Category: Gone but not forgotten

Gone but not forgotten, Sampled

Phrasing

Craig McAllister

Hey! You! Put aside the dog-eared copy of Absolute Beginners that you’re currently re-reading for the 5th (6th?) time. Lift the needle from the freely-spinning Cafe Bleu on the old Dansette. Brew yourself a fresh cappuccino, or even an espresso forte, and sit back and read this.

Jazz is America’s first music, a liberation from daily struggle, the artist given the freedom to play and sing however they choose. Those jazz cats used the music as a platform for cultural expression, whether that be Billie Holiday’s heart-stopping vocal on Strange Fruit or John Coltrane’s faith meditation on A Love Supreme, Miles Davis’s exotic inroads on the voodoo funk of Miles In The Sky or Louis Armstrong’s rasping love song to the Wonderful World he found himself living in. Oppression, worship, love, death…jazz is life itself. Folk that say they don’t like jazz just haven’t yet found the strand of the genre that will resonate with them.

Jazz, though? Soul – that’s obvious. Blues? That’s obvious too. But jazz? Why jazz?

Way back a hundred or so years ago, ‘jazz’ was a slang word used to describe liveliness and spirited behaviour; ‘She’s so jazz!’, ‘This dance is wildly jazz!’, ‘That baseball team is totally jazz!’ etc. So, in the time it took Louis Armstrong to parp out a trumpet triad, ‘this music is totally jazz!’ went from adjective to noun. Interestingly (or otherwise) the word ‘jazz’ itself originated from the word ‘jism’, in that if you were lively and spirited between the sheets with the person of your fancy, well…you know what tends to happen. So, the next time you hear the word ‘jazz’, ponder on that for a bit.

“Hey boy, bring me ma drink,” Hey boy, play me anutha toon,” “Hey boy, don’cha quit playin’ until you been told to quit playin’.” In the jazz clubs during the good old days of white supremacy and inherent, unfiltered racism (which could be either last century or last week), American black men took to calling one another ‘man’ – a required and regular reminder of respect between the oppressed that their fellow brother should be just as valid and just as valued as any other man in the place.

“Hey, man. You doin’ okay?”

Nowadays, folk like myself use the word without thinking of its true origins. It’s worth reflecting the next time you drop the word into conversation.

Those black me and women could trace their collective blood line back to slavery. Of the many thousands of Africans who were shipped to the Americas, the ethnicity of a large percentage of the people was rooted in the Wolof tribe. As with all indigenous people, the Wolofs kept their history alive through song, passing down stories and traditions from the elders through music and oral storytelling. Hence the phrase ‘folk music’.

The Wolof word for ‘music’ is ‘katt’, and it’s thought this is the origin of the phrase ‘jazz cat’.

Me, I’m a fair weather jazz fan. My list of favourite jazz albums would look as obvious and lightweight as one you might find published in the arts section of the Guardian or in the near-the-back pages of Mojo. Miles…Coltrane…Nina… bore off, pretentious jazz wanker. With the sun blazing a hole in the sky and the last week of the summer holiday slowly fizzling to a close, it’s Jimmy Smith‘s Back At The Chicken Shack that’s been doing it for me these past few days.

Here’s something to ponder – why is it that the soul and blues players kept their Sunday name – James Brown, James Carr, but the jazz cats adopted the more street variation – Jimmy McGriff, Jimmy Smith?

Anyway. Jimmy Smith. He’s the link between jazz and soul, his shimmering and colossal Hammond organ sound driving his group with a grit and right-on funkiness that’s impossible to dislike. Like all the best jazzers, his group was fluid and ever changing, evolving its sound as each musician passed through on their way to wherever it was they were going.

Jimmy Smith – Back At The Chicken Shack

On Back At The Chicken Shack‘s title track, Smith trades call and response organ phrases with the omnipresent Kenny Burrell on guitar and the ubiquitous Stanley Turrentine on tenor sax, his regular drummer Donald ‘Duck’ Bailey keeping the beat just on the right side of slow but progressive.

Burrell is all over the Blue Note catalogue, both as band leader and sideman, and his Gibson 400 CES ripples patterns of woody eloquence at every opportunity. On Back At The Chicken Shack he’s content to play understated augmented chords beneath Jimmy Smith’s expressive playing in the first and last sections, but in the middle, after his bandleader has given him the nod, he’s off and flying, fingers cleanly picking tight and taut melodies across the strings and frets with a speedy ease that’s both mesmerising (as a listener) and frustrating (as a hamfisted guitar player). His phrasing, the spaces he leaves between the notes, is perfect. Off-the-cuff-playing like this doesn’t come easy, as easy as it sounds.

Turrentine is no stranger to the Blue Note discography either and his forceful yet soothing sax playing swoops and soars in all the right places. The band falls in step behind him as he freeforms and riffs across the top of the steady groove being cooked up. If yr head ain’t nodding and yr foot ain’t tapping by this point, maybe you need to give your ears a wee clean out. Imagine hearing this live in a sweaty Village basement club, or even being spun by a hip DJ in the Flamingo in 1963, all the ace faces dancing in studied concentration. It’s enough to pop the buttons on yr tonic suit.

Back At The Chicken Shack – seek it out, man.

Gone but not forgotten, Live!

There Is No Culture Is My Brag*

Craig McAllister

There’s no gig goer on the planet whose live music experience isn’t enhanced by the headline act using a piece of classical music to herald their entrance to the stage.

Back at a Cult show in 1987, the Barrowlands lights went down and instantly Wagner’s Ride Of The Valkyries played at deafening volume. Strobes flashed, silhouettes of road crew and band members were frozen in position momentarily on-stage and the crowd, already at fever pitch, swirled and heaved as one giant organism to the booming classical music while the flickering group members strapped on their instruments and took their spots. The unmistakable outline of Astbury-as-Morrison leaned into the mic. The backline lights swept upwards to bathe the room in technicolour. Valkyries ended and the drummer (one of a series of revolving Cult sticksmen of the era) twirled his sticks as Billy Duffy, shrouded in dry ice and adopting a leather-trousered legs apart rock pose, picked the opening riff to Nirvana. It’s even louder than the intro music, it’s theatre and it works. Apocalpyse now!

From their September 1984 tour of the UK onwards, The Smiths famously took to the stage to the high drama of Prokofiev’s March of the Capulets, the signature piece from the Ukrainian composer’s score that would accompany the ballet of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.

The Smiths – Intro Music, Irvine Magnum Centre 22.9.85

You’ll be more than familiar with old Sergei’s tune these days, Smiths fan or otherwise, due maybe to its inclusion in the Roman orgy-fuelled Caligula (another tenuous Smiths reference there), but certainly to its ubiquity on The Apprentice, where it soundtracks Alan Sugar’s every arrival in the boardroom. The piece of music’s sense of foreboding and knives-out tension is perfect for a pre-sacking amuse-bouche. It’s over-played these days to the point of pantomime, but back in 1984, to hear this booming out of The Smiths PA must have been genuinely thrilling. The increasing tension of Prokofiev’s score giving way to the euphoria that accompanied Morrissey’s rasping “hallo!” – it’s this that upsets me most about missing The Smiths in concert. Not the songs they’d play. Not the sense of communion. It’s that sense of anticipation of what is to come, and it’s Prokofiev’s music that does this.

A good musicologist would point to the semitones involved in the music’s refraining opening bars (dum-dah, dum-dah – see also ‘Jaws’) and the heady combination of dynamics and dissonance, of hellraising brass and high sweeping strings that simultaneously jangle the nerves and set the heart a-flutter, but to these ears it’s just a perfect piece of dramatic music, the ideal fanfare for a band steeped in spectacle and highbrow culture.

There’s a lighter section, all butterfly flutters on delicate strings and a suggestion, perhaps, of respite or even just a glimmer of hope on the horizon, before the brass blows its wicked way in again and the whole thing tramples all over you. In Romeo and Juliet, there’s no doubt that those Capulets are truly marching and totally unstoppable, and you fairly get the sense of this in Prokofiev’s attention-grabbing score.

In an interview I did with him a few years back, Mike Joyce told me that, even now when he hears it, the hairs on his arms stand to attention.

“…and I still know the exact part of the music when we’d turn to one another, nod and begin our walk onto the stage. The roar of the crowd as their anticipation is realised, becoming deafening as I take my seat and then Morrissey’s opening line before it all kicked off. Doing that every night never got boring, let me tell you.”

Smiths trainspotters can no doubt point to the exact version of March Of The Capulets used by The Smiths. That’d be the Philadelphia Orchestra recording from 1982, as conducted by Riccardo Muti, of course. Rake long and patiently and you’ll maybe find it at the back of a box of classical records in your local British Heart Foundation shop. That’s where I found mine.

Suite No. 2 from Romeo and Juliet, Op. 64ter: I. The Montagues and Capulets

Philadelphia Orchestra cond. by Riccardo Muti

Smiths trainspotters can also undoubtedly point to the group’s show in Gloucester on the 24th September 1984 as the first time their group would enter the stage in such giddy fashion. In keeping with his persona of the time, Morrissey welcomed everyone with a  ‘hello, you little scallywags‘ before Johnny led the others into Hand In Glove.

Now, that’s how you start a show!

*That headline? The Classical, innit. If y’know, y’know. And I know you do.

Get This!, Gone but not forgotten

Homo Superior In My Interior

Craig McAllister

It’s 1981. Buzzcocks come together to begin working on their fourth album, Martin Rushent in the producer’s chair. The band is broke, both financially and creatively. Pete Shelley, stuck in a deep rut of writer’s block, brings a handful of half-finished songs left over from his pre-Buzzcocks days. The others bring nothing much at all.  With the sessions quickly collapsing, Rushent suggests to the group that Buzzcocks take a break. The producer and singer though, they alight in Rushent’s state-of-the-art studio to work on some of Pete’s tracks.

Pete Shelley’s resultant *debut album Homosapien might’ve spun with the same spiky frothiness as the act he’s most associated with, but it was glossed in a sheen of Rushent-powered machinery; synths, drum machines and programmed sequencers that were very much in keeping with the musical landscape of 1981. The cover tells the story – a careful placement of arcane artefacts and cutting edge technology that dates it somewhere in a near future where Kraftwerk might meet Blake’s Seven around the boardroom table for a healthy discussion on the merits of analogue vs digital. The result, if we’re being honest, was a bit of a mixed bag. The eponymous lead single though? That’s a stone cold cracker.

Homosapien judders and jars its way in on the same motorised rhythm as Buzzcocks’ Something’s Gone Wrong Again, all mid-paced bounce, effect-heavy 12 string acoustic guitars, their swirling chords slashed and stabbed. It makes for a great sound. It even finds space to add an undercurrent of I Wanna Be Your Dog-giness in the verses…verses that borrow heavily from the sequenced bassline that throbs its way through Abba’s Does Your Mother Know? Play them back to back yourself and tell me I’m wrong. I bet Rushent knew exactly what he was doing here. Why wouldn’t a producer keen for a hit want to borrow a hint of DNA from pop music’s greatest contemporary hit makers?!

For all the producer’s sprinkling of magic though, it’s the singer who’s the real star of the show here. Shelley’s delivery is, as ever, terrifically sneery and archly camp, double tracked at the end of lines and even more so all over the chorus, adlibbing up and up the scales as the record fades out. It’s once you focus on the words being sung that the gravity of the record becomes crystal clear.

‘Shy boy, coy boy, cruisers, losers’.

‘Homo superior in my interior‘

‘I don’t wanna classify you like an animal in the zoo‘.

‘I just hope and pray that the day of our love is at hand‘.

‘You and I, me and you, will be one from two, understand?‘

Adding such a transparent lyric was for sure a real, eh, ballsy move by Shelley, but once it had found the ear of a jobsworth radio researcher, the record was promptly banned by the BBC. The organisation who beamed Larry Grayson into millions of living rooms every Saturday night was aghast at the record’s ‘overt references to homosexuality‘.

Exhibit A, m’lud: ‘Homo superior in my interior‘.

What a zinger of a line but.

With the era of diversity and acceptance still just a formative if growing movement on the horizon, Homosapien is perhaps the first pop song to use non-coded lyrics to get its message across. It’s brave stuff to be writing, singing, recording and releasing in 1981.

No Homosapien, no Smalltown Boy perhaps. No Smalltown Boy, no open discussions around the living room telly during Top of the Pops as its video plays for the umpteenth time. In its own small way, Homosapien is a groundbreaking record. It’s almost a bonus that it sounds utterly fantastic, and more so 40+ years later.

 

 

*We’re not counting Pete’s pre-Buzzcocks 1974’s experimental, instrumental album Sky Yen, are we? Are we?

Get This!, Gone but not forgotten

This Ain’t Livin’

Craig McAllister

I was punishing myself on the cross-trainer of death the other morning, slick rivers of sweat pooling in my hair and under my double chin, a dark, damp South America-shaped land mass of perspiration creeping slowly down my t-shirt, the ear buds on my ancient iPod slippy with wetness and falling continually out of my ears, when this came on.

Marvin Gaye – Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)

Its perfectness stopped me dead in my tracks.

Resting, I listened through gulped breaths of fresh air as it spun its golden sound from those stupid wee plastic things in my earholes, into my brain and down into my hands and vocal chords, where wee finger snaps were joined by spontaneous, harmonised ‘daddle-ah-dah-dahs’ from my own fair voice. It’s just as well for all concerned that I was the sole occupant of the gym at the time.

As far as socially-conscious music goes – and such fury stretches the decades from Billie Holiday to Kneecap – nothing comes close to Marvin Gaye‘s flawless 1971 masterpiece What’s Going On. Perhaps its greatest moment is the album closer Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler).

Since that rare moment in the gym (and you can take that in more than one way), I’ve listened to the track on repeat – properly, as Marvin intended, continually dropping the needle on a record spinning on a loudly-amped turntable – swimming in its headspin of lyricism and musicality, soaking in its every nuance and never once tiring of it.

It begins with the original clanging chimes of doom, four reverberating E flat minor 7th piano chords, stately and symphonic and setting you up for what follows. Nigel from Spinal Tap once claimed that there’s no sadder key than E minor. Nige, mate, try E flat minor. Then pair it with Marvin’s finger pointing lyric of despair; beat poetry set to fantastic music, its message addressing the frivolousness of the space race, the pointlessness of young men dying in war, race riots, increasing taxes and decreasing standards of living. Half a decade earlier, its author was too busy thinking ’bout his baby. Suddenly, he’d grown a beard and grown up.

Rockets?!? Moon shots?!? he asks incredulously.

Spend it on the have-nots!

And we’re off, congas and ting-a-ling percussion adding light to the shade of those piano chords.

Money. We make it.

Before we see it, you take it.

Oh, make me wanna holler, the way they do my life. 

This ain’t livin’.

Question: D’you zoom in on the lyric first, or is your attention grabbed by the lush orchestration of funk that oozes from every note?

Answer: You take in both, simultaneously, (it’s called multi-tasking and even men can do this) but this requires repeated plays to allow the whole stew to sink properly in.

Inflation. No chance

to increase finance.

Bills pile up, sky high

Send that boy off to die

Oh, make me wanna holler, the way they do my life. 

It’s the bassline that does it for me. A looping, call and response five note exercise in restrained and understated funk, it’s the bedrock upon which the whole thing swings. By this point in the track, muted brass is punctuating Marvin’s key words, a shimmer of strings has subtly turned up the ante and a sashay of bah-bah-bah-backing vocals is smoothing the edge from the words that continue to rain down. Imagine being in the room when this was being created. Imagine!

Hang ups. Let downs.

Bad breaks. Set backs.

Natural fact is

I can’t pay my taxes

Oh, make me wanna holler, throw up both my hands. 

The way Marvin harmonises with himself, one voice rich and low, the other pure and high, his wee adlibbed yows delivering the requisite soul…it’s all tremendous stuff. (As if you need me to tell you that.)

Violence increasin’

Trigger-happy policin’

Panic is spreadin’

God knows where we’re headin’.

A key change. That’s where we’re headin’.

Perfectly-placed within the track, it’s heady stuff and it elevates the listener further still. Flutes waft their way in like Gil Scott-Heron’s groovy cousin and the track takes a turn into new, yet familiar territory, as it refrains the mother mother lines from the album’s title track, a jazz trumpet winding in the melody as it all fades out, the perfect bookend on the perfect album.

What’s Going On? Is it a question to the listener or is it a statement to the world, a marker of the times? In Marvin’s case, it was a definite statement piece, an artistic declaration that’s become a key document of the times in which it was made.

For a pop label like Motown to allow – or rather cede – to its artist’s wishes of producing a whole concept of socio-political funk when it would rather have been churning out two and a half minute pop/love songs, is amazing. That they let Marvin do this paved the way for Stevie Wonder to take auteurship of his catalogue from then on in…and we all know how fantastic that particular run of albums would be.

 

 

 

 

Gone but not forgotten

Jam Session

Craig McAllister

I’ve a songwriter friend who once found themselves at a songwriters’ retreat somewhere in Ireland. Above the room where the musicians shared their songs and swapped ideas, someone who was connected to Sinead O’Connor listened intently to the tunes as they filtered up and through the floorboards.

The next morning, this person sought out my pal. “Can you play that song for me?” he asked. “I think Sinead would really like it and I can help you get it to her.”

A few days later they were in Sinead’s house.

“She’s sleeping just now, but when she comes down, you can’t mention the song. It must be her idea to record it. If she thinks I or you had the idea, it’ll never happen. She knows who you are, so if you’re patient the talk will get around to song writing anyway.”

By all accounts Sinead was normal and homely and chatty, a partner and a mum who just happened to be dynamite at the job she was best-known for. She and my pal went bramble picking in the hedgerows around her house. When they returned, the songwriter watched as Sinead emptied their spoils from two Mace plastic bags, boiled the gathered fruits and made them into jam. There was, and never would be, any talk about Sinead recording a version of my pal’s (brilliant, as it happens) song. C’est la vie etc etc.

I’ve long-loved Sinead’s vocal contribution to Jah Wobble‘s Visions Of You.

Jah Wobble’s Invaders of the Heart – Visions Of You

It’s Wobble’s bass of course that captures the ear first. A tune within a tune, it’s an elasticated and twangy groovy rumble that plays high up the frets. Indeed, it sounds like it might’ve wafted itself straight offa the grooves of the Dub Symphony version of Higher Than The Sun on Screamadelica – y’know, the album that, with more than a little help from their friends, took Primal Scream from an Asda-priced Guns ‘n Roses tribute act to the lysergically-kissed Mercury-winning last gang in town. Need a dubby, ever-playing and never-ending bassline to expand the senses? Want it to unravel for at least eight mind-melting minutes? Would you like it lightly toasted and mantra-inducing, sir? Forged by punk and steeped in roots reggae, Jah Wobble’s yr man.

Sinead O’Connor’s vocals are ace. Crystalline, calming and as clear as her emerald green eyes, they’re wafty and ethereal, her adlibbing ‘ah-uhs’ throughout it taking the track further east and further out there.

Jah Wobble’s Invaders of the Heart – Visions Of You (The Secret Love Child Of Hank And Johnny mix)

Eastern sounding minor chords. Highly strung one chord strums. Snaking melodies. Tablas and twang. Sitars and psychedelics. Dub-inflected desert blues. Sinead adlibbing somewhere in the background as the melody unspools. A cat dancing willy nilly across the keys of a hot to trot hammond organ and then, with a military shuffle of the snare, the drop.

And the bass.

The lovely bass.

Noodling and hypnotic and utterly magic.

Oh yeah.

On the single cut, Wobble’s vocals are cowboy-like (hence that appropriately-named Weatherall remix above), a pub singer whose real talent lies between his fingers and those four thick strings, a voice out of place yet perfect for the track’s multi-cultural ethos and vibe. On the stretched out Weatherall reworking, Wobble’s vocals are almost non existent, replaced instead by all manner of instrumentation, random movie samples, ricocheting drum breaks and fancy augmentation. It’s a beauty, obviously.

I want visions of you…L-S-D.

Has there ever been a better misheard lyric?! I thought for years that Sinead O’Connor was singing about acid, about expanding the mind, opening up the possibilities of the cosmos and all that jazz. It’s a lyric that’s arguably more fitting and better than the one Sinead employed (she sings ‘end-less-ly‘). My misheard line would’ve slotted nicely into the track’s trippy, dubby ambience and stratospheric cosmicness.

A jam of a whole different kind, Visions Of You still has the power to thrill and surprise in equal measure.

 

Gone but not forgotten

Lines That Rhyme

Craig McAllister

I once found myself in deep conversation

With a songwriter who’s known not so much through the nation

But whose songs will be known to everyone here

And the more interesting parts of the world’s blogosphere

Sitting just chatting and shooting the breeze

Their setlist half-written, their guitar at my knees

“Tell me a story…drop me a name..

…give me an insight ‘to your wee world of fame

Spare me no details…spare me them none,

but what’s the most rock ‘n roll thing that you’ve done?“

 

They thought for an instant then immediately said,

“I can tell you this story because the subject is dead.

I was somewhere on tour, in a van, not a plane

And I found myself sitting beside Kurt Cobain

One thing led to another, there’s no-one to blame

But I found myself doing cocaine with Cobain

Yes, I found myself doing cocaine with Cobain.”


Nirvana – Dumb

I’ve always loved ‘Dumb‘ from In Utero. The full album is, for many, Nirvana’s masterpiece; raw, ragged, expertly captured on tape by the royalty-waiving Steve Albini. The band is on top form. Slabs of floor-shaking, earth-quaking bass guitar, anvil-heavy drumming that sounds live and in the room, shards of abrasive, metallic, blowtorch guitar surfing violently across the rhythm section, the band’s loud/quiet/loud template caustically Brillo Padded out of all recognition by Albini’s crucial touch.

Thirty years ago it * sounded quite brilliant. Now, I need to be in a particular mood to indulge myself in it…and I ain’t been in a stinking mood like that since about 1994. It’s too screamy, too raw for me nowadays. If I want screamy I’ll take Surfer Rosa‘s more visceral moments. Raw? Gimme Flip Your Wig, thanks very much. (* you can apply this take to the Manics’ Holy Bible album also).

But Dumb is still box-fresh magic, the polite wee brother of Nevermind‘s Lithium. Where Lithium roars, Dumb whispers. Where Lithium soars (and by God, it soars), Dumb remains grounded. Discipline is required for this. Any gang of itchy-fingered musicians will, given half a chance, thrash and roar their way to the finish line. Nirvana could do that in spades. On Dumb though, they applied a different approach.

Clean strummed electric guitar that’s a happy pill away from breaking into Shocking Blue’s Venus, a resigned and slowly sighing cello, Krist’s choppy and thunking bassline and Dave’s steady head-nodding beat carrying it forward. Great cymbals. No fuzz. No Big Muff. No pedals at all. The dynamics are all in the playing and arrangement and it kills. Kurt’s vocals crack in parts, but considering the issues he was going through at the time, he’s in remarkably fine voice. His vocal is fantastic, in fact; controlled, measured, tuneful. Really sensational. There’s a great double-tracked vocal (1 min 09s) where he harmonises with both himself and the cello in that eerie and strange way he does, creating a ghostly third note and elevating the track instantly to one of Nirvana’s best.

The lyric? You can interpret that how you like. Some folk will (naturally) say it’s about Cobain’s addictions. Me? I think it’s saying that if you could really see how messed up the world is, you’d never be happy. Only dumb people are happy because they don’t have the capacity for deep thought. It’s a lyric that, if interpreted this way, rings true to this day and quite possibly forever more.

I bet you’d forgotten how great Dumb was. And still is. The real deal.

 

 

Get This!, Gone but not forgotten

God Vibrations

Craig McAllister

There are by now tons of pages and hundreds of thousands of words out there in tribute to the just-passed Brian Wilson, leader of the Beach Boys and conduit of some of the greatest creative pop music we will ever be blessed with. Many of those words, having been written by people who are far more qualified than me, will carry gravitas and authenticity, grandiloquence and authority. I’m on hat-tipping terms with a couple of lucky folk who interviewed him at various points in time, both of whom have proper Wilson-related stories that they’ve shared in recent days. Me, I’m just a fan with a typewriter.

Wilson’s compositions have affected me since first hearing them; safe and politely rockin’ hot rod and surfing anthems, love songs to unattainable caramel-skinned girls on sandy beaches, the actual sound of a summer that’s strangely alien to any Ayrshireman, set out in giddy four-part harmony to a rock ‘n roll back beat. The Beach Boys could make California seem like the promised land, and in that formative era when the most exciting TV was American (Starsky & Hutch, the Six Million Dollar Man, Dallas even), it all fed into the idea of an ideal world.

At some point I alighted on Pet Sounds, the album which was painstakingly made by Wilson in the midst of a full-on marijuana and LSD awakening. Like many of you here, I went properly nuts for it. The box set, the original mono vinyl, multiple tickets for the various Pet Sounds tours in the early ’00s. There’s not a bad track on it and every play throws up – cliche alert – new things still. It’s the record that proves – to use another well-worn cliche – Brian Wilson’s genius.

Genius. It’s thrown around a lot these days. And here’s me doing it too. What does the word even mean? If you look at the dictionary, it defines it as ‘exceptional intellectual or creative power or other natural ability.’

So, yeah, with his natural grasp of melodic structure and chord progressions and multi-layered harmonies and interesting musicality and fantastic arranging abilities and creative production techniques and ability to carve a heart-stopping melody from outta nowhere, Brian Wilson is an undisputed genius. Was an undisputed genius. Man, he’s in the past tense now.

Pet Sounds is the critics’ choice, the easy pick in many ways, but to these ears it’s where the Beach Boys (or Brian Wilson really, as by now he was the undisputed architect of the group’s sound) broke free of traditional pop music structures (verse/chorus/verse) and conventions (electric guitars, four to the floor drums, sax breaks) and ushered in a brave new sound that was created as much to get one up on The Beatles as it was to challenge himself and his audience.

There’s a run of Beach Boys albums at the end of the ’60s into the ’70s that’s the equal of any of those ‘classic’ album runs you read about in the usual places. Wild Honey – Friends – 20/20 – Sunflower – Surf’s Up – Carl and the Passions – Holland (plus the long-delayed Smile project at the start of it all). There’s not a bad album amongst them. Sure, there are occasional clunkers within the tracklistings (Surf’s Up‘s absolutely honking Student Demonstration Time for one, Wild Honey‘s How She Boogalooed It, the sore thumb in an album that’s otherwise soulful and considered being another – both bog standard 12 bar blues tracks, as it goes), but there’s not a record collection on the planet that wouldn’t be enhanced by the addition of any one of these records.

Off the top of my head:

Surf’s Up‘s Feel Flows, Disney Girls and Til I Die. Oh, and Long Promised Road‘s mid-section. And the title track. It’s a work of art, that album.

Sunflower‘s All I Wanna Do and Forever.

Friends’ Little Bird

20/20’s Never Learn Not To Love

Holland’s Sail On Sailor and Funky Pretty

Wild Honey’s Darlin’ and Let The Wind Blow

Carl and the Passions’ Marcella and You Need A Mess Of Help To Stand Alone

The entirety of Smile (Heroes & Villains…Cabinessence…Vege-Tables…Child Is The Father Of The Man…Good Vibrations)

You get the drift.

Not everything was written by Brian. As the band fell into more comfortable clothes, grew out their hair and turned beardy and weirdy, all members stepped up a gear to keep pace with their leader’s unblinkered vision. But everything came stamped with Wilson’s kite mark of quality – the arrangements, the incidental music, the high floatin’, gravity-defyin’ harmonies; a singular vision achieved with the help of willing participants, even if his group members didn’t always immediately ‘get’ Brian’s grand ideas.

The Beach Boys – Til I Die

Til I Die‘s wafty and woozy vocal is perfect. Is it autobiographical?

‘I’m a cork on the ocean…how deep is the ocean…I lost my way…”

It most certainly is, Brian pondering his insignificance in an ever-evolving musical landscape, the musicians behind him tinkling tastefully and respectfully until the world catches up. The slowly unspooling and overlapping stacked vocals, the major 7ths, the glockenspiels and chimes, the Fender bass that roots it all… it’s the sound of complete contentment and the perfect summation of Brian Wilson as a composer.

Musical fashions change like the Scottish weather. Hair, clothes, guitars, synths, the in, the out. Brian Wilson cared for none of that. The world at large didn’t always appreciate his vast talents, but you and I and countless others did. What a loss.

Football, Gone but not forgotten

Full Time After Time Added On

Craig McAllister

A seismic occasion occurred today with the breaking up of the boy’s football goals. A present for his 7th birthday, they’re being dismantled and gotten rid of after the best part of a dozen well-worn years. Or should that be seasons? They’ve been a feature of the back garden almost as much as the cluster of plant pots on the wall (sorry, shy line) and the shrubs that have since grown into trees. I haven’t felt this resigned and melancholy since the day we gave his big sister’s dolls house away to friends with younger girls. Like Andy in Toy Story 3, this seems momentous yet inevitable; the literal breaking up of childhood, the boy now a young man with a full driving licence and miles of foreign travel on his passport and miles of Edinburgh Marathon training in his legs and a place on a desirable course at Glasgow University and a healthy indulgence of the social life that goes with it…what does he want with a set of football goals these days?

It wasn’t always like this. I remember building them on a freezing cold November Sunday. My parents had taken the kids away for the afternoon and we had a couple of hours window in which to construct them in secret. I had, at best, one and a half built, with no nets yet attached, when I heard my dad arrive with the kids. The half-built goals were quickly and roughly shoved to the wall, just under the kitchen window and not finished, under torchlight, until the boy was in bed. The desired surprise effect the next morning was immediate and thrilling. Throwing open his curtains, the boy was out in his pyjamas and dressing gown before the kettle had fully boiled, booting his ball goalwards with an enthusiasm and determination that barely let up for a decade.

He’d pester me to play. “One more game! Just one more game!” Spring. Summer. Autumn. Winter. It didn’t matter. “Your tea’s out!” That didn’t matter either. It’d be dusk, then dark, then pitch black and he would still be reeling off excitable and breathy high-pitched commentary of imaginative matches where he, the wee guy, overcame the odds to defeat me, the big guy. “It’s through the legs…he leaves him dizzy…he rounds the keeper…it must be……GOAL!!!” and he’d run away, arms aloft like a million wee kids before him and since.

His pals would be round. Half a dozen wee boys getting torn into a properly competitive game. Yellow cards, defensive walls at free kicks, the lot. If I was lucky, there’d be an odd number and I’d be called into action like some ageing and doughy super-sub to make up the numbers. We had balls lost to the railway line over the fence. Balls lost to neighbours on both sides. Burst balls. Burst nets. Broken plant pots. Broken fences. Broken wrists. Broken hearts when it was bedtime.

He was football daft. He joined a team. He trained one night a week with them, and the other six nights he’d play with me; passing drills, turning and shooting, shielding the ball, tackling. Everyone  – everyone – was bigger than him (not now) and this informal training helped him to develop his game. It’s only in the last year or so that he’s stopped playing, by which time he was the best passer of the ball in the team, the designated corner taker where more often than not his crosses would be met full-on by the head of an aggressive team mate, and the most industrious and hard-working player in the squad, his envied and much talked-about close-control skills honed over hours on his wee pitch out the back door.

He still is football daft. We go to games together (Kilmarnock and Scotland) and I hope this never ends. I’m sure he’d like to travel with his pals to more games than he has done already, but there’s an unspoken rule that the football is our thing and our thing alone, and that’s just fine with me.

Before the breaking up of the goals, we had just one more game. The pitch (let’s not be pretentious any more, it’s a few metres of astroturf) suddenly seemed much smaller than before. The acres of space down both wings has been somewhat reduced. The ease it which both of us could turn one another inside out has greatly diminished (for one of us, at any rate). And don’t even think about scoring. Now I see what he’s seen for all those years – a big giant between the posts with nary an inch on either side to try and squeeze the ball into. No wonder he got good at the trick stuff, regularly wrong-footing me before wheeling away to celebrate with his mum at the kitchen window (sorry, the fans in the Directors’ Box).

“Replicate your goal celebration,” said Killie, “and we’ll make you the poster boy for the season ticket campaign.”

 

I’d like to tell you I let him win that final game. That’s what dads do, after all. But, in something of a role-reversal, he went easy on me. He’s bigger, stronger, more skilful. And smart-arsed with it too. So he rainbow flicked and nutmegged and stepped-over and wrong-footed me until I was dizzy. Then, as he momentarily slept at his front post, the pair of us bent double with laughter, I slotted a fly back heel in for the winner. Competitive dad to the very end.

“Penalties!” I suggested, eking out the very last of this last match. I beat him 3-2 on that front too. So, I’m the winner…but more importantly, I’m the winner. Who wouldn’t want to still be kicking a ball about with their children when they’re 18?

After full time, with extra time added on, it’s game over for the goalposts. But not the father/son thing. That’s got many more years still to go.

Here’s Roy Harper’s wistful and ultra-melancholic When An Old Cricketer Leaves The Crease. Maybe it’s Harper’s resigned voice. Maybe its the stately brass band that carries him home. Or maybe it’s the realisation that I’ll never kick a ball with the boy in the same way again. Either way, I appear to have something in my eye.

Roy Harper –  When An Old Cricketer Leaves The Crease

It’s Good Friday. Maybe by Sunday these’ll be resurrected and back in place.

 

 

Gone but not forgotten

Bury, Chuck

Craig McAllister

Comin’ outta the traps at 100mph, I Want You was the rich fruit of the unlikely pairing of Mark E Smith and Inspiral Carpets.

I Want You – Inspiral Carpets feat. Mark E Smith

It’s a brilliant racket, Mark’s gub full o’ gum filtered through a megaphone vocals the snarly yin to Tom Hingley’s look ma, I made the school choir bellowy yang. It’s very Fall-like, a clattering slab of snarky garage punk that might’ve peeled itself from the caustic grooves of Extricate or Shift Work, with Mark coming in, as is his wont, half-way through the second bar, the group behing him revving up slabs of power chords, propelled breathlessly by a rifling snare drum that sounds as if Craig Gill himself toppled backwards from the top of the mountain marked ‘indie-dance’, broke his drum kit but somehow kept it together enough for the length of the track. Essentially, the song is a three minute snare solo with shouting.

The Inspiral Carpets provide the pop edge, both Tim Hingley and Clint Boon wrapping their Oldham vocal chords around the melody to provide some good old-fashioned call and response backing vocals like some lost in space ’60s beat combo. Hingley takes the second verse. Mark spits his replies. The hefty chunk of basic barre chords and concrete slab bass maintain the urgency. And still the snare drum rattles. There’s some sort of warped duet by the third verse, Hingley’s baritone allowing Smith to freeform and riff around the melody. There’s nary a hint of Boon’s trademark wheezy Farfisa nor the hippity skippity shuffling beat that made early Inspirals so goddam infectious, garagey and danceable. Indeed, ol’ Mark E goes out of his way to blast any silly notions like that clean outta the Lancashire air. He drawls, he shouts, he coughs, he yelps…and he’s totally, totally into it. Driven on by their master, the Inspirals find new sounds in this brave new world of theirs. The record is billed as ‘Inspiral Carpets featuring Mark E Smith’, yet if it was billed as ‘Mark E Smith featuring Inspiral Carpets’, no one could question it.

I think you should remember whose side you are-ah on-ah, as he states on I Want You. “I love the Inspirals,” he said at the time. “Pure pop, innit?”

Released in 1994, just as the UK was waking up to the hot new sounds created by a former Inspiral Carpets roadie and the promise of a new musical movement just around the corner, it’s a real pity that neither Smith or the Inspirals thought to eke out an album’s worth of tunes. Perhaps the Inspirals had desires on recreating their late ’80s/early ’90s success with an audience tuned in to all things ’60s, or perhaps they realised the game was up. Their record compnay certainly did – Mute dropped them four months later. The Fall would turn up as support act on the last Inspirals’ tour. Mark would continue to kick against the pricks, releasing a pair of patchy mid ’90s Fall albums – Middle Class Revolt and Cerebral Caustic – that never veered far from the Fall blueprint, whether the public at large liked ’em or not. And he kept rollin’ on regardless.

 

The charting of the single meant going on Top Of The Pops, something that Mark E Smith hadn’t experienced at this point. He was – expectedly – awkward and contrarian and managed to offend 2 Unlimited, Eastenders’ Gillian Taylforth, the sainted Elvis Costello and most of the TOTP team. By the time the band was due to film, it had been put to the Inspirals’ manangement that they might be better going on without him…but no one was brave enough to confront the guest vocalist.

Here’s the brilliant Mark-enhanced Top Of The Pops appearance that found its way into living rooms up and down the country, the Inspirals bowl-cutted and rockin’ out (and Martyn perma-fiddling with the tuning pegs of his bass guitar – how very Fall), Mark with one hand in the pocket of his leather blouson, occassionally freeing it to read the song’s lyrics from a scribbled piece of paper. It’s a darkly-lit studio, there’s a lightning war of strobes to accompany the Stooges thunder on the stage and the front couple of rows in the audience are shakin’ loose and gettin’ down to it. A properly great piece of pop telly.

Get This!, Gone but not forgotten

Trailer Swift

Craig McAllister

I’ve fallen out with BBC 6 Music in the morning. It’s all gone a bit too Radio 1 for me; no Lauren Laverne + 1 very sterile playlist x Nick “yawlraight?” Grimshaw ≠ a good start to the day. Since the turn of the year I’ve been using the daily commute to catch up with Guy Garvey’s Sunday afternoon show. Depending on the traffic and if I’m able to fast forward through days’-old news bulletins whilst driving, I can listen to the I’m Guy Garvey From Elbow Show in 8 or 9 chunks – almost a perfect week of soundtracked commuting. Guy Garvey From Elbow plays a decent mix of old and new, from the unheard and unknown to the overplayed and overblown, but there’s usually something every three or four records that really piques the interest – and that’s a high kite mark and very good personal ‘hit’ ratio by any show’s standards.

A couple of shows ago, Guy Garvey, the Elbow singer, played this. I was instantly grabbed.

Richard Swift – Looking Back I Should Have Been Home More

What a tune! From its opening clip-clopping barroom piano via its sunstroke cymbal splashes and Swift’s gear-shifting vocal in the chorus, right to the bit at the end when the wind instruments swirl and dance around the melody in a none-more-Beatles way and the backing singers go, “Woo-ah-ooh-ah-oo-oo!” until the fade out has been, gone and vanished, I knew this was a track that I’d be playing on repeat for the rest of the journey…and the rest of the next week, as it came to it.

Repeated immersion in the song revealed some lovely touches; little piano trills and triplets at the end of occasional lines…a horizontal drummer (very probably Swift himself) with exactly the right wee small hours feel… a drop out and a build up… a great chord change in the ‘hold on…’ section of the chorus…but most of all the greatest of all unravelling melodies, delivered in the basking warmth of the singer’s homely tone – breathy and reedy in the main but with requisite crack and crumble for the many sad parts (the title is the great giveaway here). It’s just about the greatest song I’ve heard this year, and it’s taken from an album that was released 20 years ago.

I don’t know how I missed out on Richard Swift until now. Looking Back… ambles along like some of those great Ed Harcourt / Cherry Ghost tracks from 20+ years ago, tracks I formed a mild obsession with at the time and I’m certain Guy Garvey From Elbow will have played Richard Swift in the past. I guess my antennae hadn’t been fully receptive until now. It turns out that (of course) Guy Garvey, the Voice of Elbow, is great friends with Richard Swift.

Or, rather, was friends with him.

In a sad twist of affairs, it turns out that back in 2018, Richard Swift was an alcoholic who very slowly and very methodically and, it seems, somewhat deliberately, drank himself to death.

A musicians’ musician, he was a touring member of The Shins and The Black Keys, a foil and touring support act for Jeff Tweedy and Wilco, someone equally at home blasting out southern-fried Strokes with the Kings Of Leon as he was when putting together his own bible belt southern soul gospel-tinged records. A studio obsessive since his early teens, he famously had a trailer in his back yard where he maintained a cluttered but inspirational studio that he modelled on the creative chaos of Lee Perry’s Black Ark space and called National Freedom. It was here that Swift summoned the magic that went into his songs and onto record. He’s got a whole catalogue out there, most of it conceived in National Freedom, and I’m looking forward to jumping in head (and ears) first. Better late than never.

Coincidentally, I saw David Hepworth on Instagram tonight talking about his record collection – “or rather an accumulation of records…records that followed me home over the years and got filed away,” and how he’d picked out a 45 year-old Brian Eno album that he’d never listened to until this week that he now can’t get enough of. “Don’t pursue the music,” he advised. “The music will find you at the time when you’re ready to hear it. Sometimes it can take 45 years…and that doesn’t matter.” Good advice, that. And spot on too. Guy Garvey From Elbow’s show on BBC 6 Music is proof of that.

Just search for The Guy Garvey From Elbow Show and you’ll find it all in one click.

You can find Richard Swift’s music on Bandcamp and Secretly Canadian.