Speed freak. Triumph motorcycle. And speed freak. In shades. Daytime, night time, anytime. Suede. Corduroy. Button down shirts. Striped pants. Boots of Spanish leather. That hair.
Triumph on record. A surrealist and a cynic with added sneer. Beat group intense. Irk the purists. Fender. Electricity. Volume. A cavalcade of words. A trip and a rush, cascading forth. Get set. Get well. Try hard. Get fired. Coded. Cryptic. Crucial. Maggie, fleet foot. Face full o’ black soot. Plants in the bed. Phone tapped. Look out kid! Candles, sandals, vandals, handles.
Ol’ Bob has many faces and many aces up his sleeve, but right now, this week, after seeing A Complete Unknown, it’s mid ’60s Bob that’s doin’ it…and doin’ it good. The garage band backing, all thunking bass and rattling snare and white hot, screaming blues licks on Telecaster that ride the coattails of Bob’s scuffed acoustic and sandpapery vocal is possibly the most thrilling sound in rock ‘n roll. Sixty years will pass this year since Bob thwacked us with the insane one-two of Bringing It All Back Home (April) and Highway 61 Revisited (August – 4 months later); a pair of records that most other acts would be happy to hang an entire career on. Don’t look back, instructed Bob around then, but, man, LOOK BACK! Stop and listen to what’s on these records.
Bringing It All Back Home is my favourite of the two. Gun to my head, it’s probably my favourite Bob album of the lot, tied up as it is in childhood memories and time and place. I now own my dad’s copy, given to him by my mum not long after they met, stolen by me about 20 years later, then handed over after my dad asked me straight out of the blue one day, sometime around 2006, where it was, before it made its way back to me after my dad died. If I count it up, I think I’ve probably had it in my possession more than my dad ever did.
Bob Dylan –Subterranean Homesick Blues Take 3
It’s a record of two distinct sides. Side one is the irk the purists side: Bob’s Chuck Berry by way of Dada schtick, nonsensical and bubble gum and extremely thrilling. Subterranean Homesick Blues’ machine gunned outpouring of alliteration, rhyme and imagery; Maggie’s Farm and its gutterpunk two-step blues; the sneering and caustic head bop that is Outlaw Blues; the unexpected thrill of Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream‘s false start, hearing Dylan’s maniacal laugh as the engineer counts in Take 2… absolutely knocked me sideways as a 15 year old, that did. The Smiths and Lloyd Cole didn’t goof around on their records. Theirs were serious mood pieces. This Dylan guy? He’s off his head. He was funny though…a proper comedian. It still thrills me no less as a 55 year old too. Even the slow songs on side 1 had a backing band. She Belongs To Me‘s delicate electric runs; Love Minus Zero‘s four to the floor tambourine and woody bass.
Side 1 is Dylan’s fuck you to the folk scene and all who gate kept it, but it was the (mainly) acoustic songs on side 2 that pulled supporters like Pete Seeger back from the brink. Mr Tambourine Man, a thread-pulling and unravelling 6 minute masterpiece. Gates Of Eden, Dylan sneering about war and peace, finger pointing long into the night air, his acoustic guitar bashed into submission, his harmonica wheezing to a conclusion. It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding), with its descending drop D blues riff and complex, fantastical imagery; Money doesn’t talk, it swears…He not busy being born is busy dying…Even the President of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked. Until fairly recently, Bob was still playing this in his set and, surprise surprise, every one of his audience recognised it immediately. Don’t listen to those lazy reviewers who tell you they only found out what songs Bob played by checking online afterwards. He’s slowed down and kept things fairly standard in setlists in recent times, but it wasn’t that long ago that a night with Bob would include three or four Bringing It All Back Home gems in his set. And a couple of Highway 61 Revisited highlights. And a trio of Blonde On Blonde essentials. But stop. We’re ahead of ourselves.
Bringing It All Back Home ends, perfectly, on It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue. Just Bob, his harmonica and a gooseberrying bass guitar. It’s a song of sentiment, of a chapter closing, of the need to look to the future. The perfect metaphor, in other words, for Dylan’s continual forward propulsion, the lightning rod and conduit for songs – long, cerebral, tied in imagery and intelligence – that he couldn’t get out from inside his head quickly enough.
Two albums and one world tour in ’65. A world tour and a double album in ’66. He not busy being born is busy dying, after all.
I know nothing about Chappell Roan. I doubt I’m slap bang in the middle of her? their? demographic anyway…but I do know the one big song. It was ubiquitous for a bit there and there’s no way you haven’t heard it and fallen for its hooky charm either. Pure pop and catchier than that flu that’s been doing the rounds recently, it hangs its hookline on its spelt out titular refrain. ‘Aitch Oh Tee-Tee Oh Gee Oh-oh, You can take me Hot To Go-oh!’ It was the first great example of spelling in a pop song since Gwen Stefani Hollabacked to tell us that, indeed, that shit was bananas, Bee-Ee-En-Ae-En-Ae-Ess, back in 2025.
It’s nothing new, spelling in songs. Otis and Aretha, of course. And The Kinks. And plenty of others. From Van’s gruff Northern Irish burr wrapping its way around Gloria (“Gee-Ell-Oh-Are-Aye-Ae“) to Patti’s wired and speeding East Village take on it; From Weller’s angry young punk spitting of “Ae-Pee-Oh-Cee-Ae-El-Wy-Pee-Ess-Ee-APOCALYPSE!” at the end of ‘A’ Bomb On Wardour Street to Faith No More’s long-shorted and muscular ‘Be Aggressive! Bee-Ee! Aggressive! Bee-Eee-Ae-Gee-Gee, Are-Ee-Ess-Ess-Eye-Vee-Ee!‘; from Al (then Edwyn) serenading us with ‘Ell-Oh-Vee-Ee Love‘ via little Johnny Thunders’ drawling nod to The Shangri-Las, ‘When I say I’m in love you best believe I’m in love, Ell-Yoo-Vee!” to Hall ‘n Oates’ blue-eyed ‘M-E-T-H-O-D-O-F-L-O-V-E‘, a bit of spelling goes a long way to providing the hook. Hot Chip employed the technique on Over And Over. Len’s Steal My Sunshine includes the line, ‘L-A-T-E-R that week.’ None other than the cryptic and idiosyncratic Mark E Smith sang about a ‘C-R-E-E-P’ when the song demanded it. Even our greatest writers are under the, eh, spell.
Which brings us to Warpaint.
The oil-on-water, slow dissolve approach they take to their own Billie Holiday is supreme.
It’s a sparse track. Cleanly picked guitars, some ambient, soft-touch bass, understated keyboards, a gentle snowfall of toms and cymbals, the overlapping vocals stirring the dusky, twilight air around it. That’s the work of a moonlighting John Frusciante, manning the desk and capturing the band exactly as they’d hoped.
When the singing starts on the verses proper, you – as a pop scholar with an A+ in every one of your pop scholarly exams – will have immediately noticed they’re singing the verses to Mary Wells’ My Guy. But whereas Mary’s original is all frothing teenage effervescence, rattling along on excitable handclaps and giddy, upwardly climbing girl group vocals, Warpaint take the opposite approach. Theirs is languid and soporific, breathy and downbeat. Nothing you can say can tear me away from my guy, they exhale, with all the enthusiasm of the downtrodden and disenfranchised. If someone were to tell you this was a thinly disguised plea for help in a domestically abusive situation, you wouldn’t be that surprised. Nothin’ you could do cos I’m stuck like glue to my guy. Jeez.
In comes the refrain again, four voices melded as one, the group inching the song ever forward. Unspooling and unwinding in slo-mo, it stretches for over six sleepy and bleary-eyed minutes, voices drowning in reverb, guitars swimming in chorus and phase, the percussion being tackled with a little more muscle but no less finesse. Disciplined and majestic to the false ending and beyond.
Why Billie Holiday?
Apparently, the lyric was a place holder, the five syllable phrase borrowed from a poster in the band’s rehearsal space and utilised in song until a better set of words was arrived at. Couple that with the appropriation of My Guy and you have the notion of a fledgling band landing on their sound and trying quickly to find their feet. Great record, eh?
I’m sitting at my formica desk. I’m ‘studying’. My red, white and grey zig-zag wallpaper is hurting my eyes. The backwards clock above my portable telly shows no sign of moving forward. In fact, such is my enthusiasm for learning, it might actually really be moving backwards. The physics textbook in front of me remains uncracked. Physics! What the fuck was I thinking? Radio Clyde hisses and spits from my music centre, the wire that’s laughingly referred to as an aerial in the handbook stretched to a drawing pin that holds up the Marilyn skirt-blowing picture that I really should’ve removed by now. If I hold my hand up, the reception improves. I alternate hands as Tiger Tim spins this week’s hot hits.
My ears prick as something magic is squeezed through the static. It’s new but it’s instantly my kinda thing.
It begins with an engine rev of bass and baritone sax; a knee-buckling nod to the ’50s, of doo wop, of freedom and the cult of the teenager. Bomp-bomp-ba-ooh…Bomp-bomp-bah-ooh. The drop in chords. Bomp-bomp-ba-ooh…Bomp-bomp-bah-ooh.
The verse. Understated, but serious. I’ve nothing much to offer. I’ve nothing much to take. A casually frugging, popping bassline under a moody piano chord. Big, Spectorish drums. A scrape of the guitar strings. Funny chords that seem to rise yet fall simultaneously. Augmented? Diminished? I dunno, but who cares. An acoustic guitar doing that cliched hammer on with the pinky as you play a D chord. Absolute beginners, eh? The singer, his voice linear and stately, half-spoken and half to himself. There are voices either side of him. As long as we’re together. The rest can go to hell. One is deep, one is falsetto. As a trio, they’re sensational. I absolutely love you. The key line. Women, men, anyone with half an ounce of emotion in their wilting heart can’t fail to feel it. I’m only 16 and trying to make sense of my world, David, but in an absolute instant I absolutely love you too.
Now the chorus. Soaring into orbit, carried along on thermal winds of melody and hope, star crossed lovers against the world. Fly over mountains…laugh at the oceans…just like the films. It’s absolutely true.
Christ. I wish someone would make me feel like that. Bomp-bomp-ba-ooh.
The second verse has more of the same. The vocals are still measured and steadfast, the musicians still doing their best to keep up with their vocalist’s high standards. Nothing much can happen. Nothing we can’t shake. Steve Nieve’s spindly piano, the high notes jarring and trebly and rattlin’ your bones. Some synth washes from Rick Wakemen, not heard on a Bowie record for a good decade or more and very welcome back. Nieve, threatened perhaps, raises both his game and his talented fingers and dances across the ivories like a fleet footed musical sprite, the most delicate of touches with a classicism rarely heard in popular music. Nieve knows every key on that piano intimately and he coaxes pure melody from every one of them. In lieu of the doo-wop vocals, the sax blows a subtle bomp-bomp-bah-ooh melody as Wakemen’s synths swell towards another chorus. You can feel it, you know it’s coming. But if my love is your love, we’re certain to succeed.
And here it is.
Mountains and heartaches and films and reason and hard times and hard lines. Absolutely true. Aw jeez.
The singer bows out. The group plays on, holding the searing, white-hot chorus. Strings slide atop the melody. A tenor sax blows a jazzy yet sympathetic signature solo. Across his catalogue, Bowie would prove he loved a sax solo and Absolute Beginners is just one of a score or more that get you. Right. Where. It. Matters.
Tiger Tim shouts across the end of it. “David Bowie there!” (Up here in Scotland, Bowie rhymes with TOWIE) “Absolute Beginners! An absolute cracker!”
I absolutely agree. The physics text book remains unopened. I hot foot it to Walker’s and return with the 7″. I play it and play it and play it and play it. My first Bowie record and definitely not my last. It’s still playing the best part of 40 years later. That’s absolutely true.
Plain Or Pan turns 18 this weekend. An adult. Already a veteran of blind-eye pubs and blinding hangovers, it’s time for the blog to move on out, move on up and enrol in a college course that’ll stave off the threat of actual work for the next few years. The world’s your oyster at 18. Plain Or Pan is no different. It’s invincible. It can do whatever it likes. The 18 years’ worth of writing spread across these pages is diary-like, kinda autobiographical and extremely therapeutic in process. It is, as Van Morrison once remarked, too late to stop now. Not that I want to.
I’ve written before about my hometown of Irvine and its characters; the creatives and thinkers and drinkers who, through art and literature and music, put our wee speck of a town on the world map. I’d like to write now about the environment – or more specifically, the planned environment – in which these schemes and dreams were allowed to play out.
Irvine in the early 1970s was like any other wee town. It had shops and green spaces and transport links to bigger places. It was separated by the River Irvine, the areas of the town either side of the river linked by an old arched bridge. Toy shops and pubs and shoe shops and pubs and hardware shops and pubs and men’s and women’s outfitters and pubs dangled their tempting wares to those crossing the bridge from either side of the town. It was, in a world not yet bloated by megastores and Amazon, a busy, vibrant and thriving place to live.
The town had two football teams. West of the river, towards the harbour, was the industrial Fullarton area where Irvine Victoria huffed, puffed, scuffed and occasionally scored. Across the river and located in the residential area of what your true parochial local might call ‘real Irvine’ was the more well-known and successful Irvine Meadow. They had Scottish Cups and a grandstand to prove it. Where you lived and were brought up dictated which team you followed, and that was it set in stone for life. To this day, whenever the Vics and Meadow clash, a healthy partisan crowd of good natured locals is drawn together, the spoils of bragging rights in the pub afterwards the ultimate prize.
When, in 1966 Irvine was designated to be Scotland’s fifth and final New Town, grand plans were drawn up. Eventually published in 1971 as ‘Irvine New Town Plan’, the plans heralded in a brave new futuristic town of modernism, opportunity and progression. Irvine was an old industrial town. It was ripe for redevelopment and rehousing. It would be a family-focused satellite town for Glasgow, offering clean air and the seaside to any Glaswegians keen (or forced through regeneration schemes) to uproot and start anew. Brand new areas would be developed for housing, modern functional living set amidst landscaped estates. Castlepark. Bourteehill. Broomlands. Pennyburn. You’ve seen Gregory’s Girl? Filmed in the New Town of Cumbernauld, that’s a fair signifier of what these areas would come to look like once built and populated.
Within half a decade, the old bridge and its neighbouring commerce had been knocked down and swept aside, replaced by a state-of-the-art shopping centre spanning the River Irvine. The planners called it the Rivergate Centre, but to any Irvinite, it’ll be forever referred to as ‘The Mall’ (to rhyme with ‘pal’, rather than ‘ball’, Americanisms not yet being a thing.) The Mall was to be the focal point of the town, stretching from the old Irvine Cross all the way to the scrub of grassland near the beach that would soon be landscaped and adorned with a boating pond, a pitch and putt course and a ‘trim track’ and rebranded as The Beach Park. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here.
At the top end of the Mall, at the old town centre end, was a sub level pub (The Argyle) and below that again, in the guts of the Mall, a disco. Amanda’s was like any other provincial discotheque of the time. It played chart music only, it tolerated underagers and the air was thick with Brut and Old Spice, Anais Anais and Charlie, sexual tension and the never far away threat of a punch on the nose. Until you found your own tribe and a place where your own sort of music was not only tolerated but blasted at ear-splitting volume (hello, The Attic), Amanda’s was a necessary rite of passage. Once, when our band Sunday Drivers was playing one of Amanda’s Sunday afternoon live band slots, I shamelessly pilfered a white label 12” of Electronic’s Getting Away With It from the space laughingly referred to as a dressing room. “They’re never gonnae play this anyway,” came my reasoned argument for its liberation. I still play it to this day. That wee 12” got lucky, I tell you.
Forty or fifty shop lengths away at the other end of the Mall was its centrepiece. (I know it was this many shops away because I worked for several years in Our Price and we were number 25 and midway down the Mall.) Down there, where out of town shoppers gained access to the multi-story car park, a huge pair of rotating water wheels were placed outside Boots the Chemist, the first occupants of the Mall. Boots got in there quick. Phase 1 of the Mall’s development saw to it that this would be the prime location. On the corner and across from the big water feature was to be the epicentre from where the Mall’s intended future expansions would converge and spread; Phase 2 promised more undercover shops all the way to the train station, where you might catch a handy monorail to the beach, with its theme park, ski slope and gigantic leisure centre.
At some point, the water wheels stopped turning. Then they were taken away altogether. A metaphor for a stalled idea, finances and politics and what not decreed that there’d be no Phase 2 of development. Or, at least, there was a very reduced version of Phase 2. The Beach Park became a thing, a place to go and run and golf and boat, maybe even fly a kite. The leisure centre, the famous and world-renowned Magnum arrived. You’d get wet though, walking there, or going for a train. There would be no covered walk to the station. Ski slope? Forget about it, Klaus. Boots is still there today, at the arse end of a Mall that promised so much to so many.
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I first saw the Irvine New Town Plan lying around at home at some point in the late ’70s. I remember it lying on the dining table beside a pile of buff coloured folders from my dad’s work. My dad was a surveyor, so it makes perfect sense that he’d be interested in this plan – an actual hard back book, with groovy blue and green lines on its cover (blue sky, blue water, ample green spaces – psychology, innit?) and terrific architectural plans inside. In the last few years, and increasingly so since my dad died, I’d become a wee bit obsessed with finding the book. It’s very likely still in my mum’s house somewhere, but no amount of raking at the back of cupboards has uncovered it. Finding teasing samples of it online only increased my obsession, to the point where I set up an eBay notification.
And guess what!
The images you see here are all taken from the book. A month or so ago, an architect was selling off a load of books and the Irvine book happened to be amongst his things for sale. Up it popped in my notifications and, with a hefty thud, in it dropped through my letter box.
It’s a portal to a time when anything seemed possible. In print, the future Irvine looks sensational, full of hope and promise and desirability. Gone is the black and white industry of old. In is a Mediterranean bright and white town of the future, right here, new and now. The town planners reckoned on the town’s population quadrupling in size to 120,000 by the mid ’80s. Alongside our showcase Mall and leisure centre – the biggest in Europe at the time of opening – there’d be a proper transport infrastructure, hotels to house the tourists, a boating marina, myriad leisure pursuits, even a University out in the green fields beyond Perceton. Who wouldn’t want to live in a groovy, fashionable place like this?
None of that arrived, of course. You can finger point in all the right directions, but it’s a sad fact of life, as this 18-year old is beginning to learn, that economics will always win out over ambition.
Despite this, Irvine was a fine place to grow up. Great, even, at times. Don’t let anyone persuade you differently. Maybe, with its massive Asda and massive Tesco and massive Sainsbury’s and empty town centre with charity shops and vacant units and never ending variety of fast food outlets, it still is for some. Not so long ago though, we had cinemas. We had world-famous touring bands rolling into town every other week. We had youth organisations and sports teams, decent shops, decent restaurants and decent pubs, places to cycle and fish and lark around in. But we also had unemployment and neglect, shutters pulled down and rusted tight forever, a metal and steel curtain drawn in on a town full of decent people and lofty ambition.
Here’s The Jam – just one of many world-famous bands who played Irvine – with, given the subject matter of this article, a proper, eh, Gift of a track; steel drums, aural sunshine and a strange, helium-strangulated Weller vocal. Town Called Malice this ain’t.
The Jam – The Planner’s Dream Goes Wrong
Billy Connolly – one of those megastars who appeared in Irvine more than once – makes that joke about Partick – “‘or Partick nil,’ as they’re known in England.” Many people, thanks to The Proclaimers, know of Irvine as “Irvine no more.” When the Reid brothers sang in ‘Letter from America‘ of Scotland’s industrial decline and our population’s emigration to foreign lands of opportunity, they were putting Irvine on the map for all the wrong reasons.
Irvine no more, Craig ‘n Charlie? Irvine, what could’ve been, I’d counter.
Lists are everywhere at this time of year. I’m never that fussed by the music ones. They mainly serve to remind me just how out of touch I’ve become with the musical landscape of the day, or how underwhelming I find the best albums of the year to be. Beyoncé one of the best five albums of the year? Really, NME? Really, Guardian? Sabrina Carpenter? Gimme a break. Where’s Making Tapes for Girls by The Pearlfishers? Where’s A Dream Is All We Know by The Lemon Twigs? Where, even, is Paul Weller’s 66? This definitely says more about me than them. I’ll freely admit to never knowingly have heard so much as a note of Charli XCX’s Brat. It’s been universally lauded as the very best album of the year in almost every list going, so I can only be missing out. Watch me rave about it in 2027…
Very occasionally the lists confirm that, despite my advancing years and stubborn ears, I’ve still got a lukewarm finger on the pulse of whatever beats the nation’s collective heart.
Bill Ryder-Jones Iechyd Da was in amongst it in all the lists that matter. Released way back in January, it announced itself as an early contender for Album of the Year and hung on in there, month after month until the close of the year. With its sad melodies and wraparound blanket of melancholy, it was, despite the heaviness of its subject matter, a thrilling listen; well played, well produced, little pocket symphonies of sorrow and grief that hit you right where Ryder-Jones wanted them to land. It’s a terrific album.
It’s a terrific album, yes, but it’s second only to Cutouts by The Smile.
Scanning the lists, I was amazed to see little love for it. It’s a pretty fantastic record and, if this blog carried any clout at all, all forthcoming issues of the record would come with a hype sticker letting the world know that it’s Plain Or Pan’s album of 2024. “Album of 2024!” (Plain Or Pan) It’s pretty fantastic! Love it or your money back!
Cutouts was, after Wall Of Eyes (also notable by its absence from many lists), The Smile’s second album of the year. It is to that album what Radiohead’s Amnesiac is to Kid A – the leftovers, the cutouts if you will, from the sessions that spawned the earlier album, reorganised and whipped into a genre defying ten track cracker. It’s orchestral and rockin’, claustrophobic yet dizzy, propulsive and loud, slow and stately and quiet; super-textured, in other words, with each play revealing new layers of unspooling melodies and dazzling musicianship.
Jonny Greenwood dresses his guitars in sheets of Andy Summers chorus. Thom Yorke plays finger-bothering groovy bass. Tom Skinner rattles and rolls crazy time signatures from his polyrhythmic kit. Strings scratch and scrape and shimmer their sheen on nearly every track. Vintage synths parp and fizz their minor chords across the top, archaic and arcane, phantasmal and utterly fantastic.
The Smile – Zero Sum
It’s those unspooling melodies that dazzle most, though. It’s only after the third? Twenty-third? play that you truly begin to hear them for what they are. Zero Sum, with its jerky “Windows 95” vocal and frantic, skittering morse code guitar lines. Instant Psalm‘s funereal, majestic splendour. No Word‘s bullet train propulsion. The creeping spy theme of Don’t Get Me Started… If this record had ‘Radiohead’ printed prominently on the cover rather than ‘The Smile’, the list makers and taste shapers would’ve been falling over themselves to make it album of the year.
Plain Or Pan knows though.
“Album of 2024!” (Plain Or Pan) It’s pretty fantastic! Love it or your money back!
I was out the back door a few nights ago. We’d given the shrubbery a festive, twinkly make-over and the remote control to turn the lights off had stopped working from the lazy comfort of inside the house, meaning I had to move closer to them and, y’know, actually go outside to turn them off…half cut…at 2am…wearing pink Crocs (not mine). As I moved closer to the lights, a sudden and loud flapping noise – total Attenborough nature documentary in sound – broke the still Ayrshire silence. I froze. Almost immediately, from the big tree behind my fence, an owl began hooting.
How great!
We’re not country dwellers by any means, the Glasgow train line runs behind us, down the hill behind that big tree, but we’re right on the fringes of the town where it meets its ever-shrinking green belt and we’re clearly close enough for unexpected wildlife. It’s not been back since, but I’ll be listening out for that owl any time I happen to be awake in the small hours. Or wee hours, given how regularly I make the broken sleep stagger to the bathroom these nights.
The one owl I can I hear any time I like is this – the most interesting, most unique and unarguably the greatest track that’s graced these ears this past year.
The Tenementals – The Owl of Minerva:
Early in the 19th century, the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel wrote that “The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk.” It’s a line that suggests that true historical understanding only comes with hindsight – a phrase that could very much apply to Glasgow’s foundations in slavery and clashing religious intolerance; a reawakened city, perhaps, but one that’s still in conflict with itself.
Both inspirational and educational, The Owl of Minerva is delivered in a rich, actorly, Glaswegian brogue atop a clatter of guitars, like an electric shocked Public Service Broadcasting riding on the sort of sludgy, serrated, repetitive riff that Iggy Pop might be inclined to drop his trousers for. A fly-past of Glasgow’s streets and their history, it’s terrific. And immediate. And supremely poetic.
Mungo’s children lie in slumber, in ballrooms of pleasure and Bars of L, silent forges of production… The cantilevered roost of the Finnieston Cran(e)… Red Road in ruin… Broken bricks of Utopia… Carnivals in Castlemilk conjuring a constellation… Hills of Hag… The rapids of revolution… The highway of historical time… Beyond the Black Hills… Proddy John… Commie John… Bible John… Poppers John… Bengal/Donegal… Gorbals teens/Glasgow Greens… New futures/New presents/New pasts… And still the river flows.
This is not the soft focused, rain-soaked Glasgow of the Blue Nile. Nor is it Simple Minds’ idea of the Clyde’s majestic past writ large in Waterfront‘s filling-loosening bassline. Nor is it Alex Harvey’s sense of menace and theatre. Or Hue and Cry’s shoulder padded and reverential Mother Glasgow. It’s all of this and more, a Glasgow song that’s scuffed at the knees yet literate and informative and vital for the 21st century. And it’s seemingly arrived straight outta the blue, an unexpected blazing comet for our times.
The Tenementals crept onto my social media feeds at some point late October/early November and the by the time I’d wandered off piste and hauf pissed to properly check them out, I had, typically, missed their Oran Mor album launch show by one night – a free entry gig too, where you had the chance to buy the album and it’s thrilling lead track.
If they don’t look like yr average group of skinny jeaned, facially haired, too cool for school gang of guitar stranglers, that’s because The Tenementals aren’t really any of this. Lead vocalist David Archibald is Professor of Political Cinema at Glasgow University. They’ve collaborated with Union man and political agitator Mick Lynch. Their record label is called Strength In Numbers. Socialists to the core, their self-given job is to enlighten their listeners to the plight of the suffragettes, the beauty of La Pasionaria and the warped, cruel and beautiful history that forged the place from where they sprung.
The rest of the album is equally as thrilling, by the way. See them become more prominent in 2025.
At this time of year I feel kinda duty bound to uphold the seasonal theme of Christmas songs, but decent ones that remain underplayed and under appreciated are as thin on the ground as a field full of living turkeys two days before Santa arrives. Who needs the anxiety of trying to appear switched-on and smart-arsed enough in a barely-read blog post when there are floors still to wash, shops still to tackle and dining tables still to be extended?
Me, clearly.
Phoebe Bridgers has made it tradition since 2017 to release a cover of a Winter/Christmas-themed song in the run up to the big day. Released primarily for charitable causes, Bridgers does a neat line in shining a light on – yeah! – the underplayed and under appreciated songs that celebrate Christmas time (or the holiday season, as she more likely calls it.) Now, what I know about Phoebe Bridgers wouldn’t fit on the back of a £1.65 first class Christmas stamp (One pound sixty five!) but I do know that she is a member of Boygenius who played a terrific Beatles-inspired set on prime time US telly a year or so ago. I also know that she’s collaborated with artists as disparate as Taylor Swift and Ryan Adams. And I do know too that she has a voice that can melt even the coldest of hearts in wintertime; honeyed, pure, American. I should really investigate more.
Phoebe Bridgers – Christmas Song
Bridgers’ Christmas 2018’s offering was this really great take on Christmas Song by McCarthy Trenching (a band from Omaha, not an implausibly named FBI agent who doubles as a front porch strummer from the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia). I know even less about McCarthy Trenching than I do about Phoebe Bridgers, but I do know Christmas Song is a cracking wee country heartbreaker, jerky and waltztime, with bar room piano and brushed snare, delicate female backing vocals and an undertow of regret running through it like an electric current. “It’s Christmas, and no-one can fix it,” goes the singer at the end as you sigh into your coffee. It’s a million miles (and several gazillion sales) from Slade and Wizzard…and all the better for it.
Bridgers adds steel drums – or a guitar that sounds like steel drums – to her version; gentle and pulsing and ringing, like a perfect Hollywood snowfall; subtly Christmassy, y’know? Her voice is tender and whispered in the verses, the way the world sounds when snow is falling outside and there’s no one in the street to spoil it. It’s skyscrapingly melodic and rich in the chorus, where she’s joined by a duetting Jackson Browne. Timpanis creep in, aided and abetted by gentle strings, almost apologetic sleigh bells and something approaching a multistacked choir, yet it never goes full blown Christmas. Like the original, it’s all the better for it. If you’re new to this song, I think you’ll like it.
Christmas bonus:
If you’ve never seen it, that Boygenius Saturday Night Live/Beatles-inspired performance is here:
There was a smaller cousin of Raleigh’s Chopper bike called a Comanche. Being the cutting edge suburban youngster I was in the 1970s, I was sure I’d had one, but Googling a picture of it now, I’m not so sure I did. Maybe it belonged to my brother. Or Stuart Douglas. I dunno. There was also a third family member in the Raleigh clan; another native American-inspired bike called a Tomahawk. It too had all the features of its cousins – the long seat, the raised handlebars, big wheel at the back, smaller one at the front, a chain guarded sturdily against unwanted flare flappery, all welded to a frame heavier than Geoff Capes’ morning ablutions, the third bike in a trio of iconically-shaped ’70s must-haves.
Yeah.
The Stranglers – Golden Brown
I was always dazzled by The Stranglers‘ Golden Brown. It wasn’t just the zinging harpsichord rattling out at a weird time interval that did it. It wasn’t just that sudden and unexpected nylon stringed guitar solo, perfect in every way, with the singer adlibbing the melodic refrain as it played out like angels on a rare night off. It wasn’t just the song’s outro, with its closely knitted ‘ne-ver a…never a frown…‘ overlapping vocals – a neat trick that not many bands attempted back then or since.
And it wasn’t just the video, playing out on the Top of the Pops Christmas 1982 episode, where the band played in some exotic, ceiling-fanned, art deco-inspired place known as Radio Cairo, the harpsichord player stiff of back, his hands stabbing at the keys like a marionette puppet being worked from above, the bass player, louche and cool and leaning into his double bass like a dickie-bowed member of the Stray Cats, the drummer, as ancient as Egypt even then, his kick drum adorned with palm trees (I’m doing all this from memory, by the way, just in case the fact police are close by), or the singer, hands in pockets and bored, barely trying to sing, his Egyptian tan a handy shade of, eh, golden brown and lending his face the look of a kiss-curled Hollywood matinee idol while a caravan of camels mooches in silhouette past the Pyramids that did it.
Nope. The reason the song resonated then (and still) was due to its second line.
Golden Brown, texture like sun,
Lays me down, with my Mancheran
Mancheran. Mancheran? What were they singing about? Was this another bike – the fourth – in the Chopper family? Another addition to Raleigh’s native-American inspired names for kids’ bikes? How didn’t I know? For 40+ years (count ’em) I’ve ran with the notion that Hugh Cornwell was singing about a fucking bike, until Sunday past when Guy Garvey played the song during his radio show. I turned it up. Loud and clear came the words:
Golden Brown, texture like sun,
Lays me down, with my mind she runs
Oh!
There’s never a frown when you finally grasp the lyric. With my mind she runs. Now it makes sense! Imagine spending most of your life thinking they’re singing about a bike. What do you mean it’s about heroin?
That’ll be the reason the song became a chart mainstay.
Keen to show a different side to their usual grizzled prog/punk output, The Stranglers convinced an uncooperative record company that Golden Brown should be the single that would prove their versatile chops to the world. Relenting, it was flung into existence amidst the rush of singles released for Christmas. A slow burner, by early January it was Radio 2’s Single of the Week and began steadily climbing the charts. As traction gained, JJ Burnel let slip that the song’s subject matter was perhaps darker than anyone thought and it swiftly disappeared from the playlists.
Banned records do what banned records will always do in this situation though, and Golden Brown continued to climb; Number 4 by the third week in January. Number 3 the week later, sandwiched awkwardly between Shakin’ Stevens’ Oh Julie and Bucks Fizz’s Land Of Make Believe. It would peak the following week, swapping places with Shaky but missing out on the top spot due to The Jam’s A Town Called Malice gatecrashing the party. It stayed at Number 2 for a second week. By the start of March it was still in the Top 30. Not bad for a quietly banned record.
A perennial cracker, it’s not a Christmas song by any stretch of the imagination, but plonk me in front of an old episode of Top of the Pops and I’ll always be reminded of that Christmas end of year appearance, marionette harpsichordists, ancient drummers, misheard lyrics ‘n all.
Here, made by clever folk on the internet, is Golden Brown cleverly mashed with that other popular wonky time-signatured chart hit Take Five. It’s quite the groove.
’tis the season to flop on the sofa and self-loathe your way through a Hallmark film or three. Or four. You know the sort; good looking guy, jaw like a wedge of iron, neat hair perfectly shed and shined, turns up in small town America and falls for the attractive local schoolteacher, still living at home since her mum’s premature death, unable to leave her elderly and extremely rich father who just won’t cope without her. Somewhere in the storyline there’ll be charity work, siblings at war and log chopping in fake snow, our quiet yet self assured hero wearing a white t-shirt covered by a sleeveless body warmer, box fresh brand new Timberland boots on his manly feet, his soon-to-be love interest watching from the window as she hangs a particularly sentimental bauble on the perfectly-shaped Christmas tree (that the hunk-o-dude helped pick out and carry to his flat bed truck only yesterday). He flashes her a smile of dazzling white as his final chop splinters an exceptionally gnarly log clean in half and she sighs contentedly, knowing that her mother, dear mother, would have loved him too.
It’s something of a thing in our house to fly through the channels to the way high numbers until a Hallmark Christmas film is found. First to pick the plot apart and predict the outcome is the winner. It’s not difficult, and in the absence of anything better being on the telly, it’s good seasonal fun.
We were hanging our own tree at the weekend and I started ‘doing a Hallmark’ with each of the baubles, mid west American accent ‘n all;
“Aw, look! This is the one you made at nursery. How cute you were! And this is the one you painted at the dining room table when you were three. Remember you got green paint on it and it never came out?! Every bauble tells a story! And here’s the star! It’s still got the badly-printed picture of Dad blu-tacked to it – remember the Christmas he had Covid and couldn’t join us for dinner so we stuck him at the top of the tree to bring him closer to us? Aw! Every bauble tells a story! And look! Oh, look! Here’s the bauble we bought in Macy’s in New York a coupla years back…remember? How could you forget?! They were quite expensive but they had a 20% sale on, so we thought, what they hey, let’s get a bauble for everyone…and when we went to the counter the lady rang them up and when we queried the discount like the stoopid tourists we were she said they were priced at the discounted price already and the reason the amount was even higher than their combined price was because we had to pay tax on them – you gotsta pay tax on everything in America – and, oh how we laughed…except for your dad who was having convulsions at the total cost. Cute bauble, eh? Every bauble tells a story!”
If I was writing a Hallmark film, that’d be my plot; pick out the tree (they always pick out the tree), gather the family into the large, conservative living area and decorate it gaudily, each bauble picked causing the camera to fade to history, as the story of the bauble – and by association – the story of the film’s characters is told in flashback.
“And that’s how ma’ ended up with a broken back….and that’s why ol’ Gramps had ta sell the farm…and that’s why you were adopted, Michael. I was adopted?! etc etc.” It’s got legs, I tells ye.
Apropos of nothing connecting the music below to the words above, here’s Marvin Gaye doing Purple Snowflakes.
Marvin Gaye – Purple Snowflakes
A tinkling, light on its feet soul crooner, as delicate and gentle as a fresh Montana snow fall, Purple Snowflakes is Marvin’s own 1965 Tamla hit Pretty Little Baby, rewritten (some might say cynically) for the Christmas market. Nothing new in that, of course. Your favourite Christmas song and mine, Darlene Love’s Christmas (Please Come Home) was originally an anti-Vietnam r’n’b thumper called Johnny (Please Come Home). Lose the edgy war hero schtick, add some sleigh bells and a lyric about snow on the ground and voila! A holiday hit forever. You knew that already though.
Fly on the wall telly is nothing new, but the brilliance of those Beatles documentaries of recent years has had any old half-baked documentarian with an eye on the prize rooting around behind the sofa for forgotten scraps of footage from yesteryear. Currently on the iPlayer is a near four decades-old film of the day Band Aid‘s Feed the World was recorded. Why it’s never been seen in its entirety until now is anyone’s guess, but it’s good that it’s out there. Why? Because forty years later it makes for really great telly.
‘Feed the world, let them know it’s Christmas time.’ These days you can virtue signal the song’s lyric and you’ll not find too many folk in a 70% non-Christian world disagreeing. Bono’s big ‘tonight thank God it’s them instead of you‘ line always sounded wrong, even to my slowly awakening 15 year old ears. The sentiment of the song was honest and well-meant though, even if a quick root around online turns up all manner of suggestion that the majority of the money made from the record and the following summer’s big gig never quite made it to the intended recipients. No one knew that though when Midge ‘n Bob – very much a tag team, even if the legend has marginalised wee Midge whilst elevating Saintly Bob’s role in it all – were sitting in a tiny home studio welding Geldof’s sombre verses to Ure’s hooky chorus.
The documentary begins with the pair of them sketching out the demo, Midge’s guide vocal a necessary placeholder in absence of the stars who’d come to adorn it. They’re not long in turning up. Simon and John from Duran Duran (and their bouffants) bounce out of a surrounded car, each sporting three outrageous haircuts in one, Le Bon’s suit jacket sleeves rolled up to Don Johnson levels of rad, Taylor casually chic in a Duran Duran chunky knit tour sweater. Somewhere in the background are the three other Duranies, but being less good looking or important, they’re shoved straight out of the road of the camera lens, never to reappear until the big group shot at the end.
Tony Hadley arrives, blown in on a waft of silk blouse and pure self belief. There’s a squeal and a scream from the waiting fans – nowadays, social media would see to it that several thousand screamers would turn up and block the street – as Hadley and his pirate-legged leather trousers sprint to the safety of Sarm Studios.
A bored Bananarama spill out of their taxi, a heart-stopping riot of fags and frowns and misshapen, hole-ridden jumpers, straight outta bed (or up off a friend’s couch), the three of them each sporting a different third of John Taylor’s ozone-threatening do. Paul Weller with his slick back Euro mod hair style walks unselfconsciously to the studio. He’s caught on camera, stylishly as ever, in selvedge denim, ankle length Crombie…and a walking cane. They weren’t called (snigger) the Style Council for nuffin’.
Midge and a permanently flat cap-sporting engineer commandeer the desk, Bob chips in with unhelpful suggestions and the whole thing slowly comes to life. Hadley is one of the first up, his nostrils flaring, his eyebrows dipping, his eyes squeezed shut with one hand to the can on his ear to reinforce his emotive and real soul credentials. He cannae sing for toffee. This is both True and Gold, as, naked and on tape, his flaws and flat voice are laid bare for all. ‘Let’s maybe try the chorus now, Tony‘ sighs Midge in exasperation. It’s looking like a long day ahead.
Wee Bono and his hat appear, but not the kidney-infected Edge, and we have our first unlikely quartet gathered around a microphone. The U2 man, seven months shy of total ubiquity, stands aside a proper singer in Paul Young, hapless Hadley the seven foot haddie, and George Michael. Done up in full Lady Di blow dry and silently miffed that he’s recording the song that will deprive Wham their coveted Christmas number one, George is nonetheless just about the humblest in the room. There’s no ego there at all. He runs through the lines a couple of times and listens as Headmaster Geldof offers his advice.
“Make it quite an emotional thing, George. Really emphasise the fact that there’s no snow – NO SNOW! – in Africa. NO SNOW! That’s the most important line, George.” George looks on, emotionless. Midge slides a fader. They go again.
“I’m struggling to sing this part powerfully, Midge,” admits George at one point. “If you wouldn’t mind changing the musical notation slightly, I can start up here (raises flat hand) rather than down here (lowers palm).”
“Sure, go for it, George,” encourages Midge, and both his and Geldof’s eyes light up when, first time, George nails the song’s bridge. “But say a prayer…and pray for the other ones...” It’s instantly recognisable as the take used in the final version, a great moment captured on film as it’s being born.
That other great George, the Boy, turns up fashionably late but put him in front of the microphone and he’s as terrific and dazzling as his self-fashioned make-up. “Just turn it up in the headphones and I’ll sing it,” he demands, exasperated at a faffing Midge at the desk…and turns in an astonishing vocal that’s soulful, gritty and note-perfect. He plucks that famous ‘woah-ohoh!’ ad-lib straight outta the pop star-heavy air and vanishes to hang at the back with Marilyn.
“You’re coming in too early, Tony,” interrupts Midge from the control room, “And you’re marginally late, Sting.” The Police man gives the opinionated Bob a cold, deathly stare as the production team focus their attention on Phil Collins’ drum part. He nails it in one, sweat lashing from under his Fair Isle tank top as his steady, tribal beat rolls on. Sting stares at Geldof, coldly. Calculating.
Hadley? He shuffles uncomfortably in his blouse and leather pantaloons and slopes off to ponder a new career in pirate-themed pantomime.
Elsewhere, Status Quo and their unintentional Spinal Tapisms try and fail to add any vocals of note to the song. Maybe it’s the lack of the Quo boogie in the backing track, maybe it’s because they’re surrounded by the great and the good of the day, maybe it’s simply because they’ve clearly got half the GDP of Columbia stuffed up their beaks, but Rick ‘n Francis are rotten singers.
Listen closely to the record the next time you happen to hear it. Just in the background, around one and a half minutes, there’s a slow and steady leathery crrrrreaaaakkk. It’s underneath one of those clanging chimes of doom lines, not obvious at first, but it’s there. It’s not, would you believe, the Quo duo. It’s Hadley, doubling back on his intended early exit, the leather trousers creaking at the sudden turn of events as Mr Spandau realises he’s no longer the worst thing about the record. Both True, and Gold, as they say.
It’s around this point in the film when you start thinking, ‘where are all the women?‘ Even Glenn Gregory is in on the action, visibly wondering how the fuck it was he got here as he gets down to microphone business alongside Bono, Paul Young and fabulous George Michael.
It’s a men’s club, this Band Aid thing. Male producer, male writers, male movers and shakers, male voice choirs, a bossy and opinionated Trevor Horn. And Tony Hadley. Bananarama haven’t been seen since they arrived, not required apparently, until the grand finale. The ladies are everywhere though. Look beyond the mixing desk. Between the cameras. Behind Geldof’s ego and there they are. Being the ’80s, they’re in the background; Mrs Sting, Paula Yates, Mrs Trevor Horn, holding the babies, running after the children, doing what women did back then. Leave it to the lads, girls, thanks very much.
You should make it your business to watch this documentary as soon as possible. Despite the presence of Sting. And Bono. And Hadley. There’s no need to be afraid. You’ll love it.
Plain Or Pan 