Gone but not forgotten, Kraut-y

Expressionism

Craig McAllister

Around May/June 1977, David Bowie and Iggy Pop found themselves free of rural France and in Berlin, doing what any self-respecting culture vultures and gatekeepers of taste would do on the back of two successful (and future classic) albums (Low / The Idiot); they wandered around the city’s Brücke Museum, absorbing the Teutonic culture and getting familiar with the very fabric of Germany. Amongst the largest collection of German Expressionism on the planet, between the Kirchners and the Heckels, the Bleyls and the Schmidt-Rotluffs, they chanced upon Otto Mueller’s 1916 painting Lovers Between Garden Walls. Its loose and flowing watercolours made quite the impression on the magpie-minded Bowie and he returned time and again to soak it in, committing it to memory until a suitable use could be found for it.

Collaborating with Bowie on the album he’d quickly release to follow Low were Brian Eno and Tony Visconti. Eno was there to add the wacky vibes, an arty farty court jester enabling and encouraging Bowie to draw on oblique strategies upon which he’d create and build his new art. ‘Once the search is in progress, something will be found’, ‘Imagine the music as a moving chain or caterpillar’, ‘Remove specifics and convert to ambiguities’.  Making sense of it all at the controls was Visconti, a level head amongst the highbrow lunacy that Eno championed, and somehow, over the course of five or six weeks, the album ‘Heroes‘ took shape.

One backing track they’d built up – ‘Use exactly five chords’ – was the pick of the bunch but remained vocal-free. It was built upon a repetitive groove, played by Bowie’s Young Americans guitarist, Carlos Alomar, with added thunk from the rhythm section of George Murray (bass) and Dennis Davis (drums).

As a backing track in this state, it was perfectly serviceable, but a fantastic layer of Robert Fripp guitar spread generously across the top of it transformed it into something wild and eerie and utterly sci-fi. Fripp had found all the sweet spots in the studio where his guitar would sing and feedback and marked the spots on the studio floor with tape. As the backing track played in his headphones, Fripp prowled the studio, coaxing elongated textures of harmonic feedback while he flitted from sweet spot to sweet spot, magnetising the results on tape forever. The resultant track had to bubble and stew and ferment before being afforded a lead vocal, but when it arrived, it landed quickly.

The official Bowie story of the time is that he happened to look out of the Hansa Studio window and there, under a gun turret by the Berlin Wall, were two folk wrapped in a romantic embrace. In later years, it emerged that the man in the embrace was Tony Visconti. His marriage was crumbling and he’d found himself entangled (in every sense) with local jazz singer Antonio Maass. Bowie wanted to immortalise the embrace in song; the romantic notion of two people kissing by the Berlin Wall, defiantly against the world around them, seemed too good to ignore. As he wrote the lyrics, his mind cast itself back to the Brücke Museum and Otto Mueller’s painting of two lovers between the garden walls. Visconti and his new girlfriend were playing the picture out in front of him. Give it a word – serendipity. Give it two – beautiful happenstance.

David Bowie – Helden

 

It is, like all the best Bowie tracks, from Life On Mars to Absolute Beginners to Where Are We Now? a proper builder, Bowie’s voice rising with each subsequent verse, the high drama unfolding as each chorus gives way to a new part, his voice hoarse and high yet in total control as it gradually plays out. “Heroes” too has that magical groove and swing, it is downbeat yet danceable. Even when sung in German (especially when sung in German?) “Heroes” is an unstoppable force.

“Heroes” (those quotations are important, they suggest sarcasm; we could be heroes? Aye, right!) would be the album’s lead single, released towards the end of September, (that’s a mere 48 years ago, young man). It has since become one of Bowie’s statement pieces. Anthemic yet tender, it grew a life of its own. It was sung at Live Aid, its meaning doubling up as a metaphor for all who’d attended and taken part in the event. It blasted out at the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games in London. It was, in a sweet turn of events, played in Berlin by Bowie after the Wall came down, 15,000 reunited Berliners singing it back to him as he cried unstoppable tears.

It also forms part of a brilliant scene at the end of 2109’s Jojo Rabbit, where the young titular hero dances a very Bowiesque dance on his doorstep with the unattainable girl of his dreams. The film maker (Taikia Waititi) used the German-language version for added authenticity. As an aside, he also scores the start of the film with German-language Beatles hits, played out over fast-cut film of Hitler rallies; Beatlemania recast as Adolf-mania. Very clever stuff. If you’ve never seen it, rectify that at once.

Get This!

I Could Park A Juggernaut In Your Mouth

Craig McAllister

When the Stone Roses went from midnight telly to ubiquity in that couple of short months over the summer of 1989, they could do no wrong. By mid-July, they’d gone from underground to overground, the nation’s t-shirts were getting looser and everyone’s trouser legs were getting subtly wider, creeping downwards and outwards in direct proportion to the decaying dead ends of the Smiths quiffs their owners had stubbornly held onto until the next important band came along. And here they were, Bloggsed up and baggy, bandy-legged and cocksure with the tunes to match, an aural golden sunrise and then some.

She Bangs The Drums was released on July 17th and there on side 2 (and also side 1 if you have one of the many mis-pressed copies) was the track that we’d been desperate to find since first hearing it a month beforehand when the group played Rooftops in Glasgow. That setlist that Grant Canyon swiped from the edge of the stage, written, as it turned out, in John Squire’s own elegant hand, had it called ‘Standing’, but on record it was given its Sunday name: Standing Here.

Stone Roses – Standing Here

Beea-woo! 

That first guitar bend has you sitting straight up.

Bee-ah-ee-ah-ee-aaaoooww!

When that sixth note cracks and breaks into controlled feedback, the hairs on the back of your hands prickle. Spidey senses tingle. This is gonnae be a good one.

Standing Here is peak Stone Roses. It is at once rockin’ and rhythmic, swirling and psychedelic, a proto blast of Hendrixian histrionics deftly played across six strings yet somehow replete with the wobble-headed shuffle beat and groovy, elasticated, tight-but-loose bassline that quickly came to define the group.

A 7th chord crashes, the snare shuffles and Ian Brown, a singer who’s currently on top of the world, sings about standing on a hilltop and surveying what he sees. What he really sees is the prize; best band in the country by a mile. He’s drifting through the city, he’s swinging through the trees, he’s looking through your window, he’s everywhere…and he really is in the summer of 1989. John Squire freeforms his frazzled blues on top of the sugar-coated groove and we’re properly off and running. By the second verse he’s firing off riffs you can whistle, even 35 years later when the song pops randomly into your head.

By the second verse too, there are lovely, low in the mix ‘woo-ooh‘ backing vocals, not noticed back in the day when I was cranking my own ham-fisted version of the lead guitar track atop the heavenly choir, but a vocal line that emerged one day from the heady stew and presented itself like a gift from above, Stone Roses still surprising all these years later.

I don’t think you think like I do, goes Ian, and the group bounces around him before John leans into a guitar break, bluesy and bendy and just on the right side of rockist for all the purists who worship at the altar of indie. Throughout the track, the group instinctively knows when to drop out, when to allow the vocal to shine, or to highlight a stut-stut-stuttering bass part or yet another supreme guitar hook. And throughout it all, Reni shuffles ambidextrously, the head-down, piston-powered engine of the band, the funkiest drummer of them all, elevating his band above all peers with each successive paradiddle or technicolour cymbal splash. He’s the difference. Every time.

Then the ending. There’s not a Stone Roses bootleg on the planet that can make Ian Brown sound passable as a singer, especially over the quieter, contemplative parts, but on record he’s the consummate angel, God’s choirboy taking us home as the band ebbs and flows its way to a gentle end, waves crashing on the sand as they lullaby us back to a regular, standing heartbeat. John Leckie did an awful lot of the heavy lifting in that studio.

All the best bands have great b-sides. Standing Here might not even be the Stone Roses’ best b-side, but it’s quite the b-side all the same. Put the needle back to the start just one more time, will ye?

 

Live!

Bless Me Father

Craig McAllister

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Father John Misty – Nancy From Now On

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

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

 

Get This!, Gone but not forgotten

Capital Gains

Craig McAllister

A couple of weeks ago we had a weekend in Edinburgh. We tend to go every year around Festival time, usually as a family, always just for a day and always when the madness of the Festival is in full flight. The last time we did this though was a bit of a disaster; the four of us had very different ideas of how our day might look and none of us saw our unvoiced visions come true. I fancied a walk round the Old Town, just to take in the vibe, y’know, maybe even a casual jaunt out to Stockbridge, purely for the purpose of discovering new record shops, dreaming of pausing for a well-deserved IPA on the way. Daughter had her mind set on eating vegan croissants in Instagramable, pastel-toned, artisan bakeries. The boy had trainers money burning a hole in the deep pockets of his slim-fit combats and wanted to go to those hot beds of Edinburgh tourism JD Sports and Sports Direct. Only Mrs Pan was happy to fall into the heavy flow of human traffic on the Grassmarket, avoid the massed silent disco and take her chances to see where it all took her/us. We all fell out, we vowed never to return as a bickering four-piece, and we stuck to our word.

At Christmas the kids presented us with a pair of tickets for the Military Tattoo – the reasons for which stretch back to another family disagreement – and so Mrs Pan and myself booked a hotel and had a fairly civilised yet cultured weekend away. To be honest, the Tattoo, with its brass and buttons and ten gun salutes wasn’t really my kinda thing, but we had great seats, the evening weather was balmy (even up at the normally baltic Castle) and the whole thing passed by in an impressive blur of noise, colour, and military barking. The chieftain/military guy who compered and linked the whole thing together was a walking, talking, cliched shortbread tin of rugged Scottishness. Planting his legs firmly like the Barony ‘A’ Frame and looking like the artwork on a box of porridge oats, he swept his hand theatrically across the darkening skies while bellowing out the tourist-friendly guide to auld Caledonia.

‘Scotland! Will ye luk et hurrrr! Take a moment tae savourrr the scene. Wae hurrr bonnie hills and purrrrple mountains, rrrrrivers and glens, she’s stood firrrrm and majestic for centurrries, thrrrrough warrrrtime, peacetime, the best and worrrrst o’ times. Can ye hearrrr? The pipes and drrrrrums o’ the Rrroyal Higland Fyoozzileerrrrz! It’s a rrrare, stirrring thing o’ beauty!‘

And, with military precision, a massed band of pipes and drums floods the arena to the gasps of the significant number of ex-pats in the crowd. It’s a slick event, 75 years young and sold out every night a year in advance, so who am I to turn my tartan-averse nose up at it? Mrs Pan loved it. Luvved it, aye.

It’s the peripheral stuff – the fringe stuff, or Fringe stuff, even, that I enjoy the most. Super-smart magicians pull £20 notes clean outta the Royal Mile’s fresh air. Street piano players in evening wear rattle through the classics with all the elan of an Usher Hall headliner. An atom-sized human cannonball does death-defying stunts just because he can. And a troupe of young Asian men in tights and flesh-coloured codpieces (and nothing else) do graceful and bendy yoga/silent ballet to a confused but appreciative gathering crowd.

Welcome to Edinburgh in August.

The streets are packed, the busiest I’ve ever seen the capital’s cobbles, a noisy mixture of plodding tourists, annoyed locals and a never-ending gauntlet of flyer-thrusting young hopefuls keen for you, for anyone, to take a punt on their show. There are a lot of shows to pick from; comedians and clowns compete with free tequila slammers and  Oxbridge am-drammers for your time and attention. One-woman reviews on the gender politics of Taylor Swift, one-man live art installations, “one-legged bicycles”, to quote Liam Gallagher a few days later. It’s all going on.

We threw our lot in with the comedians; the fast-rising Stuart Mitchell, the dry and droll Ian Stone, the superb Takashi Wakasugi and Australian Aidan Jones – whose whole show revolves around deconstructing the musical puzzle that is Chopin’s Nocturne in E flat major – being the pick of what was a high watermark of good quality comedy at sensible prices. 2.6 million ticket sales were recorded at the Festival and Fringe this year. Add to that the quarter of a million bucket-hatted mad-fer-its who rolled into town for the Oasis shows and you can begin to get a sense of the bonanza that the hotels and pubs and restaurants look forward to. Capital gains indeed.

It’s now a tradition that when in Edinburgh I stand self-consciously in Cockburn Street below the entrance to Craig’s Close while Mrs Pan waits for a gap in the tidal wave of tourists to take a quick picture. I must have half a dozen and more snaps from this location, from black hair to grey, 30″ waist to 34″. My pal Scott aped the very same pose just this week – get yr own close, McLuckie! My dear old work colleague Sharon even went so far as to sketch me from one of the pictures in recent years. I’m building up quite the portfolio.

Another pal (and Fall fanatic), Iain, pointed out a year or two ago that Mark E Smith and the rest of The Fall had poured out of the opposite end of Craig’s Close in one of The Fall’s videos. A quick bit of research shows that this occurs in – of course – the promo film for Edinburgh Man.

The Fall – Edinburgh Man

Edinburgh Man might be the closest Mark E Smith got his group to soul music. They were no strangers to soul covers over the year, but Edinburgh Man has none of the caustic and off-kilter backing or ranty vocalising that characterises most of The Fall’s discography. Sure, the guitars are kinda jittery and twangy and could break into a hundred mile an hour sprint with little encouragement required, but mainly they remain understated. There’s a high cooing backing vocal that wafts in and out like the haar from the Forth. There’s an understated keyboard line. And atop it all? Well, you might be inclined to say that Mark croons his way through it. It’s certainly heart-felt.

As I sit and stare at all of England’s souls

I tell you something – 

I wish I was in Edinburgh

 

I don’t mind being by myself 

Don’t wanna be anywhere else

Just wanna be in Edinburgh

 

They say you project yourself

But I’m an Edinburgh man myself

Smith moved to Edinburgh in the late 80s. He’d split with Brix, was finding Manchester too druggy and wanted a fresh place to start again. If we’re splitting hairs here, MES actually moved to Leith which, as anyone knows is to Edinburgh as Salford is to Manchester – certainly something that Mark Edward should’ve known. Still, the year or so he spent in ‘the real Edinburgh‘ as he called it, gave the world Edinburgh Man. Thanks for that, Mark.

Get This!, Gone but not forgotten

Waiting For The Tape To Turn

Craig McAllister

1978. At the time when Saturday Night Fever and Grease stubbornly refuse to budge from the top two positions on the album chart, just as the whole of Scotland is hypnotised by Archie Gemmell turning Dutch defences inside out down there in South America, right about the point when the ahead of the curve Swedes were banning aerosol sprays on account of their ozone-damaging properties (good luck being a Stockholm-based glue-sniffing, hair-dying punk rocker), Joy Division were releasing their An Ideal For Living EP.

If 1976 is punk’s Year Zero – and common consensus decrees it is – then the two-full-years into the future that is 1978 signifies the musical movement’s transition into post-punk. The unforgiving world of now! sound moves fast, and unless you’re one of those opportunistic phlegmy-trailed third rate, third wave cartoon punk bands who came along in the scabby wake of punk’s outgrown dead ends, the scene’s key movers and shakers were now very much in their imperial post-punk phase.

An Ideal For Living and its writers may have been a product of the punk scene, but see past the Hitler Youth drum-beating boy on the cover and the band’s name with it’s links to the very worst of contemporaneous modern history and you’ll conclude that, in attitude and outlook, Joy Division and their debut record was nothing less than post-punk.

It’s the breathing space that’s given to the instruments that does it.

Joy Division – No Love Lost

It’s low-budget, high concept, ambitious cinematic rock and then some. Just three instruments and a vocal line; linear, separated and identifiable, crystal clear and with all the fat trimmed off at the source. Peter Hook’s clang of bass and four string metronomic pulse, Kraftwerk by way of Salford, Bernard’s conservative use of slashing and scraping feral guitar, fed through an ear-bending phaser pedal for additional disorientation, the sheer dynamics of the drop ins and drop outs as the bass and drums dictate proceedings… this is all high drama travelogue played out by serious young men.

Where the worst of punk sounds like it’s recorded on sandpaper inside a cardboard box, the best of post-punk sounds futuristic and other-worldly.

It’s the drums on No Love Lost that separates it from the other guitar-driven records of the era.

Stephen Morris really wants his drums to sound like the expansive steam-powered hissing and spitting that gives Bowie’s Be My Wife such a coating of propulsive Victorian workhouse modernism, and although the group has yet to orbit Martin Hannett’s wild and idiosyncratic solar system, the production on No Love Lost hints at the very out there-ness they’d soon discover with Factory’s maverick desk controller. Morris’s drums are electronically treated; the snares refract and ricochet at the edges, the toms beat a heady and reverbed tribal thunk, the hi-hat sticks two fingers up to Sweden and sprays a tsk-tsk-tsk ton of ozone-damaging aerosol into the Tropsphere, the ride cymbal splashes a silvery sheen across the top of it all… it’s not a million miles away from Low-era Bowie at all.

The vocals don’t appear until the three minute mark, a long intro – almost prog – by any fat-free group’s standards in 1978, and when they do arrive they’re both shouty and wordy. Ian Curtis flits between a mouthy punk rocker where the tune is less important than the attitude and the sort of arty and enigmatic spoken word delivery that you might find on a Velvet Underground record. As with the drums, the edges of his vocals are treated in echo and delay and all manner of mystery-enhancing effect-ect-ects. Did they ever better this? Of course they did…but as first releases go, No Love Lost is a real stall-setter.

Yeah. When Travolta was omni-present, when Gemmell was achieving God-like status, when Sweden was leading the way in planet-saving eco-friendliness, Joy Division was sowing the very serious seeds of post-punk. Essential stuff, I’m sure you’ll agree.

Gone but not forgotten, Sampled

Phrasing

Craig McAllister

Hey! You! Put aside the dog-eared copy of Absolute Beginners that you’re currently re-reading for the 5th (6th?) time. Lift the needle from the freely-spinning Cafe Bleu on the old Dansette. Brew yourself a fresh cappuccino, or even an espresso forte, and sit back and read this.

Jazz is America’s first music, a liberation from daily struggle, the artist given the freedom to play and sing however they choose. Those jazz cats used the music as a platform for cultural expression, whether that be Billie Holiday’s heart-stopping vocal on Strange Fruit or John Coltrane’s faith meditation on A Love Supreme, Miles Davis’s exotic inroads on the voodoo funk of Miles In The Sky or Louis Armstrong’s rasping love song to the Wonderful World he found himself living in. Oppression, worship, love, death…jazz is life itself. Folk that say they don’t like jazz just haven’t yet found the strand of the genre that will resonate with them.

Jazz, though? Soul – that’s obvious. Blues? That’s obvious too. But jazz? Why jazz?

Way back a hundred or so years ago, ‘jazz’ was a slang word used to describe liveliness and spirited behaviour; ‘She’s so jazz!’, ‘This dance is wildly jazz!’, ‘That baseball team is totally jazz!’ etc. So, in the time it took Louis Armstrong to parp out a trumpet triad, ‘this music is totally jazz!’ went from adjective to noun. Interestingly (or otherwise) the word ‘jazz’ itself originated from the word ‘jism’, in that if you were lively and spirited between the sheets with the person of your fancy, well…you know what tends to happen. So, the next time you hear the word ‘jazz’, ponder on that for a bit.

“Hey boy, bring me ma drink,” Hey boy, play me anutha toon,” “Hey boy, don’cha quit playin’ until you been told to quit playin’.” In the jazz clubs during the good old days of white supremacy and inherent, unfiltered racism (which could be either last century or last week), American black men took to calling one another ‘man’ – a required and regular reminder of respect between the oppressed that their fellow brother should be just as valid and just as valued as any other man in the place.

“Hey, man. You doin’ okay?”

Nowadays, folk like myself use the word without thinking of its true origins. It’s worth reflecting the next time you drop the word into conversation.

Those black me and women could trace their collective blood line back to slavery. Of the many thousands of Africans who were shipped to the Americas, the ethnicity of a large percentage of the people was rooted in the Wolof tribe. As with all indigenous people, the Wolofs kept their history alive through song, passing down stories and traditions from the elders through music and oral storytelling. Hence the phrase ‘folk music’.

The Wolof word for ‘music’ is ‘katt’, and it’s thought this is the origin of the phrase ‘jazz cat’.

Me, I’m a fair weather jazz fan. My list of favourite jazz albums would look as obvious and lightweight as one you might find published in the arts section of the Guardian or in the near-the-back pages of Mojo. Miles…Coltrane…Nina… bore off, pretentious jazz wanker. With the sun blazing a hole in the sky and the last week of the summer holiday slowly fizzling to a close, it’s Jimmy Smith‘s Back At The Chicken Shack that’s been doing it for me these past few days.

Here’s something to ponder – why is it that the soul and blues players kept their Sunday name – James Brown, James Carr, but the jazz cats adopted the more street variation – Jimmy McGriff, Jimmy Smith?

Anyway. Jimmy Smith. He’s the link between jazz and soul, his shimmering and colossal Hammond organ sound driving his group with a grit and right-on funkiness that’s impossible to dislike. Like all the best jazzers, his group was fluid and ever changing, evolving its sound as each musician passed through on their way to wherever it was they were going.

Jimmy Smith – Back At The Chicken Shack

On Back At The Chicken Shack‘s title track, Smith trades call and response organ phrases with the omnipresent Kenny Burrell on guitar and the ubiquitous Stanley Turrentine on tenor sax, his regular drummer Donald ‘Duck’ Bailey keeping the beat just on the right side of slow but progressive.

Burrell is all over the Blue Note catalogue, both as band leader and sideman, and his Gibson 400 CES ripples patterns of woody eloquence at every opportunity. On Back At The Chicken Shack he’s content to play understated augmented chords beneath Jimmy Smith’s expressive playing in the first and last sections, but in the middle, after his bandleader has given him the nod, he’s off and flying, fingers cleanly picking tight and taut melodies across the strings and frets with a speedy ease that’s both mesmerising (as a listener) and frustrating (as a hamfisted guitar player). His phrasing, the spaces he leaves between the notes, is perfect. Off-the-cuff-playing like this doesn’t come easy, as easy as it sounds.

Turrentine is no stranger to the Blue Note discography either and his forceful yet soothing sax playing swoops and soars in all the right places. The band falls in step behind him as he freeforms and riffs across the top of the steady groove being cooked up. If yr head ain’t nodding and yr foot ain’t tapping by this point, maybe you need to give your ears a wee clean out. Imagine hearing this live in a sweaty Village basement club, or even being spun by a hip DJ in the Flamingo in 1963, all the ace faces dancing in studied concentration. It’s enough to pop the buttons on yr tonic suit.

Back At The Chicken Shack – seek it out, man.

Gone but not forgotten, Live!

There Is No Culture Is My Brag*

Craig McAllister

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

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

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

The Smiths – Intro Music, Irvine Magnum Centre 22.9.85

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Philadelphia Orchestra cond. by Riccardo Muti

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

Now, that’s how you start a show!

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

Cover Versions

A Date With Elvis

Craig McAllister

One of the side effects, if you like, of the current Oasis revival has been the reshining of the spotlight on the music of 30 or so years ago. Even at the time, it was clear that there were only two or three decent bands on the go. The rest of the (gads) scene was made up of skinny-jeaned, Adidas-clad chancers who’d alighted at Camden Town and grabbed hold of the corduroy coattails of the movement and ran with it. Bands with one word, two syllable names littered the gig listings, the narrower columns of the music press and, with a depressing regularity, the shelves of your local Our Price.

Sleeper. Bluetones. Dodgy. Menswear. Embrace. Oh man! That guy couldnae sing! A couple of bowlcut brothers dressed in everyman denim while continually rewriting Let It Be? Call y’rself Embra-sis and be done with it, boys. It’s all the fault of the record companies. See what people like and replicate, dilute, repeat to ever-diminishing returns, until the whole thing swallows itself up.

Those groups above are maybe even considered the ‘best’ of the lot too. Lest we forget S*M*A*S*H. These Animal Men. The Subways. My Life Story. Rialto. Gay Dad. Heavy Stereo. Marion. Longpigs. Northern Uproar. It’s an endless list, and I haven’t had to Google any of it. Those groups have all had more front covers than I’ll ever have, so really, who am I to comment? Dare I suggest each of them has a decent tune (or two?) hiding amongst whatever passed for a song in the setlists and demos that saw them signed in the first place? Full confession: I have a soft spot for Dodgy. Great players, great songwriters, great way with a harmony and a melody. See Lovebirds for full effect.

In John Niven’s Kill Your Friends, he writes an entire page or more filled only and entirely with the names of Gallagher slipstream-riding bands, most of whom never got beyond third on the bill at the Camden Falcon and demo stage, yet; ‘bands that, for a brief, tiny window, were surely going to be bigger than The Beatles. Now, when I handle these neglected, dusty objects, I sometimes feel that I am handling nothing less than the atrophied, fossilised remains of someone’s dreams’.

Ouch.

So, yeah, Oasis have gate-crashed the contemporary and millions of folk are either reliving their teens or, like my own teenage son, blagging their way into the stage-front standing area, Pep to the left, Kamara to the right, and fulfilling their dreams by seeing them live for the first time. Good luck to ’em all. I can’t wait for the next generation of Noel-inspired songwriters to start seeping their way onto Spotify.

Sleeper but.

There was a music press-coined term used to describe the anonymous males who played behind their more photogenic – and female – lead singers. Sleeperbloke. Skinny-jeaned, Adidas clad, some Fred Perry on display, maybe a Fila track suit too. The drummer was usually pretty watchable, in a Clem Burke sort of way. One of them would have a really great haircut, the sort that you’d look at in the street and think, ‘he’s in a band’.  One of them presented an image so beige they should’ve been dumped by the rest of the group at the first opportunity (but his dad owned the van though, so, y’know…). He was quite possibly the lead singer’s boyfriend and there he was on TFI Friday, barre chording grimly while the cameras shot his short-skirted girlfriend from the ankles up, watching on helplessly as she entered a whole new orbit of hipper boyfriends and short-lived fame.

Sleeper – What Do I Do Now?

Sleeper came and went and passed me by. Nnnahh. Blondie-lite and inoffensive, I had no need for them. But a good song is a good song is a good song, and What Do I Do Now? might well be their greatest (only great) moment. Sure, it has terribly breathy vocals – you can see Louise Wener and her big, brown, doe eyes giving you the come-on as you listen – and it’s got a burbling guitar break that sounds as if it’s playing at the bottom of the North Sea, but it’s a proper story song, of a relationship breaking down and how the two protagonists deal with it.

None other than Elvis Costello thought highly enough of it that he recorded his own, pared-down version. He turns it from a fizzing and clattering indie-rock track into a waltz-time acoustic ballad, his voice close-miked and enunciating perfectly the vocals that the song’s original singer wasn’t quite able to do. His vocals, reedy and high, gulping and low, perfectly toned and pitched, are brilliant on this.

Elvis Costello – What Do I Do Now?

Tore up all your photos, didn’t feel too clever

Spent the whole of Sunday, sticking you together

Now I’d like to call, but I feel too awkward

Some things need explaining, no-one told me it was raining.

Good lyric, that.

 

Coming never: Elvis Costello Sings The Greatest Hits of Britpop.

 

Get This!, Gone but not forgotten

Homo Superior In My Interior

Craig McAllister

It’s 1981. Buzzcocks come together to begin working on their fourth album, Martin Rushent in the producer’s chair. The band is broke, both financially and creatively. Pete Shelley, stuck in a deep rut of writer’s block, brings a handful of half-finished songs left over from his pre-Buzzcocks days. The others bring nothing much at all.  With the sessions quickly collapsing, Rushent suggests to the group that Buzzcocks take a break. The producer and singer though, they alight in Rushent’s state-of-the-art studio to work on some of Pete’s tracks.

Pete Shelley’s resultant *debut album Homosapien might’ve spun with the same spiky frothiness as the act he’s most associated with, but it was glossed in a sheen of Rushent-powered machinery; synths, drum machines and programmed sequencers that were very much in keeping with the musical landscape of 1981. The cover tells the story – a careful placement of arcane artefacts and cutting edge technology that dates it somewhere in a near future where Kraftwerk might meet Blake’s Seven around the boardroom table for a healthy discussion on the merits of analogue vs digital. The result, if we’re being honest, was a bit of a mixed bag. The eponymous lead single though? That’s a stone cold cracker.

Homosapien judders and jars its way in on the same motorised rhythm as Buzzcocks’ Something’s Gone Wrong Again, all mid-paced bounce, effect-heavy 12 string acoustic guitars, their swirling chords slashed and stabbed. It makes for a great sound. It even finds space to add an undercurrent of I Wanna Be Your Dog-giness in the verses…verses that borrow heavily from the sequenced bassline that throbs its way through Abba’s Does Your Mother Know? Play them back to back yourself and tell me I’m wrong. I bet Rushent knew exactly what he was doing here. Why wouldn’t a producer keen for a hit want to borrow a hint of DNA from pop music’s greatest contemporary hit makers?!

For all the producer’s sprinkling of magic though, it’s the singer who’s the real star of the show here. Shelley’s delivery is, as ever, terrifically sneery and archly camp, double tracked at the end of lines and even more so all over the chorus, adlibbing up and up the scales as the record fades out. It’s once you focus on the words being sung that the gravity of the record becomes crystal clear.

‘Shy boy, coy boy, cruisers, losers’.

‘Homo superior in my interior‘

‘I don’t wanna classify you like an animal in the zoo‘.

‘I just hope and pray that the day of our love is at hand‘.

‘You and I, me and you, will be one from two, understand?‘

Adding such a transparent lyric was for sure a real, eh, ballsy move by Shelley, but once it had found the ear of a jobsworth radio researcher, the record was promptly banned by the BBC. The organisation who beamed Larry Grayson into millions of living rooms every Saturday night was aghast at the record’s ‘overt references to homosexuality‘.

Exhibit A, m’lud: ‘Homo superior in my interior‘.

What a zinger of a line but.

With the era of diversity and acceptance still just a formative if growing movement on the horizon, Homosapien is perhaps the first pop song to use non-coded lyrics to get its message across. It’s brave stuff to be writing, singing, recording and releasing in 1981.

No Homosapien, no Smalltown Boy perhaps. No Smalltown Boy, no open discussions around the living room telly during Top of the Pops as its video plays for the umpteenth time. In its own small way, Homosapien is a groundbreaking record. It’s almost a bonus that it sounds utterly fantastic, and more so 40+ years later.

 

 

*We’re not counting Pete’s pre-Buzzcocks 1974’s experimental, instrumental album Sky Yen, are we? Are we?

Get This!, Gone but not forgotten

This Ain’t Livin’

Craig McAllister

I was punishing myself on the cross-trainer of death the other morning, slick rivers of sweat pooling in my hair and under my double chin, a dark, damp South America-shaped land mass of perspiration creeping slowly down my t-shirt, the ear buds on my ancient iPod slippy with wetness and falling continually out of my ears, when this came on.

Marvin Gaye – Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)

Its perfectness stopped me dead in my tracks.

Resting, I listened through gulped breaths of fresh air as it spun its golden sound from those stupid wee plastic things in my earholes, into my brain and down into my hands and vocal chords, where wee finger snaps were joined by spontaneous, harmonised ‘daddle-ah-dah-dahs’ from my own fair voice. It’s just as well for all concerned that I was the sole occupant of the gym at the time.

As far as socially-conscious music goes – and such fury stretches the decades from Billie Holiday to Kneecap – nothing comes close to Marvin Gaye‘s flawless 1971 masterpiece What’s Going On. Perhaps its greatest moment is the album closer Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler).

Since that rare moment in the gym (and you can take that in more than one way), I’ve listened to the track on repeat – properly, as Marvin intended, continually dropping the needle on a record spinning on a loudly-amped turntable – swimming in its headspin of lyricism and musicality, soaking in its every nuance and never once tiring of it.

It begins with the original clanging chimes of doom, four reverberating E flat minor 7th piano chords, stately and symphonic and setting you up for what follows. Nigel from Spinal Tap once claimed that there’s no sadder key than E minor. Nige, mate, try E flat minor. Then pair it with Marvin’s finger pointing lyric of despair; beat poetry set to fantastic music, its message addressing the frivolousness of the space race, the pointlessness of young men dying in war, race riots, increasing taxes and decreasing standards of living. Half a decade earlier, its author was too busy thinking ’bout his baby. Suddenly, he’d grown a beard and grown up.

Rockets?!? Moon shots?!? he asks incredulously.

Spend it on the have-nots!

And we’re off, congas and ting-a-ling percussion adding light to the shade of those piano chords.

Money. We make it.

Before we see it, you take it.

Oh, make me wanna holler, the way they do my life. 

This ain’t livin’.

Question: D’you zoom in on the lyric first, or is your attention grabbed by the lush orchestration of funk that oozes from every note?

Answer: You take in both, simultaneously, (it’s called multi-tasking and even men can do this) but this requires repeated plays to allow the whole stew to sink properly in.

Inflation. No chance

to increase finance.

Bills pile up, sky high

Send that boy off to die

Oh, make me wanna holler, the way they do my life. 

It’s the bassline that does it for me. A looping, call and response five note exercise in restrained and understated funk, it’s the bedrock upon which the whole thing swings. By this point in the track, muted brass is punctuating Marvin’s key words, a shimmer of strings has subtly turned up the ante and a sashay of bah-bah-bah-backing vocals is smoothing the edge from the words that continue to rain down. Imagine being in the room when this was being created. Imagine!

Hang ups. Let downs.

Bad breaks. Set backs.

Natural fact is

I can’t pay my taxes

Oh, make me wanna holler, throw up both my hands. 

The way Marvin harmonises with himself, one voice rich and low, the other pure and high, his wee adlibbed yows delivering the requisite soul…it’s all tremendous stuff. (As if you need me to tell you that.)

Violence increasin’

Trigger-happy policin’

Panic is spreadin’

God knows where we’re headin’.

A key change. That’s where we’re headin’.

Perfectly-placed within the track, it’s heady stuff and it elevates the listener further still. Flutes waft their way in like Gil Scott-Heron’s groovy cousin and the track takes a turn into new, yet familiar territory, as it refrains the mother mother lines from the album’s title track, a jazz trumpet winding in the melody as it all fades out, the perfect bookend on the perfect album.

What’s Going On? Is it a question to the listener or is it a statement to the world, a marker of the times? In Marvin’s case, it was a definite statement piece, an artistic declaration that’s become a key document of the times in which it was made.

For a pop label like Motown to allow – or rather cede – to its artist’s wishes of producing a whole concept of socio-political funk when it would rather have been churning out two and a half minute pop/love songs, is amazing. That they let Marvin do this paved the way for Stevie Wonder to take auteurship of his catalogue from then on in…and we all know how fantastic that particular run of albums would be.