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.
May 1971. Marvin Gaye releases What’s Going On?, a musical tour de force of luscious, orchestral funk, dusted with hard-hitting socio-political lyrics that address the state of America. It’ll play everywhere for evermore; Marvin Gaye’s magnum opus, the album that took him from soul singer to auteur.
Six months later, In November 1971, Sly and the Family Stone release an album which is titled in direct response to Marvin’s question.
What’s Going On? asks Marvin.
There’s A Riot Goin’ On, retorts Sly. That’s what.
There’s A Riot Goin’ On won’t play everywhere for evermore. It’ll go to the top of the Billboard Charts, selling a million-plus copies on the way there, and be certified platinum as a result, but its brooding, mid-paced funk will blind-side everyone after the event. It’s a dense and murky album, overdubbed and saturated to hell, hissing in places with a lo-fi weediness that could give a Boots’ own-brand C90 a run for its money.
Gone in the main are Stone’s staple signatures; there are no fuzz-bass freak-outs, no four-to-the-floor stompers, no call-and-response soul-savers, and, apart from the excellent and evergreen Runnin’ Away, little in the way of those light-hearted, nursery rhymish sing-songs with Sister Rose that had the ability to set the charts alight with all the brilliance and colour of the Rockefeller Christmas Tree.
A product very much of its time, There’s A Riot Goin’ On is a downbeat record which reflected the singer’s move from east coast to west and found him more interested in the peripheral recreational activities of yr average ’70s musician than the music itself; the coke. And the women.
And the coke.
And the women.
Sony, in a desperate act to have new product on sale stuck out a Greatest Hits album. It’s a beauty, but you’ll know that already. Sly had enough credit in the metaphorical bank with the label that they allowed him to indulge himself, but he was now cancelling concerts and had taken up with the Black Panthers, who not only were keen to manage him, they were keen to manage him in a particular way, employing heavies and underworld gangsters to keep certain people away from Sly – his bandmates included.
With the new album so far from Stone’s immediate thoughts, drummer Greg Errico upped sticks (uh-huh) and left. And when the band eventually did book studio time, Stone would record his own parts when the group wasn’t there, going into the studio after hours, erasing what had been laid down that day and re-doing it like a proto-Prince, in his own way and all by himself.
In lieu of Errico, Stone employed the new-to-the-market Maestro Rhythm King MRK-2 drum machine. Unhappy with the pre-set sounds, Stone set to overdubbing two and three tracks of pitter-pattering drum machine until he was happy with the now unrecogniseable-from-stock beats. Further overdubs came in the form of many, many female vocalists, all of whom were wooed by Sly with the promise of a slot on his new album in return for…well, y’know…
Deed done, the vocals would be wiped. And another hopeful would show up the next night, with the same scenario. Ol’ Sly repeated this multiple times. The result was the lo-fi, saturated murkiness that has since come to define the record. It’s an album that, although released as a Family Stone record, bore the sole fingerprints of the group’s leader.
And yet…and yet…
It has something about it, not least the big single, Family Affair and the already-mentioned Runnin’ Away, but also the opener, Luv ‘N Haight.
Sly and the Family Stone – Luv ‘n Haight
Wafting in on a wave of mid-paced wah-wah and bubbling bass, the track has Sly’s coke-rasp voice echoed above and below and between layers of horns and sky-high aahing and oohing female backing vocals, the singer scatting and vocalising about feeling so good while his sister takes the verses. Pianos clang, forever on the verge of being almost in tune, vampish Fender Rhodes ghost chords weave in and around the melody and those layers of horns begin to separate into fragments of the sort of incidental music you might find in Quincy. It’s an astonishing band performance, more so given that they were purportedly at odds with one another at the time.
For an album that puts the stack-heeled boot into the fake notion of the hippy dream, and a song titled punnily to reflect this, Luv ‘n Haight is, amazingly, pretty groovy. You’d never know there was a riot goin’ on by listening to this. The group sound as tight and together as ever. And that programmed drum pattern? It’s extraordinary, not entirely artificial to these ears either…and not a million miles from the sort of stuff Jaki Liebezeit would play a year later on Can’s Ege Bamyasi. An influence on Krautrock’s metronomic and polyryhthmic very own rhythm king? You’d have to think so.
Psssst! Wanna hear the album in all its intricate instrumental glory? Luv ‘n Haightsans vocals sounds terrific. Take a bow, the internet.
Bill Forsyth’s Gregory’s Girl is the greatest film to come out of Scotland no, the UK no, the world bar none. Any one random, washed-out coloured still from the film will instantly stir more emotion, more melancholy, more longing for simpler times than any other memorial device in existence. It will also have the uncanny knack of pulling the entire script verbatim from some well-accessed cerebral filing cabinet from under my greying (but definitely not thinning) hair, the film’s never-ending treasure trove of rich one liners and cultural reference points shared and appreciated by whoever I’m with at the time.
Maybe it’s because I grew up in a new town (in my case, Irvine) which was the architectural mirror image of Cumbernauld’s jutting white symmetry and undulating green spaces. Maybe it’s because I too played terrible football on an unforgiving orange blaize pitch with a merciless Mitre 5 that stung like six of Fowler’s belt if it caught you on the back of the thigh on a February morning.
Maybe it’s because every modern school in the New Town area looked exactly like Gregory’s (the real-life Abronhill High School in Cumbernauld) and everyone I knew at my school looked like an exact clone of Gregory or any of his hapless pals; flares, skinny school blazers that were either too short or too long in the arm, shapeless grey jumpers, shirt collars as long as the nose on Concorde, gap-toothed, awkward boys with haircuts that fell somewhere between Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks abomination and your mum’s rapid-fire Sunday night handiwork, attempted with one eye on That’s Life and the other on the smouldering inch and a half of ash teetering from the Benson & Hedges wedged in her mouth.
If you’re of a certain age, I daresay Gregory’s Girl will have had the same effect on you.
From first minute to last I could identify with just about everything in it. The mazy pathways that led around exotic corners of the bright, white housing estates. The chip shop wrapping their 15p wares in brown paper and newspaper. The head teacher wafting stealthily through the corridors, his bat-winged cloak following him like dark trouble itself. The P.E. teacher’s caterpillar moustache and whistle. That row of hopefuls he has lined up at the trial where Dorothy arrives? We’ve all stood in that row, willing someone to pick us not last. “You all know what I’m looking for,” he says with a serious face, “A goalscorer. And that requires two basic skills: ball control, shooting accuracy and the ability to read the game.”
The entirety of Gregorys’ Girl was like my life on film. Everything, that is, except the true subject matter at its core. Aged 11 when Gregory’s Girl first made it to the big screen – the supporting feature, believe it or not, to the far-less interesting but far more decorated Chariots Of Fire – I was a good four or five years younger than the characters in the film and nowhere near as interested in the fairer sex as Gregory and his hormonally-rampant friends. It wouldn’t be long, but for now, girls were mainly just insignificant. Strange and alien. Not really annoying, just gang-like and giggling. Certainly not to be talked to. Not to be looked at, even. We had Subbuteo and bikes and Madness and Adam and The Ants. That was more than enough.
The music of Gregory’s Girl collected – Colin Tully
Arguably, the most iconic thing about Gregory’s Girl is its soundtrack. Composed by Scotsman Colin Tully, who was given a VHS of the soundtrack-free film by Forsyth and asked to come up with something suitable, its meandering jazz-funk and light soprano saxophone stylings are so out of step for the times it was made, yet heard nowadays they provide an instant passport back to 1981 far more than Grey Day or Stand And Deliver might.
All it takes is a crack of compressed snare, or a tinkle of Fender Rhodes, or the slap of bubbling bass, or one of Tully’s own freewheeling sax solos and I’m right back on that blaize pitch, or in that dinner hall, or in that boring class – Gregory and his pals had the welcome distraction of early leaver Steve cleaning the classroom windows one day, I had an excitable, long-tongued dog running wildly around the playground during a particularly tedious slot of double French with which to while away the long minutes.
Bella, and indeed bella. Or should that be joli, joli, Mme McGlone?
* The music embedded above comes from a digitised tape made available by its composer to a friend and subsequently shared when Tully passed away from cancer. For a soundtrack that has never been commercially available, 45 years on, this might be as good as it gets. Enjoy listening to it!
Davie Cooper didn’t play for my team, but still, he was just about my favourite player of the eighties. As a teenager, I never missed a Scotland game at Hampden and Cooper – Super Cooper, if you were a Daily Record sub-editor – was an ever-present in those teams; teams carved from squads of Scottish football legends – Miller! McLeish! Souness! Dalglish! – who, through a mixture of elan and class and stubborn Scottish grit regularly progressed to World Cups.
Among his peers, Copper dazzled. ‘Give Davie the ball‘ might’ve been the only instruction the team needed before kick-off. He was, to quote Ray Wilkins, ‘a Brazilian trapped in a Scotsman’s body,’ and Cooper could, and usually did, waltz past half the opposition, inside of them, outside of them, the ball tied to his Adidas with invisible elastic. With a dip of the shoulder and the sudden bend of a well-tanned leg, he’d turn a defender back to front and upside down, get himself to the byline, look up through the fringe of an outgrown and collapsing 1950s-style quiff and stand a ball to the back post for a Charlie Nicholas or a Maurice Johnston to do the inevitable.
Cooper had a swagger. He wasn’t like the players of today, those identikit, finitely-coached superhumans whose performances are tracked by data and details and tweaked like robots accordingly. Davie played on pure instinct, a street player, a tanner ba’ player as they love to say up here, a gallusly swashbuckling left winger with a devastating left foot to match. He could thread the ball between the narrowest of international defences. He could bend it as sweepingly as the corrugated roof that covered the West Terracing behind the Hampden goal. He could crack a shot as accurately and deadly as the most highly-trained of marksmen. So, yeah. Davie never played for my team, but he played for my country and the thrill of seeing him in the starting line-up was always a rush. They’re very different players, but I’ll wager there are wee guys today who, on seeing Scott McTominay’s name in the starting line-up, feel exactly the same way. (I know I do.)
Here’s a thing:
Davie Cooper once dribbled past me.
I can still replay it in my head – it’s playing right now as I type this – and I was certain I could date the time and place with all the accuracy and confidence of a Cooper cross, but as it turns out, I maybe can’t.
As I remember it, we’re walking down Irvine High Street, my friends and I. It’s a Friday lunchtime in late May and we’re in 6th year at school, a month away from leaving school behind forever. Being senior pupils, we’re trusted to make our own way, unaccompanied by anyone from the school, to the Magnum each Friday afternoon to take part in a selection of sports activities that the school has booked for us. There’s squash and badminton, 5-a-sides, of course, table tennis and swimming (and the flumes). Sometimes, we’ll just go and have a Slush Puppy and sit in the viewing gallery, feet up against the glass, being harmless but loud and annoying to tutting members of the public. We all look forward to these teacher-free afternoons; the perfect sharpener for the anticipation of the weekend just ahead.
Unlike in more recent years, this day in May sees the High Street properly bustling. The shops are full and varied, the pavements crowded with Irvinites going about their business. It’s a sunny, late spring day and there’s a thrum of activity and good living just above the noise of the blue buses that belch past with regularity. We’ve just passed the Kings Arms, with its top-floor wonderland ‘The Attic’ yet to be discovered, when from out of the Ladbrokes bookies next door pours half the Motherwell football team, shellsuited in claret and amber and availed of their weekly wages that they’ve no doubt staked on themselves winning the Scottish Cup Final that they’ll contest the next day against Dundee United at Hampden Park. Being an upwardly mobile New Town, Irvine has a fancy hotel – the Skean Dhu – and it is here that the football teams who are playing at Hampden (the ‘Well, the Russian national team) and the bands who play the Magnum (Thin Lizzy, Spandau Ballet) will bunk down on pure white sheets of Egyptian cotton before or after the event.
Davie Cooper is among the group of Motherwell players and as they weave their way between Irvine’s shoppers, my hero and I find ourselves walking towards one another. I go to my right to let him pass. Davie goes to his left…which is my right… and we’re left in that awkward stand-off that we’ve all been in. I go to my left. Davie goes to his right…which is my left, and we’re at stalemate again. Without a second thought, Cooper dips a shoulder, fakes left but goes right, brushing past my hips and schoolbag as he does so and suddenly he’s past me. I say loudly and excitedly to Davie Davies, “Davie Cooper’s just dribbled past me!” and as we turn to see the back of him, Cooper looks back and, hearing what I’ve said to my pal, gives me a wee wink. What a thrill!
I hope Cooper was as brave with the bookie as he was with one of his many mazy runs. Motherwell would go on to win the Cup the next day, winning 4-3 in extra time, Ladbrokes’ loss the Motherwell squad’s gain.
Good wee story that.
My only issue with it is that I left school in June 1987. Motherwell didn’t win the Scottish Cup until four years later, in May 1991. Davie Cooper definitely dribbled past me in his full Motherwell training kit. That much is true. And I definitely made the remark to Davie Davis. Yet, here I am in 2026 baffled by it all.
Davie Cooper. Like the roots of this story, a true natural mystic.
Bob Marley – Natural Mystic
There were a couple of Davie Copper-related things posted online this past week and without – quite clearly – scanning the articles, I made the assumption that the anniversary of Davie’s death was this weekend. In reality, next Saturday (23rd March) will see the 31st anniversary of his passing. So not only is this post probably a week too early, it has me thinking back to that day in 1987 – no! – 1991! – when – as a schoolboy, or definitely maybe not – he swept past me as if I were an Eastern European right back defending the six yard box at Hampden Park. Does anyone else have a memory as warped and buckled as mine?
Turn off your mind, relax, float downstream. From Trump to the Trongate, the world right now seems hellbent on willful annihilation and pointless self-destruction. Instead of firing missiles into Iran or flares into the away end at Ibrox, we should be bombarding the antagonists with this;
Peace Piece by Bill Evans
Recorded in December 1958 at Reeves Sound on New York’s East 44th Street – a coincidental hop, wop and skippity bop away from the hotel I stayed in the last time we were in the greatest city on the planet, daddy-o – it is the contemplative sound of Bill Evans winding down at the end of a recording session, under the impression that the engineer has stopped the tapes rolling on another day towards completion of Everybody Digs Bill Evans, the modestly-titled album that would cement his place in the pantheon of jazz greats.
Riffing around the sort of chord structure that Johnny Marr might make terrific use of – a Cmaj7 to G9sus4 and back again – (and sounding not unlike the opening notes on Gabriel Yared’s C’est le vent, Betty from the Betty Blue soundtrack), Peace Piece has the normally upbeat and innovative Evans in reflective, meditative, filmic mood. You can imagine the harsh New York winter outside, Christmas creeping up on the city, the sidewalks slow-moving with hatted men and hair-done women leaning into the cutting chill from the East River like doubled-up figures in an LS Lowry painting, goose feathers of snow falling from the gunmetal grey skies as the urban Manhattanites slip and slide their way about their business. And inside the studio, peace.
Evans, sleeves rolled back from the wrists, is hunched over the keyboard and letting his fingers go where they want and do what they will. A blue curl of smoke from a smouldering Chesterfield hanging at right angles from an over-flowing ashtray atop his piano vanishes into the yellow beam of the solitary studio light that washes the room in an ochre haze.
His bandmates have long packed up and are off for the night, and Evans, alone save the engineer and the red ‘recording’ light, stretches out beyond the two chords and trills suddenly at the top end of the piano, slightly discordant notes against the simple comfort of the left-handed melody. But he always comes back to the signature motif; calming, serene, a peace piece.
A long, low note fades out for a good twenty seconds at the end, the listener unsure on first listen if Evans will come back in. But no, he’s gone, and for six minutes at least, the world seems a better place.
Believing that regular playing would reduce its impact, Evans would play Peace Piece only once in concert, before retiring it like your favourite European superteam’s number 9 shirt. Not even Miles Davis could convince Evans to make it a regular part of his set, although he did get him to reprise a section of it less than a year later for Kind Of Blue‘s Flamenco Sketches.
‘He plays the piano the way it should be played,’ said Miles Davis on the cover of Everybody Digs Bill Evans. He wasn’t wrong.
‘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.
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.
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.
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?
Plain Or Pan 