Category: Live!

Alternative Version, Gone but not forgotten, Hard-to-find, Live!, Sampled

Introducing The Band

Craig McAllister

A few months ago I posted about the burst of classical music that The Smiths used to signify they were taking the stage. Walk-on music, when used as effectively as The Smiths did it, is an integral part of the live experience. Those in front of the stage have their senses heightened…quicksilver adrenaline courses through the collective mass… eagerness is fit to burst and, as one, they peak when their heroes take the stage. In the article linked above, Mike Joyce talks about the prickling of the hairs on his arms as Sergei Prokofiev’s music reaches its climax and the group emerge from the shadows and onto the stage. Intro music is pure theatre and high drama, powerful in its effect for audience and band alike.

The recent death of Mani had me revisiting the Stone Roses catalogue and reminiscing about the Stone Roses gigs I’d been at. I say gigs, but Stone Roses shows were more of an event than a mere gig. The minute the group began to pick up traction, they eschewed the usual circuit of venues and instead put on ambitious landmark concerts.

In the space of five rapid months in 1989, Stone Roses went from Glasgow Rooftops (above) – part of the touring circuit for bands of a certain size – to the Blackpool Tower Ballroom to a November show for 7000 rockers and ravers in London’s Alexandra Palace, at the time known as the broadcasting birthplace of the BBC and scene of some of those trippy 24-hour Pink Floyd and Soft Machine ‘happenings’ of the late ’60s, but certainly not the usual venue any bands might think to try and fill. Nowadays of course, any two-bit act with a bit of a following can add a date or two in the airy north London glasshouse, but in 1989 the Stone Roses’ choice of venue was genuinely inspired.

Fast forward another six months and the group would set up stall on Spike Island, a windswept and chemically-polluted estuary of the Mersey. Two months later they’d play their final show (for then, anyway) in a huge tent on Glasgow Green, 10,000 rockers, ravers and by now bucket-hatted bampots witnessing the band at the peak of their powers. The travelling tent idea is also now fairly standard practice for bands of a certain size these days. (Spike Island less so.)

As the band’s popularity grew, they went from the standard idea of support act plus half an hour of playlisted music to an actual rave culture-inspired show, the group just one element of a spectacle that would involve guest DJs dropping crashing house beats and hip hop on the P.A., lasers and strobes on the lighting rig, mass E communion in the audience and generally good vibes all round. These shows were a million miles from watching Gaye Bykers On Acid from a cider-soaked corner of Glasgow Tech or the Wedding Present at the QMU or any other touring guitar band of the era you care to mention. Yes, even you, Primal Scream. In 1989, Bobby was still looking for the key that would start up their particular bandwagon. (It was somewhere down the back of his Guns ‘n Roses leather trousers, I’m led to believe.)

All of those shows mentioned above (I was at three of them) began with I Wanna Be Adored. Since writing the song, or at least since the release of that debut album, has there ever been a Stone Roses show that didn’t start with it? I don’t think so. I Wanna Be Adored is, in its own way, a senses-heightener, a quicksilver surge of electricity, an early peak in a set full of peaks, but in the live arena, it too would come rumbling from out of the corners, fading in as an intro tape heralded the group’s imminent arrival.

Stone Roses intro music:

I’ve spent 35 years convinced that this music was made by the Stone Roses themselves, an abstract piece of art thrown away in the same vein as those backwards experiments they put onto b-sides, played for fun, recorded then used sparingly but appropriately. Certainly, the thunking, woody bassline is pure Mani. The hip-hop beat pure Reni. The sirens a clear extension of John Squire’s clarion call at the start of Elephant Stone.

Hearing this from Ally Pally’s carpeted floor minutes after Sympathy For The Devil is still strong in the memory. Hearing it again in the sweat-raining big top on Glasgow Green, many there unaware that this was not mere incidental rave music but Stone Roses’ call to arms (but we knew, oh yes, we knew, and excitement was immediately at fever pitch) still provokes a conditioned response in 2025.

It wasn’t made by Stone Roses though. Turns out it’s a piece of obscure-ish hip hop from 1987, looped, tweaked and added to by the Stone Roses team. The original – Small Time Hustler by The Dismasters – is immediately recognisable from that Stone Roses intro. Really, all the Stone Roses did was stick a few sirens on top of it…but combine that with Ally Pally’s echoing rave whistles and Glasgow Green’s surge of euphoria and it makes for high drama.

I wonder how many folk knew – truly knew – the source of that Stone Roses intro tape back in 1989?

Alternative Version, Live!

Is Not Was

Craig McAllister

Now not then.

Are not were.

Is not was.

It seems that Radiohead is back, to be spoken of in the present tense once again. Since their last shows a million years ago in 2017, there have been solo albums, side projects, film scores, even, thanks to The Bear‘s use of Let Down in a key scene, tunes trending for the millennials on Tik Tok. Significantly though, there has been no new Radiohead music since A Moon Shaped Pool. But out of the blue, they’re here again. The fanfare-free announcement a week or so ago of a series of live shows across selected European capital cities created high excitement and mild panic amongst their army of fans, and a scurrying for tickets – or for the right to queue for tickets (sheesh) – began, a sort of Oasis-lite feeding frenzy for the No Logo generation…and, as it turns out, their children.

My two made us all sign up for the presale registration, desperate as they were to see the band that their old dad regularly has playing around the house. I was ambivalent about it all. I despise, I mean totally hate, the trend for any and all pre-registration schemes that let the lucky ones elbow others out of the road and out of the queue so that they can maybe, maybe, buy a ticket for a show. I appreciate it’s to minimise touting and all of that, but still. Get back to the days of lining up outside Virgin Argyle Street in the pouring autumn rain, that’s what I say.

And of all the shows they are playing, and that includes Berlin and Copenhagen and what have ye, there’s only one date that I can fit in around work – the Saturday night in London, which is surely the most popular date in the run of shows. So the chances of securing a ticket, let alone 3 or 4, is gotta be slim you’d think.

And I’ve seen Radiohead a handful of times before anyway.

Besides, they’re bound to pencil in more shows for next year, maybe to support a new record that has very possibly been recorded already. Y’never know with Radiohead. It’s quite something in the rumour milling scrolling news feed of the modern age for a band to maintain an element of mystique, yet Radiohead has consistently done so.

But the boy, already coasting through 2025 like a king, gets The Code (of course he does) and so, come the pre-sale date, he and his sister log on while I’m at work, muttering quietly to myself about dynamic pricing and the percentage likelihood of snagging the briefs. They don’t get them, of course. They had them. Four of the little gold dust blighters. They were in the basket, £85 seated tickets inexplicably ramped up to £125 a pop (there’s yr dynamic pricing) and in the split second it took the kids to press ‘Buy’, the website had kicked them out on account of them being bots. This happened three, four, eighteen times until they gave up and admitted defeat. A quick trawl through the Radiohead forums later on unearthed dozens and hundreds of stories exactly the same. It seems the touts and dynamic pricing won the day after all, and now I’m pissed off that I won’t be going to a show that a) I didn’t expect to be at in the first place and 2) would grudge paying over the odds for anyway and 3) would’ve meant me paying Saturday night in London hotel prices for a family of four (2 rooms, thanks) the month before Christmas.

Let Down or Lucky? I dunno.

I’ll wait in keen anticipation for further, and more local, dates in 2026.

Present Tense is one of A Moon Shaped Pool‘s highlights. Ghostly and spectral, it carries itself on a deftly-picked minor key guitar pattern and unusual time signature.

Radiohead – Present Tense

There’s some lovely shuffling percussion in the background, a sandpaper rubbed against guitar strings and looped kinda effect and Thom’s voice harmonises against itself spectacularly. It’s all so intense and pretty, the climbing strings, wordless backing vocals and understated synthetic symphony carrying it gently to its pseudo bossa nova conclusion.

Sandwiched between the sprawling Talk Talk-isms of The Numbers and Tinker Tailor Soldier Sailor etc etc‘s glitchy ambient techno (all the tracks on A Moon Shaped Pool are sequenced alphabetically – but you knew that already), Present Tense might have benefited from being closer to the front of the album. Shoulda called it Aardvark, Radiohead. An opportunity missed, I think. But then, all the best bands have, to use modern parlance, deep cuts that require digging out to be held up like prize root vegetables for an unsuspecting public, and Present Tense is one of Radiohead’s very best.

The late-dusk, campfire version that Thom and Johnny filmed in the Californian desert a few years back is The One. Two men, one in a vest, two guitars, both played with the lightest of touch, a pitter-pattering drum machine and a host of fantastic interplay makes for a great listen, the outcome far greater than the sum of its parts. Treat yr ears to this:

Live!

Bless Me Father

Craig McAllister

If you could draw a Venn Diagram of idiosyncratic, well-dressed male vocalists, somewhere in the overlap between the menace of Nick Cave, the melody of Rufus Wainwright and the mastery of Scott Walker, you’d find Father John Misty. I went to see him last week at the Barrowlands and I’m fairly confident that come the end of December, I won’t have seen a better gig this year.

I’m meeting my pal Chris and his wife Ann, over from Brooklyn. They’ve built a two week tour of Ireland and Scotland around the FJM Glasgow shows, and while the draw of Dublin, Edinburgh, Skye, Ayrshire and all undoubtedly makes the trip worthwhile, it is night one in Glasgow that they’re really here for. Chris is a super-fan and he and Ann are at the venue before I’ve even finished work. When I get there and find them, they’re hugging the barrier, slightly left of centre, right at the front of the stage. Around us are other super-fans and I feel slightly fraudulent. I like Father John Misty. But I don’t love Father John Misty. Still, there I am.

Marginally late by Barrowlands standards, he saunters on, all 9 feet 3 of him, an imposing figure in dark suit and white shirt, pointy shoes and greased-back lion’s mane hair. His band shamble out of the long shadows behind him looking like Lynyrd Skynyrd’s roadcrew, all dead men’s suits and cuban heels, hair longer and greasier than the solos they’ll play whenever their leader gives them the nod.

They fall into I Guess Time Just Makes Fools Of Us All, its eight and a half-minute Leonard Cohen-does-disco groove the perfect stall setter for the night ahead. Father John Misty detaches the mic from its stand and whips the cord across the stage. He prowls, eyeballing the crowd, sussing out who exactly has come to see him; is this an audience full of folk who only know him from his Tik Tok-trending Real Love Baby, or is it an audience who knows every word of every deep cut from his back catalogue, or is it full of casual, bluffing it, fans like me? As if on cue, his radar tingles and suddenly he’s eyeballing me…like, totally staring me out, a colossus growling down at me from the very edge of the Barrowlands’ well-worn stage. This is awkward. Our eyes continue to lock until finally I break and steal a glance at his saxophone player. By the time I pluck up the courage to see where he is, he’s already at the other end of the stage giving some other unfortunate in the front couple of rows the hard death stare.

He has presence, you might say. And when he sings, man! He’s fantastic. A voice that is pure and rich on record is even better when he’s standing feet from you and letting it out with practised abandon. He has it all, from the boots-up Johnny Cash earthquake shake to a high and floaty, ear-kissing Beach Boys falsetto. You’ll know from the records that his phrasing and enunciation is superb, and it’s exactly like that here too. What you don’t get on record though are the little body pops and shakes and whatchagonnado? shrugs that punctuate the more humorous lines. Part preacher, part musical theatre…take your eyes off him at your peril.

‘She put on Astral Weeks, said, “I Love jazz” and winked at me.”

That’s the opening line on second-song-in, Josh Tillman And The Accidental Dose, a real beauty of a Beck-like track that takes the lurching orchestration from Serge Gainsbourg’s Melodie de Nelson as its jumping-off point and allows the vocals to tell a tale around it – a tale, I really hope, that isn’t as tall as the guy who sings it.

His set rolls on…Goodbye Mr Blue‘s Everybody’s Talkin‘ as sung by Glen Campbell, an exquisite Chateau Lobby #4, a stomping and angry Date Night, the less-than-subtle When You’re Smiling And Astride Me, a pin-drop quiet Summer’s Gone…song by song, this is becoming one of the great Barrowland shows. Highlights? All of it really, but especially that opening one-two, then a rampant Nothing Good Ever Happens At The Goddam Thirsty Crow, a joyful I Love You, Honeybear and, to these ears, the show’s pinnacle, Nancy From Now On. What. A. Song!

Father John Misty – Nancy From Now On

And what a gig. Slowly and steadily, something happens. I came to the Barrowlands liking Father John Misty. I left loving him. I spent the whole of the next day at work lurking around on Twickets whenever I had the chance in the hope I could pick up a ticket for that night’s show as well. No such luck on that front, sadly. I’m still giddy from Thursday night’s show, believe it or not. It goes without saying I’m already eager for him to return. Haste ye back, FJM.

Gig of 2025 and no mistake. Top that, everyone else.

 

Gone but not forgotten, Live!

There Is No Culture Is My Brag*

Craig McAllister

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

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

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

The Smiths – Intro Music, Irvine Magnum Centre 22.9.85

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Philadelphia Orchestra cond. by Riccardo Muti

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

Now, that’s how you start a show!

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

Live!

Funny? Clever? Entertaining? Mozz Def

Craig McAllister

Them Smiths burned brightly. Five years in and out. 17 singles, 4 studio albums, a trio of compilations, a live album and then gone. One of our most influential groups over and out in the time it takes other bands to harvest the data on their Tik-Tok accounts. Morrissey as a solo artist initially followed the same blueprint; high watermark of quality on the singles’ b-sides, an early years grab-all Hatful-style compilation, fervent live shows, studio albums that were inventive and funny and unique and occasionally really rockin’ and then…the downward spiral. A musical shift in the nation’s listening tastes coincided with a poor album (Southpaw Grammar) and the decline of Morrissey was in full effect.

It’s not hard to see why Smiths fans might’ve eventually if reluctantly looked elsewhere for thrills; weak albums recorded by a curmudgeon in shitty parallel jeans, the ever-revolving cast of record companies (un)willing to work with him, the shelving of albums, the contempt he shows for his fans – the merch stands at the gigs with Patti ‘n Lou ‘n Bowie records – and more recently, his own – signed by yr man at eye watering prices (£250 for a signed Suedehead?!!), the sudden, abrupt halts to shows (hecklers, the smell of meat, the cold, anything really, all cited as reasons), the last minute cancellations of gigs when, very late in the day, he just can’t be bothered to play….and not least the increasingly right wing politics, the hanging out with Russell Brand, the Brexit-posturing, the For Britain schtick and the siding with Farage, the draping of himself in the flag of Israel, for fuck’s sake. How exactly did the voice of the marginalised, the disenfranchised and the downright downtrodden find himself on the right (ie, the wrong) side of the political spectrum, a venture capitalist with a narrow and bigoted view of the world? The boy with the house in the Hollywood hills has quietly gone about forgetting where he comes from. I gave up on him a long time ago. You maybe did too.

But…

That back catalogue. I stopped listening to any of his ‘new’ stuff after 1997’s Maladjusted. I’d long held the notion that Morrissey was something of a genius at creating song titles for songs that failed to live up to their expectation – Life Is A Pigsty, To Me You Are A Work Of Art, When You Open Your Legs, Something Is Squeezing My Skull, Munich Air Disaster 1958, Mama Lay Softly On The Riverbed, I Am Not A Dog On A Chain, The Edges Are No Longer Parallel (written about a new pair of skinny fit Levi’s, I’m told), I Have Forgiven Jesus, The World Is Full Of Crashing Bores, All The Lazy Dykes, Neal Cassady Drops Dead, The Bullfighter Dies, Kick The Bride Down The Aisle…. If they thought they could get away with it, there are writers out there who would give their eye teeth to come up with song titles as inventive and witty as some of those above.

As it turns out, some of these songs are the equal of their titles. That back catalogue that I’ve been stubbornly ignoring for nigh on 30 years? It has some properly stellar tracks just waiting to be plucked from obscurity, compiled into a Spotify playlist and re-evaluated – or evaluated, in my case. This is suddenly important.

Morrissey is back over here for a handful of shows. The tickets aren’t cheap and at the time of going on sale, I’m not that fussed. But I read the reviews from Dublin last weekend. Despite the setlist being heavy on late-era Moz, no-one has a bad word to say. A creeping fear of missing out – FOMO, as your kids might say – begins to linger and intensify. By Tuesday, I’m trawling Twickets looking for a bargain. And I find one for Thursday night’s show in Glasgow. That Spotify playlist of songs played on the unfolding 2025 tour becomes essential listening for two days. I soak in the brooding and majestic Life Is A Pigsty, the slow menace of Jack The Ripper, the me! me! me! egomania of All You Need Is Me. But I skip the Charming Man-lite Rebels Without Applause, the Charming Man-even lighter I Ex-Love You (another great title) and the mess that is the unappealing Scandinavia and hope for the best.

He’s been doing Speedway, one of the best tracks on his last truly great album (Vauxhall And I). And he’s been doing You’re The One For Me Fatty, a throwaway pop song, but one that, since the subject matter himself (Chas Smash) told me it was about him, has lasted well to these cynical ears. He’s teased audiences too with a handful of Smiths songs, of course, so the good song/bad song ratio  must be stacked in my favour, mustn’t it? I can’t legislate for any Israel-defending or England for the English-type posturing. I can’t do anything if he walks off at the first whiff of a Gregg’s sausage roll…or doesn’t turn up at all. I can’t deny that that thought hasn’t crossed my mind. Yet, in a shame-faced display of backtracking and wilful contradiction – but proudly wearing my ‘Morrissey Sucks’ t-shirt (a Billy Bragg one-off that my sister managed to come by for my birthday a few years ago) off I go. Sorry Johnny, if I’ve let you down.

I find a great spot in the VIP section. Easy. I wander into it and no-on asks me to leave, so there I am, directly facing centre stage, an uninterrupted sight line, finding myself deep in conversation with two guys from Brighton who’ve been following the tour. The Academy is quickly rammed. There’s that tangible feeling you get at certain gigs where you know before a note has even been played that you’re in the right place.

The pre-show film plays in lieu of a support band. It’s great. A jigsawing of Morrissey references, it throws out a feral Ramones at CBGBs, a trashy New York Dolls, a camp Bowie…but also Benny Hill, some trashy and campy early ’70s Eurovision, Divine, Sigue Sigue Sputnik, superb footage of cabaret singers in working men’s clubs…(there’s a theme developing here)…and, of course, black and white stills and clips from Hollywood’s golden era. There’s a handsome and moustache-free Burt Reynolds There’s Alain Delon, slowly unfolding himself from a chair and onto the floor where he dies a slow death as seen on the cover of The Queen Is Dead. There’s Billy Fury, cover star of The Smiths’ greatest single. Steven Patrick will have had great fun putting all of this together, a trainspotter’s reference guide to the mind of Morrissey.

And then we’re off.

It’s thrilling.

Morrissey is funny, quick witted, whip-smart with the crowd and in fine voice. He sings great. There’s a very strong opening; All You Need Is Me – You’re The One For Me Fatty – a mesmerising Speedway (yes!) into a juddering How Soon Is Now? (note: Johnny’s band plays this better). He has us where he wants us….and so dives deeper into that strange, unfamiliar back catalogue. I’m on board with it though, although the backdrop that changes with each song keeps the attention when sometimes the music finds it wandering.

Then, mid-set, salvation.

Without fanfare or introduction, Morrissey begins to sing I Know It’s Over. His band, for so long unable to cope with the delicacies and intricacies of the Smiths tunes, does a fantastic job. They are light of touch, sympathetic to the song’s heavy veil of pathos and regret and carry the singer like it’s 1986 at the London Palladium once more. Morrissey’s voice is superb, keening and aching those familiar words, stretching out one of the Smiths’ greatest torch songs into the here and now of 2025. It’s almost worth the admission price alone.

I Know It’s Over is followed by a thundering, joyful Every Day Is Like Sunday. Mass celebration, arms aloft in the chorus, arms around your partner’s shoulder – type stuff. Properly magic. At the part in the lyric where he sings, ‘A strange dust lands on your hand and on your face,’ the house lights go up on ‘face’ and I swear, I swear!, Morrissey sticks his tongue out at me. Right at me! Then the lights go down and I’m left to ponder it.

There’s more! Every Day Is Like Sunday gives way to a properly rockin’ and crashin’ Shoplifters Of The World, the elfin Italian guitar player stage left replicating perfectly Johnny’s harmonic solo.

It’s a proper wham! bam! slam! and I am spent.

But there’s more still! Life Is A Pigsty (my new favourite ‘new’ Morrissey tune)…a fantastically theatrical Jack The Ripper, Morrissey swinging his jacket and whipping his microphone lead through plumes of red smoke…the supreme gothic pop of Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me and, finally, a spitting Irish Blood, English Heart, the full stop on a quite brilliant 90-odd minutes.

My first Morrissey show since 1997 (?) I think, but on this form, maybe, possibly, probably not my last. Agh, the conflict. I feel a wee bit grubby. Elated, but grubby.(Go and see him if you can.)

 

Live!

IdleChild

Craig McAllister

It’s 1978. World Cup summer. Irvine is underneath the flightpath flown by the very helicopter that will bring Ally McLeod and his winning team of world-beaters from Hampden (not far over there) to Prestwick Airport (just down the road) where their plane for Argentina awaits, so it’s fair to say excitement is at fever pitch. We’ve all (Mark, Stuart, Graham, Chrissy) got Scotland strips; dark blue, white triangular collar, Umbro diamonds running for miles down the sleeve, and we kick balls and become World champions for hours between the garages at the back of our houses. John Gebbie and his wee brother Derek join in, although Curries in Townhead was long out of Scotland strips by this point and their mum has got them sky blue Manchester City strips instead. Hours of booting light flyaway plastic balls and rolling around in the stony dirt later and my brother Euan has a hole in his socks and shorts and that triangular white collar on the top is misshapen and filthy. By comparison, Derek’s strip is still tucked neatly into the high waistband of the shorts and is as pristine and clean as his pure white Milky Bar Kid bowlcut to the point that he could probably return it to Mr Currie for a full refund. Funny what you remember.

We live in a quiet pedestrianised street that’s as safe as you could ever hope for if you are a parent of young kids. My sister Shona is playing with her pal Kirsty, their dolls scattered across our front grass. Kirsty lives diagonally across the path. In a t-shirt and nappy, her wee brother Roddy is running happy barefooted circles around the front garden before being lifted inside by his mum. At some point, Mrs Woomble, Roddy and Kirsty’s mum, invites me in to their house to see the electric trainset that Mr Woomble has built in the loft. I stick my head up and in and the train whizzes around the hatch, under a bridge, past some fake trees and plastic cows grazing on a piece of green felt and back again. It’s very impressive.

In 1980, we move to a new house in Bank Street, a main throroughfare into and out of the town and definitely not the quiet suburban street we’ve just left behind. The Woombles move to Bank Street too, funnily enough, and once again live diagonally across the road. At some point they move away (to France, as it transpires, with Mr Woomble’s work, and then the States) and we’d never meet again until…

…I’m in the trenches of music retail. I enjoy the spoils of listening to all the new releases in the stock room the Friday before the Monday release. When processing stock, I’ll take time to read sleevenotes and credits… all of the stuff that both you and I still do to this day. One day I unpack an Idlewild album. I stick it on, and as its jagged and angular guitars clatter like the anti-Oasis (a very good thing by this point in time). I read the small print on the CD booklet. It’s the name of the singer that jumps out at me. Roddy Woomble. There can’t be too many Roddy Woombles in the world, surely. I invest extra time in this particular album – Hope Is Important – and fall for its wonky and angry sound. By the time of the next record – 100 Broken Windows – and its follow up, The Remote Part, that wild ramalama of guitars has continued to mellow and Roddy has found his true voice. He has a way of phrasing that brings to mind Michael Stipe on those IRS-era REM albums; circuitous, literate, slightly unsure of himself but squeezing as many words as possible into each line. Roddy Woomble. Roddy Woomble. This isn’t the same wee guy running around in nappies in Adam’s Walk, is it? Is it?

Turns out it was.

On Sunday night there, we had Roddy in Irvine’s Harbour Arts Centre for the third time in maybe 8 years or so.

“I’ve just driven past my old house!” he says to me on arrival.

“No way! I just left my mum’s 20 minutes ago!” I reply, and we fall into a long and easy chat about trainsets in lofts, Derek Gebbie’s pure blond Joey Ramone bowlcut, the big houses in Bank Street and a million other Irvine and music-related points of conversation. I mention that I’d walked my sister’s dog down Adam’s Walk only last weekend, the first time I’d been in that street for over 40 years. It looked reassuringly the same, I say. Both Roddy’s old house and mine look not much different, save the mature gardens and newer front doors and windows. There’s an extension bolted on to the back of where I used to live but other than that, time has been kind to it. The Gebbies are still next door, although Derek and his bowlcut have long moved away.

Today, I have had a nostalgic pang like no other. Roddy has lived all over the world. I’ve remained within a 12 mile radius of where I grew up. The circle of life has brought us once again into one another’s orbit. We are, as it transpires, still Irvine boys at heart.

I’ve always loved Idlewild’s American English, where the guitars are chiming and polished, the production full and anthemic and the group’s sights are firmly set on the bullseye marked ‘smash hit’. Straight in at number 15? That’s a hit in anyone’s books.

Idlewild – American English

 

Live!

Bear Necessities

Craig McAllister

Just to follow on from the previous post (directly below this one) about existential crises and impending doom…

We had a gig last Friday night and we were setting up when someone remembered that the planets were to align in the skies above us at 6pm. Out we scarpered, not sure where to look exactly other than upwards. Not that it mattered. Our lovely west of Scotland skies, backdrop to much recent Aurora activity and crisp ‘n clear displays of constellations, comets and the ISS every now and then, were dull and cloudy and definitely not presenting us with the ideal circumstances in which to view Mercury, Venus, Mars et al as they lined up in a rare parade of perfect order.

“Never mind,” said one of the amateur astronomers in our midst. “They’ll be back again in 2040 – that’s only 15 years away.”

“We’ll be pushing 70,” said one of my pals quietly.

Fuck.

We all fell silent. Contemplating. Possibly shivering. I know I was in a cold sweat and panicking.

Yeah. Existential crises and impending doom.

At roughly the same time as we were fruitlessly skygazing, two of the leaders of the free world were bullying and verbally battering one of our world’s oppressed leaders, live on TV, in the White House, with the whole world (minus skygazers) gape-mouthed and watching dumbfounded. There’s been plenty written since; that Trump turned the whole thing into a baseless and degrading reality TV spectacle, that he and Vance approached the whole thing like an Asda-priced Tony Soprano and Pauli Gaultieri, only with far more power and reach than those two mobsters could ever have had, that the whole thing was a live-on-TV mugging, all soundbite ‘n snarl, Zylenskyy the unwitting fall guy in a power play so stinking you could, if you squinted, just about see the actual hammer and sickle-branded puppet strings working the two Americans from above. When I watched it back later, I hadn’t felt real anger boil up in me like that since…well, forever, really. Someone ought to take the big orange traitor out, and properly this time – none of that faked-up, vote-winning stunt of yore. But you knew that already.

In times like this, thank fuck for music.

It’s fairly ironic that our show last Friday featured Wojtek The Bear, a band named after a wartime bear adopted by Polish soldiers who were evacuated from the Soviet Union during WWII. The Soviet leader Stalin had taken sides with Hitler, leaving the Polish soldiers no option but to run for safety. Unhinged leader sides with Russia? Sounds kinda familiar. History repeating, as Shirley Bassey once sang.

Wojtek The Bear are terrific. They come in some quarters with that unnecessary addendum ‘Scottish band‘, a tag so derivative that it instantly conjures up images of the Reid brothers (Craig and Charlie, not Jim and William), the gallus and Glaswegian Sharleen Spiteri, the stadium conquering Jim Kerr, the bagpipe skirl of Stuart Adamson’s guitar, Marti Pellow’s rictus grin, Rod Stewart in a tartan suit… all that sort of cliched nonsense. Wojtek The Bear are a band that happen to come from Scotland, nothing more, nothing less. They’ve far more in common with fellow countrymen and women Admiral Fallow and Belle & Sebastian, groups for whom a flute solo is far more appealing than a baws oot burst of shredding, groups for whom a carefully arranged brass-augmented bridge is infinitely more preferable to a staged call and response with a debased audience. Considered. You could call Wojtek the Bear considered. Every element of their output is just-so.

They’ve three albums in circulation, released through the ubiquitous Last Night From Glasgow and much of Friday’s set is drawn from these records. One verse into the first song – Second Place On Purpose – and it’s clear that the planets have aligned after all! Bunched up across the tiny stage (the Harbour Arts Centre in Irvine – the best small venue in the country) the on-stage 6-piece meld and weave together; a chiming electric here, an open-tuned acoustic there, a trumpet refrain that cedes to a meandering violin solo, a wandering bassline in that part, a technically-awkward but perfectly executed drum pattern in this part. If you’re new to the band, that opening track is as good an intro as you could wish for.

Wojtek The Bear – Second Place On Purpose

This is pretty much the Wojtek sound – produced by yr actual Stephen Street, dontyeknow. And in the ideal confines of the HAC, you have everything you need. Here comes a melodica. There goes a Drop D. On goes a capo. On goes a Strat. Off counts the drummer – “one and two and three and four and five and six and baba-daba-dum…” A Sunday Without The Fear, Ferme La Bouche, Slowly Then All At Once, Shaking Hands With The NME. They’re intricate songs with fancy time signatures and vocal arrangements, expertly played, sounding in the here and now exactly as they do at home; approaching the midnight hour, a glass of whatever your fancy nestled in your hand, stereo turned low enough that the house won’t wake up. The best time to listen to Wojtek The Bear.

A band with impeccable taste in reading material.

They play three or four new tracks mid-set and these songs – these great songs – hint at a band only now hitting their stride, a rich seam of gold ripe for discovery. Speed Equals Distance is a standout. Kylie even more so, a song about writing too many letters to the titular Minogue, its chorus giving a huge nod and a wink to Kylie’s Got A Crush On Us by another ‘Scottish’ band BMX Bandits. Last time they were in the HAC they encored with it too, a nice bit of serendipity that isn’t lost on the Wojtek gang afterwards.

Wojtek The Bear. You should check them out before album number four takes them overground.

Latest album, Shaking Hands With The NME is available via LNFG here.

Live!

Rocket Boost

Craig McAllister

In a massively popular band. Breaks them up and forms misunderstood follow-up group. Subsequently begins third phase of career and releases everything under his own name. There are side projects, guest appearances, mentoring roles with younger musicians, low-key soundtrack work…all the while maintaining a very decent public image.

Are we talking about Paul McCartney here, or are we talking about Paul Weller?

The statement applies to both, of course, but there’s inarguably a considered difference that whereas McCartney’s solo work is – and will always be – massively overshadowed by his first band’s output, Weller’s solo output is nothing less than the equal of – and possibly even greater than – what’s gone before. Yeah! Fight me! I’m talkin’ to you, you with the tragic, balding feathercut and too-tight Gabicci top. Let’s clear the air ya silly auld mod.

Never was this clearer than mid-set in the Barrowland Ballroom last night, when in a quadruple wham-bam, thank you ma’am, Weller reeled off Hung Up into Shout To The Top into Start! into Broken Stones – two of his finest solo works bookending two of the finest releases in his first two groups’ recorded output, all played to within an inch of their note-perfect lives. You don’t need me to tell you how great Welller’s Small Faces infatuation makes itself known in Hung Up‘s soulful and gospely middle eight. You don’t need reminding of the joy of living breeziness that burls Shout To The Top to its stabbing and symphonic conclusion. You already know how tough-sounding and razor-sharp his SG sounds on Start!, its Beatlesy psychedelia never more obvious than when shoved in your face at maximum volume. Or how Broken Stones as it’s played tonight could have been arranged with a prime time Aretha in mind.

Weller is a magpie. He takes all the good stuff, boils it into a groovy stew and makes something new and equally vital from it. He started like that, way back when, when nicking Motown riffs for Jam songs. He continued this with the all-in policy of the Style Council; Blue Note to new note, whether you liked it or not. And he continues to this day, releasing with unbelievably metronomic regularity interesting and unique records; records stuffed to the gunnels with crackling electronica, frazzled guitars, deep house grooves, neo-classical ambience and whatever the fuck he likes. He surrounds himself with proper players who can help him achieve his sonic vision. He tours relentlessly. He’s one of our very best and we should never take him for granted.

I was going to review last night’s show but, to be honest, I’d already written the review three years ago, when Paul Weller was last at the Barrowlands. On early and off right at the stroke of curfew, back then he played the sort of back-cat trawling and sprawling set that might have Springsteen looking over his shoulder in apprehensive appreciation. Old favourites sat shoulder to shoulder with new stuff, guitar wigouts sat next to piano ballads, smash hit singles made way for indulgent jams. The set then was perfectly paced, as it was last night; Have You Ever Had It Blue? sounds terrific in the old ballroom. Headstart For Happiness, Changingman, Village, the old, the new, side by side and never sounding better. A gnarling, spitting Peacock Suit has, like the singer himself, proper bite. There’s political charge. A pro-Palestine speech garners a healthy swell of solidarity from the never less than right-minded Glaswegian audience.

But it’s the encore that floors me.

We’re expecting That’s Entertainment and Town Called Malice, his chosen double knock-out show-stoppers for the past couple of tours, but before he gets to these, Weller breaks into Rockets, the closing track from On Sunset, an album that’s already four years old and, as I’ve began to appreciate, matured nicely since being released. Rockets, it transpires later, isn’t on the set list. Weller, in a fit of spontaneity rarely present in live shows these days, pulls it out of the air for the first time on this tour. As it unspools, it dawns on both Mrs Pan and I that Rockets is Weller’s Bowie moment.

Paul Weller – Rockets

It’s slow and acoustic, the singer accompanying himself in front of some tastefully understated percussion. He shifts from major to minor key and a churchy organ shimmers its way in, Weller’s voice woody and hollow and powerful. Man, it’s powerful! By the second verse, Steve Cradock has joined in, his clipped fuzz guitar accentuating the beat. The bass player is all eyes a-closed and playing by feel, lost in the music as the Barrowlands’ glitter ball shoots little diamonds of light across a gobsmacked audience. Jacko Peake eases in, his bah-bah-bah-baritone sax punctuating the pauses in the vocals. The strings  – synthetic in the Barrowlands, full-on symphonic on record – glide in, carrying us home. Weller’s melody is slowly unravelling towards a coda where the Bowie feel is total and wonderful and complete. Singing over, the track swells to a long and stately close, little Stevie Cradock playing some cracking morse code notes and, between furtive gasps of his vape (!), some lovely elongated slide guitar parts. It was all fairly breathtaking, it has to be said, and that’s before Weller’s sock it to ’em one-two encore that followed immediately afterwards.

I seem to write this every time I review Paul Weller, but I’ll say it again; if he’s within 200 miles of where you live, find a ticket and go, go, go! Paul Weller is at the absolute peak of his game right now and you don’t want to miss him.

 

Live!

Normal Rockswell

Craig McAllister

I dunno if you’re aware of Pop Spots NYC, but you really should be. For anyone with even a passing interest in pop culture – or, if like me, an unhealthy obsession with New York and all it can throw at you – you can lose hours between its pages. They take a well-seen image of a group or an artist – Dylan in the Village, the Ramones scowling on some Bowery corner or other, the Beatles in Central Park, the building used for the cover of Physical Graffiti etc etc – and superimpose the original image with a shot from modern times. The effect is satisfyingly great; a black and white and youthful Mick Jagger ghosting through a colour image of yesterday’s trees, the tall points of the buildings in the backgrounds of both images layered, gossamer-like, on top of one another. It’s a very clever concept. I’d suggest that if you’re planning a trip to NYC and are keen to root out the iconic locations of your favourite photo shoots, album covers and artists’ haunts, it’s pretty much the only guide you’ll need.  

I was sitting watching Norman Blake soundcheck in Irvine’s Harbour Arts Centre on Friday night. As part of the Freckfest team, I help to run the gigs and it’s always a privilege to sit in as artists tweak their sound, adding more reverb to the monitors, dialling back the treble in the acoustic guitars and sometimes launching sporadically into a snippet of a favourite song. A seated Norman started unselfconsciously playing and singing The Cabbage, a somewhat restrained and homely version compared to Thirteen‘s fizzing and thumping guitar overload, but nonetheless a song that enabled instant time travel. As he sang it, my mind was transported back to an early King Tuts gig, the four members of Teenage Fanclub thrashing their way merrily through the song, a riot of limbs and denim and hair as long and tangled as the guitar solos that unwound from their Jazzmasters. I began to ‘see’ them on the HAC’s tiny ‘stage’, superimposed, Pop Spots NYC-style, across the top of the seated, spectacled and short-haired Norman. I began to think, ‘wouldn’t it be great to see a full-flight Fanclub in a place as tiny as this again?’ and then I checked myself. This, THIS!, in the here and now, was pretty spectacular. Norman, I noticed for the first time, was playing some unusual chords. I made a mental note to remember them. His voice, one of our country’s finest and no mistake, was warm and honeyed, hitting the high notes like it was 1993 again. Loud, live and in your face, a youthful Teenage Fanclub was quite something, but so, as it’s immediately clear, is Norman on his own. 

The gig itself unravels brilliantly. a 21-song set of Fanclub high points (I Don’t Want Control Of You, Planets, The Concept, What You Do To Me, It’s All In My Mind et al) interspersed with sharp left turns to the darkest corners of Norman’s output. There’s a thrillingly Kinksish piano-led take on recent TFC album track Self Sedation. There’s a folksy and uptempo cajole through Baby Lee. There’s a lovely understated take on Circling the Sun… a heart-tugging Did I Say, surely the greatest contract-filler ever… a sad and lilting I Left A Light On… a campfire version of Everything Flows. Best of all, perhaps, is the zipping and fly away He’d Be A Diamond, not on the setlist but delivered spontaneously with a gusto and oomph that delights all in the room and leaves distraught the long line of men of a certain age who’d gone to the toilet just prior. Miss our Norman at our peril!

All of these are delivered, as is usually the case in the HAC, to a hushed and pin-drop quiet audience. It’s a million miles from any number of your favourite Teenage Fanclub gigs of yore, but no less thrilling and no less life-affirming.

Sitting noticeably in the audience is Duglas Stewart, and for the encores it’s no surprise to anyone when the increasingly long-haired Bandit and his kazoo accompany Norman for some comedy chat, interspersed with a few choice numbers that’ll send us home happy.

Lynsey de Paul’s Storm In A Teacup breezes past in a light and airy display of finger points and hand gestures, Duglas yet again confirming his status as guardian and custodian of forgotten songs. Daniel Johnston’s Do You Really Love Me is given its usual full Bandits’ treatment, the chords ringing out on a Martin guitar signed by Daniel himself.

The big moment is kept for the finish, when Norman and Duglas turn the clock back with a terrifically raucous Serious Drugs. It might be minus those sliding George Harrisonisms and multi-stacked and overlapping vocals that make the recorded version so essential, but, as the night has proven so far, a great song is a great song is a great song. Dressed in bass and drums or stacked with overlapping harmonies or just plain laid bare, the song will always shine through. Luckily for us, Norman Blake (and his many pals) have them by the bucketload. 

BMX Bandits – Serious Drugs

Sail on Norman and haste ye back.

Live!

Give Forever

Craig McAllister

Those first few Oasis singles…that debut album…Some Might Say and Acquiesce and two sensational nights on Irvine Beach sandwiched in-between Definitely Maybe and Morning Glory… only a middle-aged internet bore with too much time on his hands (his hands) would deny the draw of the Gallaghers in 2024.

Lest we forget, but Cigarettes And Alcohol (first heard via a free NME tape), Live Forever, Rock ‘N Roll Star, Slide Away and half a dozen other gargantuan tunes came howling through 1994’s ether like the Fab Five Horsemen of the Apocalypse, booting down barriers, barging through doors and boorishly heralding a new movement in music. Loud, insistent and vital, Oasis were the Sex Beatles for a musical youth who had experienced neither first-hand. Within the year, an overspill of a million other identikit guitar bands followed in their bow-legged swagger, the Freddie and the Dreamers to Liam and Noel’s Lennon and McCartney. ‘Any fooker can do this,’ they gobbed off to an inspired youth, and roused by the Gallaghers’ taste in cagoules and cocky northern (southern to us) self-belief, some of them actually did.

If you are a parent, you’ll be well aware that thirty years later they continue to inspire. Oasis, it seems, give forever. The young team around here are mad fer it. There’s not a local band within earshot (both the young and the not-so-young ones who really should know better by now) who hasn’t affected their postured arrogant stance or shorn their hair (“but leave the sides, mate!“) or developed a shallow affection for the Beatles on the back of Liam and Noel’s actions. There are wee guys and girls right now, finding it surprisingly easy to crank out Cigarettes And Alcohol‘s T-Rex boogie on cheap Les Paul copies, or Epiphones if they asked Santa nicely enough. There are young guys this very moment in loose-fitting corduroy and comfy desert boots sidling up to too-high microphones in rehearsal rooms that once rang with a pre-Oasis hair metal racket, their over-elaborate voice and copied attitude a poor substitute for, y’know, actual singing ability. 

Cos unlike the (not so) great pretenders, Liam could sing. He could sing like fuck, as it goes. I’m not so sure he still can. At some point around 2000, when Oasis became a brand and not a band, he became a cartoonish parody of himself, all eeee-lonnggg-gay-teed vowels and gargle, his beak-nosed brother having perfected that open chord with bendy third string solo schtick to the point where he could trade insults with his younger sibling between verses, or sing the next song after Liam had skulked off at something he’d said. It’ll be interesting to see if Liam loses that daft hat he’s been wearing recently. Get The Hair out, Liam, and The Voice will return. It’ll be interesting too to see if Noel’s guitars have any fretboard wear lower than the top three strings.

If it ain’t broke, though, don’t fix it. Apart from the rhythm section, of course. Oasis ’25, it seems, will be just Noel and Liam and some similarly-attired and hair-styled musicians with much better chops than Guigsy, Bonehead et al. I wonder what they were thinking as the news filtered through their Amazon delivery van’s radio at 8 o’clock this morning?

“This is for all the girls,” said Liam in Irvine all those years ago, announcing Slide Away. And, as Noel eked out the opening hammer-on (it’s Don Henley’s Boys Of Summer, by the way), he pointed somewhere towards the middle distance of the audience. “Especially her over there.” Those shows introduced Don’t Look Back In Anger to a live audience for the first time, Noel ringing out those open chords with one of yer actual George Harrison’s plectrums. And both nights kicked off with the roaring Acquiesce, the Gallaghers’ love song to one another and the song which they should see fit to open next summer’s shows with.

Oasis – Acquiesce

“That’s another zero on the value of your record,” withered Alan McGee as he took a Sharpie to the cover of my 1st press (Damont) Definitely Maybe a few years ago.

The reunion thing isn’t really for me. It’ll be dynamically priced to Swift-ish proportions. You’ll be shoulder to shoulder in a field of bucket hats, miles from the stage. There’ll be piss throwing and other antisocial rubbish. You’ll be stuck behind a video screen, halfway between a mega queue for the bar and the bogs. With Kasabian as a support act. But for the young folk who want to see what all the fuss was about first-time around, I’m all for it. Mad for it, even. Had it been the Clash or whoever, I’d have been just as excited. And don’t kid yourself, you would have too.

For those old bores online who are acting as if the world has ended, watch them change their tune when the inevitable Talking Heads reunion is announced. Just wait.