Sunday, October 26, 2003
GUILTY OF PLEASURE: 100 SINGLES THEY TELL YOU NOT TO LIKE, BUT IN REALITY YOU LOVE THEM
Enough canons, already. Enough also of sneering Sloanes compiling smug 100 Worst Singles Ever for Paul Ross and Gina Yashere to sneer at on a quiet Saturday evening on Channel 4. Instead of the many ideal candidates for such a list – “Anarchy In The U.K.,” “Imagine,” “She Bangs The Drums” for instance – we have the predictable scenario of 100 singles placed together for no reason other than for us to laugh at ourselves for purchasing them or losing our virginities to them. Some of these singles also appear in the following list, or are reclaimed for the following list.
To try to make things (or, at any rate, my life) more interesting, and to prevent the suffocation of pop by canonisation – the expulsion of sex and mischief and their replacement with moderation and “objectivity,” the Q-ueasy list of Compulsory Albums/Artists about whom “we” are all agreed because it makes it easier for the record companies the writers service to repackage the same records endlessly and thus secure more profit from decay – the following is a list of 100 singles which the Customs Officers at the gates of Canonville would still not allow into their society. Records which never quite fitted in with the prevailing trends of their times – or which, more spectacularly, tried to fit in but inadvertently created something different in the process (from the Canonville level, think Dexy’s trying to do Northern Soul, or ACR trying to do funk). Or records made by artists who were just permanently unfashionable – though interestingly, their unfashionable records tended to outsell their era’s “hipper” records. Their only common denominator, apart from the fact that they all made the UK Top 40 - is that they are all fantastic, brilliant pop records – in some cases, among the greatest – and I suspect that, although almost none of you will follow me all the way with every single one of these 100 singles, a lot of you will find quite a few items in this list with which you can sympathise. The bias towards the middle rump of the ‘70s is symptomatic only of this writer’s age and consequent personal bias; still, I believe that anyone’s IPod would be a fine and faithful companion were it to carry these 100 songs amongst its soundtracks. They appear in alphabetical, rather than chronological, order.
Incidentally, I have quite deliberately omitted acts who were less than credible at the time but whose credibility has been retrospectively restored. Thus no Joe Meek, Abba, Carpenters, Hall & Oates or Bee Gees (although the latter do contribute as writers/producers/co-performers on one of the singles in my list) and no Kim Fowley either, in any of his guises (Hollywood Argyles, B Bumble, Napoleon XIV, etc.) because He Knows Exactly What He’s Doing.
ALESSI Oh Lori (1977)
A Top 10 hit in the summer of punk, the Alessi Brothers were obviously doomed not to progress further. A shame, for this is a lovely and bewitching jazz-lite androgynous croon of a record. Hear how the vibes and bass swing into life under the word “bicycle.” “You make me feel as if I’ve been born again.” It came out the same week as Mike Osborne and Stan Tracey’s Tandem, the cover of which depicted a drawing of the two venerable improvisers, in silhouette, riding on a tandem against a dark blue sky. I always thought the cover more apposite to Alessi.
HERB ALPERT Without Her (1969)
Everyone agrees on the deathless brilliance of “This Guy’s In Love With You,” but let’s not overlook this sensitive-bordering-on-neurotic reading of Harry Nilsson’s song. Jettisoning the original’s baroque-meets-minimalist string lines, Alpert intones his suicidal despair as quietly as possible, making the brief orchestral/choral eruptions all the more powerful, as his echoed trumpet opens the door for the orchestra and choir to burst in suddenly and magnify the singer’s despair to unbearable levels of intensity. Yet they, and therefore he, always pull back from the brink.
AMEN CORNER (If Paradise Was) Half As Nice (1969)
Andy Fairweather-Low’s another one with a vaguely genderless voice, and his enthusiastically heartfelt expression of devotion against the shambolic wannabe blues band not quite getting it right backing still packs a punch (especially when the entire record pauses to allow Andy to consider just how strong, how innocent, his love is). A shoe-in for number one in February 1969 (possible sub: Love Affair’s “Everlasting Love” from 1968; sharper and more in love with pop than the Robert Knight original).
ANIMOTION Obsession (1985)
I think they were Canadian, and they came through with this one top five hit; the sort of hard-hitting electropop which even at the time I remember thinking should have been the sort of thing the Human League should have been doing rather than morose ballads about moving to Inverness.
ARCHIES Sugar Sugar (1969)
The first single I bought, aged five, so it had to be here somewhere. Eight weeks at #1 for the cartoon band assimilated by Don Kirshner so that, unlike the Monkees, they could never walk out on him. Sadly subsequent jewels like “Jingle Jangle” and “Who’s Your Baby?” failed to chart. Lead vocalist Ron Dante went on to produce and arrange Barry Manilow’s hits.
BAD MANNERS Special Brew (1980)
I’m losing some of you already, aren’t I? No, hang on, Buster Bloodvessel wasn’t all about rubbish novelty cover versions, and Bad Manners never had any credibility, but this is a great and mysterious pop record because it never quite decides to cross the line into camp (cf. Al Jolson’s “Anniversary Song”). Buster’s vocal is vulnerable, sounding in places almost like AR Kane; ditto with the wide dubspaces of the backing. Aware that it could tilt disastrously into cabaret time (“All I want is a barrel of you”), it briefly speeds up in anticipation but thinks better of it and retreats to its original status. The desolate “Walkin’ In The Sunshine” from the following year shows that Bad Manners really worked when they attempted to be “serious.”
BARRY BIGGS Sideshow (1976)
The lovers’ rock perennial had his biggest UK hit (though the brilliant “Work All Day” really should have done much better than #43, and why the classic “Wide Awake In A Dream” didn’t cross over remains a mystery) with this desolate winter of a soul cover (Stylistics wannabes Blue Magic). The bargain basement keyboards and drum machine make this record particularly sinister and alien (consider also Roots Manuva).
MR ACKER BILK Stranger On The Shore (1961)
A chart-topper in the USA, and although kept at #2 by one of the other records in this list in the UK, it nevertheless stayed in the charts for 55 weeks. The KLF understood the power of this seemingly unassuming piece of music; as retrospectively did Peter Dickinson, with regard to the actually rather macabre Sunday teatime drama to which this tune was the theme (note how it doesn’t quite end as you’d been expecting, just as it seems about to transform into a different tune altogether).
BLUE MINK Stay With Me (1973)
One of the many shelters for Roger Cook and Roger Greenaway, generally utilised for their cheery “social comment” songs (“Melting Pot,” “Good Morning Freedom”), this gorgeous, barely tactile soul ballad, fully the equal of whatever was coming out of Philadelphia at the time, was their swansong.
BLUE PEARL Naked In The Rain (1990)
Could have picked any of the glorious pop-rave hits of the early ‘90s, but this blistering, subtly building, ascending and descending record (on the same label as the Orb) needs to be rescued from the out-tray of indifference.
MARC BOLAN & T REX Teenage Dream (1974)
Now here’s a thing. An entirely credible artist up to a point, and this was the point just beyond the point. A pained, wracked six-minute, funereally paced exegesis of his newly-deposed status, trailing the album Zinc Alloy And The Hidden Riders Of Tomorrow. Its chart performance was indifferent, yet it’s up there with Brett Anderson howling “Don’t take me back to the past!” at the climax of Suede’s “Stay Together.”
BUCKS FIZZ The Land Of Make Believe (1981)
Charting late in the year, this became BF’s second number one in early ’82. Lyrics by former King Crimson lyricist Pete Sinfield were, by Sinfield’s own account, an extended metaphorical attack on Thatcherism, and indeed there is something extremely disturbing simmering underneath the overly jolly surface (that Escher-like video!) exemplified by the closing recitation by the child who is either about to kill or be killed.
JOHNNY CASH A Boy Named Sue (1969)
Cash’s biggest UK hit single, taken from the otherwise extremely raw San Quentin live album, this Shel Silverstein-penned novelty take on masculinity only being made possible by the existence of a female alter ego is also perhaps Cash’s most unlikely hit. And the ambiguity inherent in this, and his prison live albums as a whole, is underlined by the whoops and hollers of the convict audience responding to any intimation of gruesome violence in the song. Irony cannot transmit through prison walls, but it’s the genuine unrest which pulls this record out of the Junior Choice out tray.
DAVID CASSIDY How Can I Be Sure? (1972)
I’ve said enough about this already, but just to sum up for newcomers; Cassidy gets the pop where Springfield couldn’t, omitting the ending and thereby turning it into an extended mediation on existentialism which takes it out of the teenpop firing line and initiates the legacy which will subsequently produce Japan’s “Ghosts” and Tricky’s “Aftermath.”
CCS Tap Turns On The Water (1971)
After initiating behind the scenes most of what charted in the ‘60s and ‘70s, Alexis Korner finally got some chart action of his own with a sequence of very smart, snappy pop hits in this big band he co-led with John Cameron (Kes, Psychomania). Various cutting edge jazzers (Beckett, Wheeler, Skidmore, Rutherford among them) with some Ted Heath old-timers (Lusher, Baker, Whittle) jostle for stage space on TOTP as Korner and co-vocalist Peter Thorup gleefully trade dubious double entendres.
CHER The Music’s No Good Without You (2001)
The almost unmentioned downside sequel to “Believe”; the Other has departed, never to return. Cher cannot really dance any more but resolves, not very convincingly, to continue living day “as if it were my last,” intoned as if she had already taken the pills.
CHICORY TIP Son Of My Father (1972)
Moroder’s first hit, and therefore one of the key records of the ‘70s, but one suspects that the decidedly pub-rock appearance of C Tip on TOTP forever militated against their ever being taken seriously. Wait for Ladytron’s cover to get to number one (it will happen). “Moogling I was googling I was preform packed.”
CLIMAX BLUES BAND Couldn’t Get It Right (1976)
Stretch’s very similar exercise in white funk “Why Did You Do It?” 12 months earlier had been taken very seriously, but this was perhaps overwhelmed by what else was happening in pop in November 1976. A simmering, keep-the-lid-on Fender Rhodes-driven funk-up with very Kornerish vocals. “So deep I’m gonna drowwwwwwNNNNNNNNN.” The echoing of “kept on looking for a sign” by the Fender Rhodes is inadvertently very sensual indeed.
PERRY COMO And I Love You So (1973)
Any early ‘70s pop record with subtle marimba is fine by me (see also the Temptations’ “Just My Imagination”). “All but life is dead…that is my belief” croons Como, via Don McLean, and perhaps it’s here because of the glint of Thursday evening sunlight on the window of the electricity shop in Uddingston Main Street one particularly balmy day in July 1973; Eddie Braben’s Worst Show On The Wireless (with a young Alison Steadman among the cast) on the radio, playing “You Are The Sunshine Of My Life” and then this.
CONNELLS ‘74/’75 (1995)
…and this record might be here because it comes as close as any pop record I can think of to recapturing that never quite retrievable feeling of extreme youth. The thought that some of these faces may no longer be living…the Picnic At Hanging Rock sinister twilight which hangs unsteadily and threateningly over this song, as if we’d already been born in sepia.
CONGREGATION Softly Whispering I Love You (1971)
A Long John Baldry soundalike wails passionately atop an asexual church choir. Who were they? Anything to do with Focus Three of “10,000 Years Behind My Mind” perhaps? (N.B.: unnerving to see Liza Strike of the latter band turning up on backing vocals on John Cale’s Fear).
JULIE COVINGTON Only Women Bleed (1977)
And Cale produced and played on this doubly ironic take on the Alice Cooper standard, though I vividly remember Covington’s (at the time) unprecedented rendition of “Bony Maronie” – not changing the gender of the lyric – on peak-time ITV.
PAUL DAVIDSON Midnight Rider (1976)
Another of the lovely legion of Strummer’s “UK pop reggae” brigade, a luscious run-through of the Gregg Allman desperado mourner.
LYNSEY DE PAUL Getting A Drag (1973)
Lynsey de Paul needs to be rediscovered, full stop, including things like the aqueous pop-funk of tracks like “Water.” But this, her second single, is a template for Elastica (listen to how she slurs and bends the title downwards). A song about tranvestitism, notably less charitable in its sentiments than Scott Walker’s “Big Louise.”
DESIRELESS Voyage, Voyage (1988)
Can’t get enough of the Europop either, especially from groups with the exquisite taste to name themselves after Don Cherry compositions (the 1:22 closing track of side one of Cherry’s Relativity Suite, including Carla Bley’s opening cascading piano runs which later reappeared on “I Don’t Like Mondays,” and Carlos Ward’s brief but shattering statement of the theme on alto). Wonderfully alienated Finland Station epitaph pop.
D’MOB FEAT. GARY HAISMAN (We Call It) Acieeed (1988)
“Get right on one Mate-y.” Emphasis on the wrong syllable, David “Kid” Jensen-style. Unashamed pop cash-in on the boom of ’88. Strange how much fun it is to listen to than, say, the 12 minutes of Phuture’s “Acid Trax,” hmm? (then again, Jamie Principle’s “Baby Wants To Ride,” Steve “Silk” Hurley remix thereof, a future inhabitant of the Greatest Single Ever Made As Of Today column).
DOUBLE The Captain Of Her Heart (1986)
Help me out here, someone, were this lot Dutch or Belgian? A song whose reticence almost argues it out of existence – but what lovely and achingly poignant chord changes, the same formula Microdisney tried to perfect.
EAST 17 House Of Love (1992)
Bookended by a growling Rottweiler, I suppose we should be grateful that no Big Brother team has attempted to cover this for a quick (s)hit, but this fantastic opening foray from Walthamstow’s finest knocked wusses Take That, er, back to Bolton. Knowingly absurd and spilling over any top available to it, Tony and the boys try to talk us out of Armageddon. And the explosion effects are the best on any single with the possible exception of “Total Destruction” by DJ Scud and Nomex. “You’re about as hardcore as Brian Harvey” says Pitman on “Phone Pitman.” Actually, in 1992 this was more hardcore than hardcore. Or at least equally so.
SHEENA EASTON Just Another Broken Heart (1981)
Part of Easton and Christopher Neil’s brief foray into electropop, this curiously brilliant single careers all over the place, like “Modern Girl” at 78 rpm stuck on a motorail in the Blackwall Tunnel. Watch out for the freeform slide whistle solo.
EDISON LIGHTHOUSE Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes) (1970)
Again, talked about this recently, but easily as good and powerful a song and performance as anything on either of the first two Big Star albums, with a surprisingly gutsy vocal from Tony Burrows.
ELECTRIC LIGHT ORCHESTRA Last Train To London (1979)
Recently sampled by Atomic Kitten, ELO remain tantalisingly on the credibility border. Why do they still not get the same kudos as, say, Roy Wood does, despite the immense debt owed to them by the Flaming Lips and Airs of this world? On this example, it might simply be down to the clodhopping drumming of the inimitable Bev Bevan, which is the only thing from stopping this record from being proto-House.
SOPHIE ELLIS-BEXTOR Murder On The Dancefloor (2001)
Her pronunciation of the word “goddam.”
DAVID ESSEX If I Could (1975)
Any of Essex’s hits from 1973-6 would qualify for this list, though only “Rock On” with its Norman Whitfield-meets-Lee Perry production – a homage which works, unlike so many other homages, because you sense the absence at the song’s core; the space which “Jimmy Dean” should be occupying. But how about this tender Cockney ballad; Pacific Palisades relocated on top of a bus going through Canning Town?
ETERNAL Don’t You Love Me? (1996)
Almost their last gasp, this reworked the “Don’t Look Any Further” template and expanded it out into a threnody for lost youth. A better use of the children’s choir than, for example, the second Soul II Soul album or the second So Solid Crew album.
EXTREME More Than Words (1991)
Six weeks at #2 in the summer of ’91, stuck behind Bryan Adams and loathed almost as universally, but why? The kind of acoustic pop-rock ballad for which the Teenage Fanclubs of this world would kill; note how the song methodically builds to the augmented minor of “I already know” in the third chorus before slowly working its way back to base.
FOCUS Sylvia (1973)
Because at certain times of the night the optimism and drive of this record subjectively justify the continuation of my existence.
FOUR SEASONS Silver Star (1976)
Thematically I could have gone with “December ’63 (Oh What A Night)” – “Seemed so wrong but now it feels so right” – but let’s instead go with this, the first House record. “Ecstasy on their faces.” A humdrum existence personified in the slow middle section, leading in either direction to release into fantasy, however it might be induced.
GENESIS Match Of The Day (1977)
Lead track on their Spot The Pigeon EP, in its seeming meaningless as disquieting a presence in the charts of summer 1977 as the Pistols’ “God Save The Queen.” “Is Match Of The Day the best way to spend your Saturday?” queries Phil Collins. Irritatingly, it never appears on any Genesis compilations.
GARY GLITTER Always Yours (1974)
Larkin’s Law – forget the artist, love the art. Whatever else he might have done, the double G had an unassailably ace sequence of singles from 1972-5, of which this seldom revived 1974 chart-topper is a kind of gloriously meaningless peak. Glitter does Sparks?
ANDREW GOLD Lonely Boy (1977)
Best known for ‘78’s “Never Let Her Slip Away,” this is a more bitter record with some real pain in the guitar-backed “Goodbye Mama” middle eight.
GOLDEN EARRING Radar Love (1973)
Dutchmen with a somersaulting drummer who later begat Stars On 45, who in fact had been in existence for almost as long as the Shadows, reached their peak here with this neurotic, paranoid reworking of the Doors’ “LA Woman” – only miles better. “Brenda Lee coming on strong.”
LONNIE GORDON Happening All Over Again (1990)
The last great record from Stock, Aitken and Waterman; sometime Bomb The Bass singer Gordon tries her best to smash the benign SAW template, wailing and screaming as if to will them out of existence. The sole manifestation of flesh and blood on SAW’s work (NB: this is not necessarily a bad thing).
ROLF HARRIS Two Little Boys (1969)
The room’s become empty all of a sudden. But I stand firmly behind the line which I myself have conceived and drawn, and consequently I stand behind this, the most subtle anti-war record ever to get to number one. Rolf has stated that John Lennon was about the only one who got it; when “Two Little Boys” got to number one, Lennon sent him a telegram congratulating him on getting an anti-Vietnam song to the top for Xmas, even though it was a rearrangement of a song which dated from the Boer War era. But as the last number one of the ‘60s and first number one of the ‘70s it makes perfect socio-aesthetic sense; the optimism of the ‘60s blown to shreds, the recent Oh, What A Lovely War still very much in mind, this made a muted, downbeat and realistic close to the decade; a quiet plea for life. Trumpeter Freddy Clayton’s closing Last Post shuts down the ‘60s.
GEORGE HARRISON You (1975)
An isolated single which was only a minor hit in the middle of a pronounced creative drought for Harrison, this nevertheless was a storming, if temporary and almost completely unnoticed, return to All Things Must Pass form, Harrison’s voice sounding more alive than anything he had done since “What Is Life?”
NOEL HARRISON Windmills Of Your Mind (1969)
Described by unsympathetic critics as the most boring chord sequence ever - the same cycle repeated in eight descending semitonal modulations – this is in fact a labyrinth of a song with an immeasurably desolate epicentre. And more than any other song in this list, it returns this writer to 1969; alone in the dark with the pictures and the sound.
JULIO IGLESIAS Begin The Beguine (Volver A Empezar) (1981)
A brilliant soundtrack for cruising over the Westway; Ramon Arcusa’s deviously just out-of-date orchestration (complete with syndrums) works in the same artful way as Gil Evans’ first big orchestral swell behind Billy Harper’s tenor on his 1969 Ampex recording of “General Assembly.”
IMAGINATION Body Talk (1981)
We are not talking Britfunk here; we are talking the Cocteau Twins, we are talking away from the body (and even away from the camp) towards some kind of nirvana. This group’s work is dying for rehabilitation.
DEE D JACKSON Automatic Lover (1978)
Tommy as restaged by Giorgio Moroder and Peter Greenaway. The saddest song to become a hit in 1978, “Shot By Both Sides” included. If this were on International Deejay Gigolo 7 you would idolise it. Even though it’s not, you still should.
JETHRO TULL Sweet Dreams (1969)
A prime example of the regression of progressive rock, Ian Anderson lyrically came across as a crusty old conservative – hear his views on revolution in “Living In The Past”: “let’s close our eyes to all their lies.” A great band, however – Super Furry Animals 25 years ahead of their time – and this blazing follow-up made the top ten in late ’69. Anderson offers, cackling, to initiate his Other into the grown-up world as behind him a compressed orchestra make like the Love of Forever Changes tackling Ravel’s “Bolero.”
ELTON JOHN Ego (1978)
Elton’s finest single; exasperated by his imagined immediate extinction, jerky, almost new wave piano soundtracks his self-loathing angst. The only time when his mask slips.
TOM JONES Daughter Of Darkness (1970)
A top five hit for the lad in 1970, but not one that’s much spoken of; notable for the gusto of the arrangement behind his tremulous baritone, oozing much of the same pizzazz as Tony Christie’s more excitable moments (“Avenues And Alleyways”).
RONAN KEATING Life Is A Rollercoaster (2000)
Admit it, readers, this is an immaculate pop record and Keating does an immaculately blank job of crooning it (“You almost got me punched in a fight”). Admit also that it’s the first in a series of diminishing return reproductions by Gregg Alexander, but this is by far the freshest. I remember when Laura and I first heard it – neither of us by any stretch of the imagination Boyzone fans – and we mutually nodded at each other the tacit understanding that (a) this is a shoe-in for number one; (b) this is a fucking great pop record.
LEVEL 42 Leaving Me Now (1985)
I’ll leave it to the boy Sinker to crenellate the jazz-funk Adorno of this single’s parent album World Machine, but this tortured ballad beats the shit out of all similar attempts by Elvis Costello, and as a bonus includes the best use of the word “mesmerised” in pop.
LIEUTENANT PIGEON Mouldy Old Dough (1972)
Come on then, let’s have that Pigeon/Stavely Makepeace compilation! In the meantime, remind yourself that (a) this extreme lo-fi Russ Conway meets Joe Meek rave-up got to number one; and (b) how impossible the industry now would make it for a middle-aged housewife pianist even to get a sniff of Top Of The Pops, never mind get to number one.
LORD ROCKINGHAM’S XI Hoots Mon (1958)
The 6.5 Special houseband, full of seasoned old pros from the ‘30s onwards, plus young Benny Green on tenor, nevertheless managed to be Down With The Kids when they got to number one with this beyond-corniness-to-the-point-of-profundity piece of rock-and-roll as only British danceband veterans can play it. Don’t want to sound like Ian MacDonald, but don’t you think we’ve lost something along the way?
LULU Take Your Mama For A Ride (1975)
The smart money currently seems to be on Lulu’s ’68 “Love Loves To Love Love” to break out of the clubs and become the next “Are You Ready For Love,” but this is unquestionably her funkiest and sexiest record. Betty Wright got kudos at the time for achieving much less.
PAUL McCARTNEY Waterfalls (1980)
Doubly poignant now, of course, following the death of Linda, all the plaintive cries of “And I need love” and the barely contained sob in the words “if you went away.” A quietly neurotic ballad which made an agreeably uncomfortable addition to the Top Ten in the late summer of 1980.
DON McLEAN Vincent (1972)
It’s those marimbas again, you see. Plus it is one of two great songs about artists to get to #1, the other being “Matchstalk Men and Matchstalk Cats and Dogs” by Brian and Michael. And anyone wishing to slag the latter can frankly fuck right off now; a nice tribute to Lowry by a couple of good socialist folkies. Would a song about suicide get into the Top 40 now, unless sung by indie or metal bands with organised fan clubs?
MARSHALL HAIN Dancing In The City (1978)
There really is something immodestly sensual about the way Kit Hain sings “action” in the second line of this typically modest British attempt at recherche pop-disco, something which connects her directly with Sophie Ellis-Bextor. A wonderful single, anyway, conceived by a sometime avant-jazzrock keyboardist (Julian Marshall). What does Kit Hain do now? (Possible sub, even though it’s nowhere near disco, except perhaps at the end of one: Judie Tzuke’s “Stay With Me ‘Til Dawn,” the best non-Elton record on Rocket Records not recorded by Kiki Dee)
MR BLOE Groovin’ With Mr Bloe (1970)
Come to think of it, this record’s appearance on the DJM label, complete with the bowler-hatted, bespectacled keyboard player who appeared on TOTP, mistakenly led some people to assume that this was Elton dicking around. In fact it was Zack Lawrence, anglicising a fairly rootsy piece of psych-pop – originally a Tony Orlando B-side, of all things – and somehow making it mean more and matter more. Listen particularly to the connecting line between Harry Pitch’s harmonica on this single and Bowie’s harmonica on “A New Career In A New Town” seven years later, when he was busy regurgitating his history of pop, removing his centre and rephrasing it for bemused Martians.
MOTORS Airport (1978)
A forlorn piece of AOR which somehow ended up being filed under new wave; yet this record brings back the frustrated, summer vacation love agonies of a 14-year-old far more avidly than, say, Pere Ubu’s “Thriller!” (even though Dub Housing was a frequent consolation soundtrack over that particular summer)
MUNGO JERRY Baby Jump (1971)
A stomp which barely exists as a song, the pianist refusing to acknowledge any chords, instead applying the Cecil Taylor elbows up and down the keyboard technique throughout. The jam stops halfway through, starts up again; everyone sounds completely stoned. This, readers, got to number one.
ROBBIE NEVIL C’est La Vie (1987)
Canadian virtual one-hit wonder with ludicrous double mallet which made Michael Bolton look like Lol Coxhill, but also with a voice like Junior Giscombe, except with better material, namely this useless but toweringly brilliant monolith of AOR trying to negotiate with electropop (and lots of subs here: go to your copy of Now 7 to rediscover the filthy joy of Sly Fox’s “Let’s Go All The Way” or, well see below…).
NEW RADICALS You Get What You Give (1998)
Well, Gregg Alexander may just have the one pop trick up his sleeve, but what a joyous one; a glorious AOR meets ELO meets Hall and Oates outranks Ben Folds Five YES to life with added cracks at Beck and Courtney Love. DON’T GIVE UP, YOU’VE GOT A REASON TO LIVE.
NU SHOOZ I Can’t Wait (1986)
Nor can I; an unbelievably sexy vocal staying just this side of tonality against stuttering electro, the bassline running up to lick your lips and more besides. A single of its year, infinitely more pop than, say, “Kiss” by the Age of Chance, or “No Conversation” by View From The Bastard Hill.
Now I really start to test you…
DES O’CONNOR Dick-A-Dum-Dum (King’s Road) (1969)
Because the guy, not to mention the song’s author (Jim Dale!), actually meant it. 37-year-old Des in his sideburns in the summer of Woodstock trying manfully to be With It, cocking a sideways glance at Roger Miller’s “England Swings” and inadvertently coming up with one of the great London pop records. The ludicrous rhyming scans throughout (readers, I give you “Portobello” and “sort-o-sell-o,” I beseech upon you “Piccadilly” and “pick a dilly”) actually reflect the pace of metropolitan intercourse pretty faithfully. And who could resist “Buckingham beat” and the killer punchline “Lend me a fiver, I’ll pay you back a spare one”?
OSMONDS Let Me In (1973)
From The Plan, a song to Jesus which 99% of its purchasers interpreted as a straight love song. But what a song and what a production; voices and orchestra really excel themselves here with harmonic ebullience worthy of the Four Seasons. And any pop record with a key change towards the end has to count for something (note: this does not include Oasis’ “All Around The World” which despite getting to number one as a single cannot really be considered “pop”).
GILBERT O’SULLIVAN Alone Again (Naturally) (1972)
Well, what does one say? Were I ranking this list in terms of aesthetic preference, this would probably come top. One of his biggest hits – a number one in America, incredibly, and a song so apt for a standard that even Dewey Redman recorded a version in the mid-‘80s – it is also the bleakest song ever to penetrate the charts. Death pervades every second of this song; the death of love, the exposure of love as a fallacy, the death of his parents, and first and foremost his own death, all accompanied with weird synchronicity by Reggie Perrin flutes and strings. All sung to a major key by someone who looked and dressed like Gareth out of The Office. The missing link between Nick Drake and Morrissey; can we go easy on the Tom Jones box sets and do one for Gilbert?
ELVIS PRESLEY An American Trilogy (1972)
Of course, the point of Mickey Newbury’s original is that the faux-triumphalism of the North and South anthems are trumped by the quiet despair of the slave song which concludes his version. But Elvis couldn’t leave it like that, oh no; he had to include everyone and everything in his own America, he could not afford to make America look small, so he builds everything back up to a triumphant reprise of “Battle Hymn Of The Republic.” Yet if America is a cardboard sham, how best, and who better, to embody the tacky heart which beats beneath the cold, massive exterior? Big and empty; but catch that “you know your daddy’s bound to die.” America can only live if he sacrifices himself. Just don’t get too close to the spectacle, for fear you might interpret it as reality.
PROCOL HARUM Pandora’s Box (1975)
An unplanned late-period Procol Top 20 hit, the combination of “magic staircase plane” and Those Marimbas kind of did it for me.
BRIAN PROTHEROE Pinball (1974)
I daresay that its inclusion on the excellent new Zigzag compilation will give it some new kudos, but this is another encapsulation of the bleak I Hate power cut reality of the mid-‘70s; Protheroe’s mind slowly splits, bridged by Tony Coe’s anguished tenor. “They say you never know when you’re insane.” An unlikely companion piece to John Cale’s “The Man Who Couldn’t Afford To Orgy” which just missed the Top 50 in October of the same year.
CLIFF RICHARD We Don’t Talk Anymore (1979)
The most futuristic record of ’79 was made not by Numan or Dammers or Nile and ‘Nard but by Alan Tarney and Cliff (no wonder Saint Etienne wanted Tarney for the single version of “You’re In A Bad Way”). Indeed Cliff’s entire run of singles from “Miss You Nights” to “Wired For Sound” would qualify for inclusion in this list. But listen especially to the single’s ace trick; not the triple backing vocal of “she-ee-eep,” but the way in which, as the second half of the chorus builds up to its climax, the synthesiser suddenly dies down momentarily, as though someone had accidentally switched it off, before it roars back into life and into the next verse.
LIONEL RICHIE All Night Long (All Night) (1983)
One of the most astute pop singles of the ‘80s, which somehow managed to fuse the spaciousness of Thriller with the sensuality of Midnight Love, the Bob Marley-esque vocal and the overlying tint of Grace Jones. Very easy to forget how undemonstrably great this record is.
CLODAGH RODGERS Come Back And Shake Me (1969)
Here instead of Mary Hopkin’s “Those Were The Days,” as the latter’s credibility has recently undergone something of a revival, but mostly because this is another of the sexiest pop records ever made; the breathing and whispering lifts the record out of the late ‘60s Brit hit factory treadmill, turns the lyrical submission into disguised dominance. If only Clodagh had found her own Lee Hazlewood, she could have become Ireland’s Nancy Sinatra.
RUBETTES Under One Roof (1976)
I think everyone recognises the deliberate genius of “Sugar Baby Love,” and it’s because of its deliberateness that it doesn’t appear here. Instead, listen to this oddly affecting ode to homosexuality, which just pipped Rod Stewart’s “Killing Of Georgie” as the first lyrically overtly gay song to make the UK charts.
BARRY RYAN Eloise (1968)
The missing link between Scott Walker and Jim Steinman, Barry sang his twin brother’s berserkly spiritual epics for some years and with increased dementia (listen to 1971’s “Red Man” with jaw ready to drop agape) but this was the big hit. Recently described in detail here, but yet again I say: for heaven’s sake rediscover this man’s genius!
LEO SAYER Thunder In My Heart (1977)
Again there is an embarrassment of riches to be plucked from Sayer’s catalogue of hits, but this is the one everyone forgets; Leo goes proto-high energy, screaming his lungs out on this surprisingly effective piece of torch disco.
PETER SKELLERN You’re A Lady (1972)
This would be high up in my personal rankings, too; from the same year as “Alone Again (Naturally)” and displaying the same shade of grey hopelessness. The first verse is quoted verbatim at the beginning of El-P’s Fantastic Damage. Skellern is very afraid. He wants to tell her that he loves her, can’t quite bring himself to say it, and even when he eventually does her response is decidedly undecided (“Hard to answer? Yes I agree”) and it’s very possible that she will turn him down. Nevertheless he deploys all the tricks he can think of to woo her, including a brass band and Home Service choir – the best use of a brass band on a pop record, or at least up there with Roy Harper’s “When An Old Cricketer Leaves The Crease” or Syd Barrett’s “Jugband Blues” (or Ron Geesin’s orchestrations for Atom Heart Mother, for that matter). Not forgetting Tom Waits’ “In The Neighborhood.” Heartbreaking in its vulnerable hopelessness; if this had been by Randy Newman we would all be lauding it to the skies. A large-scale piece on Skellern is sorely needed (try also “My Lonely Room” and try not to cry at the end of it).
SPACE Magic Fly (1977)
The ancestor of all French disco as we know it, and recognised as such by everyone from Felix Da Housekatt on down, yet oddly the original is currently unavailable on CD. Top five in the UK at the same time as Jean-Michel Jarre’s “Oxygene Part IV” and therefore very much part of the general trend of depersonalisation in 1977 pop. Perhaps the fact that track one on side two of the accompanying album was entitled “Velvet Rape” has put people off reissuing it (although the track itself sounds exactly like Air!).
STARLIGHT Numero Uno (1989)
By the same Italians who gave you “Ride On Time” but an infinitely better and sparkier record, ridiculous and brilliant Italian house at its most profound. And it appeared originally on the Discomagic label! Magic!
RINGO STARR It Don’t Come Easy (1971)
Is the Ringo’s Rotogravure album the best post-split record to come from any Beatle? Sometimes I am tempted to think so, especially in view of his brilliant opening one-single-per-year trilogy, of which this was the opening chapter. Then came “Back Off Boogaloo” and “Photograph” and…well eventually 1981’s jaw-dropping “Wrack My Brain” and ultimately Thomas The Tank Engine. A happier fate than the other three, then.
AL STEWART Year Of The Cat (1977)
In the early part of 1977, that year of all years, as an overly impressionable 13-year-old I was briefly convinced that this was the best pop single ever made. Stewart’s voice does indeed foreshadow that of Neil Tennant, and there’s something charming about the song’s inscrutability which keeps it great. Memorably covered by Peter Glaze on Crackerjack where the “Peter Lorre” reference, presumably deemed too obscure for The Kids, was substituted with “Tom and Jerry, contemplating a crime.” Genius, needless to say.
BARBRA STREISAND AND BARRY GIBB Guilty (1980)
The Bee Gees are not present in this list as performers, but throughout the ’80s their extraordinary run of hits written and produced for other artists were Bee Gees records in all but name, the group all over them. Thus it is with the first and best of these records, the title track of Streisand’s 1980 album. Fantastic blue-eyed soul; had the label said “Dionne Warwick” we’d all be calling it a classic. “And we’ve got nothing to be guilty of…” – could almost be the theme for this list, couldn’t it?
SWEET SENSATION Sad, Sweet Dreamer (1974)
Producer and arranger Des Parton pulled in the stops, crucially, for this wonderful mirage of idyllic Britsoul. Marcel King resurfaced briefly years later with a bizarre 12” on Factory.
JACKIE TRENT Where Are You Now (My Love)? (1965)
Again, had this said “Dionne Warwick/Burt Bacharach” instead of “Jackie Trent/Tony Hatch” this would have been hailed as a classic of desperation 30 years ago. Still, listening to it you can understand why this was Trent’s only hit single as an artist – her vocals are a little bit too strident, a little too old-school, a little Anne Shelton if truth be told, and she was much wiser to leave that side of things to Petula Clark subsequently.
SHANIA TWAIN That Don’t Impress Me Much (1998)
Admit it! No, admit it, Shania is great and this is a fab and sussed pop record which could have come out on Ze Records without any shame whatsoever. Funny, hip and unbearably sexy. Having witnessed the virtual anti-sexiness of operatives like the Sugababes and Rachel Stevens, these are very important qualities.
2 UNLIMITED No Limit (1991)
And what if this had been on Digital Hardcore? Extreme, ruthless, remorseless, techno techno techno TECHNO! Pretty extreme for a number one, even in 1991.
BONNIE TYLER Total Eclipse Of The Heart (1983)
Turn around. Yes, turn around, face yourself and own up…this is a magisterial and magnificent record. Always better with female voices than with the Loaf, in my opinion, Jim Steinman knows exactly how to direct a pop record as well as simply producing it, and by God he directs Tyler with beauty and grace. Tyler really does sound here as if she had been waiting all her life to sing this song; she torments herself with her increasingly frantic “every now and then”s while Rory Dodd sings in the background as her conscience. Fantasy overtakes reality – “Forever’s gonna start tonight!” – only for the glass to shatter as reality cuts Tyler into little pieces, without so much as a mere touch. She quietens again. “Once upon a time I was falling in love, now I’m only falling apart.” Then the staggering scream of “EVERY NOW AND THEN” over the thundering Trevor Horn-like drum rolls, before the life and love die (down) again. “Turn around, bright eyes” as Dodd’s voice ascends steadily towards androgynous heights. The song creeps away quietly, sadly, full of remorse. Steinman needs to be taken into serious consideration again; look out in The Naked Maja for a forthcoming celebration of his virtually forgotten 1989 masterpiece Pandora’s Box.
TRACEY ULLMAN Breakaway (1983)
Yes, it’s breakneck, and yes it should have been on Stiff Records because this is a punk record. Ullman roars through Jackie De Shannon’s song at 500 mph, almost too blurred for the listener to discern; and her performance on TOTP complete with hairbrush as microphone was priceless. If you see her You Broke My Heart In 17 Places album going second hand, then snap it up; it’s terrific and intelligent pop.
FRANKIE VALLI Swearin’ To God (1975)
Perhaps the apotheosis of Valli’s solo career is this stunned acknowledgement of love and of God. It’s a disco record but it doesn’t hammer its nails of dance into you, preferring to glide around you and seduce you. The female co-vocalist isn’t credited on the label, but this is a heart-restoring, life-affirming record.
FRANKIE VAUGHAN Tower Of Strength (1961)
I’m aware that Mr Ewing in his Popular project is likely to come to completely different conclusions about this record, which kept “Stranger On The Shore” off the top of the UK charts, but this is possibly the greatest soul vocal performance on any British pop record. Yes, that’s Frankie Vaughan I’m talking about, and his reading of the Bacharach and David chestbeater really beats its chest, knocking the stuffing out of Gene McDaniels’ original. Check the “Green Door” whoop at “then I’d walk out the door-ah!” “You’d be crawling to me-eeeh!” boasts a hoarse desperation which would not have shamed Eric Burdon or Zoot Money. This record understands that “soul” needs, by definition, to be larger than life.
ROSIE VELA Magic Smile (1987)
Bet you’d all forgotten this one – produced by Donald Fagen, this slice of intelligent jazz-pop-AOR was pretty unhip even at the time, but its gorgeous chord changes – and hear how they wash over, and beneath, Vela’s extremely seductive vocal – make this something of a classic. It also carries fond personal memories of Cromer Beach in March 1987; the other prominent soundtrack to that time, strangely enough, was “Language And Mentality” by African Head Charge.
JOE WALSH Life’s Been Good (1978)
All of his But Seriously, Folks album is good stuff, but the echoed, almost underwater, near dublike guitars (reflecting the image on the album sleeve) set against Walsh’s sardonic, high-pitched vocal, made this an ideal soundtrack for the summer of 1978. A classic year for this sort of thing, when you consider it.
TREVOR WALTERS Love Me Tonight (1981)
A Top 30 lovers’ rock pop hit from the winter of 1981 which seems to have slipped quietly out of circulation, but it’s one of the most beautiful and seductive, the old-school backing vocals included. I remember our watching this on TOTP - “This doesn’t fit into anything else on the programme.” “It’s just good music.” “Exactly.”
MARTI WEBB Take That Look Off Your Face (1980)
Andrew Lloyd Webber is it now? Carlin, you really need to be getting down to some serious gloomcore; you’re going mad in that bunker. Not so fast…great pop is great pop, and this is a classic Spector-esque belter with a lovely circulatory never quite eight-to-the-bar rhythmic and harmonic structure, and for once the essential staginess of the performance works in its favour, in a peculiarly British way (even though the parent musical was partly set in NYC). It fully deserved its Top 3 placing.
KEITH WEST Excerpt From A Teenage Opera (1967)
The appearance of other excerpts from Mark Wirtz’ aborted project on RPM Records in the late ‘90s perhaps made us thankful that the Teenage Opera as such never came to fruition, for this was the only song on it which worked as pop. And in its barefaced (if necessarily theatrical) staring of mortality in the face, it threw a sharp sting into the late Summer of Love. It delves back into some of my earliest consciousness, the circulating harpsichord entwined in my infant memory with the spiral dome on top of the Co-Op department store in Uddingston Main Street. The idea that people could actually die was new to me at the time, and this was perhaps the first artefact which made me aware of it.
ROGER WHITTAKER I Don’t Believe In If Anymore (1970)
Existentialism in the Top 10? An orchestral prologue and epilogue worthy of Scott Walker, Whittaker’s never-more-bitter vocals decrying false optimism and fake patriotism, receding into quiet regret in the chorus that life can never be what you try to make it be.
WINGS Goodnight Tonight (1979)
“The use of space in this song’s extended middle eight,” opined my dad on first listening to this song, “is pleasingly reminiscent of the Art Ensemble of Chicago.” Only my dad could make those sorts of connections. He’s right though. Look, just go out and buy the Wingspan 2CD compilation; terrific pop music, certainly in many stages far more unobtrusively adventurous than anything Lennon was doing over the same period.
JOHN PAUL YOUNG Love Is In The Air (1978)
The summer of 1978 again. Wandering out of the La Scala cinema in Sauchiehall Street on a Wednesday afternoon, having just had my mind blown by first viewing of 2001; copy of the Herald Tribune to read on the 54 bus home; the deep, cool warmth of mornings of the bluest of skies one could ever hope to witness, coupled with the knowledge that the whole summer was ahead of you without encumbrance. And being in love for something like the first time. “Love is in the air, like the rising of the sun,” over insistent bass and clavinet. Do you understand?
GHEORGHE ZAMFIR Doina De Jale (Light Of Experience) (1976)
This would be a good sign-off point. Five minutes of beatless panpipe-led drone. Top 5 in the summer of ’76. Look at the same sea I looked at then when Alan Freeman first played this on his Saturday afternoon show on Radio 1. We didn’t lose anything, readers, except perhaps ourselves.
Next week, to provide completely unnecessary balance, I will be looking at a key component of The Canon. In the meantime, I throw this concept out to you. What else should I have added to, or removed from, this list? Comments to marcellocarlin@hotmail.com please (note to record company PRs in general: do you think a box set would be viable?).
Enough canons, already. Enough also of sneering Sloanes compiling smug 100 Worst Singles Ever for Paul Ross and Gina Yashere to sneer at on a quiet Saturday evening on Channel 4. Instead of the many ideal candidates for such a list – “Anarchy In The U.K.,” “Imagine,” “She Bangs The Drums” for instance – we have the predictable scenario of 100 singles placed together for no reason other than for us to laugh at ourselves for purchasing them or losing our virginities to them. Some of these singles also appear in the following list, or are reclaimed for the following list.
To try to make things (or, at any rate, my life) more interesting, and to prevent the suffocation of pop by canonisation – the expulsion of sex and mischief and their replacement with moderation and “objectivity,” the Q-ueasy list of Compulsory Albums/Artists about whom “we” are all agreed because it makes it easier for the record companies the writers service to repackage the same records endlessly and thus secure more profit from decay – the following is a list of 100 singles which the Customs Officers at the gates of Canonville would still not allow into their society. Records which never quite fitted in with the prevailing trends of their times – or which, more spectacularly, tried to fit in but inadvertently created something different in the process (from the Canonville level, think Dexy’s trying to do Northern Soul, or ACR trying to do funk). Or records made by artists who were just permanently unfashionable – though interestingly, their unfashionable records tended to outsell their era’s “hipper” records. Their only common denominator, apart from the fact that they all made the UK Top 40 - is that they are all fantastic, brilliant pop records – in some cases, among the greatest – and I suspect that, although almost none of you will follow me all the way with every single one of these 100 singles, a lot of you will find quite a few items in this list with which you can sympathise. The bias towards the middle rump of the ‘70s is symptomatic only of this writer’s age and consequent personal bias; still, I believe that anyone’s IPod would be a fine and faithful companion were it to carry these 100 songs amongst its soundtracks. They appear in alphabetical, rather than chronological, order.
Incidentally, I have quite deliberately omitted acts who were less than credible at the time but whose credibility has been retrospectively restored. Thus no Joe Meek, Abba, Carpenters, Hall & Oates or Bee Gees (although the latter do contribute as writers/producers/co-performers on one of the singles in my list) and no Kim Fowley either, in any of his guises (Hollywood Argyles, B Bumble, Napoleon XIV, etc.) because He Knows Exactly What He’s Doing.
ALESSI Oh Lori (1977)
A Top 10 hit in the summer of punk, the Alessi Brothers were obviously doomed not to progress further. A shame, for this is a lovely and bewitching jazz-lite androgynous croon of a record. Hear how the vibes and bass swing into life under the word “bicycle.” “You make me feel as if I’ve been born again.” It came out the same week as Mike Osborne and Stan Tracey’s Tandem, the cover of which depicted a drawing of the two venerable improvisers, in silhouette, riding on a tandem against a dark blue sky. I always thought the cover more apposite to Alessi.
HERB ALPERT Without Her (1969)
Everyone agrees on the deathless brilliance of “This Guy’s In Love With You,” but let’s not overlook this sensitive-bordering-on-neurotic reading of Harry Nilsson’s song. Jettisoning the original’s baroque-meets-minimalist string lines, Alpert intones his suicidal despair as quietly as possible, making the brief orchestral/choral eruptions all the more powerful, as his echoed trumpet opens the door for the orchestra and choir to burst in suddenly and magnify the singer’s despair to unbearable levels of intensity. Yet they, and therefore he, always pull back from the brink.
AMEN CORNER (If Paradise Was) Half As Nice (1969)
Andy Fairweather-Low’s another one with a vaguely genderless voice, and his enthusiastically heartfelt expression of devotion against the shambolic wannabe blues band not quite getting it right backing still packs a punch (especially when the entire record pauses to allow Andy to consider just how strong, how innocent, his love is). A shoe-in for number one in February 1969 (possible sub: Love Affair’s “Everlasting Love” from 1968; sharper and more in love with pop than the Robert Knight original).
ANIMOTION Obsession (1985)
I think they were Canadian, and they came through with this one top five hit; the sort of hard-hitting electropop which even at the time I remember thinking should have been the sort of thing the Human League should have been doing rather than morose ballads about moving to Inverness.
ARCHIES Sugar Sugar (1969)
The first single I bought, aged five, so it had to be here somewhere. Eight weeks at #1 for the cartoon band assimilated by Don Kirshner so that, unlike the Monkees, they could never walk out on him. Sadly subsequent jewels like “Jingle Jangle” and “Who’s Your Baby?” failed to chart. Lead vocalist Ron Dante went on to produce and arrange Barry Manilow’s hits.
BAD MANNERS Special Brew (1980)
I’m losing some of you already, aren’t I? No, hang on, Buster Bloodvessel wasn’t all about rubbish novelty cover versions, and Bad Manners never had any credibility, but this is a great and mysterious pop record because it never quite decides to cross the line into camp (cf. Al Jolson’s “Anniversary Song”). Buster’s vocal is vulnerable, sounding in places almost like AR Kane; ditto with the wide dubspaces of the backing. Aware that it could tilt disastrously into cabaret time (“All I want is a barrel of you”), it briefly speeds up in anticipation but thinks better of it and retreats to its original status. The desolate “Walkin’ In The Sunshine” from the following year shows that Bad Manners really worked when they attempted to be “serious.”
BARRY BIGGS Sideshow (1976)
The lovers’ rock perennial had his biggest UK hit (though the brilliant “Work All Day” really should have done much better than #43, and why the classic “Wide Awake In A Dream” didn’t cross over remains a mystery) with this desolate winter of a soul cover (Stylistics wannabes Blue Magic). The bargain basement keyboards and drum machine make this record particularly sinister and alien (consider also Roots Manuva).
MR ACKER BILK Stranger On The Shore (1961)
A chart-topper in the USA, and although kept at #2 by one of the other records in this list in the UK, it nevertheless stayed in the charts for 55 weeks. The KLF understood the power of this seemingly unassuming piece of music; as retrospectively did Peter Dickinson, with regard to the actually rather macabre Sunday teatime drama to which this tune was the theme (note how it doesn’t quite end as you’d been expecting, just as it seems about to transform into a different tune altogether).
BLUE MINK Stay With Me (1973)
One of the many shelters for Roger Cook and Roger Greenaway, generally utilised for their cheery “social comment” songs (“Melting Pot,” “Good Morning Freedom”), this gorgeous, barely tactile soul ballad, fully the equal of whatever was coming out of Philadelphia at the time, was their swansong.
BLUE PEARL Naked In The Rain (1990)
Could have picked any of the glorious pop-rave hits of the early ‘90s, but this blistering, subtly building, ascending and descending record (on the same label as the Orb) needs to be rescued from the out-tray of indifference.
MARC BOLAN & T REX Teenage Dream (1974)
Now here’s a thing. An entirely credible artist up to a point, and this was the point just beyond the point. A pained, wracked six-minute, funereally paced exegesis of his newly-deposed status, trailing the album Zinc Alloy And The Hidden Riders Of Tomorrow. Its chart performance was indifferent, yet it’s up there with Brett Anderson howling “Don’t take me back to the past!” at the climax of Suede’s “Stay Together.”
BUCKS FIZZ The Land Of Make Believe (1981)
Charting late in the year, this became BF’s second number one in early ’82. Lyrics by former King Crimson lyricist Pete Sinfield were, by Sinfield’s own account, an extended metaphorical attack on Thatcherism, and indeed there is something extremely disturbing simmering underneath the overly jolly surface (that Escher-like video!) exemplified by the closing recitation by the child who is either about to kill or be killed.
JOHNNY CASH A Boy Named Sue (1969)
Cash’s biggest UK hit single, taken from the otherwise extremely raw San Quentin live album, this Shel Silverstein-penned novelty take on masculinity only being made possible by the existence of a female alter ego is also perhaps Cash’s most unlikely hit. And the ambiguity inherent in this, and his prison live albums as a whole, is underlined by the whoops and hollers of the convict audience responding to any intimation of gruesome violence in the song. Irony cannot transmit through prison walls, but it’s the genuine unrest which pulls this record out of the Junior Choice out tray.
DAVID CASSIDY How Can I Be Sure? (1972)
I’ve said enough about this already, but just to sum up for newcomers; Cassidy gets the pop where Springfield couldn’t, omitting the ending and thereby turning it into an extended mediation on existentialism which takes it out of the teenpop firing line and initiates the legacy which will subsequently produce Japan’s “Ghosts” and Tricky’s “Aftermath.”
CCS Tap Turns On The Water (1971)
After initiating behind the scenes most of what charted in the ‘60s and ‘70s, Alexis Korner finally got some chart action of his own with a sequence of very smart, snappy pop hits in this big band he co-led with John Cameron (Kes, Psychomania). Various cutting edge jazzers (Beckett, Wheeler, Skidmore, Rutherford among them) with some Ted Heath old-timers (Lusher, Baker, Whittle) jostle for stage space on TOTP as Korner and co-vocalist Peter Thorup gleefully trade dubious double entendres.
CHER The Music’s No Good Without You (2001)
The almost unmentioned downside sequel to “Believe”; the Other has departed, never to return. Cher cannot really dance any more but resolves, not very convincingly, to continue living day “as if it were my last,” intoned as if she had already taken the pills.
CHICORY TIP Son Of My Father (1972)
Moroder’s first hit, and therefore one of the key records of the ‘70s, but one suspects that the decidedly pub-rock appearance of C Tip on TOTP forever militated against their ever being taken seriously. Wait for Ladytron’s cover to get to number one (it will happen). “Moogling I was googling I was preform packed.”
CLIMAX BLUES BAND Couldn’t Get It Right (1976)
Stretch’s very similar exercise in white funk “Why Did You Do It?” 12 months earlier had been taken very seriously, but this was perhaps overwhelmed by what else was happening in pop in November 1976. A simmering, keep-the-lid-on Fender Rhodes-driven funk-up with very Kornerish vocals. “So deep I’m gonna drowwwwwwNNNNNNNNN.” The echoing of “kept on looking for a sign” by the Fender Rhodes is inadvertently very sensual indeed.
PERRY COMO And I Love You So (1973)
Any early ‘70s pop record with subtle marimba is fine by me (see also the Temptations’ “Just My Imagination”). “All but life is dead…that is my belief” croons Como, via Don McLean, and perhaps it’s here because of the glint of Thursday evening sunlight on the window of the electricity shop in Uddingston Main Street one particularly balmy day in July 1973; Eddie Braben’s Worst Show On The Wireless (with a young Alison Steadman among the cast) on the radio, playing “You Are The Sunshine Of My Life” and then this.
CONNELLS ‘74/’75 (1995)
…and this record might be here because it comes as close as any pop record I can think of to recapturing that never quite retrievable feeling of extreme youth. The thought that some of these faces may no longer be living…the Picnic At Hanging Rock sinister twilight which hangs unsteadily and threateningly over this song, as if we’d already been born in sepia.
CONGREGATION Softly Whispering I Love You (1971)
A Long John Baldry soundalike wails passionately atop an asexual church choir. Who were they? Anything to do with Focus Three of “10,000 Years Behind My Mind” perhaps? (N.B.: unnerving to see Liza Strike of the latter band turning up on backing vocals on John Cale’s Fear).
JULIE COVINGTON Only Women Bleed (1977)
And Cale produced and played on this doubly ironic take on the Alice Cooper standard, though I vividly remember Covington’s (at the time) unprecedented rendition of “Bony Maronie” – not changing the gender of the lyric – on peak-time ITV.
PAUL DAVIDSON Midnight Rider (1976)
Another of the lovely legion of Strummer’s “UK pop reggae” brigade, a luscious run-through of the Gregg Allman desperado mourner.
LYNSEY DE PAUL Getting A Drag (1973)
Lynsey de Paul needs to be rediscovered, full stop, including things like the aqueous pop-funk of tracks like “Water.” But this, her second single, is a template for Elastica (listen to how she slurs and bends the title downwards). A song about tranvestitism, notably less charitable in its sentiments than Scott Walker’s “Big Louise.”
DESIRELESS Voyage, Voyage (1988)
Can’t get enough of the Europop either, especially from groups with the exquisite taste to name themselves after Don Cherry compositions (the 1:22 closing track of side one of Cherry’s Relativity Suite, including Carla Bley’s opening cascading piano runs which later reappeared on “I Don’t Like Mondays,” and Carlos Ward’s brief but shattering statement of the theme on alto). Wonderfully alienated Finland Station epitaph pop.
D’MOB FEAT. GARY HAISMAN (We Call It) Acieeed (1988)
“Get right on one Mate-y.” Emphasis on the wrong syllable, David “Kid” Jensen-style. Unashamed pop cash-in on the boom of ’88. Strange how much fun it is to listen to than, say, the 12 minutes of Phuture’s “Acid Trax,” hmm? (then again, Jamie Principle’s “Baby Wants To Ride,” Steve “Silk” Hurley remix thereof, a future inhabitant of the Greatest Single Ever Made As Of Today column).
DOUBLE The Captain Of Her Heart (1986)
Help me out here, someone, were this lot Dutch or Belgian? A song whose reticence almost argues it out of existence – but what lovely and achingly poignant chord changes, the same formula Microdisney tried to perfect.
EAST 17 House Of Love (1992)
Bookended by a growling Rottweiler, I suppose we should be grateful that no Big Brother team has attempted to cover this for a quick (s)hit, but this fantastic opening foray from Walthamstow’s finest knocked wusses Take That, er, back to Bolton. Knowingly absurd and spilling over any top available to it, Tony and the boys try to talk us out of Armageddon. And the explosion effects are the best on any single with the possible exception of “Total Destruction” by DJ Scud and Nomex. “You’re about as hardcore as Brian Harvey” says Pitman on “Phone Pitman.” Actually, in 1992 this was more hardcore than hardcore. Or at least equally so.
SHEENA EASTON Just Another Broken Heart (1981)
Part of Easton and Christopher Neil’s brief foray into electropop, this curiously brilliant single careers all over the place, like “Modern Girl” at 78 rpm stuck on a motorail in the Blackwall Tunnel. Watch out for the freeform slide whistle solo.
EDISON LIGHTHOUSE Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes) (1970)
Again, talked about this recently, but easily as good and powerful a song and performance as anything on either of the first two Big Star albums, with a surprisingly gutsy vocal from Tony Burrows.
ELECTRIC LIGHT ORCHESTRA Last Train To London (1979)
Recently sampled by Atomic Kitten, ELO remain tantalisingly on the credibility border. Why do they still not get the same kudos as, say, Roy Wood does, despite the immense debt owed to them by the Flaming Lips and Airs of this world? On this example, it might simply be down to the clodhopping drumming of the inimitable Bev Bevan, which is the only thing from stopping this record from being proto-House.
SOPHIE ELLIS-BEXTOR Murder On The Dancefloor (2001)
Her pronunciation of the word “goddam.”
DAVID ESSEX If I Could (1975)
Any of Essex’s hits from 1973-6 would qualify for this list, though only “Rock On” with its Norman Whitfield-meets-Lee Perry production – a homage which works, unlike so many other homages, because you sense the absence at the song’s core; the space which “Jimmy Dean” should be occupying. But how about this tender Cockney ballad; Pacific Palisades relocated on top of a bus going through Canning Town?
ETERNAL Don’t You Love Me? (1996)
Almost their last gasp, this reworked the “Don’t Look Any Further” template and expanded it out into a threnody for lost youth. A better use of the children’s choir than, for example, the second Soul II Soul album or the second So Solid Crew album.
EXTREME More Than Words (1991)
Six weeks at #2 in the summer of ’91, stuck behind Bryan Adams and loathed almost as universally, but why? The kind of acoustic pop-rock ballad for which the Teenage Fanclubs of this world would kill; note how the song methodically builds to the augmented minor of “I already know” in the third chorus before slowly working its way back to base.
FOCUS Sylvia (1973)
Because at certain times of the night the optimism and drive of this record subjectively justify the continuation of my existence.
FOUR SEASONS Silver Star (1976)
Thematically I could have gone with “December ’63 (Oh What A Night)” – “Seemed so wrong but now it feels so right” – but let’s instead go with this, the first House record. “Ecstasy on their faces.” A humdrum existence personified in the slow middle section, leading in either direction to release into fantasy, however it might be induced.
GENESIS Match Of The Day (1977)
Lead track on their Spot The Pigeon EP, in its seeming meaningless as disquieting a presence in the charts of summer 1977 as the Pistols’ “God Save The Queen.” “Is Match Of The Day the best way to spend your Saturday?” queries Phil Collins. Irritatingly, it never appears on any Genesis compilations.
GARY GLITTER Always Yours (1974)
Larkin’s Law – forget the artist, love the art. Whatever else he might have done, the double G had an unassailably ace sequence of singles from 1972-5, of which this seldom revived 1974 chart-topper is a kind of gloriously meaningless peak. Glitter does Sparks?
ANDREW GOLD Lonely Boy (1977)
Best known for ‘78’s “Never Let Her Slip Away,” this is a more bitter record with some real pain in the guitar-backed “Goodbye Mama” middle eight.
GOLDEN EARRING Radar Love (1973)
Dutchmen with a somersaulting drummer who later begat Stars On 45, who in fact had been in existence for almost as long as the Shadows, reached their peak here with this neurotic, paranoid reworking of the Doors’ “LA Woman” – only miles better. “Brenda Lee coming on strong.”
LONNIE GORDON Happening All Over Again (1990)
The last great record from Stock, Aitken and Waterman; sometime Bomb The Bass singer Gordon tries her best to smash the benign SAW template, wailing and screaming as if to will them out of existence. The sole manifestation of flesh and blood on SAW’s work (NB: this is not necessarily a bad thing).
ROLF HARRIS Two Little Boys (1969)
The room’s become empty all of a sudden. But I stand firmly behind the line which I myself have conceived and drawn, and consequently I stand behind this, the most subtle anti-war record ever to get to number one. Rolf has stated that John Lennon was about the only one who got it; when “Two Little Boys” got to number one, Lennon sent him a telegram congratulating him on getting an anti-Vietnam song to the top for Xmas, even though it was a rearrangement of a song which dated from the Boer War era. But as the last number one of the ‘60s and first number one of the ‘70s it makes perfect socio-aesthetic sense; the optimism of the ‘60s blown to shreds, the recent Oh, What A Lovely War still very much in mind, this made a muted, downbeat and realistic close to the decade; a quiet plea for life. Trumpeter Freddy Clayton’s closing Last Post shuts down the ‘60s.
GEORGE HARRISON You (1975)
An isolated single which was only a minor hit in the middle of a pronounced creative drought for Harrison, this nevertheless was a storming, if temporary and almost completely unnoticed, return to All Things Must Pass form, Harrison’s voice sounding more alive than anything he had done since “What Is Life?”
NOEL HARRISON Windmills Of Your Mind (1969)
Described by unsympathetic critics as the most boring chord sequence ever - the same cycle repeated in eight descending semitonal modulations – this is in fact a labyrinth of a song with an immeasurably desolate epicentre. And more than any other song in this list, it returns this writer to 1969; alone in the dark with the pictures and the sound.
JULIO IGLESIAS Begin The Beguine (Volver A Empezar) (1981)
A brilliant soundtrack for cruising over the Westway; Ramon Arcusa’s deviously just out-of-date orchestration (complete with syndrums) works in the same artful way as Gil Evans’ first big orchestral swell behind Billy Harper’s tenor on his 1969 Ampex recording of “General Assembly.”
IMAGINATION Body Talk (1981)
We are not talking Britfunk here; we are talking the Cocteau Twins, we are talking away from the body (and even away from the camp) towards some kind of nirvana. This group’s work is dying for rehabilitation.
DEE D JACKSON Automatic Lover (1978)
Tommy as restaged by Giorgio Moroder and Peter Greenaway. The saddest song to become a hit in 1978, “Shot By Both Sides” included. If this were on International Deejay Gigolo 7 you would idolise it. Even though it’s not, you still should.
JETHRO TULL Sweet Dreams (1969)
A prime example of the regression of progressive rock, Ian Anderson lyrically came across as a crusty old conservative – hear his views on revolution in “Living In The Past”: “let’s close our eyes to all their lies.” A great band, however – Super Furry Animals 25 years ahead of their time – and this blazing follow-up made the top ten in late ’69. Anderson offers, cackling, to initiate his Other into the grown-up world as behind him a compressed orchestra make like the Love of Forever Changes tackling Ravel’s “Bolero.”
ELTON JOHN Ego (1978)
Elton’s finest single; exasperated by his imagined immediate extinction, jerky, almost new wave piano soundtracks his self-loathing angst. The only time when his mask slips.
TOM JONES Daughter Of Darkness (1970)
A top five hit for the lad in 1970, but not one that’s much spoken of; notable for the gusto of the arrangement behind his tremulous baritone, oozing much of the same pizzazz as Tony Christie’s more excitable moments (“Avenues And Alleyways”).
RONAN KEATING Life Is A Rollercoaster (2000)
Admit it, readers, this is an immaculate pop record and Keating does an immaculately blank job of crooning it (“You almost got me punched in a fight”). Admit also that it’s the first in a series of diminishing return reproductions by Gregg Alexander, but this is by far the freshest. I remember when Laura and I first heard it – neither of us by any stretch of the imagination Boyzone fans – and we mutually nodded at each other the tacit understanding that (a) this is a shoe-in for number one; (b) this is a fucking great pop record.
LEVEL 42 Leaving Me Now (1985)
I’ll leave it to the boy Sinker to crenellate the jazz-funk Adorno of this single’s parent album World Machine, but this tortured ballad beats the shit out of all similar attempts by Elvis Costello, and as a bonus includes the best use of the word “mesmerised” in pop.
LIEUTENANT PIGEON Mouldy Old Dough (1972)
Come on then, let’s have that Pigeon/Stavely Makepeace compilation! In the meantime, remind yourself that (a) this extreme lo-fi Russ Conway meets Joe Meek rave-up got to number one; and (b) how impossible the industry now would make it for a middle-aged housewife pianist even to get a sniff of Top Of The Pops, never mind get to number one.
LORD ROCKINGHAM’S XI Hoots Mon (1958)
The 6.5 Special houseband, full of seasoned old pros from the ‘30s onwards, plus young Benny Green on tenor, nevertheless managed to be Down With The Kids when they got to number one with this beyond-corniness-to-the-point-of-profundity piece of rock-and-roll as only British danceband veterans can play it. Don’t want to sound like Ian MacDonald, but don’t you think we’ve lost something along the way?
LULU Take Your Mama For A Ride (1975)
The smart money currently seems to be on Lulu’s ’68 “Love Loves To Love Love” to break out of the clubs and become the next “Are You Ready For Love,” but this is unquestionably her funkiest and sexiest record. Betty Wright got kudos at the time for achieving much less.
PAUL McCARTNEY Waterfalls (1980)
Doubly poignant now, of course, following the death of Linda, all the plaintive cries of “And I need love” and the barely contained sob in the words “if you went away.” A quietly neurotic ballad which made an agreeably uncomfortable addition to the Top Ten in the late summer of 1980.
DON McLEAN Vincent (1972)
It’s those marimbas again, you see. Plus it is one of two great songs about artists to get to #1, the other being “Matchstalk Men and Matchstalk Cats and Dogs” by Brian and Michael. And anyone wishing to slag the latter can frankly fuck right off now; a nice tribute to Lowry by a couple of good socialist folkies. Would a song about suicide get into the Top 40 now, unless sung by indie or metal bands with organised fan clubs?
MARSHALL HAIN Dancing In The City (1978)
There really is something immodestly sensual about the way Kit Hain sings “action” in the second line of this typically modest British attempt at recherche pop-disco, something which connects her directly with Sophie Ellis-Bextor. A wonderful single, anyway, conceived by a sometime avant-jazzrock keyboardist (Julian Marshall). What does Kit Hain do now? (Possible sub, even though it’s nowhere near disco, except perhaps at the end of one: Judie Tzuke’s “Stay With Me ‘Til Dawn,” the best non-Elton record on Rocket Records not recorded by Kiki Dee)
MR BLOE Groovin’ With Mr Bloe (1970)
Come to think of it, this record’s appearance on the DJM label, complete with the bowler-hatted, bespectacled keyboard player who appeared on TOTP, mistakenly led some people to assume that this was Elton dicking around. In fact it was Zack Lawrence, anglicising a fairly rootsy piece of psych-pop – originally a Tony Orlando B-side, of all things – and somehow making it mean more and matter more. Listen particularly to the connecting line between Harry Pitch’s harmonica on this single and Bowie’s harmonica on “A New Career In A New Town” seven years later, when he was busy regurgitating his history of pop, removing his centre and rephrasing it for bemused Martians.
MOTORS Airport (1978)
A forlorn piece of AOR which somehow ended up being filed under new wave; yet this record brings back the frustrated, summer vacation love agonies of a 14-year-old far more avidly than, say, Pere Ubu’s “Thriller!” (even though Dub Housing was a frequent consolation soundtrack over that particular summer)
MUNGO JERRY Baby Jump (1971)
A stomp which barely exists as a song, the pianist refusing to acknowledge any chords, instead applying the Cecil Taylor elbows up and down the keyboard technique throughout. The jam stops halfway through, starts up again; everyone sounds completely stoned. This, readers, got to number one.
ROBBIE NEVIL C’est La Vie (1987)
Canadian virtual one-hit wonder with ludicrous double mallet which made Michael Bolton look like Lol Coxhill, but also with a voice like Junior Giscombe, except with better material, namely this useless but toweringly brilliant monolith of AOR trying to negotiate with electropop (and lots of subs here: go to your copy of Now 7 to rediscover the filthy joy of Sly Fox’s “Let’s Go All The Way” or, well see below…).
NEW RADICALS You Get What You Give (1998)
Well, Gregg Alexander may just have the one pop trick up his sleeve, but what a joyous one; a glorious AOR meets ELO meets Hall and Oates outranks Ben Folds Five YES to life with added cracks at Beck and Courtney Love. DON’T GIVE UP, YOU’VE GOT A REASON TO LIVE.
NU SHOOZ I Can’t Wait (1986)
Nor can I; an unbelievably sexy vocal staying just this side of tonality against stuttering electro, the bassline running up to lick your lips and more besides. A single of its year, infinitely more pop than, say, “Kiss” by the Age of Chance, or “No Conversation” by View From The Bastard Hill.
Now I really start to test you…
DES O’CONNOR Dick-A-Dum-Dum (King’s Road) (1969)
Because the guy, not to mention the song’s author (Jim Dale!), actually meant it. 37-year-old Des in his sideburns in the summer of Woodstock trying manfully to be With It, cocking a sideways glance at Roger Miller’s “England Swings” and inadvertently coming up with one of the great London pop records. The ludicrous rhyming scans throughout (readers, I give you “Portobello” and “sort-o-sell-o,” I beseech upon you “Piccadilly” and “pick a dilly”) actually reflect the pace of metropolitan intercourse pretty faithfully. And who could resist “Buckingham beat” and the killer punchline “Lend me a fiver, I’ll pay you back a spare one”?
OSMONDS Let Me In (1973)
From The Plan, a song to Jesus which 99% of its purchasers interpreted as a straight love song. But what a song and what a production; voices and orchestra really excel themselves here with harmonic ebullience worthy of the Four Seasons. And any pop record with a key change towards the end has to count for something (note: this does not include Oasis’ “All Around The World” which despite getting to number one as a single cannot really be considered “pop”).
GILBERT O’SULLIVAN Alone Again (Naturally) (1972)
Well, what does one say? Were I ranking this list in terms of aesthetic preference, this would probably come top. One of his biggest hits – a number one in America, incredibly, and a song so apt for a standard that even Dewey Redman recorded a version in the mid-‘80s – it is also the bleakest song ever to penetrate the charts. Death pervades every second of this song; the death of love, the exposure of love as a fallacy, the death of his parents, and first and foremost his own death, all accompanied with weird synchronicity by Reggie Perrin flutes and strings. All sung to a major key by someone who looked and dressed like Gareth out of The Office. The missing link between Nick Drake and Morrissey; can we go easy on the Tom Jones box sets and do one for Gilbert?
ELVIS PRESLEY An American Trilogy (1972)
Of course, the point of Mickey Newbury’s original is that the faux-triumphalism of the North and South anthems are trumped by the quiet despair of the slave song which concludes his version. But Elvis couldn’t leave it like that, oh no; he had to include everyone and everything in his own America, he could not afford to make America look small, so he builds everything back up to a triumphant reprise of “Battle Hymn Of The Republic.” Yet if America is a cardboard sham, how best, and who better, to embody the tacky heart which beats beneath the cold, massive exterior? Big and empty; but catch that “you know your daddy’s bound to die.” America can only live if he sacrifices himself. Just don’t get too close to the spectacle, for fear you might interpret it as reality.
PROCOL HARUM Pandora’s Box (1975)
An unplanned late-period Procol Top 20 hit, the combination of “magic staircase plane” and Those Marimbas kind of did it for me.
BRIAN PROTHEROE Pinball (1974)
I daresay that its inclusion on the excellent new Zigzag compilation will give it some new kudos, but this is another encapsulation of the bleak I Hate power cut reality of the mid-‘70s; Protheroe’s mind slowly splits, bridged by Tony Coe’s anguished tenor. “They say you never know when you’re insane.” An unlikely companion piece to John Cale’s “The Man Who Couldn’t Afford To Orgy” which just missed the Top 50 in October of the same year.
CLIFF RICHARD We Don’t Talk Anymore (1979)
The most futuristic record of ’79 was made not by Numan or Dammers or Nile and ‘Nard but by Alan Tarney and Cliff (no wonder Saint Etienne wanted Tarney for the single version of “You’re In A Bad Way”). Indeed Cliff’s entire run of singles from “Miss You Nights” to “Wired For Sound” would qualify for inclusion in this list. But listen especially to the single’s ace trick; not the triple backing vocal of “she-ee-eep,” but the way in which, as the second half of the chorus builds up to its climax, the synthesiser suddenly dies down momentarily, as though someone had accidentally switched it off, before it roars back into life and into the next verse.
LIONEL RICHIE All Night Long (All Night) (1983)
One of the most astute pop singles of the ‘80s, which somehow managed to fuse the spaciousness of Thriller with the sensuality of Midnight Love, the Bob Marley-esque vocal and the overlying tint of Grace Jones. Very easy to forget how undemonstrably great this record is.
CLODAGH RODGERS Come Back And Shake Me (1969)
Here instead of Mary Hopkin’s “Those Were The Days,” as the latter’s credibility has recently undergone something of a revival, but mostly because this is another of the sexiest pop records ever made; the breathing and whispering lifts the record out of the late ‘60s Brit hit factory treadmill, turns the lyrical submission into disguised dominance. If only Clodagh had found her own Lee Hazlewood, she could have become Ireland’s Nancy Sinatra.
RUBETTES Under One Roof (1976)
I think everyone recognises the deliberate genius of “Sugar Baby Love,” and it’s because of its deliberateness that it doesn’t appear here. Instead, listen to this oddly affecting ode to homosexuality, which just pipped Rod Stewart’s “Killing Of Georgie” as the first lyrically overtly gay song to make the UK charts.
BARRY RYAN Eloise (1968)
The missing link between Scott Walker and Jim Steinman, Barry sang his twin brother’s berserkly spiritual epics for some years and with increased dementia (listen to 1971’s “Red Man” with jaw ready to drop agape) but this was the big hit. Recently described in detail here, but yet again I say: for heaven’s sake rediscover this man’s genius!
LEO SAYER Thunder In My Heart (1977)
Again there is an embarrassment of riches to be plucked from Sayer’s catalogue of hits, but this is the one everyone forgets; Leo goes proto-high energy, screaming his lungs out on this surprisingly effective piece of torch disco.
PETER SKELLERN You’re A Lady (1972)
This would be high up in my personal rankings, too; from the same year as “Alone Again (Naturally)” and displaying the same shade of grey hopelessness. The first verse is quoted verbatim at the beginning of El-P’s Fantastic Damage. Skellern is very afraid. He wants to tell her that he loves her, can’t quite bring himself to say it, and even when he eventually does her response is decidedly undecided (“Hard to answer? Yes I agree”) and it’s very possible that she will turn him down. Nevertheless he deploys all the tricks he can think of to woo her, including a brass band and Home Service choir – the best use of a brass band on a pop record, or at least up there with Roy Harper’s “When An Old Cricketer Leaves The Crease” or Syd Barrett’s “Jugband Blues” (or Ron Geesin’s orchestrations for Atom Heart Mother, for that matter). Not forgetting Tom Waits’ “In The Neighborhood.” Heartbreaking in its vulnerable hopelessness; if this had been by Randy Newman we would all be lauding it to the skies. A large-scale piece on Skellern is sorely needed (try also “My Lonely Room” and try not to cry at the end of it).
SPACE Magic Fly (1977)
The ancestor of all French disco as we know it, and recognised as such by everyone from Felix Da Housekatt on down, yet oddly the original is currently unavailable on CD. Top five in the UK at the same time as Jean-Michel Jarre’s “Oxygene Part IV” and therefore very much part of the general trend of depersonalisation in 1977 pop. Perhaps the fact that track one on side two of the accompanying album was entitled “Velvet Rape” has put people off reissuing it (although the track itself sounds exactly like Air!).
STARLIGHT Numero Uno (1989)
By the same Italians who gave you “Ride On Time” but an infinitely better and sparkier record, ridiculous and brilliant Italian house at its most profound. And it appeared originally on the Discomagic label! Magic!
RINGO STARR It Don’t Come Easy (1971)
Is the Ringo’s Rotogravure album the best post-split record to come from any Beatle? Sometimes I am tempted to think so, especially in view of his brilliant opening one-single-per-year trilogy, of which this was the opening chapter. Then came “Back Off Boogaloo” and “Photograph” and…well eventually 1981’s jaw-dropping “Wrack My Brain” and ultimately Thomas The Tank Engine. A happier fate than the other three, then.
AL STEWART Year Of The Cat (1977)
In the early part of 1977, that year of all years, as an overly impressionable 13-year-old I was briefly convinced that this was the best pop single ever made. Stewart’s voice does indeed foreshadow that of Neil Tennant, and there’s something charming about the song’s inscrutability which keeps it great. Memorably covered by Peter Glaze on Crackerjack where the “Peter Lorre” reference, presumably deemed too obscure for The Kids, was substituted with “Tom and Jerry, contemplating a crime.” Genius, needless to say.
BARBRA STREISAND AND BARRY GIBB Guilty (1980)
The Bee Gees are not present in this list as performers, but throughout the ’80s their extraordinary run of hits written and produced for other artists were Bee Gees records in all but name, the group all over them. Thus it is with the first and best of these records, the title track of Streisand’s 1980 album. Fantastic blue-eyed soul; had the label said “Dionne Warwick” we’d all be calling it a classic. “And we’ve got nothing to be guilty of…” – could almost be the theme for this list, couldn’t it?
SWEET SENSATION Sad, Sweet Dreamer (1974)
Producer and arranger Des Parton pulled in the stops, crucially, for this wonderful mirage of idyllic Britsoul. Marcel King resurfaced briefly years later with a bizarre 12” on Factory.
JACKIE TRENT Where Are You Now (My Love)? (1965)
Again, had this said “Dionne Warwick/Burt Bacharach” instead of “Jackie Trent/Tony Hatch” this would have been hailed as a classic of desperation 30 years ago. Still, listening to it you can understand why this was Trent’s only hit single as an artist – her vocals are a little bit too strident, a little too old-school, a little Anne Shelton if truth be told, and she was much wiser to leave that side of things to Petula Clark subsequently.
SHANIA TWAIN That Don’t Impress Me Much (1998)
Admit it! No, admit it, Shania is great and this is a fab and sussed pop record which could have come out on Ze Records without any shame whatsoever. Funny, hip and unbearably sexy. Having witnessed the virtual anti-sexiness of operatives like the Sugababes and Rachel Stevens, these are very important qualities.
2 UNLIMITED No Limit (1991)
And what if this had been on Digital Hardcore? Extreme, ruthless, remorseless, techno techno techno TECHNO! Pretty extreme for a number one, even in 1991.
BONNIE TYLER Total Eclipse Of The Heart (1983)
Turn around. Yes, turn around, face yourself and own up…this is a magisterial and magnificent record. Always better with female voices than with the Loaf, in my opinion, Jim Steinman knows exactly how to direct a pop record as well as simply producing it, and by God he directs Tyler with beauty and grace. Tyler really does sound here as if she had been waiting all her life to sing this song; she torments herself with her increasingly frantic “every now and then”s while Rory Dodd sings in the background as her conscience. Fantasy overtakes reality – “Forever’s gonna start tonight!” – only for the glass to shatter as reality cuts Tyler into little pieces, without so much as a mere touch. She quietens again. “Once upon a time I was falling in love, now I’m only falling apart.” Then the staggering scream of “EVERY NOW AND THEN” over the thundering Trevor Horn-like drum rolls, before the life and love die (down) again. “Turn around, bright eyes” as Dodd’s voice ascends steadily towards androgynous heights. The song creeps away quietly, sadly, full of remorse. Steinman needs to be taken into serious consideration again; look out in The Naked Maja for a forthcoming celebration of his virtually forgotten 1989 masterpiece Pandora’s Box.
TRACEY ULLMAN Breakaway (1983)
Yes, it’s breakneck, and yes it should have been on Stiff Records because this is a punk record. Ullman roars through Jackie De Shannon’s song at 500 mph, almost too blurred for the listener to discern; and her performance on TOTP complete with hairbrush as microphone was priceless. If you see her You Broke My Heart In 17 Places album going second hand, then snap it up; it’s terrific and intelligent pop.
FRANKIE VALLI Swearin’ To God (1975)
Perhaps the apotheosis of Valli’s solo career is this stunned acknowledgement of love and of God. It’s a disco record but it doesn’t hammer its nails of dance into you, preferring to glide around you and seduce you. The female co-vocalist isn’t credited on the label, but this is a heart-restoring, life-affirming record.
FRANKIE VAUGHAN Tower Of Strength (1961)
I’m aware that Mr Ewing in his Popular project is likely to come to completely different conclusions about this record, which kept “Stranger On The Shore” off the top of the UK charts, but this is possibly the greatest soul vocal performance on any British pop record. Yes, that’s Frankie Vaughan I’m talking about, and his reading of the Bacharach and David chestbeater really beats its chest, knocking the stuffing out of Gene McDaniels’ original. Check the “Green Door” whoop at “then I’d walk out the door-ah!” “You’d be crawling to me-eeeh!” boasts a hoarse desperation which would not have shamed Eric Burdon or Zoot Money. This record understands that “soul” needs, by definition, to be larger than life.
ROSIE VELA Magic Smile (1987)
Bet you’d all forgotten this one – produced by Donald Fagen, this slice of intelligent jazz-pop-AOR was pretty unhip even at the time, but its gorgeous chord changes – and hear how they wash over, and beneath, Vela’s extremely seductive vocal – make this something of a classic. It also carries fond personal memories of Cromer Beach in March 1987; the other prominent soundtrack to that time, strangely enough, was “Language And Mentality” by African Head Charge.
JOE WALSH Life’s Been Good (1978)
All of his But Seriously, Folks album is good stuff, but the echoed, almost underwater, near dublike guitars (reflecting the image on the album sleeve) set against Walsh’s sardonic, high-pitched vocal, made this an ideal soundtrack for the summer of 1978. A classic year for this sort of thing, when you consider it.
TREVOR WALTERS Love Me Tonight (1981)
A Top 30 lovers’ rock pop hit from the winter of 1981 which seems to have slipped quietly out of circulation, but it’s one of the most beautiful and seductive, the old-school backing vocals included. I remember our watching this on TOTP - “This doesn’t fit into anything else on the programme.” “It’s just good music.” “Exactly.”
MARTI WEBB Take That Look Off Your Face (1980)
Andrew Lloyd Webber is it now? Carlin, you really need to be getting down to some serious gloomcore; you’re going mad in that bunker. Not so fast…great pop is great pop, and this is a classic Spector-esque belter with a lovely circulatory never quite eight-to-the-bar rhythmic and harmonic structure, and for once the essential staginess of the performance works in its favour, in a peculiarly British way (even though the parent musical was partly set in NYC). It fully deserved its Top 3 placing.
KEITH WEST Excerpt From A Teenage Opera (1967)
The appearance of other excerpts from Mark Wirtz’ aborted project on RPM Records in the late ‘90s perhaps made us thankful that the Teenage Opera as such never came to fruition, for this was the only song on it which worked as pop. And in its barefaced (if necessarily theatrical) staring of mortality in the face, it threw a sharp sting into the late Summer of Love. It delves back into some of my earliest consciousness, the circulating harpsichord entwined in my infant memory with the spiral dome on top of the Co-Op department store in Uddingston Main Street. The idea that people could actually die was new to me at the time, and this was perhaps the first artefact which made me aware of it.
ROGER WHITTAKER I Don’t Believe In If Anymore (1970)
Existentialism in the Top 10? An orchestral prologue and epilogue worthy of Scott Walker, Whittaker’s never-more-bitter vocals decrying false optimism and fake patriotism, receding into quiet regret in the chorus that life can never be what you try to make it be.
WINGS Goodnight Tonight (1979)
“The use of space in this song’s extended middle eight,” opined my dad on first listening to this song, “is pleasingly reminiscent of the Art Ensemble of Chicago.” Only my dad could make those sorts of connections. He’s right though. Look, just go out and buy the Wingspan 2CD compilation; terrific pop music, certainly in many stages far more unobtrusively adventurous than anything Lennon was doing over the same period.
JOHN PAUL YOUNG Love Is In The Air (1978)
The summer of 1978 again. Wandering out of the La Scala cinema in Sauchiehall Street on a Wednesday afternoon, having just had my mind blown by first viewing of 2001; copy of the Herald Tribune to read on the 54 bus home; the deep, cool warmth of mornings of the bluest of skies one could ever hope to witness, coupled with the knowledge that the whole summer was ahead of you without encumbrance. And being in love for something like the first time. “Love is in the air, like the rising of the sun,” over insistent bass and clavinet. Do you understand?
GHEORGHE ZAMFIR Doina De Jale (Light Of Experience) (1976)
This would be a good sign-off point. Five minutes of beatless panpipe-led drone. Top 5 in the summer of ’76. Look at the same sea I looked at then when Alan Freeman first played this on his Saturday afternoon show on Radio 1. We didn’t lose anything, readers, except perhaps ourselves.
Next week, to provide completely unnecessary balance, I will be looking at a key component of The Canon. In the meantime, I throw this concept out to you. What else should I have added to, or removed from, this list? Comments to marcellocarlin@hotmail.com please (note to record company PRs in general: do you think a box set would be viable?).
Thursday, October 23, 2003
TOUCH THE HEM OF HIS GARMENT, FOR I AM A BELIEVER
We went to witness David Blaine’s emergence from his 44 days in the wilderness beside Tower Bridge last night. And it’s true that we certainly felt as though we were in the midst of a wilderness; while we were not exactly expecting an ICA/National Theatre-type audience, the crowd was uniquely terrible, a real Bank Holiday pleb outing. Lots of hooded, youthful undesirables hollering meaninglessly and, worse, witlessly, itching for a fight, itching to throw rockets at Blaine’s box, itching to have rockets thrown at them if truth be told. My colleague even asked one of the on-duty policemen whether he couldn’t just go and “arrest the yobs anyway” on suspicion that they were going to be indulging in dodgy physical business. The policeman agreed good-naturedly that he would if he could. If the editor of the Guardian is reading this, I never said that; it was a mirage. Apart from that, there were hordes of unpleasant, screaming teenagers, mobs of witless, sarcastic Australians, all vying for SJ Perelman-esque levels of humour (“Let’s hope the box drops and smashes him!” “David is the last of the true romantics!” “Did you see that Warren Zevon documentary on VH-1 last night?” Vulnerable eaders will need at this stage to secure themselves to their couches for fear of falling off them in hysterics). Bikes, prams and Rottweilers competed for decreasing millimetres of space.
In the midst of all this calamitous kerfuffle – and if you think I’m overreacting, you should have heard what my colleague had to say about the situation – Blaine managed, miraculously and sublimely, to rise above all of it. Our Saviour squatted beningly in his crate, the interior décor of which compared favourably to the light fittings department of BHS, resplendent in Jesus beard and mullet. There was no hologram, no illusion, no utilising of Yusuf Islam Previously Known As Cat Stevens or Darius Pop Idol as lookalike stand-ins; after endless Sky-initiated delays (mostly for adverts or to show some dreary Harmony Korine footage – red balloon against a blue sky, etc.), the Messiah came down from his mountain into the waiting care of paramedics; still healthy looking, still talking articulately. Was McDonald’s feeding him up that tube on the quiet – regular infusions of intravenous Filet-o-Fish? It matters not; for he has preached his gospel and I for one am a believer. Before coming down he even threw his towel, his Shroud of Blaine if you will, into the crowd, blessed with the imprints of the Mullet Holy. He stripped to the waist to show us the marks of his suffering (not that we could really see any from our viewpoint, but We Believe, damn you!), he donated his garment so that we might be privileged to touch its hem. He has revealed tumultuous truths about ourselves, about the citizens of London, and we breathlessly await his diaries for bequeathing of his unutterable wisdom. He has brought all of us together, not that we two and most of the rest of “us” particularly wanted to be together, but Goddammit We Believe!
And you want some punctum? It was beautifully provided – at the precise moment that David came down, a neighbouring boat on the Thames started to blast out Dizzee Rascal’s “Jus’ A Rascal.” It was genius, it united the two key aesthetic talking points of the year, it got even the policemen dancing. Was that the illusion, the punchline? Oh, let’s not dispute it – Blaine is surely Our Lord Jesus Christ reincarnated. Absorb the teachings of his gospel forthwith (his diaries composed in the crate are likely to be published before year’s end, and according to yesterday’s Observer will give a damning indictment of the cultural emptiness of British society, though God knows how anyone from the Observer managed to sneak into the box to read them without anyone else noticing), so that we can walk more proudly – and less plebbily – through this world.
TELEVISION THE MEDIUM NOT THE GROUP
Perhaps the most fatuous of all the fatuous arguments – and all the arguments have thus far been fatuous – against David Blaine’s 44 days is that his “stunt” is a sick gesture when there are so many starving people in this world. Suddenly we are transported back to the world of the petrified nine-year-old at the dinner table staring at an unappetising plate of green vegetable matter of uncertain origin, floating around in a potentially toxic liquid, their mother darkly intoning against their understandable reluctance to consume this glorified crocodile semen: “But think of all the starving children in Africa.” As Bill Hicks once commented in a different context, does that mean that once they reach a certain age they’re off your love list? And why only Africa?
Fair enough: Gail does think that Blaine could at the very least have donated some of his fee to charity, out of the presumed goodness of his own heart, just to prove that he is not a cynical misanthrope isolating himself in the midst of crowds of hoi polloi to magnify how much he despises them. No problem with that. Nonetheless, for those Grauniad writers with their Pavlovian pretence of moral superiority, I have a newsflash for you: David Blaine not sitting in his box without solid food for 44 days would not have prevented a single person from starving. A Gulf War-style pre-emptive invasion of Ethiopia in, say, 1984, or even 1973, to take out its corrupt rulers and ensure that (a) UN dispatches of food were sent without obstacle to those for whom it was intended; and (b) practical help in building self-sufficient feeding systems, complete with irrigation, etc., could be given, would have nullified the need for Bob Geldof. For heaven’s sake, it is showbiz, it is spectacle; Blaine not sitting in his box for 44 days would not have raised the wages of any of these poor wretches “living” up the road from his crane in Bermondsey – all these nurses, teachers, junior doctors, firefighters whom we all profess to love until they have the brass neck to demand sufficient payment for their services in order for them to live in habitable accommodation and provide three square meals per day for their families, at which stage they are immediately recast as crypto-pinkos who are only in it for the money my God isn’t the work rewarding in itself etc., a question usually asked by those who should really be asking themselves the same question, all these absolutely necessary people like newspaper columnists without whom civilisation would irretrievably collapse – but he has at least provided a focus of entertainment for some of these people, provided them with a nice Saturday afternoon out with their sandwiches and flasks of soup. Plus, despite the fact that he has pocketed some $300,000 from this experience, and even if he decides not to donate any of it to charity, there was the frisson that some real harm or permanent damage could have been done; Blaine did not exactly throw cartwheels immediately he left the box, nor did he leap into the awaiting arms of the members of Girls Aloud for a gag photo – but he returned to us and soon he will be somewhere else. He will not die; not yet, anyway. He can’t afford to.
Some criticism of Blaine’s crane has centred on the possibility that ultimately it might have been a wee bit dull and overblown, as with his other large-scale adventures. Watching a rerun last week of the documentary on his previous career practising close-up magic in the streets of NYC, one might be led to think how much better suited he is, how much more likeable he is, in this kind of environment. Against the genuine sex and mischief of his close-up magic, the block of ice, the plinth on Times Square, can, I admit, seem like (What’s The Story?) Morning Glory next to the unforced good nature of Definitely Maybe (perhaps a more contemporary parallel would be Room On Fire set against Is This It?, but the Strokes have more or less passed me by; they became big in the summer of 2001, when I had considerably more urgent and important life-and-death business to deal with, so I remain removed from and somewhat bemused at the whole phenomenon).
Still, is the world today really too small for ambition and potential large-scale ridicule? At least he’s trying, if only the patience of plebs. And better big-time Blaine than small-time Brown. Derren Brown Plays Russian Roulette again committed the sin of being boring rather than being controversial; had it been scheduled as a five-minute programme, to start at 9:55, and weed out all the sub-Pop Idol choose-my-killer nonsense which preceded it, its interest might have been a little more intense. Instead of a commercial break, or Creature Comforts, here’s Derren sitting in an old barn in Jersey with a pistol pointed at his right temple.
Of course we knew that he was not going to die on live TV, or even die on dead TV; police presence was strong and, despite his extended assurances, no live ammunition was involved at any stage. A quarter of a century after Peter Finch in Network (and if you recall, Faye Dunaway’s TV exec has to resort to planting an assassin in his audience to shoot him once his ratings start to plummet), suicide is finally revealed as yet another faintly useful facet of showbiz.
Was it coincidence that Derren Brown’s limbering-up was scheduled immediately after a documentary on the suicide of Dr David Kelly? This juxtaposition seemed to me to be a mini-sociological essay in itself; the transition from the old school of Toryism/establishmentarianism to the new. Firstly, the patriotic, High Tory Kelly who, not having been shrewd enough to expose the 45-minute idiocy in other, more subtle ways, poured it all out to the woman from Newsnight and then was, as another deceased High Tory once said, economical with the actualité in front of the Parliamentary Commission. When he realised that his conversation must have been taped – and that, when the tape became public knowledge, his MI6 career and pension would have been lost for good – he knew that his particular game was up and Did The Decent Thing. This information was conveyed to us, not by a biased party like Toynbee or Liddle, but by his best mate, disaffected ex-BBC reporter Tom Mangold. An honest, if strangely angled, coroner’s verdict; and while the prospect of Kelly and his wife being reduced to holding out their caps in Bonn Square of a Saturday morning seems an unlikely scenario, the knowledge that his life, his house, his carefully constructed refuge (in either sense), may all have been about to vanish in metaphorical smoke must have been more than Kelly could bear.
Contrast this with Derren Brown – streetwise post-Thatcherite, his close-cropped semi-beard and smartly rumpled suit in itself an aesthetic negation of Kelly’s white, flowing, faintly hippy-ish locks, donkey jacket and cap. Suicide? It’s a business decision; have to weigh up the economic pros and cons, see how far the scales slide; be brisk and waste no time. Do the job efficiently, even if nothing about it is decent.
Actually, were he to be disrobed of the loathsome post-Loaded “manliness” schtick, Brown would end up not very far away, aesthetically, from Tommy Cooper – with the very considerable difference that Cooper’s death, albeit unplanned, did occur onstage and on live TV; those five minutes or so on Live At Her Majesty’s in 1984 seemed vaguely Beckett-esque in their minimalism – why’s he stopped? Why’s he struggling? Dragged offstage from behind without a word – is this performance art? In retrospect, they are of course among the five most harrowing and disturbing minutes ever witnessed on a TV screen (particularly as the audience, not knowing what was really going on, were themselves collapsing in hysterics), and only remain so because, quite understandably, they have never been repeated or made available on video since (with one exception, a late ‘80s documentary where Harry Secombe’s voiceover sensitively takes us through Cooper’s death in detail).
Cooper himself, though, was the John Cale of comedy – a highly skilled artist who deliberately made himself out to be an amateur or an incompetent. Witnessing the clips assembled on last Monday’s documentary/confessional by Bob Monkhouse, Behind The Laughter, one was taken at the pitifully inappropriate attempts made over the decades to shoehorn Cooper’s irreducible talents into some standard and already dated “variety show” template. When taken out of his fez and away from his box of inept trickery, Cooper struggled as any landed fish would do. Then again, it may have something to do with the fact that – as with the programme’s other subjects, Frankie Howerd, Ken Dodd and Benny Hill – Cooper essentially had one basic 12-minute act, extemporised from the postwar round robin of music hall tours, which if presented undiluted on television, would not have lasted him long. That’s partly why the likes of Max Miller are still held in some kind of awe, disguising the fact that, in those pre-TV days, Miller had 20 minutes of material with which he was able to tour the music halls of Britain for decades on end without any diminution in his career. But TV was merciless in swallowing up material.
One way to tackle the problem head on was to embrace and exploit the new medium fully, which is what Benny Hill did. Unexceptional as a stand-up comic or as a radio comedian – Monkhouse said that Hill “was unable to project beyond row G” – he set about devising a ‘50s TV equivalent of close-up street magic; comedy specifically designed for the medium of TV which would be unreproducable on stage. And in those clips from his early TV shows, you can immediately sense something new happening, someone who, unlike Dodd, Howerd or Cooper, actually seemed to be of the modern age. The material may now be creaky – and the descent into the odious self-parody which beset Hill in later life, following his move to Thames (“THERAPIST/THE RAPIST” etc.) is well documented – but the unavoidable truth is that Hill was one of the great television minds, up there with Dennis Potter, Patrick McGoohan, Alan Clarke and Jim Henson, someone who saw the potential of the new media, not just for his own career but in general, and embraced it heartily.
Frankie Howerd seemed, in contrast, never to have an act at all beyond the 20 seconds of catchphrases which provided the bulk of his living throughout his long life; and it’s scarcely surprising that his career dipped perilously at repeated intervals, only to be revived by good scriptwriters (Galton and Simpson, Talbot Rothwell) or by playing the irony card (TW3, Oxford Union). Looking at him now, one marvels that he managed to sustain a career at all. And he was a lecherous fellow who made passes at a mortified Monkhouse on numerous occasions over the years; there was, last week, a priceless moment from one of Monkhouse’s chat shows where he and Howerd stroll in front of the camera crooning “Spread A Little Happiness,” with the foreknowledge that immediately prior to recording the show, Howerd had again attempted to have his way with him. Monkhouse’s fixed smile never seemed less than fixed.
Indeed the whole programme seemed to be a confessional by Monkhouse to himself, and for himself, wondering why a nice Dulwich College lad like himself had somehow ended up in the comedy business – and also perhaps revealing a greater disdain for the art of comedy. Time and again in the programme Monkhouse confessed how he was never able to “get close” to Cooper or Hill, “never got on with” Howerd – the question arising being whether Monkhouse himself was the weakest link. A professional who can rattle off Bob Hope-style gags at quickfire pace and with enviable powers of memory, but also a professional who, like Hope himself, never quite managed to be funny. Monkhouse telling gags is like watching the branch manager rattle through the AGM’s balance sheets, detailing profit and loss but without any discernible character or enthusiasm. One never quite escapes the feeling that Monkhouse considers comedy to be rather beneath him – in the same sense that a later Dulwich College alumnus, David Thomson, freely confesses that he perhaps preferred books to films the whole time. It was appropriate, then, that Dodd, being the only one of these four comedians now able to respond to Monkhouse’s assessments, should come on and break some comedic bread with him at the programme’s end. As with Monkhouse, Dodd is a fast-paced gag man, but has at least managed to construct a persona – even if it’s a flimsy one – under which he can, to an extent, get away with the not actually funny gags, and in the larger picture get away with all those fivers mouldering in his bathroom when they should have been going to the Inland Revenue. Now 75, Dodd is increasingly beginning to resemble J G Ballard, and towards the end of their conversation hinted at some deeper darkness. He compared different types of comedy as different colours of the rainbow – ranging from the bright red and yellow to the black. He solemnly intoned, “Sarcasm. Irony. Satire,” almost hissing out the last word. One suspects that Bill Hicks would not have been to his liking.
Were any of these comedians (next week’s programme promises assessments of Tony Hancock, Peter Sellers and Morecambe and Wise) ever revolutionary? Hardly; they came straight out of the war, patriots one and all, and with Thatcherite non-state reliance set about building themselves careers brick by brick. And, with the exceptions of Hancock, Morecambe and Spike Milligan, they were nearly all Conservatives; proto-Thatcherites well ahead of their time (the exceptions perhaps being Benny Hill, who was extremely careful never to express anything remotely political throughout his public life, and Ken Dodd, who has appeared at election rallies for Wilson, Heath, Callaghan, Thatcher, Major and Blair – perhaps he just likes to be on the winning side, or more probably views the whole business as a kind of adjunct to the Royal Variety Performance; perform for the Prime Minister, regardless of their party). To understand why an “improvising” musician like Derek Bailey doesn’t really change their act – the quality of the music relying on what he’s playing, or with whom he’s playing it – is perhaps to understand the postwar ENSA mindset, where you honed your 12-minute routine and tried to make a career out of it. Indeed both Milligan and Monkhouse befriended their ENSA accordion-playing colleague Stan Tracey, and both were rumoured to be shadowy presences at many improv gigs throughout the years. Then there’s the strange case of Morecambe and Wise; the inherent funniness in both which their ATV work failed so utterly to bring out and which, finally, Eddie Braben at the BBC had to articulate for them. Even when they first teamed up in the ‘30s they were unevenly balanced; Wise already an established child star, Morecambe the rookie – and so it proved; Eric the socialist, Ernie the Tory; Morecambe the closet Zappa/Beefheart fan, Wise hopelessly in love all of his life with the vanished Hollywood of Rooney, Garland, Durante. There’s more of a hint of father-and-son in their peak ‘70s work; Ernie the exasperated Patrick Brontë authoritarian father figure who ends up outliving his wilder offspring (Eric).
Ultimately, from the quality of the archive clips shown, not much of any of these comedians’ work proved to be actively funny. Do we admire the technique and fret over the loneliness and mental and physical dislocation which seems to have driven all these figures to varying degrees of despair, or do we confess to their spirits that, in the end, it was all for nothing? As with C4’s documentary on Miss World 2002 in Nigeria – Miss World, for years the central staple of television “light entertainment” (as were, let us never forget, the Black and White Minstrels), now a discarded irrelevance farmed out to the Third World with disastrous consequences.
But even the wanton ignorance of nearly all of the participants in Miss World 2002 was preferable to the deliberately-engendered neuroses of Teen Big Brother: The Experiment. I didn’t watch much of the latter, but what I did see was horrific and life-denying. 18-year-olds being treated like eight-year-olds by the patronising Sloanes who produce the programme. Two of the participants engaged in sex and cried and fretted. When actually allowed to talk about “issues,” they were surprisingly lively and commonsensical, but it was never long before they were frogmarched into performing another worthless “task” or hauled into the Diary Room and berated for not going to bed at 9:46 am, or, in extremis, locked in the bedroom. Not one of them had the guts (or had had the guts knocked out of them) to point out that the only reason they wanted kids to go to bed at 9:46 am was that they couldn’t have everyone asleep at the same time, otherwise the E4 ratings would suffer. So they were not being chastised for “moral” reasons but capitalistic, and ultimately meaningless, ones. It was hateful to witness. Perhaps there was a distant point to be made about the worthlessness of school – a place, or a system, whose point is not to educate children but to condition them for the 9-5 working environment by inculcating unquestioning obedience of “authority,” punctuality, etc., in other words to service capitalism, a job which could be better done by letting everyone who wanted to do so leave at the age of eleven, when they could go out into the world, learn an apprenticeship and Contribute More To The Economy If We’re Going To Be All Milton Friedman About It (Steve Winwood still expresses bemusement at the notion that there was anything remarkable about his joining the Spencer Davis Group at the age of 15 – in his day, kids could leave school at 14, went out and learned a trade, as he did). But most noxious of all was the smug announcer promising the audience a “bonkbuster.” He might have well have yelled, “hey, Pete Townshend/Germaine Greer! Get your Kleenex ready!” And people have problems with David Blaine?
MUSIC
I don’t want to write too much about music at the moment. I’m very conscious of what Morley says in Words And Music about why he gave up writing full-time: “…you want the music, just the music, to take up your time, not the writing about it. I decided to write about music at my leisure, and to just let music lead me and follow me as it happened, naturally, without worrying about seeming in touch, on top.” I am also sorely conscious of the multiple “then agains” which follow that statement, as well as the existence of the TV programme “Grumpy Old Men” wherein men not much older, and in some cases younger, than me lament how things aren’t what they were when we were their age, rather than examine the deeper truth that premise (b) is the necessary pre-condition for premise (a). The notion of “nowness” is necessarily personal and individual. My now might be more dated than your then, or my then more up-to-date than your now. Thus could I claim that Scott Walker’s 1983 album Climate Of Hunter can in certain conditions constitute absolute nowness, particularly if you time it so that you come at the exact moment on “Track Six” (1:17) when Evan Parker’s saxophones erupt behind Walker’s alienly ecstatic “The ceilings are rising and falling” (and thanks a million to Bill D for getting that CD-ed for me), whereas the Strokes’ 20 October 2003 album Room On Fire can seem as queerly quaint as Dave Edmunds’ Repeat When Necessary.
And “now, now, now” are the final three words of the album Parallelograms by Linda Perhacs, originally (and minimally) released in 1970 and now reissued and upgraded on CD. Did this record even exist in 1970? The original vinyl was apparently so badly pressed that Linda stuck to listening to a cassette run off the master tapes, and even her record company denied its existence. Have I dreamed this record? For here it reappears in 2003, still elusive, still unavailable even in the largest branches of the chainstores. Rough Trade’s few copies had gone by the time I arrived, but a quick trip across Portobello Road to Minus Zero proved profitable. So this is a record for which you will have to wear out some shoe leather to find, just like I Am Sitting In A Room or any of the CDs which Virgin Megastores have decided to “delete” from their stock because they’re not selling enough to make Virgin’s Top 75 Albums, which are really the only 75 albums they want to sell, ever, and soon all other chainstores will follow suit, and soon the national Top 75 album chart will grind to gridlock, with the same 75 albums to feature for the rest of time, with some occasional soundalike substitutions (Permission To Land for Sheer Heart Attack). I’m still not sure whether I have dreamed Parallelograms with its purple-on-cream pastel rural cover; I needed a record to define and articulate the way I felt drifting into nothingness along Headington’s Old High Street at 2:43 pm on a particular autumn Friday when you catch the sunlight at just the right angle to elevate you into a limbo of incredibleness, such an angle and shade as you will not find on any other day of the year, so I dreamed this record up in my mind and made it exist.
Parallelograms rarely has to raise its voice, and how bewitching Linda sounds when she does. Where to place it stylistically? Some hastily conceived midpoint between Julie Driscoll’s 1969 (the flutes, the acoustic guitars, the naughtiness hiding beneath the placidity) and Nico’s The Marble Index (to which it provides a kind of doorway) with some anticipation of Joni’s Blue. Perhaps Perhacs only made this record because there needed to be another song besides Motorhead’s “Motorhead” to include the word “parallelogram.”
In any case, it starts with “Chimacum Rain” (and the metaphor is staring you in the face). Perhacs’ voice is very 1970; soft and considerate, in the sense of Joni if not in the Wicker Man-we’re-all-doomed sense of Shirley Collins; and also manages to be very 1988, insofar as the timbres and caresses of her voice at various times anticipate Julianne Regan, Elizabeth Frazer and Margo Timmins. There is joy in that voice; witness the bliss as the voice suddenly multiplies at the chorus, the low satisfaction of “down around you” which echoes and mirrors the album’s tripartite sign-off of “now now now,” and the sudden swoop of joy on “stones” in the line “spilling over stones” at 1:05 – a voice virtually making itself pregnant. But it’s not all idyllic rose-tinted grottos; look how the music abruptly darkens at 2:05 when she intones “He belongs here” tied to an ominous bass synth tow. The electronica strives for a crescendo of some sort (who is this “he”? “I’m seeing silences that are his” – a silence which recurs throughout the album. Does this “he” even exist?) but the darkness quickly fades away (or is hurriedly stuffed away in a drawer) to welcome back the original melancholia.
Then there is sex in “Paper Mountain Man,” a Peter Green-ish blues which the drums, harmonica and lead guitar never quite allow to settle. From Linda’s opening, tantalising “Mm-hmm,” the music is lovely and filthy. So many aspects, so many teases, to Linda’s voice here – the certitude at which she bites at the word “Dutch” in “with a Dutch wooden door,” the quiver at “boots” in “you wear Marlboro boots,” the COMING of Linda when she sings “rac-COON” amidst the line “Heard tell you’re half raccoon.”
Following this glimpse of the carnal, Linda then moves back towards introspection in a remarkable trilogy of songs which indicate where All About Eve should have sailed after “Martha’s Harbour.” “Dolphin” (nothing to do with Fred Neil) finds her yearning for escape but aware of its inherent limitations (“Would you take me there and back?/But what is “there”/And what good is “back”?/I don’t know”). “Call Of The River” elaborates on the same theme, with more sensuality (listen to how she swoons on the word “far” in “like a far remembered life” at 0:59) while “Sandy Toes” is very proto-Cocteaus; there’s a lovely and telling change here in the chorus (at 0:29) when the music descends from high voice to low, from major key to minor, on the line “And the rain upon my hair is felt.”
And this is all preparation for the stunning title track and centrepiece of the album. Here Linda abandons language and sense, playing and swooping with words (“Spirallllll-o-gramgram/Semi-Para-Bolic”) in a strange anticipation of Kraftwerk’s similar linguistic passiveness. Suddenly, and shockingly, a great percussive thud, like a coffin lid closing, echoes at 1:48 and…we are away into a parallel world, a weightless world, where celeste, flutes and piano entrails float polytonally around Linda’s suddenly quite mournful multitracked chorus in strange stasis, as though the second half of Lucier’s I Am Sitting In A Room was surging backwards through her mouth. This is also the abovementioned gateway to The Marble Index - the two-chord seesawing over presumed atonality – perhaps mixed up with some anticipation of Beaver and Krause’s Gandharva before, at 3:34, the original song comes back, almost from the grave.
“Hey, Who Really Cares” (and check that anticipation of Marvin Gaye’s “But…who really cares?” at one of the many key change points of What’s Going On) sets Linda’s lyrics to music by Oliver Nelson. On one of the CD’s bonus tracks/alternate takes, this song is prefaced by a mounting cacophony of radio voices underlined by an increasing heartbeat, both of which factions suddenly stop to allow the song in. It is a lament for loneliness – “Can I bring it out to you?” she asks in the chorus. “I need someone to talk to/And no one else will spare me the time.” “You” being the listener. Again, a swoon at the “cages” in “but now they’re like circular cages” (at 1:30), and in the distance, a synthesiser wearily repeats its two-note police siren refrain.
“Moons And Cattails” brings back sex into the equation, though the atonal flutes and electronica from the title track return to bookend the song. Again, her embracing of you is extraordinary; the relish of the “k” at the end of “back” in the chorus line “I knew them way back,” and the way in which, at the line “Back to wet stones…” she continues to hiss the final “s” and then proceeds to be drowned in her own voice.
“Morning Colors” is a gorgeously sad song about a lover whom Linda can apparently only visit at night (in other words, she may be dreaming him). There is real despair as she sings “Sometimes I wonder/Has he ever really seen me?” John Neufeld duets with himself on alto sax in the background, but listen how the saxes drift out of tonality at the line “But when I go/As I always must do…” and slide gently down to support her final, grievous “The color in his day will be clear…and……blue.” The final guitar-augmented chord (underlining the word “blue”) rivals Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” as the saddest and bleakest final chord in pop.
“Porcelain Baked-Over Cast-Iron Wedding” is a relatively lighthearted examination of social fakery masquerading as love which could pass for Jake Thackray’s “Lah-Di-Dah” written from the opposite angle (“It’s a splendid, high waisted, white flavored day”). At the end, Linda sardonically signs off “…..ah, the hell with the rules!”
And everything culminates in the closing “Delicious,” one of the most beautiful odes to sex and love I’ve ever heard. So quiet in its near-silent devotion (silent because of the inexpressible ecstasy of becoming one) it’s an unquestioning acceptance of the joys of love, making all the old similes (“the cold crashing down/On a lone blade of grass”) matter again. “Oh, how I want this now” goes the ever-deepening and ever more satisfied refrain (compare with Leonard Cohen’s despairing “I need you now” echoed by the reassurance of Jennifer Warnes’ massed backing vocals on “The Guests” from the opposite end of the ‘70s) and finally…and how heavenly…she arrives at a catharsis. “Oh, how delicious. Oh, how I want this” (with no doubt that she has it) and how she slowly and beamingly swings the mirror round to reveal the “you” who have been her subject all along at 3:43. With precise and final decisiveness, and with a total embrace, she smiles at you: “Oh, how I want you…now…now……now” …. every now deeper and profounder than the previous one. Here is love and this is all I have to say.
Along with the bonus tracks/odds and sods which have been added to the CD (one of which, “If You Were My Man,” would make the Damien Rices of this world rightly weep with its unforced profundity and depth – “let me in to lie beside your soul”; another is a studio outtake wherein Linda charmingly demonstrates some xylophone/kalimba sound effects to her producer), this constitutes everything that Linda ever recorded. As with Britain’s Bill Fay, she seemed happy thereafter to return to a normal life, which today she continues to lead, having left us with an hour of music which, at 4:00 on a stoned, blissed-out Saturday morning, could not possibly sound more of this minute, of this nanosecond, to this life of all lives.
“I looked on both sides of the creek, but the path had just vanished.
Could be the fact that we were still alive had something to do with it. Hard to tell.”
(Richard Brautigan, Trout Fishing In America, Jonathan Cape Ltd, 1970)
We went to witness David Blaine’s emergence from his 44 days in the wilderness beside Tower Bridge last night. And it’s true that we certainly felt as though we were in the midst of a wilderness; while we were not exactly expecting an ICA/National Theatre-type audience, the crowd was uniquely terrible, a real Bank Holiday pleb outing. Lots of hooded, youthful undesirables hollering meaninglessly and, worse, witlessly, itching for a fight, itching to throw rockets at Blaine’s box, itching to have rockets thrown at them if truth be told. My colleague even asked one of the on-duty policemen whether he couldn’t just go and “arrest the yobs anyway” on suspicion that they were going to be indulging in dodgy physical business. The policeman agreed good-naturedly that he would if he could. If the editor of the Guardian is reading this, I never said that; it was a mirage. Apart from that, there were hordes of unpleasant, screaming teenagers, mobs of witless, sarcastic Australians, all vying for SJ Perelman-esque levels of humour (“Let’s hope the box drops and smashes him!” “David is the last of the true romantics!” “Did you see that Warren Zevon documentary on VH-1 last night?” Vulnerable eaders will need at this stage to secure themselves to their couches for fear of falling off them in hysterics). Bikes, prams and Rottweilers competed for decreasing millimetres of space.
In the midst of all this calamitous kerfuffle – and if you think I’m overreacting, you should have heard what my colleague had to say about the situation – Blaine managed, miraculously and sublimely, to rise above all of it. Our Saviour squatted beningly in his crate, the interior décor of which compared favourably to the light fittings department of BHS, resplendent in Jesus beard and mullet. There was no hologram, no illusion, no utilising of Yusuf Islam Previously Known As Cat Stevens or Darius Pop Idol as lookalike stand-ins; after endless Sky-initiated delays (mostly for adverts or to show some dreary Harmony Korine footage – red balloon against a blue sky, etc.), the Messiah came down from his mountain into the waiting care of paramedics; still healthy looking, still talking articulately. Was McDonald’s feeding him up that tube on the quiet – regular infusions of intravenous Filet-o-Fish? It matters not; for he has preached his gospel and I for one am a believer. Before coming down he even threw his towel, his Shroud of Blaine if you will, into the crowd, blessed with the imprints of the Mullet Holy. He stripped to the waist to show us the marks of his suffering (not that we could really see any from our viewpoint, but We Believe, damn you!), he donated his garment so that we might be privileged to touch its hem. He has revealed tumultuous truths about ourselves, about the citizens of London, and we breathlessly await his diaries for bequeathing of his unutterable wisdom. He has brought all of us together, not that we two and most of the rest of “us” particularly wanted to be together, but Goddammit We Believe!
And you want some punctum? It was beautifully provided – at the precise moment that David came down, a neighbouring boat on the Thames started to blast out Dizzee Rascal’s “Jus’ A Rascal.” It was genius, it united the two key aesthetic talking points of the year, it got even the policemen dancing. Was that the illusion, the punchline? Oh, let’s not dispute it – Blaine is surely Our Lord Jesus Christ reincarnated. Absorb the teachings of his gospel forthwith (his diaries composed in the crate are likely to be published before year’s end, and according to yesterday’s Observer will give a damning indictment of the cultural emptiness of British society, though God knows how anyone from the Observer managed to sneak into the box to read them without anyone else noticing), so that we can walk more proudly – and less plebbily – through this world.
TELEVISION THE MEDIUM NOT THE GROUP
Perhaps the most fatuous of all the fatuous arguments – and all the arguments have thus far been fatuous – against David Blaine’s 44 days is that his “stunt” is a sick gesture when there are so many starving people in this world. Suddenly we are transported back to the world of the petrified nine-year-old at the dinner table staring at an unappetising plate of green vegetable matter of uncertain origin, floating around in a potentially toxic liquid, their mother darkly intoning against their understandable reluctance to consume this glorified crocodile semen: “But think of all the starving children in Africa.” As Bill Hicks once commented in a different context, does that mean that once they reach a certain age they’re off your love list? And why only Africa?
Fair enough: Gail does think that Blaine could at the very least have donated some of his fee to charity, out of the presumed goodness of his own heart, just to prove that he is not a cynical misanthrope isolating himself in the midst of crowds of hoi polloi to magnify how much he despises them. No problem with that. Nonetheless, for those Grauniad writers with their Pavlovian pretence of moral superiority, I have a newsflash for you: David Blaine not sitting in his box without solid food for 44 days would not have prevented a single person from starving. A Gulf War-style pre-emptive invasion of Ethiopia in, say, 1984, or even 1973, to take out its corrupt rulers and ensure that (a) UN dispatches of food were sent without obstacle to those for whom it was intended; and (b) practical help in building self-sufficient feeding systems, complete with irrigation, etc., could be given, would have nullified the need for Bob Geldof. For heaven’s sake, it is showbiz, it is spectacle; Blaine not sitting in his box for 44 days would not have raised the wages of any of these poor wretches “living” up the road from his crane in Bermondsey – all these nurses, teachers, junior doctors, firefighters whom we all profess to love until they have the brass neck to demand sufficient payment for their services in order for them to live in habitable accommodation and provide three square meals per day for their families, at which stage they are immediately recast as crypto-pinkos who are only in it for the money my God isn’t the work rewarding in itself etc., a question usually asked by those who should really be asking themselves the same question, all these absolutely necessary people like newspaper columnists without whom civilisation would irretrievably collapse – but he has at least provided a focus of entertainment for some of these people, provided them with a nice Saturday afternoon out with their sandwiches and flasks of soup. Plus, despite the fact that he has pocketed some $300,000 from this experience, and even if he decides not to donate any of it to charity, there was the frisson that some real harm or permanent damage could have been done; Blaine did not exactly throw cartwheels immediately he left the box, nor did he leap into the awaiting arms of the members of Girls Aloud for a gag photo – but he returned to us and soon he will be somewhere else. He will not die; not yet, anyway. He can’t afford to.
Some criticism of Blaine’s crane has centred on the possibility that ultimately it might have been a wee bit dull and overblown, as with his other large-scale adventures. Watching a rerun last week of the documentary on his previous career practising close-up magic in the streets of NYC, one might be led to think how much better suited he is, how much more likeable he is, in this kind of environment. Against the genuine sex and mischief of his close-up magic, the block of ice, the plinth on Times Square, can, I admit, seem like (What’s The Story?) Morning Glory next to the unforced good nature of Definitely Maybe (perhaps a more contemporary parallel would be Room On Fire set against Is This It?, but the Strokes have more or less passed me by; they became big in the summer of 2001, when I had considerably more urgent and important life-and-death business to deal with, so I remain removed from and somewhat bemused at the whole phenomenon).
Still, is the world today really too small for ambition and potential large-scale ridicule? At least he’s trying, if only the patience of plebs. And better big-time Blaine than small-time Brown. Derren Brown Plays Russian Roulette again committed the sin of being boring rather than being controversial; had it been scheduled as a five-minute programme, to start at 9:55, and weed out all the sub-Pop Idol choose-my-killer nonsense which preceded it, its interest might have been a little more intense. Instead of a commercial break, or Creature Comforts, here’s Derren sitting in an old barn in Jersey with a pistol pointed at his right temple.
Of course we knew that he was not going to die on live TV, or even die on dead TV; police presence was strong and, despite his extended assurances, no live ammunition was involved at any stage. A quarter of a century after Peter Finch in Network (and if you recall, Faye Dunaway’s TV exec has to resort to planting an assassin in his audience to shoot him once his ratings start to plummet), suicide is finally revealed as yet another faintly useful facet of showbiz.
Was it coincidence that Derren Brown’s limbering-up was scheduled immediately after a documentary on the suicide of Dr David Kelly? This juxtaposition seemed to me to be a mini-sociological essay in itself; the transition from the old school of Toryism/establishmentarianism to the new. Firstly, the patriotic, High Tory Kelly who, not having been shrewd enough to expose the 45-minute idiocy in other, more subtle ways, poured it all out to the woman from Newsnight and then was, as another deceased High Tory once said, economical with the actualité in front of the Parliamentary Commission. When he realised that his conversation must have been taped – and that, when the tape became public knowledge, his MI6 career and pension would have been lost for good – he knew that his particular game was up and Did The Decent Thing. This information was conveyed to us, not by a biased party like Toynbee or Liddle, but by his best mate, disaffected ex-BBC reporter Tom Mangold. An honest, if strangely angled, coroner’s verdict; and while the prospect of Kelly and his wife being reduced to holding out their caps in Bonn Square of a Saturday morning seems an unlikely scenario, the knowledge that his life, his house, his carefully constructed refuge (in either sense), may all have been about to vanish in metaphorical smoke must have been more than Kelly could bear.
Contrast this with Derren Brown – streetwise post-Thatcherite, his close-cropped semi-beard and smartly rumpled suit in itself an aesthetic negation of Kelly’s white, flowing, faintly hippy-ish locks, donkey jacket and cap. Suicide? It’s a business decision; have to weigh up the economic pros and cons, see how far the scales slide; be brisk and waste no time. Do the job efficiently, even if nothing about it is decent.
Actually, were he to be disrobed of the loathsome post-Loaded “manliness” schtick, Brown would end up not very far away, aesthetically, from Tommy Cooper – with the very considerable difference that Cooper’s death, albeit unplanned, did occur onstage and on live TV; those five minutes or so on Live At Her Majesty’s in 1984 seemed vaguely Beckett-esque in their minimalism – why’s he stopped? Why’s he struggling? Dragged offstage from behind without a word – is this performance art? In retrospect, they are of course among the five most harrowing and disturbing minutes ever witnessed on a TV screen (particularly as the audience, not knowing what was really going on, were themselves collapsing in hysterics), and only remain so because, quite understandably, they have never been repeated or made available on video since (with one exception, a late ‘80s documentary where Harry Secombe’s voiceover sensitively takes us through Cooper’s death in detail).
Cooper himself, though, was the John Cale of comedy – a highly skilled artist who deliberately made himself out to be an amateur or an incompetent. Witnessing the clips assembled on last Monday’s documentary/confessional by Bob Monkhouse, Behind The Laughter, one was taken at the pitifully inappropriate attempts made over the decades to shoehorn Cooper’s irreducible talents into some standard and already dated “variety show” template. When taken out of his fez and away from his box of inept trickery, Cooper struggled as any landed fish would do. Then again, it may have something to do with the fact that – as with the programme’s other subjects, Frankie Howerd, Ken Dodd and Benny Hill – Cooper essentially had one basic 12-minute act, extemporised from the postwar round robin of music hall tours, which if presented undiluted on television, would not have lasted him long. That’s partly why the likes of Max Miller are still held in some kind of awe, disguising the fact that, in those pre-TV days, Miller had 20 minutes of material with which he was able to tour the music halls of Britain for decades on end without any diminution in his career. But TV was merciless in swallowing up material.
One way to tackle the problem head on was to embrace and exploit the new medium fully, which is what Benny Hill did. Unexceptional as a stand-up comic or as a radio comedian – Monkhouse said that Hill “was unable to project beyond row G” – he set about devising a ‘50s TV equivalent of close-up street magic; comedy specifically designed for the medium of TV which would be unreproducable on stage. And in those clips from his early TV shows, you can immediately sense something new happening, someone who, unlike Dodd, Howerd or Cooper, actually seemed to be of the modern age. The material may now be creaky – and the descent into the odious self-parody which beset Hill in later life, following his move to Thames (“THERAPIST/THE RAPIST” etc.) is well documented – but the unavoidable truth is that Hill was one of the great television minds, up there with Dennis Potter, Patrick McGoohan, Alan Clarke and Jim Henson, someone who saw the potential of the new media, not just for his own career but in general, and embraced it heartily.
Frankie Howerd seemed, in contrast, never to have an act at all beyond the 20 seconds of catchphrases which provided the bulk of his living throughout his long life; and it’s scarcely surprising that his career dipped perilously at repeated intervals, only to be revived by good scriptwriters (Galton and Simpson, Talbot Rothwell) or by playing the irony card (TW3, Oxford Union). Looking at him now, one marvels that he managed to sustain a career at all. And he was a lecherous fellow who made passes at a mortified Monkhouse on numerous occasions over the years; there was, last week, a priceless moment from one of Monkhouse’s chat shows where he and Howerd stroll in front of the camera crooning “Spread A Little Happiness,” with the foreknowledge that immediately prior to recording the show, Howerd had again attempted to have his way with him. Monkhouse’s fixed smile never seemed less than fixed.
Indeed the whole programme seemed to be a confessional by Monkhouse to himself, and for himself, wondering why a nice Dulwich College lad like himself had somehow ended up in the comedy business – and also perhaps revealing a greater disdain for the art of comedy. Time and again in the programme Monkhouse confessed how he was never able to “get close” to Cooper or Hill, “never got on with” Howerd – the question arising being whether Monkhouse himself was the weakest link. A professional who can rattle off Bob Hope-style gags at quickfire pace and with enviable powers of memory, but also a professional who, like Hope himself, never quite managed to be funny. Monkhouse telling gags is like watching the branch manager rattle through the AGM’s balance sheets, detailing profit and loss but without any discernible character or enthusiasm. One never quite escapes the feeling that Monkhouse considers comedy to be rather beneath him – in the same sense that a later Dulwich College alumnus, David Thomson, freely confesses that he perhaps preferred books to films the whole time. It was appropriate, then, that Dodd, being the only one of these four comedians now able to respond to Monkhouse’s assessments, should come on and break some comedic bread with him at the programme’s end. As with Monkhouse, Dodd is a fast-paced gag man, but has at least managed to construct a persona – even if it’s a flimsy one – under which he can, to an extent, get away with the not actually funny gags, and in the larger picture get away with all those fivers mouldering in his bathroom when they should have been going to the Inland Revenue. Now 75, Dodd is increasingly beginning to resemble J G Ballard, and towards the end of their conversation hinted at some deeper darkness. He compared different types of comedy as different colours of the rainbow – ranging from the bright red and yellow to the black. He solemnly intoned, “Sarcasm. Irony. Satire,” almost hissing out the last word. One suspects that Bill Hicks would not have been to his liking.
Were any of these comedians (next week’s programme promises assessments of Tony Hancock, Peter Sellers and Morecambe and Wise) ever revolutionary? Hardly; they came straight out of the war, patriots one and all, and with Thatcherite non-state reliance set about building themselves careers brick by brick. And, with the exceptions of Hancock, Morecambe and Spike Milligan, they were nearly all Conservatives; proto-Thatcherites well ahead of their time (the exceptions perhaps being Benny Hill, who was extremely careful never to express anything remotely political throughout his public life, and Ken Dodd, who has appeared at election rallies for Wilson, Heath, Callaghan, Thatcher, Major and Blair – perhaps he just likes to be on the winning side, or more probably views the whole business as a kind of adjunct to the Royal Variety Performance; perform for the Prime Minister, regardless of their party). To understand why an “improvising” musician like Derek Bailey doesn’t really change their act – the quality of the music relying on what he’s playing, or with whom he’s playing it – is perhaps to understand the postwar ENSA mindset, where you honed your 12-minute routine and tried to make a career out of it. Indeed both Milligan and Monkhouse befriended their ENSA accordion-playing colleague Stan Tracey, and both were rumoured to be shadowy presences at many improv gigs throughout the years. Then there’s the strange case of Morecambe and Wise; the inherent funniness in both which their ATV work failed so utterly to bring out and which, finally, Eddie Braben at the BBC had to articulate for them. Even when they first teamed up in the ‘30s they were unevenly balanced; Wise already an established child star, Morecambe the rookie – and so it proved; Eric the socialist, Ernie the Tory; Morecambe the closet Zappa/Beefheart fan, Wise hopelessly in love all of his life with the vanished Hollywood of Rooney, Garland, Durante. There’s more of a hint of father-and-son in their peak ‘70s work; Ernie the exasperated Patrick Brontë authoritarian father figure who ends up outliving his wilder offspring (Eric).
Ultimately, from the quality of the archive clips shown, not much of any of these comedians’ work proved to be actively funny. Do we admire the technique and fret over the loneliness and mental and physical dislocation which seems to have driven all these figures to varying degrees of despair, or do we confess to their spirits that, in the end, it was all for nothing? As with C4’s documentary on Miss World 2002 in Nigeria – Miss World, for years the central staple of television “light entertainment” (as were, let us never forget, the Black and White Minstrels), now a discarded irrelevance farmed out to the Third World with disastrous consequences.
But even the wanton ignorance of nearly all of the participants in Miss World 2002 was preferable to the deliberately-engendered neuroses of Teen Big Brother: The Experiment. I didn’t watch much of the latter, but what I did see was horrific and life-denying. 18-year-olds being treated like eight-year-olds by the patronising Sloanes who produce the programme. Two of the participants engaged in sex and cried and fretted. When actually allowed to talk about “issues,” they were surprisingly lively and commonsensical, but it was never long before they were frogmarched into performing another worthless “task” or hauled into the Diary Room and berated for not going to bed at 9:46 am, or, in extremis, locked in the bedroom. Not one of them had the guts (or had had the guts knocked out of them) to point out that the only reason they wanted kids to go to bed at 9:46 am was that they couldn’t have everyone asleep at the same time, otherwise the E4 ratings would suffer. So they were not being chastised for “moral” reasons but capitalistic, and ultimately meaningless, ones. It was hateful to witness. Perhaps there was a distant point to be made about the worthlessness of school – a place, or a system, whose point is not to educate children but to condition them for the 9-5 working environment by inculcating unquestioning obedience of “authority,” punctuality, etc., in other words to service capitalism, a job which could be better done by letting everyone who wanted to do so leave at the age of eleven, when they could go out into the world, learn an apprenticeship and Contribute More To The Economy If We’re Going To Be All Milton Friedman About It (Steve Winwood still expresses bemusement at the notion that there was anything remarkable about his joining the Spencer Davis Group at the age of 15 – in his day, kids could leave school at 14, went out and learned a trade, as he did). But most noxious of all was the smug announcer promising the audience a “bonkbuster.” He might have well have yelled, “hey, Pete Townshend/Germaine Greer! Get your Kleenex ready!” And people have problems with David Blaine?
MUSIC
I don’t want to write too much about music at the moment. I’m very conscious of what Morley says in Words And Music about why he gave up writing full-time: “…you want the music, just the music, to take up your time, not the writing about it. I decided to write about music at my leisure, and to just let music lead me and follow me as it happened, naturally, without worrying about seeming in touch, on top.” I am also sorely conscious of the multiple “then agains” which follow that statement, as well as the existence of the TV programme “Grumpy Old Men” wherein men not much older, and in some cases younger, than me lament how things aren’t what they were when we were their age, rather than examine the deeper truth that premise (b) is the necessary pre-condition for premise (a). The notion of “nowness” is necessarily personal and individual. My now might be more dated than your then, or my then more up-to-date than your now. Thus could I claim that Scott Walker’s 1983 album Climate Of Hunter can in certain conditions constitute absolute nowness, particularly if you time it so that you come at the exact moment on “Track Six” (1:17) when Evan Parker’s saxophones erupt behind Walker’s alienly ecstatic “The ceilings are rising and falling” (and thanks a million to Bill D for getting that CD-ed for me), whereas the Strokes’ 20 October 2003 album Room On Fire can seem as queerly quaint as Dave Edmunds’ Repeat When Necessary.
And “now, now, now” are the final three words of the album Parallelograms by Linda Perhacs, originally (and minimally) released in 1970 and now reissued and upgraded on CD. Did this record even exist in 1970? The original vinyl was apparently so badly pressed that Linda stuck to listening to a cassette run off the master tapes, and even her record company denied its existence. Have I dreamed this record? For here it reappears in 2003, still elusive, still unavailable even in the largest branches of the chainstores. Rough Trade’s few copies had gone by the time I arrived, but a quick trip across Portobello Road to Minus Zero proved profitable. So this is a record for which you will have to wear out some shoe leather to find, just like I Am Sitting In A Room or any of the CDs which Virgin Megastores have decided to “delete” from their stock because they’re not selling enough to make Virgin’s Top 75 Albums, which are really the only 75 albums they want to sell, ever, and soon all other chainstores will follow suit, and soon the national Top 75 album chart will grind to gridlock, with the same 75 albums to feature for the rest of time, with some occasional soundalike substitutions (Permission To Land for Sheer Heart Attack). I’m still not sure whether I have dreamed Parallelograms with its purple-on-cream pastel rural cover; I needed a record to define and articulate the way I felt drifting into nothingness along Headington’s Old High Street at 2:43 pm on a particular autumn Friday when you catch the sunlight at just the right angle to elevate you into a limbo of incredibleness, such an angle and shade as you will not find on any other day of the year, so I dreamed this record up in my mind and made it exist.
Parallelograms rarely has to raise its voice, and how bewitching Linda sounds when she does. Where to place it stylistically? Some hastily conceived midpoint between Julie Driscoll’s 1969 (the flutes, the acoustic guitars, the naughtiness hiding beneath the placidity) and Nico’s The Marble Index (to which it provides a kind of doorway) with some anticipation of Joni’s Blue. Perhaps Perhacs only made this record because there needed to be another song besides Motorhead’s “Motorhead” to include the word “parallelogram.”
In any case, it starts with “Chimacum Rain” (and the metaphor is staring you in the face). Perhacs’ voice is very 1970; soft and considerate, in the sense of Joni if not in the Wicker Man-we’re-all-doomed sense of Shirley Collins; and also manages to be very 1988, insofar as the timbres and caresses of her voice at various times anticipate Julianne Regan, Elizabeth Frazer and Margo Timmins. There is joy in that voice; witness the bliss as the voice suddenly multiplies at the chorus, the low satisfaction of “down around you” which echoes and mirrors the album’s tripartite sign-off of “now now now,” and the sudden swoop of joy on “stones” in the line “spilling over stones” at 1:05 – a voice virtually making itself pregnant. But it’s not all idyllic rose-tinted grottos; look how the music abruptly darkens at 2:05 when she intones “He belongs here” tied to an ominous bass synth tow. The electronica strives for a crescendo of some sort (who is this “he”? “I’m seeing silences that are his” – a silence which recurs throughout the album. Does this “he” even exist?) but the darkness quickly fades away (or is hurriedly stuffed away in a drawer) to welcome back the original melancholia.
Then there is sex in “Paper Mountain Man,” a Peter Green-ish blues which the drums, harmonica and lead guitar never quite allow to settle. From Linda’s opening, tantalising “Mm-hmm,” the music is lovely and filthy. So many aspects, so many teases, to Linda’s voice here – the certitude at which she bites at the word “Dutch” in “with a Dutch wooden door,” the quiver at “boots” in “you wear Marlboro boots,” the COMING of Linda when she sings “rac-COON” amidst the line “Heard tell you’re half raccoon.”
Following this glimpse of the carnal, Linda then moves back towards introspection in a remarkable trilogy of songs which indicate where All About Eve should have sailed after “Martha’s Harbour.” “Dolphin” (nothing to do with Fred Neil) finds her yearning for escape but aware of its inherent limitations (“Would you take me there and back?/But what is “there”/And what good is “back”?/I don’t know”). “Call Of The River” elaborates on the same theme, with more sensuality (listen to how she swoons on the word “far” in “like a far remembered life” at 0:59) while “Sandy Toes” is very proto-Cocteaus; there’s a lovely and telling change here in the chorus (at 0:29) when the music descends from high voice to low, from major key to minor, on the line “And the rain upon my hair is felt.”
And this is all preparation for the stunning title track and centrepiece of the album. Here Linda abandons language and sense, playing and swooping with words (“Spirallllll-o-gramgram/Semi-Para-Bolic”) in a strange anticipation of Kraftwerk’s similar linguistic passiveness. Suddenly, and shockingly, a great percussive thud, like a coffin lid closing, echoes at 1:48 and…we are away into a parallel world, a weightless world, where celeste, flutes and piano entrails float polytonally around Linda’s suddenly quite mournful multitracked chorus in strange stasis, as though the second half of Lucier’s I Am Sitting In A Room was surging backwards through her mouth. This is also the abovementioned gateway to The Marble Index - the two-chord seesawing over presumed atonality – perhaps mixed up with some anticipation of Beaver and Krause’s Gandharva before, at 3:34, the original song comes back, almost from the grave.
“Hey, Who Really Cares” (and check that anticipation of Marvin Gaye’s “But…who really cares?” at one of the many key change points of What’s Going On) sets Linda’s lyrics to music by Oliver Nelson. On one of the CD’s bonus tracks/alternate takes, this song is prefaced by a mounting cacophony of radio voices underlined by an increasing heartbeat, both of which factions suddenly stop to allow the song in. It is a lament for loneliness – “Can I bring it out to you?” she asks in the chorus. “I need someone to talk to/And no one else will spare me the time.” “You” being the listener. Again, a swoon at the “cages” in “but now they’re like circular cages” (at 1:30), and in the distance, a synthesiser wearily repeats its two-note police siren refrain.
“Moons And Cattails” brings back sex into the equation, though the atonal flutes and electronica from the title track return to bookend the song. Again, her embracing of you is extraordinary; the relish of the “k” at the end of “back” in the chorus line “I knew them way back,” and the way in which, at the line “Back to wet stones…” she continues to hiss the final “s” and then proceeds to be drowned in her own voice.
“Morning Colors” is a gorgeously sad song about a lover whom Linda can apparently only visit at night (in other words, she may be dreaming him). There is real despair as she sings “Sometimes I wonder/Has he ever really seen me?” John Neufeld duets with himself on alto sax in the background, but listen how the saxes drift out of tonality at the line “But when I go/As I always must do…” and slide gently down to support her final, grievous “The color in his day will be clear…and……blue.” The final guitar-augmented chord (underlining the word “blue”) rivals Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” as the saddest and bleakest final chord in pop.
“Porcelain Baked-Over Cast-Iron Wedding” is a relatively lighthearted examination of social fakery masquerading as love which could pass for Jake Thackray’s “Lah-Di-Dah” written from the opposite angle (“It’s a splendid, high waisted, white flavored day”). At the end, Linda sardonically signs off “…..ah, the hell with the rules!”
And everything culminates in the closing “Delicious,” one of the most beautiful odes to sex and love I’ve ever heard. So quiet in its near-silent devotion (silent because of the inexpressible ecstasy of becoming one) it’s an unquestioning acceptance of the joys of love, making all the old similes (“the cold crashing down/On a lone blade of grass”) matter again. “Oh, how I want this now” goes the ever-deepening and ever more satisfied refrain (compare with Leonard Cohen’s despairing “I need you now” echoed by the reassurance of Jennifer Warnes’ massed backing vocals on “The Guests” from the opposite end of the ‘70s) and finally…and how heavenly…she arrives at a catharsis. “Oh, how delicious. Oh, how I want this” (with no doubt that she has it) and how she slowly and beamingly swings the mirror round to reveal the “you” who have been her subject all along at 3:43. With precise and final decisiveness, and with a total embrace, she smiles at you: “Oh, how I want you…now…now……now” …. every now deeper and profounder than the previous one. Here is love and this is all I have to say.
Along with the bonus tracks/odds and sods which have been added to the CD (one of which, “If You Were My Man,” would make the Damien Rices of this world rightly weep with its unforced profundity and depth – “let me in to lie beside your soul”; another is a studio outtake wherein Linda charmingly demonstrates some xylophone/kalimba sound effects to her producer), this constitutes everything that Linda ever recorded. As with Britain’s Bill Fay, she seemed happy thereafter to return to a normal life, which today she continues to lead, having left us with an hour of music which, at 4:00 on a stoned, blissed-out Saturday morning, could not possibly sound more of this minute, of this nanosecond, to this life of all lives.
“I looked on both sides of the creek, but the path had just vanished.
Could be the fact that we were still alive had something to do with it. Hard to tell.”
(Richard Brautigan, Trout Fishing In America, Jonathan Cape Ltd, 1970)
O SUPERMAN
The artist lay thoughtfully but happily. He reflected that winter was approaching quietly rapidly and it would be nice to have company to keep out the cold. That indeed was his ambition; to be able to feel safe with someone, to feel at a proper distance from the life which had so nearly destroyed him, to know that nothing and no one could reach out to harm him while someone was there to protect him.
It would be so much easier to see the night out, to live through the night, and ultimately outlive the night, when you had the dual harnesses of safety and pleasure to hold you in this world, even when tomorrow was Friday. So what? He didn't have to go to work; in his day job he had negotiated a four-day working week, Monday to Thursday, and the loss of income was compensated for, and indeed matched, by the income from the other work which he did, work which did not require a timetable, work which could be fitted into his life however he wished, for it did not take him long and paid well. More time, then, to live, to travel, to love and be loved. He could quite easily stay in bed until Monday morning, send out for takeaways, get pissed if he so desired. The difference it made was immense. “Work” could now be compacted into a neat, self-contained compartment which no longer dominated the conduct of the rest of his life. It was there in its proper place, did its proper job and paid its proper dues. Its importance – in that how important it was that it did not dominate and obscure the whole of the rest of his life – was newly clear.
Time, then, not just to love, but to write, to think, to whisper, perhaps even to laugh. To discover how new things could appear to him, even though he had seen, or heard, or done them thousands of times. He thought about the exclamations of astonishment from the tourists seated at the front of the top deck of the number 88 bus earlier that day, when it dramatically swept round the corner of Great Smith Street into Parliament Square, and Big Ben, the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey all abruptly came into view. It was like a curtain parting, especially given the anticipatory excitement of running through the narrow, tall-buildinged street which prefaced it; as if we were rushing through a mighty tunnel ready to come out into the light. He had seen this sight too many times to be excited by it, he thought, but the enthusiasm and surprise of the tourists took him by surprise, and he realised how easy it was to forget just how shocking, how stunning, it must be to travel on this journey and see Parliament Square coming into view for the first time.
He was now seeing and feeling everything in this way. As he lay in reflection, a song came on the radio; a song he had certainly heard hundreds of times, but had not really listened to for maybe a decade, a song which the same DJ had played on its original release 22 autumns ago, a song which, the DJ noted with retrospective incredulity, “actually charted, it got to #2 – can’t imagine it even getting into the charts now.” An eight-minute piece of minimalist performance art which even in 1981 he had recognised as a direct descendent of Glass and Ashley (Einstein On The Beach and Private Lives in particular) but somehow played more funnily yet cut more deeply than either. He wondered how it must feel for someone now to be listening to this piece of music for the first time.
A rapid-fire staccato vocal loop – running out of breath? – ran throughout the piece, allowing it to live. The internal life of an answerphone. “Hello? This is your Mother. Are you there? Are you coming home?” (what did she do to make her run away?) and then, more sinisterly: “Hello? Is anybody home? Well, you don’t know me, but I know you…and I’ve got a message to give to you – Here come the planes. So you better get ready…get ready to go.” Not her mother. It is the announcement of the apocalypse. Delivering death to your doorstep. Composed 20 years before 9/11. It is the voice of benevolence eager for you to know that your imminent assassination is in your best interests. “This is the hand – the hand that takes (the slurring on that second “takes”)…Here come the planes. They’re American planes. Made in America.” Or playing games with death, playing sex with death, knowing that playfulness postpones death as far as possible. The US postal service motto is quoted – but ironically or not? A Casiotone keyboard plays a plaintive line which is augmented and harmonised by flutes and oboes, slightly reminiscent of Carla Bley’s 3/4 For Piano And Orchestra - he remembered at the time, how cool to have Carla Bley-derived concepts in the charts – but this soon fades, to leave the basic pulse and the voice, using a Vocoder to cover up its uncertainty. Love justice force Mom. Which, if you interpreted “Mom” or “Mother” as shorthand for the desired/enforced parentage of the USA (for this turned out to be an excerpt from a lengthy multimedia piece entitled United States I-IV), means circling back the loop to reach love. Thus does the singer, at the end of the piece, ask, plea for physical affection, or even acknowledgement of her physical existence. “So hold me ‘Mom’ in your long arms…your automatic/electronic/military/petrochemical arms…” What was that? “hold me in your military arms?” Hold me hostage? Desolation beyond loneliness. Parallel to this despair runs a soundtrack of birdsong (recorded early in the morning in Central Park) as though this is a world which the singer/victim can no longer reach. The music builds up to a final plateau; a sustained two-note major/minor bass synthesiser drone, a choral synthesiser elsewhere (18 months before “Blue Monday”) and finally, the humanity emerges out of the machinery, as a Farfisa line mutates into a tenor saxophone, before disappearing to leave the bare pulse. Count. Ing. Down. The. Sec. Onds. Be. Fore. The. Planes. Hit. The. Twin. Tow. Ers. It is an avowal of love which may not even be love, an admission of loneliness, a clear articulation of unclear grief – does an actual mother exist? And how on earth would we live with her if we found her, or she us?
(An extra frisson was added when he heard the album, some months later. The same closing motif was extended and reused in a song called “From The Air” which described a ‘plane about to crashland. “We are all going down together…This is the time. And this is the record of the time.” And, just like the “pilot” on “International Jet Set” by the Specials – neurotic backing vocals and screams by the Go-Gos – “there is no pilot” though “you are not alone”)
(And, he further wondered, why the dedication of the song to Massenet? He knew him from Manon and Werther - playfulness always present, even in the presence of tragedy. That clearly must have been why)
He remembered how his life was in transitional turmoil when the song was first made available, on a fairly expensive 7-inch American import single. It had been less than two months since his father had died, only a few weeks before he was due to leave home for university, and also for good. His own mother had insisted that he take up his place at Oxford, it was what your father would have wanted, it was what he had worked for you to achieve – she didn’t say that it might have killed him, because it didn’t (there were too many other factors, and his premature passing, though still a shock when it physically occurred, was a surprise to no one). So this song effectively served as a soundtrack to the bridge between his old life and his new one. It could only have made sense in September or October. And 22 years later, here it was again, waiting for him to cross the next bridge.
The reactions were instant. Emails poured in expressing astonishment at the song. People were moved. It might even be a hit all over again. No one, least of all the song’s author and singer, would know what it meant to him to be allowed the privilege of hearing this song anew, a second time. He could not prevent tears from rolling down his face. But now he knew it would be easier for him to translate these tears into renewed passion and love.
HOW BELLE AND SEBASTIAN AND TREVOR HORN SQUARED THE CIRCLE
The critical stock of what some still call “regressive rock” or “C86 indie” is currently very low. Still accused by some lazy commentators of being anaemic (no 14-minute guitar solos?), of not being hip hop, or worse, of not being “progressive rock” (“At least prog looked forward!” – which ignores the fact that prog was very often deliberately regressive, both musically and lyrically – back to childhood, back to the medieval age, back to the age of Agamemnon; the primordial mythical swamps of Roger Dean’s artwork, the Alfred Bendall-esque bucolic 16th century English fantasies of gnomes and courtesans which decorate early Genesis album sleeves, the a-plague-on-all-your-modern-houses approach of the likes of Jethro Tull – refer especially to the lyrics of Thick As A Brick passim), it is frowned upon as an aesthetically expensive folly, a deliberate misreading of Morrissey, music made for and by wimps (as opposed to Real Men, or worse, music made for and liked by women; observe the casual misogyny which lies behind every recent damning of the new Dido album). All of this convenient clowning conceals awkward scenarios such as the teenage Kurt Cobain, getting into music, as turned on by the Vaselines, the Pastels or the Jasmine Minks as he would have been by the Pistols; or how and why Beat Happening and K Records in general were doing the exact same thing as, say, Sarah Records, but escape critical brickbats. It is damned for failing to observe the Wire rules of what should constitute “new” music – the same critical laxity which relies on unthinking assumptions such as PiL being the “only meaningful perspective from 1976,” which is essentially another way of saying “the only thing I liked in punk was PiL,” which is fundamentally another way of saying “I love prog and secretly wish that punk had never happened,” and ignores the inconvenient fact that, for millions of people, Joe Strummer, or Donna Summer, or Brian Eno, or Lee Perry, or Kool Herc, provided just as “meaningful” a “perspective” in 1976.
What C86 certainly wasn’t was ZTT; though the former came to prominence, at least in part, because the New Pop model encapsulated by ZTT had either not quite delivered what it had promised, or was suddenly looking rather old and lumbering (FGTH’s Liverpool, anyone?). The idea of Trevor Horn producing, say, the Shop Assistants, would have been literally unimaginable; yet songs like “Somewhere In China” still carry an emotional resonance denied to the likes of the Age of Chance, desperately scraping at Nowness and the Future, with their Neubauten and Just Ice albums, and consequently already sounding absurdly dated in 1987.
In Scotland, post-Mary Chain indie continued to be the big thing, doubly so in light of its aesthetic antithesis of the time, the wearily why-am-I-not-an-American, garishly lit, aspirational “pop-soul” of the likes of Wet Wet Wet, Hue and Cry, Deacon Blue, etc. And eventually the “movement” hooked up to what was happening in the world of SST and Sub Pop – essentially bypassing “nowness” – and has maintained a presence and continuity, via Teenage Fanclub through to the rise of Chemikal Underground and the astonishing musical blossoming out (from the Delgados to Bill Wells) which ensued. David Keenan redefining post-Coltrane free music in the Wire? William Parker and Cecil Taylor playing gigs in Stirling? Wouldn’t have happened without the Pastels.
Then there is Belle and Sebastian. Given this unfeasibly long build-up, it has to be confessed that hitherto B&S have occupied only a shadowy, minor presence in this writer’s life. I liked the way in which “Electronic Renaissance” strove to be a decaffeinated “Everything’s Gone Green,” thought that “Dog On Wheels” veered dangerously close to Angus Deayton’s HeeBeeGeeBees doing Forever Changes, and felt mildly exasperated at the reluctance of “The Boy With The Arab Strap” not to ‘fess up to being “Son Of My Father.” Seven, sometimes eight, musicians in the line-up, but what were they all doing, why were they all there? Sadly I wasn’t intrigued enough to dig very much deeper. Now, however, we have Dear Catastrophe Waitress, their fifth album proper – and it has been produced by Trevor Horn.
Why Horn? Apparently his daughter is a big B&S fan. He liked their songs but felt that they deserved better production. Already this year he has joined a couple of relevant dots with tAtU’s reading of “How Soon Is Now?” and now he returns at the other extreme of the year to complete the picture. B&S to be drowned in the sea of Horn? Thankfully not. The only artists who drown in Horn’s sea are those with insufficiently strong concepts, or even identities, to stay afloat – for example, all of Horn’s stalwart salvaging cannot disguise the essential ghastliness of the new Seal album.
No, here Horn realises that, if B&S are going to shine, he needs to help them along more subtly. Not, in fact, that they require much encouragement, for this album is by a considerable distance their finest achievement, a pop record as good as any 2003 has offered (and certainly far more worth your time and money than the suddenly and shockingly dated-sounding metapop of the likes of Rachel Stevens. Compared to B&S’ newly-found effortless grace, it all just sounds like desperate Restart interviewees trying to sell records in America with a P45 gun pointed at their heads) and the first real evidence of greatness from a band whose concept has hitherto never quite been matched by the actuality of their music.
The opening track, “Step Into My Office, Baby,” begins jauntily enough with a Sgt Pepper-style flute/trombone motif set atop a glam-rock drum track which owes more to the Bay City Rollers than to Adam and the Ants and some White Album barrelhouse piano, all setting the stage for Stuart Murdoch’s now very confident vocals (Francis Rossi meets Lou Barlow). There are brass and strings present, but subtly so, and there are more obvious Horn touches in the chorus (the Dollar backing vocals shadowing the line “Need to talk,” the way the strings gradually enter and cascade down four flights of stairs in tandem with the line “office baby”), but the real genius makes itself apparent at 1:33, when the song suddenly pauses for Murdoch to sing “I’m a slave to work” accompanied solely by distended voices (descendents of Art of Noise’s “The Army Now”?), and then (at 1:47) Horn’s strings slide securely into place to underline and lock the word “bed” in the line “I’ll be in bed by nine” (a parallel to the chorus’ “Be there at nine”) such that it sounds like Murdoch is singing “I’ll be dead by nine.” The song then returns to its former upbeat status, but then at 2:47 Horn cuts out again and cuts deeper. Against Lexicon Of Love piano Murdoch quiveringly intones “My output is in decline – I was burnt out after Thatcher” and on the second syllable of “Thatcher” (3:00) the full orchestra enters, melancholy and consoling and brilliant. Then the song starts to speed up again, this time more reluctantly (Li’l Louis’ “French Kiss” goes C86!) and finishes on a Beatles harmonic third (and yes, Horn is present among the backing vocalists).
That is the most obviously “Trevor Horn” of the 12 tracks here, but really his input pervades everything on the album; observe all these beautiful little touches in the lyrically grim title track (“I’m sorry if he hit you with a full can of Coke…your face is bleeding/You’ll soon be leaving this town”) – the little Joe Meek electronic whoosh at 0:38, the sardonic plunger trombone at 1:13, the Northern Soul vibes at 1:41. Meanwhile, as the orchestra never let up in their urgent and creative commentary, Murdoch laments: “All of the customers look so old…”
How good are B&S now? Good enough to carry off the fantastic “If She Wants Me” which, if you want (to believe) it, is blue-eyed soul which pisses all over the grim, greasy Pellows and Kanes of this and all other worlds. The song takes its time to unfold in its tale of over-expectation when it comes to potential relationships (“You are too young to put all of your hopes in one envelope”) but then blossoms out to offer a hand of friendship to a listener who thinks that no such hand is forthcoming (“Someone above is looking at you with a tender eye upon your face” – and, my God, when Murdoch confidently but compassionately switches to falsetto on the word “face” at 1:03, this might just be the year’s best male vocal performance; something he wouldn’t have been confident enough to achieve previously – “You may think you’re alone but you may think again”). And it gives us perhaps this year’s most hopeful chorus in “If I could do just one near perfect thing I’d be happy/They’d write it on my grave or when they scatter my ashes/On second thoughts I’d rather hang around and be down/With my best friend…if she wants me.” The song continues on its caring course – “I’m going deaf, you’re going melancholy” is one aside, but then Murdoch goes on to proclaim “Life is good and it’s always worth living – at least for a while.” Don’t expect perfection and you’ll be satisfied and happy. Horn’s strings carefully police the borders of the song; there’s a great moment at 2:16 when a string synthesiser (I think) starts to career around the song’s backdrop in the manner of Jerry Dammers’ “Ice Rink String Sounds” which turned the 45 version of the Specials’ “Do Nothing” into an inadvertent epitaph to Joy Division.
“Piazza, New York Catcher” is set for Murdoch’s voice and acoustic guitar alone and leaves him to wander in the dreams of an imagined love (“elope with me in private”). The words “San Francisco’s calling us” and “Are you straight or are you gay?” also give an inadvertent parallel with the poignancy of Pitman’s “Words” (see below), but the reality slowly becomes apparent (“I wish that you were here with me to pass the dull weekend/I knew it wouldn’t come to love, my heroine pretend”). Magically, however, “Asleep On A Sunbeam” tries to turn this scenario into reality as female and male voices trade lines. Note especially the piano chord which ends the song (at “my joy will be complete”) – it’s like a kiss to seal the joy (as opposed to Seal’s “Kiss From A Rose,” you understand).
“I’m A Cuckoo” somehow manages to convert Thin Lizzy-style dual guitar leads into bucolic power pop, so much so that it gives us one of Murdoch’s most outrageous couplets – “I’d rather be in Tokyo/I’d rather listen to Thin Lizzy-O” complete with quick “Boys Are Back In Town” quotation – if only to hide the song’s increasing desperation. You can feel Murdoch’s hurt in lines like “I keep taking everything to be a sign” and more palpably on lines like “I’m sitting on my empty bed…the fear grows, it’s pounding, pounding!” which are balanced by the admitted ambivalence of “Scary moment/I’m loving every moment!” and the never more heartfelt climactic whimper of “I wish I was a kid again” (again he hits that falsetto on the word “kid”). So perhaps that counts as “regression.”
“You Don’t Send Me” is an attempt at self-fooling in the manner of “I Get Along Without You Very Well,” the deception being musically evident in the seemingly upbeat ‘60s go-go trumpet/piano/vibes riff – hear how the harmonics of the trumpet don’t quite go in the direction you expected. Note also Murdoch’s “Our little scene is getting smaller by the day” – his vocal, as in several places elsewhere, is actually extremely reminiscent of Ray Davies with his pop-soul “Stop Your Sobbing” hat on, and this song is easily worthy of the Kinks at their peak. Nonetheless, Horn continues to put his discreet stamp on proceedings – catch those backing vocals at 1:19 (“There’s nothing! There’s nothing!”) which could have been lifted straight from Dollar (“My mirror! My mirror!”). It’s the same with the jolly “Wrapped Up In Books” which nods in the general direction of Cliff Richard’s “In The Country” but cumulates in a closing note from a New Wave organ from which we will hear again.
Suddenly, however, the album ventures into far darker waters. “Lord Anthony” is a song about a bullied schoolboy who eventually will become a transvestite – and therefore the progenitor of Scott Walker’s “Big Louise” seen from the other end of the telescope. This is reflected by Horn’s sumptuous orchestral prelude (ABC’s “Show Me” meets Walker’s “Prologue”) which then subsides to an acoustic guitar. “You will stay quiet…or you will die,” whispers Murdoch as he details the bullying and violence visited upon he who dares to be more clever than his teachers or fellow pupils, he who dares not to be a Real Man. It plunges deeper than any B&S songs have hitherto done, and its resolution is hardly uplifting (“Melted Toblerones under your dress/Blue mascara running over your eyes”). The piano which finishes the tears wept by the words “to linger there” at the song’s close – where even Murdoch sounds emotionally drained – sounds like a coffin lid closing.
Resolution? Here is an anthem of sorts in “If You Find Yourself Caught In Love,” in which Murdoch – you guessed it – Urges You To Go Back Into The World, a hand as touching and affecting as that which guided Clearlake’s “Treat Yourself With Kindness” from earlier this year. Again Horn stays in the background (but catch that solitary tympani beat at 1:07!) while Murdoch’s passion increases as he ascends the scale of “Raise your prayer to a shout” and pleads at you to find “someone to take your life beyond another TV I Love 1999/Just one more box of cheaper wine” although is canny enough to issue some muted warnings – “You have to start somewhere/Start by kidding on you care” – and later takes a subtle swipe at the war (“Killing people isn’t my scene”).
Hard to imagine what “Roy Walker” is about, unless it’s about the same protagonist, doomed to sit and watch Catchphrase until he dies. Here Murdoch demands that he make himself understood, or even visible, as the song seesaws schizophrenically between Byrds full-flight guitar choruses and Berio-like voice-only verses, careering at 200 mph while behind them the “Beat Bop” voices of the Art of Noise have a catfight with Pierre Schaffer’s abandoned harpsichord.
How to end? How to square the circle? With the six-minute-plus “Stay Loose” which is, essentially, the Jags, or Bruce Woolley and the Camera Club, which is where Horn regresses right back to 1979 in order to bring the good news back to 2003. With absurd brilliance he swipes Steve Nieve’s organ, divests it of Costello’s I-want-to-be-on-the-cover-of-the-Wire-really persona and gives us a hypnotic mantra over which, to the extent that they decide, B&S come as near as they have ever done to “rocking out.” Still, keep an eye on fugitive comments like “It was dark outside, the day it was broken in pieces” for that might be the black cynosure of the song which few others would be astute enough to penetrate.
Thus does the union happen, thus do the last 20 years of pop music suddenly twist into a new and more beguiling sense, thus do we get the atom of a notion of how the Smiths on ZTT might have sounded. It’s a devastating sleight of hand from Horn, who by pretending that he’s not really there, is in fact all over the album, but also one which could not have been achieved without the sudden rise to near-genius of Belle and Sebastian themselves. One hesitates to comment that the stripey-jumpered unfortunate who has just had a plate of pasta dumped over his head by the titular, pissed-off waitress could represent the critic who is just a little too quick and eager to make assumptions about the course and tide of music. Life tends to be much more complicated and far less convenient.
THE FIERY FURNACES
Yet another of the year’s finest albums appears on Rough Trade – they really seem to be undergoing a fullscale renaissance right now. Gallowsbird’s Bark is the debut album by the American brother-and-sister duo The Fiery Furnaces. Yes, why does this already sound familiar and weary to you, dear reader? “Christ, not another bunch of White Stripes wannabes,” not to mention, “I thought you said this blog was going to be different from The Church Of Me, you conman.”
Not so fast, my friend. This is not written by the same person – or at least not by the same life – responsible for CoM. Life progresses, so does one story progress very naturally to another. To deny continuity would be fatuous and contrived. And there is so much still to be written about, even if the writer’s time is now largely taken up with other, closer-to-life activities. Similarly, just because Eleanor and Matthew Friedberger are brother and sister does not make them Meg and Jack White. They’re infinitely better than that.
Why are the 16 tracks and 48 minutes of Gallowsbird’s Bark so sheerly enjoyable, so eminently playable as perhaps no American “indie” album has been since the days of Surfer Rosa? Mostly, I think, because the Friedbergers have no apparent truck with being canonical – ah, the darkest of tunnels is the canon; all those records, all that music for which you must labour in penance for the rest of your working days in order to prove yourself a suitable consumer of them. The trouble with the White Stripes is that they are too cemented to the tunnel of canon, as if John Lee Hooker’s truck had squashed them, thrown them against the wall and solidified them in a pose of due respect. The Fiery Furnaces make no big deal about 1963, nor do they provide us with pompous sleevenotes telling us how much better things were when we didn’t exist. At the end, and especially at the beginning, the Whites have too much reverence in order to matter except from a jokey what-if-they-really-had-lived-in-1963 scenario – check Jack White on the cover of the current Mojo, recreating the Pieta pose with the aid of that silly old sod Iggy Pop, the latter all too willing to lapse into the rôle of Christ.
In short, the FFs are tonnes more adventurous than the WSs, and galaxies more fun. Listen, for instance, to the gloriously daft descending pub piano chords set against the proto-Velvets thrash of the opening “South Is Only A Home.” Yes, they owe their souls to what old John Cale was doing 36 years ago, but also have a subtle eye cocked at what young John Cale is doing now. Thus we zip gleefully through these 16 tracks; the faux-Suicidal Syd relocated in the swamplands of “I’m Gonna Run” (“Gimme some of that nasty water/I’ll take it one sip at a time”) before landing in the controlled explosion of “Leaky Tunnel” with its collapsing Suicide synth loop and scratchy guitar/piano interface, while Eleanor travels the world: “I bought a tambourine at the Millennium Dome/It jangled 2000 times in a row/I got a cold when I was way down South/Standing out in the heat.” Jump at 2:22 as the drums and guitar suddenly storm into the foreground and bash out a rudimentary Interstellar Space interface – while Meg White is the most subtly laconic of drummers, the FF drumming here (not sure whether it’s Eleanor or Matthew) is excitable, frenetic and passionate, like Elvin Jones jamming with the Stooges. The track also shares a certain canned-up intensity with impLOG’s imperishable “Holland Tunnel Dive” even though the “leaky tunnel” here is the one which runs under the Thames from the Isle of Dogs to Cutty Sark.
How easily do they switch from the intensity of “Leaky Tunnel” to the glorious Carly Simon/Lynsey de Paul singalong of “Up In The North.” Eleanor’s voice is pleasingly passionate throughout – almost exactly the midpoint between Debbie Harry and Patti Smith – though even in this number-one-in-a-better-world pop song Matthew’s guitars do their best to weave and warp around the pop. Great rock, too, on “Asthma Attack,” a joyous romp all about being attacked by sharks while swimming in the dark (“I would have had an asthma attack/If I’d seen the shark bite back”) while “Don’t Dance Her Down” switches from an ecstatic electropop groove (“I’m going back to England to play cards again”) to a floating Kate Bush-goes-Stockhausen piano/FX limbo and back again, this time punctuated by Matthew’s savagely stuttering guitar (cf. Manzanera/Eno on Cale’s “Gun”) and Eleanor’s own “dow-ow-own” at 2:59.
“Crystal Clear” deploys the venerable Frank Black/Butch Vig quiet/loud strategy but in a way which makes you momentarily imagine that they’d just invented it – the staccato verses (in the second verse, piano substitutes for guitar, making them sound like Sparks!) bleeding naturally into the cathartic release of the chorus (more like the Fall of Slates than the Pixies). “Two Fat Feet” plays around with the Regents’ “7Teen” riff (transferred to the upper end of the piano) while Eleanor sings “You’ve got a wind in your snaggletooth.” Meanwhile, “Bow Wow” is an easy piano/drum machine shuffle which towards the end atomises into some good freeform playing as the rhythm track shifts into glitch mode. “Nothing but nothing can beat this Gail blow” she sings - quite rightly too, for it is the truth ;-) – except that the track’s called “Gale Blow.” But still! “Worry Worry” is a terrific Shangri-Las girlbeat number, even though Matthew does his best to cause a rumpus with his “I Heard Her Call My Name” guitar stabs.
Then a touch of melancholy begins to make itself apparent. “Bright Blue Tie” is a brief, beautiful and sombre meditation set against undulating Robert Wyatt-esque organ. “This must be paradise,” muses Eleanor, “but it’s not, no no no no no,” each “no” sounding more uncertain than the previous one, before she compromises with herself and responds “but it’s sweet, sweet, sweet, sweet, sweet.” It’s as good as life gets. It segues very nicely into “Tropical Iceland,” another potential hit single, with its yearning laments (“Let’s get out before we melt away”) which at 2:21, and again to close the song, gives way to double-speed ECM guitars, finally culminating in a stately piano/synth motif at 3:28 which in turn leads to the distressed “Rub Alcohol Blues” where all the suppressed hurt suddenly comes pouring forth. “I never knew what trouble was ‘til my honey threw me down…Blues creeping over my body/Queer notions flying in my head…The easiest thing I’ve ever done was lovin’ and drinkin’ wine/The hardest thing I’ve ever done was payin’ off the judge’s fine.” Fixin’ to die.
We then proceed to an animated close with “We Got Back The Plague” in which the Fiery Furnaces more or less do the White Stripes, but better, so much more profoundly. The blues stomp is more primal, Eleanor’s vocal extremely close, stylistically and emotionally, to that of Kristin Hersh. It ends, without any postmodern irony, with Eleanor sneering “Draggin’ us down under the McLennan County dust.” Shouts appear in the background and the album fades to end. Owing nothing to anybody else’s idea of a garage, the Fiery Furnaces have come out and burnt everyone else to an aesthetic cinder.
PITMAN
“You get me? I don’t think that you do.” That’s the rhetorical question repeated throughout the debut album, It Takes A Nation Of Tossers, by Coalville’s finest miner/rapper, MC Pitman, and I’m wondering how many people will. Perhaps the above description has already put you off investigating it – a comedy rap record? Very good? Now, about this Avant Free Folk business – and some senior readers may have the dimmest recollection of a ghastly novelty record from 1981 entitled “Barnsley Bill.” Much beloved and played by Dave Lee Travis – it may even have been DLT – it was a resolutely unfunny single based on the concept that rapping in a Northern accent is in itself a reason for uncontrolled hysterical laughter. But despite the comedy overlay, and despite, or even because of, the fact that the Pitman record is frequently very funny indeed, even beyond the cover images of stalwart miners with their tea and fag…and yes I saw Robbie Williams cowering at the bottom right-hand side in his Norman Wisdom cap…it is – well, how many of you are going to “get” the notion that this record, qualitatively and aesthetically, leaves the likes of Dizzee Rascal and the Streets spluttering in the dust, even though musically we are talking strictly old school rap – there isn’t a note on this record which couldn’t have been recorded in, say, 1987 – and even though we are dealing with a curious crossbreed of Alan Partridge, Mark E Smith, Eminem and Half Man Half Biscuit (And, furthermore, note the continuing and quiet influence over the years of that most quintessentially C86 of records, Half Man Half Biscuit’s Back In The DHSS)?
Perhaps the HMHB comparison is the closest – like Nigel Blackwell, Pitman has a keen and sharp eye for the details of everyday life and media, and equally keen means of shaping them into his particular form of attack. But more than that, Nation Of Tossers is in essence an impassioned cry of anguish, of rage, against what Britain in the 21st century has allowed itself to become. Read the wrong way, it could pass for a Sun editorial; read closer, though, and you will detect that Pitman, above and beyond everything else that he hates, hates himself most deeply of all.
And, as a record, it’s infinitely more playable than Boy In Da Corner - for, no matter how adventurous and heartfelt D Rascal is, and through no fault of his own, that record has already taken on the stain of “canonical pop” and is thus now impossible to listen to without wondering whether one is worthy enough to appreciate it. It even leaves Original Pirate Material seeming rather hammy and otiose – and in the brilliant Roots Manuva-borrowing “Witness The Pitness” Pitman fires a well-aimed jibe at Skinner’s tendency to “talk like a cockney…aren’t you from Birmingham, you knob?/What street do you live in, Coronation Street?/Do you shag Vera Duckworth on your day off?” Indeed this track is typical of Pitman’s artillery of rage, which here he directs against Adam F (“You need Americans to make you look good”), MTV Bass, Rolf Harris and crap rappers in general (“You’ve got a girly voice, is Graham Norton your best mate?…I’m not flaky like you, Singing Detective…You had a threesome going with the Krankies and they pissed off ‘cos you were crap”).
More pointed, though, is Pitman’s assertion – in “What I Am,” during which he hoarsely appropriates Edie Brickell while slagging off 50 Cent (“Go back in your fuckin’ club and stay there!”), people who buy 5p cans of beans from Alda, bad interviewers (“ten shit questions about tea and biscuits”) and “Family Fortunes” (“Get Les Dennis back!”) he momentarily steps aside to ask, “Why make an effort when no one’s bothered?”
It’s the same with the following “Waiting” which mainly consists of a rant against public transport, which then blooms out into a diatribe against the State of the Nation. “Waiting for the traffic lights to change (cf. John Cale’s “You’re waiting at the traffic lights” in “Caravan”)/Waiting not to be asked for change/Waiting for this country to change/I’m in a shop – guess what – I’m waiting for change” – these lines are delivered with a weary but palpably genuine anger.
Sidestepping the hilarious skit “When Miners Attack” wherein Pitman finds himself being harangued by a disgruntled fellow miner (“I am black, you cheeky fucker! I’ve been down the pit for the last ten hours grafting!…Go and fuckin’ put your Tony Hadley Greatest Hits CD on!”) this weariness becomes more apparent in the track “Words,” perhaps the most poignant track on the album. Sampling Julio Iglesias singing Lesley Duncan’s “Love Song” (“The words I have to say/They might sound simple but they’re true”), Pitman considers what he really is – sad, desperate and without hope. “I can’t afford plasters, so I just bleed/Not a lot of friends, but I’m still trying to succeed.” It’s the ultimate negation to the Streets’ “Stay Positive” – the unsmiling reality behind the façade – during which he still manages to namecheck Jim Bowen and Paul McKenna. “Where can you go for £30? I want to get a bus to San Francisco” (cf. Belle and Sebastian, see above). “I get sneered at by posh people…/I reckon it’s because I speed up for horses that are chasing foxes…/Maybe I’m a dirty old man, but R Kelly’s doing alright out of it.” There are few sadder moments in current British music than Pitman’s sign off of “I’m gonna equalise your asses” in his East Midlands drawl. It doesn’t sound like a threat to anyone or anything. It sounds powerless. He modifies the fadeout: “I’m like Rigsby after Miss Jones – full sack.”
“Sugar In Ya Peas” sees Pitman resuming his attack on bad rappers/people he doesn’t like (“Sugar in ya peas, what ya gonna do?/Get a tin of beans out of the cupboard?”). He pointedly and grimly states “I’m not your mate” but tops that with the observational query “Who’ll be yer mate when you stink of meringue?” before moving to attack mode with “My van smells of sex, ‘cos I’m with yer gran” and then, most damningly of all, “You’d like Lenny Henry to be your dad/He hasn’t been funny since “Three Of A Kind”/Can’t see the sun ‘cos of his wife’s behind…You’re WHITE! ADMIT IT!” Whom could he possibly have in mind?
Perhaps best of all on the album is the extraordinary (sur)realist fantasia “The Pitman And Her,” this album’s equivalent to “Weak Become Heroes” which finds our hero dreaming of a day off, which he uses to go into town to buy some scourers and “air fresheners that had the stench of apple in the breeze…and some Minstrels for later.” He again has a go at the uselessness of public transport (the bus he describes as a “great germ van…I need to tax me car quick time,” which is as accurate and direct a summary of Why Socialism Will Never Win General Elections as anything which David Aaronovitch could conjure up with thousands more words at his disposal – even though they tend to be a selection of the same ones) before entering the “Anything For £2.50” shop. Looking at “a selection of damaged tins” he is accidentally sent flying into a stack of budget DVDs by a woman whom he then starts to chat up (“Amazing Lee Van Cleavage…I might let you get to know me, if you’ve got no kids or credit card debts”). Things heat up and she then starts to quote The Matrix (“There is no spoon…There fuckin’ is, I ate my Weetabix with one this morning”) before he wakes up. His “no, no, no”s at the alarm clock buzzer are as poignant as those of Eleanor Friedberger on “Bright Blue Tie.”
“Twat Farm Revisited” offers more scope for Pitman to have a go at People And Things He Doesn’t Like, including “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire,” Coldplay, Louis Theroux and garage music (“He dances to garage – poor sod!”). There’s even a quick Justin Timberlake quote (answering the query “Is that a rocket in your pocket or are you just gay?”) before he goes on to deride people who sing along to Girls Aloud in the bathroom (“they’re not worth a stab except for the ginger one” immediately answered by a cry of “Rick-ey!”).
“Mr Pitiful,” though, sees him shining his light of hatred back into his own eyes. Drawling along to the Otis Redding sample as though he Really Couldn’t Be Bothered (“it gets no shitter than this”) he warns everyone to stay out of his way, not talk to him, even having a go at his fellow miners (“Take a chill pill – in fact, take an overdose and die…At least I don’t look like Seal”). He hates himself and thus, by extension, everyone and everything else. He witnesses his own sadness morphing into madness.
Bridged by the skit “Soot FM” at which Pitman the radio DJ has an extended dig at Tim Westwood (“Bang in yer face…like a bastard…Don’t panic, that’s not a tunnel collapsing, I’m making noise to make myself sound big like they do in New York…so I’m told…I have a request here from Letitia Peppletwat…”) Pitman then covers LL’s “Mam Sed” (Knock You Out) – “floating like David Blaine on a crap little crane.”
The Radio 1 session track “What’s The Point?” he uses to lay out his manifesto. “What’s the point of buying records today when we’re all getting skanked?” – and again a genuine rage rears its head. “No, you can’t touch my bum…then no cheeky bitch can put me through any more pain.” Closer perhaps to Eminem than you’d like. Swift cut from this cynosure of brutal reality to digs at Daniel Bedingfield (“Gotta get thru what? Being crap in my bedroom?”) and Modern Music – “Why don’t they write decent songs anymore? You know, like Duran Duran did, or Feargal Sharkey or the Thompson Twins or Charles and Eddie…When I’m a desperate has been, I’ll get Wyclef to produce for me in his I-wish-I-was-Bob-Marley rôle.” He recommends going to independent record shops for “real hip hop…or you could go to HMV, like a chart twat, and buy the Blue album…go and plait Elton John’s pubes” before regaling us with what might well be, in the world of some critics, the greatest line of music criticism ever – “Simple people like simple songs. Get a job you dosser!” The record ends with “Two Twats” trying to impersonate Pitman and regurgitating his catchphrases (“Get the fuck out!” etc.) Colin Hunt-style. Again, a pre-emptive strike at what may well be a major part of the demographic who buy this record. But fundamentally Nation Of Tossers is sharper, funnier and more alert than just about anything in the world of hip hop today (Obie Trice? Ludacris? Please, readers, credit me with some discretion) – even though it has, in a very moot sense, regressed back to 1986 in order to achieve it.
The artist lay thoughtfully but happily. He reflected that winter was approaching quietly rapidly and it would be nice to have company to keep out the cold. That indeed was his ambition; to be able to feel safe with someone, to feel at a proper distance from the life which had so nearly destroyed him, to know that nothing and no one could reach out to harm him while someone was there to protect him.
It would be so much easier to see the night out, to live through the night, and ultimately outlive the night, when you had the dual harnesses of safety and pleasure to hold you in this world, even when tomorrow was Friday. So what? He didn't have to go to work; in his day job he had negotiated a four-day working week, Monday to Thursday, and the loss of income was compensated for, and indeed matched, by the income from the other work which he did, work which did not require a timetable, work which could be fitted into his life however he wished, for it did not take him long and paid well. More time, then, to live, to travel, to love and be loved. He could quite easily stay in bed until Monday morning, send out for takeaways, get pissed if he so desired. The difference it made was immense. “Work” could now be compacted into a neat, self-contained compartment which no longer dominated the conduct of the rest of his life. It was there in its proper place, did its proper job and paid its proper dues. Its importance – in that how important it was that it did not dominate and obscure the whole of the rest of his life – was newly clear.
Time, then, not just to love, but to write, to think, to whisper, perhaps even to laugh. To discover how new things could appear to him, even though he had seen, or heard, or done them thousands of times. He thought about the exclamations of astonishment from the tourists seated at the front of the top deck of the number 88 bus earlier that day, when it dramatically swept round the corner of Great Smith Street into Parliament Square, and Big Ben, the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey all abruptly came into view. It was like a curtain parting, especially given the anticipatory excitement of running through the narrow, tall-buildinged street which prefaced it; as if we were rushing through a mighty tunnel ready to come out into the light. He had seen this sight too many times to be excited by it, he thought, but the enthusiasm and surprise of the tourists took him by surprise, and he realised how easy it was to forget just how shocking, how stunning, it must be to travel on this journey and see Parliament Square coming into view for the first time.
He was now seeing and feeling everything in this way. As he lay in reflection, a song came on the radio; a song he had certainly heard hundreds of times, but had not really listened to for maybe a decade, a song which the same DJ had played on its original release 22 autumns ago, a song which, the DJ noted with retrospective incredulity, “actually charted, it got to #2 – can’t imagine it even getting into the charts now.” An eight-minute piece of minimalist performance art which even in 1981 he had recognised as a direct descendent of Glass and Ashley (Einstein On The Beach and Private Lives in particular) but somehow played more funnily yet cut more deeply than either. He wondered how it must feel for someone now to be listening to this piece of music for the first time.
A rapid-fire staccato vocal loop – running out of breath? – ran throughout the piece, allowing it to live. The internal life of an answerphone. “Hello? This is your Mother. Are you there? Are you coming home?” (what did she do to make her run away?) and then, more sinisterly: “Hello? Is anybody home? Well, you don’t know me, but I know you…and I’ve got a message to give to you – Here come the planes. So you better get ready…get ready to go.” Not her mother. It is the announcement of the apocalypse. Delivering death to your doorstep. Composed 20 years before 9/11. It is the voice of benevolence eager for you to know that your imminent assassination is in your best interests. “This is the hand – the hand that takes (the slurring on that second “takes”)…Here come the planes. They’re American planes. Made in America.” Or playing games with death, playing sex with death, knowing that playfulness postpones death as far as possible. The US postal service motto is quoted – but ironically or not? A Casiotone keyboard plays a plaintive line which is augmented and harmonised by flutes and oboes, slightly reminiscent of Carla Bley’s 3/4 For Piano And Orchestra - he remembered at the time, how cool to have Carla Bley-derived concepts in the charts – but this soon fades, to leave the basic pulse and the voice, using a Vocoder to cover up its uncertainty. Love justice force Mom. Which, if you interpreted “Mom” or “Mother” as shorthand for the desired/enforced parentage of the USA (for this turned out to be an excerpt from a lengthy multimedia piece entitled United States I-IV), means circling back the loop to reach love. Thus does the singer, at the end of the piece, ask, plea for physical affection, or even acknowledgement of her physical existence. “So hold me ‘Mom’ in your long arms…your automatic/electronic/military/petrochemical arms…” What was that? “hold me in your military arms?” Hold me hostage? Desolation beyond loneliness. Parallel to this despair runs a soundtrack of birdsong (recorded early in the morning in Central Park) as though this is a world which the singer/victim can no longer reach. The music builds up to a final plateau; a sustained two-note major/minor bass synthesiser drone, a choral synthesiser elsewhere (18 months before “Blue Monday”) and finally, the humanity emerges out of the machinery, as a Farfisa line mutates into a tenor saxophone, before disappearing to leave the bare pulse. Count. Ing. Down. The. Sec. Onds. Be. Fore. The. Planes. Hit. The. Twin. Tow. Ers. It is an avowal of love which may not even be love, an admission of loneliness, a clear articulation of unclear grief – does an actual mother exist? And how on earth would we live with her if we found her, or she us?
(An extra frisson was added when he heard the album, some months later. The same closing motif was extended and reused in a song called “From The Air” which described a ‘plane about to crashland. “We are all going down together…This is the time. And this is the record of the time.” And, just like the “pilot” on “International Jet Set” by the Specials – neurotic backing vocals and screams by the Go-Gos – “there is no pilot” though “you are not alone”)
(And, he further wondered, why the dedication of the song to Massenet? He knew him from Manon and Werther - playfulness always present, even in the presence of tragedy. That clearly must have been why)
He remembered how his life was in transitional turmoil when the song was first made available, on a fairly expensive 7-inch American import single. It had been less than two months since his father had died, only a few weeks before he was due to leave home for university, and also for good. His own mother had insisted that he take up his place at Oxford, it was what your father would have wanted, it was what he had worked for you to achieve – she didn’t say that it might have killed him, because it didn’t (there were too many other factors, and his premature passing, though still a shock when it physically occurred, was a surprise to no one). So this song effectively served as a soundtrack to the bridge between his old life and his new one. It could only have made sense in September or October. And 22 years later, here it was again, waiting for him to cross the next bridge.
The reactions were instant. Emails poured in expressing astonishment at the song. People were moved. It might even be a hit all over again. No one, least of all the song’s author and singer, would know what it meant to him to be allowed the privilege of hearing this song anew, a second time. He could not prevent tears from rolling down his face. But now he knew it would be easier for him to translate these tears into renewed passion and love.
HOW BELLE AND SEBASTIAN AND TREVOR HORN SQUARED THE CIRCLE
The critical stock of what some still call “regressive rock” or “C86 indie” is currently very low. Still accused by some lazy commentators of being anaemic (no 14-minute guitar solos?), of not being hip hop, or worse, of not being “progressive rock” (“At least prog looked forward!” – which ignores the fact that prog was very often deliberately regressive, both musically and lyrically – back to childhood, back to the medieval age, back to the age of Agamemnon; the primordial mythical swamps of Roger Dean’s artwork, the Alfred Bendall-esque bucolic 16th century English fantasies of gnomes and courtesans which decorate early Genesis album sleeves, the a-plague-on-all-your-modern-houses approach of the likes of Jethro Tull – refer especially to the lyrics of Thick As A Brick passim), it is frowned upon as an aesthetically expensive folly, a deliberate misreading of Morrissey, music made for and by wimps (as opposed to Real Men, or worse, music made for and liked by women; observe the casual misogyny which lies behind every recent damning of the new Dido album). All of this convenient clowning conceals awkward scenarios such as the teenage Kurt Cobain, getting into music, as turned on by the Vaselines, the Pastels or the Jasmine Minks as he would have been by the Pistols; or how and why Beat Happening and K Records in general were doing the exact same thing as, say, Sarah Records, but escape critical brickbats. It is damned for failing to observe the Wire rules of what should constitute “new” music – the same critical laxity which relies on unthinking assumptions such as PiL being the “only meaningful perspective from 1976,” which is essentially another way of saying “the only thing I liked in punk was PiL,” which is fundamentally another way of saying “I love prog and secretly wish that punk had never happened,” and ignores the inconvenient fact that, for millions of people, Joe Strummer, or Donna Summer, or Brian Eno, or Lee Perry, or Kool Herc, provided just as “meaningful” a “perspective” in 1976.
What C86 certainly wasn’t was ZTT; though the former came to prominence, at least in part, because the New Pop model encapsulated by ZTT had either not quite delivered what it had promised, or was suddenly looking rather old and lumbering (FGTH’s Liverpool, anyone?). The idea of Trevor Horn producing, say, the Shop Assistants, would have been literally unimaginable; yet songs like “Somewhere In China” still carry an emotional resonance denied to the likes of the Age of Chance, desperately scraping at Nowness and the Future, with their Neubauten and Just Ice albums, and consequently already sounding absurdly dated in 1987.
In Scotland, post-Mary Chain indie continued to be the big thing, doubly so in light of its aesthetic antithesis of the time, the wearily why-am-I-not-an-American, garishly lit, aspirational “pop-soul” of the likes of Wet Wet Wet, Hue and Cry, Deacon Blue, etc. And eventually the “movement” hooked up to what was happening in the world of SST and Sub Pop – essentially bypassing “nowness” – and has maintained a presence and continuity, via Teenage Fanclub through to the rise of Chemikal Underground and the astonishing musical blossoming out (from the Delgados to Bill Wells) which ensued. David Keenan redefining post-Coltrane free music in the Wire? William Parker and Cecil Taylor playing gigs in Stirling? Wouldn’t have happened without the Pastels.
Then there is Belle and Sebastian. Given this unfeasibly long build-up, it has to be confessed that hitherto B&S have occupied only a shadowy, minor presence in this writer’s life. I liked the way in which “Electronic Renaissance” strove to be a decaffeinated “Everything’s Gone Green,” thought that “Dog On Wheels” veered dangerously close to Angus Deayton’s HeeBeeGeeBees doing Forever Changes, and felt mildly exasperated at the reluctance of “The Boy With The Arab Strap” not to ‘fess up to being “Son Of My Father.” Seven, sometimes eight, musicians in the line-up, but what were they all doing, why were they all there? Sadly I wasn’t intrigued enough to dig very much deeper. Now, however, we have Dear Catastrophe Waitress, their fifth album proper – and it has been produced by Trevor Horn.
Why Horn? Apparently his daughter is a big B&S fan. He liked their songs but felt that they deserved better production. Already this year he has joined a couple of relevant dots with tAtU’s reading of “How Soon Is Now?” and now he returns at the other extreme of the year to complete the picture. B&S to be drowned in the sea of Horn? Thankfully not. The only artists who drown in Horn’s sea are those with insufficiently strong concepts, or even identities, to stay afloat – for example, all of Horn’s stalwart salvaging cannot disguise the essential ghastliness of the new Seal album.
No, here Horn realises that, if B&S are going to shine, he needs to help them along more subtly. Not, in fact, that they require much encouragement, for this album is by a considerable distance their finest achievement, a pop record as good as any 2003 has offered (and certainly far more worth your time and money than the suddenly and shockingly dated-sounding metapop of the likes of Rachel Stevens. Compared to B&S’ newly-found effortless grace, it all just sounds like desperate Restart interviewees trying to sell records in America with a P45 gun pointed at their heads) and the first real evidence of greatness from a band whose concept has hitherto never quite been matched by the actuality of their music.
The opening track, “Step Into My Office, Baby,” begins jauntily enough with a Sgt Pepper-style flute/trombone motif set atop a glam-rock drum track which owes more to the Bay City Rollers than to Adam and the Ants and some White Album barrelhouse piano, all setting the stage for Stuart Murdoch’s now very confident vocals (Francis Rossi meets Lou Barlow). There are brass and strings present, but subtly so, and there are more obvious Horn touches in the chorus (the Dollar backing vocals shadowing the line “Need to talk,” the way the strings gradually enter and cascade down four flights of stairs in tandem with the line “office baby”), but the real genius makes itself apparent at 1:33, when the song suddenly pauses for Murdoch to sing “I’m a slave to work” accompanied solely by distended voices (descendents of Art of Noise’s “The Army Now”?), and then (at 1:47) Horn’s strings slide securely into place to underline and lock the word “bed” in the line “I’ll be in bed by nine” (a parallel to the chorus’ “Be there at nine”) such that it sounds like Murdoch is singing “I’ll be dead by nine.” The song then returns to its former upbeat status, but then at 2:47 Horn cuts out again and cuts deeper. Against Lexicon Of Love piano Murdoch quiveringly intones “My output is in decline – I was burnt out after Thatcher” and on the second syllable of “Thatcher” (3:00) the full orchestra enters, melancholy and consoling and brilliant. Then the song starts to speed up again, this time more reluctantly (Li’l Louis’ “French Kiss” goes C86!) and finishes on a Beatles harmonic third (and yes, Horn is present among the backing vocalists).
That is the most obviously “Trevor Horn” of the 12 tracks here, but really his input pervades everything on the album; observe all these beautiful little touches in the lyrically grim title track (“I’m sorry if he hit you with a full can of Coke…your face is bleeding/You’ll soon be leaving this town”) – the little Joe Meek electronic whoosh at 0:38, the sardonic plunger trombone at 1:13, the Northern Soul vibes at 1:41. Meanwhile, as the orchestra never let up in their urgent and creative commentary, Murdoch laments: “All of the customers look so old…”
How good are B&S now? Good enough to carry off the fantastic “If She Wants Me” which, if you want (to believe) it, is blue-eyed soul which pisses all over the grim, greasy Pellows and Kanes of this and all other worlds. The song takes its time to unfold in its tale of over-expectation when it comes to potential relationships (“You are too young to put all of your hopes in one envelope”) but then blossoms out to offer a hand of friendship to a listener who thinks that no such hand is forthcoming (“Someone above is looking at you with a tender eye upon your face” – and, my God, when Murdoch confidently but compassionately switches to falsetto on the word “face” at 1:03, this might just be the year’s best male vocal performance; something he wouldn’t have been confident enough to achieve previously – “You may think you’re alone but you may think again”). And it gives us perhaps this year’s most hopeful chorus in “If I could do just one near perfect thing I’d be happy/They’d write it on my grave or when they scatter my ashes/On second thoughts I’d rather hang around and be down/With my best friend…if she wants me.” The song continues on its caring course – “I’m going deaf, you’re going melancholy” is one aside, but then Murdoch goes on to proclaim “Life is good and it’s always worth living – at least for a while.” Don’t expect perfection and you’ll be satisfied and happy. Horn’s strings carefully police the borders of the song; there’s a great moment at 2:16 when a string synthesiser (I think) starts to career around the song’s backdrop in the manner of Jerry Dammers’ “Ice Rink String Sounds” which turned the 45 version of the Specials’ “Do Nothing” into an inadvertent epitaph to Joy Division.
“Piazza, New York Catcher” is set for Murdoch’s voice and acoustic guitar alone and leaves him to wander in the dreams of an imagined love (“elope with me in private”). The words “San Francisco’s calling us” and “Are you straight or are you gay?” also give an inadvertent parallel with the poignancy of Pitman’s “Words” (see below), but the reality slowly becomes apparent (“I wish that you were here with me to pass the dull weekend/I knew it wouldn’t come to love, my heroine pretend”). Magically, however, “Asleep On A Sunbeam” tries to turn this scenario into reality as female and male voices trade lines. Note especially the piano chord which ends the song (at “my joy will be complete”) – it’s like a kiss to seal the joy (as opposed to Seal’s “Kiss From A Rose,” you understand).
“I’m A Cuckoo” somehow manages to convert Thin Lizzy-style dual guitar leads into bucolic power pop, so much so that it gives us one of Murdoch’s most outrageous couplets – “I’d rather be in Tokyo/I’d rather listen to Thin Lizzy-O” complete with quick “Boys Are Back In Town” quotation – if only to hide the song’s increasing desperation. You can feel Murdoch’s hurt in lines like “I keep taking everything to be a sign” and more palpably on lines like “I’m sitting on my empty bed…the fear grows, it’s pounding, pounding!” which are balanced by the admitted ambivalence of “Scary moment/I’m loving every moment!” and the never more heartfelt climactic whimper of “I wish I was a kid again” (again he hits that falsetto on the word “kid”). So perhaps that counts as “regression.”
“You Don’t Send Me” is an attempt at self-fooling in the manner of “I Get Along Without You Very Well,” the deception being musically evident in the seemingly upbeat ‘60s go-go trumpet/piano/vibes riff – hear how the harmonics of the trumpet don’t quite go in the direction you expected. Note also Murdoch’s “Our little scene is getting smaller by the day” – his vocal, as in several places elsewhere, is actually extremely reminiscent of Ray Davies with his pop-soul “Stop Your Sobbing” hat on, and this song is easily worthy of the Kinks at their peak. Nonetheless, Horn continues to put his discreet stamp on proceedings – catch those backing vocals at 1:19 (“There’s nothing! There’s nothing!”) which could have been lifted straight from Dollar (“My mirror! My mirror!”). It’s the same with the jolly “Wrapped Up In Books” which nods in the general direction of Cliff Richard’s “In The Country” but cumulates in a closing note from a New Wave organ from which we will hear again.
Suddenly, however, the album ventures into far darker waters. “Lord Anthony” is a song about a bullied schoolboy who eventually will become a transvestite – and therefore the progenitor of Scott Walker’s “Big Louise” seen from the other end of the telescope. This is reflected by Horn’s sumptuous orchestral prelude (ABC’s “Show Me” meets Walker’s “Prologue”) which then subsides to an acoustic guitar. “You will stay quiet…or you will die,” whispers Murdoch as he details the bullying and violence visited upon he who dares to be more clever than his teachers or fellow pupils, he who dares not to be a Real Man. It plunges deeper than any B&S songs have hitherto done, and its resolution is hardly uplifting (“Melted Toblerones under your dress/Blue mascara running over your eyes”). The piano which finishes the tears wept by the words “to linger there” at the song’s close – where even Murdoch sounds emotionally drained – sounds like a coffin lid closing.
Resolution? Here is an anthem of sorts in “If You Find Yourself Caught In Love,” in which Murdoch – you guessed it – Urges You To Go Back Into The World, a hand as touching and affecting as that which guided Clearlake’s “Treat Yourself With Kindness” from earlier this year. Again Horn stays in the background (but catch that solitary tympani beat at 1:07!) while Murdoch’s passion increases as he ascends the scale of “Raise your prayer to a shout” and pleads at you to find “someone to take your life beyond another TV I Love 1999/Just one more box of cheaper wine” although is canny enough to issue some muted warnings – “You have to start somewhere/Start by kidding on you care” – and later takes a subtle swipe at the war (“Killing people isn’t my scene”).
Hard to imagine what “Roy Walker” is about, unless it’s about the same protagonist, doomed to sit and watch Catchphrase until he dies. Here Murdoch demands that he make himself understood, or even visible, as the song seesaws schizophrenically between Byrds full-flight guitar choruses and Berio-like voice-only verses, careering at 200 mph while behind them the “Beat Bop” voices of the Art of Noise have a catfight with Pierre Schaffer’s abandoned harpsichord.
How to end? How to square the circle? With the six-minute-plus “Stay Loose” which is, essentially, the Jags, or Bruce Woolley and the Camera Club, which is where Horn regresses right back to 1979 in order to bring the good news back to 2003. With absurd brilliance he swipes Steve Nieve’s organ, divests it of Costello’s I-want-to-be-on-the-cover-of-the-Wire-really persona and gives us a hypnotic mantra over which, to the extent that they decide, B&S come as near as they have ever done to “rocking out.” Still, keep an eye on fugitive comments like “It was dark outside, the day it was broken in pieces” for that might be the black cynosure of the song which few others would be astute enough to penetrate.
Thus does the union happen, thus do the last 20 years of pop music suddenly twist into a new and more beguiling sense, thus do we get the atom of a notion of how the Smiths on ZTT might have sounded. It’s a devastating sleight of hand from Horn, who by pretending that he’s not really there, is in fact all over the album, but also one which could not have been achieved without the sudden rise to near-genius of Belle and Sebastian themselves. One hesitates to comment that the stripey-jumpered unfortunate who has just had a plate of pasta dumped over his head by the titular, pissed-off waitress could represent the critic who is just a little too quick and eager to make assumptions about the course and tide of music. Life tends to be much more complicated and far less convenient.
THE FIERY FURNACES
Yet another of the year’s finest albums appears on Rough Trade – they really seem to be undergoing a fullscale renaissance right now. Gallowsbird’s Bark is the debut album by the American brother-and-sister duo The Fiery Furnaces. Yes, why does this already sound familiar and weary to you, dear reader? “Christ, not another bunch of White Stripes wannabes,” not to mention, “I thought you said this blog was going to be different from The Church Of Me, you conman.”
Not so fast, my friend. This is not written by the same person – or at least not by the same life – responsible for CoM. Life progresses, so does one story progress very naturally to another. To deny continuity would be fatuous and contrived. And there is so much still to be written about, even if the writer’s time is now largely taken up with other, closer-to-life activities. Similarly, just because Eleanor and Matthew Friedberger are brother and sister does not make them Meg and Jack White. They’re infinitely better than that.
Why are the 16 tracks and 48 minutes of Gallowsbird’s Bark so sheerly enjoyable, so eminently playable as perhaps no American “indie” album has been since the days of Surfer Rosa? Mostly, I think, because the Friedbergers have no apparent truck with being canonical – ah, the darkest of tunnels is the canon; all those records, all that music for which you must labour in penance for the rest of your working days in order to prove yourself a suitable consumer of them. The trouble with the White Stripes is that they are too cemented to the tunnel of canon, as if John Lee Hooker’s truck had squashed them, thrown them against the wall and solidified them in a pose of due respect. The Fiery Furnaces make no big deal about 1963, nor do they provide us with pompous sleevenotes telling us how much better things were when we didn’t exist. At the end, and especially at the beginning, the Whites have too much reverence in order to matter except from a jokey what-if-they-really-had-lived-in-1963 scenario – check Jack White on the cover of the current Mojo, recreating the Pieta pose with the aid of that silly old sod Iggy Pop, the latter all too willing to lapse into the rôle of Christ.
In short, the FFs are tonnes more adventurous than the WSs, and galaxies more fun. Listen, for instance, to the gloriously daft descending pub piano chords set against the proto-Velvets thrash of the opening “South Is Only A Home.” Yes, they owe their souls to what old John Cale was doing 36 years ago, but also have a subtle eye cocked at what young John Cale is doing now. Thus we zip gleefully through these 16 tracks; the faux-Suicidal Syd relocated in the swamplands of “I’m Gonna Run” (“Gimme some of that nasty water/I’ll take it one sip at a time”) before landing in the controlled explosion of “Leaky Tunnel” with its collapsing Suicide synth loop and scratchy guitar/piano interface, while Eleanor travels the world: “I bought a tambourine at the Millennium Dome/It jangled 2000 times in a row/I got a cold when I was way down South/Standing out in the heat.” Jump at 2:22 as the drums and guitar suddenly storm into the foreground and bash out a rudimentary Interstellar Space interface – while Meg White is the most subtly laconic of drummers, the FF drumming here (not sure whether it’s Eleanor or Matthew) is excitable, frenetic and passionate, like Elvin Jones jamming with the Stooges. The track also shares a certain canned-up intensity with impLOG’s imperishable “Holland Tunnel Dive” even though the “leaky tunnel” here is the one which runs under the Thames from the Isle of Dogs to Cutty Sark.
How easily do they switch from the intensity of “Leaky Tunnel” to the glorious Carly Simon/Lynsey de Paul singalong of “Up In The North.” Eleanor’s voice is pleasingly passionate throughout – almost exactly the midpoint between Debbie Harry and Patti Smith – though even in this number-one-in-a-better-world pop song Matthew’s guitars do their best to weave and warp around the pop. Great rock, too, on “Asthma Attack,” a joyous romp all about being attacked by sharks while swimming in the dark (“I would have had an asthma attack/If I’d seen the shark bite back”) while “Don’t Dance Her Down” switches from an ecstatic electropop groove (“I’m going back to England to play cards again”) to a floating Kate Bush-goes-Stockhausen piano/FX limbo and back again, this time punctuated by Matthew’s savagely stuttering guitar (cf. Manzanera/Eno on Cale’s “Gun”) and Eleanor’s own “dow-ow-own” at 2:59.
“Crystal Clear” deploys the venerable Frank Black/Butch Vig quiet/loud strategy but in a way which makes you momentarily imagine that they’d just invented it – the staccato verses (in the second verse, piano substitutes for guitar, making them sound like Sparks!) bleeding naturally into the cathartic release of the chorus (more like the Fall of Slates than the Pixies). “Two Fat Feet” plays around with the Regents’ “7Teen” riff (transferred to the upper end of the piano) while Eleanor sings “You’ve got a wind in your snaggletooth.” Meanwhile, “Bow Wow” is an easy piano/drum machine shuffle which towards the end atomises into some good freeform playing as the rhythm track shifts into glitch mode. “Nothing but nothing can beat this Gail blow” she sings - quite rightly too, for it is the truth ;-) – except that the track’s called “Gale Blow.” But still! “Worry Worry” is a terrific Shangri-Las girlbeat number, even though Matthew does his best to cause a rumpus with his “I Heard Her Call My Name” guitar stabs.
Then a touch of melancholy begins to make itself apparent. “Bright Blue Tie” is a brief, beautiful and sombre meditation set against undulating Robert Wyatt-esque organ. “This must be paradise,” muses Eleanor, “but it’s not, no no no no no,” each “no” sounding more uncertain than the previous one, before she compromises with herself and responds “but it’s sweet, sweet, sweet, sweet, sweet.” It’s as good as life gets. It segues very nicely into “Tropical Iceland,” another potential hit single, with its yearning laments (“Let’s get out before we melt away”) which at 2:21, and again to close the song, gives way to double-speed ECM guitars, finally culminating in a stately piano/synth motif at 3:28 which in turn leads to the distressed “Rub Alcohol Blues” where all the suppressed hurt suddenly comes pouring forth. “I never knew what trouble was ‘til my honey threw me down…Blues creeping over my body/Queer notions flying in my head…The easiest thing I’ve ever done was lovin’ and drinkin’ wine/The hardest thing I’ve ever done was payin’ off the judge’s fine.” Fixin’ to die.
We then proceed to an animated close with “We Got Back The Plague” in which the Fiery Furnaces more or less do the White Stripes, but better, so much more profoundly. The blues stomp is more primal, Eleanor’s vocal extremely close, stylistically and emotionally, to that of Kristin Hersh. It ends, without any postmodern irony, with Eleanor sneering “Draggin’ us down under the McLennan County dust.” Shouts appear in the background and the album fades to end. Owing nothing to anybody else’s idea of a garage, the Fiery Furnaces have come out and burnt everyone else to an aesthetic cinder.
PITMAN
“You get me? I don’t think that you do.” That’s the rhetorical question repeated throughout the debut album, It Takes A Nation Of Tossers, by Coalville’s finest miner/rapper, MC Pitman, and I’m wondering how many people will. Perhaps the above description has already put you off investigating it – a comedy rap record? Very good? Now, about this Avant Free Folk business – and some senior readers may have the dimmest recollection of a ghastly novelty record from 1981 entitled “Barnsley Bill.” Much beloved and played by Dave Lee Travis – it may even have been DLT – it was a resolutely unfunny single based on the concept that rapping in a Northern accent is in itself a reason for uncontrolled hysterical laughter. But despite the comedy overlay, and despite, or even because of, the fact that the Pitman record is frequently very funny indeed, even beyond the cover images of stalwart miners with their tea and fag…and yes I saw Robbie Williams cowering at the bottom right-hand side in his Norman Wisdom cap…it is – well, how many of you are going to “get” the notion that this record, qualitatively and aesthetically, leaves the likes of Dizzee Rascal and the Streets spluttering in the dust, even though musically we are talking strictly old school rap – there isn’t a note on this record which couldn’t have been recorded in, say, 1987 – and even though we are dealing with a curious crossbreed of Alan Partridge, Mark E Smith, Eminem and Half Man Half Biscuit (And, furthermore, note the continuing and quiet influence over the years of that most quintessentially C86 of records, Half Man Half Biscuit’s Back In The DHSS)?
Perhaps the HMHB comparison is the closest – like Nigel Blackwell, Pitman has a keen and sharp eye for the details of everyday life and media, and equally keen means of shaping them into his particular form of attack. But more than that, Nation Of Tossers is in essence an impassioned cry of anguish, of rage, against what Britain in the 21st century has allowed itself to become. Read the wrong way, it could pass for a Sun editorial; read closer, though, and you will detect that Pitman, above and beyond everything else that he hates, hates himself most deeply of all.
And, as a record, it’s infinitely more playable than Boy In Da Corner - for, no matter how adventurous and heartfelt D Rascal is, and through no fault of his own, that record has already taken on the stain of “canonical pop” and is thus now impossible to listen to without wondering whether one is worthy enough to appreciate it. It even leaves Original Pirate Material seeming rather hammy and otiose – and in the brilliant Roots Manuva-borrowing “Witness The Pitness” Pitman fires a well-aimed jibe at Skinner’s tendency to “talk like a cockney…aren’t you from Birmingham, you knob?/What street do you live in, Coronation Street?/Do you shag Vera Duckworth on your day off?” Indeed this track is typical of Pitman’s artillery of rage, which here he directs against Adam F (“You need Americans to make you look good”), MTV Bass, Rolf Harris and crap rappers in general (“You’ve got a girly voice, is Graham Norton your best mate?…I’m not flaky like you, Singing Detective…You had a threesome going with the Krankies and they pissed off ‘cos you were crap”).
More pointed, though, is Pitman’s assertion – in “What I Am,” during which he hoarsely appropriates Edie Brickell while slagging off 50 Cent (“Go back in your fuckin’ club and stay there!”), people who buy 5p cans of beans from Alda, bad interviewers (“ten shit questions about tea and biscuits”) and “Family Fortunes” (“Get Les Dennis back!”) he momentarily steps aside to ask, “Why make an effort when no one’s bothered?”
It’s the same with the following “Waiting” which mainly consists of a rant against public transport, which then blooms out into a diatribe against the State of the Nation. “Waiting for the traffic lights to change (cf. John Cale’s “You’re waiting at the traffic lights” in “Caravan”)/Waiting not to be asked for change/Waiting for this country to change/I’m in a shop – guess what – I’m waiting for change” – these lines are delivered with a weary but palpably genuine anger.
Sidestepping the hilarious skit “When Miners Attack” wherein Pitman finds himself being harangued by a disgruntled fellow miner (“I am black, you cheeky fucker! I’ve been down the pit for the last ten hours grafting!…Go and fuckin’ put your Tony Hadley Greatest Hits CD on!”) this weariness becomes more apparent in the track “Words,” perhaps the most poignant track on the album. Sampling Julio Iglesias singing Lesley Duncan’s “Love Song” (“The words I have to say/They might sound simple but they’re true”), Pitman considers what he really is – sad, desperate and without hope. “I can’t afford plasters, so I just bleed/Not a lot of friends, but I’m still trying to succeed.” It’s the ultimate negation to the Streets’ “Stay Positive” – the unsmiling reality behind the façade – during which he still manages to namecheck Jim Bowen and Paul McKenna. “Where can you go for £30? I want to get a bus to San Francisco” (cf. Belle and Sebastian, see above). “I get sneered at by posh people…/I reckon it’s because I speed up for horses that are chasing foxes…/Maybe I’m a dirty old man, but R Kelly’s doing alright out of it.” There are few sadder moments in current British music than Pitman’s sign off of “I’m gonna equalise your asses” in his East Midlands drawl. It doesn’t sound like a threat to anyone or anything. It sounds powerless. He modifies the fadeout: “I’m like Rigsby after Miss Jones – full sack.”
“Sugar In Ya Peas” sees Pitman resuming his attack on bad rappers/people he doesn’t like (“Sugar in ya peas, what ya gonna do?/Get a tin of beans out of the cupboard?”). He pointedly and grimly states “I’m not your mate” but tops that with the observational query “Who’ll be yer mate when you stink of meringue?” before moving to attack mode with “My van smells of sex, ‘cos I’m with yer gran” and then, most damningly of all, “You’d like Lenny Henry to be your dad/He hasn’t been funny since “Three Of A Kind”/Can’t see the sun ‘cos of his wife’s behind…You’re WHITE! ADMIT IT!” Whom could he possibly have in mind?
Perhaps best of all on the album is the extraordinary (sur)realist fantasia “The Pitman And Her,” this album’s equivalent to “Weak Become Heroes” which finds our hero dreaming of a day off, which he uses to go into town to buy some scourers and “air fresheners that had the stench of apple in the breeze…and some Minstrels for later.” He again has a go at the uselessness of public transport (the bus he describes as a “great germ van…I need to tax me car quick time,” which is as accurate and direct a summary of Why Socialism Will Never Win General Elections as anything which David Aaronovitch could conjure up with thousands more words at his disposal – even though they tend to be a selection of the same ones) before entering the “Anything For £2.50” shop. Looking at “a selection of damaged tins” he is accidentally sent flying into a stack of budget DVDs by a woman whom he then starts to chat up (“Amazing Lee Van Cleavage…I might let you get to know me, if you’ve got no kids or credit card debts”). Things heat up and she then starts to quote The Matrix (“There is no spoon…There fuckin’ is, I ate my Weetabix with one this morning”) before he wakes up. His “no, no, no”s at the alarm clock buzzer are as poignant as those of Eleanor Friedberger on “Bright Blue Tie.”
“Twat Farm Revisited” offers more scope for Pitman to have a go at People And Things He Doesn’t Like, including “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire,” Coldplay, Louis Theroux and garage music (“He dances to garage – poor sod!”). There’s even a quick Justin Timberlake quote (answering the query “Is that a rocket in your pocket or are you just gay?”) before he goes on to deride people who sing along to Girls Aloud in the bathroom (“they’re not worth a stab except for the ginger one” immediately answered by a cry of “Rick-ey!”).
“Mr Pitiful,” though, sees him shining his light of hatred back into his own eyes. Drawling along to the Otis Redding sample as though he Really Couldn’t Be Bothered (“it gets no shitter than this”) he warns everyone to stay out of his way, not talk to him, even having a go at his fellow miners (“Take a chill pill – in fact, take an overdose and die…At least I don’t look like Seal”). He hates himself and thus, by extension, everyone and everything else. He witnesses his own sadness morphing into madness.
Bridged by the skit “Soot FM” at which Pitman the radio DJ has an extended dig at Tim Westwood (“Bang in yer face…like a bastard…Don’t panic, that’s not a tunnel collapsing, I’m making noise to make myself sound big like they do in New York…so I’m told…I have a request here from Letitia Peppletwat…”) Pitman then covers LL’s “Mam Sed” (Knock You Out) – “floating like David Blaine on a crap little crane.”
The Radio 1 session track “What’s The Point?” he uses to lay out his manifesto. “What’s the point of buying records today when we’re all getting skanked?” – and again a genuine rage rears its head. “No, you can’t touch my bum…then no cheeky bitch can put me through any more pain.” Closer perhaps to Eminem than you’d like. Swift cut from this cynosure of brutal reality to digs at Daniel Bedingfield (“Gotta get thru what? Being crap in my bedroom?”) and Modern Music – “Why don’t they write decent songs anymore? You know, like Duran Duran did, or Feargal Sharkey or the Thompson Twins or Charles and Eddie…When I’m a desperate has been, I’ll get Wyclef to produce for me in his I-wish-I-was-Bob-Marley rôle.” He recommends going to independent record shops for “real hip hop…or you could go to HMV, like a chart twat, and buy the Blue album…go and plait Elton John’s pubes” before regaling us with what might well be, in the world of some critics, the greatest line of music criticism ever – “Simple people like simple songs. Get a job you dosser!” The record ends with “Two Twats” trying to impersonate Pitman and regurgitating his catchphrases (“Get the fuck out!” etc.) Colin Hunt-style. Again, a pre-emptive strike at what may well be a major part of the demographic who buy this record. But fundamentally Nation Of Tossers is sharper, funnier and more alert than just about anything in the world of hip hop today (Obie Trice? Ludacris? Please, readers, credit me with some discretion) – even though it has, in a very moot sense, regressed back to 1986 in order to achieve it.
