An electric guitar motif, lightly jazzy, hammered-on and partially chorded, plays over and over. A flute flutters in. There’s some ambient noise in the background, a sniff from an actor, as it turns out. A spoken word dialogue comes in; filmic and scene-setting, alliteratively criminal in nature – ‘pimps, pushahs, prostitoots‘. The jazz refrain continues, the flute freestyling above it.
Willie Hutch – Brothers Gonna Work It Out
A girl sashays her way in. “Brothers gonna work it out,” she suggests, offering her observations to the dilemma of those two conversing actors. The flute replies sweetly to her melody. We’re two minutes in before the tempo kicks in. A descending harp glissando, a sharp sweep of strings, then a paradiddle of tribal drums. The “Brothers gonna work it out” refrain returns, call and response this time between male and female voices, as a ubiquitous wah-wah struts the rhythm underneath a splashing hi-hat. We have lift off.
Brothers Gonna Work It Out is widescreen sociofunk, cut from the same loose-fitting cloth as Curtis Mayfield, as hard-hitting as an Ali right hook but as danceable as disco. Cut for the soundtrack to mid-’70s blaxploitation film The Mack, it brought its creator out from behind the scenes (he’d been a Motown staffer, writing lyrics for the Jackson 5 amongst others) and slapped him bang in the middle of a musical movement that was smoothing at the edges as it transitioned from uptown to midtown, from Harlem’s Apollo to Manhattan’s Studio 54.
Brothers Gonna Work It Out straddles that dividing line effortlessly and coolly. It’s a groove, as they say.
The Chemical Brothers know a good line when they hear it. They took the ‘brothers gonna work it out‘ refrain and recast it as something of a manifesto – Dust Brothers to Chemical Brothers – for their first release to promote debut album Exit Planet Dust.
Chemical Brothers – Leave Home
Leave Home is a stall-setting cris de guerre. ‘The brothers gonna work it out‘ hookline is in your face straight away. So too is a snaking bassline and a window-rattling snare. It’s relentless and full on, full of squelchy 303s and rat-a-tat-tatting 808s. A four-to-the-floor big beat headthumper, it has, for good measure, divebombing electronic whooshes, random voices and breakdowns that lead inevitably to The Drop, when it all picks back up and comes in twice as furious as before.
Leave Home also has the dirtiest bassline this side of Bomb The Bass’s Bug Powder Dust, a real key ingredient which in parts sounds like a motorbike grinding through the gears as it overtakes you at 108mph, or 108 bpm if you’re being smart. Elsewhere it provides head-nodding grooveability, the concrete flooring upon which the ‘Brothers go about their business of working it out. Young folk these days might call this a banger. A Tom ‘n Ed Banger, even.
Beatles or Stones? Bowie or Bolan? Taylor or Lana?
Yeah – Taylor or Lana, man?
Street-smart Swift clearly takes all the press these days (and all of the world’s money, it would seem) but gimme Lana any day.
Elizabeth Woolridge Grant (her eloquent and grand name by birth) may well conjure up images of a windswept, colonial America and tightly-strained, Gone With The Wind bodices, but despite giving herself an extraneous stage name, Lana has managed to maintain an element of that same dramatic and vampish elegance of yesteryear.
Blue Jeans. High By The Beach. Video Games. Brooklyn Baby. Say Yes To Heaven. Every one of ’em a silver-screened slo-mo unravelling of pathos and regret, old school forties Hollywood set to a music steeped firmly in the girl groups of the sixties; three majors and a minor, overlapping, crashing, crushing melodies, with the merest hint of a twanging surf guitar and a trilling doo-wop piano, a broken heart and the odd f-bomb never far from the stew.
You don’t need to watch her videos to see the tumbling hair and scarlet lips, the tear-soaked pillows and empty rooms. If you watched them though, you’d also see the freeways and the free spirit, the goofing around with her girlfriends, the rolling around with her boyfriends. As urban American as James Ellroy’s stylised noir, she may be rooted, music-wise, in the past but that’s juxtaposed with all the signifiers of contemporary L.A.; the hip-hop and helicopters, the Converse and Corvettes. She’s so modern, as someone once sang.
At some point this year Lana will release her 10th album which, if my mental maths is up to scratch, is an album every 16 months since 2010’s self-titled debut. She’s certainly prolific – as prolific as Swift, as it goes, although she’s not needed to re-record any of her old records – and the quality control she has sees to it that there are no clunkers out there. Everything with her name on it is a grade A mini masterpiece that benefits from repeated plays, possibly in the small hours with minimal lighting and a glass of something decent to accompany it. The strings! The arrangements! The sultry undertones to her voice! She’s magic.
Lana Del Rey – The Greatest
‘The Greatest‘ from 2019’s Norman Fucking Rockwell! is quite possibly the finest melody to by-pass Paul McCartney and land fortuitously in someone else’s lap. It’s pure late-era Fabs, the melancholic brass ceding the air space to a gently caressed baby grand, all rising chords and spine tingling expectation. There are Beach Boys references, guitar swells, drop outs and build ups to a killer chorus – “I’m way-ay-ay-ay-ay-aysted!” – where Lana harmonises with herself as the melody unspools into a George Harrison-by-way-of-L.A. guitar refrain. At this point there are still three more minutes to go, three minutes of sparse and delicate music where you can smell the Pacific Ocean salt spray, three minutes of melodrama and horns as fuggy as the late summer Californian air, three minutes of music as bleached out and atmospheric as a roll of seventies Kodachrome film.
Three minutes where you’re already thinking, ‘I don’t want this to end’.
Introspective, reflective and melancholic to the max, it ain’t called The Greatest for nuthin’. Now, go and listen to it again without any distractions and tell me it ain’t the best ‘new’ thing you’ve heard this year.
Son of a gun is an ancient turn of phrase that can be applied in both the positive and negative. “Why, you old son of a gun, you!” they’ll say in Westerns and Hollywood golden-era classics, a phrase of surprise to indicate that one of the protagonists has gosh darned gone and done it, whatever that may be. “You son of a gun,” one character might snarl to another, an indication that they’ve really said, “son of a bitch,” but the writer or vocaliser (or studio) has thought this too crass to say aloud. Centuries ago, in nineteen hundred and eighty-six, I can remember using that self same phrase in my Higher English exam, stopping short of using the word ‘bitch’ but hopeful that whoever was marking it would read between the lines. I got an A, so I’m thinking they did.
It’s a phrase that dates back 300 years and more, to the time of sea-faring clippers and naval gunships, to an era when it was standard practice to allow married couples to be together at sea. When the women invariably fell pregnant, they’d be forced to give birth in the space between the cannons on the ship, the widest space available. Being in this space allowed the naval men to go about their business of firing at the enemy or hauling away or scrubbing the deck without the unnecessary distraction of falling in or sliding around afterbirth. Subsequently, boys born in this manner were known as sons of guns. I’m assuming they drowned the girls, or had them working in the galley by the time they could walk. Happy to be proven otherwise though.
Son Of A Gun opens The La’s only album. A record that isn’t anything as shite as Lee Mavers would have you believe, it nonetheless would’ve benefited from the inclusion of some of the multiples of session tracks that have subsequently crept out, rather than the odd flat take or two that made up the official tracklisting. To get The La’s, Jim, you’ve got to magnetise them in the first take or two. That’s where the magic happens, when the song is still cooking and the band is still feeling their way around the melody and vibe of it all.
The La’s – Son Of A Gun (Take 2)
Their second recorded take of Son Of A Gun is proof. Long before Steve Lillywhite was drafted in to jigsaw Mavers’ abandoned album together, Jeremy Allom was tasked with manning those ’60s dust-covered faders. The group responds, rattling out a skifflish and rootsy version, full of air and life and that mystical, non-descript ingredient that makes The La’s unique.
The downtuned guitar picks out a clip-clopping rhythm, all bite in the high notes and snapping twang in the low. Mavers’ sing-songy voice floats across the melody, his sidekick John Power harmonising those ‘run rabbit run‘ lines in the chorus. A lovely wee guitar run plays behind the chorus, up and down the scales and back out of consciousness by the time Mavers has begun harmonising with himself. That’ll be double-tracking, Lee. We’ll not be having much more of that nonsense.
Anyway.
The sun is currently out here in North Ayrshire and, as is tradition in this house when that happens, the Trojan reggae gets blasted. Presently Trojan’s Tighten Up Volume 2 is making the heavily scarred wooden flooring vibrate, causing ripple effects in my daughter’s mug of tea and thudding its easy skanking bass off and out through the patio doors and into the back garden, maybe even entertaining the neighbours as it floats its way across the railway tracks to be vapourised by the ball of fire in the sky.
Rudy Mills – John Jones
What I know about Rudy Mills would easily fit into the 1 cm run out groove of this late 60s beauty, and the internet can’t tell me much more. What I can tell you is that John Jones is a fine example of rocksteady.
A mid-paced groover, it has all necessary ingredients for a rockin’ good time; squeaky organ, repeating four chord riddim, slightly wobbly backing vocals and a soulful, honest delivery that leaves you in doubt of its authenticity as a bona fide roots reggae classic. Not as well known, perhaps, as other tunes and artists from the era, it’s one that belongs in your ears, for today at least. Oh yeah – and it features a ‘son of a gun‘ lyric too, as it should for a song about a low down, lying, woman-stealing ne’erdowell.
At midnight on Thursday going into Friday there, Taylor Swift released – or dropped, as they say nowadays – a new album (or albums, plural, given the cash-grab of multiple formats that is becoming more the norm these days too) and the internet this side of the border went into a bit of a mild frenzy over the inclusion of – as you will be sick of hearing by now – a Blue Nile-referencing lyric.
‘Drowning in the Blue Nile, he sent me Downtown Lights, I hadn’t heard it in a while…‘ are lines that bookend the mid-paced and breathy Guilty As Sin?, a synthy, processed track with a building chorus that doesn’t instantly hit – and why would it, I’m a 54 year-old man – but one which I suspect I’ll hear multiple times around the house and in the car until I know every word and nuance back to front. Such is the appeal of Swift round these parts. And around the globe a trillion times over. What a talent, undoubtedly.
The Blue Nile, on the other hand, I get, I understand, I fit the demographic. I love everything about them; the tectonic pace at which they work(ed), the shroud of mystery and intrigue around them, Paul Buchanan’s languid and resigned voice, the songs.
The songs! I must confess, they took a while (like Taylor Swift might) to work their magic on me. When the Blue Nile first appeared from out of the Glasgow rain, all chinos and swept back curls and faint sophistication, their stylised and expertly-produced coffee table symphonies were not to my palate. I liked my singers to bark and shout. Off mic and even off key was fine to these ears. Close-miked, enunciated crooning was for old folk over 30. I liked my guitars scuzzy and fuzzed up or jangling away at a window-rattlin’ volume for two, three minutes at a push. Politely played guitars that crept slowly beyond the five, six minute mark belonged on Dire Straits records and not in my record collection. Keyboards and drum machines? That was strictly Level 42 territory, man.
But one day, I got it. A Walk Across The Rooftops reeled me in with its slow-burning, twisting, turning and unspooling melodies and I was hooked. Then the group found hats. And then, I found Hats.
The Downtown Lights, the track that gets Taylor all a-teary, appears second song in. Taking many of its cues from the signifiers on that first album, it glides on a bed of politely pattering electronic Linn drums and long-breathing keyboards, gently pulsing electro bass and stabbing strings. Cascading percussion permeates in all the right places as Buchanan’s voice lets loose a gorgeous tumbling melody that forms the centre piece of the track.
“Nobody loves you this way!” he emotes, artificial strings swelling in time to the break of hearts, even Taylor’s. Paul Buchanan’s voice, his phrasing, his controlled delivery… it wouldn’t sound out of place at all on Station To Station or any number of those Bowie studio records from the era.
The Blue Nile – The Downtown Lights
The Downtown Lights forms part of a record that is required to be listened to as a whole, something that in the scroll, like, delete, swipe world we now live in seems almost archaic. It’s pretty much the perfect record, a record that is initially so somnolent and atmospheric that it might make more sense listening to it in deep space, or, if it’s more practical, a flotation tank.
I can totally see why Taylor Swift might dig The Blue Nile. And I totally expect The Blue Nile to chart at some point in the next week. Taylor has enough followers that, if even half a percent took a curious interest in the track and played it on Spotify, The Downtown Lights could yet end up The Blue Nile’s best-known song. Move over Tinseltown, there’s a new kid in town. Who saw that coming?
It begins with a rat-a-tat of rattling, ricocheting far-off processed beats then melts itself into a woozy, hazy, two chord guitar riff. A nagging, incessant keyboard riff (or is it effect-heavy flute? Or another guitar track filtered through a dozen stomp boxes?) follows. A proper headnodder of a groove builds around the disparate tracks. A bassline, rubbery and dependable nails the whole thing to 4/4 time and then…lurch! A divebombing tremelo wobbles six strings wonkily downwards, seasick and stoned, and suddenly you’re disorientated. Only momentarily, mind, as here come the vocals. A girl? A boy? A duet? And what are they singing? They’re more vocalising than singing really, as any number of Netflix subtitles will tell you these days, the voice(s) trippy and overlaid and harmonising in an out-of-body way that’ll have you humming along from this point on. Here’s that flute again. And the rat-a-tat. And the shape-shifting lurch. And those inter-woven harmonies. And the flute again. And the monster bassline. And another lurch, just as you’re getting the hang of the discombobulation of it all. And so it goes, for nearly 7 minutes, My Bloody Valentine‘s greatest studio moment – Soon.
My Bloody Valentine – Soon
My 7″, signed by McGee no less.
It has actual lyrics. You can look them up if you don’t believe me. They’re not what Kevin Shields wrote though. The stubborn artist – and with Soon and the rest of the Glider EP (and the Tremelo EP and Loveless), he is far more of an artist – studio auteur, even, than mere musician – wouldn’t give them to the label. He’d present Creation with the completed recordings and their titles and some poor office girl would have to sit and decipher everything through the fuggy haze on record and, very possibly, within the office itself. Naturally, many of the real lyrics are lost forever, the ‘official’ words actually the work of the Creation intern. That’s pop art for ye.
Soon isn’t necessarily a word you’d associate with My Bloody Valentine. A band so determined – so bloody-minded, even – it took them 21 years between records and then nothing since, it remains my favourite piece of music by them. It’s an astonishing piece of art still, even after 34 years. The product of hours and hours and breakdowns and missteps in the recording studio, it was painstakingly created by Kevin Shields, hunched over spooling tapes and faders and offset Fender Jazzmasters, tremelo arm nestled in his fingers and ready to glide. Just as Johnny has the jangle and Jimi has the fuzz, Shields has glide guitar as his signature. Detune your guitar to some far-out open tuning, hold a chord shape with the left hand and, as you strum, lean gently but firmly onto and into that tremelo arm. The floating bridge will reduce the tension on the strings, leaving you with that trademark sighing, tone bending, shape-shifting guitar sound. Just add a mission control-sized pedal board and a decent vintage amp or two to the chain for maximum push and pull effect.
I bet he went through a gazillion strings perfecting it.
Soon was released at an interesting intersection in indie music. My Bloody Valentine, a group synonymous with guitars and Docs and shapeless black jumpers found themselves influenced, knowingly or otherwise, by the rhythm-focused music comin’ atcha from Manchester.
That ‘Funky Drummer’ beat that propelled Fools Gold? The military two step that implored a million bucket-hatted eejits to twist their melons? Here it all was – the mellower cousin of Public Enemy’s fierce sampled beats – chopped, cut and pasted and stuck together again to provide the back beat for a track that no band, not even MBV themselves, could replicate live. Those repetitive Italo house hooklines that ear wormed their way from Happy Mondays’ back catalogue and caused van drivers to whistle while they worked? The same hooklines that had been born from Detroit techno and adopted as their own by the magpie-like Ryder clan? Here they were too, in flute form, but still there, popping up regularly enough to provide both hook and anchor for a track that might’ve been lost at sea without it.
It’s that little motif that plants Soon firmly into the future – even still in 2024 – and maintains the group’s legacy as forward-thinking studio pioneers. They’ve released other material since, of course. Not much though…and nothing with the heart and soul and (despite what I’ve just said above) originality of Soon. It’s a weird, warped beauty. Nocturnal. Otherworldly. Perfect. And peerless.
As a new artist, how hard is it to get your music heard? Rhetorical question perhaps, but “with great difficulty” would be the resounding answer. Current stats show that over 60,000 new tracks are uploaded to Spotify every day. That’s around half a million a week…two million a month….twenty four million a year. For a new artist, the impact they can expect to make is zilch. Comparable to a shed tear of realisation plopping into the Atlantic Ocean and hoping that enough ripples cause it to somehow stand out, only the foolhardy would believe that they could make it – whatever ‘make it’ is these days – and sustain a career in music.
The keen-for-success artist might also bombard the in boxes of the taste makers and influential movers and shakers on the internet in the vain/vague hope that someone will maybe feature them and their music. Even I, with my ‘outdated music for outdated people‘ tagline get dozens of weekly emails from hopefuls across the globe, all eager for me to feature them here. Sometimes I do, but as you know, mostly I don’t.
If you, the artist, wants to go the more traditional route of trying to woo a record company, the executives will no longer hot-foot it en masse to your headline show in a grimy London sweat-box. Instead, they’ll tap into your socials, check out how many followers you have, how many monthly listeners you can pull and what sort of merch you are selling via Bandcamp or wherever. Can I make money from them? is their first thought. Is the music any good? might be their second. And yet, and yet, great talent is out there…
I’m involved in putting on gigs and in recent weeks I’ve been lucky enough to witness some artists who, with a whole lot of luck, could and should be far more well-known than they currently are. A couple of weeks ago we had BMX Bandits play our wee venue (the Harbour Arts Centre) in Irvine. Duglas Bandit suggested Alice Faye as a support act. He’s such a fan of her that when it came to show time, he asked if he could introduce her to the audience…then walked across the stage to take a seat in one of the front rows to watch her. By this point in the evening, I knew why; during the soundcheck, it was just Alice, Danny the sound engineer and myself in the room, and when Alice started singing…oh man! I looked at the normally stoic and hard to impress Danny, who, lost in faders and reverb and noise gates, raised one eyebrow high and smiled knowingly to himself. He was experiencing exactly what I was; a phenomenon.
Alice’s voice was pure and clear with a tone and depth and unique personality that singled her out immediately as one of the greats. I really mean that. I was thinking Nina Simone, Joni Mitchell, Nico… unique and individual voices, and voices that Alice could sit alongside without being one iota out of place. As Alice sang her heart out shyly to an empty room, even the motes of swirling dust being picked up by the heat rays below the ancient HAC spotlights stopped what they were doing to listen. “This must’ve been what it was like when Amy Winehouse sang in front of someone for the first time,” I caught myself thinking at one point. Preposterous, yet not really. It was both jaw dropping and heart-warming in equal measure – here’s a new artist who can really, really sing. Lovely and astonishing. The song she was singing at the time was, I’m sure, Exact Same Thing, the fourth track on the playlist below.
She apparently has it all, Alice. In her vocal stylings there are clear nods not only to the past but the present. It’d be easy to imagine any of her songs sitting perfectly well amongst the ’60s shimmer and melodrama of Lana De Ray or the downbeat pop stylings of Billie Eilish. What it takes to get noticed then elevated to their sort of status is the golden prize. What’s that quote again about success being 10% talent and 90% luck? Alice Faye isn’t lacking anything on the talent front, that’s for sure. All she needs is the luck. And a lot of it.
Thrillingly, that luck might be happening. Alice has been picked up by the people behind Rufus Wainwright and she’ll support him on a couple of upcoming dates. Rufus’s audience, you would think, should appreciate a quirky voice and floating melody, so I’d hope Alice’s name is slightly better-known come the summer. Talent like Alice is so hard to find. Let’s treasure it when it lands in your lap.
In the summer of ’22, Ross Wilson assembled a 7-piece band to accompany him on Blue Rose Code‘s various festival stages. Ross, as you may well know, is more than comfortable performing as a solo performer, or as part of a stripped-back duo or trio, but the opportunity to flesh out his sound with guitar, keys, drums and a brass section proved too great to pass up…and his band and their input stretched him in great, fantastical directions as a result. Anyone who has caught him live with the full-fat Blue Rose Code will have witnessed shows akin to euphoria and religious experience. Going full-on Dexys, the band would go running – actual running – and then do press-ups backstage, right up until the point they were due on, so that by the time they’d begun their first number they were literally hitting the ground running. No easing into a set, no feeling their way with an unknown audience, it was bam! Bam! BAM! We are Blue Rose Code and this is what we do; off-mike hollers and whoops, loud boot stomps to emphasise big moments in the songs, a hand on heart as a key lyric is sung…you couldn’t help but get caught up in it all.
What Blue Rose Code did on those festival dates is very much apparent on the new album, Bright Circumstance. Building on that Dexys by way of Style Council approach honed through communal exercise and live shows, brass stabs as sharp as a stiletto puncture the Walls Come Tumbling Down stomp of opener Jericho. A fat and thumping four to the floor beat keeps it moving forward, shimmers of Hammond easing quietly into the gaps between brass and vocal and its call and response section. There’s a drop out in the middle, the spot where eager audiences were (and will be) invited to join in with enthusiastic hand claps, before the band revs up again and drives the song home in a brassy rush of Stax proportions. That’ll be yr album opener, and no mistake.
Blue Rose Code – Jericho
If you’ve seen Blue Rose Code live, in whichever guise, you’ll know that Ross touches on the big subjects; life, love, social issues and our unfair society, and they’re all here on Bright Circumstances. Most of the recent live set is present, and if you only know it from a stripped back show, the breadth of musicianship and colour afforded by the assembled musicians might leave you momentarily breathless. Sadie is carried by quietly brushed acoustic guitars, swelling, weeping pedal steel and more of that glorious Hammond shimmer; exactly the sort of track the still-switched-on Rod Stewart of the ’70s might have done to great effect.
A scraping, violin – think Neil Young’s Running Dry – scratches its way across the socio-political bite of Thirteen Years and its ‘are they heating or are they eating?‘ refrain. The bold Ross found himself in trouble last year when he managed to sneak this into a live performance being broadcast to the nation on BBC Radio 4. Inspiration is infiltration. A loose and jazzy Amazing Grace rounds off side one, Wilson taking liberties with his phrasing to great effect, the band showcasing their talents as their leader directs them in the ebb and flow of the melody.
Side two is the softer of the two sides, and it’s bookended wonderfully by two great tracks. The opener, Peace In Your Heart, will be familiar to audiences on any of the more recent BRC dates. A slow acoustic builder, it unravels into the sort of gospel folk that John Martyn and Van Morrison once did with great effect and, on this evidence, should see Ross Wilson considered an equal. You can dress your songs up in brass and electricity if you want to, but what it really comes down to, Jim, is a universal message played simply and sung well. There are no frills on Peace In Your Heart, and it’s the perfect comedown from the kitchen sink approach on side one.
Blue Rose Code – Peace In Your Heart
Midway through, you’ll find Don’t Be Afraid, its moody ambience and close-miked minor key atmospherics revealing fantastic harmonies and off-kilter counter melodies with each repeated listen. Funereal horns lead the song upwards to its heavenly conclusion, the vocal refrain namechecking God with all the gravitas and straightforwardness of Nick Cave.
The religious theme continues on Now The Big Man Has Gone, a lament for a pal no longer here. Lyle Watt, Ross’s long-standing foil on guitar and finder of the bluest of blue notes in any situation leads us in with a quietly strummed mandolin before the song opens up with more female harmonies, a mournful accordion and tinkling piano. And then it’s over.
It’s a great album, Bright Circumstance. It finds Ross in good spirits, in a good place in life and surrounded by sympathetic musicians and guests (Eddi Reader, Donald Shaw, Naomi Stirrat). He’s found peace and contentment, faith and spirituality and we are the benefactors of this. A decade into a music career that has seen him reach new heights and gather new fans with each subsequent release, it would be great if Bright Circumstance was the album that saw Ross finally lose the label of ‘best kept secret’ and brought him into the collective consciousness of music listeners with a fondness for great songs played and sung outrageously well. He deserves it. And so do we.
Bright Circumstance is released on the 10th May. You can get it everywhere, including Blue Rose Code‘s Bandcamp page (although the pre-order link isn’t quite live yet).
Before the bombast and bluster of Waterfront and its parent album Sparkle In The Rain, before Don’t You Forget About Me‘s omnipresence in top tens the world over, before they looked to the tiered arenas of the American midwest and long before they’d even thought about possibly considering property investments in Tuscany, Simple Minds made sonically-interesting and stubbornly European music; cold, glacial and filmic, music that suggested movement and travel by Eastern European train rather than by air conditioned limo the length of the Eastern Seaboard. Even their pseudo Cyrillic logo at the time, all thin and sparse and fat-fee, was a nudge-nudge wink-wink to the twin influences of the Iron Curtain and the Cold War. Those reversed Rs. The backwards Ns. Ask James Dean Bradfield about it the next time you see him.
As much as Simple Minds became a great Scottish export around the mid ’80s, it’s those earlier records where, for me, the magic really happens. Indeed, as the switched-on amongst us know, early Simple Minds was where it was truly at. That band, that line-up, that creative vision, not to mention the inspired choice of producers – John Leckie! Steve Hillage! – has a rare essence about it that makes those great, danceable post-punk records sound futuristic still, even 40 years on.
Simple Minds – Theme For Great Cities
The eerie keyboard motif that signifies Theme For Great Cities’ start is all over those Minds’ records from the era. Part Eno and part Magazine’s Dave Formula, it’s the singular instrument that hints at melody and song form in the band. Married to a punchy rhythm section, it made for a spatial and atmospheric sound, a sound that was unmistakeably Simple Minds.
Theme For Great Cities is the perfect example of the group, the juddering bassline and whip-smart electro backing conjuring images of speeding landscapes as you rattle through foreign lands. The band is precision-perfect in timing, metronomic and pinpoint in accuracy. Even Charlie Burchill is in on the act. He plays almost not one chord, almost not one sustained note. The disciplined post-punker that he is plays the track’s scratchy rhythm almost the entire time without so much as a tendon-resting break. Nile Rodgers in eye liner, he breaks free at one point to simply crash a minor chord with all the charm of a glass bottle being smashed against a wall, then slips into a little effect-heavy sustained glissando before once again taking up the chicken scratch. Arty? Yep. European? Yep. Roxy Music if played by Glaswegian tenement kids? Yep. It’s a beauty. That well-worn cliche about an old record sounding like it could’ve been recorded yesterday rings true with Theme For Great Cities.
Likewise This Earth That You Walk Upon.
Simple Minds – This Earth That You Walk Upon
It’s so disciplined, so ethereal, it might’ve launched itself straight from The Orb’s mixing desk in 1993. Its pitter-pattering drum machine springs to mind Sly Stone, but where Sly would close-mike himself and drawl coolly about baybees makin’ baybees, Simple Minds smother the pitter-patter in a soundscape of treated electric guitar and thumping slapped bass, synth washes and echo-laden keyboards. Spacey and flotation tank-light, This Earth That You Walk Upon is a bit of a year zero for the electro acts that would follow.
In movie making terms, the trajectory of Simple Minds is a bit like your favourite art house director foregoing the grit and grain of monochrome and throwing their lot in with the surround sound and widescreen epicness of the Hollywood blockbuster studio set. There’ll still be good bits in the movies, but as a whole, they’re too crowd pleasing and calculated. In the old days, the creatives at the helm knew the cost of nothing and the value of everything. When they make that move into the big leagues, the bottom line becomes the single most important factor, and undoubtedly the music suffers as a consequence. Thankfully, we can go back any time we like. Outdated music for outdated people? You bet it is.
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.
I’ve been reading everyone’s end of year lists and the one thing that strikes me – as it has done for the past half dozen years or so – is my out-of-touchness with new artists and releases. While all and any release is but a couple of clicks away from the very space I’m sitting at, I’m staunchly anti-Spotify…and it’s clearly to my listening detriment. I much prefer physical over digital any day of the week, but inevitably finance – or the lack of – has dictated that my consumption of new music is on a clear downward trend and gathering momentum with each passing month. It’ll likely be sometime around September 2024 when I stumble across a record from 2023 that’s had everyone raving for months beforehand, but I’m not that bothered to be honest.
I’ve really enjoyed the tracks that The Smile have used to promote their upcoming second album. Bending Hectic, all woozy electric guitar and close-miked Thom Yorke, was supposed to be a stand-alone single but I notice it’s on the tracklisting for the record, so clearly someone talked sense into them. To have thrown away a stone cold 21st century classic to the digital ether would have been stupid of them.
More recently, the album’s title track Wall Of Eyes has found its way onto the radio playlists. It’s a beauty; a bossa nova-ish acoustic groove with far-off layered strings that sound like thunder peals and a melody that takes repeated plays to fully unwind, but when it does…wow! I know folk go on and on and on about Radiohead – and this ain’t Radiohead – but it’s really great. Their debut album was a beauty and its follow-up already sounds like it might be too.
My favourite track of the year, for what it’s worth, was a one-sided promo 12″ that came out via Last Night From Glasgow. The label continues to go from strength to strength, and whilst providing a home to disparate but talented, long in the tooth and (mainly) Scottish acts, they also offer a platform to the new and inexperienced. Quad 90 was one such act and their track Le Blank will no doubt ring with a lot of this readership.
Quad 90 – Le Blank
It’s nothing you’ve never heard before. Forward-thinking with a knowing nod to the past, it could be ESG or ACR or even a Franz Ferdinand remix, but all necessary ingredients are present; post-punk chicken-scratch guitar, a ghosting, earwormy, Tom Tom Club-ish keyboard motif in the chorus, thumping Bernard Edwards bass and a sashaying double female vocal that falls somewhere between sultry and sulky. It played long and often round here before finding favour amongst the more discerrning radio shows across 6 Music and Radio Scotland (as did its follow-up Unequal Division) and is a good signifier of what might come next.
Gig-wise, I’m heavily involved with Freckfest in promoting shows in Irvine’s Harbour Arts Centre, a proper hidden gem of a music venue with just 100 seats and immeasurable vibes. Some of my favourite shows this year have been in here.
The Bug Club turned up on the last Tuesday in January – surely the hardest night of the year in which to sell tickets – and supported themselves by sneaking on unannounced and playing a whole half-hour of new material before coming back out to slay a hardy 80-strong audience with their Velvets x Modern Lovers rattle meets Osees x Stooges roll. For three folk, they make a quite marvellous racket. If they’re playing in a town near you (and they most likely will be at some point), you know what to do. Review here.
My favourite gig of the year was quite possibly around the same time, when the Hungry Beat collective pulled out all the stops in a marathon show that fused together like a scratchy Pete Frame family tree of Scottish alt. pop reimagined as The Band’s Last Waltz. Review here.
Other notable shows were The Waterboys epic and sprawling but razor-sharp show at the Barrowlands. Yer actual Mike Scott sent his foot messengers my way to express his personal thanks for this review, which was unexpected, and The Bluebells roof-raising homecoming album launch show in St Lukes. Yer actual Bobby Bluebell immediately re-Tweeted this review, accompanied by 3 love hearts, apparently the highest Bluebell accolade in the land.
Books are the new rock ‘n roll, dontchaknow? There were some really great book events this year that were the equal and more of any live music show. Andrew O’Hagan‘s Mayflies – already a modern classic and no mistake – had a bit of a reprise in Irvine over the late summer when a Nicola Sturgeon-chaired event saw Andrew chat about growing up in Irvine and the cultural influences that seeped their way into his autobiographical tale of life-long friendship. The former First Minister, a confirmed bookworm, asked me to sign one of my Perfect Reminder books for her and then re-Tweeted my follow-up review of the evening. Unsurprisingly, my stats went a wee bit stratospheric on the back of it, so I’m delighted (and relieved) that my writing in that review is up there with some of the best stuff I’ve ever written.
Not to be outdone, John Niven popped up in the HAC as part of the promotional tour for his powerful/excellent O Brother novel, a real autobiographical darkness and light page-turner that deals with the despair of family suicide and (the despair of) growing up in Irvine. If you’re of a similar age to me, there’ll be enough memory joggers contained within its pages to have you reading frantically to the end. It’s easily the best, most emotionally-charged book of 2023 and you really must read it. I’ve now read it twice, its pages forever smudged with the dampness of sad and happy tears.
On a personal level, I got to do more writing of worth (sleevenotes for the Trashcan Sinatras) and actual, real book stuff. A second publication bearing my name – The Full Pocket – came out at the start of the year and sold out just a few weeks ago. Of course, no sooner had it sold out than the Americans were asking for boxes of it and that man Niven was pointing out a badly-phrased and grammatically-poor sentence that might benefit from a rewrite. Should a reprint be in order, it’ll need a swift edit first.
The Full Pocket took me to another music ‘n literature event, this time in May at Frets in Strathaven, alongside James Yorkston and Vic Galloway. While James did his set, Vic and I made full use of the green room’s facilities and availed many of its bottles of their contents. Imagine my surprise the next morning when I saw photos of Vic, his quiff immaculate, accompanying James for a couple of numbers at the end of his set. I wonder just who it was I was talking to back stage all that time? I could swear Vic never moved from that green room the entire length of James Yorkston’s set.
Must get a new jacket for 2024
Vic, by now a close pal, obviously, turned up trumps in November when he got me backstage to say hello again to Johnny Marr. Vic was hosting an event where Johnny was talking about his 10 years as a solo artist and, with his last words said to me in May – “Keep in touch!” – ringing in my ears, I did just that and suggested he might be able to help me get a book to Johnny. After the show, Johnny greeted me like a long-lost friend – “Hey! It’s Craig from the Ballroom Blitz!” (a reference to his gig in Kilmarnock’s Grand Hall that Freckfest put on) and both myself and that other music writer-about-town Billy Sloan gave Johnny our respective books, much to the bemusement of the random guy who’d breached security and followed us quickly in. “Are youse guys famous?” he asked me with a worried look as he watched first Billy and then me chat easily and familiarly with Johnny. “They’ll fling me oot when they suss ahm jist a bam.”
Finally, I don’t know exactly what 2024 will bring, but I do know I’m likely to have my name on the front of another book. More on that when there’s more to tell…
Plain Or Pan 