Get This!

There’s Not A Hope

Craig McAllister

It’s an accepted truth that Electronic was very much a bit-part project, an occasional coming-together of alternative music royalty in the gaps of downtime between their respective day jobs; Bernard and New Order, Johnny and The The…and The Healers…and The Cribs… and whoever else was looking for a six-string gunslinger for hire. The reality is much different.

Although conceived by the duo of Sumner and Marr as a collaborative and ever-shifting line-up of guest musicians and vocalists, Electronic was an active and going concern for almost every year of the ’90s. The self-titled debut album was worked on quietly in the background for months at a time before seeing the light of day in 1991. The follow-up, Raise The Pressure, took two years to put together. 1999’s Twisted Tenderness, the third and presumably final album in Electronic’s discography took a similar time to conceive. Johnny has oft-debunked the notion that he and his pals reconvened for a couple of weeks now and again to throw an album together; a studio head since the earliest days of The Smiths, to him, being part of a group is a 24-hour thing. Bernard, with his patience and dedication to programming and getting the most out of ever-changing technology, is cut from a similarly dedicated cloth.

1996’s Raise The Pressure was written during interesting times. Conceived in 1994, it began life just as Noel Gallagher was borrowing guitars from Johnny to use on the first Oasis recordings (look on the cover of Supersonic and you’ll spot Johnny’s famous black and white Rickenbacker) and was released just as Noel’s band (and Johnny’s Les Paul) were getting ready to headline Knebworth. For one of these acts (and it ain’t Electronic), that’s quite a trajectory.

Raise The Pressure was a product of the last great fertile period for UK guitar bands, yet it never quite made its mark. Here’s an album recorded by two of music’s leading lights, one of whom at least, with his moddish hair and Clarks shoes – and uncanny ability to wring seven shades of melody from six strings – could be considered the uber-cool uncle of the entire movement…and no-one is all that bothered about it.

Lead single Forbidden City is a much under-appreciated track. Despite coming gift-wrapped in New Order melancholy and ever-evolving Marr riffage, it clunked its way to number 14 before vanishing for good. Just what was wrong with the record-buying public?!

Electronic – Forbidden City

The track runs the whole range of Johnny’s guitar styles; layers of sparkling electrics sprinkled across a bed of ringing acoustics…open chorded majors in the verse…barre chorded minors in the refrain…lovely complementary run downs between vocal lines in the third verse…the up the frets dazzling stuff during the choruses…the groaning, multi-layered (and sometimes backwards) feedback solo in the middle… Forbidden City really has it all. In an era of retro bores who were happily rehashing their way into the charts and getting folk to part with their money in Our Price seven days a week, thanks to their Who and Stones and freakin’ Herman’s Hermits rip-offs, (Hello Power! Hello Ashcroft! Hello Fowler ‘n Cradock!) Forbidden City deserved so much more.

Even an appearance on prime time telly couldn’t really help it.

On TFI Friday, Bernard ‘n Johnny are backed by Doves’ Jimi Goodwin on bass, with Black Grape’s Ged Lynch keeping Karl Bartos’ drum stool warm. Bernard is a ball of on the spot sprung energy, punching the air between lines, doing his trademark whoops when he needs to take a breath, gurning indiscriminately at an audience equally hopped up on the good vibes of the times. By the looks of it, Johnny hasn’t yet discovered running and is in the midst of his fat Elvis phase. Unruly hair, jawline as loose as the jeans he’s wearing and dressed in some sort of fleece/fur overcoat, he chews gum while stomping on and off his pedal board, giving, as he always does, good camera. There’s more than a whiff of chemical enhancement to the whole thing – it is the mid 90s after all – and it’s all rather fantastic.

A chart smash though? A definitive track of its era? A firm favourite amongst the masses? There’s not a hope, as the song goes.

Get This!

Different-Sized Cogs In The Same Machine

Craig McAllister

Almost a couple of years ago I met with a publisher with a view to getting the best of Plain Or Pan onto the printed page, which is, as you well know, the only print that really matters. You don’t need to ask a musician if they prefer mp3 to vinyl. It’s no different for folk who spend time agonising over words and rhythm and metre. There’s vindication in seeing your words in physical print. It means someone else has thought them worthy of sharing with others. Anyone can pick them up, flick through them, go back and forth, even highlight parts if they happen to be some sort of book masochist, but until they’re printed, the digital word lacks gravitas and acceptance. Any idiot with a keyboard and access to the internet can do this – the idiot writing this, for example – so, for me, the printed word is king.

Our meeting went well, I thought, and at the end it was agreed that I’d select the best of Plain Or Pan’s hundreds of articles and compile them into a book with a cohesively-running theme. I’d do some fact checking, tweak a few words here and there, have it proofread and have it all ready for publication. I set to work immediately.

I trawled the blog from the early days to the most recent, discounting articles on account of being too short, too similar, not good enough, just plain embarrassing – as a writer it’s really not hard to find fault in your choice of words. But a good many of the articles still held up. I’d tell you I was surprised at this, if only not to sound like a raving egomaniac, but I knew I had a way with words and phrases, so when long-forgotten articles were re-read in the cold light of a decade and more later, it was thrilling to find many of them were genuinely still exciting. “I’d forgotten about that!” “What a turn of phrase!” “An unexpectedly perfect metaphor!” Shucks, reader, I positively glowed with pride!

I knew I had a decent book in the making. It’d be split into three distinct sections; Life, Death and Music and could be read from page 1 to the end or dipped in and out of as the reader saw fit.

I secured permission from Roddy Doyle and Happy Mondays to use their words/lyrics in a couple of articles. Wayne Coyne from yr actual Flaming Lips, when asked if I could use Do You Realize? as the central theme to an article, took one read of it and said, “Go right ahead, brother!” It was game on. All the best articles would be in there.

After much detective work, I secured permission from a German exchange student to use an image they’d shot in my hometown of Irvine some 40 years previously for the book’s cover. I had everything I needed; it really was game on.

Once compiled, I used slightly hooky ‘found’ software to transfer the whole thing to my Kindle and I read chunks of it every night, making notes where changes had to be made. There weren’t many changes, in all honesty; everything that I’d selected flowed with a rhythm and pace that would make the whole book a page-turner and unputdownable object of desire.

The final job was the proofreading, a thankless task, and something my sister gamefully tackled with eagle-eyed enthusiasm. After tidying up a few stray words, lost commas and the occasional typo, it was ‘bound’ together in Word; the German exchange student’s eye-catching and very apt cover, an actual (and beautiful) foreword from a well-known writer pal of mine, a contents page and the three big sections. Watch out world, ‘POP Record‘ is coming.

It was sent to the publisher.

‘Yeah…I’m having second thoughts here…sales potential…publishing is struggling at the moment…I’ve other books ahead of yours in the queue…‘

It was one muttered and mumbled excuse after another.

It was not to be.

The whole thing currently rests in a folder on my computer. It just needs a publisher who’ll take a chance on it. Believe me, I’ve tried. And tried. And tried. It’s good to go, man. Just press print and it’ll be ready. You think it’d be easy, huh? I mean, I could go the whole self-publishing route, but that strikes me as kinda phoney. I’ve not totally dismissed the idea, but, a bit like musicians, anyone can release a home-grown CD…it’s another thing entirely to have someone release it for you. There’s that vindication word again.

I was telling this to author Andrew O’Hagan last night. He was in Glasgow promoting ‘On Friendship’, a collection of his essays on, eh, friendship and he’d asked me afterwards if I was working on any writing at the moment. *Two things, I said, and opened with the Plain Or Pan story above.

“Fuck ’em,” came Andrew’s succinct reply. “It deserves to be out there and you deserve a publisher that’ll treat it accordingly. I wonder if I can help?”

It turns out though that he needs some help of his own.

Andrew O’Hagan, the writer who at the age of 24 received a letter from Norman Mailer praising his writing style, the writer who spent time with William Burroughs, who travelled Ireland and Scotland with Seamus Heaney, who sat on the steps of the building opposite Fred and Rose West’s house and documented the whole grisly tale, who was editor-in-chief at the London Review of Books, who worked closely with Julian Assange and the WikiLeaks team to expose a corrupt world, the ambassador for UNICEF who wrote the modern classic Mayflies and watched on as it made the leap from page to screen must also, it appears, kick against the pricks.

Currently, he’s locked in discussion with Netflix over the $50 million production of his most-recent novel Caledonian Road. Should it be three seasons or five? Should he be involved in adapting his novel for the screen, or is that the job of Netflix’s screenwriting team?  Not for Andrew the goal of having his wee blog posts published on recycled paper for posterity, but – here’s the thing! – writers at every level still face opposition, friction and rejection.

You can be a blogger firing out pop-culture missives to a few thousand folk a week or a best-selling and highly respected author, but we’re both just well-oiled yet different-sized cogs in the same gritty machine. And I can draw some sort of comfort from that.

Here’s Fairport Convention‘s suitably melancholic and sepia-tinted Book Song. Waltz time and folky, it’s a song about what might have beens and features a terrific electric guitar part (Richard Thompson, I’m assuming) and a lovely duetting male/female vocal (Iain Matthews/Sandy Denny). It’s from What We Did On Our Holidays which is very much an album you should strive to hear if you never have.

Fairport Convention – Book Song

*The other thing I’m working on?

“I’d LOVE to read that!” enthused O’Hagan. Vindication, again. So while ‘POP Record‘ languishes in the ‘what mighta been’ pile, my attentions will turn to something entirely different.

Drop in again in a year or so when I’ll be back to bemoan the difficulties I face in securing that particular sure-fire Sunday Times best seller.

Get This!

Into The Fall

Craig McAllister

What is it with bands who need to look across the Atlantic for belonging and acceptance? That clattering Velvety/Stoogey feedback ‘n twang racket that the Jesus And Mary Chain committed to tape in 1988 wasn’t called Sidewalking for nuthin’.  The out of step and forever out of tune Californian slacker rock collective formed by Stephen Malkmus a year later wasn’t called Pavement for nuthin’ either. A Scottish band in thrall to the United States…an American band who held their Anglophile obsession sky high for all to see (especially with regards to The Fall – themselves a northern English group named after the American term for Autumn (maybe if Mark had named them The Autumn purely for the American market, The Fall would’ve been huge…). The other side of the world always seems more glamorous, I guess.

Loads of great songs and lines have been written about this time of year. There’s something about summer’s long and warm days shrinking in the rear-view mirror while the slow-creeping twilight and morning frost arrives head-on that prompts a melancholic pastoral and reflective creativity in our favourite songwriters. Ray Davies’ Autumn Almanac may well be the pinnacle of this, but discount Steve Marriott’s Autumn Stone and the Trashcan Sinatras’ widescreen and windswept Autumn at your peril. Add in Bill Evan’s highly evocative Autumn Leaves and Nick Drake’s Pink Moon and you have yourself a playlist to listen to as you stack your newly-chopped logs beside the woodburning stove that is soon to be the bane of your neighbours’ lives.

History may yet prove that Man Made, Teenage Fanclub’s 9th album, ushered in the group’s autumnal years. One of the last to feature the holy triumvirate of Blake, McGinley and Love on writing duties, it’s an album that comes dusted in reflective lyrics (Cells, Flowing), uplifting melancholy (Time Stops) and at least one blazing Love-authored and Love (the band)-inspired stomper (Born Under A Good Sign). It also features this slow-cooking, Gerry-created Fanclub classic:

Teenage Fanclub – Fallen Leaves

Although written in the biting cold of a Chicago winter (Chicago L Train-inspired artwork above), Fallen Leaves’ imagery of ‘empty train carriages, sinking suns, sparks and flames, useless dust‘ makes it a perfect addition to that canon of autumnal songs that sound perfect when the trees begin to shed their clothes and settle in for the winter. Play it repeatedly through a pair of headphones as you crunch and kick the leaves across Kelvingrove Park in this week’s October break and it’ll make more sense than it ever did before.

It’s a wistful, Love-only vocal. Gerry sighs and longs in the verses, and although he double tracks himself for a bit here and there, there’s none of that throw open the windows wide aural sunshine you’d get if the others joined in on the chorus harmonies. Stubbornly autumnal from title down, the song is something of a Fanclub outlier, and possibly better for it.

Gerry has a brilliant way with an arrangement – the fizzing guitars that repeat the song’s hooky refrain, the echoing and churchy ’60s-flavoured keyboard, the whammy bar action on the high chords, the froth of vintage synth that accompanies it all…it’s a really well put together pop song; simple and hooky and interesting…and something that the Love-free TFC has struggled to do since. But we’ll leave that there.

 

Gone but not forgotten, Sampled

Trouble Funk

Craig McAllister

Isaac Hayes created plenty of great music. The Black Moses album…Ike’s Rap…his reinterpretations of By The Time I Get To Phoenix and Never Can Say Goodbye to name just some, but his signature tune is undeniably Theme From Shaft, 1971’s hi-hat ‘n high groove exercise in funk. Damn right it is.

It’s generally accepted too that Curtis Mayfield’s Superfly is one of his greatest albums. A groovy stew of stabbing brass, skulking street panther bass and wah-soaked guitar lines that add musicality and danceability to hard-hitting socio-political lyrics, it followed hot on the strutting cuban heels of Shaft and reset the bar for musicians soundtracking films.

And then came Marvin Gaye.

Emerging from the success of What’s Going On, with credit in the bank and a new Motown contract offering him complete editorial control over his work, he was offered the opportunity of scoring blaxploitation flick Trouble Man. The producers had been quick to spot the pros of hitching a movie’s soundtrack to a respected musician and Marvin was equally as excited at the prospect of making exactly the sort of record he wanted to make.

His score for Trouble Man not only builds on his contemporaries’ fantastical funk ‘n soul infused soundtrack work, it also has its own personality, veering left to take itself down interesting roads in jazz-inflected atmospherics. Gaye, with his new-found artistic control, hired the Funk Brothers, Motown’s in-house band and augmented them with the cream of L.A.’s jazz scene. The result was a jigsawing of slick soul guitar riffing and solid ‘n steady on-the-one basslines to whip-smart polyrhythmic drums, nerve jangling piano and rasping brass. Underscoring all of it is hotshot film score arranger Gene Page’s sublimely shimmering string lines. A soundtrack it may be, but it works well as an album in its own right.

Is it a soul album? A funk album? A jazz album? Yes, yes and yes. And, just as Isaac and Curtis had done before him, Marvin rewrites the rule book for scoring films in the 1970s. Would Bernard Herrmann’s exquisitely anxiety-inducing Taxi Driver score be just as jarring, just as dramatic without him having Trouble Man as a reference point? That’s debatable.

Trouble Man – movie trailer voiceover

Trouble Man (the title track) popped up on Guy Garvey’s 6 Music show a week or so ago and, like all the best music, had me replaying and reappraising it for more than a few days.

Marvin Gaye – Trouble Man

It’s a beauty, isn’t it?!

That drum sound! So crisp, so exact. That’s the sound of Stix Hooper (possibly not his real name). The whole track hangs on his airy dynamic clatter… that, and the ominous register of strings… and the clanging piano’s chords of doom…and the anticipatory brass…and ubiquitous vibraphone. And especially Marvin’s killer vocal. You know that cliche about singing the phonebook? Yeah, well Marvin could sing the entire contents of Berry Gordy’s Rolodex and you’d never tire of listening to him.

I come up hard, bay-bee, but now I’m cool
I didn’t make it, sugar, playin’ by the rules.

Marvin is double-tracked for much of the song, one vocal in low register, the other offering the high and floaty falsetto that adds lightness to the heaviness of the music. Coupled with the swing of the drums, it creates real finger clickin’ hipness in the verses and high drama in between.

The guitar – played by Ray Parker Jr – mirrors the piano line and grooves on a smooth and sliding repetitive E minor riff. Sure, young Ray could very probably break out a slick jazz break or an augmented chord progression without breaking so much as a bead of sweat, but he’s here to serve the song, not to kill it in unnecessary noodling fluff. He stays well within his lane and the song is better for it.

At the chord changes, muted trumpets get on board, creating tension and dissonance that mirror Marvin’s lyric.

There’s only three things, that’s for sure:
Taxes, death and trouble

The trumpets freeform through the heady stew. The strings ramp up the anticipation and the anxiety and then, just as release always follows tension, Marvin’s high and carefree ‘Ye-eah!‘ breaks the spell and we’re back to the groove.

The track swings on.

Marvin breaks into a proto rap:

I know some places
And I see some faces
I got good connections
They dig my directions
What people say, that’s okay
They don’t bother me.

Stix Hooper continues to do his own thing; a cymbal splash here, a snare fill there, a full kit paradiddle in the funky gaps. The strings and brass continue to induce anxiety. The vibes serve as an aural lightbulb moment, the ‘ah! everything’s ok again!’ moment. The bass playing slides up a notch. The whole thing grooves. Trouble never sounded so goddam danceable and airy and exciting.

And Marvin, cool, street-smart and determinedly ploughing his own unique furrow, brings it all back to a sweet-vocalised close. Astonishing music.

 

Cover Versions, Gone but not forgotten

Don’t Argue, Buster!

Craig McAllister

Gangsters by The Specials… (or Special A.K.A., to give them their full original name). It’s just about the most perfect distillation of its times. Punkish and idiosyncratic with a generous nod, in both sound and vision, to what had gone before, it served not only as a stall-setter but a rallying cry for 2-Tone and the many brilliant things that would shortly follow on the label. Specials’ release number one…2-Tone release number one…what an entrance.

The Special A.K.A. – Gangsters

I once asked Neville Staple to sign my copy of Gangsters. My copy isn’t one of those first few thousand hand-stamped ones – of course it’s not, I was only 10 when it was first released and I wasn’t yet in the habit of skanking at 2-Tone shows where I might’ve bought one, but my pocket money stretched to a 7″ single every now and again and in amongst the Madness and Beat releases that I did buy at the time, I somehow also ended up with a copy of Gangsters, housed in the iconic 2-Tone Walt Jabsco sleeve, which no doubt attracted my magpie eyes and fertile young mind when browsing the racks of John Menzies in Irvine Mall.

Anyway, Neville.

He was appearing at Seaside Ska, an annual festival I was involved in the promotion of. I’d asked him pre-show if he wouldn’t mind signing a couple of my Specials singles and he suggested I drop in to his dressing room for a chat at the end of his performance and he’d sign them then.

Post-show, I rapped on his dressing room door.

“Joost a minute, moyte,” came the shout from behind the cheap plywood exterior. And then, almost immediately, ‘S’all roight…joost coom in.”

Neville was standing in a pair of large white Y-fronts and, apart from the pork pie hat atop the dreads and the heavy gold chain around his neck, nothing else.

Where did you get that blank expression on your face, as someone once sang.

At least, I hope I managed to maintain a blank expression. I’ve walked in on musicians doing the pre-gig pray/huddle thing. I’ve walked in on smokers, tokers, sniffers and snorters. I’ve even walked in on tribute bands and their tribute groupies. Oh yes I have. But until Neville, I’d never met one of my favourites in their underwear. Not all heroes wear capes, they say, but I can reveal that some of them wear large, functional and very clean Y-fronts.

Anyway, he signed the records – ‘That’s moi fave,’ he says of Gangsters, then, looking worriedly over my shoulder, asks to the empty corridor behind me, “Where’s all me fans?” As he sauntered off to find them – still in his Y-fronts – I went off to pack my treasured singles safely into the back of my car.

You’ll need to root around for this – Facebook is your best bet – but there’s an absolutely dynamite video performance of Gangsters on American TV that catches The Specials in April 1980, just as they are hitting their stride. Broadcast by Saturday Night Live (hence the block on YouTube and here on WordPress) it shows The Specials in all their jerky elbowed, suedeheaded and suited up youthful glory. From the opening shot of Neville standing on a staircase, barking the ‘Bernie Rhodes’ intro while brandishing a Tommy gun – can you imagine that on the telly nowadays?! – to his train-track-toasting on the microphone and the rest of the group in total syncopation, it’s just about my favourite archive live video. The energy coming from the screen as the band play it just a touch faster, just a touch more frantic than the 7″ release, could power Coventry for a year.

Standing either side of a hyper-animated Terry Hall, Neville and Lynval Golding provide the metaphorical yin and yang of the performance. One black, one white, Roddy on dark guitar, Lynval playing a light-coloured one, his arms making acute angles between elbow and bicep as he chops into the chords, Roddy’s legs forming obtuse angles as he slides them waaay out to rattle off the twanging punk-a-billy solo. To the side of them, Jerry surfs the organ, directing his band with already unnecessary nods and looks. All that practice, all those live shows as the Coventry Automatics has sharpened them up as neatly as the mohair suits they sport. Behind them, Horace manages to maintain both a solid bass line and tireless dance stance. Beside him, keeping it all together is John Bradbury, his clattering kit sounding exactly like a row of garbage cans that Benny and Choo-Choo have knocked over in the alley while escaping Officer Dibble. I tried to upload a version of it here, but it won’t go. Try Facebook if you can. You won’t be disappointed.

Reggae and ska has a long history of copying, borrowing, twisting and turning tunes, words and styles into brand new things. Gangsters, as you well know, was based on Prince Buster’s Al Capone. From the intro to the toasting, the repeating riff to the sheer excitement emanating from its heavy-set grooves, it’s a modern update on an old classic and something that 2-Tone acts would have a lot of success from. Not that I knew that as a 10-year old.

Prince Buster – Al Capone

 

 

 

 

Plain Or Pan-global

Swell Maps

Craig McAllister

Plain Or Pan is, and has always been, powered by WordPress. It’s a technically easy to use blogging platform – once logged into my account, I can write something on any internet-capable device I have to hand and upload it to the world as fast as I need it to be there. Not that there are millions, thousands, or even single digits worth of people putting their lives on hold until my next hamfisted attempt at stringing paragraphs together makes its way through the ether to them – I mean, I’m no Sally’s Baking Addiction (8 million hits a month) or Green Living Now (similarly popular, equally as monetised) – but for the odd one or two music obsessives who feel their day is incomplete until another McAllister-penned article on The Smiths or Radiohead or whoever is with them, they can be safe in the knowledge that from germination to completion, my words fairly whizz their way there.

I’ve become obsessed recently with the map feature that’s found within the ‘Stats’ section of my admin dashboard. It’s always interesting to look and see where the traffic to the blog comes from. Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of it comes from the UK – over a quarter of a million discrete addresses, as it happens, with the United States not far behind. Tyrolean hats off to the Germans though, currently providing the third-greatest number of hits to Plain Or Pan. Wunderbar, as someone once sang. To be fair, their ability to read English will be far better than my ability to write in German (Google Translate notwithstanding), but my Teutonic friends seem to like the cut of my jib even more than those readers in Australia, New Zealand and Canada – and I thought ex-pats were supposed to be homesick. Read on and reminisce. Sydney and Perth! Auckland and Wellington! Toronto and Vancouver! Get yr collective fingers out, will you?  Here are your memory triggers, you tartan-blooded immigrants.

Last week, I was delighted to find I had visitors from such far-flung places as Peru, Bangladesh and the Faroe Islands alighting on Plain Or Pan. Had they stumbled onto these pages after Googling ‘Bowie, Berlin, Heroes’? Or ‘Edinburgh Festival, Scotland, The Fall, Mark E Smith’? Or had they arrived here only to be disappointed after discovering that ‘Teenage Fanclub’ was in fact a gently rockin’ melodic guitar band from the west of Scotland and not something else entirely? (I wonder if Norman and co ever regretted the name they’ve saddled themselves with?)

Dark blue = much higher traffic.

Playing around with the features of the map stats, I was able to take a snapshot of all the traffic that’s been to Plain Or Pan since it began in January 2007. Amazingly, I reckon there are only half a dozen countries on planet Earth where people haven’t visited from. If you have friends in the Central African Republic or its near neighbour Chad, if you happen to know any music-obsessed nomads out in the Western Sahara or the rainforests of Gabon, if you are pen pal to a villager in the foothills of the Himalayas in land-locked Bhutan or up there in the frozen wilderness of the Arctic Circle, then please spread the word. Let’s get the full set. Currently, there are 195 countries in the world and 189 of them are home to someone who has visited Plain Or Pan at least once.

It’s incredible!

C’est incroyable!

Bu inanilmazdir!

Es ist unglaublich!

Es increible!

Tai bukesiyile!

Es s glybn!

Eto neveroyatno!

Det ar otroligt!

Plain Or Pan? Plain Or Pan-Global, to be more accurate.

I’d guess – and no science exists that will back me up or discredit me, so let me go with this – that there are less countries in the world where people have knowingly heard an Oasis album, or a Dolly Parton track, or even a Taylor Swift record, than there are countries which are home to someone who’s read the words on these pages. What do the islanders of Palau know about the Gallaghers? Do the female citizens of Burkina Faso soundtrack wild hen parties to the pumping sounds of 9 To 5? Do the inhabitants of Djibouti shake their er, booty, to Shake It Off? Who knows?!? All I do know, and the proof is there above, is that Plain Or Pan is a truly international thing. It’s a swell map indeed.

Ah, Swell Maps.

Swell Maps – Read About Seymour

I’ve always had a thing for Read About Seymour, their fairly pogoing short ‘n sharp DIY punk track from 1977. Tight, taut ‘n choppy electrified zipwire guitar (it’d be called ‘angular’ these days), a clattering yet fantastically rhythmic drum pattern that you can practically sing; hissing hi hats and dubble-ubble tub-thumped toms, a repeating vocal shouted through clenched teeth, a freeform bus crash ‘n broken glass of an ending…it’s over and out in less than a minute and a half yet somehow manages to invent the more raggedy end of Blur’s discography in the process. Don’t try and tell me Damon and Graham have never obsessed over this single in their time! Highly influential, highly enjoyable and still causing ripples all these years later, it’s just like Plain Or Pan really. Ask those turned-on and tuned-in Tajikistanis if y’don’t believe me.

 

Alternative Version, Live!

Is Not Was

Craig McAllister

Now not then.

Are not were.

Is not was.

It seems that Radiohead is back, to be spoken of in the present tense once again. Since their last shows a million years ago in 2017, there have been solo albums, side projects, film scores, even, thanks to The Bear‘s use of Let Down in a key scene, tunes trending for the millennials on Tik Tok. Significantly though, there has been no new Radiohead music since A Moon Shaped Pool. But out of the blue, they’re here again. The fanfare-free announcement a week or so ago of a series of live shows across selected European capital cities created high excitement and mild panic amongst their army of fans, and a scurrying for tickets – or for the right to queue for tickets (sheesh) – began, a sort of Oasis-lite feeding frenzy for the No Logo generation…and, as it turns out, their children.

My two made us all sign up for the presale registration, desperate as they were to see the band that their old dad regularly has playing around the house. I was ambivalent about it all. I despise, I mean totally hate, the trend for any and all pre-registration schemes that let the lucky ones elbow others out of the road and out of the queue so that they can maybe, maybe, buy a ticket for a show. I appreciate it’s to minimise touting and all of that, but still. Get back to the days of lining up outside Virgin Argyle Street in the pouring autumn rain, that’s what I say.

And of all the shows they are playing, and that includes Berlin and Copenhagen and what have ye, there’s only one date that I can fit in around work – the Saturday night in London, which is surely the most popular date in the run of shows. So the chances of securing a ticket, let alone 3 or 4, is gotta be slim you’d think.

And I’ve seen Radiohead a handful of times before anyway.

Besides, they’re bound to pencil in more shows for next year, maybe to support a new record that has very possibly been recorded already. Y’never know with Radiohead. It’s quite something in the rumour milling scrolling news feed of the modern age for a band to maintain an element of mystique, yet Radiohead has consistently done so.

But the boy, already coasting through 2025 like a king, gets The Code (of course he does) and so, come the pre-sale date, he and his sister log on while I’m at work, muttering quietly to myself about dynamic pricing and the percentage likelihood of snagging the briefs. They don’t get them, of course. They had them. Four of the little gold dust blighters. They were in the basket, £85 seated tickets inexplicably ramped up to £125 a pop (there’s yr dynamic pricing) and in the split second it took the kids to press ‘Buy’, the website had kicked them out on account of them being bots. This happened three, four, eighteen times until they gave up and admitted defeat. A quick trawl through the Radiohead forums later on unearthed dozens and hundreds of stories exactly the same. It seems the touts and dynamic pricing won the day after all, and now I’m pissed off that I won’t be going to a show that a) I didn’t expect to be at in the first place and 2) would grudge paying over the odds for anyway and 3) would’ve meant me paying Saturday night in London hotel prices for a family of four (2 rooms, thanks) the month before Christmas.

Let Down or Lucky? I dunno.

I’ll wait in keen anticipation for further, and more local, dates in 2026.

Present Tense is one of A Moon Shaped Pool‘s highlights. Ghostly and spectral, it carries itself on a deftly-picked minor key guitar pattern and unusual time signature.

Radiohead – Present Tense

There’s some lovely shuffling percussion in the background, a sandpaper rubbed against guitar strings and looped kinda effect and Thom’s voice harmonises against itself spectacularly. It’s all so intense and pretty, the climbing strings, wordless backing vocals and understated synthetic symphony carrying it gently to its pseudo bossa nova conclusion.

Sandwiched between the sprawling Talk Talk-isms of The Numbers and Tinker Tailor Soldier Sailor etc etc‘s glitchy ambient techno (all the tracks on A Moon Shaped Pool are sequenced alphabetically – but you knew that already), Present Tense might have benefited from being closer to the front of the album. Shoulda called it Aardvark, Radiohead. An opportunity missed, I think. But then, all the best bands have, to use modern parlance, deep cuts that require digging out to be held up like prize root vegetables for an unsuspecting public, and Present Tense is one of Radiohead’s very best.

The late-dusk, campfire version that Thom and Johnny filmed in the Californian desert a few years back is The One. Two men, one in a vest, two guitars, both played with the lightest of touch, a pitter-pattering drum machine and a host of fantastic interplay makes for a great listen, the outcome far greater than the sum of its parts. Treat yr ears to this:

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.