Category: Gone but not forgotten

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.

Gone but not forgotten, Hard-to-find

John, Paul, George and Ringwear

Craig McAllister

The impressively-named Rutherford Chang died a couple of weeks ago.

Who? you say.

What!? I retort. D’you mean you never followed him on Instagram? 

It’s a fascinating story…

The son of a Palo Alto tech bigwig, Rutherford’s comfortable lifestyle allowed him to forego a normal working routine, instead affording him the time and resources to indulge in high conceptual art; taking the front page of the New York Times and, with all the news that’s fit to print, rearranging every piece of text into alphabetical order; cutting and pasting all of Asian actor Andy Lau’s numerous and varied death scenes into one near-half hour video compilation of death after death after death; editing a George W. Bush State of the Nation speech by removing all of the President’s words and leaving only Bush’s pauses, coughs, breaths, rustles and the crowd reactions in place. Crazy and interesting stuff like this.

A chance teenage purchase of a second-hand Beatles’ White Album in the late ’90s would lead him to his defining concept, one which would bring his name to a wider audience and one which would allow him to fully indulge his need for order, ranking and system within his particularly niche world.

(When I get to the bottom I go back to the top of the slide.)

A while after buying that Beatles album, and noticing that a second copy of the same record in another shop had aged differently, Chang had the masterstroke of all conceptual ideas. He bought that second copy of the White Album and right there and then began to obsessively gather as many copies of the record as he could.  He advertised locally. He trawled record shops. Or stores, as he’d no doubt call them. He pored over Craig’s List. He sought out garage sales. And gradually, he amassed an impressive array of White Albums and only White Albums.

(Where I stop and I turn and I go for a ride.)

Battered, bruised, bashed, beat up, the more so the better. Those copies had more life in them, more unknown stories to tell. Chang was interested in how something that began life so white and pure – and mass produced – could end up discoloured, written on, stained and unique. The journey each record and it’s sleeve had taken was just as important to Chang as the music that filled their grooves.

(Till I get to the bottom)

“There are three million of them out there,” he said cheerfully in 2013, by which time he owned nearly 700 copies of the album. He played them all too. He set up a gallery space in New York’s Soho, recreated the feel of a classic record shop, stuck a ‘We Buy White Albums’ neon sign in the window and, when he wasn’t bartering with potential sellers, allowed gallery visitors to browse his ‘racks’, select a copy and stick it on the in-house turntable.

It was clear that, as they spun, some of his acquired copies were beautifully pristine. Some sounded like bacon and eggs frying down a well. Some jumped. Some stuck. Some were stereo copies. Some were mono. But all were versions of the same record.

(and I see you again

and again

and again

and again

and again

and again)

By 2014 – a year later, Chang had collected over 1000 copies, buying on average one copy a day since 2013. And, like the most diligent of museum collection curators, he meticulously catalogued them all. Where he’d bought it, how much he’d paid for it, what the stamped number on the front was, was it a mono or a stereo, a first press from the UK or a third press from the US, a seventeenth press from the Phillipines? And once catalogued, the records were displayed in his gallery. Dividers were slotted into bins, arranging the records by serial number or origin or year. Just like a real record shop, only different; this collection was a record of White Albums and the stories they held. Wouldn’t you just love a browse through them all?

He had a rule – hard to believe in 2025 – that no copy should cost him more than $20, but I’m not sure how steadfastly he managed to stick to that rule. He had some pretty low-numbered and interesting copies in there and, regardless of the state of any of them, I’ve sure never been lucky enough to upturn a copy of the record – mono, please, a toploader…with all the inserts, thanks – at anything under three figures. The one I found by chance in a box of records in New York’s Chelsea Market flea sale was a snip at a cool $599 and it looked like it had been well-loved, to be kind to it.

Even my bog standard ’80s reissue (yeah, it has the poster and the four portraits, as well as two slabs of well-looked after stereo vinyl) would fetch £40 on the current second-hand market. Not that Chang would’ve been too keen on securing mine. I appreciate he was all for securing copies that had seen a bit of life but, as long-term readers here may know, I drunkenly relieved myself on my prized copy on the night of my 18th birthday. Some of Rutherford’s copies had coffee stains. Some had food stains. Light brown pish stains though, the colour of an earthy Farrow And Ball paint chart? And this is none of your Greenwich Village hippy stoner pish either, I’m talking primo McEwan’s Lager pish stains from the west of Scotland. I bet Chang never had a copy quite like that. Bog standard, by the way. Pun intended.

What Rutherford did have was plentiful and interesting enough that his collection would travel to Liverpool to be shown in the city’s FACT art gallery. There, visitors could browse what was undeniably the largest collection White Albums in the world. Sleeves with scribbled names. Sleeves with love letters falling out of them. Sleeves with break-up letters inside them. Soft drugs, soft porn, money… sleeves teeming with the minutae of life. Sleeves teeming with the minutae of life, safeguarding one of music’s most important artistic statements. High concept art.

To accompany his travelling exhibition, Chang took 100 copies from his racks and did two things.

Using trick photography, he superimposed all of the 100 sleeves on top of one another to create a master sleeve that was anything but pure white. In its own way it’s a unique work of art.

He then took those same 100 records and built a wall of sound of the 100 records playing simultaneously. Due to a number of contributory factors; where the needle dropped, the minute variations in belt drive speed of the turntables, the gaps between the tracks themselves (micro seconds of a difference, if at all, but multiply that by 100…), Chang unwittingly produced? built? a proper slice of arty, woozy psychedelia that the Beatles themselves, and indeed, Yoko Ono, would’ve been proud of.

The delay-lay-layed way in which Dear Dear Prudence fades in on Back In The USSR‘s roaring jetstream…Glass Onion‘s sandpaper rumble and oh yeah-yeah-yeah- oh yeah-yeah-yeahs…, Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da‘s jittery and jangly piano intro (la la la la life goes on…and on…and on…) …the compressed mayhem of While My Guitar Gently Weeps-eeps-eeps…that bleeds into Warm Gun…Warm Gun Warm Gun…Yeah…Yeah…Yeah…Yeah… It makes for an interesting, occasionally unsettling (and possibly just once in a lifetime) listen. I wonder what Charles Manson would’ve made of it all.

At the time of his death two weeks ago, Rutherford Chang had amassed almost three and a half thousand White Albums. He was only 45 and had many more years of collecting ahead of him. I wonder what happens to the records now? Does someone take the project on? Do the people who sold them to Chang in the first instance get offered a chance to buy their copy back for the $20 they were paid? Rutherford’s detailed records will, after all, have all the necessary contact info. Or, does someone sell them all and rake in a whole load of money? I’m keeping a keen eye on things from over here.

 

demo, Gone but not forgotten, Hard-to-find

You’re Breaking My Heart

Craig McAllister

When Elliott Smith was making records, his output shot off in a rapid and upward curve of brilliance. From lo-fi scratchy beginnings to Beatles-great, full bhoona productions, his six albums in five years dazzle with deft fingerpicking and unusual chords, unravelling melodies and unwavering lyricism, every one of his great, great songs double-tracked and knee deep in melancholy and, often, total and utter sadness. And sad music is, as you know already, the best kind of music.

The posthumous world of Elliott Smith though? Bar a couple of noise-for-noise’s-sake thrashers and half-arsed unfinished sketches, it’s a proper treasure chest of rarely-heard/never intended to be heard nuggets. Often these are the equal of, and sometimes even better than, the songs released during Elliott’s lifetime.

The couple of official post-death releases in his discography have uncovered some real gems; New Moon‘s Looking Over My Shoulder and Whatever (Folk Song In ‘C’) are the picks in a ragbag full of alt versions and unreleased session tracks from across his earlier years. From A Basement On A Hill collates material from his later era major label recordings; better recorded, better produced, often overdubbed with multiple guitars, a rhythm section and, as has been said already, Beatles-level vocal arrangements. Twilight. Let’s Get Lost. A Fond Farewell. Look them up…but wallow first in the depths of Pretty (Ugly Before). It’s a real beauty.

Elliott Smith – Pretty (Ugly Before)

It begins with a wobbly keyboard droning the song’s melody behind a chiming, inverted Gmaj7 chord, it’s openness hinting at widescreen Elliott rather than introverted Elliott…

Sunshine. Keeping me up for days, sings Elliott in that breathy, gossamer-light voice of his.

“Ah shite,” you realise. “Elliott is back on the heroin. This can’t end well.” Yep. References to getting high, destruction, no nighttime – only a passing phase, confirm what you think.

The song unfolds with a gentle drum roll into a piano-backed mid-paced ballad, all chugging electrics and deft bass runs, unexpected chord changes and piano trills. By the end of the second chorus, Elliott has found the key to unlocking the track’s true potential. There’s a minor chord, a tightly jangling and country twangin’ 12 string that mimics his vocal melody (how very George), some politely slashing chords, a splash of cymbals and, on the turn of a 7th chord, the resolve. In the angle of Elliott’s exquisite jangle we have lift-off. When his singing returns, he’s double-tracked (how very John) and harmonising with himself, stretching out some very John and Paul backing vocals – ‘Ug-lee-bee-fore‘ – until the song fades its way into the sunset on a squiggle of backwards tape and wonky noise. How very brilliant. And how very Beatles. Such a great tune for a ballad about being a helpless junkie.

There is, far deeper down the Elliott rabbit hole, a bootleg album called From A White Basement On The Hill (Beatleish nod ahoy!) A reimagined fan-compiled album, its setlist is culled from poring over interviews with Elliott, discussions on fan forums, interactions with Elliott’s closest musical collaborators… a real and honest labour of love by all concerned. Dancing On The Highway. Memory Lane. Strung Out Again. Look them up…but wallow first in the depths of Cecilia-Amanda. Like Pretty (Ugly Before) above, it too is a real beauty.

Elliott Smith – Cecilia-Amanda

It’s another drug song, inevitably, with a heart-breaking pay-off in the final verse.

Elliott plays a great liquid mercury acoustic guitar riff at the start – grab a cheapish guitar, tune down half a step and replicate it if you can – the snare rat-a-tats the group into action and from outta nowhere comes the greatest lurching and woozy keyboard motif this side of the seventies. Unexpected and totally hooky, it sounds like drugs. The wrong kinda drugs though.

Black and blue from passing around…I don’t want to see you like you got before…dancing on a permanent scratch…. Elliott, man . Why d’you have to get involved with all of that? What a waste.

Elliott eases into the bridge, his voice reaches for the high notes, his snare drummer rattling him along. Big bassy piano notes anchor it all together before Elliott brings forth that great acoustic riff (and that woozy, lysergic keyboard) and he leads us into the final verse’s heartbreaking line;

“You got a little baby, I don’t want to see you round here no more.”

Elliott’s mastery of his voice and his instrument, his arrangement and his ear for a tune are never more apparent than on songs like the two featured above. If you’re new to Elliott, start somewhere in the middle – Either/Or was the album where he became less lo-fi and more produced, XO the album after was his major label debut and a spectacular one at that. There’s a lifetime of great songs just a-waitin’ to be discovered.

Gone but not forgotten

Absolutely True

Craig McAllister

I’m sitting at my formica desk. I’m ‘studying’. My red, white and grey zig-zag wallpaper is hurting my eyes. The backwards clock above my portable telly shows no sign of moving forward. In fact, such is my enthusiasm for learning, it might actually really be moving backwards. The physics textbook in front of me remains uncracked. Physics! What the fuck was I thinking? Radio Clyde hisses and spits from my music centre, the wire that’s laughingly referred to as an aerial in the handbook stretched to a drawing pin that holds up the Marilyn skirt-blowing picture that I really should’ve removed by now. If I hold my hand up, the reception improves. I alternate hands as Tiger Tim spins this week’s hot hits.

My ears prick as something magic is squeezed through the static. It’s new but it’s instantly my kinda thing.

It begins with an engine rev of bass and baritone sax; a knee-buckling nod to the ’50s, of doo wop, of freedom and the cult of the teenager. Bomp-bomp-ba-ooh…Bomp-bomp-bah-ooh. The drop in chords. Bomp-bomp-ba-ooh…Bomp-bomp-bah-ooh.

The verse. Understated, but serious. I’ve nothing much to offer. I’ve nothing much to take. A casually frugging, popping bassline under a moody piano chord. Big, Spectorish drums. A scrape of the guitar strings. Funny chords that seem to rise yet fall simultaneously. Augmented? Diminished? I dunno, but who cares. An acoustic guitar doing that cliched hammer on with the pinky as you play a D chord. Absolute beginners, eh? The singer, his voice linear and stately, half-spoken and half to himself. There are voices either side of him. As long as we’re together. The rest can go to hell. One is deep, one is falsetto. As a trio, they’re sensational. I absolutely love you. The key line. Women, men, anyone with half an ounce of emotion in their wilting heart can’t fail to feel it. I’m only 16 and trying to make sense of my world, David, but in an absolute instant I absolutely love you too.

Now the chorus. Soaring into orbit, carried along on thermal winds of melody and hope, star crossed lovers against the world. Fly over mountains…laugh at the oceans…just like the films. It’s absolutely true.

Christ. I wish someone would make me feel like that. Bomp-bomp-ba-ooh.

The second verse has more of the same. The vocals are still measured and steadfast, the musicians still doing their best to keep up with their vocalist’s high standards. Nothing much can happen. Nothing we can’t shake. Steve Nieve’s spindly piano, the high notes jarring and trebly and rattlin’ your bones. Some synth washes from Rick Wakemen, not heard on a Bowie record for a good decade or more and very welcome back. Nieve, threatened perhaps, raises both his game and his talented fingers and dances across the ivories like a fleet footed musical sprite, the most delicate of touches with a classicism rarely heard in popular music. Nieve knows every key on that piano intimately and he coaxes pure melody from every one of them. In lieu of the doo-wop vocals, the sax blows a subtle bomp-bomp-bah-ooh melody as Wakemen’s synths swell towards another chorus. You can feel it, you know it’s coming. But if my love is your love, we’re certain to succeed.

And here it is.

Mountains and heartaches and films and reason and hard times and hard lines. Absolutely true. Aw jeez.

The singer bows out. The group plays on, holding the searing, white-hot chorus. Strings slide atop the melody. A tenor sax blows a jazzy yet sympathetic signature solo. Across his catalogue, Bowie would prove he loved a sax solo and Absolute Beginners is just one of a score or more that get you. Right. Where. It. Matters.

Tiger Tim shouts across the end of it. “David Bowie there!” (Up here in Scotland, Bowie rhymes with TOWIE) “Absolute Beginners! An absolute cracker!”

I absolutely agree. The physics text book remains unopened. I hot foot it to Walker’s and return with the 7″. I play it and play it and play it and play it. My first Bowie record and definitely not my last. It’s still playing the best part of 40 years later. That’s absolutely true.

Rhetorical question: How great was David Bowie?

Post script

17% for physics. Pffft.