“Bill! BILL!!! Stop! STOP!!! The bassline, man… What you playin’ at? Disco’s been over for six whole months. Get your mind off the 13-year olds in Tramp and focus on the task in hand, man!”
“Mick…Mick! It ain’t disco…it’s John Taylor, innit?”
1983 was a strange year for your chart-friendly heritage rock acts.
Paul McCartney was zigzagging between writing duets with Michael Jackson and rewriting his own songbook for 1984’s roundly-battered Give My Regards To Broad Street project.
Rod Stewart was delighted that the musical world had finally caught on to his mullety, spiky, teased and coiffured bonce, but was dressing in the same sort of shiny red leather ‘n shoulder padded blouson-with-matching-pants outfit that Eddie Murphy was garnering all those laughs in. And only some of those laughs were for the jokes, let me tell ya. It’s been scientifically proven that Rod’s musical output of the era – the synth-laden Body Wishes – is absolutely no-one’s favourite Rod record at all.
The Rolling Stones were in a similar position. They hadn’t been relevant for a decade. Not really since 1972’s Exile On Main Street had they been at the forefront of things. The musical world they lorded over – they were the self-confessed Greatest Rock ‘N Roll Band In The World, lest we forget – had since birthed glam and disco and punk and post-punk (or New Wave as Jagger would call it) and the Stones had wilfully ploughed on, with a nod to punk here (Some Girls‘ Respectable) and a tasteful tip of the trilby to disco on the same album (Miss You) and a feeble gesture to post-punky new wave there (at a push, Emotional Rescue‘s She’s So Cold) and now they were in the middle of a synth revolution.
Where exactly did a group of has-been rock ‘n rollers continually out of step with the musical fashions of the era fit in in 1983?
Keith was happy to remain a blues-rocker. Mick though wanted to look outwards. He looked to his left. ‘Indie’ was about to go overground, blown in on a breeze of harmonica wheeze with The Smiths’ Hand In Glove. Pffft. This tinny, wimpy music was an irrelevance to the Stones, a bug on the sole of their stack-heeled shoe that they could squish at will. Mick looked to his right, to the pop charts and the new wave (not New Wave) of British acts currently whipping it up in the States. And right at the forefront of that invasion, in their blousy powder blue and pastel pink suits, their Lady Di haircuts and cocaine-powered self-importance was Duran Duran.
Perhaps, with their penchant for models and yachts and sunnier climes and front page splashes, Duran Duran were the natural successors to the Rolling Stones. Perhaps not, though. Park that thought. Let’s not get too silly and carried away.
Either way, the 1983 model of the Stones was a barely-functioning shadow of its former multinational corporate-self. That age-old cliche musical differences meant that Mick ‘n Keef, its two managing directors weren’t speaking. Mick recorded during the day. Night owl Keith worked under cover of darkness. If they found themselves together, they were nasty, spiteful and downright hostile to one another. “Jagger started to become unbearable,” said Keith in his autobiography, Life.
Sly and Robbie, the great Jamaican rhythm section, were brought in as de facto mediators, massaging the egos of both leaders whilst softening the need to include the other’s work on the record. The resultant album – Undercover (Of the Night) – was a largely forgettable and irrelevant record of the times…but its eponymous lead single was an absolute triumph. Pompous? Yes. Over-produced? Very likely. But essential and terrific? Indeed it was. I should know – I played the copy I bought in Irvine Library’s sale of old records for 25p over and over and over again. I had no idea what was cool and what was not…only that Undercover was such a great track from a band well past their sell-by date.
Rolling Stones – Undercover (Of the Night)
It’s the drums that hit you first. Great production. Live, reverby, in the room. Charlie – I’m really hoping it’s Charlie and not Sly Dunbar – sounds awesome; loud, metronomic, tribal…the bedrock upon which the Stones’ aural madness is allowed to unspool.
It’s the bass that gets you next. Bill – and I’m really hoping it’s Bill and not Robbie Shakespeare – pulls of a juggernauting rubberised riff that thumps and pops in the spaces left by Charlie (or Sly). It’s disco, but it’s not disco. It’s funky but it’s not funk. It’s straight-up pinched from John Taylor, that’s what it is. Listen to Planet Earth and tell me Bill Wyman wasn’t impressed enough to spot something worth stealing. Either way, between them the rhythm section maintain their position as the driving force in the Stones as an R ‘n B dance band. Charlie and Bill really cook on Undercover.
Which leaves Mick ‘n Ronnie ‘n Keith. The guitars come in; metallic and to the fore, phased, flanged and boomeranging around the room with absolutely no subtlety or finesse at all. Reverberating, disappearing, returning twice as loud, a knuckle-dragging twin axe attack of stiletto-edged slashed riffing, it’s fantastic. This ain’t linear, twelve bar rock ‘n roll like Brown Sugar or Tumbling Dice, this is Keith the Human Riff going Godzilla for four and a half zany minutes.
Mick camps it up in the vocals, going pseudo-political about the hundred disparus lost in the jails of South America. C’mon Mick! Lighten up! You’re no Billy Bragg. You’re a silly, double-jointed, hand-on-hip, rubber-lipped rock ‘n roll song ‘n dance man in a purple silk suit and yellow sweatbands. Let’s dance, you fool. Little Mick needs no encouragement. Listen out for the bit when he double tracks himself with Keith’s ‘do do-do do-do-do’ guitar refrain and try not to see him wiggling his 26″ waist to Bill ‘n Charlie’s unstoppable groove. Great track, isn’t it?
If it’s extended pops ‘n bangs ‘n whooshes ‘n ech-ech-echoing guitars yr after, look no further than the extended and absolutely epoch-defining 12″ version.
Rolling Stones – Undercover (Of the Night) Extended Cheeky Mix
Like all the acts of the time, it was absolutely de riguer to produce an extended, adult-themed and ultimately banned video to promote the single. Guns…masks…kidnappings…casual misogyny…violence in the streets…shoot-outs in the chapel… Proof, if it were needed, that bands with too much money love to flaunt their wealth in the silliest of ways.
The full 15-minute Undercover promo made it to the cinema for a brief run, opening as the supporting film for Scarface, believe it or not. Whoever thought that a gangster film about white-suit wearing cocaine fiends was a good fit with a gun-totin’ Rolling Stones promo was absolutely right on the mark. Well done that man.
This piece was originally written a month, maybe even six weeks ago, but I was waiting on permission from various sides to post it. In the interim, the Trashcans suddenly, unexpectedly and shockingly lost John Douglas, their glue and calming balm, and so any queries for permission to use it were quite rightly forgotten. Lest I’m accused of saturation, It’ll very likely be the last TCS-related piece on here for a while, but with permission now granted, it’s a fine way to draw a line under the most intense period in the Trashcans’ forty years’ history. Read on or scroll on, I’m not offended.
There’s a new Trashcan Sinatras record out just now. Released on Friday 31st July, Ever The Optimist is the group’s first in ten years. If you were a lazy, cliched critic, you might call it a return to form, but that would suggest they had somehow lost their golden touch at some point. To their dedicated listenership, it zings and sings – like their six other albums – with unravelling melodies and subtly brilliant musicianship; a million, kaleidoscopic ideas packed into its 11 songs. Initial response has been very encouraging to the point of fevered hyperbole. ‘Their best album ever‘, sort of stuff. It’s certainly, without question, one of their best. But you knew that already.
I’ve been working most of the first half of this year on a project that’ll see the story of the new record being told in print. A couple of months ago, in a deadline-looming fit of panic, the group asked if I could pull some of our interview quotes and create a short song-by-song commentary on the album specifically for press in foreign territories. Cool! Over a midnight shift and crossed fingers, I pulled together an article that, I hoped, would cut the mustard.
Reading back again the whole article that I’d written, the record spinning in the background, it seemed too good, too informative, too important even, not to share more parochially, so with the go-ahead from all concerned, I’ve put it below. Think of it as a very, very, very abridged version of what will be published at some point down the line. An amuse-bouche, if y’like.
Trashcan Sinatras – ‘Ever The Optimist’
It’s been over a decade since the last Trashcan Sinatras album, but the group has been anything but idle. In the intervening years, the Trashcans have been quietly going about their business of writing and refining and finding ‘the ‘hing’ that will, as ever, make your heart swell and swoon like it did when you first heard Cake or I’ve Seen Everything or Weightlifting or any of their half dozen previous classic albums.
‘Ever The Optimist’ is a record that hums and thrums with the Trashcans’ signature melodic touch and unmatched gift for lyrical punch. It’s a collection of eleven songs (or a round dozen if you’re lucky to be in Japan), all of which will thrill the group’s dedicated, pan-global fanbase and should, if those algorithms play the game properly, garner a new set of devotees into the bargain.
‘Ever The Optimist’ is, as is the TCS way, a record comprised of songs stewed slowly and over time before being reshaped by the constituent members of the group and Trashcanified into the sort of ear-friendly shapes that have garnered critical acclaim for the entirety of the group’s thirty-five year career as recording artists. Songs that began life as woozy mountain cabin sketches. Songs that have their roots in late-night poker sessions. Songs that are born from walking the dog. They all coalesce into one ebbing and flowing labour of love that may just be one of 2026’s very best albums.
SIDE ONE
Ever The Optimist
Less careerist and more careering, the Trashcans find themselves contemplating their position in the world. ‘We’re all gambling, trying to hold it together,’ sings Francis, a reference to both the smoky poker nights of yore and life’s cruel optimism:loss ratio. Beginning life as a breezy acoustic tune, it was reworked into a stomping, piano-driven thumper and is a real clarion call to listeners of the long-player. Listen out for the Pop Art Poem-aping ‘mmmmaybee’ and ‘fii-iire!’ in the first verse and the great nagging guitar part around the 1.46 mark. Like its title itself, this song hints at a great set of songs to follow.
John: We used to go to poker nights, smoking and drinking. I wrote a song about it called ‘Gambling’ and the finished version of ‘Ever The Optimist’ came from that. Some of the characters that sat around the poker table ended up in the song.
Paul: The finished song arrived easily. It all came together, this sophisticated pop song, in no time at all. Nothing was over rehearsed, so it all sounds fresh.
Games For the ZX Spectrum
‘It doesn’t matter what I did before, I don’t know what I’m doing anymore.’
With its see-sawing melody and call and response chorus, this will be, we predict, an immediate favourite. Written right at the tail end of the album sessions – ‘contrary to appearances, we move pretty fast,’ points out Francis – it owes its idiosyncratic title to the small group of retrophiles who continue, even in 2026, to write games for the unfashionable ZX Spectrum, the Trashcans drawing clear parallels between those dedicated furrow-ploughers and themselves.
Paul: You know how you get these retrophile guys nowadays who write games for the outmoded ZX Spectrum because it reminds them of their youth?
I was trying to draw a line between those guys and us making a Trashcans album. You know, we’re also making a thing that’s just for kicks, and it’s filtered through the eyes of the past – it was fun when we were young, but nobody’s really interested anymore, except for maybe a very small group of dedicated people.
Francis: I like this a lot. We had the album finished, and I’d promised Paul Savage (producer) that that was all the songs, there’d be no more on the record, then Paul Livingston said, ‘Oh, here’s a tape.’
He’d called it Games For the ZX Spectrum but he could just as easily have called it ‘Chocolate Teapot’. What’s the relevance of my songwriting? Why am I doing this? For what reason? It was a really great song, so it made it onto the album.
Bad Husband
Featuring Camera Obscura’s Tracyanne Campbell on co-vocals, Bad Husband is an upbeat and fresh duet that belies the song’s subject matter, with two unique voices from Scot-pop’s outer fringes melding together quite beautifully. Tracyanne’s vocal dips and swoops around the melody as Frank sings about poor judgements, bad feelings and storms coming. ‘Hey! This isn’t working!’ they both admit far too joyfully. Never has separation sounded so upbeat – ‘like the best party in a 1970’s Castlepark living room,’ to quote fellow Irvine alumnus John Niven.
John: Bad Husband had been brewing for a while. Some of the rhythm was from an old musical vignette created by Simon Dine. He’s always sending us his musical collages; the same thing over and over for five minutes. It’s a sonic thing…a feel…a groove… and sometimes, like with Bad Husband, the little collage inspires something really great.
Francis: I had this idea that Tracyanne Campbell should duet on it. This would be our very own Islands In The Stream! Tracyanne’s vocal was instantly magic, you know. I sent it to the rest of the group; ‘Guys! What d’you think of THIS?!?’
Stephen: Tracyanne’s vocals are terrific. The track worked well before we had her on there, but her singing just elevated it above and beyond. Her and Frank’s vocals really blend and hit off one another. I like that she’s almost speaking at points and at other times she’s swooping around the melody. Terrific stuff.
The Bitter End
‘When you’re lost and lonely, you can phone me on the way home.’
Already a radio staple thanks to Billy Sloan’s enthusiastic rotation and curation on his late-night Radio Scotland show, The Bitter End is a proper foot-down-and-drive rush. From its first metallic guitar K.O. to the final cymbal splash, The Bitter End leaps from the speakers like a box-fresh band jam. It may surprise listeners to note that the track began life 20 years ago, the product of a fuggy and foggy wee hours recording session on an eight-track machine that Frank had somehow rehomed in his Glasgow flat. ‘Did I really get up in the middle of the night and record something?’ wondered Paul in the morning. ‘I pressed play and heard this Rockpile-ish rocker.’ With Frank finishing off most of the words, The Bitter End sat patiently in the drawer marked ‘someday’ and waited for its time to shine. Its time, evidently, is now.
Paul: In the run up to choosing songs to record for this album, we put together a playlist of about 40 demos, including things we’d written from years ago that we didn’t care about, everything we had really, and Davy put The Bitter End on it. And everybody was like, ‘Hey! Bitter End sounds great!’
Davy: With Paul Savage in Chem 19, we gave it a bash, pretty much replicating the original demo – even the lyrics stayed as they were, which is unusual for us – and it all kinda clicked. Everyone was into it, so we worked it up into the recorded version that became the taster for the record.
Stephen: There’s, like, ten million guitars on this track, loud and brash, it’s got a great bouncing riff, and it all sounds instant and fantastic.
A View From Nowhere
Long-time Trashcans fans will be delighted to hear the return of the major 7ths on this track, a Davy-birthed strumalong that tips its jaunty hat to the unspooling melodies of Bacharach and David as arranged by John Douglas. Davy returned with its completed lyric after an inspirational walk with the dog. A View From Nowhere features terrific vapour-trailing harmonies from Frank atop a fuzzy, sustained guitar/synth break midway through. Many lesser bands will simply throw in the towel when it dawns on them that they won’t ever be able to write a song as lush and poppy as this.
John: This was one of Davy’s that had a charm, a real nice mood about it. Everyone straight away said this should be in the frame for the record.
Davy: I can’t remember when I wrote this. It wasn’t that long ago, maybe five years ago. It was written fairly quickly, a wee three chord thing that I’d recorded on my phone.
Stephen: Paul Savage is a great producer and arranger. He helped shape this track. ‘Try the bass like this, Davy,’ ‘Play that instead, Stephen.’
I love the sleepy quality that Paul got from the bridge. The whole thing is almost soft rock, no harsh sounds. It’s all just muted and soft. It’s a great wee mellow pop song.
Hold On To Today
The evergreen Green Gartside, a septuagenarian, you may be surprised to learn, heard enough promise in our rough and crappy-sounding demo and was ‘keen to try some singing on your lovely, little song.’ The result is fairly astonishing. The centrepiece of the album, Hold On To Today is subtle and lightly pulsing, a ballad with the beating heart of Fleetwood Mac’s Albatross recast as a gentle Brian Wilson tearjerker. Tinkling music boxes, lightly picked acoustics, ping-ponging electrics, stacked harmonies, sudden stops, unexpected changes and an exquisite outro … Hold On To Today closes side one of the album and will leave you breathless, frozen in wonder and momentarily unable to flip the record. Music is a powerful thing.
John: When Davy initially played us this, it was far less arranged than it ended up. The structure of it was really different to how it now sounds. But it had something. Davy wasn’t quite yet there with it, but the rest of us knew there was enough there to persevere with.
Francis: I changed the key a wee bit, we all played around with the arrangement, John made it a bit spacier…and then Davy somehow got Green Gartside to sing on it.
Davy: We gave Green the freedom to sing what he wanted, and what he gave us was fantastic.
Paul: It’s a beauty, It’s a good wee song, that. And it has a false ending. It’s the perfect song to close side one of the record.
TCS June 2026 by Stephanie Gibson
SIDE TWO
The Associated Funk
A post-punk thrash that brings to mind, in feeling rather if not sonics, A Happy Pocket’s ‘The Genius I Was’. The Associated Funk is linear, propulsive and purposeful, the soundtrack of a life unravelling messily to the regimented sound of sequencers and a motorik disco beat. TCS fans will immediately spot the lyrical lift from Wild Pendulum’s ‘Let Me Inside (Or Let Me Out)’, Paul recycling an old line to furnish his new song. ‘It was written in a mountain cabin and filmed for a Patreon vlog,’ explains the writer. ‘I was expecting something bucolic, folky and mountain cabin-y, not this A-ha/Tubeway Army stramash!’
Paul: ‘Okay, I’m gonnae book a cabin for three days, and I’m gonnae buy a bunch of weed, I’m gonnae take all my stuff up there and see if I can write and record a song from scratch.’
Davy: I liked Paul’s demo straightway. It was a total stramash, very chaotic and thrashy, but I got a New Order-y vibe from it. I knew it would work. In the group’s hands it didn’t really change much. The album version is pretty much a carbon copy of the demo that Paul had made.
Francis: Paul’s really good at finding new and interesting ways to write. And on The Associated Funk, with its synths and clangs and the electronic-ness of it all, there’s a great tune in there. It has a really bright melody.
Stephen: The riff is very good, it’s very metronomic.
Rome
Reggae James Bond. A dubby trip. A scraping, jangling, sixties TV theme with John Barry harpsichords, descending, twirling strings, bone-rattling percussion and the sticky, sonic fingerprints of Simon Dine all over its claustrophobic and eerie arrangement. John and Francis duet in the verses, double dare one another in the choruses and soar in the post guitar break, a wheezing and sliding, Gilmourish, Frippish racket. For clarity, it’s a song about friends who really shouldn’t hang out with each other. Also for clarity, it’s a beauty.
Paul: From Simon’s sound snippet, this one was instantly great. What the fuck was it? Weird-sounding reggae, in 3 / 4 time, that’s what it was. The descending strings were already there, the reggae bassline too, so I put chords on it. And made a chorus and a verse. And then I put some words to it.
Stephen: Frank and John do a great job, trading lines, coming in and out. It’s got a very good vocal on it. I love the chorus and the way it soars out of the verses.
John: It’s moody noir. I think the bass is brilliant on it. I think it’s got a vibe. And it’s kind of dictated by the bass and the kit. The star of the show here is the rhythm section.
Melodramatic
‘If you don’t leave it alone, it will never get better.’
With the band having just laid down The Bitter End and with the studio still set up for maximum guitars, bass and drums, Melodramatic was thrashed out in the time it takes to listen to. ‘Maybe it’s mind over matter’ goes the chorus, its stack of overlapping vocals and driving rhythm clearly on more than nodding terms with any number of those melody and tune-obsessed west of Scotland guitar bands you might mention in passing.
Paul: This is from about the same time as The Bitter End. I was playing about with this 4-track thing in my bedroom, and Frank was like, ‘I don’t know what you’re doing in there, but it sounds great!’ So I finished it off.
Davy: I like that, once the singing starts, it doesn’t really stop. Frank just keeps going verse after verse, chorus after chorus, from beginning to end.
Birds I Couldn’t Identify
‘If there’s one thing The White Album has taught me, it’s that you can write a song about anything!’
A great title with an allegorical aptness, Birds I Couldn’t Identify tells the story of Paul’s trip to Rishikesh, where he spent time meditating in the foothills of the Himalayas. ‘It was all quite beautiful and bizarre,’ recalls Paul. ‘We chanted a mantra for two hours every night and meditated in different places during the day, ate amazing food. I felt wonderful!Of course I went to the Beatles Ashram (in awe), then wrote this a couple of days later.’
Trashcans fans of old will delight in the climbing chord sequence and ad-libbed, high and breathy ‘yeahs’ that Francis does at the beginning. The melody that he wrings from Paul’s words is really quite something, long and floaty and, I suppose, meditative in its own way. It’d be interesting to poll listeners after they’ve lived with this album for a few months – I reckon Birds I Couldn’t Identify will be one of the favourites.
Paul: This song’s got a really natural melody that’s very good, a bit weird, but very good. I wrote the lyrics and stuff in India, in Rishikesh.
John: Straight away, when Paul played it to us, I was thinking, ‘This is a really good one.’ It was an instant hit. I fell in love with it straight away.
Stephen: This is a cracker. It’s fantastic.
Learning To Love Your Ghost
A shimmering, slow and stately album closer that builds to a tasteful crescendo of rifling drums and long-noted synths, Learning To Love Your Ghost is, as that old cliché goes, a bit of a grower. A handful of plays will have you fully appreciating its windswept drama and the way it’s carried along on the same sort of major to minor chord changes that make Wild Pendulum’s ‘Autumn’ so enduring. Learning To Love Your Ghost is, as the group cryptically puts it, about ‘inner orbits and outer space.’ As a welcome bonus, once it’s finished, it’ll have you reaching for the record to turn it over and start from side one again.
Davy: There’s an old demo I did years ago, just ideas really, not a song. And it had this bit and this bit and that bit, y’know, parts that the others might take inspiration from, maybe turn it into something, and I had the ‘Death Star split the atom’ line in there, and Paul jumped on that.
Paul: It was this two-minute epic that Davy had written that didn’t really make any sense musically or lyrically, and I just loved it. But it needed a verse.
John: I’d been through my illness, and I just wrote about that. My central station, my inner thing was invaded. We got a great song from a difficult situation.
‘Ever The Optimist’ is an album by the Trashcan Sinatras. Play it once, you’ll play it often.
I’m a sucker for a well-sung harmony. You know the sort of thing, a radiant Gibb brothers burst of aural sunshine, a California-coated Mamas and Papas heart melter, a slow-ooze of Bellshill Beach Boys triple-stacked greatness from the three original Teenage Fanclubbers out front with the mics and the guitars and the great, great tunes. A handful of voices, melding as one. Beautiful.
There is, in the Venn Diagram of harmony singing, a sweet spot that never fails to stop my world and send me momentarily dizzy. Voice A sings this note. Voice B sings that note. Voice C sings another note…and what comes out is a brand new note, pure and smooth and honeyed, entirely unattainable by one voice alone. Gasp. Swoon. Melt. And back to emptying the bins.
You’ll recognise that very sweet spot on the chorus of The Band‘s The Weight, when the group come in one by one – “a-a-aaand…you put the load right on me,’ – creating a vocal swell that sets the seratonin flyin’. It’s probably now playing in your head as you read. Sorry. Not sorry.
You’ll recognise it in the gently lilting Flightless Bird, American Mouth, a slow-burning waltz-time beauty from Iron And Wine that should be far greater appreciated than it appears to be. Three plays in and it’ll be your new favourite song. Seek it out.
And you’ll know it from The Beatles‘ Because, a track I daresay you’ll know inside out and back to front. From its opening, elongated ‘aaaaahs’ via its ‘high-igh-igh-igh‘ mid section to its golden glazed ‘ah-ah-ahs and goosebump inducing woo-oo-oo-oos” that float above the stew of harpsichord and Moog, Because is harmony in a can, a sort of medieval soundtracked stoned soul picnic for the mass market. Ain’t no-one better than The Beatles at creating such legal highs, and that’s the truth.
Elliott Smith was something of a master of the stacked harmony. Being a one-man band, this wasn’t something he could attempt in the live setting, but on record he really went for it, Fabs-style, overlapping and multi-tracking his voice to infinity in his quest to create an art that will prove to be ever-lasting.
Elliott Smith – Sweet Adeline
Sweet Adeline opens XO. Some would argue it’s his best album. You might come to blows with another arguing the merits of the more indie and lo-fi Either Or. Or XO‘s full-blown follow-up, Figure 8. The correct answer though is indeed XO. But you knew that already.
Sweet Adeline squeaks and skates its way in on the sort of scratchy fingerpicked rundown that Paul Simon built his early career on. It’s just Elliott and his guitar, close-miked and singing in your ear, a one note organ adding texture in the background. Those bedroom miserabilists who’d been with him since the early days would’ve been unsurprised by this, and unsuspecting of what was just around the corner. I know I was. For anyone else, especially those of you with a background in raving and dance music, you’ll spot the drop just before it arrives.
Your keen-eared senses will tingle and twitch, picking up on the subtle fade in just before the drum crash and the jangling, barroom piano and the WHAM! of sound as the metaphorical curtains are thrown wide open and mid July aural sunshine floods the room. Elliott’s voice is all over it here, harmonising with himself, oooooing and aaaaahing and turning his initial charcoal grey pencil sketch into something of a Renaissance masterpiece. I must’ve played this track at least 300 times (that’s over 10 times a year since its release – seems conservative, but let’s not get carried away) and it never fails to fleetingly floor me.
Elliott Smith – Pretty (Ugly Before)
Elliott loved the John Lennon method of double-tracking every vocal take to smooth out the wrinkles and create something unique and widescreen in the process. Pretty (Ugly Before) is real late-era Elliott, recorded in a decent studio at his major label’s approval…a far cry from the lo-fi and hissy stuff that got his name out there in the first place.
Seizing his chance, he goes full-on Beatles; woozy background noises that bleed in at the start, clean and chiming ‘George’ guitar, a twangin’ twelve string riff between lines…and some terrifically heart-stopping harmonies. They take a while to emerge but when they do, around the three minute mark…wow!
‘Sunshine…been keepin’ me up for days,‘ he goes, and long-time listeners’ hearts sink as they realise their boy is back on the hard drugs again. Yet… Elliott can apparently function on the stuff. By the time we’re half way through, there are two distinct vocal lines, one linear and direct, the other swooping above and below the basic melody, curling around the edges, twisting back into shape then out again as Elliott slips into a refrain that’s Fab-heavy in backwards guitar and woozy mellotron. Listen too for the slow-motion ‘Ug-lee-bih-fore’ backing vocals that he stretches out like Play-Doh in the hands of a toddler. It’s all quite fantastic.
* Bonus Track!
Here’s Elliott’s sweet take on an early Beatles number where he joyfully and unselfconsciously harmonises with himself throughout, all the way from counted-in start to spoken-word fanboy end. Found and downloaded in the good old early ’00s day when such treasures were but a dial-up click away, it’s an enduring and faithful version.
I’ve been asked a few times the past week where folk can pick up copies of my Trashcan Sinatras books. The Perfect Reminder was initially available through Last Night From Glasgow, but it seems they have no stock left. If you’re so inclined, you’ll find the last dozen copies at that most obvious of retailers. It’s having a wee bit of a second wind these days since the sudden death of John Douglas, which is bittersweet to say the least.
A Full Pocket, the second bit of writing I did around the Trashcans is now out of print. There was a brief discussion a couple of years ago about doing a reprint for the American market – that’ll be the group’s American market and most definitely not mine – but, like many things associated with the Trashcans, it was an idea that never quite made it to fruition. If you’ve never read it, I’d love to help you there, but I’m not sure how I can really.
In the meantime, I’ve been to the manuscript and copied a chunk of text around John’s song The Safecracker. It’s a perennial Trashcans favourite, played in concert before even appearing on record and a staple at their live shows ever since…although a quick glance at the set list for the Irvine show in June suggests that it wasn’t played that night. I could’ve sworn it was, too.
In typical Trashcans fashion, after writing, proofreading and eventually publishing A Full Pocket, I found out a brilliant snippet of trivia around The Safecracker; that the esteemed Paul Weller was so taken with John’s song that he cornered him at some Go! Discs shindig or other and asked John to write the words and chords out for him. Does it get better than that? (Maybe if Weller had recorded it and taken it to number one, yeah, but as a songwriter, to have Paul Weller tip his hat in your direction must feel pretty vindicating I’d have thought.) Wish I’d known at the time and I’ve chased him for a quote or two…
So here’s the Weller-endorsed The Safecracker. And below that is the original text from A Full Pocket. I hadn’t really noticed until now, but TCS guitarist Paul Livingston is noticeable by his total absence in the interviews here. There was probably a perfectly valid reason at the time.
The Trashcan Sinatras – The Safecracker
The Safecracker is a masterpiece in lyric writing and uplifting lugubriousness. It tells the story of a crook caught out by a combination of the moon, misplaced nails and general bad luck. It’s the melody attached to the brilliant lyric though
that elevates a simple story song into the dizzy heights of greatness.
“As fly to tarantula, as jugular to Dracula…to me and my Ford Spectacular, you’ll be drawn.”
That’s a line that might’ve crept from Lux Interior’s unused lyric book, that is.
Musically, it features the classic TCS signature thing of John’s acoustic guitar carrying the tune while Paul’s electric adds the light and shade, the dynamics to it. The dulcimer is once again all over this track, adding atmosphere and a mystery entirely in keeping with the song’s subject matter.
One of the finest songs in the band’s back catalogue, The Safecracker has long been a staple of live shows. The extended second verse – “they call me thrifty…I count out £2.50…” – when it builds and builds before dropping once more to the chorus is always sublime, even if the chorus steals just a fraction of the melody from Carole King’s You’ve Got A Friend. What’s the world coming to though if a song about stealing can’t purloin the odd decent melody here and there, eh?
A final observation:
‘…when her Walkman started to melt…’
‘…keeps a ten-bob note up his nose…’
‘…there’s not a single episode of ‘Dallas’ that I didn’t see…’
Lyrics can often date a song and The Safecracker is no different to that triptych of Trashcans’ favourites. A gallon of petrol would very probably get you from Irvine to Paisley, maybe even from Kilmarnock if it was downhill most of the way, but not at the recession-friendly prices mentioned in the song. As we go to print, the cost of a gallon is about 250% dearer than John’s suggested 1996 price. A song about robbery indeed.
Davy: This was one of the first songs written for the album. I remember playing it during the I’ve Seen Everything tour. The Safecracker seems to be a fans’ favourite. It’s well-arranged.
John: This is another of mine which, after some encouragement from Frank, was more or less complete by the time I’d presented it to the others. I’ve been told The Safecracker sounds like Father And Son by Cat Stevens. Carole King? That’s a new one to me, but I can sort of see that.
I’ll tell you what I did rip off for the song – well, not rip off – what did inspire the song – and I hope my memory isn’t playing tricks on me here – was the radio. One thing I’d do when I was writing and looking for inspiration was to turn on the radio and whatever song was playing, that’d be the tempo I’d use on my own song. Gene Pitney and Marc Almond had a big hit at the time with Something’s Gotten Hold Of My Heart and I latched onto the big drum fill at the end. ‘Right,’ I thought. ‘If I did that, but not as dramatic, and with major 7ths, I might have something.’
And I started to play the verse intro. Suddenly, from nothing, I was off. The whole thing arrived from that. So, I wouldn’t call
it a rip-off, but it was certainly a motivating factor in the tune arriving.
Frank (singing): Duh Duh Duh-Duh Du Duuuuh! Oh yeah – I can hear that! I never knew that! Love it, John! That’s fantastic! This was the first song written for the album. We’d been playing it on that tour of America, so it was an established song by the time we came to record it.
Davy: John’s not feart of borrowing from other songs and making them his own. I didn’t know that about the Marc Almond/Gene Pitney steal. That was quite subtle! It’s got those major 7ths that you’ll hear in other songs. There’s a bit of Brel’s Amsterdam in there too, if you tune your ears in, David Bowie’s version obviously. That’s a magic version.
John: I remember shouting Frank through into the room I had in our flat in Kilmarnock, saying, ‘Listen, I’ve got this thing, but I don’t know if it’s any good,’ and playing it for him. Frank was instantly enthusiastic and encouraging about it, so that spurred me on.
Stephen: The Safecracker is another instantly appealing classic from John. The original demo of it had a more upbeat, soul band vibe which worked but was a bit too typical. We took the drums out of the verses, and it all became much more intimate. We knew then we had caught the essence of the song; the music just floated there and gave the vocals plenty of room.
Frank: It’s a cracker of a song, the centrepiece of the album. And everyone loves it when we play it live. Where I’ll Get Them In is linear, this has peaks and troughs. It’s a really great arrangement. We had other versions. There was a wee bouncy one, with Stephen using sticks instead of brushes. The album version though, with those little pauses before the choruses,
was the best. There’s a nice wooden sound to it. Lots of lovely dulcimer again. And loads of singing, weird harmonies by John in full-on Jake Thackray baritone, lots of people just warbling away in the background. Safecracker is a good one. It’s one of my favourite Trashcans’ songs.
Stephen: Frank’s vocal is really great on it. There’s some delicious guitar interplay between John and Paul the supportive stuff and just tried to keep out of the way.
John: I tend to fall in and out of love with it. Melodically I think it’s great. Lyrically, sometimes I don’t know. I remember being very under-confident about it. I had the verses and the chorus, I knew it had something because the second verse had a different chord change that worked, so it was worth persevering with. But I was never totally sure about it. It was a big thing for us back then to try and get words that wouldn’t normally rhyme or appear in song together, rhymes that would make people go, ‘Whit?!’ Sometimes to the detriment of the song, I should add. But not in this case.
The ‘Dracula/ Spectacular’ line came out of that mindset. Ian Dury – again – used to do that too. Reasons To Be Cheerful has a wonderful lyric. I bet he was like a wee boy in a toyshop writing that. His New Boots And Panties album was a real influence on me as a songwriter. When it came out, I’d sit and listen to it over and over. There are bits that were unclear
at first – the shouting and his accent in places – but it’s packed full of brilliant little lyrical observations. He’s been a big influence on me.
Craig McAllister: Allison Thomson (trumpet, I’ve Seen Everything) is convinced that the Ford Spectacular in the song is her wee Ford Fiesta that she drove at the time.
John: Ha! Well, I don’t remember that but it’s certainly very possible. It’s a good rhyme though!
Frank: Hugh Jones (producer) was really intrigued by a couple of the lyrics. The ‘tradesmen’s entrance’ line was one he cottoned on to and asked about more than once.
“So, boys…I was wondering…This ‘tradesmen’s entrance’. Is it…you know…?”
And we’d all look at one another. And also the Paisley line. We’d told him about the ‘getting aff at Paisley’ phrase that was well-used in Ayrshire. (Paisley is the last stop on the Ayr-Glasgow rail line and was often used when describing how to avoid
unwanted pregnancy, if y’catch the drift…)
“So…uhm, yes…er…”
It’s the bane of my life that I never get to sing it live in the key in which it was recorded. Because of that open G/Bm chord it can’t be transposed. We tuned down half a step for the record to allow me to get to the high notes in the ‘nifty/two-fifty’ section, but every time we play it live, it’s an extra semitone up and it’s a bit of a struggle to get there. Some people want a pile of money, or a fancy house and a dolly bird, but my ambition in life, really, is to have a handful of guitars all tuned differently, so that I can sing Safecracker properly in concert.
Even at the Aye Write book festival show, it was just Davy and John and myself and I was like, “Right guys. Can we detune the guitars for this?” And they were like, “Just get to work, Frank.”
“They call me neee-ifff-ty…!!”
Jeez! It was so high! I’m getting old. It’s no’ fair!
A Full Pocket was expertly typeset and put together by Colin Cassells, the mild-mannered genius behind Five Hungry Joes, the internet’s best Trashcan Sinatras archive. If it’s Japanese liner notes, Australian tour posters or obscure promo sleeves you seek, you’ll find ’em all there.
These were usually John Douglas’s first words, whether one or two songs into a set with the Trashcan Sinatras, or more recently out front on his own, but also any time you met him. Throwaway (and maybe even insincere when spoken by anyone else), but delivered by John they revealed something of his true character; interested, empathetic, kind. Off-stage, they were usually delivered along with a warm bear hug, something that could melt the hearts of even the most reluctant and Calvinistic of west of Scotland males. We’re not all confident and outgoing huggers in this part of the world, but people like John made the act easier to embrace, pun intended. The outpouring following his death early on Monday morning has been universal in the notion that here was a man who was nothing but genuine, unassuming and decent. ‘Lovely’ seemed to be the adjective of choice and it’d take the hardest of cynics not to agree with that. It’s just a shame John’s not around to read the swell of testimonies since written about him.
I’ve known John for the best part of 40 years, initially as one of the older guys at the back of The Turf and The Crown, a musician I was told, a songwriter with a love of The Clash and Guinness and Benson & Hedges. He and his band The Trash Can Sinatras (3 words back then) had topped the premier league of local bands by earning a record deal with Go! Discs, but hadn’t yet released a record. As fate would have it, a drunken fracas in the toilets of The Attic, Irvine’s premier late night dancing emporium for those wanting to shake their thang to loud, alternative and non-chart music led, in a roundabout way, to a life-long friendship with two of the Trash Cans and, by default, John.
We’d sit around the table in The Crown talking music, film, football, politics, people, Irvine and they’d treat us to stories from the studio; what they were working on, how they’d turned a slow dirge into a fast racket, how they’d turned a fast racket into a slow beauty, how they were making a really great album. Cake, as you know, is a really great album. Not the best Trashcans’ record though.
That might be I’ve Seen Everything, album number two. By now, Sunday Drivers, an Irvine-born group of shouty guitar stranglers and drum bashers I was a proud part of was rehearsing directly below the TCS office at Shabby Road in Kilmarnock. One day, we broke a bass string. No one carries spare bass strings, least of all the ill-prepared bass player, because bass strings never break. But there we were, session abruptly over. Upstairs in the office, Trashcans John and Paul were sitting around smoking and drinking tea and doing whatever else young guys with a record deal do all day instead of work.
‘Eh. You don’t have any spare bass strings, by any chance? We’ve broken one.’
‘You’ve broken a bass string?! No one breaks bass strings!’ (Looking around fruitlessly, behind ashtrays, under CDs, on top of the cat,. ‘Nah. Nothing. Sorry.’
At this point, John leans into Paul and says something quietly before turning to us.
‘Take the Rickenbacker. We don’t really need it.’
The Trashcans had used some of their record company money to buy a beautiful black and white Rickenbacker bass guitar. It might’ve been a 4003 model, but in any case it was a Bruce Foxton, a late-era McCartney, a Colin Moulding, a Lemmy bass guitar. Rule number 1 for any recently-signed band is to buy the same type of classic guitar played by your heroes and influences, and so the Trashcans splurged on a Rickenbacker. Rule number 2 for the recently-signed band is most certainly not to immediately lend said instrument to a bunch of chancing and ham-fisted instrument abusers, but that’s exactly what they did…no questions asked, no ‘we need it back by Friday’ deadline sort of thing. We ended up using it for two years. Indeed, it was lying on my bedroom floor the night my parents’ house was burgled and they made off with the family jewels. Imagine they’d nicked that guitar too? How d’you explain that to the person who was generous enough to trust you with it?
There are loads of stories you can read about John; his Syd Barrett paint collection and the Trashcans’ song it inspired. His song Wild Mountainside, now something of a folk standard, sung by his wife, ‘the missus’, Eddi Reader, at the opening of the Scottish Parliament in 1999. The fact that he was never happier than when on the road with Eddi, travelling to and singing in the farthest-flung corners of this island and beyond. Lots of stuff has been…and will be.. written about this by more prominent writers than myself, so here’s a story with a thirty-years later punchline that you most definitely don’t know.
A few years back I was involved in putting on a Martin McAloon show in Irvine’s Harbour Arts Centre. I interviewed Martin in advance of the show and opened by telling him my pals had supported Prefab Sprout in 1991. “Ah! Lovely John!” he said immediately. “He used to busk ‘We Let The Stars Go‘ – did you know that?” I’d suggested getting John to open the show, but Martin, who’d only played one solo show before Irvine – and John had played one less than that – wanted to ease into his night, maybe play two sets, maybe just the one longer one, maybe we’d judge the room at the time… so the idea of a support act would only complicate the matter and my idea was dropped.
On the night of the show, Martin asked excitedly, “Is John here?” I’d invited John and ‘the missus’, but they hadn’t shown. “Ach. Give him a call, will you? I’d like him to play ‘We Let The Stars Go’ with me.”
I called John just before Martin took to the stage.
“Is that tonight?” he asked sleepily. “Shite. We were gonnae come to that!“
“Come! Martin wants you to sing ‘We Let The Stars Go’. He’s playing two sets. You could be here in an hour and appear for the encore.”
Which is just about what happened. John texted to say he’d arrived at the venue and could I let him in. As luck would have it, he’d turned up just as Martin was finishing the first of his two lengthy sets.
“How’s it gaun? Y’awright?” he asked me, followed by his customary warm bear hug. I took him into Martin’s dressing room.
My Cilla Black moment. “Martin – John. John – Martin.”
“How’s it gaun? Y’awright?” he asked, to Martin this time, and the pair of them hugged and fell into easy conversation, reminiscing about the Prefab Sprout tour, about the Trashcans’ records in the intervening years, how Martin’s brother Paddy was faring.
“Yes, John,” said an impatient Martin. “Paddy is doing well, but what I want to know is…did you bring your guitar?“
John went into the corridor and brought in his guitar case. He snapped it open, strapped it on, hit a chord to check it was in tune…and – doinnngg! – broke the top string. The lack of any spare strings in his case was immediately apparent. Helpful Martin went to his own case. Bits of stuff flew out as he raked his massive hands through the velvety interior for a string. A discarded setlist. A Sharpie. Yellow fluff. A tea towel. A massive and ancient-looking capo. But no strings. Both Martin and John looked helplessly – and sheepishly – at me.
“It’s your lucky day, John!”
Believe it or not, I’d just bought two sets of strings, one for home use and one for a guitar at school. One set was already on the Telecaster at home, but the set for the school guitar was in the boot of my car, to be taken out the next time I was at work. Given that this was the middle of the summer holidays, they were still there. What followed was a real race against the clock for the remainder of Martin’s 15-minute break as, with two professional yet shockingly underprepared singer/songwriters of some repute watching, I replaced the broken string. Roadie Level One completed.
You lend me a Rickenbacker, John, and thirty years later I’ll lend you an E string. Ye can’t say fairer than that.
New string on and guitar now in tune, John played ‘We Let The Stars Go‘ in the dressing room. Problem was, he played it in a key unfamiliar to Martin, and with the clock ticking towards the start of set two, Martin made the executive decision there and then to dispense with John’s guitar entirely. FFS! Martin would play it and John would sing it – they’d busk their way through it like the professional yet underprepared singer/songwriters they were. In the second half, Martin introduced John to rousing applause from a delighted and surprised audience and on he came – “How’s it gaun? Y’awright?” – to sing the Prefabs’ song. A great moment for everyone in the room.
As a postscript to this story, midway through his second set, Martin broke a string too. He looked at me, lurking at the side of the stage, and handed me that beautiful old semi acoustic guitar you can see in the video above. I went back into the dressing room and restrung it. I even tuned it up and placed it back on its stand at the back of the stage. Martin finished the song he’d been playing on his spare guitar, slung on the newly-strung instrument, played a G chord and gave me a thumbs up. Roadie Level Two completed. Piece of piss.
The last time I saw John was on June 18th, again at the Harbour Arts Centre. I’d been asked to secure the venue for a Trashcans video shoot that would perhaps turn into a gig. You can read all about that night here. There was something of a quiet air of finality about that show – ridiculous really, when they’d a brand new album lined up for release, but the carefully selected audience of former band members, family, friends, long-term fans and influential broadcasters and journalists who’d given many a leg-up to a group who fly defiantly in the face of fashion seemed almost serendipitous. The band – 40 years old almost to the date – played one of their first gigs in the HAC and here they were four decades later, closing out their set by playing an unplanned encore of their debut single Obscurity Knocks, played with all the feral raggedness of a teenage garage band. Full circle and fully sensational.
When I was told John was unwell, we texted a couple of times. His last text to me, a week or so ago, was asking after my wife’s health, as he’d heard she’d been at the hospital for a procedure. ‘Sending strength’, he said as he signed off. Interested, empathetic, kind, remember.
John Douglas will be missed by all who knew him, and the many more who had the measure of him through his literate, melody-packed and emotional music. He was, simply, a lovely guy.
Here’s The Hairy Years from I’ve Seen Everything, John’s confessional about stealing a snow globe to take back to his granny as a present from his holiday – ‘all the savings gone on bloody day one,’ – welded to a shouty Frank number, greatly tamed for the recording by the trickery of Paul Livingston and his mercurial way with a fluid guitar riff over a well-chosen chord sequence. It’s a mighty fine John moment in a discography choc full of them. Go and investigate it. Or investigate it further.
Jimmy Smith is the bridge between jazz and soul, a colossus of his chosen instrument who had one well-tailored foot firmly planted in the camp marked ‘strictly no sell out’ and the other in the camp marked ‘unfortunately I’ve got bills to pay.’ A master of the Hammond B-3 organ, his playing was a deep influence on Deep Purple’s Jon Lord, The Charlatans’ Rob Collins and Mick Talbot in The Style Council (et al), to name but three great players who understood the value of the B3’s flavour to their particular sonic stew.
Sampled by all manner of switched-on creatives from the Beastie Boys to DJ Shadow to The Orb, Smith’s indelible organ grind appears in the least likeliest of places at the most unexpected times. Would the Beasties’ Root Down be quite as funky without that requisite sample? Could Andrew Weatherall have borrowed from anyone other than Smith when twisting The Orb’s Perpetual Dawn inside out and upside down? Ask yr average music fan to compile a list of the ten most influential players in music and it’s unlikely that Jimmy Smith’s name would make that short list, but his influence lives long and large.
A few years ago, in the midst of a particularly heavy jazz phase, I noticed on leaving a Glasgow record shop a Japanese import of Jimmy Smith’s Back At The Chicken Shack album. A Blue Note original. A super duper Japanese pressing. And, given the pressing and its particular desirability, one that was relatively affordable. It was up high, so I couldn’t lift it down to look at it, but I wanted it. Problem was, I was properly spent out, and if I’d asked the guy at the counter to get it down for me, I’d have felt compelled to buy it with money I didn’t have. I hummed. I hawed. I left without it…but ten minutes later I’d done a U-turn down Argyle Street, flames burning from the heels of my desert boots as I hot-footed it back to the shop with the sole intention of bringing that record home with me. Of course, by the time I’d returned, some other unbelievably lucky jazz head had got there before me. We all know what buyer’s remorse is. This was not-buying remorse. Which, as you know full well, is very often worse. It’s undoubtedly good to be impulsive sometimes.
Back At The Chicken Shack is a terrific album, a proper heads-down, chin stroking melding of walking basslines, lazy drum shuffles and Smith’s smoky, croaky Hammond sound.
Jimmy Smith – Back At The Chicken Shack
The title track is a heady amalgamation of early ’60s cool, finger-clickin’ jazz. There are just four musicians on board, and the quartet contributes to a positively swingin’ affair that, if possible, is even greater than the sum of its groovy parts. Chicken Shack is brought in on a ringing, trembling bed of Smith’s organ, but no sooner have you settled in than Blue Note’s tenor sax for hire Stanley Turrentine wafts his signature rasp across the top line. Kenny Burrell’s guitar vamps quietly in the background, biding it’s time, waiting for the opportunity to break free, the swinging cymbal splash of Donald Bailey’s drums keeping everything in place and orientating the listener.
As the track meanders, unwinds and eventually pulls itself back together over the course of eight heady minutes, Smith takes centre stage; he ripples here, hits heavy chords there, goes low and bassy in this part, flies high and reedy in that. He walks his fingers up, off and out into orbit before eventually stepping aside to allow Kenny Burrell the opportunity to showcase his exquisite guitar skills; bends, double stops, soulful scales up, down and (crucially) between the frets, playing on pure instinct with his fingers going to places in the merest of nanoseconds before his brain has thought of doing likewise. Turrentine blows a cool breeze in the catch-a-breath gaps left behind, freeform yet within the structure of the track – playing riffs really, as the rock fraternity would recognise them. There’s nothing too skronky or head-melting here, just good, honest music cooked up by good, honest jazz cats playing for no-one but themselves and anyone else with an ounce of rhythm and blues in their soul.
If it’s single-button, tonic suited mod jazz yr after, look no further than Back At The Chicken Shack, daddy-o.
It’s a well-written fact over the years that Tomorrow Never Knows was the first track The Beatles recorded for Revolver. Barely out of short trousers, The Beatles turned to studio-as-instrument and created a thumping and droning kaleidoscope of looped sound – an aural collage a million miles from, yet merely 33 months since, they’d released She Loves You; inarguably, yeah (yeah, yeah), a fantastical leap of lightyear proportions. Waiting for that great leap forward, Billy Bragg? It had already happened a couple of decades prior.
Tomorrow Never Knows – The Beatles
Tomorrow Never Knows and its ground-breaking, rule-breaking appeal has been utilised well in the intervening years. Without its influential template, Harry ‘friend of Lennon’ Nilsson may have felt the need to employ more than one chord on his rockin’ Jump Into The Fire single. Adam Yauch might not have taken to threading metres of recording tape around his kitchen via nothing more than broom handles and a prayer when experimenting with drum loops before the Beastie Boys’ first album. The Chemical Brothers’ looping, thumping, kaleidoscopic Setting Son possibly/probably/most definitely wouldn’t exist. Paul Weller has used Tomorrow Never Knows as an intro at live shows and it never fails to sharpen the senses, keen the expectation and lift the roof off before he’s even arrived. In 2026 – sixty years down the road, Tomorrow Never Knows still sounds like a dazzling, just around the corner future.
It’s interesting, then, to hear Junior Parker’s 1972 version.
Tomorrow Never Knows – Junior Parker
Parker, one of the original dust bowl blues/harmonica guys, disassembles the original of its thumps and crashes, its fuck-off whooshes and fairground whirrs and recasts it as a tremolo-heavy, late-night torch song. There’s a token heartbeat of muffled percussion and ricky-tick stick action during one of its more urgent moments, but mainly one lone twanging, reverberating guitar measures the music as Parker delivers his solemn vocal. Heavy-eyed and somnolent, Parker comes across like a stoned-immaculate Jim Morrison backed by no-one but Robby Krieger on downers. It’s a fairly essential recording, all things said, and one which the Chemical Brothers (of course!) have used in concert before segueing into their own Setting Son. Now there’s a circulatory thing if there ever was one.
Junior Parker, as you well know, is also the writer of that great standard, Mystery Train.
Mystery Train – Junior Parker
Recorded in Sun Studios in 1953, it was brought to Elvis’s attention in 1955 by Sam Phillips, the studio/label owner/producer who just so happened to have given himself a writing credit for the track. Elvis took Parker’s r’n’b heavy version and hotwired it to an electric shock of helium-high hillbilly country, creating possibly his first essential recording.
Mystery Train – Elvis Presley
It’s the sparsest of recordings – the very antithesis of that Beatles session just a mere decade away – with Scotty Moore on electric guitar, rockabilly pickin’ and riff stealin from another Parker tune (Love My Baby) to great effect. Bill Black playing stand-up bass – the same instrument that would later be owned by Paul McCartney, a birthday gift from Linda – slappin’ and walkin’ his way through the song’s foggy ether. It features a sparse percussion track that makes the action on Junior Parker’s version of Tomorrow Never Knows seem like the pounding work of John Bonham by comparison. And on top of it all, Elvis’s cu-hu-huntry bu-hoy schtick and his own scuffed ‘n scrubbed acoustic guitar. Nothing more, nothing less. And all the more essential for it.
By the way, that Mystery Train riff has been copped a thousand times since, but Scotty Moore’s chicken-picked original remains the standard for all players. Simple yet deceptive, a heady mix of left hand pressure. right hand nimbleness and decades-old hot-wired electricity will get you some of the way there.
There you are. From The Beatles to Elvis via Junior Parker and the Chemical Brothers. Not for nothing does the tagline above read Outdated Music For Outdated People. Read on, oldies.
American groups – like any number of those Nuggets bands you can reel off in your sleep – or The Turtles or The Byrds (‘animal’ name, weird spelling – coincidence?!?) grew their mom’s apple pie American boy crewcuts out the moment The Beatles first yelled ‘yeah!‘ They adopted the instruments…the stance…the harmonies…everything they could that might align them with the collarless coattails of the hottest act on the planet. And good on them, for using the Lennon/McCartney approach gave the world more great records.
When John Sebastian sat down with his guitar to write a song for his new band The Lovin’ Spoonful, he looked back a year or so for inspiration, to the pop sounds that were already proven to shake and shimmy American teenagers to their core. He didn’t need to look east, across the Atlantic and towards Liverpool. I mean, he could’ve, for there was plenty there that he might chose to cop. Instead, Sebastian looked north to Detroit, to the sound of the Motor City and the hand-clappin’, finger-snappin’ giddy abandon of Motown.
And so it is that Do You Believe In Magic? wafts in on the same chords as Martha Reeves and The Vandellas‘ (Love Is Like A) Heat Wave.
Martha Reeves and The Vandellas – (Love Is Like A) Heat Wave
Other than the chord sequence at the beginning, the two songs are poles apart, of course. The Lovin’ Spoonful come across like grassed-out, close-miked preppy stoners with the knack of making an unforgettable melody appear as natural as breathing.
Martha and The Vandellas crash in with all the urgency of a group who’ve been told that this might be the only record they make. There’s a rifle shot of snare, a cavalry charge of handclaps, deep sea baritone sax that climbs to the surface and punctuates every second beat, a hundred mile an hour poundin’ pianer, a guitar that hammers on the chords like life itself depends on it and a bass line (James Jamerson?) pinning the whole thing to the floor lest it falls off and causes an imbalance on the Richter Scale. And that’s just the first 30 seconds.
Martha introduces herself by gleefully kicking in the doors of pop. ‘Whenever I’m with him, somethin’ in-si-hide…starts to burnin’ and I’m filled with dee-za-hire…‘
Ah. So it ain’t about the summer weather in Detroit then. No! It is – like a gazillion Motown songs before and since, a heartfelt paean to the joys of young love, when the world’s your oyster and no-one, daddy-o, feels like you do. Holland-Dozier-Holland have captured lighting in a bottle here. Martha is beside herself with excitement and her willing Vandellas are being dragged along in her slipstream. Falsetto ‘Heat Wave!‘ backing vocals ramp it up further. ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah!‘ they go in the outro, the piano player’s fingers still locked on the groove, the sax player somehow saving enough breath to see his way to the song’s thumping, tumbling conclusion.
Motown may have billed itself ‘The Sound of Young America’, but (Love Is Like A) Heat Wave could be billed ‘The Sound Of Young Motown’ and few would counter that claim. Give it a good listen again and tell me I’m wrong.
A decade or so later, back over this side of the Atlantic, another young songwriter with a magpie approach to creation was cribbing the chords and calls and response that he could twist into his own shapes. That Paul Weller should dig black American pop music is never in doubt; from the version of Wilson Pickett’s Midnight Hour on The Jam’s second album, via the You Can’t Hurry Love bassline that drives A Town Called Malice to the smattering of choice cuts across his b-sides (Move On Up, Stoned Out Of My Mind), The Jam’s frontman knew a well-crafted pop-soul hit when he heard it.
The Jam cut their version of Heat Wave for their fourth album Setting Sons. Maybe they were low on original material. Maybe they just fancied cutting loose. Either way, their ramalama take on Heat Wave closes the second side of the record in good, old-fashioned killer style. Dig it!
The Jam – Heat Wave
It’s the clang of the Rickenbacker…the call and response of Buckler and Foxton, the Vandellas to Weller’s Martha…the incessant pummelling of the drum kit…the vamping piano player…the subtle introduction of a brass section that would soon be far more prominent in the sound of The Jam…but, for now, the sheer, goddammed urgency of it all. Let’s get this album finished and let’s finish it NOW!
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah!
* And to answer that titular question: sadly, it has. That’ll be a job in education for ye,
David Bowie‘s Low is an album with its own split personality. On side one you get the interesting guitar stuff, heavily treated and effected tracks that cut against the punkish musical landscape of the era. On side two you get the icy cool of Bowie’s (and Eno’s) mainly vocal-free take on Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream and the new sounds he’s been soaking up in Berlin.
Even the synths on the record have split personality. On side two, they glide with slow, peaceful majesty, their glazed, chromium sheen teleporting Bowie and his gang into a cocooned and shiny, space age-y future.
On side one though, they fizz and spark, adding a layer of Brunel-ish heavy industry to the tracks; Speed Of Life whooshes in on a rapid fade-in, immediately disorientating, as if you’ve walked in on a band already half way through their thing. Breaking Glass is over in a groovy flash, a Teutonic military two step that somehow gives birth to the sound of Franz Ferdinand amongst its sub-two minute robotic funk. Sound And Vision‘s steam-powered rhythm section hisses and pops its way into the top ten like a Clydeside shipbuilders’ yard in 1901.
The whole side is coated in interesting and forward-looking instrumentation.
At the heart of it though – and you’ve no doubt picked up on this – is that all of them feature fantastically-recorded drums; live, in the room – in your room – slap-heavy snare, reverberating toms, kick-like-a-mule bass…Dennis Davis sounds terrific across everything here. Low is considered a progressive, era-changing album (as it should), but little has been made of just how goddam in-your-face percussive it all is. Next time you listen to Low – properly, on a turntable or a CD (not a crappy mp3 like the one below) – hone in on the drums and rhythms and be dazzled
I’ve long-held a fascination for Always Crashing In the Same Car. I love the unfolding, slo-mo drama of it all. Verlaine-ish vapour trails of linear guitar, interesting chords, a bassline that would be played twice as fast and employed later on Heroes, Bowie’s voice close in your ear, low one moment, sky-high the next, his phrasing never less than immaculate. It occurred to me just there as I listened again that he even employs a sneaky wee strung out but nonetheless Beatleish ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah‘ vocal adlib midway through. Listen out for it – it’s unmistakable. The more you listen, it seems, the more you spot, even all this time later. Ask a random to make a list of their ten favourite Bowie tracks and it won’t be there…but it probably should be.
David Bowie – Always Crashing In the Same Car
Russian 7″ single sleeve for ‘Always Crashing…’
Is it a study in cocaine psychosis? Bowie was living on a diet of milk, red peppers and Grade A pop star-quality pharmaceuticals at this point, so it may well be. Or is it Bowie’s metaphorical confession of a life collapsing around him as he makes the same mistake time and again? It may well be both?
Or it may, as some biographers have claimed, be Bowie’s retelling of the time he and Iggy Pop were cruising the Berlin city street late at night when they happened upon a dealer who’d recently ripped Bowie off. Off his head on drugs, or just off is head in general, Bowie chose to repeatedly ram his Mercedes into his former dealer’s car, then made his escape to the underground car park of the hotel he was living in and drove around in circles until his ire had subsided.
That ‘Jas-amine…I saw you peeping….when I put my foot down to the floor,‘ line. Some say ‘Jesamine’ is an alias for Iggy Pop. Others say it’s an alias for Bowie himself, writing in third person as he watches is own behaviour from the sidelines.
That can’t be right, that story, can it? Can it?
As unlikely as it sounds, Bowie himself introduced the song during his 1999 VH1 Storytellers performance with a very similar preamble, so who knows. You’ll find clips of the song online, but search as I have, I can’t find the video evidence of the song’s introduction for absolute proof. Never let the truth get in the way of a good story, I say.
I was sad to hear of Andy Kershaw’s death last week. We were away, and for the hours after the news had come through, I was a wee bit quiet and introspective, the way most of us go when a person in the public eye who you’ve admired from a distance passes.
I noticed an immediate spike in the stats for this page, with traffic making its way to a post I’d written about George Michael a few years ago. After George had died, Andy took to Facebook to say he couldn’t work out the level of public outpouring he was reading about a man who was essentially a pop singer and, in Andy’s words, not a ‘real’ singer, or a very good one at that.
No, no, no, Andy, I replied on his feed (to a flurry of thumbs up and further comment); when a popstar of your youth dies, a little bit of you dies too. It doesn’t matter if you liked the music, that’s almost secondary. It’s the records, tied to memories, people and places, that evokes happier, simpler times in your life, when mortgages and bills and adulting were unknown entities on some far-off and hazy horizon. That loss of childhood and innocence is what people are really upset about. And besides, Andy, George Michael was a fucking great writer and singer and, as it turned out, an even greater human being, so choose your pot-shot targets carefully, man.
In the George Michael article. I called him a twonk. Not something Kershaw would have got worked up about, but something that, since last week, has bothered me. People arriving at that article – titled, pointedly, Listen Without Prejudice – might think I had no time for Andy Kershaw, when that couldn’t be further from the truth.
I volunteer with an Ayrshire-based music promoter called Freckfest. Back in the old days of 2014, when Andy was far more active on social media – especially with a book to sell – I got in touch with him to suggest he bring his one-man ‘No Off Switch’ show to Irvine’s 100-seater Harbour Arts Centre. A date was agreed and the gig was go.
As the date of the gig loomed large, I got a daily text, every morning before 8 o’clock, to ask how sales were doing. In all honesty, they were slow. In fact, they’d stopped. A week out from showtime, we’d sold about half the HAC’s 100 capacity and it looked like we’d sell little more. He phoned me out of the blue one day while I was in the staff room at lunchtime, ‘Andy Kershaw’ appearing on my screen above a picture of him in his standard checked shirt.
‘Shite’, I thought, my heart missing several beats as I navigated my way out of the staffroom conversation I was embroiled in and made my way into the sanctity of the corridor.
‘Andy!’ I answered cheerfully whilst shitting myself. (At this point in my life, no-one mildly famous had ever called me on my phone, let alone unannounced and while I was at work). ‘What’re you saying to it?!’
‘Have we sold any more tickets, Craig? Even one? Because I’m thinking that maybe you ought to get around the town of Irvine with as many posters as you can print, like I told you to do, and pop them every chip shop, hairdressers, corner shop and bakers, like I told you to do, and demand that they display one prominently in each of their windows.’ The voice was exactly that of the radio broadcaster Andy Kershaw, which, obviously it would be, but one that nonetheless was ridiculous in the context of the call. ‘If you put posters all over the town, Craig, THEY WILL COME, mark my words.’
I was midway through suggesting it wasn’t too late to maybe postpone the show, re-evaluate our expectations and maybe put it on at a later date, when the school bell rang for the end of lunchtime.
‘Where the hell are you, Craig? In a blooody schoool?!?’
‘Eh, aye, actually, Andy. That’s exactly where I am.’
‘What the blooody hell are you doing in a schoool?’
‘I work in a school. I’m a teacher.’
‘A teacher!? A teacher?!’ said Andy, with the same incredulity that he’d normally reserve for someone who’d suggested he play Twistin’ By The Pool by Dire Straits on his radio show. ‘You’re a school teacher? You’re not a promoter?’
‘Well, I AM a promoter, but I do that in my spare time. Freckfest is a voluntary organisation. We all have real jobs to work. But we love music and if we weren’t doing this gig, no-one else would be putting it on. We grew up in a town that was soaked in music and culture and in our own way, we’re doing our wee bit to bring music and culture back to a town that’s been starved of it for too long.’
And at that, the ice melted.
Andy couldn’t do enough for us. Instead of texting me daily to ask about slow ticket sales, he got on his own social media feed and began aggressively selling the show – ‘Get down to Irvine, y’shower of cloth-eared bastards, etc, those Freckfest guys and girls do a brilliant job of bringing interesting things to Irvine – don’t let them – and me – down.’
For the record, we had stuck posters in shop windows throughout the town, like he’d told us to do, but it was Andy’s vociferous and plentiful social media posting that helped sales crawl to a respectable 80+.
Just as he was about to go on, Andy asked me to introduce him on stage. With a gulp, I very quickly put together a spontaneous version of the rolling commentary that announces Bob Dylan every time he takes the stage.
‘Ladies and gentlemen. Our guest tonight appeared wide-eyed and blagging it on Live Aid’s TV coverage. He’s stood above rivers of human bones reporting on the genocide in Rwanda. He was the first white man to shake Nelson Mandela’s hand on his release from prison. He’s worked with the Rolling Stones, Billy Bragg and the Bhundu Boys, to name just three disparate acts. He turned down ‘I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here’, but he couldn’t turn down Freckfest’s offer of a show in Irvine. Ladies and gentlemen, please show your wild appreciation for Andy Kershaw!’
And on he went.
And on and on he went.
The show was running way over time…and he still hadn’t got to the bit about his involvement in Live Aid.
Just as the Kershaw radio show packed in everything he could fit and more, it was clear we weren’t going to hear about every aspect of his quite frankly Forrest Gump-ish life before the venue’s 11 oclock curfew. He’d tell a story, shout ‘Hit it, Jim!’ to the engineer in the soundbox and a track would play loudly while Andy grinned and shuffled his way through it, his faithful dog Buster sat at his feet.
‘Route 66 is a crap way to see America,’ he extoled. ‘Unless you’re into grain stores and farming. Hit it, Jim!’
Cue: The Stones’ version of ‘Route 66‘.
‘I once tracked down James Carr to a bedsit in the deep south and let him hear some his own music for the first time. It brought both of us to tears. Hit it, Jim!’
Cue: James Carr’s ‘You’ve Got My Mind Messed Up‘.
‘The first time I heard African guitars, I was ecstatic…giddy with life! Hit it, Jim!’
Cue: Bhundu Boys‘ ‘Hupenyu Hwangu‘.
Suddenly, he writes in ‘No Off Switch’, it was as if the room was being sprayed with a fountain of jewelled guitar notes. Then the whole band kicked in. It bounced. It chimed. It popped. The melodies and harmonies instantly lifted and brightened the spirits. The guitars wound round each other, capturing and tossing back and forth the prettiest of tunes, yet always engaging with sublime simplicity. Peel and I looked at each other, frozen and open-mouthed. For the duration of the first song, neither of us said a word. By the end I was grinning.
That’s Kershaw’s famed and infectious joie de vivre right there.
Afterwards we went for a pint, where Buster farted violently in the corner and he told me stories of hanging out with Neil Young and the Rolling Stones, the sort of stuff that never fails to impress me. For a wee while in the months after, we corresponded. He sent me a BBC video of a WWII thing that I’d seen him present. ‘That’d be great for the kids I teach, Andy,’ I told him…and the next thing, he’d sent me the digital file for classroom use. He’d message unexpectedly, promising to return and finish the rest of his show. It never did happen. Probably, the thought of chastising me daily for not putting posters up in Gregg’s was less appealing to him this time around. I wish I’d held him to his promise though.
Andy Kershaw had a life well-travelled and his show, and the accompanying book, barely scratched the surface.
You’ll read all sorts of stuff about Andy Kershaw, and not all of it flattering, but I was really taken by him and his enthusiasm for life and music. If you haven’t, you should read ‘No Off Switch’. It’s a really great book. Trust me on that.
Plain Or Pan 