Get This!, Gone but not forgotten

The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Any More

Craig McAllister

We had big snow here a couple of weeks ago, the proper Hallmark/Hollywood cotton wool stuff. Great for a day or two then a treacherous pest for the rest of the week, it was just too early for Christmas. Snowed in with a classic film and a houseful of food and drink is not a bad place to be. Getting to and from work when your street is an ice rink and it’s barely light in either direction not so much. We’re now back to rain, torrential today, and the sort of wind that can whip your car door straight outta your hands if you’re not expecting it. (It did, I wasn’t. The car parked beside me seemed scarless afterwards though. Quick! Run!)

It’s at least half a week too early for Christmas music on here, so as the days creep ever-shorter to Friday’s Winter Equinox, there’s no better time to blow the dust off of Scott 3 and let it play, softly and gently, as the weather conditions – which they haven’t yet personified with a daft human name – swirl madly outside. Scott 3, Scott Walker‘s third album, funnily enough, is stately and grandiose and packed full of Ivor Raymonde’s searing and soaring string scores, practised on Dusty and perfected deftly with each subsequent Walker Brothers and Scott solo release. If you’ve never experienced it, you must do. If only for the cover art at least, I think you’d love it.

Scott Walker – It’s Raining Today

Eye Tunes

It’s Raining Today is the album’s opener, perfect for our current winter weather and a handy stall-setter for what follows on the rest of the record. It begins with the eerie scrape of high pitched, disconcerting strings – exactly the sort of strings that Jonny Greenwood has taken to employing across The Smile’s and Radiohead’s more outré work – before a pulsing two note electric bass and classically-strummed nylon acoustic offset the jarring with a bit of colour. There is too, you notice, a subtle foreshadowing cascade of icicle percussion, spiking the brain, preparing you for Walker’s tale to unfold. ‘It’s raining today,’ he croons almost immediately, ‘and I’m just about to forget…the train window girl…that wonderful day we met…she smiles through the smoke from my cigarette…‘

The melody rises and falls, ebbs and flows with Scott’s perfect delivery – smooth, slow, almost somnolent – providing a real cinematic cocoon to the world outside. You can wrap yourself right up in It’s Raining Today. Stick it on and you, the listener, are safely sheltered from the storm of life, metaphorical as well as physical.

Then…don’t get too comfy…the strings take a sudden dischordant and unnerving tumble and Walker is lost in a fog of nostalgia and regret, the song’s melody creeping like the coming of winter’s equinox itself, the fingers-down-the-blackboard strings now slow-bowed and majestic, sliding down the scales to the lowest notes possible. They’re the only instruments in the mix until right at the end, when a ripple of piano and the familiar refrain of percussion and edgy strings leads us back to another verse, the titular refrain leading us to cellophane streets and street corner girls and cold trembling leaves. Great imagery.

A few short years before this, Walker and his Brothers were headlining a wonky package bill that included Cat Stevens and the Jimi Hendrix Experience, one of three mis-cast teen idols desperate to cut the puppet strings and call their own shots. By Scott 1, Walker was. By Scott 3 he was deep in the throes of auteurship. Magic stuff.

Live!

James Sit Down

Craig McAllister

James Grant, Harbour Arts Centre, Irvine. Saturday 9th December.

James Grant has a dry, wry sense of humour, punctuated flawlessly by pin-perfect comic timing. “D’you know where that cover shot was taken?” he asked me a few years ago as I offered him my copy of Love And Money’s debut LP to sign. “We were in the Mojave desert. It’s sunset and I’m standing on top of a railroad train. The orange glow of the setting sun has captured perfectly the silhouette of me and my guitar and my out-to-here quiff.” He gestures the impressive length of quiffage as he signs the cover, hands back my sharpie and, lip curling into a self-conscious smile of pain, looks me in the eye. “What a fanny I was.”

He’s a brilliant live act, is James. From the jangling-clever Friends Again through the west coast soul (Scotland, not California) of Love And Money, to his solo records – records that ring with skilfully-picked acoustic guitars accompanied by a rich, caramel voice that has aged like a decent malt, James has the songs, years and years of them.

And he has the stage presence. He’s languid, perched cross-legged on a bar stool, his always sartorial self folded around his acoustic guitar, elbows and knees jutting out like a particularly stylish Scandinavian angle-poised lamp. He speaks in a slow and rich Glasgow burr, quietly, and his audience goes respectfully silent in his presence.

He begins both of his sets on Saturday with a lovely, understated take on Friends Again’s State Of Art. Where the original is all gated drums and rattling, jangling, downhill-without-the-brakes-on semi-acoustics that will be forever-tied to the ’80s – and magic for it, let it be said – the 2023 version has relaxed a bit, stretched its legs and grown more into itself. The words (sung originally by Chris Thomson) are enunciated clearer, the chords are strummed slower, the rich melodies pulled from the six strings like an alchemist teasing liquid gold from cold metal. A state of art indeed.

What an opener and stall-setter. For an hour and a half, James treats the audience to faithful and expertly-played takes on songs that run the whole gamut of life, the double weights of death and existential angst being seemingly particular favourites. My Father’s Coat, Lips Like Ether, Hallelujah Man, Whisky Dream, Winter (“the closest you’ll get to a Christmas song from me“), brush past naked and true, their modesty covered in low-bowed and heavy, sympathetic cello, played superbly by cellist-about-town Maya Burman-Roy.

Now and again, James will take the edge off the downbeat nature of the performance and lighten the mood by dropping in a funny story or two. Stories about his dad make regular appearances. As do tales of life in a chart-chasing pop group in an era when the business was awash with cash. Sometimes the subject matter combines. His dad would end up being in the video for Love And Money’s Jocelyn Square, immortalised on celluloid with his permanent nasal drip captured forever in monochrome. “Who’s paying for all this pish?” inquires his dad on-set, eyeing up the machinations of the industry. “Eh, I am, dad,” says James sheepishly.

As funny as his stories are – and James has some real rippers – it’s the music that endures. James is a fantastic guitar player, often sounding like three guitars at once, his combination of augmented chords and rippling, tumbling lead fairly giddy and awe-inspiring when seen up close. It dawns on me mid-set that James is one of my favourite guitar players. He can pick the fuck out of six strings, but where many acoustic players use Travis picking or a similar pattern of finger playing, James very much favours the plectrum. And not just any plectrum either. I notice, on his bar stool at the close of the show, that he’s been playing the set with a Bowie Aladdin Sane pick. Even heroes have heroes. Watch that man!

Get This!

Explosive

Craig McAllister

A film. Bleached out print, grainy in places with muted, filtered, Instagram-to-the-max colours; subtle mustards, pale yellows, murky beige, an occasional dazzling flash of suppressed ochre. The script is suitably gritty and realistic. Adapted from a forgotten and long out of print novella, the producers have secured the services of the era’s hottest shot; a Harry Palmer/Michael Caine type, perhaps, to lead the line and provide the necessary look that’ll pack out the Locarnos and Empires. Tough guy for the boys, eye candy for their dates, all marketing bases covered. The soundtrack is, of course, spectacular. Seven sharp and sudden stabs of brass and away we go. But more of that later.

The key scene – the one that’ll be quoted and re-enacted and ripped-off in tribute down the years – begins with a car chase. The car in front is an open top Triumph. Of course. It is flame red with silver spokes that glint in the low northern winter sun. Driven erratically and far too quickly, its back end swings out as it takes a bend at top speed. While its driver drops a gear to compensate – we never see his face, but it’s the late 60s, so we have to assume it’s a ‘he’ – the leather driving glove would back that up –  an oncoming Hillman Minx is forced to swerve. It briefly mounts the pavement, causing a man in a bowler hat to jump backwards. His folded broadsheet falls from under his armpit. A woman pushing a Silver Cross pram stops further down the street, taking in the scene in disbelief.

The car behind the Triumph is a midnight blue Jensen Interceptor and unsurprisingly, it is gaining on the Triumph. The Jensen’s driver has gritted teeth, slightly yellowing, even for a movie star, (and uneven too), that chew on a thin toothpick as he drives. His thick, black-framed glasses fill his handsome face and now and again the camera picks up the reflection of the Triumph in front. Steel blue eyes unblinking, the driver focuses on his prey, mentally calculating how quickly it’ll be before he’ll reduce the gap to zero. The Triumph makes a sudden and unexpected veer to the right, the screech of its tyres heard faintly above the roar of the Jensen and the accompanying soundtrack – momentarily switched to a frantic, four-to-the-floor bass and drum beat, with the tune’s signature brass no more than a short, sharp, intake of breath away.

Gears are changed, oncoming traffic is slalomed around and we’re suddenly in a multi story car park. The Triumph in front is always just disappearing around one of its tight, whitewashed corners, the metal buffers buckled and scraped, warning signs to the dangers of driving above the recommended 5 mph, but the Jensen never loses sight of, or distance, on him. The Triumph will get to the top floor and have nowhere else to run, and our hero in the Jensen knows this. He will happily drive upwards and onwards and wait for his inevitable moment.

But hold on! The driver of the Triumph is getting out! He’s abandoned ship around the next turn and left the door open in his haste to escape. The Jensen driver just catches sight of him as he runs off, a briefcase clasped across his chest and held in place with one arm. The Jensen immediately pulls up into an empty space – the multi story is deserted, of course – it’s probably Sunday – and the lead actor – the tough, the guy eye candy – sets off in pursuit. The man with the briefcase has entered a staircase and our man follows. Briefcase guy takes the stairs two at a time, the belt buckles and tails of his tan Mackintosh billowing behind like sails, the drag factor slowing him down. Just behind, our man, dressed (of course) in a sharp two-button mod suit, remains hot on his heels. His matinee idol hair, generously lacquered to his scalp, remains immovable. Even the windswept quiff is stiff and unswaying. His glasses stick firm to his face. The toothpick too is still clasped between those gritted teeth. He’s not even broken sweat. The bass guitar on the soundtrack pulses with Cold War dread, all der-der-duh-der-der boogie-woogie spy theme menace, each beat thudding out with every step on the staircase. This music actually seems to spur the Triumph’s driver on. Is he getting away from Harry Palmer/Michael Caine? I think he is. Is he?

Is he heck.

We catch a glimpse of our lead actor’s watch – an Omega, naturally – as his left arm stretches out and the leather driving glove tap-tackles his quarry. The man in front slides ungracefully on the stairs, the leather soles of his shoes suddenly unsuitable for hot pursuit, and he tumbles awkwardly. The Mackintosh opens wide as his hand falls from across his chest. The lining – Burberry – flaps wildly as the briefcase clatters to the floor, bursting open and sending a snowfall of classified documents down the spiral staircase; blueprints and Eastern European-language papers that sashay and helicopter downwards in slow motion, a total contrast to the franticness of the cars and their runners just moments before.

“Suddenly it struck me very clear…” sings the vocalist on the soundtrack. Has the volume turned up a notch? There’s no dialogue, but you can hear the breathless grunts of the two actors as they slip and slide and tangle and detangle and ankle grab and kick loose on the metal stairs, a sinewy keyboard line snaking between their huffs and puffs. The contents of the briefcase, by now strewn across the floor, provide another slippy surface – “They can’t have it, you can’t have it, I can’t have it too…” – but Palmer/Caine/the goodie has rumbled and wrestled the Triumph-driving baddy into a corner. As the Locarno crowd go wild for their champion, he pulls (from nowhere) a set of handcuffs and fixes the villain of the scene to the metal hand rail of the stair case.

“Make y’rself comfy, princess,” he sneers, toothpick jiggling up and down with each East London phoneme he spits. “The boys’ll be round in a bit to ‘ave a little word.”

The scene cuts. He’s back in the Jensen, roaring out of the brutalist car park, its dull putty-white concrete backdrop showing off the Jensen’s cool midnight blue finish. Our main man rolls down the driver’s side window. He spits out the toothpick before leaning his right arm on the windowsill. The music picks up again, the tune’s 7-note horn refrain and thumping rhythm section taking us home. “Until I learn to accept my reward.”

Teardrop Explodes – Reward

Julian Cope wanted Reward to sound like a long-forgotten spy theme played by the mariachi trumpets from Love’s Forever Changes LP. He fairly succeeded. And then some. Play loud, as they used to say.

Any directors needing a scriptwriter and/or music synch guy…hit me up, as they say nowadays.

Gone but not forgotten

Shane MacGowan

Craig McAllister

Ach. Shane MacGowan. The literate libertarian and rabble-rousing romantic has drunk and sunk his last pint. Drink up, shut up, last orders. Time gentlemen, please. 

When those pictures appeared a week or so ago showing a frail Shane propped up in bed, visited by pals and barely able to smile for the camera, it reminded me of the last days of my dad’s life, of his pals dropping in to say their final, unsaid goodbyes, of big grown men leaving the house in tears. To be honest, the pictures of Shane made me feel uncomfortable, unnecessarily voyeuristic, but for anyone who’s watched a loved one slip away, those candid snaps were an obvious foreshadow of what finally arrived at the end of the week just gone. 

Like many, I’ve binged myself on The Pogues since the news of his death broke.

I first heard of The Pogues in 1985, and only because I turned up to participate in a Bible quiz being held in an upper room of Kilmarnock’s Grand Hall. (That story has been told on here before.) It wouldn’t be long until I properly heard the MacGowan voice, that very same night, as it goes, bellowing up in fluent MacGowanese from the floor below, in-between the stuffy quizmaster’s boring questions. 

“In which book of the Bible did…”

“ahve been ssspat on, ssshat on raypedandabyooozed…“

“…Daniel encounter…”

“Sackafackazzzzhzzzzyoubastardzzz!!!“

“..a Lion?”

(Thump, clatter, diddly-dee, stomp, stomp, stomp.)

By the end of that week I owned Poguetry In Motion and never looked back. 

The Pogues’ Christmas Barrowlands shows, especially the one with Joe Strummer joining them for Clash songs, were some of my favourite-ever gigs. After the Strummer one, I nearly fainted through heat exhaustion from non-stop jumping about in a very crushed and over-sold crowd. A medic made me sit against the wall of the stairs on the way out until I’d recovered, necessitating in a mad sprint back down the Trongate and Argyle Street for the last train. By the time we’d made it, my old suit jacket was stiff from frosty dried sweat. Thawed out on the train home and back at my house, it was a stinky, soggy, shapeless mess. I hung it in the shower to dry until the next morning, when I shook out not only Joe Strummer’s actual plectrum but enough crystalised sweat to keep Mama’s chip shop in salt until the next Pogues show. Memories, as the song goes, are made of this.

By chance last night I stumbled across Julian Temple’s fantastically revealing ‘Crock Of Gold’, a two hour documentary on the life of Shane MacGowan. Culled from old interviews, both film and audio, with archive footage of Irish life and additional filmed segments from three or four years ago, it’s an absolutely essential watch and a key insight into the life and psyche of MacGowan.

Shane’s ability to romanticise the unromantic is there right from the start. Reminiscing about his early years in Tipperray, he talks about the “sepia-brown farmhouse where they pissed out the front door and shat in the field out the back….” In a series of torn and frayed photographs, the MacGowan clan is shown to be tight-knit and stern faced, the wire-thin men in flat caps, faces lined like cartographic maps of rural Ireland, the handsome-faced women with arms folded over necessary pinafores.

His upbringing was equal part prayer and profanity. “Fuck is the most-used word in the Irish dictionary,” he says. His uncle educated him on Irish history and its peoples’ continual fight, a subject that would permeate much of his songwriting. His auntie Nora too was a major influence on him, introducing him to stout and snout at the age of 5 or 6, just before the family would move to England. By the time Shane had been integrated into the English school system, he was a two bottles of stout a night veteran of the stuff. 

The family hated England. Despite his dad’s decent job, they were bog Irish. Thick Paddies. Outsiders. Shane rebelled. In the film, his dad notes with disdain the very moment Shane went properly off the rails.

“It was that Creedence Clearwater Revival,” he spits quite unexpectedly, in a tone normally reserved for discussing who might’ve nicked that morning’s milk from the doorstep and ran away. 

Youthful dabbling in substances followed, expulsion from school not long after, with psychiatric electro-therapy just around the corner. Forever the troubled outsider, Shane found his calling in the filth and fury of punk. “I was the face of ’77!” he quips, before lamenting the movement’s inability to truly change the world. “All that we had left at the end,” he laments, “were brothel creepers, a few bottles of Crazy Colour and the dole.” 

He’d discovered what a life in music might offer though, and set out to change the way Irish music was viewed. “Everyone was listening to ethnic music, so I thought, ‘Why not my ethnic music?’” The Pogues were born and the songs, poetic and proud, educating and enlightening, soon had an enthusiastic following. When asked how he goes about writing a song – “Can you write sober?” asks an interviewer at one point – Shane states that the songs are floating in the air – “that’s why they’re called airs,” he reasons, and that he reaches out to grab them “before Paul Simon does.” 

The Pogues – A Rainy Night In Soho

Could Paul Simon have written a song as sweeping and grand as A Rainy Night In Soho? Or The Broad Majestic Shannon? A song as political and hard-hitting as Birmingham Six or Thousands Are Sailing? A song as simple and melancholic as Summer In Siam or Misty Morning, Albert Bridge? A song as joyful and carefree as The Body Of An American or Sally MacLennane or Sick Bed Of Cuchulainn or Streams Of Whiskey? Of course he couldn’t. No one could write songs like these ‘cept MacGowan. From waltz-time bawlers to night time weepies, he covered all bases.

You’ll hear Fairytale Of New York – “Our Bohemian Rhapsody” a lot in the coming weeks. Nowt wrong with that, of course, but I’d like to direct you to an essential source of one of its ingredients.

Ennio Morricone – Deborah’s Theme (Overture)

Ennio Morricone’s Deborah’s Theme, from Once Upon A Time In America, is slow and stately, majestic and magnificent. Shane thought so too, making good use of the motif that he’d write – ‘It was Christmas Eve, babe/And then we sang a song/God, I’m the lucky one‘ – across the top of. A powerful, beautiful piece of soul-stirring music that gave rise to another.

Shane Patrick Lysaght MacGowan (25 December 1957 – 30 November 2023)

One of the greats.

 

 

 

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…

Get This!, Live!, Sampled

Hidden In The Back Seat Of My Head

Craig McAllister

That triptyich of ’90s solo albums which spawned the rebirth of Paul Weller deserves to be looked at again. 1992’s self-titled debut was the result of the artist being given free reign to reinvent himself, with no great expectations from a record company (Go! Discs) simply keen to offer one of our greatest songwriters the platform on which to start afresh. By 1995’s Stanley Road, Weller had entered his third imperial phase; once again a regular botherer of the charts and the elder statesmen to whom the leading lights of the day looked for validation and support. The record in the middle, 1993’s Wild Wood, is perhaps the most interesting – and best – of those three releases.

Having ‘done’ inner city angry young man and broadminded European mod, Weller looked to the English countryside for inspiration. Still unsure of who his ’90s audience was, the singer decamped to the Manor, a residential studio in the leafy Home Counties and, surrounded by trustworthy people and a handful of his favourite records, holed up to hang out, play, write and record the tracks that would become the Wild Wood album. The inner sleeve photos on the record suggest the perfect scenario for making a classic record; family and kids on the lawn, footballs, a grinning Weller astride a scooter, a home-from-home environment where inspiration flourished.

Much has been made of Weller’s listening habits during the making of the album, and the acoustic influence of Traffic and Nick Drake has oft been quoted as a source of influence, but I’d consider Wild Wood to be Weller’s Neil Young album. Loud in-the-mix acoustics ring throughout the record, attacked by Weller’s uncompromised strumming and finger picking. He might be playing a Martin, but he’s attacking it with all the fervour he normally reserves for his Casino. This is apparent on Foot Of The Mountain, its minor chord balladry giving way to an ebbing and flowing, sprawling and ragged electric outro, the rest of the band riding his coat tails for dear life. The Young influence is there too in Country‘s close-miked pastoral picking and whispered vocal. ‘Where only love can heal your heart,’ he sings, one eyebrow arched in a knowing nod to whiny old Neil as a woozy Mellotron adds a Fabbish, late sixties hue to the mix.

Wild Wood is an album that, augmented by subtle Hammond, delicate woodwind and thunking great gospel piano, showcases the best of Paul Weller. It’s there in the ferocious riffing of Sunflower and The Weaver‘s thrilling hammer-ons, the pastoral campfire soft shoe shuffle and two note dubby bass of the title track (it’s no wonder Portishead highlighted it as something to twist and turn and send into orbit), to the handclapping and roof-raising Can You Heal Us (Holy Man) and the jazz inflections of album closer Moon On Your Pyjamas.

My absolute favourite from the era though isn’t actually on the initial album release.

Paul Weller – Hung Up

As is his forever forward-thinking way, Weller had barely finished the record when he embarked upon another lap of writing. Too late for the album, Hung Up was released as a stand alone single. All the best bands, as you well know, release magnificent stand alone singles and Hung Up is undoubtedly Paul Weller’s addition to that list (even if, at some point, it was clunkily tacked on at the end of the record when Weller’s popularity began to soar.) It’s a fantastic single, Weller self-assured and riding in on a great chord sequence (C – Fm – Am – Fmaj7) before the band joins him on a chugging, descending Beatlesy progression, crisply distorted and fluidly played. The pace, the playing; perfection.

It’s the song’s bridge though that elevates the track from merely great to simply outstanding. It’s a real cracker, all loose piano and finger-squeezed guitar couplets – pure Small Faces mod-gospel with the vamping ghost of a PP Arnold-alike oozing in on the second line, her sky-surfing vocal lifting the track into orbit. Then we’re into the guitar solo. No fancy pants pedal boards here, it’s simply vintage guitar into vintage amp and the strangulation of a nimbly-rifled solo that’s halfway between Marriot (Steve) and May (Brian – really). And there’s still time for Steve White – there’s always time for Steve White – Wild Wood‘s secret, unsung hero to rattle seven shades of Gene Krupa from his kit with the mother of all drum fills, before it all ends with the singer and his acoustic guitar once again, wrung out, hung out and Hung Up in under three thrilling minutes.

*Bonus tracks!

Paul Weller – Hung Up (Live at the BBC)

Lovely wee bit of studio chatter on this version.

Paul Weller – Wild Wood (Portishead Remix)

Pistol crack snare, clacking, clipped guitar, murky dub. The drunk wasp guitar riff is a beauty. Weller had some great remixes around this period and this is one of the best. Never ever outstays its welcome.

 

 

 

Get This!, Gone but not forgotten

Not Dodgy

Craig McAllister

I spent some time in the company of Dodgy’s Nigel Clark at the end of last week. He was up doing a one-man show – all the Dodgy hits, a few of his own solo songs, a smattering of carefully-chosen covers (Tom Waits, Frankie Valli, a spontaneous run-through of the new Beatles single), all interspersed with off-kilter chat and rueful observations on life in 21st century Britain. He’s a massive soul music fan – that would explain the cover of ‘The Night‘ that he ended with, and the various soul covers that constitute those early Dodgy b-sides – and thrillingly, he played a version of a fantastic Stax track from 1975 that was totally new to me. The song found a home in my ear and, after many YouTube plays and before I’d gone to bed in the wee hours of Saturday morning, I’d found a copy of the 7″ online and bought it. I think you’ll like it…

Freddie Waters – Groovin’ On My Baby’s Love

Tinkling Fender Rhodes, descending chords playing against up-sweeping strings, a slow ‘n steady groove of snare ‘n kick drum, a cooing female backing vocalist going against the grain of Waters’ gravelly soul man voice in the chorus…there’s no chicken-scratch guitar or tasteful Cropper-esque blue notes, nor nary a whiff of honeyed brass, yet it has all the necessary ingredients, as Ray Charles one said, in a recipe for soul.

The bridge –‘some people worry ’bout simple things‘ – is pure grits ‘n gravy Memphis soul. In the hands of an Otis Redding or a William Bell or a, yes! Al Green, Groovin’ On My Baby’s Love might’ve bothered the pop charts. And maybe it did, but apparently, very little has been written about either Freddie Waters or Groovin’ On My Baby’s Love so I don’t know about that. I’m certain some switched-on soul brother or sister here will keep me right though. Typically, the track alone should have both singer and song held in far higher regard than the world seems to afford them.

There will, of course, be hundreds of songs like this, floating out in the ether, waiting for the record collector’s butterfly net to catch them as they flutter past. By way of payment, I sent a suitably gobsmacked Nigel a link to Darondo‘s Didn’t I. Featured here a few years back on the recommendation of Gerry Love – another soul-loving beat group employee, as it goes – it deserves another shining of the Plain Or Pan spotlight.

Darondo – Didn’t I

Obscure-ish mid ’70s soul recommendations most welcome. Add them in the comments below.

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!, Sampled

And They Catch Him And They Say He’s Mental

Craig McAllister

Spring-Heeled Jack was a Victorian character of folklore; a leaping, springing, impish and devilish figure with gentlemanly characteristics that might tear you in two with his clawed fingers or simply stare you half to death with his fireball-red eyes. He was able to leap high across the sooty rooftops of old London town and vanish quickly into the thick and murderous night. I’m sure he must pop up (and pop off again) in some Sherlock Holmes story or other, but I’m no Conan-Doyle expert. If he doesn’t, then that’s a perfect opportunity wasted, Arthur. It truly is.

Spring-Heeled Jim is a track off of Morrissey‘s last great solo record, Vauxhall And I. Still dressed in decent jeans and with great hair, Morrissey takes the idea of Spring-Heeled Jack and turns the Victorian villain into a post-War East End gangster – pwopah salt of the earf, loves his mother, makes sure old Mrs Jones’ milk and paper is on her doorstep each and every morning…you gotta look after one annuva, aintcha? The sort of a figure that’s part Ronnie and Reggie Kray and part Jack-the-lad, just don’t you dare cross him. I’m sure you get the idea.

Morrissey – Spring-Heeled Jim

The track creeps in on a highly atmospheric guitar track, all stealth and menace and ominous foreboding. It rolls slowly and stately like a pea souper curling from the Thames, a mixture of high in the mix plucked acoustics and a wash of reverb and sustain that would probably be more at home in Kevin Shields’ home studio but in the surroundings of a Morrissey record sounds exotic and perfectly-placed as track two’s wrong-footing mood setter. There’s sampled film dialogue playing in the background and, just as you’re trying to place it (it’s very Morrissey), the chords change and Morrissey makes himself known.

Spring-Heeled Jim winks an eye

He’ll ‘do’… he’ll never be ‘done to’

He’ll take on whoever flew through

It’s the normal thing to do

There’s scene-setting and then there’s Scene-Setting and Spring-Heeled Jim sets out its – his – stall very clearly.

So many women his head should be spinning…Spring-Heeled Jim slurs the words…once always in for the kill, now it’s too cold.

He’s an old soak, is Jim. Happy to sit in his armchair, French brandy by his side, Daily Mirror lying open at the racing pages, ready to share his stories with his many visitors – he still demands respect, after all. He’s a one-time womaniser who’d cut you from ear to ear (from ‘ere to ‘ere) should you as much as look at his female companion, although that’s probably all for show anyway, as Morrissey has pegged him as a mixed-up individual with latent homosexual tendencies that just won’t cut it in the world Jim has chosen for himself. (That’s just my opinion, your honour.)

That film dialogue that runs through the track until the last, “…and they catch ‘im and they say ‘e’s mentuhl” is from We Are The Lambeth Boys, a late ’50s documentary that follows a gang of young south London teddy boys, aiming to disepl the myth that they’re violent and delinquent youths.

When the plummy, clipped accent of the presenter isn’t spoiling things, the Lambeth Boys ride in an open top truck singing “We are the Lambeth Boys!” and shouting “‘allo darlin’” at every female they pass. They sing cockney knees-up ditties. They go to the dancing and eye up the girls (or boys) on the opposite side. They sidle up to prospective partners and with a cool nod of the head, lead them on a quickstepping jitterbug around the floor of the dusty dancehall while Lonnie Donegan’s ‘putting on the agony, putting on the style‘ skiffles its way to its conclusion. They care very much about their hair and their two-piece suits and ties. They also smoke like the London of the industrial revolution. As far as social history documentaries go, it’s a must watch.

Give yourself 50 minutes and watch the full thing here. You’d love it.

It’s an obvious Morrissey go-to, We Are The Lambeth Boys. There’s the us-against-them gang mentality that he instilled in The Smiths and every other group he’s formed around him since. There’s the rock ‘n roll reference points. The haircuts. The clothes. The attitudes. The good-looking male protagonists. Any still from the film could have been a piece of Smiths cover art.I can’t emphasise just how essential a watch it is!

For being fiercely Mancunian, Morrissey seemed to form a special bond with London in the early ’90s. That train heaved on to Euston and before you knew it he was referencing Battersea and Bethnal Green, Arsenal and West Ham, East End boxing clubs, Piccadilly and Dagenham and Ronnie and Reggie and having his picture taken outside the Grave Maurice pub, a favourite watering hole of those same Krays. Creating characters that were so clearly unfluenced by and based upon the unsavoury players of old London was the natural conclusion to this, and Spring-Heeled Jim endures as one of Morrissey’s best tracks on one of his greatest albums.