Get This!, New! Now!

Only With The Falling Of Dusk

Craig McAllister

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.

Cover Versions

Take It To The Bridge(rs)

Craig McAllister

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:

Cover Versions

With My Mancheran

Craig McAllister

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.

Dave Brubeck – Golden Brown

 

 

Cover Versions

Keep The Yuletide Gaye

Craig McAllister

’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.

Hard-to-find

True. And Gold.

Craig McAllister

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-oh oh!’ 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.

demo, Gone but not forgotten

Go Figure

Craig McAllister

I was flicking through Discogs, as you do, checking out the current resale values of some of the records in my collection. Not cos I’m selling them. I just wanted to feel good about having records that currently sit for sale at silly, over-inflated prices.

Husker Du’s Flip Your Wig at almost £40? Man! A first press Surfer Rosa now nudging £50?! Oh my golly, as the song goes. Live At The Witch Trials? That’s £60 all day long. It makes the £5 I paid for it all the more jammy. That first press of Definitely Maybe that Alan McGee later signed for me? That’ll be £250, thank you very much. Go figure. What a mad, record-buying world we currently live in.

The reissue of Elliott Smith‘s Either/Or album is a near £70 record these days. Released in 2017 for the album’s twentieth anniversary, it came beautifully packaged with extensive sleeve-notes, a Japanese-style obi strip (who doesn’t love an obi strip?) and a second LP of era-specific live cuts, demos and unreleased stuff. Normally the unreleased stuff on these sort of reissues was originally unreleased for very good reasons, but Elliott Smith could seemingly throw out incredible song after incredible song on a daily basis, far quicker than he could properly record them and commit them to release. His vault, as it has become clear, lies stuffed with stone cold, major to minor tearjerkers, coated in Beatles melodies and wistful melancholy, the likes of which I can’t seem to get enough of.

The Either/Or reissue contains two such beauties. I Don’t Think I’m Ever Gonna Figure It Out skiffs along on a Dylanish finger-picking pattern, a hundred miles an hour blur of first, second and third fingers coaxing a folky melody from the six strings below them, Elliott sounding (as always) like he’s playing two guitars at once, his voice close-miked and whispered then double tracked on the titular refrain. It’s lo-fi, campfire indie and all the more magic for it. You should seek it out.

The real treasure is what follows.

I Figured You Out arrives on a snippet of studio chatter before a mournful harmonium accompanies Elliott’s acoustic guitar, scratching out a very Elliott chord progression as a rhythm section falls in and an electric guitar picks out the melodic hooks. Elliott’s gossamer-light voice sounds sad and resigned, delicate and fragile throughout…but utterly incredible. His tone, his control, his ability to make you tear up when he harmonises with himself…he’s terrific. I’ve always been a sucker for a recorded vocal where you can hear the singer draw breath. I Figured You Out is full of that. There’s a wee bridge when he cheers up a bit, goes a bit pop, even, with some subtle whammy bar action, before he falls back into the main song again.

Elliott was a singer who didn’t need to look far to find his demons or subject matter and on I Figured You Out, he seems to be lamenting success-hungry fame hounds.

You’re every kind of collar
There ain’t nothing that you won’t claim
Your ambition and promise
And your addiction to fame

A ‘stupid pop song that I wrote in about a minute‘ (oh man!) Elliott oft compared I Figured You Out to something The Eagles might have recorded – the ultimate self-inflicted insult – and so gave it to his friend Mary Lou Lord to record and release instead. Elliott’s version though remains the definitive version, whether he lived to realise that or not. I could listen to it all day long.

Get This!, Gone but not forgotten

The Story Is Old, I Know

Craig McAllister

But it goes on.

It begins, most unSmiths-like, with a near-two minute piano prologue; a doom-laden, melodramatic affair of dark, clanging minor chords and suspenseful apprehension, Johnny’s delicately elfin fingers stretching out for notes he hasn’t yet found and ghostly, wafty sighs from a far-off Morrissey with one keen eye already on a solo career, the intro’s violent and disconcerting soundbed – striking miners clashing with police – creating the perfect tension before the release of that crashing E minor and the new dawn shining light on what would be the group’s swan song. All great bands need to go out in style and grandeur, and with Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me, The Smiths constructed the finest curtain closer and epilogue on a recording career that lasted barely five years.

The Smiths – Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me

From its title in, Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me is nothing other than sensational.  It’s a very Morrissey title and the singer delivers a terrific, detractor-baiting vocal line; he gives in to no hysterics that such a title might demand, but instead delivers a slow and measured soul baring over Johnny’s repeating chord sequence before, as the strings rise and swell, he eases himself into a howl at the moon falsetto. The Smiths never ever played this in concert, but had they, a sated and spent Morrissey would’ve been bent backwards over the stage monitors as the front row tore strips from his shirt, you can guarantee that.

Just about the last track recorded for Strangeways, the song originated in the back of the band’s tour van after a show five months previously in Carlisle. Johnny arrived on the song’s chord sequence, “ecstatic…I couldn’t work out how my fingers were playing it…holding my breath in case I lost it,” and by the following Thursday evening, the three instrument-playing Smiths had forged it into a dark and brooding Gothic masterpiece. Johnny, a hundred and seventeen guitar overdubs later, shifted his attention to the Emulator, last used on There Is A Light, and gave birth to the song’s sweeping string motif. Nowadays, any indie band with a bit of clout will call in a symphony orchestra to do the heavy lifting for them. The Smiths, being both insular and skint, chose to do it themselves.

The track’s heaviness is due, in no small part, to the rhythm section. Mike Joyce attacks it from start to finish, punctuating the end of each measure with scattergun abandon, playing the verses with solidity yet swing. In  keeping with the track and its status, this may well be Joyce’s finest performance across The Smiths’ canon.

Dependable Andy weighs in with a trademark wandering yet low-key and rumbling bass line, filling any gaps in the proceedings with little octave jumping runs, always anchoring the song with root notes. Just before the second verse, he plays a lovely and subtle bass line that hints at Morrissey’s melody to come, minutae the likes of which many of you here will know of already or appreciate all the more once you spot it.

Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me is perfect Smiths. From Johnny’s not forgotten chord sequence in the back of a van to Morrissey’s one-take vocal in Somerset’s Wool Hall Studios a few months later, the stars aligned…and then some. Mike Joyce himself said on these very pages a few years ago, with some understatement, that it was ‘pretty good‘. Both Morrissey and Marr are on record as saying it’s their favourite Smiths track. Even recording stars as disparate as David Bowie and Andre 3000 held/still hold it in equally high esteem.

Not so the record-buying public. Despite it being billed as ‘The Last Single’, it fell into the charts at number 34, limped its way to number 30 the following week and, seven days later dropped straight back out of existence. What the fuck were people buying instead? If you can’t have drama and existential angst in early December, when can you have it?

Get This!, Hard-to-find

D Lux

Craig McAllister

You’ll love this. You might be familiar with it already, but I’d be surprised. It’s not new, it’s not that old either, and the chances are that if you missed it when it first peeked out from behind 2021’s curtain of noise (100,000 Spotify uploads a day and rising) then it’ll have completely passed you by.

It’s called Duty Of Care by the impressively posh-sounding David Luximon-Herbert. Dropping the second half of his double barrelled surname has done little to shoot David’s name into the collective conscience of the music listening public…and that’s a real pity.

Crashing waves cede to crashing chords. Orchestral strings fight for ear space with cacophonous timpani. An earwormy woo-oo-ooh vocal centres the attention, fuzz guitar climbs the frets…then the drop out. The vocal comes in. Something about arrival and survival. More woo-oo-oohs and then a lovely spoken word section, Luximon’s properly Scottish burr well to the fore. “It’s not a manifesto or a benediction,” he goes, and, in a wave of bah-bah-bahs, the guitar takes us skywards again. The track rises and falls for five spellbinding, world-stopping minutes and you find yourself diving back in, time and time again, to bathe in its golden magic.

Luximon clearly put this all together with meticulous care, the way you or I might if we’ve a head full of radical ideas and been offered only one recording session in our entire lives in which to capture it. Duty Of Care is lush, full and perfectly realised, in the same way McAlmont & Butler’s Yes and Pet Shop Boys/Dusty Springfield’s What Have I Done To Deserve This? are lush, full and perfectly realised.

It’s no fluke.

Duty Of Care‘s parent album ebbs and flows beautifully, a wholly (holy) realised amalgam of fantastic orchestration melded to stinging electric guitars, rippling jazz piano and terrifically skittering and booming Axelrod-ish drums. Shimmering Hammond gives way to proggy synths, which drop out to allow slide guitar solos to wheeze themselves out into the thin air. Tremelo-heavy tracks weave their way into one another, no beginnings and no endings. Was that some bird song appearing in the gap there? Burbling water between the finger scrapes on acoustic strings? It’s so all that, this record.

The album in full is stunning. Part Virgin Prunes, part pastoral folk, totally immersive, Duty Of Care‘s tracklist reads like the titles of projected Coen Brothers’ films still to be made; Nothing Ever Good Happened Down By The River, The Town That Dreaded Sundown, Datsun Cherry. It’s super-produced by Olly Betts, long-time drummer in melodic noise-smiths The Duke Spirit and requires a proper listening session. No telly on in the background. No inane social media scrolling. No household chores while it spins. Just you, an armchair and a receptive pair of ears. Play it once and you’ll find yourself returning to it daily until you’re familiar with every nook and cranny of its perfectly nuanced sound. I think you’ll like it. A lot.

Listening to Luximon may well have you reassessing the boundaries of what good music actually is. This is great – like What’s Going On and Pet Sounds levels of great. How many other artists amongst those 100,000 other noise makers are making music as considered and vital as this? We’ll never know.

David Luximon‘s Duty Of Care is easily one of the finest records to grace the Last Night From Glasgow imprint. You can buy it here.

Bonus Track

There’s also a pretty great Max Harris Project/Ashley Lockdown remix of Care Of Duty out there. Track 2 above, it features added helicopter noises, stripped back Orb-y ambience and, quite possibly, the quiet sound of Richard Ashcroft weeping at where it all went wrong. Ol’ twiggy Ricky, he of the Axelrod pretensions and delusions of grandeur, would quite gladly forego his comfy Oasis support slots for an ounce of Luximon’s skill and gravitas. A bittersweet symphony indeed.

The remix was released as a ‘pay-what-you-want’ single, all proceeds going to Age UK/Age Scotland during the Covid crisis. Remember that?

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With Or Without ‘U’

Craig McAllister

Around the turn of the year, I bought a pair of white Puma trainers. I’m not, nor ever have been, a white trainers kinda guy, but I spotted a pair online that were reduced to a price point commensurate with my budget and spontaneously bought them. Just the thing, I thought, to complete my (cough) look for Spring/Summer ’24.

When I put them on, my kids slagged me mercilessly. My wife looked affronted, mumbled something about golf shoes then pretended not to have noticed them. These things were white. White. Like, absolutely spotless and Persil white. Crease-free and box-fresh, they were almost mirror-like in their pure patina. Even Kanye might have thought twice about styling an outfit around them. There was no suede trim to soften the harshness, no flash of colour other than a tiny gold Puma logo on the side and a khaki green tab on the heel. The uppers were white. The laces were white. The Puma stripe was white. They were the whitest trainers of all time.

I wear them, of course. A guy like me can easily carry them off.

Much more appealing than white Pumas ’round here is Black Pumas. Or Black Pyoomaz, as we’d say in the west of Scotland. Or Black Poomas, as they themselves say.

2019’s self-titled debut should be your first port of call if you’re in any way unfamiliar or curious about them. Self-styled Texan psychedelic soul, Black Pumas crackles with all the ingredients needed in a recipe for soul; vibrato-heavy guitar, watertight pistol-crack drums, flab-free horns, free-form Hammond, oohing and cooing female backing singers and an easy-going vocalist who, you’ll understand from the first line sung, has a honey-coated voice the equal of any of the greats who nestle snugly in that decent record collection of yours.

Black Pumas – Colors

Snaking in on a skeletal and ever-looping acoustic guitar riff, Colors is Black Pumas in microcosm. A ripple of barroom piano undercuts the earworm riff. Super-tight snare and air-spray hi-hat rimshot and hiss between the spaces. Electric guitar chords ripple outwards as we near the chorus. A suitably low-key yet funk-inflected bass line joins in. A sashay of females replicate the vocal lines and we’re properly off and running.

Oh yeah, the vocals. Head Puma Eric Burton honed his voice in the church, and you’ll hear that in his phrasing and adlibbing pleasantries – Yes, sir… yes, ma’am – as easy-going and soulful a delivery as you could possibly want to hear. He can do gritty and he can do tear-soaked, but what he really enjoys is letting loose and soaring off into a far-flung falsetto in the choruses. Colors is peppered with great, voice-cracking upper register spontaneity… yeah, he’s got it all.

He’s joined by slow-elbowed strings, a jazzy and unscripted electric piano solo that could’ve danced itself off of any of those old Billy Preston recordings of the ’70s and an arrangement that quietens and stirs, ebbs and flows like a golden hour Al Green. That wee ‘wooh-hoo, wooh-hoo, ooh-hoo, hoo‘ call and response section in the middle, where Burton’s vocals bounce off some plucked strings and the girls’ voices behind him is the sweetest of sweet spots.

I’ve listened to Colors many times in the last 5 years and always presumed it was a metaphorical reference to skin colour and racism. Last week I stumbled across a Song Exploder podcast episode where Black Pumas described the process behind the song and its meaning. It turns out it was written by Burton on his guitar as he sat on a rooftop watching the New Mexico sunrise alight on a brand new day. No metaphor, no hidden meaning, just a great, simplistic song about God’s creation of the natural world.

“It’s a good day to be,” suggests Burton, and with records like this on repeat, and trainers (trainurz) as funky as the ones on my not-in-the-least-affronted feet, it sure is. Black Pumas would refer to them as sneakers though. Not that I’m able to do much sneaking in a pair of shoes that look like a pair of Russian oligarch’s yachts moored proudly in an exclusive Mediterranean coastal resort.

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Rhythm ‘n Wooze

Craig McAllister

Clever band, Blur. They hit the zeitgeist with Parklife, followed it up with The Great Escape (more of the same, but written to prescription) then, when the wheels started coming loose on the Britpop bus, aimed for the ditch last navigated by Neil Young and released an album that couldn’t be further in sound from the ones that put them in the charts, on the evening news and onto teenagers’ bedroom walls. This approach – wilful and stubborn and intent on freshening things up – means that they continue to release records well into this century, playing massive, celebratory shows while remaining arty and interesting at the same time. They have, as Depeche Mode once advised, got the balance right.

Gone are the fresh faces and considered haircuts. Gone are the forced grins. Gone is the joy of popstardom. Five albums in and Blur look slightly less box-fresh than The Beatles do on that great, bleary-eyed sleeve that houses Beatles For Sale. Blur, the group’s lazily/eponymously-titled offering to their fans made little sense to many of them at the time, but as history has proven, it’s just one in a long list of albums in a year which seemed to have a properly great, must have album released every other week.

Had those queuing at midnight for the latest, bloated Oasis release (Be Here Now) swatted the grease from their shitty mod cuts and looked elsewhere, they might’ve seen what they were missing out on; Mogwai Young Team, Elliott Smith’s Either Or, Homework by Daft Punk, In It For The Money by Supergrass, Portishead’s self-titled second, Homogenic by Bjork, Tellin’ Stories by The Charlatans, Super Furry Animals’ Radiator, Primal Scream’s Vanishing Point, Dylan’s Time Out Of Mind…OK Computer… Urban Hymns… Heavy Soul…Dig Your Own Hole…The Fat Of The Land…Ladies And Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space…. Ladies and gentlemen, we were spoiled for choice.

Blur tips its cocked and wonky hat to America. Graham Coxon breathes a welcome sigh of relief and dusts down his pair of Rat distortion pedals, for the most part mothballed for the last couple of albums. They’re all over Song 2‘s hairdryer-in-a-cement-mixer ramalama, and sports stadiums Stateside subsequently went apeshit for it. Netted a 3-pointer? Woo-hoo! Smacked a home run? Woo-hoo! Steamrollered an opponent on the gridiron? Woo-hoo! Oh yeah. Gone are the rinky dink Kinksisms and cor blimey guvnor knees ups. Blur is scuffed and scarred, and listeners who’ve stuck by its insular ambience will know how terrific it sounds even to this day.

The lead single, Beetlebum, was – in a nod to the heroin of its subject matter, a heavy-eyed and down-tempo slow-burner. Hard drugs had entered the orbit of the band and their periphery – Elastica, mainly – and it seems that Blur’s lead singer wasn’t immune to their temptation. Beetlebum is intentionally woozy, the come up from heroin’s knock down and drifts in, enveloped in pathos, regret and cotton-woolled vocals.

Get nothing done, Beetlebum. Just get numb, Beetlebum

And when she lets me slip away, she turns me on then all my violence is gone,

I just slip away and I am gone

Blur – Beetlebum

Some reviewer at the time said that Blur had taken all of what made the White Album so great and boiled it down (or cooked it up) into a four minute pop song, and, man, whoever said it was kinda right. The vocals in the chorus waft in on a breath of Beatlesish harmonies, overlapping and intermingled, Damon sounding like Graham and Graham sounding like Damon, the whole band sounding pleasantly horizontal. Happiness Is A Warm Gun sung to Revolution‘s fuzzed guitars and Birthday‘s compressed drums – that smart-arsed critic was astute.

The record’s real beauty lies in the chunky rhythm fired up by Coxon’s guitar playing in the verses. His opening riff sounds like a zip tearing through sandpaper – derr dur-dur-dur, derr dur-dur-dur – before opening up on a properly clanging, open-chorded chorus. The trick to Coxon’s playing here is in not just one, but both of his hands. His left plays an unexpected chord sequence while his right intentionally scuffs it up with discordant, ringing open strings and idiosyncratic flashy parts. If it’s unique and interesting guitar players yr after, look no further.

Blur could have easily fallen into the trap marked ‘formulaic’, but with Coxon continually doing his damndest to put a metaphorical hole in the knee of their collective strides, you have the perfect push and pull that makes all the great bands tick.

Poster for a show that I’m fairly certain never happened.