Plain Or Pan

A wee bit naughty this post. Going against my principles of only featuring hard-to-get and out of print music. As a new release, this track is certainly in print and should be fairly easy to buy, but it’s here for a limited time or at least until the good people at Chemikal Underground threaten me with a lawsuit…

‘The Ballads Of The Book’ is the brainchild of Roddy Woomble. It’s a novel idea. Hee hee. Contemporary writers pen the lyrics to music played by contemporary bands such as Aidan Moffat, Norman Blake, King Creosote, Malcolm Middleton, Sons & Daughters, blah blah blah. Oh, and the Trashcan Sinatras of course. The Trashcan’s have contributed a fine tune called ‘Half An Apple’ which, like so much of their recent output is melodic, laid back and the right side of mellow. Features some pretty good slide playing that sounds like something from Brian Eno’s ‘Apollo’ album. That’s a complement by the way. Here it is. Please leave a comment in the box above.

Ali Smith is a celebrated author. She was born in Scotland but now lives down south. You can get most of her books at your local library. They’re in mine, so they should be in yours. Her latest book ‘The Accidental’ is very good. So they tell me. Culture? What’s that? I’m currently reading Dave Alexander’s excellent trainspotterish tome ‘A User’s Guide To The Fall’. Can’t put it down. I’m sure Ali Smith is just as good.

Hey! Get down! Dig it with the Vanilla Fudge and Coca Cola! My mum tells me that in the swinging 60s, most provincial teenagers never had access to, never mind actually try, the mind-bending drugs that were so obviously shaping music, fashion and the consciousness of society. Instead, the hip, with-it teenagers in my wee corner of the west of Scotland would pop a couple of aspirins into their Coca Cola and swing the night away in a tripped-out approximation of sixties bliss.

Coca Cola were well aware that things indeed go better with a Coca Cola, and their 60’s marketing team were so on the ball that they got the groups du jour to record Coke jingles for local radio and the likes. Most of these jingles are bloody magic. They are quite blatant pastiches of those artists’ current hit singles and fall into 3 distinct categories:

1. The soul/r’n’b artist – Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye & Tammi Terrell, Carla Thomas, The Supremes, Otis Redding, Ray Charles etc etc

2. The fuzzed-out, beat-driven, blues-influenced garage bands – The Who, Vanilla Fudge, Troggs, Box Tops, Dave Dee Dozy Beaky Mick & Titch (so that stretches it a bit, but you get the point)

3. The pop stars/crooners – Bee Gees, Lulu, Roy Orbison, Petula Clark, Nancy Sinatra, etc.

Here are three examples of the above. The Who’s ‘Coke after Coke’, The Supremes pastiche of ‘Baby Love’ and Tom Jones’ rerun of ‘It’s Not Unusual’ that is quite fantastic, hilarious and hideous all at the same time. “Say, I could do with a Coke right now. Somebody get me one please?” The big orange freak.

I’ll put up more of these soon. Next up Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, Nancy Sinatra, Vanilla Fudge, any requests…..

The good folks over at Ape Shall Never Kill Ape recently posted some demos from the Stone Roses ‘Second Coming’ album. And they were pretty scathing about the album too! It’s all just opinions of course, but for what it’s worth, I like the Second Coming. Sure ‘How Do You Sleep’ hasn’t stood the test of time, and was regularly skipped when I first immersed myself in the album, but ‘Love Spreads’? Come on! What’s not to like about that? Who cares if it’s the greatest track Led Zeppelin never recorded, it still sounds ace. ‘Daybreak’? “From Moss Side Manchester, to Addis Aba-ba-ba-baa”. It doesn’t get any better than that. So come on Mr Ape. Surely a reappraisal is due.

Of course, The Second Coming wisnae a patch on the first album. That is just accepted fact. If you were there when it came out you’ll know how it exploded like a technicolour blast of guitar pop and blew everything else away. Wedding Present? See ya. Wonderstuff? Beat it. Voice of the Beehive? Exactly. If you weren’t there, where were you? This was the album that got dance folk into guitar music and the pasty faced wallflowers into dance music. Morrissey quiffs were grown out faster than you could say “I am the resurrection” and suddenly flares were back in fashion. The baggier the better. Which I always found strange cos I saw the Stone Roses in Rooftops (£4 to get in, pay on the door – if we couldn’t get in, we were going to go and see Birdland instead) and Ian Brown was wearing a pair of straight-legged brown Levis cords. So, where the flares came from is a mystery to me.

Anyway, here’s a couple of demos from the first album. ‘Waterfall’ is a bit faster than the album version, and speeds up at the end, driven by Reni’s  drums. And ‘Made Of Stone’ is fairly similar to the version you know and love, which goes to show that the band pretty much had these tracks rehearsed into oblivion before they came to record the album. Sadly missing, alas, for all you trainspotters, is the recording info. Where? When? I don’t know. My bootleg CD doesn’t say. But, hey, they’re Stone Roses demos from the first album. And they’re pretty decent quality. If anyone out there has a good demo version, indeed any demo version of ‘I Am The Resurrection’, please get in touch. I’d love to hear it.

Lee Mavers once told me, “Stone Roses? (makes throat gagging sound) Stoned Poses more like.” True story that. I also met John Leckie once as well, but I’ll keep that tale for another day.

Finally, if you’re a guitar nerd, and into the Stone Roses, you’ll love this site.

No, not M People’s (shudder) Northern Soul, or even the Verve’s barefooted poncifications of the big music, but real northern soul. Finger clickin’, hip swayin’, cuttin’ a rug Northern Soul. Transferred from an ancient compilation tape that a friend from work made for me around 1992 these 2 tracks are magic, and I’m not ashamed to say I know next to nothing about them, as neither does Mr Google. What I can tell you is this…..

Diane Newby‘s ‘What Your Puttin’ (or Putting depending on where you look) Me Through came out on the Kapp label in 1965 and has long been a favourite on the northern soul scene. As soon as the piano and tambourine lead things off, you know you’re in for a rollicking 2 minutes of northern soul nirvana. To these ears, it sounds a bit like Marvin Gaye’s ‘Can I Get A Witness?’ if sung by Dusty Springfield. Sadly, it doesn’t appear to crop up on any CD compilations. The version you have here was transferred from 7″ to cassette (now 15 years old) and converted to mp3 via my trusty 4 track portastudio. If anyone has a nice clean copy that they can sort out for me, please let me know.

Likewise, Mr Google knows even less about The Playthings than I do. The Playthings do tend to crop up on compilations from time to time, most notably for the excellent ‘Stop What you’re Doing’. That track almost qualifies them as one-hit wonders, but since it wasn’t a hit…..

‘Surrounded By A Ray Of Sunshine’ was also recorded by Samantha Jones, a name familiar to most connoisseurs of the northern soul circuit, but for what it’s worth, The Playthings version beats it hands down. Sadly, this also rarely appears anywhere on digital format, so I’ve had to do it myself using the same method as above. Likewise, if anyone has a nice clean digital copy clogging up their harddrive, please let me know. In the meantime, here is my vinyl>cassette>mp3 conversion, just for you.

Now. When I think of snap, crackle and pop, I don’t only think about vinyl. I also need to rush to the kitchen and get myself a bowl of Rice Krispies. As an added bonus for today, I’ve posted an odd obscurity, an obscure oddity of a Rolling Stones track from 1964. As befits many of the bands of the era, they recorded an ad jingle. Here are the Stones doing the Rice Krispies jingle. It’s a belter!