video. The energy coming from the screen as the band play it just a touch faster, just a touch more frantic than the 7″ release, could power Coventry for a year.

Standing either side of a hyper-animated Terry Hall, Neville and Lynval Golding provide the metaphorical yin and yang of the performance. One black, one white, Roddy on dark guitar, Lynval playing a light-coloured one, his arms making acute angles between elbow and bicep as he chops into the chords, Roddy’s legs forming obtuse angles as he slides them waaay out to rattle off the twanging punk-a-billy solo. To the side of them, Jerry surfs the organ, directing his band with already unnecessary nods and looks. All that practice, all those live shows as the Coventry Automatics has sharpened them up as neatly as the mohair suits they sport. Behind them, Horace manages to maintain both a solid bass line and tireless dance stance. Beside him, keeping it all together is John Bradbury, his clattering kit sounding exactly like a row of garbage cans that Benny and Choo-Choo have knocked over in the alley while escaping Officer Dibble. I tried to upload a version of it here, but it won’t go. Try Facebook if you can. You won’t be disappointed.

Reggae and ska has a long history of copying, borrowing, twisting and turning tunes, words and styles into brand new things. Gangsters, as you well know, was based on Prince Buster’s Al Capone. From the intro to the toasting, the repeating riff to the sheer excitement emanating from its heavy-set grooves, it’s a modern update on an old classic and something that 2-Tone acts would have a lot of success from. Not that I knew that as a 10-year old.

Prince Buster – Al Capone

 

 

 

 

Gone but not forgotten, Kraut-y

Expressionism

Craig McAllister

Around May/June 1977, David Bowie and Iggy Pop found themselves free of rural France and in Berlin, doing what any self-respecting culture vultures and gatekeepers of taste would do on the back of two successful (and future classic) albums (Low / The Idiot); they wandered around the city’s Brücke Museum, absorbing the Teutonic culture and getting familiar with the very fabric of Germany. Amongst the largest collection of German Expressionism on the planet, between the Kirchners and the Heckels, the Bleyls and the Schmidt-Rotluffs, they chanced upon Otto Mueller’s 1916 painting Lovers Between Garden Walls. Its loose and flowing watercolours made quite the impression on the magpie-minded Bowie and he returned time and again to soak it in, committing it to memory until a suitable use could be found for it.

Collaborating with Bowie on the album he’d quickly release to follow Low were Brian Eno and Tony Visconti. Eno was there to add the wacky vibes, an arty farty court jester enabling and encouraging Bowie to draw on oblique strategies upon which he’d create and build his new art. ‘Once the search is in progress, something will be found’, ‘Imagine the music as a moving chain or caterpillar’, ‘Remove specifics and convert to ambiguities’.  Making sense of it all at the controls was Visconti, a level head amongst the highbrow lunacy that Eno championed, and somehow, over the course of five or six weeks, the album ‘Heroes‘ took shape.

One backing track they’d built up – ‘Use exactly five chords’ – was the pick of the bunch but remained vocal-free. It was built upon a repetitive groove, played by Bowie’s Young Americans guitarist, Carlos Alomar, with added thunk from the rhythm section of George Murray (bass) and Dennis Davis (drums).

As a backing track in this state, it was perfectly serviceable, but a fantastic layer of Robert Fripp guitar spread generously across the top of it transformed it into something wild and eerie and utterly sci-fi. Fripp had found all the sweet spots in the studio where his guitar would sing and feedback and marked the spots on the studio floor with tape. As the backing track played in his headphones, Fripp prowled the studio, coaxing elongated textures of harmonic feedback while he flitted from sweet spot to sweet spot, magnetising the results on tape forever. The resultant track had to bubble and stew and ferment before being afforded a lead vocal, but when it arrived, it landed quickly.

The official Bowie story of the time is that he happened to look out of the Hansa Studio window and there, under a gun turret by the Berlin Wall, were two folk wrapped in a romantic embrace. In later years, it emerged that the man in the embrace was Tony Visconti. His marriage was crumbling and he’d found himself entangled (in every sense) with local jazz singer Antonio Maass. Bowie wanted to immortalise the embrace in song; the romantic notion of two people kissing by the Berlin Wall, defiantly against the world around them, seemed too good to ignore. As he wrote the lyrics, his mind cast itself back to the Brücke Museum and Otto Mueller’s painting of two lovers between the garden walls. Visconti and his new girlfriend were playing the picture out in front of him. Give it a word – serendipity. Give it two – beautiful happenstance.

David Bowie – Helden

 

It is, like all the best Bowie tracks, from Life On Mars to Absolute Beginners to Where Are We Now? a proper builder, Bowie’s voice rising with each subsequent verse, the high drama unfolding as each chorus gives way to a new part, his voice hoarse and high yet in total control as it gradually plays out. “Heroes” too has that magical groove and swing, it is downbeat yet danceable. Even when sung in German (especially when sung in German?) “Heroes” is an unstoppable force.

“Heroes” (those quotations are important, they suggest sarcasm; we could be heroes? Aye, right!) would be the album’s lead single, released towards the end of September, (that’s a mere 48 years ago, young man). It has since become one of Bowie’s statement pieces. Anthemic yet tender, it grew a life of its own. It was sung at Live Aid, its meaning doubling up as a metaphor for all who’d attended and taken part in the event. It blasted out at the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games in London. It was, in a sweet turn of events, played in Berlin by Bowie after the Wall came down, 15,000 reunited Berliners singing it back to him as he cried unstoppable tears.

It also forms part of a brilliant scene at the end of 2109’s Jojo Rabbit, where the young titular hero dances a very Bowiesque dance on his doorstep with the unattainable girl of his dreams. The film maker (Taikia Waititi) used the German-language version for added authenticity. As an aside, he also scores the start of the film with German-language Beatles hits, played out over fast-cut film of Hitler rallies; Beatlemania recast as Adolf-mania. Very clever stuff. If you’ve never seen it, rectify that at once.

Get This!, Gone but not forgotten

Capital Gains

Craig McAllister

A couple of weeks ago we had a weekend in Edinburgh. We tend to go every year around Festival time, usually as a family, always just for a day and always when the madness of the Festival is in full flight. The last time we did this though was a bit of a disaster; the four of us had very different ideas of how our day might look and none of us saw our unvoiced visions come true. I fancied a walk round the Old Town, just to take in the vibe, y’know, maybe even a casual jaunt out to Stockbridge, purely for the purpose of discovering new record shops, dreaming of pausing for a well-deserved IPA on the way. Daughter had her mind set on eating vegan croissants in Instagramable, pastel-toned, artisan bakeries. The boy had trainers money burning a hole in the deep pockets of his slim-fit combats and wanted to go to those hot beds of Edinburgh tourism JD Sports and Sports Direct. Only Mrs Pan was happy to fall into the heavy flow of human traffic on the Grassmarket, avoid the massed silent disco and take her chances to see where it all took her/us. We all fell out, we vowed never to return as a bickering four-piece, and we stuck to our word.

At Christmas the kids presented us with a pair of tickets for the Military Tattoo – the reasons for which stretch back to another family disagreement – and so Mrs Pan and myself booked a hotel and had a fairly civilised yet cultured weekend away. To be honest, the Tattoo, with its brass and buttons and ten gun salutes wasn’t really my kinda thing, but we had great seats, the evening weather was balmy (even up at the normally baltic Castle) and the whole thing passed by in an impressive blur of noise, colour, and military barking. The chieftain/military guy who compered and linked the whole thing together was a walking, talking, cliched shortbread tin of rugged Scottishness. Planting his legs firmly like the Barony ‘A’ Frame and looking like the artwork on a box of porridge oats, he swept his hand theatrically across the darkening skies while bellowing out the tourist-friendly guide to auld Caledonia.

‘Scotland! Will ye luk et hurrrr! Take a moment tae savourrr the scene. Wae hurrr bonnie hills and purrrrple mountains, rrrrrivers and glens, she’s stood firrrrm and majestic for centurrries, thrrrrough warrrrtime, peacetime, the best and worrrrst o’ times. Can ye hearrrr? The pipes and drrrrrums o’ the Rrroyal Higland Fyoozzileerrrrz! It’s a rrrare, stirrring thing o’ beauty!‘

And, with military precision, a massed band of pipes and drums floods the arena to the gasps of the significant number of ex-pats in the crowd. It’s a slick event, 75 years young and sold out every night a year in advance, so who am I to turn my tartan-averse nose up at it? Mrs Pan loved it. Luvved it, aye.

It’s the peripheral stuff – the fringe stuff, or Fringe stuff, even, that I enjoy the most. Super-smart magicians pull £20 notes clean outta the Royal Mile’s fresh air. Street piano players in evening wear rattle through the classics with all the elan of an Usher Hall headliner. An atom-sized human cannonball does death-defying stunts just because he can. And a troupe of young Asian men in tights and flesh-coloured codpieces (and nothing else) do graceful and bendy yoga/silent ballet to a confused but appreciative gathering crowd.

Welcome to Edinburgh in August.

The streets are packed, the busiest I’ve ever seen the capital’s cobbles, a noisy mixture of plodding tourists, annoyed locals and a never-ending gauntlet of flyer-thrusting young hopefuls keen for you, for anyone, to take a punt on their show. There are a lot of shows to pick from; comedians and clowns compete with free tequila slammers and  Oxbridge am-drammers for your time and attention. One-woman reviews on the gender politics of Taylor Swift, one-man live art installations, “one-legged bicycles”, to quote Liam Gallagher a few days later. It’s all going on.

We threw our lot in with the comedians; the fast-rising Stuart Mitchell, the dry and droll Ian Stone, the superb Takashi Wakasugi and Australian Aidan Jones – whose whole show revolves around deconstructing the musical puzzle that is Chopin’s Nocturne in E flat major – being the pick of what was a high watermark of good quality comedy at sensible prices. 2.6 million ticket sales were recorded at the Festival and Fringe this year. Add to that the quarter of a million bucket-hatted mad-fer-its who rolled into town for the Oasis shows and you can begin to get a sense of the bonanza that the hotels and pubs and restaurants look forward to. Capital gains indeed.

It’s now a tradition that when in Edinburgh I stand self-consciously in Cockburn Street below the entrance to Craig’s Close while Mrs Pan waits for a gap in the tidal wave of tourists to take a quick picture. I must have half a dozen and more snaps from this location, from black hair to grey, 30″ waist to 34″. My pal Scott aped the very same pose just this week – get yr own close, McLuckie! My dear old work colleague Sharon even went so far as to sketch me from one of the pictures in recent years. I’m building up quite the portfolio.

Another pal (and Fall fanatic), Iain, pointed out a year or two ago that Mark E Smith and the rest of The Fall had poured out of the opposite end of Craig’s Close in one of The Fall’s videos. A quick bit of research shows that this occurs in – of course – the promo film for Edinburgh Man.

The Fall – Edinburgh Man

Edinburgh Man might be the closest Mark E Smith got his group to soul music. They were no strangers to soul covers over the year, but Edinburgh Man has none of the caustic and off-kilter backing or ranty vocalising that characterises most of The Fall’s discography. Sure, the guitars are kinda jittery and twangy and could break into a hundred mile an hour sprint with little encouragement required, but mainly they remain understated. There’s a high cooing backing vocal that wafts in and out like the haar from the Forth. There’s an understated keyboard line. And atop it all? Well, you might be inclined to say that Mark croons his way through it. It’s certainly heart-felt.

As I sit and stare at all of England’s souls

I tell you something – 

I wish I was in Edinburgh

 

I don’t mind being by myself 

Don’t wanna be anywhere else

Just wanna be in Edinburgh

 

They say you project yourself

But I’m an Edinburgh man myself

Smith moved to Edinburgh in the late 80s. He’d split with Brix, was finding Manchester too druggy and wanted a fresh place to start again. If we’re splitting hairs here, MES actually moved to Leith which, as anyone knows is to Edinburgh as Salford is to Manchester – certainly something that Mark Edward should’ve known. Still, the year or so he spent in ‘the real Edinburgh‘ as he called it, gave the world Edinburgh Man. Thanks for that, Mark.

Get This!, Gone but not forgotten

Waiting For The Tape To Turn

Craig McAllister

1978. At the time when Saturday Night Fever and Grease stubbornly refuse to budge from the top two positions on the album chart, just as the whole of Scotland is hypnotised by Archie Gemmell turning Dutch defences inside out down there in South America, right about the point when the ahead of the curve Swedes were banning aerosol sprays on account of their ozone-damaging properties (good luck being a Stockholm-based glue-sniffing, hair-dying punk rocker), Joy Division were releasing their An Ideal For Living EP.

If 1976 is punk’s Year Zero – and common consensus decrees it is – then the two-full-years into the future that is 1978 signifies the musical movement’s transition into post-punk. The unforgiving world of now! sound moves fast, and unless you’re one of those opportunistic phlegmy-trailed third rate, third wave cartoon punk bands who came along in the scabby wake of punk’s outgrown dead ends, the scene’s key movers and shakers were now very much in their imperial post-punk phase.

An Ideal For Living and its writers may have been a product of the punk scene, but see past the Hitler Youth drum-beating boy on the cover and the band’s name with it’s links to the very worst of contemporaneous modern history and you’ll conclude that, in attitude and outlook, Joy Division and their debut record was nothing less than post-punk.

It’s the breathing space that’s given to the instruments that does it.

Joy Division – No Love Lost

It’s low-budget, high concept, ambitious cinematic rock and then some. Just three instruments and a vocal line; linear, separated and identifiable, crystal clear and with all the fat trimmed off at the source. Peter Hook’s clang of bass and four string metronomic pulse, Kraftwerk by way of Salford, Bernard’s conservative use of slashing and scraping feral guitar, fed through an ear-bending phaser pedal for additional disorientation, the sheer dynamics of the drop ins and drop outs as the bass and drums dictate proceedings… this is all high drama travelogue played out by serious young men.

Where the worst of punk sounds like it’s recorded on sandpaper inside a cardboard box, the best of post-punk sounds futuristic and other-worldly.

It’s the drums on No Love Lost that separates it from the other guitar-driven records of the era.

Stephen Morris really wants his drums to sound like the expansive steam-powered hissing and spitting that gives Bowie’s Be My Wife such a coating of propulsive Victorian workhouse modernism, and although the group has yet to orbit Martin Hannett’s wild and idiosyncratic solar system, the production on No Love Lost hints at the very out there-ness they’d soon discover with Factory’s maverick desk controller. Morris’s drums are electronically treated; the snares refract and ricochet at the edges, the toms beat a heady and reverbed tribal thunk, the hi-hat sticks two fingers up to Sweden and sprays a tsk-tsk-tsk ton of ozone-damaging aerosol into the Tropsphere, the ride cymbal splashes a silvery sheen across the top of it all… it’s not a million miles away from Low-era Bowie at all.

The vocals don’t appear until the three minute mark, a long intro – almost prog – by any fat-free group’s standards in 1978, and when they do arrive they’re both shouty and wordy. Ian Curtis flits between a mouthy punk rocker where the tune is less important than the attitude and the sort of arty and enigmatic spoken word delivery that you might find on a Velvet Underground record. As with the drums, the edges of his vocals are treated in echo and delay and all manner of mystery-enhancing effect-ect-ects. Did they ever better this? Of course they did…but as first releases go, No Love Lost is a real stall-setter.

Yeah. When Travolta was omni-present, when Gemmell was achieving God-like status, when Sweden was leading the way in planet-saving eco-friendliness, Joy Division was sowing the very serious seeds of post-punk. Essential stuff, I’m sure you’ll agree.