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.
Blur. Four musicians. Four mindsets. Four sets of influences pushing and pulling the band in four different directions. Part of the appeal, you might say, and part of the reason they sound as they do (sounded as they did?), but only one of the four is responsible for putting the undisputed art into their uncouth rock.
It’s not Damon Albarn, a mega-talented writer for sure who can turn his hand to Chinese opera as quickly as he can rattle off some pseudo G-funk with Snoop Dogg. It’s not Dave the drummer either. Low-key Dave is more than happy in his old Teenage Fanclub t-shirt and standing for the right sort of politics, ready to be called upon for the pension-topping reunion shows when the public demands. And it’s not you, cheesemaking Alex. Sorry, but your pout and your cheekbones and your studied posturing, not to mention your aching mid-90s desire to be John Taylor for teenage girls in Adidas shell toes makes you just about the most punchable man there’s ever been in music. When people say they don’t like Blur, you’re the reason.
Step forward Graham Coxon. The other half of the band’s unassuming, ego-free side, Coxon quietly gets on with his job of being an arty lead guitar player in one of the nation’s greatest singles bands; hunched and studied, inventive and unique, angry and noisy but restrained and bluesy when required. Always interesting though. Especially when doing backwards rolls, Tele in hand, riffage ringing out from a 4 x 12 cabinet at ear-splitting volume. Oh yeah.
The guitar-as-siren on Popscene. The off-beat grind of the guitar against the fluid groove of Girls And Boys. The Beatlesy clang of Beetlebum‘s chorus. Coxon made them all. Lifted them, elevated the songs from promising to pretty much indispensable.
He’s tight ‘n taught, all wandering XTC by way of Remain In Light Afro-menace across forgotten single Music Is My Radar, before cutting free with an almighty wasp stuck in a food blender guitar break. Remind yrself of its greatness below.
Blur – Music Is My Radar
He’s all over Song 2‘s silly double drummer ‘n double Rat distortion blowout, its noisy jet engine take-off chorus following a clanging intro that he strived to play as horribly and sloppily as possibly. Why? He was fed up with the screaming teenage girls and pin-up appeal of his band. A bit of unexpected guitar Frippery and freakery kept him entertained and the audience on their toes. Woo-hoo.
The tension and release in M.O.R.’s gutbucket punk is magic. An arty use of fuck ’em up effect pedals welded to the band’s call and response vocals, some of them shouted through a far-away megaphone, and open chorded let-go in the chorus is the sound of the guitar player pulling against the grain of the rest of the band. Add in a clanging, out of tune piano right at the end and you have a pop single that made number 15 surely only on the back of the band’s name. Can’t imagine the shell toes and Fila tracksuits lapping this little Britpop ditty up very easily.
Blur – M.O.R.
Coxon is possibly most at home on Coffee And TV, its weird descending chords adding wooze to the vocal’s melody – his vocal, as it goes – before the all-out sonic freak attack of the ‘solo’, a worked-up in the studio affair where he stomped on and off his pedal board with all the enthusiasm of Gripper Stebson pogoing on poor Ro-land Browning’s head. You knew that already though.
Uniqueness. That’s the secret. What makes Blur so great? Graham Coxon, of course. In a lineage of great English singles bands, Blur may well be, for now, the last in that line. From The Beatles, The Kinks and The Who through to The Jam, Madness and The Smiths, an ability to amalgamate melody and electric guitars to an undeniable signature sound is a trick that all guitar bands strive for, yet few manage. Coxon at the controls of his array of effect pedals ensured Blur found their place in this exclusive club.
Some songs just fit on car journeys. Queens Of The Stone Age’s No One Knows and a midnight stretch of the relatively new ring road that by-passes the south side of Glasgow sounds awesome at 70 mph. Hall And Oates I Can’t Go For That goes nicely with cruise control on the Sunshine State’s Interstate 4. Radiohead’s There There at national speed limit-defying pace on the M4 north in an unseasonally quiet mid-July heatwave. Tindersticks’ Tiny Tears on a rain-soaked October Isle of Arran. Underworld’s Dark And Long… Stevie Wonder’s Boogie On Reggae Woman… freakin’ Band On The Run….Orbital’s Chime and the badly-needing-an-upgrade Barrhead – Irvine road fit together like hand in glove. Talking of which, the giddy acoustic rush of Bigmouth Strikes Again sounds just right driving up a deserted Dumbarton Road at two in the morning. Favourite car soundtracks. We’ve all got them.
Which takes me to the Highlands, 1993. We’re on some sort of road trip, the wee Ford Fiesta packed to the gunnels with waterproofs and Goretex and umbrellas and cagoules and all the usual things you’d take to the north of Scotland at the height of summer. We’ve a radio that simply refuses to tune to anything either side of Radio 1 and half a dozen tapes, carefully curated home-made jobs that the temperamental in-car tape player has already tried to devour before breaking north of Dunbartonshire.
At one point deep in the Highlands, heading somewhere towards the standing stones at Clava Cairns, Radio 1 drops out to intermittent static. We need to gamble on the willingness of the tape machine to play ball…and play tapes. Thankfully on this occasion it does…and it leaves me with a memory burned to the hard drive of the music section in my brain.
World Party‘s All I Gave is sandwiched mid-side, placed somewhere between Somewhere In My Heart and Groove Is In The Heart and it provides the ideal soundtrack for a jaw-dropping run through Scotland’s rich countryside. There are purple/grey peaks on the horizon, snow-flecked even in summer, with clear winding rivers far below that shimmer like chrome, old guys waist deep and fly-fishing them dry, surrounded by patchworks of untouched green fields bordered by stately pines and firs… an entire shortbread tin image of Scotland in real life, right in front of us in widescreen technicolour.
World Party – All I Gave
We like World Party. Their Bang! album is a current constant in our lives and All I Gave is our favourite song on it. Karl Wallinger has clearly been kissed on both cheeks by the Beatles’ gene, his George Harrisonisms never more to the fore than on this track. His vocals, joyful and soaring and full of his toothy sunshine smile do the sha-la-la in all the right places and tug at the strings of the heart whenever the minor chords come round. Woozy mellotronish psychedelia shares a bed with wheezing, asthmatic slide guitar, playing on top of unexpected chord changes and a melodic bassline that you really hope is played on an attention-to-detail Hohner violin bass. We rewind the track plenty and often and we never tire of it.
“I will always love you,” we sing aloud, unselfconsciously and out of tune, and the wee car with its questionable suspension bounces us up and over the brow of another single track hill. A stag – “A stag!!” – watches nonplussed as we clatter past. An eagle – “An eagle!!” – spirals in the sky to our left. The fisherman casts his fly one more time. We don’t see if the river has given up any more of its load as we’re now heading through the pines and onto Clava Cairns and its Bronze Age standing stones where, spookily, Radio 1 crackles back into life and ruins everything.
That moment with All I Gave though. That’ll last forever.
My old pal Derek was mad on coffee, in both senses of the phrase. He drank it the way a fish might presumably drink water, or the way Shane MacGowan evaporated his pints of gin, y’know; one regularly after the other, repeated non stop until bedtime. One too many and he’d be a gibbering, gum rattling freak, speeding away quite happily on a perfectly legal drug. In this state he could carpenter an intricate dado rail around your hall in the time it took the kettle to boil. A solid wood floor could routinely be laid in under an hour. The 60 Minute Make-Over? Our Derek was doing that while Claire Sweeney was still Lindsey Corkhill, mate.
Way back around 1997 Derek bought a satisfyingly chunky Italian percolator and would enjoy the ritual of preparing an espresso for you. Then another. And another. And one more before leaving. We’d be playing guitars and with each passing espresso the strumming got that little bit more ragged and loose-threaded at the ends until we were murdering the classics with Java and Illy and Lavazza running rampant through our systems. I remember rattling like a Scotrail diesel train on the walks back from his house, jerking from heel to toe at a hundred miles an hour, shaky and ill and continually needing to pee, then unable to sleep way past the midnight hour. Have you ever watched an Alex Higgins 100+ break? That. Can you miss the feeling of being totally wired? When your pals are no longer here to share it with you, of course you can.
We were at Songs Ya Bass in Glasgow’s Buff Club at the weekend. An idea that grew out of music nights in Rik and Nell’s house, for 11 strong years SYB has filled a quarterly slot in one of the city’s mankiest upstairs clubs. The premise is simple. Message Rik and Nell with 3 songs you’d want to dance/jump around to and they’ll create a playlist from everyone’s requests then play them at a decent volume until 11pm, when the Buff Club proper opens its doors and the oldies and goldies and grey hairs and nae hairs retreat down the sticky carpeted stairs and make their way to Glasgow Central for the last train home.
It was midway through Dog Eat Dog, or maybe Voodoo Ray on Saturday night, when I realised the Red Stripe was taking me well on my way to pished. The video screen slideshow that never repeats itself all night – a labour of love for Rik – had rotated from Joe Strummer to Run DMC to One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest‘s Nurse Ratched and the upstairs balcony and mobbed dancefloor were both a blurry haze of arms aloft folk not giving two hoots about what any onlooker might’ve thought of their dancing styles. Faces loomed in, grinning. The legs loosened to elastic. The sprung wooden floor (sacrilegiously laid on top of a Jim Lambie work of art, they say) became bouncy castle like. The slideshow faded from Lee Perry to Peter Cook and Dudley Moore to Muhammed Ali to The Cramps to Pele to Wilko Johnson to all the other greats. The music jarred unexpectedly from Gerald’s ‘hey oh, a-ha, a, uh-oh-ah‘ to Wham’s Young Guns to The Clash to New Order to…! Hey!…
thump-thump-thumpa-thump… ‘I’m Totally Wired! I’m Totally Wired!…I drank a jar of coffee and then I took some of these…. and I’m TOTALLY WIRED!‘ Magic!
The Fall – Totally Wired
The guitars, cheesegrater thin, cut through like tinfoil to a filling. Clang…scree…tcchhhskkkk…; relentless, repetitive and rickety, but really, really great! Steve Hanley, Mark E Smith’s long-time lieutenant plays looping, thumping bass. It worms its way into yr skull and stays there, uninvited but very welcome, the empathetic drums pounding away in the background and hammering you into submission. On top of it all, Mark Smith yelps and barks and screeches like the nails down the blackboard of popular music that he was, abrasive ADHD in the form of verse and chorus.
This – Totally Wired – is the exact jittery, nerve-shredding, anxiety-inducing sound of too much coffee (and other things, if that’s yr bag). It’s also, as it happens, the unofficial soundtrack to those frantic and fidgety walks home from Derek’s, senses jangling into the wee small hours. T-T-T-Totally Wired!!!
Late era New Order, where the quality control diminishes with each passing year but the golden era reissues get pumped out at increasingly inflated prices are still a living, breathing entity only because of the music that’s gone before. The live shows nowadays – great as I’m told they are – are in vast, soulless places, sometimes even outdoors, with tickets sold at premium prices and no more than three quarters of the original band on show. The fall-outs have been well-documented on both sides and neither looks good for it. Hook continues to stubbornly tour his Peter Hook & The Light project while the rest of New Order and a sundry supporting cast limp on. Name me an essential New Order record released this century and I’ll show you a grasping optimist.
And yet…and yet…Music Complete, released in 2015 has a couple of shining moments. Not, let’s get this clear, the hideous and plodding Iggy Pop-‘enhanced’ Stray Dog…or Now I Wanna Be Your Dog’s Dinner, as I’d have named my remix if I’d been one of the 427 remixers involved across the album’s lifespan. Nor the washed-out synth wash of Superheated with (ha!) Brandon Flowers throwing vocal shapes across its poppy, autotuned, a-ha without a heartbeat chorus. Eugh. They might as well have called the album ‘Music? Completed It.‘ because they’d clearly run out of ideas by this point. This is the band that released Power, Corruption & Lies and Low-Life and Technique and a handful of magic stand-alone singles. Except, well, it’s clearly not, is it Bernard?
New Order was always an impenetrable, mysterious force. An enigma that conjured up propulsive and forward-thinking magic from the thin Mancunian air. And here they are in 2015, giving cameos to the era’s spotlight-hoggers. Ah! Maybe that’s it. Maybe in reality it’s New Order that needs the spotlight. Maybe that’s why, besides Iggy and Brandon, they also aligned themselves with minor hit maker La Roux (or Elly Jackson, as she’s known on other folk’s records).
She sings on Tutti Frutti and it’s pretty good. Not Bizarre Love Triangle good. Or The Perfect Kiss good. Not even Shellshock good. But comparatively pretty good. It’s the one chink of light in a dark era for a band that a sympathetic vet might’ve put down by now.
New Order – Tutti Frutti
Yeah, so it’s Smalltown Boy filtered through a thumping dance/pop prism, a mid-paced pulse of Bernard melancholy and uplifting chorus, but what makes it great are those Hook-ish Too-tee-Froo-tee growling vocals at the start and end. Remember ‘You got luuurve technique?’ That. It has you almost misty-eyed for an era not long gone by, yet seeming centuries away, where the four key members of New Order were pals and creatives and untouchable.
The best New Orderish, non New Order single of recent years? That’d be GorillazAries, with Hook’s fluid signature bassline lapping its way up and down the neck as Albarn’s sad vocal surfs atop a jolting, crashing rhythm. There’s even another growly vocal at the start. ‘Ayr-eaze‘ goes Hooky, and you’re instantly pining for a band that’ll never be in the same room again.
Gorillaz – Aries
*Next year, Music Complete will be 10 years old. Look out for the triple vinyl anniversary box set with added Iggy ‘n Brandon ‘n Elly for extra cash-grabbing effect.
Adam over at Bagging Area has long been a champion of things that bang and beat in interesting ways. He’s a particular standard bearer for Andrew Weatherall (and anything that bears his hallmark) and, thrillingly, he’s found himself falling into a role as co-curator of a Weatherall-inspired compilation album, Sounds From The Flightpath Estate Volume 1. Born from ‘wouldn’t it be great if…’ chat after a DJ slot at Todmorden’s Golden Lion, in a move that apes Weatherall’s own ‘fail we may, sail we must’ manifesto, the record – already sold out on pre-orders alone – is this week’s Compilation Of The Week on Lauren Laverne’s BBC 6 Music show. Based on that fact alone, the record must surely be fast-footing its way to a repress; the charts being what they are these days, time it nicely and the possibility of real chart action isn’t unlikely. What a thrill it must be to create something out of nothing, especially one that carries the inference of something further to come.
I’ll ‘Volume 1′ you, m’lad!
Let’s hear it for the instigators, agitators and originators of this fine new release. Virtual fist bumps all round.
This past week, coincidentally, sees four years since Andrew Weatherall’s passing and on the back of Adam and co’s album announcement, I’ve been scouring the forgotten b-sides of my old 12″ singles to eke out any of his remixes. That Petrol Emotion, Flowered Up, James and Sinead O’Connor all leapt up and out at the mere mention of his name, spinning themselves into the wee hours last weekend. All have been bent, buckled and battered out of all recognisable shape by Weatherall, not always for the better, if yr asking me, but they make for interesting and usually long-form listening – ideal in that post-midnight fug.
Weatherall’s own collective, Sabres Of Paradise crept up on me only after time. Other than the ubiquitous twin collossuses Theme and Smokebelch, the albums were lost on me as I gave myself over to the more popular/shallower end of ’90s music. I’d have heard Sabresonic from behind the Our Price counter, but I daresay it would have been shunted aside for the latest Suede release or Steps or something similar. Similarly Haunted Dancehall, with its striking open-razored cover and dark beats on the inside. Classics of course nowadays, but it took me a quarter of a century to appreciate that. Given that I absolutely loved Underworld’s Dubnobasswithmyheadman – and hindsight shows us that that record may well be the greatest album of the ’90s – I’m not sure how I never picked up on Sabres Of Paradise at the time, but there y’go. You can’t surf the zeitgeist all of the time. It’ll wear you out, man. Those folk that were into everything – absolutely everything – first? Bollocks they were.
Weatherall’s Sabres’ material, made with Jagz Kooner and Gary Burns, is often relentless, head-nodding, dub-infused techno, played at a slow and steady BPM. It can be claustrophobic and anxiety-inducing yet euphoric and rush-and-release magic within the same groove.
Sabres Of Paradise – Wilmot
Wilmot builds itself around a 90-year-old horn sample from a crackly calypso record by the fantastically-named Wilmoth Houdini. Pitch-shifted down a gear or two, the horns allow space for all manner of wizardry to clash and clatter around it; skanking, off-beat guitars, filling-loosening Simonon-ish bass, electronic whooshes, big beats, high in the mix percussion, ech-ech-ech-ech-echoing refrains, trumpets heralding the arrival of the Great God Pan himself. If you’re sitting half-cut on your sofa at an hour way past your normal bedtime, it may just be the record you need to hear. I bet it’d sound great just sitting on the London underground, whizzing below the city with no idea where you are.
As you may already know, Fatboy Slim would later use the same sample on his Mighty Dub Katz Son Of Wilmot release. Given that record’s title, I’d wager that Norman Cook was possibly more familiar with the Sabres Of Paradise track than the ancient original that provided the hook for Weatherall and the other Sabres. But anyway…
Centuras – Crisis
Released on Junior Boys Own, Crisis by Centuras is Weatherall in spirit if not in presence. Another long-form, chopped up dub cut, Crisis is stretched out, messed up reggae. A squeaky keyboard elbows the warped electronics out to the margins, making way f-f-for another f-f-fan-faring horn sample. Similar yet different. Or exactly the same sample as above? Who can tell? The beat rolls ever forward, propulsive yet glitchy. Figments of spliced vocal lines ghost in and out and a rhythm that brings to mind Primal Scream at their most creative…and Weatherall-affected carries it for 5 or so chin-stroking minutes.
It’s dance music, Jim, but I’d like t’see y’try.
Unexpectedly, I found this 12″ in a charity shop in Saltcoats. The track above is worth alone the 50p I risked on it. Re-sult, as the grate diggers refrain goes.
ccsnlly smthng wll rrv n my nbx tht rlly pqs my ntrst. rlr ths lst wk ws snt ths. t’s trrfc.
t’s by bdrmm, th Hll-bsd pst-rck qrtet, sgnd t Mgw’s Rck ctn lbl nd nw httng thr strd s shgzy pdl stmprs fr gnrtn nt fmlr wth the flppy-frngd bnds f yr. Whr Rde cm t y lk fll-n Pnzr ttck, bdrmm crp p slwly bhnd y. Whr My Bldy Vlntn ctd thr tns n rpplng hz f wtr clrs, bdrmm stck t sbtl pstls. Whr Slwdv srd nd tmbld, bdrmm tmbl nd sr.
Ths nw trck, Standard Tuning, s n-ff rls tht’ll mk ts wy n 10″ t yr mr dscrnng rcod rtlrs rnd pril, by whch tme ‘ll hv lstnd t t rghly 368 tms, fndng ne thngs yt n ts mlodc hz.
t’s lsh, thr-wrldly nd hypntc. Th gtrs snd lke vntge synths. The synths snd lk vntg gtrs. Th vcls r brthy, ctd n shmmr nd hze, ts lyrc f lss nd pssng stbly fttng. Thr’s prprly Blrc prcssv bdrck t th whl thng; mtr ngns gntly tckng vr, clckng nd clttrng synthtc bts gng qtly pll-mll, whtwsh f swllng synths, lpd, strtchd nd twstd smpls, drp-ts, fde-ns nd, somwhr n the bckgrnd, sm srt f flt tht, n th wrng hnds (ny’s prhps) mght’v cm crss s tw nd nw-gy.
t ll flts ff n hz of pcflly chmng nd chng gtrs tht l smwhr btwn Th Cr nd DV (wh, concdntlly, bdrmm wll be spprtng nxt mnth) nd wll hv rchng fr th rpt bttn s sn s ts lst rcchtng nts hv snt y int shgaz-ndcd cm. Trrfc stff.
* In the interests of art, I removed all the vowels to see how this might look. Daft, isn’t it?
C’mon bdrrmm. Don’t let your music down with a stupid name.
Lowrell Simon was a Chicago-based soul singer. After being in a succession of hopeful groups, slogging around on the circuit and briefly grazing the lower reaches of the US R&B charts, he was, by the mid ’70s, a staff writer at Curtom (Curtis Mayfield’s label) writing and producing soundtrack material of little consequence. Nothing truly spectacular really materialised from his writer’s pen until the end of the decade. By then, Lowrell was back recording as a solo artist, his experiences with Curtom better equipping him for the making of glossy, groove-driven soul music.
He struck gold with the very Mayfield-titled and timeless Mellow Mellow Right On.
Lowrell Simon – Mellow Mellow Right On
Anyone who’s heard Massive Attack’s Blue Lines – and that’s everyone here, right? – will recognise instantly its marching heartbeat of a bassline, used to great effect on that album’s Lately; stately, steady and never wavering, driving that track to its soulful and melancholic conclusion.
On the original, things are a bit more upbeat. That flare of unresolved strings at the start, all tension and no release, coupled with the wet slap of funk guitar and precise drum beat promises much and delivers exactly what you hope for. A choir pops up, “Mellow, mellow, right on!” they chant…and then Lowrell himself slopes in, all spoken word and chocolate-wrapped vocals – “Ladies, I’d like to take this time out just to say…” his easy vocal easing up, out and into Marvin Gaye territory.
Behind him, his disciplined band never drops the beat. They groove and smoove their way through ten metronomic minutes and more of pure discofied funk, the sound of flapping trouser legs, jumbo-winged collars and powder blue suits, of oversized hair and oversized heels. In an era much maligned and swept aside by the snotty arrival of punk, Mellow Mellow Right On glistens like the studio lighting refracting from the mirrored lens of a pair of aviator shades and serves as a reminder that the best disco was just as valid as any other music. Fight me.
You’d get no argument on that front from Edwyn Collins. Scrolling through a Postcard Records group on Facebook recently, that old Mojo article (above) jumped right out at me, and not just because of EC’s unmatching shirt ‘n trousers combination.
Edwyn, forever on the money, whether it comes to guitars or clothes or hair, is once again correct in his assessment of Mellow Mellow Right On. Sung especially for the ladies and wrapped in a bad-ass but glossy production (the wee electronic shooms that fire off now and again, the oil slick thick guitar, the tease and timbre of the strings) – it’d be easy to imagine Dr Dre getting behind the desk to work his G-Funk magic with this as the bedrock.
I bet Edwyn’s still grooving to it now. I know I am.
We’re barely into February and already the superfly Canadian instrumentalists/producers BADBADNOTGOOD have an eye on the warmer weather. Being Canadian ‘n all, I’d imagine this time of year is particularly grim up north, but one spin of this hot-off-the-pressing-plant new release will warm even the chilliest of North American hearts and have you – yeah you! – looking ahead to the first buds of spring with eager anticipation. Take What’s Given ticks all sorts of groovy boxes.
BADBADNOTGOOD – Take What’s Given feat. reggie
Swaggering like a refreshed, sun-drenched drifter going toe to toe with Sly Stone at his most insouciant, it’s a real beauty. I mean, it’s cowboy chords welded to You’re The One That I Want. It’s We Love To Boogie. It’s Bontempi basslines at the cabaret down the Legion. It’s nuthin’ you aint ever heard before and it’s maybe the best thing you’ll hear this year. It’s certainly the most unpretentious and downright goddam joyful thing that’ll fill your ears in the coming months, that’s a fact.
It rolls sweetly on a bed of crisply played snare, gently caressed shimmering Hammond and a brass section that might’ve blown their way straight from a Muscle Shoals session. With the ghosts of Al Green and Anne Peebles stuck fast to the horns and eager to escape, it’s left to BBNG’s guest vocalist reggie to bring it home as one.
What he lacks in basic punctuation, he more than makes up for in a vocal delivery that apes good ol’ Sylvester Stewart like the best of ’em. He’s got Sly’s yawny drawl schtick going on perfectly, stretched and vocalised vowels in place of actual words in places – “Aaaaeeeeiiiiooouuuh” – a vintage, cracked baritone in others, a lovely understated harmony with himself on occasional lines, a happy choir coming in to join him halfway through. There are subtle 7th chords when they think no-one’s looking, free-flowing trumpets, getting away with it at the tail end of lines when you’re distracted by the warm hug of the singers, and enough hooks to have you playing it on repeat until the winter thaws and the daffodils come back around.
Not bad for a track made up on the spot while the principal players set up for the actual session. If this is the throwaway stuff, I can’t wait to hear the stuff they spent the real time on.
Everyone’s a singer/songwriter these days. Get yrself a laptop, a looper and a whole lotta misplaced self-belief and you too could be the next big breakout act. It makes sense to a degree; travel as a one-person show with low overheads and you’re the ideal support act – a plug in and play band in a box – and the promoter can get away with paying you much less than they might’ve done had they booked a 5-piece indie rock band to warm the crowd up.
The downside? Well, every bedroom musician sounds the same, don’t they? Don’t they?
Tap-tap-tap-tap goes the foot. Scratch-scratch-scratch-scratch goes the guitar. “1 and 2 and 3 and 4” mumbles the singer inwardly, and they fiddle with something at their feet, silence a rogue guitar line then start again. Second, maybe third time lucky and we’re off. That KT Tunstall has a lot to answer for.
Thankfully, Cathy Jain broke the mould of what it means to be a bedroom musician. Recorded in Autumn 2021, her Artificial EP features the under the radar shimmer of Green Screen.
It’s a great track. Recorded in her bedroom, it shimmers like an Indian summer, all lazy, hazy, laptop psychedelia and slo-mo melodies.
The synths veer from heart of the sun fuzz and Stylophone buzz to filmic and creeping John Barry melancholy. The langorous drum ‘beat’ is forever on the verge of falling asleep, geed up by a climbing chord progression and lovely, spaced out guitar pings. Them, and a fantastic unravelling melody that’s delivered in an exquisite vocal which falls somewhere between a sulky Lana Del Ray and a sultry Phoebe Bridgers. That first chorus, aroud the 45 second mark, where her voice swoops and overlaps itself as it swandives southwards again…I’ll never tire of that.
Cathy Jain was 16 when she recorded this. 16! Who are you, Cathy?! And where are you, Cathy? We need you back.
Plain Or Pan 