A couple of years ago, to generally positive reviews, the reformed?/reawakened?/reimagined? Blur released the horrendously-titled The Ballad Of Darren album. In this part of the world it was welcomed with keen interest, not necessarily for the music, but because the cover art showed the outdoor pool at Gourock, a seaside town a short 20 miles drive up the west coast from where I’m typing this.
Gourock, like so many of the seaside towns in Inverclyde and Ayrshire, suffered hard at the advent of the package holiday. Why shiver yr bollocks off in the Firth Of Clyde when you can gently bathe them in the mildly tepid aqua blue of the Mediterranean? Why shove a roll ‘n slice down yr gub quicker than you can bat off the local divebombing seagulls when you can sit lazily under an umbrella while drop dead gorgeous Alejandro brings you fresh tapas on request? Why suffer the slops and sticky carpet of the Kings Arms when you can be supping San Miguel in short sleeves until sunset? Tennent’s or tapas? For most Scottish sunseekers there was only one choice.
At some point a decade or so ago, someone decided Gourock’s outdoor pool needed bringing back to life. With wild swimming now being a thing, Gourock’s fresh, salt water pool would be just the ticket for any locals for whom the smell of industrial strength chlorine and echoing kids as they shot out of flumes was too much. And they were proved right. The Gourock outdoor pool is extremely popular, despite the Blur cover showing one lone swimmer getting the lengths in under a slate grey west of Scotland sky, the island of Rothesay a forlorn-looking headland over the water.
And now…
Graham Coxon, chief guitar mangler in Blur is due to release a solo album called Castle Park.
So what, you say. Written down it doesn’t have the same effect, but told to any Irvinite, Castle Park – or the singular Castlepark, as we have it – will have you instantly thinking of the large housing scheme on the outskirts of the town. Built to house Glasgow’s overspill when the city was going through a regeneration programme in the late ’60s, Castlepark subsequently spawned a whole raft of rockers and writers, many of whom eked out a living in the creative arts, and continue to do so.
First Blur and the Gourock pool. Now Coxon and his album named after an Irvine housing estate *. Sometimes your interest is piqued in the most unexpected of ways.
* not really
Recorded in 2011 and swiftly shelved due to Blur re-activity, Castle Park rattles and rolls like all the best Coxon tunes do. Lead single Billy Says is terrific, a mod pop slice of Who/Diddley maracas, off kilter harmonies, na-na-nagging hooklines and a ripper of a wonky solo – something of a Coxon trademark whenever he’s given free reign at the controls. If it’s thunking great beat music you’re after, Billy Says and Castle Park is where you need to turn to.
Back in Thatcher’s 1980s, the Irvine Music Club was housed inside a converted school prefab at Castlepark Community Centre. In the name of rock ‘n roll, lots of us cut our teeth (and fingers) strangling the life out of the classics as bands were formed and augmented and chopped and changed, some of them even savouring the sweet taste of radio airplay and mild success beyond the KA12 postcode.
If it was still going today, I’d like to think the bands in the Irvine Music Club would be creating effervescent guitar-based music like Billy Says. It’s exactly the sort of manic, groove-based guitar record that would’ve had me scrambling to rip it off had I been a cocksure teenage guitar slinger with dreams of the charts and beyond.
Plain Or Pan 