Tag: last night from glasgow

Live!

Bear Necessities

Craig McAllister

Just to follow on from the previous post (directly below this one) about existential crises and impending doom…

We had a gig last Friday night and we were setting up when someone remembered that the planets were to align in the skies above us at 6pm. Out we scarpered, not sure where to look exactly other than upwards. Not that it mattered. Our lovely west of Scotland skies, backdrop to much recent Aurora activity and crisp ‘n clear displays of constellations, comets and the ISS every now and then, were dull and cloudy and definitely not presenting us with the ideal circumstances in which to view Mercury, Venus, Mars et al as they lined up in a rare parade of perfect order.

“Never mind,” said one of the amateur astronomers in our midst. “They’ll be back again in 2040 – that’s only 15 years away.”

“We’ll be pushing 70,” said one of my pals quietly.

Fuck.

We all fell silent. Contemplating. Possibly shivering. I know I was in a cold sweat and panicking.

Yeah. Existential crises and impending doom.

At roughly the same time as we were fruitlessly skygazing, two of the leaders of the free world were bullying and verbally battering one of our world’s oppressed leaders, live on TV, in the White House, with the whole world (minus skygazers) gape-mouthed and watching dumbfounded. There’s been plenty written since; that Trump turned the whole thing into a baseless and degrading reality TV spectacle, that he and Vance approached the whole thing like an Asda-priced Tony Soprano and Pauli Gaultieri, only with far more power and reach than those two mobsters could ever have had, that the whole thing was a live-on-TV mugging, all soundbite ‘n snarl, Zylenskyy the unwitting fall guy in a power play so stinking you could, if you squinted, just about see the actual hammer and sickle-branded puppet strings working the two Americans from above. When I watched it back later, I hadn’t felt real anger boil up in me like that since…well, forever, really. Someone ought to take the big orange traitor out, and properly this time – none of that faked-up, vote-winning stunt of yore. But you knew that already.

In times like this, thank fuck for music.

It’s fairly ironic that our show last Friday featured Wojtek The Bear, a band named after a wartime bear adopted by Polish soldiers who were evacuated from the Soviet Union during WWII. The Soviet leader Stalin had taken sides with Hitler, leaving the Polish soldiers no option but to run for safety. Unhinged leader sides with Russia? Sounds kinda familiar. History repeating, as Shirley Bassey once sang.

Wojtek The Bear are terrific. They come in some quarters with that unnecessary addendum ‘Scottish band‘, a tag so derivative that it instantly conjures up images of the Reid brothers (Craig and Charlie, not Jim and William), the gallus and Glaswegian Sharleen Spiteri, the stadium conquering Jim Kerr, the bagpipe skirl of Stuart Adamson’s guitar, Marti Pellow’s rictus grin, Rod Stewart in a tartan suit… all that sort of cliched nonsense. Wojtek The Bear are a band that happen to come from Scotland, nothing more, nothing less. They’ve far more in common with fellow countrymen and women Admiral Fallow and Belle & Sebastian, groups for whom a flute solo is far more appealing than a baws oot burst of shredding, groups for whom a carefully arranged brass-augmented bridge is infinitely more preferable to a staged call and response with a debased audience. Considered. You could call Wojtek the Bear considered. Every element of their output is just-so.

They’ve three albums in circulation, released through the ubiquitous Last Night From Glasgow and much of Friday’s set is drawn from these records. One verse into the first song – Second Place On Purpose – and it’s clear that the planets have aligned after all! Bunched up across the tiny stage (the Harbour Arts Centre in Irvine – the best small venue in the country) the on-stage 6-piece meld and weave together; a chiming electric here, an open-tuned acoustic there, a trumpet refrain that cedes to a meandering violin solo, a wandering bassline in that part, a technically-awkward but perfectly executed drum pattern in this part. If you’re new to the band, that opening track is as good an intro as you could wish for.

Wojtek The Bear – Second Place On Purpose

This is pretty much the Wojtek sound – produced by yr actual Stephen Street, dontyeknow. And in the ideal confines of the HAC, you have everything you need. Here comes a melodica. There goes a Drop D. On goes a capo. On goes a Strat. Off counts the drummer – “one and two and three and four and five and six and baba-daba-dum…” A Sunday Without The Fear, Ferme La Bouche, Slowly Then All At Once, Shaking Hands With The NME. They’re intricate songs with fancy time signatures and vocal arrangements, expertly played, sounding in the here and now exactly as they do at home; approaching the midnight hour, a glass of whatever your fancy nestled in your hand, stereo turned low enough that the house won’t wake up. The best time to listen to Wojtek The Bear.

A band with impeccable taste in reading material.

They play three or four new tracks mid-set and these songs – these great songs – hint at a band only now hitting their stride, a rich seam of gold ripe for discovery. Speed Equals Distance is a standout. Kylie even more so, a song about writing too many letters to the titular Minogue, its chorus giving a huge nod and a wink to Kylie’s Got A Crush On Us by another ‘Scottish’ band BMX Bandits. Last time they were in the HAC they encored with it too, a nice bit of serendipity that isn’t lost on the Wojtek gang afterwards.

Wojtek The Bear. You should check them out before album number four takes them overground.

Latest album, Shaking Hands With The NME is available via LNFG here.

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?

Get This!

Pick A Card, Any Card

Craig McAllister

If you were lucky enough to see R.E.M. on their Green tour in 1989, there’s a good chance you saw The Blue Aeroplanes in their capacity as support act. Talk about lucky – The Blue Aeroplanes were booked, so the story goes, by a hapless UK tour agent who’d been instructed to book the Canadian country rockin’ Blue Rodeo but, thinking R.E.M.’s management had got the name wrong, booked the rising Bristolians instead.

They made a great sight and sound on those big stages, The Blue Aeroplanes, a football team-sized collective of guitar players and singers and guitar players and keyboardists and guitar players and more guitar players, stretched out in front of the headline act’s backline in a semi-circular curve, the singer hanging off the microphone in shades and the beginnings of a Dylan ’66 ‘fro. They even had a dancer – and this was before every group employed a dancer – who twisted and turned and threw shapes in the shadows as the band got on with the task of rattling out their stewing jangle, all open chords and feedback-soaked lead riffs, harmonising counter melodies played high up the frets and low in the mix. They were a good band who required more than one listen before you had the measure of them.

Thankfully for new converts post ’89, their major label debut Swagger was just around the corner. The opening track Jacket Hangs is a good distillation of that live sound that so impressed both R.E.M. and their audiences on the Green tour.

The Blue Aeroplanes – Jacket Hangs

‘Pick a card, any card,’ goes vocalist Gerard Langley, and the band is off and riffing. Jacket Hangs benefits from the group’s multiple guitarists. It’s a chorus pedal-thick gumbo of Rickenbackered low twangs and hanging chords, chattering fret rundowns and swirling arena-sized major chords. The solo in the middle rides the coattails of feedback, searing and soaring out into the great beyond and all the way to number 72 in the charts. Have we no taste, people? February 1990 might’ve found Sinead O’Connor at number 1 with Nothing Compares 2 U, and even The House Of Love had cracked the top 20 with their 93rd re-release of Shine On, but number 72?! Jacket Hangs indeed. (Full disclosure, as they say these days – I never bought it either).

The pace, the spoken vocal delivery, the ‘ohs’ as the verse climbs to the chorus (and again, the high-harmonied ‘oh‘ in the chorus that’s very Mike Mills)…it fairly brings to mind R.E.M.’s E-Bow The Letter if you stop to consider it. I’m wondering now if Peter Buck watched stage-side each night, mentally erasing the unlucky Blue Rodeo from his mind and falling for The Blue Aeroplanes in a big way. Who’s to know?

The next single from the album would fare better, but only by 9 more places.

The Blue Aeroplanes – …And Stones

…And Stones takes its lead from the solo in Jacket Hangs, adds a busily echoing morse code guitar riff and sets the controls for the heart of the sun. Building a proper groove around it – a bassline that, aye, swaggers and a bed of percussion that’s ever so slightly ahead of the game, …And Stones (perhaps in a photo-finish with That Petrol Emotion) subconsciously creates that most lamentable of genres, indie dance. Within months, Flowered Up would base most of their sound on ...And Stones. My Bloody Valentine would borrow its ambience when jigsawing together Soon. Even The Wonder Stuff, yeah, those chancers, would start getting percussive with their Black Country raggle taggle. …And Stones did it all first, and best.

Unsurprisingly, …And Stones came in a variety of remixes. The guitar-heavy Lovers All Around mix bridged the gap between classic indie rock and dance music at a time when the leap into melody-free bangs and crashes was perhaps just too much for the stripy t-shirt wearing floppy hairs from the satellite towns. And I include myself in that. You’ll need to find that online though. Gremlins are refusing to upload it here.

You can get yourself a recent reissue of Swagger at Last Night From Glasgow.

Get This!

Even The Odd One Out Is In With A Shout

Craig McAllister

It seems the Trashcan Sinatras will gatecrash the UK top Top 10 Album Chart at the end of this week. Their debut album Cake has been remastered and re-released by Last Night From Glasgow and, 33 years on from its original release on Go! Discs (peak chart placing number 74), it looks like landing at number 10. This decrees the Trashcans’ record to be not quite as popular as those by the Rolling Stones or Elton John, but marginally more so than a handful of Taylor Swift reissues. While the charts maybe don’t mean as much to anyone anymore, the group, you can imagine, is delighted.

Personally, I’m thrilled for them. Someone cleverer than I could probably make something of the serendipity of a 33-year old record taking 33 years to chart. That must be some sort of record (no pun intended), eh?

Back when the reissue was being put together it was suggested that I might write the liner notes to accompany the record’s release. A major honour and thrill, I got stuck right in about it. As I said here a few weeks ago, they were all ready to go, along with a new gatefold sleeve, a lyric sheet, unpublished photos…the full works when, at the final hurdle, the band – wanting to remain enigmatic and mysterious – decided to revert to the record’s original packaging; no lyrics, blurred photos, no liner notes.

However, in an unexpected twist, the Japanese label got in touch. Such is the Japanese way with care and attention and detail, they wanted to use not only my Cake notes on the inner sleeve of the record, but also a translated explanation of what some of the lyrics and idioms on the debut single mean. Which was nice. I got stuck right into that too.

The Japanese market for LPs is extremely healthy and, as you know, it’s not uncommon at all for releases there to become collectible to fans worldwide on account of an extra track or two or other such addendum – liner notes, perhaps – to enhance the package. The Japanese Cake comes replete with exactly that.

I’m as thrilled about all of this as the group is at their chart placing, make no mistake. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been desperately keen to get my name on a record. My days of dreaming of windmilling through an encore at the Barrowlands have all but evaporated, but this writing gig has finally allowed me the opportunity of achieving this. On such a special album too. I wonder if the record will go Top 10 in Japan?

Trashcan Sinatras – Even The Odd

If the Trashcans are new to you, Even The Odd might make a good introduction; whimisical, melody-rich and coated in a fine shimmer of acoustic and electric guitars, it features skifflish, brushed drums, tasteful feedback and a noisy and reverby breakdown with some era-defining shouty nonsense before it gathers itself together again. Frank’s voice is young-sounding to the point of being helium-powered, perhaps a reason why it’s not a song that stuck long in the Trashcans’ live set-lists. Great track and great production though.

If you want to help the Trashcans shrug off the threat of Swift and overtake Jagger and Elton to make a late push for the top 5, you can do your bit by buying the album before Thursday. Best place to get it would be via Last Night From Glasgow. A host of versions are available from them.

And finally, a message to anyone buying and listening to Cake for the first time: Wait until you hear the next album…

New! Now!

Bathe In This

Craig McAllister

The Bathers, Chris Thomson’s vehicle of unravelling melodies and swooning arrangements, moves at such a stately, tectonic pace that those other west coast hummers and hawers the Blue Nile and the Trashcan Sinatras might consider themselves in Allan Wells territory by comparison. Like a Michelin star chef marinating his secret ingredients overnight for extra devastating effect, Chris has waited 20 years and more between new studio releases before letting Sirenesque out and into the ears of anyone still tuned to his particular station. Entire bands, entire musical careers, at least 72 UK Prime Ministers at the last count, have come and gone since then. And now Thomson, with his ancient, withered, weathered, leathery vocal has crept out of the shadows bringing with him a heavy dose of pathos and regret to remind us what we’d almost forgotten about. Let it be said: Sirenesque is the finest, most autumnal – and most adult – listen you’ll have this year

The Bathers – Lost Bravado

From concept to realisation, it’s a grand album in every sense of the word; magnificent…awe-inspiring…important…all of this. Concert pianos, delicate and gossamer and bassy and rich, their notes captured suspended in solid air, form the basis of the record. From here, all manner of instrumentation pours forth. Clean twanging electric slide guitar, gently plucked nylon-stringed acoustics and fantasy land harps, subtle muted brass that might well be the ghostly breath of Chet Baker himself, chirping birdsong, the sweeping weep of the Scottish Session Orchestra’s strings, the Prague Philharmonic’s chamber arrangements, filmic and fragile and Tindersticks-tender, a coming-and-going, eerie and vampish female vocalist pitched halfway between wonky Disney and Mercury Rev’s Deserter’s Songs… it’s an album packed with ideas and invention and, crucially, control and discipline. There’s not a wasted couplet or jarring note across the record’s dozen tracks. It might’ve taken 20 years to get here, but every nuance of the record’s structure has been expertly thought out.

At its core is Chris Thomson, his close-miked ethereal whisper vocalising a very particular Glasgow; the Glasgow of high corniced ceilings and Kelvingrove and University Avenue and understated Harris Tweed and Mother India and Royal Exchange Square and croissants and coffee and 20-year old malts in the Old Toll Bar. And the words are sung in a voice of the greats, of Scott Walker, of Tom Waits, of David Bowie…very Bowie, as I’ve come to consider it. That thought struck me midway through side 2’s Welcome To Bellevue and the opening phrasing on the track that follows (She Rose Through The Isles) and has stayed with me through every subsequent spin ever since then.

I now can’t not listen to the record without filtering it through Bowie ears. It’s all there in the considered arrangements and unexpected phrasings and the time-stopping production of it all. Sirenesque is almost a companion piece to Blackstar. Seriously. And while that record’s underlying theme of death couldn’t be further from Sirenesque‘s observations on life, this new record hits almost as hard, unravelling more of its secrets and majesty with each subsequent play. In this live fast, move on, next! next! next! world that we live in, you could do worse than downpace to the thrum of Sirenesque. It’s great – Bowie great. The best kind of great.

Dive in: Last Night From Glasgow     Bandcamp

Get This!

Knocks Opportunity #1

Craig McAllister

I was contacted recently by the folk responsible for the Japanese version of the remastered reissue of Cake, the Trashcan Sinatras‘ first album. They wanted to know if I could provide an accurate translation of the meaning behind the lyrics to their debut single, Obscurity Knocks.

What, for example, does ‘I’ve turned 21, I’ve twist, I’m bust and wrong again,’ mean? Witty and pun-filled, articulate and alliterative, Obscurity Knocks is a perfect distillation of all that’s good about the Trashcans’ wordplay, but sung in a rich Ayrshire brogue, many of its metaphorical subtleties were lost to the ether.

The Trashcans (wanting to appear enigmatic and mysterious, to Go! Discs continual exasperation) kept most of their words tightly under wraps back then (although they did include Obscurity Knocks‘ lyrics on the rear of the single’s UK cover) and, in the absence of printing them on Cake‘s inner sleeve like other bands might have done, it was left to fans – and often foreign fans at that – to scribble them down as heard and offer their best versions in the rudimentary chat rooms of the nascent world wide web. Gen, my new Japanese pal, has a grasp of English that truly puts my pidgin Japanese to shame and while his understanding of the lyric was fairly accurate, I offered to go directly to the band for an official set of lyrics. A couple of messages later, I had them to hand and Gen in Japan soon had what he needed.

Gen then suggested I write something for the reissue’s sleevenotes – a Plain Or Pan-style article on Obscurity Knocks itself. Now, while that was instantly appealing – and something I immediately set to work on – I suggested going one better. I’d actually written sleevenotes for the brand new UK reissue of the album. They were ready to go, along with a new gatefold sleeve, a lyric sheet, unpublished photos, the full works when, at the final hurdle, the band decided to revert to the record’s original packaging; no lyrics, blurred photos, no sleevenotes. Enigmatic and mysterious, remember?

All of this meant that I had a set of sleevenotes without a home. Would the Japanese label like to use them? After the go-ahead from the TCS themselves, the sleevenotes found a new home in the far east. The start of this week was spent explaining some of the idioms and turns of phrase that Gen had trouble putting into pure Japanese – ‘Muscled their instruments into the mix‘, ‘A welcoming world of non-competitive leg-ups‘, ‘Baw-deep in melody,‘ (I never wrote that last one, but you get the idea) –  and there now is, apparently, a set of sleevenotes written by my own fine hand and translated beautifully and lovingly by Gen into Japanese. I really can’t wait to see what they look like.

This now means that I am left with an article on the giddy rush of Obscurity Knocks. Not one to waste things, it forms the rest of this post beyond the track itself below…

Trashcan Sinatras – Obscurity Knocks

Thoughts on ‘Obscurity Knocks’

It’s February 1990. The Trash Can Sinatras gatecrash a smattering of small, switched-on corners of the world with Obscurity Knocks, a bright ‘n breezy strumathon of major and minor 7ths that skirls and skelps and flies straight outta the traps like life itself depends on it – which it very much does. Obscurity Knocks might well be the band’s debut single, yet the Trashcans are already world-weary and wary of a music business that doesn’t quite fit their aesthetic. ‘I like your poetry but I hate your poems,’ they spit, a reference to the many rejections they had before Go! Discs came to their rescue and made them Irvine’s Most Likely To. ‘I’ve turned 21, I’ve twist, I’m bust and wrong again,’ they lament, the poker game a metaphor for their dealt hand in a life already decidedly bleak. ‘The calendar’s cluttered with days that are numbered,’ they complain, an existential crisis poetically stated in alliteration and pun. This band is something special, those words suggest, something articulate and funny and literate. Not since, oh, The Smiths maybe, has such a package come ready-made for the more discerning listener.

It helps too that Obscurity Knocks comes gift-wrapped in the greatest rush of guitars this side of The Clash and The Beatles, not in sound, clearly, but in total attitude and self-belief. That spring-fresh, hip-slung electric guitar and dusted-to-the-knuckles rattling acoustic fuse together perfectly like spit ‘n polished chrome to create a sound that can mellow a decent malt at five paces. A mesh of finger-twisting riffage at breakneck pace, they’re the springboard from which the song’s melody leaps and delights. That lightning-fast solo that pops up midway through? It brings to mind African high line and Roddy Frame and Richard Thompson and maybe even an unexpected hint of Octopus’s Garden, but it’s all over before you’ve even realised it.

Add in the tub-thumping glam stomp of a chorus, the call and response backing vocals, the drop out around the ‘Ba ba bleary eyes’ line, the zinging chords that accompany the final and decisive ‘but I hate your poems.’ Oh man! As far as stall-setting opening statements go, few bands have done better.

Some naysayers might point to Obscurity Knocks’ punning title and suggest it was a prescient fortune telling of what could have followed, but if you’re reading this, you’ll know that the Trashcan Sinatras (just the two words these days) are still very much in the business of writing and recording songs that foam to the brim with inventive guitar lines and clever wordplay. Knock on, Trashcans. Knock on.

Cake ‘n beer, Shabby Road 1991

 

 

Get This!

Sixteen

Craig McAllister

Old enough to get married, but not of the age to celebrate with a swift half down The Crown, Plain Or Pan turns 16 today.

I wouldn’t have believed you this day back in 2007 if you’d told me these pages would lead to me getting to interview Sandie Shaw, half The Smiths and a smattering of my favourite musicians, but that’s the truth. I peaked during lockdown when I was tasked with writing a biography – The Perfect Reminder – about the Trashcan Sinatras‘ second album I’ve Seen Everything. The book subsequently found its way to all corners of the UK, the USA, Europe and Japan and eventually peaked at the respected Aye Write book festival in Glasgow, where myself and photographer Stephanie Gibson, alongside John from the TCS, were interviewed on stage by BBC 6 Music’s Gideon Coe. To top off what was Aye Write’s headlining slot (and perhaps the reason why a feart and running Bobby Gillespie postponed his appearance), John, Davy and a visiting Frank Reader appeared as the ThreeCS and played a half hour set of acoustic Trashcans’ numbers. But you knew all that already.

With the Trashcans’ third album – A Happy Pocket – being reissued by Last Night From Glasgow, I was once again called to action. This time round, things have been scaled back a bit. There’s no hard back book, there’s no bespoke photographs and I doubt there’ll be an Aye Write appearace, though you never know. What we do have is something – The Full Pocket – that’s akin to more than a fanzine but not quite a book. It’s A4. It’s set in the same font as the tracklisting on the album. It’s packed full of archival photographs and artefacts. And it features all 5 band members and the occasional outside influence talking about the album and its associated b-sides track by track, story by story. I might compare it to one of those Mojo or Uncut special editions – y’know, those ‘Complete Guide to Bob Dylan’ publications that they occasionally produce?

The Full Pocket is a goldmine of TCS factoids. Funny, informative and, may I say, indisepnsable if you’ve even half a passing interest in one of our greatest under-the-radar bands. Pre-orders went online last night and it was thrilling to see the response. If you’re a fence-sitter, or perhaps an eager pre-orderer and want a sneak peek, I’ve included a short extract below. I’ve intentionally kept it shorter than the same bit in the bookzine – the band quotes are longer and more detailed in there, and I’ve not included any of the photos that will appear either. Some things are worth waiting for.

(Screenshot)

The Genius I Was (Excerpt from The Full Pocket)

Trippy, fuggy, druggy, whacked out…The Genius I Was pummels along on a tidal wave of overlapping guitars and a sneaked-in metronomic Run To You riff, coloured by needles-in-the-red zinging interludes and Frank’s buzzing fly-in-a-jar line enderzzz. Davy’s bass, solid, melodic and thumping drives the whole stramash forwards. The guitars – about 8 tracks of them, I’d guess – are phased, flanged, panned left to right and back again. A six string acoustic scrubs out the choppy rhythm as an electric zaps out the hippy, spacey stuff. There’s a lot going on here, and repeated listens reward the keenest of ears.

I must’ve played The Genius I Was about a thousand times since first hearing it and I could happily play it over and over for the next hour and never tire of its proggy, sonic resonance. Until now, have you even noticed John coming in midway through the first verse to duet with Frank from thereon in? And have you ever noticed the heavenly choir near the end as the melodies tumble and the chorus unravels? I’m sure Stephen’s voice is somewhere high within the mix. There’s a lot to unpack in what is a well-constructed track. It may be buried deep within the album, but make no mistake, The Genius I Was is one of the Trashcans’ very best.

Trashcan Sinatras – The Genius I Was

Paul: This was one of Frank’s. We worked for a while on it. For a long time, it was faster and louder and a bit queasy with those chords. It happens a lot with Frank’s songs where you’re learning it but you’re thinking, ‘What is this?’ “It’s this chord…and then you go to this chord…and then you go to that chord…”, and you’re like, ‘what the fuck?!’…

Stephen: The verse chords for The Genius I Was were there long before the rest of the song and when rehearsing we used to play them continuously, really loud. I remember the song being a two chord instrumental for some time before this.

Frank: I was sitting around on my guitar, trying to learn something when I stumbled on this nice, slideable chord. I could move it up two frets and back again, which I did for a bit, and then I went to the fourth fret and back down again. Suddenly I had a riff and it sounded weird, kinda backwards, but interesting. I played it over and over, getting into it, dang-dang der-dang-dang, it was fast and driving. And then my hands got stuck in those fret positions. I’m not a good guitar player, and I’m thinking, what can I play to get out of this?

Davy: Frank had a set of weird chords and we could never get them into shape – augmented chords, maybe diminished, I dunno, but it had a good vibe to it and was worth working on. It was very post-punky, ‘Edinburgh’, as Frank would say. The east coast bands were almost always a bit more angular and jagged than their west coast compatriots.

John: This is one that’s made by the playing on it. Davy’s bass playing on it especially is spectacular. The way he plays steady while we’re all changing and he’s just ploughing through, it’s phenomenal. He creates a really good driving sound. It’s a hard one to play live, but it’s a total belter.

Frank: I did a demo of it in the middle of the night at Shabby Road with a really simple bassline, but enough to get it started. I had the melody and everything and when Paul came in from the Hunting Lodge and heard what I’d done, he loved it and really took it on.

Hugh Jones worked on it and helped take the recording up yet another notch in the mix. Dulcimer, again, was added and everything went stratospheric, Stephen and Davy kept a driving rhythm at the core of it, Davy sliding up and down the frets with ease. It sounded fast and zingy, spooky, a bit swingy even.

Stephen: This was a real ‘studio’ production as we pretty much arranged the song as we recorded it. What linked it all together was Davy’s inspired bass playing; it’s almost a lead bass part he’s playing. There’s also some fantastic playing from Paul, especially in the choruses.

Davy: We had the tune complete before we had the title, I think. ‘The Genius I Was’ was the title of a song without a tune that I’d started years before. Frank liked it and used it here.

Frank: Davy had a sheet of words. The title at the top said ‘THE GENIUS I WAS’, all in capital letters, double underlined. The only line I took from Davy’s lyrics was the title line.

John: We should’ve done two or three mixes of it. There’s some intricate acoustic picking which you can barely hear on the finished version.

Davy: Simon Dine (Go! Discs) really liked the finished song and thought it had hit potential.

Frank: We went as far as making a video for it, sent out promos too, but The Genius I Was never got the full single release treatment.

——

 

The full version of this article can be found in A Full Pocket – The Definitive Story of Trashcan Sinatras’ A Happy Pocket.

Pre-orders are available now via Last Night From Glasgow. Click the link and you’ll have the option to buy The Full Pocket (£8) and also a multibuy deal for The Full Pocket and The Perfect Reminder (£20).

 

Live!

Aye, Right!

Craig McAllister

Indulge me.

You might remember, back in September – (Hey! Poetry!) – the sound of a trumpet being blown from these pages as long and loud and rasping as Miles Davis in the middle of an asthma attack. The reason was the imminent publication of The Perfect Reminder, a book that I wrote about The Trashcan Sinatras, one of our greatest under-the-radar bands and one of their greatest (the greatest?) under-the-radar albums – I’ve Seen Everything. If this is all sudden news to you then fear not. You can read the story behind the book here.

Since a low-key Covid-affected launch night in October (picture above) and its eventual publication, the book has found its way beyond the locality of my family and friends who felt obliged to buy it and has made its wobbly way across the Atlantic to all corners of the States and further afield to Tokyo, Osaka and Yokohama where Trashcans fans – hundreds of them as it turns out – have happily bought, read and re-read the book, Tweeting about it, seeking me out as an online pal and generally being very decent about it all. Holy Fukuoka!

And now, next Saturday – the 21st May – the book will make an appearance at Glasgow’s prestigious Aye Write book festival. I’ve been telling anyone who’s still listening to me that Aye Write is the Glastonbury of book events, which, given our prime time Saturday night slot would make us the Nile Rodgers and Chic of literature. Good Times indeed.

I say ‘us’, as quite the bill has been assembled. Ian Smith, prime mover of indie label Last Night From Glasgow, whose idea it was to put together a “posh fanzine” and planted the creative seed in ma heid, will kick things off with a brief couple of minutes to explain how his simple idea ended up becoming a hard back book of 100,000 words.

The thinking man’s John Peel, the guv’nor, BBC 6 Music’s Gideon Coe will chair a panel featuring myself and photographer Stephanie Gibson. Between the pair of us, we’ll chat about how we turned our ideas into reality, the problems we faced when writing and photographing a book during lockdown, what makes the ideal Zoom background (Pete Paphides’ was particularly impressive, Chas Smash had the most exotic) and wax lyrical about the brilliance of the book’s subject matter. Gideon, as you’ll know if you’re a regular listener to his show, is no stranger to the works of the Trashcans and was super-keen to get on board, from the initial idea to what has become its crowning glory. It’s quite the thrill to have him as our anchor man for the event.

Trashcan Sinatras – Hayfever (acoustic live at Fez, NYC, Summer 2004)

In a lovely twist, the night will finish with a short acoustic set from three of the TCS – the ThreeCS as I’ll be calling them. Due to work some more on what may well become album number seven, Frank has actually timed a trip from his home in California to team up with John and Davy, a kinda two birds with one stone mission, where he’ll sing at Aye Write and use his time here to tweak the rough vocal tracks he put down a couple of months ago on a flying visit to Glasgow. Not, that I’d imagine, there’ll be much tweaking needed. ‘Rough vocals’ and ‘Frank Reader’ aren’t normal bedfellows.

The organisers have been keen to point out that the music bit is a bonus – “We’re a book festival, remember. It’s all about the books!” so in a weird twist of billing, the Trashcans will support us, albeit they’ll go on after us. And, as much as it might be ‘all about the books’, it’s not often we get a Trashcans show in Glasgow these days, let alone one in such unique circumstances. There should be a decent audience packed in, if only for the band’s involvement.

I’m a teacher, and recently I’ve been teaching the teachers, so I’m fairly used to tough audiences who’ll ask deliberately obtuse and difficult questions. And I’m no stranger to high-pressure gigs, albeit it they were many years ago. Any hopeful young guitar strangler will have felt that rush of excitement as show time nears and the nerves begin to jingle, but in keeping with the Glastonbury idea of it all, this is our Pyramid Stage. 400 tickets in Glasgow’s plush and culturally-rich Mitchell Theatre, but not yet a sell out. I had an anxiety-inducing dream the other night that I turned up on an empty stage, one bright light in my face, and, as I blinked into focus, there wasn’t a single person in the audience. Ah, Freak Out!

Tickets for The Perfect Reminder – The Story of Trashcan Sinatras’ I’ve Seen Everything can be bought here.

It’d be great to see you. All hecklers will, of course, be encouraged ejected.

Get This!, New! Now!

Readers And Writers

Craig McAllister

I wrote a book. A proper, hefty music biography that won’t look out of place between Ziggyology and Head-On and Beastie Boys Book and Songs That Saved Your Life and Revolution In The Head and any of those other essential reads that make up your book shelf.

The Perfect Reminder tells the story behind the songs on the Trashcan Sinatras‘ second album I’ve Seen Everything – a quietly-confident-but-knows-its-place cult book about a quietly-confident-but-knows-its-place cult act. Thanks to a small team that includes a fantastic photographer (Stephanie Gibson) and a Brooklyn-based creative director with an analytical approach to typesetting and design (Chris Dooley), the finished article turned out waaaay better than expected. We got to hold it, feel it, sniff it, on Tuesday night and it was quite the thrill. The book, tactile and glossy and heavy, is also almost three times longer than my initial (now-laughable) estimate of 35,000 words, and far-better for it.

To paraphrase David Byrne, how the fuckdiddilyuck did I get here?

With the long out-of-print I’ve Seen Everything being reissued by Last Night From Glasgow, I chanced my arm and asked if I could write the sleevenotes. I had clout, I suggested. Back in 1992, I’d been around the studio during the making of the record. I was pals with the band. I’d written articles on them for local and national press; my sleevenotes would surely be wonderfully entertaining.

Clout I may have had, but that particular gig had already been promised to crack music critic and life-long Trashcans fan Pete Paphides. You can’t argue with that, I told myself, while Ian from LNFG let me down gently by asking me if I’d like to put together a “small book-type thing, a posh fanzine perhaps” that told the stories of the songs through the eyes of the Trashcans’ loyal and steadfast fan base.

There’s a better story than that, I suggested after a minute’s thought, and reeled off plans where the five Trashcans would tell their own stories of how the songs came to be; from the underwhelming initial writing sessions that filled the band with self-doubt, through to the sparkling finished product, expertly steered and produced by the affable and dude-like Ray Shulman. Despite the band separated by the small matter of the Atlantic Ocean, it would read as if the five of them were sat round a table in The Crown, telling tales of how the album came to be, each interjecting the others with contradictory tales that, when taken as a whole, would tell a version of the truth behind the making of an album that is now considered something of a lost classic, a great Scottish album by one of our greatest bands.

Trashcan Sinatras – Hayfever

“People want to know how these fabulous songs came to be,” I wagered. “The lyrics – who wrote them, what the songs were about, who the songs were about, and the music, dripping in melody and finesse – what makes it so unattainably magic, how did they come up with that wobbly sound on Send For Henny, why is there no guitar on Hayfever…the important stuff, y’know? They’re not that bothered that Marko fae Motherwell first locked eyes with the love of his life while the clanging thunderstorm of One At A Time played furiously in the background, although we’ll make space for that too. A proper music biography must be written.”

And it was. A hundred thousand words and dozens of arty photographs and eye-catchingly beautiful font later, the book, The Book – definitely anything but small and most certainly booting into orbit the concept of ‘posh fanzine’ – whatever that is – rolled off a Polish printing press, negotiated Brexit-affected customs and landed, finally, in Glasgow. It is currently winging its way to the hundreds – that’s hundreds, Archie – of TCS fans around the globe who placed pre-orders.

It’ll eventually find its way to Waterstones, Mono and a handful of select retailers. The Perfect Reminder  – titled by John from the band before a word had been typed – is very much available for order right now via LNFG. I’d recommend you read it. But you knew that already.

Get This!, Hard-to-find

Listing

Craig McAllister

I’m not one for end of year lists. I used to be. I used to spend hours refining ‘Best of the Year’ compilation CDs for my pals, sticking them snugly inside Christmas cards, eagerly received by the men, sniggered at by the wives. I enjoyed getting theirs in return – the contents equally considered, the sequencing just as agonised over, the sleeve art spat from equally temperamental printers. They functioned as snapshots of the year just gone, a ragbag of coulda been and shoulda been hits, now forgotten album tracks and one-off singles by artists who, for the main, have dropped off the radar.

Until the great PC crash of 2016, I’d spend a good fortnight in the run up to the festive period refining the running order of my Best of the Year double CD. Since the crash – and my steady return to vinyl – and the fact that my PC no longer has a CD drive (what’s all that about?!?) – my list making has stopped. My spidey senses no longer tingle in Springtime when a belter pops up on rotation on 6 Music. “Must add that to the Best Of,” I no longer think to myself. I’ve stopped appropriating the same volume of new stuff from the darker corners of the web too. That’s half the reason the old PC ground to a crashing, spam-filled halt. After deliberation, I buy from Bandcamp or the label or eBay or even Amazon, whenever the Cheap Records notification on my phone highlights something worth owning. And those wee download cards? Half the records I buy don’t come with them anymore. The ones that do lie unused. So my purchasing and playing habits have gradually regressed to the days of my youth. It’s records and that’s about it.

Crucially too, I listen to old stuff, if not exclusively, then certainly for the majority of time. I’m not blessed with a Rough Trade East or a Monorail or even an HMV anywhere near me, certainly not in a year when crossing county lines might land you in the jail. The one record shop anywhere near where I live is owned by an old rocker who stocks Japanese imports of Iron Maiden albums and overpriced Fleetwood Mac reissues. Tequila Sunrise by The Eagles is always playing whenever I enter and I always check in hope that that Small Faces album on display on the wall has perhaps lost a zero on its price tag, but it never has. It’ll still be there come the next Middle Ages. You won’t ever be tempted in there by racks of Waxahatchee and Moses Sumney fighting for shelf space with Taylor Swift and Fleet Foxes. Occassionally, a dip through the crates under the racks will produce a cracker that he places little value in – Scott 2 for £3, an unplayed copy of Sylvester’s You Make Me Feel Mighty Real on 12″ (“Och, here, if you’re taking the XTC album (also £3), you can have the disco shit on me, you’d be doing me a favour etc etc). I’d much rather find something of value in there than splurge upwards of £25 on the latest Perfume Genius record.

With so much old stuff still to rediscover, there’s no time for the new. I read these lists on social media and, honestly, I don’t know half the acts. And the ones I’ve heard of – yer Fionas ‘n Phoebes ‘n Microphones ‘n whathaveyou, I just don’t have the time or money to invest in them. I’m sure – actually, I know – I’m missing out on a whole load of great music. But…but… it’s just that there’s still loads of stuff from the 1970s to uncover. Just as you find little time or inclination to make new friends the older you get, so too do you find less time to get into new music. It seems like a lot of effort to me. It’s not that music’s a young person’s game by any means, but the music that soundtracked the formative years is the music that makes you feel young when be-slippered middle age creeps up on you and slaps you across the top of that salt ‘n pepper hair-do. I don’t care about Porridge Radio, I’m still working my way through This Is Radio Clash and Sandinista, thank you very much.

Having said that, with apologies to the acts I’ll remember and shins I’ll kick as soon as I’ve pressed ‘publish‘, I’ve very much enjoyed releases this year from;

  • Close Lobsters
  • Blue Rose Code
  • Khruangbin
  • Working Men’s Club
  • Laura Marling
  • Fontaines DC
  • Sault
  • Slow Weather

I suppose I could make that my Top 8 of 2020 – ‘in no particular order’ – and I’d fit right in.

Slow Weather – Clean Living

The Slow Weather track above is great, a gently spiralling and unfolding slow burner, a sulky Lee ‘n Nancy if picked up by one of those vending machine claws and plonked into the Scottish heartlands.

‘You’re an optimist,’ they sing in unison. ‘I’m a realist‘. Music box percussion tinkles and the track wanders its way to a treacle-slow coda somewhere between Super Furry Animals and somnambulism. If tectonic plates made, er, rock music, it might sound like this.

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The truth of the matter though is that I’ve also very much enjoyed rediscovering Loaded by The Velvet Underground, De La Soul’s first half dozen singles on 12″, Elvis Costello’s Get Happy!!, The Specials’ debut, Underworld’s Dubnobasswithmyheadman, I’ve Seen Everything by the Trashcan Sinatras, Another Music In A Different Kitchen by Buzzcocks, Wire’s Pink Flag, The House Of Love’s gnarled and shimmering back catalogue and a million other things I’ll always return to – my real Best of the Year.

The polls would suggest 2020 has been something of a good year for music releases. I’ll probably be able to concur sometime around 2045 – ‘a vintage year‘ – I might even proclaim, should I still be shuffling my shoes to the groove. Not for nothing is the tagline above Outdated Music For Outdated People.