Category: Gone but not forgotten

Alternative Version, Gone but not forgotten, Sampled

I. Am. Somebody.

Craig McAllister

‘Busboy’…’bellboy’… ‘waterboy’ …’shoeshine boy’…the reason African Americans began using ‘man’ as a full stop in conversation is there for all to see. Fed up of being treated as subordinates by their white bosses, jazz musicians and those in the service industry which enabled their scene to thrive called one another ‘man’, the inference – the point being – that you are very much the equal of the guy ordering you around. Damn right you are. Never forget it, man.

Jesse Jackson, the U.S, politician and activist who died last week, took this notion one step further. At his rallying speeches across a divided and tense States, he would punctuate his measured, proto-rap with a simple but powerful statement; “Never forget; ‘I am somebody. Respect me. Protect me. Never neglect me. I. Am. Somebody.’”

Born after his mother was raped by a neighbour, Jackson grew up living next door to half-siblings who would never know exactly who their young neighbour really was. Shunned by his natural father, Jesse Jackson more than anyone else entered adulthood understanding precisely the true meaning of ‘I am somebody’.

He worked tirelessly within the black communities of Chicago, fighting for desegregated schools, social housing and, working alongside Martin Luther King jr (he was with King in Memphis when he was assassinated), organised boycotts of whites-only shops/stores until the owners were forced not only to open their doors to all, but to actively employ people of colour. Jackson galvanised entire communities to stand up for equality, demand justice, fight for change.

Delivered in a blur of denim and suede and more than a casual approach to the use of shirt buttons, his early speeches were full of clenched fists, bared teeth, wild eyes …and absolute clarity. Go and watch them on YouTube. They were electrifying and rousing. It’s hard to relate them to the same person, the smart senior dressed in a navy blue suit and campaigning his way towards the White House a couple of decades later, but there’s Jesse; angry, fired-up and fighting for his people.

If you didn’t know, you might be forgiven for thinking these sort of speeches all occurred at some arcane point in history, around the time of Henry Ford’s Model T and Charlie Chaplin and southern state lynchings, y’know, before we knew any better, so it’s sobering to consider that the speech below was delivered in 1972, years beyond the advent of the automobile and hooded ‘Christians’ with arson habits…and very much in my lifetime. Probably yours too.

It’s all the more sobering – shocking even – to contemplate that the words spoken above still, in an oppressed, Trumpian, ICE-driven American society, ring with righteous anger and rage, a hundred years and more since the Model T Ford and silent movies and burning crosses first permeated American life. What’s really changed?

The speech above is – as you well know – the same speech that’s sampled on Andrew Weatherall’s remix of Primal Scream’s Come Together. Taken from the 1973 soundtrack release of the Wattstax benefit concert in L.A., it samples Jackson as he addresses 112,00 people in the Memorial Coliseum one balmy August day. Ensuring affordability and access for all, your $1 ticket got you a day’s music in the company of The Staple Singers, Carla and Rufus Thomas, The Bar-Kays, Isaac Hayes, Albert King – or as Jackson stated, ‘gospel and rhythm and blues and jazz…all just labels…we know that music is music…’

Primal Scream – Come Together

Weatherall’s sample is inspired, turning Primal Scream’s original (and very good) version of a gospel tinged, southern-fried heartbreaker – all heavenly trumpets and guitars dripping with the salty tears of Suspicious Minds – into a brewing and bubbling, long-form epic that very much imbues the spirit of 1990’s anything-goes/togetherness house music scene.

Even yr local indie disco was prone to dipping their Doc Martened toes into the world of repetitive beats. It wasn’t that unusual even then to have Voodoo Ray pop uo between Voodoo Chile and It’s A Shame About Ray. Three disparate records, one cutting edge dance music, one classic rock and one indie rock…but all just labels. Music is music is music, after all.

Baptist minister, two runs for President, agitator, organiser, educator: the world needs more Jesse Jacksons.

Gone but not forgotten

Snow Way Ahm Daein That

Craig McAllister

I found myself watching the Olympics the other night there. Men and women dressed head to (camel) toe in the sort of tight-fitting get up that yr average Marvel superhero might reject on grounds of it being ‘a bit revealing’ were throwing themselves down a glassy, serpentine ice track for around a minute at a time, lantern jaws and sculpted chins millimetres from the concrete ice, perfectly toned bodies rigid as arrows yet flexible enough to negotiate sudden, high banking turns, lying front-down and head-first on a plastic tray no larger than a restaurant-standard chopping block, and all at average speeds approaching 80mph. The ‘skeleton’ they call it. Probably because half the competitors become one before too long. When they finish their run, helmets are removed, hoods are peeled back and suddenly, the super-fit international youth of today is staring straight back at you with their perfect teeth and sparkling eyes and unyielding desire to give it just one more go; shave a hundredth of a second or more off your best time and you just might find yourself up there on the podium, one of the three fastest skeleton riders on the planet. Failure to do so – take the wrong line into a corner, leave your left ankle trailing for three tenths of a nanosecond as you straighten out of it, can see you languish down in 18th place at best. Or, at worst, become an actual skeleton. Four years’ training for that? It’s a tough sport.

So too the snowboarding, although that all looks a bit more loose ‘n rad ‘n rock ‘n roll. The BBC presenters, normally the last bastion of received pronunciation and standards in grammar have, quite rightly, eschewed with yr Baldings ‘n Irvines ‘n Crams – he’s got the curling to attend to – and drafted in a couple of young dudes in John Jackson and Jenny Jones, both snowboarding Olympic medalists, and both of whom are enthusiastically well-versed in the vernacular of the sport.

Halfpipes, lips, goofy stances, corks, grabs, 1440s, switches and kickers…all are explained and shouted excitedly down the microphone whenever one of the boarders becomes airborne against the inky-black Milanese sky and pulls off the unthinkable across a series of daring, freestyling manoeuevres. They zoom off the curled end of the jump, twist like Festive-time corkscrews in a blur of baggy, puffy salopettes, day-glo hip-hop graphics and sponsors’ logos on the base of their boards, winding and spiraling through the Italian night sky like it’s the most natural thing in the world. It’s a brilliant watch, especially as the camera footage is now so good. Slo-mo camera angles show the crowd reflected upside down in the visor of the boarder, capture the shavings of snow as they spray up and out from the edges of the board and let you count exactly the number of rotations the competitors have managed to squeeze into the vacuum of time between landing and launching again. You would see the fillings in their teeth as they ballet-danced their way across the skies, if only these supreme specimens of human life had fillings in their teeth.

The commentators ooh and aah or groan when either they land perfectly or crash and burn. As a spectator sport, it’s the crashes you really want to see…until they de-helmet and you realise the boarder who’s been entertaining you for the past few seconds is not yet 17 years old. Unreal. Truly. The gung-ho attitude of youth will take them further and higher and freer than before, especially if you’re one of those sneaky ski jumping cheats who’ve added extra weight to the groin area in order to gain extra in-air distance at the point of take-off. Maybe if they’d laid off the free condoms that reportedly have run dry throughout the Olympic village, nature would have seen to it that the abstaining man competing in the sport might have a natural advantage over his free-lovin’ adversary. Think about it for next time, lads. Marginal gains ‘n all that.

Anyway.

I can’t watch snowboarding without hearing an internal soundtrack of Beastie Boys. This probably comes from reading Beastie Boys Book, where Adam Yauch’s best friends/bandmates admit that they had no idea what he got up to in his spare time. At one point, they discover that Yauch has fallen so deep for snowboarding that he’s taken to flying to the top of mountains in helicopters, then jumping out, board attached, to cork, grab and switch all the way to the bottom again. I was thinking about this as I watched those young maniacs twirl their way from top to bottom in Milan, pretty sure that Yauch could’ve given them a run for their money…before breaking into a freestyling rap…or sitting down for tea with the Dalai Lama…or popping round with his plumbing gear to fix the dodgy pipe in your Brooklyn apartment. We all have friends with hidden depths, but Adam Yauch was seemingly peerless.

Here’s Something’s Got To Give, one of Check Your Head‘s more laidback moments, all ambient bass textures, loose-limbed drum action, dubby atmospherics and terrific Wurlitzer (or is it Rhodes?) playing. Next time the snowboarding is on, mute the TV commentary and instead play this. Tension is rebuilding…somethin’s got to give. It works perfectly.

Yauch takes flight

 

The Beasties, no strangers to sportswear or over-sized sunglasses or a baggy pair of pants would’ve looked great in snowboarding gear. Did they ever make a video of such? If so, I can’t find it. If not…wasted opportunity, lads.

Cover Versions, Gone but not forgotten

Sly Dunbar

Craig McAllister

It’s a long way from Scotland to Jamaica – about four and a half thousand miles at the last Google search – but the two small nations are inextricably linked. Thanks to mercenary tobacco merchants who set sale from Scotland’s second city a couple and more centuries ago, Glasgow has visual reminders of its links to the tobacco and slave trade slap bang in the middle of the city centre.

Road users enter and circumnavigate the city via the Kingston Bridge. The Sub Club, the world’s longest-running underground dance club, can be found on Jamaica Street. The streets that surround the city centre form an area known as the Merchants City, the street signs hung in long-standing tribute to the men who brought tobacco, wealth and dubious social values (and lung cancer) to the west of Scotland; Buchanan, Ingram and Glassford, to name but three, made fortunes trading in people and tobacco, using their dirty gains to build impressive townhouses that still stand today. One of them, William Cunninghame’s majestic Roman-columned mansion – Saturday afternoon hang-out for every subculture since the teddy boys – has operated for almost 30 years as the Gallery of Modern Art. You might recognise it as the building behind the statue of the guy on horseback with a traffic cone permanently skewed on his head. I dunno what a complex man such as the Duke of Wellington would make of Glasgow’s involvement in slavery, but there he stands, a traffic-coned and shat on guardian of one of the city’s finest architectural triumphs.

Go to Jamaica and you’ll be surrounded by signs of Scottish influence. The Scotch Bonnet pepper is a national delicacy, for goodness sake. Travel the island and you’ll drive through Culloden, Dundee, Aberdeen, Elgin, Kilmarnoch (with an ‘h’), even Glasgow again…albeit in undeniably better weather. There are, believe it or not, around 300 towns in Jamaica with names rooted in Scotland.

The planters, merchants and even enslaved people who worked the tobacco fields adopted – or were forced to adopt – Scottish surnames. A quick flick through Kingston’s telephone book will throw up all sorts of unlikely yet true surnames; McKenzie, McIntosh, Anderson, Campbell, Archibald. Sounds like the warmers who littered the Partick Thistle bench last weekend, doesn’t it? Every one is a common Jamaican surname. FACT: the most common surname in Jamaica is Campbell. Even Usain Bolt is named in relation to the Scots word for running extremely quickly. Or maybe he isn’t.

Anyway. This brings us to Sly Dunbar.

That surname has always intrigued me. How did a right-on roots rocker from Kingston end up with a random east of Scotland town for a surname?

The answer might be found in the history books. I may be adding two and two together here and getting five, but give this some thought.

We need to go back to 1650 and Oliver Cromwell’s march on Scotland to rid Charles II from the Scottish throne. Seen as a direct threat to his plans for an English Commonwealth, Cromwell and his army marched on Edinburgh. Forced back from there, they fought and quickly defeated the Scots in the nearby town of Dunbar. Around 3000 Scots were killed in the battle, with a further 10,000 marched as prisoners of war to Durham in the north of England. Of these 10,000, many died through disease and malnutrition. The survivors were thrown on a boat and sent to the colonies to work as tobacco plantation labourers. Eventually, they settled, formed relationships with the locals and had families. Which is where, I’d think, Sly Dunbar’s roots lie. It’s certainly a plausible theory.

Sly Dunbar played drums on literally thousands of tracks. A quick flick through your own collection, or even a random lucky dip, will quite possibly reveal something he drove the rhythm on. From Bob Marley to Bob Dylan, Serge Gainsbourg to Britney Spears, Sinead O’Connor to Yoko Ono, nothing was off-limits for him. Often in partnership with his bass playing sidekick Robbie Shakespeare (now, there’s another interesting surname), Dunbar provided nothing less than a killer rhythm. He could be thunderous, as he was when laying down the echoing patterns that ricocheted around Lee Perry’s many productions. He could be metronomically rickity-tickity, as he was when rattling out a hi-hat pattern on a roots reggae deep dive. He could be subtle and feather-like when required, like he was on the slow and steady Roots Train from Junior Murvin’s Police And Thieves album. Dylan’s Jokerman. Dury’s Girls Watching. Herbie Hancock’s Future Shock. Sympathetic to the song and what was required of him, he was never the star, but he was never not noticed.

His work with Grace Jones remains a high point. Their high, skanking take on The Pretenders’ Private Life is a proper room shaker that requires, undoubtedly, immediate attention if previously unheard. The tripped out and dubby atsmosphere he and Robbie cook up on Jones’ version of Joy Division’s She’s Lost Control is insanely great, Manchester’s greyest of rainy day anthems transported bouncily to the sunny climes of the Caribbean. The nudge-nudge innuendo they play to in Pull Up To The Bumper‘s reggae disco groove, long black limousines ‘n all, is fantastic.

Grace Jones – Warm Leatherette (long version)

I’m a sucker for the long version of Warm Leatherette, Grace’s take on Daniel Miller’s debut release for Mute Records, in itself an interesting and skronky piece of early electro experimentalism, but with Sly on the drum stool, a track that’s now drawn out into a cold and detached slice of post-punk. You know those scenes in 1980s American movies, when a shoulder-padded cop stakes out the leather blouson’d bad guy in a neon-lit multi-tiered club? This track would’ve been perfect for the soundtrack.

“Waaarrrmmm!” Grace purrs. “Leather-ette!” Keyboards tooting like traffic jams, bass prowling and popping like Jones herself in a roomful of young guys, the car and its features a metaphor for the singer’s carnal desires.

Rock(steady) on, Sly.

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

Nineteen

Craig McAllister

Plain Or Pan turns 19 today. One blink, and already, it’s into its final year of being a teenager, somehow mid-way through second year at University and making its own considered path in life. It’s very much its own thing these days, with its own mind and opinions and world view. Unlike its curator, gone is the need to be on it all weekend…unless by ‘on it’ you mean gym equipment. It’s protein, not pints for this one, and it looks good for it. Will it wish it had done more reckless things in its late teenage years? I doubt it. So far, it seems quite happy in its own skin. Let’s see how it fares in its 20th year – all things considered, it’s not bad going for a wee music blog steadfastly stuck mainly in the past.

Talking of which…

I’ve been reading Colin MacInnes’s Absolute Beginners the past week. On Paul Weller’s say-so, I’d tried it years ago, more than once, but couldn’t get with it so sat it aside and let it gather decades of dust. I’m glad the urge took me to pick it up again. Something clicked. It hooked me and I read it in three nights flat. It is, as it turns out, a terrific book; fast of pace, meaty in subject matter and, when the protagonists are in scene, written in a sort of secretive teen-speak that could give Anthony Burgess’s nadsat argot in A Clockwork Orange a decent run for its money. I suspect you knew this already though.

Set in 1958 (and published hot off the press in 1959), it tells the story of a 19-year old west London teen, moved out already and living in a run down yet vibrant multi-cultural area. His neighbours are prostitutes…druggies…violent Teddy boys…beautiful people of all sexualities; it all makes for an obscene melting pot of edgy living. A hustling freelance photographer, we never find out his name – as he comes in and out of contact with the other key characters, he is referred to as ‘Blitz Baby’, ‘the kid’, ‘teen’, and so on – and we follow him as he falls out with his mother, takes a trip with his dying father and tries to convince his once girlfriend – ‘Crepe Suzette’ – not to settle for a marriage of convenience with a much older gay man. Race issues boil over – a result of a campaign of hate by the Daily Mail (or Mrs Dale, as the young folk refer to it) and our photographer is caught up in the melee of the Notting Hill riot, his head clobbered, his Vespa stolen, an easy target on account of his friendship with the Indian and Jamaican communities.

Jazz speak falls from every page, in-the-know references made to late-night Soho establishments where modern jazz is the new thing, where style-obsessed teens pop pills and seek thrills, the first generation post-war to grow up in a technicolour world where hope, ambition and aspiration are the key factors in eking out a life as far removed from your parents’ as possible. Nineteen, with a bit of cash in your pocket? And an attitude? And a way of speaking that is alien to the generation that came before you? You’re an absolute beginner.

The 1986 film adaptation of the novel has, since its release, come in for a fair bit of well-deserved and sometimes misguided stick. Even David Bowie’s majestic theme song – and one of his very best – can’t quite save it entirely, nor the sight of him turning up as slick advertising exec Vendice Partners in the sort of suit (if not accent) he might’ve adopted as stage wear towards the end of the decade. Like most adaptations, the book is far better (the film feels the need to name our absolute beginner ‘Colin’ – in memory of the novel’s deceased author, you have to think) but in the montage below there’s some great film-only dialogue, between the vibraphones and shuffling snares, brightly-coloured sets and hammy accents, that’s worth bending your ear towards.

*One point for every cast member you can name in the clip.

 

‘Aren’t you a little too old for her?’

‘I’m only thirty-seven…’

‘Thir’y seven?! Arahnd the waist, maybe..!’

(Also – doesn’t the Bowie track that plays at the end owe more than a little to Madonna’s Material Girl? A tongue-in-cheek reference maybe, given the subject matter of the scene being soundtracked?)

Paul Weller called Absolute Beginners ‘a book of inspiration’, so much so that he ‘took’ it with him as his only source of reading material when he was banished by Kirsty Young on Desert Island Discs. If you are an impressionable teenager looking to find yourself and choose a path in life, the novel, with its themes of socialism and left-wing politics married to a decent soundtrack is a fine place to start. Weller would, of course, name a Jam track after the novel and later in the Style Council would create a tune called Mr Cool’s Dream, a reference, I’m assuming, to the character of the same name in MacInnes’s novel.

Weller was called upon to provide music for the film and so, drawing on his love of Blue Note and off-kilter time signatures, he came up with the bossanova boogaloo of Have You Ever Had It Blue?, a track that still has a comfy place in his setlist even to this day. And why not?

The Style Council – Have You Ever Had It Blue?

And here’s Our Favourite Shop‘s With Everything To Lose, the, eh, *blueprint for the above track.

 

Footnote:

Have You Ever Had It Blue?, as groovy and finger clickin’ as it undeniably is, *owes more than a passing resemblance to the horizontally laid-back sunshine soft pop of Harper & Rowe‘s 1967 non-charting (and therefore obscurish) The Dweller. It’s certainly the best Style Council track that Paul Weller didn’t write. Perhaps, for this track, Weller should’ve renamed his group The Steal Council and come clean about it.

Harper & Rowe – The Dweller

 

*in the clip:

As well as the obvious; Ray Davies, Alan Fluff Freeman, Patsy Kensit, Ed Tudor Pole, Lionel Blair, Edward ‘father of Lawrence’ Fox, Sade, Stephen Berkoff, Slim Gaillard, Smiley Culture, Bruno ‘Strictly’ Tonioli, Robbie Coltrane, Sandie Shaw, Mandy Rice-Davies…quite the cast, eh?

**maybe not all in the clip (!)

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.