That politely twanging guitar that heralds the start of the track is, by the angle of its jangle, pure early era R.E.M. Or maybe the Go-Betweens. Maybe even the Hoodoo Gurus. There’s certainly enough blend of country rockin’ low notes and clean chiming chords to suggest it. As it falls into its mid-paced, head nodding plod and the vocal appears, all gargled gravel and forced out phlegm, you could be forgiven for thinking you’ve landed feet-first in some mid-west bar, the overpowering sight of wall-to-wall plaid shirts and faded denim just about drowning out the the clack of balls on the pool table as the singer strains above it all to deliver lines worthy of a low-budget Hollywood movie. ‘Jesus rides beside me, he never buys any smokes,‘ he goes, all resigned and stretching himself above the free-roaming lead guitarist with his hot shot fancy pants riffs just below him in the mix.
As if this isn’t enough, the honeyed tones of the Memphis Horns – yr actual Stax house band, responsible for those hooks and riffs on all those great Otis records…and Al Green’s Let’s Stay Together…and Elvis’s Suspicious Minds – comes breezing in like the warm and rasping ghost of Exile On Main Street to stamp its brassy rash all over the proceedings.
And then you discover that the guitar player is none other than Alex Chilton, himself the titular subject of a track on the very same album where this track resides. A Replacement service indeed. It don’t get much better than that.
Yes, you’re listening to Can’t Hardly Wait by The Replacements – maybe even as it shuffles up randomly while you pound your sorry state around January’s unforgiving streets – and the world is alright.
The Replacements – Can’t Hardly Wait
I was never that sure about The Replacements. I’m still not, to be honest. To me, I think they’re viewed over here the way a band like Teenage Fanclub might be viewed in the States. They’ll have an enthusiastic, fervent fanbase who can’t see past them and everything they do, but the more you move away from the parochial appeal, the less they’ll matter. Unlike, say, Tom Petty, whose widescreen jangling Americana has universal appeal, and certainly not like R.E.M., who changed course and conquered the world, The Replacements just seem like you have to be American to fully appreciate them. They bring to mind teenagers driving noisy gas-guzzler first cars, hopped up high school kids chugging beer, college sophomores getting blasted at frat parties, all that sort of cliched Hollywood America.
Can’t Hardly Wait though. Great players + great points of reference = grrreat track. No arguments here.
If you were lucky enough to see R.E.M. on their Green tour in 1989, there’s a good chance you saw The Blue Aeroplanes in their capacity as support act. Talk about lucky – The Blue Aeroplanes were booked, so the story goes, by a hapless UK tour agent who’d been instructed to book the Canadian country rockin’ Blue Rodeo but, thinking R.E.M.’s management had got the name wrong, booked the rising Bristolians instead.
They made a great sight and sound on those big stages, The Blue Aeroplanes, a football team-sized collective of guitar players and singers and guitar players and keyboardists and guitar players and more guitar players, stretched out in front of the headline act’s backline in a semi-circular curve, the singer hanging off the microphone in shades and the beginnings of a Dylan ’66 ‘fro. They even had a dancer – and this was before every group employed a dancer – who twisted and turned and threw shapes in the shadows as the band got on with the task of rattling out their stewing jangle, all open chords and feedback-soaked lead riffs, harmonising counter melodies played high up the frets and low in the mix. They were a good band who required more than one listen before you had the measure of them.
Thankfully for new converts post ’89, their major label debut Swagger was just around the corner. The opening track Jacket Hangs is a good distillation of that live sound that so impressed both R.E.M. and their audiences on the Green tour.
The Blue Aeroplanes – Jacket Hangs
‘Pick a card, any card,’ goes vocalist Gerard Langley, and the band is off and riffing. Jacket Hangs benefits from the group’s multiple guitarists. It’s a chorus pedal-thick gumbo of Rickenbackered low twangs and hanging chords, chattering fret rundowns and swirling arena-sized major chords. The solo in the middle rides the coattails of feedback, searing and soaring out into the great beyond and all the way to number 72 in the charts. Have we no taste, people? February 1990 might’ve found Sinead O’Connor at number 1 with Nothing Compares 2 U, and even The House Of Love had cracked the top 20 with their 93rd re-release of Shine On, but number 72?! Jacket Hangs indeed. (Full disclosure, as they say these days – I never bought it either).
The pace, the spoken vocal delivery, the ‘ohs’ as the verse climbs to the chorus (and again, the high-harmonied ‘oh‘ in the chorus that’s very Mike Mills)…it fairly brings to mind R.E.M.’s E-Bow The Letter if you stop to consider it. I’m wondering now if Peter Buck watched stage-side each night, mentally erasing the unlucky Blue Rodeo from his mind and falling for The Blue Aeroplanes in a big way. Who’s to know?
The next single from the album would fare better, but only by 9 more places.
The Blue Aeroplanes – …And Stones
…And Stones takes its lead from the solo in Jacket Hangs, adds a busily echoing morse code guitar riff and sets the controls for the heart of the sun. Building a proper groove around it – a bassline that, aye, swaggers and a bed of percussion that’s ever so slightly ahead of the game, …And Stones (perhaps in a photo-finish with That Petrol Emotion) subconsciously creates that most lamentable of genres, indie dance. Within months, Flowered Up would base most of their sound on ...And Stones. My Bloody Valentine would borrow its ambience when jigsawing together Soon. Even The Wonder Stuff, yeah, those chancers, would start getting percussive with their Black Country raggle taggle. …And Stones did it all first, and best.
Unsurprisingly, …And Stones came in a variety of remixes. The guitar-heavy Lovers All Around mix bridged the gap between classic indie rock and dance music at a time when the leap into melody-free bangs and crashes was perhaps just too much for the stripy t-shirt wearing floppy hairs from the satellite towns. And I include myself in that. You’ll need to find that online though. Gremlins are refusing to upload it here.
On the 5th of January, Plain Or Pan will turn 17. In preparation, the L plates have been looked out, the insurance has been eye-wateringly hiked and the old banger I’ve been saving for the occasion will finally get a run-out.
I never for a moment expected to still be doing this all these years later, but here we are. Adam over at Bagging Area rationalised it best a few days ago when he said that blogging is a habit that sticks. It really is, plus Plain Or Pan has led to all sorts of unexpected opportunities in recent years…reason enough to keep going still, I think.
I’m a sucker for a studio outtake and Anthology 2 features the between-takes chatter of The Beatles as they rip their way through the first couple of goes of I’m Down, the track that would eventually find a home on the b-side of the Help! single. “It’s plastic soul, man…plastic soul,” belittles Paul McCartney, a nod to black America’s scathing opinion of Mick Jagger at the time. Considering McCartney’s vocal on I’m Down was full-on Little Richard, it’s a bit of an ironic throwaway line, but tucked away for future use, the phrase would soon turn up in more punning form as the title of The Beatles’ next record.
The second of two albums written, recorded and released by The Beatles in 1965, Rubber Soul would be the bridging link in a run of albums that saw them transition from the pure pop of Help! to the studio-driven Revolver. It’s a pace of change and progress that is unparalleled. Two albums plus assorted singles plucked out the ether and sent into millions of homes before the new year bells? Plus touring, sustaining family commitments and enjoying life as young 20-something Beatles? That’s laughably unthinkable nowadays.
Rubber Soul was put together in little over a month, with recording beginning on the 12th October and its 14 tracks mastered for both stereo and mono on the 15th November. That’s four and a half weeks from the initial writing sessions, via the recording and overdubbing, to the finished article. There are groups these days who take longer perfecting the filter on their Instagram posts. Once mastered, the album was sent to the pressing plants to be in the shops by Christmas. It was. Released on 3rd December along with the group’s first double A-side, the non-album pairing of We Can Work It Out and Day Tripper, Rubber Soul ensured a fab Christmas for all.
The Beatles – Drive My Car
Drive My Car, the album’s opening track, endures as one of the group’s very best. A McCartney-presented idea, Lennon helped shape and polish the lyrics, encouraging the pay-off double entendre (‘You can do something in-between‘) before Paul took it to the others as a track worth working on. Take 4 was the one they were happiest with and that’s the version that the world got to hear.
McCartney sings it like it’s the last song he’ll ever sing on earth, tearing his way through each line like Otis Redding on Otis Blue, John double-tracked and harmonising and hanging on for dear life behind him. That ‘beep beep ‘n beep beep, yeah! is total adlibbed genius nonsense, another hook in the vein of yeah yeah yeah! or I can’t hide! Such a little thing, but such a big part of the song.
The Beatles, knowing a good thing when they hear it, go full tilt on a (plastic?) soul stomper that still thrills in McCartney shows today. With a nod and a half to Aretha’s version of Respect, George copies Paul’s frugging bassline on his fuzzed-up Strat and it’s those two instruments that give the backing track its groove. Ringo is immense as the anchor. His snare takes a proper beating. His fills on the final line of each verse are inventive and varied and he’s nothing less than metronomic throughout.
It’s the clever overdubs that elevate the track even further; there’s a cowbell playing in time (and very high in the stereo mix) to Ringo’s snare, and a rattling pair of tambourines that vary in pattern between verse and chorus. Paul overdubs that loose ‘n funky piano on the chorus – the essential ingredient – and you have a Beatles track that could never be anything other than an album opener. Quite the statement.
It’s hard to believe that Drive My Car first found its way into my orbit through that thumping, discofied and hideous Stars On 45 record all those years ago, but there y’are. It’s also hard to believe that there are people in the world who have yet to find The Beatles. What a journey they are in for. I’m already aware that January 2024 is going to be Beatles month in this house. They’re always there, in the background, in the hard drive of the mind, waiting to be called down like patient little angels, but shining the spotlight on them always makes me hyper-fixated for long spells. Looks like it’s Rubber Soul‘s turn again.
I’ve been reading everyone’s end of year lists and the one thing that strikes me – as it has done for the past half dozen years or so – is my out-of-touchness with new artists and releases. While all and any release is but a couple of clicks away from the very space I’m sitting at, I’m staunchly anti-Spotify…and it’s clearly to my listening detriment. I much prefer physical over digital any day of the week, but inevitably finance – or the lack of – has dictated that my consumption of new music is on a clear downward trend and gathering momentum with each passing month. It’ll likely be sometime around September 2024 when I stumble across a record from 2023 that’s had everyone raving for months beforehand, but I’m not that bothered to be honest.
I’ve really enjoyed the tracks that The Smile have used to promote their upcoming second album. Bending Hectic, all woozy electric guitar and close-miked Thom Yorke, was supposed to be a stand-alone single but I notice it’s on the tracklisting for the record, so clearly someone talked sense into them. To have thrown away a stone cold 21st century classic to the digital ether would have been stupid of them.
More recently, the album’s title track Wall Of Eyes has found its way onto the radio playlists. It’s a beauty; a bossa nova-ish acoustic groove with far-off layered strings that sound like thunder peals and a melody that takes repeated plays to fully unwind, but when it does…wow! I know folk go on and on and on about Radiohead – and this ain’t Radiohead – but it’s really great. Their debut album was a beauty and its follow-up already sounds like it might be too.
My favourite track of the year, for what it’s worth, was a one-sided promo 12″ that came out via Last Night From Glasgow. The label continues to go from strength to strength, and whilst providing a home to disparate but talented, long in the tooth and (mainly) Scottish acts, they also offer a platform to the new and inexperienced. Quad 90 was one such act and their track Le Blank will no doubt ring with a lot of this readership.
Quad 90 – Le Blank
It’s nothing you’ve never heard before. Forward-thinking with a knowing nod to the past, it could be ESG or ACR or even a Franz Ferdinand remix, but all necessary ingredients are present; post-punk chicken-scratch guitar, a ghosting, earwormy, Tom Tom Club-ish keyboard motif in the chorus, thumping Bernard Edwards bass and a sashaying double female vocal that falls somewhere between sultry and sulky. It played long and often round here before finding favour amongst the more discerrning radio shows across 6 Music and Radio Scotland (as did its follow-up Unequal Division) and is a good signifier of what might come next.
Gig-wise, I’m heavily involved with Freckfest in promoting shows in Irvine’s Harbour Arts Centre, a proper hidden gem of a music venue with just 100 seats and immeasurable vibes. Some of my favourite shows this year have been in here.
The Bug Club turned up on the last Tuesday in January – surely the hardest night of the year in which to sell tickets – and supported themselves by sneaking on unannounced and playing a whole half-hour of new material before coming back out to slay a hardy 80-strong audience with their Velvets x Modern Lovers rattle meets Osees x Stooges roll. For three folk, they make a quite marvellous racket. If they’re playing in a town near you (and they most likely will be at some point), you know what to do. Review here.
My favourite gig of the year was quite possibly around the same time, when the Hungry Beat collective pulled out all the stops in a marathon show that fused together like a scratchy Pete Frame family tree of Scottish alt. pop reimagined as The Band’s Last Waltz. Review here.
Other notable shows were The Waterboys epic and sprawling but razor-sharp show at the Barrowlands. Yer actual Mike Scott sent his foot messengers my way to express his personal thanks for this review, which was unexpected, and The Bluebells roof-raising homecoming album launch show in St Lukes. Yer actual Bobby Bluebell immediately re-Tweeted this review, accompanied by 3 love hearts, apparently the highest Bluebell accolade in the land.
Books are the new rock ‘n roll, dontchaknow? There were some really great book events this year that were the equal and more of any live music show. Andrew O’Hagan‘s Mayflies – already a modern classic and no mistake – had a bit of a reprise in Irvine over the late summer when a Nicola Sturgeon-chaired event saw Andrew chat about growing up in Irvine and the cultural influences that seeped their way into his autobiographical tale of life-long friendship. The former First Minister, a confirmed bookworm, asked me to sign one of my Perfect Reminder books for her and then re-Tweeted my follow-up review of the evening. Unsurprisingly, my stats went a wee bit stratospheric on the back of it, so I’m delighted (and relieved) that my writing in that review is up there with some of the best stuff I’ve ever written.
Not to be outdone, John Niven popped up in the HAC as part of the promotional tour for his powerful/excellent O Brother novel, a real autobiographical darkness and light page-turner that deals with the despair of family suicide and (the despair of) growing up in Irvine. If you’re of a similar age to me, there’ll be enough memory joggers contained within its pages to have you reading frantically to the end. It’s easily the best, most emotionally-charged book of 2023 and you really must read it. I’ve now read it twice, its pages forever smudged with the dampness of sad and happy tears.
On a personal level, I got to do more writing of worth (sleevenotes for the Trashcan Sinatras) and actual, real book stuff. A second publication bearing my name – The Full Pocket – came out at the start of the year and sold out just a few weeks ago. Of course, no sooner had it sold out than the Americans were asking for boxes of it and that man Niven was pointing out a badly-phrased and grammatically-poor sentence that might benefit from a rewrite. Should a reprint be in order, it’ll need a swift edit first.
The Full Pocket took me to another music ‘n literature event, this time in May at Frets in Strathaven, alongside James Yorkston and Vic Galloway. While James did his set, Vic and I made full use of the green room’s facilities and availed many of its bottles of their contents. Imagine my surprise the next morning when I saw photos of Vic, his quiff immaculate, accompanying James for a couple of numbers at the end of his set. I wonder just who it was I was talking to back stage all that time? I could swear Vic never moved from that green room the entire length of James Yorkston’s set.
Must get a new jacket for 2024
Vic, by now a close pal, obviously, turned up trumps in November when he got me backstage to say hello again to Johnny Marr. Vic was hosting an event where Johnny was talking about his 10 years as a solo artist and, with his last words said to me in May – “Keep in touch!” – ringing in my ears, I did just that and suggested he might be able to help me get a book to Johnny. After the show, Johnny greeted me like a long-lost friend – “Hey! It’s Craig from the Ballroom Blitz!” (a reference to his gig in Kilmarnock’s Grand Hall that Freckfest put on) and both myself and that other music writer-about-town Billy Sloan gave Johnny our respective books, much to the bemusement of the random guy who’d breached security and followed us quickly in. “Are youse guys famous?” he asked me with a worried look as he watched first Billy and then me chat easily and familiarly with Johnny. “They’ll fling me oot when they suss ahm jist a bam.”
Finally, I don’t know exactly what 2024 will bring, but I do know I’m likely to have my name on the front of another book. More on that when there’s more to tell…
When does self defence become state-sanctioned, and Western world-approved, genocide?
(War Is Over, If You Want It.)
For the past few weeks I’ve been wanting to write something on Israel/Palestine. Truth is, I don’t have it in me to write something that’s smart, intelligent, on point and devoid of empty cliché. I’ve tried, but the words don’t come out in the way I really want them to. When it comes to the serious issues, I’m just not smart enough to express my thoughts eloquently and intelligently.
When you read about the Holocaust and the Nazis, you like to imagine you’d be the good guy. You’d fight the Nazis, you’d free the concentration camps.
This guy – Paul Biggar – says it brilliantly. Rather than link to his page, I’ve copied it, measured word for measured word, and pasted it below. I think it’s just about the most powerful article I’ve read in relation to Palestine and Gaza.
I can’t sleep
Fadel Senna/AFP/Getty ImagesI can’t sleep. I’m lying in bed every night, and images of Gaza are running through my head. Fathers holding their babies, dead, caked in dust. Bombs dropped on homes [1], on hospitals [2], on schools [3]. Tens of thousands of dead [4] in indiscriminate bombings [5]. Children crying, pulling through rubble to find their families [6].The inhumanity of the soldiers is unbearable. They shoot civilians in the street [7], imprison and torture children [8], and strip and humiliate innocent men [9]. But the soldiers are having fun [10]. They’re posting to TikTok [11], doing some war crimes [12], then celebrating on the beach [13]. I hate them. I hate them.I can’t work. I code for 5 minutes before their bodies come back. I must work, but who can do a startup through a genocide, when 20,000 are dead [14], when the Israeli-imposed starvation is setting in [15]. I try though; the distraction is good for me.I look at my colleagues – the founders, the investors, my network, my friends, my advisors. I’m afraid to open their twitters. Each time I do, it’s a roulette: is it business as usual – a new fundraise, the latest in AI, a new model released. The blasé posts are a relief. I can tell myself that they’re censored, afraid to speak up about the genocide. Unable or not knowing how to do it. That’s understandable.The propaganda kills me. People I thought were friends, were allies. So much humanity for those killed on October 7th, none for the people killed on the 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th, or in November or December [16]. 20,000 people, killed by deliberate, indiscriminate bombing [17].None either for the people killed on Oct 6th, 5th, 4th [18]. For the people massacred in 1948 [19] and since. No protest of the illegal occupation [20], the illegal settlements [21]. The razing of the villages [22] and the olive groves [23]. They don’t exist to them; they didn’t happen.
Palestinian refugees leaving the Galilee in October-November 1948 from Wikipedia
Have they no questions about why 2 million people live in Gaza and how they came to be there [24]. How Israel carefully controls the calories allowed into Gaza [25], keeping everyone starving. That Israel can turn off the water [26], can turn off the electricity [27]. That this is something a country is able to do to a people. That this is something a country is willing to do to a people [28].
Is this what Israel is? The tech outpost, the US ally, the beacon of democracy in the Middle East? A country that kills journalists [30] and writers in surgical strikes [31]. That forces doctors away from ICU babies, leaving them to die and rot in their incubators [32]. Whose snipers shoot children and grannies in the head [33].
79 year old Hadiya Nassar was killed by an Israeli sniper in December. Poet, writer, and professor Refaat Alareer was killed by a missile which also killed his brother, his sister, and her 4 children.
When the cofounder of Hamas was 9 years old, his uncle was massacred by Israeli soldiers in the Khan Yunis massacre, along with 274 other unarmed Palestinians. He was shot in house-to-house searches. Others were lined up and executed. How many Hamas’ are being created today. [29]
When you read about the Holocaust and the Nazis, you like to imagine you’d be the good guy. You’d fight the Nazis, you’d free the concentration camps. But apparently I wouldn’t. Apparently I would have just sat there paralyzed, incapable of doing anything about the genocide I see every day. Unable to think of any way to help. All I can do is retweet and protest and write a stupid blog post. I feel so stupid.
I wasn’t ready to see that my friends are Brownshirts [34]. That they actively cheer on the genocide [35]. The anger, the desire – the need even – for retribution against innocent civilians. I wasn’t ready for my friends being camp guards, party officials, propagandists.
The propaganda is real, and organized [36], and obvious [37]. Posting about antisemitism in universities to cover indiscriminate bombing of civilians — have you no shame. Repeating Israeli claims which have no proof, and no credibility [38]. Keeping the discussion anywhere except on Palestinians being murdered in Gaza. Denying the number of dead because the numbers are reported by Hamas [39].
Of course, everyone is Hamas now. The child ripped in two by an MK-84 [40] is Hamas. The woman screaming for her sister, digging at the rubble – she’s Hamas. The orphaned nine year old, now the sole parent of her 4 year old brother. Both are Hamas.
Injured children arrive at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis on Tuesday. Credit: Loay Ayyoub via Getty Images
Sometimes I work out how many people my taxes have killed [41]. Intrusive thoughts. Maybe they’re used for roads or healthcare, but maybe I bought a bomb last year and it razed a city block in Khan Yunis. Maybe it killed 50 people. Maybe I killed 50 people.
My investors keep posting. How unsafe the kids feel at Harvard [42]. Railing against “From the river to the sea” as they conveniently omit “Palestine will be free” [43]. Cancelling Tiktok for teaching the kids history instead of US and Israeli propaganda [44].
“Members of the Haganah paramilitary group escort Palestinians expelled from Haifa after Jewish forces took control in April 1948 (AFP)”. Middle East Eye
Anything to keep your eyes off the rubble that Gaza has become [45]. The trail of tears to an empty desert, bombed and shot as they go [46]. Anything to avoid their own culpability in this genocide. They are Hess. They post Israeli flags on twitter as Israel drops bombs on Gaza. They protest a ceasefire. THEY PROTEST A FUCKING CEASEFIRE.
I don’t know what to do, but I know these are not my people. Who can work with people whitewashing genocide. Are we supposed to pretend it’s business as usual as we send our friends’ intros, frolic at conferences, discuss monetization strategy.
To Ed Sim, Erica Brescia, Michael Dearing, and especially Matt Ocko, we’re done [47]. I’ll never pitch you again, never ask for help, never send intros or recommend you. I’m done with Boldstart, and DCVC, and Harrison Metal, and Redpoint. (I’m also done with Bessemer [48] and Sequoia [49] and First Round [50].)
I’m ashamed that these are some of my biggest supporters over the years, the people who invested in me, twice, the people who helped, who advised. I cannot work with the people whitewashing a killing, the people who know it’s happening, and who cover for it, who support the IDF and the US administration which allows it, which funds it.
Oct 7th was an atrocity, and so was every day since then. 20,000 Palestinians have been killed by indiscriminate, deliberate Israeli bombs.
Atrocities happened long before Oct 7th as well. The occupation was no secret. Hundreds of Palestinians killed each year since the Nakba. The rest kept under the Israeli boot, stripped of their rights and homes and dignity.
Their politicians tweet about Palestinians like they aren’t human. They discuss them like their lives don’t matter. They call them “animals”. They have killed thousands of Palestinians, and give every indication that they will continue the genocide.
They are saying it out loud [51]. I can see it, and so could Ed and Michael and Matt and Erica. They simply choose not to.
Actions
Pro-Israeli investors have created a culture of fear in tech where supporters of Palestinian freedom feel unable to raise their voices. I have spoken to many people in tech who are afraid that if they speak up, they’ll be unable to raise their next round, and lose 5-10 years of work on their venture, for their families and for their employees.
We must break the silence around the genocide in Gaza. I know this is a big ask. I know there are significant risks involved, and that’s not your fault. But all the same, we cannot continue to be complicit in this genocide.
Above all, name it. Say publicly what you see happening, and say that what Israel and the US are doing is wrong.
Feel silenced? Say that!
Just like most in tech made Black Lives Matter statements in 2020, come out and say #FreePalestine. Put a banner on your website.
Secondly, don’t make money for investors who whitewash genocide, namely partners at Boldstart, DCVC, Harrison Metal, Redpoint, Bessemer, Sequoia, or First Round.
Tech workers: Don’t work for companies who take funding from these firms. If you already work there, contact management and the founders, ask difficult questions in all-hands, anonymously if you need to. Threaten to get a new job – actually do get a new job.
Founders: don’t take money from these firms. If you already have, contact your partner to register your discomfort, and ask them to divest. Prevent them from investing in later rounds.
[1] See for example here or here, but hundreds of apartment blocks were in Gaza before its destruction. +972 Magazine reports that Israel has “A concerted policy to bomb family homes”, and details many accounts from those whose homes were bombed and families killed.
[4] The official death count on Dec 13 is 18,600, including over 5000 children. however, officials have lost the ability to count.
The accuracy of the Gaza Ministry of Health’s reporting of death tolls has been shown to be accurate by recent studies when looking at the 2008, 2014, and 2015 wars. US medical journal Lancet reviewed and affirms the numbers provided in the current war.
“These figures are professionally done and have proven to be reliable,” said Omar Shakir, Human Rights Watch’s Israel and Palestine director.
[5] Even President Biden has called the attacks “indiscriminate”, though the death toll and pictures of a destroyed Gaza demonstrate that directly.
[7] Israeli soldiers have been recorded shooting civilians who pose no threat, including children and a mentally disabled man. They even shot an Israeli civilian in Jerusalem, who was unarmed and had surrendered, falsely believed to be Hamas:
“When the soldiers saw him I’m assuming they thought he was a terrorist. But then when Yuval realized that that’s what they’re thinking, he opened his jacket to show he had nothing underneath, and got down on his knees. He opened his hands, so they could see he had nothing in his hands,” said Itkovich.
“He was shouting in Hebrew. He was shouting ‘I’m an Israeli.’ He threw his wallet, his identification, on the way so they could see he’s an Israeli. And they just shot him. They gunned him down,” he said.
[8] This well-referenced Human Rights Watch article (see similar on CNN and NBC) contains so many harrowing descriptions of shocking treatment of prisoners that you should read the whole thing. These excerpts barely do it justice:
As of November 1, Israeli authorities held nearly 7,000 Palestinians from the occupied territory in detention for alleged security offenses.
Far more Palestinians have been arrested since the October 7 attacks in Israel than have been released in the last week. Among those being held are dozens of women and scores of children.
The majority have never been convicted of a crime, including more than 2,000 of them being held in administrative detention, in which the Israeli military detains a person without charge or trial. Such detention can be renewed indefinitely based on secret information, which the detainee is not allowed to see. Administrative detainees are held on the presumption that they might commit an offense at some point in the future.
More than 1,400 complaints of torture, including painful shackling, sleep deprivation and exposure to extreme temperatures […]
[…] in 22 cases of detention of Palestinian children they documented in 2023, 64 percent said they were physically abused and 73 percent were strip searched by Israeli forces while in detention.
Prisoners released by the IDF in November report being beaten:
Na’im told CBS News. “Any new prisoner was coming in, he looked beaten up. We requested medicine or other stuff and they refused to give it to us.”
“He kept beating me for eight minutes with a stick and without caring where it lands,” Mohammed Nazal told Al Jazeera of how an Israeli guard tortured him.
“I was covering my head. The stick was aimed here, at my head, but my hands would receive the blow.”
Ahmed Al-Salaima told PBS “After October 7th, they started hitting female prisoners. And they started to reduce the quantity of the food. There were 9 of us in the room and they gave us two meals in small quantities. Before entering the jail, I was 158 pounds, but now I’m 121 pounds”
PBS has more testimony by released prisoners on their treatment.
[9] The IDF captured a group of men, stripped them to their underwear, blindfolded them and put them in trucks. The IDF later admitted that 85-90% of these men had no connection to Hamas, and provided no proof about the remaining 10-15%.
[10] This compilation thread by Palestinian writer and Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor Comms Chief Muhammad Shehada shows social media of IDF soldiers torturing prisoners, followed by Israeli civilians mocking and memeing about it. This was confirmed by other media.
In one, soldiers ride bicycles through rubble. In another, a soldier has moved Muslim prayer rugs into a bathroom. In another, a soldier films boxes of lingerie found in a Gaza home. Yet another shows a soldier trying to set fire to food and water supplies that are scarce in Gaza.
[12] This isn’t the only video I’ve seen of Palestinians being used as human shields by the IDF in the occupied Palestinian territories, but I’m trying to restrict most of the references in this piece to legacy media sites.
[14] This CNN chart updates as the death toll increases
[15] Israel blockaded Gaza from receiving food after October 7th, though a small amount (about 20 trucks a day, for a region that needs 100 trucks a day for subsistence) was allowed through during the Humanitarian pause. Gazans on the ground report they are starving.
[16] By Oct 17th, over 3,000 Gazans had been killed by Israel. By Dec 12th, that number had risen to over 18,000.
[17] Even President Biden, a self described Zionist and friend of Israel, has referred to Israel’s actions as “indiscriminate bombing”
[19] The Deir Yassin massacre in 1948 was committed by the forces that would become the IDF, in which at least 107 people were massacred.
“Women and children were stripped, lined up, photographed, and then slaughtered by automatic firing and survivors have told of even more incredible bestialities,” the report said. “Those who were taken prisoners were treated with degrading brutality.”
This was part of the Nakba, in which 15,000 Palestinians were killed and 750,000 were forced to flee.
[20] Israel has been deemed to violate many of the UN Conventions that were specifically drawn up after World War II to prevent the Nazis’ actions from happening again. Occupying land annexed by force (including Gaza and the West Bank) is illegal.
[22] During the Nakba, pre-Israeli militias razedvillages to prevent the returns of Palestinians to their land.
From 1947 to 1949, some 750,000 Palestinian Arabs were made refugees, and more than 500 Palestinian towns and villages were depopulated, most through direct attacks by Zionist militias that later became the Israeli Army.
Remarkably, olive trees contribute to 14% of Palestine’s economy.
Beyond the monetary value, olive trees have become symbolic of Palestinians attachment to their land.
Since 1967, more than 800,000 Palestinian olive trees have been illegally uprooted by the Israeli authority.3 In August 2021 alone, more than 9,000 have been removed
[24] Gaza is a tiny strip of land that was occupied by Egypt in 1948, and so was one of the only safe places for refugees from the Nakba to go. After 750,000 fled from Israeli massacres throughout Palestine, over 200,000 settled in Gaza.
The Israeli military made precise calculations of Gaza’s daily calorie needs to avoid malnutrition during a blockade imposed on the Palestinian territory between 2007 and mid-2010, according to files the defense ministry released on Wednesday under a court order.
[26] Israel controls the water in Palestine. West Bank Palestinians get access to only a third of the water that Israelis can use, and only 82% of the WHO recommended minimum.
In Gaza, some 90-95 per cent of the water supply is contaminated and unfit for human consumption. Israel does not allow water to be transferred from the West Bank to Gaza, and Gaza’s only fresh water resource, the Coastal Aquifer, is insufficient for the needs of the population and is being increasingly depleted by over-extraction and contaminated by sewage and seawater infiltration.
After October 7, the Israeli government shut off the pipes that supply Gaza with water.
It has since only resumed piping water to some parts of southern Gaza while some water has entered via Egypt, but it’s not reaching everyone and is not nearly enough to meet the needs of Gaza’s population, requiring many to rely on the local water supply. According to the UN however, more than 96 percent of the water supply in Gaza is “unfit for human consumption.”
[27] Israel controls access to fuel in Gaza, as it has for 2 decades. From Al Jazeera:
Israel classed diesel as a “dual use” good that can be used for military as well as civilian purposes. Therefore, it is heavily controlled or restricted.
However, Israel wrote the rule book on “kosher fuel” for Gaza, a highly complex system of approvals and monitoring put in place to guarantee that “civilian use” fuel flows only to Gaza’s sole power plant.
“I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed,” [Defense Minister] Gallant says following an assessment at the IDF Southern Command in Beersheba. “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly,” he adds.
[29] The Khan Yunis massacre was documented in Footnotes In Gaza by Joe Sacca, containing many first-person accounts, including a conversation in the foreword with Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi, co-founder of Hamas (along with Sheikh Ahmed Yassin). He stated “I still remember the wailing and tears of my father over his brother. I couldn’t sleep for many months after that… It left a wound in my heart that can never heal. They planted hatred in our hearts.”
[30] At least 68 journalists have been killed in Gaza since the war began. Reporters Without Borders claims Israel is “eradicating” journalism in Gaza.
[31] The killing of Refaat al-Areer on December 7th, a well-known Palestinian poet and writer. It is alleged that he was targeted in a surgical strike which destroyed only the apartment at which he was staying. The Israeli missile strike also killed his brother, his sister, and her four children.
[32] Israeli soldiers forced doctors and staff to leave Al Nasr hospital on November 10th. Two weeks later, 5 babies were found decomposing in the ruins of the hospital.
[36] Lee Fang and Jack Poulson uncovered the pro-Israel information machine, a collaboration between pro-Israeli investors, tech executives, activists, and government officials. They collaborate to fire anyone arguing in favor of Palestinian freedom, including Courtney Carey from Wix, and Paddy Cosgrave from Websummit, and to put public pressure on any comments deemed anti-Israel.
[37] When folks suddenly start talking about anti-semitism at universities, or maligning slogans of Palestinian freedom, we know it’s to cover up the genocide that’s going on in Gaza.
[38] Joseph Massad, professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia University, makes the case that Israeli propaganda has been repeatedly shown to be false, and that they have no credibility apart from what is parroted by Western news organizations.
[39] The accuracy of the Gaza Ministry of Health’s reporting of death tolls has been shown to be accurate by recent studies when looking at the 2008, 2014, and 2015 wars. US medical journal Lancet reviewed and affirms the numbers provided in the current war.
“These figures are professionally done and have proven to be reliable,” said Omar Shakir, Human Rights Watch’s Israel and Palestine director.
Israel’s liberal use of very large weapons in dense urban areas, including U.S.-made 2,000-pound bombs that can flatten an apartment tower, is surprising, some experts say.
“It’s beyond anything that I’ve seen in my career,” said Marc Garlasco, a military adviser for the Dutch organization PAX and a former senior intelligence analyst at the Pentagon. To find a historical comparison for so many large bombs in such a small area, he said, we may “have to go back to Vietnam, or the Second World War.”
In fighting during this century, by contrast, U.S. military officials often believed that the most common American aerial bomb — a 500-pound weapon — was far too large for most targets when battling the Islamic State in urban areas like Mosul, Iraq, and Raqqa, Syria.
[41] An MK-84 costs $16,000, so your taxes can kill more civilians than you think.
[42] I’ll note that the same conservatives screaming about freedom of speech for the last decade were the first to ask for freedom of speech to be shut down at universities.
[43] “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is deliberately misconstrued to imply the genocide of the the Israel people. When taken at face value, it can clearly be seen to aim for Palestinian freedom. Jewish Currents has a good article on this from 2021.
[44] Tech leaders such as the Information’s Sam Lessin called out Tiktok’s foreign ownership, complaining that it is a major national security threat. My understanding is that this referred to the significant difference between pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian hashtags, with #freepalestine winning by a margin of 4-1.
Tiktok responded essentially that the kids are alright, and that millennials are much more likely to sympathize with Palestinian oppression.
[51] A selection of quotes by senior Israeli officials:
Human animals must be treated as such. There will be no electricity and no water [in Gaza], there will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell.” – Major General Ghassan Alian, Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories
“I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly – Defense Minister Yoav Gallant
To be clear, when they say that Hamas needs to be eliminated, it also means those who sing, those who support and those who distribute candy, all of these are terrorists. […] They should all be eliminated –Itamar Ben-Gvir, Minister of National Security
Right now, one goal: Nakba! A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 48. Nakba in Gaza and Nakba to anyone who dares to join! –Ariel Kallner, Likud Party [Tweet preserved here]
We had big snow here a couple of weeks ago, the proper Hallmark/Hollywood cotton wool stuff. Great for a day or two then a treacherous pest for the rest of the week, it was just too early for Christmas. Snowed in with a classic film and a houseful of food and drink is not a bad place to be. Getting to and from work when your street is an ice rink and it’s barely light in either direction not so much. We’re now back to rain, torrential today, and the sort of wind that can whip your car door straight outta your hands if you’re not expecting it. (It did, I wasn’t. The car parked beside me seemed scarless afterwards though. Quick! Run!)
It’s at least half a week too early for Christmas music on here, so as the days creep ever-shorter to Friday’s Winter Equinox, there’s no better time to blow the dust off of Scott 3 and let it play, softly and gently, as the weather conditions – which they haven’t yet personified with a daft human name – swirl madly outside. Scott 3, Scott Walker‘s third album, funnily enough, is stately and grandiose and packed full of Ivor Raymonde’s searing and soaring string scores, practised on Dusty and perfected deftly with each subsequent Walker Brothers and Scott solo release. If you’ve never experienced it, you must do. If only for the cover art at least, I think you’d love it.
Scott Walker – It’s Raining Today
Eye Tunes
It’s Raining Today is the album’s opener, perfect for our current winter weather and a handy stall-setter for what follows on the rest of the record. It begins with the eerie scrape of high pitched, disconcerting strings – exactly the sort of strings that Jonny Greenwood has taken to employing across The Smile’s and Radiohead’s more outré work – before a pulsing two note electric bass and classically-strummed nylon acoustic offset the jarring with a bit of colour. There is too, you notice, a subtle foreshadowing cascade of icicle percussion, spiking the brain, preparing you for Walker’s tale to unfold. ‘It’s raining today,’ he croons almost immediately, ‘and I’m just about to forget…the train window girl…that wonderful day we met…she smiles through the smoke from my cigarette…‘
The melody rises and falls, ebbs and flows with Scott’s perfect delivery – smooth, slow, almost somnolent – providing a real cinematic cocoon to the world outside. You can wrap yourself right up in It’s Raining Today. Stick it on and you, the listener, are safely sheltered from the storm of life, metaphorical as well as physical.
Then…don’t get too comfy…the strings take a sudden dischordant and unnerving tumble and Walker is lost in a fog of nostalgia and regret, the song’s melody creeping like the coming of winter’s equinox itself, the fingers-down-the-blackboard strings now slow-bowed and majestic, sliding down the scales to the lowest notes possible. They’re the only instruments in the mix until right at the end, when a ripple of piano and the familiar refrain of percussion and edgy strings leads us back to another verse, the titular refrain leading us to cellophane streets and street corner girls and cold trembling leaves. Great imagery.
A few short years before this, Walker and his Brothers were headlining a wonky package bill that included Cat Stevens and the Jimi Hendrix Experience, one of three mis-cast teen idols desperate to cut the puppet strings and call their own shots. By Scott 1, Walker was. By Scott 3 he was deep in the throes of auteurship. Magic stuff.
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 funnystory 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!
A film. Bleached out print, grainy in places with muted, filtered, Instagram-to-the-max colours; subtle mustards, pale yellows, murky beige, an occasional dazzling flash of suppressed ochre. The script is suitably gritty and realistic. Adapted from a forgotten and long out of print novella, the producers have secured the services of the era’s hottest shot; a Harry Palmer/Michael Caine type, perhaps, to lead the line and provide the necessary look that’ll pack out the Locarnos and Empires. Tough guy for the boys, eye candy for their dates, all marketing bases covered. The soundtrack is, of course, spectacular. Seven sharp and sudden stabs of brass and away we go. But more of that later.
The key scene – the one that’ll be quoted and re-enacted and ripped-off in tribute down the years – begins with a car chase. The car in front is an open top Triumph. Of course. It is flame red with silver spokes that glint in the low northern winter sun. Driven erratically and far too quickly, its back end swings out as it takes a bend at top speed. While its driver drops a gear to compensate – we never see his face, but it’s the late 60s, so we have to assume it’s a ‘he’ – the leather driving glove would back that up – an oncoming Hillman Minx is forced to swerve. It briefly mounts the pavement, causing a man in a bowler hat to jump backwards. His folded broadsheet falls from under his armpit. A woman pushing a Silver Cross pram stops further down the street, taking in the scene in disbelief.
The car behind the Triumph is a midnight blue Jensen Interceptor and unsurprisingly, it is gaining on the Triumph. The Jensen’s driver has gritted teeth, slightly yellowing, even for a movie star, (and uneven too), that chew on a thin toothpick as he drives. His thick, black-framed glasses fill his handsome face and now and again the camera picks up the reflection of the Triumph in front. Steel blue eyes unblinking, the driver focuses on his prey, mentally calculating how quickly it’ll be before he’ll reduce the gap to zero. The Triumph makes a sudden and unexpected veer to the right, the screech of its tyres heard faintly above the roar of the Jensen and the accompanying soundtrack – momentarily switched to a frantic, four-to-the-floor bass and drum beat, with the tune’s signature brass no more than a short, sharp, intake of breath away.
Gears are changed, oncoming traffic is slalomed around and we’re suddenly in a multi story car park. The Triumph in front is always just disappearing around one of its tight, whitewashed corners, the metal buffers buckled and scraped, warning signs to the dangers of driving above the recommended 5 mph, but the Jensen never loses sight of, or distance, on him. The Triumph will get to the top floor and have nowhere else to run, and our hero in the Jensen knows this. He will happily drive upwards and onwards and wait for his inevitable moment.
But hold on! The driver of the Triumph is getting out! He’s abandoned ship around the next turn and left the door open in his haste to escape. The Jensen driver just catches sight of him as he runs off, a briefcase clasped across his chest and held in place with one arm. The Jensen immediately pulls up into an empty space – the multi story is deserted, of course – it’s probably Sunday – and the lead actor – the tough, the guy eye candy – sets off in pursuit. The man with the briefcase has entered a staircase and our man follows. Briefcase guy takes the stairs two at a time, the belt buckles and tails of his tan Mackintosh billowing behind like sails, the drag factor slowing him down. Just behind, our man, dressed (of course) in a sharp two-button mod suit, remains hot on his heels. His matinee idol hair, generously lacquered to his scalp, remains immovable. Even the windswept quiff is stiff and unswaying. His glasses stick firm to his face. The toothpick too is still clasped between those gritted teeth. He’s not even broken sweat. The bass guitar on the soundtrack pulses with Cold War dread, all der-der-duh-der-der boogie-woogie spy theme menace, each beat thudding out with every step on the staircase. This music actually seems to spur the Triumph’s driver on. Is he getting away from Harry Palmer/Michael Caine? I think he is. Is he?
Is he heck.
We catch a glimpse of our lead actor’s watch – an Omega, naturally – as his left arm stretches out and the leather driving glove tap-tackles his quarry. The man in front slides ungracefully on the stairs, the leather soles of his shoes suddenly unsuitable for hot pursuit, and he tumbles awkwardly. The Mackintosh opens wide as his hand falls from across his chest. The lining – Burberry – flaps wildly as the briefcase clatters to the floor, bursting open and sending a snowfall of classified documents down the spiral staircase; blueprints and Eastern European-language papers that sashay and helicopter downwards in slow motion, a total contrast to the franticness of the cars and their runners just moments before.
“Suddenly it struck me very clear…” sings the vocalist on the soundtrack. Has the volume turned up a notch? There’s no dialogue, but you can hear the breathless grunts of the two actors as they slip and slide and tangle and detangle and ankle grab and kick loose on the metal stairs, a sinewy keyboard line snaking between their huffs and puffs. The contents of the briefcase, by now strewn across the floor, provide another slippy surface – “They can’t have it, you can’t have it, I can’t have it too…” – but Palmer/Caine/the goodie has rumbled and wrestled the Triumph-driving baddy into a corner. As the Locarno crowd go wild for their champion, he pulls (from nowhere) a set of handcuffs and fixes the villain of the scene to the metal hand rail of the stair case.
“Make y’rself comfy, princess,” he sneers, toothpick jiggling up and down with each East London phoneme he spits. “The boys’ll be round in a bit to ‘ave a little word.”
The scene cuts. He’s back in the Jensen, roaring out of the brutalist car park, its dull putty-white concrete backdrop showing off the Jensen’s cool midnight blue finish. Our main man rolls down the driver’s side window. He spits out the toothpick before leaning his right arm on the windowsill. The music picks up again, the tune’s 7-note horn refrain and thumping rhythm section taking us home. “Until I learn to accept my reward.”
Teardrop Explodes – Reward
Julian Cope wanted Reward to sound like a long-forgotten spy theme played by the mariachi trumpets from Love’s Forever Changes LP. He fairly succeeded. And then some. Play loud, as they used to say.
Any directors needing a scriptwriter and/or music synch guy…hit me up, as they say nowadays.
Ach. Shane MacGowan. The literate libertarian and rabble-rousing romantic has drunk and sunk his last pint. Drink up, shut up, last orders. Time gentlemen, please.
When those pictures appeared a week or so ago showing a frail Shane propped up in bed, visited by pals and barely able to smile for the camera, it reminded me of the last days of my dad’s life, of his pals dropping in to say their final, unsaid goodbyes, of big grown men leaving the house in tears. To be honest, the pictures of Shane made me feel uncomfortable, unnecessarily voyeuristic, but for anyone who’s watched a loved one slip away, those candid snaps were an obvious foreshadow of what finally arrived at the end of the week just gone.
Like many, I’ve binged myself on The Pogues since the news of his death broke.
I first heard of The Pogues in 1985, and only because I turned up to participate in a Bible quiz being held in an upper room of Kilmarnock’s Grand Hall. (That story has been told on here before.) It wouldn’t be long until I properly heard the MacGowan voice, that very same night, as it goes, bellowing up in fluent MacGowanese from the floor below, in-between the stuffy quizmaster’s boring questions.
“In which book of the Bible did…”
“ahve been ssspat on, ssshat on raypedandabyooozed…“
By the end of that week I owned Poguetry In Motion and never looked back.
The Pogues’ Christmas Barrowlands shows, especially the one with Joe Strummer joining them for Clash songs, were some of my favourite-ever gigs. After the Strummer one, I nearly fainted through heat exhaustion from non-stop jumping about in a very crushed and over-sold crowd. A medic made me sit against the wall of the stairs on the way out until I’d recovered, necessitating in a mad sprint back down the Trongate and Argyle Street for the last train. By the time we’d made it, my old suit jacket was stiff from frosty dried sweat. Thawed out on the train home and back at my house, it was a stinky, soggy, shapeless mess. I hung it in the shower to dry until the next morning, when I shook out not only Joe Strummer’s actual plectrum but enough crystalised sweat to keep Mama’s chip shop in salt until the next Pogues show. Memories, as the song goes, are made of this.
By chance last night I stumbled across Julian Temple’s fantastically revealing ‘Crock Of Gold’, a two hour documentary on the life of Shane MacGowan. Culled from old interviews, both film and audio, with archive footage of Irish life and additional filmed segments from three or four years ago, it’s an absolutely essential watch and a key insight into the life and psyche of MacGowan.
Shane’s ability to romanticise the unromantic is there right from the start. Reminiscing about his early years in Tipperray, he talks about the “sepia-brown farmhouse where they pissed out the front door and shat in the field out the back….” In a series of torn and frayed photographs, the MacGowan clan is shown to be tight-knit and stern faced, the wire-thin men in flat caps, faces lined like cartographic maps of rural Ireland, the handsome-faced women with arms folded over necessary pinafores.
His upbringing was equal part prayer and profanity. “Fuck is the most-used word in the Irish dictionary,” he says. His uncle educated him on Irish history and its peoples’ continual fight, a subject that would permeate much of his songwriting. His auntie Nora too was a major influence on him, introducing him to stout and snout at the age of 5 or 6, just before the family would move to England. By the time Shane had been integrated into the English school system, he was a two bottles of stout a night veteran of the stuff.
The family hated England. Despite his dad’s decent job, they were bog Irish. Thick Paddies. Outsiders. Shane rebelled. In the film, his dad notes with disdain the very moment Shane went properly off the rails.
“It was that Creedence Clearwater Revival,” he spits quite unexpectedly, in a tone normally reserved for discussing who might’ve nicked that morning’s milk from the doorstep and ran away.
Youthful dabbling in substances followed, expulsion from school not long after, with psychiatric electro-therapy just around the corner. Forever the troubled outsider, Shane found his calling in the filth and fury of punk. “I was the face of ’77!” he quips, before lamenting the movement’s inability to truly change the world. “All that we had left at the end,” he laments, “were brothel creepers, a few bottles of Crazy Colour and the dole.”
He’d discovered what a life in music might offer though, and set out to change the way Irish music was viewed. “Everyone was listening to ethnic music, so I thought, ‘Why not my ethnic music?’” The Pogues were born and the songs, poetic and proud, educating and enlightening, soon had an enthusiastic following. When asked how he goes about writing a song – “Can you write sober?” asks an interviewer at one point – Shane states that the songs are floating in the air – “that’s why they’re called airs,” he reasons, and that he reaches out to grab them “before Paul Simon does.”
The Pogues – A Rainy Night In Soho
Could Paul Simon have written a song as sweeping and grand as A Rainy Night In Soho? Or The Broad Majestic Shannon? A song as political and hard-hitting as Birmingham Six or Thousands Are Sailing? A song as simple and melancholic as Summer In Siam or Misty Morning, Albert Bridge? A song as joyful and carefree as The Body Of An American or Sally MacLennane or Sick Bed Of Cuchulainn or Streams Of Whiskey? Of course he couldn’t. No one could write songs like these ‘cept MacGowan. From waltz-time bawlers to night time weepies, he covered all bases.
You’ll hear Fairytale Of New York – “Our Bohemian Rhapsody” a lot in the coming weeks. Nowt wrong with that, of course, but I’d like to direct you to an essential source of one of its ingredients.
Ennio Morricone – Deborah’s Theme (Overture)
Ennio Morricone’s Deborah’s Theme, from Once Upon A Time In America, is slow and stately, majestic and magnificent. Shane thought so too, making good use of the motif that he’d write – ‘It was Christmas Eve, babe/And then we sang a song/God, I’m the lucky one‘ – across the top of. A powerful, beautiful piece of soul-stirring music that gave rise to another.
Shane Patrick Lysaght MacGowan (25 December 1957 – 30 November 2023)
It seems the Trashcan Sinatras will gatecrash the UK top Top 10 Album Chart at the end of this week. Their debut album Cake has been remastered and re-released by Last Night From Glasgow and, 33 years on from its original release on Go! Discs (peak chart placing number 74), it looks like landing at number 10. This decrees the Trashcans’ record to be not quite as popular as those by the Rolling Stones or Elton John, but marginally more so than a handful of Taylor Swift reissues. While the charts maybe don’t mean as much to anyone anymore, the group, you can imagine, is delighted.
Personally, I’m thrilled for them. Someone cleverer than I could probably make something of the serendipity of a 33-year old record taking 33 years to chart. That must be some sort of record (no pun intended), eh?
Back when the reissue was being put together it was suggested that I might write the liner notes to accompany the record’s release. A major honour and thrill, I got stuck right in about it. As I said here a few weeks ago, they were all ready to go, along with a new gatefold sleeve, a lyric sheet, unpublished photos…the full works when, at the final hurdle, the band – wanting to remain enigmatic and mysterious – decided to revert to the record’s original packaging; no lyrics, blurred photos, no liner notes.
However, in an unexpected twist, the Japanese label got in touch. Such is the Japanese way with care and attention and detail, they wanted to use not only my Cake notes on the inner sleeve of the record, but also a translated explanation of what some of the lyrics and idioms on the debut single mean. Which was nice. I got stuck right into that too.
The Japanese market for LPs is extremely healthy and, as you know, it’s not uncommon at all for releases there to become collectible to fans worldwide on account of an extra track or two or other such addendum – liner notes, perhaps – to enhance the package. The Japanese Cake comes replete with exactly that.
I’m as thrilled about all of this as the group is at their chart placing, make no mistake. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been desperately keen to get my name on a record. My days of dreaming of windmilling through an encore at the Barrowlands have all but evaporated, but this writing gig has finally allowed me the opportunity of achieving this. On such a special album too. I wonder if the record will go Top 10 in Japan?
Trashcan Sinatras – Even The Odd
If the Trashcans are new to you, Even The Odd might make a good introduction; whimisical, melody-rich and coated in a fine shimmer of acoustic and electric guitars, it features skifflish, brushed drums, tasteful feedback and a noisy and reverby breakdown with some era-defining shouty nonsense before it gathers itself together again. Frank’s voice is young-sounding to the point of being helium-powered, perhaps a reason why it’s not a song that stuck long in the Trashcans’ live set-lists. Great track and great production though.
If you want to help the Trashcans shrug off the threat of Swift and overtake Jagger and Elton to make a late push for the top 5, you can do your bit by buying the album before Thursday. Best place to get it would be via Last Night From Glasgow. A host of versions are available from them.
And finally, a message to anyone buying and listening to Cake for the first time: Wait until you hear the next album…
Plain Or Pan 