Category: Live!

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.

Get This!, Live!

I Lost My Sharpie To A BMX Bandit

Craig McAllister

 

We’ve a book for gigs and in it bands sign

It’s falling apart and it’s split at the spine

Every show we do it’s filled with a scribble

And plectrums and set lists and other such drivel

It was BMX Bandits on Saturday there

With Duglas T Stewart and coordinated stage wear

Their set filled with favourites and new ones just out

And bananas and grapes and kazoo solos throughout.

 

At the end of the night we’re tittling and tattling

As the stage crew get on with the art of dismantling

“Will you sign the book?” I ask to Duglas reclining

And turn to a new page in prep for its signing.

 

My sharpie’s deployed and after Duglas I hand it

To guitar, drums and bass, the three other Bandits

They think and they scribble, add kisses at the bottom

Then pass the book back…but someone’s forgotten

To return back my pen, my only black sharpie

And I eyeball all four of the band hierarchy.

 

The pen’s gone for good, I’m pissed off but accept it

But it irks me, it bothers me and I can’t quite forget it

It’s only a sharpie but you’ve gotta hand it

To the nominative determinism of that BMX Bandit

Yes, it’s only a sharpie but you’ve gotta hand it

To the nominative determinism of that BMX Bandit

I said it’s only a sharpie and it’s not how I planned it

To forego a pen to the BMX Bandits

 

(As I wrote this I heard the voice of John Cooper Clarke. Maybe you won’t.)

 

Here’s Serious Drugs. Electric guitars weeping the tiny tears of George Harrison in ’68. Acoustic 12 strings jangling away like the rain-soaked ghost of Alex Chilton in ’72. Sighing backing vocals that do uplifting melancholy like no-one since Teenage Fanclub took that particular idea and ran with it in their desert boots all the way to the charts. Excellent Joe McAlinden sax solo too. Serious Drugs has got the lot. Quite possibly the group’s finest moment.

BMX Bandits – Serious Drugs

 

 

 

Live!

Ghostdancing

Craig McAllister

Roaming Roots Revue 2024

Barrowland Ballroon, Glasgow, 20.1.24

The Barrowland Ballroom is full of ghosts. The next time you’re there, let your mind wander mid-set, look vaguely into the middle distance and they’ll come to you; a transparent, milky-white film of Shane ‘n Kirsty perhaps, slow waltzing as Eddi Reader, profiled in jawline and gladrags, reaches for the highest notes in an atmospheric take on King Creosote’s Something To Believe In. A static flicker of Joe Strummer maybe, his left leg a-pumping to the furious beat of The Pogues harum scarum demolition of London Calling at that same show, exactly in the spot where Hamish Hawk is now leading the Lonesome Fire plus 50-piece orchestra through a celebratory version of his own Google-friendly The Mauritian Badminton Doubles Champion, 1973. You’ll possibly spot Joey Ramone, flickering in from the past, legs akimbo and hanging off the microphone stand like a hairy anglepoise lamp while Emma Pollock places herself in the middle of a swirling orchestral storm, her fantastic take on Gerry Rafferty’s Night Owl wowing the capacity crowd. There’s Bob Dylan on his keyboard, sweat dripping from the brim of his hat…here’s a skirling dervish Morrissey whipping his microphone lead with all the dexterity of a Billy Smart ringmaster…Michael Stipe…Lux Interior…Terry Hall stage centre and static as the other Specials flail and skank as if there’s no tomorrow…PJ Harvey in pink feather boa and not much else… The Barrowland Ballroom is full of ghosts, imprinted on the memory and ready for recall at any opportunity.

But what exactly is going on? The Roaming Roots Revue is now a staple of the Celtic Connections festival. The brainchild of Roddy Hart, he, along with his 5-piece backing band The Lonesome Fire, has assembled a 50-piece orchestra and invited along a host of his pals to celebrate (this year) the great Scottish songbook. The premise is that each act plays one of their own songs and then a cover of an accepted modern Scottish classic pop hit, all accompanied by Roddy and his band and the orchestra. And that’s what we get.

A tambourine-totin’ Tracyanne Campbell does a stomping French Navy. Eddi Reader pops back on and does an intense version of In A Big Country and there’s no one, artist or audience, who isn’t grinning widely. Admiral Fallow do a beautiful Dead Against Smoking – it sounds fantastic with live strings and brass and wood and what have ye – “you’re like gas-o-line, you’re like the wil-low tree” – before struggling a wee bit with Party Fears Two. It’s a brave person who attempts to sing like Billy Mackenzie and while they may be, eh, Admirable Fellows for having a go, they’re no substitute for the real thing.

As it all plays out, something hits me. It’s not just the groups that are ghosts. It turns out their songs are too. I can ‘see’ Stuart Adamson in his wee pilot boots and high waisted trousers cranking out those bagpipe riffs on his Yamaha electric, right there where Eddi is singing about lovers voices firing the mountainsides right now. And look! We’re now back in an encore in 1988 and here’s a floppy haired Roddy Frame being worn expertly by his oversized Gibson ES 295. He’s handsome and cool and leading a mass, communal Somewhere In My Heart, front and centre and total focal point, just where the young upstart Brownbear is currently doing that self same thing 36 years later. And talking of mass communion (and redemption), Admiral Fallow do their damndest to bring the famous old house down with their reverential – and utterly fantastic – Scottish gospel approach (“In the key of G major“) to Sunshine On Leith. Show me someone who says they don’t like that song and I’ll show you a liar. It has, as you well know, been known to make even a Hearts fan with a glass eye shed a tear. A modern Scottish classic if ever there was one.

The other highlights? It’s hard to see past a staring, beady eyed Hamish Hawk and his nervous, twitchy Ian Curtisisms, punching the steam-powered mechanical beat to Franz Ferdinand’s Take Me Out like it was he who wrote it, before he bravely and unexpectedly launches with gusto into Frightened Rabbit’s dirty and sweary Keep Yourself Warm. He means it, man. The guy has star quality written all over him and you really must check him out. The reliable Roddy and Rod from Idlewild do a great You Held The World In Your Arms, all crashing chords and sweeping orchestral flourishes. In the absence of yr actual Paul Buchanan, Roddy Hart and his band do a sterling and faithful reworking of Tinseltown In The Rain, all scratch guitars and moody ambience. Justin Currie dispenses his shonky, temperamental acoustic for a brooding and menacing dive into Del Amitri’s uncharted (quite literally) back catalogue, one leg up on the monitor, dripping his luscious, conditioned fringe over his crowd at the front. The last time I saw Justin in here, he did that whole Spinal Tap, foot on the monitor thing during one of the band’s more boogie-orientated numbers and I couldn’t help but notice the extent to which his dark jeans had frayed to a threadbare grey/white at the crotch. I wasn’t close enough to see if he’d since invested in a new pair of Levis, but I’m hoping, for the sake of those poor front row souls, he has.

But it’s Frank and John from the Trashcans that I’m looking forward to the most and they don’t disappoint. Taking liberties with the notion of what constitutes a ‘modern’ Scottish classic, they and the assembled masses fall into the near 50-year old Year Of The Cat, Al Stewart’s long and winding tale of exotic, on the road romance. It’s a very Trashcans song, you realise, its Patti Smith by way of Harvest For The World opening giving way to a lovely unravelling chord progression, all major to minor to major 7ths and back again. A mid paced groover, it rolls along for 8 exquisite minutes and more, gentle on the mind and just as gentle on the feet. The Trashcans’ own Weightlifting gets the full orchestral treatment, slow and stately from its Elis & Tom bossanova opening to the heavenly horns in the swirling coda. I’ve heard Weightlifting done by the Trashcans countless times, more recently stripped back to its acoustic core by a solo John on more than one occasion, and now with the muscle of the orchestra behind it. It doesn’t matter how it’s presented. Serve the song and it’ll serve you well.

To send us home, we get a full-on Live Aid style encore of Whole Of The Moon, half a dozen or so of tonight’s big hitters taking turns to sing the lines, shoulder to shoulder with some of the finest talent our country has produced, a Last Waltz for the 50-somethings of the west of Scotland. An incredible show.

Live!

James Sit Down

Craig McAllister

James Grant, Harbour Arts Centre, Irvine. Saturday 9th December.

James Grant has a dry, wry sense of humour, punctuated flawlessly by pin-perfect comic timing. “D’you know where that cover shot was taken?” he asked me a few years ago as I offered him my copy of Love And Money’s debut LP to sign. “We were in the Mojave desert. It’s sunset and I’m standing on top of a railroad train. The orange glow of the setting sun has captured perfectly the silhouette of me and my guitar and my out-to-here quiff.” He gestures the impressive length of quiffage as he signs the cover, hands back my sharpie and, lip curling into a self-conscious smile of pain, looks me in the eye. “What a fanny I was.”

He’s a brilliant live act, is James. From the jangling-clever Friends Again through the west coast soul (Scotland, not California) of Love And Money, to his solo records – records that ring with skilfully-picked acoustic guitars accompanied by a rich, caramel voice that has aged like a decent malt, James has the songs, years and years of them.

And he has the stage presence. He’s languid, perched cross-legged on a bar stool, his always sartorial self folded around his acoustic guitar, elbows and knees jutting out like a particularly stylish Scandinavian angle-poised lamp. He speaks in a slow and rich Glasgow burr, quietly, and his audience goes respectfully silent in his presence.

He begins both of his sets on Saturday with a lovely, understated take on Friends Again’s State Of Art. Where the original is all gated drums and rattling, jangling, downhill-without-the-brakes-on semi-acoustics that will be forever-tied to the ’80s – and magic for it, let it be said – the 2023 version has relaxed a bit, stretched its legs and grown more into itself. The words (sung originally by Chris Thomson) are enunciated clearer, the chords are strummed slower, the rich melodies pulled from the six strings like an alchemist teasing liquid gold from cold metal. A state of art indeed.

What an opener and stall-setter. For an hour and a half, James treats the audience to faithful and expertly-played takes on songs that run the whole gamut of life, the double weights of death and existential angst being seemingly particular favourites. My Father’s Coat, Lips Like Ether, Hallelujah Man, Whisky Dream, Winter (“the closest you’ll get to a Christmas song from me“), brush past naked and true, their modesty covered in low-bowed and heavy, sympathetic cello, played superbly by cellist-about-town Maya Burman-Roy.

Now and again, James will take the edge off the downbeat nature of the performance and lighten the mood by dropping in a funny story or two. Stories about his dad make regular appearances. As do tales of life in a chart-chasing pop group in an era when the business was awash with cash. Sometimes the subject matter combines. His dad would end up being in the video for Love And Money’s Jocelyn Square, immortalised on celluloid with his permanent nasal drip captured forever in monochrome. “Who’s paying for all this pish?” inquires his dad on-set, eyeing up the machinations of the industry. “Eh, I am, dad,” says James sheepishly.

As funny as his stories are – and James has some real rippers – it’s the music that endures. James is a fantastic guitar player, often sounding like three guitars at once, his combination of augmented chords and rippling, tumbling lead fairly giddy and awe-inspiring when seen up close. It dawns on me mid-set that James is one of my favourite guitar players. He can pick the fuck out of six strings, but where many acoustic players use Travis picking or a similar pattern of finger playing, James very much favours the plectrum. And not just any plectrum either. I notice, on his bar stool at the close of the show, that he’s been playing the set with a Bowie Aladdin Sane pick. Even heroes have heroes. Watch that man!