Category: Gone but not forgotten

Get This!, Gone but not forgotten

In The Buff

Craig McAllister

My old pal Derek was mad on coffee, in both senses of the phrase. He drank it the way a fish might presumably drink water, or the way Shane MacGowan evaporated his pints of gin, y’know; one regularly after the other, repeated non stop until bedtime. One too many and he’d be a gibbering, gum rattling freak, speeding away quite happily on a perfectly legal drug. In this state he could carpenter an intricate dado rail around your hall in the time it took the kettle to boil. A solid wood floor could routinely be laid in under an hour. The 60 Minute Make-Over? Our Derek was doing that while Claire Sweeney was still Lindsey Corkhill, mate.

Way back around 1997 Derek bought a satisfyingly chunky Italian percolator and would enjoy the ritual of preparing an espresso for you. Then another. And another. And one more before leaving. We’d be playing guitars and with each passing espresso the strumming got that little bit more ragged and loose-threaded at the ends until we were murdering the classics with Java and Illy and Lavazza running rampant through our systems. I remember rattling like a Scotrail diesel train on the walks back from his house, jerking from heel to toe at a hundred miles an hour, shaky and ill and continually needing to pee, then unable to sleep way past the midnight hour. Have you ever watched an Alex Higgins 100+ break? That. Can you miss the feeling of being totally wired? When your pals are no longer here to share it with you, of course you can.

We were at Songs Ya Bass in Glasgow’s Buff Club at the weekend. An idea that grew out of music nights in Rik and Nell’s house, for 11 strong years SYB has filled a quarterly slot in one of the city’s mankiest upstairs clubs. The premise is simple. Message Rik and Nell with 3 songs you’d want to dance/jump around to and they’ll create a playlist from everyone’s requests then play them at a decent volume until 11pm, when the Buff Club proper opens its doors and the oldies and goldies and grey hairs and nae hairs retreat down the sticky carpeted stairs and make their way to Glasgow Central for the last train home.

It was midway through Dog Eat Dog, or maybe Voodoo Ray on Saturday night, when I realised the Red Stripe was taking me well on my way to pished. The video screen slideshow that never repeats itself all night – a labour of love for Rik – had rotated from Joe Strummer to Run DMC to One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest‘s Nurse Ratched and the upstairs balcony and mobbed dancefloor were both a blurry haze of arms aloft folk not giving two hoots about what any onlooker might’ve thought of their dancing styles. Faces loomed in, grinning. The legs loosened to elastic. The sprung wooden floor (sacrilegiously laid on top of a Jim Lambie work of art, they say) became bouncy castle like. The slideshow faded from Lee Perry to Peter Cook and Dudley Moore to Muhammed Ali to The Cramps to Pele to Wilko Johnson to all the other greats. The music jarred unexpectedly from Gerald’s ‘hey oh, a-ha, a, uh-oh-ah‘ to Wham’s Young Guns to The Clash to New Order to…! Hey!…

thump-thump-thumpa-thump… ‘I’m Totally Wired! I’m Totally Wired!…I drank a jar of coffee and then I took some of these…. and I’m TOTALLY WIRED!‘ Magic!

The Fall – Totally Wired

The guitars, cheesegrater thin, cut through like tinfoil to a filling. Clang…scree…tcchhhskkkk…; relentless, repetitive and rickety, but really, really great! Steve Hanley, Mark E Smith’s long-time lieutenant plays looping, thumping bass. It worms its way into yr skull and stays there, uninvited but very welcome, the empathetic drums pounding away in the background and hammering you into submission. On top of it all, Mark Smith yelps and barks and screeches like the nails down the blackboard of popular music that he was, abrasive ADHD in the form of verse and chorus.

This – Totally Wired – is the exact jittery, nerve-shredding, anxiety-inducing sound of too much coffee (and other things, if that’s yr bag). It’s also, as it happens, the unofficial soundtrack to those frantic and fidgety walks home from Derek’s, senses jangling into the wee small hours. T-T-T-Totally Wired!!!

Gone but not forgotten

Limping On

Craig McAllister

Late era New Order, where the quality control diminishes with each passing year but the golden era reissues get pumped out at increasingly inflated prices are still a living, breathing entity only because of the music that’s gone before. The live shows nowadays – great as I’m told they are – are in vast, soulless places, sometimes even outdoors, with tickets sold at premium prices and no more than three quarters of the original band on show. The fall-outs have been well-documented on both sides and neither looks good for it. Hook continues to stubbornly tour his Peter Hook & The Light project while the rest of New Order and a sundry supporting cast limp on. Name me an essential New Order record released this century and I’ll show you a grasping optimist.

And yet…and yet…Music Complete, released in 2015 has a couple of shining moments. Not, let’s get this clear, the hideous and plodding Iggy Pop-‘enhanced’ Stray Dog…or Now I Wanna Be Your Dog’s Dinner, as I’d have named my remix if I’d been one of the 427 remixers involved across the album’s lifespan. Nor the washed-out synth wash of Superheated with (ha!) Brandon Flowers throwing vocal shapes across its poppy, autotuned, a-ha without a heartbeat chorus. Eugh. They might as well have called the album ‘Music? Completed It.‘ because they’d clearly run out of ideas by this point. This is the band that released Power, Corruption & Lies and Low-Life and Technique and a handful of magic stand-alone singles. Except, well, it’s clearly not, is it Bernard?

New Order was always an impenetrable, mysterious force. An enigma that conjured up propulsive and forward-thinking magic from the thin Mancunian air. And here they are in 2015, giving cameos to the era’s spotlight-hoggers. Ah! Maybe that’s it. Maybe in reality it’s New Order that needs the spotlight. Maybe that’s why, besides Iggy and Brandon, they also aligned themselves with minor hit maker La Roux (or Elly Jackson, as she’s known on other folk’s records).

She sings on Tutti Frutti and it’s pretty good. Not Bizarre Love Triangle good. Or The Perfect Kiss good. Not even Shellshock good. But comparatively pretty good. It’s the one chink of light in a dark era for a band that a sympathetic vet might’ve put down by now.

New Order – Tutti Frutti

Yeah, so it’s Smalltown Boy filtered through a thumping dance/pop prism, a mid-paced pulse of Bernard melancholy and uplifting chorus, but what makes it great are those Hook-ish Too-tee-Froo-tee growling vocals at the start and end. Remember ‘You got luuurve technique?’ That. It has you almost misty-eyed for an era not long gone by, yet seeming centuries away, where the four key members of New Order were pals and creatives and untouchable.

The best New Orderish, non New Order single of recent years? That’d be Gorillaz Aries, with Hook’s fluid signature bassline lapping its way up and down the neck as Albarn’s sad vocal surfs atop a jolting, crashing rhythm. There’s even another growly vocal at the start. ‘Ayr-eaze‘ goes Hooky, and you’re instantly pining for a band that’ll never be in the same room again.

Gorillaz – Aries

*Next year, Music Complete will be 10 years old. Look out for the triple vinyl anniversary box set with added Iggy ‘n Brandon ‘n Elly for extra cash-grabbing effect.

Gone but not forgotten, Sampled

Dub Club

Craig McAllister

Adam over at Bagging Area has long been a champion of things that bang and beat in interesting ways. He’s a particular standard bearer for Andrew Weatherall (and anything that bears his hallmark) and, thrillingly, he’s found himself falling into a role as co-curator of a Weatherall-inspired compilation album, Sounds From The Flightpath Estate Volume 1. Born from ‘wouldn’t it be great if…’ chat after a DJ slot at Todmorden’s Golden Lion, in a move that apes Weatherall’s own ‘fail we may, sail we must’ manifesto, the record – already sold out on pre-orders alone – is this week’s Compilation Of The Week on Lauren Laverne’s BBC 6 Music show. Based on that fact alone, the record must surely be fast-footing its way to a repress; the charts being what they are these days, time it nicely and the possibility of real chart action isn’t unlikely. What a thrill it must be to create something out of nothing, especially one that carries the inference of something further to come.

I’ll ‘Volume 1′ you, m’lad!

Let’s hear it for the instigators, agitators and originators of this fine new release. Virtual fist bumps all round.

This past week, coincidentally, sees four years since Andrew Weatherall’s passing and on the back of Adam and co’s album announcement, I’ve been scouring the forgotten b-sides of my old 12″ singles to eke out any of his remixes. That Petrol Emotion, Flowered Up, James and Sinead O’Connor all leapt up and out at the mere mention of his name, spinning themselves into the wee hours last weekend. All have been bent, buckled and battered out of all recognisable shape by Weatherall, not always for the better, if yr asking me, but they make for interesting and usually long-form listening – ideal in that post-midnight fug.

Weatherall’s own collective, Sabres Of Paradise crept up on me only after time. Other than the ubiquitous twin collossuses Theme and Smokebelch, the albums were lost on me as I gave myself over to the more popular/shallower end of ’90s music. I’d have heard Sabresonic from behind the Our Price counter, but I daresay it would have been shunted aside for the latest Suede release or Steps or something similar. Similarly Haunted Dancehall, with its striking open-razored cover and dark beats on the inside. Classics of course nowadays, but it took me a quarter of a century to appreciate that. Given that I absolutely loved Underworld’s Dubnobasswithmyheadman – and hindsight shows us that that record may well be the greatest album of the ’90s – I’m not sure how I never picked up on Sabres Of Paradise at the time, but there y’go. You can’t surf the zeitgeist all of the time. It’ll wear you out, man. Those folk that were into everything – absolutely everything – first? Bollocks they were.

Weatherall’s Sabres’ material, made with Jagz Kooner and Gary Burns, is often relentless, head-nodding, dub-infused techno, played at a slow and steady BPM. It can be claustrophobic and anxiety-inducing yet euphoric and rush-and-release magic within the same groove.

Sabres Of Paradise – Wilmot

Wilmot builds itself around a 90-year-old horn sample from a crackly calypso record by the fantastically-named Wilmoth Houdini. Pitch-shifted down a gear or two, the horns allow space for all manner of wizardry to clash and clatter around it; skanking, off-beat guitars, filling-loosening Simonon-ish bass, electronic whooshes, big beats, high in the mix percussion, ech-ech-ech-ech-echoing refrains, trumpets heralding the arrival of the Great God Pan himself. If you’re sitting half-cut on your sofa at an hour way past your normal bedtime, it may just be the record you need to hear. I bet it’d sound great just sitting on the London underground, whizzing below the city with no idea where you are.

As you may already know, Fatboy Slim would later use the same sample on his Mighty Dub Katz Son Of Wilmot release. Given that record’s title, I’d wager that Norman Cook was possibly more familiar with the Sabres Of Paradise track than the ancient original that provided the hook for Weatherall and the other Sabres. But anyway…

Centuras – Crisis

Released on Junior Boys Own, Crisis by Centuras is Weatherall in spirit if not in presence. Another long-form, chopped up dub cut, Crisis is stretched out, messed up reggae. A squeaky keyboard elbows the warped electronics out to the margins, making way f-f-for another f-f-fan-faring horn sample. Similar yet different. Or exactly the same sample as above? Who can tell?  The beat rolls ever forward, propulsive yet glitchy. Figments of spliced vocal lines ghost in and out and a rhythm that brings to mind Primal Scream at their most creative…and Weatherall-affected carries it for 5 or so chin-stroking minutes.

It’s dance music, Jim, but I’d like t’see y’try.

Unexpectedly, I found this 12″ in a charity shop in Saltcoats. The track above is worth alone the 50p I risked on it. Re-sult, as the grate diggers refrain goes.

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

A Week Of Saturday Nights

Craig McAllister

Lowrell Simon was a Chicago-based soul singer. After being in a succession of hopeful groups, slogging around on the circuit and briefly grazing the lower reaches of the US R&B charts, he was, by the mid ’70s, a staff writer at Curtom (Curtis Mayfield’s label) writing and producing soundtrack material of little consequence. Nothing truly spectacular really materialised from his writer’s pen until the end of the decade. By then, Lowrell was back recording as a solo artist, his experiences with Curtom better equipping him for the making of glossy, groove-driven soul music.

He struck gold with the very Mayfield-titled and timeless Mellow Mellow Right On.

Lowrell Simon – Mellow Mellow Right On

Anyone who’s heard Massive Attack’s Blue Lines – and that’s everyone here, right? – will recognise instantly its marching heartbeat of a bassline, used to great effect on that album’s Lately; stately, steady and never wavering, driving that track to its soulful and melancholic conclusion.

On the original, things are a bit more upbeat. That flare of unresolved strings at the start, all tension and no release, coupled with the wet slap of funk guitar and precise drum beat promises much and delivers exactly what you hope for. A choir pops up, “Mellow, mellow, right on!” they chant…and then Lowrell himself slopes in, all spoken word and chocolate-wrapped vocals – “Ladies, I’d like to take this time out just to say…”  his easy vocal easing up, out and into Marvin Gaye territory.

Behind him, his disciplined band never drops the beat. They groove and smoove their way through ten metronomic minutes and more of pure discofied funk, the sound of flapping trouser legs, jumbo-winged collars and powder blue suits, of oversized hair and oversized heels. In an era much maligned and swept aside by the snotty arrival of punk, Mellow Mellow Right On glistens like the studio lighting refracting from the mirrored lens of a pair of aviator shades and serves as a reminder that the best disco was just as valid as any other music. Fight me.

You’d get no argument on that front from Edwyn Collins. Scrolling through a Postcard Records group on Facebook recently, that old Mojo article (above) jumped right out at me, and not just because of EC’s unmatching shirt ‘n trousers combination.

Edwyn, forever on the money, whether it comes to guitars or clothes or hair, is once again correct in his assessment of Mellow Mellow Right On. Sung especially for the ladies and wrapped in a bad-ass but glossy production (the wee electronic shooms that fire off now and again, the oil slick thick guitar, the tease and timbre of the strings) – it’d be easy to imagine Dr Dre getting behind the desk to work his G-Funk magic with this as the bedrock.

I bet Edwyn’s still grooving to it now. I know I am.

Get This!, Gone but not forgotten

Replacement Service

Craig McAllister

That politely twanging guitar that heralds the start of the track is, by the angle of its jangle, pure early era R.E.M. Or maybe the Go-Betweens. Maybe even the Hoodoo Gurus. There’s certainly enough blend of country rockin’ low notes and clean chiming chords to suggest it. As it falls into its mid-paced, head nodding plod and the vocal appears, all gargled gravel and forced out phlegm, you could be forgiven for thinking you’ve landed feet-first in some mid-west bar, the overpowering sight of wall-to-wall plaid shirts and faded denim just about drowning out the the clack of balls on the pool table as the singer strains above it all to deliver lines worthy of a low-budget Hollywood movie. ‘Jesus rides beside me, he never buys any smokes,‘ he goes, all resigned and stretching himself above the free-roaming lead guitarist with his hot shot fancy pants riffs just below him in the mix.

As if this isn’t enough, the honeyed tones of the Memphis Horns – yr actual Stax house band, responsible for those hooks and riffs on all those great Otis records…and Al Green’s Let’s Stay Together…and Elvis’s Suspicious Minds – comes breezing in like the warm and rasping ghost of Exile On Main Street to stamp its brassy rash all over the proceedings.

And then you discover that the guitar player is none other than Alex Chilton, himself the titular subject of a track on the very same album where this track resides. A Replacement service indeed. It don’t get much better than that.

Yes, you’re listening to Can’t Hardly Wait by The Replacements – maybe even as it shuffles up randomly while you pound your sorry state around January’s unforgiving streets – and the world is alright.

The Replacements – Can’t Hardly Wait 

I was never that sure about The Replacements. I’m still not, to be honest. To me, I think they’re viewed over here the way a band like Teenage Fanclub might be viewed in the States. They’ll have an enthusiastic, fervent fanbase who can’t see past them and everything they do, but the more you move away from the parochial appeal, the less they’ll matter. Unlike, say, Tom Petty, whose widescreen jangling Americana has universal appeal, and certainly not like R.E.M., who changed course and conquered the world, The Replacements just seem like you have to be American to fully appreciate them. They bring to mind teenagers driving noisy gas-guzzler first cars, hopped up high school kids chugging beer, college sophomores getting blasted at frat parties, all that sort of cliched Hollywood America.

Can’t Hardly Wait though. Great players + great points of reference = grrreat track. No arguments here.

 

Get This!, Gone but not forgotten

Seventeen

Craig McAllister

On the 5th of January, Plain Or Pan will turn 17. In preparation, the L plates have been looked out, the insurance has been eye-wateringly hiked and the old banger I’ve been saving for the occasion will finally get a run-out.  

I never for a moment expected to still be doing this all these years later, but here we are. Adam over at Bagging Area rationalised it best a few days ago when he said that blogging is a habit that sticks. It really is, plus Plain Or Pan has led to all sorts of unexpected opportunities in recent years…reason enough to keep going still, I think.

I’m a sucker for a studio outtake and Anthology 2 features the between-takes chatter of The Beatles as they rip their way through the first couple of goes of I’m Down, the track that would eventually find a home on the b-side of the Help! single. “It’s plastic soul, man…plastic soul,” belittles Paul McCartney, a nod to black America’s scathing opinion of Mick Jagger at the time. Considering McCartney’s vocal on I’m Down was full-on Little Richard, it’s a bit of an ironic throwaway line, but tucked away for future use, the phrase would soon turn up in more punning form as the title of The Beatles’ next record. 

The second of two albums written, recorded and released by The Beatles in 1965, Rubber Soul would be the bridging link in a run of albums that saw them transition from the pure pop of Help! to the studio-driven Revolver. It’s a pace of change and progress that is unparalleled. Two albums plus assorted singles plucked out the ether and sent into millions of homes before the new year bells? Plus touring, sustaining family commitments and enjoying life as young 20-something Beatles? That’s laughably unthinkable nowadays.

Rubber Soul was put together in little over a month, with recording beginning on the 12th October and its 14 tracks mastered for both stereo and mono on the 15th November. That’s four and a half weeks from the initial writing sessions, via the recording and overdubbing, to the finished article. There are groups these days who take longer perfecting the filter on their Instagram posts. Once mastered, the album was sent to the pressing plants to be in the shops by Christmas. It was. Released on 3rd December along with the group’s first double A-side, the non-album pairing of We Can Work It Out and Day Tripper, Rubber Soul ensured a fab Christmas for all.

The Beatles – Drive My Car

Drive My Car, the album’s opening track, endures as one of the group’s very best. A McCartney-presented idea, Lennon helped shape and polish the lyrics, encouraging the pay-off double entendre (‘You can do something in-between‘) before Paul took it to the others as a track worth working on. Take 4 was the one they were happiest with and that’s the version that the world got to hear.

McCartney sings it like it’s the last song he’ll ever sing on earth, tearing his way through each line like Otis Redding on Otis Blue, John double-tracked and harmonising and hanging on for dear life behind him. That ‘beep beep ‘n beep beep, yeah! is total adlibbed genius nonsense, another hook in the vein of yeah yeah yeah! or I can’t hide! Such a little thing, but such a big part of the song. 

The Beatles, knowing a good thing when they hear it, go full tilt on a (plastic?) soul stomper that still thrills in McCartney shows today. With a nod and a half to Aretha’s version of Respect, George copies Paul’s frugging bassline on his fuzzed-up Strat and it’s those two instruments that give the backing track its groove. Ringo is immense as the anchor. His snare takes a proper beating. His fills on the final line of each verse are inventive and varied and he’s nothing less than metronomic throughout.

It’s the clever overdubs that elevate the track even further; there’s a cowbell playing in time (and very high in the stereo mix) to Ringo’s snare, and a rattling pair of tambourines that vary in pattern between verse and chorus. Paul overdubs that loose ‘n funky piano on the chorus – the essential ingredient – and you have a Beatles track that could never be anything other than an album opener. Quite the statement. 

It’s hard to believe that Drive My Car first found its way into my orbit through that thumping, discofied and hideous Stars On 45 record all those years ago, but there y’are. It’s also hard to believe that there are people in the world who have yet to find The Beatles. What a journey they are in for. I’m already aware that January 2024 is going to be Beatles month in this house. They’re always there, in the background, in the hard drive of the mind, waiting to be called down like patient little angels, but shining the spotlight on them always makes me hyper-fixated for long spells. Looks like it’s Rubber Soul‘s turn again.  

Get This!, Gone but not forgotten

The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Any More

Craig McAllister

We had big snow here a couple of weeks ago, the proper Hallmark/Hollywood cotton wool stuff. Great for a day or two then a treacherous pest for the rest of the week, it was just too early for Christmas. Snowed in with a classic film and a houseful of food and drink is not a bad place to be. Getting to and from work when your street is an ice rink and it’s barely light in either direction not so much. We’re now back to rain, torrential today, and the sort of wind that can whip your car door straight outta your hands if you’re not expecting it. (It did, I wasn’t. The car parked beside me seemed scarless afterwards though. Quick! Run!)

It’s at least half a week too early for Christmas music on here, so as the days creep ever-shorter to Friday’s Winter Equinox, there’s no better time to blow the dust off of Scott 3 and let it play, softly and gently, as the weather conditions – which they haven’t yet personified with a daft human name – swirl madly outside. Scott 3, Scott Walker‘s third album, funnily enough, is stately and grandiose and packed full of Ivor Raymonde’s searing and soaring string scores, practised on Dusty and perfected deftly with each subsequent Walker Brothers and Scott solo release. If you’ve never experienced it, you must do. If only for the cover art at least, I think you’d love it.

Scott Walker – It’s Raining Today

Eye Tunes

It’s Raining Today is the album’s opener, perfect for our current winter weather and a handy stall-setter for what follows on the rest of the record. It begins with the eerie scrape of high pitched, disconcerting strings – exactly the sort of strings that Jonny Greenwood has taken to employing across The Smile’s and Radiohead’s more outré work – before a pulsing two note electric bass and classically-strummed nylon acoustic offset the jarring with a bit of colour. There is too, you notice, a subtle foreshadowing cascade of icicle percussion, spiking the brain, preparing you for Walker’s tale to unfold. ‘It’s raining today,’ he croons almost immediately, ‘and I’m just about to forget…the train window girl…that wonderful day we met…she smiles through the smoke from my cigarette…‘

The melody rises and falls, ebbs and flows with Scott’s perfect delivery – smooth, slow, almost somnolent – providing a real cinematic cocoon to the world outside. You can wrap yourself right up in It’s Raining Today. Stick it on and you, the listener, are safely sheltered from the storm of life, metaphorical as well as physical.

Then…don’t get too comfy…the strings take a sudden dischordant and unnerving tumble and Walker is lost in a fog of nostalgia and regret, the song’s melody creeping like the coming of winter’s equinox itself, the fingers-down-the-blackboard strings now slow-bowed and majestic, sliding down the scales to the lowest notes possible. They’re the only instruments in the mix until right at the end, when a ripple of piano and the familiar refrain of percussion and edgy strings leads us back to another verse, the titular refrain leading us to cellophane streets and street corner girls and cold trembling leaves. Great imagery.

A few short years before this, Walker and his Brothers were headlining a wonky package bill that included Cat Stevens and the Jimi Hendrix Experience, one of three mis-cast teen idols desperate to cut the puppet strings and call their own shots. By Scott 1, Walker was. By Scott 3 he was deep in the throes of auteurship. Magic stuff.

Gone but not forgotten

Shane MacGowan

Craig McAllister

Ach. Shane MacGowan. The literate libertarian and rabble-rousing romantic has drunk and sunk his last pint. Drink up, shut up, last orders. Time gentlemen, please. 

When those pictures appeared a week or so ago showing a frail Shane propped up in bed, visited by pals and barely able to smile for the camera, it reminded me of the last days of my dad’s life, of his pals dropping in to say their final, unsaid goodbyes, of big grown men leaving the house in tears. To be honest, the pictures of Shane made me feel uncomfortable, unnecessarily voyeuristic, but for anyone who’s watched a loved one slip away, those candid snaps were an obvious foreshadow of what finally arrived at the end of the week just gone. 

Like many, I’ve binged myself on The Pogues since the news of his death broke.

I first heard of The Pogues in 1985, and only because I turned up to participate in a Bible quiz being held in an upper room of Kilmarnock’s Grand Hall. (That story has been told on here before.) It wouldn’t be long until I properly heard the MacGowan voice, that very same night, as it goes, bellowing up in fluent MacGowanese from the floor below, in-between the stuffy quizmaster’s boring questions. 

“In which book of the Bible did…”

“ahve been ssspat on, ssshat on raypedandabyooozed…“

“…Daniel encounter…”

“Sackafackazzzzhzzzzyoubastardzzz!!!“

“..a Lion?”

(Thump, clatter, diddly-dee, stomp, stomp, stomp.)

By the end of that week I owned Poguetry In Motion and never looked back. 

The Pogues’ Christmas Barrowlands shows, especially the one with Joe Strummer joining them for Clash songs, were some of my favourite-ever gigs. After the Strummer one, I nearly fainted through heat exhaustion from non-stop jumping about in a very crushed and over-sold crowd. A medic made me sit against the wall of the stairs on the way out until I’d recovered, necessitating in a mad sprint back down the Trongate and Argyle Street for the last train. By the time we’d made it, my old suit jacket was stiff from frosty dried sweat. Thawed out on the train home and back at my house, it was a stinky, soggy, shapeless mess. I hung it in the shower to dry until the next morning, when I shook out not only Joe Strummer’s actual plectrum but enough crystalised sweat to keep Mama’s chip shop in salt until the next Pogues show. Memories, as the song goes, are made of this.

By chance last night I stumbled across Julian Temple’s fantastically revealing ‘Crock Of Gold’, a two hour documentary on the life of Shane MacGowan. Culled from old interviews, both film and audio, with archive footage of Irish life and additional filmed segments from three or four years ago, it’s an absolutely essential watch and a key insight into the life and psyche of MacGowan.

Shane’s ability to romanticise the unromantic is there right from the start. Reminiscing about his early years in Tipperray, he talks about the “sepia-brown farmhouse where they pissed out the front door and shat in the field out the back….” In a series of torn and frayed photographs, the MacGowan clan is shown to be tight-knit and stern faced, the wire-thin men in flat caps, faces lined like cartographic maps of rural Ireland, the handsome-faced women with arms folded over necessary pinafores.

His upbringing was equal part prayer and profanity. “Fuck is the most-used word in the Irish dictionary,” he says. His uncle educated him on Irish history and its peoples’ continual fight, a subject that would permeate much of his songwriting. His auntie Nora too was a major influence on him, introducing him to stout and snout at the age of 5 or 6, just before the family would move to England. By the time Shane had been integrated into the English school system, he was a two bottles of stout a night veteran of the stuff. 

The family hated England. Despite his dad’s decent job, they were bog Irish. Thick Paddies. Outsiders. Shane rebelled. In the film, his dad notes with disdain the very moment Shane went properly off the rails.

“It was that Creedence Clearwater Revival,” he spits quite unexpectedly, in a tone normally reserved for discussing who might’ve nicked that morning’s milk from the doorstep and ran away. 

Youthful dabbling in substances followed, expulsion from school not long after, with psychiatric electro-therapy just around the corner. Forever the troubled outsider, Shane found his calling in the filth and fury of punk. “I was the face of ’77!” he quips, before lamenting the movement’s inability to truly change the world. “All that we had left at the end,” he laments, “were brothel creepers, a few bottles of Crazy Colour and the dole.” 

He’d discovered what a life in music might offer though, and set out to change the way Irish music was viewed. “Everyone was listening to ethnic music, so I thought, ‘Why not my ethnic music?’” The Pogues were born and the songs, poetic and proud, educating and enlightening, soon had an enthusiastic following. When asked how he goes about writing a song – “Can you write sober?” asks an interviewer at one point – Shane states that the songs are floating in the air – “that’s why they’re called airs,” he reasons, and that he reaches out to grab them “before Paul Simon does.” 

The Pogues – A Rainy Night In Soho

Could Paul Simon have written a song as sweeping and grand as A Rainy Night In Soho? Or The Broad Majestic Shannon? A song as political and hard-hitting as Birmingham Six or Thousands Are Sailing? A song as simple and melancholic as Summer In Siam or Misty Morning, Albert Bridge? A song as joyful and carefree as The Body Of An American or Sally MacLennane or Sick Bed Of Cuchulainn or Streams Of Whiskey? Of course he couldn’t. No one could write songs like these ‘cept MacGowan. From waltz-time bawlers to night time weepies, he covered all bases.

You’ll hear Fairytale Of New York – “Our Bohemian Rhapsody” a lot in the coming weeks. Nowt wrong with that, of course, but I’d like to direct you to an essential source of one of its ingredients.

Ennio Morricone – Deborah’s Theme (Overture)

Ennio Morricone’s Deborah’s Theme, from Once Upon A Time In America, is slow and stately, majestic and magnificent. Shane thought so too, making good use of the motif that he’d write – ‘It was Christmas Eve, babe/And then we sang a song/God, I’m the lucky one‘ – across the top of. A powerful, beautiful piece of soul-stirring music that gave rise to another.

Shane Patrick Lysaght MacGowan (25 December 1957 – 30 November 2023)

One of the greats.

 

 

 

Get This!, Gone but not forgotten

Not Dodgy

Craig McAllister

I spent some time in the company of Dodgy’s Nigel Clark at the end of last week. He was up doing a one-man show – all the Dodgy hits, a few of his own solo songs, a smattering of carefully-chosen covers (Tom Waits, Frankie Valli, a spontaneous run-through of the new Beatles single), all interspersed with off-kilter chat and rueful observations on life in 21st century Britain. He’s a massive soul music fan – that would explain the cover of ‘The Night‘ that he ended with, and the various soul covers that constitute those early Dodgy b-sides – and thrillingly, he played a version of a fantastic Stax track from 1975 that was totally new to me. The song found a home in my ear and, after many YouTube plays and before I’d gone to bed in the wee hours of Saturday morning, I’d found a copy of the 7″ online and bought it. I think you’ll like it…

Freddie Waters – Groovin’ On My Baby’s Love

Tinkling Fender Rhodes, descending chords playing against up-sweeping strings, a slow ‘n steady groove of snare ‘n kick drum, a cooing female backing vocalist going against the grain of Waters’ gravelly soul man voice in the chorus…there’s no chicken-scratch guitar or tasteful Cropper-esque blue notes, nor nary a whiff of honeyed brass, yet it has all the necessary ingredients, as Ray Charles one said, in a recipe for soul.

The bridge –‘some people worry ’bout simple things‘ – is pure grits ‘n gravy Memphis soul. In the hands of an Otis Redding or a William Bell or a, yes! Al Green, Groovin’ On My Baby’s Love might’ve bothered the pop charts. And maybe it did, but apparently, very little has been written about either Freddie Waters or Groovin’ On My Baby’s Love so I don’t know about that. I’m certain some switched-on soul brother or sister here will keep me right though. Typically, the track alone should have both singer and song held in far higher regard than the world seems to afford them.

There will, of course, be hundreds of songs like this, floating out in the ether, waiting for the record collector’s butterfly net to catch them as they flutter past. By way of payment, I sent a suitably gobsmacked Nigel a link to Darondo‘s Didn’t I. Featured here a few years back on the recommendation of Gerry Love – another soul-loving beat group employee, as it goes – it deserves another shining of the Plain Or Pan spotlight.

Darondo – Didn’t I

Obscure-ish mid ’70s soul recommendations most welcome. Add them in the comments below.

Gone but not forgotten

Lou York

Craig McAllister

It’s been a year since I was last in New York City.

52 weeks since I last allowed myself to be happily ripped off in an off-Times Square pizza joint – “Seventy bucks for four slices of greasy, cheesy pizza and four cans of Coke? Tip that up to eighty and take my money ma man.”

365 days since I last had a stiff neck from looking up, down, all around at the buildings and bridges and people and possibilities of the greatest city on the planet, listening surreptitiously to the natives as they passed, deep in loud conversation, loud in deep conversation. “I used t’be afraid of the Bronx…I heard chow chows are adorable…My social life is a gawd-damned diz-ass-tuh…and he was buh-leeding awl ovah the apartment…I dunno, John, it cawsts a lotta dough…Then he jumped on the window display and pretended to be a mannequin! Hur hur hur!!!…”

That’ll be 8760 hours since I last walked upwards of 35,000 steps each day in search of musical reference points the length and breadth of Manhattan, got passively high in Times Square, rode the subway from 42nd Street, listened to a great, soulful Beatles busker at the Lennon memorial spot in Central Park, admired the art deco wonder that is the Chrysler Building, got an hour to myself to shop for records, recreated Bob Dylan’s Freewheelin’ album cover in the wrong freakin’ street, looked into tiny but expensive apartment windows and took arty photographs atop the High Line, internally sang songs at every other street sign (Lexington Avenue, 10th Avenue etc etc), imagined seeing the singer Beck near the Empire State Building, jumped at the unexpected wail of a cop car siren, drank Brooklyn Pilsner and ate the greatest pizza in Juliana’s, sat on a brownstone stoop (should’ve broken into some doo-woo – missed opportunity) and generally had the most fulfilling experience possible.

I’m absolutely not kidding when I say that, outside of regular thoughts about family and work and what we’ll have for dinner that night and can I squeeze in a wheezy run while the boy is at the football training, the city of New York is an ever-present, permanent fixture in my head. Analytics being what they are, it’s there too in every other post in my social media feeds, and I ain’t complaining. Until I return – whenever the cost-of-living crisis hell that may be –  it’s just about the next best thing.

That most New York of bands, The Velvet Underground, decamped to L.A. for their third album, 1969’s eponymously-titled release. Following the white-hot, white light/white heat abrasiveness of its predecessor, the third album is gentle, rich in melody and only occasionally rips into cacophonous rackets of the knuckle bleeding overstrumming that’s come to define them (maybe just side 2’s Murder Mystery – and that’s pushing it.) The gossamer-light Candy Says sets the scene. The soporific Pale Blue Eyes, with its woozy, almost out of tune guitar lines and Moe Tucker’s steady tambourine rattle closes side 1 perfectly. Beginning To See The Light‘s chugging acoustic guitars and ‘here we go again‘ breakdown continues the mood into side 2, before the whole thing closes perfectly on After Hours, Moe Tucker’s surprising and wobbly lead vocal sending the whole thing off to bed.

The story – the legend- goes that the band had a whole bundle of gear stolen at some point in its journey through JFK Airport, hence the lack of distortion and discord, but Lou Reed has since debunked that by saying he simply wanted to play more melodically. Not having John Cale in the band by this point might have helped too.

I’ve been obsessing this week over Some Kind Of Love, all double twang and asthmatic slide, hypnotic and groovy and never-ending. It’s really great.

Some Kind Of Love – The Velvet Underground

The lyrics are ambiguous but, naturellement, saucy, salacious and just a little perverse. “I don’t know just what it’s all about, but just, uh, put on your red pyjamas and find out,” croons ol’ Lou at the end, smiling at his smutty little self as he does so. They tell me that New York is somewhat cleaned up these days. Lou’s mind, seemingly, was as filthy as the streets that birthed his band. Lucky for us.