Automatic by the Pointer Sisters is primo ’80s skeletal synth-funk; as slinky as Prince at his grubbiest but as pop as it comes at the same time. Built around pitter-pattering drum machines and a gulping, rubberised bassline that bulges and bounces in all the right places, it hinges itself on its 5 note synth refrain, an instant earworm from the 5th bar and regularly ever after.
Pointer Sisters – Automatic
That repetition of the hook-line in the intro is a much-borrowed idea, an old Motown trick that Berry Gordy would always insist on. By the first chorus, he noticed, listeners knew the tune and could sing it. And that, as his bank manager would point out, is yr instant hit single appeal right there.
The writers of Automatic weren’t shy in their appropriation of a great idea. They were by no means alone. Stock, Aitken and Waterman would come to rip the arse out of the idea in the short years afterwards. Whitney Houston’s writers would too. Even the Human League were partial to a bit of it. Listen out for the chorus-melody-as-intro the next time you find yourself landing on Heart 80s when you finally acknowledge 6 Music is losing its daily appeal. Automatic, like all great pop music, makes sure you know the chorus the minute it’s slapped you firmly between the ears. Take that, Mary Anne Hobbs.
Google tells me that lead Pointer Ruth’s coffee and caramel vocal is a contralto. The lowest of all female singing voices, it starts somewhere south of her ankles and snakes its way up her body as the verses make way for the familiar chorus. Sisters Anita and June add the high parts, harmonising like a puzzled Supremes relocated to some terrible mid ’80s chrome and neon video bar. You don’t need to see the video to know the trio sashay in tight dresses and back-lit hard-lacquered hair in time to the song’s sheath-like melody. Big ol’ vintage synths fizz and spark behind them, futuristic and space age even now. A rinky-dink guitar plays the melody high up the frets, like James Brown (but easier chords), Prince (again) with less flash ‘n sass, the briefest of six-string interludes in what is primarily machine-based funk music.
“Au!-Toe!-Mah!-Rhic!” go Anita and June, stretching out in simpatico, harmonies locked tighter than those dresses they’ll pour themselves into for the video.
“Automatic,” goes Ruth, sullenly dragging the words up from her solar plexus to put the full stop on things.
It’s a great record, Automatic. One that could easily have sloped off the first side of the new Janelle Monae record forty minutes ago, let alone the Pointer Sisters’ 10th album, all of forty years ago.
I’ve got a strained relationship with The Cure. They are, unarguably, one of our greatest singles bands; poppy, hooky and melodic yet strange and idiosyncratic, a band out of step with everything around them, stubbornly unique and brilliant because of it. Just Like Heaven…Hot Hot Hot!!!…Caterpillar…Close To Me…Lovecats…In Between Days…Lullaby…Why Can’t I Be You?… Friday I’m In Love…The Walk…Pictures Of You…A Forest…there’s a perfect playlist right there.
It’s the albums I struggle with. If the singles are 10 second hundred metre sprints, the albums are triathlon levels of endurance by comparison. Meandering, dark, twisty, self-indulgent – all the things I like, as it goes – I find it’s too much of an effort to properly enjoy a Cure album. There’s nothing light and airy about them, and I say that as someone who’ll listen to Radiohead until the day I die. I just slowly detach and find myself drifting off. ‘Is this nearly finished?’ I’ll ask myself as Robert and co sleepwalk their way, treacle-like, into into only the third track. It makes the thought of a live show almost too much. Even Springsteen, I bet, would find himself yawning at the two hour mid-point. My loss, I dare say.
Primary though. There’s a great track. The sole single release from 1981’s Faith album, Primary starts with a rattling, ear-splitting snare drum, played with all the finesse of a ham-fisted one-armed man. Bash! Bash! Bash! Bash! Bash! Bash! Bash! Ker-bash! If you can separate the individual instruments and voices on the record, you’ll hear that from first bash to last, the drummer never wavers from his incessant 8-bar beat.
The Cure – Primary
Backing firmly in place, Robert makes excellent use of his chorus and phase pedals, coating the track in a thick metallic swamp of rapid, scraping downstrokes and swirling chunky notes. It might sound just like his National guitar set to stun, but on this track Smith actually plays bass. As does Simon Gallup. Being unique and idiosyncratic sorts, two bass guitars on the one record is perfectly normal. While Smith maintains the song’s rhythm and muscle, Gallup wanders up and down the frets like Peter Hook in eyeliner. Perhaps surprisingly, there are no guitars on Primary at all.
It’s an intense sound, Primary. Shouty, swirly and relentlessly clattering, it finds The Cure out of step with their peers, and not for the last time. 1981 was the year when the synth became the de facto pop instrument of choice. End of year lists were populated by the Human League and Soft Cell. OMD were making inroads towards household name status. Ultravox’s Vienna was ubiquitous. Kim Wilde was doing her English version of Blondie while Clem Burke jumped drum stool to moonlight with Eurythmics. Esoteric and different, The Cure stick out as stubbornly as the Dennis the Menace haircuts they employed at the time.
The Cure – Primary (Peel Session)
Two bass guitars, one snare drum, a double-tracked voice and a whole load of imagination across three minutes – or six if you can track down the elusive 12″-only mix. Primary is a weird wee single, not afforded the status of anything in that stellar list in the opening paragraph above, but something that’s just as deserving of a place at The Cure’s top table.
This is late night music. Not upbeat, party starting music, but post-midnight meditation, meant for those wee hours that fall somewhere in the slither of space that exists just before the crack of dawn. Spun finely from ether-borne gold and slowly spooled into seamless being, the singer’s voice aches and breaks and cracks, his hot-shot band playing slow and steady, majestically understated so that the song is best served. It’s not, perhaps, the first track you’ll think of when Al Green is mentioned, but it may well come to be one of your favourites. A random shuffling of it on the iPod yesterday had me scrambling about for my battered old copy of I’m Still In Love With You, the Al album it appears on, and since then, he’s been soundtracking the weekend. Everything’s gone Green, you might say.
Al Green – Simply Beautiful
It isn’t, by any standard of imagination, what you’d call an in-your-face soul track. There’s no stomping beat, no rasping brass section, no hysterical lead vocalist hollering tears of pain down the microphone. A lot of that has to do with Green’s controlled delivery – close-miked and delivered straight from the heart – but much of the track’s introspective feel is due to Al Green’s secret weapon; the Hodges brothers.
Stax had that crack in-house band with Steve Cropper, Duck Dunn and co driving the label’s sound. Motown grooved to the four to the floor beat of the Funk Brothers. Hi Records had the Hodges Brothers. Never doubt that they’re just as influential, just as essential to the development of soul music.
The record’s producer Willie Mitchell could’ve been forgiven for flying in a female gospel trio to flesh out the song’s hook lines. He may even have thought to employ a tenor sax and a couple of trumpets to replicate that descending four note signature riff that helps anchor the song, but with the Hodges brothers on board, none of that was necessary.
Teenie Hodges
I’ve written about Teenie Hodges before. The guitarists’ guitarist and then some, Teenie is an integral part of the Al Green sound. Never brash or flashy, Teenie’s range of finely-picked arpeggios and jazz chords are the perfect foil for his vocalist’s voice. Hodges doesn’t ever get in the road of things. On Simply Beautiful, he plays very little, but what he plays – Robert Johnson-ish acoustic blues licks, cascading nylon-stringed ripples of melody and gently sliding chords – is supremely considered and tasteful and, as is the way of his playing across Al Green’s catalogue, damn-near perfect.
His brother Leroy on bass is equally economical here. Shaking himself into thudding a doe-eyed root note that lands on the same beat as the kick drum, his playing is languid to the point of being horizontally laid back. Brother Charlie on drums and/or keys (the album credits aren’t too clear) is no different. The drum pattern begins with some metronomic hi-hat and kick drum…and stays there for the duration of the track. There’s no doubt at all that Charlie (and Leroy, for that matter) could play the absolute shit out of their instruments should it be called for, but Simply Beautiful is all about The Song and they masterfully serve it.
Behind Green’s exquisitely lithe delivery you’ll hear some lovely warm Hammond, underscoring the sort of shimmering string section that made Portishead’s Dummy such a unique listen. On Simply Beautiful, the strings are equally as subtle, perfectly-placed in the background and a gazillion miles away from any of those string-driven soul stompers that you might routinely shake yr tailfeather to. This’ll allow you to listen closely between the song’s plentiful spaces where you’ll hear the overdubs of Al interjecting with himself; a spoken word here, a gravelly moan there, a high sliding falsetto to complement the main vocal. The whole thing is a masterclass in understatement, the trio of Hodges playing in simpatico to let the song breathe naturally. Simply Beautiful indeed.
We’re night four into a two week Vegas residency. An option for a third week has been pencilled in, but not yet committed to. The audio-visual wonderland that is The Sphere was mentioned from the outset, but by opening night we’re in the Colosseum inside Caesar’s Palace, its stage decked out in the most ostentatious floral display that can be mustered in a city not known for the understatement. 4000 hopped-up Anglophiles in cardigans and suit jackets stand on its velvet seats in a vulgar display of phoney rebellion, the turn-ups on their jeans almost as brazen as the bare-faced front of the singer they’re here to idolise.
Early reviews have been mixed, and that’s being kind. ‘Lumpen drums’, a bass player ‘devoid of the original’s flair and fluidity’ and, most damning of all, guitars that are ‘far more darkle than sparkle’. The singer too is getting it tight. His once collapsing quiff has collapsed to the point of thinning. He has a noticeable paunch, tucked into the high waistband of a shit pair of parallel jeans and his voice is gone gone gone. ‘Miserable Lie‘, a brave addition to nights’ one and two’s setlists has been swiftly dropped for the easier to reach ‘Jeane‘, but the guitar player – a hired LA rock guy and most definitely not Johnny Marr – can’t resist soloing between Morrissey’s lines. The knives are out and being sharpened by the encore. Johnny watches from across the Atlantic and shakes his head, his Ron Wood mod crop flopping in frustration. This is The ‘Smiths’ reunion and it stinks.
Back in his 2016 autobiography, Johnny Marr mentioned that he and Morrissey had met up and, over a pint or two, tip-toed delicately around the idea of a Smiths reunion. It was Johnny’s idea seemingly, and while Morrissey was initially on board, Morrissey being Morrissey then broke contact. Ghosted Johnny, as the young folk say these days.
If you’ve even half an eye on music, you’ll know that in the near-decade since, Johnny has built quite the profile. His live shows are sold out and celebratory, he pops up with a near Grohl-esque regularity – can we still mention him? – on the stages of his peers (James, Pearl Jam, The Pretenders, The Killers et al) and he’s collated a coffee table book featuring well-chosen words and arty shots of his arsenal of guitars. He’s often on hand to lend a quote on a matter of cultural or political importance. He even popped up on one particularly memorable edition of Would I Lie To You?
Johnny, should you need confirmation, is a Good Guy.
It seems that in far more recent times – in June just gone – Morrissey returned to his old sparring partner, suggesting that their previously-discussed Smiths reunion might in fact be (ker-ching!) not a bad idea after all. Corporate behemoth AEG, an umbrella company that owns multiple sports teams, the Coachella brand and many arenas across the globe had put an offer of a 2025 Smiths World Tour to Morrissey and Marr, and ol’ Moz, he of the ever-decreasing record sales and ever-increasing right wing tendencies, was quite keen on the idea.
It turns out that Johnny was somewhat less than enthused. It’s not for nothing that when asked by a fan on Twitter if he’d consider doing an Oasis and get The Smiths back together, Johnny simply Tweeted a shot of Nigel Farage. Matter closed.
Cue pissed off Morrissey and a statement.
And cue retaliatory statement from Johnny.
Until Johnny’s management released these words, the internet had been in a daft panic over the thought of a Johnny-fronted Smiths heading out on tour. Complete nonsense of course. That just wouldn’t ever happen. We both know that no Johnny or Morrissey = no Smiths. And there’s already no Andy. Mike? I’m not sure which horse he’d back in this one horse race. There’s no doubt at all that Johnny Marr had got wind of the possibility of Morrissey rounding up any old gang of bequiffed janglers and goose-stepping them across Europe and the States next year to celebrate the return of ‘The Smiths’. Johnny, wisely, has made moves to ensure this never happens.
The tour would have come on the back of a box set and Shirley Bassey-housed Hand In Glove reissue celebrating The Smiths debut album plus that crappily-titled ‘Smiths Rule OK‘ compilation, and Johnny, as the statement goes, has put his foot down at that idea too. How many Smiths compilations does one household need anyway? (Bizarre fact – there are more Greatest Hits compilations of boy band Blue than there are studio albums by them. Reissue, revalue, repackage ‘n all that jazz.)
Look at any Smiths record, be it 7″, 12″ or LP, and you’ll recognise it as a work of art in its own right. Old movie stars tinted in turquoise and gilded in greens, heroes and heroines presented in burnt umbers and off-yellows. The fonts stately and bold, the back sleeves always listing the principle Smiths and what they’ve played on it. Never mind what they sound like, that Smiths catalogue is one of the most iconic-looking collections in guitar-driven pop.
The Smiths – This Night Has Opened My Eyes (June ’84 demo, unreleased)
In any case, the artwork for the intended new Best Of is, by any stretch of the imagination, a disaster. It just wouldn’t do. How Morrissey, with such an eye for detail and the importance of the seemingly small stuff that folk like us obsess over could give the green light to a proposed sleeve that looks like a ten minute rush job at the end of a long Friday is anyone’s guess. It’s just as well Johnny is switched on and still cares about his band’s legacy.
This might come at a cost though. With one key Smith keen to improve his already-handsome income and the other happy to ensure his group’s back catalogue isn’t tainted, that debut album box set looks set to be shelved. For obsessives that’s a bit of a disaster. The Troy Tate tapes in fabulous hi-fi. That Cookies’ cover. An early live show with the young feral Smiths stamping their mark on guitar-driven pop. Whatever was lined up for the box set may now be confined to the dusty library shelves of the archives.
That reunion idea though. Absolutely vile, as the song goes.
One last thing before I go. That third party in 2018. The one who tried to take control of The Smiths name. Who was it?
In what might be a discarded Only Connect question, as a starter for 10 can you tell me who links Paul Weller, Sylvester and Joe Satriani?
Anyone?
A clue: he’s the same guy who links Whitney Houston, Starship and the odd Disney soundtrack or two.
No?
Bongo Bob is your answer. Bongo Bob.
A Latin Jazz aficionada, Bob worked out of San Francisco’s Bay Area in the ’80s and beyond and was the percussionist of choice for anyone needing a polyrhythmic smattering of exotica across their music. But don’t let the nickname fool you, for Bob was also the go-to guy when it came to programming computers once studios began moving from analogue to digital. One Step Ahead Bob, that’s what they shoulda called him.
That’s Bob’s computerised percussion smoothly rattling away in a none-more-’80s fashion behind Whitney as she glides through the octaves getting “so emoshunal, baybee.” His programming is all over much of Joe Satriani’s output, the sympathetic and understated backing that allows Joe to flow to his ear-bleeding max. There he is too on Starship’s perennial ‘Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now‘, his fairground ride sequencing giving the track its signature feel. Forgotten what it sounds like? Stick on Heart ’80s or Greatest Hits Radio and it’ll be with you very shortly.
Check out Bob’s extensive CV and see for yourself. If all you ever listen to is oldies radio, retro FM-blasting non-stop hits and/or classic AOR rock, there’s a chance you’ve heard Bob’s work far more than you realise.
You though – yeah, you. You don’t listen to oldies radio. Not all the time anyway. And you wouldn’t be seen dead with a Satriani album. Sylvester? Yeah, you like his stuff. Well, the early stuff, obvs. You Make Me Feel Mighty Real, really. And (trainspotters ahoy!) his groovy cover of Southern Man, but not the subsequently under-appreciated records that Bob added requisite danceability to. Never even knew about them, mate. (Sniff).
Imagine, then, that Paul Weller gets together with the Stone Foundation and at one point asks Bongo Bob along for the ride. How these planets collided is anyone’s guess, but there they are. PW and the Stone Foundation are no strangers to one another. Weller has played guitar with them on stage, laid down guitar parts on their recordings and generally elevated the status of the soul collective whenever they need it. Bongo Bob though? Weller is no slacker when it comes to collaboration. (There’s another good Only Connect question: who connects Amy Winehouse, Graham Coxon and Suggs?) But Bongo Bob? He travels a lot, does Paul, musically as well as globally. I can only think his studious knowledge of music in all its various genres somehow led him to the Californian bongo maestro and they took it from there.
A strange pairing, perhaps, but one which produced a minor Weller instrumental stomper.
Paul Weller – Mother Ethiopia (Part 2)
Perhaps in no small part to a lifelong love of the fluid riffing of Frame and Marr, I love my African music when the guitar splashes all over it like an uncontrollable fountain of joy. Mother Ethiopia is Weller’s contribution to Ethiopique Series, a long running (est ’97) thing which shines a spotlight on the music of Ethiopia. As the 30+ releases in the series will attest, lots of Ethiopian music is mainly all rhythm and horns. A very heavy thing at times. And very groovy too.
Weller’s track (particularly its part 2, above) conjures up the dusty spirit of an Addis Ababa taxi driver’s cab at peak rush hour, its tinny radio blasting warm sounds into your sweaty face. Bluesy desert guitar gives way to that great African rhythm, Bongo Bob palm slapping his instrument and fighting for ear space with an ancient wobbly synth line. There’s chanting of some sort, more sand-blown guitar, more synth, now twisting itself into weird African scales…and then the horns. They’re on the one, half James Brown, half Fela Kuti and lead a brief and funky charge. A sinewy slither of sax and trumpet weaves and winds its way between Weller’s loafered foot stomps and clipped, staccato guitar and, blown by the prevailing Westerly winds, vanishes in a dust cloud of Afrobeat. Or is it Afrojazz? The incessant rhythm only just about lets up. Magic stuff.
It’s not Changingman. It’s not Broken Stones. It’s niche Paul Weller. Worth a proper listen in your own time.
If y’know yr Bible, you’ll know that the ‘wheel inside a wheel’ idiom first appears in the book of Ezekiel. A phrase used to describe something that’s complex, maybe even over-complicated, it could well be applied to Slippery People, the Talking Heads track that hollers the words repeatedly in the song’s chorus. Not that Slippery People is over-complicated. It’s a straightforward groover of a pop song, but it’s certainly complex in arrangement, especially in its live incarnation.
The definitive version taken from Stop Making Sense was part of the holy trinity of 12″ records that soundtracked my mid-teens. Alongside Blue Monday and I Travel, it rattled on repeat from parents’ tinny living room stereos, its graphic equalisered grinding funk the foreground noise to teenage nonsense and Holsten-powered hijinks. My copy – an instant conduit to 40 years ago – has seen far better days. Low in gloss and sticky with fingerprints, it’s covered in Torvill and Dean-esque gouges of war, played to the point of death yet hanging on in there.
“…that gun, this part is simp…that gun, this part is simp…that gun, this part is simp…” (nudge) “try to recognise what is in your mind.”
“…What’s the matt…him…alright…..seven times five…come t..life…your eyes…” (and off it comes).
My Slippery People sticks and skips half a dozen times and has done for years, to the point that I should really take a Sharpie to its battered sleeve and rename it Skippery People. It’s unlistenable hell, truth be told. Any time it pops up anywhere other than on my own turntable, it really throws me when it plays through without interruption. Funny, that.
For clarity, let it to be said; that live version is a tremendous record.
Talking Heads – Slippery People (Stop Making Sense version)
The four principle Talking Heads are augmented here by bongos, bare-boned funk and minimal, morse-coding keyboards. Jerry Harrison on synth falls into a groove with David Byrne’s dirty funk guitar while Chris ‘n Tina, the husband and wife rhythm machine, play out a steady tune within the tune (wheel inside a wheel?).
On drums, Chris swings like Holger Czukay in a straightjacket, metronome-perfect, the solid bedrock that allows Tina to freestyle her bubbling offbeat notes up and down the frets as she sees fit. Clearly, there are grrreat bass players and then there’s Tina Weymouth. But you knew that already.
There’s ting-a-ling high notes on the keys, breakdowns that sound like faraway Coney Island ice cream vans in a July heat haze and Afrobeat levels of percussive flow from start to finish. The two backing singers who mirror Byrne’s spasmic jerks and respond to his “Whatsamattawithhim?” calls with enthusiastic “He’s alright!” shouts elevate the flatlining and linear studio version up, out and into the stratosphere.
Though these days he might have an ego matched only by the massive suit he wore on stage at the time, David Byrne’s gulping and hiccupping refrain remains the song’s key identifier. Magic stuff.
Compare and contrast with the science lab sterile studio version. I’ve warmed to its coldness in recent years, but having been spoiled by the live version first, it’s a clear second best to Stop Making Sense‘s polyryhthmic jamboree.
Talking Heads – Slippery People (12″ version)
The Staple Singers first had a go at Slippery People on a 1984 episode of Soul Train. Here, they emphasised the religious symbolism in the lyrics, pushed the girls’ gospel voices to the fore and turned it into a churchy song of high, high praise. Some switched on studio executive immediately had the quick thinking to frogmarch them straight into a studio where they then cut their own extended club version of the track.
Staple Singers – Slippery People (Club Version)
It’s fairly phenomenal, relying on Talking Heads’ studio original (and Burning Down The House‘s electro drum rolls) as its jumping off point, its overlapping synths and crashing drum machines set to maximum volume for ultimate ‘in the club’ effect. The guitars are, unusually for a Staples’ record, bereft of Pop’s usual wobbling tremelo but are instead suitably gritty and grindy. The bass line bends and bubbles in sympathetic harmony with the original. And the call and response refrains between the girls and their dad are joyful – listen to Pops deliver his lines and tell me he’s not having fun.
Backslidin’, how did we do? Pretty good, Pops. Pretty good.
Those first few Oasis singles…that debut album…Some Might Say and Acquiesce and two sensational nights on Irvine Beach sandwiched in-between Definitely Maybe and Morning Glory… only a middle-aged internet bore with too much time on his hands (his hands) would deny the draw of the Gallaghers in 2024.
Lest we forget, but Cigarettes And Alcohol (first heard via a free NME tape), Live Forever, Rock ‘N Roll Star, Slide Away and half a dozen other gargantuan tunes came howling through 1994’s ether like the Fab Five Horsemen of the Apocalypse, booting down barriers, barging through doors and boorishly heralding a new movement in music. Loud, insistent and vital, Oasis were the Sex Beatles for a musical youth who had experienced neither first-hand. Within the year, an overspill of a million other identikit guitar bands followed in their bow-legged swagger, the Freddie and the Dreamers to Liam and Noel’s Lennon and McCartney. ‘Any fooker can do this,’ they gobbed off to an inspired youth, and roused by the Gallaghers’ taste in cagoules and cocky northern (southern to us) self-belief, some of them actually did.
If you are a parent, you’ll be well aware that thirty years later they continue to inspire. Oasis, it seems, give forever. The young team around here are mad fer it. There’s not a local band within earshot (both the young and the not-so-young ones who really should know better by now) who hasn’t affected their postured arrogant stance or shorn their hair (“but leave the sides, mate!“) or developed a shallow affection for the Beatles on the back of Liam and Noel’s actions. There are wee guys and girls right now, finding it surprisingly easy to crank out Cigarettes And Alcohol‘s T-Rex boogie on cheap Les Paul copies, or Epiphones if they asked Santa nicely enough. There are young guys this very moment in loose-fitting corduroy and comfy desert boots sidling up to too-high microphones in rehearsal rooms that once rang with a pre-Oasis hair metal racket, their over-elaborate voice and copied attitude a poor substitute for, y’know, actual singing ability.Â
Cos unlike the (not so) great pretenders, Liam could sing. He could sing like fuck, as it goes. I’m not so sure he still can. At some point around 2000, when Oasis became a brand and not a band, he became a cartoonish parody of himself, all eeee-lonnggg-gay-teed vowels and gargle, his beak-nosed brother having perfected that open chord with bendy third string solo schtick to the point where he could trade insults with his younger sibling between verses, or sing the next song after Liam had skulked off at something he’d said. It’ll be interesting to see if Liam loses that daft hat he’s been wearing recently. Get The Hair out, Liam, and The Voice will return. It’ll be interesting too to see if Noel’s guitars have any fretboard wear lower than the top three strings.
If it ain’t broke, though, don’t fix it. Apart from the rhythm section, of course. Oasis ’25, it seems, will be just Noel and Liam and some similarly-attired and hair-styled musicians with much better chops than Guigsy, Bonehead et al. I wonder what they were thinking as the news filtered through their Amazon delivery van’s radio at 8 o’clock this morning?
“This is for all the girls,” said Liam in Irvine all those years ago, announcing Slide Away. And, as Noel eked out the opening hammer-on (it’s Don Henley’s Boys Of Summer, by the way), he pointed somewhere towards the middle distance of the audience. “Especially her over there.” Those shows introduced Don’t Look Back In Anger to a live audience for the first time, Noel ringing out those open chords with one of yer actual George Harrison’s plectrums. And both nights kicked off with the roaring Acquiesce, the Gallaghers’ love song to one another and the song which they should see fit to open next summer’s shows with.
Oasis – Acquiesce
“That’s another zero on the value of your record,” withered Alan McGee as he took a Sharpie to the cover of my 1st press (Damont) Definitely Maybe a few years ago.
The reunion thing isn’t really for me. It’ll be dynamically priced to Swift-ish proportions. You’ll be shoulder to shoulder in a field of bucket hats, miles from the stage. There’ll be piss throwing and other antisocial rubbish. You’ll be stuck behind a video screen, halfway between a mega queue for the bar and the bogs. With Kasabian as a support act. But for the young folk who want to see what all the fuss was about first-time around, I’m all for it. Mad for it, even. Had it been the Clash or whoever, I’d have been just as excited. And don’t kid yourself, you would have too.
For those old bores online who are acting as if the world has ended, watch them change their tune when the inevitable Talking Heads reunion is announced. Just wait.
If it’s mind-expanding, widescreen electronica yr after, you need look no further than Underworld.
Not necessarily the dark and longform tracks that make up the album and associated singles around Dubnobasswithmyheadman, although everything surrounding that particular release is out of this world. Nor the airbrushed and spacious ambience that wraps itself tightly around that record’s follow-up, Second Toughest In The Infants, even if such a record would see you alright for a good few months of non-stop spinning and reappraising. And not even the fantastic, Donna Summer-filtering King Of Snake; a relentless headbanger in anyone’s urban dictionary, and then some.
In recent weeks I’ve found myself returning to and wearing down the groove on an already-worn b-side, golden plunder plucked from the racks of an Irvine charity shop, a rare feat these days when anything black, round, lacquer-cut and decent – that’s the key – has been snaffled by switched-on staff or overpriced to oblivion and left to grow tatty in the subsequent months.
For exactly £2, I picked up a well-spun copy of Bruce Lee, the fifth and final single released to promote third album (their fifth, really, if you’re being picky) Beaucoup Fish. Releasing a fifth single from an 11-track record seems a wee bit desperate, so it’s not surprising to note that the single – even in its remixed form – didn’t actually chart. How many copies were pressed is anyone’s guess. Not as many as Born Slippy or Rez, that’s for sure, but for anyone who invested at the time, they were rewarded not only with the glitchy, twitchy and in-your-face, filling-loosening Micronauts remix of Bruce Lee, but also, on the record’s b-side, the groovy and propulsive (and bit of a mouthful) Salt City Orchestra remix of album opener Cups.
Underworld – Cups (Salt City Orchestra’s Vertical Bacon Vocal)
Oh man! This is where the record’s real action is. It’s light and airy, audible sunshine compared to the electrical storm brewing on the a-side, properly forward-pushing and jet-streamed pre/post-club music that would sound equally tremendous in an amber-lit West End bar as it would soundtracking an August sunrise in San Antonio.
It’s the bassline that hits first. A walking and pulsing half-cousin of Beat It with better manners. Then it’s the synth washes and faint hit of saxophone that grab you. Or is it a girl’s voice? It’s hard to say, it doesn’t really hang around. And it’s the hi-hat action, spraying away like a can of Ellnette in the seventies, never ending and hypnotic, your head bobbing and limbs loosening in subconscious time to its airy spritz. It’s also the pinging electro squiggles sprinkled on top, a marker of loads of late ’90s electronic music, but far more tastefully administered here. It’s also the way everything drops out towards the end and the potential of a whole other tune appears teasingly before the fade-out. Most of all though, it’s those trademark stream of conscious vocodered vocals, half-whispered lyrics, that, as it turns out, are wholly suggestible and full of eyebrow-raising double-entendres whenever you can make them out. Worth a Google in their own right, if that’s your sorta thing.
Underworld, as they continually prove to be, are somewhat timeless. Expand yr mind.
Lagging behind the curve again, I’ve only recently read Themes For Great Cities, Graeme Thomson’s exquisitely researched and expertly written account of Simple Minds‘ early years. The book stretches from the band’s formation on Glasgow’s southside through their infatuation with Eastern Europe and closes on Don’t You Forget About Me, the Once Upon A Time album and imminent ubiquity, and, like all the best music books, it has you scurrying back to the music with new perspectives.
It’s those early albums that are most interesting to me and, I’d assume, you too, and Thomson leaves nothing unturned in his quest to unravel the song writing secrets. How exactly does a post-punk act from Glasgow arrive at I Travel? Or the Teutonic goosestep of This Fear Of Gods? Or Sweat In Bullet‘s chrome-coated punk-funk? While their peers constructed traditional verse/chorus/solo songs, Simple Minds preferred instead to coax and tease free-flowing soundscapes from straight out of the ether, seemingly structure-free, but yet not.
Singer and de facto leader Jim Kerr freely admits he can’t play an instrument, so he’d sit in the corner as the band jammed on a riff for hours at a time, a turned-to-the-wall ghetto blaster recording it all. When the band downed tools, his work would truly begin. He’d pore over the tapes, listening out for an interesting section or bass run, guitar riff or drum beat, hone in on it and return the next day with instructions for the band on what to play. While they got on with re-learning the tune, Kerr would sketch out a lyric and the songs would slow-boil their way into being. Painstaking and longform, it’s about as far away as possible from, say, someone like Ian McCulloch turning up to the Bunnymen’s rehearsal rooms with his ego and a near-complete Killing Moon.
Kerr’s jigsawing of parts reaped rewards. Much of New Gold Dream – the thinking man’s favourite Simple Minds album and you know it – was pieced together from snippets of extended jams, not that you could necessarily tell from listening to its sinuous, gossamer textures. Charlie Burchill might be the band’s guitar player, but he barely plays two chords in a row the entire time. Instead, he conjures up a light coating of feedback here, a sequence of sustained notes there, a Chic-inspired half riff or, as on the pop-smart Glittering Prize, a wobbling Jazz Chorus-ed refrain. Like no other guitar player before or since, Charlie leaves whole blank spaces of nothing, the band’s melody carried instead by shimmering synth or inventive drumming, Kerr’s hooks or, especially, Derek Forbes’ formidable, fluid bass. With the focus always on Kerr and Burchill, Forbes was left to quietly get on with his job away from the spotlight and it is he, when placed front and central to the mix, who is Simple Minds’ secret ingredient.
Simple Minds – Promised You A Miracle
On Promised You A Miracle, the band’s specifically written for the Top 20 hit, Charlie dazzles with echoing snatches of guitar in the verse before a sparkling and fizzing (and rare for him) solo, but it’s Forbes’ quivering and magic mushroom-powered playing that provides the song’s bedrock. After every chorus he judders and jolts the verse back into being, the band holding on to his higher than high coattails for dear life, the song’s keyboard motif grounding the listener with its familiar motif. Just how familiar though would depend on how clued up you were on your House music at the time.
Bad Girls – Too Through
In October ’81, Simple Minds found themselves in New York and listening to Kiss FM. Recently-recruited drummer Kenny Hyslop became obsessed with the slap-happy and frequently-aired Too Through, recording it on his Walkman and playing it non-stop on the tour bus. Seeking more jamming inspiration, the band played along to it at their next writing session and, latching on to its keyboard hook while ignoring Jocelyn Brown’s self-assured vocal, constructed Promised You A Miracle around its disciplined yet funky framework.
Although you’ll spot Miracle-ish parts to Too Through (or should that be Too Through-ish parts to Miracle?), the end result is nothing like the inspiration. Proof, should it be needed, that that the very best bands take disparate influences and turn them into something that is uniquely them.
If you too are slow to catch on to the best music books, you’ll probably now want to read Graeme Thomson’s Themes For Great Cities. You can find it in all the usual places, but especially from the link via here.
The drop. In dance music it’s the anticipation created by the build up. The speeding rattle of the snare. The increasing intensity of the beat. The frenzied hysteria of the vocal. And then…pause. And whack! If you’ve done yr job right, the track lifts off beyond the stratosphere and out into deep space. Euphoria is fever pitch. Synapses jangle and race like bumper cars around the body. Limbs reach outwards and upwards and we. Have. Lift off. Chemical Brothers. Fat Boy Slim. Faithless. Especially Faithless. All masters of the drop.
It’s a bit different in London’s Tate Modern. Its vast, echoing atmosphere might be exactly the sort of cavernous space where filling-loosening beats and skyscraping vocals wouldn’t be out of place at all, but someone decided three decades ago to fill it with art you look at rather than dance to…and unwittingly created a visual version of the dance drop.
Take the escalator to the second floor (the tension builds), enter Viewing Room 1 (anticipation strains on the invisible leash connected to your brain), browse the rows and rows of exquisite art (the synapses start to jangle) and then…Baaam! There’s the drop.
First, it’s Georges Braques‘ ‘Mandora‘. That’s yr actual cubism, mate, in muted browns and ochres. It’s over 100 years old but still looks like the future. The guitar in the painting rings and sings and vibrates out of its actual canvas, pulling you in for a closer look, holding you there as you inspect its watery brush strokes, the detail in shaping the musician playing it and the sheer volume of sound they’re emiting. How do you go about painting something like that? Where d’you even start? What a skill to have.
Follow your nose and instinct and you’ll soon find something else worthy of special attention. There’s a whole slew of Joel Meyerowitz prints of New York; some atmospheric post-911 shots, some random photographs of brownstones and stoops and interesting people, then…Thwack!! A photograph of a Cape Cod porch at sunset that has all the isolated soul and melancholic tone of a Hopper painting. Really sensational. You’ll need to see that for yourself though. I never photographed it. Live in the moment and all that.
Turn the corner into another open gallery space and there at the back wall is…KAPOW! a Jackson Pollock – Yellow Islands from 1952, as the information card next to it tells me.
We’ve all seen Pollocks, of course. I’ve grown up wiv ’em, mate (sniffs). You can thank the Stone Roses for that. It’s a large, wall-filling painting, Yellow Islands. Possibly not Pollock’s largest, and defintely not his best, but to truly appreciate it you first need to stand back and take it all in; muted browns and ochres (again, funnily enough), but with dark inky blues and deep sea black chucked aggressively across the top of it. Move closer in and you’ll begin to appreciate the dripping white spatters of paint that run in random rivers across it. Closer still and little streaks of red appear, afterthoughts perhaps, or mistakes left in. There are too occasional light-catching sparkles – sand, I really hope. I read years ago that Jackson was fond of topping off his artwork with a sprinking of sand or ground down glass, and sometimes even a light spraying of his own blood. Maybe that’s what the red was. That would be wishful thinking though.
There’s more.
There’s (bam) a Magritte and (baam!) a Matisse and (baaam!!) a Picasso and then, baaaam!!! this absolute cracker, by an artist the luddite in me must admit to never having heard of. It’s called ‘View From The Window, Vienna‘ and was painted 99 years ago by Marie-Louise Von Motesiczky, an Austrian-born British painter.
It’s a beauty, eh? Thick oil applied to canvas, buildings topped in a dusting of snow and ice, an everyday view from a window captured forever.
The drop isn’t ordinarily a thing that guitar bands get their knickers in a twist over, but The Bug Club seem to have it sussed. Great band, The Bug Club. Take the repetitive intensity of the Velvet Underground, add some of Jonathan Richman’s mid-tempo nerdy and spoken-word swagger, add a generous portion of self-deprecating humour and then…pause. And screeee! Stomp on the Big Muff – or, as Sam did when they played Irvine at the start of ’23 – swiftly nudge the overdrive dial on the amp as far as it will go and fry those six strings in needles-in-the-red fuzz. Exactly 1 min 7 seconds for the drop…
The Bug Club – It’s Art
It’s Art is one of many great tracks on Green Dream In F#, the second album proper from one of the most prolific bands around; one-off singles, 12″ ‘singles’ with an album’s worth of unlisted bonus tracks on the flip side, limited live releases, compilation albums of early singles – of which there are many. They’re only four years old, The Bug Club, but already they’re a completist’s nightmare.
Thrillingly, they’ve recently signed to Sub Pop. Their non-stop touring might now be more manageable on a bigger budget. They might find themselves on a decent support slot. They might even crack some sort of chart or other. What’s clear is that they’ll keep writing great wee songs. And great wee short songs. Upwards of two minutes veers into nosebleed territory for the band. No frills, no fat. Guitar, bass and drums played with sonic flair, the see-sawing, call-and-response vocals singling them out as uniquely different from the others.
Plain Or Pan 